from Human Rights Watch
VANCOUVER, February 14, 2013 — Comments by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RMCP) on February 14, 2013, fail to address the core issue of a lack of security that prevents indigenous women and girls from filing complaints of police abuse, Human Rights Watch said in reply.
by Armine Yalnizyan
President Barack Obama put the idea of raising the minimum wage on the radar in the US It deserves to be on the radar in Canada too. That's because low-wage work is on the rise.
Obama says raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 an hour is good for families dependent on low-wage jobs, and for businesses dependent on more consumer power to fuel their growth. A growing economy helps balance the books too.
from Oxfam
The social and environmental policies of the world’s ten biggest food and beverage giants are not fit for modern purpose and need a major shake-up, says international agency Oxfam.
The “Big 10” food and beverage companies – that together make $1 billion-a-day – are failing millions of people in developing countries who supply land, labor, water and commodities needed to make their products.
by Ole Hendrickson
Imagine a world in which the most widely used agricultural pesticides indiscriminately killed nearly all insects, including butterflies, beetles and moths.
by Arya M Sharma
If McDonalds took 30 minutes to serve you a hamburger, no one would eat there. If it took you 30 minutes to enjoy a Happy Meal, no one would bother. That same goes for any fast food restaurant.
Now let’s take the debate of whether a fast food meal is healthy or unhealthy out of the equation. Any calorically dense food that can be "inhaled" (bite and swallow — no chewing required!), will increase your likelihood of overeating.
In other words, the problem with fast food is more the "fast" than the "food."
by Mel Watkins
Canada is headed for a bitumen cliff and it risks taking the rest of the world along. That's the chilling forecast from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and Polaris Institute — who also offered options to avert disaster — in the most comprehensive discussion to date on the "Dutch disease".
by Sarah van Gelder
Our little group of a dozen families was running out of time. After meeting every weekend for three years to plan our hoped-for cohousing community, and after investing much of our savings to acquire a few acres of land, it looked as though our dream would fail. We couldn’t find a bank that would finance a cooperative.
It was our local credit union that saved us. “You’re owned by your members? What’s so odd about that? We’re owned by our members,” the president of the Kitsap Credit Union mused.
by Trevor Harrison
Recent statements by federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty that the government’s budget plans have been thrown into disarray by a decline in Alberta’s oil revenues should come as no surprise. The differential between the North American benchmark price for crude and the price Alberta gets for its thicker brand of oil has been played up in recent months by the provincial Progressive Conservative government as a major cause of its fiscal woes. Now its federal counterpart is using the same argument to explain its declining revenues.
Certainly the differential rate is part of the story for both governments. And complaints of insufficient pipeline access to new markets hold some merit. But the differential rate is not something new, and the idea that more pipelines would solve Alberta’s and Canada’s growing revenue problems is, one might say, a pipe dream.
by Stephen Leahy
— The largest climate rally in US history occurred Sunday in Washington DC, with the aim of pressuring President Barack Obama to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
Activists are calling Keystone “the line in the sand” regarding dangerous climate change, prompting the Sierra Club to suspend its 120-year ban on civil disobedience. The group’s executive director, Michael Brune, was arrested in front of the White House during a small protest against Keystone on Wednesday.
by George Lakoff
Political journalists have a job to do — to examine the SOTU's long list of proposals. They are doing that job, many are doing it well, and I'll leave it to them. Instead, I want to discuss what in the long run is a deeper question: How did the SOTU help to change public discourse? What is the change? And technically, how did it work?
