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.

The powerless and atomized workforce that the Financial Post would like to take as the model for the future can and must be rejected. Working class solidarity must not merely be nurtured but taken to a whole new level in the struggle for a socially just post-pandemic future shaped by our collective resistance.

In the post-pandemic period, we need mass movements that go beyond protesting cuts in an effort merely to impede the advance of a regressive agenda. If we think and act along these lines, the defensive strategies that marked the neoliberal decades may yield to a more militant and radical approach that poses the question of a “broad transformation of our society.”

The idea that a better world is possible can’t take hold if those who run the present one appear invincible. The pandemic has unleashed a crisis that poses the gravest dangers but opens up the real possibility of transforming the decades of defensive struggle against neoliberal attack into an offensive challenge to the whole capitalist system.

While we must embrace the most robust demands to win greatly improved and fully accessible income support systems in these harsh times, we don’t want inadequate solutions that extend a peace offering to the neoliberal order. We need radical alternatives and bold plans of action. The concept of a basic income fell short before this searing crisis and it has even less to offer us in the face of it.

When people emerge from their homes after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic they will be confronted by a greatly changed global order. A devastating public health crisis will continue to play out and a global economic slump that the pandemic has hastened and massively exacerbated will cast its shadow over the next several years.

The left can’t allow itself to be bullied by the false and cynical allegation of antisemitism. To acquiesce in the face of the disruptive and dangerous IHRA definition is utterly unacceptable. It’s high time to confront the slanders and, in a spirit of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, accuse the accusers.

Even in a rich country like Canada, the neoliberal decades have seen a huge intensification of the rate of exploitation. Industrial jobs have been moved offshore, unions have been weakened, low wage precarious work has proliferated and the social infrastructure has been battered. A key component of the attack on social programs and public services has been the reduction of income support for unemployed, sick and disabled people.

Housing that sits empty so that speculators can enrich themselves, while pushing up housing prices, is an ugly Achilles Heel of the neoliberal city that we would be targeting in a direct and compelling way. With this approach we could create a crisis for big property owners and their political enablers out of which concessions on housing could be won that were significant enough to address the unfolding disaster of homelessness in Toronto.