Argentines weary of annual inflation soaring above 140 percent and a poverty rate that reached 40 percent have elected right-wing libertarian economist Javier Milei. He had campaigned on the promise to privatize state-owned enterprises, slash government spending, dollarize the economy, eliminate the central bank, and close key ministries, among them health and education.

Those seeking an economic and industrial policy agenda that will reduce inequality, empower workers, and support a just transition in Manitoba can look to capital spending, legislative reform, and opportunities in the Crown corporation sector as areas where progress is possible, even if the narrow fiscal policy battle may have been temporarily lost.

Canada’s growing food insecurity crisis requires solutions that go beyond asking grocery store CEOs to bring down prices. Policies from windfall profits taxes, to price controls, to city-owned grocery stores would do much more to help with food insecurity, while backing labour’s struggle for wages and working conditions.

Since Israel began its brutal siege of the Gaza Strip, Canada’s labour unions have come out in vocal support of the Palestinians. Ranging from calls for an immediate ceasefire, to opposition to Canadian arms sales to Israel, and statements opposing violence “on both sides,” unions have increasingly lined up to call out Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza and the West Bank.

It has been decades since NDP governments anywhere in Canada have undertaken such a bold approach to governing, and this particular NDP government faces fiscal constraints. Nevertheless, this is the kind of reform program that the incoming Manitoba NDP government should commit to doing. Implementing such an agenda will take vision, determination and courage.

The Manitoba government can expect opposition to each move it makes to enhance worker rights. Nevertheless, it should embrace labour issues as critical to the future of our province and our country. In so doing, New Democrats will earn support from the workers who put them into office, as well as the wider population who understand that rising inequality is not the way forward.

Fed up with the deterioration of public services under the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government, thousands took to the streets of Montréal on September 23 to demand fair pay, improved benefits, and better working conditions while unions negotiated new collective agreements with the province. Journalist Lital Khaikin provides our latest labour update.

Unions have given us the weekend. They have fought for the eight-hour day. They have agitated for improved health and safety laws. They have eradicated child labour. They have managed to get us paid holidays and six paid public holidays each year. Here in Nova Scotia, unions have given 25 percent of workers a voice in what is going on in their workplaces.

Wages do not cause inflation but they do eat into profits. And profit, the unpaid labour of the working class, is the lifeblood upon which all the parasitic layers of society depend—from bosses to central bankers. The wage-price spiral is not a serious model; it’s a tale told to frighten workers out of threatening profit.

A government that is committed to the principles of collectivism, egalitarianism and redistribution, and that has the courage to act on these principles, would drive down the incidence of poverty. Enormously difficult though this would be, as is acknowledged in my conclusion, it should and could be done. Whether social democracy can do this or not is an important question.