A reminder of a year you’d like to forget.

AOC. The first person to gain a million followers on social media channel Bluesky. Can we just hurry up and give Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the keys to the Democratic party already?

As if Dem leadership will let their party be so progressive.

BC Conservatives They’re new! They’re hot! And they are already at each other’s throats.

Fresh from the party’s election success that gave them a caucus of 44, 13 BC Conservative MLAs recently sent a letter to party leader John Rustad demanding that he discipline fellow Conservative MLA Elenore Sturko.

Sturko’s alleged crime? In a CBC interview, she agreed that Comfort Sakoma-Fadugba was right to resign as vice-chair of the Vancouver Police Board. Sakoma-Fadugba had posted online comments that, among other things, attacked Diwali celebrations as a means of “erasing Christian values from the lives of our children.”

The Gang of 13 says Sturko is a cancel culture cop. The 13 signees include Brent Chapman, the Surrey South MLA who once suggested mass shootings might be a hoax and called Palestinians “inbred.”

The BC Conservatives appear to be following the path forged by the Republican caucus in the U.S. Congress, with an extremist faction emerging to attack the faction that would qualify as extreme, if not for the existence of the more extreme faction.

Thought I'd chuck this up since game 1 feels like the most exciting match of the day. At the start of the season, 76ers @ Celtics would have looked like a good match.

While the NBA avoids competing with the NFL, I heard the NFL has 2 games on today plus a Beyoncé half-time show lol.

Happy holidays to Rezz and all other c/NBAers!

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has vowed he will help defeat the governing Liberals in a confidence vote when the House returns. The Conservatives, locked firmly ahead in the polls, have been demanding an election all fall, while the Bloc has also recently called for an election early in the new year.

Singh could still change his mind and many scenarios remain possible, such as an opposition party negotiating a big-ticket item into the budget then having a fall election as scheduled, but that's looking less and less tenable.

"It no longer makes a whole lot of sense to cut some sort of a deal and be a partner to the government that you're about to vilify a couple of months later as Public Enemy no. 1," Baran said.

A leadership race would be a hurried affair compared to Liberal party contests in the past. When Trudeau was elected leader in 2013, the race took some six months, though in 1993 the Progressive Conservatives elected Kim Campbell in a contest lasting about three months.

On Dec. 23, the bureau opened consultations on its greenwashing guidelines. Interested parties can submit feedback to the Competition Bureau by email until Feb. 28, 2025, and submissions will be posted publicly.

The Competition Act is a law designed to prevent anti-competitive practices like price-fixing, false marketing and other deceptions. The law was amended in June to specifically address greenwashing. There was swift and strong pushback from oil and gas industry players and some politicians.

Tl;dr: plant-based food options are on the rise at Canadian universities.

I'm skeptical of some universities' self-reported #s though, particularly "York University hit 60 per cent vegan offerings in 2024."

With a provincial election that left the BC NDP in government by a small margin, there’s no doubt that 2024 signalled a clear shift to the far-right with the expressed support of extreme candidates with extreme positions.

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.

As costs and damage rise, the government needs to focus on prevention and learn from First Nations.

Wildfires in the province now drive global climate change, often producing more greenhouse gas emissions than all other B.C. sources combined. Canadian wildfires in 2023 produced more GHGs than total national emissions of Germany.

But one of the most powerful reasons for action is economic — we simply can’t afford the status quo. Losses from B.C. wildfires cost tens of billions of dollars. The government reported spending over $1 billion fighting 2023 wildfires.

Yet such firefighting costs are just the tip of the economic spear. The total costs of a wildfire can range from six to 30 times the suppression costs.

For example, total costs of the 2016 Fort McMurray fire are estimated at about $9 billion to $11 billion — roughly 20 times the firefighting costs.

As wildfire conditions worsen, how will we support all the mills whose wood supply has burned? All the wineries with smoke-spoiled product? All the motels, campgrounds and restaurants emptied by smoky summers? All the Indigenous communities evacuated repeatedly? All the highways and dikes washed away by wildfire-caused flooding?

And how will we pay the increased health costs? A University of California, Los Angeles, study has linked 11 years of California wildfire smoke to more than 50,000 premature deaths and $400 billion in economic impact.

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