This past Friday marked the 20th anniversary of Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe’s August 13, 1990 by-election victory in the eastern downtown Montreal riding of  Laurier–Sainte-Marie. Even with a maternal grandfather from the United Kingdom, M. Duceppe was, so to speak, the first Canadian federal MP to be elected as an ostensibly “sovereigntist” BQ partisan. […]

It may just be the summer heat that does not seem to be going away this year – or my all too advancing age.  But the news that “Riley Keough, the 21-year-old granddaughter of Elvis Presley” has “replaced Olivia Thirlby as Jack in ‘Jack and Diane,’ a lesbian-themed werewolf romance … due to be released […]

“We know,” PM Harper told his Conservative summer caucus last week: “there are some in the opposition coalition again threatening an election, but colleagues, that is not what Canadians want.” And just today the sweetheart of Sparks Street Jane Taber is reporting that “Michael Ignatieff is under attack from Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, who are accusing […]

Guess who has just commandeered our new “Ontario tonight” feature (see bar at top of page), and turned what is supposed to be a home for “brief intermittent reports on comings and goings in Canada’s most populous province” into accommodation for yet another extended tirade on Ontario’s “founding Liberal Premier of the later 19th century, […]

Two days ago NDP guru Brian Topp opined that there was only a 40% chance of a Canadian federal election this fall. Do the somewhat intriguing results of the latest EKOS poll, released today, suggest anything that might change this opinion? The immediate shortest answer is probably no. Today’s EKOS results are not all that […]

Today, August 4, 2010, is Barack Obama’s 49th birthday. It seems to say something about who he is that his wife and daughters are on vacation at the moment. He is travelling to Chicago for fund-raising events tomorrow, and will “spend the night in his Hyde Park home” there. It has been fashionable for some […]

Sleeping in a cottage boathouse built by a long-deceased uncle this August civic holiday weekend has prompted some meditations on the varying accomplishments of various generations – and the importance of deciding which ones are most worth remembering today. My uncle’s day job was in an office in the city. But, like my father and […]

[UPDATED AUGUST 4: SEE BELOW]. Just as we awake in Canada to such improbable headlines as “Census clamour wakes sleeping nation,” yet another Vancouver expatriate (remember Edison Chen?) has arisen in a faraway region of the global village to provide relief – conceivably comic and perhaps tragic too? Canadians are bound to think that the […]

[UPDATED AUGUST 6]. Does it make any difference to the rest of Canada (to say nothing of the still wider global village) just who will be elected mayor of Canada’s current biggest city this coming October 25, 2010? The obvious answer is no, of course not. “Let’s All Hate Toronto,” and all that. But then […]

“So all we’re saying,” Treasury Board President Stockwell Day has urged in defence of the current plan to abandon the long-form census, “is this should not be mandatory.” Canadians, Mr. Day believes, should not be compelled by the long arm of the law to “tell some unknown bureaucrat” about their home life, work, and ethnic […]