Vaclav Havel

In November, Elizabeth May was twice denied the House’s consent to mark Remembrance Day. This afternoon she was apparently denied an opportunity to join the Conservatives, New Democrats and Liberals in honouring Vaclav Havel. Justin Trudeau is unimpressed.

World leaders gather in Prague for the funeral of the former Czech president

Havel’s translator, Paul Wilson, on the statesman, the dissident, the artist

In the space of a few months in late 1989 and early 1990, two events occurred that made it seem anything evil in the world’s political order, no matter how entrenched, might be definitively ended, and two inspirational figures embodied this new sense of radical possibility.

Vaclav Havel died today. Perhaps my friends at the National Post won’t mind if I reproduce the column I wrote for that paper’s edition of April 30, 1999, after Havel addressed the Senate and House of Commons of Canada.

I’ve posted this before somewhere, but for various reasons it feels appropriate to post it again. it’s from Vaclav Havel’s Summer Meditations, about his experiences as president of Czechoslovakia, later the Czech Republic.

Twenty-one two Central and East European politicians of a certain (largely mid-90s) vintage, including eight former heads of state or government (including Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Mart Laar) and six former foreign-affairs ministers, write a letter to Barack Obama whose message can perhaps be summed up as, “Hey! Look over here!”

Riot police at Freedom Square and Revolution Square. (UPDATE: reports of water cannon and tear gas.) The protesters have resisted using violence and the regime refuses to back down. Live blogs here, here, here and here. Vaclav Havel, who was jailed a decade before he became his country’s president, says this:

One of this week’s subjects is inaugural addresses. From Havel we learn three things: