kar0ling

Re “Temporary foreign workers taking jobs from young Canadians” This [wire service article reproduced in the FreeP] article is deeply troubling, in large part for the way it has been framed. You have a choice with a headline. The story is really about how the Conservatives accuse the Liberals have broken their promise to Canadians about limiting immigration numbers. The “stealing jobs” boogieman headline is clickbait, not actually elucidating the article. Equally irresponsible: nowhere in the article does anyone clearly and in simple language refute the obvious mendacity about temporary foreign workers stealing jobs from young people. Canada is a deeply racist country that maintains a temporary form worker program to obtain a workforce do the jobs Canadians won't do, certainly not for those wages nor under those conditions. In fact, immigrants create jobs. It takes an entrepreneurial spirit to leave the familiarity of home to strike out somewhere new. That courage and in...

“Marooned by Air Canada flight attendant strike? Here are your options”. A headline in the news. Biased framing right off the hop. Here’s the thing. It's not the flight attendants who marooned folks. It’s corporate greed.  It’s funny how frequently the general sentiment is to begrudge other people getting fairly compensated for their work. Yet each one of us would be unhappy to have our job demand hours of unpaid labour. Okay for thee and not for me? This is why I am troubled by this framing. Sure, it’s just a headline, but it directs the understandable frustration of disrupted travel plans at the folks who are just asking for fair wages instead of at the executives who would rather create travel chaos than pay their staff. It directs the blame for the strike at the workers who are exercising their right to strike when their reasonable demands are not met rather than at the executives who didn’t make any contingency plans for the strike because they expected the government to f...

A little letter to the FreeP: Thank you for the work of your newsroom. Hearing how PostMedia has taken over Canada, including the major newsrooms in the largest Canadian cities, I'm proud scrappy little Winnipeg has maintained an independent free press.  If I may be so bold as to offer some suggestion/critique... The constant air quality warnings and drought conditions we're experiencing are deeply worrying. What is equally disturbing is the general conversation around it which acknowledges the unpleasantness, blindly hopes it's temporary, and moves on, without addressing the climate change at the root of the conditions – and most importantly, that it is crucial we act in as many ways as we can as quickly as we can to do things to address it. Notably, pressuring our politicians that more pipelines are not the direction to go.  Public transit is an important climate mitigation as well – getting people out of wasteful private vehicles into more efficient buses and onto ...

  Dear Free Press Re: “Bubble zones sought after protests clash over Hamas” AKA “Pro-Palestinian protest at Jewish campus sparks call for safety-zone legislation” Thank you for changing the headline of Chris Kitching’s article on the event by Students Supporting Israel at the Asper Community Campus. The body of the article raises good questions about the appropriateness of protesting religious spaces. However, even after the removal of the gross mischaracterization from the headline, the second paragraph of the article gratuitously invokes Hamas, biasing the discussion. Why does the article prominently invoke memory of the violent and cruel attack on October 7, 2023, without any mention of the more salient point that the event that raised the discussion platformed soldiers of the army that has been committing a genocide for more than 500 days? (The Rome Statute, of which Canada is a signatory, defines war crimes and genocide and other states’ obligations not to participate in or...