Yesterday Premier Rachel Notley finally announced that Alberta’s long-anticipated provincial election will be held some four weeks hence, on Tuesday, April 16! Opinion polls have long been showing that former Stephen Harper federal cabinet minister Jason Kenney’s new United Conservative Party is well ahead of Premier Notley’s New Democrats. And a “new poll from Ipsos,” [...]

When relief is needed from Canada’s intermittent bouts of feeling that, to stay relevant in the global village, we must do a bad job of imitating political craziness elsewhere, the editors on this site turn to me. Or so it all too often seems, waiting for the eccentric winter of 2019 to end. Lately I [...]

[UPDATE ON ELIZABETH MAY’S MARCH 1 DEMANDS BELOW. UPDATED AGAIN MARCH 10]. What it still seems most sensible to just call the SNC-Lavalin Affair 2019 (as in, eg, the Dreyfus Affair long ago in France) would be altogether beyond reason for many of us, if our only sources were the remaining mainstream media empires in [...]

The background has been economically explained by Tiffany Crawford at the Vancouver Sun : “Burnaby South residents will vote Monday [today] in one of three federal byelections.” The riding “was vacated by former New Democrat MP Kennedy Stewart, who is now Vancouver’s mayor.” Today’s February 25 byelection “is an important race for NDP Leader Jagmeet [...]

[UPDATED FEBRUARY 18. SEE BELOW]. On Valentine’s Day 2019 it is hard to know just what to make of the first prime minister of the 1867 confederation of British North American Provinces now known as Canada. (Well … my thoughts here are actually being posted just after Valentine’s Day, but that’s just because I’m a [...]

The almost sudden rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one of the more intriguing things about American politics right now. She has become an almost sparkling new standard bearer for variously labelled radical, progressive, or just left Democrats (and even some “Wall Street liberals”!), energized by the 2018 midterm elections and the ongoing foibles of the [...]

The most interesting Canadian political event this week is almost certainly the BC provincial byelection in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, Wednesday, January 30, 2019. John Horgan’s current BC NDP government in Victoria remains in office with the help of three Green party Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs). And the NDP/Greens together are just very [...]

I’m told that I haven’t personally contributed a crime story to this site for more than a decade (“Depression economics and crime : Marine murders in California, Toronto youth violence,” Nov 15th, 2008). And the site itself hasn’t dabbled in the subject for not much less than a decade (“Murder on the Bruce Peninsula revisited [...]

It may well be that 2019 proves a difficult year on any number of fronts. But I was lucky enough to spend its first Thursday evening at one of the “top 21 new bars in Toronto” (blue bird or The Bluebird, 2072 Dundas St W, at Howard Park). I was listening to an excellent jazz [...]

At the end of this annual exercise for this (even unusually?) strange year we suddenly realize that our deepest recent preoccupations have been quite local — north of the North American Great Lakes, on the northwest shore of Lake Ontario. We may have been seeking refuge (albeit in vain) from the larger wild and crazy [...]