One week ago I was arrested along with 8 members of the Ontario Coalition against Poverty for peacefully entering the provincial Liberal headquarters in Toronto Ontario Canada. We were protesting the cut to what is called the Special Diet. Welfare recipients in Ontario in the late 90’s had their entitlements cut by 40 percent.
Since that time the Ontario Coalition against Poverty has consistently organized against these cuts under the banner of a Raise the Rates campaign. Within this campaign OCAP began organizing around legislation called the Special Diet. A provision long on the books but largely kept hidden and offered only to a few was the Special Diet which entitled recipients to a small but nevertheless amount of funds to assist with food costs for individuals with special health needs. In many cases this amounted to 250 extra dollars a month per individual.
Working on the correct assumption that everyone forced to live on welfare should be entitled to receive the Special Diet, OCAP boldly began a campaign to challenge the government’s determination to keep poor people hungry and sick. In Ontario welfare recipients cannot afford to pay their rent and eat healthily. This is a fact that cannot be disputed. An individual on welfare in Toronto, where over 80,000 people are on the waiting list for affordable housing, is forced to pay a minimum of 400 to 450 dollars a month in rent. This entitles them to incredibly meager and usually substandard housing. After housing costs this leaves poor people with perhaps 100 to 150 dollars a month for absolutely everything else they need. When we think about the articles we buy every month , toilet paper, toothpaste, dish washing liquid, clothing , god forbid a haircut once in while, it is clear that no one on welfare can eat anywhere near a healthy diet. Most are forced to rely on food banks.
This fact eludes many working people, and certainly the rich would spend more in 3 hours at a restaurant on food than tens of thousands of people on welfare. Many workers with reasonably decent wages and we are becoming fewer and fewer, might spend this amount every month on take out coffee and lunches, maybe a movie or an outing. So we should be entitled to small treats that break the monotony of 40 hours a week on the job, hours of travel to and from work, picking up the kids at day care, and all the endless hours spent eking out a living. But most of us have, with careful planning the ability to buy and prepare reasonably healthy diet. The poor however do not have this choice.
Sometimes this reality escapes most of us. Or if it does not escape us we push it to the backs of our minds and concentrate on getting through the days and weeks.
Boldly and creatively OCAP began to organize clinics with a few health care providers in community centres, library basements and invited welfare recipients to request special diet forms from their workers and bring them to these clinics where a few sympathetic nurses and physicians working with OCAP members and supporters filled out their forms based on the premise that good health requires good healthy food. Soon thousands of poor people were receiving sometimes up to 250 extra dollars a month. Millions of dollars were being forced out of the welfare budget, money that should have been there in the first place. Even this amount of extra money did not make up for the 40 percent cut in the late 1990’s. It merely gave individuals and families a chance to eat a somewhat healthier diet.
It did not take long for the province to attack OCAP and welfare recipients.
In March this year the Province announced that the Special Diet allowance would be cut. Since that time OCAP and allies have mobilized hundreds of special diet recipients, community members and trade unionists to protest against this cut. Last week we held a rally at the Ministry of Community Services. While the rally was going on 9 of us walked freely into the Liberal Party headquarters to deliver an invoice to the provincial government that showed how much it costs to buy food that even approaches a healthy diet.
We announced that we were not staying, were not occupying the offices but merely wanted to deliver the invoice, throw a banner out the window and address the rally below. We walked in and made it clear that we were prepared to walk out. That all we needed was 10-15 minutes flat to make our statement and leave. Within minutes were grabbed and handcuffed and thrown into a police van.
We were held for almost 30 hrs, subjected to strip searches, and given false and outrageous charges.
All part of the life of an activist – I guess. It should not have to be so. Workers and poor people know that the state on behalf of the rich has no problem bringing out the police to intimidate strikers and protesters. The laws of the land seem to apply only when it is convenient to do so.
Last month in Toronto and into July over 1100 protesters young and old, working and poor people, danced, sang and chanted, put up a tent city and joyfully and seriously confronted the leaders of the G8/G20 in an anti capitalist convergence. The backdrop to our protests was a shameful display of the cowardice and complicity of the labour leadership who reluctantly marched in a circle, returned to the lawn of the provincial parliament, made a few empty speeches and went home. The labour leadership in the province demonstrated a shameful and sickening cowardice in their refusal to use their massive resources to mobilize working people in unions, to organize non union workers, to bring communities in struggle together and use these days to escalate and build a commitment to fight these real criminals that are prepared to take our jobs, our homes, our health, our education and food.
At the same time with practically no resources whatsoever trade union and community activists brought tens of thousands onto the streets to protest the cuts to jobs and services , the rising unemployment and the most recent austerity measures forced upon working people, immigrants and poor.
The state unleashed massive police force at a cost of 1.2 billion dollars to intimidate, physically assault and arrest over a thousand activists on the street. The Toronto cops, RCMP and special forces from as far away as Alberta, massed together and they literally went mad, banging their shields, throwing people, even by-standers and journalists to the ground, against walls and into freezing cold temporary holding centres. Parents could not locate their sons and daughters who were detained for hours without seeing a lawyer.
All the time the provincial and national and municipal Labour organizations sat back, comfy and cozy, certain that the concessions and deals they have made over the decades would allow them to weather the storm and come out with their noses clean, in good favour with the bosses and the politicians.
Just 3 weeks later they sat down with the province and ensured that public sector workers in Ontario will be subjected to a wage freeze. After decades of concessions and compliance with the bosses agendas, they try to convince us that we have no choice.
Imagine the power the leaders of the trade unions could have if they had brought millions of workers onto the streets, challenged the bosses and politicians with strikes and sit-downs. Imagine if they had put their massive resources behind organizing workers and communities to show resistance and fight back.
This after all is their job. Instead nothing but obsequious bowing and scraping to the capitalists and their political spokespersons in power. As if this is not bad enough the Canadian Labour Congress and Ontario Federation of Labour, labour councils etc have refused even to condemn the police actions against youth and workers and ordinary struggling members of our communities whose only crime is to take to the streets and shout out NO MORE.
We often ask what it takes to raise consciousness among working people to organize and say NO MORE -to take action and refuse to succumb to further assaults on our wages and entitlements and our public services. One thing for sure is we need to take action from below to rebuild a fighting labour movement from below. Too often we avoid the language of fight and struggle as if we are ashamed to use this language, fearful that we will be perceived as too radical, too forceful. We respond defensively, afraid that if we condemn the cowards that collect our union dues and conspire behind our backs to rob of us of a living wage, the right to health care and education entitlements proceeding from the social wages we pay – something bad will happen. Well the reality is that bad things have been happening to working and poor people for decades. In the US people are dying for lack of health care.
Teachers are being fired and private schools are growing like mushrooms. Poor communities and workers have had their homes and shelter stolen. Immigrants and racialized communities are under severe attack. Hundred of thousands in North America alone go hungry or are malnourished.
Unemployed and low paid workers workers are turning against immigrant workers and we are being divided by rage and hate that should be turned against the bosses and the politicians. Workers turn against the poor. Depression and anxiety increases and resulting in more violence against each other. Again the bosses of organized labour live like parasites off our dues and refuse to aggressively organize all workers, into fighting workers organizations. They sit back and watch workers being pitted against immigrant workers and do nothing.
In Arizona and soon 12 other states vicious anti-immigrant laws are on the books. The capitalist class is having great success implementing their policies of dividing and weakening workers and poor people.
So after a long ramble here on this blog and with apparent anger I say simply-we need to take the example of organizations like OCAP, who despite miniscule resources are showing the way-if only we would look and listen and emulate. OCAP is bold andfighting organization that is a fact. Being arrested is no joke-it is not heroic, and it is not fun. Sometimes it is simply necessary to take a stand and if the cops arrest us then that merely proves that we are right on the mark. Working and poor people have to understand that we need to fight –really fight in our communities and our unions.
We are in a war and we must not cower from this fact. We cannot afford to do things politely and fear going on the offensive. Workers and poor people are in line right now for years of attacks. This means poverty and hunger, depression anxiety worry and despair if we do not organize in our unions and our communities and fight-really fight. The bosses and the rich are organized and they are bold-they are not afraid to bare their teeth and attack us. We need to cast off the mantle of fear if only because as long as we are prepared to wear it we will lose even more and our fears will become greater. There really is no where to hide. We need to see that every concession we offer up is not received gratefully by the bosses and we are not rewarded later for our sacrifices. Every sacrifice we make, every concession offered up by our union leadership, every cut into our public services is seen as a victory, a sign of weakness on the part of workers and communities –and they love it and they build on it. The capitalist class, the bosses and the politicians simply do not think like us. Like the predators that they are they see only weakness and opportunities to attack further.
You can visit OCAP
here or go to the links on the right hand column of this page.
