When I met him last summer, Jerson Ballena was thirty years old, a father of two, and worked on an assembly line in the Philippines for the Korean-owned company Daeduck Electronics. He was making Printed Circuit Boards for cars and other electronics. Jerson was also the treasurer of the Daeduck Employees Independent Union.  This got [...]

Steve Eldon Kerr remembers how November 10 dissolved into violence

Four portraits of Haitian voodoo

Olivia Messer and Joan Moses investigate bisexual experience and identity

The intersection of Islam, feminism, and democracy

A theatre school tries to untangle Canada’s language politics

On June 19, 2011, temperatures in Montreal reached the mid-20s. The children of Outremont were busy, as they always are in summer, scootering down the neighbourhood’s tree-lined streets, or sliding down its wrought-iron banisters. But at the Mile End Library, the residents of the Plateau Mont-Royal borough were ignoring the perfect summer day. They were [...]

One McGill grad’s sexmurders

“Welcome to Zuccotti Park Zoo,” says the sign, duct-taped to a tree at the edge of the newly-renamed Liberty Park, the heart of Occupy Wall Street (OWS). “Please ask before taking photos. Do not photograph the sleeping residents.” The sign is light-hearted, but its message is strangely appropriate; Liberty Park, and OWS more broadly, has [...]

Ten years after the Montreal novelist’s death, his widow Florence keeps his memory alive

Voices and numbers from the beginning of Occupy Montreal

José Casanova is a professor in the Sociology Department of Georgetown University. He’s one of the world experts on religion and globalization. His 1994 book Public Religions in the Modern World was a seminal text in the field. When I saw him speak last Wednesday, he was sitting next to Canada’s most famous philosoper, Charles Taylor. Casanova [...]

How viruses could save your life

Why you don’t want to be wrongfully convicted in Canada

A reflection on ‘The McGill Four’ and the NDP’s new youth wing