Graham Cox is a labour union researcher at Unifor focusing on economic, bargaining, and policy in the energy, road, rail, and marine sectors.
Previous to Unifor, Graham was a researcher at the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). At CUPE his work focused on economic and policy analysis for the anti-privatization, trade, post-secondary education, utilities, employment insurance, special projects, and organizing files.
Before working at CUPE, Graham served the student movement as National Researcher of the Canadian Federation of Students and chairperson of the National Graduate Caucus.
Graham has worked as a union organizer for the PSAC, CUPE, and the CFS with a focus on graduate student teaching assistant, research assistant and contingent academic staff union drives. This included leading drives to organize academic workers at the University of New Brunswick, UPEI, and Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Please also see articles under the author Editors (What’s left).
The abundance of resources is not enough for Canadian production and export to be commercially viable. And, trade between provinces is limited by the same thing it always was in Canada: distance. The solutions to ensure sustained prosperity of the Canadian people rests with the old ideas of economic solidarity through federal, provincial, and municipal owned companies.
Before Trump was elected, there was a lot of discussions and warnings about what we should avoid doing in response to Trump. Things like avoiding the idea that he means what he says, that we should analyse the psychology of the statements, that we should only pay attention to one of the things instead of looking wholistically at what is happening. We were warned that we should also avoid thinking that there is no plan or that it is all the work of some madman. Why do we seem to have forgotten this warning?
Two examples in Ontario of why the Canadian economy continues to be at risk from the aggressive threats of tariffs from the USA.
The biggest white lies we tell each other are when excuses do not match the real reasons we are doing something. Trump has expanded this out to American policy, the lies are bigger but the concept is the same.
Energy and processing power analysts are very taken with the Jevons paradox. The concept is that as energy or processing power become more efficient, demand expands to use up that increased efficiency and everyone wins. It has been applied in great haste by investors and firms in the AI space. Especially since much more efficient open source solutions have been made available commercially (such as DeepSeek).
Tariffs on Canadian oil imports and exports can change price calculation in the USA, making the market more susceptible to local conditions. Moves to increase the price of oil in the USA will bring more domestic production online and will speed-up ongoing transition of refineries and pipelines to use Permian/fracked oil.
A major issue for Canada is that investment flows from the USA. It is 80 years since the end of the 1930s tariff regimes that lead to expanding dependence on trade with the USA. Capital investment is from US-based finance.
Ever wonder what the discussion about tariffs is actually about? There are a lot of explanations on the internet and in the news about what a tariff is.
The discussion of prices, inflation, and taxes are informed by ideology. The ideologies driving our understanding of economics, how we talk about money, and who we expect to pay for certain things determines both our understanding of what is going on in the world and how we should respond to it.
The word 'resiliency' is one of the more overused words in the wake of the pandemic. Things that were disrupted because of lack of proper investment include our supply chains that move goods around the world. It is not just global pandemics that cause major crises along these supply chains.
