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Canada’s magazine

Tag Archives: Rights and Democracy

Rights and Democracy: Qui veut noyer son chien…

There’s no reason to believe three years’ worth of relentless negative coverage led to the Harper government’s decision, announced today, to shut down Rights and Democracy. No negative coverage preceded the government’s decision, announced last Thursday, to shut down the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy; Katimavik; the National Council on Welfare; and the First Nations Statistics Institute. It’s reasonable to suspect that if nobody at the PMO had taken an interest in Rights and Democracy in 2008, it would have run much as before — that is, as a beacon of hope for oppressed millions around the world — until it would have been dumped last week for the crime of having been created while Joe Clark was a minister of the Crown.

Rights and Democracy: The crisis before the crisis

The National Post‘s Graeme Hamilton has a fascinating story this morning based on access-to-information requests he filed more than a year and a half ago. The documents he received fill in much of the missing story on Rights and Democracy, the Montreal-based arm’s-length agency the Harper government’s board appointees pretty much ran into the ground in 2009 and 2010.

Kenney vs. Amnesty: And introducing a very special Amnesty critic

Whenever Jason Kenney picks a fight with an organization, it is helpful to ask, among several other questions, this one: “Hey, has the organization in question recently found itself on the wrong side of Israel’s most vocal defenders?” And indeed, in the case of Amnesty International, the answer is yes.