Redeye

Earle Peach is the director of three Vancouver-based choral groups including the High and Lows Choir and Solidarity Notes Labour Choir. He also plays a bunch of instruments and performs with musical groups. In his 2021 book, Questions to the Moon, Peach says songwriting is his strongest self-identification. The book is a collection of stories and lyrics, published by Lazara Press.

In June 2021, NSCAD University in Halifax announced that it was going to set up an institute to study Canadian slavery. The initiative was spearheaded by Dr. Charmaine Nelson, the first Black tenured professor of art history in Canada. The Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery will be a hub for the study of the art, visual cultures, and histories of Canadian slavery and its legacies. We talked with Dr. Charmaine Nelson last year.

In 2017, El Salvador became the first country in the world to pass a comprehensive law banning on metals mining nationwide. The vote was the result of a 12-year struggle by small farmers and their allies to protect the waters of the Lempa River from the impact of gold mining. Robin Broad and John Cavanagh tell this incredible story in their 2021 book The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved A Country From Corporate Greed. We spoke with John Cavanagh shortly after the book was published.

Canadian history, as many of us learned it in high school, leaves out or distorts the histories of many Canadians who do not fit into the prescribed narrative of this country. Students are often left questioning how they can study a past that does not reflect their present. The book “Transforming the Canadian History Classroom: Imagining a New "We", calls for an approach that places students at the centre of the history classroom. We spoke with author Dr. Samantha Cutrara in February 2021.

The National Trust manages historic properties and areas of countryside in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. In September 2020, the Trust commissioned a report on connections between their properties and colonialism, including links with historic slavery. The report attracted the attention of a group of Conservative MPs who attempted to discredit the work of the historians who produced it. In January 2021, we spoke with Professor Corinne Fowler of the University of Leicester about the work and the attacks on it.

A long tradition of the amateur detective exists in the mystery genre. The latest sleuth is Annick Boudreau, a clinical psychologist created by a Vancouver comedian, playwright, and novelist who based the character of Annick Boudreau, in part, on his own therapist. We speak with Charles Demers about the book, Primary Obsessions.

It’s 2022, and Canada is not on track to meet our greenhouse gas emissions targets. To do so, we’ll need radical systemic change to how we live and work—and fast. How can we ever achieve this? Top policy analyst and author Seth Klein reveals we can do it now because did it before during the Second World War. In a conversation recorded in 2020, we speak with Seth Klein about how wartime thinking and community efforts can be repurposed for Canada’s own Green New Deal.

John Ware is an iconic figure in the history of southern Alberta. He was a Black pioneer and rancher who settled in the province before the turn of the century. Born in the American South, he was already an accomplished cowboy by the time he arrived in Alberta. John Ware is the subject of a NFB documentary that showed at the Calgary and Vancouver International Film Festival in September 2020.

Born in 1931, Tla’amin elder Elsie Paul was raised by her grandparents on their ancestral territory just north of Powell River on the Sunshine Coast of BC. As her adult life unfolded against a backdrop of colonialism, she drew strength from the teachings she had learned. She now passes on those teachings to all who visit a new interactive book published by Ravenspace. We talk with one of the co-creators of the book, Elsie Paul’s grandson, Davis McKenzie in July 2020. The book is still available here: http://publications.ravenspacepublishing.org/as-i-remember-it/index

When sociologist Ingrid Waldron started teaching in the School of Nursing at Dalhousie, she says she got a lot of pushback from White student nurses who didn’t understand what race had to do with health. In this wide-ranging conversation recorded in July 2020, Waldron examines the connections between the social determinants of health, environmental racism and police violence.

Eliza Gilkyson describes her album "2020" as a collection of sing-alongs, diatribes, marching songs and love letters to the Earth. We caught up with her in May 2020 at her home in Austin, Texas for an extended conversation about politics, music and the significance of the year 2020 in the United States.

Sharon McIvor’s grandmother was a member of the Lower Nicola Band who married a non-Indigenous man. Under Canada’s Indian Act, status was decided on the basis of male lineage and so their daughter was ineligible for registration as an Indian. Sharon McIvor launched a landmark case to gain equality and won a sweeping legal victory in 2007. The Canadian government continued to drag its feet. Sharon McIvor took the case to the United Nations in 2011. Canada finally ended sex-based discrimination in the Act on August 15, 2019

Mel Watkins died in 2020 at age 87. Mel Watkins was a political economist at the University of Toronto, as well as an activist and writer. In the late 1960s, he was founder and co-leader, with James Laxer, of The Waffle, a left-wing political formation within the NDP that advocated for an “independent, socialist Canada.” Jim Stanford is author of a collection of essays on Mel Watkins’ Staple Theory of Economic Growth. Jim Stanford was formerly an economist with Unifor, and is currently director of the Centre for Future Work. He joined us in April 2020 to pay tribute to his friend and mentor.

In 1884, the Canadian government banned the Haida potlatch. But Haida elders kept the knowledge of the ceremony alive until the ban was lifted. In 1969, a potlatch was held to honour the raising of the first totem pole in 80 years, carved by Robert Davidson. Sara Florence Davidson co-wrote Potlatch as Pedagogy with her father to show how Haida traditions can be brought into present-day classrooms. She joins us in our studio to talk about the process of writing the book – and tells the story of how her father came to carve that first pole at the age of 22.

Precarious work was a major risk factor during the pandemic, and was implicated in the catastrophe that took place in long-term care. A report released last month in Ontario says that government inaction on workplace protections is undermining pandemic recovery. It documents how lack of workplace protections like decent wages and paid sick days has widened existing health inequities. We speak with Dr. Danyaal Raza, a family physician in Toronto and a member of the Decent Work and Health Network.

Northern BC is a territory roughly the size of France, but there is no public transportation system for the 200,000 people who live there. This means each family is obliged to buy and maintain at least one car or truck if they want to be able to get around. We speak with Peter Ewart, a writer and community activist based in Prince George, about the urgent need for a public bus system in rural BC.

Cycling for transportation and recreation is a climate-friendly way to move around your city. It’s affordable and healthy as well as an efficient use of urban space. But in British Columbia, cyclists are endangered every day by out-dated laws that fail to regulate and educate drivers to take care around vulnerable road users. HUB Cycling is advocating for better laws to protect people cycling and walking. We speak with Jeff Leigh, Chair of the Regional Advisory Committee for HUB Cycling.

Flawed ideas about heroin and people who use it have shaped drug law and policy in Canada for decades. A new illustrated book by Susan Boyd traces the history of Canadian heroin regulation over two centuries. Susan Boyd is a scholar/activist and distinguished professor at the University of Victoria. She joins me today to talk about her new book Heroin: An Illustrated History.

What if BC could massively increase public investment in below-market rental housing and that investment could pay for itself? Alex Hemingway is senior economist and public finance policy analyst at the CCPA BC Office. We talk about how this idea would create thousands of low-cost rental homes with no increase in public debt.

The US Supreme Court judge is poised to overturn Roe vs. Wade. In Canada, the landmark abortion rights case is the 1988 Morgentaler ruling, which struck down the country’s abortion law as unconstitutional. But legal protection is not the same as equal access and in many parts of the country, surgical abortion is still practically unavailable. I speak with Meghan Doherty of Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights.