NDP warns Alberta won't hit $10-per-day child care target without extra $200M from UCP

The Alberta NDP is again calling for the province to inject $200 million into child care staffing this year or risk failing to hit the federal government’s goal of $10-per-day child care within four years

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© Provided by Edmonton Journal Rakhi Pancholi, 

Alberta NDP critic for children's services, speaks out about the Alberta UCP government's delay on signing a $10/day child care deal with the federal government at It's All About Kids Daycare in Edmonton on Monday, Nov. 8, 2021.

Alberta and the federal government reached an agreement announced in November to bring the average cost of child care for kids under six down to an average of $10 a day by the end of 2026, and fees by 50 per cent by the end of 2022.

The YMCA of Northern Alberta has estimated 20 per cent of Alberta’s early childhood educators have left the province or are no longer working in the industry. The province’s occupational outlook forecasts that by 2028, there will be a shortage of 4,600 early childhood educators across Alberta.

Opposition NDP children’s services critic Rakhi Pancholi said at a news conference Monday the province should have put some of its more than $500-million budget surplus into child care initiatives, while child care providers have been calling on the UCP government to better attract staff, as some parents still struggle to find available child care spaces.

“In order for more families to have access to affordable childcare, they need to be able to go to spaces that are staffed, and we have a staffing problem in this province – that’s what I’m hearing from providers from Fort McMurray to Calgary to Edmonton to Grande Prairie to Jasper,” Pancholi said.

“If the UCP doesn’t invest any additional provincial dollars into childcare, there is no way that all Alberta families will benefit from $10-per-day childcare by 2026, and the UCP knows this,” said Pancholi, who added that while many families are happy to see a reduction in fees, many low-income families are not seeing the reduction that was promised, and the province needs to invest to expand physical capacity and help hire workers.

Andrew Reith, press secretary to Children’s Services Minister Rebecca Schulz said in an email the UCP government is firmly committed to implementing all the elements of the $10-a-day plan.

“While we did see a reduction in the number of early childhood educators during the pandemic, as of December of 2021, we are encouraged to see that the number has increased steadily and is on par with pre-pandemic numbers,” he said.

In budget 2022-23, Children Services is spending $1.076 billion on early learning and child care – $350 million of which comes from the province.

Federal child-care agreement funding is worth $666 million in 2022-23, but it’s expected to grow to nearly $1 billion by 2024-25.

The Children’s Services operating expense budget, not including the Canada-Alberta Early Learning and Child Care agreement, is $1.7 billion in 2022-23.

Alberta’s budget earmarks a total of $879 million towards affordability and access and $197 million towards child care quality and worker supports in 2022-23.

Reith said about $120 million will be directed towards supporting early childhood educators with wage top-ups, and through the federal agreement.

“Through the Alberta-federal child care agreement, we are investing an additional $300 million to help child care operators hire more early childhood educators and retain and train the ones already working in the system. We are working with operators to determine the best use of this investment,” he said.

lijohnson@postmedia.com

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Ontario to bring in $15 minimum wage for gig workers, more legal protections

Bianca Bharti 

POSTMEDIA

© Provided by Financial Post Ontario Premier Doug Ford.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford wants to give platform-based gig workers more legal protections, including a base minimum wage, in the latest announcement in a slew of pro-worker policy proposals recently put forth by the government.

If passed, the legislation would impact workers such as food delivery and ride share drivers for companies including Uber Inc. and SkipTheDishes Restaurant Services Inc. Ford’s government would create the Digital Platform Workers’ Rights Act, separate from the Employment Standards Act. The new act wouldn’t address employment status; rather gig workers would simply be afforded rights if they are on a platform.

“In the last few years, we’ve seen huge shifts around traditional labour markets and as we build a resilient economy, our government must keep pace with those changes,” Ford said at a press conference on Monday. “We know the gig economy is one of the fastest growing employment sectors in Ontario.”

On top of a minimum wage of $15 an hour, Ford wants to ensure apps cannot withhold tips and also give workers notice and a reason if they’re removed. If a work-related dispute arises, the government wants app companies to resolve the issue in the province. Currently it’s commonplace for issues to be resolved in a company’s headquartered city.

© Provided by Financial Post

The latest proposal is part of a series of policy announcements made by Progressive Conservatives recently, all targeting pro-worker policies. Last week, Ford and Labour Minister Monte McNaughton announced the government will pass new laws to boost labour in the skilled trades by making it easier for out-of-province workers to move to Ontario, as well as mandate that employers inform workers of electronic monitoring policies.

Ford faces an election this summer and some have questioned whether his political stripes are changing colour in a bid to win re-election. “Times have changed,” Ford told reporters, adding that inflation has become one of many economic issues weighing on the province. He underlined some recent moves by the government that would put more money in people’s pockets, such as scrapping tolls on some highways and getting rid of fees for licence plate stickers.

“We’re delivering smart, common sense policies that protect the working class and help middle class families earn more money and create a better future for them and their families,” McNaughton said in an interview. “That’s how we’re going to tackle the labour shortage and drive economic growth here in the province.”

In January, Uber signed a deal with United Food and Commercial Workers Canada, a private union, that would allow UFCW Canada to represent about 100,000 drivers and couriers, if requested, when they are facing disputes with the technology company. However, the deal doesn’t provide complete unionization; workers do not pay union dues.

Uber said it wants the government to introduce more reforms beyond the latest announcement, including accident coverage and a benefits fund that scales with time spent on platforms. It’s a change in tune for a company that’s strongly resisted unionization in the past.

“While Uber would like to provide benefits to drivers and delivery people, we can only do so once the government passes enabling legislation,” Uber said in an emailed statement. “Uber bringing these benefits in on our own would go against the current classification model of independent contractor. (It) would be seen as making drivers and delivery people as employees, and they would lose their flexibility of schedule and being able to work on multiple platforms.”

• Email: bbharti@postmedia.com | Twitter: biancabharti

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How US 'wokeness' became a right-wing cudgel around the world

AFP 

With Covid-19 beginning to fade into the rear view mirror, the largest annual conservative gathering in the United States sounded the alarm this weekend over what they deem to be another fast-spreading virus: "wokeness."

© CHANDAN KHANNA L'ex-président américain Donald Trump devant la convention annuelle des conservateurs américains à Orlando, en Floride, le 26 février 2022

Once a rallying cry for Americans to be alert to racism, "wokeness" has become the political term of the hour, co-opted by culture warriors to denigrate "political correctness" and leftist orthodoxy.

"The radical left is trying to replace American democracy with woke tyranny," former US president Donald Trump told the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida during his keynote speech Saturday.

Speaker after speaker at CPAC invoked rightwing betes noires from "cancel culture" to the policing of pronouns. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a potential 2024 presidential hopeful, joined in the barrage of accusations, telling the crowd that "the woke is the new religion of the left."

The concept has metastasized from its US origins to penetrate the global body politic, from the English-speaking world to newsrooms, university boards and parliaments in Europe, Asia and South America.

"Among conservatives, wokeness is an all-pervasive ideology of extreme identity politics on behalf of minorities and women which is oppressive towards traditional cultural views," said Democratic political analyst Ed Kilgore.

The word "woke" as a means of describing enlightened skepticism over systemic injustice has its origins in African-American vernacular dating back before World War II.

American linguist John McWhorter points to the music of US blues-folk musician Lead Belly, who can be heard imploring his fans to "stay woke" on the 1938 protest song "Scottsboro Boys."

It appears to have crept into mainstream parlance in the early-to-mid 2010s, as the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and other African-Americans ignited a firestorm of protest from Black Lives Matter activists who beseeched followers to "stay woke" to racially-motivated police brutality.

- Free speech -

Its appropriation by liberal whites as a watchword for heightened cultural awareness followed soon after.

From there conservatives turned it into a slur, an accusation of superficial, over-the-top sociopolitical sensitivity or authoritarian, performative political correctness.

In its new pejorative guise, the term spread quickly to Europe, particularly France, where "le wokisme" is seen by supporters of Eric Zemmour, a far-right election rival to President Emmanuel Macron, as a toxic, divisive US import.

In Britain, too, rightwing politicians have been pushing back against social-justice and LGBT activism, framing it as a threat to free speech and marker of progressiveness gone awry.

In the United States, "anti-woke" campaigners deplore politicians, CEOs and public figures who worry about cultural appropriation when they should be concerned with immigration, spiraling food prices and education.

A quick foray into Texas Senator Ted Cruz's Twitter pronouncements reveals he has used the word "woke" to call out the military, the news media, universities, Hollywood, the CIA, cartoons, Starbucks and even the sport of baseball.

At the four-day CPAC, marketed this time around under the slogan "Awake Not Woke," Cruz joked about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi flying on a broomstick and mocked leftists badgering people to get vaccinated.

Meanwhile serious conservative priorities such as low taxation, free trade and a hawkish foreign policy took a back seat to scorched-earth rhetoric about an America suffering under the jack boot of Marxist political elites.

- 'Woke, government-run everything' -

The Ukraine crisis came up here and there, but mostly just to be cast as a salutary warning about the excesses of political correctness.

"Woke weakness leads to things like we're seeing in the White House and what you're seeing around the world," former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker told attendees, while Senator Rick Scott warned of "woke, government-run everything."

Former White House advisor Steve Bannon lauded Russian leader Vladimir Putin for being "anti-woke," echoing the warm words of praise Trump and his chief diplomat Mike Pompeo had offered the former KGB spy.

The issue is not exclusively party political. One is as likely to hear Democratic strategist James Carville or comedian Bill Maher rail against "woke" ideology, for example, as leading Republicans.

And many critics of "wokeness" raise good faith concerns about over-medicalization of teen gender identity, zealous policing of language and the tendency to prioritize social justice over free speech.

This interpretation seems to chime with Middle America.

In November, ultra-conservative Glenn Youngkin defeated the Democratic frontrunner in Virginia's election for governor, in perhaps the biggest rejection yet of post-Trump political correctness.

During his campaign, the Republican Youngkin weaponized what he saw as performative outrage over America's racial history to cast himself as the man who would save the school curriculum from "critical race theory."

He won handily.

gma-ft/mlm

About Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's Former Acting Career, Including Voicing Paddington the Bear

Benjamin VanHoose 

© Provided by People Ukrainian Presidency/Anadolu Agency/Getty; Studiocanal

Prior to his leadership role in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had a career as a comedian and actor.

A global spotlight is currently on 44-year-old Zelenskyy as he stays on the ground in Ukraine to help stand up to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who launched an attack on the country Feb. 24, with forces moving from the north, south and east.

Details of the attack and the fighting change by the day, but this is the first major land conflict in Europe in decades — and hundreds have already been reported dead or wounded, including more than 100 children. Thousands more people have fled or tried to escape Ukraine amid warnings of a possible "refugee crisis."

"We are not putting down arms. We will be defending our country, because our weapon is truth, and our truth is that this is our land, our country, our children, and we will defend all of this," he said in a video last week, according to a CNN translation. "That is it. That's all I wanted to tell you. Glory to Ukraine."

After earning a law degree from the Kryvyi Rih Institute of Economics, Zelenskyy entered the entertainment industry, joining a competitive comedy team and going on to work as an actor.

Eventually, that led to roles in major feature films and work as an entertainment executive and, in 2015, a starring role as the president of Ukraine on the popular television series Servant of the People. He also voiced Paddington bear in the Ukrainian version of the 2014 film and its 2017 sequel, The Hollywood Reporter confirmed.

Member on the global impact of Putin's actions: 'It's an attack on the whole Democratic world."

RELATED: Ways to Help the People of Ukraine as Russia Launches War

© Provided by People Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty

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Paddington actor Hugh Bonneville reacted to that fact on Twitter over the weekend as social media pointed out Zelenskyy's voice work in the beloved role: "Until today I had no idea who provided the voice of @paddingtonbear in Ukraine. Speaking for myself, thank you, President [Zelenskyy]," wrote Bonneville.

Additionally, Zelenskyy won Ukraine's version of Dancing with the Stars back in 2006.

Observers say much of Zelenskyy's political success can be attributed to the unrest and revolution of 2014, when popular protest brought down Ukraine's then-President Viktor Yanukovich. By 2019, the disenchantment with the country's political elite had become even further ingrained, helping propel a political outsider to the highest office.

Zelenskyy — who is married to Ukrainian architect and screenwriter Olena Volodymyrivna Zelenska, with whom he shares two kids — ran with no party affiliation and no clear team of expert advisers until days before the election, and he attended no in-person campaign events and held no rallies, instead turning to social media to make a name for himself. After appearing in a slew of YouTube and Instagram posts and making television appearances, he handily won a first-round election and later, a runoff.

Zelenskyy campaigned on easing tensions with Russia, but some Ukrainians say that stance hasn't worked. He has attempted to project strength as Putin amasses troops on the border. Still, some analysts reportedly worry he's too politically inexperienced to stand up to the Russian autocrat.

Canada gets closer to building first EV battery refinery

The Government of Ontario is starting to warm up to electric vehicles (EVs) as it invests $250,000 into the development of North Aerica’s first battery-grade nickel sulfate facility.

© Provided by MobileSyrup 

The government is investing this money alongside another $250,000 from Electra and $100,000 each from Glencore plc and Talon Metals.

The goal of these companies and the Ontario government is to study and collaborate on potentially building a nickel sulfate plant and a battery precursor cathode active materials plant beside an existing cobalt refinery and recycling factory.

Ideally, building these factories within the same area allows the companies to work more efficiently to transform raw metals and other mined materials into battery parts. In the future, Electra is hoping to supply 1.5 million EV batteries to the world annually.

The bodies involved are all hoping that Canada’s reliance on renewable hydroelectricity and the proximity to the feed materials will make the materials made in Canada some of the lowest carbon footprints around.

“The low carbon North American alternative that we are proposing is much more compatible with the transition towards zero-emission vehicles to lower global greenhouse gases,” said Electra CEO Trent Mell, in a press statement.

Electra is the company spearheading this operation, and it hopes get all of these buildings commissioned and under construction by 2025 at the latest. However, the company is getting closer to building the battery-grade cobalt sulfate refinery, so construction could launch as early as 2023.

Source: Electra

Some Canadians want to answer Ukraine's call for foreign fighters

Tyler Dawson 

As Canada responds to Russia’s war on Ukraine with condemnation, sanctions and munitions, some Canadians are preparing to respond more directly, hoping to answer the call of Ukraine’s president to come take up arms in a newly formed “international brigade.”

© Provided by National Post People take part in a basic military training session on February 28, 2022 in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine.

And, so far, Canada’s government has stopped short of urging its citizens not to do so. Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly said Sunday the choices to go fight were “individual decisions,” and on Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acknowledged some Canadians would choose direct action, beyond making donations or assisting refugees.

“Some Canadians may choose to take more active steps,” Trudeau said. “We will of course look at ways to make sure that we’re keeping Canadians safe. That remains our priority every step of the way and we encourage Canadians as we have been for many, many months — many weeks, anyway — to leave Ukraine if they’re in Ukraine right now.”

On Sunday, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, posted a request for foreigners to come assist in the fighting, a call that has been repeated on embassy social media pages around the world — including in Canada.

“All foreigners wishing to join the resistance against the Russian occupiers and protect global security are invited by the Ukrainian leadership to come to our state and join the ranks of the territorial defense forces,” Zelenskyy said, according to multiple news reports.

Bryson Woolsey told the National Post Monday that he has been looking at flights from Vancouver to Warsaw, Poland, and plans to travel across the border into Ukraine. The 33-year-old cook is seeking to go, even though he has no combat experience or personal ties to the country.

“I just felt like I wanted to be over there, I wanted to help,” Woolsey said. “What’s happening over there is pretty awful and I feel it’s our responsibility to help them.”

Just outside of Halifax, a 34-year-old social worker, who asked that his name not be used, said he is preparing to fly to Poland on Thursday. He said he finds Zelenskyy “extremely inspiring.” He also has no combat or military experience, but said he knows his way around firearms.

“Ukraine seems to be fighting for democracy and for their freedom from authoritarianism,” he said. “I think people are just feeling super inspired. I also think people are kind of bored, you know what I mean?… They just want to find some meaning in their lives.”

'Mom, it’s so hard': Russian soldier allegedly texts home invasion details from Ukraine
Matt Gurney: Russian heavy artillery would unleash the full inhumanity of war on Ukraine

Woolsey said he’s been packing some equipment at home, such as a sleeping bag, but the understanding of those who are seeking to join is that once they get to Ukraine, they’ll be kitted out for combat.

“I’m not totally blind to the realities of what’s going on, right, and that I might never come back,” Woolsey said. “But I just don’t feel comfortable just sitting and while this stuff’s going on, right?”

The request for foreign fighters is reminiscent of historical instances of foreign legions going off to fight on foreign shores in distant wars. Perhaps most famously, during the Spanish Civil War, tens of thousands of foreigners — including roughly 1,500 Canadians in the MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion — travelled to Spain to fight.

Ukraine, which has been fighting with Russian-backed separatists for years, has also long been a destination for foreign fighters. While there are conflicting reports, perhaps as many as 17,000 foreign fighters have picked up weapons on both sides of the conflict since 2014.

On Monday, Hanna Maliar, Ukraine’s deputy minister of defence, said in a statement posted to social media that “thousands” of requests from foreigners had come in.

Responses from foreign governments to Ukraine’s plea for volunteer assistance have been mixed.

On Sunday, Joly, said the Canadian government is “very supportive of any form of support to Ukrainians right now.”

“We understand that people of Ukrainian descent want to support their fellow Ukrainians and also that there’s a desire to defend the motherland. In that sense, it’s their own individual decisions,” Joly said.

The National Post sought further comment from Global Affairs Canada about whether or not the government’s official position supports Canadians travelling abroad to fight for a foreign government against Russia. A spokesperson for Joly referred the Post to the foreign minister’s comments on Sunday.

Anita Anand, the defence minister, said Sunday: “We understand the desire to go, but our responsibility as a government is to indicate the security risk with undertaking travel to Ukraine.”

Michael Chong, the Conservative party’s foreign affairs critic, declined a request for an interview about Joly’s response to the request for foreign fighters, with his office citing a “busy parliamentary schedule.”

Joly’s comments echo those of Liz Truss, the United Kingdom’s foreign secretary, who said Sunday morning on the BBC that she “absolutely” would support Britons who went to Ukraine to fight Russian aggression.

“I do support that, and of course, that is something that people can make their own decisions about. They are fighting, the people of Ukraine, are fighting for freedom and democracy, not just for Ukraine but for the whole of Europe,” Truss said.

Downing Street distanced itself from Truss’s comments, with a spokesperson for Prime Minister Boris Johnson noting to the Guardian newspaper that going to Ukraine to fight would contradict the government’s official travel advice. Tobias Ellwood, a Conservative parliamentarian and soldier, said on Twitter that those without combat experience should not go fight in Ukraine.

“You may get yourself and others who have to look after you, killed,” he wrote.

The Norwegian government said it’s not illegal for nationals to go fight for Ukraine, and Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s prime minister, said, “there is nothing at first sight that would legally prevent someone from going to Ukraine to participate in the conflict, on the Ukrainian side.”

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison warned against it.

“I can understand, absolutely, the strong feelings and motivations for people to go,” Morrison said. “But I would say at this time, the legality of such actions are uncertain.”

On Monday, Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s finance minister, called the struggle for Ukraine a fight between “freedom and tyranny” and compared it to the Battle of Gettysburg, a major battle in the U.S. Civil War, and the battles against Naziism in the Second World War.

“This is one of those times and one of those places where freedom confronts tyranny. We are determined that freedom will triumph,” Freeland said.

Trudeau described Ukraine’s actions as a “heroic defence.”

“The whole world is inspired by the strength and intensity of their resistance,” he said.

• Email: tdawson@postmedia.com | Twitter:

Where are the Russian oligarchs? This Twitter feeds follows their private jets

David K. Li 

Jets and helicopters belonging to Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich were on the move Monday in such far flung locales like Moscow and Codrington, a town in Antigua and Barbuda.

© Provided by NBC News

And at around the same time, a jet owned by steel magnate and fellow Russian oligarch Alexander Abramov touched down in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates.

The comings and goings of powerful Russian elites have come under intense scrutiny since Vladimir Putin's forces invaded Ukraine last week, an attack that's drawn international condemnation.

And that's why 19-year-old Jack Sweeney, a University of Central Florida student, started tracking them on the Twitter feed Russian Oligarch Jets, which he launched this past weekend and already has more than 52,000 followers as of Monday afternoon.

"People have been asking me about Putin for a while, they wanted to know if they could track him," said Sweeney, an information technology major.

While the isolated Russian president isn't much of a jet-setter, Sweeney realized Putin's wealthy fellow countrymen are — and their movements by air are easily accessible public information. So the student did the next best thing to following Putin, which is to shadow the Russian elites.

The instant popularity of his bot, which automatically posts public data on movements of these crafts, took Sweeney by surprise.

“It’s just been crazy,” he said. "I just figured some people would be interested in it. I just didn't think all kinds of people would be."

As of Monday afternoon, Sweeney was tracking 39 planes and helicopters belonging to 19 oligarchs.

Coming into this weekend, Sweeney admitted he had little knowledge of the Russian power structure, or even what it means to be an oligarch.

“Before this, I didn’t even know there were these (influential) oligarchs like this,” he said. “They probably do have a decent amount of power from what I can understand.”

These individuals who comprise Russia’s new money class have come under intense scrutiny following the invasion of Ukraine.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, oligarchs used personal connections to take over previously state-owned industry and profit from new Russian capitalism.

"These are the glitterati of Russia," said Howard Stoffer, a Russia expert who teaches international affairs at the University of New Haven.

U.S. and other world leaders who want to pressure Putin into withdrawing his armies from Ukraine have taken to economic fight to these rich Russian businessmen.

While Western forces have been ratcheting up sanctions against the Russian economy as a whole, they've also been taking the highly unusual step of attacking the pocketbooks of Putin and the oligarchs.

Stoffer said he welcomed any sunlight shined on powerful Russians, even if it's just the travel habits of these affluent men.

"They should be exposed and they should be paying whatever price a country can extract from them," he said Monday.

"Get these (airplane) tail numbers out. Tell the governments these are the people, this is where they're located and let them take whatever action they feel is appropriate."

AND THEIR YACHTS

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2022/02/ukrainian-sailor-partially-sinks.html

After decades of flat pay, some Japan firms boost salaries to retain skilled staff

By Tetsushi Kajimoto 

© Reuters/THOMAS PETER 

People cross a street a street ahead of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games that have been postponed due to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Tokyo

TOKYO (Reuters) - Over the last five years Yokohama-based Lasertec Corp has delivered what much of Japan Inc hasn't in decades: big pay rises.

The maker of chip-measuring equipment has boosted salaries by about a third overall since 2016. Employees at its main unit, many of them engineers, make on average just under 14 million yen ($121,000) - more than three times the national average of 4.3 million yen.

Lasertec is among a subset of Japanese firms, often in specialised areas such as technology, where pay is increasingly tied to employee performance and not determined by seniority or the base pay set in annual labour talks.

While "shunto" spring wage talks between big manufacturers and unions still have immense significance for the economy - especially this year - more firms are opting for performance-based pay, experts say, a change that speaks to a wider shift slowly taking hold in Japan. 

© Reuters/Kim Kyung Hoon Outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Tokyo, Japan

"For companies like us, employees are valuable assets, not costs," said Yutaro Misawa, a senior executive at Lasertec, whose profit has soared nearly five-fold and shares have surged more than 2,800% over the past five years.

Attractive pay makes it easier to retain talented engineers who specialise in research and development, especially given the labour crunch as Japan's population shrinks, Misawa said.

But for much of the rest of the world's no.3 economy, wages remain lacklustre. Thanks to decades of deflation, companies, like households, tend to hoard cash instead of spending. Japanese companies now sit on a record $2.8 trillion in cash and deposits.

In dollar terms, average annual pay totalled $38,515 in Japan in 2020, well below the OECD average of $49,165 and little changed from the early 1990s.

Higher wages are critical for the government's target of stable 2% inflation. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has called on companies to boost salaries and kick-start a virtuous cycle of spending, as part of his platform of "new capitalism" to push for greater wealth distribution.

LAGGARD?

Renewable energy start-up Abalance Corporation has actively hired mid-career executives over the past three years, lifting the average salary in Japan by more than 30%. Its roughly 100 employees in Japan - both locals and non-Japanese - are paid on average more than 7 million yen.

"Acquiring talented people from all over the world is vital for a company's growth," said Yuichi Kawauchi, a senior executive. "If we leave things as they are and fail to show Japan as an attractive place to work, Japan will fall further behind the rest of the world."

To be sure, performance-linked pay means bonuses can get cut in a downturn - an unattractive prospect for the many Japanese workers who prize stability. Unions typically seek incremental increases to base pay, which is permanent.

Most firms don't plan to raise base pay at spring labour talks this year, the latest Reuters Corporate Survey showed. A slim majority expect to raise total pay, which includes one-off bonuses, the survey showed.

That won't be enough to keep up with recent spikes in commodity costs, analysts say, eroding household spending power.

RAISING CHILDREN

For Yamada Consulting Group, which helps midsize companies restructure, attractive pay and perks are necessary to keep staff from being poached, President Keisaku Masuda said.

The consulting firm allows staff to work shorter hours to encourage them to raise children.

"We face stiff competition for high-performance workers. We have substantially raised pay and improved working conditions to prevent head-hunting," Masuda said.

It raised pay by an average of 19% in 2020 and by 5% last year and now its average employee earns 9.2 million yen.

Japan's labour talks will eventually shift from uniform hikes in base pay towards more flexible wages that reflect the market value of workers, said Yuya Takada, a researcher at recruitment and staffing firm Recruit Holdings Co.

Even Toyota Motor Corp, itself the long-time pace-setter of the spring labour talks, has stopped disclosing details of base pay, highlighting the gradual decline in importance of the labour talks.

Seniority-based pay will become a thing of the past, Recruit's Takada said.

"That'll lower the significance of the way management and unions struggle for base pay hikes at annual rituals."

($1 = 115.4800 yen)

(The story has been refiled to fix typo in currency conversion in the second paragraph)

(Reporting by Tetsushi Kajimoto; Editing by David Dolan and Muralikumar Anantharaman)

US House passes bill making lynching a federal hate crime

The House passed legislation on Monday that would classify lynching as a federal hate crime.

Lawmakers easily passed the bill, which is named after Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy who was lynched in 1955, on a 422-3 vote.

While the bill sailed through with bipartisan support, three Republicans - Reps. Andrew Clyde (Ga.), Thomas Massie (Ky.) and Chip Roy (Texas) - voted against it.

The legislation's passage comes more than 120 years after the first federal anti-lynching legislation was introduced by then-Rep. George Henry White, who was the only Black member of Congress at that time.

"Our nation endured a shameful period during which thousands of African Americans were lynched as a means of racial subordination and enforcing white supremacy. These violent incidents were largely tolerated by state and federal officials, and they represent a stain on our nation's legacy," said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.).

"Today, we acknowledge this disgraceful chapter in American history, and we send a clear message that such violent actions - motivated by hatred and bigotry - will not be tolerated in this country," Nadler said.

The bill, authored by Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), would designate lynching as a hate crime punishable by up to 30 years in prison.

More than 4,700 lynchings occurred in the U.S. between 1882 to 1968, according to an estimate from the NAACP. Black people made up most of the victims of lynching, since typically white perpetrators would use the attacks to terrorize them.

The highest number of lynchings were in Mississippi, where Till was beaten and shot in the head by two white men for allegedly flirting with a white woman.

An all-white jury found the two men not guilty of Till's murder. But the men later admitted in a magazine interview a year later that they had in fact killed Till.

The House previously passed the bill in 2020, but Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) objected to clearing it by unanimous consent in the upper chamber.

Paul's objection came even though the Senate had previously passed a version of the bill in 2018 by unanimous consent.

Paul said that he was concerned it might "conflate lesser crimes" like minor assaults as lynching.

"There has to be justice. People are chanting justice. [But] justice has to have a brain and has to have vision and can't be hamstrung into something that could give someone ten years in prison for a minor crime," Paul said at the time.

Paul is now indicating that he supports the latest iteration of the bill after working with senators leading the effort in the upper chamber.

"I'm pleased to have worked with Senators Cory Booker and Tim Scott to strengthen the final product and ensure the language of this bill defines lynching as the absolutely heinous crime that it is, and I'm glad to cosponsor this bipartisan effort," Paul said in a statement on Monday.

Jet fuel is bad for the environment. 

Contrails are even worse.

Jason Markusoff 

MACLEANS

FEB. 28,2022

The fact that airplanes are climate-­damaging fuel hogs—aviation accounts for two per cent of human-caused climate change—has been obvious to the travelling public for some time. What’s becoming increasingly clear, though, is that spending even more jet fuel may be necessary to deal with the sector’s bigger contributor to the heating climate: contrails. As the airline industry puzzles over how to decarbonize, researchers are rapidly gathering an understanding of how these anthropogenic cloud formations add to global warming, and how they might be avoided.

© Used with permission of / © St. Joseph Communications.

 (Jostein Nilsen/EyeEm/Getty Images)

Planes constantly emit a trail of substances, including carbon dioxide, water vapour and black carbon (soot). When aircraft pass through patches of cold, humid air, the water vapour and large soot particulates combine to form a long stream of ice particles. The ones that disappear quickly aren’t a problem, explains Sebastian Eastham, research scientist at MIT’s Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment. But the formations that persist for hours can form human-made cirrus clouds, which trap huge amounts of thermal radiation that would otherwise escape into space. With contrails, Eastham says, “you have this large, sudden contribution to global warming, where you have caused the Earth’s atmosphere system to retain a significant amount of additional energy.” Carbon dioxide, by comparison, has a less acute but more prolonged energy-trapping effect.

Much of aviation’s challenge, then, is figuring out how flights can avoid the patches of cool, humid air that are ripe for creating contrails. Their locations are hard to predict—varying hour to hour—so it’s an air traffic control and modelling problem. There is a theory that temporarily flying higher (or lower) for brief stretches of some flights can create huge savings in contrails at the cost of a relatively small amount of extra fuel burn and carbon emissions—emitting a bit more to save the planet, as it were. It’s the “low-hanging fruit” for slashing aviation’s climate impact, the Royal Aeronautical Society’s John Green said at a conference last May. The industry has begun turning simulations into real-world examples: last fall, United Arab Emirates’ Etihad Airways teamed with a U.K. flight analytic firm to adjust the path of a Boeing 787 travelling from Heathrow to Abu Dhabi and says it avoided producing the equivalent of 64 tonnes of CO₂ by emitting only 0.48 extra tonnes.

Another contrail avoidance option—well, besides, flight avoidance altogether—is flying with alternative fuels. The National Research Council of Canada (NRC) has experimented with jets burning crop-based biofuels, which are less carbon-intensive over their life cycle than jet fossil fuels. They don’t necessarily produce lower in-flight carbon emissions than jet fossil fuels, says Anthony Brown, research pilot engineer with the NRC, but they substantially reduce the large soot particles that help create contrails. Given the unpredictability of when flights will hit contrail-prone skies, using different fuels is a more definitive way to tackle this problem than changing flight paths, Brown says.

But it will be years before either solution scales up to industry-wide usage. So while the conspiracy fanatics who baselessly fear “chemtrails” remain as wrong as ever, there is reason to look up, see lingering jet exhaust clouds and get a bit anxious.

This article appears in print in the March 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “Menace in the mist.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.