You’ve of course already heard of “Brexit” – Britain leaves (exits) the European Union. (And this is something that’s already happening, in one degree or another. See, eg, the excellent Scottish journalist and writer Neal Ascherson on “England prepares to leave the world.”) If you live north of the “unfortified” northern US border, you may […]

[UPDATED NOVEMBER 10, 12]. What happened on November 8, 2016 in the United States of America? A few personal impressions from the accumulating vast collection out there, based mostly on US TV, various online resources in the miraculous Age of the Internet, and a few intermittent conversations with actual voters in various parts of the […]

TORONTO, CANADA. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 8. 1:30 PM ET. I too have been called by the doctor with an almost final assignment in the most troubling US election in my memory. (Well that’s the way it seems right now. I’m so old  I can’t really remember all that much. Except that I haven’t liked the results […]

GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. MONDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2 AM. The phone rang. It was the doctor. “You’re supposed to be the humour guy,” he said. “Do something humourous about this US election. It’s killing us.” He went on : “I watched Bill Maher Friday night. President Obama – just on tape but of course impressive. Then a […]

Back in 1969, the year Richard Nixon first assumed office as President of the USA, the old-style Canadian conservative George Grant offered “perspectives on what it is to live in the Great Lakes region of North America,” in his short book Technology and Empire. Without in any way pretending to equal or follow George Grant’s […]

FBI Director James Comey’s last-minute intervention in the 2016 US election – regarding certain freshly discovered “emails of longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin that were found on a device seized during an unrelated sexting investigation of Anthony Weiner” – has cast a dark Orwellian shadow over democracy in America in the early 21st century. According […]

[UPDATED OCTOBER 25]. The big worry about the 2016 US election now is that (once again?) the forces of progress are growing too complacent and/or triumphalistic. Two of the last five national polls on both the Real Clear Politics and  Five Thirty Eight sites have Trump tied or slightly ahead. Even the more impressionistic TV […]

I hope Dr. White is right about some new mood of bipartisan co-operation rising from the ashes, “even just vaguely,” in some reborn saga of democracy in America. And I pray David Brooks will finally prove right when he wrote last Tuesday that the day after Trump loses, “there won’t be solidarity and howls of […]

CTV News anchor Marcia MacMillan, in an especially compelling dress yesterday morning, brought us the vaguely alarming news that “New poll shows Trump taking slight lead over Hillary Clinton.”  (This is now well hidden in the CTV September 6 archive.  Try “Poll: Nine weeks out, a near even race” for key numbers.) Among the experts […]

This past Friday night the excellent Steve Kornacki at MSNBC TV (sitting in for Rachel Maddow) presented some intriguing 2016 US election statistics. They showed that in the more recent past presidential candidates with as good polling numbers as Hillary Clinton has now, two weeks after the last national convention, have gone on to win […]