With all the talk of Recession in the air, it hasn’t been easy for organizations that depend on community fundraising for their survival. All the more impressive then that a group of western grain farmers – the people behind the Battle River Railway New Generation Co-op (BRR)— have managed to raise about $3.5 million from their [...]
June 22nd 2010 No Comments
Silver lining? The Crisis & Canadian media
Freelance journalists like the one featured in By-line: Charmaine are facing a complicated set of challenges right now. Traditional media has been scrambling to make do with falling ad revenues – while haemorrhaging readers and audiences to competing internet news-sources. Indeed CanWest – one of the country’s biggest media players – has gone down in [...]
Tags: english posts · news
June 11th 2010 1 Comment
Raj Patel: The GDP Project Interview
“As we confront the crisis in the worldview of orthodox economics, Raj Patel offers us a whole new way to think about price and value.†-Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
Activist and academic, Raj Patel is the author of The Value of Nothing, which offers invigorating new insight into the Great Recession and [...]
Tags: economy · english posts
May 25th 2010 No Comments
Hot in here: Thoughts on GDP
As if we needed further evidence of the climate crisis, we recently learned the first quarter of 2010 was the hottest ever in recorded history. Yikes. Sobering but sadly unsurprising, the news adds extra urgency to some questions that have been preoccupying us here at the GDP project.
Is the goal of perpetual economic growth [...]
Tags: news
May 19th 2010 No Comments
Mondragon: The Basque Model
Some members of the GDP team are heading off to Ottawa on May 30 to take part in the 2010 National Summit on a People-Centred Economy. Organized by the Canadian Community Economic Development Network, the event aims to unite folks from the coop movement with representatives from the world of social entrepreneurship – with a [...]
Tags: english posts · news
May 12th 2010 No Comments
The Recession & Rural Health
For people who live in Canada’s remote rural communities the global crisis has exacerbated a trend that’s been underway for decades.
Back in 1996 the Canadian Rural Restructuring Foundation was already reporting that “rural Canada has dying villages and towns, is losing population, and has substandard social services†– and the current global crisis has only [...]
Tags: economy · english posts · news
May 6th 2010 No Comments
A World Gone Ponzi?
“I used to think of Wall Street as a financial centre: I now think of it as a crime scene.†So says Danny Schechter – aka the News Dissector – in his recently released movie Plunder: The Crime of our Time. Check out the trailer:
In Bevan Jones: My Brother’s victim, we present the story [...]
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April 29th 2010 No Comments
Images of the Dirty Thirties
“The recession was shorter and milder in Canada,†says Philip Cross, a business cycle specialist with Statistics Canada. This news, released in early April, must come as cold comfort to the 400,000 plus Canadians who’ve lost full-time jobs in the last 2 years – but it’s true that when compared to countries like Greece, Canada [...]
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April 22nd 2010 1 Comment
Durham Region & the Art of Transition
The crisis in Canada’s manufacturing sector has been particularly acute in Ontario’s Durham Region. Our story Autoworkers at a crossroads has been documenting how the recession has been playing out in the area, and more specifically in the lives of Oshawa residents Brian and Cassandra.
The desire to look beyond traditional manufacturing and explore alternative economic [...]
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April 16th 2010 No Comments
Crisis & career change
The career advice business is doing well these days. Google “career change†and you get a long list of sponsored ad-links – agencies that will sell you tips on refreshing your old resume, conquering job interview anxiety, or reinventing yourself for the post-recession economy.
Some agencies are geared to modest aspirations, with offers of “interesting [...]
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