BEING RIGHT DIDN’T HELP MUCH. Workers who got their jobs through temp placement agencies have suffered from a higher rate of covid infection than other workers. Dr. Gayane Hovhannisyan warned they likely would. No one cared much.

IT’S RISKY AND ENVIRONMENTALLY UNETHICAL but so what. The cryptocurrency craze holds millions of us in its grip. Losing almost half its value since April hasn’t killed it. Any more than the fact its energy demands make our super-heated world even hotter.

IT HAD TO BE A CONSPIRACY. Maritime blueberry growers were certain of it. Why else would a buyer from Maine not try to outbid the dominant Canadian buyer? Why would they pay no more in Canada than the 22 cents a pound offered by Oxford Frozen Food and yet be happy to pay 45 cents a pound—more than twice as much—to growers in Maine? The growers asked the Canadian Competition Bureau to investigate. The bureau did. Then nothing.

“IT’S LIKE YELLING ‘STOP THIEF’ says Alice Power. “Taking to the street focuses attention on how the banks are free to gouge us and get away with it.”

$135 MILLION IS ONE HELLUVA TIP. But that’s what Canadians give ride-hailing giants like Uber and Lyft every year. And it’s all technically legal.

WINNING HAS MEANT NOTHING to Maria Tajan. She’s still homeless, jobless and penniless 18 months after the Ontario Ministry of Labour ruled a former employer owes her $28,000. Worse still, she will likely never get a penny of it.

COME SEE THE “FREAKS” and scare your kids away from drugs. That’s what the operator of Scared Straight Tours said his bus tour of the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood in Vancouver could deliver. Residents in the neighbourhood were outraged. Their loud and very public refusal to be part of a “human zoo” ended the tours

FRESH AIR WAS FORBIDDEN TO DEMAR. He wasn’t in prison. But he says that’s what it felt like. Demar is a recently arrived migrant worker from Jamaica. Being cooped up for 14 days without fresh air was a condition of his quarantine when he came back to work here this spring.

SCOTIABANK IS NOT BIG ON COMMUNITY. If it was it wouldn’t be closing its branch in the small town of Pemberton, B.C. on July 15. But it is. And it won’t say why.

ALL CANADIANS ARE SHOCKED by the discovery of the bodies of 215 unidentified children at a grave site near the former Kamloops Residential School. Let us all take a moment to reflect on that and to express our sympathy and offer our condolences to the families and communities who are suffering such a great loss.