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BC Politics - 2. page

These are Stuart’s articles on politics at the provincial level in British Columbia.

No More “Climate Justice!” It’s Time to Share the Losses

Back in 1988, very few people in the activist world were working on the climate crisis or, as we called it back then, the Greenhouse Effect. But I had the good fortune to encounter a group of political visionaries who were working hard, not just to touch the conscience of government but to do something that was even harder back then: convince mainstream environmental groups and their leaders that climate would be the defining environmental issue of our age.

Chief among these individuals was David Lewis, my political mentor, the firewood collector, giant and car repairman, not the retired NDP leader. With the publication of Our Common Future by the United Nations, the results of a two-year commission conducted by the prime minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland, the profile of global environmental issues, ozone depletion, migration, chemical drift and climate, temporarily eclipsed the parochial issues and locality-specific concerns.

The scientific community was quick to make that switch in emphasis because its members could see that ocean acidification, ocean hypoxia, global heating and ozone depletion could wipe out ecosystems and species without there being any direct encounter with human beings. Or, as David put it, “if we fail to arrest the destabilization of planetary life support systems, these trees will die, whether they are cut down or not.”

But David and his group, the FOOLS (Friends of the Ozone Layer), were outliers in the environmental movement, especially in British Columbia. There were, of course, exceptions, such as the future English King Charles, Greenpeace International and its founder, Jim Bohlen, along with a handful of others but, especially in British Columbia, where he and I organized, the hostility with which our message was greeted by the mainline environmental groups nearly matched that of the fossil fuel, disposable aerosol and foam packaging industries. And ultimately, Jim, David’s and my insistence on prioritizing global environmental issues over parochial issues in our analysis, during the periods we exerted substantive control over the BC Green Party (1989-91, 1993-2000) helped to provoke the take-over and purge conducted by the eco-courtiers in 2000.

While I have already written another essay on the institutional hostility we faced from the emerging eco-courtier class, and their corruption and collusion with the fossil fuel industry, I want to re-examine the politics of BC Wild (the name of the Sunoco-funded coalition of environmental groups tasked with suppressing the climate debate in BC) through the lens not of petty corruption, but of class and culture.

The Other David Lewis

David Lewis was not a rich man. A university dropout, he lived in a small, modest home in Krestova, a remote rural community that was once the centre of the Doukhobor Sons of Freedom movement. He took odd jobs fixing cars and chopping wood and, when there was a big construction contract in the region, he could get temporary construction work. The first time the consort of the patrician Swedish Green Party leader, Per Gahrton, Ulla Lemberg, met Lewis during an official visit, she was transfixed by the hardness of his palms, their deep callouses and the dirt and congealed engine oil under his fingernails that he hadn’t managed to scrub away for the press conference. She could not stop talking about David’s hands for the rest of their official visit, noting that there was no one so genuinely working class in her party, even in the Far North.

Within a year, with only me and Jim to defend him, David was pushed out of his spokesperson position in the BC Greens, with Jim forlornly remarking, “I think David Lewis is the only person who has ever truly spoken for this party.” David’s charismatic style had made him a darling of Vancouver live radio and decision to attend Globe 90, the UN conference in Vancouver, selling bottles of “sustainable development” as a nineteenth-century vaudevillian huckster, complete with an antique portable sales counter with telescoping legs, had landed him on the national news as a spokesperson for the party. But his willingness to incorporate Marxian ideas of class struggle into his media statements and emotional style of sharing his fear that humanity would not rise to the occasion were frightening to many in the party and even more in the larger environmental movement.

Pressure began to mount from environmentalists outside the party to give David the proverbial hook. This pressure came largely from environmentalists already in the tank for Mike Harcourt’s New Democratic Party, the obvious government-in-waiting as the forty-year Social Credit political dynasty entered its terminal phase.

In the late 1980s and early 90s, BC’s environmental movement was dominated by wilderness “preservation” groups, comprising local volunteer-run, subscription-based civil society organizations like Friends of Clayoquot Sound and the West Arm Watershed Alliance, as well as organizations that, while technically working on a single area, had gained an international funding base and professionalized leadership, such as Friends of the Stein Valley and the Valhalla Wilderness Society.

These latter groups, along with the branch offices of international environmental groups like the Sierra Club and World Wildlife Fund, dominated the stage and were, largely, staffed by members of the incipient commissar class who were also functioning, at this point, as eco-courtiers within the (since 1987) Third Way government in waiting, the New Democrats.

These groups channeled money from all over the world into fighting to preserve the last of BC’s old growth forest from logging. While groups like WWF and Greenpeace had many irons in the fire, their global temperate rainforest preservation campaigns were invariably headquartered in Vancouver or Victoria and the delivery of “results” in BC affected the finances of the entire organizations and all their campaigns around the world.

Return of the Seekers

While David did not oppose the efforts to fence-off ecosystems from mining, logging and other industrial development—after all, these ecosystems functioned to protect biodiversity and absorb atmospheric carbon, mitigating and slowing the collapse of planetary life support systems—he did object the discourse the Big Green groups were popularizing on multiple fronts.

First, these groups did not merely use terms like “save” and “preserve” when they talked about the stretches of forest and alpine they were seeking to have declared parks; they often amplified these claims by suggesting ecosystems would be held in their present state “forever” by an act of the state. David felt that this was both dishonest, given that his models showed that forests ecosystems would need to move nine times faster than the fastest forests had previously moved in the past to adapt to rapid climate change, and because this discourse of permanence directly undermined our movement’s warnings of impending catastrophe.

Second, the sales pitch for these new parks contained much that ran counter to the idea that areas were being preserved due to an ecological imperative. Organizations like Western Canada Wilderness Committee (WC2) went beyond marketing calendars, posters and other forms of low-end merchandise depicting the threatened ecosystems as aesthetically pleasing. They produced lavish coffee table books, featuring the art of photorealist wildlife artists like Robert Bateman and my father, Ron Parker.

Movement leaders, like Joe Foy, would juxtapose the idea that a place like the Walbran Valley merited preservation because it was “untouched” while at the same time exhorting supporters to “get out there” and camp and hike in the regions. Indeed, Foy’s WC2 went beyond encouraging eco-tourism. They use the illicit building of eco-tourist infrastructure as a means of strengthening their hand in government negotiations. The building campsites, trails, bridges and moorages became key activities of big environmental groups, especially those based on Vancouver Island.

In this way, David argued, environmentalists were speaking out of both sides of their mouths: touting the pristine, unchanged and allegedly unchangeable character of these areas that situated them outside the economy, while concurrently seeking to build an industry built around the recreational gratification of a particular class.

In later years, during David’s extended break from political activity (1991-97) I supplemented this criticism with the additional observations that rather than focusing on working class jobs being threatened by the logging industry ecosystem damage, such as the commercial fishery and canneries, and working class recreation, such as hunting and trapping, the economic activity that was touted by Big Green groups was eco-tourism, a passtime mainly of wealthy, educated urbanites that tended to provide low wage, non-union hospitality industry employment in rural areas.

In other words, the environmental movement’s focus on wilderness “preservation” had two pernicious aspects that interacted synergistically. First, it minimized the sense of urgency and impact concerning the Greenhouse Effect.

Second, it caused a reversion in the class politics of the movement to a pre-Cold War state. Prior to the Cold War, the environmental movement, as epitomized in the Sierra Club, was a quasi-religious bourgeois movement focused on the spiritual and aesthetic experiences wealthy urban elites could have in landscapes cleared of their human populations. Its international board of directors included leading lights of the Yankee patrician Republican Party elite of the time, like Teddy Roosevelt and Prescott Bush (scion of the Bush dynasty).

During the Cold War, following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the movement had taken a working class turn, focusing on the health of workers and of low-income communities. It championed farm workers with its calls for pesticide bans and working class neighbourhoods disproportionately affected by industrial disasters and waste. It gained major working class allies in farmworker union leaders like Cesar Chavez and Charan Gill.

But now it called not just for industrial workers to accept less work and lower-paying work but also more socially servile and submissive work as is axiomatic in the hospitality industry.

And when environmentalists faced accusations and criticisms from the industrial working class of the North American periphery, their response was typically not one of acknowledgement or compensation but of denial and obfuscation. Environmentalists denied that there would be any economic cost to what they proposed and instead baselessly asserted that in a green economy, everyone would become more prosperous, a delusion that finally reached its crescendo in the LEAP Manifesto of 2015.

The Rationality and Decency of the Proletariat

David, being a member of the peripheral industrial working class, himself, understood exactly how such assertions would play. Industrial workers would reasonably assume that when the costs of something were being downplayed or denied, it meant that they and not the urban bourgeoisie and commissar classes would be the ones to shoulder those costs on their own.

And so he proposed a radical departure in discourse, one that I am ashamed to say I did not have the courage to follow him on. His master term in the interviews he gave in 1989-91 was “share the losses.” Both climate change and the economic transition necessary to limit it would undoubtedly produce losses. And he felt that the only way to gain the support of the industrial working class was to stop trying to bamboozle them and present them with the cold, hard facts of the high cost of transition and a plan for sharing that cost fairly.

That’s because David believed in a politics that I did not yet understand, the politics that Bernie Sanders brought to the coal towns of West Virginia and for which coal miners voted in large numbers. You see: what liberals call “people voting against their own interests” is nothing of the kind. Working class voters are more altruistic than the bourgeoisie and the commissars. Even though they have less, they are more willing to make material sacrifices to bring about a moral order in which they believe. White working class voters demeaned and denigrated as stupid and ignorant are no more stupid than low-income Woke urban progressives working as baristas. The difference is that their culture contains a greater respect for, and ethos of, personal and collective sacrifice.

The Twenty-first Century Degradation of Climate Discourse

But, as it stands, the environmental movement did not listen to David Lewis and things have only worsened. When environmental organizations decided to become “climate champions,” in the late 1990s, they retired “the Greenhouse Effect” and replaced it with “climate change.” Whereas the former term was one that, by its very structure, educated people about the mechanism by which the climate was destabilizing, the one that replaced it severed the term from any theory of causation, making it easier for climate denialist ideas to creep in.

Whereas disputing the Greenhouse Effect entailed explaining why heavier molecules were not trapping heat in the atmosphere, disputing “climate change” simply entailed offering some half-baked theory offering some other cause of the change, or baldfaced denial that change was taking place.

And because the environmental movement’s leadership now deemed regular folks too stupid to understand how their atmosphere was changing, an appeal to reason was replaced with an appeal to authority, “trust The Science!” And indeed those touting this new approach began to suggest that it was problematic for regular people to educate themselves, examine evidence, etc. and that uppity proles who did that were risible figures, fools seduced by low production value youtube videos into a fantasy world. Best to advise the proles to not even try to understand!

And, as the first decade of the twenty-first century closed, environmentalists hit upon an even more disastrous term in which to encapsulate their discourse: “climate justice.” “Climate justice” packaged belief that carbon emissions were causing the climate to worsen with a set of unpopular, punitive government policies that targeted the working class of the Global North’s extractive periphery for special punishment through increased transportation costs, destruction of the used vehicle market, increased costs for basic heating and refrigeration and the singling-out of agriculture for special financial penalties.

It is no wonder, in our present moment that, even as extreme weather events also disproportionately ravage the property and livelihoods of the rural working class, “climate denial” increases, not just because of reaction formation but because “climate science” has been conflated with a set of punitive taxation measures targeting that class.

We Must Share the Losses

But it does not have to be this way. There is still time. As David would say if he were here, “we cannot lose faith that humanity will rise to the occasion.” And that is why I exhort us all to find a just and equitable plan to share the losses and save the planet.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

After Twenty-Five Years, Is It Time for Second Look at Harm Reduction (Part #1)

If you are just here for the actual article, skip ahead of this first section and go to section two, Denormalization Revisited. If you are already familiar with my writing on denormalization and caste-making, skip ahead to the Collapse of Vancouver’s Four Pillars.

Retention Fatigue or Why Drug Policy Now?

There is no doubt that many reading this blog have been faithful readers since before 2020, before I departed from the progressive consensus on gender identity. Since then, my reading audience has shifted and I have had to think carefully about how to manage this shift. Not only do I continue to lose readers who identify with the contemporary left, I keep gaining readers who are identified (often against their will) with the contemporary right. And there is no sign that this shift process is going to end any time soon.

Furthermore, as I continue to exit the left social scene, even as I grow more committed to some kind of Eco-Marxism as my personal politics, distance is allowing me to gain perspective on issues where I have not publicly questioned the orthodoxies of the left. When I discover another issue where I am now out of step with the left, I am faced with a practical dilemma: if I write about my thoughts, how many of my old readers will I lose? And how many new readers will I gain?

For that reason, I have been cautious about raising yet another issue on which I am out of accord with progressives, always worried that my next unorthodox opinion will be the final straw for someone and that I will lose another reader, another comrade or another friend.

But after three years of living like this, I am done. I am sick to death of walking on eggshells, wondering if my next unorthodox view will produce another cancelation campaign that gets me another blizzard of hate mail from people who were my friends until five seconds ago and gets my loyal friends harassed and threatened. I cannot handle this slow process of cancelation continuing indefinitely. For months now, I have actually been exaggerating how many conservative views and conservative associates I have just so that the people who are on the fence about canceling me will just get the fuck on with it. So now, fuck it! Drugs!

Denormalization Revisited

Two years into the Covid epidemic, I departed from the increasingly untenable progressive consensus concerning Covid vaccines, not with respect to their efficacy but rather the public policies concerning vaccination in my article, “Denormalization: From Failed Public Health Strategy to a Path to a Liberal Majority.”

In the fall of 2021, we learned that vaccine passes were not effectively limiting the spread of Omicron and later Covid variants because, while vaccination typically made Covid symptoms less severe, sometimes saving lives and preventing permanent disability, it did not have a significant impact on transmissibility. Governments’ reactions to this news were perverse, to say the least.

Rather than abandoning VaxPasses, our federal and provincial governments rolled out more restrictive policies, further abridging the assembly and mobility rights of unvaccinated or insufficiently vaccinated Canadians. When questioned about the efficacy of these policies in limiting the spread of Covid, our governments were disturbingly frank, largely admitting that these measures’ primary purpose was to stigmatize and punish those who continued to refuse the vaccines. Our leaders seemed eerily okay with just admitting the passes were a cudgel, designed to coerce recalcitrant holdouts.

Except that I refused to accept that this was even what was going on. What anyone with the most basic knowledge of the social science of public health knows is that by de-normalizing something, like smoking, for instance, you actually make that thing more popular with people who are already marginalized, who are already stigmatized and understood to be either at society’s margins or entirely outside society. And, as anyone familiar with the social determinants of health could have predicted, the Vaxpasses intensified and solidified both vaccine hesitancy and opposition to the passes themselves, ultimately culminating in the Freedom Convoy.

Had the government actually wished to promote vaccination among people of faith, manual labourers, rural Canadians and non-Indigenous racialized Canadians, it would have involved conservative faith leaders, popular rural politicians, grassroots labour leaders and small business owners in forestry, mining and oil, in making tailored appeals to vaccine hesitant populations.

But that was not, I believe, their agenda. It was instead, to create a group of pestilent “deplorables,” to engage in caste-making.

The Collapse of Vancouver’s Four Pillars

Canadian cities and those of America’s Blue State Pacific Coast are experiencing not just increases but increasing rates of increase in drug addiction, overdose deaths, homelessness and street violence, an increasing portion of which is disorganized violence of which individuals experiencing addiction and mental health struggles are both an ever-increasing proportion of both perpetrators and victims.

It is now twenty-five years since my city, Vancouver, adopted its Four Pillars policy on drugs as part of our decision to be one of the first cities in the Western Hemisphere to embrace harm reduction as the basis of our drug policy. I was one of the thousands of Vancouverites who chalked this up as a victory. Now, we thought, things will start turning around in the Downtown Eastside. At last, homelessness, prostitution, addiction, disease and misery will stop increasing and enter a slow, steady decline as drug users come out of the shadows and have their problems dealt with in the full light of day

Although these increases have a clear statistical correlation to de jure and de facto decriminalization of both soft and hard drugs, the response of progressives has been that we are just not making drugs legal, accessible and plentiful enough. In my city, purchasing and possession is no longer illegal for any drug, nor is dealing, provided one keeps one’s personal inventory low. Opinion leaders in my community are now advocating that the government get into the business of selling cocaine, heroin and other hard drugs and, when it comes to the most addictive and toxic drugs, my government is literally giving them away.

The thinking of the people backing an amplification of our already-failed policies is based on three main fallacies: (a) that the number of drug users is essentially fixed, that public policy cannot change the number of people who want to use drugs or who do use them, (b) that simply increasing the purity, affordability and accessibility of the drug supply actually is “harm reduction,” and (c) that drug use is not strongly conditioned by material and cultural factors.

To review, the Four Pillars policy Vancouver city council adopted to great fanfare in 1998 were (1) Prevention, (2) Treatment, (3) Harm Reduction and (4) Enforcement. This tetrad of policy reforms were based on a pre-existing model which showed promising results in Australia, Switzerland and Germany in the 1990s. But did Vancouver, in fact, follow the four pillars approach?

Prevention?

Prevention, i.e. policies designed to prevent people from falling into problematic substance use, were of two main types: material and educational. Material prevention policies in the places where the Four Pillars had succeeded included the provision of housing and other basic material supports to people who might otherwise become homeless or enter into survival sex work, given that homelessness, especially street homelessness and prostitution, especially survival prostitution create powerful incentives for habitual hard drug use in order to survive in these extremely damaging and challenging circumstances.

Instead, the provincial government, which provides these services to Vancouverites undertook a series of austerity programs in 1993, 1997 and 2001 to reduce income supports for housing and food. Following a 10% cut in 1993, income assistance rates in British Columbia were capped at 1993 levels for the next twenty-four years, not even permitting increases to keep pace with inflation.

As all federal and nearly all new provincial investment in affordable housing ended in 1993 and did not resume for a decade or more, the effective supply of housing continued to contract, especially as, when provincial investment did start again in the late 00s, it was increasingly directed to what is called “supportive housing,” of which there were essentially two types: (a) housing projects composed entirely of hard drug users and (b) housing projects that summarily evicted tenants for drug use, drug possession, overnight guests, etc.

Furthermore, the “shelter allowance” for those on income assistance remained capped at $375.00 per month from 1993 to 2023. Still dire but not as dire, the minimum wage remained capped at $8.00/hour from 2001 to 2011 and did not exceed $15/hour until 2021. Given that state-subsidized housing was so scarce as to be nigh-impossible to obtain for all but those in the most extreme straits, low-income people at risk of losing their housing saw their incomes decline relative to inflation while housing costs often increased at double the overall inflation rate.

In other words, government policies with respect to poverty did not merely fail to prevent substance abuse and addiction; they actively facilitated it.

Of course, we older folks do not immediately think of poverty when we hear the word “prevention.” We remember the school assemblies, the tone-deaf public service announcements, the awkward classes with our high school guidance counselors. Prevention, for us, conjures up the “scared straight,” “just say no,” and “this is your brain on drugs” after school specials and TV ads, designed to make kids frightened to try drugs, especially the harder stuff.

These traditional campaigns are denormalization campaigns. And that means that they produce perverse effects on people who already consider themselves to be marginalized. Amy Salmon and Fred Bass, the health scientists who made the empirical case studied anti-smoking de-normalization campaigns and found that they functioned like highly effective cigarette adds for young, low-income Indigenous women and girls.

De-normalization continues to be our main form of above-ground public “prevention” campaign but these campaigns are taking place in the dual context of an increasing portion of the population being economically marginalized and an increasing portion of the population receiving strong incentives and “identifying into” identities understood to be marginal, e.g. “trans,” “queer,” etc.

And it appears that both groups, both those materially marginalized by structural factors and those adopting boutique identities they believe make them marginalized, are experiencing the perverse effects of de-normalization and becoming more attracted to street drugs of all kinds. To an ever-increasing proportion of our population, our anti-drug propaganda is experienced as ads for the very drugs that we are supposedly discouraging.

Treatment?

Supposedly, there were going to be a whole lot more in the way of treatment facilities, approaches and services by now. But, as with housing and income, the reality has been escalating austerity and chronic labour shortages, compounded, most recently, by BC’s decision to be the only province in Canada that has refused to hire back its unvaccinated health care workers and, instead, to stand by as the BC College of Nurses and other healthcare syndical regulators proceed with internal witch hunts to deprive unvaccinated members of their professional accreditation, as though losing their jobs was not enough.

When it comes to the medically adjacent caring professions, like social work, the story has been even bleaker. There were mass layoffs of social workers in 1993, 1997 and 2001. And, when it comes to psychiatrists and psychologists, there are almost none remaining in the public system. I, myself, have been trying to obtain a psychiatrist through the public system for the past thirty-six months and have yet to have my first appointment.

The waiting list for detox and drug rehabilitation beds lengthens by the month and those that are available are often situated in neighbourhoods like Vancouver’s downtown Eastside, directly adjacent to the most active drug distribution and consumption scenes in the entire country.

Today, Vancouver has an “assessment centre,” to which one must be referred by a doctor, where one signs up to apply to be allowed to see a psychiatrist. If your case is urgent, the wait to see a social worker there is still two months; if it is not urgent, it is more like four to six. If you convince the social worker you are in serious distress, you wait another month or two to be interviewed by a psychiatrist. And even if you get the go-ahead, it is no one’s job but yours to somehow find you a psychiatrist who remains in the public system who is still taking clients and, if you do find one, your job to get them a referral not just from the centre but from the physician who referred you to the centre.

In other words, treatment options have declined significantly and remain out of reach for all but the most persistent and sophisticated, whereas you’re always just a phone call or taxi ride away from a baggie of heroin, cocaine, fentanyl, lorazepam or methamphetamine any hour of the day or night.

Harm Reduction?

The term “harm reduction” refers to the reduction in harms associated with the purchase of an illegal product, such as conflict with the law, adulteration or poisoning of said product, the need to pay increased costs because criminalization has increased prices, the spread of infection through unsafe consumption practices, and the use of drugs with unsafe equipment or in unsafe settings.

In this area, we experienced early and obvious gains. Our safe injection site did reduce the transmission of AIDS and hepatitis. The addition of a supervised site from crack use also appeared to produce tangible public health dividends generally.

But we have not seen commensurable improvements in public health once the state moved from creating supervised spaces and began to enlarge its own role in drug distribution while looking the other way as non-profit organizations, left-wing political parties and for-profit dealers became more public and ambitious in handing out drugs. Instead, the deterioration of the whole scene has sped up.

To help us understand why this is the case, it may be helpful to begin with Ricky from Trailer Park Boys in the episode where he trains school children to steal barbecues as part of their “Junior Achievers” after school program for aspiring entrepreneurs, “it’s the same whether you’re breaking the law or not. Profit, capital. Supply and command.” Or let me introduce this idea another way: if Canadians are really excited about an issue, the first thing they decide is that the laws of supply and demand don’t apply to it.

You will notice that people who are excited about liquefied natural gas (LNG) and believe that fracking more of it will help us save the planet make the following argument: for every joule worth of LNG we produce and export, the country to which we send it will reduce the amount of coal they burn by the same amount. They assert that the quantity of fossil fuels that are burned in the world is a fixed amount and that no matter what the price is or how large or small the supply is, the exact same amount will be burned.

But of course that is not how the market for any commodity works. If you supply the same amount of coal and simply increase the amount of LNG, prices for both commodities will fall and the total amount of fossil fuels consumed will increase. This is the first thing you learn in a first-year economic class. It is called “the Law of Supply and Demand.” If you make something cheaper, more plentiful and easier to obtain, the more of it will be consumed.

This idea that increasing the amount of legal fentanyl or cocaine on the market will lead to precisely commensurate reductions in illegal use is insane. It is stupid. It is contradicted by the evidence we receive every month as overdose deaths continue to climb and it is contradicted by everything basic economics predicts.

Drug users do not have a fixed quantity of their drug(s) of choice they need or desire in a day, after which there are satiated. The more cocaine you do, the more you want. The cheaper the price, the more you can do. The easier to access, the more you can do. The state is actually promoting the consumption of illegal fentanyl by providing free or low-cost fentanyl. Doing so depresses fentanyl prices both by flooding the market and by fixing a low cost with which for-profit dealers must compete.

Enforcement?

In the original design of the policy, new approaches to enforcement were supposed to focus policing on drug production and distribution points, to target major dealers and producers, especially of drugs that can be synthesized in urban settings. In other words, it was premised on the idea that restricted supply was a goal in the policy.

But now that we have adopted increased supply rather than restricted supply as our approach, the police are rudderless in this area, left with a legacy policy functioning in direct opposition to current approaches.

Why would anyone expect to see outcomes in Vancouver in the twenty-first century based on the Four Pillars, if only half of one pillar is even standing? We are not practicing the Four Pillars. We are not even practicing harm reduction. We are just throwing more drugs and easier, faster access to drugs into a rising tide of human misery.

Culture: the Mastodon in the Room

But missing in all of this is a much bigger factor, something that had already walled-off the Swiss, German and, more recently, Portuguese approaches to drug policy, even as we began to consider reform in the 1990s: culture. How you interact with a drug is strongly conditioned by the larger cultural context of your society and by the more local subcultural context of your drug use community.

Anglo America does not have the same culture as Portugal, Germany or Switzerland. How one engages with drugs is about something more than the material and public policy factors I laid out above. But that is for the second part of this short series, where we look at distinctive experience of substance use in a young city shaped by colonization.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George | fusangite |

Honey Boo Boo and the Fourth Punic War: How Gender and Climate Politics Are Linked

The Fall and Rise of Honey Boo Boo

Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, a deeply disturbing “reality” show took to the airwaves in 2012. It depicted the life of a child beauty queen, groomed by her mother to put on sexualized performances for audiences of grown men in her pre-pubescent body. The show’s launch was really the culmination of a set of bizarre pedophilic fads that had ripped through the heartland of American conservatism post-911. Shocking numbers of pre-pubescent girls got to experience a novel variant on Munchausen-by-proxy as abusive parents found a new way to seek attention by publicly hurting their children.

Closely coupled with this phenomenon were the father-daughter dates and dances, culminating in formal dress “prom” dates, in which men displayed their adolescent daughters as surrogate wives, again to receptive audiences that applauded these displays of Platonic incest.

But by the third season, however, ratings were falling as was the popular cultural practice the show represented. Father-daughter proms also went on the wane at around the same time.

Ironically it seemed as though, during the rise of Donald Trump, himself, an obvious abuser of his own daughter, that his base was quietly abandoning the very kind of exhibitionistic abuse in which he himself was engaging.

Today, it is the creature shambling around in the flayed skin of the Left that we most associate with pedophilic exhibitionism. We have trans child beauty queens and trans child reality shows. Dylan Mulvaney has moved on from making videos about his ability to show off his erection in a leather mini-skirt and holding summits with the leader of the free world to making videos of himself as six-year-old girl inviting you into her bed. And, of course, there is Drag Queen Story Hour, where progressive parents bring their children to watch transsexual strip club routines and slip $1 bills into the exotic dancers’ g-strings, when not being read stories from the Ally Baby series, which explains to pre-pubescent children that they can and should consent to sex acts.

I want to suggest that there is a logic to this bizarre dance with child safeguarding practices in which Anglo America has been engaged.

And, each year that goes by, less of this dereliction of child safeguarding duties is even being laundered through the discourse of the Gender Industrial Complex. School sex education curricula are teaching kids that the term “pedophile” is a stigmatizing pejorative and that the term “minor attracted person” should be used in its place. Progressive opinion leaders like University of Victoria professor Hope Cleves propound the doctrine that adults raping children is not, in fact, abuse but a mutually beneficial interaction she euphemistically calls “intergenerational sex.”

It’s the climate.

From 1996-2015, conservative Americans’ leadership acknowledged that the Greenhouse Effect was real, consequential, harmful and also not something they were going to do anything about. In other words, conservative Americans found themselves subscribing to a set of beliefs that forced them to conclude that failing to protect one’s children from a genuine threat that could ruin or impoverish their lives was okay. In fact, it was good.

“Children are resilient,” “children are hard to hurt,” “children can consent,” “children can make adult choices,” “it’s okay to hurt kids if you get something out of it materially,” “children are really just small, dimwitted adults,”—these thoughts became normalized. Publicly staging derelictions of parental duty, of the collective duty of adults to protect kids became something a huge swath of the population needed to applaud.

But by 2015, the mainstream view of the Republican Party’s leadership and of evangelical religious leaders was that the destabilization of our climate was a “Chinese hoax.” In fact, the person who most vigorously propounded the idea that there was no climate crisis was the person chosen not just as conservative America’s president but as its Caliph, a man who could also pronounce on matters of evangelical religion from his seat in the White House.

While the effects of the mainstreaming of climate denial have been devastating in many ways, they did, ironically, I believe, spare a lot of kids in places like Oklahoma from being turned into sexualized display objects by their parents.

Meanwhile, the statistics do not lie. As I explained in my previous post, governments that talk tough on climate and whose leaders march with Greta Thunberg actually build more pipelines and sink more new wells than those run by climate denialists. And, as much as progressives try to hide those ugly facts from themselves, the reality is that they cannot.

Everybody knows the German Green and Social Democratic parties are destroying people’s homes and fields, annihilating their property rights and civil liberties, assaulting and incarcerating villagers whose homes are getting in the way of the new coal mines they want to dig. They know that it was Justin Trudeau, not Stephen Harper who poured billions of dollars and hundreds of RCMP officers into forcing the Trans Mountain Pipeline through Western Canada, that oil exploration in the US is experiencing a renaissance under Joe Biden’s presidency.

In other words, progressives now hold the same position regarding climate that conservatives held 1996-2015. And so they are compelled to engage in practices of exhibitionistic, perverted child hatred to normalize their total dereliction of duty to their children, something that has only intensified since Biden returned to a level of nuclear sabre-rattling not seen since Ronald Reagan’s first term. If nuking Eastern Europe is okay; if the carbon-forced omnicide is okay; why not FGM and pedophilia?

That is why there is almost no overlap between people who believe the Greenhouse Effect is real and that it is wrong to perform hysterectomies on healthy teenage girls. Because I am such a person, engaging with this civilization is very challenging for me.

The Fourth Punic War and the Future of the West

While I vehemently disagree with Matt Walsh on gay rights and a host of other issues, I think there is one thing he and only he is saying right now that cuts right to the heart of the matter: the current progressive child endangerment movement is at war with Western Civilization itself.

While many trace the start of Western Civilization to the Iliad and the Odyssey and the civilizational competition between Greek and Phoenician city states in the Mediterranean that began in the seventh century BC, I argue that it begins a little later.

The Greek and Phoenician colonies that dotted the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, from present-day Gibraltar to Crimea were vibrant multilingual, multicultural societies that traded luxury goods and slaves. But there was a fundamental difference between the two kinds of city states. While both types of colony lived and died by the commerce that was transacted in the agora, the marketplace, the core of civic life was not there.

In Greek city states, the centre of civic life was the bouleuterion, where political decisions were made by a group of citizens through a process of deliberation and voting. While some Greek colonies has small bouleuteria that only included members of the wealthiest and most powerful families, others, like Athens, accommodated as much as 15% of their resident in enormous amphitheatre-style meeting spaces.

But in the Phoenician city states, the centre of civic life was the altar to the god Baal, where the priests sacrificed infants by heating the idol’s bronze hands so that they would literally fry the bodies of babies placed in their embrace. While the Greeks found this disgusting and condemned it, that disgust is as far as it went, and, as I have said elsewhere, it is not like the Greeks were the best advocates for child safeguarding, given their embrace of pedophilia as a natural and laudable part of their formal education systems.

It is my argument that Western Civilization truly began during the Punic Wars, between the Rome and Carthage, an empire composed of Phoenician city-states in North Africa, Sicily and the Iberian Peninsula. While these wars were largely motivated by the conflicting commercial interests of the two maritime powers vying for control of the Western Mediterranean, as the wars grew more costly, they also became more ideological. Increasingly compelling narratives had to be presented by Rome’s senate and consuls to mobilize the volunteer citizen-soldiers on which the Roman Republic relied to fill the ranks of its armies.

And the most successful and compelling narrative, the one that caused thousands of Roman soldiers to cross the sea and fight and die in North Africa was this: the Carthaginians are sacrificing their own children to their god, Baal and that Romans had a duty to protect the children of strangers.

Irrespective of the motive for doing so, it is this moment that I choose to see as the birth of Western Civilization, the radical act of imaginative empathy that makes you want to protect the children of monstrous people and exact revenge upon them for their crimes against humanity. No doubt this belief has led to much cultural intolerance, conversion at swordpoint and unnecessary bloodshed. But it has also produced a compassionate, empathetic universalism that we also associate with the West.

That is what is on the line as we stare down the climate crisis and the psychiatric comorbidities it is generating in the human brain. And there is only one way out of this: we have to build a movement that will actually confront the omnicide, not just one like, the world’s Green Parties that pay lip service to doing so, while flooring the gas over the cliff, or one that will not just throw cans of soup at it. That isn’t climate politics; it’s post-political climate nihilism. Because, like it or not, the battle against the Greenhouse Effect is also the Fourth Punic War.

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Canadian Politics Has Been Reduced To an Intramural Petroleum Industry Dispute

Yesterday, flanked by indigenous elders in elaborate neo-traditionalist ceremonial dress, David Eby, the BC premier recently installed by the fossil fuel industry in a bloodless coup, announced another amazing Identitarian “first,” the first indigenous-owned indigenous-led liquefied natural gas export terminal. Far be it from me to suggest that indigenous people should be held to higher standards of environmental stewardship than their settler neighbours. While I disagree with the Haisla Nation’s decision to cash in on the LNG bubble, I disagree with it no more or less than I disagree with the BC government’s decision to do the same. It is racist to expect indigenous people, who continue to disproportionately suffer from poverty, to forego economic opportunities their settler neighbours take.

That stated, I plan to oppose this second Kitimat-area terminal as vehemently as I do Royal Dutch Shell’s terminal up the road.

The reason I draw attention to “climate champion” Eby’s ceremonial announcement is in an effort to explain one of the central paradoxes of post-political Anglo America. The fact is that the more vigorously our parties campaign on the need to fight climate change, the faster emissions and extraction increase when they are in power. So-called conservative parties that campaign on denying or minimizing human agency and the role of atmospheric carbon in climate, and promise enthusiastic patronage of the oil industry consistently sink fewer new wells, finance fewer pipelines and increase emissions and extraction more slowly than their progressive counterparts.

How is an ecologically conscious voter to determine whom to support at the polls when a party’s positions and promises on fossil fuels are not merely unrelated but inversely correlated to what happens when the party governs? And how do we explain this phenomenon?

In our post-political age, explanation and blame have become confused. Blaming individual malefactors for a problem is the opposite of explaining the problem. “Bad people” is not really an explanation for anything, by itself. Sure, I may feel that NDP leader John Horgan and Green Party leader Andrew Weaver are malefactors and sell-outs for the mass of increases in fossil fuel subsidies and fracking increases over which they presided in their three years co-governing BC. But it grows clearer to me by the day that this is bigger than individuals.

While I oppose the fossil fuel industry, as a whole, as do most people who have spent as much of their lives fighting the Greenhouse Effect as I have, one of our collective failings has been in understanding how divided and non-monolithic the fossil fuel sector is and how different parts of it operate by opposing logics.

Big Oil, transnational corporations like BP and Royal Dutch Shell, especially those that are primarily based in Europe, have different interests than small and medium-sized domestic oil companies that dot the Canadian Prairies and Boreal Forest.

The genius—and I don’t use this term in a flattering way—of Rachel Notley, and the reason she may return to the Alberta premiership in 2024 is that Notley realized that conservative parties of the West were controlled by the interests of small and medium-sized oil and carry out the agenda of that constituency, even when they contradicted the interests of Big Oil. Furthermore, there were a number of ways in which the New Democrats and other progressive parties, like the Greens, were better situated to be Big Oil’s friends in government. Nationally, that insight by Gerald Butts, the man behind the rise of Justin Trudeau, fundamentally shaped the new Liberal Party of Canada that returned to office the same year Notley was elected in Alberta.

First of all, there is the matter of class adjacency. Elizabeth Cull, the Hill and Knowlton fossil fuel lobbyist who installed Eby by disqualifying his competitors from the race to succeed Horgan, is typical of the kind of people who transact the power of Big Oil: members of the professional courtier class that exists within the larger commissar class, moving between appointed government positions, elected government positions and lobbyist work with ease. Paying a monthly retainer to a company like Hill and Knowlton, which has a stable of courtiers to lobby the government, both formally and informally, is the way Big Oil prefers to get business done and changes made in this country.

Small and medium-sized oil, on the other hand, are still based around an owner class that does not tend to delegate nearly as much of its political influencer work to the courtier class but instead works to create broad social consensus in oil-dependent communities. Both formal and informal lobbying work is still done but tends to be more owner-based, more publicly visible and, when professional lobbyists are used, they tend to be social and economic outliers within the commissar class’s professional courtiers.

Small and medium-sized oil tend to be investors and owners of locally-based firms who lack the spending power to make serious capital investments or who have to take them very slowly, in contradistinction to Big Oil. Small and medium-sized oil is interested in reducing regulatory and cleanup burdens to maximize the little liquidity that it has. Reduced regulation, reduced taxation, lower royalty fees: these are the priorities.

Big Oil has very different interests and priorities. It is interested in getting state support for major capital investments through tax reductions targeted specifically at those investments and not to the sector as a whole and through direct subsidies euphemized as “partnerships.” It also favours state patronage through law enforcement and land rezoning and prioritizes things like special squads of police specifically tasked with helping to drive pipelines and other infrastructure through hostile territory.

But more important than boutique tax concessions and co-investment in pipelines, terminals and other infrastructure, more important than turning local cops into industry brute squads, the most significant need of Big Oil is to maintain the support and continued patronage of its investors. Transnational oil companies have a global investor community to which they need to deliver dividends and maintain high share prices and from whom they need to secure funds for new investments.

In order to continue to secure investor capital in the European Union and Blue State America, they need to demonstrate to their investors that they support the Paris Agreement, net-zero by 2050, diversity, equity, inclusion, “just transition” and, as referenced in my opening paragraph, the holy grail of investor relations for Canadian projects: decolonization and indigenous reconciliation.

In other words, investing in Donald Trump’s USA is more dangerous and less profitable than investing in Joe Biden’s. Justin Trudeau’s photos marching with Greta Thunberg are very important for reassuring and gaining investment from liberal-minded, social democratic-voting members of the European and Pacific Coastal commissar class and haute bourgeoisie.

New pipelines get built faster in jurisdictions that do not approve 100% pipeline projects but only 70%. New wells are sunk faster in jurisdictions that protect some portion of their land from fossil fuel development, faster still, if those jurisdictions are unveiling new parks, plastic straw bans, electric car quotas and gas stove phase-outs. All of those things are a boon to investor relations professionals, professionals who work across the hall from the lobbyists in the most common type of lobbying firm, one with three practices: investor relations, public relations and government relations.

In essence, an especially retrograde type of post-politics has seized Canada’s already anemic managed democracy. It is our progressive parties that now represent the Big Banks, Big Oil and Big Pharma. Conservatives have been left with the table leavings in the form of generic drug manufacturers, local financial institutions and medium-sized oil. Fortunately for them, those running the real estate pyramid scheme on which the country is increasingly basing its economy, still tilt to the right.

What does this mean for me and people like me, politically? It means that until we can break the stranglehold of the commissar class on our public square, our party system and Canadian society as a whole, it will be impossible to cast an effective vote on the climate question. We once again find ourselves one step further back, further removed from politics.

Like it or not, the commissar class and their Woke orthodoxies have appointed themselves the level bosses of this phase of our video game. Until we break through the de-politicization of politics, their destruction of democratic institutions and processes and their control of the public square, all other politics is cut off from us. Only by restoring democracy and the public square can we get back to directly fighting the oil industry as a whole.

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“Are you by any chance the Mentiads? Well, it’s just that you look like Mentiads to me.” Canada, the Pirate Planet and Its Burgeoning Grief Industry

In what I consider to be both the greatest Doctor Who serial ever made and the most underappreciated work of the great Douglas Adams, there is a lot for modern Canadians to relate to in The Pirate Planet (1979). The story chronicles the planet of Zanak which teleports through space, envelops other planets and extracts the minerals and energy before leaving behind a lifeless, drained husk.

Its people live under an authoritarian regime that routinely carries out extra-judicial killings of dissidents, killings that are popular with the general public and cheered-on as a sad necessity of living in a prosperous society. The inhabitants of the planet do little work and appear to have no interest in understanding the automated processes that provide them a luxurious, indolent life.

The killings, it is revealed, are not simply about preventing the rise of dissident political movements. Because of the extraordinary scale of the death from which they are benefiting, events of mass death, when trillions of lifeforms and every ecosystem on a planet are annihilated in a single day, some sort of psychic energy is released causing the more sensitive, empathetic members of the population to become “Mentiads,” a group of telepaths who can pool their energies into gestalt capable of telekinesis.

When a planet is destroyed, the new Mentiad converts begin screaming “lifeforce dying!” When the Doctor first observes this, he asks whether this happens often to the afflicted man and the man’s friend replies “only when the Captain announces a new golden age of prosperity.” Ultimately, the more planets Zanak consumes, the more of its residents experience the psychic grief caused by unwittingly presiding over so much death and the more Mentiads come into being, swelling the ranks of the resistance, who ultimately confront the despots running their planet and destroy them with psychic powers.

Douglas Adams offers us a compelling metaphor to which many young environmentalists just starting off in the world can relate; I certainly did when I first saw the show in syndication when I was thirteen. In this story, we suddenly become conscious of the scale of the omnicide; it deeply upsets us and it spurs us to action.

But Adams actually warns us of the pitfalls of this story as well. When the Doctor arrives on Zanak, he castigates them for the fact that, until his arrival, they have not taken any action. All they have been doing is living in a cave in their creepy hooded robes, avoiding the government death squads and loudly lamenting the death of each new planet Zanak consumes, focusing all their efforts on identifying community members and building their grief-based gestalt.

And this is why I believe the Pirate Planet needs to be watched today more than ever. Because more and more of the energy and money needed to address the omnicide is being redirected into something called “climate grief.”

As I have observed more than once, if there is a single fairy tale that expresses the class politics of the ruling class, it is the Princess and the Pea, the fable in which a young woman who does not know she is a princess has a single dried pea placed under her mattress. She is so sensitive that she cannot sleep and tosses and turns all night. To try and make a bed soft enough, people keep adding more pillows and mattresses but she can always still feel the pea, even through a dozen eider down mattresses and pillows. This sensitivity reveals her to be the true princess.

Although the sensitivity politics of the original Enlightenment bourgeoisie, for and about whom the Princess and the Pea was written, were different from those of the contemporary Commissar Class, they have many points in common. It is for a future essay to describe the substantial differences between their respective politics of emotion and sensitivity.

When members of that class engage in dominance competitions in meetings or other interactions, both inside and outside the workplace, they are structured by competitive claims of special identities (white-passing Indigenous, psychologically disabled and non-binary are favourites because any assertive high-status white man can make them) and demonstrations of emotional upset, ideally tears.

There is no world leader more effective at the latter than Canada’s own Justin Trudeau who has perfected the art of using his tears as a replacement for government action or public policy. And the BC legislature, the most Woke legislature in the country passed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous people and all eighty-seven members of the chamber had a big long cry together. And then went back to their multipartisan campaign of sending heavily-armed security forces to incarcerate the Wet’suwet’en land defenders to smash a new gas pipeline through their territory.

It is not that people cry while they act on climate or Indigenous rights. It is that they cry instead of acting.

Our governments constantly cry about things they are still doing and apologize for wrongs committed by the dead. So, naturally, aspiring commissars desire opportunities to demonstrate their own sensitivity, shed their own tears so as to rise is status within their class. And consequently, there is money to be made. Climate grief seminars, courses and retreats are being rolled out by private institutes and public universities. Zoom calls comprising a dozen middle aged white women each with “she/her” pronouns next to their names, in case anyone was going to get confused, allow the Woke to engage in miniature practice competitions to become the Apex Victim. And they can come away from the call all feeling like they have done environmental activism that day, that they are, in some small way, the Mentiads.

The area of environmental action that has been most damaged by this turn is the forensic. Efforts we used to put into assessing responsibility for quasi-natural disasters, magnified by human negligence we now put into mourning floods and fires. What has sped this up is increasing government funding for “commemoration,” “mourning” and “grief.”

And this phenomenon is not just limited to climate or environmental issues. Grief money is spreading into more sectors as demonstrations of sensitivity replace action as a new frontier in the post-political.

In 2021, the Trudeau government unveiled tens of millions of dollars in new spending on murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls. Although four government commissions in the Highway of Tears area have all had the same two core recommendations since 2000, close the camps and restore daily bus service. None of this money went into buses going anywhere, never mind a government even considering doing anything other than expanding the man camp system faster. The biggest area of funding increase and the fastest money to be released was, of course, money for commemoration, mourning and grief.

I am not one to suggest that we should not experience grief about the omnicide. I cry about it myself every couple of days and, in my social time, my friends and I talk each other through the grief over a pint or nine. But we do not mistake those times for taking action against the Greenhouse Effect. There is more work to be done than ever when it comes to taking down the fossil fuel industry. And the work continues to grow more urgent every day.

Wake up people! We’re not the Mentiads. Your tearful gestalt does nothing. Because this is reality, not science fiction.

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Canada Needs Land Reform (part 2): Rural Land Reform Lessons from Latin America

One of the most significant differences between Canada and the other countries of the Western Hemisphere has been not just what it has (or has not) done in response to the massive dispossession and oppression of Indigenous people during the European conquest but where that impetus has come from.

As I stated previously, most countries in the Americas have sought democratic political resolutions to land inequity through their legislatures. Candidates have run in elections on platforms of reconciliation, been elected and carried these programs out to varying degrees of success. The history of Canada has no such episode and recent Canadian history shows no real attempts.

In 1969, the Pierre Trudeau government put forward its white paper on Indigenous peoples, proposing termination, the legal doctrine the US had unsuccessfully applied 1894-1933 and which Mexico had tried 1857-1920 to similarly disastrous effect. Not only did First Nations leaders oppose this policy and rebuke the Trudeau government but so did many settler Canadian voters, not so much because they opposed abolishing Indigenous “status” and Reserve governments but because this radical rewriting of settler-Indigenous relations had not been placed before voters in the 1968 election.

Since Trudeau’s shelving of the doctrine of termination before the 1972 election, pretty much every significant advance in Indigenous rights in Canada has emanated not from parliament and the provincial legislatures but from the courts. As rehearsed in my essay last fall, this has produced a number of perverse and pernicious effects when it comes to resolving the land question.

With the exception of BC Premier Mike Harcourt’s proposed BC Treaty Commission, which failed to settle one single demand for land reform during its decade in operation, political leaders no longer go to the voters with plans for settling the Indigenous land question in the form of any discernible government program. Their essential message is that they will ape the language of the courts and follow the decisions of the courts because it is the judicial not the legislative branch of government that should decide the land question with respect to Indigenous peoples.

When it comes to the land crisis experienced by settlers, along with non-status, Métis and off-reserve Indigenous people, a completely different, unconnected, siloed conversation ensues. First of all, once treaties are off the table, the land question is thought to be a wholly provincial matter, or at least has functionally been so since (a) crown land south of 60 degrees was distributed to the provinces and not the federal government since the 1867, and (b) the federal government abandoned its guarantee of every Canadian enjoying a “right to shelter” when it defunded federal housing programs and enacted the Canada Health and Social Transfer legislation that untied provincial transfer payments from housing guarantees.

Shockingly, even though the vast majority of land in every province west of the Gaspé is state-owned “crown land,” governments have not come to the voters with land redistribution plans to alleviate unemployment or the housing affordability crisis. And in a divisive and perverse move, they have argued that because so much land is covered by flawed, corrupt and non-consensual “numbered treaty” system, treaties whose meanings are in dispute and often before the courts or, was simply seized by the state without a treaty, it would violate the rights of Indigenous people to redistribute land to settlers.

In reality, neither settlers nor any group of Indigenous people have meaningful, functional, stable access to the crown land near them, nor do they have any democratic control over its use, as it is typically under the direct control of forest, fossil fuel, bottled water or mining companies, or of provincial government departments responsible for selling water, minerals and timber.

The only programs remotely resembling what one might call “land reform” were some experimental pilot “community woodlot” programs in Western Canada in the 1990s, where some crown land was alienated to a local municipality or corporation with community ownership to be controlled for the limited purpose of producing wood for a local mill. Multi-use, non-extractive use, these forms of community land tenure are not even on the table, not even part of the debate.

Meanwhile in our cities and towns, the housing affordability crisis is being fobbed-off on the private sector in the same way the Indigenous land question is being fobbed-off on the judiciary. Provinces and cities rarely use their own land to solve housing problems; even when they decide to take public land and dedicate it to housing, the first step in that process is typically privatization, after which times, the failure of the land to provide what it was intended for is blamed on the free market.

This is a messed-up state of affairs but the good news is that it is uniquely Canadian. If we stopped seeing our land crisis as multiple, separate, siloed or competing land crises but as one, we could chart a different course. And if we saw our legislatures, not our courts or our markets as the place where our land problems are solved, we could chart a different course. Finally, if we looked to the rest of the continent at how to build majority coalitions for land reform, we could create the social movement needed to chart that course.

The Mexican Revolution was a complex, multi-phase, multi-faction process that effectively re-founded Mexico a century after its initial separation from the Spanish Empire in 1821. The basis of this re-founding was the restoration of something Mexicans call the ejido. Previously privatized lands that had been held by major landowners and foreign corporations were seized by the government and redistributed to rural cooperatives.

Eligibility for these lands was based on three main things: (1) the grassroots, inclusive and cooperative nature of the project, (2) the economic viability of the business it sought to create and (3) the material need for the land. In other words, the government redistributed land to the rural proletariat and peasants based on self-organization on the basis of class.

Of course, it went without saying that the primary beneficiaries of the ejido were Indigenous Mexicans because class and race function synergistically. Consequently, this policy proved very popular with Indigenous people. But it was also popular with the non-Indigenous rural poor because it did not walk back the reforms of 1857 that had abolished separatist race-based courts and race-based systems of land tenure. The fact the ejido equally available to settlers and Indigenous people located in the same geographical and class position.

The ejido proved the most popular and long-lasting of the many reforms of the Mexican Revolution but was ultimately destroyed as a condition of Mexico joining NAFTA in 1994. This attempt to re-privatize the ejido has led to an ongoing insurgency, the Zapatistas, in Southern Mexico for the past generation.

Between 1950 and 1953, Guatemala undertook a hugely popular land reform program very different from the Mexican one. There, the government expropriated private land the big fruit companies had left fallow for three or more consecutive years. This land was then parceled as family farm plots and distributed to families who had previously been sharecroppers on the fruit companies’ lands. The government assessed a market value and automatically qualified the landless family receiving the land for a mortgage with the government bank. Families began working the land and paying off their mortgages within months and Guatemala’s banana production actually rose; but much more importantly, kitchen gardens got a lot bigger and families were able to meet more of their food needs on their own land.

The program was so successful and popular with the peasants that the fruit companies convinced the Eisenhower Administration to remove the government in a coup and begin reversing the reform in 1954.

As in Mexico, the overwhelming majority of the beneficiaries were Indigenous but, as in Mexico, the land reform was based on people’s class, location and financial need. And the reforms were popular because they benefited a broad class-based coalition from all three of the country’s main castes (i.e. races), indio, ladino and criollo.

Another interesting example of land reform was that of the Peruvian dictatorship installed by the Johnson Administration at the beginning of 1969. Whereas the Mexican and Guatemalan revolutionaries were anti-capitalist (despite the Guatemalan reform being a capitalist reform designed to move the country forward historically, in the style of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1980s China), the Peruvian regime was installed by the US as a bulwark against communism and an example of how even something like land reform is possible under capitalism.

Unlike the Mexicans and Guatemalans, the junta running Peru was constrained by its alliance with the US from engaging in uncompensated expropriation. But years of corruption and tax fraud allowed the government to purchase land far below market value because the owner had been paying property taxes based on land values artificially depressed by fraud and collusion between tax assessors and the landlord class.

Like Mexico’s land reform, self-organized cooperatives rather than family units were the beneficiaries of the reform and the types of cooperatives were evaluated based on similar metrics to Mexico but with greater sensitivity to the wide diversity of Peruvian ecosystems, commodities and the amount of processing required before goods were sold for further processing or sent to market. Whereas Mexico and Guatemala had already gone through a process of termination, eliminating Indigenous land tenure, Peru had not. This meant that the junta converted pre-existing Indigenous collective lands into land cooperatives, not dissimilar to the Alaskan reorganization that was taking place at the same time. In this way, land reform was the means by which Peru effected termination.

Yet, termination was embraced by most Indigenous groups because the new cooperatives were more dynamic, democratic and prosperous and meaningfully more land. Complications later arose with these Indigenous lands but the complications stemmed not from objections to the loss of traditional forms of land tenure and government but the tendency of small holders to function more as neighbourhoods of independent yeoman farms with only superficial economic cooperation.

As with the other examples, there is a common theme: reform was conducted based on class; settlers and Indigenous of that class benefited equally; the overall program primarily benefited Indigenous people.

I am not proposing to copy any of these, except with respect to one thing. Canada should embark on a project of land reform that is driven not by the courts or the private sector but by our parliament and legislatures. And that project should benefit and be supported by a broad coalition of Canadians needing land, rural and urban, settler and Indigenous. In the next piece, I will look at global examples of reforming and redistributing urban land.

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Canada Needs Land Reform (part 1): We Are Not As Divided As We Think

One of the reasons the establishment has been so keen to import US-style cultural politics and the moral panics they generate into Canada is that keeping Canadians divided culturally grows more important every year as our material interests and needs become increasingly aligned. The growing disagreements in Canada about gay rights, women’s rights, free speech and coercive public health measures mask a broad convergence on the material interests of Canadians.

Today, there are virtually no ordinary, decent working people in this country who are not victims of Canada’s land inequity crisis. Most land in this country is owned by the banks or by real estate and development firms. Now, it is true that much of that land is technically held in the name of one or more individual Canadian “homeowners” but most of these individuals are functionally indistinguishable from renters. They must transfer a vast amount of money to a third party to avoid the loss of their home and subsequent eviction. In some senses, the average heavily mortgaged property owner has less housing security than the average renter because more legal protections exist against eviction that repossession.

For a while, this thing urbanites call “the affordability crisis” was largely limited to cities and resort areas but in recent years, all Canadian real estate, from un-serviced lots in Central New Brunswick to bungalows in the village of Valemount (despite the closure of its only sawmill and main employer), has massively inflated in cost and can only be purchased with the “assistance” of a bank.

Since Covid’s arrival on the scene, rents in rural industrial and agricultural communities have increased faster than those in resort and urban areas, almost catching up. That means that whether renting or owning, a home is an increasingly exorbitant cost and the largest cost in almost all household budgets.

Even among people who owe little or nothing to a bank, things are scarcely better. That is because as housing and land prices rise astronomically, property tax rates do not even need to increase for annual property tax bills to double in the space of less than half a decade. This is especially impactful because those who own their homes outright or almost entirely are typically seniors or people at the very end of their working life.

And because neither private- nor public-sector pensions have kept up with inflation, RRSPs grow more unreliable as the stock market in which they play grows ever more casino-like and our governments keep stripping away legal protections for private sector and union pension funds, not only are seniors incomes both volatile and in decline, they are caught in a double bind. They need their home to continue to appreciate in value so as to deal with rising inflation rates, declining income and declining income security by selling or borrowing against their home.

Finally, there are the Canadians who live on Indian Reserves. While these people’s housing is technically “free,” chronic shortages mean that not everyone entitled to reserve housing can obtain it or are forced into incompletely constructed, incompletely renovated or dilapidated housing. Furthermore, those who are unemployed (and on-reserve unemployment rates remain more than double off-reserve unemployment rates) typically have half or more of their provincial government income assistance withheld as it is categorized as a “shelter allowance.” And as we well know, a shocking proportion of those houses are connected to inferior or non-existent utility grids, often lacking in everything from reliable electricity to potable water to internet access.

Few reserve governments have been permitted by provincial or federal governments to levy their own taxes (the Sechelt and the Nisga’a nations being notable exceptions). Consequently, with such woefully insufficient and insensitive block grant funding from the federal government, reserve governments do not have a ready mechanism to fund infrastructure improvements, housing repairs or new housing. Urban reserves have increasingly turned to using their own meagre land holdings to conduct real estate megaprojects that they hope will produce a secure revenue stream. And rural reserves have been forced to accept “benefit agreements” from forestry and mining companies in exchange for endorsing industrial activities on their traditional territories.

In other words, young or old, rural or urban, conservative or progressive, owner or renter, Canadians are suffering under and trapped in an intensifying national land crisis. And a key part of the establishment’s trick in intensifying and profiting from this crisis has been to redescribe it as a set of unconnected, separate problems or, worse yet, a set of competing priorities canceling each other out in a perverse zero-sum.

Let me just list some of the most egregious and obvious ways Canadians are being divided on the land question:

Owners versus Non-Owners

Most Canadians who “own” their home are in one of two situations: (a) the bank owns their property and they need its value to appreciate because mortgage payments are so high, there is not room in the family budget for adequate retirement savings; they rely on constant appreciation to replace lost retirement savings and declining pensions; (b) they own their property almost entirely or outright but are now living on a fixed retirement income that is steadily declining against inflation and a finite number of RRSPs they will run out of in a few years; they too rely on constant appreciation as their sole source of new equity and income.

Non-owners are generally in two groups, lifelong renters and aspiring owners. Neither group is served in any way by the continuous rapid appreciation of housing. Rising mortgage costs due to appreciation and interest rates raise rents in the basement suites and laneway homes in which an ever-increasing proportion of our renters live, also driving up prices in purpose-built rental as basement suites typically occupy the bottom of the rental market. Obviously, constantly increasing home prices pull potential homes out of the reach of first-time buyers with the consistency of Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown every year.

As both groups’ financial desperation intensifies, so too does their polarization. Every years one group needs prices to rise even more, just as the other needs them to stop rising.

Landlords versus Tenants

A witty publication in my home town coined the term “artisanal landlording” last year. It pointed to the fact that a shockingly large proportion of people’s rental housing needs are being met in basement suites or laneway homes by landlords who are renting-out between one and three suites in order to meet crippling monthly mortgage payments. These artisanal landlords typically have full-time jobs and often children as well. In addition to being short of time, they often lack even the most basic building maintenance and repair skills and knowledge and often also lack the liquidity to engage tradespeople in a timely manner to deal with matters as urgent as blocked plumbing or malfunctioning heating systems.

Without any real control over rising mortgage payments, these landlords often lack financial wriggle room when provincial governments cap rental increases at a level lower than their costs have increased and are often one major flood or other architectural disaster away from their whole miniature real estate empire collapsing like a house of cards. For this reason, they often have an incentive to be slow and inattentive to repairs because, in most provinces, a landlord can only make major rent increases when switching tenants.

Tenants, consequently, face not just rents increasing as fast as legally permitted. They are dealing with increasingly incompetent, underresourced, overworked and harried amateur caretakers who will try to push them out of their home if met with a big bill or mortgage payment hike. Furthermore, tenants who live at closest quarters with their landlords and being set up to have the most acrimonious relationships. Worse still, these declining standards in the promptness and quality of maintenance and repair work in these isolated new units allow purpose-built rental businesses to cut back on their repair and maintenance spending.

Indigenous People versus Settlers

In both rural and urban environments, Indigenous people are usually the most underhoused, poorly housed and insecurely housed people. And most are associated with a “traditional territory” on which they have no title, sovereignty or rights of occupation, except at a theoretical, legal, unenacted level.

As I have long suggested, the “land acknowledgement” is one of the most odious woke racist humblebrags out there. Settlers stand in front of other settlers and engage competitive acts of weepy, emotional histrionics about how guilty they feel about doing whatever they want with the land they are standing on without, themselves, consulting anyone Indigenous about what they are doing.

In rural areas, land injustice is thrown into sharper relief than it can be in any urban environment. Tiny Indian Reserves sit in the middle of huge swaths of alienated public land, realms the size of European countries that have been alienated to pipeline, mining and forest companies. This technically public or “crown” land containing trap lines, spawning streams, sacred and historic sites and other sources of long-term sustenance, both financial and physical but it is under the sole dictatorial control of a single resource-extraction company that sees no value in other things the land produces. Indeed, it is in the interest of these companies to ruin things of value to other economic sectors as quickly as possible to reduce land use conflicts over precious things: destroy the biggest trees, most beautiful vistas and the richest sources of fish and game first.

But what many in Southwestern BC miss is that the settler towns are not in any significantly different position. Like many living on Reserve, many are of mixed Indigenous descent and have a variety of legal statuses with respect to their personal Indigeneity. Like many living on Reserve, they depend both on short-term jobs from the companies liquidating the natural capital on the land around them, and on that land not being liquidated so that it can provide recreation, food and a sense of place and belonging.

If one lives in the extractive belt from Timmins to Terrace, whether one is a settler, on-Reserve Indigenous person or off-, one enjoys no democratic control over the land around one’s community. Decisions are made by corporate boards or branch offices of transnational corporations in Calgary, Vancouver or Toronto, overseen by governments comprising legislators mainly elected in suburbs and cities far, far away.

The most demoralizingly extractive jobs, which often involve the physical destruction of places and activities with which one has grown up are, outside of white collar government work, pretty much the only family-supporting jobs in much of Western Canada’s rural industrial periphery. Consumers in the city demand wood, natural gas, pulp, etc. and then blame the workers who do their bidding for the environmental destruction they, themselves, have demanded they enact. Consequently, it is crucially important to prevent any multi-racial class-based alliance among the workers of Canada’s rural industrial periphery.

Dividing rural workers on a racial basis has been the strategy of the establishment in the West since the first cannery started paying a different wages to Chinese migrants, Anglo migrants, Tlingits and Tsimshians. But our current situation is best traced back to the 1980s and 90s when the combined effects of unsustainable over-cutting and mechanization thinned the ranks of Canada’s International Woodworkers of America from 40,000 to 8,000. The 1990s mining industry capital strike in BC and Saskatchewan produced similar effects in adjacent industries.

Whereas bush work had been largely racially integrated (even if the towns in which the workers lived often fell short of that mark with de facto restaurant, laundromat and other commercial business segregation), the layoffs were not. The minority who managed to keep their logging, mill and mining jobs were whiter than those who lost them.

Reserve governments are often as or more motivated to sign benefit agreements in order to guarantee jobs for unemployed residents as they are to gain a new revenue stream. Guarantees of a portion of new pipeline, mining or logging jobs, however temporary they may be are the best shot these communities have at resolving catastrophically high on-reserve joblessness. But those agreements are made in the context of a zero sum of bush work; every job gained by someone living off-reserve is a job that doesn’t go to someone who resides in a conventional municipality or regional district.

Similarly, court-mandated and government-negotiated land claims settlements are reasonably understood by those living off-reserve as endangering one of the few sources of non-government employment in the region. In other words, both the benefit agreements won by pro-industry reserve governments and the land claims made by traditional, hereditary governments are understood as either transferring settler and non-status bush work jobs to Indigenous people or annihilating them altogether.

A Call For Unity

But what if we swept all this aside? What if instead of pitting people against each other, we recognized that the real problem is this: forest companies, mining companies and banks have seized control of our land, the land of all people living in this country. What if we took our land back, together? What if #LandBack was not code for transferring title and sovereignty from people of one race to people of another? What if it stood for ordinary, decent, working people coming together to take our land back from the super-rich and the transnational corporations they control and use to extract the value of our land, of our work?

What if we realize that we were all being manipulated to fight each other, as a distraction by the bastards who have stolen our land and reap astronomical profits from it? The next several articles in this blog will be about how we might overcome the obstacles to building a coalition of settlers and Indigenous people, on-reserve and off-reserve, urban and rural, renter and small owner to take our land back together and all gain more land, more financial security and true political independence.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Race | fusangite |

#LandBack, #DefundThePolice and the Hashtag Politics That Have Revealed Progressives As the True Conservatives: A Jeremiad for National Indigenous Peoples Day

This is the first of three posts that will bring together the two prior series and culminate in something I have not put forward in over two years: a positive idea about where Canadians might direct their energies to create a society with the resilience to save what we can and share the losses equitably as we face the Extinction Event. Two of these posts are dedicated to specific conversations I had in 2021 that challenged me and reshaped my thinking in productive ways. The final post in the series will be dedicated to Quaker writer Arwen Brenneman who asked me to write something in this blog that was not merely critical but aspired to a practical action or goal. This one I dedicate to Zionist geneticist Jonathan Sheps who helped to realign my understanding of what radical politics is and is not.

BDS and the Rise of Hashtag Post-Politics

I am a socialist who opposes the current practices of the Israeli state and finds the continuous acts of dispossession, disenfranchisement and punitive expeditions into the West Bank and Gaza strip unconscionable, and Israel’s participation in the wider Middle Eastern practice of using non-citizen residents as right-less labour deeply disappointing. But I have struggled to support the BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions) movement, not just because, as a university instructor, its demands were uncomfortably close to putting a “No Jews” sign outside my classroom. There was something more on which I could not put my finger.

And Jonathan explained it. By appending “right of return” and other demands it would be impossible to meet to its list of reasonable demands, BDS had rendered its program not radical but instead functionally impossible. There is simply no way to get to the spatial and demographic order of the Palestinian mandate in 1948 from our present location in space-time. There is no remotely humane way to reverse all of the shifts not just in who lives where but how land is used, how land is legally held, how local hydrology and physical infrastructure have radically shifted, etc. There is no way to undo three quarters of a century of intermarriage, shifting political views and shifting economic aspirations.

By staking out, not a radical solution, like the idea of a multi-confessional, multi-ethnic unitary state of Israel-Palestine that Meretz, the coalition of Arabs and Jews, greens, socialists and the original kibbutzim movement that sits in the Knesset is beginning to articulate, but an impossible one, BDS actually confers a kind of permission on the Israeli government to continue its oppression of the Palestinian people. Because it refuses to advocate something that could actually happen.

BDS, which began as a campus campaign, was one of those political movements that functioned as a vanguard for many upsetting new political developments that are often grouped under the broad category of “wokeness.” Incubating in elite liberal arts colleges in the US and then diffusing out through the larger university system, a new kind of politics emerged, a post-political politics.

Post-political movements are, in my view, fundamentally grounded in despair. They are founded in an assumption that we, as a society, have lost the ability to come together, agree on a program for improving our collective lot and using democratic power to challenge the powerful interests standing in the way of those aspirations. Having given up on the idea of actually doing politics, post-political movements have two main foci: (a) punishing malefactors (bad people and bad institutions) and (b) describing an aspirational political order that, while appealing, cannot be reached from where we are currently located in the space-time continuum.

The Neo-McCarthyism or “cancel culture” of Wokeness is how the first is manifest. Demanding that the “right of return” whereby everyone descended from an Arab lineage pushed off their land in Israel-Palestine since 1948 be permitted to return and seize the property from its present occupant and that those occupants then relocate to wherever their ancestors were in 1948 is not just the worst game of musical chairs ever imagined; it is neither possible nor desirable. It represents not so much justice as it does an additional layer of somehow compensatory injustice in the spirit of Monty Python’s Dennis Moore.

The essential conservatism of BDS’s agenda is that while it advocates causing harm to those it blames for the Israeli occupation, it defends the status quo by arguing, via the impossibility of its demands, that there is no alternative. While BDS formed the vanguard of this kind of post-politics (as distinct from genuinely radical politics, like, for instance, declaring the Jubilee), its innovations have helped to deform popular movements into a post-political form.

Take, for instance, #MeToo. First of all, it is no coincidence that the movements I will be offering as examples henceforth will begin with hashtags. Remember folks: social media platforms are the tools of billionaires who wish to promote post-political behaviour, not just because actual politics would threaten their power but because their social media platforms are where most of post-politics takes place.

#MeToo entailed thousands of women singling-out men who had been sexually violent or abusive with them and calling them out in the public square, attempting to inflict reputational punishment on them. But when Mia Kirschner attempted to intervene in this debate by talking about the structural, institutional and procedural changes that could protect women from sexual and gender-based violence in the workplace, no one took much notice.

Kirschner, by seeking practical reforms, like contractual stipulations and changes in the law to prohibit the kinds of behaviours in which monsters like Harvey Weinstein habitually engaged, placed herself and her ideas outside the discourse of #MeToo. That is because #MeToo was post-political; no one really held out hope that we could change our culture, laws and institutions to prevent a future Weinstein, Roman Polanski or Woody Allen from abusing his power. So instead, we settled for doing patriarchy’s housecleaning for it, clearing out the men who had lost the continence necessary to keep their abuses sufficiently private and replacing them with more continent men, at least for now.

When people defend the #DefundThePolice movement to me, the conversation always starts off funny. Almost inevitably, one of the first things its defenders say is “of course, we don’t really want to defund the police. It’s really irresponsible of the media to portray us as people who want to completely defund law enforcement.” I feel like I have already made my point but I will continue. Obviously, if you do not want the police defunded, you probably should not call your movement “Defund the Police.” Except the movement only sort of made that decision, it was mostly made by Twitter moderators paid to do the bidding of the investor class.

But, these valiant defenders aside, many people like Kwantlen University Criminology Professor Jeff Shantz do argue that we should simply stop paying the police and allow volunteers to take over. But does anyone really think that is possible or desirable? There are many organizations, including a number of local motorcycle clubs who would love to take over that file. In fact, there are so many groups of young men with guns that would like to take this job on as volunteers that the state’s monopoly on violence would soon be a thing of the past and groups of “volunteers” would “compete” in a free and open marketplace for control of our streets.

Surely, nobody wants that. Nobody really wants to relinquish the small amount of public control we have over the cops because they need us to write their paycheques, surely. What we want are radical reforms to law enforcement with respect to training, promotion, recruitment and command structures; we want a broader, shared, interdisciplinary, cooperative first responder approach with firefighters, child protection workers, etc. What is needed is a way to arrest and begin to reverse Anglo America’s police forces incremental transformation into fascist paramilitaries indifferent to our democratic institutions.

But because defunding the police is the most effective way to most dramatically intensify and accelerate that process, everyone can rest assured that it will not happen, that even the most fascistic among us do not want to go that far that fast. And, as a result, demands for reform, even minor reform are effectively shouted down by a demand for that which is either impossible or undesirable.

The Rise of the #LandBack Hashtag and the Racism That Lurks Behind It

Much like the Monty Python debate between the Minister for Home Affairs and A Small Patch of Brown Liquid (probably a creosote derivative used in industrial varnishing), Justin Trudeau seems bewilderingly proud of his record on Indigenous issues, having promised to provide potable water to every reserve that lacked it back in 2015. As we approach the one-year anniversary of his third election victory, seven years later, his government has fixed the toxic water systems of exactly zero reserves. Nothing has been done. Not only has nothing been done; work has not even started.

Following multiple multi-million-dollar commissions and inquiries by the federal and provincial governments across Canada into murdered and missing Indigenous women over the past twenty years, rates of murder, rape and disappearance continue to increase. And following the key recommendations of every one of these commissions, not to mention the scholarly consensus in the field i.e. cheaper, more available interurban transportation and the elimination of fly-in worker “man camps,” we have systematically cut interurban transit and increased the number of man camps across Western Canada.

We have also invested in a special unit of RCMP officers who are deployed to deal with uppity Natives who seek to protect their land from non-consensual development. These officers have shown, time and again, a willingness to run roughshod over civil liberties, to gratuitously and punitively destroy Indigenous people’s property, sabotage trap lines, illegally hold journalists without bail and treat peaceful protesters with brutality.

It is into this maelstrom of colonial racism that #LandBack has appeared as a hashtag, a kind of BDS on steroids. The idea is that we should return land ownership to the Indigenous people whose ancestors held it before the arrival of colonists. Such an idea is both impossible and undesirable.

Does anyone really believe that 2% of Canadians should own all the land inhabited by the other 98%, that the 320 members of the Semiahmoo Nation should own all the land and make all the land use decisions for the 100,000 people living in White Rock and South Surrey? Does anyone believe that, for instance, Afro-Nova Scotians should lose all their land to the Mi’kmaq people because they lack the requisite seniority to own land in Nova Scotia? What about the Doukhobors and Jews who fled persecution and pogroms of Tsarist Russia? Or Punjabi refugees who fled Indira and Rajiv Gandhi’s extralegal killings of those who desired a Sikh homeland? Or just regular working white folks who have saved, possibly across generations, to hold a single piece of land to provide some small modicum of physical and financial security against the troubles to come?

Also, let us remember that the way Indigenous people held land varied from place to place and time to time. On BC’s coast, society was highly vertical; land tenure was not equally shared within most polities; aristocrats held the land on behalf of commoners and slaves had no land rights at all. In many of these societies, there was extensive, programmatic body modification, often from birth, so that aristocrats, commoners and slaves could be recognized easily.

And because all other institutions in settler society have abdicated to the courts the entire settler burden of dealing with the land question, this has necessitated Indigenous people presenting themselves in ways that will be viewed most favourably by the court system. As a result, it has become a material necessity to maintain or, even, to reconstruct these systems of aristocratic status in order to obtain whatever limited land justice our judicial system sees fit to dispense.

It beggars belief that so many socialists choose to align themselves not with the egalitarians and levelers in Indigenous communities but instead with the neo-traditionalists and aristocrats whom our courts compel to continue putting on this show. Such alliances make sense to me as an environmentalist but the there is nothing socialistic to be found there.

But last summer we saw something lurking under the #LandBack hashtag that goes beyond the conservatism of simple post-politics and demands for the impossible. Lurking underneath is a real rage, a real hatred on the part of Wokes for Indigenous people who refuse to put on the neo-traditionalist show, people who have decided that Christianity or mathematical excellence or a love of motorized outdoor recreation, trucks and guns is part of their Indigeneity.

Because the reaction to the most recent rediscovery of the residential school graveyards was a wave of successful and attempted church arsons specifically directed at churches attended by Indigenous people today. It is here that we see the essential conservatism of Woke hashtag politics intensifying into a kind of Bizarro fascism. The message was clear to people like my friend Nathan, who spent nights last summer sleeping in the church he loves, guarding it from white settler arsonists, just as his Assiniboine ancestors had once guarded their homes in the Red River colony a century and a half before. The message is this: if you do not want to be an exhibit in our white guilt settler museum, you will be destroyed by fire.

The parasites who cheered those arsonists on with their #LandBack rhetoric have no real material interest in living together with Indigenous people or co-governing our country with them. Because they trade on a false otherness they assign to Indigenous people. Their tirades against “cultural appropriation” are actually insulation against themselves and others using their imaginative empathy to place themselves in the shoes of our Indigenous brothers and sisters.

They are leeches who need to keep open and bleeding the wounds of Indigenous Canada so that they can suck the blood of Indigenous people into their diversity and inclusion businesses, their endless government commissions, their “land acknowledgements” performed by white people for white people, all the while demonstrating their whiteness, the true basis of their entitlement to authority. Because to attain truly Anglo Canadian whiteness, you must wash your skin clean with those performative settler tears. And those tears will come less readily if we stop giving the children of Grassy Narrows mercury poisoning.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Race | fusangite |

What the Left Should Learn from the overturning of Roe v. Wade

It finally happened. Roe vs. Wade, one of the greatest pieces of liberal judicial activism of the twentieth century was struck down. For me, my comrades and millions of American women of childbearing age this is a tragic moment, another huge piece of the Cold War social democratic welfare state’s social contract sheared-off.

But this defeat was especially searing because, unlike P3s, a US-led global order, free trade, austerity and privatization, this was not a wind-assisted victory of an elite consensus. Because that is how people of the political left see those other losses: the establishment endorsed these things; they heavily bankrolled or Astro-turfed smaller or non-existent social movement groups to echo that consensus; they got pretty much all mainstream political parties, major corporations and the liberal media to present these things as not just beneficial but inevitable. “There is no alternative,” Margaret Thatcher said.

This win is different because the establishment was on our side and was, for the most part, against the movement that just won. While anti-abortion activists enjoy the support of some major corporations in America, they are not the majority; and while they enjoy the support of one of America’s major political parties, that support is not unanimous across jurisdictions. America’s extreme Northeast and Northwest still have pro-choice Republican parties. And it was not until the early 1990s that there was even one major mainstream anti-abortion media outfit, FoxNews. And it was not until the early 2000s that TV and movie dramas touching abortion, even on Fox, ultimately came down on the side of choice.

Finally, we must remember that, even in the religious sphere, most churches were not anti-abortion when Roe v. Wade was handed-down. The Roman Catholic Church officially and vehemently opposed abortion and so, partly to distinguish themselves from the largest single denomination (Catholics), most Protestants, including most Evangelicals used abortion as a means of distinguishing themselves from Catholics. Indeed, nothing short of a complete remaking of the American religious marketplace over the next four decades was necessary to create the near-consensus among regular churchgoers in the US that the state must regulate abortion. “Mainline” Protestant churches went from being the second-largest group of American churchgoers to a tiny portion comprising no more than a tenth; evangelicals pulled away from mainline denominations and joined with the rapidly-growing fundamentalist and Pentecostal movements; historically black churches soured on abortion; and churchgoing became a rural, rather than universal American pastime.

A grassroots movement, and one that does not enjoy the support of a majority of Americans, even today, conducted a half-century struggle and beat us.

Any person of any level of political seriousness must study this victory if they have any interest in beating the establishment at anything. Whether one agrees with the anti-abortion movement or vehemently opposes it, any person truly interested in a grassroots struggle against money and power should be studying this victory with a fine-toothed comb for years to come.

So, I thought I would offer a little bit of what I have learned, as an outsider, from my experiences of organizing with anti-abortion activists and the insights I gleaned, that other social movements would do well to follow.

In 1996, mathematician and political organizer Julian West and I decided to create a coalition of political parties and civil society organizations that would champion a provincial referendum on proportional representation. Early adopters who pulled in their organizations, and built our group, the Electoral Change Coalition (ECCO), so-named by Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation’s Troy Lanigan from the ground up. They included Troy, the BC Reform Party’s David Secord, the BC Marxist-Leninist Party’s Charles Boylan and the BC Family Coalition Party’s Kathleen Toth, among many others. As the organization evolved and took its various twists and turns, I worked with a number of anti-abortion folks on voting reform work, like Kathleen’s husband Mark, FCP candidate John O’Flynn, Christian Heritage Party leader Heather Stillwell, along with BC Reform Party pro-life insurgents Bev Welsh, backer of Wilf Hanni’s successful takeover of the party by the Christian Right, Wilf, himself and, finally, Chris Delany, the Bill Vander Zalm surrogate who merged Reform into the BC Unity Party.

In fact, my last speech as leader of the BC Green Party was as part of a panel on electoral reform the month after my defeat as party leader. It ended with a hug of appreciation for my work on the file from the Zalm himself.

ECCO’s sister, and later, successor organization was Fair Voting BC, founded by Nick Loenen, the Zalm’s seat-mate representing Richmond in the legislature 1986-91. Nick’s book on PR, the original bible of BC’s voting reform movement, A Case for Proportional Representation, was explicit in arguing that PR could be a vital tool whereby the anti-abortion advocates could wield real political power in the BC legislature and was crucial in piquing so much interest in PR on the Christian Right in the 1990s.
           

Most participants in our coalition were eager to try being in such a broad, disparate and diverse group but lacked cultural experience of this kind of work. And so it fell to those most experienced with this sort of thing to take the lead, and so our organization in many ways was imprinted with the style of coalition politics practiced by the anti-abortion movement.

Learning how to formulate complex communications, strategies and tactics with allies who disagree with most of one’s political views and find a significant portion of said views not just wrong but offensive is quite tricky. But this was a movement of Catholics who had persuaded members of evangelical churches that believed the Pope was the literal Antichrist to lock themselves to abortion clinic doors together.

A fundamental tenet of our meetings was that we needed to agree on as few things as possible; the more things we added to our list of points of agreement, the more likely the coalition was to fray, to collapse into arguments. Nearly every annual general meeting featured Canadians for Direct Democracy, a junior member of our coalition, attempting to get us to expand our mandate to include support for easier-to-use initiative legislation, binding referenda and other democratic reforms. Every time, CDD was voted down.

Because we learned from our Christian comrades that the strength of a coalition comes from its size and breadth and that every additional demand a coalition makes is one that makes is narrower, smaller and weaker, no matter how apparently small or intuitive.

We also learned how to have political conversations in which we could share stories about highly charged, highly polarizing political experiences by changing the kind of story they were. Stories of logging road and abortion clinic blockades ceased being stories about old growth forests and the human soul; they became stories about being the kind of person who does this sort of thing, the run-ins one has had with the courts and police. Kathleen and I shared stories about what it was like to be a beleaguered party leader in a small organization full of eccentrics and fanatics.

In this way, what we agreed on stayed small but what we could talk about was as much as any group of people thrown together possibly could. I especially savour the memory of one night when we went for drinks after staging our annual general meeting. Every year, we would re-elect Troy president and, as he was a member of the Taxpayer movement, we always counter-balanced this by having Charles, the Marxist-Leninist, give his nominating speech. That year we had got into quite a personal tussle with CDD, whose representatives had shouted “the president is a dictator! The president is a dictator!”

Troy was commiserating with us afterwards and said, “It’s like they think I’m some kind of Stalinist,” to which Charles replied, “I’m a big fan of yours Troy. I’ve got your back. But I consider Joseph Stalin to be just about the greatest human being who ever lived and I’ll be damned if you’re going to say another word against him.” We all laughed very hard after that, led by the CHP’s Heather Stillwell, if memory serves.

Another big thing I learned from the anti-abortion movement is that you can turn a media blackout into a kind of internal publicity and morale boost. A generation before one could share crowd photos and selfies on social media and be seen by thousands of eyes, North America’s anti-abortion movement trudged through a worse media blackout than any I have ever faced—and I sure have faced a couple.

In Canada, the mainstream media would cover nomination contests in the Liberals and Tories where anti-abortion candidates for office would fight it out at nomination meetings or, as the 90s wore on, suddenly find their nomination bids vetoed by the party leader. But this did not extend to other demonstrations of the sheer size of the mobilized anti-abortion movement. When abortion clinics were blockaded, mainstream media would assiduously ignore the confrontation, no matter the turnout, even when those blockades led to multiple arrests.

But the most extreme moment of the blackout would occur annually on “Life Chain” day in which anti-abortion protesters would link hands and form into incredible multi-block chains of as many as five thousand human beings at a single location. I even asked Kevin Evans, then-anchor of CBC British Columbia’s six o’clock news about this and he confirmed that not covering the Life Chain was a matter of shared policy among all major broadcasters.

Imagine Extinction Rebellion going years or even decades without a single word of their bridge and road blockages hitting the mainstream media!

But what I found was that the week after the Life Chain was the week anti-abortion activists were most serene. Rather than feeling cheated by the lack of coverage, there was a sense of purity, of power that came from being so intentionally and obviously ignored. The Life Chain imbued a sense of confidence, the sense that their adversaries had run out of ideas for stopping them but the chain was lengthening anyway, that the power they wielded was growing and nobody co-owned it; it was all theirs.

And the very absence of coverage, the media’s implicit denial of the movement’s momentum served as proof of the real momentum it genuinely possessed.

A third important feature that merits rehearsal is perhaps the most surprising to outsiders: standing behind female leaders and listening to women. Kathleen had risen to prominence as the last president of the Social Credit Ladies’ Auxiliary, succeeding its long-time head, Hope Wotherspoon, who had ascended to the presidency of the whole party. Social Credit was the last of BC’s political parties to hold separate (sometimes concurrent) women’s conventions. And as any man who has tried to interrupt an assertive Mormon woman knows, the best place to build strong leadership skills for women is in single-sex spaces.

Not only did the churches from which anti-abortionists hailed contain and defend single-sex spaces and single-sex leadership positions, the province’s natural governing party had refused to abandon the separate spheres model until the late 1980s. This meant that there were female leaders trained, tested and promoted in female-only spaces who could meet any room she entered authoritatively and command that space. Phyllis Schaffly was not an outlier; she was a type within the Christian Right, a woman who had learned to control a room, unmediated by male power.

Given that the first and most powerful interfaith organizations in Anglo America, all the way back to the WCTU, were female-led, there was an additional expectation that conditioned this organizing. It was expected that single-faith gatherings were clergy-led and therefore male led; but by the same token, it was expected that interfaith groups and other coalitions would be more appropriately led by women. And women seemed logically qualified because if there is one gender cliché of which progressives and conservatives equally partake it is the idea of the woman as social bridge-builder, peacemaker and fence-mender.

The last observation I will make is that anti-abortion activists shared something that used to be more universal among climate activists like me: a never-ending sense of urgency, the sense that lives were being lost, people were dying every day they did not win.

That kind of profound urgency actually keeps activists from working themselves to the point of burnout, because of the knowledge that one needs to be able to keep struggling every day, that one cannot give up until victory has been achieved.

But that sense of desperation also breeds a cold political calculation, one that is willing, on the large scale, to ride on the backs of the corrupt and godless Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, if that’s the only way to get to the Supreme Court. That desperation was enacted on the small scale every day, at the grassroots level.

Kathleen Toth and I didn’t just find a way to be joyful comrades because we were friendly people who love the other humans; we did so because we were desperate, so desperate as to not let some ethos of personal purity get in the way of making the deals we had to, to save the lives we understood ourselves to be trying to save.

If we really care about the issues that animate us, it behooves us to ask: (1) is our coalition broad enough, permissive enough? (2) can we build our power and momentum without needing others to recognize it? (3) do we have a pipeline that is producing powerful female leaders? and (4) if we are as desperate as we say, are we really doing all we can?

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Origins and Legacy of Anglo America’s Racial System, Part III of Questions Raised by the Trucker Convoy

In 1985, Stephen Rogers, British Columbia’s Minister of Forests committed a major gaffe that made headlines in BC’s paper of record, the Vancouver Sun. Rogers, the new minister, had just returned from a fact-finding trip to Mississippi. The Mississippi forest industry was presenting a greater and greater competitive challenge to BC forest products as BC;’s industry increasingly focused on chewing-up the boreal forest into particleboard or making similarly low-grade shakes and shingles, as the more impressive old growth began to run out and industrial reprocessing became more important.

But what landed Rogers in hot water was not anything he said about wood quality, technology or labour. What got him in trouble was his characterization of the workers in the Mississippi industry, whom he dismissed as “poor white trash.” It may surprise readers to note that those who called for his resignation or demotion attacked him for racism.

While the term “white trash” came, for a time, to define a much larger class-based group during the 1990s, back in the 1980s it still retained its original meaning from the 1600s. And, to understand where Rogers was coming from and the racism he invoked, it is necessary to say a bit about the ethnogenesis of America’s “white trash.”

From its inception, Britain’s colonial project in the Americas was sharply divided along North-South lines. Its northern colonies were populated by two main groups of colonists: religiously-motivated settlers who saw New England as a region where they could build a Calvinist society and free young men in high-risk occupations like logging, whaling and fur-trading. It was a society based around yeoman farming of subsistence crops by free people on small parcels of land. Boston was a vibrant emerging city populated by free people.

The southern colonies were a very different place. Their elite planter class controlled vast swaths of rich valley bottom land, which they turned into vast monocrop plantations to ship out indigo, rice, tobacco, sugar and the other highly prized commodities of the Age of Sail. The labour force on these plantations was, like the loggers and whalers of New England, largely comprised of poor, young men of the working class. But whereas most of the labour in the North was free, the labour in the South was compelled, unfree. The majority of the young men were indentured servants who had been sentenced to seven-year terms of slavery, sold to the planters and shipped across the Atlantic against their will.

When these seven-year terms of indenture ended, the young men were dismissed from work, penniless, sometimes offered the chance to continue their work at poverty wages but just as often simply discharged with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.

With the valley-bottom land now monopolized by enormous, well-armed plantations, the young men who stayed often looked to the upland regions, regions to which local Indigenous people had also retrenched. These Indigenous communities were often the targets of vigilantism by the now-free but largely penniless young men who had worked in the plantations. These young men did not simply seek to seize the well-cultivated and fenced Indigenous farms; they sought out Indigenous women who faced a blizzard of abduction and sexual violence from these invaders.

Sometimes Indigenous people responded with organized punitive expeditions that counter-raided, burned crops and threatened to destabilize the uneasy treaty peace the planters had bought with Indigenous nations. The local legislature, the Virginia House of Burgesses, which had steep property requirements, shared the view of the governor and imperial government back in London: the problem was the young men; they had been debtors, vagrants and thieves back in England and their criminality was irrepressible. And so, at least on paper, government sided against the young violent men and with Indigenous people.

The problem was that, at the level of enforcement, there was little interest in enacting the imperial grand design. Most of the men engaged in law enforcement in the colonies had more in common with the young, violent men—in fact, they were often young men of the same class, press-ganged into military service or otherwise forced.

A potential solution to the problem of these unruly young men was presented by the Dutch in 1620: African slaves, captured according to the doctrine of “just war” in the Congo Basin and West Africa. But this actually served to intensify the problem of the young men for the first half-century of slave-purchasing. That is because it was not clear whether it was appropriate to keep black slaves for more than seven years, whether they had a different status or different legal rights than the indentured servants. Consequently, the number of both enslaved and free Africans in the South grew steadily through the seventeenth century. And a degree of class solidarity began to develop between African and European workers, especially on the plantations that used a mixture of European and African, free and unfree labour.

In the upland regions, African and European men served together in the irregular and unofficial militias that prosecuted a slow-motion war against the region’s Indigenous inhabitants, gradually driving out the land’s original inhabitants… mostly. The fact was that, unlike the Puritan Fathers of New England, the planter elite of the South was neither particularly interested in or capable of luring young women across the Atlantic. This meant that, whether by rape, abduction or, sometimes, mutual consent, it was largely Indigenous women who bore the children of the first generation of uplanders.

So it was that, within a generation, the idea that the blood of the uplanders was impure, tainted with the blood of Indigenous people, something that only intensified as small amounts of African blood began entering this mix in the second and third generations of this system.

Then in 1676, the original system broke. Nathaniel Bacon, a planter aligned with the uplanders proposed to the Virginia House of Burgesses a large, state-supported punitive expedition against the Indigenous people to clear more land for European and African occupation. The proposal was defeated and Bacon rallied his own army from the irregular militias, which grew as European servants and African slaves left the valley-bottom plantations to join this popular army.

And the army’s ambitions grew as it became more diverse, more radical. Its members seized the prime land the planters were monopolizing and marched on the capital of Jamestown, driving out the governor and holding the legislators at gunpoint.

Over the next four years, the British Empire regrouped, easily retook Virginia from Bacon’s rebels and rolled out the new racial system that would come to define the American South and British Caribbean for centuries to come. White servitude in the mainland colonies was abolished and the full rights of Englishmen were bestowed on the uplanders. African slavery was, on the other hand, made not just lifelong but indefinitely heritable.

It is this system that used terms like “hillbilly” and “white trash” to refer to the descendants of the indentured servants. These terms were not simply geographic and class signifiers. They implied that these people’s work as tenant farmers, farmhands, overseers of slaves or owners of low-value, high-elevation, low-productivity land arose, at least in part, from their blood being tainted with that of non-white, especially Indigenous people.

Essentially, Rogers had used the American equivalent of the Canadian term “half-breed,” the pejorative not used for all mixed-race Canadians at that time but specifically for the Métis. Earlier that year, in fact, an engaged liberal at our family dinner table had proclaimed, “I’ve just seen the most wonderful documentary on Louis Riel. I will never utter the word ‘half-breed’ again; it’s such a bohunk word.” (“Bohunk” was the rough Canadian equivalent of Polack, our nation’s generic anti-Slavic pejorative.) Canadians were growing more sensitive to anti-Métis racism in the mid-80s and so Rogers’ remarks were especially ill-timed and ill-received.

But, as I have written elsewhere, the persistence of race arises from the dynamism and flexibility of racial systems; the colour line is powerful precisely because it is in constant motion. The changes to our racial systems in the following ten years were substantial and affected me personally.

In 1985, blackness in Anglo America was still governed by the “one drop rule”—individuals of African descent with skin and hair as light as mine were understood to be black people who were either intentionally or unintentionally “passing” for white. In 1985, the bullies at school understood me to be a black person who could and did “pass.” For most of the twentieth century, most Anglo Americans understood that white-looking people were not necessarily white and efforts were made to discern the “true” race of people who looked like me.

At that point in history, “white trash” referred to people who were not really white but were granted a limited degree of whiteness as long as they functioned as supporters and enforcers of white supremacy for the planter class and Southern elite, a role into which they had been pushed in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion and in which many continued up until the late twentieth century as foot soldiers of the Klan and White Citizens’ Leagues. Naturally, those who did not participate in these enactments of white supremacy were often hit with insults like “not white enough to be white trash” but nevertheless retained membership in the group.

For reasons that will be explored in the next part of this series, the racial categories into which these people and people like me were placed dramatically shifted in the decade following. But, more importantly for my purpose here, I believe that we have been returning to the original definition over the past decade and a half. “White trash” and its polite euphemism, “the white working class” have been inexorably tacking back to meaning not the American white proletariat as a whole but specifically the passing Métis of Anglo America’s internal periphery.  

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