Now that the new Harper Conservative majority government (still elected by less than 40% of the Canadian people) has restored the pre-1968 “abject colonial” names of “Royal Canadian Navy” and “Royal Canadian Air Farce,” related new rumours are heating up in Ottawa (aka “the last lumber village before the North Pole”). Sooner than anyone may […]
Back in the late 1940s, “Canada’s first and perhaps only genuine intellectual” Harold Innis reported that: “When Oliver Mowat was introduced to a prominent statesman in England with a comment on the length of time he had been Premier of Ontario he was greeted with the comment, ‘Have you no public opinion in that Province?’” […]
August, according to the English poet W.H. Auden in 1935, was supposed to be “for the people and their favourite islands.” Apparently times have changed. In the strange summer of 2011, August is for “UK riots: Sharing of police between cities ‘reviewed hourly’ … Theresa May orders police chiefs to cancel all police leave as […]
The Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffet, may have come up with the wittiest pronouncement on Standard and Poor’s downgrade of the US credit rating from AAA to AA+. It “doesn’t make sense,” he has said: “The US, to my knowledge, owes no money in currency other than the US dollar, which it can print at […]
It used to be the Canadian English language newspaper of record. It may be somewhat less than that now? But the current online version is still where a person like me looks first, laid back on the waterfront in a much-hated big city. And here’s what I seem to be getting, at the end of […]
If Canada already were the country of the future it could be – and should eventually become – the news that federal NDP interim leader Nycole Turmel was until recently also a member of the Bloc Québécois (and is apparently still on the books of the vaguely sovereigntist provincial party, Québec Solidaire) would not be […]
If you were among the tens (or even hundreds?) of thousands (or even millions?) who watched the strangely moving ceremony in which new Baseball Hall of Fame inductee Roberto Alomar’s Toronto Blue Jays’ number 12 was officially retired, on the sunny early afternoon of Sunday, July 31, 2011, you may share a certain puzzlement among […]
Last year the civic holiday held on the first Monday of August – in various Canadian provinces and territories – fell on Monday, August 2. On the same day the Toronto Star published an article arguing that: “Today is Simcoe Day in Toronto, a holiday named in honour of the first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, […]
To start with, it may seem ironic that the Vancouver Sun (no doubt like other Postmedia News outlets in Canada) has chosen one of “Britain’s leading business and economics commentators” (Jeremy Warner at the right-wing Daily Telegraph) to explain why “America cannot lead the world if it abandons principles.” On closer inspection it is quite […]
TORONTO. MONDAY, JULY 25, 2011. 3:40 PM ET. The photo that appeared on the Toronto Star website less than an hour ago says a great deal, if not quite everything. As federal New Democrat leader Jack Layton has explained to his fellow New Democrats (in a statement subsequently made public in Toronto this afternoon): “In […]
