Fences and Windows (24 page)

December 2000

I’ve never joined a political party, never even been to a political convention. Last election, after being dragged by the hair to the ballot box, I was overcome by stomach pains more acute than those suffered by my friends who simply ingested their ballots. So why do I find myself agreeing that we need a new political alliance uniting Canada’s progressive forces, if not a new party?

It’s a debate taking place in every country where left parties are floundering but activism is on the rise, from Argentina to Italy. Canada is no exception. What’s clear is that the left as it is currently constituted—a weakened and ineffective New Democratic Party [Canada’s social democrats] and an endless series of street protests—is a recipe for fighting like crazy to make things not quite as bad as they would be otherwise. Which is still really bad.

The past four years have seen a wave of political organizing and militant protests. Students blockade trade meetings where politicians are bargaining their futures. In First Nations communities, from Vancouver Island to Burnt Church, New Brunswick, there is growing support for seizing back control of the forests and fisheries; people are tired of
waiting for Ottawa to grant permission that the courts have already affirmed. In Toronto, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty occupies buildings and demands the shelter that is the right of all Canadians.

There is no shortage of principled, radical organizing taking place, but turning that into a co-ordinated political force requires more than better “outreach” by the same old players. It requires wiping the slate clean, systematically identifying the constituencies that are suffering most under the current economic model—and already organizing against it most forcefully—and building a political platform from there.

I suspect such a vision wouldn’t look very much like the current platform of the NDP. Listen to the most economically and socially excluded Canadians and you hear an idea entirely absent from the mainstream left: a deep distrust of the state. This distrust is based on lived experience: police harassment of dissenters and immigrants, punitive welfare offices, ineffective job training programs, patronage and corruption, and scandalous mismanagement of natural resources.

Surveying the rage directed at the federal government from across the country, the NDP has responded only with an action plan for better central management. In its policy book, there is no problem that can’t be fixed with a stronger, top-down government. By consistently failing to speak to the hunger for local control, or to the well-deserved skepticism of centralized power, the NDP has yielded the entire anti-Ottawa vote to the right. It’s only the hard-right Canadian
Alliance party that offers voters outside Quebec the opportunity to “send a message to Ottawa”—even if the message is simply to demand a refund on shoddy democracy in the form of a tax cut.

A national party of the left could articulate a different vision, one founded on local democracy and sustainable economic development. But before that can happen, the left needs to come to grips with how Canadians see government. It needs to listen to the voices on native reserves and in non-native resource communities where the common ground is a rage at government—federal and provincial—for culpably mismanaging the land and the oceans from urban offices. Government programs designed to “develop” the regions are utterly discredited across the country. Federal initiatives to get fishermen into ecotourism, for instance, or farmers into information technologies are regarded as make-work projects, unresponsive and, at times, destructive to the real needs of communities.

Frustration with botched central planning is not just an issue in rural Canada and, of course, Quebec. Urban centres across the country are being bundled into megacities against their will, just as hospitals where cutting-edge programs once thrived are being amalgamated into inefficient medical factories. And if you listen to the teachers having standardized testing rammed down their throats by half-literate politicians, you hear the same resentment at faraway power, the same calls for local control and deeper, day-to-day democracy.

All these local battles are, at their root, about people
watching power shift to points farther and farther away from where they live and work: to the WTO, to unaccountable multinationals, but also to more centralized national, provincial and even municipal governments. These people are not asking for more enlightened central planning, they are asking for the tools, both financial and democratic, to control their destinies, to use their expertise, to build diverse economies that are genuinely sustainable. And they have plenty of ideas.

On the west coast of Vancouver Island, they are calling for community fish-licence banks, bodies that would keep fishing rights in the community rather than selling them back to Ottawa or to corporate fleets. Native and non-native fishermen, meanwhile, are doing end runs around the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to try to save the salmon fishery by rehabilitating spawning grounds and protecting hatcheries. In other parts of British Columbia, they talk of community forest licences: taking away Crown land from multinational forestry companies that are only interested in volume-based logging and placing sustainable forest management in the hands of local communities.

Even in Newfoundland, long written off by Ottawa as Canada’s welfare case, there was talk during the 2000 election of renegotiating federalism to regain control over the province’s rich energy reserves and what’s left of the fishery. It’s the same message from Inuit leaders determined to ensure that as the oil and gas prospectors move into their territories once again, the benefits go toward regional development rather than simply enriching multinational corporations.

In many ways, these spontaneous, grassroots ideas and experiments are the antithesis of the free-trade model pushed by the federal Liberals, which insists that increased foreign investment is the key to all our prosperity, even if it means trading away democratic powers in the process. These communities want the opposite: beefed-up local control so they can do more with less.

This vision also presents a clear alternative to the anti-immigrant and regional resentments being peddled by right-wing populists. Sure, tax cuts and scapegoats aren’t bad consolation prizes if nothing else is on offer. But there is clearly a deep desire in this country to continue to act collectively, to pool resources and knowledge and build something better than what we can achieve as individuals.

This presents a tremendous opportunity for the left, an opportunity that has been entirely wasted by the NDP and by social democratic parties across Europe. There is a wide-open space in the political landscape for a new political coalition that looks at the calls for localization and doesn’t see a dire threat to national unity but the building blocks for a unified—and diverse—culture. In these calls for self-determination, grassroots democracy and ecological sustainability are the pieces of a new political vision that includes many Canadians who have never before been represented by the so-called left.

Right now, we have federal parties that try to hold this country together against its will, and regional parties that pit the country against itself at its peril. What’s needed is a political force capable of showing us not the differences but
the connections among these struggles for localization.

That would mean chucking out some of the traditional left’s most basic ideas about how to organize a country. After all, the thread that connects municipal rights to sustainable resource management, as well as Quebec sovereignty to native self-government, is not a stronger central state. It is the desire for self-determination, economic sustainability and participatory democracy.

Decentralizing power doesn’t mean abandoning strong national and international standards—and stable, equitable funding—for health care, education, affordable housing and environmental protections. But it does mean that the mantra of the left needs to change from “increase funding” to “empower the grassroots”—in towns, on native reserves, at schools, in resource communities, in workplaces.

Bringing these, and other, forces together would draw out simmering conflicts between natives and non-natives, unions and environmentalists, urban and rural communities—as well as between the white face of the Canadian left and the darker face of Canadian poverty. To overcome these divisions, what is needed is not a new political party—at least not yet—but a new political process, one with enough faith in democracy to let a political mandate emerge.

Creating this process would be an arduous long-term project. But it would be worthwhile. Because it is in the connections between these long-ignored issues and off-the-map communities that outlines of a powerful, and genuinely new, political alternative can be found.

October 2001

In Toronto, the city where I live, housing-rights activists defied the logic that anti-corporate protests died on September 11. They did it by “shutting down” the business district last week. This was no polite rally: the posters advertising the event had a picture of skyscrapers outlined in red— the perimeters of the designated direct-action zone. It was almost as if September 11 had never happened. Sure, the organizers knew that targeting office buildings and stock exchanges isn’t very popular right now, especially just an hour’s plane journey from New York. But then again, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty wasn’t very popular before September 11. The political group’s last action involved “symbolically evicting” the provincial minister of Housing from his office (his furniture was moved into the street), so you can imagine how much support it has from the press.

In other ways, too, September 11 changed little for OCAP: the nights are still getting colder and a recession is still looming. It didn’t change the fact that many will die on the streets this winter, as they did last winter, and the one before that, unless more beds are found immediately.

But for other groups, those perhaps more interested in public opinion, September 11 changes a great deal. In North America at least, campaigns that rely on targeting—even peacefully—powerful symbols of capitalism find themselves in an utterly transformed semiotic landscape. After all, the attacks were acts of real and horrifying terror, but they were also acts of symbolic warfare, instantly understood as such. As many commentators put it, the towers were not just any buildings, they were “symbols of American capitalism.”

Of course, there is little evidence that America’s most wanted Saudi-born millionaire has a grudge against capitalism (if Osama bin Laden’s rather impressive global export network stretching from cash-crop agriculture to oil pipelines is any indication, it seems unlikely). And yet for the movement that some people describe as being “anti-globalization,” and others call “anti-capitalist” (and I tend to just sloppily call “the movement”), it’s difficult to avoid discussions about symbolism: about all the anti-corporate signs and signifiers—the culture-jammed logos, the guerrilla-warfare stylings, the choices of brand-name and political targets—that make up the movement’s dominant metaphors. Many political opponents of anti-corporate activism are using the symbolism of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks to argue that young activists, playing at guerrilla war, have now been caught out by a real war. The obituaries are already appearing in newspapers around the world: “Anti-Globalization Is So Yesterday” reads a typical headline. The movement is, according to
The Boston Globe
, “in tatters.” Is that true?

Our activism has been declared dead before. Indeed, it is declared dead with ritualistic regularity before and after every mass demonstration: our strategies apparently discredited, our coalitions divided, our arguments misguided. And yet those demonstrations have kept growing larger, from 50,000 in Seattle to 300,000, by some estimates, in Genoa.

At the same time, it would be foolish to pretend nothing has changed since September 11. This struck me recently, looking at a slide show I had been pulling together before the attacks. It is about how anti-corporate imagery is increasingly being absorbed by corporate marketing. One slide shows a group of activists spray-painting the window of a Gap outlet during the anti-WTO protests in Seattle. The next shows Gap’s recent window displays featuring its own prefab graffiti—the word “Independence” sprayed in black. And the next is a frame from Sony PlayStation’s State of Emergency game featuring cool-looking anarchists throwing rocks at evil riot cops protecting the fictitious American Trade Organization. Now all I can see is how these snapshots from the image wars have been instantly overshadowed, blown away by September 11 like so many toy cars and action figures on a disaster-movie set.

Despite the altered landscape—or because of it—it bears remembering why this movement chose to wage symbolic struggles in the first place. OCAP’s decision to “shut down” the business district came from a set of very specific circumstances. Like so many others trying to get issues of economic inequality on the political agenda, the people the group represents felt that they had been discarded,
left outside the paradigm, disappeared and reconstituted as a panhandling or squeegee problem requiring tough new legislation. They realized that what they had to confront was not just a local political enemy or even a particular trade law but an economic paradigm—the broken promise of deregulated, trickle-down capitalism.

Thus the modern activist challenge: how do you organize against an ideology so vast that it has no edges; so everywhere that it seems nowhere? Where is the site of resistance for those with no workplaces to shut down, whose communities are constantly being uprooted? What do we hold on to when so much that is powerful is virtual— currency trades, stock prices, intellectual property and arcane trade agreements?

The short answer, at least before September 11, was that you grab anything you can get your hands on: the brand image of a famous multinational, a stock exchange, a meeting of world leaders, a single trade agreement or, in the case of the Toronto group, the banks and corporate headquarters that are the engines that power this agenda. Anything that, even fleetingly, makes the intangible actual, the vastness somehow human-scale. In short, you find symbols and you hope they become metaphors for change.