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Welcome to SocialCommons.ca

SocialCommons.ca seeks to build engaging conversations and support transformative change. All stories will be framed by our five pillars that provide the foundation for all of our work. Together with our partners, we are committed to creating a future society based on stronger human rights and social protections, revitalized communities, and a more democratic economy. We seek to build an active and engaged civil society, an enlarged social commons with more shared community assets, and systems of production and distribution that ensure a sustainable eco-sphere on which all life depends.

In many ways we are at a crossroads.  The choices we make in the next ten to twenty years will either see us embrace a profoundly different path founded on human needs and ecological sustainability, or continue to founder under the weight of failing global systems based on an endless growth mindset and the ceding of more and more political influence to large multi-national corporations.

Working from within our five pillars, we seek to join with others in mapping out the path forward.  We are all on this journey together.  It involves exposing and recognizing the failures within our current systems that are holding us back. It means articulating needs and expectations, both of ourselves and each other, as we think through what must be protected, what needs to change and what we need to create together.  Finally, it means painting a picture of the future world we wish to inhabit in a way that both reflects the values and aspirations we share, and shows concrete examples of how it is feasible and can be done.  We invite you to join us on the journey.

The Social Commons: Our Five Pillars

Inclusive, Equitable Communities: Ensuring Human Rights

As we contend with the ravages of a global pandemic and plan our recovery, Canadians have discovered, as in...

Social Rights and Protections

The foundation laid for social rights and a social contract In the mid-20th century, after fifteen years of the Great...

The Social Commons: Our Five Pillars

Where We Started From Our journey began with the planning of a fall 2019 symposium exploring the relevance of the...

Sustainable Eco-Systems: Economies Living in Harmony with Nature

How Do We Ensure Sustainable Eco-Systems? Living through the pandemic has exposed how precarious so much of our social and...

Creating a Human Needs Economy

The post-pandemic economy: More of the same? As the disruption of the pandemic nears its end, we begin to imagine...

Deepening Democracy: Strengthening Democracy and Civil Society

What Is Democracy’s Place in the Commons? Living through the pandemic has exposed how precarious so much of our social...

Latest Articles

The future of cities and the future of work

Click here to view original web page at www.resilience.org I spoke last week at a conference in Cardiff on the future of work. It was...

Putting profit before life is a recipe for disaster

Click here to view original web page at rabble.ca ...

To Save Democracy, Close Tax Havens

Click here to view original web page at www.project-syndicate.org The war in Ukraine has highlighted the danger that offshore finance poses to the rules-based global...

Humanity Can No Longer Tolerate Corporations That Exist Almost Entirely to Make Money

Click here to view original web page at www.commondreams.org Society must make the necessary shift from a society that prioritizes wealth accumulation and economic...

The Global South Must Be at the Center of the Making of a Just Global Economic Order

Click here to view original web page at jacobin.com The US-dominated economic order constructed after Bretton Woods did not take the Global South into consideration....

A Young Person’s Guide to Spotting Fake News

Click here to view original web page at www.yesmagazine.org Whatever your age, you can be a critically news-literate person. Like many citizens around the world, you...

We need universal basic services to tackle the climate crisis

Click here to view original web page at neweconomics.org Through universal basic services we can ensure everyone has what they need and deliver it in...

Publicly owned land should be used for affordable housing, not sold to private developers

Click here to view original web page at theconversation.com On Jan. 25, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged to “ensure” affordable housing is built along Hamilton’s...

Time to launch a government run telco to force Rogers, Bell and Telus to lower prices? Saskatchewan proves this can work

Click here to view original web page at www.broadbentinstitute.ca SaskTel — a publicly-owned telecommunications company — already enjoys significant market share in Saskatchewan, forcing the...

Premier Doug Ford needs to explain his massive $7.2 billion under-funding of...

Click here to view original web page at rabble.ca ...

Inflation has been especially good for Canada’s extraction industries

Click here to view original web page at ricochet.media While most people struggle to afford the basics, executives at Canada’s oil, gas and mining companies...

Stuck in traffic: does your wasted time count for anything?

Click here to view original web page at www.resilience.org Traffic congestion studies make for quick and easy news articles, but they don’t even begin to...

How large corporations make huge profits from hidden markups at the expense of consumers

Click here to view original web page at theconversation.com Constantin Colonescu does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company...

Canadian developers are gentrifying Mexico’s beaches

Click here to view original web page at breachmedia.ca In a growing trend in Oaxaca, snowbirds are claiming beachfront land communally owned by Indigenous and...

Innovators develop seaweed-based alternatives to plastic food wrappers

Click here to view original web page at news.mongabay.com Developers at Flinders University and the German biotech company one • five have created a seaweed-based...

How not to deal with a debt crisis

Click here to view original web page at www.socialeurope.eu Jayati Ghosh warns against historically disastrous approaches to the sovereign-debt crisis hitting low- and middle-income countries. In...

EXCERPT: Displacement City: Fighting for Health and Homes in a Pandemic

Click here to view original web page at spacing.ca The following is the afterword by Spacing‘s Shawn Micallef in the new book Displacement City: Fighting...

We’ve seen this public service heist movie before

Click here to view original web page at rabble.ca The Conservative attack on healthcare is not a new trick. We’ve seen it before ...

Information literacy courses can help students tackle confirmation bias and spot narrative spin, disinformation

Click here to view original web page at theconversation.com When it comes to the news these days, what we choose to regard as trustworthy has...

Four Ways the Ford Government is Privatizing Hospitals

Click here to view original web page at ochuleftwords.blogspot.com Premier Ford wants for-profit surgical clinics -- but that is just one area where his government...

Creating space for community imagination

Click here to view original web page at www.resilience.org This is a time of year when we have space to reflect and to make resolutions...

Paradigm shift needed to halt and reverse biodiversity loss

Click here to view original web page at rabble.ca Western colonial expansion and the industrial interests it’s facilitated have long been rooted in a sense...

Creating third spaces of learning for a post-capitalism world: lessons from educators and activists

Click here to view original web page at www.resilience.org Spaces that prefigure a post-capitalist world are all around us if we know where to look....

Stories You May Have Missed

How the pharmaceutical industry uses disinformation to undermine drug price reform

Click here to view original web page at theconversation.com Canada’s drug prices are the fourth highest in the developed world. Despite this, Innovative Medicines Canada...

Latin American solidarity economies demonstrate the power of the people

Click here to view original web page at www.shareable.net Solidaristic principles prove great in theory, but how do they hold up in practice? Specifically, in...

Five ways to build on the labour movement’s momentum in 2023

Click here to view original web page at rabble.ca As the new year gets into full swing, there is an opportunity to build on the...

Climate, culture, and the need for a new enlightenment

Click here to view original web page at www.resilience.org It’s common to hear the assertion that we have all the technology we need to avoid...

Why don’t we zone for rental apartments?

Click here to view original web page at spon.ca There’s no law of nature preventing provincial and municipal policymakers from establishing a land use designation...

What Does Our $78-Billion Housing Program Really Fix?

Click here to view original web page at thetyee.ca Who knows? Canada spent five years and billions on the affordability crisis but still has no...

Economic democracy and the future of work

Click here to view original web page at www.socialeurope.eu Anxiety about the state of democracy amid political polarisation should direct us to an unexpected answer—economic...

Doing anti-imperialist journalism while the world marches to war

Click here to view original web page at briarpatchmagazine.com When I published an article by Humber College professor Tyler Shipley explaining the historical context of...

Doug Ford Led Ontario’s Health System Into a ‘State of Crisis’ in 2022

Click here to view original web page at pressprogress.ca According to a recent Environics poll, nearly 80% of Ontarians believe the health care system is...

‘The System’ Is Ruining Our Present and Collective Future

Click here to view original web page at www.commondreams.org Now is a time of unprecedented opportunity for progressive change. The reason is simple: "the...

We Don’t Want a Post-Pandemic “Return to Normal,” We Want a World Beyond the Limits of Capitalism

Click here to view original web page at jacobin.com In 2022, we limped out of the pandemic frying pan into the fire of resumed capitalist...

Focus: Mongabay’s most impactful climate investigations of 2022

Click here to view original web page at news.mongabay.com Mongabay published more than a dozen in-depth investigations in 2022 to hold companies and governments accountable...

Canada’s First Nations Protect Millions of Acres of Their Lands

Click here to view original web page at www.yesmagazine.org Indigenous-led efforts are conserving land on an unprecedented scale while enabling scientists to study threats to...

Central Bank Capitalism Is Forcing the Global South Into a Debt Crisis

Click here to view original web page at jacobin.com The current policies of the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Federal Reserve are being sold...

Creeping civil society curbs threaten human rights in Europe in 2023

Click here to view original web page at euobserver.com Civil society organisations, including groups that work to protect human rights, are under growing threat in...

Green Banks Catalyze Green Energy Projects

Click here to view original web page at www.yesmagazine.org Financial nonprofits are building capacity for transformative energy upgrades that could turn climate action dreams into...

15 movement victories in 2022 you may not have heard about

Click here to view original web page at breachmedia.ca All around us, ordinary people are fighting together to improve their lives and the world, and...

How workers are being sacrificed both intentionally and needlessly to a doctrine keeping unemployment high

Click here to view original web page at www.thestar.com The economy risks serious recession from an interest shock that was neither necessary, nor effective in...

supporting the shift

How We Converted to a Cooperative—and How You Can, Too

Click here to view original web page at www.yesmagazine.org The healthiest and happiest companies in the world are democracies. At Louder Than Ten, the project management...

What Does An Ecological Civilization Look Like?

In this far-reaching and well presented outline, Yes! Magazine gives shape and substance to a groundswell of ideas that could form the foundation of...

Four Views on Basic Income, Job Guarantees, and the Future of Work

This insightful summary includes four short commentaries on basic income, job guarantees, and the future of work by four leading Australian experts. It's a...