Successive Canadian governments have treated taxes like a problem that can only be fixed through tax cuts, with more slashes promised from all sides during every election. Imagine the investments we could have made by now if governments had approached taxes not as a problem, but as a solution. Progressive tax policy has a significant role to play in addressing our country’s most pressing challenges.

Even in a rich country like Canada, the neoliberal decades have seen a huge intensification of the rate of exploitation. Industrial jobs have been moved offshore, unions have been weakened, low wage precarious work has proliferated and the social infrastructure has been battered. A key component of the attack on social programs and public services has been the reduction of income support for unemployed, sick and disabled people.

Unfortunately, it is even less certain whether the country has in its politics the intellectual vigour that will preclude hasty and regrettable decisions when urgency demands action. Such a country as Canada should not seem confined or confining. But who now is capable of dreaming big?

Based on the notion that the private market can always do things better, the doctrine of privatization has become so pervasive that it is rarely questioned or challenged, becoming a driving force in our politics. The benefits of privatization are routinely asserted with great confidence, although rarely with any proof. In fact, the evidence suggests the opposite: that privatization is costing us dearly in financial terms.

The “Ok Boomer” meme, which many young people are using online as a rebuttal against out-of-touch baby boomers, taps into frustrations disproportionately experienced by millennials and Generation Zers—particularly in Canada’s most unaffordable cities. Unfortunately, however, the meme also represents a discourse that ignores the many older people experiencing poverty, discrimination and hardship.

If members of the billionaire class support a wealth tax on the grounds that it numbs adversarial attitudes towards wealthy elites—and slows the pace of growing inequality so that the rich can carry on their businesses as usual—is it likely, on its own, to be an effective way of serving the long-term interests of poor and working people?

A new paper finds that economic sanctions implemented by the Trump administration since August 2017 have caused tens of thousands of deaths and are rapidly worsening the humanitarian crisis. “The sanctions are depriving Venezuelans of lifesaving medicines, medical equipment, food, and other essential imports,” said Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of CEPR.

Theresa May’s recent claim that austerity is over is exposed as a lie as communities in the UK experience the horrible effects of the roll out of Universal Credit. In Ontario, austerity is a work in progress. What must be understood is that this attack doesn’t only impact the poorest people. It is a ruthless strategy to increase the supply of super exploited workers and, in doing so, depress wages generally.

If we want a social system that is not alienating then we must look at what we have now as a whole, as an interconnected set or processes and institutions that are utterly alienating. They must be rejected root and branch, attacked all at once and all the time.

Neoliberalism as economic theory was always an absurdity. None of its vaunted promises were even remotely possible. Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite while demolishing government controls and regulations always creates massive income inequality and monopoly power, fuels political extremism and destroys democracy.