Try reading Patricia Best’s Globe and Mail report, “My dinner with Conrad” (at “the midtown Toronto restaurant Scaramouche”), while watching CBC TV on the latest Stephen Harper adventures in Ottawa. And you may suddenly think that the thickening Harper Conservative plot in Canada and the “Conrad Black Movement” could be somehow connected. In one sense, […]

Is it all just wishful thinking? Or is “the left” in various parts of North America starting to show more spunk and savvy than it has for, oh say the past generation? The George W. Bush who gave the January 23, 2007 State of the Union address was, as The Washington Post reported, “politically wounded […]

Now that three full weeks of 2007 have elapsed, how is the new year shaping up? In some ways it all depends on where you are. In Iraq General Casey has said that “extra US troops ordered to Baghdad could begin leaving by late summer.” Closer to home, there are conflicting reports about Fidel Castro’s […]

Whatever may or may not be the leading edge in Ottawa these days (to say nothing of Washington, DC), the first few weeks of 2007 have been notable elsewhere for fresh bubblings about Canadian multiculturalism in the news. Two new studies from the Montreal-based Institute for Research on Public Policy have helped turn the heat […]

The usual year-end reflections on the state of the universe have added bite this year. Starting with Canada, the United States, and Mexico, and finally reaching all the way to the United Nations (to say nothing of the still wider eco-sphere), 2006 has seen some remarkable changes. It is probably a good thing that just […]

Stephen Harper has conceivably earned some form of distinction in the eclectic annals of Canadian political history, with his introduction of Bill C-43 at the close of the fall sitting of the 39th Parliament of Canada – somewhat cutely called “An Act to provide for consultations with electors on their preferences for appointments to the […]

The Globe and Mail is as close as Canada gets to an anglophone newspaper of record. And its readers are no representative sample of Canadian voters. But the paper’s online poll over the December 9 weekend is still worth further attention. It asked: “Does it trouble you that newly elected Liberal leader Stephane Dion has Canadian-French dual […]

As virtually everyone prophesied beforehand, on Thursday, December 7, 2006 the Canadian House of Commons defeated a motion to re-open last year’s legalization of gay marriage, 175123. Meanwhile, a December 5 item in the New York Times, headlined “America’s breadbasket moves to Canada?“, seems to have provoked remarkably little attention elsewhere. (Probably because it does not […]

It is not surprising that some of the same minds who think Michael Ignatieff will make an excellent leader of the Liberal Party of Canada also think that Governor Howard Dean, will be an excellent person to “give the keynote address at the Party’s upcoming Leadership and Biennial Convention” in Montreal, Tuesday, November 28 Saturday, December […]

In some ways the September 11, 2001 Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington are still very much with us on their fifth anniversary. Take two vaguely contradictory headlines for September 9, 2006, e.g.: “The long march home … The US public wants its troops to leave Iraq, but worries about how to […]