This past Thursday, Arianna Huffington was in Toronto to launch Huffington Post Canada. The Associated Press reports, “The HuffPo started out mostly as a left-leaning political blog with a host of celebrity bloggers when it first started six years ago with about $1 million in funding. It has since…ballooned into one of the Web’s most popular news sites. According to Comscore, which measures Web traffic, more than 27 million people in the U.S. visit the site directly every month – or 13 percent of the U.S. online population.” The article adds, “The decision to head north was fueled in part by the large number of Canadians who read the U.S. edition, Huffington said. According to Comscore, about 1.5 million Canadians check out The Huffington Post’s website every month.”
In Toronto, Huffington said, “We’re going to be doing original stories but also aggregating to other great news sites in Canada so we’re providing a platform for interesting voices some know, some not known.” One of those voices on Huffington Post Canada is Council of Canadians chairperson Maude Barlow.
To read Barlow’s first blog – a commentary on the federal election results – go to http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/maude-barlow/elections-canada_b_867617.html. In the blog (which has been posted to the Council of Canadians website, but now has a much wider reading audience), Barlow writes, “This then is our task: to work hard over the next four years to protect the laws, rights and services that generations of Canadians have fought for from being dismantled; fight the corporate-friendly, anti-environmental, security obsessed agenda that will come at us; and prepare the way for the kind of government in four years that does in fact, express the will of the people — one with an agenda of justice and respect, of care for the earth, of the more equitable sharing of our incredible bounty. This will be hard work and will take a great deal of courage and commitment. But really, what more important thing do we have to do?”
