There’s voter apathy and then there’s Alberta. In the 2008 provincial election, a mere 41 percent of eligible voters came out. The provincial Conservative government went on to claim a historic 11th straight victory, a win that Athabasca University history professor Alvin Finkel believes was the result of Albertans not believing that there’s a viable […] More »

We’ve marched, oh how we have marched. The “get back to work” signs now find their place in the closet where dust has begun to flirt with the climate-themed “350” signs of October and December. The proroguing of Parliament has left the country with no ability to act on any sort of climate legislation (though […] More »

Separating the hax0rs from the n00bs in Canada’s parliament Part of Barack Obama’s victory came on the back of a grassroots campaign that effectively used the internet to collect supporters and funds. Among social-media-savvy politicians, the president is The Man. While Obama might be down with the kids today, have any Canadian leaders managed to […] More »

On June 9, Nova Scotians elected the province’s first ever NDP government, lead by former Navy public-information-officer-turned-journalist-turned-lawyer Darrell Dexter. This caught up with the new 52-year-old premier about a month later, just after he had attended a Paul McCartney concert in Halifax. This: Did you meet McCartney? Dexter: I did. It was quite a highlight. […] More »

The September-October 2009  issue of This Magazine should now be in subscribers’ mailboxes (subscribers always get the magazine early, and you can too), and will be for sale on your local newsstand coast-to-coast this week. All the articles in the issue will be made available online in the weeks ahead, though, so keep checking back […] More »

If we ran a “WTF” blog post every time another ridiculous, inconclusive political poll came out, you’d never read anything else here. But since this particular batch of ridiculous, inconclusive polls came out as all the Canadian political parties were gearing up for the fall session, we’ll make an exception this time. Harris-Decima says the […] More »

“You know that here in Colombia, there are many human-rights violations,” says José Oney Valencia Llanos, who earns his living cutting sugar cane in Colombia’s fertile Cauca Valley. “Business people, through multinational and transnational corporations, have violated human rights and attacked workers, directly and indirectly.” Oney told me this on a humid afternoon in El […] More »

The New Democratic Party convenes today in Halifax for its federal convention, and one of the hottest questions is whether the party will drop the “New” from its name. Sure, there’s a bunch of boring old policy meetings and stuff, to, you know, lay out a vision for the country and junk, but there’s something […] More »

With its exclusive fixation on winning more seats, the NDP has sacrificed the opportunity to build a truly progressive movement. On the 75th anniversary of the CCF, James Laxer argues that to save the present, we need to remember the past [This article was originally published in the July-August 2008 issue of This Magazine. We’ve […] More »

Another B.C. election has passed, and the Liberals under Premier Gordon Campbell were able to hold on to power, but it was hard to tell at times which party stood where on the issues and the political spectrum. The environment was a central issue in this election, but it played out in a way that […] More »

If several high-profile individuals have their way, one of Canada’s major political parties could be on the way to a rebranding even before the summer is out. The New Democratic Party could enter the fall session of parliament with a new name, simply called the “Democratic Party.” The move has been promoted by a mounting […] More »