Olivia Chow has left no doubt that there is no real fire in Steve Paikin’s speculation about “How Stephen Harper Can Help Rob Ford.” As she has tweeted : “It seems the rumor mill is in full force this morning. Let me be crystal clear, the reports of an LG offer are completely false.” Yet […]
Remembrance Day 2013 – the day before yesterday – is still somewhat on my mind. And I am remembering that the fall of France in June 1940 had a brief dramatic impact across the sea in Canada. As the historian Arthur Lower explained in his old textbook Colony to Nation : “When the fall of […]
The news that “the Harper government’s most recent attempt at Senate reform has been declared unconstitutional” by the Quebec Court of Appeal ought to remind us that our Canadian history goes so much deeper than PM Harper’s beloved British monarchy. (Which is a good thing. According to a recent poll, “younger citizens – those aged […]
What a week! As we write the proroguing Harper government is scheduled to present an allegedly six-point throne speech at 5 PM ET. And it finally seems that there is serious hope for an at least temporary deal to end the almost unbelievable dysfunctional deadlock in Washington. Meanwhile, others at street level are working to […]
Yesterday a Toronto Star editorial opined : “Welcome to the world, eight-pound, six-ounce royal baby boy. While untold others were born on the same day to equally excited parents, no one else is third in line to the throne …” (Ultimately, the future George VII of some place, it has subsequently become clear.) At the […]
An alas now vanished great friend of the counterweights editors, from a vanished era in the life of the city, used to say that he seldom agreed with the newspaper columnist Alex Barris. But he almost always read his columns because he found them stimulating. We sometimes have similar feelings about the present-day Toronto Star […]
Recent attempts by aspiring establishments to salvage the expiring Canadian role of the British monarchy are one measure of how our political system is falling more and more out of step with what our Constitution Act, 1982 calls the “free and democratic society” in Canada today. In some ways, the amazing thing about the latest […]
“Great Britain, the United States and Canada” is the title of a now 65-year-old essay by Harold Innis, Canada’s pioneering great economic historian (and the godfather of Marshall McLuhan). As winter at last gives way to spring north of the North American Great Lakes, a few vaguely parallel thoughts about our time today have been […]
Still strangely enthralled by legendary Tory oligarchs of the 19th century, the mainstream media usually tries hard not to notice. But there is nonetheless an ardently gurgling Canadian republican activism even in various anglophone parts of the country in the early 21st century. This activism has a number of reasons for wanting to retire the […]
As a kind of coda, footnote, or l’envoi to various recent postings on this site (including the October 4 tribute to the late great Charles Roach), we’d just like to offer a quick thumbs up to a provocative passage in Chantal Hébert’s October 5 column in the Toronto Star, “Here’s how the Liberals can make […]
