Michael Ignatieff's bloody new fever dreams

Michael Ignatieff, the Iraq War cheerleader and champion of America’s torture programs, is once again at the service of empire. This time he is busy rewriting history as a pure fantasy in attempting to reduce the Russian war on Ukraine as both the design and actions of a single madman. And what better place for these ravings than the Globe & Mail?

Ontario labour's pathetic pandemic defeat

Fenner Dunlop workers in Bracebridge, locked out for 165 days in 2021.

Doug Ford's Bill 124 became law in November 2019. Even back then the law had imposed below-inflation wage restraints. There were already examples of long-term care workers getting screwed by Bill 124 before the pandemic hit.

With inflation now topping 5 percent, Bill 124 is even more brutal. Healthcare workers are taking big pay cuts as burnout is almost universal and labour shortages begin to mount.

The pandemic should have provided Ontario healthcare unions all the leverage they needed to crush Doug Ford's balls between walkouts and Bill 124.

The Emergencies Act and Canada's political crisis

Justin's public justifications for using the Emergencies Act is as flimsy as his dad's "apprehended insurrection" excuse for the War Measures Act in October 1970. In both cases, there is a deeper motive although neither is very hard to discern.

The Ottawa Debacle and the Defeat of the Left

Is anyone in Ottawa marching through Centretown today? If you try, will you end up fighting PSAC marshalls? What would JB McLachlan do?

Notes on the Convoy crisis

Cobbled-together notes and thoughts on the Freedumb Convoy, the New Right, and the Left. Written Wedneaday, February 9.

For The People? Early state ownership in Ontario

October 11 1910: Ontario Hydro power is switched on for Berlin (Kitchener) 

The "Laurier Boom" spanning the late 1890s to the immediate pre-war years was the onset of municipal ownership of utilities (telephone, water, gas, streetcars, electricity). In this period, Ontario also took enormous first steps towards state ownership of industry, most famously with the 1906 creation of Ontario Hydro, but also with the formation of what we now know as Ontario Northland in 1902.

Both the political left and right often portray state ownership as a form of socialism. What is striking about this early period of municipal and state ownership of utilities and infrastructure is the degree of clarity with which Ontario's political elites rejected the claim that state ownership was socialism.

Democracy vs Confederation: Médéric Lanctôt and Les Rouges

The first Canadian red scare came in the 1860s as elites from four British North American colonies pushed ahead with the project of Confederation against widespread popular opposition in the Maritimes and Quebec.

The Quebec Tories, led by George-Étienne Cartier and allied to John A. Macdonald's Upper Canadian Tories, were strong political allies with the Catholic Church, such as Montreal Bishop Ignace Bourget. Together, parliament, the pulpit, the courts and newspapers worked in concert to defeat Les Rouges, a democratic and republican political movement originating out of Montreal's Institut Canadien.