CIBC, Scotiabank Overtime Lawsuit Gets OK From Supreme Court

OTTAWA - The Supreme Court of Canada has cleared the way for two class-action lawsuits against CIBC and Scotiabank seeking hundreds of millions of dollars for unpaid overtime to go ahead.

The banks had sought leave to appeal for a lower court decision allowing the cases, but the Supreme Court dismissed the application.

Laywers David O'Connor and Louis Sokolov who represent Cindy Fulawka and Dara Fresco said their clients were pleased that the cases could now move forward on their merits.

Ontario Minimum Wage Should Be Raised To $14, Say Advocacy Groups

TORONTO - A mock $10 bill — frozen in a block of ice — was presented to a representative of Ontario's Ministry of Labour on Thursday afternoon in protest of the government's minimum wage freeze.

The protest was organized by The Campaign to Raise the Minimum Wage, a coalition of several advocacy groups in Ontario.

Quebec Reacts To Federal Budget 2012: 'Economic Sabotage'

QUEBEC - Quebec's sovereigntist government expressed fury Thursday over a budget it called a "frontal attack" on the province's economic interests.

The provincial finance minister rattled off a list of grievances, including changes to the skills-training program which he said he hoped to see quashed.

"This is an economic sabotage exercise," Finance Minister Nicolas Marceau said in Quebec City.

Federal Budget 2013: Government Stays The Course On Cuts, 2015 Balanced Budget

The federal budget for 2013 has landed.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty stood up in the House of Commons Thursday afternoon after markets closed to deliver the budget speech. Flaherty had telegraphed for several days that he would not stray from an agressive 2015 deadline to balance the budget despite falling revenues and a lower-than-expected GDP forecast for the rest of 2013.

The Osborne Files: Britain’s Mr. Austerity Goes Socialist

George Osborne, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, has been called many things since 2010, when he turned the United Kingdom into a petri dish for his experiment in austerity economics: arrogant, incompetent, supercilious, right-wing, cruel, antediluvian, deluded. Until now, though, nobody has described him as a socialist.

Let me be the first. Yesterday, in his annual budget presentation to the House of Commons, a desperate (there’s another frequently applied adjective) Osborne launched a scheme to socialize a significant portion of the U.K. mortgage market. Taking his cue from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, those two great American bastions of state socialism, he said that the U.K. government would enter the mortgage business, lending British homebuyers up to a fifth of the cost of newly-constructed houses and guaranteeing the mortgages of people who are struggling to raise enough cash for a down payment. Hitherto, mortgage finance in the U.K., unlike in the United States, has been exclusively a private-sector business. Now, Osborne, a self-described apostle of Adam Smith and Margaret Thatcher, has decided to change all that.

‘Entire US ruling class responsible for Iraq war’

The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a “willful and consolidated” decision by the American ruling elite rather than a one-off mistake, believes senior Russian official Aleksey Pushkov.

The occupation of Iraq launched a decade ago was “an implementation of the idea to create of a mono-polar world,” said Pushkov, the head of the State Duma Committee in International Affairs.

Sarkozy charged over campaign donations

France's former president, Nicholas Sarkozy, has been indicted over claims he accepted thousands of dollars in illegal donations for his election campaign, reports have said.

Sarkozy allegedly took funds from L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, France's richest woman, for his 2007 election campaign.

Lawyer Antoine Gillot told French TV i-Tele that Judge Jean-Michel Gentil in the southwestern city of Bordeaux had placed Sarkozy under investigation, after hours of questioning on Thursday.

Trudeau predicts federal-provincial friction over Budget 2013

Justin Trudeau, the prohibitive favourite to win the leadership of the federal Liberal party next month, says the new federal budget’s plan for training sets the stage for a friction between the Conservative government and the provinces over job training.

A centrepiece of Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s budget is a plan he says will “transform” the way Canadians are trained, by establishing a new “Canada Jobs Grant.” Under the plan, Ottawa would provide up to $5,000 for an employee being trained on the job, as long as the employer and the province each put up an equal amount.

New shoes and a haircut: Budget 2013 not so pretty for women in Canada

The Finance Minister got a new pair of shoes. Canadians got a new federal budget. And women in Canada got another haircut.

Budget 2013 is all about Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! And who wouldn't like a job. Maybe some training. Maybe even a full-time job. With benefits. And a pension plan. Oh go crazy, let's throw in equal pay.

Not so fast girls! NO JOB FOR YOU!

Why not?

Anarchists in the boardroom

Anarchists in the boardroom
by Liam Barrington-Bush
(Concrete Solutions ,2013;)

'The Left' has a funny relationship with the world of management.

On the one hand, it can be a dirty word; something the 'bad guys' do, a tool of 'the system.'

There's good reason for such associations.

Since its birth, the management field has largely served to reinforce the social and political status quo, manipulating the vast majority of those who fall victim to it, to work ever-longer hours and give up any sense autonomy, as well as both literal and symbolic ownership over the fruits of their labour.