Search results for “site/Pat Armstrong”

  • Québec Students Strike Over Tuition-Fee Hikes

    This morning, there are more than 65 000 students on strike in Québec. University students, but also college-level students, are walking out of classrooms to reverse the 75% raise in tuition fees over five years announced in the last provincial budget. In the space of a single week, the number…

  • Climate Justice Project

    Making a Just Transition

    The steady stream of bad news from Alberta’s oil patch is a potent reminder of the boom-and-bust nature of being a resource commodity exporter. It’s a story deeply understood in Canada’s resource communities, as decisions made halfway around the world dictate whether you will have a job tomorrow or not.…

  • The Latin American Revolution (I)

    Latin American Presidents address World Social Forum In a historic first, on January 29, five Latin American Presidents addressed the 2009 World Social Forum (WSF) held in Belem, Brazil: Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Lula da Silva of Brazil, and Fernando Lugo of…

  • Kevin Falcon’s narrow take on tax options

    BC Finance Minister Kevin Falcon says he is keen to take a fresh look at the BC tax system. He is welcoming new ideas, and he even wants your opinion. He has struck an “expert” panel to review BC’s tax regime, and in early January the government launched an online…

  • The culture of entitlement

    Don Copeman, of the infamous Vancouver clinic that bears his name, was plugging his business in Parksville’s local paper, the Oceanside Star. While doing so he managed to slag Canadians whose “culture of entitlement”, he charges, is the biggest obstacle to private clinics. “Trying to change the Canadian culture away…

  • Work Life: MB Liquor Between Rock and Hard Place

    The issuance of mandate letters to provincial crown corporations has put management and staff on notice, warning that “the old way of doing things” is over. The preamble for all the letters is the same, with claims that this government is committed to “prudent fiscal management, creating jobs, improving health…

  • The Monitor, November/December 2020

    Democracy in free fall? Download 9.95 MB Donald Trump makes people sick, himself and his entourage included. Given the U.S. president’s shameful, almost criminally negligent record on COVID-19, it will be surprising if he is re-elected on November 3. A sizeable expat community aside, most Canadians will not have a…

  • Time to give shale gas industry a closer look before we’re totally fracked

    Despite the recent release by Canada’s natural gas industry of a set of guiding principles governing the controversial gas well “stimulation” method known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”, and despite the almost immediate endorsement of those principles by BC Premier and industry cheerleader Christy Clark, more and more British Columbians…

  • Fast Facts: Changes in practices needed, if we’re serious about reconciliation

    First published in the Winnipeg Free Press April 10, 2019 Offer money to leaders in a cash-poor community to gain support for a resource extraction project. Publicly shun and disenfranchise individuals who don’t agree. Deceive people into signing their support without full information. Divide the community. Commence destructive preparation of…

  • May 2007: Pharmaceutical Secrecy Endangers Our Health

    Drug research now done mainly to protect profits, not public health Secrecy has always been the norm in the pharmaceutical arena, but over the past decade it has taken on even greater significance as the funding of medical research has swung from something that was done to improve public health…

  • Work Life: Terminally ill professor pleads for asbestos ban

    University of Manitoba professor Patricia Martens has one more mission as an epidemiologist as she confronts her final days with a terminal disease. She wants the government to stop aiding and abetting the lethal trade in asbestos. Martens is a prominent and distinguished research scientist in the university’s faculty of…

  • Climate Justice Project

    Darkwoods, the murky world of carbon credits and a “carbon neutral” BC government

    It is spun in government press releases as a “first” for any jurisdiction in North America, an achievement that places British Columbia “on the leading edge” of efforts to combat climate change. But scratch the surface just a little and questions arise about the legitimacy of Environment Minister Terry Lake’s…