Political cartoon published July 7, 1894 by the Chicago Labor newspaper showing the condition of the labouring man at the Pullman Company. The employee is being squeezed by Pullman between low wage and high rent. Image from Wikimedia Commons. After several successive interest rate shocks by the Bank of Canada,
Continue readingAuthor: Mitchell Thompson
Canadian Dimension: NATO: Against the poor of the world
Serbian men hold a poster with pictures of victims of the 1999 NATO air campaign against Serbia and Montenegro in the town of Nis. Photo by AFP. NATO and its defenders claim it is strictly an alliance of “collective Western defence” and not a belligerent organization. But a review of
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: We’re working longer hours for their profits
Photo by Liz West/Flickr A new study by TD Economics confirms the obvious: working class living standards are declining in Canada. For years, GDP and productivity growth have stagnated and, as the report observes, Canada’s bosses have sought to make up for it, in part, by extending our working hours.
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Landlords are profiting from Canada’s rental shortage
Condo towers in downtown Toronto. Photo from Wikimedia Commons. In their corporate reports and amongst themselves, Canada’s largest landlords are remarkably honest about where their revenue comes from—from gouging and displacing tenants. Landlords are easy to dislike. Headlines abound of landlords murdering their tenants, forcing them to live in units
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Blame landlords for Canada’s skyrocketing rents
Airplane visible between two Distillery District condo towers, Toronto. Photo by Lori Whelan/Flickr. While pundits and corporate media outlets delight in describing Canada’s skyrocketing rental rates as an accident of nature, the crisis actually typifies the “business model” of for-profit landlords. The crunch Canada’s housing crisis is visible in every
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Ontario hospitals looked to make themselves ‘lean’ throughout the pandemic
Grand River Hospital in Kitchener, Ontario. Photo by Nick Matthews/Flickr. Even as hospitals across Ontario were overwhelmed by patients during the pandemic—extending wait times and triggering triage protocols—the system’s managers were reportedly busy looking for “cost-savings.” And while the crisis has been used by the Doug Ford government to further
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Doug Ford ploughs ahead with attacks on education
Thousands of demonstrators gather to protest against Doug Ford and the Ontario provincial Conservatives’ planned cuts to education in front of Queen’s Park, Toronto. Photo by Mary Crandall/Flickr. For months, the Ford government has been threatening education workers with renewed demands for pay cuts, benefit cuts and overall school funding
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Correcting the record on Bill Graham and the Iraq War
Bill Graham, former Canadian defence and foreign affairs minister, died at the age of 83 on August 8. With the recent death of former Liberal Defence and Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham, has come a gush of praise for how he “resisted American arguments” and “stayed out” of the invasion
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: School wars in Ontario: McKinsey consultants, eLearning, and wage cuts
Ontario Premier Doug Ford, middle, and Education Minister Stephen Lecce, right, walk the hallway at a Toronto-area middle school, November 2020. Photo from Twitter. Since 2018, Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives have attacked education funding and devised repeated schemes to privatize parts of the school system. If reelected, new attacks will
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: For Ontario’s political establishment, cutting ‘welfare dependence’ means making the poor desperate
Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford reacts after winning the Ontario provincial election to become the new premier, June 7, 2018. Photo courtesy the Toronto Sun. Recurring proposals by the Ford government to stop social assistance “dependence” reflect a long history of Liberal and Tory governments alike, working to make
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Loblaw sees ‘profit improvements’ in wage and benefit cuts
Loblaw makes its profits by paying workers poverty wages, writes Mitchell Thompson. Photo by Lars Hagberg. Twice since the pandemic began, the billionaire CEO of Loblaw Companies Ltd. has risked job action by the company’s low wage workers in a bid to cut their $2 pandemic premium pay. More than
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Federal pandemic assistance on the chopping block—another way to ‘discipline’ workers
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivers a speech to G7 leaders at the international summit in Cornwall, England, June 13, 2021. Photo from Twitter. The Trudeau government’s willingness to curtail Employment Insurance eligibility and throw unemployed workers off its key pandemic benefit programs, prior to employment even fully recovering, is a
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Bill Davis’s anti-worker legacy
Ontario Progressive Conservative Premier Bill Davis replies to students from Carleton University at the Skyline Hotel, March 17, 1981. Photo by Russell Mant/Ottawa Citizen. The death of former Ontario Premier Bill Davis, who led the province from 1971 until 1985, was announced on August 8. Gushing praise for Davis’s “contributions”
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Is the Canada Recovery Benefit a ‘workfare’ program in disguise?
Leaving those in financial difficulty behind for a lower-wage future isn’t a bug in the CRB system—it’s a feature of a program designed and redesigned to crack down on recipients and maximize “incentive to work,” writes Mitchell Thompson. Photo by Elvert Barnes/Flickr. The Trudeau government’s forthcoming cut to the Canada
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: The Regina Manifesto at 85: More Relevant Than Ever?
The cyclical crises of Canadian capitalism has brought with it a paralysis of Canadian reformism split between the labour movement and the NDP. It is only natural that this has sparked renewed interest in the party’s founding constitution which offered a program for escaping the horrors of capitalism. But despite
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Canada’s Five Giant Banks Ought to Be Nationalized, Not Bailed Out
Photo by DRheaume Canada’s banking system is on the edge of a crisis, once again, with a collective debt of $1.8 trillion — and the public will be on the hook for most of it, sooner than most think. Last week, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) revealed that Canada,
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Ontario NDP has no answers for Toronto’s homeless death crisis
Photo by Svetlana Grechkina Toronto’s homeless death crisis is the sort of social catastrophe the Ontario NDP was created to fight. Yet, the current party is offering little in the way of solutions. Toronto Public Health data shows nearly two homeless Torontonians died every week in 2017, bringing the total
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Housing in the age of austerity: Toronto’s war on the poor
Asquith Park, Yorkville • Photo by Ed007Toronto For those in Toronto’s growing majority of low income neighbourhoods, things are bad and getting worse — and it’s no accident. A study compiled by University of Toronto professor John David Hulchanski titled Three Cities Within Toronto notes a sharp increase in the
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: A Brief History of Canadian Labour Woes
Illustration by DonkeyHotey Average hourly earnings for Canadian workers have been mostly stagnant since the late-1970s, owing to the crippling of organized labour by government and capital. Canadians are working harder but seeing slower and smaller gains. Unifor economist Jordan Brennan, reporting for iPolitics, found that between 1977 and 2012,
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Canada’s Household Debt Crisis: Blame Capitalism!
Photo by Maëlick Canadian capitalism is in crisis, with household debt reaching a record high 166.9 per cent of disposable income and about 208 per cent of GDP, and wage stagnation is a primary cause. Richard Vague told the Globe and Mail “any country whose private-debt-to-GDP ratio goes beyond 150
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