[FOR BYELECTION RESULTS SEE “August 1 Ontario byelections : a bit of a surprise – Libs 2, NDP 2, Cons 1.“] The headline for Adam Radwanski’s report in the Globe and Mail yesterday – “Ontario Liberals bracing for the end of Kathleen Wynne’s momentum” – captures the minority governing party’s worst prospects for the mini […]

[UPDATED JULY 6, 7, 13 – for byelection results see “August 1 Ontario byelections : a bit of a surprise – Libs 2, NDP 2, Cons 1.” ]. A mere four weeks from yesterday – on Thursday, August 1, 2013 – Canada’s most populous province of Ontario will be holding a kind of mini-election. As […]

QUEEN’S PARK, TORONTO. TUESDAY, JUNE 11, 2013. 4:45 PM. [UPDATED JUNE 12]. So (as Premier Wynne might say) the 2013 Ontario Budget bill has now passed third reading, 64—36. This may have surprised you, if you were paying serious attention to such Toronto Sun headlines as : “PCs call for former Liberal staffers to turn […]

[UPDATED MAY 3]. Some say the alleged Oakville gas-plant “revelations” of Ontario Power Authority chief executive Colin Andersen before a Queen’s Park legislative committee today bring an Ontario spring election close enough for jazz. And who knows? They may be right. (Although listening to Andrea Horwath’s jousting with scandal-mongering media just before noon made us […]

There is a side to Ontario, you might say, that channels Nova Scotia. Another side channels Quebec (the “sister province,” as Bill Davis liked to put it), and another side channels Alberta. Still another side channels beautiful British Columbia. And this side may have the strongest implications for the Canadian future right now. In any […]

A week or so ago Heather Mallick at the Toronto Star published a passionate defence of “British novelist Hilary Mantel’s elegant writing on Princess Kate” – which had been “viciously attacked” by various individuals and organizations in the United Kingdom. Ms Mantel’s writing had appeared, online and then in print, in the London Review of […]

[UPDATED FEBRUARY 22]. (1) Here are some quick notes on the first (and some would say last?) throne speech of Kathleen Wynne’s new Liberal minority government in Ontario yesterday. They also serve as an update to “Ontario ‘three-party system in transition’ is back .. but can Premier Kathleen do it, at last?,” which appeared on […]

In the early 1970s John Wilson and David Hoffman wrote : “The strength of the Conservative party in modern times makes it difficult to believe that Ontario was once ‘by large odds a Reform and not a Conservative Province.’ In fact, however, the Liberals were the leading political group in the province for the better […]

TORONTO. COLLEGE PARK FOOD COURT. SATURDAY, JANUARY 26, 2013. 9:00 PM ET.  So it is now official – and the “pleasant surprise” vainly hoped for on this site just two days ago has come to pass. Kathleen Wynne is the new leader of the Ontario Liberal Party. Very soon she will also officially become not […]

Without actually wanting to add to my colleague Frank Bunting’s recent over-effusive references to the work of Thomas Walkom at the Toronto Star, I have been drawn in spite of myself to yesterday’s further ruminations by the same authority,”Do Canada’s, or Ontario’s, Liberals matter any more: Thomas Walkom.” At least on the surface of things, […]