There will be no return to the days when full-time permanent jobs were the norm for many working people. Non-standard employment is the working arrangement of choice for employers eyeing their bottom lines.

Most Canadians are not aware of it but with the help of the Canadian state, corporate Canada is beginning to throw its weight around the Global South – specifically, in metal mining locations of South America, Mexico, Africa and Asia. Why are Canadian mining companies shifting their investments to the Global South?

Just as labour exploitation threw up working class movements that fought to constrain capital’s werewolf’s tendency to consume workers in its quest for profits, capital’s recklessness with nature leads to a “rebellion of nature” as “powerful social movements demand an end to ecological exploitation.”

An edited transcript of a panel discussion organized by Canadian Dimension at the Peoples’ Summit on June 19, 2010.

Unlike the World Social Forum and Social Forums in other countries,the USSF has few NGOs here and no celebrity stars. These were mostly people from local groups of grassroot activists.

The second U.S. Social Forum, held in Detroit, began with a 2 mile march that passed through empty areas full of weeds, vacant lots blighted by the city’s economic losses, but also its redesigned and rebuilt downtown of modern new buildings and impressive public art

As you cross the Slaw Rebchuck bridge, a cement arch straddling the vast rail yard that in earlier times cut off the city’s north from its south and center, a sign is visible. Opposite a high school named for a prominent organizer of the Winnipeg General Strike, on the sloped, brown roof of Nepon Motors, it reads “Welcome to the North End: People Before Profits.” Only an aspiration, I know – but where else but in Winnipeg would you find this welcoming?

John Maynard Keynes has returned from the graveyard of discarded and abandoned theorists. Blamed for the strange brew known as stagflation, Keynes’ economics had been unceremoniously dumped there in the mid-seventies. His economics was replaced by that rediscovered nineteenth-century concoction of deregulation, privatization and free trade. And so, the cycle turns.

With his May 22 election victory, Gary Doer is only the second premier in recent Manitoba history to win three consecutive majority governments. The first was Duff Roblin back in the 1960s. In fact, since the election of Ed Schreyer in 1969, the New Democratic Party has been in office for all but a dozen years of the past four decades – nearly enough to consider the NDP Manitoba’s natural governing party.

While global warming is now garnering citizens’ attention around the world, the Canadian government’s abandonment of climate policy has awakened the public to the need for action. In October, 2006, Stephen Harper attempted to hoodwink us with a PR strategy taken straight from George Bush: Promise “clean air” and phony targets for emissions that mirror business-as-usual, while raising doubt about the science of global warming and the economic consequences of taking action.