As an official national holiday Labour Day (or Labor Day) will be 112 years old this year, in both Canada and the United States. And as Harold Meyerson has nicely explained in the Washington Post, those who started it in the later 19th century would almost certainly not be too happy about Labour Day 2006. […]

[UPDATED AUGUST 23]. Along with everything else this waning summer, the free and democratic people in Canada’s most populous province of Ontario must still worry about what the influential political newsletter Inside Queen’s Park has just called a “dangerously festering dispute,” between the Six Nations Iroquois of the Grand River and assorted governments and non-aboriginal […]

The cold, cruel reality of the troubled global village that dampened the holiday mood in northern North America last summer was the terrorist bombing of the London subway system (on July 7, 2005). This year it’s the Israeli-Hezbollah mini-war in Lebanon (which began on July 12, 2006).The mini-war itself seems to open up very sobering […]

Summer in anglophone central Canada starts very seriously on Canada Day, July 1. It is so highly valued because it lasts only two months and a few more days at best. Labour Day, which falls on Monday, September 4 this year, is the very serious end of it all. Soon almost everyone in the region […]

If you’re wondering just how bad the true north could be in any hypothetical new Conservative majority age of Stephen Harper, check out Paul Jackson’s column in the June 13 Calgary Sun. It’s called “Nation of sheep: If Harper can’t turn it around there’s little hope for Canada.” It seems a good guess that the […]

TORONTO, SUNDAY, JUNE 11. US historian Richard Hofstadter’s article on “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” first appeared in Harper’s magazine in November 1964. Canadians who live in the alleged new “hotbed of Islamic extremism“ can be excused for remembering this 1960s landmark, at the end of the first full week of the “Canada terror plot” […]

According to The Province in Vancouver: “A native group within the Vancouver area operating under the banner of the Six Nations Solidarity Network have been planning a response to see how they can support their Ontario native compatriots” in the Caledonia land-claim protest, which threatened fresh violence earlier this week. Just over 95 years ago, […]

SUNDAY, MAY 7, 2006. Canada does not pay as much attention to the United Kingdom as it used to. But lately you might almost think that, inadvertently or otherwise, the new Conservative minority government in Ottawa has brought a few fresh Imperial Echoes of days that used to be long gone by. Even in Canada, e.g., Tony […]

The world is changing. And I am starting to get a bit too confused about local piped services, the Six Nations in Ontario, the right-wing coup in Canada, Stephen Colbert in Washington, and Brent Scowcroft on Iran in the global village. * * * * * * EAST TORONTO. SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 2006. There’s a cool […]

I know this already too-long meditation on Canada’s new Conservative government (with special reference to its aboriginal policy failings) is supposed to have ended. But the Canada-US softwood lumber trade deal announced late on Thursday, April 27 begs for a final exception to the rule. You can find the details of the deal tidily  summarized in The New York Times, The […]