By Montreal Simon Well as you all know, Tom Mulcair is perched precariously on a narrow plank, over the deep blue sea. With the big question being, will he be standing or swimming on Monday? But even as he marches or limps towards his destiny, some of the old guard are hobbling out to defend him. And this has […]
Harperism, from Hayek to Koch and Coyne
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 […]
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 […]
Saucy Senate should learn its place
By David@Sixthestate.net I’m intrigued by the battle lines drawn over the Senate’s recent decision to reject a terrible and churlish piece of legislation which would attempt to impose an improper and hypocritical set of financial disclosure regulations onto unions — only unions — that don’t apply to charities, corporations, political parties, or even the government […]
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 […]
