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We sometimes take for granted, just how easy it is for well-meaning people to work in silos.
But, by the same token, we must also appreciate that sometimes movements must take time to find their voice, to understand their motivations and to articulate their demands.
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"News is what someone wants suppressed. Everything else is advertising." -- Katherine Graham, American journalist.
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Prime Minister Stephen Harper famously said women who wear the face veil while taking their citizenship oath should know that it "isn't the way we do things here" in Canada. Amira Elghawaby explores.
Amira Elghawaby is Communications Director, NCCM and rabble.ca contributing editor.
If the state of Canada's democracy doesn't already reduce you to tears, it will once you get your hands on Mark Bourrie's latest book, Kill the Messengers: Stephen Harper's Assault on Your Right to Know. This book would be worth the time under any circumstances; in an election year, it's absolutely essential reading.
I suspect many of us share Adrienne Clarkson's vision of what Canada is and should be: a place where everyone can belong.
Her latest book Belonging: The Paradox of Citizenship, based on the 2014 Massey Lectures she delivered on CBC Radio, offers plenty of philosophical and evidentiary reasons for promoting the admirable concept of shared citizenship.
Yet, somehow, I also suspect that many of us couldn't help wonder whether this grand vision she describes so convincingly is fading away into a past we are already beginning to lament.
Does it ever feel like you've just woken up and found yourself living in a country you don't recognize? How did Canada get to where it is today -- a more militaristic, nationalistic, free-market-at-all-costs place that seems to have shed its world-renowned reputation as a land of peacekeepers, multiculturalism, social responsibility and scientific advancement?
It hasn't been by accident. In fact, as Donald Gutstein points out in the opening phrase of his book, Harperism: How Stephen Harper and his Think Tank Colleagues Have Transformed Canada, this is exactly what Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised he'd do.
And he did it with a little bit of help from his friends.
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