[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 the [...]

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 world [...]

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 story: [...]

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 [...]

In the midst of the manufacturing blues, and the rise of the new petro resource dynamism in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and even Newfoundland, Jim Balsillie’s Research In Motion, inventor of the amazing BlackBerry, is one thing that says Southern Ontario still has an interesting future. So when Mr. Balsillie tells the Canadian Press annual dinner that “Canadians [...]

Someone at the office here just told about how his psychic political wife was a big Stephane Dion supporter back at the Liberal Party of Canada’s Montreal leadership convention, late in 2005. But now in early 2008 she has definitively concluded she made a big mistake. Dion’s latest crying wolf on a fresh election, she [...]

To call Edison Chen a Canadian boy is pushing things somewhat. He admits he was born in Vancouver and lived in that “fairly safe” city until “about nine.” Then he moved to Hong Kong, where he “learned that the dollar bill rules everything.” In his teens he was in New York City. But he was [...]

Viewed up close, the Canadian historian Frank Underhill said long ago, the most striking thing about the USA is its almost dazzling variety. And along with all the US citizens who still worship the Grand Canyon, there are those alluded to in a November 13, 2007 Reuters article: “Many Americans are opting for French foie gras instead [...]

[UPDATED NOVEMBER 25]. John Howard admires Stephen Harper, and Stephen Harper admires John Howard. The love-in between the Australian and Canadian prime ministers has been going on for while now. Mr. Howard loaned Mr. Harper some of his key strategists before the 2006 Canadian federal election. And both leaders have bestowed on the other the [...]