Rabble

By now, we’ve all heard about the poor working conditions Amazon workers face globally. So, why then, are there only two unionized Amazon factories in North America?

Labour reporter Gabriela Calugay-Casuga talks to Félix Trudeau, the president of the first union to be certified at an Amazon warehouse in Canada, about his efforts unionizing his colleagues and what other Canadian workers can learn from their experiences.

About our guest

Félix Trudeau is the president of the first union to be certified at an Amazon warehouse in Canada. The union was created in May 2024 and is a part of the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN). Trudeau and his colleagues have entered their first round of collective bargaining with Amazon. Members continue to mobilize to secure the first collective agreement in the history of the multinational.

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When 200 Amazon workers in Laval Quebec unionized, the company argued in court that signing cards to join the union was unconstitutional. No. Card-signing is legal in Canada and the best way to organize a union. An interview with McGill assistant professor Barry Eidlin. The LabourStart report about union events. And Billy Bragg singing: ‘There is Power in a Union.’

RadioLabour is the international labour movement’s radio service. It reports on labour union events around the world with a focus on unions in the developing world. It partners with rabble to provide coverage of news of interest to Canadian workers.

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On November 10, tenants and community supporters gathered in Rockcliffe Park to serve demands to their landlord, the CEO of Smart Living Properties (SLP). 

The rally is the latest in a series of ongoing resistance efforts from tenants from two buildings on Bank St. in Ottawa, who were served N13 eviction notices in October 2023 to make way for a new development. 

The proposed nine-storey development aims to revitalise the area, while retaining the buildings’ heritage, by constructing additional residential units with retail space on the bottom, according to plans from property owner 211-231 Bank Street Holdings and its development manager, SLP. 

“People have been renting in these two buildings, some of us for 40 years,” said Julie Ivanoff, who lives on the corner of Bank and Lisgar streets, in an interview with rabble.ca. “And now they have to be displaced. This is their home. This is their community. And where are they going to go when the cost of rent is so obscene?”

According to “The National Rent Report” from rentals.ca, the average rent for a one bedroom apartment in Ottawa was $2,040 in November.  

Ivanoff said she supports densification in Centretown, but she wants to see housing that will benefit her community – and she believes SLP’s plan won’t do that. 

The planned development includes 263 residential units, which are a mix of studio, one, two and three bedroom apartments. Many of the planned bachelor apartments are less than 300 sq. ft. in size, according to documents submitted to the City of Ottawa. The city council has yet to approve the project. 

“This is not a place for somebody to live, nor is it nurturing a diverse community,” Ivanoff said. “This is for a very specific group of people. It’s transient. They’re not families. They’re not couples.”

Megan Smallwood, a member of the Neighborhood Organizing Centre, a group of neighbourhood organizers focused on tenant rights in Ottawa, has been working with the tenants living on Bank St. since May.

“The main goal of the Bank Block tenants is they all want to stay in their homes,” Smallwood said in an interview with rabble.ca. “So, our main goal right now is really just to put enough pressure on Smart Living Property directly so they back off and decide this isn’t worth their time.”

In an email statement to rabble.ca, SLP said they have no plans to withdraw the eviction notices, citing the benefit of more housing in the area. They also said that current tenants will have the option to apply for residence in the new units, once they are available, though the rates for those units have not been confirmed. 

Ivanoff said she and her neighbours have been attempting to meet with SLP for months to discuss alternatives to eviction, but have been met with silence. In September, tenants and supporters rallied at SLP’s office in Centretown. 

“They’ve closed their doors to their office,” Ivanoff said. “We’ve gone there. We’ve handed them letters. We’ve asked them to email us. They’ve denied us that. They’ve actually ignored our emails.”

In their statement, SLP said they have a team available to meet with tenants, and that they have met with tenants who have requested it. 

Ivanoff’s eviction notice was for March 31, 2024. But she’s still living on Bank St.

A hearing with Ottawa’s Landlord and Tenant Board is scheduled for March, which will decide if her eviction stands. 

When asked about her hopes for the hearing, Ivanoff said, “I’m hoping that we won’t be evicted. I don’t understand why we have to lose our homes in sacrifice for the housing crisis.”

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Heat pumps are more efficient and affordable than fossil gas heating and air conditioning — even in cold climates. Studies show they can be twice as efficient as gas heating in below-zero temperatures and up to five times in warmer conditions. They also significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and health risks related to burning gas.

Their efficiency makes heat pumps the lowest-cost way to heat and cool homes and buildings, and they’ll likely become more cost-effective as their prices drop and gas prices rise. Other alternatives to gas heating are also available — such as geothermal and heat from waste water.

That’s why it’s smart for governments to enact policies and regulations to encourage a switch from gas in households and buildings, as Vancouver did in 2020 when city council voted for a ban on gas for heat and hot water in new buildings. (It doesn’t include stoves or fireplaces.) Vancouver was considered a climate leader for this initiative, and many other jurisdictions worldwide have implemented or are planning similar policies.

Bowing to pressure from some developers and gas company FortisBC, a new Vancouver city council, elected in 2022, is backtracking, stoking fears about affordability. With little or no public consultation, council voted 6-5 to reverse the bylaw. A final vote is scheduled for November 26. Many builders, restaurateurs and other business people support the ban.

Betsy Agar, director of the Pembina Institute’s buildings program, told Corporate Knights that overturning or delaying the ban is a step backward. “Local governments should collaborate with the provincial government to ensure new homes meet the highest standards for efficiency and electrification,” she said. “This approach not only reduces emissions but also lowers energy costs for residents.”

Some critics say rescinding the ban is a simply a way to help developers reduce up-front costs — even though the regulation would significantly reduce home and building owners’ energy costs over the longer term.

Buildings are responsible for a large percentage of a city’s greenhouse gas emissions — 55 per cent in Vancouver. (Forty per cent comes from gas-powered vehicles.) Overturning the ban could make it difficult or impossible for Vancouver to meet its climate objectives. “It would set us back … potentially tens of thousands of tons of GHGs,” city sustainability director Brad Badelt told council, adding it would also create confusion in the industry and potentially roll back retrofits.

Whether misleadingly called “natural gas,” or falsely promoted as “renewable natural gas,” fossil gas (which is mostly fracked methane) is not just subject to volatile fossil fuel markets and price spikes, it’s also bad for human health, whether it’s used for home heating, cooking or fireplaces.

But the fossil fuel industry, with support from sympathetic governments and media, wants to keep raking in profits and is touting fossil gas as a climate solution. It’s not. Methane is a far more potent heat-trapping gas than carbon dioxide. Although it has a relatively short lifespan compared to CO2, it can trap as much as 80 times more heat over a couple of decades. Methane concentrations have more than doubled over the past 200 years and account for an estimated 30 per cent of global heating.

Studies also show that using gas in stoves, fireplaces and heating systems creates excessive indoor air pollution from carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, benzene, formaldehyde, particulate matter and more. Associated health issues include cancer, heart disease and childhood asthma. Research shows that one-eighth of childhood asthma cases in the U.S. are caused by cooking on gas stoves — as much as from second-hand smoking.

With so many available, affordable solutions to the climate crisis and related health risks, there’s no reason to keep propping up the fossil fuel industry — especially when it appears to be just a way to save developers a few dollars.

Vancouver has long been a leader in climate and other environmental initiatives. It’s time for council to do even more for the city and its residents and to set an example for other municipalities. With a final vote on the amendment to rescind the ban scheduled for November 26, it’s not too late for council to reconsider this decision.

Let’s all push all governments to give gas a pass, not just for heating, but stoves and fireplaces too!

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with David Suzuki Foundation Senior Writer and Editor Ian Hanington.

Learn more at davidsuzuki.org.

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The Canadian Union of Postal Workers issued a strike notice on Tuesday, and labour activists are calling on the government to respect the right to collective bargaining. Calls come after multiple actions this year from the Minister of Labour Steve Mackinnon forced public sector workers, mostly in the freight and transport industries, back on the job. 

Postal workers, represented by CUPW, have been bargaining for a new collective agreement since November 2023. The union’s main concerns regard wages and paid days off. The union is asking for 10 medical and seven personal days but the Canada Post Corporation is set on offering 13 personal days. 

Urban mail workers make about $20 to $29 dollars and hour at the moment, and rural workers’ wages are determined by the amount of sorting, deliveries and driving one does. CUPW is demanding a 23.79 per cent wage increase over four years for both urban and rural workers. The most recent publicly available offer from Canada Post proposes a 11.97 per cent wage increase over four years, 

Last time CUPW was bargaining with Canada Post, in 2018, workers were legislated off the picket line when the federal government passed back-to-work legislation. Recently, there has been a new form of government interference in labour relations. 

This week, labour minister Steven MacKinnon used section 107 of the labour code to force binding arbitration onto striking port workers in Montreal and BC

Feds trample on right to bargain 

In a press conference on Tuesday, MacKinnon said the lack of activity at Canada’s largest Eastern and Western ports pose too high of an economic, commercial and health risk. 

Unions, however, say this is a blow to labour rights. The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), which has represented the Montreal port workers since 1990, said MacKinnon’s actions “trample” labour rights and do not properly address the cause of the work stoppage. 

“These are lockouts, not strikes,” said Candace Rennick, CUPE’s national secretary-treasurer. “The employers are causing the work stoppage, then asking the government to intervene,” 

Minister Mackinnon used section 107 of the labour code in August as well. In doing so, he brought rail workers into binding arbitration. This move similarly sparked outrage and disappointment.

Labour experts and analysts say the repeated use of section 107 emboldened employers to rely on government intervention.

“There is no incentive for them to bargain in good faith because they know the federal government will back their side,” Rennick said. 

After the rail strike this summer, pilots at Air Canada were set to begin strike action in September. Pilots and their employer reached a deal on the eve of the strike deadline. Before they did, leaders from various business lobby groups including the Business Council of Canada, convened in Ottawa to call on the government to prevent an airline strike.

D.T. Cochrane, senior economist at the Canadian Labour Congress, has previously called this type of action “pathetic,” saying bargaining must happen at the table. He said employers will turn to the government to intervene when negotiations do not skew towards their interests. 

Larry Savage, professor of Labour Studies and Brock University, said the recent wave of government intervention in collective bargaining is unwelcome. During a panel discussion about defending the right to strike, Savage said CUPW could very possibly experience similar unwelcome interventions soon.

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It’s November, the time of year when we marvel at the glorious reds, yellows and oranges in our tree foliage and if we’re lucky we see some migrating birds, both a result of the seasonal chilling weather.

We’re reminded to check the batteries in our smoke and carbon monoxide detectors and, for most of us, to move our clocks back an hour.

As our communities become darker and colder, two things happen.

First, most local governments make moves in the form of a winter plan to shelter unhoused people and second, road departments announce big plans for snow removal and road salting.

Since mass homelessness exploded on the Canadian landscape in the 1990s, it’s been an uphill battle for advocates fighting for the most basic homeless services especially during inclement weather.

Municipalities have fumbled with approaches: experimenting with temperature formulas that will trigger the opening of warming and cooling centres, distributing sleeping bags and non-refillable water bottles, downloading the responsibility of shelter to volunteers from faith communities. For the most part these efforts smacked of ‘be thankful for what we’re offering’. Toronto’s first warming and cooling centres offered no cots or blankets, let alone meals. Toronto’s reliance for over 30 years on the faith-based winter-only Out of the Cold program created a forced nightly movement from one site to the next until the annual spring shut down, as if unhoused people suddenly were off to their cottage.

While these efforts saved lives, I believe an underlying and embedded prejudice towards the unhoused has driven government policies, charitable organizations’ response, the media coverage and at times even our own work as advocates.

Why do I claim prejudice? Because there should be a right to shelter on any night of the year, regardless of temperature or conditions of snow, ice, rain, or hail.

I confess that many advocacy organizations and frontline workers, me included, have used the weather as a special effect to garner political support and media coverage to pressure for shelter openings. In many cases these were textbook ‘Organizing 101’ lessons that won the opening of armouries, empty hospitals and civic buildings for shelter. These efforts also led to the concept of 24/7 respite shelters, the use of rent supplements to house people, and a federal homelessness program.

On the infamous day in 1999 that Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman called in the army to respond to a huge dump of snow, many of us were at the Board of Health with unhoused men and women who were begging for shelter. The weather backdrop and especially the shocking images of soldiers clearing our roads resulted in the precedent setting opening of the Moss Park Armoury as an emergency shelter.

In recent years it has been much harder to achieve shelter wins. I have seen a growing rigidity and callousness in the attention of local politicians and the decisions of city managers. At one point Toronto even outlawed the provision of survival supplies (sleeping bags, blankets, hot food) delivered by an Indigenous organization to people who were homeless claiming the service was enabling. City managers have resisted applying flexibility in the formula used to call weather alerts that would allow a shelter opening. Even worse, Toronto permanently cancelled its operation of cooling centres. During this year’s July floods that shut down the Don Valley Parkway, the City did not open an emergency refuge for the hundreds living in encampments, parks and ravines.

Back to cities’ predictable winter plans.

While climate change may reduce the need for snow clearing and road salting, robust winter plans to shelter homeless people are needed now more than ever.

This year, unique in their honesty, Toronto officials admitted its Winter Services Plan to respond to homelessness would not be enough to meet the demand for shelter.

Well, we knew that. Last year we sheltered 10,700 people. This year the number is 12,200. A shocking 223 people on average call the City’s own Intake line for a shelter space and are told none is available. It’s only going to get worse. Everywhere.

Encampments proliferate across the country and the intolerance towards unhoused people goes beyond Toronto. In an unprecedented move 12 Ontario Mayors have appealed to Premier Doug Ford (in fact, he requested they do so) to use the notwithstanding clause to suspend encampment residents’ Charter protected rights so they can be removed. Not only is there unavailable shelter or affordable housing for people to be moved to, it’s also widely understood in public health practices that in an ongoing pandemic it is bad practice to dislocate people.

How long can governments ignore the elephant in the room?

While Canadian politicians are reluctant to recognize the right to shelter, they are also negligent on the science and local experiences of the impact of climate change on vulnerable populations.

Like cities around the world, in the late 1990s Canadian cities faced the early signs of climate change.

In Toronto, street nurses recognized that the homeless population was experiencing deleterious effects of extreme heat (heat stroke, cardiac incidents, dehydration, electrolyte imbalances, seizures, death) and extreme cold (hypothermia, frostbite, gangrene, amputations, death). We responded by advocating for more shelter spaces, cooling and warming centres and we shifted our work to include more outreach.

The 1996 inquest into the freezing deaths of three homeless men brought these issues to a national audience.

In 1998 Toronto Disaster Relief Committee’s (TDRC) issued an extreme warning: “Prolonged homelessness permanently harms people; ultimately, it can kill them by exposure, illness, violence or suicide.”

However, it was really the 1995 Chicago heat wave that killed over 1,000 people and the subsequent social autopsy that examined the political and social fabric that put climate change on our radar in Canada.

In Anatomy of a Heat Wave I examined the relevance of the Chicago experience:

“In 2005, at least six Toronto residents who lived in scorching rooming and boarding houses died during a heat wave. Toronto Public Health research has demonstrated that mortality rates are twice as high on extreme heat days compared to comfortable days. In recent years, Toronto has reluctantly operated cooling centres triggered by a tight temperature criterion. Only one of the centres has been open 24 hours, and only with pressure did the city begin opening centres on the first of a heat wave, instead of the third day. Infamously, several years ago, the city was caught running its 24-hour centre in a hallway without staff or food — just a sign, tables and chairs and a jug of water. No activities to pass the time, no meals, no healthcare on site, no cots to sleep on unless you’re about to pass out. No appreciation of what vulnerability can mean.”

(in Chicago) Lessons were learned. First, that accelerated death rates were linked to poverty, unaffordable housing, diminished social programs, and access to air conditioning. Second, that the most critical public health measures that can save life in a heat emergency are early warning systems, the immediate opening of neighbourhood-based cooling centres, outreach to seniors and vulnerable populations including vans to pick people up to take them to cooling centres, fan, and air conditioner installation programs, and reverse 911 calls, or automated calls to people who are vulnerable.”

In 2007 Tanya Gulliver, of TDRC did a fulsome deputation to the City as part of her Maytree Public Policy fellowship. It included both timely research and urgent recommendations.

She pointed out that: “Following that deadly summer of 2005, Toronto revised the existing heat alert plan and created a detailed Hot Weather Response plan and an Urban Heat Island Mitigation Strategy. These plans, while well intentioned, are inadequate and have not been fully implemented.”

Today we have the benefit of more science, yet we have fallen behind. The climate emergency, the homelessness emergency, poverty and food insecurity have all worsened since those early warning calls. Without adequate shelter, income and housing all forms of inclement weather hit unhoused people and poor people the hardest. There is no longer a day, week or month free from danger.

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Being from Baltimore, I take civic pride in its writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, H.L. Mencken, Ogden Nash, Anne Tyler, and Frank Zappa – an eclectic bunch to be sure.

I feel a particular kinship with Zappa. Like my father, his father worked at the Edgewood Arsenal, where the U.S. Army manufactured and carried out human experiments on chemical weapons. The Edgewood Arsenal is part of the Aberdeen Proving Ground, where depleted uranium weapons were tested, and where a small nuclear reactor experienced a partial meltdown in 1968.

Zappa, like me, suffered repeated earaches. Like me, he was subjected to a now-discredited treatment, championed by researchers at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, of having radium pellets inserted up his nose.

Perhaps reflecting his family background, Zappa penned a quote that seems particularly apt in these troubled times: “Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex.”

Arguably, the main preoccupation nowadays of nation states – and their “leaders” – is to serve the corporations that profit from the military industrial complex. An example is General Dynamics. It makes the 2000-pound MX-84 bombs that the U.S. ships to Israel, and that Israel then drops on Gaza.

Will the U.S. president-elect stop these shipments, or find ways to diminish the overwhelming influence of defense contractors? Don’t count on it. Stock market investors responded enthusiastically to his win.

The “system” includes not only the corporations that “build the big bombs” (to quote Bob Dylan), but also the banks and investment firms that finance them. Canada has only one entry among the world’s top 100 defense companies (nearly half are U.S.-based), but many of those U.S. corporations have branch plants here.  And the U.S. President-elect is pushing us to increase our military spending.

According to a May 2024 report from “Don’t Bank on the Bomb,” Untenable Investments, Canadian banks are heavily invested in U.S. defense companies that operate nuclear weapons facilities: “Outside of the US, the top investor is Canada’s Sun Life Financial, with $8.7 billion invested in nuclear weapon producers.”

Even the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) Investment Board, responsible for more than 22 million CPP contributors and beneficiaries, is listed in the report, with its $682 million investment in the Netherlands-based Airbus Group, the prime contractor for the ballistic missiles used in the French nuclear arsenal.

In 2015, the Harper government handed over control of nuclear facilities owned by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) to a company called “Canadian Nuclear Laboratories” (CNL). Under a 10-year, $10-billion contract, a multinational consortium dominated by two top U.S nuclear weapons producers, Fluor and Jacobs, is in charge.

Fluor, the lead consortium member, also manages the production of U.S. nuclear weapons components at the Savannah River Site, and recently won a contract to operate the Pantex Plant, where the weapons are assembled.

Although the consortium goes under the name “Canadian National Energy Alliance” (CNEA), five of its seven directors are Americans. CNEA owns CNL and appoints its management team.

In 2023, via contract money funneled through AECL, Canadian taxpayers paid average salaries of $510,301 to each of 44 CNL executives and non-executive contract staff, mostly non-Canadians — well above the Prime Minister’s $406,200 salary.  According to the 2024 AECL Annual Report, “AECL makes payments to CNL and its parent company, Canadian National Energy Alliance… as per the terms of the contractual arrangement.”

In 2024 “Contractual amounts paid or payable” were $1,415,588,000, with $237,404,000 going to CNEA as “Contractual expenses.”

If we pay hundreds of millions of dollars each year to corporations that produce nuclear weapons to operate our nuclear research facilities, we’re well embedded in the military industrial complex.

To divert our attention, the nuclear power industry and its political entertainment division (e.g., the Canadian, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Alberta governments) claim that nuclear power produces “clean, affordable energy” and “life-saving medical isotopes”.

A fact sheet from the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility points out that “Modern medicine does not depend on nuclear power,” and that “All electricity producing reactors could be shut down permanently with little or no impact on best medical practices.”  Regarding the “affordability” of Ontario’s nuclear-dominated power grid, a Globe and Mail editorial notes “the granddaddy of big-ticket bribes: the $7.3-billion that the province says it will spend this year in rebates to households, poor and rich alike, for their electricity bills.”

By all means, let’s be entertained by politicians, but let’s not forget who’s paying, and who’s pulling the strings.

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BNN Bloomberg is a reasonably sober business news organization, so when it reports that Alberta’s United Conservative Party (UCP) wants to make Stephen Harper chair of the Alberta Investment Management Corp. (AIMCo) board, you have to take it seriously. 

This is true even if inserting a controversial former prime minister with deep ties to the fossil fuel industry and partisan links to the UCP into a leadership position at a Crown-owned company responsible for managing provincial retirement savings is just about the worst financial management idea you’ve ever heard.

It’s another example of how, with the UCP in power, just when you think things couldn’t get any weirder, they get weirder! 

The Bloomberg report, which appeared around 1 p.m. yesterday in Alberta, came five days after Alberta Finance Minister Nate Horner sacked the company’s CEO, Evan Siddall, and its entire board of directors, claiming it had to be done to “restore confidence in Alberta’s investment agency.”  

Well, it’s true, AIMCo, as the company is popularly known, has had serious performance issues that have been particularly troubling since it was known to be the UCP’s planned vessel for the Canada Pension Plan investment funds Premier Danielle Smith and her advisors desperately want to grab to establish an Alberta pension that could then be used to prop up the fossil fuel industry, which is rapidly approaching its best-before date.

But just about all of political Alberta, and most of the investment industry as well, were scratching their heads at the seemingly inexplicable timing of the move, when just days before everything had appeared to be copacetic at the Crown-owned company as far as the government was concerned.

Bloomberg’s startling revelation suggests an explanation.

There are three bylines on the Bloomberg story, so we can assume that at least three reporters have been making calls trying to pin down for the record what they’d heard from what the story refers to as “people familiar with the matter.”

If this is so – I’m just speculating here, although in an informed way – when the government realized the Harper story was about to break, it may have felt it had better get rid of the board and the CEO before they started throwing roadblocks in the way of a potentially catastrophically bad business decision. 

It also sounds to me as if Bloomberg decided to proceed without a named source when Horner’s sudden firing spree provoked a brouhaha in the investment industry about his interference in what was claimed to be an arm’s length investor of pension funds, insulated from political interference. 

Anyway, according to Bloomberg, “Harper’s name has been circulating as a potential chair for Alberta Investment Management Corp. for a number of months.” That would certainly be on brand for the UCP, which for obvious reasons holds Harper in high regard.

There would be a certain irony if the former PM were to be given the chair of the AIMCo board, since he was one of the six signatories of the notorious Firewall Letter, the 2001 Alberta sovereignty-association manifesto that called for the province to quit the CPP, create a provincial pension plan, and adopt several other measures that would amount to a half-step out of Confederation. 

Of course, this was before Harper had glimpsed the full potential of grabbing the brass ring that had the key to the Prime Minister’s Office on it. Naturally, nothing was heard of Harper’s past separatist inclinations during the gloomy years from 2006 to 2015 when he occupied the PMO. 

Since then, Harper has been busy running the Munich-based Neoliberal Internationale, officially known nowadays as the International Democracy Union, and finding clients for Harper & Associates, a consulting firm that trades heavily on his political connections. As the Bloomberg report put it, with energy industry companies among its clients, H&A “touts access to Harper’s global network and his experience as a former Group of Seven leader.”

As for Siddall, he has updated his LinkedIn resume to note he is in a state of “career transition.” For the time being, at least, he says he will be tying up loose ends and smelling wildflowers. It is to be hoped, although not expected, that those loose ends don’t involve a non-disclosure agreement. 

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Alberta Finance Minister Nate Horner wants us to believe he sacked the CEO and entire board of the Alberta Investment Management Corp. last Thursday because, as his news release put it, “the corporation has seen significant increases in operating costs, management fees and staffing without a corresponding increase to return on investment.”

After reciting a couple of out-of-context statistics about increases in fees and the number of employees, the release proclaimed, “Alberta’s government has decided to reset the investment corporation’s focus. … All board appointments have been rescinded and a new board will be established after a permanent chair is named.”

According to a report of The Canadian Press that day, Horner suggested he’d been keeping a careful eye on the pension fund management Crown corporation and had “determined changes weren’t going to happen without a ‘major reset’.”

This intentionally leaves the impression Horner had concluded the board’s members were a bunch of inattentive jerks who had to be fired without so much as a thank-you-for-your-service. But a glance at the resumes of the members of the former board strongly suggests this is not the case.

Some are exemplary. Some not quite so much. But the board was big enough to encompass a range of experience, and the experience of several former members is impressive.

Collectively, the 10 board members were clearly capable of carrying out their legal mandate to “act honestly and in good faith with a view to the best interests of the Corporation and … exercise due care, diligence and skill, and manage risk appropriately in their oversight of AIMCo.”

Indeed, if circumstances were as serious as those Horner wants us to believe, one would have thought they might have fired the CEO Evan Siddall themselves.

The governance page of the AIMCo website notes that all directors of the Crown corporation are appointed by the Lieutenant Governor in Council, that is, the provincial cabinet. To be appointed, they “must have experience in investment management, finance, accounting or law, or have served as an executive or director with a large, publicly traded company. Individuals should also have, to the extent practicable, experience in executive management of a substantial corporation. All directors are fully independent of management.”

So, let’s consider the qualifications of the 10 fired directors:

Kenneth Kroner, the board’s vice-chair and acting chair at the time of the purge, holds a PhD in economics from the University of California San Diego, where he is also a member of the university’s board of trustees. He has served as a board member, vice chair and chief executive officer of U.S.-based corporations, worked as an economics professor at the University of Arizona, and was for close to 22 years a senior managing director of BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset manager. 

Phyllis Clark is the former vice-president and chief financial officer of the University of Alberta. She chairs the Royal Canadian Mint and the Edmonton Symphony and Concert Hall Foundation, and sits on the board of Inuvialuit Investment Committee. In the past, she has been a member of the boards of the Bank of Canada; the AMA Insurance Services Board; chair of the Universities of Alberta Academic Pension Plan and its Investment Committee and a board member of the Canadian University Reciprocal Insurance Exchange. She is a former Chief Economist of Ontario, assistant deputy minister to the Management Board of Ontario’s cabinet and of its finance ministry. 

Bob Dhillon is the founder, president and CEO of Calgary-based rental apartment manager Mainstreet Equity Corp., a board member of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., Invest Alberta, and Strathcona Resources Ltd. He was the key donor, to the tune of $10 million, to the Dhillon School of Business at the University of Lethbridge. He is a member of the Order of Canada.

Jon Horsman is CEO of Horsman Enterprises Ltd. Before that, he was 14 years in senior management positions with ATB Financial, as Crown-owned Alberta Treasury Branches is now known, and chair and CEO of AltaCorp. Capital Inc. 

Joel Hunter recently joined Calgary-based TransAlta Corp., the electricity generating and marketing corporation, as executive vice-president and chief financial officer. From 2021 to this year, he was executive VP of TC Energy, the former TransCanada Corp., also based in Calgary. He is a Chartered Financial Analyst and holds bachelor’s degrees in commerce and economics from the universities of Calgary and Regina. He was appointed to the AIMCo Board by the Premier Danielle Smith’s cabinet in March. 

Jim Keohane is the former president and CEO of the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan. That’s all his LinkedIn resume says, but that would seem to be enough. 

Lorraine Mitchelmore is a member of the Suncor and BMO Financial Group boards. She was previously president and CEO of Enlighten Innovations Inc. and president and country chair of Shell Canada Ltd. She has served in the past on the boards of Shell Canada and Trans Mountain Corp. She was named the recipient of the 2024 Calgary Influential Women in Business Lifetime Achievement Award.

Jason Montemurro is tax lawyer who was appointed to the AIMCo board by the UCP cabinet on the same day as Hunter. His LinkedIn resume includes jobs as a principal of The Targeted Strategies Group, a partner in Azimuth Capital Management, a director of CIBC Capital Markets, and an audit manager of Deloitte Canada.

Roger Renaud is the former Global Chief Operating Officer and Canadian president of Manulife Asset Management and the former President of Standard Life Investments, both companies based in Montreal. He is a board member of Fonds de solidarité FTQ, which was created by the Quebec Government, and a member of numerous boards. 

Theresa Whitmarsh is the executive director of the Washington State Investment Board. She is past chair of the Council of Institutional Investors and the Pacific Pension & Investment Institute and a past director of the International Centre for Pension Management. She is based in Seattle. 

As these thumbnail bios suggest, all the AIMCo directors were arguably qualified to fill their positions. Hunter and Montemurro were criticized last spring when they were appointed because they lacked pension experience. Some have connections to past and current Conservative governments in Alberta. But by and large this is not the sort of board that you would think would be at risk of a wholesale purge. 

So what was the actual problem? 

As noted, Horner says the board wasn’t acting fast enough to cut costs and improve the results achieved by Siddell and his management team. 

Remember, AIMCo’s most serious recent problems took place in 2020 under President and CEO Kevin Uebelein, when it lost $2.1 billion in what was described at the time as an amateurish bad bet on market volatility. 

Siddell, the former president and CEO of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., was clearly hired to get AIMCo on track as a sober and thoughtful investor in which Albertans could have confidence, as befits a corporation managing $169 billion in workers’ retirement savings. 

Is it possible the real problem was that the board was too cautious for the UCP’s taste, unwilling to take big risks on questionable investments motivated by politics, not prudent investment strategies?

The investment industry is already abuzz with just such speculation. 

“Alberta’s Premier Danielle Smith has made it clear she wants the pension fund to put more capital to work in Alberta,” an investment newsletter reads. “Some stakeholders have already voiced concerns that this could mean more investment in fossil fuels.”

Top1000funds.com quoted “pension system luminary” Keith Ambachtsheer of the University of Toronto asking, “What makes the government think it can improve on the high quality of the board and executive team it just fired?”

Good question. But perhaps the UCP has something completely different in mind. “Danielle Smith I think looks at AIMCo as a bit of a cookie jar,” said a Globe and Mail business columnist. 

Siddell has been temporarily replaced by Ray Gilmour, a veteran senior civil servant trusted by the UCP but who has little experience in pension management.

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The re-election of Donald Trump to a second term as president reverberates far beyond the United States, particularly affecting Canada, America’s closest neighbor and largest trading partner. This political shift will have a social and cultural impact on Canadian society the way it did during Trump’s first presidency when his political rhetoric legitimized and enabled hate and racism.

In recent years, the rhetoric surrounding migrants, refugees, and 2SLGBTQIA+ rights has grown increasingly toxic, with many trends in Canada tracking back to the US. Trump’s first term exemplified the weaponization of fear against minority communities for political gain (the Muslim ban), a tactic he employed again during the 2024 presidential campaign. He stoked anxieties about “the other” and used lies and unfounded claims to link them to potential economic turmoil and social disorder if he is not re-elected.

Trump’s initial political rise capitalized on the anger and dissatisfaction of many Americans, framing certain minority groups — Arabs, Muslims, migrants, and refugees — as enemies. This strategy rallied his base and emboldened hate groups, resulting in a notable increase in hate crimes across the US from 2015 (when he started his campaign) to 2021, when he instigated a riot in Washington DC to prevent the certification of the 2020 presidential vote. According to FBI statistics, hate incidents surged during his presidency, highlighting the dangerous fallout of inflammatory rhetoric aimed at vilifying minority communities.

Canada witnessed a disturbing rise in hate directed at Muslims after Trump’s 2016 victory that culminated in the tragic 2017 murder of six worshippers at a Quebec City Mosque by a man influenced by Trump’s racist narratives.  In subsequent years incidents of hate continued to increase as did Trump’s rhetoric targeting certain minorities.

With Trump’s re-election, Canadians must brace for the potential fallout of strategies borrowed from Trump’s playbook by Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre in Canada heading into the next election, which could include inciting anger, feeding rage, blatant lies, and exploiting and exacerbating societal divisions for political gain. Poilievre’s approach to date mirrors that of Trump and populist politicians in other Western democracies who seek to win by catering to the fears and basest instincts of their electorates. 

The connections between the rise of populism in Canada post-2016 and what could unfold during Trump’s second term are troubling. One cannot help but draw parallels between Trump’s 2016 victory and how it exacerbated social divisions as Conservatives changed their campaign style, and what could occur in Canada during his second administration, and its impact on the Canadian political ecosystem.

The socio-political implications of Trump’s return are concerning, particularly in light of statements from many former Trump officials labeling him a fascist and unfit to hold public office. Historically, the rise of authoritarian regimes often begins with the marginalization of vulnerable populations, which Trump did during his first administration, and during this presidential campaign. Comparisons between Trump and the emergence of fascist regimes in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s may seem extreme but history has shown us that the seeds of bigotry, hatred and social breakdown sprout in times of fear and uncertainty, especially when stoked by politicians.

As Americans navigate the implications of Trump’s second term, Canadians must also confront our interconnected realities. The political climate in the US directly influences Canadian policies and attitudes, particularly among conservative circles. The rise of hate and bigotry during Trump’s first presidency spilled over into Canada with deadly consequences resulting from conservative political rhetoric, and the same could happen again. Statistics Canada has reported increasing hate crimes numbers annually for the past decade, a troubling trend that represents only one per cent of actual incidents. If history and recent right wing political tactics are any indicators then Canadians should brace for a surge in hate related incidents as hate groups are emboldened by Trump’s re-election.

In the US it seems that hateful and bigoted political narratives have been normalized if Trump’s campaign and his victory are the barometer by which to measure such things.  If we are heading in the same direction in Canada, with similar political narratives becoming the norm, it is a threat to the fabric of our society.  Over the next four years, it is crucial for Canadians to remain vigilant and proactive in combating hate, particularly when it is enabled by politicians.  We must defend the values of inclusivity that define our nation, and resist any attempts by right wing political leaders to exploit fear and stoke prejudice against minority communities for political advantage.

The late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau once remarked that being America’s neighbor is akin to sleeping next to an elephant — we feel every twitch and grunt. Trump’s re-election is like that elephant having a nightmare, with flailing arms and legs that will inevitably leave Canada bruised and possibly bloodied.

While Americans have to live with him day to day for the next four years Trump’s re-election and the risks it poses to Canada’s sociopolitical landscape must be acknowledged, and we must recognize the dangers of the resurgent populism enabled by Trump’s victory and work wherever we can to counter it and the fascist narratives it promotes.

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On October 31, The federal government’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism, Deborah Lyons, released a handbook guide on the enacting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. Far from a Halloween prank, this ghoulish handbook serves to suppress the growing movement for Palestinian liberation in Canada under the guise of protecting against antisemitism and honouring the holocaust. Yet under this handbook, myself and many other members of the Jewish community are at risk of serious consequences for our critiques of Israel. The handbook not only fails to protect Canadian Jews against antisemitism, but actually further serves to isolate and exceptionalize Jewish communities.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance is a inter-governmental organization formed in 1998 for the purpose of remembering the holocaust. Particularly as the grandchild of a holocaust survivor, I think this is a noble and unproblematic goal. As part of fulfilling this goal, the IHRA proposed the following working definition of antisemitism in 2016: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

In and of itself, the definition is also quite innocuous. But in its examples of what might constitute antisemitism, this definition suddenly equates critique of Israel with antisemitism. Because of these examples, groups like Independent Jewish Voices and Centre for Justice and Peace in the Middle East have fought this definition’s adoption in Canada for many years. 

In addition to challenging the equation of antizionism with antisemitism, this federal handbook suggests that Jews in Canada are somehow special and entitled to different protections than any other identity group in Canada. While Canada has an anti-racism strategy, there is no special envoy for anti-Indigenous racism and no handbook on definitions of anti-Black racism. Canada has appointed a Special Representative on combatting Islamophobia, yet her webpage features no definitions, handbooks, or statements.

The handbook’s forward notes, “Antisemitism is described as the world’s “oldest hatred,” having existed in various forms for thousands of years. It is also known as the “canary in the coal-mine” for all forms of hatred and intolerance. In other words, antisemitism often leads to and intersects with other forms of prejudice and hate.” At a time when more and more Canadian Jews are calling for safety through solidarity and combatting all forms of white supremacy and fascism, Canada has instead declared us the chosen people.

Despite purporting to end “the world’s oldest hatred”, this handbook harms Jews by conflating Jewish people and the State of Israel. With Israel committing a genocide in Gaza for nearly 400 days, associating me with this maniacal regime put me at greater risk of experiencing harm in a society where people are rightly very upset at our government’s inaction. As many of us in the Jewish community have shouted that Israel does not speak for us, the handbook assumes all Jews must think the same way about the most controversial issue in our contemporary history.

As though telling me what to think and claiming I love genocidal countries was not bad enough, this handbook seeks to criminalize and punish me and every other member of Jews Say No to Genocide. The name of our group alone violates the IHRA definition and could be deemed an antisemitic hate group. This definition also calls me antisemitic for describing how my family’s experience of a holocaust has prompted me to not want to commit one myself. Indeed, it is no far stretch under the IHRA to claim rabble is a hotbed of antisemitism for publishing this piece. These claims of antisemitism against anti-Zionist Jews helps de-legitimize their Jewish identity in public discourse to preserve the façade of monolithic Jewish opinion. To me, that seems far more antisemitic than me saying the phrase ‘never again’ at a Palestine rally.

As repression against the Palestinian liberation movement in Canada continues to intensify, this handbook serves as yet another tool for curtailing our right to protest and speak out against the atrocities Israel is committing. As charges from the past year against protestors in Toronto are being dropped, the state is seeking new and creative ways to criminalize Palestinian solidarity. Hiding behind the same excuse used to found the State of Israel, the IHRA definition of antisemitism and the newly released handbook are merely another tool for distraction and repression.

Over a year into what many are calling a second nakba (Arabic for catastrophe), the public is no longer willing to take these claims of antisemitism at face value and cease their criticism of Israel. For those of us actually seeking to build safety for members of the Jewish community here in Canada, we must stand against this handbook and its implementation. We must demand a Special Envoy at Antisemitism that considers all members of the Jewish community and seeks to fight all forms of oppression.

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In 2018, the Tommy Douglas Institute at George Brown College in Toronto welcomed then Senator and former head of the Truth and Reconciliation of Canada, the Honourable Murray Sinclair as its keynote speaker.

Through his poignant address about the impacts of Canada’s colonial history and the residential school system on the lives of Indigenous Peoples and the meaning of reconciliation, we experienced first-hand the brilliance, integrity, kindness and humour of this truly remarkable individual.

The Honourable Murray Sinclair passed away on the morning of November 4, 2024.

In his memory, we bring you his 2018 keynote address on Community, Education, Change: Indigenous Ways of Knowing.

Reflecting on reconciliation, Sinclair said:

“Reconciliation is a process which is building. It’s not a spectator sport. It involves everybody. And everybody is implicated in it .. No neutrality exists here. .. And understanding it is part of the educational process. And understanding the implications it has for you is part of the challenge that we also need to face. And all of that has to do with knowledge. All of that has to do with dialogue as well, and developing consensus and agreement about where we’re going to go as a country… We have to talk about what kind of relationship we’re going to have going forward. . And that means we have to think differently. We have to think better. ”

rabble.ca had previously shared Sinclair’s keynote address here.

About today’s speaker:

The Honourable Murray Sinclair served the justice system in Manitoba for over 25 years. He was the first Indigenous Judge appointed in Manitoba and Canada’s second.

Sinclair was Co-Chair of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry in Manitoba and Chief Commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). As head of the TRC, he participated in hundreds of hearings across Canada, culminating in the issuance of the TRC’s final report in 2015 and its 94 Calls to Action. He also oversaw an active multi-million dollar fundraising program to support various TRC events and activities.

Over the years, Sinclair has been invited to speak throughout Canada, the United States and internationally, including the Cambridge Lectures for members of the Judiciary of various Commonwealth Courts in England.

He served as an adjunct professor of law at the University of Manitoba. In 2021, Sinclair was appointed 15th Chancellor of Queen’s University, later becoming Chancellor Emeritus and Special Advisor to the Principal on Reconciliation of Queen’s University in 2024.

Sinclair has received numerous awards and honours, including the National Aboriginal Achievement Award, The Mahatma Gandhi Prize for Peace, the Mandela Award, the Manitoba Bar Association’s Equality Award and its Distinguished Service Award, Canada’s World Peace Prize, and the Meritorius Service Cross. He has also received honorary doctorates and degrees from universities across Canada.

Sinclair was appointed to the Canadian Senate on April 2, 2016 where he served as a Senator for five years. In 2022 Murray Sinclair was appointed a member of the Order of Canada and the Order of Manitoba in 2024.

Most recently Sinclair published his memoir, Who We Are: Four Questions for a Life and a Nation.

The Honourable Murray Sinclair passed away peacefully and surrounded by his loved ones on November 4th, 2024.

In lieu of flowers, his family requests that donations be made to the Murray Sinclair Memorial Fund at the Winnipeg Foundation.

About this series

Transcript of this episode can be accessed at georgebrown.ca/TommyDouglasInstitute or here.

Image: The Honourable Murray Sinclair / Used with permission.

Music: Ang Kahora. Lynne, Bjorn. Rights Purchased.

Intro Voices: Ashley Booth (Podcast Announcer); Bob Luker (Tommy)

Courage My Friends Podcast Organizing Committee: Chandra Budhu, Ashley Booth, Resh Budhu.

Produced by: Resh Budhu, Tommy Douglas Institute and Breanne Doyle, rabble.ca.

Original Editing and Recording by: Victoria Fenner and Emily Parr

Host: Resh Budhu.

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In 2011, the David Suzuki Foundation and the Pembina Institute released a report analyzing whether “natural” gas could be considered a “bridging fuel” during the necessary transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. It concluded that Canada should focus on developing more renewable energy, not fossil fuels, including gas. Yet, after many years, as prices for renewable energy drop and technologies continue to improve, some are still touting fossil gas as a “bridge fuel” — or even a climate solution.

A couple of new reports, including one prepared for the David Suzuki Foundation, show that fossil gas is actually a costly bridge to more pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

Since 2011, we’ve learned more about fossil gas problems, especially considering that most is now obtained from “unconventional” reserves. That means hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for shale gas, in which difficult-to-extract gas is released and brought to the surface by pumping massive amounts of pressurized liquids and chemicals into the ground to break up rock and rock formations. It’s a relatively expensive process and uses enormous amounts of water.

One new report finds not only that fossil gas isn’t an adequate “bridge fuel” but that exported gas also has a greater climate impact than coal over a 20-year period. Production and liquefying shale gas to make liquefied natural gas, or LNG, uses a lot of energy. The gas is mostly methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over the short term. Leaks, deliberate venting and incomplete combustion during extraction, production and transport can cause significant climate impacts. Studies, including some by the David Suzuki Foundation, have found that methane leaks are far higher than industry and governments estimate.

The Cornell University report, published in Energy Science & Engineering, found that burning the gas accounts for 34 per cent of its greenhouse gas footprint, while “upstream and midstream” methane emissions make up 38 per cent. Including the energy required to produce LNG brings it to 47 per cent. The liquefaction process and tanker transport add to the total. The global warming potential of LNG as a fuel is 33 per cent greater than that of coal over a 20-year period (and is still equal to or greater than coal over a 100-year period), the report concludes.

“To think we should be shipping around this gas as a climate solution is just plain wrong,” report author Robert Howarth, an environmental scientist, told the Guardian. “It’s greenwashing from oil and gas companies that has severely underestimated the emissions from this type of energy.”

Focusing on timelines through the lens of election cycles, unimaginative politicians often see gas production as a quick and easy economic boost, and so they buy into industry propaganda and greenwashing. That’s led to support and subsidies to propel a possible LNG-for-export boom in British Columbia.

A new report from Carbon Tracker with the David Suzuki Foundation and the Pembina Institute shows that’s not a viable solution. “Turning Tides: The economic risks of B.C.’s LNG expansion in a changing energy market” finds that continuing and expanding B.C.’s LNG-for-export industry is a risky investment. The International Energy Agency reports that LNG export capacity will exceed demand, which will “depress international gas prices and set the stage for fierce competition between suppliers.”

Whether the transition is fast or slow, returns will be minimal. As for global markets, large volumes can be supplied at lower prices from producers including Qatar, Australia and Mozambique. Asian markets are uncertain and appear to be contracting. That means the four LNG terminals in B.C. waiting for investment decisions will likely not be able to compete with lower-cost suppliers on global markets.

No matter how hard the fossil fuel industry and its supporters try to keep their destructive, outdated industry alive, it’s time to face reality. Fracking for more climate-altering gas is not a solution, for the climate or economy. We have cheaper, cleaner and healthier ways to produce energy. We also need to redouble efforts to improve energy efficiency, doing more with less and saving money in the process. There’s no room for more fossil fuel development — whether it’s coal, oil or gas — on a rapidly overheating planet.

It’s time to leave all fossil fuels in the ground — including gas!

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with David Suzuki Foundation Senior Writer and Editor Ian Hanington.

Learn more at davidsuzuki.org.

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With its surprise decision to cashier the entire board and the top executive of the supposedly independent Alberta Investment Management Corp., we see once again that the United Conservative Party (UCP) is determined to control everything, everywhere, all at once. 

And if you’re an Albertan, that includes your retirement savings in the Canada Pension Plan Investment Fund.

Indeed, we can be certain this shocking announcement has something to do with that scheme, because chronic underperformance by AIMCo, as the provincial Crown investment corporation is commonly known, has been a frequent target of critics of the UCP’s planned pension grab. 

Under the headline “Restoring confidence in AIMCo,” the government said in a terse and unexpected news release yesterday that “after years of AIMCo consistently failing to meet its mandated benchmark returns, the Minister of Finance will be making changes to restore confidence in Alberta’s investment agency.”

But why now?

The release complained about a 96-per-cent increase in management fees at AIMCo between 2019 and 2023 and a 29-per-cent increase in the number of employees while the Crown corporation managed a smaller percentage of funds internally – although the news release made no effort to explain exactly what that last point meant. 

“Alberta’s government has decided to reset the investment corporation’s focus,” the news release said mildly. “All board appointments have been rescinded and a new board will be established after a permanent chair is named.” That, according to the release, is supposed to take place within 30 days. 

“In the interim, President of Treasury Board and Minister of Finance Nate Horner has been appointed the sole director and chair for AIMCo, effective immediately” – which is not really reassuring for a supposedly arm’s length company managing $169 billion in pension investments. 

Notwithstanding the 30-day promise, a cabinet order set Horner’s term as chair of the AIMCo Board to run until the end of September 2025. 

Accusing the UCP of wanting to control everything, everywhere, all at once was a clever tribute to the 2022 comedy-drama movie of the same name first used by NDP Opposition Justice Critic Irfan Sabir last spring to describe the UCP fiddling with its own fixed election date law to give itself a little extra time in office. 

“Danielle Smith said during the election that Albertans were her bosses,” added Rachel Notley, who was leader of the Opposition at the time, “but it is clear now that she intends to be the boss of everyone.”

Those lines could certainly be applied with similar effect to yesterday’s bombshell. 

A comprehensive article in The Globe and Mail – which, sorry, is located behind a paywall – revealed that in addition to the 10 board members referred to but not named in the news release, Chief Executive Officer Evan Siddall and three other unnamed executives had been canned. 

Siddall, who was appointed CEO on July 1, 2021, with a mandate to turn the company around after its big trading losses during the pandemic, had been the long-time president and CEO of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Judging from his Wikipedia biography, he seems to have attended meetings of the World Economic Forum and the Bilderberg Group, which must have made certain MAGA-minded members of the UCP Caucus feel as if they had ants in their pants. 

Or maybe it was Siddall’s decision to let Alberta’s teachers have a limited role in the management of their pension fund, which had been grabbed by the UCP in 2019 and handed over to AIMCo amid great controversy. Indeed, some of those additional pension employees the government was complaining about likely came from the management arm of the teachers’ pension fund. 

Whatever happened, NDP Finance Critic Court Ellingson told the Globe that Siddall and some of his colleagues showed up at a public meeting of the standing committee on the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund on Wednesday and there was no hint anything was afoot. 

Ellingson said in a statement sent to media yesterday afternoon that firing the entire board and the CEO is too drastic a measure for this just to be about AIMCo salaries “when this government passed legislation to remove the caps on salaries for board members.”

“The premier herself appointed some of these AIMCo directors,” he said. “The finance minister himself said this spring that AIMCo was doing a good job.”

He also argued that even in a temporary role, having a partisan politician at the helm of a supposedly arm’s length agency investing 375,000 Albertans’ retirement savings is troubling.

It certainly seems to have unsettled some in investment circles. The Globe quoted the director emeritus of the International Centre for Pension Management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, Keith Ambachtsheer, saying the move “should be construed as a government takeover of (an) asset pool that belongs to the people of Alberta.”

Ellingson argued “AIMCo’s poor returns are a clear reflection of the UCP’s incompetence.”

“We have raised concerns about their poor returns for years, and we’ve noted AIMCo’s returns have been below that of the Canada Pension Plan,” he said. “Until now, the UCP even proposed using AIMCo to manage the proposed Alberta Pension Plan. Any such APP scheme should now be completely off the table.”

Count on it, though, the opposite is true. If this indicates anything, it’s that the UCP still covets the CPP’s investment funds and saw AIMCo’s returns as an impediment to that ambition. Nor does the party value independent minds in positions of oversight. 

Interestingly, another Order in Council published yesterday “approves the incorporation of a Provincial corporation for the purpose of managing and investing all or a portion of Crown assets.”

The post Firing of AIMCo CEO and entire board another sign UCP is determined to control everything appeared first on rabble.ca.

Whoever forms the next Canadian government, no matter how sympathetic they may be right now to next January’s MAGA Restoration south of the Medicine Line, the next four years at least are bound to be interesting ones for Canada. 

Interesting, that is, in the sense of that famous folk curse.

This also goes for provincial governments like Alberta’s, whose leaders may think that with Donald J. Trump in the White House again it’ll be smooth sailing for oilsands bitumen all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

Alas for all of us, the next president of the United States, just as when he was the next to last president of the United States, is a fellow who believes that every game must be a zero-sum game, with a clear winner and a clear loser. Every. Single. Time. 

And so Canada, and Alberta too, are sure to be cast in the role of losers, even if Trump didn’t mean that stuff he said about bitumen on Super Tuesday last spring. “I call it tar. It’s not oil. It’s terrible. … So for all of the environmentalists, you ought to look at that because all of that tar is going right up into the atmosphere!”

Yes, Alberta may finally get its Keystone XL Pipeline, but we’ll have to pay for it. Again. 

As for that billion and a half Loonies former Alberta premier Jason Kenney gave away to get it built almost five years ago, you can count on it to stay gone. Remember where you heard it first. 

Anyway, as the author of The Art of the Deal no doubt understands better than most, fanboys and girls who just can’t walk away from a deal make lousy negotiators. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and the United Conservative Party are straining like greyhounds in the slips to prove that all over again. 

We may have the longest undefended border on earth, but we can no longer assume for at least as long as Trump is president that the United States will automatically be our ally. Both our increasingly unpopular Liberal prime minister and his Conservative rival will try to persuade us that they have the secret sauce required to deal with Trump’s next administration. Neither is likely to have gotten that right. 

We can probably blame former PM Brian Mulroney for tying our economy so closely to the United States 36 years ago, and we will now have to live with the consequences of a relationship gone bad that critics of the deal warned us about. 

Oh well. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and, in truth, there might not have been much alternative even then. Why speak ill of the dead? Mulroney may have bought us some time. Too bad we didn’t use it very well. 

Trump’s planned 10-per-cent tariff may not do much good for the U.S. economy either, but it’s bound to do more harm to ours. That may just be fine with Trump’s supporters Stateside, as long as someone else is hurt even more than they are. Indeed, understanding that is the key to understanding Trump’s unlikely and undeniable success. 

Where there were once many guardrails to keep Trump from running off the road, now there will be none for the life of what numerous commentators are calling Trump 2.0.

So let’s just say Stephen Harper’s oft-reviled 2012 trade deal with China, despite the current brouhaha about foreign interference in Canadian elections and the former prime minister’s recent endorsement of Trump, may soon start to look wise and far-sighted!

I know, dear readers, that some of you don’t like it when I venture into geopolitics, but here are a few more hot-take predictions about the second Trump presidency in the aftermath of yesterday’s US presidential election.

First, there’s no need to do an Andrei Amalrik and wonder if the United States can survive another 15 years. It will certainly celebrate its 250th anniversary in 2026, despite the dire warnings made by Trump’s opponents in the leadup to Tuesday’s vote, and will likely last another half-century or so without changes to its borders. But there is no way Trump is going to make it great again. The U.S. is in an irreversible post-imperial slide, and we are living in a multi-polar world again. 

If you doubt me, watch what happens under the next Trump presidency to the carefully curated international agreements and institutions that did make America great. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for example, sure feels like it’s done for. Now, a great bureaucracy like NATO will never just disappear – but it may have to turn its headquarters in Brussels into a tourist attraction to justify its existence. The Wittelsbach monarchy of Bavaria is long gone, too, but you can still visit their Residenz in Munich. 

Letting the United States blow up the Nord Stream pipeline in 2022 is going to start to look like a hell of a mistake to Europe, and especially Germany, now that Old Unreliable is back in the White House. Will the Europeans take control of their own fate now that the U.S.A. is folding into itself, or will they fall to squabbling amongst one another like 1914? My crystal ball is cloudy, but change there will have to be over there if there is no change over here. 

How long will it take for the AUKUS nuclear sub scheme to fall apart, by most accounts a spectacularly terrible deal for Australia, now that the Biden Presidency is fading into history? Trump is no friend of China, but in addition to the costs and loss of Australian sovereignty, one imagines that the Aussies will realize that in a crunch it may be more dangerous to be America’s friend than it is to be its enemy, just as Henry Kissinger famously pointed out. (Or didn’t. The provenance of almost all great lines is disputed.) We’ll soon realize we were lucky not to get caught in that expensive trap. 

International courts? Currency trading deals? Your Visa card that works in Europe? All these things were designed in part to ensure the economic primacy of America and the status of the Greenback as the world’s reserve currency. Under Trump, all are likely to be at risk. 

And in what form will Trumpism survive when the undeniably charismatic Trump fails from dementia or dyspepsia before the end of his second term? In that event – quite likely, it is said here – his automatic replacement is scheduled to be the utterly uncharismatic J.D. Vance. Or will Ivanka step forward to be America’s first electable female president? 

One final prediction, hordes of disillusioned progressives are not likely to stream across the border to escape Trump, despite pre-election warnings, but enough well-heeled liberal Americans will buy a pied- à-terre in one of Canada’s nicer coastal cities to keep the housing and cost-of-living crisis here at a boil. They’ll come not just because the next president is an autocrat, or even a fascist, but because he’s an embarrassment.

The post Some post-election-night hot takes on the coming MAGA Restoration appeared first on rabble.ca.

As November 11 approaches, it can be disheartening to see the rise of militarism, war and genocide across the world. The annual White Poppy Campaign aims to recognize all of the victims of war, not just those who fought in uniform, but civilians and innocent bystanders as well.

Since 2009, Vancouver Peace Poppies have actively worked to promote the message of the white poppy in their community.

Teresa Gagné is a co-founder of Vancouver Peace Poppies. In an interview with rabble.ca, she explained that rather than being a symbol of remembrance, the white poppy symbolizes the need forpeace.

“Remembering is important, but it’s not enough,” said Gagné. “If we’re gonna stop and take a day to remember the costs and consequences of war, we gotta stop and be willing to remember all the costs and consequences, not just the ones that make us feel good about ourselves and our country.”

Remembering is not enough

After World War I, the Red Poppy Campaign was created to remember the allied soldiers who lost their lives in that conflict. The campaign was later extended to remember Canadians and their allies who fought in any conflict.

War has changed however. Gagné explained that in World War I, only about 10 per cent of the casualties in that war were civilians.

As we’re seeing in modern day conflicts in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine, the number of civilian victims of war has grown significantly in the last century.

The White Poppy campaign is to remember all victims of war and to truly drive home the message of: Never Again.

“All those comfortable concepts like valor and patriotism and sacrifice, we gotta be willing to remember also the uncomfortable things, the wasted lives, excessive force, devastation, social trauma, and all those ruined lives. And we also think it’s important to look at the effect of war on the environment,” said Gagné.

The environmental cost of war

War is an environmental disaster. Not only does war destroy and scar beautiful natural landscapes, it also emits a lot of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

According to a report by Scientists for Global Responsibility, in 2022, all of the world’s militaries combined accounted for 5.5 per cent of global emissions for that year. If the world’s militaries were a state, they would be the world’s fourth largest greenhouse gas emitter.

The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) monitors the impacts that war has on the environment. It has found that the war in Ukraine has led to a toxic poisoning of the ecosystems of that country. Not only has the landscape been devastated thanks to munitions that have been expended, but also due to spilled oil from destroyed refineries as well as other toxic chemicals and radiation released into the environment thanks to damage to nuclear installations and other facilities.

“The mapping and initial screening of environmental hazards only serves to confirm that war is quite literally toxic,” said UNEP executive director Inger Andersen in a UNEP report. “The first priority is for this senseless destruction to end now. The environment is about people: it’s about livelihoods, public health, clean air and water, and basic food systems. It’s about a safe future for Ukrainians and their neighbours, and further damage must not be done.”

Peace movement continues to grow

When Vancouver Peace Poppies began in 2009, they started with distributing just 500 white poppies.

Now, 15 years later, Gagné says they are distributing an average of 5,000 white poppies every year.

“It’s made a difference. It really opened up the discussion. When we started, it was quite controversial, and I won’t say that there’s no controversy anymore, but most people are quite accepting of the idea that we need to also be willing to count the civilian costs and not just remember the military,” said Gagné.

There particularly has been a growing interest in schools, where teachers have approached Vancouver Peace Poppies about having white poppies for their students, so that they can wear a white poppy alongside their red one if they choose.

Vancouver Peace Poppies will be holding a white poppy ceremony on Monday, November 11 from 2pm to 3:30pm Pacific time at the Vancouver Unitarian Centre.

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Well, it’s official: Donald Trump will be the 47th president of the United States.

So… now what?

For those in and out of the States, the news comes as a bit of a shock. Despite the presidential race being a tight one, particularly over the past few weeks, there were those who held out hope that Kamala Harris and her “new way forward” was going to win out.

But no. Instead, the convicted felon with a history of sexual abuse toward women won.

This week on rabble radio, rabble editor Nick Seebruch joins parliamentary reporter Karl Nerenberg by phone from France to discuss what Trump’s win means for America, Canada and beyond.

Karl Nerenberg is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster and filmmaker, working in both English and French languages. He is rabble’s senior parliamentary reporter.

If you like the show please consider subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube or wherever you find your podcasts. And please, rate, review, share rabble radio with your friends — it takes two seconds to support independent media like rabble. Follow us on social media across channels @rabbleca. 

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The United States has elected a fascist president with unchecked powers. What the effect on Canada will be. An interview with the president of Unifor, Lana Payne. The resistance against fascism in the US. The LabourStart Report about union events. And singing: ‘All You Fascists Bound to Lose’.

RadioLabour is the international labour movement’s radio service. It reports on labour union events around the world with a focus on unions in the developing world. It partners with rabble to provide coverage of news of interest to Canadian workers.

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You couldn’t make this up, but you don’t have to because it’s happening. Sylvan Adams, a looney Zionist billionaire, unknown outside a circle of funders of McGill University in Montreal, thinks he can reunite Pink Floyd to promote and celebrate the genocide of the Palestinian people. Hmmm?

In a recent interview with The Canadian Jewish News, Mr. Adams, who in the past has paid both the pop singer Madonna and the Argentine National football team to whitewash Israeli apartheid, says he’s trying to have Pink Floyd reform to play a concert in Israel at one of the kibitzes affected by the attack on October 7, 2023. Mr. Adams is quick to avow that this plan would not include the “Nutball” Roger Waters. Well at least you got that right dopey.

Mr. Adams revealed his “fantasy” to reunite Pink Floyd, (AKA Nick Mason and David Gilmour) would be part of a concerted campaign to attack conscientious students at McGill University who are protesting the genocide of the Palestinian people. MrAdams, who has had business cards printed describing himself as “Ambassador for Israel”, is demanding that McGill expel all the students opposing genocide. Already, McGill forced the student union to suspend the student group Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights and sought court injunctions to ban all protests on campus, but this isn’t enough for this heir to a fortune. Adams wants to destroy these conscientious young people’s prospects. Labeling student activists “antisemite fashionistas”, Mr. Adams claims they are funded by Iran, Qatar and China, countries who he claims have spent “trillions of dollars” to “infiltrate campuses”.

In response to Mr. Adams’ authoritarian pressure, I’ve signed a letter to McGill president Deep Saini, which the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute and Just Peace Advocates have turned into an e-mail campaign. Please support the students who have been organizing on their campus to promote international human rights and justice for Palestinians under international law.

In March 2022 seventy-one percent of McGill undergraduates voted to boycott “corporations and institutions complicit in settler-colonial apartheid against Palestinians.” In response the administration threatened to defund the student union if it ratified the vote. Even more impressive, last November 2023 78.7 per cent of undergraduates called on the administration to sever ties with “any corporations, institutions or individuals complicit in genocide, settler-colonialism, apartheid, or ethnic cleansing against Palestinians.” Still, the McGill administration refused to listen. So, now students have rallied, some have gone on hunger strike and together they organized a months-long encampment to push for divestment.

Increasingly the administration and Zionist donors are repressing student protesters. In his, ‘it would be funny if it weren’t so desperately sad,’ interview Mr. Adams proudly identifies a group of wealthy Zionist donors leveraging their wealth to suppress the McGill students’ brave opposition to Israel’s genocidal policy in all the occupied territories.

Mr. Adams also boasts that he and President Deep Saini “agree on everything.” Both men have demonstrated total indifference to Palestinian suffering. Over the past year in Gaza Israel has destroyed everything including almost all the hospitals, and schools and universities, everything then can in an onslaught that’s killed over 100,000. The Lancet medical journal recently reported that the situation in Gaza vis a vis lack of healthcare is so dire that pregnancy is increasingly becoming a death sentence for both mother and child. Yeah let that sink in.

Mr. Adams does not reserve his capacity for racism for his anti-Palestinian bigotry. In the interview he disparages the former Black woman president of Harvard as “incompetent” and a “DEI hire”. He rants about Muslim and Arab immigrants seeking “Sharia law” who fail to “assimilate” to Canadian society. Mr. Adams concludes that “all Western countries are doomed” because Muslim immigrants “are after conquest”.

Mr. Adams, like most racist supremacists, is most likely a coward. It’s a penny to a pound, this “self-described “ambassador for Israel” wouldn’t have the gall or the balls to debate either of these issues in public,

1. Whether Israel is committing genocide?

2. Whether wealthy donors should be allowed to dictate university policy?

I suspect Mr. Adams will demur, preferring to work behind the scenes with his wealthy friends to press McGill’s president to expel these courageous students for opposing this monstrous genocide.

Also, I wish him the worst possible luck in the world in his attempts to suborn the name Pink Floyd, a name I am proud to have helped create, to celebrate the obscene horrors that the state he is so proud to represent has wreaked upon this our hapless world. 

Sincerely,

Roger Waters

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Inflation fell to a rate of 1.6 per cent in September. As a result, the Bank of Canada has been lowering its interest rates. Federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland celebrated cooling inflation and decreasing interest rates on Wednesday, noting that wages in Canada have outpaced inflation for 20 months.

However, for many working Canadians, recent news of a recovering economy has had little bearing on their daily lives. 

Aaron Westaway, a retail worker living in Ottawa, said changes in inflation rates don’t mean much to him, despite the hopeful headlines he encounters. Westaway had to make major lifestyle changes to accommodate the record high prices in 2022, and the cooling economy has yet to bring his life back to normal.

Every month, after spending half his income on rent, Westaway must make a few hundred dollars last. Grocery prices hit him hard, so he has found other ways to save money. To save on transit costs, he walks for more than an hour between his house and his job.

“There’s definitely a fitness component to it, but the larger component is that it saves on money,” Westaway said.

The rich got richer

An early October report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) showed the purchasing power of Canada’s wealthiest households increased in 2023. Higher interest rates mean higher payments on loans, but it also means higher investment income.

A report from Statistics Canada, released in the same week, showed the gap in disposable income between Canada’s richest and poorest has become the highest it has ever been since the agency began collecting this data in 1999. Income from financial assets has led the wealth gap to widen as well.

D.T. Cochrane, senior economist at the Canadian Labour Congress, has previously told rabble.ca that interest rate hikes have led to weakening of the labour market from a worker’s perspective. He said he has been tracking several indicators which signal, to him, that recent interest rate hikes could ultimately do more harm than good. In September, there was a year over year increase in the number of people working part-time despite looking for full-time work. In addition, the youth unemployment rate sat at 13 per cent in September, a rate higher than it was at the same time last year.

“We all benefit when the total amount of labor power that’s on offer is being put to use,” he said. “There is a ton of work that needs to be done[…] We should be making sure that every single person who is ready, willing and able to offer their labor power is allowed to do so. We should be making use of all labor power to accomplish the socially necessary things we know need to be achieved.”

The Bank of Canada has taken too much credit for cooling inflation and not enough responsibility for unemployment, according to Mario Seccareccia, professor emeritus from the University of Ottawa’s economics department. He co-wrote a primer in 2020 that explored whether interest rates effectively target inflation. He and his co-author found that changes in interest rates directly impact income inequality and only indirectly affect inflation.

“It cannot have a direct impact on the inflation rate, because it’s people that are setting prices. There are all kinds of decisions taken by business firms in how they set these prices,” Seccareccia said. “To give you a simple example, the fact that the Bank of Canada raises interest doesn’t mean that the price of oil internationally is going to change as a result. There’s no connection whatsoever.”

Higher interest rates didn’t cool inflation

Jim Stanford, economist and director of the Centre for Future Work, wrote in 2023 that rising interest rates did affect inflation, just not in the way the Bank of Canada intended. He noted that between March and April 2023, there was a small uptick in inflation. The official Statistics Canada announcement said this uptick was mainly caused by rent prices and mortgage interest costs. Stanford said both of these factors are direct consequences of higher interest rates.

Seccareccia said interest rate hikes discourage spending, which is what the Bank of Canada intends. The nasty side-effect, however, is growth will slow significantly and unemployment will rise. This can eventually lead to a recession. Seccareccia said he knows for a fact this can happen because he witnessed it when the American central bank raised interest rates in the early 1980s. In 1981 and 1982, there was a subsequent recession.

“It’s like starving the patient to cure the disease,” he said.

The way to directly target inflation and increase consumer spending, he said, is to make full employment a priority. Full employment is difficult to pull off in the current situation because the Bank of Canada’s mandate is laser-focused on inflation targets.

Before the pandemic, Seccareccia signed onto a petition calling for the bank’s mandate to be amended to include other economic goals such as full employment.

“I’m old enough. I could tell you right now, I remember when Louis Rasminsky Fonds was the Bank of Canada governor from 1962 to 1973,” Seccateccoa said. “He was not afraid to pronounce the words full employment.”

The Bank of Canada has indeed shown their primary concern is inflation. When the inflation rate hit a record high of eight per cent in the summer of 2022, the Bank of Canada raised its interest rates ten times between then and today.

 “I’d emphasize that inflation control is the Bank’s primary mandate,” said Alex Paterson, a spokesperson for the Bank of Canada, “The Bank has long said that a healthy labour market and low, stable and predictable inflation go hand in hand.”  

He pointed to comments made by the bank’s governor, Tiff Macklem, in June. Macklem said labour market adjustments are never evenly distributed and monetary policy cannot target specific parts of it. He acknowledged the growing slack in the labour market during a Q&A in September. Now that inflation is closer to target, Macklem said the bank is hoping to see growth speed up.

Carolyn Rogers,  the senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, said in a speech on Wednesday that the last five years have been eventful. There has been a pandemic, the sharpest economic downturn in a century, followed by the fastest recovery on record, and a big spike in inflation, she said. 

“Lately, it’s been good to see inflation back to our 2 per cent target,” Rogers said. “Monetary policy worked, not painlessly, but it did get inflation under control without creating the sharp economic downturn that many feared.” 

Westaway, who sees himself as an average working Canadian, said he is not too interested in the debate around what should be included in the Bank of Canada’s mandate. What he wants is for his purchasing power to increase if inflation is down.  

“My main concern is I’m not able to save money,” Westaway said. “I’ve had multiple times in the last year where I’ve basically just had rice up until I get my next paycheck.”

As the winter months approach, Westaway said he knows he cannot keep walking to and from work for hours. Transit fares in the winter often cause him grief. He said he hopes he can see life become more affordable, until then, celebrations of cooling inflation rates are merely words.

“I’m hearing this mainly from political pundits or experts,” he said. “I want to see it really translate into my everyday life.”

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