Rabble

While hunting, chameleon lizards hide in plain sight by changing their colors to blend into their background. That is exactly what Pierre Poilievre has done since the summer of 2023 in his hunt and lust for power. 

Poilievre continues to fool many with his chameleon show and ads pretending to be a legitimate and reasonable politician. In the US the far-right evangelical, Christian nationalists who were instrumental in returning Trump to power, have now achieved their long-term goal and have gained complete power and control over the Republican party and the president. With their abhorrent treatment of women, the 2SLGBTQIA+ community and the transgendered, you may as well call them the American Taliban. 

In order to become leader of the Conservatives Poilievre required the votes and support of the far-right evangelicals here in Canada. The question is, what did Poilievre promise them in order to gain their support? 

Many in Canada are not aware of the danger that is creeping into our country.

It is very important to look at who is endorsing and supporting Poilievre. The      Conservatives have partnered with Action 4 Canada, a right-wing  anti-DEI organization. Poilievre has also been endorsed by Alex Jones, the main far right conspiracy theorist in the US. Alex Jones praised Poilievre, as the “real deal and the new superhero of the right.” To date Poilievre has not rejected or repudiated the endorsement by Alex jones.

Pierre Poilievre has shown an affinity to the far-right, rubbing shoulders with, and getting his picture taken with, the far-right Freedom Convoy demonstrators in Ottawa. This begs the question. Who has Poilievre been in contact with and what groups has he been talking to? Is this the reason why Poilievre has been refusing to get his security clearance? because he doesn’t want anyone to know who he has been in contact with? Certainly, questions for the leader’s debate.

Poilievre, like Ontario Premier Doug Ford, is actively courting the labor vote. Labor needs a serious wakeup call on the threat posed by Poilievre!

It is important to note that Poilievre has repeatedly promised on the record that the first thing he is going to do as prime minister is bring in “right to work” legislation. 

It will take Conservative premiers like Ford, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith about five seconds to bring in right to work legislation provincially if Poilievre does that federally. Workers in US states that have brought in “right to work” legislation have had their wages and benefits slashed. This legislation also greatly affects non-union workers too, lowering the wage and benefits bar. 

Poilievre continues to ape Trump with his “Canada first” and “common sense” slogans. As is his promise to reduce “the bloated bureaucracy.”  

Poilievre has nothing but disdain for reporters who criticize him, calling them “The fake news media.” Poilievre’s plan to dismantle the CBC should alarm everyone. For many in the north CBC radio and TV is their only media source. A properly funded public broadcaster is also critical to our nation’s democratic health. 

Poilievre’s “common sense” cure all for the affordability crisis are tax cuts, cutting red tape (deregulation) and privatization. Completely discredited as the “trickle-down economic theory”. Like Trump, Poilievre’s solution to every problem seems to be a tax cut. “Common sense” is wreaking havoc in the US as it did under premier Mike Harris in Ontario in the 1990’s. There is only one way to pay for tax cuts, slash transfer payments to the provinces who in turn slash funding to healthcare and education. Healthcare privatization is clearly a goal for the Conservatives. their plan is to just leave healthcare up to the provinces. 

“Common sense” is a reverse Robin Hood policy, taking from the people and giving to the rich. 

Poilievre’s plan to deal with the climate crisis is just business as usual. Like Trump and Ford, removing regulations, again cutting red tape that gets in the way of profit making. Just making the climate crisis worse.

It is also important to look at Poilievre’s record and who is supporting him financially. Poilievre was Housing Minister in Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, which allowed 800,000 affordable rental units to be sold off to corporate landlords and developers. Under the Harper Conservatives, the average home price in Canada went up 70 per cent and he refused to do anything about it. Some of Poilievre’s top donors are real estate investors – the same people cranking up rents and fighting rent control across the country.

Democracy is at risk, not just in the US but here too. Democracy is a big issue. Canadians think we are not like Americans. We are much better than them.

 The fact is as human beings we’re are just as vulnerable to lies, misinformation, intolerance and fear as Americans are. As human beings we can also think critically, demanding answers to questions asked of Poilievre here.

Pierre Poilievre’s true colors are very dangerous. 

He must never be elected Prime Minister.

The post Debate questions for Pierre Poilievre appeared first on rabble.ca.

In the 19th century, the spectre haunting Europe was communism, or so Marx argued. In our century, a new spectre is as globalized as the economy, and its name is toxic masculinity. As a filthy, tang-coloured ooze of neo-fascism spreads over the globe, it brings with it a new popularity for online cults of  toxic masculinity, resentful incels, armed militias and leaders who champion a hard bodied, hard hearted version of masculinity, violent and brutal. Looking at you, Trump, Vance, Putin and your minions.

This movement is explicitly racist, anti-feminist, anti-trans and anti-woman, and it poses some important questions. Is almost all masculinity toxic, as some feminist critics might argue? For example, in her pioneering work Sexual Politics, American feminist Kate Millett provides the materials for a  persuasive case for this notion. and Anrea Dworkin provides further support for the case in her books, starting with Woman Hating.

More questions haunt me. What does it mean to be a man in the 21st century? Are all relationships we have as men suffused with competitiveness, misogyny, dread and the threat of violence? And finally, for those of us who live in the worlds of books and ideas, are there any answers to these questions to be found in art and culture?

Let me first say that I don’t  approach these topics with any  pretense of superiority to other men. Like most men who grew up in mid-century America, I was exposed to a lot of bad models and teachings about what it meant to be a real man- teachings from the larger culture and from my own semi-dysfunctional family. A man, I learned from my alcoholic father, drank heavily, disrespected women and took what he wanted, often through manipulation and duplicitous charm. From the culture I learned that a woman who had a lot of sexual partners was a slut, but a man with many sexual adventures was a stud, a player.

While I never really learned to perform mid-century masculinity very persuasively, I did learn the lessons well enough to be heedlessly sexist in my early relationships and subject women in my life to far too much selfish and misogynist behavior. I was not Harvey Weinstein, but I was, too often, a sexist asshole. I have tried over the years to apologize to those women and to make amends, but I have no illusions that gestures erased all the damage. “Walk like a Man” indeed! Feminist women and pro-feminist men helped me face and change these repellant behaviours. I am deeply indebted to them for their criticism and support.

And for another reason, beyond my own flawed behavior, this topic is intensely personal for me. At 26, my sister, Stella Candace Sandborn, was murdered in Sacramento California in 1979, almost certainly by a man performing one of this patriarchal world’s countless acts of femicide. She was most likely targeted simply because she was a woman, and her killer dumped her body, hands bound, underground. It was nearly two years after her disappearance that she was found,-and we were able to take her body home and bury her next to our mother. Can any book  or cultural product speak to such loss and horror, or persuasively link it to a kind of masculinity?

Maybe so. Certainly,  much of the western canon suggests that male bonding and “redemptive” violence are among its core tropes. Even our oldest surviving “novel,” The Epic of Gilgamesh, over 4,000 years old, perhaps history’s first buddy movie avant la lettre, circles agonizingly around these themes. In this version of the road trip narrative, the gods send Enkidu to Uruk to correct Gilgamesh the king’s bad behavior, which includes raping his subjects. In a scene echoed in countless songs, stories, films and novels since, the men bond by fighting each other and go on to travel into the wilderness and kill a monster and clear-cut a sacred forest. Not even the death of his now beloved companion dissuades Gilgamesh from his armed sorties into the world in a search for immortality. In braid, that will be repeated down the millennia, male bonding, mortal dread and violence are bound together like a garrote.

Later,  in Homer’s Iliad, the death of his beloved Patroclus doesn’t persuade Achilles to renounce his glory- seeking adventures at the walls of Troy. In fact, he emerges from the tent where he has been sulking (over a dispute about who owned a captive Trojan woman!) and re-dons the armor that Patroclus wore into battle while he sulked. He seeks vengeance on the Trojan prince who killed his lover. After all, as Dashiell Hammett has his hard-boiled hero Sam Spade muse in The Maltese Falcon, “when your partner is killed, you have to do something.”  Hammett was one of the founding fathers of the hard-boiled American detective fiction genre along with Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain in the early and middle decades of the 20th century. This is a genre that can plausibly be viewed, together with the noir movies it inspired, as an extended meditation on toxic masculinity, misogyny and violence. Portrayals of seductive, evil women abound, and  allegiances are felt  and betrayed primarily among men. Violence and death brood over everything. Surely there are some clues in this dark material to the ambiguities and mysteries of male bonding.

A remarkable new novel from Berlin based author Vijay Khurana is a good place to begin. Reading The Passenger Seat recently took me back to these questions and prompted this essay.

Khurana uses many of the classic tropes of the buddy road trip and crime novel/ true crime genres with a critical 21st century twist – think In Cold Blood meets Grand Theft Auto with the psychological complexity and moral anguish of Dostoevsky. And while shuffling those elements, he manages to create something altogether new, profound and subtle that puts each of the old genre elements into a new and heartbreaking light that illuminates some of the questions I am posing in this essay.

Khurana’s protagonists are a pair of half-formed boys/men growing up in a small North American town. The fiction is based loosely on a real tragedy that led to five deaths across northern BC and Manitoba in 2019.

This includes what appears to have been a suicide pact by two boys after they killed three other drivers on northern roads.)  The boys run away from their small-town home and head north, following vague dreams of high paying work- men’s work. They meet and kill a tourist couple in an act of almost abstract violence reminiscent of Camus’s The Stranger, (which also includes a moment of male bonding as the protagonist testifies in support of a friend who has assaulted his mistress) then go on to commit one more murder before they die in a suicide pact. So far, so noir.

But Khurana is intent on doing something more subtle and nuanced here than the usual noir tropes of crime fiction and true crime. The author uses the difficult but powerful mechanism of free indirect discourse to take us into the squalid inner lives of Teddy and Adam as they hang out, jump from a local bridge into dark water, play video games, drink and brood about their insecure, fragile sense of what manhood means and what their friendship means. The tone is ominous from the first scene onward. For example, “As the friends fall, rocks and shallows rise to meet them, except in the darker place they have aimed for.”

Khurana uses an apocryphal quote attributed to Norman Mailer as one of his book’s epigraphs, and it too contributes to the sense of menace and impending doom that haunts the boys as we get to know them. The quote, “When two men say hello on the street, one of them loses,” signals the central role of competitiveness and unspoken but profound and potentially lethal homophobia that will play out when these two friends take to the road. The boys are acutely aware of each other physically, and at the same time willfully blind to any flashes of desire that might light up that awareness. This tension is never made explicit, but it lurks beneath the surface of the dark waters of their lives and is one of the elements that turns their fraught journey toward death.

The novel is paradoxical in its impact. It vividly renders the boys’ impoverished, numbed and squalid inner lives without any major lapses into gory deaths, polemics or explicit exposition. It reads  like a horror story read in a deadened voice, all the more horrific for its quiet tone. Only one of the acts of violence is shown directly, while the others occur “off stage.”

In another artful move, Khurana provides a coda to his main narrative that shows two older men in the town where the boys grew up sharing moments of male bonding and collusive sexism. Ron, who was having an affair with Teddy’s mother before the boys’ lethal road trip two years before, celebrates his birthday with a friend ironically named Freeman. This ironic naming echoes an earlier name irony, with one of the boys sharing a name with the biblical “first man.” The action, such as it is, is rendered through free indirect narration from within Ron’s consciousness, and over a drunken evening and hungover morning after, Ron thinks guiltily about an earlier incident when he became aware of his friend’s violence against his wife and did nothing about it. This smaller scale, male-bonding- inspired silence is an indirect comment on the silences and anguish the reader has witnessed as Adam and Teddy conduct their doomed road trip.

The coda’s effect is almost musical as it suggests harmonies and rhymes between the two narratives of toxic male bonding and collusion in violence. The structure of the book and its lyrical prose combine to make telling points about toxic male bonding and its relationship to sexist violence, all without any counterproductive lecturing or explicit judgements. The magisterial way that Khurana uses the classic elements of noir crime writing to challenge and subvert those very elements is impressive and strange-  a bit like a violinist picking up a Stradivarius and playing Schoenberg instead of classical.

Two other recent publications in the noir genre provide ways to reflect on the relationship between the genre and sexist violence. Vancouver writer Sam Wiebe’s new Wakeland novel, The Last Exile,  is set in Vancouver and like all of Wiebe’s work delivers a beautifully crafted homage to the classics of the genre. While the  rogue’s gallery of outlaw bikers that ride through the book illuminate the links between toxic masculinity and violence in dramatic terms, and while the protagonist’s loyalty to his partner echoes that of Sam Spade and other noir heroes, Wakeland’s use of genre tropes, while expert and entertaining, lacks the critical depth and psychological darkness of Khurana’s management of the same motifs. If Khurana’s work is Schoenberg on a Stradivarius, Wiebe is that same instrument playing Brahms. Both delight, but one has more emotional heft and intellectual complexity.

George Pelecanos, like Wiebe, is a modern master of the noir form. He has produced a long series of pitch perfect, semi-autobiographical novels set in Washington DC’s ethnic and Black communities outside the Beltway. He’s gone on to  a successful TV screenwriting and producing career for shows like The Wire, Treme and The Deuce. 

In the title story of his most recent publication, the story collection Owning Up, he presents a powerful narrative of male bonding in both its toxic and non-toxic forms. While not without its grim and dispiriting moments, Owning Up represents the noir genre turned against its usual commitment to misogyny and violence. His protagonist here, Nikos, is a kid torn between his loyalties to a pair of older men in the violent shadow of a now little-remembered event, the Hanafi Muslim occupation of a DC building in 1977.

Nikos, like the protagonists of The Passenger Seat, is baffled by his own emerging sexuality and the whole vexing question of what it means to be a man. One of the older men who influences him is a seedy white hipster, Ray, who entangles him in daytime burglary that veers close to violence. Ray encourages Nikos to view Mindy, a girl he is dating, as “trim,” there to be pressured, used and abandoned. The other influence on Nikos as he muddles his way toward manhood is Ed, a black man who despises Ray and urges the kid to break his connection to Ray and treat his girlfriend with respect. Ed is instrumental in protecting Nikos from the worst of Ray’s influence, but not before the young man has followed Ray’s squalid advice about pressuring and objectifying his girlfriend.
All of this is viewed retrospectively, as Nikos, now an aging but successful writer, looks back on that formative moment in the 70s and tries to “own up” to his own sexist exploitation of Mindy and other women. It is an altogether plausible, non-polemic exploration of male bonding in all its ethical complexity. The bond between Ed and Nikos is a working model of one kind of  healthy, non-toxic male bonding and a heartening change from the poisoned ideological “testosterone” so often administered by the noir genres.

In a scene that is the dramatic and ethical core of the story, Ed tells Nikos:

“You need to treat that young lady with respect. I heard you talking to Ray about her one day, how you got with her in the back seat of your car….Yeah, that’s right. Bragging on what you did. Why you telling on her like that?”

It is a challenge that stays with Nikos and informs his later maturity and ethical growth. So, we have at least one powerful literary representation of healthy male bonding between an older man and the young man he mentors. How about healthy  peer male bonding?

Although Pelecanos does not explicitly reference the feminist critique of toxic masculinity in his powerful, subtle and moving short story, it remains an evocative subtext, informing his protagonist’s reflections. Another artist who has recently fused noir tropes with an expansive critique of patriarchal masculinity (aka toxic masculinity) is the American spoken word poet and performer Steve Connell, whose We Are the Lions  was commissioned by the YWCA for an anti-violence program called AMEND,  designed to promote healthy male bonding against, not for violence against women.

In We Are the Lions, the performer is seen alone in an empty loft space, wearing a tough guy jacket and seriously cropped tough guy hair. His opening lines establish his continuity with the bog-standard toxic masculinity we all grew up with. He begins:

“I don’t have a problem with pornography.

I mean, I don’t get upset when I see sexually exploitative commercials.

In fact, those are usually my favorite ones.

I mean I don’t know what her ass has to do with my hamburger, but I’m going to drive through the very next day.

I don’t have a problem with violent movies or images or the word bitch.

I don’t have a problem with jokes about women.

In fact, I freely admit there are times where I sit back with my fellas and kick back, talk about some bitch and how I wish I could hit that, talk openly in public places, unconcerned if your kids laugh.

I mean, it’s just words, just jokes, just dudes talking shit that you never expect is going to get back.”

But then the performance takes a surprising turn, as he says:

However, I do have a problem with violence and cruelty and rape and abuse and even if we know it’s just me, it’s just you, it’s just a few harmless jokes between me and my dudes, that still perpetuates a culture where it’s easy to confuse the link between the jokes and the bruise.

Between her getting choked and what’s just jokes between dudes.

And if there’s a connection between the things I don’t have a problem with and the things that I do then perhaps I need to rethink my views on the way we view women and how many views sexually exploited images get on YouTube.”

He goes on to tell a story about a village attacked in the night again and again by lions, lions who kill only women and children. The men of the village stay up to “protect” the innocent, but the next morning there are more victims. Slowly, the men come to realize that they are the lions, the monsters they fear are alive within them, alive to emerge in the dark and ravage.

“And we are the lions time and again.

And if we aren’t the lions, we’re on their side too often standing proudly in defense of the pride.

Perhaps afraid that if we stand with women against the lion we will, ourselves, be devoured.

And so ironically to prove we aren’t cowards we become cowards.

To prove we aren’t weak we become weak.

To prove we are still lions we become sheep, unwilling to do the one thing that must be done, speak.

And our silence chokes as heavy as hands.

It stings and every black eye, where men stand violence, lives or dies.

And that is why they call this just a women’s issue?”

Like Khurana, Connell uses the tropes of toxic masculinity and them turns them inside out, with Connell notably issuing a challenge to his fellow men to stand with women against misogyny and all its insults, assaults and erasure, to actually value  a lived human decency among men that is not built on the backs of women. This is an invitation to a bearable human future in which men and women can live together without subjection and assault. It may seem to some a utopian invitation, given how woven into our culture toxic masculinity is: it is no accident that a group of lions is called a pride. As men, we can, writers like Pelecanos and Khurana and Connell suggest, step away from our complicity and silence and into a more fully human solidarity that is far better than pride of place. We  can stop being lions and start living as human beings.

It seems, as Ghandi commented about “western civilization, “worth a try.”

The post Walk like a man: Toxic masculinity in crime fiction, fact and spoken word appeared first on rabble.ca.

They say that if we fail to learn the lessons of history, we are doomed to repeat it. Recent events in my hometown of Vancouver and across North America call this warning to mind today.

On April 5 in Vancouver, a municipal special election saw two candidates from the more or less left end of the political spectrum, Sean Orr of the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) and Lucy Maloney of the NDP-adjacent One City party, elected to city council, a result that represents a stern voters’ rebuke to the developer-friendly regime of Mayor Ken Sim and his ABC party.

This is, broadly speaking, good news for workers and their allies in Vancouver, but a closer look suggests the results also imply some hard questions about the uses and misuses of labour solidarity.

First of all, it is notable that the Vancouver and District Labour Council (VDLC for short – an umbrella group of BC Fed affiliated unions in BC’s Lower Mainland) endorsed only one of the two progressive candidates who won. Instead of endorsing COPE’s Sean Orr, the VDLC endorsed Green Party candidate Annette Reilly, who only managed to rack up just over 15,000 votes, compared to Sean Orr’s first place 34,448 and the 33,732 votes won by Maloney.

Some observers will wonder if the VDLC endorsement of a Green candidate over the COPE candidate reflected nervousness about Orr’s history of involvement with Vote Socialist and Democratic Socialists of Vancouver or left over rancor stemming from earlier conflicts about election strategy between COPE and the VDLC. In any event, it left the VDLC, an important voice for BC workers, only half correct in its endorsements.

While most observers would see a vote for a Green candidate as less harmful than a vote for Sim’s ‘Always Befriend the Capitalists’ party, the class politics of the Green Party remain murky, and no one will be tempted to see the local Greens as reds. In balance, the VDLC decision to endorse Reily when a more genuinely pro-worker candidate like COPE’s Orr was available was unfortunate.

A union voice that endorsed both the progressive winners in the Vancouver byelection was heard from UniteHere, Local 40, which urged the election of both Orr and Maloney.

In addition to getting points for electoral prescience, Local 40 has, more importantly, racked up several impressive bargaining victories in the Vancouver area recently, illustrating the importance of solidarity.

Read more: Big win for hotel workers in BC illustrates important lessons

In a November 21, 2024 press release, UniteHere Local 40 said that its members at Hyatt Regency, Westin Bayshore, and Pinnacle Waterfront will enjoy a cumulative raise of 34 per cent by 2027. Under the new agreement, a room attendant will earn nearly $32.50 per hour on January 1 and will make over $37 per hour in 2027. The improved wages won by militant struggle of a workforce that is typically female and brown compare favorably with this year’s calculated Living Family Wage minimum of $27.05 for this year.

The hotel workers followed up this impressive win by resolving a strike that ran for almost four years (the longest worker strike in Canadian history) and pitted the scrappy local against international hotel giant Radisson.

This victory was won by the tough, ongoing solidarity of Local 40 members and by support from community members, both within and without the labour movement.

The gains won are considerable. According to a statement from Local 40:

• “All former Pacific Gateway workers terminated during the pandemic have the right to return based on seniority; right of recall extends for 36 months;
• Highest hotel wages in Vancouver Airport/Richmond market; returning room attendants will earn up to $28.25/hour; returning cooks will earn up to $32.50/hour;
• No rollbacks on wages, benefits and working conditions. Contract gains include medical benefit improvements with lower eligibility requirements; new personal days; and sick days that may be carried over, and other benefits;
• The agreement adopts industry leading standards such as daily room cleaning to ensure high sanitation standards for guests and safer workloads, as well as new gratuity and transparency protections for tipped workers;
• and unlimited recall protections in the event of a pandemic, emergency or renovations, and other job security protections, including expedited arbitration to address disputes arising out of return-to-work issues, and training for all returning staff.”

So, as the UniteHere experience shows, solidarity helps workers win and sustains long term struggles.

It has been one of the key themes of the workers’ movement since its inception and remains a core value. But we live in an era of aspirational fascism and anti-worker propaganda, most vividly seen in the DOGE and tariff politics of the Trump administration but squalidly present around the world, including here in Canada. And in such times, solidarity can wobble and fail.

One heart-rending example of that failure occurred recently when Sean Fain of the United Auto Workers issued a statement supporting Trump’s tariffs on Canadian and Mexican built vehicles sent to the US market.

This betrayal of auto workers in other countries by Fain, who actively supported Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris in the last presidential election, illustrates the limits and pitfalls of business unionism, the class collaboration strategy also known as Gomperism.

By falling into this time-stained and unprincipled approach, Fain dishonors the history of his union and earns absolutely just criticism from workers within and without his union.

Fain ignores the lessons of history, which show repeatedly that when leadership of workers’ organizations try to “ride the tiger” by collaborating with business class governments, workers usually end up inside the tiger.

The post Labour victories, failures and lessons in history and solidarity appeared first on rabble.ca.

There was another big health care announcement by the Alberta Government Tuesday, the second in as many days, this one about the further deconstruction of Alberta Health Services (AHS) and the shuffling of important health care activities among newly created bureaucracies like a pea under some walnut shells. 

Where’s cancer care gone? What about organ transplants and tissue donations? 

Well, now they’ll be hiding under the Acute Care Alberta shell, the expensive new bureaucracy created by the United Conservative Party (UCP) that, according to Health Minister Adriana LaGrange, will “ensure Albertans receive the high-quality, coordinated care they deserve – delivered when and where they need it most.”

If that phrase sounds familiar, nearly identical words popped up in Monday’s news release and news conference about the UCP’s planned “patient focused” funding scheme for Alberta hospitals, the flaws with which we examined in this space Tuesday. 

But despite similar talking points, which will be repeated again and again in the months ahead, there are significant differences between the way the changes announced yesterday were presented and the ones from the day before. 

While the fairy tale about better and faster health care services for Albertans was told in both announcements, unlike Monday, Tuesday there was no talk of a grand economic theory behind the changes being plotted. 

Instead of being lectured at a news conference and in a high-pressure sales video worthy of a timeshare pitch about how “patient focused funding” imported from the United States (and Australia!) would increase transparency, reduce wait times and bring new surgeons flocking to Alberta with dollar signs in their eyes, there was no justification for yesterday’s announcement beyond rote promises. 

As noted here yesterday, the activity-based funding story has been around for years and has been tried and failed in many places, most notably the hot mess immediately to Canada’s south. But it is a fancy market-fundamentalist managerial theory that can be trotted out as a justification, even if it isn’t very likely to work. 

The simplest explanation for Tuesday’s bare bones announcement – which was delivered by press release alone without a news conference at which reporters could ask embarrassing questions, even if rationed to two per questioner – is that there simply is no economic or managerial justification that makes sense for transferring cancer care and tissue donations away from AHS. 

Indeed, when you parse the words of Tuesday’s press release and think about what it’s saying, the whole idea is nuts! 

“Creating specialized focus for cancer care and organ and tissue donation and transplantation will ensure the best care in these key areas that are important for a high-functioning health care system,” says the release. But the obvious fact is that there is already a specialized focus on those areas, and shuffling them into an expensive new bureaucracy that exists for no purpose but to speed the breakup and privatization of AHS makes no sense from the perspective of delivering better health care for Albertans. 

“Acute Care Alberta will ensure improved and dedicated access to the best health care possible,” ACA CEO Chris Eagle was quoted saying. Of course, common sense suggests it will do no such thing. 

It’s not quite accurate, though, to say there is no economic justification at all for this – although there is none that will benefit Albertans. 

It is extremely difficult to see this as anything but an even more aggressive step in the UCP’s ongoing health care privatization project, one of Premier Danielle Smith’s favourite hobbyhorses. 

Something that looks very much like the recreation of the Alberta Cancer Board – which was integrated into AHS in 2009 – could have a certain nostalgic appeal, one supposes, if not much utility. 

Including tissue donation in the same package smacks of a mechanism to permit and encourage blood and organ sales by Big Pharma, a development that Canadians have been warned against continually but that is beloved by market fundamentalist evangelists. 

So if you want to understand these latest changes in Alberta’s health care system, follow the money. This about who is likely to benefit. 

Alas, Dear Readers, it is unlikely to be you.

A joke? Mark Carney told a joke? Quelle horreur! 

It takes a lot of brass for supporters of political parties like the Conservative Party of Canada and Alberta’s United Conservative Party to get their knickers in a twist about Prime Minister Mark Carney’s mild joke about Premier Smith. 

These are the guys who took coffee and donuts to the gentlemen with F— Trudeau flags on their trucks, for crying out loud, and they’re going all snowflakey about how Carney chuckled that “we won’t send Danielle Smith” to appear on Fox News? 

Oh my gosh! The disrespect! Postmedia political columnist Rick Bell devoted 800 aggrieved words, give or take, to the topic!

Well, I suppose you can’t blame the federal Conservatives for trying to find something, anything, that’ll stick to Carney – so far without much success. 

Now, there’s a school of thought that being serious and dad-like is Carney’s brand, and revealing that he has a gentle sense of humour was an unforced error. Could be, I suppose. Perhaps that’s why Carney, adopting his usual serious mien, expressed his respect for the premier in a subsequent media appearance. 

But there’s also something to be said for the view of political writer Evan Scrimshaw that in politics “amorphous traits of likability and perceived normalcy are important.” Yup, sometimes they may even help a politician get elected! 

And if you actually watch the snippet the Cons are screeching about, Carney came across as both likeable and normal, his joke harmless. 

The same cannot be said of federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. 

The post Who benefits from Alberta healthcare privatization? Follow the money! appeared first on rabble.ca.

Growing up involves confronting uncomfortable truths — about history, science and ourselves. In this era of information overload, those who have learned to employ critical thinking skills are not only better prepared to evaluate the credibility and importance of information, they’re also more resilient in the face of the discomfort it may cause.

Ignoring the history of slavery or the consequences of consumer capitalism won’t make them disappear; it will just make us more likely to repeat mistakes.

Ignoring climate change won’t make it go away either. Learning about its causes, implications and solutions is critical to human wellbeing and survival. It should be at the heart of all school curricula, as it affects every aspect of our existence. Young people are disproportionately affected.

Students in Canada are taught about climate disruption. But the origins of some of those “educational” materials may surprise you.

A report from For Our Kids and the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment states, “At least 39 oil and gas companies and 12 industry-tied organizations are using a variety of methods to influence how climate, energy, and environmental education is taught across the country. Their strategies have included: providing branded educational materials to schools; establishing partnerships with government to develop curricula and resources; sponsoring school activities; and funding and supporting third-party environmental education providers. Fossil fuel companies engaged in K–12 education in Canada include Cenovus Energy, Suncor, Imperial Oil, Canadian Natural Resources, ConocoPhillips, Enbridge, TC Energy, Fortis, and many others.”

The report, “Polluting Education: The Influence of Fossil Fuels on Children’s Education in Canada,” states that “industry-supported education materials were found to consistently muddle scientific evidence about the causes of climate change, and failed to address the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels. They routinely presented climate concerns as a ‘perspective’ alongside pro-industry counterarguments, and emphasized individual actions while ignoring corporate responsibility.”

This isn’t education; it’s propaganda — and it goes back as far as the 1920s, when Imperial Oil produced branded maps for schools. It has no place in learning environments for youth.

The report details the profound effects of climate disruption on young people, from exposure to air, water and food pollution to rising climate anxiety. One survey found 78 per cent of young people in Canada are concerned about climate impacts on their mental health.

Part of the problem — or opportunity if you’re in oil and gas — is that government budget cuts have left a funding gap for climate education, and industry is all too willing to fill it. It’s not just the fossil fuel industry. When my children were in school, they were subjected to materials from forestry, nuclear and pharmaceutical industries about how vital their work was.

The negative consequences go beyond the damage to young people. As the report states, “By maintaining a presence in schools and funding education groups, the industry has long been able to shape the public’s understanding of climate change, using misinformation to position fossil fuels as benign, protect industry interests, and delay climate action.”

Alberta and Saskatchewan’s governments have been especially receptive to industry hype, partnering with companies to produce kindergarten to Grade 12 curricula for decades.

Providing “educational” materials to schools is part of a larger strategy to downplay or deny the impacts of continuing to burn gas, oil and coal. Industry executives don’t seem to care that using their products as intended is seriously harming children and puts us all at risk — as long as they continue to reap obscenely excessive profits.

Industry people knew as early as the 1950s that burning fossil fuels emits greenhouse gases, disrupting carbon cycles and heating the planet to dangerous levels. Their own scientists and research confirmed it. But their enormous wealth and political power has facilitated an ongoing indoctrination campaign, mostly through subservient media and politicians, as well as front or “astroturf” (fake grassroots) organizations, to lie about climate and pollution.

It’s astounding that so many people, from corporate executives to politicians, care so little about the world’s youth and are willing to sacrifice their futures to short-term profit.

It’s time to put an end to fossil fuel industry influence over governments, media and society. But it’s well past time to clean up the massive oil spill polluting our children’s minds!

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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Mark Carney’s first move as prime minister—on his first day—was to end the hotly debated consumer carbon tax, signing a prime ministerial directive to remove the levy on the price of natural gas and gasoline for Canadian consumers. 

The directive came into effect on April 1—though the tax for industrial polluters remains in place. This comes alongside similar legislation from B.C. Premier David Eby to remove his province’s consumer carbon tax.  

The carbon tax has been a topic of debate this federal election cycle. Carney, who had previously been in support of the legislation, called the tax too “divisive” during his Liberal leadership campaign, citing this as a reason for his decision to remove the tax. 

In an interview with rabble.ca, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May expressed her disappointment over the decision to remove the tax, both on the provincial and federal level, urging Canadian voters to seriously consider climate when casting their ballots on April 28. 

“How can it be that in 2025 we’re going into a federal election where the only discussion about climate is how fast we can get rid of the one climate policy we’ve got?” May said. 

“[I am] frankly appalled, that when climate science is so clear that we are running out of time and standing at the literal edge of ‘too late’, we have a we have a federal election campaign in 2025 where only the Green Party is even raising climate, except to talk about axing the tax,” she continued.  

Political rhetoric used to talk about carbon tax

‘Axe the tax’ has been a slogan regularly used by Conservative Leader Pierre Polievre this campaign. Despite Carney’s removal of the consumer carbon tax, Pierre continues to campaign on eliminating the tax, promising to remove the industrial ‘backstop’ of the carbon tax, and “axe the tax . . . for good, for real.”

May said the rhetoric being used to discuss the policy is in keeping with the level of discourse used in today’s political climate.  

“Do I think that unfortunately political discourse has become so debased that three word slogans that rhyme make more of a dent than scientific advice, economic evidence, fact? I mean, Pierre Polievre’s slogan should have been axe the facts,” May said. “Axing the facts everywhere you look. And now Jagmeet Singh is axing the facts. It’s catching on. David Eby’s axing the facts.” 

Last week, the federal NDPs unveiled their climate plan, which includes removing the consumer carbon tax (but keeping the industrial carbon tax). NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh also pledged to remove government subsidies for oil and gas companies, promising to use the subsidies to retrofit homes to make them more energy efficient.

But May said that the real solution to address the climate crisis is to move away from fossil fuels entirely. 

“The climate solutions require understanding that we’re going off fossil fuels, period,” she said. “[We need to] have Canada, as an oil producing country, announce that we plan to cease using fossil fuels in this country, cease exports of fossil fuels, and make the transition rapidly.”

“What we’ve done in this country for decades now is pick a target date for when we reduce emissions, but then be afraid to actually make the commitments that make that possible,” she continued. “So, that means saying we have to enhance and diversify our exports so that we’re not reliant on fossil fuel exports.”

Climate change overshadowed by U.S. threat 

Climate change has not been a main focus this election. The election campaign has been dominated by conversations about how best to respond to the ongoing trade war with the U.S. and President Trump’s threats against Canada’s sovereignty. As a result, few party platforms have had a leading focus on climate change. 

May acknowledged Canadains’ concerns about threats from the U.S., but emphasised that multiple problems can be solved at once—and that politicians cannot remove their focus from addressing climate change.  

“This is not a time for ‘oh well, it’s not popular this election, so we won’t bother talking about climate because we’ll get more votes,’” she said. “It’s a disservice to the Canadian public. It’s an insult to the intelligence of Canadians to assume that nobody could possibly be interested in whether their grandchildren have a liveable world.”

“One hundred per cent, we’re in a poly crisis world,” she continued. “I am very concerned about our economy. And I am very concerned about having a fascist in the White House. Does that mean I no longer care about whether my grandchildren can survive on the planet?”

She added that urgent concerns about what is happening in Canada and around the world—including the war in Ukraine and U.S. threats to Canada—can be dealt with while simultaneously tackling the climate crisis. 

Do Canadians still care about climate? 

An October Abacus Data poll recorded that 62o per cent of Canadians polled said they were concerned about climate change—a decrease in 14 points from the year before. 

When asked if she thought Canadians still cared about addressing the climate crisis, May said: “I know they do.”

She said that during her time canvassing in her riding in British Columbia, she’s spoken to many people—and while many are concerned about Trump, they’re also concerned about the climate. 

“People are so anxious about Trump, upset about the U.S. pulling out of the Paris Agreement again. Wondering what we’re going to do,” she said. “I’ve never had so many people who are on the verge of tears. [People] who come to the door and say, ‘what on earth is going on? What are we doing about climate and what do we do about Trump?’”

2024 was the first year where the global average surface warming exceeded 1.5 degrees celsius above pre-industrial temperatures—the level agreed to stay below by countries who signed the Paris Agreement. Importantly, this does not mean that countries have breached the agreement, as it is not measured on an annual basis, but it is an early indicator that the long-term limit is in danger of being exceeded. 

May said there is an urgent need to act on climate change now. And that she will continue to push for change for future generations. 

“I’ve got a 5-month-old granddaughter. And I am alive and healthy—and angry,” she said. “I’m at a point where my levels of frustration and anger are so off the charts because I’m a grandmother and my maternal instinct has kicked into gear like a grizzly bear. And I will defend my cubs.”

“I’m grateful that I’m a member of Parliament. I’m so grateful,” May said. “I hope I can continue after this election. I’m very grateful that I have an outlet for my anger in effective work.”

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I met Jordan while he was tying a Naloxone kit to a park bench beside a small encampment in downtown Toronto. I was walking with my dog on the way to the park when he stopped me to ask for the time, despite him sporting two silver watches, one on either wrist. He was wearing blue, slightly torn Nitrile disposable gloves, so I assumed he was a social worker helping to distribute the fast-acting drug used to prevent opioid overdoses in areas of the city where people may need it most. I reached into my pocket for my phone and told him it was half past twelve. He thanked me and continued to casually tie the Naloxone kit to the park bench. 

I was curious how he got a hold of those Naloxone kits, since I was denied one some years ago in one of the many pharmacies across Canada that distribute them freely. I was told that because I was not in close contact with anyone who had an opioid addiction, nor had an opioid addiction myself, it didn’t make sense for me to have one. Jordan, though, had been given the kits because he had an opioid addiction and had overdosed 18 times. With the opioid crisis waning, I learned that it was easier now than it was in 2021 to get a hold of Naloxone.

As perhaps expected, drugs and homelessness often go hand-in-hand. Jordan mentioned he is also unhoused, pointing to one of the two blue tents we were standing beside. He moved to Canada from Zimbabwe 23 years ago, and feeling like he had no guidance on how to find a job and a reasonably priced place to live, he resorted to robbery and selling drugs to get by. As the story goes, the drugs eventually got to him, too. Now he’s trying to help people who suffer a similar fate. 

I asked if he had been to St. Mike’s Recovery Centre on Ossington and Queen St. in the west end of the city. He nodded as if to state the obvious, saying he’s been in and out of rehab without much success. Because of his addiction, Jordan has had a hard time finding a job, despite being on disability, having to face the undeniable cruelty of what comes with addiction and often subsequently, poverty. Whichever of the two comes first. 

Without a clear segue, Jordan started going off on Drake. “And what the f— is that guy doing, man? He’s done nothing for this city. Why is he repping Atlanta?” I mentioned Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” diss track, and Jordan cracked a smile. 

“Oh yeah, you heard that? Kendrick was right, he called him out on his s—.” Jordan was referring to Toronto’s very own rap artist making a killing from his albums while exploiting black culture, particularly the Atlanta rap scene, for his own monetary gains. 

“He hasn’t done anything for his people here. Keeping all that money to himself. Just like all these politicians. Where do you think all our money goes?” I facetiously responded with taxes, but he maintained a deadpan stare and said, “Straight into their pockets.”

About a half hour passed, Jordan and I switching back and forth between politics, music, and everything in between. He eventually motioned towards the park bench where his Naloxone kit was tied as if to get back to business, but not before turning back to fist-bump me before we parted ways, he went back to his world, I back to mine. 

Within the short time I spent talking to Jordan, there had been a number of issues he broached that many Canadians – not just Torontonians, are currently facing, ones that wreak havoc on our country’s socio-economic and political fabric. For one, Jordan’s unhoused status is a painful reminder of the thorn in our country’s side regarding unaffordable housing and lack of rent control. For instance, despite Doug Ford’s guideline rate, the average rent increased in Ontario by 55 per cent between 2014 and 2023, which was more than triple the guideline rate, highlighting a flawed system rigged with loopholes. 

On top of unaffordable housing, inflation, low salaries and a lower minimum wage are of no match to the high cost of rent, let alone a home purchase. Moreover, the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) released a devastating 2025 study that recorded upwards of 80,000 Ontarians as homeless in 2024, a 25 per cent increase since 2022. This number is expected to double in the next 10 years, reaching almost 300,000 without meaningful intervention by the province.

Jordan’s unemployed status also reminded me of Ford’s comments late last year about healthy Ontarians needing to “get off their a-s-s-e-s and start working like everyone else.” What about unhealthy Ontarians? The Internet erupted with opinions oscillating between Ford imitating tone-deaf delirium while ignoring the reality of the labour market, to blaming unemployment levels on immigration and more specifically, temporary foreign workers and international students. 

To be clear, both the housing crisis and the diminishing job market were problems festering long before Canada initiated a near open-door policy for immigration, reaching as far back as the end of the Second World War. To blame immigration for the housing crisis and unemployment is to ignore the government’s mishandling of inflation, fewer investments in housing despite a growing population, and the exploitation of temporary foreign workers for cheap labour as an attempt to boost the economy.

Jordan also talked about immigrating to Canada and the accompanying disorientation and alienation he experienced within the system. Canada was at one point a pioneer in immigration policy, with Trudeau’s 2023-2025 Immigration Levels Plan promising to welcome 465,000 permanent residents in 2023, 485,000 in 2024, and 500,000 in 2025. But the pedestal that our country once proudly stood upon is wobbling. Today, the backlog of applications and the stresses of unemployment and underemployment have caused Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), the Canadian government department that handles immigration issues, to pause its intake in December 2024, reducing 64,200 applications to streamline its process. Canada also plans to reduce targets for permanent residency from 500,000 to 395,000 in 2025. 

And finally, the ubiquitous wealth inequality was blaringly obvious from Jordan’s Drake comment. According to a 2023 Oxfam Canada report, the world’s richest one per cent brought in two-thirds of new money since 2020, reaching a staggering $42 trillion and doubling that of the bottom 99 per cent. Political campaign slogans like ‘Tax the rich’ to curb extreme wealth inequality and concentration are heard habitually. In her address to the United Nations 2024 ECOSOC Special Meeting on International Cooperation in Tax Matters, Erica Payne, founder and president of Patriotic Millionaires, called on world leaders to increase taxes on the rich to wrestle extreme wealth inequality. Noble stories of the uber wealthy sharing their piece of the pie by donating to non-profits were being praised, like when MacKenzie Scott donated $16.5 billion from the fortune she received from her divorce from her very rich and very famous ex, Jeff Bezos (see Amazon). 

The Canadian dream, if there ever was one, has become a real nightmare. Jordan, like many of us, reap the unfortunate consequences from a system that has historically failed to resolve such issues, despite promoting efforts to. For example, supervised consumption sites across the country had reversed 16,000 overdoses between March 2020 and January 2024 with the same Naloxone kits that Jordan was distributing in the park. But this effort was rescinded when Health Minister Sylvia Jones announced in July 2024 that the provincial government will close 10 supervised consumption sites for March 31, 2025, and prohibit new sites from opening, despite concerns from health workers and advocates raising the alarm of a potential increase in deaths from overdoses. 

We have seen attempts to mitigate the widening inequality gap with Ontario’s pilot program for universal basic income between 2017 and 2019, offering low-income households (under $34,000 per year for single occupants or under $48,000 per year for couples). But the program was cancelled when Doug Ford became the new premier, despite 83 per cent of recipients reporting lower levels of mental stress, increased financial wellbeing and housing security, according to a report by Carlton University’s School of Social Work and the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction. Adding more salt to the wound, The Conference Board of Canada’s recent economic report card graded Canada a D, ranking 11th out of 16 countries evaluated.

And when we look at our current immigration system, there has been a lack of cohesive communication and preparation between the federal and provincial governments. The former selling an alluring yet false reality to newcomers while not understanding labour market demands on the provincial and municipal levels nor the employers’ perspectives. Previous prime minister Justin Trudeau put a cap on temporary foreign workers and limited them to one-year contracts due to widespread unemployment. Even newcomers are leaving the country after failing to land a job in Canada.

There have been some positive strides towards resolution, however. Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow announced at a press conference on October 2, 2024, that a Canada-Ontario rent supplement plan to help families living in shelters move out was set to resume this past fall. AMO stated that this came at a time where municipalities wrestled with the balance of treating the unsheltered with respect and empathy while ensuring the surrounding communities feel safe and protected in the public sphere. 

As of January 30, 2025, the City of Toronto released a budget proposal to secure hundreds of millions of funding with the Federal Interim Housing Assistance Program (IHAP) to offer shelter to refugees. The city also secured increases to the Canada-Ontario Housing Benefit, a supplemental rent offer that encourages people living in shelters to find a home, which subsequently offers up space to bring in people from encampments. And there’s more: the AMO states an additional $11 billion will be used to end homelessness within the next decade by providing affordable housing and promoting prevention programs. 

Canada’s Homelessness Strategy, along with the National Housing Strategy, which plans to invest more than $115 billion over a 10-year period to build homes for Canadians sounds promising, but time will tell to see if this plan will fall through the cracks of a policy graveyard or not.

Community-based approaches present alternatives to address failed provincial policies. The United Way’s Inclusive Local Economic Opportunity (ILEO) initiative, for example, focuses on community-based advocacy and innovation towards issues that impact underserved neighbourhoods in greater Toronto. The initiative is set out to bring together systems change among private, public and community sectors through innovative ways to increase economic equity on the local level, particularly newcomers, racialized individuals and lower-income households – with business opportunities and better employment. In essence, what is put into the community, goes directly back to them.

While it may be easy and perhaps convenient for society to blame the individual for not shouldering most of the responsibility for their own actions, the surrounding community is equally, if not more accountable for addressing the conditions that prevent healthy progress. If we are to come close to any sort of headway, contributing systemic factors that manifest such conditions – often economic factors, family structures and socio-cultural environments – must be scrutinized and re-evaluated to create more effective and meaningful policies. If failed governmental policies can’t help us, then maybe we can help each other instead through the community. And when all is said and done, no one will come to save us but ourselves. Although Jordan comes pretty close.

Prior to joining United Way Greater Toronto, Lisa had begun writing this article in August 2023. She completed the article in March 2025 after learning about United Way’s Inclusive Local Economic Opportunity (ILEO) project. She is now an Associate Manager, Strategic Initiatives for ILEO. 

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Alberta Premier Danielle Smith claimed yesterday a new “patient-focused funding model” planned for Alberta hospitals “will increase transparency, lower wait times and attract more surgeons – helping deliver better health care for all Albertans, when and where they need it.”

But what will really happen when the United Conservative Party (UCP) puts Smith’s new acute-care funding model into effect at Alberta hospitals?

Back in 2013, Jonathon Ross, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Toledo in Ohio, warned Canadians what to expect if they were talked into adopting case-based activity fees instead of global funding to operate hospitals. 

This is, of course, exactly what Premier Smith touted yesterday at a news conference to announce, in the words of the government’s press release, “a new acute care funding model, increasing the accountability, efficiency and volume of high-quality surgical delivery.”

“I would advise extreme caution and careful assessment of the implications for cost, quality, access, equity and efficiency before adopting this hospital funding model,” wrote Dr. Ross, terming it “activity based funding” or ABF, in a piece for the Canadian Healthcare Network. 

“Depending where you live, this method of funding may be called patient-focused funding, payment by results, volume-based funding, service-base funding, case-mix funding, or prospective payment system,” he explained. “But no matter what you call it, ABF has serious side effects.”

It should be noted that “patient-focused funding” is a tendentious euphemism, intended to leave the impression it will make things better for patients, which it will not. 

“One of the dangers is that ABF can be used to ‘game the system,’” Dr. Ross said. “When you pay hospitals according to diagnosis, the incentive is to increase or otherwise modify your diagnosis so your hospital will make more money. And that’s exactly what happened when the United States implemented ABF for U.S. Medicare patients.”

“Here in the States, we have a small army of nurses reviewing every case in hospital to remind us to use special words just the right way so we can get more money for each case,” he observed. “The incentive is to list all of the diagnoses you can possibly list for every patient, as some of these will increase the payment even if it does not change your management one bit.”

In addition, he warned, there will also be pressure to discharge patients too soon. 

“If the hospitals game the codes upward, then you need another army of regulators to catch them and code them back down,” he said. “There is now a large hospital bureaucracy whose job it is to up-code the severity of illness of Medicare patients and another large Medicare bureaucracy trying to figure out how to stop the hospitals from gaming the system.”

Nothing has changed since then. Indeed, as Nobel Prize-winning American economist Paul Krugman pointed out in January, this is one of the reasons the U.S. health care system costs Americans so much. “Medicare is supposed to provide older Americans with the health care they need,” Dr. Krugman wrote on his Substack. “Yet instead of focusing solely on how best to achieve that goal, we have an arms race between insurance companies trying to game to system to charge more and deliver less and government officials trying to rein them in.”

Smith was accompanied to her news conference by Health Minister Adriana LaGrange and Chris Eagle, the interim CEO of Acute Care Alberta, the administrative agency set up specifically to introduce this funding scheme as part of the Smith Government’s effort to destroy Alberta Health Services and make its remnants easier to privatize. 

They burned up some time that could have been used more profitably for questions about how this will really work with a slick hard-sell video of the premier pushing the funding model.

Alas, when it was time for reporters’ questions, with one honourable exception, every single journalist who showed up or tuned into the tightly scheduled newser, used their time to ask questions about the federal election campaign, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s gentle joke about Ms. Smith, and U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war on Canada.

Only the Toronto Star’s Graham Thomson asked a relevant question: Wouldn’t incentives for surgeons to do more surgeries in private facilities drain resources from public hospitals, making them less efficient? Would the government, he wondered, let surgeons from private clinics use public operating rooms? 

The premier responded ambiguously, nodding affirmatively and mumbling, “Mmm-hmm.” (Whether this would be permitted under the Canada Health Act was unanswered.)

Later, she added, “I would hope our public hospitals would look at this as a way of getting more revenue.” More surgeons will come here, she also claimed, because they will be able to make more money. 

“The Premier is blowing things up even further with a plan to use public money to accelerate health care privatization,” Friends of Medicare director Chris Gallaway said bluntly in a news release later yesterday. 

The announcement, he said, “continues to claim that privatizing surgeries will save money, expand surgical capacity and shorten wait times for Albertans.” Yet a series of reports show otherwise. “If the Premier was serious about shortening wait times for Albertans, she would invest in expanding use of operating rooms in our public hospitals,” Gallaway said.

What this government is serious about, of course, is privatizing as much of our public health care system as quickly as possible. 

As Dr. Ross put it a dozen years ago: “Beware of American consultants bearing gifts such as case-based payments for hospitals as a cost-saving idea. Count your blessings, Canadians, and get to work improving the effective system that you have!”

Stephen Harper demonstrates he shouldn’t be running AIMCo

Back on November 20, I wrote that the appointment of Stephen Harper as chair of the governing board of the Alberta Investment Management Corp. meant that we could forget about the notion the provincial pension management Crown corporation has an arm’s length relationship with the political level of government in Alberta.

“Mr. Harper remains an active political figure and far-right ideological advocate in his roles as éminence grise of the Conservative Party of Canada and leader of the Munich-based neoliberal internationale, formally and tendentiously known as International Democrat Union,” I said. 

Last night, Harper introduced federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre at a large pre-election pep rally here in Edmonton. That’s fine. Harper can appear anywhere he likes, just as long as we all understand that this clearly demonstrates his complete unsuitability as a leader of a supposedly neutral manager of thousands of Albertans’ pensions. 

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If vetting federal political candidates was as strict in 2004 as it needs to be today, would Pierre Poilievre have made the cut as a candidate? I wonder. 

Since candidate vetting by national political parties is as rigorous as it is in this age of social media, where any injudicious thing we say is likely to live online forever, is the quality of the candidates we’re getting better or worse?

I’m not confident I know the answer to either question, but they’re both worth asking. 

I do know that if you’ve ever expressed a controversial opinion on social media or, God help you, in a TikTok video or equivalent, you probably shouldn’t be thinking about running for Parliament. The parties won’t want you, with good reason, even if they happen to quietly agree with you. This is because your opinion is bound to show up in The National Post or some other news organization with a political agenda – which nowadays is just about all of them. 

This is especially good advice, by the way, if you’ve already got a job that you won’t necessarily get back if you quit to run for office, as Rod Loyola discovered to his dismay last week after he’d resigned his seat as the NDP MLA for Edmonton-Ellerslie to run for the Liberals in the new Edmonton Gateway federal riding. 

That was before Loyola was outed by the Post for having said nice things about Hezbollah and Hamas 16 years ago when he was performing as a rapper at a “Say NO to NATO” rally. 

The Post must be losing its touch. They didn’t wait until it was too late for the Liberals to get Loyola’s name off the ballot before they leaked the news, which up until his resignation from the provincial Assembly someone had presumably been keeping in reserve for the next Alberta election. 

Thanks to the Post, then, the NDP has probably dodged that bullet, although as the past few days have shown, such revelations from history preserved on social media is a problem that can bedevil any political party. 

“I did not think that an intro at a hip-hop segment 16 years later would get me ‘cancelled’ after close to a decade of serving as an elected representative at the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, but here we are,” Loyola told the CBC. 

He now says he will run as an independent, but in any federal election, let alone one like this, that is a plan that will end in tears for the candidate, and maybe for a majority of voters too. He’d be wiser just to pack it in and look for a new gig. 

As the past few days show, federal parties are skidding candidates with surprising frequency and then bragging about the rigour of their vetting – which is fair enough under the circumstances, as when Poilievre boasted about some of his Conservative Party’s cashiered candidates, even if that was about all he could say in the circumstances.

If I haven’t missed anybody – it’s starting to get hard to keep up – the Conservatives are down four since Monday: 

• Mark McKenzie, Con candidate in Windsor-Tecumseh-Lakeshore, out for endorsing public hangings. (I admit it’s something of a relief to know Poilievre isn’t touting the view we should Hang the Gang!)
• Stefan Marquis, CPC candidate in Laurier-Sainte-Marie, no reason given, but by the sound of it failing to hew to the national consensus on Ukraine.
• Lourence Singh in New Westminster-Burnaby-Maillardville, no explanation at all for that one.
• Don Patel, the CPC candidate in Etobicoke-North, for endorsing a social media comment suggesting Canadians critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi should be shipped to India.

Next on the list? Who knows? Maybe Andrew Lawton, the party’s candidate in Elgin-St. Thomas-London South, who Press Progress reported Friday “was a member of a secret group chat used by Freedom Convoy leaders and their lawyers to coordinate messages on social media with right-wing alternative media personalities and far-right social media influencers.”

Apparently it won’t be Aaron Gunn, though, the Conservative candidate for North Island-Powell River on the West Coast. Yesterday, Poilievre drew the line at dumping a candidate for making statements on social media denying that Canada’s historic treatment of Indigenous peoples amounts to genocide despite an open letter from 26 municipal and Indigenous leaders condemning Gunn’s statement. 

Meanwhile, the Liberals are down two, including Loyola, both in Alberta. 

First to go was Thomas Keeper, the party’s candidate in Calgary Confederation, who the CBC reported had failed to tell the party about a 20-year-old domestic assault charge that was stayed six weeks after it was laid.

So, if I’ve got this right – and the story could be changing as I write this – the Conservatives are beating the Liberals 4 to 2 in fired candidates, even if they’re not ahead in the polls. 

It would be tied 4-4 if you counted Edmonton Centre Liberal and former Trudeau Government cabinet minister Randy Boissonnault, and Markham-Unionville MP Paul Chiang, both of whom Prime Minister Mark Carney allowed to walk the plank as candidates without an obvious shove – Boissonnault for his controversial claims about Indigenous ancestry and troubling allegations about his business activities and Chiang for his opinion that an opponent should be turned over to Chinese authorities for the bounty.

The NDP hasn’t lost anyone yet – except maybe Loyola, sort of. 

The parties only have until tomorrow to find replacements.

As for the second question – is the quality of the candidates we’re getting better or worse? – the answer is probably better, but not necessarily more interesting or inspiring. 

Young careerists found in all political parties will already have figured out that they’d better zip their lips and not share their annoying opinions in their undergraduate political science classes, because someone’s sure to have a phone discreetly recording them for future reference. 

But Canada has certainly had excellent Parliamentarians who would never be allowed to run for Parliament today. 

Consider Frank Howard, CCF member of the British Columbia Legislature and NDP MP for the old Skeena riding, who served two years in the pen for armed robbery before becoming a union leader and then embarking on a long political career. 

As an MP, he played a major role in winning the right for First Nations citizens to vote in Canadian elections. He fought for prison and divorce law reform, earning a reputation “as compassionate and caring,” reporter Jennifer Lang wrote in the Cloverdale Reporter after Howard’s death in 2011. 

“I came to this conclusion many years ago,” Lang quoted him saying in a 2004 interview, “don’t blame anybody else for your difficulties. I got to the point where I hated the police. I hated the social workers. I hated foster homes. I suppose I hated myself, too. But I still had to come to the conclusion that it was my doing.”

When someone tried to blackmail MP Howard with a threat to reveal his criminal record, he set up an interview at the local TV station in Terrace and told all on the air. First elected as an MLA by 13 votes in 1953, the northwest B.C. voters came to love him, returning him to office 10 times over 27 years, 17 of them spent as an MP in Ottawa. 

Is there anyone like that in Ottawa now? I doubt it. Could there be? Not a chance. 

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It’s our birthday month, and like many of us do on our birthdays, we’re making wishes for the year ahead. 

Our wish this year? To build up our community of progressive journalists and increase our coverage of the news and views you’ve come to rely on us for. 

For the past 24 years, we’ve been committed to providing news for the people, offering a progressive perspective on the issues that matter most. From witnessing the rise of neo-conservatism during the Harper Years to our ongoing coverage of the 2025 Federal Election, rabble has been at the forefront of Canadian news for nearly a quarter of a century.

Since our founding in 2001, independent media that speaks truth to power has only grown more essential. In a time when corporate-controlled outlets often prioritize profit over people, reliable, unbiased journalism has never been more critical. This is why we must continue to evolve and expand, ensuring that our coverage remains bold, relevant, and sustainable.

To do that, we are raising funds to support our growth and amplify our impact. 

Our dedicated team has identified a range of important stories and issues we plan to cover, but to do so effectively, we need the resources to support this work. Your support is the key to making these goals a reality and to ensuring that rabble continues to serve as an essential, independent voice in Canadian journalism. 

With your help, we can continue to provide the vital, community-driven reporting that speaks truth to power.

Every dollar we receive empowers us to report on the issues you care about – including the Federal Election, the path to reconciliation, climate change, reproductive justice, and the impacts Trump’s tariffs are having on labour in Canada. 

With your support, we can increase this coverage and grow a larger team of progressive journalists. Over the next year, we’re aiming to: 

• hire two national politics reporters and editors; 
• hire an Indigenous affairs reporter;  
• grow our podcasts production team; 
• and improve our social media vision and strategy. 

Times are unpredictable, and independent journalism in Canada is under threat. For those able to contribute, there’s no better investment than supporting free, accessible, and non-corporate media.

If you are not already a monthly donor and are in the position to become one, we welcome contributions at any level. We are also delighted to receive one-time donations. As our team sees it, each dollar donated by a rabble-rousing reader is an investment in the future of Canada’s democracy. 

After all, knowledge is the basis of empowered activism.     

Yours in solidarity,

Sarah Sahagian (she/her)
Executive director / publisher

The post Our birthday wish? Growing our team and expanding our progressive coverage! appeared first on rabble.ca.

A couple weeks ago, there was a rather unusual flurry of articles on a subject that has become somewhat of a taboo in the mainstream media these last few years: COVID-19 (aside from an ongoing trickle of minimizing and misleading opinion pieces on the harms and prevalence of the virus). The occasion for these articles was the fifth anniversary of the start of the pandemic.

Or so it seemed. These articles/retrospectives (in Canada and numerous other countries), whether it was a photo essay of pandemic relics (like social distance signage) or recollections from health care workers and others, looking back on the trauma of those early days, more than anything else, functioned to bookend the pandemic—placing it firmly in the past. 

Such articles might strike some as innocuous or even an important act of remembering, when in fact what the mass of articles are most invested in is helping you to forget that Covid is still with us. But while certainty at lower rates than a few years ago, the virus, circulating through all seasons, with multiple waves per year, is still killing off medically vulnerable people significantly more than the flu. And perhaps more significantly Long Covid continues to disable millions of people around the globe. These stats are undoubtedly undercounts as so few people, when ill, given the media narrative that COVID-19 is ostensibly no big deal, bother to test. 

And let’s be factually clear, the pandemic is not over. At least, according to the World Health Organization which, in being international, does not share the political agenda of any individual country (or at least to a much lesser extent). But you wouldn’t know this from media coverage that consistently commits journalistic malpractice by referring to the pandemic in the past tense with phrases like “during the pandemic” and “post-pandemic” (examples of this are so ubiquitous that I won’t offer links, but a Google search will provide plenty).

I am not claiming this is a conspiratorial collusion among mainstream media outlets, but they have, collectively, manufactured consent for the pandemic’s end nevertheless. As Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman sought to explain in the seminal Manufacturing Consent, mainstream media journalists serve the interests of the ruling class because of “(their) reliance… on information provided by government, business, and ‘experts’ funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power.”

In this case, what serves the interest of capital/the ruling class, in declaring Covid a thing of the past, is the tacit permission, from the populace, to return to the socio-economic status quo. “Back to normal” has accelerated Capitalist State abandonment of chronically ill and disabled people. And “back to normal,” with little resistance, has allowed nations to quietly and quickly dismantle the quasi-welfare state of 2020 through 2021 due to the crisis of the pandemic. Ironically, we briefly had a social-democratic state of the kind the institutional left in North America has been fighting for—for decades. 

The bookending of the pandemic in mainstream media articles share some common features: upholding the myth of pandemic’s end, thanks largely to vaccination, while also throwing a bone to the very organized and ascending anti-Covid-mitigation Right (that clearly scares the crap out the liberal establishment media). And a crumb or two to sick and disabled people, by acknowledging—while simultaneously downplaying—the scale and severity of Long-Covid.

Some good examples of such articles can be found in The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, and The New York Times.

In these aforementioned articles and many others, the manufactured end of the pandemic, necessarily, requires a story of how it started so that they can claim it ended. The mainstream media’s misleading story is, more or less, as follows: Public Health responded as best they could, given they were dealing with a novel virus. In hindsight, there was some government overreach, with consequences, particularly that “lockdowns” irreparably led to loss of learning among children. And an unfortunate few suffer from Long-Covid—research is necessary, but somehow, prevention is not.

As an important aside, learning loss, possibly, in part, as a result of a lengthy period of online education, is a legitimate concern, but that’s just one part of the story. Left out, is that  

Covid has been shown to cause neurological damage. Ignoring such a significant variable can only be explained either by ideologically driven bad faith or just sloppy, lazy journalism that has defined Covid reporting and opinion pieces in the last few years. 

Perhaps more importantly, granting “lockdowns” interfered with children’s learning development to some degree, they also clearly reduced the amount of deaths from the virus significantly and according to one study could have saved tens of thousands of lives if implemented, in England, sooner. Yet we have a not uncommon genre of “just asking questions” articles, pontificating that while lives were saved, maybe it wasn’t worth the downsides. If you scratch the surface of this question, the implication is that child’s development might outweigh the lives of immunocompromised, elderly folks, and other at-risk groups. This attitude normalizes eugenic-thinking for audiences—and parents in particular. In addition, there are countless articles from the financial press and right-leaning think tanks, weighing the economic costs of Covid mitigation against human lives.

Back to the main neoliberal narrative: the pandemic ended in 2022 (in the West) thanks to mass-vaccination. In truth vaccination could not keep up with variant mutation: with the arrival of the “mild” Omicron variant, mortality and deaths were nearly as high as at any other point in the pandemic (though this was, in part, due to the sheer volume of the particularly infectious variant). In other words, the “vaccine only” strategy failed. 

I also wish to jog people’s memory that our politicians and Public Health officers did not drop all Covid mitigations because they claimed the pandemic was over, but because it was time “to live with Covid.” Within a few months this morphed into a nebulous consensus that since there were no mitigations, the pandemic must be over. Living with Covid would actually entail, alongside vaccination (and developing better vaccines), universal masking in most places and an investment in cleaning the air inside our buildings, particularly in hospitals, schools and on university campuses. But why spend money on such infrastructure if you can persuade people the pandemic’s over, right? 

The biggest problem of this intellectually dishonest and/or ignorant neoliberal narrative is that in not acknowledging (or understanding) that the vaccine only strategy failed, mainstream media helped create a huge vacuum for the right-wing’s even more historically revisionist narratives to go virtually unchallenged. In short, the Right will tell you that Covid was never serious except maybe to very medical vulnerable people (who essentially don’t count as people from their eugenic perspective), lockdowns were an unlawful assault on civil liberties, vaccines were/are harmful, masks don’t work, and Public Health—and this is where disabled-leftists and the right agree, but for completely different reasons—has lost all credibility. 

The Right’s explanations for the state of affairs range from boiler plate libertarianism to what ought to be crank-conspiracies—attributing various nefarious motives to the government and Public Health response to Covid—have festered, largely unchecked, because the fact-checkers stopped paying attention in 2022. The right got to say what the facts were because no one cared anymore. Except, now we do, again: anti-vaccine conspiracy crank Robert F. Kennedy jr. oversees America’s public health agencies, which are themselves all directed by less notorious and outlandish figures, but who share similar dangerous beliefs—that will have fatal outcomes. Such eugenicist libertarians are not isolated to America; they just don’t have the power they currently enjoy in the United States—yet.

The only point of disagreement these days between liberals, fuelled by mainstream media, and the right, fuelled by an exploding reactionary podcast-sphere, is whether we should do virtually nothing or completely nothing when the next pandemic hits. 

And that next pandemic may well, as some experts are warning, be bird flu (H5N1)—a virus with a potentially 50 per cent fatality rate in humans. That seems like something we, as a society, would be incapable of learning to live with and then forgetting about: but, given the last few years, I wouldn’t put it past us.

The post The Great Bookending: Commemorating the COVID-19 pandemic to manufacture its end appeared first on rabble.ca.

My online dictionary defines neoliberalism as “a political approach that favors free-market capitalism, deregulation, and reduction in government spending.” For a deep dive into the origins and meaning of this term, I recommend a 2017 piece in The Guardian, “Neoliberalism: the idea that swallowed the world”.  

Both main parties In the current Canadian federal election are led by neoliberals. Both believe that markets must be the ultimate rulers of society. To enforce this, both promise to cut government spending, stop expanding the federal civil service, and cut taxes.

In fact, the carbon tax is already gone. The proposed increase in the capital gains tax is gone. Both would reduce personal income taxes. And they will deregulate, e.g., no more federal assessment of major private sector projects, such as new oil and gas facilities, pipelines, or mines.

It has been argued that the U.S. president represents the “ultimate triumph of neoliberalism”. He discusses territorial expansion into Canada – colonial ambitions. But he is actually seeking control through indirect economic means. He is a neocolonialist – empowering corporations to dominate subject nations such as Canada through the operations of international capitalism rather than by means of direct rule.

Few Canadians know, even in general terms, what the terms “neoliberal” and “neocolonial” mean. Most think this election is about choosing a strong leader to counter the U.S. threat – one who can best restrain the current U.S. president in his colonial ambitions. But this distracts us from the reality that Canada’s mainstream parties remain solidly in league with the U.S. in promoting a neoliberal agenda.

Neoliberalism and neocolonialism go hand-in-hand. Neoliberals – true believers in free market capitalism – seek perpetual growth of the economy. This requires unregulated extraction and consumption of energy and mineral resources. It forces neoliberals to seek control of resources outside their own countries and become neocolonialists.

In essence, the U.S. president has already won the Canadian election. His actions demonstrate that multilateral agreements on trade, environment, defense, nuclear weapons, etc. are dispensable. National borders and democratic institutions have little significance in a globalized, capitalist, free market world.

We think Canada is an independent nation. This is fiction. The current U.S. president is simply making more obvious our subservience to multinational corporations.

Whichever major party forms the next government will continue the current trend towards global dominance by wealthy individuals. Its leader will join the ranks of other neoliberals (many of them “autocrats”) who do favors for their corporate supporters.

Neoliberal leaders rule over an increasingly unstable planet, in both political and environmental terms. The gap between rich and poor grows ever wider. Environmental degradation and climate breakdown accelerate, with more fires, floods, and tornados.

To most Canadians, a “planned economy” sounds like communism. But without a democratically developed vision for the future, market forces lead to chaos. Without democratic planning, governance devolves into cronyism and corruption.

People in Nordic countries have a better overall quality of life. They retain some ecosocialist principles. Canada would benefit from an ecosocialist alternative. Proportional representation would provide an opportunity for more progressive parties to emerge, helping undo the stranglehold of neoliberalism.

As an environmental advocate, I recommend the book Half-Earth Socialism, by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass. Building on the premise that half the planet should be rewilded, they offer a set of policies that would afford an excellent quality of life –  a transition to largely vegan diets, strict individual energy consumption quotas, and most importantly, worldwide socialist planning.

You might enjoy chapter 4, News from 2047, in which a young man is transported into a socialist future in rural New England. Or if you believe that free market economics and neoliberalism represent the pinnacle of human civilization, perhaps not.

The post The election is over and the neoliberals won appeared first on rabble.ca.

It’s election time in Canada. Top of mind among the parties and their leaders is how to deal with the American President and his on-again-off-again tariffs. With voters focused on economics and the effect of tariffs on the cost of goods and services from the US, other important issues can be pushed aside.

The Canadian Medical Association (CMA) is working to keep healthcare as a major issue in the election.

At a recent Canadian Medical Association Summit, attendees were introduced to key issues in Canada’s healthcare system, from staffing shortages to AI. The summit stressed that although it might seem that individuals have few options to affect the deficiencies of the healthcare system, that is not necessarily the case.

How to pitch a politician

One speaker presented a session on pitching potential solutions to politicians. LaToia Jones, an American political strategist, presented her pitch that we should engage in dialogue with all political candidates, no matter our partisan affiliation.

She emphasized, as does the CMA in general, that while healthcare is political, it is not necessary to be partisan. In fact, the speaker recommended that voters attend as many candidate meetings as possible, expressing their concerns each time.

This tactic of interacting with as many candidates as possible, from as many parties as possible, increases the odds that no matter who wins the riding or the election, healthcare will be on the agenda.

To her credit, Jones tried to include the Canadian perspective in her lively presentation. She outlined the ways to pitch your hopes for healthcare reform, as often as possible and to as many candidates as possible.  Her methodology can be used when candidates knock at your door. Or at all-candidate meetings. Or after the election in meetings with your provincial/territorial Premier, Deputy Premier, Minister of Health, Deputy Minister of Health or your riding’s successful candidate.

Be prepared with a clear, concise and emotional message

Jones was insistent that if you don’t have a strong message, half your presentation is gone. During campaigns, both politicians seeking re-election and new candidates have a very short timeframe to introduce themselves to voters. They want to do so and to ask for your vote. To hand you some materials and to move on.

If you want to get their attention, be prepared to respond to the introduction with a few words that reflect your concerns about healthcare. Examples: “I’m glad to meet you; but before I give you my vote, I’d like to know your views on improving healthcare in this riding and beyond.”

The candidate may revert to key messages developed by their party, but Jones encouraged us not to accept political platform platitudes. She related a phrase she has used to continue the discussion. “I understand, but can we get back to the point?”

Canadians would likely soften this by inserting the phrase, “and I appreciate that,” but I digress.

Pitching a politician is not the time to get angry or to become aggressive. Instead, be assertive. This is the time to be clear, concise and emotional about what you want. How?

Do your research

Jones repeatedly mentioned that we must know the candidate’s “why.” Do the research. Why are they running for office? What is their personal connection to the riding and the party? What part of their life is similar to yours in the discussion about healthcare issues?

As examples, you may have a family member who requires specialty services. Do they? Do they have children or grandchildren with special needs? Chronic conditions? Have they faced critical illnesses? Have their family members? Find out.

It is not easy to make a connection in the very brief time that a campaigner is at your door or at an all-candidates meeting. Jones was insistent that data does not work. It is TMI – too much information. Jones insisted that stories do work (and that data comes later, at follow-up meetings). She urged us all to “make them cry.”

Jones encouraged us to present a problem and a solution, for consideration. The goal here is for the politician to remember you. In follow-ups, you can refer back to the problem/solution and continue to push your case for the latter.

For example, the connection may be that you and the candidate/politician live in the same riding. And you can point out a particular problem in that neighbourhood. Their comeback may be that they want to save money, in order to invest in healthcare in the future. Your response can be that they want to save some number of dollars, but you want to suggest a way to improve the healthcare of the same number of local residents.

Show that you care about the candidate. Remind them that you want them to be remembered as the person who solved a serious problem. And you are willing to help them do that.

Use examples from media sources to highlight the problem you want to discuss. Be specific about the number of people in the riding who have no primary healthcare provider. Suggest ways to overcome the problem.

Could school nurses be part of the healthcare team for the neighbourhood? Could community hubs offer opportunities for residents to share information? Could Indigenous leaders help provide staff at group practices?

Interestingly, Jones concluded her presentation by asking groups of attendees to create pitches and to present them to the entire audience. The ideas were wide-ranging and Jones gave constructive criticism on each pitch.

Yes, we are Canadians…

While our natural inclination as Canadians may be to be less assertive than Jones recommended, there are lessons to be learned from her. The most important is to recall that as voters, we have many opportunities to keep our healthcare concerns at the forefront of the election.

Let’s not waste those chances to make a significant difference.

The post Go to bat for healthcare in this election appeared first on rabble.ca.

In her keynote address, No One Left Behind: Building a Workers’ First Emergency Response to the Tariff Crisis that Unites Us, Deena Ladd, executive director of the Workers’ Action Centre spoke about the current trade war, the dangers facing workers and a solidarity-driven plan where working people are the priority.

About today’s guest: 

Deena Ladd has been working to improve wages and working conditions in sectors of work that are dominated with low-wages, violations of rights, precarious and temp work for over 30 years. She has worked to support and develop grassroots training, education and organizing to build the power of workers with groups such as the Fight for $15 and Fairness Campaign, Decent Work and Health Network, the Migrant Rights Network and Justice for Workers. Ladd is one of the founders and executive director of the Toronto Workers’ Action Centre. The Workers’ Action Centre organizes to improve wages and working conditions with low-waged workers, women, racialized and immigrant workers in precarious jobs that face discrimination, violations of rights and no benefits in the workplace.

ASL Interpreters: Emma Dehez and Mike Glover

Clip: Migrant Workers Alliance for Change

Questions read by: Resh Budhu, Ben McCarthy

Audio-only version and transcript can be accessed at georgebrown.ca/TommyDouglasInstitute.

Image: Deena Ladd  / Used with permission.

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

The post No one left behind: Building a workers’ first emergency response to the tariff crisis appeared first on rabble.ca.

Working Canadians are facing a multitude of issues in 2025.

Between 2023 to 2024, in Ontario alone, one million people used food bank services – a 25 per cent increase from the year before. Canada’s housing market is among the most unaffordable in the world. And of course – the latest crisis on everyone’s mind – the ongoing trade dispute with the United States.

With a federal election at the end of the month, there’s a lot to consider for working Canadians.

This week on rabble radio, labour reporter Gabriela Calugay-Casuga sits down with Deena Ladd, one of the founders and executive director of the Toronto Workers’ Action Centre. The two discuss the issues facing working Canadians today, how workers without union support are often more vulnerable to these issues, and how the Workers’ Action Centre advocates for fair work for all.

About our guest

Deena Ladd is one of the founders of the Toronto Workers’ Action Centre and currently serves as its executive director. Ladd has 30 years of organizing experience. She helped build grassroots campaigns like the Fight for $15 and Fairness campaign. Beyond the Workers’ Action Centre, Ladd has also fought for migrant justice through her involvement with the Migrants’ Rights Network and the Migrant Workers’ Action Centre.

The Workers’ Action Centre (WAC) is a worker-based organization. They are committed to improving the lives and working conditions of people in low-wage and unstable employment. They believe that the leaders in the fight for decent work should be the workers directly affected by poor working conditions. Workers have firsthand experience of problems at work, and have the best insight into what will bring fairness and dignity to Ontario’s workplaces.

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.

The post The issues facing working Canadians ahead of a federal election appeared first on rabble.ca.

A deeply flawed argument has slipped into the national election conversation.

It goes like this: there isn’t much policy difference between front-runners Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre, so it really comes down to who can best handle Donald Trump.

True, handling the U.S. president is job one and polls show Carney more trusted on this file. But the first part of the argument — that the two men have similar policies — is fundamentally wrong and dangerously misleading.

In fact, the policy differences between Prime Minister Carney and Conservative leader Poilievre are huge.

The media is highlighting superficial similarities — both men propose cutting the bottom tax rate and cancelling the carbon tax — while downplaying the huge gulf between their very different visions for the country.

Carney’s vision fits broadly within the “social contract” traditionally accepted by Canadian Liberals and Progressive Conservatives — that taxes should be progressive and should pay for social programs benefitting all Canadians.

It’s not clear exactly where Carney stands on this broad spectrum — how much progressivity he wants in the tax system and how much generosity in social programs — but he clearly accepts the basic concept.

Carney’s views are also in line with the traditional Canadian support for strong government — although Canadian governments have been weakened in recent years due to privatization.

This trend toward privatization will have to be reversed, if we’re going to be strong enough to withstand the Trump threat. Carney’s plan to revive the postwar strategy of government building affordable housing is a start.

By contrast, Poilievre is an anti-government extremist whose views are rooted in the radical libertarian economic vision — associated with U.S. economist Milton Friedman — which favours limited government, with a greatly expanded role for the market and corporate sector.

So, in responding to Trump, Poilievre’s main solution is bigger tax cuts for Canadians — which would further weaken the Canadian government, making Canadians more reliant on the marketplace.

Poilievre’s commitment to minimalist government is profound and enduring; it’s been the central focus and defining feature of his life. Mark Bourrie illustrates this well in Ripper, his new biography of the Conservative leader.

Poilievre became immersed in right-wing politics as a teenager when his mother, conservative activist Marlene Poilievre, took him to political meetings and sent him to seminars at the radical, right-wing Fraser Institute.

And, after tendinitis sidelined Poilievre from school sports, the lonely teen spent his formative years in the backrooms of Alberta’s budding, ultra-conservative protest movement, where he stood out for his ability to deliver snappy slogans during cold calls to voters.

“Poilievre is a man who was an outlier when his intellect and personality formed …,” writes Bourrie. “Poilievre’s intellect was locked in when he was a teenager, when he read the sociopathic rants of Ayn Rand and the cruel economic philosophy of Milton Friedman.”

But Poilievre is smart enough to know that, outside Alberta, most Canadians want more from government. So he avoids the subject, focusing instead on side issues like the carbon tax.

But, every now and then, he gives us a glimpse of his true vision for Canada. If only the media would pay attention!

In unscripted comments at a campaign stop at a Vancouver gas station about a year ago, Poilievre said:

“I’m very hesitant to spend taxpayers’ money on anything other than the core services of roads, bridges, police, military, border security and a safety net for those who can’t provide for themselves. That’s common sense. Let’s bring it home.”

Not a word about health care, education or pensions. This is the harsh, austere Canada envisioned by Poilievre — government limited to policing, defence, and a bare-bones safety net for the very poor.

It’s a vision Poilievre’s mother instilled in him, that the Fraser Institute nurtured and that he’s come alarmingly close to inflicting on Canadians — who mostly have no inkling that that’s what he’s all about.

This article was originally published in the Toronto Star.

The post Poilievre wants to take the country in a frighteningly different direction from Mark Carney appeared first on rabble.ca.

Greenpeace was founded in my hometown of Vancouver in 1971. It has since become an international force, campaigning and advocating for environmental sanity on issues ranging from plastic pollution to the climate crisis. I’m a proud supporter.

Like all environmental and social justice organizations, Greenpeace has made mistakes and faced backlash over the years. That in itself isn’t a problem. Healthy debate is essential to a functioning democracy. But we’re now seeing growing efforts to criminalize and bankrupt people and organizations working for a better, safer, cleaner world.

In a new low, a North Dakota jury recently decided Greenpeace must pay pipeline company Energy Transfer US$667 million after the $70 billion company sued over demonstrations against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016 and 2017, arguing that Greenpeace incited people to protest through a “misinformation campaign.”

Greenpeace raised concerns about the ability to get a fair trial in oil and gas country (many jurors had industry ties) and stated that such corporate actions are aimed at “destroying the right to peaceful protest.” The organization plans to appeal.

“What we saw over these three weeks was Energy Transfer’s blatant disregard for the voices of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. And while they also tried to distort the truth about Greenpeace’s role in the protests, we instead reaffirmed our unwavering commitment to non-violence in every action we take,” Greenpeace senior legal adviser Deepa Padmanabha said.

The 1,900-kilometre Dakota Access pipeline moves fracked oil from North Dakota’s Bakken region to an oil terminal in Patoka, Illinois, where it connects with other pipelines to refineries. It goes through four states and under the Missouri River at Lake Oahe, less than a kilometre from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.

Protests against the proposed pipeline began in 2016, when members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and Rosebud Sioux Tribe gathered to defend water and cultural resources, claiming they weren’t consulted before the Army Corp of Engineers granted permits. Thousands of supporters — including more than 300 Indigenous nations, politicians, environmental and civil rights groups and celebrities — joined them.

Things soon turned ugly. Armed soldiers and police, along with pipeline company security forces, used attack dogs, tear gas, water cannons and concussion grenades to stop the land and water defenders from hindering construction — even spraying protesters with pressurized water in below-freezing temperatures.

In late 2016, the Army Corp denied pipeline easement across Lake Oahe pending an environmental assessment and consideration of alternative routes. But on taking office in 2017, President Donald Trump — who owned shares in Energy Transfer and received generous campaign and inauguration donations from the company’s CEO — ordered the Army Corp to expedite the easement. Construction was completed and oil started flowing in 2017.

Beyond its impacts on water and Indigenous rights, the pipeline carries enough crude to emit 121 million tonnes of climate-altering greenhouse gases a year when refined and burned. Non-profit energy group RMI estimates that could be 3.5 times higher if methane and nitrous oxides were considered.

Energy Transfer wants to increase pipeline capacity, driving up emissions and rupture and spill risks. A Greenpeace and Waterkeeper Alliance report found the company and its subsidiaries have experienced numerous incidents over the years, contaminating land and water throughout the U.S.

Although Greenpeace argues it wasn’t heavily involved in the Standing Rock issue, and provided assistance at the request of the Standing Rock Sioux, the environmental group is clearly seen as a threat to oil and gas interests and is a high-profile target for increasingly common efforts to silence opposition.

From Standing Rock to Wet’suwet’en territory in British Columbia and beyond, militarized law enforcement agencies are relying more often on use of force against land and water defenders, and companies are resorting to tactics such as SLAPPs (“strategic lawsuits against public participation” designed to silence opponents through costly, time-consuming legal processes). Those working to protect land, air, water, plants and animals and our future face an increasingly uphill battle.

The lawsuit against Greenpeace is an attack on the right to protest and speak freely. It won’t be the last. We should all stand with Standing Rock, and with organizations such as Greenpeace that are working for people and the planet and holding the line against the destructive fossil fuel industry.

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

The post Pipeline company’s lawsuit against Greenpeace an attack on freedoms appeared first on rabble.ca.

Much has already been written about Sean Baker’s 2024 movie Anora. In true stripper fashion, I’m fashionably late, and want to contribute my $20 (the average cost of a lapdance). The movie won Palme D’Or in Cannes, and cleaned up at the Oscars, winning Best Picture, Best Directing, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing, and Best Actress for Mikey Madison.

Anora is a meditation on wealth and class. It’s clear that strippers are working class. They are busy selling and giving lap dances, which is physical labour. The club itself is one of the more accurate representations I’ve ever seen—the changing room is pink, with sort of crappy locker room vibes. The girls bond over their dinners that they bring in in  Tupperware and there is both fierce loyalty and drama among them. Ani complains to the manager that the DJ is rude, and asserts that she will take as much time off as she pleases until the club starts treating her like an employee and contributing towards her workers’ comp and retirement. I’ve experienced all of this at my club.

Mikey Madison plays the titular Anora, a Brooklyn-based stripper of Russian origin with a potty mouth, going by the stage name Ani while working at the strip club. Madison did a lot of preparation for the role—learning Russian, stripper lingo, and also how to pole dance from working stripper, Kennady Schneider. Diamond is jealous that Ani meets Vanya, a young, attractive rich Russian who is the son of an oligarch at the club. He and Ani go on to have a whirlwind, tragicomedic romance, because his parents disapprove that he married a “whore”. 

Not only is Normington a working stripper, she is one of the union organizers from the Los Angeles club Star Garden, which unionised in May 2023. As a side note for you, reader: San Francisco’s now closed Lusty Lady was the first unionised strip club in the US, and Portland’s Magic Tavern unionised in September 2023, both Star Garden and Magic Tavern are a part of the Actors’ Equity union. I’m glad strippers are finally starting to get recognised by the film industry, and as Normington said in this interview: “Sex workers make great performers, or particularly actors, [because] we have all of this life experience that can be injected into a role. I’m very excited that filmmakers are starting to recognize sex workers as an underrepresented community. Literal representation by sex workers to play sex workers is important.”

Another stripper, Luna Sofia Miranda, plays Lulu in the movie—Ani’s best friend. Miranda talks about how she landed her role, admitting she  “hustled her way into” the part. She met Baker while working at the KONY HQ strip club in Brighton Beach, which was later a filming location, figured out that he’s not really there to buy lap dances, but is doing research on a film, and charmed her way into an audition. 

The movie explores both Ani and Vanya’s relationship and tension with class; Ani is thrilled when Vanya buys her a giant engagement ring and she’s more than happy to retire from the club and escape her socioeconomic reality, and become a kept woman. One of my favourite parts of the movie is when Lulu tells Ani that her butterfly adorned nails are classy, compared to hers that have dollar signs painted on them.

On the other hand, Vanya, born into a wealthy family, wants to strip away from life. He doesn’t want to return to Russia and work for his father, instead wanting to marry Ani and live in America. He and Anora fly to Vegas, and have a no frills wedding at a wedding chapel, the farthest thing from a wedding that his parents would themselves organise. Vanya seems to want to sex, drugs and rock and roll his way into independence, without thinking about consequences. 

It’s too bad that Vanya turns out to be spineless and runs away after his parents send goons to persuade Anora to sign annulment paperwork. They enforce class by stating that a prostitute is not good enough for her son, despite Anora’s protests that she is legitimately in love. Anora’s protestations turn physical, she too tries to run away from the goons, but they tie her up, and a slapstick comedy ensues where she tries to fight them off. I never thought that I would see a film where violence against sex workers is not immediately triggering, it seemed to me that the goons respected that she fights back and injures them. 

I don’t want to spoil the film’s explosive yet ambiguous ending, but it does end with Anora and Vanya parting ways, and Anora ending up with one of the goons Vanya’s parents send for her to separate them. It may be pity, respect, genuine attraction or a combination of all three that brings them together for the film’s last scene. Or maybe, they see the hustler in each other, afterall, both of their jobs are in the grey market and heavily stigmatised.

Anora is a great film, and I was thrilled to watch it with my fellow strippers. The only part that we thought was inauthentic is how quickly Ani announced her retirement to the other strippers. We’re much more superstitious than that, we don’t want to tempt fate and then wind up back at the club because we were disappointed by a man or because a conventional job didn’t work out. We were very grateful to the Community Impact Team at TIFF, who invited us to the movie’s viewing. 

Some of my regular readers will recall that I reviewed the film Zola for one of my first columns and argued that strippers are culture makers and we deserve credit for our work. I’m thrilled that this is slowly happening. A couple of weeks ago, TIFF put on a screening of Zola, and invited a couple members of the stripper advocacy group, Work Safe Twerk Safe, to give opening remarks. It’s a beautiful thing to see we’re finally getting the recognition we deserve. To echo what Normington said about the role of strippers and sex workers in the arts: “I also want to go a step further. It doesn’t have to be a sex worker role. I’m ready for everyone to see the value that we have in other artistic fields.”

While Anora was not written by a stripper like Zola was, it’s still a film very much worth watching. The strippers who participated in its creation did a great job of showing that stripping is sometimes mundane, sometimes glamorous, sometimes even dangerous. At the end of the day, stripping is a degree in life, and all its ups and downs. When Luna Sofia Miranda was asked how being a sex worker affected her life, she said: “I feel like I came of age in the strip club. I cut my teeth [there]. I learned how the world works and I’m able to see bullshit a lot more clearly. It’s easier to stand up for myself after working in the club for so long.”

More than anything, Anora is a cautionary tale—not about the dangers of sex work, rather that Pretty Woman is a fantasy. In reality it’s our own hard work support from the sex workers’ community that will help us step into our post-stripping life, not a rich man with empty promises.

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How big a role did the colourful image of popsicles play in the Alberta government’s decision yesterday to drop the appalling Alberta Health Services (AHS) policy of not providing frozen treats, juice boxes, water and snacks to kids recovering from cancer treatments?

Never mind the letterhead on the memo or the excuses we’re hearing now, it’s the Alberta government that owns the penny-wise, pound-foolish policy that under the circumstances can only be described as depraved. 

As a cost-saving strategy, the measures outlined in nearly impenetrable bureaucratese in the memorandum from the senior operating officer responsible for nutrition, food, linen and environmental services at AHS were both foolish and heartless.

But the United Conservative Party (UCP) had fired the AHS Board and named former senior civil servant Andre Tremblay Official Administrator to replace it, vowing to transition the agency into “a hospital-based service provider” on January 31. The memo was dated March 17.

The buck, as they say, has to stop somewhere and the calendar shows where. 

Needless to say, when contrasted with the image of Alberta’s premier racing south to Florida at public expense to help raise money for a YouTube propaganda boiler room, the optics were unimaginably bad. 

Tremblay, who has recently been rebranded Interim President and CEO of AHS, executed a screeching reversal and announced the changes outlined in the memo to take effect Tuesday had been dropped. 

This happened after the issue embarrassed Health Minister Adriana LaGrange the day before, when it was raised by a reporter during a news conference on an unrelated health care topic. And if that wasn’t enough to push the government to act, surely the harsh column by a usually understanding newspaper columnist with a big readership helped. 

So the point of Tremblay’s statement Tuesday on the AHS website and social media – assuming it wasn’t an April Fool’s prank – appeared to be both to drop the hot potato ASAP and to blame AHS for the problem. 

“In September 2024, Alberta Health Services approved changes to the way food is supplied in our emergency departments and other non-inpatient areas,” Tremblay’s statement began. 

“After media reports surfaced, the Minister of Health raised concerns about the implementation of this policy and asked me to look into reports that food and drink may not have been made available to patients,” he continued. (I’ll bet she did!) 

“The proposed policy was not meant to deprive patients of food. What was meant to change is how food is stored and delivered to patients in an effort to reduce waste that is occurring in our hospitals. I have reviewed this policy which was brought forward prior to my arrival at AHS and, after feedback from clinicians, have decided that AHS will not move forward with these changes.” (Emphasis added.)

“We are concerned by the misinterpretation of this proposed policy and are looking into reports that food and drink may not have been available to patients.”

But that dog won’t hunt. It is not at all clear the policy was misinterpreted. “Clinics are encouraged to remind patients to bring snacks, meals, and money for food purchases,” the March 17 memo said in part. “Departments must adhere to the established core lists and refrain from requesting additional items from any other source.” 

Moreover, at the time it was issued, it was no longer really a proposed policy, although it hadn’t yet been implemented. The “reports,” by the sound of it, were based on real events that had already happened. 

Did it occur to anyone that depriving patients, some of them small children, of food – and water – was exactly what such a memo would achieve? Of course that concern was raised by front line staff and, presumably, ignored. 

Sarah Hoffman, the Opposition NDP’s health critic and a former Alberta health minister, was right, if a little too alliterative to set the proper tone for a serious news release, when she observed that “the UCP government is more focused on cuts, chaos and corruption than providing care, comfort and compassion to kids with cancer.”

It’s unlikely the policy ever would have been changed if the parents of kids in care hadn’t raised a ruckus on social media. “Don’t take away this small and sweet piece of joy to these unlucky kids enduring hell,” wrote Amanda Moppett-Beatch on Facebook below a photo of her son Easton, 11. “Find something else to pick on. Us Oncology families are dealing with enough…”

But even then the policy might have passed unnoticed had it remained, in the words of the March 17 memo, a matter of a restricted list of “established core items” and “essential nourishment items.” 

I’ll bet it was the image of the popsicles, the benefits of which anyone who’s ever taken care of a sick kid understands, that shamed this usually shameless government to walk this back.

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Though abortion is currently protected in Canada, growing political movements threaten Canada’s already rocky access to abortion care. 

In the midst of a federal election, concerns are heightened on how the presidency of Donald Trump is shaping the future of Canada’s political landscape. Within hours of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the website reproductiverights.gov was taken down. Soon after, the global gag rule was reinstated and fetal personhood was proposed in federal law within an anti-trans executive order. As barriers to reproductive health services continue to grow in the US, the strong ties between politics and healthcare services are increasingly evident. 

Though Canada’s political system is quite different from that of the US, the country is not immune to extreme right-wing political movements. Abortion in Canada has been protected under the Canada Health Act as a medically necessary service since 1988. Though there are currently no legal barriers to abortion, access remains an important issue across the country. Barriers to abortion emerge in Canada through extra-legal obstacles, including territorial restrictions and policies, access, cost, and anti-choice harassment. Abortion is a time-sensitive procedure, and barriers to receiving care can lead to unwanted continuance of pregnancy and additional negative repercussions.  

Notably, concerning trends of political polarization are increasingly spilling over from the US to Canada. Abortion rights are currently being used as a wedge issue in Canadian politics. For reproductive health care to remain protected in Canada, the next elected government must be attentive to the tactics and patterns emerging in the US, as these strategies risk being replicated in Canada. 

Though the Canada Health Act protects rights to abortion, these rights have not been equitably enforced across the country. Significant gaps in healthcare services persist outside urban centres, as well as Northern and coastal communities. Restrictive policies surrounding abortion services have been present in maritime provinces. Abortion services were not offered in the province of PEI from 1982 to 2017. Until November 7th, 2024, New Brunswick did not allow healthcare coverage for abortions completed outside hospitals. These policies were in violation of the Canada Health Act for decades. Compounding factors influence additional barriers faced by Indigenous communities when accessing reproductive health care. A 2013 study found that participants who identified as First Nation or Métis were almost three times more likely to report traveling over 100 km to access a clinic in Canada when compared to white women.

In October, the NDP announced plans to introduce a motion pledging to improve access to abortion care. The motion would call on the Federal government to commit to expanding abortion access and enforce the Canada Health Act. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, stated in a press conference that this could be done in a variety of ways but would ultimately ensure that “the right to care is universal, transferable and publicly delivered.”

Since Trump was re-elected, Justin Trudeau also made statements supporting abortion rights both in public discussions and in the House of Commons. The Liberals have been criticized for not enforcing the Canada Health Act. However, they have taken action to support reproductive rights through the passing of Bill C-64, universal access to contraception, as well as proposed legislation to regulate charitable Crisis Pregnancy Centres (CPCs). 

CPCs are unlicensed counseling centres across Canada that create barriers to accessing equitable care through the concealment of an anti-abortion agenda. Though the prorogation of parliament interrupted the actions mentioned above, they still act as evidence that both parties have committed to improving the current landscape for reproductive healthcare. The Conservative Party of Canada has remained quiet. 

Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative party, has said the party “would not touch” abortion or support legislation on abortion, and that he considers himself pro-choice (ARCC begs to differ). Unfortunately, Poilievre’s statement does not ensure Canadians will have improved access to abortion or that barriers surrounding abortion health care will be removed under Conservative leadership. Inaction is not a stand-in for abortion rights. 

Additionally, members of the Conservative party are supported per the party policy to vote freely “[o]n issues of moral conscience, such as abortion, the definition of marriage, and euthanasia.” These free votes allow Conservative party members to vote in support of private member bills tabled by their colleagues. Though party leaders can exert some control over the type of motions their MP’s put forward, Pierre Polievre has allowed for MPs to put forward bills deemed anti-choice. 

Conservative MPs have a history of tabling bills that, if passed, would infringe on abortion rights. In 2023, conservative MP Cathay Wagantall introduced a bill that activists warned could lead to the establishment of fetal personhood and the criminalization of abortion. In 2024, Conservative MP Arnold Viersen tabled petition 441-02454 that called for a restriction on abortion access. This petition did not hold legislative weight; however, it demonstrates Conservative MPs are active in their attempts to restrict access to reproductive health care. 

A promise that the Conservative party will not legislate on abortion is not a promise that ensures Canadians have accessible options for care. A Canadian government that supports human rights and recognizes the importance of abortion is a government that enforces the rights protected under the Canada Health Act and reduces barriers to access. Abortion is an essential component of healthcare.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade is the result of decades of attacks on abortion rights in the US These political actions provide a blueprint for politicians and anti-choice groups in Canada to collectively attack abortion rights through events, engagement training, and shared funding across Canada and the United States.

Lack of enforcement of the Canada Health Act is a serious federal and provincial issue. Access to life-saving services should not change based on where you reside in Canada. Consistency and enforcement of abortion rights need to be present across all provinces and territories. This is only possible with a federal government that supports and upholds the Canada Health Act. 

In the next federal election, it is essential to recognize that though abortion is legal in Canada, significant barriers still prevent equitable access to care. As we witness the rollback of reproductive rights in the United States, we must remain vigilant to protect and advance access across Canada. Engagement is key. Attend events, sign petitions, volunteer, learn about current actions via social media, your local or national reproductive rights organization. The federal election is happening now, check the ARCC’s election toolkit to see if local MPs have a history of anti-choice actions. Connect with your local MPs via email, letters, or phone calls to demand action plans for improvements to reproductive health care. Together, we can advocate for a future where access to abortion and other essential healthcare services reflects not privilege but rather equity and human rights.

Viewpoint: Reproductive Justice is a blog by the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada.

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