Photo by Matt Jiggins Anyone who really wants to get the country back from the grim reaper now in charge of Canada – and who knows our political history – would look to the NDP as their best hope. They are the only party that is not completely in the
Continue readingAuthor: Murray Dobbin
Canadian Dimension: Four Prime Questions about Harper’s Response to Ottawa Shooting
Photo from Public Domain Two weeks after the senseless murder of a soldier on Parliament Hill (and another earlier in Montreal) there are several things we know and many we don’t. Obvious questions have been asked and inconvenient ones have been left aside. We know — and indeed could predict
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: From Israel to ISIS: Harper’s ‘Orwellian’ foreign policy
Photo by SPC Ronald Shaw Jr., U.S. Army It’s getting difficult to remember a time when the Canadian Parliament actually tried to make principled decisions regarding foreign policy and our place in the community of nations. But we should try. Perhaps a first step in returning to such a time
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Why New Euro-Canada Treaty Is a Gift to Oil Firms
Photo from Public Domain By sheer coincidence the media has recently been filled with stories that reflect the parallel universes we seem to be living in. The first were the stories about the international climate summit and the huge climate march (and hundreds of smaller ones) that preceded it –
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Work in the age of anxiety
Photo from Public Domain Working Canadians, from blue collar workers to middle class professionals to hamburger flippers are facing the worst economy insecurity, most stressful working conditions, the slowest increases in real income and the most cynical anti-worker governments literally since the 1930s. At the same time the 1% and
Continue readingCanadian Dimension | Articles: Work in the age of anxiety
Working Canadians, from blue collar workers to middle class professionals to hamburger flippers are facing the worst economy insecurity, most stressful working conditions, the slowest increases in real income and the most cynical anti-worker governments literally since the 1930s. At the same time the 1% and the powerful corporations which
Continue readingCanadian Dimension | Articles: Can the NDP challenge Harper on the economy?
The NDP’s announcement that it will push for a national minimum wage if elected is good news and suggests that the party may finally be overcoming its decades-long aversion to engaging its Liberal and Conservative adversaries on the question of the economy. It’s too early to tell if they will
Continue readingCanadian Dimension | Articles: Who Needs $80 Billion? Starve Us Some More!
For years Stephen Harper often seemed at war with his own government, so consistently critical were reviews by its various independent oversight agencies. It seems that at least one “independent” body, the Parliamentary Budget Office, is now a little more PMO-friendly. A recent report from the PBO’s new chief Jean-Denis
Continue readingCanadian Dimension | Articles: Stephen Harper’s ‘Strategic’ Path to Ruin
The federal government, that is Stephen Harper, is expected to announce its long anticipated decision on Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline sometime in June. The decision could well determine whether or not the Conservatives can win the 2015 election. The momentum of opposition to the pipeline — and perhaps more importantly
Continue readingCanadian Dimension | Articles: Putin, petrorubles and our PM’s bad posture
Murray Dobbin’s State of the Nation column appears every week in The Tyee and rabble.ca and was republished here with the author’s permission. Stephen Harper’s embarrassing behaviour regarding the crisis in Ukraine — demonizing Vladimir Putin and upping the rhetoric — must be welcomed in the U.S. which created the
Continue readingCanadian Dimension | Articles: Harper’s (Un)Fair Elections Act could be a useful crisis of democracy
The Harper government seems intent on proving to its detractors and critics that things can always get worse. No matter how many anti-democratic outrages and subsequent unapologetic stonewalling they deliver to Canadians, they can always manage to one-up themselves. This is the case with the truly repugnant and shamelessly anti-democratic
Continue readingCanadian Dimension | Articles: When it comes to political ideas, how big is ‘big’?
The notion of “big ideas” periodically raises its head in Canadian politics and I recently criticized the NDP for taking a good idea – a national day of action – and wasting it in on, well, small ideas. Specifically I suggested that the party’s focus on excessive interest rates and
Continue readingCanadian Dimension | Articles: Big oil’s chokehold on Canadian democracy
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” – Benito Mussolini With the announcement by the B.C. Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) of formal complaints against the RCMP and Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) for illegally spying on environmental groups opposed to
Continue readingCanadian Dimension | Articles: We need a federal politics of big ideas
Budget days should be days when Canadians are encouraged to imagine the possibilities for one of the richest countries in the world. Not the possibilities of the shopping mall or the offerings of Netflix, but the possibilities of building – or rebuilding – community. At its best, that is what
Continue readingCanadian Dimension | Articles: Stephen Harper’s Disservice to Israel
The dictionary definition of perverse says (of a person or their actions) “…showing a deliberate and obstinate desire to behave in a way that is unreasonable or unacceptable, often in spite of the consequences.” Well, that just about sums up Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s disturbing trip to Israel. If anyone
Continue readingCanadian Dimension | Articles: Left needs soul searching
[Note: This week the Tyee is republishing some columns from the past 10 years. Yesterday they published one of mine from 2009. And I agree, the message is just as critical today as it was then.] “We hunger for communities of meaning that can transcend the individualism and selfishness that
Continue readingCanadian Dimension | Articles: 2014, the year of living consciously
Two of the big storms hitting Canada in the last year were not just terrifying and incredibly damaging, they were a little spooky. It was as if nature was making its already unmistakable message of impending catastrophe even more specific. The almost biblical flooding in Calgary — the home base
Continue readingCanadian Dimension | Articles: Harper and His Movement Were No Friends to Mandela
Of all the hypocrisies revealed by Stephen Harper, perhaps none are so morally offensive as his sudden, solemn respect for Nelson Mandela. We will never know how Harper would reconcile his past attitudes towards apartheid with his trip to South Africa to honour the iconic statesman at his memorial. In
Continue readingCanadian Dimension | Articles: Why Tories Are So Afraid of What Deloitte’s Runia Might Testify
With all the reporting on the Senate scandal you might think there’s not much more to be discovered. But reading the actual documents the RCMP turned up in its Mike Duffy investigation is definitely worth the effort. The documents pull back the curtain on Harperland, a landscape so profoundly unethical
Continue readingCanadian Dimension | Articles: Moving Beyond Our Obsession with Stephen Harper
Remember Brian Mulroney, the PM so many people loved to hate? We need to remember him so we can learn a lesson from that period in our political history: there is a real danger in demonizing prime ministers to the exclusion of other longer term political objectives. Mulroney’s unctuous manner,
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