And yet, the Chinese occupation of Tibet seems to have been met with little resistance from the worldwide community, despite a reported 127 self-immolations and a duration of more than than 50 years.

March 10 marked the 55^th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising against the Chinese occupation, and in 55 years very little has changed. With the severe repression of human rights, mass relocation of peaceful nomadic tribes, and an estimated 1.2 million deaths as a direct consequence of Chinese occupation, one might expect countries, like Canada, to voice strong protests, to threaten sanctions, and even to put severe pressure on China, as they did to other countries in similar situations.

Well, back in 2008, Stephen Harper did send a strongly worded statement to the Chinese government in regards to the then brutal crackdown on uprisings in Tibet. “Canada shares the concerns about what is happening in Tibet,” Harper said. “Canada calls upon China to fully respect human rights and peaceful protest. Canada also calls on China to show restraint in dealing with this situation.”

This seemed more than a little hollow however, as a few years later, in 2012, Harper agreed to a Chinese takeover of Nexen, despite the ongoing atrocities in Tibet, and protests against said takeover. Arguably, the Harper government is more interested in trade opportunities rather than human rights, despite previous statements to the contrary. According to Students for a Free Tibet at the time, this take-over “would give the Chinese government direct control over critical energy resources.” They added: “It will also make Canada complicit in China’s human rights atrocities in Tibet as the China National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC) is heavily funding the forced resettlement of Tibetan nomads.”

But hey, on the plus side, at least we got those cuddly panda cubs.

To be fair, the Canadian government has been very supportive of the Dalai Lama since his exile, and made him an honorary Canadian citizen back in 2006. The Dalai Lama has also made several trips to Canada and met with Harper despite warnings from China, who branded him a “political exile who has long been engaged in activities aimed at splitting China under the camouflage of religion.” But this hasn’t been much help to those in Tibet, and the protests and calls for Canada to do better continue.

Protesters matching down Toronto’s Queen’s Street Monday in protest of China’s occupation of Tibet

In Toronto, more than 1,000 people marched to mark the 55th anniversary, and the sixth year since widespread protests have swept through the Tibetan region. It ended outside of the Chines consulate. “Despite 55 years of China’s brutal occupation and systematic attempts to wipe out Tibetan resistance, the Tibetan people’s hope for freedom is stronger than ever before,” Urgyen Badheytsang, national director of Students for a Free Tibet, said in a release. “March 10 is symbolic of the enduring spirit of the Tibetan people’s struggle for freedom.”

He and others are calling on the worldwide community to hold China accountable for its actions. As Badheytsang told Inside Toronto: “I want China’s government to stop torturing Tibetan citizens, give back their human rights, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, their freedom.”

When I returned from China over the summer, having worked there for a year and a half, people would ask me, “What was it like?” And I, like a child trying to verbalize their first lofty idea, was sort of tongue-tied. There are over a billion individual perspectives in the country, yet only one autocratic organization at its helm. It is barely reined in chaos. It’s wild yet it’s orderly. It’s filled with earnest workers and disingenuous ladder-climbers. It’s pro-gay and anti-gay. It inspires close scrutiny yet offers little in the way of answers.

One thing we can say with authority is that its government doesn’t have the finest track record for human rights—detaining activists, suppressing protest, heavily censoring the Internet, and just generally eschewing democratic processes. We’re talking about the rights of roughly one-sixth of all humans. That’s why, when the UN’s Human Rights Council opened up its first investigation of China since Xi Jinping became president, I expected the government to get a good public shaming.

I was … sort of satisfied. Some countries actually trumpeted China’s progress and human right’s accomplishments—Russia said, “We commend China on protection of rights of religious beliefs”, and Yemen applauded “China’s remarkable achievements in economic and social achievements [sic]”. Most Western countries, however, reproached China for the aforementioned issues (as well as its draconian capital punishment policies and stance towards ethnic minorities). Canada, among the most direct, said, “Stop the prosecution and persecution of people for the practice of their religion or belief including Catholics, other Christians, Tibetans, Uyghurs and Falun Gong… And eliminate extrajudicial measures like forced disappearances”.

But the real win this week goes to the Tibet activists who scaled the height of the UN’s Palais de Nations to unfurl a large 9X15-meter banner reading: “China fails human rights in Tibet—U.N. stand up for Tibet”. The banner was in response to China’s colonization of Tibet (China calls it a “peaceful liberation”) and their assimilative policies, which have led some, including the Dalai Lama, to use the term “cultural genocide”. Since 2009, there have been at least 122 self-immolations in Tibet in response to China’s unwanted presence. It’s good to see the issue continue to garner attention in the west, aside from those ubiquitous bumper stickers. As for the four activists responsible, they can’t be arrested, but they’re being sent back to their home countries (Denmark, UK) to be dealt with locally.

Sadly, we aren’t able to hear what the average Chinese citizen has to say about the human rights issue in China, as netizens are fiercely censored surrounding such topics. When I was teaching there, I polled my class of 25 16-year-olds on whether they thought homosexuality should be allowed in China, and all but two of them agreed that people should be able to love whomever they want. When I asked them about Tibet, however, they didn’t even know that it was an issue outside of China. These are, of course, anecdotes, but I use them to illustrate that there is a difference between Chinese citizens and the Chinese government, and if the people were only given access to more information, the world’s most populous country could really be a force for good. For now, we can take small solace in knowing that those who’re being persecuted and marginalized have a voice outside of China—it’s not ideal, but it’s a start.

The Euro zone has so far been unable to extract itself from a debt crisis that is expected to have a domino effect in the region. Greece, still teetering on bankruptcy, would be the first block to fall. Meanwhile, the American economy is sputtering along, struggling to boost employment. Even China, the ascending superpower, is experiencing sluggish growth.

It makes me think back to the late 1990s and early 2000s, when globalization was a dirty word in activist circles (recall the Seattle riots of 1999 in response to the World Trade Organization conference.)

Resistance to the then-emerging concept centred on environmental, human rights and income inequality issues. It bears a striking resemblance to the umbrella of issues encompassed by today’s Occupy Movement.

Economics-wise, globalization meant breaking down barriers to international trade, such as uneven regulation between countries (portrayed by activists as a slackening of rules). More generally, it was used to describe the less tangible idea of a growing global interconnectedness.

In Canada, the first sign came in the form of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Then, in 1995, we joined the World Trade Organization.

Lots of free trade agreements later, there is plenty of evidence to support the predictions protestors made: the Pembina Institute has sounded the alarm over surging greenhouse gas emissions as the development of Alberta’s oil sands steams ahead; Canadian mining giants, such as Barrick Gold, have faced allegations of human rights abuses abroad; and a Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives study has shown a rising income gap in the country.

None of this seemed to faze policymakers when economies around the globe were in a state of rapid growth. But now, with economies veering toward what appears to be a double-dip recession, they’re grappling (rather unsuccessfully) with how to course correct what is essentially a systemic problem.

Recessions happened before the phenomenon of globalization, true. But this meltdown is the most severe we’ve had since our economies became so tightly intertwined. Its effects can’t be contained within borders, and in spite of their best efforts, policymakers have yet to put us on a clear path to recovery.

Canada has been relatively insulated from the worst of it so far, thanks to a more tightly-regulated banking system. However, if the Euro zone and U.S. keep backsliding, the effects are sure to bleed across the border.

Herein lies the opportunity to effect change—a period of prolonged crisis, with all other options exhausted.

And as Lia Grainger recently reported in “Among the Rebels,” a May/June 2012 This feature, the Occupy Movement may yet see a second wave—this time with a stronger Canadian contingent.

Illustration by Matt Daley

The United States’ decision to invade Afghanistan soon after 9/11 was misguided for many reasons, but one was purely practical: Al Qaeda is a stateless, decentralized network scattered across the globe. The spectral, international scope of the problem was no secret—so why wage a conventional war on one country? It was as if an outmoded way of thinking simply couldn’t react fast enough to a startling new reality.

With the rise of WikiLeaks and its release of thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents, something disturbingly similar is happening again. While the internet and geopolitical struggle were once rarely connected, in the WikiLeaks affair, they are now intertwined in a very real way. Among other things, the cables detailed secret U.S. bombings of Yemen and Chinese cyber-attacks on Google. Their publication drew loud, if somewhat hollow, condemnations from the likes of Hillary Clinton.

Unfortunately, the U.S. response to WikiLeaks seems eerily analogous to its response to 9/11. Another stateless, decentralized network has again attacked the establishments of American power. And America’s response, again, has been an ineffectual, ham-fisted blunder that mostly harms bystanders while the perpetrators vanish into the hills. Worse, corporations are also lining up behind governments to help protect the political status quo.

When WikiLeaks released the first batch of diplomatic cables, the reaction was, unsurprisingly, split. But whether people thought it good or bad, what everyone saw was that the spread of information on networks that do not adhere to traditional ideas of centralization, statehood, or journalism made that information extremely difficult to hide.

That didn’t stop the American government and companies from twisting almost every arm they could grab to try and stem the flow. Amazon, whose servers WikiLeaks were using to hold a copy of the cables, shut down WikiLeaks’ account, in part because its terms of service said its customers must own the rights to documents they publish. (Nobody at Amazon, it seems, caught the irony that the entire point of leaked documents is that you don’t ask for permission to publish them.) When the U.S Department of Justice served Twitter with a subpoena for the accounts of people associated with WikiLeaks—including WikiLeaks head Julian Assange and Icelandic MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir—Twitter had little choice but to comply.

Corporations obviously have to abide by the law. Beyond the business ramifications of legal censure, if they don’t play nice, neither other companies nor their shareholders will trust them.

Even though under most circumstances, law works to keep societies and economies running smoothly, legal protections for expressing dissent are built into truly democratic systems. If you want to demonstrate against powers that affect your life, you can always protest in a public square or on the street in front of a multinational. You are safe doing so because that space belongs to you as a citizen. But unlike a leak in the traditional press or the careful dance between protesters and police at a rally, WikiLeaks highlighted the fact that, on the internet, there is no tradition of public space. Indeed, the stark reality is that virtual world is essentially a private, corporate one.

If technology is increasingly both a tool and a site of resistance—and it unquestionably is—then the ownership of that space is of crucial importance. Centuries of common law underpin our rights to expression in public places; the internet has no equivalent.

We often treat the web like a public space, but the reality is that it is more like a private amusement park. We, the children who have been granted access, must play by the rules posted at its entrance. From the great server farms where data is stored to the pipes running under the sea to the copper wires linking your home to the web, all of it is owned by profit-seeking companies. And when the law knocks on their door—as it does every day with Twitter, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and others—they have to comply. What WikiLeaks so clearly demonstrated is that when companies beholden to the status quo own the virtual ground on which you can resist, it might be pulled from under you without recourse.

None of this succeeded in top-killing the WikiLeaks gusher, of course. The centreless nature of the web ensured that (so did legal protections in Europe).

But it did demonstrate that the authoritarian impulse is alive and well online, and that the rules of dissent, misbehaviour, and resistance are even less settled on the web than they are in the streets. The networks through which we spread information do not belong to us as citizens—only as consumers. Like any business transaction, the use of Twitter or storage on Amazon servers operates under a contract limited by the law. Anything that actually defies legality—as did the suffragettes, the civil rights movement, or anticapitalist anarchism today—is off limits.

Significant historical change often means not following the rules: taking to the streets, gathering with others, and yes, even breaking the odd window. But when the new virtual space of public assembly is owned by those with a vested interest in not rocking the boat, expressing dissent becomes more and more difficult.

So we are left with two competing, incompatible visions: of a technology that promised to upend the status quo; and a set of rules designed to ensure we never dare to try.

That wild bolshevik magazine Time has had the gall to question the notion that America is the best country in the world. The March 14th cover story, by Fareed Zakaria displays a red foam finger the reads “We’re #1” pointing downwards. “Yes, America is in decline,” reads the caption.

Some could argue that the U.S really hasn’t been in the best shape for a while now. In Canada, we have this crazy notion that Americans—occasionally—look at things from a different angle. Speaking of backwards, turn that Time cover upside down and there is a caption that reads “Yes, America is still No. 1.”

Of course the statistics say that over a year ago the unemployment rate was the worst it has been since 1983, with 15.7 million Americans out of work. Also, the U.S. is starting to fall behind other nations in terms of life expectancy, infrastructure, and is now only the 4th strongest economy in the world.

CNN specials airing this past weekend tried to advise the discouraged and unemployed with strategies on how pull themselves up by their boot straps and get back to work.

Of course this might require learning some Mandarin and having your evening news read by—gasp—a Muslim. Shockingly, some Americans aren’t too happy about this, because while millions have been out of work they have also been living under a rock. The comments on the CNN web page describing Fareed Zakaria’s feature story and his TV special “Restoring the American Dream: Getting Back to #1″ show how truly excited and open American audiences are to inform themselves and discuss change. The comment section is a swamp of racist horror that you do not need to read in full. But a few choice excerpts illustrates the point.

One commenter asks “Why is CNN/Time giving this MUSLIM a platform to trash America?” Then he/she proceeds to tell Zakaria (degrees from Yale and Harvard in hand, presumably) that he should go back to where he came from: his “shit-hole birth place INDIA.” Another asks: “Is he even American? It seems he would more likely be worried about where he is from. We don’t need some Indian telling us what we should be doing.”

Yes, America, though your economy is teetering, your political system dysfunctional, and your populace increasingly unhealthy, when it comes to weird xenophobic internet trolls, you truly are a city on a hill.

Illustration by Sylvia Nickerson

The test kitchen of the Bayview Village Loblaws grocery store in North Toronto is packed. Around 30 women and men sit clustered in pairs in a horseshoe, framed by the cupboards and counters lining the room. They are almost all white, aged 30 to 60 years old. Some small houseplants sit on the counter, the floor is the colour of cream of carrot soup, and the cupboards are dark green; the aesthetic is vaguely gradeschool. Orchestral pop floats in from the grocery store, while outside the window, one floor below, shoppers select their salad greens. Some of the couples talk quietly amongst themselves. Others wait silently with an air of anticipation. No one is here for a cooking lesson.

A cheery woman in an argyle sweater takes up her position in the centre of the chairs and begins to speak. Welcome to “How to Adopt.” This seminar, hosted by the Adoption Council of Ontario, is Adoption 101 for prospective parents interested in the idea but unsure where to start. The class outlines the various types of adoption and introduces attendees to parents who have gone through with adoption and who can speak about their personal experiences.

There are three types of adoption in Ontario: public, private and international. ACO executive director Pat Convery stresses that each kind of adoption offers its own challenges and rewards, and the route a couple or individual chooses to pursue depends on their own personal situation. What she does not say, however, is that some personal situations affect the available options more than others.

Growing up in her home country of Iran, Shirin* never imagined she would find herself in this situation. For many years, Iran promoted the virtues of large families. Shirin herself has many siblings. But now the Iranian government is thwarting her maternal ambitions. Shirin now lives in Canada and wants to adopt an Iranian child, but her birth country has declared her unfit. She came to the ACO meeting to learn about her adoption options, but unlike the couples here tonight, Shirin faces an additional obstacle. According to many countries, including Iran, she’s an unacceptable candidate because she’s gay.

Shirin is just one of an increasing number of queer women to pursue the option of international adoption, only to find that most countries classify them as substandard parents. Single mothers and lesbian couples disproportionately face barriers to international adoption because, not being in a heterosexual marriage, they’re classified as single parents. Many countries explicitly state they will not allow single women, or gays and lesbians, to adopt children, favouring a family structure that includes a mother and father. While some countries do allow single women to adopt, no other country among those usually sourced for foreign adoption, with the exception of the United States, permits openly gay women to parent their children.

International adoption is popular in Canada, with Canadian citizens and permanent residents adopting around 2,000 foreign children each year. Canadians apply to private adoption agencies licensed by specific countries to place children with parents here. Of the three types of adoption, international adoptions are the most expensive, costing parents $25,000 to $50,000 per child. The $85 that couples pay to attend sessions like the Adoptions Council seminar is just the beginning. Every prospective parent must undergo a “homestudy”—a series of in-home evaluations by adoption practitioners to ensure the applicants will be prepared and competent parents—as well as complete the mandatory adoptive parents training course known as PRIDE (Parent Resources for Information, Development and Education). While the Children’s Aid Society does not charge for these services, many individuals opt to pay the thousands of dollars it costs to go through private agencies, because it cuts down on wait times.

For many Canadians, the expense is worth it. International adoptions are popular because younger children are more readily available; at the very least there is a perception that kids up for adoption through the Children’s Aid Society may be older, part of a sibling group, or have special needs. With private adoptions, there is the risk that a birth mother will change her mind and an adoptive parent’s money and effort will be spent in vain. International adoption provides prospective parents with a formulaic stability. There is lots of paperwork, months of waiting, and usually travel abroad, but the path to parenthood is clear and understandable. Parental age is another factor: women who delayed having families, whether to pursue careers or for any other reason, face barriers within the domestic adoption process that can often be avoided with international adoption. Women over 50 are unlikely to be given an infant domestically, for instance, but several countries, such as Bulgaria, have higher parental age limits for infant adoption. Some women, such as Shirin, have a connection to a certain country or region and would like to adopt a child from that part of the world. For all these reasons, international adoption is an important option—and for many, it is a last resort after the domestic adoption process fails. Yet a growing subset of potential parents are being excluded by the countries where Canadians adopt from most. Almost one quarter of all children within Canada adopted internationally in 2008 came from China—a country that only permits heterosexual couples to adopt.

Many lesbian, bisexual, and trans women dismiss international adoption, because of its near impossibility for them and also because they object to their sexual orientation being treated as a liability. Some queer women, however, view these discriminatory policies as just one more problem they have to solve in order to adopt. These women opt instead to conceal their sexual orientation and go through the rigorous application procedures closeted, and in many cases they successfully adopt children from countries that discriminate against LGBT individuals.

As for Shirin’s plan, she is unsure of her options. She is a tall, fit woman with rich brown eyes and a few smile lines around her mouth. She has a discernable accent when she speaks. Shirin looks younger than she is, but in her late thirties she knows her options for adoption are narrowing. “I never admitted it to my family,” she says, “but I want to have children.” She wants a baby, preferably a healthy one, and while a child from the Middle East is no longer a possibility, there are still other alternatives open to her. Shirin does have one advantage; she may be gay—but she is also single.

There are 83 contracting states to the 1993 Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoptions. In the nearly two decades since the agreement was concluded, it has had a profound influence on international adoption for LBT women.

Designed to safeguard the interests of children and to combat child trafficking, the convention has changed how countries regulate adoption in several significant ways. Under the convention, keeping children within their own families or countries is prioritized. Foreign adoption is considered a last resort, to be taken only when all other domestic options have been exhausted.

“It’s taken away some of the worries that adopting families would have,” says Pat Convery, meaning that certain key questions are answered: “Was this child actually legally relinquished? Did the parent have every opportunity to parent the child? Did they really look to make sure there were no family members? Was there for sure no money that changed hands in those areas that would be illegal under Canadian law?”

But while the Hague Convention has been a positive measure for inter-country adoption in general, it has also made it more difficult for queer women to adopt. The U.S., as the only source country that permits openly queer parents to adopt, used to be a haven for many LGBT and non-LGBT would-be adoptive parents. Since signing onto the Hague Convention, however, more emphasis has been placed on securing domestic adoption for American children in need of homes.

More than the Hague Convention, however, it is countries’ own value systems that pose the largest obstacles to queer Canadians adopting abroad. Chris Veldhoven is the Queer Parenting Programs Coordinator at the 519 Church Street Community Centre in Toronto, and he teaches a seminar to would-be fathers entitled Daddies & Papas 2B that explores the topic of adoption among other parenting models and family creation practices.

“The screening tools for some countries are becoming more explicitly heterocentric,” says Veldhoven, “so it’s much more difficult for people to find a country that will officially welcome someone and not discriminate on sexual orientation or gender identity.”

Historically, Veldhoven says, lesbians led the queer community in adopting, but increasingly gay male couples are also looking to adopt. Despite domestic legal victories that prevent discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, there remains a stigma surrounding single men (or “single” men) adopting kids. Within inter-county adoption, this stigma is magnified. Single women may find their international adoption choices limited, but their situation is still better than that of single men—few countries even consider male applicants.

Elizabeth’s house is on a quiet street in the east end of Toronto. It sits across from a park where kids are playing, despite the grey morning sky. Birds chirp from the trees. Inside, the living room is cozy with wooden floors and little purple coffee tables on which Elizabeth serves tea.

When Elizabeth adopted her daughter in the late ’90s, she knew many other lesbians who were exploring adoption. But none of her other gay friends were adopting from China; Elizabeth was able to do so because at that time the country had not yet banned single women from adopting. She began her homestudy process in late 1995 and had her daughter by the summer of 1997. Most of the girls up for adoption in China at the time were there as a result of the one-child policy and, unlike in many other countries, were from poor families rather than ones with drug and alcohol problems, which meant the babies were more likely to be healthy. The adoption process was well regulated; China seemed like the ideal country to adopt from.

“I felt like it would be a clean process,” she says, “and that I would be adopting a child who otherwise wouldn’t have had a family.” Elizabeth is in her 60s now and has been with her partner for over 20 years. In addition to her adopted daughter, they have a biological child together. She is a strong-framed woman with short hair that is a mixture of dark and lighter shades of grey. She sits with her legs crossed in jeans and a black cardigan, her purple shirt matching the frames of her glasses. Going to China without her partner to collect their daughter was difficult. “I really had to censor myself all the time,” Elizabeth says. She went with several heterosexual couples from the same agency and struggled with the urge to be honest about her sexuality as everyone bonded over the experience of meeting their children. The trip lasted two weeks.

“My deal with myself, when I actually went to China,” she says, “was, no matter what the circumstances, I would not reveal my real self and real situation.”

Elizabeth pulls out photo albums of pictures from her trip to collect her daughter. She reminisces about the time abroad and gushes about her daughter: “Isn’t she adorable?” she coos, and indeed, she is.

Elizabeth found her social worker through a referral from friends who were adopting as out lesbians domestically. She says she felt comfortable with the social worker that conducted her homestudy but won’t talk about the experience of closeting herself. She feels unable to confirm or deny whether she lied about her sexuality for the evaluation process. Regardless of her evaluation, Elizabeth was adopting from China during the best possible period for LBT women to adopt from that country: before China declared it would no longer permit single female applicants. In 2007, the country amended its requirements so that all single women were forced to sign an affidavit swearing they were not gay. “If you were a single woman you had to write a letter saying you weren’t a lesbian,” says Elizabeth, taking a sip of tea. “That would have been a huge crisis for me if that had been the case when I was in the process. I don’t know what I would have done.”

Paradoxically, as social equality for LGBT individuals has strengthened within Canada, international adoption has become more difficult for queer women. Adoption practioners who conducted the homestudies of lesbian or bisexual women 10 or 15 years ago might have been willing to take a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” attitude; if they thought someone would make a good parent, they could opt to keep a parent’s sexual orientation out of their homestudy report. That’s significantly less likely to be the case today.

“If you’re going to be out and you have to have your homestudy done by a domestic social worker, they’re not as willing to censor anymore because of the ethics of it,” says Veldhoven. “In the face of decreased homophobia domestically, social workers are saying, ‘Now we have to be true about your family configuration because we don’t want to hide it, because you shouldn’t have to hide it.’ But for many countries internationally you do hide it.”

The process of the homestudy itself has also changed considerably over the last decade. Jackie Poplack is a social worker who has been working in the field for four decades and has been an adoption practitioner, which includes conducting homestudies, for the last 14 years. According to Poplack, homestudies have become much more standardized and involve a lot more verification than they used to. Poplack has worked with queer couples seeking children and says that for social workers, looking the other way is not an option. “I’m going to be 100 percent honest and if I have a question or concern I say it,” she says. But for prospective parents who are single, there’s a certain degree of plausible deniability. In her years as a practitioner, Poplack has had one or two clients who said they were heterosexual, and who might have believed that themselves, but who she thought could have been gay. When it comes to homestudies, she acknowledges that, regardless of sexuality, people will try and smooth over any aspects of their character that they think will diminish their chances of securing a child.

Lisa is one woman who hid it. In 2005, she adopted a baby girl from Haiti. She was closeted to her social worker, so the woman classified her as heterosexual on her homestudy report. Lisa was single, so while there were some fridge magnets to remove and books to hide, there was no life partner to implausibly pass off as a roommate. Today she is wearing blue jeans and an olive T-shirt with “garden hoe” written across it in black letters. As she sits sipping her mug of coffee, she smiles, talking about the process of adopting her daughter, who arrived in Canada at nine months old and who is now happily enrolled in grade school with no idea of the half-truths her mother told to secure her.

“My goal was to never lie,” says Lisa, picking her words carefully. “But not necessarily to say everything.”

The Sherbourne Health Centre sits at 333 Sherbourne Street in downtown Toronto, a massive structure of glass and concrete with wood accents elevated from the road.

Across the street is Allan Gardens. People sit on benches and soak up the sun by the greenhouse. Squirrels play in the bare branches of the trees and scurry up the wrought iron lampposts that dot the grounds. Rachel Epstein’s office is on the second floor of the centre. Epstein is coordinator of the LGBTQ Parenting Network at the centre. The parenting course she designed, Dykes Planning Tykes, has been running since 1997.

In Epstein’s years of experience working with queer parents she has seen women closet themselves and get children. But today she is more pessimistic about the possibilities for LBT women to adopt from abroad.

“Basically, queers do not see international adoption as an option,” she says. More countries are selective about who adopts and who doesn’t, and choose heterosexual married couples over single individuals. Epstein worries about the personal toll exacted by denying your sexuality. “In the past, either you are single or you closet yourself. You closet your relationship,” says Epstein. “I mean, even single people find it hard to go closeted for this process, and it can be not just the adoption process but for a while afterwards.”

For a potential LBT parent, finding a social worker to whom she can be open about her sexuality—and who is willing to omit her sexual orientation from the homestudy report—is rare. How open a woman will be with her social worker is a crucial decision that can set her adoption back months if the wrong choice is made. If a woman chooses to be honest and the social worker is unwilling to lie, then the woman must find another social worker and start the process again. “It’s more feasible if you’re single,” says Epstein. “You don’t get defined by your sexual orientation in the same way and it’s easier to not talk about that.”

Indeed, there are those within Canada’s tight-knight LGBT adoption community who feel that the less said about queers and international adoption the better. Many blame U.S. media coverage of queer adoptive parents as being instrumental in China’s decision to ban single women from adopting. As awareness of the issue grows in diplomatic circles, they say, more consulates close their doors, shutting off the few remaining channels available for women seeking this route to parenthood. One Canadian adoption advocate refused to be interviewed for this article and strongly discouraged publishing any story at all on the subject.

There are no easy answers to a problem of such emotional, legal, and cultural complexity. For Canadian social workers, having to lie about sexual orientation in a homestudy report is a serious dilemma. “That’s unethical; I would never do that,” says Poplack. “It’s tough sometimes, because some of the rules you think are really unfair. I think we have to respect other countries—but it’s really crappy for gays and lesbians.”

Lisa made the decision to out herself to her adoption practitioner after her adoption was finalized and, as a social worker herself, she has spent a long time thinking about the ethical implications of her decision. “How do you reconcile that you are going against our Charter of Rights and Freedoms? Okay, it is the other country’s rules—but they’re homophobic and they go against our codes. Social workers haven’t been able to work it out in a way that enables most of them to feel comfortable,” says Lisa. “So the people who are doing it are like the people who work as social workers for Catholic charities and then pass condoms out under the table; they’re basically doing it very quietly, very silently, afraid themselves to come out.”

The Loblaws seminar draws to a close. Everyone stands to put on their coats, wrapping scarves around their necks. The music drifting in from the grocery store has changed to the Beach Boys. Shirin thinks she may not adopt. “I can’t lie about this fact,” she says. “The homestudy is going to be really one-to-one, close work between me and the social worker or case worker, and that is going to be based on trust. The person should know about me, should know about my past, should know about my family, should know about everything. How is it going to be possible to not say such a big fact?” She’ll do some more research and talk to a friend who is also looking into inter-country adoption, but she’s still skeptical. Shirin did not come out as gay until later in her life, and after being closeted for so long she doesn’t want to be in that situation again. “I don’t approve of it; to lie about it,” she says. “You should be honest.”

Lisa, however, is contemplating adopting another child from Haiti. She will need to find a new social worker, one who doesn’t know she’s gay. Then she’ll undergo another homestudy, closeted again, but she’s willing to do it for another child. “I think I’m a seasoned pro now at it,” she says. “I’ve guided other people about how to do it; I can do it myself again and I’ve been through it once so it’s not as scary.” When she thinks back to the emotional toll of concealing her sexuality the first time, she reflects, “I never really lost connection to who I was as a person; I was just playing the game.”

It is a game that Shirin and countless other queer women may simply decide not to play.

Who knows if the global economy is recovering, stagnating, or double-dipping? To most around the world, however, the state of the economy can be reduced to two simple metrics. Do you have a job or not? Is it a good job? With that in mind we’re looking today at some of the world’s largest employers, both public and private.

1. The People’s Liberation Army (over 2.2 million employees)
You don’t get to be a global superpower these days without having an enormous military. In most countries, government spending on armies and armaments is a major part of the domestic economy. Sad, yes. True, also yes. It used to be that there were no ranks in Mao’s army but, along with the rest of China, the military has opted for a more hierarchical structure. So, for a few, the pay is good; for most, it isn’t.

2. Walmart (approximately 1.8 million employees)
Walmart’s workforce is more than triple the size of the world’s next largest corporate employer (Deutsche Post, the formerly public German mail corporation). But that’s not because it entices workers with competitive pay or generous benefits. No, Walmart has pretty much written the book on how to maintain a huge workforce while spending as little as possible. Allowing unions and respecting workers’ rights–that’s not how.

3. Indian Ministry of Railways (approximately 1.6 million employees)
India’s iconic railways are romanticized by both Indian nationalists and colonial apologists as the arteries which hold the world’s largest democracy together. This is not the longest railway network in the world (the US has 200,000+ miles of track to India’s 60,000+), but the Indian government does hold a national monopoly, making it the world’s largest railway company in the same way that Ontario’s LCBO is one of the largest liquor retailers in the world.

4. National Health Service (over 1.7 million employees across the UK)
Pensions and other vital programs are being threatened as Europe’s haves borrow and steal from Europe’s have-nots. One of the sectors likely to be hit hard is the UK’s public healthcare system, the largest in the world. In a noisy session of Parliament, Labour MP Alan Johnson accused some in the Conservative caucus of cheering “the deepest cuts to public spending in living memory,” suggesting this is what they got into politics to do.

Compiled by Kevin Philipupillai and Simon Wallace

Illustration by Matt Daley.

When Google, citing concerns over security and censorship, pulled their operations out of China in March this year, they were widely praised for taking a stand for democracy. But Google’s move wasn’t the first time a Western entity had taken the moral high road in regard to China.

In fact, almost 200 years ago, the British government also stood up for its beliefs. After they had expended countless resources developing an opium industry, China shut down its borders to the drug, claiming that addiction was taking its toll on Chinese society. The Raj, seeing not only its business threatened, but also its ideals of free trade and capitalism, twice sent its navy to war to force China to open its borders. Britain won, and China had to relent.

Of course, comparing an enforced opium trade with online free speech may slip into exaggeration. But when Google indignantly left China, an important point was lost in the sanctimonious chatter: to many in China, the difference between the Google of today and the Empire of yesterday isn’t as clear as we might like to think. And as the web increasingly becomes a battleground for cultural and political exchange, it’s worth remembering that history is never as far in the past as we might hope.

In the aftermath of Google’s departure, the chorus of satisfied approval was overwhelming. Though Google itself treaded with the kind of care any profit-minded company might, the press was less tactful. When Google launched a chart that tracked which services China had blocked, prominent tech journalist Steven Levy called it an “Evil Meter.” Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff suggested that China was simply a bully, and that Google had “beat an honourable retreat.” Meanwhile, the National Post and the Globe and Mail did their best to cast the decision in moral rather than economic terms. The complexities of geopolitics and culture were reduced to a tired old approach: “Western values good; China bad.”

One might say “fair enough”: we are talking about a totalitarian regime here. But a few hundred years of Western global domination means there’s just no way to get around the optics of a massive American multinational saying its moral views are the right ones. In light of history, that kind of ideological dogmatism comes off as more than a little paternalistic.

But Google is not a parent and places like China, with their own histories, cultures and practices, are not children. To make matters worse, Google’s business model is essentially a paragon of Western democratic capitalism: disseminate information without restriction and then find a way to make money off the ways people access it. This may seem neutral, but it isn’t. It relies on the idea that spreading knowledge and information is an inherent good because an effective social system empowers individuals to find out things for themselves, and change their lives accordingly. For us, the sovereign individual is everything.

By contrast, even in contemporary Chinese thought, what still reigns is the idea that the community gives people their place in life, and the structures of ritual and authority give life order. The individualism that underpins Google’s business model is frequently seen as both arrogance and selfishness because it seems to prioritize the individual over the knowledge of the state and its rulers. The questions Google raised in China weren’t simply a matter of “repression,” but of how people locate themselves in reality. This fact seemed to be lost on most Western journalists. (About the only dissent in the technology press came from Gizmodo’s Brian Lam, himself the son of immigrants from Hong Kong, who wrote a piece titled “Google Would Remind My Grandpa of the Arrogant White Invaders.”)

Is it a noble goal to try to spread values and ideals that seem to have benefited the societies that have adopted them? Sure. But principles like democracy and freedom of speech don’t simply float down from the sky into open arms below. They are borne out of centuries-long processes rooted in social, material, and intellectual change. To assume their universal good—as Google and the Western press seemed to—is to deny their historical and cultural specificity. And at a certain point, it ceases to matter what is “objectively” right when such presumptuousness and arrogance only serve to galvanize people against you.

For all that, it’s worth noting that when Google did leave China, many there weren’t too affected. They had Baidu—a Chinese search engine, albeit heavily censored, that is the sixth most-visited website in the world and is still growing. And this is the thing, really: a Western navy can no longer force “our” way of thinking on the world, because power is no longer centralized in the West.

But history rattles noisily still, and the values of an open, democratic web aren’t universal or even necessarily right. And some, presented with the image of Google getting up on its moral high horse, find it hard to forget an armada of ships, their holds stocked with opium, barging their way into the Canton harbour.

The Dalai Lama is charged with watching over Buddhist tradition, but on March 29, 2009 The New York Times revealed a shadowy presence was secretly watching him, invisibly sending information about the religious leader to his anonymous attackers. When the story broke, the office of the Dalai Lama believed it was dealing with an ordinary computer virus. It turned out to be something more widespread, organized, and ominous.

Long before The New York Times, Canada’s Citizen Lab was on the case. Based at the University of Toronto, Citizen Lab is a global leader in documenting and analyzing the exercise of political power in cyberspace. The Lab’s 10-month investigation into the virus that had lodged in the Dalai Lama’s desktop revealed it was in fact just one of 1,295 compromised computers in 103 countries, many found in embassies, government agencies, and significantly, Tibetan expatriate organizations. The researchers at Citizen Lab dubbed the network GhostNet, which spread through a malicious software program—“malware,” in technical circles—called Gh0st RAT. Gh0st RAT spread via email to high value targets: diplomats, politicians, the Dalai Lama. Once installed on a target’s computer it provides barrier-free access to an intruder, giving them full control of the system as if it were their own. This allowed the thieves to bring sensitive documents back to four control servers in China. Worse, Gh0st RAT allows its operators to take control of an entire computer in real-time, giving them the unfettered ability to see and hear their targets through the computer’s webcam and microphone.

It’s virtually impossible to determine whether GhostNet was a work of cyber-espionage by the Chinese government or a single hacker who wanted to make it look that way. In January 2010, search giant Google admitted they were one of 30 companies attacked by the latest version of Gh0st RAT and threatened to shut down the Chinese version of its site. Computer security firm Verisign reported it had traced the attacks back to “a single foreign entity consisting either of agents of the Chinese state or proxies thereof.” Beyond China, countries around the world are increasingly using the internet for espionage and intelligence-gathering. Observers report more viruses, more trojan horses, more botnets, more surveillance, more censorship and more denial-of-service attacks. The tactics are being used by governments and independent groups alike for intelligence gathering, terrorism, national security and religious or political propaganda. Most of it happens secretly, obscured by layers of technical complexity. In the early 2000s, China was a leader in cyber-espionage, but it has lately been joined by more players: Saudi Arabia, Russia, North Korea, Iran, the U.S., and Canada.

We are witnessing, the Citizen Lab researchers believe, the weaponization of cyberspace.

“I realized there was a major geopolitical contest going on in the domain of telecommunications,” says Professor Ron Deibert, Citizen Lab’s founder and head researcher. “The information environment today is mediated through telecommunications. So being able to control, access and retain information through those networks are vital sources of intelligence. This was happening, but it wasn’t being talked about.”

Deibert isn’t new to the intelligence game. He worked as policy analyst for satellite reconnaissance in the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but it wasn’t until he wrote a book about major technological shifts in history, and started researching his PhD—documenting how rapid technological changes of the information age affected global politics—that he began investigating the war that would set him on the path to being the “M” behind the Citizen Lab.

“Our technological advantage is key to America’s military dominance,” said U.S. President Barack Obama in a May 2009 speech on his administration’s plans for the militarization of the internet. “From now on, our digital infrastructure—the networks and computers we depend on every day—will be treated as they should be: a strategic national asset. Protecting this infrastructure will be a national security priority…. We will deter, prevent, detect and defend against attacks, and recover quickly from any disruptions or damage.” In the same speech he assured the world his security plan would not infringe on internet freedom or personal privacy. The U.S. Department of Justice, however, argues (though far less publically) it can’t be sued for illegally intercepting phone calls or emails—unless they admit what they’re doing is illegal, which they won’t.

It’s this kind of secrecy (in the name of national security or not) that Citizen Lab exposes. The small team of researchers and benevolent hackers, who work in the basement of the Munk Centre for International Studies at Devonshire Place in Toronto, watch the watchers and document the shadow war most are too busy updating their Facebook pages to notice. But more than that, Deibert wants to see Canada put its peacemaking reputation to work to lead the way in drafting a constitution for cyberspace among the nations of the G8. He believes Canada can be a leading guardian of the free and open internet, a valuable global commons worth preserving, on par in importance with land, sea, air and space.

Average internet users—the ones doing their banking, their shopping, or their FarmVille cultivating on the brightly lit thoroughfares of the web—are relatively safe from the cyber-spooks of the world. But if you challenge your government, expose injustice, or work for humanitarian ends in hostile places like China, Iran, Syria, Sudan, and Pakistan, it can become a dark, threatening place pretty quickly.

Deibert wanted to expose these injustices on behalf of citizens everywhere, but quickly discovered there were places he couldn’t go as a political scientist. So, with a research grant from the Ford Foundation, he launched the Citizen Lab in 2001 and began assembling a team dedicated to his two-pronged mission: monitoring and analyzing information warfare, and documenting patterns of internet censorship and surveillance.

The first major partner for the Citizen Lab was the SecDev Group, an Ottawa-based think tank that engages in evidence-based research targeting countries at risk from violence and insecurity. Its CEO, Rafal Rohozinski, was the man originally responsible for connecting all the countries in the former Soviet Union to the internet.

That meant he knew everyone who was anyone when it came to cyber-espionage in a region known for its deep ranks of hackers. This was the beginning of a vast network of agents who would later prove invaluable to all Citizen Lab operations. In those first days together with Rohozinski, Deibert also developed the methodology from which all Citizen Lab missions stem: A combination of technical reconnaissance, interrogation, field investigation, data mining, and analysis. In other words, the very same techniques used by government intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency in the U.S. and its Canadian equivalent, Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC). But this time, the expertise would be in the hands of the people.

“We wanted to take that combination of technical and human intelligence to turn it on its head,” Deibert said. “These organizations are using these techniques for national security purposes. They are watching everybody else, no one is watching them, and we wanted to watch them.”

Next, Deibert needed a powerhouse legal team. “We don’t break Canadian laws, but we do break the law in just about every other country,” he says. That’s why he partnered with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Based at Harvard Law School, this gives Deibert and his team access to a network of some of the best legal scholars in the country.

None was more vital than the final piece of the puzzle. All wars need soldiers and Citizen Lab needed the very best computer scientists, programmers, software developers and data analysts. All of whom were handpicked by Deibert from an unlikely recruitment pool: his own political science course.

The Munk Centre has all the architectural hallmarks of an English boarding school, left over from its days as a men’s university residence at the turn of the century. Few visitors have any idea what goes on beneath their feet in Citizen Lab’s dimly lit basement headquarters, but two of Deibert’s lieutenants have agreed to let me ride along on one of their online patrols.

Born and raised in Singapore, research associate James Tay has a personal stake in Citizen Lab’s mission. “I came from a country where those in power were willfully blocking access to the net. I just thought it wasn’t right, so when I heard about the lab tracking censorship and finally holding these governments accountable, I was like, ‘Okay, yeah, this is something I want to do.’”

That’s why, when riots broke out in Iran following its corrupted June 12, 2009, election, Tay was at Citizen Lab, keeping Iran’s lines of communication open. The Iranian government was blocking opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi Khamenei’s website, along with Western-run sites such as YouTube and Twitter. Opposition supporters needed a way to stay connected online, to share information and coordinate their response to the crackdown.

The battering ram that broke through Iran’s online barriers is called Psiphon. Developed first by Citizen Lab, the software is now its own commercial entity, helping to fund the lab’s academic research. Through small chinks in the Iranian government’s armour, Tay was able to send a short, crucial message to people inside Iran who needed unrestricted access to the web: the snippet of text he was charged with sneaking over the border through TweetDeck—software that communicates through Twitter without requiring an actual visit to its website— was an encrypted link to the Psiphon web server, a tunnel through the blockaded border that allowed users to see the web unhindered by Iran’s online filters. Once connected, Psiphon is simple to use: It appears as a second address bar in the web browser and delivers internet traffic through proxy sites that haven’t been blocked yet. Block one, and the data simply changes its route to the user. During the crisis, Tay was trusted with making sure Psiphon ran without Iranian governmental interference, allowing thousands of people to liberate their internet connections.

“Psiphon is open-source and free to the user, but the BBC and big media pay us money for the right to spread our proxy to their readers and viewers,” says Tay.

Psiphon isn’t for everyone, though. It doesn’t provide anonymity, for one, something that Psiphon users are made aware of before using it. Even so, many Iranians still used the service, often at great personal risk.

“Some of them were trying to organize rallies,” says Tay. “I saw that on Twitter a lot.”

But even more dangerous research is directed by the lab, just collecting the data risks the threat of imprisonment or torture if discovered by the offending country’s oppressive government. The project is known as The OpenNet Initiative.

If you stumble upon a site a sitting government doesn’t agree with, it may simply look like a problem with your internet connection. But that error page could be a fake. “These governments may publicly claim to block sites to protect the morals of their citizens, then use the same technique to block the site of a politician they don’t agree with,” says Jonathan Doda, Citizen Lab’s software developer for OpenNet. “They set up the error page because they don’t want people to know. The good news is they’re pretty easy to spot.”

“What’s most popular these days is proxy based blocking,” Doda says—in which a country’s internet connection is shunted through a single gateway that allows a regime to filter all the web traffic in and out— “or some American filtering software—the same thing you find in libraries and schools or some private businesses.” In every case, the country’s internet service provider intercepts your connection and substitutes an error page.

Sometimes, the error is legitimate. After all, internet connectivity in many parts of the world can be slow and unreliable. That’s why Doda must gather evidence of governments’ intent through extensive testing. His team accesses sites multiple times and compares what happens from within Canada to what happens from inside the suspected country.

Doda’s been programming since he was a kid, making software in BASIC on his PC Jr. It was fairly easy for him to create “rTurtle,” the software that collects the data, looking for anomalies like dummy IP addresses, weird-looking address headers and missing keywords in the returned page. The lab needed a way to test within the offending countries, but the lists of blocked sites are determined by religious or political elites and implemented by centralized internet providers in target countries—closed systems that are virtually impossible to penetrate as an outsider.

But Rafal Rohozinski’s international reach gave Citizen Lab the ability to recruit agents within those ISPs and other high-value positions in repressive countries’ internet hierarchies. “In Central Asia alone, we have a network of about 40 individuals working for us,” says Deibert. Some of them are literally putting their life on the line—guilty of treason for working with Citizen Lab.

“Going to Burma and running the software that Jonathan developed in an internet café—that’s life-threatening research,” says Deibert. “The person doing that would have to be aware of the risks.” Those risks range from arrest, imprisonment, and interrogation, to torture and death. Deibert knows people have been arrested under similar circumstances, so OpenNet’s work requires a delicate protocol.

“Jonathan might not know the names of testers in certain countries. I might not even know their names,” says Deibert. “They’ll have a key and it’ll be used to unlock that data they need to run the software. We don’t know who they are. There will be a person who mediates their communication with us. If Jonathan were sent to Syria and got captured, he wouldn’t be able to give out a tester’s name.” For everything at stake, you’d never know the risks by stepping into the lab. Among the islands of computer terminals and the big red vinyl couch off to one side, the only thing remotely James Bond-ish is a hollow world globe stocked with contraband cigars and bottles of alcohol from the countries they’ve visited. But for all they do for others, the Citizen Lab largely ignores internet censorship and surveillance at home.

“I’m not worried as much about Canada. We have a government that’s largely accountable. Despite all the problems, we still live in a democracy that includes the benefits of humanitarian law and respect for human rights. If I did this research in Uzbekistan, I’d be jailed and tortured within the hour,” says Deibert.

Canada has cyber secrets of its own that often escape public notice. There are two bills before parliament collectively called “lawful access” meant to aid law enforcement in obtaining information needed to make an arrest. (Both bills were put on hold when parliament prorogued in December, but they appear to be Conservative government priorities and are likely to be reintroduced.)

“The approach we’ve taken is to respect civil liberties to the fullest extent possible by recreating in the cyber world the exact same principles that have been applied in the analog world. In order for police to obtain the content of emails, or intercept phone calls over the net, they will require a warrant,” says Peter Van Loan, Canadian Minister of Public Safety.

That isn’t the whole story, says David Fewer, director of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, based at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law.

At the moment, police can’t force ISPs to hand over a customer’s name and address without a warrant, but the lawful access legislation will allow them to do just that.

“It’s bad enough that ISPs can give over that information if they want,” says Fewer. “Obviously our view is it shouldn’t be made available.” For now, there’s an unofficial compromise: for child pornography allegations, most ISPs give up the information, but for other crime such as fraud, police still need a warrant. Fewer says the informal understanding isn’t good enough.

“The system should be formalized, so there’s a formal response across the board,” Fewer says. “Police should be obliged to get a warrant except in cases of imminent harm, akin to a search warrant.” But police forces are currently demanding search warrant standards be relaxed. “There are sliding scales they’re demanding on certain search warrants. Ordinarily, police have to give ‘probable cause’ and they want that standard to be replaced with ‘reasonable suspicion.’”

Canada’s democratic laws don’t keep you immune from the government’s roving eye in cyberspace, either. “We have to start with the assumption that everything we do on the internet is public,” says Deibert, “and then work backwards and say, ‘What of my communication is private?’ Since potentially, at every step along the way, you can be monitored.”

In your terms of service agreement with Rogers or Bell they have the right to retain, store or turnover any information they provide you as a service including web history, web addresses, emails, and chat logs to the Canadian government for intelligence gathering and law enforcement purposes. CIPPIC is fighting various court battles around the disclosure of user identity to thirdparties online.

“We need courts to carve out some mechanism for preserving respect for privacy online,” says Fewer, “because privacy is a human right.”

Deibert wants the nations of the world to establish their own formalized treaty for the internet, one that treats cyberspace as a public commons and halts the aggressive arms race that threatens to further erode our basic rights. But drafting such an agreement will prove difficult, as security concerns continue to override basic rights.

Incidents like GhostNet demonstrate that even when all signs point to a massive national espionage plot, online attacks are difficult to trace, and governments nearly always enjoy plausible deniability.

“Even when we have lots of evidence that indicates a country may be behind it, the government denies any association,” says Van Loan. “Attacks are extremely hard to trace. What would likely happen is wholesome, good players would follow it, but the bad operators would continue to operate outside of it.”

And such a treaty could abuse as much as protect. “Anonymity is viewed [by governments] as a tool of terrorists and hate-mongers and—in the negative sense— whistle-blowers,” says Fewer. He fears any such treaty would inevitably morph into a cyberspace trade agreement, further tightening abusive intellectual property laws and scaling back civil liberties at an accelerated pace. “You need a tragedy for anything good to come out of a treaty like that. The International Declaration of Human Rights was the result of the First World War.”

With six billion people on the planet facing global problems, Deibert says the real tragedy is losing the open and unfettered ability to communicate globally, but Van Loan sees no other choice. “It is really the new arms race. Every time we erect new barriers and protections some smart, tech-savvy individual comes along and finds ways around those defenses.”

For the moment, it will have to be enough to know that Citizen Lab will be watching the watchers. James Tay admits he takes his work a little too seriously. “I don’t sleep,” he says. “This isn’t your typical 9-5 job. I regularly find myself responding to emails in the middle of the night. Ron wants us to sleep, but this isn’t a job for me. It’s something I live and breathe.”

Environmental activists hold a demonstration in the centre of Copenhagen on December 15, 2009 in Denmark World leaders started arriving today to attend the Climate Summit where they hope to work towards a global agreement. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

A lot of stock has been put into the current International Climate Change Conference. Not only a stake in our future, and the world as we know it continuing to exist, but our national identity—how we deal with international conflict, how we assist other countries needing a hand, and when we choose to exert a leadership role. For the issue of climate change has never just been an environmental one, but a moral one.

Yesterday, unexpectedly, the Canadian government announced that Canada had changed its position and would lead in climate reduction figures and commit to aid for developing countries to do the same. In what turned out to be a bit of a cruel joke, however, it was actually a hoax. For Canadians, it remains quite sad that the possibility of our government adopting a leadership role on climate change is just that—a joke.

Long gone are the days when Canada was seen as an international leader. We’re now generally considered one of the bigger obstructions during international discussions on the biggest issue of our time.

Not only are our political leaders positions embarrassing, but some other outspoken Canadian figures. Today on CBC’s Metro Morning Jeff Rubin, former CIBC Chief Economist and author of Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, echoed a disappointing attitude that Prime Minister Harper and Minister Prentice have voiced before—the idea that Canada is not the biggest polluter globally, and therefore it’s China and India that should step up to the plate and reduce their emissions first.

What a sad state of affairs it has become that our national attitude is to rely on developing nations, who still struggle with more basic problems of hunger, housing and poverty, to lead the way. Canadians use more oil per capita than Americans, making individual Canadians more than proportionally responsible for their part in the global climate change dilemma. It is morally reprehensible to expect those with a lower standard of living to “do their part” before us.

Yet an interesting article from the Washington Post suggests that while Canada and America do need to step up to the plate, perhaps the best thing we can do back home to send a clear message to Copenhagen is to make December “Green Free” month—that we should stop our individual efforts and demand institutional change. During the civil rights actions of the 1960’s, the author argues, it would not have been adequate for a few progressive folks to adopt integrative values in an otherwise bigoted environment—the difference is in institutional change.

So too, it argues, should be our attitude to hold our leaders accountable. It will not be acceptable to go half way, it will not be acceptable to rely on individuals to take action, and it will not be acceptable to point fingers and say someone else isn’t doing their part so we shouldn’t have to either.

We can hear the tck tck tcking of the clock as the summit only has a few days before its conclusion. What will leaders emerge with? That they have finally adopted the positions of leadership that their titles would suggest? Or is it up to us, as individuals, to paint the world green? And what, as Canadians, will we choose to hold on to as our national identity?

Flopenhagen, Hopenhagen… it may well be time for Copenhagen. As in, how are we going to cope with the aftermath and repercussions of this conference?