Almost every single province in Canada is ruled by a government committed to deep austerity cuts and assaults on workers rights. The tasks seem large, but as with various local labour battles, campaigns like the Fight for $15, and organizations like Iron & Earth, workers are constantly being pulled together in common struggles against common enemies.
For the first time Canada might be capable of shipping significant amounts of oil to markets other than the United States (assuming the project is actually completed — a big question mark given ongoing First Nations' legal challenges and resistance from British Columbians).
More than 30,000 farm workers are being brought to Canada from the Caribbean, Mexico and South East Asia to do the jobs that no one wants to do, they are treated as sub-human and forced to return home, many times as injured bodies.
The Canada-European Union "Free" Trade Pact, due to be signed on October 27, like other such agreements, favors corporate power and profits at the expense of working people. Dock workers action last July shows resistance is possible.
This young Toronto-based poet won a place on the best-seller lists with her epigrammatic, haiku-like poetry that sometimes addresses emotionally difficult subjects. This is an unusual accomplishment for poetry in today's culture. Here is this remarkable writer's story.
We never know what is actually possible until we test it. It may seem a long road from a union trying to protect jobs to a union setting out an alternative agenda for the economy. But surely the main lesson of recent years is that since capitalist corporations think big as a matter of course then we will surely lose if we continue to think small. If we don't raise our expectations, they will be lowered for us. •
The Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, Inc. (CDM – Migrant Rights Centre), accuses Canada of discrimination in hiring and the allocation of work, the general exclusion of women from the temporary work programmes and the failure to ensure compliance with laws against discrimination in employment.
By defining students as intellectual workers and transforming student unions into vehicles for social, economic, and racial justice, a new generation of young workers will transform the union movement and challenge the conventional wisdom of neoliberalism.
Like the people within, immigrant detention centers are often invisible as well. Photos and drawings of these places are rarely public; access is even more limited. Canada has three designated immigrant prisons, and it also rents beds in government-run prisons to house over one-third of its detainees. Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention begins to strip away at this invisibility.
Despite a long list of abuses by Canadian mining companies in Africa (and elsewhere) it’s incredibly difficult to hold them accountable domestically. The previous Stephen Harper government opposed legislation modeled on the U.S. Alien Torts Claims Act that would have allowed lawsuits against Canadian companies responsible for major human rights violations or ecological destruction abroad. Is Justin Trudeau prepared to defy Canada’s powerful mining industry?
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