The thing to remember about the United States of America when it intermittently seems on the verge of civil war (metaphorically at least?) is that it is in the end a very complex place, full of many different real-world human beings. For every “Ugly American” there are at least a few and often enough many […]

GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. SUN 4 MARCH 2018. 12:00 PM ET.  Just after noon yesterday the Canadian Press reported : “Ontario’s Progressive Conservative party is giving members even more time to sign up to cast their vote for a new leader.” The report went on : “The party has already extended the voter registration deadline once, pushing […]

TORONTO. 27 FEBRUARY 2018, 5 AM ET. We won’t even start to be able to start placing (again ) former Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown in the largely unknown deep political history of Canada’s most populous province until we know the actual result of the provincial election, now just three months or so away, […]

TORONTO, ON. SUN 18 FEB 2018. 3 AM ET. [UPDATED 11:00 AM, 8:00 PM, MON 19 FEB, 1 PM, WED 21 FEB, 12:45 PM, 5 PM]. I am now back one week from the brief winter holiday in the sun alluded to in “I remember the crisis in Ontario politics while escaping ‘Mon pays ce […]

FEBRUARY 1, 2018, 2 AM ET. Like others who hang out at the counterweights.ca office in the old streetcar suburbs of the provincial capital city, tomorrow I am off on a brief respite from the snows of perfidious Ontario in the exotic Caribbean. (We are back the week of February 12.) Like still others again, […]

GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. MONDAY, JANUARY 29, 2018. 5 PM ET. [UPDATED JAN 30]. It may still be, as some wise observers have suggested, that the Ontario Progressive Conservatives – now disentangled from the wobbly leadership of Patrick Brown – will go on to handily win a majority government in the June 7 provincial election. (As some […]

One thing I’ve done today (well … yesterday really) is finish reading Jeff Madrick’s review of two recent books on poverty in the USA,  in the June 22, 2017 issue of The New York Review of Books. (The two books are :  The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty, by […]

Yesterday another poll from Forum Research brought the good news that the answer to a question posed on this site a mere nine days ago – “Will it really end just deja vu all over again for John Tory (and curtains for civilization in Toronto) ??” – is almost certainly NO. (Well, probably anyway. Close […]