by Basics Kitchener-Waterloo
The increase of fatal overdoses in Kitchener has forced the local health department to declare a heroin epidemic. Despite this, little has been done to deal with this problem. While more people are getting hooked on this dangerous drug, treatment centres and methadone clinics are forced to turn people away due to lack of funding.
Long-term effects of heroin use.
“The wait list to get into a methadone clinic is about two years, and getting into rehab is harder and harder” says community activist Ryan Moore. “At the same time there are more drugs on our streets and people are dropping like flies.”
“Everyone in the downtown community has been affected by this directly or indirectly, and when friends come to me for help to get off of drugs, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere that I can send them, its heartbreaking,” says Jason Lamka, a native activist. “I think the system uses it as a tool to keep poor people down, this is a game to the rich people, who spend millions on the new courthouse and their salaries but they have no money to put into programs we desperately need.”
One point of contention is the role of the Oxycontin ban in this increase of overdoses. Michael, an activist concerned about drug addiction, stated that: “For many people who are sick, the tightening of narcotics prescriptions will just force them to go somewhere else. If people are sick or going through withdrawal they will purchase heroin as the only opiate available. These are powerful drugs that doctors are prescribing and just to cut people off is irresponsible.”
The banning of Oxycontin is simplistic according to Lamka. “Poeple are dying anyways, and its not because they can’t get Oxy. Our society creates a depression and people are getting high to escape it. There’s no jobs, no hope, and no future for many people. Until this is solved, people will get high, and more and more people will die.”
When asked about this, Regional Councillors Ken Sealing and Karl Zehr, who decide how money is spent, declined to comment.
by Megan Kinch & Mari I.
City workers trashing occupy gardens.
On May Day last year, the local food security organization, Occupy Gardens, risked arrest to plant a free community food garden in Queen’s Park. The small garden was planted to raise awareness about the unfairness of the current dysfunctional food system which places profits above the needs of people: as food prices go up and living wages fall, those who can afford it are able to purchase more and better quality food, while those who can’t are denied this fundamental of life and forced to buy unhealthy cheap nutrition-deprived junk.
Last year, the United Nation’s right-to-food envoy visited Canada and concluded that “One in 10 [Canadian] families with a child under 6 is unable to meet their daily food needs. These rates of food insecurity are unacceptable, and it is time for Canada to adopt a national right-to-food strategy.” The Canadian government criticized the Envoy for being “ill-informed” and “patronizing,” and in doing so, revealed its stance on food security in Canada.
Occupy Gardens chose to plant its free community food garden in Queen’s Park as a statement on the inadequacy of government action on food security in the city. The organizers hoped that the Garden would inspire communities to take the food problem into their own hands and build their own local free community food gardens.
The garden flourished through the summer, and was looked after by hundreds in the local community who came together to build the soil, seed, plant, weed, and water the garden. In late September, on the eve of the planned Harvest celebration, the City of Toronto ordered the Garden’s destruction. Richard Ubbens, City of Toronto Parks Director, said in an interview that the garden was being removed because it was “installed without contact with Parks, Forestry and Recreation community garden or operations staff,” and that the city didn’t know who to contact about its removal. However, Occupy Gardens organizer, Katie Berger, stated that the Occupy Gardens had pictures of a city worker inside the Parks Department holding a sign with their number on it. It remains unclear why the City would allow the Garden to grow undisturbed for five months only to throw out all the food right before it was to be harvested.
Before there was a thriving garden, then there was dirt.
Jacob Kearey-Moreland, organizer with Occupy Gardens, expressed frustration with the absurdity of the situation: “We are experiencing a “glocal” food crisis, where more and more people are lining up at food banks for kraft dinner and peanut butter, waiting lists for community gardens are growing, food prices rising, and our leaders are nowhere to be seen. Rather they are hiding behind their desk ordering the workers to destroy whatever hope we have left.”
Fortunately, the Garden was only a small part of Occupy Gardens’ work to place the power to create healthy food back into the hands of people. Occupy Gardens has a free food for all project, which mostly focuses on gleaning, but also teaching foods skills to people that have been lost over time, including fermentation and canning. Occupy Gardens has also initiated a local “seed library” to share seeds, and has a community garden (with permission) in Scadding Court.
Free community gardens is one way in which people can work together and literally serve one another, especially as it becomes abundantly clear that we cannot rely on the government or the capitalist food industry to meet our needs.
To help feed the movement contact: occupygardenstoronto@gmail.com
In 1886, 127 years ago, European immigrant workers marched in Chicago to demand an eight hour work day. The massacre and execution of trade unionists that followed has been commemorated every year since, in almost every corner of the world on May 1st – International Workers Day.
Since then, working people have waged a continuous struggle, from social reforms to revolutionary alternatives. In this country, these struggles have produced important reforms including the minimum wage, pensions, a retirement age, and many social programs and rights including access to health care and primary education. International Workers Day is also a day to celebrate these victories, especially at this time when we are compelled to organize to protect these vital gains from capitalism’s latest offensive, so-called “austerity”. This agenda is being orchestrated from the highest levels of international finance right down to municipal governments, a program to advance the redirecting social wealth from state-sponsored social programs to the richest.
May Day should also be a venue to raise many of the issues that still remain unaddressed in Canada, including within the same labour movement and social organizations that fought for these reforms.
The colonial foundations of this country, including the systematic theft of land and attempts to destroy the culture and social fabric of indigenous nations, remains the most pressing internal issue in this country today.
The ‘Idle No More’ movement has brought the issue of internal colonialism to the world, and especially to the public in Canada that has largely ignored this reality. Indigenous communities continue to wage campaigns over land claims, the inexcusable number of missing indigenous women, as well reparations for crimes committed by the residential school system, just to name a few.
The Canadian state has also been increasingly playing a role as an imperialist political, economic, and military actor. While Canada has been active in foreign military campaigns since before WWI (participating in military actions in South Africa) over the last decade Canada has gone from being a major component of the military offensive and occupation in Afghanistan to also participating in the NATO-led bombing of Libya, with the prospect of military involvement in Mali, Syria with North Korea currently under discussion. Moreover, the Canadian state has backed and assisted in the proliferation of Canadian mining companies and their operations all over the planet. In many cases, not only do these companies engage in labour exploitation and environmentally destructive practices, which have catastrophic impacts to local communities and ecosystems, but they have also been connected to targeted acts of violence against workers as well as environmental activists, from Colombia to Tanzania.
There are many more – too many – examples of the injustices and crimes that occur here and around the world, crimes that are committed to maintain the capitalist order. All over the world, the wealthy and powerful are using the governments they control to push the same relentless, criminal agenda of pursuing profit at the cost of the rights and lives of people. Whether it be by robbing people’s money as they are doing in Cyprus, or by robbing a nation’s resources through military means as in Libya, or by unrelentingly attacking social programs and workers’ rights as is happening here, their agenda and their system must be stopped.
There should be no mistake. We are not simply talking about going back in time, rewinding the clock to the supposed heyday of the so-called “welfare state” in Canada. This welfare state was at the same time pursuing its genocide of indigenous peoples through residential schools and pursuing its criminal war of aggression against the people of Korea. We cannot continue to pretend that, as Stephen Harper said, “Canada has no history of colonialism”. We can no longer pretend that Canada acts as a ‘peacekeeper’ on the world stage and that transnationals are altruistically ‘providing jobs’ as they outsource jobs here while exploiting workers and resources abroad.
On International Workers Day, we march to build a Solidarity City. Solidarity City is a unified struggle for: Respect for Indigenous Sovereignty, Status for All, an End to Imperialism and Environmental Destruction, an End to Austerity and Attacks on the Poor and Working class, continued resistance against Patriarchy, Racism, Ableism and Homophobia and Transphobia’.
On this International Workers Day, the organizations of the May 1st Movement call for:
Support for the struggle for Indigenous peoples’ liberation including:
The defense of ancestral lands and support to frontline land defenders; and
The recognition of the right of Indigenous genuine self-determination, including their right to determine all their economic and political affairs.
Pushing back on attacks upon working class and poor communities including:
Rejecting all forms of the capitalist ‘austerity’ agenda, reject the cutting of services and trampling on worker and civil rights;
Curtailing police abuses and impunity by reducing of police budgets, dismantling of the bogus Special Investigations Unit, and its replacement with a genuine community-based civilian oversight groups;
Rejecting the continued neoliberal drive towards privatizations, eliminating public incentives and tax breaks for large corporations, and resisting outsourcing by placing regulations and restrictions on these practices.
Supporting concrete campaigns that address immediate needs of workers, including:
Extending access to services without fear of deportation, while fighting for regularization of undocumented people, and extension of permanent residency to any worker in Canada while re-regulating migrant labour to eliminate laws that exempt these workers from the rights and benefits that other workers enjoy; and
Increasing the minimum wage to $14.50/ hr, re-adjustment of social assistance rates to lift people out of poverty whiling indexing both of these to inflation.
Exposing Canadian Imperialism and reasserting our support for liberation struggles abroad including:
The withdrawal of Canada’s military from all foreign outposts and immediately halting any preparations for foreign military campaigns;
The subjection of Canadian mining companies to strict regulations to protect the rights of workers, the protection of the environment and communities where mining may take place, and the rights of people to benefit from any extraction that may take place;
The immediate halt to the practice of labour import which utilized temporary immigration status to regulate and discipline labour; and
The extension of different forms of support to liberation movements abroad from peoples organizations and social movements in Canada.
Of course, there are many other issues that impact different sectors of the working class in different ways and this is but a short list of changes we demand and deserve. Perhaps more importantly, we cannot expect the Canadian state to simply ‘give’ us these things and more. We stress the need for building people’s power in communities, in workplaces, on the streets and in the reserves, if we are going to actually achieve these.
This system is not and will not work for us, the majorities, the working people both here and abroad. We are the ones who build and make things, who perform the tasks and services that make societies progress, and it is our ancestral lands that are being plundered to feed this system.
This May Day, while the same class of politicians who live well off the public dime tell us that we need to tighten our belt and that we need to blame unions and immigrants for this mess, we need to understand that this system, and those that protect it, are the problem. We must stand with each other, in solidarity, so that when any government or corporation looks to trample on one community, one union or one group, we all stand together.
LIBERATION FOR FIRST NATIONS AND ALL OPPRESSED NATIONS!
HANDS OFF OUR SOCIAL PROGRAMS AND RIGHTS!
BUILD A SOLIDARITY CITY!
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
“Feeding the People” Grassy Narrows Water Walk 2012
by Giibwanisi
“As ‘urban indians’, it is a bit harder for us to maintain our culture because we are not on the land. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try. As an Indian man, I have always sought to be a good man, husband, father, or brother to my family. What does an Indian man do? He is a warrior to protect his family, and he is also a provider for his family. Its harder to maintain our way of life in the city, but we learn to adapt. I go hunting all the time. Loblaw’s is the new hunting ground.” (Elder Vern Harper)
Living in Toronto, does not mean that we have to give up our traditional values or customs. As a the above quote indicates. For those of you who may have heard about ACTION (Anishinabek Confederacy to Invoke Our Nationhood) our organization has been comprised mainly of the Oshkimaadziig Unity Camp, located in what is known as Awenda Provincial Park. After spending a full year at the camp, it became apparent, that our peoples are not ready to make a large migration back to the land. In fact the opposite is quite true. While some of our people live on the reserves, and have grown accustomed to reserve living, many of us migrate away. A vast majority of our people leave the rural settings of the reserves and traplines, for urban areas such as Toronto. The 75 000 or so people who claim Native status in Toronto alone is a testament to this fact. (I am sometimes one of them).
While many of our peoples migrate to the urban centres, many do not leave the impoverishment of the reserves behind. Many end up in low paying jobs, or social assistance programs, dependent on food-banks, shelters, soup kitchens etc. I personally have been through all of the above, and can attest to waiting outside food-banks countless times. Having seen the donated foods in the food boxes (high carb, high sugar, low nutrients) it no wonder our people have the highest obesity, diabetes, heart/stroke statistic’s amoung all people on Turtle Island.
“We’ve got to really start doing stuff, you know building community gardens, hauling water, chopping wood, whatever they needed done. I said that is your responsibility is. That is what a warrior’s responsibility is.” (Leonard PeItier quote from “Incident at Oglala”)
As an Anishinbek man, it is my responsibility to be a protector and a provider for the people. Just because I am not always out on the land, it does not exempt me from my duties and responsibilities. Which is why I am spearheading a chapter of ACTION aimed at feeding our people in Toronto. We’ll call it “Serve the People/Feed the People.” Our first plan is to start immediately by joining the Good Food Box program established in Toronto.
(The Good Food Box (GFB) is a non-profit fresh fruit and vegetable distribution system created and operated by FoodShare. The GFB runs like a large buying club with centralized buying and coordination. Individuals place orders for boxes with volunteer coordinators in their neighborhood and receive a box brimming with fresh, tasty produce, on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly cycle.)
While most churches and NGO’s aims to subsidize the $13-18 dollar cost, ACTION aims to provide 100% of the cost. We will be hitting the streets, attending rallies, marches, roundances, with clipboards in hand asking for monthly donations from everyone.
The long term goal is to network with the farmers and community gardeners, to get all of our people involved in every aspect of planting, growing, harvesting, delivering, cooking, sharing…etc, just like our people once did. The immediate goal is to feed some of our people now.
We need public support. We have relied heavily on our allies to contribute funds directly over this past year, and we thank them greatly. But those costs mainly go to the operation of Oshkimaadiziig Unity Camp. We are calling out for public support to help ACTION feed the people.
We hope that you can see the need for such an initiative, and would be willing to give a small monthly donation. Our bank at Alterna makes donating quick and easy. One time donations can be made through our Pay Pal account.
Please contact Giibwanisi at 416 806 6929 or at guitar.my.art@gmail.com to see how you can help today.
Chi Miigwetch
by Steve da Silva
The moral backlash that Canada’s largest and most profitable bank, RBC, was met with when news broke earlier this month that they were using foreign workers to replace dozens of their IT staff has developed into a wider scandal that is engulfing virtually all of corporate Canada and all of Canada’s political parties.
It is no secret that the Temporary Foreign Worker Program has been growing rapidly, tripling in a decade to more than 338,000 workers by the end of 2012. As has been pointed out, this is a larger workforce than that of Canada’s smaller provinces.
The moral outrage sparked by the outsourcing of 45 of RBC’s IT staff reflects a sense of indignation amongst Canadians – as if a line had been crossed. Many seem to be reflecting a feeling that they’ve been lied to, and were under the impression that the Temporary Foreign Worker Program had been limited to jobs like being caregivers or tomato pickers (which are actually part of separate programs, the Live-In Caregiver Program and the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program), jobs that “Canadians don’t want” or in industries facing only temporary labour or skills shortages. After all, as the government website for the program reads, “The Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) allows Canadian employers to hire foreign nationals to fill temporary labour and skill shortages when qualified Canadian citizens or permanent residents are not available.”
As an employer, here is how you make a “Canadian” job suitable for a migrant worker: Drive wages down to rock bottom, break or block union formation, and minimize safety regulations. Then no one takes your job. But don’t worry! The TFWP will help you! Apply for a Labour Market Opinion from the Human Resources and Skills Development Canada saying that you couldn’t find enough workers in the required fourteen day advertising period, and bang! Not only do you have a cheap labour supply, but you have workers that are stuck with you as an employer, workers who can’t unionize, and who you can pay 15% less than the minimum wage. This trend is sweeping across the economy.
Temporary foreign workers are working in all sectors of the economy. In the weeks following the news, one source reported that eighteen of Canada’s largest fifty employers are on the list of users of the TFWP, including: Shaw, Sun Life, RIM, Maple Leaf, Air Canada, Canadian Tire, Financière Manuvie, Rona, Rogers, Sears, BMO, Bell, Thomson Reuters, Bombardier, Scotiabank, TD Canada Trust, Loblaws. Other notable employers of TFWs include Lulu Lemon, Hudson’s Bay Company, Bank of Canada, Shoppers Drug Mart, Walmart, Telus, Enbridge, Sobeys, CN Rail, Porter, Tim Hortons, SNC Lavalin, CP Rail, McDonald’s, Suncor, and Talisman Energy. The total number of employers now using TFWs is 33,000. Other noteworthy employers on the list include the Bank of Canada, CBC, and the Girl Guides. With an official joblessness level sitting at 1.4 million people, it should become clear where this outpouring of indignation comes from.
Not only has the scandal spread to virtually all of corporate Canada, it has spread to all of Canada’s political parties too. After some righteous posturing from the Conservatives pretending as if they weren’t aware of such uses of the program and some vague promises about immediate reforms, they have now deflected criticism by revealing active support for the program by the opposition parties. The Conservatives released this past week a series of personal letters written by Liberal and NDP MPs – including Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, NDP Status of Women Critic Niki Ashton, and NDP Foreign Affairs Critic Paul Dewar – making personal appeals for the use of temporary foreign workers in their ridings.
So all political parties have more or less supported the Program, and virtually all sectors of economy are using temporary foreign workers. Yet the moral backlash remains centered not on the super-exploitative and often abusive and dangerous conditions that temporary foreign workers have endured for decades, but rather on the concern that the TFWP has begun to cut into “Canadian jobs” and that it has far surpassed the mandate of the program to fill short-term labour or skills shortages. This is a line of thinking that is being actively encouraged by the media, with what seems like ‘two sides’ to the debate arguing over whether this or that job can or should be filled by citizens. And to the extent that this moral backlash in the media reflects popular sentiments of anxieties over people’s jobs and livelihoods, it is understandable. Rising consumer and student debts with fewer job prospects and employment insecurity is a reasonable basis for anxiety. But we can’t let those who are responsible for generating these social insecurities – all levels of government and the businesses that get them elected – leverage them for their own purposes.
The moment we workers – those of us who rely on our labour to survive, who make others rich by our work – buy into this logic of there being certain jobs that are suitable for “Canadians” and certain jobs suitable to foreign workers, we’ve already lost the battle. We’ve lost because we’ve already accepted that a divided working-class is acceptable, divisions which are only hardened by differing immigration statuses and racial lines.
But we don’t have to accept these divisions. Workers looking for real alternatives to capitalism and a way to resist capitalist “austerity” shouldn’t get pulled into this debate of where we draw around which jobs are okay for the super-exploitation of foreign workers. The capitalists and their governments will go on creating whatever hiring practices and wage systems are necessary, no matter how exploitative, to make their profits and “compete” in the global capitalist economy.
In any case, the job of workers is to organize against these capitalists. Just as immigrant workers did in militant and courageous ways in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries, so too we will and must today. Hopefully today, with greater unity and support from workers with citizenship and status.
As the May 1st Movement and its allies have called for this coming May Day, we need a Solidarity City – a city of organizations and alliances united against capitalist austerity, imperialism and colonialism, and united through a network of people’s power in this city and far beyond it that is actually capable of bringing forth a new economy and a new society.
Delegates and supporters of the ILPS Commission in Support of Indigenous People’s Struggles – Mishkeegogamang
by Laura Lepper
In February 2013, members of the Commission in Support of Indigenous People’s Struggles (of the Canadian chapter of the International League of People’s Struggles) travelled to join fellow members from Mishkeegogamang and Savant Lake on their traditional territories, 1,700 km north of Toronto. We saw the apartheid-like conditions that lead people to call the region the “deep North.” Everyone we met shared a story of severe displacement, dispossession and social trauma at the hands of state-supported projects such as residential schools and the mining and forestry industries.
In order to strengthen the alliance between grassroots struggles of Indigenous activists in different nations, and build a common front among people’s struggles from all directions, the Commission was formed at the 2013 ILPS ‘Right to Exist, Right to Resist’ conference. It is currently composed of delegates from struggles in the native communities of Six Nations, Mishkeegogamang, Savant Lake, and the groups Anishinabek Confederacy to Invoke Our Nationhood, CUPE 3903 First Nations Solidarity Working Group, and the Anti-Colonial Working Group of the Law Union of Ontario. Delegates organized a trip to the northern Ojibway communities out of a deep understanding that building an effective Commission must come from strong relationships built out of shared understanding from on-the-ground experience and concrete struggle.
Gary Wassaykeesic of Mishkeegogamang and Darlene Necan of Savant Lake introduced us to people in their communities and the nearby cities and towns. The trip began in Thunder Bay, with the Sleeping Giant rock formation always on the horizon. Our last visit was in Pickle Lake, the most northern community in the province that has year-round access by road. Pickle Lake airport is the entry point for much of the region’s mining and many of the 49 fly-in-only Indigenous communities in the region such as Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug and Attawapiskat.
Savant Lake
Darlene and Gary outside log cabin built by Darlene for elder
We traveled to Savant Lake, a small settlement of Ojibway people of the Saugeen Nation, to see Darlene’s trapline. A trapline is an area of ancestral land where a family will hunt and trap animals for food. In 2004, Darlene’s mother was kicked off her trapline because Abitibi Bowater/Resolute was spraying herbicide, which was poisoning traditional food sources. Her story is not unique among her people. Darlene shared stories of Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR), along with treeplanters, burning cabins and destroying camps put up by Anishinaabe people.
There is special interest in the land around Savant Lake, since CN Rail goes right through the town. While industry wants to transport gold through Savant and prospect on Darlene’s land, many members of the Saugeen Nation are impoverished and essentially homeless. There is also interest in Savant because of its proximity to the ‘Ring of Fire’ – an area of muskeg swamps in the James Bay Lowlands. Ontario has plans for massive escalation of mining development in the Ring of Fire, despite Indigenous leaders calling for a moratorium on mining in the area.
Mishkeegogamang
We drove about an hour north of Savant to the community of Mishkeegogamang. Jon Thompson, of the Dryden Observer, reported that of the 1,644 people living in Mishkeegogamang First Nation, 8.6 people live in every house, leading to crises of overflowing septic tanks, homes without electricity or sewage, hundreds on constant suicide watch, and traumatizing poverty. Over 1,000 more are in jail and nearly 300 people have lost their lives suddenly since 1981.
Housing conditions in Savant Lake: Elder was living in chicken coop from 1930s
Mishkeegogamang is on what is called Treaty 9 territory. Tom Wassaykeesic, a band councillor working hard to seek justice for his people, explained: ”According to the governments…we surrendered the land and all its resources. But our ancestors never agreed to surrender anything. We’ve always believed that the spirit and intent of the Treaty No.9 is to share the land.”
The original site where the treaty was signed is now underwater. In 1934, the Ontario government chose to build a hydro dam to supply the Pickle Crow Gold mine with hydro. Water began to rise in 1935, washing away homes, gardens and gravesites for the man-made Lake St. Joseph. People were not told they would be flooded and awoke to find water rising in their homes.
The dispossession of the people of Mishkeegogamang only continues. Highway 599 runs right through the reserve and is crucial for the vast gold mining industry in the area, which results in billions of dollars coming from Ojibway land and resources. The East-West route for the Ring of Fire development will include Mishkeegogamang, but as Tom highlighted, the continual promise of social development and employment has only resulted in continual disappointment.
Mishkeegogamang has a band council under the Indian Act. Gary and Tom continuously emphasized that this political system imposed by Canada has resulted in levels of corruption that have been dangerous for the people.
Pickle Lake and Central Patricia Path
Our visit to Pickle Lake, 20 km north of Mishkeegogamang, continued to reveal the displacement and apartheid conditions of the region.
The long history of mining around Pickle Lake has brought Native people to the town from the many fly-in communities such as Round Lake, Bearskin Lake, Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug only to face eviction and segregation. Tom Wassakeeysic’s family, like many others, lived in a former mining house on Central Patricia Path until “white guys from the township” told them they had 3 days to move to the Mishkeegogamang reserve so that white mining workers could live there.
We were told many stories of police brutality in the town. George shared an intense story of being harassed, tasered and arrested by the OPP “while just waiting for a cab.” A state-of-the-art OPP detachment centre stands in stark contrast to the run-down buildings of the economically depressed town. There are 13 OPP officers in this town of only 400 people.
Moving Forward
Caribou: Traditional food in Mishkeegogamang
On our drive back to Thunder Bay, Gary stated: “There’s a lot of potential now. With this group that came up [ILPS], I think you opened the door for other organizations to come in… to visualize, to support. And you’re coming into a community where that’s what people need right about now.”
These relationships and commitments extend to ILPS membership and beyond, as people committed to struggling against colonialism and imperialism, for true justice for Mother Earth and her peoples. This destructive system makes the links between us every day by raping the land in Northern Ontario to fuel financial centres and capital accumulation in Southern Ontario. Thus we must continue to form relationships in struggle which connect the defense of land in the North with people power in the South.
Concrete Next Steps: Building a Home and Building People Power
We in the ILPS Commission in Support of Indigenous People’s Struggles are in the process of working with our friends in Mishkeegogamang to see how best to support the efforts of the community to seek justice, especially for the youth.
Our immediate next step is to support a group of Saugeen women who are addressing the lack of housing in their community, their forced disconnection from the land, and the lack of institutions under people’s control. This summer, we are organizing for a group of people to join the building of a log cabin for a Saugeen woman who needs a home immediately. She wants to live directly on the land that she is fighting to protect from the incursion of mining and the poisoning of traditional food sources by forestry companies. She is leading the building of homes for many other young families who need housing and is also building a general store by the highway to address the need for resources and employment.
Her strength and vision is clear: “We’re put in these areas to look after earth and her people. That’s why I’m going to do my best to walk with the people.”
by John Clarke
As we approach May Day, it is worth considering the impact of the mounting austerity agenda on the poorest part of the working class and some of the ways the poor are fighting back as part of an emerging common front.
Since 1995, people living on social assistance in Ontario have seen their sub poverty incomes reduced by about 55%. The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) has responded to this by initiating the Raise the Rates Campaign to challenge cutbacks by the Liberal Government and to press for the restoration of social assistance. We joined with a wide range of local anti poverty organizations and with the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE Ontario) in this fight.
Towards the end of last year, the Liberals announced the elimination of the vital Community Start Up and Maintenance Benefit (CSUMB) that people on social assistance used to maintain housing or obtain it if they were homeless. It was replaced with a patchwork of locally administered, underfunded programs.
The Raise the Rates Campaign took up a huge fight on this issue. A week of action was organized in some thirty communities, with demonstrations, occupations and even road closings. This effort, along with other initiatives, forced the Government to put back $42 million in funding for the new programs. It was a partial victory but it showed that we are not powerless and can fight back successfully.
As a Provincial Budget looms, the austerity driven attacks on the poor from Queen’s Park are going to intensify and we will face greater struggles ahead.
Photo courtesy OCAP
Here in Toronto, the impact of economic downturn and social cutbacks has reached the level where homeless people are being left to die on the streets. Last year alone, there were forty two recorded homeless deaths. In recent months, we have challenged the appalling overcrowding in the homeless shelters. The response of the Mayor and administration was to claim that all was well and that the shelters were meeting needs.
OCAP and many allies mobilized to demand that the city government respond to the crisis on the streets. We held two occupations at Metro Hall and City Hall, setting up shelters for the homeless in both places. Police were used to clear us out but we didn’t give up. After months of community action, City Council voted to reduce the occupancy rate in the shelters.
We are not raising our voice against something we are powerless to stop. We are fighting to win. OCAP intends to build the size and strength of our resistance to poverty and austerity and to unite with communities and unions fighting back. Poor and working people did not create the crisis that has led to government cutbacks and we won’t let them make us pay for it.
Photo courtesy University of Maryland Press Releases
by Jordy Cummings
A few years back, were you as dependent on your cell phone as you are now? I thought not. Now that you’re hooked, big business is gonna jack up the price.
Music player, camera, video games, social media, schedule, all in one handy little device, what the business press call “mobile devices”. Capitalism’s constant drive to innovate in order to stay afloat and make a profit has produced a little device has more raw power, more memory, and a higher resolution than the top-of-the-line computers from only a few years ago.
There are three major telecommunications companies in Canada: Bell, Rogers, and Telus. Some small players have entered the game with discounted, albeit lower quality service.
An inherent factor to capitalism is towards concentration. The big fish swallowing little fish, or sometimes the little fish join together and become yet another big fish. Instead of competition between corporations, there is competition within corporations or competition between different monopolies. When a new product is introduced, producers compete by lowering prices, getting you hooked. Then, like a dope pusher, the prices get jacked up and you no longer have a landline, and they’ve got you strung out with a three year contract and a phone that’ll maybe last a year, tops. Your boss is used to having you at his beck and call to answer emails, and your social existence has become tethered to your device. So you’ve got no choice, unless of course you want to go cold turkey, and the boss and your friends aren’t going to be happy about that.
Meanwhile, the small players on the market are at loose ends. Wind Mobile in particular seems to be looking for a buyer and there has been a rumor mill circulating about Rogers engulfing it. Others point to a chance that some the smaller players- Wind, Mobilicity and Public Mobile- may merge into a mega-corporation. Either way, the virtue that these smaller firms offered working class people, is cheaper voice plans and more flexible contracts, albeit often with problems such as inferior reception or limited geographical range. They filled a market niche and even encouraged the larger companies to lower wireless bills, which have come down 10 percent in the last few years. Surely, any loss that the larger corporations took from decreased “talk” rates was offset by exorbitant growth in data usage.
But with these firms struggling, this will mean the end of cheaper phone plans and flexible contracts, and either the entry into, or replication of, the big Rogers/Bell/Telus machine. This is what happened with Fido, which had very decent service including the popular CityFido plan, but when it was taken over by Rogers it stopped offering that plan and stopped being a real option.
A lot of people will say that with less corporations competing for your mobile device usage needs, the price will inevitably go up – so the solution is for there to be more choice on the market. But this is only how capitalism operates in the first phase of any new product coming onto the market. To simply think that having more companies will, in a sustainable way, keep prices down is to ignore the fundamental logic of how the system works. Certainly, consumer advocacy campaigns aimed at discouraging monopolism in the mobile sector should be supported. But we should also call for publicly owned data networks, free and accessible data and telephone service, and for the infrastructure of telecommunications to be managed as a public utility. All of the important benefits that mobile technology has brought to our lives can then be sustained, while cutting out the capitalist logic of profit.
by Christina Soto
Since last September I have received a monthly $100 cheque in the mail, money that sits heavily in our family pocket book. If I didn’t really need it I would rip it up and throw it in the trash. It is a cash incentive from the Universal Child Care Benefit (UCCB) and it comes with a price: the cost of a National Childcare program and the overall well-being of our children.
The National Childcare program would have been a first step towards a real childcare system in Canada. However, it was cut by Stephen Harper (within three hours of taking office) in favour of this $100 a month plan. An extra $100 for a family is insignificant in the big picture and makes little impact to the actual cost of childcare.
Last month, the UCCB “celebrated” its seventh year. During this time it has cost Canada $15 billion dollars, but we have little to show for it. But parceling it out eliminates the possibility for a national childcare structure that would build regulated quality care and make families lives easier.
Instead, families have limited options.
For people in the upper income brackets there is a myriad of choices; including the Live-In-Caregiver program. For working-class families, our hostile government has left us scrambling to find our own, usually expensive, solutions. In Quebec families pay $7/day, that is $154/month. In Ontario, a space runs from $1000-$2000 a month. This is completely unreasonable for most families and especially for those of us struggling to get through difficult economic times.
One of the children of a community-run childcare collective
In light of this, some families have been forced to innovate, to band together to form Community-Run Childcare collectives. These collectives share the responsibilities of childcare amongst parents and aim to provide quality care for children. The philosophy of the collectives also runs completely counter to the individualism espoused by the UCCB (“Here’s a $100, go spend it” versus “Let’s work together and build something”).
A report published just last year from the United Nations reprimanded Canada internationally for its human rights failures on childcare. The U.N. Committee for the Rights of the Child called on Canada to fulfill their human rights obligations with regard to childcare. The report showed that only 20% of our children have access to care. While 900 thousand children have access to care almost 5 million do not.
In a global assessment of children’s health and wellbeing, Canada isn’t doing very well either. A recent UNICEF report shows that Harper’s Canada has failed our children. Compared to the rest of the world’s “rich” countries, Canada ranked poorly, landing in the bottom third of the list due to our childhood poverty rates. 1 in 7 Canadian children live in poverty. This is a grand shame.
The early years, 0-3, are the most critical in childhood development. In this increasingly inequitable society, families have to struggle to meet the basic needs of their young children. Now they also have to battle, on their own, to ensure access to childcare. High quality childcare is as important as access to good housing, healthy food, and education for the health of our communities. The short sighted thinking of the UCCB is only increasing the burden on individual families, negatively affecting the overall well-being of our children.
Thankfully, in times of pressure communities can come together and create innovative solutions. If you are interested in building a community parenting collective in your neighbourhood, contact communityparentingmovement@gmail.com.
Christina Soto is a parent and member of the Revolutionary Women’s Collective, a people’s organization that highlights women’s struggles around the world.
The kids of Little Lemurs Parenting Collective
By N. Zahra
As the old Yoruba (Nigerian) proverb goes, “It takes a village to raise a child.” With government support for affordable childcare decreasing, the community has to take things in hand. This past January, a group of parents living in northwest Toronto came together and started a “community parenting co-op” to begin to address the crisis of childcare that so many families are facing.
A parenting co-op is an arrangement where a group of parents share childcare and other responsibilities associated with parenting. It could involve playgroups, grocery shopping, child-minding, meal preparation or any other task associated with childcare. The idea for this project came to them about a year before when they started looking into the real cost of childcare in the city. With the average daycare cost for a one year old ranging between $1,000-$2,000, and almost 19,500 children from infants to school-aged waiting for childcare subsidies, they were under no illusion that they could get much help caring for the children from the city.
When asked what is a parenting co-op and why they started one, one of the parents, Steve da Silva, said: “We want to build people’s power and community self-reliance so that we are not solely dependent on the State, at this time when “austerity” cuts demonstrate that the government really doesn’t care about working-class families. We want to care for children with people who share our vision of turning to the power of the people in our communities to not only do-for-self, but to take a political stance while we’re at it. We also need time as parents to get things done and continue having a healthy relationship with our children, our spouses, and our communities… this is something that is informally done anyway among parents who cannot find or afford childcare. So far, it has been a great way to build community amongst the adults involved.”
The parenting co-op, now calling itself the Little Lemurs Parenting Collective, is actively working to build beyond its current size to build a “Community Parenting Movement,” a network of parenting co-ops across the city that can provide for our children at a time when our families are under attack.
If you are interested in building a parenting co-op in your neighbourhood, contact communityparentingmovement@gmail.com.
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