A week or so ago John Geddes at Maclean’s posted a heavyweight piece headlined “Justin Trudeau’s mid-life crisis.” The crisis, it seemed, had become a favourite theme for assorted journalists and pundits covering Canadian federal politics in Ottawa. There also seemed to be at least some obvious enough weight behind it. When Éric Grenier pondered […]
[UPDATED OCTOBER 31, NOVEMBER 1]. George Orwell’s Spanish Civil War book, Homage to Catalonia, first appeared in print in the spring of 1938. Not quite 80 years later, some updated version of its sad story about Spanish and Catalan politics – and the harsh light they cast on the wider world of the 1930s – […]
What is the most sensible (and democratic?) reaction to Quebec’s Bill 62, “requiring Quebecers to uncover their faces to get or receive government services”? (In effect Bill 62 partially bans face-covering burqa and niqab headgear worn by some – a quite small number it seems – Muslim women in Canada’s francophone-majority province.) (1) Our first […]
[UPDATED OCTOBER 13, 14, 15, 16, 20, 21]. Just when I start to conclude that the younger generation running things these days has lost all interest in the literary graces that disciplined my own heyday, I come across a headline like : “Fall features fail to fully unfurl” – in the free metro news tabloid […]
Like others, no doubt, I haven’t looked at a copy of Playboy magazine for a great many years. And I never subscribed or otherwise read the articles (or looked at the photos) regularly. But for a time in the late 1950s and 1960s, it was something young men my age were expected to know about […]
This past Monday Dan Lett at the Winnipeg Free Press wrote : “The path that Wab Kinew is walking just became incredibly steep.” Mr. Lett went on : “That’s an odd thing to say about a man who just won a landslide victory to become the new leader of the Manitoba New Democratic Party. But […]
You may not care much about Premier John Horgan’s government’s “first update on BC budget” – like finance minister Carole James herself. Â You may also be thinking, like us, that the intriguing new NDP-Green alliance in BC provincial politics still looks too insecure to be of much broader Canadian significance. We can only say we […]
Yesterday down at the beach it almost seemed that the great storms down south were making  some of their way to the northern woods. I had in any case already started this past Friday before Labour Day 2017 with brief notices from the east and west coasts of the impressive “too much geography” that is […]
TORONTO. AUGUST 22, 2017. It has been a strange-weather summer in the city this year. Right now we’re waiting for yet more rain. (I spoke too soon. It has just come. And now the question is : when will it come again? Can we go for coffee later, across from the park?) Meanwhile, it is […]
GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. AUGUST 11, 2017. It is getting harder and harder for Canadians who watch US TV to know just what is going on in the American Republic led by President Donald Trump. Rex Tillerson advises against losing sleep, with what looks like a smile. This may be the right worldly wisdom. But it is […]
