rabble radio

For an artist, precarious work isn't a new trend. Artists have always worked from contract to contract, gig to gig, cobbling together a sustainable life (or trying to) from a wide variety of sources. What is new in recent years is that it's not just artists who are living a financially precarious life. Our guest today on rabble radio is the co-organizer of a festival called  Precarious  in Peterbo...

David Kattenburg is a name you might have heard over the past few months on places like CBC and the Globe and Mail. He's in the news because he's challenged the Liquor Control Board of Ontario about two wines on their shelves, labeled as products of Israel. When Dave saw the listing, he knew they were not products of Israel. The wines come from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. He kno...

Community college students in Ontario weren't even halfway through their first semester when they got the news that they were going to be taking a break from their studies. Approximately 12,000 college faculty from 24 colleges across Ontario have been on strike since October 16, 2017. Braden Alexander is a former rabble podcast intern and volunteer. After taking a four year degree at University of...

Christopher Torres, former National Organizing Director for United We Dream speaks to rabble radio.  The status of 800,000 young people who were born in the US to undocumented migrants remains very much in limbo. We've heard a lot about DACA, which stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. To recap —  Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)   is an American immigration policy brough...

What does it mean to belong? That's a question that the  Community Foundations of Canada  has been asking over the past three years. Community foundations are one of the fastest growing ways to help people donate money to their communities. Instead of each person having to figure out what the community needs are, and where they can direct their donations, they can go to their local community found...

Gerry Caplan  is well known to our rabble readers who have been active on the progressive left for many decades. There are many dimensions to Gerry's life work. He was a key figure in the New Democratic Party for many years as a party strategist and even took a run at a seat himself at one point. He's an author, and a commentator on the state of the media. He's also an authority on genocide, espec...

The title of today's show, Pushing Up the Sidewalk, was inspired by rabble blogger Lizanne Foster. Lizanne's blog on rabble is called  Education in the age of climate change.  She's a high school teacher in B.C. who shares some of her thoughts about working creatively in a regimented education system. Three educators from three levels of education — secondary school, college and university — talk...

This summer, as much of the country celebrated Canada 150, there has been much needed discussion about the place of Indigenous people within that context. There has been growing recognition that the 'founding of Canada' narrative is not accurate and shows disrespect for the real founders of this country — Canada's Indigenous people. Complicating the equation even more, there are many people in thi...

The world is changed when we all work together. But how do we do that? There are lot of different ways, with one thing in common. We need to organize. Social movements happen on different levels — local, regional, national and international. There are many differences between organizing campaigns which involve thousands than ones which reach the small local level. But there are a lot of commonalit...

From May 8 to 12, delegates from across the country gathered in Toronto, Ontario for the  Canadian Labour Congress   convention ; Canada's largest labour convention. This year's theme was  Together for a Fair Future . rabble.ca  reported from the convention floor where we set up a booth, and gathered video, photographs and stories. On this rabble radio, a selection of highlights of the weekend's p...

Every province has its own style of electioneering, but B.C. is in a class of its own. Today's program is a look at the issues as we head up to B.C. E-day. The election is on May 9.  We put this show together on Wednesday, May 3. We've got seven days now until e-day, and we know that things can turn on a dime. The interviews you will hear were recorded at the end of last week on April 28. The peop...

On March 8, 2017, one of rabble.ca's bloggers, Penney Kome wrote an article that resonated with the women who produce rabble radio. It was called " If you want to learn how to survive the gig economy, ask a woman ". Precarious work is something we cover a lot on rabble.ca. That's because precarious work isn't going away. There is always a lot to say as our workplaces become less defined and less s...

In consideration of recent events, cities across Canada have examined ways to signal that they are open to refugees and migrants. Some municipalities, like Montreal and London, Ontario have passed motions in their city councils proclaiming that their city is now a Sanctuary City. Cities that have already voted on these motions have heard stories of continued police checks, lack of proper funding f...

What a week it's been. Looking back to last Friday, Inauguration Day, a lot of us were sharing the same sense of gloom and foreboding, wondering what the next four years are going to be like and fearing the worst. And then came Saturday … a day of resistance, defiance, hope and a resolve that the worst is not going to happen. Because it's not Donald Trump's Universe. The future belongs to people w...

What a year it was. Coming off of the maddening, disappointing and very scary U.S. election, it's too easy to look back and wish that we could have just fast forwarded from December 31, 2015 right to January 1, 2017. But that's not the whole story. In many ways it was also a really good year. Admittedly, we have to work a little harder to lift our spirits in this holiday season than in other years...

It used to be the case that media and democracy were synonymous. Democracies weren't worthy of the name unless they had free and independent media that spoke truth to power. That was in the good old days. The changes in the political winds these days means that there are more pressures than ever on the kind of media outlets to do their job preserving and strengthening democracy. Today's program co...

What does it take to build stronger communities? A lot of it is about participation — when we work together for the common good, the places where we live become stronger. We know our neighbours, we help each other. In healthy communities, people are engaged with each other. But what does that mean? Today's program is about engagement, connecting and making a difference in the places we live. How d...

Since it's harvest season, what better time to take a look at farming. And sadly, it's not the family farm we're going to be talking about. There are still some family farms left, and still some independent farmers who are making a living for themselves adopting new forms of sustainable agriculture. But despite the growth of organics, artisan food products and people who are adopting farming pract...

There were hundreds of panel discussions at the  World Social Forum . The hard thing was to make a choice which one to go to. There weren't a lot of descriptions in the handbook sometimes, so often we just had to pick one and see how it all turned out. You never knew what you were going to get.   And there were so many interviews and recordings that we weren't able to fit in to  Ears on the Earth...

Just because you can't touch, see or smell sound doesn't mean that the sounds around us don't affect us just as much as the quality of our water, air and physical environment. Today's program is all about listening. July 18 was World Listening Day, named because it is the birthday of Canadian composer, educator and sound environmentalist  R. Murray Schafer . The founder of the  World Soundscape Pr...

The media landscape isn't at all the same today as it was 15 years ago when  rabble.ca  first started publishing on the Internet. In 2001, we looked at web pages. They were mostly text and image which didn't move. And there wasn't much to hear either except your hands clicking on the keyboard. YouTube wasn't invented until 2005 (the same year rabble established the podcast network). And the terms...

Here in Canada we don't have as many Black Lives Matter chapters as there are in the United States but the ideas are just as relevant. Despite our beliefs in this country that we are not racist and not violent, Black Lives Matter is helping us see that those perspectives aren't accurate. Today, we'll hear about the two Black Lives Matter chapters in Canada, in two different cities. Toronto and Van...

August may seem like a ways away, but for the organizers of the World Social Forum in Montreal in August, time is ticking away. Two years ago in August, the city of Ottawa was the site for a warmup to the World Social Forum.  The Peoples' Social Forum   was a huge event. The thing about these kinds of Social Forums is that they are very ambitious. Anybody can propose a workshop, or a discussion gr...

Honduras is a country that doesn't show up in the news very often, especially here in Canada. A quick google search brought up links for travel destinations, World Cup soccer and the free trade agreement which Canada signed with Honduras on October 1, 2014.   The Canada-Honduras Free Trade website lists the population of Honduras as 8.2 million. What it doesn't say is that there was a U.S. backed...

What a couple of months it's been in media land. Newspapers folding, television stations getting out of local news… all because of the Internet, they say. We don't hear much about radio, though. 1. Today we go to  Podcamp Toronto  and hear about something that hasn't changed in radio. There still are way too few women on the air. rabble radio contributor Kveshe Be tells us about a study on diversi...