Yesterday Palestine solidarity activists in Vancouver fasted for 24 hours and set up an info table at a busy transit hub to inform people of the situation of Palestinian prisoners and gather support for the campaign to boycott and divest from British security firm G4S.

Five activists joined the fast and raised over $500 in pledges and donations to support Palestinian prisoners in the action organized by Samidoun Palestinian Prisoners Solidarity Network with support from BDS Vancouver – Coast Salish Territories, Canada Palestine Association and Alliance for People’s Health.

The information table highlighted the cases of Muhammad Allan, Khalida Jarrar, Shireen Issawi and Ahmad Sa’adat, but focused on the fact that the mass incarceration of Palestinian activists and political leaders is a tactic of the Israeli occupation to attack Palestinian resistance to the occupation and the whole Palestinian people.  There are currently over 5400 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, including 400 who are in ‘administrative detention’ meaning that they face no formal charge, are denied even the unfair process of Israeli military courts and do not get to see the evidence against them.

Muhammad Allan, who has been on hunger strike for 66 days, has been detained for more than 10 months on such an administrative detention.The information table also carried information about the campaign against G4S in Canada, newly launched by BDS Vancouver – Coast Salish Territories, and dozens of people signed on to support the campaign.  In addition to contracts with the Israeli Prison Authority, G4$ runs immigration detention centres in Ontario and provides security for Tar Sands oil developments and pipeline projects in Canada.

(Photo Credit: Aiyanas Ormond)

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On June 24th, the Toronto Baha’i Centre hosted a public forum called “Conversation on Carding”,  where community members came together to discuss the Toronto Police Service’s’ policy on carding, lately a hot topic in Toronto media.

Conversation focused on recent appearances by new TPS Chief Mark Saunders, who has defended carding as a harmless, “intelligence-led practice”.

Idil Burale, a former candidate for City Council who spoke at the event, pointed out that the claims TPS makes about its policy are inconsistent with reality. For example, when cops question people, the information they collect is supposed to be put into a ‘secure’ central database, which only police officers can access.

However, “there have been instances where information gathered from carding encounters is brought up when people have job interviews,” said Burale. “The top brass refuses to release any facts or statistics that supports their claim that the method of information-gathering has been useful in deterring crime.”

Anthony Morgan, the research and policy lawyer for the African Canadian Legal Clinic, detailed some of the information which can be recorded during an encounter: “they’ll take down anything: your address, information about the people were with, your skin colour, height, and weight, your disposition toward police…even the status of your parents’ marriage.”

“Black people are highly overrepresented in carding data,” he said. “Over 1.2 million contacts obtained through carding can never be justified.”

He added that Chief Saunders has referred to the tens of thousands of Black Torontonians caught up in the TPS dragnet as “collateral damage.”

Burale continued by pointing out that in spite of tall claims from police spokespeople, “the top brass refuses to release any facts or statistics that supports their claim that the method of information-gathering has been useful in deterring crime.”

“Crime rates have been decreasing since the 1970s, but the policing budget has not. Who can justify a billion-dollar budget right now?” This, despite an $850 million backlog of repairs just for the existing TCHC housing stock .

When Mayor John Tory recently announced that he wanted to put an end to carding practices, many Torontonians breathed a sigh of relief. But recent flip-flopping on his part, plus Chief Saunders’ support of the policy, have brought confusion to the issue.

Burale explained that “a lack of clear procedure from the police chief in the implementation of these practices means that nothing will change; but this ambiguity is deliberate and not something that is new.”

Many of us have noticed that the mayor and the police chief have been saying very different things about carding; but this confusion is intentional. It’s never been quite clear whether or not it’s legal for police officers in Toronto to profile Black and racialised youth. Carding isn’t explicitly legal, so the city can’t easily be called out on it, but it’s so widely accepted that in practice, cops can harass, intimidate, and assault whoever they want. While Tory flip-flops, Chief Saunders calls the shots; if his words are anything to go by, carding is here to stay.

(Photo Credit: Kevin van Paassen/Globe and Mail)

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)

When Mark Saunders and Peter Sloly were shortlisted as candidates for Chief Bill Blair’s job, it struck up a city-wide dialogue around diversity and the role of a Black police chief in tackling issues of anti-Black racism within the Toronto Police Service. Communities were proud to watch, for the first time, as men of colour rose through the ranks of the TPS, and when Mark Saunders was sworn-in, excited to begin unpacking issues of racial profiling and police violence in our city.

Mark Saunders is a Black face in a traditionally white space, but the celebration is cut short when his approach to policing upholds many of the same campaigns that disproportionately target and oppress communities of colour. Saunders has been part (and too often in charge) of divisions within the police service that, historically and currently, target and harass young men and women of colour, and instil in us a sense of fear when we think about policing.

What we are now learning is that putting a Black man in charge is not enough to meaningfully combat anti-Black racism.  Saunders’ Blackness is a symbolic victory for diversity, but it doesn’t translate into tangible gains for communities of colour across the city; his swearing-in was not followed by meaningful policy change, nor even an acknowledgement of anti-Black racism in carding policies that, to date, have logged more encounters with young Black men than the actual population of young Black men in Toronto.  For this reason, the conversation isn’t and cannot be about diversity within the TPS. We need a larger discussion around racism, classism and the adversarial relationship between the TPS and working-class communities in Toronto.

Carding—a practice that parallels the stop-and-frisk mandate of the NYPD—is a pre-emptive policing strategy that looks to tackle crime before it occurs in communities through indiscriminate, unwarranted contact with residents. The practice is loaded with issues of race- and class-based profiling. We now know that certain kinds of people in the city of Toronto are systematically stopped under these policies. Young men and women of colour are stopped and interrogated, with intimate details about our lives documented and logged in an expansive database. These encounters are deceptive, intimidating, and often degrading—creating a feeling that you can’t say “no”, because the police have guns and are largely unaccountable to anyone for the injuries they inflict.

When you’re carded, officers rarely inform you of your right to leave and demand intimate details about you, your intentions, and your background. When you hesitate, or refuse to give this information, officers bend the law to obtain it, threatening charges of trespassing, loitering, or officer baiting. Too often they resort to physical violence to get it, understanding that the complaint process is an inaccessible one, and that even when civilians do file complaints related to officer misconduct, rarely is the officer disciplined for this kind of violence.*

Carding is a very real example of how public encounters with the Toronto Police Service create a culture of fear around policing which runs so deep that many of our community partners refuse to call the police even when they are in serious danger. From an early age many Torontonians learn that the police are not their friends, and that officers are not stationed in schools, at community centres, and on their streets to serve and protect them.

Instead, many young people growing up in Toronto’s priority neighborhoods learn to actively avoid officers because of widespread harassment.  Youth with precarious status learn that their in-school resource officers work closely with Canadian Border Services to police families without status. Because of the  relationships that the Toronto Police Service has with agencies like the CBSA, the Toronto District School Board and Toronto Community Housing, negative interactions with police can have severe consequences – deportation, expulsion and eviction. For these reasons, we see people in this city, right now—entire communities—establishing their own systems of policing to avoid this one.

TPS has moved beyond policing as a tool for crime prevention and instead uses it as a regulatory tool that isolates, targets, and oppresses Toronto’s most marginalized communities.  The trajectory of policing in our city has much more to do with the social and economic makeup of Toronto and in our city we criminalize poverty—we fine poverty and toss it in holding cells for sleeping on park benches (trespassing, loitering) and begging for money (harassment). The Toronto Police Service cites crime reduction as justification enough for these policing strategies, but we see too often that these mandates are used as a guise to control “problem areas” and “problem people”.

We’re operating on a punitive model of justice that looks to punish deviance and criminalize things like poverty, mental health, addictions, and homelessness. Our police reflect a larger correctional system that looks to solve issues of crime through punishment, without thinking about rehabilitative alternatives. This kind of correctional orientation translates into the kind of brutal “community policing” initiatives that alienate a certain subset of our city—young men and women of colour, poor and marginally housed Torontonians, those with mental health and addictions related issues, sex workers, and people with precarious status.

We don’t need police half as badly as we need affordable housing, shelter, basic income, access to proper care, and opportunity. We have the capacity to build safe and healthy communities by breaking down the TPS’ billion-dollar budget and pouring these resources into development and restorative justice at the grassroots level. A lot of this discussion comes down to what we believe justice is. If our legal framework is built on punishment, it is built to oppress—to isolate the wrongdoer and punish them.

So is justice punishment? Or is justice a transformative experience, something that looks to heal communities? When we concentrate on restorative justice, we look to transform communities and transform people. This is something that’s already happening at the community level in Toronto as a response to particularly punitive policing strategies in Rexdale and Jane & Finch. Under its current framework, the Toronto Police Service operates as a billion-dollar gang and Chief Saunders as a face-lift that brings no real change.

The most powerful and effective alternatives to policing—community patrols in the downtown eastside, sex workers coordinating and organizing safe business models, and restorative justice networks across the GTA—have all grown out of a need for marginalized communities to protect themselves from violence, from harm, and from those who claim to serve and protect the rest of Toronto.

*The ultimate guarantor of violent police misconduct is the Special Investigations Unit. The SIU is a civilian oversight body that employs both civilians and former officers to conduct independent investigations in cases where a civilian has been seriously injured by an officer. Between 1990 and 2010, the SIU conducted 3,400 independent investigations, filing criminal charges in 95 of these cases. Of that, 16 officers have been convicted of a crime and 3 spent time in prison.

(Photo Credit: Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail)

John Paul Wootton in custody of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (Paul Faith/Press Association)

By Julian Ichim

On August 8th, 2015 people across the world will be joining in actions demanding the release of the Craigavon Two, Irish Republican prisoners unjustly imprisoned for the murder of a RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland) police officer. In Kitchener and Toronto local organizers are planning demonstrations and a public event around internment in the Occupied Six Counties.

Packy Carty of the Justice For The Craigavon Two Committee in Ireland stated that “the case of the Craigavon Two is a clear case of a miscarriage of justice and targeting of Irish Republicans. The case against the Craigavon Two centred around four strands of so-called evidence: the brown jacket DNA, the brown jacket residue, Witness M and a British Army MI5 tracking device.”

He continued, “When Brendan McConville and John Paul Wootton were taken for interrogation by the PSNI, they seized Wootton’s car, and in the car they found a brown jacket with a number of DNA profiles, one of which belonged to Brendan McConville; also on the jacket was a firearms type residue. It was proved beyond doubt that the residue did not come from an AK 47, which was the weapon used in the shooting. The amount of DNA on the brown jacket could have been innocently placed by a sneeze or a slight touch. Brendan McConville and John Paul Wootton were friends and Brendan had been in the car before. Yet the crown prosecution were trying to say that the coat belonged to McConville and was used in the shooting, even though the forensics disproved  this theory.”

In terms of Witness M, a secret Witness giving testimony, Carty asserts that “his testimony was discredited in court, as he could not have seen the shooting of the police officer. He needed glasses, which he was not wearing that night, and there are other inconsistencies in his testimony.”

“After Wootton and McConville had become well-known in the newspapers and media, a man known only as witness M phoned the PSNI in the middle of the night while drunk and said he could identify those involved in the shooting. Despite being a questionable witness this man became the key part of the prosecution case. He said he had seen McConville near the scene of the shooting that night; it later transpired in court that his eyewitness testimony was clinically impossible, as he was severely short sighted and lied openly in court about his eyesight” stated Carty.

Carty also brought up the fact that Witness M’s own father, who is on the court record as “Witness Z”, came forward to call his son a liar in court.

On the issue of the tracking device, Carty points out that “it emerged that on the night of the shooting the British Army, most probably at the behest of MI5, were tracking Wootton’s car using a covert device. When the device was examined after Wootton’s car was seized, half of the data was purposely deleted, yet despite this destruction of evidence the device was accepted as evidence in the court.”

Despite all these inconsistencies and nothing linking Wootton or McConnville to the scene of the crime, they were both convicted and given life sentences. An appeal was carried out, yet the conviction was upheld despite the fact that according to Carty the prosecutor admitted that they cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that either McConville or Wootton was involved in the shooting or supporting the shooters with logistics, etc. in the aftermath. At that point in time, a Supreme Court hearing was scheduled to hear the case yet this was cancelled with no explanation.

Due to the lack of justice seen in Ireland surrounding this case, international organizers have concluded that justice can only be served by people across the world taking action. Here in Kitchener, organizer Terry Helm said, “The case of the Craigavon Two is not just about these two people but about the injustice of the British occupational forces in Ireland criminalizing people, not because of acts that they can prove but rather for their political convictions.”

He continued, “If this hearing was carried out in a regular court this decision would be different, but when you have special laws, secret evidence, no right to confront your accusers and the presumption of guilt before innocence, what do you expect?”

He finished by comparing the treatment of the Craigavon Two with possible treatment of Canadian activists in the future: “With Bill C-51 becoming law, this case has more serious implications here for those who are engaged in activism, as the legal system that condemned them will become law here.”

“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)

On May 1, 2015, the board of CHRY 105.5 FM—the York University community radio station—fired all of its volunteers and community programmers and re-branded itself as VIBE 105.5. VIBE 105.5 now advertises itself as an alt-urban music station, playing electronic music, reggae, soca, r&b and hip-hop.

Upset and offended community residents, students, advertisers, and former programmers met on May 12 at York’s Centre for Women and Trans People. For many, CHRY had been more than just a radio station: it had solid historical links to the Jane-Finch corridor and the Toronto region’s Caribbean community. Many felt that the board had conspired to deny the community any voice in the future of the station. The feeling in the room was largely that, in the words of one speaker, “[the board] just gave up on the community.”

During the meeting, it emerged that over the previous weeks many of the former volunteers and programmers had attempted to call the CHRY board members or meet with them at the station. In response, the board locked the station’s doors and ignored all calls.

“The fundamental issue is that we serve as the channel for voices that are unheard, marginalised, and under-represented”, explained Pet Cleto, a programmer for Radio Migrante (a show previously hosted by CHRY) to BASICS. With the re-branding of the station as a commercial urban music broadcaster, there seems to be little future at the new station for media exploring the struggles of migrant labourers in Canada.

Omme-Salma Rahemtullah, a programmer for Amandla: An African Perspective and former CHRY board member, expressed frustration at the closing down of a space of community expression. “Amandla continues to get requests for interviews from activists in Toronto. For example, the recent mass drowning of Eritrean migrants in the Mediterranean was to receive special attention on our upcoming shows. Now family members and activists have no outlet for their voices on Toronto airwaves,” she said.

The discussion quickly turned to the legality, according to the radio station’s by-laws, of the board’s actions. In spite of a long-term understanding that CHRY was a partnership between students, community, and alumni, this partnership was never officially recognised. A legalistic and bureaucratic board would have little trouble shooting down a challenge made on legal grounds.

Participants at the meeting decided to take action collectively through an open letter to the VIBE 105.5 board, asking them to sit down with the former programmers and come to an amicable solution.

In the following two weeks, the board failed to take any significant action toward satisfying these demands, and further community meetings were held in late May and June, to plan how to organise against the board’s cynical and opportunist—but likely technically legal—actions.

The outcome of this has been the Save CHRY campaign, which is currently running a WordPress site, Facebook page and Change.org petition. The campaign will be hosting a day of live jams and spoken word poetry on Monday July 6, featuring programmers and performers who are steadfast in their desire to see the station returned to the community that built it in the first place.

(Photo Credit: Save CHRY Facebook page)

“Two people have been killed since I moved in here. Of course I feel unsafe. I feel more safe in the street than in my home.”

This is how Maryam*, a woman in her early twenties and a three-year resident of 3171 Eglinton Avenue—one of the TCHC high-rises at the intersection with Markham Road—describes her life in the building.

“I don’t feel comfortable inviting friends over. Once a friend spent the night, and at two a.m. someone started banging on the door demanding to come in. How are two women alone in an apartment at that hour going to feel?”

Of the dozens of residents at 3171 with whom BASICS has spoken, nearly all have similar concerns about safety. For female residents in particular, the greatest feeling of threat can sometimes come from other residents—in particular, men. Such feelings are common for women who, like Maryam, live alone or as single mothers.

Due to the seeming lack of other choices, some residents turn to the police. For example, after racist curses were scratched onto her door a few months ago, Maryam immediately informed the Toronto Police Service. When constables came by, however, she found them unwilling to pay even cursory attention to the situation: “When I told them about these words someone had written and asked them what they were going to do, one of them just shrugged and said, ‘It’s TCHC’.”

The cop’s indifference to Maryam’s concerns reflects the attitude of the police department towards the concerns of low-income residents. After the murder of 22 year-old Dillon Phillips in the stairwell on September 2014, a second resident recalls the police and TCHC management as encouraging residents to “Take back your building”. In such circumstances, residents and onlookers are forced to ask whether the police are in place to protect or divide communities.

Trapped between a rock (insecurity) and a hard place (disdain and disinterest from the police), Maryam’s only goal is to get as far from community housing as possible. “I don’t hang out in the area, I don’t want to be here. When I’m gone, I’ll never think about this place again,” she said to BASICS.

For a woman in her position, this view is entirely reasonable, and it is one which many women in the building seem to share. Yet when residents are lucky enough to get a transfer or start making enough money to move out, their apartments will immediately be filled by a few more people from TCHC’s 160,000-household waiting list. New residents, as well as the many who are unable to leave, are simply forced into the same stressful, unchanging, and sometimes dangerous circumstances. Unable and uninterested in providing a secure home, TCHC and the Toronto Police Service bring TCHC residents to see their apartments as places where fear and suspicion are constant.

When asked if her concerns about security cause alienation from other residents, Maryam said, “Definitely.” In a building where turnover is high, security is low, and many wish to leave, it is difficult for residents to build a sense of trust in the community.

Yet the police prove, as they did in Maryam’s case, that they have little interest in protecting working-class and racialized women—and this is without any discussion of police treatment of working-class and racialized men.

Under these circumstances, who better for female residents to turn toward than one another? Protective links already exist in small, informal ways—between friends, for instance. But if these links could turn into something larger and more organised, a safer and more inclusive community for women—and perhaps also men—at 3171 Eglinton could take shape.

*At her request, we have given Maryam a pseudonym for this article.

(Photo Credit: Chris Doucette, Toronto Sun)

On Wednesday March 4, the constituency office of Finance Minister Joe Oliver was picketed as part of the beginning of a nationwide “Campaign Against the 4 Year Limit on Migrant Workers.”

Organised by the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change (MWAC), “a coalition that includes migrant workers, allies, workers’ centres, legal aid clinics, and unions,” protesters denounced a law dubbed the “4-and-4 rule,” which allows temporary foreign workers to stay in Canada for only four years before forcing them to leave for at least another four.

“Our message here is loud and clear: we want the Canadian government to hear our call and remove the 4-and-4 rule,” said Jesson Reyes, an organiser with Migrante Ontario, to the assembled crowd. “Harper, Harper, go away, foreign workers are here to stay!” chanted picketers in response.

Forming a picket line.

“Have you ever lived in a place for four years?” asked Tzazna Miranda, an MWAC activist. “You make friends. You find family. You find a community. You learn your rights, the law. You learn your job.”

“This law doesn’t make any sense,” she continued, “for employers, for workers, or for the economy. It means employers are forced to bring in new labourers every four years, to be retrained at great cost and who know less about their rights. For workers it’s unjust; it’s traumatising.”

The action took place as part of the beginning of the cross-country campaign against the 4-and-4 rule. In the week leading up, protests around the same issue took place in Hamilton, Guelph, Edmonton, Surrey, and the Okanagan Valley. Another rally is being planned for Toronto area residents on March 29.

“When this law comes into effect on April 1, 2015, we will see massive deportations of temporary foreign workers and caregivers across Canada,” Reyes told BASICS in an interview. “We believe that if you are good enough to work here, you’re good enough to stay.”

Many activists have expressed concern that enforcement of the 4-and-4 rule will only lead to a huge increase in undocumented people, as temporary workers may refuse to leave after their visas expire, either because of a lack of opportunities at home or in account of roots they have established in Canada.

The plight of undocumented labourers has gained a great deal of publicity in the United States, where millions work for starvation wages under brutal conditions, and where any attempt to unionise or militate for higher wages or better working conditions leads to crackdowns and deportations.

A similar system has long since begun to be constructed in Canada, with much less fanfare. The municipal government already estimates that up to 500,000 undocumented workers may live in Canada, about half of which probably live in Toronto.

“Almost all migrant workers who live and work in Canada support their families back home,” said Samay Cajas, an organiser from No One Is Illegal. “To lose status and the right to work is devastating for them and their families. To even arrive, many workers incur huge debts.”

Organisers had planned to deliver a person-sized painted STOP sign to the MP. However, the Honourable Mr. Oliver was evidently too embarrassed by the government’s policy to defend it: he refused to meet with protesters and closed his office for the day.

Probably just an unfortunate coincidence.

Unlike MPs, however, police officers were present in abundance. During the course of the protest at least four separate squad cars showed up in a parking lot directly across the street from the constituency office. Why the MP for Eglinton-Lawrence regards police as better public representatives of the government than himself remains, unfortunately, unclear.

Police gathering across the street to observe the peaceful protest. A fourth car was stationed about 20 metres to the west.

The March 29 action will take place at Citizenship and Immigration Canada Headquarters, (55 St. Clair E) at 2 p.m.

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For more about the Campaign Against the 4 Year Limit on Migrant Workers, go to no4and4.tumblr.com