Ontario improving employment opportunities for people facing barriers

As companies consolidate under ever larger pools of private capital, there’s growing unease around who’s actually benefiting from corporate growth. Falice Chin writes in The Hub that it’s no coincidence, then, that voices across the political spectrum are now revisiting models of employee ownership as a potential antidote to widening wealth inequality, fading community ties and a growing distrust in capitalism itself. This deep-dive looks at how employee ownership trusts, or EOTs, could be an elegant policy remedy to a crisis of confidence in the modern economy.

Canada can’t become a sovereign country by doing the same old things, explains a new compendium of essays co-sponsored by the CCPA, the Centre for Future Work and several national civil society organizations. Elbows Up: A Practical Program for Canadian Sovereignty is a response to corporate rallying cries responding to Donald Trump with a familiar playbook: deregulation, austerity, tax cuts and fossil fuel expansion. The collection includes contributions from 20 progressive economists and policy experts, including SCP CEO Matthew Mendelsohn and others who participated in the Elbows Up Economic Summit held in September 2025 in Ottawa.

Smart investments in natural resources and AI alone will not get us through this moment of geopolitical rupture. As Matthew Mendelsohn writes in an op-ed for The Hill Times, SMEs contribute just over half of Canada’s GDP and employ 64 per cent of our people. We have to make more low-cost capital available to the smaller businesses, locally owned enterprises, not-for-profits and social enterprises who crucially employ and reinvest locally, act as important local economic infrastructure and provide services that are crucial for well-being. They are automatic stabilizers in the face of tariff threats outside our control.