canada

So the Canadian government passed a law in June that would require Meta and Google to pay news organizations for news content that is featured on their websites. Essentially acting as a kind of "link tax" for tech companies, justified by the use of content from these news organizations that appears on Facebook, Instagram, and Google (thumbnails, bylines, etc). In response Meta has blocked all Canadian news from appearing on their websites along with non-news websites from Canada like The Beaverton and Walking Eagle News (The Canadian and Indigenous versions of the Onion). You can read more here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_News_Act

https://www.parl.ca/legisinfo/en/bill/44-1/c-18

So I can see potential pros and cons of this legislation.

Pros:

I hate Google and Meta and this will make them lose money which I'm always a fan of.

This could help news organizations that have more leftist or more Indigenous focused reporting fund their work, considering those organizations don't have much funding to begin with in Canada.

The current blocking of news on Meta could help move people away from getting their news on there from sites like The Rebel

It will help ensure the survival of Canadian based news and help stave off even more American corporate and cultural hegemony over the country

Cons:

The majority of the money from this program will go towards the Postmedia owned news networks and further entrench their neoliberal worldview

What do you think about the bill?

They have been in full recruitment mode lately. Posters all over Montréal and (I'm told) Toronto. I'm guessing every major city.

Has anyone here gotten involved with them or known someone who has?

No seriously I could totally post one of these a week all summer. ... so like 8 times a year.

That's a joke about are short summers, get it ?

Quotes from article.

two "grossly intoxicated" men were spotted kayaking in the Okanagan last weekend.

they brought one of the men to shore after he passed out in his kayak

His friend attempted to intervene and fell off his kayak, and several more times as he tried to get to shore

Mounties said the pair was swearing and staggering towards their vehicle with their kayaks when officers moved in and arrested them

This is my home. These are my people.

Hope this explains my posting habits a bit.

Genocidal crackers continue to be genocidal crackers

The Canadian Armed Forces has created a new program to gradually phase out its old housing benefit after hearing feedback from military members who were set to lose the payments.

The military announced plans in March to create a new housing allowance called the Canadian Force Housing Differential, which came into effect on July 1.

The program is based on a member’s salary, unlike the post-living differential, which was aimed at offsetting the cost of living in particularly expensive communities. Those rates had been frozen since 2009, even as the cost of housing has soared.

It was estimated the change would make around 28,000 people eligible for the new allowance, or roughly 6,300 more than the previous program covered.

But the military also estimated around 7,700 members would become ineligible and thousands of others would see their monthly payments reduced. Officials said that would result in a net savings of $30 million a year, bringing the program back within its budget at around $150 million.

In an update emailed to Armed Forces members last Thursday, the director general of compensation and benefits said feedback on the change had been heard and the Treasury Board has approved the creation of a provisional policy to phase out the payments.

Brig.-Gen. Virginia Tattersall said those who would have seen their monthly housing benefit decrease will be eligible, and will receive decreasing payments until July 2026.

“Your individual entitlement will cease prior to that time if you are posted to a new location, or if your (provisional post-living differential) calculation amounts to a negative value,” Tattersall wrote in the memo, noting that individual circumstances, including promotions, will be taken into account.

Eligible members will be enrolled automatically and should get a lump-sum payment to cover the summer months sometime in mid-October.

In an interview in March, Tattersall said the new program was about “being equitable” and would benefit more people in the junior ranks.

She said the military wanted to ensure no one was forced to spend more than 25 to 35 per cent of their monthly salary on rent. An outside company was hired to assess average prices near military bases.

A critical shortage of housing on bases means that thousands of military members are on wait lists, and in some cases base commanders have allowed people to keep living in training quarters for months because they’re struggling to find other accommodations.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/802333

Saw this recently on a WAN Show (19:12). How true is this? It sounds wild.

The back panel

(Same guy who does the lee's palace mural)

article buried beneath news about trump and trudeau’s marital problems.

As far as I could tell it was a genuine publicly-owned product.

I should have known this shit was too good to be true and some powerlib somewhere would eventually put this to an end.

Bilkszto died by suicide which according to his family was 100% caused by an online anti racism training.

Bilkszto filed a lawsuit against the [Toronto District School Board] TDSB earlier this year, related to a 2021 online anti-racism training session where he claims to have been implicitly referred to as a white supremacist by the trainer and berated in front of his colleagues when he disagreed that Canada was more racist than the U.S.

None of the allegations have been proven in court ...

The claim says Bilkszto acknowledged the country's own anti-Black racism, but suggested Canada was a more just society than the U.S., making reference to different approaches to public education and health care.

He alleged the TDSB failed to investigate his workplace harassment claim and then retaliated by disinviting him from a graduation for a program he helped create and revoking a temporary contract offer.

He started a sick leave shortly after the training sessions and was diagnosed with anxiety secondary to a workplace event, according to the claim and a copy of a Workplace Safety and Insurance Board decision provided by his lawyer, lightly redacted to omit the names of medical professionals and the case manager, along with addresses and phone numbers.

The WSIB decision dated Aug. 16, 2021, concluded Bilkszto was subject to workplace harassment and bullying. The case manager wrote the trainer appeared to intend to cause reputational damage and make an example out of him. The decision granted him loss-of-earnings benefits up to July 1, 2021, noting the medical evidence on file indicated he could return to work at that time.

Interesting how an outside trainer is apparently responsible not only for a brief interaction during a workshop but also for subsequent actions taken by TDSB's management. Somehow (not explained) she was plotting behind the scenes to have this guy's hours cut. No one is safe from the embrace of precarious work, not even alternative school ex-principals.

Not that is matters much, but for some context: Toronto is a minority white city with some areas being <25% white. So it's extremely on topic for anyone in charge of a highschool to know about how people see things even if he didn't happen to agree.

Why doesn't the NDP of Canada at least briefly unify and make a coalition with other smaller, local Social-democratic parties, so that they could win a federal election with more wider support?

Like for example, Parti Quebecois, Bloc Quebecois, et Quebec solidaire in Quebec.

Albert "Ginger" Goodwin, born on this day in 1887 and nicknamed for his bright red hair, was a Canadian socialist and labor activist whose murder by police while protesting conscription led to the first general strike in Canada.

Born in Yorkshire, England on May 10th, 1887, Goodwin immigrated to Canada in 1909, at the age of 19, working as a coal miner in Nova Scotia.

In Canada, he organized with the Socialist Party of Canada and became a notable labor leade during the 1912–1914 Coal Miner's Strike against Canadian Collieries. Following the strike, he was blacklisted and was forced to move away from Cumberland to find work.

In 1916, he joined the Mining and Smelter workers Union and was elected as Secretary for the Trail chapter. Following his involvement with trade unions, Goodwin entered politics running as a candidate for the Socialist Party of Canada in the 1916 British Columbian election, although he did not win.

As World War I broke out, Goodwin became an outspoken advocate against the draft, initially refusing to sign up. Eventually, he was compelled to be drafted, and, after exhausting multiple appeals against his conscription, he fled into the hills of Cumberland, British Columbia.

On July 27th (some sources say July 26th), Goodwin was shot and killed by a member of the Dominion Police, who had ventured into the hills surrounding Comox Lake to locate men evading the draft and arrest them for their evasion. The officer who killed Goodwin successfully claimed self-defense in court, although it is unknown how the two actually encountered each other.

In protest to his murder, the first general strike in Canada, the Vancouver General Strike, took place on August 2nd, 1918. In 2015, a film about his life titled "Goodwin's Way" was released.

"War is simply part of the process of Capitalism. Big financial interests are playing the game. They'll reap the victory, no matter how the war ends."

• Albert Goodwin

Megathreads and spaces to hang out:

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reminders:

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Aid:

• 🌈 LGBTQ+ Resource Post
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Theory:

• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
• ❤️Anarchism and Other Essays

man says he found himself the unexpected companion of a moose calf, who willingly hopped into the passenger seat of his truck to escape the jaws of a waiting black bear.

https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6907646

Actually the cutest thing ever.

Kids aren't the only ones who need limited screen time – gorillas do, too.

That's according to a memo by a zoo in Toronto that is worried about the well-being of its animals.

A sign posted outside of the Toronto Zoo's gorilla enclosure asks guests to "refrain from showing them any videos or photos, as some content can be upsetting and affect their relationships and behaviour within their family," according to CTV News.

A behavioral supervisor at the zoo said it's a best practice both for the gorillas and the zoo guests.

"We just want the gorillas to be able to be gorillas," Hollie Ross told CTV News. "And when our guests come to the zoo, we want them to be able to see gorillas in a very natural state, and what they would be doing naturally – to sort of connect with them on that level."

"We just want to make sure that we know the content," Ross added. "Very much like managing an account for a child or something, you want to make sure that your parental controls are on, and that you're in control of what the content is that they're seeing."

According to the zoo's website, the gorillas do watch nature documentaries "with great interest" on occasion. Earlier this year, the zoo installed a donated flatscreen TV for one gorilla who was recovering from an illness.

Another gorilla, named Nassir, is "the epitome of a teenager, fascinated by videos," according to the website. The zoo's site said if the 13-year-old gorilla had his way, "screen time would dominate his life."

"We don't really want our guests coming and showing them videos. We would rather have them see them do gorilla things," Ross told CTV. "Nassir, in particular, was really interested in seeing different videos. I think, mostly, he was seeing videos of other animals. But, I think what is really important is that he's able to just hang out with his brother and be a gorilla."

Alija Izetbegovic’s anti-communist activism

Izetbegovic was held accountable for the war crimes he was connected to in 1946, when Tito’s communist partisans took over Yugoslavia and imprisoned him for said association for three years, according to Krsljanin. In 1970, Izetbegovic once again got into trouble with the communist state for his Islamic Fundamentalist manifesto, Islamic Declaration. Izetbegovic had the favour of US and NATO for the liberal, capitalist, and anti-communist aspects of it, who then helped obtain more Islamist recruits. The manifesto was banned in Yugoslavia for having statements like this:

“There can be neither peace nor coexistence between Islamic religion and non-Islamic social and political institutions.” (page 28)

However, Izetbegovic finally managed to get the attention and ‘sympathy’ of the west in 1983, after Amnesty International and Helsinki Watch's denunciations of ‘communist propaganda’ to 'justify his arrest'. These organisations were controlled explicitly by the CIA at the time with Operation Mockingbird. This came around the time of his Bosnian Nationalist agitation and subsequent imprisonment for twelve years, commuted to five with the introduction of multi-party politics, the breakup of Yugoslavia, and what would later be characterised as the Bosnian war.

Influential among Al-Qaeda sympathisers, NATO, and other radical Islamists, assembled during the CIA’s Operation Gladio , Izetbegovic ascended to the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the early stages of the 1992 civil war.

"We have one of the best labour law regimes here," said Gavin McGarrigle, Unifor's western regional director, in an interview after the event.

McGarrigle referred to changes in B.C.'s Labour Relations Code that came into effect in June 2022 that make it easier to form a union.

freedom of the press

Global consulting giant McKinsey & Co., under the leadership of Dominic Barton, pitched Purdue Pharma (Canada) in 2014 on how it could more aggressively market and boost sales of OxyContin and other highly addictive opioids to Canadians

McKinsey & Co. is facing a class-action lawsuit from the B.C. government, which Ottawa plans to join, that accuses the firm of engaging in reckless marketing campaigns to boost opioid sales, placing the Liberal government at odds with a company it has relied on for more than $100-million in contract work since 2015.

Mr. Barton became a pro-bono economic adviser to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau when the Liberals formed government in 2015 and was later named Canada’s ambassador to China in 2019. Since 2015, the total value of federal contracts awarded to McKinsey has risen to at least $116.8-million, spanning several federal departments. McKinsey has said in court filings that its contracts with Ottawa make up as much as 10 per cent of its gross revenue in Canada.

In recent testimony before parliamentary committees examining those contracts, Mr. Barton, who resigned as envoy to Beijing in December, 2021, to become chairman of Rio Tinto, and Robert Palter, managing partner of McKinsey’s Canadian office, stated the consulting firm has done “no opioid sales and marketing in Canada.”

What the two men did not mention was that McKinsey pitched Purdue Pharma (Canada) to do exactly that on March 18, 2014. A McKinsey memo to Purdue, titled Identifying Growth Opportunities in Canada, states: “We appreciate your interest in driving sales growth and look forward to supporting you.”

The memo to Purdue Pharma (Canada) president Craig Landau went on to say McKinsey was seeking to identify three to five near-term “revenue acceleration activities” for the 2014-2015 period.

It described how McKinsey could help Purdue determine whether there are opportunities to “better target and reach high-potential prescribers” and increase the motivation of Purdue’s pharmaceutical sales representatives by analyzing “what opportunities exist to change incentive compensation to better align the sales force goals to company objectives.”

Alley Adams, head of communications and external relations for McKinsey & Co. Canada, said the company never ended up doing this work for Purdue Pharma (Canada).

“McKinsey is not a manufacturer or distributor of opioids,” the company responds in the documents. “The plaintiff has not alleged material facts necessary to connect McKinsey to any wrongdoing because there is no meaningful connection between McKinsey and the opioid crisis in Canada. For this reason alone, the entire claim should be struck.”

A recently amended version of B.C.’s statement of claim against McKinsey accuses the consulting company of causing Canadian deaths through its past marketing advice to pharmaceutical companies.

B.C. alleges McKinsey consultants designed and implemented plans to market and promote opioid sales in Canada, “despite McKinsey’s knowledge that opioids were addictive and were being aggressively promoted to treat conditions that opioids are not effective in treating.”

The claim accuses McKinsey of working with opioid manufacturers to target physicians with marketing calls and lobbying pharmacies to increase sales, among other “false, reckless, and deceptive marketing campaigns.”

Several parliamentary committees have been studying the relationship between the federal government and McKinsey to determine why federal contracting with the consulting firm has increased steadily from nearly zero since the Liberals formed government in 2015.

In the early years of the Liberal government, Mr. Barton acted as both the head of McKinsey and the chair of former finance minister Bill Morneau’s advisory council on economic growth. The council was supported by McKinsey staff and made several major policy recommendations, many of which were enacted by the government to at least some degree.

Government and McKinsey officials have generally responded by saying it is part of a broader trend in favour of using consultants. The federal government has recently said it is reviewing its approach to consulting and will be looking to find savings in that area.

woke neoliberal Kkkonsultants: oof ouchie that sounds pretty bad have you considered Oxycontin?