RANDALL WHITE, TORONTO. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 15, 2026. Two key current political events — one international and the other national — have helped cheer up we progressive voters on the north shore of Lake Ontario (most easterly of the North American Great Lakes).

The international event is of course the April 12, 2026 election in Hungary. The good news is not just that “centre right” democrat Péter Magyar has finally defeated the 16 year-old authoritarian “illiberal democracy” of Viktor Orbán (endorsed by US President Donald Trump and helped or otherwise by the last-minute campaigning of Vice President J.D. Vance in Budapest).

What is most seriously impressive is the magnitude of Mr Magyar’s democratic victory. His Tisza party won 54% of the vote (and a “supermajority” of two-thirds of the seats in the Hungarian parliament), compared with a mere 38% for Orban’s Fidesz party.

Equally impressively, almost 80% of the Hungarian electorate turned out to vote. (Turnout in the most recent April 28, 2025 Canadian federal election, eg, was a mere 69% — a high for the last 10 elections!)

Hungary has not quite turned “left” in this election. (Mr. Magyar is a “centre right” democrat.) But it has turned towards a more broadly progressive political system than the “illiberal”authoritarian regime of Viktor Orbán — taken as a model by the current Trump II administration in Washington, DC.

Hopefully as well this April 12, 2026 democratic move in Hungary will prove a guide to the November 3, 2026 midterm elections in the USA.

Meanwhile, back in the home and native land, three April 13, 2026 federal byelection victories — backed by five earlier “floor crossings” : four from Conservatives and one from New Democrats — have finally given PM Carney’s Liberals a majority government of 174 seats in the federal House (where 172 seats currently constitutes a bare majority!).

Two of these three Liberal byelection victories were in Toronto (University—Rosedale and Scarborough Southwest). And one was in the Montreal “sovereigentist” suburb of Terrebonne.

Liberals won handily in the two Toronto districts. Danielle Martin took 64 % of the vote in University—Rosedale. Doly Begum (former deputy leader of the Ontario provincial New Democrats, now running federally for the Liberals) won almost 70% in Scarborough Southwest.

The vote was much closer in “sovereigntist” Terrebonne. Liberal Tatiana Auguste finally won with 48.4 % of the vote, while Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné of the Bloc Québécois took 46.8 %.

Turnout in byelections for a few districts is virtually never as high as in general elections for the whole country. In both Toronto districts turnout hovered around a third of all registered voters — 32.99 % in University-Rosedale and 33.54 % in Scarborough Southwest. In the Montreal suburb of Terrebonne, on the other hand, turnout was a much higher 50.76 %!

All this reminds me of my late great French Canadian/canadienne mother-in-law, who moved from Quebec to Ontario in her early 20s way back when. What she noticed most, she once confessed, was how much less interested in politics people were in Ontario than in Quebec!

There seems much agreement among pundits that PM Carney’s new majority government means the Liberals will not have to worry about calling a snap election after a defeat in the House (or for any other reason). And the next federal election in Canada will revert to something pretty much like the fixed date of October 15, 2029.

For we progressive voters on the north shore of Lake Ontario (and elsewhere, and even for some conservative and social democratic voters all across Canada) the good guys will be in office for three more years (as measured from this coming October 15, 2026), at least!

And when we notice such other events as Foreign Policy magazine’s recent colloquium on “Is America a Rogue State?” (with Yes as the obvious answer), the prospect of a stable Canadian majority government led by PM Mark Carney for the next three years (and somewhat more as of today) looks pretty fuckin’ good (as President Trump might say).

RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2026. Robert Reich, Democratic President Clinton’s secretary of labor, 1993–1997 and retired UC Berkeley professor, is far from the only eminent US commentator who has been raising deeply serious questions about President Trump’s mental health in the early spring of 2026.

Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNOW, as just one example, has called Trump’s recent social media pronouncements (which among other things used the word “fuckin” for the first time in any US presidential public utterance) “ranting like an unhinged madman.” A “growing list of lawmakers, all Democrats” are “calling for the 25th Amendment to be invoked against President Donald Trump.” (The amendment provides that a majority of Congress may remove a “President … unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”)

Meanwhile, in President Trump’s undeclared US war on Iran, CBC News is reporting : “Status of U.S., Iran ceasefire in limbo as Strait of Hormuz remains unopened… Dozens reported killed in airstrikes on Lebanon, as Israel, U.S. say country is not included in ceasefire plan.” Who knows just what is most likely to happen over the alleged next two weeks of ceasefire in Iran ????

Veteran progressive Canadian public figure Bob Rae has wisely urged : “We’ve got to stop normalizing the Trump administration. It’s not a normal administration. It’s corrupt.” And conservative US anti-Trumper Bill Kristol has declared : “The misconduct of Trump, in terms of his corruption and his associates, is unparalleled in our history. His abuses of power leave Nixon in the dust.” Yet unlike in Richard Nixon’s 1970s Watergate scandal Republican politicians in the USA today still feel obliged to support their conservative president — who even if he has “really, seriously, frighteningly lost his mind” does at least remain ostensibly conservative.

Meanwhile again, whatever the future may or may not bring in the USA, the geographically second largest country in the world in Canada next door has, for those of all ideologies, smaller but more attractive current prospects.

To start with, according to recent conservative media reports in Canada, President Trump himself has been backing off his earlier view of Canada as a potential “51st state of the USA” — especially since he’s learned that British monarch Charles III is also still (officially at least) the King of Canada. As a confirmed Canadian republican (much different from a Republican in the USA) I have always been skeptical of this kind of argument from the minority of Canadians who still support the mere symbolism of the British monarchy in Canada. And my scepticism endures.

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RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. SUNDAY, MARCH 29, 2026. According to Yahoo News : “More than 8 million people turned out at over 3,300 ‘No Kings’ protests across all 50 states on Saturday, organizers said, calling it the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history. The first two rounds, in June and October 2025, drew an estimated 5 million and 7 million, respectively. Independent verification of the figures was not immediately available.”

Whatever the ultimate verification might suggest, it is clear enough from coverage online and on TV that some impressively vast (and enthusiastic) numbers of US citizens turned out to protest the second Trump administration’s increasingly bizarre blend of political comedy and tragedy in the USA today. And : “Bruce Springsteen performed ‘Streets of Minneapolis’ at the flagship rally in St. Paul, telling a crowd of at least 100,000 that ‘federal troops brought death and terror to the streets of Minneapolis. They picked the wrong city.’”

(1) No Tyrants in Canada … and No Kings too!

Meanwhile the US “No Kings” slogan raised some (somewhat amusing) domestic doubts in Canada. In fact we do officially still pay some vague and strictly symbolic allegiance to the current British monarch, Charles III. And this has prompted some Canadian commentators to talk about “No Tyrants” instead of No Kings. (Adding fuel to the fire, for reasons only he knows our excellent PM Carney is among the current minority of Canadians who support hanging on to the monarchy — as an institution of some at least symbolic consequence in Canadian public life.)

I have been particularly struck myself by a contribution from the remarkable Tim Bousquet at The Halifax Examiner. It’s called “No kings. Really, Canada: No kings.” And, entering via a door in some Epstein place marked “Edward Mountbatten-Windsor,” it ends with :“While the monarchy is no longer politically powerful, it maintains the trappings of the unconstrained; in fact, there’s nothing left except those trappings, and the resulting terrible behaviour … Let’s end this charade … No kings.” I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly.

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SPECIAL FROM ROB SPARROW, HIGH PARK, TORONTO. MARCH 26, 2026.The 2025 Toronto Blue Jays did everything except win the last game. That is what makes them so unforgettable, and so difficult to place cleanly in the pantheon of Blue Jay franchise history. They were not quite champions, yet they were too large, too dramatic, to be tucked away with some of the other Blue Jay teams that so came before them.

They went from worst to first, from the stale disappointment of a 74-win 2024, to a 94-win division title, from “paper tigers” who perennially disappointed in crunch time, to dispatching the Yankees in the ALDS and Mariners in the ALCS to become the American League’s last survivors. Arriving in the World Series riding a momentum that took them to within two outs of the first Blue Jays World Series title since Joe Carter’s swing sent an entire country into delirium. They almost had their moment : they came that close.

A) What a Ride!!! The Thrilling Toronto Blue Jays of 2025

It is tempting, in retrospect, to say the season ended in heartbreak. “It breaks your heart”, the late MLB commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti famously wrote of baseball, “it’s designed to break your heart”. Yet that is too small for the scale of what happened. This was not a neat paperback tragedy. This was a ten-day opera in seven acts. The 2025 World Series, by any serious argument, belongs in the short list of the greatest ever played, and its seventh game may have been the most deliriously excruciating winner-take-all game the sport has ever produced. The Jays and Dodgers played 73 innings in the series, the most in World Series history and produced many unforgettable moments: the Barger first pinch-hit grand slam in series history in Game 1, Yamamoto’s complete-game masterpiece of Game 2, the 18-inning madness of Game 3, the back-to-back responding haymakers of Game 4, the rookie revelation of Trey Yesavage and his 12 strikeouts in Game 5, the ball logged in the wall controversy and sudden ending in Game 6, and then the final crescendo: an 11-inning Game 7 in which everything seemed to happen, and then happen again.

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RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. MONDAY, MARCH 23, 2026. This coming weekend, in particular Saturday, March 28, 2026, will see the third No Kings protest in Donald Trump’s wild and crazy USA, part deux — one expression of the progressive impulse in the historic Democracy in America, currently under siege.

As the No Kings website explains : “When our families are under attack and costs are pushing people to the brink, silence is not an option. We will defend ourselves and our communities against this administration’s unjust and cruel acts of violence. America does not belong to strongmen, greedy billionaires, or those who rule through fear. It belongs to us, the people.”

Meanwhile, another expression of the progressive impulse north of the formerly undefended border in Canada will be taking place over the same weekend in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

On Friday, March 27, 2026 the leadership convention of the federal New Democratic Party (NDP) will begin at the RBC Convention Centre in Winnipeg, not far from the Manitoba Legislative Building. Saturday, March 28 will mark the final day of leadership voting by party members (which began electronically on March 9). Leadership election results will be announced on the last day of the convention, Sunday, March 29.

(1) Power to the people in the USA today

Personally I hope the March 28, 2026 No Kings protests in the USA achieve all the profile and success fervently wished for and hopefully projected by the likes of Robert Reich.

(Mr. Reich, former President Bill Clinton’s old friend and labor secretary, is still unofficially hanging out to good effect at UC Berkeley, across the Bay from San Francisco in anti-Trump Governor Gavin Newsom’s Golden State of California — fourth-largest economy in the world today, behind only the USA at large itself, China, and Germany).

At a time when many complain — with much if not quite full justice — about the decline of effective checks and balances in American government and politics, the ultimate residual power of the people in half organized/half spontaneous popular protests like No Kings has a strong real-world place in the traditional Democracy in America.

In the even wilder and crazier second coming of Donald Trump, the progressive people and the lower courts are at least doing almost their best to check and balance right now. Meanwhile, there is some serious prospect that the potentially more effective checking and balancing power of Congress will acquire some new lease on life this coming November 3, 2026.

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RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. THURSDAY, MARCH 12, 2026. The long and short in Canadian federal politics is that Lori Idlout, New Democrat MP for Nunavut (a far-northern Inuit-majority constituency geographically larger than Mexico, PM Carney notes) has now crossed the floor in the House at Ottawa, to join the Carney Liberals.

This gives the Liberals 170 seats in a parliament where 172 constitutes the barest majority. If, as widely expected, they win at least the two Toronto seats slated for by-elections on April 13, the Carney Liberals will have finally achieved the barest of majority governments, without a fresh general election. (And the last such election which, as it were, made Mr Carney a minority prime minister was only on April 28, 2025 — less than a year ago.)

As often urged by close Ottawa observers, a bare majority government of this sort will not be much more commanding than the strong (or “major”) minority government PM Carney has now.

If, as usual, the House Speaker comes from the majority party eg, that will leave the governing Liberals with 171 regularly voting MP s, against 171 regularly voting opposition MPs. The Carney government will still have to frequently work with Green, New Democrat, Bloc Québécois, or even Conservative MP s to pass legislation.

At the same time, in one of the two Toronto seats the Liberals are widely expected to win on April 13 (Scarborough Southwest) the Liberal candidate is the former deputy leader of the Ontario provincial New Democrats. (See my February 6 counterweights piece “Two cheers for Doly Begum .. as Canada stiffens its defenses against Trump’s USA.”)

That makes two (more “left-wing”) NDP partisans who have recently joined the federal Liberals, along with the three (more “right-wing”) Conservative MP s who have also crossed the floor to join PM Mark Carney’s minority governing party.

Now the federal Liberals are drawing fresh supporters from both the right and the left. And this reflects the support base suggested by recent opinion polling.

The four most recent polls consulted by the aggregator 338 Canada eg all have the Liberals well ahead of the Conservatives — by respectively 8, 11, 14, and 14 points! (And 338 Canada’s March 8, 2026 seat projections based on current polling assign the Carney Liberals 201 seats, for an utterly dominant majority government!)

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GREG BARNS SC. HOBART, MELBOURNE, BRISBANE, PERTH, AUSTRALIA. TUESDAY, MARCH 3, 2026. On Thursday this week (Australian time) Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney will address the Australian parliament in Canberra. He is the first to do so in nearly 20 years. Mr. Carney is meeting with his center left counterpart Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. There is much in common between Mr. Carney’s Liberals and Mr. Albanese’s Australian Labor Party (ALP), although the latter’s strong ties to the union movement give a feel of the NDP at times.

But while both Australia and Canda are middle powers Mr. Carney seems to understand what that means. Sadly Mr Albanese and his government do not.

When Mr. Carney delivered his widely praised speech in Davos a few weeks ago about middle powers combining in an unstable world, it was noted by some Australian commentators that it was not a speech Mr. Albanese could give – one big reason being Australia’s continued love affair with Washington.

As Michael Koziol wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald on 21 January Mr Carney’s Davos rhetoric and meaning was ‘not a speech that Anthony Albanese could have given. It is not his style, for one – but moreover, it runs counter to what Labor is doing, which is drawing closer to the US at a time when the world is starting to hedge its bets.’

What Mr. Koziol is referring to is the Albanese government’s insanely dangerous and expensive decision – $A368 million for a few submarines delivered over the next few decades – to join, with the US and the UK, in a China continment strategy called AUKUS.

Why, one wonders would Australia, who’s biggest trading partner is China, want to be key link in the US’s determination to be the only, or the dominant, super power in the Asia Pacific region.

AUKUS has been roundly criticized by most of the ALP grandees. The former Prime Minister Paul Keating, in office from 1991 until 1996, has said of AUKUS it “is arguably the worst international decision by an Australian government since the former Labor leader, Billy Hughes, sought to introduce conscription to augment Australian forces in World War One”. He has also said that “what’s happened … is likely to turn Australia into the 51st state of the United States”.

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RANDALL WHITE, TORONTO. THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2026. An opinion piece by Shannon Gormley in this past Sunday’s Toronto Star urged that “Buckingham Palace may be embroiled in scandal, but Canadians have never needed the monarchy more.”

While acknowledging the gravity of this view in present circumstances (and the force of Ms Gormley’s writing), I couldn’t disagree more.

What the current challenge to the Canadian future suggests, I think, is the importance of grounding democracy in Canada today in the Canadian people.

They are the real source of our parliamentary democratic government’s legitimacy and authority in the 2020s.

(1) “British monarchy has next to no practical significance in 21st century Canada”

I would guess that Canada’s current (and I think good or even excellent) PM Mark Carney does not share my altogether negative view of the (British) monarchy in Canada today.

Yet for the sake of the more crucial struggles in defence of the country he has now taken on, I am happy to overlook this flaw in the apparent Carneyesque philosophy, for the time being!

That I can do this so easily no doubt reflects the practical insignificance of the monarchy in the true north strong and free nowadays — going on some 159 years after the old British North America Act created the present 1867 confederation in Canada.

Strictly as a monarchy (as opposed to a gratuitous theoretical shell for Canada’s “Westminster” parliamentary government), the British monarchy has next to no practical significance in 21st century Canada.

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RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2026. While tidying up the office (to escape all the snow still outside), I came across two quotations from eminent Americans, successively posted on my office magazine rack.

The first is from Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore. It’s in an article dated December 6, 2019 and entitled “The Impeachment Hearings and the Coming Storm.”

(For those of us who may have forgotten President Donald Trump was first impeached by the US House of Representatives on December 18, 2019, after Democrats won the House in the 2018 midterm elections. Republicans remained in control of the Senate in 2018, however, and on February 5, 2020, the Senate voted to acquit Trump.)

The December 2019 Jill Lepore quotation that caught my eye was : “A farmer walks across a field, bracing against the wind. Hardness is what’s required to get through a political winter: determination, forbearance, sacrifice, not bitterness but a certain sternness.”

At the time getting through a political winter this way seemed to me a key part of the ongoing US progressive response to the first Donald Trump presidential regime, especially after Democrats won the House in 2018. And the winter sternness seemed to draw on old New England values that may still have some 21st century democratic traction.

The second of my two eminent American quotations is from March 2025. Among other things it may suggest how much times did change between late December 2019 and mid -March 2025.

This quotation came from Washington Monthly editor Paul Glastris, in “The Hot (or Not) New Theory of ‘Abundance Liberalism’” — a wider conversation with his colleague Nate Weisberg (guided and ultimately set to text by Anne Kim).

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RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2026. On the happily less than altogether crazy North American politics in my own backyard, Canadian federal New Democrat MPs have criticized Ontario NDP deputy leader Doly Begum for “announcing she will run federally as a Liberal for the seat vacated by former MP Bill Blair.”

Interim federal NDP Leader Don Davies, eg, has urged : “I’ll leave it to Ms. Begum to explain to the people of Scarborough Southwest [in the east end of today’s City of Toronto] why she’s abandoning the progressive policies she claimed to believe in to run for a party that is clearly governing like a conservative party.”

My own mere progressive voter’s sense of what Doly Begum is doing is different. To start with, the first year of Trump 2.0 next door has proved even worse than predicted — for most Canadians and many Americans (arguably now even a clear enough majority?).

For we the Canadian people President Trump, eg, unambiguously wants Canada as the 51st state, no ifs, ands, or buts. He is not willing period to back down on this front. And, unlike in Minnesota, he does not seriously have to back down even in some small degree. Even among the many US citizens friendly to the country Canada is just not something that Americans pay attention to. (Or care about, as Roger Stone has recently stressed on TwitterX.)

The rise of Mark Carney from Laurier Heights

What democracy in Canada — in its legendary circuitous, roundabout, wandering style — has happily given Canada at this crucial moment in the country’s already much longer than many recognize history is Prime Minister Mark Carney. He was born in the Canadian Northwest Territories, and then largely raised in a post Second War suburb of Edmonton, Alberta intriguingly named Laurier Heights, after the present 1867 confederation’s first French Canadian (if not quite first Liberal) prime minister.

I could go on about why I think PM Carney is what many call the right man for the times in Canada today. About how he’s so smart he managed to go straight from his Edmonton high school to Harvard in the US and then Oxford in the UK. About how he then became Governor of the Bank of Canada, then Governor of the Bank of England, and then a Brookfield Asset Management private businessman (who, imagine that, actually made a lot of money from shrewd financial investments).

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