confederation

Scott Gilmore: This middle tier of government makes no sense in an increasingly urban Canada, and its distorting effect on our politics will only get worse

Don’t send laudable British legacies such as free economies, free peoples and intellectual freedom down the ‘memory hole’, writes Mark Milke

A look at what the first statistical year book after Confederation said about Canada then, and in the future

Jean Charest and Antoine Dionne-Charest on how an idealist from Quebec came to embody a certain vision of Canada

This week marks the 150th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s granting Royal Assent to the British North America Act

P.E.I. is the birthplace of Confederation, right? Not so fast, argues New Brunswick, touching off an interprovincial squabble for the ages

Say goodbye to the ‘Kingdom of Canada’

When the Second World War ended, the future of Newfoundland was not only an issue for its people, it was also a matter of considerable significance for the victorious English-speaking nations at the heart of what would be called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Newfoundland, in the British phrase, had had a very good war, taking a front-row place in the crucial Battle of the Atlantic, hosting large numbers of Allied (particularly American) servicemen and economically emerging out of the Great Depression that had seen it lose its self-rule in 1933 and become again a colony governed directly from London.

A new book shows Sir John A. Macdonald’s politics were much like ours

Who said Canadian history was devoid of excitement?

JJ McCullough blames the founding fathers for the Senate.

The B.C. Court of Appeal’s ruling on Vancouver’s Insite shooting gallery for heroin addicts makes for interesting reading. We are all so busy arguing over the merits of harm reduction, and the wisdom of the Harper government’s attempt to shut down the clinic, that it is easy to forget the big constitutional issue that was the chief concern of the court here. You would think that Canadian jurisprudence had developed a clear objective rule for settling even the trickiest “double aspect” issues, wherein both federal and provincial governments can claim that some crumb falls within their respective spheres of constitutional power.