Capitalism is currently enmeshed in its most calamitous economic crisis since the Great Depression. And, just as in that earlier historic conjuncture, while visiting enormous trauma and privation upon working people, this crisis pried open the seams of the system in a way that opened up possibilities – too soon foreclosed – for a different tomorrow. So, the current crisis is a watershed, heralding both pain and the prospect of change.

For fifty years progressives, socialists and radicals from around the world have looked to Cuba as the place in which socialism might actually both survive and blossom in its magnificent possibilities. For this reason, Cuba also has to meet higher moral standards. We expect more from its revolutionary leaders because they (especially Fidel) have promised more. And they have delivered remarkably in health, education, social welfare and the blossoming of the arts and sciences.

It’s hard to know where to begin with this book, which purports to be a kind of “expose” of the use of Aboriginal traditional knowledge in policy making and ranges far afield into a critique of the idea of Indigenous rights and a survey of problems in the fields of Aboriginal healthcare, education, self-government, land claims, and so on.

In his first speech to a business audience after his election in 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s announcement that Canada was an “emerging energy superpower” signaled his government’s commitment to unflinching support for the relentless expansion of Alberta’s tar sands, primarily to supply synthetic crude oil to the United States. Since then, the tar sands have been the subject of extensive national and international media reporting, even receiving attention in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, where his staff disparaged the tar sands as “dirty oil.”

In mid December, Robert Fowler, a career Canadian diplomat who is currently the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy to Niger, and his aide Louis Guay, an official at Foreign Affairs, were abducted in Niger. They were kidnapped not long after visiting a mine operated by Montréal-based SEMAFO (Société d’exploitation minière-Afrique de l’Ouest). The president and CEO of SEMAFO, Benoit La Salle, told the National Post: “Louis [Guay] called me and said he was going down there on a UN mission and that he heard the mine was a Canadian success and he wanted to report this back to Canada.”

In western Canadian cities like Winnipeg, a new and particularly destructive form of poverty has emerged over the past thirty years. It is inextricably linked with racism, is disproportionately concentrated in the inner city and has especially damaging effects on Aboriginal people. At the same time, it is Aboriginal people and especially Aboriginal women who are in the lead in developing effective, close-to-the-ground strategies to combat this new poverty.

My mother’s name is Gail Catherine Thomas and my late father’s name was Peter Sinclair Sr., both from the community of Pukatawagan Cree Nation located in northern Manitoba. Like many Native peoples at that time, my mother was raised in the bush.

In the midst of the greatest economic crisis this country has seen since the Great Depression, and an accelerating climate-change crisis whose damages will be massive and permanent, Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, chose to suspend Parliament to avoid facing the elected representatives of the people and being defeated in a motion of non-confidence.

Indigenous lifestyles are traditionally more linked to land and water than those of the Canadian population at large. Rural communities, especially in the north and west, still depend on country (wild) foods and forestry for livelihood and medicine. Many depend on the land for spirituality and for socio-cultural reasons. From this perspective, industrial pollution has a larger impact on Aboriginal communities.

Does it surprise us that some blogger deliberately distorted a column Lesley Hughes wrote in 2002 in his zealous efforts to embarrass her by proving that she is an anti-Semite? Hardly. Bloggers can lie. Some are desperate to be noticed. And they are unaccountable to any publication or organization.