The NDP Leadership Race, the Dutch GreenLeft, Gavin McInnes & more -- The Left Chapter Sunday Reading List March 12-19

This week's list of articles, news items and opinion pieces that I see as must reads if you are looking for a roundup that should be of interest to The Left Chapter readers.




This list covers the week of March 12 - March 19. It is generally in order of the date of the article's release.

1) Raped, beaten, exploited: the 21st-century slavery propping up Sicilian farming

Lorenzo Tondo and Annie Kelly, The Guardian

Every night for almost three years, Nicoleta Bolos lay awake at night on a dirty mattress in an outhouse in Sicily’s Ragusa province, waiting for the sound of footsteps outside the door. As the hours passed, she braced herself for the door to creak open, for the metallic clunk of a gun being placed on the table by her head and the weight of her employer thudding down on the dirty grey mattress beside her.

Read the full article.

2) 'We are all doing it': Employees at Canada's 5 big banks speak out about pressure to dupe customers

Erica Johnson, CBC News

Employees from all five of Canada's big banks have flooded Go Public with stories of how they feel pressured to upsell, trick and even lie to customers to meet unrealistic sales targets and keep their jobs.

Read the full article. 

3) A court’s decision in a Maine labor dispute hinged on the absence of an Oxford comma

Thu-Huong Ha, Quartz

A Maine court ruling in a case about overtime pay and dairy delivery didn’t come down to trucks, milk, or money. Instead, it hinged on one missing comma.

Delivery drivers for local milk and cream company Oakhurst Dairy have been tussling with their employers over whether they qualify for overtime. On March 13, a US court of appeals determined that certain clauses of Maine’s overtime laws are grammatically ambiguous. Because of that lack of clarity, the five drivers won their appeal and were found eligible for overtime. The case now can be heard in a lower court.

The profoundly nerdy ruling is also a win for anyone who dogmatically defends the serial comma.

Read the full article.

4) Meet the woke misogynist

Nona Willis Aronowitz, Fusion

I usually stretch a Tinder chat over days or even weeks, warily circling a guy to make sure he seems like a decent human. But on that sticky summer night, Bob* put me at ease right away. He was in an open relationship, just like me. He talked frankly and respectfully about sex. He said he was a “giver.” He agreed on “no sexpectations” when we made plans for a last-minute date. I can’t say for sure because he would later unmatch me, but I think his Tinder profile boasted that he was a feminist.

Read the full article.

5) RCMP response leaves Alberta sexual assault victim wishing she never reported it

Sarah Kraus, Global News

Sexual assault victims often keep quiet because of fear, embarrassment or stigma, but a woman from Sherwood Park, Alta. said it was her interaction with RCMP that left her wishing she never reported what happened to her.

Read the full article. 

6) Canadian military police to review sex-assault cases

Robyn Doolittle, The Globe and Mail

The military’s top police officer says his service will review all sexual assault cases that were dismissed as unfounded going back to 2010, making the Canadian Forces Military Police Group one of more than 50 forces to commit to similar audits in response to a Globe and Mail investigation.

Read the full article.

7) No President who ever owned human beings should be honored

Shaun King, New York Daily News

From 1914 to 1918 during World War I, Adolf Hitler was a decorated and successful soldier in the German military. Later as Germany's leader, he developed one of the most effective anti-smoking campaigns in the world. Under his rule, Germany revolutionized the jet engine.

But you know, and I know, that those facts don't mean a damn thing. He was a monster of a human being. Millions of people were targeted and killed by his regime in one of the most horrific periods in human history. He was a hateful anti-Semitic bigot. Next year he'll still be a monster. In 2050, he'll still be a monster. Hundreds of years from now, he'll still be a monster.

Read the full article.

8) The Irish Potato Famine Was Caused by Capitalism, Not a Fungus

Ocean Malandra, Paste

Put on the U2 and The Cranberries and lets down some green brew folks, it’s that time of year again. But while St. Patrick’s Day is cause to celebrate everything Irish-American, it’s also a good time to ponder just why more than a million Irish were forced to leave Ireland while another million were dying of starvation in such a short period of time in the first place. The answer, which also explains why millions of children are currently going without enough food in the U.S., has much more to do with market systems than Mother Nature.

Read the full article.

9) Private member's bill calls for extension of rent control after CBC Toronto series

Andrea Janus, CBC News

A private member's bill to be put forward by NDP MPP Peter Tabuns aims to make rental housing more affordable in the province. It calls for the end of an exemption that removes rent control from nearly all rental units built after 1991.

Read the full article.

10) Whitewashing Freeland’s Silence

Henry Srebrnik, Sheldon Kirshner Journal

I’ll lay my cards on the table: I have never been particularly fond of Chrystia Freeland’s attitude towards the Russian Federation. And when, reading her biography on Wikipedia, and noting that her mother was born in a displaced persons’ camp in postwar Germany, I felt this probably meant that her own grandparents had most likely fled Ukraine ahead of the returning Soviets.

Read the full article.

11) Senator Lynn Beyak stands by residential school remarks, cites 'fake news'

John Paul Tasker, CBC News

Conservative Senator Lynn Beyak says she has received much support after she defended residential schools in the Senate last week, and is ignoring calls to apologize to survivors of the system who have branded her remarks insensitive and inaccurate.

Read the full article.

12) Bad boy gone worse: Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes slides from right-wing provocateur to the neo-Nazi fringe

Amanda Marcotte, Salon

For those who admire the current iteration of Vice, a hip-but-professional news and culture website that invests in things like investigative journalism and a feminist vertical, it may come as something of a surprise to find out that one of the site’s founders, Gavin McInnes, has a post-Vice career (after leaving the company in 2008) as a right-wing provocateur.

Read the full article.

13) The Dutch GreenLeft party shows new ideas can turn the tide of populism

Rutger Bregman, The Guardian

Extreme rightwing ideas have been gaining ground in the Netherlands for decades. Jesse Klaver’s success suggests only radical alternatives can fight them

Read the full article.

14) NDP leadership debate fails to mention Canada's foreign policy

Yves Engler, Rabble

Is the NDP establishment scared to have party members discuss Canada's international posture?

At the party's first leadership debate last weekend there wasn't a single foreign policy question despite a host of contentious recent party positions on international affairs.

Read the full article.

15) Debunking a Myth: The Irish Were Not Slaves, Too

Liam Stack, The New York Times

It has shown up on Irish trivia Facebook pages, in Scientific American magazine, and on white nationalist message boards: the little-known story of the Irish slaves who built America, who are sometimes said to have outnumbered and been treated worse than slaves from Africa.

But it’s not true.

Read the full article.

16) How Alcohol Complicates Sex-Assault Cases

Robyn Doolittle, The Globe and Mail

As many as half of all sexual-assault cases involve alcohol. Yet cases that hinge on questions of consent face an uphill battle – despite Canada having some of the most progressive laws in the world.

Read the full article.

17) COLIN KAEPERNICK SENTENCED TO NFL LIMBO FOR THE CRIME OF SPEAKING HIS MIND

Mike Freeman, Bleacher Report

It's more than a week into free agency and Colin Kaepernick is still unemployed. Remember, this is a quarterback who played in the Super Bowl only four years ago, yet now it appears he can't get a look from teams. So I set out to discover, once and for all, what teams think of the 29-year-old former Niner.

Read the full article.

18) Sid Ryan, Ex-Union Leader, Inches Closer To Decision On NDP Leadership Race

Althia Raj, The Huffington Post

Canadian labour leader Sid Ryan says he’ll announce before the end of the month if he will run for the NDP leadership.

Speaking to The Huffington Post Canada’s politics podcast “Follow-Up,” the former president of the Ontario Federation of Labour said he’s concerned about dividing votes on the left. He wants to see whether one or several of the four candidate so far in the contest — MPs Niki Ashton, Peter Julian, Guy Caron and Charlie Angus — will adopt some of the bolder progressive ideas he’s championing.

Read the full article.

While from the previous period, this article from March 9th is also well worth reading and I missed it at the time it came out:

19) Scarborough subway boosters let residents’ imaginations overtake reality

Edward Keenan, The Toronto Star

Neethan Shan, the newest member of Toronto city council, trumpeted as a progressive by members of city council’s left, is fond of speculating on how much time the Scarborough subway extension could save people in his neighbourhood. He estimated “half an hour each way” earlier this month, and at the end of a debate at city council on Tuesday, he was saying it’d be 20 to 30 minutes faster each way than the status quo.

As my colleague Jennifer Pagliaro has pointed out, this number appears not to come from any study of the proposal at hand, but instead from the councillor’s imagination.

Read the full article.

See also: Chrystia Freeland, IWD, the British Empire & more -- The Left Chapter Sunday Reading List March 5 - 12

See also: Judge Lenehan, Dr. Seuss, Berta Cáceres & more -- The Left Chapter Sunday Reading List February 26 - March 5

John Tory's austerity regime triumphs in latest Toronto budget

Toronto Mayor John Tory's austerity budget passed Wednesday night after a variety of attempts to soften its impact or to increase property taxes above the rate of inflation failed.

This is a budget that is part of a broader austerity agenda and a larger pattern that prioritizes the better off, drivers and homeowners over people living in poverty, tenants, transit users, community housing, community programs and making Toronto a fairer and better place to live for everyone, and that does so in some pretty obvious ways.

Tory and most of council's obsession with keeping residential property tax increases at the rate of inflation continued to much detrimental effect. In fact this longstanding history in the post-amalgamation city of tying property tax increases to inflation or freezing them altogether -- as happened at some points under both Mel Lastman and Rob Ford -- has lead to the increasingly grotesque divergence in increases in these property taxes versus the increase in tolls and user fees of various kinds like TTC fares.

For example, while inflation in Ontario between 2006 and 2016 was 17.65% the cost of a TTC monthly Metropass increased by over 40%. During this entire period increases in the residential tax rate, with the exception of one year, remained either close to or below the rate of inflation. In 2011 they were frozen altogether.

User fee rates for garbage containers, water, community programs, etc, have also seen dramatic increases.

In the 2015 budget, which was supported by all of Toronto City Council's nominally progressive Councillors, this capping of residential tax rates at the rate of inflation led to the annual cost of a Metropass increasing more than annual taxes did for the average homeowner in absolute dollar terms! 

Showing a little more fortitude this time around council's left, led by Parkdale Councillor Gord Perks on this front, tried to push for bigger residential property tax increases but failed:

Councillor Gord Perks, who has long argued that residents can afford to pay more to help the city’s most vulnerable, put forward a 4.26 per cent increase. That motion failed 10-32.
“What I am proposing is that we ask those people in the city of Toronto who have the most wealth to put more money back into the system and the reason I want to do that is so that we can afford the programs that help the people who truly are struggling to live in the City of Toronto,” Perks told his colleagues on the council floor.
His motion would have meant the average homeowner would see their taxes increase by $152.50 this year instead of the approved $90.

Notably his motion was opposed by the new darling of the NDP wing of council -- whose victory was celebrated by Councillors like Mike Layton and others -- Neethan Shan who ran in part on the not terribly progressive platform of towing Tory's line on taxes and supporting the Scarborough subway boondoggle. Likely to appease his alleged allies Shan did, in the end, vote against the budget as a whole despite this, which makes his position on residential property taxes basically incoherent.

The fact is there is no path towards actually building a broad progressive platform around transit, housing, community and social programs without above inflation property tax increases in the present context given what City Council can actually do to raise revenues in a serious way

As the Torontoist pointed out in a detailed article on the subject in 2014, residential property taxes in Toronto (and elsewhere in Ontario) are not, actually, tied directly to the value of an individual property and how it increases or declines in the way most people think. They are tied to the value of any individual property versus everyone else's property set against the municipal average.

If a given residential property increases in value at the same rate as other properties in the city its property taxes will remain the same unless the city raises the overall property tax rate generally.

Ontario's Municipal Property Assessment Corporation, who are responsible for working out the municipal property taxes owed in every municipality in the province, has a handy short video (which apparently almost no one has watched), explaining this:




This is a key point which many people, including Councillors, either do not seem to grasp or do not understand the implications of. Property taxes in Toronto are ultimately revenue neutral over time -- and are based on the total revenue Toronto needs to raise relative to the total number of paying households relative to each other's value relative to non-residential property tax revenue -- unless council increases the general rate overall to fund new expenditures/programs/costs which is part of the reason that raising property taxes at the rate of inflation if Councillors want to expand overall expenditure is a no starter and that freezing them is disastrous.

It will inevitably mean that city council will have to either increase user fees or other taxes/fees of one kind or another, or that it will have to make cutbacks and start down the path towards austerity as Tory did with his cookie cutter idiocy demanding that every city department trim an identical 2.6% from their budgets. If the city wants to increase or expand programs, to create new infrastructure, or even to maintain what it has given expanding population and needs it cannot be done by keeping residential property taxes at the rate of inflation. Period.

It is simply not possible and it is crucial to understand this when discussing property taxes in Toronto.

All talk of gigantic new downtown parks, vastly improving transit, truly dealing with the crisis in community housing, and so on is pure fantasy otherwise.

Both Rob Ford and John Tory have de facto admitted this with the special and supposedly temporary property tax levies that have been put in place to fund things like the Scarborough subway.

And while shelter workers were cut and while community program user fees will rise above the rate of inflation the city will spend hundred of millions of dollars to keep the eastern extension of the Gardiner Expressway in place entirely toll free thanks to the political cowardice of the Wynne provincial government which wants Toronto to continue to be exclusively responsible for paying to maintain this infrastructure without being allowed to decide how to, while drivers in regional municipalities who do not contribute to Toronto's revenues get to freeload when they use them!

But keeping the Gardiner in place still remains a decision that Toronto politicians made and, as Desmond Cole pointed out in the Toronto Star, specifically about the lack of commitment to housing,:

...when the voters who put Tory in office want costly roads and subways, he goes to the bank. Tory is right to say the property tax base was never meant to fund housing, and that Queen’s Park and Ottawa aren’t paying close to their respective shares. But these governments use Tory’s rhetoric against him. They similarly claim a responsibility to fuel prosperity by keeping taxes low, even if people are thrown from subsidized housing as a result.
Metro columnist and city budget enthusiast Matt Elliott told me bluntly this week, “I don’t have any time for politicians at city council who say the city is broke.” Elliott pointed to debt-financing for transit and roads as proof the city is choosing some investments over others. “The money is there if they want it to be, it just comes with trade-offs,” said Elliott.

This is true, of course, though it is also linked with a terribly destructive notion that the goal of government on all levels is to somehow keep life "affordable", a goal that actually applies only to some and that actually makes life less "affordable" or even less basically livable for others.

For when these politicians talk about "affordable" they are not talking about transit users, tenants (who end up paying via their rent for the much higher property tax rates on apartment buildings)  or those who rely on community services or social programs, they are talking about middle, upper-middle and upper class homeowners and car drivers who actually benefit almost exclusively and massively disproportionately from these policies to the detriment of those who truly need government to intervene in the economy, in the building of public infrastructure and in society on their behalf.

And that is a fundamental travesty that is a basic feature of neo-liberal economics and taxation policies.

See also: What is with all the Ontario left ranting about road tolls and Toronto 'elites'?

See also: Full austerity jacket -- The gloves come off in Tory's Toronto

See also: 42-2: John Tory, Toronto City Council and the austerity consensus