A responsible and progressive fiscal policy would weigh all these options in an effort to limit as much as possible our dependence on the money machine of the central bank. The alternative is debt monetization via inflation, and that means the less well-off pay the price, while anyone lucky enough to own property gets richer.

While Ecuadorians rise up in protest of a mercilessly cruel economic system, the Trudeau government has stayed silent while the Canadian embassy degrades them as violent rioters. It should come as no surprise that the leader of a global mining superpower should react this way toward a protest movement demanding social and economic change within Latin America.

Since Justin Trudeau took office in 2015, Canadian global arms sales have risen every year, with the sole exception of 2020. And while 2020 was a low for the Trudeau government, it remains Canada’s third-highest year for military exports on record. The only two years in which Canada sold more arms abroad also occurred under the Trudeau government: 2018 (over $2 billion) and 2019 (almost $4 billion).

Like it or not, Ottawa seems determined to bring online communication in Canada under the thumb of federal bureaucrats. Its assault on the Internet began in earnest when the ruling Liberal-NDP coalition used its majority in Parliament to invoke closure and ram through the contentious Bill C-11, or Online Streaming Act.

Gustavo Petro’s election victory in Colombia is a major blow to Justin Trudeau’s bid to bolster reactionary and pro-Washington governments in the hemisphere. Sunday’s presidential vote strengthens the socialist and regional integrationist forces Ottawa has sought to undercut. An ex-rebel fighter, Petro is widely considered Colombia’s first ever left wing leader.

We are in desperate need of global cooperation and investment in the environment, disarmament, refugee aid, and poverty reduction. Military spending and war are the main impediments to cooperation, to the rule of law, to the elimination of bigotry and hatred, to the ending of government secrecy and surveillance, and to the reduction and elimination of the risk of nuclear annihilation.

Following the 2022 Ontario provincial election, a new strategy needs to reconnect with social movements that are certainly growing amid multiple global crises but are now growing at an increasing distance from the electoral left. Amid the Liberal’s and Ontario NDP’s ongoing leadership transitions, the parties ought to give serious thought on changing how the electoral left builds from here.

In the lead-up to the upcoming WTO ministerial meetings, key figures in the global movement for vaccine justice are calling on the Canadian government to change its position on lifting intellectual property rules for COVID-19 vaccines and other tools. For more than 18 months, Canadian trade officials have refused to back the call for making vaccines, tests, and treatments available globally as public goods.

Whether 825,000 past NDP and Liberal voters who stayed home on June 2 think of themselves as progressive or not, the fact that they were not motivated to vote at all should set off alarm bells. Any progressive strategy for change must be rooted in the hard work of organizing, not just in the weeks before elections but always. To do anything else is to leave people on the sidelines.

The NDP has the time and window to take this moment not just to reset but to tear the party down and rebuild. That work can only be done by listening to its members and empowering them from the grassroots up. The province doesn’t need another liberal party. It has one and that’s more than enough. It needs an unabashedly left party. And now the NDP has a chance to give it one.