Cost of Living Adjustment Needed Overwhelmingly, 33,000 BC Government employees have voted with a 94.6 percent majority, for strike action as they try to get the NDP government to agree wages that maintain living standards. The union, BCGEU, had an extensive campaign to reach members on the issues and to vote, taking the campaign to […]
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The recent announcement that possession of up to 2.5 grams of certain illicit drugs will be exempted from criminal prosecution in BC has rightly been called a historic “forward step” towards addressing the ongoing toxic drug deaths. But in emergency situations, “forward steps” are not good enough — not if they are too slow and […]
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Climate change is the foremost political issue on young people’s minds. We are the ones who will live with the full horrors of climate change and environmental degradation unless the world changes course. Yet, we see nearly everyone in a position of power acknowledges the crisis but does next to nothing to solve it and […]
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Capitalism’s overriding imperative is to extract wealth from the land and labour in order to enrich the elite. Workers struggle to survive or eke out a living as profits flow into the pockets of the wealthy. As capitalism replaced feudalism, the exploitation of both land and labour played out in countries around the world. As […]
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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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