Another week of sunshine and great content here on rabble.ca. As we scan through the trending headlines, rabble.ca bloggers offer their informed and insightful takes on stories that are capturing Canadians attention. From the 2016 summer Olympics in Rio to the face of journalism in Canada, here are some of this week’s top blogs.
Much of the world’s attention has turned to Rio for the 2016 summer Olympic games. But Nick Filmore examines an issue behind the games that people rarely talk about. While athletes struggle to afford the high costs involved in taking part in the Olympics, the Canadian and International Olympics Committees are spending millions of dollars on themselves. He notes that the COC is also recovering from a large sexual harassment problem. One of the issues is that the IOC is not held to account by anyone but itself and we are seeing what happens when power and spending goes unchecked.
In related news, there has been much discussion about health and social problems in Rio. But Cathy Crowe reminds us that we only need to look into our own backyard to find the same issues. She cites Andrew NikiForuk’s The Fourth Horseman: A Short History of Plagues, Famine and Other Scourges as to how health epidemics spread when social problems like overcrowding happen. She says solutions to this problem lie in social supports like a national housing plan, and harm-reduction strategies.
Expanding on the issue of homelessness, Sadie McInnes explores the unique experience of homeless women. She notes factors like motherhood, violence and the intersections of identity as to why we need a gender analysis of homelessness in Canada.
Last week 22-year-old Colten Boushie was shot and killed for the crime of being First Nations and looking for help to fix a flat tire in rural Saskatchewan. J Baglow likens Boushie’s death to a lynching, citing racist comments on a site to raise funds for the man that killed him. He notes longstanding issues of racism in the RCMP and how their press release about the crime placed blame on the victim.
On a lighter note, Tinder has become one of the most popular dating apps in the world. But Kyle Curlew wonders what this means for surveillance and intimacy. He details how algorithms on social media are shaping how we communicate and are not neutral. He says that Tinder is shaping romance by quantifying desire and questions what these means for the kind of relationships they curate.
Finally, Joanna Chiu discusses how her journalism career might be different if she had stayed in Canada. She details how mostly white newsrooms don’t reflect the demography of most Canadian cities. She also notes that women are underrepresented and underpaid when it comes to senior management positions. And this means that stories about marginalized populations tend to be ignored by media organizations.
That’s it for this week’s blog roundup! Make sure to check out more rabble.ca blogs to find out what’s happening in your world.
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