News you can use: how to get the $25 gift card Superstore, Independent Grocer, No Frills and others are giving away to to make you forget the money the company fleeced from consumers by fixing the price of certain brands of bread with its supposed ‘competitors.’ And if you have trouble making ends meet, we recommend that you take the money and spend it any way you wish.
El Jones provides this quick update on Abdoul Abdi, the refugee who is at high risk of deportation to Somalia or Saudi Arabia, even though he has lived in Canada since he arrived here as a young boy. The speed at which they are moving suggests they are prioritizing deportation over all other issues, and despite the severe human rights issues in this case, they are pushing forward.
Fisher and activist Darren Porter on the latest developments around the illegal fish kills by the Annapolis tidal generating station. A study by the Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat may offer Nova Scotia Power a way out of the mess of its own creation, he says.
Danny Cavanagh, president of the Nova Scotia Federation of Labour, looks ahead at some of the challenges in 2018, from improving workers’ safety to the Fight for 15 and meeting the challenges of the anti-union provincial Liberals. “We encourage you think critically about things and not be so fast to buy into the same old sound bites that we hear over and over. Things have not gotten better for workers in the same way they have for the corporate elite in our country. Having workers who toil to earn those profits get a little bigger share of the wealth isn’t a lot to ask,” he writes.
Ralph Goodale, the federal minister of Public Safety, continues his efforts to deport Abdoulkader Abdi to either Saudi Arabia or Somalia, his lawyer reported yesterday. He has no family connections in either country, does not speak the language, and does not know the local culture. Deportation would separate Abdoul from his entire family who are all in Canada, including his Canadian-born daughter. None of this would have happened if Nova Scotia’s Department of Community Services had applied for Canadian citizenship on his behalf while Abdoul was a ward of the state.
From Bill Swan’s excellent Faces of Pharmacare website we feature the story of a Nova Scotia woman faced with a $3500 monthly bill for the life saving medications she needs. In her case a solution was found in the end, but “I succeeded because I was determined, persistent and angry enough to take action. I knew how to explain my case. I knew how to write convincing letters. I’d been a bureaucrat and a consultant. Many people are too sick to advocate together with their doctors; many people are intimidated by the system; they know it is not fair but feel powerless to influence decisions.”
This article by historian Lachlan MacKinnon was originally published on September 18, 2014 on the excellent ActiveHistory.ca site. We re-publish this now three-year old article because the gap between mill workers and Pictou County environmentalists the author identifies if anything has widened in the last three years. “Environmentalists must confront the fact that structural power is also wielded against other marginalized groups, such as industrial workers facing the threat of deindustrialization. In this recognition, we can hope to transcend narrow categories such as worker and environmentalist and achieve a broader-based support for systemic change.”
If your apartment is too expensive, or badly needs repairs, and moving is out of the question, then things aren’t likely to improve in the foreseeable future. Statistics Canada census data released in November 2017 shows that the number of households in core housing needs in Nova Scotia continues to go up, while the trend in the other Atlantic provinces is moving downward.