This past Friday Canada’s self-confessed national newspaper revealed that “Britain’s Prince William and his wife Catherine will be celebrating their first wedding anniversary on Sunday … Intolerable media intrusion was cited by many sources as the reason the couple broke up in 2007, but they soon got back together and married in a global ceremony […]

I had just waded through an even two dozen articles on Michael Ignatieff and his latest thoughts about what Pierre Trudeau’s book of 1968 called Federalism and the French Canadians. (Well … that’s not exactly true : the first of the two dozen was actually an article by Michael Ignatieff himself – a review of […]

TORONTO. APRIL 24, 2:00 PM. So … as if the Alberta election weren’t enough of a surprise, the final act of the Liberal-NDP dance of the dialectic on Ontario Budget 2012 managed to bring us something a bit different too. For the details I just quote directly from Karen Howlett’s concise summary in the self-confessed […]

MONDAY, APRIL 23, 11:45 PM ET/9:45 PM MT. So … Every now and then voters decide to ignore what one Alberta commentator has called “the media narrative,” and the opinion polls,  and even the obscure hasty opinions of aging bloggers from another planet such as myself. They vote against what all the chattering classes and […]

To start with, happy earth day, of course. Meanwhile, on a vaguely related front (or more?), there are a full half-dozen texts for this Sunday’s “Sermonette,” on the almost religious prospect that Danielle Smith and the Wildrose Alliance just might win the Alberta provincial election tomorrow, Monday, April 23, 2012 : (1) “Wildrose Party to […]

[UPDATED APRIL 22, 23]. Contrary to many prognostications, the dance of Larry Zolf’s Winnipeg dialectic between Dalton McGuinty’s Ontario Liberals and Andrea Horwath’s Ontario New Democrats, over the current Liberal major-minority government’s Budget 2012, has not yet shown decisive signs of coming to some stable point of rest. (Well … that too has now changed, […]

“And Barbara it’s starting to rain, very gently.” So a youthful Peter Mansbridge told David Frum’s mother – and TV viewers across Canada –  as Elizabeth II approached  the table to sign the proclamation of the Constitution Act, 1982, 30 years ago, on Saturday, April 17, 1982. The ceremony was held outdoors on Parliament Hill […]

Watching Ronald Reagan’s former budget director David Stockman on Bill Maher’s excellent US TV show last night reminded some of us that Clyde Prestowitz, another former Reagan Administration apparatchik (counselor to the Secretary of Commerce), has also been saying some remarkably sensible and even “progressive” things about economic policy lately. The latest  Prestowitz literary soundbite […]

Larry Zolf’s 117-page opus Dance of the Dialectic – on “How Pierre Elliot Trudeau went from Philosopher-King to the Incorruptible Robespierre to Philosopher-Queen Marie Antoinette to Canada’s Generalissimo and then to Mackenzie King and Even Better” – was published 39 long years ago now. In the strange spring of 2012, however, its title has taken […]

Up in the not-so great white north, on the heels of a winter that never was, it is once again time for baseball.  And in a city that is craving something to cheer about, the Blue Jays have given all the reason for optimism, with a record-setting spring going 24-7, and inspired play in Cleveland […]