“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, through multinational and transnational corporations, have violated human rights and attacked workers, directly and indirectly.” Oney told me this on a humid afternoon in El […] More »

If you missed the Daily Show this week, on Wednesday it offered a kind of condensed, sweetened version of the current political moment in the U.S., a methodical and droll demolition of the out-and-out insanity that has gripped the American right. In the segment—which, by the way, earns every ounce of smugness it exudes—the archives […] More »

International development and foreign aid is a complicated and contentious field. A thousand different components—such as water, sanitation, food security, child care, education, infrastructure—need to be addressed simultaneously. The targeted community must be the leader of all changes. Financing must come from a sustainable source, such as partial subsidization by the community itself, to ensure […] More »

It’s not the size of your bureaucracy. It’s how you use it. Onward, Stephen Harper: lead us to the socialist utopia! If you follow the right-wing punditry you’d think comrades Harper, Obama, Brown, and the like are leading us along that slippery slope to—gasp—socialism. Not that any of these leaders has a nice word to […] More »

The Alberta environment ministry announced this week that they’re going to cut back on acid-rain testing in the northern tar sands region, citing budget cuts. Up to now, the province has been sampling rain for its acidic content every week. They believe they can get the same top-notch quality results by testing less: “It’s a […] More »

Quebec city’s recent 400th anniversary celebration was quite a spectacle — Paul McCartney, Celine Dion, treasures from the Louvre, and even the occasional nod to diversity like the multicultural rap show, Hip hop tout en couleurs (Hip hop in all Colours). For the most part, though, the Quebec black experience went unacknowledged. For “Webster” Aly […] More »

When Finance Minister Jim Flaherty first revealed his stimulus spending package back in January, he announced that Canada’s Economic Action Plan would “protect Canadians during the global recession” and “put more money in the hands of Canadian families, to help them weather the current storm.” Although Flaherty claims to have introduced a budget that is […] More »

As the wheels hit the hot asphalt of the runway, I look up to see the frenetic expressions on the faces of my fellow passengers—a look that falls somewhere between anxious and anaphylactic, and it’s clear they’re desperate to get off the plane. It’s been a short and relatively painless flight from Nairobi, Kenya, to […] More »

I’m a fan of the AMC series Mad Men, which premiered its third season last night. The show has always occupied an awkward cultural space, both fetishizing and pathologizing its subjects: meticulously styled and artfully shot, it depicts a glossy, nostalgic vision of the early 1960s in America, but continually undermines that nostalgia, exposing the […] More »

The New Democratic Party convenes today in Halifax for its federal convention, and one of the hottest questions is whether the party will drop the “New” from its name. Sure, there’s a bunch of boring old policy meetings and stuff, to, you know, lay out a vision for the country and junk, but there’s something […] More »

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 […] More »