Peter Menzies minces few words in voicing his disdain for Ottawa’s recent wealth redistribution efforts on behalf of Canada’s news media. If he’s not railing against the Online News Act, which put bureaucrats from the Canada Revenue Agency in charge of distributing its proceeds to news media, he’s railing against the Online Streaming Act, which put bureaucrats and political appointees from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in charge of distributing its proceeds to broadcasters. As a senior fellow at the conservative Macdonald-Laurier Institute, it’s his job to ge ..read more

In the summer of 1990, Ellen Gabriel (Katsi’tsakwas) was chosen by the People of the Longhouse and her community of Kanehsatà:ke to be their spokesperson during the infamous “Oka Crisis,” a 78-day standoff to protect ancestral Kanien’kéha:ka (Mohawk) land in Québec. Photo by Caitlyn Richard. When the Pine Needles Fall: Indigenous Acts of Resistance Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel with Sean Carleton Between the Lines, 2024 At 5:15 am on July 11, 1990, the Sûreté de Québec (SQ), the provincial police force, along with the RCMP and other paramilitary units, marched on a blockade on a dirt road in Ka ..read more

Cubicles at a supervised injection site in Strasbourg. Photo by Claude Truong-Ngoc/Wikimedia Commons. Across the street from a ceramics studio on Dundas Street in London, Ontario there’s an unassuming little clinic in a squat, grey building. Throughout the day people come and go from the cinderblock low-rise, attending their appointments and getting the care they need. They are accessing primary care, mental health resources, and a range of specialized programs from gender affirming care, to ongoing interventions for HIV, hepatitis, and diabetes. For over 30 years, the London InterCommunity H ..read more

Donald Trump in 2019. Photo by Dana M. Clarke/Wikimedia Commons. It’s hard to believe that the federal government plans to forge closer economic ties with the US when Donald Trump becomes president again. He’s said he will become dictator for a day. It will likely be for much longer. Canada is not deepening economic ties with China, Russia, or North Korea. Should we do so with a Trump-run US if he acts like a dictator? Trump’s second coming will likely be quite different than his first. He has a much better understanding of the system’s vulnerabilities, is appointing only yes-men and women, a ..read more

Israeli checkpoint at the entrance of Shuhada Street in Hebron, Palestine. Photo by Mehdi Chebil. The Message Ta-Nehisi Coates One World, 2024 In East Jerusalem, roughly a dozen participants in the Palestine Festival of Literature, including American author Ta-Nehisi Coates, are met by Israeli soldiers outside the Al-Aqsa complex and are made to wait. “No justifications were given, no questions asked, no instructions offered,” Coates writes. The following day, in the West Bank, as the group of authors are navigating the many checkpoint of Hebron, a soldier asks Coates his religion. When Coate ..read more

Photo by Serge Tanet/Flickr Writing about all of the problems with the ownership of Canada’s news media, as I have done for the past quarter century, has become frustrating. From sky-high concentration of corporate ownership to our hare-brained millennium experiment with the “convergence” of newspaper and television ownership to massive foreign ownership by faceless hedge funds, the problems only keep getting worse. After mostly ignoring the problems despite the repeated warnings of its own media inquiries going back more than 50 years, Ottawa finally sprang into action last year, passing the ..read more

Damaged apartment block in Kyiv. Photo by Oleksandr Ratushniak/UNDP Ukraine/Flickr. Back in 1997, when Canada still had a more or less independent foreign policy, the Canadian government celebrated the signing of the Ottawa Treaty banning the use of anti-personnel landmines. At the time, it was heralded as an extraordinary achievement of Canadian diplomacy, and was a source of great national pride. One might imagine, therefore, that Canadians today would be concerned with potential breaches of a treaty that was once considered the crown jewel of our country’s foreign policy. But it appears no ..read more

Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Photo by Fabio Rodrigues Pozzebom/Agência Brasil/Flickr. As world leaders met in Rio de Janeiro for the G20 summit on November 19, Brazil’s Federal Police arrested five individuals for their involvement in a 2022 plot to assassinate then-president elect Lula da Silva, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, and Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Four of those arrested were military personnel assigned to guard the summit. The fifth was a police officer. The suspects could be charged with violent abolition of the rule of law, coup-plotting, and ..read more

Kamala Harris speaking with attendees at the 2019 Iowa Democratic Wing Ding at Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa. Photo by Gage Skidmore/Flickr. Red lines? What red lines? If anyone has any remaining doubts about the outgoing Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza—even after Kamala Harris lost the election to Donald Trump—they can safely put them to rest. As Joe Biden reminded his longtime “personal friend” and “friend to our nation” Israeli President Isaac Herzog in the Oval Office on November 12, “the United States’ commitment to Israel is ironclad.” That same d ..read more

Stephen Harper meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, February 20, 2024. Photo by Kobi Gideon/Office of the President of Israel/X. A Toronto Sun editorial recently praised Stephen Harper’s “moral clarity” on current events in the Middle East. After quitting politics in 2015 the former Canadian prime minister worked with American Zionist billionaire and Trump backer Sheldon Adelson before serving on the boards of organizations like the Friends of Israel Initiative. In addition to his graduate degree in economics, Harper received an honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv U ..read more