March 10, 2010
Counting the Vancouver 2010 Olympics’ broken promises
One of Pivot Legal Society's Red Tents on the streets of Vancouver during the 2010 Winter Olympics. Photo by The Blackbird. The five-ring circus has rolled out of Vancouver, but the tents are still up. Hundreds of red tents, which became as much a symbol of our 2010 Games as those maple leaf mittens, won’t be coming down until we get our housing legacy. That’s the pledge of Pivot Legal Society,... [More >>]
March 2, 2010
How to bring democracy back to Alberta
There’s voter apathy and then there’s Alberta. In the 2008 provincial election, a mere 41 percent of eligible voters came out. The provincial Conservative government went on to claim a historic 11th straight victory, a win that Athabasca University history professor Alvin Finkel believes was the result of Albertans not believing that there’s a viable alternative to the Tories. So this past June,... [More >>]
January 7, 2010
Which party leader uses social media better?
Separating the hax0rs from the n00bs in Canada’s parliament Part of Barack Obama’s victory came on the back of a grassroots campaign that effectively used the internet to collect supporters and funds. Among social-media-savvy politicians, the president is The Man. While Obama might be down with the kids today, have any Canadian leaders managed to cash in on the social-media cachet? Or is Twitter... [More >>]
October 16, 2009
Interview: Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter
On June 9, Nova Scotians elected the province’s first ever NDP government, lead by former Navy public-information-officer-turned-journalist-turned-lawyer Darrell Dexter. This caught up with the new 52-year-old premier about a month later, just after he had attended a Paul McCartney concert in Halifax. This: Did you meet McCartney? Dexter: I did. It was quite a highlight. When you were a kid if someone... [More >>]
August 24, 2009
Deadly dealings surround Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement
Juan Pablo Ochoa, left, addresses a crowd of cane cutters in Bua, Colombia after a court hearing related to their strike. "What is going on is a frame-up." Photo credit: Dawn Paley. “You know that here in Colombia, there are many human-rights violations,” says José Oney Valencia Llanos, who earns his living cutting sugar cane in Colombia’s fertile Cauca Valley. “Business people,... [More >>]
August 14, 2009
How to rehabilitate the NDP
With its exclusive fixation on winning more seats, the NDP has sacrificed the opportunity to build a truly progressive movement. On the 75th anniversary of the CCF, James Laxer argues that to save the present, we need to remember the past [This article was originally published in the July-August 2008 issue of This Magazine. We've reposted it here since the NDP 2009 federal convention happens this weekend... [More >>]
August 13, 2009
How the Green Party is skewing Canadian elections
Another B.C. election has passed, and the Liberals under Premier Gordon Campbell were able to hold on to power, but it was hard to tell at times which party stood where on the issues and the political spectrum. The environment was a central issue in this election, but it played out in a way that made no sense based on the historic positioning of political parties in Canada. The Liberal Party of B.C.,... [More >>]
May 1, 2009
Baffled at the Ballot Box
In 1864, Thomas Hare argued at the Association Internationale pour le Progrès des Sciences Sociales meeting in Amsterdam that proportional representation — in which parliamentary seats are awarded based on political parties’ share of the popular vote — was a much fairer system than the “single member plurality” system being used in his home country of England. Within 60 years,... [More >>]
