“America remains a place … where the shadow of disappointment always threatens to darken the day.” So wrote Robert Pogue Harrison, Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature at Stanford University in California, in the October 28, 2010 issue of the New York Review of Books.” On the old Frank Underhill theory that “practically all Canadians […]
If you search “Gilles Duceppe” in the online editions of either the Washington Post or the New York Times at the moment, you will just get “No Results Found” or “Your search – Gilles Duceppe – did not match any documents under Past 30 Days.” Even if you try the same game on Le Devoir.com, […]
It is a strictly parochial contest. But on this Canadian Thanksgiving holiday weekend (some six-and- a-half weeks before the real Thanksgiving in the USA) the competition among the four daily newspapers that Canada’s largest city is still so lucky to enjoy may have been won by the Toronto Star. For me at least two particular […]
The Globe and Mail has just published some fresh but rather desultory seat projections for a next Canadian federal election, if it were held more or less right now. They “are based on a weighted average of three recent polls conducted by Angus-Reid, EKOS Research and Ipsos-Reid between Sept. 21 and Sept. 28, and including […]
Tuesday, September 28, 2010 is the 10th anniversary of the death of Pierre Trudeau, 15th prime minister of the modern Canadian confederation (and in office for 15 years, five months, and a little more than one week:1968—1979, 1980—1984). Bruce Cheadle in the Globe and Mail and Randy Boswell in all of the Vancouver Sun, Windsor […]
Ever since Canada definitively became An Actual Democracy in the early 20th century (at the very least), its unreformed, “relic-of-the-19th-century” Senate has generally refrained from trying to defeat legislation duly passed by a majority of the democratically elected Canadian House of Commons. A merely appointed Senate in an actual democracy that tried to actually exercise […]
[UPDATED SEPTEMBER 22, 11 PM ET]. There is still probably a small question mark beside the fate of the long gun registry in the Canadian House of Commons on Wednesday, September 22, sometime after 5:30 PM ET. But as the Globe and Mail has reported, assuming no further surprises between now and then, the decision […]
[UPDATED SEPTEMBER 16: SEE BELOW.] Much has been written and otherwise communicated about the federal long-gun registry in Canada lately. One of the more sensible commentaries has been Andrew Coyne’s piece in Macleans.ca last Friday, “The long-gun registry’s value is only symbolic.” Mr. Coyne writes (not without a suitably sardonic Canadian sense of political humour, […]
Why is the ninth anniversary of the September 11 disaster in the USA suddenly such a poignant occasion? The 10th anniversary next year would seem a reasonable time for retrospective hand-wringing. But the ninth? Why make a fuss about that? The obvious answer is that 2010 is an election year. Only “mid-terms”: President Obama does […]
At first the news that Toronto City Council has just endorsed the “Vienna Declaration” (which “advocates harm reduction over the law enforcement-driven war on drugs”) – set beside the news that “Paris Hilton was arrested late Friday night on suspicion of possession of cocaine after police noticed the smell of marijuana coming from the SUV […]
