If we, as educators and as social justice advocates who have dedicated our lives to anti-racism and equity work, find that the limits of our compassion and understanding stop short of addressing Palestine, what does this say about our own complicity?
Education
What could lead people to say such things as, “I can physically, like on every level, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, feel myself changing and transforming,” and “my peers, they see a difference, they see me more open and, you know, thinking about future endeavours and what I want to do”?
It seemed for a moment as if adult basic education’s time had finally come. Premier Wab Kinew spoke publicly about its important role in moving people into the paid labour force; an Adult Literacy Act is in first reading; so too are legislative changes enabling people on Employment and Income Assistance (EIA) to pursue adult education and still receive benefits.
Then the budget came down.
VANCOUVER — The federal government is considering ways for employees to have more ownership and control in their workplace by tabling legislation to create a new Employee Ownership Trust legal structure.
Tuesday's federal budget includes a capital gains tax exemption for sales of businesses to employee ownership trusts to allow for such control.
Decades before most of us had ever heard the phrase “novel coronavirus,” researchers at universities around the world were advancing our understanding of vaccines. Their basic research laid the foundation to develop the vaccines that changed the course of the pandemic, in record time.
Basic research — the type of work in science, social sciences and the humanities that has no obvious application nor agenda — is the core of scholarly production. It’s central to the value that universities bring to contemporary societies.
Muslim young women who wear the hijab are stigmatized because of their religious and ethnic or racial backgrounds. Community-based reports in Winnipeg have documented how Muslim young women have been humiliated and threatened by their peers and teachers in schools through physical attacks, bullying, and harassment. These experiences often happen with limited if any accountability from schools.
In the neverending right-wing-led campaigns against social progress, public schools are frequently targeted. And there’s a reason: while battered and underfunded, these institutions are still symbolic of the actualization that we are more than just individual agents or even the sum of our parts; that differences needn’t divide; that a fairer, kinder future for all of us, starting with our kids, is always worth committing to, investing in and being collectively responsible for.
This report calls on the provincial government to work with school divisions, unions, and the ministry of education to equalize wages for educational support staff across the province. Pay disparities are not present for teachers across the province. The Manitoba government, which controls all significant funding sources in our school system, must play an active role in ensuring that these wage gaps are eliminated and ensure that rural school divisions operations are no longer subsidized by substandard wages paid to a predominately female workforce.
Over the last three decades, no province in Canada has moved more aggressively, or more consistently, to cut public funding to universities than Ontario. Ontario’s funding model, if it can be called that, is simply less funding, year after year.
TORONTO — The government of Ontario should double its funding to public universities in the province, a new report from the Ontario office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives says.