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, […]
GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. DECEMBER 4, 2017. [UPDATED DECEMBER 11]. Who can doubt that we are now living in challenging times – especially in those realms of fake and other news where “Canada’s top party school” also qualifies as one of the “10 Wildest Party Schools in North America”? (Even as “Sex assault allegations place NS university’s […]
[UPDATED OCTOBER 31, NOVEMBER 1]. George Orwell’s Spanish Civil War book, Homage to Catalonia, first appeared in print in the spring of 1938. Not quite 80 years later, some updated version of its sad story about Spanish and Catalan politics – and the harsh light they cast on the wider world of the 1930s – […]
What is the most sensible (and democratic?) reaction to Quebec’s Bill 62, “requiring Quebecers to uncover their faces to get or receive government services”? (In effect Bill 62 partially bans face-covering burqa and niqab headgear worn by some – a quite small number it seems – Muslim women in Canada’s francophone-majority province.) (1) Our first […]
You may not care much about Premier John Horgan’s government’s “first update on BC budget” – like finance minister Carole James herself. Â You may also be thinking, like us, that the intriguing new NDP-Green alliance in BC provincial politics still looks too insecure to be of much broader Canadian significance. We can only say we […]
