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

By: Aiyanas Ormond

On Tuesday, September 16, about 30 people picketed St. George’s, an elite private school in Vancouver.  The picket, organized by Grassroots Women comes after more than 2 weeks of school closures as teachers in B.C. have been on strike.

St. George’s is the most expensive private school in the province with tuition ranging from $15,000 to $20,000 for non-boarded students and upwards of $50,000 a year for boarded students.  The school boasts of its small class sizes, extensive supports and extracurricular programs, the exact things that public school  teachers are saying are under attack with declining funding in B.C. public schools.

Grassroots Women, a working-class and militant women’s organization active in Vancouver since 1995, called for the picket to expose the fact that St. Georges also receives significant public funding, and to make the connection between the increasing number of students enrolled in publicly funded private schools and the economic starving of public schools, especially in working class neighbourhoods and communities.

“We’re picketing this school because, even though the tuition here is more than the annual income of tens of thousands of B.C. families, this school is subsidized from the public purse,” said Grassroots Women member Martha Roberts.  “They receive 35% of the funding a public school would receive, per student enrolled – millions of dollars annually.  And yet the sole purpose of this school, which is evident in reading any of their materials, is to replicate the economic power and class privilege of the families who can afford to send their kids here.”

It also happens to be the school where B.C. Premier Christy Clark sends her son.  Her support for education privatization goes beyond her own personal preference though, British Columbia subsidizes private schools in the province to the tune of $300 million annually and has the highest number of children enrolled in private schools per capita of any province.  B.C. also has the highest child poverty rate in Canada.

On the morning of the picket, the Province and teacher’s union announced a tentative agreement in contract negotiations that have been ongoing since public school teachers were left without a contract before the end of the school year of June 2013. “The union mounted escalating stages of labour action starting last April in an attempt to get movement from the employer at the bargaining table. After three weeks of rotating strikes, teachers launched a full-scale walkout about two weeks before the end of the last school year,” according to the Canadian Press. Thus, being on strike since the beginning of the current school year.

But the picket organizers were very clear that the issues of school privatization will not be resolved by a new contract for teachers.

“The public funding for private education is going to continue after this strike,” said Grassroots Women member Suzanne Baustad.  “What we have is an increasing two-tiered system, one that is based on reproducing the next generation of bosses and bureaucrats on the one side, and workers on the other.  This conflict really isn’t about government and teachers – its a class conflict, and redistributing resources from public to private schools is an attack on working class women and children.”

The action was the target of a significant online backlash, both from St. George’s parents, as well as from public school teachers and supporters, who were worried that militant action would “damage the teachers bargaining position.” An interesting reminder of how taboo it remains to engage in class conflict outside of the mediation of the State or the carefully scripted and managed collective bargaining process.

The picket that was organized by Grassroots Women in front of St. George’s Private School to protest education privatization. PHOTO: AIYANAS ORMAND

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

The following content derives from a speech delivered by Martha Roberts, a practicing Registered Midwife in Vancouver and a member of the Alliance for People’s Health, at the 3rd Annual Day of Action for Refugee Health Care in Vancouver on June 16, 2014.  The title of the original speech is “End Medical Profiteering! Demand Health for All!” 

I’d like to tell you story; a story about a woman who’s baby I recently delivered. It is a true story, and a common story. This story is not unique. It is one story of thousands, a story of who benefits and who loses from forced migration and global chains of economic exploitation.

Maria came to Canada in August from United Arab Emirates through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program to be a low-wage cashier for the Canadian operations of an unnamed global petrochemical corporation. Shortly after arriving in Canada Maria discovered she was pregnant, having been briefly reunited with her husband who was working construction in Dubai over the summer. Maria planned to continue working her contract and planned to only take a few days off to give birth to her baby, who would be sent to live with family. Her story of economic exploitation and family separation is heartbreaking, but the story doesn’t end there.

Shortly after Maria started work in Canada her employer started to request that Maria go out on dates with important clients after she finished her work. For precarious workers, abuse and theft are common experiences. Afraid of losing her job and being forced to leave Canada, Maria complied, until finally she was raped. Two months after starting to work in Canada, Maria fled sexual violence from her employer, wound up in a women’s shelter with no open work permit, pregnant with no access to medical care or health care coverage, fearing reprisal for breaking her contract, and terrified of being deported with no money to provide for herself or her family.

As a midwife and a community health organizer, I was glad to be connected to Maria, and to provide some basic free maternity care until she could apply for an open work permit, have her [B.C.] Medical Services Plan application reinstated, and find new employment – a process which would take her well beyond the birth of her baby. Maria was able to mobilize community supports and resources for herself and her baby – but not every woman forced to migrate for economic or political reasons has this support. Maria was forced to decline recommended ultrasounds and prenatal testing due to lack of finances and fear of discovery, Maria worried through her entire pregnancy about Canadian Border Service Agency officers arriving to deport her, about the very real possibility of her work permit being denied, about lacking any savings and being not able to support her 5-year-old son and her own parents, from whom she had been separated for over 3 years.

Maria wasn’t a refugee claimant, but no doubt Maria was forced to migrate, enduring family separation, employer violence, and gross economic exploitation due to an economic system built on the cheap labour of migrant workers and the unpaid reproductive work of women.

As a midwife looking after moms and babies I know first-hand that cuts to health care for refugees and the gross lack of accessible health care services for undocumented and temporary workers hurts entire generations as women are forced to decline essential diagnostic tests and treatments due to cost. And while I’m a home birth advocate, home birth should be about love and trust, and not based in fear of costs or harassment by immigration or corrupt bosses. After years of struggle to make midwifery care accessible to all, we still haven’t achieved this goal.

Families go without access to health care because the federal government stated it wanted to “save” a paltry $100 million…

Yet our tax dollars funded:

• $785 million dollars to arm 4800 CBSA officers;
• $600 million to build 2,700 new prison cells; and
• 2.84 billion in federal and provincial subsidies to petrochemical industries
• 

Why? Because precarious workers without any rights but with a lot of fear form a cheap and readily-available labour pool, working to earn greater profits for big businesses and their bosses & shareholders;

Because shifting public dollars from health care increases industry subsidies and funding for the security culture and the mass incarceration agenda.

Why should health care workers struggle for economic justice?

Privatization, de-regulation and trade liberalization aren’t just buzz words we use to feel smart. Neoliberalism is the basis of a string of economic and political attacks on the health of working class and marginalized communities.

The roll-back of essential services that we have all come to rely on due to low wages and the rising cost of living is an attack on the health of working class and marginalized communities.

It is time for health care workers to accept that we have to make a choice: Which side are we on? Are we on the side of people? Or are we on the side of profits?

´       Do we really believe that armed CBSA agents are good for the health of our communities?

´       Do we really believe that incarcerating for women crimes of poverty is good for the health of our communities?

´       Do we really believe that subsidizing mining, pipelines, and fracking is good for the health of our communities?

´       Do we really believe that denying public health insurance to refugees and undocumented workers is good for the health of our communities?

If our society wasn’t based on profit – wouldn’t our common goal be health and a meaningful life for all?

We must develop a structural analysis of our economy, of our federal budget, to expose and oppose the grossly unequal distribution of wealth and power in our society.

We must decry the ongoing colonial occupation of these lands.

We must be brave and declare these cuts as a component of ongoing injustices under capitalism.

It is time for health care workers to join with communities in the struggle for access to health care in the context of a broader struggle for social and economic justice.

“GN Saibaba is being targeted for opposing the Government’s anti-Naxal war.” – Arundhati Roy

Members of Vancouver’s South Asian community, human rights activists and health workers gathered outside the Consul General of India in Vancouver on June 20 to protest the continued detention of Revolutionary Democratic Front leader and Delhi University professor GN Saibaba.

Dr. Saibaba was arrested by Indian security forces on May 9, 2014 through the application of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, which makes a criminal offence of any action ‘which causes or is intended to cause disaffection against India.’ Specifically, he is accused of being a member or associate of the Communist Party of India (Maoist). The CPI (Maoist) – referred to by many in India as the “Naxalites” – leads a people’s war in India centred in the eastern-central regions.

Saibaba’s visible political activities with the Revolutionary Democratic Front include the defence of the rights of women, Dalit people and the Adivasi communities who are resisting development aggression by multinational corporations, in some cases as part of an explicitly revolutionary communist armed struggle.  Saibaba has been vocal in his stance against the Indian state’s brutal counter insurgency program. Known as ‘Operation Green Hunt,’ the Indian state’s offensive against the people’s war has mobilized more than 200,000 troops in recent years, and Saibaba’s principled stance against it has earned him harassment, interrogation and now imprisonment by the Indian State.

Dr. Saibaba, who is paralyzed and uses a wheelchair, is currently being held in deplorable conditions, where he has reported “excruciating pains in the joints, legs and vertebra.” Saibaba is being denied access to medications prescribed by his doctor and lacks access to a toilet that he can use without considerable assistance.

Representatives from the participating organizations in Vancouver delivered a letter to the Consul General calling on the Indian government to: “Immediately and unconditionally release Dr. Saibaba and all political prisoners”; “Scrap the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and other pieces of legislation aimed at targeting, criminalizing and silencing political dissent;” and to “End Operation Green Hunt which is in fact a war against the people aimed at suppressing their legitimate struggles in order to pave the way for destructive and exploitative resource extraction.”

The protest was organized by member organizations of the International League of People’s Struggle – South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy, Alliance for Peoples Health, and Canada-Philippines Solidarity for Human Rights – and was joined by Red Sparks Union, East Indian Defence Committee and Revolutionary Student Movement.

Organizational statements made in defense of Saibaba can be found at the websites of the Alliance for Peoples Health and the South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy.