Now that the convoy has been cleared from Ottawa’s streets, it is worth remembering when desperate workers tried to take their protest to the federal government in Ottawa in 1935. The “On to Ottawa Trek” saw unemployed men housed in military relief camps travel by rail from Vancouver, stopping at towns along the way gaining […]
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The cost of expanding the Trans Mountain Pipeline is out of control. When the government bought the pipeline from Kinder Morgan in 2018 for $4.5 billion, it was estimated that it would cost a further $7.4 billion to complete the expansion. Now the estimate has nearly tripled to $21.4 billion! The increased costs are partly […]
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The BC Liberals have a new leader — Kevin Falcon. The nearly year-long campaign for the leadership ended on February 5. After the 5th ballot Kevin Falcon took in 52 percent of the votes; however, this result was largely inevitable from the first ballot where he led decisively with 47 percent. The leadership race came […]
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Defund the Coastal GasLink Pipeline! On a cold grey December 21, sixty people rallied outside the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) branch on 1st Avenue and Commercial Drive in Vancouver. All of Canada’s major banks invest heavily in the oil and gas sector; RBC leads the pack in pushing climate change. It owns 8 percent […]
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No to Corporate Profiteering Socialist Alternative Canada joins organizations across Canada and the US in calling for the big banks to divest from the Coastal GasLink (CGL) pipeline. Supporters and allies of the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs have called for the December 20th Week of Action to #DefundCoastalGasLink. In 2020, 27 banks from around the world […]
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The BC government announced a guaranteed minimum number of employer-paid sick days for most workers; there are exclusions. The Worker Solidarity Network, the BC Federation of Labour, and other allied groups, including Socialist Alternative, called for 10 paid sick days per year for all workers, as a minimum standard required to ensure the health and […]
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Paramedics face crises everyday as a basic part of their job. In British Columbia, they are also facing entirely avoidable crises of understaffing, low pay, and burnout. All of this was cruelly exposed in the summer heat dome, with soaring distress calls, long waits for ambulances and unnecessary deaths. It wasn’t always this way. BC’s […]
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Southern British Columbia has been hit by two catastrophic weather events in a few months. First was heat and fire, now rain and floods. On November 13 and 14, the skies opened as an “atmospheric river” flowed across much of southern BC, resulting in overflowing rivers, landslides, mud slides, and ruptured railways and highways. This […]
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On Friday November 12, the last day of COP26, a peaceful rally of several hundred for climate justice was disrupted by over-the-top action of the Vancouver Police Department. An Indigenous man, as part of a ceremony, placed red handprints, representing Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, on the building that houses Canada’s Department of […]
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The BC Supreme Court made news in September by deciding not to extend an injunction against old-growth logging protesters at the Fair Creek watershed. This would have ended the ongoing RCMP enforcement of the injunction, had the BC Court of Appeal not granted a temporary injunction about a week later. Protesters have been in the […]
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