I have found two things in the news especially annoying this week. And I have come up with the idea that it will provide some relief if I can somehow link them together. To start with, like millions of other TV addicts in North America (and around the world?), I was appalled this past Tuesday […]
Technically, a Canadian federal election on December 31, 2010 could still be called as late as November 26 – 11 days from now. (And as some will want to remember here, the Federal Court of Appeal has “ruled that the Bill C-16 fixed-election-date measures” which became law “in May 2007 … did not … change […]
Ever since we acquired our new site design more than a year ago now, in the summer of 2009, we have been looking for pages to fill out the bar just beneath the masthead. We started with just “Home,” “About,” and “Links.” Then thanks to a welcome good-news message from Vancouver, late this past spring, […]
According to the sometimes (if of course far from always) quite good Wikipedia, “‘O Valiant Hearts’ is a hymn remembering the fallen of the First World War.” And, technically so to speak, the at least beginning of the end of the First World War in a railway car at Compiègne, France, on November 11, 1918, […]
Jim Coyle at the Toronto Star is probably or even almost certainly right: Despite the “ripples through Queen’s Park” launched by the surprise resignation of BC Premier Gordon Campbell this week, Ontario Premier Dalton “McGuinty is within a year of an election. In all likelihood, there’s too little time to change leaders. And, in any […]
“America remains a place … where the shadow of disappointment always threatens to darken the day.” So wrote Robert Pogue Harrison, Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature at Stanford University in California, in the October 28, 2010 issue of the New York Review of Books.” On the old Frank Underhill theory that “practically all Canadians […]
The big North American political news this coming week is of course the US mid-term elections on Tuesday, November 2 – which may or may not put Barack Obama and his beleaguered Democrats in some kind of dog house (and almost certainly will: the only real question is just how dirty it will be?). Meanwhile, […]
Concerns about how “Canada’s mining, oil and gas firms behave ethically abroad” have been a staple of certain kinds of cocktail party and after-work-drinks conversation for several years now. And testimony from at least some in the field suggest some reasons for concern. Thus we have just had “Liberal John McKay’s private member’s bill to […]
It is of course strictly a Toronto prejudice that the results of a Toronto municipal election mean anything to anyone in any other part of the true north, strong and free, la belle province qui n’est pas comme les autres (is that the right French – probably not?) : to say nothing of any other […]
Even in Toronto the local intelligentsia are moaning: “No Torontonian can look west … without feeling a pang of jealousy. The election of Naheed Nenshi as mayor of Calgary is the most exciting political event of the year. He makes the trio of candidates for mayor of Toronto look like stale remnants of another age.” […]
