NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK. RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, SUNDAY, APRIL 2, 2023. My first encounter with US TV this Sunday morning (with Donald Trump to be arraigned Tuesday in New York) was all about this year’s unusual March Madness — the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s annual quest “to determine the … Division I men’s college […]

RANDALL WHITE, TORONTO. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2022. Now that the slender Republican majority in the House has been confirmed, I can report on our journey to northeastern California for the 2022 US midterm elections. (And Nancy Pelosi’s announcement yesterday of her resignation as leader of the Democrats in the House, while continuing to represent her […]

RANDALL WHITE, TORONTO. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2022. Early this Sunday morning we’re off to the airport, travelling to Vancouver and then from there to Sacramento, California (and then from the airport there to the north end of Sacramento County by car), in time for the US midterm elections on Tuesday, November 8. Catching Bill Maher […]

NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK. RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, 14 JANUARY 2022. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 34 of the 100 seats in the Senate will be contested in the US mid term elections some 10 months down the road, on November 8, 2022. There will also be contests for Governor in […]

NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK – RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. JUNE 7, 2021. The troubling big news in Canada right now appears in reports like : “How radar technology is used to discover unmarked graves at former residential schools” ; and “Papal apology for church’s role in residential schools may not be ‘way forward’: archbishop.” In […]

FROM THE COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS, GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. WED 2 DEC 2020 : The main focus of our November 30 gathering was federal finance minister Chrystia Freeland’s economic and fiscal update for the Government of Canada – on cable news TV at or about 4 PM, direct from the Canadian House of Commons in Ottawa. The Government […]

FROM THE DESKTOP OF CITIZEN X, GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. NOVEMBER 1, 2020. One thing Canadians never quite understand about their friendly-giant neighbours in the USA is how they ever manage to remember even the bare political geography of their federal system. Memorizing the 10 provinces of Canada and their capital cities at school or otherwise takes […]

TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA. JANUARY 7, 2018. 1:30 AM. Sometimes it is hard to resist the pure soap opera that American politics has become in the age of Donald Trump, even if you live far away in the northern woods. Two contributions to the latest bout of near-serious madness induced by the publication of Michael Wolff’s […]

FBI Director James Comey’s last-minute intervention in the 2016 US election – regarding certain freshly discovered “emails of longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin that were found on a device seized during an unrelated sexting investigation of Anthony Weiner” – has cast a dark Orwellian shadow over democracy in America in the early 21st century. According […]

I hope Dr. White is right about some new mood of bipartisan co-operation rising from the ashes, “even just vaguely,” in some reborn saga of democracy in America. And I pray David Brooks will finally prove right when he wrote last Tuesday that the day after Trump loses, “there won’t be solidarity and howls of […]