St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia – only Canadian grove of academe to make it onto international list of “The 10 Wildest Party Schools In North America.” Will recent sexual assault charges against two varsity football players change all that?

GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. DECEMBER 4, 2017. [UPDATED DECEMBER 11]. Who can doubt that we are now living in challenging times – especially in those realms of fake and other news where “Canada’s top party school” also qualifies as one of the “10 Wildest Party Schools in North America”?

(Even as “Sex assault allegations place NS university’s party culture under spotlight,” where “students spend more than 7 hours on average” drinking to excess and worse every week of the academic year – just like many of the working adults they know.)

Beyond our northern borders we hear “Trump tweets: ‘I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn’” and “Germany offers to pay migrants who go back home.”

Back in the northern homeland : “Trudeau arrives in China for trade talks with Xi” (are u  listening US NAFTA negotiators? ; “Poll suggests majority of Canadians back ban on guns in urban areas” ; “Kenney mirroring Trump in rhetoric on pipelines: Notley” ; “Quebec revising winter tire rules; incentive-based approach suggested for elsewhere” ; and “White Christmas ahead, but expect mild winter temperatures: Environment Canada.” [UPDATE : And yes Justin Trudeau’s back from China now. See Robin Sears on “Canada is playing the long game with China” Note Alexander Panetta as well on how “Despite Trump’s insistence the US has a trade deficit with Canada, statistics from the website of the office of the US Trade Representative – the office handling NAFTA negotiations – paint an opposite portrait.”)

William Lyon Mackenzie King (l) and one of his key mentors, William Mulock, on the occasion of Mr. Mulock’s 101st birthday in 1944.

For all of us here at the Canadian republican underground, Ganatsekwyagon branch, these current challenges have happily coincided with the long-anticipated arrival of the next installment in Dr. Randall White’s work-in-progress, Children of the Global Village – Canada in the 21st Century : Tales about the history that matters.

If you go to “Long Journey to a Canadian Republic” on the bar above (or just CLICK HERE), you will find a short introduction to this modern history of Canadian democracy, along with the “Prologue : too much geography.”

This is followed by links to the currently completed six chapters in Part I, four  chapters in Part II, and the first four chapters in Part III on the old Dominion of Canada. You will now find as well a link to Chapter 5 of PART III : THE DOMINION OF CANADA, 1867—1963, “Age of the Incredible Canadian, 1921—1948.”

US comic book, c. 1942. Thanks to Ley and Lois Smith War, Memory and Popular Culture Research Collection, University of Western Ontario.

Yet again on a foggy day at the edge of the northern woods we eventually stumbled into Dr. White and his captivating business manager (in her freshly cleaned white faux fur winter coat), at the Tim Horton’s across from the local park.

We explained how we understood that William Lyon Mackenzie King, grandson of the 1837 Canadian rebel leader William Lyon Mackenzie (and still Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, 1921-1926, 1926-1930, 1935-1948), was the “Incredible Canadian” in the title of his latest installment. And we asked Dr. White what he had finally taken from his encounter of the past number of months with Mackenzie King – the “profoundly eccentric, even creepy and worse … dead-mother-loving, lifelong bachelor spiritualist with a Harvard PhD … with all his strange and even crazy as well as brilliant political sides”?

Dr. White just said : “Well this is by far the longest chapter in the book so far. I think I can safely predict no future chapter will be at all so long. And I guess that says something (if not everything) about how Mackenzie King strikes me.”

More top party school action at St. FX – “Bishops’ Ball dance-off (Gordon La)” : and tks to Maclean’s website.

He took a bite from a Boston cream donut and pronounced it astonishingly fresh but lacking in cream. Then he added :

“In 1952 Bruce Hutchison wrote  ‘The mystery of William Lyon Mackenzie King is not the mystery of a man. It is the mystery of a people. We do not understand King because we do not understand ourselves … The full knowledge of both may be some time off …’”

He took a long gulp of regular coffee in the new seasonal cups and continued :

“It is still some time off, no doubt, even today. But we’re getting closer.” When we asked what he thought Mackenzie King would make of our challenges today – a strange US president, a deranged regime in North Korea, Brexit in the UK, a still massively unstable Middle East, climate change, Canadian pipelines, Russia and cyber security, etc, etc, etc – he just laughed and said he had to get back to the office (even on a Sunday afternoon).