Canada

Reading up on One Big Union. The Wikipedia article mentions that at the end of its days it was generating income via a lottery in its bulletin. This gave me an idea.

In the interest of diversifying news media, strengthening journalistic practices and integrity, creating non-partisan news coverage, and giving Canadian works a national outlet for publishing, I would like to start an online newspaper. However, I would like to limit ads since I find them distasteful at best and compromising at worst. This leaves subscription income and one-off purchases as the main revenue sources.

The issue with this is that people don't purchase news media anymore. They either look at an ad-supported website or they wait for someone else to buy a paywalled article and copypaste it somewhere. So the issue with a non-ad-supported model is that there's no incentive to buy. Hence, a lottery a la a 50/50 draw or some such. This would give people incentive to buy, increasing the circulation of the newspaper. So I'm hoping someone might be able to provide some insight into the matter.

• "Supreme Court won't hear appeal in Montreal MK-ULTRA brainwashing case". The Canadian Press. 2024-05-30T16:39Z. CBC News (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/mk-ultra-supreme-court-of-canada-class-action-1.7219478).
• Archive Link

I feel like we skipped over the 'truth' bit in Truth and Reconcilliation here.

In 2023, a shocking one out of every five people in Canada were food insecure — defined as having a lack of access to food, or concern over lack of food access. Severe food insecurity — when people miss meals and sometimes go days without food — rose by 50 per cent.

The Globe and Mail reported that Per Bank, the new CEO of Loblaw Companies Ltd., made $22 million from two months of work in 2023 — including an $18 million signing bonus. That’s 500 times more than the yearly median income in Canada.

Galen Weston Jr., Loblaw’s president, blamed suppliers, who forced “unjustified” price increases on the company. Others, like the Conservatives, blame the carbon tax for raising prices. In a report, the Centre for Future Work found that there is an infinitesimally small correlation between carbon pricing and inflation — just 0.15 per cent.

When prices spike, corporations take advantage. According to Statistics Canada, food prices were twice as high as the overall inflation rate — which was at its highest level in almost 40 years. Meanwhile, since 2020, Canadian food retailers have nearly tripled profit margins and doubled profits — making $6 billion per year. It’s not difficult to do the math. This is called “greedflation” — companies taking advantage of inflation to raise prices even higher.

Meanwhile, Canada’s top three food retailers (Loblaw, Sobey’s and Metro) control 57 per cent of food sales. Loblaw alone takes home 27 per cent. Costco and Walmart are next in line at 11 per cent and 7.5 per cent respectively, according to 2022 statistics.

The boycott has focused the country on the affordability crisis and the role of corporate profiteering. However, the responsibility for change does not fall on the consumer, but rather those in government, who are ultimately the ones with the tools to curtail corporate greed. Reigning in corporate profiteering, curtailing oligopolies, building holistic approaches to food provisioning and supporting incomes to match the cost of living are the real changes we need. On May 30 at 1 p.m. EST, Food Secure Canada is hosting a webinar titled "Greedflation: The role of large corporations in food price inflation and what can be done about it." You can register here.

If an election were held tomorrow, all signs point to a resounding Conservative victory. The latest projections from 338Canada show the Conservatives with a commanding lead and a projected 220 seats in the Commons, well past the 170 required to form a majority government.

One Tyee reader will receive four compelling works from McClelland & Stewart that collectively trace Indigenous legacies of the past, present and future.

If their party’s messaging is to be believed, the first order of business in a Pierre Poilievre government will be to “axe the tax” and end the Liberal government’s carbon pricing program.

However, their victory may be short-lived.

The debate over the carbon tax has focused so far on domestic politics. However, this misses the importance of the international context. Increasingly, our trading partners take the threat of climate change seriously and use carbon tariffs to punish other countries they see as free riders.

Any government that wants to protect Canada from these tariffs will need a credible plan to reduce emissions. The result is that a future Conservative government may have to bring back the carbon tax, whether it likes it or not.

The Speaker of Alberta’s legislature is refusing to explain how a former Edmonton Police Service officer with a history of violent domestic assault and several other officers with serious disciplinary records came to be hired as part-time security officers at the legislature.

Speaker Nathan Cooper, a United Conservative Party MLA, is ultimately responsible for legislature security. But Cooper refused to respond to three interview requests during the past week.

The Tyee wanted to know if former EPS officer Scott Mugford, and several other former EPS officers, were vetted before they were hired as legislature security officers.

“There is absolutely no way someone with this pattern of behaviour should have anything to do with any law enforcement agency or anything directly related to security,” said former West Vancouver police chief and former British Columbia solicitor general Kash Heed, referring to Mugford.

Having been an MLA, and knowing the security personnel at B.C.’s legislature in Victoria, Heed said that “someone with [Mugford’s] background would never be within their ranks.”

Heed said there would be an “outcry” from MLAs to the sergeant-at-arms and the Speaker “if it became known that they had someone like this within the ranks of that security detail in the legislature in Victoria.” The sergeant-at-arms is responsible for legislature security.

It's Delaney Mack’s first time pulling crab traps and she is unsure what to do. Mack, the newest member of the Nuxalk Guardian Watchmen, has had months of training for the multifaceted job, which might on any given day include rescuing a kayaker, taking ocean samples or monitoring a logging operation. But winching crabs up 100ft from the sea floor was not in the manual.

Soon, however, the four-person operation is humming along. The crab survey is a vital part of their work as guardians of this Indigenous territory in the Canadian province of British Columbia. It was started more than 15 years ago in response to heavy commercial crab fishing in an area where the federal government had done little independent monitoring to determine if a fishery was sustainable.

It is the quintessential guardian assignment: remote monitoring work of immediate importance to a small community, far beyond the gaze of administrators at understaffed government agencies.

The watchmen are the eyes and ears of their First Nation community on the lands and water of their territory, which spans about 18,000 sq km (7,000 sq miles, roughly the size of Kuwait) on the central coast of British Columbia around the town of Bella Coola, 430 mountainous kilometres northwest of Vancouver.

Try it and give feedback here:

https://beta-performance.cira.ca/

Relevant details about the tool (some from the link above, others from their newsletter):

Key Features

• Improved design: experience a more user-friendly and intuitive interface.
• Responsive and touch-screen friendly: easier to take tests with tablets and phones.
• Powerful testing capabilities: test your internet and access over 60 key performance metrics.

What is being done with the data

The data you create from each test will be anonymously aggregated with all the other performance tests done throughout Canada. These results help researchers understand and build a better internet for Canada. All the data is made available so researchers, governments and policy makers all have access to the information to base analysis and decisions on.

Help contribute to changing Canada’s internet for the better by running regular tests and providing valuable feedback at the end of each test.

What CIRA is:

the organization that manages the .ca country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Canada. [...] CIRA sets the policies and agendas that support Canada's internet community and Canada's involvement in international internet governance

A new study by Léger has assessed Canadians’ perceptions on the Loblaws boycott, which is currently underway over claims of greedflation.

Canadian real estate prices have surged in almost every market, with a typical home price doubling in many regions. A median household in major cities like Toronto and Vancouver would need to save over 20 years for just the down payment, more than 3x the historic average. Seems absurd? The outlandish scenario was apparently a […]

This is similar to the previous post based on the Toronto Star article, but this press release adds that the unions are trying to directly legally intervene on the matter as well.

Two of the largest unions in the province and the largest unions at the University of Toronto are seeking to intervene in the injunction application by the university against demonstrations.

The United Steelworkers union (USW) and OPSEU/SEFPO are seeking intervenor status in the injunction application by the university which would allow administrators to end protests. The unions are working together to protect the freedom of expression and freedom of association by workers at the university.

“We will defend workers’ right to their freedom of expression. The university cannot deny workers or students their rights as outlined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms because they are inconvenient,” said Myles Sullivan, USW District 6 Director (Ontario and Atlantic region). “We will defend the right to protest on public property, like the University of Toronto and ensure Charter rights are not trampled. As far as we are concerned, the protest has the right to stay and workers have the right to participate.” The USW represents 10,000 workers at the University of Toronto as well as workers at other University campuses.

“University campuses are precisely the places where our community debates the most pressing issues of the day. Above all, it’s where we find common ground, and if necessary, we disagree, but we do so without violence” said JP Hornick, President of OPSEU/SEFPO. “So to threaten to forcibly remove a peaceful encampment which is simply an expression of political opinion, where students and workers and other members of the University community are asserting their Charter rights – is an abdication of the University’s very reason for existence.”

“A ruling like this has the potential to threaten the Charter protected right to the freedom of association (Section 2 (d)) so we take this very seriously indeed,” concluded Hornick. OPSEU/SEFPO represents workers on the University of Toronto campus as well as workers on other University campuses and also represents workers on every public college campus in Ontario.

https://opseu.org/news/unions-seek-intervenor-status-to-protect-the-charter-of-rights-and-freedoms-at-the-university-of-toronto-protests/227836/

In case anyone still wants to somehow debate whether the Liberals will deliver affordable housing.

“Housing needs to retain its value,” Mr. Trudeau told The Globe and Mail’s City Space podcast. “It’s a huge part of people’s potential for retirement and future nest egg.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20240527182453/https://theconversation.com/why-are-grocery-bills-so-high-a-new-study-looks-at-the-science-behind-food-price-reporting-230086

So, we completed a rigorous analysis of the most prominent reports that shape the narratives around food prices in Canada, including twelve years of Canada’s Food Price Reports and 39 reports from Statistics Canada. Our findings, which are peer reviewed and soon to be published in Canadian Food Studies, were both insightful and concerning.

Our analysis found that most claims about food prices in these reports lack scientific rigour. Nearly two-thirds of the explanations for price changes given are not backed by evidence. Arguments about the causes of food inflation are frequently incomplete, neglecting to connect the dots between cause and effect.

These reports also rarely consider the decisions that grocers and other private sector entities have on food prices. Increased consolidation and concentration in the grocery sector is a structural issue that deserves scrutiny.

The bread price-fixing scandal a few years ago showed how a lack of competition enables price manipulation and hurts consumers. Canada’s Competition Bureau recently announced they are launching an investigation into the owners of Loblaws and Sobeys for alleged anti-competitive conduct.

With grocer profits expanding in Canada, too, it is fair to ask tough questions about how much grocers’ decisions are contributing to the pain at the till.

In our analysis, only three per cent of the over 200 explanations for food price changes point to grocer actions or other agency in the private sector as driving price increases. This reflects a tendency to portray food prices as erratic and overwhelmingly opaque.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240527133143/https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/may-2024/tax-the-rich/

In its 2024 federal budget, the Trudeau government proposed steps that would help equalize the tax rates between the richest Canadians who primarily make their money from passive income, and working people who earn a paycheque. These proposed changes to how capital gains are taxed would only require the richest 0.13 per cent of Canadians to pay more, alongside help to address exploding housing costs.

Despite the narrow scope of this change, it (predictably) generated outrage among some of my wealthy peers alongside those who seem ready to go to battle to ensure that the very rich continue paying less tax than working people as a per cent of taxes on income.

It’s not an option available to most people, and yet while working people are taxed on their full paycheque, only 50 per cent of capital gains are currently taxed. I may pay a higher dollar amount compared with some working people, but I pay a much lower rate, even compared to high earning doctors, lawyers and engineers.

Why should I pay a lower rate just because I was lucky enough to have money to invest, and why should someone who actually works for a living have to pay a higher one?

As you move up the wealth and income scale, you come across fewer and fewer people who are making most, or sometimes any, of their money from a paycheque. Instead, the rich invest in the stock market, property and other ways to keep their wealth growing. As such, they have enjoyed lower tax rates for decades.

Meta recently announced the layoff of 11,000 people. This resulted in a 20 per cent increase in their stock price, and a dividend issued to shareholders. I own stock in Meta. If I sell that stock and realize capital gains, I will have directly benefited from an already profitable company that has just negatively impacted the lives of thousands of people.

At the very least, I should be paying the same per cent of tax on those gains as former employees would have paid on their salaries.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240529042737/https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/we-will-be-your-human-shields-why-unions-are-showing-up-in-force-to-support/article_562a3da0-1c62-11ef-91f5-2f4615a0758e.html

On Monday, union leaders from across Ontario descended on the University of Toronto campus, vowing to physically defend the students.

“Our job is to put our bodies in between you and whatever the administration brings to you,” JP Hornick, president, Ontario Public Service Employees’ Union (OPSEU), told a rally by the protesters and their allies. “If the police come, we will be your human shields. We will be your line of defence. And I promise you that we will be here for as long as it takes to make sure that you are safe.”

Laura Walton, president of the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL), pledged not only her union membership in defence of the protesters, but her own maternal instinct.

On Saturday, in response to the university’s trespassing notice, the OFL’s Walton issued a call to all unions to support the encampment, and on Monday she was joined by four past and present union leaders, including Sid Ryan, former head of CUPE; Fred Hahn, current president of CUPE; and Carolyn Egan, president, United Steelworkers (USW) Toronto Area Council.

Walton said that, in her mind, support for the protesters is undeniably linked to labour issues. “If the university administrators can get away with trampling on your rights to protest and dismissing your legitimate demands, then employers everywhere will feel emboldened to do the same,” she said.

A former member of the Parole Board of Canada breached government codes of conduct by making "unwanted advances" toward female employees, Canada's public sector integrity commissioner has ruled.

In a report tabled in Parliament Tuesday, Commissioner Harriet Solloway said that the Parole Board committed gross mismanagement and endangered the health and safety of employees when it failed to respond to and document reports of Michael Sanford's misconduct.

"Evidence obtained during our investigation shows that over a period of approximately eight years, Mr. Sanford repeatedly made unwanted advances towards female employees, including touching, inappropriate comments and unsolicited phone calls and text messages," Solloway wrote.

"Evidence also shows that Parole Board of Canada management did not take adequate action to stop or document Mr. Sanford's behaviour in 2015. In fact, he was reappointed for a second term as a Board Member in 2020 and subsequently behaved inappropriately towards at least two other female employees."

Premier Doug Ford's push to get beer and wine into convenience stores ahead of schedule will cost Ontario taxpayers at least $225 million, but there's evidence the full price tag actually adds up to hundreds of millions more.

When the Ford government announced that it will pay the multinational owners of The Beer Store to allow what it calls "early implementation" of the expanded alcohol sales, it did not disclose the cost of other key components of its plan. Those components include:

• Giving private-sector retailers (including grocery and convenience stores) a wholesale discount of 10 per cent off the LCBO's basic retail price.
• Giving brewers a full rebate of what the LCBO calls its "cost-of-service fees" on wholesale beer sales.
• Giving more than 8,000 grocery and convenience stores the right to sell beer, wine, cider and ready-to-drink beverages at prices lower than the LCBO's.

Official figures from the Ministry of Finance and the LCBO obtained by CBC News on Monday show the province is facing a net revenue loss of $150 to $200 million per year as a result of the changes, in addition to the Beer Store payment.

The Ontario Liberal Party claims the costs will add up to $1 billion in direct payouts to the Beer Store, grocery chains and convenience store owners, as well as foregone revenue for the LCBO.

It’s been three months since Fozia Alvi got back from her medical aid mission in Gaza, but what she witnessed there continues to haunt her.

One Tyee reader will receive four compelling works from McClelland & Stewart that collectively trace Indigenous legacies of the past, present and future.

“Every space was overcrowded [and] we were rationing medical supplies,” Alvi told The Tyee in an interview. “A mile away, thousands of humanitarian aid trucks were and still are being obstructed from entering Gaza.”

The Pakistan-born, Calgary-based physician has been vocal about what she and many international scholars have referred to as a genocide in Gaza.

Last December, she published an op-ed in The Tyee about the health crisis in Gaza. “I must make it clear that I am not pro-Hamas,” she wrote. “As a medical professional, I value all human life. And I mourn all the lives lost in Israel.”

There is so much Shannon Bruno still doesn’t understand about the murder of her daughter Lyndsay in Edmonton on Aug. 13, 2021.

But of one thing Shannon is certain: the dereliction of duty by the 911 operator who brushed off her daughter’s call for help was the inevitable result of the failure, dating back decades, of the Edmonton Police Service and Alberta’s justice system to hold that operator to account.

The 911 operator was Scott Mugford, a name with which I am familiar because I wrote about him several times when he was an EPS officer. Most of those stories were about concerns he wasn’t held fully accountable for his conduct — and so is this story.