ICYMI this week ...

A weekly round-up of headlines from the Daily News podcast

Mar 17, 2024

Tomorrow morning, I’m going to be in Ottawa. I’m part of a group that’s called the Economic Equity Alliance that’s sounding the alarm bell on the state of self-employment for women and gender diverse folks in Canada. We are releasing a report that calls on the federal government to make changes that will address the racial, gendered and abled/disabled inequality that is baked into self-employment in Canada. We hope it’ll be a refreshing remix on who we imagine are Canada’s normative self-employed and small business owners. The press conference should air on CPAC at 10:00 ET but hey, who knows, maybe another former PM will kick the bucket and scoop attention away from the announcement.

And it’s true — being self-employed in this country has a lot of benefits but mostly, it sucks. Now, I’m lucky to be in Quebec. I had access to parental benefits when I had kids. I would have been SOL in the rest of Canada. But it is brutal, especially when you work in the industry that I’ve decided to work in.

For example: I am currently owed somthing like $8000 going back five months for various things. Some of that money (like, I dunno, a third?) are *expenses* … not even money I get to say I’m making. I have no pension and my savings have gotten way too thin for my liking this past year, thanks to $8 butter.

Then, there’s the reality that Oct. 7 and the events that have followed have fundamentally changed media in Canada. To explain how would take its own article but all of a sudden, the biggest news in the world was mostly ignored by Canadian publishers, even though there’s a lot of us who want to write about it. That clash is moving many people out of media jobs or gigs and other people into them. Now, these changes are at the macro level — If I look at my work today versus where I was a year ago, I’m out something like $15,000 due to a combination of technically unrelated though sometimes a bit related things: CBC killing the Sunday morning conversation panel, my decision to walk away from Maple Opinion, uhhh whatever is going on at Canadaland, a very funny little thing I did regularly last year for the Tel Aviv-based channel i24. That butter doesn’t pay for itself, you know.

But hey, at least I’ve replaced all of that with things that pay virtually nothing (two books, total advance: $6000, so far received I think maybe like $1000? And paid out for services, -$750), Youtube (literally nothing) and this Substack. If you’re a paid subscriber, thanks so much. If you aren’t, well, you can always pay!! Unless you can’t, and that’s fine too. You can always share :)

So yeah, things like EI reform, parental benefits for all, and uhhh a pension all sound really great. Because while I hope to work until I die, I also hope that I’ll at least have the choice to tap out.

Anyway, here is a video that I made this week about the audacity of Mélanie Joly and below, all the headlines that made it into this week’s Daily News podcast.