From his student days in the late fifties campaigning for nuclear disarmament to representing the International Uranium Congress in hearings on nuclear-waste disposal in the nineties, Jim Harding has been holding Saskatchewan nuclear proponents to account.

Since its inception the Internet has promised an extraordinary opportunity for a huge array of communicative activity. People have new ways of communicating directly with one another and independent media producers can distribute their content cheaply. More information seems to be more available to more people every day.

First, a confession. Whenever I come across Brian Mulroney’s photograph in the newspaper, I amuse myself by blackening his teeth. It’s therapeutic. I tell myself: Somebody’s got to do it – for all the life-threatening wounds the man inflicted on this country, its media has never raised a hand to him. Not until November of 2007, that is.

To live under external ownership and control has been the common fate of Canadians, and has powerfully conditioned our lives and our politics. Aboriginal people were so treated from early on by the settlers who, in turn, embraced their own lot as imperial subjects.

Progressive-minded Canadians have long been concerned that private media concentration threatens democratic values. In June, 2006, even the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications Report on the Canadian News Media warned that there are “areas where the concentration of ownership has reached levels that few other countries would consider acceptable.”

On October 10, Ontarians will go the polls in their first fixed-date election, just one of a host of allegedly modernizing innovations introduced by the McGuinty Liberal government. But election day will also offer voters a chance to comment on a much more radical and far-reaching proposal to alter Ontario’s electoral process; for there will also be a referendum on the provincial voting system.

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.

Without the assent of the NDP, Harper’s Conservatives are unlikely to remain in power much longer. Chances are that, in the coming months, Layton & Co. will once again bring down a minority government, sending Canadians to the polls for the second time in a little over a year.

It is the case that folks seriously interested in transforming society seldom consider achieving their objectives through changes in the tax system. Nevertheless, tax reform should be on the agenda of all those who want to change the world in more modest ways.

We are seeing an international paradigm shift on climate change, which will bypass Canada if we remain locked into unlimited energy exports. Until Canada gets a “Mexican exemption” and exits NAFTA’s energy-proportionality clause, there is little chance of Canada fulfilling its modest, international Kyoto targets, let alone going far beyond them.