If we want to identify the real masters of cancel culture, however, we need to follow the modus operandi of the institutional pro-Israel lobby and its adherents, like the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs or B’nai Brith Canada. They can teach us a thing or two about how to kill free speech, and how cancel culture works to stop an utterance before it is even spoken.

Incarceration is a manifestation and continuation of chronic and interwoven structures of oppression. It is used to enforce racial capitalism, apartheid and colonialism, from the US to Canada to occupied Palestine. This system is not broken because it tolerates the death traps prisons and jails have become. It is functioning exactly as designed, and will not provide justice in response to this tragedy.

Should Canadian foreign policy continue to be enmeshed with mining interests abroad? That is one of ten questions put forward in an open letter calling for a “fundamental reassessment of Canadian foreign policy” following Canada’s second consecutive defeat for a seat on the United Nations Security Council.

Across Canada, the coronavirus crisis has accelerated the adoption of vast surveillance technologies—from systems that allow citizens to report neighbours who violate COVID safety precautions to contact-tracing through phones. But while these technologies are only beginning to be normalized among the larger Canadian public, they have been more commonly deployed among our most vulnerable communities.

Our team at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research has developed a ten-point agenda for a post-COVID-19 world. Last week, I presented this agenda at the High-Level Conference on the Post-Pandemic Economy, organized by the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). We are certainly in need of a New International Economic Order.

In the struggle against racism and police violence we need to enlarge our circle of those who deserve our support to the entire world. The “cop problem” we face is intimately tied to the wealthy imposing their will on the majority. Reforms of the police are doomed to fail until we overthrow the unjust global economic order that requires force to maintain minority rule.

The health crisis unfolding around the globe has already had monumental impacts. News media report the pandemic is an unprecedented event. However, casting this crisis as exceptional narrows the focus. While the COVID-19 virus is unprecedented in its transmissibility, the lack of preparedness and inadequate protection for health-care workers is an old story.

Canadian Dimension spoke with Karrie Auger, an amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton) organizer with Free Lands Free Peoples and its Prairie Province Prisoner Support Fund, an emergency fund that has raised over $23,000 to distribute to “recently released prisoners, those still inside, and the families of people still incarcerated in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.”

Data is not immune to injustice. In fact, it can be used to perpetuate injustice. The demands for equity data collection and analysis aim not to reproduce the taxonomies and hierarchies of oppression, but to forever undermine them. Our ethical obligation to life is a refusal to omit the inequitable conditions that expand the chasm of expected longevity.

The increasing violence surrounding extractive operations around the world demonstrates the role of mining as capitalism’s ‘commodities fallback’ in the face of unprecedented economic upheaval during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the global crisis continues to unfold, the inherent dilemmas of this planet-wrecking system are quickly being unearthed.