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 […]

[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 […]