from Change.org
HALIFAX, NS April 15 2013 — Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter announced today that he would do what more than 375,000 others from around the world have been asking him to do: call an independent review of the Rehtaeh Parsons investigation that resulted in no charges.
by Gillian Steward
Alberta Premier Alison Redford was in Washington last week trying to convince legislators and other decision-makers that the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline should get the green light despite a well-organized and liberally funded campaign in the US to stop it.
This was Redford’s fourth trip in 18 months, a sign of just how desperate the Alberta government is to get this project approved so diluted bitumen from the oilsands can be delivered to refineries on the US gulf coast.
by Karen Nickel
January, 2013 — This is a tale of two rapes. One has been widely reported, protested and has sparked a global outcry and condemnation. It inspired actions of solidarity against rape culture and decried the lack of women’s rights. The other rape has barely been noticed locally, let alone nationally or globally.
by Stephen Kimber
On April 19, 1989, a 39-year-old woman named Trisha Meili went for a jog in New York’s Central Park. She was raped and violently assaulted.
Partly because of the attack’s brutality, partly because of news reports the perpetrators were a gang of “wilding” black youths and partly because of who the victim was — white, a Yale MBA, a Wall Street investment banker—“the Central Park Jogger” case stirred global pre-Internet passions and angry demands police arrest someone — now.
The police did charge five teenaged boys, four blacks and an Hispanic. Though some were juveniles, police and media publicly identified them anyway. Four confessed. They were all convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. “Justice” had been done.
By Bill Tieleman
"The research clearly shows that negative ads are not more persuasive than positive ads."
– Bill Benoit, Ohio University communication studies professor
New Democrat leader Adrian Dix is taking the biggest political risk of his life — and his party will win or lose this election because of it.
No, it's not by promising well in advance that an NDP government would increase the corporate tax rates or put a minimum tax on banks and financial institutions nor is it an ill-advised policy in the party's forthcoming platform.
Dix rolled the dice a year ago when he publicly pledged the NDP will not run negative or personal attack ads, period. The NDP has not and will not respond in kind to the vicious $1 million assault on Dix's own character launched by Concerned Citizens for BC, a BC Liberal-linked group led by Jim Shepard, an ex-Christy Clark advisor and former corporate CEO.
How ironic that, at a time when many Albertans are mourning the death of Ralph Klein under whom Alberta's Tories won some of their greatest victories, some political observers are wondering whether the party and government have run out of steam.
The immediate economic cause of these musings is the government's recent budget, a pastiche of cuts to public services amid a fiscal deficit and growing debt, things Klein's government had proudly eliminated in the mid-2000s.
by Clare Demerse, Director of Federal Policy, Pembina Institute
Let’s say you’re a government with a bit of a green image problem. You also happen to have an oilsands sector that’s facing challenges on environmental grounds everywhere you turn. You’ve already tried giving speeches. Sending minister after minister to the US doesn’t seem to have convinced your critics. So what’s left? Maybe it’s time to try an effective regulation on the oil and gas sector’s greenhouse gas pollution.
by Stephen Kimber
Did Darrell Dexter balance the budget? Is the pope Argentinian? Depends on which pope you mean. And what you mean by balance. The perhaps more relevant pre-election questions out of last week’s legislature exercise: Would the other parties have done anything different in either the budget’s broad strokes or in its jiggery-pokery, see-we-kept-our-promise presentation?
from an Environics poll commissioned by 692 Canadians via Leadnow
TORONTO, April 4, 2013 — A new national Environics poll shows that Canadians think our democratic system is broken, overwhelmingly favour proportional representation, and are willing to vote for cooperation candidates to defeat Conservative MPs in the next federal election.
from Inside Queen's Park Volume 26, Number 07
IQP has been pointing out for several years that the public sector salary disclosure scheme is most illuminating when analysis focuses on the changing compensation patterns of the nine different sectors within the reporting regime formula — rather than picking and choosing among the bulging individual pay-packets received by CEOs and other key managers as well as by the cops, jail guards and other public sector workers who sign up to work as much overtime as they possibly can get.
