by Johnny Hawke and Richard Peters

Land claim settlements between the federal government and the indigenous Anishinabek Nations of Turtle Island are being resolved using biased colonial policies where these settler states are the judge and jury of their own crimes. The policies used to settle the land claims reflect the same injustices that are in the claims are supposed to resolve.  Unlike our ancestors we can read and write in the colonial languages and understand what we are signing and surrendering.

There are two types of Aboriginal claims in Canada that are commonly referred to as “land claims”: comprehensive claims and specific claims. Comprehensive claims (also called modern treaties) are always about rights to land. Specific claims deal with a majority of our grievances and allow our Nations to purchase private lands back from private landowners on a willing seller and willing buyer basis.  Specific claims also involve financial compensation distributed per capita to “Band Members.” The remaining dollars are usually not enough to acquire the same amount of lands that were stolen.

Why should we have to purchase our own territories that were stolen from us? Our teachings are that we are of the Earth and do not own the Earth but these lands are our territory. Just as a bear belongs to its natural territory, we have our natural habitat. The theft of our lands allowed for the imposition of colonial policies that suppressed our own forms of government as sovereign nations. In these land claim settlements there is no relinquishing of these foreign laws such as the Indian Act and the judicial system that are imposed on our nations.

Our Nations of Turtle Island have Intertribal Agreements where many nations around the Great Lakes agreed to the One Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt. This agreement established a peace and coexistence treaty that acknowledged each nation’s right to their territory. We know we don’t own the Earth and never colonized each other for territory. We made this agreement because what happens to one nation’s territory affects the others. This Agreement was forgotten as individual groups started to cede away their own territories to the settler nations without first consulting with the Nations involved in this agreement. Many land surrenders are invalid because this agreement has not been respected.

The 1764 Treaty of Fort Niagara is an agreement where our nations established an alliance with the British Crown where the Canadian state is its current representative. Our nations and the Crown accepted a nation-to-nation relationship rooted in a policy of peace, non-interference and coexistence. When the Crown breaches this Agreement, which ultimately legitimizes their presence on this Continent, every one of their laws becomes invalid.

If we as Anishinabek Nations believe one does not sell or own the Earth and at the same time believe that we need to walk in both a mainstream and an Anishinabek world how do we then accept the benefits from selling our share of the Earth to survive in the mainstream capitalist world yet expect to distinguish ourselves as a distinct Nation with a belief system that connects us to the Earth?

My community has accepted $307 million settlement surrendering our traditional territories. I, along with my brother, opted out of this illegal process and have repossessed a traditional gathering place that now sits in a provincial park, a place interwoven in the Six Nations and Ojibway Friendship Belt. A Nation is not a Nation without a connection to the Earth and a Territory to feed its own people. Like a bear I will die fighting to protect my territory and way of life. No surrender!

Canadian banks posting record profits amidst stagnating production and deepening crisis for most people

by Steve da Silva

On August 22, the Governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney – a former  leading executive of Goldman Sachs for thirteen years – delivered a speech to an unlikely audience of trade union delegates at the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) convention.  In a post-speech news conference, Carney tried to play to his audience by criticizing corporate Canada for not re-investing the record levels of cash reserves that they are sitting on – a whopping $526 billion, what Carney called “dead money”.  This figure was brought to light by the Canadian Labour Congress in a January 2012 study that attributes the rising cash reserves to decades of tax breaks for corporations.

While many of the responses to Carney’s speech expressed shock that the Bank of Canada Governor would take a shot at corporate Canada, it certainly wasn’t a slip.  If it was, Carney’s comments wouldn’t have been echoed by Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty just a few days later when he said that “At a certain point, it’s not up to the government to stimulate the economy; it’s up to the private sector; and they have lots of capital.”  So what motivated these comments?

For one, the Federal government is running out of easy scapegoats for an economic crisis for which they have no exit strategy. They say that private sector wages are too high for Canada to compete; there’s a recession in the U.S.; and those lazy Portuguese, Irish, Italian, Greek, and Spaniard workers (the PIIGS) are keeping the whole world economy down.  The critique of a supposed corporate stinginess a great way to strike a balance in the blame game, even if they know that a crisis of profitability

For his part in the Bank of Canada, Carney has kept the ‘overnight rate’ (the rate at which the banks make short-term loans to each other) below or at 1% since 2009.  These rates translate into low borrowing costs for everyone, which, when combined with eroding or slashed wages, has pushed the debt-to-income ratio of Canadians to an all time high of 152%.  With Canadians cash-strapped and up to their eyes in debt, household spending cannot drive the long-promised economic recovery.  This fact, in turn, keeps corporations from rapidly expanding production beyond current capacity.  Labour leaders tell us that raising wages would solve all the problems, that the middle class is the core of any “great democracy”.  What they refuse to acknowledge is that high wages are just another obstacle to corporate profit.  

Reports last week revealed that non-financial corporations experienced a five percent decline in operating earnings in the second quarter of 2012, following a downward trend of non-financial corporation profits over the last year.  Meanwhile, Canada’s financial industry is booming – a trend that is not in contradiction to the downward trend  in non-financial sector.

Canada’s big banks just released details of spectacular quarterly profits for April-June 2012, totaling a whopping $7.8 billion.  Profits like these derive less and less from manufacturing, and more and more from mergers and acquisitions like the one made by Scotia Bank last week, when it acquired ING’s operations in Canada for $3.1 billion – the largest bank acquisition in Canada in more than a decade.  Since the beginning of the economic crisis in 2008, big corporations have resorted to mergers and acquisitions (M&As) – especially in the financial and extractive industries – to knock out the competition, capture new markets, and prop up profits in a time of recession.  This centralizing of capital is in direct contradiction to the type of investments and spending that Carney and Flaherty were calling for.

Corporate Canada – financial and non-financial – is doing everything it needs to do to make profits in the current context.  It would be foolish to think that Carney and Flaherty don’t know this.  Their comments in late August were nothing more than a veiled attempt to pass the buck so they don’t have to admit that the economy is structurally stagnant, especially in industries that create lots of jobs.

The sooner we come to terms with the reality that a government elected through a demagogy of prosperity at any costs is only a government of prosperity only for the few – that we’re not “all in this together” – the sooner we can organize ourselves for the fight back.

But that’ll remain a challenge so long as we have labour leaders who invite central bankers to speak at union conventions.

by Tony Couto

In the immediate aftermath of the July 16 shootings on Danzig St. in Scarborough, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford took the airwaves on AM640 and in his predictably racist and idiotic style pledged “to find out how our immigration laws work” so he could expel those convicted of gun crimes in Toronto: “I don’t care if you’re an immigrant or not, if you get caught with a gun, I want to find out the legalities of are you allowed to stay here or are you not… I’m sure it falls under some sort of immigration law.”

Ford’s remarks would have been laughable were they not echoing the disturbing trend of the Federal government to link crime (speciously) to immigration.  Take for instance Federal Bill C-43, what is being called the “Faster Removal of Foreign Criminals Act”.  If passed, this legislation would allow for the deportation of any non-citizen who has received a sentence of six months or more for any crime carrying a ten-year maximum sentence, beefing up the Conservatives’ anti-immigrant and anti-refugee arsenal of laws.

Ford the anti-tax crusader also seized upon the Danzig incident as an opportunity to express his opposition to social programming: “I don’t believe in these programs – I call them hug-a-thug programs.”  So, the users of community arts and sports programs in Toronto’s designated “priority neighbourhoods” are all thugs?  Ford continued, “[these programs] haven’t been very productive in the past” – arguing through assertion not reason –“and I don’t know why they are continuing with them.”  Ford routinely uses the popular appeal of his anti-tax cause – a major factor that got him elected – to attack social spending and attack unions. But when it comes to police spending, however, Ford’s City Hall has no problems throwing billions into the law-and-order abyss.

The official police budget for 2012 was previously projected at $936 million; but as Ford began demanding of Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty extra funding for police as advisor close to Ford revealed that that Toronto is already spending closer to $1.2 billion on policing. On July 23, McGuinty technically declined Ford’s request for $5-10 million to fund new officers, but he did the next best thing for the pro-cop agenda by pledging to permanently fund the so-called Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS) to the tune of $5 million a year.  McGuinty made himself more palatable to the public than Ford by paying some lip service to social programming and taking a more “balanced approach” to gun violence. But McGuinty’s announcement for the fast tracking of $500,000 through the so-called Safer and Vital Communities Program is not a counter-balance to the more-cops approach: it’s a extension of it.

To receive grants through this program, organizations and agencies must be willing to work with the police.  This funding criterion will exclude all those organizations that acknowledge police brutality and profiling/carding in the “priority neighbourhoods” as a serious problem and are unwilling to collaborate with the police as a condition for the provision of social services.

While in Toronto for his July 24 meeting with Mayor Rob Ford at the ‘Gun Summit’, in addition to talking up Bill C-43, Harper defended his general ‘law and order’ agenda: defending elements of his Omnibus Crime Bill that judges have deemed unconstitutional or in violation of the Charter; and promoting a private member’s bill, C-394 (Criminal Organization Recruitment), recently introduced by Conservative MP Parm Gill of Brampton-Springdale. Gill recently said of the proposed legislation that “Criminal organizations today are targeting youth under the age of 12 and as young as 8 years-old to participate in criminal activity… There is a dire need to protect our communities from those who prey on innocent and vulnerable individuals.”  What’s objectionable to this bill is not only the provision of the police and the courts with yet another law to criminalize youth; but its emphasis on petty criminal enterprises (would anything but a petty criminal enterprise recruit an 8 year-old?) when there exist much bigger players behind the guns and drugs game.

In a joint public statement from Toronto-based Filipino and Latino community organizations concerning events in the wake of the Danzig shootings, Pablo Vivanco of Barrio Nuevo raised this exact point: “We also need to start asking where these guns are coming from, who is bringing them into this City and why.  These youth are not making or smuggling guns, so we need to acknowledge that there are bigger things at play and target the real players in this morbid game.”  In this whole debate on gun crime, the giant elephant in the middle of the room that the media, police, and politicians are refusing to acknowledge is the role played by larger criminal syndicates – nothing short of a conspiracy of silence.

The influence of organized crime in Canada has been hitting the headlines in Quebec in recent months with a public inquiry exploring the links between the construction industry, the mafia, and Quebec’s political parties.  The assassination of a series of major mob figures in Montreal has also in forced the issue of organized crime back into the mainstream.  But are illegal donations to political parties and unfair public contracts the worst of it for the mob these days?

Then there’s the vast network built up by the Hell’s Angels over the last decade.  It’s no secret that the Hell’s Angels – on the surface an all-white biker club – fronts for a large criminal network embedded within and around it.

Considering the very existence of large criminal enterprises like these, it isn’t a quantum leap to the arrive at the conclusion that there must be greater forces behind the guns and drugs flooding into and fracturing working-class communities in cities like Toronto.  Yet it’s in our communities where the policing and criminalization is concentrated and where the violent scramble for market share plagues youth gang culture.

That impoverished racialized communities end up experiencing the bulk of the violence should come as no surprise when we analyze the socio-economic reality we’re left with: a shrinking pool of jobs for youth and their parents; rising tuition fees of post-secondary education (not to mention the alienating experience of racist curricula and administrators in high schools); rising costs of living; cuts to social programming; and the broad criminalization, profiling, and discrimination of racialized youth that push many out of the job market to begin with. Now throw into this mix of desperate circumstances the prospect of making a quick buck in the petty drug trade made possible by larger criminal syndicates reaching down into “priority neighbourhoods” for candidates to move their product, and what you get is a violent scramble for market share and domination. The big gangsters are getting paid behind the scenes regardless of the violence happening on the ground; and this violence gives the cops a cause for crusade, the politicians an election issue, and big capitalists a sense of security that the armed apparatus of the state is getting stronger and stronger at a time when the masses of people are getting poorer and more desperate.

The tragic shootings on Danzig St. on July 16 should definitely have us asking questions about violence in our communities and searching for solutions. But these questions, and the answers that must follow, are not the ones being posed by Rob Ford, Dalton McGuinty, Bill Blair, and Stephen Harper, these enemies of the people who are exploiting the Danzig tragedy to beef up police forces; peddle their racist, anti-immigrant, anti-people, and anti-social policies.  These policies are not solutions to gun violence and crime: they’re desperate measures to stabilize a decaying capitalist society by dividing and containing the people.

The question that remains is how much the law enforcement agencies and politicians actually know about the relationship of larger criminal enterprises to the guns and drugs in our communities.  Just for the record, that’s not an appeal to power: it’s an indicment of it.

On May 29, over a thousand people rallied in Ottawa in support of the Quebec student strike. People marched through the streets of centre town and downtown with people on street corners and in apartments showing their support. The march then crossed the bridge to Gatineau where the UQO students and their supporters have been organizing regular nightly demonstrations in support of the strike and against Law 78.

This video is a speech given by a student from the University of Quebec in Outaouais (UQO).

 Click here to view Flickr stream.

On May 1st, 1886, workers in Chicago were shot down as they marched for an 8-hour workday. Ever since then, May 1st or May Day has been recognized as International Workers Day, a day of celebration and struggle for the toiling masses all across the world.

The twentieth century witnessed heroic struggles and glorious achievements of human liberation under the leadership of workers and supported by the most oppressed and exploited people.  The struggles of workers and peasants, women and students of the popular classes, and people resisting occupation, military dictatorship and fascism carved out important gains for the people in the past century.  However, decades of neoliberal “globalization” have reversed the gains of previous generations of working class struggles, revolutions, and anti-colonial movements.

With the onset of the 2008 financial crisis – after a brief period when many were questioning the viability of capitalism – the ruling classes of the G20 countries regrouped, decided upon their strategy, and declared open war on the people.  In June 2010 at the G20 Summit in Toronto, while 1,100 people were being rounded up in the streets of Toronto and thrown into cages, Stephen Harper announced that we were entering the “Age of Austerity”.

But this new era of “austerity” really isn’t so new. It intensifies the attacks of neoliberalism of the last thirty years on the Third World and the poorest people in countries like Canada, while extending the offensive to those layers of the working class who previously considered themselves as “middle class” – workers in manufacturing and the public sector.  Since 2003, 500,000 well-paying manufacturing jobs have been transferred from Canada to countries where workers are more heavily exploited.

For decades, Federal governments have slashed corporate tax rates in the name of job creation and attracting foreign capital. Yet, non financial Canadian corporations alone are sitting on more than $500 billion in cash reserves – never mind what the banks and financial corporations have.1   The stagnant economy is not the result of high taxes or “uneasy investors”, but a crisis of overproduction and overaccumulation of capital across the world economy.  The biggest corporations in the world seek to grow today not by expanding their capacity to invest in new production, but by swallowing up their competitors and often closing down their factories in order to conquer new markets, control output, and tweak price levels just to optimize profits.  One can say there is a crisis of “overaccumulation” because the capitalists have more capital than they can profitably invest.  Redistributing wealth is not an option for the ruling class because that means us workers wouldn’t be as desperate and exploitable.

This crisis of overproduction is what accounts for the upsurge in mergers and acquisitions (M&As) amongst the biggest corporations in the world. The media has a lot to say when a Canadian company is confronted with a takeover by a foreign corporation, but has little to say about Canadian companies buying up assets all across the world. In fact, Canadian companies, especially in mining and finance, have outpaced foreign companies in M&As for the last few years. In 2010, the global mining sector in particular experienced a record number of mergers and acquisitions – a staggering 2,693 – worth USD113 billion, in which Canadian capital was responsible for a breathtaking 713 of these takeovers, or 36 percent of the total global value in this sector.2  Canada is not being taken over by foreign corporations; Canadian companies are more and more dominating in the world.  This is what makes Canada “imperialist”, and it’s the people – most especially Aboriginal peoples, and third world workers and peasants  – who are paying the heavy cost for the gains of these big capitalists. But it’s also the workers losing their jobs. Our misery is their profit.

These takeovers then allow for big companies to close down the competition and shift production to places where labour is super-exploited.  This was the case with Caterpillar’s takeover of Electro-Motive in London, Ontario in 2010 and its eventual shutdown of the plant when it liquidated 500 jobs in early 2012, shifting production to a non-unionized plant in Indiana.  Meanwhile, the corporate media divides the working class by blaming more exploited workers in other countries, especially China, for the movement of capital.

The Federal government’s drastic reforms to the immigration system complement super-exploitation. Refugees are being criminalized to keep them out and it is being made more difficult to sponsor family members to come to Canada, while Canada continues the “brain-drain” of professionals and high-skilled workers from the “developing” world — labour and experts that the Canadian system did not have to invest in to train and educate. Meanwhile, the numbers of Temporary Foreign Workers (TFWs) in the country continues to grow.  Capital wants to see a workforce that is disposable — that has few rights, no access to services, and can be sent back home when they’re no longer needed (when they’re injured or done their jobs).  In 2008, the number of TFWs entering Canada exceeded the number of permanent residents being allowed into the country.  As of 2011, there were more than 300,000 TFWs in Canada.  These workers look to Canada for a better life precisely because multinational corporations like those in Canada have made the prospects of a better life back home (under capitalism!) impossible.

Cheaper wages and shrinking social programs are allowing the capitalists to make record profits. Yet, only four years after the biggest financial bailouts in human history, running into the trillions of dollars, the international bankers and G20 countries have the audacity to call for more austerity from the workers!  The Canadian government (through the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation) is currently guaranteeing the big banks for up to $600 billion dollars in mortgage assets. That means that as Canadians begin to default on their mortgages under the heavy weight of record-high debt levels, public funds will go to bailout these banks rather than the people who cannot make their payments due to declining wages and lack of jobs.

Such bailouts are a major part of the  “fiscal crisis” that has become the justification for the major spending cuts and privatizing public goods. Tens of thousands of Federal public sector workers will lose their jobs in the coming years, a move that will disproportionately affect women employed in these jobs and families who rely on the related services.3  Workers under 54 years of age have had two years stolen from their old age security in the last Federal budget.

Yet, you can always become a cop, join the military, or help build new prisons for the poor!  These “public services” are exempt from austerity because they’ll be needed to contain the next round of popular struggles. Canada is in the midst of the largest prison building boom since the Great Depression.  Federal and provincial governments are building or expanding upon 60 prisons across Canada to make space for the Federal government’s Omnibus Crime Bill.4   The second largest addition is the New Toronto South Detention Center with 1100 beds.  It costs $117,000 to house an inmate at a Federal facility.  If even a quarter of this money was directed towards job creation, community services, affordable housing, and raising the disability support and welfare rates, crime would plummet significantly.  How do we know this? Close to 100% of all inmates are from the poorest 10% of the population – a shocking statistic that reveals the relationship between poverty and criminalization.5   What’s worse is that the prison population is “racialized”: Aboriginal and black peoples make up much higher proportions of the prison population than they make up in the Canadian population.

Yet the main debate we see animating Parliament today is about who got the contract to build the F-35 jets and how many we’re getting for however many billions of dollars.  The people are asking why the hell we’re spending billions on these death machine to begin with.  There’s no party in Parliament that has clearly stood up against any spending for these weapons of mass destruction to begin with. Why would they? Every parliamentary Party supported the bombing of Libya.  Canada dropped more than 550 bombs on the country, destroying its infrastructure and paving the way – or destroying the way – for the new Western-backed Libyan government to take out billions in foreign loans from for “reconstruction”.  It’s for wars like this that the F-35s are needed.

Meanwhile, the unions can’t even resist the concessions being forced onto their members. The only leverage that the unions have to resist attacks on their narrow defense of the collective agreement – the right to strike when collective bargaining breaks down – has been virtually banned by the state through the wanton use of “back-to-work legislation” by Federal and provincial governments. Examples: Air Canada pilot strike in March 2012; Canada Post postal workers in June 2011 and Air Canada flight attendants in October 2011; York U. teaching assistants and contract faculty in 2009; Toronto transit workers in 2008; the list goes on.  Some workers, such as seasonal farm workers, have no right to form unions at all.

Yet, the only resistance that labour leaders have to offer is begging at the feet of corporate management and various levels of government for “good jobs” and “green jobs”, as if the harmonious relationship between workers and capitalists can continue – a collaboration that was always premised on the super-exploitation of workers and peasants in the oppressed countries.

Now that this era of class peace between unionized workers and the big capitalists in countries like Canada is coming to an end, a new era is opening up for class struggle.  It’s time to reclaim the history of militant labour!  It’s time to reorganize workers under the leadership of our own class! It’s time to break with the bosses, the bureaucrats, and the bourgeois politicians! Most importantly, it’s time to break with the illusions of the previous era: namely, that capitalism can continue and that the majority of us have anything to gain by continuing to defend the capitalist system.

Our exploitation is their profits. Our grinding poverty and desperation means we’re forced to work for less.  Price increases to food, gasoline, and rent are extorting the people of our ever-shrinking real wages, while filling the coffers of the rich.

It’s either capitalism or the people. It’s either a system based on blind production for private profit and necessitating the destruction of the environment and the conquest of peoples and nations, or a system where production meets the needs of all people and future generations.  Those are the only two ways forward at this juncture of history.

The May 1st Movement (M1M) was founded in late 2008 as a coalition of working-class and people’s organizations to reclaim the history of May Day for the working class in Toronto. After four years of organizing May Day activities and rallies, in 2012 we have contributed to bringing together people’s organizations for a united rally on International Workers’ Day.  In the coming years, we must broaden and strengthen this unity with all possible forces in order to advance our struggles.

To do this, M1M and all progressives, militants, and revolutionaries – all anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial forces – must work together to win over more and more people to a positive vision of what is to be done.  The crisis of capitalism is deepening day-by-day.  Before the ruling class finds more reactionary solutions to the crisis, people’s organizations must struggle to unify around a project of universal liberation.

The May 1st Movement (M1M) believes that we cannot expect capitalism to meet the needs of the people. Our demands should reflect this reality, and so should our strategy for change.  We can’t propagate illusions about what’s possible in this system.  We need to build the capacity of the people to fight for a new society. We need to reclaim the history of militant labour and unions led by the workers, not big salaried bureaucrats. We need grassroots power in our communities and our schools — in every sector of society.  We need as many people as possible to take a lead. The Aboriginal people in this country are showing us the way forward as they stand up all across the country to defend their land, their lives, and their livelihoods from the plunder of Canadian government and the corporations.  The rest of us must do the same.

Let May Day be the launching point for the struggles that must come.  Let May Day be the day when we march with the toiling peoples of the world against the global capitalist and imperialist system!

by Jasmine Green

As of April 12th, student associations representing over 171,000 students from Quebec’s universities and CEGEP programs have gone on strike and organised protests in opposition to the recent government decision to increase tuition fees by 75 percent over five years. It began with 30, 000 students on February 13th and grew  to reach  192,000 students in 39 days. This nine weeks student strike is the longest in Canadian history.

Major peaceful protests, some met with police violence, have been taking place in Montreal and have resulted in hundreds of arrests. On March 7, CEGEP student Francis Grenier suffered an eye injury as a result of a clash with the police.

Student associations at various universities have been going on strike to demand that the Liberal government reverse its decision to increase tuition fees by $325 a year, for a total of $1,625, by 2016.

“The main focus of the strike is tuition fees,” said Hugo Bonin, a student in Concordia’s women studies program whose association is on strike. “But I think this is an opportunity to politicise a lot of students and people across Quebec.”

While there seems to be an overwhelming support for the strike among the student community, a few CEGEPs and student associations voted against the strike, most notably  the student union at Dawson College.

Quebec’s tuition fees are currently $2,519 per year on average, the lowest in the country. Even with the proposed changes, Quebec’s tuition will remain lower than the Canadian average of $5,366. This has been a common point of criticism against the strike.

But Bonin disagrees.

“Tuition fees are lower in Quebec than the rest of Canada, but so is the student debt, which is a good impact of low tuition fees,” he said. “This [along] with the free CEGEP years has resulted in a 9% higher enrollment than the rest of Canada.”

The student movement in Quebec has a lengthy history of strikes, the most recent successful strike being in 2005.

On March 22, 200,000 people took to the streets, in opposition to the hikes. There still has not been any options for negotiations between the liberal government and the student union CLASSE, as they have been requesting.

Line Beauchamp, Quebec minister of education,  refuses any renegotiation of the hike. As the strike goes on, the demonstrations have begun to incorporate the blockage of economic power centres as part a strategy to increase the pressure on the government to negotiate.

Students have begun to call for general strikes, and have been receiving widespread support from everyday citizens in their protests. Most recently, on April 14th, 30, 000 people took to the streets in Montreal calling for a broader social mobilisation in the province, referring to it as the “maple spring”.  Other slogans such as: “the strike is student, but the struggle is a popular one!” show that the classist nature of this strike is clear to the movement and therefore supported by society at large.

In the context of governmental austerity, this struggle is perhaps the most decisive yet. CEGEPS and Universities have begun ordering students back to classes, going against democratic decisions of general assemblies. Injunctions are beginning to be imposed on picketers of classes by universities. Nevertheless, the movement has not let the intimidation tactics break the strike, as massive outpour of support comes from fellow students and even professors.

“In Ontario, education is no longer accessible,” Nicole Desnoyers, a campaign organizer with the University of Ottawa “I think that Ontario students getting a victory to lower tuition fees is partially dependent on Quebec students being able to block this tuition fee hike.”

The issue of student poverty and student debt is an increasing concern for students. If the trend of tuition hikes continues, there is a fear that universities will witness higher dropout rates, especially of students from lower income families.

“This struggle is being led by the people who will be hit the hardest by the strike: parent-students, women and working class students with loans up to their ears,” notes Louisa Worrell, a student in the University of Quebec in Montreal UQAM “For these people, the hike will be the difference between attending university  or not. That is why the struggle will win;  we have no other choice.”

By Mike Brito.

Some recent numbers coming out from Statistics Canada show that unemployment rates across the country are reaching levels above 17% for people between the ages of 15-24.  This is more than double the national unemployment rate from 2011, which was around 7.5%.  In Ontario, the numbers are slightly lower, but are still above 15% for youth 15-24.  According to Nancy Schaefer, president of the Toronto based non-profit organization Youth Employment Services, “The permanent, well-paying jobs that you can count on just aren’t there.  So young people, even if they’re able to get something, are taking part-time work, or piecemeal work, or contract work. “

Often these unemployment levels are attributed to changing dynamics specific to Canada including the recent elimination of mandatory retirement and larger numbers of “baby boomers” hanging on to jobs.  Some have pointed out that laid-off workers are competing with youth for an increasingly smaller pool of jobs to distribute amongst workers.  The reality of the current situation is that this is part of a larger worldwide trend, in particular amongst Europe and North America where the Global Recession of 2008 has contributed to an increase in youth unemployment that has reached levels as high as 50% in Spain and Greece.  According to Tom Zizys of the Metcalf Foundation based here in Toronto, “in times of recession, youth are the first to go and the last to be rehired.”

The rioting that occurred across England last summer was sparked by the police shooting of Mark Duggan, many observers have connected the uprisings that started in London but quickly spread, to the high-levels of unemployment amongst young people in that country, where rates are over 20% for people aged 16-24.  According to police, the rioters were almost all under 20, mostly born in the 1990’s with the youngest arrested being 11 years old.  Research conducted after the uprisings has also shown that the districts with the highest rates of youth unemployment were the most effected, and that most of the participating youth were from low-income neighbourhoods and public housing where employment prospects for youth are low.

Across Europe there has been similar trends in levels of unemployment, the EU reports their youth unemployment rate as 22.4%.  Greece and Spain have some of the highest levels, both with rates above 50%.  In Spain, young people also took to the streets last year in a movement called “Los Indiganados”, or the indignant ones.  This movement opposed high levels of unemployment as well as protested banks, bankers, capitalism, welfare cuts and the entire Spanish political system.