CALL IT A SOLIDARITY GAP. It’s the distance between what unions are doing to support the homeless in Toronto park encampments and what they could and should be doing. Many union activists in Toronto are organizing to close that gap.

“I’M LIVING WITH WAR EVERY DAY” is not just a line from the 2006 Neil Young song. It was a reality for all of us then. It is a reality for all of us today. A July 14 open letter asks Prime Minster Trudeau to recognize that reality and reject it.

A TAXI RIDE TO A STRANGE MAN’S BED is not where she wanted to go, but that’s where a 19-year-old Indigenous woman wound up in Winnipeg in 2016. The risk of sexual assault at the hands of a taxi driver was real and ever-present for all Winnipeg women back then. Not now. Not since Indigenous women in the city took collective direct action to protect themselves.

SOLIDARITY MEANS DOING MORE than just enough. Unions prove it every day. None more so than the over 3000 academic workers in CUPE Local 3906 at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

THE WESTJET WORKERS SAID “YES” JUST ONCE and they got their union. It doesn’t happen everywhere.

THE POPULAR RESISTANCE PAID OFF. Big Coal will not be free to rip the tops off mountains in Alberta, make drinking water toxic and threaten whole ecosystems.

IT WAS A CHICKEN LITTLE MOMENT IN QUEBEC. The sky was falling because a million chickens would be “euthanized”—all because 600 chicken plant workers dared to think they mattered more than chickens.

DON CRAWFORD DID HIS JOB AND GOT PUNISHED. His job was to investigate the cause of a CP Rail train derailment that killed three train crew workers. His conclusion was the police needed to be brought in. That’s the last thing his bosses at the Transportation Safety Board (TSB) or CP Rail wanted.

DORITOS WEREN’T WORTH THE RISK. That’s the conclusion of one of the retail workers surveyed by a team of Acadia University professors from August to October last year.

UNIONS MATTER, EVEN IF YOU DON’T HAVE ONE. The B.C. Government and Service Employees’ Union (BCGEU) proved that to Dollarama warehouse workers in Quebec June 9.