The Death Of Boa Sr

Indigenous men on Great Andaman in largely traditional dress, photographed in 1875. Public domain image.

The Andaman Islands, for those of you as geographically challenged as yours truly, are an archipelago lying in the Bay of Bengal between India and Burma. They are administered by India, and have a large Indian population, but their original inhabitants were a group of isolated peoples whose modern descendants apparently number only about 1,000.

These Andamanese have been a perennial source of fascination for anthropologists, since they appear to be in some sense a relic of the earliest dispersals of biologically modern Homo sapiens out of Africa. Humanity began to expand out of the dark continent several tens of thousands of years ago, with some migrants spreading along the shores of the Indian Ocean to eventually reach southeast Asia and Australia. At some point, members of this ancient migration arrived on the Andaman Islands and stayed.

The Rights and Democracy Scandal: Backroom politics in Canadian Foreign Policy

In the next few days, I am going to write something more substantial on the growing controversy over at the allegedly “arm’s length” federal human rights agency Rights and Democracy, where an internal conflict– over both the policy and politics of the agency’s work abroad–  between staff and Board (the latter which includes several government appointed members) has spilled out into the public domain. This wider media coverage was largely due not only to an unusual open letter sent by staff calling for the Board’s resignation, and the untimely death of the agency’s former President after a heated meeting, but also the important and unrelenting digging Paul Wells has been doing on the case, with the fruits of that work available over at his Maclean’s blog.

In the meantime, those interested should keep a laser like focus on Wells’ blog, including this great piece today deconstructing the arguments of David Matas, one of the Government’s political appointments to the embattled Rights and Democracy Board.  For those less familiar with the dispute, read some of Wells’ earlier posts, or this recent Globe article on point, which offers a good summary. It’s an important story for Canada’s World readers, and Canadians generally, because it illustrates how a determined executive branch can quietly — particularly when Parliament has been prorogued– influence and and shift Canadian foreign policy behind closed doors, and in backrooms, in ways the public might never know.

Youth Employment Pt 2: The Irony of Unpaid Internships

In December I began to write about the irony of unpaid internships. I was specifically concerned with how the over-use of highly-skilled interns as temp workers is degrading the workplace, forcing energetic youngsters to hop from job to job with little training and even less security.

I see the heavily sought-after internship as a form of glorified exploitation in which recent college and university graduates and those attempting to enter a new field are promised experience and an “in,” when in reality they are offered little more than hours of paper filing and coffee making, albeit under the guise of a fancy title to adorn their resume, a document that increasingly necessitates a competitive edge if one is to bag yet another internship that promises opportunity and a future and yada yada. It’s an endless cycle, and as a young worker keeping my nose just above the water, I am exhausted by it.

I want to continue on with this theme of exploitation within internships, this time by focusing on the non-profit world’s heavily reliance upon unpaid positions. In most ways, internships are used in the same way in this industry as in any other, with young workers looked to as a way to get projects done cheaply and fast. But non-profits have a special ownership over the justification of the (ab)use of interns.

A Good Year For NFB, A Great Year For Open Access

Congratulations to the National Film Board for proving that the open-source model can be a successful driver for showcasing national talent. After having launched the excellent iPhone application last October, the NFB is celebrating their first anniversary of the launch of the “Screening Room,” their open-access online archive. The NFB’s bold marketing strategy over the year of has done more for distributing Canadian culture both domestically and abroad than any regulations have.

This is primarily because individuals independently access the content through sharing and peer suggestion. There was no regulatory body requiring that a percentage of domestic content can be accessed on the Internet in Canada, as has been the case in other mediums. The NFB has a good product and they know it, but they did not stop there, they made it free, shareable and portable.

NFB’s statistics page reports that since the site’s launch, there have been 3.7 million film views – of which nearly half have been from out of Canada.

The No Prorogue Movement: Re-Inciting the Art of Protest.

A young protester makes his voice heard at a No Prorogue rally. Photo couresty of Fifth_Businesses, flickr.

Protests in Vancouver are usually lackluster at best. Throughout my four-year attempt at being a rabble-rousing UBC student, I attended many rallies and marches in wet city streets, demanding protection of InSite or better housing for the homeless or greater awareness of First Nations rights.

Regardless of the cause, the atmosphere was always familiar, with the same few solemn faces standing behind a banner or two, the same angry young egos screaming into worn-out megaphones. We would usually number in the tends to low hundreds at best, and although we were passionate and held strong beliefs, I’m not sure that we were ever convinced that our yelling and marching and sign waving was making any real change.

But last weekend’s coordinated No Prorogue events, which took place across the country and drew an estimated crowd of 2,500 in Vancouver, re-ignited my passion and belief in the power of collective action. Never before have I heard so many voices raised for one cause on a dull, rainy, winter day.