The Dominion - poverty

Homeless in Halifax

hillarybain — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:49:03 +0000

A first person account

HALIFAX—I’m fixing dinner on another damp Halifax evening and enjoying the momentary peace in my large kitchen.

Behind me, a middle-aged mom is trying to persuade her two-year-old that milk tastes better than juice and, not surprisingly, losing that argument for the moment. To my left, a younger woman is perched on a stool, engrossed in a third-year university chemistry text—heck, at Dalhousie University, I never made it past the first page of that book, which is why I promptly switched back to psychology. From the living room, I hear laughter about some of the latest signs to appear in our home:

Please do not dry cigarettes in the Microwave. Thank you, Staff

Please do not open window – it will fall out. Thank you, Staff

Squash stew for breakfast – enjoy! - Your Staff

Welcome to my new home. Welcome to a Halifax Shelter for Homeless Women.

Hannah, making dinner for her daughter, has been unable to find affordable rental accommodation that also accepts children in Halifax, which is where she moved after she lost her job in Cape Breton. “I borrowed the money to take a bus here, just because we figured there were more jobs in the Halifax,” Hannah explains. She had not expected that when she arrived, she would be unable to find housing that she could afford, with or without her child. And she still can’t.

Hannah has now become a member of an exclusive club, which, for want of a better label, might be called the CAE Club—the “Chicken and Egg” Club, where I too am now an unwilling member.

You may be part of the CAE Club because you need housing to get a job—a place to get dressed, receive mail, communicate with employers, store your belongings, do laundry, have meals. But you need a job in order to get that place and pay for that home. That job will provide the rent to get a place to live, or to satisfy a landlord that you are working and can afford your rent. For many of us at a shelter, the question of getting a job, or getting a home first, no longer makes any difference. We currently no longer have resources to make either happen.

In 1998, the Big City Mayors Caucus of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) declared homelessness in Canada a national disaster.

That was thirteen years ago.

By conservative estimates, there are over 200,000 people in Canada who are homeless today, according to organizers of November’s Housing and Homeless Conference in Halifax. Women, youth, and families are the fastest growing groups in the homeless and at-risk populations.

In the kitchen on this rainy night, my chemistry-text-loving friend, Denise, and I are now looking for the best place to put her cane so I don’t keep tripping over it. Denise represents another audience needing shelters; she has a health issue. In her case, a stroke that she suffered a year ago. Denise’s subsequent inability to walk unaided was something that her new husband could not cope with. In spite of some great health care agencies which worked with the couple to create Denise’s successful transition from a wheelchair to her cane, “he just didn’t expect to be looking after me,” says Denise of her husband. He kicked her out of a home where her name was not on the rental agreement. Her husband since left the province, along with their car and bankbook.

I remember Lenore, another health “victim” at another Halifax shelter with a similar story, but she faced even greater problems—she not only could not walk properly, but a stroke had affected her speech. Lenore’s move to a shelter came after she discovered that the mortgage for the home she shared with her partner of 20 years did not include her name, and he “no longer wanted me anyway,” she says. She could not afford to hire a lawyer or use Legal Aid options, none of which she qualified for. Lenore did, however, qualify for her current shelter residence which is where I got to know her, and where I finally discovered someone who could beat me at a game I had ruled all my life: I am no longer the Maritime Scrabble Queen.

I asked Stephanie, a staff member at a Halifax shelter, what the hardest part of her job was: “The hardest part of my job is telling a homeless woman who is already facing the worst day of her life, that she has to move, whether she has a place to go or not. Her time to use a shelter for a roof over her head has run out. Whether she has a place to go or not, there is someone who also now needs that her space.” There is no longer a "room at the inn."

I continue to be amazed at how “up” most residents are in these situations which are so often just unbearable: no home, sometimes limited food, cramped surroundings. It seemed to go without saying that residents usually give incredible support to others also living at the shelter. A house-mate will offer an exhausted young mom some down time from her cranky baby. Today, one the residents who has stayed at the shelter the longest dropped a pile of books off by my bed after a great discussion about best authors; she had seen how much I enjoy a good read. This weekend, I also received an unsolicited Tim Hortons’ gift card when another housemate passed along the card which had been given to her to share.

There are, of course, downsides to living at a shelter and, for me, noise is my greatest challenge. I am used to a pretty quiet life, but that does not necessarily fit with the in-the-gene-pool gift of gab we Maritimers are inevitably born with. Nor is waiting to do laundry, or the other rules that can come with communal living. Still, there are success stories celebrated at women’s shelters every day—and celebrate we do.

A former shelter roommate, Barb, has just been accepted into a community college chef program and her application for financial support, allowing her to move forward with her life, was also approved. The mother sharing the kitchen with me, Hannah, thinks she has found an apartment where children are allowed, although she will need another roommate to help with the rent.

I’m about to take this evening’s dinner to the living room and join in a twelve-woman, lively discussion about the Grey Cup game and the Lions’ victory. Yes, this is a women’s shelter. And yes, a sports-focused conversation about football may not be what one expects in a place for homeless women. But surprises are definitely part of my current life. I am just looking forward to the happy surprise of having a new home again, but I am so glad I have this shelter, and the amazing company of these new friends, until that home finally happens. And it will. To date, staff tell me, no one has ever been here forever.

*The author's name has been changed.

L.D. Steeves is currently living in a shelter for women in Halifax.

This article was originally published by the Halifax Media Co-op.

Gottingen St

Affordable Houing

Occupons Edmundston

hillarybain — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 11:10:10 +0000

Edmundston workers, pensioners and students have many reasons to occupy

EDMUNDSTON, NB—The Occupy movement has spread to the small, francophone city of Edmundston, in northern New Brunswick. Occupations of public spaces have been ongoing since October 15 in cities across North America, but many smaller cities and towns have now joined in.

Around 50 people, mostly students but also workers and retirees, demonstrated in front of Edmundston City Hall on October 29.

"I'm here today because of social and economic inequality," said Nicole Ouellet, a caregiver for the elderly who is making the same salary today in Edmundston that she made 30 years ago in Montreal. "Food prices are going up all the time but not our salaries," remarked Ouellet.

At an age when she should be planning her retirement and enjoying time with her grandchildren, Ouellet has gone back to work in caregiving, a sector traditionally dominated by women that is today considered underpaid by pay equity advocates. Caregivers like Ouellet and her male co-worker, who also participated in Occupons Edmundston, would benefit from long-awaited pay equity legislation in the province. Pay equity is equal pay for work of equal or comparable value. Skill, responsibility, effort and working conditions are factors long ignored in jobs predominately done by women.

"My husband must work in Alberta. One of our kids is forced to work outside the province. We wish we could live near our kids so that we could get to know our grandkids," said Ouellet.

France Ritchie, a friend of Ouellet's, said, "They take $30 away from the poor all the time instead of ending the war. I'm old enough so it doesn't affect me to protest. A lot of people are afraid to lose their jobs or their reputation and that's why they're not out in the streets. We're here to support the people occupying Wall Street. We will not take it anymore. It started in Egypt. I knew it was only a matter of time before it spread here."

André Charest, who came out because his 15-year-old son, Emmanuel, felt it important to attend, said, "I'm against the model we have. The majority pays while a minority puts it in their pockets." The father and son held signs that conveyed this message. They were greeted with many honks of support from passing motorists. "I may be young but I'm going to feel the consequences," said Emmanuel.

The majority of the people who participated in the Occupons Edmundston protest were students from the Edmundston campus of Université de Moncton. They sang protest songs that warmed the crowd during what was a chilly October afternoon.

Two targets of protest have appeared at most Occupy sites: one being corporate greed and the banks, with the other being the system, namely capitalism. Opponents of the latter target argue that equality will not result from tweaking the system, regulating the banks or policy reform. They point out that the oppression of workers and crises are inherent to capitalism. The latest crisis, its effect on workers, and now the Occupy movement have created opportunities to question capitalism and discuss another form of economic and social relations where in which every worker is able to control their lives and realize their full potential, dreams and capacities.

"I'm here to protest against capitalism," said Sebastien Levesque, one of the university students studying philosophy, politics and history. "It's an important contemporary problem. The system is destroying everything including the environment." Étienne Rousseau, another university student, who held a sign with the popular Occupy slogan, "Capitalism isn't broken, it was built that way," agreed with Levesque. "I hate the system. The rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. It's expensive to study right now. We are the next generation. We have to do something," said Rousseau.

Dominic Duval, an arts and social sciences student, organized Occupons Edmundston after waiting for someone to organize it and no one did. "The Occupy movement has spread to over 80 countries and 1,600 cities. It is important for Edmundston to do its part. We don't want to promote the status quo. We want change. We need change," said Duval.

Nicole Ouellet said the Fraser Papers' pensioners in Edmundston who lost about 35 per cent of the benefits in their pensions are part of their movement. When Fraser Papers received protection under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act in 2009, Brookfield Asset Management, its controlling shareholder, sold part of the company to itself and divested itself of pension obligations for all their pensioners and current workers.

Brookfield Asset Management, with former New Brunswick Premier Frank McKenna on its board, came under fire recently at the original Occupy Wall Street location for threatening to evict Occupy participants in Zucotti Park. Brookfield owns Zucotti Park. The company had called for protesters to be removed so that it could clean the park, but its efforts were unsuccessful and the occupation continues.

Like Nicole Ouellet, some of the pensioners have been forced to return to work to pay the bills. In an open letter published October 27, Jacques Sarlabous, a Fraser Papers' mill pensioner, said he sent 134 resumes over a five month period and got three part-time jobs at minimum wage. Sarlabous said he had to take the jobs because he and his wife suffer from serious health conditions that require costly medications.

Sarlabous wrote, "I worked at the Fraser Papers' mill in Edmundston, New Brunswick, for 36 years. On each pay cheque, I contributed a portion of my wages to the pension fund, which I believed would be a guaranteed investment. In 2009, with talks of a potential bankruptcy at Fraser, I decided to withdraw my pension plan with the aim of securing my assets. I signed documents and withdrew the first pension payment that I was entitled to. Unfortunately, I was able to benefit from my full pension for only three months. Having given 36 years of my life to Fraser Papers, I got a full pension for three months. In other words, one month of pension for every 10 years of service!"

Edmundston pensioners were among the first to participate in Occupy actions in Canada. Organized as the Victims of Brookfield Association, with a membership of 800 retirees, four Edmundston pensioners and two Thurso, Quebec, pensioners participated in Occupy Toronto and demonstrated in front of the Toronto offices of Brookfield Asset Management on October 15. They shared their stories of losing their hard-earned pensions.

It's not the first time that the pensioners occupied Brookfield Asset Management's head offices in Toronto. On January 2010, union leader Gaétan Ménard and Fraser Papers’ pensioners occupied the company's office. According to the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers' Union, the union representing the pensioners and workers, Brookfield CEO Bruce Flatt was “not concerned” that pensioners could lose 40 per cent of their pensions as a result of the company’s restructuring plan. A year later, the pensioners and union leaders occupied the office again in an attempt to have the company reinstate the workers' pensions. The workers were escorted out of the office both times.

"Why the Occupy movement? Because too many laws in this country are about protecting big corporations, not workers," wrote Sarlabous.

Tracy Glynn gets to bash capitalism as a PhD student at the University of New Brunswick. She does reporting for the New Brunswick Media Co-op, where this article was originally posted.

Occupy Edmonston

Occupy Edmonston 2

A Town Without Poverty?

Martin Lukacs — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 10:08:24 +0000

Canada's only experiment in guaranteed income finally gets reckoning

WHITEHORSE, YK—Try to imagine a town where the government paid each of the residents a living income, regardless of who they were and what they did, and a Soviet hamlet in the early 1980s may come to mind.

But this experiment happened much closer to home. For a four-year period in the '70s, the poorest families in Dauphin, Manitoba, were granted a guaranteed minimum income by the federal and provincial governments. Thirty-five years later all that remains of the experiment are 2,000 boxes of documents that have gathered dust in the Canadian archives building in Winnipeg.

Until now little has been known about what unfolded over those four years in the small rural town, since the government locked away the data that had been collected and prevented it from being analyzed.

But after a five year struggle, Evelyn Forget, a professor of health sciences at the University of Manitoba, secured access to those boxes in 2009. Until the data is computerized, any systematic analysis is impossible. Undeterred, Forget has begun to piece together the story by using the census, health records, and the testimony of the program's participants. What is now emerging reveals that the program could have counted many successes.

Beginning in 1974, Pierre Trudeau's Liberals and Manitoba's first elected New Democratic Party government gave money to every person and family in Dauphin who fell below the poverty line. Under the program—called “Mincome”—about 1,000 families received monthly cheques.

Unlike welfare, which only certain individuals qualified for, the guaranteed minimum income project was open to everyone. It was the first—and to this day, only—time that Canada has ever experimented with such an open-door social assistance program.

In today’s conservative political climate, with constant government and media rhetoric about the inefficiency and wastefulness of the welfare state, the Mincome project sounds like nothing short of a fairy tale.

For four years Dauphin was a place where anyone living below the poverty line could receive monthly cheques to boost their income, no questions asked. Single mothers could afford to put their kids through school and low-income families weren't scrambling to pay the rent each month.

For Amy Richardson, it meant she could afford to buy her children books for school. Richardson joined the program in 1977, just after her husband had gone on disability leave from his job. At the time, she was struggling to raise her three youngest children on $1.50 haircuts she gave in her living room beauty parlour.

The $1,200 per year she received in monthly increments was a welcome supplement, in a time when the poverty line was $2,100 a year.

“The extra money meant that I was also able to give my kids something I wouldn't ordinarily be able to, like taking them to a show or some small luxury like that,” said Richardson, now 84, who spoke to The Dominion by phone from Dauphin.

As part of the experiment, an army of researchers were sent to Dauphin to interview the Mincome families. Residents in nearby rural towns who didn't receive Mincome were also surveyed so their statistics could be compared against those from Dauphin. But after the government cut the program in 1978, they simply warehoused the data and never bothered to analyze it.

“When the government introduced the program they really thought it would be a pilot project and that by the end of the decade they would roll this out and everybody would participate,” said Forget. “They thought it would become a universal program. But of course, the idea eventually just died off.”

During the Mincome program, the federal and provincial governments collectively spent $17 million, though it was initially supposed to have cost only a few million.

Meant to last several more years, the program came to a quick halt in 1978 when an economic recession hit Canada. The recession had caused prices to increase 10 per cent each year, so payouts to families under Mincome had increased accordingly.

Trudeau's Liberals, already on the defensive for an overhaul of Canada's employment insurance system, killed the program and withheld any additional money to analyze the data that had been amassed.

“It's hugely unfortunate and typical of the strange ways in which government works that the data was never analyzed,” says Ron Hikel who coordinated the Mincome program. Hikel now works in the United States to promote universal healthcare reform.

“Government officials opposed [to Mincome] didn't want to spend more money to analyze the data and show what they already thought: that it didn't work,” says Hikel, who remains a strong proponent of guaranteed income programs.

“And the people who were in favour of Mincome were worried because if the analysis was done and the data wasn't favourable then they would have just spent another million dollars on analysis and be even more embarrassed.”

But Forget has culled some useful info from Manitoba labour data. Her research confirms numerous positive consequences of the program.

Initially, the Mincome program was conceived as a labour market experiment. The government wanted to know what would happen if everybody in town received a guaranteed income, and specifically, they wanted to know whether people would still work.

It turns out they did.

Only two segments of Dauphin's labour force worked less as a result of Mincome—new mothers and teenagers. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies. And teenagers worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their families.

The end result was that they spent more time at school and more teenagers graduated. Those who continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work they did.

“People didn't have to take the first job that came along,” says Hikel. “They could wait for something better that suited them.”

For some, it meant the opportunity to land a job to help them get by.

When Doreen and Hugh Henderson arrived in Dauphin in 1970 with their two young children they were broke. Doreen suggested moving from Vancouver to her hometown because she thought her husband would have an easier time finding work there. But when they arrived, things weren't any better.

“My husband didn't have a very good job and I couldn't find work,” she told The Dominion by phone from Dauphin.

It wasn't until 1978, after receiving Mincome payments for two years, that her husband finally landed janitorial work at the local school, a job he kept for 28 years.

“I don't know how we would have lived without [Mincome],” said Doreen.“I don't know if we would have stayed in Dauphin.”

Although the Mincome experiment was intended to provide a body of information to study labour market trends, Forget discovered that Mincome had a significant effect on people's well being. Two years ago, the professor started studying the health records of Dauphin residents to assess the impacts of the program.

In the period that Mincome was administered, hospital visits dropped 8.5 per cent. Fewer people went to the hospital with work-related injuries and there were fewer emergency room visits from car accidents and domestic abuse. There were also far fewer mental health visits.

It's not hard to see why, says Forget.

“When you walk around a hospital, it's pretty clear that a lot of the time what we're treating are the consequences of poverty,” she says.

Give people financial independence and control over their lives and these accidents and illnesses tend to dissipate, says Forget. In today's terms, an 8.5 per cent decrease in hospital visits across Canada would save the government $4 billion annually, by her calculations. And $4 billion is the amount that the federal government is currently trying to save by slashing social programming and arts funding.

Having analyzed the health data, Forget is now working on a cost-benefit analysis to see what a guaranteed income program might save the federal government if it were implemented today. She’s already worked with a Senate committee investigating a guaranteed income program for all low-income Canadians.

The Canadian government's sudden interest in guaranteed income programs doesn't surprise Forget.

Every 10 or 15 years there seems to be a renewed interest in getting Guaranteed Income (GI) programs off the ground, according to Saskatchewan social work professor James Mulvale. He's researched and written extensively about guaranteed income programs and is also part the Canadian chapter of the Basic Income Earth Network, a worldwide organization that advocates for guaranteed income.

GI programs exist in countries like Brazil, Mexico, France and even the state of Alaska.

Although people may not recognize it, subtle forms of guaranteed income already exist in Canada, says Mulvale, pointing to the child benefit tax, guaranteed income for seniors and the modest GST/HST rebate program for low-income earners.

However, a wider-reaching guaranteed income program would go a long way in decreasing poverty, he says.

Mulvale is in favour of a “demo-grant” model of GI that would give automatic cash transfers to everybody in Canada. This kind of plan would also provide the option of taxing higher-income earners at the end of the year so poorer people receive benefits.

A model such as this has a higher chance of broad support because it goes out to everybody, according to Mulvale. GI can also be administered as a negative income tax to the poor, meaning they'd receive an amount of money back directly in proportion to what they make each year.

“GI by itself wouldn't eliminate poverty but it would go a heck of a long way to decrease the extent of poverty in this country,” says Mulvale.

Conservative senator Hugh Segal has been the biggest supporter of this kind of GI, claiming it would eliminate the social assistance programs now administered by the provinces and territories. Rather than having a separate office to administer child tax benefits, welfare, unemployment insurance and income supplement for seniors, they could all be rolled into one GI scheme.

It would also mean that anybody could apply for support. Many people fall through the cracks under the current welfare system, says Forget. Not everybody can access welfare and those who can are penalized for going to school or for working a job since the money they receive from welfare is then clawed back.

If a guaranteed income program can target more people and is more efficient than other social assistance programs, then why doesn't Canada have such a program in place already? Perhaps the biggest barrier is the prevalence of negative stereotypes about poor people.

“There's very strong feelings out there that we shouldn't give people money for nothing,” Mulvale says.

Guaranteed income proponents aren't holding their breaths that they'll see such a program here anytime soon, but they are hopeful that one day Canada will consider the merits of guaranteed income.

The cost would be "not nearly as prohibitive to do as people imagine it is," says Forget. “A guaranteed minimum income program is a superior way of delivering social assistance. The only thing is that it's of course politically difficult to implement.”

Vivian Belik is a freelance journalist based in the frozen northlands of Whitehorse, Yukon. She was, however, raised in Manitoba where she has spotted many of the provinces small-town statues including the giant beaver in Dauphin.

Mincome

Descartes Without Debt

hillarybain — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 12:12:52 +0000

Course teaches great books free of charge

HALIFAX—The Halifax Humanities 101 program graduated its sixth class at King’s College Chapel on June 4, reigniting the debate regarding the value of a humanities course for low-income people.

Over eight months, students of Halifax Humanities attended classes twice a week and read Plato, Homer, Dante, St. Augustine, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Alice Munro, and Virginia Woolf—to name a few—in between lectures. The program is free, and books and reading materials are provided for students to keep. University professors, who volunteer their time, teach all the classes.

Raising funds for a course that does not bill itself as "employment training" for people on low incomes is not always easy, says Mary Lu Redden, the Director of Halifax Humanities. But according to the program’s participants, the opportunity to study classic works of literature, philosophy and art has a value that’s impossible to quantify.

“It opens up your mind and your heart,” says Bonnie Shepherd, one of the program’s first students six years ago. “You have more compassion and empathy when you realize what humans throughout the ages have gone through.”

“When the curriculum was first devised, I wondered if it might be better to be more practical and better suited to the students’ experience,” says Dr. Henry Roper, a volunteer professor from King’s University who has been with the program since its creation. That didn’t seem to be what the participants were looking for, explains Roper. He says the curriculum gets shaped by the needs and wants of the participants each year.

“The opportunity to learn from so many excellent and learned minds has been a remarkable, precious experience,” says Jan G., one of this year’s graduates. “Learning about the journey of humanity through the ages brings a better sense of understanding the world we live in. This experience has given me more confidence in my approach to life.”

“The great works of the West should be available to anyone who wants to tolle lege [take up and read], to bum a phrase from Augustine,” says Dr. Laura Penny, another volunteer professor with Halifax Humanities. “It's a real joy to be part of a program that makes it clear that reading, thinking, and writing are not elitist or superfluous hobbies, but a way to understand the world and the self.”

“There’s something about the core of Marxism that poor people get right away,” says Dr. Sarah Clift who teaches Nietzsche, Marx and others as part of the course. “There’s nothing theoretical about it. [The students] understand the alienation of labour immediately.”

It wasn’t Marx who first touched Kathleen Higney, but Socrates.

Higney remembers her first class in September 2007 on the Socratic method. "I remember wondering, ‘What the heck is [the professor] talking about?’ But I was hooked and carried on...listening, questioning, thinking, and writing.”

Higney has continued studying through the Seminar for Graduates, offered to people who complete the first course. “I highly recommend Halifax Humanities 101 to adults who love to learn but cannot afford the cost of university tuition and books,” she says.

The course is also an invitation to participate in the broader community—an invitation that is desperately needed and rarely extended, says Clift. “The barrier is real and it has social, spiritual and financial implications.”

Lauri Noye, one of this year’s graduates, brightened up her class by bringing her seizure-alert dog to every session. She has felt that isolation in her own life.

“I had become housebound a while ago and this [course] helped me to get out,” says Noye. “I learned a lot about myself and the community and I made new friends. My relationship to the community at large has changed. I found out about things going on that I can participate in and I’m more involved.”

Heather D., who was co-valedictorian of this year's class, had a similar experience. She noticed the change when she found herself attending several New Year’s Levees for the very first time in her life. “I would never have done that before. I have a wider sense of community. Not in a million years would I have come into contact with this group. It’s so outside your known world,” she says. Heather feels the benefits are not limited to those attending the course. “All the people around me have also been affected. It was a ripple effect. It’s not always a dollars-and-cents payoff.”

Halifax Humanities 101 will begin classes again in the fall.

Lamont Dobbin is a recent graduate of the Halifax Humanities course. He lives below the poverty line on a disability pension.

Halifax Humanities 101

The Strength to Carry on

mccabe.melissa — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 14:49:20 +0000

Residential school survivor speaks out as part of In Our Own Voices writing project

The stories that make up the In Our Own Voices writing project are the fruits of weeks of exercises, workshops, drafts and revisions. They are personal stories, written by members of the Power of Women Group, who organize out of the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre.

These are stories of incredible hardship, resistance, struggle, courage, and resilience; of grappling with and sometimes overcoming fear, addictions, abuse, and illness; and of persistent state violence and racism, dealt liberally and frequently, and usually without a modicum of justice.

Stella's is just one of the voices that you’ll find on the Vancouver Media Co-op site this month. In the place of fragments, a passing nod at a rally or a quick hello on the street, readers can walk beside these brave, powerful women.

—Dawn Paley

VANCOUVER—I was six years old when I was taken away from my parents and grandparents in Ahousat, BC and forced into a residential school. The Department of Indian Affairs came to our reserve every year in the 1950s, taking Native children away and placing them in residential schools to learn the White way of life.

In residential schools, under the federal policy of “aggressive assimilation,” we were stripped of our language, our culture, and our customs. We had to scrub ourselves clean until we were White. It is estimated that approximately 150,000 Native children were removed from our communities and forced to attend residential schools, with the last school closing only as recently as 1996.

I was forced to attend the Christie Indian Residential School and then the Mission City St. Mary’s Residential School. I felt like I was in a concentration camp. In these schools, we were punished for speaking our language. Our punishment was being kept in isolation in a dark room for the whole day. Often we would be fed food from the garbage and be forced to drink raw cow milk. We were strapped and beaten until we were too sore to stand.

If we did not get up on time in the mornings, the nuns would drag us across the floor, beat us, and make us go without breakfast. I remember every morning they would wake us up by saying: “You are not on the reserve; you are in White Man’s land. Indians are liars, filthy and good for nothing. You don’t want to live like an Indian.”

When we were silent, they made us talk. But when we talked, they did not like what we had to say and persistently hit us while repeating: “God doesn’t like you talking like that.” We were too scared to do anything. We would often go without food and there would be no activities. At nighttime we would often see the children taken out of their dorm rooms and they would come back crying and bleeding.

I was incredibly lonely in the residential schools. The priests and nuns did not like us making friends with each other. Even brothers and sisters were kept apart and forced to act like strangers with one another. From the time I was placed in residential schools, I did not have a single kind word said to me. No one appreciated me for the individual I was, or the culture I came from.

All I remember is being punished for anything and everything. I still have horrible flashbacks. I grew up with a tremendous amount of shame and loss of dignity. I believe that residential schools were prisons for young children.

I managed to get out of residential school earlier than the other children because one day my brother managed to sneak a phone call to my grandparents and told them to come get me. The nuns had beaten me so badly across my head with a stick and a ruler that my ears would not stop bleeding. My grandparents got me out of the school for a special doctor’s visit. The doctor determined that I had permanently lost my hearing in both ears. My grandparents were furious and kept me at home, refusing to send me back to the residential school. When the school called the Indian band office looking for me, my grandparents told the school and the Indian agents that the nuns had given me a severely damaged ear. The officials hung up the phone and did not try forcing me back.

When I was older, I moved to the Downtown Eastside. Almost 60 per cent of Native people and 72 per cent of Native women now live in urban settings with the erosion of the land base of our communities and Indian Act regulations limiting women’s access to housing on the reserves. I, too, drifted here from the Island and found work at a fish plant. Since then, this neighbourhood has become my permanent home.

Like me, most people here carry deep scars. It is hard to describe all the different experiences that women have, for example the history of abuse that has brought many of us here to the DTES, the brutality of child apprehensions that many of us have borne as a direct result of poverty, the fact that many of us do not know our parents because of the legacy of residential schools and colonization has destroyed our families, the chronic and often fatal illnesses such as AIDS and Hepatitis C that break our bodies, the grief of living through the deaths of our missing and murdered sisters, and much more. People who drive by us every day to work have no idea what nightmares we live with. My heart wants to shatter when I hear some of the stories about why people have turned to drugs and alcohol.

The Downtown Eastside is the poorest part of town. Low-income housing in the DTES is of such sub-standard quality that many prefer to sleep on the streets. Problems in the single-room occupancies include: absence of heat, toilets, and running water; presence of mold, bedbug infestations and rats; and illegal practices by landlords including refusal to return damage deposits, entering rooms without permission, and arbitrary evictions.

In the DTES Power of Women Group, we support our people to get proper homes. The government should provide a living wage and a decent home for all people so that we have somewhere to stay and so that no one has to work the street. A lot of our young people are working for drug dealers. Women who owe drug debts have much harm come to them, sometimes even death, like the murder of 22-year-old Ashley Machisknic last year. A lot of girls who have to work in the sex-trade are further abused by their clients and their pimps and often don’t get paid.

And then there is the constant harassment on the street by police officers. I have seen officers walk by and kick people while they are passed out or sleeping on the street. Our people are not able to defend themselves against guns and tasers. It hurts me to see people slammed to the pavement by police officers just because they are poor and nobody cares what happens to poor people.

But the hidden truth of the Downtown Eastside is that despite the poverty, criminalization, and trauma, we all care for each other and socialize with one another. Especially in the DTES Power of Women Group, where we are like one family and support the community on issues such as police brutality, child apprehensions, violence against women, and housing. Whether people are sober or high on drugs, we listen to each other’s dreams and desires to make this neighbourhood a better place for ourselves.

Stella's is just one of the voices that you’ll find on the Vancouver Media Co-op site this month. Readers can walk beside these brave, powerful women. This story is part of the Downtown Eastside Power of Women “In Our Own Voices” writing project. For more information and to read more stories, click here.

Stella August, from the Nuu-chah-nulth Nation, was born in 1945 in Ahousat, BC. She is a long-time resident of the Downtown Eastside. When she joined the DTES Power of Women Group she learnt that as a woman in this neighbourhood, she has a voice and a collective group through which to support her people. She is also a member of the Feb 14th Womens’ memorial march Committee.

Dawn Paley is a journalist and organizer with the Vancouver Media coop, where the full version of her introduction can be read. Stories from In Our Own Voices can be read on the VMC.

POW members at the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre

The Downtown East side Power of Women Group Present In Our Own Voices Writing Project

Convicted by the Media, Sentenced by the Courts

hillarybain — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 05:52:51 +0000

Supporters of Nicole Kish say she is innocent and the media is guilty

HAMILTON—Nicole Kish feels like she’s “living in a bad John Grisham novel.”

Kish was convicted of second-degree murder on March 1, 2011, and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 12 years. An activist, artist and a singer-songwriter with no criminal record, Kish has maintained her innocence since the 2007 death of Ross Hammond, which occurred after a large street brawl near the Toronto intersection of Queen and Bathurst.

Friends and supporters of Kish argue the media storm around the so-called "panhandler killer" was partially responsible for her unfair trial and wrongful conviction, and they are fighting for her release.

The physical altercation that resulted in one man’s death, first described by Detective Sgt. Gary Giroux—and then reiterated by both local and national media—as being between “street kids” and “jocks,” began when a woman identified as Faith Watts allegedly asked for money from George Dranichak and Ross Hammond. On the stand at the preliminary hearings and at the trial, Dranichak testified that he and Hammond, who died of a stab wound that night, responded to Watts with sexually derogatory remarks, such as telling her to perform sexual acts if she wanted money. While on the stand, Dranichak went on to acknowledge that their persistence had fuelled the confrontation.

Nicole Kish had been walking down Queen Street that night with a large number of people celebrating her 21st birthday. She had been in Toronto only for a day prior to the altercation.

Out of the 20 witnesses to testify at the trial, not one identified Kish or saw anyone stabbed that night. In rendering his verdict, Justice Nordheimer addressed this as being inconsequential, saying, “In this case we are not dealing with direct identification but rather with circumstantial identification.”

Two witnesses did testify to seeing a woman in possession of a knife. Kish’s former co-accused, Faith Watts, testified to having pulled out a knife during the altercation and said she had done so out fear for her life and the life of her boyfriend, who witnesses testify was beaten unconscious. Additionally, a substantial amount of DNA was found on Watts’s clothing. However, Nordheimer attributed the DNA findings as being the “limitations of physical evidence,” and while he acknowledged that the knife belonged to Watts, he goes so far as to suggest the knife may have changed hands three times before its fatal use. Stating his case for conviction, he focused on Kish being stabbed, saying that since Kish had been stabbed, there’s an “irresistible inference” that she must have killed Hammond.

Several surveillance cameras were recording that night; two, however, were inexplicably lost while in police custody: the footage on one was recorded over, and the other was “lost”. The explanation Detective Giroux had provided to the courts was that the video was placed in the evidence box but by the time it came into his possession, the video was simply no longer there. Citing previous case law (R. v. La), Nordhiemer attributed the loss of that video to the “frailties of human nature.”

“It’s dumbfounding,” says Kish via telephone from the women’s prison in Kitchener, Ontario. Reflecting on her conviction and the lack of evidence to substantiate it, she emphasizes that she is not alone, saying, “To one end, I understand oppression. I understand humanity’s long history of abuse; I understand I am not the first, nor will I be the last, to be convicted of a crime I did not commit. I just don't understand why.”

“This was not a fair and impartial trial, but a politically-motivated attempt to vilify a young activist, justify draconian ‘Safe Streets’ legislation and further criminalize and marginalize youth and poor people,” says Kevin MacKay, a Professor at Mohawk College and the Executive Director of the Sky Dragon Community Development Centre in Hamilton. MacKay first met Kish when she asked if she could use the centre as a drop off location for Books to Bars, a non-profit organization she founded in Southern Ontario which donates reading and educational material to over a dozen correctional facilities. Describing Kish as being “hard-working and passionate,” MacKay grew to know her through their joint organizing of the G20 Hamilton Primer and her stage performances at the Sky Dragon. MacKay describes Kish’s trial as revealing “a desire on behalf of the police to force a conviction against massive contrary evidence,” in order to obtain the conviction that, from the very beginning, the Toronto Police had promised to the media and the public.

Furthermore, MacKay blames the mainstream media for showing an “equally disturbing level of bias and corruption” in what he describes as “erroneous reports” such as the Toronto Sun claiming Kish was identified at trial as having the knife clenched in her mouth (which she wasn’t), or the media labeling her “the panhandler killer” despite the fact that no evidence indicated that Kish had been panhandling.

Many of Kish’s supporters share this criticism of the media. Within hours of the altercation, the case was highly publicized as the “panhandler stabbing,” causing an extraordinary amount of public outcry against the city’s perceived leniency towards panhandling and the homeless. Top city and provincial officials as well as columnists and talk show hosts weighed in on the incident, calling for panhandling to be made illegal in the city. The media storm began before much was known about the case except what was included in press releases from the Toronto Police, which Kish’s mother Christine Bivens said the media treated “as gospel.”

“One of the ways they [the media] shaped the case [is that] Nicole was always referred to as the panhandler despite the fact there was absolutely no testimony that she was a panhandler,” said Bivens. “Contrast this with the portrayal of George Dranichak, purveyor of porn, and his business associate Ross Hammond, whom the media referred to as internet marketers.”

George Dranichak is an owner of a multi-level porn marketing company, which manages such sites as Uncaged Marketing and Guerrilla Traffic. Also, it came to light during the trial that while attending school in Kentucky, Dranichak settled out of court after violently assaulting an individual after forcing his way into the person's dorm. Being someone who runs a pornography marketing company and has a history of violence carries entirely different implications than being an “internet marketer,” and might have provided a very different narrative to the public discourse. However, these elements of Dranichak’s character were left out of media coverage.

When Kish was out on bail she was under a stringent publication ban that prohibited her and her family from speaking publicly about the case. Her grandmother Val Lewis says the ban affected the outcome of the case. She feels this way especially in regards to Kish’s character, saying that Kish “would fight for a cause up to but excluding violence. Violence has never been a part of her makeup. But drawing attention to wrongs always has.”

Despite the media coverage, Kish’s conviction sparked immediate backlash and a grassroots campaign to advocate for her release. Weeks after her conviction, supporters organized a show to raise awareness and funds for her appeal. They held a rally outside the courthouse immediately following Kish’s sentencing on April 4, 2011, which heard the courtroom erupt in chants of “Free Nyki!”

When asked what’s next for the Free Nyki Campaign, Bivens believes that the courts will “overturn Nicole’s conviction if [they find] it wasn’t properly based on points of law.” If this happens, it will make Kish eligible for bail pending a second trial, which is a priority for Kish’s family and supporters.

Eugene is a writer and activist living in Hamilton Ontario. He came to know Nicole Kish through both their participation in the arts and in community organizing. He currently supports the campaign to free Nyki.

Free Nyki

Victoria Bivens

A Very Calm Revolution

Moira Peters — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 05:18:57 +0000

Community acupuncture in Canada

VANCOUVER—If you step into a certain storefront on East Broadway in Vancouver, and walk around the black tissue paper screen, you see six, maybe eight, people sleeping in recliners under blankets, their heads and exposed limbs studded with tiny silver needles. You don't feel alarmed, though; the sense of tranquility takes over, relaxing your forehead. This is a typical scene at Poke Community Acupuncture.

“In today’s world, it is so difficult to stay connected to one’s self,” says Darcy Carroll, owner of Poke, who argues that the shared stillness is perhaps as significant as the needles.

“There are numerous distractions—email, cell phones, television,” she says. “Having time to sit with oneself is so valuable. Likely more valuable than much of what I may have to say to a patient.”

Acupuncture is the millennia-old practice of inserting fine needles at specific points in the body to cultivate health and treat disease. It is effective in treating a myriad of physical and mental illnesses and every conceivable type of pain. It can cost almost nothing and, aside from relaxation and mood elevation, it is generally understood that acupuncture has no side effects.

In Canada, most acupuncturists charge $65-175 per hour-long session, making it inaccessible for most people. A small but growing number of community acupuncturists—affectionately referred to as "acupunks"—are working to change this.

Carroll opened Poke Community Acupuncture in 2009 on a busy street in Vancouver. Poke offers treatments on a sliding scale of $20-40. Patients are told, “You pay what you can afford,” no questions asked. Poke is open seven days per week, employing three acupuncturists and one part-time office manager, with 150-170 patient visits each week. (Carroll does not advertise; Poke's patients take care of that, grabbing fistfuls of business cards on their way out the door.) At Poke, patients are booked six per hour and are treated, fully clothed, in recliner chairs, in a group setting.

This is the way acupuncture is traditionally practiced in Asia: many patients per hour and very little talking. Community acupuncture practitioners say that a collective energy field (known as “community qi”) generated by several people having treatments at once enhances the effects of individual treatments. Up to eight people share the treatment room at a time, relaxing under blankets to the sound of soothing music (and steady traffic on Broadway). It is common to slumber among strangers for two hours at a stretch. A busy day in Poke is very, very calm.

Patients at Poke are encouraged to stay as long as they like (“We do encourage napping,” Carroll smiles), letting the acupuncturist know with a look or a soft “ah-hem” when they’ve decided they are ready to go. For many patients this is new: their own bodies will know what’s best for them.

Community acupuncture is a potent form of nonverbal community building, says Carroll. Healing in a group interrupts the isolation that often accompanies depression, illness and chronic pain. People from all backgrounds sleep deeply in recliners at Poke.

“Community acupuncture as practiced at Poke breaks down class barriers, challenges the idea of value being attached to a price,” Carroll says. Effective pain relief without drugs or side effects leads to a more critical view of pharmaceutical drugs. "The group setting also disputes the concept of health as something that you consume, privately, if you can afford it. Instead, health is something you share with your community."

Community acupuncture is growing in Canada. In Vancouver, Poke Community Acupuncture, Fir Street Community Acupuncture, and 5Shen offer sliding-scale acupuncture treatments. In Victoria, Hemma Community Acupuncture and Heart & Hands Health Centre are options for affordable acupuncture. A community clinic has sprung up in Nelson, BC, as have a handful in Ontario.

Acupuncture is a therapy, and works best with regular treatments—a course of a dozen treatments, given at least once a week, is often necessary for lasting effects. People of average incomes generally stop after one or two treatments, not because they are apathetic about their health, but because they can’t afford the expense of multiple visits to the acupuncturist. Instead of achieving success by marketing their services to the wealthy, the community acupuncture model provides practitioners a stable income from many small sources.

Carroll recommends Lisa Rohleder's manifesto, Acupuncture is Like Noodles: The Little (Red) Cookbook of Working-Class Acupuncture for any acupuncturist interested in exploring community acupuncture. The community acupuncture network offers a worldwide directory of community acupuncture clinics, as well as online camaraderie, inspiration and advice. In April 2011 the first-ever Community Acupuncture Network Conference will take place in Portland, Oregon. At the time of writing, at least four Canadian acupuncturists are planning on attending the conference.

"I think we have enough practitioners out there who cater to folks with lots of money, or juicy medical plans," says Laurel Irons. Irons operates 5Shen, an accessible mobile community acupuncture clinic providing individual and group acupuncture throughout Vancouver. The five shen are the five psycho-emotional aspects of our selves, corresponding with the five elements in traditional oriental medicine.

5Shen promotes harm reduction and peer-led, client-centred services. Irons focuses on increasing accessibility to acupuncture and holistic therapies, especially among marginalized people who often don't have access to such forms of health. Locations include women’s recovery houses, BC's Queer Resource Centre and Positive Living BC (formerly BCPWA). Irons bills through Medical Services Plan, which covers 10 acupuncture visits per year for those on premium assistance (100 per cent subsidized health care for low-income British Columbians).

"Folks living in poverty are in serious need of greater options around health and wellness, and we need more practitioners who can find a way to get involved,” she says.

Last summer, for instance, Irons and a colleague offered free acupuncture aftercare to people returning from anti-G20 protests in Toronto, using the five-needle auricular protocol developed by the National Acupuncture Detox Association. The five points in each ear ease cravings and the emotional roller coasters of addiction and withdrawal, and also provide potent treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. The five-needle protocol treats sleep disturbances, depression and anxiety, often achieving instant results.

In a free drop-in clinic in East Vancouver last summer, three times per week for over a month, two acupunks treated several dozen people dealing with the emotional, psychological and physical consequences of violence and incarceration as a result of police brutality at the G20. People who arrived stressed out, anxious and in pain received acupuncture (many for the first time) and experienced deep relaxation sitting on couches and folding chairs arranged in a loose circle.

The effects of unresolved trauma can fracture families and friendships as well as movements. When a group is calm and quiet together, hope and resilience rise powerfully. More than one participant from the post-G20 clinic commented that after an acupuncture treatment, “That was the most relaxed I’ve ever been.”

Worldwide resource depletion, austerity measures and increasing state repression are creating the need for simple, creative and unconventional ways of taking care of each other. Community acupuncture and other alternative healing methods are a growing part of radical liberation movements as the focus increases on not only dismantling repressive structures but also on actively building a more just and gentle world.

Acupuncturists were on hand in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, in Haiti after the earthquake and in New York after the 9/11 attacks. Community acupuncture was also available after Vancouver’s Transgendered Day of Remembrance in 2010, and at an event in connection to the Womens’ Memorial March in February 2011. It was offered with the understanding that these memorial events, while important for the healing of the community, are potentially re-traumatizing.

“The acupuncture helps us to hold on, helps us to let go,” says Irons. “I love being involved with radical, inspiring, revolutionary folks in a nurturing capacity—this is how I choose to support the movements I am a part of and I am honoured to be accepted into these kinds of spaces.”

Lisa Baird is a spoken word poet and acupunk in Vancouver BC.

acupunk

Grounds for Disruption

Moira Peters — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 06:58:17 +0000

Tent cities evolve to bring politics out of—and permanence into—the housing debate

VANCOUVER—On the anniversary of the 2010 Olympics, a second tent city will disrupt Vancouver. Like the Olympic Tent Village that occupied 58 West Hastings in the Downtown East Side one year ago, this incarnation may only last a few weeks. However, discussions have been initiated within Vancouver Action (VANACT), the primary group organizing the tent city, about evolving this tent city into a more permanent project, mirroring such tent cities as those in and around Seattle, Washington State.

"[Last year] we thought it would last a week, but by the end of the week there was a community meeting where individuals decided to stay until people got housing,” said Tristan Markle of VANACT. Markle was involved in last year’s tent village, and hopes to carry those lessons into this year’s project.

“Learning from that experience, we have to be prepared and anticipate that the people who need a liberated space might want to stay as long as necessary,” he said. Those who stayed and squatted 58 West Hastings eventually helped secure low-income housing for 35 residents of Olympic Tent Village.

When it was occupied one year ago, 58 West Hastings was an empty lot that the Vancouver Olympic Committee (VANOC) had leased from condo developer Concord Pacific with the intention of using the space for Olympics-related parking. This year’s tent village is expected to occupy a space in the now desolate and bankrupt Olympic Village, which has come to symbolize both the misplaced financial extravagance of the Games, and the city’s failure to follow through with its Olympic promise of more low-income homes.

****

Across the border in Seattle, one finds a history of tent cities that have survived in various forms for over a decade. In the late 1990s, Tent City 1, and then Tent City 2, were created illegally to address the growing numbers of homeless people in the King County region of Washington State. Both were opposed by local government and eventually shut down, but the dire need for such an establishment had been made visible.

Tent City 3 was created in 2000, but it was not until March of 2002 that its legality was made clear following a court ordered “Consent Degree” between the organizers and the city attorney. This “Consent Degree” established basic rules and a system of temporary locations on offered private land. Tent City 3 continues to provide shelter for approximately 100 people.

Partly in response to some of the limitations of this legal yet controlled encampment, Tent City 4 was created in May of 2004, with the intent of defying the “Consent Decree” by occupying public spaces and using public resources. It eventually transitioned from using public spaces into a system of staying on properties owned by faith-based organizations, such as parking lots. This project also continues to operate, with a population fluctuating between 50 to 100 people.

More recently, a separate project to provide shelter for the growing numbers of homeless people was created in the University District of Seattle. It was coined “Nickelsville” in response to then-Mayor Greg Nickel’s use of police to clear out homeless encampments, and specifically an edict issued by the mayor on April 4, 2008, that outlawed setting up shelter on city property such as overpasses, greenways and parks. The original location of Nickelsville was at 7115 West Marginal Way SW in Seattle, and was built in the early morning of September 22, 2008. This encampment only lasted four days, until police entered, arresting 23 people and removing the installed shelters.

Nickelsville stumbled through a few more locations before it found a more stable home in the private parking lot of the University Christian Church in the University District, a space made more secure due in part to great support by the local faith-based communities. This began a string of temporary locations for Nickelsville, sometimes moving to areas of King County outside Seattle.

Nickelsville built a list of rules that are largely self-enforced. No drugs, alcohol or criminal activity is tolerated within the tent city; any offenders risk immediate eviction. The entry point to the tent city is carefully monitored with an official check-in table. Many tenants take on roles such as security and “moving boss” to help ensure respect for the rules and oversee getting everyone packed between locations.

By August 2010, Nickelsville was back in the space it had occupied nearly two years prior, at the University Congregational United Church of Christ. While some locals were happy to have the tent city back, others recalled increased break-ins and other associated criminal activity. Church groups intended to mitigate the motivations for increased local crime by helping provide Nickelsville tenants with access to bathrooms, showers and other facilities. Nevertheless, wherever the tent city went, there was often local resistance to Nickelsville sharing the neighbourhood. The neighbourhood agitation, combined with a growing need for shelter, contributed to the push by organizers to re-envision Nickelsville as a more stable project with a permanent location.

Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn formed a citizen review panel in October 2010 to explore solutions to the growing problem of homelessness. It recommended the creation of a permanent tent city location. Such an initiative has been strongly supported by the organizers and tenants of Nickelsville, and is listed as a demand in a recent declaration endorsed by several of the organizations deeply involved with the tent city. Nickelsville presently occupies an old Lake City Fire Station, north of the University District—a location that provides warmth during the winter months. While this site continues to provide shelter for approximately 100 people, the community hopes a permanent location could accommodate up to 1,000 tenants.

****

The size of Nickelsville, and its long history, can be attributed to both Seattle’s large homeless population and also a well-organized network of citizen support.

A homelessness count performed in Seattle in the early hours of January 28, 2011, found 1,753 people in Seattle and 2,442 people in the greater King County area on the streets between 2:00 am and 5:00 am, while more than 6,000 others took advantage of available emergency shelters and other accommodation. Currently, Seattle has nearly 2,000 shelter beds and more than 3,000 in the King County region in total.

In contrast, Vancouver’s 2010 count found 811 people on the street and an additional 765 in shelters. Both Seattle and Vancouver are faced with dramatically increasing rates of homelessness.

“One study shows Vancouver to be the most unaffordable city in the world,” said Markle. “And one year after the Olympics, homelessness has tripled.”

Similar stories are told in Seattle. On January 10, 2011, at a community meeting on homelessness, Ruth Blaw, director of the Orion youth shelter, which is run under the umbrella organization Youthcare, explained that the organization had seen the use of its services double in the past 18 months, and they are no longer able to provide beds to meet demand.

The meeting was part of the University District Conversation on Homelessness, which convenes monthly at a local church or faith-based community center. Updates are provided on the most recent political news affecting homeless individuals, and representatives from local churches, synagogues, mosques and other groups meet to help form a unified face in tackling ongoing issues around homelessness.

The tent cities in King County have been able to depend on the support of such groups for logistics. The groups also play a crucial role in pushing back against government reluctance to make serious commitments. In 2007, under the pressure of these groups, the state government introduced Bill HB 2244, which prevented city governments from stopping churches from hosting tent cities, or setting a time limit of less than 90 days on the stay of individuals within the encampments.

A younger initiative, Vancouver’s tent city movement has involvement from its own faith-based community. One of the major support pillars of the Olympic Tent Village was Streams of Justice, a Christian social justice movement.

Dave Diewert of Streams of Justice offered a lucid description of the social mechanics behind the Olympic Tent Village in the second edition of Village Voice, the newsletter of the tent city. He explained that the political component of the Olympic tent village was a kind of “eruption,” a disruption of the status quo. This eruption “crosses lines of legality and illegality of who owns this space and who occupies this space...eruptions of those structures become opportunities to say something strong. The point is for this action to bring into light in a powerful way...the reality of homelessness, gentrification, and the criminalization of poverty.”

****

Markle sees the upcoming tent city as a similar eruption, explaining that one of its most direct intentions is “to bring the issues out into the open, rather than having them brushed under the carpet or hidden out of sight, so that people are forced to confront the issues.”

A similar phenomena was taking place in the early tent cities of Seattle, with illegal occupations in response to an acute housing crisis. However, Seattle’s tent cit[ies] gradually evolved, accruing stability. Nickelsville’s goal of providing shelter for 1,000 people demonstrates how the focus has shifted to providing a steady base for a many homeless people as possible.

The example of Nickelsville reveals an inverse relationship between permanence and visibility with respect to the issue of homelessness: as permanent shelter needs are met, political visibility goes down.

On the one end, tent cities that mark a large public event—such as the Olympic Tent Village and the tent city created in Allen Gardens during the G20 summit in Toronto, which lasted for just one night—act, according to Markle, as “political manifestation[s] that bring the politics [of homelessness] into the open.”

In the middle, more permanent establishments such as Tent City 1 and Tent City 2 in Seattle, while being illegal “eruptions,” also provide longer-term shelter. The state sanctions, or at least tolerates, tent cities that shift from one site to another approximately every three months, but their continual change of location, and all of the associated hurdles, help maintain public awareness of the ongoing need for housing solutions.

At the other end of the spectrum, tent cities with a permanent location and properly established facilities begin to blur the line between quasi-legal occupations and traditional homeless shelters. As Markle explained, forcing people into small shelters or scattered spaces throughout a city means that the problem of homelessness “doesn’t appear to be a political issue.” Similarly, once a tent city is located in a more permanent location, often in a low-income area far from an urban centre, it is effectively “out of sight and out of mind” for many city dwellers. However, Markle is clear to point out that “shelters are [important] emergency stop gap measures until real housing [can be acquired].”

****

The eruptive tent city is also “an affirmation of community” which may carry though to later incarnations, according to Diewert. The establishment of a tent city represents a refusal of citizens to “sit around and wait for the state, nor to give it opportunities to act and set the framework within which...action can take place, but rather for the community to say ‘we can do this’ and to take initiative.”

This perspective is echoed in the opinions of others. “The main point of a tent city is an exercise in self sustainability, self-organization, and community-building,” said Yifan Li of VANACT, who also helped build last year’s Olympic Tent Village. In a similar vein, Markle said the “hope is that the tent city is a solidarity action between folks who live in the inner city and allies city-wide.”

The strength of this solidarity will perhaps dictate the resilience and longevity of Vancouver’s newest tent city.

“Once a space is liberated...people will take advantage of that liberated space and create a community there, but one has to be prepared to support it as long as possible,” said Markle.

Whether Vancouver's upcoming tent city is the starting point of such a venture will depend on what unfolds in the ensuing weeks.

Zander Winther is a recent graduate of the Philosophy MA program at the University of Waterloo, and currently feels at home in both Vancouver and Seattle.

Tent City Crowd

Tent City Tents

The Cost of Free

Moira Peters — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 05:45:03 +0000

What does charity do for a local economy?

VANCOUVER—“Thirty years of development aid and the basic nature of poverty hasn’t changed,” said Pablo Recalde, the head of the United Nations World Food Program for Zambia, as we travelled the country’s sandy roads.

I was part of a press convoy hitching a ride in his decked-out UN land rover to a rural medical outpost called Makunka Health Centre. Only 30 kilometres from Livingstone, the third largest city in the country, the journey took over three hours over non-existent tracks.

My Zambian colleagues and I were covering a standard aid photo-op. Godfrey Mpende and Angela Mutale were two notable Livingstone journalists making the salary of a top reporter: US $150 per month.

Clinics serve as community centres in the bush. Makunk was the size of a small elementary school gymnasium with two wards—one for men and one for women—with a recent paint job. Two nurses worked on staff. At the medical station, toddlers had the fat of their arms measured with tailor’s tape to judge if their gaunt bodies qualified for emergency bags of pounded maize, the staple food in the country.

Sixty-five per cent of the country lives in rural areas like those surrounding Makunka. On this particular day about 30 mothers trickled in from surrounding areas to receive enough maize for two weeks, after which time, if available, they would return again to the clinic. Many of the mothers were farmers themselves and most were in their teens or early twenties. Only 10 years ago life expectancy in Zambia was a paltry 33 years of age and there is a noticeable lack of elders in the country. Grey hair is about as common as a paved road. HIV/AIDS nearly wiped out an entire generation.

Poised for success at independence in 1964, in 2006 Zambia was drowning in debt before the bulk of this crippling foreign debt was erased. Now Zambia is the poorest non-conflict country in the world.

The youthful mothers watched patiently as their children were measured and weighed, their names given a checkmark on a written ledger after which they received their share of nshima (pounded maize). Their share was calculated on the same scale that weighed the child. The absurd display of weights and balances is an unfortunate part of development projects ensuring that “aid” reaches the deserving and not swindlers.

As Dambisa Moyo’s groundbreaking 2009 book Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How there is a Better Way for Africa shows us, the international development industry has entrenched a destructive class in Sub-Saharan Africa, making close oversight one of the many strings attached to foreign aid.

Pablo Recalde oversaw the feeding of three million people each day and was in charge of yet another UN development scheme, this one called “Production for Progress.” The idea was to give small-scale farmers a guaranteed market for their crops and prevent the surplus production from rotting in isolated silos.

Encouraged to grow grain for profit, a guaranteed market for goods is an entrepreneur’s dream and can break the nightmare of poverty and aid dependency.

But it has achieved neither. Selling food to aid agencies is not a real economy. Where is the demand for local grain when everyone in the country is fed through aid handouts?

In the rural south of Zambia chronic malnutrition was rampant in 2008 when news broke that small land holders were selling all of their maize at the end of harvest season leaving no food for their own families through the arid months. The story made me chuckle since it was one of many constant and absurd experiences of the NGO world. As the hot season bleached their fields the farmers knew the aid agencies would feed them. They had become fluent in the economy of aid—the biggest employer in the country. Welfare fraud by any other name, you would be hard pressed to find a person anywhere in the world who would not do the same given the circumstances.

Other than copper exports for which multinationals pay almost zero tax to mine (companies use instability and unpredictable property rights in the region as a bargaining position), Zambia has no economy to speak of.

Nevertheless, I witnessed the greatest economic ingenuity I have ever seen: street kids pooling their pennies to purchase a single newspaper and rent it to readers; illegal gas stations selling watered-down fuel at a discount (gas was US $3 per litre in 2009); women buying up bread at the grocery store to re-sell it after hours on the same grocery store steps; little girls selling individual cigarettes for seven cents (a two-penny mark up); old men in “phone booths,” which consisted of a cell phone, a cardboard sign, and three minutes’ worth of talk time; farmers selling all of their maize on the presumption that aid agencies would give it all back.

To understand the nature of poverty in Zambia it is worth revisiting Pablo Recalde’s observations: 30 years of development aid had not changed the basic nature of poverty in the country. That aid is the problem in Zambia is the premise of Zambian economist Moyo’s bestseller Dead Aid.

“...Over $US 1 trillion of African aid, and not much good to show for it,” she writes.

How could good intentions go so wrong? Everyday community groups, governments, NGOs, rock stars, churches, school groups and others throughout the West raise dollar after dollar to send in response to the fetishization of aid in support of inflicted and uneducated and starving Africans as seen on TV. Without thinking about the consequences of charity glut few who donate their dollars ever realize that “free” can have disastrous and costly consequence.

Take clothing as an example. In Livingstone I saw a man wearing a Winnipeg Jets jersey. If the consequences were not so dire such clothing might deserve a second smirk. But that hockey jersey under the hot sun bears no irony.

Having a shirt is a luxury in many parts of Zambia. Having a job is an even greater luxury. Unemployment in the formal sector is well above 50 per cent and those with an income have the incredible burden to provide for endless dependants. While a “free” shirt solves a short-term need the shadows cast by the shuttered doors of Livingstone’s former textile factories point to the real problem: a once vibrant, though small, fabric industry has gone bust. It cannot compete with free.

Donated clothing generally comes in massive containers shipped from rich countries. I once helped fill one of these containers. I have since seen several of these “donated” bins unloaded into massive piles in third world market squares thus squeezing out local textile producers. I have even seen Value Village tags still on the sleeves of clothing in Zambian bazaars. Moyo rightly notes that “free” comes at a cost since it disrupts nascent economic channels and keeps even the smallest of indigenous businesses from developing.

Moyo describes the eroding aspects of charitable mosquito nets which have the ultimate impact of putting local net makers out of business. She states:

Enter vociferous Hollywood movie star who rallies the masses and goads Western governments to collect and send 100,000 mosquito nets to the afflicted region, at a cost of a million dollars. The nets arrive, the nets are distributed, and a "good" deed is done. With the markets flooded with foreign nets, however, our mosquito net maker is promptly put out of business.

Moyo calls this the micro/macro paradox: the sacrifice of long-term growth for short-term gain. If local investment were supported instead of the guilt relieving cauldron of “free,” the village would be able to produce its own mosquito nets. That mosquito net maker would then earn enough money to feed his family and send his kids to school, rather than rely upon aid agencies for every aspect of his existence. This phenomenon is one of Moyo’s primary arguments against development aid. This view is compounded by her assertion that aid rarely, if ever, gets to those it is intended for.

More than 85 per cent of direct foreign aid is misallocated, says Moyo. What is worse, the most chronic offenders of misappropriation are never punished. In hopes of retaining past loans, donors re-finance loans to the worst offenders.

Although most African states claim to be democracies the reality is that rulers have very little need for the people other than as leverage to access more foreign aid. Leaders are more accountable to donors and companies because their budgets do not come from taxing the people, notably the middle class, which is scant in Zambia.

“Aid effectiveness should be measured against its contribution to long-term sustainable growth, and whether it moves the greatest number of people out of poverty in a sustainable way. When seen through this lens, aid is found to be wanting,” writes Moyo.

The nail in the coffin of her addicted-to-aid argument is the example of Chinese investment. Much to the chagrin of European states still basking in their colonial fiduciary ties as former empirical masters, Moyo has titled an entire chapter, “The Chinese are our Friends.”

Chinese investment will fill the hole that aid has been poorly filling since the 1950s and offer Africa what it most desperately needs: investment and employment. The reason, she says, is that China offers trade, not aid. Something the West has yet to do on such scale and without charity.

Darren Fleet is a master's candidate at the University of British Columbia. He has reported from Zambia and Thailand.

Cost of Free

The Roots of Rage

hillarybain — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 05:44:34 +0000

Halifax's poverty, racism and "swarmings"

HALIFAX—Halifax doesn’t feel like a violent city. In fact, walking down North Street past jellybean-coloured houses and a view of the harbour, you can even hear birds chirping. But this is the same city—the same area of the same city—where seven violent attacks stunned Halifax residents over Labour Day weekend. All were perpetrated by groups of young people, most of whom are allegedly black.

“Violence can happen anywhere, but not with the volume and intensity that Halifax has for a city its size,” says Jeff*, a recent victim who sustained severe injuries. Jeff will be unable to work for several months and says the recent attacks in Halifax have left him with conflicting emotions. “I love this city but don't want to live somewhere where I don't feel safe.”

Jeff and his partner were walking in his North End neighbourhood early one September evening when they were approached by a group of young people who asked them for a cigarette. Before he could respond, Jeff was severely beaten by between six and eight young men and women.

His experience is typical in what have become known as "swarmings" in Halifax. Swarmings are violent physical attacks perpetrated by large groups of people upon individuals or small groups. These attacks are unprovoked and random: the perpetrators and the victims are unknown to each other and, while robbery has sometimes been involved, it does not appear to be the main motivation for the attack.

This kind of violence is not new to the city. In 2006, after several swarmings and an unrelated deadly bar fight, Halifax Mayor Peter Kelly initiated a Roundtable on Violence in the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM). Now, four years later, the roundtables are over and the report is written, but Halifax's streets are still not safe. At the time of this article's release, an eighth attack—where injuries were sustained—and another attempted attack—where the victim escaped—were reported.

According to a 2005 Statistics Canada survey, Halifax has the highest rates of violent crime in the country—sexual and physical assault, homicides, robbery and break-and-enters. Furthermore, the locally-commissioned roundtable report, written by criminologist Dan Clairmont, states that the HRM is tied with Regina and Saskatoon for the highest percentage of youth (ages 19-24) involved with violent crime in the country.

“The causes of youth crime are hard to pinpoint in terms of finding a single, all-encompassing source,” says Charys Payne, Dalhousie law student and youth worker. “However, one of the roots of crime is, of course, poverty. Furthermore, in the North End—a racialized community—this is coupled with the experience of racism.” The Ryerson Anti-Racism Task Force defines racialization as “the social process by which certain groups of people are singled out for unequal treatment on the basis of race and other characteristics, whether real or imagined.” The Task Force also says that racialization is a historical process.

In Halifax, the roots of this process are clear.

According to the website of the 2006 Racism, Violence and Health Project undertaken by Dalhousie University’s Department of Social Work (for which Payne was a researcher), thousands of Blacks settled in Nova Scotia during the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, and thousands more settled here after the American Revolution. They were promised land and freedom in exchange for fighting for Britain, but upon arrival were denied both land and equal rights.

In more recent history, the infamous destruction of the Black community of Africville in the late 1960s displaced citizens who were then relocated to the Uniacke Square public housing project in the North End of Halifax. Former Africville residents and their descendants, according to the Racism, Violence and Health Project website, still face serious socio-economic hardships, and many still live in public housing.

In 2007-2008, Payne was the Executive Director of Saint George’s YouthNet, a youth organization a few blocks from Uniacke Square that offers free morning, lunch, after-school and summer programs. Reflecting on the causes of violence in the North End, she says, “intergenerational poverty begets systemic violence.” Payne explains that poor, racialized youth “already face the strongly held stereotype that they are violent and angry so this behavior becomes a sort of armor which shields them from the pain of exclusion from middle class judgment.”

In short, for symptoms to improve, the core issues need to be addressed. From Payne’s perspective, “while the reality is sometimes bleak this does not mean that the situation cannot be resolved."

“It all comes back to issues that are unaddressed in our lives,” says Marshall Williams Jr., suggesting abuse, discrimination and lack of self-respect as examples of the roots of violent behaviour. Williams is a resident of the Preston area, the largest Indigenous Black community in Canada and member of the IMove (In My Own Voice) youth group, a media-based program for at-risk youth. Unfortunately, young people don’t get together on the streets to talk about their issues, according to Williams. “They’re getting together and reflecting them back out.”

Williams, 29, says more and better recreation facilities, community organizations, and an improved education system could give support to young people—especially to those who do not have their needs met within their homes. He has seen the decline of these supports as he has gotten older, with fewer recreation opportunities available, and decreased youth involvement in community organizations.

According to Williams, “The people in the position to address these things are not addressing them.”

The Roundtable on Violence was intended to locate and target the underlying causes of Halifax’s crime and violence, but it is unclear whether or how the recommendations have been implemented. Mayor Peter Kelly did not respond to calls for an interview.

Sarah MacLaren, Executive Director of Leave Out Violence (LOVE) Halifax, says the greatest disappointment regarding the roundtable report is that it was released just prior to the city’s 2006 budget, but appropriate funds were not earmarked to address the recommendations.

MacLaren also notes that when money is spent, it’s not necessarily spent well. As an example, she points to new recreation facilities in the HRM: while some youth will benefit from these facilities, she says that those who can’t afford new sneakers or sports equipment, or who don’t have transportation to the recreation centres, are the ones who could really use them.

There is also the question of the education system. Rocking back in her chair behind a desk full of papers, MacLaren says she does not believe all the responsibility lies with the Department of Education, but “in terms of access to youth over years and hours, they have the most. Youth spend a lot of time at school.” Unlike provinces that have publicly funded alternative schools, Nova Scotia lacks educational infrastructure for those students whose needs lie beyond the traditional classroom, or who have unique learning needs.

MacLaren asks, “Where’s the formal curriculum around life skills? Where are the alternative schools?” She sees schools as a logical locale for prevention-based programming, but does not believe that they are the only place to engage disenfranchized youth. Most of the young people MacLaren works with have already been implicated in violence and, she says, “I have seen youth completely turn around when given the support they need.”

LOVE, an organization that helps youth overcome the challenge of violence in their lives, is only one of the places young people end up. Many youth who have committed a violent crime end up negotiating the Youth Criminal Justice System, which MacLaren sees as being a prolonged and sometimes unhelpful process.

One of the recommendations of the roundtable report is a stronger focus on in-depth restorative justice programs through the Department of Justice and the Community Justice Society (CJS). In practice, restorative justice involves both those who have been involved in and affected by the crime—i.e.; the perpetrators of the crime and the victim—in a co-operative process that determines the outcome for both parties, with the intent to seek true justice.

"Enforcement and accountability are necessary, but so are social development strategies that provide alternatives and opportunities,” says Yvonne Atwell, Executive Director of CJS. While CJS is a program of the provincial government, the roundtable report recommends that the municipality’s role in furthering restorative justice in Halifax “would be an advocacy [role] vis-a-vis the provincial government.”

So far, “we haven’t seen anything from the city whatsoever,” says Atwell.

Williams believes that if the money spent to keep people in prison were redirected to community programs and supports, Halifax would see fewer people locked up. He says it costs around $125,000 to keep someone in prison for a year—which, for five people, would be over $600,000. "I guarantee,” Williams says, "if you put half that money into community programs and supports, four out of those five youth aren’t going to be in the criminal system anymore.”

For Jeff, whose life has been turned upside-down by the attack, “the best type of punishment for this would be to give back to the victim.”

In a recent email exchange he acknowledged his anger, especially given he is no longer able to do the work he loves. At the same time, he says he’d "like to have the opportunity to explain to [the attackers] and show them how I live and work in the hope that maybe it would restore what little empathy they have towards other people.”

As complicated as it may be for the victim, Williams sees this kind of empathy as a two-way street. “It’s really hard to hate somebody when you know what they’ve been through,” he says.

* The victim’s name has been changed to protect his or her anonymity.

Angela Day is a writer, educator, urban gardener and community organizer with roots in Halifax. She currently coordinates programs for young women across HRM. This article was originally published by the Halifax Media Co-op.

Swarming Illustration

Marshall Williams

Olympics Sidelines Youth

Moira Peters — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 05:22:21 +0000

Understanding wider impacts of the Games

OTTAWA—The Winter Olympics have come and gone, and Vancouver is left to take stock of the lasting effects of having hosted this global mega-sporting event. As decisions are made about the fate of social housing in the Athlete’s Village, and as the last of the Red Tents are taken down, Vancouver might consider what the Olympics has meant for one of its most marginalized populations—homeless and street-involved youth.

Young people who watch the Olympics are expected to benefit from the Games, according to sociologist J.J. MacAloon in This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games. MacAloon says youth ought to relate to the athletes, who are themselves young adults, and be inspired by the example of these fine role models. Go to any Olympic host city organizing committee’s website, and you will encounter special games, educational activities, and interactive content geared directly at youth. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has recently taken its focus on youth a step further with the introduction of the Youth Olympics, whose inaugural event is to be held in Singapore in August 2010. Its stated goal is to “inspire youth around the world to embrace, embody and express the Olympic values of Excellence, Friendship and Respect.”

Vancouver is the capital city of the province with the highest child poverty rate in Canada. So, consideration might have been given to the effects the Games would have on these young people. Whatever the Olympics has meant for Canadian youth overall, the Games' effects on Vancouver’s homeless and street-involved youth are not so rosy. The Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) failed to meet approximately half the commitments outlined in their Inner-City Inclusivity Statement, according to the Interim Report Card compiled by the Impacts on Community Coalition. VANOC used these commitments to promote their bid and recruit wider support in Vancouver for hosting the Olympics. One such failure, according to the Report Card, was of VANOC’s commitment to protect inner-city housing and shelters. The Report Card points out that homelessness has more than doubled since Vancouver won the Olympic bid, and at the same time, between 1,085 and 1,580 units of low-income housing were lost in the inner city alone. The majority of housing losses occurred as a result of the transformation of Single Residence Occupancy (SRO) hotels into condominiums. According to a report by Pivot Legal Society, low-income housing loss in this period is a direct result of real estate speculation pressures generated by the Olympic Games.

A report by the Social Policy and Research Council of BC indicates BC Employment and Assistance Rates (i.e., Employment Insurance and welfare) remain far below a living income, particularly in an expensive city like Vancouver.

These factors, albeit not all related to the Olympics, combine to exacerbate homeless and street-involved youths’ difficulties surviving in Vancouver.

“You don’t know what it is to live on welfare until you’ve lived on welfare. It’s awful. Especially in BC. You can’t even live off welfare and have a place unless you have housing [provided], which is impossible,” said Sarah*, a young woman living in a youth homeless shelter in Vancouver.

The irony, of course, is that the Olympics are touted—especially at the bidding stage—as an event that will make things better for the inhabitants of host cities.

But Helen Lenskyj, in her book Olympic Industry Resistance, points out that Olympic host cities face a multitude of negative effects, particularly in relation to affordable housing and homelessness. Sara pointed out, “Not only are they making condos to try and shove their problem under the carpet but they’re deciding that oh, if they make some place and get [homeless people] off the street [the city will] look good... But actually [now that] the Olympics is done those places [temporary shelters] are coming down and new buildings, which people are going to pay for, are coming up and the homeless people are right back where they were.”

The Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions published an extensive report in 2007 about housing and the Olympics. Their research suggests that Olympic Games “are often catalysts for redevelopment entailing massive displacements and reductions in low cost and social housing stock.” They also note the common use of legislation “to allow for speedy expropriations of property or to criminalize homelessness.”

In BC, the provincial government passed a controversial Assistance to Shelter Act less than three months before the Vancouver Olympic Games began. The act gave the police new powers to move homeless people off the streets and into shelters. Advocates for homeless people dubbed the law the “Olympic kidnapping act.”

Such policies are consistent with global efforts to market cities to tourists and potential investors, according to E.J. McCann’s 2009 article, “City Marketing.” These strategies include “the constant policing and management of the city itself, so that its public spaces—and even its people—or at least those who are on public view in spaces likely to be traversed by tourists or business people—correspond to and enhance the brand.”

This happened with particular intensity—according to a number of homeless and street-involved youth who witnessed police activity—during the year leading up to the Games. In particular, homeless youth found themselves increasingly moved from downtown tourist streets such as Granville or Robson.

“There are certain neighbourhoods [the police] won't let you in, but in the West End, if they find you in one place? They'll be checking it every night after that for about a month,” said Curtis, a young Aboriginal man living in a youth homeless shelter. The Downtown East Side—an area notorious for open drug use, sex trade work and poverty— was the only neighbourhood these young people felt was free from police harassment in the year before the Olympics.

“They don't care if you're down there. They'll come up to me while I've been using drugs and they're like, we don't care that you're using. Just stay out of sight,” said Jennifer, a formerly homeless woman who continues to attend the youth drop-ins at her local homeless shelter.

The pressure to get off downtown streets meant that some youth had trouble accessing the services clustered around the West end of the city, including youth shelters such as Covenant House and Directions. It also meant they were pushed into areas of the city where they faced increased risks of drug involvement or crime.

“The East Side is the worst because you can get caught up in anything out there. We don't want to do that. That's why a lot of us come out to this area,” said Michael, a street-involved youth currently living in a shelter in the West End.

During the Games themselves, scrutiny by police seemed to ease. “The worst of the bad effects didn’t materialize,” noted Am Johal of the Impacts on Community Coalition (IOCC), “largely because of civil society pressure on government.” Pressure tactics included volunteer training offered by Pivot Legal Society and the BC Civil Liberties Association for Vancouver residents to monitor police, and an ongoing campaign against Olympic-induced displacement by the Carnegie Community Action Project.

Despite these efforts, homeless and street-involved youth still encountered the police during the Olympics, particularly if the young people were perceived to be out of place. Justine, a young Aboriginal woman who had recently secured social housing in Vancouver’s affluent West end, relayed a conversation she had with police during the Games: “[I was] just walking down the street, like [the police said] ‘You don’t look like you’re from around here.’ And it’s like, ‘I just live down the street actually.’ And they’re like, ‘Are you sure, what’s your name, what’s your address?’ and like interrogating me when I walk down the street just because you don’t look like you belong in the area.”

Homeless and street-involved youth also noticed police treated other young people differently during the Games, particularly if they were obviously Olympic revellers. “If you’re wearing Canada gear, you can be as hammered as you want and the cops won’t bother you, as long as you’re going, ‘Go, Canada!’” said Jason, a young man currently housed in Vancouver’s east side. This injustice rankled Jason and other youth, particularly given that they experience regular police harassment for relatively minor infringements.

As cities gear up for future Olympic Games—London 2012, Sochi 2014, Rio 2016—and as Toronto begins to prepare in earnest for the arrival of another mega-sporting event (the 2015 PanAm Games), it will be important to assess the effects on people from all walks of life, including low-income and homeless youth. These young people live in a city in a way most people don’t. Athletes, tourists, international media, and police and security forces will be stomping through the bedrooms and living rooms of street-involved and homeless youth when they descend on a host city. If the Olympics are marketed as the purview of the young, then young people ought to be the true beneficiaries, rather than the victims, of the Games.

*All names used in this story are pseudonyms.

Jackie Kennelly is an assistant professor at Carleton University in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, currently studying the effects of the Olympics in Vancouver and London on low-income young people.

Street Youth & the Olymics

World Cup Knock-Out

Moira Peters — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 05:49:19 +0000

South Africa to score big public debt in 2010

Former South African President Thabo Mbeki wrote in his country’s 2004 bid to host the 2010 World Cup: “We want to ensure that one day, historians will reflect upon the 2010 World Cup as a moment when Africa stood tall and resolutely turned the tide on poverty and conflict.” Contrary to Mbeki’s professed aim of unity and economic development, it seems the legacy of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa will be limited to a handful of multinational and national corporations making massive profits on the backs of a reserve army of labour and through the generation of massive public debt.

VANCOUVER—While Canadian protesters throughout the 2010 Winter Olympic Games organized around the call, “Homes, Not Games!”, the same slogan could be shouted at the opposite end of the world, where this year South Africa will also be hosting a sport mega-event: the 2010 soccer World Cup.

In South Africa, over 13 per cent of the population lives in makeshift housing. In 2008—the year the food, energy, and financial crises simultaneously rocked the country—the rates of makeshift housing rose.

Twenty-nine per cent of the population of South Africa cannot afford to pay for water and almost eight per cent of households use bucket toilets, an apartheid leftover that successive democratic national governments have both pledged and failed to eradicate as an issue of immediate concern. According to Eddie Cottle, Coordinator of the Campaign for Decent Work Toward and Beyond 2010 in South Africa, the amount of South African public money being spent by the government on World Cup preparations “is equivalent to the amount the state spent on housing delivery over a ten-year period.”

Around the globe, the rhetoric employed by government leaders to exalt the potential of sport mega-events bears striking similarities. On October 30, 2009, British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell announced at the Olympic Torch Relay Celebration that “the Olympics bring us together.” In South Africa, the government has announced that the World Cup is an unprecedented “unique opportunity” to build “unity and pride amongst South Africans.” Not only do South African government leaders present the World Cup as an opportunity to unite South Africans but also to unite and develop the African continent as a whole and “celebrate Africa’s humanity.”

UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon stated the South African World Cup is a “time to present a different story of the African continent, a story of peace, democracy and investment.” His statement was met by a unanimous resolution passed in the UN General Assembly to endorse the World Cup in South Africa as a “platform for social development and peace across the African continent.”

Are these mega-sporting events really opportunities to bridge divides and build unity amongst citizens within and across nations?

For a country like South Africa, which is not only adjusting to globalization, but also dealing with massive socio-economic inequalities and ideological differences around issues of gender, race, class, and culture produced by the combined legacy of colonialism and apartheid, what impact can South Africa expect from hosting the World Cup?

As Cottle points out, the costs of sport mega-event infrastructure, such as stadia, are substantially higher in countries of the Global South than countries of the Global North, where the infrastructure to host these events is already in place. On its World Cup in 1994, the US spent less than US $30 million (US $50 million today). France spent less than US $500 million in 1998, and South Korea spent US $2 billion in 2002. The South African government will be spending at least US $4.1 billion by the end of the World Cup. Since 2004, when South Africa won the bid to host the World Cup, the cost to the South African public of building the stadia (and the necessary electricity, communications, roads, parking, water and sanitation infrastructure) to host the event—the most expensive item in the public’s World Cup expenditure—increased by over 750 per cent from the original budget.

Danny Jordaan, CEO of the South African World Cup Local Organizing Committee, claims the benefits of spending this $4.1 billion in public money will trickle down to South Africans through job creation and the development of public infrastructure.

While World Cup construction has created 22,000 jobs, 70-80 per cent of these jobs are subcontracted positions typically lasting three months. Building and Wood Workers International (BWI) research uncovered construction workers working for as little as US $1 per hour. The net wages of an average construction worker in 2008 was approximately US $2 per hour.

As Maytome Tachi, a construction worker at Ellis Park Stadium in Johannesburg notes: “the World Cup creates jobs, but not better working conditions.” Two construction workers have lost their lives at World Cup construction sites. Workers at one of the hallmark sites, Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban, embarked on an 11-day strike in 2007 in part due to unsafe working conditions.

The Durban strike was not unique. Throughout South Africa, World Cup stadia have been plagued not only by poor working conditions; they have also been sites of resistance for workers and their organizations, who have organized 26 strikes throughout the country since World Cup construction began. In July 2009, 70,000 workers embarked on a national strike—the first of its kind in a fragmented sector represented by different labour organizations—to demand a 13 per cent wage increase. In the end, because of inflation rates of 10-15 per cent, the subsequent agreement of 12 per cent did not amount to a substantial increase, let alone a living wage for the average construction worker.

If workers on World Cup projects are struggling to make a living and taxpayers are footing the cost of an ever-expanding bill, who is benefiting from this massive public expenditure?

According to BWI, “construction company annual reports for 2009 indicate mega-profits being made despite the downturn taking place internationally and in the local economy.” The largest South African construction companies report before-tax profits of 58 to 142 per cent. The average CEO of such a company contracted for the World Cup earns around 245 times the income of the average construction worker.

Whereas South African construction companies have been forced to address workers’ demands to a certain extent, as Cottle notes, Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) is guaranteed to make money, regardless of what happens in labour disputes. Thus, the biggest winner from South Africa’s hosting of the World Cup appears not to be a South African business or shareholder, but FIFA. The South African government passed legislation in 2006 treating FIFA and its subsidiaries “as diplomatic missions” and thereby creating a “tax-free bubble” around all their economic activities. With its tax-exempt status and before the World Cup has even begun, FIFA has already reported profits of US $3.2 billion from the 2010 World Cup– the largest profit it has ever made in pre-Cup economic activities.

While FIFA repatriates record profits from the World Cup, construction companies have secured the largest international venue to showcase their world-class stadia and thereby future opportunities for expansion. The South African public, however, will be left footing the bill for World Cup-related costs incurred even after 2010. According to Cottle, there is no way the stadia will generate enough revenue to be self-sustaining. The costs of sustaining them will therefore be offloaded onto municipalities, many of which are already cash-strapped and resorting to increasing fees for public services such as water and electricity.

As a result of its World Cup expenditures and its loss in revenue due to the world economic crisis, the South African government recently announced it is entering into deficit spending and will be borrowing over US $1 billion from international financial institutions. Meanwhile, predicting that World Cup-related travel will not reach the levels originally anticipated, FIFA’s official accommodation agent recently relinquished its rights to around half a million bed nights it had reserved at local hotels. South African corporate analysts then warned that the once-projected massive boost to the South African economy from the World Cup will be “muted.”

As public resources are diverted toward select national and transnational corporations that are profiting from the World Cup being hosted in South Africa, the very same South African public that will be indebted because of the event has had to be mobilized in support of it. Government and big business secured public support for the World Cup by promising that public revenue generated from the event would far exceed the costs of hosting it, and that over 500,000 jobs would be created. To guarantee this continued support, the South African government has spent over US$2.5 million in events to “mobilize communities and create awareness and enthusiasm for the World Cup.” And while the government mobilizes communities in the name of nation-building and “psychological readiness” for the event, it is spending close to US$100 million in security equipment and deploying a dedicated police force of 41,000 officers to contain the same public during the event.

Thus, while the government states it will “leave nothing to chance in securing the event,” it leaves the security of its citizens to chance as it bequeaths them with debt, and millions remain in need of stable housing, water, sanitation, and safe, secure jobs.

On opposite sides of the globe, 2010 in both Canada and South Africa has shown that hosting mega-sport events is actually widening the gap between rich and poor in host countries. The unifying potential of sport is ideologically employed, obscuring class tensions that these mega events in fact reproduce and exacerbate.

Rachel Elfenbein is a PhD student at SFU and Chair of the Teaching Support Staff Union. Before moving to Canada, she conducted popular education and research with civil society organizations in southern Africa. An original version of this article was published by the Vancouver Media Co-op.

SAfrica World Cup

Update From Olympic Tent Village

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:14:56 +0000

Organizers and residents of the Olympic Tent Village in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside give a press conference on the day after the tent city is set up.

Rally and March to Begin the Olympic Tent Village

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:43:52 +0000

Residents of a neighbourhood in Vancouver that is often referred as the countrys poorest postal code set up a tent encampment in a vacant Downtown Eastside lot to advocate for housing and to shelter the neighbourhoods homeless population.

2010 Rings Hollow

Van Ferrier — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 20:11:53 +0000

This documentary feature examines the history of housing in Vancouver and the impact of the 2010 Olympic Games on the city's homelessness and poverty. The film features interviews with legal experts, activists, and people affected by the housing crisis, with particular focus on hotel closures, evictions and the criminalization of dissent.