October 2008
128 posts
Harper's election could be undone
by Alice Klein
Under the radar of the mainstream, the movement to unseat Harper is growing strong. VoteforEnvironment.ca has been up for just over a week and it is getting an impressive 10,000 unique users a day. A steady stream of media including the Toronto Star, the Ottawa Citizen, Le Devoir, CBC Canada Votes, and Canadian Press. Web campaigner Avaaz has been highlighting the site as a go to...
Booga Booga!
by Vicky Smallman
For an oh-so-brief moment I actually thought that women’s issues were going to get some real attention this election. Here was Stéphane Dion touting the Liberals’ success in recruiting women candidates…. Equal Voice’s candidate tracking project had some good attention from the national media…. Pro-choice advocates marched in Montreal and protested...
A Billion is a Thousand Million
by Blair Redlin
Is it just me, or are the size of these dollar figures starting to make your head spin? $700 billion to a trillion dollars for the U.S. banks. $50 billion in corporate tax cuts here at home. A billion here, a billion there.
Ever wondered what a billion is? It’s a lot really. A billion is a thousand million. Like - nine zeros in a billion. 12 zeros in a trillion.
But in...
Dying to go to school
by Mai Nguyen, rabble staff
Saying no to war isn’t that easy. When you’ve got a pile of debt from your student loans, or you’re working a minimum wage job, or you have an unreliable health plan, it’s hard to refuse when military recruiters dangle a “solution” to your problems. Let’s face it; higher education is expensive, making university campuses hot spots for military recruiters to enlist....
September 2008
222 posts
Bailouts and governments - starting a new...
By Armine Yalnizyan, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
From the start of this federal election, the ballot box question for voters has been - how would they handle an economic slowdown?
The events of the past week make that an unavoidable question issue now, and it’s not just a question of how each leader would keep the country in the black. It’s more personal - what would...
Top ten reasons for thanking conservatives.
by Robert Chernomas *
You can find Walkerton, Ontario on the map.
You know that Listeria is not a street where desperate housewives live.
You now know a word, Vioxx, with more than one X in it.
You know how many zeros there are in a $700B
You don’t need to remember how to pronounce Kyoto.
You finally know whom they are talking about when they say, “the meek
shall inherit the earth.”
You...
And the choices in Yukon are ...
By Lily Gontard
Like many Canadians, I was on vacation when the election was called. When I returned home, there were just over two weeks left to assess the candidates and their parties.
In the salad of junk mail that awaited me, two brochures were tossed between flyers for Pizza Hut and The Brick: one from from Conservative Party candidate Darrell Pasloski; the other from long-serving incumbent...
Harper 'unwelcomed' in Northern Quebec
by Pierre Beaudet
Over 400 people ‘welcomed’ Harper yesterday in northern Quebec to tell him that he was NOT welcomed there. Val D’Or is one of these hard-hit communities where the decline of the lumber industry has put thousands of people at risk. It’s also a mining area where the situation is better, but where permanent jobs are not that many since the industry is heavily mechanized now. All in...
Yesterday's News
Trish Hennessy, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
Today’s Globe and Mail touts a headline which should become a classic reference in Wikipedia for the definition of yesterday’s news: “Canadian economy booms in July”.
Talk about stale dated. Just yesterday afternoon, the very same Globe and Mail informed us the world’s stock markets were in free fall after U.S....
Strong leaders have open minds
By David Suzuki
How often must a president or prime minister make split-second decisions of the kind they have to make during a debate? We’ve witnessed eight years of an American president who apparently isn’t interested in seeking advice or counsel when his mind is already made up and who doggedly refuses to admit mistakes or change his mind. That’s truly scary because he’s running the most...
Law and Order stick (shtick)
by Dionne Brand
Conservatives and their satraps religiously haul out the ‘law and order’ stick each election. Fear not remedy is at the base of their deploying this trope. No one is against law and order, it would be like being against water, or against air or something; so the fake attacks about who is soft, and who hard, on crime are really just so much fear mongering and macho posturing. The...
Self Immolation is Not Limited to American...
By James Laxer
One Republican Congressman who voted against the Bush administration’s bailout package yesterday said it was a choice between freedom and material comfort. He chose freedom. Others warned that what had been averted when the plan failed in the House of Representatives was no less than the onset of socialism. Lou Dobbs, who hosts a show on CNN that is...
Doing the Blog Circuit
by Bernadette Wagner
Bloggers are part of the new media and I like to check out what they have to say about the goings-on in our country, particularly when an election campaign is underway! So, here goes:
I’ll start in Saskatchewan, with Joe, over at Owls and Roosters, who’s talking about the federal Agriculture Minister, Gerry Ritz. Ritz is MIA.
[The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix]...
Financial Hurricane and the Election
by Jim Stanford
Posted below is the unexpurgated version of my column in today’s Globe
and Mail regarding the U.S. financial crisis and our election (the line
about the RCMP got left on the cutting room floor, go figger!). This
afternoon’s dramatic events (U.S. bailout package defeated, markets are
now plunging) makes it all the more timely. Mr. Harper’s clear
endorsement...
The NDP is right to reverse corporate tax cuts
By Murray Dobbin
The corporate media - which now unfortunately includes the CBC - is on the
verge of hysteria about the NDP’s pledge to reverse Stephen Harper’s
outrageous $50 billion corporate tax cuts. These cuts would make us, by
2012, the lowest taxed jurisdiction in the developed world.
Will it make us more competitive? There is not a shred of evidence to
support this claim...
NAFTA’s threat to health care: ‘we told you so’
By Steven Shrybman
NAFTA’s threat to health care has been exposed right in the middle of the federal election.
For some time we have been warning that Canada’s health care system is vulnerable to attack under NAFTA investment rules (Chapter 11 of the trade deal.) That risk increases with the extent to which private investment is allowed into the medicare system.
The “we”...
We must elect leaders who care about the planet
By David Suzuki with Faisal Moola. Leaders of nations worldwide know we are near more than one environmental tipping point. So they’ve met to hammer out agreements in crucial areas such as biodiversity loss and global warming. Canada itself has acknowledged, through national planning and legislation, the importance of issues such as species conservation and sustainable development. Many of...
Dion Sneers at the NDP
By James Laxer
During this campaign, Stephane Dion has been giving lessons on how to play a bad hand badly.
Last week Jack Layton hinted (it was a very mild hint) that he might be willing to consider forming a coalition government with the Liberals. The suggestion was that even if the Conservatives ranked first in seats, provided that the NDP and the Liberals had more...
Labour Movements on the March
by Pierre Beaudet The Anything but Harper campaign continues unabated. The Fédération interprofessionnelle de la santé du Québec which has 57 000 members (mostly nurses and health professionals) has called for a ‘strategic vote’. Lisa Bonamie, the FIQ’s President, has declared that voters should look in their ridings and see who can actually beat the Conservative. The FIQ has just published a...
The election babble continues...
by Michelle Langlois, rabble staff
Strategic voting is a hot topic on babble lately. Elizabeth May is calling for it, and heck, even some NDP supporters are calling for it now that the Liberals and NDP are neck-and-neck in the polls. There’s even a brand new web site dedicated to the idea - but many babblers wonder whether it’s merely the latest effort to get NDP supporters to vote...
Revisiting our roots
by Bernadette Wagner
The current crisis facing global capital and Naomi Klein’s recent lecture to a an 800+ crowd in Regina has me thinking that we in Canada need to elect a government that will prevent economic shock therapy on us when capital’s crisis hits Canada. We certainly cannot trust Mr. Harper and the Cons to help us out.
So, I’m thinking that now might be a good...
The Fundamentals of the US economy are Strong -...
by Robert Chernomas*
A crisis brought to you from the people who ask you to vote for tax cuts
(mostly for the rich and corporations) deregulation and privatization.
Our job as citizens is to free the corporate world of any responsibility
other than to provide us with the opportunity to work for them and
consume their products. When necessary they must be protected from their
own excesses,...
Half way there
by Pierre Beaudet In Quebec at this juncture, Harper has not secured his big jump. This is the good news. In the last weeks, anything but Harper has made a difference. The Harper revolution has been challenged. Like the new repressive legislation to put kids in prisons. An unusual coalition came about to denounce that, including the police, academics, professionals and the left! It is sensitive...
The Godfather of the Conservative Party of Canada...
by James Laxer
Here was the truth about the world as William Aberhart learned it from social credit founder Major Douglas: In the modern age, technology has created the potential for an era of prosperity for all. What prevents this from happening are the operations of banks and other financial institutions which continually take money out of the system. This denies to the people...
The middle class enigma
by Pierre Beaudet Over the last period, the public discourse over class has changed. Classes and class struggle are now back on the agenda, but in way that the left had not hoped for. Nowadays, it is often presented like this: the ‘ordinary person’, the ‘working man’ is fighting the ‘bad system’ controlled by an invading state, an inoperant public sector, a sinister labor movement, in brief, a...
Stephen Harper on Canadian 'culture"
By Murray Dobbin
In an interview by Kevin Michael Grace that appeared in the Montreal Gazette
on March 22, 2002, Stephen Harper offered this answer when asked: “Is there
a Canadian culture?”
Strephen Harper: “Yes, in a very loose sense. But I think that Canadians
culture is complex. It consists of regional cultures within Canada, regional
cultures that cross borders with the...
When artists get organized...
By Dave Oswald Mitchell, Briarpatch Magazine
Never underestimate the power of a bunch of pissed-off artists.
That was Wajdi Mouawad’s key message in his dynamite open letter to Prime Minister Harper. And Canada’s arts community has risen to the challenge in countless ways, large and small.
To add to the growing list to creative responses that could swing this election in a few...
Time to Focus Our Attention (and our Votes)
by Jim Stanford
Harper’s ruthlessly disciplined, defensive campaign (complete with RCMP
assistance to keep protestors and reporters alike at bay) has got him
tantalizingly close to majority territory.
Progressive Canadians know in their guts what a Harper majority, and a
4-year blank cheque to his hard neoliberal vision, would mean for our
prospects for social and environmental justice. ...
The Godfather of the Conservative Party of Canada...
by James Laxer
Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party of Canada is a hybrid of two parties, the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservative Party. The two merged, or more realistically, the Canadian Alliance acquired the PCs in December 1993.
In its traditions, the Conservative Party does not trace its origins back to the Liberal-Conservative Party (known as...
Harper wades into the bitumen quick sand
By Fred Wilson
The Liberals and Conservatives tried to trap NDP candidate Michael Byers yesterday on a poor formulation of NDP policy on the tar sands. But it is the PM who should be answering questions today.
Today in Calgary, Stephen Harper made two announcements on oil and gas policy. He said a new Conservative government would:
Prohibit the exportation of bitumen to countries outside...
ABC by the Numbers
By Marc Lee
Polls and elections go together like right-wingers and tax cuts, but this election campaign seems to be particularly poll-obsessed. The media’s coverage has been weak on issues with excessive attention on the horse race among the main parties.
In those polls what is most striking to me is how little has changed since the 2006 election. The Conservatives got 36.3% of the popular...
Apologies Are Easy, But We’re Still Waiting for...
By Garry John
The federal apology for the residential schools needs some criticism in this election. While government recognition of the abuses indigenous people faced in the residential schools system is welcome, where is the policy change?
Indeed, Canada’s opposition to the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenenous Peoples under Harper, indicates that despite the apology, not much...
NAFTA does threaten water exports
Today, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said that he “re-affirms Canada’s position that the North American Free Trade Agreement cannot require Canada to export bulk water to other NAFTA countries.” This is simply not true.
Council of Canadians chairperson Maude Barlow and national water campaigner Meera Karunananthan tell the fuller story in “Policy Drought: The Harper government’s ...
Breaking news: Andrew McKeever and Krystalline...
rabble.ca has just received notice of Andrew McKeever and Krystalline Kraus’ joint statement on the breaking earlier this week. Read below: — In recent days there has been a lot of discussion about comments Mr. McKeever posted on Facebook that were sexist, offensive and wrong. This issue is not about the medium of the Internet or Facebook. Mr. McKeever has acknowledged what he said...
What about health care?
By Jan Malek, Council of Canadians
There was a good column in The Ottawa Citizen today wondering why health care hasn’t been talked about this election. Both the Conservative and Liberal parties appear to be avoiding the topic of health care like the plague, and while the NDP and the Greens have referred to the importance of the Canada Health Act and cracking down on privatization, the ...
Quebec women join the battle
by Pierre Beaudet The Fédération des femmes du Québec, our biggest coalition of women’s organizations, is calling to defeat Stephen Harper. ‘We are non-partisan’ says the FFQ in its latest communiqué, ‘but women need to defeat Harper and oppose conservative policies’. Michèle Asselin, the President of the FFQ, says Harper is destroying some of the gains achieved by the women’s movement in the past...
Watch out for a CBC wedgie
By Karen Wirsig, Campaign for Democratic Media Artists and “youth criminals” - ie. racialized young people – are being demonized this election to provide the wedge between hard-working, law-abiding, ordinary, red-meat Canadians – ie. those who should vote Conservative – and the city-slicking, ivory-tower, tofu whiners whose minds will not be changed from voting Anyone But Harper.
The...
