Unifor’s call for a full weapons ban and embargo on Israel should be followed by a call for the Government of Canada to immediately end arms exports to Saudi Arabia. Labour can and must do its part to stop the flow of arms to Saudi Arabia. Our movement’s commitment to peace, human rights, and solidarity with working people everywhere, demands it. We look forward to hearing from you.

Leaving those in financial difficulty behind for a lower-wage future isn’t a bug in the Canada Recovery Benefit system—it’s a feature of a program designed and redesigned to crack down on recipients and maximize “incentive to work.” The CRB was, to this end, designed within the ‘workfare’ tradition that’s marked every social program in Canada since at least the mid-1990s.

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, workers at the Nestlé manufacturing plant in Toronto’s west end are facing unfair conditions including part-time pay, pension cuts and precarious employment, and management is unwilling to negotiate a reasonable contract with its employees. As of May 19, more than 470 workers are on indefinite strike after talks between Unifor Local 252 and the chocolate company broke down.

The following is an excerpt from Bent out of Shape: Shame, Solidarity, and Women’s Bodies at Work by award-winning ergonomist Karen Messing, published by Between the Lines in April 2021. Dr. Messing is a professor of biology at the Université du Québec à Montréal, where she does research in partnership with unions and women’s groups. She was trained in ergonomics and genetics.

Throughout the pandemic, the actions of Manitoba’s Progressive Conservatives have never been in the best interests of teachers. They have been focused solely on the economy. That’s why the government will not close schools for any meaningful amount of time. If they did, the Conservatives would have to then admit that transmission is occurring in schools and fund either universal child care or paid sick days for all Manitobans.

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.

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.

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? Or would those who saw the plague as a canary-in-the-coal mine moment prevail?

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.

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.