Material World – News from Canada
Climate change in Canada is irreversible! So says a report issued by Environment and Climate Change Canada on 3 September and authored by two dozen government and climate scientists. The average temperatures are expected to rise by 3.5C by the end of the century. It says that even if the world reaches net-zero emissions by 2075, the effects on Canada will still be very bad. These include a 50 percent increase in the area burned by wildfires and glaciers losing 75 percent of their mass. Ryan Ness, director of ECCC, made a comment breathtaking in its brilliance, ‘The most surprising thing is the contrast between what the report says we can expect for our future climate and the level of action the federal government and other governments are taking.’ Nevertheless Mr. Ness knows how we can adapt to these awful changes, like retrofitting homes with more fireproof material and to build flood walls around communities. Once again capitalism creates problems it can’t solve.
Parti Québécois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon caused an uproar on 4 September while campaigning for support in the provincial election in October. Plamondon claimed that Premier Legault’s ruling Coalition Avenir Québec had lost control of its immigration system. Plamondon said a PQ government would reduce the number of temporary immigrants in Quebec per year from more than 500,000 to between 200,000 and 250,000. He promised to reduce this number to 35,000 a year, claiming Quebec isn’t capable of absorbing too many immigrants. Suffice to say all other parties went ballistic over his comments but the PQ won the election. This is allegedly one of capitalism’s most rotten stinking aspects: ‘Too many Jews, Pakistanis, Moslems, etc have been allowed in, soon they’ll take over our jobs and then they’ll be telling us what to do’. Capitalism is a divisive system, splitting the working class, who in contrast should stand united against the system that attempts to divide them.
There is a new organization, the Toronto Tenant Union, which is expanding across the city fighting rising rents, evictions and bad housing conditions. Toronto is one of the most expensive cities, rent wise, anywhere. An average one-bedroom apartment requires an income of $90,000 a year. Research by the Canadian Alliance to end Homelessness shows the loss of affordable housing has created higher rates of homelessness. According to Leilani Farha, former U.N. expert on housing, ‘What tenants often don’t know is that their rent increases are predetermined, calculated into a firm’s return on investment before it even buys a building. Our biggest banks who are also reaping in record profits, reward the behaviour by offering better loan terms when the building owners raise rents. I call this displacement financing; the more a landlord raises rents the cheaper their financing becomes’. As for help from politicians — good luck — 128 of Canada’s 338 federal MPs are landlords, while renters make up nearly a third of Canada’s households. While we may hope the new tenants’ union has some success, nevertheless, dealing with the effects of capitalism is not the answer, its abolition is.
A Canadian company, Calian Group Ltd., has signed a deal to partner with Ukrainian defence company SkyFall to focus on drone defence training. The two companies will develop unmanned systems training and education for armed forces in Canada and various NATO members and allied countries. Mark Carney said Canada will work with Ukraine to produce millions of drones, after a meeting with President Zelensky. The SkyFall Academy is a training center for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence, which specializes in unmanned systems training and has trained more than 30,000 military personnel over the last three years. Carney probably thinks this will help the Canadian economy, which if it does, just goes to show how disgusting it is that production for war is a major profit source of capitalism.
Despite all the terrible things Trump has done, nevertheless he’s good for a laugh. He has accused Canada of, ‘Ripping America off’; it’s hilarious on the news watching people take down Lake Ontario signs and put up Lake America ones. At the time of writing, Donny baby was considering calling New Mexico, New America. By the time you read this he will probably have done more stupid things. However, to any non-socialist who may read this we can say that, yes Trump has caused a lot of problems for people all over the world, but be that as it is, he is still a product of his time, which is a time when the capitalist system is spiralling downward, which he has worsened. In other words, capitalism is the disease, Trump its symptom.
On 24 September, at an interview with the New York Times, Mark Carney said that he had carefully examined the possibility of a U.S. military action against Canada. Carney was sending a message to Canadians, to Trump, and the world at large. Initially he had said he thought Canada and the U.S. were involved in a trade war, though obviously he had thought it could go beyond that. The Toronto Star ran an article the next day headlined, ‘Carney will need the support of the workers’. As socialists we all know wars are economically based, and as everyone knows, an invasion of Canada isn’t something one can put past Trump. As socialists we also know the working class have no stake in wars, but depressing as it is, so many Canadian workers have said they would fight tenaciously to defend Canada against the U.S. As Pete Seeger said, ‘When will they ever learn?’
(From the October monthly bulletin of the Socialist Party of Canada)