COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS. GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2024. What to say in the midst of assorted disturbing numbers for the great cause of the free and democratic society in the USA today?

Even if Michael Moore now (or still?) believes the Harris-Walz Democrats will win in the end on November 5.

And more to the point , no doubt, for those involved as citizens of the USA (as opposed to Canada next door, like us) “when we fight we win.”

Meanwhile, recent counterweights web adventures have reminded us of two articles on this site from back in October 2020, in the last days of the last US election in which Donald Trump and his party were defeated, by a clear if certainly not vast majority of the American people.

(1) Donald Trump and Warren Harding

Our first 2020 “looking-back”article is directly focused on the US campaign four years ago : “Is it really true that Donald Trump ‘isn’t as bad as Warren Harding’??” by L. Frank Bunting on the eastern shore of Lake Superior, and first posted Oct 7th, 2020.

With election fever high on US (and Canadian) TV, Bunting investigated remarks of a “gentleman from the white suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia,” encountered “on a trip last year.”

The gentleman had urged that “whatever else, Donald Trump ‘isn’t as bad as Warren Harding’” (29th president of the United States — March 4, 1921—August 2, 1923).

After some brief but careful investigation Bunting concluded : “As things look up here north of the Great Lakes at least … the plain truth seems much closer to “Warren Harding — once thought to be America’s worst president — wasn’t as bad as Donald Trump.”

(2) BC elections in Canada, 2020 and 2024

Our second October 2020 counterweights article encountered on recent web adventures looked at a Canadian provincial election in the air again today, four years later : “If BC NDP can win a stable majority government to manage COVID-19,what about the Liberals in Ottawa?.” We Counterweights Editors were the authors of this piece, first posted Oct 25th, 2020.

We discussed the main results of the October 24, 2020 election in “British California” (a solid enough parliamentary majority for the governing New Democrats) — and their implications for Canada’s third most populous province, Canada at large, and even the USA about to vote in a historic contest next door.

In this last connection we finally observed : “like everywhere else in Canada BC has its own connections to American democracy and the American dream. And in its October 24, 2020 election, complete with mail-in ballots during the pandemic and so forth, the progressives did clearly win. And the conservatives clearly lost.”

In the present here and now at the edge of the vast Pacific Ocean, David Eby’s New Democrats are in a tougher fight with John Rustad’s Conservatives in the BC provincial election very soon (Saturday, October 19, 2024). The 2024 fight in BC also seems more Trumpian (and/or just weird?) than anything four years ago in 2020. May the best man win this coming Saturday. (Which without doubt in our view would certainly be David Eby — not all that much unlike the lovely Kamala Harris against the Donald Trump who has “completely lost his marbles” [ Anthony Scaramucci] in the USA next door.)

(3) Children of the Global Village Update

Meanwhile again, we are finally pleased (well … happy enough?) to report here that Randall White has been working to perfect the Epilogue and (now separate) Appendix on Constitutional Issues, in the conclusion to his political-history work in progress, Children of the Global Village : Democracy in Canada Since 1497.

(A draft of the full text for the project, complete except for some further notes on sources in progress, appears on this site’s “Long Journey to a Canadian Republic” page. A final version will be published in hard copy by eastendbooks in the near future.)

As the author explains, quoting from his slightly revised Epilogue, the “ultimate conclusion” of his story of Canadian democracy since 1497 is that “Canada’s 21st century democracy still has unfinished business, of the broadly constitutional sort that began in the 1960s and then stopped with the failed referendums on the 1992 Charlottetown Accord.”

Children of the Global Village particularly concludes “that the logical and otherwise altogether most sensible next step in the growth of Canadian democracy is a constitutional amendment which politely waves goodbye to the monarch in Buckingham Palace, and quietly democratizes the office of governor general as the monarch’s successor in theory as well as practice.”

(4) Constitutional and Related Issues in the Canadian future (and praying for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the USA today)

Randall White’s book also recognizes one “apparently strong argument against pursuing any constitutional amendment to end the monarchy in Canada.” As “history shows, once you open up debate on one constitutional issue in the confederation of 1867 others will rush in to demand their own place at the table.”

The book nonetheless concludes that abolishing (or more exactly perhaps, democratizing) the current British monarchy in Canada should be the first such constitutional issue to be addressed in the now foreseeable future — more or less all by itself.

This is “the best and most effective first step” on any and all further Canadian constitutional odysseys that may or may not subsequently pursue such issues as “Indigenous rights, Quebec in confederation, Senate reform, and all the other more intriguing 21st century plots to enhance and extend the free and democratic society of the Constitution Act, 1982.”

Earlier drafts of the Epilogue to Children of the Global Village : Democracy in Canada Since 1497 had included “a long appendix on further constitutional issues in some mythical Canadian future. Yet, whatever else, this was the wrong ending for this book. And it has now been consigned to the world wide web where it first appeared.”

The author further explains that “anyone crazy enough” to actually want to consult “one ordinary voter’s” Canadian constitutional “opinions, many of which may never see any practical light of day in the darker real world of Canadian politics,” can turn to “APPENDIX : On Constitutional and Related Issues in Canada” — still here on the web, where it no doubt does belong.

On a much more crucial front right now all of us here at this counterweights.ca website — like many others around the global village over the next three weeks, no doubt — will simply be praying fervently every night that what passes for the American people, under the present Constitution of the USA, USA, will NOT finally prove crazy enough to elect Donald Trump to a second (non-consecutive) term as American president, on November 5, 2024.