Articles
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The Scandal
The better part of 250 million dollars of our tax-payer dollars has flowed through the Federal Government Sponsorship funds into the grubby hands of Liberal Party of Canada public relations firms in Québec during a period of 4 years, from 1997 to 2001.
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Hard-won Choice at Risk
The Planned Parenthood Federation of Canada is promoting a Day of Action for Choice on April 25th with the slogan, “Your right to choose is at risk.” Pro-choice activists around the world are feeling insecure as never before — years of abortion clinic bombings and bloody fetuses notwithstanding. The April 25th event in Canada was timed to coincide with a March for Women’s Lives organized for that date by the U.S. Planned Parenthood and other pro-choice organizations.
While the pro-choice world has long had to protect itself from low-level (though often violent) nutcases, it’s far more disturbing when the extremists are camped out in the Oval Office. We should be paying close attention.
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Trade Unions and the Left
On almost every issue trade union members are significantly more progressive than the other segments of the population. I suppose there are many reasons for this. Collective power probably gives union members the confidence to think more about the potential for changing things. Union education programs undoubtedly play a role. The democratic process of unions also requires members to discuss and debate issues.
So it should not come as a surprise that gaining employment in a unionized workplace would promote some leftward political movement among a proportion of the members. Of course one can overstate the political development of union members. Unionists may be twice as likely to vote for the NDP than the new Conservative Party, but a majority of union members still choose the Liberals as their first voting choice.
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A Radical Election Platform 2004 - Editorial
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The World Wide Web Is Ten Years Old!
Excuse me, may I have your cell phone? I see you’re wearing a pager; may I have that too? Your lap top computer, if you don’t mind? And I’ll take the palm pilot I see in your shirt pocket.
Feel like somebody’s bewildered, possibly hostile naked lunch without your high tech toys?
Welcome to the wrong side of the Digital Divide, the developing world in which hundreds of millions of poor people in the south are left behind the more prosperous people of the north at the lightning speed of the latest computer chip.
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NAFTA At Ten
It’s a good time to “do the sums” on NAFTA. But don’t stop for long. Despite clear victories in Cancun and Miami for popular movements and for Venezuela and Brazil and other countries with progressive leadership, the juggernaut extending corporate and United States interests, whether through bilateral, regional or global negotiations — or under the table with economic and political leverage — goes on apace. And, in Canada, corporate leadership, the “think-tanks” and lobbyists they employ, and the politicians who carry their freight have been pumping out speeches, papers and proposals for their “big idea”: ever deeper integration.
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Beyond Nafta
For many of us, it’s hard to get excited about another review of NAFTA’s economic successes or failures. It’s not that such an economic review is irrelevant — coping with the economic implications of NAFTA obviously remains central to anyone concerned with social change. But in itself, the economic debate is unlikely to move us much ahead. There are just too many Œwhat-ifs’ involved for any numbers to convince skeptics. (Would business investment in Canada have slowed down if the corporate sector were defeated on NAFTA? Would Canadian companies have been less productive if they didn’t face the pressures of free trade? Would U.S. retaliation against Canadian exports into the U.S. been worse?)
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Life in Vaginaville
Somewhere in that great pile of Junos and Emmys, I hope there’s an Elephant on the Table Award for the performer who discovers something perfectly obvious during the making of a television series.
“The elephant on the table” is how communications experts describe something carefully overlooked and unmentioned but urgently important. It may sound impossible to ignore something so striking as a wild beast lounging in the middle of an ordinary room, but if the elephant is embarrassing enough, human beings can learn to do it.
Such an award, if it exists, ought to go to Samantha Bee. She’s the sweet-faced Canadian component on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart’s wildly popular half-hour news parody, which recently replaced Mike Bullard’s nightly talk show on CTV.
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Bolivia
The multitude of Bolivians who were blocking the roads, building barricades and surrounding the presidential palace — the peasants, miners, street venders, unemployed and many others — were the product of at least a half-century of revolutionary struggle against landlords, mine-owners, big-business people and the U.S. Embassy.
Beginning with the social revolution of 1952, which expropriated the mines and landed estates of the oligarchy and destroyed the military, the Bolivian workers and peasants forged their own class-based trade unions and militias. State power, however, was taken by the middle-class National Revolutionary Party (MNR), which began a process of re-establishing capitalist hegemony in alliance with the United States.
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The Contemporary Struggle against Racism in Canada
Racism continues to be manifest in various ways in Canadian society. It is not a distant “bad” memory, something that previous generations practiced and experienced. Many Canadians acknowledge some history of racial oppression and the need to address it. But efforts are often limited by the habitual contrast of Canadian racism with American racism in a way that encourages moral superiority, drawing on such artifacts as the underground railroad.
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