Essay by Patrick Lawrence, re-published here in The Multiplural World, Oct 12, 2026
(With extensive, related readings further below. Patrick Lawrence is a former correspondent in Europe with the International Herald Tribune. The following essay first appeared in his Substack blog ‘The Floutist’ on October 11, 2026. His essays are regularly re-published in Consortium News.
On 30 October, dockworkers across the Mediterranean are going on strike to stop the imperialist war machine. We are launching a strike fund to support them.
In the Progressive International’s thirty-first briefing of 2026, we look at NATO’s breathtaking re-armament drive, the dockworker unions mobilizing to arrest the gears of war, and the campaign of solidarity.
Announcing funding to prepare BC for oil spills is ‘a warning sign all on its own,’ UBCIC women’s rep says.
Ending months of speculation, today the Carney government designated the West Coast oil pipeline a project of national interest, sidestepping environmental safeguards that have been in place for decades and charting a course that could irrevocably alter the Salish Sea.
The potential rival to NATO will come with a call for an ‘Alliance for the future’ with Canada, according to a draft
STRASBOURG – Ursula von der Leyen will propose a radical change to Europe’s security architecture and the NATO Western alliance when she takes the floor in the European Parliament on Wednesday.
Bek MacIntosh helped rally her Alberta town to kill a megaproject. The wider fight, she vows, is ‘just getting started.’
The first thing that Bek MacIntosh, a 42-year-old business owner and mother of three, wants Albertans to know is this: it is possible for a community to stop a $10-billion hyperscale data centre dead in its tracks.
Even when the local and provincial governments have different plans.
We dodged a bad deal. Now the PM needs to take these steps to signal where Canadians really stand.
While it is a good thing that Prime Minister Mark Carney ultimately refused to sign an agreement with the United States, it is important not to mythologize that decision.
Israel’s ongoing genocide is the fascists’ blueprint for the world they seek to construct
Gaza has long been a warning of a new world order, now it is a blueprint—a testing ground, genocide laboratory, space of exception. The smaller of the two Palestinian territories has exposed how the limits of permissible bloodshed are tested, refined, and exported into broader global practice.
“To be honest, there aren’t really good data on the cost of climate change,” co-author Andy Hira said, something he attributed to “willful ignorance” among policy-makers reluctant to link fossil fuel production to the costs it helps create.
![Saab JAS 39 Gripen fighter jets. [Thomas Imo/Photothek for the German Federal Foreign Office via Getty Images]](https://ecosocialistsvancouver.org/sites/default/files/styles/medium/public/article-image/gettyimages-2276908674.jpg?itok=1yrJAflD)
