A New Life for Mexico’s Oldest Union / by David Bacon

_{^{Electrical workers march for their jobs. (Photo by David Bacon)}}

“Our vision is defending the interests of workers and a democratic union life.” In conversation with a longtime labor journalist, a Mexican union leader puts current worker struggles in context.

_{Reposted from ZNet}

Humberto Montes de Oca is the Secretary for Internal Relations of the Mexican Union of Electrical Workers (SME). He was originally a working-class art student who became active in the left-wing political movements of the period of Mexico’s Dirty War (1970s to early 1980s). He joined the SME as a political act to become part of the country’s radical working-class movement, and he became one of its most important leaders.

In 2009 the administration of Felipe Calderón dissolved the Power and Light Company of Central Mexico, one of the country’s two national providers of electrical power. He then declared the union non-existent and terminated the jobs of its 44,000 members. While other administrations had regarded the SME, one of Mexico’s oldest, and most democratic and radical unions, as a political opponent, no government before had taken such an extreme step.

About 16,000 of the union’s members decided to resist the attack, and they began an effort that continues today to recover their jobs and workplace rights, including the union contract. They kept the union’s structure and headquarters intact, and then set up an allied workers’ cooperative to generate work and help members survive. The other members took the government’s severance package and gave up their union and job rights.

In this interview, presented as a first-person narrative, Montes de Oca describes the current state of the union and its relationship with the progressive administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO).

The Current State of Labor Reform

Today we are in a situation created by the 2019 freedom of association reform. To some degree that reform was forced on the government by the pressure of unions in Canada and the United States, as part of the negotiation of the new free trade agreement T-MEC (Tratado–Mexico Estados Unidos Canada, USCMA in English). Pressure was put on Mexico to make changes in union representation because charrismo and the employer protection contracts were used to cheapen the labor of Mexicans. Workers in Canada and the United States were at a disadvantage. Capital investment comes to Mexico because of these more favorable conditions.

In Mexico, those unions argued, workers should have greater ability to defend their interests to increase their benefits and income. This reform was implemented using this logic. It requires all unions to show that they are legitimate representatives of workers, and to create legitimate collective labor contracts. The corporate and employer protection unions opposed this reform because it goes against their interests. But they have also adjusted by inventing a strategy in which they go through the process, even though everything actually remains the same.

It is true that U.S. and Canadian unions sought to integrate the labor reforms in Mexican legislation into the labor chapter of the T-MEC. But it is also true that in Mexican unionism there is a tradition of democratic struggle. Our very survival as a union has been a fight for union democracy in tough battles in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

But the reform created bodies, like the Federal Labor Registration Center, which exercise very arbitrary power in a way that does not correspond to the spirit of the law. There is a danger that unions themselves will lose their autonomy and the labor movement its independence.

Yet there are groups of workers who are taking advantage of the situation to free themselves from charro unions. The example of the independent union victory at the General Motors plant in Silao is the clearest. We can see that it is possible for workers, using this legitimation process, to displace charro unions and achieve authentic collective bargaining.

So there are two kinds of outcomes. On the one hand a sham process allows charro unions and protection unions to become legitimate through a fraudulent procedure. On the other hand, an authentic process makes it possible to displace the charros and create new democratic unions.

Unfortunately, there is as yet no commitment to a widespread challenge by established independent unions to the old Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) structure. Democratic unions are fragmented.

At the same time, the Left no longer talks about unions. It is losing its link with the workers. We need a workers’ movement that thinks of itself as a class, beyond individual sectors or branches. The new Central Obrero, and organizations in other sectors who want a movement for union democratization in our country, should come together. We have common issues: freedom of association, union democracy, social security, pensions, retirements, salaries—the basis for generating a movement. In that movement there’s room for many efforts, including the Casas Obreras, the new emerging unions and federations of unions, and the old pillars of democratic unionism such as the SME.

Perhaps in the medium- and long-term there will be a regrouping. Even if some are not moving in that direction now, perhaps later they will be convinced that this is needed, and they can help to build that process.

Nationalizing the Energy Industry

We share with the government the idea of nationalizing the electrical industry. In the past, we defended the nationalized electricity industry against the gradual privatization that took place in previous administrations.

Today we call for reversing Enrique Peña Nieto’s structural privatization reform, imposed in 2013. But we want to add a social dimension, the recognition of the human right to energy as a constitutional right, and the social management of this strategic area, with broad participation of technicians, workers, and energy users. We need researchers who can manage this public company and not turn it into a political instrument of the state and the party in power. This is what we’ve frequently seen in our country, in the case of public companies.

It is not enough to nationalize or renationalize the energy industry. We need the social management of strategic industries for the common good, with the broad participation of society, of workers, of specialists, of the energy consumers themselves. The right to energy is an inalienable human right. The solution is not as simple as saying, “let it be made public and that’s it.” What we have now is the bureaucratization of the management—public officials who obey commercial logic rather than the general interest of society.

The Federal Electricity Commission, the company that supplies electric energy, is a public company, but that does not mean that it has a social character. The company will still cut you off if you don’t pay.

Difficult Relations with the Lopez Obrador Administration

AMLO was running for office in 2010, during the hunger strike in which our union fought the attack meant to destroy us. On one occasion he came to be with us. He gave us a letter in which he promised that when he became president, he would reintegrate us into the workforce. To date he has not fulfilled this commitment, and he has not given the union a hearing.

Instead, AMLO has supported the former leaders of our union, who in 2009 called for the capitulation of the SME. They wanted to collect severance pay, so they resigned from the union and tried to dissolve it, liquidating its assets and distributing the money among the workers. We made a commitment to resist, and to fight against the extinction decree. They abandoned this fight and yet, after we fought for 14 years, they are the ones close to the president.

Some officials, like presidential spokesperson Jesús Ramírez Cuevas and the director of the Federal Electricity Commission, Manuel Bartlett Díaz, are using these dissident groups to attack the union. They threaten to take over our facilities by violence and mount a media campaign of slander.

People in this government believe that the governing party should have unions that are useful, loyal, and subordinate. To them, a corporatized SME would be useful. Since we have not shown any subordination, and we safeguard our autonomy, they don’t like this.

Our organization has always been critical. We recognize that the president is making an effort to recover the country’s energy sovereignty, but we also have criticisms of its labor policy. There are many unresolved conflicts and strikes, like the three-year strike in Sur Notimex and the miners’ strike in Cananea. There is no solution for our colleagues of the National Coordination of Education Workers. In short, the regime’s labor policy is not what one might hope for from a democratic government.

The current government has little dialogue with social movements, unlike the progressivism in South America, where presidents like Lula, Chávez, and Evo Morales have had a lot of communication with them. In Mexico, many social movements that supported MORENA [the current governing party] in 2018 feel disappointed because they have not seen their situation improve or attention to their demands. The government proposes a direct relationship with the population without intermediaries. In its view, a union, a neighborhood organization, or an organization of academics or researchers is an intermediary. Instead, the government supports the people through its social policy and assistance programs.

This is a clientelistic electoral policy, and in Mexico City, MORENA lost the majority of the mayoralties in the last election. The city has been the cradle of the left-wing social movement in Mexico, but there is not a good relationship between the government and its social movements.

The Status of the SME Today

Currently we have a membership of approximately 15,000 active workers and 10,000 retirees, who come from the former company Luz y Fuerza del Centro. We have work in the generation plants recovered from that public company, and other economic ventures where we have collective contracts. We have a collective bargaining agreement with Generadora Fénix and a contract with the Portuguese company Mota-Engil, where we are part of the public limited liability company that generates electricity. We have the right to 50 percent of the company’s profits.

We have other collective contracts with other companies, smaller agreements, which enable us to keep the national industrial registry of our union. We also have people working in the LF del Centro cooperative. The union is made up of workers who work under a collective labor contract, cooperative workers who work in the union’s social and solidarity economy projects, and workers who do not have a job.

We are incorporating the children of the workers in resistance as members, not only in terms of looking for a job, but creating spaces for our young people and children. We have groups for women and for pensioners and retirees. Under Mexican law we have a legal and legitimately constituted, democratically elected leadership. We want to provide spaces for participation.

We have a strong presence in the central states of Mexico, with a union structure in Morelos, Michoacán, Hidalgo, the State of Mexico, and Mexico City. We maintain a strong strategic alliance with the users of electrical energy—the National Assembly of Electrical Energy—and we hold days of struggle on the 11th of each month. Our objective is labor reintegration in the nationalized electricity industry. For users, we want recognition of the human right to energy. Users need a clean slate so their debts are forgiven.

We have very good relations with the unions in the United States and Canada. We were able to present a complaint under the labor chapter of the old NAFTA because of help from the unions in both countries. That complaint helped us put pressure on the Peña Nieto government to find a political solution to our conflict. We work to maintain those relationships.

This link between unions is necessary to defend the interests of the working class in our three countries. There is actually greater protection and more freedom for workers in Mexico than in the United States, where labor rights are very restricted. Article 123 of our Constitution and the Federal Labor Law are the products of our social movements. Paradoxically, however, our income levels are much lower, and unions in our country often operate on behalf of employers’ interests and not those of the majority of workers. And there is no authentic respect for the autonomy of unions.

We are part of the process of change in Latin America. We have scheduled several events bringing together international energy workers. We try to support the workers of France, who are defending their retirement system, and the Peruvian people who are being massacred. We just signed a statement opposing the attacks on the Indigenous Zapatista communities by paramilitary groups linked to the political elite in the state of Chiapas.

Creating a Class-Conscious Membership

Before the government’s attempt to destroy the union in 2009, we had a school for union activists, organized by retired colleagues with a political background. All union representatives had to participate in this mandatory training school. We had an escalating series of general modules, from the history of the labor movement and of our union to the study of political economy, historical materialism, and Marxism.

When I held the position of departmental representative, I was a rank-and-file underground distribution worker in the underground cable department. As soon as I began to represent my colleagues, I immediately began to attend these classes.

Trainers came from the national university and other higher education institutions, like Alejandro Álvarez and Andrés Barrera. We had workshops on the human right to energy. But it was often a very stuffy, dogmatic education, in the sense that reality was interpreted with the eyes of the past. The proof of the dogmatism was that the teachers who taught those classes were among the first to give up when the government attacked us in 2009.

What had to be done was to create theory and practice based on new challenges and conditions—a new situation with new goals. The challenge is to understand the reality we are living in, and use Marxism as a methodological tool to interpret and change it. What happened 100 years ago can’t just be duplicated now. There are many changes in the economy, in politics, in ideology, that need a contemporary analysis from a revolutionary perspective, trying to formulate an alternative.

We are capable of creating and recreating revolutionary ideas based on the needs of our time.

We are going to reactivate and restructure the school for activists. We have to deal with the reality of generational change, and make sure our leaders have the tools and knowledge that will allow them to give the right direction to our union.

We have scholarships for the children of workers who belong to the union. We call them the children of the resistance, the sons and daughters of the workers who resisted the extinction of our source of work and the forced dissolution of our union during the past 14 years. We are incorporating them into our training program. They get an introduction about unions, and then an explanation of how our union was born and its history over 100 years. We talk about the most important moments of struggle, how we created a process of resistance to prevent its disappearance, and our perspective for the future.

_{^{This article from the}}_{^{North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA)}}_{^{is an abridged version of a UCLA interview series. The full-length conversations were}}_^published_{^{by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE), the Labor Center, and the Center for Mexican Studies at UCLA.}}

_{David Bacon is a photojournalist, author, political activist, and union organizer who has focused on labor issues, particularly those related to immigrant labor. He has written several books and numerous articles on the subject and has held photographic exhibitions. He became interested in labor issues from an early age and he was involved in organizing efforts for the United Farm Workers, the United Electrical Workers, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, the Molders’ Union and others.}

Despair is the currency of massacre / by Lital Khaikin

_{^{All Out for Gaza demonstration in Montréal, Tuesday, October 17, 2023. Photo by Lital Khaikin.}}

How deflecting from the Palestinian humanitarian crisis to the ‘Israel-Hamas’ war enables continued apartheid

_{Reposted from Canadian Dimension}

“More than 20,000 Palestinians have perished in the new war,” reads a newspaper photo caption citing December’s death toll since the beginning of the Israeli siege. A young girl reading in a café remarks to her father, “Why? They call it a war, but it was an attack. Israel completely demolished Gaza.”

When Israel predictably bombs Palestinians every year, the episodic tragedy beckons many back to the writing of academic and literary critic Edward Said. Beyond documenting the cyclical nature of Israeli apartheid since the Nakba, Said’s essays anchor the politicization of emotion within the history of crisis in Palestine. What Said saw unravelling from the neglect—internationally and by Palestine’s own elected officials—of Palestine’s humanitarian crisis and the continuity of Israeli apartheid in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, and the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, has never been more urgent. The inability to address the racist and classist policies of repressive states is only adding fodder to reactive extremism and eroding ideological diversity in anti-imperialist resistance.

The Palestinian humanitarian crisis has long since been reduced to a story of periodic suffering and a media sandbox topic for the perfection of algorithms. Canadian policy-makers pay marginal attention to the daily reality of the IDF’s detention and murder of Palestinian civilians at Israeli checkpoints, inhumane medical and living conditions, targeting and murder of journalists, bombing of civilians and civilian infrastructure, and restricted mobility in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison, now reduced to rubble.

In response to the massacre of around 1,200 Israelis by Hamas militants at a music festival, Israel launched the opening salvo of its assault on Gaza in October. In the months since, the siege has been rebranded as the “Israel-Hamas war.” A status update from the Times of Israel in December assures the world that the war is “almost half done,” while months of continued fighting are still expected. With December’s campaign against Hamas through a siege on northern Gaza, Israel is pursuing “full operational control” to continue expanding its illegal settlements. The Times founding editor David Horovitz has transparently described this as “a situation that is supposed to enable the beginning of a return and rebuilding of communities in sovereign Israel.”

For a nation pushed day after day against Israel’s wall of execution, this past year is on record as the deadliest since 2005, when the United Nations started systematically documenting Palestinian casualties. In the week of October 13 alone, the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported the killing of at least 1,900 Palestinians and the injury of 7,699 people in Gaza.

Following the bombing of al-Alhi Hospital, Ramallah-based human rights organization al-Haq denounced the continued carpet-bombing of Gaza. Human Rights Watch called out the IDF’s use of white phosphorous munitions in Israeli airstrikes targeting Gaza and Lebanon in October. In light of this, Israel has still not signed and is not bound by the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons which prohibits the use of the chemical weapons in areas with dense civilian populations.

Predictably, the United States rushed to provide a $14.3 billion (USD) military aid package to the IDF, one of the world’s most technologically advanced and well-funded militaries. And despite Justin Trudeau decrying Israel’s “killing of women, of children, of babies” in Gaza, Canadian military exports to Israel are nearly as high as during the First Intifada. Last year alone, Canada exported over $21 million (CAD) worth of military goods including bombs, torpedoes and missiles, aircraft, and electronic equipment.

In the initial weeks of the Israeli assault on Gaza, protests in downtown Montréal shut down the streets from the US embassy to the steps of the Israeli embassy. On Friday, October 13, the groups Palestinian Youth Movement, Al Raya Dawson, SPHR Concordia, Academics for Palestine, and Montreal4Palestine organized emergency protests as Israel issued an evacuation order to civilians in Gaza.

Essential services have long been a weapon in the IDF’s arsenal, and, true to form, Israel cut off water and electricity to Gaza in October. While IDF Colonel Elad Goren proclaimed that there was enough water to satisfy humanitarian needs when Israel reopened pipes and about half the usual supply of water in October, Gaza had depended on Israel supplying roughly 49 million litres of water per day on average prior to the siege. Contrary to the IDF’s claims on fulfilling humanitarian needs, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) continued to report a shortage of food and water through November, and an outbreak of waterborne illnesses like cholera and typhoid.

With this dependency on Israeli infrastructure and vendors, Palestinians have long lacked sufficient access to clean drinking water. Some communities in northern Gaza, like areas of Beit Lahiya, have historically lacked access to safe drinking water for the majority of their citizens. Electricity blackouts are simply routine.

Médecins sans frontières (MSF) called for an end to the “egregious level of collective punishment currently being meted out to the people of Gaza” and for restoring “unconditional humanity,” emphasizing that medical workers and emergency responders cannot work safely in Gaza. The MSF reported that surgeons at al-Shifa hospital had been operating without painkillers. Medical and emergency supplies could not pass through the Rafah crossing in and out of Egypt, although it was eventually opened. Impeding the free movement of medical staff and supplies in conflict zones is in violation of the Geneva Fourth Convention and has been condemned by the UN Third Committee.

In the wake of the bombing of al-Alhi Hospital (Al-Maamadani) on October 17, Palestinian organizers called supporters to strike. In December, calls for a strike in Montréal continued. Several actions have taken place since, including sit-ins, vigils, the national march on Ottawa, and independent strikes like a Gazette columnist putting her collaboration with Postmedia on hold to protest Canadian media coverage of Palestine.

Palestinian trade unions—including the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (Gaza), the General Union of Palestinian Teachers, and the General Union of Palestinian Women—have called on unions globally to refuse manufacturing and transporting weapons to Israel, and to lobby their governments to end military trade with Israel. Members of the CSU/SCP (the Canadian Staff Union, working at CUPE) passed a resolution to respond to the call from Palestinian trade unions, and to protect workers from being punished or silenced for opposing the Israeli occupation.

World Beyond War has called for an end to Canadian companies profiting from Israeli apartheid through the export of weapons, weapon components and military technologies. Labour Against the Arms Trade and Labour 4 Palestine have taken actions like blockading the facilities of Toronto-based INKAS, a company specializing in security technologies and armoured vehicles that sells supplies to Israel.

Many community groups and arts organizations across Montréal have shown continued solidarity through an open letter initiated by CERAS (South Asia Forum), with supporters including South Asian Diaspora Action Collective (SADAC), Québec Public Interest Research Group (QPIRG), Climate Justice Montréal, and the Québec Writers’ Federation.

But ask solidarity groups for a comment on the current siege, and you’ll receive a statement that could very well have been unchanged for years, worn out by being ineffectually trotted out to the media. Palestinian and Jewish Unity (PAJU) shared a link to a statement decrying the distortion of Judaism in the service of Israeli apartheid: “It is time to draw a distinction between Zionism—the cult of right-wing Jewish supremacy—and Judaism, the Jewish religion of transcendence and tolerance.” Following the censure over the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in November, Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) published the statement: “It cannot be inherently violent to call for your own dignity to be respected, and to label the Palestinian quest for freedom as inherently antisemitic or actively violent is Islamophobic and a form of anti-Palestinian racism.”

Year after year, the Palestinian humanitarian crisis continues to be mired in a war of rhetoric and the tired conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism and the defence of Palestinian human rights with “terrorism.” Year after year, human rights groups like Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) condemn Israel’s permanent state of apartheid that continues without censure or penalty as the international community watches the Zionist state play bingo with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court’s checklist of war crimes.

**_{All out for Gaza demonstration in Montreal, Friday October 13, 2023 | Photo by Lital Khaikin.}**

Why is there silence around the extrajudicial killings and political assassinations carried out by the Israeli right-wing fundamentalist Zionist government as it pursues the eradication of Hamas and rounds up Palestinian “military-aged” men—including Al-Araby Al-Jadeed (The New Arab) correspondent Diaa Al-Kahlout—for detention, interrogation and torture at Beersheba prison? Does the targeting of Gaza’s Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, or the assassination of the West Bank’s Hamas chief Saleh al-Arouiri in Beirut, not deserve the same scrutiny by the UN as the extrajudicial assassination of Iranian military general Qassem Souleimani?

In Canadian media, Palestine cannot be said to exist as an autonomous political entity with an internal complexity of class struggle, labour rights, women’s rights, electoral politics, and its own renditions of political corruption. Hamas is only part of this story. Despite the exaggerations of Palestinian support for the extremist right-wing Islamist party and the discomfort it provokes, there are deeper roots to the past decades’ gradual shift in popular support toward Hamas.

A recent survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) reported that support for Hamas has risen in the West Bank; its leadership is more appealing than the prospect of governance under the Palestinian Authority, even without President Mahmoud Abbas at the helm. While Gaza burns, the West Bank has only flickered through the headlines as Israel killed more civilians between January and October than in any year since 2005. The majority of respondents want the current Palestinian president to resign.

That the name of Abbas has not even been uttered for almost a decade at Canadian solidarity protests is an echo of the disillusionment with political leadership in Palestine. Nor is it an accident that protest organizers in Montréal did not once invoke the UAE or Saudi Arabia when roll-calling representation from the Arab states at demonstrations this fall. The Gulf states are understood to be aiding and abetting US imperialism and the genocide in Yemen, and participating in the resource race for key trade corridors in the Horn of Africa.

The discontent of younger generations born after the Oslo Accords was apparent in a statement by the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) in 2020 that called for the mobilization of young Palestinian voters and international youth movements against the incompetence of the Palestinian government under Abbas: “to affirm that the leadership of the Palestinian Authority does not represent our people and is outside the ranks of our national struggle.”

Abbas is keenly aware of the lack of support from the people he is supposed to be representing and defending: he derailed the anticipated May 2021 elections when he sensed an erosion of voter support in the wake of Sheikh Jarrah and Israel’s brutal siege of Gaza. Israel’s bombing of Gaza that month took out four residential high-rises and damaged thousands of civilian buildings, with growing incidents in Israeli settler violence reported the following year.

Arafat was similarly derided for being holed up in Ramallah as his government lost the faith and respect of Palestinians in the years leading up to the majority election of Hamas to the Palestinian parliament in 2006. In 2001, Edward Said wrote: “It is a self-sacrificing spirit of human and moral solidarity with his people that Arafat’s leadership so fatally lacks. I am afraid that this terrible absence has now almost completely marginalized him and his ill-fated and ineffective Authority.”

“It has been years since Arafat represented his people, their sufferings and cause,” he wrote the following year, days before Israeli forces razed the villages of ‘Abasan and Khuza’a. “There is thus no strong moral centre in the Arab world today.”

In the absence of international accountability for Israeli genocide and daily conditions of apartheid, it is no wonder Palestine has increasingly rallied behind the leadership of Hamas. After all, only one form of self-defence is justified: that of the oppressor defending their right to oppress. This much has been made clear in the Israeli and US refusal of Abbas’ negotiations for a ceasefire without “the destruction of Hamas,” as Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan described it.

Back in October, an open letter by the Birzeit University Union of Professors and Students stated: “The unfathomable crime of silence and complicity perpetuated by the entire world— including Arab and Muslim regimes under the oppressive power of American impositions—are openly supportive of genocide or mute witness to the crimes of settlers.” That silence has been decades long. Is it not a deeply Jewish question to ask how much longer a people are supposed to remain complacent in their own destruction?

The open letter ends with the observation: “[…] Now that our resistance has used guerrilla war tactics, we have now become the oppressors?!” This refers to the criminalization of Palestinian resistance to the apartheid conditions imposed on people in Gaza and the West Bank since the Nakba, and to the sustained dependency on the Israeli state for essential services, the right of movement, and even the fundamental right to exist. That the Birzeit letter refers to “guerilla war tactics” speaks volumes about frustrated and fruitless efforts to hold Israel accountable for decades of illegal settlements and police-state brutality, and the absurdity of the occupying state playing the victim.***

The unstable growth of support for Hamas is a negation, not an affirmation: the Islamist party’s religious fundamentalist core contributes to bolstering the Israeli state agenda of eradicating the last remnants of Palestinian autonomy and further incentivizing regime-change in the Middle East and North Africa.

Said predicted the erosion of secular resistance to Israeli imperialism in the years following the Oslo Accords—when the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) renounced terrorism and Israel recognized its leadership. Said saw hardline religious fanaticism gaining power in the Palestinian struggle for liberation, emerging out of the corruption and ineptitude that shook faith in the PLO and the Palestinian Authority.

“How many of us, for example, have openly and honestly stood up for secular politics, and have condemned the use of religion in the Islamic world,” he wrote, “as roundly and earnestly as we have denounced the manipulation of Judaism and Christianity in Israel and the West?”

Despite acknowledging the reality of growing religious fundamentalism in the Palestinian liberation movement, he wrote on the conflation of criticizing US and Israeli imperialism with condoning terrorism: “Intellectually, morally, politically, such an attitude is disastrous since the equation between understanding and condoning is profoundly wrong and very far from being true.” Such conflation erases empathy and denies the “common sense of anguish” of people living in literal entrapment in the Palestinian territories.

As the Israeli siege continues through the Judeo-Christian holiday season, mainstream media has been turning its attention from the plight of ordinary Palestinians to the “Axis of Resistance,” a union of Sunni and Shiite militant groups Hamas, Hezbollah and Ansar Allah (or Houthis). When the Houthis targeted Israeli-owned or -bound ships in the Red Sea with rockets and drones, this attack was described by journalist Rami Khouri as the “first serious coordinated battlefield action” by the Axis of Resistance beyond Gaza.

The most recent deflection from the Palestinian struggle for liberation toward the war against Hamas and the “Axis of Resistance” recalls the use of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda as, in Said’s words, “stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination”. In the weeks preceding the invasion of Afghanistan by the US, Canada, Australia and other NATO allies, this association resulted in an “inattentiveness even to the possibility of dialogue with secular movements and people who have real grievances.”

This fall in Montréal, lofty rhetoric of anti-terrorism spawned from the “Israel-Hamas” war followed the well-worn grooves from government statements and media language guidebooks to the streets. After a protest in October, drunken passersby on Sainte-Catherine street point and laugh at “les terrorists”: a group of laughing young women in hijabs walking with Palestinian flags.

Since October, weekend protests have become routine in downtown Montréal—another event to attend with friends on the weekend. Shoppers no longer linger as long beside the Palestinian flags, banners and keffiya patterning the blocks between the Louis Vuitton, Chanel, and Victoria’s Secret storefronts.

Said was correct when he wrote back in 2001 that the US war against terrorism was stirring things up in “ways that might not be containable”. Where he was incorrect, however, was in his optimistic evaluation that “there is no way to continue indefinitely a thirty-five-year-old occupation.”

So it is that year after year, it takes the spectacle of massacre to bring attention to the indignity of life under Israeli occupation. While the written word itself is not enough to stop bombs, it is a conduit of memory, continuity and dignity in crisis. The written word preserves names when rubble is cleared, faces uncovered, and flags disintegrated. It exists to find sense in the senseless. It lends numbers to crimes, letters to politicians, and hope—as Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote, “the twin of despair.” Darwish, who had criticized the extremist elements of Hamas, knew well what words, verses and songs meant in the face of inhumanity battling inhumanity.

There is no nation smaller than its poem
But weapons make words too big for the living
and the dead who inhabit the living
And letters make the sword on the dawn’s belt glitter
til the desert becomes parched for songs or drowns in them.

_{Lital Khaikin is an author and journalist based in Tiohtiá:ke (Montréal). She has published articles in Toward Freedom, Warscapes, Briarpatch, and the Media Co-op, and has appeared in literary publications like 3:AM Magazine, Berfrois, Tripwire, and Black Sun Lit’s “Vestiges” journal. She also runs The Green Violin, a slow-burning samizdat-style literary press for the free distribution of literary paraphernalia.}

Big Pharma Vows to Fight Historic FDA Approval of Medicine Imports From Canada / by Jake Johnson

_{^{U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) talks about the cost of insulin in the U.S. versus Canada on July 28, 2019 in Windsor, Canada | Photo: Scott Eisen/Getty Images}}

The FDA’s decision is “a win for consumers and for Bernie Sanders, who first spearheaded bus trips to Canada 25 years ago,” wrote David Sirota, a former Sanders campaign adviser.

_{Reposted from Common Dreams}

The pharmaceutical lobby pledged Friday to do everything in its power to fight back after the Food and Drug Administration approved a Florida program that will allow the state to import medications from Canada at a steep discount relative to sky-high U.S. prices, which force millions of Americans to skip doses to save money.

“PhRMA is considering all options for preventing this policy from harming patients,” Stephen Ubl, the industry trade group’s CEO, said in a statement, condemning the FDA’s decision as “reckless.”

Prescription drug importation from Canada is a broadly popular approach that has long been advocated by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who more than two decades ago led a caravan of women across the U.S.-Canada border to purchase breast cancer medication. Sanders, then a member of the House, spearheaded a legislative effort to approve more drug imports, but Republicans packed the final bill with loopholes for Big Pharma.

Sanders traveled across the Canadian border again in 2019 with Type 1 diabetes patients looking to buy insulin, which is dangerously pricey in the U.S.

Now, following the FDA’s decision on Friday, Republican-led Florida is on track to become the first U.S. state to import cheaper prescription drugs from the country’s northern neighbor. The RAND Corporation has estimated that Canadians pay less than half of what Americans pay for brand-name drugs.

The New York Times, which was first to report the FDA’s approval, noted that Florida has estimated it “could save up to $150 million in its first year of the program, importing medicines that treat HIV, AIDS, diabetes, hepatitis C, and psychiatric conditions.”

“With its approval in hand, Florida has more work to do,” the Times added. “Before it can distribute Canadian drugs, the state must send the FDA details on those it plans to import. The state has to ensure that the drugs are potent and not counterfeit. It also must put FDA-approved labels on medications instead of those used in Canada.”

At least eight other states—including Maine, Vermont, and Colorado—have implemented laws authorizing a drug importation program and are aiming for a green light from the FDA.

“The FDA is committed to working with states and Indian tribes that seek to develop successful section 804 importation proposals,” FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said in a statement Friday. “These proposals must demonstrate the programs would result in significant cost savings to consumers without adding risk of exposure to unsafe or ineffective drugs.”

The powerful pharmaceutical industry, which has spent billions of dollars on lobbying over the past decade, is sure to fight tooth and nail to prevent the widespread adoption of importation programs—as it does with virtually every government effort to rein in drug costs.

David Mitchell, the founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs, wrote Friday that Florida’s program “is a reflection of the fact that U.S. prices are too high and Americans need relief.”

“But state-by-state importation from Canada isn’t workable for all of us,” argued Mitchell, a cancer patient who relies on drugs that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. “We need federal solutions that lower prices for everyone.”

_{Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.}

Massive labor-community coalition in Canada demands: Ceasefire now / by C.J. Atkins

_{^{Supporters of the Labour for Palestine coalition participate in a rally near Canada’s federal parliament building in Ottawa. | Photo via Labour for Palestine}}

_{Reposted from the People’s World}

TORONTO—A giant coalition of over 50 pan-Canadian labor, civil society, peace, and justice organizations have signed a joint statement demanding that the federal government led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau call for an immediate ceasefire of all hostilities in Gaza.

Going even further, the country’s largest trade union—the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE)—is demanding that the government immediately halt all arms sales to Israel.

“The people of Quebec and Canada watch in horror as the violence between Israel and Palestine escalates to what now appears to be becoming an all-out war,” opens the joint “Ceasfire Now/ Cessez Le Feu” statement issued on Oct. 21.

It says the Trudeau government must push its ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to end the inhuman blockade of Gaza, restore water and electricity to the besieged territory, and allow life-saving humanitarian aid to flow.

The list of signatories to the statement, growing by the day since it was first issued, includes Arab, Jewish, Christian, and secular organizations. Trade union federations and labor groups make up a significant chunk of backers, as well.

“Our members are proud to join with this powerhouse coalition of civil society groups to demand an end to the bloodshed now,” Corey Balsam, national coordinator of Independent Jewish Voices told the media Monday. “Canada cannot remain silent, nor support the indiscriminate bombing in Gaza. We must prioritize the sanctity of human life and call for a ceasefire immediately.”

“There is no justification for war crimes,” said Dania Majid, a Palestinian member of the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association. Referring to Netanyahu’s aerial bombardment of Gaza and the pending ground assault, Majid said, “The Canadian government’s failure to call for an immediate ceasefire is giving Israel cover for a genocide in Gaza.”

The statement unequivocally condemns “the targeting of innocent Palestinian and Israeli civilians,” and says all hostages must be safely returned and that the “root cause” of the violence must be addressed: “Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territory.”

The Ontario branch of CUPE is a signatory to the statement, along with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW), Unifor, the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the Asian Canadian Labor Alliance-Ontario, the Canadian Freelance Union, the National Union of Public and General Employees, and other labor groups.

CUPE National, in a separate emergency resolution passed at its convention in Quebec City on Oct. 24, declared that it “stands with Palestine.” The far-reaching position statement demands that the Canadian government not only call for a ceasefire, but also immediately terminate all arms sales to Israel, end diplomatic immunity for its officials, and fully condemn the blockade of Gaza.

_{^{Members of the Communist Party of Canada participate in a rally against the Israeli war on Gaza in Toronto. | Photo via CPC}}

Furthermore, the union pledged to launch a campaign to educate its members about the “history of Israel’s occupation and colonization of Palestine” as well as “Canada’s complicity” in it. The membership will be encouraged to take action to “support a just peace.”

The resolution followed a CUPE statement issued earlier in the current war, on Oct. 10, that urged a ceasefire, “the enforcement of international law,” and encouraged Trudeau to work toward a “peaceful resolution that upholds the rights to life and freedom of Palestinians and Israelis.” It also reiterated its longstanding recognition that lasting peace can only come with the withdrawal of the Israeli state from the occupied Palestinian territories.

The Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), equivalent to the AFL-CIO in the U.S., has not signed onto the Ceasefire Now coalition statement as of press time and has generally remained quiet throughout Israel’s latest war on Gaza, which exploded following the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7

So far, the CLC has only posted a link on its website to a declaration issued by the International Trade Union Confederation calling for an immediate ceasefire and pushing governments to work for the realization of a “two-state solution.” Its officers have so far issued no public statements of their own.

The Ontario Federation of Labour, provincial section of the CLC, is calling for a ceasefire, an end to Israel’s blockade, and warns of a “sharp spike in anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism.”

The OFL recalled the labor movement’s “long tradition of speaking out against war” and pledged its “solidarity to all peace-loving people who are building the movement we need to end the violence.”

_{We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!}

_{C.J. Atkins is the managing editor at People’s World. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from York University in Toronto and has a research and teaching background in political economy and the politics and ideas of the American left. In addition to his work at People’s World, C.J. currently serves as the Deputy Executive Director of ProudPolitics.}

The Housing Crisis Is Class War / Sahar Raza

_{^{Tenants of a low-rent apartment building in Toronto, Canada, protesting evictions, July 16, 2022. (Steve Russell / Toronto Star via Getty Images)}}

_{Republished from The Monitor / Posted in Jacobin on June 18, 2023}

_{Review of the The Tenant Class by Ricardo Tranjan (Between the Lines, 2023).}

A new book on the housing crisis in Canada poses the idea that the housing crisis is simply a result of the housing market working in exactly the way it was designed. To break this paradigm, the tenant class must organize and build political power.

What if there is no housing crisis, but a housing market working exactly as designed?

Ricardo Tranjan’s The Tenant Class rests on this premise, effortlessly dismantling apolitical narratives of Canada’s housing system to reveal an intentionally obscured class struggle between exploited tenants and extractive landlords — most of whom wouldn’t have it any other way.

In this timely and refreshing manifesto, Tranjan takes aim at Canada’s structurally inequitable and increasingly deregulated rental market, which prevents, rather than promotes, housing security, affordability, and adequacy among tenants.

He draws parallels between exploitative labor relations and the exploitative rental market to describe how property-owning landlords amass wealth on the backs of tenants — all thanks to government complicity dating back to the dispossession of indigenous lands and creation of property rights.

He then uses historical and contemporary tenant organizing stories — alongside his own professional and lived experiences as a political economist, policy researcher, and child of turbulent 1980s Brazil — to argue that the only solution is a struggle: the tenant class must organize to build political power and demand a more equitable, regulated, and largely nonmarket housing system.

Which Side Are You On?

To create the conditions for social change, Tranjan also calls on progressive researchers and allies to practically feed and support on-the-ground movements. After all, “it takes political power to go up against the landlord class and force governments to rein in markets,” and part of building that power involves addressing the cultural marginalization of the tenant class.

But more than that, it requires that the rest of society sees and names the class struggle within Canada’s housing system for what it is. To this end, Tranjan advances a simple and unsettling provocation in the last chapter, reminding readers of their own agency: “now the question is . . . where you stand.”

The message is clear: it’s time to pick a side in this class struggle. There is no neutrality in the face of injustice, disinformation, and exploitation.

The Tenant Class practices what it preaches, systematically busting harmful myths about tenants and “struggling landlords” while offering compelling and research-backed arguments, stories, and quips, which can be mobilized by organizers and advocates to push for housing justice. And though it may not be politically palatable to the roughly two-thirds of the population who benefit from the status quo (namely, property owners), Tranjan’s clear and incisive class-based analysis extricates itself from the endless housing “policy merry-go-round” in important and radical ways.

The Housing Crisis Is Not Apolitical

For one, Tranjan decisively names the power-holders that feed, constitute, and enable the elite landlord class in its mission to extract more and more income from tenants. From homeowners to industry players, landlords, real estate investment firms, pension funds, developers, banks, and other mortgage providers, he makes apparent that a huge segment of the population benefits from a housing market in which rents rise faster and faster, untethered from income, inflation rates, and vacancy rates (not to mention human rights standards).

This doesn’t happen in a vacuum, however — government laws and policies (or lack thereof), institutions like landlord and tenant boards, and mainstream moral standards permit and legitimize this wealth accumulation. Meanwhile, disproportionately racialized, low-income, and already marginalized peoples in, or in need of, rental housing face deepening intergenerational poverty at the hands of the property-owning elite — a fact that is conveniently obscured in our mainstream news media and consciousness.

Tranjan thus argues that mainstream narratives that frame the “housing crisis” as an apolitical, complex, or new issue that requires technical or win-win solutions only serve the interests of the elite. In fact, these elites pour money and resources into making these narratives appear to be common sense or the way of the world, particularly through their influence over news media and government. They even co-opt progressive language (like the language of human rights, equity, and “affordable housing”) or use disinformation to undermine criticism, disguise their exploitative policies and practices, and maintain the status quo.

“Supply-side” arguments constitute one such narrative, suggesting that we simply need to build more housing faster to make housing affordable — a solution that conveniently involves sweetening the deal for developers and landlords through financial incentives. And, as Tranjan notes, our governments reproduce, pander to, and invest in these narratives.

Take Canada’s National Housing Strategy, for example. Steeped in supply-side logic, the strategy funnels billions of dollars to for-profit developers who produce housing that, more often than not, ends up contributing to, rather than addressing, the root causes of unaffordability, homelessness, and housing inequity. Yet, insidiously, the strategy uses the language of human rights and affordability to disguise these extractive practices.

In the context of my own work to implement the human right to adequate housing via federal policy, I see these dynamics firsthand. Well-intentioned and progressive housing policy professionals too often become trapped in cycles of consultation, make-work, and self-censorship with governments, only to have their research and solutions shelved time and time again.

Government and sector leaders engage in the endless “merry-go-round” of debating policy tweaks or Band-Aid solutions to homelessness and inadequate housing rather than meaningful, structural, and human rights–based change. And all the while, our political and policy leaders (many of whom are part of the elite class) manage to evade naming and regulating the profiteers and beneficiaries of housing injustice.

Fighting Back

This reality is what makes The Tenant Class so powerful, timely, and necessary. It resists the cyclical dynamics of the housing discourse and reminds readers of what tenant movements have known for decades: the problem is political, not technical. And importantly, profit doesn’t have to be part of the housing equation.

Drawing from inspirational stories of defiant tenant movements, resistance, and power, Tranjan places our contemporary “housing crisis” within a century-long history of class-based struggles — struggles that are ongoing.

The book reminds tenants of their agency and allies of the need to center and support those tenants, all while recognizing that “the challenge for the tenant class is not to find solutions for the so-called housing crisis, but to enact the solutions we know work”: namely, moving as much housing as possible outside of the private market (i.e., to increase nonmarket housing); tightly regulating private market housing (i.e., via tenant protections, rent and vacancy controls, etc.); and keeping tenants organized to ensure ongoing political pressure and access to adequate, affordable, and secure housing.

In this way, The Tenant Class stands apart from the mainstream housing paradigm and gets to the heart of Canada’s so-called housing crisis with precision and conviction. Weaving together history, data, and stories with thoughtful ease that makes the complex feel accessible, it serves as fuel for social change and vividly demonstrates the power of collective action. It paints a vision of a housing system that decenters profit in favor of justice, democracy, and human rights — one in which everyone has access to safe, affordable, and dignified housing.

And, most importantly, it makes social change feel possible so long as readers confront the reality of our class-based housing system head on.

This book is, therefore, a must-read for tenants, housing advocates, policy professionals, or “anyone else interested in rental housing.”

To tenants, it says: join or start a tenant union — you have the power to fight back.

To housing advocates and policy wonks, it says: now is the time to organize, build political pressure, and link arms with tenant movements who have been doing this work all along.

And to everyone else, it says: pick a side. Do you stand in solidarity with the rising tenant class, or will you uphold the exploitative status quo?

Tranjan doesn’t let anyone off the hook in this compelling piece, asserting that it is up to all of us to take up the mantle of tenant organizing, to support those on the front lines of the struggle, and to demand a world in which adequate housing is truly for everyone.

_{Sahar Raza is director of policy and communications at the National Right to Housing Network and a member of Oxfam Canada’s board of directors.}

Canadian aid for Cuba? 35 national and regional organizations support it / by Stephen Kimber and John Kirk

_{^{Cuban propaganda poster proclaiming a quote from Fidel Castro: “Luchar contra lo imposible y vencer” (“To fight against the impossible and win”). Photo from Wikimedia Commons.}}

_{Originally posted in Canadian Dimension on May 27, 2023}

Cuba desperately needs food and medical aid now. It also deserves an end to the longest-standing embargo in modern times

It is not often that the United Church of Canada, the (Anglican) Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund, Oxfam, and the Communist Party of Canada join to lobby the Canadian government. But that is what they have just done.

Together with 27 other Church groups, unions, development agencies and civil society groups in mid-April they wrote to Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly and International Development Minister Harjit Sajjan, requesting humanitarian aid for Cuba, and asking Canada to lobby Washington for a change in its policy towards Cuba.

What unites this broad alliance is their shared concern about Cuba’s current social and economic crises and the continuing impact of a US policy of aggression against Cuba.

Cuba is in desperate shape, with major shortages of food and medicine. The shelves in the pharmacies and grocery stores are empty. There isn’t enough fuel to transport fresh produce to the cities. The inflation rate is 44 percent. The price of food and non-alcoholic beverages in March 2022 cost 72 percent more than the same period last year.

I (Kirk) was in Cuba in December 2022 and again in April this year. I saw first-hand how desperate life is for ordinary Cubans.

A friend who is a dental surgeon in Havana told me that he had been unable to perform surgery for three months because of a lack of anesthetics. Another medical colleague, head of the emergency department at a large hospital, told me that they were badly in need of everything from antibiotics to bandages, painkillers to Band-Aids.

There are also nationwide fuel shortages which, combined with ancient power generator infrastructure, have resulted in massive blackouts—some lasting days.

In late April 2023, fuel was only guaranteed for tourist activities, public transportation, ambulances and hearses. University classes in five provinces had to go online. A lack of fuel resulted in a concert by the national symphony orchestra being cancelled, as was the traditional annual May Day parade—for the first time since 1959.

Food rations—including essentials such as basic grains and cooking oil—often arrive late and are incomplete. The 2022 sugar harvest—historically the mainstay of the economy—was the worst in over a century, reaching only half its target. This year’s is predicted to be worse.

While tourism has increased 139 percent over the same period last year, it is still far behind the pre-COVID numbers (4.2 million for 2019).

Cuba is in crisis, and in desperate need of humanitarian aid. Hence the alliance of these 35 groups, and the letter to the Canadian government.

What is happening in Cuba?

There are several explanations for the current crisis. The pandemic decimated Cuba’s critically important tourist industry for the past two years. Moreover, the country’s traditional top-down economic management system also hamstrings innovation and efficiency. Worst, of course, is the US embargo—the longest in contemporary history. Its screws tightened during the Trump presidency and barely loosened since—wreaking havoc with every sector of the economy.

Nature has also caused major damage to the island. There is widespread drought, with 400,000 people affected in March. Hurricane Ian, with winds of 220 kilometres an hour, devastated western Cuba in late September 2022, damaging 63,000 homes, and destroying several thousand. A month earlier fire destroyed half of Cuba’s only supertanker oil storage facility in Matanzas.

It is not surprising that some 280,000 Cubans left the island for the United States in 2022, the greatest exodus in decades.

Ultimately, however, the causes are less important today than the reality—and the massive humanitarian needs of the Cuban people.

In the early 1990s during a similar humanitarian crisis after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Canada stepped up aid to the Cuban people.

This 35-member alliance wants the Canadian government to not only support Cubans with increased humanitarian (food and medical) aid but also to use its good offices to lobby the Biden administration to drop the debilitating trade embargo on Cuba, in effect since 1962.

The embargo was once again condemned at the United Nations General Assembly last year, with 185 countries (including Canada) supporting Cuba, and only two (the United States and Israel) supporting it.

The alliance also wants Ottawa to press Washington to take Cuba off the list of countries that allegedly support terrorism. This designation, unsupported by evidence, was overturned by Barack Obama, but slapped back on by Donald Trump, and remains in place.

Being on this list (along with North Korea, Iran and Syria) has significant consequences. International banks are unwilling to process Cuban payments and have frozen accounts for businesses and individuals seeking a normal commercial relationship with Cuba. It has a chilling effect on bank transactions, academic exchanges, investment and trade. It has also made it difficult for faith-based groups to send food to the Cuban people.

This all has a major human cost on the Cuban population, resulting in widespread food and medicine shortages—as the government faces obstacles in importing badly needed supplies.

The group’s letter to Ministers Joly and Sajjan reminds them of the close historical ties between Canada and Cuba. Canada and Mexico were the only two countries in the Western Hemisphere not to break relations with Cuba in the 1960s, and Pierre Trudeau was the first leader of a NATO country to visit Cuba. For its part, Cuba was the only country in 1970 willing to accept the FLQ terrorists from Québec. It is still Canada’s principal market in the Caribbean/Central American region, and Canadians currently make up 51 percent of tourists to the island.

Cuba desperately needs food and medical aid now. It also deserves an end to the longest-standing embargo in modern times.

Canada can play a major role in promoting both outcomes. By doing so it will provide desperately needed humanitarian assistance, but will also enhance its own role in the region where Cuba, because of its medical aid to dozens of countries, plays an outsized role. The ball is now in the court of Ministers Joly and Sajjan.

_{Stephen Kimber is an award-winning journalist and the author of 13 books, including What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five.}

_{John Kirk is Professor Emeritus of Latin American Studies at Dalhousie University and the author and co-editor of 18 books on Cuba.}

U.N. Indigenous forum tells U.S. and Canada to decommission Great Lakes oil pipeline / by Brandon Chew

_{^{The Mackinac Bridge is visible from a marker near Enbridge Line 5 on the northern shore of the Straits of Mackinac in Michigan. | Neil Blake / The Grand Rapids Press via AP}}

_{Originally published in the People’s World on May 15, 2023}

LANSING, Mich.—On Friday, April 28, the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues called on Canada and the U.S. to decommission Enbridge’s Line 5 oil pipeline, which runs underneath the Straits of Mackinac.

Connecting Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, the Straits are the short waterways between the state of Michigan’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas.

In the final report of its annual session, the UNPFII stated that Line 5 “jeopardize[s] the Great Lakes” and “represents a real and credible threat to the treaty-protected fishing rights of Indigenous Peoples in the United States and Canada.”

Line 5 is just west of the Mackinac Bridge and was built in 1953 to transport oil from the tarsands in the Canadian province of Alberta to tanker ships in Lake Superior.

**_{^{A diver inspects one of the Line 5 oil pipelines at the lake bottom in the Straits of Mackinac. | Photo via National Wildlife Federation}}**

To convince local residents to accept Line 5, the company deployed salespeople to the region in the early 1950s presenting the project as “essential to the defense of the United States and the whole North American continent” amidst the Cold War.

In the decades that followed, Enbridge continuously increased the flow rate. By 2013, the corporation was pumping 540,000 barrels per day under the Straits.

The UNPFII recommends that Canada and the United States “decommission Line 5,” a spokesperson said.

The body was established in 2000 to provide advice and recommendations on Indigenous issues to the U.N. Economic and Social Council. The April 28 meeting of the UNPFII can be viewed by using this link.

“The Anishinabek are the people of the Great Lakes and never before has there been such a unified call for action for both the United States and Canada to abandon failing fossil fuel infrastructure to protect our land and water,” said Bay Mills Indian Community Ogimaakwe President Whitney Gravelle in a statement.

Members of a coalition of Anishinaabe leaders and environmental advocates attended the forum to advocate the highlighting of Line 5 as an Indigenous and human rights concern.

“Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline has already leaked at least 29 times, spilling over 4.5 million [liters] of oil. It isn’t a matter of if, but when another rupture will occur,” said Michelle Woodhouse, Water Program Manager for Environmental Defense Canada in a statement.

**_{^{Cory Morse / The Grand Rapids Press via AP}}**

“At a time when the world is facing a biodiversity, freshwater, and climate crises, it’s unconscionable for the Canadian government to gamble with the Great Lakes,” Woodhouse said.

“The Government of Canada must withdraw its use of the 1977 pipeline treaty, and work with U.S. governments and the Anishinaabeg Nations of the Great Lakes to shut down Line 5,” Woodhouse said.

Several representatives of Indigenous communities within the Great Lakes region recently submitted a report to the United Nations Human Rights Council voicing concerns over Canada’s support for Line 5.

That report (which can be read here) was submitted for consideration under Canada’s fourth Universal Periodic Review, in which Canada’s human rights record will be reviewed and scrutinized by other U.N. member states.

Canada’s upcoming Universal Periodic Review is scheduled to take place from Nov. 6 – 17, 2023, at the U.N. Human Rights Council.

_{Brandon Chew is a journalist from northern Michigan.}

Landlords Are One of the Leading Causes of Canada’s Rent Crisis / by Mitchell Thompson

_{^{Nearly 20 percent of renters in Toronto are forced into overcrowded housing units. (Roberto Machado Noa / LightRocket via Getty Images)}}

_{Originally published in Jacobin on May 11, 2023}

Dismissing Canada’s rental crisis as nothing but a supply-demand issue overlooks the fact that a small group of landlords dominates the rental market and exploits tenants. As rents become extortionate, Canadian landlords are reaping record profits.

Canada’s rental crisis is often dismissed by the corporate media as a “mismatch” between supply and demand. But a deeper analysis of the country’s rental market — where tenants face some of the highest housing costs on the planet — reveals that a tiny percentage of landlords are controlling the sector and exploiting tenants for their own gain.

None of Canada’s five million tenants need to read Canada’s mainstream media to know that the county is facing a rental crisis. Over the past year, according to an RBC Economics study, the country saw its “highest annual increase in rent growth on record.” These skyrocketing rents have also caused homelessness to explode in nearly all of Canada’s major cities. Housing congestion is a growing issue as well, with nearly 20 percent of renters in Toronto, 21 percent in Mississauga, 11 percent in Montreal, 13 percent in Edmonton, and 11 percent in Vancouver are forced into overcrowded housing units “not suitable for their household size.”

However, a significant portion of media coverage simplistically attributes the housing crisis to a mere incongruity between the demand for rental housing and its supply, removing from the equation the landlords who are charging excessive rents. On this view, housing crises are not examples of profiteers leveraging market failure, but rather a fleeting problem that people should accept and move beyond.

With five million renters competing for two million purpose-built units, we’re told, double-digit rent hikes are unavoidable. Various politicians and corporate media outlets suggest that scrapping rent control and other tenant protections will somehow lower “housing costs.”

Against the backdrop of the housing crisis, some members of the ruling elite have used it as a justification to call for an overhaul of Canada’s immigration system. News outlets like BNN Bloomberg have run with headlines like: “Rents are soaring in Canada as surge of people goes undercounted.”

Blame for record-high rents seems to be placed on everything and everyone — except landlords and speculators. Lamenting that it “has become cool” to “disparage” real estate speculation, the Toronto Sun claimed earlier this year: “If it wasn’t profitable for investors to own rental properties, investors would take their capital elsewhere and supply would diminish. We need them.”

It’s true enough that Canada’s major cities are experiencing population growth, as a result of both immigration abroad and from the residential reclamation of ex-industrial urban corridors. It is also true that housing is being absorbed, both by ordinary people — and speculators.

The country’s extortionate rent hikes are hardly an accident of mismatched supply and demand. Housing scarcity is undoubtedly a problem. But using it to hand-wave away eye-watering rental costs is obtuse or disingenuous. Canada’s landlords are not simply having their hands forced. Empowered by Canada’s governments, landlords are reaping record profits at their tenants’ expense.

The Chimera of the Mom-and-Pop Landlord

Senior economist Ricardo Tranjan from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) provides an insightful analysis of the concentration of Canada’s rental units in his remarkable new book, The Tenant Class. The book breaks the rental supply down into four segments: 12 percent of renters occupy nonmarket housing, 38 percent rent non-purpose-built units from private landlords, and the remaining half rent from corporate and financial landlords.

Despite the media’s focus on Canada’s so-called “small landlords,” Tranjan observes:

The widespread notion of “struggling landlords” is a grave mischaracterization of the rental market. In fact, Canada’s landlord class comprises wealthy families, small businesses, corporations, and financial investors. Rent revenue increases their wealth and political influence, allowing them to extract more income from more tenants, amass more wealth, and do it again.

The private rental market generally refers to individual landlords who own one or a few rental properties. It can be challenging to keep track of the total number of units as they can include not only private homes and condos but also their individual rooms, garages, basements, and closets. But the concentration of wealth in this market is increasing too.

The book calculates that units in the private rental market account for roughly 38 percent of the overall rental market. Tranjan estimates that multiple-property owners have an average net worth of around $1.7 million. As he notes, these owners are hardly “scraping to get by.”

Statistics Canada estimates that the relatively small number of homeowners, who have invested in multiple units, account for nearly one-third of total home ownership.

In 2021, half of the dwellings in the downtowns of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver were condos. But, as Statistics Canada notes, more than half of these condominiums were owned by investors — comprising a total 840,045 units overall. These investors have, on average, managed to obtain up to a 30 percent increase in the value of their assets while renting them out to desperate tenants in Canada’s major cities.

Corporate Landlords and Financial Landlords

Among Canada’s purpose-built rental housing units, the concentration is even more enormous. In 2017, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) economist Gustavo Durango noted: that “Roughly 90 percent of purpose-built rental apartment units in Canada are owned by individual investors and private corporations.”

The book breaks the concentration down further. Tranjan estimates that 22 percent of the country’s rental housing units are owned by small business landlords — individual investors and joint ventures. On average, these landlords own 44 units each nationally and up to 151 each in Toronto. The remaining 28 percent of units is split between corporate and financial landlords. Typically, corporate landlords own and manage rental properties as part of a larger real estate investment portfolio, while financial landlords are entities such as pension funds, insurance companies, and investment trusts.

According to University of Waterloo professor Martine August, Canada’s twenty-five largest landlords, split between corporate and financial landlords, held about 330,000 units in 2020 — nearly 20 percent of the country’s private purpose-built stock of rental apartments. These include rental juggernauts like Starlight Investments, CAPREIT, Boardwalk REIT, Skyline Apartment REIT, Killam Apartment REIT, and Mainstreet Equity.

Since 2020, in turn, there is every reason to believe this concentration has gotten worse. As August wrote in Policy Options, “In some communities, financial firms have effective monopolies over the local market.”

How They Make Their Millions

These corporate and financial landlords are upfront about where their revenue comes from — by extracting rents from squeezed and beleaguered tenants. In the final quarter of 2022, CAPREIT, with over sixty-seven thousand units, was named one of Canada’s safest dividends. As noted by BNN, the company itself explicitly stated the source of its profits. “A record 24.3 percent average rent increase on turnover.” This increase is above average, but not by much. A report by CMHC found that after a tenant moves out of a two-bedroom apartment, the average rent increases by 18.2 percent.

Despite the claims of Canada’s landlord lobby groups, rent hikes have almost nothing to do with “increased expenses,” maintenance costs, or utility rates.

Starlight Investments has openly declared its intention to profit from the rental shortage in Canada. “We think there is a definite housing shortage, or almost a crisis level in Canada,” said then CEO Dale Drimmer in 2019, “and the good news for investors is there is no easy solution in sight.”

Similarly, last year, Hazelview Investments vowed to “create value” by massively hiking rents. “We believe the key to creating value will be identifying companies with pricing power that are able to raise rents on new leases and pass-through higher rental rates on existing leases.”

In 2012, fellow behemoth landlord Timbercreek listed “evictions,” as one of its strategies for hiking rents. As quoted to Canada’s human rights tribunal the company’s “value-add repositioning” program starts by reducing expenses and then “stabilizing revenue” through methods such as “improving the quality of the tenant and tenant profitability,” as well as implementing “stronger disciplinary measures for problem tenants, including evictions.”

“We Only Want the Earth”

In a recent report, Canada’s central bank tracked the flow of capital, focusing on 2008 to 2022, away from productive investment and into housing speculation, housing debt, and rental housing. This reallocation of capital was marked, the report notes, chiefly by the growth of real estate and rental and leasing (RERL) firms, “high-yield debt markets,” the mortgage-backed securities made famous by the 2008 meltdown, and by ever-rising rents. Crucially, the bank notes, none of these entities are really reaping their returns from housing as such — they’re reaping their returns chiefly in areas where “land is scarce” — from their monopoly over a portion of the Earth.

The CCPA likewise notes:

In Canada, housing prices have been driven higher largely by land appreciation; it is not uncommon in major cities for the structures built on land to comprise just a small sliver of the value of a property. For example, between 2007 and 2018, real estate in British Columbia doubled in value, appreciating by nearly $1 trillion in inflation-adjusted terms, the vast majority of that a result of higher land values.

This is “ground rent” — profit that reflects investor’s state-sanctioned monopoly over a natural resource. Land prices are, naturally, monopoly prices. And they make housing unlike any other investment item.

As the New Economics Foundation notes: “Most capital assets depreciate in value over time due to natural wear and tear but land tends to appreciate.” This is, in large part, as they observe, because “The permanence and inherent scarcity of land make it a good asset for the storing of value.” Liberalized credit markets across the Western world since the 1970s, they further note, “have also incentivized banks to favor property-related lending over other types of loans and so contributed to keeping property and land prices up.”

This helps to explain why, just before the pandemic, Statistics Canada found that $8.752 trillion or 76 percent of Canada’s $11 trillion national wealth, was caught up in real estate. It also helps to explain why Statistics Canada found, in 2016, that the top fifth of Canadian households own 63 percent of Canadian real estate’s net worth, while the bottom 40 percent own just 2 percent. Among properties that are not principal residences, the top quintile owns 81 percent of the net worth.

As land values rise, more people are left struggling to find affordable housing. This creates an opportunity for landlords to exploit their tenants by increasing rents at an exorbitant rate, thereby securing a steady stream of passive income. It’s a vicious circle and landlords always win.

The “rental crisis” is not simply a scarcity problem, it’s also a policy failure. To ease the crisis, the most parasitic wing of the capitalist class — landlords — must have their power broken. Large cities everywhere should follow the lead of Berlin and expropriate their most powerful landlords. These vast holdings should be turned over to public housing for human need and not for speculation. And once the inevitable elite backlash occurs, doubling down on such expropriations should be the way forward, with no concessions made.

_{Mitchell Thompson is a writer, researcher, and occasional radio producer in Toronto.}

Private health care is no remedy for an ailing system / by Guillaume Hébert

_{Originally posted in Canadian Dimension on March 14, 2023}

As the right-wing populist CAQ (Coalition Avenir Québec) government continues to peddle privatization as the solution to the province’s health care woes, progressive organizations throughout Québec are sounding the alarm about the creeping establishment of a two-tier health care system. This overview and critical analysis of the situation in Québec is a translation of the fourth part of a series on health care in Québec published in April 2022 by IRIS (Institut de recherches et d’informations socioéconomiques), Québec’s leading progressive research institute.”

In both the United States and Canada, the growth of the private sector has led to intense lobbying for private interests by the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry (which hold big stakes in drug insurance, among other things). As we have seen, these interests are largely incompatible with the common good.

The role of the private sector in health care has been expanding for decades. Why hasn’t it delivered its promised benefits?

The Québec government has announced plans to begin “rebuilding” its health and social services system, and none too soon. The COVID-19 pandemic clearly showed that the top-down, hyper-centralized health care system is failing to meet the public’s needs and is placing its workers under undue strain. A parallel private system is increasingly seen as a solution to these problems. But would it really improve access to health care for Québecers?

The role of the private sector in health care has been expanding for decades. Why hasn’t it delivered its promised benefits already? This article reviews the main arguments in favour of private health care and shows why it cannot improve health care and social services in Québec.

Private financing

In a privately financed health care system, households must pay private providers directly for medical care or take out private insurance to cover the cost—much the way dental, vision and psychological care work now. Most experts reject this approach because a large segment of the population would be unable to afford private insurance.

However, some argue that people should have the option of buying private insurance for services covered by Medicare. Those who could afford the insurance would then be able to seek medical care in the private sector. Such “duplicate” insurance is currently prohibited; private policies are not allowed to insure services that are covered by Medicare. This ban prevents the development of any real market for basic care and an exodus of professionals to the private sector, as few people can afford to pay for medical treatment out of pocket.

Allowing duplicate insurance and creating a two-tier medical system would therefore exclude the less affluent. It would also cost more overall. Though proponents of the private sector often criticize bureaucratic red tape in the public sector, the administrative costs of private insurance are four, five, even ten times higher than those of Medicare, since insurance companies cannot achieve the economies of scale of a universal public plan.

Private insurers are also less efficient: a much higher proportion of the money they collect in premiums from plan members goes to non-medical expenses, such as administrative costs, marketing expenses and dividends to shareholders. In 2011, Canadians paid $6.8 billion more in premiums for private health insurance than the cost of the medical services they received in return.

Québec’s prescription drug insurance plan is a good example of the consequences of a hybrid public-private system. The people who have private insurance are mostly in the workforce and therefore tend to be younger and healthier. The public plan covers everyone else, i.e., those who would be a financial burden on the private plans. As a result, drug insurance in Québec is very lucrative for private insurers while the public plan runs a huge deficit. This has nothing to do with their relative efficiency: the system is designed to generate profits for the private sector and losses for the public sector.

Private health care delivery

Instead of private financing, advocates of privatization are now calling for a greater role for the private sector in delivering medical services. They want more services to be provided by private facilities, even if the funding of these services remains public. They argue that a parallel private system would take some of the pressure off the public system.

What would private health care contribute to the system? Clearly, it couldn’t be human resources. There is already a shortage of health and social service personnel in Québec and a private system doesn’t produce clones: its personnel often come from the public system, exacerbating the staff shortage there. In addition, the private sector relies heavily on the public education system to train its staff. So the private sector does not contribute new human resources and cannibalizes the public sector more than it relieves the pressure on it.

The private sector’s contribution would therefore be in the form of private investors financing the development of private facilities. These investors would naturally want to extract profits, so the private facilities would have to generate a sufficiently attractive return. It is no coincidence that major private clinics such as Rockland MD, Clinique Dix30 and Opmedic are located near affluent neighbourhoods and not in Montréal’s Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district: they’re not looking for patients to treat but, first and foremost, for lucrative business opportunities.

The profit imperative that drives private health care tends to conflict with accessibility and quality of care. For example, Québec’s family medicine groups (FMGs), the vast majority of which are private organizations, have yet to fulfill their promise of improved access to family physicians. The history of the FMGs also shows that private investment is not enough to develop a sufficiently profitable private medical sector in Québec, and what the advocates of private care basically want is a private health care industry bankrolled primarily by public funding.

Ban on dual practice

In addition to the prohibition of duplicate private insurance, one of the obstacles to private medicine in Québec is the existing ban on dual practice. A doctor cannot practice simultaneously in the public system and the private sector: they must choose one or the other. The purpose of this rule is to ensure that all resources are available to care for the public and to prevent the diversion of some resources to serve only the interests of the wealthiest. Because private health care is so expensive, the market for it is limited and it is difficult for physicians to serve it exclusively. As the majority of physicians cannot afford to stop billing the state, most stay in the public system.

According to private sector advocates, ending the ban on dual practice would allow doctors to earn more money by seeing more patients, thereby increasing the supply of services and helping to reduce wait times. However, we have a telling example of the possible consequences of abolishing Québec’s ban on dual practice: the case of medical imaging.

Since the 1980s, an exception to the ban has allowed radiologists to practice in the public system as well as privately. This has facilitated the migration of technicians to the private sector and contributed to the emergence of a labour shortage in the public system, which is preventing public facilities from operating at full capacity and lengthening waiting lists. It has also created an incentive for radiologists not to reduce wait times in the public system, so they can offer patients who can afford it faster service at their private clinics.

The outcome of this inefficient arrangement is that Québec has more medical imaging equipment (such as MRIs) than other Canadian provinces because of the private facilities but performs fewer or similar numbers of exams per capita. This setup has also made radiologists among the highest-paid physicians in Québec, with an average income of $875,293 in 2018-2019, not counting the profits from their private clinics.

This mix of public and private financing and service delivery illustrates the adverse consequences that can result from private investment in a health care system.

The fantasy of entrepreneurship

Beyond financing and service delivery, private health care, according to its supporters, brings to the table the ingenuity of entrepreneurs, who are better able to find creative solutions to the system’s problems. In this view, the lure of profit will give these entrepreneurs the power to resolve the issues in the system.

The creativity of workers in community and non-profit organizations suggests that returns in the form of profit are not the decisive factor in improving services to the public. Creativity is fostered far more by autonomy from technocrats and managers than by the profit motive, whether the local organizations enjoying such autonomy are public or private.

In Québec, the public Local Community Service Centres (CLSCs), internationally considered one of the most innovative models in the Western world, have been hijacked by conservative social forces (doctors and business) who prefer a private service delivery model (polyclinics and FMGs).

Conversely, the arrival of entrepreneurs eager to extract profits from the health and social services system has had undesirable effects in a number of cases. For example, some placement agencies saw an opportunity during the pandemic. They poached workers from the public system and then sold their services back to the system at very high rates, pocketing substantial profits in the process. Labs that perform tests and analyses have a similar business model and are also taking advantage of the shortage of resources in the public system.

Private health care: solution or problem?

This article has outlined how private financing and delivery of health care undermines the health and social services system. The adverse effects of the various forms of privatization include reduced accessibility, inefficiency and higher costs. Some people are proposing an expanded role for the private sector as a solution to the problems in the health care system. The government should be wary of this approach. Instead, it should commit to the refinancing and decentralization of the public system that many have been urging for decades.

Finally, it should be noted that the development of a health care industry is likely to strengthen the voice of pro-private sector economic and political actors in debates about health and social services in Québec. In both the United States and Canada, the growth of the private sector has led to intense lobbying for private interests by the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry (which hold big stakes in drug insurance, among other things). As we have seen, these interests are largely incompatible with the common good.

_{Translated by John Detre.}

_{Guillaume Hébert is a researcher at IRIS (Institut de recherches et d’informations socioéconomiques), where he focuses on issues related to Québec’s health and social service system, public finances, and housing. His work is widely published in Québec’s progressive media outlets and he is also a frequent guest commentator in the mainstream media. He holds a master’s degree in political science from the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Follow him on Twitter @Guillaume__H.}

Combatting the ruinous greed of the developers / by John Clarke

_{^{Condo towers in Toronto. Photo courtesy PARTISANS Projects/Flickr.}}

_{Originally published in Canadian Dimension on March 13, 2023}

Last November, Gaétan Héroux and I wrote an article for Canadian Dimension on an emerging struggle to prevent the construction of a 47-storey condominium tower in Toronto’s Downtown East. We argued that this project would serve to drive up land prices and rents, while fuelling the gentrification of this poor working class community. We also pointed out that this upscale project would give the green light to “developers seeking to speculate and buy up properties in the Downtown East, thereby endangering a whole infrastructure of services in the area that took decades to establish.” Gentrification of this area has been going on for some time, but a luxury condo tower in the very heart of the community would take the process to an unprecedented level.

Redevelopment juggernaut

When we wrote that article, we were not fully aware of the dimensions of the redevelopment juggernaut descending on the Downtown East or of the momentum the project has already gathered. Drawing on information that is available through the City of Toronto, we have now been able to take stock of the developer-led plans for one of the poorest urban neighbourhoods in Canada.

Dundas Street East cuts a swath through the community, often referred to as the “Dundas Corridor.” Along this strip, four major condo developments have been completed and seven more are yet to be built. The developers responsible for the four that have been finished are Menkes Development (205 condo units), the Gupta Group (1,012 units), CentreCourt (Grid Condos, 565 units), and Great Gulf (Pace Condominiums, 387 units).

The seven developments that are still at the planning stage are being inflicted on the community by Kingsett Capital (responsible for the 619 unit condo development at Dundas and Sherbourne), Menkes Development (500 units), Metropia (670 units), Centricity Condos (594 units), CentreCourt Developments Inc. (665 units), Amexon Development (58 units), and the Pemberton Group (598 units).

We estimate the total sales revenue of the 2,169 condo units that have been completed at $1.734 billion. Experts generally expect profits from condo construction to range from 10 to 20 percent. If we set the rate at the lower end, say, 12 percent, the developers in these ventures would amass $208.29 million. As for the as-yet uncompleted projects, these will comprise an additional 4,227 units, a sales revenue of $3.48 billion and profits in the range of $410 million. If the higher rate applied, the yet to be completed buildings would bring in $700 million. With the four projects already in place, this would total $1.047 billion in profits from the development drive, a remarkable figure for a single Toronto neighbourhood.

The reckless push to create an oversupply of upscale housing along the Dundas Corridor is unfolding without regard for long-term implications or the devastating impact on a poor working class community with roots there dating back to the 1800s. Laughably, the luxury housing development under construction in the area will include a mere 24 ‘affordable’ rental units. Across Ontario and the rest of Canada, the destructive role of developers in the extreme commodification of housing is producing comparably dreadful results.

Of course, the path taken by developers and others who profit from the present approach to housing provision is being cleared by political decision-makers at every level. The idea of challenging the developers is completely out of the question for the members of Toronto City Council. Even the left wing at City Hall is reduced to appealing for a few more ‘affordable’ units to be included in upscale projects.

For its part, Doug Ford’s administration is operating overtly as a political agent of the developers. Ford’s readiness to hand over a portion of the Greenbelt around Toronto has sparked outrage across the country. The Ontario Tories express, in the crudest terms, the consensus among governments in this country that the supply of housing must be met, to the extent that it is, by subordinating everything to the dictates of profit-making.

As Ford rides out the scandalous revelation that developers came to a party at his house with cash gifts for his soon-to-be married daughter, it becomes clear that while the rural sprawl he has happily encouraged may be profitable, it runs counter to responsible urban planning. A new report informs us that “[the city of] Hamilton already has enough space to build 87,600 homes within its urban boundary—close to double its provincial target—without needing to open up the Greenbelt or expand into prime farmland.”

Clearly, the prevailing view that housing should be treated as a commodity and a source of speculative wealth is at odds with the needs of communities and the equitable and sustainable use of urban space. As the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, Balakrishhan Rajagopal, has affirmed, “The right to adequate housing is more than having a roof over one’s head, it is the right to live in safety and dignity in a decent home.”

The developers’ profit bonanza along the Dundas Corridor makes a mockery of this view. The condo towers they are erecting will provide luxury homes for a select segment of middle class professionals, although we may be sure that many will sit empty, as speculators hold onto them in the hope of turning a profit. This distorted system of housing provision will, of course, render the housing market even more unstable and exclusionary.

The acceleration of upscale redevelopment will force up rents, drive out low income tenants and facilitate the removal of the numerous homeless shelters and other vital services that have long been based in this area. This clearing process will be conducted ruthlessly, as property values and developers’ aspirations take priority over human need. Increased inequality, poverty, destitution and the proliferation of urban sprawl will be the price the rest of us pay for the enrichment of developers and parasitic speculators.

Fighting back

The Downtown East community has a long and proud history of fighting back and another round of struggle is shaping up, as profits are put ahead of the housing needs of those who live in the area. A challenge to the redevelopment juggernaut is emerging that is focused on the proposed condo development at Dundas and Sherbourne. An organization called 230 Fightback is leading a campaign to stop the condo and ensure that desperately needed social housing is built in its place.

Last month, 230 Fightback brought a mass delegation to the banking tower in the financial district where the developer, KingSett Capital, has an office. Efforts by police and private security to shut out the delegation failed, and a senior representative of the company was forced to accept a letter of protest. It was made abundantly clear that the developer and its enablers in City Hall can expect to be challenged. If Bay Street is coming to Dundas and Sherbourne then Dundas and Sherbourne will come to Bay Street.

The fight will escalate over the spring and summer. There are plans for community meetings and a major mobilization on the streets in June. In challenging this condo development and the other projects in the area, 230 Fightback is taking up a struggle that is in the interest of communities all across Canada. Housing must be treated as a vital social need and a human right and the destructive profit bonanza of the developers must be brought to an end.

_{John Clarke is a writer and retired organizer for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP). Follow his tweets at @JohnOCAP and blog at johnclarkeblog.com.}

Dispelling myths about for-profit health care / Pat Armstrong and Hugh Armstrong

_{Originally published in Canadian Dimension on February 7, 2023}

An old friend of ours recently confessed to using a private clinic for her cataract surgery. She said that, while she felt guilty, she nonetheless received wonderful care and paid with her health card. When we asked the name of the clinic, she said the Kensington Eye Institute (located on Toronto’s College Street). It is indeed a private clinic that provides vision surgeries for cases considered non-complicated. It has justly received a good reputation. But a critical piece was missing from the ‘private’ label. Kensington is a non-profit, community-based eye surgery centre.

It is this essential distinction that is too often missing from current debates about Canada’s health care crisis, even among those who are usually on top of the issues (including our friend). Indeed, the term ‘private’ is often used to purposely hide distinctions (and consequences), with proponents arguing that our health care system is already mainly private. All those hospitals named after saints are not public in the sense that they are not owned by the government. But they are public because of the fact that they are responsible to the public and, in Ontario, fall under the Public Hospitals Act. Their books and board meetings are public. They report publicly. They do not seek a profit nor are they allowed to earn a profit on care.

When we argue that the primary objective of for-profit care is profit, this is not an ideological argument, as Premier Doug Ford insists. Indeed, it is factual. Businesses that do not make a profit go out of business. Moreover, the primary responsibility of for-profit companies is to their shareholders, not the public. So it is often hard to tell where the profits are coming from and what this means in terms of care and care work.

Take the case of for-profit long-term care homes. We know they make a profit; we know they have a pattern of fewer staff, lower pay, more bed sores and more transfers to hospitals. This reveals some sources of profit, but doesn’t provide a full picture. There is indeed gold in the golden years, but too often not for those needing or working in care.

Ford likes to repeat the line that people will pay for standalone services offered by the for-profit clinics he’s granting a larger role in health delivery with their health card and not their credit card. Not to worry, he says, there will still be access to care without fees. But he fails to tell us what the sources of profits will be. There has been talk about ‘upselling’ services that you may or may not need: special lenses for those cataracts, to take just one example. However, there are some indications that the government will also pay more for services in these clinics than in hospitals, meaning that we may pay for the profits through our tax dollars.

When questions are raised about accountability, the answer has been unspecified regulations. It is a rather ironic answer from a government dedicated to removing ‘red tape.’ Some regulations are obviously necessary but many of these will undoubtedly be required, and at more cost to public funds if they are to be enforced. Effective regulations to prevent the poaching of doctors, nurses, and technologists from public hospitals to new ‘independent’ clinics with shorter hours will be very hard to implement.

Our research on scandals about long-term care homes in various countries shows both that the scandals are more likely to arise in for-profit homes and that in North America especially they are more likely to result in more, but not necessarily more effective, regulation. Unlike in Sweden and Norway where governments cancel their contracts with for-profit owners when scandals are exposed in the media, North American governments choose to regulate. In the US we are repeatedly told that care homes are more regulated than the nuclear industry, but regulation too often mean workers spend scarce care time on filling out forms with little visible improvement in the delivery of care.

A case can be made for specialized clinics. They can make sense in a number of areas such as cataract surgeries. But as doctors’ organizations in Ontario have argued, they make the most sense when they are connected to hospitals so that resources can be shared and complications easily transferred for more advanced care. They also make sense when they are not searching for profit but rather focused on quality care, with oversight from hospitals. And when they are publicly funded, they are publicly accountable, with open board meetings and minutes and enforced regulations about quality care and working conditions. What doesn’t make sense is spending public money on profit. Premier Ford has not even offered a case supporting for-profit care, only for independent clinics.

It is not enough to declare that, given the current crises in health care, the status quo will not do and thus we need to turn to the for-profit sector. Changes that are proposed need to be backed up with evidence-informed arguments. Meanwhile, the evidence indicates that for-profit delivery is less efficient, not more. Experiences ranging from dismal overall health outcomes in the US, to the dismantling and thus fragmenting of the NHS in the UK, to longer wait times for many following the move to for-profit cataract eye surgery in Alberta all make clear.

The crises in health care brought about by years of austerity faced with a pandemic have created the opportunity to build back better. However, it also created the opportunity for those searching for profit in all corners of care, from dental offices to home care, telehealth, colonoscopies, and vaccinations. We are at a critical point in our health care system. Now more than ever we have to make the distinction between private and profit clear. If our friend didn’t see the differences, clearly we have a lot of work to do.

_{Pat Armstrong is a Canadian sociologist and Distinguished Research Professor at York University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.}

_{Hugh Armstrong is a Distinguished Research Professor and Professor Emeritus of Social Work and Political Economy at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. Dr. Armstrong’s major research interests include long-term care, the political economy of health care, unions and public policy, the organization of work and family and household structures.}

Compassion in an age of anxiety and disillusionment / Review by Lital Khaikin

_{Originally published in Canadian Dimension on February 2, 2023}

Gabor Maté’s new book explores questions of survival and thriving in a traumatized and and (re)traumatizing society

Published in September 2022, Canadian physician and author Gabor Maté’s new book, The Myth of Normal, is a rich examination of the conditions that lead not only to individual illness, but to the cultural normalization of stress, emotional repression, alienation, and disenfranchisement. Through his therapeutic practice of ‘compassionate inquiry,’ Maté shows how psychological trauma is exacerbated by cultural norms and capitalism, and emphasizes a curiosity toward individual circumstance as a way of understanding and healing core psychic wounds.

**The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture**
Gabor Maté with Daniel Maté
Knopf Canada, 2022

Accessibly written in collaboration with his son Daniel Maté, The Myth of Normal questions and dismantles notions of ‘normalcy,’ interrogating the factors behind the apparent rise of trauma-related illnesses and the oft overlooked social and economic circumstances that can make us sick.

The theme of disillusionment anchors The Myth of Normal, and the book signals in many ways an evolution from Maté’s earlier works including In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts (2008), a study of the addiction and opioid crisis in Canada. In that acclaimed earlier work, Maté makes a clear link between economic precarity, social disenfranchisement, and the stigmatization of difference with an individual’s predisposition to opiate addiction. As he wrote: “The question is never ‘Why the addiction?’ but ‘Why the pain?’”

Where Maté’s extensive study of the social roots of the opioid crisis ended, however, his new book picks up, tying in common threads with his 2003 work When the Body Says No. The Myth of Normal broadly explores the consequences of the “mind-body bifurcation,” or the dissonance between the mind’s narrative and the body’s sensed reality. This division is encouraged by social conditioning that traps people in traumatized patterns and maladaptive coping mechanisms based on emotional repression and denial.

Reiterating his past insights, Maté shows how chronic illness and immune disorders from cancer, multiple sclerosis, and ALS are often symptomatic of emotional repression and accumulated stress. The urgency of Maté’s arguments is clear as Canada’s health care system sees intensifying privatization, while social support systems become increasingly difficult to access.

As Maté writes, it is the “willingness to be disillusioned” that serves as a point of departure for bringing trauma awareness into medicine, legal systems, and educational environments in an intentional and systematic way.

“The personality is an adaptation”

While Maté emphasizes compassionate inquiry as a core element of his therapeutic practice, The Myth of Normal proposes curiosity as the foundation of a caring society. Curiosity, by nature, embraces the unknown. Its absence shapes a society where individuals are not in dynamic conversation with their environments and with unknown ‘others,’ and relate to one another through an ‘identity-by-template’ formula.

Without curiosity, we may become emotionally repressed, resentful, and disempowered. This is exacerbated when selected fragments of our lives are uploaded to social media platforms that are optimized based on unattainable ideals, and which are designed to capitalize on our most vulnerable insecurities.

Maté explores how dependence on external self‐presentation is an extension of neuromarketing, the normalized corporate strategy of targeting the pleasure response, which is often foundational to the algorithms that shape the content and behaviours of internet communities.

Indeed, social media is the ultimate marketplace for the self as product. It is geared towards optimizing the performance of self, of one’s visible social networks, and of a person’s aesthetic, gestures, expressions, and tonality. The result is a closed system where the self that best matches an algorithm displaces multiplicity and authentic diversity, convincing people into desiring to be anything but themselves. This creates a tension between the perception of self and an uncanny absence of self. As Maté writes, citing Trappist monk and poet Thomas Merton, this results in “living always in somebody else’s imagination” within a society “whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension.”

Contrary to notions of a fixed self, The Myth of Normal emphasizes permeability and changeability. “It is closer to the truth to think of the personality as a recurring phenomenon than a fixed or permanent one,” he writes, “much like the way individual movie frames projected at rapid speed create the optical illusion of a single, continuous narrative.”

This principle, however, doesn’t fit capitalist incentives for profit that trap us within states of insecurity and precarity, and which engender a perception of inner lack. Feelings of self-completeness, the absence of desperate co-dependence, and the fluidity of self-expression are much harder to influence and control—and are not profitable for industries that depend on keeping people stuck in their traumas, scrutinizing and fixating on their shortcomings.

But it also poses a challenge when a person’s sense of self is shaped by the narrative and scars of trauma, and disruptive traumatic response is internalized as an immutable part of one’s identity. Maté has addressed this in his previous writings, showing how addiction (a form of traumatic response and coping) can become an anchor for identity, with the addict seeing no other possibility for existence: “No matter how much he may acknowledge the costs of his addiction, he fears a loss of self if it were absent from his life. In his own mind, he would cease to exist as he knows himself.”

In an honest reflection on his own evolution in therapeutic practice in a chapter entitled “An Inaccurate Map of Our Pain,” Maté acknowledges the potential benefits of pharmacological approaches to treating symptoms of trauma, but bases the heart of his new book on healing the root of suffering rather than medicating. “In my medical practice I became something of a Prozac booster, succumbing to the error of looking for pathology where there was only everyday unhappiness,” he writes. “I am primarily interested in what will promote the healing of the psychic wounds the ongoing traumatic patterns represent.”

As in Maté’s previous books, The Myth of Normal includes many examples and stories of patients and individuals Maté has encountered to support his emphasis on psychic wounds within therapeutic practice in order to treat the root causes of suffering. Recounting the story of a young doctor in the section “A Physician Heals Herself,” Maté draws a portrait of a woman who systematically repressed her emotions and tolerated harassment at work. It took being admitted to a hospital for coronary distress and pre-cancerous cervical abnormality, and later becoming suicidal, to confront the abuse the interpersonal stress was inflicting on her emotional self.

Maté shows how these superficial symptoms can be addressed through a change of environment, with what appears to be a facet of personality or an unsolvable crisis transforming in conditions that are conducive to temperament and thriving.

Similarly, in the popular book Attached, authors Amir Levine and Rachel Heller write how elements of seeming pathology, which they reframe as chronic activation of attachment systems, can be understood and transformed by changing one’s environment. Through numerous examples of relationships with conflicting needs, the authors demonstrate how the absence of what Maté might call ‘compassionate inquiry’ within a relationship creates a defensive environment that shows fundamental lack of care for wellbeing.

Levine and Heller describe a relational framework that, rather logically, sees behaviours as interdependent and the conditions for wellbeing as being a product of reciprocation in their environments. While seemingly obvious, such thinking is not as normalized as punitive judgements of individuals. Crucially, the authors of Attached don’t assign moral judgement or prescribe doom to any attachment pattern or combination thereof. Rather, they emphasize the plasticity of behaviour through awareness, allowing people to retain dignity within confusion, and illustrating how different approaches can either contribute to perpetuating or resolving traumatic patterns.

An inherited legacy

The Myth of Normal offers many segues into domestic and global political issues, and many of them relate to repression and punishment of difference, and the internalization of shame as a mode of social control. In particular, Maté explores the profound consequences of emotional repression in intimate and social relationships due to a fear of risking non-compliance, and of disappointing or being cut off from a caregiver or authority. But as trauma theory and its vocabulary gain mainstream acceptance, the knowledge of traumatic response and its manifestations can also be used to discredit and exert coercive control over individuals, and to invalidate their criticisms—be it in the bedroom, the workplace, or in the geopolitical theatre.

In his chapter “A Template for Distress,” Maté describes the phenomenon of self-abandonment in the face of threats as ‘hypnotic passivity,’ which is programmed through punitive measures for non-conformity, protest, and spontaneity in ways of being. “As citizens in ostensibly democratic countries, we have free will, up to a point—but in practice that freedom rarely strays beyond the frontier of what is socially acceptable,” he writes. “Not daring to rock the boat, we risk sinking with it.”

In Sara Ahmed’s acclaimed book Complaint! (2021), the feminist theorist’s analysis of how institutional power in academia protects itself by discouraging, suppressing, disappearing, or even co-opting complaint shows the extent of normalization around guilt and shame for being a “trouble-maker” or “feminist killjoy.” Illustrating this phenomenon in an interview with The Paris Review, Ahmed described how institutional power pathologizes complaint and capitalizes on the internalization of shame to target individuals rather than confronting embedded, systemic problems: “A lot of people talked to me about how when they tried to make complaints, it was often the diversity agenda that would be used against them—as if they weren’t doing this the right way, as if they weren’t being appealing enough, as if by even using certain words they were trying to make life difficult for other people, including other minoritized staff.”

The relational nature of trauma explored in The Myth of Normal also recalls the cautionary angles on trauma’s place in social institutions raised in the book The Empire of Trauma (2009) by Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman. Using France’s immigration system as an example, Fassin and Rechtman offer a nuanced critique of treating trauma as an unassailable moral category within systems that are already antagonistic toward vulnerable and marginalized people like refugees, veterans, and survivors of abuse and torture.

Reflecting on how the category of trauma has moved from clinical psychiatry into “everyday parlance,” the authors are wary of how, outside of a clinical context, the category of trauma gives a sense of social validation and status which are not otherwise afforded by society. “[T]he truth of trauma lies not in the psyche, the mind, or the brain,” they write, “but in the moral economy of contemporary societies.”

Fassin and Rechtman criticize the ideological underpinnings of social infrastructures based on a lack of compassion, and the trap of a cynical era that demands performance of victimhood in order for suffering to be heard and validated, and thus as “an important indication of the way in which the tragic is understood in contemporary societies.”

Speaking with Canadian Dimension, co-writer Daniel Maté explained that The Myth of Normal makes a point of trying to reach those “who might not already be convinced” by trauma theory. His response echoes the challenge of creating a ‘new normal’ and unmaking myths presented in the book’s last chapter.

“There are medical practitioners who haven’t fully ‘lost their religion’ or become disillusioned entirely with Western medicine, yet there is a sliver of openness there,” he described in an email. “And then there are the real tough nuts: people deeply ensconced in academia or scientific institutions who might have a knee-jerk distaste for this project.

“Often there are culture-war aspects to this: some people distrust the ‘woke’ use of victimized identity as a cudgel to force compliance in others, particularly on the level of oppressed groups, and see coddling as a danger.”

The Myth of Normal is a comprehensive volume that ties in common threads from across Gabor Maté’s previous works, and connects a progressive therapeutic approach toward trauma with the social crises borne under capitalism. The humanitarian tone of the book and the inherent liberatory potential of trauma-informed social praxis are at the heart of building a world whose visible and invisible structures can be guided by compassion instead of fear.

At its heart, the arguments presented in the book encourage the possibility that each of us can play a redemptive role in one another’s life; nudging off the well-trod pathways of self-sabotage, transforming one another’s betrayed sense of safety and vulnerability, and allowing the possibility for just one thing, this time, to be different on the way to an authentic life. As Maté invokes by quoting Victor Hugo: “At intervals can be seen a glimpse of truth, the daylight of the human soul.”