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When you live in downtown Vancouver, you can’t help noticing what’s on the cover of the Georgia Straight, one of the city’s weekly alternative newspapers. This week’s cover shows Barack Obama and Michael Ignatieff standing close together and grinning at the camera. They look a little bit like old friends at a high school reunion.

It’s a fitting resemblance. After all, as the headline suggests, they’re both “Harvard men.” Obama graduated from Harvard Law School; Ignatieff got his PhD at Harvard and directed the university’s human rights centre for several years before entering Canadian politics (he’s now the Leader of the Opposition).

The Harvard connection is a minor point, but a telling one. Obama and Ignatieff both have ties to Harvard not by some strange coincidence, but because they are both members and representatives of  North America’s political and economic elite. It’s no surprise, then, that there are other, more substantial similarities between the two men on the cover of the Georgia Straight. Politically, they’re both centrists; economically, they’re neoliberals. They’re hawks on Afghanistan, supporters of the War on Terror, and proponents of Western imperialism in general, in the form of what Ignatieff calls empire lite. Neither Ignatieff nor Obama has any intention of questioning the fundamental assumptions of mainstream North American politics.

And we know what happens when you turn those assumptions into state policy. The worst economic crisis in over 60 years. Growing income inequality in both Canada and the United States. The ongoing erosion of civil liberties. Imminent environmental catastrophe. A series of pointless, unwinnable wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, with thousands of dead foreigners as collateral damage (the UN counted 2,118 civilian deaths in Afghanistan alone in 2008; anywhere from 100,000 to well over a million civilians have been killed in Iraq since the invasion). Those are the consequences of the kind of thinking that got Obama and Ignatieff where they are today.

It’s become almost boring to see the same old faces in the news all the time, shilling minor variations on the same old policies on behalf of the same old interests. Obama claimed that he stood for change, but he’s already shown that what he really stands for is a ruling class we can believe in. Ignatieff doesn’t even pretend to represent a break with the past. But a break with the past is precisely what we need. I’d say it’s past time for some real change — the kind of change that doesn’t come from men in suits grinning on the front pages of newspapers.

According to Statistics Canada, the unemployment rate in this country rose to 8% in March, with some 387,000 full-time jobs lost since last October. But the official unemployment rate is a weird and very narrowly defined statistic. It includes only “the percentage of the labour force that actively seeks work but is unable to find work at a given time.” If we add other groups of people that you and I would consider unemployed or underemployed — such as those who have given up looking for work altogether and those working part-time because they can’t find full-time work — the real unemployment rate for March is more like 12.4%. That translates into approximately 1,456,600 people without full-time jobs in Canada.

The real unemployment rate in the United States, by the way, is 15.6%, which works out to more than 13 million people. According to the Center for American Progress, more Americans have lost their jobs in the past year than at any other time since the government started tracking unemployment just after World War II.