After winning its lowest number of seats since 1991 in last year’s snap election, the BC Liberal Party is now in the early stages of a leadership race to fill the role vacated by Andrew Wilkinson, who resigned in February. With four leadership candidates currently declared, rifts between the party’s elected caucus and membership, as well as between its socially “progressive” and social conservative wings are becoming increasingly apparent.

Following months of pressure and after more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, British Columbia’s NDP government has finally announced plans to introduce a permanent paid sick leave program to cover the gaps in the federal government’s lacklustre Canada Recovery Sickness Benefit. Yet, as Alex Cosh writes, it shouldn’t haven take this much effort to win such basic protections.

The timing of this immensely important book could not be more urgent. Just as the Canadian establishment’s early complacency (and sometimes open encouragement) towards the Klan’s hate permitted the group a foothold in the early-twentieth century, so too do foolish appeals to so-called “Canadian exceptionalism” provide an opening for hate groups to exploit today.

To make the most of its historic mandate while addressing concerns like housing, poverty and homelessness, the BC NDP needs to ensure that its program over the next four years is focused on implementing lasting changes that make a clean break from the disastrous neoliberal dogmatisms of yesteryear. This will require more ambitious measures than the party offered in its election platform.

In addition to highlighting a lack of political will to provide renters and homeless populations with sufficient aid at their time of greatest need, this crisis exposes the deeper problem with relying on private markets to provide housing. Simply put: modest financial supplements will not fix this problem. Alex Cosh explains.

In a field of relatively underwhelming candidates, the best possible outcome appears to be a Long-Bailey victory. Though far from ideal, Long-Bailey is at least the best chance the left has of keeping anti-austerity and a radical green industrial strategy in mainstream conversation, and holding the line against those who would use the U.K. election results to silence grassroots democratic socialist movements everywhere.

The “Ok Boomer” meme, which many young people are using online as a rebuttal against out-of-touch baby boomers, taps into frustrations disproportionately experienced by millennials and Generation Zers—particularly in Canada’s most unaffordable cities. Unfortunately, however, the meme also represents a discourse that ignores the many older people experiencing poverty, discrimination and hardship.

If members of the billionaire class support a wealth tax on the grounds that it numbs adversarial attitudes towards wealthy elites—and slows the pace of growing inequality so that the rich can carry on their businesses as usual—is it likely, on its own, to be an effective way of serving the long-term interests of poor and working people?

While some observers hailed the federal government’s recent addition of Neo-Nazi groups Blood & Honour and Combat 18 to the national terrorist list as symbolically important, analysts point out that Canada’s security services are doing far too little, far too late to address the broader dangers of the far-right. Instead of counting on law enforcement, social institutions and organizers must coordinate a comprehensive response to the rise of right-wing extremism.

After making vague promises in its 2017 election platform to “modernize” provincial labour standards, the British Columbia Green Party recently blocked two important reforms to the province’s labour code, showing that, in practice, Canada’s mainstream Green movement harbours anti-worker biases that negatively impact the struggle against climate change.