There has been much gnashing of teeth over Canada’s foreign-policy stance since the day Stephen Harper and his Conservative government was elected to office.

Canada’s relations with the U.S. on a phalanx of fronts have been at the centre of controversy.

We brought an interesting video to the Six Nations information session at the Montreal Native Friendship Centre. The land and historic issues behind the reclamation of land at Six Nations were well explained. The video showed how, early in the dispute, hundreds of young people from the nearby non-Native town of Caledonia were lured to the Indigenous barricade by such enticements as beer, marshmallows and hot dogs. At first the kids were reasonable and talked about how they wanted to organize things. As the night wore on, things started to break down. The crowd became loud and raucous.

She’s everywhere. Less than a week after she was elected leader of the Green Party, Elizabeth May was on key political-pundit television programs exuding her trademark charm and energy, and sounding supremely confident. The media honeymoon with May will no doubt continue for some time. Stephen Harper, almost pathologically arrogant, won’t engage the media. The Liberals are leaderless and their leadership campaign is pretty boring. Jack Layton is all tactics and no vision his call for withdrawal from Afghanistan being the exception as he tries to implement a long-term (twenty-year?) strategy of replacing the Liberals. He is therefore all caution and no risk. Elizabeth May looks pretty interesting at the moment.

Unlike most Latin Americans, Cubans enjoy substantive rights. Despite the constant refrain, “no es facil,” Cubans don’t work as hard as their neighbours, nor do they suffer anxieties that they’ll have no access to health care or go homeless. Cuba’s transition team of experienced Communists can strengthen socialist institutions by opening up discussion on key decisions to its educated population.

Back in January, when the Harper Tories eked out their election squeaker, Canadian foreign policy wasn’t even on the radar screen, despite valiant efforts by the anti-war movement to challenge Canada’s role in the occupations of Haiti and Afghanistan. Things will be different next time. As Canadian troops die in sizeable numbers for the first time since the Korean War, foreign policy could become a key factor in blocking a Harper majority.

It’s true that the military brass, key business organizations like the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and the political right are pulling out all the stops, and this may have some impact. The “red rallies” to “support our troops” are a well-orchestrated campaign to whip up patriotic fervour, and every time a bomb kills civilians in Kabul, the corporate media sings the “save the Afghan civilians” tune.

In the apocalypse that is now, Davis offers us a simple oppositional truth: “If the Empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side.” Perhaps. But we cannot trust in the deities of disorder. Only the godless materialism of revolutionary change can save us from the barbarism at our gate, be it in Sao Paulo or Saskatoon.

Grassy Narrows First Nation gets a boil-water advisory from the Medical Services Environmental Health Worker for Treaty #3 First Nations. My first thought was: “I thought we were safe.” To say the least, it’s very inconvenient to boil water for two minutes to kill any bacteria that live in it. But if we do not boil the water, the elders, infants and children, and weak adults are susceptible to severe stomach cramps, diarrhea and/or vomiting.

The vast majority of water and wastewater systems in Canada are owned, operated and maintained within the public sector. Essential to our public health system, municipal water systems were one of the first major services to be publicly delivered in Canada. The reason why water infrastructure is overwhelmingly public is because the private sector could not be relied upon to deliver a quality service at a price that all residents could afford. It’s therefore ironic that water corporations from rich countries like our own are now trying to persuade developing countries not to develop water resources publicly but to experiment with the private sector instead. What’s more, the belief that the private sector can manage our public water resources is now gaining ground in Canadian government and policy circles.

When Prime Minister Stephen Harper sat down with President George W. Bush in their first White House meeting on July 6, one of the “unmentionable” items on their agenda may well have been the question of bulk water exports from Canada. After all, Bush himself raised the issue back in July, 2001, when he talked “off the cuff” to reporters about growing water shortages in his home state of Texas and elsewhere in the country, saying he would like to begin negotiations with Ottawa on water exports from Canada. In Texas, he said, “water is more valuable than oil.” “A lot of people don’t need it, but when you head south and west, we need it,” Bush declared, adding that he “looked forward” to discussing the matter with then-prime minister Jean Chretien.

The editorial in the July/August issue of Canadian Dimension – “Building a Grassroots Opposition to Harper” – noted that some members of the CD collective have been discussing the possibility of establishing local “people’s assemblies.” In this article, CD Editorial Collective member Sam Gindin explains how a project of this type has already emerged in the U.S. – and bears close observation on this side of the border.*