The unfolding climate catastrophe, growing inequality, the disintegration of the country’s social safety net, and the rise of profoundly reactionary yet increasingly viable political forces at home and abroad make it imperative for Canadian socialists to develop strategies to begin to substantively challenge Canadian elites at the national scale.

On November 28, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) announced it had selected Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation and the municipality of Ignace as “host communities” for all of Canada’s high-level nuclear waste. Yet the extent to which the people of northwestern Ontario consent to the proposed waste repository is, at best, unclear.

For Malcolm Norris and Jim Brady, the struggle for socialism was inextricable from the struggle for Indigenous rights. Their vision of social and economic democracy was rooted in the Métis experience of violence, racism, and dispossession at the hands of the Canadian state, including after the 1870 Red River Resistance, and the implementation of the scrip system.

No government fulfils every promise it makes to voters at election time. Still, looking back on the Trudeau government’s performance over the past nine, sometimes chaotic years—with the exception of major policy achievements like child care, pandemic income supports and dental care—this government has consistently overcommitted and underdelivered.

In its many forms, the global protest against the continued genocide of Palestinians—the refusal to be silenced, even against threats of arrest, deportation, and physical violence—not only challenges the national collective myth of the Israeli settler state, but also enacts a refusal to be complicit in violence carried out in its name.

Across Canada and abroad, the commercial forest industry has created monoculture conifer plantations of lodgepole pine, spruce and Douglas fir. It’s common practice to use glyphosate and brush saws in forests to destroy broadleaf species—such as aspen, birch, cottonwood, willow and alder—which are crucial for biodiversity and sequestering carbon.

This challenging and illuminating account is truly a new history for the twenty-first century, one that lays out how the country’s past lies before us, demanding redress. The two books that comprise this retelling of Canada’s rise from a colony to a nation that has routinely and relentlessly colonized, should and will be widely read by all concerned with basic issues of social justice.

Indigenous communities have always been at the forefront of struggles against the nuclear industry on Turtle Island. The current battles against nuclear waste disposal in northwestern Ontario are no different. If Canada is to have a just transition away from fossil fuels, then it cannot be based on nuclear power.

Defence Minister Bill Blair and Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly were recently in Nunavut to promote Canada’s new defence policy update. The policy change will expand the military presence of NORAD and NATO in the Arctic. This costly, carbon-intensive plan to militarize the region poses a grave threat both to Inuit communities and to the climate.

The estimated millions it would cost to search for and recover the remains of three slain Indigenous women buried in a Manitoban landfill would be much better spent on regenerating the site to create a national memorial to murdered and missing Indigenous women. As Robert France explains, “the site must become a double place: the unnamed healed and the named re-named.”