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.

Doug Ford’s use of notwithstanding thus becomes a declaration that he is engaged in class war. The legal niceties do not matter. He has unleashed a weapon of mass destruction. The right response is for CUPE, and all those who want to support them, to fight the fight in the same spirit. It is time to show the dominant class that without workers, they would not have anything.

It is likely that antisemitism is rising everywhere commensurate with other forms of white supremacism, like anti-Black racism and Islamophobia. While any hate activity on campus is disturbing, are Jews (and Jewish students) more subject to bigotry than those in other groups, like Blacks and Muslims? This is not an easy question to answer.

Not content simply to suppress the wages of public workers across the province, Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government of Doug Ford has fired a fresh barrage in its ongoing war: it aims to curb the right of education workers to strike. The new front the Conservative Party has opened against Ontario workers occurs at a moment of impasse in a specific contract negotiation.

The time has come for real political resistance to Ford and his austerity agenda, writes doctoral student Ryan Kelpin. At the heart of this specific union contract are the foundations of decades of anti-worker politics that must be confronted head-on. These are battles that are won in the streets by rank-and-file unionists and their allies. We must support them.

The CUPE 3912 labour dispute is the fallout from an inequitable distribution of resources within a two-tiered academic system. It is also an indictment of a two-tiered university professoriate which employs highly paid permanent faculty members while failing to increase pay for precariously employed sessional and temporary assistants and instructors.

Municipal elections in Ontario are fast approaching, and the oft-forgotten school board races are more important than ever. These elections are often left out of the discussion in part because of how complicated they are: every public school in Ontario is under the auspices of either the English, French, English-Catholic, or French-Catholic school boards.

Given the current crisis of politics, agency, history, and memory, educators need a new political and pedagogical language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which anti-democratic forces draw upon an unprecedented convergence of resources to exercise powerful and diverse forms of control.