Alberta Finance Minister Travis Toews joins race to replace outgoing Premier Jason Kenney

CBC/Radio-Canada - 

Finance Minister Travis Toews has entered the campaign for leadership of Alberta's governing United Conservative Party.

© Juris Graney/CBC

Alberta Finance Minister Travis Toews speaks to the media prior to tabling Budget 2020 on February 27, 2020.

Toews is the first candidate to officially join the race as the party prepares to replace outgoing Premier Jason Kenney.

Kenney plans to stay on in the top job until a permanent leader is chosen.

Toews, who had been rumoured as a contender, officially registered for the campaign on May 30, according to the Elections Alberta website.

Toews, the MLA for Grande Prairie-Wapiti, was first elected in April 2019 and was appointed finance minister.

Last week he declined to confirm or deny rumours about his pending campaign, telling reporters he wanted to focus on the business of the legislature.

If successful, he would become party leader and Alberta's new premier.

While no other candidates have officially registered with Elections Alberta, he likely won't be alone on the summer campaign trail.

Several candidates are already jostling to replace Kenney who announced his resignation earlier this month after earning 51.4 per cent in a party leadership review.

Former Opposition Wildrose Party leader and media personality Danielle Smith has said she'll be running in the leadership race, as has another former Wildrose and Opposition leader, Fort McMurray-Lac La Biche MLA Brian Jean.

Other ministers contemplating a run include Children's Services Minister Rebecca Schulz and Transportation Minister Rajan Sawhney.

A leadership Election Committee was appointed last week by the UCP.

The committee is responsible under UCP bylaws, for setting the rules and procedures for the race, such as timelines, entrance requirements and the format of the ballot.

The party is keen to find a replacement for Kenney before the fall sitting of the legislature begins on October 31.

It's also the last summer before the next scheduled provincial election date on or before May 29, 2023.

Alberta’s political culture and history played a part in Jason Kenney’s downfall

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney speaks in response to the results of the United Conservative Party leadership review in Calgary on May 18, 2022. 

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Dave Chidley

THE CONVERSATION
Published: May 24, 2022 

Jason Kenney’s imminent resignation as Alberta premier shows that even leaders with track records of success can fall victim to unpredictable crises, poor leadership choices and the unspoken norms of provincial politics.

Kenney failed because he didn’t fully understand Alberta’s populist and leader-centric culture and its role in creating expectations about how the province should be governed. But even though he faced a challenging set of problems, the final outcome is Kenney’s own responsibility.

What makes Kenney’s poor showing in the recent leadership review so striking is the fact that he played a key role in the Stephen Harper government’s electoral success and the creation of its policy agenda.

He represented something that some contemporary Canadian conservatives struggle with: a coherent, consistent and electorally viable conservative approach to governing.

Read more: Ontario election: 4 ways Doug Ford has changed the province's politics

In addition to his roots as the director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, Kenney was also seen as the key architect of the Conservative Party of Canada’s success in appealing to suburban immigrant communities through the careful articulation of shared social conservative values.

That’s why Kenney was able to establish himself as the heir apparent to Alberta’s conservative movement in 2017. In doing so, he managed to unite two bitterly divided parties, the Progressive Conservatives and Wildrose, into the United Conservative Party (UCP) and delivered a big majority win in the 2018 provincial election.

Alberta Wildrose leader Brian Jean and Kenney announce a unity deal in Edmonton on May 18, 2017. Five years later to the day, Kenney is out as leader of the United Conservative Party – and Alberta premier. 

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson

Started on a high as premier

As premier, Kenney not only had the support of his large caucus, but he also had the majority of the province behind him to pursue his promises to expand the energy sector and take a more confrontational stance against what some Albertans believe is an increasingly hostile federal government.

Unlike the centrism pursued by some of his fellow Conservative premiers, Kenney continued to run Canada’s most consistently conservative government throughout his tenure, introducing corporate tax cuts, reduced spending, strong deregulation and overhauls to the school curriculum.

Nevertheless, before finishing his first term, Kenney’s premiership is now effectively over following his poor showing (51.4 per cent) in the UCP’s leadership review.

What went wrong? Some observers have pointed to the UCP’s ultra-conservative faction that’s punished Kenney for his occasional support of COVID-19 restrictions. Others also cite Kenney’s autocratic leadership style.

These are both only partially true. A full understanding of what occurred requires a broader look at Alberta’s general political culture and history.

Alberta is anti-establishment

Although historically supportive of conservative governments, Alberta’s conservatism is consistently overstated. In addition to being the home of notable leftist movements, polls have consistently shown that Albertans are in line with the rest of Canada in supporting high levels of government spending and interventions to address issues related to poverty, the environment and discrimination.

Alberta is better understood by examining how it’s been shaped by the anti-establishment, grassroots and populist sentiments that are a feature of both left and right.

This is largely the product of history, because Alberta’s role as a frontier society fostered the belief that prosperity and well-being would come through self-reliance, fairness and the wisdom of ordinary people, rather than tradition, authority or hierarchy. This has come to be romanticized as the prototype of the contrarian, free-thinking Albertan “maverick.”

Riders and their horses pass through a canola field on an Alberta summer’s day. 

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh

The province’s ongoing reliance on oil and gas exports has historically united Albertans, while also placing the federal government in the role of the villain for its perceived hostile interventions in Alberta’s energy sector.

This populist culture is evident in direct democracy initiatives at the local level that has allowed citizens to have a more immediate role in decision-making through practices like referendums and the ability to recall elected politicians.

But it’s also created a leader-centric provincial dynamic. Through the common practice of attacking the federal government or other supposedly hostile forces, several leaders have found success in positioning themselves as the authentic voice of Alberta.

Read more: Jason Kenney won by portraying himself as the Guardian of Alberta

When combined with Albertans’ general lack of partisan attachment and a majoritarian electoral system, this has allowed these leaders to create an illusion of unanimity through substantial electoral wins, despite the fact that a large portion of Albertans may oppose them.

It’s a tricky dynamic: despite having significant power, leaders are also pressured to be effective, fair, democratic and anti-elitist towards the public and their own caucus. Alberta has had popular, larger-than-life leaders, but it’s also had a number of premiers who — due to economic downturns, personal scandals or inadequate caucus management — can be regarded as failures.
Uneasy alliance

What puts Kenney in the second category is the fact that enough of his party lacked confidence in his leadership. Wildrose party members, who Kenney had successfully merged into the UCP coalition, initially liked his contrarian tradition of opposing what they viewed to be the elitist, self-interested and out-of-touch power brokers in the mainstream PC party. To them, Kenney had simply returned to the old form.

The trends were there before the pandemic. The race between Kenney and Brian Jean, the former leader of Wildrose, for control of the UCP left a bitter aftertaste due to allegations of criminal identity fraud that is the subject of an ongoing RCMP probe.

Brian Jean arrives at the United Conservative caucus in Calgary to determine next steps after Kenney announced he is stepping down. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh

Former Kenney staffers also alleged a toxic environment of long hours, sexual harassment and alcoholism. Discontented caucus members also complained of a premier’s office that was insular and failed to consult with caucus which, in their view, contributed to many of the government’s mistakes.

The province’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic entrenched this opposition. The response itself was inconsistent as Kenney manoeuvred between a public that supported restrictions and a more skeptical caucus.

His promise to totally reopen in the summer of 2021 was his biggest mistake because a subsequent outbreak forced Kenney to backtrack and simultaneously disappoint both sides. Kenney’s own personal integrity was also compromised, as both he and cabinet ministers were caught violating their own restrictions.

Kenney’s failure, therefore, is largely the immediate consequences of his own leadership choices. But there’s a broader context. The premier not only faced an unprecedented crisis, but dealt with a profoundly contrarian wing of the Albertan conservative movement. Kenney, to his credit, made an effort to consult and accommodate these voices once dissent began to congeal.

But Alberta provincial politics is a gamble. Although leaders have the potential to become era-defining personalities — think Ralph Klein or Peter Lougheed — they can also be quickly cast aside. Kenney’s fall from grace is a vivid illustration of the volatility of the province’s political landscape.

Author

Sam Routley
PhD Student, Political Science, Western University

The folly of the work-life balance



The TV show ‘Severance’ has employees separate their work self from their home self completely. (Apple TV+)

THE CONVERSATION
Published: May 31, 2022

Ontario employers have until June 2 to craft a written policy on disconnecting from work. Will companies take inspiration from the television series Severance where workers volunteer to have their work self and home self surgically severed?

Although companies are unlikely to be inserting chips into the brains of their employees anytime soon, the show points to the ultimate paradox of the work-life balance: relieving the stress of work or home life requires complete submission to a powerful corporation that takes control of the worker’s body.

Severance’s dystopian message mimics today’s all-encompassing digital capitalism: there is no escape.

The pandemic threw into disarray any semblance of a work-life balance, and Ontario’s right-to-disconnect legislation reflects that working from home, for at least part of the week, has become permanent.

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The pandemic was not the beginning of this disarray, however, but rather its culmination. Right-to-disconnect policies preceded the pandemic by at least six years.
Separation of work from home life

The work-life balance is about more than shutting off devices or abstaining from emails and meetings after 6 p.m. — which is the gist of Ontario’s definition of disconnecting from work.

Monte McNaughton, Ontario’s minister of labour, training and skills development, describes his rational for the policy: “I believe we should be able to separate work time and personal time. I want people to be able to spend quality time with their kids and their spouses.”

Imagining work as separate from home life has its roots in the Anglo-American suburban model: drive along newly built highways to the downtown office in the morning and retreat home to family in the suburban idyll.

The physical separation of work from home is no longer easy. (T M/Unsplash)

One of the keenest observers of the separation of work from family life was suburban planner and theorist Humphrey Carver, who wrote in 1962 that bureaucratic work lacked the nobility of labour, so the living spaces in the suburbs should encourage people to leave their work behind, and let them be consumers and community members.

Severance’s surgical procedure means that access to memories become spatially dictated. When severed workers arrive at Lumon Industries, they enter the elevator as their home self, and leave the elevator as their work self.

These scenes of coming to and leaving work were shot in the Bell Labs Holmdel office park in suburban New Jersey. The complex was constructed over a five-year period (1957-62) and designed by noted modernist architect Eero Saarinen, who pioneered a new genre of architecture: the suburban corporate campus.

The building is a monument to the modernist esthetics of separation: generous parking lots, artificial lakes, rustic surroundings, an oval ring road that separates cars and pedestrians and a water tower that looks like it grew right out of American technological optimism and domination.

Bell Labs Holmdel Complex functioned for 44 years as a research and development facility and is where several scenes of ‘Severance’ were shot.

  (MBisanz/Wikimedia Commons), CC BY-NC-SA

Separation

If the suburban corporate office park was part of the evolution of work—life, futurist Alvin Toffler took it one step further in his book, The Third Wave. He wrote, overturn the 9-to-5 workday, erode the distinction between work and home life and turn the home into an electronic cottage. Basically, a worker living in a home equipped with a personal computer and networked connection has no need for an office.

Read more: Working from home during COVID-19: What do employees really want?

Forty years before the pandemic forced us into working from home, Toffler made the electronic cottage and flexibility and flextime, the key aspects of the shift to post-industrial work.

Toffler saw it differently — post-capitalist and post-socialist — but it turned out to be ready made for the digital capitalism of Amazon, Google and Apple, whose business model depends on the erosion of boundaries: ordering goods from home, working, editing and meeting at home, all on phones, iPads and laptops.

Toffler was an influential public figure, but he was simply charting changes that began in the 1970s as corporations asked for, if not demanded, the whole you, body and soul and promoted flexibility — corporate speak for the end of permanent work and the rise of precarious and unstable employment.

In ‘Severance’ work life and home life being separate means at work, the characters never feel rested. (Apple TV+)

Separation has always been in part artificial, particularly for women managing the household, whose unpaid labour was, and is often still, exploited and inseparable from the home. This was exacerbated during the worst waves of the pandemic. One sub-plot in Severance has women undergoing the procedure to out-source their labour — the baby birthing kind — to their surrogate self.

The irony of Severance is that the “work you” feels like you have never left the office, even though your actual body has recharged away from work.

Edelman, a global communications company, which instituted a policy of no email between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. in 2013, offered this reason for the policy: “We really want to encourage that space because when you have a bit of recharge time, you actually are going to be a better version of yourself for our clients.”

Lumon’s philosophy is the ultimate, unresolved contradiction: united in severance. It is an apt description for the state of the work-life balance.

Author

Steven Logan
Postdoctoral Researcher, Institute for Communication, Culture, Information and Technology, University of Toronto

More long-term care beds in Ontario won't help without well-paid, well-trained staff

Andrew Costa, Associate Professor |

 Schlegel Chair in Clinical Epidemiology & Aging, McMaster University

The Conversation

 - Yesterday 

Days away from the Ontario election, with health care a top issue, what are the three major parties’ proposals for fixing Ontario’s chronic long-term care problems?


© THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn

A resident chats with workers at Orchard Villa Long-Term Care in Pickering, Ont., in June 2020.

The governing Conservatives are planning to open 30,000 more beds and upgrade existing facilities.

The Liberals plan to end for-profit long-term care and increase the proportion of at-home care, increasing spending by 10 per cent annually.

The New Democrats would add long-term care spaces, help seniors live at home longer and upgrade the pay of the personal support workers who provide most of the physical care in nursing homes and home-care settings.

I wouldn’t believe any of their promises.

Their plans gloss over what is really going on — we haven’t been training nearly enough health-care workers necessary to care for our elderly. The promised new beds and money for services require people to actually work at long-term care facilities and provide care, which we don’t have.

Let’s not blame the politicians completely though. All of this was predicted years ago, yet it took a pandemic for many of us to wake up to the reality. Our elder-care system is in trouble and Ontario’s fastest growing demographic faces a grim future. Many of us may shortly find ourselves or our loved ones without care.

COVID-19 devastation

We were all saddened, often angered, by what we saw happening in Ontario’s long-term care homes in the early months of the pandemic. COVID-19 swept into facilities filled with vulnerable residents but severely lacking in well-trained, adequately paid, experienced professional care workers.

The results were tragic — many COVID-19 deaths in Ontario occurred in long-term care homes while many more residents were sickened, forced into quarantine and separated from their families.


© THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn

A sea of ornamental poppies in front of the Main Street Terrace long-term care home in Toronto in November 2020. The home experienced a COVID-19 outbreak among residents and staff.

The pandemic exposed problems that had long festered. Many of them boiled down to not having enough staff, or staff who weren’t trained sufficiently and who lacked experience. That’s because there is simply not enough money being spent on people to look after us as we age.

Many of us, at some point, will cease to be able to live independently. Research suggests we’ll likely need care in a residential home or, if fortunate, in our own home. Many of us will be dependent on others at some point … but who will we depend on?

Long-term care is, at its root, straightforward. Vulnerable people, many of them older, need skilled, trustworthy caregivers to help them move around, bathe and dress.

While technology and automation have made many other sectors much more efficient, their use is naturally limited in long-term care or home-based care, since almost all the work is one-to-one skilled personal care. Health care, consequently, requires paying people to help other people.

The backbone of elder care

Whether care happens at home or in a facility, most care is provided by personal support workers, who are the unregulated backbone of elder care. Their jobs are stressful and laborious, and they don’t get paid enough. As a result, there is high staff turnover, which makes it difficult to develop an experienced, professional and committed workforce.

Important care is also provided by nurses, therapists, physicians and others who are also not incentivized to care for our elders.

More beds will not help unless those beds come with real staff. This has been made plain during the pandemic, when anecdotal reports circulate that much of the COVID-19 emergency care funds were returned because there wasn’t enough staff available to pay to expand care.

The number of personal care workers, nurses and others has declined per capita in Canada, and is well below comparable countries.

It’s no surprise that burnout among care workers is at an all-time high, and many are working reduced hours or leaving health care altogether. It’s also no surprise that as society ages, so do care workers, compounding the issue.

What Ontario most needs is far more people caring for our elders and other vulnerable populations, and for those caregivers to be better trained and better paid.

So when political candidates talk about their long-term care proposals, let’s remember there isn’t much point unless we train and adequately compensate enough workers to care for our loved ones.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.

Read more:
Non-profit long-term care homes have lost too many residents to COVID-19

How some OECD countries helped control COVID-19 in long-term care homes

Andrew Costa receives funding from: Canadian Institutes for Health Research, Public Health Agency of Canada, Health Canada, Retirement Homes Regulatory Authority. I do not accept private funding, gifts, or fees. I hold the position of Schlegel Chair at McMaster University, which was established by a gift by the Schlegel family - who own and operate Schlegel Villages; a chain of long-term care and retirement homes. Schlegel Chair endowment was a charitable donation to McMaster. I was appointed to Chair by institution and have no obligation to the donor.

Archaeologists discover passageways in 3,000-year-old Peruvian temple



By REUTERS 


A team of archaeologists has discovered a network of passageways under a more than 3,000-year-old temple in the Peruvian Andes.

Chavin de Huantar temple, located in the north-central Andes, was once a religious and administrative center for people across the region.

The passageways were found earlier in May and have features believed to have been built earlier than the temple's labyrinthine galleries, according to John Rick, an archaeologist at Stanford University who was involved in the excavation.


Mount Huandoy, Callejon de Huaylas, Ancash, Peru 

Located 3,200 meters above sea level, at least 35 underground passageways have been found over the years of excavations, which all connect with each other and were built between 1,200 and 200 years B.C. in the foothills of the Andes.

"It's a passageway, but it's very different. It's a different form of construction. It has features from earlier periods that we've never seen in passageways,"John Rick, archaeologist at Stanford University

"It's a passageway, but it's very different. It's a different form of construction. It has features from earlier periods that we've never seen in passageways," Rick said.
History

Chavin de Huantar, declared a World Heritage Site in 1985, was the inspiration and name of the operation carried out when the Peruvian armed forces built a network of tunnels to rescue 72 people taken hostage by the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) rebel group at the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima in 1997.

Rare Saiga antelope population now over a million in Kazakhstan

Agence France-Presse
May 31, 2022

In 2015, a nasal bacteria wiped out more than half of the world’s Saiga antelope population 

Abduaziz MADYAROV AFP/File

The population of endangered Saiga antelopes in Kazakhstan is now over 1.3 million, the ecology ministry said Tuesday, in the latest boost to a species threatened by poaching and disease.

In 2015, around 200,000 of the antelopes -- well over half the total global population at the time -- were wiped out by what scientists later determined was a nasal bacterium that spread in unusually warm and humid conditions.

But last year brought good news as the numbers rebounded from 334,000 in 2019 to 842,000 across the centre, west and northwest of the vast Central Asian state.

The April aerial count ahead of this year's spring calving took the population to 1,318,000, according to a dataset shared with AFP by the ecology ministry.

The former Soviet country's vast steppe is home to a majority of the world's Saiga with Russia's Kalmykia region and Mongolia hosting smaller numbers.

Poaching is a persistent threat to the Saiga, known for its distinctive bulbous nose, and is fueled by demand for their horn in traditional Chinese medicine.

Kazakhstan's leaders pledged to intensify their crackdown on poaching after two state rangers were killed by poachers in 2019.

But the success of conservation efforts have raised fears that Kazakhstan will once again allow hunting, with a ban introduced in the late 1990s running out in 2023.

© 2022 AFP

Daniel Defense, the US gunmaker is notorious for ‘aggressive marketing’ to young adults

Agence France-Presse
May 31, 2022

This illustration photo shows the Twitter page of Daniel Defense displayed on a mobile phone in Arlington, Virginia, US on May 25, 2022. © Olivier Douliery, AFP

The perpetrator of the massacre in Uvalde, Texas in which 19 children and two adults lost their lives on May 24 – the worst US school shooting in a decade – used a semi-automatic weapon manufactured by Daniel Defense, one of the most aggressive marketers of assault weapons to ordinary Americans, notably young adults.

A week after the Uvalde school shooting, Daniel Defense shied away from attending the National Rifle Association convention.

“Daniel Defense is not attending the NRA meeting due to the horrifying tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, where one of our products was criminally misused,” the company’s vice president of marketing Steve Reed said in a statement. “We believe this week is not the appropriate time to be promoting our products in Texas at the NRA meeting.”

Indeed, the killer had acquired an AR-15 DDM4 V7 – Daniel Defense’s flagship semi-automatic rifle – to “celebrate” his 18th birthday. A few days later, he entered Robb Elementary School and carried out the massacre that revulsed the world, and shocked the US, even if it was the country's 27th school shooting in 2022.

“We are deeply saddened by the tragic events in Texas this week,” read a statement on Daniel Defense’s website posted in the wake of the shooting. “Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families and community devastated by this evil act.”

Daniel Defense also took the opportunity to remove a message – on its website’s home page until the day after the Uvalde massacre – promoting a lottery with a prize of $15,000 to spend on guns or ammunition.

This kind of advertising is typical of Daniel Defense’s aggressive promotional approach. “Daniel Defense is basically the poster child of this egregious, aggressive marketing,” Ryan Busse, a former executive at the gun manufacturer Kimber, now a prominent critic of the US gun industry, told The New York Times.

One particular image – which Daniel Defense posted on Twitter ten days before the Uvalde massacre – is emblematic of its outré marketing style. It shows a toddler clutching the same type of semi-automatic rifle the Uvalde shooter used, with the line: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”

An online backlash followed the discovery of this tweet after the Uvalde massacre – prompting Daniel Defense to make its Twitter account private and limit people’s ability to comment on its Facebook page.

Trump fan CEO

This is not the first time, however, that Daniel Defense has received an avalanche of criticism for manufacturing weapons subsequently used in mass shootings. Four of its semi-automatic rifles were part of the arsenal of the shooter who killed 58 people in Las Vegas in 2017. At the time, Daniel Defense sent its “thoughts and prayers” to victims’ families – but did not change anything about its business practices.

Marty Daniel, the company’s CEO and founder, only expressed regret once – after 27 people were killed in a shooting at a Baptist church in Texas in 2017. Daniel endorsed slightly tightening gun control laws in the aftermath of this massacre, as did the NRA. But he changed his mind a few days later.

Daniel Defense’s website portrays the company’s CEO, a Donald Trump supporter and big donor to Republican candidates, as a jack of all trades who sold windows and fireplaces before finding his métier in gun manufacturing.

It also states that Daniel developed a love for firearms after failing to make his mark in golf. “Daniel Defense got its start because Marty’s golf game sucked,” the website reads. “He would spend most of his free time unwinding on the golf course, until the day a friend invited him to shoot his AR.”

Ever-widening audience

Marty Daniel founded the company in 2000 and won his first contract for the US Army two years later. His company has had more than 100 Pentagon contracts since then.

But Daniel Defense has long been keen to market its wares to private US citizens – courting the general public in its promotional efforts since 2004, upon the expiry of the ban on selling new assault weapons for civilian use that was signed into law by then president Bill Clinton in 1994.

Since then, the company has been keen to convince American gun enthusiasts that they are entitled to the same AR-15s as the soldiers it has equipped over the past two decades – making this point explicit in an advert it unsuccessfully sought to air in local media markets during the Super Bowl in 2014.

Yet Daniel Defense’s marketing ploys have reached an ever-widening audience. The firm is now one of the US’s 25 largest firearms sellers in a crowded market for its niche, with more than 500 companies making semi-automatic rifles since 2004.

The AR-15 DDM4 V7 used by the Uvalde shooter is one of 19 models Daniel Defense makes. These are often marketed at young people. A recent advertising clip shows a teenager practicing shooting, and the company has repeatedly used clips from video games like "Call of Duty" and films such as the "Star Wars" franchise to appeal to fans.

A more famous gun manufacturer, Remington, used the same tricks to sell its weapons to young people. That cost Remington dearly when families of the victims of the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut were awarded a payout of $72 million in a lawsuit for irresponsible marketing, after the shooter had used an AR-15 produced by one of the company’s subsidiaries.

This article was translated from the original in French.

French ex-chambermaid runs for MP after labor battle

Agence France-Presse
May 31, 2022

Rachel Keke, 48, will run for the new left-wing alliance in France's parliamentary elections in June JOEL SAGET AFP

Former chambermaid Rachel Keke took on her employers and won a grueling battle for better working conditions in the Paris hotel where she cleaned. Now she's running to be an MP.

Keke, 48, will run on a ticket for a new left-wing alliance in France's parliamentary polls in June.

She faces French President Emmanuel Macron's former sports minister, Roxana Maracineanu, in the fight for a seat in the southeastern Paris suburbs.

"I will beat her. She doesn't live here. She's not from the working-class suburbs," Keke told AFP as she campaigned in the district of Chevilly-Larue on the outskirts of the capital.

"What are you coming here for?," Keke said, as if addressing her rival.

"We are the ones who live in deprived areas and do key jobs. We are the ones who are held in contempt and are exploited. So let us defend ourselves in parliament."

Centrist Macron is seeking a legislative majority to push through his domestic agenda following his re-election in April. The left-wing alliance, made up of new faces such as Keke's, threatens to block his programme.

Keke was one of around 20 chambermaids -- most originally from sub-Saharan Africa -- who defied their employers at an Ibis hotel in northwestern Paris to demand better pay and working conditions.

Nearly two years later, in May 2021, the fight against global hotel giant Accor, which owns the Ibis brand, ended in victory. They won a pay increase of between 250 and 500 euros ($270-540) per month.

-'Leader of the masses'-

MPs from the far-left France Unbowed (LFI) party supported the women throughout the campaign, leading Keke to campaign for them during the presidential election.

But running for MP was not part of her plans, until local LFI official Hadi Issahnane suggested it to her.

"We're not far from her being a symbol of our political struggle -- quite literally. She naturally embodies it," Issahnane told AFP.

LFI MP Eric Coquerel said Keke "has something magnetic about her".

"She's strong, she finds the right words and doesn’t need to read from cues when she speaks".

"She's what I call a leader of the masses," he added.

Keke was born in Ivory Coast. Her mother who sold clothes and her father was a bus driver.


After her mother died when she was 12, she looked after her brothers and sisters.

The mother-of-five arrived in France, aged 26, in 2000.

"I love France," Keke said, recalling the stories she heard as a child about her grandfather, who fought in World War II in the southwestern French city of Pau.

Keke started off as a hairdresser before becoming a hotel cleaning lady.

"After my first day I came home aching all over. It was as if I'd been hit everywhere. It was really hard," she said.

Cleaning is a job that "destroys the body", she said.

-'Symbolic importance'-

LFI leader Jean-Luc Melenchon emerged as the dominant force on the left in April's presidential election.

He missed out on the run-off vote against Macron by a whisker, beaten into third place by far-right candidate Marine Le Pen.

After Macron's win, Melenchon immediately urged voters to hand the left a parliamentary majority to block the president's pro-business reforms. He himself is seeking to become prime minister.

Part of Melenchon's strategy is to push forward new faces such as Keke -- a candidate of "symbolic importance", according to Emeric Brehier, a former Socialist lawmaker now with the Fondation Jean-Jaures think-tank.

"The left are saying, 'We represent the real working classes and we have representatives of these classes,'" Brehier told AFP.

Stephane Ravacley, a baker who went on hunger strike in eastern France to protest at the planned deportation of his young Guinean apprentice, is also running on the left-wing ticket.

Recent opinion polls show the presidential majority and the left-wing alliance are neck-and-neck in the popular vote.

But the two-stage election -- the first round on June 12 and run-offs on June 19 -- and the fact the LFI's popularity is concentrated in specific geographic areas, suggest Macron's bloc is likely to retain a majority in parliament.

Keke said she was not afraid of being surrounded by professional politicians, mostly from a different social class.

"People know the status of a chambermaid. They know I don't have a Master's degree," she said.

"If I'm asked a question I don't understand, I won't answer. The media need to get used to it."

© 2022 AFP

Colombia’s Trump May Be Headed for the Presidential Palace

The Colombian establishment is lining up behind Rodolfo Hernández, a populist businessman with an incendiary streak, to defeat the leftist former rebel Gustavo Petro.

Rodolfo Hernández after voting in Bucaramanga, Colombia, on Sunday.

Credit...Schneyder Mendoza/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


By Julie Turkewitz
May 30, 2022

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Colombia’s political landscape has shifted remarkably in a matter of 24 hours.

For months, pollsters predicted that Gustavo Petro, a former rebel-turned-senator making a bid to be the nation’s first leftist president, would head to a June presidential runoff against Federico Gutiérrez, a conservative establishment candidate who had argued that a vote for Mr. Petro amounted to “a leap into the void.’’

Instead, on Sunday, voters gave the top two spots to Mr. Petro and Rodolfo Hernández, a former mayor and wealthy businessman with a populist, anti-corruption platform whose outsider status, incendiary statements and single-issue approach to politics have earned him comparisons to Donald Trump.

The vote — for a leftist who has made a career assailing the conservative political class and for a relatively unknown candidate with no formal party backing — represented a repudiation of the conservative establishment that has governed Colombia for generations.

But it also remade the political calculus for Mr. Petro. Now, it is Mr. Petro who is billing himself as the safe change, and Mr. Hernández as the dangerous leap into the void.

“There are changes that are not changes,” Mr. Petro said at a campaign event on Sunday night, “they are suicides.”

Mr. Hernández once called himself a follower of Adolf Hitler, has suggested combining major ministries to save money, and says that as president he plans to declare a state of emergency to deal with corruption, leading to fears that he could shut down Congress or suspend mayors.

Still, Colombia’s right-wing establishment has begun lining up behind him, bringing many of their votes with them, and making a win for Mr. Petro look like an uphill climb.

On Sunday, Mr. Gutiérrez, a former mayor of Medellín, the country’s second-largest city, threw his support behind Mr. Hernández, saying his intention was to “safeguard democracy.”

But Fernando Posada, a political scientist, said the move was also the establishment right’s last-ditch effort to block Mr. Petro, whose plan to remake the Colombian economy “puts at risk many of the interests of the traditional political class.”

“The Colombian right has reached such an extremely disastrous stage,” said Mr. Posada, “that they prefer a government that offers them nothing as long as it is not Petro.”

Gustavo Petro, flanked by his wife Verónica Alcocer and vice-presidential candidate Francia Márquez at the end of the first round of presidential elections in Bogotá.

Credit...Federico Rios for The New York Times

Mr. Hernández, who had gained limited attention in most of the country until just a few weeks ago, is a one-time mayor of the mid-sized city of Bucaramanga in the northern part of the country. He made his fortune in construction, building low-income housing in the 1990s.

At 77, Mr. Hernández built much of his support on TikTok, once slapped a city councilman on camera and recently told The Washington Post that he had a “messianic” effect on his supporters, who he compared to the “brainwashed” hijackers who destroyed the twin towers on 9/11.

Pressed on whether such a comparison was problematic, he rejected the idea. “What I’m comparing is that after you get into that state, you don’t change your position. You don’t change it.”

Until just a few days ago, Colombia’s political narrative seemed simple: For generations, politics had been dominated by a few wealthy families, and more recently, by a hard-line conservatism known as Uribismo, founded by the country’s powerful political kingmaker, former president Álvaro Uribe.

But voter frustration with poverty, inequality and insecurity, which was exacerbated by the pandemic, along with a growing acceptance of the left following the country’s 2016 peace process with its largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, seemed to shift the dynamic.

By 2022, Mr. Petro, long the combative face of the Colombian left, thought it was his moment. And in the months leading to the May 29 election, voters flocked to his proposals — a broad expansion of social programs, a halt to all new oil drilling in a country dependent on oil exports, and a focus on social justice.

The story line was: left versus right, change versus continuity, the elite versus the rest of the country.

But Mr. Hernández’s improbable rise reflects both a rejection of the conservative elite and of Mr. Petro.

It also reveals that the narrative was never so simple.

Mr. Hernández, who won 28 percent of the vote, has attracted a broad swath of voters eager for change who could never get on board with Mr. Petro.

Mr. Petro is a former member of a rebel group called the M-19 in a country where rebels terrorized the population for decades. And he is a leftist in a nation that shares a border with Venezuela, a country plunged into a humanitarian crisis by authoritarians who claim the leftist banner.

Mr. Hernández, with his fuzzy orange hair and businessman’s approach to politics, has also attracted voters who say they want someone with Trumpian ambition, and are not troubled if he is prone to tactlessness. (Years after saying he was a follower of Adolf Hitler, Mr. Hernández clarified that he meant to say he was a follower of Albert Einstein.)

Federico Gutiérrez, a conservative establishment candidate, at a rally in Parques del Rio, this month.

Credit...Nathalia Angarita for The New York Times

Two of the country’s biggest issues are poverty and lack of opportunity, and Mr. Hernández appeals to people who say he can help them escape both.

“I think that he looks at Colombia as a possibility of growth. And that’s how I think that he differs from the other candidates,” said Salvador Rizo, 26, a tech consultant in Medellín. “I think that the other candidates are watching a house that is on fire and they want to extinguish that fire and reveal the house. What I think the view of Rodolfo is: That there’s a house that can be a massive hotel in the future.”

He has also been a relentless critic of corruption, a chronic issue that some Colombians call a cancer.

Early on, he made a pledge not to take campaign money from private entities, and says he is funding his presidential bid himself.

“Political people steal shamelessly,” said Álvaro Mejía, 29, who runs a solar energy company in Cali.

He says he prefers Mr. Hernández to Mr. Petro, a longtime senator, precisely because of his lack of political experience.

The question is whether Mr. Hernández will be able to maintain that outsider status in the weeks leading up to the runoff, as key political figures align themselves to his campaign.

Just minutes after he won second place on Sunday, two powerful right-wing senators, María Fernanda Cabal and Paloma Valencia, pledged their support for him, and Mr. Posada predicted that others were likely to follow.

Mr. Uribe, who backed Mr. Hernández’s run for mayor in 2015, is an increasingly polemic figure who turns off many Colombians. Mr. Posada predicted that he would not throw his weight behind Mr. Hernández, so as not to cost him voters.

Former President Álvaro Uribe at the Supreme Court in Bogotá, in February.

Credit...Juan Barreto/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

If Mr. Hernández can walk that difficult line — courting the establishment’s votes without tarnishing his image — it could be difficult for Mr. Petro to beat him.

Many political analysts believe that the roughly 8.5 million votes Mr. Petro got on Sunday is his ceiling, and that many of Mr. Gutiérrez’s five million votes will be added to the six million Mr. Hernández received.

As the results became clear, Mr. Hernández’s supporters rushed to his campaign headquarters on one of the main avenues in Bogotá, the capital.

Many wore bright yellow campaign T-shirts, hats and ponchos, which they said they’d bought themselves instead of being handed out free by the campaign, in keeping with Mr. Hernández’s cost-cutting principles.

“I have never seen a person with characteristics like those of the engineer Rodolfo,” said Liliana Vargas, a 39-year old lawyer, using a common nickname for Mr. Hernández, who is a civil engineer. “He is a political being who is not a politician,” she said. “It is the first time that I am totally excited to participate in a democratic election in my country.”

Nearby, Juan Sebastián Rodríguez, 39, a leader of Mr. Hernández’s Bogotá campaign, called the candidate “a rock star.”

“He is a phenomenon,” he said. “We are sure that we are going to win.

Mr. Petro and Mr. Hernández on the front pages of local newspapers on Monday.

Credit...Yuri Cortez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Genevieve Glatsky contributed reporting from Bogotá.
Colombia’s Election

In Colombia, a Leftist and a Right-Wing Populist Head for June Runoff
May 29, 2022

Will Colombia Elect Its First Leftist Leader?
May 26, 2022

Teen Mother. Housekeeper. Activist. Vice President?
May 6, 2022

Julie Turkewitz is the Andes bureau chief, covering Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Suriname and Guyana. Before moving to South America, she was a national correspondent covering the American West. @julieturkewitz

A version of this article appears in print on May 31, 2022, Section A, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: A Populist Candidate in Colombia Is Shaking Up the Field. 

Right-wing snowflakes love to whine about free speech — this socialist went to jail for it

Matthew Rozsa,

 Salon
May 29, 2022

Eugene V. Debs (Wikimedia Commons)

Nothing divides Americans like the question of free speech: What it means, who deserves it and who does not. Conservatives like to complain about being "censored" or "canceled" for their attacks on LGBTQ rights or mask mandates, but lately have started trying to impose all kinds of restrictions on speech in education, especially on issues of gender identity, sexual orientation and race.

When it comes to the legendary Eugene Victor Debs, however — a leading labor and political activist in the late 19th and early 20th century — there's just no question: He was a martyr for free speech and a case study in overcoming oppression. When Debs was sent to prison for speaking truth to "the man" — and in this case, it really was The Man, meaning President Woodrow Wilson — he fought back by deciding to run for president himself.

RELATED: We celebrated "free speech" this week — just as it's slipping away from us

Our story begins on June 16, 1918, on a balmy afternoon in Canton, Ohio, where Debs was scheduled to speak at the state's Socialist Convention, and then at a picnic — in fact, one named for him. Debs was then a 62-year-old veteran of the labor movement, who had helped found the American Railway Union (ARU) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and had gradually moved leftward out of the Democratic Party to various socialist organizations. In the 1900 presidential election, he was the Social Democratic Party's presidential nominee; after that party imploded, he was the Socialist Party candidate in 1904, 1908 and 1912. Voter turnout in that last election was so low that although Debs only got about 900,000 votes, that was about 6% of the total — probably the most impressive electoral performance by a left-wing independent in American history. (Ralph Nader got almost 2.9 million votes in the 2000 election, for example, but that was only 2.7% of the total.)

That election made Debs into something of a celebrity, and America's most powerful socialist, articulating an anti-capitalist, anti-corporate ideology that would inspire generations yet to come (including Bernie Sanders, who took Debs as something of a role model). By 1918, however, Debs was preoccupied by foreign policy. After considerable hesitation, the U.S. had committed troops to fight in World War I, which Debs believed was driven by irrational nationalist rhetoric and a combination of imperialism and capitalism run amok. (The term "military-industrial complex" was not yet in use, but Debs would surely have embraced it.) To him, the so-called Great War was about the working class suffering and dying for the benefit of the wealthy few.

Unsurprisingly, Debs was also opposed to the military draft, which put him at odds with Woodrow Wilson's administration, which had just passed an infamous law called the Espionage Act, which, among other things, made it a federal crime to interfere with conscription. When Debs spoke in Canton on that June afternoon, the audience included agents from the Department of Justice, eager to see if they could ensnare him in something that might conceivably violate the law. Debs was aware of the risk, warned his audience that he had to be "extremely careful, prudent, as to what I say, and even more careful and more prudent as to how I say it." Maybe he was daring the agents to come after him for whatever he said, and they took the bait, as did a federal prosecutor named Edwin Wertz, after Debs said this:

They have always taught you that it is your patriotic duty to go to war and slaughter yourselves at their command. You have never had a voice in the war. The working class who make the sacrifices, who shed the blood, have never yet had a voice in declaring war.

As soon as he was charged under the Espionage Act, Debs knew he would be convicted. It was essentially a political show trial, an attempt by Wilson to intimidate left-wing critics into silence, in a wartime climate of patriotism Americans were even more suspicious of the left than usual. Debs refused to call defense witnesses, speaking directly to the jury to explain why he was unwilling to play the court's game. After his inevitable conviction, he delivered a statement to the court that would later be immortalized:

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

I listened to all that was said in this court in support and justification of this prosecution, but my mind remains unchanged. I look upon the Espionage Law as a despotic enactment in flagrant conflict with democratic principles and with the spirit of free institutions …

Debs' 1920 campaign wasn't so much about anything he said or did as about the symbolic importance of "Prisoner 9653" running for president.

On the day Debs went to prison, a protest march in Cleveland was attacked by police, leading to the May Day riots of 1919. The Socialist Party nominated him once again as its presidential candidate, although he had not run in 1916 and likely hadn't intended to in 1920. Debs wrote numerous statements from his prison cell, detailing his views on everything from the war to class inequality. But his campaign wasn't based on anything he said or did, but the symbolic importance of the imprisoned free-thinker running for the highest office in the land. Supporters didn't just ask people to vote for Debs; they told them to vote for "Prisoner 9653." Word quickly spread that Debs, by all accounts a kind and courtly man in his personal interactions, was highly popular among both prison staff and his fellow inmates.

Of course Debs didn't win — he was running as a third-party candidate, after all — but he received just over 913,000 votes, slightly more than he had in 1912. Notably, that was only about half as much of the total popular vote (3.4%) as it had been eight years earlier, largely because the electorate was much larger: The 1920 election was the first in which all American women had the right to vote, following the passage of the 19th Amendment.

That was Eugene Debs' last presidential campaign. He declined to run in 1924, facing failing health, and died in 1926. If it had been up to Wilson, Debs might have died in prison — but it was the next president, conservative Republican Warren G. Harding (winner of that 1920 election), who ultimately let him go. After taking office, Harding sent Attorney General Harry Daugherty to discuss terms for a potential pardon or clemency with Debs. On Christmas Eve of 1921, Harding announced he would commute the sentences of 24 political prisoners from the Wilson era, and that Debs would be among them.

Harding made a point of criticizing Debs in his public statement, stating that he was guilty as convicted and calling him "a dangerous man calculated to mislead the unthinking and affording excuse for those with criminal intent." Harding said he was extending clemency because of Debs' age and physical frailty, and because he "was by no means, however, as rabid and outspoken in his expressions as many others, and but for his prominence and the resulting far-reaching effect of his words, very probably might not have received the sentence he did."

As Debs walked out of the Atlanta Penitentiary on Christmas Day 1921, he and his brother heard hundreds of prisoners standing at the bars of their cells cheering for him. Harding then asked for a private meeting with Debs — no reporters allowed — where he reportedly told him, "Well, I've heard so damned much about you, Mr. Debs, that I am now glad to meet you personally."

There are many lessons to be drawn from Debs' story, but perhaps the most important one is so obvious that it needs to be stated directly. When we talk about free speech, there is a big difference between people who merely face criticism for what they say and those who are actually persecuted or oppressed for it If people write mean things about your Netflix special, or an online platform decides not to host a particular video, that's not oppression or censorship. But journalists targeted for violence over their reporting, or teachers who lose their jobs for telling the truth about American history, really are being oppressed, censored and silenced. Eugene Debs refused to shut up or follow the rules, and paid the price. That makes him a free-speech hero whether you agree with his views or not.