#10 – Imperialism’s Real Interest in Haiti: Crushing the popular movement
by Niraj Joshi – BASICS Issue #18
We are told that the massive American, Canadian and United Nations military deployment to a battered and broken Haiti after the earthquake is for security. But the greatest threat to the life and limbs of Haitians following the massive earthquake was the unconscionable delay in search and rescue due to prioritizing military needs versus recovery and medical needs. Credible aid organizations have reported no difficulties working unguarded among a population that they say displayed remarkable calm and solidarity in the midst of chaos; and the military-led framework for delivery of humanitarian assistance has been a tragic and indisputable failure.
So what is the “security” concern of the Canadian, American, and UN occupying armies of Haiti?
With the Haitian government and the repressive (Canadian-trained) Haitian police force in collapse, and with the United Nations occupation force itself afflicted, there has been no external power to continue the containment of Haiti’s resilient social forces. Despite their unimaginable suffering, the Haitian people have been self-organizing into popular committees to remove the rubble, recover bodies, organize and secure camps for the displaced and distribute whatever aid they can gather; all in the tradition of Haiti’s popular and powerful social and political force, the political movement and party known as Lavalas, Haitian kreyol for “the flood”.
Read more of this story here…
#9 – Liberals Cut the Special Diet – Poor Must Fight Back
John Clarke (Ontario Coalition Against Poverty) – BASICS Issue #19 – May/June 2010
The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty’s “March on the Liberal Government” on April 15 was designed as a means of initiating a Province-wide fight for decent income for people on welfare and disability. This struggle has been taken up as a response to McGuinty’s vicious elimination of the vital Special Diet benefit.
People on social assistance today have an income that is 55% lower than it was in the early 1990s. A single person on Ontario Works would need a $300 a month increase to be back to where he or she would have been in 1993. The only means that was available to people to alleviate this worsening poverty was the Special Diet. After OCAP began fighting for access to it in 2005, it went from a $6 million a year program to being one that was providing $200 million in desperately needed extra income. At the time of the cut, one in five people on assistance were accessing it.
#8 – Esplanade Community Moves on Police Brutality
Community Group Launches Civil Rights Struggle
Kirstyn Whightman, Solomon Muyoboke, & Farshad Azadian – BASICS Issue #19 – May/June 2010
On March 3, some 60 residents of the Esplanade neighborhood came together to address the pressing issue of police brutality. This event, held at a local recreation centre, wasorganized by the Esplanade Community Group in response to several incidences of police brutality and harassment. This turnout, made up of residents of all generations, came together to launch an organized response to defend the community against police violence.
#7 – ‘Operation PROFUNC: Canada’s Plans to Intern 16,000 Communists, 50,000 Sympathizers
BASICS Issue #23 (Nov/Dev 2010) – by S. da Silva
To many, the unprecedented crackdown and detention of over 1000 activists, dissidents, even regular people, at the G20 Summit in Toronto seemed to express the emergence of a ‘police state’ in Canada. For others, it was unbelievable that this could happen ‘here,’ that things like this only happened elsewhere, in ‘other’ places, like in third world countries or under military dictatorships.
Some Canadians may recall the internment of over 9000 ‘enemy aliens’ during World War I – mostly the Ukrainians who were reduced to slave-like labour, working under the barrel of a gun, clearing, draining, and cultivating new lands for more worthy settlers. Many more will also remember the dispossession and internment of some 22,000 Japanese Canadians during World War II. However, ceremonial apologies have rendered these events regrettable things of the past and have nothing to do with today, right? Wrong.
#6 – 2010 – A Year of Police Terror
by Kabir Joshi-Vijayan – Issue #23 (Nov/Dec 2010)
The G20 debacle will be remembered, above all else, because for thousands of student organizers, social justice activists, journalists and onlookers, it was their first experience with savage, un-restrained police terror.
Even the most liberal observer could not simply dismiss what happened at the G20 Summit: The images of protestors being pepper sprayed and clubbed by fully armored thugs, grabbed off the street and thrown into unmarked vans; the testimony of people having their basic constitutional rights suspended; the largest mass arrests in Canadian history; the crude and illegal violence enacted against an entirely non-violent group of demonstrators.
It made clear for many the lengths to which the Canadian state would go to eliminate and repress a perceived threat.
The G20 arrests laid bare for those who hadn’t already realized it the nature and purpose of the Toronto Police Services.
And since then, the Toronto police have met with impunity for their conduct.
The SIU’s joke of an investigation into a mere 6 incidents (two of which have already been dismissed because the offending officers couldn’t be identified in matching riot gear), and Bill Blair’s ridiculous pledge to mount an ‘internal inquiry’ with the RCMP and OPP, have simply made apparent the non-existence of independent civilian oversight over police activities.
#5 – The Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP): An Ever-Changing Trap
by Petronila Cleto – BASICS #17 (Jan/Feb 2010)
Are the Canadian political and legal systems truly democratic enough to create appropriate changes to the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP), so that rights and welfare issues of the marginalized community of Filipino domestic workers can be justly resolved?
Within the past decade before December 2009, the answer has been a very dismal “no”. In Toronto, from 2001 to 2003, three caregivers were involved in court cases – two of them accused in criminal cases for allegedly sexually assaulting children in their care. They, and many others, have struggled to regain self-respect and reclaim hopes of justice and equality. They represent the precarious lives of caregivers on the fringes of society, although they work in its very heart – inside homes.
Why is such a situation maintained?
Read more here…
#4 -Toronto School Board: Selling your local school
by Errol Young – BASICS Online February 2010
Over 100 community public schools could close in Toronto and the land sold to developers in three to five years.
This development should be of great concern to us all. First there is the economic scale of this thing. Selling 100 sites for about five millions dollars each means that over half a billion dollars will be exchanging hands. Second – and more importantly – these sales will result in a significant loss of publicly owned resources.
To sell off these assets, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) is holding school-closing meetings in 10 areas of the city that they are calling Accommodation Review Committees (ARC). Any recommendations made by the public favouring keeping schools open can be and will be ignored by the TDSB, the body that has the final say. Read more here…
#3 – A brief history of cuts to social housing in Toronto
by M. Cook – BASICS #17 (Jan / Feb 2009)
Regent Park, Toronto
Patrick LeSage, former Chief Justice of the Superior Court of Ontario, has been conducting public forums investigating Toronto Community Housing Corporation’s (TCHC) eviction policies after the death of a former TCHC tenant. We, at BASICS, want to provide tenants with another space to share their experiences and to organize to make changes. This article is intended to provide a brief overview of social housing and we hope to continue a series on social housing based on tenants’ experiences.
Canada has never had a national housing strategy. After WWII, the Canadian government began to construct public housing as a response to the struggles waged by strong labour unions and community organizers. Regent Park was one of the first public housing projects, built in the 1950s. The ruling establishment liked it because it was seen as a way to control a potentially radical collective force, the working class. The project resulted in the destruction of a previously working-class neighborhood (Cabbagetown) and the displacement of its residents.
Read more here…
Riot police confront G20 protesters earlier at Queen/Spadina June 26
#2 – Police move in to arrest 300 peaceful protesters outside Novotel Hotel
TORONTO 11:40pm, June 26 — G20 Police have threatened to mass arrest 300 peaceful protesters outside the Novotel hotel on The Esplanade in Toronto, according to a demonstrator at the protest. Since 10:30pm they have been snatching protesters one-by-one from the crowd and “the rest of us are just waiting to be arrested,” said the experienced activist, who has asked not to be named.
Protesters were sitting outside the hotel peacefully, when dozens of police in full riot gear with teargas guns marched in from the east side of the narrow street and then on the west side, enclosing the protesters.
According to the demonstrator, most of the protesters are young people who have little previous experience in demonstrations and have not been involved in any previous G20 demonstrations on June 26 or earlier. Moreover they have no legal information because they were not expecting any kind of trouble. “These are simply members of the public who want to make their voices heard,” the demonstrator said. The peaceful protesters include many who joined a march which earlier proceeded down Yonge Street after being brutally forced out of what was supposed to be the “free speech zone” at Queen’s Park.
Read more here…
#1 – Story of the Year
18-year-old Junior Manon Beat to Death by Toronto Police – May 5
by S. da Silva – BASICS Online – 6 May 2010
Editorial Note: This story received almost 40,000 hits at basicsnews.ca in 2010, 20,000 of which came within the first 24 hours of its publication. The story was posted elsewhere all across the web and widely read through social media. We can safely speculate that the hundreds of thousands who read or heard about this story from BASICS within the days of Junior’s murder served as the main counter-punch to the pro-cop corporate media lies that Junior died of a heart-attack. The success of this story speaks to the necessity of building a strong people’s media apparatus.
Running from the police is not a crime punishable by death in Canada. Yet this is the sentence 18-year-old Junior Alexander Manon received on the evening of May 5, 2010 when he ran from the police near York University in Toronto. And by looks of what became of the young Dominican teenager, it’s no surprise that youth like him run when confronted by Toronto police.
Around 6:30pm, Manon jumped out of a car and fled police after a random pull-over on Founders Road and Steeles. Police claim that Manon spontaneously collapsed and died of a heart attack while trying to run from them, despite witness testimonies and a pool of blood to suggest otherwise.
A witness on the scene and another passenger of the vehicle reported that: “They beat him up, he was on the floor, he wasn’t resisting. Two officers on him, punching him in the face, one kicking him in the ribs… And then five more come and jump on him… He’s not that big for seven boy’dem [cops] to be on him like that.”
Read more here…
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