During the race, she vehemently opposed leadership rival Jim Flaherty’s promise to make homelessness illegal and jail those who persisted in living on the streets.
via Elizabeth Witmer Quits: Tory MPP's Resignation Opens Door To Liberal Majority In Ontario.
But with the billy-club governance of the Harper era, we are breaking new ground in the subverting of the democratic process. Technically we might still call it a democracy. In practice it’s a democracy in name alone.
via Is this still a democracy? You be the judge | iPolitics.
Hundreds of researchers from around the globe arrived in Montreal this week to attend the International Polar Year Conference, but those scientists working for Environment Canada were also accompanied by so-called "media relations contacts" tasked with monitoring and recording interactions with the press.
via Federal scientists closely monitored during polar conference – Technology & Science – CBC News.
The federal government is closing B.C.’s command centre for emergency oil spills at a time when the province is facing two possible pipeline projects and a potential spike in tanker traffic in West Coast waterways.
Ottawa has said it will shut down B.C.’s regional office for emergency oil-spill responders, located in Vancouver, and centralize operations in Quebec in the wake of the cost-cutting March 29 federal budget.
The move could affect about 42 jobs in the B.C.Yukon region.
via Oil-spill centre moving out of B.C..
Andrew is very connected to the landscape near his home in Central Ontario. He bikes, camps, and, as many of you know, skis. His work communicates his sense of joy in the landscape and he has chosen a contemporary style of painting to do so. He reaches back in history with his style, but also forward to the digital effects developed more recently in photography. As Andrew says of his work ‘The effect is similar to a kaleidoscope or stained glass window, which fragments an image and reassembles it in a new way.’
via Amongst the Forest.
These are unprecedented times for our organization and for our country. As North Americans we must grapple with the threats that Big Oil poses not just to our wilderness, clean air and water, but our democracy. We need your help spreading the word of this urgent, globally significantly message.
via You have the power to protect forests and fight climate change.
If we end up footing the bill for mandatory online spying for through our taxes—the alternative being that we pay even more on our monthly bills—Big Telecom may be looking at violations of your privacy as a new revenue source.
via Geist: Big Telecom wants to make money on online spying | OpenMedia.ca.
This isn’t about the planes, in other words, or costs, or accounting. This is about accountability. This is is about whether departments are answerable to their ministers, and whether ministers are answerable to Parliament — or whether billions of public dollars can be appropriated without the informed consent of either Parliament or the public. It is about whether ministers speak for their departments, or can disown them when it suits them. And it is about whether we, as citizens, are prepared to pay attention, and hold people in power to account when they lie to us.
The treatment of Oscar and Emmy-nominated filmmaker and journalist Laura Poitras, which we recently touched upon in detail HERE, has ignited a fire amongst her fellow creative peers, to the point where they have all banded together to object against the American Department of Homeland Security’s policies concerning free press.
One of the more extreme government abuses of the post-9/11 era targets U.S. citizens re-entering their own country, and it has received far too little attention. With no oversight or legal framework whatsoever, the Department of Homeland Security routinely singles out individuals who are suspected of no crimes, detains them and questions them at the airport, often for hours, when they return to the U.S. after an international trip, and then copies and even seizes their electronic devices (laptops, cameras, cellphones) and other papers (notebooks, journals, credit card receipts), forever storing their contents in government files. No search warrant is needed for any of this. No oversight exists. And there are no apparent constraints on what the U.S. Government can do with regard to whom it decides to target or why.
via U.S. filmmaker repeatedly detained at border – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.
