Amidst sustained opposition to the holocaust in Gaza, Israel’s supporters are acting more and more like fascists. They have been pushing to restrict civil liberties, dismantle democratic organizations and expand policing for months, but now want to deport protesters, buy arms and ban protests. Straight out of Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts playbook, a Jewish Khananist mob attacked a peaceful student encampment at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) on Wednesday. The middle of the night assault with sticks, fireworks and chemical irritants left dozens injured. As was sometimes the ..read more

Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) president Bea Bruske called on federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre to end his party’s obstruction of the national Pharmacare Bill. Dubbed Bill C-64, the legislation would create a framework for a national pharmacare plan, which initially would cover insulin for those living with diabetes up to $1,500 a year and $200 a year for birth control for women and gender diverse people. After years of effort on the part of labour, non-profit groups and the NDP, the bill was finally introduced into the House of Commons earlier this year. READ MORE: Labour celebrat ..read more

Alberta’s United Conservative Party (UCP) MLAs are likely to soon get a hard lesson in what the late Colin Powell supposedly called the Pottery Barn Rule.  To wit: If you break it, you own it.  In Canadian politics, there is a relevant corollary to the Pottery Barn Rule, which Powell, a career soldier who rose to be a general of the Army and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is said to have used when he was US Secretary of State in 2003 to try to explain to President George W. Bush what would happen if the United States invaded Iraq. The corollary is, there’s nothing an elected ..read more

A dozen years ago, Pierre Poilievre was a relatively obscure political figure who was mostly regarded — to the extent he was regarded at all — as a fiercely anti-labour guy on the far-right of the Harper cabinet. But there he was in Parliament last February, voting in favour of pro-labour legislation banning scabs in federal workplaces. Has he fundamentally changed his thinking — or was that simply part of his new, air-brushed “friend of the working man” look? Surely, there should be a lot more media scrutiny of this mysterious individual who, after shedding his glasses and a ..read more

Alberta has a plan to create a “master plan” for a huge passenger rail network around the province! Really. The central showpiece will be a high-speed super-train whizzing between Calgary and Edmonton – powered by mighty engines that, presumably, generate steam produced by coal from the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains.  I jest. They’ll run on hydrogen, of course.  Whatever they run on, these imaginary trains, we can be pretty sure it won’t be electricity generated from wind or sunshine. This is Danielle Smith’s Alberta, after all, where the sun isn’t allowed to shine at n ..read more

Less than 24 hours after the Alberta’s United Conservative Party Government pulled the plug on low-income transit programs in Edmonton and Calgary, Seniors, Community and Social Services Minister Jason Nixon executed a screeching bootlegger turn this morning and completely reversed course. It must have been a hell of a reaction UCP MLAs got – especially from voters in the crucial electoral battleground of the City of Calgary. I can’t recall Alberta Conservatives backing off a terrible policy this quickly since premier Ralph Klein’s government hastily pulled a bill that would have strippe ..read more

Having announced Monday it would spend $9 million cooking up a fanciful provincial railway “masterplan” that includes a public transit component, the United Conservative Party (UCP) informed Edmonton and Calgary it is ending its contribution to their low-income transit pass programs.  The mayors of both cities appear to have been gobsmacked by the unexpected notice they received of cuts of $9 million to Edmonton and $6.2 million to Calgary for the subsidized transit passes for seniors, students and residents living in poverty, which the government did not bother to announce to the public ..read more

Conservatives seem to name bills something they are not. Bill 165 Keeping Energy Costs Down Act 2024, looks very much like more of the same as Bill 35 The Energy Competition Act, The Electricity Act and the Ontario Energy Board Act in 1998. This undemocratic legislation is still costing a fortune to this day.  Bill 165 is very undemocratic, just giving the government more power to rule by decree. Everyone should be concerned by the removal of “procedural fairness” in this bill. Ford constantly claims “Ontario is open for business,” Business loves low cost, stability and predictability. F ..read more

When then municipal affairs minister Danielle Larivee fired three Thorhild County councillors in 2016, the county’s reeve accused the Alberta NDP of “Soviet-style government.”  Under the circumstances, this hardly seems fair.  Still, Reeve Dan Buryn’s anger can be understood, if not sympathized with. He was one of the trio of councillors who had been sacked by Larivee for what an inquiry report termed “irregular, improper and improvident” actions and inappropriate behaviour.  Larivee’s predecessor in the portfolio, Deron Bilous, had followed provincial law when he ordered the t ..read more

We may be living in the 21st Century, but Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Government is apparently still suffering from the 19th Century distrust of voters and democracy that convinced the Fathers of Confederation to give us that unelected Senate.  So, yesterday, Alberta Municipal Affairs Minister Ric McIver introduced Bill 20, the Municipal Affairs Statutes Amendment Act, legislation clearly intended to get voters, especially in Alberta’s two biggest cities, to stop electing progressive city councillors who are not in lockstep with the UCP’s increasingly authoritarian polic ..read more