Canada is clearly in the middle of a severe addiction crisis. What is presently lacking is a coherent approach to what can be done to prevent so many of us from dying. Even though there are varied reasons why so many people die from addictions, predominant addiction and treatment models have, until recently, remained entrenched in approaches coming out of the 1930s.

Religious attacks on the public school system show contempt for this valuable public institution, and for the freedom of conscience and religion. Conservative cuts to the public school system, as well as promises of tax incentives for parents of children in private schools, are nothing but thinly veiled religious policies.

Turning education into a high-priced commodity is constricting access once again just when greater numbers of women, minorities, and Indigenous people have begun to access it. These are among the reasons why UMFA supports low or no fees, greater public funding of post-secondary higher education, and a return to universities’ core educational, researching, and training functions.

This November 2, students from Victoria to St. John’s will take to the streets for the Canadian Federation of Students’ (CFS) National Day of Action for tuition-free post-secondary education. Why free tuition? We are sleepwalking backwards towards a time when our post-secondary institutions were closed shops, reserved for children of the elite and dramatic change is needed now.

In the overlapping realms of cultural studies and critical theory, few scholars have made a more significant impact upon contemporary educational theory than Henry Giroux. In 2002, the American-Canadian academic was named by the British publisher Routledge as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period.

A wet snow fell in Montreal, Québec, on March 21, 2015. Thousands of people walked in a demonstration through the streets that afternoon and 38 000 students went on strike two days later, March 23rd, launching a much-anticipated movement, Printemps 2015 (Spring 2015). Spring 2015 was to be a mass mobilization in Québec against austerity and fossil fuels.

Will collectively produced wealth be used to enable students to work and learn free from the burden of wondering how to pay the rent, or will it be siphoned of by tax cuts, leaving students to pay a higher bill for access to institutions whose priorities are less and less determined by academics and students and more by unaccountable owners of money-value wealth?

Bringing together these strikes with the burgeoning OPS contract fight, and showing up at OPSEU’s numerous rallies and info pickets, Ontario workers can begin to build some real solidarity and power capable of taking on the Liberals.

We would do well to add If I Had a Hammer to our political playlists and to learn from David Rovics’ songs generally as we build our movements to bring about social change.

University professors have made a significant step forward in the fight against pervasive attempts to control discourse on Occupied Palestine, via stifling academic freedom on college and university campuses.