This Magazine articles from March 1997

This Magazine archives from March 1997

Moral debt: what's the real price of three centuries of slavery? (Race and reparations: a black perspective for the 21st century).
March 1, 1997... $1-billion? $50-billion? $4-trillion? How much money would it take to finally balance the books between black and white in North America? Most of us have been forced to address the notion of debt, either by a deficitobsessed political...

Press "4" for frustration on the immigration phone tree.
March 1, 1997... For refugees to Canada, getting in touch with the federal government has become a phone-tree odyssey -- with no human beings at the end of the journey. Over the past three years, the Department of Immigration has established a central...

Pulling out: Burma's human-rights abuses put Canadian firms in the hot seat.
March 1, 1997... Pulling out of business dealings in Burma seems to be a trend these days among multi-million-dollar corporations. The South Asian country has been under military control since 1962. The future began to look brighter in 1988, when pro-democratic...

Can banking change? Calmeadow's progressive lending gives credit where credit is due (micro-credit lending).
March 1, 1997... Banks, says economics professor Dr. Muhammed Yunus, have created "a system of apartheid" -- forcing people into low socioeconomic stratas and holding them there. Their struggle with these circumstances has provoked some innovative alternatives...

In 1988 ... (Editors of This Magazine).
March 1, 1997... Crad Kilodney published a story in The Canadian Fiction Review. It tells of a man who checks into a hospital after suffering a series of brain-stem failures: his eyesight keeps cutting out, and his arms and legs keep going temporarily...

Shot in the dark: with white Canada so complacent about police use of force, maybe it's time to take a new look at the issue.
March 1, 1997... "My son was killed in June and I still don't know what's happening. Seven months and still I've heard nothing." Shaheen Kamadia is standing ramrod straight at the microphone, staring down the panel of police officials in front of her. She's a...

King and I: from Kensington to Compton -- how Al Waxman (almost) made a film about young, black Canadians.
March 1, 1997... "And so I flop down on my stomach, I grab fistfuls of grass and I hug Canada. And you know what? If you stay really still, it almost feels like Canada is hugging you back. And I miss that feeling. I really do." --the final speech from Riot...

My sister's love.
March 1, 1997... My sister's arrival in Canada had the effect of a cleaver, slicing up our lives. Three years earlier, my father had sponsored my mother and me to Canada. My mother had to leave my sister behind in Hong Kong because she was not my father's...

Home truths: my once-liberal relatives are veering right: is that why Mike Harris sounds like an Italian father?
March 1, 1997... He was a disheveled middleaged man who reminded me of a dear uncle, with his heavy brown coat and his cellular phone dangling from grey track pants. He scanned the office and gave us a once-over. He said he had come to pass on a message, but...

Crossroads: seeing art as politics ought to make it controversial: then why is it so easy to ignore?
March 1, 1997... The first time I heard the music of Robert Johnson, I was, like so many before me, overwhelmed by a sound and emotion that easily crossed the decades to move me A country blues guitarist with an indescribably poignant voice, Johnson...

Northern light: in helping to create the world's first gender-balanced parliament, a young Inuit woman is healing the North -- and herself.
March 1, 1997... Not everything dies in the winter. Thawed and kicking, a radical concept for Canadian democracy recently moved closer to realization in the eastern Arctic--the chunk of Confederation that will, by spring 1999, become the self-governing,...

Boxed set: if you can't worldbeat 'em join 'em.
March 1, 1997... I was 14 years old -- a recent transplant from an island paradise in the Caribbean to the frosty shores of North Bay, Ontario. It was my first day at Widdifield High. The greeting committee stood at the entrance to the school. One committee...