FROM THE COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS, GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. NOVEMBER 9, 2021. Liberal-NDP co-operation in Canadian federal politics — albeit mostly informal — has a history that goes back to the beginnings of the modern New Democratic Party in the 1960s. But it looks like rumoured prospects of some 2021 formal agreement, broadly on the model of the […]

NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK – RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. JUNE 11, 2021. I think Stephen Maher’s June 7, 2021 Maclean’s article, “John A. Macdonald can wait — We are at the beginning, not the end, of a process of reassessing our history“, says a number of good things on an important issue at the right […]

RANDALL WHITE, TORONTO, SEPTEMBER 20, 2020 : John Napier Turner (June 7, 1929 — September 18, 2020) sat in the Canadian House of Commons for the Montreal electoral district of St. Lawrence-St.George, 1962—1968, for Ottawa-Carleton, 1968—1976, and finally for Vancouver-Quadra, 1984—1993. He served as Minister of Consumer and Corporate Affairs in Lester Pearson’s Liberal cabinet, […]

GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. MARCH 24, 2020. I want to stress that I like the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who comes on TV somewhat before lunch these days, from the porch just outside his current democratically ordinary-looking residence in “Rideau Cottage,” to tell us where our Canada-wide fight against the COVID-19 pandemic stands. I’m not averse either […]

The middle of the summer of 1977 was not quite nine months after René Lévesque’s unsettling PQ victory in the November 1976 Quebec provincial election. And it was at this point that the Anglo-American economist and philosopher Kenneth Boulding told the 44th annual Couchiching Conference in Ontario : Canada is an “absurd country straight out […]

[UPDATE ON ELIZABETH MAY’S MARCH 1 DEMANDS BELOW. UPDATED AGAIN MARCH 10 ; AND YET AGAIN MARCH 30 : For March 30 update scroll straight to end of this page — where there are also now updates for March 31 and April 2]. What it still seems most sensible to just call the SNC-Lavalin Affair […]

One counterweights item from the year now ending that has seen fresh visits in the most recent past is Randall White’s “Can Justin Trudeau be defeated in the next Canadian federal election?,” first posted back on May 8, 2018. In the new age of fixed-date elections (sort of) the campaign for the 43rd Canadian federal […]

Some would characterize the Nobel Peace Prize winner Lester “Mike” Pearson’s comparatively short prime ministerial career (1963–68) as the time when Canada’s long-incubating federal welfare state achieved its ultimate modern fruition. Others would allude to one of “the most influential commissions in Canadian history, the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963–69),” which “brought about […]

Now that PM Justin Trudeau’s excellent adventure in Washington, DC is fading into the sunset, other thoughts have begun to cross our collective minds. To take just one case in point, one interesting thing about supervising a so-called Canadian political blogazine for almost 12 years (since the late summer of 2004 in fact) is that […]

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 […]