Canada, the late Robertson Davies used to say, is the kind of country you worry about. And even though the present Canadian confederation has now been in business for 143 years (or at least will be this coming July 1), it is still all too easy to imagine that soon enough it will disappear off […]
Some will view today’s EKOS poll on Canadian federal politics, for the CBC, as just further evidence that a snap spring election in the true north remains somewhat less than probable – even if Conservative minority Prime Minister Stephen Harper is still “refusing to cower before the new clout of his parliamentary [majority] opposition.” (In […]
One thing that’s always been a bit hard to understand about the Harper minority government’s reluctance to release the now fabled “Afghan detainee documents” in Canada is why the prime minister should be quite so worried? It wasn’t his minority government that started the current Canadian adventure in Afghanistan. And, as Tasha Kheiriddin at the […]
So if Canadians are rightly “turned off by the ‘prurient obsession with the private lives of a couple who are encountering serious difficulties’” [best wishes Helena and Rahim], what else is going on that properly begs more serious attention? Well, for one thing: “A former CSIS director has panned the Conservative [minority] government’s plan to […]
As the almost always interesting Chantal Hébert is reporting today, Ottawa insiders are currently agog over: “the expulsion of ex-minister of state Helena Guergis from the benches of the government;” the unhappy fate of “Rémy Beauregard … late president of Rights and Democracy” who had some kind of trouble with “the government’s preferred pro-Israel line;” […]
TORONTO. MONDAY, APRIL 12, 2010. Just in time for the Blue Jays’ home opener against the Chicago White Sox tonight, pretty close to what Walt Whitman once called “the blue foreground” of Lake Ontario, our resident sporting life authority Rob Sparrow has filed his 2010 report on the prospects for the MLB team that actually […]
Back in the 1930s the historian Percy Robinson called Toronto “the citadel of British sentiment in America,” and Ontario “the most British of all the provinces.” He had not spent enough time in Victoria, BC or Halifax, NS – to say nothing of (parts of) Alberta (or Newfoundland, which was not a Canadian province in […]
The Canadian Press reports that the “Harper government is trying, for the fourth time in four years, to impose eight-year term limits on the Senate … Legislation introduced Monday [March 29, 2010] would limit senators to a single, non-renewable term and would apply to all senators appointed since October 2008.” On an earlier theory, this […]
MACKINAW CITY, MI. FRIDAY MARCH 19, 2010. This may or may not prove to be a historic week in the history of democracy in America. According to the Washington Post: “Pushing toward a Sunday vote that could transform the nation’s health-insurance system, House leaders announced a $940 billion compromise Thursday that would extend coverage to […]
The vital last words on the McGuinty government’s new “Open Ontario” throne speech won’t be heard until the provincial budget a few weeks hence. Some think Premier Dalton just “wants to change the channel … to forget eHealth and the HST.” Others believe that while “his path converged with Harper’s during tough times, [the] Ontario […]
