It was not public support that kept the flight attendants on the picket line after the federal government ordered them back to work, or brought about victory for them over management at Air Canada. Again this is what I am seeing in Canadian journalistic coverage after the strike ended, at least for now. In another article, from The Globe and Mail, it was Andrew Coyne. Now I am seeing it in an article in The National Post from Sammy Hudes, an article entitled, “After Air Canada Strike, Ottawa may need to change its intervention strategy, experts say.” Actually the article came originally from The Canadian Press, and it was published on August 29, 2025. Sammy interviewed “Brock University labour professor Larry Savage”, who said, “The flight attendants were able to use high levels of public support for their bargaining positions to their advantage as they held out on the picket lines defying the federal order.”
There was no time for the flight attendants at Air Canada to drum up public support for their cause, which included higher wages, better benefits, and pay for work done before the plane takes off, and after it has landed. Only five days passed between the start of demonstrations by the flight attendants at various airports across Canada (August 11), and the time they went on strike (August 16). That same day (August 16), the government ordered the flight attendants back to work, and they refused. Management at Air Canada returned to the bargaining table the next day (August 17), and a tentative agreement was reached in only three days (August 19), ending the strike at least temporarily. The decision of the flight attendants to defy the order to return to work and stay on the picket lines, and the concessions they won from management, had nothing to do with public support for their cause.
Beyond the lack of time before any public support for the flight attendants could come into effect, there was the lack of evidence of any such support during those days from August 11 to August 19. How did we know that at least a majority of Canadians supported the case made by the flight attendants? Were there any public opinion polls carried out by the media or some other organization? Did anyone from the media talk with anybody who experienced a flight cancelled between say August 14 and August 17? If so what did they say? Were these people blaming Air Canada management or the flight attendants for their cancelled flights? What proof was there that management at Air Canada was actually influenced by public opinion, and if public opinion was so clearly in favour of the flight attendants, then why did the federal government take the risk of ordering them back to work?
What really made the flight attendants stand their ground against Air Canada and the federal government, was the rightness of their position and the strength of their conviction. This rightness and strength was evident within the flight attendants from the first day they began to demonstrate at the big airports across Canada. Larry Savage, the labour professor from Brock University, wants us to believe that, “Air Canada’s management bungled this labour dispute very badly…” and that the strike by the flight attendants “was a calculated risk in the end…” No. The position of Air Canada management, like all management at all corporations, was just simply hollow and could not withstand the determination of the flight attendants. Furthermore, that hollowness was why Air Canada had to rely on the power of the federal government to help them out, and why even the power of the government, specifically section 107 of the Canada Labour Code, failed.
Now I don’t want to be too hard on Larry Savage. I think he got one thing right in this article. According to Sammy, the author of the article, Larry “predicted a ‘strong counteroffensive’ from employers in order to tip the scales back in their favour.” Yes, the managers are going to hit back after their defeat, although Larry should call for resistance to such a managerial attack on labour. Nor do I want to be too hard on Sammy. Besides talking with Larry, Sammy talked with a different academic who saw more clearly the exciting implications of the strike. That academic was Barry Eidlin: “Eidlin said the company’s concessions prove that despite all the tools in employers’ arsenal to quash labour unrest, they do have to negotiate.” I do, however, insist that all three of these individuals talk directly to the workers who are on strike as part of their research in the future.
I don’t know what Andrew’s problem is; Andrew Coyne from The Globe and Mail. Andrew was quite upset at the recent victory achieved by the unionized flight attendants at Air Canada. On August 16, 2025, the flight attendants went on strike for higher wages, and furthermore to get paid for work they performed before the plane was in the air, and after it landed. It was the first time they went on strike in forty years. That same day the federal government enacted back-to-work legislation, which ordered the flight attendants back to the job while the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) arbitrated the matter. But the flight attendants refused to return to the job. They stood their ground against the federal government and won significant concessions from management at Air Canada in a new tentative contract. For Andrew the whole outcome was a travesty, and he wrote about it in a column for The Globe on August 19, 2025.
One indication that Andrew viewed the strike by the flight attendants negatively was that he undermined their victory. In his mind, it’s not that the flight attendants and their union won the labour struggle, rather it’s that Air Canada lost. Writing in the second paragraph of the column, Andrew stated that, “What happened is that Air Canada blinked.” Andrew argues that Air Canada was weak. Wrong. The flight attendants, through their union, stood firm against the pressure from the federal government, even at the risk of jail time for the union’s representatives. It was worker unity, backed up by the strength of their conviction, that brought about their victory. Furthermore it was a great victory for the labour movement overall, as it set a precedent that challenged the legitimacy of back-to-work legislation by the federal government in the future. No longer can company management count on the federal government to back them up over the workers.
Andrew also undermined the flight attendants union by declaring that its demand to be paid for groundwork, such as boarding, deplaning, and dealing with delays, was illegitimate. According to Andrew, “Most jobs include some element of unpaid work. Teachers prepare lessons ahead of class. Nurses stay late to finish charting or prepare medications. Why, even journalists put in hours off the clock, transcribing interviews or travelling for a story.” So what if most jobs contain an element of unpaid work, that doesn’t mean that it’s right, especially if the flight attendants were indeed putting in an extra thirty-five hours per month without pay, as they insisted was happening. The flight attendants are the one’s who decide what is legitimately a part of their jobs, not anyone else, including Andrew. Besides the flight attendants were only doing the same as teachers and nurses who use their strong unions to influence their respective conditions of work.
A third way that Andrew undermined the flight attendants union, and their strike, was to attack their demand for higher wages. Andrew stated, “Median compensation runs to about $54,000 in salary alone – considerably more when various benefits, including heavily discounted air travel, are included. New hires it is true, make more like $20,000. But flight attendants only put in 70-80 hours in the air a month.” Andrew, however, fails to mention that along with the 70-80 hours in the air are the many hours that flight attendants spend away from home during their time on the job. It is difficult to raise a family under these circumstances. Factor in that time away from home, and $54,000 is way too low in salary, let alone $20.000. As for benefits, Andrew failed to mention that employees have to pay for them through weekly premiums and co-pays, and that discounted air travel does not pay the bills.
Another way that Andrew undermined the flight attendants was by suggesting that they duped the public in order to win support for their cause. According to Andrew, “What turned the issue for the union wasn’t the strike, or the back-to-work order, but two words: ‘unpaid work’. A great number of people who ought to know better were persuaded Air Canada is engaged in a kind of high-altitude slavery.” Continuing at the end of the article, Andrew wrote, “But management is not the intended audience of the unpaid work argument. The public, the media, and the politicians are. And on them it worked like a charm.” The flight attendants duped nobody; they made hourly wages as much an issue as unpaid work, and nobody in the union compared their unpaid work situation with slavery. Anyway the public had no time to be duped, or show any kind of feeling toward the strike, as it all unfolded so quickly.
I saw in that article in The Globe and Mail a clear prejudice from the author; Andrew Coyne. He was disgusted that the workers, in that case the unionized flight attendants at Air Canada, had dared to challenge management. Even more so he was disgusted that the workers emerged victorious, at least partially. They may still continue fighting and go on to achieve all of their aims, which I am sure will leave Andrew feeling either apoplectic or depressed. I saw also in that article an arrogance on the part of Andrew. I am certain that he has not worked as a flight attendant, and yet he felt qualified to determine how much they should be paid and what they should settle for. Moreover, he thought he really knew what was going on, and that everybody else had been fooled. While prejudice and arrogance make for clever and sophisticated writing, these characteristics cannot produce good journalism.
Okay, so I don’t really know what Rita Trichur is telling us in her latest rant about the so-called productivity crisis in Canada’s economy. In her rant, published on August 13, 2025, in The Globe and Mail, Trichur argues that “A Canadian worker contributes $100 to the national economy compared with an American who spends the same time and effort, but contributes $130, according to a 2024 estimate cited by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.” This “yawning productivity gap” between U.S. and Canadian workers has been developing for decades, she further states, and that one way to fix this situation is to have more corporations set up their headquarters in Canada. According to one Canadian CEO she quotes, “It’s generally been proven that where a headquarters is located will affect where the R&D occurs, and it’ll affect a lot of the supply chain.” In turn, greater R&D leads to greater economic productivity.
My confusion with Rita’s argument begins with her main example of how a company helps Canadian productivity by setting up shop in Canada. That example is a company called MDA Space Limited, which was detached from its American parent company and “repatriated to Canada in 2020.” As she states, “Back in 2021, its revenue per permanent employee, which is a measure of productivity, was $224,000. Fast forward to 2025, and that figure has nearly doubled to $436,000.” If the revenue per employee has nearly doubled since returning to Canada, wouldn’t that suggest that there is no productivity crisis in Canada? To the contrary, Canadian workers seem to be more productive than their U.S. counterparts. Furthermore, why would the CEO of MDA, a man named Mike Greenley, move the company back to Canada if there was a productivity crisis in our country: wouldn’t it be better to stay down in the U.S.?
Another source of confusion for me in Rita’s rant over failing Canadian productivity is the poor evidence behind her assertion. The only evidence she offers is an estimate from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce (COC) from 2024. Surely on a matter as important as a nation’s economic productivity we need to consult a variety of sources. Surely there must be other sources of economic analysis that question an estimate from the COC. What about any economic analysis from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, or from any labour organizations, such as the Canadian Labour Congress? Moreover it must be understood by Canadians that the COC is an organization that represents the interests of business owners and managers, and not the interests of any workers at any business. Owners and managers are constantly telling workers that they are not working hard enough. Is the productivity crisis in Canada real, or just manufactured?
A third source of confusion for me in Rita’s rant is the lack of any real definition of productivity. Sure, she states that, “Labour productivity, which influences our standard of living, is the economic output for each hour worked.” But what does that mean in real terms? At the ground level, where I have spent most of my adult working life, productivity is about management squeezing more work than is possible out of each individual worker at a business, while at the same time paying them shit wages. Across the fields of manufacturing, housekeeping/ custodial, and warehousing, I have experienced that we are working too hard; under the control of management. Our economy chews people up and spits them out. It sounds like Rita is arguing that Canadians are not working hard enough. This is wrong. We don’t have a crisis of low productivity, we have a crisis of too much productivity.
Rita’s column seems to be little more than a justification for lowering taxes in Canada, which would only be for the business owners and managers. Going back to the CEO of MDA, Rita states that he is “urging municipal, provincial and federal governments to create more incentives for companies to establish and maintain their head offices in Canada.” These incentives, Rita continues, could involve Ottawa creating “two tiers of investment tax credits, with the highest rate favouring companies that maintained domestic head offices.” The CEO would also like to see Canada attract top executive-level talent from abroad for running Canadian companies in Canada, and do so by lowering their income tax in Canada. Finally, the CEO said that, “Canada could also improve its corporate tax rate to make Canada more competitive with other jurisdictions. Rita’s column is not really about a productivity crisis, it’s about lowering taxes for Canada’s business elite.
I do not know why Rita pushes this line about a productivity crisis in Canada and lowering taxes, along with other contributors to The Globe and Mail. Lowering taxes, for rich people and corporations, will only mean less money for the public services utilized by all Canadians. I’m sure that Rita needs public healthcare and public education for her children just as much as the rest of us. Pushing the productivity crisis does not benefit her and the other columnists at The Globe in any way. Indeed, Rita and the others are themselves possibly an example of too much production. The shallowness of so much of their work suggests to me that they are heavily pressured for output by management at The Globe. They would do better to question the gospel of productivity and the ideology of their employer, and in so doing benefit a great many other Canadians as well.
Oh my God, I found a true soulmate; or at least I thought I did. Her name was Kadine Cooper, also known as “Coach K” according to The Globe and Mail, and she is a “certified coach, facilitator and speaker, specializing in empowering professionals and organizations to reach their full potential.” In a column published in The Globe on July 30, 2025, Kadine wrote down several ideas on the issue of workplace burnout that appealed to me. On the first page of the column she stated, “Burnout has become so common; we almost don’t question it anymore. But what we label as a personal problem is often a workplace one.” And on the second page she stated, “for leaders and organizations, it’s time to stop treating burnout as an HR initiative and start seeing it as a cultural imperative.” Kadine is arguing that workers are being pushed too hard on the job, and that this phenomenon needs to be stopped.
As a former worker in manufacturing and warehousing, as well as a former housekeeping supervisor, I understood the problems described by Kadine. Manual labourers were given high workloads that were not only exhausting, but caused injuries. In some cases, the work I have experienced has been brutal. So many manual workers were forced to quit or get fired because management, with the help of HR, was constantly pushing them well beyond what was a reasonable amount of work for an eight hour shift. On top of the workload there were repetitive strain injuries (RSI), which accounted for the largest number of time-lost injuries across the world of work. Many people end up homeless because of their experience in manual labour, and it has happened to me. Many others barely survive living on workers compensation or social security. Similar to Kadine, I have argued that burnout was not the fault of the individual, and that ending burnout is a “cultural imperative.”
Where I lost Kadine as a soulmate, however, was in her definition of “cultural imperative,” or what she thinks we have to do to end burnout in the workforce. Kadine believes that we have to get down to the root cause of burnout. We have to redefine “success” for ourselves individually, and that involves the asking of three questions: 1) Who am I performing for? 2) What version of success am I chasing and does it even feel like mine? 3) Where have I said yes when I should have said no?” Continuing, she writes that “Burnout isn’t a trend, it’s a wake-up call. It’s a signal to stop performing and start aligning. And no, a bubble bath won’t cut it. But a courageous look inward? That just might.” Kadine said that we have to be true to ourselves and take control of our working lives, and furthermore, these individuals will become the new leaders of organizations in the future.
Manual labourers don’t get to take control of their working lives, or redefine success, or ask who am I performing for, or say no instead of yes on the job. Whenever we do anything like that we get fired from the job. There is no courageous look inward to align your internal and external world. Manual labourers spend their days under the total control of somebody called a manager, somebody who does not care about the worker at all. Managers, with the help of HR, control your workload, your working conditions, and the shit pay you receive in return for all of your effort. Burnout has been a fact of life for manual labourers, both physically and mentally, for the last two hundred years, and longer than that I’m sure. Only unionization and the growth of the labour movement over the last one hundred and fifty years, has mitigated to some degree the working life faced by manual labourers.
As an “executive leadership coach,” Kadine doesn’t seem to understand that the people she works with are the main cause of burnout in the workplace, not just for themselves but all the rest of the workers. These so-called leaders, along with the rest of the managers down the line in the company and HR, enforce a system that is built around elitism, prejudice, and ego. They enforce a social hierarchy in the workplace that is miserably anti-human. If they are burning out on the job, it is only because the system they created and maintain has come back to bite them on the ass. Frankly, it’s enjoyable for me to read about this happening. Yes they need to take a deep look inward, and hopefully discover what is really wrong, what is really out of alignment in their lives. It is not that their work is out of line with their values, it’s that their values are wrong.
At the beginning of Kadine’s column, The Globe stated that, “With a focus on personal and professional development, Ms. Cooper leverages her expertise to drive positive change and growth.” Well, if Kadine is really serious about doing this, she will push her clients to dissolve the social hierarchy in the workplace, to dissolve the workplace structure that underlies employee burnout. Managerial power and authority, backed up by HR, has to come to an end. There will be no end to burnout in the workplace unless it is brought to an end for everybody. The only positive change and growth is that which drives our society towards human equality. This is our real cultural imperative, and the only legitimate future for the people who call themselves leaders. Anything less than that for Kadine, and she is merely serving as a shoulder to cry-on for her high level clients when they see that they too are stressed out because of the job.
I have been wanting to write on this topic since the end of our most recent federal election (April 2025); the virtual collapse of the federal New Democratic Party. Giving me a chance to do so is a recent column on the CTV News website by Tom Mulcair, a former leader of the federal NDP and regular contributor to CTV. In the column, published on July 23, 2025, Tom argues that the NDP dropped from 24 to 7 seats in the House of Commons because, 1) “their decision to hop in the sack with Trudeau’s Liberals” through the supply and confidence agreement, and 2) the inconsistent messaging from the NDP on the Israel-Palestine conflict. I disagree with Tom on this issue vehemently, and further I want to admonish Canadians for failing to support the NDP in the 2025 federal election.
No, the federal NDP did not “hop in the sack with Trudeau’s Liberals.” The NDP utilized a traditional party tactic with the supply and confidence agreement. They took advantage of the Liberal minority status in the House of Commons to influence public policy for the better in Canada; pushing the government to adopt national dental care, national pharmacare, and anti-scab legislation in federally regulated industries. Tommy Douglas and the NDP took advantage of a similar situation in 1967 to push the Liberals to adopt universal healthcare for Canada. In the 1968 federal election the Liberals stayed in power and the NDP seat count stayed exactly the same. Was that weak showing by the NDP because Tommy Douglas hopped in bed with the Liberals? Tom doesn’t say. I’m sure that in 2025, NDP voters recognized what Singh was doing was a legitimate political tactic.
Nor did the NDP make a mistake in signing the supply and confidence agreement with the Liberals, as argued by Tom: “That so-called supply and confidence agreement saw several NDP priorities like dental care and pharmacare become new strands of Canada’s social safety net; a worthwhile initiative that came at a huge political price.” Dental care and pharmacare come from the very core of the NDP’s identity, a party that is supposed to defend the disadvantaged in society. I think Tommy Douglas would have praised Jagmeet Singh, and in the 2025 federal election the NDP should have touted these accomplishments more so. If NDP voters abandoned their party to vote for the Liberals, just because the NDP supported the Liberals for three years as part of the agreement, they should not have. The same could be said for the rest of Canada.
Was the NDPs messaging on the Israel-Palestine conflict really all that inconsistent, as argued by Tom: “Singh’s NDP put itself at odds with the party’s usually balanced approach to the complex issues of the Middle East, when some caucus members began to express strident anti-Israel positions.” As I see it, Singh was allowing his caucus members to think and speak freely on the issue, rather than imposing a policy position on his caucus members. It was a more democratic approach, and new members that have come into the NDP caucus since the days of Tom Mulcair, and his predecessor Jack Layton, will have new opinions on that conflict. Besides, the Israel-Palestine conflict is a small issue for the large majority of Canadians. It seems impossible to me that the NDP lost seats in the 2025 election because of that issue.
What was the cause of the NDPs poor showing in the last election? Why did their seat count in the House of Commons drop from 24 to 7? I don’t exactly know. They deserved much better from Canadians, and Jagmeet Singh was right to say that, “Canada is better off with having a strong number of NDP Members of Parliament,” or words to that effect during the election. Moreover, this is not the first time that the federal NDP experienced such a major loss during a federal election, as suggested by Tom: “The NDP suffered its worst defeat in its history in last April’s election, gaining the support of just six per cent of Canadian voters.” In the federal election of 2015, the NDP dropped from 95 seats to 44 seats, all while Tom was the party leader.
What I do know is that Tom Mulcair seemed to actively undermine the campaign of the NDP under Jagmeet Singh in the 2025 election. On March 24, 2025, CTV News published a column from Tom entitled, “Trump’s threat to Canada means this election must be a choice between the Liberals and the Conservatives.” I was just appalled to see him so viciously turn against his own party. He stated in reference to the NDP, the Green Party and the Bloc, that “in a time of existential crisis for Canada as a whole, they’re an afterthought.” We were all caught up in Trump’s insane threats, but Tom should have been supporting the NDP, and touting the NDPs accomplishments through their supply and confidence agreement with the Liberals. Furthermore, Jagmeet defended Canada against Trump just as vigorously as his political rivals.
During the 2015 election, Tom Mulcair was known as “Angry Tom.” The moniker was not fair, but I do think he was angry over his defeat in that election. He was seriously hoping to become the prime minister, or at least remain as the official opposition. Also he was angry that he was forced to step down as the leader of the federal NDP in 2016, to be replaced by Jagmeet Singh. I’d say he is still angry. In his latest column he suggests that the federal NDP was just so much better when he was in charge, as well as before him when Jack Layton was in charge. Anger is not the right frame of mind from which to comment on anything, including politics. CTV needs to watch for this when they publish Tom’s columns.
Kevin Yin must be out of his mind. Kevin, “a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail and an economics doctoral student at the University of California,” is telling us that Canada’s economic problems come down to a productivity crisis. In an article published in The Globe on July 17, 2025, Kevin argues that Canadians are producing less economic output per hour of work than Americans or Europeans. Consequently, Canadians earn lower incomes while Americans earn much more for the same amount of work hours, and the Europeans are able to work fewer hours and indulge more leisure time in their lives. As he states at the end of the article, “Canadians work a lot for relatively little. Americans can take pride in their staggering incomes, while Europeans can at least bask in the extra time they have on their hands. In this sense, our growth challenge is the worst of both worlds.”
What staggering incomes in America? Kevin needs to come out of his ivory tower and see what is really going on in that country. Large swathes of the U.S. population live at or below the poverty line, including the homeless, the unemployed, those living on social security benefits, and those surviving on minimum wage. I would add that minimum wage is higher in Canada than in the U.S. Even those earning many dollars an hour over minimum wage are not thriving in the American economy. Countless American authors have written about this situation. What does America have to boast about when the staggering incomes are restricted to just 15% of the population, and the top 5% control half of the wealth generated by the U.S. economy. Are we really supposed to believe that America is basking in something that Canada is not? At least Canada can bask in its universal healthcare.
Wages or salary is not determined solely by productivity or Gross Domestic Product, or economic growth. Much of a societies pay structure, if not all of it, is determined by a miserable social hierarchy, which exists in both the U.S. and Canada. At the top of this hierarchy are a group of people calling themselves managers. The managers get to decide what is skilled labour and what is not, and the wages/salary that follows for everybody else within that organization. Such decisions are made based on ignorance, greed, prejudice, and power. As a result, the managers get staggering wages, not to mention hazard-free work environments, while most of the rest of us just stagger. America is perhaps the worst country in the world for this problem. At least in Canada we have succeeded to some degree in restraining the rich through higher income tax, and ultimately preserving some notion of equality.
If we leave this social/economic hierarchy in place, it will ensure that we continue to have a poor economy for tens of millions of citizens no matter what growth in productivity and the economy we achieve. We have to dissolve the hierarchy, and institute in its place a society that recognizes a legitimate definition of job skill and value, and the fundamental worth of all human beings. Elitism and tyranny will have to fade into the background. This development will diffuse the massive wealth we generate across the whole population; where it belongs. Now that would really be something to bask in. As for Europe, I only know of one country that works fewer hours, and that is France, where they have a thirty-five hour work-week. This shorter work-week has nothing to do with productivity. Rather it was legislated by the communist government in the early 1980s. We could do the same.
Based on what I see in Kevin’s article in The Globe and Mail, his eventual doctoral thesis is going to be shallow and weak. His thesis is just going to spew out more conventional economic thinking, with its distorted focus on Gross Domestic Product, growth, and especially productivity. While that may be good enough for the ivory tower, and for The Globe, it will contribute nothing of value to society. The economies of North America will continue to be poor for tens of millions of people. Wealth will continue to be hoarded by the mangers and a few others near the top of our social hierarchy, perpetuating a gross inequality among human beings. I would like to see Kevin do better, and The Globe and Mail for that matter. Those people struggling in the economy need all the help they can get. I am not, however, going to get my hopes up.
The Globe and Mail is having the wrong discussion on the topic of Canadian defence policy. Recently, the Canadian prime minister has announced that our country will substantially increase its defence budget as a percentage of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP), all in response to pressure from Donald Trump and NATO. This means that we will be spending many tens of billions more taxpayer dollars on defence, far more than we have ever paid before in peacetime. There was virtually no debate around the PM’s decision and surely it is called for, especially within the media as Parliament is presently shut down for the summer recess. Except the writers at The Globe have just accepted the new defence policy and have merely tried to figure out how we are going to find the money within our existing national budget. So far I have seen this development with Andrew Coyne and Marcus Gee, and now it is with another contributor named Todd Hirsch.
On July 3, 2025, The Globe published an article from Todd that was entitled, “To up defence spending, Canada must cut deeper, tax harder and borrow- all at once.” In the two-page article Todd certainly recognizes that the latest increase in defence spending is exceptional: “No sooner had Canada committed to immediately meeting NATO’s long-standing target of spending 2 per cent of its GDP on defence – an increase of $9 billion annually, than the goal post shifted. Dramatically.” Continuing, Todd writes, “At last weeks NATO meetings, a new benchmark emerged: 5 per cent of GDP. While 1.5 per cent of that could include spending on cybersecurity, infrastructure, and defence-related technology, the overall target is a staggering $50 billion increase.” Nowhere in the article, however, does Todd critique this policy of dramatically increasing the budget for Canadian defence. Is the policy positive or negative for Canadians? He merely accepts the federal government is going to do it, and then proceeds to develop a case for how to find the money.
I would argue strongly that there is no need for such a massive increase in defence spending, merely because of pressure from NATO and Trump. Canada already does enough for NATO. We maintain combat forces in Latvia, and we have been training tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers since 2014 for the fight against Russia, which is NATOs principal opponent. That does not include Canada’s participation in NATO operations in Afghanistan, where we lost 150 soldiers killed. Why support NATO so much when we can expect no support from them in the event of a U.S. attack on Canada. When Trump threatened to annex Canada, I did not see one of our so-called NATO allies speak up in our defence. If we ever have to defend ourselves from Trump, it is clear that we will be fighting alone. Then there is the fact that Trump doesn’t even like NATO, rather he likes Vlad and Xi. Trump is looking for a reason to take the U.S. out of NATO.
Another reason that the massive Canadian increase in defence spending is unnecessary is that American policy is driven as much or more by internal factors, rather than any threat from Russia or China. First among those factors is the military-industrial complex in the U.S. High spending on the military in the U.S. is because so many jobs in America are dependent on this policy. Their economy is significantly built around military spending. A second internal factor driving high U.S. military spending is America’s aggressive foreign policy. America started wars in Vietnam and Iraq, and lately have bombed Iran. They maintain a large expensive military force because they want to be a powerful actor on the international stage. The third internal factor that is behind Trump’s push for Canada to up its defence spending, is that the U.S. wants Canada to purchase more American military hardware. These internal factors contribute far more to Trump’s push against Canada than any problem with Canada taking advantage of American military protection.
The Globe and Mail and its contributing writers need to ruthlessly examine Mark Carney’s new defence policy for Canada, not just accept the policy and proceed from there to support it. At stake are many tens of billions of dollars. These dollars will be raised by higher taxation of Canadians, and more so by cutting the budget for such federal programs as healthcare, education, welfare, child care, senior benefits like Old Age Security, pharmacare, dental care, and money for homeless support programs. If these programs are diminished in scope, it will affect the lives of millions of Canadians immediately, especially those people bringing in low incomes. Economic instability is the daily threat to so many Canadians, not China or Russia. Mark Carney’s decision to massively elevate Canadian defence spending is going to turn Canada into a photocopy of Trump’s America. The fact that The Globe and Mail doesn’t question Carney’s new defence policy for Canada suggests to me that they are motivated more by political ideology than real journalism.
Marcus Gee must be high on something, or maybe it’s just that my eyesight is playing tricks on me. On July 5, 2025, The Globe and Mail published an opinion article from Marcus that was called, “How Trump could make Canada better.” After double-checking the title of the article, and reading through it several times, I see that Marcus is in fact serious. He believes that Trump is forcing Canada “to rethink bad ideas, question sacred cows and brace itself for the challenges of the future.” How in God’s name could a madman like Trump, who despises Canada and is busy destroying his own country, possibly do or say anything that would make our country better?
Marcus mentions three separate positive changes that Trump has forced on Canada, including cancelling the digital services tax, interprovincial free-trade, and increased defence spending, as well as a possible fourth change centering on Canada’s dairy industry. But I am going to focus on only one of those from Marcus’ list. That is in the realm of national defence; meaning that Trump has finally forced Canada to pay its fair share as a part of NATO: “Mr. Trump has said for years that Canada and the other countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are freeloading off the United States, relying on Washington to keep the Western alliance well armed while scrimping on armaments themselves.”
Indeed, according to Marcus, “Canada was one of the worst of the laggards, its rate of spending near the bottom of the pack. By outsourcing our defence to our mighty next-door neighbour, we saved countless billions – money that was freed up for other needs such as hospitals, roads, parks and schools. The generous healthcare and other social programs that Canadians cherish were in effect underwritten by the U.S.” Continuing, Marcus states, “That had to change sometime. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine showed how vital it is to keep NATO strong, united and well armed.” So the extra tens of billions Canada is now going to spend on defence over the next decade is a good thing.
No, Canada is not a laggard in NATO, or free-loading off the U.S. military. During the Cold War Canada contributed an army brigade and air force squadron to NATO forces in Europe, not to mention to NORAD. We also contributed a battle group in support of NATO operations in Afghanistan, where we lost 150 soldiers in battle. For Ukraine’s fight against Russia, Canada has sent billions of dollars in military assistance, as well as training tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers for the fight since 2014. On top of all that, Canada maintains combat forces in Latvia. We have done enough for NATO, and I wonder if they would defend us in the event of an American invasion.
It further needs to be said that the U.S. spends too much money on defence. As early as the 1950s much of America’s defence spending was driven by the military/industrial complex, rather than the real level of military threat from the Soviet Union. The U.S. has built much of its economy around military spending. America’s defence spending is also built around an aggressive foreign policy. They launched wars in Vietnam and Iraq that cost them trillions of dollars. How were these wars in defence of Canada? Today the U.S. spends more money on defence than the next thirteen countries combined, and for what reason? Russia and China are no direct threat to the U.S., and anyway Trump likes Putin and Jinping.
There was no reason for Trump or NATO to push Canada to dramatically increase its spending on defence. Prime Minister Mark Carney caved in to Trump and NATO, and the result for Canada will be bad. The only way we will be able to pay for this higher level of defence is by significantly cutting back on social services. Carney will have to cut into healthcare, education, welfare, pharmacare, dental care, childcare, and possibly other programs. Any cuts to these programs will have more of an impact on the lives of millions of Canadians than anything from Russia or China. Many European countries have these programs, why not us. Marcus might be ashamed of Canada; I am not.
I see Andrew Coyne is at it again; looking for a reason to cut spending on social programs by the federal government in Canada. This time it is through the expected increase in defence spending by Canada over the next decade in response to pressure from Donald Trump and NATO. As Andrew stated in the title of a column he wrote for The Globe and Mail on June 25, 2025: “Can we find the extra $50 billion we promised NATO we’d spend on defence out of cuts in other spending? Yes, we can.” Immediately he rules out raising the extra money through the federal government borrowing more money, as we are already running a large deficit. Then he immediately rules out increasing taxes on the rich (“there is not enough of them”), and the middle class (“they have a lot of votes”) and will not support such an increase by the federal government. So the only option, according to Andrew, is “Let’s take another look at those untouchable social programs.”
The first social program that Andrew goes after for cuts is benefits to the elderly in Canada. Andrew wants to combine Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement, which he suggests will free-up approximately $3 billion for extra defence spending. Employment Insurance (EI) is the next program he has in mind for cuts. Andrew calls EI a “tangled mess”, and if subject to even just “modest reforms” could free-up another $3 billion for spending on national defence. Healthcare spending is third on his list of social programs that is in need of reform. Andrew wants the transfer of federal money to the provinces for healthcare to be replaced by a program that forces provincial health care to “grow more in line with the economy in the long run,” although he makes no estimation of potential cost savings for the federal government. Not only will we find more money for defence spending with these reforms, argues Andrew, but will do so “without harm to vulnerable individuals.”
Really. Out of Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement, the GIS has a higher threshold for qualification. If OAS is merged with the GIS into one single retirement program, there is a good chance that the eligibility criteria for the GIS will be adopted, significantly reducing the number of Canadians who will benefit from government assistance in retirement. Employment Insurance was never meant to be a source of government revenue, it was meant to provide some financial assistance to laid-off workers who have paid into the fund. Any reforms should result in lower weekly EI premiums for employees, not money for defence spending. The real “tangled mess” is not EI, it is Andrew’s convoluted scheme for ending direct federal funding to the provinces and territories for healthcare, and replacing it with a system of “tax points.” It is obvious that his plan will reduce the level of healthcare to Canadians. Andrew’s proposals will hurt millions of Canadians, in the name of national defence, and he knows it.
He has a narrow and distorted vision of Canada. I am talking about John Turley-Ewart, “a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail, a regulatory compliance consultant, and a Canadian banking historian.” On June 23, 2025, The Globe published an opinion article from John with the title, “Canada, prepare for a decade of thrift and lower living standards.” In the article, John argues that the finances of Canadians are being impacted by Trump’s tariffs, inflation, and the housing crisis, and that as a result Canadians will have less disposable income after paying their mortgage, and further less money to put away for retirement. Summing up the whole argument, John states that, “Today’s Canadian dream is to make the next mortgage payment without having to borrow it. The housing crisis hasn’t just hobbled the hopes of many Canadians; it is undercutting middle-class living standards.”
Well I would like to inform John that tens of millions of Canadians do not live in the so-called middle class, nor even in the upper level of the working class. This group of Canadians consists of manual labourers working in factories, warehouses, housekeeping/custodial services, and kitchens, as well as clerical workers in offices, call centre workers, and banking workers, among others. For the most part, these Canadians earn just enough in wages to place them at or somewhat above the poverty level; through no fault of their own. They do not own a home, and never will. Nor will they put away much for retirement, and can expect a drop in living standards when they do retire. Their “Canadian dream” is to be able to pay the rent reliably into the future, and feed their families at least semi-nutritious meals.
If The Globe and Mail is going to call itself Canada’s “national newspaper”, then its contributing writers need to broaden their intellectual vision to include the people I have just described. The biggest threat to their economic future is not the tariffs of Donald Trump, or the housing crisis or inflation. The biggest threat to their economic future is the social hierarchy that we have in Canada, a system which tells them that their work is unskilled and less valuable compared to the so-called middle class, and that they should be overworked and poorly paid. John Turley-Ewart and the other writers for The Globe need to examine our class system in Canada, and see that the people I am talking about are already practising “thrift and lower living standards”, and that the solution to their problems requires that the media push for equality.
Another poorly written article on homelessness in Canada; this one from the CBC news website. Omar Dabaghi-Pacheco was dispatched by the CBC to follow up on homelessness and drug over-dose deaths in Belleville, Ontario, one year after that city declared an emergency over the situation in 2024. For what appeared to be one day, Omar interviewed two homeless people, the city mayor, a Belleville resident, and a constable in the Belleville police. Out of that research came an article that was distinguished more for what information was left out, rather than what was explained to the reader about the issue of homelessness.
In terms of the breadth of his research for the article, Omar only talked with two homeless people out of an estimated homeless population of three hundred people in Belleville. Was the story of why they ended up homeless really the same for all three hundred? Omar should have interviewed more like twenty homeless people as a way to bring out the complexity of homelessness for the reader. Not all homeless people are drug addicts. Moreover, he should have interviewed any people advocating for the homeless, and any representatives from homeless support organizations, such as emergency shelters, and particularly any social workers.
The first homeless person Omar interviewed was a man who appeared to be middle-aged from the accompanying photograph, and as it turned out he had a girlfriend that was pregnant. While Omar did describe to some degree the awfulness of that couple’s situation, he never really asked the man why he was homeless. Isn’t that the most important question in any study of homelessness? There seems to be an implication that it came down to a lack of affordable housing for the couple, but that explanation was not clarified. Furthermore, it would have helped to know the man’s previous job and the salary.
When Omar talked with the second homeless person, a woman in her thirties it sounded like, we saw that in fact she was a regular drug user before becoming homeless for the first time. However, Omar didn’t ask her why she was taking drugs to begin with. Do we still judge drug users as criminals and losers in society? In fact very many Canadians self-medicate, to deal with mental health problems or some trauma that has happened to them, past or present, including the use of alcohol. Very likely there was a reason for her taking drugs, and that reason might be understandable.
Omar’s line of questioning with the other people interviewed in this article is also weak. I was sure that the police constable was correct when he told Omar that some homeless people get granted a social housing unit, only to be evicted because they allowed homeless friends to come over to the apartment and then drug use became an issue for the neighbors. But out of the approximately three hundred homeless people residing in Belleville, how many even got the chance at getting social housing; probably very few, and of those how many exactly have been evicted? How big was the problem?
As for the Mayor of Belleville, he seemed overwhelmed by the whole problem. All that he could say to Omar was that, “It’s the worst social issue that we are facing in our lifetime and it’s not going to get any better.” If I was Omar, I would have asked the mayor why he declared a state of emergency in 2024. Did such a declaration open up a new source of funding to address the emergency, or was it for political show? Then I would have asked the mayor if he was prepared to allow tent-encampments until the city could house all of its homeless people.
What I am saying is that the analysis of homelessness and drug-overdoses in that article was shallow. Along with so much other journalism on this subject, we were left with a distorted understanding. The focus is often on drug use, not on the homeless people, leaving us to think that it is all their fault. I understand that it was a news article and not a Ph.D thesis. Still, Omar could have probed deeper with just a few of the right questions. Journalists can and have to play a bigger role in turning around this awful mess. Otherwise we will continue to sleepwalk as the crisis worsens.
The Globe and Mail, of which I am a subscriber of the online edition, needs to be more serious about who contributes to their newspaper on the subject of homelessness in Canada. Somebody named Shelley Todd published an opinion-editorial in The Globe entitled, When it comes to homelessness, my heart is in danger of bleeding dry, and the article is all over the place. There is no clear argument on the matter one way or the other.
First, Shelley tells us that she is a “bleeding heart liberal”, who is happy to be taxed to help the people around her. Then she tells us that her heart is bleeding dry because she doesn’t like homeless tent-encampments being set up in public parks anywhere in Canada. Following that statement, Shelley admonishes city governments and police forces for clearing out those same tent-encampments: “When un-housed folks had nowhere else to go.”
Next, Shelley shows a somewhat broader understanding of homelessness by recognizing that other factors contribute to this social problem. Instead of it being simply addictions, there are mental health problems, colonialism, domestic violence, and poverty behind homelessness. While at the same time, Shelley implies that the primary cause of homelessness is drug addiction, which is a way to say that homeless people are to blame for their situation
Continuing, Shelley criticizes governments at all levels across the country for not providing enough emergency shelters, and addiction treatment programs to adequately address the problem of homelessness. Following this, she tells the reader about how homeless people regularly leave a mess of trash and excrement at the entrance to her husband’s business in downtown Kelowna, B.C. It seems that she’s as disgusted with homeless people as the governments that she criticizes.
Finally, Shelley discusses how her house was burglarized by homeless people on one occasion; they ransacked the place and stole many items. Her heart is “bleeding” more because of this incident, and understandably so. Yet she then goes on to say, “But if people stop caring, particularly people putting their faith in strong social supports, donating to their local charities, and committed to a kind and compassionate Canada – then we are all the poorer for it.”
Really I don’t know what Shelley is trying to tell us in her opinion editorial, published in The Globe And Mail on May 16, 2025. She seems to be a very good example of how so many people are affected when they see and think about homelessness. The whole matter of homelessness brings out in us a rush of negative feelings; anger, guilt, intense dislike, judgement, disgust. Homelessness makes us feel very uncomfortable.
Shelley is a Canadian writer and journalist, and after reading online about her work, I can’t see any articles or books that even touch on the issue of homelessness. On the subject of homelessness, we need serious and insightful commentary, we need contributions from people who have really studied the issue, and sorted out their own feelings. One gets the feeling that Shelley’s article was published because she knows someone at The Globe And Mail.
Eric Reguly is just too easily impressed I have to say, at least after reading his column in The Globe And Mail on April 26, 2025. The column was about the recently diseased Pope Francis, and in particular his exhortation that capitalism needed to become human again, that the world economy needed to be inclusive for all of humanity. That philosophy, according to Eric, first emerged in a conference convened by the Pope in 2013, a conference that involved the CEOs of some of the world’s biggest mining companies. While not participating in the conference, Eric was invited as a journalist to report on the event, one which had been organized by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace at the Vatican.
Looking back on that conference, Eric highlighted a line in the Pope’s invitation to the mining CEO’s, which stated that the Pope hoped they would develop a “process guided by moral principles which sees the good for all parties involved in the sector.” As further evidence of the Pope’s desire to improve the lives of the poor and downtrodden, Eric brought back for us in his column some words from one of the mining CEOs about the goal of the conference: “to open a dialogue where mining interfaces with the community…to hear other views with the promise of all of us making a difference.” That conference, Eric argued, clearly represented an early display of the Pope’s desire to reform capitalism.
A few months later, even more evidence of that commitment on the part of Pope Francis emerged when he released a papal document called Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel). According to Eric, “The document came as a shock. It was blunt, provocative, fresh – a challenge to a hoary old Church bound by clericalism, bureaucracy, formality and remoteness hobbled by Catholics who act like sourpusses…and their rather inattentive treatment of the poor.” Eric went on to say that, “Of course, Francis knew that good Catholics have compassion for the poor, but feeling sorry for the downtrodden wasn’t enough, as far as he was concerned. He wanted Catholics to advocate for them, to be vigilant on their behalf.”
Eric further backed up his case for Pope Francis as a beacon of social justice with direct passages from Evangelii Gaudium. One of these passages was, “None of us can think we are exempt from concern for the poor and for social justice.” Another passage stated, “How can it be that it is not a news item when an older homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” A third passage quoted by Eric was, “Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded.” Then came the really big passage, a remark about capitalism: “Such an economy kills.” Eric said those words from the Pope “resonated around the world.”
If that was not enough proof that Pope Francis was truly dedicated to social justice, Eric quoted comments from other people that admired Evangelii Guadium. One such admirer was Michael Czerny, a Canadian Cardinal at the Vatican who was involved in coordinating the conference with the mining CEOs in 2013. “The Pope,” Michael said, “was in favour of capitalism in service of the people.” Cardinal Czerny also said, “An ‘economy that kills’ is a spectacular quote.” Another person quoted by Eric was none other than Raul Castro, the leader of communist Cuba at the time: “If the Pope continues this way, I will go back to praying and go back to the church. I am not joking.”
So, in the mind of Eric, it was clear that Pope Francis genuinely wanted to see capitalism reformed. Except that it was really not that clear. If I had wrote on the legacy of Pope Francis, I would have asked many more questions than Eric. According to Eric, the Pope spent most of his life in the Catholic Church in Argentina, where eventually he rose to the position of Archbishop of Buenos Aires. During that time did Pope Francis openly support the labour unions that were fighting against the upper class for workers’ rights and a better life? When labour and left-wing activists were being “disappeared” by the government, did Pope Francis openly speak out against these crimes?
About the meeting between Pope Francis and the mining company CEOs in 2013, I would have asked a series of questions. Why did Pope Francis assemble just CEOs, and not any representatives from labour groups from around the world, such as the International Labour Organization (ILO)? Was there any later conference organized by the Vatican that did include any international labour groups? Did Pope Francis ever meet directly with any workers and ask them what concrete measures would be necessary to improve their work lives? Did the CEOs at the meeting commit to making any concrete reforms to the way they ran their respective companies, and was there any follow-up by the Vatican with the subsequent performance of these CEOs?
Next I would have inquired about the Vatican itself. Where did its wealth come from? Was the Vatican invested in any of those mining companies, and receiving any substantial return? Was the Vatican invested in any other corporation around the world, all of which are just as excessive in their capitalism as the mining company CEOs? How much if any Vatican money was directed towards fighting against capitalism, and in what way? What about any workers at the Vatican; how were they treated in terms of working conditions and pay? Did the Pope live in the same kind of opulence as the mining CEOs? Why was the Vatican structured the same way as a business corporation; based on power and inequality?
Finally, I would question Evangelii Gaudium. Supposedly the document was about curbing the excesses of capitalism. To that I would have said to Pope Francis, have you ever studied the history of capitalism? Did Pope Francis ever read any works about capitalism, such as What is Property? by Pierre-Joseph Prudhon, or The Conditions of the English Working Class by Friederich Engels, books which exposed the hell of early capitalism for workers? Did Pope Francis read A History of Capitalism 1500-2000 by Michel Beaud, or The Age of Capital 1848 to 1875 by Eric Hobsbawm? From these books it was clear that capitalism has never integrated human values, rather it has destroyed human values. Why did Pope Francis think it was possible to reform capitalism today?
Before we celebrate the life of Pope Francis and his supposed fight against economic oppression and poverty around the world, many more questions need to be asked? Was Pope Francis a bad guy? No, probably not. Apparently he established a homeless shelter in Rome, and possibly he did better than his predecessors in that matter, as argued by Eric. But as I saw it, Pope Francis could have been as elitist in his thinking as those mining company CEOs that he met with in 2013, and as equally prejudiced against workers as every CEO around the world. Pope Francis, it seemed to me, was as much or more a part of the problem with capitalism than he was a part of any solution.
What a joke, I thought as I read about some suggestions for rebuilding Canada’s economy on the CBC news website. Appearing on the website on April 24, 2025, the article pulled together the main economic ideas that have emerged during the country’s recent federal election, and presented them as a necessary platform for whatever party forms the next government. There are four ideas, and they include: 1) Speed up the approvals process for natural resources projects, 2) Remove inter-provincial trade barriers, 3) Manufacture more military equipment in Canada, 4) Develop a strong domestic artificial intelligence (AI) industry. These ideas, according to the author of the article, will rebuild Canada’s economy after supposedly years of stagnation, and strengthen our economy in the face of a trade war thrust upon us by the United States. The author, Peter Armstrong, even goes so far as to argue that we are in a once-in-a-generation position to transform our economy, and that we better follow through or we face a problematic future.
On the surface the ideas outlined by Peter look positive. Building more pipelines inside Canada, and by extension increasing our use of oil will bring more jobs to the economy. There will be more jobs in extracting the oil, in construction for the pipelines, and perhaps more work at our domestic oil refineries. Increased inter-provincial trade will help maintain a tariff free market for Canadian goods, albeit on a smaller scale than we had with access to the huge American market. Expanding our manufacturing in the military sphere will bring more jobs for Canadians, not to mention increasing our military self-sufficiency. As for AI, opening up this emerging industry will bring more jobs to Canadians, as well as perhaps giving us an edge in technological know-how over our international competitors. All of these ideas appear to be a no-brainer as a way through which we can substantially grow the Canadian economy, as well as securing our future against a general hostility coming from Trump and America.
Underneath the surface, however, these ideas are of dubious merit. Expanding our use of oil will have a detrimental effect on the environment? Interprovincial free trade is not really any different than the international free trade that we have carried out with the United States over the past thirty-five years. Our goods will just be going to a different market, and a much smaller market. Manufacturing has become highly mechanized, displacing countless thousands of jobs in that sector for human beings. In military manufacturing it is the same, and so the number of new jobs for Canadians to arise out of this idea will be limited at best. Plus, we don’t know how well those jobs will pay. Many manufacturing jobs pay poorly. Artificial Intelligence as an industry may also bring only a small number of jobs, and for some people, the goal of AI is to replace humans on the job. How many manufacturing and warehousing jobs will be lost as a result of AI?
Not only are these four ideas for rebuilding the economy of dubious merit, they would do nothing to transform the economy of Canada. The fundamental economic structure of the present would remain in place, and this is the real source of our economic problems. Our economy is built around inequality, around a social hierarchy that favours the people called managers, and oppresses everybody underneath them within any workplace. This oppression is especially strong against manual labourers, like those working in manufacturing, warehousing, and housekeeping/custodial. Having total control over the workplace allows managers to overload employees with work, impose a tight physical work environment on the staff, and pay them poorly. Through this structure, the managers are able to generate a large monetary surplus for the company, and then in turn ensure that a disproportionately high share of that money goes to the managers. Any transformation of the economy has to start at the ground level, and by implementing equality in the workplace.
If Peter had spoken with workers, instead of just drawing from CEOs and industry experts, he would have found very different ideas for transforming the economy. Some of these ideas would include, 1) Genuine freedom of speech in the workplace, 2) Individual worker control over daily workloads, 3) Individual control over working conditions, and 4) Equal pay. Peter would also encounter ideas about shorter workdays, and the removal of obstacles to forming a union. Implementation of these logical ideas would really increase employment. As a result, many more people would have more money to spend in the economy, as well as more money to pay out in taxes to the government. There wold be a real boost to worker productivity, and a lowering of absenteeism. Work injuries would decline dramatically, leading to lower costs for workers compensation claims, and reduced expenses for our healthcare system. The government would have more money to invest in Canadian business development, and best of all, we could virtually eliminate homelessness in society.
We need to bring about equality in the workplace if we are to truly transform the Canadian economy. Anything less, such as the four ideas outlined by Peter, will just be more of the same economic structure we already have. In the present Canadian economy there are severe disparities in income, leaving millions of our people struggling, and hundreds of thousands of Canadians falling into homelessness. Tens of thousands of our children have already fallen behind and may never catch up in life. Equality in the workplace brings us more than just elevating the number of jobs, it’s about making sure those jobs and all jobs are economically stable. In this way we will build an economy that is very different from what exists in the U.S., and will do so much more to secure our economic future in the face of American tariffs and hostility. Finally, establishing equality in the workplace does not have to take place through some once-in-a generation opportunity, we can do it anytime.
Thanks Elon, thanks for caring so much about us and our future. The subject of Universal Basic Income (UBI) has come up in an article on the CNN website on April 12, 2025, which was reposted on the CTV News website, and the author has quoted a statement in support of UBI from none other than Elon Musk: “universal income will be necessary over time if AI takes over most human jobs.” The statement was from 2018, but no doubt he thinks the same way today. No Elon, we don’t need a Universal Basic Income. A UBI is no substitute for having a job, and getting paid all of the money that is necessary for a good life from that job.
In practice there is not going to be a UBI for everyone, and Musk knows this. If nobody is working and producing a good or service, how are we going to generate any income as an economy? Where are the taxes going to come from to pay for a Universal Basic Income? Is Elon Musk prepared to see his own income tax skyrocket, assuming that he will keep his job, in order to fund a UBI? Is he going to support a skyrocketing corporate tax to fund the UBI? I don’t think so. His support for a UBI is only a means to assuage people’s fears as he advocates for AI to put an end to their jobs.
In the time before AI takes over most or all of the jobs, there is another advantage for Musk in his false support for a UBI. Eventually a UBI will be considered part of a person’s wages, part of their general income, which will allow Musk to pay lower wages to his workers at Tesla. He does not see the UBI as a supplement to a worker’s wages, to allow them to live better lives, he see the UBI as a replacement for a workers wages. If workers call for higher wages, then Musk will just say that you need to get your increase in income from an increased UBI. This is a criticism of UBI that is not mentioned in the CNN article.
A third advantage for Musk in his false support for a UBI, is that it distracts us from the real problem in our economy. That problem is that management, backed-up by the government and the law, has total control over the company. Managers use this control, with assistance from human resource departments, to set difficult working conditions for workers, establish unreasonably high work productivity quotas, divide the workers, and pay the workers shit. These hierarchical conditions generate a surplus of money for the company, which the managers then distribute among themselves at a much higher scale. They justify their control and much higher pay by telling us that their jobs are more demanding in knowledge, skill, and responsibility. A handful of managers control so much of our society.
There is no justification for the superior position of management within a company. This position is based purely on prejudice and privilege. We need to bring equality and freedom to the workplace. Such a workplace will result in a continuation of paid jobs in the future, full employment in society, and the necessary pay for each individual to live a decent and fulfilling life, not to mention providing the same such life to their families. This is the way to provide a UBI, so it is the responsibility of the company, and not an already cash-strapped government. We need to fight back against Elon Musk’s empty and poor vision of the future, one powered by AI, and fight for a fair distribution of corporate resources throughout society.
Here we go again with the “productivity” thing. The Globe And Mail it seems is obsessed with the supposed issue of declining productivity in Canada’s economy. One commentator after another in The Globe is panicked over the belief that American workers are producing so much more per hour of work than Canadian workers, and that as a result the Canadian standard of living is substantially declining relative to that in America. On this occasion, April 2, 2025, it is a guest columnist named John Turley-Ewart, who argues that, “This economic decline measures the toll our productivity crisis is taking, which at its core is a crisis born of shrinking business investment in Canada…” Continuing, John states that, “The gap between U.S. and Canadian productivity and living standards, if not effectively addressed, will be the slow death of Canada.” It is an issue even more important than the tariffs recently imposed on Canada by U.S. president Donald Trump, according to John, and that ultimately we must reimagine our economy.
So what does John suggest we do to improve the productivity of Canadian workers, which will in turn attract more business investment to the Canadian economy? He says nothing specific. All he does in his column is refer to a report published by an organization called Coalition For a Better Future. According to the report, “Poverty rates are going up” in Canada, and “Household incomes are going down.” Furthermore, the report states that in Canada, “just about every metric for private sector investment looks terrible.” If there is any recommendation from the report about how to improve the productivity of individual Canadian workers, John does not mention it in his column. In fact he does not even show from the report that the average American really is doing so much better as a result of supposedly higher productivity than their Canadian counterpart. Poverty is widespread in America, and this fact is well known. So also is it well known that tens of millions of Americans have little or no healthcare!
John further fails to even consider any other possible reason for the rise in poverty and decline in household income in Canada. While it is at least doubtful that low Canadian productivity is the source of the problem with our economy, it is certain that inequality in the workplace very much produces poverty. In the private sector workplace, the managers have total control over the enterprise, backed up by the government, the law, the police, and if necessary the military. As such they have total control over the pay received by the workers, not to mention individual productivity quotas, work discipline, and work conditions. Through this control, managers are able to distribute a higher and usually much higher share of the company’s money to themselves. In Canada an ever-growing share of the money generated by our economy is being soaked up by the managers, and other people supposedly more skilled and more important than the workers. The hard work of millions of working Canadians brings in less and less reward.
We can only guess at what John believes is necessary to improve Canadian business productivity, and my guess is that he wants the same things as other columnists in The Globe And Mail. Consistently The Globe advocates for reducing taxes on business and personal income tax, reducing business regulation, and for government investment in the research and development of technology. On paper it all sounds smart, commonsensical. In reality it will cause a lot of damage to Canada. Reducing business tax means less money for government, which in turn means the degradation of such social programs as healthcare, dental care, pharmacare, welfare, and $10/day childcare. They could even be eliminated. Reducing personal income tax will have the same effect. Business deregulation really means diminishing the laws that protect workers, such as Employment Standards, Labour Relations, and Occupational Safety and Health. More technology will just end up replacing workers on the job. The only people that will benefit from the ideas of The Globe will be the business managers and shareholders.
John says his goal is to preserve Canada’s independence from the U.S. by improving our business productivity, and by extension our living standards. Canada will thrive, instead of declining economically relative to the U.S. I disagree. I think John wants Canada to become more like the United States, a country that caters to the rich and powerful, a country that allows the rich and powerful to soak up a heavy share of the money at the expense of the large majority of the population. The way forward charted by John and The Globe will actually bring about that “slow death” of Canada that John says is our greatest national threat. If we are really going to reimagine our economy, and make Canada immune to eventual absorption by the U.S., we need to move in the opposite direction of John and the so-called elites that run our country and share his vision. We need to stop believing in the supposed productivity crisis, and examine the severe and still growing inequality in the workplace
There is another way to fight Trump, a way that is better than what I found suggested in a recent column about the federal election in The Globe And Mail. On March 25, 2025, The Globe Editorial Board argued that, “Voters understand that the best way to beat Mr. Trump is to reduce the country’s reliance on the U.S. for trade and defence so that his crude threats, or those of a successor, no longer carry the same existential power.” In that column the Editorial Board went on to state that, “Doing so will mean exploiting its natural resources by building pipelines and speeding up approvals processes, making Canada more inviting to investors by lowering taxes, removing interprovincial trade barriers, balancing the books, rebuilding the military and forging new alliances.” While some of these suggestions from The Globe might be useful in our fight against Trump’s America, a far more effective way to strengthen Canada would be to aggressively further democratize our country.
I mean that we should finally go after democratizing the business-corporation, and indeed all workplaces. Right now the workplace is built on a hierarchical structure of power. A small minority of people called managers, with the help of human resource departments, rule over those who constitute the majority of the workforce; the workers. The managers make all of the decisions regarding workloads, working conditions, work discipline, and pay. Freedom of speech is suppressed under the threat of termination of employment. In effect the workplace is a tyranny, an apartheid system of rule under which we spend at least one-half of our waking hours. As a result a great many Canadians, especially manual labourers, have rough and unstable lives. Furthermore we have an ever-growing number of Canadians that have no lives at all; they are homeless. We need to decentralize power in the workplace away from this small group of so-called elites, and institute equality among all workers. People need to have control over their lives.
Decentralizing power in the workplace will strengthen Canada so much more than anything suggested in that opinion-piece in The Globe. The daily lives of Canadians will be so much better, making us individually much stronger, and from that will grow a much stronger Canada. Canadians, feeling an atmosphere of equality, will fiercely defend our independence from any attack by Trump’s America. Decentralizing power in the workplace will just as importantly broaden the base of wealth and thus tremendously boost our economy. The economy will be more resilient to any external shock. Moreover, it will make much more money available to the government through taxes, without having to increase the tax rate. More income for the government means more money for the social programs about which Canadians are so proud, and distinguish us from Trump’s America; programs such as medicare for all, good public education for all, low-cost childcare, dental care, and pharmacare. Finally, decentralizing power in the workplace will not cost us even one cent.
In that Globe And Mail column, the Editorial Board argued that politicians in this federal election campaign need to seize the opportunity to advance a vision of transformative change for Canada. Canadians, they say, “need a campaign in which they can choose between sweeping proposals for the future of the country at the very moment they are ready for – are even hungry for – a new Canada to emerge.” Continuing, the Editorial Board said, “Canadians have one demand: they want their country to be stronger and freer, and they are ready for a leader with the boldness to deliver that.” Absolutely, and decentralizing power in the workplace is that transformation; not the stale and regressive ideas put forward by The Globe Editorial Board. Let’s use the threat from Trump’s America as the way to make Canada stronger and freer than ever before, and along the way piss off Trump and the people in Canada that support Trump’s business-authoritarian vision of society.
It’s not working, I wanted to say to Andre Picard after reading his column in The Globe And Mail on March 17, 2025. Andre called for the various governments in Canada to get busy solving the crisis of homelessness in our country, specifically by building more shelters, and more supportive housing for people with drug addictions and mental illnesses. Through such an initiative, done on a large scale, we will diminish and remove the homeless people inhabiting our public spaces, from sidewalks, to public parks, bus-stop shelters, and now subway stations. As just one example, Andre mentioned the Metro system in Montreal (STM), where seemingly a large group of homeless people have taken up regular residence, and made travelling by the subway a very unpleasant experience for the large number of people using the system daily. The homeless people were drinking, doing drugs, urinating, defecating, and in some instances being confrontational with transit riders. Andre supported the new policy introduced by Montreal transit to put a stop to loitering in all of its facilities.
The trouble is that governments across Canada are not solving the ever-growing crisis of homelessness in Canada, they are not building the necessary shelters and supportive housing and show no interest in doing so. Governments, municipal, provincial, and federal are dragging their asses and doing the bare minimum. In Regina, my hometown, at least one more shelter was needed to accommodate the City’s homeless population. After years and years of stalling by City Council, and waiting for funding from the government of Saskatchewan, a building was to be renovated and turned into a purpose-built shelter. The problem was that they decided at the same time to cancel funding for an existing temporary shelter. There was to be no increase in individual spaces overall, leaving so many people still living on the street. I talked with one of these left-out people one night in a bus-stop shelter, and she confirmed for me that there wasn’t enough shelter space in the city. I am sure that this city council scenario has played itself out in cities across Canada.
It turns out that politicians, like so many other Canadians, are prejudiced against homeless people. Homeless people are looked upon as lazy and weak and uncouth. For a time there was a homeless tent-encampment set up right in front of Regina City Hall. The Mayor and City Councillors would not speak to any of them, no doubt feeling disgusted by their presence. Eventually the camp inhabitants were forced to move again by the police. Doug Ford, the Premier of Ontario, responded with the same sort of disgust when asked by a reporter about government assistance for the homeless. As reported in the news, he said that homeless people needed to get off their asses and get a job. In Manitoba, one of the candidates for leadership of the provincial Conservative Party had something even nastier to say about homeless people. He suggested letting the polar bears of Northern Manitoba loose on the homeless people of Winnipeg. Prejudice against homeless people pervades our society, and as a result our so-called leaders will continue to fail in solving the homeless crisis.
We need to do something different in our approach to homelessness; all Canadians and especially writers for mainstream media need to challenge their prejudice. We have to get close to homeless people and understand them; ask them why they have ended up in that situation. It’s okay, they don’t bite; they are not savages. Writing about homeless people as if they are disgusting, like emphasizing their ugly behaviour in subway stations, will get us nowhere. You might temporarily get them moved along, but they will just pop-up again in some other public space for us to see, and leaving us frustrated. What’s really disgusting is that we have homeless people at all in a country of such vast wealth as Canada. Let’s find out the truth, that it could happen to any of us at any time in our lives. We need to see and write about homeless people as if they are human beings, not lazy and dirty and weak. Only then will politicians seriously end homelessness, and our public spaces will be free of poverty.
I don’t want to think about it either; the possibility that Trump will invade Canada. For one hundred and fifty years we have not had to fear any military conflict with our neighbor to the south. Canada and the United States have lived side-by-side peacefully, and this has allowed us to focus mainly on economic relations and thus to mutually prosper. Many years ago, while my brothers and I were young, our family travelled frequently to the U.S., and one of my brothers immigrated to that country. My father had a family relative from New York State, who would come up to visit our family on occasion. I have studied American history and politics, and on September 11, 2001, I believed that we should stand with America in the coming fight against Al-Quaida. A strong relationship has developed between our two countries, and I can hardly imagine that it has now come to an end with the threat of annexation from U.S. president Trump.
I see the same reluctance to think about this possibility in Andrew Coyne, a columnist at The Globe And Mail newspaper. Everything he says in his column of February 28, 2025, points in the direction of potential U.S. military aggression against Canada at some point down the road. With a sense of horror he describes a long list of actions and words from Donald Trump that demonstrate a growing insanity in the man. Furthermore, Andrew demonstrates that Trump’s insanity is accelerating and that it is not going to settle down: “We need to understand that however awful Mr. Trump’s behaviour may have been until now – however callous, dictatorial, insane or dangerous…it is only going to get worse, and at a rate that will itself defy all expectations.” Andrew makes a convincing case that Canada is in a rapidly worsening situation with Trump, one that could soon lead to war. Yet Andrew himself still refuses to suggest any such possibility.
Unfortunately, I think all of Canada must at least begin to prepare ourselves for a U.S. invasion. As I see it, the invasion will happen in stages. First, Trump will deploy troops to the Canadian border, arguing that fentanyl and illegal immigrants are still crossing from Canada into the U.S. Next, Trump will order his military forces to cross the border into Canada by something like twenty-five miles, saying that, “We have to create a buffer zone.” After the U.S. Army defeats our small Canadian army in its valiant but futile response, U.S. forces will move rapidly to Ottawa to dissolve our federal government. From there, U.S. forces will almost certainly move to take over the areas of the country that are rich in natural resources, in particular our oil reserves, uranium, and any critical minerals. In the process of capturing our natural resources, I imagine that the U.S. will move to all of the provincial and territorial capitals and dissolve those governments.
However the invasion happens, and I am no military expert, it is unrealistic to think that we would defeat U.S. military power in a conventional war. They can overwhelm us with soldiers, firepower, and everything else, and I am sure most Canadians understand this fact. We can also expect little-to-no military assistance from our co-called allies in the event of a war with the U.S. Since Donald Trump declared his desire and intention to annex Canada early in January of 2025, no European country has spoken up against the U.S. president in defense of Canada’s nationhood. Europe expects us to provide them with troops to defend against potential Russian aggression, all during the Cold War and still today, yet they are unwilling to do us the favour in return should it become necessary. Even Britain, our so-called mother country, has abandoned us to our fate with the Americans. We will be alone in our fight against the U.S.
The only way that Canada will be able to take on and defeat a U.S. military invasion, I believe, will be through some kind of guerrilla warfare. We will fight them in our cities using urban guerrilla tactics, and whatever else becomes necessary to wear down the invading forces. We will be on our home turf and fighting for that turf. The heirs to our soldiers from both World Wars, Korea, the Cold war, and Afghanistan, will be highly motivated regular Canadians across the country, fighting with what we have in our hands. At the beginning of his article, Andrew paraphrased a quote supposedly from Wayne Gretzky: “Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it’s been.” In other words, look ahead to where Trump is going and prepare for what you see. I think the puck is very possibly heading toward a Canadian defensive war, and that we must begin preparing for it now.
You have got to watch him carefully. I’m talking about Stephen Harper, the former prime minister of Canada (2006-2015). On February 20, 2025, The Globe And Mail published an article from the former PM outlining a response to our current challenge from U.S. president Donald Trump. In his calculated response, Stephen argues that Canada has to: 1) Be calm in the face of Trump’s threats, 2) Plan well in advance for any possible scenario from the U.S., 3) Make no unilateral concessions to Trump; and 4) Do not allow ourselves to become any more economically dependent on the U.S. The first three steps make sense to me, and it seems are being largely followed by Canada’s political leaders since Trump announced his big trade tariffs on Canada back in January. Step four, however, is a thinly disguised push to fundamentally alter Canada, and would ultimately weaken us as a nation-state.
In pursuit of step four, Stephen argues that Canada should build an “internationally competitive economy”, and to do so, “We must break down interprovincial trade barriers, open internal markets, lower taxes, reduce subsidies, thin regulation, get our resources out of the ground, build export-oriented infrastructure, and make it a national mission to diversify our external markets.” Of course it makes sense to create more robust trade relationships with the rest of the world, and one has to acknowledge the effort made by Stephen toward this end during his years as PM, specifically the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), as he mentioned in the article. But I disagree that we should lower taxes and thin regulation, as to do so would result in greater struggle for millions of Canadians, and restrict any benefits from diversified trade to the people in Canada who are already economically prosperous.
Lowering personal income tax rates disproportionately benefits upper income earners. They would save much more money than the lower income earners would, and that is money removed from the government treasury. If the treasury shrinks, then important social programs are diminished or even eliminated, programs like healthcare, education, childcare, pharmacare, dental care, and welfare. Countless millions of Canadians depend on these government programs in order to survive, or live half-decent to decent lives, from the homeless, to those on social assistance, to the working poor, to those a little higher up the income pyramid. The lowering of corporate taxes, which I am sure Stephen has in mind, will only further cut into social programs. Canada is already suffering from severe inequality. What is the point of developing an internationally competitive economy if it means that life will get worse, not better for a large percentage of Canadians?
“Thinning regulation”, in the mind of Stephen, almost certainly means labour laws in Canada. While most labour law comes under the jurisdiction of the provinces and territories, Stephen would undoubtedly want provincial governments to follow a path of deregulation as well. The formation of labour unions across industry, the civil service, teaching, and nursing, among other sectors of the economy, is what has spread the wealth of Canada across a broad segment of Canadians, rather than allowing it to be concentrated in the hands of a small segment at the top. Other labour laws that Stephen would also like to see diminished, I’m sure, include Employment Standards, which gives an employee some rights over work-schedules and payroll, and Occupational Safety and Health, which gives an employee some protection from dangerous working conditions. I do not want to see our economy become internationally competitive at the expense of our labour laws.
Not only does Stephen want Canada to lower taxes and thin regulation, he wants us to have the necessary leaders to make his plan happen. As he states, “We need leaders who oppose the woke denigration of Canada. Our distinct history, identity and cultures are worth preserving.” Clearly he is criticizing Justin Trudeau, and believes that Pierre Poillievre, his former protégé, is the man for the job. But Stephen and Pierre had and have a narrow view of Canadian culture. Essentially, they see Canada in terms of the dominance of white people, and the continued subjugation of Indigenous people. Though it can be said that Trudeau is phony, there is nothing wrong or denigrating about questioning our history with regards to the horrors that Canada has inflicted on Indigenous people. For Indigenous people, an internationally competitive economy is worthless if it is achieved at the continuation of the status quo.
Don’t be fooled by Stephen Harper. Sure he likes to talk about making Canada “strong and proud” as a country in the world. He even claims that his plan is for all Canadians, stating that “Our competitiveness agenda must be focused on opportunities and incomes for working Canadian families, not just the economic one per cent.” This is not a plan for a better Canada, it is a plan to deepen inequality among our people, which is nothing to be proud of for a government or country. It’s ironic: He says that he wants to preserve our distinct culture and our independence from the U.S., yet his plan would only make our country more like the U.S.. The same could be said about the comments coming from a lot of our so-called leaders; business, intellectual, political and military. In a different way, Trump may get his victory over Canada.
Reach out to us, there is a whole segment of Canadian society that would back you up. That is what I thought after reading an article on CBC.ca about the issue of “Reconciliation” between Canadians and Indigenous people. Actually it was an interview, from February 6, 2025, where the CBC’s Nahlah Ayed spoke with Brandi Morin, an Indigenous journalist covering a wide variety of topics but especially contemporary Indigenous issues in Canada. During the interview, Brandi argued that “Reconciliation”, the process of reintegrating Indigenous people into the centre of Canadian life in the broad sense, “right now is on life support.” Throughout the interview she said that Canadians were failing to engage with Indigenous people in a meaningful way and bring about real change in society. “We need”, Brandi emphasized, “a revolution of the Canadian spirit.”
The people that I think Brandi should reach out to, along with any other Indigenous advocate, are the so-called un-skilled workers in Canadian society. I am talking about the people working in manufacturing, warehousing, housekeeping/custodial, lumber mills, restaurants, coffee shops, call centres, banks, and retail outlets among others. People in these vocations stand to benefit a great deal from a resurgence of Indigenous peoples in Canada and their values of equality and fairness. Indigenous values will substantially reform the workplace, bringing freedom of speech for workers, equality of pay, control over individual workload and work hours, control over working conditions, and a jury process for disciplinary matters. A resurgence of Indigenous values will challenge and diminish the ideology of capitalism that presently dominates Canada, and ultimately weaken the tyranny of management in the workplace.
I understand that the push for Reconciliation in Canada should not have to come from Indigenous peoples. They have done nothing wrong. It is the white European colonists and their descendants that have inflicted harm, harm on Indigenous people by taking away their lands, forcing them onto reserves, starving them, forcing their children into Residential Schools, denying them jobs and medical care through direct racism, unequal treatment before the law, and so much else. We, the white people that have built Canada on top of the destruction of Indigenous people and culture, are the ones that have to reconcile. We have to acknowledge the destruction and return to them the means to rebuild their lives and communities. White Canada has to concede actual economic and political power to Indigenous people immediately and over the long term.
Unfortunately, as Brandi has informed us, the changes that are necessary from white Canada are terribly slow in coming. In light of this major problem, I would like to see Indigenous activists begin talking directly to the working people I described above. When they talk with the media, or in public forums, I would like them to talk about what kind of society Reconciliation will bring about overall, and that there are many Canadians out there that would benefit from this revolutionary new society. They should talk specifically about fairness and equality in the workplace, and this could well bring them new allies. You see, the humanity that we seek is also terribly slow in coming over the last one-hundred and fifty years. We are oppressed by corporate management, and the political process has let us down as well.
In turn, we need to actively support the cause of Indigenous people in Canada. Already the labour movement has forged some ties with the Indigenous community, but we need to go much further. First, we should call for more homeless shelters to be built in cities across Canada, a move which will benefit all homeless people. Second, we should call for funding of Indigenous peoples education to be on par with every other Canadian student. Third we should push political parties to recruit Indigenous candidates, and vote for Indigenous candidates in elections. Fourth we should push the government to return land to Indigenous control, which will bring to them a fair share of our national resources, and allow Indigenous values to become part of our overall culture. Finally, labour unions should actively tell their members about the benefits of Reconciliation.
Let us lead Canada in that “Revolution of the spirit” that Brandi calls for in non-Indigenous Canadians. Not only will it benefit us in practical ways, we owe this support to Indigenous people for moral reasons. When Europeans first came to North America, the Indigenous people supported them. For the colonists, conditions were harsh and they survived only because of Indigenous people. Without Indigenous people there would be no Canada. Then we betrayed them. As our ancestors formed Canada politically, we left them out. We told them that the lands now belong to us, and as John Ralston Saul has argued, we expected them to gradually disappear. Well they did not disappear. Indigenous people survived one-hundred and fifty years of oppression. They are making a comeback. Let’s repay our debt to them, and through that revolution create a better Canada.
“Wishful thinking” is what I would say to Stephen Marche, a Canadian author and essayist, in response to his recent comments on a possible U.S. invasion of Canada. Stephen’s comments, as part of an interview with CTV Your Morning on February 13, 2025, were that it was possible that America would fall apart to the point it would be unable to invade Canada: “Annexing a country is the work of a state, and they’re in the middle of breaking down their state.” As we all know by now, U.S. president Trump has repeatedly declared his desire to make Canada the 51st state. While it is good to see CTV discussing a scenario of U.S. military invasion, which is so far being largely ignored in the Canadian media, it is wishful to think that we can count on U.S. political collapse as a way to avoid this possibility.
While Trump and Elon Musk are dismantling some U.S. federal departments, they have not dismantled the U.S. military in any way. So far at least the annual military budget of approximately $800 billion has been maintained by Trump, making American forces still powerful enough to attack Ottawa and depose the Canadian federal government, if not yet subjugate all of Canada. Trump can also utilize private military companies (PMC) to provide imperial troops; PMCs like Blackwater. During the Iraq war, approximately half of the total occupying American force was made up of private military contractors, a PMC force of about 140,000 personnel. In Afghanistan, the U.S. utilized approximately 16000 PMC personnel to augment its military ground forces. So even if he does break down the U.S. military, he can still turn to private businesses to fill any shortfall in the forces necessary to conquer Canada.
Trump is also not dismantling presidential power. On the contrary, he is strengthening that power, through devious means. Right from day one he has issued Presidential Orders that violated parts of the U.S. Constitution. So far the Trump administration is complying with actions from the courts to stop him, but clearly he is going to continue in that direction. There is even talk among people in his administration of ignoring the courts and Trump doing whatever the hell he wants. This should come as no surprise from a man that fomented an insurrection at the end of his last term in office in order to stay in power. Trump has no regard for the concept of law or democracy. He is going to eliminate the checks and balances on presidential power in the U.S. system, and build a situation where he alone can take the country to war.
We can observe as well that Trump is not dismantling the power of U.S. corporations or the financial system. It is through these corporations, not the American state apparatus, that Trump will rule over Canada. During his first term Trump reduced corporate taxes and income tax on the rich. He will continue doing so throughout his second term. Trump has been complaining about taxes levelled against American corporations, such as digital taxes on American social media, and has promised to fight for these corporations. American oil companies have been told by Trump to “drill baby drill.” He is demanding that Canada, where banking regulations are stricter than in America, open itself up to U.S. banks. Trump is a businessman and will allow U.S. corporations to take over Canada, just like the British East India Company did in India, complete with their own private armies.
The only power that Trump and Musk are dismantling is that of the opposition. To begin with, Trump has filled his cabinet with individuals who are just as aggressive and immoral as himself. Not one of them would even think of opposing a Trump policy or decision. Trump is cutting away at the press. He has said that the press “needs to be reigned-in”, and is now prohibiting access to the White House of any reporter that questions his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. No doubt h will take further measures against any reporter that questions him, essentially gutting a key element of democracy. Trump is undermining Congress by attempting to close down federal agencies that were established by Congress, and his Vice President, J.D. Vance, has said that the Supreme Court should not have any power over the president.
Whatever weakening of the state that is being carried out by Trump and Musk, they are still in a strong position to launch a military invasion of Canada. They don’t even need the support of a large majority of Americans to invade Canada. History shows that U.S. presidents can take the country into war and maintain the war effort in the face of internal disunity. The Vietnam War furnishes just such an example, and though the U.S. lost that war, they were able to inflict a great deal of damage on Vietnam. A more recent example of American aggression despite internal disunity was the war in Iraq. To make their war against Canada, Trump and Musk just have to convince some of the population that America is a victim with regards to Canada, just as Trump convinced enough Americans that he himself is a victim in the world.
I want very much to agree with Stephen Marche when he suggests that the U.S. will be too weak to invade Canada in the future. A U.S. invasion would terribly uphend Canada. Our society would be forced to militarize, impacting our culture. Money would be diverted from critical social programs to fighting in defence of our country. There would be capitulation of political and business leaders, evidence of which we are already seeing. Intellectuals would justify and support the power of the Americans. Millions of Canadians would be displaced to make way for Americans. Canadians would turn against each other under the pressure of occupation. Our economy would be shattered, and recovery after victory over the Americans would be long and hard. Then there would be all the people permanently maimed and killed. I would like very much to agree with Stephen Marche, but I am just not there yet.
What does Rita Trichur really mean when she talks about the need to improve productivity as a way to improve Canada’s economy? On January 31, 2025, Rita Trichur argued in The Globe And Mail that in terms of output per one hour of labour, Canada was lagging behind the United States. For every one hour of work, the American worker was adding $130 to the American economy, while the Canadian worker was adding only $100 to their respective economy. Referring to a statement in 2024 by Carolyn Rogers, the Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada, Rita said that our productivity was now a “national emergency”. Not only do we have to improve our economy in this respect, she went on to say, but as well that task becomes all the more urgent in the face of Donald Trump’s high tariffs planned for Canada, which will exacerbate the situation.
Low productivity is not the main problem affecting the Canadian economy. Canadian workers, at least those in manual labour, are working very hard; I mean the people working in manufacturing, warehousing, housekeeping/custodial, construction, mining, steel production and lumber mills, among others. I have worked in several of these occupations, as well as being a writer, and so I know for a fact that they are working as hard as any columnist at The Globe And Mail, including Rita Trichur, and contributing at least as much to our national economy. The same can be said for service workers across Canada, like the staff in retail outlets and coffee shops, servers in restaurants, taxi drivers and bus drivers. To this can be added call-centre workers, secretaries, customer service representatives, and bank tellers, among others. Really all of those people working in so-called unskilled menial jobs are being very productive.
The problem is that the productivity targets set by management are too high. Aside from my personal experience, evidence for this argument can be found through a multitude of measurements. One such measurement is the tens of thousands of work injuries and compensation claims occurring across the country annually. High individual work quotas are a primary method used by management to generate a higher income for the company, and especially more money for themselves. More indications that productivity targets are too high include, high numbers of unemployed people, high numbers of homeless people, high numbers of drug users and overdoses, huge disparities in income across society, high levels of property crime, a growing crisis of peoples mental health, and ever-rising costs in healthcare. Calling for improved productivity, on the part of Rita, Carolyn and many others, reflects a real ignorance of the daily working life experienced by millions of Canadians.
In reality, Rita is not calling for an improvement in our economy, she is calling for the transfer of an even greater amount of income from manual workers to managers and the broader middle class. Rita’s motive becomes even clearer when we examine some of her specific ideas for improving productivity. She wants increased investment in “technology, machinery, and innovation”. This is another way of saying use machines instead of people, as machines can work at a faster pace, you don’t have to pay them, and they don’t fight back by forming unions. Create better conditions for business, she says, and cut red tape. This is another way of saying strike down the rules and regulations that protect workers from the power and greed of management. Reform the tax code, she further argues, which is just a way of saying reduce corporate taxes and income tax for the rich.
If Canada’s economy and affordability are declining, it has little to do with stagnant productivity, as Rita has argued. Instead the decline has to do with inequality. Power in our society is concentrated in the hands of managers, from the entry level up to the chief executive officer. With this power, which is backed up by the government, the law, the police, and much of the media and academe, management has total control over the money generated by the workforce. Management is able to bleed a large percentage of the population dry, the people in the so-called unskilled jobs mentioned above, and the people outside of the working world, also described above. Management is able to hoard the lion’s share of our money. How is our economy supposed to grow and thrive if so many people are excluded from it? Stimulating the economy can only happen if everybody is involved equally.
As a first measure towards stimulating our economy, I want management’s control over productivity, as well as working conditions, to be eliminated. Workers, in any workplace, have the right to control their working lives. Through this measure we will reintegrate millions of Canadians into the economy, and prevent millions of others from falling out. Secondly I want management’s control over the money to be eliminated. The workers contribute as much to the success of any company or organization as any manager, and so have the right to share equally in that success. Third, I want many of our so-called thinkers, in the media, academe, and think tanks, to dig much deeper in their analysis of our economy. Presently, so many of them merely justify and prop up the hierarchical structure of our society. It is an elitist view of the world, and it is wrong.
What sort of dumb-shit is this from The Globe and Mail? On January 25, 2025, the editorial board of The Globe and Mail published an opinion piece on their website entitled, “It’s time for Canada to finally grow-up”. Growing up, they seem to argue, means that Canada has to spend a lot more on defence and take-on its real responsibility as a good military ally on the international stage. Furthermore, they argue that Canada needs to improve the competitiveness of its business sector by opening Canada up to more economic competition from abroad. For too long, The Globe says, Canada has ridden on the economic and military back of the United States, and that we “have displayed the self-indulgent complacency of a teenager who tries to get away with doing the bare minimum.”
This opinion-piece acts as if Canada has done nothing recently to militarily support the U.S. and Europe. As I write this response a Canadian warship has been sailing in the Taiwan Strait as part of a U.S. naval task force. Over in Europe, we have stationed a battle group in Latvia for the past several years, as well as operating two missions to train Ukrainian soldiers. One of those training missions has been going on since 2015. In the past Canada has stationed a small contingent of soldiers in Iraq to train Kurdish and Iraqi soldiers as part of the larger U.S. military mission in Iraq. One Canadian soldier was killed on that mission. Many more of our soldiers were killed in the Afghanistan war, where we supported the Americans for nine years.
There are other important factors that the editorial board of The Globe and Mail fails to mention in their article. One factor is the recruiting and retention problem experienced by the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), and that a good deal of this problem is internal. The CAF has been plagued by scandals over sexual assault, from the bottom up to high-level officers. Racism persists in the CAF. If the CAF is unable “to carry out basic military missions”, a good deal of the problem is their own fault, not because Canada overly relies on the U.S. for protection. Another factor is that America’s ludicrous level of defence spending is very much driven by internal factors. Their economy is heavily built around the military-industrial complex, not some external threat that requires military assistance from Canada.
The Globe editorial board, which argues “that Canada is not doing anywhere near enough to protect the Arctic on behalf of its continental ally”, fails to mention Canada’s existing military presence in that region. There is Canadian Forces Station Alert in the Arctic Circle, and some patrols through Arctic waters by our Navy and Coast Guard. Our Arctic defense is almost as strong as it was during the Cold War, when Russian military forces were much more powerful than today, and more ice-breaker ships are being built by us. Canada has also added billions of dollars to bolster our contribution to NORAD. Besides, it is clear from history that the U.S. will still patrol the Arctic waters no matter how much money we spend on Arctic defense. They insist that the Arctic constitutes international waters, not Canadian waters.
Another factor that the editorial board at The Globe fails to mention is that NATO does not seem to have any plan to defend Canada in the event that we are attacked. All during the Cold War the emphasis was on NATOs defense of Western Europe. No NATO military exercises were carried out on Canadian soil in preparation for a potential Soviet attack on Canada. Always we were expected to station military forces in Europe, and be prepared to send reinforcements. This situation is still the case today, and it has become even more glaring now that U.S. president Trump has declared that he intends to absorb Canada. I have not heard anything from NATO or the European Union about defending Canada in the event of a U.S. invasion. Do we really owe Europe any more military commitment?
The Globe editorial board fails to mention the costs to our country with high defence spending in peacetime. More money for defence has to come from somewhere, and usually by cutting social programs for Canadians, such as healthcare, $10/day childcare, national dental care and national pharmacare. The Globe editorial board won’t come and say it like this, instead they talk of these programs as “self-indulgent”, “voter-friendly”, “pleasant things”, “big government”, and that “difficult choices have to be made”. For millions of Canadians, many of whom are the working poor and below, these programs are a lifeline. The biggest threat to them is internal, not any external military threat. Is it really self-indulgent to want dental care for your children, to want childcare so you can go to work, to not end up homeless?
As for Canada’s supposed “economic immaturity”, the editorial board at The Globe fails to ask and answer some important questions. Does it not make sense for us to trade mainly with the U.S., as it has worked well for the past sixty years? The issue of interprovincial trade barriers has been around for at least forty years. Is there a legitimate reason why some or all of the provinces maintain these barriers? Has Canada not already endeavoured to expand its trade beyond the U.S., to such countries as Mexico and China, and through a free trade deal with the European Union? Have these efforts benefitted Canada that much? Is there perhaps a good reason why Canada protects its dairy market from U.S. competition? What “regulatory handcuffs” and “uncompetitive taxes” is The Globe editorial board referring to?
It is The Globe and Mail editorial board that needs to finally grow up. The opinions expressed in their article reflect a deep ignorance of Canadian history and current affairs. Complex defence and economic issues are examined in a rambling and incoherent manner. Their analysis does not even rise to the level of being shallow. Along with their ignorance, one can see in them a real inferiority complex about Canada and its standing in the world. The make no defense of Canada. Furthermore, an anti-Liberal Party bias can easily be detected in their article. The whole article is nothing more than an emotional outburst in response to some pressure from Donald Trump on Canada. I expect more from the editorial board at The Globe and Mail, a newspaper that claims for itself a role in influencing national public opinion.
What do they mean by that? What do the Conservatives mean when they say the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is a “broken and failing propaganda machine”? This was said by Damien Kurek, the Heritage critic for the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), and reported on by Anja Karadeglija of The Canadian Press. The article by Anja, headlined “With Conservatives promising to ‘defund’, could the next election kill the CBC?”, appeared on The Globe and Mail website on January 12, 2025.
In the past, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared that CBC journalism was inherently biased against their Party, and more favourable to the Liberal Party of Canada (LPC). Stephen Harper wanted to defund the CBC, but didn’t because of the unpopularity of such a move among Canadians. Erin O’Toole, a former Conservative Party leader, said that if elected he would “gut the English language services of the CBC”. Now the same position is being taken by Pierre Poillievre, the current Conservative Party leader.
If the CBC is inherently anti-Conservative, if it is a “broken propaganda machine” for the Liberals, then where is the proof? I want to see specific articles from the CBC website, or from some television or radio broadcast, that maliciously attacks members of the Conservative Party, or its policy. Conversely, I want to see a lot of examples of where the CBC took it easy on the Liberals. The CPC has to make a solid case, not just spew out empty words.
Poillievre goes further. Not only does he want to defund the CBC because he feels that it is biased against the Conservative Party, he wants “to save the government $1 billion annually.” According to the article, “In 2023-2024, CBC/Radio-Canada received $1.44 billion from the federal government and generated $493.5 million in revenue.” Poillievre has made an economic argument as well, and with evident delight, Kurek went on to say that the party “would turn the CBC headquarters into beautiful homes for Canadian families.”
Clearly it is the Conservatives that are biased, biased against the CBC. Journalism from the CBC questions Conservative policies, and questions the words and actions of Conservative Party members. In fact, the Conservatives are biased against media reporting in general. Stephen Harper, during his tenure as PM, significantly restricted his availability to the media, all of the media. Harper also restricted the availability of all of his cabinet ministers to the media. You can bet that Poillievre will do the same.
More evidence of the Conservative bias against the CBC can be seen by the fact that the CBC does hold Liberal Party policies and members to account. As somebody who explores the CBC website daily, I have certainly seen articles that examine the faults of Liberal government policies. For example, the present government has been criticized in the CBC for its failure in housing policy, immigration policy, and Indigenous policy. It is not like the CBC focuses exclusively on the Conservatives.
Is the CBC perfectly without bias in its media coverage of the Conservative Party? No. Reporters are human, and sometimes their work does not measure up to the necessary standard of objectivity. The same thing, however, can be said about journalism at all media outlets, like CTV news, Global News, and The Globe and Mail. I see some level of bias across the media. Moreover, I see articles in the other media that criticize the Conservative Party. CBC is no worse than the others.
If the Conservatives are going after the CBC specifically, it probably has to do with the fact that the CBC is under government control. Funding for the CBC comes from the Feds. If the Conservatives achieve power, they will be able to turn off that funding, although it is interesting to observe that they are turning off funding only for the English language programming. French language programming will continue. By doing this, they will eliminate at least one source of Canadian media.
A democracy needs a wide variety of media to ensure that the truth of any matter or issue emerges. For this reason it is very good to see The Globe and Mail covering the issue of defunding the CBC, and attempting to highlight the importance of this issue for the approaching federal election. The Toronto Sun has done so as well, among possibly others. I hope their coverage continues, and that Canadians wake up to what is at stake if the Conservatives take power.
I knew it was wrong to appease Donald Trump, as I argued in one of my columns from In The News 2024 (Understanding Trump’s Threat of High Tariffs on Canadian Economic Trade). Threatening a 25% tariff on Canadian exports to the United States, he demanded that Canada increase its defence spending massively, and that we prevent all illegal drugs and immigrants from passing into the U.S. from Canada. Immediately several provinces responded by announcing new border security plans that required billions of more dollars in spending, including money from the federal government. Many of the provinces also demanded that the federal government substantially increase funding for Canadian defence. Instead of Trump being satisfied with these measures, he has now declared that he intends to absorb Canada into the U.S. through economic pressure, which is more or less a declaration of war on Canada. Appeasement always fails.
Thankfully it seems that we are no longer looking at appeasement as a policy towards Trump and his MAGA followers. Doug Ford, premier of Ontario, appeared to be first among Canadian politicians to bite back at Trump, declaring that Canada would never be part of America, and threatening to cut off energy supplies from Ontario to the U.S. if Trump goes through with the planned tariff hike. Pierre Poillievre also spoke up, publicly announcing the same thing as Doug Ford. The prime minister followed soon after, stating “There wasn’t a snowballs chance in hell that Canada would join the U.S.” Then Jagmeet Singh, leader of the Federal NDP, told Trump to “Cut the crap.” In terms of policy, the federal government appears prepared to retaliate against Trump with Canadian tariffs on American goods coming into our country, at least according to Melanie Joly, the Foreign Minister.
Retaliating against Trump, however, may not be the end of the battle that is forthcoming between Canada and the U.S.. After a time, when Trump sees that bullying Canada is not having the desired effect, he is going to get frustrated. Likely he will just blow more hot air out of his dumb ass. I mean he is a clown. There is the possibility though that Trump may go further than economic pressure on Canada. As a spoiled little brat that is used to getting his own way, he may escalate his threats against Canada. Already he has declared that the “line between Canada and the U.S. was artificially drawn”, and that “it would be so great if we could erase that line.” If he does escalate and continue his threats to Canada, he may be forced to back them up, and where will all of that lead.
While Trump has stated that military force will not be used to annex Canada, he might very well change this policy. During his first presidency, he threatened to call out the military to supress rioting in multiple American cities, which unfolded in response to the murder of George Floyd by a police officer. If he is willing to use military force on his own people, then it is conceivable he would be willing to use military force on a foreign people; like Canadians. This is especially the case as his second term in office comes with a stronger electoral mandate from Americans. Really he is in a position “to do whatever the hell he wants”, as he said about Vladimir Putin. Furthermore, Trump looks on Canada the same way as Putin looks upon Ukraine, and Xi Xinping looks on Taiwan; they have no right to exist.
Should we not at least think about how we are going to counter a U.S. invasion of Canada? Presently our defence policy is oriented mainly towards Europe. We have a battle group stationed in Latvia, and we have two separate missions to train Ukrainian troops for their defence against Russia’s invasion. I suppose we can maintain those commitments, as we are part of NATO and the cause of Ukraine is just. There should be, however, little or no more military commitment to Europe. The primary threat to Canada has shifted from Russia to the United States. We need to reorient our defence policy to the defence of Canada, and restructure the Canadian Armed Forces accordingly. Additionally, we should not hope for any military assistance from NATO if we are attacked by the U.S.. Europe has said it will defend Denmark (Greenland), but nothing about Canada. We will be on our own.
I am infuriated at this emerging American military threat to Canada, as it means the necessity of spending a lot more money on defence. This money will likely come from diminishing or eliminating social programs. Ten dollar-a-day childcare will be affected, the emerging national pharmacare program, and the developing national dental care. I want these programs, which are crucial to the lives of millions of Canadians, to be not only preserved but expanded. For the people who benefit from these programs, the primary threat to their security comes from poverty, not foreign invasion. National funding for welfare will also likely be cut, and some or all of the funding committed to assisting the one or two hundred thousand people in Canada that are homeless. Hopefully the government will do the right thing and find the necessary funds from higher income taxes on the people who are rich.
I don’t think it will work myself; that is Andrew Coyne’s argument that our system of politics in Canada needs to be overhauled. I read his argument in one of his recent columns on The Globe and Mail website (January 3, 2025), where he laments the emergence of certain political trends, particularly at the federal level of politics. These trends include the ever-increasing dominance of the prime minister in government, the increasing power of the Prime Minister’s Office, which undermines the role of the elected members of Parliament and the Cabinet, the proroguing of the House of Commons as simply a political tactic, and our winner-take-all system of elections. Canada, he goes on to say, has to deal with these deeper problems if we are to slow down and ultimately reverse the decline of our democracy.
In terms of grasping these emerging problems, I think Andrew is right on. Many scholars, such as Donald Savoie, have pointed out that these problems started developing decades ago; at least as far back as the government of Pierre Trudeau (1968-1984). Each successive government has taken their power further, along with other problems, such as the partisanship and divisiveness of the House of Commons as a result of party politics, and diminishing media access to the government instituted by Stephen Harper. Politicians have also pointed out these problems, usually after they have left office. Multiple memoirs have come out from former members of Justin Trudeau’s government that criticized the almost absolute control exercised by the Prime Minister’s Office over members of the Cabinet. Among these former politicians are Celina Caesar-Chavannes, Jody Wilson-Raybould, Bill Morneau, and Marc Garneau.
Where I think Andrew’s analysis falls short is in how we deal with the underlying problems he has observed. His only suggestion, at least in this particular column, seems to be that we adopt a system of proportional representation as a replacement for our current system of winner-take-all, or as it is usually called, “first past-the-post”. Proportional representation would provide greater representation of all the political parties in the House of Commons based on voting percentages, a more authentic distribution of power. With such a distribution of MPs, at least theoretically, cooperation among the various political parties would be broader and deeper. It is an interesting idea, and one that has been discussed by political scientists and journalists for several decades at least. Maybe proportional representation could improve the nature of Canadian politics, although perhaps not by much.
Yet as Andrew seems to imply in his column, there is little to no chance that proportional representation would be adopted in Canadian politics, and I would agree with him. Stephen Harper showed no interest in proportional representation during his tenure as prime minister. Justin Trudeau campaigned on eliminating first past-the-post in the 2015 election, and then promptly forgot about that promise after the Liberals won the election, especially as they won with a majority. Ten years later his promise of electoral reform remains unfulfilled. As Andrew suggests, there is no real incentive for a political party to adopt proportional representation after it comes to power. They don’t want to adopt a system that might dilute their chances of winning power again. Every party wants to achieve full legislative control. They want power, not cooperation.
So while Andrew correctly recognizes that we have deeper problems in Canadian politics, he suggests no way of tackling these problems. He tells us that it is essential to solve these problems, and I agree with him. Near the end of his column he states, “Otherwise we are simply going to repeat this farce at periodic intervals”, although I do not think the disaster is on quite the level argued by Andrew. In Canadian politics, like politics in any other country, there is always an element of muddling through problems. Nothing as complex as running a democratic society will ever go smoothly. There is no need to get unnecessarily depressed. It could be worse. But I am not sure that Andrew understands what we have to do to get at the roots of our problematic national politics.
In my opinion these problems are rooted more deeply in Canadian culture itself. Maybe we don’t like to admit to it, but our culture is highly competitive and adversarial, even aggressive. Additionally, there is a real element of judgementalism and self-righteousness in many of us, as well as a feeling of class superiority. I have experienced and contributed to this culture through such institutions as our educational system, university, the military, political parties, and most certainly as a worker and a supervisor in the corporate sector of our society. The system of politics that we have now is probably the best that we can achieve given our underlying culture, with the possibility of modest improvement. Andrew is not prepared to dig this deep, though it is only a column that he has written here, not an essay or book.
Attempting to overhaul our present politics is not going to work within our existing social and political framework. We are going to have to bring in a whole new perspective on culture and politics. One culture within Canada that holds such a possibility of creating more balance is that of Indigenous peoples. Of greater value to Indigenous people are the concepts of equality and consensus-building within the community. A passionate explanation of Indigenous culture and politics can be found in Jody Wilson-Raybould’s political memoir, called Indian In The Cabinet: Speaking Truth To Power. We have so excluded Indigenous people from Canada that they have been able to keep alive a whole different outlook on the world. Moreover, as they have had to fight against severe oppression by Canada, they understand the faults of our political system; better than we do.