The gun is now a part of Canadian politics. Richard Henry Bain killed one person and injured another at the PQ rally last Wed night. He was ill, it seems, and a recluse, like many of those who suddenly, unexpectedly, tragically erupt into violence. It’s tempting to leave it there,
Continue readingAuthor: Dave McLaren
Canadian Dimension Feed: Fix, don’t scrap, rights panels
Bill Whatcott is a man who doesn’t much like gay men and isn’t shy about saying so. The Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission thought that what he said went beyond dislike, all the way to hate. That ruling went to the Supreme Court, which is now trying to decide whether hate
Continue readingCanadian Dimension Feed: Black Gold or Fool’s Gold
It was a text-book case of misdirection. Like snake-oil salesmen of old warming up their marks with a shell game, Prime Minister Harper and Joe Oliver accused radical environmental groups of using “foreign money” to “hijack” Canada’s regulatory process on the Northern Gateway pipeline. And the Prime Minister’s Office labelled
Continue readingCanadian Dimension Feed: We have a different understanding
At the January 23rd summit meeting between First Nations Chiefs and the Prime Minister of the rest of Canada, the two solitudes talked past one another. Grand Chief Shawn Atleo spoke of another kind of relationship, one informed by an Aboriginal understanding of things. He even brought the wampum agreements
Continue readingCanadian Dimension Feed: A diamond is forever
Perhaps the most iconic irony of the whole crisis at Attawapiskat is the presence, a scant 90 km away, of the De Beers Diamond Mine at Victor Lake. The top 1% and some of us 98%ers could be wearing diamonds pulled from the traditional territories of the poorest 1%. If
Continue readingCanadian Dimension Feed: Ethical Oil is Snake Oil
Talking about ethical oil is like saying guns don’t kill people. Well they don’t. People kill people. But sometimes they use a gun to do it. Oil isn’t ethical or unethical (unless you add corn … get it? ethyl alcohol? Sorry, corny I know, but I couldn’t resist. And it
Continue readingCanadian Dimension Feed: We can do better: Attawapiskat
The dialogue around the tragedy at Attawapiskat has taken a nasty turn in the last few days. From justifiable shock and outrage that a community in Canada (any community in Canada) can be living in such squalor, to blame and finger-pointing. A reporter on the CBC’s The National confronted the
Continue readingCanadian Dimension Feed: Occupied
One by one the Occupy camps are coming down and I, for one, will be sorry to see them go. They were a constant reminder that there are things we need to fix in this world. Without that reminder, chances are they’re going to stay broken. The Occupiers have a
Continue readingCanadian Dimension Feed: Before the Revolution
On a hot August afternoon, a few years before the Revolution, Winston sat in his cubicle on the fifth floor of the Department trying to connect the dots. Connecting dots was not his job. That was the job of the Prime Leader’s Office. And now the …
Continue readingCanadian Dimension Feed: Doh!conomics: How to turn a doughnut economy into a feudal society
There’s a hole in the economy where the middle class used to be. And the Harper Government is making it bigger by busting unions.
You’ve heard of Reaganomics? That’s where money was supposed to trickle down from the rich to the poor…
Continue readingCanadian Dimension Feed: Busting the arts
The Harper Government, sweater-vests and John Lennon songs notwithstanding, doesn’t like the arts. It made serious cuts to the creative community back in 2008 and then did some fancy accounting to make it look as though it hadn’t. Now it ha…
Continue readingCanadian Dimension Feed: Video Vigilantism in Vancouver
It’s been over half a century since George Orwell wrote 1984, but Big Brother is still watching us. In fact, he’s been watching us more and more—email and phone conversations keyed to certain words, surveillance cameras on street corn…
Continue readingCanadian Dimension Feed: Mr Harper finds his whale, the Liberals are lost at sea
Well Mr Harper has found his elusive majority and Mr Layton’s job just got a whole lot harder. Now he must to try to keep the captain from taking the ship over the edge of the known world. If you remember Moby Dick, you’ll remember that Aha…
Continue readingCanadian Dimension Feed: Pierre Peladeau’s Good Deed for the Day
On April 27th Sun Media newspapers across the country dutifully printed an article written by their President and CEO, Pierre Peladeau. It was a curious piece – half news story and half promo for Sun TV, entitled “All’s not fair in wa…
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