Minister Wilkinson and Pathways Alliance top September’s oil & gas lobbying round up – Environmental Defence:

It has been about a month since we launched the Federal Oil & Gas Lobbying Bot on Twitter.
Since then, it has been tweeting out a constant stream of announcements
about which oil & gas companies and associations have been lobbying
which Canadian government politicians and ministries. (Read more about the bot.)

We’ve looked at the raw data from the lobbyist registry, and pulled out highlights from September, the most recent month with complete data.

Fossil fuel lobbyists met with government officials a minimum of 102 times in September: over four times per working day.

This only counts the federal government, not provincial or territorial governments.

Federal government must confront challenges for Canadians who rent homes:

The rental sector is the poor cousin of the Canadian housing market.

We Canadians tend to fetishize home ownership, and believe it should
be everyone’s aspiration. Governments at all levels cater to that
obsession.

But renters are a growing group on the Canadian housing scene. Statistics Canada tells us the proportion of renters in Canada is on the increase, while growth in home ownership is slowing.

As of 2021, two-thirds of Canadian households were in the homeowner
category, down from a peak of nearly seven-in-10 a decade earlier. A
third of households were renters.

More importantly, in StatsCan’s words, “the growth in renter
households (+21.5%) is more than double the growth in owner households
(+8.4%)”.

Currently, Canadians under the age of 75 are less likely to own their
own homes than they were a decade ago. And while only a minority of
folks in the 25 to 29 age range have ever owned homes, 44 per cent in
that group owned homes ten years ago compared to 36 per cent today – an
eight-point drop.

At this rate it will not be long before half or more of all Canadian households are renters.

‘Not going to back down’: Ontario education workers walk off the job, government calls action ‘illegal’ | CBC News:

School
board workers represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees
(CUPE) were protesting at politicians’ offices, including hundreds of
members outside Queen’s Park and the education minister’s constituency
office in Vaughan, Ont. Members of other unions — including the Ontario
Public Service Employees Union and Unifor — also joined the picketers.

On
Thursday, the Progressive Conservative government enacted Bill 28, a
law that imposed contracts on 55,000 CUPE members and banned them from
striking. The law also uses the notwithstanding clause to protect
against constitutional challenges — a legal mechanism that has only been
used twice in Ontario’s history, both times by the governments of
Premier Doug Ford.

CUPE says the law is an attack on all workers’
bargaining rights and is staging a walkout anyway, warning that it will
last until the government repeals the bill.

Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau called the Ford government’s legislation an “attack on one of
the most basic rights available, that of collective bargaining.”