Inroads: A Journal of Opinion articles from June 22 2008

Inroads: A Journal of Opinion archives from June 22 2008

Introducing Inroads 23.
June 22, 2008... Inroads has become a quarterly. Well, sort of. Feeling that six months between issues is too long, in March we put together a 34-page package that we made available only through email and our website. Its main feature was an exchange on...

The return of God--and what to do about it.(OPINION)(Essay)
June 22, 2008... Who would have thought that the new millennium would begin with jihads, holy wars, fatwas, inquisitions and slaughter of the innocents in the name of God? Almost four centuries since the Catholic Church condemned Galileo for heresy; a...

Trust on a street corner, approaching midnight.(OPINION)
June 22, 2008... A few blocks north and slightly to the east of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., there is a post office. Around a quarter to midnight on April 15 this year, I happened to be walking by (don't ask why). One thing, then another, grabbed my...

Did the Israel lobby kill Rachel Carrie?(OPINION)
June 22, 2008... Rachel Corrie, an idealistic 23-year-old American from Olympia, Washington, was crushed to death by a bulldozer driven by an Israeli soldier in Gaza on March 16, 2003. She was protesting collective punishment and the destruction of Palestinian...

Polygamy, impunity and human rights.(OPINION)
June 22, 2008... Polygamy has been illegal in Canada since 1890. It was criminalized soon after Charles O. Card, a fugitive escaping prosecution in Utah for having more than one wife, settled in Alberta. Card and several senior members of the Church of...

Enfranchising immigrants: should noncitizen residents have the right to vote?(FRONT MATTER)
June 22, 2008... In an interview with the Toronto Star's editorial board, Toronto Mayor David Miller indicated his support for a policy that would extend municipal voting rights to landed immigrants in Toronto. According to Miller, people should have "a real...

Stephen Harper, Canadian: a personality at a distance profile.(Case study)
June 22, 2008... Stephen Harper presents a serious puzzle to students of Canadian politics. Often portrayed as a radically conservative ideologue, his policies on both the domestic and international fronts have been less dogmatic than most observers expected....

Politically correct and lovin' it.
June 22, 2008... One of my first jobs in journalism, back in the 1970s, was as researcher on CBC radio's Cross Country Checkup, the national phone-in show. Generally it was serious political stuff, but around April Fool's Day we decided to go light. In the era...

Dr. Dion, or how I learned to stop worrying and love Minority Government.(FRONT MATTER)
June 22, 2008... When the Liberals announced that they would not vote down the 2008 budget, Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson wrote, "The recent, silly, occasionally frenzied speculation about an election will end, for which Canadians can only be...

The Prairie NDP's uncertain future: a realistic Aboriginal agenda is nowhere to be found.(POLITICAL CHANGE ON THE PRAIRIES)
June 22, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In 2007, Manitoba voters reelected their NDP government, while Saskatchewan voters defeated theirs. Two elections, opposite results. What do they mean? In the following pages, Chris Adams examines polling data that...

Diverging paths? Why Manitoba still likes the NDP, and Saskatchewan doesn't.(POLITICAL CHANGE ON THE PRAIRIES)
June 22, 2008... In 2007, New Democratic Party governments in both Manitoba and Saskatchewan faced their electorates, and the two elections produced different outcomes. The results in the party's historical heartland have much to say about where the NDP has...

The de Tocqueville of Saskatchewan: an appreciation of Seymour Martin Lipset.(POLITICAL CHANGE ON THE PRAIRIES)
June 22, 2008... In his youth, the author of Agrarian Socialism was a Trotskyist; in his mature years, he figured prominently among neoconservative intellectuals, a group whose ideas and debates played an important role in shaping American public policy over...

Language: how well are we doing?(LANGUAGE POLICY)(Brief article)
June 22, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A country's census tells us something about its concerns. The U.S. census affords much data on black/white and Hispanic/white trends in per capita income, education levels, rates of single parenthood and...

Linguistic peace: a time to take stock: the language situation in Canada and Quebec.(LANGUAGE POLICY)
June 22, 2008... Statistics Canada's release of 2006 census data on language brought forth a number of reactions, particularly in Quebec. English-speaking Canada seems less given to linguistic anguish than French-speaking Canada, but it would be a mistake to...

Francophone immigration beyond the Bilingual Belt: wasting a precious resource.(LANGUAGE POLICY)
June 22, 2008... As a journalist, Graham Fraser could be fairly critical of Canada's language policy, but he did find bright spots. One of them was the idea of attracting francophone immigrants to bolster the francophone minorities outside Quebec. * He observed...

Belgium: less than the sum of its parts?(LANGUAGE POLICY)
June 22, 2008... Apart from chocolate and beer, one of the major products exported from Belgium over the last two decades has been its constitutional model. It has not been copied elsewhere, at least not in its entirety ("Thank God," some would say), but it has...

Thinking North America.(NORTH AMERICA)
June 22, 2008... It was the Spanish part of the invention of America that liberated Western man from the fetters of a prison-like conception of his physical world, and it was the English part that liberated him from subordination to a Europe-centred conception...

Scenes of hope and horror.(AFRICA)(Cover story)
June 22, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the following pages we present three extraordinary observations by Canadians abroad. The primary focus is Africa, although Don Cayo's travels took him to Cambodia and Poland as well as Rwanda. Robert Cohen...

A work in progress: the new South Africa's first fifteen years.(AFRICA)(Company overview)
June 22, 2008... It is almost 15 years since the African National Congress took power in South Africa--a good time to assess what has been accomplished, what has not been accomplished and what just might be accomplished. Here I follow these paths through...

Northern Uganda: the human face of atrocity.(AFRICA)
June 22, 2008... In early April, the stage was set for the signing of a peace treaty between the government of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). The treaty was to mark the formal end of one of Africa's longest and most brutal wars, in which the LRA,...

Stella Achan.
June 22, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "I dream about the people I've killed" At the age of 14, Stella Achan was stolen from her village with an older brother and forced to march into Sudan. The trek was gruelling. Sometimes captives would stumble or...

John Ochola.( )
June 22, 2008... "A normal human being cannot do that" John Ochola's face is the face of war in northern Uganda. When he was 23, rebels mutilated his nose, lips and ears and chopped off his hands. Today he lives in a simple hut with his wife, Grace, and...

Remembering genocide.
June 22, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] No need for words... Let the silence speak for you. --A visitor to Washington's Holocaust Museum My travels over the last year have taken me to some of the vilest places on earth. I don't mean landscapes...

The struggle for the meaning of war.(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Suzanne Evans, Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World War I end the Politics of Grief Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007. 209 pages. For several years, the terms of debate on the Iraq war in the United...