streetfestival

For everyone from Donald Trump to the United Nations, Canada’s system is seen as a highly effective way to control and manage migration for the needs of the corporate class

These racialized workers generate great wealth for the corporate class inside countries like Canada because they’ve been made exploitable through a restrictive immigration regime designed to ensure they remain vulnerable, docile, deportable and disposable.

Capitalists tend not to be fundamentally anti-migrant but rather seek to control and manage migration for the needs of business. They envision migration to be a kind of kitchen faucet that can be turned on and off according to labour market fluctuations. These include some of the largest corporations on the planet like Uber, Amazon, Walmart, and giants within the Canadian economy like Loblaws and Dollarama. Corporations in critical sectors like logistics, warehouses and distribution rely on the same strategies in the Global South as they do in the Global North: when the industries cannot be offshored, they rely on a precarious workforce of migrants.

But over the last two decades, both Liberal and Conservative governments had made this possible, constructing an immigration regime that prioritized temporary migrant labour. Increasingly restrictive for asylum seekers and those living with precarious status or without status, it ensures the disposability of certain categories of migrants, while opening the door to permanent migration for those deemed “deserving.” In the process, Canada’s model has drawn the attention of other governments and agencies around the world—in many ways, a model immigration regime to service global capitalism.

The Israeli military says it’s looking into what happened last month when its soldiers were filmed planting explosives and destroying a water-processing facility in the city of Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are sheltering.

When the NDP government came into power in 2017 and committed to raising B.C.’s carbon tax, it made special provisions for industry. Their increased carbon taxes would be fully returned to “best-in-class” companies and through supporting projects advancing industrial decarbonization.

As of April, a new system — the output-based pricing system — is in place.

The name is somewhat confusing, but the key point is that it is a system of managing carbon pricing for big polluters by exempting a portion of emissions from taxation.

This new system exempts 65 per cent of industrial emissions from the carbon tax.

Canadian emissions rose for the third straight year in 2023, according to the seventy-fourth edition of the venerable “Statistical Review of World Energy” report. The reason I’m turning to data in this report is because Canada won't release its 2023 numbers until next year. This delay, which can exceed two years, keeps Canadians in the dark about where we are and where we are headed.

Many of Canada’s peers in the Group of Seven (G7) nations have already published their 2023 emission estimates — including the United States (U.S.), European Union (E.U.), France, Germany and the United Kingdom (U.K.).

So, to try to provide some current insight into where Canadians are now in the climate fight — and what it will take now to hit our 2030 climate target — I’ve gathered all these numbers and created a series of charts.

The dizzyingly steep path to Canada’s 2030 target
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Fossil fuel companies and their industry associations lobbied the federal government an average of five times per working day in 2023, according to a new analysis from Environmental Defence.

The environmental watchdog tracked 31 companies and industry associations over the course of last year and identified 1,255 separate meetings. The top lobbied departments were Energy and Natural Resources Canada (NRCAN), Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) and Finance Canada, with 313, 253 and 118 meetings respectively.

It’s no surprise the three departments most responsible for the country’s emission reduction efforts are the target of intense lobbying, according to the study’s lead author, Emilia Belliveau.

RJ Barrett led all scorers with 24 points in the victory. He shot 8-for-14 from the floor and added seven rebounds, five assists and two steals. His 24 points were the most by a Canadian at the Olympic Men’s basketball tournament since Steve Nash had 26 points in 2000.

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander overcame early foul trouble to finish with 16 points on 8-for-10 field goals, adding four rebounds, three assists, three steals, and two blocked shots in 26 minutes, while Dillon Brooks scored 16 points. Lu Dort added 11 points while playing stellar defence in the second half as Canada pulled away.

Canada’s defensive pressure in the second half helped to force Australia into 18 turnovers in the game, while Canada had 11 miscues of their own. Canada held a 28-10 advantage in points scored off turnovers.

"I think we came back with a purpose in the third quarter," Fernández said. "We did a great job, 22 deflections in the second half, only 16 points in the paint allowed and that ignited our offence. The way we ran the floor, we scored a lot off of their turnovers. It starts with the defence.”

“The resiliency and how relentless this group is [was the difference],” Fernández said. “The way they fought in the second half, Lu Dort was amazing. Dillon was amazing. I think Khem Birch gave us great minutes, Dwight [Powell]with nine rebounds. It was a great team effort. It wasn’t perfect, but for game two, we’re still growing, and we’re about to face one of the best programs in the world.”

The men's next game (vs Spain) is Friday at 11:15 am ET. The women's next game - hopefully a bounce back one after a blowout loss to France to start the group phase 0-1 - is Thursday at 7:30 am ET and they'll take on Australia.

In 2023, the cost of policing to Canadian taxpayers closed in on $20 billion for the first time. While annual police budgets continue to grow, there is little debate in the media about its cost to taxpayers and the value for money in relation to crime reduction.

This 50 per cent increase over inflation in the cost of policing from 20 years ago is now coinciding with disturbing increases in violent crime. Homicides are up, stoking public fear. Violent crime has returned to levels seen 20 years ago. Canada’s homicide rate is second only to the United States among G7 countries, and is rising as the American rate drops.

The rate of homicide involving Indigenous victims is six times that of non-Indigenous people, and it’s three times higher for Black men.

With one in three women experiencing some form of violence in their lifetimes, intimate partner and sexual violence is now recognized as being at epidemic levels.

The majority of policing costs are paid from municipal taxes and have risen faster than expenditures on transit or social services. The cost of policing at the municipal level per capita varies considerably from a high of $496 annually for Vancouver to a low of $217 in Québec City.

Though much of the rhetoric for justifying increasing police budgets is about crime, an analysis of trends over the last 20 years in Canada could not find any correlation between increases in municipal police budgets and a reduction in crime rates.

Our review of studies in the United Kingdom and the United States shows that investments in programs tackling risk factors give better returns than innovations like problem-oriented policing.

Canada provided up to $200 million to pipeline company Coastal Gaslink, recently updated financial data reveals — an apparent violation of a commitment to phase out fossil fuel subsidies.

According to Export Development Canada (EDC), a Crown corporation that provides loans and grants to help businesses reach the market, Coastal Gaslink was given between $100 million and $200 million worth of project financing to help it export gas. The publicly-disclosed financing is thin on details, but was signed on June 27.

Coastal GasLink, owned by Calgary-based TC Energy, snakes through several Indigenous territories, including the Wet’suwet’en Nation. Wet’suwet’en hereditary leadership, who maintains jurisdiction over the land in question, opposes the pipeline. Hereditary Chief Namoks (also known as John Ridsdale), told Canada’s National Observer he was disappointed to see hundreds of millions of dollars provided to a company violating his nation’s rights.

Any government funding “that goes against human rights, Indigenous rights and [the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples] simply should not be allowed,” he said.

“So it clearly shows the oil and gas industry is steering the government.”

Five years ago, Kim Gavine, general manager of Conservation Ontario, warned that the province was already “experiencing stronger and more frequent flood events as a result of climate change impacts."

Instead of taking this threat seriously, Doug Ford slashed Ontario’s funding for flood management programs and has recklessly tried to pave the Greenbelt, a crucial network of protected waterways and wetlands that help prevent flooding. By prioritizing the interests of his corporate developer buddies and expanding gas power plants when we desperately need to be transitioning to a green grid and investing in proactive resilience measures, Ford is making communities across the province more vulnerable to climate disasters like what I just experienced.

This isn’t just a Toronto or Ontario problem either. David Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, described last week’s massive urban flooding as our new reality. Our governments, at every level, need to do what it takes to better prepare for these escalating climate impacts everywhere.

We don’t yet know the full extent of the damage from last week’s storms, but Global News' Chief Meteorologist reported that the flooding was likely to be “worse and more widespread than the recent benchmark event in July 2013 and that was a billion-dollar disaster.” A billion dollars that our already strapped municipal government doesn’t have, money that we desperately need for housing, transit, and social services.

I recently migrated to Librewolf from Firefox due to Mozilla's recent blunder of covertly adding adware to their browser.

I like the ResistFingerprinting feature for added privacy, but enabling it seems to set my browser time to GMT instead of ET, with most times on webpages (which refer to browser time) ahead by several hours as a result.

Can I define my desired timezone in the browser settings so I don't have to pick one or the other between a correct browser time and better privacy? TIA :D!

“[Carbon capture] is a dangerous distraction driven by the same big polluters who have caused the climate emergency,” Julia Levin, associate director of national climate for Environmental Defence, told Canada’s National Observer in a phone interview.

This situation is “especially frustrating because Strathcona has no intention of paying a single dime between getting 50 per cent of their capital costs covered by the investment tax credit and 50 per cent covered by the Canada Growth Fund,” Levin said.

“Why are taxpayers covering the full cost of one of the country's largest oil producers to continue to extract more oil?”

Tell me we don't live in a plutocracy, ffs.

The federal government wants to restrict farmers' ability to save seeds and other reproductive plant materials like tree grafts for some crops – and is asking farmers to comment on the changes during the height of the growing season.

Last month, the government announced it is considering amendments to Canada's seed laws that would force farmers to pay seed companies royalties for decades after their original purchase of seeds from protected varieties of plants. Even if farmers grow that plant variety in later years with seed they produced themselves from earlier crops, instead of buying new seed, they must pay the royalties for over 20 years.

If passed, the changes will apply to horticultural crops like vegetables, fruit trees and ornamental plants. They will also restrict farmers’ ability to save and use hybrid seeds, which combine the desirable traits of several genetically different varieties. Public consultations on the proposed changes opened May 29, 2024 and ends on July 12, 2024.

Critics say the move will further exacerbate a crisis in Canadian seed diversity, supply and resilience to climate change. Over the past 100 years, 75 per cent of agricultural biodiversity has declined globally, and only 10 per cent of remaining crop varieties are commercially available in the country.