COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS/SEASONS GREETINGS, TORONTO, DECEMBER 18, 2021. We’re back from the Northern California exurbs. (Possibly just in the nick of time?). And more on that later. For now we’ll just note that everything was excellent without exception. Meanwhile, in some strange brew of celebration and commemoration here are 21 counterweights blogazine articles from the year […]

NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK. RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, ON, 26 NOVEMBER 2021.This coming Tuesday, November 30 Dame Sandra Mason will be sworn in as the first President of the island nation of Barbados (“the most easterly of the Caribbean Islands,” current population c 288,000). With this act Barbados will officially change from a “Commonwealth Realm” […]

SPECIAL FROM ASHOK CHARLES, TORONTO/THUNDER BAY. APRIL 10, 2021 : Canada’s current citizenship oath, with its medieval pledge of fealty to a hereditary monarch, does not meet the needs of a prominent 21st century democracy. In 2019 Canada accepted 340,000 new permanent residents, and is among the countries with the highest levels of immigration. Some […]

SPECIAL FROM ASHOK CHARLES, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, REPUBLIC NOW/RÉPUBLIQUE DU CANADA, TORONTO/THUNDER BAY. OCTOBER 18, 2020 : That Barbados has resolved to transition from constitutional monarchy to constitutional democracy (see “Barbados To Become A Republic by 2021”) also has relevance for Canada. Explaining the coming changeover, Barbados’ Governor General, Sandra Mason, said : “Barbadians want a […]

TELEGRAM FROM RANDALL WHITE. GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. It is no doubt only to be expected that strange things will happen during such historical eras as the COVID-19 global pandemic – in public as well as private life. That any rate strikes me as the most sensible context in which to view the summer 2020 controversy over […]

SPECIAL FROM GREG BARNS. HOBART, MELBOURNE, BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA, 14 JULY 2020. The 11th of November 1975 is a date etched into the collective mind of the Australian body politic. It was the day that the Queen’s representative, Governor General John Kerr, dismissed the elected Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, and commissioned Opposition Leader Malcolm Fraser to […]

CANADA DAY, JULY 1, 2020. GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. RANDALL WHITE : As quite recently noted by the counterweights editors, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has urged that the COVID-19 pandemic has given us a “chance to reshape Canada’s future.” In the prime minister’s own words, the coronavirus “has been an unprecedented challenge.” But it “has also been […]

From a Canadian point of view, it probably does make some kind of sense that, as the Queen has recently informed us, Harry and Meghan will be going through “a period of transition in which” they “will spend time in Canada and the UK.” As suggested by Philippe Lagassé, described in the New York Times […]

God only knows just what is going to happen to planet earth in the year 2020 that is about to begin. Here in Canada we are bound to be paying a lot of attention to the US presidential election on Tuesday, November 3, 2020. (Even if the companion Democratic presidential primaries do not seem as […]

The middle of the summer of 1977 was not quite nine months after René Lévesque’s unsettling PQ victory in the November 1976 Quebec provincial election. And it was at this point that the Anglo-American economist and philosopher Kenneth Boulding told the 44th annual Couchiching Conference in Ontario : Canada is an “absurd country straight out […]