We watched the TV coverage of various 2015 Remembrance Day ceremonies in the office lounge this past Wednesday. And there was general agreement that they were unusually crowded and poignant this year. Some attributed this to a greater sense of fragility about the struggles of the global village, that seems to be in the air […]

As we write in the early morning on Tuesday, October 20, 2015, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have won 184 seats in the Canadian House of Commons with 39.5% of the cross-Canada popular vote. (A mere 170 seats is required for a bare majority government : Mr. Trudeau is the new prime minister elect of Canada.) The […]

Here in Toronto, where our editorial offices are currently located (most of the time), with just nine days before the fateful 2015 Canadian federal election on October 19, we are starting to learn that you have to be steely about the baseball Blue Jays. Meanwhile, back in the land of election data, if there is […]

Just before the week of September 28—October 4 began, we received a tip from the front lines of the ground war. It suggested the Mulcair New Democrats were about to implode, as the 2015 Canadian federal election draws closer to the day of decision on Monday, October 19. Now that the first day of the […]

Steve Benen, who writes for Rachel Maddow’s blog, has finally clued us in on what it is about hotelier Donald Trump’s sudden surge to prominence in the US Republican primary pre-season that is seriously interesting. Benen’s August 24, 2015 piece on “Are the rules of politics being rewritten?” declares : “Political science, based largely on […]

There was a time when we felt it was inappropriate to use the ancient English expletive “fuck” in published writing. (It does not appear, eg, in our office copy of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary in two volumes,  1972 printing.) But the Internet and various new political and broader cultural vibrations since the 1980s (?) […]

Now that Stephen Harper has “called” a “long federal election” –  for October 19, as already prescribed in his own 2007 fixed election date legislation –  here are three quick notes to celebrate the start of the official campaign (as opposed to the unofficial one underway for almost too long already) : (1) Fixing elections? […]

The truth seems so easy to forget. Maybe because it so often reminds us of unpleasant facts? Or at least facts we would just as soon not remember? So we counterweights editors here have been wondering. Why, in the middle of July 2015,  is the Citizen X posting for January 31, 2015 still dragging in […]

One thing we’ve done to celebrate Canada Day 2015 is post C.M.W. Marcel’s long awaited report on the 400th anniversary of Samuel de Champlain’s visit to what is now Ontario in the summer of 1615.  ( See “Huronia/Wendake 2015” above and/or CLICK HERE.) Meanwhile, Happy Canada Day 2015 – a year when there “has never […]

Questions have been raised about the Confederate flag still flying over the South Carolina state capitol, even after the appalling terrorist prayer-meeting murders in Charleston this past Wednesday night. They may remind some of us north of the Great Lakes that a few much milder questions were raised about the current Ontario provincial flag last […]