Just as the success of the climate youth movement has been attributed to the clarity and consistency of messaging, we need this same strategy with COVID-19. We also need that clarity as we move beyond the current pandemic and address ongoing societal challenges, using it as a transformative force to move forward as a global community.

By shutting down so much of our economy and turning the media funding model on its head, there is a unique opportunity to change Canada’s media ecosystem for the better. We must continue supporting left media, but this is also the time to push for a CBC that is more accountable to the public, has the funding to better fulfill its mandate.

Father. Professor. Partner. Friend. Son. Mentor. Ally. Scholar. Teacher. Uncle. Blue Jays fan. Music lover. Zaida. These are all words that could describe Mark Golden, professor emeritus in the Department of Classics at the University of Winnipeg, who on April 9 died of pancreatic cancer, a disease he had been stoically coping with for the past 17 months.

The government’s inaction reflects a deeply rooted attachment to risk-based, reactive paradigms when proactive initiatives that are precautionary and based on harm-avoidance are needed. The Liberal government is ignoring the reality that the virus does not discriminate, that prisons are porous to it, and that protecting the right to live is what defines us as human beings.

Multiple and concurrent disasters are unfolding in pockets all across North America connected to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. We understand this particularly in medical settings or in geographic contexts such as the hot spots in Seattle and New York City. But we will also witness disaster in institutional contexts, where a human tragedy is unfolding.

Dimitri Lascaris is intent to push the Green Party to the left, and to dispense with the notion that ideological camps on the right or the left have lost their meaning. He also wants to give progressives a place to stake their long-term future, and give the majority of Canadians who hold progressive views a real voice in parliament. Canadian Dimension spoke with Lascaris on Saturday, April 11.

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.

Unlike what many liberals claim, police cannot be reformed with better training, oversight, or diversity. Nor can police violence be eliminated by following the victim-blaming advice from (mostly) white social media users. Both of these supposed solutions reflect deeply naive and ahistorical understandings of what it is that police do.

As many Canadians remain isolated in their homes due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the Trudeau government quietly announced it was lifting its suspension of arms export permits to Saudi Arabia. It has also renegotiated the government’s $14 billion armoured vehicle deal with the belligerent and repressive monarchy.

Inequality and class disparity have been on full display in the devastating coronavirus outbreak. On the one hand, Canada’s dependence on the work of undervalued and underpaid health care workers, cleaners and retail employees has been clearer than ever. On the other, these workers are bearing the brunt of the economic crisis. In March, one-third of workers earning $14 an hour or less became jobless or lost most of their hours of work.