At first the news that Toronto City Council has just endorsed the “Vienna Declaration” (which “advocates harm reduction over the law enforcement-driven war on drugs”) – set beside the news that “Paris Hilton was arrested late Friday night on suspicion of possession of cocaine after police noticed the smell of marijuana coming from the SUV […]

Assuming it’s real, the recent CBC news story “Cannabis electric car to be made in Canada” offers various varieties of food for thought. In fact the story is so intriguing that it’s all too easy to think it’s too good to be true. This is just the CBC trying to get back at Stephen Harper, […]

[UPDATED JANUARY 26, 2012: scroll to bottom of page]. Canadian political junkies following the still uncertain results of this past Saturday’s Australian federal election are entitled to feelings of amazement at the snowballing complexities of what is going down down under at the moment. In some ways Australia, as a fellow former self-governing dominion of […]

I sometimes think stiffening Canadian sovereignty in those parts of the Arctic north customarily marked as Canadian territory on Canadian maps is one of the three almost impressive things that Stephen’s Harper’s Conservative minority government has done, since it first came to office on February 6, 2006. The other two are the parliamentary recognition of […]

Our very first counterweights article, “John Ibbitson’s next Canada,” appeared on August 19, 2004 – exactly six years ago today. Since then the “next Canada” Mr. Ibbitson was talking about has actually arrived, with the accession of the Stephen Harper minority government in Ottawa, in February 2006. Our own assessment in August 2010 (like that […]

This past Friday marked the 20th anniversary of Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe’s August 13, 1990 by-election victory in the eastern downtown Montreal riding of  Laurier–Sainte-Marie. Even with a maternal grandfather from the United Kingdom, M. Duceppe was, so to speak, the first Canadian federal MP to be elected as an ostensibly “sovereigntist” BQ partisan. […]

It may just be the summer heat that does not seem to be going away this year – or my all too advancing age.  But the news that “Riley Keough, the 21-year-old granddaughter of Elvis Presley” has “replaced Olivia Thirlby as Jack in ‘Jack and Diane,’ a lesbian-themed werewolf romance … due to be released […]

“We know,” PM Harper told his Conservative summer caucus last week: “there are some in the opposition coalition again threatening an election, but colleagues, that is not what Canadians want.” And just today the sweetheart of Sparks Street Jane Taber is reporting that “Michael Ignatieff is under attack from Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, who are accusing […]

Guess who has just commandeered our new “Ontario tonight” feature (see bar at top of page), and turned what is supposed to be a home for “brief intermittent reports on comings and goings in Canada’s most populous province” into accommodation for yet another extended tirade on Ontario’s “founding Liberal Premier of the later 19th century, […]

Two days ago NDP guru Brian Topp opined that there was only a 40% chance of a Canadian federal election this fall. Do the somewhat intriguing results of the latest EKOS poll, released today, suggest anything that might change this opinion? The immediate shortest answer is probably no. Today’s EKOS results are not all that […]