This challenging and illuminating account is truly a new history for the twenty-first century, one that lays out how the country’s past lies before us, demanding redress. The two books that comprise this retelling of Canada’s rise from a colony to a nation that has routinely and relentlessly colonized, should and will be widely read by all concerned with basic issues of social justice.

As government programs like social housing have been dismantled and wages have been suppressed to the point where regular jobs can no longer provide a decent life, Canadians have increasingly turned to rent-seeking behaviour to resolve their financial insecurity. The result is that single-family homes have become a battlefield; the winners get to collect houses and the rent.

Some media companies have been denied status by Ottawa as a so-called Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization, eligible to claim payroll tax credits from Ottawa’s $595 million news media bailout. They will also thus likely be unable to receive payments from Google’s promised $100 million annual contribution to Canadian media under the Online News Act.

The Ukrainian attack on Kursk is a considerable gamble, driven perhaps by a sense that Ukraine’s weak military position left few other options other than a slow, grinding retreat. If it does induce the Russian government to negotiate, then it will have succeeded. But it could also end up extending the war rather than bringing it to a quicker end.

The harrowing conditions inside a notorious detention centre for immigrants in Mexico are brought to life in Inside Siglo XXI, the fifth book from journalist and author Belén Fernández. An Al Jazeera columnist and Jacobin contributing editor, Fernández got access to the jail not because she secured a press pass but because—thanks to an expired visa—she was a detainee.

Without the foregrounding of root causes, utilitarian piecemeal attempts at improvements to a weakened, degraded system are destined to failure. If decisive action is not taken against the privatizers and their enablers in government, then we are in grave danger of losing a vitally important part of what defines us as a decent society: a system in which one and all have access to quality health care.

There are many ways of measuring the evil that Israel has done to Palestinians. But the true measure of our evil lies in the West’s complicity in maintaining Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land, and in particular, in the support it has offered Israel in its genocidal assault on Gaza in response to October 7.

Elections highlight differences. Justin Trudeau and Pierre Poilievre already seem like opposites, and once the federal election campaign heats up, they will look even further apart. But after election day, magnified differences fade away. A Poilievre government would undoubtedly bring change, but also considerable continuity in critical areas.

In a small but significant step for defenders of Palestinian rights, the Canada Revenue Agency has revoked the charitable status of the Jewish National Fund, an organization that violates Canadian law by funnelling tax deductible charitable donations to the Israeli military. According to CRA policy, funds intended to benefit the operations of a foreign military cannot be tax deductible.

Here’s how bad things have gotten in Canada’s troubled newspaper industry: one bankrupt chain is now being taken over by a chain that is effectively bankrupt. Believe it or not, there is a high-finance method to this madness, but as CD media columnist Marc Edge explains, it takes a vulture capitalist mindset to wrap your brain around it.