[UPDATE DECEMBER 4 : Initial impressions of first NDP/NPD leadership debate – SEE BELOW]. Tomorrow, Sunday 4 December 2011, at 2PM ET / 11AM PT, the nine (count em) contenders for the leadership of the New Democratic Party of Canada / Nouveau Parti démocratique du Canada will be holding their first debate in Ottawa – […]

[UPDATED DECEMBER 1]. One of the good things about Canada is that it is more serious and high-minded than other places, right? And a good example of this is the Globe and Mail – whose semi-post-modern headquarters at the edge of the lakeshore rail line into downtown Toronto still proudly proclaims “Canada’s National Newspaper”? Right […]

It is more than 30 years since the ill-fated National Energy Program (NEP) in Canada began – and more than 25 years since it ended. So even the few in the most populous province who have bumped into the recent Vancouver Sun article headlined “Alberta premier tries to build bridges with Ontario on energy policy […]

We need to be experimenting more these days, throughout the global village it seems. We can’t do anything of consequence about that ourselves, no doubt. (And look what has happened lately to Yes We Can among the broader community of Yankees to the south of us, who must south of us remain.) But we can […]

The 30th anniversary of the day after the Canadian Night of the Long Knives – when “on November 5th, 1981, a radiant Trudeau announced the deal that had been reached with the nine provinces” and a “fuming Lévesque looked on” – has already been commemorated, at various places on and off the world wide web. […]

BBC News Europe is reporting that: “The Labour Party’s Michael D Higgins has been officially confirmed as the ninth Irish president after one of the most remarkable comebacks in the state’s history … The poet and campaigner received 701,101 first-preference votes – almost 40% of the total … His victory over one-time favourite Sean Gallagher […]

Not that anyone is paying much attention (right now). But we’d just like to add our voices of support (or at least special interest) for the federal NDP leadership candidacy of Nathan Cullen – MP for the vast northern BC riding of Skeena-Bulkley Valley. A few weeks ago, Barbara Yaffe noted in the Vancouver Sun […]

The last seven posts on this blog – on the October 6 Ontario election, in which Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals have now won a so-called “major minority” – have all been written by the same individual (and he is very individual). So why, you might well ask, are the rest of the counterweights editors, and other […]

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2011. The Canadian House of Commons returns to work today, after its usual long summer vacation (once an essential break for family farmers, for whom summer was the crucial busy season). According to the lovely Jennifer Ditchburn at The Canadian Press, after “tributes to late NDP leader Jack Layton” are paid in […]

“Can Lloyd George Do It?” is the title of a 1929 tract by John Maynard Keynes and Hubert Douglas Henderson on the economic policy of the fading British Liberal Party of the day. (As the Duke University economist E. Roy Weintraub put it a few years ago, in commenting on a New York Times column […]