COVID-19 is making many bearish about bitumen. Deborah Lawrence’s past pessimism has proven unpopular, and correct.
Geoff Dembicki reports for The Tyee. His work also appears in Vice, Foreign Policy and the New York Times.
Deborah Lawrence used to be a stockbroker with Merrill Lynch. Over the past decade, the independent economic analyst has developed a reputation for telling oil investors what they don’t want to hear.
Across Ontario, seven health-care workers have died from COVID-19 and more than 3,200 are sick.
Those sobering statistics has pushed the province’s largest union to lobby for one piece of equipment that may help those on the front lines.
“We’ve been calling on the government to use its emergency powers to order industry to produce the N95 mask and it was disappointing to learn General Motors in Oshawa will be making masks but not the N95 masks,” says Michael Hurley, president of the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions.
On Saturday, May 9, 2020 a large cavalcade wended its way through the city of Oshawa, past the major city hospital (Lakeridge Health) and Hillsdale Terraces, a long-term care home where Covid-19 has infected 42 residents (of whom 14 died), and 13 staff members. The cavalcade of 65+ vehicles ended up at the sprawling General Motors Assembly Complex, now mostly empty since GM abandoned vehicle production last December.
Support Health Care Workers – Manufacture More PPE
The rush to reopen the economy highlights a divide between those motivated by public health and those who would sacrifice minimum wage workers to protect profits
Last week John Ivison wrote a lazy screed for the National Post arguing that the CERB was too generous and would prompt minimum-wage workers to stay home rather than return to work in the middle of a pandemic.
Pandemic brings systemic issues around remittances and migrant labour exploitation into sharper focus
Since mid-March, the enhanced community quarantine imposed on the Philippines’s largest island in response to COVID-19 has caused life to grind to a halt, closing down public transportation and most businesses and throwing people out of work.
The effects of this dire situation have reached Canada, as many overseas Filipino workers and families face the urgent need to send remittances home despite their own precarious situations.
Amidst the pandemic, a flawed negotiation approach quietly aims at assimilation, not reconciliation.
When measures to combat COVID-19 went into full effect in Canada, it was on the heels of cross-country protests in support of the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs blocking a gas pipeline.
[Editor: If not the last words on the film certainly worth reading.]
May 10, 2020
The backlash may be more revealing than the film itself, but both inform us where we are at in the fight against climate change and ecological collapse. The environmental establishment’s frenzied attacks against Planet of the Humans says a lot about their commitment to big-money and technological solutions.
