Articles
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How I Became A Left Canadian Nationalist
I spent my childhood on a mixed family farm helping raise chickens, cows, barley, wheat and pigs, but I grew up feeling like the black sheep. Growing up the unconsciously progressive child of staunch conservatives — so staunch, my mother currently works for the Fraser Institute — I always felt as though maybe something was wrong with me. My parents often couldn’t help but agree. “The things we thought would upset you didn’t upset you,” they’ve since told me. “But things that we didn’t think would matter made you get upset.”
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The Council of Canadians at 20
In March, 2005, the Council of Canadians will celebrate its twentieth anniversary. To mark the occasion, Canadian Dimension has chosen the Council as its Pathbreaker Towards a New Society.
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Why A Canada-U.S. Customs Union is a Bad Idea
The potential shutdown of the Canada-U.S. border is a prospect that sends shivers down the spine of corporate Canada. These fears crystallized in the days after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.
Since that time, pressure has been mounting for a new deal between Canada and the United States to ensure that the border stays open in the future. A new wave of pro-integration literature has emerged with hypothetical proposals for a “strategic bargain” (in the words of the C.D. Howe Institute) with the U.S. across a number of policy areas, including border security, defence policy and immigration.
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Jean Charest’s Latest Deception
In response to opposition from many sectors of the population to his project of “re-engineering” (i.e. dismantling) the state, Jean Charest’s ultra-conservative government is changing its tune. It is now wrapping its neoliberal policies in talk about sustainable development, imitating an approach mastered by the previous PQ government. It is therefore not surprising that the only real opposition is extra-parliamentary.
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Conversations with God About Going to War
U.S. President William McKinley’s words should echo with President Bush and his evangelical zealots. Like the Republican who initiated U.S. overseas military expansion, the current president also talks to God and hears His words. Like McKinley, Bush understands that the stars and stripes stand for inseparable U.S. commercial interests and pious purposes.
After McKinley was assassinated in 1900, subsequent presidents sent troops back to Cuba three times in the next two decades, until finally “losing” the island in the 1959 revolution. Until 1933, 120,000 U.S. troops occupied the Philippines. “Pacifying” those “heathens” took longer than McKinley thought and brought out the brute in the soul of U.S. Christian soldiers. Long before troops destroyed the Vietnamese village “to save it,” and a century-plus before GIs decimated Falluja and killed thousands of its residents to bring democracy to Iraq, their predecessors committed atrocities in the Philippines.
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Message in a Bottle
ith this edition, Canadian Dimension joins the infinite numbers of romantics who, throughout history, have put a message in a bottle and thrown it out to sea, never knowing where it might land, who might read it, or what might happen as a result.
We were aiming for Clark County, Ohio. We know it’s landlocked. We know the odds anyone there will get our message are slim to none. But hey — we’re romantics!
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The Greatest Canadian Shit-Disturber
My family came from Eastern Europe, part of the large immigration in the early 1900s — poor, largely peasant Jews escaping the pogroms of the Tsarist Russian Empire. I was born in 1944 in the so-called Jewish ghetto in downtown Montréal. My early years were spent in the St. Urbain Street neighbourhood immortalized in Mordecai Richler’s biting and hilarious novels.
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The Economic Basis of Imperial Power
International economic power is increasingly dispersed between the competing major power blocs. However, one power centre — the U.S. — has greater domination over more sectors than the other power blocs.
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Squatting and the City
Movies and television programs regularly invoke imagery of big cities as sites of pleasure and prestige — places for people to wear glamorous clothes, flag a cab in rhinestone-clustered stilettos, and taste the culinary delights of the latest trendy “fusion” restaurant. While the image of cosmopolitan opulence certainly does not convey the full story of Canadian cities, this type of “urban evolution” does provide a glimpse, at least in part, of what an ideal capitalist city aspires to be — a mecca of entrepreneurial opportunity, individual prosperity and rampant consumerism.
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Where’s the Green Party Going?
he last election might be viewed as the Greens’ first real kick at the can. It was the first time the party ran candidates in all federal ridings, the first time they were considered for inclusion in the leaders’ debates and the first time they garnered significant media attention. On election night, it won 4.3 per cent of the popular vote, making it eligible for public financing. Most voters look at the “green” moniker and seem to think they have a pretty good idea of what the Green Party stands for. Many Canadians assume that the Green Party of Canada is like the Green parties of Europe and the U.S. However, in their recent convention, the Canadian Greens seem to have opted to continue in a direction that is not entirely in keeping with progressive values.
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