GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. DECEMBER 4, 2017. [UPDATED DECEMBER 11]. Who can doubt that we are now living in challenging times — especially in those realms of fake and other news where “Canada’s top party school” also qualifies as one of the “10 Wildest Party Schools in North America”? (Even as “Sex assault allegations place NS university’s [...]

Not too long before the November 4 swearing-in ceremony finally began at Rideau Hall, the CBC TV cameras came to rest briefly on Justin Trudeau’s younger brother Alexandre (aka Sacha), and his wife Zoe and their three children. They were quietly slipping into their seats, in the row just behind the row where the new [...]

As we write in the early morning on Tuesday, October 20, 2015, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have won 184 seats in the Canadian House of Commons with 39.5% of the cross-Canada popular vote. (A mere 170 seats is required for a bare majority government : Mr. Trudeau is the new prime minister elect of Canada.) The [...]

[UPDATED AUG 18TH]. The second week in the long official campaign for the Canadian federal election of 2015 is over. And the congenital regional diversity of it all is what sticks in my mind right now. I’m watching from the old East Toronto, close to the most easterly of the Great Lakes. Reading “Liberal leader [...]

This past Friday two big names on the Toronto newspaper pundit scene explored the sudden surge of New Democratic support in Canadian federal politics, during a key election year. In the Globe and Mail Jeffrey Simpson asked “Can a third orange wave splash across Canada?” And he finally answered : “The failure of the Conservatives [...]

The world being what it is at the moment, even (or especially?) in Canada, it is difficult not to be  at least somewhat cynical about the trial of the suspended senator Mike Duffy, that starts in an Ottawa courtroom today. From this angle Andrew Coyne strikes the right note in a National Post article, headlined [...]

Moving into the second quarter of 2015 may remind political junkies that the much anticipated Canadian federal election this year will probably come in the early fourth quarter. So, as some wise guys argue, the election is still six months away. Things looked different six months ago than they do now. Who knows just how [...]

[UPDATED OCTOBER 15]. Coming home on the airplane from a recent trip to Europe, I read an article by an eminent Cambridge academic in a British political magazine. And I was almost shocked when it proclaimed that the “two most successful leaders in contemporary western politics are Angela Merkel and Stephen Harper.” This international point [...]

GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. THURSDAY, MAY 8, 2014. 2:00 AM ET. As elsewhere in the global village (the ongoing vast democratic election in India, eg), there are some interesting things going on in what the late great George Grant used to call “the Great Lakes region of North America” these days — and especially (maybe?) in the [...]

On one theory at least, what goes on in Canada’s federal parliament is crucial to the vitality of our parliamentary democracy. Whatever else, it forms a convenient framework for professional media coverage of Canadian federal politics. And on an old (and now almost certainly obsolete) Anglo Central Canadian theory, hockey and federal (or as some [...]