If Biden allows Trump to weaponize language like this, the American narrative will further shift toward a realm of “alternative facts” and enter a hellish realm of ambiguity, ripe for the plotting of totalitarian propaganda. Given the United States’ global power, allowing such an atmosphere to rule could have severe international repercussions.

Data and statistics will keep piling up on the desks of indifferent bureaucrats, functioning, in a sense, like political sedatives. We cannot allow the passive decorum of Canadian political sentiment to temper our latent power—justice only emerges by means of popular revolt. Resisting capitalist interests will not be an easy task, but the fight to expand medicare must be led by working people—not policymakers.

The complexity of history cannot be folded up and prepackaged into the shape of a man made out of metal, standing proudly among living people. Yet, politicians are calling for Macdonald’s statue to be re-erected in the name of national conversation. Instead, we should liberate our public spaces from all symbols of ideology and allow them to flourish as communal, living ecologies.

The central culprit behind accelerated gentrification in one of Canada’s poorest neighbourhoods is the new University of Montreal science complex, established on a former railway yard between Outremont, an affluent francophone neighbourhood, and Parc-Extension, an immigrant and working-class district where 61 percent of residents were born outside Canada.