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Our shame: Canada supported apartheid South Africa
Ottawa;s policy towards apartheid South Africa was controversial among Canadians. There was an active solidarity movement that opposed Canadian support for the racist regime and to the extent that Canadian politicians played a role in challenging South African apartheid it was largely due to their efforts.
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Ending Canada’s shameful practice of indefinite detention
Migrant prisoners in Canada have been beaten back into their cells, imprisoned for “preventive” reasons, reallocated to prevent political organising, and lied to by prison authorities in an ongoing and historic migrant prisoner strike.
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Listen to Chomsky’s Montréal discussion period
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.
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Right-to-die ruling: Win for families, loss for common decency
The Supreme Court of Canada’s 5-2 decision in Rasouli is a clear victory for the family. Sadly, it is a loss for common sense and common humanity. It is also a blow against physician integrity and potentially damaging to the Canadian health-care system.
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Challenging Sex Segregation in Sport
When Hank Aaron left the Negro Leagues for major league baseball in the early 1950s, a woman named Toni Stone took his spot on second base. More than 50 years later, Toni Stone’s story is still stunning. This is how little progress we have made in shifting attitudes about women’s capabilities in sport.
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The rise of the Native Rights-Based Strategic Framework
We have come too far as Indigenous peoples to give up who we are. We have always been kind and we will share the wealth and abundance of our homelands with our relatives from across the pond. Instead of lessons on how to survive the harsh winters of our lands, today we are offering lessons on how to be resilient and to overcome the oppression from the archaic oil sector and in our own government who have lost their minds with power.
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Who Are You Calling Bogus?
Canada’s rejection of the Roma is a far cry from the past when our willingness to admit refugees won us a United Nations Nansen Medal in 1982. In those days, we took in thousands of Czechs, Ugandans, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Lebanese and Chinese as they fled conflict zones. Today, the government points to geopolitical realities as reasons to sort refugees into deserving and undeserving groups. It asserts suspicion not compassion, exclusion not inclusion, family division not family reunification. It defies the spirit of the Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees whose obligations we assumed when we signed that agreement.
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Support from Israel Lobby for Mulcair NDP leadership bid raises serious concerns
With voting underway to elect the new leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party and just two weeks until the leadership convention, Independent Jewish Voices Canada (IJV) has discovered information indicating that key players at the highest levels in Canada’s Israel Lobby are backing the candidacy of Thomas Mulcair.
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Oh Canada Our home and Wire-tapped Land
For more than three decades the RCMP ran PROFUNC (PROminent FUNCtionaries of the Communist Party), a highly secretive espionage operation and internment plan. In case of a “national security” threat up to 16,000 suspected communists and 50,000 sympathizers were to be apprehended and interned in one of eightcamps across the country. Initiated by RCMP Commissioner Stuart Taylor Wood in 1950, the plan continued until 1983.
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RebELLEs
In October 2008, under the theme of Toujours RebELLES-Waves of Resistance, 500 young feminists, aged fourteen to thirty-five, from all regions of Canada and Québec gathered in Montreal. What motivated a group of young Québec feminists to invest incommensurable energy and political courage in this adventure and organize what became the RebELLEs Movement?