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 »

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 »

[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 »

Thousands of people who experienced the G20 summit weekend in Toronto have their own individual stories—some of them terrifying, we’ll have some from our own correspondents soon—and Twitter was one of the main ways that the narrative was shaped. Lots of people took their smartphones into the streets to document the protests and the police […] More »

Jonas Naimark took one of the most striking photos from Sunday, showing the demonstrators and bystanders hemmed in by riot police at the corner of Queen and Spadina. This is just a small portion of the image; click to see the remarkable full-size photo on Naimark’s website. One of the most notorious images from Saturday […] More »

By far the most significant video of the weekend was this one, shot by Meghann Millard from her third floor office on Queen St. West, in which the protesters sing the national anthem, and are then charged by a line of police in riot gear. This video received an extra boost when no less than […] More »

In this edition of Listen to This, Associate Editor Natalie Samson talks with Eternia, the Canadian rapper whose music and volunteer work aim to challenge gender-based stereotypes and injustices such as sexism in the music industry, violence against women, and rape. Eternia was in Toronto two weeks ago for the People’s Summit, the alternative gathering […] More »

From June 25–27, the world’s most influential political and economic leaders will descend upon Muskoka and Toronto for the G8 and G20 summits. Joining them will be thousands of protesters advocating everything from anti-globalization to climate justice. If you want to get in on the dissent, check out this advice for emerging activists from Mike […] More »

[Editor’s note: Alixandra Gould is attending the 2010 Canadian Water Summit on Thursday, June 17. In advance of that, she interviewed a few of the experts who will be speaking at the event about some of the key issues in current Canadian water policy. Yesterday she contributed a report on the sorry state of water infrastructure […] More »

Last night we had a great turnout for the Speak the F**k Up! panel talk we put on in partnership with rabble.ca. Unfortunately, we had technical difficulties — no internet access — that made streaming the video live impossible. But the brave souls at RabbleTV pressed on and recorded the talk for posterity, so we […] More »

So we promised you a live video stream of the panel discussion tonight (http://this.org/speakup). Unfortunately, technical difficulties are going to prevent that. We’ll have the video for you tomorrow, but int the meantime, you can follow as we liveblog the talk here: http://2th.is/cjgR9J Sorry for the inconvenience, we’re disappointed too! But we’ll do our best […] More »