I know this already too-long meditation on Canada’s new Conservative government (with special reference to its aboriginal policy failings) is supposed to have ended. But the Canada-US softwood lumber trade deal announced late on Thursday, April 27 begs for a final exception to the rule. You can find the details of the deal tidily  summarized in The New York Times, The […]

The best teachers of the 1960s Ontario high-school history course on “Canada and the United States” used to joke that Canadian history was just US history 10 years late. It still seems a good enough joke in the winter of our discontent 20052006. Canada, some would say, has succumbed to the latest continental political pathology, just as the United […]

Canada’s new federal health minister Tony Clement has rejected suggestions that the current surge of provincial government interest in public health care reform has been “emboldened by the election of a Tory government” in Ottawa.But provocative fresh talk about allowing “a mix of private and public health-care delivery, as long as health care remains publicly funded […]

George W. Bush may be, as Bill Maher memorably said on HBO TV last month, “a catastrophe that walks like a man” – who should now “do what you’ve always done best: lose interest and walk away.” It is also all too likely that if the Iraq Constitutional Referendum this coming Saturday, October 15 is […]

Will George W. Bush now be a lame-duck president for the next three years? Is that what the Hurricane Katrina trauma finally means for the big framework of world politics? There is of course evidence that Mr. Bush remains quite popular in some places: “With an air of secrecy that would make the Pentagon envious, […]

Those who know the disaster management literature say that there are typically many bitter complaints about initial government responses to major natural disasters. Raw politics get mixed up in such things as well. A Washington Post-ABC poll has reported that 46% of Americans approved of President George W. Bush’s “performance after Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast,” […]

CALGARY. Monday, July 4, 2005. Much free advice is being offered to Conservative leader Stephen Harper on how to improve his performance in Canadian federal politics. But one question lingers. Just what does it mean that he is running for prime minister of Canada, and not president of the United States? The Harper headquarters of Calgary, Alberta, e.g., is […]

As the prospect of warmer weather settles in again across the true north, the latest political rumblings of quasi-hysteria in Ottawa can start to seem beside the point. Now even Liberals are apparently unhappy about the Liberal government’s neo-Machiavellian blending of both the Kyoto and Atlantic accords with upcoming federal budget legislation. Yet a “vote […]

On Tuesday, March 8, 2005 the Globe and Mail in Toronto reported “Democracy key to beating terror, Bush says.” At this point it also looked as if current events in Lebanon were about to move President Bush’s growing reputation as a stand-up prophet of humanitarian democratic progress in the global village up a few more […]

There were two lead news items on the Philadelphia Inquirer website for Friday, January, 7, 2005 – an account of the latest insurgency action in Iraq, and an update on the South and Southeast Asian tsunami disasters of December 26, 2004. It may have been just a slow-news Friday, at the start of a new […]