Transcript of “A new wave of anti-ableist and anti-eugenics organizing in Canada”

Talking Radical Radio
"A new wave of anti-ableist and anti-eugenics organizing in Canada"
May 18, 2021

Host: Scott Neigh
Guests: Quin Lawrence and Catherine Frazee


Scott Neigh  0:08  
My name is Scott Neigh. And this is Talking Radical Radio.

(Opening theme music)

Hello and welcome to Talking Radical Radio, where we bring you grassroots voices from across Canada. We give you the chance to hear many different people who are facing many different struggles talk about what they're doing, how they're doing it and why they're doing it, in the belief that such listening is a crucial step in strengthening all of our efforts to change the world. On this week's show, I'll be speaking with Catherine Frazee and Quin Lawrence. In 2019, the Superior Court of Quebec ruled that language in Canada's medical assistance in dying legislation that limited eligibility to people who were already close to death was unconstitutional. Rather than appealing this decision to the Supreme Court, the federal government proposed and, in March 2021, ultimately passed what was called Bill C-7. Under the new eligibility criteria, medical assistance in dying is now also open to people who are not near death, but who have a serious and incurable illness, disease or disability; who are in an advanced state of irreversible decline and capability; and who experience enduring an intolerable suffering, either physical or psychological. In other words, certain disabled people. Initially, opposition to this legislation seem to be limited to certain faith-based and right-wing constituencies that oppose medical assistance in dying as a whole. Support, on the other hand, was quite broad and seemed to include a strong progressive consensus. All of that changed however, as disability justice activists and many other disabled people challenged this framing and voiced grave concerns with Bill C-7. They argued that understanding what this legislation will actually do has to start from a recognition of the deeply ableist character of Canadian society. Disabled people face all kinds of systemic barriers, harms, and indignities and are prevented from accessing a wide range of spaces, supports, opportunities, and resources that non-disabled people take for granted, which in turn restricts their survival and thriving. This is of course intensified and all of the intersections with other axes of oppression. Moreover, activists have to fight tooth and nail for even small wins against systemic ableism. And their efforts are almost always met with indifference or active refusal at all levels of government. In other words, in a society that is organized in ways that actively amplify the suffering of disabled people, Bill C-7 was a measure that responded to that suffering by making it easier for disabled people to die -- despite the fact that governments of all parties do little to reduce that suffering or to make it easier for disabled people to live and to thrive. And C-7 does not make non-disabled people who are suffering eligible for assisted dying. For those reasons, today's guests and many others named Bill C-7 not only as ablest but as a form of eugenics. Catherine Frazee is a white lesbian disabled settler and a retired professor of disability studies. Quin Lawrence, who also goes by Q and uses they/them or it pronouns, is a community organizer and a cultural worker. Both are part of a network of disability justice activists who worked in lots of ways to oppose the bill. As the final vote approached, and it seemed clear that it would pass -- and given that COVID made an in person demonstration and advisable -- they organized what they called the Disability Filibuster. It was a sort of long duration live stream where a broad cross section of disabled people from across Canada and beyond talked about their lives, their issues, and the legislation. According to Q, it became a space for "education and grief and joy." And Frazee said it was "deliberately kept gritty," as disabled people refuse to tone down their realities, their rage, or their politics. They knew it wouldn't stop Bill C-7, but they felt it was important to show vocal and principled opposition right to the end. In the aftermath, the group has continued to work together. Rhey've debrief the defeat, and done a couple of subsequent broadcasts. They're busily figuring out how to build ways for disabled people to support each other, and how to continue to oppose the recently passed eugenic measures as well as other aspects of systemic ableism. As well, during the struggle against C-7, they found that non disabled people with broadly left politics were much less supportive than they'd hoped. And they also want to address that as they move forward. Frazee laments, "Ableist impulses are also found at the heart of the left... We really have to root these out in order to be a truly inclusive and progressive social movement." I speak with Lawrence and Frazee about the Disability Filibuster, their work against the ableism and eugenics of Bill C-y, and their vision for continuing the struggle now.

Quin Lawrence  5:10  
I'm Q. I also go by Quin. I do use they/them or it pronouns. I'm a disability organizer, and leftist activist. I became involved in grassroots work as someone who grew up with quite a complicated family, which meant that I spent a fair amount of my teenage years either on the streets or couch surfing. And through that experience was instilled with the value of leftist organizing. People that are street-involved need to do a certain amount of organizing in order to stay alive and with whatever energy we have left to fight for better conditions for our lives. So even after I became housed again, that remained a priority for me. The organizing that I've done has always been around substance use, Indigenous landback claims and sovereignty, and general collective liberation -- which I think in my experience and in my prioritizations has always really centered disabled people, because we are at the intersections of so much societal violence. Everything I do is about disability justice and disabled liberation, and that has to necessarily centre and ground itself in Black liberation and Indigenous liberation, because those are the community members that are most impacted by ableism and white supremacy.

Catherine Frazee  6:42  
I'm Catherine Frazee. I go by she/her. I'm a white, lesbian, disabled, settler livingin Mi'kma'ki, otherwise known as Nova Scotia. I'm a retired professor of disability studies and long-time human rights activist. I was born in the mid 1950s. I've always had very significant physical disabilities. So I went to segregated schools for what were called crippled children in those days. I was born into an upwardly mobile middle-class family and so there was a significant layer of class that sheltered me from the much harsher realities that I would learn later in my adult life. Somewhere along the lines in the early 1980s, when disability began to be recognized as a human rights category, I became awakened to the broader sphere of human rights. I in the late 1980s worked at the Ontario Human Rights Commission, where I really came to a more fulsome understanding of substantive equality and systemic injustice. In later years, I had the opportunity to study as an academic substantive equality and the role that activism plays in the pursuit of equality. And since my retirement, I've been able to become more engaged. Collectively, Q and I and Gabrielle Peters and a whole bunch of other very enthusiastic and diverse activist-volunteers made up the Disability Filibuster. I and many, many other people with disabilities, people from marginalized social communities, had been expressing our concern about the expansion of eligibility for medically assisted dying in Canada, as expressed in Bill C-7. We had been working intensely through all conventional channels to express our opposition and to really fight for a place on the public radar. Because initially, discourse can get very severely misrepresent or diminish the disability rights perspective on this issue. As it became more and more apparent that the bill would be passed over all of our objects, there were many of us who simply wanted to take a final stand. We weren't prepared to concede. In the pre-COVID time, we would have demonstrated. We would have put our bodies on line. But we really didn't have that option. So with the constraints of the pandemic facing us, and knowing that there's a particular embodied rhetoric to disability protest, that we can use our bodies in ways that I think are distinct to how other perhaps more conventional non-disabled bodies express their protests, that we wanted to capitalize on that strength. And the notion of an online filibuster involving disabled people simply taking up space, making ourselves heard, making a place for ourselves that suited our rules and our timelines. We would follow what we call crip time, which is time that is regulated more by the rhythms of our bodies and what is comfortable and healthy for us, rather than by the rhythms of political or other kinds of arbitrary and ableist deadlines. So we would create a place that was welcoming, was anti-ableist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, anti-exclusionary, and we would demonstrate our passion, our protest, and our refusal to surrender. That was the germ of an idea that to my friend Gabrielle Peters and floated with her. We had about three days in which to pull this off. We knew we would have to do it on a national scale. We wanted it to be inclusive and fully accessible. And we thought we had nothing to lose.

Quin Lawrence  11:45  
Gabrielle got in touch with me and asked me to get in touch with disabled people that I knew that would be interested and available for this filibuster. And at that point, it was very likely that it wouldn't happen. There was a lot left to do. The priority for us was accessibility and we knew that if we couldn't ensure a certain level of baseline accessibility, in particular ASL interpretation and live captioning or cart, then this just wouldn't happen. Because that is a level of accessibility that should be expected from all spaces, let alone a disability activist space. Knowing that I reached out very vaguely to as many people as I could. And everyone that I got in touch with was either completely on board in terms of whatever I needed, or were very clear that while they could not directly participate, they were entirely in support.

Scott Neigh  12:51  
Let's back up a little and talk about the issues involved. How was Bill C-7 -- the legislation to update the eligibility for medical assistance in dying -- ableist?

Catherine Frazee  13:02  
Medical assistance in dying has been legal since 2016. The way it was established in Canada, it was available for persons for whom natural death was reasonably foreseeable. So in other words, a person who is approaching the end of their natural life, who wants to avoid a painful death, can request the assistance of a physician to end their life with a lethal injection. Immediately after the passage, court challenges began. And so Bill C-7 was an attempt to respond to one of those cases, called the Truchon case. And the Truchon case said yes, it is unfair, it is discriminatory, to exclude people who have years to live, or an indefinite period of time to live, from what the court deemed the benefit of a choice to die with a doctor's assistance. So Bill C-7 attempts to address that perceived injustice by offering assisted death to any person with a grievous medical condition if they have intolerable suffering and wish to die. Now, what's important here to realize is that if you have intolerable suffering, but you do not have a medical condition, there's no provision in the law to have a doctor facilitate your death, unless you're wearing your death yourself. However, if you have a medical condition of such severity as to render you a disabled person, then and only then do you have the quote option of a medically assisted death. For those of us who pay careful attention to the social trends and the social implications of ableism, and the eugenic history of ableist policies, there's a very vividly red flag that goes up when the state says that persons who have a disability can ask to be made dead and we the state will provide agents of the state -- doctors -- to perform this service of killing free of charge, as part of our healthcare system. There is no interrogation in Bill C-7 into the causes of the suffering that lead a person to want to die. And there's no real querying about why this service, or this benefit, would only be seen as a benefit for a disabled person. That death can be a benefit to a disabled persons, but a harm to non-disabled persons is a fundamentally ableist and actually very eugenic proposition. And so we objected right from the very beginning to the possibility of this kind of framing of an exemption to the Criminal Code in the case of disability.

Quin Lawrence  16:43  
This is modern eugenics. It will impact people living in poverty. It will also impact disproportionately Black and Indigenous people in particular, but people of color across the board. We heard from many people that this would be the case. And it will also disproportionately affect the queer community, in particular the transgender community. As a trans person myself, we face systemic health barriers. And that's true, again, for BIPOC as well. And these systemic health barriers mean that we have higher rates of disability and higher rates of illness. And these factors combined with a often actively hostile healthcare system really mean that our communities are at risk of not getting adequate care. And therefore, any disabilities and illnesses that we do live with will cause this intractable suffering that is written into law, now, when in fact, it's the social determinants that are causing our suffering. And again, that distinction isn't made in Bill C-7, which is actively dangerous to many communities that are impacted by systemic inequality.

Catherine Frazee  18:11  
It is and felt like a very cruel irony that those of us who have been on the front lines of disability justice work for decades have fought for every small breadcrumb of support, of legislated recognition, of opportunity for access to education, to employment, to transportation, to disability supports, to a decent income, to accessible, supportive, safe housing. All of these battles go on and on, and we take them to court, and the courts are cautious and never do we get these things as a matter of right, that are critical to living a dignified life. Never do we hear our parliamentarians standing up with any kind of meaningful expression of support for these measures that would be dignity- and life-affirming. And the moment a disabled person raises their hand and says, I would like to die, then all manner of support is expressed. The courts are on board. Our lawmakers are on board. That kind of support from our able-bodied neighbors, from our physician, and many of our care providers, that is deeply unsettling when it comes in the wake of years of neglect, and I would say outright abuse of disabled citizens. And not only do they celebrate this as a great victory, but thanks celebrate this as a human rights victory and a victory for people with disabilities, as if they were speaking for us. And that really is why we felt, with the filibuster, that enough is enough, we shall speak for ourselves. You will pass this bill, but you will not be able to claim that you did it for us.

Scott Neigh  20:23  
Tell listeners about the Disability Filibuster itself.

Quin Lawrence  20:27  
The plan was to go for as long as possible, continuously, and have the filibuster as an interactive community space where people could register in advance for time slots to be broadcasting, but other people would also be in the Zoom call with everyone. And there could be questions and conversations and a very involved and communal space. We initiated that and unfortunately, almost immediately, we were Zoom-bombed quite violently. Catherine and Gabrielle decided that they would be a necessary shut down and reordering to factor in for greater security and safety. We got a lot of last minute technical support. And the next evening, we relaunched with the new model of what we were able to do. And instead of it being this rich communal space, it was still a very integrative model but we had to switch to streaming the filibuster to YouTube, and only allowing direct broadcasters into the actual Zoom call. But from there, it really took off in a beautiful crip, disabled way. We had broadcasters of all different sorts of people -- people involved in academia, people who like myself are very street-based, direct action trained. We had folks across ages and genders and cultural and racial backgrounds, and it became a space for both education and grief and joy.

Catherine Frazee  22:28  
It was deliberately kept gritty, within the parameters of making sure it would be a safe space for all participants. I think we really did achieve a new modality. And so we were broadcasting from our beds. We were making the parts of our embodied experience that nobody talks about and that we aren't cover up as fully as possible in order to pass, in the ableist world -- we got rid of all of that artifice, and we were simply ourselves. And, you know, we were by definition talking about some pretty uncomfortable topics -- death, for starters, and suffering, and the ways in which we suffer, and the ways in which we resist death. And all of that was done with humor, and with art, and with a lot of love. It was a place of discovery and excitement, and venting of rage and fear, but a place that was big enough to hold those big feelings, and a place for discovering who we are without all of our makeup on.

Scott Neigh  23:49  
I understand that you're working to carry the spirit of that action forward.

Catherine Frazee  23:54  
In the immediate aftermath of the passage of the bill, we remained together. We felt that no one should be alone in this moment of political defeat. And so we watched the final vote together, we sort of keep briefed together, and we helped each other I think to cushion the blow. We then have held a couple of more substantial broadcasts, focusing on next steps, focusing on measures that people can take to stay alive, to remain safe, to get helpm to seek and provide mutual support. And also to focus on where the fight moves now -- whether it moves into the Canadian courts or into international proceedings, just how we're going to continue the struggle in order to continue to resist the ableist rollout of assisted dying and other eugenic policies that threaten us as well. Gabrielle and I have been experiencing quite a bit about filibuster 2.0.

Quin Lawrence  25:09  
We're at the less glamorous point in organizing. Where we were on screen, on the quote-unquote front line. And that's the cool place. That's the place where everyone knows what you're doing, and you look like you're doing all the big important work. And a lot of it is very important. But now it's time to do those dishes. It's time to sit down to a lot of emails, and sit in front of research, and have phone calls. And again, supporting each other, making sure that we are safe, that we are able to access health care without potential coercion, without higher risks of death for our community than what we already face. It's all of those dishes that inevitably pile up when you're working on radical causes.

Catherine Frazee  26:09  
The realm I think that has been difficult for us to penetrate is around leaft-leaning politics, where we thought we would have easier alliances than we have had. There have been many on the left who have felt that we have perhaps in the minds of some overstated when it comes to the risks for disabled and marginalized peoples. You know, I'll debate that with anyone at any time. I welcome those opportunities to engage further with the intellectual, the political community that I like to consider my home as well, and to engage constructively in conversations about why it's so pervasive as to be almost invisible. Ableist impulses are also found at the heart of the left. And we really have to repeat in order to be a truly inclusive and progressive social movement.

Scott Neigh  27:18  
You have been listening to my interview with Quin Lawrence and Catherine Frazee of Disability Filibuster. To learn more about the group, go to disabilityfillibuster.ca. To find out more about Talking Radical Radio, the guests, the theme music, and the ways that you can listen, go to TalkingRadical.ca and click on the link for the radio show. On the site, you can sign up for email updates, or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, iTunes, SoundCloud, and other platforms. I'm Scott Neigh, a writer and media producer based in Hamilton, Ontario, and the author of two books of Canadian history told through the stories of activists published by Fernwood Publishing. Thank you very much for listening and I hope you tune in again next week.

(Closing theme music)