Welcome to Need to Know, The Hub’s twice-weekly roundup of expert insights into the biggest economic stories, political news, and policy developments Hub readers need to be keeping their eyes on.
CUPE Ontario must end its odd obsession with Israel
By Brian Dijkema, president for Canada at Cardus
Why, in the name of all that is holy, is a Canadian public sector union organizing a rally in favour of a totalitarian theocratic regime in Iran? Why is the same union that speaks with pride about its support for gay Canadians, and repeatedly about the importance of union solidarity, supporting a regime that tortures and murders gay people and journalists, and has an open policy of state persecution against religious minorities, critics of the regime, and which suppresses all of the freedoms that Canadian workers have?
The answer is found in two words: Israel and Jews.
While the rest of Canada, including Jewish CUPE members, is completely aware and baffled by the contradictions of CUPE’s behaviour, its leadership continues to unapologetically support anything, anybody, any regime, no matter how heinous, that is against Israel.
Why? How can we make sense of this?
There are two reasons.
One is an ideological capture by a worldview that prefers black and white categories of victim and oppressor to careful moral thinking that weighs words, actions, history, and, well, facts to find, on a balance of probabilities, a path toward justice. It prefers signals to substance; smugness to justice. Israel and the Jews seem strong and organized? Simple: they’re the problem. Hamas and Iran seem to be losing? Simple, they’re on the side of the right.
The second is labour relations policy that provides virtually no meaningful way for unions to be held accountable by individual members. As I have shown elsewhere, Ontario’s labour law makes it close to structurally impossible for a given member, or even a group of members, to place real pressure on their union to act in accordance with their consciences.
CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees) education workers strike on the picket line in Kingston, Ont., Friday, Nov. 4, 2022. Lars Hagberg/The Canadian Press.
What’s the solution?
For the first, it will take a combination of patient, steadfast, clear, and firm highlighting of the moral inconsistencies and incoherence of CUPE’s worldview. We need to continually remind the public of the purpose of unions, the nature of justice, and why CUPE’s simplistic response is likely to lead to a proliferation, not elimination, of injustice and oppression. And the best approach to this is not sensationalism, but a dogged reminder to CUPE of actual evidence about the serious differences in openness to labour between Iran and Israel. There will be times for strong condemnation, but the long work is where the winning will take place.
For the second, and this will assist with the first, we need to put in real, meaningful ways, for unions to be held accountable for supporting terror. To do that, we need real, practical, and constitutionally sound means to create a structure of incentives that brings real cost to the behaviour we’re seeing from CUPE. While I support and applaud Kathryn Marshall’s efforts to use the Human Rights Tribunals to win justice for CUPE members, it shouldn’t be that hard, that expensive, or that unpredictable. What is needed is legislation that enhances the ability of individual workers—or groups of workers—to exact a real penalty upon unions that act outside of the bounds of their consciences. I’ve shown that path in The Hub. The question now remains, will our government—who has spoken so well against antisemitism in the union movement—give us action, not just words?
In the meantime, I continue to stand with Jewish union members, whether in CUPE or any of the other unions that have been captured by antisemitic sentiment. Solidarity forever, friends.
Should working families stay in Canada?
By Aiden Muscovitch, assistant editor at The Hub
Last Tuesday, CivicAction published a research paper on the housing challenge for middle-income workers in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA). It highlights the reasons why working families earning between $40,000 and $125,000 a year in the GTHA are being squeezed out. Recent reports from Statistics Canada found that over 133,000 left in the last year, including nearly 30,000 who departed Canada in the first quarter of 2025. Many, no doubt, driven away because of the high cost of living and housing.
The core problem is that many full-time employed residents in the GTHA with middle-class incomes are increasingly struggling to secure affordable housing for either ownership or rental. Toronto homebuyers need to devote nearly 77 percent of their median household income to make mortgage payments, while Hamilton residents require just over 63 percent. Both of these figures are more than double the 30 percent threshold that housing experts consider to be affordable.
Additionally, the qualifying annual income required to obtain a mortgage on an average home has increased to $234,981 in Toronto and $214,025 in Hamilton, compared to median yearly household incomes of $100,401 and $96,111.
This problem is not exclusive to the GTHA. Working families in cities across Canada are being pushed out of their hometowns, where their families, friends, and jobs are located, because the hyperinflated housing market has propelled Canada into neofeudalism.
What type of life could spending just under 80 percent of your income on mortgage payments in an average home bring a young, working family? How are parents supposed to afford school, clothes, and food for their kids? Put money away for their retirement?
When Liberal Housing Minister Gregor Robertson was asked if housing prices needed to go down, he said, “No.” Working Canadians are on their own, while the federal government appears to be focused on keeping the property values of seniors residing in urban areas and suburbs—who voted Liberal en masse—high, effectively showing young, working Canadians the door.
Can you blame those who got fed up and left?
A very concerning report on Canada’s military
By Richard Shimooka, a Hub contributing writer and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute
Yesterday, the Department of National Defence released its Departmental Plan for the coming years. It makes for extremely grim reading. One table identifies that the percentage of key maritime, land, and aerospace fleets that meet availability requirements is on average around 47 percent, and is only projected to return to the objective of 70 percent by 2032.
Whether or not these numbers were updated with new numbers based on the influx of new spending recently announced by Prime Minister Mark Carney is not clear. While Defence Minister David McGuinty’s comments at the start reference them, it often takes weeks, if not months, to revise such reports. Nevertheless, it likely would not change the situation dramatically. One of the more concerning statistics concerns the percentage of occupations with critical shortfalls—this has grown from 61.7 percent in 2021-22 to 72.9 percent in 2023-24.
This shouldn’t be surprising to individuals who closely watch DND: the personnel death spiral has riven through the CAF, and now affects almost all occupations. Unfortunately, the report does not distinguish between the criticality of some of these positions. For example, maritime technicians, essentially the red blood cells of any naval vessel, were at roughly 60 percent manning last year—a concerning number, given that without them, vessels are simply unable to operate at all.
Part of the issue is that most of these individuals are tasked with keeping the few capabilities operational, and as a result, there is little capacity to train incoming new personnel. It’s part of the reason why the Royal Canadian Air Force is facing issues transitioning new recruits into specific roles—they simply are unable to provide the courses to train them.
The importance of the report is that any effort to rebuild the Canadian Armed Forces will, even under the best-case scenario, be at least seven years away. The likely reality is that this number will slip, to 10 or more years, in part because the transition to new systems will complicate the personnel situation, and it’s highly unlikely that all of the systems themselves will be delivered on time and with the promised performance metrics. Moreover, this ignores the reality that the capabilities the CAF can put forward are exceedingly limited for the money invested: in many areas, they remain token contributions, rather than pillars able to make a major contribution to international peace and security, or Canada’s interests.
In sum, the report suggests that for all of the talk about renewing the CAF, it’s unlikely to see much headway for the next five years or more. Even the welcome news of hitting the 2 percent NATO threshold at the end of this fiscal year is unlikely to alter the department’s trajectory. Not unless much more substantial reforms are enacted, that is.
