Source: https://xcancel.com/kensimcity/status/2111222203358588934?s=46

If you don’t know much about Ken Sim and ABC, here are just a few things they’ve done in their 4 years in office:

- Eliminated Vancouver’s living wage policy for city workers.

- Killed the Renters Office.

- Tried to eliminate our democratically elected Park Board so they could sell our public parks to private developers.

- Put a pause on all new supportive housing in a city with a toxic drug crisis, massive wealth inequality and a large homeless population that gets larger every year.

- Rolled back popular climate measures to allow for natural gas heating in new builds at the behest of the gas lobby.

- Increased the police budget by 40%, the largest police budget per capita in Canada.

- Passed a “zero means zero” austerity budget that slashed public services and staff while increasing funding for police.

- Spread lies on Chinese social media and traditional media that their socialist city councillor colleague Sean Orr was handing out free drugs on Christmas Day to people on the street. They eventually had to walk it back when they were caught, and now Sean Orr is suing Ken Sim for defamation.

- Named October 3rd “Chip Wilson Day”, the racist lululemon billionaire who once put a sign outside his house calling the BC NDP communist.

There’s much more, but for the sake of brevity I’ll stop there. Needless to say, this is an extremely shameful decision by Mable. Ken Sim is a right-wing, billionaire-backed politician who does not care about the working class that the NDP is supposed to represent.

The NDP has been calling out the Temporary Foreign Worker Program/LMIA Process since 2014:

https://www.ndp.ca/news/official-opposition-statement-temporary-foreign-worker-program

The party has done countless statements on this but here is another in 2024:

https://www.ndp.ca/news/ndp-statement-temporary-foreign-worker-program-cuts

The Liberal Party of Canada/Conservative Party of Canada though refuse to deal with the root issues of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, International Student Program, International Mobility Program, and the list goes on.

The issue is that it creates a cheap exploitable labour framework. Period.

I like Lewis because he doesn't make immigrants and vulnerable communities scapegoats. Many of us are immigrants or from immigrant families and this should be a place of respect, kindness, and overall solidarity.

We need to be calling for systematic reform of all these programs to avoid alienation, division, and exploitation in the working class. Period. This is the definition of real Workers Solidarity.

We need to be calling for investigations, trials, and SEVERE punishments for the bad immigration consultants, bad employers, and others that STILL engage in rampant fraud to exploit vulnerable working demographics and pit workers against each other in a race to the bottom for valuing labour.

We have to stop allowing the reactionary/regressive sphere to control the narratives of this space and connect with the people that have been hurt by these policy frameworks. It only increases the levels of gross xenophobia and racism.

Lewis needs to get LOUD on this and start showing there can be a real substantive pro-worker policy out there. Not just one of hatred of "Other".

NEW from Isaac Peltz and Aedan Burnett

I don't need to convince you all that Canada is in desperate need of Electoral Reform, and I myself have some ideas as to how it could be implemented, based on how New Zealand implemented it, if anyone wants to hear it:

1. Mixed-Member Proportional Representation and LIST Seats

In 2025, 630K people voted Liberal in Alberta but the Liberals ended up with two seats, 203K people voted Conservative in Nova Scotia but ended up with only ONE seat (and later none), and 368K people voted NDP in Ontario, but they got NO seats.

If the seat count properly reflected the popular vote, 10 seats in Alberta would be Liberal, 4 seats in Nova Scotia would be Conservative, and 6 seats in Ontario would be NDP. But with the current system we have right now, anyone who votes for their riding’s losing party, regardless of political affiliation, might as well stay home. 

And it's no wonder why SO MANY people are disillusioned with FPTP, especially when millions of people in this country vote for their preferred party and then have their votes completely ignored because someone won a riding with 30% of the vote.

The only two parties that benefit from this system are the Liberals and the Conservatives (and maybe the Bloc Quebecois). Because they know if they actually implement electoral reform, they will lose a significant chunk of their power and influence.

Mixed Member Proportional Representation and List Seats (where members are appointed by political parties rather than elected directly) could fix this.

100 LIST seats could be added along with the already existing 343 constituency seats (where the members are elected directly), and when a party wins a certain percent of the vote, that party can appoint a certain number of MPs to the LIST seats based on the percentage they won in each province (if the Liberals win 50% of the popular vote in Ontario they get 19 seats and so on). And if the party leader loses their seat/doesn't have a seat, they can appoint themselves to a List seat.

Here’s how it could work based on the results of the 2025 federal election:

Overall Seats (443) (222 for a majority)
Liberals: 215 (+46)
Conservatives: 185 (+41)
Bloc Quebecois: 28 (+6)
NDP: 14 (+7)
Greens: 1 (-)

it wouldn't be 100% perfect, but at least it will make people feel more represented

2. Indigenous Seats

in New Zealand there are 7 constituencies that represent Māori voters, I think doing the same thing here in Canada would be a really interesting idea, Especially given how the riding of North Island Powell River, a riding with a sizeable First Nations population, is currently being represented by a residential school denier.

19 new seats could be added (did a lot of math to narrow this down), and could shift based on each province’s indigenous population.

To be qualified to vote in an Indigenous Seat, people need to prove that they are of First Nations, Metis or Inuit descent. The Electoral Commission will maintain two separate electoral rolls (the Indigenous Electoral Roll and the General Electoral Roll) and eligible voters could change between them at almost any time.

The Indigenous Electorate candidates as well must be of First Nations, Metis or Inuit descent. These candidates could run as members of the major political parties (Liberals, NDP, Conservatives etc.) but could also run as members of smaller parties (i.e. a hypothetical first nations party) much like our system.

feel free to let me know what you think!

Hey folks, work has been murderous of late and I haven't had time to do my own deep dive of the polling data.

But from what I've read on https://338canada.com/bc/ things look pretty dire and that we've got a strong possibility of getting a con majority. Someone talk me off the ledge here, tell me why I shouldn't be worried.

Reported by the Canadian Palestinian Association of Manitoba who was at the Legislature today for Islamic Heritage Month

I'm looking for book recommendations related to the history of the labour movement, socialism, and the left in Quebec. I'm want a better understanding of the province's politics!

It’s been over 100 days for these people and all they are asking for is what they already have. My coworkers and I will be proudly standing in support of basic human decency and we’ll stand up to Goliath employers that break the law like the bank of Canada ! 💪 (we should also be out there as a show against C-39… 🤦‍♂️ )

“Canadian steelmaker Stelco, owned and run by a Trump supporter, is now in the process of laying off most of its Hamilton, Ontario workers .. and there appears to be only one party leader that has proposed a plan to save those jobs.” -Rational National

I thought the good people here may be interested in these transcriptions that I typed out from a couple of Tommy Douglas clips, where Douglas defends the concept of public healthcare, and then argues why we should actually expand the public system.

This first one comes from a speech Tommy Douglas gave to the NDP in 1983, for the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the party's founding:

Again, it's been mentioned: to save Medicare from subtle strangulation.

When you go back to your constituencies and you run into somebody who says "Oh, it's a good idea for you soft-hearted humanitarians, but we can't afford it", let me give you a simple statistic which you can put down on a piece of paper and carry in your head. And that is that our friends in the United States are spending 9% of their Gross National Product -- and they got a higher per-capita Gross National Product than we do -- they spend 9% of their Gross National Product on healthcare, and 34 million of their people have no healthcare coverage. And in Canada, we spend 7% of our Gross National Product, and every man, woman, and child is covered under medicare.

But I want to warn you, as one who started out even before I was in politics, dedicated to the idea of comprehensive health insurance, fought for it through all my political life. I want to say to you: that Medicare and hospital insurance are already marked for destruction, unless you stop the per-capita taxes and the extra billing which most of the governments of Canada are now permitting. Someone said, "Oh, what am I gonna do?". A per-capita tax, which is levied without any basis on the ability to pay -- a woman in Ontario with two children, having to pay over $50 a month, $600 a year, can she afford that? -- And that's levied on a per-capita basis, not on the basis of ability to pay. I know you need money to run medicare, how blatantly I can tell you about the cost of that. But if we need money for medicare, or for any other humane service, let it be financed on the basis of ability to pay, and not so much per head.

We must fight as we have never fought before to say, the per-capita tax for healthcare is out the window. To say, no extra billing or extra charges. Oh, you say, "Why, what harm does it do?". I'll tell you what harm it does. It means that increasingly the people who can afford to pay the per-capita tax -- and its going up, its just gone up in Alberta -- people who can afford to pay the per-capita tax, and the people who can afford to pay the extra billing, will pay it. And they will get the best care, they will get the most experienced surgeons and physicians, they will get into the best hospitals. And the people who cant pay? They will take what's left. If you want a two-tiered health program, then just continue the way we're going.

And I remind you that in this movement we pledged ourselves 50 years ago, that we would provide healthcare for every man, woman, and child, irrespective of their colour, or their race, or their financial status. And by God we're gonna do it!

This second one comes from a 1976 CBC interview:

Tommy Douglas: I would propose in the act, that we say the federal government will enter into a 50/50 arrangement with the provinces to institute nursing care, home nursing care, meals-on-wheels, that we would share 50% of the costs of setting up community health clinics, we'd start a program of denti-care among school children --

Interviewer: In other words, we should dictate the services we're going to pay for.

TD: We dictate the ones we're going to pay for: we would say these are the programs we are prepared to pay for, we are prepared to share with you on a 50/50 basis. Now, there is no way in which the federal government can dictate to the provinces that it must undertake those programs, but they can say to the provinces "If you want to institute these programs, we'll pay 50% of the cost". I think what most people miss is the essential point, namely, that the provinces are even more interested than the federal government is in cutting costs down, because the provincial governments are much less able to finance their half of the costs than the federal government is. So if the federal government is worried about escalating costs, just imagine what little provinces like New Brunswick, and Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia feel about rising health costs.

I: And we get caught in the middle?

TD: You mean the public?

I: Yes.

TD: Of course the public gets caught in the middle! And the public who are going to get caught the most severely are the ones in the poorer provinces. With the federal government copping out of some of its responsibility from Medicare, the chances are that the more affluent provinces like Ontario and Alberta and British Columbia will be able to absorb the extra costs. But in the Atlantic provinces particularly -- and in the Prairie provinces if there were a few bad crops -- the only way that they could get by would be to begin reducing medical care services. And if you do that, what you're really saying is there are two classes of Canadians: those Canadians who live in well-to-do provinces that are going to have a high standard of health services, and the people who live in the poorer provinces who are going to have a very poor standard of health services. And that means that in the years ahead, there are going to be children who are going to be less healthy, children with poor teeth, children with long-staying-illnesses whose health will be impaired because they happened to have grown up in a poor province; and that surely ought not to be the kind of standard we set for Canada.

Avi Lewis hosted some powerful speakers at the mass mobilization to stop bill C-39 call yesterday, including:

• Ramon Kataquapita youth leader from Attawapiskat First Nation
• Bushra Asghar from the national Youth Climate Corp
• Mark Hancock, CUPE National President

Bill C-39 threatens to:

• violate the rights and lands of Indigenous Nations 
• gut environmental legislation designed to protect species and ecosystems
• strip workers right to strike

Click HERE to sign up with the mass mobilization phone zap happening this week Oct 14-16, and HERE for more details and instructions.

Watch a video of the livestream HERE

The federal NDP’s proposal to nationalize Stelco has me thinking about the broader case for public ownership. Which led me to this great piece from policyalternatives.ca on the disaster that CN’s privatization has been since Chrétien sold the crown corporation in 1995.

I feel like this is the most clear explanation I’ve seen so far - and I think they need to get this message out a lot better because I see a lot of confusion and misinformation about why this was called.