Nearly 1.7 million mostly public sector workers are being balloted on or have voted for stoppages
Rail passengers narrowly escaped fresh disruption this weekend as unions suspended three days of strikes – but over the coming weeks and months, Rishi Sunak’s government is still facing the most significant wave of industrial action since the 1980s miners’ strike.
"The government managed to unite the entire labour movement in an effort to repeal Bill 28 and protect the Charter rights of workers across Canada.”
A union representing tens of thousands of education workers in Ontario called off planned strike actions on Monday in exchange for the Doug Ford government promising to rescind legislation that imposed a contract and made going on strike illegal.
Over the past several decades, governments in Canada have intervened in labour disputes on behalf of employers with increasing frequency. In recent years postal workers, teaching assistants, college instructors, pilots, healthcare workers, and others, have had their collective bargaining rights trampled by back-to-work legislation passed at both the provincial and federal levels.
A Canada-wide initiative is showing people it's not too late to return the concrete jungle back to nature.
Depave Paradise, a multi-community project run by environmental non-profit Green Communities Canada (GCC), challenges the idea of urbanization as irreversible by ripping out asphalt surfaces and replacing them with gardens that can help to soak up excess rainwater.
For this strike to be successful, unions across Ontario and Canada will need to offer more than strong words.
To borrow a phrase from Mark Hancock, the national president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), the Doug Ford government in Ontario has gone “full nuclear” and suspended the Charter-protected rights of the provinces’ lowest paid education workers to collectively bargain and strike.
The Doug Ford government has just turned a minor labour dispute into class war in Ontario.
Refusing to budge in negotiations, offering a piddly 10 per cent wage increase when 50 per cent was demanded, the Ford government, usually notoriously lazy, started the legislative session at 5 a.m. on November 1 to drive through a bill that not only removes union rights to free collective bargaining and to strike in Ontario but also puts at threat all of our constitutionally protected rights.
Website editor: the second short video below is worth watching - "Heating and eating: can cost of living and climate protesters join forces?"
Oct. 26, 2022
As the crackdown on our freedoms intensifies, the list of our national ailments seems endless. But there’s one issue that can prise things open
Before we decide what needs to change, let’s take stock of what we have lost. I want to begin with what happened last week. I don’t mean the resignation of the prime minister. This is more important.
Here's a very excellent video adaptation of a 2010 David Harvey presentation which explains the 2008 economic crisis and how the financialization of capital (among other things) helped to contribute to that crisis.
In this RSA Animate, celebrated academic David Harvey looks beyond capitalism towards a new social order. Can we find a more responsible, just, and humane economic system?
