Welcome to Union Town

A union town is a place where people have each other's backs as a matter of course.

The bus driver, the nurse, the framer, the cashier, the teacher, the dishwasher, the warehouse picker — everybody understands they're in it together. The boss class is a known quantity, not a mystery. And the kids grow up assuming they'll inherit something worth inheriting.

We don't have enough of those towns anymore. This is a project about getting them back.

Union Town is a Canadian outlet about working-class power — a newsletter, a blog, short videos, and posts on the open social web.

We're here to tell the truth about who's taking what from whom, to point you toward the people fighting back, and to do it in plain language.

Here's why we're starting now.

The slow robbery

For about forty years, this country has been run on one idea: that the market knows best, that government should get out of the way, and that what's good for big business will trickle down to the rest of us eventually.

That idea has a name — neoliberalism — and it's been the house religion of both Liberal and Conservative governments since the 1980s.

We'll use the word a lot, so that's the only definition you'll need: it's the forty-year project of handing the country over to the people who already own most of it, and calling that freedom.

You don't need a degree to see the results. Wages that haven't kept up with the price of a normal life. Rent that eats a paycheque. A grocery bill set by three companies. A phone bill set by three more. Hospitals stretched thin. Public things — the post office, the railway, whole utilities — sold off to people who promised efficiency and delivered fees.

The share of the country's income that goes to workers, instead of to owners, has been falling for fifty years. That's not an accident. It was a series of choices, made in boardrooms and cabinet rooms, and choices can be made differently.

The current government under Mark Carney is not a break from any of this. It's the polished version.

There's a phrase for what's going on — passive revolution — and it's simpler than it sounds: it's when a ruling party borrows the angry language of the people knocking at the door, soothes the crowd with it, and then quietly keeps doing the same thing it was always doing, just in a nicer suit.

Watch the actual decisions, not the speeches.

The Digital Services Tax that would have made Big Tech pay, dropped. Military spending up under pressure from Washington. Bill C-5 fast-tracking projects over the consent of Indigenous nations. Bay Street looked after; Main Street told to wait.

We're going to name that, clearly and often. And then we're going to spend most of our time on the people doing something about it.

The story Canada keeps telling itself

To understand how we got here, it helps to understand a very old Canadian habit — one we need to break.

Back in the 1920s, an economic historian named Harold Innis noticed that Canada's whole economy had been built, wave after wave, around shipping one raw thing out the door.

First it was fur. Then fish off the East Coast. Then timber. Then prairie wheat. Then nickel and other minerals.

Now it's oil — bitumen out of northern Alberta.

A young economist named Mel Watkins took Innis's insight and turned it into a proper framework in 1963. We call it Staple Theory, and a "staple" just means a raw resource we dig up or cut down and sell off mostly unprocessed.

Here's the trap the theory describes, in plain terms. When a country organizes itself around hauling raw stuff out of the ground and shipping it away cheap, a few things follow, and none of them are good for ordinary people.

The economy gets owned from elsewhere, because it takes outside money to build the mines and the pipelines, and the profits leave with it.

The country never develops the broad mix of factories, trades, and good steady jobs that a diversified place has, because all the energy and capital keep getting sucked back into the next big dig.

The whole thing rides a rollercoaster — boom when the world price is high, bust when it crashes — and every single Canadian staples boom in our history has eventually gone bust. The beaver, the cod, the wheat, and yes, the oil.

There's even a nasty side effect economists call "Dutch disease": when the resource boom is hot, it pumps up the value of the Canadian dollar, which makes everything else we'd sell to the world — manufactured goods, especially — too expensive to compete, so the factories close. We hollow ourselves out to fill a hole in the ground.

Staple Theory is the lamp that shows us all of this. It's a good lamp. Watkins and Innis did us a real service.

But the thing we need to climb out of isn't the theory — it's the trap the theory describes.

We need to get the staples mindset out of our national bloodstream: the deep, lazy assumption that Canada just is a quarry and a woodlot and an oil patch, a place that exists to be extracted from, a resource colony that ships out the raw and imports the finished.

That's the story Canada keeps telling itself. It's a story written by the people who profit from the digging.

And there's a part of that story those early economists missed, which Watkins himself admitted near the end of his life: the staples economy was built on stolen land.

Every wave of it — the fur trade, the railways, the mines, the pipelines — ran straight through Indigenous nations who never agreed to any of it.

You cannot tell the honest history of Canadian wealth without telling the history of dispossession. That's not a footnote for us. It's the foundation, and we'll treat it that way in everything we cover.

What prosperity actually is

So here's the argument at the heart of this whole project, and we'll be making it a hundred different ways.

A country is not rich because a handful of corporations are extracting record profits.

A town is not healthy because there's a boom on.

Real prosperity — from the smallest municipality to this whole community that stretches sea to sea to sea, across three oceans and hundreds of nations — is measured one way: by how the people are doing.

Can a family afford a home? Can a worker get hurt on the job and not lose everything? Can a kid see a doctor? Can an elder retire? Can a community decide its own future on its own land?

When we measure that way, the last forty years look like exactly what they are: a long, quiet transfer of wealth and security away from the many and toward the few.

The few have done extraordinarily well. The rest of us were told to be patient.

We're done being patient.

And we're done pretending that a record quarter for a grocery chain or an oil major has anything to do with whether our neighbours can make rent. Prosperity is the well-being of people, full stop. Not the output of corporations that have wriggled out of every moral constraint a decent society ever put on them.

What we'll do, and where

We'll cover the fights where this all comes to a head: labour organizing and strikes, housing as a human right, the cost-of-living squeeze and the companies behind it, public ownership and the Canadian habit of building great things together, the climate emergency and a just transition that doesn't leave workers behind, Indigenous land defence, and the giant tech platforms quietly shaping what a whole country is even allowed to see.

We'll name names — companies, policies, decision-makers. Vague gestures at "the system" are what left so many people cynical in the first place.

And if you came to us from the political right, angry at a country that stopped working for you...you're welcome here, genuinely! Your anger is appropriate! We just think you've been handed the wrong target.

The problem was never the immigrant or the trans kid down the street. The problem is the three companies that own your grocery store and the policy choices that let them. Come argue with us about it. We'll level with you like an adult.

One more thing, and it matters: We're building this on ground we own: an open feed nobody can take from us on the open social web, the independent corner of the internet that isn't owned by five billionaires. If that doesn't make sense right now, then don't worry, we'll explain all that plainly as we go. You may eventually find us on the big platforms too, because that's where most people are, but think of those as quarantined outposts.

Home is the corner store, not the mall.

That's the country we're trying to remember how to build. A union town, scaled up to a nation.

Pull up a chair. There's work to do, and it's better done together.