There is no Kent Monkman retrospective planned for the AGO next month. A virtual vernissage occasionally drifts by, but no popup galleries feature his work amongst red wine in paper cups, and the list of his upcoming exhibitions dwindles with every month of COVID-19 closures. This doesn’t mean the art world has forgotten the Cree Two-Spirited artist, as his pieces still sell steadily for five and...
Last October, swarthy Joe Rogan interviewed scrawny Edward Snowden about mass surveillance, patriotism, and extraterrestrial life. Eleven million people have tuned in since. Snowden, who copied and leaked over a million highly classified files from US military and intelligence agencies, shares the stage with Chelsea Manning, and the currently unnamed individuals behind the Panama Papers and the...
Angela Bain represents the law school and the nation at the UN Human Rights Council Osgoode is known by many to have an excellent international law program. From courses in international human rights law and international trade regulation to the International and Transnational Law Intensive Program (ITLIP), Osgoode provides concrete means for interested students to engage in the theoretical and...
Talking Rights & Freedoms with the CCLA’s Michael Bryant Walk five minutes east from Eglinton subway station past city arteries exposed by crazed LRT construction and take a left at the lights. Nine floors up, you’ll find seven people in seven offices working carefully and conscientiously to protect rights and freedoms that most of us probably take for granted. Those seven people – five...
On November 30th, the TTC will stop selling tickets, tokens and passes. “Not to worry,” their subway posters tell us, “PRESTO’s got you covered.” This cheerful reassurance hides the fact that this latest change to service is approaching the last step in a gradual process of de-anonymization: beginning with the introduction of PRESTO in 2009, accelerating with the extinction of the Metropass last...
2300 BC: According to the contents of wooden bowls excavated from a burial mound, people in what is now Northwestern China are burning cannabis and inhaling the smoke to obtain its psychoactive effects. 1606: The first crop of cannabis is planted in Canada by an apothecary accompanying Samuel de Champlain. Instead of smoking, the plant is used to make rope, cloth and paper for colonial purposes...
Thoughts on Our Constitutional Values Jack Letts was born and raised in England. He likes pasties and Dr. Who, speaks with a British accent, and looks like someone you’d call a regular bloke. But as of this summer, Jack Letts is no longer a citizen of the United Kingdom. After travelling to Syria in 2014 to join ISIL (where he admittedly fought against the Syrian army, trained child soldiers and...
anyone who, after one full day of law school, found themselves solicited for legal advice by friends and family, drink. anyone with a crush on a Dean’s Fellow, drink. anyone in torts who thought chattel just meant cows & horses; anyone in legal process who wrote ultra virus when they meant ultra vires, drink. married couples, drink. dating couples, drink. if you came here looking for love...
Obiter Covers the 2019 Election Last month, in Fundy National Park, a 40-something lumber mill worker named Brent told me, “I just want Trudeau gone – I don’t trust him! Might go Green this time around.” A few days later, in Montreal, a group of friends nodded solemnly over cans of beer when I asked if they’d consider voting for the Green Party this October. Regardless of where I was, a...
Doug Ford’s gas pump stickers are meant to mislead There are different ways to be wrong, and the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario’s plan to mandate a ‘federal carbon tax notice’ on gas pumps across the province can lay claim to at least two of them: they’re misleading, and they’re unconstitutional. The simple, easy rebuke of these problematic sticky squares lies in their failure to...