Three days after the prorogued federal Parliament returns to work in Canada, the people of Iceland will be voting in an unusual referendum. It has been called, in effect, by the ceremonial head of state, who has doubts about recent controversial actions by the Icelandic parliament and prime minister.
Here in Canada, the Iceland example can [...]

Just last week, on October 5, 2009, the Governor General of Canada, Michaelle Jean, gave a speech to a United Nations cultural group in Paris, in which she called herself — and not just once but twice — the Canadian “head of state.”
This soon enough brought a surge of protest from the diminishing forces of [...]

TORONTO. SUNDAY, JUNE 28, 2009. The Canada Day that looms ahead this year is looking a bit gloomy in Canada’s most populous metropolis. As just one of many cases in point, an Ontario cabinet minister from faraway Windsor has called Torontonians “babies” for complaining about a garbage strike right when the weather gets hot. Premier [...]

Pierre Trudeau’s essay “Some Obstacles to Democracy in Quebec” was first published in the old Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science in August 1958 – when Premier Maurice Duplessis was still shouting orders to the Speaker of the Quebec legislative assembly. French Canadians, Trudeau wrote at the time, “must begin to learn democracy from [...]

It is more than a little foolish to say – as the federal Conservative website does – that “Stephane Dion … lets the unelected, unaccountable Liberal insiders in the Senate boss him around on issues ranging from crime bills to Senate reform.” And Hugh Segal, a Conservative appointed by former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin, is [...]

The current quixotic and apparently only half-serious quest for Senate reform in Canada shows both the best and worst sides of the Stephen Harper Conservative minority government in Ottawa. There is a high-minded sense in which this relic of the 19th century desperately ought to be brought up to date, in the interests of a [...]

On Friday, May 18 CBC News reported that Toronto civil rights lawyer Charles Roach “has won a key battle in his bid to take the Canadian oath of citizenship – without pledging allegiance to the Queen.” The Attorney General of Canada had wanted the court case in which Mr. Roach is trying to do this [...]

As further evidence that “Canada’s new government” is still attached to some nowadays too old-fashioned Canadian habits, it has just been reported that the “British monarch’s name was put forth by Ottawa for a list of potential guests to be invited to the celebrations … at next year’s 400th birthday bash of Quebec’s capital city.” As [...]

The interesting website Vive le Canada has just published a remarkable piece of political writing called “Walk in the Old Paths – An Open Appeal to the Conservative Party From a Muslim High Tory.”  It is probably the most sophisticated and up-to-date defence imaginable for the future of the present British constitutional monarchy in such [...]

On the face of things the big Canadian political excitement this weekend is the last federal Liberal leadership debate in Toronto today, Sunday, October 15. But the 2006 race to lead the legendary old Grits – “Canada’s natural governing party” for at least about two-thirds of the 20th century – won’t quite catch fire (if [...]