Canadian News

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.

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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.”

The post Bank of Canada inflation policies widened wealth gap appeared first on rabble.ca.

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Over 33,000 Boeing workers in Washington state and Oregon,  represented by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM local 751 and W 24) have been on strike against the aerospace giant since early September. Despite US government pressure to settle the dispute and loudly voiced concerns from employer class spokesmen about the strike’s impact on supply chains and the larger US economy, the Boeing workers voted by a 64 per cent majority to reject the company’s latest offer. In an example of pro-business pressure for a settlement, the Republican governors of Missouri, Montana and Utah (Governors Mike Parson, Greg Gianforte and Spencer Cox), wrote a letter urging Boeing and the union to end the strike, expressing their concern as to the “far-reaching” impact on their states and on Boeing’s supply chain.

And Ken Herbert, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets, after the contract rejection told investors that “the clock is ticking for Boeing.”

“The potential impact of the strike on the supply chain is becoming a greater concern,” he wrote.

While discussions between the union and employer reopened on October 29, Boeing workers seem determined to hold on until they get a settlement that restores pension entitlement lost in a hated giveaway contract a decade ago. They are also calling for other contract  improvements. Rank and file militants at Boeing are leading the fight and have called for international solidarity.

At a meeting held on October 27, 175 workers from Canada, Australia, Germany, Britain, Brazil, and from across the US, called on workers world-wide to support the Boeing strike.

The issues in this dispute have profound implications for Canadian workers. Daniel, a Canadian postal  worker who attended, told the meeting: “The fact remains that our unions are aligned in a corporate tripartite alliance with the government and with management. The cowardly union bureaucrats, IAM and CUPW (Canadian Union of Postal Workers)  included, would never dream of defying strike-breaking legislation, which would require the broad mobilization of workers across industry and across geographic lines, such as we are doing right now.”

Andy Niklaus, a bus driver from Germany, told the Boeing workers: “I would like to start by expressing our unreserved solidarity and support for your strike. We are very impressed that for the second time you have rejected, by a large majority, the miserable collective agreement drawn up and signed by the bureaucrats of the IAM. We must fight back all attacks on wages, working conditions and pensions. And we have to defend all jobs,” he said, noting that more than 120,000 jobs in the German auto sector were threatened.

The Boeing workers will need all the support they can muster. Boeing spokespeople have insisted that there is “no scenario” in which the company will restore the pension entitlements given away by union leadership a decade ago, and the company has already enacted a brutal  retaliation against strikers by cutting their health care coverage.

And the business press is buzzing with alarmist claims that the strike will cripple Boeing, despite the fact that wages and benefits for workers at the aerospace giant only represent five per cent of the company’s production costs, and despite the fact that Boeing’s current troubles have more to do with management’s cost cutting measures and the resulting disastrous safety issues with Boeing planes than with what the company pays its workers.

Apart from the general need for international solidarity when workers square off against big companies with global reach , there are ways that the strike at the aerospace multinational engages issues that are vital for Canadian workers. It is in our interest to support the Boeing militants, as well as being the right thing to do ethically. Although the IAM’s international membership of 600,000 workers give it some leverage, real questions exist about how far the union leadership is willing to go to win its stated demands.

For the Boeing workers, restoring the pension plans frozen a decade ago is a key issue, and Canadian workers, too, know what it is like to work without adequate pension protection, in both the public and private sectors. According to the National Association of Federal Retirees: “The percentage of public-sector employees who have DB (defined benefit) plans has declined by about four per cent over the past 20 years while the number of private-sector DB pension plans has dropped from 21.9 per cent in 1997 to 9.2 per cent in 2017, as many employers move toward defined-contribution plans, putting investment risk on employees’ shoulders. Two-thirds of Canadians do not belong to a workplace pension plan at all, and these numbers are not improving. Many argue that governments and public-sector employers should also move away from DB plans, as seen in New Brunswick where the provincial government moved public-sector pensions to “shared-risk” plans. Other provinces, such as Nova Scotia and Manitoba, are considering similar moves.”

Although Canadian levels of unionization are higher than those in the US, and consequently workers here do enjoy more union benefits than workers in the States, our levels of union membership are lower than they used to be and the dire, looming prospect of a Conservative win in the next federal election may well lead to new attacks on unions and the rights Canadian workers have won over the last century. And as the Canadian postal worker quoted above suggests, we cannot always count on union leaders to fight as hard as they should to forestall such attacks and develop fightback tactics. Canadian workers should find ways to support the militants spearheading the Boeing struggle directly by linking to organizations like the Boeing Workers Rank-and-File committee at boeingworkersrfc@gmail.com and by pushing our unions to support the Boeing struggle. We are all in the same boat on both sides of the border, and the employers mean to sink it if they can.

The post Boeing strike has lessons for Canadian labour appeared first on rabble.ca.

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