I have never, ever joined a political party before. It's something that I slowly mull over forever and decide against. (I have helped out in Green party campaigns before.)

Workers' first right of refusal is something I've been staunchly in support of, and I have never signed up for something so quickly.

@mayintoronto You have this in common with Avi Lewis, working on Green Party campaigns, specifically endorsing BC Green Party candidate (now leader) Emily Lowan.

Ironically, I learned this from an NDP centralist who thought that this, along with Avi's work with environmental activists, was somebow a thing he had to "answer for", lol! No, we are voting him for NDP leadership BECAUSE he stands with the environment and against war, and BECAUSE the NDP has lost its way to centralism, abandoning its staunch labour activism and union roots. We WANT the NDP to work closer with environmental activists and to keep the party on left-wing platforms which have been silenced by centralist shifts to pull everyone right at the behest of wealth ownership.

In my neighbourhood we are in a big pickle that could have been countered by Avi's public ownership and public grocery policies. Despite the city's attempts at creating 15-minute cities with basic needs acceesible in walking distance, the big hurdle.is capitalism and especially in grocery where big grocers put restrictive covenants on their property to prevent any competing grocers from taking over their space (councilor Michael Janz has a lot of informative things to say about this). Nobody has the capital to create costly infrastructure like grocery stores, restaurants, and bakeries, so these businesses move into spaces previously used by the same type of business. Grocery conglomeraes stop this from happening.

We had a wonderful IGA at the end of our alleyway, which was a beloved fixture in our neighborhood for half a centry. But the owner got old and wanted to reitre. He didn't run the store, his son-in-law did. His daughter was involved, and the business was run like a family business but all his family were treated as employees. So when Andy wanted to retire, did he leave the community store to his daighter and her husband, who were running the business for decades? No he wanted to cash out, so he sold the business off to an AUTO DEALERSHIP who wanted to get their hands in the grocery business, leaving his own family members to return under new ownership as employees of the next capitalist venture! As predicted, this auto dealership's capital venture into grocery completely bombed with high prices and incredibly bad quality control (like selling rotting meat and vegetables), and we were very soon left with no grocery store in our neighborhood and even our beloved restaurant was pushed out as this auto dealership bought the entire shopping complex and put in their own horrible restaurant which overcooked everything dry and stale, while over charging for it. Because destroying the geocery business wasn't enough, they had to take down the restaurant business too.

Public ownership and public grocery options would have saved our community's access to food, and saved the jobs of so many loyal workers who stayed through all this capitalist turmoil only to be left jobless and destitute. Instead, an old man got to retire rich while our community lost everything.

While so many here believe "that's only right, he deserves to be rich! We all wamt to be rich, so don't take that dream away!" there is a much better option. We CAN have what we all deserve, and what we the labourers are actually worth, instead of living out somebody else's dream vicariously. We CAN build our commubities with public resources we can ALL bemefit from. The public good is your good, and my good.