rabble radio

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...

The sound of a train in the night… it's a comforting sound that tells us somebody's out there in the darkness. But to the people of Lac-Mégantic in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, the sound of a train has very different associations. It's a reminder of that night — July 6, 2013 just after 1 am, when a runaway train barrelled into town, killing 47 people and decimating the core of the small town o...

Even though we're in Canada, many of us are watching the U.S. midterms next Tuesday with hope, and also fear and trepidation. Not just because the U.S. and Canada have important economic links, but also because what's happening in the U.S. also affects our social and political life up here. In particular, we've seen that Trump's brand of racism isn't stopping at the border. A return of Democratic...

During the 1980s, many young people from Canada and around the world traveled to Nicaragua. Young and idealistic, they wanted to help the people of that country rebuild after the  revolution  which saw the election of the  Sandinistas . The Sandinistas were a people's party which came to power after 40 years of military dictatorship under the repressive Somoza family. Lois Ross is an Ottawa-based...

Over the past month, Phillip Dwight Morgan has been writing a special series for rabble.ca called Toronto Votes 2018. Phillip Dwight Morgan is a Toronto-based journalist and writer and was rabble.ca's first  Jack Layton Journalism for Change Fellow . This fall we asked him to do a series of stories about the election. You can read his series  here . To wrap it up,   rabble.ca  podcast executive pr...

It seems pretty obvious to most of us.  The same countries that are 'up in arms' about refugees are also the ones which are working the hardest to discourage refugees from coming to their country. Even though they're the ones creating the crisis (US of A, we're looking at you). Today's rabble radio features an interview with  Cesar Jaramillo , Executive Director of  Project Ploughshares , based in...

When rabble.ca podcast producer Victoria Fenner was driving out in the farmlands outside Barrie, Ontario where she lives, she noticed a billboard that wasn't the usual ad to buy real estate, furniture or other consumer commodities. On the side of the road, next to a stand of forest, the billboard said 'Free Political Prisoners in Honduras. Free Elmvale's Edwin Espinal'. She'd heard of Edwin Espina...

Earth is no longer a safe operating space, according to today's guest on rabble radio. Look at the dramatic and devastating events of this year – hundreds of fires across the world, monster sized hurricanes, earth parching heat waves and drought. All but the most stubborn of climate change deniers can see this. Unfortunately, some of those climate change deniers are politicians who are making deci...

If you look at maps of electoral riding across the country and which politicians represent them, it's pretty evident that most of the progressive politicians are elected from large urban centres. Not exclusively, but mostly.  rabble podcast executive producer Victoria Fenner lives in one of those conservative places that has a track record of electing politicians who don't seem to understand a lot...