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Category: Archive

Writings prior to December 2007.

Can Mike Harris win?

MAY 10, 1999 – Suddenly, what seemed unthinkable 18 months ago, is looming as a real possibility. Mike Harris, reviled by thousands, might just get re-elected in the Ontario election. Some polls have him trailing the Liberals. But the Toronto Star, based on a fairly large sample, put Harris at 51% just as the election was called, 12 points up on the Liberals, and far ahead of the NDP.[1] Harris could still blow it. There is deep hatred towards him across the province. He will be dogged by activists at every stop. But what happens on June 4 if we…

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CUPE mass pickets show Tories can be beaten

MARCH 15, 1999 – When striking educational support staff in Toronto turned to mass pickets last week, they unleashed a power that can stop the Tory cuts. Two weeks into their strike against the Toronto Board of Education, the 14,000 striking members of CUPE local 4400 switched from pickets scattered across the more than 300 schools in the district, to concentrated mass pickets of hundreds at selected high schools.[1] From Harbord Collegiate and West Toronto Collegiate in the west end, to Riverdale and East York in the east, hundreds and hundreds of pickets and supporters, on Monday and Tuesday of…

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Support staff walk out – Striking against the Harris cuts

MARCH 1, 1999 – Saturday morning, February 27, more than 14,000 educational workers in the Toronto school board, members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) local 4400, walked off the job.[1] According to CUPE, the Toronto board is facing budget cuts of $172-million because of the Harris Tories’ Bill 160, cuts which pose the possibility of 4,358 job losses in the next four years.[2] But these are essential workers. They are the custodians, administrative staff, teaching assistants, English as a Second Language (ESL) instructors, international language instructors and lunch-room assistants. They have already faced job losses and downsizing.…

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Heads of Unions cancel general strike

AUGUST 3, 1998 – The summer of silence from the Ontario Federation of Labour was broken through an article in The Globe and Mail.[1] The heads of Ontario unions have met, the bosses’ paper reported, and there will be no one-day province-wide strike this fall against the Harris Tories. In a phone interview, Buzz Hargrove, head of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW), said “my understanding is that there’s no one-day” general strike. Sid Ryan of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) said, “apparently, the province-wide strike at this time has been cancelled.” Wayne Samuelson, head of the Ontario Federation…

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Strike action is the key, not convention politics

OCTOBER 21, 1997 – The one-day general strike in Windsor was incredibly successful. Not since the Toronto shutdown in October 1996 and the Hamilton shutdown in February 1996, has there been such an impressive display of working class power in the province. But it was successful in spite of very little enthusiasm from top labour leaders. The number of buses mobilized to bring supporters in were numbered in dozens, not the hundreds which descended on Toronto and Hamilton.[1] And most significantly, at this writing, there are no further public plans for days of action, let alone a province-wide general strike.…

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Don’t let the teachers fight alone

OCTOBER 8, 1997 – On October 17, Windsor Ontario will become the eighth Ontario city to be shut by a one-day general strike in the “Days of Action” campaign against the province’s Tories. If it is anything like the general strike in North Bay on September 26, it will again display the deep anger and willingness to fight in the Ontario workers’ movement. On Friday September 26 in North Bay, many workplaces were shut down by picket lines and an estimated 3,000 demonstrated at Memorial Gardens. On Saturday between 15,000 and 20,000, including 180 busloads of protesters, marched through the…

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A documentary from Mars

JANUARY 6, 1997 – Review – Mars Attacks, director Tim Burton This film is supposed to be a comedy. Maybe. I’m convinced it’s really a documentary in disguise. Let me make the case. The night I watched it, there were very few moments of laughter. Except when the Martians fried Congress. The audience loved that. And anyone who knows the politics of the current, Newt Gingrich congress in the U.S., couldn’t help but love it too. (There is a strong case to be made, in fact, that Newt hails from the Red Planet. But that’s another story). Mars Attacks seems at…

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How the press turned 250,000 into 50,000

NOVEMBER 27, 1996 – The numbers game has loomed large in the wake of the days of action in Toronto. Toronto cops came up with the ludicrous figure of 40,000 for the demonstration on October 26, a figure so unbelievable that they had to increase it to 75,000.[1] The Toronto Star contributed to the nonsense by having “experts” count heads of an aerial photograph of the demo at Queen’s Park. They arrived at a figure of 52,800 for the crowd size.[2] But the problem is that the crowd took hours to march to Queen’s Park. At any one time, only…

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CAW – ‘We’re occupying to save our jobs’

CAW – ‘We’re occupying to save our jobs’ OCTOBER 16 – A six-hour occupation of the Fabrication plant by 150 striking members of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW), has stopped GM from trying to move equipment across the picket lines. After picket lines went up two weeks ago, management tried unsuccessfully to remove 75 dies from the Fabrication plant so it could keep using them to manufacture components. When striking members of CAW Local 222 refused to lift their lines so the machines could be moved, GM sought an injunction against the union. But after only a few hours of…

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The time to strike is now

OCTOBER 2, 1996 – The term ‘jobless recovery’ perfectly describes the state of the Canadian economy. There is statistical growth, but unemployment is stuck at obscene levels. But even if the current recovery is jobless, it does create better conditions for workers to wrench gains from both employers and the state than existed in the early 1990s. During the desperate slump of 1989-1992, every day brought news of factory closings and layoffs. The situation is different today. There are still layoffs. There is still high unemployment. But there are also plants putting on more shifts, hiring more workers. Chrysler announced,…

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