“The best thing you can do for New York right now is to go out and shop !” So decreed former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani in answer to how New York was to re-settle itself economically – even spiritually – following the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. A crude suggestion, perhaps, but one nonetheless summarily taken up by millions upon millions of Americans, many of whom are likely now scratching their heads in debt-inspired bewilderment.

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.

I fell in love when I was seven. I mean really and truly in love. It was the kind of rapturous love that changes the lighting in your world and makes everything sharper, clearer, like it never existed in quite that way before, or ever will again.

Buzz Hargrove recently ignited controversy over the environment and auto-industry jobs. While seemingly criticizing federal environmental policy, Buzz may have played into the Harper government’s unprecedented campaign of deception and trickery on climate change.

If society has an imagination to express its desires and fears, it is activated through art. If society is to experiment with change, with new forms, with its power structures, with ways of seeing and with language itself, it must be through art. If social change is the agenda, then art must make up a large part of the toolkit.

Like a thousand other domestic mining companies operating abroad, Glamis is supported through Canadian stock exchanges, the world’s biggest source of capital for mining. Canada’s laws protect investors by imposing reporting, disclosure and other obligations on corporations. These laws, however, do little to protect people in developing countries from mining risks, including the human-rights abuses that often accompany such mega-projects.

Dubbed “NAFTA Plus” by pundits in the popular press, the SPP is the continuing expansion of free-trade policies that were consolidated under NAFTA ten years earlier. The winners and losers of this ongoing trilateral power alliance remain the same – big capital in the North continues to expand its power at the expense of workers, their communities, and the environment in both the North and the South.

By mid-March, 2006, when activist communities discovered the land reclamation at Six Nations of the Grand River, carloads of non-Aboriginal supporters from Toronto, Montreal and beyond made almost daily trips to the site loaded with supplies and youthful activists eager to staff the cookhouse, help out in the first-aid tent, or do a security shift. At night gaggles of underdressed youth would huddle at the fire, soaking up community gossip directly from “the real grassroots” (as one white activist described members of the Grand River community).

My grandfather’s name was John Wagamese. Our family name, Wagamese, comes from an Ojibway phrase meaning “man walking by the crooked water.” It was shortened by the treaty registrar because Wagamese was all he could pronounce of it, but it came from the trapline my great-great-grandfather established along the Winnipeg River. The same one my grandfather walked all his life.

May Day is a time when workers around the world celebrate their collective strength, solidarity with other movements and their accomplishments in working towards peace, equality and social justice. In Canadian Dimension we also choose to use this as a time to reflect upon the health of our labour movement.