A recent poll on the pride Canadians place in more than a dozen symbols and achievements found that the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 this year came in near the bottom – even though the federal government has budgeted more than $28 million to mark the occasion. The 175th anniversary of the so-called […]
According to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC this past Tuesday, such Republican luminaries as John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and Kelly Ayotte “are so virulently attacking Susan Rice [mostly over her already well-explained first reaction to the Benghazi attack on US diplomats in Libya] … to give the GOP a shot at picking up John Kerry’s senate […]
[UPDATED NOVEMBER 24]. With only a week left before the deadline for entering the Ontario Liberal leadership race (don’t forget your 250 party-member signatures and $50,000 entry fee), the slate of candidates on offer has become much clearer than it was a month ago. And so has the process involved. As Robert Benzie and Rob […]
TORONTO, CANADA. NOVEMBER 7, 2012. 2 AM ET. I woke this morning to cp24 TV (well, strictly speaking, now it’s yesterday morning I guess). And I heard that nothing we think up here in the Canadian attic about the US election will make it through the bubble of the American consciousness. (Which is no doubt […]
[UPDATED OCTOBER 30]. A sentence in one of Martin Regg Cohn’s recent Toronto Star columns (Saturday, October 27, 2012) has revived some of my enthusiasm for what strikes some among us as a benign potential Ontario political development, that has lately seemed to have slid too far beyond the pale of realization in the real […]
TORONTO. OCTOBER 15, 2012. 11:00 PM ET. Like everyone else (except Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, apparently), I was altogether surprised by Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty’s announcement early this evening (“just before 6:30 pm ET”), that he was proroguing the Legislative Assembly at Queens’s Park, and stepping down as leader of the provincial Liberal Party. As […]
[UPDATED OCTOBER 14, 15]. People have been asking me, “do you still think President Barack Obama is the biggest thing that’s happened in American history in your lifetime (as I wrote back on September 9), now that the results of the first presidential debate are in?” I have just read my September 9 meanderings over […]
For all our vast technical progress over the past few centuries, we mere human beings still don’t seem to know much more about the vast mysteries of death than our ancestors several thousand years ago. And perhaps it is true enough — in some profoundly mysterious way — that certain kinds of people more or […]
For some Canadians – if opinion polls are to be believed, even for at least a bare majority, coast to coast to coast – the news that “Canada and Britain to run combined embassies” or “Canada, Britain to sign deal to ‘link up’ embassies abroad” or “Canada and Britain to join diplomatic forces” or “Canada, […]
You can’t deny that a lot of people these days are disappointed in US President Barack Obama – including some who really were enthused about him four years ago. I personally have friends, in both the United States and in Canada, where I live myself, who have told me they feel this way. It is […]
