[UPDATED AUGUST 6]. Does it make any difference to the rest of Canada (to say nothing of the still wider global village) just who will be elected mayor of Canada’s current biggest city this coming October 25, 2010? The obvious answer is no, of course not. “Let’s All Hate Toronto,” and all that. But then […]
I rarely agree with Peter Worthington, the right-wing militarist journalist who has done so much for the Toronto Sun. But I think he is onto something in the case of Captain Robert Semrau. A native of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Captain Semrau was granted an “exemplary discharge” from the British army before joining the Canadian forces. […]
UPDATED JULY 21 [see below]. My first reaction to the evolving long-form census issue in Canadian federal politics was stark disbelief. Noting how it has progressed hand in hand with the rising heat in this apparently hotter-than-ever-before summer, however, I have come to see it as a rational phenomenon among people suffering from increasing degrees […]
The impossible dream of a single national securities regulator for Canada summarizes many intractable problems of our congenitally elusive Canadian national unity in the early 21st century. And as the Reuters agency has just explained: “Canada’s current minority Conservative government has come closer than any of its predecessors to launching” such an organization. But “it […]
“Why are you keeping these things if you’re never going to look at them again?” It’s a good question. So I recently re-read Jonathan Raban’s review of The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime by the estimable William Langewiesche, in the August 12, 2004 issue of the New York Review of Books. […]
[UPDATED JULY 10, 13]. It is a sign of the strange waters Canadian federal politics are in these days that the Harper minority government’s current omnibus budget bill may be stuck in the still unreformed Senate of Canada. The Canadian Press reports: “The Tories are threatening a fall election after opposition senators stripped contentious provisions […]
According to CTV, “late Wednesday night,” July 7, David Johnston, the 69-year-old president of the University of Waterloo, who earlier served Stephen Harper by (rather deftly) writing “the terms of reference for the Oliphant inquiry, which examined former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s business dealings with German-Canadian arms dealer Karlheinz Schreiber,” will be announced as the […]
TORONTO. JUNE 30, 2010. 10:30 PM ET. Everything is clearer in retrospect. And only a few days after the latest G20 congregation has left this blandly civilized city with the secret heart of a loan shark, various fresh possibilities for judging the event a failure are blowing in the summer breeze. Two possibilities deserve particular […]
TORONTO. SUNDAY, JUNE 27, 2010. 11:15 PM ET. Customary Sunday dinner guests begged off this evening. They live just outside the G20 security zone downtown, and have to dig their car out of an alleyway. They did not want to confront the too many police on the streets near their house, who often seemed to […]
[UPDATED JANUARY 31, 2011, JULY 24, 2012]. I have been asked by the editors to jot down a few quick words of au revoir to the Canadian House of Commons, which is “preparing to rise today for its summer break”: (1) THE LATEST EKOS POLL also unveiled today shows, for cross-Canada popular vote (rounded to […]
