RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. TUESDAY, JANUARY 16, 2024. The day before yesterday polling guru Philippe J. Fournier @338Canada urged that in the world of Canadian federal politics : “For those counting, this is the 6th consecutive month the Conservatives have been leading the Liberals by double-digits … That’s a stretch longer than Sheer’s lead […]

NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK. RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, SUNDAY, MARCH 12, 2023. This weekend we’ve been hearing that several more days of serious rainstorms are expected in the county exurbs “approximately 25 miles (40 km) northeast of Sacramento,” capital city of the Golden State of California. (While in the heights around Lake Tahoe residents are […]

COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS, GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. JULY 28, 2022. Paul Elie, a senior fellow at Georgetown University with a special interest in religion, has written in The New Yorker about Pope Francis’s current Canadian visit, to confront the role of the Catholic Church in the historic appalling and now quite discredited Indian Residential Schools in Canada : […]

SPECIAL FROM THE DEMOCRATIC DESKTOP OF CITIZEN X, BUCKHORN, ON. K0L 0C1. 30 SEP 21, 2021. I quote from a Government of Canada, Canadian Heritage web page : “September 30, 2021 marks the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation … The day honours the lost children and Survivors of residential schools, their families and […]

COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS, EAST TORONTO OFFICE. Back on Canada Day 2021 Mano Majumdar, a lecturer at Western University’s Ivey Business School, started a petition to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, “to replace the provincial flag with a more distinct and inclusive flag, chosen by democratic means.” For those who may have forgotten (“You mean Ontario has […]

SPECIAL FROM DOMINIC BERRY, MAN ABOUT MAIN STREET, GRAND BEND, ON. JUNE 29, 2021. It’s been hot enough here lately. But not quite like : “Extreme heat warnings remain in place over much of Western Canada as a historic heat wave that has shattered 103 all-time heat records across BC, Alberta, Yukon and NWT moves […]

NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK – RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. JUNE 11, 2021. I think Stephen Maher’s June 7, 2021 Maclean’s article, “John A. Macdonald can wait — We are at the beginning, not the end, of a process of reassessing our history“, says a number of good things on an important issue at the right […]

NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK – RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. JUNE 7, 2021. The troubling big news in Canada right now appears in reports like : “How radar technology is used to discover unmarked graves at former residential schools” ; and “Papal apology for church’s role in residential schools may not be ‘way forward’: archbishop.” In […]

SPECIAL FROM RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, APRIL 25, 2021. Pierre Berton published his two-volume history of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the early 1970s – The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (1970) and The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (1971). I think there are good and bad things to […]

What to make of the latest political craziness in the USA today (at least from where I live, north of the Great Lakes)? Here are four clusters of mid-summer 2019 intelligence, gleaned from the World Wide Web – and beyond : I. THE WISDOM OF GEORGE WILL : My shrewdest insider source from the hard […]