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Busting the rent control myth
Improved rent controls alone will not solve the housing crisis, but they can play a major role. With the evidence on our side, and a rigged market on the other, it’s long overdue for cities and provinces across Canada to pursue improved, expansive rent controls, and help bring the outrageous and unchallenged influence of speculators to an end.
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BC’s logging industry is using mill closures as a political tool in its fight against regulation
The coincident timing of sawmill closures and the BC government’s plans to improve the sustainability of the province’s logging sector suggests that the industry isn’t just responding to market conditions; it’s sacrificing workers and communities as a political threat designed to scare Premier David Eby out of implementing any meaningful new regulations.
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Why news of population decline and economic slowdown isn’t necessarily a bad thing
Sure, the end of economic expansion and population growth is a challenging prospect. But it’s not nearly as daunting as the crisis we are setting up for ourselves if we continue to destroy nature through wasteful consumption and pollution. China’s slowdown is a welcome opportunity to get our priorities straight and set ourselves on a path of sustainable happiness and wellbeing.
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The life and death struggle for public health care
As health care provision moves closer to collapse, the most destructive course of action is to offer privatized medical care to those with the means to pay for it, while forcing the rest of us to line up for the sub-standard remnants of the public system. Given the prevailing political agenda, it is hardly surprising that this threat is looming over us.
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Imperialism is inscribed in the very DNA of capitalism
John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis argues for a theory of contemporary imperialism grounded in super-exploitation, outsourcing, and global labour arbitrage. It is a highly readable and clarifying text that offers a comprehensive analysis of the global shift of production to the South in recent decades.
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Keynes and the left
The ideas and theories of John Maynard Keynes still dominate the economic views and policy proposals of the leaders of the labour movement in the major capitalist economies. Keynes is seen as offering a ‘third way’ between the pro-capitalist ‘free market’ economics that dominates the universities and is often perceived as the opposite of dangerously revolutionary Marxian economics.
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Why Turkey was ill-prepared for the Kahramanmaras earthquake
On February 5 and 6, 2023, the East Anatolian fault in Turkey released two major earthquakes, the largest one registering 7.8 on the Richter scale. This earthquake is now among the strongest recorded in Turkey’s modern history. The massive tectonic move was felt from the Black Sea coast all the way down to Lebanon. It is one of the biggest disasters Turkey has experienced in the last century.
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Public health care is under attack—it’s time to take a stand
Canadians cherish public health care. It’s part of our national identity; a social contract that ensures we’ll be cared for when we’re vulnerable, regardless of the size of our bank account. It’s an affirmation of our collective commitment to equality and justice. But our health care system is in crisis. NDP MP and health critic Don Davies explains why.
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Deconstructing Loblaw’s inept self-justification
Supermarkets like Loblaw complain they are being unfairly singled out for responsibility for food inflation. They claim they are innocent victims, caught in the middle: merely passing along higher prices they are charged by their own suppliers. These arguments have not washed well with the shopping public, every time they shell out $200 for a cart of groceries.
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Four ways the Ford government is privatizing health care
Ford endlessly claims that all services will be paid for through OHIP, but research conducted by the Ontario Health Coalition clearly shows that for years private clinics took public funding and extra-billed patients. The Ford government has done nothing to stop this—although it is contrary to the Canada Health Act and limits access to care, particularly for lower income families and elders.