Transcript: Building visibility, equity, and impact for Asian Canadian artists

Posted on January 4, 2023 by Scott

The following is a rough transcript of the episode of Talking Radical Radio for the week of January 2 to 6, 2023.

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

Theme music

Shawn Tse 0:30
When we talk about the inequities that Asian Canadians face in all types of sectors, we are lacking a lot of data. Really the only data that we know is pretty surface and already beaten into, I think, our society’s consciousness — the lack of representation. We need to start building, I would say, more nuanced data and more nuanced ways of signaling to our systems that go beyond the representation piece because it’s not just about representation.

Scott Neigh 1:01
That’s the voice of Shawn Tse. He’s today’s guest on Talking Radical Radio. This show brings you grassroots voices from across Canada. We give you the chance to hear many different people who are involved in 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 can strengthen all of our efforts to change the world. In Canada, the dominant shape of the art sector can largely trace its history to a Royal Commission headed by future Governor General Vincent Massey, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. A fairly explicit exercise in nation building, it produced a vision of the arts that was — unsurprisingly — Eurocentric, white dominated and settler colonial. A lot has changed since then, as institutional and funding practices in the arts sector, not to mention the nation more broadly, have been challenged and changed by the relentless work of Black, Indigenous and racialized people, and by a range of people of all backgrounds with a different vision of belonging and thriving in northern Turtle Island. Nonetheless, much work remains to be done to realize a vision of the arts in this country that is fully equitable, inclusive, and just. Shawn Tse is an artist, filmmaker, and community organizer based in amiskwacîwâskahikan, also known as Edmonton, Alberta, in Treaty Six territory and the Métis homeland. Tse grew up in Toronto. He was always very involved in music and theater, and he attended film school. But he didn’t have any insider connections in the industry and he didn’t see a lot of space for stories based on racialized experiences back then. So after graduating, he decided to become an educator and spent a decade teaching English in various places in Asia. It took the revolution in high quality, affordable digital technology to bring him back to filmmaking. He moved back to Canada and launched his own production company, Fallout Media, in 2016. A lot of his filmmaking work has happened in community-based settings, often in collaboration with nonprofits, newcomer organizations, and arts based organizations, and often grounded in Edmonton’s Chinatown. Through those relationships, he learned a lot about a range of social justice issues and inequities, and they became an increasing focus for him. Today, he sees much of what he does as bringing together art and filmmaking with community organizing. In 2019, Tse heard about a Montreal-based organization called Festival Accès Asie that was hosting an Asian Heritage Symposium, bringing together people from across Canada involved in various kinds of community work in Asian-Canadian context. And pretty soon he got involved in the working group that was guiding it. A little later on, through the symposium itself, through written surveys, and through consultations with community organizers and with arts organizations in lots of different Asian-Canadian communities, this informal group began to develop a more robust sense of what Asian-Canadian artists need — primarily, according to their findings, visibility and connection. So, with Festival Accès Asie as the lead agency, they applied for and got grant funding to produce an online platform to meet those needs called the CanAsian Arts Network. Much of the work of developing the platform was technical — it involves taking their insights into community need, and figuring out how to implement a useful and accessible online space to address them. A key element of this site allows Asian-Canadian artists to make searchable profiles, including in depth discussion of their arts practice and a portfolio. In conjunction with the site’s other tools for sharing content and for focused collective conversation, they hope that this will facilitate the growth of networks of artists across different communities and contexts. They hope it will also make it easier for Asian Canadian artists to find and connect with opportunities. In the platform’s vision of justice and equity, a key priority is contributing to reconciliation and decolonization, including by catalyzing related conversations in Asian-Canadian arts contexts, and bringing Asian-Canadian and Indigenous artists together for discussion and collaboration. In 2023, the network will be hosting 16 digital literacy workshops as well as other events to help Asian Canadian artists build their knowledge and skills. And the broader vision is to have the online platform of the CanAsian Arts Network and the periodic in person Asian heritage symposium do complimentary work, all the while continuing to evolve as the needs of artists and communities shift, and hopefully contributing to the larger ongoing work of developing an arts sector in Canada with a broadened understanding of the arts and to more just and equitable practices. I speak with Tse about the development and work of the CanAsian Arts Network.

Shawn Tse 5:28
Hi, my name is Sean Tse. He/him pronouns. I’m based in amiskwacîwâskahikan, also known as Edmonton, Treaty Six territory, Métis homeland. I’m an artist, a filmmaker, community organizer, and doing a project called AanAsian Arts Network, which is a platform bringing more visibility to Asian-Canadian artists across our country. I’ve always been very active in performing arts. I grew up in a home where music was a big deal. So I played a lot of music, and then was part of doing a lot of theater growing up. And then eventually I found my way into film through film school. I think film is my core practice right now. The path into film, there was kind of a side turn. Because after I graduated, I ended up going to Asia to teach English. It wasn’t until really the digital age, that really developed closer to the end of my time in Asia, where I started getting back into film. It was much more affordable and accessible for someone like me that didn’t really see necessarily a future in film, because I didn’t really have any great networks. I also didn’t really see a lot of stories that really wanted to centre around the racialized experience, back when I graduated. And so yeah, that technology allowed to break some of those barriers in terms of being able to capture and create stories that I wanted to tell as, you know, a very small crew, or even one-person crew. I decided to come back to Canada and start my own production company called Fallout Media. And I have been working on this media production business since 2016. Most of the work that we’ve been doing at Fallout Media has really been focused around social change-type projects. So, working with a lot of nonprofit, and community, and arts-based projects. And those skills of building a business and also having to coordinate sets and coordinate shoots — a lot of those skills were transferable towards community organizing. And I’m very grateful for those connections specifically in the newcomer and nonprofit spaces. That’s how I started becoming more aware of the different social justice issues, inequities — just being part of a community that really surfaced a lot of the untold stories in our municipality. And through that, my career just continued to build off of learning more about grassroots organizations and how they’re connected and how they are, in many ways, forgotten within our high-level systems. That’s basically how I got into and continue to work in both filmmaking, art, and community organizing. COVID was quite pivotal in taking my work beyond the local, municipal, even provincial context. I heard in 2019, that a Asian heritage festival organization, Festival Accès Asie, based in Montreal, was creating this Asian Heritage Symposium. And it was the second annual one. And I was like, What is this? And how do I not know about this? That put a bit more on my radar that there was this world out there where folks from across Canada who identify as Asian Canadian were meeting up. That event initially was supposed to be just in person, but it switched to virtual. And that’s really how Edmonton was reached out to and folks in the community here that were already organizers were invited to participate. And so I joined a working group that helped steer what this virtual symposium was going to look like. And that’s how I got connected with this network, or this growing idea of what this network would be. Because eventually, through the symposium, we were able to build some data and build some proof around what were the needs of Asian-Canadian artists from across Canada. And one thing that was identified, especially over COVID, is the lack of infrastructure for folks to connect within the virtual space. And so really the prompt for those needs helped generate the grant that was eventually developed and led by Festival Accès Asie, which is the folks that ran the symposium to put in an application for Canada Council to get a digital strategies grant. Through that support of Canada Council, and then also Festival Accès Asie, the community has been able to take it forward to launch within the last few months, this digital platform to serve the community that identifies as Asian-Canadian artists, and bring visibility and ways of connection within the virtual space.

Scott Neigh 10:31
How did you go about engaging with the community in order to assess what Asian-Canadian artists need?

Shawn Tse 10:36
The symposium itself had a number of different workshops that had surveys. We also, when we did finally get the grant or developing the grant itself, had three written surveys for Asian-Canadian artists, but also presenters and folks within industry who would be looking to hire or to invite Asian-Canadian artists to some of their events. So we built some data really around what it would look like and what would the needs be within a digital space. That’s how we generated the idea around visibility and connection as some of the core needs. The other aspects, in terms of consultation, we have a digital council, which is a group of folks from all over Canada who are Asian-Canadian organizers or part of Asian-Canadian organizing arts groups. And they are really important to consult with to shape also how this platform is created, and how it also is outreach to the community. Some of the other things that I’ve done as part of the project is community consultations. Thanks to being able to host virtual engagements, we’ve been able to do a number of different types of community conversations and build more qualitative data around what the specific needs and the functions would be. You know, we know about visibility and we know about wanting connection, but the community conversations really helped to get us closer and closer to real life examples and real life use of what visibility would look like and what connections would look like.

Scott Neigh 12:24
What work was involved in going from this understanding of need to actually establishing the CanAsian Arts Network?

Shawn Tse 12:31
This is a digital platform, so a massive part of it is just tech. And most of the grant funds really went towards a professional web design company to basically take all the information that we had and build it into code, from scratch. And so that was the next stage. You know, here’s what we’ve heard, here are the different functions that we really like, and then negotiating and navigating what that would look like technically and stylistically, as a platform itself. And so most of the work that I’ve been in is, you know, doing a lot of testing and doing a lot of meetings with the tech folks to try to improve the ways that we can make this, at least from a back end perspective, more accessible for the community.

Scott Neigh 13:21
What are some of the key features of the platform that implement the vision you had developed?

Shawn Tse 13:25
If you are an Asian-Canadian artist and you would like to join, it’s a very simple signup form. Once you’ve signed up and your account is approved, you can create your own page where you have a portfolio, where you can really talk a bit more in depth about what your practices. And how that links to the website itself, there’s a directory where you can use all sorts of filters and search functions to really find folks in your community. So I do a lot of organizing in my local Chinatown here in Edmonton. And so within the directory of artists, if you put in the word Chinatown in the search bar, you’d be able to find other artists — myself in there as well — that do specifically Chinatown type art projects. So that’s a really, really important tool and function of visibility, because I think that — and this kind of relates more to my own personal journey in arts, a huge part of me staying within the Chinatown organizing is being able to build connections outside to other folks in their Chinatown. So, you know, I’ve connected with people in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and these kinds of connections have allowed me to share notes and think about certain tools and different strategies in thinking about community organizing in Chinatown here. So those are the types of concrete ways that I can see these kinds of connections being built with other artists, is that naturally you’re going to find folks that you didn’t know in other parts of the country that are doing potentially similar types of themes or topics or practices. And on the website, you’ll be able to either message them, or create a group, or create an interest group. And that’s other ways of connecting. Yeah, there are so many other functions as well. There’s resources, there’s events that you can post, there’s articles that you could write and share. And so, yeah, there’s a number of ways that folks that are in the community can really promote the work that they’re doing, and just bring more visibility to other folks who are interested in this type of cultural and arts material to outside of your networks.

Scott Neigh 15:37
What’s your sense of the community’s response to and uptake of the platform so far?

Shawn Tse 15:42
We’ve hit some of our targets in terms of populating the directory. I don’t know exactly what the number is, but I think we’re close to 300 right now. And so in the few months that we’ve had, and through more word of mouth and social media sharing, we’ve been able to get a nice number of artists be active in the space. We are developing some different workshops and content. This is kind of an ongoing question in terms of having a platform that goes beyond just kind of a static and self-empowered or self-instructed type of website to one that is more dynamic and engaged with folks. That’s the next steps, in terms of where we’re going nd what we know folks are looking towards. Like, how do we generate content or generate activities so that people have, you know, not just this tool to bring visibility to their platform, but also a way to engage community and their own educational learning within the arts and cultural sector?

Scott Neigh 16:45
What have you been doing to get word out about the platform?

Shawn Tse 16:48
We have a great communications strategist, Michelle, based in Montreal, and they’ve been working on a number of different ways of promoting the platform. That’s kind of an ongoing process, right? For now, most of our community outreach has been word of mouth and through social media platforms, and posting this very preliminary foundation step of, you know, are you an artist that identifies as Asian-Canadian that wants to have more visibility and connect with other artists across Canada? So that is a very general kind of pitch to gain the interest and get folks to just sign up. And now we’re in that step of building content that really speaks to getting them engaged and stay connected with the platform itself. So we’ve also developed a blog and, like, encouraging folks to upload their events so that other folks are able to attend and/or see what are the different activities that are out there in Canada that are focused around our community.

Scott Neigh 17:54
What are the paths that you see connecting the functionality of the platform and the things it brings to the community around visibility and connection to the larger challenges that Asian-Canadian artists experience in terms of, you know, their work, and the broader arts community, and the Canadian context as a whole?

Shawn Tse 18:12
I think there’s a number of things. Reconciliation or decolonization is a really important framework right now within the platform itself. People’s experiences within the Asian-Canadian community are varied, right. And I think, like, in Canada as well, everyone is either learning or has already developed specific practice in how they’re engaging within the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the 94 calls to action. So we have put that front and centre as a way to really prompt our community to also recognize there’s work for us as a community and as individuals to really engage in how are we in solidarity with indigenous community. And so that, I think, is one of the really important emphases that we’ve really established as part of the core to why we’re doing this work. And to be very clear and honest, because of our lack of, I would say, community knowledge around this, we’re working towards this. We need help, right? And so that’s why we have an Indigenous consultant really helping us think about not just what a platform would look like in talking about decolonization, but also, within the consultation but also the content that we are producing, how are we making it so that it’s not just a tokened concept. You know, like, you can have your land acknowledgement and stuff like that, but what are the very specific actions and what are the concrete ways that we are furthering this conversation around Indigenous sovereignty and intercultural solidarity? Some of the content that we are building right now is around bringing together Asian-Canadian artists and Indigenous artists to talk about what it is to work together interculturally. Those talks will be released in the new year. But these are some of the ways that we’re navigating these new futures and these new places that really, really we need to invest in. So that’s, that’s one big, big, big, big one. Some of the other ways I would say, we talk about changing paradigms around the way that we look at arts. There’s a hope for a different language when it comes to who is an artist. One of the biggest things that we know from our consultations is kind of this homogeneous labeling of what art or an artist is, and that is very much dictated by our governments, our arts councils, and our federal, provincial and our municipal granting agencies in arts. For a lot of folks who are artists, they rely on these high-level decision makers and gatekeepers to tell us who is an artist and who is not an artist. And I think culturally speaking, especially if you’re a person that’s practicing, you know, a cultural-based type of art — like if I was playing guzheng. Like, there’s no school here for specifically getting some sort of university accreditation for that. And so does that make me not a professional artist if I’ve trained in guzheng for 20 years? So I think that there’s parts of that that we’re also trying to hopefully make some paradigm shifts on what is accessible, or what is considered art within Canada. There are folks that are constantly going on to the website that say, you know, why isn’t this practice more highlighted. For example, spoken word poetry — why isn’t that a title? There is a lot of potential barriers to even wanting to sign up for something like this, because there are a lot of different artists that have different labels or different types of ways that they want to express themselves and consider themselves artists, that potentially this platform does not yet unearth. So that is an important part of the work that we need to do, is not only signaling to our high-level systems that the artists within our community have signaled that they don’t necessarily feel included, but how do we also include them, and then also be a voice making sure that the arts sector is accessible to them? Segueing into the more high level, for the most part, our world is very data-centric. So when we talk about the inequities that Asian Canadians face in all types of sectors, we are lacking a lot of data. Really the only data that we know is pretty surface and already beaten into I think our society’s consciousness, is the lack of representation, right? There’s a lot of conversation still around lack of representation, and how do we increase representation, how do we get folks into roles that have more power. But, yeah, we need to start building I would say, more nuanced data and more nuanced ways of signaling to our systems that go beyond the representation piece. Because it’s not just about representation. There’s a lot more that we can do when we think about, structurally, how do we create safe spaces and spaces where folks do feel empowered to improve our systems? How do we take some of these criticisms that are within this platform and within this community, and generate that to signal to our larger systems to say, these are the types of additional — I would say a bit more complex — ways of looking around how we can generate better systems. As an organizer myself, I’m really interested in seeing how a platform like this can really inform and make more complex and detailed feedback around how our infrastructures or our systems are changing, and how they potentially could change to make things more barrier free and accessible and inclusive.

Scott Neigh 24:09
And building on that, what can you say at this point about the kinds of changes consistent with but going beyond the goals of the CanAsian Arts Network that need to be made by arts funders and by mainstream arts organizations?

Shawn Tse 24:22
I do think that institutions want to develop practices of change. I don’t see that as one of the problems. It’s just right now, when we talk about, you know, gatekeeping and these high-level institutions, it’s slow. It’s slow, because we need organizers on the ground to bring attention or to figure out strategies so that high-level can understand it in a way that they can also see a way for them to engage and make changes. So there’s a process, right? As someone that does move into these different spaces — like grassroots to even institutionalized spaces — my recommendation really is about how do we invest in grassroots organizers to stay and continue and sustain careers in this type of work. Because really, a lot of our institutions and our high-level systems and our governments, they need the grassroots folks to inform them how to move forward. So there has to be just a bit more of that kind of synergy that really invites everyone to be engaged. And what we do see is that when you are an institution that has, like, a good financial backing and, you know, health benefits and things that are like very stable, they will continue to prosper and live on. But grassroot organizations, it’s much more volatile, it’s a lot harder to sustain. And so the reality is, the burnout is so real. There’s so many passionate folks out there that have to walk away because life happens. So how can institution and government and these more stable access points actually invest in grassroots partners that they’ve always partnered with, to encourage them to keep going?

Scott Neigh 26:16
What does the network have coming up in 2023?

Shawn Tse 26:19
We have some really exciting digital literacy and community conversations that will be coming out in 2023. There’ll be 16 digital literacy workshops. We are focusing on helping Asian-Canadian artists learn about, you know, business and arts, social media, the digital space, and also a really important theme, like I had mentioned before, decolonization. And then the community conversations will be invites to a panel and we will talk about some of the gaps and some of the different topics that folks in the community have flagged. It’s also been really exciting meeting up with all these really great leaders in not just the Asian community but the Indigenous and the BIPOC community, to see how we can move together when we talk about justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Scott Neigh 27:15
You have been listening to my interview with Sean Tse about the CanAsian Arts Network. To learn more about the network, go to canasianarts.com. 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.

Theme music

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Radio: Building visibility, equity, and impact for Asian Canadian artists

Posted on January 3, 2023 by Scott

Shawn Tse is an artist, filmmaker, and community organizer based in amiskwacîwâskahikan, also known as Edmonton, Alberta, in Treaty Six territory and the Métis homeland. Scott Neigh interviews him about the development and work of the CanAsian Arts Network, a digitally-facilitated network of Asian Canadian artists, cultural workers, and organizations that aims to catalyze collaboration and build visibility, equity, impact, and representation.

In Canada, the dominant shape of the arts sector can largely trace its history to a royal commission headed by future governor-general Vincent Massey in the late 1940s and early 1950s. A fairly explicit exercise in nation-building, it produced a vision of the arts that was, unsurprisingly, Eurocentric, white-dominated, and settler-colonial. A lot has changed since then, as institutional and funding practices in the arts sector – not to mention the nation more broadly – have been challenged and changed by the relentless work of Black, Indigenous, and racialized people, and by a range of people of all backgrounds with a different understanding of belonging and thriving in northern Turtle Island. Nonetheless, much work remains to be done to realize a vision of the arts in this country that is fully equitable, inclusive, and just.

Tse grew up in Toronto. He was always very involved in music and theatre, and he attended film school. But he did not have any insider connections in the industry and he did not see a lot of space for stories based on racialized experiences back then. So after graduating, he decided to become an educator, and spent a decade teaching English in various places in Asia.

It took the revolution in high quality, affordable digital technology to bring Tse back to filmmaking. He said, “The technology allowed [me] to break some of those barriers in terms of being able to capture and create stories that I wanted to tell, as a very small crew, or even, like, your own one-person crew.” He moved back to Canada and launched his own production company, Fallout Media, in 2016.

A lot of his filmmaking work has happened in community-based settings, often in collaboration with nonprofits, newcomer organizations, and arts-based organizations, and often grounded in Edmonton’s Chinatown. Tse said, “That’s how I started becoming more aware of the different social justice issues [and] inequities – just being part of a community that really surfaced a lot of the untold stories in our municipality.” Today, he sees much of what he does as bringing together art and filmmaking with community organizing. He continued, “Most of the work that we’ve been doing at Fallout Media has really been focused around social change-type projects.”

In 2019, Tse heard about a Montreal-based organization called Festival Accès Asie that was hosting an Asian Heritage Symposium, bringing together people from across Canada involved in various kinds of community work in Asian Canadian contexts, and pretty soon he got involved in the working-group that was guiding it. A little later on, through the symposium itself, through written surveys, and through consultations with community organizers and with arts organizations in lots of different Asian Canadian communities, this informal group began to develop a more robust sense of what Asian Canadian artists need – primarily, according to their findings, visibility and connection. So, with Festival Accès Asie as the lead agency, they applied for and got grant funding to produce an online platform to meet those needs, called the CanAsian Arts Network. The project is also guided by what Tse described as a “digital council … which is a group of folks from all over Canada who are Asian Canadian organizers, or are part of Asian Canadian organizing arts groups.”

Much of the work of developing the platform was technical – it involved taking their insights into community need and figuring out how to implement a useful and accessible online space to address them. A key element of the site allows Asian Canadian artists to make searchable profiles, including in-depth discussion of their arts practice and a portfolio. In conjunction with the site’s other tools for sharing content and for focused collective conversation, they hope that this will facilitate the growth of networks of artists in different communities. They hope it will also make it easier for Asian Canadian artists to find and connect with opportunities.

Tse used his own filmmaking practice as an example of how this networking can work, and how it can benefit artists. “A huge part of me staying within the Chinatown organizing is being able to build connections outside, to other folks in their Chinatowns. So, you know, I’ve connected with people in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and these kinds of connections have allowed me to share notes and think about certain tools and different strategies in thinking about community organizing in Chinatown here. So, yeah, those those are the types of concrete ways that I can see these kinds of connections being built with other artists … Naturally, you’re going to find folks that you didn’t know in other parts of the country that are doing potentially similar types of themes or topics or practices.”

In the platform’s overall vision of justice and equity, Tse said, “Reconciliation or decolonization is a really important framework.” He said that like all non-Indigenous people in this country, people in Asian Canadian communities are still learning and figuring out what that means for them. “So we have put that front and centre as a way to really prompt our community to also recognize that there’s work for us as a community and as individuals, to really engage in how are we in solidarity with Indigenous community.” As the platform has developed, the CanAsian Arts Network has worked with an Indigenous consultant to ensure that such things are included in a substantive, rather than token, way. “What are the very specific actions and what are the specific concrete ways that we are furthering this conversation around Indigenous sovereignty and intercultural solidarity?” An important part of this work beyond the site itself involves catalyzing related conversations in Asian Canadian arts contexts and bringing Asian Canadian and Indigenous artists together for discussion and collaboration.

Tse also hopes that the network can be part of broadening some of the fundamental understandings that we have of the arts in Canada. He said, “We talk about changing paradigms, about the way that we look at arts” and have “hopes for a different language when it comes to who is an artist.” Often, these things are subject to a sort of “homogeneous labelling” that can sometimes exclude “cultural-based type of art.” Definitions for grants, exhibitions, or other forms of institutional recognition or support might, for instance, exclude certain kinds of visual arts, performance, or musical practices common in specific Asian Canadian (or other racialized) communities. And these definitions are “very much dictated by our governments, our arts councils, and our federal, provincial, and our municipal granting agencies in arts. For a lot of folks who are artists, they rely on these high-level decision makers and gatekeepers to tell us who is an artist and who is not an artist.” The platform is working to get past these exclusions in its own work, and is also involved in “signalling to our high-level systems that the artists within our community have signalled that they don’t necessarily feel included.”

More broadly, Tse hopes that the CanAsian Arts Network can be part of making conversations about equity and inclusion more complex and expansive. He said, “When we talk about the inequities that Asian Canadians face in all types of sectors, we are lacking a lot of data. Really the only data that we know is pretty surface and already beaten into, I think, our society’s consciousness, [and that] is the lack of representation.” But he wants “more nuanced data and more nuanced ways of signalling to our systems that go beyond the representation piece.”

He said, “There’s a lot more that we can do when we think about, structurally, how do we create safe spaces and spaces where folks do feel empowered to improve our systems. How do we take some of these criticisms that are within this platform and within this community, and generate that to signal to our larger systems to say, these are the types of additional – I would say a bit more complex – ways of looking around how we can generate better systems. As an organizer myself, I’m really interested in seeing how a platform like this can really inform and make more complex and detailed feedback around how our infrastructures or our systems are changing, and how they potentially could change to make things more barrier-free and accessible and inclusive.”

In 2023, the network will be hosting 16 digital literacy workshops and other events to help Asian Canadian artists build their knowledge and skills. And the broader vision is to have the online platform of the CanAsian Arts Network and the periodic in-person Asian Heritage Symposium do complementary work, all the while continuing to evolve as the needs of artists and communities shift, and hopefully contributing to the larger ongoing work of developing an arts sector in Canada with a broadened understanding of the arts and more just and equitable practices.

Please read about the big changes coming for Talking Radical Radio in 2023!

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 the CanAsian Arts Network.

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

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Big Changes for Talking Radical

Posted on January 1, 2023 by Scott

Hello supporters of Talking Radical!

For many of us, the new year is a time when we reflect on the year just past and the changes that lie ahead. In that spirit, I want to share with you some big news about what is coming up for me and for the Talking Radical project.

As of the end of February 2023, Talking Radical Radio will have been running for ten years. Over that time, I have done more than 500 interviews with people engaged in activism, organizing, and other kinds of change work, and I have brought at least 50 episodes per year to community radio stations across the country and to a range of online platforms. I have benefited immeasurably from getting to speak with so many people doing interesting and important work whom I would never otherwise have encountered, and I am constantly humbled by how generously people have shared their stories. Even a decade in, it is satisfying work and it feels like a politically useful way to employ my time and my skills.

However, after extensive reflection and lots of conversations over the last six months, I have decided that once Talking Radical Radio reaches the 10-year mark at the end of February, it will be ending its weekly run. There are lots of reasons for this, and I may go into more detail in a future email/post, but a lot of it boils down to the fact that the show takes by far the biggest chunk of my work time each week and each year, and I want to have that time to take on new challenges and to make other things.

For the next two months, the show will still reach you every week in whichever of the many ways you listen. As for what comes after – there are a few things I know for sure, and plenty more that I look forward to exploring, but I do not want to say much more than that just yet. Certainly, the Talking Radical project as a whole is not over. As a sort of container for my work grounded in the voices of activists, organizers, and other people engaged in collective struggle, it began long before the radio show, with the oral history project that resulted in the two books I published with Fernwood Publishing in 2012, and it will continue after the show. At the moment, I don’t know exactly what form that will take, or what other directions my work as a whole will go – a desire to reconnect with that sense of broad possibility is part of the point of this change – but it seems likely that struggles for collective liberation will remain a significant focus of what I do. It is even possible that Talking Radical Radio is not gone for good, as I am leaving open the possibility of returning to it as a podcast-only project with periodic, time-limited seasons – I’m not committing to that, but it is a possibility.

Thank-you so much for listening and for supporting the show over the years! And I look forward to continuing to share the work that I do in this area via the Talking Radical email list and via social media.

Solidarity and best wishes in the new year,

Scott 8)

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REBROADCAST: Immigrant workers confronting the people who exploit them

Posted on December 27, 2022 by Scott

The following is a rebroadcast of an episode of Talking Radical Radio originally broadcast in July 2022.

Simran Kaur Dhunna and Bikram Singh are members of the Naujawan Support Network, a group of international students and immigrant workers primarily based in Brampton, Ontario, who are challenging the exploitation and mistreatment that their members face using protest, mutual support, and collective direct action. Scott Neigh interviews them about how they directly confront the employers, landlords, immigration consultants, and other people who exploit them, and why that is such an important part of workers building power and winning victories.

Brampton is a city of around 650,000 people located in Peel Region, part of the suburbs within the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) in southern Ontario. More than three-quarters of the population is racialized and many residents are also immigrants, and there is a particularly large Punjabi population. Along with substantial hospitality and construction sectors, Brampton is a central logistics hub for southern Ontario, and it is home to many truck yards, warehouses, distribution centres, and so on. These businesses, and therefore millions of Ontarians, depend on Brampton’s international students and other racialized immigrant workers. Dhunna said that Brampton, “like many of the suburbs, has held up the GTA and southern Ontario throughout the pandemic, and well before that.”

It is, sadly, nothing new for international students and recent immigrants working in these sectors to be facing a wide range of oppressive circumstances, but there were two developments in 2021 that inspired Punjabi youth to get together and form the Naujawan Support Network. One was the massive uprising by farmers from Punjab, Haryana, and other states in India that ultimately defeated the oppressive farm laws that Narendra Modi’s BJP government was attempting to impose – that was, according to Dhunna, “a very politicizing force” in the community, particularly for international students whose parents were directly involved in the uprising.

The other development was a shocking number of instances of young workers in the community dying by suicide. A community meeting was organized to discuss the issue, to better understand the hopelessness that some youth were feeling. Dhunna said, “We had a discussion about why that’s happening, what are the root causes – the main one being exploitation. Because if you’re not paid your wages, you can’t pay your rent, you can’t pay your tuition. It’s difficult to face parents who have taken out loans and gone into debt debt to send you here.” So they formed the network to “confront the people who exploit us directly.”

Since its formation, wage theft has been one of the most common problems that the Naujawan Support Network has dealt with. While it is something that happens to low-wage workers in lots of different contexts, Canada’s immigration system makes international students and other recent immigrants particularly vulnerable to this kind of exploitation.

International students, for example, pay much higher tuition fees than domestic students. They are legally limited to spend no more than 20 hours per week working for a wage. However, in order to pay rent, pay tuition, and otherwise survive, they need to work more than that. Employers know about the 20-hour limit, so it is a very common practice for them to pay minimum wage for those 20 hours and then as little as $5/hr to $10/hr for any time beyond that. As well, the large number of international students in need of work means that it is also common for employers to fire students for no reason without paying owed wages, knowing they will have no trouble finding someone else to hire. According to Singh, “Every [international] student faces this issue of wage theft.” Employers sometimes also threaten deportation or use the need for references in students’ applications for permanent residency as leverage to get them to work for lower pay than the minimum to which they are legally entitled. As well, workers in the network have faced other forms of mistreatment, abuse, or even outright violence, including sexual violence, from employers.

While the network regularly supports workers in filing legal complaints at the labour board, it is direct confrontation that comprises the bulk of their work. Singh said, “Legal processes always work for the rich people. They are in the favour of the employer.” They have found that official legal processes are often ineffective at recovering owed wages, and that even when they do, they rarely impose consequences on employers who steal wages.

Dhunna said, “The way that the labour court system also works is that individualizes people’s issues and struggles, and in many ways invisibilizes the exploitation, in the sense that one can go through the labour court, and the community and other workers will have no awareness of the exploitation that’s happened. It’s not really brought to the public’s eye. And so one of the things that protest and organization does is it visibilizes and brings to the fore the exploitation that’s actually taking place and imposes a cost, imposes as a consequence on employers, who otherwise have no fear of labour courts.” Singh added, “We choose to expose that wage thief in the society.”

When a worker approaches the network with an instance of wage theft, the first thing they do is talk with that worker about their situation and about the network. Dhunna said, “We let people know that this isn’t an NGO, this isn’t a charity. We do struggle.” Workers are expected to take a lead role in their own case, and to participate in the struggles of others. As well, they go over the details of the case, including all of the documentation that the worker has. Then they put together a letter that they deliver to the employer, demanding that the back wages be paid. If, after multiple chances, the employer still refuses to pay, they publish the details of the case on social media and hold a small protest at the work site. If the employer still refuses, they continue to escalate their actions in terms of size and target, including protesting at the employer’s home and shaming them in front of their neighbours.

In response, employers have done things like threaten workers with deportation or even violence, called the cops, mobilized other community members against them, and filed defamation suits – you can donate to the Naujawan Support Network’s legal defense fund on GoFundMe. While the community at large has mostly been quite supportive of the network, there have also been instances of Punjabi-language media hosts propagandizing for employers and mobilizing them to collectively oppose workers. Dhunna speculates that they “most likely get funds or run the ads of employers.”

It is the defamation suits that are the most common response. The purpose of such lawsuits is to “silence and intimidate,” according to Dhunna, but for the most part, if you are speaking the truth, such suits will not succeed. She said, “Sure, it will take time in the courts. Sure, it will cost money, money that we’ve been able to fundraise. Or, you know, some firms and some community organizations have been able to represent us pro bono. But it’s not something that scares us, and [we] let workers know as well that you shouldn’t be afraid of legal repercussions or retaliation if you’re on the side of the truth. That’s one of the main points that we make to our membership, and a message that we give to employers as well – that they can take us through the courts, but it’s not something that will deter us from building our power and continuing to organize.”

Even in the face of employer opposition, by working together and engaging in collective protest and direct action, the network has won a lot of victories. These days, sometimes just mentioning the network’s name is enough to get employers to pay up. They estimate that they have recovered more than $200,000 in wages for workers over the last year, and Dhunna said she has seen a “palpable increase in confidence among workers” because of their organizing.

She continued, “There are people … in activist spaces or on the left who may think that there’s no point in just protesting against an employer, one by one. They might think it doesn’t really make sense, that it’s not systemic. And to those people, I think we would say that there is a lot of power that is built through collectively confronting our exploiters. And there’s been a tendency in recent times, or at least since I’ve been organizing, to rely on legal reform or advocacy, and to do so in a way that doesn’t actually allow workers to talk to one another and lead the organizing. So I would say that it’s really important that whether we’re in a union or whether we’re in an organization, that we organize to confront the people directly who exploit us. And to understand why we have those shared conditions, how we want to transform them. And to then have collective conversations on transforming our conditions, with the aim of building worker power. And I think the fact that Naujawan Support Network has grown so much in a year is a testament to that strategy and that tactic.”

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 the Naujawan Support Network.

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

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Radio: The hard, slow work of opposing poverty in an era of growing crisis

Posted on December 20, 2022 by Scott

Sandee Lovas and Silke Force are members of the Alliance Against Poverty, a grassroots anti-poverty group in Kitchener-Waterloo, which is an hour southwest of Toronto in southern Ontario. Scott Neigh interviews them about the impact of poverty on their lives and their community, and about the group’s campaigns around public transit, housing and homelessness, and other issues.

These days, poverty seems to be getting broader and deeper all the time. People around the world are facing rampant inflation and a cost of living crisis. Many jurisdictions across Canada are experiencing a housing affordability crisis, linked to the increasing financialization of the housing market. For decades, governments of all stripes have been refusing to set welfare and disability rates at a level even close to high enough to allow people to live with dignity, and increases to the minimum wage have been slow, grudging, and won only through extensive struggle. And according to today’s guests, people in Waterloo Region, as in a number of areas in southern Ontario, have seen housing costs spiral upwards even faster than many other places in the country, as people fleeing the intense unaffordability of Toronto move in and drive prices up.

Lovas is a queer and nonbinary person with multiple disabilities who lives with poverty. Force is a chaplain who does on-call work in hospitals, and who has also had plenty of experience of living with poverty. Neither of today’s interview participants were involved back then, but they say that the Alliance Against Poverty was founded about 15 years ago as a way to bring together people who themselves were living in poverty and also people in community and faith-based organizations concerned with the issue, in order to work for change. Their primary focus and their go-to tactics have varied over time, as circumstance and people’s capacities have shifted.

According to Lovas, for instance, just before she got involved in the group five or six years ago, they had a major campaign demanding free public transit – an idea implemented in a number of places around the world which has been a focus of organizing in a few cities in Canada in the last decade, but that still faces a steep uphill battle in this country. Force lamented, “The idea of free transit, for some strange reason, just won’t go over here.” Along with its many environmental benefits, a high quality, free, public transit system would significantly reduce barriers faced by people living in poverty to accessing services, finding employment, and maintaining social connections.

More recently, though, the group has turned its attention largely to issues of housing and homelessness – because, Lovas said, “of how dire the situation has been getting in this area.” She continued, “It’s becoming more and more difficult to maintain an apartment here if you’re living on disability or [welfare], because our entire cheques do not cover the average month’s rent for a one bedroom apartment in this area.” This results in lots of people being homeless, and many more being precariously housed. “So the people who have apartments that they can afford to live in, even if it’s taking up almost their entire disability payment, are trying anything they can to stay in that apartment, because they know there is nowhere else to go in this province, should they lose that apartment. Which makes them vulnerable to abuse from their landlords, from neighbours, from partners. Because there’s nowhere else that they can escape to. The shelter system is not adequate for the number of people that we have in this area, and shelters aren’t the answer.”

Lovas said that the group thinks there is “no one fix” for this crisis, but a need for many different kinds of interventions at many different levels – tiny homes, improved zoning and property development decisions, an end to homeless encampment evictions, housing subsidies that follow the tenant, an improved shelter system, greater government investment in co-operatives and other social housing, and lots of other things. She said, “They’re all just parts of the overall solution…. There’s multiple reasons why the housing crisis has gotten so bad and why poverty has gotten so bad. It’s going to take more than one thing to fix it.”

An additional facet of the issue in Kitchener-Waterloo is related to the city’s recent construction of a light-rail transit system (LRT). To make room for the construction, some buildings along the route were demolished, including numerous rental units at the more affordable end of the market. This was accompanied by promises that they would be replaced by new affordable units along the route but, Lovas said, “None of those affordable apartments have been replaced,” and new developments are a mix of condos and high-end rentals.

Force added, “It irritates me and many others that the City Hall is absolutely not helping with this situation at all. They bow to the money of the developers time and time again.” Despite the promises that affordable units would be replaced, “there is absolutely no sticking to their word. I have, frankly, never been so disgusted in my life with developers. It matches my disdain for the way banks take advantage of people as well.”

One major component of how the group tries to push anti-poverty concerns forward is through public education. Lovas said, “I feel a lot of people don’t know how bad it’s gotten. And I truly believe that if more people knew how bad it was, they would care.” This includes maintaining a presence at festivals and other public events, speaking to community organizations, and lots of media work. They also delegate and lobby regularly at city hall, engage with local politicians from other levels of government, and intervene in issue-based ways in elections.

They will also, when the occasion demands, organize a demonstration, and they participate in those organized by others. And in earlier years they even did things like sit-ins, though many core members of the group are getting older and many others are disabled, and in our ableist world, that places additional barriers in the way of such actions.

In addition, COVID-19 has been a major impediment. Lovas explained, “A lot of what we want to do had run into a barrier with COVID, because many people in the [group] who live with disabilities also have health issues and are immunocompromised, and have become even more isolated since COVID started. So it’s hard to get out there and organize in the community when there’s a pandemic going on, which has just exacerbated the whole situation. And some people not wanting to go into the shelters available because there could be COVID there and they can’t risk getting it. Or other people who can’t get out to the soup kitchens, can’t get out to the food banks because they can’t go on transit anymore, because there’s no more mask requirements. So COVID has definitely slowed down any momentum we were building.”

In addition to their focus on housing issues, they are currently working to further develop their online presence, and to build stronger connections with younger activists.

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.

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

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Radio: Preserving trans histories

Posted on December 13, 2022 by Scott

Aaron Devor is the Chair in Transgender Studies at the University of Victoria (UVic), in the territories of the Lkwungen-speaking peoples on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Scott Neigh interviews him about the Transgender Archives at UVic, the largest archive in the world of material related to trans people, research on trans issues, and struggles by trans communities.

Any group of people facing systemic oppression in the past and the present likely face as part of that oppression a substantial erasure and marginalization of their history. This is particularly stark for transgender people. As Devor put it, “Almost none of the history of trans+ people has been written.” This erasure is perhaps most tragically symbolized by the Nazi burning in 1933 of the books and records of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, a prominent early centre for research and activism related to (in contemporary terminology) LGBTQ+ people, including trans people specifically. However, that is but one terrible moment in a much more pervasive silencing.

When Devor was a graduate student in the early 1980s, the language that was available for people to express their experiences of gender was quite different than what emerged in subsequent decades – terms like “transgender” and “nonbinary” were not yet in common use, though certainly there were plenty of people navigating the experiences that those words would later name.

Devor said, “At that point in my life, I was a very gender non-conforming person myself, and as I moved through the world it was clear to me that my gender expression caused other people a great deal of consternation, and therefore it made my life somewhat difficult as well.” So he decided that people who were gender-variant and the struggles that they faced would be at the centre of his research. And he has never stopped with that work. The role of Chair of Transgender Studies that he holds at UVic is the only research chair in Transgender Studies in the world.

In 2005, a trans woman named Rikki Swin, who was also a wealthy industrialist, got in touch with Devor. She had founded a research institute dealing with trans issues in Chicago in 2001, but had closed it by 2004, and the relatively extensive holdings it had amassed in that time were sitting idle in a locked building. Devor asked Swin if she would be willing to donate that material to the archives at UVic, which she eventually did in 2007. Over the next few years, Devor’s substantial connections with both research and community-based activism related to trans people led to two further substantial donations of trans-related material to the UVic archives. And by 2011, the process of collecting such material had gained sufficient critical mass that Devor announced the launch of the Transgender Archives.

Devor said that the archives’ “focus is on research concerning transgender people and transgender issues, and activism concerning transgender people and transgender issues. And we use ‘transgender’ in the broadest possible interpretation of what that could include.”

The archives have no budget to purchase material, though the university will pay for its transportation to Victoria if necessary, but their holdings have continued to grow through donations. At this point, if you lined up the boxes containing all of these documents (and associated ephemera), it would stretch farther than one and a half football fields. The archives has material on trans-related research going back to the 19th century, and on activism by trans people going back to 1960. This includes things like the entire print run of an important early magazine called Transvetia, which ran from 1960 into the 1980s; the papers of the main US-based foundation supporting trans causes in those years; and records from the longest-running event for trans people in the Western world, called the Fantasia Fair, which has been held in Massachusetts since 1974.

Devor acknowledges that a range of structural issues mean that their holdings are more likely to capture material from trans people who are more privileged along other dimensions, but it is an issue that they are working on and there are some important exceptions. They have, for instance, the papers of Aiyyana Maracle, a trans and Two Spirit Haudenosaunee woman from Six Nations who was a renowned artist, educator, and storyteller. And they have most of the papers of Red Jordan Arobateau, a working-class Black trans man and prolific artist and author from San Francisco.

Along with conserving material for use by community-based and academic researchers – and according to Devor, the Transgender Archives is the busiest archive hosted at UVic other than the university’s own – they also make use of the material for a range of public education interventions. Currently, for instance, they have an exhibition called “Word of Mouth.” Based on oral history interviews with 15 trans activists and two allies, which were conducted under the auspices of the LGBTQ Oral History Collaboraotry and are preserved in the Trans Archives, it documents the emergence of trans networks and communities in North America in the second half of the 20th century.

The exhibition weaves together material from the interviews with additional research, stories, and visuals. Devor said, “If they mentioned a TV show, we got a clip from that TV show. If they mentioned a person whose story appeared in the newspaper, we tell the story of who that person was and we get a copy of the newspaper articles that they reference. And some of them talk about each other, in fact. And so we have this whole exhibit that is a history lesson in little pieces,” which allows for multiple entry points into the work and for people to explore it in lots of different ways.

Devor said, “We called it ‘Word of Mouth’ because these folks are mostly talking about pre-internet days. And we subtitled it ‘How the trans+ community found itself’ – trans+ meaning, you know, trans in the largest sense. And before the internet, word of mouth [and] paper was how people found each other.” He continued, “Almost everyone [interviewed in the project] – because, remember, they’re of a certain age – almost everyone starts the story by saying, I thought I was the only one. I didn’t know how to find anybody else. I didn’t know anybody else like me existed.”

He concluded, “We want a better future for trans+ people than the past. … I think that the role of the archives is to help us to understand, again, where do we come from [and] how did we get here, as a tool to helping us to define a better future.”

Devor also connects the Transgender Archives to another facet of his work, a recurring conference on trans history called Moving Trans History Forward which is happening next at the end of March 2023.

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: torbakhopper / Wikimedia.

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

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Radio: Forcing Canadian companies to respect human rights

Posted on December 6, 2022 by Scott

Emily Dwyer is the policy director at the Canadian Network on Corporate Accountability (CNCA), and Aidan Gilchirst-Blackwood is its network coordinator. The CNCA is a broad network of Canadian civil society organizations that are working to ensure that Canadian companies respect human rights and the environment when working abroad. Scott Neigh interviews them about the network’s origins and about its past and present campaigns, including current efforts to get the federal government to pass human rights and environmental due diligence legislation.

According to Dwyer, examples of environmental and human rights abuses around the world committed by corporations based in Canada are “widespread and longstanding.” This is at least sometimes most visible among Canadian mining and other resource extraction companies, given Canada’s disproportionately large role in the global mining sector. But it is true of lots of other kinds of corporations too – Dwyer pointed to examples in the garment industry, manufacturing, seafood processing, and agriculture, just to name a few. Kinds of abuses include killings, gang rape, serious bodily harm, forced labour, and lots of other things.

Around 2005, there were parliamentary hearings in Canada related to certain abuses by Canadian mining companies, which resulted in some quite strong recommendations for change. Then the federal government held a series of roundtables across the country involving academics, civil society, industry, and government, to discuss these recommendations.

While the recommendations have largely not, to this point, been enacted, the roundtables did prompt the related civil society organizations to begin coordinating more extensively among themselves. Not every group was able to participate in every meeting, so they set up an informal network as a way to make sure that the right voices were present to speak at the right events, and to share information with each other about what had happened. The groups that were involved decided that they liked being able to work together in this way, so they formalized the network into the CNCA.

Membership of the network has increased over the years to its current total of 40 organizations, and it includes groups across a wide range of sectors, kinds, and sizes. Members include Amnesty International Canada, the United Church of Canada, Unifor, MiningWatch, the Canadian Labour Congress, Cooperation Canada, Development and Peace, Friends of the Earth, Kairos, Peace Brigades International, the Public Service Alliance, and lots of others.

Coordinating and sharing information among all of these organizations has remained an important role for the CNCA over the years. But the network has also engaged in campaigning.

One early initiative was their mobilization in 2009 in support of Bill C-300. That was, Dwyer said, “a private member’s bill that would have conditioned Canadian government support on companies’ adherence to human rights norms. It came quite close to becoming a law – it lost by six votes at third reading in the House of Commons.”

In 2013, they launched a campaign that they called Open for Justice, which Dwyer said “called for an independent ombudsperson empowered to investigate allegations of abuse linked to Canadian mining companies.” Organizations in the CNCA network and the members of those organizations were very active on this issue. Hundreds of thousands of Canadians called or sent postcards to their MPs, signed petitions, or took part in delegations. Dwyer said, “We got reports back that sometimes, for some MPs, this was the issue that they were hearing the most about. Which is unusual, for issues that are outside of Canada and involving human rights to be the top issue that an MP would be hearing about.”

In 2018, the federal government announced the creation of an office that they originally said would have many of the powers that the CNCA was demanding, including the ability to compel documents and testimony from companies in the course of investigating human rights abuses. Dwyer said, “That was an important win for this movement. Unfortunately, after that announcement, there was a pretty significant push-back and mobilization campaign, lobbying campaign, by the mining industry, and the [federal Liberal] government ended up watering down its approach [and] gutting the office’s powers before it was open. So that campaign continues to be active. We did shift the narrative, but are still waiting for that office to be effective.”

The group’s main campaign at the moment is called Non-Negotiable. It is demanding that Canada catch up with certain other countries and pass a law that, Dwyer said, “would actually require companies to stop profiting off of abuses, to take action to prevent and remedy human rights violations throughout their supply chains and global operations, that would help impacted communities and workers access Canadian courts to be able to enforce those obligations and access remedy, and that would apply to all human rights.”

The network sees such legislation as a winnable goal. Last year, they held a media conference in support of the idea that involved participation of MPs from all of the parties in Parliament other than the Conservatives. The CNCA has produced model legislation, and two different bills based on that work – Bills C-262 and C-263 – have been introduced in Parliament. They have been mobilizing people in support of those bills in ways similar to their earlier campaign.

Currently, their emphasis is on making clear to MPs how these two pieces of legislation would be substantive and effective in implementing corporate accountability, in contrast with another proposal currently receiving attention in Parliament.

Dwyer described this other proposal – “a modern slavery reporting bill that’s already gone through the Senate and that is currently being studied by the Foreign Affairs Committee” – as “really weak” and something that the CNCA is “really concerned about.” She said that bill is “quite meaningless. It would just require companies to publish an annual report on if they’ve taken any steps to identify and address forced labour and child labour in their supply chains. It wouldn’t actually require them to take any of those steps. And it wouldn’t actually require companies to stop using forced labour. So we think that that approach is really problematic. And we’re worried that that kind of bill – that makes it look like the government’s doing something, that makes it look like there’s a response to the serious problem of forced labour in Canadian supply chains – will kind of quash the real momentum we think is building in Canada towards a more effective response.”

In passing human rights and environmental due diligence legislation, Canada would be playing catch-up with a number of other countries, particularly in Europe, that either have already passed such legislation or are working towards doing so. Dwyer clarified that none of the existing laws are perfect, “so there’s lots of room for Canada to go beyond what the examples are in Europe.”

“But,” she said, “without a doubt, we’re far behind those examples.”

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: Kevin Walsh / Wikimedia.

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

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