By Alison@Creekside Neo-liberalism: trickle-down, deregulating, deunionizing, globalizing free market privatization of government. When Stephen Harper was studying under the “Calgary school” in the 80’s, he became so enamored with the neo-liberalism of Austrian philosopher Friedrich von Hayek — guru to Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, the Chicago boys, the IMF, and the WTO — it formed the basis […]
United we watch
By Rod Mickleburgh My mother hated Labour Day. For her, a high school English teacher, it was not only a day to pay tribute to workers and unions, but a signal that the lazy, hazy days of summer were over, and it was time to go back to work. Every year, the prospect of facing […]
Kenney’s new “Labour Minister Missing in Action” program
By Alison@Creekside This week Employment Minister Jason Kenney replaced the old LMOA, Labour Market Opinion Assessment, with the brand new LMIA, or Labour Market Impact Assessment — henceforth to be known as the LabourMinister Missing in Action program for its accelerated 10-working-day approval process to put TFWs in skilled trades. Remember those 270 unionized welders and pipefitters laid off from a Husky […]
Serving up labour
By Alison@Creekside Evan Solomon asks why restaurants don’t just raise wages to attract workers: “This is the criticism — raise the wages and they will come.” Garth Whyte of Restaurants Canada: “So let’s raise it to $100 an hour — we’ll still need them [temporary foreign workers]. That’s the issue, we have, uh, you know, people, […]
Solidarity whatever
By Rod Mickleburgh These are strange days, indeed, for public sector unions. Big developments, not always happy ones, are everywhere. Yet the dearth of labour reporters and collective yawns from editors and the public alike have combined to obscure groundbreaking events that would have dominated front pages not so long ago, when unions were considered […]
Farewell, Big Jack
By Rod Mickleburgh I talked with Big Jack Munro a few days before he died in November. It was pretty tough going. The big booming voice that had bellowed from the podiums of hundreds of meetings was down to a whisper. His legendary fire was just about spent. But some things had not changed. His […]
Life In Canada’s Small Government Dystopia
By David@Sixthestate.net The following post is deliberately alarmist. Orwellian, you might say. I’m not trying to paint a picture of what things are like in Canada right now, or even what I think they’ll be like in the near future. I’m not an idiot. But I do want to paint a picture of the sort […]
Put to bed: The strike that broke the news at The Calgary Herald
The Calgary Herald told its striking workers they were about to “jump off a cliff.” By the end, the Herald had gone over the edge, too ~~ Excerpted from Leaving Dublin: Writing My Way From Dublin to Canada, by kind permission of Rocky Mountain Books By Brian Brennan I never envisaged it would end the […]
