As public hearings around Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline begin, national attention is focused more than ever on the major debates related to tarsands development in Alberta and, increasingly, Saskatchewan. Quietly slipping under the public radar, it appears, is another significant set of energy projects that are not likely to gain major media time or space: the continued development of hydroelectric energy in northern Manitoba.

Travelling up the Nelson River, it’s easy to see the impacts of hydro development. The once-pristine water is now silty and not to be trusted for drinking. Trees fall into the river everywhere along the shore, thanks to erosion caused by constantly fluctuating water levels. Ancient graves are being exposed, and sacred sites are now under water. What was once a highway for hunters is now dangerous to travel in winter, as the location of ice pockets created by flooding and retreating water cannot be predicted. A river that was once the basis for life has become deadly.

When the Churchill River Diversion and Lake Winnipeg Regulation projects were undertaken in the 1970s, national attention was riveted by the Mackenzie pipeline project of that era and the struggle against hydro development megaprojects in northern Quebec. Although the communities affected by the Churchill River and Lake Winnipeg projects were sufficiently united and gained enough public support within the province to force a modern treaty on Manitoba Hydro, known as the Northern Flood Agreement, the terms of that agreement and the systematic violation of it that ensued over the next decade were no doubt influenced by the low national profile of these projects.

History is about to repeat itself as a new wave of dams is currently under development with equally little media attention. Have you heard of the Wuskwatim project? Or Keeyask?

Around much of northern Manitoba, “hydro” is a dirty word, and for good reason. These projects have reconfigured the landscape of the entire region, drying whole rivers and engorging lakes. Mercury has likely been released into the groundwater, and wildlife habitat has been destroyed.

Manitoba Hydro has a racially stratified work force: the highly paid technical and administrative work is done by non-Native southerners, and the few jobs that northern Cree workers can get are low-paid and menial.

In the Grand Rapids hydro facility, as in most others, Aboriginal employees push brooms and fill plates for more highly paid engineers from the south. The community is divided between a nearly impoverished First Nation and municipality, and a prosperous suburban community built by Manitoba Hydro for its employees. Hydro employees’ houses have two electricity meters as their bills are subsidized by the utility, while nearby Aboriginal residents are not given any reprieve when their power is cut off due to unpaid bills.

Among the Cree of northern Manitoba, it is clear that the end result of the Churchill River Diversion and Lake Winnipeg Regulation projects, and the inexpensive hydro rates they have made available to southern Manitobans, is ecological and social devastation.

The Great Falls Dam, built in 1923, was the first of four on the Winnipeg River. It was constructed without any consultation with the First Nation most affected by the project (Sagkeeng, at that time known as Fort Alexander), as were the 1960 Kelsey Generating Station on the Nelson River and the 1965 Grand Rapids dam on the Saskatchewan River.

The latter project involved the wholesale relocation of the community of Chemawawin to Easterville. It also completely disrupted the Grand Rapids First Nation (now Misipawistik), located at the site of construction, by drying up the site of the once-sacred rapids, flooding land, and every year sending more debris into the river and lake, making fishing much more difficult.

By the early 1970s, plans for further major hydro developments were under way, which eventually led to the Churchill River Diversion and Lake Winnipeg Regulation projects. These projects reshaped the whole hydrology of northern Manitoba, to the detriment of six Cree communities.

When construction for these projects first began, the five First Nations affected came together to form the Northern Flood Committee. While they were entirely opposed to the proposed projects, they eventually conceded to a negotiated settlement, the Northern Flood Agreement (NFA), which allowed development to proceed. Like Chemawawin, the community of South
Indian Lake was entirely relocated and effectively destroyed as a fishing community due to project-related flooding.

The NFA made many promises. A much-quoted schedule attached to the agreement detailed the promotion of studies for the purpose of the “alleviation of mass poverty and unemployment,” which many read as a substantive commitment. However, within a few years it became clear that Manitoba Hydro and the provincial government were not interested in implementing the agreement in good faith.

Rather than creating prosperity for nearby communities, hydro-related flooding has immiserated them. Eventually, Manitoba Hydro planners began to pursue even more dams, but since Aboriginal rights were now constitutionally recognized, they needed the co-operation of communities where their actions had created a legacy of hatred. Thus, Manitoba Hydro offered each community, separately, a financial settlement for what were called “implementation agreements.” They succeeded in getting four of the five First Nations to sign on, which was sufficient to proceed with a new wave of projects.

The first dam, Wuskwatim, on the Burntwood River, is expected to be finished this year. This project is to be followed by a much larger one, the Keeyask, on the lower Nelson River, and then another, Conawapa, also on the Nelson River. Two other dams, Notigi and Gillam Island, are on Manitoba Hydro’s wish list. The power generated by these dams is not needed in Manitoba, but will instead be exported to the United States.

After the NFA was signed in the 1970s, the Northern Flood Committee linking communities opposed to hydro development ceased to exist.

Among the reasons for Hydro’s continued colonial success is that it now deals with communities one at a time, so opposition is fragmented. However, one of the five NFA signatories, Pimicikamak (formerly Cross Lake), has still not signed an implementation agreement and stands outside Hydro’s current paradigm, fighting for actual implementation of the NFA. They have been enormously creative in their political resistance, developing their own governance system and generally making life difficult by trying to force the utility to live up to its promises. Whether they, and the opposition groups in Tataskweyak, Nisichawayasihk, and elsewhere, manage to make any gains will depend in part on their story getting a wider hearing in Canada and internationally than it has so far.

“Free showers” at Occupy Nova Scotia in Halifax. Photo: Mark Archibald

There has been a shift in our social movements of late. After many years of attempting to halt capitalism and reverse the ever-increasing concentration of wealth and power, it feels like we are starting to get somewhere. Whether the past year’s popular mobilizations in the Middle East and the Americas are a result of global injustice and inequality reaching intolerable levels, a new collective consciousness, social media, or some combination of these, these movements are changing the way we organize.

Varied in their origins but united in their broader goals of redistributing power and wealth and asserting grassroots democracy, these mass uprisings and occupations are steering us away from hero-driven, loud but fleeting convergence protests, toward more co-operatively organized, sustained movements. In addition to creating a fissure in the stale crust of the status quo, these movements are demonstrating tangible alternative socio-economic structures as a model for the way forward, as depicted in this issue’s photo essay “Reimagining revolution.”

This is just the type of collective creativity we need to respond effectively to government austerity. In the “Parting Shots” on page 40, Gens Hellquist discusses the fatal impact government cuts have had on queer communities, and queer youth in particular. In response to cuts to social programs of all kinds, community groups have been stepping up to fill the void, serving the people that government refuses to. In this issue’s cover story, Jane Kirby asks what happens when community groups are sidetracked from political organizing in order to fulfill the role of government, and encourages us to respond creatively rather than reactively to fiscal austerity.

Capitalism is founded on the concept of competition. Replete with metaphors of ladders to climb, battles to win and glass ceilings to break, the capitalist system puts individuals at war with one another. When we accept this competition-driven modus operandi, we accept that our success depends on another’s failure; that our freedom can only come through the oppression of others.

Non-hierarchical organization does not mean a lack of leadership; it doesn’t necessarily mean chaos. An absence of hierarchy exists when no single leader or group of leaders dominates at the expense of others. It means all voices are included in decision-making, and that everyone leads in different ways at different times based on what they can offer in a particular context.

But our efforts to organize more co-operatively must go beyond inclusivity. For power to be truly re-distributed, we must pay particular attention to the voices that have been most silenced by global capitalism. We must move beyond a politics of inclusion and toward an active privileging of our most de-privileged communities. Or, as Harsha Walia states in the context of Indigenous sovereignty, “beyond a politics of solidarity toward a practice of decolonization.” Otherwise, we remain complicit in the continued oppression of marginalized communities, even within our movements for social justice.

The Occupy movements have relied heavily on the inclusion and leadership of those who are often ignored in capitalist society – particularly the homeless and under- or unemployed. By opening the space for people to simply offer what they are able to offer, whether that’s food donations, massages, first aid or simply sustained presence, the Occupy movements have allowed people to feel valuable in non-economic terms – as contributing members of a community, rather than as consumers. That this is such a radical departure from the current norm is a disheartening sign of the extent of our disconnection from one another and from the unique voice that each of us has to offer the world.

Only when we include everyone’s voice, particularly those that have been most silenced within capitalism, do we ensure that justice is a collective endeavour.

Illustration: Aimée van Drimmelen

The last three decades have seen the gradual erosion of the welfare state, with both provincial and federal governments slashing services in neoliberalism’s unholy quest for fiscal reform. Schools, libraries, hospitals and social programs, to name just a few, have all had their budgets slashed or threatened. With the Harper government relentlessly pursuing a renewed commitment to economic austerity, these types of cuts can only be expected to continue into the next several years.

In the face of sometimes drastic social service cutbacks, community organizers and volunteers are stepping up to fill the void, in some cases organizing to provide discontinued services using the most limited of resources. For the optimistic, short-term losses represent long-term opportunities for building the capacity of communities to meet their own needs, independent of the state. Others critique what they see as the offloading of government services onto the backs of community members working for free and the impact this offloading has on longer term organizing for social change. While the potential exists to build social justice based services run by and for the community, these opportunities remain limited as volunteer-based services become institutionalized and depoliticized.

Coming out of the cold

The phenomenon of volunteer-run Out of the Cold shelters popping up across the country is one example of this trend in community members providing services that were once the purview of the welfare state. In the face of inadequate funding for shelter systems and too few beds to house growing homeless populations on the coldest of winter nights, groups of volunteers have come together to open their own shelters with minimal resources.

While many Out of the Cold initiatives have come in response to generalized frustration with a lack of shelter beds, in Halifax the connection of the shelter with government cutbacks is far more explicit. In 2008 the Nova Scotia Department of Community Services decided to close Pendleton Place, an emergency winter shelter that operated under a harm reduction framework and served a population excluded from the city’s other shelters. A group of concerned service providers and anti-poverty activists came together to find a solution to the crisis situation they foresaw resulting from this reduction in shelter beds for the most vulnerable. They opened the Out of the Cold Emergency Winter Shelter (OTCS) to provide 15 beds to people of all genders, focusing on serving those facing barriers to accessing other shelters.

Although originally intended as a temporary measure, the shelter is now in its fourth year of operation and continues to rely primarily on volunteer labour. OTCS organizers remain critical of their role in allowing the government to shirk its responsibilities to homeless populations, but see no alternative to continuing to do this work. “Like it or not, it’s been offloaded,” says Jordan Roberts, who was the volunteer coordinator at OTCS for the 2010-2011 season. “And we have talked about, well, maybe this is the year we don’t open, maybe this is the year we say enough is enough. People will see the crisis at the shelters. People will see the capacity issues. People will see what a winter looks like with no Pendleton, no Out of the Cold. But do we really want to make that point on the backs of individuals we’ve come to know by name?”

Beyond the Politics of Demand

The fight against social service cutbacks and government offloading has understandably been geared toward making demands that the government reinstate funding through protest and lobbying. In what anarchist theory dismisses as the “politics of demand,” political action becomes increasingly centred around making demands for rights, recognition and funding from the state, thereby reifying state power and disempowering individuals and communities as autonomous agents of change. In a climate of economic austerity, however, this style of politics is increasingly being rejected for a far more pragmatic reason: more often than not, it is proving to be ineffective in attaining even the most limited of demands.

For Capp Larsen, one of the founders of OTCS, it was a frustration with this kind of organizing that led her to work with the shelter. “My inspiration for starting the shelter was that I was very involved in protesting the closure of Pendleton Place with the Halifax Coalition Against Poverty,” says Larsen. When the protests initiated by the now-defunct direct-action anti-poverty organization proved ineffective, Larsen was looking for other solutions. “At a certain point I got frustrated with the limited tactic of issuing demands to government officials to do something that they refused to do. The approach was little more than a fierce version of government lobbying, and it wasn’t very effective. It was disempowering to always be yelling at an institution to do something.”

The dehumanizing nature of this kind of activism has led some organizers to stop making demands even while they continue to use many of the forms and tactics of demand-based politics. The large-scale protests of the anti-neoliberal globalization movement, for example, rarely involved formal demands, even though their one-off, convergence-style organization was informed by demand-based politics and offered little room for other goals like longer term community building. Others are looking beyond protests for new tactics to achieve their objectives, often involving the creation of autonomous alternatives to state-controlled institutions. In cases where the state has withdrawn from providing necessary services, obvious opportunities exist.

“When the efforts to get Pendleton Place reopened didn’t work, my reaction was to try to sever the dependence on the government to provide services that they refused to provide. I thought, screw them. We can do this on our own, and we can run it in a way that addresses the need and is community based,” says Larsen. “It was in our power to do, and it was better than exhausting all of our energy trying to convince a government institution to do it for us.”

There are several advantages to this kind of organizing independent of the state. While Roberts, the former volunteer coordinator, maintains her belief that the government has a responsibility to provide enough shelter beds, she also knows that OTCS does many things better than a state-supported shelter ever could. “We want a harm reduction, trans-inclusive, progressive, social justice based shelter. And the government is not going to provide that.”

Larsen agrees. “At Pendleton Place they had policies that were really problematic,” she says, pointing out that Pendleton Place’s status as a shelter of last resort meant that people weren’t allowed to access its services until they were formally denied access to other shelters in the area, even if they had safety or other concerns that prevented them from going there. “There are benefits to services being run without governments dictating what you can and can’t do. There’s an advantage to being able to design policies based on what works.”

Replacing political action?

Such initiatives often begin as struggles that are inherently political assertions of community will and direct affronts to those who insist the services are no longer necessary. If they survive, however, many such organizations are at risk of becoming institutionalized and reincorporated into state structures, often at the expense of maintaining the political nature of the work.

“At the beginning it was a fight,” says Larsen of OTCS. “We had to fight the cuts. We had to fight zoning laws. We had to fight neighbourhoods that didn’t want a shelter there. We had to fight the Department of Community Services; they refused to acknowledge that we existed. But by the third season, a lot of that changed. We were good, and so it wasn’t a fight anymore.”

The shelter was so good, in fact, that the Department of Community Services decided to fund the shelter to the tune of $40,000 in the 2010-2011 season. While the money came with no strings attached, organizers are aware of the injustice of the situation in which they are now co-operating with the government to help it provide an essential service at a fraction of the cost. “They gave us money because they realized that if OTCS didn’t open they would have a big problem on their hands,” says Larsen. “They realized they made a mistake in closing Pendleton Place.”

Along with this increased institutionalization came a decline in political work. “Without the fight, eventually the political work slipped away because we had to focus on more day-to-day problems,” says Larsen, evoking one of the more common criticisms of community volunteers stepping in to fill the role of government. “When the shelter was fighting to exist we had no choice but to address the wider issues of homelessness, poverty, our failing housing system, the impact of capitalism, etc. When those issues were no longer present, the fight became focused on supporting individuals. Again, very important work, but work that is mostly private in nature and does not usually require an articulated analysis of the root of the problem.”

When consumed by the daily push to provide services, it can be easy to lose sight of broader political goals and to disengage from more conflict-oriented organizing work. This is particularly true when the services provided remain within a form that is acceptable to the state rather than existing as challenges to state power. In the case of OTCS, while shelter volunteers have never lost interest in coupling political action with their volunteer work, the reality is that this often takes a back seat to just keeping the shelter operating.

“Government services are offloaded because if the people who have the passion and the talent for organizing, mobilizing and agitating are more occupied with who is going to get the milk tonight and sorting laundry than they are about organizing a tent city or talking about why we don’t have more affordable housing, then those things aren’t going to happen,” agrees Roberts. “And that’s why the government offloads services, far more than to save themselves money. They want to keep the people who actually care about the issues busy and burned out.”

Possibilities of Service Provision

Despite these problems, service provision remains an important way to work for social change and to transcend politics based solely on making demands. Indeed, service provision has long been an essential part of radical community organizing efforts: the Black Panther Party’s breakfast program, which began in 1969 and eventually provided breakfast to an estimated 10,000 underprivileged youth every day across the U.S., is an oft-cited historical example. The Occupy movement is a contemporary example of attempting to combine protest with the provision of shelter and food to anyone who needs it, in the spirit of building communities that provide for one another. In addition to providing needed services to the community, these kinds of initiatives can help build solidarity and support for more radical or controversial political action. In the case of OTCS, the shelter holds potential as a politicizing space because it attracts volunteers who may not be initially interested in political work. “Their eyes are opened to the realities of homelessness in the city,” says Roberts. “I think that, politically, ideals and values get really pushed. I know mine did.” For such potential to be realized, however, political goals need to remain central.

Service provision as a way of directly responding to government cutbacks remains limited insofar as it remains reactionary rather than creative. In the case of OTCS, part of the problem lies in the fact that because they are merely stepping in to provide a service cut by the government, their broader visions are not really reflected in the service they are providing, even if they are saving lives. “We’re not really advocating for more shelter beds,” says Roberts. “What we want to see is more housing, more affordable and supportive housing.”

A great deal is sacrificed when these broader political goals get lost in favour of providing bare minimum community supports. For organizers to transcend both the politics of demand and the depoliticizing effects of service provision, it is important to reconsider how to provide services that can serve broader goals while simultaneously supporting the community, rather than immediately stepping up to fill the state’s shoes. This kind of creativity will only become more essential as the drive for austerity continues.

Hundreds of people attended the funeral for Marcelo Rivera, the first anti-mining activist to be killed in El Salvador in July 2009. He had been missing for 12 days before his body was found at the bottom of a well showing signs of torture. Photo credit: SHARE El Salvador

In late August 2011, I sat in a meeting room in the Intercontinental Hotel in San Salvador. It was packed with hundreds of farmers, high-school students and working people, some of whom had travelled from distant rural communities to participate in a forum on metallic mining in El Salvador. Following speeches from a panel of politicians, including Lina Pohl, the Salvadoran vice-minister of the environment, a man from the back of the room spoke into a microphone, echoing the unanimous position of community members present that gold mining must be prohibited in the country. “We may be poor,” he said, “but we are not ignorant. We are humble of heart, but we are not stupid.”

The women and men of El Salvador struggle with the legacies of military repression, armed conflict, neoliberal trade policies and the culture of impunity that continues to flourish in the tiny Central American republic. Yet, Salvadorans active in social movements persistently demonstrate deep commitment to protecting the life of their communities. “Power is built; nobody will give it to you. You must build it in every moment,” said an environmental activist I met in 2004.

The Salvadoran people’s spirit of resistance is being tested once again in the legal battle against Canadian mining company Pacific Rim. In 2009, the Salvadoran government refused to grant the company a licence to exploit its two proposed gold mining projects, citing the company’s failure to meet environmental assessment requirements. Now the firm is suing El Salvador for $77 million in a World Bank tribunal under the terms of the Central American Free Trade Agreement.

On the ground in the region of Cabañas, where Pacific Rim’s sights lie, another facet of the conflict is unfolding. This June, the body of environmental activist Juan Francisco Duran Ayala was exhumed from a common grave in San Salvador. Unable to identify his remains, the National Civilian Police had interred Ayala’s body there. He was the third activist from the area surrounding the proposed mine sites to be killed in a fashion reminiscent of the right-wing death squad activity of the 1980s when thousands of students, labour leaders and activists were abducted, tortured and killed, or else simply disappeared.

El Dorado

Two days after attending the mining forum in San Salvador, I hitch a ride to Cabañas with a friend who works in the district surrounding the larger of Pacific Rim’s two proposed gold mines. The drive from El Salvador’s capital city to Cabañas reveals much about what community organizer Marvin Guillermo Orellana calls “the most forgotten” region in the country. As a sign on the main highway indicates the turnoff for Ilobasco, Orellana’s hometown, his words begin to resonate. The roads are treacherous; it is necessary to weave between potholes as large as vehicles, sometimes by swerving into the oncoming lane. The stark level of poverty in this municipality is at odds with what lies beneath its dusty and deforested clay earth: some of the richest deposits of gold in Central America.

Just outside the village of San Isidro, a sign stands on the side of the highway bearing the name Pacific Rim and a claim to “Socially and Environmentally Responsible Mining.” This is El Dorado, the property where the Canadian corporation has identified gold deposits totalling 1.4 million ounces. From the road, the site appears no different from any other property in the area, but as I approach the metal gate that cuts across the laneway, a security guard emerges from his small post. Curious visitors do not appear to be welcome here.

Many of the communities here have been repopulated after thousands of refugees fled across the Rio Lempa during the early 1980s to Honduras, with aerial assaults by the military resulting in hundreds of casualties as entire villages attempted to cross the border to safety. The same river that once ran red from so many deaths is also a symbol of life for the region. Pacific Rim’s plan to extract precious metal from rock using a cyanide leaching process poses grave threats to environmental and human health – threats that are compounded by El Dorado’s position upstream from the major source of freshwater for El Salvador. Skin disease, miscarriages and the death of livestock are among the documented effects of contamination from this process. El Salvador is also one of the most seismically active countries in the Americas. Reassurances offered by corporate representatives that waste water pools lined with non-degradable materials will prevent contamination of the Rio Lempa in perpetuity ring hollow to the ears of many in the affected area.

Depoliticizing the murders

Zenayda Serrano Iraheta was a lawyer working in the attorney general’s office in Cabañas when Marcelo Rivera, a community leader from San Isidro, disappeared. Rivera’s body was recovered 12 days later in the bottom of a 100-foot well. His hair and toenails had been removed, his trachea crushed. The autopsy report concluded that Rivera was killed in a drunken brawl, the signs of torture on his body mere indications of decomposition. For testifying that the investigation was corrupt and inaccurate and for pressing for an independent investigation consistent with the facts of Rivera’s death, Iraheta was fired from her position. Evidence and equipment were stolen from her office, and, in response to a stream of death threats, she and her husband moved with their young child to San Salvador for greater security.

Friends and family of Rivera knew that something was wrong with the autopsy findings. “For one thing, Rivera didn’t drink alcohol,” Rina Navarrete recalls. I met with her in the sparsely furnished office of ASIC, the Friends of San Isidro Cabañas, which has been leading the campaign against Pacific Rim in the community. Now director of the organization, the young mother was recruited to the cause personally by Rivera the week that he disappeared. Two years have passed, yet her grief is palpable. “There are some things about this that you just cannot say,” she remarks, referring to the crippling sadness of losing a charismatic leader who was also a lifelong friend.

The tactic of depoliticizing the murders of anti-mining activists has been used repeatedly over the past two years, with local investigations concluding that familial disputes involving alcohol resulted in the deaths of activists Ramiro Rivera (no relation to Marcelo) and Dora “Alicia” Sorto Recinos, who was eight months pregnant when she was fatally shot in 2009. Early investigations into the recent killing of Juan Francisco Duran Ayala attempted to link his death to gang activity. Although gang violence is ubiquitous in El Salvador, it seems unlikely to those who knew Ayala that gangs had anything to do with his disappearance.

“The police said he must have been connected to the MS [the Mara Salvatrucha, one of El Salvador’s rival gangs] because he had a tattoo,” Navarrete recounts. “But it was a tattoo of Che Guevara.” From the perspective of those who worked with Ayala, it is more likely that his demise was politically motivated. The last night he was seen alive, Ayala and his friends were followed by police while putting up posters for an anti-mining workshop.

Pacific Rim has resisted any association with the repression of anti-mining activists in Cabañas. In a statement released two weeks after the discovery of Ayala’s body, the company denounced an “opposition leadership” for making libelous accusations against them and delivered an unexpected deflection. Magnifying the gravity of property damage and alleged threats against company employees in contrast to this string of grisly homicides, Pacific Rim’s statement reads: “We have never retaliated against those who have perpetrated violence against us.”

Mining on trial

Pacific Rim’s claim against the Republic of El Salvador is being heard in a World Bank tribunal in Washington, D.C. El Salvador has raised compelling arguments that Pacific Rim, a wholly Canadian-owned corporation that recently acquired a Nevada subsidiary to bring itself within the ambit of the United States-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), has no jurisdiction to make their claim.

After decades of dictatorship and armed struggle in El Salvador, democratic institutions are still emerging. The communities most at risk from the harms of metallic mining are not assured that their concerns will be adequately represented by their government. As a result, a national coalition of community groups has made submissions to the tribunal expressing environmental and social concerns, like the severe water shortages in the country, doubts that the affected communities are adequately informed regarding the decision to support mining in their territories, and questions about whether affected communities have the political capital to participate in the public policy debate surrounding mining.

Constitutional scholars in El Salvador have raised uncertainty as to the legality of CAFTA’s ratification in the country. Even while the terms of the agreement were being negotiated, opposition among Salvadorans to becoming a party to free trade with the United States was widespread. A farmer and ex-combatant I met in 2004 explained the reasoning behind this reticence: “Free trade is a shot in the head to Central America,” he stated plainly. “People will die when CAFTA is ratified. I’ve survived 12 years of civil war, displacement and an injury, a hurricane and two earthquakes, but the free trade agreements will leave us powerless to change anything. And the power we have gained will be lost to the megaprojects of American entrepreneurs.”

These words proved prophetic – the megaprojects he foresaw are well under way. In addition to the 29 mining projects scattered across the northeastern edge of the country, all currently in the exploration stage, the construction of the Carretera Longitudinal del Norte (Northern Longitudinal Highway) rumbles ahead, carving its way from Santa Ana in the southeast to the mountains of Chalatenango where it meets the Honduran border. The towns in Cabañas affected by Pacific Rim’s proposed mining development lie directly in its path. Under the free trade agenda, the governments of impoverished Central American countries foot the bill for development projects designed to suck resources out of the region, with capital and benefits flowing in one direction, and displacement and contamination flowing in the other.

By its own estimates, Pacific Rim stands to gross trillions of dollars if given the opportunity to extract gold deposits at the El Dorado and Santa Rita sites. Gold extraction is on hold in El Salvador for the moment, but as the price of this commodity continues to ascend and pressures to exploit this resource increase, it is unclear how long the government will maintain its moratorium on mining.

The culture of impunity that has been allowed to continue in El Salvador makes activists who speak out against lucrative development projects particularly vulnerable. While the government of El Salvador makes headway in the international investment dispute, arguing that Pacific Rim has no jurisdiction to bring its claim against the country, political corruption on the local level in Cabañas allows the intimidation, death threats and disappearances of anti-mining activists to be dismissed by local institutions. Pacific Rim maintains that it bears no responsibility for the violence targeted at those who oppose its presence in the region. However, the lack of independent investigations into the deaths of activists there means that the truth about who perpetrated the crimes remains buried. The murders of anti-mining activists in Cabañas are one tangible manifestation of the lack of respect for individual and collective rights in the face of highly lucrative development projects.

Salvadorans have made untold sacrifices for the chance to participate in the decisions that affect their lives. Their suffering has forged in them the understanding that power is not given, that it must be built in every moment. With remarkable resilience, their struggle for self-determination continues.

Hassan Diab is fighting deportation to France under Canada’s Extradition Act for allegations that would not stand up in Canadian courts.

Hassan Diab, a Canadian citizen and former University of Ottawa professor, faces the possibility of life imprisonment in France for his alleged role in a 1980 Paris bombing that killed four people. Diab’s finger and palm prints do not match those of the suspect, nor does his handwriting. The suspect’s physical description is unlike what Diab looked like in 1980, and Diab denies being in France and emphatically condemns the bombing. He’s being sought based on secret intelligence, the source of which even French officials are unaware, that may have been extracted under torture. Nevertheless, Canada’s draconian Extradition Act may provide legal grounds for Canada to send Diab to France to stand trial.

The likelihood that Diab would receive a fair trial in France is uncertain. That country is currently before the European Court of Human Rights for violating Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights – the right to fair trial – for running trials based on secret, anonymous intelligence.

This extremely problematic case is part of a general trend over the past decade of extraterritorial, frontier justice under which fragile rule-of-law precepts, such as reasonable grounds for arrest, charges, and a fair trial, have been tossed aside under the national security rubric. The seemingly inviolable protections of citizenship or refugee status become secondary concerns when one country seeks the apprehension of someone halfway around the world. While the past decade’s abduction and rendition to torture programs have received a fair amount of attention, lesser known, judicially sanctioned processes such as the Extradition Act are also used to uproot someone to face a perilous fate in another nation.

Most Canadians will never experience the violence of being nabbed by a foreign government. But Diab’s case highlights the dangers posed, especially to already targeted communities, by legally sanctioned arbitrary arrest, detention and overseas imprisonment on the simple say-so of a foreign government. As stated in a 2009 counterterrorism study by the International Commission of Jurists, certain governments “want to reserve for themselves the power to designate a class of people who are not entitled to the same rights as other human beings.”

Were Diab to be tried in Canada, the case would be laughed out of court. But an extradition hearing is not a trial. Rather, it is an exercise in maintaining cordial relations with a foreign government. Once the Justice minister sets the process in motion, an individual is arrested and faces an extradition hearing that many critics view as a rubber stamp. An individual seeking to present evidence of innocence is normally halted by a judge who says that all those issues can be sorted out “over there,” where it is presumed a fair trial will ensue. As Manitoba Judge Freda Steel wrote in a 1999 extradition case: “Evidence at an extradition hearing should be accepted even if the judge feels it is manifestly unreliable, incomplete, false, misleading, contradictory of other evidence, or the judge feels the witness may have perjured themselves.”

And so Diab, like many before him, suffers the double-barrelled wound of a process under which the standards to commit someone to extradition are painfully low and an ultimate decision that is more political than legal. While the Justice minister considers whether to proceed in the beginning and also receives submissions towards the end of the process – in essence, having the rarely exercised opportunity to reject the initial decision – the Supreme Court of Canada has noted the minister must ultimately determine the extent to which the feathers of a foreign power will be ruffled if the extradition is rejected. While the minister can refuse based on grounds that the surrender would be unjust, oppressive or motivated by political or racial persecution, such a decision is extremely rare, given the political ramifications.

In addition, while Canada has more than 50 extradition agreements, not all of them are reciprocal. France, for example, will not allow its citizens to be extradited to Canada.

In theory, this process could affect, for example, a Saskatchewan trade unionist in contact with labour colleagues in the repressive country of Colombia where standing up for workers’ rights is equated with terrorism. Or it could ensnare someone in New Brunswick who donates to a global charity that runs afoul of U.S. authorities and is placed on a blacklist. In both instances, those foreign governments could allege that the Canadian has contravened their country’s antiterrorism scheme and could precipitate their extradition to Colombia or the U.S. Under Canada’s extradition laws, anyone in this country could be deprived of their basic Charter of Rights protections in order to maintain friendly diplomatic relations with the requesting state. Persecution by proxy against a political pain in the neck who lives in Canada is not out of the question.

In practice, however, the extradition process is most often used against communities that are already marginalized and criminalized based on race or religious background. Among numerous examples of recent cases is Edmonton’s Sayfildin Tahir Sharif, accused of contributing to a 2009 Iraq bombing that killed American soldiers. Arrested in January 2011, Sharif is sought by the United States. And according to the CBC, the RCMP prevented him from seeing his lawyer while in an Edmonton jail until U.S. interrogators had finished with him. If he did pose a threat, though, why was he not charged in Canada? Or was there a better chance of a conviction if he were to be tried in the U.S.? Weeks later, Sharif was denied bail at a hearing, despite the judge concluding that the evidence against him was “not overwhelming.”

The failure of a case to be “overwhelming” in extradition scenarios is a common refrain. American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier – still in prison after almost 40 years – was turned over to the U.S. by Pierre Trudeau’s since regretful solicitor general, Warren Allmand, even though, as Amnesty International points out, the extradition was based on false information. In 2003, First Nations activist John Graham was also extradited on hearsay and circumstantial grounds that would not withstand a Canadian court’s scrutiny. Then there’s Marc Emery, the Prince of Pot, who was selling cannabis seeds over the Internet from Vancouver, which is legal here but in contravention of U.S. laws, landing him a five-year sentence stateside courtesy of the Extradition Act.

For Toronto’s Gary Freeman, a 35-year-old incident a Chicago cold case squad brought to the RCMP in 2004 resulted in the mild-mannered library worker’s high-profile takedown arrest. The case against Freeman – which alleged that the African American shot a white police officer in self-defence in the racially charged climate of 1969 Chicago – was so replete with errors, inconsistencies and a lack of original evidence (which mysteriously disappeared) that the Crown attorney at one point was reduced to defending the inconsistency between one account describing seven shots fired and another stating it was “about 13 shots.” The Crown argued that the descriptions were close enough since seven is almost 13, to which the judge replied: “Seven isn’t ‘about 13’ where I come from. Twelve is about 13; 14 is about 13, but not seven. What it means in the ultimate result may be another matter quite altogether.”

The judge nonetheless proceeded to sign the order that eventually landed Freeman back in Chicago where, under a plea agreement, he served 28 days in Cook County Jail and made a significant charitable donation before being released. Now, with a U.S. criminal record, Freeman is considered inadmissible to Canada and is unable to return to his family in Ontario, where he had lived for over three decades.

Disturbingly, extradition requests also undermine the legal protections accorded refugees. Adolf Horvath, declared by Canadian immigration officials to be a person in need of protection because of the severe violence he and other Roma suffer in Hungary, found his refugee status at risk when his former country sought his return to face extortion charges even after the two key witnesses had recanted their original allegations. Faced with sending a refugee back to a country Canada had already determined was dangerous for Horvath, the Justice minister simply wrote to the Immigration minister asking for a new opinion. Conveniently, a reply came back claiming the situation in Hungary had remarkably “changed” and that Horvath would not be at risk, contrary to all established human rights assessments of the time.

Horvath went underground rather than surrender to Canadian authorities, but after a year was found and sent back to Hungary, where a sham trial proceeded and he served a jail term. Although Horvath has since returned to Canada, government officials now say that his criminal record in Hungary renders him inadmissible, despite his protected person status, and he is fighting deportation once again.

For Ottawa’s Diab, life is a constant waiting game. The only thing that keeps him out of the Ottawa Detention Centre is a GPS monitoring unit that tracks his every move, for which he and his partner Rania Tfaily must pay $2,000 a month to ensure his limited freedom. Having to cough up so much money to stay out of jail while the process winds its way through the courts is yet another violation of the presumption of innocence that disappears once the extradition process begins.

Diab’s nightmare began in 2007. Because Hassan Diab is a common Middle Eastern name, Diab chose to not respond with alarm when, while working as a University of Ottawa sociology professor, he was approached by a Le Figaro reporter asking him whether he knew French authorities were claiming he had been involved in the 1980 bombing.

Diab could not so easily dismiss the unidentified individuals and vehicles that began following him or the attempted break-in at his residence. Although he filed numerous reports with Ottawa police, the intensive surveillance (which he later found out was conducted by RCMP agents) continued, culminating in his 2008 arrest.

Since then, Diab has been involved in protracted court proceedings challenging weaknesses in the French case. Things came to a head with a June 6, 2011, decision to commit Diab to extradition. While most extradition proceedings last one or two days, Diab and his lawyer, Donald Bayne, waged a Herculean, year-long effort to illustrate the implausible nature of the French case.

A packed Ottawa courtroom filled with Diab supporters was shocked when the Ontario court judge, Robert Maranger, after calling the case against Diab “weak,” “suspect” and “confusing” and claiming that “the prospects of conviction in the context of a fair trial seem unlikely,” concluded: “It matters not that I hold this view. The law is clear that in such circumstances a committal order is mandated.”

The French case had long attributed smoking-gun status to a single piece of evidence – a handwriting report by someone with a degree in biology and forensics who took only 21 hours of training in expert handwriting analysis. The report was subject to three blistering critiques by internationally renowned handwriting experts, all of whom testified to its “appalling unreliability.” In addition, both France and Canada’s attorney general had withdrawn previous handwriting reports when it was revealed that they were based on handwriting samples that were not even written by Diab.

“Although I could not conclude it was manifestly unreliable, it was nonetheless highly susceptible to criticism and impeachment,” Judge Maranger wrote of the handwriting evidence. He added that the report was based on questionable methods and analysis, calling it not only illogical but also “convoluted, very confusing, with conclusions that are suspect.” However, Maranger also accepted the Canadian government’s position that “there is no responsibility upon a requesting state to provide full disclosure of all of its evidence.” In other words, even if all of the available evidence points to an individual’s innocence, the requesting state’s allegations – even when based on evidence they may choose not to disclose – take precedence.

Diab’s conundrum now hinges in part on differing interpretations of the law. The Supreme Court of Canada recently ruled in another case that it is “axiomatic that a person could not be committed for trial for an offence in Canada if the evidence is so manifestly unreliable that it would be unsafe to rest a verdict upon it. It follows that if a judge on an extradition hearing concludes that the evidence is manifestly unreliable, the judge should not order extradition.”
The opinion of Canada’s highest court would trump Maranger’s finding as would the opinion of courts in British Columbia where standards on extradition are interpreted differently than in Ontario. Had Diab been a Vancouver resident, he would likely be a free man today instead of facing the possibility of life imprisonment.

In the meantime, Diab continues to endure daily life under debt-ridden house arrest as his case makes its way through the judicial and ministerial bureaucracy. An early 2012 hearing before the Ontario Court of Appeal will attempt to reverse the Maranger extradition decision, and if that fails, Diab is prepared to head to the Supreme Court. He also awaits a final decision based on legal submissions to the Justice minister, an outcome for which he is not holding his breath given the current political climate. In the meantime, he and Tfaily continue organizing to bring Canada’s extradition law into harmony with the fair trial standards accorded anyone else caught up in the criminal justice system and to restore justice and peace to their own lives.

Helen Hollywood was sick of living in the shadows. On an early June 2011 morning, after enduring 10 years of overpriced housing in booming Whitehorse, Yukon, she pitched her tent on the front lawn of the territory’s legislature. Frustrated with antiquated, one-sided provisions of the Yukon Landlord and Tenant Act, she vowed not to leave until her concerns were addressed.

Overnight, she became the public face of opposition to the growing ignorance of the homeless and hard-to-house in the Yukon. For over five months, Hollywood kept a vigil on the legislature grounds. She was not alone for long.
Over the summer months, the site, dubbed “Tent City,” grew to house over 70 tents and 90 individuals. Housing became one of the top election issues during the fall territorial race, and in late October, Tent City became the Yukon hub of the global Occupy movement.

On November 9, 2011, White Pass and Yukon Route, the Yukon-based transportation company that owns the land, ordered the removal of Tent City citing concerns about liability. The occupants moved a few metres away onto the grounds of the Yukon legislature until the government evicted them on November 18 citing health and safety concerns as temperatures approached -30°C. Hollywood has since been moved to a social housing unit but remains committed to addressing the inequities that exist for Yukoners seeking safe and affordable accommodation.

Halifax. By Mark Archibald.

From the Arab Spring to mass demonstrations in South America to Occupy movements worldwide, the past year has been hailed as the beginning of a new era of social movements. As the Occupy movement collectively determines the best path forward following widespread evictions and arrests, no one can doubt that it has already had a lasting impact on the way that we organize for social and environmental justice.

In addition to bringing income inequality to the forefront of political discourse, the movement has demonstrated new ways (or ancient ways, reimagined) of organizing and taking care of one another. Through strategies such as consensus-based general assemblies, the human microphone, gift economies and volunteer committees to feed, clothe, inform and entertain one another, the movements have begun to model a sustainable, non-hierarchical alternative to the capitalist system.

Through word of mouth and social media, the strategies and best practices for building this alternative spread from city to city. Movements supported one another in troubleshooting and mediating conflict when it arose, and in maintaining non-violence even when subject to violent oppression from authorities.

The Occupy movement has demonstrated a tenacious and effective commitment to non-violent, collaborative tactics. The following photos, from various photographers, capture some of the ways in which the Occupy movements have helped us to reimagine how we organize and relate to one another within our collective struggle for justice.

Manic Breeze of the Kingston Derby Girls. Photo: Unveiled Photography

Roller derby is back! The female-dominated sport that sees players battle it out in full contact around a roller skating track has made a comeback in the past decade. While roller derby began in the 1930s as skate-a-thons and experienced a resurgence in the ’70s, the present reincarnation has players embodying badass alter egos, complete with unconventional costumes and stage names, and has become known as a space of feminine empowerment. As the sport gains popularity and leagues attract increasingly diverse members, the question of how to include trans women – women who were born biologically male – has sparked important conversations and at times led to divisions.

Space of female empowerment and community

Nancy Kenny is an actor and playwright whose 2011 fringe festival play, Roller Derby Saved My Soul, explains the transition of a shy, dissatisfied 30-something to a strong and confident athlete. “Roller derby pushes women and shows them they can do things they never had a chance to try or never even thought they were capable of,” Kenny explains. “It really does help women build confidence.”

Part of the attraction of roller derby is that it creates a space in which women encourage one another to be everything that society tells them not to be. “It goes against conventional societal norms,” Kenny continues. “Tough, strong women are not what society trains us to be. That is why it is a fringe sport. If women were fully embraced and accepted as strong, powerful, sexual and athletic beings, I don’t know if derby would have the kind of revival it is experiencing. It fulfills a need.”

Theresa Leishman agrees. Not only is it a place for her, as a mother and veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder, to express herself in a way she typically does not, she has also found it to be a space of mutual support and community.

Unsure of how to deal with her stress load, her obsessive-compulsiveness and other anxieties associated with PTSD, and struggling to maintain her physical health, Leishman, or Commando Momma #338 of Kingston’s Limestone CrusHers, has found a sisterhood in roller derby that she’s never seen elsewhere. “A lot was taken away from me. But now I found a group that loves me – other female misfits that never fit anywhere else,” she jokes.

Leishman appreciates derby’s acceptance of all women regardless of background, age and athletic ability. “You get such a diverse range of women, from students to your professional moms.” This diversity contributes to making derby more than just an amateur sport. It also helps create an empowering and supportive space for women.

Increasing accessibility

For all its emphasis on inclusivity, however, some are questioning if derby is really an empowering space for all women.

Marie Bencze, or Manic Breeze, of the Kingston Derby Girls, spends much of her time helping run the league. Through the Mutual Aid Collective, Bencze and fellow members prompted the league to sell 50 tickets for each bout on a sliding scale. The committee also fundraises and organizes to provide services such as child care, and collects and distributes used equipment for those who could not otherwise afford to participate.

In her efforts to decrease barriers to participation, Bencze, an anarchist, also asked her teammates to consider another aspect of the sport’s accessibility – what an empowering space for women mean for trans women – which pushed many women out of their comfort zones, even with skates off.

Gender policy has been a point of contention in many leagues, opening up difficult conversations about body types and maintaining a safe yet inclusive space for women. Conversations around gender policy were one factor that eventually led to divisions within Kingston Derby Girls and the founding of the city’s newer league, the Limestone CrusHers.

Many leagues in Canada are still developing gender policies, but many have modelled their trans policies after Montreal’s, which states that all players must demonstrate that they have been living full-time as a woman and have had female hormone levels for at least a year. Both of these criteria need to be proven with documentation. Acceptable forms of documentation are outlined in the policy and may include proof of a legal name change to a female name, sex reassignment surgery or evidence that “their testosterone levels are not elevated.”

Bencze was uncomfortable including these stipulations in the Kingston Derby Girls’ policy. “What if someone does not have status and cannot legally change their name? What if people don’t want to or can’t take hormones?” She adds that these requirements would compromise the accessibility of the sport for many women due to individual health, lack of access to the health care system and lack of financial resources to pay for hormone supplements.

Many who have worked on gender policies for the sport assert the need for hormones to address differences between sexes such as muscle mass and physical ability and to ensure safety in such an aggressive sport.

But those developing the gender policy for Toronto Roller Derby (ToRD) found that there was actually no evidence to prove that full-contact, coed sports were more dangerous for athletes. Mia Henderson, or Smack Mia Round, is a trans derby girl who was opposed to incorporating hormones into ToRD’s gender policy and found that some of the most vocal opposition to hormone checks came from her cisgendered (non-trans) allies.

“Cisgendered women in the league recognized that if we were going to have a gender policy, it needed to apply to all women in the league and not just trans women.” She points out that some leagues will state in their policies that players must have “normal hormone levels,” but without stating specifics, calling into question what normal female hormone levels actually are. “Post-menopausal women have different hormone levels than pre-menopausal women, and that doesn’t mean they are not ‘normal.’”

Bratty Cardia, a trans woman and referee for ToRD, echoes some of the flaws with debates around hormones. She questions the prevailing idea that certain hormone levels equal certain body types and that testosterone will automatically make people more athletic and better at sports. “This is just not the case. The fact that we need to even out hormone levels is a concession to sexism and patriarchy.” Policies that tie eligibility to hormone levels put the question of who is able to play the sport in the hands of medical professionals.

The governing board for ToRD is currently in the process of approving a gender policy stating that all players must have been living as a woman or non-male identification for the past year. The Kingston Derby Girls have adopted a similar clause.

Smack Mia Round says that derby is one of the most trans-positive environments in which she has ever been. “When I am with groups of trans folks, trans-ness is always a thing. In derby, I am just one of the girls.”

Leishman notes that these discussions got her thinking about issues she would never have otherwise considered. “I now have trans friends, and I don’t really know if I would have if it weren’t for derby. Roller derby really does push you to look beyond your own sphere. It has definitely done that for me.”

It’s developments like these that confirm for Bencze that the challenging and tedious work of developing gender policies, responding to endless email threads and attending meetings contribute not just to making the sport more accessible, but also to broader goals of gender justice and social justice. “It is empowering to see what we can do, both in the community of derby and in the greater communities we’re involved in. This is how social change happens. We find a setting that gives us strength to really find and be who we are. In roller derby, we have been crossing boundaries and showing the dynamic nature of not only women but all people.”

Illustrations by Afuwa

Canada’s state and corporate wealth is largely based on subsidies gained from the theft of Indigenous lands and resources. Conquest in Canada was designed to ensure forced displacement of Indigenous peoples from their territories, the destruction of autonomy and self-determination in Indigenous self-governance and the assimilation of Indigenous peoples’ cultures and traditions. Given the devastating cultural, spiritual, economic, linguistic and political impacts of colonialism on Indigenous people in Canada, any serious attempt by non-natives at allying with Indigenous struggles must entail solidarity in the fight against colonization.

Non-natives must be able to position ourselves as active and integral participants in a decolonization movement for political liberation, social transformation, renewed cultural kinships and the development of an economic system that serves rather than threatens our collective life on this planet. Decolonization is as much a process as a goal. It requires a profound recentring on Indigenous worldviews. Syed Hussan, a Toronto-based activist, states: “Decolonization is a dramatic reimagining of relationships with land, people and the state. Much of this requires study. It requires conversation. It is a practice; it is an unlearning.”

Indigenous solidarity on its own terms

A growing number of social movements are recognizing that Indigenous self-determination must become the foundation for all our broader social justice mobilizing. Indigenous peoples in Canada are the most impacted by the pillage of lands, experience disproportionate poverty and homelessness, are overrepresented in statistics of missing and murdered women and are the primary targets of repressive policing and prosecutions in the criminal injustice system. Rather than being treated as a single issue within a laundry list of demands, Indigenous self-determination is increasingly understood as intertwined with struggles against racism, poverty, police violence, war and occupation, violence against women and environmental justice.

Incorporating Indigenous self-determination into these movements can, however, subordinate and compartmentalize Indigenous struggle within the machinery of existing Leftist narratives. Anarchists point to the antiauthoritarian tendencies within Indigenous communities, environmentalists highlight the connection to land that Indigenous communities have, anti-racists subsume Indigenous people into the broader discourse about systemic oppression in Canada, and women’s organizations point to the relentless violence inflicted on Indigenous women in discussions about patriarchy.

We have to be cautious not to replicate the Canadian state’s assimilationist model of liberal pluralism, forcing Indigenous identities to fit within our existing groups and narratives. The inherent right to traditional lands and to self-determination is expressed collectively and should not be subsumed within the discourse of individual or human rights. Furthermore, it is imperative to understand that being Indigenous is not just an identity but a way of life, which is intricately connected to Indigenous peoples’ relationship to the land and all its inhabitants. Indigenous struggle cannot simply be accommodated within other struggles; it demands solidarity on its own terms.

The practice of solidarity

One of the basic principles of Indigenous solidarity organizing is the notion of taking leadership. According to this principle, non-natives must be accountable and responsive to the experiences, voices, needs and political perspectives of Indigenous people themselves. From an anti-oppression perspective, meaningful support for Indigenous struggles cannot be directed by non-natives. Taking leadership means being humble and honouring front-line voices of resistance as well as offering tangible solidarity as needed and requested. Specifically, this translates to taking initiative for self-education about the specific histories of the lands we reside upon, organizing support with the clear consent and guidance of an Indigenous community or group, building long-term relationships of accountability and never assuming or taking for granted the personal and political trust that non-natives may earn from Indigenous peoples over time.

In offering support to a specific community in the defence of their land, non-natives should organize with a mandate from the community and an understanding of the parameters of the support being sought. Once these guidelines are established, non-natives should be proactive in offering logistical, fundraising and campaign support. Clear lines of communication must always be maintained, and a commitment should be made for long-term support. This means not just being present for blockades or in moments of crisis, but developing an ongoing commitment to the well-being of Indigenous peoples and communities.

Organizing in accordance with these principles is not always straightforward. Respecting Indigenous leadership is not the same as doing nothing while waiting around to be told what to do. “I am waiting to be told exactly what to do” should not be an excuse for inaction, and seeking guidance must be weighed against the possibility of further burdening Indigenous people with questions. A willingness to decentre oneself and to learn and act from a place of responsibility rather than guilt are helpful in determining the line between being too interventionist and being paralyzed.

Cultivating an ethic of responsibility within the Indigenous solidarity movement begins with non-natives understanding ourselves as beneficiaries of the illegal settlement of Indigenous peoples’ land and unjust appropriation of Indigenous peoples’ resources and jurisdiction. When faced with this truth, it is common for activists to get stuck in their feelings of guilt, which I would argue is a state of self-absorption that actually upholds privilege. While guilt is often a sign of a much-needed shift in consciousness, in itself it does nothing to motivate the responsibility necessary to actively dismantle entrenched systems of oppression. In a movement-building round table, long-time Montreal activist Jaggi Singh said: “The only way to escape complicity with settlement is active opposition to it. That only happens in the context of on-the-ground, day-to-day organizing, and creating and cultivating the spaces where we can begin dialogues and discussions as natives and non-natives.”

Sustained alliance building

Sustaining a multiplicity of meaningful and diverse relationships with Indigenous peoples is critical in building a non-native movement for Indigenous self-determination. “Solidarity is not the same as support,” says feminist writer bell hooks. “To experience solidarity, we must have a community of interests, shared beliefs and goals around which to unite, to build Sisterhood. Support can be occasional. It can be given and just as easily withdrawn. Solidarity requires sustained, ongoing commitment.”

Who exactly one takes direction from while building networks of ongoing solidarity can be complicated. As in any community, a diversity of political opinions often exists within Indigenous communities. How do we determine whose leadership to follow and which alliances to build? I take leadership from and offer tangible support to grassroots Indigenous peoples who are exercising traditional governance and customs in the face of state control and bureaucratization, who are seeking redress and reparations for acts of genocide and assimilation, such as residential schools, who are opposing corporate development on their lands. I support those who are pushing back against the oppressions of hetero-patriarchy imposed by settler society, who are struggling against poverty and systemic marginalization in urban areas, who are criticizing unjust land claims and treaty processes and who are affirming their own languages, customs, traditions, creative expression and spiritual practices.

Alliances with Indigenous communities should be based on shared values, principles and analysis. For example, during the anti-Olympics campaign in 2010, activists chose not to align with the Four Host First Nations, a pro-corporate body created in conjunction with the Vancouver Olympics organizing committee. Instead, we took leadership from and strengthened alliances with land defenders in the Secwepemc and St’át’imc nations and Indigenous people being directly impacted by homelessness and poverty in the Downtown Eastside. In general, however, differences surrounding strategy within a community should be for community members to discuss and resolve. We should be cautious of a persistent dynamic where solidarity activists start to fixate on the internal politics of an oppressed community. Allies should avoid trying to intrude and interfere in struggles within and between communities, which perpetuates the civilizing ideology of the white man’s burden and violates the basic principles of self-determination.

Building intentional alliances should also avoid devolution into tokenization. Non-natives often choose which Indigenous voices to privilege by defaulting to Indigenous activists they determine to be better known, easier-to-contact or “less hostile.” This selectivity distorts the diversity present in Indigenous communities and can exacerbate tensions and colonially imposed divisions between Indigenous peoples. In opposing the colonialism of the state and settler society, non-natives must recognize our own role in perpetuating colonialism within our solidarity efforts. We can actively counter this by theorizing about and discussing the nuanced issues of solidarity, leadership, strategy and analysis – not in abstraction, but within our real and informed and sustained relationships with Indigenous peoples.

Decolonizing relationships

While centring and honouring Indigenous voices and leadership, the obligation for decolonization rests on all of us. In “Building a ‘Canadian’ Decolonization Movement: Fighting the Occupation at ‘Home,’” Nora Burke says: “A decolonisation movement cannot be comprised solely of solidarity and support for Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty and self-determination. If we are in support of self-determination, we too need to be self-determining. It is time to cut the state out of this relationship, and to replace it with a new relationship, one which is mutually negotiated, and premised on a core respect for autonomy and freedom.”

Being responsible for decolonization can require us to locate ourselves within the context of colonization in complicated ways, often as simultaneously oppressed and complicit. This is true, for example, for racialized migrants in Canada. Within the anticolonial migrant justice movement of No One Is Illegal, we go beyond demanding citizenship rights for racialized migrants as that would lend false legitimacy to a settler state. We challenge the official state discourse of multiculturalism that undermines the autonomy of Indigenous communities by granting and mediating rights through the imposed structures of the state and that seeks to assimilate diversities into a singular Canadian identity. Andrea Smith, Indigenous feminist intellectual, says: “All non-Native peoples are promised the ability to join in the colonial project of settling indigenous lands. In all of these cases, we would check our aspirations against the aspirations of other communities to ensure that our model of liberation does not become the model of oppression for others.” In B.C., immigrants and refugees have participated in several delegations to Indigenous blockades, while Indigenous communities have offered protection and refuge for migrants facing deportation.

Decolonization is the process whereby we create the conditions in which we want to live and the social relations we wish to have. We have to commit ourselves to supplanting the colonial logic of the state itself. Almost a hundred years ago, German anarchist Gustav Landauer wrote: “The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships.” Decolonization requires us to exercise our sovereignties differently and to reconfigure our communities based on shared experiences, ideals and visions. Almost all Indigenous formulations of sovereignty – such as the Two Row Wampum agreement of peace, friendship and respect between the Haudenosaunee nations and settlers – are premised on revolutionary notions of respectful coexistence and stewardship of the land, which goes far beyond any Western liberal democratic ideal.

I have been encouraged to think of human interconnectedness and kinship in building alliances with Indigenous communities. Black-Cherokee writer Zainab Amadahy uses the term “relationship framework” to describe how our activism should be grounded. “Understanding the world through a Relationship Framework … we don’t see ourselves, our communities, or our species as inherently superior to any other, but rather see our roles and responsibilities to each other as inherent to enjoying our life experiences,” says Amadahy. From Turtle Island to Palestine, striving toward decolonization and walking together toward transformation requires us to challenge a dehumanizing social organization that perpetuates our isolation from each other and normalizes a lack of responsibility to one another and the Earth.

This is an altered and condensed version of a chapter from the 2012 forthcoming book Organize! Building From the Local for Global Justice, edited by Aziz Choudry, Jill Hanley and Eric Shragge.

Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence
By Leanne Simpson
Arbeiter Ring 2011

What does reconciliation look like for Indigenous peoples in what is currently Canada? In part, argues Leanne Simpson in Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back, it must take the form of the resurgence of Indigenous peoples’ political traditions in their nation-to-nation relationships with Canada.

For Canada, however, reconciliation is about turning a page in its colonial history. This notion emanates from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as mandated by the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, which is designed to promote healing between residential school survivors and Canadians through truth telling. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is based on principles that are victim centred. It is meant to look forward, but it is doing so without naming decolonization as integral to the future of Canada’s relationships with Indigenous peoples. For Canada, reconciliation means apologizing for its history without recognizing its current role in neo-colonialism.

Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back unpacks some of the implications that this narrow notion of reconciliation holds for Indigenous peoples. For example, framing reconciliation as turning the page ensures a future of colonialism in Canada. Indigenous peoples have not and cannot forget the residential school genocide era while its effects remain tangible in many Indigenous families and communities – whether urban or reserve – in the form of intergenerational trauma. Turning the page on this existing trauma is a form of erasure as much as it is a way to make a history of genocide less uncomfortable for settlers.

Reconciliation can be a form of neo-colonialism when it becomes an opportunity for Canadians to turn the page on, or silence, Indigenous peoples’ ongoing resistance to colonialism. Simpson shows that Canada’s narrowly defined form of reconciliation can preclude Indigenous peoples’ contention with the state. And there is much to contend yet: outstanding land claims, the state’s continued sanctioning of racism and sexism through its use of the Indian Act, its abrogation of existing treaties, and the continued occupation of Indigenous territories by settler society, resource extraction companies, etc. The risk of applying Canada’s narrow version of reconciliation to broader issues is that Indigenous peoples’ ongoing contention with the state will be criminalized because, in the minds of settlers and according to the state, we will have no reason to challenge settler colonialism – everything will be reconciled and therefore beyond critique.

In addition to interrogating colonialism, _Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back is in many ways a celebration of Anishinabek political traditions that, far from being erased, have survived the worst of colonialism and are now resurging in the contemporary context. After critiquing the state’s version of reconciliation, the majority of the book is about applying these traditions to explain what reconciliation should look like if Canada is serious about making things right with Anishinabek.

Simpson demonstrates that the resurgence of Anishinabek traditions is reconciliation. For example, the Anishinabek teaching of biskaabiiyang – a decolonizing theory based in Anishinabek thought – fights colonial erasure. Biskaabiiyang is a returning to one’s self, a verb meaning to look back and to reinterpret Anishinabek teachings in our contemporary context in ways that “bring meaning to our practices and illuminate our lifeways” today. Biskaabiiyang means that our political relationships with Canada cannot be solely defined by the state, but must also be informed by Anishinabek political traditions.

Reconciliation based in Anishinabek political traditions means both parties are committed to maintaining (re)balanced relationships without one party dominating the other; it means taking into account the concerns of everyone, including the ecology, when decisions are being made; it means moving toward an understanding of decolonization as a process that can be engaged right now instead of a far-off goal for which we must wait. A broad and decolonizing definition of reconciliation means Anishinabek will be able to engage in a nation-to-nation relationship with Canada as Anishinabek, rather than being grouped with all Indigenous peoples into a defanged category of Aboriginal Canadians.

As Simpson discusses in the last sections of the book, true reconciliation will occur when new generations of Anishinabek and other Indigenous peoples are able to enjoy their cultures, languages, territories and political systems free of state interference. Reconciliation thus requires a complete cessation of Canada’s interventions in Indigenous communities, including, for example, ceasing to co-opt Indigenous peoples’ self-determination movements, so that our leaders are able to relate to Canada in ways that honour unique Indigenous political traditions.

Otherwise, reconciliation will just be a euphemism for neo-colonialism.

Anishinabek words in this review are intentionally not italicized to assert the validity of the Anishinabek language in its own right. Italicization makes Anishinabek words appear to be exotic within English texts, ultimately rendering Indigenous languages as Other while recentring the languages of the West as normal.

Walkers march in Prince Albert. Photo: Lorraine Beardsworth

Introduction by Briarpatch Staff

On July 27, 2011, a group of people from communities in northern Saskatchewan, including a large youth contingent, began an 820-kilometre walk from the village of Pinehouse to the provincial legislature in Regina. Over 20 days, the walkers visited 12 communities between Pinehouse and Regina. The purpose of their journey was to raise awareness about the storage and transportation of nuclear waste in the province, and to oppose a proposed nuclear waste dump near Pinehouse.

The walk was organized by the Committee for Future Generations, which was formed in spring 2011 after residents of the northern Saskatchewan communities of Pinehouse, English River and Creighton found out that their administrations, along with those of a few communities in northern Ontario, had expressed interest in hosting a nuclear waste repository.

Three weeks after the discovery, the newly formed Committee for Future Generations hosted a public forum where 200 attendees from 12 northern and 8 southern communities, representing a diversity of ages, backgrounds and organizations, voted unanimously to lobby government for a ban on nuclear waste storage and transportation in Saskatchewan. The walk was organized with the intention of building solidarity among the province’s residents to push for a legislated ban.

Serious questions have been raised about the unethical means by which the industry-driven Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) is attempting to fulfill its duty to consult potentially affected Aboriginal communities, as ordered by the Supreme Court of Canada. In addition to paying hundreds of dollars in per diems to elders to liaise between their communities and NWMO, the organization also brought elders and youth together under the pretext of an elders’ circle on suicide prevention, which in fact turned out to be a blatant promotion for the storage of nuclear waste in northern Saskatchewan. Max Morin of Beauval, Saskatchewan, had been invited to attend as an elder. “After two hours of pouring our hearts out, sharing in a talking circle,” Morin states that the NWMO facilitator wrote “duty to consult” on the flip chart and abruptly turned the conversation to nuclear waste storage. “‘NWMO’ was written on the flip chart too, and all of a sudden it was all about NWMO.” Morin reports that 11 elders walked out of the meeting in protest.

The walkers arrived in Regina on August 16, where they were joined by several hundred people for the last few kilometres of their walk. Although the committee had invited Premier Brad Wall to meet with them, on arrival at the provincial legislature only a lone government staffer appeared to quickly shake hands before retreating back into the building.

Nonetheless, the walk succeeded in bringing opposition to a nuclear dump into the mainstream media, and in building province-wide solidarity against the storage and transportation of nuclear waste in Saskatchewan. Don Kossick caught up with some of the walkers a few weeks after the walk. This is an excerpt from his interview with Doreen Docken, Max Morin, Debby Morin and Victor Mispounas.

Tell me about your motivations for doing this walk.

Doreen: Before the walk started, I sometimes wondered, what am I thinking? I’m overweight, limited in my knowledge and I have lots of other things to do. But I had lived most of my life in an area that most people only dream of, with clear, clean water; air without impurities; smells of pine and birch as the wind whistles over the willows; cranes, pelicans, loons and eagles that talk to me throughout the day – pristine beauty. This was a land that I wanted to share with my children, grandchildren and their children, a land that they have every right to enjoy.

How did the walk go? Did it achieve what you wanted it to?

Doreen: We were about 10 in our core group, but we grew as we travelled. We learned a lot from others who have been involved in anti-nuclear work for over 30 years. They supported us, educated us and walked alongside us. I was inspired – inspired to educate friends, family and surrounding communities.

Debby: Our greatest treasures of that walk were the people that we met. We were really reminded that that’s where the real strength is. We were ready to go straight to Regina by ourselves if we had to, but we sure didn’t have to.

Victor: I didn’t know there were so many white people out there who were so caring. Before, I had nothing to do with white people. I didn’t trust them. Now I feel a whole lot different.

Max: It felt so great to make it to the legislature. Our expectation was to meet with the government there, and they didn’t really show. But by then, we’d woken up the whole province, and I think we achieved what we needed to to make this an issue of the province, of Saskatchewan – not just the north, not just the south, but all of Saskatchewan.

This is a beautiful Saskatchewan, and it should stay that way. Our rivers, our living skies, our trees, our land, our resources, our wildlife, our moose, our fish – that’s what we want to hang on to. We don’t want to be victims like those in Chernobyl and Japan. My heart goes out to those places.

During the walk, you gathered water from each community in a buffalo horn. What was the significance of that?

Debby: All of Saskatchewan is like a sponge that holds water. If you drop vinegar or something on one side of a sponge holding water, it will eventually spread throughout the whole sponge, and that’s exactly what would happen with a nuclear accident. Water unites us all.

We already have nuclear waste up here with the tailings that have been lying around. With the amount of cancers that have been happening, we would like to get some tests done on the radioactivity of the water up here. What we’re trying to prevent is more, not only more volume but more deadly waste from coming.

Collecting the water from the communities was part of the waking up, part of the educating. We sent out an invitation to a representative of each community we went to, to present us with a gift of their water, which they would pour into a buffalo horn. We started at Pinehouse with a prayer from an elder. We put tobacco in the lake and started. That was our first collection of water, followed by rivers and lakes in communities all the way down. The water in that container is a symbol of how we’re all united.

You have said that the walk wasn’t the end; it was the beginning. What’s been happening since the walk?

Max: NWMO has pushed back really hard. Because of the awakening inspired by the walk, NWMO has had to dig deeper into their pockets and spend a little bit more money on organizations, groups and communities, to stay ahead of the game. Our committee and the northern communities it represents, we’re not rich, but the message is being passed around through grassroots. Moccasin telegraph, we’ll say.

Debby: Our petition to ban nuclear waste storage and transportation in the province now has more than 10,000 signatures. Including the 5,000 signatures submitted by Clean Green Saskatchewan in April 2011, that’s 15,000 Saskatchewan residents and counting now petitioning the government to ban nuclear waste.

Doreen: Through the walk, we realized how little people in Saskatchewan knew, how much more education we need to do. That little awakening poke was not enough. The people of Saskatchewan need to know the truth, and I feel obligated as a mother, an educator and a human being to work as hard as I can to stop this insanity and to protect the blessings that have been given to me.

This interview first aired on Making the Links Radio and is available at www.makingthelinksradio.ca.

Since the interview, the Committee for Future Generations has continued its work to educate on the dangers of nuclear waste storage and transportation and strengthen opposition to the storage and transportation of nuclear waste in the province. It has accepted invitations to several speaking engagements with organizations such as Kairos, In-Equality, and Occupy, and has brought in experts for community information sessions.

On December 3, the Committee hosted a traditional thank-you feast for all the organizations and individuals who supported the walk. A joyful reunion of people from Pinehouse to Regina, the feast was followed by a strategy meeting, out of which emerged several task groups. In addition to saying “No” to nuclear waste, they also say “Yes” to renewable energy, and their plans include the promotion and development of a renewable energy economic base.

Shayna Paul. All photos: Debby Morin

In summer 2011, several people from communities in northern Saskatchewan walked 820 kilometres from Pinehouse to Regina to raise awareness about the storage and transportation of nuclear waste in the province, and to oppose a proposed nuclear waste dump near Pinehouse.

Youth played an important role in the walk. Among the core walkers were five courageous young people who gave up a good chunk of their summer vacation to stand up for their communities and for future generations.

Geron Paul, age 19 and from Beauval, walked for the full three weeks. At the rally at the Saskatchewan legislature in Regina at the end of the walk, Paul had his public speaking debut when he addressed the crowd of hundreds about the dangers of nuclear waste. “I am proud of our natural resources. I am proud to say I live by one of the most beautiful lakes in Saskatchewan,” he said. “If I have to give up an ‘unparalleled economic opportunity’ to keep it clean, I am willing to live with the consequences.”

Rueben Roy, age 16, of English River First Nation also participated in the whole walk. Roy is concerned about the impact that nuclear waste storage could have on the natural environment surrounding his community, including the animals and water. “Walking on the road instead of driving it allows you to see and feel more with nature,” he notes. “We want to see a north that is not polluted.”

Marissa Favel, age 17 and in Grade 10 in Ile-a-la-Crosse, says she joined the walk “for everyone in this world, but especially for the children.” Favel has two younger brothers and considers the storage of nuclear waste in her community a threat to their future. In this photo she is accepting a gift of water in the group’s buffalo horn from the driver of the Batoche ferry that took the group over the South Saskatchewan River.

Shayna Paul, age 17 and in Grade 11 in Beauval, also had her younger siblings and cousins in mind when she decided to join the walk. “I don’t want them to have this stuff in their backyard,” she says. A powwow dancer since the age of two, Paul danced the walkers into the cities of Prince Albert and Regina. She says she felt proud to be able to do this and also enjoyed the opportunity to connect with the elders and other youth in the group as they walked.

River Cote, the youngest of the group at 13, was so inspired by the walkers when they stayed at his home in Saskatoon that he persuaded his mom to join them for the remainder of their journey. Cote gave up a much-anticipated trip to Saskatoon’s Exhibition to attend the walk. “It was amazing to get out of the city and walk,” he says. And besides, he continues, “the Exhibition comes every year, but this opportunity just comes once in a lifetime. If they bury [nuclear waste] up there and something happens, everywhere around will be a disaster.”

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews on the Conservative Party’s “It Gets Better” video

Suicide among young queer people is not a new problem. It’s been going on since before I came out in 1965. I wasn’t out more than a couple months before I heard about the suicide of a fellow member of the small queer community. It’s been a constant issue ever since, with most suicides going unreported. The only difference today is that some families are finally willing to openly acknowledge that homophobia caused their loved ones to kill themselves.

School boards and administrations continue to wring their hands and argue over policy to address bullying but seem squeamish about addressing the root cause, offering excuses such as “Kids will be kids,” and “We have to recognize that we serve varied families with varied values.” What kind of family would support bullying someone to the point where they kill themselves?

The latest suicide that has become public was that of Jamie Hubley, the son of Ottawa city councillor Allan Hubley. Hubley was 15 when he took his own life on October 14. In his blog he wrote, “I am tired of life really. It’s so hard, I’m sorry, I can’t take it anymore. I don’t want to wait three more years, this hurts too much. How do you even know it will get better? It’s not.”

He was referring to the It Gets Better campaign founded by syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage to reassure queer youth that they just have to endure a few more years of hate and intolerance before it magically “gets better.”
Hubley also wrote, “I’m not really anything special, just depressed. I wish I could be happy. I try, I try, I try… I just want to feel special to someone. I’m gay?!”

The Harper government’s response to Hubley’s suicide was to produce their own It Gets Better video. This from a government that has within its ranks the most homophobic politicians in the country who’ve never been averse to speaking in hateful tones about queer people.

The poorly produced video begins with an MP who informs youth that, while today they may be fighting “some of the fiercest battles” of their lives, “when you get through them life is beautiful.” Tell that to those in our community who continue to struggle with self-esteem, substance abuse and mental health issues that originated in adolescence.

Another speaker tells youth, “you are not alone,” but one wouldn’t know that from the lack of government policy addressing queer issues. We are then treated to a succession of dour-faced Conservative MPs who each parrot the phrase “It gets better.” Included is Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, who has opposed anything related to queer issues, and John Baird, the not-so-openly-gay Minister of Foreign Affairs. Not one of them utters the word gay.

Is this the best that our government can do? Videos aren’t going to keep our youth safe. We need programs that provide support and comfort for queer kids, and that are accessible to every young person in this country. We need programs that educate kids about the impact of bullying, and programs to support kids who are bullied.

I didn’t see anything in that video that would suggest that Harper and his flock are prepared to get serious about addressing queer youth suicides. In fact, Harper’s Conservative caucus continues to cut programs that support queer initiatives.

I just spent the summer closing an organization that had been bringing the issues of queer health into the forefront. Unfortunately, the Canadian Rainbow Health Coalition is no longer. During its heyday it brought together queer activists and allies to learn from one another and to develop resources and strategies to bring about real changes in the health of queer people. As a national organization it looked to the federal government for support but outside of a one-time 27-month project grant, the cupboard was bare.

It’s time we all rose up and demanded that our governments stop wasting their breath on empty platitudes. Instead, they should get serious about supporting the queer community through progressive policies, strategies and funding to allow queer communities to develop the programs that our youth so desperately need.

Community organizing:
A holistic approach
By Joan Kuyek
Fernwood Publishing, 2011

Those of us who are active in our communities, whether dealing with issues like homelessness or fundraising for a high school basketball team, have much to learn from the thoughts and insights of Joan Kuyek, whose experiences as a community organizer span some 30 years.

Joan Kuyek began her life work as a Company of Young Canadians (CYC) researcher in Ontario, where she first learned about community development. With the Student Union for Peace Action in Kingston, she was involved in the Kingston Community Project, organizing tenants and a food co-op. When she later moved to Sudbury, Kuyek immersed herself in community development, union organizing and mining activism. This led her to be part of the formation of Mining Watch Canada. Throughout all of this, Kuyek took part-time jobs to cover the expenses of her organizing, including work for the World Council of Churches, the Sudbury Better Beginnings Better Futures program, and the Samuel and Saidye Bronfman Foundation.

Kuyek’s organizing experience ranges from the protracted Inco strikes in Sudbury of 1978-79 to the individual actions at the North Eastern Ontario Women’s Conference. But in Community Organizing, Kuyek goes beyond the basics of telling her story to explain some of the underpinnings of the fight and her understanding of power, as well as an assessment of some of the bigger pictures and how they influence our local actions. Her knowledge of how to work though the planning steps of community organizing provides readers, from relative neophytes to seasoned activists, with a valuable template. Her story of the North Eastern Ontario Women’s Conferences, for example, shows how two separate and important groups of individuals, Aboriginal and Euro-Canadian women, can work together and develop a common understanding of women’s issues.

Kuyek calls for holistic organizing. People come to be involved in change for many reasons. If we want change, we have to be open and listen to others. We need to build community by choosing the causes we want to work on. If the problems are more systemic, as one might say of today, then the movement must be broadened and more inclusive, and defined by the common good, rather than for one group of people. When we tell the truth, develop a vision of tomorrow, and work towards that vision, all is possible. The current system is created by our labour, and depends on our consent.

Kuyek’s perspectives on Canadian culture are interwoven through her stories and experiences. Her affirmation of the anguish and frustration of not getting things moving or changed easily assures us that we are never cycling alone, so to speak. It is also heartening to hear of successes and victories, and to know that the next time you hit the road, while the hills will be there, and perhaps the Rocky Mountains, you will get over them, and the ride down the other side will be energizing, restorative and worth all the blood, sweat and pain put into the fight.

“They tell us we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are.”
— Slavoj Žižek at Liberty Plaza in Lower Manhattan.

As this issue goes to press, protests inspired by Occupy Wall Street have taken hold in well over 1,000 cities across North America and beyond, including nearly every major city in Canada. What began as an encampment of a few hundred people in the heart of New York City’s financial district on September 17th has erupted into a popular movement that continues to capture the imagination and sympathies of growing numbers of people. This nascent movement has become a lightning rod for their collective anger over a system in which those responsible for the current economic crisis continue to rake in record profits while the rest of us endure unrelenting austerity measures.

At a time of pervasive defeatism and paralysis on the radical left, this movement has caught many by surprise, and inspired hope in the possibility of a turning point. Flawed and fragmented though it may be, the Occupy movement can’t help but feel historically significant, particularly as diverse communities rooted in histories of struggle and those most affected by the current crisis carve space within and alongside it.

Among those who’ve joined the ranks of the Occupy movement is organized labour, beginning with the refusal of bus drivers from the 30,000-strong New York Transport Workers Union to ferry arrested demonstrators to jail. Since then, unions ranging from the United Steelworkers to National Nurses United and the Service Employees International Union, collectively representing hundreds of thousands of workers, have pledged their support for Occupy Wall Street and taken to the streets.

The support of unions is not merely an extension of solidarity to demonstrators. As the spokesperson for New York’s transit workers explains, “We view the protests as young people who are articulating the same kind of things that we’ve been trying to articulate.”

As the Occupy movement continues to gather momentum, this moment presents an opportunity to re-evaluate the role of unions in social transformation and look beyond the reactive task of simply defending the working conditions of their members within the capitalist system, to which much of the labour movement has become resigned. Moreover, it has opened a window to forge new alliances at a time when the need for cross-movement solidarity is dire.

Organized labour is under sustained attack across Canada, as evidenced by both provincial and federal legislation undermining the right to organize, to bargain collectively, and to strike. As Hans Rollman writes in this issue, the use of back-to-work legislation to force an end to, or even pre-empt, labour disputes on terms favourable to employers has become the new norm, calling into question the future of labour’s single most powerful tactic: the strike.

As Tracey Mitchell describes in the following pages, legislative attacks have been accompanied by a public relations war on unions in which “right-wing governments and conservative media are succeeding in playing the average worker against the union worker, who is typically portrayed as cash-grabbing and lazy.”

In a context where only three out of ten workers are unionized (the numbers are considerably worse for workers of colour, who are disproportionately concentrated in poorly paid, part-time and precarious jobs), the labour movement is losing its ability to enforce minimum standards in wages and benefits across both unionized and non-unionized workplaces, and is indeed challenged to justify its relevance to non-unionized workers.

How will we resist becoming further categorized and divided, and build the relationships of mutual support and solidarity necessary to realize the potential of our collective power?

As Dave Bleakney writes in his post-mortem of the recent postal strike and ensuing lock-out, “at times such as strikes, the need for support and solidarity from the community is clear. But what are we doing to foster these relationships in between moments of crisis? And what is the labour movement, in turn, doing to support the communities that we are all part of? Why do we not have a labour movement that stands with G20 prisoners, rounded up and brutalized in what has now become a rote activity of police repression at summits everywhere? Why do we celebrate the culture of Aboriginal peoples, the drumming and the ceremonies, but not their militant struggles?”

As scholar and activist Vijay Prashad recently wrote in reference to the Occupy Wall Street movement, goodwill alone cannot overcome the divisions among us, upon which capitalism has built itself. They must be actively struggled against, while we continue to welcome more people, “bringing with them their many complaints and dreams.” Our movement “must promise more to each of us than what is available in the present… it must breathe in the many currents of dissatisfaction, and breathe out a new radical imagination.”

“For those who dominate and oppress us benefit most when we have nothing to give our own, when they have so taken from us our dignity, our humanness that we have nothing left, no ‘homeplace’ where we can recover ourselves.” — bell hooks

Homeplace is where we are grown and raised into social beings, where we receive our earliest definitions of humanity, where we first learn to recognize love, violence, justice and pain. Yet it has persisted in our imagination as a private sphere of emotional and material dependence, rather than as a front in revolutionary struggle. The practices that constitute it, like caregiving, child rearing and homekeeping (broadly, mothering), are still regarded as the domain of individual women whose labours are often taken as much for granted by radical communities as by the market economy. The skills, strategies and bodies of mothers/caregivers are rarely present in spaces where political problems are defined and decisions made. Yet the survival of capitalism has fundamentally required the colonization of activities, relationships and physical spaces associated with home. Indeed, home is where human bodies are made into, or resist becoming, obedient subjects of capitalist rule.

The capture of home has taken place through state-sponsored practices, historically targeting Indigenous communities and communities of colour, including physical displacement and expropriation of land, laws preventing marriage during slavery, marriage laws dispossessing Indigenous women of Indian status, the appropriation of children from their families through sale or residential schools, forced sterilizations and so on. In the past century, these techniques have shifted toward, among others, mass incarceration, compulsory contraception, child apprehensions and adoption policies transferring mass numbers of racialized children into white families, and the forced separation of women in the South from their children when they are driven abroad to find work. These state interventions have been instrumental in breaking autonomous generational processes that could educate and nourish human beings capable of opposing capitalist logic.

While theft of land, resources and labour enabled early European capitalists to rob poor folks and people of colour of their material capacity to survive independently of capitalist rule, the destruction of home spaces was designed to destroy our resources for socializing future generations on our own terms. The autonomous home, in other words, is a threat to capitalism.

Within this framework, we need to question what it means to expect the state to protect or provide for mothers/caregivers and their dependents. Historically, feminist movements (led by predominantly middle-class, white women) have appealed to the state for voting rights, protection against abusive husbands, the equalization of their educational and employment opportunities with (white) men’s, and support for single mothers. With the rise of neoliberalism, the state has neutralized feminist pressure by increasingly contracting out “women’s issues” to non-profit organizations. This work includes women facilitating other women’s entry into a network of state services, regulations and surveillance. De-privatization of the domestic sphere has thus meant an awkward marriage between the state and feminism. And while women might be better positioned to escape individual abusers, they do not necessarily become more able to defend the home from those forces that compelled them to live with violence in the first place.

I am often asked if I think we should demand wages for mothering so that mothers/caregivers can be econom­ically independent and secure. After much reflection, my answer is still no. Absolutely, unpaid mothering subsidizes the capitalist economy. Mothers do not benefit from any kind of recognition as people who work, and often have to work double or triple shifts to make ends meet, especially as single mothers. As many feminists have argued, women have been disciplined into accepting exploitative conditions of motherhood through the hetero-patriarchal ideology of maternal love. This premise, however, does not make mothering work any less of a political resource in our liberation struggles.

Writing of black mothers who were forced to care for white children instead of their own, bell hooks has argued for the need to honour their fight to defend home as a space of affirmation where generations of black people could “restore to [themselves] the dignity denied [them] … in the public world.” While the conditions that shape mothering today differ radically across communities, the principle that homeplace can and should be a site of reclamation resonates powerfully for me. As Sto:Loh scholar Lee Maracle claims, “Without children I could not have learned that what is revival and renaissance for a Native is death for a colonizer.”

There is a vast store of experience, knowledge and resilience among women who, as mothers and caregivers, have made it possible for their communities of struggle to continue. Under neoliberalism, poor women’s individual responsibilities to earn formal and informal wages, as part-time, contingent, flexible labour, while caregiving for family and community members cut off from state support are constantly multiplying. The tendency to fixate on their victimization or idealize them as “superwomen” stalls recognition of their capacities as oppositional leaders, organizers, intellectuals and strategists. Further, the absence of intellectual and creative energy dedicated to articulating programs of resistance centered on feminized work tends to promote individualized strategies of “empowerment.” It also lets single, able-bodied folks without caregiving responsibilities off the hook by failing to redistribute unpaid feminized work. To the extent that progressive struggles are limited to increasing or defending welfare rates, wages, state-provided child care and other provisions to ameliorate dispossession and alienation under capitalism, they also perpetuate the feminization and privatization of mothering/caregiving labour, while surrendering actual mothers/caregivers to state and corporate exploitation, judgment and surveillance.

As capitalism races toward its zenith, we enter a historical moment of crisis and possibility that more than ever requires generative and multi-generational ways of conducting revolutionary struggle. We cannot afford to continue seeing homeplace simply as a source of sustenance; rather, it is a fundamental front in the production of life and political subjects that is constitutive of both capitalism and its limits. This is something the organized right implicitly recognizes, which is why definitions of family, home and education have consistently formed the centrepieces of their ideology. Meanwhile, the left is still talking about how to create access for mothers and children in revolutionary work!

Once we recognize that raising a revolutionary generation is inherently political labour, collectivizing mothering work begins to make sense. It is work without applause which requires a profound decolonization of our ideas about personal freedom, which tend to mean the elimination of constraint and hierarchy rather than an active descent into relationships marked by necessity, dependence and negotiation of power imbalances, like those between adults and children. Mothering work commits us to the daily, mundane, repetitive, minute, inglorious labours of stitching together whole human beings. This is a skill and a long view adaptable to all aspects of revolutionary struggle. Perhaps encumbering ourselves with each other, and seeing beauty in that process, might be precisely the end that we need to accomplish. Perhaps this is what it takes to become subjects of something on the other side of capitalist oppression, something hopefully more imbued with love.

In the months since the election that secured Stephen Harper’s Conservative majority, many people on the left have repeated the refrain, “Don’t mourn; organize.” While it is an apt and important directive, what does it really mean? How will we organize? In the absence of clear strategies for social change, we risk working ourselves into the ground without making the gains we need.

The right in Canada has clearly understood the importance of developing a strategy with winnable goals, and in the last 10 years it has succeeded in shifting public discourse far to the right of where it had been for decades. Stephen Harper went from an outspoken conservative activist who had served only one previous term as an MP to consolidating the Canadian right into a single political party and controlling, unfettered, the federal government.

By contrast, the radical left has largely been in decline over the past 10 years, both in visibility and influence. Indeed, many radicals feel we do not have a fighting chance, and carry on with a bizarre mantra akin to “everything is hopeless, but we have to do something.” Often we talk about a radically transformed society in much the same way as Christians talk about heaven or the Rapture – something to look forward to far, far in the future, but not something that can be attained, even in part, in a span of months or years.

To reverse this downward spiral, we must develop winning strategies of our own. If we hope to achieve a more just society in the future, we need to alter the way we work in the present. We must develop strategic action plans that increase the organized power of our movement and result in concrete and measurable improvements in people’s lives.

I would like to offer four thoughts as my contribution to this ongoing discussion within radical community and worker organizations in Canada.

1. A lost cause?

On November 16, 2010, a small community-based organ­ization representing migrant farm workers signed a historic agreement with their employers to improve conditions for workers in Florida’s tomato industry. This marked the conclusion of the most recent chapter in a story that began in 1993, when the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) was formed to demand improved working conditions for migrant farm workers and an end to poverty wages. The 2010 agreement between the CIW and the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, the organization representing land­owners, extended the CIW’s “fair food principles” to over 90 per cent of the Florida tomato industry. These principles include a strict code of conduct, a co-operative complaint resolution system, a participatory health and safety program and a worker-to-worker education process. The agreement also solidified a victory previously won by the CIW from tomato purchasers to increase farm worker wages by almost 100 per cent.

It is hard to imagine a group of workers more marginalized than those who form the membership of the CIW – largely undocumented migrants from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean – or an adversary as relatively powerful as the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, which brings in billions of dollars in profit every year. To many, the CIW’s cause, while just, seemed lost from the beginning. Indeed, from our current vantage point, it is easy to view a campaign such as this one as a lost cause.

Our causes are not lost. But in the absence of a coherent strategy, our activism is unlikely to produce any clear-cut victories. Whether we are planning a short-term campaign or the theoretical work of long-term, widespread and systemic social change, the process of strategy development is the same. To begin developing a winning strategy, we must first ask ourselves: what does victory look like?

In a context where victories on the left are rare, the campaign led by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers – which was won through commitment to a well-planned strategy – has much to teach us. The CIW had a clear vision of justice: increased wages and improved working conditions. Based on this foundation, they developed concrete goals that would help them realize their vision. Their fair food principles were clear and well-defined, and enabled workers to determine, without ambiguity, whether they had been successful in their campaign or not.

Our strategies – as a movement, as a coalition, or within our respective organizations or communities – must begin with a clear vision developed through democratic discussion. This vision can then be refined into tangible goals to work toward. For example, a vision of “housing as a right” may lead to goals such as a national housing strategy, with guaranteed annual funding for rental housing and new housing co-ops owned and controlled by their members, and legislation that would give homeless people the right to seek a court order forcing the government to provide them with housing.

As we develop these goals, we need to be both creative and disciplined, allowing ourselves to dream big, while at the same time stopping ourselves from degenerating into arguments over the details of our vision of a post-revolutionary society. After setting our goals, we can begin to build a strategy that will lead us to victory, a strategy that must be constantly evaluated as it unfolds and adjusted as necessary.

2. Power, to the people

On June 25, 2011, Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party legislated an end to the Canadian Union of Postal Workers’ strike. The newly invigorated NDP, recently elected as the official Opposition, attempted a filibuster, prolonging debate over 58 hours. In the end, however, the legislation passed and the strike was ended. A number of prominent radicals later used the NDP’s failure to stop the legislation as proof that there is no power in voting. In fact, the Canada Post situation suggests otherwise. Harper was able to force workers back on the job, on terms favourable to the employer, because his party secured enough seats to constitute a majority. He has tremendous power to shape the conditions of our lives, power he gained through the electoral process, however illegitimate we believe it to be.

Power is the ability to shape our lives and the world that surrounds us. We build our power by organizing collectively. Unions, for example, have great potential power, as they have a defined membership, organizational structure and mandate. Whatever form our organizing takes, our strategy for social change must have at its core a plan to build the organized power of oppressed people.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers understood power well and developed their strategy accordingly. After identifying their goal, the CIW identified the target of their campaign: the growers. Targets are the people who have the institutional power to concede to your demands. They are those who can sign the cheque, cancel the contract, introduce or repeal the legislation and so on. If, during your strategy development, you arrive at a long list of targets, your goal is likely not adequately refined. In our hierarchical society, the kind of power needed to make institutional change is almost always vested in a single person or a small number of people.

In the small town of Immokalee, Florida, the majority of workers toil on fields owned by a small number of companies. Because the CIW wanted to improve wages and conditions for all of their members – who often worked on several farms in a given season – they organized a campaign targeting all growers. They engaged in three community-wide work stoppages and a high-profile hunger strike but, after years of working to get the growers to concede to their demands, realized they did not have the power necessary to force their targets to capitulate.

The CIW then identified a secondary target that had power over the growers – the corporations that purchased their produce. In 2001 the CIW launched a boycott of Taco Bell. They called on their allies to stop buying food at Taco Bell restaurants until the fast-food giant took responsibility for human rights violations in their supply chain. They also demanded that Taco Bell support their campaign to “pass on a penny per pound” pay increase for farm workers and to buy tomatoes only from compliant Florida growers.

In 2005, after a hard-fought and high-profile campaign, Taco Bell agreed to meet all of the workers’ demands, and the CIW called off the boycott. Taco Bell could not present the agreement as a goodwill gesture as it was clearly a concession to the power of the workers who had struggled for it. The CIW then moved to target McDonald’s, another of the growers’ biggest customers.

The right takes the project of building institutional power very seriously. As Tom Flanagan, Conservative academic and Harper confidante, has said, “… controlling the government as often as possible is the most effective way of shifting the public philosophy.” The radical left has shown that mass movements, outside of government, can also be powerful enough to shift public philosophy and to radically improve people’s lives. Our movements must become a growing source of organized power that can be consciously wielded and directed against our targets in the service of attaining our goals, and affecting a lasting shift in the balance of power.

3. Seeing through clear and open eyes

While the G8 and G20 countries met in southern Ontario in June of 2010, thousands of people marched and rallied in a week of protest. These actions were met with massive police repression, and by the end of the week hundreds of people had been assaulted and harassed, and over 1,000 people had been arrested. The targeting of activists and militants continued for weeks, and several hundred faced charges by summer’s end.

A month after the G20 protests, the coordinating body for much of the radical left during the protests released a statement insisting that in “June 2010, on the streets of Toronto, the people won.”

This assessment was based primarily on the fact that participants of diverse struggles and community organizations were leading many of the street protests, and did so despite overwhelming police intimidation. If our only goal was to voice our discontent, in all its diversity, then the mobilization against the G20 was a victory. However, if the goal was to change the destructive policies of the G20, to alter the balance of power between the economic-political elite and the rest of us, and to inspire those not already committed to join us, our success was neither clear nor resounding.

Our success in these struggles will depend on our ability to see the world through clear and open eyes, and to make reasoned assessments of our strategies, actions and their outcomes. This process demands that we identify the people and groups that constitute our base, our allies and our opponents.

Our base (or constituency) includes those oppressed people and communities that are already active or organized. Many members of unions and community organizations are within our base, and can move their organizations to become part of our base or movement. Our potential base includes all people oppressed by capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism and ableism, but who are not actively resisting that oppression.

Our allies are those who share some, but not necessarily all, of our goals, with whom we can work on a common cause. Many unions are our allies. Their primary goal is not the end of capitalist oppression, but rather the improvement of their members’ working conditions and wages, and some positive social reforms. Single-issue social justice organizations are another.

Our opponents are organizations and groups that benefit from the oppression we are fighting against. They may control the levers of power directly, or have influence over our targets without having that power themselves. Landlord and industry lobby groups, the Conservative Party, the Fraser Institute, organized racist movements and Zionist lobby groups are some examples of opponents.

The state is our primary target, because it can give us much of what we want. The state, however, is a complex institution. Its overarching purpose is to protect the interests of capital and maintain the status quo, but it is also composed of individuals and institutions with shifting or competing allegiances. If we view the state only as a monolithic oppressive entity with a single, unified purpose, we miss opportunities to exploit those differences to win concessions.

In their struggle for fair food, the benefits of the CIW’s lucid self-assessment were clear. When they determined that their well-organized base lacked the power necessary to force their target to concede, they identified a network of powerful allies. They reached out to students because Taco Bell targeted them as consumers. They also allied themselves with religious groups that they hoped would be motivated by a sense of justice and moral outrage, and which were already organized into congregations and church networks.

To develop a strategy capable of radical social transformation, we must also assess the power of our movement relative to that of our opponents and targets. We should have a clear sense of the numbers of each group and their geographical distribution, the donations and resources at their disposal and so on. The number of active and engaged people in radical movements in Canada number only a few thousand at most, and much of this activity is focused in a handful of urban centres and Indigenous communities across the country. Certainly there are more people who are sympathetic to some of our goals, or who would benefit from the changes we seek, but they are only potential constituents until they become active in some way.

By contrast, the Conservative Party has organizers in each federal riding who fund­raise, coordinate get-out-the-vote work during elections, monitor local media and engage in other campaign work. To support their work, the Conservatives received donations from 95,010 people, totalling over $17.4 million in 2010. This may seem like an impossible sum for radicals in this country, but it amounts to a relatively small donation of $183 per person, or a monthly donation of only $15. If the left could do more to secure commitments like this from our base, whether they are in the form of time or money to build our infrastructure or pay organizers, we could dramatically increase our power.

By explicitly identifying our base, our potential constituents, our opponents, and those somewhere in the middle, and by assessing each group’s strengths and weaknesses, we can make informed choices about our direction as a movement and the tactics we choose to target our opponents where they are weakest.

4. Throwing punches

The CIW came to their recent victory after a long struggle. They employed a variety of powerful tactics targeting their employers during the first seven years, including three work stoppages, a month-long hunger strike and a 370-kilometre march across Florida. When they changed the focus of their strategy to target fast-food chains and corporate buyers of Florida tomatoes in order to pressure the growers into conceding, they employed many of the same tactics.

Students and other social justice groups held demonstrations in cities across the United States, and helped the CIW mobilize cross-country caravans and several national days of action. Some student groups were successful in forcing franchises off their campuses. Religious leaders motivated their congregations to join the campaign, collected donations for the CIW, and held press conferences to exert pressure through moral persuasion or embarrassment, to isolate the fast-food giants from support, and to polarize the debate around the issue. By the end of 2008, the CIW had won campaigns against the four largest fast-food companies in the world.

Our strategies must employ a variety, or diversity, of tactics to achieve our goals. These tactics must be directed at our targets to pressure those with the power to give us what we want – whether that is a change in immigration law, more affordable housing, or a complete shift in government policy. It is not the perceived militancy of our tactics that matters, but whether they effectively pressure our target to concede to our demands and, while doing so, help build our base. The pressure must not be rhetorical, but actually felt by the target.

The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty – a radical anti-poverty organization based in Toronto – organizes under the slogan “Fight to win.” They understand that those in power do not listen to moral argument, but that the poor will have to build a movement capable of forcing politicians to act.

We should take this lesson to heart, but when we repeat this slogan, we should not make the mistake – as many have done and continue to do – of putting the emphasis on “fight” rather than on “to win.” How we fight should be determined by how it helps us win. Throwing one’s fists into the air in all directions – hoping that you land a knockout punch – is not how one wins a boxing match. Not every target is vulnerable in the same way. A disruptive direct action may be effective against one but not another, and what works once may not work a second time. Many of our targets are immune to protests and demonstrations, but this does not mean they cannot be successfully pressured.

Our actions must be well-planned manifestations of our power, directed with clear purpose against our targets. We must be able to win short-term victories as steps in our strategy and to strengthen our movements so that, eventually, we will have permanently altered the balance of power and become a force to be reckoned with – a cause not lost, but rather an organized movement capable of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.

Less than two months into their majority mandate, the federal Conservatives passed legislation that left the Canadian labour movement reeling.

The Harper government’s use of back-to-work legislation to force an end to labour disputes at Air Canada and Canada Post was just the latest blow, however, to the labour movement’s most time-honoured tactic: the strike.

The use of strikes by unions to pressure employers in labour disputes has been steadily undermined in Canada in recent decades, not only by the use of coercive legislation to end – and at times pre-empt – strikes, but also by the increasing presence of transnational corporations (TNCs) with sufficient economic power to sit out strikes in a given country, or import replacement workers when local regulations allow.

In Newfoundland and Labrador – Canada’s most highly unionized province – workers have responded to the gradual erosion of the strike as an effective tool of the labour movement in a number of ways, ranging from civil disobedience and defiance of government legislation, to creative proposals to transform traditional collective bargaining structures.

In this sense, the North Atlantic’s labour movement demonstrates some of the creative ways workers are striking back against government efforts to smother their hard-won labour rights.

Domestic norms, international condemnations

Use of government legislation to interfere in or terminate labour disputes is not new, but it has been used with growing frequency since the 1980s. A 2008 study revealed 179 cases where provincial or federal governments had passed laws that interfered with bargaining rights between 1982 and 2008 (85 of those were back-to-work legislation). And the legislating has intensified in recent years.

Leo Panitch has been following this trend with interest and concern. A professor of political science at York University in Toronto, he wrote, together with Donald Swartz, what’s become a classic study of the phenomenon.

Their work puts Canada’s record in international context. Since 1981, they observe, more complaints have been filed against Canada by its unions than any other country in the world. Since the International Labour Organization’s Freedom of Association Committee was created in 1951, only four countries – Argentina, Colombia, Peru and Greece – have faced more complaints than Canada. By 1991, more than one-third of all international labour complaints against G7 countries were filed against Canada. Many of these were the result of back-to-work legislation.

Use of back-to-work laws has become so commonplace in Canada that governments and the public alike are often oblivious to the singular reputation Canada has garnered internationally by disregarding global labour standards.

Panitch and Swartz coined a term for this: permanent exceptionalism. What was meant to be an exception – legislating workers back to work – has now become the permanent norm. “The result,” says Panitch, “is a permanent dampening effect on the use of the strike.”

Defying the law

Newfoundland and Labrador’s government has used back-to-work legislation a total of nine times since joining Canada in 1949. In many cases, this legislation has been met with defiance.

In the 1980s and 1990s, a number of union leaders, strikers and even sitting legislators served jail time for resisting and refusing to obey back-to-work and other restrictive legislation. One notable case was during a public sector strike in 1986. Passing legislation only made the strike more turbulent, as striking unions opted to defy the legislation. Hundreds were arrested, leading to justice department concerns that provincial prisons and police forces would be unable to handle the militant strikers if arrests continued.

Peter Fenwick was head of the provincial New Democratic Party and a member of the house of assembly during the 1986 strike. When back-to-work legislation was tabled by the provincial government, his party opposed it, much like the federal NDP opposed back-to-work legislation for Canada Post earlier this year. Unlike the federal NDP, however, he joined strikers in defying the legislation, knowing the act of civil disobedience could earn him a prison sentence. And it did.

“They had a prison full of public employees,” he said, reflecting on the events 25 years later. “It seemed to me that the most effective way to protest was to join them on the picket line and help turn the sentiment against what the government was doing.”

After his arrest, Fenwick was sentenced to two months in jail but was released after 20 days, remaining on probation for a year.

25 years later: a more complicated world

Lana Payne is the current president of the Newfoundland and Labrador Federation of Labour. She says today’s governments have made it tougher for unions to make the sort of principled protest that sent Fenwick to jail in 1986.

“In the past, labour leaders have defied legislation and gone to jail, but now governments have become smart. It’s not the leaders they go after; it’s the individual workers who get fined and charged. That’s a difficult scenario for unions to deal with. It’s hard for unions to expect their members to take this on individually,” says Payne. “In the good old days it used to be the labour leader who faced the time and faced the fine.”

But Payne raises another important point: being militant doesn’t just mean getting arrested on a picket line.

“There are different types of militancy,” she points out. “Brigette DePape was pretty militant, and she just stood up with a ‘Stop Harper’ sign in Parliament. She didn’t put up a picket line. Militancy can come in all kinds of forms: it can come on a picket line, it can come in the workplace. It’s about taking opportunities and being smart about the kind of campaigns that we have around strikes so that it’s not just us and the employer. How do you bring in the public and the community? How do you find other ways to pressure employers? Militancy is not just going to jail. There’s all kinds of ways to express your power.”

Expressing that power has taken a number of creative forms in Newfoundland and Labrador. During the sealers’ strikes of the early 1800s, poor sealers, masked and under cover of darkness, stormed and destroyed the boat of a merchant who was trying to force them to give up cash payment and accept credit notes for their dangerous and back-breaking work.

In 1956, union organizers rented planes and parachuted into remote logging camps, bypassing company security blockades in order to reach and unionize the workers. Organizers used every possible strategy on land, sea and air to organize labour’s power, with an enthusiasm that led a visiting Canadian labour representative to declare, shortly before Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, that the capital of St. John’s was “the most organized [unionized] city I have ever seen.”

In 2005 the Fish, Food and Allied Workers (FFAW) organized almost two straight months of protest over policy changes to the fishery that included occupation of government offices and harbour blockades. One of the highlights of that strike occurred when a Portuguese trawler tried to cross the blockade. The blockading union vessels pursued and surrounded it, holding it at sea for four hours in what they dubbed a “fishermen’s arrest.” Combining the charged public issue of foreign overfishing with the union’s demands helped the union boost public support. Even normally conservative local media applauded the move, and ratings for wildly popular premier Danny Williams dropped to their lowest levels.

“For over 20-odd straight days, we blockaded the house of assembly,” recalled FFAW staffer John Boland. “There was a fair bit of civil disobedience. I think we probably pushed the line with a lot of it. At one time, we had seven or eight court injunctions out against us. My wife said to me, ‘One day pretty soon, when you wake up the only place you’ll be allowed to strike is at home!’
“At one point we blocked a shipping lane and had 14 ocean-going oil tankers just stranded at sea, unable to land. We had a blockade of St. John’s Harbour on the go for five or seven days.

Unfortunately a lot of people said that’s against the law, and I guess it is, but when times get tough we roll up our sleeves. If I look at the history of the labour movement, it wasn’t built on workers being nice people. Nice people were set aside and ignored.”

Transnationals: the new challenge

In addition to increasingly coercive governments siding with employers, the growing presence of transnational corporations, many of them headquartered outside of Canada, has also contributed to undermining the power of the strike.

Steelworkers employed by Brazilian mining giant Vale in Voisey’s Bay, N.L., learned that in 2009. Workers at the company’s mines in both Voisey’s Bay and Sudbury, Ont., went on strike that year, and for the Labrador workers it was a strike that lasted two years.

It was only after the Newfoundland and Labrador government launched an inquiry into the reasons for the ongoing strike that a settlement was reached. The Newfoundland Federation of Labour had denounced Vale’s use of replacement workers as a violation of free collective bargaining, and called on government to use other tools in the Labour Relations Act – such as use of mediators – to bring it to a close. When these failed to bear fruit, the government inquiry was launched.

The resulting report, known as the Roil Report, called for significant changes to labour relations in the province. It cautioned that TNCs disrupt traditional labour relations models since they have such disproportionate power compared to unions. It also recommended that government implement new rules to regulate labour relations with TNCs: mandatory arbitration boards and imposition of collective agreements where existing labour relations methods have completely failed (while protecting the general right to strike), quicker grievance hearings, and further research on the role of replacement workers, or “scabs.” But probably its greatest impact lies in giving public voice to the fact that labour relations need a level playing field.

“Roil is a very good summary of what happens in jurisdictions where TNCs have incredible power,” says Payne. “How do you change laws to ensure the rights we believe we have are still there and have the same meaning as when they were first introduced? That’s really the challenge, because the economy has changed substantially in the last three decades, but the laws have not changed to keep up with the economy as it is now, which is one with TNCs. And they are really game changers. We don’t have the same balance of power at the bargaining table when they can close a workplace down for a year and it has very little impact on their bottom line because they have operations around the world.”

Panitch finds the report’s conclusions interesting, but cautions that every situation is different. “Some have argued that with TNCs, if you strategically strike in one place, you can shut the whole operation down.”

Whatever unions do, Panitch says, they’re going to have to do it quickly. “I think the smashing of public sector unions is on the agenda. And I don’t just think it’s Canada. It’s everywhere.”

Instead of picket lines, work-ins?

In a creative article published last year, Sam Gindin, York University Packer Visitor in Social Justice, and Michael Hurley, vice-president for the Ontario wing of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), argued for a novel idea. As part of a wider range of tactics designed to expand collective bargaining, they suggested workers stage “work-ins.” For instance, health- or long-term care workers could pick a day to all come in to highlight worker shortages. Social workers could meet with welfare recipients to discuss their mutual frustrations with how programs operate. They note that the Public Service Alliance of Canada did this when employment insurance rules were recently tightened. They prepared pamphlets to inform recipients about how to avoid being cut off.

Such acts would improve service and demonstrate very clearly what unions have been arguing: more public service workers means better public services. Moreover, workers themselves would organize these tasks and thus start taking control of the workplace out of the hands of employers and putting it back into the hands of the workers. If employers don’t like it, their only option would be to kick out the workers, reducing the quality of service and generating public backlash against the employer – not the striking worker.

Panitch thinks the idea is one that should be taken ser­iously. “It raises the question not only of showing up at work, but also beginning to take responsibility for the labour process. A lot of workers don’t like to do this because they think that’s management’s job. But a work-in could show how much better services could be if there were additional staff, how many fewer accidents there would be in nursing homes, how much better patients in hospital would feel about being there, and what have you.”

Panitch feels part of the problem is that strikes have become associated almost exclusively with wages, and that’s not all of what it should be about. “It isn’t just about getting more in order to keep up your standard of living. It’s that, but it’s also an expression of frustration with regard to the lack of interest and control over one’s work. And it’s always been that. But the easiest thing to bargain is wages. It’s much harder to transform the deeply authoritarian nature of the workplace.”

Is there any point?

With governments so willing to intervene in favour of corporations, is there still any point to going on strike?

Panitch thinks there is, but warns unions need to recognize public attitudes toward strikes and be strategic in their use. “There are smart strikes, and there are dumb strikes. And you choose times that are good to strike and bad to strike. And you need to conduct strikes in such a way that you’re not alienating the populace of the city. I think even if you know that you’re going to be legislated back, if it’s part of a mobilizing strategy where it’s going to carry your members’ notions of consciousness and solidarity and understanding of the state further, it may be worth doing.”

On the other hand, he points to the CUPE municipal workers’ strike in 2009, which he feels contributed to the strengthening of right-wing sentiment in Toronto and the election of Rob Ford and other conservative candidates to city council.

Ultimately, he says, unions need to make decisions on a case-by-case basis. “I don’t think there’s ever a ready recipe for every instance. I think people do need to make sacrifices sometimes if they think it’ll have a galvanizing effect.”

Payne also feels that striking remains an important form of action for unions. “We’re facing a government that declared a war on the labour movement,” she says. “We have to keep doing what it is what we do, and always be looking for ways to step it up.”

Canada Post is a public sector success story. As a steadily profitable state-owned enterprise, it provides postal service to communities across the country as well as roughly 54,000 jobs with mostly decent wages and benefits for workers. Its profits over the past 15 years have totalled almost $2 billion. Yet Canada Post, with the support of its friends in Parliament, proceeded this year to eviscerate the wages, benefits and pensions of postal workers, with changes amounting to an 18 per cent wage reduction for new hires, reduced job guarantees and weaker sick leave provisions, to name a few.

After two weeks of rotating strikes by postal workers in June, Canada Post locked out its workers and suspended mail delivery countrywide, prompting the federal government to introduce back-to-work legislation. Despite assurances by the labour minister that an experienced person with a labour relations background would be appointed to arbitrate, a retired judge with no known experience in the field was chosen. Questions to the minister about his experience have gone unanswered.

After hours of NDP filibustering, wages and other terms of the employment contract were imposed by an act of Parliament. While some locals passed resolutions to defy the legislation, in the end this was not the option postal workers chose. Governments have become clever, ensuring that defiance will no longer mean jail time (and there is no shortage of workers willing to defy under those conditions) but rather economic terror in the form of massive daily fines ranging from $1,000 per day for rank and file members to $100,000 per day for the union.

This downward spiral of workplace austerity and declining bargaining power is not limited to postal workers. Similar neoliberal austerity programs are being implemented with ideological fervour across Canada in response to the failures of global capitalism. The rights of workers to resist these measures by collective bargaining, or through tactics such as the strike, are under sustained attack. Collective bargaining has increasingly become a hollow shell, a theatre, a staged moment in which the rights of workers steadily deteriorate. This has placed trade unions in a reactive and survivalist mode of operating. Whether intentionally or otherwise, some have become comfortable with this mode of operation.

Postal workers (and most workers, for that matter) are in a bind. The rules have changed, but have we as a labour movement? For 65 years, the Rand formula has provided union structures and bureaucracies with a steady flow of revenue and recognition. It has also brought a kind of labour peace for bosses in which a narrow window of collective bargaining power for workers is permitted in return for management control of the work process. The notion of downing tools to settle a workplace dispute in the moment is mostly gone. Rank-and-file members no longer look to each other to deal with workplace harassment, but rather to legal advocates and meetings in offices far away from the source of the problem.

These rules were put in place not to benefit workers, but to confine and manage dissent and resistance. But now, even this process has been chipped away at so as to become almost meaningless. Perhaps it is time for us to revisit that post-war arrangement, just as bosses and politicians have. There are tough, and perhaps unpopular, questions that we must confront, and choices that we, as a movement, must make.

What lessons can be learned from the 2011 postal strike-turned-lockout in evaluating where we are as a movement?

A periodic opening

For workers, a strike is a traumatic affair. It’s also something of a roller-coaster ride. On the one hand, there are beautiful moments of community, defiance and celebration. But the bills remain, as do a host of other economic pressures.

Rank-and-file workers are at their most active when on strike. Those who never go to union meetings are hungry for more information. Members read bulletins, ask questions, show up on picket lines and engage in discussions. They demonstrate, and even join occupations.

Unions seem to miss this point, and continue to position themselves in the traditional, and largely outdated, striker-scab framework. While workers are on the lookout for non-existent scabs (now called “replacement workers” in some labour circles), how might these periodic and emotional openings be used to increase member participation, analysis and militancy? What space is available for discussion among membership during this crucial time? Isn’t what happens after the strike equally or more important as what happened before and during the strike?

Strikes provide us with rare opportunities to build new models and more empowering practices in which people are meaningfully engaged, and where the labour movement can move beyond reproducing its defensive practices and its position as a victim of neoliberalism. The strike is not an end that we work toward, but another beginning. Harvesting the rare collective empowerment of such moments has to be a priority. What discussions can happen with rank-and-file members after the strike that do not limit us to placing our hopes in the judicial and parliamentary process?

Directly following the end of a strike there is a window of opportunity to hold these deeper and more critical discussions, to talk about the trauma, the uncertainty, the high moments and, most importantly, how we move forward. If we are to exercise our collective power over the long haul, we must ask tougher questions of ourselves and our practices while creating new spaces of engagement.

The Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) developed a discussion module for rank-and-file members for this purpose. Only two locals out of more than 200 tried to use it. Why would they? Our practice and history has been mostly to react. Once the terms of back-to-work legislation or a negotiated settlement have been declared, we go back to work, file grievances, complain, and wait until the next big fight. And so the cycle continues.

Rather than meaningfully evaluating where we are at as a movement, we become victims, complaining again and again about what they are doing to us. Being a victim is very righteous; it absolves us of any responsibility and reduces the debate to one of bad guys and good guys. But does our self-victimization and our faith in parliamentary and judicial processes not ultimately serve to reproduce our own obedience? How can we act as proactive agents, defining and articulating our own demands, strategies and tactics, rather than retreating to reactive and survivalist politics?

From isolated victims to collective actors

What might have happened if the modules designed by CUPW were used to provide space for these discussions to take place? And what might happen to the broader labour movement should our stifling structures and practices open up? Experiences in both Winnipeg and Edmonton indicate that when the calls were made, even at the last minute, postal workers showed up. In Winnipeg I attended a series of discussions where over 100 rank-and-file workers, some with less than one day’s notice, showed up for assemblies. Many had never been to a union meeting. They were caught up in the emotion of the moment, which was not about facts and details or talking heads but about their experiences, critiques and questions. It was a space for them to talk, and not just listen, to a union leader.

Spaces such as these exist outside the domain of the local membership meeting and its hierarchical processes, expressions of power and internal bickering. Members of the union – the critical and the not-so-critical, including those who feel out of the loop, angry, or fearful about union meetings – can come together in a circle as a class of equals, where every word matters and differences of opinion are not silenced. These moments for open discussion are too few, but critical if we are going to grow a movement capable of fighting back.

In Edmonton, several hundred members attended a mass session in which they forced a resolution from the floor calling for defiance of back-to-work legislation through a general strike, and refusal to submit to the forced arbitration process. In other words, postal workers were willing to accept fines to raise the offensive. This is not insignificant. How could traditional labour serve to accelerate resistance and fearlessness such as this, rather than managing or avoiding it? Or do we believe the status quo actually works for us?

And what might have happened had community supporters – those who showed so much support and solidarity to postal workers – also been invited to these sessions? How could these moments have been used to broaden our base of support, and to support others in the community?

In some locals, members did not just remain on the picket lines but went door to door. They asked people to put up signs of support. Halifax was awash in CUPW support signs in windows and on lawns. Even mailboxes were decorated with public messages of support. It happened because union members used this moment to make direct contact with people in small businesses and communities. They chose not to strike in isolation from the larger community. They realized that face-to-face engagement can undo much of what the corporate media and ingrained myths deny us.

According to sociologist Heidi Rimke, “the left appears unable to understand the workings of power; it is a force relation rather than something that can be possessed or assigned, such as social status or class position. Power is not an object or something one holds, but something one does. Exercising individual and collective agency expresses power in multiple forms. The social relations of community are not based on sitting inside homes in physical isolation from one another, but rather talking to one another on the streets and anywhere that provides an opportunity to interact face-to-face.”

At times such as strikes, the need for support and solidarity from the community is clear. But what are we doing to foster these relationships in between moments of crisis? And what is the labour movement, in turn, doing to support the communities that we are all part of?

Why do we not have a labour movement that stands with G20 prisoners, rounded up and brutalized in what has now become a rote activity of police repression at summits everywhere? Why do we celebrate the culture of Aboriginal peoples, the drumming and the ceremonies, but not their militant struggles? And when we talk of “green jobs,” what are we saying to small farmers around the world who see our environmental problem as a systemic destruction that cannot be recovered through greenwashing, or by maintaining economic hegemony in rich countries? Why are we fearful of having such discussions?

Rather than permitting ourselves to be categorized and divided, maybe it’s time for us to re-examine the notion of sectoral bargaining in isolation from other unions, and from non-unionized workers. Why should unions act as sectors rather than as a class? Union local meetings are an important place to do union business, but this should not be our only venue. What would alternative forms of organizing, such as workplace and community assemblies, look like?

We have seen too many rallies and demonstrations through the years where the protesters and passers-by are in two separate worlds – the general public looking apathetic to protesters and protesters looking like some kind of cult to the passing public. Engagement in these moments is critical, something postal workers know very well. When we fight, we must fight for the community too. We can’t allow these to be separate or unrelated struggles.

With heads up high

At the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) convention in May 2011, there were dismally few hours of debate, accompanied by an uncomfortable air of conformity, fear, theatre, spectacle and self-censorship in the room. Incidentally, this was, according to CLC president Ken Georgetti, “one of the best CLC conventions ever.” Contrary to the staged assemblies of labour aristocracy as the vanguard of worker aspirations, 21st-century unionism will require something more organic, where communities and people will no longer be organized in segregated units and sectors in competition and isolation. It will refuse to reproduce the same systems of division and denial that CEOs use to rob us. It will no longer pretend things can remain as they have been, or that a social democratic government could resolve our problems in a global economy.

In this economic roller coaster – one that only goes down for most of us – we must ask ourselves the question: do we wish to live in a society where we are jackals picking over the scraps? Or can our reactive culture, expectations and rhetoric be transformed into something more permanent and reflective of a larger movement? And can all of us, as national president Denis Lemelin said of CUPW members, “hold our heads up high”?

A pill trolley rattles urgently as it makes its rounds in one of Ontario’s many long-term care homes. The support worker pushing it looks visibly exhausted, while a nurse practitioner moves stressfully under the imperatives of time and patient needs, tending to the unwashed, unshaved, undressed, unturned and unfed.

Ontario’s long-term care homes, which provide 24-hour nursing services to chronically ill residents who require some form of basic assistance for daily living, suffer intolerably from an understaffing crisis.

As the pioneer of privatized care in Canada, Ontario has opened the doors for a corporate takeover of long-term care homes, resulting in chronic understaffing by profit-seeking multinational providers.

Those in Ontario with the good fortune of longevity must brave the consequences of this increasingly corporate care. For residents, this means that staff are so busy as to be unreachable. Meanwhile the owners – the corporate directors and proprietors of the homes – continue to extract a profit, a vital portion of which is public money funnelled from government subsidies urgently needed for patient care.

In an effort to counter this deliberate understaffing, a coalition of forces – unions, residents and their families – have been principled in their calls for an enforceable average of 3.5 hours of care per resident. Ontario is the only province without such a law. The currently triumphant opposition is the corporations whose profits are based on the ability to keep staffing levels as close to zero as possible.

Despite the understaffing crisis, multinational providers such as Extendicare, whose workers reported 36 understaffed shifts in one month, have no scruples about advertising themselves to investors as an asset that “generates strong cash flow” – cash flow derived from public money that ought to be allocated for long-term care staff.

Long-term care is a burgeoning market across Canada. This is particularly true in Ontario, with over 75,000 long-term care residents. Of these residents, 75 per cent of whom are women, 73 per cent have a form of dementia, 72 per cent need assistance with mobility and 86 per cent have some degree of incontinence.

The need for reliable and safe levels of staff clashes irreconcilably with the imperative of a corporate provider to expand its quarterly earnings. Ontario’s long-term care sector is now the most corporatized in the country, with six multinational corporations having secured 76 per cent of the market. Staffing levels in Ontario rank below all provinces save for B.C. The connection between privatization and understaffing is neither spurious nor shocking.

The making of Ontario’s long-term care market

During the recession of the early 1990s, the debt obligations of the Ontario government became intractably high. As part of sweeping cutbacks in public services, Bob Rae’s NDP government began to delist the services provided by hospitals, which are covered under the Ontario Health Insurance Plan.

The ground watered by Rae quickly bore fruit for multinational real estate investment trusts, looped and linked as they were with Ontario Conservatives in the 1996 election. In exchange for lavish contributions to their campaign, the Tories began the process of contracting out services as recommended by the Health Services Restructuring Commission. The three corporations that gave donations in excess of $22,000 – Extendicare, Central Park Lodges and Leisureworld – received roughly 40 per cent of the contracts by 2001. Thus began the conversion of Ontario’s long-term care homes into coveted commodities and the diminishment of staff to boost the profitability of these assets.

In 1994 there were 74.4 registered nurses per 10,000 people; by 1999 there were 67.6. The corporations that made seemingly low bids for contracts did so only under the stipulation that they could cut their staffing levels to recoup profits. Then-premier Mike Harris erased the legislation that required a minimum of 2.25 hours of care per resident, ensuring that profits would rebound sufficiently.

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, appearing more benign than the Tories, was elected on the grounds that he would reverse the Tories’ assault on the public sector. Yet the Liberals have actually managed to contribute less to Ontario health care than their Tory predecessors. Between 2003 and 2007 health-care spending increased by 30 per cent, whereas between 1998 and 2003 the same indicator increased by 43 per cent.

In 2007 Premier McGuinty finally appeared to be honouring his health-care promises and tabled Bill 140, which become the Long-Term Care Homes Act in 2010. After three years of ostensibly fruitful consultations with a vast number of unions and advocacy groups like the Ontario Health Coalition, the McGuinty government had everyone convinced that a minimum of 3.5 hours of care would find life in black letter legal code.

Yet the chief consultant for the provincial government, Shirley Sharkey, abruptly abandoned the minimum standard and advanced toothless and non-binding guidelines, which the corporate community has blithely ignored. Sharkey and Premier McGuinty disregarded the near-universal calls for minimum standards of care, as the resolution to the understaffing crisis was entirely contingent on an amendment to Bill 140 that would give the public the power to set staffing standards.

The real crisis in provincial health care finances

The understaffing crisis in Ontario’s long-term care homes is bred in the bone of privatization. Based on the assessed needs of a home’s residents, the government provides a per diem subsidy, which currently stands at $152.94 per resident per day for services.

Government funding goes into four envelopes in each private or public home: staffing, food, services and accommodations. The accommodations envelope is the only envelope from which a corporate home is not obliged to return to the government any unused funds. In other words, every unused dollar in this envelope is rendered into profits. Managers, then, seek to move costs, like incontinence supplies, into other envelopes to free up potential money for profit.

Such managerial manoeuvres require approval by regulatory bodies, such as Ontario’s unelected Local Health Integration Networks, which are composed of Liberal and corporate patronage appointees. The cozy relationship between corporations and public officials makes this a much simpler affair than it ought to be. Without a legislated standard, this sort of double-dealing with envelopes is as unpreventable as it is dangerous.

The consequences of corporate care in Ontario are felt by both residents and workers. Residents who suffer from cognitive impairments, making language and social connections and abstract thought difficult, register their frustration against the first hurried staff member who eventually gets around to tend to their needs. One York University study, “Out of Control: Violence Against Personal Support Workers in Long-Term Care,” found that nearly half of all staff can expect to be assaulted at least once a day.

Ontario is the pioneer of this style of “care,” where exploitation of staff and neglect of residents thicken the dividends for corporate owners. Other provincial governments are, frighteningly, beginning to follow suit.

But as nurse-to-patient ratios grow unsustainably high, front-line caregivers, along with the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario, CUPE, the Ontario Public Service Employees Union and the Ontario Health Coalition, have entered into a struggle to stop corporate providers from misappropriating public money for private profit. Central to their campaign is the call for a minimum standard of 3.5 hours of daily care per resident, without which corporate providers face no imperative to provide adequate staffing.

This battle goes beyond the elderly. Since even the sprightliest of us will invariably face the trials of aging, we ought all to be concerned with restoring accountable, publicly provided long-term care across Canada.