The recent U.K. election has raised the issue of electoral reform there, as the Liberal Democratic party made it a condition for propping up the Conservative government. This spoke to social activist Judy Rebick, who is a member of Fair Vote Canada, about her group’s campaign to bring some form of proportional representation to Canada. […] More »

The July-August 2010 issue of This is now in subscribers’ mailboxes and on newsstands. As usual, you’ll be able to read all the articles here on the website as we post them over the next few weeks. But also as usual, we encourage you to subscribe to the magazine, which is the best way to […] More »

Peter Milliken has had it made for almost ten years. He lives just down the hall from work, gets to throw lavish parties at a country estate, and makes a whole lot of money every year. Such is the life of the Speaker of the House of Commons—according to the image propagated by most news […] More »

Canada has shockingly few female legislators. Our electoral system is broken. Voting reform could fix both problems at once. One Thursday last spring, an Angolan MP named Faustina Fernandes Inglês de Almeida Alves addressed an assembly at United Nations Headquarters in New York City. Those present—members of the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the UN Division for […] More »

This week’s edition of Tuesday Tracks rounds up a trilogy of music videos. The theme was inspired by our first selection today. It occurred to me how much the landscape has changed over the past ten years for music videos. As an adolescent, videos were my primary source for new music. Commercial radio was the […] More »

Another new entry today in the Verbatim series, the transcripts we provide of our Listen to This podcast. (Just a reminder that you can catch new, original interviews every other Monday—you can subscribe with any podcast listening program by grabbing the podcast rss feed, or easily subscribing through iTunes.) In today’s interview, associate editor Natalie Samson talked with Eternia, […] More »

Young Québécois filmmakers are rejecting the commercially successful nostalgia movies of recent years in favour of suburban ennui, substance abuse, and suicide. Get ready to get gloomy! The title of Quebec director Stéphane Lafleur’s Continental, un film sans fusil (Continental, A Film Without Guns) is not only a playful warning to viewers seeking the adrenaline […] More »

This week on Tuesday Tracks we’ve decided to bring you a trio of sad songs. We’ve celebrated all sorts of strange psychedelic dance-a-thons in the past few weeks, great for parties and good times. It’s just as important however, to embrace melancholy sometimes. Whether it’s because of a bad run of luck, the end of […] More »

[Editor’s note: This interview was conducted and published ahead of the final decisions about the fate of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. Eventually, the Pride Toronto board of directors decided to ban the phrase “Israeli Apartheid,” then retracted the decision after community outcry. See today’s blog post by Natalie Samson for a different—and considerably less sunny—outlook […] More »

You may have already heard something of Pride Toronto’s new sign-vetting policy,  its banning of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) from the parade, and its outlawing of the term “Israeli apartheid” from all Pride-related events.  Or about how, after weeks of public outrage, including the humiliation of having several Pride honourees return their awards, Pride […] More »