Episode Transcript
ANTIFASCIST DAD — Episode 23
The Future of Socialism in Canada
with Jasmine Peardon
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MATTHEW: Hey everyone, this is Matthew Remski with Episode 23, "The Future of Socialism in Canada," with Jasmine Peardon, who is running for president of the New Democratic Party. In my home country of Canada, we'll go deep into the weeds on what it will take to rally the aging left-of-centre old political guard to think and act as boldly as the socialists did a century ago, especially in light of the climate crisis.
JASMINE: Yeah, you're right that this is going to be an uphill battle. But I don't think it's necessarily more realistic to say, oh, we can just ignore that people die in these terrible working conditions, and that we have wildfires taking out whole towns just regularly, every single year now. I just don't see that as realistic. Something that we say within our campaign a lot is: you're not crazy, you're not insane — they're the radical ones.
MATTHEW: So that's coming up. For housekeeping: you can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, and I'm on YouTube and TikTok as AntiFascistDad. The Patreon for this show is AntiFascistDadPodcast, where subscribers get early access to every second part of these main feed episodes, including this one. And once again, I'll remind you that April 26th is the date my new book will be out. It's called Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times. If you pre-order — the link is in the show notes — that's really good for visibility, algorithms, all of that. So thank you so much for checking that out.
So I wanted to talk with Jasmine Peardon today for a bunch of reasons. She's an organizer, policy researcher, and grassroots activist running for president of the New Democratic Party. We're speaking just before the 2026 NDP convention, which is coming up in about a week in Winnipeg.
Along with the clarity and pragmatism she brings to her political commentary on social media, she carries the acute awareness — as a lot of us do — of the critical moment we're at in Canadian political history.
There's always a fork in the road, with socialism on one side and barbarism on the other. Today we're barrelling towards that fork well over the speed limit.
Now, for my non-Canadian listeners: the NDP has been Canada's third-party option to Liberal and Conservative pro-capitalist rule. There is a small Green Party here and a Quebec separatist party as well, but these have their limitations. For leftists committed to electoral politics today, the NDP is really the focal point for whether the critical need for socialist policies can be communicated and implemented at scale.
Is the party suited for this? We'll cover the timeline at the top of our discussion. But the short story goes like this: the NDP was founded in 1961 as a merger between the Canadian Labour Congress and the anti-capitalist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. But it shed its anti-capitalism almost immediately. By 1969, the main socialist faction was already being pushed out. And since then, the party has pursued reformism over structural change, delivering compromises like healthcare that are now being rolled back.
You'll hear me mention in my discussion with Jasmine that growing up in an NDP family here in Toronto, I knew we were the good guys. But the union talk between my parents over the dinner table was focused on their professions — as it should have been — but with not a lot of time or available information to consider things like imperialism, the oil economy, or internationalism. These things weren't ignored; they were just relegated to the background.
So the core emotional drive of that membership was defensive: hold the line against the boss, extract as many concessions as possible, and make sure you keep them — because they're going to get clawed back.
And that was all good. But through it I also kind of developed an implicit liberal position that if enough people were on this side, took this point of view, capitalism would just function more cleanly. And so I didn't have much of an idea of how much history and vitality had been stripped out of my political horizons — or all of our political horizons.
By the time I was Jasmine's age, at 28, I was disinterested in politics because, to be honest, reformism is just endlessly disappointing and boring. And so I swerved into a life of spiritual seeking.
Now, at the same age, Jasmine is heading in the opposite direction, seeking to administrate the party that has disappointed so many. And she's doing it against long odds within the party, given the old guard's power. Should she win, she'll be administering a caucus that is totally broke and may only have a few seats in Parliament, as Mark Carney hoovers up floor-crossers toward a new neoliberal majority — one in which populist fears of the fascist chaos to our south are mobilized to support Carney's vision of strength, which is to become basically a junior arms broker who makes money for his corporate friends by turning our wilderness into an ATM.
For the past six years, working on Conspirituality with Derek and Julian, I've had to absorb myself in American politics. That's not foreign to me — I'm actually a dual citizen, I was born in Michigan, it's in my heart and blood. But with this episode and episodes to come, I'm more concretely and permanently turning my attention to my city, my province, and my country.
Not only because I have to work more where I am for my own sanity, and getting better informed for the sake of my kids is a really good idea, but because I think this is a crucial historical moment for socialist possibility in Canada. The question is: will the Liberal establishment fold completely to fascist power?
The US scenarios that blend together into an analogy for how I'm thinking about this are the shooting of anti-Vietnam protesters at Kent State, George McGovern's 1972 presidential run and his crushing defeat to Nixon, and the DNC cutting Bernie Sanders off at the knees in favour of Hillary Clinton in 2016.
So why is this such a critical time? Here are just some of the intersecting patterns of capitalist crisis and proto-fascism that I see rising around me. Economically: decades of declining profit rates have deepened since the 2014 oil price collapse, and the US tariffs instituted in 2025 have escalated this spiral. Unemployment sits near 7%, housing remains unaffordable for an entire generation of workers, and corporate and household debt continue to rise. The Carney government's response — his Canada Strong budget — cuts $57 billion in program spending over five years while committing $81 billion to military expansion and cancelling a capital gains tax hike. Social services, refugee healthcare, Indigenous programs, and 40,000 public sector jobs are being sacrificed to fund rearmament. Some of those jobs belong to the people who monitor climate change in the Arctic. We're really talking about a DOGE-type situation here in Canada.
On the culture war front, white nationalist Active Clubs now number more than 30 chapters in Canada. The armed forces have been infiltrated by white nationalists, and members have been charged with plotting anti-government terrorist attacks. Rachel Gilmore has been reporting on the rise of fascist fight clubs that use gyms in major cities in after-hours slots, often without the gym owners knowing what they're up to.
Conservative opposition leader Pierre Poilievre may be on his last legs in the leadership. I won't be sad to see him go — but he has nonetheless mainstreamed far-right rhetoric for the foreseeable future, through the Jordan Peterson pipeline and by cozying up to and validating the right-wing extremists who ran the trucker convoy back during pandemic lockdown.
In terms of media: the Postmedia Group, which controls about 130 newspapers in this country, is 66% owned by a Trump-linked American hedge fund. You can feel it, you can sense it in everything that comes across the desk. The Overton window of concerns and potential for analysis is very narrow. Meanwhile, the CBC — the last major Canadian-controlled national broadcaster — faces defunding threats from the Conservatives. But of course Carney will probably get to it first, with $192 million slated to be removed over the next several years.
In terms of more concrete US influence: the vultures from down south are actively meeting with Alberta separatists — specifically the Alberta Prosperity Project, a group calling for a referendum on whether the energy-rich province should leave Canada. Geoffrey Rath, a leader of the APP, confirmed the group is seeking another meeting with US officials, where they are expected to ask for a $500 billion credit line to support Alberta if a future independence referendum goes their way. You can imagine the strings that would be attached to that credit.
In the coming months I'll be doing more of this, because I think for those living outside the full fascist conditions of the US, it's important to document how a middle power — as Carney likes to call us — is skidding in the same direction, and what anti-fascists can do in the short and long term to stop it.
Okay. Jasmine Peardon is a graduate student. She's spent several years working in federal public policy, co-founded Montreal Anti-Apartheid, and co-led the development of the Capitalism Can't Be Fixed policy platform for the Yves Engler for NDP Leader campaign.
An inside-baseball note on that: you'll hear Jasmine mention how Engler — a lifelong ecosocialist activist — was barred from running for the leadership by a backroom, closed-doors party vetting process that probably had a lot to do with his hardline position and his unambiguous rhetoric against Zionist violence in Palestine. This was a bruising defeat for the most radical wing of the NDP in formation. For insiders, I think it really exemplifies the struggle between by-the-book socialism and democratic socialism, or people's perception of this difference. The frontrunner now is Avi Lewis, who overlaps with Engler in that 90% way where the remaining 10% might be more about rhetoric or strategy than anything else. I do have a healthy hope that the most radical aspirations and skills of the party will continue to be centred.
Jasmine Peardon, welcome to Antifascist Dad. Thank you for taking the time.
JASMINE: Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me.
MATTHEW: There are a lot of ways we could briefly encapsulate the state of Canadian politics at the present, but I want to use a character arc that my listeners are familiar with and that now has some global attention. It's about Mark Carney's movement from his speech at Davos to his endorsement of the US-Israeli illegal war in Iran. I think he's really giving us a clear picture of what the powerful of this country want. Do you feel that's fair, and if so, what do they want?
JASMINE: I think it's very fair. It's not unusual for politicians to say one thing and do another thing. And I think that's exactly what we saw with Mark Carney, and what we've seen throughout all of recent history. Trudeau did the same thing — he talked about the international rules-based order. We've had "responsible conviction." We've had all of these different terms that politicians use to try to make it seem like we're better than we are.
MATTHEW: "Responsible conviction" — was that Trudeau? I think I missed that one.
JASMINE: Yeah, that was Trudeau, in the first year that I dissociated.
MATTHEW: Yeah, we have ass-covering terms for it. But the drive is towards what?
JASMINE: You have to think about who he was speaking to. That was at Davos, not at the United Nations or something like that. At Davos he's speaking to a technocratic business elite. And what he's saying is: business as usual. We're going to make partnerships with the European Union. There's also a lot of right-wing attention at Davos in recent years, so he's kind of speaking to them too, giving them more of a populist argument. He's trying to play both sides. But if you actually look at what he's saying, he's saying: we're open for business.
MATTHEW: For our American listeners who are used to the capitalist duopoly of the Democrats and Republicans, and who might think the New Democratic Party is currently a left-wing or socialist party — what would you tell them about the last 40 years of NDP politics to add some nuance to that view?
JASMINE: The NDP is a social democratic party. It's kind of aligned with Bernie Sanders. It's not a democratic socialist party. That distinction is really important. The founding of the NDP — in 1961 — was a merger between the Canadian Labour Congress and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. The CCF was the anti-capitalist part of that merger. But as soon as they created the NDP, they got rid of the fight against capitalism. Now they're more about reforming capitalism. We see that throughout the NDP's history — it's been reformist. They've had some wins, but those wins have been compromises, and we're seeing them rolled back now. Universal healthcare is obviously the biggest win — we got that around the 1970s for most provinces. But it was a compromise, because today we're seeing it degrade in front of our eyes. Same with the dental care program. That's a compromise because it's not available to everyone — it's actually quite exclusive, hard to access — and it didn't even get increased funding this year. So it's not a socialist party. It's very much trying to alleviate some of the pains of capitalism, and that's important, but it's definitely not a socialist party.
MATTHEW: I grew up in an NDP household, in a union family, with both of my parents being high school teachers. My sort of immature impression — but I think it was kind of accurate — was that the party was there to ensure concessions might be possible from the government with regard to salaries, benefits, things like that. They were kind of your representative in relationship to the government, there to extract the best deal. And my understanding is that the general union focus — really narrowed down to the particular trade, like teachers asking for this stuff and auto workers asking for that stuff — meant there wasn't really a sense in which these movements were coordinated into an all-out, coherent attack against the capitalist system in general. And I suppose what you're saying is that that got washed out of the mix right back in the 1960s, in that original merger.
JASMINE: That's exactly it. It was created in 1961, and then by 1969 there was already the Waffle movement, calling for socialist representation within the party. And the Waffle movement ended up essentially getting kicked out. So from the very start, the NDP has not been socialist — it's just been trying to reform certain aspects for certain people at certain times. It's not a full-out assault or opposition.
MATTHEW: So maybe for our American listeners: if you can imagine a party built around, let's say, the Squad Democrats in Congress — people who are not necessarily committed to anti-capitalist politics and who are always sort of hopeful that the mainstream centre-left or progressive spectrum can be swung a little bit more towards fairness, and it never really seems to work out — that's maybe the correct political comparison?
JASMINE: Yeah, they're really what Kshama Sawant calls the "progressive establishment." It's like AOC, Bernie Sanders — their voices are important to an extent. But at the same time, you have to wonder: how much are they just co-opting this progressive energy and then dead-ending it into either the Democratic Party or the NDP?
MATTHEW: Yeah, this is a really important concept that I don't think has been aired out on this podcast yet, which is movement capture. The progressive element of the Democratic Party can speak to and speak for a certain amount of pain within the working class. And if it captures that attention, that allegiance — because it's part of the Democratic Party — eventually it's going to be absorbed into a little bit of fresh energy behind the next cycle of choosing between the banker and the bureaucrat.
JASMINE: I think it's really dangerous, because people are really upset about something, and then they do their civic duty — voting, donating, maybe knocking on doors for a day — and then they give up. And that's exactly what the party wants. They don't want full-time activists working year-round. They just want your money and your votes.
MATTHEW: You know, speaking of all of this history, you're kind of trying to reverse it — because you are running for NDP Party president from the Socialist Caucus. How much history are you fighting against? And is there some good part of NDP history that you're trying to resuscitate?
JASMINE: We need to be honest about what's possible and what we're fighting for. Our movement, from the very start, has been very honest about how much of a chance we actually have. But I'm picking up on a long line of people who have challenged the NDP to go further left. Most recently, in 2022, Jessa McLean ran a presidential campaign in the NDP on a very similar platform to mine — and I didn't even know about it until after I articulated my own platform, and somebody said, "Hey, someone just did this a few years ago." So this is a continual process, and it's not something we can give up on just because we might lose. We need to be fighting in all areas. As a socialist, you run in elections, you put your ideas into parties. You can't just not speak to them.
MATTHEW: What happened to McLean's bid?
JASMINE: She got 30% of the vote, which was very shocking. What she was saying was true, and it resonated. But here's how it works: only people attending the NDP convention can vote for the president. It's not the broader membership across the country. The people who go to the convention — maybe a thousand of them — are all party insiders, compared to the 100,000 to 150,000 NDP members. And it costs money to go. It's in person. There's a delegate fee, and you have to get nominated to become a delegate. So it really is just party insiders.
MATTHEW: Yeah, I voted online this week, and there was no option to vote for you or for any other candidate for president. So I figured it was a convention thing. We're talking about what, like 500 people being responsible for this?
JASMINE: Potentially a thousand, depending on how many people go and who votes. But it's so important — and so telling — that they don't give you the option of democracy in it. That's how you know it's very important.
MATTHEW: Oh — you mean they don't spread it out to the entire membership?
JASMINE: No, exactly. Only people at the convention can vote for this.
MATTHEW: Oh, okay — so it's already favouring the old guard.
JASMINE: Yes, 100%. The unions have a lot of representation at the convention. They always send a delegate or multiple delegates — and their expenses are paid, I imagine.
MATTHEW: Right.
JASMINE: Exactly. And they're kind of already deciding who their candidate is before they go, and then they just make a recommendation to everybody there. But what I've been told is that the other candidates for president are going to have access to all the different rooms and caucuses happening during the convention. Whereas me, as a grassroots candidate, I can only be in one place at one time, and only in the rooms I'm invited into. So when people are making their pitch for president, if they haven't heard my name or heard my speech, I have no chance — whereas all the other establishment candidates will have that opportunity. So a big part of my campaign is asking people: when you're in these caucuses, ask if you can invite me in to make a speech or a statement on my behalf.
MATTHEW: It's amazing what you actually have to overcome. So we're going to talk about how you manage your hope and expectations in a little bit. But on this notion of how the old guard is going to respond to a younger member of the Socialist Caucus running for president — let me just pretend for a moment that I'm an old guard boomer. I'm not a boomer, but let's just pretend. And I say something like this: "Jasmine, you're young, you're enthusiastic, we really need that energy. But politics is a long game and you need a lot of patience if you want to make even small amounts of progress. Revolutions don't turn out so well, so I don't know why you think everyone should be thinking about Gaza and climate collapse and Iran when most people just need good union jobs." What do you say to that, Uncle?
JASMINE: There's so much to unpack. There's the paternalistic aspect of it — oh, it's so great that you're young and trying, but you have no idea what you're doing.
MATTHEW: I'm really sorry. I felt like shit saying that. But I imagine you get that all the time.
JASMINE: Oh, increasingly every day now — unprovoked emails from people saying, "Oh, this is amazing, but you're very young and..."
MATTHEW: It follows. I interviewed Sara Rzaik, who was one of the main organizers of the U of T encampments a couple of years ago, and one of the things we talked about was the patronizing framing of each initial exchange — it seems friendly, but it rides entirely on: "You just don't know shit. You're too young to understand the world, the way things work, the ways in which we've learned to compromise with our values." It's a formula.
JASMINE: It's understandable because capitalism is all-encompassing, and it draws you in and keeps you there. So you have to constantly fight if you're going to go against it. And yes, this is going to be an uphill battle. But I don't think it's more realistic to say we can just ignore that people die in terrible working conditions, that wildfires are taking out whole towns every single year now. I just don't see that as realistic. Something that we say in our campaign a lot is: you're not crazy, you're not insane — they're the radical ones. And I think that's very true.
MATTHEW: Yeah, it's such a great point, because the "be reasonable" contradiction is the premise that we're living in a reasonable manner — that things are flowing along in a sensible way, or that they could sensibly improve, or that things will work out. And all of the evidence is to the contrary. It's like you have to speak through a spell or something.
JASMINE: Exactly. What they're saying doesn't actually make sense. A good union job is not a job that kills the environment. That's not a good job — that's a bad job. A union job just means you have protections around your job. It doesn't need to be environmentally destructive. It can just as well be environmentally beneficial. You need to be strong within your own principles, understand what's right and logical — ignoring all the propaganda, ignoring all the voices whispering in your ear — and just say: no, that's actually illogical.
MATTHEW: Rhetorically, though — saying "no, that's not logical," is that your opening line? When you're on a stage or on a panel, what's your opening line?
JASMINE: I think honesty is really important. You started this conversation talking about Mark Carney, and the lack of honesty is very confusing — especially for young people trying to get into politics, because they see someone saying one thing and doing another and they think: I'm confused, and now I'm in peril because I don't really understand. So honesty means — for example, in my run for president right now, I've been approached by a group trying to do democratic renewal within the NDP. They position themselves as the grassroots voice of the party. At the same time, I know this group has been extremely hostile to my campaign with Yves Engler and with Bianca, and has allowed anti-democratic measures throughout this entire leadership race. So I can't just come to them and berate them and say, "You didn't stand for democracy, therefore I won't work with you." That's unrealistic. But I can let them know that I represent certain principles and values, that I'm happy to open my campaign to include everyone — but I'm not going to bend my principles. We might have disagreements, and that's fine, because the whole point of my campaign is democracy.
MATTHEW: Yeah. So when you speak about democratic renewal, you're talking about the nuts and bolts of internal party mechanics — how meetings happen, how various administrative processes go, who gets to chair things. Is that the profile of the job?
JASMINE: Yeah, exactly. There are kind of two campaigns going on right now. In the broader left world there's the leadership campaign, and that's important — leadership should be deciding the future of the party and what policies are going to happen. But what we've actually realized — those of us who are hard-left activists or party insiders — is that the NDP establishment, the ones who don't get voted on by the broader public and aren't really known, they're the ones actually calling the shots. So there's now a dual campaign going on behind the scenes, because we realize they're restraining the party, making decisions that are not democratic, limiting what a leader can do, and limiting the party's future.
MATTHEW: I want to just pick up on one thing you remarked upon — that when young people come into politics, they hear something dishonest and it is paralyzing. Why would that happen? Why would anybody be dishonest in public life? It's almost as if — and I'm not saying this in a derogatory or infantilizing way — there's a time in adolescence where you understand very clearly what the contradictions of social life are, and you understand what doesn't make sense, and you feel injustice really acutely. And I think you're describing the situation of the person who has not yet left that behind — or hasn't had it drilled out of them, or beaten out of them. Is that what you're talking about? You arrive and you can't believe that people are two-faced.
JASMINE: When I was younger — and I also see it in some of the younger people I hang out with now — they always ask me: "Okay, but what's the right answer? Which one is correct?" And you have to kind of tell them: well, it's what you believe. You can believe in capitalism or you can believe in other things, and that will be the right answer for you. When you're getting taught by professors, they have a right answer. But you still don't know what your right answer is, and that can be really paralyzing. So you start just asking people, "Which one should I choose? Which one's correct?" For me, it was something I had to read my way through. I had to read a lot of books. And then I finally found what made sense for me — what had the broadest explanatory power, what correctly identified the causes, diagnosed the problem, and offered a solution. That's my guiding philosophy now. And it makes decision-making so much easier and clearer.
MATTHEW: Does the fact that the NDP got beaten badly enough in the last election to lose party status — does that increase the stakes in the sense that everything is now up for grabs in terms of policy and direction?
JASMINE: No.
MATTHEW: I was hoping you'd say yes.
JASMINE: Leadership races should be times to determine the future of the party. When Jagmeet Singh stepped down at the last election, it should have been a stable period, then a leadership race, then a new path forward. What we've seen instead is that since Jagmeet Singh stepped down, the same people who were behind him are still calling the shots. Not everybody can become a leadership candidate in this leadership race. This is a rigged election. Essentially, there's a vetting committee that decides who can and who can't be a candidate. Vetting is somewhat understandable — you want to make sure a person doesn't have a terrible past, something embarrassing that would pop up later and hurt the party. But now vetting is being used as a subjective weapon. Anything the establishment doesn't like gets filtered out. We saw that with two candidates in this leadership race. First was Yves Engler. All of the reasons given were his foreign policy views — he's very opposed to what's going on in Gaza and wants to pull out of NATO. They literally put this explicitly in the reasons for rejecting him. And not only that, they make you sign a confidentiality agreement, so you're not even allowed to share the reasons why you were rejected, or even that you applied and were vetted out.
MATTHEW: Oh, that's very untransparent.
JASMINE: Yeah. And I think some people within the NDP leadership race think there's a lot of consensus on things like Palestine or Gaza — but there really isn't. The things that, for example, Tony Mccaulay, one of the leadership candidates, advocates for, and the things our campaign advocates for, are very different from just lamenting that people are dying and being upset about it. We're saying explicitly: find and prosecute Canadians who are going to fight in Gaza, and hold them to account for war crimes.
MATTHEW: I can say, having attended an Avi Lewis event here in Toronto, that there is a high degree of cohesion around anti-genocide policy toward Gaza. I haven't heard them speak specifically to prosecuting Canadian IDF soldiers — so that's something to look for. What I noticed at the Lewis event from a bunch of speakers — including Judy Rebick, who was part of the Waffle movement — is that yes, the party is deeply flawed, but the attitude seems to be that it's like an old car with infrastructure and some working parts that somebody can fix up. Is that kind of the vision you have as well?
JASMINE: I don't know. It's definitely something I'm wrestling with, and it changes dramatically every month. I do become a little more disillusioned with the NDP. We just had a human rights complaint against the NDP from Bianca Mugyenyi, because she was vetted out for being a proxy for her husband. She said: this is sexist. They made the complaint and the party completely rejected it. I just don't feel like the NDP is holding up the values it claims to have — democracy, fairness, equality, inclusion, integrity. So I do find it difficult to have faith in the NDP. At the same time, there's a really important race, and if there's an opportunity to potentially make a difference, I'm going to put everything I have behind that and try. Is it a lot of energy? Yes. Am I losing anything? I'm not sure.
MATTHEW: It feels like a profound existential question. You're looking at something that seems impossible and you don't really have any choice but to go forward. But the other thing I wanted to ask about — and Judy Rebick said this too, at the event I attended — is that party politics can't be your only focus. She was talking about how many radical members of the NDP understand the party as an organizing hub for movements outside of electoral politics as well. Do you share that view? Is there a virtue in having some foothold in this party structure so that its infrastructure and resources can be used for extra-electoral activities?
JASMINE: Yeah, that's absolutely essential. We know that activists haven't given up on their fight — they've just given up on the party as a place to achieve their wins. It's up to the party establishment to make their resources available and actually become a vehicle for change. Activists, if they're receiving help, they're going to take it. Don't be confused — it's not the activists who are refusing the party; it's the party that's refusing the activists. I just went to an event on the solidarity economy. They're essentially creating a separate economy — you can barter, you can spend your money within their network, outside of the capitalist economy. But how effective is that, really? Are you creating structural, transformative change, or are you creating one micro-option in your city? That's where the value of political parties comes in — they offer centralized planning and structural change. Activists have learned that political parties are not going to create change, so they're doing it on the side. But if you can get those two things together — there's so much work being done, but it's being done at such low capacity because political parties are just not useful right now.
MATTHEW: It's a very common story to come across the activist who can rattle off ten or twelve local projects that are essentially anti-capitalist — a particular co-op health food store, community gardens, a co-op childcare centre. And you have this sense of incredible people doing very creative, resistance-oriented things that, if they could scale, would be transformative. And yet they seem to be perpetually ghettoized or invisible in some way. And I suppose that's how you're thinking about this, right?
JASMINE: Exactly. And it's very important to note who's paying for those solidarity economy endeavours. That's taxpayers — but not through their taxes. It's through their extra disposable income. So then what is our tax money going towards? It's going towards war, and all of these other things. So while these movements are good and useful, they're kind of undermining the responsibility of the state to actually provide these services, and channelling more money toward worse things.
MATTHEW: I'd heard the displacement-of-responsibility argument before, but I hadn't thought about it economically. If you put a lot of work and effort into your community garden, and your taxes continue to go to subsidized monoculture agribusiness somewhere, that's a very weird contradiction to live with. You're doing one thing with your body and another thing with your national identity and its ties to the financial system. And so you're saying that these small, friendly, anarchist-adjacent projects are actually an economy on top of the economy — but the baseline economy is still stealing from their pockets.
JASMINE: Exactly. Regular people are paying twice — paying with their own pocket or their own time for these initiatives, and then also paying through their taxes. It just undermines the social agreement between the state and the population.
MATTHEW: If there is a social agreement between the state and the population. Unless the state is just there to manage capital and make sure the class war continues — but keeps it manageable.
JASMINE: Yeah.
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MATTHEW: In part two of our interview, which is now up on Patreon but will be unlocked here in a few weeks, as they all are — we'll get into Jasmine's journey: her education at UBC, three years in federal public policy, her travel through the Global South, her current graduate studies at Concordia. We look at the obstacles facing Gen Z political engagement, psychologically and economically. Jasmine identifies intergenerational socialist mentorship as her core source of resilience, and discusses how Marxist theory functions as a living analytical tool — one that can name concrete demands rather than the vague principles we hear from most conventional politicians. She closes by advising young people to read freely, build practical skills, and let political consciousness develop without being compressed by urgency. That's on Patreon now — you can catch it there, or in a few weeks right here. Thanks for listening, everyone. Please take care of each other.
