Category: Politics

  • There Is No Word for This Grief: On Gaza, Famine, and the World That Watches

    There Is No Word for This Grief: On Gaza, Famine, and the World That Watches

    I wasn’t supposed to be writing this.

    I’m supposed to be writing a comprehensive exam about temporality and health. About how Black queer people live and care for one another in timeframes not designed for our survival. I’m supposed to be providing therapy tomorrow—offering calm, presence, holding—for clients navigating their own overwhelm, grief, burnout. I’m supposed to be finishing a manuscript, drafting another talk, prepping for the next ball.

    But there is a genocide happening in Gaza.

    And I am broken.

    And that’s not what this is about. But it’s also what everything is about.

    Because I don’t know how to move through this world anymore.

    Not in a poetic way. Not in a metaphor. I mean literally. My body doesn’t know what to do with itself. I sit still and I shake. I eat and feel nauseous. I sleep and wake up in a sweat. I walk outside into wildfire smoke so thick that Tiohtià:ke now has the worst air quality in the world—and even still, I know I’m breathing freer than a child in Rafah.

    And what do you even do with that kind of knowing?

    There is a level 5 famine in Gaza.The highest designation possible.
    Thousands of children are already dead from starvation.
    More will die in the coming days.

    And the food is already there.
    Just metres away.
    Across the border.
    In trucks.
    In planes.
    In warehouses.

    Blocked.
    By policy.
    By intention.
    By design.

    This is not a crisis. This is not a natural disaster. This is not an unfortunate byproduct of war. This is a settler colonial genocide. A calculated campaign of extermination. Ethnic cleansing disguised as self-defence. Starvation weaponized. Infrastructure targeted. Grief made endless.

    This is the logic of Zionism.
    This is the logic of empire.
    This is what it means to disappear a people in real time.

    And the world watches.
    Scrolls.
    Shrugs.
    Argues.
    Donates, maybe.
    Then forgets again.

    Because forgetting is the luxury of the unaffected.

    And if you know what it is to be Black, to be queer, to be Indigenous, to be trans, to be displaced, to be criminalized, to be border-crossed or borderless, then you already know this truth: the world is not neutral.

    Not when it comes to genocide.
    Not when it comes to who gets to live.
    Not when it comes to who the world calls human.

    What’s happening in Gaza isn’t unimaginable.
    It’s entirely imaginable.
    That’s what makes it unbearable.

    This is what genocide looks like in the age of livestreams.
    This is what settler colonialism looks like when the camera’s always on.
    This is what fascism looks like when it doesn’t need to hide anymore.
    This is what it means to beg for mercy and be called a terrorist.
    This is what it means to scream for food and be met with silence.
    This is what it means when a child’s life is worth less than the narrative.

    And here we are. Watching.
    In real time.
    As Gaza bleeds.

    I’m not here to offer hope.
    Not the kind you can package.
    Not the kind you can sell.

    Because if you’re watching this and still talking about “both sides,”
    If you’re more outraged by broken windows than by bombed hospitals,
    If your solidarity is contingent on respectability, strategy, or PR optics,
    If your grief only activates when white bodies are harmed,
    Then your humanity is not mine.

    And I am not interested in convincing anyone that Palestinians deserve to live.

    Because life is not earned.
    Freedom is not a prize.
    Liberation is not a matter of debate.

    Palestinians do not need your approval to resist.
    They do not need your permission to mourn.
    They do not need to be perfect victims in order to be spared.

    They are not being starved because of Hamas.
    They are not being bombed because they resist.
    They are being exterminated because they exist.
    Because they are Indigenous.
    Because they are still there.
    Because they refuse to disappear.

    And I am wrecked by this.

    Not just as a witness, but as someone who knows what it means to be told that your life is too complicated to matter.
    Who knows what it means to scream into silence.
    To live in a body that the state treats as collateral.
    To walk through a world that sees your death as routine.

    But this isn’t about me.

    It’s about a father holding the body of his child and saying I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you.
    It’s about people breaking apart stale bread to share with twenty others.
    It’s about the doctor who keeps treating the wounded in the rubble of a bombed out hospital.

    It’s about the poets still writing.
    The dancers still dancing.
    The children still drawing keys to homes that no longer exist.
    The elders still planting seeds in soil they know they may not survive to harvest.

    This isn’t resilience.
    This is refusal.

    This isn’t optimism.
    This is survival strategy.

    This isn’t a tragedy.
    It’s a crime.
    An atrocity.
    A catastrophe authored by cowards in suits and suits in tanks and tanks in children’s bedrooms.

    And still, somehow, there is singing.
    Still, somehow, there is prayer.
    Still, somehow, there is resistance.

    Still, somehow, they live.

    And I want you to understand what it means to keep living in the middle of a genocide.
    To not just breathe—but to love.
    To not just exist—but to refuse.
    To not just survive—but to fight.

    So no, I don’t have the words.
    I have this grief lodged in my throat like shrapnel.
    I have these tears that feel like they betray the scale of the loss.
    I have this ache in my chest from trying to hold space for others while knowing the world is falling apart.
    I have the unbearable knowing that every second I spend writing this, someone else is dying.

    And still—I write.
    Because silence is complicity.
    Because bearing witness is not enough, but it is necessary.

    Because abolition means all cages.
    Because solidarity means now, not after.

    Because Palestine is not a symbol—it’s a place, a people, a love, a struggle that stretches across oceans and generations.
    Because to be Black and queer and abolitionist and breathing in this world is to take a side.

    And I will say it again and again and again, even if my voice shakes:

    From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

    And may we live long enough to see that day.

    And may we never forget what we did—and didn’t—do until then.

  • Independence Fantasies, Colonial Truths

    Independence Fantasies, Colonial Truths

    Alberta wants to leave. Again. And this time, it’s louder than usual.

    Calls for Western separatism—what some are now trying to brand as a serious referendum campaign—are gaining traction. Politicians are testing the waters. The Premier hasn’t ruled it out. And, predictably, they’re invoking Quebec’s sovereignty movements as a model.

    But let me be clear from the outset: I’m not defending Canada. I’m not clinging to the federation. I don’t believe states are worth saving—not this one, not any of them. I’m not interested in sovereignty narratives that just redraw the same borders with different colours. I’m an abolitionist. And as a Black queer person raised in Quebec, I know firsthand how nation-building is so often just empire with better PR.

    That’s exactly why Alberta’s separatist posturing doesn’t read as radical to me. It reads as settler revanchism—masked in the language of resistance.

    Yes, Quebec’s independence movements have been violent, colonial, anti-Black, and shot through with contradictions. But they emerged from something real: a distinct cultural, linguistic, and historical formation shaped by centuries of attempted assimilation. That doesn’t absolve them. But it contextualizes them.

    Alberta has no such context.

    There’s no endangered language. No collective memory of being colonized by the Canadian state. No suppressed literature or forbidden faith. What there is, is capital. Oil. Guns. White grievance. And an economy built on extraction and entitlement.

    What Alberta wants to separate from isn’t oppression—it’s accountability.

    This isn’t a fight for freedom. It’s a tantrum from a province that’s never been told no. A province that has long enjoyed disproportionate political power, federal subsidies, and a privileged place in the settler imagination. And now, as the climate crisis accelerates and global scrutiny mounts, Alberta doesn’t want to change. It wants to opt out.

    It’s not seeking liberation. It’s demanding exemption.

    And when Alberta reaches for Quebec as its excuse—as its supposed precedent—it exposes something deeper. It shows how shallow this separatism really is. Because for all of Quebec’s failings, there is a cultural infrastructure here: a language, a kinship system, a literature of struggle (even if that struggle has too often excluded Black and Indigenous people). Alberta has none of that. Just the myth of rugged individualism and the fantasy of permanent control.

    This is not decolonization. This is a colony refusing to share.

    Alberta separatism borrows the postures of liberation movements to double down on domination. It mimics the rhetoric of resistance while clinging to the very systems that are killing us. And that’s what makes it so dangerous: it masquerades as anti-state politics while defending everything the state was built to protect—white wealth, settler power, and the right to extract without consequence.

    As someone who has lived through Quebec’s nationalism and survived the Canadian state’s violences, I don’t mistake any of this for freedom. I’ve seen what nationhood does to those of us who don’t fit its image. I’ve watched how state-building chews up the very people it claims to uplift. I’ve learned that not all exits lead somewhere better.

    Abolition isn’t about preserving Canada. But it’s not about celebrating every departure from it, either. Especially not the ones led by those who already have everything and just want more.

    So no—I won’t romanticize Alberta’s separatist dreams. I won’t let them smuggle white supremacy into the conversation under the banner of autonomy. I won’t let them use Quebec as cover while erasing the very people Quebec has tried to silence.

    Alberta isn’t trying to escape oppression. It’s trying to protect it.

    And some of us are done pretending not to notice.

  • After the Election: No Victory, No Salvation, Only the Work Ahead

    After the Election: No Victory, No Salvation, Only the Work Ahead

    Yesterday’s election unfolded the way it always does in a decaying settler state: desperate, fragmented, unmoored from any real possibility of change.
    Mark Carney won a minority government.
    Not because he inspired anyone.
    Not because he offered a vision of something better.
    But because fear of collapse keeps people clinging to the wreckage.
    Carney’s victory is a victory for capital, for managed decline. He will govern not with transformation, but with technocratic violence, offering competence while administering crisis. He represents an empire trying to manage its own decay without ever questioning the structures that brought it to this point.

    The NDP, meanwhile, collapsed into near-irrelevance.
    Not by accident.
    They spent years softening their demands, trimming the edges off movements that once demanded real justice, chasing approval from the very systems that were built to contain and destroy them.
    By the time they realized who they had abandoned, it was too late.
    The base that built the NDP—racialized, working-class, Indigenous, disabled, queer communities—has already moved on.
    Many of us have stopped looking to electoral politics for salvation.
    We learned long ago that there is no ballot box for liberation.

    And then there’s Poilievre.
    His personal defeat is not a victory.
    He lost his seat but grew the Conservative base.
    He played with the fire of white rage, conspiracy, and open fascism, and those flames are not going out.
    They will find new leaders, more dangerous ones.
    The centre did not hold. It barely even tried.
    What we are seeing is not a reversal of right-wing momentum. It is its acceleration, even in the absence of the man who helped bring it to this point.

    Taken together, tonight’s results confirm what many of us already knew.
    Canada, as a project, is dying.
    Not with a rupture that could birth something new, but through a long, grinding erosion that tightens its violence while pretending to offer stability.
    There is no vision here. No future being built.
    Only a managed decline, administered by people too invested in the structures of extraction, policing, and dispossession to imagine anything different.

    For Black, Indigenous, racialized, queer, and trans communities, this election does not change the terrain.
    The state was never our protector.
    It was never ours to reclaim.
    There was never a version of this country where we were meant to survive with dignity.
    That’s not pessimism. It’s clarity.

    The task ahead is the same as it has always been.
    To build outside of the crumbling systems.
    To invest in abolitionist infrastructures: mutual aid, communal care, survival networks that are not dependent on the permission of the state.
    To protect each other when the safety nets fail, because they were never designed to catch us in the first place.
    To refuse despair, not because we are hopeful about the system, but because we are committed to each other beyond it.

    Carney’s victory is hollow.
    Poilievre’s downfall is dangerous in disguise.
    The NDP’s disappearance is a cautionary tale about what happens when you sell your soul for electoral respectability.

    But our survival has never depended on who wins elections.
    It has always depended on how fiercely we remember who we are to each other.
    How fiercely we build in the cracks they cannot seal.
    How boldly we refuse to accept the limits they place on what we can imagine.

    No ballot was going to save us last night.
    No parliament will save us today.
    Our future will not be built in the halls of power.
    It will be built in kitchens, basements, parks, community centres.
    It will be built in memory, in movement, in revolt, in care.

    No victory.
    No salvation.
    Only us.
    Only everything we still have to build, together.

  • A Gesture of Hate

    A Gesture of Hate

    In the aftermath of Elon Musk’s unmistakable Nazi salutes at Donald Trump’s inauguration on 20 January 2025, much of the media coverage has predictably veered toward obfuscation, excuse-making, and, most disturbingly, a kind of ableist scapegoating. Instead of calling out the gesture for what it is—an unambiguous alignment with fascist symbolism—mainstream narratives have gone to great lengths to soften its implications. Some have even resorted to blaming Musk’s autism or Asperger’s diagnosis, a form of saneism that shifts focus from fascism to neurodivergence. This is a dangerous, disingenuous, and ableist deflection, and as a mental health professional, I’m here to say: stop blaming autism for white supremacy. 

    Saneism in the Defense of Fascism

    Saneism—the systemic discrimination against people deemed “mentally unfit”—has long been a tool of oppression, wielded to delegitimize, discredit, and silence. In this case, it’s being weaponized to absolve Musk of accountability. Media outlets and commentators alike have leaned into the narrative that Musk’s alleged neurodivergence might explain his behavior, as though autism or Asperger’s somehow predisposes someone to fascist gestures. 

    This is not only an absurd and unscientific claim but a profoundly harmful one. It reinforces the stigma that neurodivergent people are socially inept, dangerous, or incapable of understanding the implications of their actions. It erases the agency of neurodivergent people while simultaneously absolving powerful individuals of their complicity in oppressive systems. 

    Let’s be clear: Autism is not a precursor to fascism. Fascism is learned. It is deliberate. It is a choice made by people in positions of power who understand exactly what they are doing. To conflate neurodivergence with hate is to perpetuate ableism on a massive scale, distracting from the real issue: the normalization of fascist ideology in our society. 

    The Media’s Role in Normalizing Hate

    The media’s handling of Musk’s gesture reflects a broader pattern of reluctance to call out fascism for what it is, especially when it comes dressed in wealth, influence, and tech-world allure. Instead of interrogating the deeper implications of Musk’s actions, outlets have chosen to debate his intentions, contextualize the moment as a misunderstanding, or—most egregiously—blame his neurodivergence. 

    This avoidance is more than cowardice; it’s complicity. By deflecting attention from the explicitly fascist nature of the gesture, the media allows it to be rebranded as harmless, ironic, or accidental. This creates fertile ground for fascism to grow, unchecked and unchallenged, under the guise of plausibly deniable “jokes” or misunderstandings. And by dragging autism into the narrative, it compounds the harm, further marginalizing neurodivergent communities in the process. 

    Why This Matters: The Path from Symbols to Systems

    As a mental health professional, I work with clients who are intimately familiar with the toll of ableism, racism, and systemic oppression. Many of them are neurodivergent, many of them are Black, and all of them live under the weight of a society that demands they justify their existence while figures like Musk are given free passes to perpetuate harm. This moment is a microcosm of how hate operates—not in overt, glaring announcements, but in subtle, insidious gestures that the powerful dismiss while marginalized communities suffer the consequences.  

    Symbols matter. They carry weight. When someone as visible as Musk performs a Nazi salute, whether ironically or not, it signals alignment with systems of white supremacy. The fact that this act is being minimized or dismissed outright is not an accident; it is part of the slow normalization of fascism in mainstream culture. And by blaming autism, the media doubles down on the harm, turning attention away from systemic hate and toward an already marginalized group. 

    A Call to Action

    We cannot let this slide. We cannot let Musk or his defenders hide behind ambiguity, ableism, or irony. We must call this out for what it is: a deliberate act of fascist signaling, made more dangerous by the media’s refusal to engage with its implications. 

    If we allow saneism and ableism to dictate this narrative, we betray not only neurodivergent communities but all those targeted by the systems of hate Musk’s gesture reinforces. As someone who works every day to support mental health and challenge oppression, I know how deeply these narratives harm. And I refuse to let them go unchallenged. 

    To the media: Stop blaming autism for fascism. To the public: Hold Musk accountable. To all of us: Resist the normalization of hate, in every form it takes. This is not a misunderstanding. It is a wake-up call. And we cannot afford to hit snooze. 

  • Urgent Call for Dalhousie to Divest from Companies Complicit in Israeli Occupation

    Urgent Call for Dalhousie to Divest from Companies Complicit in Israeli Occupation

    Dear Members of the Dalhousie University Board of Governors,

    As a current doctoral student at Dalhousie University, I feel compelled to speak out on an issue that goes to the very heart of our shared values as an academic institution. The university’s investments in companies complicit in the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine contradict its commitments to equity, justice, and human dignity. This is not just a financial matter—it is a moral crisis. Dalhousie’s continued financial ties to these companies make it complicit in ongoing violence that the United Nations has clearly identified as having genocidal intent.

    The recent report  by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese provides chilling details about the systematic destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza. The report describes the forced displacement, mass killings, and deliberate targeting of civilians as actions that amount to genocide. This is not a distant issue; it is one that our university directly engages with through its investments in companies that profit from illegal settlements, home demolitions, and militarized violence. These financial choices have real, devastating consequences for millions of Palestinians.

    Dalhousie’s history shows us what happens when institutions prioritize profit over people. The Lord Dalhousie Panel Report laid bare the university’s deep entanglements with anti-Black racism, slavery, and colonial exploitation. While efforts have been made to address that legacy, the university’s investments in companies enabling the destruction of Palestine perpetuate the same systems of violence. These decisions undermine everything Dalhousie claims to stand for.

    As a student at this university, I had felt proud to be part of a community that values equity and reconciliation. But those values must be reflected in our actions, and over the three years I have spent at Dal to date, what I have seen is a lot of lip service to equity and social justice without doing the very difficult work needed to actively undermine the legitimacy of the systems that reinforce oppression. Let me be clear: investing in companies complicit in genocide is antithetical to everything our community profess to believe. We cannot look away while lives are being destroyed, communities erased, and an entire people subjected to state-organized oppression. Neutrality in the face of such violence is complicity.

    My work as a scholar focuses on how systemic violence fractures communities, identities, and lives. I know deeply how interconnected these struggles are. The settler-colonial violence Palestinians and Lebanese populations face today is not unlike the legacies of anti-Blackness and Indigenous dispossession that continue to shape Canada and Nova Scotia. These systems of oppression are linked, and our response to one reflects our commitments to all.

    Dalhousie has an opportunity to lead—not with words, but with action. Divestment is not a radical demand; it is a necessary step toward aligning the university’s financial practices with its values. By divesting, Dalhousie can affirm its commitment to justice and human dignity, standing in solidarity with those resisting systemic violence. This is not just about Palestine—it is about Dalhousie’s role in shaping a more just world.

    I urge you to act now. Divest from all companies complicit in the illegal Israeli occupation. To delay is to allow our resources to continue funding violence and destruction. The choice before you is clear: to perpetuate harm or to stand on the side of justice.

    This is a defining moment for our university. Let Dalhousie be remembered as an institution that chose accountability and courage in the face of genocide. Let it be a leader in the fight for equity, dignity, and human rights.

    In solidarity,

    Vincent Mousseau, MSc RSW
    PhD Student
    Faculty of Health, Dalhousie University