rabble radio

This week, rabble editor Nick Seebruch sits down with Off the Hill co-hosts to review how rabble’s monthly panel series came to be and where we hope to go in the future.  About our guests  Robin Browne is Off the Hill’s co-host. Robin is a communications professional and founder of the 613-819 Black Hub, living in Ottawa. His blog is The “True” North. Libby Davies is Off the Hill’s co-host and author of Outside In: a Political Memoir. She served as the MP for Vancouver East from 1997-2015, and is former NDP Deputy Leader and House Leader. If you like the show please consider subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you find your podcasts. And please, rate, review, share rabble radio with your friends — it takes two seconds to support independent media like rabble. Follow us on social media across channels @rabbleca. 

This week on rabble radio, we share a clip from the first episode of the new season of the Courage My Friends podcast: Climate and the city: Are we ready? In this episode, host Resh Budhu sits down with former mayor of Toronto, David Miller to discuss the crucial role of cities in “fixing” the climate crisis and what we can learn in building sustainable and equitable urban communities. Miller and Budhu also explore the question of just how prepared Canadian cities are to meet the challenges of this crisis. About our guest  Miller was Mayor of Toronto from 2003 to 2010 and served as Chair of C40 Cities from 2008 until 2010. Under his leadership, Toronto became widely admired internationally for its environmental leadership, economic strength and social integration. He is a leading advocate for the creation of sustainable urban economies.   Miller has held a variety of public and private positions and served as Future of Cities Global Fellow at Polytechnic Institute of New York University from 2011 to 2014. He has an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Waterloo in Environmental Studies, an Honorary Doctor of Laws from York University and is currently executive in residence at the University of Victoria. David Miller is a Harvard trained economist and professionally is a lawyer. He and his wife, lawyer Jill Arthur, are the parents of two children. About Courage My Friends  The Courage My Friends podcast is presented by rabble.ca and the Tommy Douglas Institute, with the support of the Douglas Coldwell Layton Foundation. If you’d like to hear more from the Courage My Friends podcast, please subscribe to Needs No Introduction - a podcast by rabble which presents a series of speeches and lectures from the finest minds of our time. Available on rabble.ca, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.  If you like the show please consider subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you find your podcasts. And please, rate, review, share rabble radio with your friends — it takes two seconds to support independent media like rabble. Follow us on social media across channels @rabbleca. 

Earlier this month, the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE) launched a campaign this month highlighting how the fossil fuel industry in British Columbia is increasing healthcare system costs and reducing access to care. The campaign shared billboards and transit ads, held a press conference in front of Vancouver General Hospital and shared an open letter from over 300 doctors and nurses calling for immediate action to protect communities and the healthcare system. Today on rabble radio, Dr. Melissa Lem, the president of CAPE, joins rabble labour reporter Gabriela Calugay-Casuga to discuss in more detail about this campaign, and how CAPE works with other healthcare organizations and unions to create a healthier planet and population.  Lem last joined us on rabble radio in 2022 as part of our Boiling Point series. She and Stephen Wentzell explored the many ways in which climate change is a health issue and why it’s so important for governments, at all levels, to put policies in place to protect people during extreme weather events. About our guest  Dr. Melissa Lem is a Vancouver family physician who also works in rural and northern communities within Canada. President of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, she is an internationally recognized leader in the field of nature, biodiversity and health. Lem has also engaged in advocacy and policy work on a broad range of other issues ranging from extreme heat and hydraulic fracturing to sustainable health care and low-carbon transportation. A widely published writer, climate change panelist on CBC Radio's Early Edition, in-house medical columnist for CBC TV Vancouver and clinical assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, one of her major priorities is knowledge translation. If you like the show please consider subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you find your podcasts. And please, rate, review, share rabble radio with your friends — it takes two seconds to support independent media like rabble. Follow us on social media across channels @rabbleca.

This week on rabble radio, labour reporter Gabriela Calugay-Casuga sits down with Mahendra Pandey. Mahendra shares his experience as a former migrant worker in Saudi Arabia, as well as his work organizing migrant workers today. About our guest  Mahendra Pandey is the senior manager of forced labor and human trafficking at Humanity United. Through this role, he focuses on the human trafficking in labor migration portfolio. Before getting involved in advocacy work, Pandey worked in Saudi Arabia as a migrant worker and experienced first-hand the poor working conditions that many Nepali migrant workers face.  While in Saudi Arabia, he developed a Nepali migrant rights network, Pravasi Nepali Coordination Committee (PNCC). Pandey holds a master’s degree in digital media and storytelling from American University at Washington D.C. and recently completed a leadership organizing and action course at Harvard University.  To learn more about Humanity United, visit this link.  If you like the show please consider subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you find your podcasts. And please, rate, review, share rabble radio with your friends — it takes two seconds to support independent media like rabble. Follow us on social media across channels @rabbleca. 

Nick Seebruch sits down with Joyce Arthur, founder and executive director of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada to talk about belief-based denial of care and the state of abortion rights in Canada. About our guest  Joyce Arthur is the founder and executive director of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada.  The Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada (ARCC) is a broad-based national feminist organization consisting of groups and individuals who support ARCC’s vision and mandate. It recognizes and respects the cultural and political diversity of our country and its provinces and territories, works to represent as many women and communities as possible, and operates in both official languages.  ARCC acts as a “voice for choice.” Its primary mandate is to undertake political and educational work on reproductive rights and health issues. If you like the show please consider subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you find your podcasts. And please, rate, review, share rabble radio with your friends — it takes two seconds to support independent media like rabble. Follow us on social media across channels @rabbleca. 

Being an activist brings an emotional burden.  The issues we deal with are intense, difficult and sometimes without any immediate solution. And often, we try to deal with these issues through logically planning a strategy and communicating issues using words. It’s an intellectual process, but with a lot of underlying emotional baggage. Elisa Lee has some thoughts about how to get under the intellect to connect with ourselves and people in our communities on a deeper level. She, and many other people involved in grief work, think that it’s important to deal with the full range of emotions ranging from anger and fear to hope and joy. Today on rabble radio, we’re re-releasing an episode from May 2020, in which former rabble radio host Victoria Fenner sat down with Elisa Lee to talk about climate grief and how activists can better take care of themselves. This interview was originally a part of rabble’s series on Climate Hope in the Time of the Pandemic. To listen to the original episode, please click here.  About our guest  For the past 15 years, Elisa Lee has been promoting personal development in collaboration with nature as a specialist teacher in ecological education, a self-care facilitator and a rite of passage guide. She holds a masters degree in environmental education with a focus on women’s rites of passage and is the founder of Fire & Flower, a rite of passage organization for girls.  Lee’s current activism focuses on community grief rituals and nature-based rites of passage for girls and adults. A big part of that sense of being is getting beyond the intellectual processes which help us explain the world to ourselves and others, but does not get to the root of our reactions to the complex issues that we all face in these difficult times. If you like the show please consider subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you find your podcasts. And please, rate, review, share rabble radio with your friends — it takes two seconds to support independent media like rabble. Follow us on social media across channels @rabbleca.

In January last year, rabble’s parliamentary reporter Karl Nerenberg shared a piece calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh to revive the idea of electoral reform for Canada – and on the podcast, he joined Réal Lavergne, former president of Fair Vote Canada, to dissect Canada’s current voting system and discuss how a fairer way to vote might be accomplished in the future.   Today, we’re revisiting the topic of proportional representation and electoral reform in Canada.  Next year is an election year in Canada, and with a decline in popularity for current Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and with far-right extremism on the rise (and apparently influencing certain Conservative leaders across the country), many Canadians are already wondering how they might cast their vote.  Joining us on rabble radio this week is Ted Cragg, a spokesperson for Fair Vote Canada.  Ted Cragg has been involved with Fair Vote Canada since 2009, during the British Columbia referendum on electoral reform of that year. He previously served as president of the organization's national capital region chapter. He currently lives in Saint-Léonard-d'Aston, Québec, a province showing promising signs of being the first to adopt proportional representation in Canada. Fair Vote Canada seeks broad, multi-partisan support to embody in new legislation the basic principle of democratic representative government and ultimate safeguard of a free society: the right of each citizen to equal treatment under election laws and equal representation in legislatures. If you like the show please consider subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you find your podcasts. And please, rate, review, share rabble radio with your friends — it takes two seconds to support independent media like rabble. Follow us on social media across channels @rabbleca. 

On July 8, workers at the Children’s Aid Society of Ottawa (CASO) walked off the job after contract negotiations broke down with their employer over issues of funding and a strained workforce for essential child care services. On Tuesday OPSEU/SEFPO, the union representing CASO, took to X (formally Twitter) to announce a tentative agreement had been reached with their employer.  "Children’s Aid Society of Ottawa workers, members of OPSEU/SEFPO Local 454, reached a tentative agreement last night after braving 24 days on strike. Further details to follow once the ratification vote concludes this afternoon – solidarity!" On Wednesday, it was announced the deal had been ratified. However, as Michele Thorn, president of OPSEU/SEFPO Local 454 and adoption worker at CASO, says: the fight is far from over. Michele Thorn has worked at the Children's Aid Society of Ottawa since 1995 and was a child protection worker for 20 years. She is currently working as an adoption worker. She has been the president of OPSEU/SEFPO Local 454 since 2017 and has now been on the bargaining team six times since 2009. If you like the show please consider subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you find your podcasts. And please, rate, review, share rabble radio with your friends — it takes two seconds to support independent media like rabble. Follow us on social media across channels @rabbleca.

On April 17, 2024 a pro-Palestine protest encampment was built at Columbia University where students called on their school to disclose and divest their investments in companies linked to Israel and its war on Gaza. This inspired a movement in universities across North America –and the globe– for students to create their own on-campus encampments.  After months of peaceful protest, the encampments at UofT, McGill, UOttawa have now been dismantled, but the pressure for divestment continues.  Today on rabble radio, freelance reporter Stephen Wentzell sits down with journalist and activist Desmond Cole to outline the misconceptions some had about the student encampments and what responsible reporting for Palestine looks like. Desmond Cole is a journalist, radio host, and activist. His debut book, The Skin We’re In, won the Toronto Book Award and was a finalist for the Forest of Reading Evergreen Award and the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. It was also named a best book of 2020 by The Globe and Mail, NOW Magazine, CBC, Quill & Quire, and Indigo. Cole’s writing has appeared in the Toronto Star, Toronto Life, The Walrus, and the Ottawa Citizen, among others. He lives in Toronto. Stephen Wentzell is a journalist based in New York City covering politics, social issues, and the criminal legal system. A former national politics reporter at rabble.ca, Stephen has also worked at publications including CTV Atlantic and CityNews Halifax. In 2023, Stephen began studying at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, where he is concentrating in local accountability journalism, as well as health and science reporting. When he's not working, Stephen can be found snuggling with his cat Benson and watching the latest episode of the Real Housewives. If you like the show please consider subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. And please, rate, review, share rabble radio with your friends — it takes two seconds to support independent media like rabble. Follow us on social media across channels @rabbleca.

This week on rabble radio, Nick Seebruch sits down with Deblekha Guin, the executive director of Access to Media Education Society. The two discuss the work the organization does to educate and empower youth through storytelling, artistic collaboration and peer facilitation.  In 1996, Deblekha (she/her) founded Access to Media Education Society (AMES), a non-profit that supports directly impacted youth in making and sharing personally and socially transformative digital stories. Since AMES's emergence Guin has co-visioned and coordinated 50+ distinct participatory media and digital arts production programs that have engaged over 2000 youth from equity-deserving communities in the creation of 500+ videos, animations and digital works.  Guin was recognized for her extensive BIPOC-centred, intergenerational and intersectional creative community-building work through an Intercultural Trust Award at the BC Multiculturalism and Anti-racism Awards in 2020. To learn more about Access to Media Education Society please click here.  If you like the show please consider subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. And please, rate, review, share rabble radio with your friends — it takes two seconds to support independent media like rabble. Follow us on social media across channels @rabbleca.