At first the news that Toronto City Council has just endorsed the “Vienna Declaration” (which “advocates harm reduction over the law enforcement-driven war on drugs”) — set beside the news that “Paris Hilton was arrested late Friday night on suspicion of possession of cocaine after police noticed the smell of marijuana coming from the SUV [...]

I sometimes think stiffening Canadian sovereignty in those parts of the Arctic north customarily marked as Canadian territory on Canadian maps is one of the three almost impressive things that Stephen’s Harper’s Conservative minority government has done, since it first came to office on February 6, 2006. The other two are the parliamentary recognition of [...]

This past Friday marked the 20th anniversary of Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe’s August 13, 1990 by-election victory in the eastern downtown Montreal riding of  Laurier—Sainte-Marie. Even with a maternal grandfather from the United Kingdom, M. Duceppe was, so to speak, the first Canadian federal MP to be elected as an ostensibly “sovereigntist” BQ partisan. [...]

“We know,” PM Harper told his Conservative summer caucus last week: “there are some in the opposition coalition again threatening an election, but colleagues, that is not what Canadians want.” And just today the sweetheart of Sparks Street Jane Taber is reporting that “Michael Ignatieff is under attack from Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, who are accusing [...]

Sleeping in a cottage boathouse built by a long-deceased uncle this August civic holiday weekend has prompted some meditations on the varying accomplishments of various generations — and the importance of deciding which ones are most worth remembering today. My uncle’s day job was in an office in the city. But, like my father and [...]

“So all we’re saying,” Treasury Board President Stockwell Day has urged in defence of the current plan to abandon the long-form census, “is this should not be mandatory.” Canadians, Mr. Day believes, should not be compelled by the long arm of the law to “tell some unknown bureaucrat” about their home life, work, and ethnic [...]

Two apparently widely read columns from the New York Times this past weekend finally brought home, for me at any rate, some new hard truths about the changing mood in the USA today: “There’s a Battle Outside and It Is Still Ragin’” by Frank Rich, and Maureen Dowd’s “You’ll Never Believe What This White House [...]

The impossible dream of a single national securities regulator for Canada summarizes many intractable problems of our congenitally elusive Canadian national unity in the early 21st century. And as the Reuters agency has just explained: “Canada’s current minority Conservative government has come closer than any of its predecessors to launching” such an organization. But “it [...]

“Why are you keeping these things if you’re never going to look at them again?”  It’s a good question. So I recently re-read Jonathan Raban’s review of  The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime by the estimable William Langewiesche, in the August 12, 2004 issue of the New York Review of Books. [...]

According to CTV, “late Wednesday night,” July 7, David Johnston, the 69-year-old president of the University of Waterloo, who earlier served Stephen Harper by (rather deftly) writing “the terms of reference for the Oliphant inquiry, which examined former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s business dealings with German-Canadian arms dealer Karlheinz Schreiber,” will be announced as the [...]