A few days prior to the ruling, activists Julien Villeneuve and Jaggi Singh who have both filed constitutional challenges to the bylaw obtained documents which revealed that the city of Montreal contracted a private lawyer to defend the regulation's constitutionality, which raised some eyebrows given the context of austerity in the province.
"The context is that the austerity programme is 'back-loaded' so that the pain comes at the end," Mason explained.
The wider context of stagnation, austerity and the rightward turn of politics has reinforced this.
So the Reinhart-Rogoff fiasco needs to be seen in the broader context of austerity mania: the obviously intense desire of policy makers, politicians and pundits across the Western world to turn their backs on the unemployed and instead use the economic crisis as an excuse to slash social programs.
"In the context of wider austerity in public spending, such an increase is not plausible," the paper states.
4 In a context of financial austerity in the UK, local government authorities have faced unprecedented cuts over the past 5 years, which have impacted heavily on adult social care and its capacity to deliver services for its population.
The "anti-elite" message of the most radical elements of Podemos in Spain and of Greece's Syriza movement may have attractive elements – understandable in the context of economic austerity, high unemployment and deep frustration among many young people.
In the context of austerity and tax evasion, the rich and powerful have ripped up the social contract with the people that had secured the rule in return for our acquiescence.
In the context of the global financial crisis, austerity and uneven growth, national, sub-national and local state actors are being compelled to adopt the increasingly speculative activities of urban entrepreneurialism to attract new capital, develop 'innovative' financial instruments and models, and establish new or reform existing institutional arrangements for urban infrastructure governance.
It is this context of austerity that the demise of youthful revolt is mourned.
This in the context of austerity.
