I.  LIVING NEXT DOOR TO INCREASINGLY JUST PLAIN CRAZY ELEPHANT [UPDATED JAN 23]. Is anyone surprised that there is a US federal government “shutdown” on the anniversary of Donald Trump’s first year in office? If you actually are interested, try : “On Trump’s First Anniversary, a Government Shutdown” by John Cassidy in The New Yorker […]

This coming Saturday morning the entire staff here (except for Dominic Berry, who has a big date with his current squeeze at a local sporting event) will be boarding an airplane at YYZ, bound for our regular seminar with technical support staff currently residing in the land of the Golden State Warriors. (They are now, […]

The juxtaposition of the last days of the twisted 2016 US election campaign and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s latest round of “independent” appointments to the still seriously unreformed Senate of Canada casts some harsh light on what the new Liberal government in Ottawa is trying to do with this archaic Canadian institution – still too […]

Those of us who regularly have breakfast while watching cp24 in Canada’s most disliked city region will already have seen the reassuring video of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, resigning today as Member of Parliament for Calgary Heritage. I never voted for Mr. Harper’s party, and I remain opposed to most of its declared  policies. […]

“The Shadow of Your Smile” was one of the last enduring popular songs in the tradition of the Great American Songbook – whose truest heyday was “from the 1920s to the 1950s.” With music by Johnny Mandel and lyrics by Paul Francis Webster, it first appeared in 1965, as the Academy Award winning Best Original […]

[UPDATED AUG 18TH]. The second week in the long official campaign for the Canadian federal election of 2015 is over. And the congenital regional diversity of it all is what sticks in my mind right now. I’m watching from the old East Toronto, close to the most easterly of the Great Lakes. Reading “Liberal leader […]

GANATSEKWYAGON, ONTARIO. MONDAY, JUNE 1, 2015. 1:20 AM ET. The trial of suspended Canadian Senator Mike Duffy resumes today in Ottawa, some four and a half months before the much anticipated Canadian federal election of 2015. Mr. Duffy faces 28 charges involving fraud and breach of trust in various claimed expenses as a Senator, and […]

The ongoing trial of suspended Canadian Senator Mike Duffy has reminded some of us that back in the late spring of 2013 Randall White posted a note on this site about Harold Innis’s “more or less random observations on the Senate, and the related issue of Canadian regionalism” – which, taken together, “add up to […]

The April 25, 2014 Supreme Court of Canada response to the Harper government’s queries on Senate reform includes some poignant passages. This is one of them: “The Constitution Act, 1867 contemplates a specific structure for the federal Parliament, ‘similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom’ … The Act creates both a lower elected […]

So much is going on north of the Great Lakes these days that it’s hard to focus on any one thing.  So here are quick notes on five things animating the late-afternoon water-cooler debates among we counterweights editors on Wednesday, April 23, 2014 : (1) On Monday Susanna Kelley, empress of the excellent ontarionewswatch.com, posted […]