Even as hospitals across Ontario were overwhelmed by patients during the pandemic, the system’s managers were reportedly busy looking for “cost-savings.” While the crisis has been used by Ontario’s right-wing government to further privatize the system, there is further evidence that the health system’s public sector managers have spent years wrecking it from inside.

Universities are supposedly society’s proponents of evidence-based decision making. And yet, increasingly we’re seeing university administrators citing scholarship when it supports predetermined positions and ignoring that scholarship when it proves inconvenient to economic and political goals. Are university leaders undermining the credibility of the institutions they are charged with leading?

It would be quite innovative for the government to acquire the Medicago vaccine plant they already paid for. This would provide Canada with something it hasn’t had since the mid-1980s: a domestic vaccine production facility. Not only could Canada then produce its own COVID vaccine, it could use the plant-based vaccine production process to create other essential vaccines.

The economic dislocation of the past few decades, aggravated by the pandemic, have weakened or severed these bonds, leaving us disconnected, atomized, trapped in a debilitating anomie that fosters rage, despair, loneliness and fuels the epidemic of substance abuse, depression and suicidal ideation. Estranged from society, we become estranged from ourselves.

Despite much discussion about ‘lessons learned,’ there have been few efforts at actually adapting our social protection systems in the pandemic’s wake, writes researcher Chris Webb. There has been alarmingly limited recognition that our income support systems remain ill-equipped to deal with both the changing world of work and future crises.

Housekeepers and food and beverage workers—a sector dominated by women of colour—have experienced increased pressure on the job, which has been exacerbated by the pandemic. But British Columbia’s hospitality workers raised the alarm, staging the longest hotel strike in the province’s history and securing a new vote in favour of a collective bargaining agreement.

Canadian Dimension spoke with Megan Q. Linton, a disabled and mad studies researcher and writer, and creator of the Invisible Institutions podcast. Megan’s research on institutionalization and disability has appeared in Canadian Dimension, Briarpatch magazine, the Disability Visibility Project and the CBC. Megan is currently a doctoral student at Carleton University.

Recession fear is now at levels worldwide last seen in 2020, cautions Marxist economist and commentator Michael Roberts. At the very least, global inflation rates are still likely to be much higher than before the COVID pandemic by this time next year—and at the worst, the global economy could have entered a new slump only three years from the last one.

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.

The transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is speedier than we can handle. Even with high rates of vaccination, the virus can both overload health care systems and generate problematic variants. With both six million dead, and a continuing toll of some 8,000 more per day, COVID-19 is a far greater threat than Ebola. It is its own perfect storm, and we may be caught in its midst for some time yet.