CUPE education workers and supporters amass at Queen’s Park to protest after the Ontario government enacted the notwithstanding clause to legislate a contract on the union. Photo courtesy OPSEU. In early November of this year an all-too familiar story seemed to be unfolding in Ontario. In this case, the 55,000
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Canadian Dimension: Inflation: Reframing the narrative
Photo by Frank Busch/Unsplash Fighting inflation is on the public agenda today in a way not seen since the 1970s. The orthodox response—having central banks raise interest rates to slow the economy, and ultimately, prices—is already in play. Yet current price increases aren’t the result of the traditional phantoms haunting
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Living socialism today: Remembering Leo Panitch
Leo Panitch (1945-2020) at The World Transformed 2018 in Liverpool. Photo by Kevin Walsh/Wikimedia Commons. Standing outside a conference with a group of devotees, a famous political scientist brags that there’s only two people in the world he’s afraid of: his mother and Leo Panitch. To anyone who knows Leo,
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: The electric car comes to Oakville
In late September, Ford reached a deal with Unifor to build electric vehicles at the Oakville assembly plant. The three-year deal includes investing $1.95 billion in two Ontario facilities. Photo from Flickr. Major auto bargaining has long been one of the most-hyped events in Canada’s labour calendar; historically rich in
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Political openings: Class struggle during and after the pandemic
One in seven small businesses in Canada are at risk of closing permanently as a result of COVID-19 in addition to the ones that have already shuttered. Photo from Pixabay. For some on the left, the economic breakthrough brought on by the pandemic was the general consensus, not least among
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Health Workers: From Praise to Protection
Green Jobs Oshawa has pushed to highlight the desperate need for more PPE for front line workers, especially N95 masks. Photo courtesy Courage Coalition. Crises sometimes bring out the best in society and sometimes—or even at the same time—they clarify what is so darkly wrong within. In the particular case
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: The GM Strike and the Historical Convergence of Possibilities
Workers leave Flint Assembly plant early Monday, September 16, 2019 while taking part in a national strike against General Motors after stalled contract negotiations with General Motors. Photo by Ryan Garza/Detroit Free Press. On September 16, 2019, forty-six thousand defiant General Motors (GM) workers streamed out on strike. This eruption
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: NAFTA renewed. Now what?
Photo by The White House When Donald Trump declared NAFTA to be “the worst deal” in American history (and the worst deal ever signed “by any country”), those who had long opposed NAFTA found themselves in a bind. They could hardly side with Trump and be identified with the imperial
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Will the Ontario Labour Movement Return to Class Struggle as Austerity Deepens?
Photo by Randy Risling (Toronto Star) The Ontario labour movement is in deep crisis. Some impressive struggles aside, it has been staggering since the end of the great mobilizations of the 1990s. Given the labour movement’s historic role in leading and supporting progressive change, its current disorientation should be a
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Bob White, Union Organizer, Union Leader: April 28, 1935 – February 19, 2017
Photo from CanadianLabour.ca When I last visited Bob at his nursing home in Kincardine, a nurse politely pulled me aside to tell me that he no longer talked much but remained quite sociable. The deterioration in his condition was sad to hear, but I remarked that his retention of social
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: The Power of Deep Organizing
Photo by Kheel Center The profound defeat of the U.S. labour movement over the past three to four decades is usually measured by the loss of things that workers once took for granted like decent wages and benefits. A less quantifiable but ultimately more decisive indicator is the retreat from
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Big Three Bargaining: Different Ways of Making History
Photo by Ford Motor Company Canadian autoworkers have long been pace setters in the Canadian labour movement and as soon as its most recent agreement with General Motors was ratified, Unifor (the successor in 2013 after the merger of CAW and CEP) laid claim to that agreement’s ‘historic’ status. It
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: When History Knocks
Photo by Jonathan McIntosh Naomi Klein is a longtime movement and media icon, a gifted synthesizer and popularizer who, over the past two decades, has been a leading chronicler of anti-corporate, anti-globalization, and anti-capitalist social movements (a series of “anti”s that undeniably needs some unpacking). Who else on the Left
Continue readingCanadian Dimension | Articles: Unmaking global capitalism
Subscribe to our free e-newsletter HERE. This piece was originally published in Jacobin. When Karl Marx famously declared that while the “philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it,” he was asserting that it was not enough to dream of another world nor
Continue readingCanadian Dimension | Articles: Unmaking Global Capitalism
When Marx famously declared that while the philosophers have interpreted the world, the point is to change it, he was asserting that it was not enough to dream of another world nor to understand the dynamics of the present. It was critical above all to address the question of agency
Continue readingCanadian Dimension | Articles: Beyond the impasse of Canadian labour: union renewal, political renewal
This is the opening piece of our “State of the Unions” special issue of Canadian Dimension Magazine published in May, 2014, which you can view and purchase HERE. Subscribe to our free e-newsletter HERE. Canadian workers have been remarkably patient. For over three decades now—a generation—their wages have been restrained,
Continue readingCanadian Dimension | Articles: Raising our expectations
Looking back to the defeat of the labor movement since the early 1980s, three lessons seem especially important. First, any gains made under capitalism are temporary; they can be reversed. Second, the kind of unionism we developed in that earlier period of gains was inherently limited; it left us in
Continue readingCanadian Dimension | Articles: Stagnation, austerity and left politics
That the many attempts to theorize the crisis of 2008, the deepest crisis since the Depression, have at best been inconclusive should not be all that surprising. After all, as Michael Bernstein noted in the late 1980s, a half-century after the Great Depression there was not yet any general agreement
Continue readingCanadian Dimension | Articles: Beyond the Economic Crisis: The Crisis In Trade Unionism
Discussions on the left about the economy might be summarized as warning that things are going to get a lot worse before they get…worse. This is not just a matter of the sustained attacks on the labour movement but as much a reflection of the crisis within labour. For some
Continue readingCanadian Dimension Feed: The Global Economic Crisis—Part 3
CD: The financial sector has been remarkably successful in shifting the debt burden into the public sector which also bears much of the cost of “recapitalizing” the banks. But what problems persist in the financial sector? Sam Gindin: Before answering any of the questions, it’s important to clarify the role
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