RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. WEDNESDAY, JULY 16, 2025. The high heat in the city these deep summer days could make watching the “Hallmark movie Jingle Bell Princess” — allegedly about a chilly Christmas in Maine, with deep snow on the ground — seem almost reasonable in the middle of July. Add the wildfire smoke […]

RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. SUNDAY, JULY 6, 2025. As this summer weekend began (with a somewhat boisterous outdoor wedding party, on the lot immediately behind us, next street over), I suddenly stumbled across four quick notes on key current events in Canada and the wider global village today : (1) “The world will adapt […]

RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. TUESDAY, JUNE 24, 2025. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s current trip to Europe — to sign a Canada-Europe security and defence pact in Brussels — may look somewhat provocative, in the immediate wake of Donald Trump’s sudden US strategic bombing of three nuclear energy sites in Iran. Yet the so-called […]

RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. MONDAY, JUNE 16, 2025. In traditional western historical literature “June Days” means “an uprising staged by French workers from 22 to 26 June 1848 .. in response to plans to close the National Workshops, created by the Second Republic in order to provide work and a minimal source of […]

RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, JUNE 6, 2025. As Andrew Delbanco explains in the May 29, 2025 issue of The New York Review of Books, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel The Great Gatsby was “published on April 10, 1925, to good reviews but disappointing sales.” So the exact 100th anniversary of this […]

RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. MONDAY, MAY 26, 2025. This is the last day of the Memorial Day long weekend in the USA. Our version of something similar in Canada was last weekend. (We like to keep things a little different in Canada.) It is now celebrated as Victoria Day — “a federal statutory […]

RANDALL WHITE, “CANADA’S CAPITAL REGION FROM FOUR HOURS AND FORTY MINUTES WEST”. FRIDAY, MAY 16, 2025. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s new Canadian federal cabinet held its first meeting the day before yesterday. One of its “first orders of business” was a “tax cut for the middle class. Starting July 1, hard-working Canadians will keep more […]

GREG BARNS SC. HOBART, MELBOURNE, BRISBANE, PERTH, AUSTRALIA. MONDAY, MAY 5, 2025. Newly minted Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and his Liberals have something in common with the winner of Australia’s national election on Saturday, Anthony Albanese and the Australian Labor Party (ALP). Both brought their governments back from the brink of defeat partly because […]

RANDALL WHITE, “CANADA’S CAPITAL REGION FROM FOUR HOURS AND FORTY MINUTES WEST”. SATURDAY, MAY 3, 2025. I should make two (or maybe three) things clear up front. First, I am a (somewhat cranky?) 80- year-old man who was born in Canada. I have lived here all my life, with brief exceptions for travel abroad. I […]

RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 30, 2025. The more or less final results of the 2025 Canadian federal election were still not fully known with certainty, even as we approached dinner on the day after election day. It has nonetheless been clear since late on election day (Monday, April 28) that Liberal leader […]