ONTARIO NOTEBOOK – RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. AUGUST 9, 2021. Like so many others I was saddened to hear that the 18th premier of Ontario – bland Bill Davis from Brampton – died peacefully at his home yesterday morning, with his family by his side, some nine days after celebrating his 92nd birthday. There […]

NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK – RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. JULY 26, 2021. My TV set has confirmed that Mary Simon, Canada’s first Indigenous Governor General, is now properly installed in office. My own related thoughts lately go back to June 11, when : “A new study from the non-profit Angus Reid Institute finds that one-in-five […]

NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK – RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. JULY 4, 2021. [UPDATED JULY 6]. Susan B. Glasser’s credentials are impressive : “… currently a staff writer at The New Yorker … Prior to her joining The New Yorker … she founded the award-winning Politico Magazine … previously served as the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy […]

NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK – RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. JUNE 11, 2021. I think Stephen Maher’s June 7, 2021 Maclean’s article, “John A. Macdonald can wait — We are at the beginning, not the end, of a process of reassessing our history“, says a number of good things on an important issue at the right […]

NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK – RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. JUNE 7, 2021. The troubling big news in Canada right now appears in reports like : “How radar technology is used to discover unmarked graves at former residential schools” ; and “Papal apology for church’s role in residential schools may not be ‘way forward’: archbishop.” In […]

NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK – RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. MAY 8, 2021. My treasured daily mail from Rachel Maddow a few days ago included a well-earned slight on the still-all-too-alive top Republican in the US Senate. It read : “This is his vision. It is not a secret. With Biden in the Oval Office, McConnell […]

SPECIAL FROM RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, APRIL 25, 2021. Pierre Berton published his two-volume history of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the early 1970s – The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (1970) and The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (1971). I think there are good and bad things to […]

This is the opening prologue to Randall White’s work in progress on the modern history of democracy in Canada, tentatively entitled Children of the Global Village : Democracy in Canada Since 1497. For more on the project see The Long Journey to a Canadian Republic, which also now includes drafts of all remaining chapters in […]

Thirty years later many might say that the people of Canada made the right decision when they rejected the Charlottetown Accord in the autumn of 1992. The constitutional future the deal envisioned had been conceived in too much haste with too little popular debate. The major provisions for Quebec’s unique status, Senate reform, and aboriginal […]

SPECIAL FROM RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, JANUARY 30, 2021. The main reaction to the unusual resignation of Governor General Julie Payette so far has focused on how she was vetted, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau chose her to fill the office in the summer of 2017. The Democracy Watch advocacy group has already spoken […]