In a true democracy, government policy generally reflects the will of the people and prioritizes the interests of the most vulnerable citizens. By that standard, the United States is no democracy at all. Indeed, we Canadians should stop describing and thinking of America as a “democracy.” Instead, we should acknowledge the reality of what our neighbour to the south has become.

Hydro-Québec’s goal to be “the battery of North America” recently received a setback in Maine, where voters in a referendum decided to protect their environment from the clear-cutting that would be needed to erect a massive hydroelectric corridor, but they may also have been responding to current scientific thinking that no longer sees all hydropower as ‘green.’

The current hearings on the extradition of Meng Wanzhou are a tangled web of legal arguments that obscure a simple truth: Ottawa is enabling a witch hunt on the part of the Trump administration against a Chinese capitalist rival—the telecommunications giant, Huawei. This is putting Canada in the crosshairs of the US and China, aligning us closer to wayward American foreign policy.

The great Farley Mowat passed away this week. We bring you his first article for Canadian Dimension magazine, published in 1967 about the Vietnam War. "The American presence in Vietnam and the undeclared war being waged there by the United States constitutes one of the most blatant acts of aggression the world has seen since the destruction of Hitler’s Third Reich," Farley wrote in this powerful piece.

Listen to the discussion period from Noam Chomsky’s Montréal lecture in Oct. 2013, a discussion that touches upon the reality of growing police repression in Montréal under the municipal law P-6 that bans free protest, to a clear denunciation of the pending Quebec secularist charter.

Today – with the mainstream media failing to adequately serve the public in many parts of the country, and with multitudes of people fed up with how corporate media manipulate the news – is an opportune time for independent media projects to be established or refocused. The question is, as always: how to get financial backing for the work?

October 7 will grimly mark the eighth anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. As the death toll mounts daily, reaching unprecedented levels this year, a sober assessment of Canada’s mission of folly is required. Exposing the crisis and corruption in Afghanistan and Canada, intellectuals James Laxer and John W. Warnock offer two scathing critiques of the war and the successive Canadian governments that poured oil on the fire. The Canadian anti-war movement is muted at best, so Laxer’s and Warnock’s latest publications must be read as a means of exposing the deadly and disgraceful policy of the Canadian government. A strengthened approach is required to end this war.

On August 20, U.S. president George W. Bush, Mexican president Felipe Calderón and Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper met in Montebello, Quebec, for a two-day conference to ratify the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP). The SPP, which was initiated in Waco, Texas, in 2005 by Bush, Canadian prime minister Paul Martin and Mexican president Vincente Fox, is a plan for continental integration or a North American Union along the lines of the European Union.

Many Canadians are outraged that the government has given its secret security and police forces new repressive powers to help conduct the U.S.-initiated “War on Terror.” A central aspect of these powers is the increased use of security certificates which allow for the arbitrary arrest and deportation of foreign-born nationals.

Since it signed NAFTA (1994) and joined the Organization of American States, the Canadian government has aligned its foreign policy with that of the United States more closely than at any point in recent history. At the same time, the Canadian government has taken an increasing interest in the affairs of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Some attention has been paid to things like joint military exercises in the Caribbean with the U.S. and other allies, support for the damaging practices of Canadian mining companies and the expanding presence of Canadian financial interests in the global South, but a newer area of Canada’s foreign-policy posture warrants scrutiny: Canada’s deepening involvement in the controversial field of international “democracy promotion” activities.