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Moving Beyond Ford: The Transportation We Want
Canadian PoliticsIn Toronto and beyond, campaigns are underway to confront the Ford government’s initiative to take the Toronto subway system from the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) in order to reorganize, further automobilize and possibly privatize transit and transportation across the Greater Toronto area (GTA). This and other Ford Government initiatives have put progressive transportation advocates as well as transit riders and workers on the defensive. Once more, proactive initiatives are forced onto the backburner.
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Canada’s corrupt foreign policy practices come home to roost on Parliament Hill
Canadian BusinessJustin Trudeau’s government is engulfed in a major political scandal that lays bare the role of corporate power in Ottawa. But SNC Lavalin’s important role in Canadian foreign policy has largely been ignored in discussion of the controversy. The PMO has been accused of interfering in the federal court case against the giant Canadian engineering and construction firm for bribing officials in Libya. Former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould claims she was repeatedly pressured to defer prosecution of the company and instead negotiate a fine.
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Trudeau and SNC-Lavalin: Of Hosts and Parasites
Canadian BusinessIt is not a pretty picture, but to anti-capitalists it could be a useful one. They might find fertile ground for the argument that, when the SNC-Lavalins of the world cheat and lie, they forfeit their right to exist as well as their assets, as is done when we deal with people that we like to label members of gangs and racketeers. These assets could be used for socially acceptable purposes, saving the jobs which, according to the Trudeaus of the world, can only be saved by allowing rapacious capitalists to satisfy their greed by hook or by crook.
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‘Progressive’ Trudeau Government Attacks Venezuela
Canadian PoliticsAnyone who still entertains any illusions in the ‘progressive’ nature of the Trudeau government would have been shocked to witness Chrystia Freeland assembling a collection of regional representatives of the Washington Consensus in Ottawa to further the coup plot against Venezuela. The so called Lima Group that she brought together dutifully issued a statement calling for the “national armed forces of Venezuela to demonstrate their loyalty to the interim president in his constitutional functions as their commander in chief.”
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Canada’s Ugly Role in the US-led Coup in Venezuela
Canadian PoliticsMost Canadians think of their country as a force for good in the world, but efforts by Trudeau’s government to overthrow Venezuela’s elected government have revealed the ugly truth about the Great White North. We are an important partner in imperialism, willing to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, including the use of military force, to benefit the perceived self-interest of our elites.
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Pacification by pipeline
Canadian PoliticsThe framing of TMX as vital to the national interest, and further cloaked with a national security rationale, could make infringement all the more compelling. At the same time, it provides the justification, within Canada’s legal framework, to take measures to prevent opponents from disrupting Canada’s imagined energy future by defining them as threats to (future) national security.
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When these streets talk, do we listen?
Canadian PoliticsWhether through the blood rinsed down sidewalks and into our sewers, or through organized protest, the streets have spoken many times over. They have told us that Toronto, like so many other cities in this land we call Canada, is a place of grotesque violence, abuse, and shame. As I wait for the streetcar, I picture a young Black man, not yet grown into his adolescent body, being pinned down to the ground. The officers kneel on the boy’s spine as his lips and teeth gnash against the ground below. “I didn’t do anything!” he yells. “You’re hurting me!”
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The criminalized lives of others
Canadian PoliticsThe Stanley verdict drew attention to a system marked by hypocrisy that results in unfair treatment. It was a harsh reminder that the criminal justice system has been deployed ever since Canada’s inception to protect the use of the land for European settlement, to maintain and promote business ventures and private investments, and to control people living in poverty, especially in urban areas.
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Don’t blame seniors for rising healthcare costs
Canadian PoliticsIt is easy to blame seniors for the mounting financial burden of healthcare. Statistics are stacked against them, and having left the labour market, they are not organized. These conditions allow ageism to operate with impunity. But examining the context in which seniors incur a high proportion of healthcare costs reveals many factors for which they are not responsible. Reinvestment in public healthcare would enable everyone not only to avoid the worst impacts of senescence, but also to enjoy physical, mental, and social well-being as they age with dignity.
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Doug Ford’s Ontario: Hard Right Turn
Canadian PoliticsIn sum, Fordism in Ontario is an extraordinarily contradictory agenda. The antistate, market populism used to sustain the rate of accumulation at any cost exists alongside an increasingly interventionist and authoritarian state mobilizing its resources and reordering its administrative apparatuses to buttress this process. Ford’s “government for the people” thus pivots, like Trump’s regime in the U.S., around ideological appeals to a hard-right provincialism, patriarchal family values set against a hostile world of crime and terrorism, mobilization of ethnic and racial chauvinisms.
