Radio: Challenging government abandonment of citizens detained abroad

Posted on May 17, 2022 by Scott

Sally Lane is the mother of Jack Letts, a Canadian citizen who has been detained for more than five years in northeastern Syria in conditions akin to torture. Matthew Behrens is a long-time activist and a member of Stop Canadian Involvement in Torture. Scott Neigh interviews them about Jack’s case and about the campaign to push the Canadian government to finally take action to bring Jack back to Canada.

The mistreatment of Muslims by the Canadian state since September 11, 2001 has taken numerous forms, domestically and internationally, including RCMP and CSIS harassment of Muslim communities and organizations domestically, and participation in military violence harming Muslim civilians in multiple countries around the world. Among other things, the Canadian national security state has profiled, targeted, and harassed Muslims. There was the use of national security certificates, whereby a number of Muslim men were detained indefinitely in the absence of any charges, publically presented evidence, or meaningful due process – the so-called “secret trials” cases. Then there have been instances of rendition to torture, in which the Canadian state engaged in various forms of complicity with the torture of Muslims (including Canadians) by other governments, whether through facilitating their rendition, providing or acquiring intelligence, and/or refusing to repatriate them. In all of these cases, the Canadian state has actively eroded or outright violated guarantees of due process and human rights – and has often gone on to lie about it.

The case of Jack Letts, originally a resident of the UK and dual citizen of the UK and Canada, is best understood in this context. According to Lane, Jack was always a “very intense kid” who threw himself into whatever he did. In his teens, his best friends at school were the Muslim kids in his class. He took a high school course in philosophy and ethics that opened his eyes to injustice in the world, got into lots of conversations and debates, and at the age of 16 converted to Islam and started to teach himself Arabic.

A few years later, with his parents’ support, Jack was on a trip to visit a friend in Jordan and to take a course in Kuwait. And then his parents got a call from him saying that he was in war-torn Syria. Lane said, “That was the point that our nightmare began.”

Events since then have been difficult and convoluted, to say the least. For a period of time, Jack was in territory controlled by the Islamic State (or ISIS). This was of great concern to his parents, of course, but it also put him on the radar of state authorities in the UK, who closely monitored his location and communications. At some point, a right-wing tabloid in the UK got hold of Jack’s story and turned distortions, half-truths, and lies into an Islamophobic media firestorm demonizing Jack, which has had repercussions down to the present day.

In his communications from Syria with his parents, Jack has been very clear throughout that he was never a member of ISIS and had not engaged in harmful activities. Lane said, “Jack has always said that he was never a member of ISIS, that he detested ISIS – that, yes, he was in IS territory, but he challenged them in the street. He actually went to court in Mosul, testifying against them, at which point he got thrown in prison. He was actually imprisoned by them twice. And they said the third time they caught him, they would kill him.”

Despite their intense surveillance, at no point have UK or Canadian state officials presented any evidence to Lane, to the media, or to a court proving that Jack belonged to ISIS or that he had engaged in anything like the kinds of wrongdoing alluded to by media lies – something UK officials no doubt would have done if they could when they put Jack’s parents on trial. After he had been in Syria for about a year, Lane said that Jack started to send them “desperate messages saying the he needed to get out, that ISIS were hunting him, and we needed to pay a people smuggler.” Experts in the field affirmed for them that this was indeed the only way to get him out, and initially police in the UK gave them permission to send him money to escape. Then, Lane said, the police “withdrew that permission after three days and said they changed their mind. And they arrested us for funding terrorism.”

In the years that their case was before the courts, Lane and her husband were not able to rebut the lies being told about their son in the media, under threat of contempt-of-court charges. They were ultimately acquitted at a trial in London’s Old Bailey – a resolution based on the defence that they were sending money to Jack to save his life, according to Lane, meaning that the court recognized that Jack was “running for his life” in IS territory. But since their acquittal, they have had very little luck in getting mainstream journalists to take an interest in the extensive evidence they have in their possession that contradicts the earlier lies published about their son. She said, “All this information has never come into the public domain. I’ve tried very hard. I’ve sent the original messages to journalists, both in the UK and in Canada. And they won’t publish them.”

In 2017, Jack somehow ended up in the custody of Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria – he may have been captured while trying to flee among refugees, or he may have been sold to them as a potentially high-value foreign captive, it is unclear. That makes him one of more than 40 Canadian Muslims currently detained by Kurdish forces in Syria, most of whom are women and children, all of whom are being held in terrible conditions.

In 2019, after Lane and her husband were acquitted, the UK government stripped Jack of his UK citizenship, so Lane moved to Canada to pursue her son’s case here. In an earlier period, the Canadian government had sounded somewhat supportive in response to inquiries about Jack’s case. But, Lane said, “At one point in 2018, everything changed. All the positive messaging completely shut down and became one paragraph – we have no consular assistance, we closed our embassy in 2012, there’s nothing further we can do. And that is the battle we have been fighting ever since.”

Currently, Lane is pursuing two courses of action. One is a court challenge being mounted by the families of a number of Canadians detained in northeastern Syria, which is expected to be heard in June. They are asking the court to force the federal government to act on its responsibilities towards citizens and help them return home. This is in line with earlier cases, such as that of Abousfian Abdelrazik, whom the federal government refused to repatriate from detention and torture in Sudan until a federal court ordered them to do so.

The other course of action, though lawyers advised against it, is a public campaign. Lane had been engaged in some low-key activism to try to get organizations to take a stand in support of Jack and the other detainees, with little luck. She said,”I thought, it’s just not working. If I don’t go public, then I won’t have a son.”

The campaign is being organized in conjunction with Behrens, who among other things has been active since the early 2000s in a number of the secret trials and rendition to torture cases. The campaign includes an online petition, a chain fast, a vigil in front of the Prime Minister’s residence, other public events, a social media campaign, and lots of advocacy.

A key goal of the campaign is to chip away at the baseless rhetoric from politicians and media portraying Jack as a monster, and instead to humanize him. They are demanding that the Canadian state meet its obligations and bring him home. And in so doing, they are making it clear that, like most of the other Muslims that the Canadian state has targeted over the last two decades, no evidence has been presented showing any wrongdoing on Jack’s part – and even if there had, that should not lead to him being deprived of basic due process, citizenship rights, or human rights.

Behrens said, “We are seeing the fruits now of decades of governmental abuses being committed against marginalized and stigmatized communities. And I think that if you have a doubt about Jack or any of the detainees, look at the record of the organizations and the politicians who are making accusations and see that persistent period of dishonesty, deception, reliance on torture, racism, Islamophobia, and violence, and ask yourself, who do you really trust here? … As Sally said, [Jack] was in touch for many years. She knew what was going on. She knew what he believed in. And it was very clear that he was not this monster that he had been made out to be. … And when you do speak up, you’re speaking up not only for Jack and these detainees, but you’re also speaking up for a democratic process, which has been so seriously eroded over the last few decades in the name of national security, that it’s really quite shocking how few rights are left that are being respected for those who are marginalized.”

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 Sally Lane and Matthew Behrens.

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

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Radio: Long years of grassroots work for missing and murdered Indigenous women

Posted on May 10, 2022 by Scott

Darlene Okemaysim-Sicotte is part of a grassroots group called Iskwewuk E-wichiwitochik, or Women Walking Together, that has been working for many years in Saskatoon on the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Scott Neigh interviews her about what that work has involved.

Okemaysim-Sicotte grew up in Beardy’s and Okemasis’ Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, north of Saskatoon. She was one of fourteen children, and her parents were residential school survivors. She grew up immersed in both the Catholic faith and in traditional Cree practices and ceremonies. Her family was very involved in the community, and her parents regularly set an example of standing up and speaking out when something unjust was going on. From a young age, Okemaysim-Sicotte was a high achiever in school. She attended the University of Saskatchewan, where she was active in Indigenous student politics and got a degree in sociology and women’s studies. As a young woman, she had a relationship with a Dakota man, with whom she had several children, and from him she also learned about different kinds of activist traditions from his people. After graduating, she worked in Indigenous community organizations in Saskatoon, but was eventually hired by the Indigenous Studies Department at the university.

Back in 2005, there were many Indigenous women and girls from Saskatchewan who were missing, and many others who had experienced violence. And in those years, mainstream media seldom gave the issue much attention. Okemaysim-Sicotte and a number of other people, particularly other Indigenous women, decided to come together and take action collectively in response to the crisis, initially with an event on that year’s International Human Rights Day on December 10. Out of that work they founded Iskwewuk E-wichiwitochik.

For Okemaysim-Sicotte, the root causes of the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women can be found by looking at the history of colonization. Gender worked in lots of different ways in different Indigenous nations before colonization, but none of them were in line with the Christian patriarchy guiding the early generations of colonizers. Moreover, Indigenous women were central to their nations, in many instances as leaders and decision-makers. So even as far back as the days of the fur trade, undermining Indigenous nations through attacking Indigenous women was a central colonial strategy. She said, “You had, you know, kidnapping or jailing of Indigenous women, or even killing of Indigenous women, because of the power they had in their communities.”

That continued as colonial settlement and agriculture came to predominate, and then via residential schools starting later in the 19th century. In the 20th century, as residential schools gradually began to recede, there was the so-called ’60s Scoop, in which large numbers of Indigenous children were taken from their families and placed primarily with settler families. And still today, the so-called child welfare system continues to target Indigenous families, to the point where more than three times as many Indigenous children are placed in state “care” now than were at the height of the residential school system. While many of these systemic violences against Indigenous people have not only targeted women and girls, their harms most certainly do have a huge impact on women and girls, and often specific and distinct impacts. It is this history that has produced the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, according to Okemaysim-Sicotte. Despite all of it, however, she said, “Indigenous women are resilient, we’re not going anywhere.”

Iskwewuk E-wichiwitochik has never incorporated or sought formal funding. Their work has always followed the lead of the families of missing and murdered women, and has involved planning dozens and dozens of actions, fundraising, logistical support work, cultural and emotional support, and working hard to shield the families from the sometimes hostile media, public, and legal system. It has included work with specific families, broader public commemorations, local actions as part of national efforts, and much more. She said, “The first four or five years I think we did about 60 actions, all different types.” Though the pace is much slower today, similar work is still going on. They have also contributed to research and writing projects related to missing and murdered Indigenous women, and in recent years have been working with other groups in Saskatoon around enacting reconciliation at the municipal level.

Perhaps the most visible development on the issue in the last decade was the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People. Iskwewuk E-wichiwitochik was very involved in advocating for such an inquiry in the years before it happened, in contributing to the inquiry itself, and in the subsequent process to develop a national action plan. Often, as a grassroots group, they have not been given much space by official organizations, but they have done their best. Okemaysim-Sicotte recognizes that working within formal state processes has certain challenges, but nonetheless sees that work as an important path towards changes that will improve people’s lives and shift the circumstances that allow the crisis to persist.

These days, the core membership of Iskwewuk E-wichiwitochik is getting smaller and older. They are still going strong, but now with a greater emphasis on mentoring, consulting, and providing guidance to those newly taking up the struggle.

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: Edna Winti / Wikimedia

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

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Radio: Defending the forest in southwest Nova Scotia

Posted on May 3, 2022 by Scott

Nina Newington is a long-time activist and an organizer of the Last Hope Camp, whose participants have been living in tents on the land since December to block the logging of an ecologically important forest in southwest Nova Scotia. Scott Neigh interviews her about the practicalities of taking this kind of direct action, about the broader struggle to defend forests in Nova Scotia, and about the Last Hope Camp.

As a relatively small province, and one of the first historically to be hit by the devastating impacts of settler colonialism, the amount of forested land in Nova Scotia is fairly modest compared to most other provinces, and almost none of it is old growth. However, though employment in the sector has been steadily declining for many years, there is still enough that the province has an active forestry industry. Most of the forest in Nova Scotia is designated “Wabanaki-Acadian,” which indicates a sort of mix between evergreen boreal forest and more southerly deciduous forest.

Given the devastating impact it has had on ecosystems in Nova Scotia, the rules governing how the industry operates have been hotly contested for a long time. There have been two major reform efforts in the last decade and a half that have attempted to introduce more ecologically sound approaches, but resistance by industry to proposed changes has been fierce and largely successful. The most recent effort took the form of a government review in 2018 that produced a set of proposals that many environmentalists regarded as far from perfect but nonetheless a step forward, but late last year the author of the review issued what CBC described as a “scathing update” on the “lack of progress” in implementing it. And in their victory in last year’s provincial election over the incumbent Liberals, the Conservatives promised to protect 20% of the province’s land, to the Liberals’ 17%, yet little progress has been made on implementing that either. Today’s guest describes the overarching tendency across governments in recent decades as “talk-and-log” – making promises of consultation and future change, while continuing to actively facilitate the same old ecological harms.

Nina Newington came out as a lesbian in 1970s England, which, she said, “was not a very friendly place to come out. So I had a kind of outsider’s view. And that left me with a fairly skeptical take on the structures of power.” She lived for many years as an undocumented immigrant in the US, where she was involved in environmental action related to a nearby nuclear reactor. In the early 2000s, she and her wife moved to Canada, initially to Edmonton, but for many years now living on a farm in southwest Nova Scotia. This has given her plenty of opportunity to witness the “devastating effect that industrial forestry was having.” She said that Nova Scotia has “been at the mercy of pulp and paper mills for a hundred years. But particularly in the last 30, the clear cutting has gone crazy.” This has become a primary focus for her grassroots political work. At some point, she discovered the Nova Scotia branch of climate action group Extinction Rebellion and co-founded a chapter in her area, which at this point has, in a loose sense, been the base of three major forest defence direct actions.

The most recent of those action – the Last Hope Camp – started in early December 2021. Newington saw a comment in a Facebook group from a local farmer, hunter, and trapper who was frustrated that nearby Crown land, where he’d had a cabin for many years, was set to be logged within a couple of weeks. She connected with him, they talked it over, and they decided to set up a camp. The threatened forest is not old growth, but at about 80 years old, it is still older than the vast majority of forest in the province. It is ecologically important as it provides habitat for a number of species-at-risk and connects three large wetland areas. The name “Last Hope Camp” comes from a hunting camp that had existed in the same place in the early 20th century – in those years, game was already getting scarce, and hunters who didn’t have the meat they needed to last the winter would often go there and have a good chance of finding moose.

In the almost six months since the camp began, around 80 people have spent time there, including 50 who have camped, and many more have acted in support in urban areas. It was a rough winter in Nova Scotia, but prospector’s tents and other quality gear made it almost easy – “glamping with a possible criminal record,” Newington joked. In fact, her assessment is that the risk of arrest in this particular action is very low, given that it is on Crown land.

Of particular importance to the camp was a visit early on from the chief of the local district of the traditional Mi’kmaq governance system, who presented them with a flag of the seven Mi’kmaq districts. Newington said, “We’ve been told that this is our invitation to be on territory, and thanks to us for our efforts to protect the land and the creatures that live on it.”

So far, though it was supposed to begin late last year, there has been no sign of any attempts to start logging the area. At least part of the reason for that is that the group has successfully identified numerous instances of species-at-risk in the forest, particularly rare lichens, that the provincial government’s supposedly thorough assessment of the forest had somehow missed. This resulted in a temporary formal pause in the permission to log the area, as well as a certain amount of embarrassment for the provincial government, according to Newington. She said that before the discovery of these lichens, the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources and Renewables had “made quite a big deal out of the fact that their biologists had reviewed the site not once but twice in response to citizen concerns, and had found nothing that they needed to worry about. And as it turned out, their biologist just basically never left their desk. Because they mostly don’t.” The official pause in the logging permit has since lapsed, with new requirements that any logging leave a buffer around the rare lichen.

The camp is demanding that permission to log this particular piece of forest be rescinded permanently. They are also asking that a larger piece of territory that encompasses where the camp is, as well as some of the province’s minuscule remaining old growth, be protected. Newington believes that in their talk of protecting 20% of the land in Nova Scotia, the current government is following in the footsteps of previous governments and “playing us all for fools,” and that substantial grassroots pressure will be necessary to force them to keep that promise. She hopes a broader movement can push for an end to the “talk-and-log” orientation and for real governmental action to preserve the province’s forests.

Newington said, “What I hope would happen eventually is that people connect to places that they care about, near where they live, and decide that they’re really not willing to accept those areas being cut. And that they really do want them protected and they’ll do what they need to do to keep them whole until they’re protected.”

She emphasized that while direct action is important in protecting forests, it is only one part of the picture. She said, “My own feeling is that we all need to do what we can do. And some people, for lots of different reasons, can’t risk arrest. … So it’s important to value everything that people can contribute.” Maintaining an action like the Last Hope Camp requires all sorts of off-site logistical work, for instance, and turning such a camp into a political win involves lots of other kinds of organizing too. “It won’t work if the people who are camping are not connecting to a wider circle of people who might not be up for camping on a logging road, let alone getting arrested, but are up for signing petitions and writing letters and donating some money and calling politicians. And, you know, many of us might feel like we’ve tried letters and petitions and marches and it doesn’t do enough. But it doesn’t mean that those things shouldn’t happen. You need them to happen so the politicians can’t say, oh, it’s just a gaggle of ten loony tree huggers out in the woods and nobody else cares.”

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 Last Hope Camp.

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

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Radio: Union members pushing their pension plan to divest from fossil fuels

Posted on April 26, 2022 by Scott

Jillian Maguire and Kim Benson are teachers in British Columbia. As such, they are both members of the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF), and they have recently been organizing to get their pension plan to divest from fossil fuel industries. Scott Neigh interview them about the BCTF Divest Now campaign and about their success in getting the BCTF to pass a motion in favour of divestment.

Maguire teaches English at Kitsilano Secondary School on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-waututh territory in Vancouver. Benson is a teacher on call at the elementary level in the Sea to Sky school district on the unceded territory of the Squamish Nation, north of Vancouver.

Like so many of us, in recent years Maguire and Benson have been grappling with the enormity of the climate crisis and its implications for…well, everything. For Maguire, a key moment happened two summers ago when she encountered a blockade by climate action group Extinction Rebellion on Vancouver’s Burrard Street Bridge. At around the same time, Benson started doing a lot of reading on the topic, which really drove home for her the urgency of the crisis. Both were inspired to get involved, and began taking part in all manner of public actions. As well, Benson started a Teachers for Future – Canada Instagram page as a way to connect teachers interested in climate action to each other and to the youth climate organizing that has been so important in recent years.

Then a few months ago, the two of them met for the first time – fittingly, at a public talk related to the climate crisis. They got to chatting, and realized they had both started wondering about whether their pension plan – the pension plan to which all teachers in BC belong – had divested from fossil fuels.

Divestment is a strategy of encouraging particularly institutions to pull their money out of fossil fuel industries. This can introduce practical impediments to industrial activities that contribute to the climate crisis, but perhaps more importantly can be a powerful way of delegitimizing such activities.

Public sector pension plans are major institutional investors. The BC Teachers’ Pension Plan represents 49,000 employed members and 40,000 retired members, and it has assets in excess of $34 billion. As with other public sector pensions in the province, it is managed by two provincial crown corporations – the BC Pension Corporation deals with members, and the BC Investment Management Corporation (BCI) does the investing. The plan is governed by a ten-member board, half of whom are appointed by the provincial government and the other half of whom are appointed by the BCTF.

The BCTF is a union with a history and a self-image suggesting a particular commitment to an activist vision of social justice. However, while it certainly has had important moments of militance and of engagement with international solidarity over the decades, Maguire and Benson were disappointed to learn that despite years of work by activists within the union, it had taken no steps towards divesting its pension plan from fossil fuels. Maguire said, “The BCTF talks about itself as a social justice union. But I’m starting to doubt whether, in fact, we are a social justice union.”

The standard response to demands for divestment has been to point out that it is not something that the union can unilaterally decide. However, divestment activists argue that this does not meant the union can and should be doing nothing at all. Maguire said, “If we are truly a social justice union, then we wouldn’t be taking no for an answer so easily.”

So Maguire and Benson decided to start the BCTF Divest Now campaign. They reached out to teachers that they knew and put together a core group that wanted to be involved. Within a couple of weeks, they had a social media and web presence. And they discovered that two motions committing the union to divestment were already slated to go to the BCTF annual general meeting in March.

Though unions are, for the most part, democratic, bureaucracy can still make it very hard for activists to get things done. It has meant, for instance, that divestment motions in prior years were never given the chance to be voted on. According to Benson, “I think from at least 2011, motions for divestment have been coming to the AGM but never hitting the floor, always disappearing at some point or another.”

And the bureaucracy also made working through union channels in support of this year’s motions difficult and frustrating. Maguire said, “Even to get the motion past the layers of bureaucracy that are involved in our union was mind boggling. … I wouldn’t say that there’s a resistance to it, but it’s, you know, everybody thinks that it’s somebody else’s job to do this, and nobody wants to take the initiative to take ownership of this particular process.”

For this reason, the BCTF Divest Now campaign decided that the best tactic would be to build pressure outside of regular union channels – they developed a petition and began to circulate it far and wide, and to build public pressure on the union to act. And this time, one of the divestment motions made it to the AGM floor, and BCTF members voted by an overwhelming margin to pass it.

Despite the passage of that motion, given how the pension plan is governed, it is not clear what happens next. While the union cannot implement divestment on its own, it can certainly use its institutional power to demand it, though it is uncertain what this might look like. At the very least, according to Benson, the passage of this resolution makes it clear that “most members want divestment – and also investment in sustainable, restorative companies and investments.” She describes it as “a turning point” and “very encouraging … it puts us in a good spot to engage more teachers in this conversation.” The campaign is still figuring out its next steps, but Maguire and Benson suspect that ongoing pressure both inside and outside the BCTF will continue to be necessary.

In the grand scheme of things, Maguire and Benson see divestment as only one facet of climate action among many. Despite the growing urgency, they see governments of all parties and at all levels as complicit with fossil fuel industries in delaying substantial responses to the climate crisis. In that context, Maguire said, “The work that we’re doing at the BCTF is really essential. But … just, you know, [people] going to a meeting and sending a few emails to try to get their union to divest – that’s not going to be nearly enough. People have to take a lot more action than that.” They believe that large-scale nonviolent direct action and mass protest will be necessary to achieve the kind of just transition that the world needs. Benson said, “I visualize 46,000 teachers actually coming out for civil disobedience, protecting old growth and protesting against the fossil fuel expansion.”

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: Chris Yakimov / Flickr

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

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Radio: Ottawa residents against the convoy, and for solidarity and social justice

Posted on April 19, 2022 by Scott

Alex Silas and Angella MacEwen live in Ottawa and are active in their unions and their communities. This includes as members of Community Solidarity Ottawa (CSO), a coalition of unions, community organizations, and residents that came together during the recent convoy occupation of downtown Ottawa to give voice to grassroots opposition to the convoy, its far-right organizers, and its harmful tactics, while also opposing governments that have not done enough to support working-class communities and frontline workers during the pandemic. Scott Neigh interviews them about the convoy, about grassroots responses to it, and about Community Solidarity Ottawa.

Silas has been active in community groups working for things like a higher minimum wage and tenant rights, and also in his union, the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), where he is currently the regional vice-president for the National Capital Region. Angella MacEwen has been involved in the peace and climate movements, and she is an economist with the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE).

As residents of Ottawa, when the convoy protest rolled into town at the end of January, they, their friends, and their co-workers were among the people who had to face the convoy’s harmful impacts – MacEwen, in particular, lives in the downtown area that was occupied.

The ostensible basis for the convoy occupation in Ottawa, and related actions across the country, was opposition to vaccine mandates and other public health measures. And, certainly, while vaccine acceptance in Canada is very high and almost 90% of eligible people in this country have had at least one shot of vaccine, the organizers still managed to tap into some real dissatisfaction with government handling of the pandemic. Though today’s interview participants are harshly critical of the convey, they have their own criticisms of government action, pointing towards vastly inadequate government supports for people detrimentally impacted by the pandemic, as well as lack of sensitivity and equity in the implementation of public health measures. MacEwen said, “I do think that we have, collectively, a responsibility for creating the situation where people felt like the convoy was speaking for them.”

However, even a cursory look makes it clear that the convoy protest was a very different thing than its organizers’ PR claimed. It was not, for instance, a protest of working-class truckers. Most participants were not truckers, those who were truckers were largely not working-class but owner-operators – in the words of Silas, whose uncle is a trucker in Atlantic Canada, “they were bosses, essentially” – and their demands had little to do with the very genuine issues that truckers in this country face. More importantly, most of the convoy’s core organizers were well-known far-right and white nationalist figures, and they used a quite broad and non-specific appeal to people’s dissatisfaction to draw people into their orbit, and to grow the networks and build the momentum connected with their very reactionary and very harmful form of politics.

The impacts of the convoy on Ottawa residents were profound. The incessant noise, the presence of far-right and racist symbols among convoy participants, and the active harassment of racialized people, queer and trans people, and women meant, according to MacEwen, “We really felt like we were just being held hostage in our houses.” Silas echoed, “People felt unsafe in their own neighborhoods. People were harassed. People were scared.”

In this context, the official response offered little help, and arguably did more to support the convoy than residents. MacEwen said, “We just had this growing sense of … having been abandoned by any of the institutions that are supposed to protect us, both in terms of public health and public safety.” For a period of time, for instance, one contribution from the mayor’s office was to advise people to stay safe by not going downtown, a profoundly unhelpful response for residents of the downtown and people working frontline jobs there. “It’s like, dude, people live here,” said Silas.

The role of the police was particularly concerning. As is true in most cities, the Ottawa police have a long history of violence and racism. The most prominent case in recent years involved an officer who used steel-reinforced gloves to beat a Black man suffering from mental illness to death – an act for which he was later acquitted. According to MacEwen, there are “groups who are doing really good work around accountability, around shifting the focus of funding from policing to preventative issues,” but also intense resistance to any of that from the police themselves and from their many supporters within the city’s leadership.

During the convoy occupation, there was widespread outrage among residents directed particularly at the police, who for weeks seemed to be doing practically nothing and at times seemed to be actively facilitating the occupation. MacEwen said, “We didn’t know, was there a mutiny happening within the city police? Because the leadership at city council were telling us that they were doing one thing, and journalists on the ground were showing us that that was not happening. For example, they were saying that they weren’t allowing refueling to happen, of the trucks. But then there were police officers there allowing jerry cans to go in. So it was clear that there was a disconnect between what leadership was saying and what was happening on the ground. But we didn’t know why. We didn’t know how serious that disconnect was.” She continued, “Racialized people, who had been organizing and trying to raise that there’s these issues that exist within Ottawa city police, were kind of like, ‘Yeah, we told you, this is this is what we’ve been saying. Can you see what we’re saying now, that the police aren’t there to protect us? … They agree with the convoy, they’re on their side, they’re sympathetic. They’re not here to protect us.'”

The city’s grassroots left was caught off guard by the convoy. As other activists have noted elsewhere, this is not the first time a similar tactic has been employed by Canada’s far right. In the past, it fizzled without amounting to much, and they expected the same this time. As well, while there is plenty of great grassroots stuff happening in Ottawa, the kind of organized presence necessary to adequately confront the convoy or prevent the occupation just did not exist.

During the convoy’s first couple of weeks, local activist networks were largely engaged in mutual aid and the kind of support work that doesn’t make the news. But people were definitely talking, including MacEwen, Silas, and many others – phone calls, informal Zoom meet-ups, emails, social media posts. All of that gradually cohered into a couple of larger and more formal meetings. There were some initial plans for a protest at city hall that was postponed over concerns about capacity to ensure people’s safety, in light of misgivings about the behaviour of both convoy participants and the police, but then a community march was organized on February 12.

In many ways, that march was only a first step, but it was an important one in that, after two long weeks of occupation by the convoy, it gave public, grassroots voice to a vision of care, health, thriving, and the common good, in contrast to the underlying agenda of the convoy’s organizers. The next day was the now much-mythologized Battle of Billings Bridge, in which residents – including many people who had participated in the march the day before – successfully blockaded convoy efforts to bring new vehicles and new supplies to the occupation of the downtown.

As the convoy subsided and since, there has been an upsurge in interest in grassroots political work in Ottawa. That has taken many forms, but one was the decision by the organizers of that initial march to form Community Solidarity Ottawa as an ongoing project, to dig into the long-term work of strengthening communities and insisting on better responses at all levels to threats to community health, wellbeing, and thriving, whether those threats take the form of the pandemic, cuts to public services, or organized action by the far 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 used with permission of Community Solidarity Ottawa.

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

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Radio: Temp agency workers getting organized

Posted on April 12, 2022 by Scott

Manuel Salamanca Cardona is an activist with the Immigrant Workers Centre (IWC), which organizes with immigrant and migrant workers in a wide range of contexts in Montreal. Scott Neigh interviews him specifically about the struggles of workers employed by temp agencies, and about the work of the IWC-affiliated Temporary Agency Workers Association, which fights for improved conditions and labour rights for temp agency workers.

Founded in 2000, the IWC engages in popular education, workplace and community mobilization, policy advocacy, individual support, and a range of other movement-building work. In its early years, a sort of working-group emerged within the centre focused specifically on the experiences, needs, and struggles of those workers employed by temp agencies. A temp agency is a firm that subcontracts workers to other enterprises. As the name suggests, this ostensibly happens on a temporary basis, though in many sectors temps have become a permanent part of the workforce and of corporate business models. According to today’s guest, sectors that make heavy use of temp agencies in Montreal include warehouses, health care, and food production.

Along with all of the other issues faced by low-wage, precarious workers, particularly when intersecting with experiences of racism and with Canada’s oppressive immigration system, “the main challenge with temp agencies is this triangular relationship, established through subcontracting,” among the worker, the temp agency, and the enterprise where they are placed, according to Salamanca Cardona. Until quite recently, employment law in Quebec (and in most other provinces) lacked clear regulation dealing with this situation. This vagueness about what the agency was responsible for and what the enterprise was responsible for lead to all kinds of situations in which it was, quite predictably, the worker who ended up suffering – from lack of clarity about who had to provide safety equipment, to a lack of recourse to get wages owed when one or the other party went bankrupt, to all kinds of other scenarios. Workers with precarious migration status are particularly vulnerable in such situations, because the threat posed by loss of status and deportation can make it more difficult for workers to demand their rights.

Salamanca Cardona said, “The big enterprises are profiting from that, and also agencies. And it’s like agencies are using vulnerable labour, based on vulnerabilities created by immigration policies to create cheap labour. Because they cannot ask, they cannot fight for their rights.”

In 2011, the working-group of temp workers within the IWC launched TAWA (in French, the Association des travailleurs et travailleuses temporaire d’agence, or ATTAP). Initially, the new organization continued with all of the work that was already happening to support temp agency workers, mobilize around common issues, participate in larger campaigns, and gather stories and experiences of what workers were facing. Starting in 2014, the association entered dialogue with the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN), one of the large labour centrals in Quebec, and they developed a strong working relationship. Then, in 2016, the association created a list of five key demands for labour law reform – things like mandating joint responsibility between the agency and the enterprise for health and safety and for ensuring workers were paid, as well as equal access to the law for workers regardless of migration status.

The combination of campaigning by the association and the adoption of these demands as part of the broader labour movement’s agenda resulted in labour law reforms in 2018, some of which were relevant to temp agency workers. Gains included mandating shared responsibility between the agency and the enterprise for wages, mandatory government registration of all temp agencies, and wage parity between permanent and temporary workers doing the same job. Salamanca Cardona described these as “important gains” and “very significant,” while still acknowledging there is much left to do – “There are ways that enterprises and agencies can evade the new labour regulations. Also, there are issues that are still not regulated.”

In the lead-up to the pandemic, TAWA was engaging in its regular support and movement-building work, and was in the process of developing plans to test the new regulations and how they were working for temp agency workers. But with the onset of COVID, things changed drastically. Not only were the conditions for organizing suddenly very different, given public health restrictions, but so were the needs of workers. For instance, the major concentration of temp agency workers in the warehouse sector was suddenly bearing a major part of the risk of the pandemic, as their labours became essential to allow more privileged workers to safely work from home.

According to Salamanca Cardona, “The situation for immigrant racialized workers was happening different from the middle class white Canadians that were able to work from home. So that started a sort of new element to develop a campaign of public denunciation, to show that immigrant communities were receiving the biggest negative impacts of the effects of the pandemic in Canada. But at the same time, they were keeping the economy working.” He continued, “The worst of the pandemic was being lived by immigrant and migrant workers.” Among other things, there was a constant need to fight for access to personal protective equipment and safety measures, with little support from regulators. In addition, migrant agricultural workers faced new levels of struggle related to both safety and migration status, and heightened employment (and exploitation) of temp agency workers became an increasing element of efforts to stabilize an overburdened health care system.

Moving forward, temp agency workers in IWC and TAWA have a few priorities. This includes continuing to build on the partial victory of the earlier law reforms, possibly campaigning to use a feature of Quebec labour law that allows one collective agreement to be decreed as the minimum standard for an entire sector, and efforts to consolidate organizing in factories in the rural areas surrounding Montreal. There is also a growing campaign by women within TAWA around the specific violences that they face in the workplace.

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 Immigrant Workers Centre and the Temporary Agency Workers Association.

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

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Radio: Dispatches from the movement for police abolition in Canada

Posted on April 5, 2022 by Scott

Ellie Ade Kur and Abby Stadnyk are grassroots organizers with abolitionist politics. They are also both involved in Disarm, Defund, Dismantle: Police Abolition in Canada (Between the Lines, 2022), a new book collection bringing together pieces by organizers and scholars writing in the context of the constellation of efforts to defund and abolish the police in Canada over the last two years. Scott Neigh interviews them about their own organizing work, about the larger movement, and about the new book.

In 2020, North America saw the beginning of a massive uprising against anti-Black racism and police violence. Sparked most directly by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, but also a product of the highly inequitable hardships of the then-new COVID-19 pandemic, the uprising soon became most clearly associated with the slogan “Defund the police!” It was one of those moments where a movement catalyzed a rapid and previously unthinkable transition in mainstream opinion. And within other social movement contexts, politics critical of the cops were taken up and centred more broadly than ever before. This moment was only possible because it built on longstanding traditions of police and prison abolitionist organizing – grassroots political work of survival, thriving, and resistance in the face of state violence that has not always used the language of abolition, but that has played out over decades, even centuries, and has most often been grounded in communities of people who are most harshly targeted by the harms of policing and prisons.

In Canada, the abolitionist work over the last two years has taken many different forms. Not only have there been campaigns (mostly so far unsuccessful) to reduce the budgets of police forces, but also massive mutual aid projects, resistance within prisons as always-terrible conditions got worse in the context of COVID, campaigns for decarceration as a COVID safety measure, extensive public education, and efforts to uncover the histories of abolitionist struggles and think through abolition in the context of specific geographies, communities, professions, and movements.

At the invitation of Kevin Walby, a criminology scholar and abolitionist organizer, a number of people active in this work across Canada came together to produce the book that became Disarm, Defund, Dismantle. It was intended as a way to record and to celebrate the heightened resistance in this moment, a way to share lessons, and a way to provide a space to deepen the radical thinking that has been so much a part of this movement. (There will be a virtual launch event for the book at 7pm Eastern Time on April 14, 2022.)

Abby Stadnyk is a white settler writer and organizer living in amiskwacîwâskahikan, also known as Edmonton, Alberta. Her understanding of policing and prisons was radicalized through learning from the sharp anti-colonial analyses of the mostly Indigenous men that she got to know initially as a volunteer writing teacher in prisons. She is currently a member of Free Lands, Free Peoples, an Indigenous-led, anti-colonial abolitionist group based in Edmonton.

Ellie Ade Kur works with Maggie’s Toronto Sex Worker Action Project, one of Canada’s oldest sex worker justice organizations. She identifies her abolitionist politics as coming from her own experiences and from the ceaseless need to organize in support of friends, family, and co-workers targeted by the state. In the case of sex worker justice organizing, she argues, too often that happens in the absence of any meaningful support from other social movements.

Stadnyk is one of the editors of the collection, along with Shiri Pasternak and Kevin Walby, and she co-wrote the chapter “A Brief Introduction to Anti-colonial Abolition” with other members of Free Lands, Free Peoples. It is an effort to advance an understanding of abolition that is explicitly anti-colonial and grounded in the prairie context.

Ade Kur co-wrote a chapter with Jenny Duffy on behalf of Maggie’s called “Sex Worker Justice – By Us, For Us: Toronto Sex Workers Resisting Carceral Violence.” It looks at the violent and oppressive policing of sex work in general in Toronto, and resistance by sex workers. In particular, it talks about the powerful collective efforts by queer and trans, Black, Indigenous, and racialized sex workers in Toronto’s Downtown East and their allies in response to the police refusal to investigate the disappearance of Black and Indigenous trans woman Alloura Wells in 2017.

The collection includes a chapter examining how Indigenous communities have responded in grassroots ways to situations of missing and murdered women, girls, and Two-Spirit people. It includes two chapters examining the ways in which social work is part of the carceral system. Another looks at the struggle against participation by police in the labour movement. Other chapters examine the connection between policing and white supremacy and settler colnoialism, histories of abolitionist organizing in specific places, policing and the overdose crisis, and other aspects of abolitionist work by sex workers.

According to Stadnyk, the book includes both explorations of “how people, particularly within communities that have never been served by police and prisons, and who have been violently harmed by those institutions, are actually taking care of themselves and each other anyway, already” and “creating those alternative worlds outside of the system,” and other pieces that take apart how “mythologies about police function to naturalize police in our society.”

From the vantage point of 2022, the breathtaking momentum of the initial uprising has long since receded, but gains have definitely been made. Looking back over the last two years, abolitionist organizing in the Canadian context has resulted in more people engaged in more grassroots projects (of all of the kinds already mentioned and more), a greater reach for both broad sentiment critical of the police as well as deeper abolitionist ideas, and greater interconnection across local abolitionist work in different cities. Still, much work remains to be done. Stadnyk warns of possibilities of backlash and crackdown. And Ade Kur points out the need for ongoing political work within abolitionist organizing spaces, particularly because so many continue to exclude or marginalize sex workers.

She said, “There’s something that’s really important about political development … that comes from a place of understanding the violence of the state, the violence of police, and the violence of the criminal justice system through a place of direct experience with it and having to organize to support friends, family, co-workers, in the absence of support from literally anyone else. From, you know, state actors, from social workers, from health care providers, but also … a lack of support and erasure from other activists as well.” She continued, “I see a lot of hope and I see a lot of strength in sex worker communities to resist state violence and to resist some of the stigma and the erasure that comes from public spaces, from social movement spaces. But I also really see a need for our movements across the board, for Black liberation movements, for organizing around queer and trans rights, anti-poverty organizing, and harm reduction advocates – I see a need for there to be a much stronger analysis and interrogation of the anti-sex worker sentiments that thrive in social movement spaces.”

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 by Scott Neigh.

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

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