By: Aiyanas Ormond
“Don’t kick us when we’re down,” said Susan Aleck, standing in front of the provincial courthouse in Vancouver. “Let us get up and make ourselves better. Give us some space.”
Aleck is one of four members of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) who, with representation from PIVOT Legal Society, are challenging street vending bylaw tickets on the grounds that the bylaw violates their constitutional right to ‘security of the person’. This past Tuesday, September 23, B.C. provincial court Judge William Yee upheld the bylaw, delivering a big f-you to poor people and telling them that they have ‘other options’ even though each of the four had testified in detail that vending used goods was the best of a bad list of options available to them at the time they were ticketed.
VANDU has had a campaign against the use of bylaw ticketing to criminalize poor people and people who use drugs in Vancouver since 2009. In that year, in the lead up the Olympics, the Vancouver Police Department went on a ticketing blitz, giving out more than 1400 tickets (normally a years worth) in a matter of days in the Downtown Eastside. These tickets were for offenses like jaywalking, vending, public urination and riding a bike without a bell. The targeted nature of the ticketing, the fact that people on welfare would never be able to pay them, and the reality that bylaw tickets can very easily turn into a warrant and jail time – usually for failure to appear for a court date – made this campaign a high priority for VANDU members. VANDU took Political action, including shutting down a City Council Meeting, and forced the City Prosecutor to eventually scrap about two-thirds of the tickets. But the pattern of criminalization has continued as the VPD use bylaw tickets to target, harass and criminalize poor people in the Downtown Eastside. Churning poor people through their oppressive containment system also keeps police busy over-policing the community, justifies the inflated VPD budget and fills the new semi-privatized provincial remand centre.
As part of the campaign VANDU has: completed a major study on pedestrian safety in the neighbourhood and won a 30km speed zone on Hastings; helped launch a community controlled Sunday street market that has run for several years; exposed that 75% of all jaywalking tickets and 95% of all vending tickets are handed out in the Downtown Eastside; picketed City Hall and protested in Vancouver Police Board meetings; conducted a participatory action research report on lack of access to toilets in the DTES which the City paid for but would not publish; held a hot seat meeting with a City Councillor and 100 VANDU members; and made mass visits to the Mayor’s office.
The tactic of a legal, constitutional challenge to the vending bylaw was only one component of multi-faceted strategy, but the outcome is instructive. Basically, the decision makes it very clear that class war from above – starvation level welfare rates, gutting of social programs, criminalization of poor people’s survival activities – is both legal and constitutional. In fact, we should expect less and less room to maneuver within the legal system. The neoliberal containment state – the strengthening of the legal, police and prison apparatus of repression – is not an optional policy of neoliberal capitalism, but a necessary complement to the rising rate of economic exploitation inherent in neoliberal economic policy. The judiciary, far from being independent, is profoundly implicated in (and shaped by) this process and ultimately will conform with the governance strategy of the ruling class.
This is why VANDU understands the ‘ticketing campaign’ as existing within broader campaigns against criminalization (‘Homes Not Jails!’ and ‘No More Drug War’) and those campaigns as only components of still broader project of drug users liberation which itself intersects with struggles against colonialism, racism and capitalism.
Louise’s video interview can be found here. See a previous article on this issue.
“The Vancouver Police Department went on a ticketing blitz, giving out more than 1400 tickets (normally a years worth) in a matter of days in the Downtown Eastside” PHOTO: VANDU
“fix the class system to fix the school system”
Please see full article: Education inequality shocks Thorncliffe Park residents.
To get involved or to learn more about Thorncliffe Reach-Out Teach-In (TRT)’s community organizing efforts to challenge these inequalities, e-mail [email protected], or visit the Facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/ThorncliffeRT/
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The ‘Ford Agenda’ won’t go down with Ford
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by Steve da Silva
In the midst of the financial crisis, in early 2009 the Ontario provincial and federal governments dumped more than $10.8 billion in loans and debt forgiveness into bailing out General Motors (another $2.9 billion went to Chrysler) – which translated into an 11.7 % stake in the company for the two levels of government.
In late July 2013, the rumour mill had it that the two governments were now looking to sell those shares.
In 2010, the two levels of government got back over $1.1 billion USD when they sold off 35 million shares at GM’s initial public offering. But they still hold 140 million shares, making them the third largest investor in the company, currently valued at around $5.2 billion CDN. The stock would have to be valued at over $50 a share for Canadian taxpayers to get their money back. They stand to lose billions of dollars from the sale.
But thanks to the bailouts – and years of low-financing options with the help of low interest rates set by the Bank of Canada – the ‘big-three’ automakers in North America are posting record profits in the last couple of years. In early January 2013, Stephen Harper dumped another $250 million of subsidies to the auto sector.
In the panic of the financial crisis, various levels of government and the Canadian Auto Workers union leaders past and present were defending the bailouts as a necessary move to keep auto-sector production in Ontario and Canada. But with billions of dollars dumped into GM, jobs are still disappearing and production is still drifting south in search of more exploited workers. Jobs are no more secure than before the bailouts.
Since 2001, endless subsidies and concessions to the auto companies have done nothing to stop the nearly 60,000 auto-sector jobs that have disappeared. This has been the result of restructuring of the industry to move production to countries where workers can be paid far less, as well as boosts in productivity from replacing workers with machinery.
GM upset the Canadian government in December 2012 when it announced it was shifting the production of the Chevrolet Camaro to Lansing, Michigan in 2015, moving 1,000 jobs south of the border. The decision was announced a week after Michigan passed the notorious, union-busting ‘right-to-work’ legislation. The Canadian Autoworkers Union made major concessions in bargaining in 2006 to keep the Camaro in Oshawa. The other major plant in Oshawa only has production earmarked until 2017 according to the terms of the bailout agreement.
What’s worse, is that with the legacy of the bailout dollars set to end soon, industry analysts are speculating that GM may return to troubled times almost immediately as billions of dollars worth of liabilities hit them in the coming years: pension costs are set to soar as government funds for company pension obligations come to an end; the interest-free loans will come to an end; and payments to finance health care costs will no longer be covered by the government.
In effect, it’s been public tax dollars paying for the pensions of former GM workers while the company takes the credit. Currently, GM pays its pensioners through a combination of $200-million in annual company contributions and drawing down amounts from what is known as a prior year’s credit balance. The credit balance was created by a $4-billion deposit to the pension funds as part of the 2009 bailout. The credit balance is effectively a bank account from which GM Canada was allowed to draw for five years to finance its annual pension payments, thus avoiding hefty annual cash contributions. This balance is expected to reach zero around September 2014, at which point the company will have to start using its own money.
The $220-million in interest-free loans that the federal and Quebec governments gave the company for a shuttered plant in Ste-Thérèse, Que., also come due on April 1, 2017.
In late 2014, the first of five annual payments on an $800-million note that finances a trust fund set up to pay for health care costs for unionized retirees will also come due. Those payments amount to $1.28-billion over the five-year period.
Just last month, Canadian GM retirees won a court case against the company when it broke agreements and slashed health care and life insurance benefits in 2009 as part of its restructuring. GM said it would appeal the decision. The success of the class action lawsuit would place another $1.5 billion in obligations on the company.
Anyone who has bought into the neoliberal story about welfare programs sapping state resources should take a look at the big, fat elephant in the middle of the room: big corporations, despite their ‘free-market’ rhetoric, are the biggest drain on public resources.
In a couple of years, when GM starts to find itself wracked with its financial liabilities once again, the case will be made that it’s the fault of overpaid, unionized workers that the auto-sector is in trouble and why it’s necessary for the government to come to the rescue.
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