What to make of the latest political craziness in the USA today (at least from where I live, north of the Great Lakes)? Here are four clusters of mid-summer 2019 intelligence, gleaned from the World Wide Web – and beyond : I. THE WISDOM OF GEORGE WILL : My shrewdest insider source from the hard […]

[UPDATED JUNE 22]. The obvious first reaction to Premier Doug Ford’s big cabinet shuffle at the end of his first year in office is that it wasn’t his cabinet who was so visibly booed at the Toronto Raptors NBA championship celebration this past Monday. The point was not lost on CBC TV’s “This Hour Has […]

(1) Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s chief of staff, Dean French, is going ahead with “a defamation lawsuit over posts made on social media by Randy Hillier, the maverick MPP ejected from the governing Progressive Conservative caucus.” And “Maverick MPP Randy Hillier says lawsuit by top Doug Ford aide is meant to silence him.” All this […]

Canadians ought to be especially sensitive to the subtle nuances of Robert Mueller’s apparent conclusions on the narrow issues he was commissioned to investigate, in the current age of crisis and testing for Democracy in America. One of the few key sentences from the actual Mueller report that Attorney General Barr has quoted directly is […]

[UPDATE ON ELIZABETH MAY’S MARCH 1 DEMANDS BELOW. UPDATED AGAIN MARCH 10 ; AND YET AGAIN MARCH 30 : For March 30 update scroll straight to end of this page — where there are also now updates for March 31 and April 2]. What it still seems most sensible to just call the SNC-Lavalin Affair […]

[UPDATED FEBRUARY 18. SEE BELOW]. On Valentine’s Day 2019 it is hard to know just what to make of the first prime minister of the 1867 confederation of British North American Provinces now known as Canada. (Well … my thoughts here are actually being posted just after Valentine’s Day, but that’s just because I’m a […]

The most interesting Canadian political event this week is almost certainly the BC provincial byelection in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, Wednesday, January 30, 2019. John Horgan’s current BC NDP government in Victoria remains in office with the help of three Green party Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs). And the NDP/Greens together are just very […]

Some would characterize the Nobel Peace Prize winner Lester “Mike” Pearson’s comparatively short prime ministerial career (1963–68) as the time when Canada’s long-incubating federal welfare state achieved its ultimate modern fruition. Others would allude to one of “the most influential commissions in Canadian history, the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963–69),” which “brought about […]

The day itself was an entire week ago now, but no matter … The drama of the 2018 municipal election in Canada’s current largest city was all before election day. The somewhat Trumpian Doug Ford, new premier of Canada’s most populous province of Ontario (and failed Toronto mayoral candidate in 2014), finally managed to reduce […]

I have no deep familiarity with the writing of V.S. Naipaul, who “died at his home in London” Saturday, August 11, 2018, just a few days short of his 86th birthday. But he is at least one of only a few great literary talents I for a while found fascinating after my mid-30s. I feel […]