By Steve da Silva

The TCHC residents of Regent Park and Lawrence Heights will easily recognize the name ‘Public Interest’. Public Interest Strategy and Communications was the consulting firm that was hired by TCHC to conduct the bogus “consultation” processes with residents about plans for ‘Revitalization’ (a.k.a. Gentrification).In essence, these consultations were all about selling the idea of “redevelopment” to the people, managing people’s dissident when it arose, and channeling people’s opposition into harmless forms of community engagement.

On Sunday, March 13, 2011, a citywide organizing meeting was held in Lawrence Heights to create tenant opposition to the new threats of privatization. The folks of Public Interest (alongside one of the two purged TCHC ‘Tenant Rep’ Board members Catherine Wilkinson) immediately thrust themselves into the center of the organizing initiative.

Can a TCHC-contracted consulting group be in a position to provide genuine leadership to the tenant opposition to privatization?  Or are they merely concerned about losing their hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts if TCHC is privatized?  At least one Lawrence Heights resident saw the conflict of interest when she demanded Public Interest be excluded from the March 13 meeting: “How could these people be here if they’ve been the ones promoting the “revitalization” of our communities?”

One look at the biography of Wilkinson on the TCHC website would have most tenants thinking twice about whose been “representing” them at TCHC.  A Board Member of the Innisfil Chamber of Commerce and formerly an Auxiliary Police Constable are only a few of the highlights of Wilkinson’s stacked resume.

Sean Meagher (President) and Effie Vlachoyannacos (employee) of Public Interest have also established a series of other non-tenant led “community outreach and engagement programs”, including Save Our Structures.  It’s also no secret that Meagher, Vlachoyannacos, and the work of Public Interest as a whole isvery close to the NDP.

Tenants haven’t forgotten that it was the NDP Mayor David Miller who oversaw the deterioration of social housing in Toronto and the unpopular “revitalization” schemes.  Certainly, higher levels of government need to be blamed. But the NDP at the level of municipal politics in Toronto has done nothing but to hold back the initiative of tenants at a period when what we really need is a massive organizing and mobilizing initiative, not lobbying and electoral politics.

Since the March 13 meeting, the Public Interest-Wilkinson duo have been dominating and directing what has developed into a grouping called “Tenants for Social Housing: We are not for sale!”  They have struggled hard to ensure that the work of this grouping would limit itself to lobbying politicians, petitioning, and reinstating tenant representation (read: Catherine Wilkinson) on the TCHC Board of Directors.

I, Steve da Silva, a member of BASICS Community News Service, alongside Shafiq Aziz, a TCHC resident, have been attending these meetings and strongly advocating for the creation a completely independent tenant initiative.  Indeed, BASICS (and myself) were advocating for this sort of independent organizing since early 2007 when we created our newspaper in Lawrence Heights to counter the gentrification schemes on the horizon – around the same time that Public Interest was signing their first contracts with TCHC for the Lawrence Heights project.

If Public Interest and Wilkinson are against privatization, good on them; the people need allies.  But TCHC residents had no shortage of problems under the former Board of Directors and under the NDP-oriented City Hall of David Miller; and things are certainly about to get a hell of a lot worse with Mayor Rob Ford.  Residents cannot let their initiatives be supported to the NDP electoral machine or any other narrow set of interests.

At this time, tenants need a truly independent, citywide tenant organization to fight against privatization, fight for the long-overdue repairs, and build truly democratic tenant-led movement in our communities.

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