Issues, ethics, memory
On December 12 Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty International Canada, spoke to a room filled with supporters in Ottawa about global human rights. The picture is sombre and disturbing but Neve said those who hold human rights dear will persist in their efforts for as long as it takes. I was in the audience... Continue Reading →
Activist Tony Clarke was respected by foes and revered by activists for speaking truth to power in Canada and abroad. He died on December 4, 2024. I am reposting a blog piece that I wrote in 2018, upon the release of Clarke's last book, Getting to Zero: Canada Confronts Global Warming.
The New York Times recently carried an investigative story about how high ranking officers at Facebook attempted to conceal Russia’s use of the social media platform to spread false and distorted information during the 2016 US presidential election. Here in Canada, the federal government will likely use its November 20 economic update to outline plans aimed... Continue Reading →
Former Liberal cabinet minister Irwin Cotler says that he will nominate Syrian Civil Defense, better known as the White Helmets, for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. The group has drawn world-wide attention for pulling wounded people, including children, from the rubble created by aerial bombing raids carried out by the Syrian government and the... Continue Reading →
Dear Friends: After more than 10 years of posting regularly to my Pulpit and Politics blog, I have been mainly silent for the past few months, but I will pick up the pace again this fall. There are several reasons why I have been less active than usual. A new book of mine, Speeches That Changed Canada, was published... Continue Reading →
Chris Hedges is an American journalist, author, activist, professor and, for good measure, a divinity school graduate and ordained Presbyterian minister. He was recently in Canada promoting his latest book, America: The Farewell Tour, in which he predicts the imminent demise of the American empire and the collapse of that society as we have known it.... Continue Reading →
In the Introduction to his book Journeys to Justice, Joe Gunn, executive director of Citizens for Public Justice (CPJ) writes a letter to the next generation, including his own young adult children. He expresses frustration that largely they don’t know about the struggles by members of Christian churches for justice in the not-so-distant past, and... Continue Reading →
The Liberals promised in the recent federal budget to look into pharmacare and they lured Ontario’s health minister Dr. Eric Hoskins away from provincial politics to lead consultations on how to proceed. This may be mostly a ploy to thwart the NDP which, along with the labour movement, has been trying to build support for... Continue Reading →
I had just begun reading a biography of Martin Luther King when the not guilty verdict was rendered in the Gerald Stanley murder trial. As is now widely known, Stanley shot and killed an Indigenous youth named Colton Boushie at close range after a vehicle containing Boushie and four others entered Stanley’s farm yard near... Continue Reading →
The minimum wage in Ontario was increased from $11.40 to $14 an hour on January 1 and will rise to $15 a year from now, and that means that the sky is falling according to a coalition of business groups called Keep Ontario Working (KOW). The name implies everything -- by raising the minimum wage... Continue Reading →
Pulpit and Politics 