In this insightful book review, Tony Richardson summarises and analyses Cory Doctorow's compelling arguments in his latest book about how a few powerful technology companies have come to dominate the internet and other industries.
First of all, Doctorow deals with how Big Tech took control of the internet. He argues that Lovelace, Turing, and others pioneered the internet. In other words, Amazon could not exist without its predecessors.
The agriculture and agri-food sectors are, perhaps, the most complex, diverse and challenging sectors to work with on sustainability. There are several efforts underway in Canada, some national and some regional, some focused on smaller-scale farms and some with large industrial agri-food interests, but there is not a cohesive sense of the endgame. What does sustainable, climate-resilient, profitable farming, at scale, look like?
For years, Sébastien Sauvé, a professor of environmental chemistry at the University of Montreal, would go to public places, like Tim Horton’s, with an empty water bottle in his jacket. Sauvé would make his way back to the bathroom sink and fill his bottle — not to drink, but to take to his lab and test for harmful chemicals in Quebec’s drinking water.
I write this as I sit in Karachi, Pakistan, after deportation from Canada because of my nonviolent activism on the climate crisis. My activism, and that of my Canadian wife, Sophie, is on hold as we chart our course through a life in exile and hope for reunification in Canada.
The Canadian government has approved a new $20-billion loan to finance the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline two years after the government said it would not provide further money for the project.
The loan to the pipeline project, known as TMX, was provided through Export Development Canada’s Canada Account, which supports transactions when the Crown corporation is unable to back a project because of a combination of financial and market risks.
