streetfestival

This is similar to the previous post based on the Toronto Star article, but this press release adds that the unions are trying to directly legally intervene on the matter as well.

Two of the largest unions in the province and the largest unions at the University of Toronto are seeking to intervene in the injunction application by the university against demonstrations.

The United Steelworkers union (USW) and OPSEU/SEFPO are seeking intervenor status in the injunction application by the university which would allow administrators to end protests. The unions are working together to protect the freedom of expression and freedom of association by workers at the university.

“We will defend workers’ right to their freedom of expression. The university cannot deny workers or students their rights as outlined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms because they are inconvenient,” said Myles Sullivan, USW District 6 Director (Ontario and Atlantic region). “We will defend the right to protest on public property, like the University of Toronto and ensure Charter rights are not trampled. As far as we are concerned, the protest has the right to stay and workers have the right to participate.” The USW represents 10,000 workers at the University of Toronto as well as workers at other University campuses.

“University campuses are precisely the places where our community debates the most pressing issues of the day. Above all, it’s where we find common ground, and if necessary, we disagree, but we do so without violence” said JP Hornick, President of OPSEU/SEFPO. “So to threaten to forcibly remove a peaceful encampment which is simply an expression of political opinion, where students and workers and other members of the University community are asserting their Charter rights – is an abdication of the University’s very reason for existence.”

“A ruling like this has the potential to threaten the Charter protected right to the freedom of association (Section 2 (d)) so we take this very seriously indeed,” concluded Hornick. OPSEU/SEFPO represents workers on the University of Toronto campus as well as workers on other University campuses and also represents workers on every public college campus in Ontario.

https://opseu.org/news/unions-seek-intervenor-status-to-protect-the-charter-of-rights-and-freedoms-at-the-university-of-toronto-protests/227836/

https://web.archive.org/web/20240527182453/https://theconversation.com/why-are-grocery-bills-so-high-a-new-study-looks-at-the-science-behind-food-price-reporting-230086

So, we completed a rigorous analysis of the most prominent reports that shape the narratives around food prices in Canada, including twelve years of Canada’s Food Price Reports and 39 reports from Statistics Canada. Our findings, which are peer reviewed and soon to be published in Canadian Food Studies, were both insightful and concerning.

Our analysis found that most claims about food prices in these reports lack scientific rigour. Nearly two-thirds of the explanations for price changes given are not backed by evidence. Arguments about the causes of food inflation are frequently incomplete, neglecting to connect the dots between cause and effect.

These reports also rarely consider the decisions that grocers and other private sector entities have on food prices. Increased consolidation and concentration in the grocery sector is a structural issue that deserves scrutiny.

The bread price-fixing scandal a few years ago showed how a lack of competition enables price manipulation and hurts consumers. Canada’s Competition Bureau recently announced they are launching an investigation into the owners of Loblaws and Sobeys for alleged anti-competitive conduct.

With grocer profits expanding in Canada, too, it is fair to ask tough questions about how much grocers’ decisions are contributing to the pain at the till.

In our analysis, only three per cent of the over 200 explanations for food price changes point to grocer actions or other agency in the private sector as driving price increases. This reflects a tendency to portray food prices as erratic and overwhelmingly opaque.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240527133143/https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/may-2024/tax-the-rich/

In its 2024 federal budget, the Trudeau government proposed steps that would help equalize the tax rates between the richest Canadians who primarily make their money from passive income, and working people who earn a paycheque. These proposed changes to how capital gains are taxed would only require the richest 0.13 per cent of Canadians to pay more, alongside help to address exploding housing costs.

Despite the narrow scope of this change, it (predictably) generated outrage among some of my wealthy peers alongside those who seem ready to go to battle to ensure that the very rich continue paying less tax than working people as a per cent of taxes on income.

It’s not an option available to most people, and yet while working people are taxed on their full paycheque, only 50 per cent of capital gains are currently taxed. I may pay a higher dollar amount compared with some working people, but I pay a much lower rate, even compared to high earning doctors, lawyers and engineers.

Why should I pay a lower rate just because I was lucky enough to have money to invest, and why should someone who actually works for a living have to pay a higher one?

As you move up the wealth and income scale, you come across fewer and fewer people who are making most, or sometimes any, of their money from a paycheque. Instead, the rich invest in the stock market, property and other ways to keep their wealth growing. As such, they have enjoyed lower tax rates for decades.

Meta recently announced the layoff of 11,000 people. This resulted in a 20 per cent increase in their stock price, and a dividend issued to shareholders. I own stock in Meta. If I sell that stock and realize capital gains, I will have directly benefited from an already profitable company that has just negatively impacted the lives of thousands of people.

At the very least, I should be paying the same per cent of tax on those gains as former employees would have paid on their salaries.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240529042737/https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/we-will-be-your-human-shields-why-unions-are-showing-up-in-force-to-support/article_562a3da0-1c62-11ef-91f5-2f4615a0758e.html

On Monday, union leaders from across Ontario descended on the University of Toronto campus, vowing to physically defend the students.

“Our job is to put our bodies in between you and whatever the administration brings to you,” JP Hornick, president, Ontario Public Service Employees’ Union (OPSEU), told a rally by the protesters and their allies. “If the police come, we will be your human shields. We will be your line of defence. And I promise you that we will be here for as long as it takes to make sure that you are safe.”

Laura Walton, president of the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL), pledged not only her union membership in defence of the protesters, but her own maternal instinct.

On Saturday, in response to the university’s trespassing notice, the OFL’s Walton issued a call to all unions to support the encampment, and on Monday she was joined by four past and present union leaders, including Sid Ryan, former head of CUPE; Fred Hahn, current president of CUPE; and Carolyn Egan, president, United Steelworkers (USW) Toronto Area Council.

Walton said that, in her mind, support for the protesters is undeniably linked to labour issues. “If the university administrators can get away with trampling on your rights to protest and dismissing your legitimate demands, then employers everywhere will feel emboldened to do the same,” she said.

https://piped.video/watch?v=5AuLkMBAFZg

I miss the days of VHS and DVD shelfs in homes, for example. If you bought the tapes and had them in your home, no corporate entity could alter those tapes without your consent, monitor how many times you watch them, sell your data to whomever they please without your knowledge, roll out new mandatory conditions to a 'user agreement,' or remove them from your library if/when they like.

I noticed some dumb change in how Dictionary definitions are shown in the Spotlight (ie, overall search my computer function) in MacOS this week. I've turned off all auto-updates, and I didn't make that change or consent to it. But despite paying the full price all by myself for this machine, I clearly don't have 100% control over it. It seems very clearly to me that consumers having control and privacy over their Internet-connected devices is a bygone era.

After Blizzard, the video game company, replaced copies of Warcraft 3 that I and others had paid for in full and installed on our computers that we could play without connecting to the Internet with a lower-quality copy that prohibited offline play - I swore I'd never pay for a video game again*, and 3 years later I haven't backslid on that. I felt so angry, cheated, and robbed by that. (*Edit: my criticism and frustration is really more with larger developers/companies/creators - I appreciate and am happy to support smaller, more independent and libre ones.)

Many people probably won't be bothered by these things, but I am. I don't want to pay full price for something that I don't truly own. I miss the familiarity. I miss the reliability. I miss feeling like it's mine. Dependable. Trustworthy.

Picking my old guitar up again has never looked so appealing. I think I want to go back to investing more time, money, and energy into things that aren't connected to the internet

1:21 video shows the scale of the protest.

Shulamit Ron, Demonstrator: "We hope the world hears us: the people of Israel are not the government of Israel. We don't agree with the policy; we don't agree with the way they behave; and we want to have a different future."

Roi Tzohar, Demonstrator: "The Israeli people are hostages to their right-wing government. The people of Gaza are hostages to Hamas. And, basically, there has to be a way to overcome that and to stop the fighting and the killing. This [demonstration?] is to give everybody hope."

Toronto Public Library branch removed a poem by a celebrated Palestinian poet killed in an Israeli airstrike in December, following pressure from pro-Israel lobby group B’nai Brith Canada, a move that advocates are calling a clear example of anti-Palestinian racism.

“The removal of the poem highlights concerns regarding Palestinian voices and their rights to express their human experiences. It implies that Palestinians are reduced to mere political issues without the entitlement to cultural expression or even the basic right to exist without facing labels of anti-Israel or antisemitic,” Ewais [researcher at Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME)] says.

She added that “writing about death should not automatically be equated with glorifying martyrdom; rather, it is a part of the human experience. To remove Palestinian narratives without valid reasons is a form of discrimination and racism.”

Since the start of Ottawa’s $10-a-day program, Sandra Christian has had many families leave her private child-care centre in B.C. for a spot in a subsidized centre.

But that’s not what worries her — child-care services are in high demand so empty spots get filled quickly.

What worries her and her office manager, Carley Babiarz, is some of these families have said the money they’ve saved on child care has helped them buy a second property.

“We don't believe that that's the intention of the [$10-a-day] program,” said Babiarz, who works at the Creative Kids Learning Centers, which has nine locations in Surrey, Langley and Chilliwack, B.C. “It doesn't best suit our low-income… families.”

Many other child-care workers shared the same opinion at the first national conference for child-care operators, hosted by the Association of Alberta Childcare Entrepreneurs on Tuesday.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15001340

"Such an invasion could lead to horrific massacres and raise scenarios of a second Nakba," the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights said recently. "After 200 days of horrific genocidal acts in Gaza, the real objectives of the attack are the continuation of the 76-year-long ongoing Nakba and the erasure and genocidal destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Israel is laying the groundwork to fulfill its settler-colonial plan of colonizing Gaza."

Human rights defenders have warned that Israel may ultimately seek to ethnically cleanse as many Palestinians as possible from Gaza.

The link is a 4:03-minute embedded YT video and transcript. It's informative, inspiring, and a home-run piece by The Breach imo.

Piped link for video: https://piped.video/watch?v=Of8hV24Q8iA

Sarah Shamy, Palestinian Youth Movement Montreal: We’re really seeing the student movement be on the front lines of this movement, which is for Palestinian Liberation. Columbia University really sparked the initial fire that really kind of erupted and became a movement on its own, where students have been answering the call to set up encampments.

Miriam Liben, IJV Concordia: There was a video that we saw this morning of children in refugee camps in Gaza, holding up signs being like “thank you for your solidarity,” with McGill and Columbia and different names of different universities. I think that felt incredibly powerful.

Text: The media have also repeated McGill’s administration’s suggestion that antisemitism is rife in the encampment.

Mara Thompson, [Independent Jewish Voices] (IJV) McGill: I feel that McGill has played a really dangerous game and an irresponsible game by conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. I feel that their consultation with the Jewish student body is totally incomplete. They disregard student referendums, and student testimonies and groups like IJV who are publicly anti-Zionist and still very rooted in their Jewish values. I think that conflating the two risks diluting what we understand antisemitism to be, which I think is really dangerous in the long term, since antisemitism is a threat.