Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Linda McQuaig discusses Stephen Harper’s class war: Canadians don’t like Harper’s anti-worker agenda — when they notice it. That’s why there’s been such a public outcry since the temporary foreign worker program was exposed as a mechanism by which the Harper government has
Continue readingTag: Dennis Gruending
BigCityLib Strikes Back: The Canadian Catholic Church, Then And Now
From Dennis Gruending on the 30th anniversary of the Canada’s Catholic bishops’ report Ethical Reflections on the Economic Crisis:“We are losing the tension between the church and the state in Canada. The government has seduced the hierarchy to provide a blessing for their policies. The leadership has been silenced and refuses to
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Gruending On The New Pope
How deep was he in with the Argentine generals? Actually, its kind of hard to say. But he hates communists, that’s for damn sure.
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Gruending On The Manning Center Confab
Preston Manning and his wife Sandra created the Manning Centre in 2005 to act as a training ground for conservative politicos and a think tank and advocacy arm for conservative causes. Each year Manning holds what he calls a networking conference in Ottawa. Often the guest speakers are those such
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Shawn McCarthy discusses the Cons’ latest plan to sell Keystone XL to the U.S. – which involves hoping that the best-resourced government on the planet will be suckered into accepting a transparently false pretense that the Cons have the slightest interest in addressing
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Assorted content to start your week. – Dennis Gruending writes about the importance of Edgar Schmidt’s whistleblowing against unconstitutional legislation: Schmidt says that he has over a period of years raised concerns about what he considers the department’s flawed practices. He has done that through various official channels, up to
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Gruending On John Baird’s Office of Religious Freedom
In fact, the plan is modeled on the Office of International Religious Freedom which was created by the Clinton administration in the United States in 1998. A common criticism is that the American office was focused almost entirely on the persecution of Christians abroad, and that it was used to
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Catholic Bishops Cave To Tories!
A couple of posts by Gruending give the best run-down of a story I’ve been following out of the corner of my eye for awhile now: the suspension of Development’s And Peace’s fall post card campaign after it was judged “too political” by the &n…
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Gruending On Remembrance Day
One might be tempted to consign T.T. Shields and his demagoguery to the past but it is not so different from a recent program that I saw on CTS Television. Preacher Jack Van Impe was fulminating about Iran and its president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, describ…
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Dennis Gruending On The Oppression Of Canadian Mennonite Magazine
Quite a bit more detail here than in the CBC piece. The most interesting bit, though, is not even about the magazine per se. Its about the financial costs associated with running afoul of the CRA:[David] Suzuki…said that his foundati…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material to end your Saturday. – Jim Stanford looks in detail at the aftereffects of free trade with the U.S., and finds rather little to cheer: In sum, the promise that free trade would induce more trade, productivity growth, and higher incomes (following traditional Heckscher-Ohlin mechanisms) is not remotely
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Gruending On Chaplains In Prisons
If the changes introduced by Minister Toews are not really about cutting costs, then what is going on? The best analysis that I have seen is from Stephen Maher for Postmedia News. “Toew’s decision,” he wrote, “fits the pattern of this government regarding groups of people whom devout elements of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Alison nicely debunks the Cons’ latest Robocon talking points. Paula Boutis offers her own suggestions to strengthen Elections Canada in investigating vote suppression. And Glen McGregor and Stephen Maher report that the Cons have been working on funneling federal money through a
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Dennis Gruending On The Sale Of The Saskatchewan Wheat Pool
Farmers fought long and hard to create the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool in 1924, but 88 years later the company, now known as Viterra, is being sold to a Swiss-based multinational called Glencore for $6.1 billion. This is a sad story, a kind of morality tale about the gradual destruction of
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Harper Brings Down The Hammer On Another Faith-Based Group
From Gruending: The hammer that had earlier landed on faith-based organizations such as KAIROS and the Mennonite Central Committee has now fallen on the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace (D&P). Michael Casey, D&P’s executive director, has just written an emergency letter to the organization’s local volunteer leaders in
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Harper Defunds Mennonite Church Group
Dennis Gruending predicted it in his last outing: CIDA will soon abandon a number of its long-standing development partners among Canadian NGOs, including a number of church-based organizations. Reliable sources say that a number of those groups will see their funding ended or curtailed this year. And indeed the axe
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Book Review: Pulpit and Politics
Dennis Gruending is a former journalist and NDP MP who blogs about political and religious issues – which in theory should make for an ideal background for a book focusing on the interplay between religion and politics in Canada. And Pulpit and Politics is indeed well worth a read. But
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Gruending On Christians In Syria
Former MP and Politics & Pulpit author takes a look at the dilemma facing Syrian Christians: The Scottish writer William Dalrymple says that Syria has been a kind of oasis for Christians in the Middle East. But Syrian Christians are now faced with a painful choice. They can offer support
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Gruending On Canadian Churches, Climate Change, And Durban
Its all good, but my favorite bit is about how The National Post felt it necessary to spike Rex Murphy’s geriatric rage at the fact a mere African might dare to criticize Canada’s environmental record: The advertisement generated a torrent of exaggerated invective from some of the usual suspects – including CBC
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: The Church And The Occupy Movement: Has The Religuous Left Lost Its Voice?
I’ll let Dennis Gruending ponder that one. But one small point that seems to have been missed in the case of Occupy Toronto: In Toronto, the occupiers were camped in a park owned jointly by the city and the (Anglican) Cathedral Church of St. James. Toronto mayor Rob Ford wanted to
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