In Canada, 2025 is the year of the transit fare hike. Fares have gone up in Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, and Victoria, with Edmonton and Calgary soon to follow. Many cities are also cracking down on fare evaders despite Human Rights Watch warning that such crackdowns disproportionately target poor and racialized people. Meanwhile transit service is […]
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The public post office has been set up to fail. Its high-paid executives have mismanaged it, provoking a labour dispute and spending $470 million on an unnecessary new high-tech processing facility in Scarborough, Ontario. Successive federal governments have encumbered it with various restrictions and mandates, forcing it to compete with multinational corporations like Amazon. They […]
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A small group of Uber drivers, union officials and organizers gathered in Victoria’s inner harbour on the morning of Thursday, July 3, 2025, to drink coffee, pose for pictures, and celebrate the first-ever union certification of gig workers in Canada. This historic moment for the labour movement brings over 500 individual drivers into one, much […]
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On June 18, Vancouver dockworkers and their allies commemorated the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Ballantyne Pier (1935). This so-called battle was actually a vicious attack by police, who were armed with machine guns and tear gas, on unarmed workers who were trying to provide for their families in the midst of the Great […]
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In 2014 a tailings pond collapsed in BC at the Mount Polley mine, spilling 25 billion litres of toxic sludge that obliterated a watershed and contaminated Quesnel Lake — a source of drinking water, a Fraser River tributary and home to salmon and trout. This stands as one of Canada’s worst ecological mining disasters. The […]
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Cities are the world remade by society. So why are they so inhospitable? The high cost of living, air and noise pollution, the many barriers to accessibility, the scarcity of communal gathering places and green space, the high rate of traffic accidents, washrooms and drinking water for customers only, narrow or no sidewalks — all […]
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But His Persecution Proves That No One Is Truly Free Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been released from prison and allowed to go home to his wife and children in Australia after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage. His sudden release ends a legal nightmare for Assange during which he was involuntarily confined for […]
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This year marks the 30th anniversary of the climactic battle in the long simmering “War in the Woods” in Clayoquot Sound. On March 12, 1993, protesters stormed the legislature building to demand that the BC NDP fulfill their election promise to protect what was — even back then — some of BC’s last remaining old […]
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BC’s NDP government recently announced a $12 million budget increase to the Employment Standards Branch (ESB) — an 85 percent boost! This is a win for BC workers, who depend on the ESB to enforce their rights: without it, they are often at the mercy of their bosses, who profit from exploiting them. And this […]
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Tell the NDP to Enforce Employment Standards! Socialist Alternative, alongside groups like the Worker Solidarity Network, recently waged a campaign in BC for ten paid sick days per year for workers in the face of the ongoing COVID pandemic, in the end, winning five. This partial victory represents an incremental step toward a truly fair […]
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