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Canadian aid for Cuba? 35 national and regional organizations support it
Cuba desperately needs food and medical aid now. It also deserves an end to the longest-standing embargo in modern times. Canada can play a major role in promoting both outcomes. By doing so it will provide desperately needed humanitarian assistance, but will also enhance its own role in the region where Cuba plays an outsized role. The ball is now in the court of Ministers Joly and Sajjan.
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Legalized immorality: the scapegoating of Hassan Diab
The fate of Dr. Hassan Diab is being determined by scapegoating and by an absolutist moral belief that law is engraved in stone. This undeveloped form of morality reduces justice to rules in which the state’s role is limited to examining compliance with the law. In Dr. Diab’s case, appeals were rejected and ultimately blamed for preventing the efficient processing of his extradition.
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What’s really going on in Israel’s political crisis?
We often hear the refrain that Israeli politics is very complicated. It’s usually used as an excuse to stop conversation dead. But given the current turmoil among Israel’s Jewish population, it’s imperative to try to step back and simplify. The crisis now roiling the country is a dramatic moment in an ongoing and epoch-making demographic and political shift.
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Roxham Road and the Canadian unconscious
When I say Roxham Road is Canada’s unconscious, I mean Roxham Road is a reminder that Canada thinks of itself as a white nation and that Black people here are always understood to be too many already. As Rinaldo Walcott explains, Roxham Road and what it has come to represent in contemporary struggles around the freedom to move exposes this racist unconscious.
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Foreign Affairs acknowledges Israel has destroyed the ‘two-state solution’
By allying with extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has taken the country so far to the right that he appears to be causing tensions with Israel’s most powerful backers in the West. The recent article in Foreign Affairs shows how this tension is influencing the thinking of an element of the US foreign policy elite.
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Renovictions are fuelling Toronto’s housing crisis
Cole Webber and Philip Zigman share the findings of a new report they authored which shines a light on the dirty tricks Toronto landlords use against their tenants. They investigate how renovictions, a practice of evicting renters from their units under the guise of performing renovations that are often minor or unnecessary, are fueling an invisible crisis in Canada’s most populous city.
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Broken windows and broken lives
There is only one Russian political prisoner, Alexei Navalny, who is known in the West. In Russia itself, he is also the most famous among the many people who are behind bars for their political activities. But this creates a problem for many of the victims of Putin’s system, because their suffering is hidden from view by the single-minded focus on “prisoner number one.”
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The case against Iran sanctions
Canada isn’t “advocating for Iranians and their human rights.” It’s violating those rights. As Greg Shupak argues, sanctions shouldn’t be merely seen as contradicting our stated goal of helping the Iranian people. Rather, the unilateral coercive measures, as sanctions are sometimes called, are perfectly consistent with Canada’s broader policy of hostility against Iran.
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What does it take to ‘stabilize’ Haiti?
On President Joe Biden’s visit to Ottawa he will push Canada to do the US’s bidding to help “stabilize” Haiti. Justin Trudeau has an opportunity to make good on his commitments to human rights, feminist foreign policy, and refugee protection—if he can muster the diplomatic wherewithal to stand up to his southern neighbour.
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The future of dental care in Canada
Canada’s dental care system does not have common-sense priorities because the right incentives are not in place. As Brandon Doucet writes, if our current policies support the for-profit health insurance industry and dental corporations, then the system will be shaped by institutions that care about their bottom line and not public health.