Last Tuesday, June 21, 2011, the new Harper majority government’s Bill C7, the Senate Reform Act, had its first reading – not all that long, as it turned out, before the new 41st Parliament of Canada (following “the longest filibuster in Canadian history over back-to-work legislation”) – ran for the exits and the annual summer […]

The death of the actor Peter Falk this past Thursday, June 23, 2011, at his home in Beverly Hills, California, at the age of 83, is worth commemorating for a host of good reasons. But I have a particular reason myself. Peter Falk – and more exactly, or especially, in his “defining role” as Columbo, […]

According to  Daryl Bruce, a self-confessed “avid royal watcher since the wedding of Prince Andrew to Sarah,” a “source in the Prime Minister’s Office” has “told the Canadian media” that the upcoming local tour of William and Catherine “could go a long way to cementing the monarchy in Canada for a new generation in the […]

Tonight at 9 PM ET (6 PM PT) the CN Tower in Toronto will be lit in the colours of the traditional Medicine Wheel, to help celebrate National Aboriginal Day in Canada, June 21, 2011.  The first National Aboriginal Day was celebrated 15 years ago in 1996, when Governor General Romeo LeBlanc declared in Ottawa: […]

According to back-of-the-envelope calculations I have just made, I cast my first democratic ballot in the Ontario provincial election of October 17, 1967. I did not know where my local polling station was, but I did know the NDP candidate’s campaign office. I went there to ask where to go to lose my electoral virginity […]

According to Martin Regg Cohn, in “Ontario’s political air war – the battle of the campaign ads … launched during the final game of the hockey season” last night, the Tim Hudak Conservatives’ mindless “anti-tax commercial” (part of  “a wave of new commercials blasting [Ontario Premier Dalton] McGuinty as ‘The Tax Man’”) won first prize. […]

[UPDATED JUNE 20]. More than two weeks ago, the lovely Althia Raj warned that trouble for the latest Stephen Harper step by step Senate reform adventures was brewing among the new Tory majority in the unreformed Senate of Canada itself (“Conservative senators balking at Senate reform agenda: sources”). Now a fresh wave of similar reports […]

My peripatetic summer journeys from the big smoke to the surrounding countryside are beginning early this year – in what is technically only the very late spring. I will be starting with a return to summer holiday scenes of my childhood, updated for the all too advanced age I and my siblings have subsequently achieved. […]

Senate reform has been in the Canadian news again this past week. And – even with the new Harper Conservative majority in the elected “lower house” of Parliament –  the sceptical bottom line is don’t hold your breath. Jeffrey Simpson concluded his latest shot in this dark forest with: “The Senate can’t be unilaterally abolished […]

[UPDATED JUNE 9, 12]. So US progressive documentarian Michael Moore feels former unreformed Senate of Canada page Brigette DePape’s ejection from the fabled Red Chamber with her ”Stop Harper” stop sign facsimile last Friday was “an iconic moment for Canada.” He goes on: “Moore said a functioning democracy should ‘encourage you to be disrespectful, to […]