According to many pundits, former Ontario Premier Bill Davis deserves credit for having “ushered in Ontario’s modern era”—one marked by underfunded hospitals, schools in disrepair, and enormous restrictions on the rights of workers to organize. In the end, Davis did what he had to to remain in power and maintain the status quo as best he could. But that status quo always required keeping the working class down.

We are often told that voting is a form of ‘harm reduction.’ But consider all the energy and resources poured into trying-and-usually-failing to get NDP candidates elected to a parliament where they likely cannot or will not make any difference in the actual policy output. What if we put those resources and energy into the actual harm reduction itself?

As the legal battle over the Kumtor gold mine rages on, Centerra’s legal options for extending its management of the mine look more limited by the day. Any Canadian who is interested in how their country’s capital functions on the global stage, and how affected countries are trying to resist this neocolonial domination, should eagerly follow new developments in the case.

The 2021 Canadian federal election is over, and it produced one of the most status quo results in Canadian history. While not all ridings have been called, the end result is determined. No party will gain or lose more than a few seats, there was little popular vote shift among the larger parties, and the result is another healthy Trudeau Liberal minority where neither the NDP nor the Bloc Québécois hold the balance of power on their own.

Two years of minority parliament and several weeks of rather bland campaigning later the election seems to have taken the country right back to where it was in 2019 before the pandemic and all of its staggering consequences and impacts. The Liberals lost the popular vote as in 2019 but will just as then will hold on to a minority while all the parties landed seat-wise almost exactly where they began.

For the many millions of Canadians frustrated by Liberal incompetence and repulsed by Conservative callousness, this federal election outcome is not a joyous one. And how could it be, when both parties (in differing degrees, granted) are either ignoring the country’s most pressing issues, offering insufficient, piecemeal policies to address them, or are complicit in exacerbating them?

The real story of the election was the emergence in this country of what we would have to call a form of voter suppression. Thousands of Canadians had a harder time casting their vote than in any other election in more than 75 years. The truth is that the Trudeau government decided to call an election in the midst of a pandemic knowing full well that campaigning and voting would be more difficult than in normal times.

Jason Kenney and his strategic brain trust have proved themselves to be either sympathetic to that caucus or too fearful of raising its ire to act decisively in dealing with the COVID situation. This is what happens when you let the tail wag the dog. Will O’Toole have the stuff to rein in a caucus loaded with members who answer to the loud-mouthed minority? I’m not optimistic.

Where every other party is obliged to broker the interests of working class and colonized people to the grand abstraction of ‘The Economy,’ balancing corporate interests with the best of their respective platforms, the Communist Party of Canada can confidently name the profit system that dispossesses all, however differently—of land, of lifetime, of the wealth that we incessantly create.

Erin O’Toole’s childcare strategy misses the mark: it contains no plan to bring more women into the workforce, create new daycare spaces, or provide more equitable pay to childcare workers. And while there’s little doubt providing more cash to parents would help with affordability, the Conservatives’ planned tax rebate gets nowhere close to reducing the accessibility gap, particularly in underserved communities or cities with a high cost of living.