Whatever else, Canada does have a vast chunk of northern geography. And both climate change and new resource technologies seem to hold out fresh prospects for far northern economic development that more southerly business interests can applaud. The eastern Arctic is also now home to the innovative Nunavut Territory – whose creation in 1999 still […]

Usually Canadians can take comfort from the thought that, however crazy things may be in Canada, they are still a lot crazier in the colossal United States next door. But looking out on the sixth month of 2007 it seems possible that things are different this year. Just what is going to happen, e.g., on […]

The sun is shining at last in some parts of the country. But other voices are still asking why 63% of a random sample of Canadians recently told pollsters they want to elect judges. Others again are still trying to sing happy 25th birthday to the Charter of Rights. And Jean Chretien has at last […]

Being a millionaire nowadays of course means nothing. A decent executive house, in most places where decent executives would live, starts at around $1 million. According to one recent estimate: “There are about 250,000 people in Canada [alone] with a net worth of more than a million dollars, not counting real estate.” Being a billionaire, […]

Try reading Patricia Best’s Globe and Mail report, “My dinner with Conrad” (at “the midtown Toronto restaurant Scaramouche”), while watching CBC TV on the latest Stephen Harper adventures in Ottawa. And you may suddenly think that the thickening Harper Conservative plot in Canada and the “Conrad Black Movement” could be somehow connected. In one sense, […]

Sometimes you hear about a murder in the media, and you think that could be someone I know. Other times it sounds more like a paperback you read on a rainy vacation, when nothing else was around. The February 12, 2007 double-slaying of Paula Menendez, 34, and Julie Crocker, 33, at a quiet family home […]

At the opening of the new and (more or less) Democrat-controlled US Congress on January 4, such progressive luminaries as Daniel Ellsberg, Cindy Sheehan, and Gore Vidal took to the streets to urge that “the House of Representatives immediately initiate Articles of Impeachment” against President George W. Bush, for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” If Bill Clinton deserved […]

The trouble with what Bob Woodward seemed to be saying in the October 3 excerpt from his new book in the Washington Post – and on Larry King’s CNN TV show the night before – was that it reduces the whole healthy US domestic controversy over the Iraq War these days to a question of […]

In some ways the September 11, 2001 Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington are still very much with us on their fifth anniversary. Take two vaguely contradictory headlines for September 9, 2006, e.g.: “The long march home … The US public wants its troops to leave Iraq, but worries about how to […]

The cold, cruel reality of the troubled global village that dampened the holiday mood in northern North America last summer was the terrorist bombing of the London subway system (on July 7, 2005). This year it’s the Israeli-Hezbollah mini-war in Lebanon (which began on July 12, 2006).The mini-war itself seems to open up very sobering […]