Just as fresh revelations keep oozing out about the broad extent of the international criminality perpetrated by the regime of the former US president, Canada is becoming the main site of a corporate-driven effort to re-brand George W. Bush as a legitimate political pundit. On May 29 Mr. Bush joins Bill Clinton on the stage of the Metropolitan Toronto Convention Centre in an event hosted by the TD Financial Group and several other sponsors. The hosts include the Calgary-based Bennett Jones law firm, the global accounting giant Ernst and Young, the Toronto Board of Trade as well as the Toronto-based Globe and Mail newspaper.

Does President Obama think about what victory means in Afghanistan? Converting Afghanistan to the U.S. order? Or, stopping terrorist attacks against the United States? Either way the military – with its long no-win record – seems unlikely to accomplish the job.

President Obama’s greatest foreign policy successes are found in the reports of the mass media. His greatest failures go unreported, but are of great consequence. A survey of the major foreign policy priorities of the White House reveals a continuous series of major setbacks, which call into question the principal objectives and methods pursued by the Obama regime.

As part of Penguin Canada’s ongoing Extraordinary Canadians series—which just saw a handful of releases this April—Nino Ricci’s Pierre Elliott Trudeau marks the Montreal novelist’s first foray into non-fiction. “However mistaken some of Trudeau’s policies might have been, none the less there was this sense of grandeur to him and this sense of vision, and we’ve really lacked that since then,” said Ricci.

One of the most striking aspect of contemporary US-Latin American relations is the profound divergence between the hopes, expectations and positive image of the Obama regime and the policies, strategies and practices which are being pursued. Many so-called progressive North American commentators and not a few Latin American writers have ignored the most elementary features of US foreign policy, and focused exclusively on the highly deceptive rhetoric of “change” and “new beginnings.” A serious understanding of US foreign policy toward Latin America requires a discussion of the main objectives of the Obama regime, the global priorities of imperial policy in times of multiple wars and world depression.

Tyler McCreary’s article for Canadian Dimension, “Tough union, tough lessons” would be a useful contribution to the important post-mortem of a strike ended wrong, if not for the fact that most of the evidence upon which his arguments are premised bears little resemblance whatsoever to the historical record.

Your job just got a whole lot harder,” quipped Naomi Klein after Iran’s Prime Minister, Ahmed Ahmadinejad’s address on April 20, at the opening day of the Durban Review of the World Conference Against Racism. In the lead-up to the Conference, I had written and lobbied tirelessly to defend it against allegations that it was an anti-Semitic hate fest.

Naomi was right. The world’s powers instantly condemned the speech to banner headlines. President Obama called it “harmful” and White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs called the speech “hateful rhetoric.” Peter Gooderham, British ambassador to the UN said it was “outrageous” and “anti-Semitic.” British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, labeled it “offensive, inflammatory and utterly unacceptable.” And French President Nicolas Sarkozy condemned it as “an intolerable call to racist hate.”

Last month military forces trained by the Canadian Special Operational Regiment subdued a hijacker who took command of a Halifax-based CanJet plane at an airport partly run by Vancouver Airport Services. While Canadian companies and institutions played a major role in these events this drama did not, in fact, take place in Canada. It happened in Montego Bay.

Canada has long been influential in Jamaica and across the English-speaking Caribbean. Some prominent Canadians once wanted to add Britain¹s Caribbean colonies to Canada’s expanding territory.

Despite what the public would like to believe, the unfortunate reality is this: The ability to treat and contain a pandemic is unaided by medical innovation or healthcare workers. Instead, these efforts are undone by just-in-time logistics that place profits and economic “efficiency” ahead of public security.

Everything labour across Canada. Festivals of “workers as artists” are happening across the country this May and we have the only national calendar of Mayworks events. From Vancouver Island to Ottawa, head out to a film screening, art-exhibit, May Day march, or workshop and help support worker creativity.