In his new book, A People’s Green New Deal, Max Ajl dismantles ruling class and ostensibly progressive visions for a Green New Deal, contrasting these settler futures with revolutionary alternatives grounded in agroecology, anti-imperialism, and Indigenous self-determination. In doing so, writes James, Wilt, Ajl demonstrates these alternatives aren’t utopian solutions but are already very much in motion.

Andreas Malm’s latest book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline—his second in less than six months from Verso—is a call for rapid escalation by the global climate movement into the realm of sabotage and property destruction. Yet Malm spends no time at all in this text on the very real threats of policing, surveillance, or incarceration. As James Wilt explains, this is an astonishing abdication of responsibility.

The results of inquests and inquiries into police violence often end up excusing and entrenching oppressive institutions. Worse still, policymakers simply ignore their recommendations completely. Canadian Dimension spoke with Sherene H. Razack, Distinguished Professor in Women’s Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, about the function of inquests and inquiries in a settler colonial society.

The City of Winnipeg’s preliminary budget for 2021 was tabled on November 27. It is the latest confirmation that council is not interested in listening to community demands to defund the police and reallocate resources to life-sustaining services. We take this opportunity now to not only hold our elected civic officials accountable for their actions, but also to restate our vision for a future without police.

Amidst the ongoing chaos of COVID-19, Manitoba’s Progressive Conservatives are attempting to ram through a bill that will criminalize protests at so-called “critical infrastructure” sites such as roads and railways. Canadian Dimension spoke with Mike Bagamery, an organizer with the Manitoba Energy Justice Coalition (MEJC) about the province’s proposed bill and how we can fight back against it.

Unfortunately, Andreas Malm’s entry in Verso’s pamphlet series—Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century—reads as rushed and theoretically underdeveloped, spending more time taking shots at other leftists than fleshing out what would be required to implement what he calls “war communism” (which, as it turns out, Malm doesn’t really believe in at all).

Headingley Correctional Centre, a provincial jail on the western edge of Winnipeg, is among the sites hardest hit by the pandemic. As of Friday, October 30, the jail had 69 confirmed cases—mostly prisoners along with a handful of staff. Canadian Dimension spoke with someone whose husband is incarcerated in Headingley. After a major bout of sickness, he was finally diagnosed with COVID-19.

44-year-old Richard Kakish passed away after an incident involving the Winnipeg Police in August 2017. Richard died after being kicked and repeatedly punched by officers during an arrest. He was a father of four, and grandfather of three. Here, James Wilt speaks with Richard’s daughter about her father’s killing and her family’s struggle for justice.

This marks the seventh installment in an ongoing curated series that asks contributors to imagine the perils and possibilities that will ground our collective response to or emergence from the COVID-19 crisis. Our seventh edition, about water, features contributions from Heather Dorries, Alice Cohen, Brittany Luby and the Niisaachewan Anishinaabe Nation, Kathryn Furlong, and Deborah McGregor.

Liquor control tends to be far more about control than liquor. It has been part and parcel of a network of genocidal policies of colonialism: residential schools, forced relocation, family separation, police violence, and ongoing dispossession. Rather than relinquish colonial management of Indigenous peoples, the state reconstitutes liquor control as a means of justifying continued interventions.