Category: Canada and Empire

I live in Toronto. I live right in the city, and have no car. I get around using public transit – the TTC. Over the weekend, TTC employees went on strike, against a deal that wasn’t all that transparently presented in the media but the contentious part of which involved the increasing use of short-term contracts by the employer (that’s my understanding anyway). The strike took effect midnight on Friday/Saturday. On Sunday, the provincial legislature met and all three parties – the Conservatives (who trashed and looted the province from 1995-2003), the ruling Liberals, and the New Democrats (whose electoral base is pretty much the public sector unions) pushed through back-to-work legislation in about a half an hour.

I suffered some inconvenience from the strike but it was that – inconvenience. You can imagine that my instinctive sympathies are with labor in labor-management disputes. This is no exception. But what is bothering me about this is the way the whole thing is presented in the media – the sense of entitlement for users (consumers) and the utter lack of rights or any legitimate case by the TTC employees (workers) is assumed. The media is full of hard-luck stories of commuters. Take this Toronto Star story:

“I’m very upset with them,” Tameika Fowler, 24, said of TTC workers as she rode an eastbound train on the Bloor subway line this morning.“They don’t think of other people. It was a selfish thing for them to do.”

On Sunday, Fowler took a $43 cab ride from Scarborough to Bathurst and Bloor Sts., where she works as a cashier at a Tim Hortons restaurant for $9 an hour. She worked a double shift from yesterday afternoon through this morning because she wasn’t sure she’d be able to get home at midnight after her shift.

“My eyes feel so heavy, I had to drink a lot of coffee just to stay up,” said Fowler, who thinks TTC drivers should be declared an essential service. “I think these people should be grateful for what they have.”

A single mother with an autistic four-year-old, she said she was tuned into the radio all weekend for updates on the strike.

“It was so stressful,” she said, explaining how she had to arrange for her cousin to care for her son overnight.

With all respect for Ms. Fowler’s difficulties, and acknowledging the fact that it was the TTC strike that put her out of pocket for $43, the fact that a single mother with an autistic 4-year old has to make do with $9/hr and very little social support is not due to the TTC or the union. It does, however, have something to do with the Conservative destruction of public welfare in the province since 1995 and the Liberals’ continuation of it since 2003. It’s understandable that Ms. Fowler might get angry at the workers, but that kind of anger – the anger of a single mother towards unionized workers – was the kind of anger that the Conservatives relied on to rule. Seeing it exploited by the Toronto Star just now gave me a reminder of the politics of those days. It wasn’t just the economic policies, the privatizations, the cuts to social services, and the attacks on workers (and, it is very much worth adding, single mothers and people on welfare). It was the ugliness of the whole public (and private) conversation that was encouraged by these very filthy politicians. The head of Ontario’s Conservative party, John Tory, lived up to the repulsive traditions of his party by talking about horsewhipping union leaders. Such talk ought to be beneath decent people, but it is standard fare for Tory and his party.

The first few years after 1995 were full of this kind of poison, and this weekend offered a little taste of those years, for me. The anger of riders at losing a service could be balanced with a discussion of the implications for workers, and what it might mean that any strike action in any important sector can be met by back-to-work legislation of such incredible legislative efficiency and the full support of all parties (and, evidently, the public and the media).

They also never seem to go out to talk to single moms when TTC fares go up, as they have gone up several times over the past couple of years. I suspect that fare hikes put Ms. Fowler out of pocket by much more than $43 over the past year. But the anger of riders can only be told in the media when it’s directed at unionized workers, not at the legislative priorities that decide that user fees of $2.75 (and rising) are acceptable levels for minimum-wage workers, students, and single moms to pay to get to work.

It’s a bit sad that my province and my city don’t seem to be able to have that kind of conversation.

Just read that Canada maneuvered to ensure water wouldn’t be a basic human right at the UN. My first thought was: couldn’t Canada have just allowed it to become a human right, and then ignored it, as with all other rights? And then I realized that it is another element of abandoning hypocrisy, which the Harper regime seems particularly keen on: presenting the ugliest of Canada to ourselves and the world, as if to revel in it.

Continue reading “Water’s not a human right, thanks to Canada”

[Published on ZNet March 31/08]

en espanol, gracias a Michelle Olimpia Boido y ALAI

Continue reading “Canada’s latest political prisoners”

The opening episode of CBC’s “The Border” is a good example of the moral complexity that its producers want to present the show’s characters grappling with. The complexity seems to be that not all Muslims are bad and not all Canadians are good. Instead, there are good Canadians like Kessler and bad ones like Mannering, good Muslims like Aram-al-Kir and Nizar Karim and bad Muslims like Tariq Haddad.

Continue reading “CBC’s The Border: Episode 1, “pockets of vulnerability””

Published on ZNet Jan 5/08

The phrase “defend the border” wasn’t always a metaphor. And it isn’t just a metaphor in many parts of the world, even today: some states do have to worry about overland military invasions.

Canada is not such a state. To the degree that it is, the only conceivable invader is, of course, the United States. Those in Canada who talk about “defending the border” are distinctly unconcerned about such a possibility. They are, instead, making an analogy for a set of power institutions designed to keep “them” out and “us” safe.

Some argue that the threat of terrorism to Canada is so great that it outweighs any mushy, politically correct concerns. The historian J.L. Granatstein, in his book, “Whose War Is It?” makes such claims (1). So, with its new show, does the CBC, a point to which I’ll return below. Stripped down to basics, his argument is that Canada, to be safe, needs to subordinate its foreign policy to the US and join its War on Terror wholeheartedly, instead of half-heartedly. The most incredible aspect of his book, however, is that Granatstein relies on fiction – literally, entirely fictional scenarios about Muslim terrorists releasing poison gas in a Toronto subway at the same time as a natural disaster on the West Coast – to demonstrate how Canada needs to have better military preparedness. Granatstein can’t find real threats to justify his policy suggestions, so he makes them up. The detention of over a dozen young Muslim men in Toronto for over a year, accused of some sort of convoluted terrorist plot and possibly entrapped by the authorities, suggests that perhaps Canada’s police and intelligence agencies are also in the business of making up threats (2).

Besides making up threats, the policy suggestions of this school of thought are designed to bring such threats into existence. If certain kinds of terrorism are correlated with foreign occupation, as for example Robert Pape argued in his systematic study of suicide terrorism (“Dying to Win”), Canada’s participation in the occupation of Afghanistan, supported by these hawks, is increasing the threat to Canadians. So, too, is Canada’s support for Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, its bombing of Lebanon, and the US occupation of Iraq.

This two-pronged approach, trying to create public fear and racism by contriving fictional threats on the one hand, and participating in occupations and human rights violations on the other, results in a toxic public conversation and a deadly foreign policy. All the same, it is embraced by historians like Granatstein, right-wing newspapers like the National Post, and, most recently, by the CBC.

The CBC’s new show, “The Border”, provides an expensive fictional apology for this two-pronged approach. Its heroes wrestle with moral dilemmas. According to the show’s publicity, “every week, a crack team of Canadian immigration and customs agents deal not only with the latest border-security crisis, but also with the consequences of their actions. Are they rushing to judgment? Are the bad guys really bad guys, or just victims of racial profiling?”

Wrestling with moral dilemmas of immigration and customs would of course be welcome, and Canadians can certainly use more such wrestling. But if the questions are those of an impoverished moral universe (“are the bad guys really bad guys?”) then the answers aren’t going to yield any riches. If we begin from the premise that there are these “bad guys” who threaten us because they are “bad guys”, and the job of customs agents is to use high-tech surveillance and psychological interrogation methods to ferret the “bad guys” out from the ordinary victims of racial profiling, we have already forfeited our moral and political sense. War and terrorism are political phenomena. They are done by political actors (including the US and Canada, if we are consistent in our definitions of war and of terrorism, as well as groups like al-Qaeda) pursuing political agendas with the means they have available. To stop war or terrorism requires first understanding these agendas and actors and seeking political solutions to the problems. This does not exclude the use of force or intelligence, but there is no way that fear, faked threats, celebrating the shredding of civil liberties, ignorance, or propaganda can help. The propaganda of “bad guys” and “evildoers” is itself a tool of war, and the CBC’s new show is such a tool.

I perused “The Border” website (cbc.ca/theborder), viewed the character profiles, and played the online game. The show does, indeed, look well-produced, well-acted, and well-written, which of course makes it worse. The main character, Mike Kessler, is a former JTF2 “counter-terrorism” officer who helped cover-up a massacre in Bosnia, and is tormented by his past. His goal, according to the website, is “to stop people like Mannering (a CSIS agent) from using fear to subvert democracy and take over the country.” This, too, sounds noble, as does his “struggle to hold a line of decency and integrity in a world gone mad.” But the very premise, Kessler’s fundamental moral dilemma – how do you keep your decency while fighting “evil” – is flawed, and from it one can never reach an understanding of what is really happening in these wars. The real question for such agents in the war on terror is simpler: how do you keep your decency while doing evil. And the answer is clear. You can’t.

Other characters with moral dilemmas include Layla Hourani, the “South Asian woman in a white man’s job, a Muslim agent who locks up Muslim bad guys” and finds herself drawn to her charming, roguish partner Gray Jackson, a “womanizer, gambler, and all-round cowboy, with an athlete’s body and an easy, amiable smile.”

Gray and Layla are the agents you face when you play the Border’s interactive game. They intimidate you and present you with fabricated evidence that you committed a border violation, threatening you with a 48-hour detention, using various psychological techniques like asking you why you are so nervous and telling you they already know you did something. When you pass the interrogation, Kessler comes in and says he admires your ability to keep your cool and would like to recruit you to work for ICS. When you accept, you are on to the next level and the next assignment, trying to locate an “evildoer” named Tariq Haddad. Tariq Haddad is an Afghan national whose languages are Arabic and English. This is itself interesting, since Arabic isn’t one of Afghanistan’s national languages and Haddad is an Arab surname – but perhaps the evildoer is a naturalized Afghan. In any case, your assignment is to locate Haddad using spy technology to find his cellphone, and then crack the code allowing you to read his hard drive. There, you find that Tariq Haddad is probably planning to blow up Toronto’s airport. The trailer for the show has Tariq Haddad in a hostage situation at the airport, with his gun at a woman’s head. Kessler coolly tells him this is nothing but suicide. And it’s hard to imagine how any of it can end well.

Casting immigration agents as action heroes fighting fictional threats covers up what they really do. They aren’t sexy action heroes keeping the country safe. They are bureaucrats who deport people who overstay their visas, pull children out of school to deport them and their parents, hand Canadian citizens off to other countries be tortured for ten months, and raid churches to deport people trying to claim sanctuary. They terrorize a whole class of people who live and work in the West without status, exploited and abused by employers, invisible and unable to participate because if they were to live openly they would be deported. The “good guys” profit from the labor of these people who are unable to claim their rights because they live in fear of immigration agents. The whole thing is all the more sordid because Canada’s international behavior, like other wealthy countries, helps create conditions in which people have to flee their homes and be exploited and live in fear. Once they are on this side of The Border, these people are illegal (or, if they are on some limited special work visa, partially legal), without rights, subject to arbitrary power. A documentary like Min Sook Lee’s “El Contrato” can show something of this reality, as can a feature film like Ken Loach’s “Bread and Roses” or Stephen Frears’s “Dirty Pretty Things” (3). But in such stories, immigration agents aren’t heroes. They are the first line of defense of a rotten system.

For all its seeming moral complexity, “The Border” thinks it knows who the bad guys are and thinks it knows that they aren’t us. But there is no way out of this war that doesn’t reject these very premises. “Bad guys” are those who kill and torture and bomb and starve to achieve their ends, regardless of what passports they carry or where they were born. The more powerful they are, the badder they can be. And on the other hand, the thousands of American victims of 9/11, the million Iraqi victims of the US war on Iraq and the uncounted tens of thousands of Afghan victims of the US/Canada/NATO war on Afghanistan all deserve to be counted, with dignity and proportion. Everything that works against that sense of proportion, the CBC’s new show included, is going to keep us fighting this senseless and yes, evil, war, longer.

1) See Jim Miles’s review of this book for ZNet: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=13013
2) Thomas Walkom’s reporting on this case has been the best, though he makes the important point that he and other reporters have been denied access to information needed to make a proper report.
3) For El Contrato, see the description and order it here: http://www.nfb.ca/collection/films/fiche/?id=51087. For “Bread and Roses”, here: http://www.britfilms.com/britishfilms/catalogue/browse/?id=D5FD9B420eeaf2E8F3pWjPCEEA71. For “Dirty Pretty Things”, here. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301199/.

Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer. He can be reached at justin@killingtrain.com

Unlike most leftists, I happen to think that we spend too much time ranting against liberals, as opposed to, say, putting forth practical and workable versions of our own ideas and presenting strategic ideas and commentary. Liberals aren’t, after all, us. They have a different vision for society, different interests, and different strategies. They share many of society’s racist premises. They don’t even hate the way right-wing governments in power destroy the fabric of society and the potential for positive change in the future the way we hate it. So when they set themselves up to get trounced by the right, they don’t find it as upsetting as we do. So why should we get worked up about it?

And yet, here I am, disgusted with Canada’s Liberals for deciding to support the Conservative minority government. A little drop in the polls for them, a couple of by-elections that went against them, a little bit of bluster by the “US Prime Minister for Canada”, and they back off. The two issues on which they could have defeated Harper are the climate and the war. Harper gave them both on a platter, and gave them the choice of whether to use them now or not be able to use them later. How are they going to argue for Kyoto, now that they’ve supported dropping it? How are they going to argue to get out of the senseless and destructive war in Afghanistan when Canadians really turn against it, now that they’ve supported staying there?

I read this book a few weeks ago but I didn’t write about it because I got engrossed in ‘The Shock Doctrine’ (I’ll do a full review of that soon – but as a preview, though I’m sure you’re all reading it, I’m finding it really brilliant. It started strong, with things that were part of conversations I’d had years ago – torture, war, Ewen Cameron, the dictatorships of South America, Chile – but once I hit the stuff about Poland and China, which I knew very little about, the book really took off for me. The way she weaves it all into a chronological narrative and follows people like Sachs through it all… it’s very impressive).

‘Wasase’ is an attempt by Taiaiake Alfred, a Mohawk scholar who works at the University of Victoria, to formulate a strategy for indigenous resurgence (that’s his word). How can a country like Canada, built on genocide and colonialism, be decolonized? That’s the question he tackles. And his answers are – through nonviolent political action, without excluding self-defense; by delegitimizing colonialism, starting with the colonized. To that end, he presents some very interesting points about how colonialism depends on what is happening in people’s minds, and if that can change, the system can become untenable.

Alfred doesn’t preclude the idea of solidarity from the settler society, but nor is he willing to count on it and, indeed, he presents arguments that settler society is so racist that it shouldn’t be looked to, at least not in the first stages of resurgence.

One aspect of the book, and of his work generally (I read ‘Peace, Power, Righteousness’ years ago) is that while he is confident and strong in his values and commitment, he is very intellectually humble and open. Much of the book is dialogues with other people, in which he faithfully presents their thoughts and ideas, before commenting on them. Much of the rest of the book is him giving a careful reading to the history of anti-colonial struggle in other places, and presenting his thoughts on these struggles and their thinkers. Reading along, you feel like you’re exploring something very important with someone who is exploring with you (that’s something of what I try to do in this blog, I suppose).

His openness also leads him to admit when he doesn’t have answers. When he explores the question of indigenous-run casinos, for example, he notes the importance the money has had for some communities, and he also notes the limitations and the problems that these have caused. He quotes proponents and opponents, both favourably.

Wasase is an attempt to open a conversation about one of the most important questions North American society has, all the more important because the society is so unwilling to face it.

And while we’re on the subject of Canada’s disgraceful treatment of indigenous people, try this article I just published on Shawn Brant’s case. I don’t think Shawn or Sue know who I am, but I remember hearing them speak in Toronto in the spring of 2001 before the Quebec City anti-FTAA protests, being much impressed then and since. I hope my article gives some idea of how impressed.