Hamilton Book Launch

Date: November 8
Time: 7pm
Location: Room 1010, Michael G. DeGroote Centre for Learning (MDCL), McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, Ontario

Join author and activist Scott Neigh for a talk and book signing as he launches two new books published by Fernwood Publishing: Gender and Sexuality: Canadian History Through the Stories of Activists and Resisting the State: Canadian History Through the Stories of Activists. Hear about some of the many struggles that have shaped the Canada of today, and talk about new ways of relating to the past as we struggle for a transformed tomorrow.

To learn more about the books and the project of which they are a part, and to read and hear excerpts from the interviews around which the books are organized, visit here. To find out about ways to purchase the books if you can’t make it to the launch, click here.

From the book jackets:

We usually learn our history from the perspective of our rulers — from the top down. In these books we learn about our history from the perspectives of ordinary people — from the bottom up. Whatever liberty and justice that communities, workplaces and individuals in Canada enjoy are due to the many struggles and social movements in our country’s history. Yet the stories and histories of those movements to overcome racism, sexism, and poverty, for example, remain largely untold, thanks to the single, simplistic national story taught to us in school. Deftly combining history with accounts from participants in social movements, Neigh introduces us to the untold histories of activists, histories that encourage all of us to engage in struggles that will shape our shared tomorrow.

Gender and Sexuality unearths a diverse spectrum of struggle through the accounts of longstanding social movement participants. From indigenous women working against colonization and Christian women trying to end sexism and homophobia in their churches, to gay men opposing sexual oppression and women fighting against hostile employers and violence, this book reveals the ways that oppressions based on gender and sexuality — and the struggles against them — have shaped our society.

In Resisting the State, Neigh details the histories of a broad range of social movements and provides readers with a richer understanding of the Canadian state and why so many people — including military draftees, welfare recipients, workers, indigenous people, psychiatric survivors, immigrants and refugees — have struggled, and continue to struggle, for equality and justice for all members of society.

What people are saying about Gender and Sexuality and Resisting the State:

“Never doubt that a few committed people can change Canada (and the world) for the better. Scott Neigh’s oral histories show not only the power of committed idealism, but also how the history of our whole country has been shaped by brave Canadians who refuse to accept the misery and injustice that surrounds us. Read these books to learn how the history of social change organizing is indeed the history of Canada — and then go out and start making your own history.” — Jim Stanford, union economist and peace activist

“This work is a treasure that provides a portal to Canadian history, bringing it alive and urgent through the voices and profound insights of veteran social justice activists, an indispensable guide for present and future generations to carry on these struggles.” — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, veteran activist and author

And even more.

Scott Neigh is a writer, parent, and activist currently based in Sudbury, Ontario. He lived in Hamilton, Ontario, from 1993 until 2004, where he was active in student, anti-poverty, anti-racism, environmental, and other social justice organizing, including as a board member of OPIRG McMaster. He blogs regularly on political topics at A Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land. You can learn more about these books and the project of which they are a part at the Talking Radical site, and more about Scott here.

This event is sponsored by OPIRG McMaster, Bryan Prince Bookseller, and Fernwood Publishing.

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Learning from Organizers — Saleh Waziruddin

[Originally published on The Media Co-op.]

Saleh Waziruddin is a South Asian anti-racism activist who has participated in grassroots struggles throughout his adult life. In his 20s, he organized in the Muslim community in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Now in his 40s, he lives in Niagara, Ontario, and is active in the Niagara Region Anti-Racism Association (NRARA). Though not one of its founders, he has been part of the group since it started in 2018. He is on its executive committee and is most active in its campaigns related to police reform, support for individuals experiencing racism, and municipal anti-racism advisory committees.

The Media Co-op: What are a couple of important things you’ve learned from struggles that you, yourself, are not directly involved in, and why are they important?

Saleh Waziruddin: I’ve been looking into revolutions in the 1970s, because they broke the conventional wisdom that you need to organize a majority first and re-confirmed the Bolshevik model of revolution to some extent, which many still say is outdated – the Afghan Republican and April Revolutions (1973, 1978), the Portuguese and Ethiopian revolutions (1974), and Grenada’s revolution (1979, see below for resources). While sources for most of these are hard to get in English, Grenada is an English-speaking country and busts the myth that English-speaking countries have never had a revolution or never will.

One of the recent books by a leader of Grenada’s revolution says it was very difficult for women leaders to participate because of the burdens they had to carry as women in addition to leading the revolution. Activist groups and progressive governments need to address this by making childcare and housework socialized and shared, something advocated by Alexandra Kollontai, the Bolshevik revolutionary.

TMC: How might your learning about the revolutions of the 1970s relate to or inform struggles in Canada today?

SW: Many activists look at examples like Podemos in Spain or SYRIZA in Greece to think about how progressives can come to power and bring political change. These are “post-Gramsci” models based on the works of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau that call for compromising clear left agendas to encompass a majority of the population first, and Antonio Gramsci advocated getting hegemony for the left first before seizing state power. Gramsci said the Bolshevik model was for a bygone time and place. However, Podemos and SYRIZA have failed spectacularly, and are discredited because of their compromises. The revolutions in the 1970s instead took the Bolshevik approach of seizing power as soon as possible and then, after seizing power, trying to get a majority through bringing results and progressive reforms instead of waiting for a majority first. Rosa Luxemburg summed this up excellently in her 1918 work The Russian Revolution:

Thereby the Bolsheviks solved the famous problem of “winning a majority of the people,” which problem has ever weighed on the German Social-Democracy like a nightmare. As bred-in-the-bone disciples of parliamentary cretinism, these German Social-Democrats have sought to apply to revolutions the home-made wisdom of the parliamentary nursery: in order to carry anything, you must first have a majority. The same, they say, applies to a revolution: first let’s become a “majority.” The true dialectic of revolutions, however, stands this wisdom of parliamentary moles on its head: not through a majority, but through revolutionary tactics to a majority – that’s the way the road runs.

TMC: What are a couple of sources related to struggles that you aren’t involved in that you’ve found to be particularly useful or important?

SW: There has been a recent spate of books and responses written by leaders of Grenada’s revolution because many have only just been released from prison. Bernard Coard has written a series of books (The Grenada Revolution: What Really Happened, Skyred: A Tale of Two Revolutions, Forward Ever: Journey to a New Granada) as has Phyllis Coard (Unchained: A Caribbean Woman’s Journey Through Invasion, Incarceration & Liberation).

Bernard Coard is blamed in part for the failure of the revolution and unfortunately his book does not cover the exact details of the assassination of its leader Maurice Bishop, something that has still not been fully explained.

Incidentally, Bernard Coard’s 1971 book (How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Sub-Normal by the British School System), written when he was an anti-racism activist in the UK, is still very useful for looking at the roots of racism in Canada’s education systems.

TMC: What are a couple of key things about struggles that you are involved in or about your approach to activism and organizing that you would like other people to know more about?

SW: One of the most important things is to go by people’s actions (under close examination) and not their words alone. Many people talk anti-racism but have no idea about actually challenging white supremacy. When it comes time to take action they are not allies but actually work against you. Many of these people have all kinds of credentials related to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) and have the education to use the right words, though of course not everyone with credentials or education is a fake.

It’s difficult to recruit the right people but movements that are active, such as Palestine solidarity, are a great source to find people who are being radicalized and want to make a bigger contribution to change than the movement they are involved in.

TMC: What are a couple of sources related to struggles that you are involved in or to your approach to activism and organizing that you would want other people to read/watch/listen to/learn from?

As a cisgender straight man, I am catching up on long-established analysis of the many ways men like me cause damage in movements. One classic paper I found useful is “Deconstructing Militant Manhood” by Lara Montesinos Coleman & Serena A. Bassi in International Feminist Journal of Politics, May 20, 2011.

I found the reference in a thesis written on a local activist group a few years ago but the author asked me to please not mention their thesis. However, people should look up theses written on activist groups doing similar things to what they are involved in or groups in their area to get a better understanding of past lessons learned (or not learned).

TMC: You say that “Many people talk anti-racism but have no idea about actually challenging white supremacy.” What are a couple of key things that distinguish empty anti-racism discourse from genuine struggle against white supremacy, and what are a few sources that people can look to if they want to learn more about the latter?

SW: The way to tell the difference between public relations and anti-racism is that anti-racism means actual change and spending resources, in terms of money and staff time. If there’s no actual change delivered and resources aren’t being put into it, it’s just public relations. That’s the stumbling block: will the government body actually put money and staff time into delivering the change, or will they say “well that takes too much staff time so we can’t do it.” This easy test can be applied to any proposals and policies. I have specific policies I’ve seen get watered down but those are probably too obscure for general reading.

Talking Radical: Resources is a collaboration between The Media Co-op and theTalking Radical project. In these short monthly interviews, activists and organizers from across so-called Canada connect you with ideas and with tools for learning related to struggles for justice and collective liberation. They talk about how they have learned, and about ways that you can learn.

Scott Neigh is a writer, media producer, and activist based in Hamilton, Ontario, and the author oftwo books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.

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Learning from Organizers – Nina Newington

Nina in Bell Tent at Last Hope, Dec 22 2022

[Originally published on The Media Co-op.]

Nina Newington is an organizer based in rural Nova Scotia. In recent years, her grassroots work has focused on protecting forests in the province. 

Newington says that her political consciousness “really emerged from being a queer kid in England in the 1970s” and not knowing that there was anyone else like her. Over the years, she got involved in the battered women’s shelter movement, gay rights, and feminism. Later, she lived downstream from a nuclear reactor in Massachusetts and was involved in anti-nuclear activism. She also, she says, took part in “various other sorts of struggles in a pretty ‘fellow traveller’ kind of way.” 

Her forest defence work in Nova Scotia since 2019 has been under the banner of Extinction Rebellion, and has included the use of direct action to prevent logging. She says that she understands this work “as part of fighting biodiversity loss and climate change, but I also see it as being part of the much larger struggle to move away from an incredibly destructive system.”

The Media Co-op: What are a couple of important things you’ve learned from struggles that you, yourself, are not directly involved in, and why are they important?

Nina Newington: One of the things that I was not directly involved in but was connected to was a whole movement of women of colour, often lesbians, who were really figuring out intersectionality. This is back in the early ’80s. What I learned from that was a really radical commitment to being true to themselves in the middle of all of these intersections of different struggles. I think particularly about Gloria Anzaldúa, who co-edited This Bridge Called My Back with Cherríe Moraga, from whom I took writing classes over a number of years. And through her, reading the works of Native American women like Beth Brant, and other Chicana women.

It’s hard to explain – I think I’ve gotten a lot more of my information from reading novels and poems in some ways than I have from reading more theoretical work. It’s left me with a very strong sense of how necessary that internal work is, if there are going to be alliances that work. And how much people’s lives are endangered by all the forces that pull people down and leave you vulnerable to addiction, vulnerable to self-hatred and suicide, to violence within the community. Those are things that I’ve seen within the queer community in my own life. But I’ve also witnessed how powerful those forces are and how necessary it is to take them into account in other struggles.

TMC: How has your engagement with novels and poems informed your work and your journey through the world?

NN: If you grow up as an isolated queer person, one of the first things you encounter is the sense that, ‘Oh, I’m unnatural.’ With luck, you come to understand that the idea of the natural is very coercive. As a teenager, novels and poems – oh, and Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa – opened out to me the idea that, no, the way things are is not the way they have to be. There are alternatives – there are other ways of being and seeing and organizing the world. That’s a fundamental political understanding, that the way things are is not the way they have to be. Reading gave me that. 

One of the first queer books I came across was the French writer André Gide‘s Journals, at a point when nobody was talking about him being gay, we didn’t even use that word. Discovering both like and unlike in reading gave me a sense that there was a world I might be able to live in. That’s a powerful part of all the movements for change. To say, the world that we’re in isn’t working for this person, for this group, for me. Let’s pay attention to that, in people’s lived lives as well as in theory about it. So maybe one of the places where reading really has helped is teaching me to listen, to try and pay attention to what people are saying about their lives, not what I think about their lives.

TMC: What are a couple of other sources related to struggles that you aren’t involved in that you found to be particularly useful or important to you?

NN: This is still under the heading of books, but different books. There are certain books I’ve come across that are much more about the strategy for nonviolent movements. And those I’ve also found incredibly helpful. So there’s a book by George Lakey called How We Win. George Lakey was part of the early civil rights movement. He was a white gay man, and later part of gay rights movements. He has a really broad and thoughtful and intelligent way of looking at what might work and what might not work in a strategic sense. That kind of thinking, I think, is often there in books where somebody has had time to think things through.

I mean, I like listening to podcasts. I listen to CBC. I read lots of different newspapers. I like the National Observer. I read TheTyee. I read the Halifax Examiner. I also read mainstream papers like The Globe and Mail and The New York Times because I want to know what they’re saying. Those are more current sources. But I really value the places where people have taken a lot of time to think things through.

The flip side to that, though, is – for a while I’ve been a part of a Spirit of Treaty Zoom that’s put on by the District Chief of Kespukwitk, where I live. That’s district one of the seven traditional Mi’kma’ki districts. It’s very gracious of that Mi’kmaq core group to invite others of us in to participate – non-Indigenous folks. And that’s been in a way quite the opposite of what I’m talking about, about books. It’s a very raw, open, immediate sort of exploration of things that are coming up, issues that are happening, you know, where somebody lives. But also intersections between Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists. So there’s an opportunity for fairly direct communication that, I think, has been really helpful.

TMC: What are a couple of key things about struggles that you are involved in or about your approach to activism and organizing that you would like other people to know more about?

NN: It’s incredibly important not to fall for the divisions that are offered and may be exploited. For example, ‘Oh, if you care for nature, then you’re not caring for people, you don’t care about class struggles, you don’t care about racism, you don’t care about whatever. That must be a kind of middle-class struggle over there.’ I think that all of those efforts to divide need to be treated with a great deal of care.

“Care,” actually, is really an important word to me. If we’re going to link up the different campaigns in different areas of concern and become a much bigger movement that’s actually capable of making the changes that need to be made, if we’re even going to survive as a habitable planet, the basis needs to be a sense of care for each other, for nature. And that sounds, I don’t know, kind of mother’s milk, kind of obvious. But in practice, treating each other with care is something that needs to be done all the way through. Whether you’re doing, as we did, six months camping on a logging road through a cold winter, or whether it’s something much simpler – blocking a bridge for a day or for a few hours – the way in which we pay attention to what people need and how we can help makes an incredible difference to whether people can keep going in those kinds of struggles, whether we feel valued, whether the struggle is also something that improves your life. Which it should, if possible. Putting that care to the forefront is pretty critical to me. As we go along and feel ever more urgent and desperate in the face of inaction, it’s going to matter more and more that we treat each other with care.

The other side of that is respect – is, in the work for the environment, to look for guidance from Indigenous peoples of the land where we’re taking action. It’s different in every part of the country, I think. But the basic principle is still the same. The basic principle is to act with respect. And with understanding about what the settler history, the colonial history has done, or as much understanding as we can manage. That’s part of the care and the listening, to try to have a clear and emotionally accurate picture, as much as one can, of what has happened to the people that you’re dealing with. 

In my area of rural Nova Scotia, it’s also the working-class people who are afraid of losing the last of the forestry jobs, and might feel that we don’t really give a damn about them, those of us who are blocking a logging road. Those are also conversations to be had and care to be expressed.

TMC: What are a couple of sources related to struggles that you’re involved in or to your approach to activism and organizing that you would want other people to read or watch or listen to, or otherwise learn from?

NN: I would say that the National Observer does a very good job, in terms of climate and environment, of bringing together information. It’s not perfect, but nothing is. If somebody’s in Nova Scotia, the Halifax Examiner is a really excellent source. But it’s getting harder to find deep-digging journalism. I read the UK-based newspaper The Guardian a lot. I have questions about stuff – it’s not that it’s perfect. But it’s a source of information for a lot of what’s going on, especially for what’s going on internationally. 

I have to say that I use Facebook a fair amount. For a couple of our actions, I learned about imminent threats to areas that were important to species at risk from somebody posting in complete dismay on Facebook about how logging companies were about to come in and clear-cut moose habitat or whatever. So, with reservations, I do use Facebook, because it’s a place where you can pick up that information and it’s a place where you can tell people about the things that you’re doing, and learn what they’re doing. I also love the radio.

TMC: You spoke passionately about care as an important element in our movements. Are there any sources that you think provide important insight or guidance with respect to care, in the way that you understand it?

NN: I think that the book Braiding Sweetgrassby Potawotami scholar and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer is an extraordinary tutorial in widening one’s understanding of care, based on her nation’s traditional teachings. I could probably re-read that book every year – or you can just re-read a few of the essays from it – and learn new things every time. 

She has an essay in there about taking a bunch of mostly very Christian students through a Carolina silverbell grove in the Smokies. She starts out focused on what she wants to teach them and ends up learning from their joy in the grove. There’s a lot of nuance, if you’re really paying attention to the carer and the cared-for, to what the emotional experience is. It’s never going to be, “This is how to be a good carer.” Those two ideas flip around, carer and cared-for, back and forth.

Along the way, I was part of a group living and organizing downstream from a nuclear reactor. There was a woman who was sort of the leader of that group. She was this working-class Jewish social worker from New York City. This was in Massachusetts. She was incredibly funny and raunchy and tough and kind, and I remember thinking, ”Okay, I’ll do whatever I can so that I free her up to do the stuff that she’s brilliant at.” So, yeah, I’d go off and be the community representative on the nuclear reactor board where they’re gonna go blah, blah, blah. But now I’m in something closer to her role in relation to the organizing here. She’s an incredibly powerful mentor in my mind for how to do it, because she took on a lot but she didn’t take on more than she could take, than she was willing to do. And she was very able to just do what she could do, accept what other people could do, and, be like, ‘Okay, let’s do what we can.’ That ended up really being a model for me. 

I think also – not in a syrupy way – we did feel cared for by her. And she in turn was cared for by people within the group. I guess maybe that’s the other thing, learning from other people, learning from good examples.

I have been in recovery from alcoholism for 40 years, and I’ve learned a vast amount from recovery programs, both for substance abuse and for the families and children of substance abuse and alcoholism. That support network is life-saving. There’s a tremendous power in just listening and not trying to fix things, not trying to fix people, but being willing to be present and listen. 

It’s pretty easy as an activist to be focused on wanting to make change. But I think there’s an element of needing to first allow what is, both within oneself and in other people – to really look at it and see it before trying to jump into action. There’s a stage between awareness and action, there’s a stage of acceptance. I don’t mean accepting that things are all for the best and it’s all lovely and wonderful, and, you know, ‘God made the world this way, and it’s great.’ But just to accept, oh, this is the way it is, this is the way I feel, this is the way that person’s behaving, this is the way that the government is treating us, this is the way the forestry industry is acting – taking a moment and taking time to understand what’s happening, and not just running around trying to make it different.

Talking Radical: Resources is a collaboration betweenThe Media Co-op and theTalking Radical project. In these short interviews, activists and organizers from across so-called Canada will connect you with ideas and with tools for learning related to struggles for justice and collective liberation. They will talk about how they themselves have learned, and about ways that you can learn from the grassroots work that they are involved in.

Scott Neigh is a writer, media producer, and activist based in Hamilton, Ontario, and the author oftwo books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.

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Learning from organizers – Stefan Christoff

Stefan Christoff playing guitar. Photo by Philippe Teixeira St-Cyr, obtained from Stefan Christoff.

Stefan Christoff is an organizer, musician, and broadcaster based in Tiohtià:ke, also known as Montreal. Across his decades of activism and organizing, he has been part of supporting lots of different struggles resisting systemic violence and oppression, including colonial systems here on Turtle Island (North America) and around the world. That has involved solidarity work with migrant, Indigenous, and racialized communities; organizing against police brutality, exploitation, and capitalism; and many other things. His political work is primarily grassroots rather than institutional, drawing on “the power of collective community organizing,” Christoff says, and a lot of it “has centred on the intersections of art and activism.” He is the host of Free City Radio.

The Media Co-op: What are a couple of important things you’ve learned from struggles that you, yourself, are not directly involved in, and why are they important?

Stefan Christoff: I think one of the main things that I learned from past social movements has been that the mainstream media narratives about power, and mainstream media narratives that try to locate and make sense of the world, are inaccurate.

Some of the most important voices that impacted me when I was in my early 20s as an activist were from the United States. As an anglophone living in Montreal, I was drawn a lot to New York City. And I first heard the voices of former members of the Black Panther Party around this time. Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Ashanti Alston, Elaine Brown are three people that I saw speak in person in different cities – New York City, Washington, DC, Montreal. And I think that these voices really placed the power of community work at the forefront, in the Black Panther context but also more broadly, thinking about confronting state power and corporate power and the violence that is perpetuated by those systems in a direct way. I learned about that.

I also listen to lectures from Indigenous activists. John “Splitting the Sky” Boncore Hill is somebody that comes to mind. His lecture about the Attica prison uprising really had a huge impact on me, in thinking about the falsity of the fixed notion of colonial borderlines. And I think the members of the Native Youth Movement that confronted Canadian colonialism, particularly their struggle against Sun Peaks Ski Resort, and the Secwepemc Nation. I got to know members of the awesome Manuel family, including the late Arthur Manuel and Kanahus Manuel. I visited that community and spent time there in the context of the Sun Peaks Ski Resort blockade protest camp that they were organizing, which was to oppose the expansion of Sun Peaks Ski Resort, which was being built and extended on traditional Secwepemc land. That was a very important struggle for me to learn about, but also to see firsthand and to be present with Indigenous activists involved in frontline land defense.

And if we want to get into tactics, I think the first organization that I learned a lot from living in Montreal was the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP). I learned about direct action tactics in real time. Although I wasn’t directly a member of the organization, I participated in a lot of actions and solidarity responses to post 9/11 policies of repression that were happening towards migrants and asylum seekers and undocumented people, [including] campaigns against deportations. And one of the things that I learned from the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty was taking voices of people directly affected to the offices of those in power. So I remember a number of cases where OCAP sent delegations to government minister offices, and also government ministries, like Immigration Canada. I participated in some of them. I remember some actions for a woman from Nigeria named Dorothy Igharo. I remember some actions against the cuts to social assistance at the very tail end of Mike Harris’ Conservative administration in Ontario in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was actions that took place after Kimberly Rogers had died, in the context of cuts to social services. So this direct action politics, I learned a lot from the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty.

And I think more generally, the other thing that has really taught me a lot is the intersection of art and activism. So, in sustaining involvement in these things for a very long time, I’ve been drawn to finding space for reflection in music and other creative outlets as a way to find a pathway to sustain the struggle. I think it’s really important to sustain involvement and retain a sort of spiritual health. And, you know, sometimes these aspects of things are difficult to describe in words. But I think a lot of state repression results in people either turning that violence against themselves, or internally in the movement. There’s a lot of issues that come up when people don’t take care of their mental health. And I think for me, the arts was really important and learning slowly about that process.

TMC: What are a couple of sources related to struggles that you aren’t involved in that you’ve found to be particularly useful or important?

SC: If we’re talking about media sources, I think that generally I have found community radio to be very important. You know, stations like CKUT 90.3. FM in Montreal was where I heard a lot of social movement voices for the first time. I remember listening to a lecture of Vandana Shiva on the program Alternative Radio. And at the end of that lecture there was somebody who came on the broadcast to explain where people could register to get on the buses to go to Washington DC for protests against the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank in April 2000. And that was my first mass protests that I joined. So community radio was a very important source.

TMC: What are a couple of key things about struggles that you are involved in or about your approach to activism and organizing that you would like other people to know more about?

SC: I think one key reflection that I would like to share around organizing is this idea that it’s really important to go into campaigns with, like, clear demands, and to be firm in those demands, especially when dealing with structures of power. But I don’t think that having firm demands means that you have an answer for the overall systemic questions that are at play in these types of campaigns. So I’ll think about that in relation to both, like, political solutions and change. But also in terms of organizational process.

I think that each campaign has its own context. And it’s very important to be open to understanding the context of how each campaign manifests itself in relation to the various actors involved, and the various community factors. I’ll think about very tangibly, like, doing work in support of migrant workers in the context of the pandemic lockdowns, where there was a lot of workers in warehouses – particularly in Dollarama warehouses in the Montreal area – that were facing unjust work conditions, low pay, and often were in various very dangerous conditions due to the lack of safety protocols. This is before the vaccines. So I think it was important to have clear demands around those efforts and that campaign.

But, you know, each campaign evolves in its own way, right? And I think it’s important to retain a fluid approach. And to be open to building coalitions. That does not mean, for me, that you water down your demands, but it means that you need to seek support from other political actors and networks. And that can also be at a very grassroots level, right?

TMC:What are a couple of sources related to struggles that you are involved in or related to your approach to activism and organizing that you would want other people to read/watch/listen to/learn from?

SC: I’ve really learned a lot from people I’ve directly worked with. So, a lot of asylum seekers. I really took the time to listen and learn from their stories. That informed me a lot about different contexts around the world, and the various through-lines between, you know, historical contexts of colonialism and violence, and the present day, and how that leads to displacement. I think listening to people at a grassroots level and learning from their stories is really essential. Because that is often a way for learning to take place that is not official, but that is deep and important.

And I’d say that right now, that sort of conversational style of listening and learning informs a lot of my work in community radio around my weekly program. Those conversations are really an opportunity to share different voices and to create a space to learn from people involved in social movements around the world. Free City Radio broadcasts on CKUT 90.3. FM on Wednesdays at 11am; CHLO 1690 AM in Tiohtià:ke Montreal on Tuesdays at 1pm; CKUW 95.9 FM in Winnipeg at 10:30pm on Tuesdays; CFRC 101.9 FM in Kingston at 11:30am on Wednesdays; CFUV 101.9 FM in Victoria BC on Wednesdays at 9am and Saturdays at 7am; Met Radio 1280 AM in Toronto at 5:30am on Fridays; and CKCU 93.1 FM in Ottawa on Tuesdays at 2pm. The archives are on SoundCloud. Thank you!

Talking Radical: Resources is a collaboration between The Media Co-op and the Talking Radical project. In these short monthly interviews, activists and organizers from across so-called Canada will connect you with ideas and with tools for learning related to struggles for justice and collective liberation. They will talk about how they themselves have learned, and about ways that you can learn from the grassroots work that they are involved in.

Scott Neigh is a writer, media producer, and activist based in Hamilton, Ontario, and the author of two books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.

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Learning from abolitionist organizing in Winnipeg

Talking Radical: Resources is a new collaboration from The Media Co-op and the Talking Radical project. In these short, monthly interviews, activists and organizers from across so-called Canada will connect you with ideas and with tools for learning related to struggles for justice and collective liberation. They will talk about how they themselves have learned, and about ways that you can learn from the grassroots work that they are involved in.

The first interview in the series is with chantale garand. They are a queer, non-binary, two-spirit Métis organizer based on Treaty 1 in Winnipeg who has been involved in a wide range of grassroots political work. This has included participation in short-term mobilizations related to various provincial, municipal, social, and policing issues, including with groups like The Real Team Manitoba, Budget 4 All, and Millennium 4 All. They have been part of collaborations related to action planning, logistics, and security at events. Their longer term commitments include participation in work towards organizing goals with a new group called Abolitionist Futures. But these days, the main focus for their energy is the Métis abolitionist and sovereign future dreaming collective Red River Echoes.

The Media Co-op: What are a couple of important things you’ve learned from struggles that you are not directly involved in, and why are they important?

chantale garand: Learning from how others approach organizing is a central part of how I participate in organizing, including learning from those I vehemently disagree with.

A few years ago, I learned a lot about how the Sandinistas, a liberation movement that overthrew the longest-running dictatorship in Latin America in 1979, were able to build mass power through supporting the literacy of the working class in the 1970s and ’80s. In an age of social media, where creating a graphic and asking people to “like + share” is being said to be “activism,” what I took from that: if you want people to join you, give them the tools and the knowledge to join you.

From Black liberation movements, and particularly people like Malcolm X and Angela Davis, I learned the ability to do radical foundational work that furthers relationality and collective consciousness in times of danger.

From people like Secwépemc leader and Indigenous activist Arthur Manuel – whose writings quite literally changed my life and how I view things – I learned the ability to foresee the bigger wins, and the value and ability to learn from the losses as well.

TMC: What are a couple of sources related to struggles that you aren’t involved in that you’ve found to be particularly useful or important?

cg: I really enjoy Haymarket Books as a source of not only radical books, but also the talks that they put on and keep up on their website/YouTube. During the pandemic, it was a regular part of my life to be able to listen to how/why other people were involved in their organizing and struggles, the wins they’ve gained and how, and the losses, too. The losses are so very important to learn from.

Podcasts like Sandy and Nora give me some laughs about grim and bleak topics while also pointing me in directions of organizing that I had yet to hear about. Laughs are important for me. Also Talking Radical led me to a bunch of cool people doing rad things that I may not have found otherwise.

For shorter reads, things like Briarpatch magazine, People’s Voice, and Upping The Anti provide regular and much needed snapshots into what’s going on around canada and collective struggles internationally, and the people working in them.

Staying up on organizing around No Cop City, Wet’suwet’en, Fairy Creek, rent strikes and housing in Toronto, Sarah Jama and disability justice, Hamilton has some good municipal organizing right now, things like that. I try to follow any group engaging in actions, as there’s things to learn in everyone’s tactics.

TMC: What are a couple of key things about struggles that you are involved in or about your approach to activism and organizing that you would like other people to know more about?

cg: Building true power: Pulling off an action doesn’t necessarily equal building power. Building power is long-term and intentional. It requires time and relationships. Relationships in radical organizing require trust. Trust requires time and/or events. For a variety of reasons, social determinants of health being a main reason, building true power is becoming harder and harder to achieve as the capitalist society marches us further and further into crushing disparities – but there is good stuff happening everywhere, people who refuse to stop fighting.

Also, incorporating transformative justice tools as a means to build that power, that solidarity, and ways to overcome how we are carceral within ourselves and towards the people we are in relationship with, folks that we inherently love through collective struggle. The ability to work through conflict, or things that come up, internally so that it works for everyone involved and doesn’t lead to implosion of good and important work.

TMC: What are a couple of sources related to struggles that you are involved in or to your approach to activism and organizing that you would want other people to read/watch/listen to/learn from?

cg: The people I organize with are sources. The people that organize in Winnipeg are sources. I will support and be in solidarity with any group who is fighting back against oppression and violence against their, and my, communities – regardless of how quick, easy, simple, short, long, complicated, their organizing or actions may be. I believe in a diversity of tactics, and if we are all doing something within our capacities to speak out against injustices levied against us, or supporting those with lived experiences, we are moving. However little that dial moves, in either direction, we are moving. And as long as we are learning from others, from ourselves, from that movement, it will lead to advancement in some way. Would I like that advancement to happen faster and be more grandiose? Sure. But my only problem is when we are static. If we’re okay with the status quo. If we self-implode because conversations with those we love are scarier to us than the hate and injustice we face from those unknown.

Lastly, remember to always lead with love. To have laughter and fun and joy in what you’re doing, in and outside of organizing. To feel those feelings. Burnout is real and affects folks engaging in this work, and for me, it happened because dealing with so much hate and holding that anger was heavy. Too heavy. So I remember to lead with love.

Scott Neigh is a writer, media producer, and activist based in Hamilton, Ontario, and the author of two books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.

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Reflections based on 10 years of Talking Radical Radio

Talking Radical Radio was a weekly radio show and podcast featuring interviews with people involved in a wide range of grassroots political work across so-called Canada. It ran from February 2013 to February 2023, and over that time there were 510 original episodes (plus one or two re-runs each year).

The show was, more or less, a one-person operation. When I began to talk with people about the possibility of winding the show down, a couple of them independently suggested that I write something based on the experience. I decided that I liked that idea, and this document is the result. It is divided into two main sections. The first half focuses on the show itself and the work that went into making it, written with an eye to being useful to people who are considering doing similar work themselves. As such, it likely contains far more detail than most readers will care about. The second half is a somewhat arbitrary collection of political reflections based on my time doing this work. As one of those reflections describes in more detail, it is mostly not an effort to derive practical lessons about and for social movements that might then be taken up and applied in the course of struggle, but rather more diffuse political thoughts emerging from the work of making the show.

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The Making of Talking Radical Radio

The Model of the Show

The beginning of what I later came to think of as the Talking Radical project was in the early 2000s, when I did oral history interviews with 50 long-time activists and organizers from across Canada. Eventually, I used some of those interviews as the basis for two books that were published by Fernwood Publishing in 2012.

I had done community radio between 1998 and 2001, and based on that experience, I had also originally intended to turn those oral history interviews into a series of radio shows. Ultimately, I decided that it wasn’t feasible to do so, but I didn’t abandon my interest in some sort of related audio project at some future point. In the later years of working on the books, I began to piece together a model for an interview-based, movement-focused show with a (mostly) contemporary rather than historical focus. I knew I didn’t have time then to take on such a project, but it felt like an idea with potential, and once the books were out, I started figuring out how to put it into practice.

Here are some of the key elements of that model:

Long-form interviews – The centre of the show would be long-form interviews – so, not carefully culled short quotes set in some larger narrative, but an opportunity for people involved in activism, organizing, political art, and a range of other kinds of grassroots political work to speak at length. Even in left media, that is fairly rare. My hope was that it would give listeners a way to learn about issues and struggles directly from those who are in the thick of things, which most people rarely have the chance to do.

Manageable labour – The other reason for having a single, long-form interview as opposed to, say, a multi-voice documentary format was to keep the amount of labour required to make the show at a manageable level. Don’t get me wrong, it still ended up being a lot of work, but I knew that I was going to be doing the show on my own, and I knew I needed to find a format that wouldn’t burn me out.

Community radio – It is probably unfair to draw an excessively sharp distinction between podcasts and community radio – goodness knows that there are many different kinds of shows, even many different kinds of nonfiction spoken word shows, found in both contexts. Nonetheless, a lot of issue-focused or political podcasts have an informal, conversational approach organized around chit-chat and hot takes that I, frankly, don’t like very much. That plus my own background encouraged me to take my understanding of community radio’s sensibility as my starting point, and to aim for a format with a bit more formality that was interview-based rather than conversational. Despite the growing popularity of online-only audio distribution in the years leading up to the launch of the show, I also knew that I wanted to get it on the airwaves of community stations, if I could figure out how.

Scope – I wanted the show to have a broad scope along multiple axes. I wanted it to be pan-Canadian, but even more than that, as someone then living in northern Ontario, I wanted to put effort into including voices from outside of the Vancouver-Toronto-Montreal axis that so often dominates how we think of movements in this country. I wanted it to cover a wide range of movements and struggles, including those that are often left out of conventional left narratives and those that get treated as marginal. I wanted it to regularly feature the voices of people who are more often excluded from the media. I also wanted to include projects with forms ranging from the extremely grassroots to at least moderately institutional, and politics from the obviously radical to the more interesting-to-me subset of what you might call left-liberal. At least part of my motivation for a model emphasizing breadth of issues, movements, voices, organizational forms, and politics rather than a narrow focus was out of a sense that it would create the possibility for listening across those forms of difference, which felt to me to be politically useful.

Getting Started

I began work on the show in late 2012 by producing three pilot episodes. I did three interviews that I hoped were a start at sketching out the kinds of breadth that I wanted the show to encompass, and then began the process of figuring out how to turn those interviews into finished episodes. I used the pilots to approach three outlets – 93.3 FM CFMU in Hamilton, Ontario, which was the station where I had done community radio before and where I still knew some of the staff; 96.7 FM CKLU in Sudbury, Ontario, where I was living at the time; and Rabble.ca, one of Canada’s oldest left-ish news-and-views sites. At the time, Rabble.ca still had its Rabble Podcast Network, which it originally developed as a sort of aggregator and go-to source for left audio content in the years before podcasting/podcatching infrastructure fully matured. All three were interested in carrying the show. I can’t remember the details, but I believe the timing of the launch was determined by a delay in approval at Rabble.ca. When all of that was lined up, the show began its run at the end of February 2013.

Outreach

I took a number of approaches over the years to finding interview participants.

  • From beginning to end, an important source of show ideas was the (definitely excessive) amount of time I already spent on social media, particularly Twitter but in a more limited way Facebook, reading whatever I could find about social movements and communities-in-struggle in the context of so-called Canada. Both have become less effective for doing this as the drive for profit has pushed them to become worse in almost every respect, but they remain somewhat useful.
  • Occasionally, I would also ask directly on Facebook or Twitter for suggestions, sometimes just generally but sometimes with respect to specific geographies, movements, or topics. This was hit or miss in any given instance, but it led to some great ideas that would never otherwise have occurred to me.
  • After a given episode was released, my email passing along the links to the interview participant(s) would include a question about whether there were any other grassroots groups, projects, or organizations that they thought I should have on the show. Not everyone had suggestions, but lots of people did. And there were a handful of people who continued to occasionally send me ideas even years after I had initially interviewed them, which I always very much appreciated.
  • For awhile, I had Google Alerts set up for a number of social movement-related keywords combined with the names of Canadian cities. While this did lead to a handful of show ideas, it was not very useful and at some point I discontinued it.

Sometimes, a suggestion by a past participant would be accompanied by contact information for the group as a whole or for a specific member. Much more often, though, I would just have a group name and would need to track down contact information myself. Which you would think would be easy – certainly there are a few kinds of formations committed to struggle that have no interest in random people contacting them, but most are at least theoretically invested in opportunities to share their work, to recruit participants, and to get their ideas into the media. But it was a semi-regular source of frustration that more activist groups than you might think organize their online presence in a way that makes contacting them quite difficult. Another common irritation was groups that were no longer active but had not updated their online presence to reflect that.

My first choice for approaching groups was email. Some left little option but to message them on a social media platform. Very, very occasionally I would make contact by phone.

I would send an initial message, wait a week or so for a response, and then send a follow-up. If they still didn’t reply, I would move on. There were more than a few instances where a group finally responded months or even more than a year after I initially approached them.

In my opening email, I would give them basic information about myself, about the show, and about the interview I was requesting. If a group replied and was interested, it was usually a fairly straightforward process of answering any further questions that they had and then figuring out a day and time that would work. It did occasionally happen that we would be in the middle of corresponding about the details of the interview when suddenly they would stop responding. There were also instances where it took several months or even up to a year to find a time that worked.

The outreach process was unpredictable, and occasionally technology would fail or people would just flake out on the day of the interview, so it was important to be a few interviews ahead – sometimes I cut it very close, but I did my best to have extra interviews stockpiled. It also helped to be at different stages of the outreach process with multiple groups at any given time.

Interviews

Recording Tech – The equipment that I used to do the interviews shifted significantly over the ten years of the show. At least a few in the first year, for instance, were captured by putting a hand-held recorder next to a phone in speaker mode. Needless to say, the audio quality was not good at all, and I cringe now to think about doing it this way, but it was what I could manage at the time. There were multiple changes between that point and the end of the show, but I will talk mostly about how I did things in the final few years.

Other than one that I did in-person and one episode based on an interview done by someone else and only edited by me, I did all of the rest of the interviews myself, at a distance. For a long time, I offered people the option of doing it by Skype or by phone. I use computers that run Linux, and there was a period of time when the Skype client for Linux was highly unreliable, so I began to use what was then called Google Hangouts. In the final years of the show, I offered Skype, phone, or what was by then Google Meet. Interestingly, at this point almost noone opted for Skype, though I used it on my end when the participant(s) wanted to be on the phone. Increasingly over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, people would ask to use Zoom. Like most people, I use Zoom for other things, but I found that it sometimes interfered in some way that I couldn’t figure out with my recording set-up – I think again it was an issue of how the client for Linux was implemented – so pretty quickly I stopped offering it as an option.

I recorded the interviews in two different ways. I used Audacity – the most popular free sound editing software on Linux – to capture the audio directly onto my computer’s harddrive. And I also pumped the audio out to a sound board and from there to an external recorder. The sound board was a Behringer Xenyx X1222usb – according to my musician brother, it would not be good enough to do high-quality music work, but it was more than adequate for my purposes. The external recorder was a Zoom H4N, which is a pretty robust and basic piece of equipment that I think is commonly used in lots of different professional contexts. The reason why I recorded the interviews in two different ways was that, for a couple of years before I started using this set-up, I was recording using Audacity only – which worked well until one time it failed in a way that left me with an unusable recording, and I decided I wanted some redundancy in the system.

The mic I used was an Audio-Technica AT2020. It currently sells for about $120-150, I think, and has decent enough sound. You could certainly spend more to get better sound, but most of Talking Radical Radio‘s airtime was filled by the interview participants, so the limiting factor in the audio quality was always the connection over which we recorded. Given that the majority of the show was always going to sound more or less like a phone call, it never felt like it was worth it to get a fancier mic.

Participants – Most of the interviews featured between one and three participants, and occasionally four or five. Particularly later in the show’s run, I actively discouraged more than three. A group that large often resulted in an interview that didn’t flow very well. Plus, interviews with more participants tend to be longer and therefore take more labour to edit. Also – again in the spirit of keeping the amount of labour manageable – I almost always insisted that all participants for a given episode talk to me as part of the same interview rather than separately, though I made a handful of exceptions to that over the years. Occasionally, a prospective interviewee would ask to participate anonymously or with their first name only. I was generally cautious about such requests but open to them, particularly when they were based in concerns about consequences or safety, though there was a frustrating period of a couple of years when one of the platforms hosting the show pretty much refused to allow this regardless of the risk it would have put participants in.

Prep – These interviews required relatively little specific background research or preparatory reading. I would familiarize myself with the group’s website and social media presence, and read whatever relevant news articles I found, but not much more. Partly, that was because there often wasn’t much more, particularly when it was a locally-focused, relatively small, or very grassroots group. Partly, it was because of the nature of the interviews – slow, long-form, and with the goal of getting them to tell stories, rather than in the pursuit of specific facts or short quotes. While there were certainly instances where I found myself wishing in the middle of an interview that I knew more about the specifics of their situation so I could ask better questions, mostly this approach worked well.

What was far more important than having lots of specific knowledge was, I think, having lots of general knowledge about the struggle or movement in question – so, having read or otherwise learned enough in general about, say, Indigenous struggles or trans organizing or the labour movement to ask good questions and understand the answers, and to have a good gut-level feel for the range of relevant politics and sensibilities. The obvious point of contrast here is mainstream journalists who so often have little general knowledge about grassroots movements and the politics that inform them, so they tend to ask poor questions on the rare occasions when they interview activists and organizers, and then show in what they make from those interviews that they haven’t really understood the answers.

Questions – As I would tell participants if they asked for a list of questions in advance, I generally did not enter into these interviews with a rigid list. That said, however, the interviews did usually end up taking on a similar shape. I wanted to know a bit about the interview participants as individuals, often including something about their political origins or their grassroots involvement before and beyond the main focus of the interview. Then I would ask about the group or organization or project that we were there to talk about, often starting with its founding and moving forward at least initially in a broadly chronological way. Exactly what I would ask and how would depend a lot on how they told stories, how much they needed to be prompted, and exactly what the interview was about. Later in the interview, I would generally ask more reflective questions. And I would encourage them to give me lots of background and context at every step along the way. Despite the similar shape to most of these interviews, careful listening and then crafting questions in the moment was crucial to getting good material.

Doing the Interview – I am terrible at small talk, so my general practice was to be fairly quick and efficient in welcoming and thanking participants. I would offer them an opportunity to ask me any questions that they had before we got started. And then we would do the interview. At the end, I would thank them again, and tell them what I could about when the episode based on the interview would be released and when they could expect to hear from me again.

Length – I tried to end up with recordings that were between 40 and 60 minutes in length, and ideally 45-50. If an interview was shorter than 40 minutes, I would run the risk of not having enough material for a 28-minute show after the editing process, or at least of having to include material that I would rather cut. But the longer an interview was, the more time it would take to edit. I think the shortest interview I did for the show was about 35 minutes, and the longest was something like 80 or 90 minutes.

Preserving the Audio – I would save the Audacity version and move the recorder version over to the same directory. I had enough close calls over the years that I was pretty paranoid about losing interviews due to technology failures, so I would immediately back up the directory containing the recordings on another local hard drive. In later years, I also had my system set up so that it would back up to a remote service, and I had a sort of home-brew local automated script to back all my data up to an external drive once a day.

Editing

Transcript – In the first couple of years, the first step of the editing process was to listen to the interview and make a very rough map of it, usually just noting the time at which I asked each question and perhaps the major elements of the answers. At some point, I realized that the editing process would be faster and my editing would be better if I had a full transcript to work from. For a couple of years after that, I did the transcription by hand. This was not actually as horrible or as time consuming as you might think, but it was definitely not my favourite part of the process. Then someone pointed me towards otter.ai, which is an automated transcription service that does a pretty good job. I would take the initial transcript generated by that site and do a quick pass through it while listening to the audio to fix it up further. The resulting version still wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be more than adequate for use in the audio editing process.

General Intro & Outro – The first 30 seconds of the show and the last 45 seconds were the same every week. I think I used the same general intro for every episode, and had maybe three slightly different versions of the general outro over the years. The former featured me speaking about a dozen words to name myself and the show, and then the theme music. The latter was a longer clip of me giving more information about myself and about the show, then pointing people towards the show’s website and social media, followed again by the theme music. The theme was “It is the Hour (Get Up),” produced by snowflake and featuring Calling Sister Midnight and spinmeister, and I initially found it on a Creative Commons music site called ccMixter.

Introduction – Each week, I would write an episode-specific introduction to the show. I made the decision early on to make my introductions fairly long. I was never 100% certain about this decision, but positive feedback about the intros always outweighed the negative, so I stuck with it. Because of the broad range of topics, movements, and locations covered by the show, and because I couldn’t assume any particular specialized knowledge on the part of listeners, I wanted to make sure that the format gave me plenty of space to provide background and context, to introduce terms or ideas that the participants used that might be unfamiliar to listeners, and perhaps to introduce an idea or two of my own. My approach to the introductions evolved over the years, and I think they got clearer and more polished. For most of the run of the show, I aimed to make them about 4 1/2 minutes long. Once I had a written introduction of the right length, I would record it. I would go paragraph by paragraph, usually doing two takes and sometimes a third. I would then edit it to remove background noise, breath sounds, pauses, and so on, using the best bits and pieces from each take.

For the first 8 years or so, my words would start as the theme music in the general intro faded. In 2021 or thereabouts, someone suggested that it might be good to have the voice of one of the interview participants appear earlier in the episode, and I agreed. I started putting a 20-30 second clip from the interview between the theme music and my introduction. I tried to choose a clip that would catch listeners’ interest or exemplify something important about the interview.

The Body – Material drawn from the interviews comprised the bulk of each episode – usually from about the 5 minute mark or a little after to the 27 minute mark. As I said, the interviews were highly edited. I didn’t think it through this explicitly at the time, but looking back the editing was guided by three broad principles:

  • I wanted the final episode to accurately convey the intent and ideas of the interview participant(s).
  • I wanted to optimize the flow of the interview, both the flow of the sound (i.e. making sure that it felt natural and did not, through obvious disjunctures caused by editing or noise on the track, distract from the listening experience) and the flow of the content (i.e. making sure that the sequence of words and ideas made sense and organically drew the listener along).
  • And, particularly given my long (and perhaps indulgent) introductions, I wanted to maximize the amount of airspace in the body of the episode given to the words of the participants and minimize the amount taken by my words.

I didn’t always succeed in all three of these, but they were what I aimed for.

Beyond using an Audacity tool to remove background noise, the kinds of editing practices required for each interview would vary, depending on things like its length, the quality of the connection/recording, and the way that the interview participants told stories. It might involve re-ordering the question or other large chunks of audio to improve flow. It always involved cutting – sometimes entire questions, and usually subsections of answers, sentences, phrases, single words. What to cut and what to keep was about finding the best way to honour the three principles above while getting the interview down to the length it needed to be. That involved developing a capacity to quickly assess elements of the interview for how important they were (to the participants’ vision, to my own sense of what was politically valuable about the interview, and to the flow) and how engaging they would be to listeners, and balancing those against the need to get the interview to the right length. I would do lots of lower-level cutting to remove breath sounds and verbal tics – except when that disrupted the flow or interfered with meaning – and to reduce pauses, as part of maximizing the space for participants’ words. I would also re-record my questions. I started doing that to make a little more time each episode for participants’ words. Sometimes, though, it was also a way to intervene in the flow – I could change my question to be able to use only part of their answer, to better reflect a question/answer being in a new place, or to just be more clear. Sometimes, I would also add short clips in my voice interrupting an answer to contextualize something that the participants had said, though I tried not to do that any more than absolutely necessary.

Outro – Between the end of the body and the general outro I would place a short episode-specific outro in which I would reiterate the names of the participants and their organizational affiliations, and give a link to some element of the organization’s online presence.

Finishing Touches – I would use Audacity’s ‘compressor’ tool and perhaps some manual tinkering to even out the volume across the episode. Then I would listen through the whole thing one final time to make sure it all worked and that I hadn’t screwed anything up. Finally, I would produce an MP3 of the episode.

Preview – I was largely unwilling to give interview participants a chance to hear the show before it was broadcast/published, but I made an exception in perhaps two or three cases over the ten years. These were not meant as a way for them to give detailed input into the content or the editing, but were a sort of last-minute opportunity to withdraw consent if I had made any major errors or had acted in bad faith. I made these exceptions for interview participants from groups with a particularly pronounced history of being treated in abusive ways by the media, including by left media – so, once or twice for sex worker advocacy groups and once for a trans activist.

Distribution

Radio – For the entire decade of the show, distribution to campus and community radio stations felt…well, a little chaotic. At the start, I used Dropbox to get each week’s MP3 to the original stations that carried it, CFMU and CKLU. Because I knew the staff, communication from the former was usually pretty good, but because of their mandate to prioritize locally produced content, during the early years, sometimes CFMU would carry the show and sometimes they wouldn’t (though they carried it consistently in later years). But CKLU was a lesson in how I could not count on communication from most stations. At some point early on, they hired a new person for their only paid staff position, and the station was simultaneously going through some pretty intense challenges related to budgetary and technical problems. Even though I was local, they just stopped broadcasting the show without telling me. I never listened to it over the airwaves, so it was six or nine months later when I actually discovered they were no longer carrying it. It was something of a challenge to get it back on the air, though I’m pretty sure they carried it consistently after that point.

If I remember correctly, my first big push to reach out to other stations involved digging around online to find the addresses of all of the English-language campus and community stations in Canada, sending them some promotional material via snail mail, and following up by email. As I recall, I got no response from most of them (which did not surprise me), active interest in broadcasting the show from a few (which made me happy), and an email from one who got in touch just to say some unkind (though probably deserved) things about my sound quality. At some point, I learned about the National Campus and Community Radio Association, which brings together many though not all of the English-language campus/community station in Canada. One of their resources is an online distribution system for audio content – originally it was called the Community Radio Exchange, though recently they upgraded to a new platform called Earshot. For a chunk of time in the middle of Talking Radical Radio‘s run and then for the final few years, I also distributed the show through Radio4All, an old US-based site for distributing grassroots audio.

Despite the existence of a national platform for doing so, my impression is that a licensing requirement that campus and community stations in Canada prioritize locally produced content means that we do not have the same culture of grassroots circulation of community radio programming as in, say, the United States. It was also quite difficult for me to know exactly when and where it was being broadcast. Sometimes, when a new station wanted to pick it up, they would get in touch and let me know or even ask permission. But often, they wouldn’t. And they almost never let me know when they decided to stop broadcasting the show. So periodically, I would have to scour the schedules of stations and do online searches to determine when and where the show was being broadcast. This was never a high priority activity for me, so I think my list was almost always out of date. In any case, a few years in, the number of stations carrying it every week seemed to stabilize at between 8 and 12 at any given time, though exactly which stations would shift. And other stations would occasionally use individual episodes. In my experience, it was stations in mid-sized cities that were most likely to consistently carry the show. My guess is that the stations in the largest cities always had far more people who wanted to make content locally than they had slots to fill. And some stations in smaller communities definitely carried it, but that was less predictable – probably a product of the politics of whoever at that station made programming decisions.

My sense is that the largest chunk of the listenership of the show came through its presence on community radio stations, particularly its consistent presence over many years in cities like Halifax, Hamilton, Winnipeg, and others. But because most community stations have no solid numbers for their listenership, I was never able to give people who inquired a good number for my own likely audience.

Rabble.ca / The Media Co-op / Podcasting – Distribution of the show to listeners online went through several phases. I will forego the details, but I was not always happy with the role that Rabble.ca played in that process in earlier years, and in retrospect I wish I had taken responsibility earlier for distribution to podcasting platforms. But, nonetheless, in the later years of the show’s relationship with Rabble.ca and then after it switched to The Media Co-op at the beginning of 2021, things worked more or less the same – I would upload the show to whichever of those sites was carrying it at the time, and some listeners would find it there, and I would upload it to SoundCloud, which would then be the source for platforms like iTunes, Stitcher, Tune-in, and so on.

As far as I can tell, most audio that is distributed online these days primarily reaches listeners through podcasting infrastructure. That includes show notes of some kind, though usually they are quite limited – the necessary production info and enough about that week’s episode to hook listener interest. Because, throughout its run, Talking Radical Radio also circulated as a post on a left news site, it was always accompanied by a somewhat more elaborate write-up. That generally looked like a modified version of the text for the show-specific introduction that began each episode, but the nature of the modification to turn it into a post shifted substantially over the years. I was happiest with the approach I arrived at in the final year and a half of the show, though it did take quite a bit longer each week to write. In that final period, I would extract good quotes from the interview as I was doing the editing, and then on the day that I posted the show, I would use those quotes to turn the intro text into a full interview-style article. This seemed like a good way to make the interview useful to people who don’t like consuming audio content.

Circulating it this way also meant that I had to have an image to include with the show. Things got substantially tighter in terms of observing copyright restrictions over the run of the show. Occasionally I could use a photo I had taken myself, but usually I would search online for some relevant image licensed for free use, or I would identify an image on the social media or website of the group featured in the episode and ask their permission to use it. I would then need to produce several versions of the image with different dimensions and with or without added text, for use in different contexts.

YouTube – For several years, I posted the show to YouTube as well. I know some podcasts do this by posting video footage of the interview, but I just used the image for that week’s episode with the audio over top. This was never a major way that people listened, and because of some technical challenges I was having, I dropped it in the final couple of years.

Posting Routine – My routine for posting involved putting the episode up on Dropbox on Sunday night, which functioned as my deadline each week. A number of stations downloaded the show from Dropbox beyond the initial two. Another radio station wanted me to upload it to a specific Google Drive folder, which I also did on Sunday nights. Then on Tuesday mornings, I would adapt the intro to a post, put the show up on The Media Co-op, and upload it to SoundCloud (the source, as I said, for the podcast platforms, as well as for several radio stations), YouTube, Radio4All, and Earshot.

Promotion

I’m not sure I ever really figured out the optimal way to promote the show. I suppose – and I am saying this while rolling my eyes – I could have grown my social media reach by getting into meaningless high-profile disputes on Twitter, and I certainly could have done a better job of networking with other people doing grassroots media work in so-called Canada, but neither of those particularly play to my strengths. In any case, most of my promotion involved a fairly basic social media routine.

Each week, I would post the episode a few times each to my personal Twitter account, the show’s Twitter account, and (in the last couple of years) The Media Co-op‘s Twitter account. I would post it once each week to my personal Facebook page, my author page on Facebook, and the show’s Facebook page. For a long time now, organic reach on Facebook – for anything, but seemingly particularly for left-leaning grassroots media – is basically zero unless you pay to promote it, so each week I would put a few dollars into doing so for the post on the show’s page. As much as I resented giving Mark Zuckerberg my money, this did get it in front of eyeballs and helped to gradually build the following of the page. Even this became less useful when Facebook stopped allowing you to target content to people with political interests consistent with that content. And there was sometimes a high density of obnoxious right-wing reactions and comments, though it did help after someone let me know that for Facebook pages you can set up a list of words whose presence triggers the comment to be hidden. If you pick a list of common words, basically everything is hidden automatically.

I would also post it each week on the show’s page on Instagram. And I maintained an email list of supporters, whom I sent the link each Tuesday. My sense is that it is a good practice to funnel people from social media to your email list, because email is not subject to the arbitrary tyranny of social media algorithms, but this was a slow and highly uneven process.

Mistakes

During the run of the show, the most anxious time for me in any given week was right before and after that week’s episode was publically posted – those hours were my final opportunity to catch any errors I had made and the time when, if I didn’t catch them, other people would bring them to my attention. I was, I think, pretty diligent in trying to make sure I didn’t make mistakes. But no matter how extravagant your precautions, you are still going to screw up. It didn’t happen often, but there were still times when I managed to mispronounce or misspell names, get basic facts wrong, and in one mortifying instance misgender someone in about the most jarring way possible. As well, there were also times when the show write-up was fine when it left my hands but an error was introduced by my editor at the main online venue then hosting the show, including one memorable and horrifying instance when they managed to reverse the meaning of my words into something that was blatantly anti-Indigenous. In all of these situations, once you notice the problem or someone points it out to you, there is nothing to be done but apologize genuinely and unreservedly, and then fix it as soon as you can.

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Political Reflections

Any time you act in the world it can be a form of research, if you pay the right kind of attention. And experience of all sorts can be an important starting point for thinking and theorizing the world. I am writing this too soon after the end of Talking Radical Radio for that decade of experiences to have undergone the necessary metaphorical composting (or, more optimistically, alchemy) to have turned into anything very profound, and I haven’t done the kinds of additional reading and research required to give any of this much in the way of rigour or reach. Nonetheless, making a radio show involves a lot of time sitting quietly on your own and engaging in very repetitive tasks with nothing else to do but think, so there are a few observations and reflections that emerged from that work and from the contemplation I’ve done since. These are somewhat random and far from exhaustive and I’m not sure how useful anyone else will find them, but I will share them nonetheless.

For and about movements

When I decided to write this document, I had vague thoughts about this perhaps being an opportunity to use my ten years of doing interviews with activists and organizers to derive some insights that are directly about and applicable to movements. These, I imagined, would be things that movements could take up to inform their work. They might be of the form “There are problems with X way of doing things” or “Hey, there’s this big issue Y that we don’t talk about enough” or “Tactic/practice A in contexts like B is preferable to tactic/practice C,” or even just “Question D is important, and here and a bunch of considerations related to it.” And in principle, I still think that’s possible – to treat these 510 interviews as a sort of qualitative data set, and listen to them in a way that is oriented towards extracting that kind of insight. But it did not take much reflection for me to decide that I do not feel well positioned to do that, for a number of reasons.

Partly, I’m too close to the work, and will be for some time. I think a bit more distance, a bit more opportunity to process it all, would be necessary before I could usefully do anything like that.

Partly, it’s because I think doing it well would require an investment of effort that I’m not willing to make. It would be very easy to approach doing this in a way that just cherry-picked stories and examples to confirm the ideas I already hold, and I don’t see much point in that. I think doing it well would require me, first of all, to spend a lot of time thinking about how exactly to approach the work – that is, how to listen to these interviews with that objective in mind, which is quite different than listening to them with the goal of making a good radio show. And then there would be many, many hours spent re-listening to interviews as well as re-reading transcripts, extracting themes and quotes, and all of that. And I just don’t want to do that.

And partly, it’s because I am very conscious – I think in part precisely because of my work on Talking Radical Radio, actually – of the fairly widespread tendency towards a kind of ungrounded pontificating on the left about what ‘we’ (whoever that might be) should do, in a way that is detached from the actual material questions facing people on the ground. Not that offering opinions about how movement should do things is inherently bad, and not that I have never done so myself. But the way that lots of us do so is pretty unhelpful, which pushes me to be even more cautious about how I do it.

I happened to read Homage to Catalonia,George Orwell’s memoir of his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, while I was writing this document, and his account of the left press of the 1930s shows that this is nothing new. I observed a different sort of ungroundedness when I was first politicizing in the 1990s and encountered dense analytical pieces by socialist academics that read as if they were engaged in debates about strategy in party newspapers in early 20th century Germany, with little care for how material conditions and the state of struggle in 1995 Ontario made what they were saying pretty much irrelevant. And these days, we have a media ecosystem that incentivizes hot-take commentary, and that shapes what those of us on the left do no less than anyone else. There are countless examples, ranging from the most casual of social media posts to much more carefully crafted analyses, of left opining about what some group or the generic ‘we’ should be doing that are just so obviously disconnected from the circumstances in which real people are making real decisions. I remember being particularly struck during the far-right-led convoy occupation in Ottawa in 2022 by all of the unhelpful pontificating coming from people (mostly men, I think) on the left who were not based in Ottawa about what the locals there should and shouldn’t be doing to oppose the convoy, usually delivered in ways that were not only clearly detached from the everyday realities that people were facing in Ottawa in that moment, but that usually showed no interest in thinking about what the pontificator himself should be doing to oppose the far right where he lived based on the lessons that could be learned from listening to what people were actually doing in Ottawa.

So while there probably are things I could say for and about movements based on my time working on Talking Radical Radio, I don’t think the ways that I could say them at this juncture would be principled or useful.


Both/and

Like most people on the left, I have had moments over the years of falling into casual sectarianism or just being plain ol’ politically judgey – particularly, I suspect, when I was newly politicized, and also sometimes when pints of beer with other leftist/radical/activist mostly-men were involved, but not only then. Still, on the whole, my baseline inclination has much more often been to reject that sort of thing, and to orient myself towards what you might describe as a both/and approach to movements rather than an either/or approach. By “both/and,” I mean a rejection of the idea that there is always some singular correct line or action in any given moment that you can find through analysis and debate, and a recognition that not only is it inevitable that different people and groups are going to come to different conclusions about how to act, it’s actually a good thing for movements.

I’m not sure to what extent my affinity for both/and can be attributed to temperament, and to what extent it is about having the right kinds of early encounters to both push me out of my own certainties and to demonstrate examples of behaviour in movement spaces that I definitely did not want to emulate, but it is something I already had by the time I started to work on the show. Even so, spending so much time listening deeply to the words of people engaged in a wide range of grassroots activities informed by so many different politics only reinforced it. The practical work of conducting an interview and turning it into a finished radio show meant listening to their words multiple times, including slowly and repeatedly in a fine-grained way during the editing proper. And the need to both write a suitable introduction and the imperative to not just make a show but make a good show pushed me to really think about those words and to take them seriously. That didn’t mean that I never had critical thoughts about the work and choices of the people I interviewed – I didn’t generally share them, but of course I had them. There were certainly instances where, by the day the episode was released, I knew exactly how I would argue against some element of the interviewee’s activities if someone in a group that I was part of suggested that we do something similar. There were even a few times where I was a little embarrassed by the worry that doing a show on a given group might be perceived as stronger endorsement for their politics than I actually felt. Nonetheless, even in those situations, and certainly in the case of the vast majority of episodes where I felt no such thing, the kind of attention that the work of the show forced me to give to such a breadth of ideas made me appreciate even more deeply than I did already the value in a wide range of approaches to grassroots political work.

And, sure, I have heard over the years the critique of a both/and orientation that boils down to accusing it of being mushy and unstrategic, and I get where that is coming from. But it seems to me that the kind of openness required by a both/and orientation to movement politics actually points towards a better and more materialist way of assessing your options in a given context – you are not just dismissing a given approach out of hand based on pre-existing certainty, but are able to be both generous and critical in assessing what the various alternatives would do and what kind of synthesis beyond your own comfort zone might be possible. As well, while we will always face circumstances that require us to make a definite decision about our own actions, we much more often encounter grassroots politics that differ from our own when we are observing what other people in other contexts are doing. And I think we will learn more in such circumstances if we approach them with open curiosity rather than with sectarian dismissal.

Listen to the less radical

Part of the premise of Talking Radical Radio was that there is value to listening to people talk about the grassroots political work that they do across various kinds of difference – in movement, in experience, in politics, in place, and so on. There is a lot that I could say about why I think that is important, and about the quite different ways that it works in different contexts and directions. Here, though, I particularly want to highlight the value I see in people listening to activists, organizers, and other people involved in grassroots political work whom they consider to be less radical than themselves. (I think the opposite – i.e. listening to people we consider to be in some sense more radical than ourselves – is even more important, but the reasoning for that feels obvious, so I’m not going to bother exploring it.)

I don’t really care what the specific content of “more radical” and “less radical” might be in any particular instance. I’m not even interested in establishing whether it is ever a useful rubric for thinking about differences in politics – I think it can be, though often it isn’t, but it doesn’t really matter for what I’m saying here. What matters is not whether it is valid, just that it is commonly used. Lots of people on the left will rhetorically identify a difference between their own politics and someone else’s using some version of “less radical” vs. “more radical”, and use that to mark themselves as politically more sound. Probably the most common way of doing this is to dismiss someone else as a “liberal,” but there is lots of other language used to make essentially the same rhetorical move. It can be a thin mask for sectarianism based on tiny differences or it can be a genuine recognition of a real gap between politics committed to working within the liberal political order versus organizing to overthrow it.

The point I want to make is that however substantive the difference or hand-wavey the rhetorical gesture, I think there is still often a lot to learn from people who are (in whatever sense) “less radical” than you think you are. Even if that categorization is substantive and relevant, it often encompasses people who face things you don’t, people who have developed knowledge or expertise that you haven’t, or even just people who have good-faith critiques of things you consider to be self-evident. In making the show (and, honestly, in lots of other contexts) I have learned a lot from people in all of those categories whom I could easily have not listened to because they were “liberals” or otherwise failed to meet some sort of political standard. That’s not to say that you have to pay any attention to people who dehumanize you (or anyone else), and it’s definitely not saying you should give up the transformative character of your politics, but there are still often things to be learned.

Amplifying the voices of people who have done harm

The work of Talking Radical Radio involved amplifying the voices of people in movements. Like people in every context, sometimes people who are involved in movements and communities-in-struggle do harm, even quite significant harm, including to the movements they are a part of and to other people in those movements and in broader communities. This is inevitable, and it is an ongoing process for people in movements to figure out how to respond when harm happens. Given the scope of the show, often I was interviewing people based in contexts that not only was I not a part of myself but that I was very distant from. So even the kind of imperfect and sometimes problematic but nonetheless very important whisper networks that might let you know that a person you’ve never met directly in your own community is someone you might want to stay away from would have no chance of reaching me.

With that in mind, I can think of at least two or three instances where I later learned that someone I had as a guest on the show had done significant harm in movement contexts. In at least one, the harm had happened before I interviewed him but I only learned about it later, and in the other two they caused this harm after we talked. (And, no, I will not be going into any more detail than that.) No doubt there are others as well that I haven’t heard about, and won’t.

I’m not sure I have a clear lesson that I can draw from this. Certainly I don’t think there is anything that I could have done to avoid it – I did my best to trust my instincts and avoid interviewing groups or people who gave off obvious signs of being politically toxic, but especially when you are not in the same community (and even when you are) there is no magical way to know for sure. An important lesson from transformative justice activists and abolitionists is that we are all capable of doing harm. I suppose the observation here is just a reinforcement of that very common piece of wisdom – that even people who are (or who appear to be) doing good, radical political work can sometimes also do toxic, harmful things, and our ways of working in movements and our ways of engaging with material produced about movements should keep that in mind even when no instances of it are immediately evident.

Individual or collective

Like I said above, Talking Radical Radio was, from beginning to end, a one-person project. Each episode was in a sense a collaboration with whoever was interviewed, and there was an element of (fairly minimal) editorial attention to the show write-ups from specific people at first Rabble.ca and then The Media Co-op. It was also integrated into the social flow of doing in the same way that everything is, in that it depended on the labour of those who created the infrastructure that made it possible, from the coders who created the podcasting platforms, to the program managers at community radio stations, and all the rest. There was even one young interview participant in the early years who expressed interest in becoming involved in the show, but then, when I offered very cautious openness to exploring what might be possible, he silently faded away. But, basically, it was just me at the heart of things.

Along the way, I would occasionally ask myself whether this was a good thing or not. We live in an era in which the social atomization inherent to capitalism is being taken to ever-greater extremes, and I believe that the single most important thing that we can do as we act in the world is to counter this neoliberal erosion, not necessarily through adopting any particular tactics or social forms, but rather through doing whatever we do to with other people. That’s not always easy – our lives are often organized in ways that make this difficult, and I hate meetings as much as the next person, maybe more. But I think it’s essential. So, given that, perhaps it would have been better to start Talking Radical Radio not as a me-only thing, but as a collective effort.

In addition, when I started thinking very seriously in mid-2022 about moving on from the show, it occurred to me that it would have been easier to do if I was just one person in a collective. After all, when a project is based on the work of multiple people, then any one of them can move on without the project ending. I even spent some time contemplating a range of scenarios that might have allowed me to turn it into a collective project at that late point, though none of those were even remotely practical.

However, despite the fact that there are good political and practical arguments for why approaching the show in a collective way might have been better, my honest assessment is that if I had tried to start it as a collective project, there is a good chance that it either would never have happened at all or it would have ended much sooner. Talking Radical Radio happened in part because economic and other forms of privilege give me a bit more breathing room than a lot of people when it comes to the imperatives of the capitalist market, and in part because I see making grassroots media as a politically important and personally satisfying way to spend my time. All of those things are rarer than they were in, say, the 1990s. In general, it is harder to make a living than it used to be. As well, people in and around social movements seem less interested in using their time to make media than was true 30 years ago. Even in grassroots media projects that are able to pay relatively well for, say, an individual piece of writing, it can be a struggle these days to find people who want to do it. So I’m not convinced that a collective, time-intensive, shoe-string media project, even if it got off the ground initially, could have made it to ten years, unless it somehow managed to find substantial funding – which it would not have.

Grassroots media

I could go on at great length about the grassroots media environment in so-called Canada over the ten years of the show, but I will try to restrain myself. (I encourage people to check out the final episode, which featured an interview with three long-time media activists who made similar points to what I say below plus many others.)

The main idea that I want to convey is an endorsement of making (and consuming) media that, at least to an extent, deliberately refuses to do what is optimal or expected given the constraints of the currently dominant media environment.

Any media-making that you do is going to be in an environment defined by institutions that you don’t control, whether you are writing for your high school paper or the New York Times, whether you are churning out blog posts or making a podcast, or whatever else. Even if you are just writing random reflections on your own and publishing them on a website, or if you are part of the group guiding some collective but autonomous online or print publication, you are still to a great extent at the mercy of privately owned, for-profit social media platforms when it comes to building an audience. And regardless of the medium you are working in or the immediate organizational form in which you are doing it, you are going to be faced with audience expectations and consumption practices that have been socially produced as part of the overall media environment.

All of which means that regardless of the specifics of your media-making, there is an extent to which you have to tailor what you do to the requirements of the institutional environment. That might mean, for instance, being guided by the Times‘ institutional definition of what counts as newsworthy and their particular way of defining ‘balance’, or it might mean being attentive to what the algorithm of your social media platform of choice amplifies or constricts. You can’t escape the need to cater to those requirements, at least to an extent. But what I’m suggesting is that it is worth pushing back against them, or just plain ignoring them, at least some of the time, particularly when it means you can make something useful that would otherwise not be possible. So, for instance, that might mean outright rejecting the way that the Times classifies some important story as not newsworthy and deciding to write for another outlet instead, or it might mean sticking around there and finding smaller ways to push boundaries. Or it might mean making a particular kind of YouTube video that isn’t what the algorithm likes even though it’ll get you fewer views and make you less money, because it communicates something you think is important or experiments with the form in some interesting way.

I didn’t set out to do this deliberately with Talking Radical Radio, but there are a number of key ways in which it is what I ended up doing – and once I realized this, I stuck with it.

I think where the show fit best was on community radio stations. The commitment to weekly, year-round original episodes with very few re-runs, the format and sensibility, the consistent quality, and the breadth of what it covered worked well for community radio. And while, as I mentioned, there were factors that limited the show’s spread in this context, it found and held a consistent niche.

On the other hand, I made choices that did not fit as well with the requirements of a podcast or online-distributed show. In some cases, adapting to these requirements would have necessitated me making a fundamentally different show. In other cases, that would not necessarily have been the case, but it could well have made the work less sustainable for me and driven me away from making the show much sooner.

Breadth – In contrast with 20th century broadcast media, which generally succeeded by constructing as broad an audience as possible for any given piece of content, development of a consistent audience in the 21st century online environment often benefits from having a narrow focus – you do a specific thing consistently and in an interesting way, and it attracts a narrow but enthusiastic slice of the online attention economy. Any kind of weird or specialized or niche interest you can dream up probably already has online media devoted to it. And while I certainly wouldn’t dispute the fact that Talking Radical Radio was niche in its own way, it was also oriented towards breadth rather than focus in its content. If, say, you have one episode about Indigenous language learning, the next about prison abolition struggles, the next about feminism in the labour movement, and the next about the slow grind of faith-based anti-poverty work in a small city, there certainly is a population of people who will want to listen to all four, but there are plenty more who might stumble across one, listen, like it, but then not take any steps to stay connected to the show because a lot of the other topics just don’t interest them.

Timeliness – The online attention economy has its own rhythm. As much as it caters to niche interests, it also regularly sweeps segments of the online population of varying sizes towards paying attention to the same thing, at least for a week or a day or an hour. This might be the latest antics of a president in the country to the south of us, it might be an awards show, it might be a wave of Indigenous-led blockades across the country, it might be a violent police action to clear a homeless encampment out of a city park. If you depend on social media to drive people to your content, catering to this dynamic can really benefit you – that is, working hard to latch onto the fickle waves of the attention economy and ride them. While Talking Radical Radio did sometimes do quite timely episodes, often it didn’t. The fairly long and extremely grassroots production process just made it practically impossible to do it consistently. And, frankly, it wasn’t the point of the show. I was much more interested in telling thoughtful, politically interesting stories regardless of their relationship to whatever was gripping the internet in that moment, including stories that would likely never be the focus of mass attention on social media.

Movement journalism vs. op/eds – It would be very easy to put this one too starkly, or to exaggerate it for rhetorical effect, and I’ll try to avoid that. But (as was also observed in the interview in the final episode), a lot of left-ish media outlets are more likely to publish op/eds (read: hot takes) on the high-profile issues-of-the-day, often written by someone with some level of name recognition on the left, than they are to publish movement journalism. Partly, they do this because the former is quicker and easier to produce than the latter. And partly, they do it because the former gets consumed and circulated more than the latter. Talking Radical Radio wasn’t quite movement journalism in a classic sense, in that it wasn’t multiple voices from multiple perspectives integrated into a journalistic whole, but it was long-form attention to a single movement-based voice (or two or three grounded in the same context), so in spirit and sensibility it was on the movement journalism side of the spectrum.

Long form – This is a somewhat trickier one. In a way, it is related to the last item – the kinds of op/ed content that circulates farther and faster also does so because it tends to be quicker and easier to consume than movement journalism or longer-form analysis. But plenty of high-profile podcasts have episodes that are longer than Talking Radical Radio‘s 28 minutes, and you can find video essays on YouTube that are longer and that get huge numbers of views. Some of this is just because none of the things I’m saying here are absolute. Some of it is because of a specific choice on YouTube’s part about how to use its algorithm to maximize time spent on the platform. But I think some of it also makes more sense when you understand that this is not just about length of time to consume in a direct sense, but also about the sensibility of the piece in question. Some popular podcasts, for example, may be quite long in terms of number of minutes from start to end, but will arrange themselves internally to reproduce the rhythm of short, snappy, variegated content. In that sense, Talking Radical and its commitment to a fairly slow and thoughtful engagement with a single topic over 28 minutes was long-form.

Neoliberal maker culture – There are a variety of other things that the tyranny of the algorithm has made integral to the neoliberal culture of online content creators that I just couldn’t be bothered with. I didn’t organize my presence in the show and on social media around an effort to cultivate a parasocial relationship with listeners. I am not someone who likes to engage in conversation with strangers on social media, so I just ignored the common piece of wisdom that generous engagement with comments/responses on your social media page increases visibility and followers – like I said, once I discovered how to automatically hide comments on the show’s Facebook page, I did so with enthusiasm and relief. And I made little effort more generally to adapt the show itself or my show-related presence on social media to the ever-changing demands of the algorithm.

Not all of the above were good choices. In particular, it would have been useful if I could have done more in terms of engagement with comments and staying current with best practices in online neoliberal maker culture. I chose not to do those things because I knew that I would hate doing them, and if I forced myself, I would have made my work on the show less sustainable. But making a show that was long-form movement journalism, broad in focus rather than narrow, and oriented towards stories and struggle that we usually hear little about rather than whatever happened to be centred by the attention economy in a given moment, was deliberate and, I think, a politically sound choice. While it meant that what I made was not as well suited as it could have been to the online media environment, it also meant that I was making something that, at least in my analysis, was both distinct and politically useful.

I’m not arguing that we should refuse to pay any attention whatsoever to the constraints of the media environments in which we are operating – obviously we can’t do that. But I think we need more grassroots media on the left that deliberately flouts at least elements of what the current media environment favours. And we need to cultivate independent grassroots media and social media infrastructures that operate differently than their mainstream counterparts, as well as media consumption practices among movements and their supporters that enable this refusal and subversion of a dominant media environment that doesn’t serve our movements. If I could have one wish, it would be that more people would make, more outlets would publish, more people would consume and circulate movement journalism, particularly in its longer forms.

Posted in Other Writing by Scott, Project Update, Radio | Tagged | Comments Off on Reflections based on 10 years of Talking Radical Radio

Radio: The future of grassroots media in Canada

Saima Desai, Dave Gray-Donald, and Sharmeen Khan have all been active in grassroots media for a long time – mostly in projects towards the more activist and movement-grounded end of the sector. Scott Neigh interviews them about their work, about the current state of grassroots media in so-called Canada, and about their vision for what we need to be doing to strengthen both media and movements oriented towards justice and collective liberation.

Desai currently lives in the Dish With One Spoon Territory, in Toronto. She was radicalized through her involvement in media as a student at McGill University in Montreal, where she wrote for The McGill Daily. She has spent most of the last five years living in Regina, on Treaty Four Territory, as the editor of the movement magazine Briarpatch, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. She is currently on a one-year leave from that position. Her ongoing commitment to grassroots media is, she said, “Because of what it brought to me and the way that it changed how I understand the world, and that really deep seated understanding that it can do that for other people as well.”

Gray-Donald got his start in grassroots media when, as a climate justice activist in Montreal, he noticed that English-language media in particular was doing a lousy job of covering climate struggles, so he picked up a pen and started writing. Along with ongoing journalistic work, he has also been quite involved in “the more manage-y side [or] business side” of media-making. He is a former publisher of Briarpatch, a board member and volunteer editor at The Media Co-op, and most recently is centrally involved in The Grind, a new free magazine in Toronto.

Khan’s radicalization also occurred in part through her involvement in grassroots media, which started when she was a teenager in Regina in the 1990s. She wrote for a publication called Prairie Dog, served on the board of Briarpatch, and for many years was extensively involved in the community radio sector. When she first got active, she said, “I think what was important was the more anti-racist and feminist entry point into media, which was around representation and voice, and being able to articulate not only lived experience of, you know, racism and sexism and other forms of oppression in the prairies, but just getting the confidence and getting really important skills that I use to this day. Even activist media, grassroots media was quite white and male. It was very, very hard for a young woman of colour to get access to any forms of media, including alternative, grassroots media. And I just fell in love with it.”

These days, Khan lives in Toronto. Her involvement in radical organizing and in media work have taken lots of different forms, but her central media involvement since its founding in 2005 has been as an editorial collective member for Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action, which is a non-academic but intellectually rigorous movement-based print publication that offers a pluralist, nonsectarian space to think through theoretical and strategic questions of relevance to organizing. Khan sees an important role for “grassroots theory” – that is, developing our capacities for “being able to talk about the world we want” and “being able to figure out how power operates in our lives” in non-academic, accessible ways – in struggles for social transformation.

The grassroots media landscape in so-called Canada has changed profoundly over the last few decades. Khan said that “grassroots media is not as powerful as it used to be” and identified the 1990s as a sort of “peak” for its scope, reach, and relationships with movements. Desai agreed that when she first started working at Briarpatch things seemed to be in a serious “lull” across the country, and there were a number of other older publications that were in rough shape. However, since then, she said, “There has been this small flourishing of new projects like The Hoser and The Grind and Passage, The Maple, Midnight Sun. And so it feels like there’s more of us once more.”

Along with perennial problems that all media organizations and social movements in Canada face – the challenge of raising funds and securing other kinds of resources, the difficult logistics of the country’s geography and population distribution, and so on – the three also identify a number of interrelated changes in dominant media, in information technology, in movements, and in grassroots media organizations themselves that are important for understanding the current state of things.

Khan said that one crucial factor is that “the trajectory of activist media is [only] as strong as our social movements across the country. And right now, I feel like [left movements] are in a bit of a low point.” With movements at a low ebb, it is hardly surprising that grassroots media is as well.

Desai identified aspects of powerful mainstream institutions as having downstream impacts on grassroots media. In recent research on the topic, for instance, she discovered that there are currently 11 public relations, marketing, or advertising people for every journalist in the Canadian context, “so as journalists, we’re just vastly, vastly outnumbered by people who are intent on getting governments’ and corporations’ and institutions’ perspectives out there.” As well, she said that corporate media is facing stark challenges related to declining revenues. As a result, they are doing things to try and bring in more money – everything from experiments with increasingly restrictive paywalls, to buying up local papers and pumping them full of national news and ads rather than more expensive local content. All of these things are “pissing their audiences off” and as a result “trust in media is really, really declining.” While this may offer some opportunities for grassroots media, it is also “bad for grassroots media, because when trust in media declines, it hurts all kinds of media.”

The three also say that there has been a shift among some people who participate in or support social movements in their orientation towards grassroots media. On one level, such people seem more likely to consume and circulate corporate media than in the past, and less likely to seek out and amplify grassroots sources. Khan said, “I am finding that there isn’t [as] much support from our base as before.”

Beyond that, people in and around social movements are, today, less likely to make media themselves. In the 1990s, Khan said, from both movements and from grassroots media projects, “There was an emphasis on building an army of activist journalists, really sharing those skills, so that many people could participate. But I’m finding right now that a lot of activists … would rather just consume – read news however they get their news and not really participate in that process.” She added, “It’s a constant struggle for my project to get to get activists and organizers and revolutionaries to write. The interest in actually producing media has waned.”

And when activists do make things to put out into the world, “they are also producing more corporate media or on corporate social media channels,” Gray-Donald said. Even as recently as five or ten years ago, it was pretty common for activist media outlets to publish reports on protests and other actions that had been written by activists themselves, but that rarely happens these days. More often, activists either post to corporate social media platforms or write media releases to send to corporate outlets. Some of this shift can be explained by the overwhelming role now played by corporate social media in our information ecosystems. After all, at least sometimes they can provide opportunities even for relatively radical material to spread far and fast – so, Gray-Donald said, “of course you’re going to do that.” But as a result, “that sort of activist production of media went away” and “these corporate platforms, and also corporate media itself” have become more “dominant,” even in left and progressive contexts. He said, “I’m trying to understand exactly why. And part of it, I think, is we didn’t keep our tools and our organizations really strong.”

Changes in how grassroots media projects operate are also part of this. Among the newer outlets, Desai said, “Some … are written by a very small number of people who sometimes have some professional journalism training or see themselves as journalists, and are not made in the way that some of the older activist media was made by just going out there and trying to convince activists to consider themselves as writers or to write down stuff that they knew and had seen.”

Gray-Donald agrees that there is a “new level of professionalization of indie media.” That certainly has positive aspects – for instance, projects he is involved in and others are “trying to pay writers well, have good labour standards, all of that kind of thing. But it does lead to … a difference, where activists don’t see themselves as writers. There’s like a professional sort of sector that does that. And that’s different. That’s new. That’s something else.”

At least some grassroots outlets have responded to the dominance of corporate social media and other pressures by prioritizing different forms of content and understanding their role with respect to struggle in new ways. For instance, according to Desai, while they also publish some investigative pieces, some of the newer outlets “are very focused on publishing opinion pieces and these sort of timely interventions into conversations that mainstream media is having. While there is some utility to that, we are also losing this ability to do … movement journalism and reporting.”

This connects, Gray-Donald said, to a tendency in some left and progressive contexts to relate to struggles for change as a “comms battle – that everything just happens in the media and it’s about winning the media battle and the media narrative. And that’s not actually how things change. It’s a part of it, and media is certainly important.” But a change in media narrative alone, or even a major shift in something like media ownership, “doesn’t fundamentally shift labour relations under capitalism, doesn’t fundamentally shift colonialism. And there is a bit of a lull in organizing in Canda, and I think sometimes we substitute sending out a tweet that goes viral, or doing a publication, for organizing.”

Khan is not a huge fan of the extensive emphasis on publishing opinion pieces either, but recognized that part of why so many are published is that they are “very popular” and often circulate farther and faster than journalistic pieces or longer-form analysis. And she sees value in opinion writing too. It “helps movements grow” because “being able to articulate your politics and the world you’re fighting for is central to revolutionary changes – [and] being able to explain power and oppression, like systems that capitalist and colonial powers try to hide every day through mainstream media.”

The three see no simple answers to any of this. The current circumstances are a “challenge,” Khan said, but it is just a matter of figuring out how to respond. This is the latest version of the ever-present need for grassroots media to “reflect” and “change” with respect to their “basis of unity” and their “goals”, and to think about “technology” and about “how relevant they are in relation to different social movements.”

Desai said that she is “torn between producing the kind of media that people consume in the greatest volume and that’s easiest to consume – the stuff that’s really shareable on social media, that’s broken down into bite sized pieces, and that’s likely to reach people who have not already been reached by our publications and perhaps changed their minds – versus producing the kind of media that I personally love to produce and read, but understand is sometimes difficult and time consuming to read. I think it’s awesome to try and reach people where they’re at, but I also think that we are perhaps sacrificing something really important when we lean all the way into that way of making media.” She continued, “I’ve learned the most from articles that are really long and in-depth. I really enjoy reading them. They’re the ones where they’re most likely sometimes to change my mind because they go in depth and get specific enough that I feel like they’re properly substantiated.”

According to Khan, Upping the Anti, which is an outlet focused on pieces that are longer and often more challenging to write and to read, has also been making some adaptations in this direction. This includes experimenting with new and more accessible forms, like political comics, and developing practices for making better use of social media in relation to the kinds of things they publish.

The key might be to find ways to adapt to the current context without de-centering organizing, movement journalism, longer forms, or challenging ideas. Gray-Donald said that publications like Briarpatch and Upping the Anti “are really important because they do talk about organizing in a way that some of the more clickbaity media doesn’t.” This includes an emphasis on publishing content that actually talks about movements and how they work, and content that reports on the actual material realities of how struggles are playing out on the ground. Both the work of investigating for and writing such pieces, and also the experience of reading them, can be important in building public understanding of issues, in letting people know how they can become active, in communicating how movements actually work in practice, and in building relevant skills. Gray-Donald said that there is “a critical need for showing how movements happen, what is happening, how to get involved, all those kinds of things.”

At heart, Khan said, it is crucial that grassroots media projects “not act like we’re separate from social movements. So let activists know that we’re resources for them – not only to, like, read about different social movements, but also explore and gain skills and be able to write, think, research. … I feel like the skills they get from being able to write articles go back into their organizations.”

Part of this might involve a return by grassroots media outlets to a greater emphasis on building media skills among movement participants who have no desire to become media professionals but who have important experiences and ideas to share, as well as other efforts at building relationships with movement organizations.

Desai also identified a number of possible approaches that grassroots media-makers in Canada are only beginning to explore, including using print as a way to push back against the fragmentation of attention by the online information economy, nascent efforts among existing grassroots projects to support each other, and a renewed focus on local rather than national outlets.

She said, “Where media is really atrophying and people are really being left behind with very little information is in smaller localities. And it’s just providing people with less and less information about what’s going on in their communities. And I think that that kind of media, which returns our focus to what’s going on in our communities, is a good way to use media to help people learn to organize. Because that’s where you start organizing.”

A lot, of course, comes back to the age-old question of resources. Gray-Donald said, “If you’ve been on the fence about whether to support … indie media [through a donation], definitely go ahead. This media’s only going to exist with the support of readers, of listeners.”

And despite the challenges, Desai definitely sees some opportunities. While the overall loss of trust in media can be a problem for grassroots outlets, “I think it also provides a bit of an opening for us to say, yeah, you are right to be pissed off and distrustful of the media that is full of ads for real estate companies, and reports only from the perspective of your boss and only from the perspective of the cops. So I think there’s something there that grassroots media can tap into amid growing distrust of corporate media.”

This episode concludes Talking Radical Radio’s ten-year weekly run – read more here!

Talking Radical Radio brings you grassroots voices from across Canada, giving you the chance to hear many different people that are facing many different struggles talk about what they do, why they do it, and how they do it, in the belief that such listening is a crucial step in strengthening all of our efforts to change the world. To learn more about the show check out our website here. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or contact [email protected] to join our weekly email update list.

Talking Radical Radio is brought to you by Scott Neigh, a writer, media producer, and activist based in Hamilton Ontario, and the author of two books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists. In the spirit of full disclosure relevant to this episode, he is also a board member and volunteer editor with The Media Co-op and an advisory board member for Upping the Anti.

Image: Photo by Scott Neigh.

Theme music: “It Is the Hour (Get Up)” by Snowflake, via CCMixter

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Radio: Injured workers fighting for compensation and care

Eugene Lefrancois, Steve Mantis, and Janet Paterson are injured workers living in Thunder Bay, Ontario, on the north shore of Lake Superior. Lefrancois is the president of the Thunder Bay and District Injured Workers Support Group, while Mantis is that group’s treasurer. And Paterson is the president of the Ontario Network of Injured Workers Groups. Scott Neigh interviewed them about the issues faced by injured workers in Ontario, and about their involvement in peer support, public education, and advocacy.

Ontario’s first law related to the compensation of workers injured on the job passed in 1886, though it still left the process largely in the hands of the courts. As industrialization and therefore the number of accidents grew, as juries increasingly held employers responsible for injuries, and as the labour movement organized around the issue, the groundwork was laid for a more substantial change. The 1914 reforms, based on an inquiry by Chief Justice of Ontario, Sir William Meredith, saw workers give up their right to sue in return for an administrative, no-fault system paid by employers that was, at least in theory, supposed to ensure speedy and reliable payments for as long as an injured worker was disabled. Today, that system is called the Workplace Safety Insurance Board (WSIB), though for many years it was the Workers Compensation Board.

While in many ways a gain for workers, the system since the changes in 1914 has – as one might predict – served as a new terrain for the struggle between workers and employers, rather than ending it. In broad strokes, employers and their political representatives have done whatever they can over the years to minimize costs and therefore the supports that the system provides, even when that harms working people, and workers have done their best to push for improvements in the system.

The Thunder Bay Injured Workers Support Group was founded in 1984, in the context of one iteration of that ongoing struggle. The Conservative government of the day was attempting to pass legislation that would have changed things for the worse in how permanently disabled workers in Ontario – then numbering in excess of 100,000 – were compensated. Mobilization by injured workers and their allies across the province, including in Thunder Bay, beat back those changes. But the struggle continued. Legislation passed by another Conservative government in the late 1990s, and regulations issued by a subsequent Liberal government, remade the system in important ways, to the detriment of workers.

The Thunder Bay group does a lot of different things. Mantis has been involved right from the start, and he said, “We first had to educate ourselves. And we did that really by telling our stories to each other.” And decades later, “peer support and education” remain core commitments for the group. They hold regular sessions – originally in-person, currently on Zoom – where workers can come to talk about what they are facing, to socialize, and to learn. The sessions regularly feature expert speakers on related issues.

“But during the session,” Mantis emphasized, “we’re there to support each other. And it’s not unusual in the middle of a session, someone will share that they’re in crisis. And the session kind of immediately turns to, how can we help you? What can we do to help alleviate that crisis?”

Outside of such moments of crisis, the peer support and social gatherings also serve an important role in addressing the intense isolation experienced by many injured workers. Mantis said that through coming together in these ways, injured workers often “gain some of their confidence back and see how they’re positioned, in relation to the big power – the Workers Compensation Board (now the WSIB) – who has so much power over them, and their ability to pay their bills and feed their families. As people learn more, they get more confidence, they see they’re not alone, they see they’re facing these barriers together. And we’re better able then to meet these challenges on an individual basis. And sometimes, sowing us together on a collective basis to face these barriers really in a systemic way.”

This move from individual experiences to collective issues is an important one for the group. Mantis said, “As we experience and hear the stories, and we see the similarities, we begin to pick some of those issues to focus on.” This allows them to identify systemic problems with workplace compensation in Ontario, and then engage in advocacy, lobbying, and other activities to push for improvements by the WSIB and the provincial government.

The issues they deal with cover a broad range. One specific case, for instance, involves construction workers who were part of a re-build at a paper mill in Dryden, Ontario, 20 years ago, who were exposed to chemicals during the work and are experiencing high rates of illness. Mantis said, “We’ve been working with this group of workers to get public attention around this, to get them both medical treatment and financial compensation for the losses they’ve experienced. And then also to try to hold the employer accountable. Because the mill managers knew that this was a risk. And they chose to expose these workers instead of protecting them from the toxic exposures. And we thought, this kind of thing should not happen.” In addition to helping this group of workers demand accountability, the Thunder Bay group is also helping them connect with workers facing related issues elsewhere in the province.

Another important issue that injured workers in Ontario currently face is related to the cost-of-living increments that the WSIB has used in recent years. According to Paterson, the increments are consistently lower than, for instance, Statistics Canada calculates. She said that they have filed a court case demanding increments that better reflect the actual impact of inflation on workers, which will likely be heard later this year, and “we are asking the court to rule on this.”

Paterson said that the inadequacy of workplace compensation for many workers was particularly stark during the initial phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. She said, “With COVID, you weren’t going to get on the bus now to go get your meds, for instance. You’d have to take a taxi.” That was just one example of the ways in which the early pandemic imposed “more costs” on many injured workers. She said that groups such as veterans, seniors, and recipients of Ontario Works and the Ontario Disability Support Program – the province’s social assistance systems for general welfare and disability, respectively – received at least minimal additional support payments during the worst period of the pandemic. But the WSIB refused to do the same for injured workers.

More generally, the Thunder Bay group and other injured worker advocacy efforts push back however they can against the many rules, regulations, and procedures at the WSIB that they say make it very difficult for workers to get what they need in terms of both care and compensation.

According to Lefrancois, the underlying problem is “the whole attitude of putting profits before people.” He argued that one way this shows up is the way the system incentivizes the underreporting of injuries. Employers pay a premium each year to the WSIB in order to be able to operate. If there are no injuries in their workplace and workers make no claims on the system over that time, then the employer gets a portion back.

Lefrancois said, “Now you have a cash incentive, not for the worker but for the employer, not to report injuries,” so many employers take steps to “discourage claims.” He continued, “Claim suppression by employers has been happening since they introduced rebate back for your premium. That, I think, is what dogs the injured workers against the employers. … It’s all money, it’s all profit. And the governments have bought into the employers.”

Mantis said that in contrast, “We’re trying to make … the WSIB worker-friendly.” They want it to be an organization that is fundamentally oriented towards offering “support” and “help” – both “financial” and “other support” – to injured workers who need it, which he said it currently is not.

He continued, “There [are] many changes that happen in your life as a result [of an injury], and we think the compensation board should be there to help you through that. What we have experienced, and many others have experienced, is that rather than help, they are adding insult to injury. They create a stigma that workers that are coming looking for help are looking for a free ride, or looking for a handout. Maybe they go further – they might be ‘scammers’ or ‘malingerers.’ This attitude that happens within the compensation board … that oftentimes spreads into the larger community creates real problems for workers who are struggling to adjust to now living with a disability. So we’re saying, hey, we want to heal, we want to get better, but we’re being treated as if we are liars and scammers.”

“Many employers don’t want people with a disability or injury working for them,” Mantis said. “We end up feeling like we’re damaged goods that they just want to get rid of and be replaced by young healthy workers.” He said that many employers are unwilling to engage in “modifying the work in a real way, to change the design of work so it can accommodate people with a disability. … They’re actually required to do that under human rights [legislation], but there’s no-one really monitoring that, so the situation runs into trouble, and it’s the workers who are usually blamed for that. And as a result can be cut off benefits entirely. … The implication is, we really don’t want to work, we’re not trying hard enough. But in fact we’re not the ones who control the design of the job and the management of the worksite.”

He concluded, “In many cases … [employers are] not providing the necessary accommodations to accommodate our disabilities that were caused by [them] not taking that preventative action in the first place, at the workplace. So we’re blamed for any of the shortcomings of the system, and that’s causing that insult to injury, making our disabilities worse and worse.”

According to Paterson, additional barriers and stigma can happen through the medical system. Some workers, particularly those who need support with pain management, face intense stigma when they seek care. Beyond that, she said, “the doctor isn’t listened to” by the system in many cases, and lots of workers are forced to appeal to get access to the compensation and care that their doctors say that they need. The appeal process can take up to a decade, and with that delay, she said, “your hopes of recovery are very slim, if there are any at all. So there’s a huge cost involved, and I’m not talking a dollar and cents cost” in terms of impact on the injured worker’s life and family.

The Thunder Bay group, in conjunction with allied groups across the province, are consistently pushing for changes in both legislation and policy related to injured workers. They work with researchers to build evidence in support of those changes. They regularly meet with WSIB staff and management, as well as both supportive and less supportive MPPs – Paterson said that even the latter is useful because “it’s important to make certain that they can’t say they didn’t know” about the issues.

According to Mantis, another important ongoing initiative is supporting an NDP private members bill around “‘deeming,’ which is the issue that if the WSIB says you’re ready to go back to work, they then assume you’re getting your full pay and you’re cut off benefits. So they’re deeming you to have a job when in fact you don’t have a job. This legislation, if it were to pass, would say you really have to base the lost wages on the actual lost wages, as opposed to this make believe.”

Talking Radical Radio’s ten-year weekly run will be ending at the end of February 2023 – read more here!

Talking Radical Radio brings you grassroots voices from across Canada, giving you the chance to hear many different people that are facing many different struggles talk about what they do, why they do it, and how they do it, in the belief that such listening is a crucial step in strengthening all of our efforts to change the world. To learn more about the show check out our website here. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or contact [email protected] to join our weekly email update list.

Talking Radical Radio is brought to you by Scott Neigh, a writer, media producer, and activist based in Hamilton Ontario, and the author of two books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.

Image: Mpelletier1 / Wikimedia

Theme music: “It Is the Hour (Get Up)” by Snowflake, via CCMixter

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