“Can Lloyd George Do It?” is the title of a 1929 tract by John Maynard Keynes and Hubert Douglas Henderson on the economic policy of the fading British Liberal Party of the day. (As the Duke University economist E. Roy Weintraub put it a few years ago, in commenting on a New York Times column […]
Like others, no doubt, I kept a few notes on my own remote experience of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. I won’t even try to say just why. And my especially marginal experience of the main events in New York and Washington took place in the current biggest city of […]
Sometimes two headlines in the same newspaper on the same day can seem to explain each other. I had that feeling about two headlines in yesterday’s Toronto Star: “Lack of innovation holding Canada back: report” and “Tories order diplomats to hang portraits of the Queen by week’s end.” The first article explained how: “Canada has […]
A casual encounter with the Business News Network (BNN) the other day suddenly brought some of us face to face with what could be a looming issue of some importance for the mid to longer term economic development of what, say whatever else you like, remains Canada’s most populous province, by some considerable distance. But […]
This coming week the campaign for what might be one of the biggest Ontario provincial elections in years gets underway. Not much more than three weeks ago John Michael McGrath at Toronto Life was opining on how Ontario Premier Dalton “McGuinty’s personality (or lack thereof) is a huge part of the Liberal brand–borrowing Tory Bill […]
According to today’s Globe and Mail: “The push for a merger between the [federal] Liberal Party and the NDP has quickly become a major issue among the growing field of candidates to replace Jack Layton … The top contenders for the NDP leadership – party president Brian Topp and House Leader Thomas Mulcair – are […]
TORONTO. SUNDAY, AUGUST 28, 2011. This seems to have been a summer of pipe and drum bands in this city. We went to the Warriors’ Day Parade at the Exhibition last Saturday, to probe the impact of the new Harper conservatism on the city’s old militia culture. (Well … probably more as a sentimental journey […]
The serious part of the 2011 Ontario provincial election campaign is now less than two weeks away. And the excitement is building ( for some of us at least). This past weekend Chantal Hébert was explaining just why “Ontario vote most important in recent history.” And yesterday Duff Conacher’s Democracy Watch in Ottawa was complaining […]
It was less than a month ago (Monday, July 25, 2011) that Jack Layton announced: “ I have a new, non-prostate cancer that will require further treatment … So, on the advice of my doctors, I am going to focus on treatment and recovery … I will therefore be taking a temporary leave of absence […]
I agree that over the mid to long term future, Stephen Harper’s “abject colonial” restoration of the “‘royal’ designation to Canada’s air force and navy” last week is almost certainly going to work to the advantage of those of us who see a Canadian republic as our ultimate rational democratic destiny in the true north, […]
