This coming Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (December 9—11, 2014) “First Nation leaders from across Canada will gather in Winnipeg … for the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) Special Chiefs Assembly (SCA) and election for AFN National Chief.” Nancy Macdonald has nicely summarized the details here on the Maclean’s website. (Or not, if you don’t like […]

Wherever they landed in northern North America in 1497, on behalf of the English monarch, Henry VII, John Cabot and the small crew of the Matthew met no other human beings. In 1501 a Spanish expedition visited Labrador, and “claimed to have acquired from the natives with whom they came into contact a fragment of […]

Still strangely enthralled by legendary Tory oligarchs of the 19th century, the mainstream media usually tries hard not to notice. But there is nonetheless an ardently gurgling Canadian republican activism even in various anglophone parts of the country in the early 21st century. This activism has a number of reasons for wanting to retire the […]

We are of course far from alone in our view of 2011 as a hinge of fate. Here, eg, is Bloomberg Business Week on the subject: “Rampaging natural catastrophes, global financial calamities, the deaths of despots and desperados, the passing of America’s greatest modern technical innovator and roiling protests that shook the Arab world and […]

Strictly speaking, counterweights turned seven years old this past summer. Our very first full-length article, “John Ibbitson’s next Canada” (by Randall White) appeared on August 19, 2004. We very quietly marked our seventh birthday, as it were, with “Just what was PM Harper thinking .. how about ‘Canadian Navy, Air Force Name Change Divides NDP […]

The vital last words on the McGuinty government’s new “Open Ontario” throne speech won’t be heard until the provincial budget a few weeks hence. Some think Premier Dalton just “wants to change the channel … to forget eHealth and the HST.” Others believe that while “his path converged with Harper’s during tough times, [the] Ontario […]

Mostly, the historian Jill Lepore wrote in a New Yorker article a few months ago, “we’re bankrupt of history.” And in the wake of General Motors’ April 27, 2009 decision to discontinue the manufacture of Pontiac automobiles (and the still more recent GM filing for US bankruptcy protection on June 1), the historian Gordon Mitchell […]

According to The Province in Vancouver: “A native group within the Vancouver area operating under the banner of the Six Nations Solidarity Network have been planning a response to see how they can support their Ontario native compatriots” in the Caledonia land-claim protest, which threatened fresh violence earlier this week. Just over 95 years ago, […]

How many of what the 2001 Census called the 20 fastest-growing “census subdivisions” in Canada’s most populous province of Ontario can you name? If you guess the City of Vaughan, just north of Toronto, you are not doing too badly. That was number 20. If you go on to guess the Town of Wasaga Beach on Georgian Bay, you deserve a small […]