Over the past years, activists have made important gains in the effort to provide people who menstruate with adequate and free supplies.

In Canada, all washrooms in federally regulated workplaces must have period supplies. In Manitoba, period supplies are offered to students in all public schools in a three-year initiative through a corporate partnership and charitable donation.

Further from home, Scotland became the first country to make period products free to all in 2020, and more recently, to our south, Minnesota’s initiative to make menstrual products free in schools has made headlines.

Yet, despite these advances, menstruation continues to shape lives in negative ways and diminish opportunities for many of those who experience it. Providing free supplies in some places — while necessary in the movement towards equity — is only part of the story.

Shifting the conversation from period poverty to menstrual justice is an important step. Menstrual justice is about ensuring that all people who menstruate be provided with the resources and infrastructure to do so safely and with dignity.

To read more of Adele Perry’s article, visit The Conversation. 

Decolonizing Lens is a film and discussion series based in Winnipeg that brings together Indigenous filmmakers, their films and audiences as a form of public education.

We began the series in 2016 after the publication of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada and a gathering of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students facilitated by a youth-driven movement, the 4Rs. The 4Rs engages young people in cross-cultural dialogue toward reconciliation. We helped co-ordinate the gathering at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) at the University of Manitoba.

As educators, we share a commitment to Call to Action 65 of the TRC, which focuses on the roles of universities and the national centre in advancing understandings of reconciliation.

Participants at the gathering said they wanted to keep learning about Indigenous history, and about colonialism in Canada and its effects on Indigenous peoples and lands. They said they had not learned very much about these topics in elementary or high school.

Film screenings we have since organized, followed by discussions, aim to continue the conversation and help it grow.

Read more about this film series on The Conversation

The federal government established the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions, led by Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, in September 2023.

In Canada, foreign interference is defined as “harmful activities undertaken by foreign states or their proxies that are clandestine, deceptive, or involve a threat to any person to advance the strategic objectives of those states to the detriment of Canada’s national interests.”

These threats and activities of state or non-state entities foster polarization, distrust and erode faith in democratic systems.

Read the full article here.

When Aleksandr Zhadan used ChatGPT to talk to over 5,000 women on Tinder, it was a sign of things to come.

As artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated and easily available, online dating is facing an onslaught of AI-powered fraud. The industry, which is dominated by a small number of incumbents, has already proven slow to respond to long-standing problems on its apps. AI will be its moment of reckoning — there are even apps that can help people write their messages.

Read the full article on The Conversation website.

A groundbreaking announcement for the recovery of lost ancient literature was recently made. Using a non-invasive method that harnesses machine learning, an international trio of scholars retrieved 15 columns of ancient Greek text from within a carbonized papyrus from Herculaneum, a seaside Roman town eight kilometres southeast of Naples, Italy.

Their achievement earned them a US$700,000 grand prize from the Vesuvius Challenge. The challenge sought to incentivize technological development by inviting public participation in the research.

Read the full article.

How will young men learn to love when many messages seem to be either focused on what is wrong with them — or how they can dominate?

Many masculinity critics speak of the dangers of traditional gender ideologies, rape culture or toxic ways of being male.

Meanwhile, some men, like Andrew Tate, promote visions of masculinity based on misogyny and male domination, while others, like Jordan Peterson, reinforce traditional gender ideologies as a misguided way of responding to men’s search for meaning and belonging.

My scholarship examines masculinity and critical race theory in both early modern drama and contemporary Canadian literature, with a focus on Black and Indigenous literature.

Read the full article here.

Protesters in Winnipeg recently took to the streets to demand accountability after police shot and killed a 19-year-old Black university student on New Year’s Eve. Afolabi Opaso was an undergraduate student from Nigeria studying economics at the University of Manitoba.

Police officers responding to a well-being call say the young man was holding two knives. Opaso was shot and later died of his injuries. A lawyer for his family said that he was dealing with a mental health crisis and was not a threat to anyone. Manitoba’s police watchdog has transferred the investigation to Alberta.

This tragic death highlights once more the potentially fatal dangers Black men face from police. Research has shown how police-involved deaths are on the rise in Canada, and that Black and Indigenous people are more likely than others to be killed by police.

Read the full article here.

Australia goes to the polls on October 14 in a referendum on whether to enshrine an Indigenous advisory body, known as the Voice to Parliament, into the country’s constitution.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, a political theorist from the Torres Strait Islands, an archipelago between Australia and Papua New Guinea, explains the background to the Voice and the arguments for and against it. Plus, we hear a view from Canada on how the Voice proposal compares with Indigenous systems of representation elsewhere in the world.

Calls for a representative voice for Indigenous people emerged as a priority from a series of consultations over the past decade, culminating in the Uluru Statement from the Heart in 2017.

In March 2023, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced Australia would hold a referendum on whether to establish a new advisory body for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to parliament and the executive government.

If the “yes” vote is successful, the government has agreed to a set of design principles on how to set up the representative body, explains Sana Nakata, a political theorist at James Cook University in Australia, who is from the Torres Strait Islands. “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities themselves will be in charge of determining the process by which their representatives are selected and who those representatives are,” says Nakata.

In early October, the “no” vote was ahead in the polls despite some strengthening support for the “yes” camp.

“There have been really interesting arguments against the Voice across the political spectrum,” explains Nakata. Some on the left, and some First Nations communities, argue the priority should be to establish treaties for First Nations people in Australia, rather than a Voice to Parliament. “On the other side of the political spectrum, we have arguments against the Voice really on the idea that [it] goes too far,” she says.

The Voice referendum is being watched with interest in countries such as Canada, which has a long history of Indigenous treaty-making, but no equivalent representative body such as the Voice. Kiera Ladner, an expert in Indigenous politics at the University of Manitoba who has conducted research in Australia, says she’s “always amazed” that “there’s no treaty” in Australia for First Nations people.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about the Voice referendum, and how it’s being viewed from Canada, on The Conversation Weekly podcast.

Manitoba voters have elected the NDP’s Wab Kinew as premier. His election is both a break with recent Manitoba political history and a continuation of the long history of Indigenous involvement in electoral politics in Manitoba.

Kinew is Manitoba’s first First Nations premier, though not its first Indigenous leader. That mantle goes to Louis Riel if we consider the legislative assembly of Assiniboia that named the Métis leader president in 1869 to be a legitimate precursor to the province of Manitoba.

A 2019 Act passed by the Manitoba legislature did just that when it named Riel Manitoba’s first premier.

The title of first Indigenous premier might also go to John Norquay, Manitoba’s elected premier from 1878 to 1887. An ally of the federal Conservative party from the mid-1870s onwards, Norquay was born in 1841 the Red River settlement. He spoke French, English, Cree, Annishinaabemowin and Bungee, a dialect associated with Manitoba’s Interlake region and its Métis history.

In his new biography of Norquay, historian Gerald Friesen portrays a thoughtful leader who was a loyal kinsman to his relations, and led hunting parties and negotiations with the federal government.

Settler colonial order

Since 1887, Manitoba has been presided over by non-Indigenous people. Apart from outgoing Conservative Premier Heather Stefanson, all of them have been men.

This tells us a great deal about the settler colonial order that unfolded in Manitoba in the wake of the Manitoba Act of 1870 (which included the qualification that women could not vote), the dispersal and dispossession of Métis people, the Indian Act of 1876, the development of a reserve system and the creation of a federal system of Indian residential schools in the middle of the 1880s.

Laws emerged in these years that barred Indigenous people from holding office or voting. They were in force for part of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.

In 1886, Manitoba’s government disqualified “Indians or persons of Indian blood receiving an annuity from the Crown” from the right to vote or hold office. The vote was not restored to status Indians who received treaty annuities until 1952, some 36 years after Manitoba became the first province to grant women the right to vote on the same terms as men.

It was not until 1981 that Manitoba elected a First Nations member of the provincial legislature, Elijah Harper, in the northern riding of Rupertsland.

Indigenous people who were not excluded by law from voting or holding office — most notably Métis — often discovered that informal barriers, including violence, were an effective check on their participation in electoral politics.

Change in Manitoba

Kinew is Manitoba’s first First Nations premier. He is an Annishinaabeg, a citizen of Onigaming First Nation in the Treaty Three region of northwestern Ontario and the son of a residential school survivor.

This represents a significant change, but one that has been in the works for some time. The 2019 provincial election returned the most racially diverse legislative assembly in the province’s history, including seven Indigenous members, three Black members and the first openly non-binary member, Uzoma Asagwara.

In government, Kinew will sit alongside seasoned and talented Indigenous legislators, most of them women. This includes Amanda Lathlin (The Pas), Bernadette Smith (Point Douglas) and Nahanni Fontaine.

Fontaine has represented the Winnipeg riding of St. John’s since 2016, and most recently served as House leader, critic for families and spokesperson for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirited People.

The election of Kinew’s NDP in 2023 represents a powerful rejection of the racial politics of recent Conservative governments led by Stefanson and her predecessor, Brian Pallister.

Annishinaabeg scholar and journalist Niigaan Sinclair argues that Pallister’s views on Indigenous people, who make up about 30 per cent of the province’s population, marked the end of his political career in 2021.

The hope that Pallister’s replacement would offer a kinder and gentler version of conservative politics never materialized.

The Stefanson campaign’s decision to make a platform out of their refusal to support the search of the Prairie Green Landfill for the remains of three First Nations women — Morgan Harris, Marcedes Myran and Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, or Buffalo Woman — became a symbol of her government’s callous disregard of Indigenous lives.

Timbits and hockey

The 2023 election also represents a return to a social democratic politics familiar to Manitobans.

In a campaign managed by NDP veteran Brian Topp, Manitobans saw a genial, blue-suited Kinew offering Timbits and talking hockey. On the campaign trail, Kinew emphasized his party’s commitment to addressing a health-care system in shambles and distanced himself from calls to redirect resources away from the police and incarceration.

The campaign had little to say specifically about what might usually be defined as Indigenous issues. When former NDP premier Gary Doer publicly endorsed Kinew, it signalled a connection between this new government and the one that governed Manitoba from 1999 to 2016.

When Kinew took the microphone at the Orange Shirt Day Survivors Walk and Pow Wow in Winnipeg’s downtown hockey arena three days before the election, he was in an orange Blue Bombers shirt. Kinew urged Indigenous people to retain their languages and cultures and prove that the architects of residential schools failed.

Kinew is not Manitoba’s first Indigenous premier, but he is the first since 1897. He is the first premier who identifies as Annishinaabeg, whose family history includes residential schools, and whose direct ancestors would have been banned from voting until mid-century.

Kinew’s election is both a break in history and a continuation of important elements of Manitoba’s past. This includes long and complicated histories of Indigenous people in electoral politics and of social democratic provincial governments that have faced serious challenges in addressing poverty and delivering health care.

The high-octane anti-Indigenous racism represented by the Conservative governments of Stefanson and Pallister appears to be no longer sustainable in Manitoba.

Canada’s first national disability benefit, Bill C-22, received royal assent on June 22, 2023. The bill was reintroduced in 2022 after initially being tabled two years prior.

Bill C-22 remains short on details, but has two notable features. The first is that it will focus on poverty reduction and financial security for working-age persons with disabilities. The second is that it will be delivered through the tax system via changes to the Income Tax Act.

When the bill was reintroduced, then-Employment Minister Carla Qualtrough said the bill aimed to create a monthly benefit for working-age Canadians with disabilities modelled after the Guaranteed Income Supplement. Qualtrough also said the benefit is designed to fill a significant income security gap that leaves one in four adults with disabilities living below the poverty line.

The Guaranteed Income Supplement is a longstanding and popular refundable tax credit that provides income security to seniors.

This type of income assistance has also been used to offset GST and assist children and workers in low-income families. While this gives us a clue about the form of the Canada Disability Benefit, its ultimate impact on income security for those with disabilities will depend on the details.

Disability tax credit

While Canada does have economic support already in place for persons with disabilities, they aren’t as wide-reaching as they need to be. Canadians with disabilities can apply for the federal disability tax credit on their income tax form if they have certification from a medical practitioner.

The current credit amount is $8,870 for those 18 and over and $5,174 for those 17 and younger. The credit is not refundable, but any unused amount may be transferred to a supporting family member.

However, while about 1.4 million Canadians had obtained a disability tax credit certificate as of 2020, less than 900,000 received any benefit.

This shortfall can be attributed largely to the non-refundable nature of the credit, which means it doesn’t provide benefits to persons with disabilities in families with insufficient taxable income. These are precisely the families that are targeted by Bill C-22.

Key questions remain

In a recent study, my late colleague Harvey Stevens and I found that half of those who were eligible for the disability tax credit, either for themselves or for a dependant, received no benefit. Hence, the current design of the disability tax credit doesn’t adequately help those with the greatest need for assistance, since the poorest adults with disabilities received very little benefit.

Rather than helping the poorest Canadians with disabilities, the credit becomes more beneficial to families as their incomes rise — the opposite of the intentions of the Canada Disability Benefit.

Our study simulated the effect of making the disability tax credit refundable. This would transfer the benefits to persons with disabilities living in families with the lowest, rather than the highest, incomes.

For the same cost, the refundable credit would improve the incomes of the poorest families by an average of 20 per cent. It would also provide a framework for the provinces to convert their non-refundable disability tax credits to refundable tax credits, further increasing benefits for families most in need by about one-third.

A critical question is whether the Canada Disability Benefit will replace, complement or be integrated into the disability tax credit. The maximum impact of a refundable Canada Disability Benefit can only be achieved if the disability tax credit is eliminated.

A balancing act

Any refundable credit involves a trade-off between its maximum benefit and the rate at which benefits are reduced as family income rises. The Guaranteed Income Supplement reduces its payment by 50 cents for every dollar of income, ensuring the benefit primarily goes to seniors in lower-income families.

For example, if a senior and their spouse have an income above $27,984 (assuming the spouse receives a full Old Age Security pension), no benefit is paid. In contrast, the Canada Child Benefit has benefit reduction rates between three and 23 per cent and provides benefits to families with incomes as high as $200,000.

If the Canada Disability Benefit were to replace the disability tax credit while attempting to maintain most of the benefits currently available to higher income families, it would need to adopt low benefit reduction rates similar to the Canada Child Benefit.

However, this design choice would result in limited income security for the poorest Canadians with disabilities or a substantially more expensive program. Taking Bill C-22 at its word, the Canada Disability Benefit should provide a large maximum benefit with reduction rates of one-third or more to make sure the target is those with disabilities who are poor and economically insecure.