If your progressive message is truthful but critical of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, it automatically qualifies for a “threat” and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) won’t allow it to fly over Ottawa. Let me put it another way: Ottawa is no place for legitimate political dissent. That’s the message our-scandal-ridden
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Accidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Labour Day Links
Assorted content for your Labour Day reading. – The Star comments on the place of the union movement in the face of a determined push to silence workers: Given the challenges ahead, and all the ground that’s been lost so far, it remains to be seen if the new union
Continue readingAlberta Diary: Happy Labour Day! Push-polls prove it… Canadians hate unions … really, really they do!
Some of the participants in a recent Edmonton Labour Day picnic. If the union haters had their way, unions giving food to these guys would be illegal. Below, Merit Contractors Association President Stephen Kushner and the group’s weird website image. Some of my younger readers may not realize this, but
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Plenty of commentators are using the Labour Day weekend to discuss the place of workers in Canadian society. Sid Ryan notes that depressed wages are bad news for Canada’s economy generally. And Morna Ballantyne and Steven Staples point out the need for unions
Continue readingCanadian Progressive: Ottawa Labour Day Event: POSTER
Event sponsored by the Ottawa and District Labour Council (ODLC), its affiliated unions and the community. Celebrating labour, family and community.
Continue readingCanadian Progressive: Harper Government Pressured Mexico To Nuke Peaceful Excellon Protests
Evidence suggests that the Harper Government pressured Mexico to nuke peaceful protests at Canadian company Excellon Resources Inc’s La Platosa Mine.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
This and that to start your long weekend. – Antonia Zerbisias and Thomas Walkom both discuss the connection between organized labour and the very existence of a substantial middle class. And Janice Kennedy worries about the all-too-prevalent trend toward worker-bashing. – But Andrew Jackson nicely points out why attempts to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Linda McQuaig highlights how attacks on workers are used to distract attention from the systematic transfer of wealth to those who need it least: As long as the right can keep workers envious and suspicious of each other, the focus won’t be on
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – While Thomas Walkom’s latest has faced some justified criticism from a couple of angles, this part at least looks to be right on the money: The assumption here was that if businesses were allowed to keep more of their profits they would
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Kady points out that despite the Cons’ best efforts to stonewall, the Robocon investigation in Guelph looks to have locked in on the source of their fraudulent robocalls. And while it’s indeed somewhat concerning that Elections Canada hasn’t reached anywhere near the same
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Jessica Bruno reports on Tom Mulcair’s first six months as leader of the NDP. But while it’s certainly a plus for pundits to recognize the NDP as a viable government in waiting, perhaps the most significant development is Mulcair’s ability to persuade Canadians
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Yes, it’s alarming that the Cons are eliminating environmental assessments on a huge number of projects. But even more worrisome is the complete lack of a connection between the basis for the exclusion and the possible environmental impacts: Ottawa is also walking away
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – I’ll follow up with one extra note from Mark Carney’s address to the CAW – as the headlines seem to have missed a rather important point about the relative effect of the Canadian dollar and even the widest possible definition of labour
Continue readingAlberta Diary: Anti-union Wildrose Party’s fund-raising pitch piggybacks on union’s heavy lifting
Closed? Open? With Alberta Diary you can have it all. This blog is closed for a few days while your blogger takes a short break from writing stuff all the time. This means there can likely be no post on the Conservative Party’s Calgary Centre by-election nomination on Friday, Aug.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Armine Yalnizyan points to the Law Commission of Ontario’s proposals to make sure that labour laws don’t stack the deck against workers, and encourages citiznes to have their own say: The truth is, most people don’t know anything about their legal rights as
Continue readingwmtc: why is "entitled" a dirty word? some thoughts on what we are all entitled to.
When did “entitled” become a dirty word? Why do we hear “entitled” being used as catch-all slur, a derogatory description to be thrown at progressive people working for change? And why should we permit this word to retain such a heavily negative connotation? Here are some people I have seen
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Andrew Jackson thoroughly demolishes the argument that after three decades of wage stagnation and soaring corporate profits, Canada’s economy somehow needs to see workers suffer even more: The reality is that the pay of most workers has stagnated in real terms over the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Sum Of Us deserves plenty of credit for highlighting Enbridge’s attempt to delete a thousand square kilometers of treacherous and sensitive islands in order to sugar-coat the dangers of shipping oil out of Kitimat. But it’s also worth noting that the issue
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Carol Goar comments on the CEP/CAW plan to merge and work toward a far more active type of unionism: Both the CAW and the CEP — of which I am a member — gobbled up smaller unions to reach their current size.
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