test blog 3

Bravo to the hundreds of Canadian family doctors who protested the dismantling of the refugee health care system! There was a demonstration in Ottawa, occupations of MP's offices in Winnipeg and Toronto, and press conferences in other cities. "I just cannot understand how my government can take the most vulnerable of people and decide it's appropriate to make them more vulnerable," said Dr. Paul Caulford, a Scarborough, Ont., family physician, who has worked with immigrants and refugees for decades. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney claims that refugee claimants have better health care than other Canadians - a lie - and that this is a cost-cutting measure - another lie. The Interim Federal Health Program costs a pittance. And we all know that allowing health needs to go untreated does not save money in the long run. The move is part of Jason Kenney's program of tightening the noose around certain prospective immigrants and refugee claimants, to make Canada a hars...

Elizabeth May, House of Commons, May 11, 2012: Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-38. I am very sad, because this bill is the worst of all bills of this House, for two reasons. First, because the government has chosen to introduce fundamental changes to many laws that affect the environmental, social and economic life of Canada, without consultation and in a way that is illegitimate and scandalous. This process is unacceptable and against true democracy. Second, beyond the process that is so offensive, this bill that purports to be a budget bill is, in substance, something quite different. The substance of the changes is equally alarming. Laws this bad take some explanation. As I have sat through the truncated debate on this process at second reading, what we have had are presentations from the government side, the Conservative MPs, basically providing lists of things they like in the legislation, and from the opposition benches, lists of things we do not like in this legisla...

I didn't blog about this year's seal slaughter, although I followed news of it through HSI Canada. It isn't going well for sealers, as the market for their antiquated product has all but disappeared. Despite millions of dollars in government financing provided to the sealing industry this year, most sealers are not participating in the slaughter. In recent days, only a few dozen sealing vessels have hailed out, down from more than 1,000 in the past. As of April 15, about 25,000 seals have been killed out of a quota of 400,000. While the scale of the slaughter so far has been smaller than in previous years, it was devastating to witness the suffering of the very young pups, who were killed just so their skins could be stockpiled. Just as notable was the impact of climate change on these ice dependent harp seals. Instead of solid pack ice, we found tiny, melting ice floes and only a few thousand pups in regions where there should be hundreds of thousands. Between closing sea...

Andrew Mitrovica, author of Covert Entry: Spies, Lies and Crimes Inside Canada’s Secret Service : Late last week, in its familiar stealth-like fashion, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government shuttered the office of the Inspector General (IG) over Canada’s spy service, CSIS. The IG acted as the public safety minister’s eyes and ears, monitoring whether or not our powerfully intrusive domestic intelligence service was abiding by its policies and, more important, the law as it went about its key counter-espionage and counter-terrorism responsibilities. I say “stealth-like” because the Conservative government buried its decision to shut down the IG’s office deep inside a budget bill it tabled last week. If not for the industrious work of Canadian Press reporter Bruce Cheadle, Canadians would have been kept in the dark about this astonishingly wrong-headed decision to pull the plug on the only independent agency that provided some measure of oversight over CSIS’s day-to-day operations. Th...

On Monday, June 4, websites representing thousands of Canadian people and organizations will go dark to protest changes introduced in the Harper Government's TM budget act (Bill C-38). To join this online protest, go to Black Out Speak Out - or Silence, on parle! - and sign up. You'll receive tools to turn your blog or website into a message of protest that will be counted by all the major media and political parties. This government, which represents the interests of industries and profit over the interests of ordinary Canadian people, is putting the future of our land, water and climate at risk. More than a third of the budget is dedicated to weakening Canada's most important environmental laws, including measures to make it more difficult for environmental charities to participate in the public policy process. Typically undemocratic and typically insular, this will further extend the government's orientation of making policy decisions based on profit and ideology,...

This is the last installment of my notes from the 2011 Marxism conference in Toronto. The series starts here. This post is less complete than the preceding Marxism 2011 posts. They are Allan's notes from the sessions I chaired, and two sessions he attended without me. Apparently Allan is not the note-taker I am! But I've learned that you never know who is reading or who is Googling, and what they might need. In that spirit, here are four short takes on four more talks from Marxism 2011. * * * * Racism, Islamophobia and Attacks on Multi-Culturalism Dr. Jasmin Zine and Ayesha Adhami May 29, 2011 Dr. Jasmin Zine discussed the rise in Islamophobia since the September 11, 2001 attacks. She asked some open-ended questions: What is a radical? How can we identify a radical? She talked about the common public image of a violent jihadist, how that image is developed, by whom, and why. She asked: What are the limits of tolerance, the limits of multi-culturalism? What kind of ideas are tol...