Ever since I wrote a book about nasty multinationals and the activists who bash them, I started getting the question: "So Miss No Logo, where do you shop?"

Those are the aggressive people. The nice ones ask, "Where should I shop?" Sometimes, they send e-mails requesting annotated lists of "good corporations." Last week, an Irish radio interviewer asked me, on air, for suggestions of ethical gifts his listeners could give their children.

I don't know how I became a professional ethical shopper, and I'm not very good at it. But I can sympathize with the dilemma.

The newspapers are scattered with stories about factory fires in Bangladesh and sweatshop-stained children's toys imported from China. Last week, a coalition of labour and human-rights groups announced that, despite encouragement from the Department of Foreign Affairs to restrict trade with the brutal dictatorship in Myanmar, Canadian retailers have actually increased their imports from that country -- by 170 per cent since last year.

Where do we go from here? There's a big space in the political landscape for a new party, one that looks at the calls for localization and doesn't see a dire threat to national unity.

There is a very simple reason to have a left-wing alternative to the Liberal Party: People are suffering. Despite all the wealth created by deregulated markets, many Canadians are seeing no part of it.

In fishing communities from coast to coast, on family farms, on the streets of large cities, Liberal Canada's recipe for economic growth has meant people being thrown into the global market without a net.

When Canadian Auto Workers president Buzz Hargrove called for an emergency task force on the future of the NDP, he got blasted. Mr. Hargrove was "posturing," an NDP insider said. "The press isn't the place to do this," Nancy Riche of the Canadian Labour Congress said— in the press. And NDP Leader Alexa McDonough claimed the process Mr. Hargrove demanded was happening already.

It is time to "let a thousand flowers bloom," Ms. McDonough said with a cheerfulness that has become increasingly manic, recalling a post-Regis Kathie Lee Gifford. Elsewhere, Ms. McDonough insisted that "there are no questions that are not fair game to put on the table."

The real question is: Why on earth would anyone on the left entrust this process to the NDP?

On the weekend, the man in the mask came down from the jungle and held a press conference. In the new year, he will travel to Mexico City and address Congress on the need for an Indian bill of rights.

Subcomandante Marcos, voice of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, has been keeping a low profile lately. But he's back, in trademark ski mask, rifle over his shoulder, and pipe hanging from his mouth. Rumour has it he is a university professor who fled to the hills to lead an indigenous uprising in Chiapas, but Marcos has no comment. Showing his face, he jokes, would disappoint his female fans.

It's a mark of the Zapatistas' influence that the very first act by Mexico's new president was to order a partial withdrawal of troops from Chiapas. Vicente Fox also invited the Zapatistas to resume negotiations that broke down under his predecessor. Marcos told reporters he's ready to talk, but not until Mr. Fox completes the troop withdrawal and releases all political prisoners.

Last week, two Canadians made international headlines by burning their passports. They were protesting Canada's leading role in making sure that the climate summit in The Hague was a complete disaster.

The catalyst? A coalition of 287 environmental groups handed daily "fossil" awards to countries that were especially obstructionist in the negotiations. Canada ended the conference with more awards than any other country, including the United States. For most people, the passport bonfire was a bit extreme—"shrill" to quote The New York Times.

When Tooker Gomberg, one of the passport pyros, called from The Hague on Sunday, I told him he may have done the cause of climate change a disservice. "If a single journalist had asked me why I burned my passport," he replied angrily, "I would have been happy to tell them."

He has a point. Mr. Gomberg's stunt was the only event at the summit that managed to pry the attention of Canadians away from our election and the Florida recount—if only for 30 seconds. And the scandalous events in The Hague deserve much more scrutiny than that.

When Alliance candidate Betty Granger used the phrase "Asian invasion," it was a flashback to Second World War "yellow peril" rhetoric and she was forced to resign. But there was another pearl of wisdom the ex-candidate shared with students at the University of Winnipeg, one that went largely unnoticed. Referring to the boats of Chinese immigrants seized off the B.C. coast, she said, "There was a realization that what was coming off these boats was not the best clientele you would want for this country."

Clientele. It doesn't have the same xenophobic ring as "Asian invasion"; in fact, it sounds positively clinical. But it may be more dangerous, especially because it is an idea that is not relegated to the fringe of the Alliance but lies at the very centre of the national immigration debate.

On Oct 20, University of Toronto student Derek Laventure attended a protest outside the Ontario Tory convention. He saw a police officer drag away a fellow activist and he was heard to say, "That's not right." Next, witnesses say, he was brutally assaulted by several police officers, thrown against a barricade headfirst (his eye was so bruised, it swelled shut), and arrested.

His crime? Allegedly carrying a weapon and using it to assault a police officer. The "weapon" was a black flag.

On the night Mr. Laventure was arrested, Elan Ohayon, a U of T PhD student, was sleeping in Toronto's Allan Gardens. He had camped there every Friday for more than a year as part of a protest against inadequate public housing and police harassment of homeless people. The next morning, Mr. Ohayon woke up surrounded by police officers. They arrested him and, he alleges, assaulted him. Like Mr. Laventure, Mr. Ohayon was charged with assaulting police. He was told to sign bail conditions that barred him from returning to Allan Gardens. He refused. That meant abandoning the vigil to which he had committed himself as an activist.

When the top two executives at BMG Entertainment resigned on the weekend, it revealed a deep schism in the way multinational companies see the Internet's culture of sharing. Despite all the attempts to turn the Net into a giant shopping mall, the default ethos still seems to be anti-shopping: On the Internet, we may purchase things here and there, but we share ceaselessly—ideas, humour, information and, yes, music files.

So here's the real debate as it goes down in the boardroom: Is this culture of on-line swapping and trading a threat to the heart of the profit motive, or is it an unprecedented profit-making opportunity, a chance to turn sharing itself into an enormously profitable sales tool?

When the five major record labels, under the umbrella of the Recording Industry Association of America, launched a lawsuit against Napster, they threw their lot decidedly into the first camp: file-sharing is theft of copyright, pure and simple, and it must be stopped.

The United States is supposed to be a culture driven by the worship of success. And yet it seems there is one man for whom success is universally unacceptable: Ralph Nader.

Mr. Nader is scolded for his popularity among voters. Ex-friends call him vain, reckless. He should quit, and instruct supporters to vote for Al Gore.

The man who was exiled to the margins for this entire campaign—barred from the debates, blacked out from the news—is now at the dead centre of the race.

No wonder there are threats being made against Mr. Nader's advocacy group, Public Citizen, headed by Joan Claybrook. "How many progressive congressmen will be prepared to take Joan Claybrook's telephone calls?" demands Jack Blum, counsel to Americans for Democratic Action.

Is that Ralph Nader running for Prime Minister? It seemed that way when Jean Chretien entered the election with fists flying at fat cats, millionaires and "radical" right-wingers who care only about "the market forces."

Now, admittedly, Mr. Chretien could use an emergency tutorial from Mr. Nader on the etiquette of championing the working class. (Lesson #1: Don't call factory workers uneducated, stunted citizens—as the Prime Minister did on Monday—especially when those workers are the very ones responsible for the economic boom you are hoping to parlay into a third term in office.)

But Mr. Chretien is doing his best. He even cancelled a Team Canada trade mission to China. There he was, all set to help Canada's multinational manufacturers find low-wage factories where they can produce their goods cheaply and without pesky unions (presumably, he doesn't think much of factory workers in China either) when he decided to stay home and lecture us about "Canadian values."