We at Canadian Dimension join our voices with the many left organizations, including Rabkor, the media outlet founded by Kagarlitsky, as well as Green Left, The Nation, Counterpunch, and the Transnational Institute, calling for Kagarlitsky’s immediate release and we urge our readers to support this international solidarity campaign.

Along with many other progressive forces in the settler community, Canadian Dimension stands in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en and their struggle to exercise their sovereignty and protect their land. We are appalled at the never-ending injustice and violence visited upon Indigenous communities in Canada and committed to amplifying their voices and supporting their demands.

This is a statement by a majority of the members of the Canadian Dimension editorial board regarding the resignations of three members in March 2021. Also published here is a dissenting view written by Canadian Dimension founder Cy Gonick, along with an addendum composed by longtime CD editorial collective member Paul S. Graham.

Few party leadership contests in recent years have been as critical for the left in Canada as the current race for the leadership of the federal Green Party. Putting Dimitri Lascaris at the helm of the GPC could help expand the real estate of the left on the political spectrum and put pressure on the NDP to reacquaint itself with radicalism.

Conservatives are gaining momentum in part because of the absence of a real radical resistance. Politically, there have been few notes of optimism, with the exception of Québec solidaire. The socalled alternative parties, the NDP and Greens, have demonstrated a cowardly lack of leadership in recent years as well as an inability to put forward a bold set of policy proposals that address the root of our social, economic, and ecological problems.

Our best hope for justice and sustainability in Canada lies with communities like the Wet’suwet’en nation, who take their relationship and responsibilities to their lands and waters so seriously that they will risk all they have to defend it. Our hope also lies with the many Canadians respecting and actively supporting the rights of these Indigenous communities to take care of their territories.

Alternatives to incarceration must be found both for the still relatively small numbers of migrant families detained in Canada and the disproportionately high numbers of Indigenous youths populating Canadian prisons. Until Canada radically reforms its prison system and ceases to criminalize asylum seekers, our smug responses to the egregious actions of the United States are unwarranted.

As Canada commemorates its sesquicentennial with a festival of propaganda, the gulf between this country’s reality and its image—prettily packaged at home and exported around the world—has perhaps never been wider. For evidence, we needn’t look further than the August cover of Rolling Stone exhibiting a photo of Justin Trudeau alongside the question “Is he the free world’s best hope?”

The Liberals are dragging their feet on amending Bill-C-51—the Conservatives’ draconian legislation buttressing already formidable national security-state powers. Meanwhile, protest is mounting over Trudeau’s broken promises on everything from emissions targets to electoral reform. In Trudeau’s Canada, as in Trump’s America, a treacherous course is being set.

From a Canadian vantage point, it is easy to lose track of the sheer volume of discontent, if not outright resistance, around the world to the structures and policies of neoliberal globalization. People everywhere are chaffing at the limits imposed on their capacities to democratically shape and plan their own political and economic lives.