This Magazine articles from March 1996

This Magazine archives from March 1996

Global pillage: NAFTA has become a charter of rights and freedoms for corporations.
March 1, 1996... I want to tell you a story. Many people know about how the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank force developing countries into the unregulated free-market global economy by a process of structural adjustment. This process...

Adventures of Sarah Polley.
March 1, 1996... It's sort of funny hearing that from 17-year-old Sarah Polley, considering that she's best known for her acting. Polley, who's spent the last 13 years of her life starring in shows such as the critically acclaimed Road to Avonlea, wants to be...

Punditnation! Meet these 10 modest demands and get your mug on the cover of Saturday Night.
March 1, 1996... For some, the December 1995, issue of Saturday Night magazine seemed to press the issue, not to mention the envelope, of Canadian fame. Not what it is, but how you get it. As many squeamish souls will recall, this was the issue with neo-con...

Grace notes: it's 1966 ... union leader Grace Hartman blazes a trail for working women.
March 1, 1996... As it happens, I spent a good part of 1995 in 1966, the year This Magazine began publishing. That was the year I came of age and joined the burgeoning ranks of youthful dissenters, renouncing nuclearfamily values and cancelling my subscription...

Untouchables: in New Brunswick, the Irvings own virtually everything.
March 1, 1996... In May, 1994 Local 691 of the Communication, Energy and Paperworkers (CEP) Union went on strike at the Irving oil refinery in Saint John, N.B. They had been fighting for the preservation of national bargaining standards, and against company...

Who's talking: ... a conversation between Stevie Cameron and Linda McQuaig.
March 1, 1996... In what was supposed to be the year of neo-conservatism, somehow two of the best-selling works of non-fiction were written by progressive women taking on Canada's power brokers. Stevie Cameron's investigation of corruption in the Mulroney...

Breakthrough syndrome: if you think feminism's day is done, just ask the women who've "made it".
March 1, 1996... Those words, and similar sentiments, were meant to dismiss my opinions, to retire me to my playpen and to remind me that none of my ideas could compete with the expertise that the old boys had built up over the years. No doubt, at age 24 I had...

From the streets to the elites.
March 1, 1996... Two years ago Jenny Kwan was a front-line advocacy worker in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside - the most down-and-out few square miles in Canada. Now, while her former co-workers protest the provincial NDP's regressive welfare reforms - including...

Quiet revolutions: when English Canada gets peeved at Quebec, it forgets the whole premise of multiculturalism.
March 1, 1996... ASSUME, as we say in economics, that Canada consists of three nations: Quebec, the First Nations, and the Rest of Canada, or ROC. It's likely that the prevailing view in ROC is that the first two nations exist - we concede that Quebec is a...

Then and now (changes at ThisMagazine).
March 1, 1996... For over 20 years, starting in 1973, I attended meetings, usually weekly, as a member of the This Magazine editorial board. Since then I've been a contributing editor. I'd like to ruminate here on some differences in the nature of the magazine...

Why I write poetry.
March 1, 1996... I recently read an account of a study which intends to show how writers of a certain age - my age, roughly - attempt to "seize control" of the stories of their own lives by deviously concocting their own biographies. However, it's a feature of...

Childhood: a novel in pieces.
March 1, 1996... 1.2 (Schwartz) I've been writing these memoirs for weeks now, and I'm surprised at how arduous it is to record and rearrange even so dull a life as mine: two words forward, one word back. I get up at seven, as usual, but most of the day is...

Sovereign mind.
March 1, 1996... Shortly before the referendum, Quebec playwright Rene-Daniel Dubois was asked by long-time militant separatist Andree Ferretti to contribute a letter to Trente lettres pour un Oui, a manifesto of Quebec's artistic community promoting...

Saved by the bell: in which Lynn Crosbie enters the world of private education and learns how to strip for her lover.
March 1, 1996... THREE years ago, I took several courses at The Learning Annex - a Toronto "adult education" center - as an exercise in intrepid reporting. Apparently, I am considered to be an alumnus of this institution, and still receive their calenders on a...

Engine knock: forget about the tiger in your tank -- there's a neurotoxin in your gasoline.
March 1, 1996... JUST because you threaten to kill the prime minister doesn't necessarily mean you're crazy. In 1991, Karel Kraan - a gas station worker in London - was arrested after threatening to shoot then-prime-minister Brian Mulroney. At the time,...