Bruce K. Ward

One of the most remarkable political events of the strange period that was the COVID‑19 global health emergency was surely the month-long protest that played out in our capital city in January and February 2022. I was particularly absorbed in it for personal reasons, as I had close family living in the downtown and because I had lived in Ottawa during the October Crisis of…

On a road trip to Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula in the fall of 2021, my wife and I passed through the Matapedia Valley, in driving rain, to land late in the day in a town called Carleton-sur-Mer, on the shores of the Baie des Chaleurs. The next morning, the rain had given way to sunshine and a clearing…

On the relationship between friendship and politics, perhaps the definitive pronouncement is that attributed to Aristotle: “O my friends, there is no friend.” This enigmatic insight haunts the pages of the remarkable correspondence between the friends and political adversaries Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Pierre Vadeboncoeur, recently published in Quebec and generating much discussion there. The figure of…

Like the rest of Canada, Quebec is experiencing a crise de conscience in relation to Indigenous people. The video of a dying Atikamekw woman named Joyce Echaquan in a Joliette hospital last September raised in harrowing fashion the question of anti-Indigenous racism, in a place that has not been very self-critical in this…

There has been much praise for the Department of External Affairs (now Global Affairs) that oversaw Canadian foreign policy after the Second World War. Just as the British still take pride in the former reputation of their intelligence service, Canadians might point to the quality of their foreign service in the 1950s and ’60s. Some might even be familiar with such names as…

This past July, during the usually unremarkable annual meeting of provincial premiers, something noteworthy occurred. The leaders of Alberta and Manitoba took the premier of Quebec to task: the former over Quebec’s opposition to an oil pipeline, and the latter over Quebec’s new law banning police officers, teachers, judges, and other public employees from wearing religious symbols at…

In January of this year, the Bloc Québécois chose a new leader, Yves-François Blanchet, who promised to promote independence tirelessly in order to “win Quebec and win for Quebec.” To those anglophone Canadians who noticed, this probably seemed a ghostly echo from the past. Yet the event does prompt us to ask what has become of Quebec…