Monday, June 16th, residents and community organizations held a press conference to demand an end to police sweeps in the Downtown East. Photo from OCAP.

The Downtown East community is one of the poorest urban neighbourhoods in Canada – it is suffering from a lack of resources and services and definitely not from a lack of policing.  There is a high concentration of homelessness, overfull shelters, run-down community housing, and underfunded services. Communities like ours are bearing the brunt of an escalating agenda of austerity coupled with the impact of upscale redevelopment.  If the money being put into this crackdown were, instead, used to provide housing and shelter, the safety and well being of the people in this community, and many others, would be far better served.

The TAVIS intervention may be presented as a challenge to violence or as part of the ‘war on drugs’ but like all claims of a ‘war on drugs’ it will be felt in this community as ‘the war on the poor’.  It is also sickening irony that this past fall and winter, 51 Division police failed to even use this kind of mass resources to alert women in the community of a series of sexual assaults let alone find the perpetrators.

We also know that where TAVIS has gone before – communities like Rexdale and Jane-Finch, they have only brought chaos and increased profiling and criminalization. Poor communities across Toronto have been policed to death – and we are sick of it. They can’t arrest their way out of poverty and inequality – but Toronto cops are making sure that the new jail and mega prisons the government has spent billions on, will continue to fill up.

What will happen when TAVIS invades our community

Homeless people will be harassed. Poor drug users will be targeted while drugs are consumed with impunity up the road in wealthy Rosedale. Sex workers will face an escalation in police scrutiny that can only make life harder and more dangerous for them.  As civil liberties are disregarded, indigenous people, immigrants and people of colour, especially youth will face disruption of their lives and criminalization.

Why is this happening

This police repression is part of an ongoing effort to gentrify, a.k.a. ‘revitalize’ the Downtown East community through the process of social cleansing and an effort to push poor people and services out of the neighbourhood. On top of this, just around the corner from the Downtown East, World Pride will be hosted in the village – despite many poor folks in our community being LGBTQ, the distraction of poor folks for tourists will not be tolerated. Also, the Downtown East neighbourhood is alarmingly close to the athletes’ village of next year’s Pan Am Games, we strongly suspect that his year’s crackdown is a dry run for an even greater police intrusion in 2015.

TAVIS is not welcome in our community.  We are not going to let them roam our streets with impunity. Their patrols will be monitored and their abuses challenged. Meet the needs that exist in this community and stop police harassment of those who live here.

From the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty

By BASICS Community News Service

We in BASICS Community News Service advance this discussion document in this same spirit of unity and struggle that has built a movement to reclaim May Day since 2009 with our allies both within the May 1st Movement (M1M) and outside of it.   We wish to advance what we see as key questions facing the struggles of oppressed and exploited peoples in this city.

These questions pertain to the forms of organizing that will make us stronger and better prepared for the fights ahead.  We welcome feedback and commentary.

2006-2014: Our experiences in building a people’s media apparatus

BASICS was launched in 2006 to serve the immediate purpose of building a fight against gentrification in Lawrence Heights.  As our paper’s readership grew in this and other communities, our membership did as well, ultimately extending our organization’s coverage and connection to many more issues facing the most exploited, precarious, and brutalized sections of the working class in Toronto.

To the extent that we have developed as a people’s media apparatus is the extent to which we’ve reported on the day-to-day horrors of capitalism, from the daily physical and mental strain of surviving under capitalism, living under slumlord landlords, living with precarious status, or facing cops serving out orders to mine our communities for more racialized working-class folks and all too ready to shoot our people down.

 Yet, we also recognize that we have much to improve as a people’s media organization. We need to: produce more regularly; extend our distribution; be more consistent in developing sharp, appealing and accessible formats; and most importantly, produce content that, in the example of the best stories we’ve covered, lights some fires and appeals to all the just concerns of the people.

But we are also not paid. There are little to no career opportunities in our work.  We have been and remain an organization of people with stakes in nothing less than the realization of a movement that can confront our class oppressors and exploiters, dispossess them of their power and wealth, and avert the global ecological disaster unfolding in real time.

We see our role as a people’s media organization not to “speak truth to power,” but to collect and reflect back to the people the most revolutionary ideas and advanced struggles amongst us, from around the world, throughout history, and right down to the struggles on our blocks and in our buildings.

But, as observers and participants in people’s struggles, we have to do more than just hold up a mirror to the unfolding disasters around us.

This is why we consciously reject the liberal sham of a notion of “objectivity” in our reportage. The capitalist media, in all its entities, are united in the perpetuation of our exploitation and the plunder of the earth to keep their system profitable. Even when the ruling class appears divided over how to continue governing in their parasitic system — with a smile or a sneer, with sugar-coated bullets or tear gas and tasers – they are united in keeping us under their guns, scattered, and disorganized.

Therefore, an active discussion and debate on the methods by which to end exploitation and oppression by capitalist imperialism must all be part of the unfolding discussion and debate in our media work.

 We need to build people’s power for the fights ahead

The simplest way of expressing our conception of progressive political change is as follows: the conscious political activity of the masses of people is the only means to liberation. The expanding participation, control, and conscious direction of the people in the struggle against their class enemies is what keeps that struggle on a path that leads towards universalizing social emancipation, and not towards new forms of exploitation and oppression. This is what democracy looks like. It’s not a formal or procedural thing. It’s a substantive thing, and it has a class content. Democracy for our class enemies is their dictatorship over us.

So we are faced with the question of how to build democratic mass organization that expands and deepens amongst the people. Not a coalition for the next election. Not a process that launches political careers for a select few among us. Not a build up for one day of action that can pressure our enemies.  Rather, combative, class-struggle mass organizations where democracy is about how we define the growing power within our movement, not how we are going to relate to social classes that are parasites upon our bodies.

Are we building organizational forms that can actually capture the imagination of people who share common oppressors and exploiters?  Do we have the capacity to stimulate struggles that can build an expanding struggle against common enemies, rather than simply reacting in this or that defensive way against a new round of ruling class attacks? Do we even have the basis of defining common enemies at this point? We want to be able to answer all these questions in the affirmative, but we don’t think any organization in Toronto can at this point.

For those of us who are seriously committed to the organization and mobilization of the masses in our communities for struggle, for a conscious fight back, for an offensive that we need a long-term buildup of forces for, what organizational and political formations do we require to advance people’s struggles in our city? We don’t have definite answers, but we hope we can raise some important questions and we believe that we have a correct orientation towards their resolution.

 First steps: Towards a combative working-class mass organization

Over the summer of 2014, BASICS will be launching an intensive wave of social investigation in a series of neighbourhoods, reporting on these investigations along the way in our media, and exploring where there may be the most important sites of intervention for the construction of new organizing initiatives.

We would like to see the outcome of our 2014 initiative to be to develop a strong, strategically united, pan-Toronto mass organization of peoples oppressed and exploited by Canadian imperialism, capitalism, and colonialism who live in this city. Such an organization can’t be afraid of talking to people who may like Rob Ford.  And this organization has to be willing and able to sink deep roots amongst the most oppressed and exploited.

Since class struggle advances only in proportion to the degree of people consciously taking initiative within clearly formulated and tactically-flexible strategic plans, we want to open up this debate far beyond the confines of our own organizations.  We wish to work with any and all organizers who can roll with us in a practice that builds the capacity of the people for combative struggles and a concerted fight back beyond May Day.

Let’s also be clear about our own sympathies in BASICS is with with general socialist orientation. But for the record, our practice contrasts sharply with those who see the path to “socialism” as a struggle within the NDP, as primarily a struggle within unions, as an electoral or parliamentary process, or those who define socialism as a project that can be advanced independently of the struggles of people against imperialism across the world.  We may not be guided by a clear socialist program, but that doesn’t stop us from taking stock of the positive lessons of the most revolutionary, powerful and mass-based movements in the world fighting against imperialism and for socialism and a complete elimination of class division and national oppression.

But let’s not be divided by vocabularies that we may not (yet) have in common. We stand for a mass-based, grassroots, people-power organizing that puts a widening section of the oppressed and exploited people in the driver’s seat of revolutionary social change.  If we do anything contrary to spirit of these principles, we demand to be held to account, and we want to be criticized.  If you’re down with this orientation, get at us. Comment on this article on our website — or on Facebook if that’s where to find it. Email us at [email protected].

Serve the People! Fight the Power!

BASICS Community News Service

To all our relations,

The latest in a series of recent attacks on Indigenous peoples’ rights and sovereignty in Canada is being prepared right now by the Federal Conservative government. Bill C-10 – formally called the Tackling Contraband Tobacco Act – will criminalize the Native tobacco trade and destroy one of the few remaining economic infrastructures in indigenous communities that allows many people to remain in their ancestral territories and communities.

Bill C-10 will criminalize the possession for the purpose of sale of “unstamped” (meaning unpaid Canadian duties) tobacco. It will invoke mandatory minimum sentencing for those found with 10,000 cigarettes or more than 10 kilograms of loose leaf tobacco. It will require First Nations, local, and provincial police to criminally charge those in violation of the act, which will dramatically escalate already tense relationships between Indigenous peoples and police forces. It will allow police to draw up massively expanded search warrants and seize all assets deemed to be connected to tobacco “crime”, including peoples’ homes, vehicles and more. Perhaps the most troubling fact of all is that Bill C-10 will create a militarized RCMP Anti-Tobacco force to be used against Indigenous communities, putting far more indigenous people at risk from lethal police violence.

Bill C-10 will impact communities, families and workers. By attacking the First Nation tobacco trade, many people will lose their livelihoods, contributing to further destitution and dislocation. Such effects will hurt Indigenous families, especially women, forcing many out of decent jobs, out of their communities, and into the streets of Canadian cities where the crisis of murdered and missing Indigenous women is already at epidemic proportions. Such outcomes are unconscionable. On top of these outcomes, this new law violates principles of international, domestic, and treaty law. As sovereign nations, First Nations assert their rights to economic self-determination and deny Canada the right to tax their economies, making the law amount to illegal economic sanctions. The Constitution of Canada calls for respecting Aboriginal rights, which many see the sale of tobacco as including. As a violation of the Two Row Wampum and its principles of non-interference in the affairs of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), the law seems destined to cause conflict.

Bill C-10 does not emerge out of nowhere. Rather, it is tactical move on the part of the Canadian government in their larger strategic framework to contain, control, and ultimately assimilate Indigenous peoples. Mass incarceration of Indigenous peoples, the persistent murder and disappearance of Indigenous women, the surveillance of Indigenous activists, and the pressure by all levels of the Canadian state to accelerate land surrenders and secure “in all finality” the dispossession of Indigenous ancestral territories are all aspects of ongoing colonization. The passage and implementation of Bill C-10 will not only clearly aggravate all these other expressions of colonialism; it will deal a deadly blow in this multi-pronged set of attacks on Indigenous peoples that some analysts have described as a comprehensive “termination plan”.

The introduction of Bill C-10 a year after the emergence of Idle No More shows that the Conservative government, building on decades and centuries of colonial policies, has no intention but to continue, intensify and accelerate colonial violence and dispossession in Canada. This has been described in some communities as a “declaration of war”.

Please join us in saying NO TO BILL C-10! Our support of indigenous communities and their inalienable rights to self-determination depend on it.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

– Add your organization’s name to a list of endorsers of this statement and participate in meetings of the Coalition to help stop Bill C-10
– Sign the petition at http://killbillc10.com and have all your relations do the same
– Like and follow us on Facebook and Twitter
– Stay tuned for upcoming events and actions concerning Bill C-10.

In solidarity,

The Coalition Against Bill C-10