If Brian Pallister’s Conservatives get re-elected and they follow through with their secret age-old plans to privatize Manitoba Hydro, this is exactly what may happen here. And so instead of Manitobans having the lowest electricity prices in North America, we may face what happened in Alberta and Ontario.

The text of NAFTA 2.0, now to be known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, leaves out in their entirety Chapters 6 and 11 of NAFTA 1.0. By not being in the new agreement the provisions of these chapters are simply no longer applicable. This is a fact of major consequence, yet it has received very little coverage in the mainstream media.

Since it can no longer pretend to be the government-in-waiting, the NDP must rethink its role in parliament and indeed in the country. In the course of its soul-searching the NDP should acknowledge the fact that during the 2015 election it lost support from the public largely because of the failure of the party to present bold, progressive ideas.

The Bank of Canada was established in 1934 under private ownership but in 1938 the government nationalized the bank and, since then, it has been publicly owned. It was mandated to lend not only to the federal government but to the provinces as well. To help bring Canada out of the Great Depression, debt-free money was injected into various infrastructure projects.

As the newly elected leader of the federal NDP, Jagmeet Singh is in a position to carry on with the party’s sound policies but he is also in a position to challenge and try to change policies that are not in the party’s or Canada’s best interests. I am writing to alert you to some of these questionable policies, which I think should be changed.

When your government came into office last fall you inherited Harper’s foreign policy towards Ukraine and Russia which was in lock-step with that of the USA. My purpose in writing to you was to alert your new government to the fact that there was considerable evidence that for a variety of reasons Harper’s foreign policy positions were at variance with the reality of the situation.

When Ralph Nader called Gordon Laxer’s book After the Sands “a myth-destroying blockbuster” it couldn’t have been better put. This is a long-overdue insightful analysis of not only Canada’s oil and gas industry, but also the economic and political framework within which it operates.

In due course, with such a meaningful platform and a dynamic leader who would support these causes, the NDP might be able to win the support of the Canadian public. Canada could then have a government that could change the course of history for this country.

Retired University of Winnipeg geography professor John Ryan discusses at length the current situation in Ukraine, the political and military events unfolding there and the very immediate and dire implications for the entire European region.

Since the overthrow of the Yanukovych government at the end of February 2014, the mainstream media en masse has attempted to whitewash the nature of the current interim Ukrainian government. With Ukraine now having Europe’s first government since Hitler’s time to include fascists in high-profile cabinet positions, one might wonder how their presence affects the operation of the state.