“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.” – Assata Shakur

On Saturday March 26th, over a thousand people gathered for #BlackOut Against Police Brutality to demand justice for Andrew Loku and Alex Wettlaufer who were murdered by the pigs. On Monday April 4th, hundreds marched to Queen’s Park, demanded and were granted an audience with Kathleen Wynne, who admitted “I believe that we still have systemic racism in our society”.

Black Lives Matter Toronto (BLMTO) forces onlookers to recognize that police brutality exists and that black people in this city are specifically targeted by the police. It also gives voice to the ways that black people and people of colour experience racism in Canada today. Occupying a space like Police HQ shows that people can come together to build inclusive spaces that rely on the contributions, support and commitment of people across the city.

The Black Lives Matters Toronto movement has made concrete their solidarity with Indigenous organizers. BLMTO stood side by side with occupiers of the Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) office in Toronto, just as indigenous allies had stood with the people occupying TPS headquarters when they were attacked by the pigs in the middle of the night.

As a result of Tent City and other actions, Toronto City Council voted to restore Afro-Fest to a full two-day event and unanimously voted to review the province’s Special Investigations Unit through an ‘anti-black racism lens’. Kathleen Wynne committed to meet again with BLMTO organizers and the Ontario Coroner opened an inquest into the death of Andrew Loku. And Michael Coteau, the Minister Responsible for Anti-Racism has promised there will be public meetings to talk about anti-blackness in policing.

But now that Tent City has come to an end, how will the community prevent police from harassing and killing our people? How will we prevent more state-sponsored murders, such as those of Jermaine Carby, Sammy Yatim, and Andrew Loku? Demanding inquests into the murders of people at the hands of police is not something new and has never changed the way police brutalize and murder the people in our communities.

The state has a long history of maneuvering around the demands of protest movements. In the 1990’s, the Black Action Defense Committee (BADC) agitated against the Toronto Police to stop the police’s investigation of police, which led to the formation of the Special Investigations Unit (SIU). However, provincial and municipal governments have always found ways to protect the police because the police are accountable to the state, not the people. Today, the SIU is filled with people who are ex-cops and apologists who do nothing but uphold the current system of exploitation that allow these murders to happen in the first place.

We have to ask ourselves: what is it going to take to build strong and independent communities, to disrupt police brutality, and to challenge state power?

Basics Community News Service members have been working with the families of the victims of police brutality for almost a decade now from Alwy al-Nadhir to Junior Manon to Sammy Yatim to Jermaine Carby. In spite of increasing public awareness, the law continues to drag its feet year after year in the case of Jermaine Carby, who was murdered in December 2014. In the case of Sammy Yatim, the law was used to justify the clearance of murder charges against Officer James Forcillo.

“We are not going to eliminate imperialism by shouting insults at it” – Amilcar Cabral

Despite vocal protests against state violence, the demands formed during Tent City will not provide the people with any way of protecting themselves from being brutalized, because the demands are not focused on building up our own power and capacity – they rely on the state agreeing to change for the better. BLMTO organizers frequently chant “the system isn’t broken, it was built this way”. But if the system is working the way that it is supposed to, why do we insist on asking this very system–directly responsible for the oppression we face–for small and incremental changes that don’t address the root of the problem?

The law will never go after the cops who killed Andrew Loku last July, even if they are identified, because that’s the way the system works.

We cannot ask to participate in the colonizer’s power. ‘Freedom’ does not look like black consultation with the SIU or a new body that will replicate the same incompetence. A number of public meetings that were held throughout the province last year had a resounding message: eliminate the practice of carding immediately. But even with all of these public meetings and promises that were made by Yasir Naqvi, the Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services, carding has merely been ‘regulated’ and in some cases temporarily suspended while under review.

But the practice of racial profiling and police targeting black people and people of colour still continues. What will these new meetings on anti-blackness in policing reveal that we didn’t know already? What can they change if the enforcement completely relies on the state and police to follow through on their empty promises?

Do we want to be on their investigation committees after they shoot our families and friends, or should we make sure that another pig does not dare kill another one of our own? Our power and freedom will come from protecting each other, and from creating our own autonomous communities that maintain the livelihood of the people within them.

“Whether it’s in America or the rest of the African world, black lives will never matter until we attain BLACK POWER; which is power in our hands to determine our future for subsequent generations to come.” – Black is Back Coalition

The people who are incarcerated by police know that they are human and deserve justice. What they don’t have is an organized community that has their back. We cannot ask the state to recognize the value of our lives; we cannot ask them for power. Black lives have never mattered to the Canadian state, and they will never matter, regardless of how much we plead for recognition.

For police violence to end in our communities, we must work towards building genuine people power that can be organized to prevent or respond to state violence. Building genuine people power means that we create alternative structures that directly challenge the repressive power of the state.

We don’t ask to be accommodated in the system or try to hold it accountable to the people. You don’t ask your enemy to solve your problems for you — especially when they are the ones who created the problem in the first place.

These tactics have proven successful in communities throughout the city including in the Esplanade, Dufferin and Eglinton and in Jamestown. Community members have made significant interventions the moment cops attempt violence on the streets.

In the Esplanade, when the TPS attempted to falsely arrest a young black man, accusing him of committing a murder that he had no involvement in, the Esplanade Community Group (ECG) intervened and prevented his arrest. When the community faced ongoing harassment and brutalization by constant police patrols, ECG members organized a cop watch and systematically intervened by gathering people around the police and recording video of police interactions. When a member of the ECG was targeted by police who attempted to throw him down a set of stairs, once again the community was there to protest police violence. Actions cannot just invite community members to attend, support and then leave, but must actively integrate them into the organizing.

In the neighbourhood of Dufferin and Eglinton, the police of 13 Division had targeted and terrorized the community to the point where black youth could not move freely in the community. If youth were in groups larger than two people, police would stop them and subject them to pat down searches and other forms of harassment. Youth who were most impacted by this police terrorism decided that they had to organize to change these conditions.

They began meeting regularly in the basement of a local bookstore to discuss the issues of police harassment and engaged in political education including knowing their rights when dealing with the police. This organizing work led to the creation of the Black Fist Defence Brigade in the community, and after a period of six months of organizing, youth would be able to walk the streets in their neighbourhood in groups of five, ten, or more without fear of police harassment. The police could no longer stop and harass these youth, because they had an organization to back them up and the support of elders their community.

In Jamestown, the TCHC regularly collaborates with the police at 23 Division, permits police to conduct searches of tenants’ homes, and uses the police to enforce evictions. When families came under attack by these two state institutions, local organizers in the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) mobilized their members and community supporters to defend them from being kicked out of their homes and put out on the street. InPDUM engaged community members directly with the understanding that the police are an institution of the state, which was built and maintained through the theft and destruction of Indigenous, African and other exploited peoples. With this understanding, InPDUM members did not ask the police to reform their tactics or improve their interactions with the community. Instead, the people recognized that in order to make change, they needed to be organized to contend with the power of the state and police.

These interactions with the police were successfully challenged because there was already a clearly outlined protocol in place for community members to follow. The efforts of InPDUM and the residents of Jamestown reflect how organizing – specifically, having meetings with the most affected, working class members of the community, establishing goals collectively, and demanding responsibility from each other rather than the state – all play a crucial role in developing our capacity to be leaders and protectors of our own communities. This is why organizing tactics must focus on creating trust and reliability of members within the community – our only strength is in our unity and organization. We must recognize this in order to combat a state that exists to eliminate indigenous people, brutalize people of colour and exploit the working class.

Organizing to resist and combat the violence inflicted on our communities by the police is not a simple task. But there are more of us than there are of them.

“We ain’t gonna fight no reactionary pigs who run up and down the street being reactionary; we’re gonna organize and dedicate ourselves to revolutionary political power and teach ourselves the specific needs of resisting the power structure, arm ourselves, and we’re gonna fight reactionary pigs with international proletarian revolution. That’s what it has to be. The people have to have the power: it belongs to the people.” – Fred Hampton

On December 9th, taxi drivers from across Toronto staged a series of protests against the rival company Uber. Protesters shut down four high traffic areas before finishing with a demonstration at City Hall, calling upon the mayor to ‘bring justice’ to drivers by stopping Uber from operating illegally. These disruptions reverberated throughout the city as thousands of commuter vehicles came to a resounding halt.

Uber is a company that uses online software to connect customers to drivers, often for much cheaper than what many licensced taxi competitors offer. Since Uber’s conception in Silicon Valley only a few years ago, it has spread to cities across the world—much to the dismay and protest of local taxi drivers. Both the Uber company and its software seem to represent where capitalism is headed right now. Many companies like Uber are moving toward a model in which they focus on the delivery of goods and services as efficiently as possible to middle class consumers using a combination of cutting edge technology and easily exploitable and disposable workers who are conveniently labelled independent contractors. The broader ‘Uberization’ of the economy is already underway, as the Uber platform is now being used from everything from package deliveries, to health care, to snow removal.

In Toronto during the December 9th strike, drivers pointed out that Uber drivers don’t pay licensing fees and undergo minimal training. As the Ontario Highway Traffic Act makes it illegal for any taxis to operate without special licensing, drivers questioned why city officials had yet to impose any restrictions on Uber operations. Mayor John Tory had indicated on several occasions that such plans were in the works, yet none had materialized.

In their protest, taxi drivers staged city hall demonstrations, road blocks, and a hunger strike. Frustrations were clearly running high: in one widely circulated video, a taxi driver was dragged down Queens Park Crescent by an Uber car; in another, a driver compared Uber to ISIS. Still, the sentiment of the protest is relatable.

Uber receives an unfair business advantage due to lack of regulation, and its introduction to Toronto has brought dramatic changes to the lives of already poorly paid taxi drivers—more than 80% of whom are working class immigrants. It is not uncommon for taxi drivers to have seen their incomes halved since the advent of Uber. “I’ve been a taxi driver for 25 years,” said one driver from Scarborough, “and this is the biggest change I’ve seen in my income over the shortest amount of time.”

Uber drivers have fared no better. Many were tempted by the flexibility of owning their own business and scheduling their own hours—something that the company advertises as a key selling point. Uber calls its drivers ‘business partners,’ only requiring them to have access to a car and a license, making it a highly accessible low-skilled job. As economic opportunities are scarce enough for those at the bottom, it’s not surprising to learn that many Uber drivers—especially those who drive for the lower-class ‘UberX’, and especially those who rely on Uber for most of their income—are working class immigrants who live in Toronto’s suburbs.

Since Uber cut its prices in 2014, many drivers now claim to work much longer hours and still struggle to make minimum wage from their fares. Even though drivers own their cars and pay for car insurance, gas, repairs, and so on, Uber still pockets 20% of their income as an access fee to the market of transporting people.

Uber drivers also depend on their customer satisfaction star-ratings, and rarely speak frankly about the conditions of their exploitation. For example, if they hold an average rating of less than 4.7 (out of 5) in many cities, they can be fired. Uber drivers have begun to organize in parts of the USA, demanding fairer working conditions and a living wage.

Parallels can easily be drawn between exploitation of both taxi drivers and Uber drivers by their respective employers. All drivers are faced with the burden of paying for the maintenance of their own vehicles. They also face daily, sometimes violent, racism. The companies that employ these drivers refuse to raise their wages, even as their livelihoods are threatened by economic insecurity. All are working longer hours and even taking on other jobs to make ends meet. Importantly, so many drivers are immigrants who came to Canada, the so-called land of economic opportunity, only to find themselves racialized and forced into cheap labour markets.

There is no doubt that the Uber corporation is worthy of contempt. Nevertheless, something missing from the recent taxi strike was a working class perspective. By directing complaint at the illegality of Uber, the protests missed the point that taxi drivers and many Uber drivers actually share a common struggle. It also shifts responsibility away from the exploitative taxi companies who continue to profit from their drivers’ labour.

Still, in the so-called Uberizing economy taxi and Uber drivers alike should take stock of the incredible power they sit on, as demonstrated by the traffic-blocking protests. In Toronto, a city where business demands the fast-moving uninterrupted flow of people and goods, taxis (and Ubers) are a vital part of the transportation infrastructure. Organizing a city-wide shutdown is undoubtedly a useful way to make one’s voice heard.

Featured image from The National Post

Over the last year in Toronto, we’ve seen disbelief and anger swell amongst people as they’ve learned that the police in this city have “carded” some 1.2 million people between 2008-2013, with young black men being the most targeted group.  What has shocked people has been both the illegal and violating nature of the whole practice.  If you haven’t been a victim of this practice, just imagine what it must be like to be profiled, stopped, harassed, questioned about where you’re going and who you know.

Now, imagine if that invasion of your privacy extended right to your front door. Imagine living in a place where your every movement in and out of your house was tracked, viewed, and the recordings controlled by someone else.  Now, imagine that the people who control these cameras can be sitting at home, on their couch, watching you in real time.

Welcome to 3400 Eglinton Ave East, where the superintendents can watch the comings and goings of every resident from the comfort of their own living room.

As reported by BASICS recently, the conditions in this 16-story Scarborough high rise at Markham and Eglinton shock even those who have lived in Toronto’s “low-income” hoods most of our lives.  Water leaking from hallway ceilings. Rampant roach and bedbug infestations. Carpets that hadn’t seen a steam cleaner in years, and only finally ripped out this past November to leave exposed deadly slippery flooring. Elevators are in a chronic state of disrepair.  The father of one Caribbean family on the 6th floor recently told BASICS that he “got stuck halfway between the basement and first floor [back in October] with a pregnant woman and a kid. I had to pull them all out.”

Yet, with very few funds flowing to repairs, last year Premax Management Ltd somehow found the money to install surveillance cameras on every floor of the building.  Pointing in each direction when you exit the elevator, there are cameras recording the comings and goings of every person in the building.

Kim, a resident and mother on the 17th floor, describes her first encounter with these cameras:  “I just came out of my apartment one day and realized that there was a camera facing my door. As far as I know, there at least needs to be a notice put up if your landlord is watching you.”

Kim’s right. According to the guidelines set out by the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, prior to the installation of such a surveillance system, “consultations should be conducted with relevant stakeholders as to the necessity of the proposed video surveillance program and its acceptability to the public. Extensive public consultation should take place.” Such a consultation reportedly never happened.

A mother on the 9th floor, Benisha, who finally picked up and left the building this past November, told BASICS that back in June 2015 her entire load of laundry was stolen in the direct line of sight of the cameras. When she confronted one of the superintendents, Chamu, she was told that “That camera is not for all that stuff. It’s for when something happens in the building. If you have a problem with that, call the police… What do you want me to do about that right now? I tell you guys when you washing your clothes, ‘stay there, stay there’”.

Click here to listen to short audio segment from resident concerning stolen laundry

BASICS questioned the superintendent Chamu about the purpose of the surveillance cameras in the building, relaying concerns that residents had shared with us. Her response was brief: “Who has complaints with the cameras!? It’s for security.”  Chamu was more concerned with identifying those who were airing their grievances than giving a good explanation for why the cameras were installed. Again, more surveillance.

Abha*, an Indian mother who also lives in 3400, described two incidents where in spite of the existence of cameras, neither perpetrators nor lost property were ever located. “A year ago”, she says, “my friend saw a man looking lost, like he didn’t know where he was going in the building. My friend asked him if he was looking for something. He snatched her chain and ran down the staircase. We never found the chain though.”

Abha also relayed an incident about the cars of multiple residents being damaged in the parking lot. “It seemed as though the damage was intentional, as if someone had hit multiple cars in a row with a sharp rod of some sort.”  In the recent past, other residents have also reported to BASICS instances of their vehicles being damaged, even stolen, under the watchful eye of surveillance cameras. Residents reported that no action was taken by building management.

In six months of social investigation and literally hundreds of conversations by BASICS and allied community organizers, we have not come across a single story of the cameras being used to address people’s legitimate concerns about safety or protection of their personal belongings.  At least two residents specifically reported to us being robbed of their jewelry during building-related repairs.

But the problem at 3400 Eglinton is not that the cameras are going completely unused.

Many have reported that camera footage is indeed being used: used to harass residents about who visits their apartments, what personal consumer objects they own, and even the conversations they are having in the elevators or hallways.

In the spring of 2015, one single mother told a BASICS reporter that Chamu questioned her about a man who visited her apartment late. “She said to me: ‘You’re on welfare, you’re not supposed to be having any men over.’  A teenage girl residing on the 9th floor also reported that her mother was questioned about a man that had been in their unit. This man when her older brother, who came to stay with them for a few days.

A number of residents also believe that the cameras may also be equipped with audio. Karl Murray of the 6th floor told BASICS that: “You can say anything you want in the hallway, and they know about it. A lot of people are saying this. Somehow they know what people are talking about in their private conversations.”  A resident who wished not to be identified in this article backed up this suspicion by reporting that one of the few residents in the building who is close with the super told her earlier this year that the cameras are indeed audio equipped.

The ability of the cameras to record both movement and conversations disturbs many, particularly female residents. A resident and mother from the 6th floor, another Kim, also told BASICS that “I have to be conscious of what I’m wearing – it’s not like I’m wearing anything inappropriate, it’s just that it’s something I have to think about just outside my own home”. Michelle, who lives across from 6th floor Kim, said that “Women in this building do not feel safe… You should be able to have conversations without people using them against you.”

As we were talking to Kim on the 17th floor, one of the superintendents, Chet, arrived and threatened to remove BASICS correspondents from the building.

Though we could not acquire a legal opinion on the cameras prior to the print deadline on this article, a city inspector on site at 3400 Eglinton Ave this past October 2015 commented to a BASICS correspondent that personal surveillance of private activities seemed unlawful**.

Again, according to guidelines set out by the Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, “organizations should ensure that the proposed design and operation of the video surveillance system minimizes privacy intrusion to that which is absolutely necessary to achieve its required, lawful goals.”  

It’s not so clear if harassing residents, threatening people’s journalists, and ignoring people’s concerns about their personal belongings constitutes “lawful goals”, but that’s the law of the land at 3400 Eglinton Ave East.  

But like “the law” in general, as with police carding, when people don’t fight back, “the law” will oppress us. The “lawful” authorities will use illegal, criminal means to keep the people down. So it’s time to stand up.

*Name altered to respect privacy. Unlike the superintendents at 3400 Eglinton Ave E.
**Correction made at 7:36 PM on 27 December 2015. Original article read: “Though we could not acquire a legal opinion on the cameras prior to the print deadline on this article, a city inspector on site at 3400 Eglinton Ave this past October 2015 commented to a BASICS correspondent that the surveillance system seemed unlawful.”

In Toronto, one of the main ways that working class people find work when they find themselves out of a job and need to pay bills is through various temporary agencies. These agencies play the role of middlemen between corporations and workers. Corporations use them for a number of reasons, though they all add up to saving the corporations money. Workers hired through temporary agencies are often paid minimum wage, with the temporary agency making money off of each worker they supply to a company.

While it doesn’t immediately appear this way in any accounting books, what basically happens is that the temporary agency takes part of the money the worker would otherwise be paid for every hour of work. What is even worse about this is that this total amount is often still less than a ‘regular’ full-time employee of a company doing the same job makes per hour.

Javeed, a printing factory worker interviewed for this article, explained, “I’ve been working in this factory for eight months and still make minimum wage. The full-time packers make nearly double what I make, while machine operators make even more than that. I’m only working there as a temp so that I can get a job with the company, but it’s getting too frustrating. I have no idea how much money the temp. agency has been making off me, but i know they are making good money. I see the cars they drive there when I pick up my paycheques.”

These temporary agencies operate in different parts of the city, often on a particular ethnic, language or community basis, recruiting exploitable immigrants from all the various communities of Toronto so that companies can make an easy profit without having to worry about taking care of workers.

Sometimes, these temp. agencies attempt to take even more money from their workers by purposely not paying them for the hours they’ve worked and still refusing to pay even after a formal complaint has been made. A case of exactly this kind was brought to the attention of Basics several years ago in Etobicoke.

In this case, a worker named Mohammed was refused several days pay worth over $200 by his temp. agency after he finished working for them. This temp. agency particularly focused on recruiting workers from African backgrounds in the northwest part of the city and was controlled by one man out of a small office located in a strip mall.

However, Mohammed was able to get back his money after contacting the Solidarity Committee of the Industrial Workers of the World, who came out to his temp. bosses office with him and presented him with formal written and oral demands for the wages to be paid. This confrontation was enough to get this temp. agency to pay up.

As workers, many of us have no choice but to work for temporary agencies to pay the bills, though this doesn’t mean we should just accept their parasitical nature as natural or normal.

People should not profit off us by sitting in an office or even their own home and siphoning off money while we work in some of the most physically demanding and stressful jobs in the city, barely being able to afford to get to work each day. The same goes for the big corporations themselves and their executives and managers. All of these parasites make money off us each day and live luxurious lifestyles off the labour we provide for them, for which they pay us as few scraps as possible.

¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York was on display at The Bronx, El Museo del Barrio and Loisaida museums in New York this fall. The exhibit displayed the immense body of art, culture, and politics that the Young Lords produced over the years, a sort of shrine to the radical love that the movement was so committed to.

The Young Lords Party (YLP) was a group of mainly Puerto Rican socialist revolutionaries who organized in cities across America during the 1960s-80s. The party was influenced by groups such as the Black Panther Party. YLP gradually transformed itself from a small network of gang members into a broader human rights movement pushing neighbourhood empowerment and Puerto Rican self-determination as its core missions.

Lining the walls of the Bronx Museum in particular are dozens of copies of Palante, The Young Lord, and Pitirre, the three newspapers produced by the party. These newspapers recounted the stories and culture that gave life to the Young Lords movement, and it is for this reason that the newspapers are still admired and displayed in museums to this day.

The newspapers documented the atrocities committed against these racialized working class groups over the years—violent racism, poor housing conditions, police brutality, and even a CIA undercover program to flood Puerto Rican neighbourhoods with heroin.

Countless other historical examples can be drawn of newspapers acting as a central means of uniting people by documenting struggle—notably, the Black Panther Party paper, which outlined the famous 10-point program calling for ‘Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice, and Peace’ among other demands. Another is the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement newspaper, Inner City Voice, that was not only the voice of radical politics in working class black Detroit but also published articles on guerrilla movements in Latin America, women’s liberation, and anti-war movements during the 1960s. The titles of the headlines in this paper make it clear the ideological agenda it promoted: “Michigan Slavery”, “Cops on rampage- 14 year old shot”, or “Black worker uprising”, to name but a few. The newspaper here was used as not only as a tool for education and empowerment, but also to counter the hegemonic discourse of capitalist publications that were all but silent on the substantive issues of class, race, or gender.

The culture of revolution: Documenting and archiving the Young Lords struggle in New York circa 1970

While the newspaper can be a tool used for social change, if in the hands of the wrong people it can also be a tool used to control people. The bourgeois mass media—most large-scale television, radio, and newspapers that are run to make a profit—don’t tell the stories that reflect people’s struggles. Rather, they skew and distort stories to make them more palatable, pleasant, and less ‘threatening’ to the social order. This is because the mass media is controlled by people who have a vested interest in the status quo, and whose profit or dominance is threatened by the idea of large-scale social change–that is, they are capitalist enterprises.

Stories that are run by the bourgeois media claim to take a ‘neutral’ stance, but in truth they are pushing a very carefully constructed, de-politicized point of view. They could not, for example, publish an article pushing a specific anti-capitalist, anti-racist, or anti-colonial perspective.

Even the best left-wing journalist enterprises are most often bourgeois media, and because of this their stories are limited in scope and purpose. The Toronto Star is an excellent example of this. The Star can run an editorial on the ongoing genocide of Palestinians by the settler colony Israel but at the same time endorse Liberal leader Justin Trudeau for Prime Minister–a man who is a professed Zionist and apologist for Israeli apartheid.

Likewise, right-wing publications in Toronto appeal outright to populism with no attempt at critical commentary. The Toronto Sun, for example, has strong ties to capitalist think-tanks (the Fraser Institute, C.D. Howe Institute, or Conference Board of Canada to name a few) that are funded by corporations or political interests with deep pockets.

The community newspaper, then, has a duty to expose these faults in the mass media, to poke holes in its ideology at every opportunity, and to document instead the stories that reflect the experiences of the working class.

Archived front pages of Young Lords newspapers on display at the Bronx Museum, New York

It is newspapers like those produced by the Young Lords that recount the story of revolution and a creative imagination of another world that is possible. More than that, it reminds us of the need to document and archive struggle. In many ways this same documenting and archiving drives hip hop’s need to preserve the history and legacies of slavery and racism in America, and other artistic representations of suffering and loss. And, because the newspaper is mass-distributed, it is a useful tool for uniting many of us in a common struggle—to bring people together by documenting the livelihoods, stories, and collective memory of exploitation endured by working-class people.

Archives of Palante can be found online here.

Radio Basics interviewed the Young Lords founder José Cha Cha Jiménez, archived here.

In 2014, the Toronto Community Housing Corporation issued its annual Performance Report, a document which measures whether TCHC reached its own targets in providing repairs and “sustainable living” conditions for tenants. Last year’s report included a section for Resident Satisfaction.

This new section meant to examine whether there was an “increase in resident satisfaction with the quality and conditions of their homes and buildings”, but concluded that there was “no tool to measure progress” and that a “resident survey [is] required.”

In the 2015 TCH Performance Report, however, the same statement is written under Resident Satisfaction: “Measure under development”.

Since TCHC seems pretty busy with coming up with a survey, BASICS has decided to report some of the experiences which residents at 3171 Eglinton Ave E. have shared about the state of repairs in their aging complex.

*Fatima, a resident of 3171 Eglinton for four years, described her first few months moving into the apartment: “When I arrived, I needed to repaint the walls to accommodate my son’s respiratory issues—because it wasn’t the ‘normal’ paint, I was charged for 50% of the cost.”

Respiratory concerns are shared by many residents due to the mold that is growing throughout TCHC building. Management is slow to make any changes in the perpetually damaged state of the building: ”When things go wrong, we must make an appointment with the superintendent. When you make an appointment, people only show up after three weeks, sometimes a month,” said Bilal, another resident.

Fatima and Bilal’s experiences are shared widely by others. Jacob, a long-term resident, explained that he reported mold in his kitchen cabinets repeatedly: “When they finally came to address it, they just painted over it. I keep my cups in there, it’s a health concern”.

Some aspects of the TCHC building seem to never get fixed, as BASICS reporters realized during our weekly stairwell hikes to the twelfth floor. “When I came, it was because I was told the building was very accessible. Then the elevators started to break down. Now they break two or three times a month,” said Fatima. “They are still broken now.”

Just this month, BASICS reporters saw one woman get her foot stuck in the doors of the elevator at 3171 Eglinton, due to its faltering ability to sense the presence of passing bodies. Disturbingly, after the initial shock, she seemed fairly dismissive of the occurrence: “It’s not the first time,” she said with a shrug.

The dismissal of individual experiences are unsurprising when seeing how building-wide infrastructural crises are dealt with. Bilal described the bursting of hot water from broken pipes in February: “The water flooded the plaster in the entrance, it wasn’t fixed until March.”

The fall of four storeys worth of brick in April of this year was covered by multiple Toronto news sources. Residents who spoke to us described it as “terrifying.” Hannah, a mother who has lived at 3171 for decades, reported being “afraid to sleep in my own room at night.”

Residents of that end of the complex were given a complimentary hotel-stay three weeks after the event, perhaps as a belated apology by TCHC for the potentially-life threatening situation. Today, the outskirts of the building are surrounded by two fences, apparently in the hope that no remaining bricks will fall on passing pedestrians. One fence is a metal grille, and the other plywood. Yet the ravaged south end of the building remains covered by no more than a long sheet of tarpaulin.

Experienced tenants have told BASICS repeatedly that after private property management companies—such as DMS, which currently runs 3171 Eglinton—took over from TCHC employees, repairs have become even rarer and less effective.

The TCHC website claims that “contract management is a cost-effective way to provide the same high level of service to tenants.” If the above tenant experiences are what TCHC identifies as a high level of service, then it is clearly unqualified to provide any assessment of “sustainable living” or “resident satisfaction”. Only the tenants themselves are qualified to measure the performance of TCHC, and this can only be achieved through by communicating and organising with one another.

*Some of the names of 3171 Eglinton residents have been changed in this article at their request.

“Two people have been killed since I moved in here. Of course I feel unsafe. I feel more safe in the street than in my home.”

This is how Maryam*, a woman in her early twenties and a three-year resident of 3171 Eglinton Avenue—one of the TCHC high-rises at the intersection with Markham Road—describes her life in the building.

“I don’t feel comfortable inviting friends over. Once a friend spent the night, and at two a.m. someone started banging on the door demanding to come in. How are two women alone in an apartment at that hour going to feel?”

Of the dozens of residents at 3171 with whom BASICS has spoken, nearly all have similar concerns about safety. For female residents in particular, the greatest feeling of threat can sometimes come from other residents—in particular, men. Such feelings are common for women who, like Maryam, live alone or as single mothers.

Due to the seeming lack of other choices, some residents turn to the police. For example, after racist curses were scratched onto her door a few months ago, Maryam immediately informed the Toronto Police Service. When constables came by, however, she found them unwilling to pay even cursory attention to the situation: “When I told them about these words someone had written and asked them what they were going to do, one of them just shrugged and said, ‘It’s TCHC’.”

The cop’s indifference to Maryam’s concerns reflects the attitude of the police department towards the concerns of low-income residents. After the murder of 22 year-old Dillon Phillips in the stairwell on September 2014, a second resident recalls the police and TCHC management as encouraging residents to “Take back your building”. In such circumstances, residents and onlookers are forced to ask whether the police are in place to protect or divide communities.

Trapped between a rock (insecurity) and a hard place (disdain and disinterest from the police), Maryam’s only goal is to get as far from community housing as possible. “I don’t hang out in the area, I don’t want to be here. When I’m gone, I’ll never think about this place again,” she said to BASICS.

For a woman in her position, this view is entirely reasonable, and it is one which many women in the building seem to share. Yet when residents are lucky enough to get a transfer or start making enough money to move out, their apartments will immediately be filled by a few more people from TCHC’s 160,000-household waiting list. New residents, as well as the many who are unable to leave, are simply forced into the same stressful, unchanging, and sometimes dangerous circumstances. Unable and uninterested in providing a secure home, TCHC and the Toronto Police Service bring TCHC residents to see their apartments as places where fear and suspicion are constant.

When asked if her concerns about security cause alienation from other residents, Maryam said, “Definitely.” In a building where turnover is high, security is low, and many wish to leave, it is difficult for residents to build a sense of trust in the community.

Yet the police prove, as they did in Maryam’s case, that they have little interest in protecting working-class and racialized women—and this is without any discussion of police treatment of working-class and racialized men.

Under these circumstances, who better for female residents to turn toward than one another? Protective links already exist in small, informal ways—between friends, for instance. But if these links could turn into something larger and more organised, a safer and more inclusive community for women—and perhaps also men—at 3171 Eglinton could take shape.

*At her request, we have given Maryam a pseudonym for this article.

(Photo Credit: Chris Doucette, Toronto Sun)

Concerned residents and community members gathered at a vigil on Christmas eve for Jermaine Carby, a Brampton man who was shot and killed by Peel Regional Police three months earlier.  The gathering rallied about 50 members at the location of Carby’s murder, near Queen and Kennedy, where members of the Justice for Jermaine Carby Campaign along with friends, family, activists, and community members participated in an hour long blockade of the busy Brampton intersection.

Carby’s cousin La Tanya Grant, a lead member of the Justice for Jermaine campaign, stated that the vigil was held, “to bring awareness, to let [police] know that we are not going to stop, that we are going to keep coming in the media eye to demand answers for Jermaine.”

Carby was shot on September 24, shortly after being stopped by police for undisclosed reasons. Witnesses have stated that he had his hands up or was slowly approaching the officer who shot him, claims consistent with the gunshot wound to his inner left forearm which his autopsy indicated.

Grant spoke about his death as a personal tragedy, but also emphasised that it was only one moment in the red record of the Peel Police.

“A young man died and nothing is happening,” said Brampton resident Amuna, who went to highschool with Michael Wade Lawson, the 17-year-old who was also shot and killed by Peel Region Police officers in 1988 in the back of the head by an illegal 38-calibre slug known as a “hot bullet” which expands on contact, banned in Ontario by the Ontario Police Act.  Lawson’s murder, and the mass protests it set off, contributed to the creation of the S.I.U. a couple years later.

But nearly a quarter century later, organizers with the Justice for Jermaine campaign see little use for the S.I.U. except to “cover up” police actions, and put families on ice while community anger dissipates. Among the demands of the campaign included, disbanding the S.I.U., which organizers brought up “clears officers of wrongdoing at a rate of 98%.” The campaign is also demanding:

• That the name of the officer who shot Carby be released.
• That the name of the person in whose vehicle Carby was a passenger be released.
• Immediate public disclosure of whether a knife was recovered at the scene.

Police cruisers quickly showed up. They attempted to isolate the vigil by blocking off the roads around the intersection, but met with limited success for some time. While two or three drivers expressed anger at the vigil participants, uttering death threats to organizers right in front of Peel police, many others joined in, and some passersby shouted encouragement.

An inconvenienced driver threatens to the cops that he “run ’em over” if protestors are not removed by the police, while flailing his arms in the cops’ faces. How many people of colour could get away with uttering death threats and aggressively approaching the police? As one protestor mockingly hollered at this perturbed little man, “Hang on buddy, you’ll get to have that eggnog soon enough!” #white privilege #white terror 

One protester, who saw Jermaine like a big brother told BASICS, “I was homeless and he gave me a home. This was the kind of person he was… He helped me find a place… Why did they take him from me? He was my older brother and I love him so much, and I will not forget him.”

“Sabey” – being interviewd by BASICS correspondent Steve da Silva.

After almost an hour, the intersection was clear in all four directions but for the police roadblocks. The campaign organizers, buoyed by the strong impression they had made and the solidarity the participants had shown, thanked everyone in attendance. Shortly before the end of the vigil, a CityTV team showed up, but did not speak to any of the participants, and quickly left when it became clear that things were winding down. No other major media outlet was present.

For a video essay of the rally, see the following video

On October 29, 2014, Sportchek in a partnership with Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment (the Raptors owners) launched an advertising and publicity campaign called #MyNorth asking Torontonians to share stories about local basketball culture in the various Toronto ‘hoods. The campaign builds off of Drake’s re-branding of the Toronto Raptors earlier this year, with his #WeTheNorth campaign, which included an intelligent and extremely well-produced television advertisement featuring basketball courts largely located in social housing projects throughout Toronto.

The #MyNorth campaign seeks to implement the ideas developed in the initial Raptors re-brand marketing that centered around attempting to get people who identify with the local basketball culture to begin to associate this culture with the Raptors themselves.  Torontonians have never really identified the Raptors as somehow defining or even influencing the local basketball culture, unlike some basketball meccas like New York with the Knicks and Chicago with the Bulls where local basketball cultures are strongly influenced by their NBA teams.  In New York, the Knicks are almost considered to be part of the city’s identity and history, much like the Yankees.

While the new #WeTheNorth campaign is attempting to develop a similar identification with the Raptors in Toronto basketball culture, the campaign has made some surprising mistakes in understanding the very nature of basketball culture and how this culture is viewed by those who participate in it.

Bathurst Heights basketball courts built on the surface of old tennis courts in 2004 with a donation of $20,000 from Nike in honour of Phil Dixon. It say a lot about the #MyNorth campaign that it is being launched in the winter when all outdoor courts are frozen as in this picture. It is clearly scheduled to coincide with the start of the NBA season as well as the high school basketball season.

These mistakes are surprising only because of how savvy the initial Raptors rebrand of #WeTheNorth was, with it being obvious to many that Drake’s knowledge of Toronto’s culture and geography, having grown up in Toronto’s west end in Vaughan and Oakwood and Forest Hill, was the factor that led to the success of the initial campaign and its relatability to Torontonians. Some of the mistakes of the #MyNorth campaign would suggest a lesser degree of creative control from Drake or really anyone who understands basketball culture or geography in Toronto.

Thus far, the new campaign features billboards, several television advertisements as well as the Twitter hashtag itself, which has apparently received little use by actual Torontonians.  Mostly it’s been used to post scores of Raptors wins by Sportchek employees as well as several video ads telling local basketball stories. For example, a video was posted that told the story of a former Toronto high school player named Denham Brown who scored 111 points in his last high-school game in 2001 before going on to play for the University of Connecticut. Another ad tells the story of Phil Dixon, a former Bathurst Heights basketball star in the late 1980s, who was pegged to be a star in the NBA but never played a game at that level due to an injury early in his college career.

There is another video advertisement being used by #MyNorth that talks about the campaign in general and attempts to get the general concept across, and has a very similar message to the videos focused on Dixon and Brown, focusing on individual stars on high-school teams and Toronto’s ‘hoods as producers of potential basketball stars who may be one of the few to make it from rags-to-riches and become superstars or ‘heroes’, as the video openly states.

The problem with all of these videos is that they fail to actually talk about the basketball culture of any of the ‘hoods they are supposedly focused on.  They instead tell stories about individual stars in the context of their school-based careers and their school-based teams and not their ‘hoods recreational basketball history and the broader basketball culture in which they honed their skills and style growing up.

The video about Phil Dixon, the former Bathurst Heights star, produced for #MyNorth doesn’t even mention the existence of Lawrence Heights once, though the public basketball courts at Bathurst Heights (now John Polanyi Collegiate Institute) are generally recognized as some of the most interesting in Toronto in terms of the diversity of ages, abilities and ethnicities of players to play there over the years, as well as the sometimes surprisingly high quality of games to be played on these fairly dusty and poorly maintained recreational courts that were actually rebuilt nearly a decade ago with money from the Raptors and Nike in honour of Dixon himself. A lot of the culture around these courts comes out of Lawrence Heights, with youth who use the courts generally feeling that they belong to those who live in Lawrence Heights and the surrounding areas.

There has often been a degree of hostility among area youth to anyone from Keele and Eglinton, the centre of another distinct urban youth culture that is also connected to particular basketball courts located at a nearby recreation center. While both of these somewhat distinct recreational basketball cultures are located partially around a high school, this does not mean that these teams are central to these cultures.  Rather, there is an overall recreational basketball culture around the student populations of these high schools that goes way beyond the actual team and is sometimes almost unrelated. While some people do occasionally play basketball in both areas, this is quite rare, partially for the reasons mentioned above.

In the above analysis of these localized basketball cultures I did not once mention North York or York, the respective old Metro Toronto municipalities in which the two areas are located. However, the #MyNorth campaign bases itself off of these old municipal-legal divisions of Metro Toronto rather than actual neighbourhoods. They effectively call all of North York, Scarborough and old Toronto ‘neighbourhoods’ despite the fact that they all contain many distinct neighbourhoods with very different basketball cultures that have little in common with each other and basically no relations or overlap. It is unknown why they did this, though it seems that this was done solely because the campaign was designed by people who know very little about Toronto basketball culture or Toronto in general, and just looked at a map of the old Metro Toronto municipal divisions. It is this particular flaw of the campaign that would suggest that Drake has had very little creative control or even oversight in it.

Another reason for their choice of the old metro divisions may be their privileging of school basketball teams, with these divisions making somewhat more sense when it comes to high-school basketball competition between schools than actual basketball culture as a whole. There are, of course, larger problems with their centering of basketball culture in school basketball teams, which in my own experience, at Northern Secondary School involved major contradictions between the players and an old, white, racist and classist coach whom the players suspected of playing games with the line-up based on racial competition between the black and white players. The are are also many good players who never even try out for their high school teams, don’t have good enough grades to play or drop out of high school altogether.

Despite the failings of #MyNorth, they are doing some interesting things that warrant our attention. They claim to be making basketball culture documentaries on each of the ‘neighbourhoods’ of Toronto and doing area-specific clothing launches, with all of this supposedly being based on input from local residents who actually know basketball culture. While we can already see that they probably won’t do this very effectively and we know that they are only doing it to make a buck at the end of the day, there is something interesting about their ‘engagement’ with the community that warrants further investigation.

Their campaign involves a strategy that is called community engagement or public participation in the corporate and government world, which resembles a kind of caricature of some of the strategies organizers have developed to organize communities. These strategies generally involve going to people where they are, understanding their issues, consciousness and stories, and then coming back to them with some kind of plan, political program or project based on this and continuing the process.

Of course, #MyNorth will only end up selling people branded merchandise with a slightly more local flavour, not giving people a plan to improve local conditions or get them involved in changing the hoods and larger society that they live in. That corporate institutions have developed such strategies and are trying to implement them is part of the ongoing battle for Toronto and its neighbourhoods.

Michael grew up playing on several courts in the area before the Bathurst Heights courts were built, though many of them have been rebuilt and relocated or closed to the public, specifically one at a private hebrew school that is now secured by high fences and a complex alarm system. He is one of a small number of people to still play basketball on outdoor public courts in his 20’s, and has put in a lot of hours playing at the Bathurst Heights courts since 2004. He has probably seen three ‘generations’ of court regulars come and go in this time. 

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