The Ontario Provincial Police have now actually charged two Ontario Liberal Party workers – Patricia Sorbara in Toronto and Gerry Lougheed in Sudbury – with “bribery” under the provincial Elections Act, in connection with a political controversy surrounding a by-election in Sudbury almost two years ago. My own reaction when I first heard the news […]

FBI Director James Comey’s last-minute intervention in the 2016 US election – regarding certain freshly discovered “emails of longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin that were found on a device seized during an unrelated sexting investigation of Anthony Weiner” – has cast a dark Orwellian shadow over democracy in America in the early 21st century. According […]

The juxtaposition of the last days of the twisted 2016 US election campaign and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s latest round of “independent” appointments to the still seriously unreformed Senate of Canada casts some harsh light on what the new Liberal government in Ottawa is trying to do with this archaic Canadian institution – still too […]

[UPDATED OCTOBER 25]. The big worry about the 2016 US election now is that (once again?) the forces of progress are growing too complacent and/or triumphalistic. Two of the last five national polls on both the Real Clear Politics and  Five Thirty Eight sites have Trump tied or slightly ahead. Even the more impressionistic TV […]

Letting the sovereign voters decide complex public policy questions has been given something of a bad name lately by the still quite puzzling Brexit experience in the United Kingdom. And in a Canadian city like Toronto (Calgary, Halifax, Montreal, Vancouver, Winnipeg, etc) you are still slightly closer to news from the UK (and/or France) than […]

I hope Dr. White is right about some new mood of bipartisan co-operation rising from the ashes, “even just vaguely,” in some reborn saga of democracy in America. And I pray David Brooks will finally prove right when he wrote last Tuesday that the day after Trump loses, “there won’t be solidarity and howls of […]

Just a  footnote to my underground report of last week – “This isn’t the first time Donald Trump has pretended to run for President etc.” The footnote is inspired by two examples of higher political journalism in the  USA today – David Brooks’s October 11, 2016 article in the New York Times, “Donald Trump’s Sad, […]

For those who may be interested, Prince William and Kate and their children from the UK will begin a visit to British Columbia and the Yukon a week this Saturday. As if in anticipation, the National Post – Conrad Black’s old last gasp of the colonized mind in Canada – has published some remarks by […]

GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. The return to realism after Labour day is almost here. And it suddenly becomes clear that this past Thursday’s Scarborough-Rouge River byelection was a welcome splash of cold water for we rare but resolute fans of Ontario provincial politics. (See, eg : “Ontario Tories win hotly-contested Toronto-area byelection” by Allison Jones at The […]

Those of us who regularly have breakfast while watching cp24 in Canada’s most disliked city region will already have seen the reassuring video of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, resigning today as Member of Parliament for Calgary Heritage. I never voted for Mr. Harper’s party, and I remain opposed to most of its declared  policies. […]