Features

Redefining security for the 21st century

Jun 052012

Climate change, water shortages, famine and failing states the new threats.

by Lester R Brown of Earth Policy Institute

One of our legacies from the last century, which was dominated by two world wars and the cold war, is a sense of security that is defined almost exclusively in military terms. It so dominates Washington thinking that the U.S. foreign affairs budget of $701 billion in 2009 consisted of $661 billion for military purposes and $40 billion for foreign assistance and diplomatic programs.

But the situation in which we find ourselves pushes us to redefine security in twenty-first century terms. The time when military forces were the prime threat to security has faded into the past. The threats now are climate volatility, spreading water shortages, continuing population growth, spreading hunger, and failing states. The challenge is to devise new fiscal priorities that match these new security threats.

Anti-terrorism law to name ecologists as threat

Jun 052012

Features

Stephen Harper government turns environmentalists into public enemies.

by Linda McQuaig

Nicole Eaton may be Canada's Mitt Romney.

The Republican presidential candidate comes across as a wealthy patrician with little sense of how tough the world can be for people who don't have tens of millions of dollars at their disposal.

That tendency also seems to afflict Eaton, a wealthy Conservative fundraiser appointed to the Senate by Stephen Harper. She's a leading figure in the Harper government's campaign to go after environmental activist groups aggressively by threatening their charitable status.

There goes CANDU

May 222012

Features

SNC Lavalin scandal compromises CANDU support, nuclear security.

by Gordon Edwards

SNC-Lavalin, the company that bought the CANDU division of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) for a mere $15 million last fall, is now rocked with scandal — and accused by its own nuclear engineers of "destroying" the CANDU industry by its unsupportive policies.

Already hundreds of the best-qualified professionals in the CANDU field have fled the company, seriously compromising its capability to design and build new reactors, as well as undermining the competence needed to service and refurbish old reactors.

Yesterday (May 9) we learned that SNC-Lavalin is being sued (in a class action suit by investors) for $1.5 billion in losses, due to plummeting stock prices triggered by improper activities on the part of the company's directors.

Charities and advocacy

May 222012

Features

Most Canadians still honour social contract, despite Harper.

by John Baglow

Andrew Coyne believes that a robust democracy of many voices and interests should not be promoted at the taxpayers' expense.

To be more explicit, he stated in a May 5 article that Harper's crackdown on charitable groups for "political activity" is warranted, and that subsidies for political parties are wrong as well. Why should a taxpayer be forced, in one way or another, to fund views with which he or she disagrees? He wrote:

It's a safe bet that a good many of the more well-known advocacy groups in the country, including the various think thanks of the left and right, are operating in excess of this standard, and have been for years. As long as it's even-handed about it, I see nothing wrong with simply enforcing the law, as the government proposes. Indeed, I'd go further. Why should any charity be permitted to spend any money on advocacy of any kind?

Under current law, charities are forbidden from overtly partisan advocacy of any kind. They are, however, permitted to devote up to 10 percent (as a general rule: there are higher limits for smaller charities) of their resources, financial or otherwise, to more broadly defined "political activities" — for example, advocating that a particular law should be "retained, opposed, or changed," or some other equally explicit "call to political action."

Setting aside the fact that Coyne advances no evidence of anyone's operations being in excess of the law, it might be noted that similar arguments have been made about the CBC, notably by its competitors. But why stop there? Without too much difficulty such arguments can be applied to almost any government expenditure on anything. Why should I have to pay for the F-35s? Why must I support the risible Office of Religious Freedom on my nickel?

Quebec students: ten talking points

May 222012

Features

The issue is debt, not tuition fees.

by Andrew Gavin Marshall

Student strikes in Quebec began in February and have lasted for three months, despite draconian police and legislative response. Demonstrations and organizations involving roughly 175,000 students have been conducted mainly in French, a factor that allows English language media to ignore or misconstrue the students and their struggle. The following is a list of ten talking points about the student movement in Quebec, to help place their struggle in its proper global context.

200 million looking for work, globally

May 222012

Features

Federal policies make it easier to hire a cheaper you.

by Armine Yalnizyan

Have you noticed how common it has become to talk about replacing workers with even cheaper workers? If you're looking over your shoulder, you're not paranoid; you're paying attention. There's probably a cheaper you out there. And in Canada, the feds are helping your boss find them. This week, the International Labour Organization noted there are 50 million fewer jobs in the global economy than before the financial crisis began in 2008. Some 200 million people are now looking for work, and many of them are on the move. Some have landed here.

But with 1.4 million unemployed, many Canadians, too, are desperately seeking opportunity, and trying to avoid losing economic ground. As manufacturers continue to decamp to low-wage climes, and the public sector sheds jobs, the job options are sliding down the income scale. There, the growing competition is pushing the pay floor lower and lower.

Fourteenth week of protests

May 152012

Features

Quebec student demonstrators have a point.

by Stephen Block

Even after fourteen weeks of student protests, callers to talk radio here in Montreal, especially on the Anglo side, have trouble not comparing them to labour disputes. In fact many callers confuse them with union strike action. While there really is not much connection, the comparisons, albeit inadvertent, are nonetheless very illuminating.

First, student associations are very different from legally constituted labour unions. Unlike unions, student associations are not bound by a labour code. That's what makes this series of strike actions so interesting and socially important.

Raising tuition isn’t smart

May 152012

Features

We all pay for the defunding of higher education.

by Erika Shaker

I went to McGill in the late 1980s and early '90s, when tuition fees were less than $1,200 a year. So with summer jobs and some parental help I graduated from my first degree debt-free. For my MA, which I took in Ontario, I worked part-time and graduated after one year with a debt of $10,000.

By way of comparison: my partner went to university in Ontario after grants were eliminated, and when the first round of tuition fee hikes were implemented. He completed a BA and then an MA, and graduated with a debt load (and compound interest) requiring monthly payments of close to $650 for 10 years.

From academia to action

May 152012

Features

Scientists block BC coal train, urge others to take up civil disobedience.

by Alejandro Frid, with addendum by Stephen Leahy

Prominent academics, fed up with governments that ignore science and heed the priorities of corporations, have turned to civil disobedience. James Hansen, a senior climate scientist with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, led by example last year when he got himself arrested in front of the White House to protest the Keystone Pipeline that would carry oil from the Alberta Tar Sands to the US. That was his third arrest in three years; the previous two involved civil disobedience against the mining of coal, a huge contributor to greenhouse gases.

On May 5 2012, In the wake of Hansen's arrests, Mark Jaccard (a prominent economist, IPCC member, and professor at the Energy and Materials Research Group of Simon Fraser University) got himself arrested in White Rock, BC, for blocking a coal train carrying US coal for export to China via BC ports. There were 12 others with Jaccard, among them a man in his 80s, several men in their 60s and 70s, and a few youngsters like myself and my good friend Lynne Quarmby. Lynne happens to be chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at Simon Fraser University.

Self-financing Toronto

May 142012

Features

City could ease cash crisis if it put revenues in a bank of its own.

by Paul Weinberg

Those who participated in Occupy Toronto last fall have fond memories of economist Jim Stanford at the protest mic in front of the bank towers on King. The high point of his speech was all about a public, democratic, accountable banking system that serves the economy, not private wealth accumulation.

Now, Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam has a plan to get Toronto out of its financial logjam with just such an effort, inspired by the 93-year-old public-owned Bank of North Dakota.

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