Funding healthcare through public dollars raised by taxes is what many of Canada’s peer countries do, and they do more of it. Canadians spend more of their on private payment than the people of Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Norway.
In a fireside chat, Avi Lewis engaged with Isabella Weber on her ideas, policy proposals, their application to the Canadian economy, and how we can build the collective economic future that brings power back to working people across the world.
In 2004, the CBC polled Canadians on who they thought had the most profound impact on the country’s history. Tommy Douglas was crowned “Greatest Canadian,” ahead of Canadian cultural icons and Prime Ministers. But what did Douglas do to deserve this title?
While it is now safe to say that there are Canadian policymakers listening to Weber’s answers to the cost-of-living crisis, the next step must be turning those policy ideas into reality – to ensure affordability and defend Canadian democracy.
Reviving the NDP’s legacy as a mass party requires new innovation for today’s world to recover the purpose that motivated democratization—to grant ordinary citizens the maximum possible role in the governance of Canadian society.
The anti-war movement was the incubator, the training ground for the emergence of the Canadian political economy movement I had been active in the sixties in the peace movement and then later in the Student Union for Peace Action as a full-time organizer.
Important political economy analytics of “capture”, outsourcing, public-private partnership etc., fall short of adequately capturing the degree to which private corporate power has assumed sovereign functions today. A new era for political economy research is just beginning, the time for democratic resistance is now.
My read of history turned into a read of the aggregate data points that influence the formation of political economy; the present state of society’s institutions, informed by history.
Politics and economics have been the key ways I have discovered and understood the world. It was my union that changed my life for the better.
