Written by Socialist Alternative members in Ontario. “As a mom, I don’t like this deal. As a worker, I don’t like this deal.” With these words Laura Walton, the leader of CUPE Ontario’s 55,000 education workers, recommended voting yes to the offer from the Doug Ford government. Why should union members vote for a bad […]
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In early November, as BC’s southern interior got cold enough to be life threatening, a group of community service organizations operating shelters sent a joint letter to municipal officials, Interior Health, and BC Housing essentially withdrawing their services. The letter calls BC’s response to the homelessness crisis “an exercise in futility, at best” and went […]
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Are we here for a good time, Dave Barrett the new Premier asked at his first cabinet meeting. The answer was yes! Fifty years ago in the fall of 1972, the first NDP government in BC set to work on a powerful program of change to improve life for most in BC. A Landslide Victory […]
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Unsurprisingly, the Coalition Avenir Québec (Coalition for Quebec’s Future, CAQ) under François Legault won a second term in the province’s election. The far-right libertarian Québec Conservative Party, led by Éric Duhaime, votes grew dramatically. The Liberals and Parti Québécois, which dominated elections for years, continued an ignominious decline. Meanwhile, Québec’s reformist left stagnates and ignores […]
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Written by Socialist Alternative members in Ontario. But The Fight Is Not Over Yet In one week, Ontario’s Conservative government went from an all-out attack on union rights to backing down. Monday, November 7 was a dramatic day in Ontario’s CUPE strike. In the morning, Premier Doug Ford’s press conference indicated he would be willing […]
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Written by Socialist Alternative members in Ontario. On October 30, the Ford government announced legislation that would make it illegal for 55,000 education workers in the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) to go on strike on Friday, November 4. Stephen Lecce, Ontario’s Minister of Education, announced the emergency legislation on Halloween but he certainly […]
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Capitalism Does Not Lead to Democracy The end of the neoliberal era was recently recognized by Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. Her speech on October 11, at the Brookings Institution in Washington, outlined a vision, what some are calling the “Freeland Doctrine,” stridently calling out China and Russia as geopolitical enemies of Western capitalism. […]
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The New Democratic Party (and its pre-1961 predecessor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) was once a party with relatively healthy internal democracy and a relatively active membership. While never more than a social-democratic party, it kept its base engaged through riding association meetings, workplace activity through unions, and literal kitchen-table talks in big cities and small […]
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Written by BC Public Sector workers. Only a slim majority of BCGEU’s members voted to ratify the recent agreement with the BC government. According to the union, 71 percent of the 32,600 members voted and only 53.4 percent voted Yes. The difference between the number of yes and no votes is around 1,500 members. This […]
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The new leader of the misnamed United Conservative Party and the new premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, has been propelled to power by insurgent right populism in the party. The leadership race revealed a deep split in the party, where Smith won by just 53.8 percent on the sixth count of the votes, compared to […]
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