Tim Hudak’s “wild and crazy plan for Tories to win” may not be “that crazy” (Martin Regg Cohn at the Toronto Star, believe it or not), but the latest opinion polls on the current Ontario election campaign certainly seem to qualify on both counts. As noted yesterday, a Forum Research poll taken on May 12Â […]
What is still only potentially the most interesting Ontario election campaign in years has not yet come to any tight focus, some 10 days after the at least unofficial start. A question raised on this site back this past January may come closest to where things almost seem to be : “Is an uber right-wing […]
The late great Canadian literary critic, Northrop Frye – who came to Toronto via Sherbrooke, Quebec and then mostly Moncton, New Brunswick, “to compete in a national typing contest in 1929” (!!!!) – once called Ontario “surely one of the most inarticulate communities in human culture.” And there is something about the still very youthful […]
So much is going on north of the Great Lakes these days that it’s hard to focus on any one thing. So here are quick notes on five things animating the late-afternoon water-cooler debates among we counterweights editors on Wednesday, April 23, 2014 : (1) On Monday Susanna Kelley, empress of the excellent ontarionewswatch.com, posted […]
No partisan of the Canadian future can fail to admire the practical political judgment of the people of Quebec in their April 7, 2014 provincial election, for seats in the Assemblée nationale in Quebec City. Strictly in terms of seats the current results, just after midnight on the Globe and Mail site, are : LIBERAL […]
Tomorrow the counterweights editors and editorial staff in Toronto will be leaving more or less en masse to consult and otherwise constructively interact with the technical support staff in Palo Alto, California (and their new rural branch office in the exurbs of Gilroy, south of San Jose). We will be doing what we can to […]
The Liberal Party of Canada has some reasons for feeling good at its Montreal convention this weekend. (Eg : “Majority says it’s ‘time for another federal party to take over’: poll” ; “More Canadians share Justin Trudeau’s values: poll” ; and “Liberals open wider lead over Conservatives: poll.”) Two members of CBC TV’s most widely […]
On one theory at least, what goes on in Canada’s federal parliament is crucial to the vitality of our parliamentary democracy. Whatever else, it forms a convenient framework for professional media coverage of Canadian federal politics. And on an old (and now almost certainly obsolete) Anglo Central Canadian theory, hockey and federal (or as some […]
In the land of the friendly giant next door, the year began with the at least somewhat hopeful inauguration of Barack Obama’s second term. (And then ended, sadly for us at any rate, with a progressive American president in more trouble than we’d like to see.) Meanwhile, much closer to our particular home and native […]
Here in the new wild-and-crazy City of Toronto “left-wing kooks” is a term most memorably applied by the dean of Canadian hockey commentators, Don Cherry, at the inauguration of Mayor Rob Ford, some three years ago now. (As in : “Rob’s honest, he’s truthful…I say he’s going to be the greatest mayor this city has […]
