News, Events & Comments

Who Is Vaclav Smil and why should Canadians know what much of the world, including Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, already knows of him? Arguably, with 39 books to his credit , he is the most prominent “unknown” Canadian thinker. And in a period when the world hangs over a precipice of energy shortage, given his specialty in the linkage of energy, food and the environment Smil is a key voice for the future of the world. Simply put his proposal is to consume less and consume better. In "Numbers Don't Lie: 71 stories to help understand the modern world" The University of Manitoba's Smil offers unsentimental commentary on many green energy "solutions". You can purchase the book from Libra, our socially superior alternative to Amazon and TorontotheBetter's parent worker co-op (email libra@web.ca with Smil in the subject line) - or borrrow it from the Toronto Public Library at www.torontopubliclibrary.ca. For more on Smil the person see: www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/meet-vaclav-smil-man-who-has-quietly-shaped-how-world-thinks-about-energy

In fact, they must if we are to overcome mountains of political inertia. Millions worldwide follow professional #sports, a huge body of latent political activism. So, TorontotheBetter offers congrats to the soccer supporters with #Glasgow Celtic and #Bayern Munich colours, as featured here mingling with those of Palestine, and hijabs, who together attended Toronto's recent free Palestine support rally. Just like the enterprises featured in the TorontotheBetter social economy directory, professional sports corporations are fundamentally political in the choices they make about what they do. This is a time for all sectors to step up to their political responsibilities.

Welcome recently organized Westjet workers to the union family, from TorontotheBetter IWW workers at Libra Knowledge and Information Co-op. To learn about Westjet's Unifor local see: https://westjet.unifor.org

Though Charles Dickens' Mr. Bumble, the beadle, is a figure of fun and hardly a role model, as a legal functionary he knew whereof he spoke when he declared the law to be "a ass". And no, this post is not about driving while under the influence; it's about the intrinsic limits of legal mechanisms for achieving political ends. As Leon Trotsky put it, our opponents have their morals and we have ours. We do not inhabit a circumstance of legality on one side and its absence on the other. For a variety of reasons, not least the demographics of class-based societies, lawyers are commonly chosen as power technicians, most particularly, of course, in states constructed on a legal basis. Because of the "binarity" of law things are, or they are not, allowed. This, though "binality", with its echo of the single letter variant term "banality" might have been the verbal coining of choice for Mr. Bumble. The results of law, however precise, inevitably violate the continuously fine-grained texture of life as it is lived, even if specific legal agents may be sensitive to the limitations of their trade. You can't blame a carpenter for thinking in the language of wood, but of course to a hammer everything looks like a nail or, otherwise put, an opportunity for hammering. Better than law, we argue, is the more aspirational flexibility of a charter,a mechanism particularly resonant in a Canada bound (loosely of course, but bound nonetheless) by a charter of rights and freedoms. Stay tuned to this space for more detail on a  social economy charter for enterprise and a recognition that beyond all cultural mechanisms the directness of action is ultimately prime. A random directory of items such as Torontothebetter has the advantage, TorontotheBetter believes, of flexibility but within clear bounds.

Probably we hope most people have by now seen through the implied COVID-19 solidarity of "We're all in this together" talk. As George Orwell famously wrote of equality some are more all-in this COVID-19 equality than others. Added "immunity" to the virus comes from socio-economic status, that is primarily from higher incomes, and, in the particular circumstances of COVID-19, self-distancing capabilities, these effects heightened by the reckless policies of private sector favouring political leaders. Until health is understood as fundamentally socially determined and not a genetic lottery we will continue to see medical emergencies reinforce the inequalities endemic in class-based and -divided societies. Pandemics make the important point that we share some vulnerabilities. When will political wills echo our vulnerability with support for the solidarity mechnism of basic equality? Until then the all in it together rhetoric will resound as empty, if not cynical.In these times the social economy supported by TorontotheBetter will continue to play its role as a support to basic rights and conditions, but requires the statutory embedding for which an enterprise social charter is needed if it is to be a reality for all, not just for the fortunate few. Stay tuned to this blog for more on social business chartering.

This greyhound is moving in one direction: out of Canada. Of course the news - https://news.greyhound.ca/ - of Greyhound Canada closing all its services in Toronto and elsewhere in Canada is bad for the many, often low-income bus travellers and the small Canadian communities for which Greyhound bus service had become a transportation lifeline over many years. And it is not news for many communities previously divested, but as with many recent challenges like, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic, there is, and must, be a linked opportunity for radical transfomation if similar societal breakdowns are not to re-occur. Simply put, the public sector in Canada, particularly in recent years, under the control of neoliberal privatization and divestment policies has increasingly relied on porivate organizations to conduct public services for which they are unfitted. Simply to state the problem thus is to reveal the basic contradiction. The challenge is not Greyhound's to resolve; as forewarened by their previous desertion of communities in western Canada they have taken a simple profit-loss buiness position on their Canadian services and concluded Canada is not worth the cost of operating here. TorontotheBetter calls on all in Canada concerned with maintaining basic public services to make their voices heard for re-investment in social transportation, either public or non-profit. We are in transformative times. We must take action now to avoid further shredding of our societal service fabric. For-profit market suppliers can never be reliable providers of public service, though the socially purposed rnterprise can make a valuable contrinution. This is a principle that is basic to TorontotheBetter. Stay tuned to this blog for more ideas and opportunities for progressive post-pandemic socio-economic change.

Ideas don't belong to anyone. They exist in the commons of language that is the heritage of all.In pandemics like COVID-19 intellectual property rights mean corporations like Pfizer are profiting from the suffering caused by knowledge exclusion. TorontotheBetter calls on all local enterprises to share their urgent knowledge using licenses such as the Creative Commons and on governments to break dowm the copyright barriers that restrict access. In pandemic times death by intellectual property law is just as fatal as disease. Time to prevent it in a social economy that values human life over profit