As the head of the World Bank’s committee to review and criticize the development goals of the Bretton Woods institutions, Lester Pearson had the opportunity to foreground an alternative form of Northern engagement with the South. Instead, he reaffirmed all the most harmful aspects of these institutions and argued for their greater involvement in the lives of people in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

The progressive Colombian government of Gustavo Petro is drafting legislation that, if enacted, will require mining companies to obtain environmental licenses for mineral exploration. Currently, Colombia only requires environmental licenses for the extraction and production phases of mining. Petro won the Colombian presidential election in a runoff on June 19.

When we imagine sustainable and socially equitable futures, agriculture must be front and centre of the program. It is in the agricultural realm that questions of land and resource distribution are fought, and it is where historical and ongoing battles between advocates of capitalist labour relations and those of independent self-provisioning clash.

In the context of Britain’s colonial administrations of terror, the 1975 constitutional coup in Australia may hardly seem worth remembering. However, the removal of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s reformist Labor government must be included, even though if pales in comparison to British atrocities in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean that occurred under her reign.

While there is no direct Canadian involvement in the Marikana massacre, Canadian mining companies and the Canadian state played a sizeable role in ensuring that the post-apartheid ANC government did not radically restructure the economy for the benefit of the Indigenous black majority, and that they retained a favourable investment climate for foreign companies.

It is incumbent upon us as a species, especially us in the Global North, to seriously consider alternative futures from an anti-capitalist, dialectical, ecological point-of-view, writes CD columnist Owen Schalk. This will unavoidably entail challenging the ideology of growth that pervades the political institutions of Northern countries.

The 2022 national protests in Ecuador were a powerful statement in opposition to the socioeconomic status quo that is favoured by Ecuador’s conservative elite and the Canadian state. While the protestors achieved some important gains, Lasso’s continued embrace of foreign mining investment at the expense of Indigenous peoples may be doomed to incite another uprising.

The Trudeau government has ignored the Biden administration’s responsibility for the current devastation in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Canadian laws are preventing food aid from reaching the country. Earlier this month, World Vision had to cancel a shipment of food that would have fed 1,800 children because of a federal law that bans Canadians who provide terrorist groups with property or finances.

Across Latin America, the state of Israel’s best friends are, almost without fail, the most reactionary right-wing elements of the ruling classes. This seems to contradict the tolerant brand that Israel has been attempting to cultivate as of late, which seeks to elevate Israel to the status of an enlightened and democratic outlier amidst an archipelago of authoritarians.

Canadian mining companies extract tens of billions of dollars from Latin America, Africa, and Asia while poverty rates in these regions remain crushingly high. An industry ad campaign aimed at the Canadian public changes nothing about the realities of Canadian mining practices domestically and especially in the Global South—practices which enabled $143 billion in revenues in 2021.