Sometimes two headlines in the same newspaper on the same day can seem to explain each other. I had that feeling about two headlines in yesterday’s Toronto Star: “Lack of innovation holding Canada back: report” and “Tories order diplomats to hang portraits of the Queen by week’s end.” The first article explained how: “Canada has […]

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 […]

FRIDAY, JULY 8, 2011, 11 AM PT. As reported by the Los Angeles Times: “Prince William and his wife, Catherine … will arrive at Los Angeles International Airport in the late afternoon, where they will be greeted by California Gov. Jerry Brown and his wife, Anne Gust Brown; Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa; and the […]

As the Ottawa Citizen has just noted, “opinion surveys have long uncovered a strong republican streak among Canadians.” So what are those of us who do not at all care for the British monarchy in Canada to make of the great flood of commentary on the monarchy’s Canadian future, induced by the current North American […]

The “pattern of Canada,” the preface to the much-praised 1987 first volume of the Historical Atlas of Canada tells us, “has been taking shape for almost 500 years and by New World standards is old.” Just a few pages later, Plate 1 on “The Last Ice Sheets, 18,000—10,000 BC” can prompt the thought that our […]

According to  Daryl Bruce, a self-confessed “avid royal watcher since the wedding of Prince Andrew to Sarah,” a “source in the Prime Minister’s Office” has “told the Canadian media” that the upcoming local tour of William and Catherine “could go a long way to cementing the monarchy in Canada for a new generation in the […]

Once upon a time, the near-great economic historian Harold Innis began his 1947 “Minerva’s Owl” Presidential Address to the Royal Society of Canada with: “I have taken the title from that striking sentence of Hegel ‘Minerva’s owl begins its flight only in the gathering dusk…’” As much more recently explained by Lauren O’Nizzle, “a 20-something […]

Our main attraction as we say goodbye to the poignant year of 2010 (CE) and give a warm welcome to the perhaps still more poignant year of the rabbit, 2011, is a rather extensive but (we think) compelling contribution to a new made-in-Canada great debate launched over this past holiday season in (of all places) […]

I am not a fan of the National Post. But over the 2010 holiday season I think it deserves some credit for contributing to both sides of what is not quite yet an important debate we will be having in Canada, if and when we show serious signs of surviving the 21st century. To kick […]