streetfestival

Unfortunately, Ford had already jumped into the fray with both feet firmly in his mouth.

Ontario’s premier got Trump’s attention with a threat to cut electricity exports from Ontario to New York, Michigan and Wisconsin. A Ford spokesperson emphasized this could affect up to 1.5 million households.

While that sounds significant, let's put Ontario’s exports in context: the gargantuan eastern U.S. grid has 700 GW of generating capacity, while Ontario’s exports to that grid represent less than 0.3 per cent of that total. If Ontario stopped exports, the province would lose up to $700 million annually in revenue and further idle its generating capacity, or worse, waste off-peak electricity it can’t do anything with, while the U.S. has large resources to rebalance.

Ford’s tit-for-tat threat opened a door we don’t want opened. The idea of using energy as a cudgel is unbelievably terrible for Ontario when we look at how energy is supplied to the province. Ontario has far more to lose if the U.S. slashes energy supplies to Canada than the other way around.

Great article, highly recommended reading. Bold in excerpts mine.

As governments across Europe and the United States have been taken over by far-right parties, it becomes increasingly clear that centrist and progressive politics have failed to address the expanding inequality of the last four decades. This inequality has been effectively documented by scholars, including Thomas Piketty and Mark Blyth.

Here in Canada, the governing Liberals and New Democratic Party continue to tinker around the edges of inequality. This was alluded to by Freeland in her resignation letter. All the while, the Liberal brass fail to recognize what voters really need are new financial approaches that will stem the tide of the movement of wealth upward.

During the last decade, however, centrists and progressives alike continually fail to grasp that many voters have reached the point of ‘anything must be better than this.’

With all due respect to Trudeau and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, they have been fiddling while Rome burns. Canada is home to some of the worst corporate concentration in the world in the food sector. Little to nothing has been done to address this.

Housing costs have become untenable due to poorly planned immigration policies, designed to give the corporate world access to a cheap army of reserve labour. Voters of all stripes and demographics feel this in their pocketbooks and when they cannot sleep at night.

The far-right is happily engaging in populism. The closest thing we’ve seen to a real left-wing economic populism on the North American continent has been Bernie Sanders. Notably, the Vermont Senator's candidacy was stamped out by the Democratic Party establishment in the United States.

In 2024, American Democrats actually ran on being the party of democracy while failing to hold a real presidential primary. Kamala Harris then proceeded to seek Republican endorsements, rather than address the concerns of the Democrats’ historical working-class base.

It is no longer sufficient to blame these problems on global conditions. Frankly, to do so looks weak at a time when voters are looking for bold moves. Getting there will require politicians who are willing to draw their power from working- and middle-class voters, rather than corporate donors. It is no longer enough for Liberal politicians to just say they are for Canada’s middle class and those working hard to join it.

If the Alberta government built a nuclear reactor near your home, would you want to know the facts informing that decision? If Alberta gives millions, or billions, to private industry, would you want to know why? What risks and rewards did the government consider when choosing the ground beneath your home as an ideal place to store carbon dioxide?

Under new legislation, you might never have the tools to find out.

As the fall sitting of the legislature wrapped up, and the day after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s government announced Bill 34, which lays out new rules for freedom of information in the province. Once passed, the government will be able to censor factual information used to make decisions and restrict the power of the commissioner who can challenge its censorship.

The move, in some ways, would simply legalize the years-long practice of suppressing information in violation of the existing freedom of information act. But it would also make it easier to suppress more information, more often.

The changes would make it all but impossible to learn why the premier and her ministers make important public-interest decisions and would shield an undefined class of “political staff” from any oversight.

Only six animals may be left in the Wabasca herd of northern Alberta, where their range may soon be drilled — over the objections of Elders

On December 13, the federal government did what many expected and forced striking Canada Post employees back to work. If anyone needed confirmation of the Trudeau government’s utter contempt for workers’ rights and free collective bargaining, this latest back-to-work order is further proof.

This is the fifth time this year that the Liberals have intervened to end a high-profile strike in the federal jurisdiction.

“I thought I was going to die,” Adam Melanson says about his Dec. 2023 arrest. Multiple officers pinned him to the ground, punched him repeatedly, and one used the banned “knee-on-neck” restraint. A year later, his charges of assaulting and obstructing a police officer were fully withdrawn after coming to an agreement with crown prosecutors. This is part of a larger pattern, argues Dalia Awwad.

Since the beginning of Israel’s genocide, it appears the Toronto Police Service’s (TPS) role has been to criminalize, vilify, surveil, and brutalize the masses showing up in solidarity with Palestine. The harm the state is trying to inflict through TPS is multifaceted, physically through beatings, psychologically through surveillance and harassment, and materially through doxxing and criminalization.

“Our ability to talk, teach, and learn about Palestine and Palestinian liberation, as this report shows, has long been under punitive threat at York University. Under the current administration, this threat has deepened exponentially,” conclude the authors of the new report, titled Surveilled & Silenced: A Report on Palestine Solidarity at York University.

The report, published in October, draws from surveys carried out separately by the York University Faculty Association’s Race Equity Caucus and by the student group Palestine Solidarity Collective.

The surveys were initiated after hearing mounting anecdotal evidence from Palestinian students and their allies about increased policing of their actions, harassment from other students and faculty in class, at rallies or even in their dorms, microaggressions and overt racial slurs, online doxxing, and more.

The findings are divided into four main themes:

• Silence and inaction from the administration
• Justifying repression by using “community safety” rhetoric
• Hyper-surveillance and increased police harassment
• Growing distrust for the administration

Two weeks ago, a survey conducted by the Jewish Medical Association of Ontario (JMAO) made headlines in the Toronto Star, the National Post and the Toronto Sun. The methodologically-questionable survey promotes misleading claims about antisemitism and Jewish identity — namely that there is an environment of imminent and overwhelming danger facing Jewish physicians in Canada.

As Jewish physicians, we share our colleagues’ concerns about real and disturbing incidents of antisemitism in Canada today, especially those perpetrated by white supremacists. Unfortunately, criticisms of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza are often mislabelled as instances of antisemitism. This results in a mainstream discourse around antisemitism that serves to suppress legitimate political debate. And it has led some Canadian health workers to be defamed as antisemitic or even suspended for calling attention to Israeli war crimes against the Palestinian people.

To effectively combat antisemitism and other forms of discrimination, we must accurately identify them.

Readers could easily read Vincent’s article and still believe the false claim that 40 babies had been killed.

So, why won’t The Star issue a correction for such a widely weaponized false claim?

The paper regularly issues corrections on page 2 of its print edition. These sometimes include much more mundane matters, such as clarifying how much tax increases might affect hotel fees.

We asked Himelfarb and Vincent whether they are putting the “Palestine exception” into action, meaning disregarding normal editorial practices when it comes to their coverage of Palestine.

I learned about this new economic neologism elsewhere on Lemmy.

"vibecession," a term that refers to a disconnect between economic data and how consumers feel.

My curiosity was piqued because I heard that Chrystia Freeland used it a month ago, before she was in the spotlight. Apparently the Liberals' 2-month tax holiday and $250 cheques were in part to target this "vibecession." Let's listen.

"One of the positive impacts of this measure is to help Canadians get past that vibecession. Because how Canadians feel really does have a real economic impact," Freeland said at a news conference on Nov. 25.

This term has perhaps been co-opted in the 2 or 3 years since economist Kyla Scanlon coined it. It sounds like she used it to mean purely a mismatch between popular economic indicators (e.g., national GDP, consumer spending, interest rates) and everyday people's sense of their finances and the economy.

However Freeland and other politicians seem to be using it to mean that perceived issues with the economy are all in voters' heads.

For me, I think the evidence is mounting that Freeland is not better than Trudeau.

But I think there's more to unpack from the idea of a "vibecession." I'm not an economist, but it seems to me that both things can be true: the popular economic indicators can be looking good and everyday people can be experiencing greater levels of financial hardship than they or their parents have ever known.

Any progressive who wants to represent workers needs to push those gross economic indicators to the side and look at the financial prosperity indicators that capture everyday people's struggles and matter to them - at least when talking to voters. Because I think that's what they'll pay attention to.

And when people don't do this - don't look at meaningful and relevant metrics, like age of first home ownership, cost of a food basket or rent against a median income (something like that), how many are living paycheck to paycheck - that's when people will flock even more to the fictitious BS that Trump or PP hock. Because if someone can never afford to own a home, for example, and we don't see politicians meaningfully tackling housing or affordability, and they're telling as about how great the economy is doing per GDP - they aren't listening to talking to us.

Both quotes from https://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/vibecession-creator-freeland-1.7397093