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TORONTO’S BIGGEST
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Horizontal violence, political opportunism and the war on our communities Kabir Joshi-Vijayan On July 17th 2012, just hours after the mass shooting at a Scarborough block party that left 23 wounded and two dead, Mayor Rob Ford declared: “Some people have suggested there is a gang war brewing. I don’t know if that’s true. But, I do know it’s time for us to declare war on these violent gangs.… “We must use every legal means to make life for these thugs miserable, to put them behind bars, or to run them out of town. We will not rest until being a gang member is a miserable, undesirable life.” Indeed there were many upset faces, repeated condolences and
angry words from officials and politicians after the Danzig tragedy. The usual bad cop/good cop routine was acted out: The Mayor had his ridiculed outburst about using “immigration laws” to exile anyone with gun charges from the city, and later blubbered on about useless “Hug-a-Thug programs.” The Premier chided the statement as “short-sighted” and pleaded for a balanced and reflective approach. ‘Progressive’ politicians, like Councillor Adam Vaughan, got emotional: “If…all they want to talk about is jail, they can go to hell!” After this media charade was over, both the stick and
carrot were ready for action and unanimous approval. Within a week Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair, Premier McGuinty and Mayor Ford were chuckling over a table passing a $12.5 million boost to aggressive policing programs in Ontario (the stick). A month later the same provincial government unveiled a $20 million plan for youth jobs and community programs (the carrot). Both strategies serve the same wicked agenda – exploiting blood and fear to ramp up the invasion, occupation and containment of poor and oppressed communities. Self-destruction festers in every hood in the city, con-
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BASICS #29, SEP / OCT 2012 (Andy Miah/Flickr)
BASICS
POLITICAL HORSETRADING IN K-W AUTOWORKERS AT CROSSROADS SUPPORTING MIGRANT WORKERS RIGHT TO EXIST, RIGHT TO RESIST! RECORD PROFITS FOR CDN BANKS
suming African (West Indian, West African and Somali) men as both the primary victims and perpetrators. Murders this year included two people close to BASICS members past and present: 22 year-old Nixon Nirmalendran, the second target in the Eaton’s Centre shooting; and a month later 25 year-old Abdulle Elmi. It’s clear that this horizontal violence needs to be called out and confronted, but it’s no mistake that the official analysis fails to trace its origin. This level of violence emerged in the early 90’s after Toronto’s ghettos were flooded with drugs and guns over the >> continued, pg. 2
Police superint. intimidates JaneFinch leader Steve da Silva On Friday, June 8th 2012, the Jane Finch Crisis Support Network – a network of agency reps and active community residents working together around issues of community safety – convened its regular monthly meeting at the Black Creek Community Health Center at Yorkgate Mall. At this particular meeting there was an uninvited guest, 31 Division’s Superintendent Dave McLeod, who brought with him some unplanned agenda items and some unwelcome behaviour that certainly made the community no safer. “Superintendent McLeod hijacked the meeting with his own agenda item. He repeatedly verbally attacked the meeting’s chair, Sabrina (Butterfly) Gopaul, calling a quote from her in an interview with the Boss Magazine, ‘borderline criminal’ behaviour.” An Open Letter dated July 24 from Jane-Finch Action Against Poverty (JFAAP) provided context for McLeod’s ‘threatening’ comments: “Ms. Gopaul had stated in this interview that what she was most passionate about making happen in the JaneFinch community was ‘a community led resistance against the police and working towards global comradeship against the austerity knife.’” In addition to her tireless work and many a late night helping Jane-Finch residents at her place of employment, the Black Creek Community Health Center, Butterfly is also active in a number of independent anti-poverty, >> continued, pg. 4
Six Nations and Dundalk fight corporate crap Laura Lepper
You have probably never heard of a small, rural town in Southgate Township called Dundalk. But its location is significant. The town is situated at the highest elevation in Ontario, the headwaters of both the Grand and Saugeen rivers, and sits on land deeded to the Six Nations through the Haldimand Proclamation of 1763. Despite the ecological importance of the region and the outstanding land claim, the Southgate municipal council and Lystek International Inc. are attempting to secretly force through a plan to build a “biosolids” processing facility just a stone’s throw from the town. The process and product are banned in much of Europe. This project would involve trucking Toronto’s sludge – including everything flushed down sewers, toilets, and sinks in homes, hospitals and indus-
try – up to Dundalk to be turned into a “fertilizer”. This sludge plant is set to be built on land that is practically sitting on water surrounded by wetland. The sludge would then be spread on farm fields - meaning our food, water and land would be poisoned by sludge. “Three applications of these biosolids on the land and it’s dead,” says Doyle Prier who lives on a nearby farm. Lystek and the town council’s plans have been met with powerful resistance from local residents and Six Nations community members alike. After exhausting the official government channels, concerned Dundalk residents approached Six Nations for assistance in their opposition to the sludge. Southgate township resident Lori Prier remarks “We hadn’t heard of our council consulting Six Nations … and I became very concerned … because it’s
their land.” Dundalk sits at the very top of the Haldimand Tract, the territory stretching six miles on either side of the entire Grand River, recognized by the British Crown as a territory which was specifically granted to the Mohawks and other members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy
in return for losses suffered for supporting the British side in the war of American Independence. Sharing concern for the land, the health of their communities and future generations, members of Six Nations have been working together with Dundalk residents to stop construction of the sludge plant. Because Six Nations people drew
a line in the sand saying the construction could not continue on their lands, Dundalk residents were given Haudenosaunee flags to fly on the frontlines of their resistance. For about 100 days, they held a blockade in the name of Six Nations land rights where they stopped all construction on Lystek. >> continued, pg. 8
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Local
BASICS #29 SEP / OCT 2012
Broken Worlds: a poem
The following piece is a reflection on the June 2nd, 2012 shooting at the Eaton Centre in downtown Toronto that resulted in the deaths of two young men named Ahmed Hassan (age 24) and Nixon Nirmealendran (age 22). The piece speaks to the ways in which young men with dark skin are vilified and dehumanized by the general public and the complex ways in which violence structures the lives of all of those who live in Toronto.
of a man, and we had forgotten that men break when they have been broken. We had forgotten that cities and people explode when they have no other choice, and finally we had forgotten that darkness is not evil it is sacred. And as the city exploded, the only question that most asked was, how do we keep the darkness from our lives? When instead we should have asked how have we become so far gone, that we can’t mourn the life of a young black boy killed in broad daylight, in the busiest mall in the busiest city in this country. And as the winds thrashed the streets, and the rain soaked the people, they begged me to listen, for when the city explodes, it is always a collective process. For men break, when they have been broken.
This weekend the heavens opened up and the city exploded in a burst of light. I’m sure it happened, the gusts of wind told me so. And of course the headlines of the daily newspaper agreed, as they swept their ominous messages across the city of Toronto. Somewhere an army of voices declared a war on blackness and violence and darkness, and the city exploded right before our eyes, and no one could do anything of it. The newspapers spoke hushed words, spreading into the minds of the people, warning the law-abiding citizens that evil lurked among us, gangs of blackness and violence in the heart of the city. The newspapers said sternly and without challenge that this evil, like all darkness, must be purged from our lives, once and for all.
This weekend the police were on high alert, for the newspapers assured us that explosions in the city must come from darkness and blackness. All to get blown up in bursts of masculinity – ticking time bombs, ticking time bombs. The wind warned of a danger much deeper, but However, the choruses of voices that came hurtling forth the police were still on high alert searching wrapped within the wind spoke stories that the newspapers and silencing, searching and silencing. would never dare to print. Stories that screamed of sadness, and urgency, stories of violent neglect and stories of a world spiraling And I am left with a thought, a reality of this out of control. The winds shrieked, saying that it takes a broken world: world, for a broken man to pull a trigger, for he is never alone, it “I am scared of the darkness, but the darkness is a collective and communal process. But the newspapers would is sacred.” never say this, because then we’d all realize just how accountable shono (right) is a spoken word artist and storyteller. lost each one of us is. The winds implored us to remember all that we in history, he sees the need to recover forgotten words, so he had forgotten to do. For we had forgotten to mourn the death writes. (jrtanaka@gmail.com)
« Toronto’s biggest gangsters, from PG. 1 preceding years. This coordinated process began in the U.S. in a campaign to neutralize the revolutionary Black Power movement, particularly the Black Panther Party; and while those radical forces were sparse in Canada, the potential for social upheaval was still present. That lethal flood was followed by the disappearance of manufacturing jobs with the signing of the NAFTA trade agreement in 1992, and then by the systematic stripping of social assistance and programs under Mike Harris (Premier of Ontario 1995-2002). Those cuts to welfare and other benefits have been maintained by every provincial government and political party since, and because of inflation have actually been intensified. Blatantly white supremacist policies like the Safe Schools Act deliberately fed the violence by expelling Black students, pushing them into illegal means of survival, and thereby into sharper confrontation with each other. During the eventual Ontario Human Rights lawsuit it was estimated 80% of expelled students were non-white; the majority of those being Black males. This agenda continues to advance
with the annual increases to the Toronto Police Service’s budget (currently over $1 billion/year), and mass incarceration with the March 2012 passing of Harper’s Bill C-10. So the calls of “Stop the Violence” from the same political and social forces that created the conditions in the first place couldn’t be more perverse. On the ground police officers not only do nothing to prevent conflicts from arising, but often deliberately instigate tensions between youth. The hypocrisy can be seen in public discourse where the only time crime becomes an issue is when it spills over into the commercial centers of the city, or when certain bodies become targets: a white teenager on Boxing Day, a 14-year old, or University graduate at a BBQ as opposed to the dehumanized young men “known to police.” This is not to say the system as a whole really holds any more value for the former lives; but that their deaths allow for the whipping up of public hysteria to push through long-desired pieces of legislation and policies that people would otherwise meet with skepticism. After Jane Creba’s death in 2005 TAVIS (Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy) introduced new levels of occupation and surveillance to the poorest neighbourhoods in the city, and has since been responsible for 4 massive paramilitary raids and 22,000 arrests. On July 24th TAVIS got approved for indefinite provincial funding ($5 million/year), along Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty. with $7.5 mil to
PAVIS (Provincial Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy), its now permanent counterpart across Ontario. Also in Danzig’s aftermath the Harper regime wasted no time in relating and promoting their proposed piece of legislation that would see any non-citizen (landed, refugee, permanent resident etc.) deported automatically after any sentence over 6 months. As for Bill C-10 – which ends pardons, introduces mandatory minimums and eliminates conditional sentences for a number of charges – we have yet to see the real impact in part because many judges are refusing to implement it. Now the Justice Minister and others are demanding they be forced to do so. Along with pigs and prisons there’s the carrot being dangled in front of us: a multimillion dollar social service industry. The same 2005 “Year of the Gun” saw the designation of 13 priority neighbourhoods and the injection of millions through such boards as the Youth Challenge Fund. This was parallel to police expansion that saw TAVIS deployed in the same neighbourhoods. In total $100 million has been pumped into these areas over the past six years, and despite many important projects making use of the flow, most money never reached the ground and was instead siphoned off into bureaucratic structures, poverty pimps, and spaces inaccessible to actual communities. This government-NGO complex in fact serves as another form of control: preventing independent mobilization and self-determination, reinforcing dependency on the system and illusions of its necessity and generosity. Even the limited community power created by genuine peoples’ initiatives is destabilized as successful projects get funded
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one year and cut the next. Any substantial discussion of violence perpetrated by the system is censored, and sponsored organizations and individuals are often forced to work directly with cops and other crooked apparatuses, like the social housing authority, Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC). Much of McGuinty’s Youth Action Plan goes directly towards this – the ‘Youth-in-Policing Initiative’ for example, or the $500,000 ‘Safer and Vital Communities Program’ where applicants “must partner with the police.” Horizontal violence (violence amongst the people) will only be resolved when we have real democratic control over our communities; when neighbourhoods have enough organization to solve internal strife and defend their common interests against vertical violence coming down from the state. This does not mean we stop getting every dollar, space and opportunity we can grab to advance the immediate needs of our people, including using the social service sector for employment as many mass leaders have done. But it does mean moving towards the consolidation of institutions that remain accountable only to the people and strive for self-sufficiency. When Rob Ford declares a war on
gangs he does not mean a war on the Hell’s Angels, the Mob or any of the high level syndicates often allowed to operate as extensions of the system – sometimes with the collaboration of elements of the state. He means a war on the racialized bodies at the very bottom of the drug trade. He means a furthering of the attack on poor neighbourhoods: heightened levels of harassment, more sweeps, new laws and packed jails. And not because they oppose smoking, dealing, robbing or shooting when the victims are almost always in the same conditions and communities; but due to the connotation of these behaviours: disregard for the law, and more significantly, the danger of that armed force being redirected at them. And for those not connected to these areas, the G20 and Quebec Student Strike have shown that the methods of physical repression and containment usually reserved for the hood will be extended to any rebellious section of the population. As poor, working, and progressive people we have a collective interest in recognizing and resisting this physical, economic and social attack. If this is war they are the only side fighting. It’s about time we responded.
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PROVINCIAL
BASICS #29, SEP / OCT 2012
Provincial government puts students and education workers last
(Michael Swan/Flickr)
N. Zahra On September 11, 2012 the Ontario Provincial Legislature voted in bill 115, also known as the Putting Students First Act, 2012. They claim they are doing this “to protect the gains made in the education system…to address the Province’s significant fiscal challenges by containing costs… to protect full-day kindergarten, smaller class sizes, and the classroom experience” and finally, to “preserve 20,000 teaching and support staff positions” (Legislative Assembly of Ontario). The government’s claims that they are acting in order to ensure the well-being of
students and teachers, are false. As with other labour disputes, the Liberal government is preemptively choking the right of workers to strike or indeed, undertake any political action in order to uphold existing agreements or to ask for changes that would benefit students and education workers. As with other public sector employees, the government is trying to malign teachers by claiming that they are not doing their part to combat austerity and take a hit for the team. Government media spin aside, the proposed deal being put forward by the Ontario Government includes a reduction in sick days, a two year pay freeze and unpaid
professional development days, where teachers would go in to work without being paid. They claim that taking unpaid professional activity days somehow benefits young teachers by continuing “to move [them] through the grid according to their experience and additional qualifications”. As a young teacher, not getting paid for days worked and also having a two year pay freeze will not benefit me or my family. All it will do is ensure that my pay does not match my living costs in the coming years. Shame on the provincial government for trampling on workers’ basic rights!
Horse-trading before Kitchener by-election blow to injured workers Julian Ichim The Conservatives, Liberals, and NDP struggled to distinguish themselves as they battled for control of two ridings in Vaughan and Kitchener that were up for grabs with the September 6 by-elections. But less is being said of how the Kitchener by-election was triggered to begin with. On August 22 at Queen St. Commons in downtown Kitchener, Ralph Gerstenberg, a member of Steelworkers Local 1005 and the Ontario Injured Workers Association, spoke about the plight of injured workers. Gerstenberg described how the latest collaboration between the provincial Liberals and Tories (or at least one Tory) that triggered the by-election in Kitchener is about to make the situation of injured workers much worse. Progressive Conservative MPP Liz Witmer gave up her seat in late April 2012 at Queen’s Park in exchange for the McGuinty government appointing her the chair of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board of Ontario (WSIB). This places her in charge of an agency dealing with workplace injuries and compensation pay for injured workers. The plum position in the bureaucracy will pay her nearly $200,000 a year for the
Auto manufacturing workers at a crossroads Marlon Berg “The place is hot like hell, especially in the summer time at night, bad ventilation, a lot of humidity and of course machines emitting heat doesn’t help,” said Iain*, a temporary worker at an auto parts plant in the Toronto area. “To top it off I work night shift so there’s the extra stress of not actually functioning like a normal human being. I work for what, by most standards, are fairly good starting wages but are drastically inferior to the wages of permanent workers. “But I’m hardly the hardest done by of the employees that work there, a lot of them have families they never see because we’re given 6-7 days a week. Yes, overtime is paid, but it doesn’t give you much time to do anything else. “Theoretically you could turn down the overtime but then you wouldn’t be working there for very long.” These are typical working conditions for auto parts plant workers in the inner suburbs of Toronto and nearby cities. For the first time since the 2008 economic crisis that nearly destroyed the automotive sector, the industry seems to be entering a period of sustained growth. Job opportunities are opening up again at the parts companies that
(CAW Media/Flickr) supply GM, Ford, and Chrysler. The three major parts suppliers in Canada, Magna, Linamar, and Martinrea, have all seen slow yet steady growth. Yet, jobs at GM, Ford and Chrysler (the big three) in Ontario continue to decline as these companies persist in closing plants and laying off large numbers of workers to take advantage of the cheaper labour in the United States, particularly in states that have passed anti-union or socalled ‘right-to-work’ laws that make workers’ unions difficult to organize and maintain.
All of the permanent workers at the big three plants in Ontario are unionized with the Canadian Automotive Workers (CAW). However, the CAW has been unable to mount a successful fight against closures and layoffs at the big three and other employers, including some of the parts suppliers that they had unionized in the past. The remaining work is in the parts suppliers and the new hires entering these companies are mostly without any kind of union representation. They often have shockingly bad working
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conditions and the lowest wages in the automotive sector. Some workers, like Ian, are forced to work too much overtime, others work unstable shifts and can’t get enough hours. “The time I was at Linamar, there was two very serious safety incidents,” says Yelena*, a former employee in Guelph. “In the worst one, someone moved up the line to finish the work they had forgotten, and the component ended up falling 20 feet onto their shoulder.” She explains the reasons behind this kind of accident, “There is a lot of pressure with numbers and
job, despite her notorious track record for attacking workers. In exchange, the Liberals now have a chance of returning to their position of majority government. In her 22-year career as a Progressive Conservative MPP, Witmer served as a senior cabinet minister and Deputy Premier under Mike Harris. As Minister of Labour under Premier Mike Harris, she enacted legislation abolishing the 8-hour work day, attacked unions, slashed basic benefits for workers, and redefined workplace injury to benefit the bosses, all of which hurt workers and their rights and workplace safety. Participants of the August 22 meeting in Kitchener committed to exposing and opposing the attacks on injured workers moving forward. They agreed to a series of actions: Taking up door-to-door outreach to put the issues of injured workers on the agenda. Distributing the newspaper of the Ontario Injured Workers Association. Participating in coalition work with other workers, such as the teachers now coming under attack. Exposing the blatant opportunism of the political parties. And most importantly, emphasizing the need for working class people to come up with their own politics and set their own agenda. forced overtime on Saturdays if the numbers were not met, so people took the numbers very seriously, and it was also one of the hottest days of the summer.” Linamar also “stopped paying him after a week, so he had to go back to work... he also wasn’t getting the extra documentation he needed to see his specialist, and that they were taking a long time to get to him.” Workers “would have to check off machinery as safe even if it had a problem, and would just have to call in maintenance and wait till they came to fix it while continuing to run.” “There were also two deaths at Linamar couple years back, one person was electrocuted and another was crushed, and there was another person electrocuted recently too, and he was in a coma last I heard.” Her uncle also works for the company and “his pay has gone down to $16 an hour from $26 an hour a few years ago and he’s been there 17 years. He’s getting older and older, and the work is getting more and more difficult for him, and he’s making less and less money.” In London, Ontario, at a Caterpillar plant that was unionized with the CAW, the management locked out the workers when they wouldn’t agree to a 50% cut in their wages and then closed the plant so they could move production to Indiana, which >> continued, pg. 4
PROVINCIAL
BASICS #29 SEP / OCT 2012
An injury to one: why we all need to stand for migrant workers
« Jane-Finch, PG. 1
io government to deny migrant workers the right to join or form union. The International Labour Organizations ruled that this constituted a breach of labour and human rights. While labour organizations are launching a campaign to address the issues of workplace rights and dignity, the May 1st Movement and its affiliate organizations reaffirm that the safety and rights of the most vulnerable set of workers, including migrants, must be on the top of the agenda. Following the cue from the Fraser Institute’s recommendations to shift immigration further towards this labour import model, where citizenship and status are used as tools to divide and discipline workers, the Conservative government has started to openly promote schemes that incentivizes further exploitation by allowing employers to pay migrant workers 15% less than the minimum wage. Not only is this a brazen attack on what little rights migrants workers have, it is also setting the stage for pitting migrant workers and resident workers against each other for the withering pool of jobs. As we sink deeper into this global crisis in capitalism, this will surely feed xenophobic and racist scapegoating in the same way it has in Europe. We must demand the end to the distinct categorization and regulation of migrant labour designed to keep them in precarious conditions, the guarantee of the social benefits that migrant workers pay for and are entitled to, the right to organize, and clear pathways to residency. By fighting for the rights of these workers, we are also fighting to ensure that no government is able to lower the bar for all workers. While fighting for these necessary reforms to alleviate the condition of migrant workers, we must also be clear that this international phenomenon of labour import and export – the trading and use of women and men as cheap, disposable labour – is an inhumane practice that lines the pockets of the companies and governments involved, while keeping countries poor and workers subjugated.
media, and arts organizations in the area, including JFAAP, the LIFE movement, the online community news service JaneFinch.com, and CHRY 105.5 FM. Being one with the community and firm on principle, Butterfly is known for speaking out against issues of poverty and the police intimidation, carding, harassment, and brutality she sees as the daily reality in the area. Instead of addressing the root of the community’s deep-seated hatred of the police, the police are trying to manage it by coming down on people like Butterfly. When one attendee at the meeting defended Gopaul’s Charter Right to the freedom of speech, McLeod responded that as a community leader she did not have that right! A community leader without the right to speak to the lived reality of the people? If anything, that’s exactly what a community leader must be. The sort of leaders the police would prefer are subservient “yes men”, who do what they’re told, the opportunist self-serving careerists who we generally think of when we hear the word “politician” or “political leaders”. Despite numerous interventions from other participants in the June 8 meeting, calling out McLeod’s behaviour as inappropriate, he continued to be “severe, unrelenting, and intimidating in his manner.” Gopaul, who was chairing the meeting and was almost eight months pregnant at the time, was forced to bring the meeting to a close before the organization could even address its own agenda. In response to June 8 incident and the countless other examples of police intimidation and brutality in the community, JFAAP has demanded “to see [McLeod] removed from [his] position [of Superintendent] as soon as possible.” Pending that – let’s not hold our breath – we in the community and beyond need to come together to defend leaders like Butterfly from such attacks and attempts to isolate them, lest these verbal attacks signal worse things to come.
Mural by Gilda Monreal at the Agricultural Workers Alliance (AWA) Support Centre in Leamington, ON.
May 1st Movement When he arrived at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport 3 years ago, Santiago Escobar saw a large group of people who caught his attention. Based on their clothing which resembled the traditional clothing of indigenous peoples of Central America, Escobar assumed that they were Latin Americans. Having just arrived in Canada on a work permit himself, his curiosity got the better of him and he went to speak to the group. “It was not easy to strike up a conversation because they were intimidated, one of them told me they were farm workers and they were forbidden to talk to strangers,” said Escobar. “When I asked him who had forbidden this, he chose to keep walking and our conversation ended there. I felt a lot of mistrust and fear from the worker.” Today, Escobar works with the Agricultural Workers Alliance in Virgil, Ontario where he provides services and advocacy for migrant workers there. Every year, tens of thousands of migrant workers from some 80 countries including Mexico, Guatemala, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and the Philippines arrive in Canada on a temporary, seasonal basis. Over the last decade, the number of these workers has increased from 100,000 to 250,000. Working for minimum wage in agricultural fields, hotels, restaurants, slaughterhouses, factories, and households as caregivers, these workers must pay for their flights, insurance, and housing. Most receive no payment for overtime nor rest during the holidays. Moreover, because their job security is at the discretion of the employer, many workers endure further hardships in order to avoid the risk of being sent back. A worker who chose to identify as Francisco said, “Fortunately the members of the Support Centre help by taking us to the medical clinics, because if you notify the Patron (master), you run the risk of being returned to Mexico. The Patron is not interested in
sick or unproductive workers. “Here we come to work and if you cannot work then you are on the next flight back”. These workers must also pay the income, retirement, social security and workplace safety taxes that a regular worker pays, despite the fact that migrant workers are often denied access to the benefits that they pay into. Edward, a Jamaican migrant worker who has been participating in the program for almost twenty years was recently denied Parental Benefits because he did not apply during the time required by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada. “I do not understand, why after working 19 years through this program and paying all my taxes, my application was denied. No one informed me about the time restrictions.” Recently, with the erratic and unpredictable weather, many of the crops in Southern Ontario have been devastated. Without access to the Employment Insurance that they pay into or to the government compensation that Ontario farmers receive, hundreds of migrant workers were set back to their home countries. Despite these exploitative conditions, many migrant workers are forced to take out personal loans in order to provide for their families back home. In many of the ‘sender’ countries, governments make ‘labour export’ agreements with countries like Canada as a way of addressing high unemployment. These agreements also ensure that additional income comes into the country in the form of remittances. In the Philippines for example, remittances from overseas Filipino workers account for over 9% of the GDP. These governments have continued a reckless subservience to domestic economic policies which favour transnational firms over people and local producers. “Before NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada, US and Mexico –Ed.], I cultivated my corn fields and had work in Mexico,” said Magdalena Per-
ez, an agricultural worker. “If you invested $1000 you would at least get back $1,800. Currently, you can’t even recover $500 because it is cheaper to buy imported U.S. corn,” said Perez. Heavily subsidized US corn was allowed to enter the Mexican market as part of NAFTA. Over the past year or so, the work done by the Agricultural Workers Alliance / United Food and Commercial Workers and migrant advocacy organizations (such as Justicia for Migrant Workers and MIGRANTE) have raised the profile of the plight of migrant workers and the conditions of their super-exploitation. Unfortunately, this has not led to greater protections as evidence by the recent deaths of workers—including the 11 killed in Hampstead due to unsafe working conditions; and the deaths of Paul Roach and Ralston White, two Jamaican workers who died while attempting to fix a pump for a vinegar vat at the apple orchard where they worked. Ontario’s legal framework places these workers at risk and makes them vulnerable to abuse and exploitation as well as injury or even death. In 2011, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled with the Ontar-
« Auto manufacturing workers, from PG. 3 has anti-union laws in place. While there was a massive movement against this closure by the workers themselves as well as workers from all over Ontario, who came to London on buses to support the struggle of the London workers against Caterpillar, the CAW was unable to save these workers’ jobs. Herman Rosenfeld, a retired automotive worker and longtime member of CAW, is very critical of the CAW’s approach to the Caterpillar lockout. He believes that rather than just standing outside the plant and setting up a picket around it, they “needed to take it over… they would have upped the ante, they would have raised the question of pressuring the government to take it over.”
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While they did win good severance packages for their members, many good blue collar jobs were lost in London due to the inability of CAW to, in Rosenfeld’s words, “actually challenge capital.” It seems that across the board, whether unionized or not, auto workers are under attack. CAW is currently in negotiations with the big three automakers and just voted at their recent convention to merge with another big union, Canadian Energy and Paperworkers, to form a new union that will attempt to initiate a massive organizing drive to recruit more racialized workers and work in immigrant neighbourhoods, which they have traditionally failed to do. It seems that the union
leadership has realized that auto workers in Ontario and industrial workers generally are at a historic make or break point. Iain, the temp auto worker, believes “that it has to be an initiative that comes from the workers themselves, and that if there is actually the anger and the will to organize, nobody can stop them, but people can divert them and channel that energy into fruitless enterprises… “And as far as unions having halls in immigrant neighborhoods, I don’t know of a single union that has a big presence there, but all of these temp agencies have a major presence in immigrant neighborhoods.” *Names changed to protect workers’ identities –Ed.
FEDERAL
BASICS #29 SEP / OCT 2012
The myth of walking in two worlds Johnny Hawke (right) and Richard Peters (left) in the repossessed traditional gathering place known as Council Rock and Oshkimaadizing Unity Camp.
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!
Québec student movement blocks tuition hike Louisa Worrell The student movement in Quebec has won a major victory: we have forced the incoming government to promise to stop the tuition fee hike and to nullify the anticonstitutional Law 12, a law created to break the student movement. After a six month long strike, with hundreds of thousands of people regularly taking to the streets, the Quebec student movement has made it clear that we are a force to be reckoned with. The liberal government of Charest was hell bent on crushing the student movement and pushing through the tuition fee hike. They first imposed Law 12 which made the way we protested illegal, and suspended classes. Then, the it called for provincial elections as an attempt to re-direct the energies of the student movement away from the streets and into the electoral arena. The liberal government found it was a better bet to potentially lose an election and lose some of their relative power as an elite group that controls capital rather than to continue down this road and face definite defeat by the student movement. This defeat would have meant losing a more absolute chunk of capital’s power, as opposed to the simple changing of hands of who is going to control the state. Initially, the call for the provincial elections did have a dissuasive effect on the stu-
dent movement. Within 2 weeks of being ordered back to class on August 13, all the CEGEPS (colleges) had gone back to school. That loss accounted for nearly half of the students on strike. From the various general assemblies, which had relatively high participation rates, the general feeling was that students were tired. These were moments of great sadness for the many activists who had worked hard to build the movement. The universities voted next. While some of the student associations voted to remain on strike, a majority voted to go back to class. The students who voted to remain on strike wanted to maintain the pressure on the government to block the tuition hikes and stop the increasing privatization and commercialisation of postsecondary education. Despite the return to classes, the students will continue to put pressure on the new government. They will be holding national demonstrations on the 22nd of each month in order to ensure that the tuition fee hike is cancelled. In addition, more and more student associations are voting to join the student union ASSE (CLASSE) and are moving away from the mainstream unions. We have lost much. We have lost time and money. Some of our comrades have lost eyes. Some have broken limbs. But we have won what we started fighting for, and we won by working together, staying focused and organised.
Canadian banks posting record profits amidst deepening crisis 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, “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 >> continued, pg. 8
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Massive rally on May 22, 2012 to mark the 100th day of the Quebec student strike.
INTERNATIONAL
BASICS #29 SEP / OCT 2012
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DIVIDED WORLD DIVIDED CLASS Global political Economy and the stratification of Labour under Capitalism, by Zak Cope
Richard Aoki
and the new ‘snitch jacketing’ Carlos A. Rivera-Jones Richard Aoki (1938-2009) was a Japanese-American revolutionary. He grew up in a WW2 internment camp, then became a street hoodlum and was forced to join the military to clear his criminal record. He later became connected with the Communist Party, the Socialist Worker’s Party, before ultimately becoming an influential leader in the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and the Third World Liberation Front. These groups were critical components of the civil rights struggles in the late 1960s in the USA, and in particular the Bay Area of California, a hotbed of radicalism at the time. Aoki’s military training, access to weapons, ethnic origin, and charisma, were critical components in the development of the practice of the Black Panthers, its views on internationalism, its views on armed struggle, and its approach to ethnic groups other than Black Americans. He helped shaped the Black Panthers into something more than just a Black nationalist formation, but rather an antiimperialist, internationalist formation. Recently, he has been alleged to have been a long time informant of the FBI. Aoki was a symbol of uncompromising antiimperialist internationalism, a political line that remains as valid now as it was then, and remains equally dangerous to the State and to those that
defend imperialism and oppose national liberation. On the right, the defense of white supremacy and empire is of importance, and in the left, self-ghettoization and the pacifist liberalism of identity politics find an advantage in the pushing of this myth of Aoki-as-agent. Even on the left that is not identitarian or pacifist there are already sectarian rumbles, full of the wounds of another era, that take advantage of the uncertainty to promote sectarian explanations for Aoki’s move from Trotskyism to a form of Third Worldism – a view that the revolutionary moment was focused on the peoples of the Third World. To cast him in the light of a snitch shakes the very foundations of one of the most important, successful, and tragic examples of revolutionary organizing in the second half of the 20th century in the USA. It opens wounds of antiAsian bigotry among Black revolutionaries, questions the internationalist instincts of the BPP, and in general pushes the ever present question of a security culture to the forefront. It also forces us to revisit COINTELPRO (a covert and often illegal program run by the FBI to disrupt radical movements), and its current incarnations as an existing force, rather than a painful memory of a long-gone era. “Snitch jacketing” is a classic counter-intelligence practice, in which people who are not informants are named as
informants either via “leaks” or other actual informants, in order to de-stabilize the targeted individual or the targeted group. It is historically extremely effective, and hence has been used time and time again. Often the instincts of the movement are wrong: snitching is much less effective than the allergic reaction to its possibility as way to disrupt movements by causing them to self destruct. The presence of snitches is a normal part of revolutionary politics but it must not become the primary preoccupation of a movement over and above the political struggle. Snitch jacketing, however, has been losing effectiveness because of the information society and also because it generated a culture within certain corners of the revolutionary movement in which the fear of informants is such that the State has no need to deploy it: groups perpetuate a paranoid style of politics and neutralize themselves. The contemporary State hence has modified the age-old technique into something we can call Snitch Jackecting 2.0. It utilizes existing history to create a climate of panoptical paranoia, where people are scared into passive compliance by the state through the snitch jacketing of historical leaders. This climate of fear and selfisolation needs to be fed from time to time with fresh kills, to keep the tree of fear and uncertainty watered. There is good reason to be
The double standards of ‘democratic’ governments Santiago Escobar and Camila Uribe Rosales The double standard of the so-called “democratic” governments, specifically England, Sweden and U.S. have been unveiled through the recent events surrounding Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. In the corporate media, we are constantly told that Assange is wanted in Sweden for charges of sexual assault. Yet, Assange has not been charged, and instead is
wanted for questioning. Swedish authorities have refused to question him on British soil and have demanded his extradition to Sweden. Assange asked the Ecuadorian State for political asylum because he, and many others, believe that the U.S. is pulling strings so that they can extradite him to the U.S., where he could face the death penalty. One of those people is J. Wagner, an ex-American soldier and writer, who during the Vietnam War was
forced by the U.S. Army to torture Vietnamese soldiers. He was later punished for refusing to continue these acts. He recently sent a letter to Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, expressing his concerns that Assange would be another victim of the atrocities committed by the United States, just as he was. In contrast to Assange’s persecution, in 2000 the English government gladly released, after one year of house arrest, the Chilean former dicta-
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Divided World Divided Class charts the history of the ‘labour aristocracy’ in the capitalist world system, from its roots in colonialism to its birth and eventual maturation into a full-fledged middle class in the age of imperialism. It argues that pervasive national, racial and cultural chauvinism in the core capitalist countries is not primarily attributable to ‘false class consciousness’, ideological indoctrination or ignorance as much left and liberal thinking assumes. Rather, these and related forms of bigotry are concentrated expressions of the major social strata of the core capitalist nations’ shared economic interest in the exploitation and repression of dependent nations. $20.00 • Kersplebedeb • ISBN 9781894946414 • paperback • 387 pages AVA I L A B L E from kErspLEBEdEB dIstrIButIon Cp 63560 CCCp VAn HornE, montrEAL, quEBEC, CAnAdA H3w 3H8 www.kersplebedeb.com • email: info@kersplebedeb.com
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skeptical of the claims against Aoki. The evidence against him is extremely thin and entirely from FBI sources, which are hardly credible on their own. Also, in spite of ample opportunity to do so, these allegations were never made public while he was alive to defend himself. That is highly suspect in itself – in the context of escalating mass resistances in the greater
Bay Area of California, the political scene in which Aoki always stood out as an icon of a certain brand of cross-ethnic internationalism. As white supremacy suffers a demographic challenge with whites becoming a minority, this is of extreme historic importance: divide and conquer is a tool of power much older and powerful than snitch jacketing ever was.
tor Augusto Pinochet, a man responsible for the death, torture, and disappearance of tens of thousands of people. During Pinochet’s house arrest in London, he was visited by his old friend and ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who thanked him for his support during the Falklands conflict and for “restoring democracy” to Chile. The same English government recently threatened to violate the Vienna Conventions and raid the Ecuadorian embassy in order to extradite Assange. Over 8,000 signatures were
gathered in support of his petition to Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, amongst whom were: Noam Chomsky, Naomi Wolf, Hollywood directors Oliver Stone and Michael Moore, actor Danny Glover, comedian Bill Maher, as well as Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked documents related to the USA’s war crimes in Vietnam. Demonstrations of solidarity followed soon after. While our politicians back dictators, we have to rely on the strength of people to fight for a better world.
ARTS & CULTURE No books in jail
(Jürgen Priebe/Flickr)
Megan Kinch Don’t even think about reading. That’s the message prisoners are getting after a bureaucratic maze of regulations effectively cuts off access to printed materials in some Toronto-area prisons. The lack of access to reading material is only one example of the conditions prisons gen-
erally, where the institution has almost complete impunity to mess with the daily lives of inmates, which also shows in other areas, such as the lack of respect for fasting prisoners during Ramadan. In Toronto West Detention Centre, located in Rexdale, it used to be possible to mail books to prisoners directly from
the publisher, and there was a small library cart in the prison. But when Alex Hundert (alexhundert.wordpress.com), a political prisoner incarcerated for his role in organizing G20 protests, was sent to Toronto West this year, this was no longer the case. The book cart had not been seen on his unit in 5 months. Alex was told by other prisoners that there had been a raid on his unit a month before and that every single book, including a Bible and two Qur’ans were thrown out by the guards. Contrary to official policy, books mailed directly from the publishers were being withheld as well. Even “educational” TV channels such as History and Discovery channel have been canceled. Alex writes: “the less intellectual stimulation there is... the more violence there is in this
BASICS #29 SEP / OCT 2012
shockingly overcrowded jail... this place feels like a powder keg waiting to explode.” When the Toronto Star picked up the story about the lack of books from Alex’s prison blog, the institution claimed that the library cart was not being run due to ‘lack of volunteers’. An executive from the John Howard society told the Star that actually they would be able to find volunteers and that they had never been asked to provide any. Alex points out that inmates do many other jobs in prison including laundry and food and that there is no reason they couldn’t also push the library cart around. In women’s prison at Vanier, located just west of Toronto in Milton, the situation is slightly better. According to Mandy Hiscocks (boredbutnotbroken.tao.ca), also imprisoned for G20 protest
organizing, the prison cart library has improved slightly since 2010 when only romance novels were available. But the only books that can be mailed to Vanier are if they are officially on the syllabus of a course in which the prisoner is registered. Alex writes that needlessly cutting essential services like books in jails, or asking volunteers to do it is part of the austerity agenda, “especially when those services are needed by vulnerable and targeted people like prisoners or migrants or the poor. “Ironically, it was organizing protests against the austerity agenda that got me thrown in jail in the first place.” Alex has since been transferred to prison in Penetang, where he was punished after asking about his newspaper subscription, which was being maliciously withheld by the guards.
« Six Nations and Dundalk, from PG. 1
« Canadian banks, from PG. 6 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 shortterm 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 cashstrapped 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 AprilJune 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 merg-
ers 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
(Dave Rutt/Flickr)
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Several organizers are now fighting lawsuits and an injunction. “As we work to protect the land, in many ways we have a common struggle with Six Nations,” states Dundalk resident Mike Roth. Echoing many other Dundalk residents, Paul Chatterbull stresses that, “if we don’t work with Six Nations, we have no hope whatsoever.” This struggle is not only important to support because of the disastrous effect on communities’ health, water and food security this project would have; it is also a living example of the concrete links that are possible between environmental justice and Six Nations land rights, between people seeking justice for nonnative and native working class people through the advocacy of
Indigenous sovereignty. Concerned Torontonians should also pay attention because it is our waste products that are planned to be dumped in Dundalk, requiring pending approval of the Toronto Works committee. Our water and our food will be affected. Furthermore, this environmentally destructive project would violate both the spirit and the letter of the treaties which allow nonnative people to be on this land. For information on how to get involved with either Six Nations solidarity activities, contact the Toronto First Nations Solidarity Working Group: Email april28info@ gmail.com. Web: april28.net. Follow @TorontoFNSWG on Twitter.
everything it needs to do to make profits in the current context. It would be quite unwise 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.