Originally planned to be released with fanfare and a cross-country tour, a Health Canada report on climate change will instead be quietly ‘made available’ to Canadians who request copies. At a July 3 conference, scientists who worked on Human Health in a Changing Climate learned long-delayed launch plans had been scrubbed. Instead, on July 31 Health Canada quietly announced hard copies of the report could be ordered by emailing or phoning Health Canada. Health Canada spokesperson Paul Spendlove later told the media the ground-breaking research document itself was “too big” to post on the government’s website.     

Meanwhile, Milan Ilnyckyj, an Oxford scholar living in Ottawa, experienced no such difficulty posting the scientific report to his blog, A Sibilant Intake of Breath. He has broken it into downloadable chapters, as well posted the full 500-page document as a single file, at this link. A handful of others around the country have done the same, while various alternative media outlets have begun spreading the word that the report is now available on the web, thanks to some alert and resourceful citizens.

Entertainers The Weakerthans rock band, Boots Riley and Silk-E of the Coup, Theresa Sokyrka, Tom Jackson, Fred Penner, the Deep Dark Woods, Joseph Naytowhow, and novelists Yann Martel and Guy Vanderhaeghe are among celebrities who will headline the We Are Many (WAM) environmental and arts festival to be held August 22nd-24th at Diefenbaker Park in Saskatoon.

“We’re delighted with the outpouring of support we’ve received from leading Canadian entertainers and citizens of Saskatoon who want to help us show that people can make simple changes in their lives that will collectively have a big impact on the environment,” says WAM organizer Jon Henderson.  

‘Missing Women’ is opening at the University of Regina’s fifth parallel gallery today from 4:00 – 6:00 p.m. The exhibition features work by students from various disciplines who travelled to Mexico City in May for a Women's Studies course, "Studies on Violence and Women in Mexico," taught by Prof. Brenda Anderson.

 The course examined the underpinnings of violence against Indigenous women in Mexico, including displacement and dispossession of land, cultural genocide and sexual violence as a strategy of domination.

Stories of conquest
As part of the class, students were expected to create journals that reflected their experience in Mexico.  The students studied at the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) in the "Transformational Immersion Program".  The ELCA's program methodology is popular education and liberation theology with guest lectures, tours and visits to impoverished Indigenous communities.