RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2026. Robert Reich, Democratic President Clinton’s secretary of labor, 1993–1997 and retired UC Berkeley professor, is far from the only eminent US commentator who has been raising deeply serious questions about President Trump’s mental health in the early spring of 2026. Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNOW, as […]

RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. MONDAY, MARCH 23, 2026. This coming weekend, in particular Saturday, March 28, 2026, will see the third No Kings protest in Donald Trump’s wild and crazy USA, part deux — one expression of the progressive impulse in the historic Democracy in America, currently under siege. As the No Kings […]

RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. THURSDAY, MARCH 12, 2026. The long and short in Canadian federal politics is that Lori Idlout, New Democrat MP for Nunavut (a far-northern Inuit-majority constituency geographically larger than Mexico, PM Carney notes) has now crossed the floor in the House at Ottawa, to join the Carney Liberals. This gives […]

GREG BARNS SC. HOBART, MELBOURNE, BRISBANE, PERTH, AUSTRALIA. TUESDAY, MARCH 3, 2026. On Thursday this week (Australian time) Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney will address the Australian parliament in Canberra. He is the first to do so in nearly 20 years. Mr. Carney is meeting with his center left counterpart Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. […]

RANDALL WHITE, TORONTO. THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2026. An opinion piece by Shannon Gormley in this past Sunday’s Toronto Star urged that “Buckingham Palace may be embroiled in scandal, but Canadians have never needed the monarchy more.” While acknowledging the gravity of this view in present circumstances (and the force of Ms Gormley’s writing), I couldn’t […]

RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2026. While tidying up the office (to escape all the snow still outside), I came across two quotations from eminent Americans, successively posted on my office magazine rack. The first is from Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore. It’s in an article dated December […]

RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2026. On the happily less than altogether crazy North American politics in my own backyard, Canadian federal New Democrat MPs have criticized Ontario NDP deputy leader Doly Begum for “announcing she will run federally as a Liberal for the seat vacated by former MP Bill Blair.” […]

COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS. GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. SATURDAY, JANUARY 24/SUNDAY, JANUARY25, 2026. This is a crazy weekend on the northwest shore of Lake Ontario, at the eastern beginning of the North American Great Lakes. For one thing it’s unusually cold outside, even for late January. (As we look out on a snowy yard from our back boardroom, which […]

RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 2026. In the midst of all the 51st State nonsense on Twitter/X lately, Alice Hunt’s recent piece on King“James VI & I” (1566–1625) in the London Review of Books gave me a fresh (if also crazy) slant on the 250-year-old non-unification of the United States and […]

RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. TUESDAY, JANUARY 6, 2026. To start with this is the fifth anniversary of the wild and crazy attempt to overturn the 2020 US presidential election in Washington, DC — at and in which President Donald Trump was both present and an involved observer (or much more?). I may not […]