Canada

The Toronto Star (6/March/2010) asks “Who will be tomorrow’s Builders?” It goes on to list the famous men (no women!) who have “built” the great concert halls, university colleges and other public and private buildings of Toronto. Maybe I have missed something here. I thought builders wore jeans and hard hats and poured the...
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Under Capitalism When the lead smelters came to Jiyhuan, China, the workers rejoiced for the new jobs, the infrastructure upgrades, the new cultural hall, and the new basketball stadium. The lead smelters also brought lead poisoning. Jiyhuan’s blue skies have gone, its fruits and vegetables are stunted, its children and workers poisoned. The story...
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For some years the city of Mississauga, Ontario, has been held up as an example of how efficiently a city can be run, inferring that it is the incompetence of other jurisdictions that prevent them being run prosperously. While its next-door neighbour, Toronto, has had its financial woes for twenty years, Mississauga went without...
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Canada is now a superpower in the African mining sector. According to the Ministry of Natural Resources Canada , only the Republic of South Africa, with over 35% of assets and investments, is just ahead of Canada in the African mining industry. But with South Africa’s assets concentrated on its own territory, Canada dominates...
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Capitalism has a nasty habit of suddenly laying a ton of grief on unsuspecting members of the working class. A typical example is when the employees of Consumers Glass in Etobicoke, Ontario, were recently told the plant was going to be shut down just two weeks after they had negotiated a union contract. But...
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In the wake of the Brian Mulroney/Karl Heinz Schreiber scandal there has been an outpouring of emotion concerning politicians in general and Mulroney in particular. This has reached such an extent that on December 15th the Toronto Star published the results of an Angus Reid strategies poll showing how Canadians felt about ex-prime ministers...
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The Magna Corporation is the largest supplier of parts to the auto industry in Canada. It employs more workers than GM Canada, all non-union and all working below union rates putting downward pressure on wages in the industry. (It will come as no surprise that CEO Stronach takes home higher than union wages –...
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Imagine is the magazine of our Canadian Companion Party – the SPC. In this issue they celebrate “100 Years For Socialism”
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By Peter Campbell, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal & Kingston, pp.303, 1999. Peter Campbell discusses, and focuses on, the lives of four individuals—Ernest Winch, William Pritchard, Arthur Mould and Robert Russell, all of whom originally came from Britain and from religious backgrounds. The title and the phrase, “a Third Way”, is something of a misnomer,...
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“Emancipation not Palliation” Socialism vs. Capitalism To understand socialism, one must necessarily understand the present social system; i.e., capitalism. Under capitalism, society is divided into hostile classes: an owning capitalist class, whose members have ownership of the various parts of the instruments of wealth production. This includes: The land, the factories, the railroads, the...
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