THURSDAY, NOV 3 @ 7 PM
REGINA, Artful Dodger Cafe & Music Emporium (in the Gallery Wine Bar), 1631 11th Avenue.
Join us for a special evening with Author Yves Engler to discuss the pressing issues presented in his latest book: A Propaganda System: How Canada’s Government, Corporations, Media and Academia Sell War and Exploitation
About the Book:
A Propaganda System reveals why most Canadians believe their country is a force for good in the world, despite a long history of supporting empire, racism and exploitation. The book traces the long history of government information control during war, including formal censorship, as well as extreme media bias on topics ranging from Haiti to Palestine, investment agreements to the mining industry.
The book details the vast sums Global Affairs Canada, Veterans Affairs and the Department of National Defence spend articulating a one-sided version of Canada's foreign policy. With the largest PR machine in the country, the Canadian Forces promotes its worldview through a history department, university, journals, war commemorations, think tanks, academic programs and hundreds of public relations officers. The book also details the corporate elite’s funding for university programs and think tanks.
Written for ordinary Canadians interested in the structures impeding understanding of this country’s role in the world, the book should be of interest to journalists curious about the institutions seeking to “spin” them, development workers dependent on government funds and academics interested in the foreign-policy establishment’s influence on campus.
About Yves Engler:
Former Vice President of the Concordia Student Union, Yves Engler is a Montréal-based activist and author. He has published eight books: Canada in Africa — 300 Years of Aid and Exploitation, The Ugly Canadian — Stephen Harper’s Foreign Policy, Lester Pearson’s Peacekeeping — The Truth May Hurt, Stop Signs — Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay (with Bianca Mugyenyi), The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy (Shortlisted for the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non Fiction in the Quebec Writers’ Federation Literary Awards), Playing Left Wing: From Rink Rat to Student Radical and (with Anthony Fenton) Canada in Haiti: Waging War on The Poor Majority and Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid.
Yves was born in Vancouver, where he grew up playing hockey. He was a peewee teammate of NHL star Mike Ribeiro at Huron Hochelaga in Montréal before playing in the B.C. Junior League. After being suspended from Concordia University, he turned to research and writing, but he’s still a fan of the great Canadian sport.
Reviews of A Propaganda System:
“Once again, Yves Engler wades into the murky waters of Canada’s foreign policy, courageously going into the depths the mainstream media avoid.”
Antonia Zerbisias - former Toronto Star media columnist
“An inventory of the State-Corporate-Academic-NGO-Media networks that manufacture consent among Canadians for war and for looting of the Global South. As old myths crumble and Western hegemony declines, Yves Engler’s well-documented book is a must read for the 21st century.”
Jooneed Khan, retired La Presse international correspondent
“Having spent three decades on the opposite side of the playing field, I have long been aware of many elements revealed in A Propaganda System. But, by thoroughly cataloguing and linking these agencies author Engler provides a powerful argument to support his thesis that the Canadian military fields the largest PR apparatus in the nation. This fact runs in stark contrast to Canadians' popular notion that we are a peace-loving country.”
Scott Taylor - publisher Esprit de Corps
"Yves Engler studies and lays bare the crucial and ignored or distorted topic area of Canada’s foreign policy. He documents the links between corporations, government, media and academia, when it comes to establishing and maintaining Canada’s brutal foreign policy. The actual policy he documents will shock Canadians who don’t regularly follow international writers such as Noam Chomsky, Stephen Kinzer, and Chris Hedges, or Canada’s Naomi Klein."
James Winter - Professor, Communications, Media & Film, University of Windsor
“Yves Engler's engagingly-written book highlights the dark sides of Canada's real involvement in the world, from helping destabilize Haiti's democratically elected government to backing human rights-abusing Canadian-based mining companies. He identifies the institutional forces, including corporate media, most responsible for perpetuating the myth of Canada as an exclusively benign force in the world. A Propaganda System provides a needed counterbalance to conventional wisdom. It will interest Canadians concerned with promoting peace and human rights, and with understanding the impact of power on our understandings of the world.”
Robert Hackett - Professor, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University