The renewed struggle for self-determination of Indigenous Peoples in Canada and Québec is slowly changing the character of left politics across the country, as the long overdue reckoning with the brutal historic dispossession of the original inhabitants of the places we call Canada and Québec “unsettles” our ways of seeing, putting the concept of settler-colonialism in the centre of much contemporary left analysis and activism.

As Snowden has eloquently said, none of us should be complacent about surrendering our rights, because you never know when you might need them. Our failure to respond in any significant way to the crisis of surveillance, collectively or individually, is a surrender of our hard-won privacy rights.