Jim Flaherty, post 2009 budget

Progressive Canadians seldom get very excited whenever a Conservative government brings down a budget. More often than not, the priorities of the two groups are so wildly different that it’s almost not worth the effort to make a fuss.

Last year’s budget was a different story. Stephen Harper’s team came up with a plan of action to fight the sagging economy that was straight out of the Keynesian playbook. The massive stimulus spending pissed off hardcore conservatives and delighted their opponents. On that point at the very least, progressives were appeased.

But that was last year. This year was a different story.

Budget Day was March 4. It’s a peculiar day in Ottawa, because it’s one of the only times all year when you can find most of the city’s journalists in one place. They all gather in the Government Conference Centre, a beautiful beaux-arts structure that used to be a train station, and they pore over embargoed copies of the federal budget. It’s all very boring until the finance minister stands up in the House of Commons and delivers his speech.

That’s when the ravenous pack of journalists marches up to the Hill.

Waiting for the scribes is a group of smart people who sat in another lockup for a few hours, reading the same document back and forth for a similar amount of time. Among that group of smart people are some of those aforementioned progressive Canadians. Labour is always there, as are environmental and social justice lobbyists.

Each reads through the sections most relevant to them, so some have more reading to do than others. They come up with responses, memorize them, memorize them again, and then venture out to meet the journalists.

The chosen location: the Railway Room, which is just down the hall from the House of Commons. The two sides clash even before the finance minister sits down.

It is within this context that the progressives laid siege on the government’s plan. There was no shortage of criticism, and it came from all corners.

Sierra Club Canada’s John Bennett was among the most outspoken on Budget Day. After reading through the government’s plans for cleaning up the Great Lakes and dealing with invasive species and re-jigging environmental assessments, Bennett was furious.

“There is no intention to protect the environment,” he said. “We’re going to have environmental disasters as a direct result of this budget.”

Paul Moist, the national president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, was happy that the stimulus spending continued. But he was disappointed on just about every other front.

“It seems to me there was a choice between investing in people and infrastructure renewal for Canada’s cities, or being fixated on the deficit. And there’s no question that they’re giving every signal that from this point forward, fighting the deficit is going to happen at all costs.”

Canadian Centre of Policy Alternatives economist David Macdonald said that compared to last year’s budget, which he called a “Liberal, verging on NDP” budget, this year’s document fails on most fronts.

“This year is a very Conservative budget,” he said. “I think this shows their longer term priorities … rock-bottom corporate tax rates, smaller government less able to plan for the future, and on the foreign policy front, it clearly means more money for defence and less money for reconstruction.”

Here’s a nauseating little snippet of Kavanagh’s list of “Do’s and Don’ts”, as reported by the Tyee:

“Do not have Pepsi or Dairy Queen sponsor your event,” read guidelines sent to VPL branch heads and supervisory staff last fall. “Coke and McDonald’s are the Olympic sponsors. If you are planning a kids’ event and approaching sponsors, approach McDonald’s and not another well-known fast-food outlet.”

Among other things, the memo reportedly goes on to say that if  librarians have a guest speaker in from, say, Telus instead of Olympic sponsor Bell, they should make sure they’re not wearing a Telus jacket or other logo-wear while they’re speaking. And if there is any audio-visual equipment being used, make sure it’s from Worldwide Olympic Partner Panasonic. But Jean — what if it’s a Sony brand CD player? The horror! Kavanagh is a step ahead of you with this helpful tip: “I would get some tape and put it over the ‘Sony,'” Kavanagh [told the Tyee]. “Just a little piece of tape.”

The president of CUPE 391, which represents Vancouver’s librarians, told the Globe and Mail that these rules are non-starters:

Alex Youngberg, president of the library union, says the memo is contrary to the spirit of a public library. “There’s something in my library to offend everybody,” she said. “And that’s our job. Our job as library staff is to not ever censor any information.”

C’mon Alex, why be such a Debbie Downer? Catch the Olympic Spirit! Catch it! NO REALLY — CATCH IT. CATCH THE SPIRIT.

Students, faculty, workers and community members will march today, November 5th, as part of the Campaign for a Poverty-Free Ontario. Organized by the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) and allied groups, this Day of Action calls on the McGuinty government to take concrete steps to eliminate poverty in Ontario by adequately funding social services and equity measures.

A CFS press release states that:

In the wake of high job-loss and other effects caused by the recession, Ontarians are calling on the McGuinty government to recognise the important role that social services play in mitigating hardship and equalising opportunity. Record-high student unemployment coupled with record-high tuition fees have placed students in a particularly precarious position….In response, students are adding their voices to broad-based demands for Employment Insurance and social assistance reform, a liveable minimum wage, affordable childcare and housing, good jobs for all and reduced tuition fees.

Furthermore, according to the University of Toronto Graduate Students’ Union:

This year is a critical year to lobby as the province is currently revising all of its funding policies to institute a new multi-year agreement for funding schemes to post-secondary education.

The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), an allied community organization participating in the march, is demanding:

Affordable and accessible housing: increased social housing and access to proper shelter supports

Decent income: increase social assistance by 40%, increased (Un) Employment Insurance and minimum wage

Status for all immigrants and refugees: access to services without fear

Justice for First Nations: stop economic warfare and recognize sovereignty

Currently 1.3 million people in Ontario live in poverty and the province is facing a $24.7 billion deficit. Since deficits usually mean greater cuts for education and social services, it’s crucial that people gather today to express their concern.

Marches are taking place in thirteen communities across Ontario. To learn more visit dropfees.ca.

(For those in Toronto, action is taking place at U of T at 1 p.m. at Sidney Smith Hall, at 2 p.m. for a city-wide march starting at U of T’s Convocation Hall, and at 4 p.m. at the Queen’s Park Legislature.)

Toronto's city-worker strike has exposed just how wasteful our lives are. Creative Commons photo by Laurie McGregor.

The buzzword around Toronto for the past two weeks has been “garbage.” The garbage that is pilling up around public canisters into miniature CN Towers. The garbage that is filling parks and arenas a quarter full arousing smells and attracting pests to local neighbors. And the garbage Torontonians left behind after the celebratory mess of the Pride Parade and Canada Day.

Its day 12 of a public workers strike in Toronto and already there are signs of our livable-city utopia coming crashing down as garbage stinks up our homes, city and, apparently, attitudes. Some argue the city is keeping its cool. But like all things under smoldering summer heat, it can only keep so long until it ferments. This summer Torontonians will need to face the problem festering in the bins outside our houses: the enormous amount of waste we make.

According to the Toronto Star, Ontario produces 12.4 million tonnes of garbage annually. That is the equivalent weight of more than 80,000 fully loaded Boeing 707 jetliners. Out of that, only 3 million tonnes—just 20 percent—of garbage is diverted into recycled goods despite our aggressive recycling system. Many Ontario landfills will reach full capacity in less than 20 years.

Much of our waste is plastic water bottles, packaging and coffee cups. In Toronto alone, there are 1 million plastic water bottles discarded daily and another 1 million coffee cups, says the Star.

But we can’t blame Starbucks and the Coca-Cola water brand Dasani for this. We are the consumers creating this waste. And while climate change is the umbrella issue of our time, there are other issues that get veiled over. Like the big smelly elephant in the room that nobody likes talking about – our consumption and the waste that follows it.

As individuals, there are many ways to reduce our trash footprint. Adria Vasil promotes several ways to do this in her EcoHolic column, including: composting, going meat-free, package-free, as well as things we commonly don’t think about—such as separating our condoms and “hygiene products.”

GarbageRevolution.com is a film and website that experiments with keeping one’s garbage for an extended period of time to assess our individual garbage output.

There are plenty of additional ways we can redirect our waste into more useful means outside of dumpsites. Treehugger reports that Broward County, Fla., for example is using garbage as a resource in waste-based energy production, creating alternatives for our energy crisis.  And Houston’s Waste Management will be converting garbage into fuel and electricity with waste gasification in a joint venture with InEnTec, says Kevin Bulls in Technology Review.

There are plenty of ways of slimming down and transforming our waste streams. But the one thing we can’t do is continue to think of garbage as a simple summer inconvenience with the public workers strike.  Otherwise we will literally sink communities and the oceans with our Timmy’s coffee cups. Let’s be bold and face our own stink.

[image source]

Emily Hunter is an environmental journalist and This Magazine’s resident eco-blogger. She is currently working on a book about young environmental activism, The Next Eco-Warriors, and is the eco-correspondent to MTV News Canada.

CUPE workers on strike in Toronto. Image source: Lorenda Reddekopp/CBC

[Disclosure: CUPE is a This Magazine advertiser]

Toronto is now about half a day into a municipal workers’ strike, and the usual braying chorus has sprung up on radio, television, and the op-ed pages, alternately condemning or defending the strike action. Generally, there are three viewpoints expressed:

1. This is inconvenient, but overall I support the union’s strike;
2. Unions (all unions) are “extortionists” that are “holding us hostage”;
3. I don’t really care who’s to blame—what am I going to do with my garbage?

Already the sentiment that seemed to be gaining media traction this morning was “In this Post-Global-Recession World, shouldn’t CUPE just suck it up and accept that the benefits they negotiated are no longer viable, and they should just give them up now so we can all get on with our lives?” It’s one of those arguments that’s appealing to centrist media, because they get to slap the “Irrelevant!” sticker on the union, without being anti-union per se. It’s just that this strike crosses, you know, some arbitrary threshold of acceptability, and look, all these easily agitated people who like to call talk radio shows are worked up about it! Well, sorry, that’s not how it works. It’s not CUPE’s job to roll over and die every time management has a cashflow problem. The union exists to preserve existing benefits, negotiate for new ones, and stand up for their members’ job rights. That’s their job—they’re not running for Miss Congeniality.

And, despite their grumbling, many Canadians believe that collective bargaining and the right to strike are not negotiable based on the convenience or inconvenience of this particular strike, or the next one. The benefits of the union movement—even for those who don’t belong to one—outweigh the occasional frustrations.

I linked to this essay, “In Search of Solidarity” by Christopher Hayes on Twitter last week, but it’s stuck with me over the weekend and seemed particularly apt today. It’s worth reading in full, but here’s a great excerpt, related to the New York transit strike in 2005. Keep this in mind in the next few days.

Among liberals–people who loathe Bush, oppose the war, favor national healthcare—there’s an ambivalence about the strikers’ demands: Who gets to retire at 55 with a half-salary pension? The New York Times editorial page calls the strike “unnecessary,” the union’s account of negotiations “ridiculous,” and bellows that [the union] “should not have the ability to hold the city hostage.”

But despite the near-unanimous condemnation by the city’s mandarins and negative round-the-clock coverage, New Yorkers, astonishingly, support the strikers.

I get an inkling of this when I walk past an MTA bus depot in East Harlem on the strike’s second day. Instead of a riotous mob shouting insults, cars honk approval as they zip past the picketers.

Polls commissioned by local news outlets bear this out, though you’d hardly know it from the coverage. One, commissioned by a local ABC affiliate and conducted by Survey USA on the first day of the strike, asked the question: “In the transit strike…whose side are you on?” Fifty-two percent of respondents said the union. Forty percent said the MTA. A poll from local radio station WWRL found that 71 percent of respondents blamed the MTA for the strike and 14 percent blamed the union. A poll by local cable channel NY1 found a majority of New Yorkers thought the union’s demands “fair.”

The real story of the strike is not the epic hassle it created. It is the fact that despite universal condemnation from opinion makers, millions of New Yorkers were in solidarity with the strikers.

“In Search of Solidarity” by Christopher Hayes [originally appeared in In These Times] [image source]