I am not a fan of the National Post. But over the 2010 holiday season I think it deserves some credit for contributing to both sides of what is not quite yet an important debate we will be having in Canada, if and when we show serious signs of surviving the 21st century. To kick […]
Julian Assange is now out on bail, living the high life at “Ellingham Hall, a lavish country estate in eastern England, where under the bail conditions he must spend every night.” I have been trying to understand what makes his case as high-minded as it does seem to have become, even though he probably is […]
[UPDATED MARCH 30, 2011]. Ira Gershwin’s lyrics to the Kurt Weill tune, “The Saga of Jenny,” from the 1941 Broadway musical Lady in the Dark, has some appropriate seasonal allusions in 2010: “Jenny made her mind up when she was three / She herself was going to trim the Christmas tree / Christmas Eve she […]
“Many of our national security issues,” Gary Wills wrote recently, in the November 25, 2010 issue of the New York Review of Books, “are not meant to deceive the enemy, but to keep Congress and the American people in the dark about what our government is doing in our name.” Given the time lags in […]
UPDATED DECEMBER 4: The big Ottawa mystery this Friday afternoon in early December is whether John Ibbitson was right, when he reported yesterday on the Globe and Mail website (appearing in the print edition this morning), that: “The Harper government and the opposition parties have agreed to quietly sink legislation [aka Bill C-12] that would […]
UPDATE NOVEMBER 30, 2010. 1:15 AM ET. As widely predicted, Robert Sopuck did win the rural Manitoba riding of Dauphin-Swan River-Marquette handily enough for the Conservatives, with “about 58 per cent of the vote.” Elsewhere it now seems clear enough that the Ignatieff Liberals have not fared quite as badly as some had feared (including, […]
At the level of international political soap opera, at any rate, are we or are we not on the verge of some kind of revival of the ancient British monarchy, in an age of resurgent conservatism in the new global village on which the sun still never dares to set? For our particular purposes here, […]
Yesterday marked the 125th anniversary of the hanging of the Canadian Métis leader, Louis Riel, shortly after 8:15 AM, local time, in what is now Regina, Saskatchewan. The preceding summer he had been tried for treason to the then 18-year-old Dominion of Canada, for his role in the so-called North West Rebellion of 1885. And […]
Technically, a Canadian federal election on December 31, 2010 could still be called as late as November 26 – 11 days from now. (And as some will want to remember here, the Federal Court of Appeal has “ruled that the Bill C-16 fixed-election-date measures” which became law “in May 2007 … did not … change […]
Jim Coyle at the Toronto Star is probably or even almost certainly right: Despite the “ripples through Queen’s Park” launched by the surprise resignation of BC Premier Gordon Campbell this week, Ontario Premier Dalton “McGuinty is within a year of an election. In all likelihood, there’s too little time to change leaders. And, in any […]
