A week or so after our Toronto head office re-opened, almost all the individual notes on our two-weeks-plus   Western Europe conference circuit, in a poignant time of change, have been handed in.  We now ought to be able to synthesize some broad overview of our collective findings. For better or worse,  “random impressions” is  almost [...]

It is not entirely clear that Europe ought to get most of the blame for the latest bout of international financial neurosis — all too reflected in such other places as the Toronto Stock Exchange this past week. But the once mighty continent is certainly playing that role in the eyes of the concerned global [...]

It is altogether an accident that the “the unfolding tragedy in Japan” is happening alongside reports on yet another theory about the “great civilization destroyed by floodwaters following a massive undersea earthquake,” as described in Plato’s 2400-year-old story of the lost world of Atlantis (which purports to recount events that took place 9000 years earlier [...]

[UPDATED JANUARY 31, 2011, JULY 24, 2012]. “Globalization” is nothing new, in some ways. It used to be called “imperialism.” Its current incarnation began with the “Portuguese Pioneers” — when Bartolomeo Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, and Vasco da Gama made landfall on the coast of India 10 years later. In [...]

Now that the final stages of the “Toronto 18” terror case are underway, a  closely related package from down under has arrived in the mail. It makes clear (yet again) that some striking similarities between the two former senior dominions of the fallen British Empire and Commonwealth remain, even if many early 21st century Australians [...]

[UPDATED DECEMBER 2, 2009]. How many sovereign people of Canada today are even aware that there was a 60th anniversary summit of the Commonwealth of Nations this past weekend in Trinidad and Tobago? A poll commissioned by something called the Royal Commonwealth Society this past  summer asked a representative sample of Canadians: “Which one of [...]

OLD CHINATOWN, DUNDAS STREET, TORONTO. OCTOBER 1, 2009. Today is of course not the actual birthday of the late Mao Zedong (1893–1976). It is only the 60th anniversary of the official founding of the modern People’s Republic — when Mao made the now historic declaration: “China has stood up!” The new Chinese role in the [...]

Prime Minister Stephen Harper likes to think of himself as a northern hemisphere variant of former Australian prime minister, John Howard. Harper plays his politics tough, loves nothing better than burying his opponents, and has adopted from Howard the habit of dividing Canadian society into those who are ordinary’ or mainstream’ and those who are [...]

Just when it seemed that the encouraging, moderate, and essentially rational new Islamic democracy in Turkey might be about to blow apart, wiser heads have prevailed. And there are at least some fresh grounds for hope about the future of the troubled global village today. Headlines from more or less around the world tell the [...]

On June 11, 2008 Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered a formal “apology to former students of Indian residential schools.” And when you factor the $1.9 billion compensation fund in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement of 2006 into the picture, Mr. Harper’s ostensibly right-wing government has made the ostensibly left-wing Australian Prime Minister Kevin [...]