In this moment of global upheaval, and even as we acknowledge how much the political climate has been changed by anti-colonial and anti-racist movements, what would those who are bearing the brunt of our age’s most brutalizing forms of dispossession, disenfranchisement, wars, violence and ongoing genocides have to say of what we do in these institutions today?

Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce must really want to be a magician: making elephants disappear, then reappear behind you. Maybe that explains his tactic of making cuts to education, then announcing the addition of nearly 2,000 more educators all while introducing new legislation that will further centralize education and enable his Tories to make school properties available to their developer friends.

We reject Smyth’s attack on the credibility of the Manitoba Research Alliance. Community-based and accountable research is essential for understanding social conditions from the lived experiences of minoritized communities. Community-based research is and should be the basis for setting policy in the interest of all communities—not only those in positions of power.

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?

At a time when institutions are attempting to repair the harms they caused to Black communities and organizations involved in the 1969 Sir George occupation, when will the Canadian state acknowledge its role in manufacturing anti-Black violence during the occupation, and the continuum of harm and racial terror committed by the RCMP Security Service that followed?

First Nations seem unusually well placed to challenge an exclusionary politics that withholds scientific power from the majority of those affected by it. The successes of these First Nations could lead to greater changes. Perhaps this is why the faux-partisan pundit classes seem so bent on distracting us with their interminable squabbling over how to divide the cake amongst themselves.

At this moment in time, writes author and researcher Sam Gindin, the over-riding political question is how we to organize ourselves so as to build that kind of working class. The Ontario CUPE education workers gave us a glimpse of what is needed and what is possible. Will the labour movement in Canada build on this? There is much more to be done.

Moments of struggle always provide openings to build and move forward, and for workers who are participating, to learn key lessons and develop deeper consciousness and understanding. But every struggle and every moment aren’t necessarily similar. As a socialist, one has to look at the particularities of the experience and the potentials, and build on them.

When the OSBCU strike started, thousands of labour activists across the province were filled with a sense of hope; something all too rare in the labour movement these days. Not only was a union finally defying back-to-work legislation, but they were being joined by other unions, tacitly defying both the bans on solidarity strikes and wildcat strikes. What went wrong?

The Tories set off a bomb. But they were really just following the neoliberal agenda they brought with them to Queen’s Park in 2018: privatizing or diminishing everything that supports the public good—not building it up or making it last. Good neoliberals don’t want to pay proper wages, or ensure that governments meet basic needs like health care, food security, housing and education.