Canada

In a rather busy span last month, the Alberta government confirmed that former prime minister Stephen Harper would be the chair of a completely remade board of Alberta's investment megafund AIMCo, forecast a bigger-than-anticipated budget surplus, and announced the most substantial changes to the province's auto insurance system in at least two decades.

Boosters will call that firing on all cylinders. Critics will say she's flooding the zone. Alberta New Democrats privately grumble that Smith's been doing so much so fast that there's not been much bandwidth for them to get an idea in edgewise.

So let's consider all that she's doing and undoing.

• Dividing the health system into four agencies. Quadrupling the number of new school builds, and directing more resources and emphasis toward the charters and privates.

• Carving out with the sheriffs a new provincial police force to bolster local police and the RCMP (or replace the latter, should the RCMP one day leave community policing). Implementing an addictions strategy with forced treatment and recovery campuses, and less harm reduction.

• Overhauling both the electricity and insurance systems.

• Charting a new course for the province's $169-billion investment and public-sector workers' pension fund. A reshaped relationship with municipalities, in which the province takes more control. Consistently pushing back against Ottawa, so the federal government has less control within Alberta.

• Plotting new commuter rail lines all over Alberta, and putting itself in the middle of planning Calgary's next LRT line.

• Creating Canada's most wide-ranging rules governing transgender youth in health, education and sport.

The House of Commons is days from passing Bill S-210, a dangerously broad age verification bill that would put an age lock on most of Canada's Internet and threaten every Canadian’s privacy.

As the postal workers’ strike stretched to four weeks, one argument against them has resounded loudly: that the post office is a quaint relic of a bygone era. Past its due due, no longer worth defending, it would be better supplanted by the digital giants or privatized entirely.

At least this is what the corporate class, right wing politicians, and the establishment media want you to think.

While the postal service is indeed threatened by a digital crisis, its purpose has in fact barely been realized.

Few people stop to think that there are actually twice as many post offices as Tim Hortons, making it a retail network unlike any other in the country. Working with this understanding, eight years ago the postal workers put forward Delivering Community Power, a comprehensive plan to transform Canada Post into a vibrant 21st century public service.

Though this plan has recently barely gotten any media coverage, it had enormous appeal: they proposed converting their fleet of cars to electric vehicles and setting up electric charging stations at post offices, introducing check-ins for seniors living at home and farm-to-table food delivery, and offering public banking services that could help low-income communities and bankroll renewable energy projects. (By way of disclosure, I helped launch this campaign, in my pre-Breach life.)

The plan’s environmental potential freaked out conservative pundits, one of whom was inspired to invoke a notorious anti-government quip. “Ronald Reagan often said the nine most terrifying words in the English language were ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ Not even Reagan could have imagined,” William Watson wrote in the Financial Post, “that people would one day be saying ‘We’re from the post office and we’re going to save the climate.’”

In over 30 years of practice, Dr. Errol Billinkoff rarely saw a man without kids come into his Winnipeg clinic to get a vasectomy. But since the pandemic began, he says it's become an almost daily occurrence.

And he's not alone.

"At first, I thought I was the only one who was noticing this," Billinkoff, who brought a no-scalpel vasectomy procedure to Winnipeg in the early 1990s, told CBC News in a November interview.

"But I am part of an international chat group where doctors who do vasectomies participate and the topic came up, and it's like everybody notices it."

The incident unfolded on Aug. 2, 2022, after police received several 911 calls saying a man had broken into the municipal building and set several fires inside.

Officers arrived to find the suspect still inside the building, armed with a large machete.

Two officers armed with Anti Riot Weapon Enfield (ARWEN) devices shot the suspect nine times over the course of 35 minutes.

Despite undergoing surgery, the man lost one testicle. The other was injured and only a portion could be saved.

Health Canada says daily cannabis use has remained stable since it was legalized in 2018.

The federal agency released data from its annual survey on cannabis consumption Friday, showing approximately 25 per cent of respondents consumed cannabis daily, or almost daily.

Overall, males were more likely to use cannabis daily or almost daily at 26 per cent compared to females at 21 per cent.

Among teenagers, 20 per cent per cent reported daily or almost daily use in the last year, compared to 23 per cent in 2018.

Fifty-six per cent of respondents consumed cannabis three days per month or less, compared to 55 per cent in 2018.

The survey also found 72 per cent of people who reported consuming cannabis in the past 12 months bought it from a legal store or website, an increase from 37 per cent in 2019, as statistics were not available for the previous year.

The strike by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers—of which I’ve been a member for more than two years—is now the third-longest non-rotating strike in the history of the Canadian post office. It’s shorter only than the strike in 1975, which won job security, and the strike in 1981, in which CUPW won a maternity leave policy that later formed the basis of public maternity leave for the entire country.

Overall, there is a sense that management has grown out of touch with its workforce. This was clear enough when Canada Post spokesperson John Hamilton told The Globe and Mail that “many young people are not looking for full-time, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. jobs. They want flexibility. They could work for Canada Post part-time and have other part-time jobs during the week.” [...] His line was clearly a justification for the increasing trend of the corporation relying on casual workers, who now constitute around 20 per cent of CUPW’s total membership, myself included.

Despite its importance to postal workers and the future of this postal service, the strike is poorly understood from the outside. It has mostly been seen as a dispute over wages. And it’s true, the wages are part of the disagreement: the union is seeking to keep them in line with inflation, something in the ballpark of 22 to 24 per cent. The corporation has offered just shy of 12 per cent over that same period. But my sense from the picket line is that while wages are still on the bargaining table, they are far from the defining factor that motivates workers to walk the picket line day after day. Instead, workers are driven by attacks to the pension fund and an even more aggressive push toward casual work.

Beyond a few details—a guarantee of only eight hours per week, with up to 30 hours of availability expected if the corporation requires it—little is known about the type of positions management wants to create, and employees have not been consulted on potential changes.

The media has seemed more interested in the public power struggle between Canada Post and CUPW than any of the actual issues that underlie it. A national union fighting the casualization of labour that has infected the entire Canadian economy ought to be a big story, but the coverage so far has largely focused on existential questions about the post office, set against the all-too-convenient backdrop of the corporation’s latest financial results.

wtf...

Colten Williams began putting together his Christmas light show a decade ago at the behest of his grandmother, who was inspired by light shows she had seen on TV.

But trouble started brewing in Kingsville after several neighbours lodged complaints about their street being crowded with cars for six weeks every year.

This month, the city enacted a new bylaw that would force the Williams family to apply for a permit for their display while also placing restrictions on the number of hours they would be allowed to leave the lights on.

“They basically limited the amount of hours I could have my show from about 28 hours a week down to 10 hours a week,” Williams said. “So you have 500 hours, 600 hours worth of set up time just to have 40 hours the lights on all month long. That’s an insane amount of work.”

Rogers said the council is sad to see them turn off the lights but said the show had outgrown its location as well.

“We were saddened to learn that the Williams family will not move forward with their light display this year,” he said.

“Our discussions with the family last year at a council meeting we both agreed that they had outgrown the neighbourhood.”

Rogers went on to say that the city had tried to work with the family to find an alternative location but was unable to meet their demands.