Obviously it's a bit tricky to predict the future (thanks for nothing, Mayans), but man, with such stellar media forecasting, it's like we barely even need to live through 2013 at all! Which is good, cause the year sounds pretty sucky.

With her hunger strike a mere four days away from passing the one-month mark (a perseverance even Gandhi couldn't muster), Chief Theresa Spence has now undeniably earned her right to sit alongside Bridgette DePape and Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois in the pantheon of truly great Canadian attention whores. 'Course, whether Theresa actually attends Harper's expedited summit or not, most of our pundit pals remain pretty skeptical about whether this latest round of talks will yield anything productive and substantive, or just the usual vapid posturing, meaningless commitments and thin, well, gruel.

What makes this sideshow all the more embarrassing is that there's been a complete breakdown in the Chief's relationship with the one independent agency whose power actually does matter -- the press. The indifferent contempt in which she has so consistently held the press is beginning to return in kind. You can almost hear her 15 minutes ticking away. To put it bluntly, you can't just do this.

If the Liberal Party of Ontario elects Canada's first openly gay premier next week, you can be sure we'll never hear the end of it. So why aren't we hearing more about it now? If Kathleen Wynne herself has shown little fear about brandishing the L-word, the mainstream press has been considerably more cautious. Whether the press is deliberately downplaying Wynne's not-so-secret secret as a way to emphasize their own tolerance ("notice how we're not making it an issue?") or simply because they're loath to highlight trivial factoids that could "unfairly" jeopardize her campaign, it's a hard game to play for very long.

If you like your tales of Canadian do-gooding to be humble and cutesy, I imagine you'll be charmed to learn that the primary reason why our air force intervened in Mali this week was because we were already in the neighbourhood. Once you begin to watch the headlines, it becomes harder to ignore the decidedly inelegant possibly that Canadian foreign policy is actually governed by much of the same lazy logic as the rest of Canadian life -- namely, we'll do whatever's cheap, fast, popular, and easy, and -- if time and cost permits -- right.

This weekend, I sat through a full two-hour debate with the Liberal Leadership candidates. The sheer number of inoffensive, non-committal cliches and talking-points spouted made for a pretty grim afternoon.

Whatever we may think of the Liberals' new leader Kathleen Wynne and her glamorous status as Ontario's first lesbian premier, the fact remains that Canadians have once again witnessed the extraordinarily undemocratic spectacle of a tiny group of partisans installing a ruler over them.

Much fuss has been made lately about a proposed NDP motion to water down the rules of Quebec seccession via a couple edits to the "Clarity Act." But this bill has about a cheese curd's chance in gravy of becoming law.