The most striking political thing I’ve heard lately came from a lady on the 39th floor of a downtown Toronto residential tower – over grapes, nuts and Perrier water, looking south out a big window on the naked city in all its current wonder. She follows Canadian federal politics with real interest, but without any […]
From a Canadian point of view, it probably does make some kind of sense that, as the Queen has recently informed us, Harry and Meghan will be going through “a period of transition in which” they “will spend time in Canada and the UK.” As suggested by Philippe Lagassé, described in the New York Times […]
[UPDATED JANUARY 9, 11, 2020]. On the northwest shore of the smallest North American Great Lake just watching the TV news in the early days of January can fill you with foreboding about the year 2020. There are the wildfires and extreme heat in Australia. There is flooding in Indonesia. Then “China removes top official […]
God only knows just what is going to happen to planet earth in the year 2020 that is about to begin. Here in Canada we are bound to be paying a lot of attention to the US presidential election on Tuesday, November 3, 2020. (Even if the companion Democratic presidential primaries do not seem as […]
We’ve already noted our favourite counterweights articles for the first three months of this year (in “Six from the 6ix in early snow as 2019 winds down : Impeachment, Throne Speech, 1st Quarter, Birdhop at last”). We’re now ready to cover the final nine months. (And at the end of this we’ll also have a […]
It is a kind of Rachel Maddow moment. The best beginning may just be to quote her : “This is really happening. This is your life. This is our country in our time … It is Wednesday, the 18th of December in the year 2019 and President Donald Trump is impeached.” Like my counterweights colleague […]
At night, or very early in the morning, you feel the early December snow outside your window, and you contemplate half a dozen souvenirs of the strange year that’s winding down : (1) Jill Lepore on “The Impeachment Hearings and the Coming Storm.” The Harvard historian who writes for the New Yorker (and has recently […]
Just before the November 20, 2019 swearing-in of the new Trudeau Liberal minority cabinet – in the “Tent Room” at Rideau Hall in Ottawa – the counterweights editors brought a piece I did on the swearing-in of the first Justin Trudeau cabinet four years ago to my attention. It was posted on November 7, 2015, […]
It is somewhat agreeable to turn from the latest tweets on the sorta-civil-war front south of the northern US border to our slightly less antagonistic federal politics in what the Constitution Act, 1982 calls Canada’s present “free and democratic society.” It is still more agreeable to turn from Canadian federal politics to some brief but […]
TORONTO, ON. NOVEMBER 8, 2019. FROM THE DESKTOP COMPUTER OF CITIZEN X. There was a little snow on the ground yesterday morning — unusually early in the season for Canada’s current largest metropolis. (Between the former largest, still vital past in Montreal, and the future in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa-Gatineau, and beyond. The 10 Canadian […]
