Lawrence Martin’s quite remarkable Globe and Mail column this past Tuesday (November 18, 2014)  – “A pro-active PM seizes the agenda” – deserves more attention, and debate. The essential argument is nicely (or otherwise) summarized in Mr. Martin’s first paragraph : “If victory goes to the guy who wants it most, Stephen Harper is making […]

As it starts to seem that this just may be another long, cold winter, various bits of early snow in the air are telling confusing tales of the much anticipated Canadian federal election of 2015. In the latest journalistic style, here are five things on this subject that may or may not interest the Canadian […]

Robert G. Kaiser clearly wrote his current piece in the November 6, 2014 issue of the New York Review of Books – on “Our Conservative, Criminal Politicians” – before the November 4 US midterm elections. But I read it just after. And it helped me do something with my private thoughts about the future of […]

[UPDATED NOV 5]. Those of us who believe that history and the future will judge Barack Obama a much more seminal and successful US president than the present is doing can only look at the midterm elections this Tuesday, November 4, 2014 and weep. The prospects for sitting administrations in such contests are almost never […]

As Rob Ford stressed during one of his random TV appearances, for a time early on in the evening of Monday, October 27, 2014 Doug Ford was running only about three points behind John Tory. But the final numbers for the big three were John Tory 394,775 votes or 40.3%, Doug Ford 330,610 votes or […]

People who don’t live in or even vaguely like Toronto, and are fed up with both Rob and Doug Ford and  the 2014 Toronto mayoral race, may take comfort from the fact that the race has effectively ended even before election day tomorrow, Monday, October 27. Or as John Wright, senior vice president of the […]

A valued Nova Scotia correspondent who also knows Canada’s largest big city urged me to look at Royson James’s column in this past Friday’s Toronto Star : “Politics exposes Toronto’s troubled past and future … The election campaign elicits despair as it reveals the city’s so-easily manipulated divisions.” I’m glad I did finally read Mr. […]

Yesterday another poll from Forum Research brought the good news that the answer to a question posed on this site a mere nine days ago – “Will it really end just deja vu all over again for John Tory (and curtains for civilization in Toronto) ??” – is almost certainly NO. (Well, probably anyway. Close […]

We’ve just gone through a major computer renovation at head office here. And even between the cracks we’ve been getting queries on the results of the travelling conference from which most of us have just returned. The work of reporting on all this has been assigned to X. He says it is challenging, because much […]

“This is a big week of big events. Hold onto your socks.” (Frances Horodelski, BNN) “It seems like we’ve just returned from our Walnut Creek Conference in California,” someone among us said the other day. “And now we’re going to another travelling conference in Europe? Does that make a lot of sense? Or any sense […]