Radio: Next steps for sexual and reproductive rights activism in Canada

Posted on February 8, 2022 by Scott

Martha Paynter and Frédérique Chabot have each spent a lot of years doing a lot of different kinds of grassroots political work related to sexual and reproductive health and rights. Scott Neigh interviews them about why such work is important, and about why in Canada today it is vital that it centre prison abolition, migrant justice, and other struggles led by people who are regularly “discarded” and dehumanized by dominant systems.

Paynter is a registered nurse who practices in the area of abortion and reproductive health in unceded Mi’kmaq territory, in what is colonially known as Nova Scotia. She is also a researcher and activist, and the founder of an organization called Wellness Within, which works for reproductive justice, health equity, and prison abolition.

Chabot lives in unceded Algonquin territory in Ottawa, and is currently the director of health promotion at Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights. Action Canada engages in public education, health promotion, service provision, and policy advocacy related to sexual and reproductive health and rights in Canada and globally. In earlier years, Chabot was also very involved in work related to HIV/AIDS and in advocacy related to the rights of sex workers.

The occasion of today’s interview is Sexual and Reproductive Health Awareness Week (SRH Week), a campaign from Action Canada that each year focuses on a topic related to sexual health and offers events and resources on that topic to the general public, to health care providers, and to other audiences. This year’s SRH Week runs from February 14 to 18 and its theme will be “Advocacy in Action.”

Whatever sexual and reproductive rights that we enjoy in Canada today owe a lot to a wide range of advocacy, activism, and organizing over the last century. Moreover, advocacy is just as relevant to our sexual and reproductive health. Chabot said, “[Sexual] health outcomes are often impacted by sexism, gender inequality, racism, and other structural forces…. Stigma and taboos around sex, pleasure, abortion, or adolescent sexuality, among other things, mean that sexual health and reproductive health are often seen or treated as problematic or improper or are not even part of the conversation. So seeing that a lot of those issues are often ignored, neglected, or actually actively written out of medical school curricula, health institutions, or government policies, we really wanted to talk about what change makers throughout history and today have [done] in terms of ensuring that people have access to the services they need, have their rights respected, and what work is left to do. And to call people to understand how they can participate in getting sexual and reproductive health on the agenda.”

Many struggles related to sexual and reproductive health and rights ongoing today have to do with the exclusion of variously oppressed and exploited people from the rights and services that more privileged people can take for granted. So, for instance, Black, Indigenous, and racialized people tend to have worse experiences and worse outcomes when it comes to reproductive health care. Or take abortion care – it is decriminalized in Canada, but services are not uniformly available, particularly in remote, rural, and northern areas, and the expense of accessing services can be a significant barrier for pregnant people who are poor (and at all of those intersections that make poverty more likely). Similarly, things like the lack of a national pharmacare program and inadequate social assistance and other forms of social support also put barriers in the way of people exercising their sexual and reproductive rights.

Chabot and Paynter argue that it is particularly important to centre conversation about sexual and reproductive rights advocacy in groups that Chabot describes as “people who are discarded” – that is, groups so dehumanized that they are largely excluded from even basic sexual and reproductive rights and healthcare. Even when they are not in geographically isolated areas, for example, undocumented migrants in Canada cannot access most aspects of the public health care system, including abortion care, and often live in poverty so have little capacity to access the other options that money makes possible. One of the many elements of Action Canada’s work is maintaining a fund to support people who are otherwise unable to access abortion care, and Chabot estimates that about a third of the people who access it each year are undocumented. She said, “If there wasn’t support to pay for procedure costs or travel, or if there wasn’t the ability to connect with a network of healthcare providers who basically create this kind of back-end way for people to access services, people would be left with nowhere to go.”

In addition, Chabot continued, “We follow the lead of organizations like like the Migrant Workers Center and the Migrant Rights Alliance and other organizations that fight every single day for status for all in Canada because … if we believe in reproductive rights, we have to fight for things like, you know, status for all, so people can have access to health care.”

Paynter and Wellness Within work with another group of “discarded” people – prisoners. They provide doula sevices to pregnant people who are incarcerated. They do related educational work in health professional schools, with the public, and inside jails. They do research. And they do a lot of advocacy. The fact that they receive no funding beyond the occasional small project grant makes their work difficult in lots of ways, but it does allow for what Paynter describes as “ferocious independence” in speaking up against the injustices prisoners face and for prison abolition. They see providing doula services in jails as itself a way of preventing some of the violence that pregnant people regularly face in prison. As well, they are focused on challenging mainstream pro-choice advocates and health professionals to take up abolitionist politics.

“What I’m trying to do is convince people that prisons are where we need to focus our efforts,” Paynter said. “Doesn’t matter how liberal the laws are about abortion, you can’t have reproductive rights in this country if you have prisons – prisons where people are subjected to strip search, to violence, to unmet needs for contraception, for abortion, for perinatal care, to violent births, then denied access to their children after they’re born. You can’t have all these things and have reproductive rights in the country. So prison, as a system – and of course, this system intersects with the child protection system – is the the next real realm of reproductive rights activism that we need to get not just activists working on, but my clinical colleagues. I want [obstetricians and gynecologists] to be calling for abolition, [and] all my nurse colleagues, 400,000 nurses in this country. So there’s a ton of political power that could be mobilized to abolition, if there was a broader understanding and vision that that saw these things as so profoundly connected.”

Wellness Within was also a major voice speaking against the practice of birth alerts in Nova Scotia, a mechanism that facilitates state authorities taking newly born children from parents that has disproportionately impacted Black and Indigenous families. A major focus of their current work is addressing white supremacy in the doula profession and putting in place trainings and partnerships to reduce the barriers to Black and Indigenous people becoming doulas.

In encouraging people to participate in the upcoming SRH Week activities, Chabot said, “There’s so much work in terms of continuing to expand access to sexual and reproductive health care [in Canada]. And if we think that we have achieved everything with just access to abortion, then we’re failing to see that there’s still a lot of people that are not accessing that care. And … definitely one of the publics that I think can make such a difference here are health care providers and social service providers. Because in many cases, being loyal to institutions or rules or policies, as opposed to looking at the larger picture of who’s being impacted, who has access to services, has led to such discrimination. And over history, if we had just kept to, ‘Well, this is the rule and this is the policy,’ we wouldn’t have abortion care, we wouldn’t have contraceptives, we wouldn’t have gender affirming surgeries, we wouldn’t have midwifery care. There’s a lot of sexual reproductive health care that came because we stopped being loyal to policies that were unjust and we fought for change.”

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: Used with permission of Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights.

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

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Radio: Messy activism, filling community gaps, and grassroots infrastructure

Posted on February 1, 2022 by Scott

David Alton and William Turman are founding members of a multi-issue grassroots group in southern Ontario called GroundUp Waterloo Region. Scott Neigh interviews them about their commitment to what they call “messy activism” and about the group’s work supporting other grassroots groups, filling community gaps, building grassroots infrastructure, and holding politicians to account.

Alton and Turman both have backgrounds in urban planning and they live in Waterloo Region, an Ontario jurisdiction comprised of three cities and four townships. Turman currently works as a planner, while Alton does community engagement and facilitation work in less formalized settings.

GroundUp WR got its start when the two were out for a walk in the city of Kitchener’s downtown, in an area with an empty mall, a shut down bus station, and a number of huge parking lots. It was a space that seemed to them to be emblematic not only of a sort of generic governmental failure but also a more specific sort of failure of institutions, governments, and elected officials at all levels to be truly accountable to communities. They were, in Alton’s words, “ranting” about it. However, he continued, there was “more substantiveness to it than just ranting.” Both had been peripherally connected to different kinds of grassroots work in the past, but never really in the middle of it, so they weren’t quite sure what they could do or what they wanted to do – but they knew they had to do something.

Their first step – done, in fact, while still mid-rant – was to create a Twitter account. They were well aware of the limits of online-only activism, but thought it might be a useful place to start. Alton said, “There is a certain almost vulnerability that people in power have online. Like, it’s a place of their egos … We could almost manipulate that vulnerability to try and create some leverage and create some opportunities for these other grassroots organizations that were doing so much great work on the ground.”

In that initial phase, but also since then, they have used social media to, most importantly, amplify voices and calls to action from other local, grassroots groups working on lots of different issues. As well, they use the account to assertively and relentlessly identify politicians who are not being accountable to their communities, and to facilitate residents putting pressure on them.

Social media interactions with other local activists and organizers soon turned into conversations – about the issues, about the community, about collaboration, and about what GroundUp could do to support the important work that was already happening. As well, they began to have conversations with other people in the community who were not already active, but who wanted to be. Some of those got involved in other groups after learning about them through Ground Up, but some got involved in GroundUP itself – which, pretty soon, went from two random white guys with a Twitter account to an active, thriving grassroots group in its own right.

Another priority for GroundUp is to identify and, where possible, fill grassroots community gaps. An important early instance of doing this also ended up being a useful step in building trust with other activists and organizers in the region.

The Township of Wilmot, the rural area of Waterloo Region where Alton lives, has seen what he described as “some fairly egregious sexist and racist actions” in recent years. He used that phrase to characterize things the township’s mayor had done, but then went on to describe similarly troubling actions by a range of community members and politicians, including chronic sexist mistreatment of women who were on town council, and consistent white supremacist harassment through the summer of 2020 of Indigenous-led mobilizations pushing for the removal of a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald from the front of town hall.

In the spring of 2021, word started to circulate that white supremacists intended to organize a rally in the township. Local anti-racist organizers were already burned out and had faced considerable hostility due to other work in recent years, so in consultation with those organizers, GroundUp decided that they needed to step up and do something. It was a challenging process, not least because it was happening in the middle of the provincial COVID-19 stay-at-home order, and initial buy-in from at least some politicians and community leaders turned to hostility and backlash. But they planned a range of COVID-safe ways for people in Wilmot to demonstrate their opposition to racism, and the action was a success.

These days, the group meets weekly. It is a mix of people participating as individuals and others taking part as representatives of groups. GroundUp’s top priority is always responding to any requests for support or action they have received that week from other grassroots groups – that can be anything from promoting campaigns to lending a hand at actions to developing communication materials, and lots more. As well, when they have the capacity, they work on their own projects to fill grassroots gaps and build grassroots infrastructure – from a project to push the municipality to make sidewalks more accessible by clearing snow, to longer-term visions for bringing grassroots groups and communities together through an alternative municipal budget process and a digital community platform to facilitate grassroots action.

In all of this, they act in the spirit of what they call “messy activism.” They are very clear that they are not expert activists or organizers. But, given the urgent issues our communities face, they think it is important for all of us to take action anyway, without feeling the need to meet unreachable standards of activist purity or perfection. Crucially, though, doing that in a way that isn’t just going to make things worse means you have to build relationships, you have to listen, and you have to engage in the work with humility and accountability. Alton said that the group’s approach has been one of “just messily doing and consistently showing solidarity” and of “only amplifying the grassroots and only existing for the grassroots.”

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: Used with permission of GroundUp WR.

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

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Radio: Opposing the arms industry in one Canadian community

Posted on January 25, 2022 by Scott

Anna Badillo and David Heap are members of People for Peace, a local grassroots peace group in the city of London in southwestern Ontario. Scott Neigh interviews them about the group’s two decades of action on a wide range of issues, and in particular about their work opposing the manufacture in a London plant of the light-armoured vehicles (LAVs) being sold to Saudi Arabia in the largest arms deal in Canadian history.

People for Peace initially came together in the lead-up to the US-led invasion and recolonization of Iraq in 2003. While many of the groups formed in that era of mass anti-war politics faded within a few years, People for Peace stuck around and has been involved in many different struggles in the two decades since. A major focus in the earlier years was supporting US war resisters – that is, US soldiers who came to Canada to avoid serving in the occupation forces in Iraq. The group of course acted where they could in opposition to the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As well, over those years, there were periodic assaults by the Israeli state against Palestinian people in Gaza, and People for Peace has been quite involved in organizing demonstrations in those moments, in opposing the Israeli siege of Gaza, and in supporting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement called for by Palestinian civil society. They contribute locally to efforts to get Canada out of NATO, to stop the federal government from spending untold billions on new fighter jets, and many other initiatives from the broader peace movement. They have also acted in support of prisoner justice struggles, numerous Indigenous struggles, the movement for Black lives, and lots more.

Badillo did a degree in peace studies in Dublin, Ireland, and continues to work in academic contexts. She is involved in various nonprofits and advocacy groups, and she has been active around prisoner justice, Palestine solidarity, and lots of other issues. She has been part of People for Peace since about 2014. Heap is a teacher and researcher in linguistics and French at the University of Western Ontario, and has been active in a range of social movements since his youth. He is one of the founding members of the group.

Perhaps the national issue in which London has been most central in recent years has been the growing opposition to Canada’s arms sales to Saudi Arabia. A former locomotive plant in the city was re-tooled around 40 years ago (with active support by the federal government led by then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau) to produce LAVs, a category of tank-like military vehicle. From early on, Saudi Arabia was one of its customers. In 2014, the Harper Conservative government signed a deal that was subsequently approved by the Liberals under Justin Trudeau for the largest arms sale in Canadian history – the Saudi’s would pay approximately $15 billion for LAVs from General Dynamics Land Systems, to be manufactured at their London plant.

“There is tangible evidence that these LAVs are being used in grave human rights violation over in Saudi Arabia and Yemen,” according to Badillo. For several years now the United Nations has named Yemen as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, and in the last two years it has named Canada as part of the problem for its role in arming the Saudis.

According to Heap, General Dynamics has always been skilled at cultivating goodwill locally. They constantly emphasize the local economic benefits of the plant. As well, he said, “They’re flagship donors of whatever causes in London’s community.” In addition, they fund things like materials science research at the University of Western Ontario, located in London, and so “provide benefits for researchers and students.”

Heap continued, “This is a way that these mega profitable corporations can … try to buy civil society compliance. They get municipal politicians on side, provincial and federal politicians from different parties on side, and sell it in that way, as one of the last really high quality industrial jobs in the region.”

There is a broad coalition in Canada against the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia, and People for Peace is a member. The group has done lots of work in the community to try to counter the company’s influence. This has involved extensive public education on the issue. They have also lobbied local politicians, picketed the plant, and briefly blocked the rails by which finished LAVs were about to be transported.

While the coalition is focused on opposing the deal with Saudi Arabia, People for Peace has its sights set much higher. According to Heap, “We need to go farther and say, in fact, there are no acceptable clients, even when they sell them to the ‘friendly’ Canadian and US military.”

Badillo added, “I think that’s what’s unique about People for Peace is that we’re not just asking for … the end of this contract, but we’re also looking at and asking for conversion of the plant, and to stop producing these war machines for the war industry and convert and transition to peaceful production.” The original role of the plant in manufacturing locomotives provides a cue to what it could do after conversion, given the extensive changes in infrastructure required by the climate crisis.

Heap said, “It’s not as if Canada doesn’t need heavy industries, right? We know the government has to invest in green infrastructure, it has to invest in mass transit in a big way. That plant could be producing, once again, locomotives and other green transport. … People in the community remember when it was a local locomotive plant, remember when it was producing stuff that people actually need and want. And we could get back to that, but it takes leadership. It takes a change in direction from from the government to not facilitate and fund conversion to war industries, which is what they’ve done for the last number of decades, but redirect back towards a conversion towards peace industries. And right now, nothing is more necessary than green infrastructure and public transit. So it would be a perfect fit, to keep those jobs in the community, keep the all of the quality spin offs that come from that plant, but end not just the contract with Saudi, but phase out the war industry in general.”

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: Wikipedia

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

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Radio: Public sector workers building power in tough times

Posted on January 18, 2022 by Scott

Joe Curnow is a professor in the faculty of education at the University of Manitoba, a long-time community organizer, and a member of the organizing and communications team for the University of Manitoba Faculty Association (UMFA). Scott Neigh interviews her about UMFA’s recent strike, in which an organizing orientation allowed the union to accomplish quite a lot despite very challenging circumstances, and about the lessons it holds for other public sector unions.

These days, the broader public sector in Canada is facing an ongoing, slow-motion crisis in the form of incremental denial of adequate resources, forced piecemeal privatization and subordination to market forces, and the perpetual looming possibility of more overt and vicious attacks from hostile governments. So while there are local specificities to what UMFA had to face in its recent strike, the broad features are relevant to what a lot of other workers in a lot of other contexts are dealing with.

The specificities in Manitoba include an aggressive Conservative provincial government that has used legislation – the so-called Public Sector Sustainability Act (PSSA) – and behind-the-scenes mandates to public sector employers to prevent wage increases. For UMFA, the context also included a round of wage-only bargaining in 2020 in which COVID and massive public health restrictions on collective action contributed to a narrow vote to accept a deal that many members were very unhappy with.

With the full contract coming up for bargaining in 2021, UMFA was deeply divided and in disarray. Both an internal election and decisions about the bargaining platform became deeply contentious. Some members wanted to put money into hiring external bargaining and media relations professionals. But a majority, including Curnow, thought that rather than seeking more polished ways to ask for a better deal, they should get serious about organizing and building power among the members in order to be more able to demand one.

So UMFA put a great deal of work, long before the possibility of a strike loomed, into building the strength of the union on the shop floor in a unit-by-unit way. Around 30 active members participated in a well-known training for building organizing capacity, Jane Mcalevey’s “Organizing for Power”. UMFA also hired an organizer, who in turn built capacity to do that work among worker-leaders, including lots of one-on-one meetings and various other approaches for giving them lots of support to develop their skills and confidence to go back to their departments and organize. They also put a lot of work into talking with members, to build a picture of what they wanted and what they were willing to fight for. In addition – and this was Curnow’s main focus – UMFA began building power oriented outwards, towards the community and the formal political realm. This was part of a strategic decision to target the provincial government’s ongoing interference in the bargaining process.

This externally focused work started from the deceptively simple approach of getting as many members as possible to meet with their MLAs to present some pretty easy and simple demands. Not only did this start a process of building relations of accountability between workers and politicians, but it also served as an important context in which members who had never done anything like this before developed their capacities to take action and politicized their understandings of their situation, which in turn opened possibilities for other kinds of action.

This politicization began even prior to the MLA meetings, through the preparation sessions that Curnow led, where workers had a chance to “talk about the ways that the government mandate and interference in our workplaces was impacting them.” Wages were a prime concern for workers in this strike, after many consecutive years of no or tiny increases. But these conversations were the first time that workers started to realize that the relatively uncompetitive wages at U of M had created a “widespread recruitment and retention crisis” – meaning the university was having trouble recruiting and retaining faculty – across many different departments. This was an important issue to present to elected officials, Curnow said, “but it was really even more important for our members to hear that, and to hear that their experience was not isolated. … It really collectivized the experience and politicized it.” This crisis, and its broader implications for postsecondary education in Manitoba, became a central part of the union’s messaging.

The strike began in early November 2021. There was both conventional picketing at the university and also what they called virtual picketing, which mobilized workers to take other kinds of actions from their own homes – contacting politicians, social media work, reaching out individually to friends and family, and other kinds of political work made possible by online tools. In line with the choice to target the province, there was also a picket at the legislature every day, and UMFA members showed up to protest at pretty much every public event held by Manitoba’s then-new premier. They also did door-to-door canvassing in Conservative ridings, had a prolific and creative social media and meme game, and worked with a group of supportive students on theatrical, disruptive, and direct actions of various kinds.

The strike lasted for five weeks, and was resolved by an agreement to go to binding arbitration. That is not normally the kind of outcome that unions prefer, but in this instance it was binding arbitration that was explicitly instructed to ignore the province’s mandate to freeze wages. And while this was in no way a decisive victory for the union, Curnow said there were “a lot of significant things, small wins, that came out of the strike.” This included substantial wage gains for UMFA’s lowest paid members, significant progress in terms of building the union’s capacity and political position, and pushing the province to make quiet but real concessions that it didn’t want to make. In other words, despite the disarray the union had been in and the aggressive hostility from the province, an organizing orientation was able to accomplish a lot. For Curnow, that is the key lesson from the strike – that even in difficult conditions, an ongoing commitment to putting time and energy into developing a membership that is empowered and active is a key way for unions to build strength, defend past victories, and even make some gains.

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: Wikimedia / Sancho McCann

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

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Radio: Working in Canada for a just peace in Kashmir

Posted on January 11, 2022 by Scott

Today’s guest on Talking Radical Radio is a Kashmiri-Canadian and a member of Canadians for Peace and Justice in Kashmir, a group of Canadians – some of whom have ties to the region, some of whom do not – committed to working in this country towards a just peace in Kashmir. Scott Neigh interviews him about the history of the conflict in Kashmir and about the work of CPJK.

When political violence erupted in Kashmir in the early 1990s, today’s interview participant and his young family reluctantly decided to emigrate. More than two decades ago, he settled in Canada.

Using passive language like “political violence erupted” almost always obscures power dynamics and histories of oppression and resistance – in this case, the longstanding and brutal occupation of Kashmir by the Indian state. In speaking as a member of CPJK, today’s guest has requested to remain anonymous, because there have been instances in which Indian security forces have responded to people in the Kashmiri diaspora speaking out against the occupation and its human rights violations by retaliating against their family and friends in Kashmir.

He said, “I have the ability to speak up that my fellow countrymen and people back home don’t have. But it also puts the onus on me to make sure that they’re protected, because me speaking freely has a huge impact on people living back home. And that, to me, is the primary reason that I want to be anonymous, so that there won’t be any reprisals against my family, against my parents, against my extended family.”

The roots of the current conflict go back to British colonial domination of the subcontinent. When the British were forced out in the 1940s, they decided to divide the many small kingdoms, principalities, and territories through which they exerted control into two countries – the Muslim nation of Pakistan, and the Hindu-majority but officially secular India. The way the British enacted this Partition resulted in violence, turmoil, and up to 2 million people being killed, plus tens of millions more displaced. And this is aside from the disputes arising with respect to the fate of a number of specific territories – including Kashmir, which has a Muslim-majority population but had a ruler in those years who was Hindu. Ultimately, Pakistan and India went to war over Kashmir in 1947. The Western powers insisted that they stop, and the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution that both countries should withdraw and there should be a plebiscite to determine Kashmir’s fate. But none of that happened, and India continued to occupy the most populous portions of the territory, while Pakistan held onto the rest.

That was more or less how things stayed for several decades. Today’s guest said, “The majority of the Kashimiri population has it always in the back of their mind they have never been given their right to determine where they want to go.” In 1989, this resulted in a “mass rebellion” among Kashmiris demanding the right to self-determination enshrined in the UN Security Council resolution. The uprising included a component of armed struggle. The response by the Indian state was violent and ruthless, particularly in the early 1990s – massacres, mass rapes, and all manner of human rights abuses have been documented.

And while that may have been a tragic high-point for the intensity of the repression, today’s guest said, “the rebellion is still going on in a low-key manner [and] India is still being brutal,” so the basic everyday violence and dehumanizing indignity of occupation have remained fundamentally similar in the subsequent decades.

Today’s guest said, “The worst thing about an occupation is how demeaning it is. How much you’re controlled and how much you’re not allowed to think as a human being. You are literally turned into an animal. And only people who have lived through an occupation would be able to relate to that.”

In 2019, the far right Indian government of Narendra Modi unilaterally revoked the guarantee of partial autonomy for Kashmir that had been part of the Indian constitution, instituted direct rule of the territory by the federal government, and significantly tightened the noose of the occupation in multiple ways. Some of the changes suggest a campaign by the Indian state to fundamentally change Kashmir’s demographics to undermine the claims by Kashmiris to their own territory. Commentators have drawn parallels between the Indian occupation of Kashmir and both the brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine and the genocidal occupation of a wide range of Indigenous nations by the Canadian and US states.

Few Canadians who do not themselves have ties to Kashmir know much about the conflict, so a key element of CPJK’s work is doing public education on the issue. They have also lobbied MPs and presented to the Parliamentary Foreign Relations Committee. Individual members of the group have also published articles about the conflict in a range of venues.

Today’s guest recognizes that it will be an uphill battle – Canada is hoping to deepen economic ties with India, and the Western powers seem to be using India as an element of their increasingly hostile orientation towards China – but the group’s goal is to get the Canadian government to do more to speak up for the human rights of Kashmiris and to use their influence in that direction with other Western powers. They encourage all Canadians to learn more, and to get involved.

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: Wikimedia / Commonist

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

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Radio: A new look at one of Ontario’s most notorious grassroots groups

Posted on January 4, 2022 by Scott

For more than 20 years, A.J. Withers was active with one of Ontario’s best known grassroots groups, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP). Recently, Withers released a new book telling stories of and drawing lessons from four of OCAP’s key campaigns over the years related to homelessness. Scott Neigh interviews them about OCAP and about Fight to Win: Inside Poor People’s Organizing (Fernwood Publishing, 2021).

Withers has been involved in grassroots political work since the late 1990s, initially environmentalism and then in the global justice movement, which in those years brought large direct-action protests to the summits of oppressive international organizations. Even in that moment, Withers was conscious of some of the weaknesses of the global justice movement that were soon to become widely discussed, and was looking for other ways to fight for transformative change. Not long after, they found a political home in OCAP, an anti-capitalist direct action anti-poverty organization. Since 1990, OCAP has combined militant mass mobilization in support of demands around things like raising social assistance rates and housing for all, with the use of direct action to win concrete gains for individual people living in poverty. Withers was active in OCAP for the next two decades.

In the last decade, Withers has also engaged in political writing. Their work includes an accessible introduction to radical disability theory and co-authoring a critical history of the politics of social work.

Fight to Win is Withers’ most recent book. They had a couple of different motivations for writing it. One is that, as an experienced organizer, for a long time they had been quite dissatisfied with most writing about organizing coming out of contemporary movements. This was largely because such writing often tries to do two things that pull it in very different directions – it tries to describe and perhaps analyze the organizing work, which requires a willingness to talk about mistakes and problems, but it also tries to generate enthusiasm and draw people into the movement in general or specific organizations, which encourages a more celebratory orientation. According to Withers, this means that authors “therefore are often describing the groups that they want to be in as much as the groups that they’re in, if not more so.” As well, Withers has seen lots of groups in lots of places over the last twenty years attempt to model themselves on OCAP, but many of them have foundered because of the ways in which they have drawn lessons from the Toronto-based group – far too many have applied the model as a “cookie cutter, when the beauty of OCAP historically has been its ability to respond to the community that it’s in.”

In Fight to Win, Withers attempts to look at OCAP’s work in a more nuanced way to “actually give meaningful lessons about organizing” that will be useful both to experienced organizers looking to apply them in other contexts and also to people newer to grassroots politics.

The book starts out by examining a short but highly successful fight in 2017 in opposition to a neighbourhood business improvement area in Toronto that was employing a private security guard to harass homeless people in the local park. Another chapter looks at an emergency housing benefit meant to prevent homelessness, that was discriminating against disabled people and families. The group largely approached that struggle through its direct action casework, and experienced a mix of success and failure. Another chapter focuses on OCAP’s many campaigns related to pushing for improvements in the city’s emergency shelter system, with particular attention to the many different strategies employed by the city to demobilize the struggle. And the book concludes with a look at encampment organizing in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Along the way, the book takes up many important ideas. For instance, it critically examines the “housing first” policy, touted by progressives and implemented in many places across Canada, and the ways in which its real-world impacts are “actually pretty terrible.” The book also looks at the direct action casework tactic in some detail. And it covers the crucial role of “epistemic violence” – that is, how deeply central the denial of the experiences and knowledge of poor people and grassroots organizers is to efforts to maintain the brutal systemic violence to which poor people are constantly subjected.

Though it is a book packed with ideas and theory, Withers said, “it expresses that theory really accessibly. I work to tell stories of organizing in a day-to-day way that captures the realities of organizing.” Its aim, they said, is to be “a useful tool for anyone that’s doing any kind of community organizing, or any work on homelessness and housing” – to be a tool through which “folks can think through organizing, and also homelessness policy” in their own concrete circumstances and “really push the struggle forward.”

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: Used with permission of Fernwood Publishing.

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

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Radio — REBROADCAST: Fighting environmental racism in small-town Nova Scotia

Posted on December 28, 2021 by Scott

This is a rebroadcast of an episode of Talking Radical Radio originally broadcast in July 2021.

Vanessa Hartley is 21 years old and an eighth generation Black Loyalist descendent. She is the chair of the South End Environmental Injustice Society (SEED). And she is a resident of Shelburne, a town of about 1200 people on the southwest coast of Nova Scotia. Scott Neigh interviews her about the town, about environmental racism, and about the work of SEED.

Shelburne has a long history. After the US War of Independence, many Loyalists – those who fought on the British side – resettled in other areas still claimed by the British. This included people of African descent, who largely had been enslaved but were recognized by the British as free as an element of the war effort. Many of these Black Loyalists settled in the Shelburne area, particularly in nearby Birchtown – which for a period of time was the largest settlement of free Black people in North America – but many working and living in Shelburne itself. In July 1784, Shelburne and Birchtown became the site of Canada’s (and perhaps North America’s) first race riot, as white residents attacked Black residents and burned down their homes.

The land grants given to Black people were generally fewer, smaller, and lower in quality than those given to white people. Across Nova Scotia, authorities enforced residential segregation, with Black people made to live in entirely separate towns or in separate neighbourhoods. And over time, noxious, harmful, and polluting land uses tended to be disproportionately placed in or next to Black communities (as well as Mi’kmaq communities). This means that African Nova Scotians are disproportionately exposed to pollutants – a pattern known as “environmental racism.”

In the 1950s, a dump was built very close to homes in the Black community in Shelburne’s south end. The dump’s contents included industrial and medical wastes, and in earlier years those managing it regularly set its contents on fire.

Around the time the dump closed in 2016, Shelburne resident Louise Delisle founded SEED. South end residents had noticed what seemed to be oil leaking from barrels in the dump, and they came together to demand something be done about it – particularly given that many of them got their drinking water from wells. The leaking barrels were eventually dealt with, but the larger problem of the dump remains. In 2018, SEED and various partner organizations got funding to test the water in the wells. Most came back as unsafe to drink. While SEED and its partners have worked very hard to ensure south end residents have safe drinking water, there are still some that do not.

Hartley has been involved in the group for the last year or so. Delisle asked her to join after Hartley was part of organizing a local Black Lives Matter march in Shelburne. She had never heard of environmental racism before, but once she learned about it, she said, “there was a fire that just lit me up.”

A central part of the group’s work continues to be related to the dump and to water quality for residents in the south end. They continue to raise money to install filtration systems in the remaining wells. Also, they have been part of a protracted, frustrating process with the town: In 2019, Halifax-born actor Elliot Page offered to pay for a new community well in the south end. The town of Shelburne finally and grudgingly accepted this offer in principle, with a number of conditions, in February 2020. Yet the concrete details have still not been finalized. In addition, SEED continues to press all levels of government to commit to a full clean-up of the dump site.

SEED’s work also extends well beyond dealing with environmental racism. They are active in liaising with governments and partnering with other organizations to get the needs of Shelburne’s Black community met. This has included, for instance, working to regionally disburse money from a substantial solidarity fund raised by the Black Lives Matter group in Halifax.

In the future, the group hopes to continue to build its organizational capacity. They will be partnering in a new academic study examining disproportionate cancer rates among Black residents of Shelburne in relation to their exposure to pollutants. And they will be re-testing all of the wells in the community this summer to see how things have changed. Ultimately, SEED would like to see full remediation of the dump site and reparations for the harms caused.

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: André Carrotflower / Wikimedia

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

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