Police possess unique and extreme powers, however the only reason they can deploy such powers is because governments consistently award them more and more funding. Despite the real mediating roles of police boards and provinces, city councils retain significant powers to reduce police budgets and reallocate resources to life-sustaining services.

Canadian Dimension spoke with Megan Q. Linton, a disabled and mad studies researcher and writer, and creator of the Invisible Institutions podcast. Megan’s research on institutionalization and disability has appeared in Canadian Dimension, Briarpatch magazine, the Disability Visibility Project and the CBC. Megan is currently a doctoral student at Carleton University.

Despite the ubiquity of a legal and safer supply of alcohol⁠, beverage alcohol contributes to the deaths of some three million people around the world every single year via traumatic injuries, chronic diseases, self-harm, cancers, and alcohol use disorders, including alcohol dependency. Countless more people live with alcohol-related diseases, chronic pains, mental health issues, and various disabilities.

World Beyond War is a vital force in the global anti-war struggle, helping organize campaigns against military bases, the arms trade, and imperialist trade shows. Canadian Dimension spoke with Rachel Small, the Canada Organizer for World Beyond War, about Ottawa’s escalating funding for the military, recent direct actions against weapons manufacturers, and the upcoming global #NoWar2022 conference.

Paris Marx is one of the leading authorities on all things “tech.” As host of the award-winning Tech Won’t Save Us podcast and author the upcoming Verso book Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, Marx expertly dissects the countless promises—and far more often, failures—of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and fads like cryptocurrency and the Metaverse.

In contrast to the simplistic notion that capital unilaterally imposes consumption upon us, German scholars Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, authors of The Imperial Mode of Living, emphasize a dialectical analysis in which capitalist domination “draws on the wishes and desires of the populace … becomes a part of individual identity, shapes it, and thereby becomes all the more effective.”

Transit infrastructure has become the site of visibly manifesting contradictions at the heart of the vicious capitalist and colonial project because it’s one of the few public spaces left for people to safely gather. However, this reality is under escalating threats and it’s imperative that these efforts be coherently resisted with a program of radical alternatives.

Despite dedicated organizing by the disability justice community, Bill C-7, which expanded “medical assistance in dying” to people whose death is not “reasonably foreseeable,” became law on March 17, 2021. CD spoke with Catherine Frazee and Gabrielle Peters about the meaning of C-7, the implicit ableism of pro-MAiD narratives, and the involvement by the left in disability justice.

The latest federal budget is out and despite all the media bluster about new progressive housing policy—which consists mostly of a new tax-free savings account for home buyers, an “accelerator fund” for municipalities to incentivize gentrification, and meager support for Indigenous housing—it should be understood as a clear entrenchment of Canada’s position as a global capitalist, colonial, and imperialist power.

Conditions are dire, but transit riders and workers continue to fight for change. Canadian Dimension spoke with two organizers with TTCriders about their current campaigns, organizing during the pandemic, the relationship between transit politics and climate justice, and advice for people who want to get involved in transit organizing in their own communities.