Freeman Dyson’s recent interesting note on Albert Einstein and the old  “dualistic philosophy” of quantum mechanics – masquerading as a New York review of Stephen Gimbel’s Einstein: His Space and Times – has also made some of us think about what ought to be another big issue in this year’s Canadian federal election. (Believe it […]
The ongoing trial of suspended Canadian Senator Mike Duffy has reminded some of us that back in the late spring of 2013 Randall White posted a note on this site about Harold Innis’s “more or less random observations on the Senate, and the related issue of Canadian regionalism” – which, taken together, “add up to […]
Canadian history would be easier to digest if its main story-line was just that the French and Indians began the modern country in the 17th and first half of the 18th centuries, and then the British monarchy and its rising global empire took it over at the 1759 Battle of the Plains of Abraham, as […]
You know you are living in strange times when you read headlines like “‘Anti-petroleum’ movement a growing security threat to Canada, RCMP say.” Really? Our lives and property are at risk from an “anti-petroleum” movement? Is Franz Kafka working for the RCMP now? Will we soon have crimes like anti-petroleum activities? Will purchasing a Tesla […]
We are glad to hear that the French flag has been “flying outside Toronto’s city hall … in solidarity with the people of France.” And we were pleased to read about how “Toronto’s French community gathers for Charlie Hebdo vigil … Facebook group summons demonstrators to consulate Wednesday to declare ‘Je suis Charlie’ after massacre […]
Modern Canada begins with contact between North American Indigenous peoples and seaborne Europeans in the 16th century. (There was earlier contact of this sort, more than a half century before the 1066 Norman Conquest in England — as described by Plate 16 in the 1987 first volume of the Historical Atlas of Canada, on “Norse […]
Lawrence Martin’s quite remarkable Globe and Mail column this past Tuesday (November 18, 2014) Â – “A pro-active PM seizes the agenda” – deserves more attention, and debate. The essential argument is nicely (or otherwise) summarized in Mr. Martin’s first paragraph : “If victory goes to the guy who wants it most, Stephen Harper is making […]
One sign of the continuing influence of Harold Innis’s more than 90-year-old local classic, The Fur Trade in Canada, is that it remains in print today. And the first date it still points to in modern Canadian history is 1497. Innis says nothing specific about the date. His first detailed reportage jumps to Jacques Cartier’s […]
“The Long Journey to a Canadian Republic, 1963—20??” is the title of Part IV in Randall White’s current book project, tentatively and still too lengthily called Children of the Global Village – Canada in the 21st Century : Tales about the history that matters. (One inspiration for the title and larger project has apparently been […]
