One long-time teacher, who did not want to be identified for fear of professional retribution, said the timing of the email is particularly galling given the audit and the recent $39,000, three-day retreat to the Toronto Blue Jays stadium hotel by school board brass amid a $7.6-million board budget deficit.
“Draft bill attached,” wrote a lobbyist representing two influential fossil fuel trade groups to the lead counsel for the West Virginia state energy committee in January 2020.
Beautiful! The cat tree you made looks great, and what a lovely gift. I LOLed at the closeup of Koda sleeping in the tree (his facial expression indicates a deep slumber :)
Yeah, retaining nursing is a big deal. In Ontario, I think we have 150,000 nurses. The government's approach to nurses leaving the workforce post COVID because of poor working conditions has been to graduate more nurses. But a new-grad nurse is not as competent as a nurse with 10 years of experience, and so the 'graduate more nurses' approach does not offset the competency drain from any excessive churn of experienced nurses
Adorable! My brain sees a patch of a ginger cat style to the right of the face and just below
I know google's amp links are BS designed to keep in you a google ecosystem and never take you to the actual content creators' sites. Do you mind outlining for my and others' edification what's not to like about CBC's links with "amp" in them? I'd love to know. Thanks!
I know, right? Especially if the doctor is that floofy and blissed out
So he won MVP in his 4th season in the MLB, runner up MVP to Judge when Judge hit 62 homers (5th season), and then MVP in his 6th season, last year. He's presumed to win MVP again this year, but this will be the first year he nabs it without pitching. How many MVPs is he going to win in 10 years (from the time he won his first)? What's the over/under if he stays healthy (just to get a sense)? 6.5? It's interesting to watch going forward; I wonder if voters will ever 'fatigue' of voting him for MVP. Will he actually pitch (in relief) in the playoffs this year? And when would that happen, like game 1 or series on the line for the Dodgers?
I think it's so neat you two recognize one another (despite being very different species) and have a special bond :)
I believe you mentioned in a past post that your favourite squirrel has a short tail. Is that that squirrel? Did you reconnect with your favourite squirrel after the 3-ish month absence?
Pharmacists ordering lab tests (bloodwork) is a pretty radical expansion of their practice
Most pharmacists I'm pretty sure work for private, mostly corporate companies. This is another effort to further privatize healthcare
I think I might have mistakenly sounded like a Conservative talking point. My point was supposed to be that I think many people who vote left of the Conservatives see Justin Trudeau as the lesser of two evils at best, someone who has not delivered on their promises, and someone who seems increasingly out of touch with the needs of working Canadians.
I vote NDP and am fortunate to have almost always have lived in NDP ridings. I mean to lament how disappointing it is to have the most realistic alternative to PP be so unappealing, especially against the incredible showings of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz who've shown how momentous progressive politics can be.
I, personally, don't think Trudeau has a chance against PP but that any decent replacement candidate for the LPC would probably have a slight advantage against PP to begin.
More than anything, my concern is the detrimental effects of a Conservative government. And JT staying on the ticket seems like most influential factor at this point
Technically, it's probably the government providing too little funding to school boards to cover hiring enough qualified teachers. But you're right; this is clearly a structural problem:
More frustrating, she says, was learning that schools in the anglophone system are still short by 32 teachers — and three districts of the four are relying on 132 people on local permit contracts.
The Cons want to accelerate inequity among Canadians in health, wealth, and everything else. That's a huge problem. I think it's safe to say Canadians are sick of Justin Trudeau and his out of touch with everyday Canadians approach. His ego is going to keep him on the election ballot and the only question about the government that forms will be Conservative minority or majority. I feel like we're all hostage to Justin Trudeau's ego right now. Looking south of the border, Biden and camp waited until the decision was made for them. I don't see the same forces converging in JT's case. I think things are going to have to get very very loud for JT to wake up to do the right thing. I don't know how helpful the mainstream media will be in acknowledging popular interest in left-of-centre politics yet staunch opposition to JT at this point
I 'converted' 1 person, and then she converted 3 generations of her family. I had mentioned something along the lines of "why love one yet eat the other" (e.g., dog and cow/pig/chicken, respectively) a little while before. She approached me and said she was thinking about what I'd said and was re-evaluating how she's always seen things. I listened non-judgementally. I answered her questions. A little while later, she told me she'd been vegan for X weeks. She loved how the new diet felt on her GI system (never bloated)
If you're in Ontario, this is a good tool for finding resources: https://connexontario.ca/
Yeah, Lemmy's still pretty small, unfortunately. That sounds like a good idea though! Maybe some kind of group for people with mild schizophrenia (and are around the same age perhaps). Asking your psychiatrist is a good idea. You might also want to do a little online searching to see if you find anything of interest locally, so you can ask for a referral to that specifically - just an idea. There might also be mild schizophrenia forums online outside of Lemmy that you might find with an online search. You might be able to check posts out without creating an account
I'm on a mailing list and got an email that read > We’re super excited to announce that They’re Trying To Kill Us is now on Apple TV for download or rental, and streaming for FREE on Roku, Tubi and Youtube’s official movie channel
I watched it a year or two ago. It's more about anti-Black food and environmental racism in the US than it is about veganism per se, but I found it a highly edifying vegan-ish video.
https://www.theyretryingtokillus.com/ > They’re Trying to Kill Us is a new groundbreaking documentary from Executive Producers seven-time NBA All-Star, Chris Paul and 7X Grammy winner, Billie Eilish.
> The film features notable influencers from the fields of Hip Hop, medicine, sports, entertainment, policy, and politics weighing in on the singular most deadly threat to American society that mainstream media doesn't want to talk about.
Recyclable trash is just being dumped in a private open lot.
https://mstdn.social/@DemocracyMattersALot/113063952703333947 > BREAKING: Following Donald Trump’s debacle at Arlington National Cemetery, Vote Vets released this devastating ad calling out Donald Trump for his BS. Retweet to make sure all Americans see this.
Click link for video (1 min, 33 secs) hosted on a Mastodon instance
Written by: Aidan Jonah A think-tank funded by the Canadian, American and multiple European governments , along with Open Society Foundations , has attacked The Canada Files and Daniel Dumbrill for our dual-support for China and Palestine. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD)’s report im
The Canadian government is spending money to attack rigorous journalists who partially dissent with Canadian foreign policy (e.g., Israel and Co's genocide) and to call them Chinese state-affiliated news outlets.
I already had strong suspicions the Canadian government was employing associations with China as pretext to disparage and censor dissenting ideas, people, and platforms. This is strong evidence.
I wish our government focused more on governing based on public wants and needs and less on covering up governance that goes against or that is morally bankrupt or corrupt
BC Conservative leader John Rustad was expelled from the BC Liberal Party in 2022 over controversial views on climate science
> The BC Conservative party’s official “climate policy” explicitly rejects the idea that climate change is a “crisis.”
> In August 2022, Rustad retweeted a tweet from prominent climate science denier Patrick Moore casting doubt on climate science.: “The case for CO2 being the control knob of global temperature gets weaker every day,” said the tweet amplified by Rustad, adding that people should “celebrate C02.”
Gas giant Enbridge is receiving millions of dollars of new federal funding to help build Canada’s hydrogen economy - a "slap in the face" for some.
> Several million spread across a handful of projects may seem like small potatoes compared to other federal financing worth hundreds of millions, but Alex Cool-Fergus, Climate Action Network Canada’s national policy manager, is frustrated to see the federal government pump any money into the hydrogen sector. In an interview with Canada’s National Observer she called hydrogen an improbable “techno-fix” that has been effectively marketed by the fossil fuel industry.
> The possible end uses for hydrogen are dwindling, which is eroding its forecasted demand. To put in perspective just how significant this is, four years ago Natural Resources Canada expected the global market could be worth up to $11.7 trillion, but now says it could be worth up to $1.9 trillion — an 84 per cent drop.
> “It's disappointing to see that the federal government continues to invest in this false solution, and that disappointment is amplified by the fact that some of this money is going to massive companies that don't need any more money,” she said, calling it a “slap in the face.”
> “If [fossil fuel companies are] going to be investing in this at all, they should be using their own profits.” Last year, Enbridge posted $5.8 billion in profit and greenlit $10 billion worth of new projects.
One of 39 nations that pledged to end non-domestic support for fossil fuels at the COP26 climate change conference in 2021, Canada spent $6.75-billion less last year backing new sector projects, according to International Institute of Sustainable Development
> Export Development Canada (EDC) and other national crown corporations have provided $7.6 to $13.5 billion a year between 2020 and 2022 to support the domestic fossil fuel industry, as compared with just $147 million for in-country renewable energy production, number-crunching by the IISD revealed in June.
> Canada was criticized in the new report for a “lack of transparency in reporting” that made it hard to ascertain whether finance was going to domestic or international markets. EDC data shows it has provided $88 billion to the oil and gas sector since 2016.
Jagmeet Singh and the NDP sit in the shadow of the Liberal Government, caught between criticizing those in power while also attempting to claim agency over bills being passed.
> Today, the NDP sits in the shadow of the Liberal government, caught between criticizing those in power while also attempting to claim agency over bills being passed. Most peculiar of all has been Singh’s retreat from online spaces. In 2023, he deactivated his TikTok account citing privacy concerns, but the shift in the tone of his content went beyond that.
> His once fresh, relatable, curtain-tearing content had been replaced by generic campaign videos of Singh reading scripts word-for-word that feel like they were copied directly from the platform section of the NDP website. It became boring, uninspired and — most importantly — ineffective. Polls now project a loss of seats for the NDP in the next election.
> One thing is for certain: we are closer to a Singh exit than we are from his arrival. Come October, he will have been party leader for seven years — he will certainly not be leader in seven years. So, has his choice to abandon his online roots damaged the future of his party?
> Whatever the future of the NDP holds and whoever its next leader will be, it is clear that it remains a party in desperate need of reimagination — the exact same issue that Singh was brought in to solve.
If plans to expand carbon capture technology are pursued, it will mean a network of hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometres of concentrated CO2 pipelines running under communities and Indigenous nations, demanding increased attention paid to these emerging risks.
This is an aspect of the carbon capture greenwashing initiative I wasn't aware of. It will need another pipeline network that can be very costly to human and environmental health (and operated by an industry that our government is willfully blind to).
> Carbon capture is becoming a linchpin of Canada’s plan to reduce emissions from its oil and gas sector, but to pull this plan off would require massive investments in necessary infrastructure: pipelines, pressurization stations, equipping carbon capture to bitumen upgraders and more, all of which could fail. In a carbon management strategy, released in 2023, the federal government says to support the country’s emission reduction efforts, carbon capture capacity must grow 270 per cent from current levels by 2030, with “significant further scaling required” to reach net-zero by 2050.
> when carbon dioxide pipelines fail, they can fail catastrophically.
> According to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation, there have been at least 76 reported safety incidents related to CO2 pipelines since 2010 in the United States. Some incidents are minor and others are disastrous, but all point to the risks of transporting and storing carbon dioxide as a way to manage greenhouse gas emissions.
> Dodging a full assessment
> By far the largest project would be the Pathways Alliance’s $16.5-billion flagship carbon capture project, which would include a carbon dioxide pipeline stretching 400 kilometres from the oilsands in northern Alberta to a storage hub about 300 kilometres east of Edmonton.
> The Pathways Alliance is splitting its megaproject into 126 smaller segments, with multiple applications for various licences with the AER. As previously reported by Canada’s National Observer, that means the project won’t be subject to a full environmental assessment that examines what the impact of the project in its entirety would be. “The impacts are never being articulated to the public, and that includes impacts on the environment, the climate and Indigenous rights,” said Matt Hulse, a lawyer with Ecojustice collaborating with the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation to call for an impact assessment.
Years after Ontario's premier promised 1.5 million net new homes by 2030, his government's own NIMBY zoning, outdated construction rules and subsidies for inefficient sprawl development have prevented both market and non-market builders from making shifts to more labour-efficient building formats an...
> So why, years after the Premier promised legal reforms that would deliver “more homes faster” and 1.5 million net new homes by 2030, is the housing shortage even worse? Why are housing starts actually down, year over year? It’s because rather than ending restrictions on midrise housing and slamming the brakes on sprawl and highway schemes that squander construction, Ontario’s changes to land use planning, environmental and transportation laws and policies have done the opposite.
> Soon after Premier Doug Ford took office, his government began to dismantle even the modest measures the previous government had taken to promote more efficient housing construction.
> Despite calls from housing and environmental experts across the political spectrum — and its own housing task force — to scrap outdated rules such as minimum parking requirements and to permit mid-rise housing on major streets throughout existing residential neighbourhoods, Ford intervened. He personally blocked efforts to legalize even 4-storey “4-plex” apartment buildings.
> In recent months, as his government’s failure on housing has become more obvious, Ford has tried to pass the buck by blaming everyone from immigrants to the Bank of Canada. What he glosses over is that the housing market could easily have adapted to population and rate changes, but has instead turned the challenge of high interest rates and the opportunity of a growing population into a housing crisis by willfully sabotaging the solutions.
> It’s generally fair to wait for a policy to unfold, to leave some time to judge its effects, before we decide whether it will succeed or fail. The Ford government has done its critics a favour this week, however, with its announced changes to drug policy in Ontario, shutting more than half of the province’s safe consumption sites. The logic adopted by the government and its defenders is that because the province’s overall high rate of opioid deaths has continued, these safe consumption sites are a failure. This is despite the fact that no patient has died of an overdose at these sites precisely because they’ve been monitored and treated.
> The bad news for the government, and the good news for its critics, is that if the benchmark for success is "reducing the rate of opioid overdose deaths in Ontario” then nothing announced this week will succeed. That’s not because an emphasis on treatment over harm reduction is itself indefensible. It’s because the scale of the problem that Ontario faces is so far beyond the resources that have so far been committed, and because addiction itself is such a wicked problem for health policy.
> For nearly a century, the Beer Store has, in one form or another, operated arguably the best-performing recycling program in the province of Ontario. Its deposit-return system — which sees consumers get refunds of 10 or 20 cents per container returned to the stores — boasts a return rate of nearly 80 per cent overall, and for some specific types of containers, the number is higher still: 89 per cent of glass bottles were returned in 2022, according to the most recent environmental-stewardship report on the Beer Store’s website.
> The success of the deposit-return scheme, which has been expanded to include wine bottles and other alcohol-beverage containers, stands in stark contrast to the middling diversion rates achieved by the blue-box program operated by many municipalities. The city of Toronto, for example, achieved an overall diversion rate of just 53.6 per cent in residential collection, and even single-family homes (which perform better than the city’s older apartment buildings) rate only 63.9 per cent. The numbers provincewide aren’t any better overall, and a report from the province’s Resource Productivity and Recovery Authority suggests Ontario’s diversion rates have actually fallen over the past decade.
> So the closure of Beer Store locations in small northern communities poses a problem that, at least in some cases, is going to fall on the property-tax bill of local homeowners.
> “As a municipality, we now are going to be stuck having to pick up everyone’s empties, and it’s going to impact our landfill space. It’s going to end up in the pile at the front of everyone’s driveway on garbage day,” McPherson says. “We are in the process right now of applying for an environmental assessment for new waste management because the Geraldton landfill is full. This is absolutely the wrong time for us to have excess material going into the landfill.”
> Greenstone isn’t alone: Beer Store locations in Nipigon and Cochrane are also reportedly closing in September. In at least some cases, the Beer Store’s former customers will still be able to get beer at an LCBO or a new outlet such as a corner store or gas station — but locals will have nowhere to return empties.
> New research finds that access to the surgery has increased since an Ontario government funding change — “but only for one group”
> A new study adds weight to such suspicions. Analyzing six years of patient data, it has found that a disproportionate number of surgeries performed by private clinics since the province’s new funding allocation have gone to the wealthiest Ontarians.
> “You can’t actually charge patients for cataract surgery, because of OHIP,” says Campbell. “But [these clinics] would have OHIP pay for the cataract surgeries and charge patients for other services in a way that would cover their costs and left a profit.”
> “What we did is divide people into five different strata by socioeconomic status and compare their rates of surgery before and after this policy change,” Campbell says. “To put it bluntly, access did go up, but only for one group — and that was the group that could afford to pay extra.” In fact, the team found that surgeries for those in the highest socioeconomic strata went up by nearly 25 per cent in private clinics. For those in the lowest, however, they fell by 8.5 per cent.
> While it is difficult to say what precisely is driving this change, Campbell says it likely comes down to two major factors. “The first is the continued request for payment from patients who are seeking care in private centres … The second is these clinics keeping separate wait-lists for people who are willing to pay extra versus those who aren’t,” he says. “That allows them to sell, essentially, the ability to jump the line. Extra lenses and whatnot might have some value to them, but the real value is in jumping what is perceived as a really long queue.”
> “The whole thing was equal parts unnerving and a miracle,” he says. “The most terrifying thing was seeing them interacting with 80-year-olds who were confused, worried, and just wanted their vision back so they could see their grandkids. These people were accepting those fees left and right.”
#ALTtext: A screenshot capture shows the cookies settings popup window of a current website. The first sentence of the popup starts: "We and our 843 partners store and access personal data..." The screenshot is annotated. "843 partners" is highlighted with "Is that all?" written beside it
A top Kroger executive admitted under questioning from a Federal Trade Commission attorney on Tuesday that the grocery chain raised its egg and milk prices above the rate of inflation.
> A top Kroger executive admitted under questioning from a Federal Trade Commission attorney on Tuesday that the grocery chain raised its egg and milk prices above the rate of inflation, a concession that came as no surprise to economists who have been highlighting corporate price gouging across the U.S. economy in recent years.
> The U.S. grocery sector—dominated by Kroger, Walmart, and a handful of other major companies—profited hugely during the Covid-19 pandemic as corporate giants exploited supply chain disruptions to aggressively jack up prices.
> "The grocery industry, as represented by four of its largest players, became more profitable in the pandemic, and it has stayed that way for a couple of years at least," The Financial Timesnoted Monday. "It is a good guess that price increases in excess of cost increases have played a role in this."
4 months old but new to me and pretty funny.
~
https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=epvLrK6Mhd4
https://newsie.social/@Geewhizpat/113028457198325540
#ALTtext: Parody video of video footage of various 1-on-1 interviews with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin combined with closed captioning of lyrics related to a Trump scandal(s) and to the tune of Shaggy's hit (2000) "It wasn't me." There's a music backing track as well. There are Trump-like and Putin-like voices singing their respective parts. Trump lists things he's done like "dabbling in election fraud" to his confidant, Putin, who elaborates on his general advice, to say "it wasn't me."
This is a new development.
> At 10:00 a.m. eastern today, the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference served CN with a strike notice effective Monday, August 26, at 10:00 a.m.
> As meetings with the CIRB continue, the Board has yet to make a ruling that would force binding arbitration or end any work stoppage.
> To protect workers’ right to collectively bargain and frustrate CN’s attempt to force arbitration, the union will take strike action to pressure CN into negotiating an agreement.
> “By sidestepping the collective bargaining process and ordering binding arbitration, the federal government has undermined the foundation on which labour unions work to improve wages and working conditions for all Canadians. Bargaining is also the primary way our union fights for rail safety—all considerations that outweigh short-term economic concerns,” said Paul Boucher, President of the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference.
> The parties held a case management conference with the CIRB last night, and hearings are currently underway today to address preliminary issues. The timeline for a decision from the CIRB regarding the Minister’s referrals is still unclear at this time. The union is prepared to appeal to the federal court if necessary.
-----
Context from CN and CPKC Begin Lockout
> The main obstacles to reaching an agreement remain the companies’ demands, not union proposals.
> Neither CN nor CPKC has relented on their push to weaken protections around rest periods and scheduling, increasing the risk of fatigue-related safety issues. CN also continues to demand a forced relocation scheme, which could see workers ordered to move across the country, tearing families apart in the process.
> The main obstacles to reaching an agreement remain the companies’ demands, not union proposals.
> Neither CN nor CPKC has relented on their push to weaken protections around rest periods and scheduling, increasing the risk of fatigue-related safety issues. CN also continues to demand a forced relocation scheme, which could see workers ordered to move across the country, tearing families apart in the process.
