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CALGARY – Unifor says it has filed for conciliation in its contract talks with railway company Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ltd.

The union represents more than 1,200 workers at CPKC, including mechanics, labourers, diesel service attendants and mechanical support staff.

Unifor says its negotiations with CPKC have reached an impasse over key issues.

Unifor Local 101R officially opened contract talks with the railway earlier this month.

Among the top concerns raised by the union were high levels of contracting out, forced overtime and company policies that hurt work-life balance.

CPKC says it is focused on arriving at a negotiated outcome that is in the best interests of its employees and their families.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 29, 2024.

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The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

The number of newspapers endorsing a candidate for president has dwindled with the industry’s financial troubles the past two decades, in part because owners reason that it makes no sense to alienate some subscribers by taking a clear stand in a politically polarizing time.

Yet in the past week, The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times have angered readers for precisely the opposite reason: by choosing not to select a favored candidate.

The fallout from both decisions continued Monday, with Post owner Jeff Bezos taking the unusual step of publicly defending the move in the columns of his own paper. Three members of the Post’s editorial board resigned their positions and some journalists pleaded with readers to not express their disapproval by canceling subscriptions. Many thousands have already done so.

Bezos, in a note to readers, said it was a principled stand to ditch endorsements. People essentially don’t care and see it as a sign of bias, he said. His comments appeared hours after NPR reported that more than 200,000 people had canceled their Washington Post subscriptions.

If NPR’s report is true, that would be a startling blow to an outlet that lost money and shed staff despite having more than 2.5 million subscribers last year. A Post spokeswoman would not comment on the report.

Subscribers are falling away in recent days

The Times has acknowledged losing thousands of subscribers due to its own decision.

Both newspapers had reportedly prepared editorials supporting Democrat Kamala Harris. Instead, at the behest of Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong at the Times, they decided not to endorse. Post publisher Will Lewis called it “a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds.”

By announcing their decisions within two weeks of Election Day, however, the newspapers left themselves vulnerable to criticism that their publishers were trying not to anger Republican Donald Trump if voters returned him to power. “It looked like they were not making a principled decision,” said John Woolley, co-director of the American Presidency Project at the University of California-Santa Barbara.

Retired Post editor Martin Baron, on social media, said the decision showed “disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage” and that Trump would see it as a further invitation to intimidate Bezos.

Endorsements have a long history

Back in the 1800s, newspapers were sharply partisan in both their news pages and editorials. Even when a trend toward unbiased news reports took hold in the 1900s, editorial pages remained opinionated and the two functions were kept separate.

As recently as 2008, 92 of the nation’s 100 largest newspapers endorsed either Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain for president. But by 2020, only 54 made a choice between Trump and Joe Biden, according to the presidency project. Figuring there were even fewer this year, Woolley said they aren’t even planning to count.

Studies found readers paid endorsements little heed and, in a digital world, many didn’t understand the distinction between straight news stories and advocacy-driven editorials. In many cases, chain ownership took the decision out of the hands of local editors. At a time the news business is struggling, they didn’t want to give any readers an excuse to leave.

“They really don’t want to rattle or piss off the people who are not going to like their endorsement,” said Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank. “The solution is just not to do them.”

That hasn’t seemed to fly at newspapers in two large metropolitan areas with liberal populations. The Post, under Baron’s leadership during the Trump administration, saw its circulation spike with aggressive political coverage that frequently angered the former president.

The Post’s decision drew ire from many quarters

Besides Baron, the decision was denounced by Watergate era reporting legends Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Columnists Robert Kagan and Michele Norris said they were quitting the newspaper in protest. Three of the nine members of the Post’s editorial board said they were leaving that role.

Out West, a Los Angeles Times editorial writer, Karin Klein, wrote in the Hollywood Reporter that she was quitting the newspaper. Klein said that while Soon-Shiong had the right to impose his will on editorial policy, by making the non-endorsement so late in the campaign he was effectively expressing the opposite of the neutrality he claimed to seek.

Indeed, timing was the one regret Bezos expressed. “I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it,” he wrote. “That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.”

In an article about the continuing fallout on the Post’s website Monday, more than 2,000 people left comments, many of them saying they were leaving. Even former GOP congresswoman Liz Cheney said she was canceling.

“From what I’ve seen in recent days, the paper is hearing its subscribers very clearly,” Post media critic Erik Wemple said during an online chat Monday.

There are worries that journalists will be the ones hurt

The protests have left some journalists alarmed, worried that they and their colleagues would only be hurt in the end. The union representing Los Angeles Times workers issued a statement last week that “before you hit that ‘cancel’ button,” recognize that subscriptions help underwrite the salaries of hundreds of journalists.

“The more cancellations there are, the more jobs will be lost, and the less good journalism there will be,” Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote.

It would be better, one commenter on the newspaper’s website said on Monday, to boycott Amazon — founded by Bezos — than the Washington Post.

Milbank said he was angered by the decision, too. He helped organize a protest letter that some of the paper’s columnists signed. But he noted that, except for the endorsement decision, he’s seen no evidence of Bezos interfering in the Post’s editorial operations.

“For the past nine years, I’ve been labeling Trump a racist and a fascist, adding more evidence each week — and not once have I been stifled,” he wrote. “I’ve never even met nor spoke to Bezos.”

The owner said as much in his column. “I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at the Post in favor of my own interests,” he wrote. “It hasn’t happened.”

Some newspapers are bucking the trend of non-endorsements. The Oregonian, for example, reversed its decision not to endorse after staying neutral in 2012 and 2016. “We heard the community’s disappointment over our non-endorsements loud and clear,” editor Therese Bottomly wrote in response to a question by Poynter’s Edmonds.

In Cleveland, Plain Dealer Editor Chris Quinn polled his editorial board about whether to make a presidential endorsement. “We don’t delude ourselves about our presidential endorsement impacting voters,” Quinn wrote. “If we are not going to impact voters, why publish something that will anger half our audience?”

He cast the deciding vote. The Plain Dealer endorsed Harris. Quinn had raised the question via text to some of his readers. They felt a non-endorsement would be a betrayal, he wrote — an act of cowardice.

“That was enough for me,” Quinn wrote. “Our duty is to the readers.”

___

David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder.

TORONTO – New federal rules would prevent international students who graduate from early childhood education programs from applying for a work permit in Canada — a change that the Ontario government, colleges and advocates warn will kneecap the growth of Ottawa’s signature $10-a-day child-care program.

Under immigration changes announced last month, the postgraduate work permits, which were widely available in the past, will now be restricted to areas that have labour-market shortages in Canada.

Ontario is facing a shortage of early childhood educators, or ECEs, that some child-care operators say is preventing them from operating at full capacity right now and could stop them from opening new spaces in the future.

Despite that, the only mention of early childhood education in the federal government’s list of categories in which students will continue to qualify for postgrad work permits is “education/teaching of individuals in early childhood special education programs.”

“This federal policy change will make it even more difficult for Ontarians to find affordable child care and no doubt impacts will be felt immediately,” said Marketa Evans, president and CEO of Colleges Ontario.

Internal government documents previously obtained by The Canadian Press through a freedom-of-information request show that the province expects a shortage of 8,500 ECEs by 2026.

Public colleges currently have 5,300 international ECE students enrolled, Evans said, which is about 50 per cent of total enrolments.

Alana Powell, the executive director of the Association of Early Childhood Educators of Ontario, has been seeking clarity about the impacts of the federal changes, and said if international student ECE graduates are excluded from accessing work permits, it will be a blow to the sector.

“We are experiencing a workforce crisis,” she said.

“Ongoing retention and recruitment of early childhood educators in Ontario continues to be a concern, and it’s concern for current operational levels, let alone planned expansion under the $10-a-day system. So to see any sort of barrier in place for bringing more early childhood educators into the workforce is a big problem at a time like this.”

When asked about the apparent omission, Immigration Minister Marc Miller’s office was adamant that ECE programs would be included in the list of those that qualify for postgrad work permits.

“Absolutely, ECEs will definitely be covered,” director of communications Aissa Diop first said three weeks ago, suggesting it was a matter of unclear wording on the government website.

But the changes take effect for students who apply for permits after this Friday, and with the exception of special education, early childhood education programs were still not on the government’s list of eligible study areas as of Tuesday morning.

Ontario’s minister of colleges and universities has written to Miller, warning that early childhood education is not currently eligible, nor are other areas in which the province sees shortages, including hospitality, health-care administration, and automotive technologists.

“Several critical areas are currently missing for Ontario,” Nolan Quinn wrote.

The list appears to have been quietly updated this week to include registered nursing — a change the province hopes signals the federal government is willing to consider more inclusions.

Quinn has asked Miller to more openly communicate any future updates.

It is all leading to a lot of confusion among colleges, which are trying to sort out the impacts on their programs ahead of the new rules kicking in Friday, Evans said.

“Our ask is that it be paused because of all of this confusion,” she said in an interview. “We don’t know if these are errors or intentional omissions and again, I think there hasn’t been that much time to digest.”

When Miller announced the changes, he said the growth in international students and the corresponding postgraduate work and spousal permits are areas where “we owe it to Canadians, and in the context of an economy where the labour market in some areas is constricting, we need to adjust accordingly.”

At the time, Miller also announced he was slashing the number of international student visas by another 10 per cent. That was on top of a temporary cap the government announced in January to reduce the number of new student visas by more than one-third this year, done in part to ease pressure on an already-strained housing market.

Colleges Ontario has raised other sectors it believes the federal government is wrongfully omitting, including engineering technician and technology programs, which Evans says are key to the electric-vehicle industry, and dental hygiene, key to the federal dental-care rollout.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 29, 2024.