On February 1, American farm, labour and civil society organizations formally asked the Biden-Harris administration to withdraw the attack on Canada’s dairy sector initiated by the United States Trade Representative (USTR) in the dying days of the Trump administration. In the first dispute launched under the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA),…
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The new year brought with it a spate of new COVID-19 lockdowns across much of the world alongside worries of new and more contagious variants of the novel coronavirus. For Canada, at least, there is the hope of widespread vaccination by summer’s end. The same cannot be said for poorer…
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News stories of rents for vacant apartments going down, coupled with anecdotes about landlords offering incentives to attract tenants, have fuelled the notion that renters have gained the upper hand in the rental market. Or, as some say, that we now have a “renter’s market.” That would have been nice….
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Ontario, one of the world’s most diverse regions, demonstrated in real time and with devastating clarity how COVID-19 has disproportionately affected BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) and poverty-stricken communities, both from a health perspective and from an economic one. The impacts of the shutdown and the reopening, and the…
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The narrative the Saskatchewan government would like you to believe is that during the COVID-19 crisis, it has been the sole, steady hand on the tiller of the economy—making the sober, sensible decisions both for the public’s health and the public’s purse. If the federal government is mentioned at all…
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Ontario is in a declared state of emergency due to COVID-19. It should be. As of Jan. 25, COVID-19 had killed at least 5,846 Ontarians, including 3,376 residents and staff in our long-term care homes. More people have now died in the second wave of the virus, which began in…
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A couple of months ago, my colleague Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood considered five ways in which Canada’s climate policy might be affected (hopefully for the better) by the Biden-Harris presidency. Inauguration day now safely behind us (phew), I thought I would perform a similar thought experiment with Biden’s proposed worker- and climate-centred…
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I’ve written a report for Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) that assesses the likely long-term impact of the current recession on homelessness. The link to the report is here. Here are 10 things to know: 1. The current recession may contribute to rising homelessness across Canada, but that matter is…
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When it comes to addressing anti-Black racism in Canada, I can’t help but think of the mythic plight of Sisyphus. As the story goes, the Greek gods sentenced Sisyphus to an eternity of repeatedly rolling a large boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down again once…
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The pandemic’s tightening grip and government efforts to strengthen public health measures are impacting employment in Canada: we lost 63,000 jobs between November and December 2020. And with additional necessary public health measures this winter, we can expect even more job losses—especially among Black, Indigenous and other racialized workers who…
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