The 2024 budget does not get us anywhere near the kind of public leadership that we need. But the increase to capital gains taxes is an important, if minor, reversal of tax cuts that increased the wealth and power of the richest families at the expense of everyone else. That increase needs to be defended against the vested interests that will refuse any challenge to their power.

Israel’s Western backers know they are losing. They know that, despite the carnage the Israeli military is unleashing on Gaza, it is not any closer to defeating Hamas. They know that Israel is quickly becoming a pariah state, and as its global reputation sinks like an anchor, it’s dragging down Western credibility with it.

Budget 2024 took a significant step towards tax fairness by increasing the capital gains inclusion rate on Canada’s richest individuals and corporations. Tellingly, a measure designed to tax the rich to fund crucial public investments has caused a wave of outrage amongst a very vocal minority. Muneeb Javaid of Canadians for Tax Fairness explains.

If the carbon tax is a dead corpse that keeps on dying, let’s make livelier offers. The transition to a sustainable energy system should have been rooted in class from the start. Let’s stop playing rhetorical tricks on ourselves, and fill the political void with actionable proposals. Along the way, we might even heal social wounds as well as environmental ones.

In Manitoba, a tax-cut shell game is obscuring regressive policies while deepening poverty. As Marianne Cerilli details, activists are working to challenge the provincial government’s focus on tax breaks over vital social investments, urging new Premier Wab Kinew to adopt an intersectional, participatory approach to budgeting to work towards true social justice.

The estimated millions it would cost to search for and recover the remains of three slain Indigenous women buried in a Manitoban landfill would be much better spent on regenerating the site to create a national memorial to murdered and missing Indigenous women. As Robert France explains, “the site must become a double place: the unnamed healed and the named re-named.”

With this budget, the NDP has maintained a long-standing right-wing trajectory by increasing funding to policing at the expense of things that actually keep people safe. The “justice” budget is a shameful expansion of criminalization that—regardless of the government’s supposedly progressive bluster—will result in even more Indigenous people being policed, jailed, and criminalized.

In the unfair fight for automatic tax filing, Canadians need to get behind the underdog. While many of us might welcome and benefit from this service, it’s our vulnerable friends and neighbours who need it the most. We must come together to join the chorus calling for this crucial tax reform—and be louder than those motivated by nothing more than greed.

Climate change is the most visible, most threatening expression of a larger, planetary ecological crisis. Our approach must be commensurate with the structural challenge that crisis poses to the way society is organized if we are to halt and reverse the ecological catastrophe toward which we are now hurtling—and which is fueled by our dependency on fossil fuels.

On March 18, the House of Commons passed an opposition day motion put forward by NDP MP Heather McPherson. It called for a reconsideration of Canadian policy toward securing Middle East peace in the midst of Israel’s onslaught in the Gaza Strip. The initial NDP proposal was significantly stronger than the final version—though not nearly as strong as it should have been.