Where Local Sustainable Food Policy Meets Action
UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization Calls Food and Hunger a “Crisis Within a Crisis” of COVID-19 Food often suffers from the problem that it can’t get no respect as a public policy issue. But the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization has been quick off the mark to produce a flurry of food-related briefings reminding [...]
It’s too early for precise answers to questions about the coronavirus pandemic’s long-term impacts on the ways food is produced, processed, distributed, eaten, recycled and appreciated. But my experience managing food policy issues in Toronto for one of the world’s leading city-based public health departments gives me some searching questions that can help us prepare [...]
On the second anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti, let’s get down to a skimpy project that lays bare a whole lot about the men in charge of international emergency aid missions. This has to do with women’s drawers, and their new role in the agenda of global emergency assistance. The story starts here in [...]
By Wayne Roberts Jack Layton’s death on August 22 feels so cry-out-loud tragic – and has touched a chord across the country with an outpouring of national grief, leading the federal government to hold a formal state funeral in his honor – because he was still brimming with vitality, positive energy and hope even as [...]
Find Wayne’s article Here Featured On the WorldWatch Institute website.
Cuts to Government Services, But not to Double Standards By Wayne Roberts Politicians at all levels are promising more cuts to government expenses without any cut to services. For politicians, this is better than a gift that keeps on giving. It’s a promise they can keep on promising. For most of the past 40 years, [...]
Although the Ontario election is still six months away, the surprise candidate for most polarizing issue likely to turn the political contest into an emotional cliffhanger has already come to the fore. A 6 billion tonne gravel “mega quarry” – second-largest in North America – has been proposed in what is now quiet farm and [...]
Tears have been wiped dry, major resignations are in, and thoughts about ways of overcoming disproportionate misrepresentation allowing Harpers Conservatives to turn 39 per cent of all votes into a majority government are in the hopper. But the sleeper issue on the political agenda continues to doze. One reason why all pundits are talking about [...]
As much as Canada’s federal election delivered historic consequences for every political party, the election’s future significance turns more on historic changes within the electorate than on changes of any significance within any particular party. There’s a strong — though barely visible — possibility that the unrest and volatility expressed by voters will drive political [...]
I grew up with the habit of Thursday nights as the time when family shopped together at the local supermarket, and I always assumed, for good or ill, that supermarkets were permanent. It’s now clear that old style super-markets are on their way out. Beginning this month, Wal-Mart Canada kicks off its one-year agenda to [...]
There’s something a tad self-absorbed about the outpouring of media grief and analysis over a shooting rampage that left six dead in Arizona. Analysis is normally reserved for things that have larger numbers attached to them, like the uneventful and painfully slow death from starvation each day of at least 16,000 children (some reputable agencies [...]
I wrote most of this as an assessment of Toronto’s election during the day of October 25, before the polls were closed and any votes counted in Toronto’s city elections. I didn’t know who won, but I already knew what lost — Toronto’s longstanding consensus around the “radical middle” of city responsibilities for social belonging [...]