rabble radio

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...

We've heard a lot about the crisis in local news as small community papers have closed down and local tv newscasts removed and replaced with big city casts. Most radio stations haven't had local news content for a long time, and there is some doubt that online news will fill the gap. As a result, small communities in particular are being abandoned and are becoming news deserts. A new $50 million l...

Anti-sexual abuse and women's empowerment campaigns like #MeToo and #TimesUp have upended the conversation surrounding sexual violence and women's issues worldwide. But in parts of West Africa, strong cultural and religious taboos have prevented some women from speaking out in support of these movements. In Ghana,  research that dates back to 2009  shows sexual abuse in schools accounts for more t...

Do I stay or do I go? After the election of Trump in 2016, there were a lot of memes and stories going around social media about why Americans should become Canadians.  Some of  that was real, and some of it was the Canadian tendency to pat ourselves on the back when we compare ourselves to the US. Regardless, many of us have friends who asked the same thing, so we know  there were some Americans...

Long before any of us were podcasting, Frieda Werden was doing audio programs for an about women from a feminist perspective. She is cofounder of  WINGS: Women's International News Gathering Service , which started production back in 1986. Coordinating an international network on a low budget was a huge job back then. Low budget organizations couldn't afford satellite transmission time, which was...

We're hearing a lot in the news that there is still no resolution of the trade impasse between Canada and the United States. But as is often the case, we're not often hearing the voices of labour on the issue. Today's rabble radio interview is with a representative from a trade union which is being directly affected by tariffs on steel and aluminum by the United States which were announced on May...

Fighting climate change is a numbers game, in units of degrees Celsius and millions and billions of tonnes. As the atmospheric concentration of earth-warming CO2 rises above 400 parts per million — almost twice what it was 200 years ago – the nations of the world struggle to roll back their emissions by the gigatonne. Canada has vowed to cut emissions by 30 percent, relative to its emissions in 20...

Today, May 17, a Canadian delegation of people from labour, community and media will be going to Venezuela to observe the May 20 national federal elections and to meet with local community and labour leaders. The mainstream media coverage of events in Venezuela has been historically misleading. Many believe that's because Venezuela has a socialist government that the big global power players objec...

Regular rabble readers and listeners know that the Canadian Boat to Gaza and the international Freedom Flotilla is something we think it's important to cover each year. We've done some outstanding coverage over the past 8 years that the Flotilla has sailed. In 2011, the Canadian boat the Tahrir was seized by the Israeli military and we are proud that we were able to do interviews with participants...

This week, politicians, reporters and pundits say it's a make or break week for the North American Free Trade talks in Washington. They say if there isn't a deal really soon, upcoming elections in the United States and Mexico could complicate things dramatically. Despite all the boosterism for a successfully renegotiated NAFTA that we are usually hearing in the media, there are still people who th...

Anyone who has lived in B.C. or follows political trends in Canada knows that our most westerly province is reputed to be one of the most politically polarized provinces in the nation. A lot of that has to do with the province's unions, which are known for being formidable opponents at the bargaining table, and if it comes to that, on the picket lines. But it's not all black and white. There is a...

Homemade movies are something we tend to take for granted in this era of selfie culture. Flashback to the 1950s and super 8 film. And then, in the 80s and 90s, all of the home movies shot on videotape. It was a very different technology and a different way of documenting and archiving than we see nowadays. Those films have mostly been regarded as private, family moments. They weren't shared. Today...

Today in anticipation of Earth Day and Earth Week, we're celebrating and paying attention to the world we hear. Acoustic ecology is the study of human beings in their relationship to their environment through sound. Multidisciplinary artists Brady Marks, Mark Timmings have created  The Wetland Project  to celebrate Earth Week 2018, a program of events exploring the soundscape of a Saturna Island,...

The voice and words of Judy Rebick are well known to rabble readers and listeners. Judy was one of the co-founders of rabble in 2001 and she continues to be a good friend and mentor to rabble these 17 years later. In her new memoir  Heroes in my Head , she recounts many of the political battles that she has waged over the years for women's rights, a just and progressive society, and her involvemen...

The 24th anniversary of Rwanda's hundred-day genocide is Friday, April 6. It began when a plane carrying the president of Rwanda, Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down. From April to July, 1994, almost a million ethnic Tutsis and their Hutu friends were slaughtered by marauding gangs of Hutu extremists. In alternative media, there is a long tradition of using radio for peacebuilding, so many community...

The influx of money into our communities comes at a cost. All those shiny new buildings come with a high price tag as people with higher incomes move into our communities from elsewhere. They bring high real estate prices as the market grows. And new economic development also changes the kinds of services that are needed or desired to serve the growing and changing city. It's happening all over th...

Last week, March 16, marked a tragic milestone – the 50th anniversary of the  My Lai Massacre , the mass murder of unarmed people in two small villages in Vietnam. It has been called one of the most shocking events of the entire war. My Lai was one of the two villages. The exact number of deaths has never been definitively established, with estimates ranging from 170 to over 500. Many of the peopl...

Imagine coming home to your apartment building and seeing a sniffer-dog your lobby from a private canine detection company hired by your landlord. Or you go to a music festival and there is a group of security guards and sniffer dogs. That's what happened to Michelle Guo's friend from Australia. So Michelle decided to look into the legality of using sniffer dogs and what our rights are here in Can...