canadian politics

The concerns about proportional representation being raised about yesterday's election are all fair, but I think we should recognize the root of the problem with our political system.

Wikileaks released 1800 cables about Canada yesterday, mostly sent from US consulates back to Washington. They give some idea of what the US is keeping tabs on. Here's a quick overview of some things you'll find.

As far as social justice organizing in Canada:

Here's a letter I just sent to my Member of Parliament. If anyone else is considering taking action on this, please do.

Hi Pat,

I have two questions for you about Honduras. The Lobo government is holding a conference called "Honduras is Open for Business" at the start of May.

Over the past few weeks the media have been closely following the ups and (mostly) downs of Wyclef Jean's bid for candidacy as the next president of Haiti. Maybe they think fluffy stories about the hip-hop singer help make the Haitian election more interesting to the Canadian public, who'd otherwise see it as largely irrelevant.

I wrote an article that appears in the new issue of the Dominion, a project of the Canadian Media Co-op. It's on Canada vengefully blocking debt forgiveness to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on behalf of a big mining outfit called First Quantum Minerals, based out of Vancouver.

The Manitoba government has apologized for relocating a Dene community in northern Manitoba to Churchill in the late 1950s, offering them 20 square miles of land in compensation. They were told they were being moved because the caribou in their region were dissapearing, which the government later admitted it had been wrong about.

Justin Podur was blogging all day yesterday about the start of his computer-aided analysis of the War Diary.

It's been interesting to watch the discourse around the Afghan War Diary in the Canadian corporate press, and to see what they're talking about, and what they're not.

On Sunday, Wikileaks released 91,731 documents about the war in Afghanistan. This is the biggest leak in US history. It'll take some time for analysts to comb through it all, but some reporting trends are already emerging.