WEDNESDAY, MAY 17, 2017. Toronto, Ontario.  This coming Monday we will celebrate locally what is known here in Ontario (and other Canadian provinces) as Victoria Day.  (In Quebec the same holiday is now more sensibly called  Journée nationale des patriotes.) The holiday is nowadays defined as “the last Monday preceding May 25.” And this entrenches [...]

So, as all the polls predicted again, the centre-left Emmanuel Macron (or just straight centrist, as the anglophone mainstream media seem to have decided?) has quite handily defeated the far-right Front National leader Marine Le Pen (Donald Trump’s favourite?) for the presidency of the Fifth French Republic. With all the vote now counted, 66.1% has [...]

Why am I not surprised that I am yet again stuck with drafting another counterweights editors travelogue  — this time visiting the technical support masters in the (especially Northern) California bear-flag republic? Among the key current alleged insights submitted : * ASIA IN AMERICA ON THE PACIFIC COAST. On the Atlantic coast the USA is [...]

This coming Saturday morning the entire staff here (except for Dominic Berry, who has a big date with his current squeeze at a local sporting event) will be boarding an airplane at YYZ, bound for our regular seminar with technical support staff currently residing in the land of the Golden State Warriors. (They are now, [...]

Baseball is back in the great white north, signaling spring revival, while also commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Blue Jays’ inaugural game (April 7, 1977) at snowy Exhibition Stadium on the north shore of Lake Ontario. While it was an entertaining 2016 down at the ballpark known previously as the Skydome, last year once [...]

APRIL 8, 2017. GANATSEKWYAGON, ONTARIO, CANADA. Is it true that : “Missile attack on Syria a ‘win-win’ for Trump … Strike will allow US president to deflect attention from domestic crises and regain moral high ground”? And does the departure of Steve Banon from the US National Security Council similarly mean that adults are taking [...]

[UPDATED APRIL 3 — DORIS DAY’S BIRTHDAY]. Someone has sent this issue to me for comment. I’m not quite sure why. I have never lived in Quebec myself. (I am, for better or worse, a born and raised Torontonian.) I do have a son who spent four years at McGill University in Montreal. And my [...]

Last week the irrepressible Preston Manning had an article in the Globe and Mail on how “Canada’s elites could use a crash course in populism.” He cited  Tom Flanagan’s Waiting for the Wave and W. L. Morton’s The Progressive Party in Canada as useful reading for any elites actually wanting to take the course he [...]

“Such usually thoughtful writers as Paula Simons of the Edmonton Journal, Colby Cosh of the National Post and Paul Wells of the Toronto Star” are apparently on her side. So our Canadian Foreign Minister does not need help from the likes of me, in responding to the arguments skillfully advanced by David Climenhaga in “CHRYSTIA [...]

[UPDATED MARCH 11]. Perhaps with half their minds on reported divisions among US Republicans over the new “Trumpcare” health bill in Washington, DC, our Canadian mainstream media have lately been giving we folks back home such headlines as : * “Liberals defy Trudeau, approve genetic testing bill he calls unconstitutional” (CTV NEWS) ; * “Liberal [...]