At the end of this annual exercise for this (even unusually?) strange year we suddenly realize that our deepest recent preoccupations have been quite local – north of the North American Great Lakes, on the northwest shore of Lake Ontario. We may have been seeking refuge (albeit in vain) from the larger wild and crazy […]
One counterweights item from the year now ending that has seen fresh visits in the most recent past is Randall White’s “Can Justin Trudeau be defeated in the next Canadian federal election?,” first posted back on May 8, 2018. In the new age of fixed-date elections (sort of) the campaign for the 43rd Canadian federal […]
Ordinarily as the year ends we post a few lists of our own favourite or at least most-visited articles from the time on its way out. And we will be doing this again before December 31, 2018 (New Year’s Eve), at least once – and possibly twice. (Or more? Who can really say anything in […]
6:20 PM ET : Nothing too striking in the earliest 2018 US Midterms vote, as best as we can tell, on Twitter and/or TV. But it’s a relief that the evening has finally begun, as Rachel Maddow has recently observed. 12:15 AM : We agreed to wait somewhat longer before making any brief comments. Until […]
First, the bad news. Our text here is Neil Macdonald’s October 16 piece on the CBC News site :Â “Lose your illusions. It’s an ugly, dystopian world … People my age grew up believing the world, led by the West, was becoming more progressive. It wasn’t and isn’t.” Macdonald offers a “few thoughts on the […]
CANADA/SAUDI ARABIA : To us what the Canadian federal government has done in its recent complaints about the fate of Samar Badawi, and other human rights activists in Saudi Arabia, is altogether what should be done. We have stood up on the side of the angels, and we should just have the balls to stay […]
[UPDATED 4 PM]. The brief but fierce big rainy wind that toppled a huge old oak tree down by the lake is over, here in this big-urban Ontario NDP electoral district. But it also almost seemed like a meteorological comment on key current political events. The human dramas have calmed down now, along with the […]
In some ways we cannot really say that almost all of us in the Toronto editorial office here will be headed for Trump’s America on April 18, 2018, for one of our regular conferences with our growing technical staff in northern California. California generally is not really in Trump’s America, of course, and northern California […]
The other night on TV the eminent and excellent CBC News poll analyst Éric Grenier advised that, based on current polling data, the coming June 7 election in Canada’s most populous province is “Doug Ford’s to lose.” This has various people nervous, including us. However you look at it, the new provincial Progressive Conservative leader […]
Who would even want to deny that 2017 has been a strange year? Certainly not us, at any rate. And here’s one cut at how the world looked to five brazen voices from our team on the northwest shore of the most easterly North American Great Lake – Dominic Berry, the Counterweights Editors, Rob Sparrow, […]
