Probably very few citizens of the USA today would want to call Detroit Tigers vs. St. Louis Cardinals the French World Series of 2006. But this does make some sense for Canadians, francophones and anglophones alike, who know their own history. Detroit was founded in 1701 by Antoine de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, and […]
When Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty started making noises against Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s plans for Canadian Senate reform this past spring, it still seemed possible for the strange but hardy breed of local Ontario Senate reformers to believe that there was some deeper message between the lines. Now two excellent reports by Susan Delacourt in the Toronto […]
When the Vancouver Sun runs a news item on an Ontario provincial by-election in the old Toronto west end you can guess something is happening. On the surface, federal Liberal leadership candidate Gerard Kennedy’s old Ontario provincial seat in Parkdale-High Park was just up for grabs in a by-election, on Thursday, September 14, 2006. Yet this somehow […]
[UPDATED AUGUST 23]. Along with everything else this waning summer, the free and democratic people in Canada’s most populous province of Ontario must still worry about what the influential political newsletter Inside Queen’s Park has just called a “dangerously festering dispute,” between the Six Nations Iroquois of the Grand River and assorted governments and non-aboriginal […]
George Orwell (1903-1950) was such an interesting political writer partly because he lived through so many troubling issues of both his and our day in his own life. Reading about the human rights activist Charm Tong’s June 2006 visit to Canada, at least, is likely to make anyone who has read the book remember Orwell’s […]
According to The Province in Vancouver: “A native group within the Vancouver area operating under the banner of the Six Nations Solidarity Network have been planning a response to see how they can support their Ontario native compatriots” in the Caledonia land-claim protest, which threatened fresh violence earlier this week. Just over 95 years ago, […]
SUNDAY, MAY 7, 2006. Canada does not pay as much attention to the United Kingdom as it used to. But lately you might almost think that, inadvertently or otherwise, the new Conservative minority government in Ottawa has brought a few fresh Imperial Echoes of days that used to be long gone by. Even in Canada, e.g., Tony […]
Mr. John Ibbitson is arguably the most stimulating and even brilliant political columnist in Ottawa today. He is always worth reading, and often right. But for growing numbers of the Canadian people he is just wrong in his recent Toronto Globe and Mail column on “Why we need a Queen of Canada.” Electing the governor-general […]
Would there be so much talk these days about “the economic capital of Canada rapidly moving west” (Thomas Courchene in the latest Inside Queen’s Park newsletter), if the 2006 election had delivered another Ontario-dominated Liberal minority government instead of a new Alberta-dominated Conservative minority government in Ottawa? Or, do Canadians have a new minority Conservative government because oil-rich Calgary and […]
New minority Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s surprise visit to Canadian troops in Afghanistan over the past few days, it is now being said, has just stiffened the case for “a huge debate” in Canada today – “and we need to have it.” As one suitably modest place to start, just what does the international community […]
