Out May 6, 2025

Canada in Decline Book Two – Corporate Control

How deep does corporate dominance go in Canada? The second book in Nora Loreto’s landmark series dives into the corporate web spun around Canada’s economy, society, and politics.

The joke goes that Canada is three mining companies in a trench coat. Or three oil companies in a trench coat. Or three telecom companies in a trench coat. It’s funny because it’s almost true: a handful of corporations exert a disproportionate amount of power over Canadian democracy.

Corporate profits are at a record high, and the divide between the rich and the poor has never been wider. Canadians are struggling with affordability, the housing crisis, and wages that don’t cover basic needs. The combination of these forces is a pressure cooker that politicians have promised to tackle, except they can’t: they are too restricted by corporate power to confront the roots of the problems Canadians face.

The first book in the Canada in Decline series examines the rise and fall of Canada’s social safety net. In this next volume, Loreto goes further, identifying why Canadian politicians seem impotent in the face of corporate Canada.

Check out this interview about Corporate Control with the NB Media Coop.

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Canada in Decline - The Social Safety Net

Canada’s social safety net is fraying. Why does it feel like everything is collapsing?

Canada is at a crossroad. Neoliberalism has hollowed out and sold off the social services Canadians rely on now more than ever, and has brought into stark relief the dissonance among colonial, Indigenous, and some of Canada's most at-risk groups.

The Social Safety Net tracks the forty-year attack on Canada’s social safety net. As neoliberalism has matured in Canada, Canadians are seeing the impact of these attacks: unreliable health services, crises in education and social services, and a society that feels like it is losing cohesion.

The first volume in a series by activist, author, and journalist Nora Loreto, the Canada in Decline series is the story of Canada’s untenable status quo and the forces that have led us to where we are today. It outlines the choices we need to make as well as the possible paths forward to fix all that is crumbling around us.

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“The book dives meticulously into reports and scholarship, citing progressive research from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and a variety of scholarly sources. And while the book could have benefited from direct interviews to support her thorough research, Loreto backs up her claims with heavy-hitting, hard facts, showing how “the neoliberal experiments that started in the 1980s and kicked into overdrive in the 1990s did not achieve what Canadians were told they would achieve.” The country has instead been led into decline in recent decades, she argues, with worsening inequality and compiling crises that beg us to wonder if we progressives deserve the tone of optimism that we so often permit ourselves. 

The Social Safety Net reveals Canada’s sharp turn away from social welfare, and serves as essential reading for those curious about our country’s deep infatuation with neoliberalism.”

Jack McClelland, Montreal Review of Books

 

Spin Doctors

This book documents each month of the first year of the pandemic and examines the issues that emerged, from racialized workers to residential care to policing. It demonstrates how politicians and uncritical media shaped the popular understanding of these issues and helped to justify the maintenance of a status quo that created the worst ravages of the crisis. Spin Doctors argues alternative ways in which Canadians should understand the big themes of the crisis and create the necessary knowledge to demand large-scale change

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The Quebec City journalist, author and social activist likes to take hold of a subject and explore it with every tool at her disposal, and beginning in March 2020 the perfect opportunity presented itself. The result is her second book, Spin Doctors: How Media and Politicians Misdiagnosed the COVID-19 Pandemic (Fernwood Publishing, 368 pages, $35), a comprehensive, impassioned and highly readable work that itemizes how a confluence of factors created a perfect storm of denial and unpreparedness.

Ian McGillis, Montreal Gazette

What Loreto describes in her book is a multi-system failure. Canadian media is in system failure. Long-term care is in system failure. Capitalism is in system failure at the expense of the working class. Industry takes advantage of the failure by refusing to increase wages on pace with inflation, by eroding worker’s rights and providing care to society’s most vulnerable as cheaply as possible. As neoliberalism is wont to do, individuals are blamed for the spiral.

Chelsea Nash, Rabble.ca

Spin Doctors relies not on one-off tragedies or impersonal statistics but rather a rhythmic and consistent approach to writing that couldn’t make the author’s argument any clearer: Canadian media failed to write stories that connected the country’s pandemic response to its own capitalistic impulses. And we are now paying the price.

Sarah Krichel, The Tyee

As someone who suffers from pandemic fatigue as much as any news junkie, I was surprised to feel a sense of relief as I read Spin Doctors. It is a much-needed reminder that confusion, rage, distrust, and nausea are not inevitable outcomes of a pandemic. If you are suffering from any of those symptoms, it is certainly worth reading.

Kathleen Adamson, The Charity Report

Visit breachmedia.ca to read an excerpt from Nora Loreto’s book Spin Doctors: How Media and Politicians Misdiagnosed the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Download the Spin Doctors press release.

Take Back the Fight

In Take Back The Fight, Nora Loreto examines the state of modern feminism in Canada and argues that feminists must organize to take back feminism from politicians, business leaders and journalists who distort and obscure its power. Furthermore, Loreto urges today’s activists to overcome the challenges that sank the movement decades ago, to stop centering whiteness as the quintessential woman’s experience, and to find ways to rebuild the communities that have been obliterated by neoliberal economic policies.

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Take Back the Fight

You can also listen to Nora’s interviews with Dahlia Katz from CFRA 580 in Ottawa and Allison Brunet from CBC Quebec’s Quebec AM.

From Demonized to Organized

From Demonized to Organized is used widely in university and college classes, and within unions to orient new members to their union: why it exists and what role it pays in a democratic system.

From the back cover: This book seeks to explain unionization to my generation; to my friends who distrust civil society organizations as much as they distrust government; to my unemployed friends who are living from contract to contract and who would kill for a stable, unionized job; for the workers who have never had the benefit of being represented when facing injustice at work; for the workers who would rather not think of what would happen if they were injured on the job.

It’s a reminder to unionized folks that many of the truths that they take for granted are not obvious to others and that the labour movement must change how it reaches out to its members, its communities and to non-unionized workers if it hopes to grow. It’s a call to action for activists to share their stories, debunk the existing right-wing, anti-union rhetoric, re-engage in their communities, and build a movement that can defeat neoliberal policies and their political proponents.

From Demonized to Organized
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Take Back the Fight is an excellent analysis of the rise and decline of second-wave feminism in Canada and in particular of the extraordinary National Action Committee on the Status of Women. Nora Loreto shows both the strengths and the weaknesses of Canada’s largest feminist organization, giving readers an anti-racist feminist view of that history and persuasively argues that we need a cross-country organization to unite feminist activists today. Thank you to Nora for making this important part of activist history come alive for readers and now be documented for history.

Judy Rebick, Author of Ten Thousand Roses and former President of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women

As an online activist myself, those chapters echoed what I’ve been feeling for years with eerie accuracy — and, honestly, I’m overjoyed at the idea of other young activists being able to read those insights in a book instead of having to experience Twitter for themselves.

Rayne Fisher-Quann, Rabble.ca

How we did get to a place where feminism is ubiquitous and yet women’s lives don’t seem to be getting any better? Nora Loreto’s new book Take Back the Fight (a play on the name of the annual Take Back The Night march against sexual and domestic violence) examines this apparent contradiction and points out ideas to build a feminist movement that can once again pose a serious challenge to the forces arrayed against women.

Briarpatch Magazine

Keenly attuned to our current moment’s ethical timbre, Loreto is unflinchingly committed to presenting feminism’s anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-racist imperative. She makes the connection between societal struggles and the possibilities of a truly emancipatory feminist movement that gathers all people under its cover in solidarity.

Montreal Review of Books

In Take Back the Fight, Quebec City writer and podcaster Nora Loreto has crafted a meticulous look at how we can address barriers in contemporary Canadian feminist organizing.

Quill and Quire

Charting a tumultuous history of mainstream feminism, Nora Loreto’s Take Back the Fight is a clarion call for a large-scale, intersectional and radical feminist movement in Canada.

Harsha Walia, Author of Undoing Border Imperialism

De la diabolisation à l’organisation

Traduit en 2015, voici l’extrait, tiré du dernier page : “Dans ce livre, je tente d’expliquer le syndicalisme aux membres de ma génération : à mes amis qui se méfient autant des organisations bien établies de la société civile que du gouvernement; à mes amis chômeurs qui vivent de contrat en contrat et qui feraient n’importe quoi pour obtenir un emploi stable et syndiqué; aux travailleuses et travailleurs qui n’ont jamais eu l’avantage d’être représentés en cas d’injustice au travail; et enfin aux travailleuses et travailleurs qui préfèrent ne pas penser à ce qui leur arriverait s’ils se blessaient au travail.

Ce livre vise également à rappeler aux travailleuses et travailleurs syndiqués qu’un grand nombre des vérités qui sont pour eux évidentes ne le sont pas forcément pour tout le monde, et que, s’il espère croitre, le mouvement syndical devra changer sa façon d’établir le contact avec ses membres, les communautés et les travailleuses et travailleurs non syndiqués. Il se veut un appel à l’action pour inciter les militantes et militants à raconter leur histoire, à démystifier le discours antisyndical de droite, à se réengager dans leur communauté et à bâtir un mouvement capable de faire obstacle aux politiques néolibérales et à leurs adeptes.”

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