One feature of cruise ships is that (briefly but sometimes with a strange intensity) you get to know people you might not otherwise encounter in your more particular ordinary life. Late last month I met various citizens of the USA this way. And some of these encounters came back as I watched the results of […]
Late in the evening of this coming Wednesday, May 11, the entire office staff here will be boarding an airplane for our semi-regular European conference. We’ll be returning on Thursday, May 26, late in the afternoon. This time we’re in the north of what a UK series on TV Ontario many years ago called The […]
Inevitably, the sad death of the so-called “Diefenbaby,” George Dryden, highlights the career of his “likely” unacknowledged father, John George Diefenbaker. For those not old enough to remember, Dief the Chief was a melodramatic prairie courtroom lawyer from Wakaw (and then Prince Albert), Saskatchewan. Somehow he became supreme leader of “my fellow Canadians,” 1957—1963 – […]
This past Tuesday’s “Acela primaries” (after the Amtrak train that connects the five northeast states of Connec-ticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island ) have stiffened the prospect that it really is going to be a Donald vs Hillary sideshow in the US presidential election this fall. There is some excitement in some quarters about […]
According to Susan Delacourt at the Toronto Star, the debate over the “suicide crisis” (aka “mental health crisis”) on the Attawapiskat First Nation reserve “sparked a rare outbreak of civility among rival parties this [past] week” in the Canadian House of Commons. For a while now there has seemed to be a growing consensus among […]
[UPDATED APRIL 13]. One thing that keeps our free and democratic Canadian politics going these days – in spite of many good reasons otherwise – is its recurrent capacity for surprise. It’s like the woman (or man if it also works in that direction) who continually fascinates you, because you can never quite figure out […]
June 15, 2016 will mark the 72nd anniversary of the triumph of Tommy Douglas’s “first socialist government in North America,” in the 10th Saskatchewan provincial election of 1944. And it is at least intriguing to bear this in mind when contemplating the strange juxtaposition of yesterday’s 28th Saskatchewan provincial election on April 4, 2016, and […]
One of our wider Toronto region reporters has been complaining lately about how the local and regional media have been going overboard over the unhappy and far too early death of former notorious but widely known Toronto mayor, Rob Ford. (“Ford died on March 22 after battling a rare, soft-tissue cancer for 18 months … […]
The wisest thing I’ve come across on the American presidential primaries lately urges that 2016 so far is “democracy as depicted by Hieronymus Bosch” (from the Huffington Post’s “Top 12 Reasons This Is The Most Depressing Election Ever,” March 14, 6:53 AM ET). As best as I can tell a few days later, the so-called […]
Now that PM Justin Trudeau’s excellent adventure in Washington, DC is fading into the sunset, other thoughts have begun to cross our collective minds. To take just one case in point, one interesting thing about supervising a so-called Canadian political blogazine for almost 12 years (since the late summer of 2004 in fact) is that […]
