News, Events & Comments

There seems to be rare mainstream media consensus once again, as in some times past, that government deficits are ok in times of national emergency like COVID-19, but one key part of Canada's vaccine purchase story that receives no media covergage is that to get the vaccine millions of dollars, including their hefty profit margin, will be paid to pharamaceurical giants like Pfizer. In effect we are seing another example of public subsidies to private enterprise like the bailout to big business during the financial collapse of 2008. Here's TorontotheBetter's position: if we want to prepare for the next pandemic and save on expenditures at the same time, hmve the public take an ownership stake in big pharma, already massively subsidized in various ways, or, better, nationalize the sector. Privzte pofit and healthcare investment are opposites. We must hold private enterprise and invention structurally accountable, in the spirit of the great Marie Curie, discoverer of radium, who donated her ideas freely to the public domain.

One thing we haven't seen lately in Toronto is Greyhound buses, For-profit Greyhound early quit Ontario as pandemic set in, including the route from Toronto to education and tech hub Kitchener/Cambridge/Waterloo where it has been making money from students for many years. Without the continuing GO Transit service many Ontario workers and students would be without income and learning. There's a lesson here about the importance of public service imnvestment and it's not the one promoting cutbacks that neoliberals have been preaching for the last three decades. All citizebs need public service investment to survive.contribute and thrive.

                    

TorontotheBetter calls on all  to support TTCRiders’ digital Transit is Essential rally for safe, reliable and affordable public transit.at 7.30pm on Tuesday Dec.1.For details about this and other actions for Toronto actions visit US02web.zoom.us and TTCriders.ca.

                             A better Toronto requires better public services AND better enterprise. 

At 2pm today at the Polish consulate 2603 Lake Shore Blvd. West, Toronto, join protesters against a proposed law effectively banning abortion in Polamd. The Polssh women's protest Strajk Kobiet! [Women Strike] is taking a stand for people of all countries who support women's right to choose.    

For details see: https://canoe.com/news/world/polish-court-ruling-amounts-to-almost-total-abortion-ban

and

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-poland-abortion-idUSKBN2780UK

Remember this man, now, predictably on several Canadian corporate boards? Championed most notably by former prime miniister Stephen Harper, but in fact the presiding principle of most governments in recent ears neoliberalism counsels government cutbacks and market expansion, whatever the consequences for unemployment and social distress. Today, there is much lamenting by Canada's political leadership about "the vulnerable", i.e. the largely poor and racialized victims, but the real problem is being avoided, so no solution will be achieved. The real problem for the COVID "vulnerable" is that the great majority of long term care [LTC] homes in Toronto and Canada as a whole are for-profiit in institutions or ill funded public ones, for which the real bottom'line for most is profit generation, profit maximization and cost minimization. Death and disease  are marketing problems for the LTC industry but if most homes have the same concerns - the "market" norm - this means that there will be no solution as decisions tht are made are based on achieving or increasing profit, not on saving lives. Talk about LTC home guidelines by the Liberal government  are a cop-out since it means there will be no obligation to do the right thing. Public ownership and accountability by adequately funded public bodies are the solution, It was for the same resaon that\ Canada finally developed a public healthcare system in the 1960’s. Long term care is healthcare so the solution must be to include LTC in Canada's public healthcare system. This is a solution that "guidelines" are too weak to achieve. COVID times are not times for compromise. Serious about saving lives? The profit maximization and austerity of neoliberalism will not solve the problem governments say they want to solve. Are they serious? .    

 

If the nineteenth century and the horrors of early industrial Europe, as dramatized in Victor Hugo's classic novel Les Miserables, seem a long time ago, they are not, but the naked reality of  the excluded are hidden in today's laundered mainstream discourse. Suddenly, not so long ago some terms and the people they refer to, like the poor, or the oppressed, that used to be assigned to those who fail to “make the grade” in the mainstream of affluent societies have been recast as “the vulnerable”. The shift looks sympathetic and caring but in fact it’s a stigmatization of those who might once have been understood as poor or victimized, where condition responsibility is recognized as external and imposed on them. Vulnerability is  different because it carries with it the strong suggestion of weakness. So in effect replacing  “victims” with “the vulnerable” at our time of growing inequality burdens the poor and otherwise excluded with the responsibility for their own situation. It must be a great comfort to “the invulnerable” to know they avoid wounds because they are strong. To avoid this fairy tale it’s time to accept again that the poor are usually born poor and they will remain poor unless societies that accept poverty are changed. We are all vulnerable to external blows but the so-called “vulnerable” class have the added assumed wound of self-harm. In fact they likely  don’t eat organic grub at Whole Foods or other “healthy food” establishments because they can’t afford it, not because they don’t care  about their health. Time to call a spade a spade and “the vulnerable” poor. Then we will all  understand better that where we are depends most on where we start. If healthy food restaurants really want all to eat better they should lower their prices so all can.

The language being used about the recent NBA players' work stoppage [aka strike] tells us something about the state of professional sports in 2020. The most common term used in the m,ainstream media is a "boycott". But is that really what we should be calling it?                         

Players are taking a worthy and important stand against the continuing outrage of racism in professional sports where black and other racialized players punch above their demographic weight. Finally we hope the nonsense of a sports/politics separation will be laid to rest. Sports is as political as everything else in our lives, invluding economics. One suggestion when engaging in a work stoppage -  don't use the gentle word boycott. Call it what it is: a strike. Another word of advice, If you're in a strike situation you don't tell the boss when you will end it. Set some goals to be achieved before you return to work. In this case with multi-millionaire players it's not about wages/. When it comes to racism in sport there are lots of targets to choose from, including racist owners who make money from people of backgrounds they demonize in private. Expose them.             

Two idealistic north Toronto teenagers got together in the early 2000s after seeing theabject working  conditions of children in far off Asian countries laboring to produce consumer goods for the West. Craig and Marc Keilburger  set up a non-government organization inspirationally called “Free the Children” designed to liberate young people from abusive workplaces. It caught the mood of the times and achieved significant support social support as many people and organizations were seeking something other than the race to the bottom set in motion by neo-liberal policies.  So successful was the initiative that it led to the creation of a broader initiative – Me to We to engage young people globally in social activities for the good of their communities. Free the Children became Me to We as ambitions and aspirations grew. Eventually the Canadian government signed on, seeing Me To We as a tool for engaging Canadian youth and  eventually a major contract was awarded with some money flowing to clearly compromised persons in high places in Canadian public life. In the meantime Me to We generated a charitable foundation (WE) giving the seal of selfless do-gooding to what happened in the Me to We penumbra. What is wrong with this? Beyond the clear ethical problems of insiders rewarding themselves for ostensibly  charitable activity, there is a more insidious problem to which social enterprises are vulnerable. How do you draw the line between self-interest and selflessness? The Keilburgers  became famous and idealized by many through their idealistic endeavours and much good has no doubt been  done.  But there took place an escalation of organizational scope and ambition that was not only difficult to maintain without engaging in questionable practices ironically similar to those of the corporations Free the Children originally exposed but seems ultimately to have succumbed to the lure of Growth. In effect, insofar as the Keilburgers became an enterprise then a charity, Free eventually became Me. The challenge for all social enterprises is how to avoid such trajectories.                 

 In 2020 most everbybody knows they should recycle their houehold waste, whether it is "green"  or not, but when it comes to our ever-increasing tech footprint (cellphones, computers, printers and other electronic gadgets) most of us are less sure about what to do and how to do it. In an economic system built on profit through increasing profits  and decreasing expenses the problem is likely to grow as in fact it has, since the advent of the industrial age in the nineteenth century. Currently producers gain an advantage though built-in obsolescence as users have to buy new versions on a regular basis, and so help to sustain the increasing profit margins that capitalist investors seek. The inevitable result is what we have: growing amounts of garbage, an increasing proportion of which is comtech hardware. Until there is a broad political commitment to real cost economics, where producers are responsible for the waste the create our environmental problems will not be solved. In the meantime there are some less damaging options and everbody should know about them. 

Right-wing nationalist governments with neoliberal policies that favour “free markets” and cutbacks in Public spending. The results are clear: Inequality grows and inequality kills. Those who die most are the most unequal: the poor, the homeless, the racially excluded.  Abandon austerity and invest for a better world is the way forward. Prevention is the Better way says TorontotheBetter. 

For the latest figures by country see www.coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

Steinman Transportation (worker owned transportation company) PATCH (construction hoarding street art), and Charlie’s Free Wheels (youth targeted bike education).

As market housing in Toronto gets ever more unaffordable and affordable housing ever harder to find TorontotheBetter calls on all to show support for the un-housed and de-housed. 

It's pretty common to hear heart-warming statements of social solidarity these days of pandemic but like pandemics of times past, though anyone can be infected the fatal consequences are tilted against the poor, as recent COVID demographics have clearly shown. The poor and socially excluded are worst hit as inequality does the tilting. The only difference from the "old normal" is that COVID outcomes arrive quicker than the usually drawn out daily grind of stress and shortage that is the norm for the socio-economically excluded, aka the poor. Our primary need for avoiding future pandemics and their unbalanced results,TorontotheBetter affirms, is to rid ourselves of inequaliity, combining private and public sectors in an organic social economy where human need is the overriding priority.                

The recent COVID-19 death toll in for-profit long term care homes in Ontario should act as a reminder of the broader ongoing absurdity of a public health care system that excludes drug costs and dental care. Crisis is opportunity so TorontotheBetter supports the #fixLTCFord campaign of the Ontario Health Coalition (www.ontariohealthcoalition.ca) for a radical transformation of long term care in Ontario. Profit making and health care are contradictory and a fragmented and fractured “Care” system is not a care system.

No prize for understanding what these figures from Canada's past have in common. The problem is an up to date picture may not look very different. 

No matter the so-called constituional monarchy that is the so-called “United“ Kingdom, ruled by a Queen, not a king, the “Royal Family” has always been above the law and long engaged in abuse of minors and women, not to say, anybody who got in their way. It is a murderous, abusive history of exploitation for which the current Queen Elizabeth now serves as a clean-up agent. Let nobody be fooled. The royals and their large salaries are the heirs of killers and abusers. All monarchies should be removed.

Suitably distanced from each other, but not from the neoliberal, anti-worker policies that bite students and teachers even harder in pandemic times TorontotheBetter recently spoke to union colleague Paul Bocking in downtown Toronto about his new book on education throughout the NAFTA region. 

ToronotheBetter encourages blog visitors reading this review to look for a copy of Paul Bocking's  in their local library but we  offer substantially discounted copies and free shipping for any who seek to buy their own by emailing postmaster@torontothebetter.net with Education in the subject line.

Once all imperial and racist legacies have been erased from Toronto's streets what will be left?

"Silence is excellent and eloquent" said deputy Prime-Minister Freeland about her superior, Justin Trudeau's silence on the behaviour of the president of Canada's largest trading partner. In fact it was a not very subtle attempt to avoid telling truth to power. Silence in the face of racism is acceptance. Freeland and Trudeau are, therfore, gutless hypocrites when they say how unacceptable they believe it to be. Expressing unambiguous disapproval without expletives is something true leaders have always been able to do, but apparently not the leaders of the current government of Canada. Imagine if silence been the chosen response in the face of Adolf Hitler and other historical racists! TorontotheBetter seeks a world where we build respect through honesty.     

No sooner had the reaction to the murder of George Floyd by state representatives appeared on the streets of the U.S.A. and other countries than predictable voices like ‘peace activist’ Donald Trump emerged, attacking “violence”. Such protesting about protest is hypocritical. What it really means is one type of violence (ours) is ok but your reaction is not. Same for anger. Much anger, from childhood on, is a reaction to injustice and such anger will lead to violence if ignored. If we are not angry about injustice we are complacent, and complacency enables continuance of the injustice and the anger. The truth is no progressive changes in history, from abolition of slavery to democracy and civil rights have occurred without anger and the violence it will lead to when the injustice that caused it continues Not all anger is just or creative but it can be and often has been, so the key issue here is not violence; it is whose violence and what is its purpose. If the unjust cause is not removed the anger and resulting violence cant’t  be either. Better understood, such anger and violence, are the necessary seeds of change and improvement, if improvement is ever to occur. Building a better society for All in it is the best way to prevent anger. And “violence”.

Thousands of Torontonians took to the street on May 30,2020 to protest the latest fatalities in the continuing outrage of violence by established Canadian and American authorities against the racially oppressed, who are, not at all coincidentally, the economically disadvantaged. Both recent victims, George Floyd in the U.S.A. and Regis Korchinski-Paquet in Canada, have the sadly predictable features of racial and economic exclusion. The evidence has long been available to those who wish to see it. As always, the challenge is action and mass demonstrations like todays are important steps in the pressure to foment it. As one chant had it today, "this is not an accident, it was designed that way." Undesigning the mainstream economy is what TorontotheBetter is about and, as this recent report - https://evonomics.com/science-flow-says-extreme-inequality-causes-economic-collapse/ - confirms extreme inequality, like racism, causes economic collapse. There are many ways of turning back "pandemics", whether economic, environmental or biological, our challenge is to seize the moment before it (and we) are too late.     

The herartfelt tears, embarrasssed out of many responsible by the recent undeniable statistics of death by COVID in Canada's largely private long term care sectoor, may be genuine, but will action follow the contrition? Public enquiries or commissions will embarrass a few more but the only long term solution is government action, the kind of action few of Canada's neoliberal minded leaders are currently likely to take. To ensure universal inclusion TorontotheBetter proposes a charter of aged rights and the inclusion of all homes, private or public, in the Canada Health Act. 

It is one of the best supports for the environment, as well as the poor and disadvantaged, in fact everybody. It is happening now in several  Ontario cities, but we should not need a pandemic to do this right/wise  thing in Toronto, or anywhere.  

If not now, in the middle of a pandemic, when will be the right time? The Network of Wellbeing https://networkofwellbeing.org/ hosts a free webinar about reconstruction on Tuesday  May 26 at 7.30pm.
 

Though the phrase was catchy and supported by various market interests after the 1968 article that popularized the phrase there never was a tragedy of the commons, except as an idea. But to apply the phrase to the COVID pandemic is wrong for another reason too. COVID is a fundamentally a biological affliction, arising from the nature of the virus. Its rapid spread everywhere around the world is associated with the typical everyday indiscriminate travel and social mingling of people in many countries, but the inability to control it quickly likely had as much to do with the inability of societies to act with a united (aka common) approach that, if need be, curtails previous individual license. Either way, the problem is not just that of people coming together, it has been a problem of a public policy failure to coordinate, compounded by the reduction of public investment, as promoted by neoliberal economists, in societal resources like Personal Protective Equipment.

No sign of masks in the marketing images, but there may be a few behind the scenes.