The rise of the right and Islamophobia, both in Québec, where it gave rise two years ago to the tragic Québec City mosque shooting, and also at the international level, of which the mosque shootings in Christ Church, New Zealand last March are a fearful expression, shows us that exclusion only serves to fuel hatred. Solidarity must transcend cultural distances and national borders.

Successive Canadian governments have treated taxes like a problem that can only be fixed through tax cuts, with more slashes promised from all sides during every election. Imagine the investments we could have made by now if governments had approached taxes not as a problem, but as a solution. Progressive tax policy has a significant role to play in addressing our country’s most pressing challenges, from the ongoing climate emergency to inequality’s seemingly unending expansion.

Canada needs its own Green New Deal to enable a rapid transition away from fossil fuels that benefits every working class Canadian by guaranteeing them good jobs, improving their public services, and investing in their communities instead of letting ‘the market’ decide who prospers and who falls into poverty. But that will require political vision ready to challenge the oil industry and the executives reaping the benefits of Kenney’s tax cuts and Trudeau’s public subsidies.

Labour shortages, daycare rates rising faster than inflation, and the increasing scarcity of spaces for children, plague most provinces. These issues are compounded by a lack of proper funding from provincial and federal governments, and the rapid expansion of the private sector. The crisis facing Canadian parents and daycare workers is now a serious concern. The lack of funding and the government’s increasing faith in market-based solutions ultimately reflect a grave neglect of the crucial social capital that early childcare education provides.

Recent changes to the Conservative Party leadership election rules are designed to limit the candidate field to those with significant financial resources or friends in high places—otherwise known as generous corporate sponsors. In what some consider an “elitist” move, the Leadership Election Organizing Committee has upped the ante for aspiring hopefuls; increasing the entrance fee to $300,000 (the highest in any leadership race, of any party, at any time), and requiring candidates to obtain the support of 3,000 party members in order to qualify.

Trudeau’s middle-class tax cut is a smokescreen to obscure class realities and inequalities in Canada. It allows him to simultaneously claim he’s standing with the 80% of Canadians who are part of this gargantuan class without a definition, all while funnelling benefits disproportionately to well-off people instead of ensuring basic social services for the neediest Canadians.

Even in a rich country like Canada, the neoliberal decades have seen a huge intensification of the rate of exploitation. Industrial jobs have been moved offshore, unions have been weakened, low wage precarious work has proliferated and the social infrastructure has been battered. A key component of the attack on social programs and public services has been the reduction of income support for unemployed, sick and disabled people.

With practically any major power it would care to engage, the US must count the cost of their retaliation and those of their increasingly powerful allies. The danger of war lies in the very real possibility that, in the prosecution of their internal civil war, the US executive will be unable or unwilling to count it. It also lies in the pervasive tendency in of the media, the political leadership and the intelligentsia to subordinate themselves to the needs of the war machine.

Winnipeg recently lost an icon of the left, with the passing of Loa Henry. Loa was a life-long feminist, a creative, and a social justice advocate whose life stands testament to the clarity and depth of her commitment to progressive politics. As anyone who knew her can attest, Loa was no armchair theorist, but an activist who lived up to her commitments.

Housing that sits empty so that speculators can enrich themselves, while pushing up housing prices, is an ugly Achilles Heel of the neoliberal city that we would be targeting in a direct and compelling way. With this approach we could create a crisis for big property owners and their political enablers out of which concessions on housing could be won that were significant enough to address the unfolding disaster of homelessness in Toronto.