Alt-weeklies have fallen on hard times recently with the flight of advertising to social media, but Prairie Dog and its Saskatoon sister newspaper Planet S have endured through ingenuity and community support, and co-op ownership is one reason. Photo by D. McFadzean. When television station CHEK in BC’s picturesque capital of Victoria was threatened with closure in 2009, its workers banded together to form a co-op and buy it, with each contributing $15,000 to an employee stock ownership plan. Community members rallied in the city of 340,000, with some selling T-shirts emblazoned “Save CHEK TV ..read more

Lavender fields near Hitchin, England. Photo by DeFacto/Wikimedia Commons. “Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” —William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1 Lavender For some unknown, but no doubt morbidly humorous reason—the same sick humour, perhaps, that leads the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to refer to their periodic punitive strikes on Gaza as “mowing the grass“—the IDF have decided that “Lavender” is an appropriate name for the artificial intelligence (AI) software they use to identify “human targets” in Gaza. Since Octobe ..read more

Toronto Police Service cordoning off CUPE’s protest. Photo courtesy the author. For almost eight weeks, York University’s graduate teaching assistants and contract faculty have been striking for a liveable wage and fair working conditions. Yet despite the continuing efforts of CUPE 3903, the union that represents them, to bring York back to the bargaining table, the University remains unwilling to bargain in good faith. In the meantime, York hosted its annual alumni awards gala on April 3 at the Glenn Gould Studio in downtown Toronto, with the aim of celebrating York’s purported academic, fin ..read more

A formation of Nigerien soldiers from the 322nd Parachute Regiment march to a training site where they will learn combat and counterterrorism skills from US Army soldiers during Operation Flintlock, US Africa Command’s premier and largest annual special operations exercise. Photo courtesy US Navy/Wikimedia Commons. On March 16, the military government in Niger—also known as the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland (CNSP)—declared the presence of US troops in the country “illegal,” effectively giving the American soldiers the boot. Since seizing power in July 2023, the Nigerien j ..read more

Statues placed at Toronto’s Ireland Park to represent the arrival of Irish famine migrants to the city in 1847. Designed by Irish sculptor Rowan Gillespie, they were modelled on a similar Famine Memorial in Dublin for which he created seven statues of famine migrants about to embark on their journey. The seven sculptures that stand in Dublin were reduced to five in Toronto to represent the tragic loss of life on the Atlantic and in quarantine stations. Photo courtesy Canada Ireland Foundation. For several months in 1847 the population of Toronto tripled when close to 40,000 Irish famine refug ..read more

“Pink slime’” journalism is a murky world of partisan websites and print outlets that deceptively pose as local news to push political candidates and parties. Photo by lane Becker/Flickr. The explosion of non-profit news in the US seen over the past decade, which a small but growing movement in Canada is slowly catching up to, is made up to an alarming extent of phony “pink slime” operations pushing political candidates or parties, as my last column showed. That’s just part of the problem, however, as corporations have also set up local faux news operations to exert political influence and “g ..read more

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