On December 20, 1989, US forces invaded Panama and overthrew the government of Manuel Noriega. Noriega had proven too independent for his one-time sponsors in Washington, who suddenly accused him of drug trafficking and endangering American citizens in the country. Canada was the only nation in the Western Hemisphere to openly support the invasion.

With our federal Liberal government teetering and an election imminent, the Online News Act under which Google promised to subsidize news media here could be in jeopardy, since Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has threatened that a Conservative government would repeal it if elected.

In the Great Lakes region of Africa, which is ground zero in the global supply chain for Big Tech, Apple appears to have betrayed its vision. The company stands accused of deceiving consumers, laundering Congolese minerals and profiting from war crimes, according to criminal complaints filed against Apple subsidiaries in France and Belgium.

Economists like to fashion themselves as the “adults in the room.” However, their notion that incomes are determined by productivity is naïve. It ignores the role of power in the determination of distribution. The guise of objectivity that economists give to distribution diverts us from the difficult adult conversation that we must have: who should get what and why?

There is no way for the moderate, left-of-centre approach to work within the larger neoliberal world economy. Unless the latter is subverted, or challenged with a new political project, the kinds of alternatives proposed in Andrew Jackson and Scott Sinclair’s article (including an expanded social safety net and caring sector) cannot come to be.

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.