Yesterday’s 2021 federal budget tabled by Liberal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland fails to meet the needs of Canadians during the greatest crisis facing this country since the Second World War, writes Christo Aivalis. While there are certainly decent elements in this budget, the flaws and omissions are too significant, leaving notable space on the left to critique and improve upon it.

As world leaders prepare for this November’s United Nations Climate Conference in Scotland, a new report from the Cambridge Sustainability Commission reveals that nearly half the growth in absolute global emissions were cause by the world’s richest 10 percent, with the most affluent five percent alone contributing 37 percent.

In Janet Yellen’s confirmation speech to US Senators, she said the government must “act big” to deal with the pandemic’s economic fallout. Three months into her role as the first woman treasury secretary, Yellen is going beyond big spending with an ambitious plan to rollback decades of corporate tax cutting. Canada’s Liberal government must grab the same opportunity to go as big, if not bigger.

It is clear we need to expand our resistance and critique of the Fraser Institute beyond the reports it publishes and the ideologues and media pundits it puts in front of the television cameras. If these ideas go uncontested, we stand to lose a growing number of students to far-right economic views. The Peter Munk Centre for Free Enterprise Education is a real threat and we should treat it like one.

Now is not the time for timidity. The NDP is ostensibly the only party willing to take on a Green New Deal and make it a part of its platform. Andrea Horwath and party insiders, however, are too afraid of the cries of populism from the Liberals and Tories to give the people what they are craving. Standing with the voters isn’t populism, it is how elections are won. And winning, well that’s good politics.

Poverty is the product of policy decisions. When elected officials give billions of dollars in handouts to multinational conglomerates or nearly a trillion dollars to the big banks in liquidity support, they are making choices of their own. They are saying that the one in five children living in poverty by no choice of their own in Canada are less important to them than shareholder profits.

The fabric of our society is dependent on some semblance of equity and the issue of wealth inequality has been the demise of monarchs and empires. A progressive wealth tax may be the only policy that can prevent Canadian society from completely unraveling. Is the danger of doing nothing to appease the tiny fraction of Canadians with extreme wealth who will be affected worth the risk? We cannot afford to find out.

The pandemic has political leaders and policy-makers floundering about. They declare some areas free from restrictions, while others are to abide by varying degrees of lockdowns. Then the virus does an about-turn, and so do the so-called leaders and policy wonks. New and different restriction rules are put into place. Throughout all this reactive helter-skelter, there is one constant. Essential workers are to continue working. There are many of them.

With the arts facing a host of market failures, the promise of disruption and decentralization offered by 2021’s buzziest acronym—NFTs, or non-fungible tokens—seems messianic to a nascent class of techno-optimists who seem eager to come to the aid of the starving artists among us. Unfortunately, however, NFTs look to be more like an expression of venture capitalism and commodification than a salve to the world’s ailing creative industries.

Recently, the NDP’s official Twitter account put up a post suggesting that “small businesses are the backbone of our economy.” And while one tweet’s importance should not be overstated, Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley said the same thing recently, and it is representative of a problem that is central to the NDP and its failure to put forward a coherent message rooted in the class conflict and social relations that define Canada.