COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS. GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. MONDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2025. Santa has now come and gone, here as elsewhere. We have a few last moments to contemplate our own record for the fourth and final quarter of the very fateful year 2025.

For us here on the northwest shore of the Great Lake Ontario, one very big event for Fri, Oct 24 — Sat, Nov 1, 2025 was the Toronto Blue Jays narrowly losing baseball’s World Series in the seventh and final game on Nov 1.

At the start of the 2025 season almost no one even guessed wildly at this prospect. As early as March 26, however, our own sporting life specialist Rob Sparrow had presented at least one “best-case scenario for 2025.”

It read : “The Jays sneak into the postseason and finally win a game, breaking their nearly decade-long drought and make a run in the playoffs … That’s the dream.”

Which did come true in this case. And in tribute to its on-the-money best-case scenario we’re somewhat crazily treating the Sparrow’s piece from March as the first item in our year-end selections, for the fourth and final quarter of the fateful and crazy year now about to end!

(And this reminds us that back in the first few weeks of June 2025 the Edmonton Oilers didn’t quite manage to take the ancient top trophy of professional hockey away from the Florida Panthers either. Here again a Canadian team did not finally bring the championship hardware of professional sport in North America back to the home and native land. Yet here as well Canada was playing at the top! Bigger things can only lie ahead … )

Meanwhile our somewhat personalized list of favourite half-dozen counterweights pieces for the fourth quarter of 2025 (suitably amended to allow Rob Sparrow’s spring piece on the Jays into the autumn fold) stands as follows :

(1) Mar 26th 2025 /Oct 4, 2025. By Rob Sparrow. “Blue Jays 2025: The Final Flight of Vladdy & Bo…or Another Crash Landing”. (See above.) …

(2) Oct 7th, 2025. By Randall White. “A tale of two economies — nationalism and cultural homogeneity in Poland, globalism and multiculturalism in Toronto” … “More than half Toronto metropolitan area residents today were born outside Canada, in what often does seem like every corner of the global village.” And : “For reasons I don’t entirely understand, contemporary Toronto multiculturalism is on display almost brilliantly on the first westbound subway train Sunday morning (around 8AM).”

(3) Oct 26th, 2025. By Counterweights Editors. “On the new McCarthyism spreading into Canada in the fall of 2025.” It “also seems clear enough (so far) that even President Donald J. Trump II is not quite crazy enough (yet?) to actually invade Canada with military force. Or try to. We have long embraced the view of … political science professor Aisha Ahmad, that any US military conquest of Canada would only initiate a long period of political violence and “guerilla warfare” on the northern US border … So as Trump has actually acknowledged in public himself : ‘It takes two to tango.’ And the Canadian people don’t want to dance!”

(4) Nov 6th, 2025. “A week is a long time in politics .. but Liberal budget in Canada and Democrat victories in USA state and local elections mark November 4, 2025” — “the 4PM ET presentation of the 2025 Canadian federal budget in Parliament at Ottawa was a suitable prelude to the subsequent evening burst of Democratic party victories in the USA, USA — especially but by no means exclusively in Virginia, New Jersey, New York City, and California.”

(5) Nov 21st, 2025. “Is Liberal PM Mark Carney in 2020s reviving at least one side of Liberal PM William Lyon Mackenzie King in 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s ??”. Another cut at the Carney-King comparison first broached in miniature (and in counterweights) back on May 26, 2025 : “The cultural and social side of Mackenzie King’s Canadianism has now drifted away, as history does suggest it should … The political and economic side has nonetheless hung on. And in more than a few ways it makes even more sense today than it did in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.”

(6) Dec 8th, 2025. “Beware of (some) seriously crazy GOP voters in USA (while still taking comfort from Canadian PM Mark Carney).” This is in part a kind of second cut at a question first broached in the middle of the summer of 2025 — “how Donald Trump actually managed to get elected as president of the USA a second time (or a first time for that matter).” This midsummer meditation tred a bit gingerly on the possible answer “too many ignorant voters????” With the end of the year in sight in early December even such authentic conservatives as Heath Mayo in the USA and Jason Kenney in Canada were bridling over new polling evidence that, eg, “Over a third of GOP voters think the moon landing was faked … Over 40% think 9/11 was likely an inside job … And more than half still think the 2020 election was rigged.”

In quick summary 2025, no matter where you spent it, was certainly an extraordinary year. Its deepest immediate meanings for the USA next door will not be even initially clear until almost this time next year, 2026. But in Canada we are already forging new paths to the future, even if it is still not clear exactly where they will lead! (And how could it be already of course?)

Meanwhile, on a fourth-quarter list that already includes one piece from earlier in the year, we quickly again want to finally add another — in memory of a longtime friend of this website : “RIP David Alexandre Montgomery (1942–2024) — a regional existentialist who made Ontario, Canada interesting.”

We’d be remiss as well if we didn’t very quickly note that, very close at hand, 2025 has been the banner year in which our much-valued technical support staff has returned to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, from various locales in the great Golden State of California, with all five new recruits (and their serious techno skills) in tow. In the midst of all the great grief south of the northern US border Democracy in America 2025 has brought us this great personal blessing.

And so to anyone and everyone who ever gets anywhere near this counterweights.ca website we wish you many further blessings of this and all other sorts in the Happy New Year 2026.

Whatever else, it is very difficult not to be very interested in whatever is about to happen, virtually anywhere and everywhere in the global village, in the year that lies ahead. (But perhaps especially in Canada, and in the quite separate country of the United States next door?)