Oct 31
Earlier this year a small group of anti-pipeline protesters kicked off a series of direct action protests in Burnaby BC. Their first high-profile action happened in May when three of them locked their necks to the front gate of Chevron’s refinery “in solidarity” with the anarchist/native led Unist’ot’en action camp. One of he protesters was …
Oct 22
I had a long night on Monday working early into Tuesday morning finishing off my story analysing Toronto city councillor’s expense reports. It was nearly daybreak when I got into bed- exhausted, I slept like a log. I was awakened by someone telling me the police were at the front door- quickly throwing on my …
Oct 19
One of the most interesting resources published on the City of Toronto’s website is a detailed listing of councillor’s expense reports. Councillors are given a fixed annual budget each year ($30,815.40 in 2014), details of their spending (and reciepts) can be found at this link. The data can’t be downloaded in spreadsheet form, and it can …
Oct 19
Correction: Joel Solomon resigned from TIDES in April 2014 On Friday Jorge Barrera of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) released one of the most fascinating stories I’ve read in months. His article RCMP tracked movements of Indigenous activist from ‘extremist’ group discussed an access to information request filed by Carleton University criminology instructor Jeffrey Monaghan that confirms …
Oct 17
There’s been a lot of talk about the Canada Revenue Agency’s enforcement of charity regulations the past few weeks. The media chatter got started when the CRA decided to audit several (questionable) charities- the bovine excrement meter has been at red ever since. Yesterday, right when it appeared that the bullshit couldn’t get any deeper, …
Oct 16
Update: Since this article was written, Hollyhock has now deleted the tweet from their account- interesting… In January, 2012 I had the pleasure of staying at Hollyhock, a charity owned training resort on Cortes Island BC; one of the most beautiful places on the planet. Hollyhock is a contentious place; some view it as (literally) magical, …
Oct 14
On November 5th, 2011, a man was found passed-out, overdosed, in one of Occupy Vancouver’s tented areas- that’s how we learned there was bad heroin in town. One would think, with a recent near death in the camp, that we’d have been flooded with people from the city and harm reduction services offering to help- …
Oct 08
The battle against Enbridge reversing the flow of their Line 9 pipeline seemed destined for failure since the beginning. Line 9 was previously used to carry oil from east-to-west, carrying oil imported into Canadian refineries, the reversal will enable Enbridge to deliver Canadian oil to those refineries instead. The project made sense to most people- even …
Oct 07
In a replay of the Gandhi of Vancouver’s quixotic battle against the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline, four protesters locked themselves up to the gate of a Quebec Enbridge facility this morning. They came to protest the reversal of the Line 9 pipeline, a project that’s expected to be complete in the next few …
Oct 04
If you’ve been following the news you’re probably aware of the large-scale demonstrations happening in Hong Kong. Occupy Central With Love And Peace is a civil disobedience campaign formed in March, 2013; their goal is to fight for the right of Hong Kongese to have a free and unbridled democracy. On August 31st the Chinese government …