This author has yet to write their bio.Meanwhile lets just say that we are proud shawn contributed a whooping 38 entries.
A robust and accessible transit network offers more than an efficient way of getting from point A to point B: it is the great equalizer, the spinal cord of a city that’s built around principles of democracy, inclusion, and responsibility towards those who will face the consequences of climate change, if we don’t urgently change the way we live and move through our cities.
Few Montrealers came to associate Richard Bergeron’s Projet Montréal with causes of social justice or participatory democracy. The party’s current leadership race is an opportunity to change that, and to help build a new urban movement in Montreal that can propel the next generation of leaders into power in 2017.
The NDP’s debate over the Leap Manifesto could reignite Canadian politics by re-engaging youth, who want nothing more desperately than to simply believe in the future again. And if we’re fortunate, the bottom-up pressures it unleashes could reshape electoral politics across the land.
In his new book The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution, former Adbusters editor and Occupy Wall Street co-initiator Micah White delivers a forceful call for the world’s activists and idealists to reimagine protest for the 21st century. Infused throughout with a sense of hope and possibility, the book offers an important and insightful account of Occupy’s successes and failures, a compelling projection into alternative futures, and above all, an impassioned plea to revive the revolutionary imaginary. I spoke with Micah in Montreal.
I have long been an ardent critic of the Liberal leader, and he may yet prove my initial instincts right. But as the newly minted cabinet ministers paraded eagerly before the media, it was hard not to feel even the most tenuous and superfluous utterances of ideals from their mouths — a “most vulnerable among us” here, an “extreme poverty in the world” there — ring out as echoes of a once-familiar country we nearly let slip away.
The Montreal Review of Books sings the praises of Generation Rising in a new review published in its fall edition.
All parties employ specialists in the art of image-making, and all engage in the politics of spectacle to differing degrees. But in this campaign, it is without a doubt the Liberals who have been the most hyper-savvy — and most cynical — in exploiting many voters’ lack of discernment between a made-for-TV campaign and the lack of substance it can hide.
To the deep dismay of many, Gilles Duceppe, so often a man of progressive principles, has now wrapped himself in the same xenophobic flag as Harper, and with the identical aim of prying loose votes on the backs of Québec’s minorities. It is to his profound disgrace, for which he should be made to pay the same price as Pauline Marois by following his friend into political retirement.
Come join Shawn for a drink and a chat at the Winnipeg Anarchist Bookfair’s evening party on October 24, organized in conjunction with Broken Pencil magazine.
We’re thrilled to announce that Shawn will be coming to the University of Winnipeg as part of the Uniter Speaker Series.
Shawn Katz is a writer and educator from Montreal, Canada. He is the author of Generation Rising: The Time of the Quebec Student Spring (Fernwood Publishing, 2015) and a contributor to The Rise of Cities (Black Rose Books, 2017)