On June 23, 2022, the Canadian government officially made Holocaust denialism a crime. This amendment to the Criminal Code was secretly tucked away in Bill C-19, Canada’s budget implementation act. Canadians hardly noticed it was there — we were too distracted by the budgetary provisions that we were promised would make life more affordable for us.
Canada’s latest attempt to regulate speech comes in the form of the hotly debated bill, Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act (though it was hardly debated in the House-–MPs rushed over 150 amendments to meet the government imposed deadline).
Somewhere along the way, the environmental movement became human-centric. We turned Nature into the Environment, Animals into Resources, and Land into Conservation Sites
For the better part of a decade, I immersed myself in social justice causes. I made sure I kept myself up-to-date with the latest social justice jargon, even when it was confusing and contradictory (though I wouldn’t admit to it at the time).
Moral grandstanding is an ever-present, seductive force. It may feel impossible to avoid for many of us, but it is necessary to do so if we want to coexist meaningfully with each other. Next time you feel the urge to make a moral proclamation, consider whether you are actually advancing a cause, or yourself.
On Canada Day, July 1, 2021, a Catholic church in East Vancouver, B.C. was vandalized with orange paint. A video posted to social media revealed two young women behind this act of vandalism.
For well over a year, all eyes have been on the pandemic. While we have been singularly focused on the pandemic, another global tragedy has been taking place, though this tragedy has been happening for many years, its existence well-known, but conveniently ignored. It’s all around us, and has been normalized to such a point where any mention of it is met with denial, justification, ostracization, and anger – not anger on behalf of those suffering, but anger towards the messenger who is making the suffering known.
Is the world a better place? Opinions vary, though the enduring Western-centric belief is that humankind has never had it better. This belief is commonly espoused by technologists who praise the information age for ushering in a new era of opportunity and prosperity. The information age, coupled with industrialization, has certainly shaped the world in ways previously thought unimaginable. Advances in technology have transformed everyday life. Facial recognition software. Artificial intelligence. Microchip implants. Renewable energy. Genetic engineering. A revolutionary mRNA vaccine designed in just two days.
Given all this progress, it’s hard not to believe in the “prosperity presumption,” the belief that the world, as a whole, is getting better. Indeed, techno-utopians who adhere to the prosperity presumption also hold the belief that any form of technological stagnation is antithetical to progress. Some of the biggest technologists fall under this category.
Trigger moments in human history awaken us to injustice and turn the tide of public perception. What happened in Waterloo, Iowa may not have been a watershed moment but as far as human folly, it was a doozy.
Between March and mid-April 2020, as the pandemic surged, managers at the Tyson Foods plant in Waterloo lay bets on how many employees would fall prey to COVID-19. This, while the brass told workers they had “a responsibility to keep working in order to ensure Americans don’t go hungry.”