We planned this issue in the months leading up to the December UN climate change conference to be held in Copenhagen, Denmark. Besides our focus of articles by Joel Kovel, Danny Harvey, Tom Goldtooth, Keith Stewart and Larry Lohmann all commissioned for this issue our editorial and book reviews are devoted to the climate crisis.

For years CD has been chastised, and correctly so, for lacking in humour. Well, humour has found us. Maurice Dufour began sending us articles about eight months ago and we’ve published him in most issues going back to then. Here he is again, with more to come.

John Lasker’s article tells the story of the Banro Corporation of Toronto, yet another example of a Canadian mining company escaping environmental regulations and taxes at home to exploit Third World resources, in this case, gold in the Congo. This is investigative journalism at its best. We had thought to hold off publishing this piece until we were ready with a whole issue devoted to Canadian mining companies ripping off the world’s poorest peoples. That issue is still coming, but we decided that John Lasker’s exposé was too important to hold.

As usually happens when we put out a special issue, we receive more articles than we can publish in a single issue. Our Sept/Oct focus on immigration is a case in point. Here we add Abad Khan’s fine article on Canada’s Temporary Foreign Workers Program. Once the immigration issue came out there have been still more interesting proposals. Those we can’t accommodate in the magazine, we will put on the CD website.

CD has never backed away from controversy, not least the Israel-Palestine conflict. But we have never gone to the root of that conflict, the Zionist project. We contacted our friend Yacob Rabkin, a leading authority on Zionism, to write a two part series that explores the history, implications, and impact of the Zionist project and alternatives to it. Here’s Part One.

CD is raising its commitment to Arts and Politics by another rung. Literary Editor Brenda Austin Smith is accepting poetry submissions, proposals for a feature on “New Canadian Writing” and reviews of Canadian literature by genre, author, and topic. Write to her at [email protected]