November 10th, 2009 Andrew Cash
By Andrew Cash
Well, we knew there had to be a hitch when Stephen Harper got up at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa to sing a Beatles song. Setting the bar sufficiently low – it was a song Ringo sang, after all – is a Harper specialty.
But as the country woke up to the image of our wooden PM at the piano, many Canadian recording artists were twigging to yet another arts cut – one they say will hobble Canada’s specialized music community.
And like Harper’s arts misstep in the last election, this one – the chopping of the Canada Music Fund’s Canadian Musical Diversity component – has once again engaged and enraged a grassroots arts revolt. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in All Blog Posts, Canadian, General, Music and Digital Culture, Now Magazine, Politics, Toronto | No Comments »
October 27th, 2009 Andrew Cash
By Andrew Cash
A flash of deja vu hits me as i sit in the beautiful Victoria College Chapel at U of T on October 20 last week listening to the Council of Canadians’ Maude Barlow talk about free trade.
My first awareness of this human rights champion was during the great debate in the 80s over Canada’s free trade deal with the U.S. I can’t help feeling a little nostalgic for that simple time when the story was a bit clearer: you were either for or against closer ties with our huge neighbour to the south.
But Barlow and fellow panelist Sid Ryan tell the almost 200 people in attendance that while 20 years ago there were very few bilateral trade deals, there are now 2,600 around the world. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in All Blog Posts, Canadian, General, Human Rights, Now Magazine, Politics | No Comments »
September 23rd, 2009 Andrew Cash
T.O.’s got one of the highest urban jobless rates in the country — but guess what? We’re copping fewer EI benefits.
By Andrew Cash
I started the day Monday (September 21) sitting at the back of a banquet hall at the downtown Hilton watching 1,000 T-dot business folks give a lukewarm welcome to what had been billed as a major speech by Michael Ignatieff outlining his economic vision.
Maybe they were just eager to dig into their lunch.
By the end of the day, I was at the back of another room, this one a town hall meeting organized by the Good Jobs for All Coalition at Ryerson, listening along with about 75 others to some hair-raising stories of big-city unemployment.
The two events seem to encapsulate the disconnect I’ve been feeling over Ottawa’s hot potato: Employment Insurance. At the beginning of the summer, the Liberals stepped up to the plate demanding EI changes – or else.
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September 9th, 2009 Andrew Cash
I’ve lost friends as “collateral damage” in a war that badly needs peace
By Andrew Cash
I didn’t know Darcy Allan Sheppard, but our household has mourned the death of two close friends in the last few years who were killed riding their bikes – one a gifted photographer, the other a budding musician, both unwitting “collateral damage” in a war that badly needs some peace.
But this war isn’t really just about competing modes of transportation. It’s a contest between top-down and bottom-up power, one that, as in the altercation between Sheppard and former provincial attorney general Michael Bryant, sometimes ends in tragedy.
The car is quintessentially top-down: it’s about status, speed, steel, ego, privacy, convenience, the individual and entitlement to space and resources. Not to mention it’s a brilliant example of human ingenuity.
Grassroots power has no better symbol than the humble two-wheeler, which is simple, accessible, communal, public, physical and a light touch on dwindling resources.
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Posted in All Blog Posts, Environment, Now Magazine, Transit | No Comments »
May 6th, 2009 Andrew Cash
Lib’s new king might grant you an audience, but you won’t change his manifesto
By Andrew Cash
While Michael Ignatieff has certainly given the Libs a bump in the polls and the party bank account, his coronation last weekend in Vancouver underlines some sad facts about the state of political participation these days.
If the grassroots of the party showed some pluck in voting for Stéphane Dion in 2006, they have caved since Dion’s flameout, as if to say with relief, “Please, oh powerful ones in the Liberal executive, don’t invest us with this awesome power. Look what we did with it last time.”
And who better than Ignatieff, who can trace his roots to the court of the last czar of Russia, to save a neutered rank and file that would rather be told than tell?
Only about 2,000 delegates of an eligible 8,000 showed up in Vancouver, well over 600 of them party officials, MPs, etc, points out U of T prof Nelson Wiseman. “Add all that up and the convention was a real comment on how little importance Canadians place on political parties.”
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April 14th, 2009 Andrew Cash
Electric shock
Those dreams of the e-car refuelling our economy? Not if they’re China-made.
By Andrew Cash
I admit I’m not really a car guy. When I rent a car, the conversation at the rental desk goes like this: Clerk: “We’ve got a blah blah or a blah blah..,” to which I reply, “Oh, just give me the cheapest one.”
But this time, for a trip to Pennsylvania to visit relatives, I’m handed the keys – well, there are no keys really – to a Prius, Toyota’s smash hit hybrid. Wow, this car I know about, since it’s the kind of vehicle that’s carrying the hopes of the folks who make cars, the environment that chokes on them and the taxpayer who seems increasingly on the hook for producing them.
But are all those billions we’re lending Big Auto really going to produce enough of the pollution-?free wheels greens are dreaming of?
In Pennsylvania, in the belly of car culture, green cars, electric or otherwise, seem so far way. Still, at one point, our 80-year-old uncle saunters around behind the rental. I’m thinking, “Okay, I’m going to get it for renting an import.”
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Posted in All Blog Posts, Environment, Now Magazine | No Comments »
April 2nd, 2009 Andrew Cash
Saving Ontario’s backbone means more than bailing out cars
By Andrew Cash
The hate-on for artists and cultural workers as whining pigs at the public trough is alive and well across Tory land.
The latest round of this particular blood sport occurred in the last few weeks, when the feds forced a crisis on the CBC by withholding bridge funding, necessitating the cutting of 800 broadcasting jobs.
The provincial Liberals, it’s true, have a more civilized take on the creative class, but they weren’t exactly going all out for culture in last week’s budget either. McGuintyites handed over 20 mil to the Ontario Media Development Corp, $77 mil to film and TV in tax credits and $17 mil per year in tax support for interactive digital media products.
Still, compared to the gnashing of teeth over the decline of manufacturing, forestry and steel and the consequent $26 bil increase in new provincial infrastructure spending, arts and culture seem like bit players. Building cars, making steel, chopping trees – now, that’s where the big boys play; that’s the economic backbone of the country, isn’t it?
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Posted in All Blog Posts, Environment, General, Now Magazine | No Comments »
February 11th, 2009 Andrew Cash
Okay, I’ll say it: this is a boring party, the place you’d be if you’d drawn the short straw
By Andrew Cash
The Ontario NDP is the Toronto Maple Leafs of politics. Like the hapless hockey crew, the ONDP has spent most of the last four decades near the bottom of the standings but dining out regularly on past glories.
Most NHL teams, when mired in the basement, take the time to rebuild, rediscover a sense of purpose, nurture their fan base and a crop of young keeners, and while no one is looking, start getting competitive.
The Leafs, over the last 40 years never did this. Alas, the ONDP over the last decade and a half hasn’t either. With what may be the largest reordering of the capitalist economy since the 30s underway, these should be heady times for provincial Dippers who next month pick a new leader to replace Howard Hampton.
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December 17th, 2008 Andrew Cash
NDP bill makes a beeline for heavy-handed developers chilling citizen dissent with pricey lawsuits
By Andrew Cash
While all eyes have been glued to the wild ride our parliamentary democracy has been taking of late, a real threat to citizens’ power is playing out in near obscurity on the 16th floor of the Bay Street hearing room of the Ontario Municipal Board.
Here, final arguments wrap up on whether a Lake Simcoe residents group should pay the legal costs of a large land developer.
Shortly after winning a several-? year fight at the OMB a year ago to plunk a resort and marina smack dab in the middle of the bucolic Lake Simcoe community of Big Bay Point, Markham-?based developer Geranium Corporation quickly turned around and asked the OMB to make those opposed to the project pay its legal costs.
On the hook for $3.2 million in costs are the Innisfil District Association, some individual members of the group and, surprisingly, their lawyer, David Donnelly.
Though the OMB rarely awards costs and rarely for this amount, the case is being watched carefully by countless residents groups across the province, as well as by Hamilton Centre NDP MPP Andrea Horwath. Last week she introduced a private member’s bill to give residents’ groups protection against what are known as SLAPPs, or strategic lawsuits against public participation.
Horwath says she first came face to face with the problem as a Hamilton city councillor working with a residents group opposing a development. “The threat of a SLAPP action makes it harder for regular people to participate if they are concerned about a project,” she says.
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Posted in All Blog Posts, Environment, Now Magazine, Ontario | No Comments »
December 10th, 2008 Andrew Cash
Taking Canada Back
By Andrew Cash
How quickly old boys douse the flames of party change
Yikes. What a snafu.
With Bob Rae stepping out of the Liberal race, the Libs can now do what they do best, power-broke their way to a new leadership.
Way back an eternity ago, in 2006, when Stéphane Dion was chosen Liberal leader, I wrote that the grassroots was giving the finger to the Liberal elite. Looks like the backroom boys are about to return the favour.
Problem is, the appointment of Michael Ignatieff doesn’t settle the democratic deficit of the Liberal party on any level. And what about all that talk at the last Grit convention about renewal in the party, new ways of doing things, more bottom-up participation?
And where are all those young conventioneers wearing Dion green and believing they’d transformed a cynical, top-heavy party ragged from internal warring?
Don’t Liberals get it that we’re in the Obama era, when party building is supposed to turn supporters into engaged participants?
But more to the point, handing over the party to Ignatieff doesn’t settle the broader democratic deficit either, where the majority of voters didn’t vote for but still got Tory rule. A broke and tired centre-right party has chosen the leadership candidate least jazzed about taking power in a coalition with the NDP.
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