Irving Howe (the New York socialist) once wrote “Blessed New York Times! What would radical journalism in America do without it?” The newspaper was, to be sure, a tool of the bourgeois but a tool that reported the news with unequalled comprehensiveness. Read it and, ideology aside, you became the possessor of a full range […] More »
The eleven extraordinary young people profiled in Citizens of Nowhere have been teachers, social workers, mediators, and breadwinners. Journalist Debi Goodwin meets them as refugees in Dadaab, Kenya, and follows them through their difficult transition to life as first-year university students in Canada. They have each been sponsored to come to study in Canada as […] More »
Last week we learned that the federal government spent $107,749.52 on Nikon DSLR D300s for the G20. For those of you who, like me five minutes ago, don’t know anything about photography let me tell you all you need to know about the D300s: it’s a really good camera. You can check out the reviews […] More »
Consider this exchange: Speaker 1: “Would you like to go the aquarium with me [tomorrow] to see the dolphin show?” Speaker 2: “The dolphin show?” Speaker 1: “The dolphins are very intelligent animals.” Speaker 3: “But the aquarium is not open tomorrow.” Speaker 1: “It will be open tomorrow” Out of context it’s hard to […] More »
The Toronto Community Mobilization Network kicked off its themed days of resistance to the G20 on Monday with activists converging around a mixed bag of issues including income equity, community control over resources, migrant justice, and an end to war and occupation. It’s an ambitious start for the week-long campaigns. On their own, each issue […] More »
We’ve talked a lot about what’s going wrong so far with the G20 and G8 meetings taking place in Ontario this year. And lord knows there are plenty of problems: aside from the lack of discussion surrounding women’s health we’re now chopping down trees in an urban jungle and searching around for supposedly stolen police […] More »
While the prime minister has been trying to do damage control for his G20 agenda, activists and organizers of all stripes have been busy building social justice movements. Sometimes movement-building involves bickering over listservs about who gets to the carry the banner, but sometimes it also involves holding massive, multi-day, multi-issue summits. Left Forum might […] More »
Unless you have been living under a fake rock beside a fake lake, chances are you’ve heard about this G8/G20 business in some way, shape, or form. The reasons why many people are protesting, however, may not be as clear. That’s probably because there isn’t any single issue uniting all protesters. And, despite what you […] 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 »
The G20 is less than two weeks away, and there’s a lot going on. You could just turn to the usual media suspects to get your news about the G20, but when it comes to the street-level collision of neoconservative colonialist plutocrats and anti-globalization activists (among many other blocs of interests), it pays to look […] More »
With all this hand-wringing over firebombs and security perimeters, perhaps it’s time to put our hands to better use. I’m talking, of course, about getting creative when the G8/G20 rolls into the province next month. John Greyson, filmmaker and York University professor, posted this short film on his Vimeo site a few days ago. Greyson’s […] More »