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How to blow up a movement: Andreas Malm’s new book dreams of sabotage but ignores consequences
Andreas Malm’s latest book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline—his second in less than six months from Verso—is a call for rapid escalation by the global climate movement into the realm of sabotage and property destruction. Yet Malm spends no time at all in this text on the very real threats of policing, surveillance, or incarceration. As James Wilt explains, this is an astonishing abdication of responsibility.
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Space neoliberalization agitates the frontiers of Canadian data privacy
Internet connectivity that relies on crossing uncharted territories inevitably brings with it new forms of colonialism. Seemingly benign infrastructure is in fact strengthening global supply chains that enrich the world’s billionaires. The future is cheap and fast, and the jostling of the private sector to claim a stake in satellite internet is just one small part of this space opera.
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André Frappier’s journey as a class struggle militant
I first met André Frappier in the late 1970s, when we were members of the Revolutionary Workers League, a pan-Canadian Marxist cadre organization. When the league decided to hoist its banner in the 1980 federal election campaign, André was chosen as our candidate in a downtown Montréal riding. For André, this was by no means the end of his political activism, quite the contrary, as this recent interview by Pierre Beaudet shows.
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China, the Canadian left, and countering state capitalist apologia
We must learn to resist China’s dispossession and discrimination against Uighurs and other ethnic minorities as part and parcel of a global movement against racial subjugation, colonialism, police brutality, surveillance, and incarceration. Only then will we be able to realize that working-class interests transcend borders, regardless of what the elites in our respective countries keep telling us.
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It’s not too late for Canada to support a temporary waiver of COVID vaccine patents
With an upcoming meeting of the World Trade Organization’s Council on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property scheduled for next month, it is not too late for wealthy countries including Canada to do the right thing and support the temporary waiving of intellectual property rights to enable poor countries to import cheap generic versions of patented COVID-19 vaccines—and save many lives in the process.
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Where’s Trudeau’s pipeline for water to First Nations?
The question that needs to be asked is what sort of mindset allows this crisis to continue? It cannot be explained by political orientation as both Conservative and Liberal governments have failed to remedy the issue for decades. Until we confront the racist underpinnings of government laws and policies—like funding policies for water systems on reserves—we will never end the water crisis in First Nations.
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Racial capitalism and the betrayal of Haiti
The day after his already paper-thin constitutional legitimacy completely eroded, Haitian President Jovenel Moïse gave significant amounts of the country’s land to a light-skinned tycoon working with Coca-Cola. Why would the state offer land to a firm producing for Coca-Cola rather than invest in local food production in a country where nearly 42 percent of the population, or four million people, are experiencing acute hunger?
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Trudeau Liberals block NDP pharmacare plan in the middle of a pandemic
Liberal members of Parliament will tell you that they truly support pharmacare, but that they just don’t like the way the NDP is going about it. But, as Christo Aivalis explains, the reality is far clearer. Like with the wealth tax, the Liberals see a popular policy that their own base supports, but it is one which clashes with their core neoliberal ideology. In the end, allegiance to the latter is what matters.
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Canada Goose workers fight for fairness in Winnipeg
Canada Goose Union is the latest iteration of a movement pushing for unionization among Winnipeg garment workers, calling out the luxury garment maker’s union busting practices, and shining a light on the hypocrisy of majority owner Bain Capital. For all the national pride associated with the “made-in-Canada” product, the company has been majority owned by the Mitt Romney-founded private investment firm since 2013.
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Ontario’s hidden institutions
Long-term care facilities in have been decimated by the COVID-19 pandemic, with almost three-quarters of all pandemic-related deaths in Canada occurring within them. But there’s another type of institution in Ontario that is somehow even less regulated and less transparent than long-term care facilities: residential service homes, also known as domiciliary hostels, which are privately run and operate for profit.