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As of October 23, 33,239 Syrian refugees have been resettled in Canada. rabble.ca's Activist Toolkit is interviewing people who are on the frontlines of refugee settlement to find out about what they are seeing on the ground and what additional supports they need to address the needs of this surge of refugees. 

Maybe Brad Wall really is Alberta's favourite politician...corporate Alberta’s, anyway. Leastways, according to an important news story broken by Progress Alberta this morning, Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall's political party received 657 donations large and small from Alberta companies between 2006 and last year.

If you happened to read Terence Corcoran yesterday, either because your eyes were bleeding and you needed to pick up the closest rag you could find, or because you were trapped on a flight beside a business fellow who manspreaded his way into your personal space, you would have read a fascinating work of fiction. In a screed that sounds something like "Won't somebody please think of the children?" (except replace children with "the capitalist class"), Corcoran takes one for the team and does his best to make a Union Boss look like Donald Trump.

Happy Halloween! Rest easy, Fort McMurray! Clown costumes of any type are verboten in your public schools today. Other types of costumes that may be judged inappropriate for a host of actually legitimate reasons? Not so much, it would appear. Ten days ago, Fort Mac’s Superintendent of Public Schools, Doug Nicholls, wrote a letter to parents of students advising them that as a result of "several reports about threats by individuals dressed up as clowns both locally and internationally" no clown costumes "of any type" would be allowed on school property, even on Halloween. "Some actions by people dressed as clowns have resulted in criminal charges," he added.

Purple is a colour that calms the mind and nerves, offers a sense of spirituality and encourages creativity. It’s also the colour of courage. Purple embodies the ingredients necessary to move a woman from a place of fear to one of empowerment. November is Woman Abuse Prevention Month in Ontario, a time to shine a purple light on gendered violence. Woman abuse takes many forms including physical, sexual, psychological or emotional, as well as intellectual, social, financial, verbal, cyberbullying, stalking, manipulating children, environmental and spiritual violence.

In the late 1980s, because of my Indigenous policy background, I was convinced by a close friend to get involved in efforts to create an Aboriginal Peoples' Commission within the Liberal Party of Canada. The Liberal Party already had a Women's and Youth Commission so the model to change the Liberal Party's constitution was already there. I agreed to get involved because the Mulroney era was a disaster. In 1986, a secret federal Cabinet document was leaked called the "Buffalo Jump of the 1980s," which recommended -- like the 1969 White Paper on Indian Policy -- the termination of Indigenous rights through various policy measures including off-loading federal responsibilities for "status Indians" onto the provinces.