For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

When it first arrived, social media felt electric. Perhaps it was sheer novelty, but the early years of Facebook, Twitter, and more felt like a crackling debate club, hyper TV channel, and a friend’s living room all rolled into one. Reality quickly set in. Now that it’s matured, it turns out social media is full of noise and acrimony, and finding the great stuff is increasingly hard.

If that weren’t enough, it’s become clear that the owners of the most popular social networks have their own agendas. This year alone we were reminded that Facebook’s algorithms always risk being biased. Meanwhile, Twitter may be struggling to deal with abuse and hate speech on the platform not because it doesn’t know how to, but because doing so might affect how quickly it grows, thus upsetting Wall Street. Perhaps social media’s problems all have the same root cause: networks are increasingly shaped by the need to make money.

It is tempting then to suggest that what is good about social networking was just an historical accident, now destroyed by the realities of economics. But social networking is no trinket; it is the evolution of the public sphere, the arena in which much of public discourse now takes place. Yet, in the past societies have recognized that such forums were too important to leave solely to the whims of profit-seeking companies: they should either be subject to some kind of regulation or, as is the case with institutions like the CBC or BBC, the state itself should be intimately involved. It’s time to consider what a public social network might look like—one that isn’t merely public by mistake, but actually publicly run or owned.

It is admittedly a difficult proposition. Questions abound: should the state itself produce its own version of a social network? How might it do so given the rapid pace of change and tendency of regulation to tamp down on creativity and innovation? And there is of course a looming elephant in the room: if a government were to create something like its own Twitter, how could it not be seen as anything but monumentally boring?

But perhaps “boring” might be the point. Think of a driver’s licence: it’s an entrance pass onto a network of roads on which, as long as you follow certain rules, you are free to do and go as you please. What if one of many social media options was a public network with an official identity on which public discourse could flourish—not a replacement for the ambivalent liveliness of Facebook or Twitter, but an amalgam of the two that took their structure and pace, while abandoning their emphasis on user growth and advertising revenue.

Yes, it would undoubtedly be initially derided as the social network for squares. The appeal, however, would be clear, and would become most obvious over time in contrast to private social media: there would be no ads; the network would prioritize user needs, allowing personalized control over what appears in one’s feed; and in relying on a single account, it would help mitigate some of the issues around abuse and hate speech. After all, a public social network would have to abide by the rules of the government that runs it, not the whims of, say, a libertarian-leaning American company.

We even have an existing model to use as inspiration: the @indigenousXca account on Twitter. Each week, a different Indigenous Twitter user in Canada takes control of the account and talks about whatever they want. It is not profit-oriented, nor is it done for clicks or likes. It is, rather, about injecting much-overlooked perspectives into the public sphere, and as such, it is democracy in the activist sense, not the capitalist one. It is the kind of project we as a society should strive for. After all: isn’t it time that our digital spaces reflected our values, rather than those of large corporations?

Onward, Stephen Harper: lead us to the socialist utopia! If you follow the right-wing punditry you’d think comrades Harper, Obama, Brown, and the like are leading us along that slippery slope to—gasp—socialism. Not that any of these leaders has a nice word to say about socialism; they don’t. But the more alarmist fringes of the right wing depict the government response to the economic crisis as a Trojan horse. As the government becomes involved in forestalling economic calamity, they say, opportunists will exploit this crisis to promote a creeping socialist agenda.

This whole hysteria stems from one of the most bizarre, but effective, misconceptions the right wing has been able to perpetuate in public discourse; the idea that “big” government is a left-wing agenda.

In their backlash against the welfare state, right-wingers reviled government as a stultifying force that smothered good old capitalist ingenuity with taxes, regulations, and social programs. Downsizing government became a neo-liberal mantra. Thus a perniciously convenient equation was promoted: big government equals socialism, while small government equals capitalism.

But “big” government is not easily categorized as a left or right agenda. The size and range of activities of government oscillate for lots of reasons. Sometimes government gets bigger in response to popular demands (say, the creation of new social programs). But sometimes government gets bigger to pander to business. Business elites love government programs that provide cheap loans (so many of which never seem to get repaid), train workers, subsidize research and development, or promote exports on the government’s dime. Ironically, the patron saint of big government is arguably Ronald Reagan, who enormously increased government spending (and left a legacy of public debt) to feed the military machine.

The term “big government” persists as a schizophrenic double standard. New programs that help the bottom line of business are endorsed by the business punditocracy as wise investments in competitiveness. Government programs that help the bottom lines of the rest of us are pejoratively denounced as “big government.” Hello, Orwellian doublespeak! What is good for business is in the public interest, while what is good for anybody else is just the self-serving whining of special-interest groups. The current economic crisis has shifted rhetoric, but this wacky double standard persists. Card-carrying opponents of big government have squeamishly conceded that government must intervene big time before capitalism hits the fan.

These crusaders against big government are now obliged to do some fancy rhetorical footwork. Their new lingo focuses on “where to draw the line.” Judicious government intervention is supposed to reinstate the previous economic status quo—okay, maybe with a few new regulations to prevent further corporate shenanigans from making a bad economic situation worse. Just make sure nothing permanently shifts power away from business.

What is the right’s ideal fiscal stimulation plan? Use public money to rescue business, while imposing painful concessions on workers. Of course, this requires the überOrwellian feat of deflecting any blame for the economic crisis from management to workers. (Unbelievably, spin doctors have proven remarkably successful in their attempts to blame auto workers for Detroit’s problems). Better yet, attack unions. If unions are on their knees, workers will be much less likely to win back some of what they have sacrificed if their employers recover.

But if government action extends beyond restoring the former economic status quo to embrace some notion of a greater public interest, it is deemed to have “crossed the line.” If you argue that public money carries with it the obligation to pursue something beyond a narrow pro-corporate agenda (say, dealing with economic inequality or meeting environmental goals) then get ready to be unfavourably compared to Josef Stalin.

The Harper stimulus plan is crafted to steer well clear of “crossing the line.” Sure, under intense pressure from the opposition, the Conservatives increased spending (although not as fast, or as much, as Conservative spinmeisters would have you believe). But what is the government spending money on? Things like infrastructure. Business groups are okay with that: they have been crying out that aging infrastructure is hampering Canadian competitiveness. But making meaningful repairs to the gaping holes in unemployment insurance is the last thing Harper wants. After all, a stingy EI system helps keep the balance of power tilted in favour of employers.

Since Harper has been able to spend money that supports his corporate allies, his right-wing credentials are intact. But any government that dares to spend money that really helps those who are suffering the most is castigated as “socialist.”

We need to move beyond labels that have hidden and unhelpful political meanings. Rhetoric is a funhouse mirror (seriously— does anyone really believe that Harper’s last budget means he has moved to the left?). The key is to analyze who benefits from government action—not to get mesmerized by buzzwords the pundits and public relations war machines are throwing around. This is not about big versus small government, or more versus less spending. It’s about looking at each policy to see the real agendas behind the labels.