Nora Loreto – författare

THE HILL TIMES TOP 100 BOOKS OF 2024Canada's social safety net is fraying. Why does it feel like everything is collapsing?Canada is at a crossroads. Social services and politics have been transformed to serve market economies, while Canadians struggle to pay rent, buy food, and find a stable job that pays well enough to cover daily costs. Everywhere we look, things are falling apart, but there's still time to reverse the decline. The Social Safety Net, the first book in the Canada in Decline series, tracks the forty-year attack on Canada s welfare state. As neoliberalism has matured, Canadians have seen the impact of these attacks: unreliable healthcare, crises in education and social services, and a society that feels like it is losing cohesion. This series tells 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 to fix all that is crumbling around us as well as the possible paths forward.

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.

Two decades of neoliberalism have destroyed a structured, pan-regional feminist movement in Canada. As a result, new generations of feminists have come to age without ever seeing the force that an organized social movement can have in democratic society. They have never benefited from the knowledge, the debates, the actions, the mass mobilizations or the leadership that all accompany a social movement and instead organize in decentralized silos. As a result, government and corporate leaders have co-opted feminism to turn it into something that can be bought, sold, or used to attract voters. Campaigns like #BeenRapedNeverReported, #MeToo, the SlutWalks and the Canadian Women’s marches, while important, don’t yet have the organized power to bring the changes that activists seek to make in society.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.

As Canada was in the grips of the worst pandemic in a century, Canadian media struggled to tell the story. Newsrooms, already run on threadbare budgets, struggled to make broader connections that could allow their audience to better understand what was really happening, and why. Politicians and public health officials were mostly given the benefit of the doubt that what they said was true and that they acted in good faith.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.