This past Tuesday’s “Acela primaries” (after the Amtrak train that connects the five northeast states of Connec-ticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island ) have stiffened the prospect that it really is going to be a Donald vs Hillary sideshow in the US presidential election this fall. There is some excitement in some quarters about […]

For a while now it has been clear enough that the wildrose province of Alberta is thirsting to leave some new mark on the evolving story of the Canadian confederation of 1867. The not-so-great debate on Senate reform since the 1980s – pushed along by an Alberta provincial government report called Strengthening Canada –  is […]

According to Susan Delacourt at the Toronto Star, the debate over the “suicide crisis” (aka “mental health crisis”) on the Attawapiskat First Nation reserve “sparked a rare outbreak of civility among rival parties this [past] week” in the Canadian House of Commons. For a while now there has seemed to be a growing consensus among […]

Political deadlock in the United Province of Canada probably was a big enough cause of the wider confederation of British North American provinces, for the 2.5 million people who were living in the United Province by the early 1860s. It meant next to nothing, however, for the 583,000 people in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick […]

[UPDATED APRIL 13]. One thing that keeps our free and democratic Canadian politics going these days – in spite of many good reasons otherwise – is its recurrent capacity for surprise. It’s like the woman (or man if it also works in that direction) who continually fascinates you, because you can never quite figure out […]

There is symmetry in numbers…200 of them to be exact.  For that was how many days the Blue Jays had in 2015.  A mercurial season that began in early April and ended on the 200th day in heart breaking fashion, eliminated on a cold and rainy Kauffman Field in Game 6 of the AL Championship […]

June 15, 2016 will mark the 72nd anniversary of the triumph of Tommy Douglas’s “first socialist government in North America,” in the 10th Saskatchewan provincial election of 1944. And it is at least intriguing to bear this in mind when contemplating the strange juxtaposition of yesterday’s 28th Saskatchewan provincial election on April 4, 2016, and […]