Geography Archives: Canada

Those who advocate “freeing the market” claim that doing so will encourage competition and thereby increase majority well-being. These advocates have certainly had their way shaping economic policies. And the results? According to several leading economists, the results include the growing monopolization of product markets and the steady decline in labour’s share of national income. Neither outcome desirable.

  The speech below was delivered by the President of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP), Dave Coles, to the labor breakfast titled “Confronting the Climate Crisis: Can Labor Help Shape an Effective Strategy?” held at the City University of New York on 17 January 2013. The obvious answer to the question […]

A curious article recently appeared in Canada’s Globe and Mail.  The authors are US economist Paul Romer and Octavio Sanchez, chief of staff to the President of Honduras.  They are promoting Romer’s idea for “charter cities,” in which Canada is invited to play a role in an ostensibly new model to promote development and prosperity […]

A trend is taking hold across Canada of working class resistance to the capitalist crisis and attacks by governments and corporations on workers’ rights and the social wage.  Library workers in the city of Toronto and transit and university workers in Halifax recently went on strike, as did daycare workers in Quebec.  Workers at Air […]

I think -and I do not intend to offend anyone- that this is how the Prime Minister of Canada is called. I deduced it from a statement published on “Holy Wednesday” by a spokesperson of the Foreign Ministry of that country. The United Nations Organization membership is made up by almost 200 States -allegedly independent […]

Canada’s federal and provincial governments are falling in with other Western countries in delivering austerity budgets that foist costs of the global capitalist crisis onto the backs of workers and the poor.  Canada’s federal government is trying to package its latest austerity budget as something that must be done to reduce government debts and deficits […]

Like the Grinch who stole Christmas, the Conservative government of Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper has just left a lump of coal in Canadian workers’ stockings.  A cover story in the Globe and Mail of December 22, 2011 announces that federal public pension programs are being targeted for cuts to reduce the federal deficit.1  The […]

  We are living one of those historic moments that cry out for rallying the working class to build new capacities, new solidarities, and concrete hope.  The crucial question is not how far the attacks on the public sector will go.  The real question is how far we will let them go.  How will working-class […]

Abstract: Using concepts of feminist economics, this paper demonstrates the range of ways in which carework is undervalued in Canada, from the labour of the unpaid care worker within the home, to the paid labour of the registered nurse in institutions.  Through qualitative analysis of various caring occupations, and a comparison of wages of caring […]

Will the surprising surge of the New Democratic Party hold today at the ballot boxes in Canada, where voters say health care (31.5%) and jobs/economy (23.4%) are the top issues, only 4.9% of them prioritizing “high taxes” as the number one problem? The graphs above are from Nano Research.  The methodology is available at . […]

The merger would create an international union of one million metal workers and miners. The United Steelworkers (USW), which represents 850,000 workers in Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States, and the National Union of Miners and Metal Workers (SNTMMSRM), known as the Mineros, which represents 180,000 workers in Mexico, have announced plans to explore […]

  We asked queers in our city to tell us why they are against Israeli apartheid.  Here’s what they said. Video by Alexis Mitchell * * * Editor’s Note: QuAIA has come under attack by the pro-Israel lobby and Toronto city bureaucrats: “An April 18, 2010 feature story in the Toronto Star revealed that City […]

  Enormous resources have been marshaled by conservative and Zionist organizations in an attempt to silence criticism of the Canadian government’s unwavering support for Israel.  The first few months of 2009 have seen a concerted campaign to shut down Palestine advocacy in Canada.  Such examples include: cutting funding to the Canadian Arab Federation (CAF) due […]

If you would like to sign on to this letter, send an email toantizionistjews@gmail.com with your name and city January 5th, 2009 Like much of the world, we have spent the last week watching in shock and disgust as Israel continues its assault on the Gaza Strip.  With the body count rising and a new […]

OTTAWA — In a classic 19th century work, English journalist Walter Bagehot divided the Constitution into two parts.  The “efficient” part — the executive (cabinet) and legislative — was responsible for the business of government.  The “dignified” part, the Queen, was to put a human face on the capitalist state.  Bagehot noted, however, that the […]

  There is always something unsettling about people who say one thing and do another.  There is for one thing the hypocrisy.  Then, there is the uncertainty.  It only takes a few disappointments to sow the seeds of doubt about whether you can ever trust their judgement again or whether you can ever expect them […]

  This Thursday the House of Commons passed a Confidence Motion put forward by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper to extend the Canadian mission in Kandahar, Afghanistan to December 2011 past the current commitment to 2009.  With the support of the Liberal Party (breaking their previous position of a call for a […]

An Anishnabe blockade in 1996.  Photo by Macdonald Stainsby John Cutfeet outside the Legislature in June 2007.  Members of Grassy Narrows and Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nations protested mining on their land.  Photo Adrian Wyld Opposition to uranium mining has once again become a major topic of coverage by the media.  From Australia to Canada, people […]

For a discipline explicitly engaged in the study of power, particularly as exercised in liberal democracies, it is striking how little Canadian political science has actually examined the concentration of private economic power, the political organization of the business classes and the extension of that power into the political realm.  Indeed, Canadian political science has […]

The active imagining of an alternate global politics could hardly be more pressing.  Mounting global inequalities, the turbulence of climate change, and recurring military interventions by Western powers have been the daily fare of the neoliberal world order.  This world order was constructed over the last two decades under the hegemony of the U.S., in […]