The election of the Doug Ford-led Conservative Party to a majority government in Ontario, Canada’s largest province by output and population, should leave little doubt that an authoritarian phase of neoliberalism is sinking deep roots in Canada.

Against the endless security panics and the reworking of the strategic and operational deployments of Canada’s military and foreign policy branches of the state since 9/11, the enduring national mythologies of Canada as peacekeeping nation and non-imperialist state rest uneasily. the hard right conservative government of Stephen Harper has been relentlessly refashioning the cultural symbols of the state.

The political and economic setting facing the union movement today is the most difficult since the Great Depression. Unions have already confronted two decades of unrelenting assault from neoliberal policies of labour-market flexibility, austerity and political conservatism. Then, the global financial crisis ripped across the entire world market. Many forecasts for 2009 are projecting negative growth for the world economy as a whole for the first time since the 1930s.

magining an alternate global politics could hardly be more pressing. Mounting global inequalities, the turbulence of climate change and recurring military interventions by Western powers has been the daily fare of the neoliberal world order. This world order was constructed over the last two decades under the hegemony of the U.S., in alliance with key European, Japanese and Canadian al

There has been much gnashing of teeth over Canada’s foreign-policy stance since the day Stephen Harper and his Conservative government was elected to office.

Canada’s relations with the U.S. on a phalanx of fronts have been at the centre of controversy.

The January federal election results unexpectedly yielded a minority Conservative government. The Great Moving-To-The-Right Show is having yet another run. In Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Canada now has the most ideologically committed neoliberal in power since Margaret Thatcher. The five priorities Harper has announced – an accountability package, a cut in the GST, a market-based childcare system, a law-and-order agenda centred on sentencing and a reduction in health-care wait times through increased delivery flexibility – all reflect these commitments. These proposals are embedded in the overall strategic priority of aligning Canada even more tightly with the U.S. through increased overseas military commitments and further economic integration. Canada’s takeover of the NATO command in Afghanistan and increased troop deployment is already sketching in the new terrain. It could hardly be more pressing for the Left to take stock of what the Harper government is and might become.

The Left today confronts several hard realities about the political terrain that has formed over the last two decades.

It is our view that the dilemmas facing cities in Canada, and around the world, are of staggering importance; that local politics and struggles are crucial to political organization today; and that confronting neoliberalism is also a confrontation with the political forces shaping today’s city of glittering towers, endless sprawl, shameful poverty, public wreckage.