It has been over five months since the victory of Liberal party leader Justin Trudeau in the Canadian federal elections, ending Stephen Harper’s nine-year rule of tyranny in Parliament. Canadians rejoiced, thinking that there has finally been an end to the racist fear-mongering tactics of the Conservative party leader. But what has actually changed so far under the leadership of the Trudeau government?

Was the appointment of a “diverse” cabinet, one which supposedly “looks like Canada” according to Trudeau, but is only made up of people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, really worth celebrating?

The appointment of Harjit Sajjan as Minister of Defense made many celebrate the racial diversity of Trudeau’s new cabinet. Sajjan, a Sikh man from India was paraded around by media as a “badass” Canadian hero, earning his chops by being the biggest “Uncle Taj” in the Canadian military.

Working in a position of authority in the Canadian military intelligence body, he was aware of the ongoing torture of civilians but did nothing to address or stop it. Far from being a hero, his experience in the army shows that he is responsible for the deaths of many innocent civilians in the war in Afghanistan that can never be justified and continues to this very day.

G.I. Sajjan, A “Real Canadian Hero” By: Jason A. Das

The appointment of an Afghan refugee, Maryam Monsef, to Minister of Democratic Institutions means that there will be no mention of the reason why she had to flee her country in the first place. Her swearing in is an oath of submission to the monarchy, and there will be no recognition of the attempts made by the British military to invade her country.

As the imperialist war against the Afghan people continues, Monsef is used as a tokenized tool of her own colonizers. Let us keep in mind that the Liberals voted for the “Barbaric Cultural Practices Act”, a racist law that specifically targets people who look just like Maryam Monsef.

So what do these Cabinet appointments mean for the people of Canada? Faces and policies may change but our material conditions remain the same; with poor housing, precarious work, and overall exploitation. As much as Trudeau might present himself as a Prime Minister of the people, when working class people continue to struggle to make enough to survive on a monthly basis, what difference does it make if our cabinet is more diverse?

While Trudeau’s public relations and media team distract us with people of colour in exploitative leadership positions, we cannot forget the programs that routinely exploit working class labour.

Let us not forget that the Liberal party was the one to create the Temporary Foreign Worker program, a form of labour exploitation that tears apart families and has people working many years in indentured servitude.

Real change will not come from a swap in power within a system built upon genocide and theft. That change can only come from the people themselves. The Liberal and Conservative parties of Canada are two sides of the same coin. It’s not just about stopping Harper or other Conservatives; it’s about collectively challenging systemic issues that are engrained in the very system that Canadians are celebrating because it includes some semblance of diversity.

The participation of minorities within a capitalist system, which seeks to exploit the very people it continually excludes, is not a solution. It is not “real change”, as much as Trudeau may like to throw those words around. The so-called lesser of evils is still evil.

Featured Image from Time.com

In Toronto, one of the main ways that working class people find work when they find themselves out of a job and need to pay bills is through various temporary agencies. These agencies play the role of middlemen between corporations and workers. Corporations use them for a number of reasons, though they all add up to saving the corporations money. Workers hired through temporary agencies are often paid minimum wage, with the temporary agency making money off of each worker they supply to a company.

While it doesn’t immediately appear this way in any accounting books, what basically happens is that the temporary agency takes part of the money the worker would otherwise be paid for every hour of work. What is even worse about this is that this total amount is often still less than a ‘regular’ full-time employee of a company doing the same job makes per hour.

Javeed, a printing factory worker interviewed for this article, explained, “I’ve been working in this factory for eight months and still make minimum wage. The full-time packers make nearly double what I make, while machine operators make even more than that. I’m only working there as a temp so that I can get a job with the company, but it’s getting too frustrating. I have no idea how much money the temp. agency has been making off me, but i know they are making good money. I see the cars they drive there when I pick up my paycheques.”

These temporary agencies operate in different parts of the city, often on a particular ethnic, language or community basis, recruiting exploitable immigrants from all the various communities of Toronto so that companies can make an easy profit without having to worry about taking care of workers.

Sometimes, these temp. agencies attempt to take even more money from their workers by purposely not paying them for the hours they’ve worked and still refusing to pay even after a formal complaint has been made. A case of exactly this kind was brought to the attention of Basics several years ago in Etobicoke.

In this case, a worker named Mohammed was refused several days pay worth over $200 by his temp. agency after he finished working for them. This temp. agency particularly focused on recruiting workers from African backgrounds in the northwest part of the city and was controlled by one man out of a small office located in a strip mall.

However, Mohammed was able to get back his money after contacting the Solidarity Committee of the Industrial Workers of the World, who came out to his temp. bosses office with him and presented him with formal written and oral demands for the wages to be paid. This confrontation was enough to get this temp. agency to pay up.

As workers, many of us have no choice but to work for temporary agencies to pay the bills, though this doesn’t mean we should just accept their parasitical nature as natural or normal.

People should not profit off us by sitting in an office or even their own home and siphoning off money while we work in some of the most physically demanding and stressful jobs in the city, barely being able to afford to get to work each day. The same goes for the big corporations themselves and their executives and managers. All of these parasites make money off us each day and live luxurious lifestyles off the labour we provide for them, for which they pay us as few scraps as possible.

Dennis Edney has spent the last decade of his life defending Omar Khadr. He may have done more than any living person to rescue Khadr from the racist collusion of the Canadian and American governments, which together sought to keep him locked up in military prisons for the rest of his life. In return for thousands of hours of labour and endless stress, Edney has received some small amount of fame, a Wikipedia page, and next to no money. So he deserves immense praise and respect for his principled, decade-long stand.

However, the BASICS editorial team wishes to correct what we view as certain erroneous views about the “rule of law” which Edney expressed to his audience as a solid basis from which to oppose the government’s treatment of his client.

The rule of law is a phrase typically used to mean that everyone within a given country is subject to a single set of laws—both private citizens and the government. If the government or any citizen appears to have broken the law, the police have a responsibility to investigate, and the state has a responsibility to prosecute any crime uncovered. If the prosecution makes a case which a jury can be convinced is true, a person is deemed guilty, convicted, and receives a sentence.

Canada is a country in which, supposedly, the rule of law applies. When speaking of Omar Khadr’s treatment, Edney continually referred to the need to follow the rule of law, cultivate respect for the rule of law among politicians and ordinary people, and rely on the law for protection and the defence of one’s rights. His condemnation of Khadr’s treatment, in other words, was not that it was merely brutal, but more importantly that it was illegal.

What is important, in our view, is that what is evil and racist is not necessarily the same thing as what is illegal. That the government refused to protect one of its citizens and knowingly left him to the tender mercy of American “enhanced interrogation techniques” is clear; that by doing so it broke the law is not.

If, in this case, it actually did break the law, we can be very certain that no Canadian Prime Minister or Foreign Minister responsible for these actions will actually be brought to punishment. And if it did not break the law, it seems quite clear to us that the law does not exist to protect Canadian citizens.

We hear distantly, from the ranks of liberal policy-makers, opinion-writers, and analysts, a cry go up: “This is going too far! A single example of abuse doesn’t prove that the whole system must come down.”

And, if only the single example existed, the argument would be true. BASICS exists, however, to prove the opposite: where laws exist to protect working people, Canada’s indigenous population, migrant workers, racialised individuals, women, and queer and trans folk, they are extensively and routinely violated by the Canadian government, its officials, its police forces, and its army. Very often, however, there are either no laws, or the laws simply exist to aid in oppression and exploitation.

The way in which the Canadian state has interacted with Onkwehonwe (First Nations) peoples provides an object lesson in a whole legal regime designed explicitly to destroy a population and its way of life. The routine seizure of Indigenous children by child welfare authorities on the slimmest pretexts, the serene disregard of investigators for the extensive sex-trafficking and murder of Indigenous women, the everyday brutality with which police treat Indigenous men (exemplified by but not limited to so-called “starlight tours”), and the undisguised glee with which policymakers and bureaucrats seize the land of bands across the country and distribute it to resource extraction companies such as Enbridge and Barrick Gold: all of these taken together form a genocidal policy, in some ways sanctioned by the law, in other ways against it, but in general, simply outside its purview.

What we mean is that no case in any Canadian court will ever be able to stop the genocide of Canada’s Indigenous peoples. Telling Indigenous people to have respect for the law or to address their concerns with recourse to law, is to tell them to accept slow strangulation, isolated from reliance on one another.

It is the position of BASICS that the same is true for Black and racialised people, trans people, working people, women, migrants, and the whole spectrum of oppressed peoples in Canada.

The law will never go after the cop who killed Jermaine Carby last September (whose name the Peel Police still refuse to publish). The law drags its feet year after year in punishing James Forcillo, the murderer of Sammy Yatim.

Therefore, when Dennis Edney stands up in front of an audience of Muslim Canadians and explains to them that Guantánamo Bay is uniquely horrible as “a world outside the reach of the law”, we regard this as evidence of either some naiveté on his part or an explanation concocted to justify his profession.

The law certainly exists in Guantánamo, as it does in Canada. It simply decides to recognise some wrongs and not others. When a torturer in Guantánamo beats his prisoner, the law is perfectly silent, as it is when a Canadian police officer executes a young Black man in the street. In both places, the law offers certain rights, privileges and protections to everyone—on paper. In both places, when we see the law in action in real life, we recognise very quickly that these rights, privileges, and protections mostly exist for white people and rich people and mostly don’t exist for anyone else.

Edney believes, correctly, that the government in power right now is subverting the law in service of a racist agenda. But he also believes that if the dispossessed only speak loudly enough, if we only demand firmly enough, if we only elect a liberal enough government, that the law can be turned to our advantage. In this respect, he believes in a fictional equality. Every guard at Guantánamo knows, like every TPS pig who’s assaulted a kid for giving him attitude knows, that the law serves those who enforce it.

(Photo Credit: Jennifer Poburan/CBC)

“I saw Omar on a screen, stretched out and tied to this wire mesh, crying, screaming in pain; his body had suffered such terrible wounds, and the torturers, these evil men, when Omar had to pee, they would take him down and they would use his head as a mop to pick up the urine.”

These were the words used by defense lawyer Dennis Edney on June 6th at the Islamic Foundation of Toronto in describing the horrific experiences of Omar Khadr during his decade-long stay in Guantánamo Bay.

Khadr, a Canadian citizen, was just fifteen years old when he was captured by US forces in eastern Afghanistan, and has since spent over a decade in American military prisons. Accused of (and tried twice for) killing an American soldier, the evidence against him was so inadequate—based mostly on his own confessions coerced through routine torture—that even openly-biased American military courts couldn’t successfully convict him. Edney has been Khadr’s legal counsel since 2004.

Edney spoke passionately to an audience of hundreds, including members of the Khadr family, about the inhumane treatment that Khadr experienced, first at the military “hospital” at Bagram Airfield—an American military base north of Kabul, Afghanistan—and later at Guantánamo Bay, a maximum-security detention facility located in Cuba.

He described the method by which the Americans convinced Khadr that he had killed Sgt. Christopher Speer, saying, “when Omar woke up [at Bagram] he had been unconscious for a whole week, and from that moment he was put into stress positions—painful positions—and told that he had thrown a hand grenade that killed an American soldier. When they ask Omar [in interrogation videos], he says, ‘I don’t know if I did or not!’ Because from the moment he woke and throughout his many years at Guantánamo, when tortured, he was told that he had done that.”

“When your torturer asks you questions, after a while you’ll give them any answer that you think will make it go away,” he added.

All this, he emphasised over and over again, was a result of the American government’s refusal to act according to the ‘rule of law.’ “One has to look no further than the story of Guantánamo Bay to understand how easy it is for a nation to fall into lawlessness,” he explained, referring to the prison as a “hell-hole…outside the reach of the law. A place shut off from the rest of the world [and] forgotten by all of us.”

He pointed fingers at the Canadian government as well, accusing both the Liberal government of Paul Martin as well as the current Harper Conservatives of abandoning Omar. “When every Western government requested, and was granted, the return of their citizens—all of whom were adults—we left a child. The message that was given to the Americans was ‘we don’t care, do what you want with him.’ While the only message [the Canadian public] got to hear was ‘this young man committed a heinous crime; he’s a terrorist.’”

He attributed Khadr’s abandonment in Guantánamo to the Canadian government’s disregard for its legal obligations to protect its citizens: “Governments such as Germany, Britain, and France demanded that their citizens get out of that hell-hole because [they knew] it was beyond the rule of law… civil liberty was just a fiction there. Meanwhile, I remember [then-Public Safety Minister] Peter MacKay saying to the media, ‘we have been assured by the Americans that he’s being treated well.’ We still don’t talk about the fact that our government allowed one of our own children to be tortured and abused.”

Edney concluded his speech by linking the so-called ‘War on Terror’ to Canadians’ legal rights, stating: “In my view, defeating terrorism means convincing the world of the importance of following the rule of law….we must be alert to the extent to which governments, including our own government, continue to exploit us, by playing the fear card [and] trumping our civil liberties.”

But he also criticised Canadians for “failing” to defend Khadr and themselves from illegal government activity. “As we have failed Omar, we’ve also failed our children through bequeathing to them an uncertain future as the result of this systemic apathy shown by Canadian citizens and our civil institutions. We have all participated in abandoning him. As long as we allow a place like Guantánamo Bay to exist, we cannot call ourselves a civil society.”
Currently released on bail, Khadr now lives with Edney’s family in Edmonton, Alberta. Although his bail has many conditions, including a curfew and an ankle-monitor, Edney told the audience that Khadr studies a lot and is doing well with readjusting to society. “I recall a few years ago, saying to Omar, ‘What do you want to do when we get you out of Guantánamo?’ He said, ‘I wish to be a doctor, to make sure that no one is ever treated like I was.’”

Edney and Khadr in a press conference outside the lawyer’s home in Edmonton. (Jason Franson/The Canadian Press via AP)

This article is reprinted with permission from the Red Sparks Union 

In early August a massive tailings pond at Imperial Metals’ Mount Polley copper and gold mine burst. The Secwepemc, the Xatsull and Esketemc Nations in the Cariboo region of BC immediately mobilized as the toxic waste spilled through their territories. Further north, in the Klappan region, members of the Tahltan nation went into action. It is here that Imperial Metals’ Red Chris mine – with an even larger similarly-flawed tailings pond – is under construction in a pristine area known as Tl’abāne, the Sacred Headwaters of the salmon-rich Stikine, Nass and Skeena Rivers. Sacred fires have been lit, resistance camps built, and various direct actions taken against both mining operations.

The Klabona Keepers, an organization of Tahltan elders and families, hold the Tl’abāne central to their food sustenance, traditions, and inter­generational teachings. Their 2005 blockades nixed a Shell fracking plan in the Klappan area. But the mining and oil/gas capitalists keep coming with government approval of LNG projects and an open-pit coal mine in the area.

The Mount Polley disaster was no “accident.” There is growing evidence that lax government inspection and years of corporate greed allowed massive waste dumping and environmental cost-cutting while workers’ warnings of cracks in the dam walls were ignored. When the tailings pond breached, people in the region mobilized to preserve traditional ways of living on these lands.

The Yuct Ne Senxiymetkwe Camp was established as a monitoring checkpoint at the entrance to the Mount Polley mine with the strong support of the Secwepemc people, the elder’s councils, the Ts’ka7 Warriors, as well as environmental activists and local residents. Clearly, the company’s clean-up efforts have made little progress. Even BC’s Environment Minister acknowledges the company has done less than two percent of the clean-up.

Heavy metals continue to leach into Quesnel Lake raising concerns about more damage with the spring break-up.

Within days of the August disaster, the Klabona Keepers set up a blockade at Red Chris Mine, hoping to prevent a similar catastrophe. When the Tahltan Central Council (TCC) and Imperial Metals came to an agreement for an independent review, the blockade was temporarily dismantled but was re-established at the end of September. Imperial Metals got an injunction and began pressing for arrests.

Though they have been arrested before, the Klabona Keepers took down the blockade to avoid that trauma of further prison time, and have been fighting the injunction ever since. This legal battle has been difficult as they’re up against corporate lawyers in a colonial court in far-away Terrace. The company has also managed to stir up division amongst the Tahltan nation. Two hundred members of the nation have been employed in the construction of the mine, and Imperial Metals is pressing for permits to begin operations by January, promising more jobs. The TCC has intervened against the Klabona Keepers in the injunction proceedings.

Meanwhile, the BC government has hampered an investigation of the disaster, failing to release records. Notably, billionaire and Imperial Metals shareholder

Murray Edwards was a fundraiser for Clarke’s re-election campaign. Both the Liberals and NDP say they won’t block Imperial Metal’s application to re-open Mount Polley, claiming the mine’s operations will pay for the clean-up!

The Klabona Keepers don’t trust the company or the government – and for good reason. “Imperial Metals has showed to us a lot of lies” says one of the grandmothers fighting for the land that has sustained her people for many generations and is their main source of food and cultural sustenance.

The Klabona Keepers are asking for solidarity, time and donations so that they can defend the land for their grandchildren. Their call has been answered by many, notably Elsipogtog Mi’kmaq Warriors (fighting fracking), Unist’ot’en Camp (standing against several pipeline projects) and Madii Lii camp (resisting LNG expansion.) Meanwhile, on Burnaby Mountain, five women were recently arrested opposing the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline and “in solidarity with the Klabona Keepers.”

Immigrant workers are the first to experience the shift in the labour market towards an increase in temporary work, and the reduction of permanent jobs with benefits and legally enforceable health, safety and labour standards.  Many immigrant workers obtain temporary jobs through agencies that are unregulated and fly-by-night.  R’s experiences shed light on the difficulties that temporary agency workers in Montreal face, difficulties that create what he described as “a kind of super-stress.”

R came to Canada from Mexico in 2008 and obtained different kinds of jobs through agencies: cleaning trays in a bakery, general cleaning work, jobs clearing snow and ice.  When we asked him about safety conditions on the job he said, “Well, the degree of safety that I’ve had is basically nil.”  He described “clearing snow at a height of three metres on slippery icy roofs…without safety equipment, cleats, cords, harnesses” for the temporary workers. “At the other end, people that were insured, who worked directly for the company, the whole team was provided with helmets, cleats, harnesses, special tools and special clothing for the cold, and meanwhile all we had was rubber boots.”  R left that job but he told us, “One of my buddies fell, fractured his clavicle, and was incapacitated for two or three months.”

R eventually did suffer a serious workplace injury: “The injury that I had was caused by a fall on a production line, on a conveyor belt. We didn’t have access to the controls for the machines, so people had accustomed themselves to jumping the belt. There was no other way, because shutting down the machine would slow things down and cause problems with production. One of the security railings was loose…I fell on my head, and remained unconscious for a few moments. And there, I don’t remember… After what happened, there was no ambulance called. They sent me to the cafeteria. I was in a state of shock. And they continued with the production, which for them was the most important thing.”

The employer took no action whatsoever after this accident.  Under pressure to keep working to meet family expenses, and because he didn’t want any trouble, R continued to work.  Later, as he continued to get headaches and suffer from tinnitus, he went to see a doctor, but didn’t receive proper care because he hadn’t sought it in time.  “I’m still dealing with some gaps, holes in my memory, even to date.”

R told us that he had witnessed other temporary workers sustain terrible injuries on the job: “Well, I remember in one case, there was a station where there were normally supposed to be two people doing packaging, and they only put one person at the station, to try to force her to speed up, but there really should have been two…She slipped and fell and hurt her mouth, opened up her lip. Intense. For another person, it was their hand in one of the conveyor belts, where the trays come out of the oven, got stuck and their skin got ripped off. They had to take them to the emergency room, and the wound was about 10 centimetres long.”

“One of the worst accidents that I saw, a co-worker fell backwards because the floor is always covered in mineral oil, so he slipped and one of the protective railings on the machine that the oil was leaking from wasn’t there, so he fell, lacerated his hand, cutting his tendons and lost the ability to use his hand. Afterwards, this person went to make a demand to the employer, but the employer pointed the finger at him, and then he started to have problems with immigration. I think he was deported.”

Besides the physical dangers, the conditions of work were extremely gruelling.  R had to work night shifts, and found changing his sleep rhythm difficult.  “It starts to produce a lot of stress in your body, and besides that, physically, you have to be constantly alert and focused on what you’re doing. For example they set you to work in places where normally the machine should be able to function on it’s own, but nobody had calibrated it, because they didn’t bother to contract a technician to do it. It’s controlled with a kind of laser beam in order to keep the size of the loaves of bread standard. But we had to do it manually, so you’re watching these laser beams constantly for an eight our shift… some people ended up dizzy or vomiting. So really, you come out of that totally physically drained.”

But even more draining than the physical stress was the constant psychological pressure that supervisors put on workers.  R described this pressure: “They were constantly threatening to fire us…The state of being constantly threatened with dismissal sets off a kind of super-stress, and that can end up also creating psychological problems. I lived through that, and, well, it’s pretty tough. It leaves a mark on you.”

“And the problems then can get transferred through a person to their family, to their wife, their children, neuroses… and a person feels a kind of incompetence towards all kinds of things, their job… being in that kind of situation constantly blocks the kind of consciousness that you need to get out of the vicious cycle.  And having a low wage puts you in a situation where, say, you can’t handle having a whole week without work. And as a result, you can’t leave your job. On a psychological level, that’s really hard to deal with.”

As R explained, employers use threats of dismissal to discourage workers from complaining about their working conditions: “Well, even when you invest yourself in doing the job well, doing it right, that doesn’t get noticed and basically they don’t care about you. But say you arrive five minutes late, then they notice, and that’s a horribly serious mistake for one to make. And all of a sudden it’s like you’re on a kind of blacklist. And so it starts to get complicated, because you can’t even make the tiniest of mistakes, and that to is a pretty serious form of pressure. And just as much, it’s a way to keep a worker submissive. I think that’s one of the basics for the use of psychological pressure as a means of controlling workers.”

R elaborated on the fact that temporary workers form a sort of parallel work force in the same place of employment.  “In a lot of cases there isn’t even a contract. Obviously we don’t have all of the rights that workers have, we’re basically pawns that they plug in to the assembly line until they’re no good anymore, and then they bring someone else in.”

Even though temp agency workers often do the same job as permanent workers, they are almost always paid less.  “I was making nine dollars, in contexts where, in the written contracts that I saw with my own eyes, it was stipulated that a person would be making seventeen dollars an hour, for example, in the packing area. In a context where normally they would have two people working there full time, they have one person, making nine dollars an hour…The difference in pay between what we make and somebody who is hired directly by the company, well, that’s profits for the temp agency.”

Some temporary agencies pay workers irregularly, and frequently, temporary employment agencies ‘disappear’ without paying all of their workers’ wages. As R put it, “Once the term of work is over, sometimes it’s easier for the agency to simply leave its workers behind without paying them at all, without granting them their vacation pay or any other kind of severance, then to go and open up a new agency, and avoid having to even pay taxes to the government.”

R ultimately decided to act on his rights, with the help of organizations that exist to help workers.  This involved “going and presenting my complaint and presenting the situations at work, explaining what had happened, and the resulting debts that I had, the fact that I hadn’t gotten my vacation pay, my rights, and also bringing forward other people that were in the same situation, and bringing them right to the Labour Standards Board [in Quebec]. I put in my complaint at Labour Standards, and the person who was my agent looked through the system and found that this agency owed more than a million in income tax. And then they started to follow the agency’s tracks. But the agency had already closed and filed for bankruptcy.”

Eventually, R became a member of the Immigrant Workers Center.  He described how this happened: “Well, I contacted the Centre when I was, let’s say I was already at the end of my line… I didn’t have a job anymore, I couldn’t get access to welfare, I had zero income. I had to reach out to organizations that provided assistance. And I met a person who told me about the existence of the Immigrant Workers Center, and told me that they might be able to help. So I got in touch, and little by little they got me oriented, and at every step they accompanied me in filing complaints, they accompanied me with translators, they provided contact with lawyers, through volunteers in the universities, and basically because of that I was able to file my demands the right way.”

R’s message for other workers was: “Well, I hope that many people won’t have to suffer the same kinds of consequences that I suffered for lack of consciousness, lack of knowledge about my rights, also that they realise that this organization exists, that they can get help at any time, even if they’re not dealing with any problems… For people that are going through a problem, the most important thing is to find calm, so that they don’t get immersed in that super-stress, since they do have rights, and those rights can be demanded.  They need to reach out, that they need to file letters, they need to make their demands, and not stand there with their arms crossed because if that’s what we do, this situation is going to continue, this abuse of workers…”

Montreal’s Immigrant Workers’ Center has just launched a new newspaper, “La Voix des Migrant(e)s”, from which this article is sourced.

R’s message for the federal and provincial authorities was this: “There are gaps in the law, through which all kinds of agencies can grow and thrive.  This is a problem that affects the government itself, because these companies aren’t paying taxes, but also because it damages the image of investment, damages the image of the government.  They have to focus their attention on these gaps in the law so that it’s harder for agencies to dodge the law and leave people in situations like this. They should specify exactly who holds the responsibility for paying medical insurance and taking care of workplace safety. Is it the agency, or the company that hires the agency? It needs to be spelled out clearly so that workers can protect their rights.”

As changes are being considered to the Live-In Caregiver Program that would increase eligibility requirements for participants, decrease the number of applicants accepted, and make it more difficult for participants to obtain permanent residency, it seems timely to reflect on the experiences of caregivers who are presently in the program.

B’s story, gleaned from a face-to-face interview, sheds light on some of the frustrations and challenges that caregivers experience because of restrictions on their mobility, an undervaluing of their prior experience and qualifications, and their vulnerability in their situations of work.

After graduating in the Philippines, B worked as a nurse in the Middle East.  She said that she found working as part of a team in the pediatric care and the infectious diseases units at a hospital extremely rewarding.  Encouraged by her sister, B decided to come to Canada in 2008, even though this meant giving up a career in nursing.  She told herself that she would, after 24 months, be eligible to apply for permanent residence, and be able to find her way back to her original career track.  In fact, the wait for permanent residence dragged on, and when we interviewed her, she had been waiting for nine months after submitting her application.

B said her job – which involved caring for two children and doing household chores – had been a good one, relatively speaking.  This was because her employers did not require her to live in their home, and respected the hours stipulated in her contract, so she was able to work from 9 to 5.  She said that most Filipina caregivers who are part of the LCP work from 6:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. because they are always on call, living as they do at their place of work.  She said this was not only exploitative but also terribly stressful and damaging to their health.

While B was not asked to work extra hours, she found that the specific hours she was asked to work were frequently shifted at the last minute:  “For me, I always wanted a good working relationship with my employer, so I have to give in most of the time, and it’s really hard.”   Also, although she was supposed to work for a single employer, she was expected to work in the households of relatives and friends of her employer: “With the jobs as live-in caregiver, one thing really that I really disagree, but there’s nothing I can do about it, is, like, the employer can just give you to either his friend or their friend, or their parents’, their sister.” She found this difficult as she had to learn the particulars of each household. B said that most live-in caregivers put up with wage-theft, exploitative conditions, and worse, because they tell themselves that after 24 months they will be free to find other jobs.  Here again, they are likely to be frustrated, B noted, because the regulations and processing times keep changing.  And while they wait, they are not able to take academic courses, as B had hoped to do to requalify as a nurse.

In her time in Montreal, B has appreciated the support of the Filipina women’s organization PINAY, which she says really helps live-in caregivers.  She is proud to be a member of PINAY.

SIX NATIONS – Late Friday, Two Row Times learned that the CAS and McMaster Children’s Hospital are seeking a push from the courts to forcibly return Jada Johnson into chemotherapy. The 11-year-old female from Six Nations was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia in August.

Initially the CAS did inform the child’s mother Deneen Hill, that they had no issue with her decision to seek a holistic hybrid method of Ongwehowe Onongwatri:yo and other alternative therapies as treatment for Jada. This form of treatment will also be monitored by doctors.

However now sources say an unnamed third party is involved in bringing the CAS to court to order the child be put back into chemotherapy.

If the court makes that decision, it would violate Articles 10 & 24 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; that indigenous people cannot be forcibly removed from their lands without free and prior consent, and the right to use traditional medicines and health care practices without discrimination.

After completing 11-days of a 32-day round of intense chemotherapy, the child’s mother stopped the treatments because Hill says her daughter was experiencing severe reactions to standard chemo. That is when Hill opted to end chemotherapy and brought Jada home to instead start a traditional indigenous treatment program combined with other alternatives.

When Hill announced she was pulling Jada from the chemo treatments, CAS was contacted and they initiated a family visit.

Hill previously told the Two Row Times that CAS had no issue with her decision since she is willing to be cooperative with the hospital and a doctor from McMaster who would be tracking her progress. However now the CAS and McMaster Children’s Hospital are bringing the issue to court this Monday.

This is the second child from the Six Nations/New Credit community to have an ALL diagnosis and who reacted badly to standard chemotherapy treatments given at McMaster Children’s Hospital.

Earlier this year, Makayla Sault, also 11 years old, endured 11 weeks of chemotherapy at McMaster Children’s Hospital and endured severe side effects. After being informed by doctors that it is known that  First Nations Children don’t fare well in chemo, Sault’s parents pulled her from chemo in favor of treatment through Ongwehowe Onongwatri:yo medicines and alternative therapies. A decision that the New Credit Band Council and other band councils across the country supported. A large gathering of indigenous people from across the province also organized, the Makayla Defense Force, who said they were ready to peaceably ensure that the child would not be removed from her territory.

Sault’s parents previously told the Two Row Times that a doctor at McMaster told her that anyone who tells them indigenous medicines work “should be thrown in jail.”

The Sault family was also threatened by personnel from McMaster Children’s Hospital with CAS enforcement, being told that if they did not keep Makayla in treatment that CAS would be contacted and that they would likely remove all three of their children.

Eventually the CAS did become involved, however, they did not have objections to the child being treated with indigenous medicines while being monitored by the family’s physician.

The CAS called a public meeting official where they publicly apologized to the Sault family. The Sault’s also received a letter of apology from McMaster Children’s Hospital earlier this summer.

Sault is now healthy and has returned to school. She continues to receive indigenous medicines to support her immune system and keep her healthy.

Within the Six Nations/New Credit communities the rate of cancer survivorship in after utilizing an holisitc indigenous method of treatment for is high. However because it is considered traditional knowledge, practitioners choose not to put their patients through analysis and judgement by an external scientific review – one that is founded on studies that scrutinize data to establish proof.

This is in contrast to the indigenous perspective which has known thousands of years of experiential proof and knowledge via oral history.

This foundational difference has created a rift – specifically in treating children with cancer. While adults have the freedom to choose the course of treatment, hospitals in Canada who feel that a child is not being provided with what they percieve as proper treatment for illnesses must report the family to the CAS.

This article was originally published in the Two Row Times. 

Reproduced with permission from author and The Mainlander: Vancouver’s Place for Progressive Politics

AUTHOR’S NOTE | This article emerges from 5 years of working as a community organizer for the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU). Thank you to the VANDU Board for allowing me to lean on their community organizing work and to collaborate in developing an analysis of the ‘mass incarceration agenda.’ And thank you to all the VANDU members who shared their experiences, challenged my ignorance and encouraged me to contribute this analysis to the struggle against the drug war and the war on the poor.

Introduction

The last decade in Canada has seen the strengthening of the instruments of repression of the Canadian State such that we can now begin to describe and analyze the neoliberal containment state as a specific set of policies and institutions. These policies and institutions are aimed at containing the growing social ‘disorder’ and emerging resistance that have resulted from 30 years of the neoliberal economic order.

Far from being a sinister machination of the “Harper agenda,” the neoliberal containment state enjoys a consensus across the ruling class and between electoral parties. No mainstream political party is putting forward a coherent alternative vision for managing monopoly capitalism. The appeals to a softer gentler capitalism coming from the labour bureaucracy and the ‘left’ wing of the NDP have no coherent economic program attached to them. The reality is that the strengthening of the police/incarceration containment state is intimately tied to the social consensus of the bourgeoisie about how to manage capitalism and accumulation in this historical period. The neoliberal containment state is a necessary corollary of the other components of the neoliberal project in Canada:

1. Trade liberalization beginning with the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement and NAFTA.
2. Privatization of former state enterprises and public services.
3. De-funding of redistributive social programs under the cover of austerity and debt reduction.
4. Weakening and dismantling of regulatory frameworks including environmental and labour regulations.
5. Diminishing the use function of social programs for working class communities and increasing their control function.

It is important to understand the institutions and instruments of this containment state, their connections to the economics of neoliberalism, and their functionality for the Canadian colonial capitalist project as we build movements of struggle, resistance and revolution.

Components of the neoliberal containment state

Legislating criminals

While people often view the components of the neoliberal containment state as purely a product of the Harper government, several important elements were already in place before the conservatives came to power. These include anti-gang legislation and anti-terrorism legislation which interact with and give ideological cover to the broader sweeping criminalization of poor people, drug users, Indigenous people, immigrants and refugees that has emerged in the legislation’s wake.

Under anti-gang legislation, concerns about ‘gang violence’ – stripped of any structural analysis of gangs, where they come from and why people join them – have become a justification for more cops on the streets. In particular urban working class communities of colour and Indigenous communities are targeted by increasingly militarized and violent gang units which exacerbate horizontal violence and effectively criminalize whole communities. As a component of the drug war, these police strategies are much more likely to target and arrest poor low level sellers and users (the low lying fruit) than the big time dealers. Poor people are singled out within what is essentially a criminalized capitalist enterprise with multiple layers of security protecting the upper managers from law enforcement.

Police use gang labeling in much the same way that the imperialist countries use terrorist labeling – to take violence out of its historical and political context and define large groups of people as simply ‘bad guys,’ justifying any level of repression against them.

The terrorism legislation, especially the list of ‘Listed Terrorist Entities’ which includes numerous movements of national liberation and resistance to neo-colonial oppression, has in practice been used as a means to sow fear within immigrant communities, to divide them from their liberation struggles, and to target institutions of Indigenous resistance. The first direct application of the terrorist legislation was against such an institution, the West Coast Warriors Society, in 2006. Since 2001, labeling of Indigenous resistance as an ‘internal terror threat’ has emerged as a normal feature of settler-colonial societies from Canada to New Zealand, Australia and Israel.

We can view these antecedents – anti-gang legislation and anti-terrorist legislation – as the thin edge of the wedge in the initial development of the neoliberal containment state. Main legislative components of the neoliberal containment state have, however, come under the Harper majority government since 2011. They include key pieces of legislation like the so-called ‘Truth in Sentencing Act,’ the ‘Omnibus Crime Bill’ – which includes the dismantling of the Youth Criminal Justice Act leading to harsher sentences for young offenders – and intensified criminalization of immigrants and refugees, including arbitrary and indefinite detention (incarceration) of im/migrants.

The Canadian State has steadily increased the number of people cycling through the criminal justice system, experiencing regular punitive interactions with the police or other disciplinary arms of the State, and facing actual incarceration. This has taken place through a combination of criminalizing economic survival strategies, increasing prison time with mandatory minimum sentences, eliminating ‘double time served’ practices (where sentences are reduced by double the amount of time spent in a remand facility awaiting trial), making pardons and parole more difficult, and closing off legal avenues to status and citizenship for immigrants and refugees.

Mandatory minimums are a major new component in the war on drugs, serving as a mechanism for the criminalization and incarceration of poor people, particularly poor Indigenous people and Black people, in Canada. These provisions impose a minimum sentence for a range of offenses which are mostly linked to the production and distribution of currently illegal drugs. The legislation strips the judge of the ability to exercise discretion, including in cases where it is very clear that jail time will have no rehabilitative benefit and likely no social benefit.

While the rhetoric of mandatory minimums and the ‘tough on crime’ agenda is that these laws target ‘violent offenders’ and people involved in criminal gangs, the reality on the ground is that low level drug sellers – often addicted to the drugs that they are selling and frequently paid in drugs – are the ones who catch the vast majority of charges. Poor and overpoliced neighbourhoods in Canada’s major cities supply most of the ‘candidates’ for incarceration. In a recent case in B.C., where the judge refused to give the one year mandatory minimum, the ‘drug dealer’ is a poor man who is selling to support his own addiction. The mandatory minimum applies because of his previous ‘criminal history’ which includes a previous drug charge.

The legislative component of this containment state has both an ideological function and a control function. Ideologically, the legislation and ‘tough on crime’ discourse exploits and directs the economic insecurity of the middle class and more established working-class:

1. Directing the anxiety (and hostility) of the increasingly economically insecure middle class towards ‘downstream’ threats: the ‘disorderly’ poor and unemployed; ‘criminals’; ‘Indians’ and ‘terrorists.’
2. Exploiting intraclass divisions between the securely employed working-class and the unemployed working-class; and between working-class people with citizenship and working class people who are temporary foreign workers or migrant workers without status.

The control function also plays on different levels associated with maximizing the rate of exploitation and containing potentially unruly or rebellious populations:

1. Physical control and intimidation of the systematically excluded portions of the working-class – workers with addiction; serious physical and mental illness, the elderly, single mothers caring for children and other caregivers with dependents. Physical containment and intimidation supports the slashing of spending on programs that support this group.
2. Intimidation of new immigrants, temporary foreign workers and workers without status as a means to maximize the rate of exploitation by the Canadian capitalists who employ them.
3. Identification and containment of Indigenous assertion of territorial and self-determination rights.

Strengthening the institutions of repression: Police

Despite the fact that the crime rate (including violent crime) has been falling since 1991, the aggregate expenditure on Canadian police continues to rise, reaching $13.5 billion in 2012. In 2012 there was a slight dip in the number of actual cops on the job (slightly less than 70,000), but this is only because new ‘authorized’ (funded) police positions have not yet been filled. Meanwhile, the trend of increasing numbers of private security guards also continued, with over 140,000 licensed security guards in Canada.

There are also about 7,000 uniformed Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) officers across the country of which more than 3,000 are armed with semi-automatic 9mm Beretta pistols. While most of the CBSA officers are deployed at borders, ports, and airports, a small proportion of these are engaged in internal policing and removal of immigrants, refugees and migrants. They constitute an important added layer of the containment state and of surveillance, harassment and violence in the lives of immigrant, migrant and refugee communities.

The main role of police in the neoliberal containment state is functional, as the enforcers of the criminalizing legislation. However, police also constitute a semi-autonomous interest group advocating ‘tough on crime’ policies to justify increasing budgets and perpetuating the cycle of criminalization through aggressive over-policing of poor neighbourhoods and communities, a practice that has been characterized as ‘mining for crime.’

In 2013, Vancouver Police Department Chief Jim Chu earned $314,000, enough to put him squarely in the 1% along with other top police and RCMP managers. Even the rank and file cops, however, make as much as high level managers in capitalist firms – 650 VPD members make more than $100,000 and 3,000 Toronto cops are in this range. They are very highly paid for a job that is neither particularly dangerous (not in the top ten most dangerous occupations in Canada) nor requiring any particularly specialized skills. Moreover while police do not directly exploit workers, they enjoy a high degree of autonomy, prestige, and exercise a huge amount of ‘delegated’ class power as part of their job. So the material interest and class position of cops tie them profoundly to the ruling order.

Associations of chiefs of police as well as various police associations act as lobby groups for ‘tough on crime’ policies, despite their demonstrable ineffectiveness, exploiting the profoundly ahistorical and ideological construction of police as neutral and disinterested ‘protectors of public safety.’

Strengthening of the institutions of repression: Mass incarceration

Canada is currently undergoing what the National Post described in 2011 as “the largest expansion in prison building since the 1930s.” Some of this expansion is happening in the federal system (about 2,000 spots under construction at the time), but the vast majority of the spots (about 9,000 – some of which have now come online) are in the provincial system. Mostly these are remand spots. Remand is prison for people awaiting trial who have not yet been convicted of the crime for which they are charged. The new Edmonton Remand Centre (pictured below) is an example of this type of facility. It is a 16 hectare maximum security facility built at a cost of $580 million and built to house 1,952 prisoners, with room to expand by almost 1,000.

B.C. is also expanding remand space. The province is spending about $500 million to build new prisons in the Lower Mainland and the interior of the province. The recently completed 216-cell remand centre in Surrey makes the Surrey Pretrial Centre the largest jail in the province. In the interior a new 378 cell remand centre is being built on land owned by the Osoyoos Indian Band. In addition to considerably increasing the overall capacity to lock people up in the province, especially individuals who have yet to go to trial, these new prisons are almost entirely privatized. The staff and administration of the prison are public employees, but every other aspect of the facility is privatized: a contract to build-design and operate the facility (in the case of the Surrey facility this was awarded to Brookfield International, one of the largest and most profitable real-estate management companies in the world); health services; food services; and laundry. So while the profiteering is not as crass as it is in the corporate prisons in the U.S, there is nonetheless considerable profit taking in the neoliberal containment state.

Remand is where poor people being cycled and recycled through the criminal justice system do the vast majority of their time. This includes months awaiting trial, often without having committed any violent crime. Remand facilities are built as short term holding facilities even though they are now where the majority of prison time in Canada is served. They are maximum security, with one or more people locked in a tiny cell for 23 out of every 24 hours. They have no access to educational or self improvement programs, and no pretence at rehabilitation (after all the people in these facilities have not yet been found guilty of a crime).  On any given day about 60% of incarcerated people in Canada are in remand.

Conditions in remand are so punitive that some people charged with minor crimes will plead guilty just to speed up the judicial process and get out of remand and into a less punitive prison environment (like a low or medium security facility) or on to some kind of parole. But the conditions of parole are often unreasonable, frequently resulting in rearrest and contributing to the massive numbers of people incarcerated for administration of justice type charges.  For highly criminalized populations, the accumulation of convictions makes individuals increasingly vulnerable to re-incarceration. Administration of justice charges (failure to appear in court, breach of a court order, breach of a condition of parole) now constitute the most common charge in Canadian criminal courts (21% of all cases) and 42% of all charges in B.C.

In a 2011 Op Ed for the Toronto Star, Conservative Senator Hugh Segal notes that “less than 10 per cent of Canadians live beneath the poverty line but almost 100 per cent of our prison inmates come from that 10 per cent.” Segal cites the work by Star journalists Sandra Contenta and Jim Rankin whose analysis of a ‘one day snapshot’ of who is in Toronto jails showed that the vast majority of prisoners were drawn from a few very poor neighbourhoods. This is a process – referred to above as ‘mining for crime’– driven by heavy police presence, stop and search practices, and the policing of so-called street disorder.  In these neighbourhoods the police criminalize almost everyone creating conditions for easy and frequent arrests – especially for warrants for failure to appear, for breaches, for minor drug offences and street disorder charges like panhandling, vending and public drunkenness.

The population of Canada’s prisons says much more about the racist and colonial nature of the Canadian society than the ‘crimes’ of the incarcerated. Indigenous people make up about 4% of the population of Canada but are more than 23% of people incarcerated in the federal system. In the Prairie provinces (Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta) Indigenous people are about 50% of the incarcerated population in the federal system, and an even higher proportion in the provincial system. The mass incarceration of Indigenous women is even more disproportionate, with Indigenous women making up about 4% of all women but 41% of all incarcerated women.

Along with Black people who make up about 2.5% of the Canadian population but over 9% of the prison population, Indigenous people account for much of the 75% increase in ‘visible minorities’ in Canadian prisons in the last decade. Each of these statistics demonstrate the continuing significance of systemic racism and colonialism in shaping the criminal justice system, and this is without including the nearly 10,000 migrants jailed in Canada in 2013 for a total of 183,928 days or 504 years.

Restructuring of social programs to maximize the control function

Under the historic welfare state, government social programs – unemployment insurance, welfare, public education, public healthcare, public transit – were developed to transfer a small portion of the socially generated surplus back to the working class. These programs served both a use function (for the working class communities that rely on them economic stability and survival) and a control function (for the ruling class who uses them to cover up the underlying system of exploitation and to tie people ideologically and materially to the current order). As part of the basic economics of neoliberalism these programs have been gutted through a mixture of privatization, contracting out, and shifting the burden of payment onto those who rely on the program (through user fees), thus undermining their redistributive function. These changes erode or eliminate the use value of social programs for working class people.

Under the neoliberal containment state, the role and purpose of social programs is further transformed. More specifically, new structures and processes are introduced exclusively to increase the control function of social programs, which become increasingly intertwined with institutions of repression.

Transit in Vancouver is a good example. In the first decade of the 21st century the regional transit authority rapidly increased fares, decreasing the redistributive function of the public service for transit dependent working class people (who are disproportionately women and people of colour). At the same time Translink created a new police service, armed with semi automatic pistols on the buses and skytrain. The role of this police force is to ticket, publicly humiliate, and in some cases violently arrest those unable to pay the fare. Translink is also paying$171 million to install fare gates in the metro stations to capture (by their own figures) about  $6 million per year in unpaid fares.

Another example is welfare in B.C. The welfare rates have not risen substantially in 30 years, and are now so low that the Dieticians of Canada published a report showing that a person cannot eat properly on the current BC welfare rates, even if they were to spend their entirely monthly disposable income on food. Meanwhile the control function of welfare, mainly aimed at forcing people into any kind of exploitative low-wage work available, has increased with wait times to get on welfare, regular demands for proof of job searches, and mandatory participation in ineffective job search programs. Most relevant to emergence of the neoliberal containment state, however, is the increased securitization of interactions with welfare and the increasing direct involvement of police.

Under the new set up all requests and inquiries be made over the phone through a centralized call centre and the only face to face interaction in the remaining welfare offices is with clerical staff who accept and give out forms but don’t have any actual decision making power. These offices are routinely staffed by private security guards and all interactions take place through security glass. People on welfare no longer have an assigned social worker with whom they can develop an ongoing relationship.  In interactions over the phone, ‘tone of voice’ or any degree of emotion are used by social workers to hang up and end the interaction.  Thus the predictable anger of people who are being literally starved amid the conspicuous consumption and waste of Canadian capitalist society is met with ‘security’ and containment.

A further illustration is the provincial legislation enacted in June 2010 whereby people with an outstanding warrant anywhere in Canada can be denied or cut off welfare; thus the welfare state institution is transformed in such a way as to prop up and support the neoliberal containment state.

The Containment State as an Instrument of Canadian capitalism, colonization, and imperialism