#austerity measures

Alberta's decision to cancel funding for an elite wildfire-fighting crew in 2019 came despite pleas to keep the Rapattack program from at least three municipalities, including one that has since been evacuated during this spring's blazes.

"Rapattack is a pivotal program in the fight against wildfire and without them communities will be losing a valuable resource," wrote Jim Hailes, then mayor of Fox Creek, to Devin Dreeshen, then the United Conservative forestry minister.

Fox Creek's 1,700 residents are expected to be out of their homes until at least Wednesday.

Rapattack firefighters are rappelled from helicopters to douse wildfires while they still only covered a few hectares. They can extinguish small fires before they merge and clear landing spaces for other helicopters to bring in crews and gear. [...]

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In celebration of the first US publication of the anthology Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry (edited by Karen Van Dyck) in our NYRB Poets series, several of the poets collected in the book sent in original videos of themselves reading one of their poems from the anthology. We’ve just posted all of these videos, along with a few clips from our book launch event at McNally Jackson Booksellers last month, to our website and in a YouTube playlist that you can visit here. Every video is very different—and you really get a bit of the particular poet’s personality in each. As a teaser here’s the first video on the playlist: Danae Sioziou reading her poem “Around the House” (translation by Rachel Hadas).

Insolvency trustee Doug Hoyes encounters a lot of Canadians with money troubles, but he's become particularly sympathetic to the plight of young people who find themselves financially underwater.

For more than a decade, his Ontario-based firm Hoyes Michalos has been crunching bankruptcy and insolvency numbers for its annual "Joe Debtor" analysis, with its latest results released last month ahead of tax season.

He's concluded that millennial Canadians have been dealt a generational losing hand as they face student loans layered with bad debts from credit cards, high-interest loans, and post-pandemic tax debt from collecting CERB.

"I think there's a whole bunch of whammies that have hit millennials." Hoyes said. "The CERB was the final straw that broke the camel's back." [...]

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Great history of Bob Rae and the NDP in power in Ontario in the early 1990s. My parents still feel betrayed all these decades later. "Deficit mania In its first two years of power, the NDP had brought in important labour law changes, raised the minimum wage, raised welfare rates, invested in housing, and raised taxes on higher income earners. 

At the same time, the government was laying the groundwork for severe austerity. In January 1992, Rae took to television to tell Ontarians there were unsustainable deficits ahead and action needed to be taken. The NDP’s main focus was to get the deficit under control.

Either the NDP was going to push forward real substantive changes to how the economy works and for whom, or it was going to appease the economic forces in power. Rather than take on the big business agenda head-on, the NDP in government was pulled into managing the economy. And, first and foremost, this meant placating business interests and creating a stable climate for investment and business. 

It should be noted that much of the hew and cry about the deficit and impending debt wall was baseless. The government claimed that the deficit would be $18 billion by 1995, an over-the-top projection. The real figure was almost half of that. Ontario still had access to financial markets; there was little concern about its long run debt to GDP ratio. 

The NDP was viciously attacked by the rightwing and under siege from the big business lobby but there is little to suggest that Ontario was facing an actual fiscal crisis. The net debt-to-GDP ratio under the Rae government was lower than any subsequent government in Ontario.