Canadian News

Charlotte Yates announced that she is stepping down effective immediately.

The future of public transit is just one of several issues Saskatoon's mayor and city council will have to juggle once they are sworn into office.

The University of Ottawa and the union that represents its full-time professors and librarians have scheduled three more days for conciliation in January. Read More

Ontario Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria was asked repeatedly on Thursday about plans Premier Doug Ford had previously indicated were underway to buy Highway 407.

The average asking rent for all residential property types in Canada saw its first annual decrease since July 2021, but it's yet to be seen if the drop will continue.

The first theft happened at 5:11 a.m. on Thursday when Telus and Rogers cable lines were cut in the 33500 block of Huntingdon Road, Abbotsford police said.

The province says the move comes 'after years of AIMCo consistently failing to meet its mandated benchmark returns.' For now, Finance Minister Nate Horner has been appointed the sole director and chair for AIMCo.

The fugitive monkeys are too young and small to carry disease, the testing facility assured local residents.

A Crown prosecutor argued Thursday that Jagmeet Grewal knew he was "a ticking time bomb" when the truck he was driving in Laval five years ago crashed into several vehicles and killed four people. Read More

Travis Green is paid to make the tough decisions. Read More

The death of an Edmonton woman, allegedly at the hands of the man she was trying to leave, has prompted calls for stronger support for victims attempting to flee intimate partner violence and improved judicial systems to rehabilitate repeat offenders. 

An investigation into Le Jardin Unit of the Laval CISSS found that several special-needs youth at the residence were exposed to situations that compromised their security and integrity between March and November 2023. Read More

Provincial police in Hawkesbury are warning residents to be vigilant about a new scam in the area purporting to be from the federal government. Read More

The borough of Pierrefonds-Roxboro is hoping a change at City Hall will revive a project killed by the Plante administration to build an urban boulevard through the western part of the borough. Read More

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

The post Sylvan Adams ‘leave the kids alone’ appeared first on rabble.ca.

Actor Elliot Page and musician Rufus Wainwright were among the stars who honoured 2SLGBTQ+ charities at the inaugural PTP Pink Awards in Toronto Thursday, in the shadow of a U.S. election that has many worried about queer and trans rights.

After Trump’s surprisingly decisive victory this week, many north of the border are asking how this could have happened, among other questions. How will Canada be affected? What parallels are there with the political dynamic here, as we go to the polls next year? How will Prime Minister Justin Trudeau get along with Trump this time? Read More

A provincial court judge says a Manitoba man likely wouldn't have died if proper policy had been followed when he was placed in an RCMP holding cell in The Pas in 2019.

As consolation prizes go, being named the East Division's most outstanding defensive player isn't so bad, Tyrice Beverette admitted. Read More

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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