With the federal government planning to deliver a regularization scheme that would provide a path to permanent residency for up to 500,000 undocumented migrants, we need to acknowledge the struggle of the migrants’ rights organizers who have brought us to this point. Brett McKay investigates the movement fighting to improve the livelihoods of people who live in Canada with precarious status.

Anti-mask rallies have been near weekly events in Alberta since the summer, and there has been a consistent presence of identifiable far-right extremists like the Soldiers of Odin, Three Percent Militia, and the Proud Boys. Even with negative attention and condemnation coming from public officials, it appears the confidence of these groups is growing in stride with the increasingly emboldened anti-lockdown community.

Alberta was born in rapid societal change, its population growing a staggering 413 percent in its first decade. For reasons of geography, economy, and chance, the province’s history has been defined by booms that draw people in and crashes that can foster paranoid worldviews. Conspiracy theories evolve along with and as part of political culture, perhaps even faster when the culture itself refuses to.

Prisoners are at a higher risk of contracting COVID-19, and the response to this risk within correctional facilities across Canada has only created an alternate outbreak of health problems. For prisoner advocates like Michelle Gushue of the Elizabeth Fry Society, the most compassionate and effective response to this problem is removing people from these institutions and returning them to their communities.

Our willingness to leave settler violence unnamed permits it. It allows arsonists to be cast as conservationists, and for systemic problems to be framed as regional disputes. From Atlantic fisheries to Alberta classrooms, there is no part of settler society violence does not touch. After all, it is a whole society that must realize the need to face the consequences of a traumatic history.

The province of Alberta may eventually be forced to repeal Jason Kenney and the UCP’s Bill 1—the Critical Infrastructure Defense Act—but in the meantime, standing in opposition to this draconian legislation that infringes on Indigenous rights must mean standing on the front lines with the communities who will be most detrimentally affected by it.

The fate of the Unemployment Leagues will be familiar to any student of social movements. But just as their members cautioned it would, record unemployment is again about to return. If we as workers want more than an extension until the next reckless cycle can be set in motion, we need to take up the challenge posed by these prairie radicals, refuse to submit to the demands of capitalism and rebel against it instead.