The big Canadian national event July 3-12, 2009 is the Calgary Stampede. This year’s marshal for the July 3 Stampede parade was Canada’s most painstaking (and expensive?) TV handyman, Mike Holmes. He at least “lives outside of Toronto, ON.” And so a further blow of sorts was struck for national unity. East is east and […]
TORONTO. SUNDAY, JUNE 28, 2009. The Canada Day that looms ahead this year is looking a bit gloomy in Canada’s most populous metropolis. As just one of many cases in point, an Ontario cabinet minister from faraway Windsor has called Torontonians “babies” for complaining about a garbage strike right when the weather gets hot. Premier […]
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 17, 2009. “No summer election as Harper, Ignatieff reach deal” is the headline for a Canadian Press story run in the Halifax Chronicle Herald today. Yahoo Canada is carrying a later revised version, re-titled “MPs brace for fall election as summer vote averted.” Other variations include “Harper and Ignatieff reach deal” (Globe and […]
UPDATED NOVEMBER 4, 2009, JANUARY 9, 2011, and JANUARY 13, 2011. In Ontario today, as in so many other places no doubt, the rule of law often seems to move at what can only strike we ordinary citizens and taxpayers as an astoundingly glacial pace. It was more than 16 months ago now that the 57-year-old Dr. […]
Gordon Gibson had a column in the Vancouver Sun earlier this week, urging that British Columbia should stop re-negotiating its contract for provincial police services with the RCMP – and re-establish the old BC Provincial Police, disbanded back in 1950. (As matters stand, only Ontario and Quebec now have their own police forces. All eight […]
OTTAWA, FEBRUARY 20, 2009. Many years ago now the long since departed Canadian historian Frank Underhill declared: “Canadians always vote Democratic in American elections.” Opinion polls have subsequently borne out the wisdom of this remark – through various shifts in demography, etc, etc. That may be because US Democratic politicians have at least sometimes shown […]
OTTAWA. WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2009. 8 PM ET. The dubiously prorogued Parliament of Canada has been back in business some two and a half weeks. It now has a more or less big economic stimulus budget to its credit - though is it big enough, etc, etc? And it is time to wrap up our already […]
It was not easy to be cheerful when we saw headlines like: “Think 2008 was bad? Just wait, economists say” ; “Economists grim in their forecasts for 2009” ; and “2009 to be ‘weakest year’ since World War II.”On the other hand, on the second-last day of the fateful old year we heard as well that […]
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2008. 11:30 PM ET. [UPDATED DECEMBER 1 BELOW]. All day today CTV Newsnet has been breathlessly broadcasting that, on the basis of a tape of a “telephone-conference meeting” that Jack Layton held “with his caucus Saturday morning” (surreptitiously recorded by the Conservatives), the “New Democrats and Bloc Quebecois held talks to form […]
The term “Speech from the Throne” itself reminds us that the present confederation began as the mere first self-governing dominion of the British empire – back in “the era of Queen Victoria,” and so forth (as the excellent Governor General Michaelle Jean put it on the afternoon of Wednesday, February 19, 2008). And the peculiar […]
