politics

It is International Women’s Day 2010, forty years after the Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women. A generation has passed, my generation. In some ways, there has been a revolution in the status of women since that time. 

Yesterday when I heard that Stephen Harper was suddenly taken with a desire to promote maternal health as the key issue for the G8, I have to admit to being perplexed.  I don't think I've ever heard Harper talk about women's issues. Behind the scenes his government, which of course means him, has not only cut funding to most women's groups and the most progressive NGOs like Alternatives and Kairos but have eliminated the word "equality" from their women's bureau.  Harper is no doubt that most anti-feminist PM we have ever had.

On Saturday,  January 23  at 1 pm in more than 60 cities and towns, Canadians will hit the street to demand a real democracy in this country.  What started as a protest against the prorogation of Parliament is starting to look like a democracy movement.

Voters in both the United States and Canada are reacting to a broken system.  In the US by voting down the Democratic candidate for Senate in the most Democratic state of Massachusetts and in Canada by this unprecendented uprising.

Today I was on The Current  to debate the proposed name change of the NDP. The name is the least of their problems is my view.  David Michael Lamb, the guest host, asked me why I wasn't going the NDP convention.  I answered, "I've kind of given up on the NDP."  Frankly, it didn't even occur to me to go.  I have been involved in efforts to change the NDP since the 1980's in Ontario and with a few exceptions (getting them to support the Morgentaler clinic), it has been almost impossible to get them to change.  Their response to opposition from the Waffle , a powerful youth opposition reflecting the new politics on the 1960's until now has been to crush it.

 By Sam Gindin

Public sector strikes are frustrating to both the public and the strikers. The public is upset with losing daily services they have come to depend on, while the strikers are upset with the apparent lack of respect for the work they do.

Below is an excellent commentary on the Toronto City Strike now almost settled

    Hi all. Judy is still away on vacation, so I’m still filling in as a guest-blogger here at Transforming Power. Judy will be back towards the end of the month, as energizied and invigorated as ever! In the meantime, here’s my latest post. Enjoy.
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Judy is off on vacation for a couple of weeks, so I'm going to take over her blog and post videos of Michael Jackson here.  (Just kidding.  We've all seen enough of that on Twitter and Facebook.  Pam Kapoor wrote an interesting article about that here, in fact.)

What I really want to blog about is social media, which Judy also talks about in her book, in chapter 8.  I just went to a fantastic conference a couple of weeks ago - Social Tech Training 2009.  In a nutshell, the conference was for people who want to learn and share ideas about how to use social media to organize, promote, and create social change.  Instead of taking notes, I tweeted them out on twitter as a way of staying in touch with Judy about what I was learning (since I was there for both of us), and you can find my play-by-play and other participants' notes from the conference under the hashtags #stt09 and #ncwk.  So I won't rehash (ha, get it?) that here.

Instead, I'll talk about my own journey with social media, and I invite you to share yours in the comments here if you feel so inclined.

After seeing the hysterical headline in today's Globe and Mail Angry Europe Embraces the Fringe, I figured that maybe we were starting to see a repeat of pre-World War II in Europe where a split and factional left allowed for the rise of the extreme right; although this time it would be the shift to the right of the social democrats and failure of the left to re-invent itself.  So I went to the UK Guardian, who were barely talking about the elections at all so ho hum were the results to them and then to Open Democracy, where I found a rational discussion of the election results and the failure of the European Parliament to attract citizens to vote at all.  With the exception of the election of a member of the Pirate Party of Sweden, ahoy, it seems that most people looking for alternatives didn't bother to vote at all.  If people who want progressive change see no point in elections and parties of the left fail to see the challenge to electoral democracy the way it is practiced in Europe and Canada, the dominance of the Right can continue and anyone who thinks that doesn't matter hasn't lived in Canada for the last couple of years.

The following is an article on the rather frightening rise of populist right-wing parties in Europe.  He concludes: "The left will only be able to fight the racism and right- wing populism spreading through Europe’s working class if it is prepared to take a critical look at itself. As the FrP’s highly successful leader puts it, ‘The Norwegian people are sick of being patronised. The other parties, and Labour in particular, show nothing but contempt for the people."