Jeremy Appel is an Edmonton-based independent journalist and author of the Orchard newsletter on Substack. He cohosts the Forgotten Corner and Big Shiny Takes podcasts.
Populist grievances are pushing Alberta, Canada’s most conservative province, further to the right. The activist group Take Back Alberta is working to escalate this trend.
Setting up 250 picket lines across the country, 155,000 members of the Public Service Alliance of Canada have gone on strike. The walkout, the country’s largest strike ever against a sole employer, is a fight against inflation eroding wages into a pay cut.
Despite the silver lining of green energy initiatives, Canada’s most recent federal budget does little for the country’s working people. In this, it stays consistent with the Liberal Party’s determination to throw its working-class constituents overboard.
Between 2018 and 2020, Canada ranked as the world’s top subsidizer of the fossil fuel industry. Now the province of Alberta is trying to outdo the nation by paying oil and gas producers to fulfill their legal obligation to clean up their own mess.
Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program seemed like a step forward for choice and dignity. But it is beginning to look like a dystopian end run around the cost of providing social welfare that can beat back the deprivations that make life unbearable.
Ontario premier Doug Ford’s conservative government and its allies are using fear of school disruption to impose a contract on education workers. But the best way to support education and prevent disruptions is by paying education workers properly.
Danielle Smith’s conspiracy theories and shock-jock populist messaging have made her the front-runner in Alberta’s Conservative Party leadership election. Her campaign is a preview of the challenges to Canada’s left from an emboldened post-pandemic right.
Canada’s Starbucks organizing wave is moving eastward from British Columbia, with a store in Alberta going union earlier this month. Poetically, the Starbucks union win is on anti-labor Alberta premier Jason Kenney’s home turf.
Amazon is ramping up its anti-union tactics in Canada. But union organizers say Amazon’s American-style union busting won’t work in Quebec’s pro-labor environment.
The only unionized Starbucks location in Canada is being excluded from a company-wide pay increase. Why? Because the raise is “not in the workers’ union contract.” The company has hit peak petulance just in time for more unionization bids.
The position of Canada’s Conservative Party boss is up for grabs. On offer from the three front-runners are right-wing populist libertarianism, Tory nostalgia, and evangelical culture war. Canada’s left should pay attention.
The union drive at a Starbucks in Calgary, Alberta, was defeated by both the anti-union tactics of the company and the province’s ruling party. Successful votes elsewhere, however, indicate the Starbucks unionization wave is only just beginning in Canada.
A Starbucks location in Calgary awaiting its ballot results may prove to be the spear tip of a Canadian answer to the labor surge of its US counterparts. The longtime union-busting company may find itself on the receiving end of an emboldened workforce.
Alberta’s United Conservative Party is using the health care crisis caused by the pandemic to its ideological advantage. Citing backlogs in surgeries — resulting from overrun hospitals — the party is seeking to privatize the province’s health care system.
While Canadian workers took to picket lines to agitate in the face of the hardships brought on by the pandemic, Canadian businesses collected COVID benefits intended for the very employees they laid off.
The meatpacking company Cargill didn’t lift a finger when a massive COVID outbreak left half its workers in High River, Alberta, ill. The business’s unwillingness to take employees’ health seriously motivated workers to fight for — and win — a new contract.
The Canadian military has been caught using PSYOP tactics it honed in Afghanistan on domestic soil. The dirty tricks, which included a scheme to spread panic about imaginary wolf attacks in Nova Scotia, should worry anyone concerned about civil liberties.
Canada is deeply implicated in the blood-soaked global arms trade. It won’t stop until we make it stop.
Cargill runs Canada’s biggest meatpacking facility and obliged its workers to come in despite the COVID-19 pandemic. Now the company is facing a criminal investigation — the first of its kind — after the sadly predictable deaths of workers and their family members.
Alberta’s UCP government, led by premier Jason Kenney, is kowtowing to the province’s bosses in every conceivable way. The passage of Bill 32 demonstrates their devotion to Alberta’s business class and their contempt for working people.