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Currently viewing articles tagged with Policy.
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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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CLC Policy
We agree with the Canadian Labour Congress’s controversial position paper that free trade has not been a total “economic disaster.” But we disagree that economic integration has gone so far that measures to reduce our dependency and challenge this right-wing direction cannot be contemplated. In this sense, the Canadian Labour Congress’s new industrial policy paper is a deep disappointment. Instead of insisting on new directions in economic policy, the CLC’s new paper lacks critical leadership, merely offering new concessions to free trade and the rule of the market.
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U.S. Elections
Aristotle defined an oligarchy as a polity in which the few elect the rulers to govern over the many. That formula fits exactly the description of U.S. primaries and general elections. In New York state, where only 15 per cent of the party members voted in the recent Democratic primaries, Kerry won with eight per cent of registered Democrats. In the general elections in November, 25 million voters (out of 50 million) can decide who will rule over 280 million citizens. The great majority of blacks, Hispanics and poor workers will not vote, because they perceive that neither the Republican Bush nor the Democrat Kerry speak to the problems that most affect their lives.
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One Year of Charest
A year after its election, the ultra-conservative government of Jean Charest is facing a level of unpopularity proportionate to the arrogance and insensitivity it has demonstrated through its dismantling of the Québécois state. In an effort to spruce up its image, the Charest government is undergoing a vast cosmetic operation to explain its policies to people through regional forums. Faced with such a masquerade, general mobilization in the streets remains the most appropriate way for people to make themselves heard. Why go and sit in front of Charest’s ministers, who will only pretend to listen to us?
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John Richards’ Howlers on Aboriginal Policy
As I have had occasion to remark before, “God save me from intellectuals!” especially right-wing Canadian intellectuals, when they take unto themselves the impulse to discourse on Aboriginal policy.
In recent years, these people have perpetrated some real howlers, whose only use has been to indicate how deep the gap remains between the beliefs and posture of Aboriginal people in Canada, and what could at a pinch be described as the thinking of many influential, fuzzy-minded, well- intentioned, ill-informed Canadians of European background.
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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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Racism in Canada
Historians like to engage in thought experiments with dates. One way to measure the change in racism in Canada over the past forty years is to put the question in the context of the previous forty-year period. If one was asked the same question in 1963, Canada would probably not have looked all that different from the Canada of 1923. In 1963, as in 1923, Canada was still a country in which nearly all citizens (with the exception of Aboriginal people) could either directly or indirectly trace their ancestry to Europe. Within government policy and many organizations, non-white immigrants and Aboriginal peoples were still regarded as groups who posed “racial” problems for the processes of nation building and state formation.
I doubt whether we can say that there is a similar continuity to the 1963-2003 comparison. Canada today is considerably different from the Canada that existed four decades ago
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