The Ontario Provincial Police have now actually charged two Ontario Liberal Party workers – Patricia Sorbara in Toronto and Gerry Lougheed in Sudbury – with “bribery” under the provincial Elections Act, in connection with a political controversy surrounding a by-election in Sudbury almost two years ago. My own reaction when I first heard the news […]

The juxtaposition of the last days of the twisted 2016 US election campaign and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s latest round of “independent” appointments to the still seriously unreformed Senate of Canada casts some harsh light on what the new Liberal government in Ottawa is trying to do with this archaic Canadian institution – still too […]

[UPDATED OCTOBER 25]. The big worry about the 2016 US election now is that (once again?) the forces of progress are growing too complacent and/or triumphalistic. Two of the last five national polls on both the Real Clear Politics and  Five Thirty Eight sites have Trump tied or slightly ahead. Even the more impressionistic TV […]

Just a  footnote to my underground report of last week – “This isn’t the first time Donald Trump has pretended to run for President etc.” The footnote is inspired by two examples of higher political journalism in the  USA today – David Brooks’s October 11, 2016 article in the New York Times, “Donald Trump’s Sad, […]

I bumped into L. Frank Bunting at The Rex this past weekend. And he agreed that with Donald Trump’s possibly “Worst Week in Presidential Campaign History” now behind us, the US election campaign is looking a little less like “democracy as depicted by Hieronymus Bosch.” (See his September 22 meditation on “Hieronymus Bosch back in […]

In the early 21st century it is not easy to think constructively about the now largely vanished first self-governing British dominion of Canada. The northern North American universe from the late 1860s to the early 1960s is both too remote yet still too close at hand. Then there is the late historian Ramsay Cook’s quip […]

GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. The return to realism after Labour day is almost here. And it suddenly becomes clear that this past Thursday’s Scarborough-Rouge River byelection was a welcome splash of cold water for we rare but resolute fans of Ontario provincial politics. (See, eg : “Ontario Tories win hotly-contested Toronto-area byelection” by Allison Jones at The […]

Those of us who regularly have breakfast while watching cp24 in Canada’s most disliked city region will already have seen the reassuring video of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, resigning today as Member of Parliament for Calgary Heritage. I never voted for Mr. Harper’s party, and I remain opposed to most of its declared  policies. […]

This past Friday night the excellent Steve Kornacki at MSNBC TV (sitting in for Rachel Maddow) presented some intriguing 2016 US election statistics. They showed that in the more recent past presidential candidates with as good polling numbers as Hillary Clinton has now, two weeks after the last national convention, have gone on to win […]

[UPDATED JULY 28, 29]. According to two US national polls at the start of this week on Monday, July 25, “Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump tied going into Democratic convention” and (still worse) “Donald Trump bounces into the lead.” And then, very early on Wednesday, July 27, even the Associated Press was reporting : “Sanders […]