The strike by 7,400 longshore workers in Vancouver, Prince Rupert, Nanaimo and Port Alberni is no exception to the rule that news reporting of labour disputes impacting West Coast ports tends to unfold according to a predictable, misleading formula.
There doesn’t even need to be an actual work stoppage for this to happen.
Merely the occurrence of collective bargaining with the implicit risk it could end in a strike is enough to get employer groups to claim the union won’t bargain and Conservative Prairie premiers to demand Ottawa intervene immediately to force the employees to keep working no matter what. (Plus, of course, to own the Libs, since ports come under federal jurisdiction.)
Certain assumptions are typically made, and never questioned, in these reports.
The current strike, which began on Saturday, is the first in Vancouver in nearly three decades. Never mind that, though, all the elements of the Vancouver port negotiations Kabuki theatre were in play within hours.
“The association representing employers in an ongoing strike at British Columbia ports says it doesn’t think more bargaining is going to produce a collective agreement,” The Canadian Press hyperventilated in the lead of its main story on the dispute yesterday.
So why take the employers’ word for it? This is what port employers always say. It’s standard bargaining procedure – all the better for them because it often works.
In fact, if you read the story carefully, the British Columbia Maritime Employers Association, which represents 49 shipping companies and port operators on the West Coast, said the opposite.
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union Canada, according to the employers’ group, “went on strike over demands that were and continue to be outside any reasonable framework for settlement.” (That, of course, is just typical labour relations rhetoric everywhere, literally business as usual, signifying nothing.) “Given the foregoing mentioned, the BCMEA is of the view that a continuation of bargaining at this time is not going to produce a collective agreement.”
Therefore, the employer group asserted, “ILWU Canada needs to decide if they are going to continue this strike with no hope of settlement, or significantly modify their position so a fair and balanced deal can be reached.” (Emphasis added.)
In other words, if you think about what was actually said by the employers, it’s that more bargaining isn’t going to produce a collective agreement because they won’t budge.
So the employers’ obvious hope – which is guaranteed to be supported uncritically by the usual business groups, corporate-financed right-wing think tanks, and instantly hysterical Conservative Prairie premiers – is that Ottawa will intervene immediately to keep the ports open because the employers themselves won’t negotiate!
Media – especially nowadays when there are so few reporters assigned to pay attention to labour law, labour unions and labour disputes – parrots this uncritically, ignoring the contradictions right in the statements before them.
So, let’s look at this another way:
If so much damage is being done to the national interest (that’s still a big if, with the strike only in its third day) that the strike must be ended immediately, and if, furthermore, the employer group has in effect admitted that is because it refuses to budge to reach a reasonable compromise its employees could live with, shouldn’t any back-to-work deal that is imposed by Ottawa give the workers what they want?
Of course, this would occur to no one involved in this ritual.
But it’s not because the workers are wrong in their arguments that they were the ones who took the risks to keep the ports open during the pandemic, that it’s their families who are now forced to deal with post-pandemic inflation, that they have legitimate concern about long-term job security, or that it’s time for their employers to share some of the massive pandemic profits they made during the pandemic thanks to their employees’ work.
The assumption by virtually all journalists at this point in the discussion is that if the ports are to reopen, as all the usual suspects demand, it must be on the employers’ terms. No further thinking required!
Now, let’s consider what Alberta Premier Danielle Smith had to say.
“This past weekend 7,400 workers began strike action across ports of British Columbia, immediately disrupting Canadian and global supply chains,” she complained in a statement published on Twitter yesterday morning but not on the Government of Alberta website.
“Our government is monitoring the situation and echos (sic) the concerns of various business groups on the negative impact this will have on the Canadian economy, including increased inflationary pressures on consumers,” she continued, defaulting to supporting the employers and their Greek chorus of sympathizers. The premier’s tweet also linked to a Globe and Mail story that quotes the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, Canadian Chamber of Commerce, and, of course, the B.C. Maritime Employers Association.
Ms. Smith concluded: “We urge the federal government to work with all parties to ensure a rapid resolution to the dispute.”
Which is precisely what the federal Government is doing, by trying to encourage the parties to reach an agreement through collective bargaining.
Needless to say, all this is highly ironic coming from a provincial government that refused to intervene in the illegal 17-day Coutts border blockade in 2022 while it cost the Alberta economy an estimated $44 million a day. That same government is now led by a premier who lionizes the blockaders and other convoy protesters as heroes, and has even interfered with the administration of justice to get one of them off the hook for criminal activities.
Well, I guess there’s no danger of United Conservative Party MLAs and Conservative MPs from Alberta joining the strikers on their legal picket lines in B.C. bearing gifts of coffee and doughnuts, as they did in Coutts and Ottawa.
Can you imagine the ruckus if a Liberal or NDP politician did show up to support the strikers at the Port of Vancouver?
As for the union, it warns that if the federal government forces a deal dock workers don’t like on them, “there will never be labour peace on the waterfront.”
If there is anything to be learned from the history of the Vancouver waterfront in the first half of the 20th Century, that could very well turn out to be true.
I’m not sure how long this strike could last. I read that a recession is basically here, and this strike will be a contributing factor.
Hi Anonymous. I don’t doubt the world will soon be in a recession, if indeed it isn’t already.
But the usual suspects blaming the Vancouver dock workers is a bit rich. Only one CBC report (I didn’t bookmark it) mentioned that American dock workers are either on strike now, or threatening to strike—for exactly the same reasons as their BC counterparts.
Whether “this strike will be a contributing factor” to a recession is more likely a matter of opinion. (Labour lawyer, “no”; corporate economist, “yes. Yes! Of course!”) Do you remember the source? It’d be interesting to know which side of the argument the opinion came from.
Mike J Danysh: Like you, I didn’t bookmark the article. I wish I did. The article was released not that long ago.
Is the problem the strike, or the robber barons profiteering off the people doing the actual work?
In my opinion, when the employees working for such significant employers, decide unanimously to walk down the street, knowing that the societal shift will feel tremendously affected! They expect this will not last more than a couple of days, I presume.
But who knows, when the employees of Canada Post, all voted to go on strike, if they thought the same thoughts, but we all remember!
Then now again, we’re in July of 2023, here we have another employer who cannot realize that those who walk down the street, in Canada, are deserving way much more than what they are asking for. And we shouldn’t be where we are standing today.
So Please, give them what they want! It’s a lot less than what they deserve.
Thank You
Hi Chantal. Being myself ex-union, I’d agree with you—and our host, DJC—that workers these days deserve more than they’re getting. Mostly, that’s because of the pandemic (inflation due to supply-chain chaos) and Putin’s illegal, undeclared war on Ukraine (inflation due to global panic-buying of oil, wheat and anything remotely connected to Ukraine).
But the deck is thoroughly stacked against anybody who isn’t rich, a corporate CEO, or both. Central banks, including the Bank of Canada, are doing their best (under corporate urging if not orders, I’m certain) to quash demands for higher wages. The meme amounts to, “Hey, I have expenses too! I can’t AFFORD to give you a raise!” Pointing out that corporate profits are up thanks to spiking prices results in…crickets.
“Mostly, that’s because of the pandemic (inflation due to supply-chain chaos) and Putin’s illegal, undeclared war on Ukraine (inflation due to global panic-buying of oil, wheat and anything remotely connected to Ukraine).”
Apparently, that is an incomplete narrative that has been largely fed to a gullible public and it is one that is illustrative of the quality and thoroughness of the indoctrination that is necessary to maintain the mythology of the dominant economic religion of our time. That is:
1. “You see a very clear reluctance to discuss profit,” Daniela Gabor, a professor of economics and macro-finance at the University of West England in Bristol. “That illustrates that the distributional politics of inflation targeting is: You don’t go for profits; you don’t go for capital.” Because, “The idea that companies have been raising prices in excess of their costs at the expense of consumers and wage earners is likely to anger the general public.”
2. “Similarly, profits rather than labour costs and taxes have accounted for the lion’s share of domestic price pressures in the euro zone since 2021, according to ECB calculations based on Eurostat data.”
3. “ECB board member Fabio Panetta later said workers had borne the brunt of the surge in prices while, on balance, company mark-ups had remained stable, or even increased in some sectors.”
4. “A key missing ingredient is the bargaining strength of the labour movement, which is structurally weakened by the disinflation policies of the 1980s and the ensuing liberalisation of labour markets,” said Mattias Vermeiren, a professor of international political economy at the Ghent Institute for International and European Studies.”
https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/ecb-confronts-cold-reality-companies-are-cashing-inflation-2023-03-02/
5. “Consumers have also been unusually willing to accept higher prices lately. Paul Donovan, chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, said businesses are betting that consumers will go along because they know about supply bottlenecks and higher energy prices. “They are confident that they can convince consumers that it isn’t their fault, and it won’t damage their brand,” Mr. Donovan said.”
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/markets/why-is-inflation-so-sticky-it-could-be-corporate-profits/
Ect., the reality is hardly dissimilar in North America, i.e., docile, passive consumers and a disciplined, regulated labor force.
All good points, and mostly overlooked–just as you said. Despite vigorous denials by business moguls world-wide, profits are up in many industries. In fact, that point was mentioned in an article about the dock-workers’ strike.
It also, in my opinion, explains why central banks are pushing interest rates higher now, even though the inflation rate is falling. CEOs hate giving raises to workers. It cuts into the profit margin, and removes money from the executive bonus pool.
Inflation is caused by folks who own commodities or large sectors of the retail market charging more for their products. It’s not a natural force of nature.
As to your second point, it’s not the war, it’s the sanctions and the EU deciding to blow up their economies to be loyal vassals to the west and Russiaphobes. If it was the war we would expect runaway inflation in Russia, no ?
As for the legality in question. Just wondering what you call the eight years of genocidal attacks against ethnic Russians in the east of Ukraine that predated the SMO ?
FWIW I am not jingoistic or anti-Russian, but I am anti-imperialism. It was bad when America invaded Iraq, and it is bad that Russia invaded Ukraine. I have a friend who has fallen into the Russian information silo, so I’m familiar with the claims you have heard about genocide, I’m familiar with how Russia has called Ukrainians Nazis whenever convenient for them since WW2. In reality, Nazis and other extreme-right wing ideologies are no more popular in Ukraine than they are in any other Western country, and less than many. I am aware of the Azov Brigade, and that individuals of Ukrainian descent sometimes honour specific individuals many think of as Nazis, for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Shukhevych_statue. The history behind that is kind of complicated, TLDR, if one monster fought along you against another monster when no one else could or would help you, it would be possible to view that monster fondly.
Russian propaganda relies heavily on emotion. Please, please, please, be dispassionate when considering their arguments. Anger clouds the mind.
I really like the people of Russia and respect the hell out of them, but the people are not the government. Russia went directly from serfdom to Soviet tyranny. No one, to my knowledge, has ever ruled Russia without the use of organized state terror. The people of Ukraine remember what it is like to live in Russia, and they’ve made it pretty obvious that they do not want to go back to that. I completely support them in their fight against tyranny, as I support all who resist having another’s boot on their throat.
International affairs is a poker game where everyone is cheating. The west is not trustworthy. Neither is anyone else, Russia included. They are all lying to us, none of them are good people, Canada included. Opposing someone who is bad does not automatically make you good. Hope this helps, I hate seeing people who want to resist something bad get tricked into supporting something else that is bad.
Of course all this will lead Danielle Smith to call for Alberta’s right to acccess tide water, as prescribed by some UN declaration that no one understands. (Save for a Poli-Sci instructor at Mount Royal U, whose claim begs the question … do you become stupider after you get a PoliSci degree?) Or, Smith will go all cowboy and demand the construction of a deep-water port at Hudson’s Bay, not to mention a network of pipelines and a Hyperloop to the said but yet established port. Of course, who’s going to cough up the trillions in dollars needed to build that boondoggle? (Alberta will soon have R-Star on their plate, so they’re tapped out.)
While much of what Smith and her fellow travellers propose sounds like the yammerings of the barflies after way too many shots, it makes for some great entertainment. How about a convoy protest down at the BC ports? I mean isn’t this all about the FreeDUMB to get all those goodies from Commie China?
Hello DJC,
It astounds me that, when the employers had months and sometimes years to negotiate an agreement with workers, employers still behave in such a way that these kinds of strikes are virtually inevitable. Economy-damaging strikes often result, but employers are quite happy to blame someone else. From what I remember over the years, longshore workers are particularly unwilling to accede to agreements that offer them little to no benefit.
– Businesses are bad.
– Media Parrots
– It’s always a formula, routine, and ritual.
– Unions will become violent
With respect, Siva, I doubt unions will become violent. They might, though, become very uncooperative and, even if they don’t, some of their members might. DJC
Methinks Siva was looking at the striker *(?) wearing the ‘Son’s of Anarchy ‘ shirt, conveniently focused on by the camera operator…..
gaslighting/dog whistle ??
And in the meantime, PP posted a tweet ( which I was surprised how long it took him, i expected less than 24hrs) …in which he has a picture of Omar MoT…holding a pair of sneakers….
And because our Honourable leader of the opposition is so predictable, i went searching.
Sure enough, the picture was from a month ago, in an article that also features his deputy, and it’s about Omar starting a trend of wearing fancy kicks to work.
PP and his media staff really need to give their heads a shake….they except us to accept their dribble, Really???
The Con-servative anti union record speaks for itself, I’m not buying their concerns, except for how much mileage they hope to get out of it for PMJT and Omar bashing. IMHO, PP is on a crusade with him ,a continuation of the whole Mustafa- passport episode.
And I concur, that the longer the employees have been without a contract, the more this puts the onus on the employer, if i heard right, they’ve been without a contract for 7mths , and NOW its a problem?? Maybe, I’m simplifying things, but having worked union jobs, walked the picket lines, i would think that if you’re looking at ” critical infrastructure jobs ” you get the contracts resolved before you run out of time. These negotiations shouldn’t be used for political purposes.
Just saying.
If you can’t write a simple sentence correctly, I have to question your judgment. Btw, how far did you get in school again?
How else would an individual expect a ‘libertarian’ business lobbyist to react? [ “Our government . . . echos (sic) the concerns of various business groups . . . ” ; where, ‘government’ is synonymous with ‘business’ and ‘business’ is synonymous with ‘government’, naturally].
Notwithstanding the free enterprise ‘just so stories’, propaganda , and PR, the reality for workers is one where, for example,
“Changes in unionization are important for a variety of reasons. Unions may influence wage setting directly (Cahuc, Carcillo and Zylberberg 2014) and indirectly by increasing the outside options of non-unionized workers (Beaudry, Green and Sand 2012). They may also affect the hiring practices of non-unionized firms (Taschereau-Dumouchel 2020). Unionized jobs tend to have higher-than-average coverage by registered pension plans (RPPs) (Morissette and Drolet 2001). As a result, changes in unionization may affect the RPP coverage and the preparedness for retirement of various groups of workers. Lastly, unions may negotiate with employers on a certain number of working conditions, such as work from home, a work arrangement that has become increasingly important in Canada and several industrialized countries since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (Mehdi and Morissette 2021).”
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/36-28-0001/2022011/article/00001-eng.htm
Aside from that reality, the dogma and rhetoric that constantly emanates from the business lobbyist acting as a political clerk ensures that the [Alberta] ‘American Dream’ will continue to be chased:
“The only time that the bottom tenth of the population and the top tenth of the population have come closer together has been during those years, when unions were operating in the largest corporations in this country,” Devault [a professor of labor history at Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations School] says. As unionization declined in the 1970s and 80s, that income gap grew once more. Today, it is at an all-time high since tracking began over 50 years ago, based on Census Bureau data. Research shows that as much as $50 trillion has migrated into the coffers of the top 1% of income earners in the U.S., an upward redistribution of wealth that has squeezed out the middle class.”
The Port of Vancouver ranks as one of the world’s least efficient, yet the unions are looking for higher pay, restrictions on outsourcing and limits to automation?
https://financialpost.com/news/economy/port-of-vancouver-is-among-the-worst-in-the-world-according-to-world-bank-report
The stats suggest the port needs more automation, rendering the first two arguments largely moot
If you look carefully the report talks about the number of ships in demurrage (waiting at anchor) which actually goes to prove that the port is very popular and shippers are knowingly and willingly choosing to ship to/from Vancouver.
The issue is not with worker inefficacy, but with management not working to improve structural inefficiencies, part of which is working with the unions to improve their practices. Instead management choses to try to reduce the number of workers.
These issues have existed for decades at this and most ports.
Doug: As a full-time Alberta grain farmer growing my 47th crop, perhaps I can offer a bit of context to remarks about port efficiency. In my observation, labour unions have no control and little influence over port efficiency simply because the ports have always been highly mechanized.
Most of the bulk commodity export shipments from Vancouver are grains along with a small amount of coal. Grain loading at port has been heavily mechanized since exports started over100 years ago.
Organizing those export shipments for loading onto ships is a big part of what makes a port efficient. Labourers and their unions have zero influence over those private business arrangements. That is entirely the responsibility of the shippers using the port. If the shipments are late or mismanaged, the shipper must pay the ship owner a penalty called “demurrage.” For the private sector, demurrage is simply a cost of doing business they pass on to producers and consumers.
Here is a well documented real-world example of how that works. In the 1996/97 crop year the railways suddenly discovered there was snow in the mountains, grain shipments were late, and the Canadian Wheat Board was forced to pay almost $19 million in demurrage penalties to ship owners that year. The CWB successfully sued the railways for poor service and won $15 million from CP rail and an undisclosed amount from CN rail.
Between the 1997/98 crop year and 2010 when Harper killed the CWB, the Wheat Board made an extra $44 million dollars for getting the ships out of port ahead of the agreed time because of the market discipline the Wheat Board imposed on the railways. All that money went back to prairie farmers. For the private grain companies, demurrage is just another cost of business they pass onto farmers in the form of lower farm-gate prices.
There is more to port logistics than just making the trains run on-time however. For various reasons none of the port grain terminals hold enough grain to completely load one ocean-going ship. The CWB would make sure enough grain was sent to several terminals to load ships simply by moving them from terminal to terminal. On average 30% of vessels were loaded the same day by the CWB compared to now where very few vessels are loaded the same day. Those partially loaded vessels then sit idling off the Gulf Islands, polluting the air, while they wait for the private grain trade to move more grain into their own terminals.
As the head of the Grain Handlers Union told farmers at one of our Wheat Board Alliance conventions some years ago, now that the CWB is gone, ships must go back to anchor three and four times before they get a full load, unlike when the CWB organized the logistics of selling and loading grain. The CWB effectively ran the ports as a single organization for shipping grain with financial benefits to farmers and to Canada’s reputation for reliability. Now the private sector has lost that reputation and the resulting extra costs are hidden from the public and farmers who pay the tab.
It is self evident from Vancouver’s miserable efficiency ranking that the private companies cannot provide the same logistical benefits to prairie grain farmers as the CWB did. One of the giant grain companies did try and you may wish to read this report from 2019 on that effort:
http://www.cwbafacts.ca/2019/02/will-farmers-share-in-dreyfus-win-over-railway/
I suspect the same lack of logistical coordination plagues other shippers and the importers who use Vancouver and our other deep-water ports. So-called free enterprise is never free. Blaming the labour unions, who really have little control over how logistics are handled at port is simply wrong.
My apologies to our host for this rather wordy example, but the devil, as always, is in the details.
Hmm the worlds largest port is in Shanghai, I wonder if they have any unions in China. The port of Copenhagen also quite large and bustling, I wonder if they have unions in Denmark.
What you’re saying is laughable on its face. Which, is quite predictable at this point.
don’t know about unions in China, but if they excist, you can bet the CommunistParty of China controls it. Denmark, don’t know. Rotterdam Harbour–has two recognized unions and two which are more informal. Mind you, in the Netherlands, even the military is Unionized.
EAF: Almost everyone who works in Denmark is a member of a union, so the chances are good that the dockworkers are unionized too. I did not succeed in finding the name of the union or unions that represent them, however. Wouldn’t you know it, but almost everything on the topic is written in Danish! DJC
Funny thing: online information about Rotterdam harbour is more likely to be in Dutch rather than Danish, as Rotterdam is in the Netherlands — aka Holland — not Denmark.
Jerry: I was responding to e.a.f.’s comment, “Denmark, don’t know.” Mainly, I checked the Port of Copenhagen, which I’m pretty sure is still in Denmark. DJC
It should amaze me, but it doesn’t, that the Oilberduh UCP have very short and selective memories. Danielle Smith is the worst, but the others are only different by degree. “Coutts blockade? Artur Pawlowski? Lemme think….”
Of course, the big difference is that the Coutts protestors and so-Reverend Pawlowski were heroes protesting vaccination policies. It said so, right there on the label. They were the former fanboys of Jason Kenney, now of Danielle Smith. So that made everything they did right, moral and just.
BC dock workers, OTOH, are just a bunch of greedy union scuts who don’t care about the common good, amiright? This is the gospel according to Neocons.
And still the nincompoop “economists” argue that workers are the ones driving inflation upward! And the stupid politicians believe them!! How many people [not just ‘labour’, but real people!] have kept up with the current spate of inflation that none of them caused?
These ARE the good old days.
Scary thought….
I don’t lament “the good old days,” just the end of them—forty-two years ago. (Wow! That’s more than an average working career!) Last time I was on strike was in Port Alberni in 1981: a typical, all-summer-long work-stoppage, demanding 18% over two years, settling for 15% over three, picketed out for another month by the Paper Workers’ strike, and finally given a sandwich wrapped in a road map the day after they settled their own dispute.
That was the day when unionized workers’ position went from Heyday to Hey! What the hell happened? Four decades of low-to-no wage increases, clawbacks, contracting out, and incremental erosion of union membership and workers’ (union or not) buying power. Compound these negatives for all that while, multiply that by the bidding up of real property (homes) afforded by inherited wealth (earned during those pre-‘81 Heydays) and it’s no wonder the income and wealth gap is so yawningly huge and so many Canadians can’t afford to buy a home—and so many are finding it difficult even to make rent.
It’s a long way back to the fork in the road we missed. It had to start sometime and now is it. There’s only one way to bring uncooperative employers to the negotiation table. We’ll look back someday and say: one of the silver linings of Covid is a return to job action and higher wage and benefit demands. Without that, society suffered—the proof is there for all to see.
“The family wage” ie a good enough wage to raise a family on was once the rallying cry of unions. Wages are just a cost of doing business and lower the income tax a corporation or business pays. Of course if corporate income tax is too low, they have an incentive (greed) to starve workers and use the profits for shareholder dividends instead of investing in plant and equipment. We are near the end of that downward spiral in Canada and the US. Hence the poverty and desperation.
jagmeet singh was at the ilwu strike on day two. gave a nice speech and everything
Lets start with the The National Post et al, almost media monopoly generally is anti union. So how do you think media coverage of this is going to go?
It seems somewhat generally acknowledged that a big issue here is job security and automation, so I can see the union being quite concerned and motivated. So this may not be something as easily resolved as if the biggest issue was only a difference of a bit on pay. Yes, if this goes on for a while there will be an economic cost, but of course there are other ways to bring goods in to and out from Canada and other ports are no longer so backlogged.
So a big part of the economic cost will be borne by the employer here and that will increase the longer it goes on, whereas any savings from automation will not. I suspect pressure on say grain export disruptions now is not as much as in the fall or early winter and that is probably a good thing for those who don’t want political involvement.
I feel the somewhat knee jerk response from mostly the usual suspects for political involvement so soon is not a sign of strength in this case, it is a sign of weakness.
Typical, and predictable to the point of being boring. I agree with you David, 100%.
The Board at CBC is dominated by Harper appointees. CTV is owned by Ted Rodgers, (A Trump fan-boi) who just bought Shaw that owns Global TV. Post Media that owns most newspapers in Canada, is in turn owned by a US-based Trumpist hedge fund that also owns the National Enquirer. If we get any “real” and unbiased news in Canada, it’s purely coincidental, save for you, and a few other independent online newspapers. God forbid workers should beg for wage increases when employers are turning over record profits during an inflationary period. These profiteers won’t be happy until the working class are reduced to serfs working for root vegetables. Billionaires aren’t greedy, workers are, and unions are all communists, is the false narrative that’s been pushed since the Thatcher/Reagan years.
I beg to differ about CBC’s coverage of this dispute: just today as my darling and I listened to CBC Radio Vancouver, we remarked that the newscast seemed careful to refer to it as a two-sided affair —that the two sides had not reached an agreement yet. I do concede that the previous day’s news didn’t fail to note the supposed cost of the dispute. I take that as fact, fact without particular bias. Indeed, the dollar-value of shipping through the port of Vancouver alone is huge, but it’s easy to take that as a measure of urgency which the two sides will doubtlessly keep foremost in mind as they (eventually) come together to negotiate a fair settlement.
Worth remembering CBC was very critical of Harper too. I think a better explanation is that CBC has traditionally been very eager to be taken seriously as independent journalism, and tend to demonstrate their journalistic independence by being very critical of whatever PM/Party is currently in power. I think every PM since the CBC came out has had an adversarial relationship with them.
IMO CBC is biting the PM’s hand a little bit less right now because the other parties keep making him look like the only adult in the room (I absolutely hate saying that about him, can’t wait for it to stop being true). The NDP have abandoned their traditional principles to try to eat the Liberals’ lunch and have a mouthful of broken teeth for their troubles, the CPC is a flaming dumpster being surfed into a tire fire by Angry Milhouse, the Greens are a shambles, the Bloc doesn’t want to be in Canada, and the People’s Party is a place for definitely-not-white-supremacists to park their protest votes. I would hate to be a political reporter in Canada right now. Almost as much as I hate being a voter in Canada right now.
“quotes from G&M,paywall so next :CFIB ,since they are making noise on MSM, plus flagged from something during the pandemic….and off we go.
from the Tyee : Aug 17/2020**
“No, covid support…..
How PR pros got media to run a misleading ‘survey’ for their business clients. ”
Then a quick wiki search on CFIB , and i can see why DS and the conservatives are “quoting ” them. As soon as I see the word lobbyist, my eyes starts twitching; by the time I finished reading, my neck is strained. I need a break.
**My apologies, I have no idea how to do the links…basically computer illiterate, flying by the seat of my pants…’gmab’, and if the phone is so smart, well never mind….
If anyone has the stomach for it, interesting piece on Brian Higgs….my take—-“Danielle, hold my beer —- unless she’s quietly calling him for advice, yikes.!!!!
Whoops, my mistake, the article on Higgs was from
‘the Conversation’- (5hrs ago)
Move over Danielle Smith……
Completely agree with this article. One reason I keep trying to clarify when someone calls a centrist a far left radical is because the owning class is creating the conditions where far left radicalism can flourish. For instance, one form that violent left wing radicalism can take is killing everyone wealthy and redistributing their wealth. Seen any “eat the rich” memes lately? Don’t get me wrong, if I thought it would work I’d be advocating for it, problem is it’s been tried many times and, to my knowledge, has never worked.
When I watch someone erect a building made of tinder during fire season, I worry they are creating the ideal conditions for a tragedy.
As I watch the owning class create ever-more-obvious needless and unjust poverty so they can wallow in increasingly-obscene excess, I worry they are creating the ideal conditions for a tragedy.
Neil — Robespierre, comes to mind. The “let them eat cake ” (real or interpretation) attitude has become much more prevalent in the last few years. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that people see the correlation between the big corporations and their overpaid CEOs and what was the feudal system; all those little kingdoms, with the knights and clergy, and the poor uneducated serfs, with the merchant men in between.
I am 1/4 of the way through a recording on our Knowledge network: documentary from 2017— What is Democracy?—– and find it very relevant to what is going on in the world right now. More ‘food’ for thought.
IMO lots of people see the link, but they are kept out of the mainstream media because their views would go against the interests of the owning class, and the owning class owns all of our major media except state-owned entities such as CBC.
The example of Robespierre and the Terror is the single biggest reason I do not advocate for violent revolution. Second biggest is that once a violent revolution begins it lasts for, on average, seven years*. Usually long before the violence ends people have given up on their initial goals and just want the killing to stop.
That said, if you compare Britain and France’s budget for the monarchy, you have to admit, Robespierre has saved them a ton of money over the years lol
*I can’t for the life of me remember my source for that claim so take it with a grain of salt, but I remember being very convinced of it