The impossible dream of a single national securities regulator for Canada summarizes many intractable problems of our congenitally elusive Canadian national unity in the early 21st century. And as the Reuters agency has just explained: “Canada’s current minority Conservative government has come closer than any of its predecessors to launching” such an organization. But “it [...]

In Drummondville, Québec over the past weekend “Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois … drew a parallel between her party’s goal of making Québec a sovereign country and the Montréal Canadiens’ quest for the Stanley Cup. ‘The whole nation is vibrating in tune with a team of players who were called too small, not talented enough, [...]

[UPDATED MARCH 5]. Late last year I wrote that “the Angus Reid approval and disapproval ratings for late November 2009 have at last convinced me that the McGuinty Liberal regime in Ontario today could be in more longer-term trouble than I have thought so far.” And I noted that the Toronto Centre by-election, February 4, [...]

You could say that current plots to “harmonize” the federal Goods and Services Tax (GST) with the Provincial Sales Tax (PST) into one more efficient HST (Harmonized Sales Tax) are only afoot in two of Canada’s 10 provinces — and thus of only slight interest Canada-wide. But the two provinces involved, Ontario and British Columbia, [...]

The news that the Ontario provincial government will now be running a deficit of some $24.7 billion for the current 2009-2010 fiscal year has induced much hyperbolic, knee-jerk hand-wringing among certain observers, who rely more on ideology than on the tedious task of reading the actual public documents, with all their mind-numbing numbers and hard-to-digest [...]

[UPDATED SEPTEMBER 4.] Yesterday Ontario finance minister Dwight Duncan announced at a press conference that he had accepted the resignations of the entire board of directors of the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation. A new interim board of senior public servants has been appointed. And it has dismissed the OLG chief executive officer Kelly McDougald [...]

SATURDAY, JUNE 20, 2009. On a day when politically obsessed people around the world are haunted by the latest tense reports about Fierce clashes on streets of Tehran, it may seem a bit quaint to pay brief homage to yesterday’s installation of Darrell Dexter’s first New Democratic government in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. [...]

UPDATED MAY 11, MAY 12. Ontario residents, it is often said, are Canadians first. And nothing illustrates the sometimes bizarre linkages between federal and provincial politics in Canada’s most populous province quite so bizarrely as the demand for the resignation of Ontario provincial Liberal labour minister Peter Fonseca, over his failure to aggressively investigate alleged [...]

Gordon Gibson had a column in the Vancouver Sun earlier this week, urging that British Columbia should stop re-negotiating its contract for provincial police services with the RCMP – and re-establish the old BC Provincial Police, disbanded back in 1950. (As matters stand, only Ontario and Quebec now have their own police forces. All eight [...]

Pavilion Lake, BC is about 420 kilometers northeast of Vancouver – in Marble Canyon not far west of Kamloops, and “within the traditional territory of the Ts’kw’aylaxw people, and the Pavilion First Nations Indian Band.” Especially this time of year, the lake is “clear … and warm … surrounded by large old growth fir trees, [...]