A new form of convergence is roiling Canada’s media. Our media were ravaged at the millennium by the convergence of ownership between newspapers and television which has left both on life support. A quarter century later, a new form of media convergence sees Canada’s big telecom companies engaged in a turf war with global tech firms.

Canada’s hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed even in Israel itself. Nevertheless, activists in Canada have been labelled antisemitic by university administrations, media outlets, and politicians for saying what Mordechai, a Jewish historian in Israel, documents clearly: that Israel is committing genocide, and Canada is complicit.

This is a crucial period during which countries must rapidly reduce emissions to limit global mean temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Instead, Canada is ramping up military spending and munitions production to meet NATO targets. Allied nations that are the most responsible for global warming have not paid their fair share to address the problem, and are heaping fuel on the fire.

It has been almost 40 years since there was major debate in Canada about our relations with the United States. While the FTA was implemented after the 1988 election, a majority of voters supported a more active role by governments in shaping economic development. Today we are confronted with the very serious probability that the free trade era has come to an end.

For over a year now, the West has been tearing up the legal and institutional fabric on which the post-war international order and its increasingly threadbare claims to moral authority rest—in much the same way as Biden has overridden the US judicial system to grant his son a pardon and Trump promises to weaponize the same system to settle scores with his political enemies.

The only lasting solution to this crisis is the upending of the economic order and the creation of a just and equitable mode of production—one that is able to rise to the challenge of climate breakdown, one that can claw back the wealth that has been hoarded by a tiny few, and one that is able to care for, educate, and give hope to all.

The Canadian establishment doggedly enables Israel and finds it advantageous for supporters of the Palestinian struggle to be contained. However, the lobby’s role in equating Jewish identity with Zionism and labelling opposition to this colonialist ideology as antisemitic is a potent factor that we should not underestimate.

One important element in this new phase of pan-Africanist struggle is the fight against foreign mining companies. West Africa is a mineral-rich region, and leaders from Traoré to Goïta to Senegal’s Bassirou Diomaye Faye recognize that greater state control of the industry is a necessary precondition for sovereign development.

Efforts by Western governments to suppress evidence-based history, whether through banning “critical race theory” or a focus on ideologically sifted “facts and dates” must be fought. We need to insist on national histories being told from the point of view of the common people with that history placed in the context of the whole history of our species.

Like our Palestinian allies in this struggle, we refuse to be patronized by Canadian policymakers. We refuse to be told that we are making a mountain out of a molehill. And we refuse to be told that we lack understanding by politicians who are in fact contradicting themselves. Our demands are simple and we will not stop pressing for them until they are realized.