This article is reprinted with permission from the Red Sparks Union 

In early August a massive tailings pond at Imperial Metals’ Mount Polley copper and gold mine burst. The Secwepemc, the Xatsull and Esketemc Nations in the Cariboo region of BC immediately mobilized as the toxic waste spilled through their territories. Further north, in the Klappan region, members of the Tahltan nation went into action. It is here that Imperial Metals’ Red Chris mine – with an even larger similarly-flawed tailings pond – is under construction in a pristine area known as Tl’abāne, the Sacred Headwaters of the salmon-rich Stikine, Nass and Skeena Rivers. Sacred fires have been lit, resistance camps built, and various direct actions taken against both mining operations.

The Klabona Keepers, an organization of Tahltan elders and families, hold the Tl’abāne central to their food sustenance, traditions, and inter­generational teachings. Their 2005 blockades nixed a Shell fracking plan in the Klappan area. But the mining and oil/gas capitalists keep coming with government approval of LNG projects and an open-pit coal mine in the area.

The Mount Polley disaster was no “accident.” There is growing evidence that lax government inspection and years of corporate greed allowed massive waste dumping and environmental cost-cutting while workers’ warnings of cracks in the dam walls were ignored. When the tailings pond breached, people in the region mobilized to preserve traditional ways of living on these lands.

The Yuct Ne Senxiymetkwe Camp was established as a monitoring checkpoint at the entrance to the Mount Polley mine with the strong support of the Secwepemc people, the elder’s councils, the Ts’ka7 Warriors, as well as environmental activists and local residents. Clearly, the company’s clean-up efforts have made little progress. Even BC’s Environment Minister acknowledges the company has done less than two percent of the clean-up.

Heavy metals continue to leach into Quesnel Lake raising concerns about more damage with the spring break-up.

Within days of the August disaster, the Klabona Keepers set up a blockade at Red Chris Mine, hoping to prevent a similar catastrophe. When the Tahltan Central Council (TCC) and Imperial Metals came to an agreement for an independent review, the blockade was temporarily dismantled but was re-established at the end of September. Imperial Metals got an injunction and began pressing for arrests.

Though they have been arrested before, the Klabona Keepers took down the blockade to avoid that trauma of further prison time, and have been fighting the injunction ever since. This legal battle has been difficult as they’re up against corporate lawyers in a colonial court in far-away Terrace. The company has also managed to stir up division amongst the Tahltan nation. Two hundred members of the nation have been employed in the construction of the mine, and Imperial Metals is pressing for permits to begin operations by January, promising more jobs. The TCC has intervened against the Klabona Keepers in the injunction proceedings.

Meanwhile, the BC government has hampered an investigation of the disaster, failing to release records. Notably, billionaire and Imperial Metals shareholder

Murray Edwards was a fundraiser for Clarke’s re-election campaign. Both the Liberals and NDP say they won’t block Imperial Metal’s application to re-open Mount Polley, claiming the mine’s operations will pay for the clean-up!

The Klabona Keepers don’t trust the company or the government – and for good reason. “Imperial Metals has showed to us a lot of lies” says one of the grandmothers fighting for the land that has sustained her people for many generations and is their main source of food and cultural sustenance.

The Klabona Keepers are asking for solidarity, time and donations so that they can defend the land for their grandchildren. Their call has been answered by many, notably Elsipogtog Mi’kmaq Warriors (fighting fracking), Unist’ot’en Camp (standing against several pipeline projects) and Madii Lii camp (resisting LNG expansion.) Meanwhile, on Burnaby Mountain, five women were recently arrested opposing the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline and “in solidarity with the Klabona Keepers.”

If you roll along the curves of 6th line following the flow of the Grand River you will come across two of the three sites where the Six Nations Farmers Association (SNFA) has planted community white corn that is ready for harvest.

Arthur Porter of the Oneida Nation and head of the SNFA shares, “the field, that’s down on River Range Road is the one that was planted later, and it’s actually good right now for ceremony. It’s good if somebody’s going to make green corn”.

The SNFA invite all Six Nations community members to visit any of the three growing sites and pick your own white corn that’s ready for harvest.

The sites are located at:

1. West of physical locator # 3202 on River Range Road
2. South side on 6th Line West of Chiefs Wood Road near physical locator # 1593
3. North side on 6th Line West of Chiefs Wood Road near physical locator # 1593

Porter explains, “we’ve been growing white corn consistently for a few years to help our community and the elected system has been kind enough to fund the projects, and we try to grow around 20 – 25-acres. So we have quite an anchorage there”. In speaking to the Two Row Times, Porter muses that, “we get a lot of good reports, people stop and compliment us on what we are doing. Sort of helps us to know that we are doing something good for the community. It takes a little bit of work, a little bit of time and land, but it’s good. We want to give back to the community, that’s the goal here”.

Fellow member of the SNFA, Ralph Sowden of the Mohawk Nation adds that “we didn’t just start it a few years ago, us guys [SNFA] have been doing it for quite a few years. It’s been 10-15 years that AJ Farm’s has been doing it. And the Band Council has just pitched in the last two/three years to help us to do the buying of the corn, [mostly] the seeds [because] the seeds are expensive”.

In exploring the reasons behind why this project was started and taken up by the SNFA, Mohawk and Turtle clan member Ruby Jacobs, who is the SNFA’s Secretary and Treasurer explains, “a couple of years ago there was no white corn; a shortage that stimulated a concern across the community and the farmers felt it and wanted to do something”. Further, Porter iterates, “in one of our meetings it was discussed how we could start to put something back and we started farming it [white corn] as a group in the Farmers Association. And it just kept going from there and we want to keep it going. We want to have corn available as long as we are farming. It’s a staple for our community and to give back that way is great”.

When asked about what are some of the challenges about getting the community white corn project off the ground, Porter shares “weather is the biggest part in growing anything on the farm…and we’ve had children ride through our crops, like ride through the corn. There’s been quite a bit of damage down there where they went through. It’s sort of picked up this year for some reason. We have worked with the police to get into the schools to tell the children, DON’T RIDE IN THE FIELDS!”

Farming along with stewardship of the land and care for community for each Porter, Sowden, and Jacobs has deep cultural and family roots. Porter emphasizes, “I think when you’re a farmer, an old school farmer I’d say, you want to help your neighbor, you want to make sure they have enough. If it’s white corn or extra potatoes you pass it on”. To that Sowden highlights, “I guess it’s just a community thing…There aren’t many people who want to help as it’s dollars that you see today, and there’s isn’t dollars at the end of the row I’ll tell ya…It’s got to be a community thing, help one another out.” Jacobs reflects, “because I came from a farm, I really understand the importance of that way of life, in order to sustain your family, community, yourself and the Haudenosaunee culture, the way of life of the Haudenosauee people”.

The SNFA, along with the community white corn project has plans of expanding their work and impacts in the community. Porter divulges, “we’ve been working on plans to get land to store our own grain, which would be better than taking her off the territory, plus a cold storage facility. Somebody would raise eggs; raise chickens, so we would have our own chickens, either way. There’s no reason in the world why we shouldn’t have our own….we’ve got some plans in the works. It’s just going to take a little time to get it, but hopefully before Ralph and I hang up our pitchforks. We want to have something in place for the next generation to carry on.”

SIX NATIONS – Late Friday, Two Row Times learned that the CAS and McMaster Children’s Hospital are seeking a push from the courts to forcibly return Jada Johnson into chemotherapy. The 11-year-old female from Six Nations was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia in August.

Initially the CAS did inform the child’s mother Deneen Hill, that they had no issue with her decision to seek a holistic hybrid method of Ongwehowe Onongwatri:yo and other alternative therapies as treatment for Jada. This form of treatment will also be monitored by doctors.

However now sources say an unnamed third party is involved in bringing the CAS to court to order the child be put back into chemotherapy.

If the court makes that decision, it would violate Articles 10 & 24 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; that indigenous people cannot be forcibly removed from their lands without free and prior consent, and the right to use traditional medicines and health care practices without discrimination.

After completing 11-days of a 32-day round of intense chemotherapy, the child’s mother stopped the treatments because Hill says her daughter was experiencing severe reactions to standard chemo. That is when Hill opted to end chemotherapy and brought Jada home to instead start a traditional indigenous treatment program combined with other alternatives.

When Hill announced she was pulling Jada from the chemo treatments, CAS was contacted and they initiated a family visit.

Hill previously told the Two Row Times that CAS had no issue with her decision since she is willing to be cooperative with the hospital and a doctor from McMaster who would be tracking her progress. However now the CAS and McMaster Children’s Hospital are bringing the issue to court this Monday.

This is the second child from the Six Nations/New Credit community to have an ALL diagnosis and who reacted badly to standard chemotherapy treatments given at McMaster Children’s Hospital.

Earlier this year, Makayla Sault, also 11 years old, endured 11 weeks of chemotherapy at McMaster Children’s Hospital and endured severe side effects. After being informed by doctors that it is known that  First Nations Children don’t fare well in chemo, Sault’s parents pulled her from chemo in favor of treatment through Ongwehowe Onongwatri:yo medicines and alternative therapies. A decision that the New Credit Band Council and other band councils across the country supported. A large gathering of indigenous people from across the province also organized, the Makayla Defense Force, who said they were ready to peaceably ensure that the child would not be removed from her territory.

Sault’s parents previously told the Two Row Times that a doctor at McMaster told her that anyone who tells them indigenous medicines work “should be thrown in jail.”

The Sault family was also threatened by personnel from McMaster Children’s Hospital with CAS enforcement, being told that if they did not keep Makayla in treatment that CAS would be contacted and that they would likely remove all three of their children.

Eventually the CAS did become involved, however, they did not have objections to the child being treated with indigenous medicines while being monitored by the family’s physician.

The CAS called a public meeting official where they publicly apologized to the Sault family. The Sault’s also received a letter of apology from McMaster Children’s Hospital earlier this summer.

Sault is now healthy and has returned to school. She continues to receive indigenous medicines to support her immune system and keep her healthy.

Within the Six Nations/New Credit communities the rate of cancer survivorship in after utilizing an holisitc indigenous method of treatment for is high. However because it is considered traditional knowledge, practitioners choose not to put their patients through analysis and judgement by an external scientific review – one that is founded on studies that scrutinize data to establish proof.

This is in contrast to the indigenous perspective which has known thousands of years of experiential proof and knowledge via oral history.

This foundational difference has created a rift – specifically in treating children with cancer. While adults have the freedom to choose the course of treatment, hospitals in Canada who feel that a child is not being provided with what they percieve as proper treatment for illnesses must report the family to the CAS.

This article was originally published in the Two Row Times. 

By Tascha Shahriari-Parsa

Participants setting up for the Rally on July 27, 2014 to commemorate the anniversary of the Komagatu Maru.

On May 23^rd, 1914, the Komagata Maru steamship arrived in Vancouver with 376 passengers who were fleeing India. There were already over 2000 Indians living in Canada, primarily Punjabis, who faced blatant discrimination. Due to racist government policies to keep out the so called ‘brown invasion’, the passengers of the ship were not let off, and the Komagata Maru was forced to return to India by the Canadian government. 20 of the passengers were killed upon arrival by British colonialists’ bullets.

That was the ‘old Canada’. Now, one hundred years later in what we might consider the ‘new Canada’, people of different nations, led by the Indian community, stood together on July 27^th, 2014 in Vancouver to commemorate the anniversary of the incident. It wasn’t, however, a passive commemoration. It was not the kind of commemoration that merely acknowledges the barbarity of the past and takes an idle stance on the present. It was not only a day to reflect on the racist government policies of the past, but also a day to connect them with the present. It was a day for marginalized and oppressed communities to voice resistance against the racism that is integral to colonialism and imperialism and the power of oppressive classes today, both in Canada and around the world.

Just over a hundred years ago, the Continuous Passage Act of 1908 was one of the discriminatory laws passed by the Canadian government, a law that required all immigrants to travel to Canada in an uninterrupted journey. The law made it extremely difficult for Asian immigrants to enter Canada, since most trips from Asia involved stops, and actually made it impossible for Indians to enter Canada as immigrants since there were no steamship lines that provided direct service between India and Canada.[1] To combat this blatantly racist law, Baba Gurditt Singh Sandhu led the journey of the Komagata Maru ship to challenge the act.

“Going a little further back in time,” spoke Lakhbir, from the Ghadar Party Centenary Celebrations Committee and the East Indian Defence Committee, “we can see that the economic hard-ships and social desperation that the Punjabi farmers faced due to increased taxation by British Colonialists on farmers forced them to flee the hell of colonial rule to look for better work opportunities. As the British subjects began to arrive in regions like Canada, part of the British Common Wealth, the Immigration laws became more and more discriminatory against the ‘undesirable ones’. The excuse given by the then Government was to avoid conflict between locals and immigrants, because locals feared job loss to immigrants.”

Lakhbir, from the Ghadar Party Centenary Celebrations Committee and the East Indian Defence Committee

 Thinking back to this incident, it is important that we do not see it in isolation, but rather understand that racism is and has always been inherent in the settler colonialism on which this country was founded; the appropriation of land and rapid accumulation of capital that once funded the British Empire and now serves the Canadian imperialist ruling class would not be possible without this racism.

If we think back in time to 1492, when Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, the Europeans immediately began their plans to subjugate the Indigenous people. “They ought to make good and skilled servants…” Columbus writes early on, “With 50 men, you could subject everyone and make them do what you wished,” he said. This was a war of conquest, pursued with racist justifications for the purpose of economic domination. Merely 4 years after Columbus’s arrival in the island of Hispaniola, shared by the modern day Dominican Republic and Haiti, half of the 8 million Indigenous peoples on the island were dead. In the coming decades, this genocide spread through Mexico, Central America, and Peru, killing tens of millions of indigenous people, arguably comprising the most devastating holocaust of history.

The Europeans did not simply arrive in North America for the purposes of settlement – the indigenous peoples were enslaved, forced to work on their own land to grow crops for Europe or extract silver and gold through perilous mines – very similarly to the British occupation of India and the imperialist ventures that continue to exploit the Indian people today. Racism was so vital to this exploitation that it became in and of itself part of the rule of law: racism that has managed to exist independently of economic incentives and racism that has itself governed the nature of society.

Evidently, the refusal of the Komagata Maru very much fits into this legacy of racism. As Lakhbir continued, “On the other hand there were 400,000 immigrants admitted to Canada from Europe in 1913 alone: a figure that remains unsurpassed to this day.  One wonders then, if this was really not an act designed as a policy to keep Canada ‘White’?  One of the most important reasons was certainly, as we strongly believe, the initiations of National Liberation aspirations and fervour amongst Indian people. The heroic legacy of Indian People in resisting occupation and embarking on the liberation struggle, soon after the occupation was complete, is known to the world. The great Ghadar movement of 1857 is also known as last battle of resistance against occupation and first battle for National liberation. And the 1857 Ghadar rebellion has since inspired, generation after generation of Indian people to wage pitched battles against unjust rule.”

That was the old Canada. What about the new Canada?

As if to make us certain that racism persists today in the policies of our governments, the Federal government of Canada recently passed Bill-C24: The Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act. This is a Bill that is so illegitimate that it violates International Law on Citizenship. Now, the citizenship of a person born in Canada can be revoked if they are thought to be able to claim citizenship in another state through one of their parents – even if that person has absolutely no connection to their parent’s country. What might merit such a revocation? The criteria is membership in “an armed force of a country or as a member of an organized armed group and that country or group was engaged in an armed conflict with Canada” or engagement “in certain actions contrary to the national interest of Canada”.

The wording of this bill is so vague, who knows what could constitute “actions contrary to the national interest of Canada.” What is the national interest of Canada, and who decides it? ; Certainly not the indigenous people whose interests are completely ignored by the colonial government. Rather, the decision is made by the Minister of Immigration and Citizenship, on paper, without a hearing of any sort; The minister merely provides a notice of intent to revoke Citizenship, allows for a letter in response, and then makes a decision. Not only that, but the minister must have only “reasonable grounds to believe” that a person possesses or could possess citizenship to another country in order to deport them – someone who is incorrectly perceived to hold citizenship elsewhere could become stateless, breaching article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Bill C24 has been part of a long line of actions, taken by this government, to persecute the very same people who are fleeing persecution and seeking asylum in Canada. In 2012, the Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act made it so that any group of refugees coming to Canada without papers, by boat or air, could be detained for up to a year without any form of judicial review. The Immigration Minister also brought forth a racist list of 27 nations that he deemed to be ‘safe countries’, making it so that Roma people fleeing persecution from Hungary would have no chance of being accepted as refugees in Canada. In the same year, the conservative government also cut health care for refugees, depriving them from life-saving medication, until the Federal Court struck down the government’s changes in July of 2014.

These racist policies of the Canadian government show that even the thin veil of ‘democracy’ that exists is being taken away – or perhaps its inexistence is becoming clear. People sometimes believe that we have democracy because of the court system, as we have the right to a fair trial and that the rule of law governs over them with justice; but as the capitalist crisis has hit post-recession, the state can’t even afford to put on a facade of democracy anymore. We see this with the stripping away of social programs, the implementation of brutal austerity measures, and bills like C-24.

Thus, while we commemorate the anniversary of the Komagata Maru, it’s important that we do not make the mistake of believing that racist government policies are a mere thing of the past. They have been ingrained in our system since the inception of our settler colonial state and they continue to persist today. The Canadian government has left us with nothing other than what the East Indian Defence Committee considers the “eye-wash politicsof Apologies”: what good are apologies for racist policies of the past when equally racist policies are being enacted in the present?

A placard reads “Down with Policies of Apologies”.

“Welcome to the new Canada,” said Aiyanas Ormand, a writer for BASICS, on behalf of the International League of People’s Struggle and Red Sparks Union, “Sadly, it is very much like the old Canada that so ruthlessly turned away the Komagata-Maru.”

 “We urgently need to build an alliance of oppressed people capable of not only waging powerful defensive battles, but also of linking with the revolutionary movements developing in the global South and of fighting for social transformation here in the belly of the beast,” Aiyanas continued. “We need an alliance of Indigenous peoples, people of oppressed nationalities, and the super-exploited multi-racial working class organized on a firm basis of anti-racism, anti-capitalism, women’s liberation and internationalism.

 “The positive Komagata-Maru legacy has been the role of the South Asian community, in Vancouver,  leading many very important struggles for social justice, and in linking us here to the great movements of the subcontinent for national and social liberation. Today, we should all commit to carrying on this legacy until this rotten racist patriarchal imperialist system is finally overthrown.”

 Therefore, let us stand for the legacy of the ship, and actively fight against racism and all other forms of oppression in the spirit of its passengers.

 The Komagata Maru rally was organized by the Ghadar Party Centenary Committee and supported by International League of People’s Struggles, No One is Illegal, Red Sparks Union, and the Revolutionary Student Movement. The following resolutions were also unanimously adapted:

1. This rally resolves to dedicate itself to the memory of the Passengers aboard Komagata Maru, who endured ugly unwelcoming gestures upon their arrival in Canada, inhuman conditions while they awaited their fate in the waters of the Burrard Inlet, and death for 20 of them (a miserable life for the rest) on return to India.

2. This rally resolves to call upon people to unite and fight against all the anti-people laws, such as Bill C-24, being enacted and enforced to devastate people’s lives. It further calls upon people to stand united and vigilant against the recurrence of Komagata Maru-like incidents.

3. This rally believes that, the politics of apologies is nothing more than a corrosive eye wash for people. This rally resolves to denounce the “POLITICS OF APOLOGIES”.

4. This rally resolves to denounce the “BILL C-24”, the so called ‘citizen-ship strengthening act’. The rally further resolves to challenge the BILL C-24 and call for its immediate withdrawal.

5. This rally resolves to denounce Israel’s occupation of Palestinian Nation, present attack on civilian population in Gaza, killings of innocent women and children. This rally further denounces the WAR CRIMES being committed by Apartheid Israel state. This rally resolves to be in solidarity with Palestinian people’s struggle for freedom.

6. This rally resolves to support the Native people’s struggle for their rights.

7. This rally resolves to denounce the Fascist Indian state, which crackdown on people’s democratic rights. It further resolves to call for an immediate end to Operation Green Hunt and other such operations. This rally also resolves to Demand for the release of all political prisoners in India.

[1] http://www.whitepinepictures.com/seeds/i/10/sidebar.html

Reproduced with permission from author and The Mainlander: Vancouver’s Place for Progressive Politics

AUTHOR’S NOTE | This article emerges from 5 years of working as a community organizer for the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU). Thank you to the VANDU Board for allowing me to lean on their community organizing work and to collaborate in developing an analysis of the ‘mass incarceration agenda.’ And thank you to all the VANDU members who shared their experiences, challenged my ignorance and encouraged me to contribute this analysis to the struggle against the drug war and the war on the poor.

Introduction

The last decade in Canada has seen the strengthening of the instruments of repression of the Canadian State such that we can now begin to describe and analyze the neoliberal containment state as a specific set of policies and institutions. These policies and institutions are aimed at containing the growing social ‘disorder’ and emerging resistance that have resulted from 30 years of the neoliberal economic order.

Far from being a sinister machination of the “Harper agenda,” the neoliberal containment state enjoys a consensus across the ruling class and between electoral parties. No mainstream political party is putting forward a coherent alternative vision for managing monopoly capitalism. The appeals to a softer gentler capitalism coming from the labour bureaucracy and the ‘left’ wing of the NDP have no coherent economic program attached to them. The reality is that the strengthening of the police/incarceration containment state is intimately tied to the social consensus of the bourgeoisie about how to manage capitalism and accumulation in this historical period. The neoliberal containment state is a necessary corollary of the other components of the neoliberal project in Canada:

1. Trade liberalization beginning with the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement and NAFTA.
2. Privatization of former state enterprises and public services.
3. De-funding of redistributive social programs under the cover of austerity and debt reduction.
4. Weakening and dismantling of regulatory frameworks including environmental and labour regulations.
5. Diminishing the use function of social programs for working class communities and increasing their control function.

It is important to understand the institutions and instruments of this containment state, their connections to the economics of neoliberalism, and their functionality for the Canadian colonial capitalist project as we build movements of struggle, resistance and revolution.

Components of the neoliberal containment state

Legislating criminals

While people often view the components of the neoliberal containment state as purely a product of the Harper government, several important elements were already in place before the conservatives came to power. These include anti-gang legislation and anti-terrorism legislation which interact with and give ideological cover to the broader sweeping criminalization of poor people, drug users, Indigenous people, immigrants and refugees that has emerged in the legislation’s wake.

Under anti-gang legislation, concerns about ‘gang violence’ – stripped of any structural analysis of gangs, where they come from and why people join them – have become a justification for more cops on the streets. In particular urban working class communities of colour and Indigenous communities are targeted by increasingly militarized and violent gang units which exacerbate horizontal violence and effectively criminalize whole communities. As a component of the drug war, these police strategies are much more likely to target and arrest poor low level sellers and users (the low lying fruit) than the big time dealers. Poor people are singled out within what is essentially a criminalized capitalist enterprise with multiple layers of security protecting the upper managers from law enforcement.

Police use gang labeling in much the same way that the imperialist countries use terrorist labeling – to take violence out of its historical and political context and define large groups of people as simply ‘bad guys,’ justifying any level of repression against them.

The terrorism legislation, especially the list of ‘Listed Terrorist Entities’ which includes numerous movements of national liberation and resistance to neo-colonial oppression, has in practice been used as a means to sow fear within immigrant communities, to divide them from their liberation struggles, and to target institutions of Indigenous resistance. The first direct application of the terrorist legislation was against such an institution, the West Coast Warriors Society, in 2006. Since 2001, labeling of Indigenous resistance as an ‘internal terror threat’ has emerged as a normal feature of settler-colonial societies from Canada to New Zealand, Australia and Israel.

We can view these antecedents – anti-gang legislation and anti-terrorist legislation – as the thin edge of the wedge in the initial development of the neoliberal containment state. Main legislative components of the neoliberal containment state have, however, come under the Harper majority government since 2011. They include key pieces of legislation like the so-called ‘Truth in Sentencing Act,’ the ‘Omnibus Crime Bill’ – which includes the dismantling of the Youth Criminal Justice Act leading to harsher sentences for young offenders – and intensified criminalization of immigrants and refugees, including arbitrary and indefinite detention (incarceration) of im/migrants.

The Canadian State has steadily increased the number of people cycling through the criminal justice system, experiencing regular punitive interactions with the police or other disciplinary arms of the State, and facing actual incarceration. This has taken place through a combination of criminalizing economic survival strategies, increasing prison time with mandatory minimum sentences, eliminating ‘double time served’ practices (where sentences are reduced by double the amount of time spent in a remand facility awaiting trial), making pardons and parole more difficult, and closing off legal avenues to status and citizenship for immigrants and refugees.

Mandatory minimums are a major new component in the war on drugs, serving as a mechanism for the criminalization and incarceration of poor people, particularly poor Indigenous people and Black people, in Canada. These provisions impose a minimum sentence for a range of offenses which are mostly linked to the production and distribution of currently illegal drugs. The legislation strips the judge of the ability to exercise discretion, including in cases where it is very clear that jail time will have no rehabilitative benefit and likely no social benefit.

While the rhetoric of mandatory minimums and the ‘tough on crime’ agenda is that these laws target ‘violent offenders’ and people involved in criminal gangs, the reality on the ground is that low level drug sellers – often addicted to the drugs that they are selling and frequently paid in drugs – are the ones who catch the vast majority of charges. Poor and overpoliced neighbourhoods in Canada’s major cities supply most of the ‘candidates’ for incarceration. In a recent case in B.C., where the judge refused to give the one year mandatory minimum, the ‘drug dealer’ is a poor man who is selling to support his own addiction. The mandatory minimum applies because of his previous ‘criminal history’ which includes a previous drug charge.

The legislative component of this containment state has both an ideological function and a control function. Ideologically, the legislation and ‘tough on crime’ discourse exploits and directs the economic insecurity of the middle class and more established working-class:

1. Directing the anxiety (and hostility) of the increasingly economically insecure middle class towards ‘downstream’ threats: the ‘disorderly’ poor and unemployed; ‘criminals’; ‘Indians’ and ‘terrorists.’
2. Exploiting intraclass divisions between the securely employed working-class and the unemployed working-class; and between working-class people with citizenship and working class people who are temporary foreign workers or migrant workers without status.

The control function also plays on different levels associated with maximizing the rate of exploitation and containing potentially unruly or rebellious populations:

1. Physical control and intimidation of the systematically excluded portions of the working-class – workers with addiction; serious physical and mental illness, the elderly, single mothers caring for children and other caregivers with dependents. Physical containment and intimidation supports the slashing of spending on programs that support this group.
2. Intimidation of new immigrants, temporary foreign workers and workers without status as a means to maximize the rate of exploitation by the Canadian capitalists who employ them.
3. Identification and containment of Indigenous assertion of territorial and self-determination rights.

Strengthening the institutions of repression: Police

Despite the fact that the crime rate (including violent crime) has been falling since 1991, the aggregate expenditure on Canadian police continues to rise, reaching $13.5 billion in 2012. In 2012 there was a slight dip in the number of actual cops on the job (slightly less than 70,000), but this is only because new ‘authorized’ (funded) police positions have not yet been filled. Meanwhile, the trend of increasing numbers of private security guards also continued, with over 140,000 licensed security guards in Canada.

There are also about 7,000 uniformed Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) officers across the country of which more than 3,000 are armed with semi-automatic 9mm Beretta pistols. While most of the CBSA officers are deployed at borders, ports, and airports, a small proportion of these are engaged in internal policing and removal of immigrants, refugees and migrants. They constitute an important added layer of the containment state and of surveillance, harassment and violence in the lives of immigrant, migrant and refugee communities.

The main role of police in the neoliberal containment state is functional, as the enforcers of the criminalizing legislation. However, police also constitute a semi-autonomous interest group advocating ‘tough on crime’ policies to justify increasing budgets and perpetuating the cycle of criminalization through aggressive over-policing of poor neighbourhoods and communities, a practice that has been characterized as ‘mining for crime.’

In 2013, Vancouver Police Department Chief Jim Chu earned $314,000, enough to put him squarely in the 1% along with other top police and RCMP managers. Even the rank and file cops, however, make as much as high level managers in capitalist firms – 650 VPD members make more than $100,000 and 3,000 Toronto cops are in this range. They are very highly paid for a job that is neither particularly dangerous (not in the top ten most dangerous occupations in Canada) nor requiring any particularly specialized skills. Moreover while police do not directly exploit workers, they enjoy a high degree of autonomy, prestige, and exercise a huge amount of ‘delegated’ class power as part of their job. So the material interest and class position of cops tie them profoundly to the ruling order.

Associations of chiefs of police as well as various police associations act as lobby groups for ‘tough on crime’ policies, despite their demonstrable ineffectiveness, exploiting the profoundly ahistorical and ideological construction of police as neutral and disinterested ‘protectors of public safety.’

Strengthening of the institutions of repression: Mass incarceration

Canada is currently undergoing what the National Post described in 2011 as “the largest expansion in prison building since the 1930s.” Some of this expansion is happening in the federal system (about 2,000 spots under construction at the time), but the vast majority of the spots (about 9,000 – some of which have now come online) are in the provincial system. Mostly these are remand spots. Remand is prison for people awaiting trial who have not yet been convicted of the crime for which they are charged. The new Edmonton Remand Centre (pictured below) is an example of this type of facility. It is a 16 hectare maximum security facility built at a cost of $580 million and built to house 1,952 prisoners, with room to expand by almost 1,000.

B.C. is also expanding remand space. The province is spending about $500 million to build new prisons in the Lower Mainland and the interior of the province. The recently completed 216-cell remand centre in Surrey makes the Surrey Pretrial Centre the largest jail in the province. In the interior a new 378 cell remand centre is being built on land owned by the Osoyoos Indian Band. In addition to considerably increasing the overall capacity to lock people up in the province, especially individuals who have yet to go to trial, these new prisons are almost entirely privatized. The staff and administration of the prison are public employees, but every other aspect of the facility is privatized: a contract to build-design and operate the facility (in the case of the Surrey facility this was awarded to Brookfield International, one of the largest and most profitable real-estate management companies in the world); health services; food services; and laundry. So while the profiteering is not as crass as it is in the corporate prisons in the U.S, there is nonetheless considerable profit taking in the neoliberal containment state.

Remand is where poor people being cycled and recycled through the criminal justice system do the vast majority of their time. This includes months awaiting trial, often without having committed any violent crime. Remand facilities are built as short term holding facilities even though they are now where the majority of prison time in Canada is served. They are maximum security, with one or more people locked in a tiny cell for 23 out of every 24 hours. They have no access to educational or self improvement programs, and no pretence at rehabilitation (after all the people in these facilities have not yet been found guilty of a crime).  On any given day about 60% of incarcerated people in Canada are in remand.

Conditions in remand are so punitive that some people charged with minor crimes will plead guilty just to speed up the judicial process and get out of remand and into a less punitive prison environment (like a low or medium security facility) or on to some kind of parole. But the conditions of parole are often unreasonable, frequently resulting in rearrest and contributing to the massive numbers of people incarcerated for administration of justice type charges.  For highly criminalized populations, the accumulation of convictions makes individuals increasingly vulnerable to re-incarceration. Administration of justice charges (failure to appear in court, breach of a court order, breach of a condition of parole) now constitute the most common charge in Canadian criminal courts (21% of all cases) and 42% of all charges in B.C.

In a 2011 Op Ed for the Toronto Star, Conservative Senator Hugh Segal notes that “less than 10 per cent of Canadians live beneath the poverty line but almost 100 per cent of our prison inmates come from that 10 per cent.” Segal cites the work by Star journalists Sandra Contenta and Jim Rankin whose analysis of a ‘one day snapshot’ of who is in Toronto jails showed that the vast majority of prisoners were drawn from a few very poor neighbourhoods. This is a process – referred to above as ‘mining for crime’– driven by heavy police presence, stop and search practices, and the policing of so-called street disorder.  In these neighbourhoods the police criminalize almost everyone creating conditions for easy and frequent arrests – especially for warrants for failure to appear, for breaches, for minor drug offences and street disorder charges like panhandling, vending and public drunkenness.

The population of Canada’s prisons says much more about the racist and colonial nature of the Canadian society than the ‘crimes’ of the incarcerated. Indigenous people make up about 4% of the population of Canada but are more than 23% of people incarcerated in the federal system. In the Prairie provinces (Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta) Indigenous people are about 50% of the incarcerated population in the federal system, and an even higher proportion in the provincial system. The mass incarceration of Indigenous women is even more disproportionate, with Indigenous women making up about 4% of all women but 41% of all incarcerated women.

Along with Black people who make up about 2.5% of the Canadian population but over 9% of the prison population, Indigenous people account for much of the 75% increase in ‘visible minorities’ in Canadian prisons in the last decade. Each of these statistics demonstrate the continuing significance of systemic racism and colonialism in shaping the criminal justice system, and this is without including the nearly 10,000 migrants jailed in Canada in 2013 for a total of 183,928 days or 504 years.

Restructuring of social programs to maximize the control function

Under the historic welfare state, government social programs – unemployment insurance, welfare, public education, public healthcare, public transit – were developed to transfer a small portion of the socially generated surplus back to the working class. These programs served both a use function (for the working class communities that rely on them economic stability and survival) and a control function (for the ruling class who uses them to cover up the underlying system of exploitation and to tie people ideologically and materially to the current order). As part of the basic economics of neoliberalism these programs have been gutted through a mixture of privatization, contracting out, and shifting the burden of payment onto those who rely on the program (through user fees), thus undermining their redistributive function. These changes erode or eliminate the use value of social programs for working class people.

Under the neoliberal containment state, the role and purpose of social programs is further transformed. More specifically, new structures and processes are introduced exclusively to increase the control function of social programs, which become increasingly intertwined with institutions of repression.

Transit in Vancouver is a good example. In the first decade of the 21st century the regional transit authority rapidly increased fares, decreasing the redistributive function of the public service for transit dependent working class people (who are disproportionately women and people of colour). At the same time Translink created a new police service, armed with semi automatic pistols on the buses and skytrain. The role of this police force is to ticket, publicly humiliate, and in some cases violently arrest those unable to pay the fare. Translink is also paying$171 million to install fare gates in the metro stations to capture (by their own figures) about  $6 million per year in unpaid fares.

Another example is welfare in B.C. The welfare rates have not risen substantially in 30 years, and are now so low that the Dieticians of Canada published a report showing that a person cannot eat properly on the current BC welfare rates, even if they were to spend their entirely monthly disposable income on food. Meanwhile the control function of welfare, mainly aimed at forcing people into any kind of exploitative low-wage work available, has increased with wait times to get on welfare, regular demands for proof of job searches, and mandatory participation in ineffective job search programs. Most relevant to emergence of the neoliberal containment state, however, is the increased securitization of interactions with welfare and the increasing direct involvement of police.

Under the new set up all requests and inquiries be made over the phone through a centralized call centre and the only face to face interaction in the remaining welfare offices is with clerical staff who accept and give out forms but don’t have any actual decision making power. These offices are routinely staffed by private security guards and all interactions take place through security glass. People on welfare no longer have an assigned social worker with whom they can develop an ongoing relationship.  In interactions over the phone, ‘tone of voice’ or any degree of emotion are used by social workers to hang up and end the interaction.  Thus the predictable anger of people who are being literally starved amid the conspicuous consumption and waste of Canadian capitalist society is met with ‘security’ and containment.

A further illustration is the provincial legislation enacted in June 2010 whereby people with an outstanding warrant anywhere in Canada can be denied or cut off welfare; thus the welfare state institution is transformed in such a way as to prop up and support the neoliberal containment state.

The Containment State as an Instrument of Canadian capitalism, colonization, and imperialism

by Steve da Silva

The writing on the wall couldn’t have been written in bigger, bolder, and clearer letters over the past year: The relentless exploitation of fossil fuel is rushing the planet beyond a series of irreversible environmental tipping points. Melting glaciers. Acidifying oceans. An atmosphere reaching carbon levels not seen in millions of years. We are in the midst of what scientists call a “mass extinction” event that is directly attributable to capitalist economy.  Species are being killed off at 1000 times the ‘background rate’ or normal rate at which species statistically go out of existence.

This is the context in which the National Energy Board and the Federal cabinet approved Enbridge’s Northern Gateway project, which plans to lay 1200 km of pipeline carrying diluted bitumen from Alberta to a northwest coast shipping terminus at Kitimat, B.C.

Last week’s decision was expected to yield a positive decision for the oil industry.  In December 2013, a three-member Joint Review Panel – ostensibly “independent” from but mandated by the Ministry of Environment and the National Energy Board (NEB) – issued a report recommending approval for the project subject to the 209 conditions that the Federal cabinet last week set for the project’s go ahead.  But this report has been analyzed as deeply flawed by the actually independent experts.

Scientific Opposition

On May 26, 250 members of the scientific community from throughout Canada and across the world published an Open Letter criticizing the “flawed analysis” of the Joint Review Panel’s assessment of the Northern Gateway project. As the letter highlighted who benefits and who will pay for Northern Gateway by drawing attention to the JRP’s “broad view of the economic benefits, but an asymmetrically narrow view of the environmental risks and costs.” The Open Letter concluded deemed the Joint Review Panel Report “as indefensible as a basis to judge in favour of the project.”

The Open Letter from scientists also brought attention to the proverbial elephant in the middle of the room: the Joint Review Panel’s complete exclusion of considerations for the increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

Climatologists argue that the proportion of atmospheric carbon that humans have evolved over the last couple hundred thousand years has been around 275 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric molecules.  As of the end of May 2014, the carbon content of the atmosphere stood at 400 ppm, well above the 350ppm that climatologists argue is necessary to preserve the current ecological equilibrium on earth.  The relentless expansion of the fossil fuel industry into hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), deep sea drilling, and oil sands is sealing the fate on irreversible ecological catastrophes.

The carbon content of the atmosphere as of May 2014, already a disastrous and climate changing level according to scientists, and climbing at a rate of 2 ppm / year and accelerating.

Northern Gateway to Where? Who benefits?

But none of this seems to matter to industry heads focused on their “bottom lines”.  Since the financial collapse of 2007/08, corporations have been all the more desperate for profitable investment opportunities that seem increasingly elusive. But intensified resource exploitation is a seeming to be a sure-fire way for Canada to keep itself at the apex of a stagnant, crisis-ridden and profit-based capitalist world economy.

The planned and now approved pipeline would see an estimated 220 oil tankers port and load at Kitimat each year.  Each day, the pipeline would fill 525,000 barrels of oil – a carrying capacity that Alberta’s oil industry is hungry for. In 2013, Alberta’s tar sands were already producing 1.95 million barrels a day, and the industry is planning for an upward expansion to 3.2 million barrels a day by 2020.  This is why industry is hedging its bets with the southward flowing expansion of Keystone XL.  When U.S. President Obama suspended the expansion of Keystone XL in 2011, Canada’s oil industry turned to Asia to become a new destination for its oil supplies.

If Northern Gateway goes online, it is estimated that it will bring tax revenue to B.C. of $1.2 billion dollars over a thirty year period.  That’s less than $40 million a year.  But these revenues are vastly dwarfed by the estimated clean-up costs of an oil spill on the northwest coast, which is estimated to range from anywhere between $2-$10 billion for such a disaster.  Yet, for all the risks and costs, Enbridge is only claiming that the project will yield a mere 560 permanent jobs and 3000 short-term jobs to build the pipeline.

A detailed map of the oil pipelines running throughout Canada. Image taken from an interactive infographic at CBC.

The Two Mountains: Popular Opposition, Indigenous Resistance

Major obstacles remain to the project, which Enbridge hopes to operational by 2018; and those obstacles aren’t just the Rocky and Coastal mountains that lay in the proposed pipeline’s path.

For one, by all measures it is clear that the majority of B.C. residents oppose the project, even in Kitimat, B.C.  Where one might expect to find the largest base of support given the concentration of jobs that would land in Kitimat’s small community of 9000, an April referendum saw 58% of voters oppose the project.  The ruling parties at the Federal level and in B.C. are looking wearily at this as many a lost vote. Trudeau’s Liberals and Mulcair’s NDP have said they’d reverse the decision if elected in 2015.  The Federal Green Party’s Elizabeth May, for her part, offered weak words of opposition saying that that “Next step is encouraging all British Columbians to use all democratic and peaceful and legal means to stop this pipeline.”

But beyond what’s legal and democratic is what’s ecological necessary and morally right, and such action is almost certainly forthcoming from the more firm opponents to be found amongst the Indigenous peoples of the northwest coast and interior nations.

First Nation communities must be “consulted” and won over as part of the 209 conditions that have been set out for Enbridge to meet – wise conditions for the Feds to set out, knowing that anything less would intensify the resistance that already exists to the project.

In December 2013, the First Nations Summit and Union of BC Indian Chiefs called upon the Feds to reject the Joint Review Panel’s recommendations and criticized the “the federal government [for] instead [chosing] to gut federal environmental protections, [and] unilaterally designed and imposed its greatly weakened environmental review process as a quick-and-dirty Aboriginal consultation process for the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project.”

In the wake of last week’s decision, Art Sterritt of the Coastal First Nations promised said in a statement that ““We’ll see if Enbridge dares to put its shovels in the ground… We will never allow oil tankers into our territorial waters.”

The Haida Nation added as unequivocally last week that: “We will take our fight to the land, sea and courts to uphold and protect Haida territory, and to ensure clean water, clean air, and a healthy way of life for future generations.”

Most importantly, perhaps, is the ongoing direct action by members of the Unist’ot’en Camp, who pledged to continue defending their territories “against the incursion of government and industry” in the wake of Northern Gateway’s approval.

Members of the Wet’suwet’en Nation erected a “soft blockade” in 2009 to block all pipeline projects trespassing upon their territories.

In a video statement released on June 17, two leading members of the Unist’ot’en Camp announced their resolve to continue their resistance.  Toghestiy said “This war is far from being over. We’re going to win this one, and we’re going to win it decisively.”

Freda Huson reminded warned that “If they [the Canadian government] try to bring any forces, we’re more skilled in the wilderness than they are, so… We’re not afraid of the Harper government. We’re not afraid of anybody else who is going to try to forcefully push their projects through our territories.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKLLEz_0R8M

So begins the delicate dance of Enbridge and its partners to find some ‘Aboriginal’ partners to give the project their blessings before proceeding further.

Sureté du Québec Lt. Guy Lapointe shows tobacco seized by the Quebec police force at a news conference, April 30, 2014 in Montreal. Photo credit: Ryan Remiorz , THE CANADIAN PRESS.

by M. Cooke

“You don’t have to go to Kahnawake to combat crime. The government is trying to make us [indigenous people] look worse in the eyes of their public,” says John Kane, host of radio program “Let’s Talk Native” on WWKB 1520 out of New York.

The Mohawk radio personality believes that the police raids around Montreal, earlier yesterday, are more about public relations than targeting criminal organizations. He says that by criminalizing the trade and manufacturing of tobacco, the Canadian government is violating Mohawks’ rights to develop their own economies.

The April 30th police raids were the largest raids involving contraband tobacco in North American history. Over 400 officers were deployed in what was the culmination of an 18-month operation.  According to details acquired by the Two Row Times, 35 warrants were issued and 28 people were arrested, which included eight people from the Mohawk territories of Kahnawake and Akwesasne.

The timing on the raids couldn’t be better for the federal government as they are just a few days away from the third reading of the Bill C-10, the Tackling Contraband Tobacco Act.  This Act will criminalize all those involved in “contraband tobacco”, tobacco that does not comply with federal and provincial statutes, which means tobacco produced independently by native producers in their own territories.

Much of the media has emphasized the involvement of the mob in the transportation of the tobacco from the U.S. to Akwesasne. Kane says that those reports are helping justify the further regulation of the Native tobacco enterprises.

Also known as Bill C-10, if the Act passes its third reading, it will introduce mandatory minimums for those found with more than 50 cartons of contraband tobacco. The Act will also force First Nations police to work with provincial and municipal police to enforce the act.

Kane says that proposed laws like Bill C-10 are in violation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.

“The declaration states that we have the right to free, prior and informed consent. In addition, we have the right to develop our own economies. Both of which, the Canadian government is violating,” says Kane.

“The manufacturing and selling of cigarettes is an enterprise. It is the same thing they [multinational cigarette companies] are doing,” says Kane.

“When you criminalize our enterprises, it brings in nefarious characters. It forces your hand,” says Kane.

Kane ties the Canadian governments raids and legislation targeting Native tobacco enterprises to an ongoing history of colonialism.

“The Canadian and US governments have been trying to either assimilate or eliminate us. They don’t allow us to develop our own economies. They want us to remain in a ward-custodian relation,” says Kane.

By targeting Native enterprises, Kane says that the government is preventing the development of an independent economy and is instead forcing indigenous people onto welfare.

“They are trying to keep us on welfare and band council money. But most of us will never accept that scenario. We are going to continue to trade between our territories,” says Kane.

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

One of the three sites of Anishnawbe Health Toronto.

by Steve da Silva

A recent study Walking in their shoes published by Anishnawbe Health Toronto finds that the average age of death for users of four “Aboriginal” health and social service centers in Toronto are shockingly below the average Torontonian at 37 years.  The Indigenous male clients who died over the period of the study at the four centers had the average age of 34, with women at 41.

The study’s method was to review the medical history of 43 clients of Anishnawbe Health Toronto who died 2012-2013, as well that of 66 other individuals across three other agencies.  The study then coupled this research with interviews with 20 community members who knew people among the deceased in an attempt to identify “root causes” of these premature deaths.

Acknowledging that “Indigenous peoples face some of the heaviest burdens of ill health,” the study unsurprisingly concluded that the “loss of culture, unstable housing and homelessness, a lack of education and stable jobs, and a lack of social supports” is the result of “histories of colonization, marginalization, discrimination, and racism.”

From the interviews conducted emerged narratives of the deceased that traced many people’s health issues back to the “overarching theme of colonial policies,” with sub-themes of “assimilation policies, systematic discrimination, and cultural disruption.” Among the colonial policies named in the study included the “60s scoop” period when Indigenous peoples made up as many as 40% of children in foster care in Canada, and the violence people experienced in Residential schools.

“[The deceased’s] brother was [raped] by the priest there,” or [The deceased] had bent over to do up her shoe, and because she was showing so much leg, a nun beat her with a yardstick. She was just a little girl,” are just a couple of the harrowing narratives among the many recounted in the study.

This image is taken from the ‘Walking in their Shoes’ study, illustrating the ripple effects from colonial policies to early deaths.

Though initial media coverage at CTV last week misreported the study’s findings as accounting for the “life expectancy” of all clients at the four centers (as opposed to just those who died over a defined period), comparison with other life expectancy stats across the world are instructive for demonstrating how serious the problem is.  In 2010 Afghanistan was ranked by the World Health Organization as having one of the lowest life expectancies in the world, at an average of 47 years.  Afghans – not unlike Indigenous peoples in Canada – have suffered decades of colonial violence and occupation by foreign powers, which included the Canadian military between 2001-2014.  Yet, the life expectancy of Afghans as a whole is still a decade above the average age of death for the subjects of the Walking in their Shoes study.

In light of the City of Toronto’s declaration of 2013-2014 being the ‘Year of Truth and Reconciliation,” Anishnawbe Health Toronto has called for a “multi-year action plan” with “defined and measurable outcomes”, that should consist of more partnerships with the Aboriginal community from the public and private sector, an Aboriginal employment strategy, better representation of Aboriginal people in municipal agencies and corporations, and decreasing the “empathy gap” through “cultural competency training.”

BASICS asked the principal author of the study, Dr. Chandrakant Shah, how effective these recommendations could be in light of ongoing policies of colonization in Canada, including massively disproportionate incarceration rates and ongoing land dispossession and resource plunder:

“We need to address the empathy gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people and to do this we need to first address history. If you don’t know this history, and you only hear about the adverse conditions Aboriginal people are facing, people shake their heads and may blame these people.” Relating Indigenous people’s health issues to the history of colonialism, Dr. Shah said “I call what’s happening here a “delayed tsumami effect.”

“I don’t want pity or compassion for Aboriginal people, I want empathy. I want people to walk in Aboriginal peoples shoes, before we can really begin to address the policies and programs needed. We need a lot of education to get there.”

The presentation made by Dr. Shah to Toronto’s Aboriginal Affairs Committee on March 26, 2014 was forwarded to City Hall’s Executive Committee and was set to be discussed at the April 23, 2014 meeting.  The report was also forwarded to the Directors of Equity, Diversity and Human Rights, and Strategic Recruitment Compensation and Employment Services for consideration as part of the city’s programs and policies.

This piece was co-produced with the Two Row Times.