Which will the NDP put first: party or country?
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 –…
Murray Dobbin
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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”…
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…
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…
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…
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 –…
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)…
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…
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…
Left needs soul searching
“We hunger for communities of meaning that can transcend the individualism and selfishness that we see around us and
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…
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…
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…
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…