Overimpressed by Malene Arpe’s vain plea in the newspaper, “I wish that just once, everyone would turn on the glam for Toronto,” we had dressed up, slightly – or at least more than we usually do. It was strange enough that when our Rastifarian neighbour walked by, while we were waiting for the streetcar, he […]
[UPDATED SEPTEMBER 16: SEE BELOW.] Much has been written and otherwise communicated about the federal long-gun registry in Canada lately. One of the more sensible commentaries has been Andrew Coyne’s piece in Macleans.ca last Friday, “The long-gun registry’s value is only symbolic.” Mr. Coyne writes (not without a suitably sardonic Canadian sense of political humour, […]
Why is the ninth anniversary of the September 11 disaster in the USA suddenly such a poignant occasion? The 10th anniversary next year would seem a reasonable time for retrospective hand-wringing. But the ninth? Why make a fuss about that? The obvious answer is that 2010 is an election year. Only “mid-terms”: President Obama does […]
Unlike their Canadian counterparts, Australian voters are not enamoured of minority governments at the federal level. Until 17 days ago that is. That’s when the Labor Party Prime Minister and the Liberal Party Opposition Leader both claimed they should form the next government because both ended up with 73 seats in the 150-seat national parliament. […]
Dark clouds hang over Labor Day 2010 in the USA – with what at least seem right now to be growing prospects of strong anti-labor Republican inroads in this year’s mid-term elections. Something about today’s exotic variations on the long tradition of North American labour struggles appears in the news that “Detroit AFL-CIO President Saundra […]
At first the news that Toronto City Council has just endorsed the “Vienna Declaration” (which “advocates harm reduction over the law enforcement-driven war on drugs”) – set beside the news that “Paris Hilton was arrested late Friday night on suspicion of possession of cocaine after police noticed the smell of marijuana coming from the SUV […]
Assuming it’s real, the recent CBC news story “Cannabis electric car to be made in Canada” offers various varieties of food for thought. In fact the story is so intriguing that it’s all too easy to think it’s too good to be true. This is just the CBC trying to get back at Stephen Harper, […]
[UPDATED JANUARY 26, 2012: scroll to bottom of page]. Canadian political junkies following the still uncertain results of this past Saturday’s Australian federal election are entitled to feelings of amazement at the snowballing complexities of what is going down down under at the moment. In some ways Australia, as a fellow former self-governing dominion of […]
I sometimes think stiffening Canadian sovereignty in those parts of the Arctic north customarily marked as Canadian territory on Canadian maps is one of the three almost impressive things that Stephen’s Harper’s Conservative minority government has done, since it first came to office on February 6, 2006. The other two are the parliamentary recognition of […]
Our very first counterweights article, “John Ibbitson’s next Canada,” appeared on August 19, 2004 – exactly six years ago today. Since then the “next Canada” Mr. Ibbitson was talking about has actually arrived, with the accession of the Stephen Harper minority government in Ottawa, in February 2006. Our own assessment in August 2010 (like that […]
