This coming week I will be covering the 6th UNESCO Youth Forum in Paris. In preparation for the event, youth delegates have been participating in an online forum and discussing a variety of issues which affect youth during this global economic (and social) crisis. Naturally, one of my preferred topics is along the lines of […] More »
The sky is falling on news, said Mike Katrycz, but this isn’t the first time. The veteran news director joined a panel discussion called “Local TV News Under Siege” at Ryerson Journalism School on Wednesday night. With him were CTV managing editor Adrian Bateman, CBC managing editor Sophia Hadzipetros, and CITY Toronto reporter Farah Nasser. […] More »
For seven days in July, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission met in Gatineau, Quebec, to deliberate on the future of the Canadian internet. Until this summer, the CRTC took an essentially laissez-faire approach to the web: it was too new and too poorly understood to start carving out rules to govern it. But the […] More »
The Ancient Olympic Games were held in Greece every four years and celebrated culture as much as sports. The founder of the modern Olympic movement, Pierre de Coubertin, placed an emphasis on culture as well, making it the “second pillar” of the Olympics, equal to sports. In the early 20th Century, the second pillar was […] More »
The Robert Dziekanski case—in which the unfortunate victim, a non-English speaker who died at the Vancouver airport in 2007 after being Tasered by RCMP officers 24 seconds after they arrived—continues to play out at the Braidwood Inquiry. On Tuesday, RCMP superintendent Wayne Rideout told the inquiry that having RCMP officers investigate their own colleagues presents […] More »
On May 5, 2006, 35 Toronto area video-game developers converged in one spot with a particular goal in mind: to create an entire game, start to finish, in just three days. It was a daunting task, but in the end 10 completed games were assembled, while seven others came just short of the deadline. The […] More »
When civil war between representatives of south Sudan and the government — or north Sudan — erupted in the early 80s, the debris took the form of mass displacement, thousands upon thousands of southern Sudanese leaving their villages that had been ravaged by government-financed militia. Among the unhappy travellers were newly orphaned young males, the […] More »
Ian Brown’s The Boy in the Moon had already achieved a mythic status long before it was ever ready for public eyes. It was this insiders’ rumour, the much anticipated, nagging project that was going to blow away everything the Globe and Mail feature writer had ever written previously. As far back as 2007, the […] More »
It hasn’t been easy being Alberta’s neighbour these last few years. While Canada’s economic wunderkind enjoyed double-digit growth, next-door Saskatchewan saw the near-disappearance of the family farm and watched 35,000 residents in five years flee to other provinces. So when the Conservative Saskatchewan Party swept to power in 2007, promising a $20,000 tuition rebate for […] More »
[Editor’s note: EcoChamber is back after a short break while Emily Hunter was on assignment in the Alberta Tar Sands to see the devastation first hand. Her observations will appear at This.org and in the print edition soon.] The show must not go on. That is what activists are saying about the Toronto International Film […] More »
Above I’ve embedded Lacey’s Story, one of the films in the National Film Board’s Playing It Safe series. If you can’t see it, click here to watch it on the NFB website. Documentaries about drug use and life on the street can easily become depressing cautionary tales. The NFB’s website Playing It Safe avoids this […] More »