Topics – Politics

Around much of northern Manitoba, “hydro” is a dirty word, and for good reason. These projects have reconfigured the landscape of the entire region, drying whole rivers and engorging lakes.

In the face of drastic social service cutbacks, community organizers and volunteers are stepping up to fill the void. For the optimistic, this represents opportunity for building the capacity of communities to become more independent of the state. Others critique the impact this offloading has on longer term organizing for social change.

As a court battle ensues between the Salvadoran government and Canadian mining company Pacific Rim, the disappearances and murders of anti-mining activists are a tangible manifestation of the lack of respect for individual and collective rights in the face of highly lucrative development projects.

Canada’s Extradition Act allows the deportation of Canadian citizens on the simple say-so of a foreign government, even when the case against them is groundless.

What does reconciliation look like for Indigenous peoples in what is currently Canada? In part, argues Leanne Simpson in Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back, it must take the form of the resurgence of Indigenous peoples’ political traditions in their nation-to-nation relationships with Canada.

The federal government should get serious about supporting the queer community through progressive policies, strategies and funding to allow queer communities to develop the programs that our youth so desperately need.

Homeplace is where we are grown and raised into social beings, where we receive our earliest definitions of humanity, where we first learn to recognize love, violence, justice and pain. Yet it has persisted in our imagination as a private sphere of emotional and material dependence, rather than as a front in revolutionary struggle.

Whether we are planning a short-term campaign or the theoretical work of long-term, widespread and systemic social change, the process of strategy development is the same. To begin developing a winning strategy, we must first ask ourselves: what does victory look like?

Less than two months into their majority mandate, the federal Conservatives passed legislation that left the labour movement reeling. The Harper government’s use of back-to-work legislation to force an end to labour disputes at Air Canada and Canada Post was just the latest blow, however, to the labour movement’s most time-honoured tactic: the strike.