Time magazine named eight final candidates for its 2014 Person of the Year designation : acting Iraqi Kurdish Region president Masoud Barzani  ; first openly gay Fortune 500 CEO Tim Cook ; the Ebola caregivers ; the Ferguson protesters ; controversial National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell ; Chinese e-commerce giant founder Jack Ma ; […]

The recent murders of two New York City policeman by an emotionally challenged young man, who claimed to be making a political protest, are without any shred of doubt altogether appalling and unacceptable. Such acts are nothing more or less than high crimes, with no redeeming or any other kind of political content in a […]

I remember the Christmas Eves on Cardigan Avenue in the 1950s – from 1950, say, when my grandfather died, to 1957, when we moved to the suburbs. Later I understood that my father’s family had big parties because they were immigrants. Friends and acquaintances recruited from similar backgrounds in the city mixed with the children […]

For Canadian federal politics 2015 is bound to be a crucial year. And two recent comment pieces by Andrew Coyne and Chantal Hébert make for rather ominous reading, as the start of the year comes into clear view. Both Mr Coyne and Ms Hébert are worrying about just what may or may not happen if […]

Some time ago now I was assigned the task of congratulating the new mayor of Victoria, BC,  Lisa Helps – for declining to swear allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II during Mayor Helps’s inauguration the week before last. Maybe just because I’m getting older and slower, in the midst of the very rapidly gathering holiday season, […]

This coming Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (December 9—11, 2014) “First Nation leaders from across Canada will gather in Winnipeg … for the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) Special Chiefs Assembly (SCA) and election for AFN National Chief.” Nancy Macdonald has nicely summarized the details here on the Maclean’s website. (Or not, if you don’t like […]

Wherever they landed in northern North America in 1497, on behalf of the English monarch, Henry VII, John Cabot and the small crew of the Matthew met no other human beings. In 1501 a Spanish expedition visited Labrador, and “claimed to have acquired from the natives with whom they came into contact a fragment of […]

Like others on this site, I have been an agnostic on John Tory – who was sworn in as the new Mayor of Toronto, Canada’s current largest metropolis, this past Tuesday. (Mr. Tory succeeds the better internationally known Rob Ford, now battling a rare form of cancer. While he recovers, Rob is sitting as one […]