According to today’s Globe and Mail: “The push for a merger between the [federal] Liberal Party and the NDP has quickly become a major issue among the growing field of candidates to replace Jack Layton … The top contenders for the NDP leadership – party president Brian Topp and House Leader Thomas Mulcair – are […]
TORONTO. SUNDAY, AUGUST 28, 2011. This seems to have been a summer of pipe and drum bands in this city. We went to the Warriors’ Day Parade at the Exhibition last Saturday, to probe the impact of the new Harper conservatism on the city’s old militia culture. (Well … probably more as a sentimental journey […]
The serious part of the 2011 Ontario provincial election campaign is now less than two weeks away. And the excitement is building ( for some of us at least). This past weekend Chantal Hébert was explaining just why “Ontario vote most important in recent history.” And yesterday Duff Conacher’s Democracy Watch in Ottawa was complaining […]
It was less than a month ago (Monday, July 25, 2011) that Jack Layton announced: “ I have a new, non-prostate cancer that will require further treatment … So, on the advice of my doctors, I am going to focus on treatment and recovery … I will therefore be taking a temporary leave of absence […]
I agree that over the mid to long term future, Stephen Harper’s “abject colonial” restoration of the “‘royal’ designation to Canada’s air force and navy” last week is almost certainly going to work to the advantage of those of us who see a Canadian republic as our ultimate rational democratic destiny in the true north, […]
Now that the new Harper Conservative majority government (still elected by less than 40% of the Canadian people) has restored the pre-1968 “abject colonial” names of “Royal Canadian Navy” and “Royal Canadian Air Farce,” related new rumours are heating up in Ottawa (aka “the last lumber village before the North Pole”). Sooner than anyone may […]
Back in the late 1940s, “Canada’s first and perhaps only genuine intellectual” Harold Innis reported that: “When Oliver Mowat was introduced to a prominent statesman in England with a comment on the length of time he had been Premier of Ontario he was greeted with the comment, ‘Have you no public opinion in that Province?’” […]
August, according to the English poet W.H. Auden in 1935, was supposed to be “for the people and their favourite islands.” Apparently times have changed. In the strange summer of 2011, August is for “UK riots: Sharing of police between cities ‘reviewed hourly’ … Theresa May orders police chiefs to cancel all police leave as […]
The Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffet, may have come up with the wittiest pronouncement on Standard and Poor’s downgrade of the US credit rating from AAA to AA+. It “doesn’t make sense,” he has said: “The US, to my knowledge, owes no money in currency other than the US dollar, which it can print at […]
It used to be the Canadian English language newspaper of record. It may be somewhat less than that now? But the current online version is still where a person like me looks first, laid back on the waterfront in a much-hated big city. And here’s what I seem to be getting, at the end of […]
