Nuance

Canadians vest authority in our federal government to act in our best interest, to uphold our collective values, and to respect the rule of law. It should come as little surprise, then, that someone might get the distinct impression that walking into a mosque and opening fire with a weapon is fundamentally Canadian. After all, we are complicit in the legitimization of murder on an unfathomable scale.

“Muslim-Canadians are an important part of our national fabric, and these senseless acts [of violence] have no place in our communities, cities and country,” wrote Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau immediately following January’s barbaric attack in Quebec City. Indeed they are, and indeed they do not. But what about Muslims who aren’t Canadian? Who don’t live in our communities, cities, or country? Who aren’t Shiite, or, depending on the particular conflict, Sunni?

This is where things might get confusing for someone that looks to the state to set an example for what is right and what is wrong, to inform which lives have value, and which have none. Because the reality is, both directly and indirectly, the Canadian government and its Western allies have been killing and dehumanizing innocent Muslims year after year after year – in their places of worship, at their places of work, where they study, even while they seek treatment in hospital.

This isn't even partisan politics, as subtly suggested by islamophobe Alexandre Bissonnette's Facebook ‘Like‘ of the NDP on Facebook – but rather this ongoing and pervasive defence of murder on the flimsiest of humanitarian pretenses is deeply ingrained in the very fabric of our parliamentary democracy, and has been since at least 2001. Across the political spectrum, all major federal parties have blood on their hands: the Conservatives in Iraq and Syria, the NDP in Libya, the Liberals in Yemen – often all three are happy to find common ground when it comes to dropping bombs, exporting weapons, or providing the training and logistical assistance to kill millions.

The violence of the state is both unparalleled and beyond dispute. That Muslims have borne the brunt of that violence for almost two decades is not without its sad consequences at home. That the state won’t tolerate violence in our communities, cities and country, but will readily export it across Africa and the Middle East, is perhaps a contradictory moral and legal position too nuanced for someone like Bissonnette.

Canadians don’t shoot innocent Muslims in Canadian mosques, we only drop bombs on them while they work on dairy farms in northern Iraq.

Alerte Rouge

Crime 101

Happy Holidays Canada!

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Against the Grain: Agency & Urban Agriculture in Toronto

Introduction – Imagining a Food Secure Future in Toronto

Over the past decade, Canada has seen a dramatic rise both in local food awareness and urban agriculture projects, while simultaneously witnessing a growing dependence on food banks by its most vulnerable citizens. “In March 2010, 867,948 people were assisted by food banks in Canada. This is a 9% increase over 2009 – and the highest level of food bank use on record.” Time and again, statistics point to a relatively uniform segment of the population requiring annual food aid: the un- and under-employed, single mothers, seniors, visible minorities, students, recent immigrants, and people with physical disabilities.

Unfortunately, with the election of the Rob Ford administration to Toronto’s City Council in October 2010, the future development of a municipally-led and legislated urban agriculture movement has never looked so bleak. The Ford agenda presents an enormous challenge for food and poverty activists in the city. Policies which benefit high income earners and property owners (e.g., tax breaks) have already created budgetary shortfalls which the administration has indicated a willingness to remedy with massive cuts to social spending, the elimination of grants and regulatory oversight, and the privatization and elimination of many city services. Within this toxic policy and financial environment, the likelihood of leadership from City Hall on issues such as short-term investment designed to secure long-term quality of life improvements is slim. Nevertheless, it also creates a perfect opportunity to draw attention to the linkages between food security and income security and to imagine the genuinely radical ways in which supporting urban agriculture in Toronto can create alternative spaces in which resistance to the types of neoliberal policies mentioned above can flourish.

The relationship between hunger and income insecurity is well-established and thus forms the philosophical foundation upon which most food security organizations guide their policy, research, outreach, and community engagement. The development of urban agriculture is a symbiotic solution to both cause and effect. Urban and semi-urban food production is uniquely situated as a means to promote income security through sales and directly confront food insecurity by providing food for household and community consumption. In general terms, any comprehensive urban agriculture policy framework would be created with the input of direct and indirect stakeholders and local communities, would take into account food safety and health risks, and would focus on projects which could be instituted in a sustainable manner with organic and locally-derived inputs and little reliance on industrial production methods. The foundation for such a progressive transformation of Toronto’s foodscape could easily be appropriated from other cities with similar characteristics and already-existing urban agriculture frameworks and further developed within a local context. Additionally, provincial and federal policy could directly support programs in Toronto by, for instance, making access to safe, nutritious, and culturally-appropriate food a fundamental and constitutionally-inalienable human right.

Most importantly, urban agriculture allows for the development of agency in the very communities most likely to be affected by Rob Ford’s austerity measures, and agency comprises one of the most radical ingredients in any revolutionary reorganization of socio-political and economic systems. Forming zones of resistance to capital – zones which exist outside of its logic (i.e., co-ops, non-monetized community gardens and orchards, food shares, non-profits, etc.) – is an integral part of creating viable alternatives to the ultimately unsustainable and dis-empowering neoliberal market. By situating urban agriculture as one such site of struggle and allowing vulnerable groups to empower themselves, a future vision of a food and income secure Toronto is also a radical future vision of a Toronto where human lives and the environment come before tax breaks and profits. “In the food system […] the possibility of achieving a more equitable path of development and the social stability that only greater equity can secure requires a successful challenge of the powerful interests that have captured the economic and political agenda.”

A Framework for Building an Alternative

For most food-focused charities, agencies, and non-governmental organizations, the difference between providing short-term solutions to food insecurity and finding long-term solutions to the systemic causes of that insecurity can be found within the gap between a radical analysis and critique of neoliberal market mechanisms and its acceptance. The very structure of such organizations needs to be built upon a foundation which consists of ultimately eliminating the need for their future necessity.

To advance beyond mere food aid, food-based organizations need to actively engage in a series of multifaceted activities with the goal of one day securing a sustainable and equitable food system. The first of these activities is an active engagement in research and policy analysis (e.g., questionnaires, stakeholder interviews, etc.), the second is the fostering of client and community agency (e.g., the development of a robust urban agriculture plan), and the third is in the formation of alliances with other (non-food-based) organizations and agencies that also explicitly link poverty and class to arrive at an equally damning critique of capital. A combination of all three of these activities can challenge capital even more effectively than one or two in isolation.

Crushed

It took decades for progressives to coalesce around an alternative to Canada’s de facto two-party federal system in numbers sufficient to catapult the NDP into the role of Official Opposition. Shamefully, it took only until the conclusion of the first vote in the new House of Commons to crush any hopes that the NDP would prove to be any better than the rest of parliament.

Support for the Libyan intervention by the NDP was at least marginally understandable in the lead up to the May 2nd election. The very language of ‘humanitarian’ interventions purposefully frames any discussion and debate as being ‘against the clock’ and certainly no one wants to be seen to be responsible for civilian deaths that might have been prevented had bombs only started dropping sooner. A federal election was looming large and the NDP needed to begin the delicate process of courting liberal voters through subtle shifts in policy. Perhaps it was the case that the NDP’s historical memory was a bit hazy as to the sad legacy of such interventions and the numerous critiques of the myth of humanitarian intervention were lost on MPs with no time to read the latest analysis. And perhaps it was even the case that at the time, an entirely defensive, NATO-enforced no-fly zone, genuinely seemed like the best way to safeguard innocent lives in Benghazi.

But to support the Harper government and recommit to the Libyan mission three months later as the NDP’s first act as the Official Opposition is nothing short of criminal.

Sure, the real blame here might fairly be levelled at Harper, as the NDP and other opposition parties don’t even have enough seats to disrupt the Conservative agenda. But here’s the thing: no one expects Harper to do the right thing on Libya. Harper and his cronies are committed to purchasing new fighter jets and support continued Israeli war crimes like a badge of honour. The NDP, on the other hand, should know better, and to me, that makes them even more disgusting. They were elected with the expectation that they would at least try to do the right thing, not only because they owe it to the progressive base that mobilized to elect them in the first place, but also because until Libya, their (admittedly meagre) history of opposing ill-conceived and illegal military invasions by Canada set a refreshing precedent. It was also the perfect opportunity to quickly and confidently define a truly alternative voice with which to map the future of an NDP-led opposition. Instead, the NDP squandered the hopes and dreams of a new generation of progressive Canadian voters and then swiftly made them complicit participants in continued war crimes and crimes against humanity.

You might think it would have been even easier for the NDP to vote with a conscience when the outcome of the debate was already decided before any yeas or nays were recorded. You might think that the growing evidence of the sticky influence of oil politics on the decision to invade Libya would give cause for pause, as Wikileaks cables recently confirmed what we all knew anyway, which is that Libya is a country that has historically never played nice with the West with regards to its oil reserves. (The rebel opposition, on the other hand, which the NDP was happy to recognize officially yesterday, has already begun oil shipments to the United States.) You might be right to imagine that since the campaign has murderously and unequivocally morphed from defensively protecting airspace around rebel-held territory to offensively terrorizing Tripoli in a massive wave of bombings -- which recently included killing staff and students at a university and using helicopter gunships which continue to damage civilian targets such as hospitals, homes, and other essential, non-military infrastructure -- it would be easy to vote against the continuation of the mission in Libya. You would be wrong, however, if you assumed the NDP would see it that way.

Because the NDP has gone from supporting a neutral no-fly zone to openly supporting an increasingly clear – yet entirely illegal – mandate for violent regime change at the hands of NATO. More ominously for party faithful, perhaps, is the signal that any rhetoric by Jack Layton about shaking up the status quo in Ottawa has been decisively put to rest at the cost of thousands of innocent lives.

The Coming Storm

What we are seeing already from police and the Integrated Security Unit (ISU) as the G20 meetings in Toronto draw closer, is the widespread manipulation of public sentiment to the effect that protesters are ‘dangerous’, ‘criminal’, and hell-bent on violence and destruction -- the fabrication of a pre-justification for the deployment of future violence by the state.

Effectively using terror to trounce our right to democratic protest and free speech, members of the ISU, in connection with CSIS agents, have repeatedly harassed non-violent activists in a manner more commonly seen in countries with a secret police, public denunciations, and disappearances. The police have publicly advertised the purchase of new weapons to use against protesters, including an LRAD system, new riot gear, and hundreds of new cameras; they have paraded in front of the media in a massively-aggressive show of force; and they have leaked internal communications requesting the services of area doctors and the existence of a converted factory lot that will serve as a makeshift concentration camp for arrested demonstrators. For the police, the summits represent a massive public windfall of both financial and social capital with which to purchase new toys and to openly bend the law.

The police are effectively trying to deter less-committed, less-radical, and first-time activists from ever showing up while simultaneously antagonizing more radical elements by picking a fight they already know they can win. The police and the media are happy to go out of their way to stress how a majority of the 1.2 billion dollars being spent on security for the summits is clearly not to protect a bunch of VIPs from terrorists (who may crash their fancy dinner parties), but rather simply to protect those VIPs from having their precious schmoozing interrupted by informed and angry citizens wishing to express themselves freely outside of the meetings.

Even 9 years ago, when the G8 met in Genoa, Italy, in 2001, putting large fences around international gatherings to create "red zones" was all the rage. It was the height of the anti-globalization movement, pre-9/11, and over 300,000 demonstrators turned out to democratically voice their grievances.

Predictably, the police also turned out in force, viciously attacking and injuring more than 400 unarmed civilians (caught in the wrong place at the wrong time), journalists, and activists with a combination of chemical weapons and less-lethal projectiles. Mass arrests were not yet common police practice, but those 300 or so arrested were subject to verbal intimidation, beatings, and the threat of rape. Genoa also marked the first recorded death of a protestor at a demonstration in the Western world (since the movement gained momentum in Seattle in 1999), when Carlo Giuliani was shot in the head and run-over, twice, by a member of Italy’s military police, the Carabinieri.