If capital sees the Olympic Games as the end of a pandemic and a way out of an existential crisis that could have—but didn’t—signal its collapse, the left must observe the Olympics as a beginning; as a launching point to organize and build to the next crisis, taking the failure of this one as a lesson and not an acceptance of our system’s seemingly eternal power.

Green Party leader Annamie Paul thinks Canada should take over hosting duties for the 2022 Olympics Games, citing China’s human rights record and treatment of its Uighur and Muslim minority populations. This is a terrible idea. It ignores the role of Canada in perpetuating ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples and fundamentally misunderstands the role of the Olympics in furthering the goals of settler states the world over.

In charting a course forward, amid the pandemic and beyond, socialists must use their energy strategically. Transforming the New Democratic Party, for many, might simply prove to be too costly or too pointless to manage in a time of great upheaval and even greater opportunity. With so many trains leaving the station, is the NDP’s the right one to jump on?

With the sports world’s recent focus on police violence and racial justice there must also be a focus on other issues that surround almost every major sporting event: policing and security. Sports enterprises that claim to support anti-racism must be pushed to take steps away from overpolicing and towards divestment from intelligence technology apparati that reflect the most draconian elements of capitalist security governance.

Culture informs politics, and politics inform culture. The often confounding questions of why people vote against their own interests, get swept up in conspiracy theories, or rally behind politicians who only seek to further their own agenda has answers that can be difficult to articulate, given the complex intersections at play. But to understand it, we don’t need to look much further than the field.

Canada is in a unique position to implement MMT, perhaps better than any country in the world. Elements of UBI have been tested before, but never all of them in concert. With increasing corporate capture of our everyday lives and the states that govern us, it may be time to try something new—even if it doesn’t take us all the way to a truly egalitarian and equitable society.

The NDP is in the midst of a quiet crisis. The party has not made significant headway since the 2015 federal election, when they won just under 20 percent of the vote, a number they repeated in 2019 with even worse results under Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system. A big part of the problem may lie with an NDP legend who party faithful feel unable or unwilling to criticize: Jack Layton.