The ho-hum quality of the 2007 annual meeting of the leaders of the United States, Mexico, and Canada – held this year “in a massive cedar log chateau” at Montebello, Quebec – was nicely summarized in headlines from the three leading US newspapers of record. According to the New York Times, e.g., there were “No […]
The summering partners of the counterweights editors up here in Canada have just emailed a bizarre new theory about the near-term future of American politics. They say they arrived at their propositions after a tough mid August 2007 evening, watching MSNBC TV. But, it turns out, no less than Newt Gingrich had already started the […]
Even in Canada the rising great mess in the Middle East is the focal point of the summer this year. And for Canadians especially it is not just Iraq – it’s Afghanistan and now Pakistan too. Meanwhile, Stephen Harper is on the road in the Western Hemisphere (Colombia, Chile, Barbados, and Haiti). And a somewhat […]
Friday, July 13, 2007 turns out an unlucky day for the fallen media baron Conrad Black, who used to be a Canadian citizen but gave that up to become a British lord. A US jury in Chicago has finally found him guilty on four of 13 white-collar-crime charges. That might sound not too bad, all […]
“It could end with them all coming out or it could end in a bloodbath,” Stephen Cohen, South Asia expert at the Brookings Institute in Washington, said on Monday, July 9. Then at 4 AM on Tuesday, Pakistan time, Major-General Waheed Arshad announced that Pakistani forces had “launched an operation … to clear militants” from […]
Soon enough some 2,500 brave soldiers from French Canada’s fabled Vingt-Deux Regiment will be dangerously at work in Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, at a send-off on June 20 “anti-war sentiment spilled on to the floor of the Quebec National Assembly.” But this did not perturb commanding Brigadier-General Guy Laroche, who just said: “It is good to […]
On Friday, May 18 CBC News reported that Toronto civil rights lawyer Charles Roach “has won a key battle in his bid to take the Canadian oath of citizenship – without pledging allegiance to the Queen.” The Attorney General of Canada had wanted the court case in which Mr. Roach is trying to do this […]
The females in our focus group finally agreed that, on the level of Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie in The Simple Life, Margaret and Sophie Trudeau in Ethiopia works. The appearance of Liberal candidate Justin Trudeau’s wife and mother in the CTV show A Window Opens, on Saturday, May 12, at 7 PM (whatever your […]
Even before the definitive result was known, it seemed clear enough from the cable TV news that the right-wing candidate, Nicholas Sarkozy, was going to win the final round of the French presidential election on Sunday, May 6, 2007. If it’s a choice between “Dracula and Mary Poppins,” as the London press proposed, it probably […]
Two new polls on federal party standings have confirmed recent instincts about the essential dead-calm in the cross-Canada political mood. Another election soon would probably just put the same people back in the same seats as last year’s election. And that may definitively banish all further fevered election speculation at least until the fall. What […]
