![James Laxer](http://rabble.ca/sites/rabble/files/imagecache/thumbnail/category_pictures/picture-62_0.jpg "James Laxer is regularly asked to comment on current national and global issues by the Canadian media and frequently writes columns in major newspapers and periodicals.
In 1969, he was one of the founders of the Waffle Group, Canada’s largest New Left political movement. In 1971, at the age of 29, he ran second for the national leadership of the New Democratic Party. In the mid 1970s, James Laxer was a leading crusader against the power of multi national petroleum companies. His books, speeches and television appearances helped lead to the creation of a nationally owned oil company, Petro Canada, established to counter the power of companies like Exxon in Canada.
In 1981, Laxer was appointed research director of the federal New Democratic Party. At the end of his two year term, he wrote a controversial, book length critique of the party’s economic policies, charging that they were seriously dated. The report was front page news in Canada and was debated for months in the national media.
In 1984, the National Film Board of Canada hired Laxer to be host narrator, for a series of documentaries on the changing global economy and Canada’s place in it. In preparing the series, Laxer travelled extensively in Japan, Europe and the United States. The series, entitled Reckoning, was denied broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation because it was seen as too controversial.
Instead it was broadcast by a hook up of all the English language educational networks in the country. The series was also broadcast in the United States, as well, by a large number of PBS stations. The Reckoning series has won awards in both the United States and Canada. One of its films won the blue ribbon, first prize, at the prestigious American Film and Video Festival, for best political documentary. The same film won the Atlantic
Film Festival and national Gemini Awards in Canada for best writing in an information series, awards which went to Laxer and the film’s director as co-authors.
In 1986-87, Laxer spent a year in Europe writing Decline of the Superpowers. From 1978 to 1981, he hosted a public affairs television program on TV Ontario. He regularly went to Europe to conduct interviews with leading European political and intellectual figures. In 1993 his book False God: How the Globalization Myth Has Impoverished Canada, was published by Lester Publishing. In Search of a New Left: Canadian Politics
After the Neo-Conservative Assault was published by Viking in 1996. The Undeclared War: Class Conflict in the Age of Cyber Capitalism, was published by Viking in 1998, and by Penguin Canada in 1999, in a paperback edition. Dalton Camp wrote that the Undeclared War "is an informed and cogent book on the great and growing dilemma of our time: how to preserve a free society in the face of increasing disparity and the creation of a new class society---‘a dominant class and a dominated class.’ This is stuff we need to know." Laxer’s book, Stalking the Elephant: My Discovery of America was on national best seller lists for seven weeks in the autumn of 2000. In his review of the book for the Globe and Mail, David Shribman, Pulitzer prize winning columnist for the Boston Globe, commented: "This is a book by a Canadian that can change the United States." Stalking the Elephant is to be published by The New Press in New York in September 2001. In 2003, his book, The Border: Canada, the U.S. and Dispatches from the 49th Parallel, was published by Doubleday Canada. In 2004, Douglas and McIntyre published his book Red Diaper Baby: A Boyhood in the Age of McCarthyism. This memoir of James Laxer’s childhood was the winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award for best biography/memoir in 2005.
James Laxer is a Professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto")
Sometimes Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Defence Minister Peter MacKay are given insufficient credit for their wry sense of humour. The serious, literal-minded members of the opposition need to lighten up.
Yesterday, three Canadian generals testified before the parliamentary committee that is hearing testimony on the allegations that detainees handed over to the Afghans by Canadian soldiers were tortured and that the top soldiers and government ministers failed to heed the warnings coming to them from diplomat Richard Colvin in 2006-2007.
The soldiers -- Major General, See No Evil, Lieutenant General, Hear No Evil, and General General Speak No Evil -- seemed genuinely mystified at what Colvin said in his testimony last week. The generals didn't get Colvin's message at the time, they told the committee. In fact, Colvin didn't even use the word "torture," Lieutenant General Hear No Evil insisted.
Two of the generals are now retired, but that didn't stop them from being allowed to read Colvin's missives so they could prepare for their testimony.
Meanwhile, Colvin is being blocked by the government from releasing those missives so that we can all learn what he said in them. And the government won't let the members of the parliamentary committee read them either.
In a perfectly realized military operation, the generals aimed their heavy fire power at Colvin, but no one on the other side could shoot back.
That's because in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister and the Minister of National Defence were carrying out their own maneuver -- denying the MPs the Colvin documents, while insisting that the opposition was trying to block those on the anti-Colvin side from testifying.
Peter MacKay plays a great straight man to Harper's straight man. Droll. So much wit and leger de main that the plodding opposition members don't stand a chance.
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