In his first major move to address the economic fallout of the war in the Middle East, PM Mark Carney has temporarily axed Canada’s federal fuel tax.
But experts warn the sugar high of tax relief fails to address Canada’s dependence on a volatile energy source. @zoeyunker.bsky.social reports.
Media needs to stop with "critics say" and just quote the actual language of the bill.
HB 249 creates a new category of "seminudity" which can be used to arrest women who aren't nude, but are wearing clothing — leggings, t-shirts without bras — that religious groups feel is too provocative.
🚨 BREAKING: 25+ of Canada's leading rights orgs, privacy scholars, and legal experts just delivered a joint letter to Parliament.
The ask? Kill #BillC22.
The reason? It would be "the most expansive invasion of Canadian privacy rights in modern history." 🧵
openmedia.org/press/item/c...
#cdnpoli 1/
I wrote this to help people understand that universal basic income is not meant to permanently replace all jobs. It's meant to be a floor below which no one can fall, and a dividend that universally distributes a share of our economy. It's meant to provide the power to say no and freedom to choose.
Today, postal workers begin voting on new collective agreements. But CUPW's leadership is divided on what members should do.
The mixed signals that Canada Post workers are getting from their union:
pressprogress.ca/canada-post-...
My sleepy brain read invalid as in, without validation, and was concerned what they were putting in cookbooks that couldn't be validated as food lol
Chase inspiration Burst lightning Monsterous rage Expressive firedancer Sanar, Unfinished genius Disdainful stroke Landscape painter Spirit mascot Joined researchers Stone docent x2 Elemental mascot Skycoach conductor Charging strifeknight Malestrom artisan Owlin historian Researched debater Ark of hunger Spectacular skywhale Stadium tidalmage Spellbook seeker Ajani's response Traumatic critique Skycoach waypoint Sundown pass Spectical summit x2
Did my first prerelease since Eldraine and came in second, turns out the thousands of games on Arena are helping me be a better player
#mtgsos
“In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. Those affected receive a small apartment & counselling with no preconditions. 4 out of 5 people affected make their way back to a stable life. And all this is CHEAPER than accepting homelessness.”
IT SAVES PUBLIC MONEY to house people.
Reposting with alt text
The Free Speech Coalition is serious about starting an adult industry credit union. Part of this is being able to show regulators that enough people would use it, so please fill out this form if you're interested!
(Yes, credit unions can issue credit cards!)
www.freespeechcoalition.com/survey
We already KNOW how to make super babies, you eugenicist creeps! And it's all the things you fucking fucks are fucking up! THREAD!
Today, on Palestinian Prisoners' Day the BDS movement calls for intensifying BDS pressure against companies involved in genocidal Israel’s prison complex and its crimes against Palestinian prisoners, particularly Microsoft, HP, and Cisco.
#FreeThemAll
bdsmovement.net/news/Palesti...
Since the start of its ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza in October 2023, Israeli authorities have drastically escalated their policy of torture, abuse, & extreme deprivation of food & medical care against Palestinian prisoners in a desperate attempt to break their will.
#FreeThemAll
Democracy has infrastructure. It requires independent courts, free media, genuine electoral competition – the apparatus of formal institutional design. But it also requires something more diffuse and harder to legislate: a population that is not so materially precarious that its members cannot afford to exercise political judgment freely. Where enough people live in sufficient dependency – on employers, on local patrons, on political machines that control access to basic resources – the formal apparatus of democracy operates on a substrate that corrodes its meaning.
An unconditional basic income addresses the substrate directly. A payment sufficient to sustain a dignified existence, received by right and not by grace, is precisely a form of structural independence from the kinds of dependency networks that The Price of the Vote documented so devastatingly. It does not require voters to be brave. It does not require communities to organise collectively in order to resist. It creates, quietly and automatically, the material floor from which Van Parijs’s power to say no becomes available to everyone – not merely to those fortunate enough to have resources of their own.
The semi-serfdom of the workfare system, in which access to employment, heating, and medicine was administered by local political agents, was not incidental to Fidesz’s grip on power: it was the mechanism. Dismantling it requires more than removing the operatives who ran it. It requires building something in its place that gives people in those regions genuine economic independence. A basic income – unconditional, individual, paid as a right rather than a favour – would accomplish exactly this. It would not solve Hungary’s economic problems overnight. But
economic problems overnight. But it would make a return to Orbán-style electoral manipulation structurally harder, by dissolving the dependency substrate on which such manipulation depends. The Hungarian case, viewed from this angle, is not merely a cautionary tale about what happens when economic autonomy is absent. It is also a prospectus for what a genuinely democratic welfare architecture might look like: one that gives citizens not just the right to say no, but the material means to mean it.
This is an important take on what happened in Hungary. Unconditional basic income should be seen as part of an infrastructure of democracy. By putting conditions on survival, democracy is weakened. UBI is needed to create a citizenry with the power and freedom to say no
www.ubie.org/dependency-i...
It's hard to articulate the level of anger & rage I have about watching this happen. I first saw weev doxx people I love *TWENTY* years ago. I spoke to founders of multiple social networks about the risk of these people over 15 years ago. I wrote about it all a dozen+ years ago. They let it happen.
Corporations have found a creepy new way to rip you off. It's called "surveillance pricing" and it's coming for all of us at the checkout if we don't stop it.
Add your name and help stop retailers from price-gouging us with the help of Big Tech: ndp.ca/surveillance-pricing
New from 404 Media: WebinarTV is a company secretly scraping peoples' Zoom meetings and posting them online for others to watch. We've now found those include anonymous recovery programs, substance abuse meetings, etc. Supposed to be anonymous but show names and faces www.404media.co/webinartv-se...
Preaching to the choir here, but I'm an advocate of making people uncomfortable for still supporting Potter stuff. Don't let them try and handwave it away. Make them confront the harm their support enables.
‘I wished for death’: Sexual violence in Israel’s prisons is an ‘organised state policy’ Palestinian testimonies reveal how sexual violence, including rape using objects and dogs, is approved by 'highest levels' of Israeli leadership
The testimony here about sexual violence by Israel against Palestinian prisoners is so beyond the pale everyone must see it.
It is so bad I can’t in good conscience share a quote other than the headline, which somehow manages to understate the horror within.
www.middleeasteye.net/news/i-wishe...
🧵 The Canadian federal government’s 2025 budget has allocated:
More business tax breaks including for fossil fuels sector
$925 million for AI
$81.8 billion over 5 years for military
However, this comes at the expense of cultural heritage.
After watching this, I have to say
I dont even think breakthroughs in medical science are worth what artificial intelligence is going to cost us.
I doubt anything it can do will benefit anyone but the rich in this timeline, anyway.
OpenAI ignored three warnings that a ChatGPT user was dangerous — including its own mass casualty flag — while he stalked and harassed his ex-girlfriend, a new lawsuit alleges.
these closures are the implementation of the policy choice to exclude a specific group of people from the category of *the public* – this is dehumanization
and it is a choice being made throughout Canada
Ontario
1/
low resolution excerpt from the USArmyEsports twitch channel from 2020 covered in people talking about warcrimes, ACAB, & generally dunking on the channel while it's live
same as the last picture but with more examples. Previous alt text follows: low resolution excerpt from the USArmyEsports twitch channel from 2020 covered in people talking about warcrimes, ACAB, & generally dunking on the channel while it's live
screenshot of a twitter post showing an anime girl vtuber with pink hair wearing a navy uniform with the caption "Why should YOU enlist in the us navy?"
US army keeps trying to get on Twitch to recruit vulnerable people.
Last time it was an esports channel in 2020 that failed so hard it resorted to banning people for talking about war crimes & now they are trying again with a US Navy vtuber
It's all attempts at manipulation, always has been
So it turns out paying people a living wage doesn’t collapse the economy; it’s almost like the rich have been lying to us to maintain their power over our lives.
Ontario’s Recent Policy Changes Are Part of a Larger Pattern to Centralize Power and Silence Dissent, Critics Say
Ford’s attempts to "streamline" the province are infringing on local democracy.
pressprogress.ca/ontarios-rec...
In the latest episode of Sources, Ontario reporter @ericwickham.ca speaks to @jackhauen.bsky.social about what changes to Freedom of Information laws mean for Ontario.
🎧Listen here: pressprogress.ca/heres-what-c...
The RCMP is asking the Federal Court to overturn a finding that its officers discriminated against Indigenous people when they investigated historical abuse allegations at two northern B.C. schools. @amandafollett.bsky.social reports.
Is it because they're not raking the forests?
