The victory of Geert Wilders in the Dutch general elections should provoke intense self-reflection in the European Union. Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom won 37 seats of 150, becoming the largest party in the House of Representatives and the latest right-wing challenger to ‘Merkelism,’ named for long-time German chancellor Angela Merkel.

The Cobre Panamá copper mine, owned by Vancouver-based First Quantum Minerals, is once against facing widespread grassroots resistance from Panamanian activists. As Owen Schalk explains, the mine, which is the largest foreign investment in the country, has remained a central focus of Panamanian protest movements for more than a decade.

The Ontario New Democrats cannot be allowed to forget that, as a genocide loomed in Gaza, they expelled a critic of Israeli violence while their party leader, Marit Stiles, spoke alongside a man who compared Palestinians to cockroaches. As Owen Schalk argues, we must remember whose alliances the NDP values, and whose it discards.

The Trudeau government’s unequivocal support for Israel’s right to “self-defence” is exposing the hypocrisy behind Canada’s magnanimous brand. There is simply no nuance to Ottawa’s statements: it fully stands behind the forces that are destroying hospitals, uprooting hundreds of thousands, and espousing genocidal rhetoric.

Many understand that the House of Commons’ decision to honour Yaroslav Hunka should not be treated as a one-off lapse in judgement. Rather, as Owen Schalk explains, it was a shocking public exposure of the deep-rootedness of World War II revisionism in Canada, which is far more widespread than one official’s ill-advised invite to an old man in his riding.

The stereotype of Nazi-embracing Latin American dictatorships is a common one, but it distracts attention from the myriad ways in which the US and Canada welcomed thousands more Nazi veterans and allowed their ideology to fester, untouched, amongst many far-right diaspora groups. As Owen Schalk writes, it is past time we confront this dark history.

On September 22, Parliamentarians gave a standing ovation to Yaroslav Hunka, a former member of the the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, the military wing of the Nazi Party, during Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Ottawa. Before the end of the war, the unit was renamed the “First Ukrainian Division” in order to remove its association with the Waffen-SS.

The Derna tragedy shows that Canada was not generous or well-intentioned in Libya. As Owen Schalk argues, Ottawa wanted the Libyan state to fall. Now that it has, average Libyans are bearing the anguish while officials in Ottawa pat themselves on their backs for ‘freeing’ the country from tyranny. The cognitive dissonance is nothing short of astounding.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame is notorious for being one of Africa’s most repressive and blood-stained dictators. As Owen Schalk writes, Ottawa’s seemingly unconditional support for him is further evidence of the emptiness of Canadian rhetoric on democracy and human rights.

For several decades, Liberal and Conservative governments have steadily militarized Canada. Since the end of the Cold War, peacekeeping numbers have dwindled while Canadian contributions to military interventions abroad have increased. Canada now ranks 70th out of 122 United Nations member states that contribute to peacekeeping operations.