Some of us were at The Bluebird near the Dundas West subway station in Toronto as the results of the provincial election in Newfoundland and Labrador (aka The Rock) rolled in. We were listening to the “Stubble Jumpers … a brand new cooperative Jazz Organ trio consisting of Kelly Jefferson (saxes), Jeff McLeod (organ), and […]

Our apologies to all and any who may have visited us over the past week or so, and found we had temporarily vanished from the world wide web. The long and short is that the site just suddenly crashed, not long after our April 3, 2019 post on “Time for a change : our latest […]

We have two main objectives in this short note on the latest episodes in what the Montreal Gazette has nicely called “Canada’s SNC melodrama.” The first is to offer gratitude and praise to the rafters for Andrew Cohen’s recent opinion piece : “Canada’s SNC melodrama baffles a world facing real crisis … ‘To our allies, […]

On this rainy, second-last day of March, 2019 (a Saturday – here at the start of at least one great Northwest canoe passage from the Great Lakes to the Canadian Prairies, the Rocky Mountains, and Canada’s beautiful Pacific coast), we have two short notes to offer from frequent contributors to this site. First, Randall White […]

Canadians ought to be especially sensitive to the subtle nuances of Robert Mueller’s apparent conclusions on the narrow issues he was commissioned to investigate, in the current age of crisis and testing for Democracy in America. One of the few key sentences from the actual Mueller report that Attorney General Barr has quoted directly is […]

[UPDATE ON ELIZABETH MAY’S MARCH 1 DEMANDS BELOW. UPDATED AGAIN MARCH 10 ; AND YET AGAIN MARCH 30 : For March 30 update scroll straight to end of this page — where there are also now updates for March 31 and April 2]. What it still seems most sensible to just call the SNC-Lavalin Affair […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

On the third-last Monday of 2018, here are four short notes on the world as it looks up close in We the North of the North American Great Lakes : 1. Is Trump getting ready to jump (what would Machiavelli think?) This past Saturday morning Maggie at “Hear Me Roar” – who specializes in “The […]