December 16
Canada’s Mental Health Crisis
With one in five Canadians experiencing a mental health issue each year, the state of mental health in our country is nothing short of alarming. It’s time to stop treating mental health as a secondary concern and recognize its fundamental importance to the well-being of individuals and society as a whole.
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December 9
Canada Needs to Safeguard our Water
During the 2024 U.S. Presidential election, a bit of an absurd comment from then-candidate Donald Trump inspired some baffling chuckles on this side of the border. At a press conference at a golf course in Los Angeles, he said “so you have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north with the snow caps in Canada and all pouring down. And they have essentially a very large faucet. And you turn the faucet and it takes one day to turn it. It’s massive.” It was a...
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December 6
A GST Tax Holiday will Help, but a Permanent Removal on Essentials Needed
Last week, the Prime Minister announced that he’d be seeking to introduce legislation in Parliament to provide a two-month break on the Goods and Services Tax (GST) and Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) for groceries, some essential items, and some gift items during the holiday season. He also announced that he would seek to provide $250 cheques to each working-aged Canadian who made less than $150,000 in 2023. This follows a New Democrat push to permanently remove the GST from many essential...
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November 26
Canada Post Strike could have been Averted with Good Faith Bargaining
It’s starting to feel a bit predictable, but workers at another major federally regulated industry have been pushed into a labour dispute for the third time in as many months. Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) employees at Canada Post have overwhelmingly voted in favor of a strike mandate. Just weeks ago, port workers and longshoremen in British Columbia and Quebec were locked out following significant labour disagreements, and in August it was Teamsters-affiliated rail workers who...
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November 23
Action Needed to End Telecom Price Gouging
Being connected to the internet is more essential now than it has ever been, particularly in today’s interconnected world, yet Canadians face some of the highest telecom prices around the globe. The cost of accessing telecommunications and internet services places a significant burden on families, businesses, and individuals alike. This burden falls especially hard on rural and Indigenous communities, who have long struggled with exorbitant costs for vital services like internet and...
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November 13
CRA Hack Needs a Thorough Investigation
CBC’s The Fifth Estate recently broke the news that the Canada Revenue Agency had discovered that hackers had managed to obtain confidential data on taxpayers used by private tax firm H&R Block. Fraudsters then used the confidential information, including H&R Block’s confidential credentials to log into the personal CRA accounts of thousands of individuals. What does this mean for most Canadians, why hasn’t the CRA made this information public, how much money has been...
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November 5
Is it Time to Get Tougher on Residential School Denialism?
From the early days before Confederation, Canada’s earliest settler leaders treated Indigenous peoples as others. They created systems that were designed to assimilate Indigenous peoples and strip them of their identity and their culture. One of the most widely recognized parts of this systemic discrimination was the development of residential schools. Supported by Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. MacDonald, the Department of Indian Affairs and various denominations of...
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October 31
Canada’s Major Step Towards Pharmacare, and the Challenges Ahead
Late on the evening of October 10th, Bill C-64, the pharmacare framework legislation, passed the Senate, received Royal Assent, and became law. This was a major step in advancing public health care and stands as one of the crowning achievements the NDP managed to secure this parliament. However, there’s still a significant amount of work to do to ensure Canadians can get access to timely medications through a public, single payer universal pharmacare system.
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October 31
Why is Parliament Being Held Up in SDTC Documents Case?
For almost a month now, the House of Commons has been at a standstill. It’s been paralyzed over a dispute about how and when the government should release documents related to its green technology fund. So what’s going on and how can this issue be resolved?
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