Refugee camp in Sudan. Photo by Alun McDonald/Oxfam/Flickr. “We feel shunned” On Saturday, February 22, on a bitterly cold and snowy afternoon in downtown Montréal, a demonstration was held by the Sudanese Canadian Association of Québec. The turnout was small and drew about 20 people to Square Philips. The protest happened in the wake of an announcement made two days prior by Immigration Minister Marc Miller to increase the application quotas on humanitarian immigration pathways for Sudanese nationals. Canada made a new commitment to resettle 4,700 Sudanese refugees by 2026. Four thousand peo ..read more

Whitedog Falls Generating Station, located on the Winnipeg River. Photo courtesy Ontario Power Generation/X. Do we need new east-west oil pipelines to gain energy sovereignty and supply Atlantic Canadians with domestic oil? Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and other heavy hitters in the Conservative party think so. When pipelines were laid in the 1950s to get Alberta oil to southern Ontario and Québec, a big mistake was made. Instead of taking an all-Canadian route through northern Ontario like the three transcontinental railways and the natural gas pipeline did, they went through Illinois and ..read more

Protest against the United States’ withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in front of the United States Embassy in Tehran. Photo by Hamed Jafarnejad/Wikimedia Commons. When Donald Trump illegally pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, he promised to secure a better arrangement through a policy of “maximum pressure” on the West Asian country. He did not get a better deal. Instead, Iran wrested back its bargaining chip by further increasing its enrichment of uranium. Trump was, as Iran expert Trita Parsi argued, “given disingenuously bad advice” by his advisors ..read more

Locals repaint a revolutionary mural in Havana. Photo by Carsten ten Brink/Flickr. The following article is adapted from a presentation given by the author at the 2025 annual general meeting of the Manitoba-Cuba Solidarity Committee. “The Special Period never ended.” As I read news from Cuba today, I think about these words, spoken by one of our guides during the 2022 Che Guevara Volunteer Work Brigade. The “Special Period” began in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s largest trading partner, and it was worsened by the tightening of the US blockade through measures like the Hel ..read more

Yves Engler raises his fist after being released from jail, February 24, 2025. Photo by Alex Tyrrell/X. Canada has long supported Israel’s violence and apartheid, but targeting the domestic anti-war movement is one of the more insidious aspects of this country’s complicity in Palestinian dispossession. I was recently arrested for social media posts critical of Israel and spent five days in jail to win the right to respond to Dahlia Kurtz, the Zionist influencer who pursued harassment charges against me. My experience fits in with a long history of Canadian police and intelligence services tar ..read more

Photo by Brenda Gottsabend/Flickr The Canadian government’s response to US President Donald Trump’s tariff threats must also contend with the growing weakness of our labour market. A weak labour market is always bad for workers. But it is an even bigger problem as we deal with Trump’s attacks on Canada’s economy. Canada’s current unemployment rate is 6.6 percent, down from a recent high of 6.9 percent. However, it is well above the 4.8 percent achieved in 2022, or even the 5.5 percent reached in 2019. The higher unemployment rate means hundreds of thousands of extra workers without paid work ..read more

Daily traffic on the 401 in Toronto. Photo from Flickr. After six years of carbon pricing in Canada, the signature—and highly controversial—climate policy of the Justin Trudeau-led Liberals is on its last legs. Provincial and federal Conservatives have opposed the measure since its inception, launching legal challenges against carbon pricing legislation in the Supreme Court and foregrounding an “Axe the Tax” message as a core plank of Pierre Poilievre’s campaign for the looming federal election. The NDP has also backtracked from its support of the policy, with federal leader Jagmeet Singh cal ..read more

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau meets with President Volodymyr Zelensky to express solidarity with Ukraine on the three-year mark since Russia’s full-scale invasion. Photo courtesy Office of the Prime Minister/X. As Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau prepares to exit the political stage from which he was recently ostracized, he has announced one more parting gift for Ukraine. The Trudeau government has been one of the staunchest supporters of Ukraine in its war against Russia. Canada ranks fifth among countries in support for Ukraine when all military, financial and humanitarian contributio ..read more

Photo by aisletwentytwo/Flickr This Black History Month, it’s important to recognize that economic injustice—both in Canada and around the world—is deeply rooted in racism. The property system in Canada was founded on the forced displacement and exclusion of Indigenous peoples from their land and immigration policies that prevented non-white immigration, effectively barring many thousands of people from accessing property in Canada. These racialized colonial systems laid the foundation for the current racial wealth gap, where racialized Canadians have about half as much wealth as their non-ra ..read more

Montréal-based writer and political activist Yves Engler is a long-time contributor to CD. On February 20, long-time Canadian Dimension columnist and contributor Yves Engler was arrested by Montréal police at the behest of pro-Israel media personality Dahlia Kurtz. In today’s Canada, offending Zionist influencers is apparently enough to land you behind bars. Canadians involved in progressive politics, from the left-wing of the NDP and Greens to the Communist Party, read Engler’s work and admire his commitment to social struggle. For decades, he has organized in support of just causes, from he ..read more