Saturday, January 11th marked the 12th anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo Bay. Over on activist toolkit, Steffanie Pinch lists some ways you can help close this corrupt holding centre. Suggestions include organizing a film screening or direct action to educate the public, writing a letter of solidarity to a detainee, or making use of a toolkit from nogitmos.org.
January 11th was also the 199th birthday of John A. Macdonald, unabashed racist and Canada’s first Prime Minister. In the grand tradition of memorializing statecrafters while ignoring their legacies of colonialism and violence, Steve Paikin threw a party in #sirJAM’s honour, to which a couple arrived dressed in red face. Then, the National Post published an op-ed whose title posed the despicable question: could it be that residential schools weren’t that bad? Nora Loreto eloquently responds to each of these instances of historical erasure.
After the Globe and Mail published this story about whether a male student refusing to associate with his female peers amounted to required religious accommodation or sexism, politicians from across the land cried out in indignation. Azeezah Kanji and Khadijah Kanji point out the hypocrisy of such criticism on The Views Expressed, while Penney Kome explores the legal implications in On The Other Hand.
Neil Young’s Honour the Treaties tour in support of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation kicked off in Toronto this week and was preceded by an interview with CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi that had everyone in the national media atwitter (literally and figuratively). While Young’s anti-tarsands stance sheds important light on the havoc wreaked by the Alberta oil industry, rabble.ca bloggers were on top of other, equally pressing environmental issues this week. Roger Annis discusses the extreme volatility of Canada’s oil-by-rail industry in a thorough and detailed post, while John Bennett writes about the alarming increase in mercury levels in Alberta’s tar sands. Green Party leader Elizabeth May also covered significant environmental wins and losses for Canada in 2013, and David Suzuki recommends a new documentary film, Climate Change in Atlantic Canada, which is a series of anecdotes that “add up to an overwhelming warning that social, economic and ecological costs are rapidly mounting and we must take climate change seriously.”
Finally, Campus Notes covered myriad forms of union activity on Canadian postsecondary campuses this week. First, we reprinted an article from Carleton’s student paper about the thwarted efforts of residence fellows on that campus to organize with CUPE, and then reported on the ongoing faculty strike and lockout at the University of New Brunswick.
Photo: Karsten Saunders/The Brunswickian
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