NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK. RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, 4 AUGUST 2022. It would no doubt be wrong to express too much joy about “‘No’ prevails: Kansas votes to protect abortion rights in state constitution.” This supposedly “red state” support for the progressive option may not finally have real impact on the crucial November 8 midterm […]

ONTARIO TONITE. RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, TUESDAY 19 JULY 2022. For the longest time I have done my best to ignore Pierre Poilievre (“he pronounces it ‘paul-ee-EV’”), current frontrunner in the Conservative Party of Canada leadership race (to be decided this coming Saturday, September 10 — now less than two months away). It was […]

NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK. RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, FRIDAY 1 JULY 2022. On the one hand, Canada Day 2022 could be declared a happy event since the country has largely joined the growing part of the global village that is pretending the COVID-19 pandemic has ended. This year there is a Canada Day Picnic more […]

NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK. RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, 14 JUNE 2022. Last week I had lunch on the leafy sunshine back patio of a long-established local bar with an old colleague and friend seriously down on the USA. (And today this is only slightly remarkable in someone born and raised in a neighbouring state of […]

ONTARIO TONITE. RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, 2 JUNE 2022. [UPDATED 6 JUNE]. This is the first day of the official celebration of Queen Elizabeth II’s 70th or platinum anniversary of what no less than the Toronto Star has called “her journey as the longest-serving monarch in British and Canadian history.” (One might quibble about […]

The very last 15 years of the history of democracy in Canada since 1497 sketched in this book are still too close for altogether realistic assessment. The most recent past from which we might hope to gain the most in confronting the present is also the most difficult to understand. The main Canadian federal political […]

ONTARIO TONITE. RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, 30 MARCH 2022. Strictly by accident, I was in Richmond, Virginia at the time of the wedding of the mother and father of the William who just recently completed “an eight-day tour of Belize, Jamaica and the Bahamas during which he and wife Kate were celebrated but also […]

ONTARIO TONITE. RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, 21 MARCH 2022. [UPDATED 22 MARCH]. A friend, colleague, (fellow amateur musician), and person deeply into progressive party politics in Canada’s most populous province said to me yesterday, with a shrug of resignation (and only the slightest hint of a question mark) : “Well I guess Doug Ford […]

ONTARIO TONITE. RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, 10 MARCH 2022. One thing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has done for me personally is increase my heretofore extremely slight interest in the question of just who Vladimir Putin is. As an international politics fan I have vaguely known that Putin was born and raised in what is […]

ONTARIO TONITE. RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, 1 MARCH 2022. [UPDATED 7 MARCH]. It is of course impossible to say just what is finally going to happen in Ukraine in early March of 2022. Hard-edged realism may well suggest that in the end Russia (population 146 million) just has so many more resources than Ukraine […]