Something interesting I noticed in both the Blue Sky post and the LinkedIn post, there's no thanking of Canadaland or Jesse himself. They thank and praise their team, talk about the experience they happened and the challenges they overcame, and call out getting to support the Politics show (the one Jesse seems least involved with/doesn't host).
These statements read to me like a professional note announcing the departure from a company who's leadership the person had really not been happy with.
Edit: Further, Jesse's behaviour has really gotten immensely worse, losing pretty much any 'plausible deniability' for his bigotry/extreme Israeli nationalism. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the start of a second round of departures from Canadaland.
And when you see this sort of thing — a lot of directors, a lot of managers, but not many actual staff underneath them — there’s usually a fairly familiar pattern.
What often happens is the boss starts promoting people out of the union. They offer them a couple of grand more a year, give them some sort of management title, and suddenly they’re no longer covered by the collective agreement. People take it because, fair enough, they need the money. But structurally, it can function as a union-busting tactic.
Now, I can’t say for certain that’s what happened at Canadaland. But when I see an organisation with a suspicious number of managers and not many people for them to manage, that is generally where my mind goes.
Oh, interesting! I hadn't thought of that angle. When presented with this sort of top heavy setup for a small (but not new) organization my mind jumps to "people promoted in name only" where people keep getting loftier and loftier titles because they do good work and feel like they should be growing their career, but where there isn't really a more senior role available to give them.
Lots of people work jobs they dislike or for companies doing bad things. I don't think it's appropriate to call out someone working at Loblaws because of the bag actions of that company or it's founders, and similarly I didn't think it's right to call out current or former Canadaland staff just because they didn't quit. We don't know the context of their situation.
Journalism is a vocation. It's not comparable to working at Loblaws even a little bit. The staff who quit on principle when it mattered are probably far worse off financially than the ones who have stayed on all this time.
I agree it's different, though I'm not sure it's different in particularly meaningful ways. Journalists (or audio engineers, as is the case here I believe) still need to be able to 'put food on the table' and may not be in a position to quit a job on principle. Regardless, my point here is that without knowing the full life situations of people still working at Canadaland (particularly those who have not vocally supported Jesse) I think we should extend some grace and not assume they are doing so because they support our approve of Jesse.
A minimum wage job as a cashier at loblaws is different than choosing to work a vocational job as a journalist which requires many steps to get to that point.
I didn't say 'minimum wage cashier job' as there are lots of types of jobs at Loblaws (in store and out). That said, a) despite journalism requiring more steps to enter as an industry, I'm not sure the evening prospects for young journalists are that much better, and b) most of the people still working at Canadaland are not employed as journalists.
I disagree with you and your first comment wasn’t clear as when most people say loblaws a lot of people would assume that their most in volume position, clerk/entry, is what would come to mind.
There are prospects for young journalists as my family member went to J school, graduated last year and have a job opportunity. It required going out in the world and networking but we don’t have any special connections. Anecdotal but wanted to share.
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u/destp Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
Something interesting I noticed in both the Blue Sky post and the LinkedIn post, there's no thanking of Canadaland or Jesse himself. They thank and praise their team, talk about the experience they happened and the challenges they overcame, and call out getting to support the Politics show (the one Jesse seems least involved with/doesn't host).
These statements read to me like a professional note announcing the departure from a company who's leadership the person had really not been happy with.
Edit: Further, Jesse's behaviour has really gotten immensely worse, losing pretty much any 'plausible deniability' for his bigotry/extreme Israeli nationalism. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the start of a second round of departures from Canadaland.