The idea that a better world is possible can’t take hold if those who run the present one appear invincible. The pandemic has unleashed a crisis that poses the gravest dangers but opens up the real possibility of transforming the decades of defensive struggle against neoliberal attack into an offensive challenge to the whole capitalist system.

The COVID-19 crisis is making us do some of the things required to live within the planet’s ecological boundaries. We have a stark choice before us. Rework our economy and polity around the possibilities that tackle climate change, or continue to ratchet up the labour market to produce ever more jobs while paying no attention to their ecological implications or levels of pay and conditions of work.

Over the last few weeks, it has become increasingly difficult to watch Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister deliver updates during his COVID-19 livestreamed press conferences at the provincial legislature in Winnipeg. The situation in the province is developing in such a way that it may soon become a case study in the disastrous effects of austerity policies on societies recovering from the pandemic.

The COVID-19 crisis presents a remarkable opportunity to realize a post-pandemic Canada in the interests of the many through unity and action. To achieve fundamental change, we need to find a unified voice and to coalesce around and embrace a historic project of democratic decision-making. Are we up to it?

The spin is in! The Trump administration’s economic ‘message bearers’, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Kevin Hasset, the president’s senior economic adviser, have launched a coordinated effort to calm the growing public concern that the current economic contraction due to the COVID-19 pandemic may be as bad (or worse) than the Great Depression of the 1930s.

There is no pre-pandemic normal to return to. Neoliberal capitalism is certain to emerge from the present crisis transformed. There is, however, the question of how and by whom: by left forces in a progressive direction or by those of capital and the right in an even more authoritarian direction? That is what is politically at stake in the present moment. That is what this manifesto is about.

We know that profit-driven, capitalist care with its various forms of medical rationing and dehumanizing institutional approaches threaten all of us when a crisis hits. Now, it is more important than ever to build on existing successful models for anti-capitalist care, knit them together, and demand a society where people, and their care, are central in our political, social and economic organization.

The disastrous spread of COVID-19 in Canadian and American prisons illustrates the shocking exploitation and harms produced by incarceration. A response to this crisis, and beyond, must move beyond prison reform, and towards widespread decarceration—the rapid reduction of numbers of incarcerated people and subsequent reform of sentencing connected to the criminal code.

The rapid fraying of the economy due to COVID-19, with unemployment rates projected to reach 25 percent and higher, has prompted heightened interest in universal basic income (UBI). Can the CERB serve as a model? Is now the time to implement a UBI for Canada? If so, what needs to be done to create an effective, efficient and equitable basic income?

The outbreak has been blamed incorrectly on everything other than the employers, from a community conspiracy against authorities to the necessity of workers to carpool. Around 70 percent of workers at the Cargill High River plant, it turns out, are Filipinos; some of whom are recent migrants who were hired through the federal Temporary Foreign Workers (TFW) Program.