I don’t think my enemies are those who honestly feel that basic income is the best approach. Rather, they are those who maintain the system of colonialism, racism and poverty. The stakes are too high to set the debate aside, but I hope we can pursue it in ways that are useful and constructive. In that spirit, I offer this response to what is, in my view, the mistaken notion that basic income offers us a way forward.

The key consideration is how the left should orient itself in the period that is now opening up. The concessions that employers and states make aren’t driven by wishes and hopes; they hinge on the willingness of those in power to provide them. The post-war approach was based on a capacity to broker social peace, while ensuring a robust flow of profits. There is no such prospect before us at present.

It is hard to imagine any credible political perspective on the left that isn’t hostile to US-led imperialism. However, there is more to be considered than the geopolitical map and the actions of governments. We live in a world in which working class people face exploitation and oppression and in which they take to the streets to challenge those conditions.

The pandemic will continue to shape our lives for a long time to come yet. However, even when it is finally behind us, the economic fallout and deeper problems of global capitalism will be left in its wake. As workers and as members of communities under attack, we are going to have to be able to assert the popular will through powerful and united social movements.

Governments, even with liberals in charge, won’t stop the right today anymore than Hindenburg stopped Hitler. Governments of the discredited neoliberal centre won’t contain the social dislocation and discontent that feeds the growth of fascism. The threat will only be stopped by powerful working class action that drives the fascists off the streets and challenges the system that produces them.

Canada shares with other settler colonial states a deeply rooted desire to deny or minimize the reality of dispossession and to disregard the Indigenous past. A challenge to the colonial present in Canada will require a society based on human solidarity that rejects colonialism as an abomination and respects and cherishes Indigenous rights and Indigenous sovereignty.

We are living in a time of biomedical, economic and ecological crises. A Biden administration will only offer more of the same measures that will fuel the rise of something even more aberrant than Trump. The only alternative lies neither in unity with the political centre nor in the false hope of deliverance by lesser evil, but in mass social action and the forging of a clear socialist project.

Throne speeches are part of a tradition of parliamentary hypocrisy. We may sometimes win things in those settings, but the far more decisive question is the struggle that is taken up on the streets. In this time of crisis, that is truer than ever before and we must build the movements to hammer out and win a post-pandemic future based on the needs of workers and communities rather than empty Liberal promises.

What takes place in the House of Commons in September will be of considerable interest but the fight for workers’ rights, decent income and housing that we take up outside of Parliament will be considerably more important. We can be sure that whatever Trudeau’s “ambitious plan” looks like in the end, that fight will remain urgent and inescapable.

We are entering a period of crisis that is simply without precedent and the course the federal government is pursuing shows a clear intention to ensure that working class people will pay for that crisis, while corporations are cushioned and supported by the state. Unions and communities will have to respond to this with a united fightback against attacks on workers’ rights and public services.