Our apologies to all and any who may have visited us over the past week or so, and found we had temporarily vanished from the world wide web.

The long and short is that the site just suddenly crashed, not long after our April 3, 2019 post on “Time for a change : our latest Canadian madness is really starting to make us look dumb in the global village.”

(Which also offered “gratitude and praise to the rafters for Andrew Cohen’s recent opinion piece : ‘Canada’s SNC melodrama baffles a world facing real crisis … “To our allies, our debate is parochial and petty. Worse, in a world of unrest where Canada’s progressiveness matters, it is self-indulgent.”’”)

As best we mere editorial people can understand from our much valued technical advisors, the crash was the result of malevolent cyber-attacks from sources that have still not been exactly defined and determined.

Various steps have been taken to guard against future attacks of this sort. But without knowing exactly where the malevolence comes from such steps inevitably involve guesswork that could prove wrong. So we could be attacked and shut down for a time again.

Having started in the summer of 2004, however, we’re not about to surrender now (or “give up” may be better), in the year of an important Canadian federal election (on October 21, 2019) and an important provincial election in Alberta today (and Prince Edward Island, where the Greens may actually win, next Tuesday, April 23).

While we’re at it, we don’t have anything to add to the widely held poll-driven conventional wisdom that, although Rachel Notley’s New Democrats (NDP) are doing better than many expected, the likely enough winners will still be the United Conservatives (UCP) – led by Jason Kenney, the currently somewhat but apparently not decisively scandal-ridden grandson of Canadian “premier” big band leader Mart Kenney (and his Western Gentlemen) : a kind of hip version of Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians back when.

(Guy and his brothers were from Southwestern Ontario. Even the Liberal Mart Kenney for a time ran a musical ranch in the Greater Toronto Area, where he was in fact born, although he retired to BC where his serious musical career began. Alberta, which also seldom gets credit as Marshall McLuhan’s birthplace, has a right to sing the blues. As today’s election will one way or another make clear!)

We’ll nonetheless be pleased if Ms Notley – who by all appearances north of the Great Lakes has done a commendable job as premier of one of Canada’s Big 4 provinces in challenging times – proves the conventional wisdom wrong. And even on the polling this seems unlikely but not necessarily impossible!

Meanwhile, one of the technical measures to try to guard against future counterweights crash attacks from the malevolent side of the also remarkable and even benign regions of cyberspace involves updating the software that we mere editorial people use. Please bear with us while we struggle through yet another set of new software ropes. It is a jungle out there, no doubt.

UPDATE APRIL 17, 12:30 AM : Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party has now won an unquestionably commanding 62 of 87 seats in the Alberta Legislative Assembly, with some 54% of the cross-province popular vote. The premier-elect has a big task ahead of him, but there can be no doubt that he is what a quite clear majority of the people of Alberta want right now. Even his Liberal grandfather would almost certainly be impressed (and probably a bit pleased as well).