Social

On Saturday, November 29, Québecers braved the cold and took to the streets of Québec and Montréal. Buses were sent hundreds of kilometres across the province to the two cities, where workers from all sectors marched against the province’s planed austerity measures.

The march was organized by a coalition of community, student and labour groups and pulled out more people than any multi-city rally since the Maple Spring of 2012.

In Québec City, it was more people at a march than anyone could even remember.

. . . For half a day, everyone on lockdown no doubt felt the fear, despair, sadness and fragile sense of mortality that people in Iraq and Syria have experienced daily for decades, an extra punch of which they will soon receive at the hands of Canadian CF-18 bombers.

For half a day, everyone on lockdown no doubt felt the fear, despair, sadness and fragile sense of mortality that people in Iraq and Syria have experienced daily for decades, an extra punch of which they will soon receive at the hands of Canadian CF-18 bombers.

What do we call this time? It’s not the information age: the collapse of popular education movements left a void now filled by marketing and conspiracy theories(1). Like the stone age, iron age and space age, the digital age says plenty about our artefacts but little about society. The anthropocene, in which humans exert a major impact on the biosphere, fails to distinguish this century from the previous twenty. What clear social change marks out our time from those that precede it? To me it’s obvious. This is the Age of Loneliness.

Last year, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed concern that the world's commitment to mitigate climate change was insufficient. Indeed, in today's Lancet, a Comment by Andy Haines and others provides a stark reminder of the likely adverse effects on human health should fossil fuel consumption and high population growth continue at their present levels. They call for the health community to take a longer term view, where actions that target climate change and health today will reduce the global burden of ill-health in the future.

Today, those friends in the labour movement stepped up with a massive amount of money to help the B.C. Teachers' Federation combat the Christy Clark government.

The B.C. Nurses' Union has given the teachers' hardship fund $500,000. It comes at a time when teachers are not receiving strike pay.

Teachers in British Columbia will be on the picket lines beginning next Monday May 26 after 16 months of failed contract talks. The strike is province-wide and rotating – teachers will strike one day per week in each school district. (see dates for each district here). The government has also notified teachers Wednesday May 21 that they will be “locked out” effective May 26 for only certain activities.

On January 1, 2013, Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, became the largest city in the world to make mass transit free for its residents. While the effects of having done this are, of course, specific to the context of the city itself, it has shown that a major city can do it and that it has been widely popular with its residents. It has also focused attention on a growing international movement of groups, activists and parties who feel that free mass transit in major urban areas is an important social and environmental goal to be worked toward in the near future.

Harry Neufeld, who wrote a report on problems in the last federal election, is warning of the potential for more abuse at polling stations if one part of the government's proposed fair elections act goes ahead. Neufeld, B.C.'s former chief electoral officer and now an independent electoral management consultant, wrote the compliance review that identified polling problems in the 2011 election and made recommendations on how to fix them.

EDMONTON - Some Peace River area doctors are afraid to speak out about health impacts of oil and gas activity and in some cases have declined to treat area residents who wondered if their health problems were related to emissions, says one of two independent health experts hired by the Alberta Energy Regulator.