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Public transit advocates are criticizing a $30-billion plan to improve public transportation unveiled by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Wednesday. [...] Trudeau called the investment the “largest public transit investment in Canadian history.” But for Nate Wallace, Environmental Defence’s clean transportation program manager, the announcement misses the mark almost entirely.

The Canada Public Transit Fund will invest approximately $3 billion per year, over 10 years, in public transit by providing “baseline funding” that can be used to upgrade and replace things like buses and trains, as well as specific project-based funding for things like electrification and transportation in Indigenous communities. The money won’t start flowing until 2026 –– after the next federal election. None of it is going to cover day-to-day operations, which observers note is the major gap transit systems are dealing with right now. [bold is mine]

Transit is expensive to operate, and in the pandemic years, municipalities were stretched thin as workers stayed home, exacerbating a ridership crisis years in the making. Cities began hiking fares and cutting service to make up for budget shortfalls, which saved money in the short term but discouraged use.

Due to these year-over-year budget shortfalls, totalling over $1 billion since the pandemic began, the TTC is now facing a potential “death spiral” of declining revenues and ensuing service cuts, according to The Globe and Mail. In Vancouver, TransLink expects a funding gap of $600 million in 2026, while Montreal’s transit authority, the Société de transport de Montréal (STM), anticipates a budget shortfall of $560 million next year, growing to nearly $700 million by 2028.

“It feels like this program is being announced in a separate universe. A universe where transit systems aren't facing massive operating deficits,” Wallace said. “Transit systems can't plan for the future if they're struggling to figure out how to keep the lights on today.”

Obligatory mention of proportional representation, which is the most important improvement that we could make to our democracy, but this article describes another issue - that the Prime Minister most likely has too much power in this country.

Canadian prime ministerial powers fall into two main categories. The first is the ability of the prime minister, backed by their staff in the Prime Minister’s Office—the PMO—and the Privy Council Office—the PCO—to direct and control what happens in government and in Parliament. The second is the astonishing unchecked power of patronage Canadians give their prime minister to appoint all the leading figures in the country’s public life, judiciary, and administration.

Backbenchers in the House of Commons no longer see themselves primarily as representatives of the people who elected them and therefore owing prime loyalty to the interests of their constituents. Canadian MPs see loyalty to their party and its leader as their duty beyond any other. A 2020 study by the Samara Centre for Democracy found that Canadian MPs vote as they are instructed by their party whips 99.6 percent of the time.

I have become convinced that the key to unlocking the barriers to repairing our democracy is to dismantle this electoral system that revolves around the celebrity and curb appeal of a handful of individuals. If Ottawa worked as it should—if it worked as a representative system based on discussion and resolution of communal issues—then the other problems with the Canadian polity and federation can be overcome. In a country of immense diversity, no other democratic model will work. Fundamentally, the overriding problem for Canadian democracy is the unaccountable power that has gathered into the hands of the prime minister. Until that problem is addressed and redressed, until a sustainable working relationship between the prime minister and Parliament is restored, no tinkering with the other levels of our institutions will work.

Last month, Alberta didn’t just announce it had transitioned entirely off coal as an energy source; the province kicked the fossil fuel six years ahead of a wildly ambitious schedule. The scale of achievement this represents defies exaggeration—and contains a warning for oil fans everywhere. [...] what happened to coal is coming for oil next.

Virtually every major analyst that isn’t an oil company (and even some of them, like BP) now expects global demand for oil to peak around 2030, if not sooner; McKinsey, Rystad Energy, DNV, and the International Energy Agency all agree. This places Canada in a uniquely vulnerable position. Oil is Canada’s biggest export by a mile, a vital organ of our economy: we sold $123 billion worth of it in 2022 (cars came in second, at just under $30 billion). Three quarters of that oil is exported as bitumen—the most expensive, emissions-heavy form of petroleum in the market and therefore the hardest to sell. That makes us incredibly sensitive to fluctuations in global demand. Think of coal as the canary in our oil patch.

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe recently announced new oil and gas courses that will be offered to grade 11 and 12 students in the province to prepare students to work in those industries.

The Saskatchewan Distance Learning Centre, which provides Kindergarten to Grade 12 online education to Saskatchewan students, partnered with Teine Energy, an Alberta-based company to develop the courses. They will include 50 hours of online theory and 50 hours of work placement.

This training will directly benefit oil and gas companies and prepare students for careers in industries that other jurisdictions — like Québec — are phasing out.

As global leaders and agencies call for a wind-down of the use of fossil fuels, Saskatchewan is winding up its partnership with oil and gas in education by joining hands with an industry referred to by the UN Secretary General as “godfathers of climate chaos.”

Historically in Ontario, when the Liberals are in power in Ottawa, voters elect a Conservative provincial government. [...] One explanation for this seesaw is that voters aim for balance: a more progressive party at one level of government, and a more conservative party at the other level.

Regardless of the dynamics of electoral swings, the quandary for Ford is that if Trudeau is re-elected in the fall of 2025, Ford can be fairly certain of victory a few months later. But if Trudeau and the Liberals falter, and a Conservative government under Pierre Poilievre takes power in Ottawa, Ontario voters are less likely to grant a third consecutive term to the provincial Conservatives.

In other words, Ford worries that a pivot to the Conservatives in Ottawa will compromise, or doom, his re-election bid in Ontario.

As such, Ford has an incentive to hold the provincial election a year early, in the spring of 2025, when the Liberals will likely still be in power in Ottawa.

Or will they?Trudeau would undoubtedly prefer that Conservatives were running the show in Ontario during the next federal election campaign. The many seats in the province, and especially in the Greater Toronto region, are essential for a federal Liberal victory. With Ford still ruling, the federal Liberals hope to once again capture these ridings.

Here's the full roster with their current pro teams:

• Nickeil Alexander-Walker (Minnesota Timberwolves)
• RJ Barrett (Toronto Raptors)
• Khem Birch (Basquet Girona, Spain)
• Dillon Brooks (Houston Rockets)
• Lu Dort (Oklahoma City Thunder)
• Melvin Ejim (Unicaja, Spain)
• Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (Oklahoma City Thunder)
• Trey Lyles (Sacramento Kings)
• Jamal Murray (Denver Nuggets)
• Andrew Nembhard (Indiana Pacers)
• Kelly Olynyk (Toronto Raptors)
• Dwight Powell (Dallas Mavericks)

The Women's National team, which has a much longer history of success than the Mens', announced their roster on July 2nd. Canada will also be sending a Women's 3x3 basketball team to the Paris Olympics

Armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence. Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases. The total death toll is expected to be large given the intensity of this conflict; destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; the population's inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to UNRWA, one of the very few humanitarian organisations still active in the Gaza Strip.^8^

In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death^9^ to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2 375 259, this would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip.

I’ve been at this university for the past three years and I’ve been pretty limited in my engagement with other disciplines. I tend to speak to the same people who take the same classes as me. This is one of the first times that I feel myself engaging with the academic community here. I’ve witnessed people put their studies to use: engineering students have stopped our canopies from leaking when it rains, urban planning students organized the setup of our tents, and philosophy and humanities students created a beautiful library space and held reading circles. It feels as if we have taken our classes and put them into practice.

Being at the Circle is one of the only times on campus I have felt a Palestinian presence. This university has a habit of alienating Palestinians, especially in the last eight months. There is an active genocide going on and academic departments refuse to acknowledge it. I have watched my professors get more and more uncomfortable when people bring up Palestine. They act as if senior administrators will pop in at any time and fire them on the spot.

The Circle is the only place on campus where I feel we can talk about Palestine for what it is and what it can be.

A foreign multinational company can export Canadian blood plasma products for profit abroad, The Breach has learned. That flies in the face of what’s been pledged by Canadian Blood Services and Grifols, the Spanish multinational corporation that is trying to open private plasma collection centres across Ontario and already operates in some other provinces. But the revelation that they can export products for sale overseas is the first window into a secret contract the company signed with Canada’s blood authority in 2022 to allow them to pay for blood plasma.

Grifols hit a roadblock on Monday, as Hamilton’s Public Health Committee unanimously backed a resolution from Mayor Andrea Horwath to reject a planned Grifols collection centre and declare the city a “paid-plasma-free zone.” Horwath said that “anything that preys upon the most vulnerable is hideous and doesn’t belong in Hamilton.”

That deal between Grifols and Canada’s blood authority has accelerated an assault on the voluntarism that has been at the core of blood and plasma collection in Canada for decades, and quickened the country’s shift toward a for-profit system.

Critics have often invoked the example of the United States, where private centres operate in low-income neighbourhoods, paying poor people to sell their plasma so multinational companies can manufacture expensive drugs for large profits.

The privatization of blood and plasma collection goes against the founding principles of Canadian Blood Services, a national charity that manages blood supply outside of Quebec. It was created to keep donations voluntary after the “tainted blood” scandal of the 1980s, which resulted in 8,000 Canadians dying from improperly screened, infected blood from paid donors through a for-profit donation system.

Paying for blood donations remains banned in British Columbia, Quebec, and Ontario. But Doug Ford’s Conservative government quietly gave a green light to Grifols earlier this year, appearing to accept the Canadian blood authority’s argument that the Spanish company is acting as an “agent” of Canadian Blood Services.

Major oil companies have in recent years made splashy climate pledges to cut their greenhouse gas emissions and take on the climate crisis, but a new report suggests those plans do not stand up to scrutiny.

The research and advocacy group Oil Change International examined climate plans from the eight largest US- and European-based international oil and gas producers — BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Eni, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies — and found none were compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels — a threshold scientists have long warned could have dire consequences if breached.

The report’s authors used 10 criteria and ranked each aspect of each company’s plan on a spectrum from “fully aligned” to “grossly insufficient” and found all eight companies ranked “grossly insufficient” or “insufficient” on nearly all criteria.

The authors also found that the companies’ current oil and gas extraction plans could lead to more than 2.4C of global temperature rise, which would probably usher in climate devastation. The eight firms alone are on track to use 30% of the world’s remaining global carbon budget to keep global average temperature rise to 1.5C, the study found.

The report, in its fourth annual edition, was endorsed by more than 200 climate groups internationally. Since the first edition of the report in 2020, many oil companies have rolled back climate pledges amid spiking fossil fuel prices.“ The Big Oil Reality Check data illustrates these companies’ dangerous commitment to profit at all cost,” said Tong. It follows a March report from the thinktank Carbon Tracker, which found none of the world’s 25 largest fossil fuel companies’ production and transition plans align with the central goal of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

In 2023, a shocking one out of every five people in Canada were food insecure — defined as having a lack of access to food, or concern over lack of food access. Severe food insecurity — when people miss meals and sometimes go days without food — rose by 50 per cent.

The Globe and Mail reported that Per Bank, the new CEO of Loblaw Companies Ltd., made $22 million from two months of work in 2023 — including an $18 million signing bonus. That’s 500 times more than the yearly median income in Canada.

Galen Weston Jr., Loblaw’s president, blamed suppliers, who forced “unjustified” price increases on the company. Others, like the Conservatives, blame the carbon tax for raising prices. In a report, the Centre for Future Work found that there is an infinitesimally small correlation between carbon pricing and inflation — just 0.15 per cent.

When prices spike, corporations take advantage. According to Statistics Canada, food prices were twice as high as the overall inflation rate — which was at its highest level in almost 40 years. Meanwhile, since 2020, Canadian food retailers have nearly tripled profit margins and doubled profits — making $6 billion per year. It’s not difficult to do the math. This is called “greedflation” — companies taking advantage of inflation to raise prices even higher.

Meanwhile, Canada’s top three food retailers (Loblaw, Sobey’s and Metro) control 57 per cent of food sales. Loblaw alone takes home 27 per cent. Costco and Walmart are next in line at 11 per cent and 7.5 per cent respectively, according to 2022 statistics.

The boycott has focused the country on the affordability crisis and the role of corporate profiteering. However, the responsibility for change does not fall on the consumer, but rather those in government, who are ultimately the ones with the tools to curtail corporate greed. Reigning in corporate profiteering, curtailing oligopolies, building holistic approaches to food provisioning and supporting incomes to match the cost of living are the real changes we need. On May 30 at 1 p.m. EST, Food Secure Canada is hosting a webinar titled "Greedflation: The role of large corporations in food price inflation and what can be done about it." You can register here.

Foreign affairs usually don’t play a role when it comes to voting in Canadian federal elections. But the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza is having an effect on religious voters in this country. That’s the finding of a new poll by the Angus Reid Institute that shows low support for the federal Liberal party among all religious groups, including two groups they have traditionally counted on — Muslims and Jews.

The poll, which was released in mid-May, shows

• 41 per cent of Muslims support the NDP, 31 per cent support the Liberals and 15 per cent support the Conservatives. By contrast, in a 2016 Environics Institute poll, 65 per cent of Muslims reported voting for the Liberals in the 2015 election, 10 per cent voted for the NDP and just two per cent supported the Conservatives.
• Jewish support for Liberals is also low, with 42 per cent supporting the Conservatives compared to 33 per cent for the Liberals. Liberals have traditionally performed well in federal ridings with significant Jewish populations, the Angus Reid article notes.
• forty-five per cent of Roman Catholics prefer the Conservatives, 24 per cent the Liberals and 16 per cent are for the NDP.
• Among mainline Protestants, 58 per cent are for the Conservatives, 25 per cent for the Liberals and 11 per cent are NDP.
• Seventy-nine per cent of evangelicals would vote Conservative, five per cent for the Liberals and 14 per cent NDP. -Fifty-three per cent of Hindus would vote Conservative, 22 per cent support the Liberals and 18 per cent the NDP.
• For Sikhs, 54 per cent are Conservative, 21 per cent Liberal and 20 per cent NDP.