Showing posts with label occupy canada. Show all posts
Showing posts with label occupy canada. Show all posts

Saturday, March 7, 2015

It Could Happen To You

Although the narration is at times melodramatic, the message of this video is clear: trusting government to respect your privacy is a naive notion.


H/t Occupy Canada and Operation Maple

Thursday, October 13, 2011

What the Occupy Movement Means for Canada

There is a surprisingly good article (but only online, I think) in the Globe and Mail by an economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Armine Yalnizyan, who offers an interesting assessment of the Occupation Movement.

These are a few of the facts the article brings forth:

Raise the top tax rate by 3 per cent on those making over $250,000 -- a round number which marks the entry gate for the fabled 1 per cent - - and, at 32 per cent, you’d still pay less than the 33 per cent rate in the U.S. at that income level. It would raise about $2-billion, the federal share of, say, a national child-care program.

A 35 per cent tax bracket for Canadians whose income is higher than $750,000 -- the U.S. top rate, except there it’s applied on incomes above $373,650 -- would yield $1.2-billion. Over a decade, that could pay for the federal share of fixing drinking-water and waste-water infrastructure across Canada.

Realistically, however, such is not going to happen in the near future. As Yalnizan points out:

But governments are increasingly tangled up in elite interests. The latest example is Finance Minister Jim Flaherty‘s drive to marshall support to scuttle a proposed financial transactions tax, a mechanism that could help slow down the wild gyrations of the stock market we’ve witnessed of late. Flaherty and other G20 finance ministers will be meeting in Paris just as thousands of Canadians gather to Occupy Toronto on Bay Street. He will be protecting certain interests, just not those of the majority of Canadians.

And that will likely remain the status quo, unless and until enough of us join the movement to make both our voices, and our outrage, heard.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Gerald Caplan Writes on The Occupy Wall Street Movement

In an online article entitled This is what democracy looks like: Occupying Wall Street and Bay Street, Gerald Caplan and Amanda Gryzyb discuss why the occupation movement is a healthy expression of the people, and address some of the inequities that will surely help focus its Canadian incarnation beginning on October 15: vast social inequities, climate change, rising unemployment, precarious jobs, the lack of upward social mobility and the egregious corporate influence over government.

More specifically in Canada, some dismaying facts about life here are as follows:

The youth unemployment rate is 17.2 per cent. An increasing number of Canadians – young and old – are precariously employed or underemployed, without benefits and without job security.

The poverty rate in Canada is over 10 per cent, and one in seven children live in poverty.

Our homeless shelters are over capacity and our food banks face constant shortages.

Tuitions at Canadian universities are rising, and graduating students are debilitated by student loan debt.

A nation of such wealth simply should not have such glaring social inequities.


Let's hope for a good turnout on Saturday.