IT’S A CRAP SHOOT every pay day for all 290,000 workers in the public service of Canada. Nothing is a safe bet. You might get paid, or you might not. You might get too much, or not enough. Insufficient tax deductions might leave you coping with huge pay reductions in future paycheques. The accuracy of T4 slips is anybody’s guess, It’s a crap shoot.

EVERYTHING’S STILL FUCKED is the slogan on Nick Beaton’s t-shirt. It sure seemed that way on the first day of the Mass Casualty Commission hearings in Halifax into the mass murder of 22 people in Portapique, N.S. in April 2020.

PARDEEP THANDI IS COLLATERAL DAMAGE in our covid wars. So are over 140 other UNITE HERE Local 40 union members who worked at the Pacific Gateway Hotel in Richmond, B.C. They all got fired. Thanks, in large part, to the indifference of our federal government.

THEY BURN BARNS, DON’T THEY? It’s a hard fact the RCMP can’t deny and one Wet’suwet’en protesters can’t forget, as they process a report from the RCMP of a “violent confrontation” at the Coastal GasLink construction camp near the Morice River in the B.C. interior on February 17.

DOING THE SHIT JOBS not only gets you shit pay, it gets you treated like shit too. That’s the workaday reality for building 155 cleaners and 159 food service workers at Simon Fraser University (SFU), in Burnaby, B.C

PAID SICK DAYS ARE BACK IN NOVA SCOTIA. For a while at least. But a law requiring all employers to provide paid sick days remains about as likely as catching a blue 100 pound lobster in the Halifax Public Gardens duck pond.

WHO NEEDS DOCTORS WHEN YOU’VE GOT BOSSES? That is the guiding principle behind a new Alberta public health order that gives employers near unquestioned authority to decide when workers infected with COVID-19 still need to come into work.

NURSES CAN’T CATCH A BREAK—or even take one. In Ontario, Premier Ford wants them to volunteer to work unpaid extra hours in COVID-19 immunization clinics. In Quebec, Premier Legault lets their bosses take away their vacations.

THE BITTER IRONY CUTS DEEP for Brent Cosgrove and his 19 work mates at the the Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre (MNFC) in Halifax. All 20 of them were thrown out of work on December 13. The workers are convinced it was because they had applied to join a union

BILLIONAIRES GOT BURIED IN MONEY. That’s what happened. Silently. All without even trying. The money drifted in. Ankle-deep. Knee-deep. Hip-deep.