Bruce Anderson and David Coletto at Abacus Data have come up with (I think) an especially helpful and interesting take on the October 21 Canadian federal election, in reporting on their latest “national survey of 4,549 Canadians, completed on August 28.” (The Anderson and Coletto report is dated September 5.) They start by noting that, […]

[UPDATED 12:10 AM ET, SEPTEMBER 11, 2019]. There was a time not too long ago (late September 2017?) when newly elected Manitoba NDP leader Wab Kinew seemed likely enough to become the first Indigenous premier of a modern Canadian province. And this milestone would fit nicely with the past of a democratic political community that […]

TORONTO, CANADA. AUGUST 27, 2019. I read this past Sunday about the “author, podcast host and former ‘Jeopardy!’ champion” Ken Jennings, from the US Pacific North West. Perhaps after watching FOX News, he foolishly criticized the “20,000 surprisingly awful Canadians” who “drive down to watch a Blue Jays game” in Seattle during the northern summers. […]

[UPDATED AUGUST 21]. In something of a surprising report on what had seemed to be the fading “SNC-Lavalin affair,” released August 14, Canadian House of Commons’ Conflict of Interest and Ethics commissioner, Mario Dion has claimed that Prime Minister Justin “Trudeau used his position of authority over [former Attorney General Jody] Wilson-Raybould to try to […]

TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA. AUGUST 14, 2019. Yesterday the pro-democracy protests at the Hong Kong Airport (if these are quite the right words) broke through the bubble that usually shields US TV from too much contact with the outside global village. Now we can supplement our troubled research elsewhere with TV coverage on CNN and MSNBC. […]

It’s the early days of August — “for the people and their favourite islands.” Beyond the great but too often sad entertainment of current American history next door, no Canadian of any sense is thinking about anything at all serious. And that certainly goes double for the Canadian federal election this coming October 21. Photographs […]

[UPDATED AUGUST 1, 2019]. The first striking fact about the first night of the CNN Democratic primary debate in Detroit on Tuesday, July 30, 2019 is that it was held in the Fox theatre — one of the truly great legacies from the golden age of the American motion picture. (It was “opened in 1928 […]

What to make of the latest political craziness in the USA today (at least from where I live, north of the Great Lakes)? Here are four clusters of mid-summer 2019 intelligence, gleaned from the World Wide Web — and beyond : I. THE WISDOM OF GEORGE WILL : My shrewdest insider source from the hard […]

Last Friday — a week ago now — the Globe and Mail published an obituary for “Character actor Sean McCann” who died in Toronto “on June 13 of heart failure at the age of 83.” The Toronto Star and Toronto Sun had earlier published their own commemorations — “Canadian actor Sean McCann dies at 83” […]

Another Canada Day has come and gone. And this year it’s hard not to be a bit uneasy about what at least we Canadians (with only 11.3% of the adjacent US population) continue to perversely believe is the real greatest country in the world — the “true north strong and free,” as the English words […]