This week, on August 23, under the intriguing headline “TAMILS SAID THEY WERE GOING TO STAG PARTY,” the Toronto Globe and Mail cast some light on a current brand of alleged international terrorism that does not involve Islamist fantasies, Al-Qaida, or the Middle East. Here as elsewhere, Canada has distinguished itself from the elephant next […]

No doubt it is just the summer heat. But the news that Fidel Castro has just appointed his brother Raul as temporary custodian of Cuba, while Fidel recovers from surgery, has set off its own brand of crazed speculation in the true north. TV reports from across the border say that CNN has been interviewing […]

Canadians watching the beginnings of what the hyperbolic right is calling World War III (or IV) on US TV have a right to be a bit puzzled by the news that there are only an “estimated 25,000 Americans … in Lebanon.” According to the local media in Canada, “officials estimate that at least 50,000 Canadians” […]

The news from Mexico that some have been waiting for since the evening of this past Sunday, July 2 finally arrived in the late afternoon of Thursday, July 6. With all 41 million votes apparently now properly counted, Felipe Calderon of the conservative National Action Party has 35.88%. Lopez Obrador of the left-wing Democratic Revolution […]

George Orwell (1903-1950) was such an interesting political writer partly because he lived through so many troubling issues of both his and our day in his own life. Reading about the human rights activist Charm Tong’s June 2006 visit to Canada, at least, is likely to make anyone who has read the book remember Orwell’s […]

UPDATE. MONDAY, APRIL 10, 11:30 PM EST. Debates on foreign policy in the parliamentary  democratic tradition, the British historian A.J.P. Taylor said long ago, conventionally pit “the stupid party” on the right against “the silly party” on the left. And there were more than a few moments when this evening’s debate on Afghanistan in the Canadian […]

New minority Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s surprise visit to Canadian troops in Afghanistan over the past few days, it is now being said, has just stiffened the case for “a huge debate” in Canada today – “and we need to have it.” As one suitably modest place to start, just what does the international community […]

George W. Bush may be, as Bill Maher memorably said on HBO TV last month, “a catastrophe that walks like a man” – who should now “do what you’ve always done best: lose interest and walk away.” It is also all too likely that if the Iraq Constitutional Referendum this coming Saturday, October 15 is […]

With one eye on the upcoming March 23 meeting of George W. Bush, Vicente Fox, and Paul Martin in Texas, a tri-national task force has just recommended an assortment of aggressive steps toward a bold new kind of North America. If the press reports are to be believed, there is little real appetite for such […]

The text of Paul Martin’s December 6 speech to the Canada-China Business Council in Toronto has given Canadians some initial glimpse of their federal government’s emerging thinking on the new Chinese role in Canadian development. And with the US magazine Business Week‘s recent talk about the “massive shift in economic power” towards China now underway, […]