corporate and think-tank researcher

Donald Gutstein

01 Sep '12

Harper’s Assault on Employment Insurance

Mae Burrows and Donald Gutstein OUR TIMES Sept./Nov. 2012 Our son works in the construction industry. Several years ago he was fired — unfairly — from his job and thus denied access to Employment Insurance benefits that he had been contributing to for several years. Not only was he out of work, but, since he

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01 Jul '12

Young and Old, Together

By Mae Burrows and Donald Gutstein OUR TIMES July/August 2012 Whatever the future of the Occupy movement may be, it provided us with the clarity to see the profound inequality in our society and gave inequality a name: the one per cent versus the 99 per cent. Occupy also provided the opportunity for young and

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19 Apr '12

Stephen Harper repeats U.S. Republican lines on energy

To welcome in the 2012 U.S. election year, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum gave a New Year’s Eve speech in Ottumwa, Iowa, in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses. By rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline, Santorum warned, U.S. President Barack Obama was “pandering to radical environmentalists who don’t want energy production, who don’t want us

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01 Apr '12

Making Workers’ Health a Public Concern

Mae Burrows and Donald Gutstein OUR TIMES Apr/June 2012 Canadian workers and their families gave up their right to sue employers for workplace-related injury, illness or death many decades ago. In exchange, they agreed to the transfer of the power and resources to maintain healthy and safe worksites, and to provide just compensation for workplace

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11 Feb '12

Stoking the False War Between Generations

The world seemed to change dramatically in 2011. On the global stage the democracy movement that started in Tunisia spread throughout the Middle East and beyond, eventually settling into tiny Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, just blocks from Wall Street. From there, Occupy Wall Street rippled out to become a global protest movement. The Occupy

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01 Feb '12

A Living Wage for All

By Mae Burrows and Donald Gutstein OUR TIMES Feb/Mar 2012 Every year during the cold winter months, we worry that homeless people have shelter and enough food so they won’t die in the cold. In 1994, workers in Baltimore’s homeless shelters and soup kitchens had similar worries. They noticed they were serving a new clientele.

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11 Jan '12

Surely Harper Doesn’t Want More Poor People. Or Does He?

Is Stephen Harper’s goal for Canada the United States of today? That would mean a nation in which somewhere between a half and a third of its citizens have fallen into poverty or are hovering just above, in low income. This according to latest data released by the U.S. Census Bureau. Meanwhile, 400 Americans are

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01 Dec '11

How Canada’s corporate media framed the Occupy movement

The Occupy movement occupied two parallel, rarely intersecting universes in the corporate media. In one, described frequently in the Toronto Star, occasionally in the Vancouver Sun and Globe and Mail and only once in the National Post, Occupy is a worldwide movement created in response to the growing gap between the one percent at the

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17 Nov '11

How the media shaped the Vancouver election

An Angus Reid poll reported by The Globe and Mail and CTV News a few days before the 2011 Vancouver civic election asked respondents about the issues important to them. Topping the list were: providing good sanitation services, ensuring public safety, enhancing the overall quality of life, protecting the environment, dealing with homelessness and poverty,

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10 Nov '11

Canada’s right-wing media monopolies move further right

Canadian news reporting and commentary is controlled today by a handful of wealthy families and corporations. Let’s call them the Gang of Seven.

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24 Jun '11

Debunking the Fraser Institute’s Latest Crusade: Teacher Merit Pay

Most studies show scant link between student achievement and financial rewards for instructors. Fresh from the triumph of successfully promoting its fallacious school report card, this time in Alberta, the Fraser Institute is already scheming to peg teacher pay to student test scores and create a market for teachers. We should remember that the institute’s

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02 May '11

Big Media’s Sway Will Be Tested at Ballot Box

(This article was first published in The Tyee on May 2, the day of the election.) Most corporate news outlets buttressed Harper’s drive for a majority. But has the game changed? Richard Nixon famously declared “I am not a crook” in his televised defence of his handling of the Watergate affair. After that everyone thought

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12 Apr '11

Sun News to Shine on Conservatives

On April 18, with two weeks left in the federal election, Stephen Harper will receive a boost in his quest to achieve his long-lusted-after majority. That’s the day Sun News, the new conservative channel also known as Fox News North, goes live, as the final cog in the right-wing media machine is lowered into place.

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24 Mar '11

Harper’s Crime Floggers

Crime rates are rising, crime rates are rising, crime rates are rising… Say this often enough and it becomes official truth. That seems to be the strategy devised by the Harper government and its current think-tank squeeze, the Macdonald Laurier Institute. In February 2011, the Ottawa-based institute released a study which purported to prove that

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24 Feb '11

Kevin Falcon — The Fraser Institute’s Candidate?

There’s reason to think so. Start with his ‘heroes’ Bill Bennett, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. If Kevin Falcon wins the BC Liberal leadership contest on Feb. 26 and becomes premier, will the Fraser Institute help him craft his first budget? There’s plenty of precedent for such a scenario. Take 1983, for instance. Three weeks

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