Immigrant workers are the first to experience the shift in the labour market towards an increase in temporary work, and the reduction of permanent jobs with benefits and legally enforceable health, safety and labour standards.  Many immigrant workers obtain temporary jobs through agencies that are unregulated and fly-by-night.  R’s experiences shed light on the difficulties that temporary agency workers in Montreal face, difficulties that create what he described as “a kind of super-stress.”

R came to Canada from Mexico in 2008 and obtained different kinds of jobs through agencies: cleaning trays in a bakery, general cleaning work, jobs clearing snow and ice.  When we asked him about safety conditions on the job he said, “Well, the degree of safety that I’ve had is basically nil.”  He described “clearing snow at a height of three metres on slippery icy roofs…without safety equipment, cleats, cords, harnesses” for the temporary workers. “At the other end, people that were insured, who worked directly for the company, the whole team was provided with helmets, cleats, harnesses, special tools and special clothing for the cold, and meanwhile all we had was rubber boots.”  R left that job but he told us, “One of my buddies fell, fractured his clavicle, and was incapacitated for two or three months.”

R eventually did suffer a serious workplace injury: “The injury that I had was caused by a fall on a production line, on a conveyor belt. We didn’t have access to the controls for the machines, so people had accustomed themselves to jumping the belt. There was no other way, because shutting down the machine would slow things down and cause problems with production. One of the security railings was loose…I fell on my head, and remained unconscious for a few moments. And there, I don’t remember… After what happened, there was no ambulance called. They sent me to the cafeteria. I was in a state of shock. And they continued with the production, which for them was the most important thing.”

The employer took no action whatsoever after this accident.  Under pressure to keep working to meet family expenses, and because he didn’t want any trouble, R continued to work.  Later, as he continued to get headaches and suffer from tinnitus, he went to see a doctor, but didn’t receive proper care because he hadn’t sought it in time.  “I’m still dealing with some gaps, holes in my memory, even to date.”

R told us that he had witnessed other temporary workers sustain terrible injuries on the job: “Well, I remember in one case, there was a station where there were normally supposed to be two people doing packaging, and they only put one person at the station, to try to force her to speed up, but there really should have been two…She slipped and fell and hurt her mouth, opened up her lip. Intense. For another person, it was their hand in one of the conveyor belts, where the trays come out of the oven, got stuck and their skin got ripped off. They had to take them to the emergency room, and the wound was about 10 centimetres long.”

“One of the worst accidents that I saw, a co-worker fell backwards because the floor is always covered in mineral oil, so he slipped and one of the protective railings on the machine that the oil was leaking from wasn’t there, so he fell, lacerated his hand, cutting his tendons and lost the ability to use his hand. Afterwards, this person went to make a demand to the employer, but the employer pointed the finger at him, and then he started to have problems with immigration. I think he was deported.”

Besides the physical dangers, the conditions of work were extremely gruelling.  R had to work night shifts, and found changing his sleep rhythm difficult.  “It starts to produce a lot of stress in your body, and besides that, physically, you have to be constantly alert and focused on what you’re doing. For example they set you to work in places where normally the machine should be able to function on it’s own, but nobody had calibrated it, because they didn’t bother to contract a technician to do it. It’s controlled with a kind of laser beam in order to keep the size of the loaves of bread standard. But we had to do it manually, so you’re watching these laser beams constantly for an eight our shift… some people ended up dizzy or vomiting. So really, you come out of that totally physically drained.”

But even more draining than the physical stress was the constant psychological pressure that supervisors put on workers.  R described this pressure: “They were constantly threatening to fire us…The state of being constantly threatened with dismissal sets off a kind of super-stress, and that can end up also creating psychological problems. I lived through that, and, well, it’s pretty tough. It leaves a mark on you.”

“And the problems then can get transferred through a person to their family, to their wife, their children, neuroses… and a person feels a kind of incompetence towards all kinds of things, their job… being in that kind of situation constantly blocks the kind of consciousness that you need to get out of the vicious cycle.  And having a low wage puts you in a situation where, say, you can’t handle having a whole week without work. And as a result, you can’t leave your job. On a psychological level, that’s really hard to deal with.”

As R explained, employers use threats of dismissal to discourage workers from complaining about their working conditions: “Well, even when you invest yourself in doing the job well, doing it right, that doesn’t get noticed and basically they don’t care about you. But say you arrive five minutes late, then they notice, and that’s a horribly serious mistake for one to make. And all of a sudden it’s like you’re on a kind of blacklist. And so it starts to get complicated, because you can’t even make the tiniest of mistakes, and that to is a pretty serious form of pressure. And just as much, it’s a way to keep a worker submissive. I think that’s one of the basics for the use of psychological pressure as a means of controlling workers.”

R elaborated on the fact that temporary workers form a sort of parallel work force in the same place of employment.  “In a lot of cases there isn’t even a contract. Obviously we don’t have all of the rights that workers have, we’re basically pawns that they plug in to the assembly line until they’re no good anymore, and then they bring someone else in.”

Even though temp agency workers often do the same job as permanent workers, they are almost always paid less.  “I was making nine dollars, in contexts where, in the written contracts that I saw with my own eyes, it was stipulated that a person would be making seventeen dollars an hour, for example, in the packing area. In a context where normally they would have two people working there full time, they have one person, making nine dollars an hour…The difference in pay between what we make and somebody who is hired directly by the company, well, that’s profits for the temp agency.”

Some temporary agencies pay workers irregularly, and frequently, temporary employment agencies ‘disappear’ without paying all of their workers’ wages. As R put it, “Once the term of work is over, sometimes it’s easier for the agency to simply leave its workers behind without paying them at all, without granting them their vacation pay or any other kind of severance, then to go and open up a new agency, and avoid having to even pay taxes to the government.”

R ultimately decided to act on his rights, with the help of organizations that exist to help workers.  This involved “going and presenting my complaint and presenting the situations at work, explaining what had happened, and the resulting debts that I had, the fact that I hadn’t gotten my vacation pay, my rights, and also bringing forward other people that were in the same situation, and bringing them right to the Labour Standards Board [in Quebec]. I put in my complaint at Labour Standards, and the person who was my agent looked through the system and found that this agency owed more than a million in income tax. And then they started to follow the agency’s tracks. But the agency had already closed and filed for bankruptcy.”

Eventually, R became a member of the Immigrant Workers Center.  He described how this happened: “Well, I contacted the Centre when I was, let’s say I was already at the end of my line… I didn’t have a job anymore, I couldn’t get access to welfare, I had zero income. I had to reach out to organizations that provided assistance. And I met a person who told me about the existence of the Immigrant Workers Center, and told me that they might be able to help. So I got in touch, and little by little they got me oriented, and at every step they accompanied me in filing complaints, they accompanied me with translators, they provided contact with lawyers, through volunteers in the universities, and basically because of that I was able to file my demands the right way.”

R’s message for other workers was: “Well, I hope that many people won’t have to suffer the same kinds of consequences that I suffered for lack of consciousness, lack of knowledge about my rights, also that they realise that this organization exists, that they can get help at any time, even if they’re not dealing with any problems… For people that are going through a problem, the most important thing is to find calm, so that they don’t get immersed in that super-stress, since they do have rights, and those rights can be demanded.  They need to reach out, that they need to file letters, they need to make their demands, and not stand there with their arms crossed because if that’s what we do, this situation is going to continue, this abuse of workers…”

Montreal’s Immigrant Workers’ Center has just launched a new newspaper, “La Voix des Migrant(e)s”, from which this article is sourced.

R’s message for the federal and provincial authorities was this: “There are gaps in the law, through which all kinds of agencies can grow and thrive.  This is a problem that affects the government itself, because these companies aren’t paying taxes, but also because it damages the image of investment, damages the image of the government.  They have to focus their attention on these gaps in the law so that it’s harder for agencies to dodge the law and leave people in situations like this. They should specify exactly who holds the responsibility for paying medical insurance and taking care of workplace safety. Is it the agency, or the company that hires the agency? It needs to be spelled out clearly so that workers can protect their rights.”

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.

Total Fitness Studio doesn’t look like your typical mainstream gym, and doesn’t follow the same model. With a small studio in the heart of Scarborough, it promotes healthy living with fun — “Move it to lose it!”

This fitness studio removes the veil of expensive machines as the only way to be ‘healthy’ with realistic and sustainable exercises that are meant to use one’s own body weight. It doesn’t feel like a business, but a place to have fun working out.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of getting fit with expensive machines. Too often, people are bombarded by aggressive gym advertisers and salespeople interested in signing up gym memberships but not really looking at people’s health or financial issues.  People end up continuing to pay these fees, without actually going to the gym anymore with lack of motivation.

High membership fees and personal training costs also create a hierarchy of those who can afford to pay these exorbitant fees and those who are struggling with their health but are not able to pay for these luxuries.

But fitness is a $2.2 billion business in Canada according to the Fitness Industry Council of Canada and nearly 5.4 million people are enrolled in health clubs in Canada. The fitness industry both creates and feeds off the fear of gaining weight and counts on people as consumers that need to purchase a particular body type.

Fitness and diet can contribute to positive transformations with alternative ways of looking at staying ‘fit’ to look good and maintaining health to feel good.
Photo: Robin M Myers article in Liberty Voice

“The view that some weights are unacceptable and that body weight is malleable has led to a large diet industry in North America, with estimated annual revenues of $35 to $50 billion,” write Marion P Olmsted and Traci McFarlane in an article in the scientific journal BMC Women’s Health. “Our current cultural preoccupation with thinness extends beyond the health risks associated with obesity.”

The fitness and diet industry place blame on those who ‘choose’ to eat unhealthy food or develop unhealthy habits.  The cycle of poverty or the socio-economic factors that contributes to the lack of access to ‘healthy lifestyles’ is ignored, as is an holistic, overall approach to health. The financial burden and mounting societal pressure that people face don’t factor in; neither does the concept of a community that fosters self-care, love and acceptance along with mutual support. 

Not everyone has the means to afford organic food nor the money to afford a gym membership, which is more often than not, seen as the only way to get fit within the thinking that drives the business of fitness. This is where Total Fitness Studio comes in.

“I started this gym in hopes of helping others, looking back at the lack of money to afford going to a gym, while also being overweight and struggling to become healthy,” says Lisa, the personal trainer and co-owner of Total Fitness Studio. She went through a journey of losing 200lbs on her own.

Lisa is not looking to make a buck, only to make enough money to keep the gym open. “I want to make a positive, transformative change in people’s lives,” she says. “It’s a risk in the business world, but is it not better to try?” If you want to get in touch with Lisa, give her a call at 416-709-3710. **Lisa has since had to close down the gym in the summer of 2014**

People before profits! Health before greed!

On Jan 3, 2014, the Kitchener-Waterloo Spot Collective announced the relaunching and professionalising of their people’s programs.

The people’s programs, which include the serving of free food, programs for those dealing with addiction, and literacy programs, have come out of the need to deal with the problems the community faces by mobilising the community, says organizer Amber Sinson.

The Spot Collective serving free food and coffee downtown, November 2013. Photo: DIANNE HARTMAN

“Our children need food, warm winter clothing and basic needs that are not provided by the state,” Amber continues. “It’s obvious that we must rely on ourselves to solve our own problems.”

The Spot Collective, created in 1998 by street youth and socialist students looking for for solutions to the problems they were facing, has always focused on balancing the immediate needs of the community with solving the root causes of poverty by attacking systemic problems, according to Sinson. The relaunching of the people’s programs is a continuation of this combined approach.

When asked about food banks and other social agencies that provide such services she replied, “They humiliate you and make you feel like garbage, and that it’s your fault you’re poor. They also do nothing to address the issues behind poverty.”

Wesley Gibbons, a person who uses the peoples programs, also added, “You can only get one or two boxes a month from the food bank and most of the stuff is expired.”

Those interested in participating are invited to come out to meetings Wednesday nights at 6pm at 43 Queen St., after the free food servings. Contact: 226-289-2559.

by Nicole Oliver

“We will come together again in Toronto this February 14th for the 9th year in a row. We stand together on this day to show our solidarity with the community of the downtown eastside in Vancouver where the Memorial March has been taking place for 23 years and because the violence is here too and inherent to settler colonialism”, Audrey Huntley of No More Silence shared with BASICS.

In January, 1991, a woman was murdered on Powell Street in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Her family wanted to share their love for their daughter on Valentine’s Day and so the annual march began honouring women who have died violent and premature deaths. The family requests that her name not be spoken.

Indigenous women are five to seven times more likely than other women to die as the result of violence, cites Canadian government statistics. Still officers of the colonial state, including the police, have a track record of over-persecuting and under-protecting indigenous women. In Canada, Onkwehon:we (original) peoples make up four per cent of the population, yet First Nations, Inuit and Metis women account for 32.6 per cent of the inmates in the federal prison system.

To coincide with this year’s marches No More Silence, Families of Sisters in Spirit and their community partners including The Native Youth Sexual Health Network having been working on the creation of a community run database documenting violent deaths of indigenous women, two-spirited, and trans people.

”This year our hearts will be heavy with loss as we will grieve three beautiful lives cut far too short in 2013. Cheyenne, Terra and Bella were loved and leave behind family and friends whose lives have been shattered and forever shared,” Huntley told BASICS.

Since last year’s ceremony, Toronto has seen the unresolved violent deaths of three more indigenous women – Cheyenne Fox, Terra Gardner, and Bella Laboucan McLean.

Cheyenne Fox, 20; Terra Gardner, 26; and Bella, 25, were all killed in violent deaths within a few months of each other. Bella and Cheyenne plunged to their deaths from condo highrises, while Terra was struck by a train near Summerhill station at a time when she was been compelled to testify in a murder investigation.  Read this piece by Nicole Oliver for more info.

Between 2005-2010, the Native Women’s Association (NWAC) with the support of the federal government’s Status of Women Canada fund created the Sisters in Spirit project. This included a database with over 200 variables to record information related to missing and murdered indigenous women and girls in Canada.  In 2010 the federal government decided to terminate funding to NWAC’s database project.

When the Sisters in Spirit database project funding was cut and the project terminated, 582 cases of missing and murdered indigenous women had been documented. Comparatively, in what is being described as a one of the most comprehensive fully public databases to date, Maryanne Pearce an Ottawa researcher, documents that 824 Inuit, Métis, or First Nations women have been murdered or gone missing in Canada since 1980. Pearce began this database as part of her doctoral dissertation in Law at the University of Ottawa.

The information documented through the Sisters in Spirit project remains inaccessible to the families of missing and murdered women and the wider public, despite the 10-million dollars of public funds allotted to compile the data. Initiatives by the federal government announced remaining funds would be directed to the RCMP for another database on missing persons with no particular focus on women, let alone Indigenous women. As the documentation was never made public the information collected cannot be validated nor analyzed by an outside party.

In response to the violence that continues to affect indigenous women, their families and communities, No More Silence, Families of Sisters in Spirit and community partners including The Native Youth Sexual Health Network envision a database beyond the reach of Canada’s institutions. The work of No More Silence and the database are to be part of building a larger movement not only against gendered colonial violence, but also for decolonization. This database is intended for the families of the missing and murdered and for communities to access, unlike NWAC’s exclusive database. No More Silence is a network of volunteers. They have started gathering information from nothing – with no funding and no data.

Since the research is led by and for Native women working with allies, it is not constrained by legal or academic definitions: the categories and understandings of the deaths and disappearances have been broadened, derived by rich process work with the families involved. The database documents the lives of women who have died violent and premature deaths, such as suicides and deaths not necessarily committed by one perpetrator, but have more to do with colonial violence in the context of a woman’s life. The database includes deaths and disappearances of Trans and Two-Spirit women as well, where information is often misconstrued or miscategorized by police databases and legal reports due to gender misrecognition constrained by heteropatriarchal norms. The documentation is not only about lives lost, but honors the lived memories of women who have passed on.

A scene from last year’s Strawberry Ceremony outside Toronto Police Headquarters.

Despite awareness and efforts of grassroots work done by networks like No More Silence and from the Annual Memorial Marches of February 14, the violence continues. This is not so surprising as the Canadian imperialist government increasingly pushes for resource extraction and development aggression on stolen lands and on unceded and treaty territories of First Nations peoples.

The degradation of the land often plays out on women’s bodies, as women are the life-bearers of future generations. There exists a direct relationship between rape and gender-based violence, racism, and colonialism, in which, violence against women becomes a tool of domination.  Due to systemic violence inherent in Canadian state policies and practices –  such as the Indian Act and the Residential School System – themes of intergenerational trauma, loss of land, housing issues, loss of family members, family breakdown, loss of a sense of community are part of many of the stories collected by No More Silence.

Thus, the February 14 Memorial Marches and the database work of Sisters in Spirit are about demonstrating that these lives matter. This year’s February 14 Strawberry Ceremony will be held in front of the Toronto Police Headquarters at 40 College St. West in Toronto. For information about February 14 marches occurring in different communities visit: http://womensmemorialmarch.wordpress.com/national.

Rogerio Marques DeSouza, an undocumented worker, died an untimely death. However, the discrimination he faced due to his immigration status did not end with his passing.

At 49, Rogerio, the father of three teenage children, had been fighting colon cancer for over three years. As an undocumented migrant from Brazil, he was denied access to health care and had to hide his illness.

When his bosses discovered he was coming to work with a colostomy bag, they fired him.

Unable to keep up with his rent on top of the $100,000 he incurred in medical fees, he began working in a bakery and moved in with his children to save on rent. Shortly thereafter his condition quickly worsened and Rogerio quietly passed away at Toronto Grace Health Centre on January 18 earlier this year.

“We got a call from Rogerio’s relatives asking for support. They had been trying to get [the City of] Toronto to fund the funeral, as they didn’t have the resources themselves but were being denied because he didn’t have status,” Syed Hussan of No One Is Illegal – Toronto told BASICS.

“We wrote the city a strongly worded letter giving them 24 hours to resolve the situation, but they responded with an offer that was starkly inhumane.”

Using his immigration status as an excuse, the City of Toronto denied Rogerio’s low-income family the City’s funeral subsidy and instead offered to quietly burn the body. As Barbara Steeves, guardian of Rogerio’s three children, explained in an interview with the Toronto Star, “They said we must sign the release of the body to the city, so they can bury him in an unknown spot. And that’s the only way.”

Adding insult to injury, the treatment of Rogerio’s remains and his family come just in advance of the one year anniversary of Toronto City Council reaffirming its commitment to providing services without fear to undocumented residents on February 21, 2013. The reaffirmation was the result of two decades of community mobilization, and caught Toronto up to over 50 American cities with longstanding “sanctuary city” laws of the sort.

But as we mark this date, we must also step back and reflect on the work that has yet to be done.

“Seeing that the City bureaucrats weren’t going to live up to the promise of a Sanctuary City, we released the details of Rogerio’s case in a Toronto Star story and planned a delegation to Metro Hall,” added Hussan. “Minutes before heading in, we received a call from a private organization that wanted to pay for the funeral.

“After much deliberation the family accepted the offer, but insisted that we can’t always rely on charity. The overall structure must change.”

Rogerio with his family.

No One Is Illegal has since launched a Change.org petition calling on the Ontario government to make its services accessible to undocumented peoples.

A report released by the Solidarity City Network in December recommended that the City identify key city-funded services accessed by undocumented residents and develop department specific policies to ensure full access. Test-calling to hundreds of city agencies showed huge numbers of undocumented people being turned away and the city has still shown little sign of upholding its promise to make Toronto a fully functioning sanctuary city in practice, not just on paper.

Immigration status, for those fortunate enough to receive it, is becoming much more temporary and easier to lose. Sponsoring family members, getting refugee status, and going from temporary worker to permanent resident are all being choked off by the federal government. Systematically, racialized immigrants and refugee workers remain insecure, while paying income, sales and property taxes for services they are not entitled to use and to subsidize tax cuts for the wealthy in a climate of increasing income-inequality.

Poor health, isolation and repeated displacement are made worse with the criminalization of migrants through indefinite detention, raids, and surveillance in our communities. The result is that an entire section of our communities is living in fear — the same fear Rogerio felt three years ago when he first began experiencing symptoms, afraid of being reported to immigration authorities by the hospital. This indignity followed him into death, when his family found out the City hadn’t implemented its own policy.

Rogerio’s story sheds light on the high cost of denying our friends, neighbours and coworkers access to basic services based on immigration status. While it is the federal government that determines citizenship, the actual result of that denial would be far less dangerous were it not for provincial and municipal policies that place citizenship requirements on accessing basic services. Both the city and the province can enact changes to fill this gap and resist such blatantly racist and exclusionary Federal immigration policies, by refusing to deny health care, social housing, medical services, post-secondary education, and other important services to people based on citizenship.

Although the government does not keep track of its undocumented residents, estimates hover around 200,000 throughout the country. Every day, people like Rogerio resist the forces that seek to criminalize them. Enrolling their children in school, feeding their families, and accessing basic services  – the day-to-day struggle to survive carries the ultimate risk. And in Rogerio’s case, surviving as an undocumented worker can carry the even greater cost of one’s own life.

Those of us working and living with status have nothing to lose and much to gain by standing alongside people like Rogerio. Let’s end these divisions imposed amongst working people and struggle for “Status for All.”

by Santiago Escobar

As the Unist’ot’en continue their protracted battle against Chevron and other companies in resistance to the Pacific Trails Pipeline in northern B.C. over unceded Wet’suwet’en territory, Indigenous peoples of the Amazon Rain Forest in Ecuador are pursuing Chevron in Canada for damages in one of the largest oil-related catastrophes in history.

This past December 2013, after twenty years of legal battles with America’s third largest corporation – ranking 11^th in the world – the 30,000+ Indigenous plaintiffs of Ecuador made a small step forward when an Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that they could pursue Chevonr for damages they were awarded in the Ecuadorian courts.  But the battle is far from over.

Between 1964 and 1990, U.S. oil giant Texaco (now Chevron) deliberately contaminated Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest by dumping some 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater, among other contaminants, leaving in its wake pollution levels 30 times higher than the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska.  What has been called Amazon’s ‘Chernobyl’ has led to a proliferation of miscarriages, birth defects, and cancer rates that are thirty times higher than elsewhere in the country.  Scientific readings of the toxicity of water and soil in the region have revealed levels thousands of times above what is permitted by both Ecuadorian and U.S. law.  And it’s the region’s Indigenous inhabitants – which includes the Quechua, Siona, Cofan, Secoya and Huaorani peoples – who are bearing the brunt of the genocidal effects of the Amazon’s destruction. The Tetetes and the Sansahuari peoples have already been killed off by Chevron’s activities.

The battle with Chevron is just one of many faced by Ecuador and its inhabitants in the face of U.S. corporate interests and imperialist military operations in the region, including the militarization of Colombia, which has in the past already launched military attacks into Ecuador.   For his part, Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa has opposed U.S. manoeuvres in the region, launching the campaign “Dirty Hands” against Chevron.

Chevron has used all the “legal” resources at its disposal to avoid compensating those affected in Ecuador. According to the indigenous plaintiffs, Chevron has a legal army with more than 60 legal firms, some 2,000 legal professionals, top-notch public relations firms, the shadowy “investigative and risk” management firm Kroll. In 2013 alone, Chevron spent $400 million alone in 2013 for “legal services” that have been deemed “unethical”. “This is probably the most money any company in history has spent defending itself on environmental claims,” said Aaron Page, a U.S. lawyer for the Ecuadorians. “The total legal cost for Chevron shareholders is likely approaching $2 billion and it is rising fast.”

In addition to the ‘legal’ means at its disposal to defeat the case, Chevron has also employed a whole series of other dirty tricks to undermine the lawsuit, including: harassing the plaintiffs’ legal team, several bribery attempts, and undercover plots such as setting a trap to the judge overseeing the case in Ecuador.

After nearly 20 years of battle, in 2011 an Ecuadorian court ruled that Chevron had to pay for the destruction that it caused and was required to compensate the victims. On December 11, 2013 the Supreme Court of Ecuador ratified the ruling and set the final amount owed at US$9.5 billion.

The plaintiffs are now trying to gain justice in several courts across the globe, including Canada, since Chevron no longer has assets remaining in Ecuador. On December 17, 2013, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that Ecuador’s Indigenous communities indeed have the right to pursue Chevron’s assets in Canada to enforce the US$9.5 billion Ecuador judgment. Chevron’s assets in Canada are currently estimated at US$15 billion. Thus, the entirety of the Ecuador judgment can be collected in Canada if the communities prevail on their enforcement action.

Referring to comments from a Chevron spokesman that the company would “fight this until hell freezes over” and then “fight it out on the ice,” Justice James Mac Pherson of the Court of Appeal for Ontario said that: “Chevron’s wish is granted. After all these years, the Ecuadorian plaintiffs deserve to have the recognition and enforcement of the Ecuadorian judgment heard on the merits in the appropriate jurisdiction. At this juncture, Ontario is that jurisdiction.”

An image from the Unist’ot’en Camp, Freda Huson sitting to the left with the crutches.

Indigenous peoples in Canada will be watching the ruling closely, as the notorious polluter pursues development of the Pacific Trails pipeline through unceded Wet’suwet’en territory in central B.C.

In an interview with BASICS, Freda Huson, a spokesperson for the Unist’ot’en, said, “We are protecting the Morice River and Gosnell creek, which feed into the Bulkley River. Salmon is one of our main staple food that spawn in Gosnel and swim down stream into Bulkley.”  The Unist’ot’en built a cabin near the initial route of the proposed pipeline in 2010, which forced a route change for the Pacific Trails Pipeline.

Huson told BASICS Community News Service that “We have since constructed a traditional pithouse on their new proposed route. We have people living at the site blocking the only bridge into our territory.  We stand in solidarity with many other nations struggles against industry destruction.”

Currently, several organizations and alliances in Canada are backing the Indigenous plaintiffs in Ecuador, including the Canadian and Quebec sections of the International League of People’s Struggles; the Hugo Chavez People’s Defense Front;  Red de Amigos de la Revolución Ciudadana; Centro Comunitario San Lorenzo; and Barrio Nuevo.

The alliances are planning to have the first meeting of a Solidarity Committee at 6:30pm on January 16, 2014 at the Hispanic Centre of York, 1652 Keele St., Toronto.

Food allergies and intolerances are growing, and this is not coincidental

by N. Zahra 

It is estimated that approximately 1 in 3 North Americans is lactose intolerant and 1 in 100 North Americans suffer from celiac disease, or severe gluten intolerance.  According to the National Digestive Diseases Information Clearinghouse, Lactose intolerance is the inability to digest lactose, a sugar found in milk and milk products.  Gluten intolerance refers to the inability to tolerate gluten-containing foods such as wheat, rye and barley.  In the last few years, there seems to be an increasing trend toward people developing food intolerance in North America.

Personal experiences collected on websites such as motherearthnews.com, suggests that people are noticing a big difference in their digestive health when they consume dairy and wheat in North America versus when they consume it elsewhere, such as in Europe.  So far, there is no conclusive research that suggests that food intolerance is a uniquely North American phenomenon, but in examining data from European countries, one can see that although food intolerance is increasingly on the radar, they are not common enough to merit serious attention by those looking to cash in on peoples’ illnesses or perceived illnesses, such as speciality food companies or pharmaceutical companies.

According to a paper produced by the Institute of Food Research, although there is an increasing public perception of food intolerance, researchers cannot find a large enough cohort of subjects to study in any one European country because diagnosis levels are so low.  Somewhere between 3-5% of Europeans are diagnosed with some form of food intolerance, while in North America, it is estimated that up to 11.5 % of the total population suffers from food intolerance, according to a study published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology in 2010, with many cases still going undiagnosed.  Conversely, according to a study done by The Gluten-Free Agency, a consulting firm dedicated to helping advertisers market their gluten-free products, the market for gluten-free products is exploding here with consumers in the 50-64 and 25-34 age ranges in North America, being the largest consumers of gluten-free products world-wide.

If we put the andecdotal evidence together with these startling consumer trends, a picture starts to emerge of an ill-health phenomenon that is making big bucks for specialty food companies.  Another dimension to this trend is the difference between those who have been made aware of their food intolerance issues and who can afford to treat them, and those that suffer in silence, thinking that it is normal to be bloated and gassy after every meal.

It is important to raise awareness that bloating and gas after every meal indicates ill digestive health and that the way that food is produced in North America might be largely to blame for this problem.