Canada, like most of the Western (wealthy) world, is a self-styled “liberal democracy,” broadly considered the gold standard in global development. Liberal democracies are founded on a commitment to universal human rights and freedoms, values codified in international law. But in the last week in Canada, we have seen these liberal values rocked to their core.

The Dead Candidate’s Report: A Memoir tells the story of celebrated journalist Lesley Hughes, who decided she wanted to be a member of Canada’s Parliament, only to have her candidacy cancelled by her leader without notice, as she was preparing to launch her campaign. In fact, her political obituary was written and distributed to the news media even before the candidate herself was informed.

Just days after the conclusion of the United Nations COP26 climate summit in Glasgow and calls from international groups to stop the criminalization of Indigenous land defenders, militarized police violence against defenders in Canada has seemingly become normalized while a key deadline set by a UN committee that urged Canada to stop the Coastal GasLink pipeline has been ignored.

It turns out that all those government reports issued decades ago—the Special Senate Subcommittee on Mass Media (1970), the Royal Commission on Newspapers (1981), and the Senate Report on News Media (2005)—were right when they warned that Big Media in Canada were getting too big and powerful. Now they are monetizing their power over public perceptions and laughing all the way to the bank as a result, at least from New Jersey.

The extraction of Canadian radium by Eldorado Gold Mines Ltd. (later Eldorado Mining & Refining Ltd.) began with the exploitation of Dene land and labour on the coasts of Great Bear Lake and saw its calamitous fruition in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a still misunderstood act of barbarism that was only made possible with massive supplies of Canadian resources.

On Monday, November 8, Matthew Lau, a right-wing writer who works for the Fraser Institute and Montreal Economic Institute, wrote a piece titled “Conservatives are wooing unions and killing jobs as a result” for Postmedia’s flagship paper. The piece suggests that Canadian conservative parties have abdicated traditional right-wing economics by cozying up to labour unions. This couldn’t be more mistaken.

If we’ve learned anything over these past six years, it’s that Trudeau and his team are great at crafting their image, but rarely deliver the substance to back it up. As we see the government trying to greenwash itself once again, we should think back to 2015 and demand a climate policy that gets to the root of the problem. That means taking on the capitalist structures that created the problem in the first place.

Two and a half months after the fall of Kabul, the situation in Afghanistan could not be more dire. With the totalitarian Taliban reign among the most misogynist the contemporary world has seen, Afghanistan is a litmus test not only for any feminist foreign policy but for human rights in general. If Canada continues to abandon those women and young girls whose minds, dreams, and aspirations it has helped shape, it forfeits all moral authority.

Many people are ready for more democracy, for real democracy, not just for better electoral democratic practices. All political action, no matter how specific or local, should be coupled with demands for more direct decision-making power by the very people to be affected by a decision or practice. Economic democracy, democratization of public and private institutions, should be the focus of invigorated struggles.

Conditions are dire, but transit riders and workers continue to fight for change. Canadian Dimension spoke with two organizers with TTCriders—a grassroots, membership-based advocacy group in Toronto—about their current campaigns, organizing during the pandemic, the relationship between transit politics and climate justice, and advice for people who want to get involved in transit organizing in their own communities.