Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre, Kigali, Rwanda. Photo from Flickr. Facing history means facing ourselves. No history is hermetically sealed. One of the most serious historical tasks is to examine our role in shaping and interpreting events. It is only after scrutinizing ourselves that we are able to see where we have erred, what we may have overlooked or dismissed. In examining the Rwandan genocide, which occurred 30 years ago, we are forced to ask several disruptive questions: why would events crucial to our understanding of that history be removed from the public record? What would justify ..read more

Mural honouring missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls on the main road into the Brady Road landfill, just outside of Winnipeg. A blockade went up on the road after the province refused to fund a search of Prairie Green landfill, located north of Winnipeg, for the remains of three Indigenous women. Photo courtesy Winnipeg Police Cause Harm/X. Manitoba’s quandary The rates of violence perpetrated against Indigenous women in Canada greatly exceeds that for non-Indigenous women. In 2022, a man was charged with the murders of Rebecca Contois, Morgan Harris, Marcedes Myran, and an unident ..read more

In 2024-25, spending on provincial policing in Manitoba will increase by $28.6 million, from $270.6 million in 2023-24 to almost $300 million this year. Photo courtesy Wab Kinew/X. After forming a majority government in October 2023, the Manitoba NDP delivered its first provincial budget on Tuesday. Understandably, much of the focus since has been on the budget’s big commitments to health care, as well as the dizzying array of targeted tax cuts and credits. But there are also some sizable updates to the funding of policing and jailing that warrant attention. Premier Wab Kinew has constantly r ..read more

The Bank of Canada complex on Ottawa’s Wellington Street. Photo courtesy the Bank of Canada Museum. It is rare for the Bank of Canada to say that we face a national economic emergency. But that is exactly what Deputy Governor Carolyn Rogers did on March 26. She was referring to Canada’s dismal record on labour productivity, which is indeed a major, albeit long-standing issue. Her widely publicized speech put a sharper focus on very weak Canadian economic performance, especially relative to the United States. As Rogers said, “labour productivity measures how much an economy produces per hour o ..read more

Destruction in Gaza following an Israeli bombing raid. Photo courtesy Fars News Agency/Wikimedia Commons. Red lines In his State of the Union address, delivered on March 7, US President Joe Biden signaled an apparent shift in American policy toward the Gaza War—though so far, it has to be said, this has proved largely cosmetic. Asked afterward by an MSNBC interviewer whether Israel’s threatened invasion of Rafah, where 1.5 million desperate Palestinians have taken refuge, would constitute a “red line,” Biden answered: It is a red line, but I’m never going to leave Israel. The defense of Israe ..read more

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu displays a map of Israel omitting the occupied Palestinian territories during a speech at the United Nations General Assembly. Image from YouTube. The following is a transcript of a presentation made by Sid Shniad in Castlegar, British Columbia on March 24, 2024. Shniad is a founding member of Independent Jewish Voices Canada (IJV), a national human rights organization whose mandate is to promote a just resolution to the dispute in Israel and Palestine through the application of international law and respect for the human rights of all parties. Founde ..read more

“The Fin de Siècle Newspaper Proprietor” by Frederick Burr Opper, Keppler & Schwarzmann, 1894. Image courtesy the Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons. Having been down a couple of rabbit holes recently and emerging from the last one covered in pink slime, I am now having sober second thoughts about the non-profit alternative I touted in this space recently as the only path to a sustainable news media. Sure, for-profit corporate ownership has pretty much wrecked our news media, along with federal bungling, but believe it or not a system of non-profit news media such as has emerged in the ..read more

Filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, who won the Oscar for Best International Feature Film for The Zone of Interest, delivers his acceptance speech at the 2024 Academy Awards. Photo by Rich Polk/Variety/Getty Images. Last week, Variety reported that “more than 1,000 Jewish creatives, executives and Hollywood professionals have signed an open letter denouncing Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest Oscar speech.” The angry letter is a tight script for a real-life drama of defending Israel as it continues to methodically kill civilians no less precious than the signers’ own loved ones. A few ethical word ..read more

Medic carrying a wounded Palestinian child in Gaza. Photo courtesy Fars Media Corporation/Wikimedia Commons. On March 18, the world’s famine watchdog the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), whose “main goal … is to provide decision-makers with a rigorous, evidence- and consensus-based analysis of food insecurity and acute malnutrition situations,” reported that: The entire population in the Gaza Strip (2.23 million) is facing high levels of acute food insecurity. Between mid-March and mid-July, in the most likely scenario and under the assumption of an escalation of the confl ..read more

Photo by Kris Krüg/Flickr Free Transit Ottawa (FTO) organized a public meeting on March 18 on the theme “Fighting Climate Change: Beyond the Carbon Tax.” The event was co-sponsored by a range of local climate justice movements including, Ecology Ottawa, Horizon Ottawa, Justice for Workers, Fridays for Future and the City for All Women Initiative (CAWI). Speakers on the introductory panel were Emma Bider of Climate Justice Ottawa, Angella MacEwen of CUPE and the Green Economy Network, and myself representing Free Transit Ottawa. The following text is based on my remarks. Climate change is the ..read more