Feb 8, 2012

Or face the end of food sovereignty in Canada by Ken Larsen • While the popular media is full of stories of globalization and its corrosive effects on local communities, most are unaware of the back-story when it comes to the Canadian Wheat Board. In the grain trade, globalization is not a new story. In fact, it pre-dates the settling of Canada’s west...

Feb 8, 2012

DRUG BUST by Alan Cassels The people's briefing note on perscription drugs • A few years ago, I was invited to be the guest on an Ottawa radio talk show, the topic being something I was well familiar with, a book I co-wrote called Selling Sickness. The book explores how the pharmaceutical industry influences regulators, physicians and patients in order...

Feb 8, 2012

A memorable book about money sparks memories of an in-flight conversation by Geoff Olson • Back in 1998, I was sitting on a plane at Heathrow airport, thumbing through a volume on finance I had picked up in a London bookshop. It wasn’t my usual area of interest, but the title caught my eye: Frozen Desire: An Inquiry Into the Meaning of Money. This...

Feb 8, 2012

SCIENCE MATTERS by David Suzuki • The battle lines are drawn and Northern BC’s pristine wilderness is the latest front. With hearings underway into the proposed $5.5-billion, dual 1,172-kilometre Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline project to transport bitumen from the Alberta tar sands to Kitimat and imported condensate to dilute it from the coast...

Jan 3, 2012

by Paul Summerville   Back in May, when our host Martin LeClair got in touch with me about tonight, he asked if I could be a little bit funny and very educational in an economist sort of way. So an economics presentation that’s supposed to be a little bit funny – how about Alan Greenspan apologizing for destroying the American economy? Or how...