Community and labour make a May Day call for workers’ rights

Press release of the Public Service Alliance of Canada

HALIFAX (April 29, 2010) – This Saturday members of the Public Service Alliance of Canada will join other labour and community activists to celebrate May Day.

At a Victoria Park rally, workers will make a call for workers’ rights in the context of continued job loss, attacks on wages, pensions and benefits, and assaults on public services. PSAC members will draw attention to the particular ways they have been targeted by the spending freeze contained in the Harper Conservative’s budget.

“In Nova Scotia the Federal Government is attacking our most vulnerable members in our most vulnerable communities,” says Colleen Hodder, PSAC Alternate Regional Executive Vice-President for the Atlantic, “And when our members lose jobs, public services everywhere suffer.”

Within the last month plans have been announced to eliminate 147 term and casual positions at Citizenship and Immigration Canada in Sydney and to close Canada Posts National Philatelic Centre in Antigonish at the cost of 65 jobs. Nova Scotia is also seeing a quiet program of centralization of Service Canada staff and cuts to services for the unemployed. The province also recently lost its Federal Labour Affairs Officer in Cape Breton and will lose its Human Rights Commission Office in the fall.

PSAC and other Canadian Labour Congress affiliates will bring their pension campaign to May Day activities. Labour is calling for the protection of defined benefit pension plans everywhere and for the enhancement of public pensions to ensure retirement security for all Canadians.

“Workers everywhere have been used as shock absorbers for an economic crisis they didn’t’ create,” Hodder says. “May Day is an opportunity to fight back together.”

PSAC members will also be traveling from Antigonish to demonstrate along side grassroots community activists, workers, seniors, youth and members of other unions like CUPE and CUPW.

The rally and march will start at 1pm on Saturday, May 1st, at Victoria Park in Halifax. A Festival-Forum will follow at 2:30pm at the Mi’Kmaq Friendship Centre at 2158 Gottingen Street.

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Colleen Hodder, PSAC Alternate Regional Executive Vice-President for the Atlantic, Home: 902-765-6921, Cell: 902-848-6850

Mark Rogers, Regional Representative, PSAC, Office: 902-445-0341, Cell: 902-476-4449

May Day celebrations in Halifax draw support of major Canadian unions

Pensions: N.S. Government Retired Employees Association

[April 22, 2010] THE Nova Scotia Government Retired Employees Association (NSGREA) Provincial Executive and Regional Representatives met yesterday to discuss the proposed changes put forward by Finance Minister Graham Steele on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) as it applies to our pension.

Canadian Human Rights Commission offices closed in Halifax, Toronto and Vancouver

Harper government’s anti-democratic agenda

Calling all CUPW members to Halifax May Day rally and march

Postal workers defend their jobs and strive to stop the wrecking of the public postal service

Vigorously prepare for May Day celebration!

MAY FIRST, International Workers’ Day, will be celebrated in Halifax this year with a rally, parade, forum and festival.

Wikipedia – The dumbing down of world knowledge

Essay by EDWIN BLACK*

JAY LENO probably said it best a few weeks ago when he joked that when Wikipedia’s servers briefly went down for some three hours, it left the world without a source for false and erroneous information. But many in our information-driven society believe it is no joke. A growing community of the informed believes that Wikipedia, the constantly-changing knowledge base created by a global free-for-all of anonymous users, now stands as the leading force for the dumbing down of world knowledge. If Wikipedia’s almost unstoppable momentum continues, critics say, it threatens to quickly reverse centuries of progress in the sharing of verifiable knowledge with its highest aspiration being genuine fact. In its place would be a constant cacophony of fact and falsity that Wikipedia’s critics call a “law of the jungle.”

Nova Scotia NDP’s 2010 budget

By K.C. ADAMS, TML Daily, April 12, 2010 – No. 68

NOVA SCOTIA’S Finance Minister Graham Steele’s budget “Back to Balance: The Four Year Plan” introduced in the Nova Scotia Legislature on April 6, 2010 makes the claim of being a budget of many firsts. One “first” is the claim that this budget “marks the first step back to balance” and another is that this budget “represents a new course for Nova Scotia.” Both statements in and of themselves cannot be refuted.

Calling all PSAC members to Halifax May Day march

More cuts coming at Canada Post

– Canadian Union of Postal Workers, April 9, 2010 –

In THE WAKE of last week’s contracting out of call centres and the elimination of more than 300 jobs, Canada Post has announced further dramatic changes to its operations in Victoria, BC, Kitchener, Ontario, and Moncton, New Brunswick.

The scramble for Africa – Berlin Conference to AFRICOM

THE HODGEPODGE of geometric boundaries that today divide Africa into 50 plus irregular nations under Eurocentric subjugation all started in Berlin, Germany on November 15, 1884, writes ITAI MUCHENA*. Today Germany unashamedly hosts the headquarters for the new U.S. African Command (AFRICOM).

Cuban medical aid to Haiti: One of the world’s best kept secrets

By EMILY J. KIRK and JOHN M. KIRK*

Cubans setting up the field hospital in Jacmel, Haiti, January 2010.

MEDIA COVERAGE of Cuban medical cooperation following the disastrous recent earthquake in Haiti was sparse indeed. International news reports usually described the Dominican Republic as being the first to provide assistance, while Fox News sang the praises of U.S. relief efforts in a report entitled “U.S. Spearheads Global Response to Haiti Earthquake” – a common theme of its extensive coverage. CNN also broadcast hundreds of reports, and in fact one focused on a Cuban doctor wearing a T-shirt with a large image of Che Guevara – and yet described him as a “Spanish doctor.”