rabble radio

Pamela Palmater's  Reconciliation Book Club  successfully launched with the first book club event last Saturday. The book club is her way to help people learn about reconciliation and Canada's First Nations in a safe and supportive space. To date, it has received almost 1,000 views and over 60 comments online, so it seems to have hit the right notes. The first book she chose was  Whose Land is it...

Understanding the historic roots of the broken relationship between settlers and Canada's Indigenous people is a necessary step which we need to take to start solving the problems. And we especially need to acknowledge how those historic patterns still manifest themselves today. This edition of rabble radio features an interview with  Dr. Bruce Clark . Bruce Clark has been arguing for the past two...

David Kattenburg is a tireless advocate calling for the end of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. He's a Winnipeg based university science instructor and web publisher of  The Green Planet Monitor . And he also works for social justice on matters related to environment, sustainability and the wide variety of subjects under that big tent. (A side note – he's also seeking a judicial review of a Ju...

Happy summer, everybody, now that it's here. It's been a long time coming in some parts of the country. It's an unusual summer, weatherwise, and it's also a different pace from summers gone by because we're in the leadup to the fall election. We'll be doing a lot of advance election coverage on rabble, including in our podcasts. But for today, we thought we'd do something a bit lighter related to...

In May and June, over a hundred groups across the country came together for town hall meetings to discuss climate change and what a Green New Deal for Canada could look like. And the energy continues – there are still a few town halls happening in the month of July. This week, a  report was posted online  summarizing what some of those findings were, and what communities were saying about how the...

Next Tuesday, June 25 marks the 100th anniversary of the end of the Winnipeg General Strike. Today's program features a panel discussion about the impact of the strike a century later. It was done by the  Global Research News Hour , hosted and produced by Michael Welch in the same city where the  Winnipeg General Strike  happened. Global Research News Hour is produced and broadcast at CKUW, the ca...

This spring marks a grim anniversary. It's the 25th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide which happened from April 7 to July 15 in 1994.  Today's guest on rabble radio wants us to remember how genocides happen in the hopes that this knowledge will prevent similar tragedies from happening in the future. Heidi Berger believes that genocide education needs to be taught in Canadian classrooms. To addre...

With the federal election just six months away, new candidates are putting their names forward to run. And some familiar names we've seen during many campaigns have assessed their future and decided it's time to move on to the next phase of their lives. Either way, it's a hard decision. Libby Davies  knows firsthand what it's like to make that choice.  In 2015, she decided to retire from her posit...

We don't usually have a lot of music on rabble podcasts, and we're happy that rabble radio is full of music on this week's show. It's a difficult theme though, related to a painful, personal story of childhood sexual abuse. Which makes it all the  more  important to do a program about it because a lot of the best songs expose pain and bring an awareness about the things we need to change. Alyssa W...

April 18, 2001. That's when it all started.  rabble.ca   was built on the efforts of progressive journalists, writers, artists and activists across the country and has a unique role of reporting on stories from civil society while providing a counterbalance to corporate-owned media. Back in 2001, online journalism was still in its infancy. In case you can't remember back that far or weren't born y...

Unifor is Canada's largest private sector union with over 315,000 members. It's also a very young union. Just five years old, Unifor was formed through a merger of two unions — the  Canadian Autoworkers Union  and the  Communication, Energy and Paperworkers Union . Today's guest on rabble radio helped make that merger happen. Fred Wilson played a key organizing and planning role in the New Union P...

A bill to ban the importation and exportation of shark fins received its second reading in the House last month.  Bill S-238  was sponsored by  Finn Donnelly , Member of Parliament for Port Moody-Conquitlam in BC. It was passed by the Senate last fall and is up against the clock to be passed before this session of Parliament is over and electioneering begins. Today's rabble radio interview is with...

The political situation in Venezuela is a subject of extremely polarized debate which will likely continue for many months, if not years. The legitimacy of President Maduro is still in dispute, people are starving and leaving the country. It's a country in crisis, that much can be agreed upon. But it can be hard to find the middle ground between the different points of view regarding the reasons f...

The  Jewish National Fund  is an international charity with branches around the world, including Canada. The organization describes its work on its website this way: "For decades the Jewish National Fund of Canada has cared for the land of Israel. This mission took the role of planting trees, building water reservoirs, preserving natural habitats, and building parks and bicycle trails. More recent...

There are many media workers in Canada who got their start at community based campus radio stations. That possibility may not exist in Ontario if the Ford government's new plan for student fees is implemented. Ontario-based campus radio stations are fighting for their lives. The Ford government's surprise Student Choice Initiative will have a direct impact on campus based community radio stations,...

On today's episode of rabble radio, we're discussing the  Progressive International movement , a budding network of social movements, activists, and political organizers around the world who are linking up local struggles with an international vision to rebuild a progressive world order. Progressive International is working towards a vision of a world built around a shared progressive values of so...

As the implications of last week's takeover of the elected Venezuelan presidency by the unelected leader of the opposition become more clear, the debate intensifies. The Canadian government, along with the majority of Western governments, supports the removal of the democratically elected President Nicolas Maduro from power and the replacement with unelected Opposition leader Juan Guaido. But not...

The Doug Ford government is continuing to cut back and change post-secondary education in Ontario. One of the things announced last week was a plan to make ancillary fees optional. Those are fees that students pay for a wide variety things that aren't directly related to their course work. Right now, in many cases, students can already opt out by paying and asking for a refund. This new idea is an...

Brenda O'Farrell has been on the job as rabble.ca's editor-in-chief for a few months now. She started working with us  in October 2018. Now that she's had a few months to settle in, and with it being a brand new year, Victoria Fenner thought it would be a time to ask her to share her ideas about media in Canada and rabble.ca in particular. Brenda comes from a different place in the media ecosystem...

Tomorrow is the deadline to submit comments to the federal government about what we'd all like to see in a new Broadcast and Telecommunications Act. The government's  goal  for the review, as stated on its website, is "to update and modernize the legislative framework in a balanced way that takes into account the realities of Canadian consumers and businesses, and our artists, artisans and broadca...

rabble radio's first program of 2019 looks southward at the people who are migrating north from Central America to the United States. Crushing poverty and ultra violence in Central America are usually said to be the main factors causing migration from that region to the U.S. That perception is grounded in fact — gang violence and poverty  are  some of the big factors. But there is also a link betw...

Simon Chambers has just come back from COP 24, the  Annual United Nations Climate Change Conference  in Katowice, Poland. The conference just ended on the weekend. The conference was scheduled to take place between December 2 and 14 but went into overtime to resolve important outstanding issues. Simon is Head of Communications at the  ACT Alliance , a coalition of 151 churches and faith-based orga...

John Foster's new book  Oil and World Politics  was the result of unconventional inspiration. The retired economist specializing in the oil and petroleum industry was attending a series of lectures where, as he describes it in the preface of the book, a couple of his colleagues called him out for rolling his eyes in the back row. In his own words, "the speakers extolled all the wonderful things th...

Today's program comes from the recent Hospital Employees Union annual convention called  Powered by Solidarity . It was held from November 4 through 9, 2018 in Vancouver. There's a lot to talk about when it comes to health care, but today's podcast isn't going to be about that. It  is  about solidarity though. In this case, it's about solidarity with and by Indigenous workers. Rod Mickleburgh is t...

Last week, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) reported that the  number of migrants and refugees from Venezuela has reached 3 million . We've seen a lot about this on the news but there are some different interpretations about what is causing this mass migration that you don't hear. Last May,  rabble.ca was part of a  delegation that went to Venezuela  to observe the country's elections. Th...