MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2011. The Canadian House of Commons returns to work today, after its usual long summer vacation (once an essential break for family farmers, for whom summer was the crucial busy season). According to the lovely Jennifer Ditchburn at The Canadian Press, after “tributes to late NDP leader Jack Layton” are paid in […]

Before non-Tory partisans get too excited about such headlines as “Ontario voters trending to McGuinty, poll suggests” (Globe and Mail) or “Liberals inch ahead of Tories in two new polls” (Toronto Star), they might want to at least consider “Tories leading the pack: Poll” (surprise, surprise – in the Toronto Sun). The poll in the […]

A casual encounter with the Business News Network (BNN) the other day suddenly brought some of us face to face with what could be a looming issue of some importance for the mid to longer term economic development of what, say whatever else you like, remains Canada’s most populous province, by some considerable distance. But […]

This coming week the campaign for what might be one of the biggest Ontario provincial elections in years gets underway. Not much more than three weeks ago  John Michael McGrath at Toronto Life was opining on how Ontario Premier Dalton “McGuinty’s personality (or lack thereof) is a huge part of the Liberal brand–borrowing Tory Bill […]

According to today’s Globe and Mail: “The push for a merger between the [federal] Liberal Party and the NDP has quickly become a major issue among the growing field of candidates to replace Jack Layton … The top contenders for the NDP leadership – party president Brian Topp and House Leader Thomas Mulcair – are […]

TORONTO. SUNDAY, AUGUST 28, 2011. This seems to have been a summer of pipe and drum bands in this city. We went to the Warriors’ Day Parade at the Exhibition last Saturday, to probe the impact of the new Harper conservatism on the city’s old militia culture. (Well … probably more as a sentimental journey […]

The serious part of the 2011 Ontario provincial election campaign is now less than two weeks away. And the excitement is building ( for some of us at least). This past weekend Chantal Hébert was explaining just why “Ontario vote most important in recent history.” And yesterday Duff Conacher’s Democracy Watch in Ottawa was complaining […]

It was less than a month ago (Monday, July 25, 2011) that Jack Layton announced: “ I have a new, non-prostate cancer that will require further treatment … So, on the advice of my doctors, I am going to focus on treatment and recovery … I will therefore be taking a temporary leave of absence […]

Now that the new Harper Conservative majority government (still elected by less than 40% of the Canadian people) has restored the pre-1968 “abject colonial” names of “Royal Canadian Navy” and “Royal Canadian Air Farce,” related new rumours are heating up in Ottawa (aka “the last lumber village before the North Pole”). Sooner than anyone may […]

Back in the late 1940s, “Canada’s first and perhaps only genuine intellectual” Harold Innis reported that: “When Oliver Mowat was introduced to a prominent statesman in England with a comment on the length of time he had been Premier of Ontario he was greeted with the comment, ‘Have you no public opinion in that Province?’” […]