Brian Flemming

It might be time to ditch Pierre Trudeau’s now shopworn description of what it’s like for Canadians living next door to our gigantic U.S. neighbour. Instead of mice sleeping next to elephants, Canadians should be imagining themselves as the cops on Law and Order: we can see and hear everything happening on the other side of the one-way glass but those in the interrogation…

When I joined what media critics then called the “imperial PMO” of Pierre Trudeau in the autumn of 1976 as a policy advisor, one of the first things I did was to ask the Privy Council library for everything it had on “prime ministers’ offices” or “central agencies” plus any other readings that might help me understand the world I had just…

Drawing lines around the perimeter of one’s property, or one’s country’s territory, has always been a parlous process. Indeed, the earliest written treaties we possess, some from more than 4,000 years ago, were often about settling border disputes between ancient eastern empires. Plus, as a former practising lawyer, I know that some of the bitterest battles in contemporary society have been waged between neighbours fighting over small slivers of property on the edges of adjacent parcels of…