The Conservative Member of Parliament for Edmonton-St. Albert, the riding in which I reside, has made a name for himself by being a noisy defender of the Harper Government's effort to shut down the national rifle and shotgun registry and destroy all its records.

Brent Rathgeber likes to describe his party's nearly completed plan to eliminate the registry and permanently trash all its information, despite the pleas of the police whom he also purports to support, as a way to preserve "the liberty of law-abiding farmers, hunters, fishermen, trappers and others."

On Dec. 7, 2011, Justice Campbell of the Federal Court issued a declaration that the Minister of Agriculture, Gerry Ritz, acted in breach of his statutory obligation to hold a plebiscite of farmers before abolishing the Canadian Wheat Board's "single desk" mandate for marketing wheat and barley.

Justice Campbell expressed no hesitation in granting a request by the Friends of the Canadian Wheat Board and the Canadian Wheat Board that "the Minister's conduct is an affront to the rule of law."

Toronto Pig Save activists bear witness to and protest what they refer to as the "Un-Royal" Agricultural Winter Fair.

On Tuesday, November 8, 2011, "The Market Lamb and Market Kid Auction" included the sale of number 200 lamb, who was born less than two months ago in mid-September and weighed only 50 pounds. The bids occur in dollars per pound, underlining how these animals are viewed as mere objects and property by the "sellers" and "buyers."

Last week marked the centennial of the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, in which 146 mostly immigrant workers died. The tragedy prompted widespread labour reforms in the United States, but its commemoration underscores the plight of immigrant workers similarly exploited today.

As Richard Greenwald notes at Working in These Times, the disaster marked "the moment that a strong collective working class demanded its citizenship rights," while today, "we are living in a time where organized labor is weak, fractured and leaderless." He concludes that a rebirth of labour must come, as it did in 1911, from today's new immigrant communities, which continue to bear the brunt of exploitative labour practices.