Barack Obama’s undoubted status as the first African American president of Democracy in America can obscure his greater depths as one of the most distinctive occupants of the office ever, “without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.” Such were my thoughts, at any rate, […]
The establishment of several regional political cultures of united empire loyalism was one thing going on in the second British North America during the first half of the 19th century. Something of this old imperial and monarchist ideology still has traction in some parts of Canada today. Yet it is no longer at any centre […]
[UPDATED AUG 18TH]. The second week in the long official campaign for the Canadian federal election of 2015 is over. And the congenital regional diversity of it all is what sticks in my mind right now. I’m watching from the old East Toronto, close to the most easterly of the Great Lakes. Reading “Liberal leader […]
The official 2015 “long form” Canadian federal election campaign has only just begun. And already I can understand what Rosemary Barton means when she says : “In this election campaign, the only constant is ‘change’ .” I know it’s finally just because I am so much older and more tired than Ms Barton. But it […]
Those of us who have been wondering just what exotic political toy Stephen Harper would be pulling from his now well-worn bag of inside Ottawa tricks next can stop wondering. He has produced the device in question and – whatever it is, exactly – it has apparently worked. (So far, at any rate. There are […]
Up here in the northern woods, watching the Canadian sunset over the lake in July, I am starting to think that Andrew Coyne was on to something last month. He told us  there “has never been an election campaign like the one on which we are now embarked. There’s a weird fin-de-siècle glow in the […]
GANATSEKWYAGON, ONTARIO. SUNDAY, JUNE 28, 2015. 2:30 AM ET. Â The early summer storms that have lately been battering this region have returned. Right now you can literally hear the wind and the rain in the darkness outside the back office window, here at the edge of the great lake. There does seem some kind of […]
Up here in the land of the Canadian Sunset a George Soros article in the July 9, 2015 issue of the New York Review of Books offers evidence that the Harper government’s ongoing harassment of Ontario’s Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and International Trade, Michael Chan, is not just “a flourish of 1950s-era McCarthyism – call […]
On the world wide web in the summer of 2015 the Wikipedia entry for “United Empire Loyalist” declared that “Loyalists settled in what was initially Quebec … and modern-day Ontario … and in Nova Scotia (including modern-day New Brunswick). Their arrival marked the beginning of a predominantly English-speaking population in the future Canada west and […]
This past Friday two big names on the Toronto newspaper pundit scene explored the sudden surge of New Democratic support in Canadian federal politics, during a key election year. In the Globe and Mail Jeffrey Simpson asked “Can a third orange wave splash across Canada?” And he finally answered : “The failure of the Conservatives […]
