When Cabbagetown-born Carole Addesso (née Feraci) attended the Reader’s Digest 50th anniversary party at the White House as one of the Ray Conniff Singers in January, 1972, she defiantly challenged then President Richard Nixon to his face over his ongoing war in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Will Justin Trudeau support the introduction of a new bill to mandate Canadian corporate respect for human rights standards and environmental responsibility? Will he stop supplying some of the world’s worst regimes with military equipment used to repress their own populations?

But does change have to wait another four years for a new party to come along, or can we get to the business of organizing ourselves into a social force that cannot be ignored? One answer, as African American poet June Jordan reminded us, is this: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”

Indeed, our very way of life is dependent on globalized repression to guarantee a good return on our retirement investments, and when the victims of that system are forced to flee for their lives, we blame them for their problems, coming up with pathetic excuses for why we should not help them.

Until last week. A Harper cabinet already in a morgue-like mood from the NDP victory in Alberta was now facing another blow to its house of cards. Seeing Omar on his lawyer’s driveway was like witnessing the beginning of the end of a wrongful conviction case.

A recent run-of-the-mill telemarketing call from one of Canada’s largest credit companies took on a threatening tone. Who knew that owning a credit card whose purchases produced redeemable points for free groceries also entailed an insidious tradeoff that invaded our privacy and left a chilling aftertaste?

Following December’s release of the U.S. Senate report on American complicity in torture, Prime Minister Stephen Harper quickly declared, “It has nothing to do whatsoever with the government of Canada.” Despite the CIA’s close relationship with Canadian state security agencies, as well as two judicial inquiries finding Ottawa complicit in the torture of Canadian citizens in Syria and Egypt, Harper preferred to ignore the facts.

Harper’s rhetoric has been coked up with apocalyptic rhetoric, from describing ISIS as everything from a “death cult” (a term more appropriate to NATO, an alliance that has always reserved the right to unleash nuclear weapons and thereby contribute to the end of human life altogether) to a gigantic squid.

When the RCMP announced an Ottawa anti-terrorism arrest last week, the timing could not have been better for a federal government that appears to thrive on national security hysteria.

I often find it hard to feel empathy for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. But when I saw the grim picture of him talking on the phone following the end of his confinement in the locked down House of Commons yesterday, I sensed in him a vulnerability he rarely exhibits.