King Stephen loves a good punishment system.
prisons
The Conservative prison policy is a white elephant with bars
In its first major policy announcements of 2011, the Conservative government revealed eight additional prison expansions, putting new bars on the windows and adding new walls to (by latest count) 24 facilities across Canada, at a cost of $2 billion over five years.
In his year-end summary of good works from his government, Prime Minister Stephen Harper lauded their efforts at crime fighting. Of the domestic list of 13 "major successes achieved," fully seven involved legislation to get tough on crime.
Beware the national security state
For those considering issue triage -- picking five or six issues to focus on -- in the fight to rid the country of the current government, one area that is critical to the outcome is exposing the Harper government's construction of the national security state.
I am referring here to the commitment of the Harper government to implementing policies that increase the importance of a war-fighting military in Canadian society, its preoccupation with tough-on-crime legislation, its blank cheque for security operations like the one "protecting" the G20 Summit in June and its continued efforts to convince Canadians that they face the constant risk of terrorist attack.
Conservative policies create intolerable situation for First Nations
The Assembly of First Nations declared the week of Sept. 20 as the National Week of Action on Education.
The resumption of Parliament and the vote on the long gun registry overshadowed First Nations' demonstrations, but in the long run the education issue is of greater urgency.
While media were focused on the pointless vote on the gun registry, something of substance was happening in their backyard. At a rally on Parliament Hill, students and their supporters marched and demonstrated from individual First Nations and the First Nations University of Canada. The rally brought out several thousand protesters.
Civil disobedience considered by prison farm protesters
Is Stephen Harper ready to face more angry citizens so soon after his G20 fiasco in Toronto? Certainly, the venue will be different -- a smaller city -- and there will be no international spotlight, but it might be unpleasant just the same.
I'm talking about the large number of Kingstonians of all ages who have signed up to help stop the government from selling and removing the dairy herd, established a century ago, from the property of the Frontenac Institution prison farm. It's one of six prison farms slated for closure by the Harper government -- and a clear majority of citizens want it to stay.
HIV and hepatitis C: Diseases that run rampant in Canadian prisons
In April, the Corrections Service of Canada released a report which revealed considerably higher rates of HIV infections among inmates in federal prisons than had been previously officially acknowledged. Indeed, the reported rate of 4.6 per cent, based on a 2007 survey of prisoners, was more than twice the previous official estimates, and the reported rate of hepatitis C -- a staggering 31 per cent of prisoners -- was also higher.
'If a town of that size had rates like these, it would be treated like a public health emergency,' says Seth Clarke, federal community development co-ordinator with the Prisoners' HIV/AIDS Support Action Network.
![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")
Global corporate power and the decay of Canada
What happened to Canada? It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States became unpalatable. No nuclear weapons. No huge military-industrial complex. Universal health care. Funding for the arts. A good record on the environment.
