OTTAWA - The building used to feature endless cubicles, long hallways and fluorescent lighting.
Now, the same spaces house modern apartments featuring granite countertop islands, fully furnished bedrooms and living rooms with views looking out to the Gatineau Hills.
An important point that some of us have overlooked: Canada will come under increasing pressure to market fossil fuels to other nations to balance our trade accounts!!!
- Gene (Vancouver Ecosocialists)
In Canada, which is heavily trade-dependent, free trade has been popular for several decades. For Conservative or Liberal governments, inking a new pact was reflexively hailed as a big achievement.
This week, the UAW presented proposals to automakers in contract negotiations covering some 150,000 workers. Autoworkers want big raises, an end to tiers, and the right to strike over plant closures — and conditions appear favorable for them to win.
In years past, the negotiations between the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the Big Three auto manufacturers — Ford, General Motors (GM), and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) — began with the union’s president shaking hands with the auto executives across the bargaining table. Not so this year.
Canada was on track to be a leader in high-speed rail—and then we chose highways. But we don’t have to stay married to cars. Trains hold one key to accessibility, climate safety, and colonial restitution.
This post originally appeared on Rolling Stone and was published January 21, 2020.
In 2014, a muscular, middle-aged Ohio man named Peter took a job trucking waste for the oil-and-gas industry. The hours were long — he was out the door by 3 a.m. every morning and not home until well after dark — but the steady $16-an-hour pay was appealing, says Peter, who asked to use a pseudonym. “This is a poverty area,” he says of his home in the state’s rural southeast corner. “Throw a little money at us and by God we’ll jump and take it.”
