[UPDATED OCTOBER 1, 3, 20]. Yesterday Canada’s so-called Prince of Pot, Marc Emery, surrendered to authorities at the BC Supreme Court. He is now in a Canadian jail awaiting extradition to the United States, on a 2005 charge of selling marijuana seeds to US customers through the mail. The “US Attorney’s Office is pressing for […]
TORONTO. SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2009. [UPDATED SEPTEMBER 28]. Both Lawrence Martin of the Globe and Mail and Ralph Surette of the Halifax Chronicle Herald have shown some special sympathy for Jack Layton and his New Democrats lately – in the midst of their new marriage of convenience with the definitely non-progressive Harper Conservatives. But who […]
PITTSBURGH, PA. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2009. [UPDATED SEPTEMBER 25 and SEPTEMBER 26].What is the G20 that is meeting today and tomorrow in this reviving old US rust-belt city on the site of the mid 18th century French Fort Duquesne, at the junction of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers? Well … to start with it […]
President Obama is busy this week with an international agenda (Middle East, UN General Assembly, and G20 in Pittsburgh). But the linchpin in the current US domestic debate – health care reform – goes on and on and on. At least the online readers of the Globe and Mail in Canada still rate the president’s […]
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2009. 2:00 PM EDT. As expected the Harper minority government’s ways and means budget motion sailed through the Canadian House of Commons easily this morning, with the support of the Bloc Québécois and the New Democrats. The vote was 224 Yea to 74 Nay, with only Liberals voting against. As a result, […]
Anyone who hoped Dalton McGuinty’s governing Ontario Liberals were in for a setback in the St. Paul’s by-election in midtown Toronto yesterday will be disappointed. The Liberal candidate, Dr. Eric Hoskins won handily with 13,192 votes. His Conservative challenger Sue-Ann Levy managed only 7,851 votes, compared with 4,677 for Julian Heller of the NDP, and […]
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 1:30 PM EDT. [UPDATED SEPTEMBER 17]: The New Democrats have now made clear that they will join the Bloc Quebecois in supporting the Conservative minority government’s ways and means budget motion this Friday, September 18. Only a little reading between the lines of NDP spokesperson Thomas Mulcair’s remarks also suggests that his […]
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2009. 4:30 PM EDT. Well, well, well … Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe has now officially announced that his party will support the Harper minority government’s ways and means budget motion this coming Friday, September 18 – and thus at least avert yet another Canadian federal election in the utterly immediate future. […]
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2009. 5:00 PM EDT. [UPDATED 11:00 PM EDT; SEPTEMBER 18; OCTOBER 9]. So the federal Parliament of Canada has now reconvened on the banks of the Ottawa River. In question period today Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff aptly enough told Conservative minority Prime Minister Stephen Harper that “the problem of instability is you.” […]
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2009. Exactly 250 years ago today the residents of Quebec City awoke to find some 4,000 British soldiers waiting to do battle on the flat open space at the top of the cliffs, known as the Plains of Abraham. And this finally proved the penultimate act of what is still called la […]
