January 2006

J. F. Conway

This is the second time in recent history that the RCMP has played a significant and highly inappropriate political role.

With ten days to voting day, pollsters reported that Stephen Harper and his Tories were destined to win a minority government, and were just a handful of seats away from a narrow majority. One poll gave the Tories a 10-point lead over the Liberals; another reported a 9-point lead. The biggest breakthrough for the Tories occurred in Quebec, where they replaced the Liberals for second place far behind the Bloc.

The turning point in the polls was the RCMP announcement that they were conducting a criminal investigation into Ralph Goodale’s office regarding allegations of leaks about the government’s policy shift on income trusts, leading to possible insider trading.

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Fair Vote Canada

According to poll results and seat projections released yesterday, Stephen Harper may be close to setting a new Canadian record for the phoniest majority government ever.

The current record is held by Jean Chretien, who captured a majority of seats in 1997 with only 38.5 per cent of the popular vote.

According to the January 13-15 Ipsos Reid survey, the Conservatives have 38 per cent support but, thanks to distorted results created by the first-past-the-post system, are poised to win 152 seats, just a few shy of majority control of Parliament.

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Cy Gonick
Radio ALERT
(Canadian Dimension)

The NDP

With progressive voters voting Liberal over the past 12 years to stop the

The great challenge for the anti-war movement is to avoid having a movement to end the Iraq War transformed into a movement to save Empire.”

by Ak Gupta
from Left Turn Magazine #19

More than three years after an anti-war movement first took shape, momentum is on the side of those calling for an end to the US occupation of Iraq. President Bush

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
10 January 2006
The Independent (UK)

The UN has for the first time admitted that a number of innocent civilians may have become “collateral victims” and killed during a controversial raid by peacekeeping forces in Haiti. The admission will likely add to the tension inside the capital city, Port-au-Prince, already wracked by violence and chaos

The message of the TV series, that torturers can retain their human dignity if the cause is right, is a profound lie.

Slavoj Zizek
Tuesday January 10, 2006
The Guardian

24 should not be seen as a simple popular depiction of the sort of problematic methods the US resorts to in its “war on terror”. Much more is at stake.”

On Sunday, the fifth season of the phenomenally successful television drama 24 will start in the US. Each season is composed of 24 one-hour episodes and the whole season covers the events of a single day. The story of the latest series is the desperate attempt of the LA-based Counter Terrorist Unit to prevent an act of catastrophic magnitude and the action focuses on the unit’s agents, the White House and the terrorist suspects.

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Chris Arsenault
Zmag, December 2005

After a few years of relative quiet, relegated to their misty mountain strongholds in southern Mexico, Zapatista rebels recently tried to re-assert their presence on the international stage, continung a unique military strategy based more on words than weapons.

Throughout July and August, during a highly publicized red-alert and a series of communiques, the Zapatistas announced a broad new political initiative-for now, called “the other campaign”-to break out of a stalemate with government forces.

What began as a “scandalously Indian” uprising in Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state, is metamorphosing into a “national campaign for building another way of doing politics, for a program of national struggle of the left, and for a new Constitution,” according to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacondon, issued by the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee (CCRIG), the military commanders of the Zapatistas’ armed wing.

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James Petras
Canadian Dimension

A realistic assessment of the electoral victory of Evo Morales requires knowledge of his recent role in Bolivia

By Murray Dobbin
January 5, 2006
TheTyee.ca

Every vote is a strategic vote.

I say that, even though I have attacked the advocacy of strategic voting coming from the CAW’s Buzz Hargrove. But my quibble isn’t with strategic voting. It is really a matter of whether or not you are following a good strategy. The trouble with Hargrove’s call for strategic voting was that it was just lousy strategy for those with a social democratic vision for the country. His early election call to vote Liberal, except in ridings where the NDP had a good chance of winning, ignored the fact that it simply played into the hands of the Liberals’ use of scare tactics to scoop NDP voters. Last time around, it defeated at least five NDP candidates who, as MPs, would have given the party the real balance of power.

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