I remember looking into Greenland years ago. I was in the stacks of the library downtown. Even the shelves with the Greenland books seemed cold and forbidding So I like reading about Greenland on the net now, when it is so hot in town. And the last lazy, hazy hallucinations at the beach bear down […]
Not long ago I overheard a local politician of more or less conservative bent answering a question about Kathleen Wynne’s performance as Ontario Liberal premier so far. Some people, he suggested, belong to a party because they know they couldn’t get elected if they belonged to the party of their heart. Premier Wynne is a […]
[FOR BYELECTION RESULTS SEE “August 1 Ontario byelections : a bit of a surprise – Libs 2, NDP 2, Cons 1.“] The headline for Adam Radwanski’s report in the Globe and Mail yesterday – “Ontario Liberals bracing for the end of Kathleen Wynne’s momentum” – captures the minority governing party’s worst prospects for the mini […]
From even just a short distance beyond the actual borders of the USA, the big trouble with the Zimmerman acquittal announced last night is how can an armed (white/hispanic) man possibly shoot an unarmed (black) teenager to death in self defence? In a country where black men are still incarcerated at almost seven times the […]
[UPDATED JULY 6, 7, 13 – for byelection results see “August 1 Ontario byelections : a bit of a surprise – Libs 2, NDP 2, Cons 1.” ]. A mere four weeks from yesterday – on Thursday, August 1, 2013 – Canada’s most populous province of Ontario will be holding a kind of mini-election. As […]
An alas now vanished great friend of the counterweights editors, from a vanished era in the life of the city, used to say that he seldom agreed with the newspaper columnist Alex Barris. But he almost always read his columns because he found them stimulating. We sometimes have similar feelings about the present-day Toronto Star […]
[UPDATE JUNE 27 : On Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt movie … scroll to bottom of page]. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not the only global political observer who has suggested similarities between the mass protests faced by his democratic government lately and those faced by the democratic government of President Dilma Roussef […]
Up here in the northern wilderness today marks both the summer solstice, or official start of summer, and National Aboriginal Day (Journée nationale des Autochtones). In the spirit of the season the Canadian House of Commons adjourned for its summer holiday early this year – two days ago. (“All parties agreed late Tuesday night to […]
QUEEN’S PARK, TORONTO. TUESDAY, JUNE 11, 2013. 4:45 PM. [UPDATED JUNE 12]. So (as Premier Wynne might say) the 2013 Ontario Budget bill has now passed third reading, 64—36. This may have surprised you, if you were paying serious attention to such Toronto Sun headlines as : “PCs call for former Liberal staffers to turn […]
Dr. Dave Town from Orillia, Ontario offered an intriguing comment on my recent post about Senate reform, “Is doing anything sensible with the Senate of Canada just a vain fantasy?” (And I believe he is the same person I have now intriguingly discovered on the “gossip-stew of the internet” : successful chiropractor by day, public-spirited […]
