Amidst shifting political winds, we consider seven once common, now preventable diseases.

There’s a concerning trend emerging in Canada and the United States when it comes to vaccine hesitancy.

In the United States, a key legal adviser to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man tapped to be the next U.S. health secretary, is working to get rid of polio and hepatitis B vaccines in America, according to the New York Times. Kennedy himself has vocally opposed vaccines for years.

On Canada’s East Coast, where vaccinations are readily available, three out of every 10 kids are not vaccinated against measles.

It’s not too different on the West Coast. Wong said that last year only around 69 per cent of two-year-olds in B.C. were up to date on all recommended vaccines, down from 74 per cent in 2017. By seven years old, that percentage falls to 66 per cent, which is down from 73 per cent in 2021, Wong added.

China said on Sunday it was taking countermeasures against two Canadian institutions and 20 people involved in human rights issues concerning the Uyghurs and Tibet.

The measures, which took effect on Saturday, include asset freezes and bans on entry and the targets include Canada's Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project and the Canada-Tibet Committee, China's foreign ministry announces on its website.

Rights groups accuse Beijing of widespread abuses of Uyghurs, a mainly Muslim ethnic minority that numbers around 10 million in the western region of Xinjiang, including the mass use of forced labour in camps. Beijing denies any abuses.

China seized control of Tibet in 1950 in what it describes as a "peaceful liberation" from feudalistic serfdom. International human rights groups and exiles, however, have routinely condemned what they call China's oppressive rule in Tibetan areas.

History of the tradition from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibb's_Eve

Tibb's Eve is a folk expression for a day which will never arrive. A celebration held on 23 December in Newfoundland and Labrador is also known as Tibb's/Tipp's Eve.[1]

Tibb's Eve was traditionally used in Newfoundland vernacular as a unspecified date that didn't exist. If you asked someone when they were going to pay you back the money they owed you they might answer "On Tibb's Eve" meaning that you probably won't see that money again.[17]

Eventually, proverbial explanations arose as to when this non-existent Tibs Eve was: "Neither before nor after Christmas" was one. "Between the old year and the new" was another. Thus, the day became associated with the Christmas season.[3]

Sometime around World War II, people along the south coast of Newfoundland began to associate 23 December with the phrase 'Tibb's Eve' and deemed it the first night during Advent when it was appropriate to have a drink. Advent was a sober, religious time of year and traditionally people would not drink alcohol until Christmas Day at the earliest. Tibb's Eve emerged as an excuse to imbibe two days earlier.[9]

An outport tradition not originally celebrated in St. John's, Tibb's Eve was adopted circa 2010 by local bar owners, who saw it as a business opportunity.[18] Brewery taproom owners have suggested that hosting Tibb's Eve events allow them to open up "Newfoundland experiences to outsiders."[19]

Since then, social media and expatriate Newfoundlanders have spread the tradition to other parts of Canada, such as Halifax, Nova Scotia[23] and Toronto, Ontario.[24]

In 2019, comedian Colin Hollett described the holiday this way for a Halifax newspaper: Tibb's Eve on December 23, when people drink and eat at kitchen parties and bars with all the people they want to celebrate with before spending time with those they have to. I have no idea how that isn't huge everywhere else.[27]

@antium@lemmy.world - I saw via search that you'd commented about this, so you may be able to share more :)

Karsten Heuer helped bring bison back to Banff. Facing his own end, he reflected with amazement on how nature remembers.

~

Wes Olson, who spent 40 years studying and reintroducing bison in places as far afield as Alaska and Siberia, came to observe the newly freed bison in Banff in 2018. Olson had been involved in other introductions, and in every case, “it felt like we put them in a strange place. In Banff, if felt like we had brought them home.”

Almost immediately the land came to life, said Olson. “I watched a group of ravens fly over and look down at these strange beasts. They could have been hovering in mid-air, they were so shocked. Then they went to gaggle in some spruce trees where they pondered the arrival, of something old yet deeply familiar.”

Within a few days Olson observed Columbian ground squirrels gathering shedded bison hair to line their birth dens as they had done since time immemorial. “After 140 years of their absence, I found that amazing.”

~

A few bulls that gambolled beyond the park’s borders were shot or relocated. The Alberta government does not recognize bison as wildlife.

~

The second thing the buffalo taught Heuer was not to reduce animal biology down to its smallest pieces the way so much western science does to everything. The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts, and connections to other species matter. Animals have unexplained powers and are more conscious than most humans recognize.

With increased focus on gambling-suicide links in countries like Australia and the United Kingdom, and with strategizing at the federal level to reduce suicides overall, there is pressure on lawmakers to rethink Canada’s approach to GRS [gambling-related suicide]. Questions remain about whether provinces have done enough to track and prevent deaths.

Survey data released last week by the charitable research organization Mental Health Research Canada suggests 60 per cent of people at high risk of gambling problems reported that ads influenced them to gamble more.

The widespread cultural acceptance of legalized gambling is connected to viewing gambling as a personal choice, neglecting the addictive nature of the heavily-promoted gaming options and ignoring the dire financial and mental health consequences for those who become addicted — a view pushed through marketing and industry lobbying efforts.

This underlying risk seems at odds with the continued expansion and availability of legalized gambling across Canada, including legal single-sports betting in every province, two recently-opened casino resorts in the Greater Toronto Area, and more than 80 new legal online casinos in Ontario through its iGaming Ontario provincial agency.

Bold mine.

Since 2021, global auto giants including Volkswagen, General Motors, Ford and Honda — and battery-makers from South Korea to Sweden — have pledged $46.1 billion in investments, mostly in Ontario and Quebec. Canadian taxpayers have kicked in $52.5 billion through subsidies, tax credits and other funding from federal and provincial coffers.

Nevertheless, the wheels have begun to wobble enough in recent months to fuel doubts about how realistic Canada’s EV ambitions are.

Several automakers have postponed or shelved projects as consumers fret over battery range and gaps in charging networks for still-pricey electric vehicles. Battery producers facing lower prices and margins have scaled back, too.

At stake are thousands of new EV manufacturing and battery jobs, opportunities for scores of small and medium-sized suppliers, and Canada’s aim to be the critical minerals supplier to the world. A slow-down in the shift to electric cars, buses and trucks would also jeopardize plans to clean up the transportation sector, the country’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter.

Great article, highly recommended reading. Bold in excerpts mine.

As governments across Europe and the United States have been taken over by far-right parties, it becomes increasingly clear that centrist and progressive politics have failed to address the expanding inequality of the last four decades. This inequality has been effectively documented by scholars, including Thomas Piketty and Mark Blyth.

Here in Canada, the governing Liberals and New Democratic Party continue to tinker around the edges of inequality. This was alluded to by Freeland in her resignation letter. All the while, the Liberal brass fail to recognize what voters really need are new financial approaches that will stem the tide of the movement of wealth upward.

During the last decade, however, centrists and progressives alike continually fail to grasp that many voters have reached the point of ‘anything must be better than this.’

With all due respect to Trudeau and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, they have been fiddling while Rome burns. Canada is home to some of the worst corporate concentration in the world in the food sector. Little to nothing has been done to address this.

Housing costs have become untenable due to poorly planned immigration policies, designed to give the corporate world access to a cheap army of reserve labour. Voters of all stripes and demographics feel this in their pocketbooks and when they cannot sleep at night.

The far-right is happily engaging in populism. The closest thing we’ve seen to a real left-wing economic populism on the North American continent has been Bernie Sanders. Notably, the Vermont Senator's candidacy was stamped out by the Democratic Party establishment in the United States.

In 2024, American Democrats actually ran on being the party of democracy while failing to hold a real presidential primary. Kamala Harris then proceeded to seek Republican endorsements, rather than address the concerns of the Democrats’ historical working-class base.

It is no longer sufficient to blame these problems on global conditions. Frankly, to do so looks weak at a time when voters are looking for bold moves. Getting there will require politicians who are willing to draw their power from working- and middle-class voters, rather than corporate donors. It is no longer enough for Liberal politicians to just say they are for Canada’s middle class and those working hard to join it.

“Our ability to talk, teach, and learn about Palestine and Palestinian liberation, as this report shows, has long been under punitive threat at York University. Under the current administration, this threat has deepened exponentially,” conclude the authors of the new report, titled Surveilled & Silenced: A Report on Palestine Solidarity at York University.

The report, published in October, draws from surveys carried out separately by the York University Faculty Association’s Race Equity Caucus and by the student group Palestine Solidarity Collective.

The surveys were initiated after hearing mounting anecdotal evidence from Palestinian students and their allies about increased policing of their actions, harassment from other students and faculty in class, at rallies or even in their dorms, microaggressions and overt racial slurs, online doxxing, and more.

The findings are divided into four main themes:

• Silence and inaction from the administration
• Justifying repression by using “community safety” rhetoric
• Hyper-surveillance and increased police harassment
• Growing distrust for the administration

Two weeks ago, a survey conducted by the Jewish Medical Association of Ontario (JMAO) made headlines in the Toronto Star, the National Post and the Toronto Sun. The methodologically-questionable survey promotes misleading claims about antisemitism and Jewish identity — namely that there is an environment of imminent and overwhelming danger facing Jewish physicians in Canada.

As Jewish physicians, we share our colleagues’ concerns about real and disturbing incidents of antisemitism in Canada today, especially those perpetrated by white supremacists. Unfortunately, criticisms of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza are often mislabelled as instances of antisemitism. This results in a mainstream discourse around antisemitism that serves to suppress legitimate political debate. And it has led some Canadian health workers to be defamed as antisemitic or even suspended for calling attention to Israeli war crimes against the Palestinian people.

To effectively combat antisemitism and other forms of discrimination, we must accurately identify them.

“Most consumers are probably of the opinion that the CFIA is managing food safety among manufacturers in Canada – and they’re not, because of the lack of resources. The CFIA is not delivering on a proper food-safety mandate.”

oopsie doopsie

a facility in Pickering, Ont., linked to a deadly listeria outbreak this summer was deemed a lower priority for inspections. As a result, the site had not been visited by a CFIA inspector in the five years leading up to the outbreak. It was only after the outbreak that the CFIA says it discovered the plant had not been conducting testing for listeria in finished products or on food contact surfaces.

Using genome sequencing, public-health officials determined that the listeria strain involved in the outbreak sickened 20 people as far back as August, 2023. Three people died.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

/unjerk

Fuck this shit. We've underfunded our institutions, privatized our regulators, and made producers responsible for their own compliance.

I'd say that we deserve what we get, but the people who got sick and died from this shit clearly didn't.

🔵CPC 232 --------------majority: 172 seats ⚜️BQ 45 🔴LPC 39 🟠NDP 25 🟢GPC 2

Conservatives are up 1%+ in popularity now at 45%.

I learned about this new economic neologism elsewhere on Lemmy.

"vibecession," a term that refers to a disconnect between economic data and how consumers feel.

My curiosity was piqued because I heard that Chrystia Freeland used it a month ago, before she was in the spotlight. Apparently the Liberals' 2-month tax holiday and $250 cheques were in part to target this "vibecession." Let's listen.

"One of the positive impacts of this measure is to help Canadians get past that vibecession. Because how Canadians feel really does have a real economic impact," Freeland said at a news conference on Nov. 25.

This term has perhaps been co-opted in the 2 or 3 years since economist Kyla Scanlon coined it. It sounds like she used it to mean purely a mismatch between popular economic indicators (e.g., national GDP, consumer spending, interest rates) and everyday people's sense of their finances and the economy.

However Freeland and other politicians seem to be using it to mean that perceived issues with the economy are all in voters' heads.

For me, I think the evidence is mounting that Freeland is not better than Trudeau.

But I think there's more to unpack from the idea of a "vibecession." I'm not an economist, but it seems to me that both things can be true: the popular economic indicators can be looking good and everyday people can be experiencing greater levels of financial hardship than they or their parents have ever known.

Any progressive who wants to represent workers needs to push those gross economic indicators to the side and look at the financial prosperity indicators that capture everyday people's struggles and matter to them - at least when talking to voters. Because I think that's what they'll pay attention to.

And when people don't do this - don't look at meaningful and relevant metrics, like age of first home ownership, cost of a food basket or rent against a median income (something like that), how many are living paycheck to paycheck - that's when people will flock even more to the fictitious BS that Trump or PP hock. Because if someone can never afford to own a home, for example, and we don't see politicians meaningfully tackling housing or affordability, and they're telling as about how great the economy is doing per GDP - they aren't listening to talking to us.

Both quotes from https://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/vibecession-creator-freeland-1.7397093

Twin sisters set to attend University of Waterloo to complete their PhDs have died in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza.

Dalia Ghazi Ibaid and Sally Ghazi Ibaid were planning to come to Waterloo to do their PhDs in System Design Engineering. They were both recipients of UWaterloo’s Student Relief Fellowship.

“Dalia and Sally were selected based on their outstanding academic achievement and demonstrated research potential,” read UWaterloo’s statement.

They were both killed in an airstrike on Dec. 5.

https://youtu.be/pKfVwZjJ0MA

As the postal workers’ strike stretched to four weeks, one argument against them has resounded loudly: that the post office is a quaint relic of a bygone era. Past its due due, no longer worth defending, it would be better supplanted by the digital giants or privatized entirely.

At least this is what the corporate class, right wing politicians, and the establishment media want you to think.

While the postal service is indeed threatened by a digital crisis, its purpose has in fact barely been realized.

Few people stop to think that there are actually twice as many post offices as Tim Hortons, making it a retail network unlike any other in the country. Working with this understanding, eight years ago the postal workers put forward Delivering Community Power, a comprehensive plan to transform Canada Post into a vibrant 21st century public service.

Though this plan has recently barely gotten any media coverage, it had enormous appeal: they proposed converting their fleet of cars to electric vehicles and setting up electric charging stations at post offices, introducing check-ins for seniors living at home and farm-to-table food delivery, and offering public banking services that could help low-income communities and bankroll renewable energy projects. (By way of disclosure, I helped launch this campaign, in my pre-Breach life.)

The plan’s environmental potential freaked out conservative pundits, one of whom was inspired to invoke a notorious anti-government quip. “Ronald Reagan often said the nine most terrifying words in the English language were ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ Not even Reagan could have imagined,” William Watson wrote in the Financial Post, “that people would one day be saying ‘We’re from the post office and we’re going to save the climate.’”

As 2024 draws to a close, there are many good reasons for liberation-minded people to feel concern about the state of the world. But there are also many victories to celebrate—victories that were achieved by ordinary people joining together to fight for a better future.

With right-wing forces celebrating their recent electoral triumph in the United States and holding a solid lead in the polls with a federal election due in Canada in 2025, the world can feel even more grim than usual.

In moments like this, though, it is more important than ever that we remember that when we organize, we sometimes win.

Continuing an annual Breach tradition, here are 15 movement victories in 2024 to take heart from as we look ahead to the new year.

This was a nice read, after a bleak year and amid a mainstream news culture that increasingly vilifies grassroots organizations that hold power to account