All Out for Gaza demonstration in Montréal, Tuesday, October 17, 2023. Photo by Lital Khaikin. “More than 20,000 Palestinians have perished in the new war,” reads a newspaper photo caption citing December’s death toll since the beginning of the Israeli siege. A young girl reading in a café remarks to
Continue readingAuthor: Lital Khaikin
Canadian Dimension: Québec public sector workers are ready for a general strike
Members of the front commun march down Park Avenue, Montréal, September 23, 2023. Photo by Lital Khaikin. “I make $30 an hour and am barely scraping by,” said Audrey Perreault, a radiology technologist who marched in downtown Montréal last weekend during a massive demonstration of public sector workers. Fed up
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Compassion in an age of anxiety and disillusionment
The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture Gabor Maté with Daniel Maté Knopf Canada, 2022 Published in September 2022, Canadian physician and author Gabor Maté’s new book, The Myth of Normal, is a rich examination of the conditions that lead not only to individual illness,
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: “The voice of Indigenous peoples is the real voice of nature”
A jade mine in Myanmar. Photo by Hosana Chay/NRGI Myanmar/Flickr. “False solutions” In our ways, spiritual consciousness is the highest form of politics. The people who are living on this planet need to break with the narrow concept of human liberation, and begin to see liberation as something which needs
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Who watches the watchers?
Photo by Don Fontijn/Unsplash The infrastructure of blacklists Much Western media reporting on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has amounted to hand-holding the public by avoiding content deemed to be disinformation and fake news. Few questions have been raised about who decides what falls into those categories or about the consequences
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Amnesia and fragmentation in the narrative of Israel’s occupation of Palestine
A Palestinian youth placed a flag on the Israeli Separation Wall during a protest marking nine years for the struggle against the wall in the West Bank village of Bil’in, February 28, 2014. Photo by Oren Ziv/GroundTruth. “There’s nane ever fear’d that the truth should be heard But they wham
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Land grabs for rare earth metals continue outside the South American Lithium Triangle
Mongolia has long been one of Canada’s closest partners in Asia as a source of strategic metals and minerals, while occupying a fulcrum point between Southeast Asia, Russia and the Middle East. Image courtesy the United Nations Development Programme. $310,000. That’s how much a slice of the Gobi Desert was
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Space neoliberalization agitates the frontiers of Canadian data privacy
From the European Space Agency, an artist’s illustration of the huge numbers of satellites and space debris in Earth’s orbit today. Image by Hopeful in NJ/Flickr. A space opera Notions of private and non-commercialized space were forced into a dramatic showdown in 2019 when a SpaceX satellite in low-earth orbit
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Unconscionable treatment continues in Canadian detention centres
The lack of oversight and preventive measures in Canadian state facilities ultimately undermines the credibility of Canada’s stance on protecting human rights. Image by Jared Rodriguez/Truthout/Flickr. This is the second article in a three-part series on Canada’s historical reluctance to ratify the United Nations’ Optional Protocol with the Convention against
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Stumbling toward peace in Donbass
Heavy tanks and soldiers during the conflict in the Donbass, 2014. Photo from Wikimedia Commons. Despite Canada’s long-standing support for the Ukrainian army—and the reverberations of Ukrainian nationalist politics through Canada’s electoral landscape—there has been almost no coverage of recent peace talks in the war-ravaged Donbass. More concerningly, few have
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: WESCAM controversy highlights double standards in Canadian arms controls
GA-ASI MQ-9 Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS), manufactured by Burlington-based L3Harris WESCAM. Photo courtesy of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. Double standards In a rare rapid response to concerns raised by civil society groups about Canadian-made sensors being used by the Azerbaijan army against Armenia in the disputed territory of
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: An inconvenient coup: Canada’s disingenuous response to Mali’s revolt against a corrupt government
A security officer stands guard during a visit of the Deputy Special Representative for the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), Joanne Adamson, to Bandiagara, Mopti region, October 8, 2020. United Nations photo by Harandane Dicko/Flickr. In face of the seasonal waves of coup attempts that have
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Machines in the chain of command
Taranis by BAE Systems. Image courtesy of BAE Systems. Follow the leader From the Pentagon’s feral “legged squad support system” to swarms of drones to malicious computer programs directing theatres of war without human intervention—killer robots have dominated the imagination in this century’s defining arms race. Lethal autonomous weapons systems
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Canada drags its feet on international convention against torture
While torture is illegal in Canada, ratifying the UN’s Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (OPCAT) would make Canada accountable as a nation to international human rights standards, rather than individual institutions subject only to ad hoc and inconsistent governmental
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Screening for ideals: Social credit is alive and well in Canada
“Subway,” Fortunato Depero, 1930 “You will be perfect, you will be machine-equal. The path to one-hundred-percent happiness is clear.” —Yevgenii Zamyatin, We On bad behaviour In a bloated market for the collection and sale of personal data, predictive tech has been quickly ascending the most profitable rungs in the civic
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Shadowboxing with Russian bots
Russian President Vladimir Putin. Photo courtesy of the Kremlin/Wikimedia Commons. In the name of democracy Hide your kids, hide your wife, the Russians are coming, but this time for Canada’s pipelines, and they’re taking Alberta with them! At least, this is a scenario devised by Defence Research and Development Canada
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Criminalizing the most vulnerable: Migrant surveillance in Canada
Enhanced data gathering and other forms of intrusive risk analysis are part of a new era of surveillance technologies targeting migrant workers in Canada and beyond. Photo by ar130405/Pixabay. Alternatives to detention Across Canada, the coronavirus crisis has accelerated the adoption of vast surveillance technologies—from contact-tracing through phones, to apps
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: The Right-Wing Checkpoint for Canada’s Intervention in Ukraine
Members of the Azov Battalion and other far-right groups march through Kyiv during Defenders of Ukraine Day, October 14, 2018. Photo from Leave the West Behind. Stoking the fire For over six years, Ukrainian and Russian-supported separatist forces have been in a stand-off in an armed conflict that has ravaged
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: COVID-19 Is Exacerbating Discrimination Against Asylum Seekers in Québec
Immigration holding centre in Laval, Québec. “Not a safe place for us” The first experience of a person seeking asylum in Canada may very well be incarceration. From the moment a person sets foot in the country, the clock starts ticking for a first review before a judge within 24
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: ‘The Poland of Northeast Asia’: Mongolia’s Lithium Frontier
A truck at the vast Oyu Tolgoi mine near the Gobi Desert in southern Mongolia. Photo by Rio Tinto. With its heavy dependence on the extractive industry, facilitated by a powerful mining lobby, Mongolia is quickly resembling what Naomi Klein has described as an environmental sacrifice zone. The country’s generous
Continue reading