Tag: Activism

“In my view the law plays a sufficient contributory role in preventing a prostitute from taking steps that could reduce the risk of such violence.” With these concluding remarks by Justice Susan Himel, the laws that kept sex work illegal in Ontario were struck down in November 2010. The ruling, however, has been stayed, pending an appeal by the federal government that’s scheduled to begin in June, 2011.

If passed, the DREAM Act would grant conditional permanent residency and a path to citizenship to undocumented students who arrived in the U.S. as minors. This article chronicles the lives of three queer undocumented activists who have risked deportation to fight for its passage.

With Toronto’s 31st annual Pride Parade fast approaching, the legacy of last year’s controversial attempted banning of the group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid from the Parade continues to resonate today.

I remember the exact moment I realized I had just spent the last five years of my life building the wrong type of *F*eminism. I was on a conference call with my fellow women-of-colour organizers when my 10-year-old daughter interrupted me to declare that she had friends who were “hooking up” with older boys and men online.

Nearly three years after Stephen Harper’s historic apology to residential school survivors, Canada’s iniquitous treatment of Indigenous children lives on. With over 27,000 First Nations children currently in foster care, there are more than three times as many Indigenous youth in state care than at the height of the residential school era in the 1940s.

Spirituality and activism are not strangers. The intimate relationship between the two is evident in the work of icons like Gandhi, Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X and Desmond Tutu, for whom activism was part and parcel of their commitments to something or someone beyond the sensory world.

With Islam having moved to the centre of North American political discourse since 9/11, Muslim practices, cultural formations, sectarian divides, religious laws and political histories are being publicly scrutinized as never before. Grandiose proclamations of a “clash of civilizations” are now commonplace, as are routine examples of racial profiling, hate crimes, polls documenting shockingly discriminatory public opinions, and inflammatory rhetoric from public figures across the political spectrum.

Many activists practice yoga, but few would describe their yoga practice as a form of activism or treat their activism as an expression of their yoga practice. Michael Stone is working to change that.

“Our action is our spirituality. It’s my faith that makes me fight.” When Rubens Pita said this, nearly everyone in the room spoke up to offer their own reflections. Rubens is an educator and coordinator at the Escola Fé e Política: Pe. Humberto Plummen (School of Faith and Politics) in Recife, Brazil.

It’s the year 2011. Icebergs are melting, forest fires are raging out of control, sea levels are rising, drinking water is becoming scarcer, droughts, famine, conflict and other climate-related pressures are growing exponentially. How can this crisis — the greatest challenge humanity has yet faced — be transformed into the greatest love story on earth?

While specific spiritual beliefs are as varied as the distinct First Nations communities on this land, Indigenous world views generally operate from a framework of interconnectedness whereby relationship is the lens through which we understand and sense the world. It informs the ultimate vision of sovereignty and decolonization, and impacts the goals, strategies and tactics of our activism.

The G20 summit held in Toronto this June closed with a commitment to “fiscal consolidation” from the world’s economic leaders. Among the strongest proponents of slashing public spending was Canada’s Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty. For many of those protesting the G20 on the streets of Toronto, the subtext of Flaherty’s austerity agenda was well understood: a continuation of the attack on access to housing, health care, education and welfare, among other social necessities.

Globalization has propelled neoliberalism across borders, not just as an ideology or system of commerce, but as the primary determinant of the daily realities of where people live, what they eat, how they work, and what rights they enjoy.

The concept of indigenous food sovereignty represents a policy approach that extends the concept of food security through honouring the wisdom and values of indigenous knowledge in maintaining responsible relationships with the land.

Of the more than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children who were forcibly removed from their families and enrolled in one of the many Indian Residential Schools (IRS) in Canada, it is estimated that there are 85,000 residential school survivors in Canada today. Alongside these survivors are the thousands more impacted by the intergenerational effects of residential schools on Aboriginal families.

A new generation of anti-choice groups is establishing a reputation for itself on Canadian campuses, with increasingly visible tactics that many pro-choice activists call discriminatory, harassing and hateful. In response, student unions and pro-choice groups have mobilized to prevent anti-choice presentations from taking place on campus and anti-choice groups from gaining club status.

At midnight on May 31, 2009, the guards who manned the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) station on the Mohawk (Kahnienkehaka) reserve of Akwesasne, near Cornwall, Ontario, abandoned the Canadian side of the U.S.-Canada border and went home. The guards were to be issued 9-mm Beretta pistols on the following day as part of Canada’s border security policy, but had been warned by Akwesasne community groups that armed agents of the Canadian government would not be tolerated on their land.

Arsham Parsi is a tireless organizer for queer rights, both internationally and in his native Iran. He is proud to call Canada home, but in the wake of proposed changes to Canada’s refugee status determination system and the elimination of any reference to gay rights in the new version of Canada’s citizenship guide, some wonder whether Parsi would be admitted to this country if he claimed asylum here today.

Imagine you were born in Honduras and spent your childhood days on the dusty streets of Tegucigalpa. When you’re 12, you and your parents emigrate to Canada. You’re granted permanent residency and the stability it offers. By the time you’re 20, Canada is home and Honduras a distant memory.

Two downtown neighbourhoods in Hamilton, Ontario – James St. North and Landsdale – have recently been the site of several skirmishes in a gentrification war waged in the media, art galleries and on the streets themselves.