Radio: Fighting for collective bargaining rights for tenants

Posted on July 5, 2022 by Scott

James Barbeiro is a chef who lives in Sinixt territory in Nelson, British Columbia. Jen works in the social service sector and lives in Secwepmc territory, in Kamloops, BC. Both are tenants and tenant organizers. Scott Neigh interviews them about Rent Strike Bargain, a province-wide campaign in BC that is fighting for the right of tenants to collectively bargain with landlords, and that is also active in supporting the recent upsurge in local organizing by tenants.

Rental housing in BC is the most expensive in Canada. In 2021, a two-bedroom apartment in Vancouver averaged almost $3000/month. While Vancouver is particularly expensive, the average cost of a one-bedroom unit in the province as a whole was still over $2100/month. Whether you are working for a wage in the lower end of the labour market or on some form of social assistance, rents of that magnitude fall somewhere between “unaffordable” and “completely unaffordable.”

James said, “realistically, renting could work for a lot of people, but the way it is designed now, it just really doesn’t.” In his experience, “I think most tenants feel the ultimate issue is that [housing] is too expensive, for not all that much.”

He continued, “Tenants are living in a housing system that takes all of the agency from their lives when it comes to housing,” and he described this situation as “dehumanizing.” Not only does it exclude many, many people from even the dream of owning a home, it forces many renters to live in circumstances that they would never have voluntarily chosen in terms of safety, location, unit type, quality, who they live with, and so much else. Often, the housing at the more affordable end of the range is in lousy condition. Though there are limits to how much landlords can raise rents on existing tenants, rent on vacant units is not controlled, and landlords have lots of tactics to displace people so they can hike up the rents. Whether it is about affordability, precarity, quality, or just being subject to landlords’ power, Jen used words like “pressure”, “insecurity”, and “anxiety” to describe the experience of being a tenant in BC.

However, there is a long history of BC tenants working together to fight for change, including through tenants unions. In the last few years, such organizations seem to be enjoying a resurgence. After its founding in 2017, the Vancouver Tenants Union heard from so many people from elsewhere in the province who had questions, needed support, or wanted to get involved that they decided to found a provincial organization – Rent Strike Bargain.

Rent Strike Bargain’s work includes supporting the founding of new tenants unions, connecting tenants unions from different communities, and connecting individual tenants with each other, which can be particularly important in smaller centres. They are developing a toolkit for renters to use in getting organized, which will launch soon. And they can sometimes offer concrete support – Jen, for instance, made the lengthy trip from Kamloops to Nelson to help do a know-your-rights workshop, an important early event in getting the Nelson Tenants Union started.

Their main focus for the moment, however, is fighting for collective bargaining rights for tenants. They are supportive of a range of measures that would improve the situation of tenants, but are aware of far too many instances where policies that sound good in theory are implemented in ways that do not actually do very much, particularly when tenants do not have the collective power to give them teeth. James said, for examples, “Rent controls and vacancy controls can be really effective, but can sometimes get all of the meaning stripped out of them, without the protections from collective bargaining.”

According to Jen, the group’s understanding is that “tenants already have that right through the nature of the relationships” – that is, they see the right to collective bargaining as flowing from the inherent power imbalance in the landlord/renter relationship and the common experience among tenants subject to the power of a given landlord or group of landlords, in a way analogous to the right to collective bargaining in the workplace for workers. With that in mind, labour organizations both large and small have been supporting the campaign, and one of Rent Strike Bargain’s slogans is “A union at work. A union at home.”

The group is taking three different kinds of action to assert the right to collectively bargain. The first is direct action – as more tenants form tenant unions, build collective power, and engage in struggle, including via things like rent strikes, the overall demand for collective bargaining rights is getting harder to ignore. A second pathway is through judicial mechanisms, and the group is on the lookout for possible test cases. And finally, there is public campaigning for legislative change – they have been meeting regularly with provincial officials, and both their online platform and the growing strength of tenants in local communities are helping to mobilize support for this side of the work.

So far, they have seen an entirely predictable lack of enthusiasm, and often open hostility, from landlords. But according to James, tenants he has talked to have for the most part been “pretty stoked about the whole idea.” Some are worried about reprisals from landlords if they get involved, and even beyond that, he said, “It’s tough, because tenants have to sacrifice so much of their own time to just be able to have the roof over their head in the first place, that also engaging in organizing then becomes, like, really above and beyond.”

But Jen said, “Every movement lives and dies on people’s individual connections and investments, and what we’re seeing with the amount of emails and interest we’re getting from renters all around territories in the jurisdiction of BC is just – there’s so much interest and people are in such tough situations.” She said that tenants’ right to collective bargaining “is just something that, with the current housing crisis, people need more than ever, and frankly are not hesitating to assert.”

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: Ted McGrath / Flickr

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

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Radio: A veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle talks about anti-racism today

Posted on June 28, 2022 by Scott

Steve September was born into the struggle against South African apartheid, and today he is the chair of the Anti-Racism Coalition (ARC) Vancouver, a grassroots group working to end all forms of racial inequality through education, legislation, and social events. Scott Neigh interviews him about the work of ARC Vancouver and about the perspective he brings to anti-racist organizing based on his involvement in opposing apartheid.

September is racialized and Jewish, and he and his parents moved to Canada from South Africa in the early 1960s. They were active as part of the African National Congress (ANC), the broad front for the national liberation struggle against the racist apartheid regime that ruled South Africa for decades, and they fled the country to avoid being arrested during an anti-ANC crackdown by the government. In Canada, they very quickly got active building a base in this country for ongoing anti-apartheid work. And as he grew up, September was very involved as well.

This week’s episode focuses on more recent work by September. In the course of the interview, he does not always draw this connection himself, but the analysis that he presents on behalf of the organization and the ways of work that he describes seem to have a bit of a distinctive character – one that, in some respects at least, is a little different than many activist groups in Canada today, and that seems to have been informed to an extent by his experience of the anti-apartheid struggle.

In talking about racism, for instance, his account is more deliberately global than what you often hear, and it really foregrounds the interconnection between racism and histories of colonization and empire, and the capitalist drive for profit. September is particularly scathing about the role of the British Empire in all of these. And ARC as an organization emphasizes an approach to coalition that is deliberately expansive, and operates in ways that are relatively formal. It has a vision statement, a mission, and a proper constitution. In contrast with the preference in many movement contexts today for consensus, it operates using Robert’s Rules of Order, voting, and majority rule. Often they will circulate discussion papers before each meeting, and proceed on the basis of motions, amendments, and so on.

In terms of ARC Vancouver’s activities, education is the area where they have been most involved. A big part of the group’s early work was spurred by teachers dealing with the lack of resources available for use during Black History Month. So ARC Vancouver, particularly the teachers who were involved, set about to create them. Members of the group, including September, regularly speak in schools as well as to youth in other settings. A major project of the organization has been what they call “Black Shirt Day,” an event they have organized in recent years on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday on January 15th. Modelled on Orange Shirt Day in solidarity with residential school survivors and the anti-bullying initiatives marked with pink shirts, it calls on people to wear black shirts as part of larger efforts to talk about Black history, Black lives, and working against racism.

As well, ARC Vancouver’s members regularly stand with other people and groups who are taking their own actions against racism. This includes taking part in larger actions on days with broad anti-racist significance, such as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Emancipation Day, and so on. And it includes showing up at more specific anti-racist and anti-colonial events organized by other groups, whether that is in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en land defenders, in support of high school students demanding that a colonial name be removed from a nearby street, in support of Indigenous women on Red Dress Day, or any number of other things.

September draws a number of lessons for today from his involvement in the movement against South African apartheid. One is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the importance of vocally opposing apartheid – including the variant of apartheid enacted by the Israeli state against the Palestinian people. Another is the importance for movement building of engaging with people across differences in identity and politics. He said, “You find out there’s way more like-minded people than you thought.” And finally, there is the absolute centrality of what he describes as “boots on the ground” – meaning, not just making statements or writing analyses, though those matter too, but actually getting out to demonstrations and actions, being bodily present, and doing things in person and with others to advance your vision for change.

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

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

Image: Used with permission of ARC Vancouver.

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

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Radio: A grassroots re-imagining of gender-affirming care

Posted on June 21, 2022 by Scott

Riley Nileson-Baker and Felix Vandergrift are part of Gender Affirming Care Nova Scotia, a grassroots, community-based policy process to address issues of gender-affirming care and access to health care for trans, intersex, and gender-diverse people in Nova Scotia. Scott Neigh interviews them about the process, the policy, and the work they have been doing to make it all happen.

Both Nielson-Baker and Vandergrift have experience with the workings of government – in their day jobs, the former is a public servant who works on issues related to sexual assault and gender-based violence and the latter works as a consultant in the environmental sector. As well, Nielson-Baker has a Master’s degree in public administration and is working on another Master’s in political science, studying the concept of the transgender person in Canadian law. Both have faced their own challenges with the gender-affirming care system in Nova Scotia.

Gender-affirming care is any healthcare that affirms someone’s gender identity through better aligning their body and physical presentation with that identity. This can include interventions like surgeries and hormone replacement therapy, as well as other forms of related care like voice training, hair removal, and supports to learn various kinds of aesthetic practices that can be important to expressing gender.

According to Nielson-Baker, gender-affirming care in Nova Scotia is currently “incredibly limited, incredibly gatekept.” The province offers a small number of basic gender-affirming surgeries through the public system. However, everything beyond that must be paid for out-of-pocket. Many trans people have very limited opportunities in the job market because of anti-trans discrimination, which means the financial barriers can be prohibitive.

Even among the gender-affirming care that is provided publically, access is limited by lengthy waiting lists, arbitrary rules that have no grounding in genuine health concerns or the wellbeing of trans people, gatekeeping by medical professionals, and intense bureaucracy. Access is further limited because the system pushes people to adhere to very narrow understandings of what it means to be trans, with little recognition that different people need different things to affirm their genders, and some trans people have no interest in fitting themselves into dominant understandings of “male” and “female” or into medicalized stereotypes of trans-ness.

In what trans people say about their own experiences and in multiple studies, there is a powerful link between gender-affirming care and keeping trans people alive. Nielson-Baker said they have a slogan that they use a great deal within their group, though much more cautiously in public contexts: “Trans suicides are a policy choice.” It is well known what needs to be done to reduce trans suicides, and the choice by governments not to do those things is a form of blatant, active disregard for trans people’s survival.

When gender-affirming care is inaccessible, Vandergrift said, we “lose people from suicide, from addiction, from violence, from whatever. Because that’s their last hope, right?” He added, “This process is so burdensome, and so onerous, and the policy is so outdated, you already have people that are strapped to mental capacity.” With respect to his own transition journey, he said, “I work in bureaucracy for a living,” but even so “this has been an absolutely bureaucratic nightmare of paperwork, of specialists, of checklists … not to mention the cost.”

In late 2020, Nielson-Baker was part of a small leftist organizing group in Nova Scotia and was working on a number of policy proposals for the group aimed as interventions in the then-upcoming provincial election, including one related to gender-affirming care. They were uneasy, however, about the possibility of feeding into the politicization (in a party-political sense) of the needs and lives of trans people. Perhaps with an eye to the disturbing trajectories in the US and the UK, Nielson-Baker said, “When we politicize trans lives, trans people lose.”

So early in 2021, Nielson-Baker decided instead to pursue the work as an independent, grassroots, community-based process. Starting with a handful of participants and some informal consultation, the process grew to include a lively core group – which today includes Vandergrift – extensive consultations with other trans people in the province, and endorsements from more than 50 organizations, including LGBTQ2S+ groups, unions, churches, and professional associations like Doctors Nova Scotia. The work has involved documenting how things work now in Nova Scotia, how other jurisdictions do things, and what the community wants, and it has resulted in a robust and detailed policy that, if adopted, would dramatically improve gender-affirming care in Nova Scotia.

Nielson-Baker said, “In my policy training and policy education, the importance of consultation is always emphasized because you can’t make policy about or for people without including them. Because they are the ones that are the most impacted by what’s happening in these systems. They know where it’s failing. They know how to fix a lot of these issues. And really, community-based policy work is just taking that a step further. Not only is the community consulting on the policy, the community is making the policy. We are having 100% control and 100% say in what’s happening in this policy, and what potentially will happen in the healthcare system here in Nova Scotia.”

The overarching thrust of the policy is to remove barriers to gender-affirming care and to expand coverage within the public system. This means a lot of different things, many addressing the existing limitations to gender-affirming care in Nova Scotia mentioned above. It reduces arbitrary criteria and expert gatekeeping, while centering the individual in decision making. It includes ensuring care for trans people is understood as medically necessary and part of core health care competencies, rather than as boutique, cosmetic, or specialty care. Instead of focusing on making trans people prove that they are “trans enough” by some arbitrary external standard, it would prioritize trans peoples’ actual needs. It includes addressing additional barriers faced by some trans people related to things like medical racism. It would provide public coverage for a much wider range of services, including body contouring, face feminization and masculinization surgery, hair removal and transplants, and lots more.

Crucially, the policy they have developed involves a shift from centering gender dysphoria to centering gender euphoria – that is, instead of focusing on trans suffering and the distress that some trans people experience due to discrepancies between their gender and their sex assigned at birth, it means focusing on trans joy and on the elation or comfort that results when those things align. Nielson-Baker said, “Dysphoria is not the only determinant of the necessity of gender affirming care… It’s not even necessarily the best or strongest determinant. What is, is euphoria … the satisfaction, the happiness, the security that one gets from having their social experience and their physical experience validated and reflected in their daily life, and in the health care that they receive.”

According to Nielson-Baker, as they work to get this policy implemented, “We’re purposely not really engaging with politicians. Politicians have a tendency to politicize… The opposite of what we want in this process is to further politicize trans lives. We have instead been focusing on the public service and the general public. Because realistically, that’s who is important in these conversations.”

Along with meeting with officials to try to get these changes integrated into the provincial health system, they have also been hosting a series of townhalls and other forms of public engagement. Nielson-Baker said, “The media reception has been incredibly positive. … And the outpouring from the community, of people who were just, like, ‘I have no knowledge about the trans experience or trans healthcare or gender-affirming care, but I just want to come and learn and have these conversations,’ is the majority of the people who have been engaging with us lately. They don’t know, but they want to know, and they want to know how they can do better. And it’s very incredible to see, and incredible to experience both as a trans person and as a policy author, to see the public so willing to engage and have these conversations, and being willing to admit that they don’t know but they want to find out.”

The work that the group has been doing on this policy is very much about what trans people are facing in the immediate term, and leaves many larger political questions for the future. Nielson-Baker said, “We’re too worried about surviving now, surviving in the short term, that we can’t even begin to have these larger conversations about social control in capitalism, and the role that capitalism and neoliberalism places on trans people, and really all marginalized communities, and really all people in society. We can’t even have those conversations yet because we’re too focused on, ‘Will we be alive tomorrow?'”

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 Gender Affirming Care Nova Scotia.

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

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Radio: Confronting the overdose crisis, demanding a safe supply

Posted on June 14, 2022 by Scott

Jordan Westfall is co-founder and president of the Canadian Association for Safe Supply (CASS), an organization that aims to reduce the immense harms of the overdose crisis by pushing for an increase in people’s access to a drug supply that is legal, regulated, and safe. Scott Neigh interviews him about the crisis and about the crucial role that a safe supply could play in ending it.

Westfall describes the overdose crisis in Canada as “ongoing and unyielding.” Its impact has been catastrophic. According to official statistics, nearly 27,000 people died from apparent opioid toxicity in Canada between 2016 and mid-2021, mostly in British Columbia, Ontario, and Alberta, but increasingly in other parts of the country as well. The rate is increasing – from 7 per day in 2016 to 20 per day in 2021 – and it is severe enough that in BC it has shortened overall life expectancy. Young men and Indigenous people seem to be disproportionately impacted. Toxicity in the available supply of street drugs is recognized as a major factor driving the crisis.

Westfall is a harm reduction activist based in BC and has a Master’s degree in public policy from Simon Fraser University.

The phrase “harm reduction” captures a wide range of practices and programs that seek to reduce the harms caused by drug use without judging or punishing those who use them, or insisting that they abstain in order to receive support – most commonly, this looks like things like needle exchange programs or safe injection sites.

“Safe supply” is a term that Westfall himself coined in 2018, and it and its variants have spread quickly and widely since then. It is premised on the idea that creating ways for drug users to access legal, regulated substances – uncontaminated and of known potency – would be a major step in reducing the harm, suffering, and death of the overdose crisis.

Westfall said, “I’m schooled in public policy, I know the way politicians look at you when you say you want to legalize heroin. So the idea behind ‘safe supply’ was, one … to get politicians to think about something without getting their backs up against the wall right away. And then the other side, it was something easy for anybody on the street to remember and recognize…. And so the term itself spread very, very quickly.”

As with other elements of harm reduction, there is considerable evidence for the benefits of safe supply. According to Westfall, this includes clinical trials that took place in Vancouver, more than two decades of experience with related measures in Europe, and a range of other studies that have been subject to rigorous review both by independent experts and by the relevant federal agency in Canada.

Westfall and a handful of other activists started CASS in 2019. Inspired in important respects by the HIV/AIDS movement, the group has combined a willingness to engage in raucous, militant protest with participation in the official processes that are shaping policy and government action. Combining the two requires a “constant tiptoeing balance,” according to Westfall, but the fact that CASS has never received government funding allows them to speak bluntly, whether that is on the streets or in meeting rooms.

The group started out with a splash in 2019, with a series of actions targeting ministers in BC’s NDP government, demanding that they take action to institute a safe supply. The group has also been active in mobilizing people sympathetic to harm reduction in the context of elections. During the most recent provincial election in BC, for instance, their actions were part of catalyzing the emergence of an all-party consensus in favour of safe supply, albeit with varying approaches and levels of enthusiasm among the parties.

On the policy side, the group has done things like produce guidances for health care providers and participate in countless policy-related meetings with governments. They are collaborating at the moment with Health Canada around a knowledge exchange series focused on making senior government officials more familiar with the evidence supporting safe supply. And separate from his role in CASS, Westfall co-chairs the Health Canada expert advisory group on the issue.

As well, the group is regularly contacted by people seeking access to safe supply programs. Westfall said that common “subject lines in my emails are, like, ‘Just overdosed again, please help,’ stuff like that.” They do what they can to connect people to whatever resources exist in their communities, but the sad fact is that such resources are often few and limited.

At the moment, there seems to be at least a modest willingness on the federal level to do the kinds of work mentioned above and to fund safe supply research and pilot projects. This is important, and is creating one possible starting point for future, full-scale implementation. But the safe supply projects that are out there are small and scattered. A big barrier to scaling them up is resistance at the provincial level – overt hostility from Conservative governments in Ontario and particularly Alberta, and from the NDP in BC nominal support coupled with constant delay and inaction.

“British Columbia is way past the point of pilot projects,” according to Westfall. “British Columbia is known as this harbinger of progressive drug policy, and it’s going through the worst years, in history, of overdose. They should be so far beyond the point of pilot projects. The rest of Canada … we need those pilot projects. But I feel like British Columbia is dragging their feet to say, oh, let’s just wait and see what this evidence is, let’s just wait and see. And we’re losing record breaking amounts of people in the meantime.” Since this interview was conducted, it was announced that next year British Columbia will be decriminalizing possession of small amounts of certain drugs, but this is still a long way from a fully legalized safe supply.

Westfall believes we are at a crucial juncture. The need is urgent, the evidence is clear, and a range of existing models could be used to implement safe supply in a broad way. He also sees the promised national pharmacare program as a potential vehicle to implement safe supply. He said, “I heard the NDP critic, Don Davies, saying that safe supply had nothing to do with pharmacare, and I couldn’t disagree more. That’s a crucial missed opportunity to get people across the country who may never ever be able to get a safe supply, to get that safe supply.”

Sooner or later, he is confident that safe supply will be implemented: “This is going to become, at some point, a standard of care.” But none of it will happen without a fight.

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: Pxhere.

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

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Radio: Against poverty in Calgary

Posted on June 7, 2022 by Scott

Lisa Hari and Rosemary Brown are active in We’re Together Ending Poverty (WTEP), a grassroots anti-poverty group in Calgary. Scott Neigh interviews them about what poverty looks like in their city, about the group’s evolution over the years, and about their work to bring people together to build shared understandings and collective action.

Over her career, Hari has engaged in anti-racism and anti-oppression work in the context of all three levels of government and the nonprofit sector. Brown has been involved in activism and organizing for most of her adult life around racism, women’s liberation, Indigenous and international solidarity, workers’ struggles, and much more.

As with any Canadian city, there is a lot of poverty in Calgary. Even before the pandemic, close to 200,000 people, or about 12% of the population, did not make enough money to meet their basic needs, and that skyrocketed under the impacts of COVID-19. With demand high and vacancy rates low, the cost of rental housing jumped 25% between January and May of this year, and the financialization of the housing market means a growing gap between what low-wage earners and social assistance recipients can afford and what most rental housing costs. Close to 2000 people experience absolute homelessness in the city on any given night. And food bank use in Calgary increased by one-third between February 2021 and February 2022. Brown said that in the stories of living in poverty that she heard in her working-class family growing up, “Above and beyond the hardship involved was the lack of dignity with which you were often treated by others.” And generally speaking, people who face racism, sexism, ableism, transphobia, and other forms of oppression are more likely to experience poverty.

Back in 2007 or 2008, there was a local initiative in Calgary called Poverty Talks, which brought together people living in poverty to talk about their experiences and also about what they thought would help their situations. One result of this process was an extensive list of recommendations addressed to various institutions and governments. However, at one discussion group in this process, organized by the Calgary Women’s Centre, a woman who was present stood up at the end and proposed that the women in the room themselves needed to take action. Over the next several months, those who were interested met to figure out some baseline commitments for the group – things like addressing the root causes of poverty through systemic change; foregrounding the importance of sexism, racism, and ableism, as well as the concentration of wealth, in creating poverty and shaping how it is experienced; and developing mutually supportive relationships and challenging oppression in their work.

Much of what they have done since then has continued to involve the slow, deliberate work of bringing people together to share experiences and build collective understandings and relationships, through things like workshops, conferences, events, and sharing circles. They have collectively asked questions, shifted their understanding and ways of work, and taken action based on the experiences of and dialogue among their members. This has involved things like thinking through capitalism and its relationship to poverty, particularly in the context of Alberta’s oil industry. It has led to being part of specific campaigns, like that for a fairer tax system in Alberta and various kinds of work in support of tenants. And it led the group to shift from its original incarnation as Women Together Ending Poverty to We’re Together Ending Poverty, to expand its base to include the gamut of nonbinary, gender-diverse, trans, and Two-Spirit people.

The group has also become active in campaigning for a guaranteed basic income, though with full awareness of the limits and challenges of that approach as voiced by many of their members and other people living in poverty. And in recent years, they have been working more closely with local Indigenous activists to expand their understanding of poverty and do more to centre and challenge the pervasive realities of colonization and racism in their thinking and in their activities.

In reflecting on the group’s many years of work, Brown said, “Alberta is such a difficult place to organize in.” The group’s focus on bringing people together and building shared understandings sometimes feels small in the face of the crises that we collectively face, but Brown sees it as being part of the necessary groundwork to create the conditions of possibility for broader change.

In her understanding, “there’s the political, the electoral level, but then there’s also our movement level,” and people concerned with justice need to build both collective vision and collective power on both levels.

On the electoral front, the United Conservative Party government in Alberta is relentlessly implementing a wide range of harmful measures. While she sees limits to what elections can accomplish, she argued, “We need to bring in another government that at least gives us some breathing room, to not always constantly being under attack, whether we’re a teacher, or a healthcare worker, or working in social services.”

On the movement level, she points to the far-right-led convoy protests earlier in the year, whom she refers to as the “hate honkers,” and the lack of a strong progressive response. “Where was the unified counter narrative in terms of the work being done in communities to protect each other during COVID, to support each other during COVID? … I can’t speak for other parts of the country, but we need a more unified progressive movement here in Calgary.”

She said, “WTEP has always tried to collaborate with others in terms of our work, and to build common understanding and build some deeper understandings around the issues,” and she sees that as one element of “collaborating with other movements to build more of a movement.”

Hari said, “People living in poverty know all about living in poverty.” For her, a big part of WTEP’s work involves “educating people that think that poverty doesn’t exist in our society, or don’t see it. And I think it’s that broader education that really makes a change in our society – long term change. So it’s really educating and engaging people that can really make a difference. Not only are we empowering people that live in poverty, but we are asking those that can make a difference to be allies.”

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 We’re Together Ending Poverty.

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

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Radio: Preserving and popularizing the history of working-class Toronto

Posted on May 31, 2022 by Scott

Craig Heron, Holly Kirkconnell, and David Kidd are active with the Toronto Workers’ History Project (TWHP), an initiative devoted to preserving and promoting the history of working people in Toronto. Scott Neigh interviews them about the enthusiasm they have found in the community for working-class history, the many facets of the project’s work, and the importance of history for social movements today.

A number of episodes of this show over the years have touched on the idea that the history that most of us have the opportunity to learn has little to say about the lives of ordinary people and about the struggles through which we have collectively shaped the world – as Kidd said, “Histories of cities are generally those of the rich, and so forth.” But what can we do about that? How, for instance, can working-class people – meaning working-class people of all genders, racial backgrounds, sexualities, and abilities – learn about their history and about the struggles of working-class people of earlier generations? The TWHP is attempting to provide at least one kind of answer to that question.

Craig Heron is a retired history and labour studies professor from York University in Toronto who has also been very involved in doing public history related to workers. David Kidd, also retired, was an elected leader in the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), as well as an activist in low-income communities. And Holly Kirkconnell was active for many years in the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) and as a delegate to the Toronto and York District Labour Council.

Back in 2016, in the lead-up to the 145th anniversary of the labour council in Toronto, someone gave Heron a call asking for photographs that they could use as part of a commemoration. He obliged, of course, but it got him thinking. It just didn’t seem right that the only way to access such very basic elements of the heritage of working-class people in Toronto required being part of the right informal relationship networks and knowing who to ask. So not long after, he and Kidd sat down and had a conversation, and decided to see if there was interest in a collective project focused on working-class history. They called two public meetings to discuss the possibility, got an enthusiastic response, and spent the summer workshopping specific ideas before launching that fall.

The goal of the TWHP has been to both coordinate existing efforts and spark new work related to the heritage of working-class people in Toronto – again, understood expansively. According to Heron, “The kinds of history that we’re interested in is not simply people who happen to have a union card in their pockets. Because those are, first of all, most likely white men, for a large part of the period. And also a minority of the working-class population, for long stretches of time. So we are interested in the entire experience, organized and unorganized, all genders, races, ethnicities. It’s a full and and comprehensive look at working-class experience.” Over the years, the work has divided roughly into two parts – educational work aiming to popularize and circulate history, and primary preservation work.

The core of the group’s educational work has been its monthly meetings. Each one focuses on a specific topic. They have often involved bringing together someone with relevant historical training or expertise and someone involved in related activist work in the present. Topics have included things like the history of Black teachers in Ontario, the history of the Kensington Market, the struggle for child care in Ontario, struggles by hotel workers and taxi drivers in the city, the Toronto Purchase and local Indigenous history, workers and sport, the Metro Days of Action in the 1990s, and much more. After a brief hiatus at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the meetings were moved online.

Another important facet of the group’s educational work has been creating and performing original theatre pieces – as “another way of conveying information about the histories,” according to Kirkconnell. They tried to do two or three per year before the pandemic, usually thematically related to and performed as part of a monthly meeting. Earlier in May, they put on their first standalone production, focused on the radical housewives movement in Toronto in the 1930s and 1940s. Kirkconnell said that in her experience, the plays have been “well received.” She continued, “I think they add to the monthly meetings. I’ve heard some members say, ‘Well, I always come out when there’s going to be a theatre piece involved.'”

The TWHP also have a regular book club. They have done walking tours, and before the pandemic were in the process of planning biking and driving tours. They created a travelling exhibit. Some members were very involved last year in the many commemorations of the Toronto labour council’s 150th anniversary. As well, each December, they host what they describe as an “antiques roadshow” event, in which people from the community come together and bring items related to working-class Toronto that they have kept in basements and attics, and use those items as a sort of focus for telling community stories.

As well, the group has done some primary preservation work. Though they have no space and do not have the resources to do the archiving themselves, they have given advice and support to unions and other organizations looking to find ways to preserve their older records. And perhaps most importantly, they have engaged in two oral history projects, interviewing people and recording their stories. The first was a small project in the group’s earlier years focused specifically on immigrant working-class activists. And the second is ongoing, making use of the turn to video calls during the pandemic to capture the stories of a wide range of older working-class leaders and activists in Toronto.

According to Kidd, it is important to have a project like the TWHP because the labour movement and other social movements can really benefit from a better understanding of the past, but often do not have the resources or energy to do that work on their own. He added, “A lot of unions and organizations are literally fighting for their collective lives right now. The post-pandemic world will produce austerity and other reductions in employees. And of course, the community groups are facing all those ongoing issues of homelessness and challenges otherwise in their lives. To look back, it’s something that is assistive to them. And so that’s something we try to do is assist them in the process.”

Heron said that many people are interested in making those kinds of connections. In, for example, the group’s monthly meetings, “people are very keen” to make the “relevance of the past” an active part of the conversation. He said, “We’ve tried to be sensitive to that dynamic between the past and the present – and the future, I guess – in the way we structure the meetings and in the discussions. And if we don’t, then someone almost invariably in the audience raises it.” As for the details of that relevance, he said it varies a lot depending on the issue, struggle, and history in question. “In very simple terms, sometimes it’s just the heroism of the past is inspiring. Some other times, it’s the difficulties that people encountered in the past are sobering. The parallels with the past. Or the complete difference, whether the advantages we have now or the disadvantages we have now. Those kinds of points of comparison are really very, very interesting for people and I think that’s what makes us relevant beyond simply being an antiquarian history society.”

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: Flickr / City of Toronto

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

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Radio: Pushing Ontario to fix its massive school repair backlog

Posted on May 24, 2022 by Scott

Krista Wylie is a mother of one current and one former student in public schools in Toronto, and she is a co-founder of the Fix Our Schools campaign. Scott Neigh interviews her about the $16.8 billion repair backlog in Ontario schools and about her years of campaigning to get the provincial government to take seriously the impact that has on students, teachers, and other education workers, and to invest adequately in school repair and renewal.

Back in 2014, both of Wylie’s kids were students in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB). Because they lived in an older part of the city, the buildings in which they went to school were older buildings – they were approaching the century mark, and it showed. She and other parents would sometimes complain to each other about the state of disrepair in schools, they would go as individuals to the odd public meeting, they might write a letter once in awhile, but it all seemed like an issue where there was not much to be done but shrug your shoulders, shake your head, and count down the years until your kids graduated. But after hearing a senior TDSB staffer give a talk about how school funding actually works and about potential solutions to the problem, she and a number of other parents were inspired. They decided that they needed to do something, and they co-founded Fix Our Schools. She said, “It just didn’t make sense that in a province and a country where there was really quite incredible wealth, that the buildings in which children spend their days were being allowed to fall into such a state of disrepair.”

They started taking action out of a recognition that school disrepair is not just about peeling paint or aesthetics, but rather has a major impact on the everyday experiences, the learning and teaching, and even the health of students and education workers.

For Wylie, climate control is a key example. Years ago, when one of her kids was in elementary school, he came home and talked about this neat science experiment that his class had done, where the teacher took a thermometer and they measured the temperature in all of the classrooms in their hallway. When he said that his classroom had been 12ºC or thereabouts, she initially thought he must be mistaken. When he went to say that he and his classmates had been wearing their winter coats and hats in class for weeks, she was outraged.

Buildings that get unbearably hot in the warm months and cold in the winter, leaking roofs, washrooms in a dismal state, drinking water quality issues, asbestos – all of these and more can be found in Ontario’s schools. Issues of poor ventilation in schools have become particularly visible in the last two years as a COVID-related safety concern, but poor indoor air quality can have major impacts on both health and on learning even outside of a pandemic.

At the very beginning, the group focused on Toronto. Within a year, however, they realized that communities across Ontario were facing the same issue, and that it was the provincial government rather than individual school boards that had both the resources and the mandate to do something about it.

None of the parents who came together to form Fix Our Schools had much experience doing advocacy, but they learned fast. In their early years, they really focused on building a base through extensive in-person and online outreach. They also put a lot of energy into making sure they had good information to support their demands, as well as good narratives to explain them. When they started their work, school boards and the province largely kept numbers related to school disrepair fairly quiet, but the group – aided significantly by a well-timed study from the provincial auditor – played a role in making the issue a regular part of the public conversation.

Fix Our Schools has engaged in advocacy in a number of different ways. They have, for example, intervened in elections. In the 2018 provincial election, they worked with several education unions to get candidates from all parties to sign a pledge related to addressing school disrepair, and helped make it a campaign issue. They have also invested a great deal of energy in advocating directly with politicians and staff. That felt useful during the Liberal government under Premier Kathleen Wynne, when those meetings extended to senior policy staff in the premier’s office and there was a real sense that those on the government side were listening – which, Wylie hastens to point out, “is not meant to be a partisan plug for the Liberals” who “had 15 years to do a whole lot more than they did,” but it is in stark contrast with the active disinterest they have felt from the Ford Conservatives.

The biggest win on this issue took place in 2016, when the Liberals increased the amount spent on repair and renewal of schools from $150 million to $1.4 billion per year. As welcome as that boost was, however, the group warned at the time that the new amount was, based on widely accepted industry standards, still just barely enough to keep the problem from getting worse, and not enough to start undoing the harm done by decades of underfunding. From a $15 billion repair backlog in Ontario schools at that point, the amount has still edged upwards to $16.8 billion today.

In the current provincial election, all of the main opposition parties have made promises of various kinds related to fixing school infrastructure. But in the budget document released right before the election was called, it looks like the Conservative plan moving forward amounts to a disguised cut to that annual funding – they promise $1.4 billion per year, but instead of spending it just on repair and renewal, it is earmarked to cover new school construction in the province as well. In this election, Fix Our Schools is advocating strategic voting to defeat the Conservatives, and has been working with other groups that have a similar analysis to make it happen. Wylie said, “We have been working behind the scenes to support the candidates that we feel have the best chance of beating the Conservative in their riding.”

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: Pixabay

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

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