Indigenous Human Rights in Canada
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This essay was written for a book on human rights edited by Geoffrey Davis and forthcoming from Routledge.
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The Walrus Wants Google to Strangle Globalresearch.ca: Lessons in the New McCarthyism
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A McCarthyist suppression of dissent is precisely what The Walrus is advocating with Justin Ling's full-throated call, in “Why Google Has a Responsibility to Fight Fake News” (The Walrus, January 5, 2018), for Google to put a prominent Canadian political-commentary website, the Centre for Research on Globalization, out of existence.
Read MoreLetter on Grassy Narrows, 25 June 2017
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This short letter was prompted by an Earthroots campaign in support of the Grassy Narrows First Nation; some of the language in it is borrowed from Earthroots, and minor revisions have been made to the version sent to Ontario Environment Minister Glen Murray. On June 27 Murray announced an $85 million program to remedy what he denounced as "gross neglect" over a half-century. Credit is due to the Grassy Narrows people and all the activists who have supported them by more than just writing letters.
Read MoreResisting McCarthyism: From the “PC Wars” to the “New Antisemitism”
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This essay examines two waves of neo-McCarthyist attacks on free speech and academic freedom: the 1990s campaign against “political correctness,” and (in greater detail) contemporary attempts to silence human rights activists who call for the application of international law in support of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and oppression. Resistance here takes the primary form of analytical understanding of the motives involved, of the parallel rhetorical inversions deployed in both cases, and of the political and legal tactics being used in the current attempt to reconfigure human rights solidarity as a form of “new antisemitism” (and hence as hate speech). Since the author has been closely involved in resisting both forms of neo-McCarthyism, the essay draws repeatedly on his own past interventions.
Read MoreThis should be more than just a day of remembering
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On Hallowe'en we mock the power of death, turning skeletons, graveyards and ghouls into jokes: the point of that mockery is a celebration of life and renewal, in the beauty and playfulness of our outlandishly costumed young children. But Remembrance Day is genuinely a Day of the Dead [...].
Read MoreBack-Talk from the 'Old Stock'
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Stephen Harper has been talking recently about "old stock" Canadians -- and at the same time stirring up fear and loathing against more recent arrivals in this country, notably those of Muslim faith, in order to mobilize electoral support for his Conservative Party. I think it's time "old stock" Canadians shared their opinion of these antics.
Read MoreSabotaging Democracy (7): After 2011 voter-suppression fraud, Conservatives remain unrepentant
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I have proposed that there were elements of farce in the trial of Michael Sona -- in which the prosecution's star witness, against whom there was serious material evidence, was given immunity to confabulate, while the accused was convicted on evidence not unlike that of the jail-house snitches whose testimony is used to sew up corrupt criminal trials in the US.
Read MoreSabotaging Democracy (6): Elections Canada bungled its investigation of Michael Sona and the 2011 robocall scandal
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In the preceding entry, we saw how the Conservative Party supporters or agents who in 2008 engineered Minister of Natural Resources Gary Lunn's re-election through robocall fraud got away with the crime scot-free; and we noted some of the deficiencies in Elections Canada's investigation in the 2011 ground-zero riding of Guelph. Let's consider now some of the more substantive failings in the investigation of the 2011 vote-suppression fraud.
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