I shouldn’t have to live in substandard housing while building and repairing homes for others. Everyone deserves housing and a decent quality of life, but there is a major paradox when the people who build the housing don’t make enough to live in it. The irony of being a construction worker in a housing crisis is not lost on me or my co-workers.

The musings of billionaires, the pronouncements of leading politicians and the version of events that we get from the corporate media all reveal how the rich and powerful view the world and their own place in it. We need to be alert to the common ways in which they misrepresent and distort reality for their own advantage, writes John Clarke.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of people are being accused of antisemitism or fired from their jobs because they dare to criticize the State of Israel, call it an apartheid state, and denounce the genocide of the Palestinians. May they rest assured: they are in good company, because if Einstein were alive today he would be on the front lines demonstrating with them.

After a year of bombardment, and with all eyes on the US presidential election, Gaza has become exactly what Naomi Klein and Jonathan Glazer feared—part of the soundtrack to everyday life, background noise we can all too easily tune out. But while life goes on as normal on our side of the walls, the genocide continues, barely within earshot.

As geographer Brett Christophers shows, many people now live in homes and rely on infrastructure like toll roads, hospitals, gas pipelines, data centres, water and sanitation services, telecom towers, and electricity generation facilities that are ultimately owned by pension funds, insurance companies, and banks through highly complex asset management schemes.

There is an unwillingness to entertain a future in which Canada Post’s role can evolve to serve the needs of Canadians. The degradation of delivery work by Amazon is accepted as a fait accompli, instead of something we can reverse if the government is prepared to defend workers’ rights against a company whose business model is geared towards undermining them.

The current election is notable not only for the issues being raised by Trump and Harris, but for the issues the candidates decline to address. Perhaps even more important, there’s been no discussion of the existential issues that will impact voters—and the country’s very stability—even more dramatically in the months immediately following the election.

Canada is in the depths of a severe housing crisis. Nationally, rents have increased 21 percent in just two years. While some large landlords are reporting huge gains in income, it is estimated that fewer than one percent of rental units are both vacant and affordable for the average Canadian. So, in such a dire moment, why is Canada subsidizing landlords?

We should not blindly accept what tech companies and their benefactors in government and the weapons industry impose, nor should we fuel AI-enabled wars as consumers. We need to scrutinize this paradigm shift and, at the very least, understand how these technologies endanger human life and may ultimately defy human nature as we know it.

All across the country our political leaders are getting behind coercive intervention as the best possible response to the ongoing opioid epidemic. We are meant to believe that this is a bold, commonsense approach set to change everything. But forced treatment is not new in Canada. It’s already an integral and growing part of our health care systems.