Category Archives: Analysis

Analysis, Anti-War, International

Vanessa Beeley’s Syria Meeting in Montreal: a Report

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By Robbie Mahood

Vanessa Beeley, a British journalist known for her outspoken views on Syria, spoke to a gathering of more than 100 persons in Montreal December 10, 2019.

A meeting planned the day before at University of Montreal was cancelled after a successful campaign by anti-Assad forces to bar her from speaking.

For me, attending Beeley’s talk was a question of principle: to oppose an attempt to shut down debate on an issue that has divided the left.

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Analysis, Global, International

“Superfoods” – for good health or a slick marketing ploy?

quinoaby Rob McBean

Let’s take a look at this idea of “super food”. Are there foods which are in some way better to other, non-super or just regular foods? Are there “super humans” walking around, who are vastly superior to us due to their consumption of “super foods”?

The reality is that there are only two different categories that you can put people into based on what foods they eat. Those two categories are: People who are malnourished, and, people who aren’t.

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Analysis, Canada

A Capitalist ‘Sport’ – at Public Expense

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A review by John Orrett

Linda McQuaig’s new book, “The Sport and Prey of Capitalists, How the Rich Are Stealing Canada’s Public Wealth” (2019, Dundurn Publishers, 264 pages), exposes how Canada’s economic elite privatize public companies to increase their wealth to the detriment of the public interest.  It follows her national best sellers ‘’ Shooting the Hippo: Death by Deficit’’ (1995), and “The Trouble with Billionaires’’ (2010) co-authored by Neil Brooks. They all challenge the pervasive myths of neo-liberal economics.

McQuaig is a distinguished journalist, columnist, public speaker and aspiring politician. In 1989-90, in the Globe and Mail, she exposed an illegal political donation scheme, dubbed the Patti Starr affair, that benefited the Ontario Liberal Government of David Peterson, contributing to his electoral defeat and victory of the first New Democratic Party government in Ontario history in 1990.

She ran for the NDP in the federal elections of 2011 and 2015, finishing second to Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland and Finance Minister Bill Morneau respectively, the most powerful figures in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet.

Her new book reads like a big business espionage novel.  The sad reality is that the described rip-off of the public is true. It is a captivating read.

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Analysis, Anti-War, Environment

Green Party Foreign Policy – ‘Connected’ to NATO and American Imperialism?

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by Dimitri Lascaris

The Green Party of Canada declares that it “begins with the basic premise that all life on the planet is interconnected.” Yet, the Greens’ newly released electoral platform, consisting of eighty-two pages, says remarkably little about Canada’s relationship with the rest of humanity. A mere two pages of that platform, which appear at the very end, are devoted to that subject.

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Analysis, International, Statements

SA/LAS in Dialog with the Trotskyist Fraction – F.I.

In 2016 and 2017 Socialist Action / Ligue pour l’Action socialiste (Canadian state) contributed to the formation of a new revolutionary political current in the Fourth International. It was based on a text which constituted a sound, principled and absolutely necessary challenge to the F.I. leadership’s abandonment of the historic programme of world Trotskyism. Published in six languages, the document gained support by organizations and individuals around the world. Unfortunately, the Platform for a Revolutionary International obtained few votes at the World Congress held in March 2018.

At the SA/LAS convention in Toronto in May 2018 we pledged to continue our close collaboration with our American comrades in Socialist Action (USA), our very good relations with the Fourth International section in Greece, with the comrades of the Anticapitalist and Revolution (AetR) tendency of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) in France, with the Revolutionary Left Anti-capitalists (IZAR) in Spain, with Socialist Democracy in Ireland, with the LUS in Mexico, and with co-thinkers in Italy, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Hong Kong and other countries. Our efforts to participate in the FI as a sympathizing organization, or even to attain observer status, have seemingly reached a dead end. The decision of the 1995 World Congress to include SA/LAS in all F.I. gatherings has been systematically violated. Farcically, the dormant Gauche socialiste in Quebec, which claims to have ten members, remains the official F.I. section in Canada.

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