[UPDATED DECEMBER 2, 2009]. How many sovereign people of Canada today are even aware that there was a 60th anniversary summit of the Commonwealth of Nations this past weekend in Trinidad and Tobago? A poll commissioned by something called the Royal Commonwealth Society this past  summer asked a representative sample of Canadians: “Which one of […]

TORONTO. NOVEMBER 11, 2009. It was inevitable that the quiet journey of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall through four Canadian provinces during the first few weeks of  November this year would finally bump into some noisy protest when it reached la belle province du Quebec. (See “Flying eggs, riot police, pro-Quebec […]

These are not easy days for aspiring progressive voters in Canadian federal politics, at the edge of four by-elections that actually will happen on Monday, November 9. According to the October 29 EKOS poll, eg: “Stephen Harper’s federal Conservatives lead the second-place Liberals by a double-digit margin for the fourth week in a row, suggesting […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

What the Canadian Press had earlier called “a small knot of demonstrators,” who “plan to show up, calling for an end to what they see as an undemocratic vestige of the colonial past,” actually did appear among the protesters at the otherwise radiant official “installation” of Canada’s new Governor General Michaelle Jean, on the sunny […]