In this talk, Mr. Arar speaks about the fragility
of our rights, the dangers of allowing deeper 
integration with the US to trump human rights, 
and the need for meaningful oversight of CSIS 
and the RCMP if we are to restore Canada's 
tarnished reputation for promoting human rights 
both at home and around the globe.

This edition of Canadian Voices features urban activist, author and Ottawa City Councillor Clive Doucet, speaking on themes from his 2007 book: Urban Meltdown: Cities, Climate Change, and Politics as Usual, published by New Society Publishers.

The Writers' trust of Canada, which nominated Doucet's book for its 2008 prize for political writing, describes Urban meltdown as An insiderâs perspective into how explosive urban growth is accelerating global warming, and why political action seems paralyzed.

This edition of Canadian Voices features Chris Turner, journalist and author of the national bestseller 'The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the World We Need'. He speaks on themes from this 2007 book.

Concerned about the unpromising future his newborn daughter might face, the Calgary-based journalist and author spent a year touring the world looking for the ecological innovators who are trying to make our world a more livable place While investigating issues like energy consumption, alternative housing, and the commitment involved in living a greener lifestyle, he takes the reader on a journey that stretches from Colorado to India.

He spoke at an event sponsored by Selkirk College's Mir Centre for Peace in Nelson, BC, in February, 2009.

Michael Ableman currently farms at the Foxglove Farm, a 120 acre farm on Saltspring island, British Columbia, where he is developing the Centre for Art, Ecology and Agriculture. His experience as a practitioner of sustainable agriculture and a proponent of regional food systems for almost 30 years informs his talk and the stories about farmers he recounts.

In March 2004, the Native Womenâs Association of Canada and the ecumenical social justice network KAIROS launched the Sisters in Spirit campaign to draw attention to the high levels of violence faced by Indigenous women in Canada, especially the largely unacknowledged pattern of racialized sexualized violence faced by Indigenous women in Canadian cities.

Later that year, Amnesty International issued the report Stolen Sisters: A Human Rights
Response to discrimination and violence against Indigenous Women in Canada. The report had three central themes:

 The role of racism and discrimination in fuelling acts of extreme brutality targeted
against Indigenous women.

 How historic and continuing marginalization and impoverishment of Indigenous
women has pushed many Indigenous women into unsafe environments

 The failure of the Canadian government and society to respond adequately to the
frequency and seriousness of this violence, including by ensuring consistent, thorough investigation into reports of missing Indigenous women.

Beverley Jacobs was the lead researcher and consultant to Amnesty Inrternational on this report, and delivered the findings in this talk at St Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, in October, 2004. The talk was recorded by Pierrre Loiselle of Praxis Media.

This edition of Canadian Voices features Andrew Cohen, author and journalist, speaking on themes from his 2007 book, The Unfinished Canadian: the People We Are. The talk was originally broadcast on TV Ontario's Big Ideas programme in November, 2007.

Taking from his book, the Carleton University journalism professor asks why Canada is so reluctant to understand and commemorate her accomplishments, and so content to forget her past. He ponders questions of national character, and delves into our past and present in search of our defining national characteristics. He argues that we are the product of many different forces, including our political culture of moderation and ambiguity, and that we have a lack of memory with regards to our history.

Cohen breaks down Canadaâs identity into different facets â The Unconscious Canadian who knows nothing of history; the American Canadian, who holds onto great myths of national differences; the Casual Canadian, who is flippant about the responsibilities of citizenship; and the Capital Canadian, who is indifferent about Canadaâs lacklustre capital city.

In this lecture Cohen argues that our mythology, our jealousy, our complacency, our apathy, our amnesia, and our moderation are all part of the unbearable lightness of being Canadian.

In the Gift of Thanks, Margaret Visser takes her cues from linguistics, the classics, and anthropology, to investigate the way gratitude manifests itself across cultures, from tipping waiters in restaurants, to standing in silence on Remembrance Day. Her inquiry into all aspects of gratefulness ranges from the unusual determination with which parents teach their children to thank, to the difference between speaking the words and feeling them, to the way different cultures handle the complex matter of giving, receiving, and returning favours and presents. In this talk, gratitude is revealed as a key to understanding many aspects of everyday behaviour.

This lecture was first broadcast on TV Ontario's Big Ideas programme,on September 6, 2008. For more information on that series, visit tvo.org/bigideas.

This edition of Canadian Voices features Martin Van Den Borre, Co-Director of Ottawa-'s La Siembra Worker Co-op. He speaks on â Cooperation and Survival: The Fair Trade Revolutionâ?, at an event co-presented by Canadian Voices and the Upper Columbia Co-op Council, in Nelson, BC, in April, 2008.

La Siembra Worker Co-op produces the award winning cocoa camino line of organic fair trade cocoa , chocolate, and sugar products, and has been a pioneer in North American Fair Trade Certification. The Co-op's mission is to offer goods that improve the livelihoods of family farmers and the well-being of communities at home and abroad. Founded in 1999, La Siembra has chosen to identify with its producer partners by adopting the same democratic, participatory and transparent model that they follow in their own co-operatives in the South.

Mr. Van den Borre discusses how cooperatives in both the North and the South are supporting a shift in international trade practices, toward fair trade, and away from the conventional free trade system, which is characterized by poor working conditions including low pay, overwork, pesticide exposure, and child labour; and by trade regulations that are biased against small southern farmers.

This edition of Canadian Voices features Michael Geist, a University of Ottawa Law School professor , a champion of copyright reform, and an internationally renowned expert on law and the internet . Dr. Geist delivered the 2006 Hart House Lecture at the University of Toronto. His talk is entitled Our Own Creative Land: Cultural Monopoly and the Trouble with Copyright.

A recording of this talk was made available by TV Ontario's Big Ideas programme, on which it was first broadcast on May 27, 2006.More information tvo.org/bigideas.

The second half of the programme features author and philospher Mark Kingwell. speaking on Boredom, Philosophy, and the Meaning of Life, at an event produced by the Necessary Voices Society in Vancouver, in November, 2003, more information on this society at www.necessaryvoices.org.

HÃbert penned her first book, French Kiss: Stephen Harperâs Blind Date with Quebec , as both a post-mortem of the Canadian federation that died on January 23, 2006, the night of the last federal election, as well as an examination of our changing political future, one that involves living with Quebec rather than just wooing it.

On that election night, Chantal Hebert explains that she stood in a Calgary convention hall with 2,000 cheering Alberta Conservatives, watching as their party captured 10 seats in her native Quebec. Before the confetti had stopped falling, she realized that she could be witnessing the start of a major political realignment.

HÃbert is one of a new breed of Canadian journalists. A francophone, she works in English as a national affairs columnist for the Toronto Star and as a commentator on CBC Television. With one foot in each of the two solitudes, she has developed a unique ability to explain the intricacies of Quebec's political arena for an English-speaking audience.

She spoke in November, 2007

She spoke in Vancouver, BC in May, 2007.

From the visual ideas put forward by Leonardo Da Vinci, musical thoughts created by Beethoven, and the pornography of Machiavelli, Paul Kennedy discusses the importance of ideas in the fields of Philosophy, Art and Politics, through the lens of his work as documentarist and radio producer.

Paul Watson has been denounced by many as a misanthrope and an ecoterrorist. He believes that government is a body that overseas the mass destruction of human and non-human life, that they sell the licences to over-fish, to clear-cut, to hunt, to drain swamps and to destroy wetlands. He finds fault in those aiming for âsustainableâ? living, and has been arrested in Canada, Norway and Holland for his efforts to halt fishing and hunting of maritime animals. Paul Watson, however, has never been convicted. He defends his actions as falling within International Law, and Sea Shepherdâs right to enforce maritime regulations against illegal whalers and sealers.

He spoke on September 15, 2005 in Edmonton , Alberta.

Intent for a Nation, the title of which is followed by: â A relentlessly optimistic manifesto for Canadaâs role in the worldâ?, has been called a compelling call to arms to reinvigorate our vision of Canadaâs place in the world, from one of the best of our new generation of public intellectuals.

The book plays against Lament for A Nation, the influential 1965 work of political philosophy by George Grant, which paints Canada as a country already lost to the forces of Americanization.

Called the provinceâs âoptimistic environmentalistâ?, his talk was part of a symposium called Climate Change: Exploring Regional Solutions presented by the West Kootenay EcoSociety, held in Nelson , BC on April 23, 2007.

Adrienne Clarkson delivered the 2007 LaFontaine-Baldwin Lecture in Vancouver in March, 2007, and spoke on " A Society of Difference". The lecture was recorded by CBC's Ideas.

He spoke at the Vancouver Public Library as part of the Necessary Voices Lecture Series, on November 10. 2006.

The talk was recorded by Thomas Hicks of the Necessary Voices Society. 

He spoke as part of the 2007 Vancouver Institute Lecture Series in Februray, 2007.

Melanie Mark is from the Nisga'a Nation. Growing up in a disadvantaged environment, Melanie has made it her work to be an advocate for at-risk Native youth. She is the former president of the Urban Native Youth Association, and Chair of the organizations $47 million capital campaign for the development of a Native Youth Centre designed to serve as a cornerstone for the Native community on the east side of Vancouver. The Urban Native Youth Association has been working with all three levels of government to raise the funds needed to make this centre a reality.   As of the date of this talk, the Association had raised almost $6 million, including securing the land needed to build this 65,000 sq ft Centre. 

This edition of Canadian Voices features Zool Suleman, Immigration Lawyer and anti racial-profiling activist, and Jason Gratl, Chair of the BC Civil Liberites Association, speaking on the issue of Racial profiling in Canada.

In the Post 9-11 world, racial profiling has come to the forefront as a tool to aid government in creating a more secure society. In the Canadian context, where government denies that racial profiling occurs and where affected communities insist that racial profiling occurs, what are the relevant issues for consideration?

Zool Suleman and Jason Gratl spoke at a Canadian Voices produced Lecture at the Vancouver Public Library on March 7, 2007.

Sheila Watt -Cloutier is a climate change activist, outgoing Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, and nominee for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. She spoke on The Right To Be Cold: The Arctic Environment, Climate Change, and Human Rights, in March, 2006, in a lecture sponsored by the Wilderness Institute at the University of Montana, in Missoula, Montana.  

Sheila Watt Cloutier has made it her life's work to preserve the environment and advocate for the people of the circumpolar region. Born in the tiny community of Kuujjuaq in Northern Quebec, Ms. Watt-Cloutier was raised traditionally on the land for ten years, before attending school in Churchill, Manitoba. She currently makes her home in Iqaluit, in Nunavut.  In her capacity as President of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, from 1995-2002, and her election as International Chair in 2002, she was successful in persuading states to sign a global agreement to ban the generation and use of persistent organic pollutants, such as DDT and the PCBs that contaminate the Arctic food chain.

John Ralston Saul, author, essayist and philosopher, spoke at the Parkland Instituteâs Tenth Annual Conference, on November 17, 2006 in Edmonton, Alberta.  A Companion of the Order of Canada, he is also Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de France. His 14 honorary degrees range from McGill and the University of Ottawa, to Herzen State Pedagogical University in St Petersburg, Russia.

He speaks on Democracy, Citizenship and Sovereignty.

This episode features Matt Elrod, a Victoria, BC-based drug policy activist. Matt provides a brief history of what he explains as the racist origins of drug prohibition, and discusses the modern day impact of the "War on Drugs" on the civil liberties of both drug users and abstainers alike.