Stuart Parker Dot CA: Recent Episodes
Stuart Parker
This is the podcast for Stuart Parker's weekly public affairs show, which began on Prince George's CFIS 93.1 as After Nine - Monday Edition and has now moved to CFUR 88.7.
While we are hard at work on starting the new video podcast, here is a recording listeners might enjoy of a public lecture on the relationship between "cancel culture" and Marxist theories of labour and politics.
Don talks about more of his adventures abroad, in France and the Middle East and we discuss the Punic Wars and their impact on our imaginative empathy.
This interview covers the period from 1963 to the 1990s when he worked as a professor of philosophy first at UBC then at SFU. Here we get Don's take on the hippie movement, the discipline of philosophy and anti-intellectual fads, past and present.
Part two of our program finale wherein Don recounts his encounter with the Beat movement.
This is the first part of Cocktail Hour's five-episode finale featuring the philosopher Don Todd
Los Altos Institute hosted Ira Zbarsky, a lifelong supporter of communities seeking autonomy through bioregional self-reliance and fair trade on November 28th in Vancouver.
This second of two episodes of my political baby photos covers 1996 and 1997. The first interview is the Green Party's first appearance on Rafe Mair's (or any other major radio) talkshow on April 16, 1996 in response to a vigorous campaign by our supporters to break the six-year media blackout under which we had been labouring.
While you wait for me to finish the Don Todd interviews, here is the radio equivalent of my baby pictures, featuring four interviews I did when I was 17, back in 1989. I talk about what animated me at the time: youth suffrage, McDonald's ozone-damaging packaging and the proposed Stanley Park zoo expansion.
Jon and I meant to discuss three issues on the show but discovered that an hour had passed talking about the first one, the state of the modern university.
Sam wanted to talk about men's experience of miscarriages, which, other than wine, is mostly what we talked about.
In the show, we drink passionfruit mezcal cocktails discuss Tabasco sauce, Oaxaca cheese, the background and mixed record of Pope Francis, the rise of Latin American Pentecostalism and the relationship between neoliberal healthcare austerity and rising magical belief.
Cherry Smiley is a dark horse candidate for leader of the BC New Democratic Party running on a feminist platform. We spend seventy minutes talking provincial issues and about the challenges of participating in the NDP.
Nathan Giede, Prince George-based Assiniboine columnist, podcaster, Catholic traditionalist, former Tory candidate joins us to talk about all and sundry as we relaunch the show.
In this episode I interview my longtime friend John Thompson, military man, defense policy analyst and now author of a new book on the Second World War. We drink rum; Thompson's bum leg went out so he couldn't make it to the shops and had to subsist on his emergency navy rum supply.
After a two month hiatus, the Cocktail Hour is back on the air with the amazing Edward Kopp, navy man, chef, public intellectual and candidate in the Democratic Party 2024 Brooklyn congressional primary.
This is a show produced for Los Altos Institute's podcast channel being reposted here. It's a panel discussion on the Ukraine conflict with Jonathan Sheps, Stuart Parker, Tom Ewasiuk and RT Hatfield.
We interview Bill Tieleman, long-time political operator in British Columbia on the left and law enforcement, as well as the state of the New Democratic Party.
This week, the conversation was over tea with Lierre Keith, co-founder of Deep Green Resistance, founder of Women's Liberation Front (WOLF) and author of several books on feminism and the ecological crisis.
This episode of Cocktail Hour, I interview my friend and comrade, geneticist Jonathan Sheps. We talk politics, diaspora and Zionism but we also get to hear his potentially world-changing synthesis of DNA research into bedbugs, lice, syphilis and early hominids. There is even something for sasquatch and yeti enthusiasts.
My second interview with Derrick Jensen of Deep Green Resistance covers his up coming book, Marijuana: A Love Story, chronicling the perverse effects of marijuana legalization. We then move on to discussing the problem of scale, properties of capitalism and the Identitarian turn of the eco-left.
We enjoy a beer with Hants County Nova Scotia journalist and opinion leader Scott Costen, host of the Sidebar on the prospects for socialist politics in Atlantic Canada and more broadly in the English speaking world. You can find the Sidebar at @thesidebar1 on Twitter and https://thesidebar.ca/.
Heather Mason, prisoner rights campaigner talks about the devastating impact of the Gender Orthodoxy on incarcerated women in Canada. If you care about the physical safety of Indigenous women and girls, this show is a must-listen.
Historian, chef and photographer Rick Halpern catches up with Stuart with a negroni in hand. Subjects range from Szechuan cuisine to the rise of the authoritarians to the colour line's upsetting persistence.
The last NDP MP Saskatchewan sent to Ottawa was in Hawaii. We caught up over rum and cokes, talking about the prospects of the Canadian left.
This is the last of our four-parter on the gender orthodoxy, as the review of this show by CFUR is over and we have been summarily canceled from the public airwaves in Canada. So, unrestrained by the fear of cancelation, we have a great discussion with a young, lesbian, Marxist intellectual heavyweight with a great sense of humour.
Amy Hamm is a nurse in Vancouver who is currently fighting the loss of her accreditation to practice on the grounds not of her nursing practice but of the political opinions she expresses when not at work. We talk about the social movement that launched the complaint to have her removed from the nursing profession, its demands and the other intimidation and speech-chilling tactics it uses.
Another cocktail-free cocktail hour due to the exigencies of this new journalistic project. Still, the intro contains a cocktail recipe and recommendation, the Mighty Chewbacca. Start at minute four if you want to dive directly into Chris Elston's campaign against the widespread use of puberty blockers on our children.
In this episode, I make some additional announcements about the show's current status and then we take a break from cocktails to discuss the Identitarian turn in modern identity politics with Daniel Kaufman, a professor of philosophy at Missouri State University. Dr. Kaufman focuses much of his critique on the idea of compelled speech and its incompatibility with a liberal society.
It is the first of an indefinite series of shows with critics of Identitarianism that will end when Identitarians stop their efforts to prevent people from hearing this show.
In this show, Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, historian of the Spanish Empire and I discuss the long-term legacies of colonialism in the Americas, from the origins of race and racism to contemporary education policies that discriminate against Latinos. We also enjoy some sangria.
In this show we discuss Eileen's faculty activism, her new design house and clothing line and our current moment in neoliberalism.
Jeremy Stewart, poet, musician, scholar and impresario comes on the program to talk about his novella, In Singing, He Composed a Song.
My longtime friend Ken Mills of the University of Michigan enjoy gimlets together and talk about lessons we can learn from the study of the Spanish Empire... and mystery novels.
This is the final episode of Missing Peter Gzowski in Prince George, explaining the show's cancelation and the show that will replace it.
Join former Green candidates Wes Regan (Vancouver), Cheryl Wiens (Langley), Darcie Lanthier (Prince Edward Island) and Green Party of Quebec leader, Alex Tyrrell as they discuss the crisis gripping the Green Party of Canada.
Professor, journalist and philosopher of the Fourth Estate has written an article fact-checking climate denialist Patrick Moore. He discusses the piece with tech entrepreneur, Los Altos fellow and former Green Party city councilor Art Vanden Berg.
We spend a full hour with Norm Farrell of Insights.ca, an accountant who has made it his business in retirement to look at the financial dimensions of the BC government's love affair with mining, forestry and energy companies.
We return to the Leon Bibb archive today and listen to some of his duets with his son Eric and return to Leon's recollections of Paul Robeson, Muhammad Ali and Leonard Bernstein.
I discuss the changing demography and politics of the Fraser Valley with long-time residents, activists and academics.
Nathan Giede, former BC Conservative candidate, Sam Schechter, former BC NDP candidate and city councilor, Cheryl Wiens, former BC Green Party candidate and Ryan Campbell, BC Liberal Party organizer discuss provincial and national childcare programs and promises.
This episode includes more archival recordings of the Leon Bibb interviews of 2011. Leon is then followed by musician, musicologist and polymath Naomi Kavka, continuing on themes of race and musical genre.
Andrew Loman is a most erudite man, a professor of literature at Memorial University and popular essayist. We spend an hour reading and discussing his work.
I still post my interviews from other shows here. I guess the cancellation is wearing off. Mike Smyth puts me back on CKNW.
Darcy Repen, former mayor of Telkwa and Rural BC Party candidate, James Steidl, Prince George woodworker and anti-glyphosate activist and Meaghan Cursons, Executive Director of Cumberland Forest on democratizing land use decisions in BC.
The regular panel of Sam Schechter (BC NDP), Nathan Giede (BC Conservatives), Cheryl Wiens (BC Greens) and Ryan Campbell (BC Liberals) discuss questions of municipal jurisdiction and representation.
We spend the whole hour talking with Jordan Brown about his re-election in Newfoundland to the riding of Labrador West and how it is that New Democrats like him remain popular and relevant in rural and industrial communities, unlike their political fate in BC, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
Sean Frackowiak, our film correspondent returns with a discussion of Zac Snyder superhero ensemble movies and the problems of Medicaid. Naomi Kavka, musician, musicologist and singer joins the show as our regular music correspondent.
In 2011, I received permission to write the authorized biography of civil rights leader, actor, director and writer Leon Bibb. Leon has since passed away, the interviews and writing project incomplete. But I have been left with some great archival footage of candid interviews I conducted in the summer and fall of 2011, along with notes from my interviews with the Bibb family in Louisville, Kentucky in the spring of 2012. For the next few weeks, I will be airing the portions of those interviews suitable for radio broadcast as part of a new approach to completing the biography.
We join our regular political panel, Ryan Campbell of the BC Liberals, Nathan Giede of the BC Tories, Sam Schechter of the BC NDP and Cheryl Wiens of the BC Green Party in discussing the implications for each provincial party of a likely federal election call.
An interview with long-time friend of the show, Nathan Giede, BC Tory and Roman Catholic activist, broadcaster and writer and Aaron Eckman, former treasurer of the BC Federation of Labour on their new BC issues and identity podcast, Ram & Stag.
We interview author, philosopher and activist for eco-politics Derrick Jensen about his latest (of more than two dozen) book, Bright Green Lies and related matters. You can purchase the book here: https://www.monkfishpublishing.com/products-page-2/environmentalism/bright-green-lies/
We interview Ken Boon, president of the Peace Valley Landowners' Association about the current state of the Site C megaproject and then follow up with our regular science and energy guy, Art Vanden Berg, tech entrepreneur and former city councilor.
The BC Government has finally released its report on Basic Minimum Income. The answer: we're not doing it. Cheryl Wiens of the Greens, Sam Schecter of the NDP, Ryan Campbell of the BC Liberals and Nathan Giede of the BC Tories weigh in.
In this episode, we return from another unexpected broadcasting hiatus to talk with Prince George activist and yoga instructor about her campaign to label architecture hostile to unhoused folks. We then move to Rebecca Smith and Dean McGee on the defection of Asad Syed, Niovi Patzicakis and themselves from the NDP to the Greens on the eve of last fall's election in Surrey.
Our regular panel of Nathan Giede (Conservative Party), Ryan Campbell (BC Liberal Party), Sam Schechter (BC NDP) and Cheryl Wiens (BC Green Party) weigh in on last year's #DefundThePolice campaign and its implications and effects in BC politics.
Our broadcast covers the two issues I feel we covered best last year, (1) efforts by the Wet'suwet'en to stop the #HorganPipeline being built through their territory without consent and (2) a generation of mistreatment of rural and Northern BC by BC's Ministry of Education, right up to the reopening of our schools in September.
It features past interviews with guests Patti Bacchus, Jerome Turner, Karla Tait, Molly Wickham, Adam Finch, Joanne Hapke and Joanna Larson. Thanks folks for coming on the show last year and explaining events as they transpired.
This episode is a shorter show featuring a longer interview with Samuel Getachew, an Ethiopian-Canadian journalist who helps to put the Tigray political and humanitarian crisis in sharper relief. The show also features a historical background on Ethiopia and Samuel, who is slumming it by coming on our show after writing for the Washington Post.
This is our year in review, 2020, program featuring a panel comprising Piers Brown, a professor of English at Kenyon College in Ohio, Jeff Ranger, a college instructor in Vancouver and Arthur Hatfield, a data security professional in Atlanta, GA. Piers, former Secretary of the BC Green Party, Jeff, a former director of the BC Ecosocialist Party and Arthur, a director of Los Altos Institute, bring a materialist, left perspective to their observations.
Sam Schechter (NDP), Nathan Giede (Conservative), Ryan Campbell (BC Liberal) and Cheryl Wiens (Green) discuss the entangled questions of emissions, exports, rural-urban differences and economic fairness in BC's climate change debate.
Today's show features Connecticut sex worker Sensual Stormi on her work with disabled clients and dangers faced by contemporary sex workers, followed by Michael Laxer, publisher of the Left Chapter and former Ontario Socialist Party leader on the state of the left in English Canada, particularly Ontario.
This week we spend, not 100% intentionally, our entire show interviewing Hugh Esco, Secretary of the state Green Party of Georgia. We touch on the challenges faced by Greens in a highly polarized, highly monetized political environment in the US generally and Georgia in particular. But the main purpose of the interview is to promote an online event by the Georgia Greens to bring an ecofeminist, materialist approach to ending violence against women.
Communications and journalism professor Sean Holman returns to the show to talk about recent revelations at the Cullen Commission, BC's commission on illegal gambling, money laundering and real estate. Before he was a professor, Sean was an investigative journalist who helped break the original story of political interference in the BC government's decision to disband the RCMP taskforce investigating this. Then, Sean Frackowiak, our entertainment columnist, returns to the show with Christmas movie advice and a review of Borat.
Our regular post-election political panel, comprising Cheryl Wiens of the BC Green Party, Sam Schechter of the BC NDP, Ryan Campbell of the BC Liberals and Nathan Giede of the BC Conservative Party evaluates the new regional political of BC post-campaign and looks at shifting public opinion on BC's management of the pandemic.
The show begins with an introduction to the glyphosate spraying issue for listeners from outside of BC's rural industrial belt. I then interview long-time friend of the show, Laura Parent who made her first run for public office in Prince George-Valemount this fall, followed by Mike Morris, re-elected as a BC Liberal MLA for Prince George-Mackenzie. We discussed the rural-urban divide in BC politics, challenges facing smaller communities and, most importantly, Mike's renewed initiative and private member's bill to end glyphosate spraying in our forests.
We touch down in two swing states with members of the most coveted demographics in the US. Scott Moore of suburban Raleigh, North Carolina and Arthur Hatfield of suburban Atlanta, Georgia offer their observations from the vantage point of coveted voters in swing states. Edward Kopp follows up, talking about the post-election work from Brooklyn, New York.
I tried to feature the parties that made a difference in this election that did not appear on last week's political panel. Very interesting interview with the former mayor of Telkwa and first-ever candidate for the Rural BC Party. And another warm and nostalgic interview with Doug Gook, the Green candidate in Cariboo-North. This was followed by some election analysis by me because the Christian Heritage Party declined their interview.
Join Sam Schechter from the BC NDP, Ryan Campbell from the BC Liberals and Nathan Giede from the BC Conservatives for a discussion of BC's issue-less election, the disastrous BC Liberal campaign, the place of social conservatism in BC politics and the relevance of the BC Greens. With the BC Ecosocialists declining to run candidates in the election, Jeremy Stewart has left the panel and Cheryl Wiens' substitute, Wes Regan, was unable to join the call.
Cheryl Wiens of the Greens, Nathan Giede of the Tories, Ryan Campbell of the Liberals, Sam Schechter of the NDP and Jeremy Stewart of the BC Ecosocialists discuss the drug poisoning epidemic, the return to school and the correctly-predicted imminent election call. Sorry for the three-day delay in putting this one up. Those in the know might know I've been a tad busy.
I interview Rebecca Smith, Executive Director of Surrey Hospice Society about the challenges of providing hospice care during Covid, the tough decisions she has had to take regarding staffing, programming and a shrinking budget, and then I interview Donna Flood, who does the same job in Prince George, who tells us a very different story. While there are important commonalities between these interviews about grief, loss, community and their interaction with Covid, the differences are the subject of a short post-show editorial.
We interview a local social entrepreneur and school trustee for District 57 (Prince George), Trent Derrick, along with Joanne Hapke, President of the SD57 BCTF and Andrea Beckett, President of the SD57 District Parent Advisory Committee. On BC's back-to-school plans and how they are going to shake down locally here in Prince George and the Upper Fraser.
Nicole Lindsay, an organizer of the August 31st Prince George vigil for families who have lost loved ones in the drug poisoning crisis speaks about her experience of losing her son to the epidemic and the need to move beyond discourses of overdose and addiction. Scott Costen the Canadian correspondent for Redaction Politics, a new leftist news source for the Anglosphere talks Maritime politics, police violence and the Green Party leadership race.
We finished my first year as a radio broadcaster with the BC politics panel, featuring our regulars, the NDP's Sam Schechter, the BC Liberals' Ryan Campbell, the BC Greens' Cheryl Wiens and the BC Tories' Nathan Giede. Filling in for BC Ecosocialist Jeremy Stewart was UNBC's Nicole Lindsay, former editor of BC Hansard.
This week, we discussed how to do "big tent" politics in BC, especially with respect to social conservatism. We also spent some time considering whether there is a "third rail" in BC politics as there is or was in the US
I spend a little under an hour interviewing Harold Steves about BC politics, eco-politics and socialism, past and present. Harold has served as a Richmond city councilor for nearly fifty years, following three years as the member of the BC legislature for Richmond.
There has been a lot of bad news in Canadian journalism the past year with the developments at the Toronto Now, Georgia Straight, Metro and Torstar. The one bright spot has been the arrival of the Narwhal, providing not just non-profit, ecologically conscious journalism but old school investigative reporting with close editing, travel budgets and a careful careful research. We interview their newest journalist, Matt Simmons, the BC Northwest beat reporter. But before that, we check-in with Michael Demers, our regular sports reporter, on the rush back to work by Anglo America's main sports leagues.
In honour of the holiday weekend, we recorded a whole episode on barbecuing. Our first interviewee was June Starkey, an an Adjunct Professor of Education at the University of Toronto's OISE, speaking after her successful cottage country barbecue near Prince Edward County. She was followed by Culinary Institute of America-trained executive chef Edward Kopp in Brooklyn. Ron Shewchuk, PR flak, award-winning competitive barbecuer and barbecuing cookbook author, both of who talked about the relationship between barbecuing and grilling, while passing on some solid culinary ideas.
Over the last weekend of July, the BC Politics panel of Missing Peter Gzowski in Prince George met to discuss the ethics of a fall election. John Horgan has been talking about ending the Confidence and Supply Agreement with the Green Party as early as September. Is this legal? Is this ethical? Is this good for regular folks in BC?
This episode welcomed Cheryl Wiens as our permanent Green Party representative. She joined the NDP's Sam Schechter, BC Liberals' Ryan Campbell and the Ecosocialists' Jeremy Stewart. The BC Tories' Nathan Giede was not able to join us from his long work assignment in Churchill MB.
This show, we interviewed Martha Rans, head of the Artists Legal Outreach Clinic, whose practice of providing pro-bono legal advice to artists is becoming a Canada-wide enterprise. This was followed with an interview with my romantic partner Corey Matthews on her up coming show at Two Rivers Gallery in Prince George as well as landscapes, reservoirs and the kinds of things Martha's organization seeks to protect artists from.
I am teaching three courses at UNBC this fall on The Indian Rim Since Antiquity, Historiography and Early Modern World history. So, to promote enrollment in my classes, I thought I would feature a sample on my show. So, what you will hear on today's podcast are excerpts from my lecture on the idea of landscape, delivered at Simon Fraser University last spring.
Anthony Dunn, one of our UK election commentators was back for a wide-ranging chat about the state of the post-Brexit scene. The model for the Captain Morgan painting on the Anglosphere's most illustrious mid-priced rum, he has variously worked as an assembly line factor worker, used car dealer, tour guide, university lecturer, TV actor, West End stage leading man and Ibizan dance instructor/comedian/sex worker. He grew up in Norfolk in a working class Anglo-Indian household. He recently had a letter on class analysis published in Private Eye Magazine.
Wes Regan, Green politician, urbanist, opinion leader and high-level policy-maker public servant dropped by to converse about a major area of mutual interest: the threats posed by the growth of modern conspiracy theory.
This week our political panel discussed the Justin Neufeld scandal in which a BC Liberal volunteer was cut from the party over social media posts comparing Black Lives Matter to the Nazis. Urbanist and public health expert Wes Regan represented the Greens; arts impresario, poet and Derrida scholar Jeremy Stewart represented the Ecosocialists; Sam Schechter, Douglas College communications instructor represented the NDP; Nathan Giede Prince George citizen columnist and radio host represented the BC Conservatives and Ryan Campbell, construction project manager and long-time Fair Vote Canada director represented the BC Liberals. The panel delved into questions of how changing ideas of labour and democracy are remaking our political parties at the grassroots level.
June 15th's Missing Peter Gzowski in Prince George features Meaghan Cursons, Executive Director of the Cumberland Forest, talking about the economic, social and ecological evolution of a post-mining town and efforts to democratize land use and remediation. Then we have the second part of our epistemology of authoritarianism series with OCAD University's Eileen Wennekers and Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University's Samir Gandesha who make some interesting comparisons between Donald Trump and Narendra Modi.
James Douglas is the first returning guest on my CFUR show. He and his partner in many things, Danette Boucher give the final interview on Barkerville Historic Site's dive into virtual public history and the Zoom platform at the end of the program. They are preceded by Social Work MA candidate Juls Budau on Northern BC's overdose crisis and the need for a safe drug supply and then by journalist and opinion leader Jordan Tucker on Prince George's Black Lives Matter and police reform solidarity protests.
Our June 1st, 2020 show features Albany-based food security and racial justice activist James Surano on the policing crisis in the United States, followed by Victoria Councilor Ben Isitt on a Vancouver Island initiative to keep key new government "emergency" programs post-Covid.
This is the first of our monthly political panels on Missing Peter Gzowski in Prince George. It is a deliberate tribute to the Dalton Camp-Eric Kierans-Stephen Lewis panel of the 1980s, from the world before talking points, back when people demonstrated their loyalty to their party not just by praising it when it was right but criticizing it when it was wrong. Kierans and Camp epitomized that old school loyalty that made them challenge their leaders from time to time. We have a very clever and loyal bunch on this panel:
Sam Schechter former North Vancouver city councillor, communications instructor at Douglas College, former BC NDP staffer, member of the party’s oversight committee.
Jeremy Stewart arts impresario, poet, PhD candidate at Lancashire University, former BC Ecosocialist Communications chair and communications and outreach director for the White Rock Business improvement association.
Wes Regan former Green candidate and federal party director, environmental activist, urban studies commentator and population health expert for the BC government.
Nathan Giede former BC Conservative Party candidate, CFIS radio show host, Prince George Citizen columnist and copier salesman.
Ryan Campbell former BC Liberal riding association director, long-time Fair Vote Canada national director, co-founder of Liberals for Fair Voting and construction sector project manager
Wes is not our regular Green Party contributor. Cheryl Wiens will be sliding into his chair in the summer.
I had to move hundreds of pounds of furniture and books this weekend and tired myself right out. So, I went to my trusty show archives and found a whole hour just of Sean Frackowiak doing his very witty entertainment column. Sit back and enjoy. Regular current affairs programming will return next week.
We finished our interview with Dimitri Lascaris and then had a long, curiosity-driven discussion about how fascist and authoritarian movements figure out what is and is not true. Prepare to have your vocabulary expanded in party two.
Today's show has a pretty deep dive into forty-three years of Star Wars material, which kind of crowds out the dynamic Green Party of Canada leadership contender, Dimitri Lascaris, who will, consequently, be back.
I am proud of this show. Each of the interviews saw Covid-19 as a jumping-off point for thinking more deeply about major issues in our society, from bereavement, death and loss to no-fault insurance schemes to cosplaying the industrial working class. Rebecca, Echo and Ingrid are all sharp interview subjects I'm eager to speak with again.
This show is a technically rough show for a bunch of reasons, the chief of which is that we do not do studio interviews or have access to studio editing facilities. Despite the tech problems, we have two great guests, Fiona York of Carnegie Community Action Project, a partner of Red Braid Alliance, in the Squat2Survive campaign. Our regular Red Braid Alliance guest, was in jail at the time. This was followed by a longer interview with local Prince George conservative opinion leader for an in-movement perspective on all things conservative in Canada.
This week's show featured three guests on very different beats. Dock Currie, former NDP candidate, law student and former York university instructor joined us to talk about the emerging personality cult around BC's chief medical health officer. Our regular sports guy, Michael Demers, had some advice on how to handle the end of live sports entertainment during the pandemic. And Prince George activist Laura Parent filled us in on the Kelly Road school controversy, the bizarre, racially-charged conflict that our city was focused on before the pandemic.
This week was our second episode on CFUR 88.7 and the first in our regular time slot of 11am Pacific Time. We had three guests, Isabel Krupp from Red Braid Alliance (formerly Alliance Against Displacement) talking about the special challenges of the unhoused and underhoused during the pandemic and state of emergency. We then talked with Jennifer Neilson, chairperson of the BC Ecosocialist Party about the need for local control during major emergencies and ended up with communications instructor Sam Schecter from Douglas College, looking at the prospects for higher education during the pandemic.
For our first episode on CFUR, we interviewed Prince George city councilor Cori Ramsey on local governance during the Covid-19 crisis and Mount Royal University Professor Sean Holman on the ways Covid-19 is reshaping public discourse and ideas of authority.
This is a compressed explanation of the profound changes wrought by the fossil fuel revolution in the late 18th century.
This is a short three-part lecture on the challenges of reproducing an Aristotelian or Ciceronian appeal to ethos or ethical appeal in the present day from my old Western Canon course at BCIT.
I debate George Affleck, proponent of a 2030 Vancouver Olympic bid on Mike Smyth's CKNW show.
I was interviewed on SFU campus radio shortly after the founding of the BC Ecosocialists on October 27th.
This is the final lecture of the course, wrapping up the various themes addressed throughout.
This is the penultimate episode of the course, examining the epistemological and moral barriers to addressing the extinction event.
This is the fifth lecture in IS 373 - Global Environmental Politics examining the heyday of Soviet central planning and Keynesianism and how these optimistic, interventionist economic ideologies were reflected in environmental policy and action.
This is a lecture given to my Global Environmental Politics Class (IS 373) at Simon Fraser University about the birth of modern environmental consciousness.
This announcement was played on CFIS following my removal as host, chronicled in this Glacier Media article here.
Today, my show moved to the coveted Tuesday timeslot and underwent a reset. Henceforth, we will be hearing more from our regular contributors more frequently and we will be getting back to a weekly roundup of global news stories.
We began our show with that roundup, followed by Michael Demers our sports commentator on emergency backup goalies and the winter Olympics. We then moved to my D&D buddy Solomon Goudsward and Alex Verge from UNBC Musical Productions, promoting their latest musical comedy and rounded out the program with a twenty minutes on the brilliant Amazon series Man in the High Castle with our entertainment correspondent, Sean Frackowiak.
Our final Monday broadcast features Sebastian Nicholson from Positive Living – North talking about his work educating people about sexual health and sexual and gender identity questions. I also ask him about some of the big controversies in gender and sexual politics in BC today. In the second half, Patti Bacchus, the Georgia Straight’s education columnist and longest- serving Vancouver school board chair goes hammer and tongs at education austerity in BC.
Today’s show featured two longer interviews, one with Green Party of Canada leadership candidate Alex Tyrrell, currently the leader of the Green Party of Quebec and Annerose Georgeson, Vanderhoof artist featured in a major career retrospective at Two Rivers Gallery in downtown Prince George.
We gave our whole show to widening the optic for understanding Prince George’s acute classroom teacher shortage and how it arises from a cross-partisan consensus in Victoria. We began with Joanne Hapke, President of Prince George’s BC Teachers’ Federation local, followed by Joanna Larsen, a Prince Rupert BCTF activist and then concluded with Andrea Beckett, President of the Prince George District Parent Advisory Council.
On After Nine – Monday Edition, we continue our look at the BC-Wet’suwet’en territorial conflict in northwestern BC by taking a deeper dive into questions of framing and identity, first with policy analyst Adam Finch and then with Samir Gandesha from the SFU Institute of Humanities. We were then joined in studio by my partner, Corey Matthews Hardeman and her artistic collaborator Jan Little \to discuss their pop-up gallery show “Affinity” on February 1st.
Continuing our coverage of the Wet’suwet’en land protectors, we spoke to Ricochet Media’s Jerome Turner in the first part of our program. In our second, we spoke with Wayne Hughes, retiring executive director of the Prince George John Howard Society. I closed with an “edutorial” on the office of the Solicitor-General.
It was a great privilege to interview four women involved in defending the traditional territory of the Unis’tot’en and Gidimt’en clans this week. We began with Dr. Annie Booth of the UNBC faculty union, which just passed a resolution of support to the defenders. You can hear her interview , followed by the start of my interview Sleydo’ Molly Wickham at the Gidimt’en checkpoint. We then move on to Karla Tait, a clinical psychologist and Wet’suwet’en member working out of the Unis’tot’en Healing Centre. We finish up with UNBC’s Antonia Mills who was an expert witness in Delgamuukw, the Supreme Court case that established hereditary Indigenous title and who teaches a summer course at Unis’tot’en.
Today’s show featured two guests, Jo Graber of PACHA, the People’s Action Committee for Healthy Air, Prince George’s local air quality citizens’ group, speaking about the problems associated with the proposed West Coast Olefins plant and David Merner, the only British Columbians running to replace Elizabeth May as Green Party leader.
After Nine – Monday Edition finished its 2019 broadcasting schedule with two leaders in BC’s alternative media, Gurpreet Singh of Radical Desi and Spice Radio on Indian disaporic politics, the rise of Hindu nationalism and the Kashmir crisis. Charlie Smith, editor of the Georgia Straight also joined us for a wide ranging interview about the climate crisis, challenges in alternative media and key political stories from around BC.
If the harvest show was an homage to Peter Gzowski’s Morningside of the 80s, this show owes credit to Kathryn Gretzinger’s Early Edition.
In our first segment, my partner and famed BC nature artist Corey Matthews speaks on her return to Prince George and our shared project working on landscape through Los Altos Institute. Former Prince George Symphony Orchestra executive director and poet Jeremy Stewart then joins us to compare notes on Prince George’s and South Surrey/White Rock’s moral panics about downtown business and poverty.
Our regular sports columnist Michael Demers joins us to talk about the NHL coaching abuse scandal, followed by our movie reviewer Sean Frackowiak offering a spoiler-free review of the final Star Wars movie now showing in theatres.
This show is a great example of how Canadian politeness gets in the way of responsible journalism. Listen to me have a perfectly civil conversation with a guy from the petrochemical industry that only gets testy once or twice. Never addressed in the show is how polyethylene is used as unnecessary filler to stretch harder plastics that make things other than disposable bags and how the discredited idea that petrochemical production is insensitive to markets and does not respond to the laws of supply and demand.
We begin with Kenneth James, of West Coast Olefins, move on to Art Vanden Berg and finish up with Susanne Weber before closing with Tom Ewasiuk of Los Altos Institute who joined me to help promote an exciting new project I’m rolling out next year.
The December 9th episode of After Nine — Monday edition contains a short UK election primer for those observing from overseas, followed by interviews with actor and historian, Anthony Dunn, and historian and political scientist,Malcolm Coldcleugh, both of whom live in the battleground Central London riding of Battersea.
Our program today featured two guests, Sharel Warrington, a Prince George School trustee since 2005 and one of the seven (of over three hundred) trustees on the BC Public Sector Employers’ Council (PSEA) and Dean McGee, former Surrey Trustee candidate and president of the Surrey District Parent Advisory Council, serving BC’s largest school district. Our discussions focused on current contract negotiations with BC teachers, accommodating disabled students and how we make decisions about education at the provincial and local levels.
Today’s show features Isabel Krupp from Alliance Against Displacement speaking about the housing crisis in BC, its causes and its effects in our first segment. The rest of the show features Scott Moore, a life coach talking about the growth of his profession and attempts to regulate it. Our final segment is an editorial responding to statements made on our show on November 21st and some of my partner’s and my personal plans to intervene in the debate over downtown.
This week’s After Nine — Monday Edition features three compelling segments dealing with important, current issues: Laura Parent on Jason Luke’s new Prince George downtown property owners organization and their plans for a pogrom; Michael Demers on the firing of Don Cherry by Rogers and Chris Markevich on the Left Behind Podcast.
Today’s episode of After Nine – Monday Edition features two experts and no NDP MLAs. That’s because Ravi Kahlon, the parliamentary secretary for the BC Forest Ministry won’t come on a community radio program in a mill town and the Manitoba NDP has decided it doesn’t want its new northern MLA to talk about representing Northern communities.
So, instead, former broadcaster and waitlisted member of the Sasquatch rewilding program, Sean Frackowiak, tells us about the insanity that is Amazon Prime. And then Art Vanden Berg, inventor, tech entrepreneur, former city councilor and Los Altos Institute fellow explains the electric vehicle revolution and how it’s shaking down in BC. Also, be forwarned: there may be some tech problems with segment 3.
In today’s After Nine Monday edition, on CFIS, I spent most of the show discussing a set of interlocking issues with Sean Holman, founder of Public Eye Radio, producer of Whipped, the documentary and professor of communications at Mount Royal University. His recent interventions on journalistic ethics and the climate crisis have been a subject of major interest and debate.
It’s election day in Canada and today’s show is an effort to explain why it is hard to cast effective votes in a Canadian election and consider how we might solve that problem in both the immediate and long term.
In the first segment, I explain our voting system and some of its unique problems. In our second segment, Ryan Cambpell of Fair Vote and the Liberal Party of Canada talks about civic literacy issues and the need for reform. In our last segment, we discuss the need for voting reform and the challenges we face with movement veteran John Deverell, former Toronto Star reporter, trade union leader and founding treasurer of Fair Vote Canada.
In this week’s edition of After Nine, we interview punk klezmer accordionist and social and climate justice activist Geoff Berner, the host of his up coming local show Danny Bell and ends with an editorial in response to correspondence received by our show.
This week’s show features four guests: Elaine Codling of Comox, associated with the Mid Island Farmers Institute, Jolene Swain of Kispiox, associated with Woodgrain Farm and the Young Agrarians movement, Laurie Gallant of Hazelton, associated with Hazelton Hops and the Northwest BC Food Action Network and Cindy Verbeek of Houston, associated with A Rocha International.
On the show, we discuss agriculture here in BC, this fall’s harvest and a number of associated community development and food security projects, and begin by placing them in the context of the voluntary simplicity and permaculture movements.
In this week’s broadcast, we are joined by lobbyist and pundit Bill Tieleman to discuss the Canadian federal election and author and project coordinator Scott Davis who designs and builds micro-hydro and other renewable energy systems.
This week’s show was a full one because it looked into a pressing issue: the lack of interurban ground transportation in Northern and Interior British Columbia since Greyhound pulled out of Western Canada. And we looked at the issue from a variety of perspectives:
In our first segment, we spoke with Jo-Anna Larson of LeadNow.ca, a Prince Rupert-based educator who led the grassroots campaign for the BC government’s replacement service, BC Bus North, a solution she now deems inadequate.
In our second, we spoke with Jeremy Hainsworth, who covers this beat for the Prince George Citizen and the other Glacier News papers about the economics and financing behind busing in BC’s North.
In our third and fourth segments, we spoke with Laura Parent a Prince George activist, who organized the campaign for BC Bus North that took place inside the BC NDP about her views of the service and of the changes to Prince George municipal bus fares this fall.
We ended with Vancouver-based transit expert, Richard Campbell who helped to place this issue in comparative international and ethical context.
This was our first show focusing on arts and culture and it featured Theatre Northwest’s Marnie Hamagami and AMDA Institute for the Performing Arts’ Heather Ramey. We talked about the concept of “relaxed theatre,” live theatre that does not require audience members to be quiet or still and consequently accommodates parents, their children and people with disabilities.
Our second show, this one featuring the two candidates on/near the left of the political spectrum in the riding of Cariboo-Prince George, the NDP’s Heather Sapergia and the Green Party’s Mackenzie Kerr. We just have the full version of the show this week, with commercials and announcements. Listen through the whole program and you can learn not just about the candidates but about where global issues meet the local scene, especially the proposed plastics manufacturing plant in Prince George.
I do not mind saying that I ended the show unwilling to vote for either candidate. Neither was willing to back the kind of Green New Deal we need and both are choosing to play a dangerous game of footsie with the fracking industry, refusing to abandon their support of a proposed plastics plant that will run on 100% fracked gas from new fracked wells. So I will be bringing them back on the program later in the campaign to see if they are prepared to stop equivocating on fracking.
This is the first episode of the show with guest Douglas Gook from Quesnel, a long-time horse logger and environmental activist.