We’ve been investigating the cost of living crisis – specifically, your skyrocketing grocery bill. This intensive reporting, looking at the issues that you face every day is expensive.
Help us meet the moment.
Help build a sustainable future for public-interest journalism.
Carney’s first 100 days: Unpacking the new prime minister’s ‘disappointing move to the right’ with Linda McQuaig
‘If it comes to a U.S. invasion, no amount of military spending on our part is going to defend us from that’.
By: Andrea Houston
Just four months into his leadership, critics say Prime Minister Mark Carney has already shown far too much “weakness” by capitulating to U.S. President Donald Trump on a number of fronts.
This week, author and columnist Linda McQuaig was Adrian Harewood’s guest on the Ricochet podcast In Bed with the Elephant. She said that under Carney, there’s been “a disappointing shift to the right.”
“Mark Carney has come out much more conservative and leaning to the right than we saw during the election, and so far I’m very disturbed by some of those tendencies,” she said.
McQuaig, whose most recent book is The Sport & Prey of Capitalists: How the Rich are Stealing Canada’s Public Wealth, has sharp criticism of Carney’s backtrack on the Digital Services Tax.
“It was a vital tax,” she said. “Otherwise we have no way to tax these big tech companies. They are consuming so much of the advertising market in our country, making it difficult for media to compete with them, and yet they escape taxation because they are located outside the country… It just showed such weakness.”
The Air Canada flight attendant strike was illegal. It was also profoundly Canadian
Canada’s democracy depends on defiance, not obedience.
By: Jen Hassum
Ten thousand flight attendants walked off the job at Air Canada, and for a day, the country glimpsed what it looks like when ordinary people defy both their employer and their government. The wildcat strike was illegal. It was also profoundly Canadian.
We have, after all, been here before.
In 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, one in three Canadian trade union members took part in a strike. There were two main reasons: the rapid industrialization of Canada created deep economic tensions, and those tensions were made worse by the government’s hostile, combative approach to organized labour. Strikes spread through every industrial town large and small. Munitions plants sat idle, and workers filled the streets with pickets and parades demanding that their elected unions be recognized and allowed to bargain with their bosses. The typical Canadian supported the war but also asked the critical question: how could our government claim to be fighting for democracy abroad while denying it to us at home? Placards and newspaper ads then might have spoken for today, reading “Democracy? Yes — for the rich. What about us?”
The political and corporate elite hoped to turn “class struggle” into class snuggle.
Eighty-one years later, Mark Carney has upended the compromise that the greatest of generations built for us. In his very first major test as prime minister, he intervened in the Air Canada dispute not by compelling bargaining, but by relieving the company of its obligations to negotiate altogether.
By invoking a little-known Section 107 loophole, the government acted unilaterally, setting a stark precedent: corporations need not negotiate, for the state will act as their enforcer.
For workers, the lesson was equally clear. If corporations are no longer required to follow the rules, why must unions adhere to the same rules? The flight attendants, in defying the law with their wildcat strike, made it clear — democracy belongs in the workplace, too.
With more old-growth logging set to begin near Fairy Creek, a new blockade has emerged to save the irreplaceable forests
Meanwhile, as First Nations increasingly work with industry to share in economic development, some critics say the province is getting them to do their ‘dirty work’.
By: Sidney Coles
As Fairy Creek activists mark the five-year anniversary of the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history, new old growth logging is set to begin in two key areas — where some trees are as ancient as more than a thousand years old.
The new old growth logging by First Nations and their industry partners is set to resume just 50 kilometres away along the Little Nitinat River and in the storied Walbran Valley. A blockade along the Walbran Main Road, by former Fairy Creek participants, was set up this weekend. Blockade organizers, many of whom were at the original Fairy Creek, protests say they’re constructing “a wooden cougar,” a 15 foot tripod to block the road to industry, while making a statement with a piece of artwork.
“This is very disheartening news for fans of B.C.’s old-growth forests. Some of the largest individual trees, groves and forest stands remaining on earth are in the Walbran and along the Nitinat River,” ecologist and author Andy McKinnon told Ricochet.