Four weeks ago, I almost lost my life while waiting for emergency care in a Calgary hospital. The ironic part of the story is that I always thought of Canada as having saved my life from the brutal Syrian dictatorship I fled more than 30 years ago. But never would I have thought that my life would be threatened in Canada—and certainly not in a Canadian emergency room.

More and more ECEs and care givers are leaving the sector in search of better paid work. Current early childhood education students are uncertain about their futures. Many are opting out of pursuing a career in this field altogether. Indeed, the province could be short 8,500 ECEs by 2026. Ontario needs to do better and pay its ECEs and child care workers a decent wage.

If the carbon tax is a dead corpse that keeps on dying, let’s make livelier offers. The transition to a sustainable energy system should have been rooted in class from the start. Let’s stop playing rhetorical tricks on ourselves, and fill the political void with actionable proposals. Along the way, we might even heal social wounds as well as environmental ones.

In Manitoba, a tax-cut shell game is obscuring regressive policies while deepening poverty. As Marianne Cerilli details, activists are working to challenge the provincial government’s focus on tax breaks over vital social investments, urging new Premier Wab Kinew to adopt an intersectional, participatory approach to budgeting to work towards true social justice.

Media co-ops and employee-owned media have been growing around the world in recent years. Majority shareholders of the leading French daily Le Monde announced last year that they would donate it to a foundation controlled by its journalists and other employees. As news media in Canada continue to crumble, going the co-op route makes increasing sense for their displaced workers.

The great science fiction fear has always been of AI escaping human control and the machines taking over, as in The Matrix films. The story of Lavender suggests, on the contrary, that the real danger arises when the awesome data-crunching capacities of AI are put in the hands of human beings. Derek Sayer on Israel’s human targeting software and the banality of evil.

While York’s vice-chancellor, administration, and philanthropic alumni enjoy a disproportionate share of financial wealth, the workers, teachers, and students at York University remain left out in the cold, with their concerns and demands for living wages and a safe and protected educational environment going unmet.

Canada’s role in West Africa was ostensibly a counterterrorism effort, but like the US and European presence it was meant to bolster, Canada failed to bring security or development to the region. In fact, the results of the ‘War on Terror’ have been catastrophic. Since 2002-2003, deaths in Islamist militant attacks in the Sahel have risen a shocking 50,000 percent.

Refugees are not a burden, and should not be scapegoated for a myriad of problems that are not of their making. They are people fleeing for their lives and seeking safety and opportunity, just like the famine Irish did. Their rights as displaced people and people seeking asylum need to be protected, and we need to do better at welcoming them.

The explosion of non-profit news in the US seen over the past decade is made up to an alarming extent of phony “pink slime” operations pushing political candidates or parties. That’s just part of the problem, however, as corporations have also set up local faux news operations to exert political influence and “greenwash” their environmental records.