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Writing politics during the pandemic
We should take this moment to reflect on political writing as a collective act. The writer comes from a community, physical and digital. The writer produces material that goes into those communities, even if we do not all experience life in those communities the same. Even during a pandemic, these spaces can be productive and powerful, serving as a part of the struggle for justice and accountability.
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Federal budget ignores Canada’s ongoing genocide against Indigenous peoples
Canada’s continued denial of the basic human rights of Indigenous peoples is written right into budget 2021, a document that clearly falls well short on addressing this country’s ongoing genocide crisis. How many more Indigenous women and girls need to go missing before the federal government addresses this historic crime for what it is—genocide—and takes the nationwide urgent action that is needed to end it?
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Defending the left case against basic income
I don’t think my enemies are those who honestly feel that basic income is the best approach. Rather, they are those who maintain the system of colonialism, racism and poverty. The stakes are too high to set the debate aside, but I hope we can pursue it in ways that are useful and constructive. In that spirit, I offer this response to what is, in my view, the mistaken notion that basic income offers us a way forward.
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Why is a Montréal school pushing students to join the Israeli military?
Canadian law makes it illegal to recruit soldiers within the country for a foreign state, but the line between enticing impressionable young people to consider joining the IDF and formal recruitment is blurred. Legal questions aside, should a Montréal school funnel youngsters into a foreign military engaged in a brutal 50-year occupation? And should taxpayers foot the bill?
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It shouldn’t have taken this long for the BC NDP to legislate paid sick leave
Following months of pressure and after more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, British Columbia’s NDP government has finally announced plans to introduce a permanent paid sick leave program to cover the gaps in the federal government’s lacklustre Canada Recovery Sickness Benefit. Yet, as Alex Cosh writes, it shouldn’t haven take this much effort to win such basic protections.
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How COVID-19 and CERB proved that basic income is not only possible—it works
As the pandemic unfolded, the momentum behind a Basic Income has grown steadily. Not surprisingly, people were given to wondering aloud: Just what kind of world would emerge post-pandemic? Would the megaphones of market fundamentalism holler about debt and deficit and the need to return to the decades of austerity, drowning out radical alternatives?
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Who controls the basic income narrative?
Instead of protecting the status quo, it is time for governments to pay their fair share in support of greater equality and equity in this country, especially when that wealth was borne out of the deliberate and ongoing oppression and dispossession of BIPOC communities. Basic income is the way forward in lifting millions of Canadians out of poverty, and empowering them to make their own choices.
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Trudeau abandons promised LTC standards, bowing to for-profit care agenda
After promising to establish national standards for long-term care in response to the tragic outcomes of COVID-19, the federal government has now washed its hands of that responsibility. It is instead passing the buck to a toothless accreditation industry to create updated standards. This band-aid solution is a far cry from what experts, advocates, and many residents, have long been asking for.
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India’s COVID crisis shows why Canada needs to oppose vaccine monopolies
Canada’s role in obstructing India and the rest of the Global South in their attempts to waive vaccine patent rights is immoral, unjust, and completely illogical, propping up a system of extreme vaccine inequality by allowing just 16 percent of the world’s population, all of whom reside in wealthy countries, to maintain control of half of all confirmed vaccine orders.
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How the Romanov dynasty bested Doug Ford in pandemic management
Yes, it’s true: Ontario Premier Doug Ford is being outpaced in the realm of pandemic management by the tyrannical Romanov dynasty who governed at a time when bloodletting and miasma theories were still considered legitimate medical practice. If even they could figure out that paid sick days are key to managing a pandemic, it should be fantastically embarrassing that Ford cannot.