Liberal surrender on civil rights is unacceptable

Today in Parliament, the governing Conservatives hope to pass Bill S-7, a set of so called “anti-terror” provisions. Bill S-7 allows the police to:

• arrest Canadians suspected of terrorist activities without a warrant;
• summon citizens deemed to have information on terrorism before a judge (also called “investigative hearing”);
• imprison Canadians without charges for up to a year on suspicion of future terrorist activity (also called “preventative detention”).

Conservatives prioritized this legislation after last week’s bombings at the Boston Marathon, and have used the renewed “war on terror” media fixation to justify a swift hearing of the bill. It is not clear exactly how the proposed measures will protect Canadians, or why we need them now. The Canadian Civil Liberties Union warns that S-7 “seeks to normalize exceptional powers, inconsistent with established democratic principles, and which threaten hard-won civil liberties.”

The Conservative majority government doesn’t need votes from other parties to pass the measure, but federal Liberals have pledged their support for S-7 without proposing a single amendment to it. Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s wholesale acceptance of S-7 fits with the party’s disturbing retreat on civil rights since the attacks in the United States on September 11 2001. Liberals originally introduced, then struck down, the measures S-7 seeks to restore today. The party’s tendency to condone the suspension of our freedoms in the name of “public safety” is shocking and unacceptable.

Three months after the 9/11 attacks, Jean Chretien and the majority Liberal government passed the Anti-Terrorism Act, which included the police powers Conservatives have revived with bill S-7. Representatives from Canada’s legal associations, immigrant and refugee groups, and civil rights organizations said the legislation was excessive, discriminatory, and in violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In response, Liberals included a “sunset clause” in the legislation that would allow the most controversial police powers to expire after five years. In 2007, opposition Liberals joined with federal New Democrats (who had opposed the act from the start) to get rid of the preventative detention and investigative hearing provisions.

Conservatives have been trying to restore these measures ever since – they have tried and failed four times since they first formed government in 2006. So yes, the government is using the Boston attacks, and the recent arrest of two Canadian residents who allegedly planned to attack a VIA passenger train, to bolster its case. But Conservatives simply never wanted the police powers to expire in the first place.

When Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced in 2011 that his majority government would table bill S-7, then Liberal leader Bob Rae said, “the prime minister has to explain to us why, if these measures are so important and so necessary, they were not in place for four years. Is the prime minister saying that for the last four, five years, we’ve been at risk?”

Yet today, in the shadow of last week’s Boston attacks, Trudeau is quietly supporting S-7, minus the curiosity about how necessary the measures are. As they did after 9/11, the Liberals are responding to an attack on American soil with a restriction of civil liberties in Canada. They are prepared to restore the police powers in S-7 for another five years, and they do not even have the heart to tell Canadians why.

The official opposition under NDP leader Tom Mulcair has dared to suggest that we do not need new anti-terror legislation, and that Bill S-7 will diminish rights for all Canadians, particularly Canada’s Muslim population. But yesterday during question period, Mulcair himself made no mention of his party’s steadfast opposition to S-7. Instead he joined with Harper to congratulate the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Muslim community for apprehending the two VIA suspects.

It is scary to stand up to a bully, especially on his own turf. Thankfully, the NDP caucus members challenging S-7 have had the courage to reference Maher Arar, the G20 summit, and the increasingly McCarthyist climate in Canada and the U.S. where Muslims are denied the presumption of innocence. Liberals know these things, but would rather not talk about them. Despite numerous cases of police and RCMP abuses in recent memory, Liberals still fetishize the myth of inerrant state power.

Much has been made of Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s “root causes” comments on terrorism, in apparent contrast to Stephen Harper’s emphasis on condemning terrorists. Those who applauded Trudeau’s “wisdom” probably didn’t realize that more warrantless arrests, interrogations, and detentions are also part of his preventative terror toolkit. Trudeau’s failing is not an unwillingness to condemn terror – it is an unwillingness to defend our civil liberties in the face of terror, intimidation, and the Prime Minister’s political opportunism.

An open letter to anyone who has experienced sexual assault

Reblogged from canada.com:

I don't need to know you to believe you. I don't need to know what happened to you. I don't need to know how "severe" or "serious" it was, because we should take all sexual assault seriously. Period.

If someone doesn't take "no" for an answer, they are dangerous.

If they make you too afraid or uncomfortable to say "no" to them, or if they are too important to say "no" to, they are dangerous.

Read more… 308 more words

Fair Vote Canada Should Live Up To Its Name

Organizations that advocate for fairness, whether in sports, politics, or education, are rightly expected to walk their talk, to exemplify the principled behaviour they demand from others. When your organization’s name is Fair Vote Canada, the expectations to practice what you preach are understandably pretty high. I fear the group is falling well short of expectations at present.

A year ago, I was volunteering with two groups, both of which are pushing for fairer political elections. Members of Group A, Fair Vote Canada, got mad that I also volunteered my time with group B, the Ranked Ballot Initiative of Toronto (RaBIT). So Fair Vote leaders removed me and other members from our elected positions, and barred several other members from seeking office.

Torontonians have been hearing a lot about conflict of interest recently, and learning that a failure on the part of elected officials to avoid it can be disastrous. In my case, Fair Vote drafted a new conflict of interest policy last month, and more or less defined “conflict of interest” as belonging to RaBIT. I was subsequently informed of my “inherent and continued conflict of interest” about two weeks ago, and was immediately and indefinitely turfed.

Fair Vote Canada is a national vote reform organization. It advocates that Canadians adopt fairer systems for our elections. Sadly, the group’s current leadership is making a mockery of Fair Vote’s good name and lofty principles.

There simply aren’t enough people aggressively advocating for electoral reform in this country; among those who do, few are young and almost all are white and male. Of the seven people now indefinitely removed or barred from office in Fair Vote, none are older than forty, and six are women or racialized people. The group that says Canada’s politicians should reflect the country’s diversity has purged diversity from its own elected ranks.

The apparent wrongdoing of those barred is that we volunteered our free time to promote RaBIT, a group pushing reform specifically in Toronto’s municipal elections. Both RaBIT and Fair Vote believe in changing the current system, but advance different remedies. Fair Vote, which focuses on reforming provincial and federal elections, recently held an internal referendum in which 45% of its members said the group should endorse RaBIT. Many believe, as journalist Andrew Coyne recently argued, that either proposed reform is better than our current system.

But Fair Vote’s national leadership feels that any reform other than one, proportional representation, is a threat to its advocacy. I am still a member of Fair Vote, but I can’t hold office because of my former involvement with RaBIT. Since RaBIT has no formal membership, just supporters, Fair Vote leaders are hand-picking current and former volunteers for exclusion. The seven who have been barred or expelled were explicitly named, yet others within Fair Vote who share our feelings face no consequences.

Even some members of Fair Vote’s high-profile advisory board are RaBIT supporters. Outside of the current national executive, it seems there’s plenty of room for cooperation and mutual respect between the two groups.

I cannot tell this story without outlining the role of Dave Meslin, a prominent local activist and dear friend. Meslin has volunteered with Fair Vote for almost ten years, and also founded RaBIT about three years ago. A few Fair Vote leaders are angry with him for starting a local group that advocates for a non-proportional system. They say RaBIT will derail Fair Vote’s goals provincially and federally by advancing a different reform in Toronto, a notion Coyne describes as “madness” in his recent column (it’s also worth noting that Fair Vote USA includes advocates of both reforms in one united movement).

Meslin’s name appears first on the motion to bar or remove members from office, and the desire to sanction him has extended to those who have worked with him on RaBIT.

This is a great shame, mostly because of the amount of time and energy Meslin has devoted to electoral reform. Among other things, he went to live in British Columbia for a month in 2007 to campaign for proportional representation in a provincial referendum. It’s hard to believe that Fair Vote’s leaders are willing to forgo this kind of voluntary commitment over a difference in voting systems. I doubt national council’s actions represent the will of most members, who were not consulted on decisions to nullify member votes and essentially segregate the membership.

Fair Vote Canada needs to live up to its name, and honour its status as a chapter-based, member-driven, registered non-profit organization. My volunteerism outside the group should not be grounds for barring me from office. None of the members deemed in conflict were given a chance to correct their alleged violation before being barred. The motion to remove us empowers the remaining members of the Toronto executive to police future chapter nominations for perceived outsiders. This isn’t my idea of fairness. Any member of Fair Vote should be allowed to seek office.

There’s a classic Monty Python gag about the predicament my barred colleagues and I find ourselves in. People united in fighting the status quo often cannot resist the temptation to turn on each other. It’s been a tough go for electoral reform in Canada, as four provincial referendums on changing to proportional systems have all failed. I doubt the disenfranchisement of Fair Vote’s youngest officers and the imposition of membership tiers will help the movement. These actions will more likely discredit Fair Vote Canada’s own calls for fairer electoral processes. We shouldn’t let that happen.

Contact Fair Vote Canada’s National Council: office@fairvote.ca

Desmond Cole was elected to the Toronto executive of Fair Vote Canada in April 2012. He is the former project coordinator of I Vote Toronto, a campaign to extend Toronto’s municipal vote to permanent residents.

It’s Your Own Fault: A Conservative Love Song

Yesterday, an elected representative of our city gave his best Mitt Romney impression, and described a huge and diverse segment of Torontonians as lazy, unambitious moochers. Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong (Ward 34, Don Valley East) went nuclear on people living in Toronto without proper immigration status, and offered a demeaning caricature of them to justify his scorn.

I grew up in a city of about 140,000 people. Toronto officials believe there could be up to three times that many undocumented people living in Toronto. Minnan-Wong's prejudiced declaration of their collective moral bankruptcy is an old song, a tone-deaf, tough love conservative anthem that always seems to apply to the poor, the racialized, and the marginalized. If this hateful trash isn't played out by now, it should be, but it's not going to stop until we call in an request something new.

The following are Minnan-Wong's comments during debate at City Hall yesterday:

“Madame Chair, undocumented workers are illegal workers, illegal immigrants. They come to this country, many of them with no intention of leaving. They remain illegally. In fact, many flout our laws and laugh at us.

I know some illegal immigrants arrive at Pearson airport from Europe. Their first stop is the welfare office. They already know the address because they’ve been told back home where to go. They’ve been told in their home country, this is true, where the welfare office is. They want to go to the office where they say they can get the free money.

Madame Chair, undocumented workers, illegal immigrants are subject to detention orders and deportation orders. They should be removed, we should not encourage them, we should not help them, we should not facilitate them.

They are an insult to every immigrant who played by the rules to get into this country. They are an insult to every immigrant who is waiting to enter this country legally. It sends a message to the world that it is okay to break the law to come to Canada, and it says the city of Toronto is an accomplice to this lawbreaking.

Contact councillor Minnan-Wong at 416-397-9256 or councillor_minnan-wong@toronto.ca

A Crisis in Shelter Access: John Clarke

Housing advocates hold demonstration outside Metro Hall on February 1, 2013. Photos by Desmond Cole.

On Friday February 1, about 40 housing advocates staged a demonstration outside Metro Hall at King and John Streets. They warned that homeless people are dying on Toronto’s streets, in part because they cannot access shelter from extreme winter weather.

Representatives from the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, Street Health, AIDS Action Now, Sistering, Health Providers Against Poverty, and Sanctuary Ministries of Toronto spoke about the need—in the dire absence of affordable housing and social supports—for more access to emergency shelter in Toronto.

Nearly all speakers challenged the city of Toronto’s assessment of the need for emergency shelter beds, including John Clarke of OCAP. The following are excepts of his comments:

“I’d like to thank everybody for coming out on such short notice. This is an emergency action. It is response to the fact that social cutbacks from the province and the city have created a situation of such proportions that we are seeing, now, a spate of people dying.

In the last short while, two people have died, one from the circumstances–he appears to have trying to keep himself warm with a heater, and was burned to death.

The refrain that we get constantly from the administration is here is that there’s nothing to worry about, there’s plenty of beds, there’s no problem, this is all an over-reaction…

This is really offensive and obscene to be covering up the fact that there is not enough shelter space available.

Yesterday, a lawyer called the OCAP office and pointed out that she has clients who are trying to make bail in jail. To get bail, they need a shelter bed, and they are staying in jail because no shelter beds are available, and the jails have become warehouses for human beings on that basis.

Anyone who tries to find beds, because they need them, or because they’re looking for a bed for homeless people that they’re advocating for, is fully aware of the enormities of the crisis. And now we have municipal cuts, we have the province eliminating the community start-up benefit. All these things are contributing to this enormous crisis…

[City officials] need to respond to this crisis. They need to make changes to the new housing stabilization fund that replaces community start-up. They need to free up $3 million in contingency funds that they are sitting on while people are dying. And more than anything else, they need to stop lying about the situation, they need to stop covering up. They need to acknowledge that there is a crisis on the streets of this city.

Today, everybody is talking about the austerity agenda that governments are committed to. Homeless people dying on the streets are both the logical result and the ultimate effect of the austerity agenda, and we cannot tolerate this. If we have a situation where it becomes normal an routine for homeless people to die on the streets of Toronto, and nobody raises a voice of objection, then there is no hope. We have to challenge this injustice.”

An Innocent Question

To The Public Editor of the Toronto Star:

I am curious about the Toronto Star‘s use of the term “innocent bystander,” most recently on July 16 2012 in the story, “Scarborough shootings: Two killed, 19 injured as bullets fly at barbecue.” The word “innocent” has always confused and troubled me in this context.

Why does the Star choose to characterize a bystander as “innocent” only when they are shot, nearly shot, or threatened with serious physical harm in other very specific ways? What does the notion of innocence have to do with describing a victim of interpersonal violence? Would the Star, for example, describe me as an innocent bystander if I got struck by lightning?

The designation of innocence only for some bystanders suggests other bystanders are not innocent. I have never explicitly seen the Star describe a bystander as being “guilty” of anything, although your paper routinely informs us when the victim of violence has a criminal record. In these cases, the target of the violence seems never to be characterized as innocent.

When something happens to a bystander, but the Star does not describe that person as an innocent victim, what is the reader to interpret? What separates an innocent bystander from any other person? Does the reporter determine innocence? Do Star reporters ask eyewitnesses if the victim of violence was innocent?

Is the idea of innocence is being used to describe someone who is not the intended target of violence? If so, wouldn’t it be better to just say that instead? Can someone who we perceive as being violent or threatening still be deemed innocent if they are the target of violence? What about someone armed with a weapon? And what does the word “innocent” mean in this context? Blameless? Free from moral or legal wrong?

The notion of innocence is so powerful, and has so much potential to be misunderstood when used to describe someone who is standing somewhere when something happens. When a bystander is attacked but is not described as innocent, people may interpret that the victim bears some responsibility for the violence perpetrated against them. This idea terrifies me, because it can lead people to ignore or downplay acts of violence based on a very superficial notion of the guilt or innocence of the victim.

I assume the Star abhors violence regardless of the identity of the victim. But as I’ve said, it’s also an issue of the accuracy of the term “innocent.” I would be very happy if your publication stopped using this term, or provided a justification for its use that I fail to see. It’s great to have a Public Editor, so thank you in advance!

Sent on July 18 2012. Contact the Star’s Public Editor at publiced@thestar.ca.

Whose Prosperity are Provincial Tories Defending?

Take away workers’ rights? I don’t think so, Tim.

After the provincial legislature adjourned for the summer, the Progressive Conservatives released a policy paper entitled “Paths To Prosperity: Flexible Labour Markets.” The document [PDF] is a not-so-subtle directive to cripple Ontario’s labour unions. It also includes measures to reduce injury and disability premiums across the board. The PCs don’t have the votes to pass any of this, and so the paper’s release was intended purely to help Tim Hudak and company spend the so-called summer barbecue season roasting Ontario’s workforce.

The policy document suggests the path to prosperity is a less regulated labour market, and that the rise of unions has blunted our once prosperous economy. Tory MPP Randy Hillier describes “endless opportunities in manufacturing, skilled trades, professional services and a burgeoning service sector” when he entered the workforce a mere forty years ago. He then argues that collective bargaining rights his generation enjoyed were “created in the era of protectionism,” otherwise known as the post-Second World War 1940s.

The Tories propose an end to mandatory union dues and increased scrutiny of union contributions. “Rules that make union leaders work a little harder to justify their value boosts employment, increases paycheques, attracts business investment and expands the economy,” the paper says. Of course, as many have already noted, the real goal of this proposal is to reduce wages across the board, and to prevent unions from mobilizing against the PCs, as they did so effectively during last year’s election.

Hudak and friends also argue that insurance premiums employers pay into the Workplace Safety and Insurace Board are too high, and that private insurers should be allowed to compete with the WSIB to drive down workers’ injury and disability benefits. Again, the theory is that if employers can pay lower wages and benefits across the province, they can use their savings to create more jobs. But the paper’s claim that existing premiums are “the result of establishing premiums and benefits to suit political considerations instead of actual market demands,” deserves much closer scrutiny.

Former PC leader Mike Harris underfunded the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board during the 90s, and helped to create a $14 Billion unfunded liability. Ironically, Harris’ labour minister at that time, Elizabeth Witmer, recently resigned from Hudak’s cabinet to accept an appointment to lead the WSIB and address its massive shortfall. Now that the WSIB appears to be in crisis, the conservatives see an opportunity to get private insurers into the mix.

As conservatives contend that businesses just need a few more incentives to re-enter the shaky economy, those same business continue to rack up cash and stash it away. Despite the difficult economic times of the last few years, Canadian corporations have been hoarding hundreds of billions in profits instead of re-investing in the economy.

This attack against workers, particularly unionized ones, is the continuation of a Tory strategy to employ wedge politics as a distraction from decisions by large employers to remove jobs and investments from Ontario. During the last election, Hudak courted votes with shameless homophobic, racist, and xenophobic electioneering. But the particular groups Hudak blames for our economic struggles are less important than his desire to shift that blame from the private sector.

The proposal to reduce benefits for injured and disabled workers has consequences for all workers, not simply those conservatives characterize as entitled or lazy. But the objective is the same: perpetuate the notion that private interests are eager to invest in Ontario’s economic future, if only we can understand their challenges and moderate our demands accordingly. Rather than buy into simplistic “pro” or “anti” union rhetoric, we should be asking how we will ultimately benefit from lower wages, more precarious employment, and fewer protections for those too sick or too injured to work.