Q: Dear Progressive Detective: I’m worried about radiation from the cellphone tower that was just installed on my building’s roof. What can I do about it?

A: Everyone and their grandma is on a cellphone these days, and because we believe nothing should impede us from updating everybody on everything, cellular service companies are rushing to expand and improve the reliability of their network coverage.

Canada is currently home to around 8,000 cellphone towers, or base stations. The best estimates peg about a third of those on buildings. Health risks from the radio frequency (RF) electromagnetic radiation the equipment emits are contested and consensus seems to sway with each new published scientific study. That hasn’t stopped Health Canada from playing it safe. Right now, radiation limits are 50 times below the rate believed by Health Canada to pose health risks.

Still, we get you might want to play it even safer. Because each province and territory has its own tenancy regulation, what you can do depends on where you live. Mira Gamsa, spokesperson for Ontario’s Landlord and Tenant Board, says, like most jurisdictions, the province’s legislation doesn’t address cellphone towers. If a landlord can’t quell your worries, you can file an application with the board stating the tower is interfering with your “reasonable enjoyment” of the unit.

Come armed with information from Health Canada—which cites studies concluding RF can cause body temperature to rise—and the World Health Organization, which recognizes a condition called “electromagnetic hypersensitivity.” Those affected suffer myriad symptoms, all from exposure to electromagnetic fields. Scary, but it might not help you. Since Gamsa’s never heard of any such complaints, she wouldn’t speculate on what ruling the adjudicator would, or could, make.

You can also try Industry Canada, which regulates the establishment of new sites and requires companies go through a public consultation process with local land-use authorities before getting approval. You’ll get a chance to voice your opinion there, but it may be for naught: Industry Canada doesn’t give municipalities authority to create their own RF-exposure limits. So if you’re sitting in your apartment and your body heat’s rising, it may be time to start rallying your neighbours. Or start looking for a new place to live.

1838–1850 Great Britain’s Chartist movement, which is steeped in Methodist thought, becomes among the first broad labour movements in modern history. Prominent members William Lovett and Joseph Sturge, and much of the Methodist clergy, consider it their Christian duty to bring freedom and social justice to all, following the example of Christ. Although the movement faded after 1850, it precipitated the Reform Act of 1867, which extended the vote to the working class.

1915-1947 Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian National Congress, and the Hindu Mahasabha (a nationalist organization) use the Hindu principle of non-violence to guide their struggle for an independent India. They lead several non- violent events including the Salt March, boycotts against British goods, and the Quit India movement, resulting in the country’s 1947 liberation.

1930 Zainab Al-Ghazali founds the Muslim Women’s Association and fights for women’s liberation within an Islamic framework. Al-Ghazali believes Islam gave women a tremendous amount of rights when it came to the family, so the MWA focuses on helping poor families, mediating family disputes, and giving women access to education.

1940s Reeling from the Holocaust, Jewish NGOs band together to push for a universal system of human rights. Their determination contributes to the UN adopting the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Meanwhile, in Canada, the Canadian Jewish Congress played an important role at the Senate hearings of 1950 that explored human rights here at home.

1957–1965 Backed by dozens of southern Baptist churches, Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference plays a central role in the civil rights movement, pressuring the U.S. government to pass the 1964 law ending school segregation and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Today Environmentalism is the latest social movement to get a boost by organized religion. Several Christian organizations, including the Evangelical Environmental Network that has reached 35,000 churches, actively encourage believers to care for God’s gifts by living a greener lifestyle.

Honduran citizens cast their votes in defiance of a military coup that ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and cancelled planned elections. Photo by Oswaldo Rivas/Reuters.

Sunday morning was dark and my alarm didn’t go off, so I slept in. I was awakened late in the morning to a fellow gringo, my friend Luke, shouting through my window. “Ashley!” he yelled, “wake up, did you hear what happened?” I had heard nothing but silence that day. I let him in and before he could explain what was going on my alarm began to flash and my cellphone began to ring. The silence is broken. On the other end of the phone my father shouts, “Are you okay, what is going on there Ashley. Come home.” Before I even knew it, my father told me that overnight, I’d been swept up in a military coup.

I had arrived in the small city of Santa Rosa de Copán, Honduras, in the early summer of 2009 to work with an NGO and study the atrocities of the Canadian gold mining industry for my master’s thesis. As a student of international development, June 28, 2009, was one of the most educational days of my life.

That was the day that Honduran President Manuel Zelaya had slated for a referendum on adding a fourth ballot to the upcoming election asking Hondurans if they supported the writing of a new constitution. For the 70 percent of Hondurans who live in poverty, this was an opportunity for unprecedented change. The professors, the indigenous people, the NGOs, the activists—at least the ones I heard from—were all voting yes. This was a day that everyone had been talking about, although the democratic system in Honduras had seldom inspired too much confidence: People thought that perhaps the referendum would be cancelled; that officials would record who voted in order to intimidate them; or that the results would be rigged.

What actually happened—Zelaya forced from his home by the army and exiled to Costa Rica in a midnight coup— hadn’t even been on the radar, but that’s exactly what happened. Immediately, thousands of Zelaya supporters took to the streets in the capital, calling it an act of terrorism, and condemning the coup as the work of Honduras’ rich and powerful ruling class.

Still half asleep and incredibly confused, I threw on some jeans and joined Luke on the eerily deserted street corner. We arrived at the park to find about 30 people wearing red T-shirts that read “Yes to the Fourth Ballot,” singing the national anthem, and passing around makeshift ballots for people to cast their mock votes. Four military guards cornered the park. Elsewhere, all of the stores were closed and the church service ended early so we could all return home in time for the 9 p.m. curfew the new president had enforced “for safety.” Or, argued my colleagues, to keep the protesters out of the big cities.

When I returned to my hotel the door was padlocked with chains. The hotel owner hastily shuffled me inside and told me that we must be careful, since no one knew exactly what to expect. Although it may be overwhelming, he told me with grim humour, I couldn’t be here at a more opportune time: “Ashley,” he told me, “You are going to leave this country with the highest understanding of politics and revolution.”

Sunday night I couldn’t get to sleep. Fantasizing about being back home, where I could get minute-by-minute news feeds sent to my phone, I eventually dozed off, only to wake up the following day faced with a curfew newly extended from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., no independent news channels, limited cellphone connections—and a glimpse of what real resistance looks like.

MIT Professor Sheila Kennedy's solar-energy-producing textiles. Courtesy Sheila Kennedy.

Rick Mercer’s quip during the Copenhagen climate conference last December summed it up best: “So [Stephen] Harper flew to Copenhagen to have a club sandwich and hide in his room?”

The post-Copenhagen doldrums were still bringing us down when Thomas Auer, managing director of Transsolar, the German climate-engineering firm assigned to the Manitoba Hydro Place, stepped onto a stage at Toronto’s Interior Design Show in January to explain his vision on designing a world without oil. The future in sustainable architecture is about harnessing daylight and fresh air, he declared.

The theme that came up again and again in presentations from renowned engineers, architects, designers and futurists at IDS was if we are to kick our oil addiction, guilt-tripping us won’t work. But seduction through innovative design just might. As design guru Bruce Mau said, “I don’t believe we can succeed in sustainability without making it more sexy and beautiful.”

So imagine, for example, a beach house with billowing curtains that harvest sunlight and convert it to energy— enough to juice up your laptop or illuminate your bedroom at night. Sheila Kennedy, architect, inventor and MIT prof, has done just that. Her sensuous textiles (including lace) are implanted with ultra-thin photovoltaic strips that produce electricity when exposed to light.

For Fritz Haeg, desirable objects took a backseat to the human condition. A geodesic-dome-dwelling architect based in California, Haeg says the story of oil is one of disconnection. There was a time when we used the resources immediately within our reach and dealt with our waste locally as well, Haeg says, but oil took this away and unintentionally led to our present ignorance about the environment.

One of Fritz Haeg's Edible Estates. Courtesy Fritz Haeg.

Edible Estates, Haeg’s ongoing gardening project, is trying to change that. By turning eight suburban front lawns from spaces you cut and “keep off” into productive gardens, Haeg wants to bring back a reality rendered invisible by oil. He’s not a Slow Food idealist; instead, Haeg says that questioning the front lawn is just the easiest first wedge into unraveling the old structure of our cities. But he acknowledges the idea will face resistance in suburbia. “How far have we come from the core of our humanity that the act of growing our own food might be considered impolite, unseemly, threatening, radical or even hostile?” he asks.

Yello Strom energy metre in use. Courtesy Yello Strom.

Like Haeg, Ted Howes of global consultancy IDEO believes that we have to turn energy from an invisible commodity into a tangible experience. And social media can help. The Yello Strom energy meter, which Howes helped develop for the German market, is a small wall-mounted box with a curvy bright yellow shell and a simple-to-read meter that could easily have been plucked from an Apple store window. It sends out tweets about your energy consumption and gives consumers direct access to Google’s energy management tool, PowerMeter. A phone app is sure to follow.

The attitude that we can wean ourselves off oil by finding more attractive alternatives may have ironically been best summed up by the man who was Saudi Arabia’s oil minister during the 1973 oil embargo. “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone,” sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani said recently, “and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.”

“We know that the greatest obstacles to technological progress are organizational, cultural, sociological,” says Anita McGahan, a professor who teaches “The End of Oil” [PDF] at the University of Toronto. “They’re not technical. We have the technology.”

Now we need the political leadership.

“Working people did not cause this crisis … and we won’t pay for it!”

These words were printed in bright red letters on a flyer recently published by the Communist Party of Canada as part of its effort to raise public awareness about the root causes of the global economic crisis. The flyer sat atop a pile of documents at the entrance to the Communist Party’s central office in Toronto, where, for 17 years, Miguel Figueroa has been busily engaged in resisting mass capitalism. The room isn’t big, but it is filled with desks, documents, books and other mementoes. The walls are lined with pictures of Lenin and other legendary communist leaders.

Not far from the CPC’s headquarters, I met a gregarious Figueroa at a Greek restaurant on Danforth Avenue in Greektown, just east of Toronto’s downtown. He’s stepped out for a few seconds when the waitress approaches me and asks if I want something. “No thanks, I’m just waiting for someone,” I reply.

She knows who I’m waiting for: “I think it’s Miguel, yes?” When he returns inside and sits down, another woman coming around to clean the tables recognizes him. “Hi Miguel! How are you?” she asks cheerfully. He’s a regular.

It’s not just his neighbourhood restaurant: Figueroa is also a regular in Canadian left-wing politics. He has been leader of the Communist party for 17 years. Since 1992, in fact—which makes him the longest-standing active federal party leader in Canada. None of the leaders for the four parties represented in Parliament even come close to that; Michael Ignatieff has been leading the Liberals since 2008, Stephen Harper the Conservatives since 2004, Jack Layton the NDP since 2003. Even Gilles Duceppe, who seems to have been at the helm of the Bloc Québécois for an eternity, has only been in charge since 1997. To put things in perspective, the Conservative party has had eight different leaders since 1992, and the Liberal party five.

Figueroa says he’s held on for all this time mostly because the hectic job requires it, and because, well, somebody has to do it. “We have many people in our party who are much more capable than I am, but who aren’t in a position to work for the party full-time,” he says.

His term as leader only represents the second half of Figueroa’s career as a member of the CPC. Before being elected head of the party, he spent some 15 years working for the Communists in various capacities at both ends of the country. He became a party organizer in Vancouver in 1978 and moved to Halifax in 1986, where he led the Atlantic branch of the party. In total, the 57-year-old Figueroa has devoted more than 30 years of his life to further build a party in which— despite public support for communism and socialism that is weak at the best of times—he still believes.

And he might have reason to. After all of the hardships his party has endured through the years, the Communist Party of Canada is still alive, which is an achievement in itself. It was formed in 1921 in a barn near Guelph, Ontario. It didn’t take long for the RCMP to target the party and start harassing it, even arresting its leaders in 1931. Nonetheless, several members of the CPC were elected to municipal and provincial offices in the following years. But in 1940, the party was banned because it opposed the country’s participation in the Second World War, and hundreds of its members were imprisoned.

Ironically, the subsequent years were those during which the Communists’ popularity peaked. The party resurfaced as the “Labour-Progressive Party” and, according to former party leader George Hewison, had about 25,000 members after the war. One of them, Fred Rose, was even elected to the House of Commons when he represented the party in the Montreal riding of Cartier in the 1943 federal by-election. But after Soviet Communist leader Nikita Khrushchev exposed the cruelty of Joseph Stalin and his regime in 1956 in the USSR, disenchanted communists around the world left their respective parties. The Communist party was no different, and its membership dwindled until the fall of communism in Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991.

Then all hell broke loose.

It was December, 1992. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the CPC held a watershed convention. The year before, the party had split along ideological lines: one group, led by General Secretary George Hewison, sought to shift the party’s philosophy from Marxism-Leninism to social democracy, while a faction led by Figueroa opposed the change. Eleven opponents were expelled from the party with Figueroa resigning in sympathy. Figueroa and his group subsequently threatened court action against Hewison and his colleagues to challenge the dismissal. The two sides reached an out-of-court settlement, and at the 1992 convention, a new central committee was elected, with Figueroa at the head of a fractured party in need of serious repair.

Figueroa’s political ascent was unlikely: The Montrealborn Figueroa was not a part of a political family such as the Trudeaus or Martins. He spent a few years in the United States as a child and, after his parents separated, he and his mother moved back to Quebec when he was beginning Grade 9. “We were on welfare,” he says. “The bailiffs actually came to our apartment. They broke down the door with a sledgehammer, came in and confiscated all of our belongings because my mother couldn’t pay some of the bills. They left us with our clothes, our books, and our beds. It was very humiliating for my mother, devastating for her.” This was in 1969 or 1970, he says, an era when an officer could simply show up at a nonpayer’s home and “clean up the house.” “It wasn’t as if it was a decision of the court or she was called to court and didn’t show up. It was draconian.” It was his political awakening.

The incident drove him to get involved in Montreal’s antipoverty movement, where he met lefties, went to meetings, and read the classics of Marxist literature and theory. After leaving Quebec, he joined the National Union of Students (now known as the Canadian Federation of Students) and became interested in the Communist Party. He liked its approach, the fact that it was trying to build unity, working with unions and community organizations, rather than just shouting slogans. But the CPC was also pro-Soviet at the time, a position that placed it in the political wilderness as American rhetoric about the “Evil Empire” was in the ascent. In American schools, says Figueroa, pupils were taught “in Russia, the KGB can come in at three in the morning and take your toys! And there’s nothing scarier to a kid than having their toys taken. It’s dramatic!” But he agreed with most of the party’s program and, defying the anti-communist fog, decided to take out a membership. He hasn’t looked back since.

Even those who once disagreed with Figueroa acknowledge he is an impressive organizer. George Hewison—once Figueroa’s courtroom opponent over the party split— tells me that Figueroa is “very talented, very intelligent.” Johan Boyden, General Secretary of the Young Communist League of Canada, says that Figueroa is “very dedicated.” I started to understand why Figueroa commands such respect when he elaborated on socialist theories and history. To most people, and even by its very nature, communism is associated with working-class struggle and the uprising of the proletariat. Although Figueroa was never an aristocrat, his political education didn’t exactly happen at the bottom of a coal mine: After completing his pre-university studies in arts and science at Dawson College in Montreal and taking courses in urban studies and economics at McGill and Concordia universities, he spent six months studying political economy at the Lenin Institute in Moscow in 1985-86, where Hewison was one of his classmates. Figueroa then returned to the classroom in the early 1990s to start his graduate studies in international development at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. He never completed his thesis though, because, among other things, he was elected Communist Party Leader.

The first order of business was whipping the party into shape for an election, and, in the process, Figueroa ended up reshaping Canadian elections themselves. The Communists were struggling to register the minimum of 50 candidates required under the Canada Elections Act to get official party status and participate in the 1993 federal election. This meant that the Communist Party would not be on the ballots, and that Elections Canada would also deregister the party and seize its assets. Figueroa challenged the provision on the basis it discriminated against smaller political parties. He pursued the suit for six years, and in 1999, Justice Anne Molloy of the Ontario Court ruled that the 50-candidate threshold was, according to official documents, “inconsistent with the right of each citizen to run for office” and ordered that it be reduced to two candidates.

The Attorney General’s office appealed the decision, and the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that the threshold was indeed constitutional, although parties that could field at least 12 candidates for an election would be able to have their party’s name on the ballot next to the candidate’s name. Not content with the halfway measure, Figueroa appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, claiming the rule violated Section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The hearing started in November 2002, and in June 2003, the historic Figueroa v. Canada (Attorney General) decision determined that “the 50-candidate threshold is inconsistent with the right of each citizen to play a meaningful role in the electoral process.” Ten years after his party was deregistered, Figueroa had successfully forced Elections Canada to overturn its rule and the Communist Party of Canada was back on the ballot.

Being on the ballot is one thing; winning is another, and the Communist Party remains a distant also-ran when it comes to actually delivering votes. During the CPC’s decade of oblivion, Figueroa remained active on the political scene by running twice as an independent candidate in the Canadian federal election. In 1993, in the riding of Parkdale-High Park, he finished ninth out of 11 candidates; in 1997 in Toronto’s Davenport riding, he finished seventh out of eight.

Though it still barely registers on the electoral scale, the Communist Party’s Supreme Court fight remains a historic win, and not just for Figueroa and the party.

“It established new grounds in evaluating election law,” says Peter Rosenthal, the CPC’s lawyer at the time. Rosenthal has worked on a number of cases related to electoral law, but believes this one spawned several others and had positive consequences for small parties. Nelson Wiseman, associate professor with the department of political science at the University of Toronto, had originally predicted there would be a proliferation of parties following the Supreme Court’s decision. “But the government has tightened up the requirements for registering a party,” he says, noting the number of registered federal parties is not much higher today than it was in 2003: among other things, the number of members required for party registration was increased from 100 to 250, and each party must have three other officers in addition to its leader.

But while new parties haven’t exactly mushroomed since Figueroa v. Canada, some existing ones have been able to survive. “My hero!” exclaims Blair T. Longley upon hearing Figueroa’s name. The Marijuana Party of Canada leader, whose party has been decimated in recent years due to several of its members joining more prominent parties, admits “We wouldn’t exist without Miguel Figueroa and Peter Rosenthal’s work. None of the small parties would exist.” Indeed, several of those parties rallied behind Figueroa during the court challenge, and the case made for strange bedfellows: in addition to the Marijuana Party, the right-wing Christian Heritage Party—which couldn’t meet the 50-candidate threshold for the 2000 election—joined in. Pastors associated with the party even asked their congregations at Sunday church services to pray for Figueroa while the case was being debated.

“This is a landmark case in the status of small parties,” says Boyden. “It’s a great advancement for democracy in Canada because it recognized that there was a role for those parties…. The Green Party, which is now much larger than it was back then, was right there at the table in the Figueroa case,” he says.

In addition to his work as party leader, Figueroa is an editorial board member of the People’s Voice, the nationally distributed bi-monthly newspaper published by the CPC. But in spite of the party’s rebirth, publications and political involvement, Figueroa is still leading a small party that only represents half of the Communist left in Canada, the other being the similarly (perhaps confusingly) named, but ideologically different, Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist). Moreover, the Communist Party currently has approximately 500 members coast to coast. Nevertheless, Figueroa’s party is a bit like one of those inflatable bop bags that always get back up after being knocked down; it simply refuses to give up and go away. No matter how hard the government, the RCMP or Elections Canada has tried to kick it off the political scene, the Communists have always found a way to return. Figueroa is simply the architect of the latest rebuilding, which, even after 17 years, hardly threatens to overturn the decades-long status quo of Liberal or Conservative rule. But like its leader, the Communist Party of Canada is a regular, a fixture on the scene, not the flashiest customer but a reliable one. And like Figueroa, it intends to stay that way.

There is a little red book
in which I etch occasions
that seemed to matter to us
for the sake of a future
encounter with engraved instances
that will make a boy or girl
with something of my genetic
structure unknowingly sad.

This little red book
is a little red bird, lost
in the sky, not knowing
its course of flight, not knowing
if it’s about to see
heaven or worms.

My scratchings are barely
legible on the inside of
the tiny bird’s heart,
the little bird’s tiny
racing heart.

If anyone wishes to know
what I am remembering,
he must find the bird,
capture the bird,
kill the bird, dissect the bird,
cut the pages of the little
bird’s tiny heart, and try to read
what is written there.

Dear Death,

I had a book with empty pages
that I used to write you letters.

You never answered my long questions,
but I continued writing letters

to you, Death. I kept writing you
long and boring, heartfelt letters.

You never answered my stupid questions.
And now you take my book from me?

Summer

Spiders spin webs around flower pots.

Squirrels grow teeth the length of wood sleds.

Bees make honey in soda pop traps.

Birds perch aimlessly on dented eaves.

Skunks barely fit into their holes.

Taxi drivers leave crossword squares unfilled.

Teachers crouch to teach children things.

Worms burrow deeper.

I walk on the dying grass.

November 13, 1971, The Pas, Manitoba. Four young white men drive past Helen Betty Osborne, a 19-year-old Cree girl. They call for her to get in the car and party with them. “I think I heard a yes,” one man taunts. When she refuses, the men pull her into the car and drive off.

Flip the page, to illustrated panels showing the RCMP knocking on her mother’s door, about to deliver the news of Osborne’s rape and murder. Winnipeg author David Alexander Robertson uses the advantages of a graphic novel to detail the horrific event in his book, The Life of Helen Betty Osborne.

“Her story is really close to my heart. All of us involved in it really got to know her,” Robertson says. His father comes from Norway House, the same small northern community where Osborne spent her early years.

Robertson had self-published two novels when the Helen Betty Osborne Memorial Foundation asked him to write a book about Osborne’s murder to use in schools. He came up with the idea for a graphic novel telling the story of the girl’s last days, showing her hanging out at high school with her friends and dreaming of becoming a teacher—depicting her as a person, not a victim. What’s left for discussion is the racism, sexism and indifference behind the fact that only one of the four men implicated was ever convicted, and only sixteen years after the fact. It’s a tale of sloppy police work, townfolk who wouldn’t speak up about what they knew, and official indifference to a pattern of white men sexually harassing aboriginal women and girls.

The racial tension that divided whites and aboriginals in The Pas in the 1970s has lessened, but Robertson argues his book is relevant all these years later because the problems that played a part in Osborne’s death are still very much at play. He sees a connection between Osborne and hundreds of other disappeared aboriginal women. “There are 520 murdered and missing aboriginal women in Canada, half of them in this decade. By telling Helen Betty Osborne’s story to a wider audience, it’s bringing a new awareness to the issue. We’re seeing the awareness build, but it’s a long slow build.”

Robertson’s book is just the latest in a string of non-fiction Canadian graphic novels to surface. Many landmark works are personal projects, like Skim by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki—which, like Robertson’s book, sketches the life of a teenage girl. Others, like Chester Brown’s footnoted history Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography or Guy Delisle’s Burma Chronicles take a more documentary approach. These home-grown examples follow in the footsteps of global successes like Joe Sacco’s pointillist reportage on the Bosnian War with The Fixer, Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of an Iranian childhood in Persepolis, and Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning holocaust memoir, Maus.

Unlike these creators, Robertson writes the script but leaves the art to others. For Osborne, illustrator Madison Blackstone applied a range of graphic techniques, including full-colour paintings and black and white drawings. Some panels mesh drawings and photographs, underlining that this project is based on a real woman; the photos show the flowers and cigarette lighters that continue to be placed on Osborne’s grave and memorial, the hold she has on people’s memory in a town that cannot forget her death.

“I love the way that graphic novels offer different ways to engage people, from elementary school to people in their sixties,” Robertson says. For his next project, he’s working on a comic book series called 7 Generations, a historical work of fiction focused on the Plains Cree area. “It’s all about the impact of history, how can we address that and move on.”

Graphic novels are long past being comic relief. Robertson’s new book joins a growing tradition that expands our idea of what to expect from the un-funny pages.

The Gomery Commission, underway in 2005. Sweeping Royal Commissions have fallen out of favour as governments fear they cannot control the outcome.

For the past six months, opposition parties in Ottawa and in Quebec City have been persistently calling for the appointment of Royal Commissions.

At the federal level, the demand has been for an impartial inquiry into the fate of detainees that Canadian troops turned over to local authorities in Afghanistan, and whether or not the Harper government was aware at the time that they were likely being tortured.

In Quebec, the Charest government has been under pressure to establish an inquiry into allegations of corruption and price-rigging at the municipal level over government construction contacts. More recently, and closer to the provincial government, there has been a call for a separate inquiry into allegations that the province’s $7-a-day childcare plan had been used in a “pay-for-play” scheme to benefit Jean Charest’s Liberal Party. Historically, Royal Commissions have been the right mechanism to deal with these sorts of issues, but neither the federal government nor the Quebec government has agreed to establishing them in these cases.

Canadian law gives investigating commissioners sweeping powers, including the authority to compel testimony, even from cabinet ministers, and subpoena documents, even those classified at the highest levels. And unlike parliamentary committees, which are composed of elected partisans, commissions are usually led by judges. These inquiries do not simply examine wrongdoing; history has shown that they often produce serious government reform.

Take, for example, the Glassco Commission of the 1960s. This was chaired by chartered accountant Grant Glassco and laid the groundwork for the complete reorganization of the federal government’s administration and practices, paving the way for professionalization of the public service and greater financial accountability. The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism paved the way for the Official Languages Act and for Canada’s multiculturalism policy, two initiatives that have been integral in making Canada a more egalitarian, pluralistic and tolerant society.

The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Certain Activities of the RCMP, dubbed the McDonald Commission after its chair, Judge David McDonald was sensational at the time, given its reports of RCMP officers infiltrating Quebec separatist political parties, and it resulted in the creation of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. It also subjected it to a series of public oversight bodies such as the Inspector General of CSIS and the Security Intelligence Review Committee and, by extension, placed the RCMP under scrutiny from the Public Complaints Commission and the External Review Committee.

Compare those Royal Commissions to the ones conducted in the past decade—particularly the inquiry into the sponsorship program, chaired by Justice John Gomery, and the commission into the financial dealings of Karlheinz Schreiber and former prime minister Brian Mulroney, chaired by Justice Jeffrey Oliphant.

The Gomery Inquiry cannot lay claim to a single major reform of government policy or practice. By the time it was established the sponsorship program had already been shut down and the Chrétien government had already severely restricted corporate donations to political parties and established public election financing. The charges laid against the ad executives for falsely invoicing the government came out of an RCMP investigation which was started following an auditor general’s report.

What the Gomery Inquiry did do was tarnish the Liberal brand in Quebec, letting Stephen Harper’s Conservatives come to power even though the party is out of step ideologically with Quebecers in particular—something that additionally gave the Bloc Québécois a new lease on life and doomed Canada to a succession of minority governments.

The Gomery experience is why opposition parties salivate at the possibility of a new inquiry and make daily demands for its appointment. It is equally why governments now refuse.

While the Oliphant Commission was struck by the Harper government in response to news reports that Mulroney had received cash payments from German businessman Schreiber, the government was not putting itself at risk: only Mulroney was personally implicated, so had there been any surprising revelations, the risk to the current incarnation of the Conservative Party was minimal. Just to be safe, however, the Harper government gave the Oliphant Commission a very limited mandate. So its report, in May 2010, is unlikely even to get to the bottom of Mulroney and Schreiber’s relationship, let alone propose any significant reform of federal government policy and practice. The Oliphant Inquiry is simply about being seen to act.

Real commissions threaten governments, which is why they now reject them outright, despite the fact that in these two instances, they are badly needed. The military interventions Canada now finds itself increasingly embroiled in raise a myriad of legal and political issues that have never been properly debated. Not being an actual war, the rules of war don’t apply in Afghanistan and a country like Canada embarks on the mission without the requisite clarity of purpose. This goes beyond the fact that the people captured are not “prisoners” and yet are taken prisoner and thus are legally ambiguous. There are complex legal, moral, ethical, and strategic matters that deserve the sort of in-depth examination that only a Royal Commission can provide.

The same is true for something as seemingly mundane as construction contracting. The relationship between a municipality and the province, under whose constitutional authority a municipality is permitted to exist, has always been ambiguous. And the challenges of transparency in government contracting goes well beyond any one level of government.

These sorts of issues could only benefit from a public inquiry—but with governments of all stripes scared to start a process whose outcome they cannot control, Canadian public policy will suffer in the long run.

Managing Environmental Resources to Enable Transitions to More Sustainable Livelihoods Through Partnerships and Land Use Solidarity, or MERET-PLUS, is a joint project between the Ethiopian government and the United Nations’ World Food Programme. Through it, Tekale and thousands others are employed to plant rows of tiny trees, destined for hillside farms like his. The roots should stop erosion, and the fruit can be eaten, traded or sold. “Our whole livelihood now depends on this,” says Tekale.

Thanks to MERET-PLUS, dozens of seedling nurseries and other small-scale sites have sprung up across Ethiopia. The program pays participants in grain to make compost to refresh tired soils, build retaining walls to stop erosion, and ponds to catch rainwater. Tekale earns 135 kilograms of grain per month, which feeds his family, his wife’s family and her relatives.

Meanwhile, though, MERET-PLUS itself is going hungry. A 2009 WFP report says expected donor contributions to MERET-PLUS fell nearly 50 percent since 2007, a shortfall blamed on food price increases and the global economic meltdown. Of US$166 million promised for 2007–2011, MERET-PLUS officials now expect to receive US$75 million. Major donors are Canada, the United States, Denmark, Norway and Russia.

WFP officer Arega Yirga won’t say which country is the weak funding link, but Canada claims to be doing its part. Denise Robichaud, media officer at the Canadian International Development Agency, says we met our 2006 commitment of $20 million. It’s of little comfort. The funding gap caused postponement of 260 planned projects in 2008, and only 76,000 people—of a planned 122,000—received grain payments.

This wasted potential frustrates Fisseha Gizachew, MERET-PLUS regional coordinator in Awassa, southern Ethiopia. “People are coming to us because they understand the problems they are facing,” he says, adding, at the same time, lost funding has his office waiting for grain promised by the WFP seven months ago.

He won’t be the only one. This year, lost funding will force over 45,000 Ethiopian farmers off work while their land degrades. Too bad; during that time thousands of retaining walls and catchment ponds could have been built—long-term investments that help Ethiopians help themselves.

In some corners of the web, piracy is a form of curation. Illustration by Matt Daley.

In the summer of 1999, a terrifying rumour began circulating on the then-young internet, gluing millions to their screens: Napster, the illegal music service, was about to be shut down. It seemed like the party with an endless soundtrack was coming to an end.

The site, which famously provided access to millions of illicitly copied songs, introduced internet piracy to the masses. Once people had a taste for a web that was a unending cultural smorgasbord, there was no going back: piracy has now become as central to web culture as celebrity news and porn.

But though the greedy rush to download anything and everything remains, a new and surprisingly widespread breed of piracy has been quietly simmering in the corners of the internet. Rather than encouraging users to grab as much pop culture as they can, these sites are about quality, not quantity. Instead of an anarchic free-for-all, they’re more like a curated exchange amongst aficionados. By most definitions, it’s still stealing, but stealing with a “Robin Hood” twist: the ultimate goal is to spread good art and challenging ideas—for free. That may be controversial, but as principles go, it’s a pretty noble one.

Today, the most common way to download copyrighted material might be a site called The Pirate Bay. It’s just one of the sites that index content scattered across the internet rather than housing it, making them harder to shut down. Every day, millions of films, songs and books are downloaded; unsurprisingly, the most commercially successful entertainment is also the most pirated. A perhaps unintended consequence of the entertainment industry’s hype for the new and popular is that it also drives those who steal from it.

But another approach to piracy has been evolving, too. Rather than an all-you-can-eat buffet, these sites are more akin to an underground dinner club for foodies. Instead of an array of popular, everyday items, one is presented with the crème de la crème of culture, whether a pristine copy of a Fellini film or that Ella Fitzgerald recording few have ever heard.

It was perhaps a music community named OiNK.cd that was the most prominent of these more rigorous sites. This go-to place for quality tunes was shut down by a legal challenge in 2007, though the site’s owner was recently cleared of charges. Nonetheless, What.cd and Waffles.fm (which, for visitors to its homepage, pretends to be a site about recipes), quickly took the place of OiNK. cd. In function, these sites work much like The Pirate Bay. In philosophy, they differ significantly. Many users take time to find and upload obscure tracks of smart, Scandinavian electronica rather than something by Beyoncé. Discussion on the sites’ forums often reflects this commitment to hidden gems, and those who share obscure or difficult works often gain credibility. Instead of mirroring the behaviour of the populist industries they seek to undercut, the sites are unapologetically elitist.

But to characterize these sites as a paradise for thieves with highbrow tastes would be to miss part of the picture. The original material might have been pirated, but these sites make members share amongst themselves. Ratios of uploads to downloads are enforced. Download every available bit of Spanish jazz without sharing in kind and you will be ruthlessly and quickly ejected. What’s more, rather than the populist grab-whatyou-can ethos of The Pirate Bay, you have a community of invested, informed people to guide your wanderings, introducing you to the innovative and new as you return the favour with your own obscure treasures.

Nor is this phenomenon limited to movies and music. AAAARG.org, a site that stores hundreds of academic articles, has electrified cultural theory geeks by finally putting some of that anti-establishment Marxist thinking into practice. When an academic publisher recently requested an article be taken down, it was met with angry and erudite responses about “the exploitative forces of capital.” To the publisher, a copyrighted work was being distributed without compensation; to the sites’ users, ideas were being shared for the greater good.

From the start, we knew the web was going to change things. What we possibly didn’t realize was, unbeknownst to many, new modes of cultural exchange were being born that replaced blind consumption with careful curation, often by simply removing the costly barriers erected around “the good stuff.” As a result, those who adhere to the letter of the law, and the spirit of copyright and ownership that underpin it, believe these sites are simply dens of theft.

But such a view is short-sighted. What these services let us see is that when the exchange of ideas, rather than the exchange of dollars, is the controlling principle, communities will form around the best and most challenging of what culture has to offer. Call me a naive idealist, but I think that’s a good thing. And when history looks back on this moment, rather than maintain the status quo, I’d rather it be known I was in Robin Hood’s band of merry thieves.