Transcript: Anti-ableism and disability justice education

Posted on August 17, 2022 by Scott

The following is a rough transcript of the episode of Talking Radical Radio for the week of August 15 to 19, 2022.

Scott Neigh 0:08
My name is Scott Neigh, and this is Talking Radical Radio

Theme music

Dev R 0:30
Disability is not something that only affects specific disabled people. Everybody has varying abilities, they have varying skills, they have varying strengths, and capitalism, society, all of these things really try to enforce an idea of what a normal typical productive human being as and for a lot of us, disabled and non disabled, like, we don’t really fit those categories.

Scott Neigh 1:03
That’s the voice of Dev Ramsawakh. They and Kate Welsh are today’s guests 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. Kate Welsh is a white, queer, disabled person who uses she or they pronouns. They’re involved in anti-ableism education and visual arts. They work doing research related to ableism and they have a private practice as a mental health counsellor and provide support for queer and trans people who are disabled or chronically ill death. Ramsawakh is a diasporic, Indo-Caribbean, gender fluid, disabled artist who uses they and he pronouns. There are a multidisciplinary storyteller who works with a wide range of media. And one key focus for that work is disability justice. Kate and Dev are speaking today about the CRIP Collective, a small group of Toronto-based disabled educators and artists who do anti-ableism, anti-oppression, and disability justice workshops, and various other kinds of community building with disabled people with an intersectional approach. The first word in the collective’s name is a slur that some but certainly not all disabled people are reclaiming. In the case of this collective, it is also an acronym for “Community Resistance Intimacy Project.” The story of the collective begins about five years ago. Kate was working in the social service sector. She was the only (at least visibly) disabled employee at a seemingly progressive nonprofit – the kind of place that had good policies related to anti-racism, anti-oppression, trans inclusion, and so on, and employees with lots of different intersecting identities. But Kate experienced some very blatant ableism in that workplace. Neither their colleagues nor the organization were able to deal with it effectively. And they ended up quitting. The head of the organization asked Kate to connect them with some kind of workshop on anti-oppression and anti-ableism. So she looked around the Toronto context and found…well, nothing. This was a huge gap in the community and Kate decided to do what they could to fill it. They had co-facilitated some workshops on disability and queerness in earlier years, but they knew that they did not want to take on this new challenge on their own. So they reached out through community networks seeking specifically racialized and queer disabled folks who might want to co-facilitate and they connected with Dev. The two really hit it off and decided that they wanted to work together. And by 2018, they and another facilitator – Jayde Hinds, who’s no longer with the collective – had developed a workshop they called Unpacking Ableism demand for their work was high right from the start. And by 2021, Kate and Dev could no longer meet it on their own. So they invited five new members into the collective. They’ve also been expanding the kinds of things that the collective offers, along with anti-ableism education ranging from 101-level to more advanced they also do more focused on specialized workshops as well as various kinds of disability justice-centered facilitation and community building. In response to a question about the key things that non disabled people consistently fail to understand about disability, Dev said, “It’s pretty much just everything about disability.” Often non disabled people treat disability as a discrete thing that can always be clearly and easily identified, and then met with clear accommodations, but ableism just isn’t reducible to say being unable to get into building X or to make use of service Y. Rather, ableism permeates everything about how our world and lives are socially organized. While being disabled can be a vital source of joy, resilience and community, systemic ableism can, especially for multiply marginalized disabled people, make it nearly impossible to just survive. In the face of all of this, the kind of educational and community building work that the collective does is only one facet of the change work that is needed. But it’s an important one. Making a healthcare setting a workplace, a social service, or a community group into a more livable, less ableist space can make a big difference for the disabled people in that space. And the way Kate and Dev approach it, education is not about making sure people have particular terminology or information, but about cultivating the kind of critical perspective and confidence that can allow people to actively engage in working collectively against ableism. I speak with Kate and Dev about the work of the CRIP collective.

Dev R 5:46
I’m Dev. I use they/them or he/him pronouns. I’m what you might call a multidisciplinary storyteller. I am a little bit of a jack of all trades when it comes to media, but all of my work centers disability justice and all of my intersecting identities as a diasporic, Indo-Caribbean, gender fluid disabled artist.

Kate W 6:10
My name is Kate. My pronouns are they and she. I am a white, queer, disabled person. I use a walker sometimes and also wheelchair sometimes depending on the day. I do a lot of different things. I have this collective where we do anti-ableism education. I am an artist. I’ve done visual art around disability, disability justice, chronic illness, invisible disabilities, lots of things. Currently working at the Centre for Independent Living working on a disability equity project. I’m a researcher at University of Toronto, and also at St. Mike’s Hospital, where I do research around disability and the healthcare system. And then I also have a private practice where I am a mental health counsellor and I provide support for queer and trans disabled and chronically ill folks, as well as support for couples who are experiencing conflicting access needs. So for me, my life really is around like multi-level, multi-layer look at disability justice. The CRIP collective was started by me and Dev and another person named Jayde. It started just as providing workshops around anti-ableism education. And then we’ve expanded to include more disabled people in our collective and we do things that are more than just our one on one workshop. Now, we do these workshops for lots of different organizations nationally, as well as for disabled groups, specifically. So we’ve run some peer support groups. But mostly we’re doing this anti-oppression training focusing on disability inclusion and anti-ableism.

Dev R 8:04
One thing that we are working towards as well as a collective is creating community spaces in terms of like getting disabled folks connected to each other, getting disabled folks opportunities to share their experiences, or share things that they have to teach. And we can learn from, and just getting folks connected to opportunities that will help them thrive rather than just surviving.

Scott Neigh 8:32
How did your collective initially form and what has its trajectory been through the years?

Kate W 8:38
I have been working in a lot of different jobs, specifically in the social service sector. So in shelters and mental health support organizations supporting queer and trans people, and I was always the only visibly disabled employee. During some of my schooling, I ran workshops around queerness and disability, looking at the intersections of those two things. But this collective was actually, for me, born out of a negative experience. I was working at a seemingly progressive nonprofit that had progressive policies around anti-racism, anti-oppression, trans inclusion, also had quite substantial intersectionality among the employees among the management, and I experienced some very blatant ableism at this workplace. And I also experienced that my co-workers and managers and supervisors did not know how to support me when I experienced some pretty blatant ableism, and my coworkers didn’t know how to unpack it other than being like that was wrong. “Don’t say that,” rather than like being able to talk about the history of ableism in society, in this field, etc, etc, etc, right? There was no unpacking it, it was just, like, “This is wrong. And we don’t even know why it’s wrong.” So I actually ended up resigning from that job after a pretty unsupportive work environment. And the executive director said to me, “Well, why don’t you just bring me a workshop on anti-oppression and anti-ableism.” And I looked around, and there was nothing. No workshops existed. The workshops that did exist around anti-oppression rarely talked about disability, or it was like something in passing, it wasn’t intersectional, it wasn’t in depth. So I had previously been doing some work around queerness and disability, some work around community education. But this experience really lit a fire under me to be like, I need to do something, because I don’t want this experience to happen other people, or to me again. The person that I had previously been facilitating workshops with had moved out of the city. And I think that one person speaking out of the front of the classroom isn’t the best learning and I wanted to build a collective. And I also don’t think that it’s right for me to be a white person standing at the classroom by myself teaching about this stuff, when really, we need the voices of other folks.

Dev R 11:32
This was back around, I think, 2017. For me, on my side, I think somebody shared a post with me that Kate had made looking for other disabled folks, specifically racialized and queer disabled folks who would be interested in getting more experience doing facilitation work, and getting involved and doing workshops and things like that. So I responded to Kate’s post, and we met up at a coffee shop, late 2017. It was just, like, instant friendship. We talked just about how we thought about disability, our experiences, things like that, getting to know each other. Fast forward to about 2018, we decided to create Unpacking Ableism, which is the original workshop that we started, we had another facilitator, Jayde Hinds. And we decided to just throw, Unpacking Ableism together – like, develop this workshop on our own and just put it out to the public and be like, okay, we’ve got this thing, if anybody wants to check it out, we can run it for you, we can also get your feedback, things like that. We put it out thinking it would just be like our communities, or folks from our workplaces, or just, you know, folks that we know. But when we actually launched the workshop, we found that there were folks who, you know, found us just by searching up ableism training on Eventbrite, and we’re like, the only thing that popped up because, at least in Toronto, there just wasn’t anything else. The first iteration of the workshop was this full day workshop that was back in in-person days. But from there, it grew. Because it became really clear that there wasn’t just a gap in the training, but there was actually like a thirst for that training. Like, folks were really interested in it. Jayde ended up taking like a step back from the collective to focus on some of their own things. But me and Kate continued on. Back, I think, last year, 2021, we had been getting lots and lots of facilitation requests, even virtually. It was more than Kate and I could handle on our own. And something we talked about when we began was growing a collective and having more than just us to do these workshops. So we put out a call for some other folks, specifically, like, racialized folks, prioritizing queer and trans folks, to be able to make sure that we weren’t forgetting voices or leaving out perspectives or things like that when we’re doing this training, especially perspectives that are very often erased already. So that’s how we brought on Kain, Kitty, Salima, Jheanelle. And then this year, we brought on another member, Midnight. And we have been doing more and more of these workshops, we’ve been branching out into different kinds of facilitation, different kinds of educating and different kinds of community building type of things as a collective. And then as individuals, we all have our own arts practices and our own educative practices and careers and things like that. And so we all bring these really diverse perspectives and these different areas of expertise.

Kate W 14:57
I think we’re also at the point where maybe we’ll keep growing because we have these 101 workshop requests, but we also have community requests. And we’re starting to be able to be a bit more sustainable because people are paying us money for the workshops, we’ve started getting some corporate gigs around like media representation of disability and how to support disabled employees and how to build peer programs that are disability inclusive. So there’s a lot of momentum around this work. Everyone in our collective is disabled or neurodivergent, although not everyone identifies with the word “crip.” Crip is a reclaimed word for people with disabilities. Historically, it was used as a slur. We’ve reclaimed it. And then part of disability justice work is really making sure that we’re centering the most marginalized voices. So making sure that we’re centering the people in our collective who have the various intersections of oppression and making sure that we are continuing to do that, as we continue to build our collective as we continue to facilitate workshops, etc.

Scott Neigh 16:15
Based on your years of experience doing this work, what would you say are the key things that non-disabled people consistently fail to understand about disability and ableism?

Dev R 16:27
Generally, it’s pretty much just everything about disability. There’s this idea, I think a lot of non-disabled folks have that disability is really easy to identify, and that once you have a disability, you’re just sort of given accommodations. And that’s just that, you know, it’s basically living life the same way. But you know, you use a ramp instead of stairs, or whatever. And a lot of folks think that disability is something that you can see something that you can identify and prove with the naked eye, and no medical training. And there’s this idea that disability is very defined, that there’s a very rigid definition for what disability is, and that encompasses. And so with our workshops, the biggest thing that we really focus on is just educating about what disability really is, who’s impacted, how people are impacted, what it is like to try and access accommodations, and how multiply marginalized people experience barriers that are unique to their identities. Racialized disabled people experience disability very differently from white disabled people. So there’s a lot that people just aren’t aware of, and they aren’t aware that there are these things to be aware of. I think a lot of folks have this idea that they know about disability, and that they are really educated about it, because they know phrases like “people with disabilities” or, you know, they can tell you where to find the elevator. But it’s so much bigger and broader than that. These systems that impact us have these really insidious histories when it comes to disabled people. So I think that the biggest misconception that we are unravelling is that these issues are more than just getting into a building. It’s, you know, our basic survival. And for multiply marginalized people, that ability to survive is impacted, and so many different ways that it really is set up to be nearly impossible for us to just survive. Like, I’m not even talking about just having comfortable lives, just being able to survive is something that is made difficult for us.

Kate W 18:57
People aren’t aware of the fact that the biggest minority is disabled people. One in five people in Canada is disabled. And probably more than that, especially because we’re going through COVID right now, which is a mass disabling event worldwide. I think people have this idea that they’re not going to become disabled. But that’s a total myth, right? Like, we all have bodies. So we all are inevitably going to become disabled. We all have internalized ableism that is impacted by productivity and capitalism. And so thinking about how do we change systems, change attitudes, change how people treat each other, so that hopefully when they become disabled, they’re not having to go through what it was like when I became disabled, like, 20 years ago, or when Dev was born or whatever. I also want to say one thing that we really try to do in our workshops is make it okay for people to ask questions they might feel uncomfortable asking. So it’s really getting people to talk about, like, what are the practical ways that we can support them to make them feel comfortable talking about disability, and in turn, make it better for disabled people to like live in the world.

Dev R 20:19
Disability is not something that only affects specific disabled people. Everybody has varying abilities, they have varying skills, they have varying strengths, and capitalism, society, all of these things, really try to enforce an idea of what a normal typical productive human being is. And for a lot of us, disabled and non-disabled, like, we don’t really fit those categories and the expectations that are put on us by capitalism. Even for non-disabled folks, the levels of productivity that we are expected to be sustaining long term, it’s only been in the last like 50, 60 years that we’ve been at this level of productivity, while the wealth disparity gap is still growing, and folks are getting sick, they’re getting hurt by capitalism, they’re getting disabled by poverty by overworking themselves by trying to push through. It’s really this very individualist attitude that capitalism promotes, that we earn for ourselves, we have to earn our way through life, we have to prove that we are a productive member of society, and that we earn all the resources that we get. And instead of thinking about resources as, okay, let’s make sure everybody has the resources we need, let’s make sure we all take care of each other. What capitalism does is it promotes a very specific type of care. It’s about buying things. Whereas what disability justice is focused on, and what disabled people really need, and what society needs as a whole, is community care and interdependence. And that’s the ability to like rely on each other and not have to fend for ourselves all the time, and things like that.

Scott Neigh 22:18
In the context of the many different kinds of change work that ableism demands – as multifaceted, pervasive, systemic, and often incredibly harsh as it is – what do you see as the specific importance and role of the educational mode that is the focus of your group’s work?

Kate W 22:38
For me, education feels like one of the best ways to enact social change, because you’re working on changing attitudes and behaviours at a very base level. And we know that there’s other people doing other sorts of change, like policy change, and building change, or whatever. But the education piece for me I saw was really lacking. And also, that’s personally where I think I have a strength, I feel like I have strength in doing educational work. And education is so, so, so broad, that there’s so many things that education can touch. Where do we learn to be ableist? Where is that taught to us? And so we do talk about like the media and other things within our education. I think also, our education, you know, we have a chance to do on the ground stuff with you, we have a chance to do education with healthcare providers who are on the ground, shaping disabled people’s view of themselves, we have a chance to educate like CBC and players who are doing work around media representation. So for me, education feels like a very broad way to do systems change work. And we also know that disabled people are excluded from all parts of society, but education is really, like, embedded in all parts of society. So it feels to me like a balance. You know, bringing disabled people into this work is like bringing us into places where we’re historically excluded and actually being the, like, experts at the front of the classroom or on the screen or whatever. And education also feels good to me because for me, it’s important to do collective work. And education feels like inherently collective to me.

Dev R 24:38
We are trying to push back against this idea that you need formal training – you know, a degree in something – in order to be an expert. This is something that is especially important to push back against because of the harm that medical communities have inflicted upon disabled folks of all kinds throughout history and currently. There’s medical bias of all kinds. There’s reported studies on racism in healthcare. And I think that is also really important to acknowledge that our educational systems currently work as capitalist propaganda – the way that our curriculums are built, the way that we are expected to learn in very specific ways. It’s all built to make us into perfect workers, make us into the productive drone who will do the work and not question authority and be, like, okay, history class taught me that the government officials are always able to figure it out in the end. And, you know, that’s just something we all live with. And that’s, you know, something that we are seeing in action today with COVID. You know, there’s a lot of folks who aren’t paying attention to what the actual news, what the actual science, what the actual studies are saying about COVID. They’re relying on government officials to be looking out for their best interest. And clearly that’s not happening. So when we are thinking about education, we want to change folks ideas of who we value as educators who we take seriously, whose perspectives are we paying attention to and valuing? And is it worth it? A major part of our education work is conversations. We don’t just come into our workshops and throw information at you and go, okay, this is what you need to know. You know, there’s no tests, there’s no whatever. What it is, is we come in, we give folks the language to be able to engage in conversation with us. And then we work with folks and meet them where they’re at in terms of what their experiences are, what their perspectives are. And it is not about getting the language right. It’s about having the understanding to be able to walk away from those workshops, and be able to think critically about what is happening around you, and be able to identify issues without anybody having to explain to you why it’s an issue.

Scott Neigh 27:14
You have been listening to my interview with Dev Ransawakh and Kate Welsh of the CRIP collective. To learn more about their work, go to cripproject.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: Anti-ableism and disability justice education

Posted on August 16, 2022 by Scott

Kate Welsh and Dev Ramsawakh are co-creators of the CRIP Collective, a small group of Toronto-based disabled educators and artists who do anti-ableism, anti-oppression, and disability justice-related workshops, and various other kinds of community building with disabled people, using an intersectional approach. Scott Neigh talks with them about disability, ableism, and the collective’s use of education as a tool for change.

Welsh is a white, queer, disabled person who uses she or they pronouns. They are involved in anti-ableism education and visual arts as well as research related to ableism, and they have a private practice as a mental health counsellor through which they provide support for queer and trans people who are disabled or chronically ill.

Ramsawakh is a diasporic Indo-Caribbean, gender fluid, disabled artist who uses they and he pronouns. They are a multi-disciplinary storyteller who works with a wide range of media, and one key focus for that work is disability justice.

The name of the collective is both an act of reclamation and an acronym. The first word in the collective’s name is a slur that some (though not all) disabled people are reclaiming. In the case of this collective, it is also an acronym for “Community Resistance Intimacy Project.”

The story of the collective begins about five years ago. Welsh was working in the social service sector. She was the only (at least visibly) disabled employee at a seemingly progressive non-profit – the kind of place that had good policies related to anti-racism, anti-oppression, trans inclusion, and so on, and employees with lots of different intersecting identities. But Welsh experienced some very blatant ableism in that workplace. Neither their colleagues nor the organization were able to deal with it effectively, and they ended up quitting. They said, “This experience really lit a fire under me to be, like, I need to do something.” The head of the organization asked Welsh to connect them with some kind of workshop on anti-oppression and anti-ableism. So she looked around the Toronto context and found…well, nothing.

This was a huge gap in the community, and Welsh decided to do what they could to fill it. They had co-facilitated some workshops on disability and queerness in earlier years, but they knew that they did not want to take on this new challenge on their own, so they reached out through community networks seeking specifically racialized and queer disabled folks who might want to co-facilitate. They connected with Ramsawakh. The two really hit it off and decided that they wanted to work together, and by 2018 they and another facilitator – Jayde Hinds, who is no longer with the collective – had developed a workshop they called Unpacking Ableism.

Demand for their work was high right from the start, and in Ramsawakh’s words, “There wasn’t just a gap … but there was actually a thirst for that training. Like, folks were really interested in it.” And by 2021, Welsh and Ramsawakh could no longer meet the demand on their own, so they invited five new members into the collective. They have also been expanding the kinds of things that the collective offers. Along with anti-ableism education ranging from 101-level to more advanced, they also do more focused or specialized workshops, as well as various kinds of disability justice-centred facilitation and community building.

In response to a question about the key things that non-disabled people consistently fail to understand about disability, Ramsawakh said, “It’s pretty much just everything about disability.” Often, non-disabled people treat disability as a discrete thing that can always be clearly and easily identified, and then met with clear accommodations. But ableism just is not reducible to, say, being unable to get into building X or to make use of service Y. Rather, ableism permeates everything. And while being disabled can be a vital source of joy, resilience, and community, the impacts of systemic ableism are profound.

Ramsawakh said, “I think a lot of folks have this idea that they know about disability and that they are really educated about it because they know phrases like ‘people with disabilities’ or, you know, they can tell you where to find the elevator. But it’s so much bigger and broader than that. These systems that impact us have these really insidious histories when it comes to disabled people. And so I think that the biggest misconception that we are unravelling is that these issues are more than just getting into a building. It’s, you know, our basic survival. And for multiply marginalized people, that ability to survive is impacted in so many different ways that it really is set up to be nearly impossible for us to just survive. Like, I’m not even talking about just having comfortable lives – just being able to survive is something that is made difficult for us.”

In the face of all of this, the kind of educational and community-building work that the collective does is only one facet of the change-work that is needed – but it is an important one. Making a healthcare setting, a workplace, a social service, or a community group into a more liveable, less ableist space can make a huge difference for the disabled people who are (or want to be, or need to be) in that space. And the way Ramsawakh, Welsh, and the other members of the collective approach it, education is not about making sure people have particular terminology or information, but about cultivating the kind of critical perspective and confidence that can allow people to actively engage in practical ways in supporting disabled people and working against ableism.

According to Welsh, “Disability actually affects us all, because we all have bodies.” In part, this means that all of us who live long enough will one day be disabled. But it also means that all of us face pressures – often tied to work under capitalism – to meet expectations about what “normal” bodies are and what they can do. Ramsawakh said, “Everybody has varying abilities. They have varying skills, they have varying strengths. And capitalism, society, all of these things really try to enforce an idea of what a normal, typical, productive human being is. And for a lot of us, disabled and non-disabled alike, we don’t really fit those categories.”

A rough transcript of this episode can be found here.

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

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

Image: Used with permission of the CRIP Collective.

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

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Radio: A broad coalition pushing for climate action in Ontario

Posted on August 9, 2022 by Scott

Mili Roy and Angela Bischoff are involved, in different capacities, in the Ontario Climate Emergency Campaign (OCEC), a broad, loose, non-partisan coalition of individuals and groups working hard to get Ontario to improve its response to the climate crisis. Scott Neigh interviews them about the crisis, about the campaign’s 12-point Climate Action Plan to address it, and about the strengths and weaknesses of working in a broad coalition.

These days, a few reactionaries and fossil fuel industry apologists aside, most people do not need to be convinced that the climate crisis is real, that it is serious, and the we need to do something about it. But even so, governments and corporations consistently refuse to take action of a kind and scale that the crisis demands – sometimes they say encouraging things and do a little bit, sometimes they don’t, but so far none are doing enough. So what do we do?

There is no single answer to that. If you look at the history of social movements, when they are vibrant and successful, they are invariably constituted by lots of different kinds of organizations, with different social forms, different constituencies, and different specific goals. And there are definitely people experimenting with lots of different possibilities when it comes to the climate crisis. Today’s episode focuses on one such experiment.

In 2021, a collection of primarily environmental groups and health groups started talking among themselves about what do about the fact that, in the words of one of today’s guests, Ontario is “headed in the wrong direction” in terms of climate action. In those initial conversations, they drew inspiration from two broad climate coalitions in other jurisdictions – Le pacte in Quebec and a coalition in British Columbia initiated by the Climate Emegency Unit, a project of the David Suzuki Foundation – and decided to form the OCEC. Mili Roy is a physician and is active with the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, but she is participating in today’s interview as the co-chair of the OCEC.

Through months of consultation with a wide range of experts and constituencies, they hammered out a Climate Action Plan to serve as their basis of unity. It demands the province set binding climate targets, prioritize and respect Indigenous sovereignty and autonomy, end all fossil fuel subsidies and wind down all fossil fuel use, prioritize public health, and ensure that the transition off of fossil fuels is just and equitable, among other things. They then used that action plan, both before and after their formal launch in April 2022, to expand and diversify their support, amassing endorsements from more than 250 agricultural, arts, business, labour, education, faith, environment, youth, seniors, education, community, and other kinds of groups, representing more than 850,000 Ontarians.

Angela Bischoff is a long-time environmental activist who works with the Ontario Clean Air Alliance (OCAA). The alliance is one of the member organizations of the OCEC, and Biscoff is speaking today from that perspective. The OCAA has been around since the 1990s and played a key role in pushing the province to phase out coal-powered electricity plants. These days, they are very involved in opposing the plans by Doug Ford’s Conservative government to renew and expand the province’s nuclear sector and to vastly increase gas-powered electricity generation. The OCAA’s decision to be part of the OCEC was similar to how lots of groups decide to get involved in broader coalitions – it was a chance to bring their central concerns together with those of other groups doing different but related work, and to speak with a louder voice.

The loose character of the coalition is key to how the OCEC works. In both intervening in the provincial election that took place in June 2022 and since, it is the member groups of the campaign that have done the largest part of the on-the-ground legwork pushing forward their own particular demands – the OCAA, for instance, succeeded in pushing the opposition parties to at least some level of opposition to gas-burning plants feeding Ontario’s electricity grid. In the election period, the OCEC itself did some media work, as well as some work specifically to engage youth. And now, they are using their Climate Action Plan as a basis for media work, lobbying, and public actions at a provincial level, and to make climate an issue in October’s municipal elections.

The Conservative majority under Premier Doug Ford that was given a second term by June’s provincial election is, alas, not a government that seems terribly inclined to take climate action. But according to Roy, the OCEC finds the work of Le pacte in Quebec to be “really inspiring” in that context. They, too, have faced a provincial government “which was not felt to be the most proactive or progressive government on climate” but that through the hard work of Le pacte and other groups was “forced by public opinion to bring in a lot of pro-environmental and climate-progressive policy.” They expect that emphasizing the economic case for climate action might be one way to push the Ford government to act. But they also see broad public support and mobilization around climate action in its own right in Ontario. Bischoff said, “There’s a lot of political support and momentum already pushing from the grassroots up into the municipal level, which is going up into the various parties…. We just gotta keep pushing that momentum.”

Today’s guests acknowledge that coalitions can be difficult. They can be a lot of work, for instance, and they can result in more radical demands being watered down or silenced, even when such demands are clearly necessary. But both are pleased with the role the OCEC has played so far, and are hopeful that through bringing together and amplifying the existing work of its many member groups, it can be one useful organization among many to push Ontario to finally take the kinds of climate action that we need to see.

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: abdallahh / Flickr

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

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Radio: Story and film as tools for decolonization

Posted on August 2, 2022 by Scott

Gladys Rowe, Teddy Zegeye-Gebrehiwot, and Liz Carlson-Manathara are part of Stories of Decolonization, a film project that is working to give people in Canada a chance to reflect on how colonization shapes our lives, on what decolonization might mean, and on how we might act to get there. Scott Neigh interviews them about the role that story and film can play in larger processes decolonization and about their many years of work on the project.

Gladys Rowe is a Muskego Inniniw or Swampy Cree person (who also has ancestors from a number of European countries) originally from Fox Lake Cree Nation in Treaty 5 territory in northern Manitoba. She currently lives on the lands of the Duwamish and Suquamish nations just outside of Seattle, Washington. Teddy Zegeye-Gebrehiwot is a Black Ethiopian Greek Canadian settler living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on Treaty 1 territory and the homeland of the Métis people. Liz Carlson-Manathara is a white settler who currently lives on Anishinaabe Aki, in Sudbury, Ontario, on lands covered by the Robinson Huron Treaty of 1850.

More than a decade ago, all three of them lived in Winnipeg. Carlson-Manathara was a doctoral student in social work whose research focused on what white settlers like herself could be doing to change their understandings and their ways of being and doing in the world to move towards decolonization. As part of that work, she was doing lots of interviews with a wide range of people who had all sorts of relevant lived experience and expertise. One of the members of her supervisory committee challenged her to go beyond just writing up her findings in standard scholarly ways, and to use those interviews as the basis of a film project that could be useful in classrooms and communities to catalyze conversation, learning, and change.

Carlson-Manathara had no experience whatsoever with film, and she started looking for collaborators. At the time, Zegeye-Gebrehiwot was a fledgling anti-racist and anti-capitalist activist, and he was finishing a BA with a major in film studies. One of Carlson-Manathara’s emails reached his inbox, and he got in touch and got involved. Rowe was in the early stages of an interdisciplinary PhD in social work, Indigenous studies, and English, film, and theatre. She had already been talking about related issues with Carlson-Manathara, and eagerly said yes when asked if she wanted to be part of the project.

In working on this project, the three have been very deliberate about creating ways of work that reflect, as best they can, the larger vision of transformed relations at its heart. While Zegeye-Gebrehiwot does the bulk of the technical side of the editing, most of the rest of the work on the project is shared, and they make decisions by consensus. And they have taken great care in using a much more active and participatory approach to consent with interview participants than the industry-standard sign-a-form-and-your-done model.

Rowe said that with the project they wanted to create “an opportunity for people to engage with content around the colonization process in Canada, and really think about what that means for the current circumstances that we’re in and how we might consider working towards this concept or vision that we call decolonization.” They wanted to make films that were nuanced and thoughtful, and that could speak to a very broad public, especially to people who have never really thought about colonization and decolonization.

They realized early on that presenting the ideas from Carlson-Manathara’s dissertation interviews on their own might be inaccessible. So they decided to expand the project from one film to three. At each step, they have been doing many additional interviews, and each film has an associated curriculum guide to help facilitate, in Rowe’s words, “deep reflection and contemplation” with respect to the questions they raise. Two of the three films have been completed and released – Stories of Decolonization: Land Dispossession and Settlement came out in 2016 and Stories of Decolonization: Decolonial Relations was launched in June of this year.

Storytelling is central to the project’s approach, hence its name. The basic building blocks of the project are its many, many interviews – that is, Carlson-Manathara said, people telling their own stories “about their own lives and their own learnings about colonialism and decolonization, and the role of their families within that.” The idea is that storytelling differs in important ways from approaches that, for instance, focus just on dry facts or intellectual arguments. At its best, storytelling invites people in and can be a powerful way to relate ideas, knowledge, and experiences, while defusing defensiveness, and also connecting and communicating in more emotional, embodied, and holistic modes.

Rowe said, “There’s so many opportunities within our society today to depersonalize, to create boundaries around our lives where we don’t have to interact with one another, or [don’t have to do it] in ways that make us uncomfortable or cause discomforts to what it is we know, or what it is we’ve experienced to be true. And I think offering a way to relate to one another that re-personalizes, that offers new insights that we might not have heard or experienced before – sharing stories of our experiences, sharing stories of our hopes, sharing stories of what we see for the future – I think it feels different to be in the space of story. It’s such a powerful medium for expressing ideas and concepts and experiences in a way that potentially we can relate to, relate to one another. And so that’s why I just am so adamant that story is a powerful tool to think about talking about colonization and decolonization, because it asks us to step into a circle with other human beings and to listen to one another.”

Zegeye-Gebrehiwot added, “People have their own worldviews, people have their own experiences, and we’re making sense of the world as we go. But story has a way of sort of interfering and intercepting, and opening up new possibilities. And I think that is a powerful thing to tap into.”

However, he cautioned, “I’m not trying to say that having an emotional experience or listening to a story is a substitute for other kinds of actions. Because we need a whole bunch of different kinds of actions to make change. But there already are stories, there already are ideas, and those are affecting how we make choices in this world. And if we don’t engage with that level of discourse, or stories, or socialization, we’re really not tapping into the thing that people are doing. Which is, making sense of the world as they go. And the stories that are mainstream that reinforce oppression and colonialism are not good enough, obviously. So we need something better.”

“This is only one part of change,” Carlson-Manathara agreed. “And I do think that as people move towards taking more and more decolonial actions and engaging in more and more decolonial transformations, that having more knowledge really does help deepen the process and helps people, as they’re engaging in action, to have a greater understanding of the ramifications and the relationships and the accountabilities around that action. But of course, just learning isn’t enough. We do need to act. And we really hope that this film project plays a role in generating more and more action, and building those communities of resistance.”

The three are quite pleased with how the films have been taken up so far. The first has been watched fairly widely online and they expect the same will be true of the second, which will be available for free on their website very soon. As well, their use in classrooms and community events has sparked just the kind of conversations that they had hoped. And their commitment to tying it all back to action will be reflected in the focus of the third film, which they will start working on soon.

Rowe said, “This third film really will move into that space of the stories that have come from Liz’s dissertation and people really sharing about, what could decolonization look like? What does that mean at an individual level? What does that mean at a systemic level, at a governmental level, at a level of nationhood of living in Indigenous sovereignty? What does it mean to actually shift the way that we relate to one another and work towards a vision that is different than the one that we’re experiencing right now?”

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: Mustang Joe / Flickr

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

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Radio: Immigrant workers confronting the people who exploit them

Posted on July 26, 2022 by Scott

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: Climate disaster stories as a catalyst for change

Posted on July 19, 2022 by Scott

Sean Holman is the Wayne Crookes professor of Environmental and Climate Journalism at the University of Victoria, in Lekwungen territory on Vancouver Island. Scott Neigh interviews him about the shifts in journalism’s social role in our current political moment, about the news media’s response to the climate crisis so far, and about the new model for covering it that is being developed as part of the Climate Disaster Project.

Earlier in his career, for around a decade, Holman worked as an investigative journalist. Back in the years when such things were new, he ran an independent investigative site called Public Eye, a British Columbia-based project focused on journalistic staples like accountability and corruption, including with respect to issues like resource development, the environment, and child welfare.

When he transitioned out of that work and into academia in the early 2010s, it was in part out of a desire to have the opportunity to reflect more deeply on why exactly journalism matters and on the importance in democracies of the public knowledge generated through journalism. He concluded that in the political environment of liberal democracies in the decades after the Second World War, information mattered because it allowed for “control and certainty.” He elaborated, “We value information because we can make better decisions about the world around us, thereby controlling public and private institutions. And we can also better understand the past and present, and better predict the future, thereby feeling more certain about the world.”

In more recent years, however, political life seems to be changing in some important respects. Holman said, “Evidence-based politics is really on the decline, unfortunately, and may be on its way out.” Certainly there is room to debate the limits of such politics even in their heyday – power has always played a crucial role, after all – but there is no denying that these days, information and knowledge seem to have a reduced role in shaping the responses of both publics and institutions to the issues of the day, and things like right-wing authoritarianism and conspiracy theories are increasingly filling that space.

There is no issue where the stakes of this shift are higher than the climate crisis – the evidence is clear and the potential consequences are existential, but institutions and governments deny it either overtly in their statements or implicitly through their actions, and substantial publics do likewise.

According to Holman, journalism has done “very poorly” in dealing with the climate crisis, though he sees some modest improvements in the last couple of years. However, because of the decline in what he describes as “evidence-based politics,” he argues that even if news media had done a better job, we might not be much better off. He said, “Maybe no matter how much evidence is out there, no matter how much information the news media accurately communicates about climate change, maybe we are in a situation where that evidence just doesn’t matter, and we need to find other ways of ensuring that we take action on climate change.”

The Climate Disaster Project, according to Holman, is connected to questions like, “What does journalism need to do at this time of crisis? If evidence-equals-action is no longer really the world we’re living in, what is the place of journalism? And how can journalism help? How can journalism be of service against the backdrop of an ever increasing disaster around the world? … How could journalists be of service to populations that are being increasingly affected every single day by climate change?”

The project, of which Holman is a principle investigator, is a collaboration of journalism faculty working at over a dozen postsecondary institutions across Canada and around the world. It involves having students work with survivors of the many different sorts of climate disasters that are hitting us with increasing frequency. So far, the project has talked to survivors of hurricanes on the east coast, the intense derecho thunder storm that hit Ontario earlier in the summer, the fires that destroyed the town of Lytton, British Columbia last year, and many more. Rather than pursue conventional interviews with survivors, students use an approach that is trauma-informed and collaborative to produce what are called “as-told-to” stories, which are first-person accounts in which people relate their experiences of whatever disaster they survived and its aftermath.

Crucially, Holman said, “I think journalists often come into situations thinking that they are going to piece together what should be done … about any given problem that they’re reporting on. Instead, how can we really listen to people who are being affected by climate change and serve them as journalists?” So in producing the as-told-to stories with climate disaster survivors, Holman said, “We don’t just leave it at the trauma that they’ve experienced. We also like to hear about … the potential solutions to the problems that they’ve experienced.”

Along with providing a new and powerful sort of coverage for one of the defining issues of our era, another key goal of this work is to use the telling and sharing of stories to help build a broader sense of shared experience and community among survivors of disparate climate disasters. The project will also be facilitating gatherings of survivors. Holman said, “The most powerful social movements of our time have really been about people sharing private stories publicly, and forming community around those experiences. And that’s not really happening when it comes to climate change right now. So can we change that?” The hope is that this will not only be directly useful to survivors but might catalyze more effective action around things like supporting survivors and addressing the climate crisis. The project also aims to launch solutions journalism and investigative journalism projects based on what survivors have said, which can further amplify their experiences and ground the analyses and answers that they have shared.

The project will have collected 78 survivor interviews by the end of the summer and aims to do another 100 in the fall, and that is just a start. A central archive of the narratives produced through the project, called the Climate Disaster Survivor Memory Vault, will be launching in 2023.

Ultimately, the hope is that this project can offer a new model that journalists can add to their repertoire, in the face of both the climate crisis and the challenges of the current political moment. According to Holman, “In the absence of control and certainty, people look for pretty unhealthy forms of control and certainty – right wing authoritarianism, conspiracy theories, etc. That’s just going to become worse in the future. So what we’re also hoping is that through this project, we can also help build more equitable, more resilient, more just, evidence-based communities around the experience of climate change. Because there’s a real risk that as climate change becomes worse and worse, and as the crises that surround climate change become worse and worse, that you will see the development of the kind of communities none of us really want to see, communities with walls around them, exclusionary communities, racism and xenophobia like you wouldn’t believe. That really is a potential future. And we really need to be thinking right now about how do we avoid that.”

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: Advancing a vision of ecological farming and farmers’ rights

Posted on July 12, 2022 by Scott

Beatriz Oliver and Aabir Dey work for SeedChange, an organization based in Canada that supports farmers here and around the world in working for a more just, sustainable, and environmentally sound future. Scott Neigh interviews them about the food system as it exists today, the vision embedded in the work of SeedChange, and what they are doing to realize it.

Despite the fact that most of us are completely dependent for our survival on the network of farmers, processors, wholesalers, and retailers that comprise the food system, we mostly do not know much about how it works or really pay it much attention. Rising food costs are getting noticed, as they detrimentally impact more and more of us, and occasional stories – like, for example, Canada’s big bread price-fixing scandal of 2018 – make waves in the mainstream media, but most of the nuts and bolts of how it all works remain obscure.

As today’s interview participants discuss, most of our food system involves what sometimes gets described as “industrial agriculture” – it tends to favour large-scale production, heavy use of synthetic inputs like pesticides and chemical fertilizers, and a powerful role for large corporations. And it works this way, at least in part, because of regulatory frameworks and government practices that favour this kind of approach. That means a lot of different things, but here in Canada, it includes ways that seeds and plant varieties are regulated that make it more difficult for farmers who are committed to other visions of how our food system might work.

Founded in 1945 as USC Canada, SeedChange has played a number of quite different roles over the decades. These days, according to Oliver, it is “really focused on food and agriculture, particularly agroecology and food sovereignty,” and as the organization’s name suggests, seeds are a big part of their work. Oliver explained that agroecology means “growing food in a way that works with nature, ecologically, with local resources and local knowledge. So really, it’s centered on small scale farmers, Indigenous farmers. And food sovereignty is the right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture systems and to grow food in a way that’s ecologically sound and culturally appropriate.” Oliver is SeedChange’s director of international programs. Dey directs the organization’s Canadian field program, which is called the Bauta Family Initiative on Canadian Seed Security.

In its international work, SeedChange is active in around a dozen countries. The details vary, but a lot of that work involves partnering with local organizations, particularly rural and Indigenous organizations. Much of it includes providing technical and financial supports, and working with partners as they strive to strengthen ecological farming, farmers’ rights (including a growing emphasis on women’s rights), and community organizing. This includes things like developing local collective institutions like seed banks, that can play a crucial role in community seed security, and in conserving and developing varieties of food crops that are adapted to local conditions. They also support policy advocacy work – particularly in the face of regulatory regimes that favour multinational corporations and prohibit farmers from saving, sharing, or trading seeds – with the aim of moving towards greater support for the rights of small farmers and for ecological approaches, and recognition of the importance of locally developed and produced seed.

The work in Canada is more recent in its origins and is happening in a much different context, but in many ways it is similar. SeedChange partners with farmers and organizations that are already engaged with ecological farming. Some of this work is to support farmers in saving seeds to preserve local varieties. As well, because ecological growing methods tend to expose plants to different conditions, and because the most common varieties of most food crops grown in Canada are not adapted to those conditions, SeedChange partners with both farmers and universities to develop new plant varieties more suited to agroecological approaches. And similarly, much like SeedChange’s international work, the policy work in the Canadian context also focuses on ensuring that farmers using agroecological methods are at the table as policies are being developed, and on removing the regulatory barriers that stand in the way of a more farmer-centric, ecologically sound seed system.

Oliver said, “At a global level, farmers’ rights to save and exchange and sell their seeds are being infringed on. This is a trend that is led by the work of the large seed and agrochemical companies. And it is linked to intellectual property rights on seeds. So, either patents or plant variety protections. So there are different processes that companies use to ensure that farmers will always have to buy seeds from them, rather than being able to save them themselves and give them to neighbours, for example. And unfortunately, a lot of the seed laws around the world do not reflect the need for farmers to have these rights recognized. … A lot of countries have seed laws that are quite good, but globally, the trend is to have more restrictive laws on farmers rights on their seeds. And that’s really worrying. And it affects in Canada as well.”

“We need to protect farmers’ rights to save seed,” Dey affirmed. “And there’s so much energy being put into, globally, how to cater to the needs of large multinational seed companies that already have such enormous market share on seed varieties through intellectual property rights, as opposed to trying to figure out how to preserve the widest amount of seed diversity possible for the public good. … Through empowering farmers and mobilizing farmers to develop varieties that work on their farms, on organic and ecological farms, what we’re trying to support is also that farmers have agency in the variety development process, and that they can choose how seeds should be distributed for the benefit of their communities and the communities that that support them.”

Oliver concluded, “Farmers have been doing this incredible service for humanity by preserving seeds, by having crop diversity, and by adapting it on their fields. And to not recognize that that role, to not have farmers at the table deciding the policies, is really not right.”

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: Mykola Swarnyk / Wikimedia

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

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