Time magazine named eight final candidates for its 2014 Person of the Year designation : acting Iraqi Kurdish Region president Masoud Barzani  ; first openly gay Fortune 500 CEO Tim Cook ; the Ebola caregivers ; the Ferguson protesters ; controversial National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell ; Chinese e-commerce giant founder Jack Ma ; […]

This coming Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (December 9—11, 2014) “First Nation leaders from across Canada will gather in Winnipeg … for the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) Special Chiefs Assembly (SCA) and election for AFN National Chief.” Nancy Macdonald has nicely summarized the details here on the Maclean’s website. (Or not, if you don’t like […]

Lawrence Martin’s quite remarkable Globe and Mail column this past Tuesday (November 18, 2014)  – “A pro-active PM seizes the agenda” – deserves more attention, and debate. The essential argument is nicely (or otherwise) summarized in Mr. Martin’s first paragraph : “If victory goes to the guy who wants it most, Stephen Harper is making […]

Yesterday another poll from Forum Research brought the good news that the answer to a question posed on this site a mere nine days ago – “Will it really end just deja vu all over again for John Tory (and curtains for civilization in Toronto) ??” – is almost certainly NO. (Well, probably anyway. Close […]

“This is a big week of big events. Hold onto your socks.” (Frances Horodelski, BNN) “It seems like we’ve just returned from our Walnut Creek Conference in California,” someone among us said the other day. “And now we’re going to another travelling conference in Europe? Does that make a lot of sense? Or any sense […]

We’ve admired Lauren O’Neil ever since we bumped into her student think-piece on Harold Innis and the Owl of Minerva. (See “Minerva’s owl spreads its wings on Stephen Harper’s last gasp of the British monarchy in Canada,” February 18, 2011.) More recently Ms  O’Neil has happily found a berth on the CBC News website. And […]

“The Long Journey to a Canadian Republic, 1963—20??” is the title of Part IV in Randall White’s current book project, tentatively and still too lengthily called Children of the Global Village – Canada in the 21st Century : Tales about the history that matters. (One inspiration for the title and larger project has apparently been […]

By noon tomorrow (Sunday, August 3, 2014) our counterweights Toronto editorial staff (well, most of us anyway) will be on an Air Canada jet bound for San Francisco. At the San Francisco International Airport (“SFO” as they say locally), we will board the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train to Walnut Creek – en route […]

It may be hard to get a word in about anything but the Malaysian airplane disaster in east Ukraine today (or possibly the new Israeli ground offensive in Gaza) – and with good enough reason. But life in our own small corner still goes on. This week we’ve been at the receiving end of two […]

As best as we can make out, there is something … well, tacky at best …  about the way Moody’s rating agency changed   “Ont. outlook to negative from stable …  as it reaffirmed Ontario’s Aa2 ratings”, just before a new throne speech kicked off the 41st Parliament at Queen’s Park. According to Moody’s vice president […]