The Conservative leadership race ends this Saturday, May 27. In the months leading up to the big day, This collected some of the worst uh-oh moments from candidates: Deepak Obhrai’s French made a lacklustre appearance at the January 17 debate in Quebec City, featuring a lot of finger-stabbing, repetition of poorly pronounced words (“bonsoir, bonsoir, bonsoir”), and […] More »

IT’S FROM BEHIND THE PLEXIGLAS BARRIER of the visitor’s cubicle that I wait for Glory Anawa. I’m at the Immigration Holding Centre in Toronto—or, as Anawa and her two-year-old son Alpha have called it since February 2013, home. In front of me, etched in the glass separating visitor and prisoner, is that same word, HOME, […] More »

IN 2007, after just over one year in power, Stephen Harper’s federal Conservatives dealt a major blow to Canada’s aboriginals—the first of many. That year, the United Nations adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a non-binding international agreement designed to define worldwide human rights standards for Indigenous peoples. Canada, along with the […] More »

THE SUN HITS the back of my neck as I kneel over my poster board. It’s a hot summer afternoon in June and I’m colouring with markers, shared with the hands of girls decades my junior, helping with childcare at a sex worker solidarity rally. We’re at Toronto’s Allan Gardens, the day’s setting for lunch, […] More »

THERE IS NO REASON for the federal budget to be balanced at any particular time, argues Jim Stanford, an economist at Unifor and author of Economics for Everyone. The cartwheels necessary to balance Canada’s federal budget, he maintains, actually ensure slower growth and smaller future surpluses. It could, in short, harm the economy—not boost it. […] More »

OVER THE PAST SIX YEARS, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government has—surprisingly—become an outspoken champion of gay rights worldwide. In 2009, Harper arranged a private meeting with Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni to urge him to drop a controversial law that would imprison homosexuals for life. In 2011, Immigration Minister John Baird not only launched a pilot program […] More »

IN 2007, the federal government signed the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Ratified in the House of Commons several years later in 2010, the convention recognizes the rights, dignity, and worth of those with disabilities, while providing a framework for a high-quality, equitable life. This is all great stuff—and yet, the […] More »

HERE ARE JUST A FEW of the things that keep James Turk up at night: Unapologetic fear mongering; trampling over fundamental civil rights; limiting access to information; an invasive gaze cast over Canadians protesting in public, leading to their arrest; an iron fist that limits Canadians’ ability to move freely across borders; the introduction of […] More »

THERE ISN’T MUCH OF A GROWING SEASON in Old Crow, the Yukon’s northernmost community. Yet a vegetable garden has flourished there for the past three years, thanks to the efforts of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation and funding, in part, from the territorial government. In June, residents planted cauliflower, garlic, kale, cabbage, onions, potatoes, lettuce, […] More »

SIX YEARS AGO, then 16-year-old Urooba Jamal was walking home from school in Surrey, B.C. with her two friends, one of whom was wearing hijab. Suddenly, she felt something hit her leg. It was a rock. Then came another and another—more whizzed past her. The culprits were a group of boys, likely no older than […] More »

With the upcoming election, Canada is set to take a different path—if we want it to. But to what new direction? To answer that question, we first decided to look back over the past nine years of Conservative Canada. While we didn’t have space to examine every aspect of policy (which could, in itself, fill […] More »