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 […]

COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS, GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. MAY 6, 2023. Almost by accident we have stumbled across a (for us) especially sensible way of commemorating the events of today back in the old imperial metropolis across the seas. Recently our colleague Randall White completed the last or concluding draft chapter of his political-history work in progress, Children of […]

COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS. GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. MAY 10, 2022. Just as the Ontario provincial election campaign finally starts showing some (half?) life (maybe?), we’ve at long last just received the last narrative chapter in Randall White’s work in progress, Children of the Global Village : Democracy in Canada Since 1497. It is called “‘An object lesson to […]

SPECIAL FROM RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, JANUARY 30, 2021. The main reaction to the unusual resignation of Governor General Julie Payette so far has focused on how she was vetted, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau chose her to fill the office in the summer of 2017. The Democracy Watch advocacy group has already spoken […]

In some ways we cannot really say that almost all of us in the Toronto editorial office here will be headed for Trump’s America on April 18, 2018, for one of our regular conferences with our growing technical staff in northern California. California generally is not really in Trump’s America, of course,  and northern California […]

Political deadlock in the United Province of Canada probably was a big enough cause of the wider confederation of British North American provinces, for the 2.5 million people who were living in the United Province by the early 1860s. It meant next to nothing, however, for the 583,000 people in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick […]

Three days after the prorogued federal Parliament returns to work in Canada, the people of Iceland will be voting in an unusual referendum. It has been called, in effect, by the ceremonial head of state, who has doubts about recent controversial actions by the Icelandic parliament and prime minister. Here in Canada, the Iceland example […]

You of course hear nothing about Canadian politics via the ordinary media in Florida, where I spent the counterweights late January prorogue. And I didn’t take a laptop computer with me. On the theory that a week is a long time in politics, one of my first tasks on returning to the northern deep freeze […]

Public debate on minority Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s decision to “prorogue” the Parliament of Canada, until March 3, 2010, at least seems to have grown to a greater degree more quickly than many who follow such obscure events at first imagined. And I am among those who have been pleasantly enough surprised. At the […]