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 [...]

[UPDATED MAY 15, 2008.] Istanbul today is the former Constantinople and before that Byzantium, as in W.B. Yeats’s poem: “That is no country for old men, The young / In one another’s arms, birds in the trees.” It is also the jewel of any eastern Mediterranean sea cruise, of the sort too many North Americans may [...]

OTTAWA, SEPTEMBER 5/8. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is now in Sydney, at the 2007 summit of the 21-nation Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum (APEC). So are  President Bush of the USA and President Hu Jintao of China. And Australian Prime Minister John Howard has just said that this “APEC meeting is undeniably the most important [...]

The ho-hum quality of the 2007 annual meeting of the leaders of the United States, Mexico, and Canada – held this year “in a massive cedar log chateau” at Montebello, Quebec – was nicely summarized in headlines from the three leading US newspapers of record. According to the New York Times, e.g., there were “No [...]

“It could end with them all coming out or it could end in a bloodbath,” Stephen Cohen, South Asia expert at the Brookings Institute in Washington, said on Monday, July 9. Then at 4 AM on Tuesday, Pakistan time, Major-General Waheed Arshad announced that Pakistani forces had “launched an operation … to clear militants” from [...]

Even before the definitive result was known, it seemed clear enough from the cable TV news that the right-wing candidate, Nicholas Sarkozy, was going to win the final round of the French presidential election on Sunday, May 6, 2007. If it’s a choice between “Dracula and Mary Poppins,” as the London press proposed, it probably [...]

Sgolne Royal – the glamorous Socialist candidate in the upcoming French presidential election (round one on April 22) – first made the Canadian news recently when she “sparked a diplomatic row by backing demands for the French-speaking province [of Quebec] to split from Canada.” Now the deepest significance of this event has been clarified by [...]

Not too long ago, it almost looked as if a tricky vote on the Harper minority government’s softwood lumber deal with the USA today might monopolize the drama when the Parliament of Canada returns to work on Monday, September 18. But it now seems that, here as elsewhere, the Bloc Quebecois will probably keep the [...]

This week, on August 23, under the intriguing headline “TAMILS SAID THEY WERE GOING TO STAG PARTY,” the Toronto Globe and Mail cast some light on a current brand of alleged international terrorism that does not involve Islamist fantasies, Al-Qaida, or the Middle East. Here as elsewhere, Canada has distinguished itself from the elephant next [...]