RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. SUNDAY, AUGUST 11, 2024. It’s cooler up here on the northwest shore of the most easterly North American Great Lake. In some similar spirit the final strand of the new Democratic party ticket for the 2024 US election is now in place. Kamala Harris has chosen Minnesota Governor Tim Walz […]

RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO . THURSDAY, AUGUST 1, 2024. Still in the middle of the summer of 2024. The heat is starting to feel oppressive. In the US : “The National Weather Service predicts hotter-than-normal conditions almost everywhere. And … last year was the hottest … on record.” I live in Canada. I should […]

RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO . MONDAY, JULY 29, 2024. In the middle of the summer of 2024 the old-school conservative T.S. Eliot’s “History has many cunning passages” has suddenly come home to roost in the USA. It would of course be rash to try to say this early just where the cunning will […]

RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO . MONDAY, JULY 22, 2024. What a day yesterday was! And any current guesses about just what will happen in the (maybe) fateful US election this coming November 5, 2024 are strictly guesses (of course). Then there is the still apparently relevant view of the Will Rogers who died […]

RANDALL WHITE, GLOBAL VILLAGE NOTES, TORONTO . WEDNESDAY, JULY 10, 2024. John Rentoul at The Independent nicely summarized this past Thursday’s general election in the United Kingdom with the headline “The strangest landslide.” As widely expected (and foretold in polls) Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won a strong majority of seats in the Mother of Parliaments […]

COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS, GANATSEKWYAGON, ON, CANADA. MONDAY, JULY 1, 2024. This is the 157th anniversary of the Canadian confederation of 1867 — and the 77th anniversary of the first Canadian Citizenship Act that took effect in 1947. (During the 80 years from 1867 to 1947 residents of the confederation of the old British North American provinces […]

RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO . SATURDAY, JUNE 22, 2024. When I first heard about the new Léger poll “Official bilingualism in Canada a ‘myth‘” on TV last night, I was suitably outraged. I was 24 years old when the concept was “enshrined into law in 1969, making English and French Canada’s official languages.” […]

RANDALL WHITE, ONTARIO TONITE, TORONTO . TUESDAY, JUNE 18, 2024. The somewhat bizarre recent Ontario cabinet shuffle, “shortly after the Ontario Legislature ended for an extended summer break,” might be viewed as proof that Premier Doug Ford really is in some ways quite a lot like Donald Trump in the USA . Whatever else, the […]

COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS, GANATSEKWYAGON, ON, CANADA. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 12, 2024. In our last Indian election report about a month ago we wrote : “As things still look to us, Modi almost certainly will win his third term as prime minister on June 4. His BJP might not be as strong in the Lok Sabha as it […]

COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS, GANATSEKWYAGON, ON, CANADA. TUESDAY, JUNE 4, 2024. This is the day India’s election results are due — the grand conclusion of the world’s largest democracy’s majestic but still somewhat troubling 2024 quest to give Nardendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP government a third consecutive term in office. As we write the BJP has still […]