Liberals block first step to universal dental care

Brandon Doucet
May 12, 2021



This past week, NDP MP Jack Harris introduced a private member's bill aiming to address a glaring gap in our universal health-care system. The bill proposed that dental insurance be provided to households that presently lack dental insurance and make less than $90,000 per year. Harris views this as an interim measure until dental care can be included in Canada's universal health-care system.

A public dental plan is urgently needed. The financial hardship caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has led to more unemployment and many are working reduced hours. This results in a loss of dental coverage for many people as well as less disposable income to pay for dental procedures out of pocket. The current safety net for dental care is inadequate, with only 5 per cent coming from targeted government programs. This number is even lower than the 10 per cent spent in the U.S. on public programs.

The targeted programs vary between provinces, but they tend to cover people on social services, low-income children as well as the federal government funding a dental plan for Indigenous peoples. As these targeted programs are underfunded, many in need fall through the gaps, and those who rely on the programs often struggle finding a dentist who will accept them.

In order for this much-needed bill to become reality, the NDP would need to have the support of the Liberals, who have signalled that they will not support the bill. Health Minister Patty Hajdu claims that the data is both limited and dated. Granted, while some of the data addressing access to dental care is several years old, the need for this program is clearly indicated.

Since dental care is private in Canada, many people with low and middle incomes are unable to access routine care. In 2018, one in three Canadians lacked dental insurance and over one in five avoid the dentist each year due to financial constraints. This lack of access is a serious problem. When preventative cleanings and early treatment are neglected, oral health deteriorates, which has consequences that extend beyond the mouth.

Poor oral health has been shown to cause or worsen many general health conditions like heart disease and diabetes, among others. Missing front teeth or visible decay can make it difficult to find employment. Further, living with dental pain can make it difficult to sleep or to focus at work.

When people are unable to afford dental care, they often end up turning to their doctor for relief. In 2014, doctors' offices were visited every three minutes and emergency departments every nine minutes by patients seeking treatment for dental pain. Nationwide, this problem is estimated to cost $150 million annually, while patients are left still needing treatment by a dentist.

Economic trends show the number of people who are uninsured is rising as many retire and lose work-related benefits. Additionally, more people work in the precarious gig economy, which does not provide benefits like dental insurance.

The financial hardship caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has only made things worse. Before the pandemic in 2019, the parliamentary budget officer (PBO) estimated this dental plan would help 4.2 million people. An updated estimate from the PBO in October 2020 showed this number jumping to 6.5 million as people lost income and employment during the pandemic.

The dental plan is estimated to cost $1.5 billion per year. With only half a per cent increase in health-care spending, a lot of dental neglect and the resulting pain and suffering could be alleviated or even prevented. Further, the plan could ease some of the financial hardships Canadians are facing by allowing people to use their health card rather than their credit card to access dental care.

Through implementation of a wealth tax, this plan can be paid for by more affluent Canadians, whose wealth has increased by a staggering $78 billion during the pandemic.

Given the indisputable evidence supporting the need for the proposed bill, it is clear that if the Liberals truly cared about access to dental care, they would support the modest NDP plan. With a 2019 poll showing 86 per cent of Canadians are in support of a dental plan for the uninsured, it is time the Liberals to put some teeth into medicare.

Brandon Doucet is a dentist practising in Nova Scotia with interests in surgery and public health and the founder of Coalition for Dentalcare.

Image credit: StockSnap/PixabayFURTHER READING

Smile with Dignity: A social justice perspective on dental care
A close look at the Alliance for People's Health Smile with Dignity Campaign, featuring interviews with members of VANDU, Bruce Wallace, Martha Roberts and Melanie Roberts.

2.3 million people in Ontario cannot afford dental care
Demand that Ontario extend public dental programs.

Canada's pseudo-health-care system relies on people getting sick, not staying well
Federal and most provincial governments continue to deny many thousands of citizens the basic preventive and protective health services that are standard practice in most other advanced nations.

The folly of right-wing nationalist politics

Duncan Cameron

May 11, 2021

 

In the preface of his just-published memoir La Grande Illusion, Michel Barnier, the man who led the Brexit negotiations for the EU, cites an anguished King Lear beating his own head: "[…] that let thy folly in, / And thy dear judgment out."

Barnier explains his job was to limit Brexit damage to the EU; he lamented that whatever was agreed and decided, Bexit would leave both parties weaker.

In France, right wing, anti-immigrant, anti-EU leader Marine Le Pen was virtually alone in welcoming Brexit enthusiastically.

For Barnier, the U.K. authorities erred by taking right-wing nationalist Nigel Farage and his UK Independence Party (UKIP) too lightly, something he believes historical memory in Germany and France helped to prevent.

American Republicans have been fostering right-wing nationalism for political gain for decades. Nelson Rockefeller, U.S. vice-president under Gerald Ford, was the last liberal Republican of any standing. He left office in 1977.

In the mid-1960s, U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson isolated southern Democratic politicians so as to pass much-needed civil rights legislation.

The Texan president was proud of his civil rights laws, but knew he had relegated the historic Democratic "solid South" to history.

The Republican southern strategy was based on appeals to the rural poor struggling to make a living or to find a new life in the cities.

From Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, Republicans relied on appeals to America first and military spending to cover up what became a serious deterioration in the U.S. social fabric as government spending went from being part of the solution to being the problem on its own. 

Political scientist Thomas Ferguson has documented how U.S. big business interests poured money into local and state elections to ensure positive support for their largely unpopular policies.

What Ferguson calls "political investment" is the practice of spending serious sums on party competition to keep hand-picked, docile representatives in power.

Elections matter -- so the right rigged the elections. Public opinion matters, so business interests ensured the investor perspective prevailed in think-tanks, editorial meetings, and cabinet decision-making.

Having turned one citizen, one vote -- or electoral democracy -- into who spends the most, wins, makes nonsense of ballots and elections.

It is nonetheless surprising to see 120 congressional Republicans denying the 2020 presidential election results. Countless party members are still playing along with the outlandish view popularized by Donald Trump that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Nor should one imagine that all the problems are on the Republican side of the aisle.

Following the defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016, the Democratic National Committee concocted a very dubious analysis of the results, claiming electoral manipulation by the Russians influenced the election.

The corollary of this assertion was that Trump won with Russian support, and that he was likely to be under the influence of Russian President Putin.

The entire American media was taken up for months with examining this obviously bogus explanation for the loss by Hillary Clinton.

As embarrassing as it must have been to admit that her candidacy failed, Clinton lost to a man who was clearly unfit for office.

In order to fund the U.S. military-industrial-university complex at the growing astronomical levels that baffle all understanding, Democrats and Republicans alike identify external enemies of the U.S.

China, which has begun to reclaim its centuries-long position as a leading economic power, is now accused by the U.S. of ignoring world trade rules and plotting actions in the South China Sea. It is not clear how this China bashing will turn out, but it is tiresome in the extreme to have to put up with such accusations being repeated constantly in the media.

Not long after the Cold War ended in 1989, U.S. president Bill Clinton expanded NATO into the Russian backyard in violation of undertakings by previous president George H.W. Bush. 

Why take such a provocative step? American military suppliers wanted Poland and other eastern European countries in NATO so they would buy American-made NATO-approved military equipment.

No country needs this NATO-approved equipment.

The total absurdity of increased military spending to meet non-existent threats to national security is clearly evident.

Given that military spending represents the single-largest cause of greenhouse gas emissions, continued expansion of outlays for new equipment says volumes about the dangerous, irrational actions of the American political class.

The only thing likely to force a revision to American policies is a worldwide citizen revolt. Fortunately, as Nancy Fraser has been explaining, one is underway that looks to be growing.

For those unable to see the folly of right-wing American nationalist politics, a look at other right-wing regimes serves to make the point.  

The monstrous Bolsonaro regime in Brazil has not only left its citizens unprotected from the deadly coronavirus, its neglect of basic sanitary protections has led to the disease leaking to its neighbours.

In Europe, the virus has devastated Hungary, otherwise notable because it is led by an antisemitic crypto-fascist.

Leader of India, the Hindu nationalist Modi, has watched the country become the world leader in absolute number of deaths from the pandemic without coming up with any kind of plan to stem the spread of the malady.

The pandemic has revealed what historians have long pointed to: right-wing authoritarian governments damage the social fabric, leaving citizens with a diminished sense of well-being.

We "the citizens of the United Nations" must fight back. Invoking the climate emergency to unite behind an immediate halt to every type of military spending would be a good place to start.

Duncan Cameron is president emeritus of rabble.ca and writes a weekly column on politics and current affairs.

Image credit: The U.S. Army/Flickr

Human rights defenders call on Canada to end support to Colombian police and army

Brent Patterson

May 12, 2021

As the violence against the ongoing national strike in Colombia continues, the Colombian human rights organization CREDHOS (the Regional Corporation for the Defence of Human Rights) is calling on Canada to stop any technical assistance, aid, logistical or financial support to the Colombian army and police.

Representatives from CREDHOS have stated:

"The military and the police are interfering with peaceful social protest. The army is patrolling different urban areas of the cities. We are calling on the international community to ensure that logistical or financial support to the police and national army is stopped because right now they are attacking the people and we don't want that to continue."

"The world is seeing the repression that is happening in Colombia. We call on Canada and other countries to please talk about the violence in Colombia. If there is any sort of military support or technical assistance, please abstain from providing that military aid because they are attacking the civilian population."

"With due respect to the Canadian government we are asking that through your different actions and mechanisms, [and] diplomatic channels that you have with the Colombian state, that you can speak to the national government and express your concern about systematic human rights violations in the context of the social protests."

"Hopefully from the actions of the Canadian government and other countries we will be able to de-escalate the violence we are facing today in our country."

Bilateral police initiative with Colombia

On October 30, 2017, the Canadian Press reported on a "bilateral police initiative" between Canada and Colombia.

At that time, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stated: "This effort will support post-conflict policing efforts in Colombia and will see Canadian police providing training, capacity building and strategic advice to our Colombian friends."

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) has also noted that they maintain a "liaison officer" in Bogota. The RCMP says their role is to "act as the link between law enforcement agencies in Canada and in their host country."

$45 million of Canadian military exports to Colombia

In 2018, Canada exported $310,576 of military goods to Colombia. In 2017, it was $114,688. In 2016, it was $215,066. And it 2015 it was $522,203.

In 2014, it was $44,754,393.

That was the year that the Canadian Commercial Corporation, a federal government-owned Crown corporation, stated it toured the exhibition floor at the CANSEC arms show in Ottawa with a delegation from Colombia. That was also the year that Canada sold 24 light armoured vehicles (LAVs) to the Colombian army and at least four armoured personnel carriers (APCs) to the National Police of Colombia.

The precedent for stopping military exports

Canada has previously taken action to stop military exports when there have been serious concerns about human rights violations.

In July 2020, The Globe and Mail reported that Canada would "block the export of sensitive military goods" to Hong Kong and that "a Canadian government official familiar [with the announcement] said Ottawa wants to prevent equipment being shipped to Hong Kong that could be used by the local police to suppress protests."

Next steps

On May 4, the Canadian ambassador to Colombia Marcel Lebleu tweeted: "I deeply regret all the deaths, injuries and violence in Colombia. We defend the right to peaceful demonstration and we are concerned about the excessive use of force against protesters. My thoughts are with the families of the deceased."

On May 9, Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau stated: "Canada condemns the violence, including the disproportionate use of force by security forces, and urges that the violence cease. The right to peaceful assembly and association are the bedrock of democracy and must be promoted and protected at all times."

As a next step, it's hoped the ambassador and minister will hear the plea from CREDHOS to help de-escalate the violence and support the call to stop providing military aid, technical assistance, and logistical and financial support to the police and national army.

Brent Patterson is the executive director of Peace Brigades International-Canada. Follow them at @PBIcanada.

Image: Neda Amani/Twitter

KANADA

Reconciliation means rethinking parks governance

David Suzuki

May 12, 2021

Protection and restoration are two sides of the conservation coin -- protection for spaces that haven't yet been damaged or destroyed by large-scale human impacts and restoration for ecologically critical places that have.

Although both might seem like relatively straightforward scientific tasks, they have been and continue to be significantly shaped by colonialism -- globally and in Canada.

Landscape-level restoration initiatives are somewhat new. It's only recently that the scale of our activities has degraded entire ecosystems. Yet restoration initiatives are still subject to colonial approaches.

Consider one recent European-led, nature-based approach to climate change, part of an initiative to plant a billion trees. It included the Serengeti plains and Kruger National Park in Africa as potential reforestation areas. According to the Yale Journal of Forestry, "By not excluding conservation areas and traditional rangelands … these maps promote the idea that Africa's natural heritage can be turned into industrial tree plantations to offset the rich world's carbon emissions."

Protected areas were established in Canada decades before Newfoundland and Labrador joined other provinces and territories to form the country we know today. Most are rooted in a colonial approach that defied Indigenous rights and fractured Indigenous peoples' relations with land.

Jasper National Park's website provides this overview:

"When Jasper Park Forest Reserve was created in 1907… Indigenous peoples were seen as obstacles to the enjoyment of nature. According to wilderness conservation policies at the time, Indigenous peoples were considered incompatible with nature and so couldn't live in, hunt, or harvest within park boundaries. First Nation and Métis peoples were physically removed from the landscape, blocked from accessing it and banned from harvesting plants and animals, holding gatherings and accessing cultural sites."

This is not unique to Jasper. Indigenous people were also forcibly removed to create Vancouver's Stanley Park and Quetico Park in Ontario, among others.

As Indigenous writer Robert Jago remarks in "National Parks Are Colonial Crime Scenes," "Canada's Parks Departments have treated Indigenous peoples like an infestation ever since the founding, in 1885, of what is now Banff National Park."

How can we, who find solace and communion in parks, help overcome these past injustices?

Indigenous peoples are already leading on many fronts, including championing land repatriation and Indigenous land governance, and by asserting rights and responsibilities that provincial and federal governments have long denied. These initiatives deserve broad public support.

As one example, in Jasper, Simpcw First Nation Chief Nathan Matthew announced in 2017 that his tribe was going to resume hunting deer, sheep and elk within the park, after being banned from doing so when the park was established. "We're determined to exercise our title and right within our territory," he said.

In "Return the National Parks to the Tribes," Indigenous American David Treuer writes:

"For Native Americans, there can be no better remedy for the theft of land than land. And for us, no lands are as spiritually significant as the national parks. They should be returned to us. Indians should tend -- and protect and preserve -- these favoured gardens again."

Canada too must explore new means of land governance. Indigenous peoples have long histories of responsibly stewarding ecosystems, of living within them without causing their demise. Many national and provincial parks are not succeeding in their primary objective to maintain biodiversity. Jasper recently announced extirpation of a resident caribou herd, and conflict continues over management decisions that could affect the two remaining, highly imperilled, herds.

According to Treuer:

"[i]t's not clear that today's model of care and custodianship best meets the needs of the land, Native people, or the general public. Nor is it clear that the current system will adequately ensure the parks' future. That's something Indians are good at: pushing ahead while bringing the past along with us.… Placing these lands under collective Native control would be good not just for Natives, but for the parks as well."

It's our collective responsibility to engage in conversations about how new systems of land governance could look. Everything should be on the table, including ownership and governance of current protected areas. As Jago notes, "The places Canada has made into parks are filled with our stories -- every mountain, every valley has a name and a history for Indigenous peoples."

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Boreal Project Manager Rachel Plotkin.

Learn more at davidsuzuki.org. 

Image credit: Pavel Brodsky/Unsplash

CANADA NUKED

'Informed and unwilling': opposition to

high-level nuclear waste burial grows

Joyce Nelson

May 14, 2021

RABBLE.CA 

   

A new organization called "We the Nuclear Free North" held a very informative webinar on May 10 to address concerns about the proposed burial of high-level nuclear waste in northwestern Ontario. High-level nuclear waste is intensely radioactive, spent nuclear fuel rods taken mainly from nuclear power plants. (Viewers wishing to access the webinar can contact We the Nuclear Free North or email nuclearfreenorth[at]gmail.com.)

The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) has selected the Revell Lake area, between Ignace and Dryden (northwest of Thunder Bay), as one of the two most promising sites in Ontario for a deep geological repository (DGR).

The other site is just north of Teeswater in the Municipality of South Bruce.

The NWMO is a consortium formed by Ontario Power Generation (OPG), New Brunswick Power, and Hydro-Quebec. In 2007, the Canadian government gave the consortium the responsibility for finding an "informed and willing" community to host the nuclear waste site. Since 2010, the NWMO has considered at least 18 sites in Ontario for the high-level nuclear waste, narrowing the list down to two while studies of bedrock continue in both locations.

But now opposition is growing in these areas, as residents increasingly become "informed and unwilling." What they are up against, however, is formidable power and money.

Dangers of deep geological repositories

The Nuclear Free North webinar focused on two great dangers from the deep geological repository: the transportation of nuclear waste to the site and the threat to the watersheds from underground burial.

The nuclear waste consortium wants to transport some 57,000 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel rods from 18 nuclear reactors in Ontario and one in New Brunswick to the disposal site. As the webinar panelists explained, that would mean "two or three trucks per day" making the long-distance drive to the site "every day for the next 40 years." 

An accident en route could result in significant radioactive contamination. If the nuclear waste were transported by rail, that too is not risk-free for communities along the route.

As the waste arrives at the disposal site, it would be re-packaged and sealed in copper cannisters, encased in cement, and buried in bedrock tunnels and chambers 500 metres deep.

But as the webinar told listeners, at the consortium, "they acknowledge the containers will fail." That means eventual nuclear contamination of the watersheds. According to the Nuclear Free North website, "Dryden, Kenora, many Treaty 3 communities, and Winnipeg's drinking water are all downstream" from the Revell Lake site.

So far, around the world there have been three attempts to bury nuclear waste in deep geological repositories, but all have leaked nuclear radiation into the environment. Dr. M.V. Ramana, an expert on nuclear energy and professor at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at UBC, told me by email that currently, "Finland and Sweden have identified sites [for DGRs] and Finland is constructing one but it is not yet completed. Sweden's project is yet to be approved."

When asked why the nuclear industry wants a deep geological repository, Dr. Ramana answered that "nuclear power operators want to make the claim that nuclear waste is not a problem. Commissioning, or even starting work on a DGR, will allow them to argue that they have dealt with this concern."

By allowing "in-situ decommissioning" of any future small modular reactors (abandoning the waste on site) and starting work on a deep geological repository, the nuclear industry and governments can claim the nuclear waste problem has been solved.

Money talks

Recently, CBC News published an article on the "goodwill money" that the NWMO has been pouring into South Bruce -- the other site being considered for the nuclear disposal site.

In 2012, the local council volunteered to be considered as a host for the site, and that's when the money started flowing: "According to a March 2021 report from South Bruce Treasurer Kendra Reinhart, the community has received more than $3.2 million from the NWMO since 2012." But that doesn't include "a $4 million NWMO-sponsored investment fund" that the community can also draw upon.

Members of a local grassroots group, Protecting Our Waterways -- No Nuclear Waste, told CBC that by taking the money, the municipality is undermining its official position, which is that it is simply learning about the project and is neither for or against hosting the nuclear disposal site.

Michelle Stein and Bill Noll, president and vice-president of Protect Our Waterways, "said the more the municipality of South Bruce becomes intertwined financially with the NWMO, the harder it will be for the community to disentangle itself by saying no to the nuclear disposal site, lest it cut off the community's newfound source of wealth."

South Bruce Mayor Robert Buckle disagrees with that assessment and told CBC News that it would be "foolish" to not accept the money from NWMO. "That's just business," he said.

The same thing has been happening at the other proposed nuclear disposal site.

Brennain Lloyd of Nuclear Free North told me by email that the NWMO "is definitely delivering large amounts of money to municipalities to curry favour, including over $2 million (that we know of, so far) to the Township of Ignace," and "earlier this year $624,078 to the City of Dryden."

Lloyd says "it's been a 10-year campaign by the NWMO with regular injections of large amounts of cash into low-budget municipalities (including those the NWMO has 'suspended' their investigation of). And the mayor of Ignace has now dropped any pretense of 'learning' about the project and is now blatantly pitching for it."

The nuclear waste consortium wants to select the final site by 2023.

During the May 10 webinar, a question was asked about where NWMO gets its money. Brennain Lloyd answered, "From rate-payers." She noted that in Ontario, as you saw your electricity bill going up over the past decade, "some of your bill is going to fund their activities."

Ironically, those same rate-payers will be paying for their own endangerment by funding the transport of nuclear waste.

Saugeen Ojibway Nation

The South Bruce site is located on Saugeen Ojibway Nation territory. The NWMO has promised the First Nation that they will not proceed with the high-level nuclear disposal site if the community does not give its consent.

In January 2020, 85 per cent of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation voted against siting a low- and medium-level nuclear waste site in Kincardine, also located on their territory. Ontario Power Generation had promised the First Nation that it would not build the repository without their consent. But Ontario Power Generation had also offered the First Nation $150 million to host the site -- money which the community turned down.

Days ago, Saugeen Ojibway Nation Communications Manager Kurt Kivell told me by email that the First Nation:

"[i]s exercising its Rights in the Territory and have begun a free, prior, and informed consent-based process towards a Community decision on the proposed [nuclear waste repository]. We are in the early stages of engagement and consultation with NWMO on the project and sharing information with the Community to support informed decision-making towards a Community decision. We have not had any discussions with NWMO regarding financial compensation for supporting the Project."

I asked Dr. Ramana what would happen if both the South Bruce and the Ignace/Dryden sites are rejected because of public opposition. Would the nuclear waste consortium revisit earlier ("suspended") sites? He answered, "Good question. I don't know. It is also possible that they may open new sites."

During the Nuclear Free North webinar, panelists were asked whether it would be only the communities of Ignace and/or Dryden that would make the final decision about the deep geological repository. The answer was stark: "An infinitesimal number of people will make this decision in comparison to the millions who will be affected along the routes."

Canadian freelance writer Joyce Nelson is the author of seven books. She can be reached via www.joycenelson.ca

Image credit: kallerna/Wikimedia Commons

Groups oppose plans to abandon defunct nuclear reactors and radioact

Citizen groups concerned about nuclear safety are objecting to plans in the works to abandon nuclear reactors and the radioactive waste they produce once they are shut down.

Budget may reveal extent of federal support for risky new nuclear reactors

Opponents of nuclear technology they call "dirty, dangerous and distracting" will be watching the federal budget to see just how far the Liberals will go in their push for small modular reactors.

U.S. corporations profiting from major Canadian nuclear liability

The nearly 70-year history of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited has left a $16-billion toxic legacy of shuttered reactors, polluted lakes and groundwater, contaminated soils, and radioactive waste.

ARYAN FARMERS

Migrant farmworkers left out of Alberta's vaccination rollout, says activist group

Chelsea Nash
May 11, 2021

Vanesa Ortiz, her husband, and her 13-year-old daughter have been working as a family on behalf of Alberta's Mexican migrant agricultural workers since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020.

Ortiz, her family and the organization they represent -- the Association of Mexicans in Calgary (AMexCal) -- started out as an anti-racism organization for the Latino community in Alberta. When COVID-19 hit the province, they directed all of their energies to supporting migrant farmworkers.

"The agricultural workforce in Alberta is migrant farm workers and it's completely invisible," Ortiz said in an interview.

A Mexican immigrant herself, Ortiz has built her connections with migrant agricultural workers and some of the farmers who employ them from the ground up.

"There has really not been advocacy in many years [specifically] around migrant farmworkers," she said.

Ortiz, her family, and AMexCal have been organizing in coordination with Migrante Alberta, who have long advocated for temporary foreign workers, undocumented workers and caregivers. They have also been mentored by the Ontario-based advocacy organization Justicia for Migrant Workers.

Ortiz said she's driven all over Alberta building relationships with workers, laughing at how quickly she has become an expert in navigating even the smallest of communities.

Throughout the pandemic, she has been delivering supplies such as hand sanitizer, Lysol wipes, toilet paper, and masks, as well as food to workers who are often restricted from leaving the farms -- even to grocery shop -- due to the pandemic.

Sometimes, when the employer of migrant farmworkers does not allow her to make deliveries or enter the farm, she drops supplies off by the side of the road after dark, where workers will collect them.

Ortiz said the migrant worker population is lower than previous years, likely because fewer workers are coming to Canada due to pandemic fears. Last year, after two migrant farmworkers died in Essex County, Ontario, from COVID-19, Mexico stopped sending temporary foreign workers to Canada, limiting the workforce here.

However, living conditions are still crowded, Ortiz said, with three or four workers often living in one shared bedroom.

Now, she says, the most pressing matter for migrant agricultural workers in the province is getting vaccinated.

On May 3, Ortiz and Luis Vazquez -- president of AMexCal -- sent a letter to Premier Jason Kenney, Alberta Minister of Health Tyler Shandro, and several other provincial and federal ministers responsible for labour, immigration, agriculture and food.

The letter laid out the situation for the province's migrant agricultural workers, describing the essential jobs they undertake to sustain communities' food chains, despite being excluded from provincial services and labour protections.

Because of the congregate work and living conditions, Ortiz says migrant agricultural workers must be prioritized in Alberta's vaccine rollout.

Not only that, but this population of vulnerable workers requires support in acquiring their vaccines, in the form of vaccination information in their own languages, and physical access to vaccination clinics.

Ortiz notes this could take the form of providing transportation to and from vaccine clinics for workers living in remote communities. She also suggests that vaccine clinics be brought to the workers so that entire farms can be offered vaccines at once. But, she points out, the process must be non-coercive.

A spokesperson from Alberta Health Services said in an emailed statement that "anyone in Alberta, including a migrant farm worker, who is 12 or older can get the vaccine…Work is underway to increase outreach to marginalized or vulnerable groups across the province."

The spokesperson also said if an individual does not have identification with their age on it, they can book a vaccination appointment by calling Alberta Health Services at 811. He did not answer questions about the issue of a lack of transportation that migrant farmworkers face.

The letter from AMexCal also featured quotes from migrant workers themselves, though their names were changed to protect their privacy.

The quotes from workers described fears that they will be required to have been vaccinated in order to return to their home countries when the season ends. They also expressed a fear of taking COVID-19 home with them to their families.

"If we get sick, operations at the farm might stop. We want to work but we also want to be protected from COVID and go back with health to our families," a worker named as Luis G. said.

Canada relies heavily on the temporary foreign worker program for its food production. In all of Canada, temporary foreign workers make up 20 per cent of total employment in the agriculture sector. In 2018 in Alberta, there were 1,900 migrant farmworkers employed on farms, or roughly six per cent of the total workforce.

Ortiz said the issues facing migrant agricultural workers in Alberta get little attention when compared to workers in Ontario or British Columbia. She also said the agricultural sector has a firm grip on public opinion in the province, and criticism of farmers is not readily accepted.

Chelsea Nash is rabble's labour beat reporter for 2020-2021. To contact her with story leads, email chelsea[at]rabble.ca.

Image credit: Faith Unlimited/Flickr

Jason Kenney kicks out two rebellious MLAs following UCP caucus dissent

David J. Climenhaga
May 14, 2021
POLITICS IN CANADA


Can Alberta Premier Jason Kenney remain in officer longer than Alison Redford was premier?

Until yesterday, I would have answered that despite his current unpopularity, Premier Kenney's rule would obviously last longer than Redford's short, unhappy tenure.

Now I am not so sure.

Kenney has not emerged looking stronger after it took him most of the afternoon and well into the evening to drag his United Conservative Party caucus kicking and screaming behind him to dump two dissident MLAs who had openly challenged his leadership.

And while Cypress-Medicine Hat MLA Drew Barnes and Central Peace-Notley MLA Todd Loewen have now been turfed from the UCP caucus, at least 16 MLAs from the dissident group known as the COVID 18 remain in the party.

Redford, who was in effect fired by her own Progressive Conservative party caucus at the end of March 2014, lasted 898 days as premier of Alberta after she perpetrated a series of scandals and missteps that PC MLAs feared threatened the continued rule of the party. Their fear turned out to be warranted in May 2015 when Albertans elected an NDP majority government led by Rachel Notley.

As of today, Kenney has held the job for only 746 days.

No one's fired him yet, although Barnes has been needling him for weeks and Loewen took a decent stab at trying to unseat him yesterday with his letter saying the UCP "did not unite around blind loyalty to one man" and telling the premier to resign.

When he came to power in the 2019 provincial election after playing a significant role uniting the far-right Wildrose and centre-right Progressive Conservative parties, Kenney looked like a colossus astride Alberta, his grip on power historic and unshakable.

But he did it on a promise that he could not deliver -- even without a global pandemic to make everything worse. It was delusional to think anyone could restore the boom times to Alberta with a snap of the fingers and the restoration of Conservative government. That is now obvious to many.

Kenney's tone deafness, arrogance, miscalculations, constant flip-flopping on COVID-19, and dismissal of the new UCP's old Wildrose base recounted in Loewen's bitter epistle did not help. His personal popularity, which has always lagged his party's, is now in the toilet.

And as my blogging colleague Dave Cournoyer pithily observed yesterday, the UCP "is an institutional mix of former Progressive Conservatives, who do not tolerate leaders who look like they are going to lose, and Wildrosers, who just don't want to be led."

Right now, the UCP trails the Opposition NDP -- whose four years in power were made possible in part by Redford's foibles.

In the fall of 2018, when the NDP kicked out rebellious MLA Robyn Luff -- who seemed in a tweet last night to be comparing her fate to Loewen's -- the party caucus was solid, committed to the same vision and united behind Rachel Notley's leadership. After the Calgary MLA had announced she wouldn't sit in the legislature any more, alleging bullying by NDP brass, the vote to remove her actually brought the NDP caucus together, insiders now say.

Kenney's position today is quite different. The COVID 18 is still the COVID 16. Kenney's grip on power looks far from sure.

The Western Standard, the far-right online news outfit founded by former UCP finance critic Derek Fildebrandt, who was kicked out of the party on Kenney's command in 2018, was practically live-tweeting the supposedly closed-door caucus meeting yesterday. That sure doesn't make Kenney look like a strong leader in command of his troops.

But at least the premier managed to skid Loewen and Barnes at the end of the day, otherwise his grip would have been shakier still.

There was no vote to remove Dave Hanson, the UCP MLA for Bonnyville-Cold Lake-St. Paul, who praised Loewen on his own Facebook page and shared his letter. This suggests what the current limits to Kenney's power are.

If the UCP caucus had told Kenney to forget about dumping the dissident pair, he wouldn't have had much choice but to resign himself. He would then have had to find something to do to keep body and soul together until his generous parliamentary pension kicks in in May 2024.

The Wildrose Independent Party's leadership nominations close at 5 p.m. today, so it's not too late for Barnes, who has definite separatist leanings, to throw his hat in that ring.

David Climenhaga, author of the Alberta Diary blog, is a journalist, author, journalism teacher, poet and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions at The Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald.

Image credit: Alberta Newsroom/Flickr

ANALYSIS

A Coronavirus Hell of Kenney’s Own Making

The COVID-19 devil runs free, yet again, in Alberta and the premier has no excuse.

Andrew Nikiforuk 3 May 2021 | TheTyee.ca
Tyee contributing editor Andrew Nikiforuk is an award-winning journalist whose books and articles focus on epidemics, the energy industry, nature and more.

Cartoon by Greg Perry.


Alberta has now recorded more daily confirmed COVID-19 cases on a per capita basis than any other Canadian province or U.S. state.

That’s more than 2,400 cases a day in a province of four million people. Nearly 30 per cent of the infected are children.

With a rising infection rate of 12 per cent, one in eight Albertans test positive for the virus, likely in the form of its many variants, breaking all previous provincial records.*

These numbers reflect, first and foremost, Premier Jason Kenney’s callous and persistent disregard for scientific findings and mathematical reality. He apparently does not understand or deliberately ignores the inconvenient truth that the virus spreads exponentially and therefore, left to its own devices, explosively. And that the faster and wider it spreads, the more it strengthens through mutation.

Because premiers have at their disposal any expert advice they choose to summon, and also the use of Google, all of this was knowable to Kenney a year ago. Yet even during the second wave last fall, he did not impose restrictions until COVID-19 threatened to totally overwhelm the province’s ICU capacity.

And now he’s daring fate again, behaving in the same reckless fashion.

As a consequence, Alberta now has 508.2 cases per 100,000 citizens. That’s double the rate in hard-hit Ontario and more than triple the rate in British Columbia.

As Lethbridge Mayor Chris Spearman lamented to the CBC last weekend: “We have done the least of the provinces. We’ve tolerated protests against masks and at the hospital and rapid vaccination clinic.”

Once you let the devil in the door, he often runs the house. Kenney again has waved him right in.

Failing to outrun the variants

A man with high opinions of himself, Kenney thought he could outrun the variants with vaccines. He lost that gamble totally, and now young citizens are struggling for air in hospitals with tubes in their tracheas. One 17-year-old woman in Magrath tragically died within five days of exposure. When governments give a dangerous virus free rein, bad things happen.

What explains Kenny’s dithering and wholesale aversion to leading in the public’s interest? The brash libertarian, probably the most unpopular premier in Alberta’s history, set the tone in his politicking by signalling he really doesn’t believe the government should restrict anything — including the movement of viruses.

Then when Kenney began to fiddle with closing, opening and closing again in response to lurching COVID-19 rates, 17 members of his own caucus flung his own don’t-tread-on-me notions back in his face, protesting such measures. Last month they openly chastised their premier and called for a regional approach that would allow areas with low infection rates to avoid restrictions.

The only problem with this idea is that the scientific evidence shows this kind of inequality doesn’t work in a pandemic for a logical reason. People travel from zones of high transmission to zones of low infection to avoid restrictions. In the process, they faithfully spread the virus.

Meanwhile, however, calls for Kenney to resign are reportedly growing among United Conservative Party influentials.

So, to appease his rebellious MLAs, Kenney has now done the unthinkable. He created, last week, a two-tiered pandemic system for Alberta based on half measures or no measures of consequence.

Cities like Calgary, Edmonton, Red Deer and Fort McMurray got one set of rules, including the closure of high schools and gyms along with the threat of curfew.

Meanwhile rural Alberta, where the virus is also running amuck, got another set of rules: the equivalent of don’t worry, you can ignore the science.


Stoking division

To compound the confusion, the previous day Kenney proclaimed, “There’s a false idea that lockdowns stop viral spread, that they can be effective in every instance.”

That’s not what the science says at all. In fact, England only stopped its variants with a harsh three-month lockdown.

Kenney has stoked potentially deadly division and disinformation about the virus in other ways. For example, he has welcomed increasingly ugly anti-mask protests as legitimate forms of democratic debate. A notorious Edmonton church openly violated COVID-19 distance and masking rules for four months before the province took any action. What kind of message does that send to Albertans?

In a province where the premier doesn’t apparently give a damn, the enforcement of COVID-19 rules has become a joke throughout the province.

This willful dereliction of duty in the face of a public emergency prompted this sharp tweet from Shannon Phillips, NDP MLA for Lethbridge West:

“Conservatives used to be a party where self-discipline, rule of law, and understanding rights come w/ responsibilities was the narrative. Now it’s do what you want, disregard others, break the law, reject responsibility, just yell, blame, lie with no intellectual anchor.”

Discriminatory messages

Let’s not forget that Kenney didn’t see anything wrong when the cabinet minister in charge of vaccine distribution and other politicos took off for trips aboard last Christmas, until Albertans pointed out injustice and the double standard. Everyone knows that Kenney is a do-as-I-say guy, not a do-as-I-do leader.

Kenney’s messaging malpractice has at times been racist. He repeatedly has been tone deaf to how and why COVID-19 disproportionately attacks people of colour and essential workers. They are often one and the same population.

When last year the virus ravaged the largely immigrant workforce of the U.S.-owned meat packer Cargill — then one of the largest outbreaks in North America — Kenney refused to shut down the contaminated workplace. Several workers died, and the outbreak spread throughout the community of High River.

And when COVID-19 ran rampant last fall through Calgary’s northeast, a thriving immigrant community of 120,000, Kenney’s response was equally racist. Flaunting his ignorance of the science, he intimated that the whole problem had nothing to do with essential workers toiling in badly ventilated buildings or having to deal face to face with the public.

Kenney falsely argued that infection rates in Calgary’s northeast were due to “big family gatherings at home.” In Kenney’s world, no infection ever happens in the workplace.

Tellingly, government pandemic support for Calgary’s northeast did not arrive until last December. That response came in the form of free self-isolation hotels and information packages in foreign languages in the midst of a punishing second wave. Don’t even ask about sick benefits.

Kenney is now so fearful of making any decision that might antagonize his ideological base that he did nothing when COVID-19 cases surged through the school system last month.

Instead, he left it up to the Calgary Board of Education and Calgary Catholic School District to make the independent decision to shut down or not. That way, the premier of Alberta didn’t have to speak truth to science-blind constituents in order to protect young Albertans.

Kenney now hopes that he will be able to avoid any more restrictions by using the province’s exhausted health-care system as a sort of shock absorber.

Right now, 150 beds are full. There’s the capacity to expand to 425 — except there aren’t enough qualified personnel to staff them. The calculated political decision to fill hospitals with sick citizens in order to avoid proper public health restrictions in the community is nothing short of cowardly, incompetent and abusive.

The price of failed leadership

In January, experts warned that the variants represented a new pandemic. They advised prudent and conservative leaders to stamp out the new threat or face an ongoing catastrophe.

The experts advised these things for a reason. Because they are more contagious, the variants are much harder to bring under control. The English proved this reality with a lengthy and severe lockdown the hard way. So, too, did Portugal, Ireland and Denmark.

Last week, the Lancet published another study showing that jurisdictions that choose the approach called elimination — making a cluster of hard decisions to eliminate the virus within their borders — have achieved better outcomes socially, politically, economically and health wise.

Kenney has repeatedly disavowed elimination in favor of the failed strategy of mitigation, which typically translates into a circus of openings and closings that fail to solve the problem, instead eroding public trust.

In contrast, elimination uses a lockdown, followed by rigorous testing, tracing and quarantining, to achieve a health goal that frees the population from future restrictions.

OECD countries that opted for elimination (Australia, Iceland, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea) have recorded about 25 times lower deaths per million people than other OECD countries that championed mitigation. Unlike Alberta, their economies thrived.

The evidence also shows that jurisdictions that opted for elimination strongly minimized restrictions on civil liberties while the mitigators like Kenney’s Alberta locked their populations in COVID hell.

Eliminating the virus also gives people more freedom and choice. New Zealand, for example, is not panicking about vaccinating its people, because they are free of the virus.

Meanwhile, Alberta has belatedly realized that its linear vaccination program cannot outpace an exponential virus. Moreover, history shows repeatedly that no vaccination program can work without strong public health measures.


Canada’s Crazy Pandemic Response

READ MORE

The Lancet study also highlights another truth made evident by Kenney’s failing COVID gamble. Relying solely on vaccines to control the pandemic is very risky for several reasons. The rollouts and uptakes for vaccinations are uneven; immunity is limited to perhaps 200 days, and new COVID variants keep emerging.

One workforce enjoys Kenney’s protection. He has closed Alberta’s legislature for two weeks out of viral precaution. For everyone else in Alberta, no such luck.

Kenny could have chosen a different path for Alberta. But that would have required leadership. Instead, a conceited political gambler has defended a failing strategy, squandered the province’s resources, ignored the best science, pandered to pandemic deniers and betrayed its citizens.

It’s time to pray for Alberta.

*Story updated on May 3 at 9:30 p.m. to reflect tests do not indicate one in eight Albertans carry the virus.

DOXA Opener Takes the Gig Economy to Task

The gap between the potential and the reality of ‘platform’ work is disturbingly wide, argues filmmaker Shannon Walsh.

Frederick Blichert 3 May 2021 | TheTyee.ca
Frederick Blichert is a freelance journalist and film critic. His writing appears in Vice, Paste Magazine, Xtra, Motherboard and elsewhere. You can reach him here.


Watch the trailer for The Gig Is Up above. It plays the upcoming DOXA Documentary Film Festival.


The gig economy. The ghost economy. The platform economy. Task-based work.

Call it what you will, but there’s no denying that labour has been dramatically transformed by digital platforms divvying up tasks among armies of so-called independent contractors.

You’ve likely participated in this, maybe unwittingly. Even if you avoid Uber Eats and Amazon, the artificial intelligence behind your standard Google search is supplemented by humans, invisibly filling in data gaps for literal pennies.

In her new doc The Gig Is Up, which will open the upcoming DOXA Documentary Film Festival, Vancouver filmmaker Shannon Walsh talks to experts as well as workers who have no real protections and are severely exploited.

It’s mostly an exposé of what’s wrong with gig work, and why the promise of more freedom for workers has largely been broken, replaced by a dehumanizing reality in which workers are given ratings, like consumer products, and subject to the whims of unaccountable corporations — or worse, algorithms.

The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated this dehumanizing process. I remember my first contactless meal delivery in early 2020. Instead of the customary handoff, I received a notification on my phone that my meal had been delivered and was waiting at the door

.

My Uber Eats courier had even provided a photo of the brown paper bag sitting sadly on the tacky carpeting in the hall outside my apartment door. As I collected my dinner, I shouted a thank you towards the elevators, unsure if anyone was even there. “Thank you. Have a good night,” a disembodied voice shouted back.

I spoke with Shannon Walsh about The Gig Is Up ahead of its virtual premiere at DOXA. This interview has been condensed and lightly edited.

The Tyee: The gig economy is such a huge phenomenon, and I think it can be hard to grasp the link between something like an Uber driver in Vancouver and somebody analyzing images for Amazon’s AI in Nigeria. How do you go about making connections between these?

Shannon Walsh: I think that’s what is really different right now, and that sometimes gets skipped over. Like, “musicians are in the gig economy, it’s just the same.” But this idea that your work is being mediated by an algorithm, and that your manager is a rating system you have no control over in all of these areas is really the huge transformation that we’ve seen, and that we don’t yet understand how to deal with. [American anthropologist and author] Mary Gray calls it task-based work, which I think is a nice way to put it, because it just lets us understand the fact that it’s on-demand. People making themselves available for tasks is as valuable as the task-doing itself.

I think the tech industry has done a really good job of either telling us that this is a liberating form of work, or that there aren’t humans there at all. And neither of those things are true.

How important was it to you that this be a global project?

The thing that struck me so much as someone who’s been working on issues of globalization over the years is how flattened the platform economy has made the space for workers. So, someone in Florida is doing literally the same job for the same pay as someone in Nigeria or someone in India, and that was really striking to me, that you can see the globalization of inequality, really distinctly. It’s definitely different than anything I’d seen before.

A lot of gig workers speak very openly in the film. Were there fears of repercussions because of that abusive work model?

I was thinking a lot about that. I didn’t want to make a film that ended up putting people’s work in jeopardy, or their livelihoods in jeopardy, so I networked with folks that were already organizing… people who had already decided to become visible to some degree. Al, in the film, from San Francisco, talks about the fact that he’s got a legion of workers from the Yemeni community who won’t even speak out loud. They send Facebook messages to him to even ask questions.

You leave room for a certain sense of hope and opportunity. Do you feel like there’s room for a functional gig economy in the world?

I hope so, honestly. I am an artist myself. I get why people want flexibility and to be able to do creative work and not make their lives revolve around a 9 to 5. I think people are getting used to living with that kind of convenience, but it does have a cost.

I do think that there’s space to make change. We’ve done it before as a society. We don’t have child workers anymore. We got a weekend. It’s not impossible, right? There is a degree to which the vampire of capitalism is just getting worse and worse. But people are getting so damn tired of the whole thing that there’s a rise of co-operatives and collective ideas and a localism.

The film ends on something of an activist note, encouraging viewers to get involved by going to your website. Can you tell me a bit about how you’re trying to engage people outside the film?

I’ve started working with organizers in different local contexts to connect people with what’s happening where they live. Often, we watch social impact or political docs like this and think, “Oh gosh, how awful. Tell me to delete the app or something, and I’ll feel better.” But I don’t think it’s as easy as that. I think that’s really the answer to this big, globalized situation is to remember these are people in our communities, in our neighbourhoods, and a lot of them are organizing already.

I think the gig economy has started to feel a lot more real to a lot of us during this pandemic. You shot a lot of this before the pandemic and got to check in again with a lot of these people mid-pandemic. How did that affect your relationship to this material?

I think it did what you’re saying, and completely brought it to a much larger part of the population’s everyday lives. So, I hope that the public is more open to talking about it and thinking about it. The idea of these workers as “essential” never would have struck me, but that’s the role that they’ve ended up playing. I hope that the takeaway is some respect and giving some dignity to the people who are doing this work, and at the very least, recognizing that an algorithm’s rating is not a way to treat a human’s livelihood. We’re not on a reality TV show.

‘The Gig Is Up’ is available to stream through DOXA from anywhere in Canada, May 6 to 17. A Q&A with Walsh will be livestreamed on May 7. Learn more on the DOXA website.