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May warns Ottawa will be forced to pay for oilpatch cleanup costs
Canadian PoliticsMay noted that the sector, which extracts heavy oil from tar-like bituminous deposits of sand beneath Alberta’s boreal forest, has been heavily subsidized ever since former prime minister Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government offered billions of dollars in incentives. She said the cost of liabilities would dramatically rise if governments continue to allow the industry to expand. She suggested it would be better to maintain current levels of production, refining the product in Alberta and cancelling new pipeline expansion projects to reduce carbon pollution.
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One Key Way NAFTA 2.0 Reinvigorates Canadian Sovereignty
Canadian PoliticsThe federal government should pursue new agreements — as New Zealand has done under the re-born Trans-Pacific Partnership — to drop ISDS. We should respect each other’s democracies and courts and, if some companies have doubts, they have the option to negotiate for ISDS in their government contracts, buy insurance against political risks, or just decline to invest in unreliable countries.
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Canada brings Venezuela to International Criminal Court
Canadian PoliticsRequesting the International Criminal Court to investigate Venezuela’s government is a significant escalation in Ottawa’s campaign of interference in the domestic affairs of another country. Supported by five like-minded South American nations, it’s the first time a member state has been brought before the ICC’s chief prosecutor by other members.
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Canada capitulates to Trump on trade with renegotiated NAFTA
Canadian PoliticsThe USMCA is being spun in Canada as a tweak to NAFTA. By the time the U.S. implementing legislation gets written up, even the trade policy specialists usually onside are going to be critical of much that is new. So far not one new positive element has been identified in the USMCA as a benefit for Canada. Pierre Trudeau called the original FTA with the U.S. “a monstrous swindle.” The new deal is that, plus a set of unnecessary capitulations to shut up Donald Trump on trade. It won’t.
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Quebec’s election frontrunners are frozen in climate denialism
Canadian PoliticsMore than 70 people perished in Quebec this summer during an unprecedented heat wave that sent the mercury soaring across the world. Welcome to the new reality: a decade ago, the Global Humanitarian Forum had already estimated casualties in the hundreds of thousands each year as a result of climate change, with hundreds of millions more suffering serious harm.
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Turning Doug Ford’s Attack on Toronto into a Movement for Democratic Renewal
Canadian PoliticsAn open letter about Bill 5 Better Local Government Act. We, the undersigned group of scholars and teachers, deplore the autocratic and arbitrary reduction of ward representation for Toronto city council contained in Bill 5 being rushed through the Ontario Legislature by the just-elected Doug Ford-led Conservative provincial government. There are numerous problems with this initiative – both in terms of policy and process – that cannot be squared with democratic values or procedures.
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Trudeau clings to Chapter 19 in NAFTA, but why?
Canadian PoliticsLet us also remember that the NAFTA talks not only lack transparency and genuine public input, but they are now being rushed, in part, so that they can be concluded under outgoing NAFTA-friendly Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto, rather than Andrés Manuel López Obrador (who was elected on July 1 and is to be sworn into office on December 1). NAFTA is part of the architecture of corporate rule, the Chapter 19 provision doesn’t change that fundamental truth.
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Appropriated identities and the new wave of dispossession
Canadian PoliticsThis new wave of dispossession is something completely different. French settlers and indeed other non-Indigenous peoples will quickly be able to= undermine our Indigenous efforts to reassert our identities and rights if we allow reconciliation to become the shield under which white supremacists hide. We must confront this threat head-on despite the inevitable claims of “lateral violence,” “colonial mentality” or “unsafe space” every time someone questions the appropriated identities of these groups.
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Will the Ontario Labour Movement Return to Class Struggle as Austerity Deepens?
Canadian PoliticsThe Ontario labour movement is in deep crisis, and has been staggering since the end of the 1990s. Given the labour movement’s historic role in leading and supporting progressive change, its current disorientation should be a matter of alarm to its members of course, but also to anyone concerned with countering the insatiable greed and social destructiveness of capitalism.
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Opportunity knocks
Canadian PoliticsWe should seize this unexpected opportunity to withdraw from NAFTA and any other agreement that puts corporate interests before the public interest. Canada is a trading nation and always will be and the U.S. economy will always be a major factor in Canadian economic life — but our economic stability depends on an inward turn toward an east-west rather than a north-south axis, wherever possible replacing global value chains with domestic ones and choosing democratic national planning over capitalist global planning.
