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In case everyone hasn't seen this yet, written by someone named Ben Feral Selinger. July 6 Okay, I'm fucking sick of the idiocy and done with writing a diatribe every single time a friend posts about how they're upset that Trudeau is giving a terrorist $10m. You people are.... wilfully ignorant and hypocritical. Here's why. (And I thoroughly suggest reading the entire post. If you know me, you know I'm neither stupid, nor an apologist. I am pure fucking science, and this post is such. Read it before making an ass of yourself by posting about how we just gave a terrorist money). The story (the facts we know). * Canadian born Khadr was taken to Afghanistan at age 9, by his father. We don't know if he wanted to go, and we don't know why they went. There has been zero evidence put forth to suggest the trip had anything to do with terrorism. Regardless, as he was only 9, he had no choice in the matter. * Khadr, aged 15, was found in critical condition following a...

It's Canada Day, this year dubbed Canada 150, with its own  corporate brand  and a carefully worded story of that number 150. We also have Canada 150+ , which acknowledges that human cultures and societies have been living in what is now Canada for thousands of years. I have mixed feelings about Canada Day. First, I despise nationalism of all kinds, including the kind called patriotism. I used to make a distinction between the two (something I learned from my mother), but have come to feel that it is all the same: I am better than you because I live on this piece of land and you don't. In Canada, patriotism mostly translates into complacency, as if "we're much better than our neighbours to the south!" is good enough. But more importantly, when it comes to Canada 150, are indigenous people. The very concept of Canada 150 excludes and erases the original inhabitants of this land. From an indigenous point of view, Canada 150 marks the beginning of colonialism, occupa...

When I tell people I'm going to Egypt, they are happy and excited for me. Then, almost everyone asks me if it's safe there, and says, "Be careful." The recent incident in Berlin has caused me to reflect on why this is. First: I am not complaining about friends expressing concern for my safety. I know that they are coming from a place of care and concern. But they are also coming from a place of fear. The media has conditioned us to think of the Middle East as inherently unstable and unsafe. Add to that the violence during and after the 2011 Egyptian revolution, and western fears that US-backed dictator Mubarak would be replaced with a fundamentalist theocracy. In Canada, there's also another layer: what I observe as a prevalent Canadian attitude about travel safety. To my mind, many Canadians are inordinately worried about safety when travelling. They are often timid about the world, risk-averse, people who value safety over adventure, and the known world over e...

Still war resisters. Still in Canada. Still fighting to stay. So far, the change in government hasn't helped the Iraq War resisters who remain here, nor the ones who were forced out of Canada who would like to return. The Trudeau government could do this so easily. And yet. The CBC Radio show " DNTO " recently did an excellent segment about the US Iraq War resisters and the fight - still going on - to let them stay in Canada. When American soldier Joshua Key fled to Canada in 2005 , he never imagined that ten years later he would still be fighting a war — against the U.S. army, against post-traumatic stress disorder, and against the Canadian government. Key is one of an estimated 15 Iraq war veterans who are fighting to remain in Canada. The resisters left home to avoid being sent back to a war they didn't believe in. Today, they fear they'll be sent to prison if they're deported. On this week's DNTO, you'll meet modern war resisters. Each of their sto...

About a month ago, I received an email from a film producer: Netflix is making a documentary about Americans who moved to Canada for political reasons, and asked if Allan and I would be interviewed. We spent a long time chatting with her, before being told that the film is being shot in Vancouver and we're not in it. Oh well. A few days later, a writer called about a story for The Guardian , asking much the same questions. That interview resulted in this article: 'An alternative exists': the US citizens who vowed to flee to Canada – and did . This writer didn't use much of my interview, but I did get the last word! Then someone at The Toronto Star noticed the Guardian story and did a long interview with me. That story came out yesterday: Disenchanted U.S. voters look with longing eyes to Canada, but few follow through . The editors scrapped most of what I said about the differences between Canada and the U.S. I even gave them the bullet-point version: universal health ...

I attended OLA * for only one day this year, partly because I'm already missing so much work for bargaining and other union business, and partly because one day is often enough. There's a huge lineup of presentations, poster sessions, book signings, vendors, keynote speakers, tours, receptions, etc. - lots of etc. - but the presentations are the meat of the conference. Four presentations a day for three days is just too much. As it happened, three of the four talks I attended shared a theme: bringing library services to underserved, marginalized, and socially excluded communities. My first of the day was Choosing to Walk a Path: Library Services with Indigenous Peoples on Purpose . Monique Woroniak, from Winnipeg, a city with a significant indigenous population, first set the social and political context. It was a bit like being at our annual socialist conference: the presenter using the expression the Canadian state , as opposed to Canada , and speaking about settler colonial...

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has just completed its week-long closing event in Ottawa. The Commission was part of the historic settlement between the Canadian Government and the survivors of the former Indian Residential Schools. Its mandate is to inform all Canadians about what happened in Indian Residential Schools (IRS). The Commission will document the truth of survivors, families, communities and anyone personally affected by the IRS experience. This includes First Nations, Inuit and Métis former Indian Residential School students, their families, communities, the Churches, former school employees, Government and other Canadians. I don't know if this is well known outside of Canada, or outside of people who take a special interest in indigenous issues. The divide between natives and non-natives in Canada is vast. Environmental activism - opposition to the tar sands, pipelines, fracking, and Canadian mining globally - offers prime opportunity for cooperat...

I'm in New York for a few days, visiting my mom and some friends. Today at a Whole Foods, my mother said to the cashier, "Don't make the packages too heavy." And the cashier said, "OK." I was a bit surprised. My mother is a very polite, friendly person. Yet I thought she sounded somewhat rude. And then I thought, no, this is what people sound like here. In Canada - even in Mississauga, where supposedly we're practically American  - this same conversation "at the cash" sounds like this: "Hi, how are you today?" "Fine thanks, and you?" "I'm doing fine. If you don't mind, could you please not put too much in any one package? I'm not very strong!" "Oh sure, no problem. Is three bags all right? Or would you prefer four?" "Three is fine, thank you!" "Do you need help getting out to your car?" "No that's fine, I'm good." "Are you sure?" "Yes, I pro...

Robert Fisk, in The Independent : But as the years passed, old Bill Fisk became very ruminative about the Great War. He learned that Haig had lied, that he himself had fought for a world that betrayed him, that 20,000 British dead on the first day of the Somme – which he mercifully avoided because his first regiment, the Cheshires, sent him to Dublin and Cork to deal with another 1916 "problem" – was a trashing of human life. In hospital and recovering from cancer, I asked him once why the Great War was fought. "All I can tell you, fellah," he said, "was that it was a great waste." And he swept his hand from left to right. Then he stopped wearing his poppy. I asked him why, and he said that he didn't want to see "so many damn fools" wearing it – he was a provocative man and, sadly, I fell out with him in his old age. What he meant was that all kinds of people who had no idea of the suffering of the Great War – or the Second, for that matter ...

I've been thinking a lot about Kevin Vickers. By now the world knows Vickers' name: he is the sergeant-at-arms of the Parliament of Canada, and his quick thinking and courage undoubtedly saved lives. Vickers shot killed Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, who had already killed one person and appeared intent on killing others. Vickers is a hero. But my thoughts of him are filled not with adulation, but with sorrow. Imagine going to work one day, a day like any other, and by the time the day is done, you have taken a human life. You have killed a man at close range. What could that be like? It would not be surprising if Vickers will grapple with flashbacks, night terrors, or other forms of PTSD. Despite Vickers' courage and his new celebrity, I'd bet that few of us would want to stand in his shoes. I've also been thinking of Nathan Cirillo, because it's impossible not to. Although I consume very little mainstream media, a short dip into my Facebook feed is enough: the dog Ciri...

I had been living in Canada but a few short months when Stephen Harper, as leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, formed his first minority government. At the time, this blog hosted an active and lively ongoing discussion about Canadian culture and politics, and my personal acculturation. I did not like Harper or his Conservatives, but I balked at what I saw as hyperbole from certain progressive people: Harper will turn Canada into the United States. I felt the two countries were different enough to make that particular magic trick impossible. Now, almost ten years later, at least a portion of my friends' dire prophesy seems at the verge of coming true: Canada is becoming a country continually at war. It's safe to say that during my lifetime, the United States has been continually at war.* North of the border, the view is different in scale, but is it different in kind? As Prime Minister Harper prepares to send Canadian Forces into Iraq, we should look at Canada's rece...

Indian Horse , by Richard Wagamese, is a hauntingly beautiful novel about an Ojibway boy's journey into manhood. It was the Readers' Choice winner of the 2013  Canada Reads , CBC Radio's book promotion program. But if you're like me and don't listen to the radio, you may have missed it. Don't miss it. Indian Horse should be widely read - by everyone, but especially by Canadians. In a slim, spare volume, drawing vivid pictures with very few words, Wagamese brings you into the Ojibway family. They are struggling to hold onto their culture - and indeed, to keep their family physically together, as children are being abducted and forced into the so-called residential schools. Saul Indian Horse, the hero and narrator of the novel, survives the residential school by finding solace and joy in an unlikely place: hockey. Hockey is an integral part of Indian Horse , and Wagamese has written some of the best description of sport I've read in a novel, seamlessly knitti...

At year's end, The Tyee reported that a memo - marked "secret" and first reported on OCanada.com  - cast grave doubts on the Harper Government's claim that environmental archives were destroyed only after they had been preserved digitally. In other words, the memo proves what progressive and concerned Canadians have long known and suspected to be true. A federal document marked "secret" obtained by Postmedia News indicates the closure or destruction of more than half a dozen world famous science libraries has little if anything to do with digitizing books as claimed by the Harper government. In fact, the document, a compendium of cuts to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans that can be read in its entirety at the bottom of this story, mentions only the "culling of materials" as the "main activities" involved as the science libraries are reduced from nine to two. Specifically, it details "culling materials in the closed libraries ...

For Canadians who fear and distrust the steadily growing militarism suffusing the culture of our country, two recent books are indispensable: What We Talk About When We Talk About War , by Noah Richler, and Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety by Ian McKay and Jamie Swift. Richler's book focuses on the re-writing and re-framing the distant past. And as the title (with its homage to Raymond Carver) suggests, Richler focuses on language. He analyzes how Canada's image of itself, in relation to war-making and the military, has been radically altered, bit by incremental bit. The book is not a play-by-play of the process; Richler assumes you know the general outline and the major players. It's a deep analysis of the language and symbolism of a right-wing cabal intent on discrediting Canada's history of peacekeeping, and changing its national self-image through revisionist history, from the War of 1812 to Vimy Ridge to Remembrance Day, right on up to the re...

From Noah Richler's What We Talk About When We Talk About War : We have a duty to be honest and rigorous, with ourselves and with others, and to be able to brook contradiction and argument in our discussions of past wars and the present one in Afghanistan. But instead, in today's Canada, we have arrived at a point where the use of any language that is not euphemistic is greeted as an assault on the work of soldiers, on a singular view of our past, and therefore on the character of the nation itself. Ideology thrives. History hardly comes into it. . . . . Among the traditional words and phrases prone to high diction that [Paul] Fussell [author of The Great War in Modern Memory ] lists are: Friend... comrade Obedient... brave Earnestly brave... gallant Cheerfully brave... plucky Bravery considered after the fact... valour ... Not to complain is to be... manly A soldier is a... warrior The legs and arms of young men are... limbs The dead on the battlefield are... fallen The object...

[The over-emphasis on Canadian military history] distorts and downplays the significant roles that Canadian politicians, diplomats, jurists and a variety of other civilians (such as artists) have had in shaping not just the domestic Canadian polity but abstract, universal ideas about statehood that have served as examples internationally - in Scottish constitutional development, for instance, and of course in the development of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted in 1948. The nature of this contribution is significant specifically because the truth of Canadian history is that our military's stake has not been inordinate. Resolution through discussion and compromise, and the recognition of the interests of others that such an approach entails, is seen to contribute to the greater good and to have characterized not only the relationship between the government and Aboriginals, between English- and French-speaking Quebeckers (and between the British government a...

Some years ago, I analyzed the "Discover Canada", the most recent guide for immigrants studying for the Canadian citizenship exam. I compared the booklet to the previous citizenship guide, "A Look At Canada", and found within its pages the Harper Government's vision of Canada. Later, we learned that the citizenship exam itself uses a significantly higher reading level than past exams, and functions as a barrier for many newcomers who wish to become citizens: " jason kenney gets his wish: the anglicising of canadian citizenship ". More recently, columnist Heather Mallick analyzed the new Canadian passport. Unsurprisingly, she found the Harper Government's fingerprints all over it. Mallick: Canada is increasingly becoming unrecognizable to me. I don’t mean this just in an abstract sense, when I read about shameful things like Ottawa trying to avoid taking in refugees who have been tortured, because they require extra medical care. Foreigners who wak...

I have written a bit about the use of professional sports as a vehicle for war propaganda and militarism, such as when the Harper Government used the Olympic torch relay  to promote its war in Afghanistan. My partner Allan has covered this ground more consistently, since he writes a sports blog. See, for example, his " Thoughts Prompted By The Red Sox Foundation's Association With "Run To Home Base" " and " The National Anthem And The Idea Of Respect ", among others. These are mostly from a US perspective, since that's mostly where Major League Baseball is played. Whether it's endless rounds of "God Bless America," (nationalism being the first stop on the road to war), the honouring of veterans who are always deemed "heroes," or in one case, a plan to distribute dog-tags to kids attending a game ( dropped after protests ), the continuing militarization of sports is a disturbing - yet largely uncontested - trend. When milit...

Here's a chance to preserve Canadian history - the real history, not the government-approved kind - and to preserve art and creativity and alternative media, all at the same time. Please consider giving $7.00 - or any amount - and sharing this excellent campaign with your friends and on social media. More info: Hi! My name is Nicole Marie Guiniling and I’m the founder of Ad Astra Comix . Ad Astra is a website that promotes political and historical comic books, and has recently stepped, albeit with shakey legs, into production, distribution, and publishing. Over the next 40 days, I'm here on IndieGoGo to promote the re-mastering of "100 Year Rip-Off: The Real History of British Columbia." It’s a graphic history of the province that was first published in 1971. That makes it the oldest "Graphic History" on record in Canada. 100 Year Rip-Off In July 1971, 100 Year Rip-Off was printed as an 8-page tabloid-sized insert in the counter-culture newspaper, Socialis...

Congratulations to Andy Barrie, former CBC broadcaster, on being awarded the Order of Canada, the country's highest civilian honour. This CBC story says that Barrie "left the U.S. and moved to Canada during the Vietnam War". But if you listen to this interview , you will hear how Barry "left" and "moved": he had volunteered for the war in Vietnam, then deserted, and fled to Canada. Andy Barrie is a war resister, and was a deserter. (Do you hear that, Jason Kenney? Andy volunteered and deserted , and he was still allowed to stay.) Andy has been a longtime and active supporter of the War Resisters Support Campaign and of our current group of resisters to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Thank you, Andy Barrie, for being in Canada, and for choosing peace.