The Waffle is long dead and little remembered. Forty years ago, at the very tail-end of the fabulous decade known as the 60s—if you missed it, too bad—it burst on the scene as a radical grouping within the NDP with a Manifesto calling for an independent socialist Canada, no less, and did so to media attention the likes of which the Left has yet to match.

Some believe that the Canadian immigration system is fair and generous. It isn’t. And Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney are swiftly making it even worse.

Economics For Everyone is an invaluable book and a necessary addition to the library of popular educators, trade unionists, activists, or any person trying to make sense of the conundrum that is modern capitalism. And as Stanford makes clear, the first step to transforming the system is knowing how it works and for whom. To this end, Stanford’s book has made a vital contribution.

The mark of the 4000 Mexican farm labourers that come to Leamington, Canada’s “Tomato Capital”, each year to harvest up to half a billion tomatoes a year is necessarily transient. Despite working and living in Leamington up to eight months of the year, some workers returning ten seasons in a row, their presence is often treated with suspicion. They are wanted as labourers only, not citizens.

An important legacy of the Nazi Holocaust is the perpetrator’s defense “I didn’t know” at the Nuremberg tribunal hearings. More recently law challenges this “ostrich defense” by both perpetrators and bystanders, implying that there is an obligation to know. With regard to Israel/Palestine, there is little reason not to know about the horrific realities, for despite massive pro-Israeli advocacy there is ample documentation from within and without pointing to the clear culpability of the State of Israel in a number of international crimes against the Palestinian people.

The jury is still out on participatory democracy in Canada. Even before questions of participatory government can be breached, however, there is a long way to go. The common refrain is that a functioning democracy requires an informed population. Instead, we have a population with parcels of information, often distorted and just as often outright falsified for political gain.

Canada’s minister for the Americas is reported to have said things at the OAS special meeting of July 4 that, whatever its participants understood, do mislead Canadian quick readers of newspapers. Readers are left with a strong impression not just that Canada supports the military’s ouster of the Honduran president, but that Canada should support the putsch, as should everyone.

Hostility to the military coup in Honduras is increasing. So is the Harper government’s isolation on the issue.

Inflation is spiraling out of control in Canada. A huge ego-bubble has developed on Sussex Drive and Bay Street, where chests have been expanding dangerously with every new media report extolling Canada’s success in weathering the global economic storm.

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.