Canada

A chillingly seductive glimpse of assisted dying

21 September 2024 9:00 am

A few weeks ago, I was present when my aunt, a Canadian citizen born in the UK, chose to die…

Whoever imagined that geology was a lifeless subject?

17 August 2024 9:00 am

The shifting rocks of Earth’s crust are part of the planet’s ecology just as much as plants and animals, says Marcia Bjornerud – applying to geology the principle of universal connectivity

Why Joni Mitchell sounded different from the start

27 July 2024 9:00 am

Polio in childhood weakened her left hand, leaving her to devise alternative tuning, surprising phrasing and ‘chords of inquiry’ that hang like question marks in the air

Even Orwell’s Thought Police didn’t go as far as Trudeau

20 April 2024 9:00 am

You’d assume the reaction to the SNP’s new hate crime laws would make other authoritarian governments hesitate before introducing similar…

Adrift on the Canadian frontier: The Voyageur, by Paul Carlucci, reviewed

13 April 2024 9:00 am

Based on the 19th-century ‘voyageur’ Alexis de Martin, Carlucci’s young protagonist is befriended by kindly strangers. But what are their true motives?

The problem with trying to resuscitate dying languages

9 March 2024 9:00 am

Ross Perlin is determined to support the ‘last speakers’ of endangered tongues, such as Seke. But if these speakers really are the last, they are not, in any real sense, speaking

Longing for oblivion: The Warm Hands of Ghosts, by Katherine Arden, reviewed

2 March 2024 9:00 am

Arden’s novel spares us no details of trench warfare on the Western Front and the severely traumatised men dreaming of escape into amnesia

Something the Tories can learn from Canada’s conservatives

29 February 2024 9:43 pm

When contemplating the scale of the Tories’ expected drubbing in the coming general election, some commentators reach for the example…

Canada’s parents are taking to the streets

24 September 2023 7:34 pm

In the biggest demonstration since the Freedom Convoy, large numbers of Canadian families and supporters took to the streets across…

The rise of conspiracy history

5 August 2023 9:00 am

Canada’s determination to believe the worst about its past

Canada’s assisted dying horror story

22 July 2023 9:00 am

My favourite Martin Amis novel was his 1991 book Time’s Arrow. It is a pyrotechnically brilliant work in which all…

Must we now despise colonial architecture too?

6 August 2022 9:00 am

Here’s a thing. A disturbing book about disturbing cities. And it’s full of loaded questions. Like Hezbollah, the publisher uses…

Travels in time and space: Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel, reviewed

21 May 2022 9:00 am

It’s a bold writer who confronts a major historical moment such as a pandemic before it’s over, but Emily St.…

Fabulously boring: Weather Station's How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars reviewed

12 March 2022 9:00 am

Grade: C– Anyone remember that TV advert for Canada from the 1980s – a succession of colourful images, including a…

Where's the outrage over Trudeau's trip to Britain?

8 March 2022 6:00 pm

As Justin Trudeau waltzed through the UK, visiting Boris Johnson and the Queen, did anyone spare a thought for Canadians…

Portrait of the week: Storms rage, Covid curbs end and Russia’s ‘renewed invasion’

26 February 2022 9:00 am

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, announced, in the House of Commons, sanctions against Russia after its ‘renewed invasion’ of…

The tyranny of Trudeau

26 February 2022 9:00 am

Early in the corona era the historian David Starkey gave some thoughts on Covid. ‘We’ve got a Chinese virus,’ he…

Trudeau vs truckers: a head-on collision

5 February 2022 9:00 am

Canada’s Covid protestors have a point

Portrait of the week: Sue Gray speaks, Boris goes to Ukraine and 477-mile bolt of lightning strikes

5 February 2022 9:00 am

Home Sue Gray, the second permanent secretary in the Cabinet Office, in a 12-page ‘update’ on her investigation into 16…

Canada should be proud of the truckers’ convoy

1 February 2022 6:52 pm

The first wave of truckers in the Freedom Convoy arrived in Ottawa on Friday, having travelled across Canada to protest…

No, America couldn’t have been Canada

29 September 2021 4:56 am

What if William Howe, the dithering British commander, hadn’t let the American army escape in the Battle of Long Island…

Another stupid, redundant, dismal Canadian election

22 September 2021 7:08 am

Canada has just surpassed even its own previous records for absurd and boring elections yielding predictable and dreary results. Almost…

Justin Trudeau’s election gamble is backfiring

3 September 2021 8:34 am

In 1966, a year before Pierre Elliott Trudeau first blazed to power, the bard-poet Leonard Cohen published his second and final…

Justin Trudeau isn't the progressive leader he thinks he is

10 July 2021 7:20 pm

It came as no surprise to me to see activists ‘celebrating’ Canada Day by setting fire to churches and toppling…

covid left

The COVID response shows the left is losing its way

8 December 2020 12:30 am

Last month, British Columbia announced that those who don’t wear masks indoors can now be fined $230. ‘To me, it’s…