Duets for Abdelrazik, a benefit record, is “a meditation on the fact that we live in a country where the government’s actions led to the torture of a Canadian citizen.”

Stephen Harper’s no-longer-secret agenda to implement a revolution from the right and dismantle Canada has one major impediment that must really stick in his craw. He is constrained in what he can do by the constitutional division of powers which gives the provinces so much political authority.

Canada’s rejection of the Roma is a far cry from the past when our willingness to admit refugees won us a United Nations Nansen Medal in 1982. In those days, we took in thousands of Czechs, Ugandans, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Lebanese and Chinese as they fled conflict zones. Today, the government points to geopolitical realities as reasons to sort refugees into deserving and undeserving groups. It asserts suspicion not compassion, exclusion not inclusion, family division not family reunification. It defies the spirit of the Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees whose obligations we assumed when we signed that agreement.

The defeat of the Charest Liberals after more than nine years in power can only be welcomed. It was past time for Quebecers to say good riddance to an anti-democratic, environmentally hostile government ever ready to accommodate the demands of transnational capital. Overall, however, the 2012 election is far from a good news story.

Among the issues championed by the Parti québécois was that of strengthening Quebecois identity, focused around the PQ demand for a charte de laïcité or Charter of Secularism that would effectively exclude women wearing the Muslim hijab or scarf from employment in government or public services. PQ leader Pauline Marois drove the point home by parachuting a notorious Islamophobe as the party’s candidate in the riding of Trois-Rivières. Djemila Benhabib was defeated, but not before this provocative action had been widely publicized.

The so-called “Arab Spring:” is a distant and bitter memory to those who fought and struggled for a better world, not to speak of the thousands who lost, life and limb.

In its place, throughout the Muslim world, a new wave of reactionaries, corrupt and servile politicians have taken the reins of power buttressed by the same military, secret police and judicial power who sustained the previous rulers.

Their demonstrations have shaken Quebec in recent months, and yesterday students and environmentalists won major victories.

Since we will not learn in school the lessons about the 1% we ought to know, many of us rely on movies and TV, so that through images and sound we can form ideas of who the men were who screwed up our economy. In Arbitrage, we see how how Hollywood conceives of a cinematic grammar into which we can analyze the nature of the people who sparked the the financial crisis.

Over 80 influential leaders from the business, First Nations, environmental, labour, academic, medical and artistic communities across Canada today announced an upcoming mass sit-in in front of the provincial legislature in Victoria, British Columbia on October 22. The sit-in will oppose tar sands pipelines and tankers and the threats they would pose to the west coast.