RANDALL WHITE. HOME AND NATIVE LAND. FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2026. Like many others no doubt, I have a few personal memories of the disastrous events of September 11, 2001 in New York City.

One is a phone call from the only friend from my Toronto high-school days I am still in touch with. It happened shortly after I first saw the morning TV reports on how “hijackers seized US passenger jets and crashed them into two New York skyscrapers, killing thousands of people.”

Another is an email from my younger son, then working in San Francisco, reporting the “somber mood” on the other side of the USA, more than 4500 kilometers (2900 miles) west of New York City.

Yet another is the late great Ontario politics guru Graham Murray’s somewhat later remark on how “devastatingly effective” 9/11 was, from the standpoint of the Middle East suicide bombers who did the appalling selfless work. (Possibly in an issue of his original Inside Queen’s Park or possibly some related communication that I can’t for the moment track down!)

As it happens today, the 25th birthday of 9/11 is unhappily mixed up with Donald Trump’s not surprising compulsive lies about how two New York firemen dragged his very big and somewhat unwilling body from one of the the sites of the New York City branch of the disaster (and attack), back when it happened.

And Donald Trump has by now threatened the sheer existence of the great majority of Canadians, to the point where Canada cannot avoid deep questions about the USA USA next door.

Note eg the recent Nanos finding that when its sample Canadians were asked “Do you support or oppose Canada rejecting the trade deal with the US despite the potential economic risk to Canadians?”, 85% answered “Support”: and only 12% said “Oppose”. Or the paralell Angus Reid result that “Canadians by a five-to-one ratio say it was the right move to walk away.”

Then again, down on the ground in the real world of politics Cult MTL@cultmtl has calculated that PM Mark Carney’s current approval rating ranges from a low of 60% in Alberta, to 65% in Quebec, 66% in Saskatchewan, 69% in BC and Manitoba, and 70% in Atlantic Canada and Canada’s most populous province of Ontario.

At the same time, does anyone else feel as recurrently annoyed as I do by the myopic half-criticism of the Carney government and current Canadian public policy, about which the great democratic majority of Canadians do agree, on Canadian TV (and I can only assume on Canadian radio and in the press as well?)

Former Carney cabinet minister Chrystia Freeland, eg, has just given the US a ‘reality check’:: “President Trump was elected not once, but twice, and that is causing a lot of Canadians to wonder if the United States can ever be trusted again.”

This was on US TV. Why don’t I hear more of such current common sense on Canadian TV too?

Like the great majority of Canadians I am profoundly pleased when eg “Carney warns of tough times ahead in video message as retaliatory tariffs kick in … PM says pivot will come at a cost, but ‘it doesn’t come close to the cost of standing still’.”

I also like the prime minister’s YouTube remarks in “Forward Guidance: A Stronger Canada … ‘Canada is a nation forged in adversity’.” They remind me of the late great P.B. Waite’s 1971 history book, Canada 1874–1896 : Arduous Destiny.

I am simply not interested in hearing so much in the mass media on the self-doubts of various alleged experts on domestic affairs at this juncture in the now 400-year-old story of modern Canada. I don’t think it is any part of the media’s proper role to fill the airwaves with these self-doubts in the country’s current circumstances. I do think the prime minister we are at the moment so lucky to have in office is a smarter and more capable leader than any of his media critics.

Like others again I have been happy to learn that the leader of Canada’s official opposition has finally come to understand the deepest truth here. (“I’m not going to attack my prime minister on foreign soil. It’s just not something I’m going to do … My mission here is to fight for my country, not to score political points domestically.”)

I think those in charge at the CBC and CTV should take a hint from all this for what goes on TV domestically in Canada right now.

Of course “freedom of the press” is an absolute value in our present-day “free and democratic society” (see the Constitution Act 1982).

But that doesn’t mean that Canadian TV must somehow effectively show respect for the Trump administration’s relentless lying about the Canadian economy.

Here as elsewhere the US president doesn’t really have the kind of power he thinks he has, or ought to have. And our mass media don’t need to pretend he does, in the interests of freedom of the press.

RANDALL WHITE. FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. Friday, September 4, 2026. The print copy of the 13 August 2026 issue of the London Review of Books has finally arrived at my front door. And I have finally had a chance to read its lead article — Emily Wilson’s controversial review of the new movie on Homer’s ancient Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan.

I should preface my short report here by noting two earlier appearances of the brilliant University of Pennsylvania Classical Studies professor Emily Wilson on counterweights.ca.

Back in the middle of March 2019 (somewhat more than seven years ago, during the first Trump administration), my colleague and friend L.Frank Bunting posted “Taking time out from current madness to consider one woman’s brilliant writing more than 2500 years ago.”

This covered Emily Wilson’s admiring review of Anne Carson’s translation of the limited surviving work of the great ancient Greek lyric poet, If Not, Winter – Fragments of Sappho.

Then, somewhat more than three years later, in late August 2022 during what now seems the interim sanity (relatively speaking) of the Biden administration, the collective wisdom of the Counterweights Editors posted “As summer winds down there’s a Quebec election in the air (and Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey on YouTube!).”

Emily Wilson — more respectful and supportive of Christopher Nolan?

There is another Quebec election in the air in the late summer of 2026. And Emily Wilson’s 2017 English translation of Homer’s original Odyssey in ancient Greek is also referred to in Ms. Wilson’s 2026 LRB review of Christopher Nolan’s new Odyssey movie:

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RANDALL WHITE. HOME AND NATIVE LAND. FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2026. Here on the northwest shore of Lake Ontario (where the Indigenous Wendat “name Lacus Ontario was first recorded in 1660 by Francis Creuxius”), not far from a 17th century Seneca village, it is impossible to resist the thought that the USA USA in 2026 is in the presidential hands of a maniac, plain and simple.

And yet happily enough, in our ongoing In Search of Canadian Liberalism we the Canadian people have now fortunately landed on Prime Minister Mark Carney — former Governor of the Bank of Canada and then the Bank of England, and yet another Canadian “first among equals” with a relevant PhD. (Even if almost a quarter of us still do not believe in the good fortune.)

These also plain and simple preceding 120 words at least summarize my own feelings about and even analysis of the current moment in the politics of the Canada-US trade war, started by the second Trump administration for its own twisted reasons.

And these reasons have nothing at all obvious to do with the long-standing friendships and even (as I can personally testify) family ties between The United States and Canada (also the title of a Canadian political science textbook, first published in 2019 during the first Trump administration).

Strangely enough as well, I do continue to think that, whatever the ultimate world-history judgments about winners and losers, the Canadian future will be in one way or another enhanced by the Carney government in Ottawa’s current standing-up to the clear madness south of the border — clearly enough supported by a clear and even strong majority of the Canadian people.

At a time when no less a political pundit than Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s labor secretary, is reprinting poems by W.B. Yeats and W.H. Auden as guides to the present, I can only return to one of my favourite lines from T.S. Eliot (from his “Gerontion” first published in 1920) : “After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now/History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors/And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,/Guides us by vanities.”

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RANDALL WHITE. HOME AND NATIVE LAND. FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. MONDAY, AUGUST 24, 2026. My immediate reaction to how the Government of Canada has just stood up for the home team in the ongoing trade war unleashed on the true north strong and free by the increasingly wild and crazy Trump administration next door is four cheers (or more) for PM Mark Carney.

By way of quick prelude, note that Mr. Carney has also just won applause from as unlikely a pair of US observers as Anthony Scaramucci (“Carney now leads the West”) and Mia Farrow (“Mark Carney and Canada are now the ‘leaders of the ‘Free World’”).

For the moment I just want to offer some quick numbers that set in some wider perspective the no doubt big enough challenge to Canada in the madman Trump’s new 50 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods.

These numbers suggest that the Trump administration’s own claims about the impact on Canada in the latest lunacy from south of the once undefended border are at best wildly exaggerated.

According to CTV News : “Roughly 87,000 Canadian jobs could be at risk because of the United States’ new 50 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods, according to an analysis conducted by University of Calgary economics professor Trevor Tombe … The hardest-hit provinces for job losses are Ontario (36,100), Quebec (18,300) and B.C. (11,200).”

If you are or fear you might be one of the 87,000 Canadians who just might lose their their jobs in this context these numbers are no doubt seriously fearsome. And public policy must do something to soften the blow — as PM Carney and provincial premiers have acknowledged.

At the same time, according to Statistics Canada’s latest Labour Force survey there were some 21,215,000 jobs in Canada as of the end of this past July 2026. And Professor Tombe’s 87,000 jobs at risk amount to a mere 0.4% of this number.

Moreover, Ontario, Quebec, and BC are the most populous provinces in the Canadian confederation today. To say that they are also the provinces where the most jobs could be be lost (or are “at risk”) is just to say that the most jobs lost because of the United States’ new 50 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods will be in the most populous provinces. Which is hardly surprising.

Moreover, while 36,000 jobs could be at risk in Ontario eg, according to the July 2026 Labour Force survey Ontario gained some 52,000 jobs last month — even with all the earlier Trumpian measures meant to harm and humiliate the sovereign (and bilingual) Canadian confederation (whose modern history goes back some 400 years).

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RANDALL WHITE. HOME AND NATIVE LAND. FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, AUGUST 21, 2026. Through no fault of my own or that of anyone at all close, I live in one of the three Canadian federal electoral districts (or ridings in the old school lexicon) where a byelection is taking place this coming Monday, August 31 — only 10 days away.

Judging by traditional election signage in front of houses and apartment buildings and so forth, you might be hard-pressed to know that a local federal election is just 10 days away. At the same time, from those who run sign campaigns I have learned that a lot of signs finally just means a strong well-organized sign campaign in some technical sense. — and not too much more.

(I should also confess that we have a small sign in front of our house. This is entirely the result of my TV-watching-partner’s down-on-the-ground action — with my prior agreement. In the interests of objective reporting, I will not reveal who our sign is supporting!)

Today’s Rabble Review is headlined “NDP feels momentum growing in run up to Beaches-East York by-election.” But M. Fournier at 338Canada would not be impressed His Beaches—East York numbers for August 16, 2026 put Liberals at 62% , NDP 18%, and Conservatives 15%. It will take A LOT of momentum over the next 10 days to carry the New Democrats into anything close to Liberal territory, if M. Fournier is anywhere close to the real world.

I have seen public polling numbers as well that suggest Mark Carney’s Liberals have at least some prospects of winning all three August 31 byelections. Least likely may be Chicoutimi-Le Fjord in Quebec. Here an August 15, 2026 post from Polling Canada put the Liberals at 35%, Bloc Québécois 31%, and Conservatives 26%. An August 9, 2026 Polling Canada post for the bylection in North Vancouver-Capilano put the Liberals at 54%, Conservatives 31%, NDP 10% — not quite as Liberal-likely as Beaches-East York in Toronto, but close. (And the east-end Toronto Beaches are sometimes locally critiqued as a den of “Vancouver wannabees.”)

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RANDALL WHITE, CANADIAN REPUBLIC NOTEBOOK. TORONTO. FRIDAY, AUGUST 14, 2026. Toronto’s annual “Canadian National Exhibition” (CNE) starts just a week ahead — August 21, ending Labour Day, September 7. And this is just one day before the start of Vancouver’s 2026 “Pacific National Exhibition” (PNE) — August 22–September 7.

These seasonal fairs in the air mean it’s also time to at least start waving goodbye to “August for the people and their favourite islands.” One approach currently in the news focuses on an issue of serious if still too much un-debated importance to the Canadian people, who form the real sovereign power in Canada’s “Westminster” parliamentary democracy of the 21st century.

Two recent posts on the CBC News site illustrate the current state of this particular art : First, “Supreme Court of Canada to hear case on constitutionality of requiring oath to the Crown … Decision comes after Alberta’s top court decided requiring oath for lawyers violates Constitution.” Second, “Quebec law ending mandatory oath to King faces constitutional challenge … Lawyer takes aim at 2022 law scrapping requirement for Quebec legislators.”

The general form of the Canadian “oath of allegiance” involved here“derives from that which was, and still is, taken by parliamentarians in the United Kingdom.”

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RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, AUGUST 7, 2/026. With the fabled local “Exhibition Weather” almost about to settle over this Canadian metropolis where I live, I have just been inspired by two pieces in the July 23, 2026 issue of the New York Review of Books.

The first is “Space Oddity … Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s Muskism examines how Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, by selling a vision of the future that very few people would want to inhabit.” This is a review of Slobodian and Tarnoff’s Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by the 47-year-old Irish writer (and Dublin resident) Mark O’Connell. (Not to be confused with the Mark O’Connell who is a “Board Director & Investor” and lives in Toronto.)

My second NYRB piece is “The New Ellis Island … A history of five families in El Paso reveals the city’s significance as a bellwether of America’s immigration policy.” This is a review of Jazmine Ulloa’s El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory by the 75-year-old American journalist and eminent immigration specialist Julia Preston, who grew up in Lake Forest, Illinois and now lives in Hoboken, New Jersey (just across the Hudson River from Greenwich Village in New York City).

The long and short of my inspiration is that I was first especially struck by the last few sentences of Mark O’Connell’s review : “Musk’s worldview … is an explicitly antihuman one. But it is also—and this is the point of Slobodian and Tarnoff’s persuasive and vital book—not just Musk’s worldview. It already underpins much of contemporary capitalism and may come to be seen as the presiding pathology in our time of monsters.”

My initial reaction here was to wonder if we do in fact live in a “ time of monsters” right now? Donald Trump, eg, is to me an essentially ignorant schoolyard bully and total jerk who is not remotely qualified to be President of the USA. But I wonder if he has an at all big enough personality to also qualify as a credible monster?

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RANDALL WHITE. FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, JULY 31, 2026. A few days ago Curtis Fric at Canadian Polling posted “After Years of Control, Ford Faces a Real Fight … A string of weaker polls and collapsing approval ratings are raising new questions about Doug Ford’s political future.”

(1) Ford faltering?

Curtis Fric’s post also raises a broad issue I opined on here a few weeks ago with “‘In Ontario Donald Trump is pronounced Doug Ford’ .. & Premier Ford’s current 21% approval even more appalling if he stays in office until April 2030.”

Premier Ford’s latest claim that the federal government has been listening to a “fringe group” on Toronto island airport expansion is still more appalling.

His conservative party has never won even close to a majority of the popular vote (an average of 41%) in any of its three elections in seven years. But thanks to a divided progressive opposition it has won decisive majorities of seats in the provincial legislature.

Moreover, only 44% and then 45% of all eligible voters turned out in the most recent 2022 and 2025 Ontario elections.— the lowest voter turnouts in the province’s history since 1867.

Doug Ford’s conservatives are the real fringe group in Ontario today.

It still seems to me, however, that constitutionally (as most recently formulated in legislation passed by Premier Ford’s large majority of seats in the legislature), Doug Ford can still remain in office until April 2030, regardless of what opinion polls, pundits, opposition politicians, or mere bloggers such as myself may say or do.

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RANDALL WHITE. FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, JULY 24, 2026. Among many other things, the 180 forest fires currently burning in (mostly Northern) Ontario — see eg “Ontario firefighters battling record wildfires … Ford government says it has increased resources” — bring a largely still evaded big difference between “Near Northern” and “Far Northern” Ontario into the harsh light of day, down here far away in the provincial capital city.

Like the Ontario forest itself, the current forest fires in the province are concentrated in Northern Ontario (which accounts for some 90% of Ontario’s land area but less than 10% of its population). And, although it is customary to distinguish between Northeastern and Northwestern Ontario, an equally or even more poignant distinction betwwen what might be caled “Near Northern” and “Far Northern” Ontario is still far less common.

One key human geography feature of this last distinction is that there is no provincial or virtually any other large road network in Far Northern Ontario : “Secondary Highway 599, commonly referred to as Highway 599, is a provincially maintained secondary highway in … Ontario.” It “connects Highway 17 near Ignace with the remote northern community of Pickle Lake; its terminus at Pickle Lake marks the northernmost point on the provincial highway system.”

There is still a lot of Ontario land area north of the end of Highway 599. And this Far Northern Ontario is especially notable for First Nations communities “in remote northern regions accessible only by air or winter ice roads. Ontario contains more remote First Nations communities than any other province in Canada.”

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RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, JULY 17, 2/026. One of my approaches to coping with the extreme summer heat and wildfire smoke we are currently assailed by in Toronto (along with many adjacent places in both Canada and the US) has been to sit in my most air-conditioned room, and read the latest print issue of the London Review of Books to arrive in the old-school mail.

I have been especially struck by John Lahr’s 3,650-word piece on David Margolick ‘s When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy.

John Lahr is an eminent if now somewhat retired theatre and movie critic (“currently a chief theater critic emeritus of The New Yorker”). He is also the son of Bert Lahr who played the Cowardly Lion in the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie. His review of David Margolick ‘s new Sid Caesar book (rated 4.4 out of 5 on the Amazon site) is fun to read and well worth any deep reader’s time. And it comes to more than a few heavyweight and no doubt apt judgments.

Mr. Lahr, however, does have his (man-in-his-80s) reservations about both Sid Caesar and David Margolick’s book. (If it is true eg that Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy, John Lahr complains, “then gallstones are jewellery.”)

I

My brother and I — both pre-teens at the time — were enthusiastic TV fans of “the hour-long Caesar’s Hour (1954-57).” We missed the earlier Admiral Broadway Revue (1949) and the 90-minute episodes of Your Show of Shows (1950-54), almost certainly because our family did not have a TV set until the mid 1950s.

I have only a few sketchy recollections of particular Sid Caesar TV skits and characters from 1954 to 1957. (I am also an old man in his 80s.) But I do happily remember how much my brother and I enjoyed watching Caesar’s Hour. (I don’t have memories of my parents watching almost any TV at that point : they had too many better things to do with their time. Our modest TV set was always sequestered away in some small extra bedroom, or in the basement.)

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