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Review: This is an Honour Song

January 18, 2011 in Briarpatch Articles, Jan/Feb 2011: the Soul of Activism by admin | 1 comment

This is an Honour Song: Twenty years since the blockades. By Leanne Simpson and Kiera L. Ladner, eds. Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2010.

Reviewed by Tyler McCreary
Briarpatch Magazine

In the summer of 1990, a group of Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) people took a stand in defence of their territories. Conventionally known as the Oka Crisis, that summer represented a flashpoint in the relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples in Canada. While the land dispute ostensibly centred on a proposed golf course to be built over a sacred grove of pines, it represented something far larger. For the Kanien’kehaka of Kanehsatà:ke, it represented the culmination of hundreds of years of resistance to colonial policies. For Indigenous peoples across North America, particularly those contending with the Canadian state, it signalled the continued resilience and strength of Indigenous peoples in the face of brute colonial aggression. Read the rest of this entry »

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Review – Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era

January 5, 2010 in Briarpatch Articles, Jan/Feb 2010: Responsibility to protest by briarpatch | 1 comment

By Lorne Brown
Briarpatch Magazine
January/February 2010

Canada’s 1960s (By Brian D. Palmer University of Toronto Press, 2009) is a magnificent achievement that distills the essence of the political and social upheavals that defined the 1960s in Canada. Palmer sets out to demonstrate that the 1960s transformed Canada in fundamental ways, and does so very convincingly. Canada, as it had previously been understood, “fractured and came apart in the 1960s.” When Canadian identity was put back together again after that rebellious decade, “it bore little resemblance to the Canada that many of the pre-1950 years thought they knew so well.”

Perhaps what had changed most significantly in the political identity of the country was the perception of Canada as a British self-governing Dominion with some subordinate regional and ethnic variations. Waves of non-British post-war immigration, the beginnings of the Quebec independence movement and the rise of a Red Power movement among Aboriginals would powerfully challenge this perception. British decline and the rise of American imperialism further contributed to changing the nature of nationalism in both Canada and Quebec.

Youth and labour in revolt

The revolt of the Québécois and Native peoples overlapped with a generalized revolt among youth, workers, women and the intelligentsia. In many respects youth were at the forefront of all these struggles, as revolutionary politics coincided with a broader transformation of the cultural and political mores of the country.

When many people think of the youth revolt of the 1960s they imagine university students. Palmer, however, demonstrates that youth revolt drew strength from all sectors and was very pronounced among the working class, women and Aboriginal peoples. Demographic changes fuelled this youth surge as the post-War baby boomers poured into the workforce and the educational institutions and, in some areas, swelled the ranks of the unemployed.

Between 1964 and 1966 the country was beset by a tremendous wave of strikes – many of them illegal, and often involving sabotage and violence. About 600,000 workers went on strike between 1964 and 1966. Young workers were at the forefront of most of these struggles, especially the wildcats, which were in defiance of not only capital and the state but the union leadership as well.

At the same time, the union movement underwent a transformation in which economic struggles intersected with nationalist anti-imperialist struggles in both Canada and Quebec. This was the beginning of a process where the “internationals” (American unions with branches in Canada) would eventually lose their dominance in the House of Labour and the broader concerns of social unionism would supersede the narrow interests of business unionism in many labour organizations. Much of the Quebec movement would become overtly socialist and radical-syndicalist for a time.

Palmer ends his chapter on the great labour revolt with speculation on what might have been if the many sectors in revolt had combined their forces. “Around the corner of the wildcat wave of 1965-6 was a growing left challenge. Had it co-joined youth of the university and the unions, the result could well have reconfigured the nature of twentieth-century Canada. Class difference is a difficult hurdle to leap, however, and as campus youth, women, and Aboriginal advocates of ‘Red Power’ joined the unruly workers of the 1960s in an explosive embrace of dissidence and opposition, they did so, ultimately, divided from one another, in separate and unequal mobilizations.”

Multiplying & divided movements

Palmer describes the growth in the 1960s of a predominantly youthful left, emerging with the Combined Universities Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament but soon coalescing around a great variety of organizations, ranging from the relatively narrow Student Union For Peace Action to the much broader Canadian Union of Students. By the mid-1960s, marking the generational shift underway, participants in these groups would be referred to as the “New Left” to distinguish them from the “Old Left” of the CCF/NDP, Communist Party and other formations.

The New Left hit its high-water mark in about 1968, with most organizations disbanded or in the process of disintegration by the end of the decade. Some individuals went in anarchist, anti-Marxist, apolitical or crackpot directions. The more political joined the NDP or the traditional Communists or joined formations with a Maoist or Trotskyist bent. Many made their mark in academia or in progressive organizations not associated with any party. Three broad, often overlapping tendencies emerged, which Palmer identifies as Marxism, left nationalism and feminism.

The left nationalist tendencies that emerged at the end of the decade maintained greater ties with the Old Left, though many individuals with New Left experience would play important roles in movements that emphasized the connections between independence from U.S. economic dominance and socialism. The manifesto For an Independent Socialist Canada, launched by the Waffle movement in 1969, forwarded an anti-imperialist analysis that in­dependence could only be safeguarded by socializing the most important means of production, as only the working class and their allies had a vested interest in Canadian independence. The Waffle would exert considerable influence in the NDP, as well as some influence in trade unions and other institutions.

Feminism predated the 1960s, of course, but there were many new developments during the decade. The decade would witness campaigns including demands for daycare, equal pay for work of equal value, equality in the workplace and other institutions, education around birth control and a campaign against the antiquated abortion laws (which resulted in the first demonstration ever to shut down the House of Commons). Women’s issues became important in many trade unions and influenced both the organized and unorganized working class.

The organized women’s movement won or partially won some of their demands and influenced many institutions. They were strong in the Waffle movement within the NDP, and through them influenced the party as a whole. Feminists, like the broader Left, eventually split into different factions, with the two broad tendencies being the socialist feminists and the radical feminists.

Nations within the state

The struggles of the 1960s were fiercest in Quebec. The class struggle was sharper there and related much more directly to the national struggle than in English Canada. “Quebec’s particular oppression,” Palmer writes, “meant that it was in the forefront of both socialist and countercultural challenges to the mainstream of the Canadian nation in the 1960s.”

Palmer entitles his Quebec chapter “Quebec: Revolution Now!” for good reason. There were large numbers of Quebecois who felt that a radical transformation was both necessary and possible, and a small minority who actively worked at what they hoped would be a socialist revolution for national liberation. Palmer does a superb job of analyzing these years of struggle which in nearly all sectors were on a broader and deeper scale than in English Canada. Quebec did not, of course, experience a revolution but did undergo a more far-reaching transformation than anywhere else in North America.

The chapter on Aboriginal struggles is appropriately entitled “The ‘Discovery’ of the ‘Indian.’” It is appropriate because after the dispossession of Canada’s First Nations in the nineteenth century, col­onial society accorded them no economic or political rights. On many reserves, residents could not even leave without permission of the Indian agent. Status Indians were not recognized as citizens and could not vote until the early 1960s. The majority of First Nations people lived in deplorable economic and social conditions. Further, the government pursued a program of cultural genocide through prohibition of Aboriginal religious and political traditions in law and the suppression of language and culture through the residential school system. Colonial Canada assumed Aboriginal peoples would simply disappear from history as distinct peoples.

This began to change, however, as Aboriginal populations began to recover in the 1930s from the devastating impacts of the introduction of new diseases. This contributed to renewed struggles for their rights in the 1930s and 1940s. Aboriginal peoples asserted the necessity for treaties to be honoured, and economic, social and cultural rights, as well as Aboriginal title, to be recognized. Some Aboriginal peoples further demanded self-determination. As in other sectors the methods of struggle assumed many forms – petition, negotiation, public demands, political lobbying, and among the more militant, blockades, occupations, civil disobedience and the threat of violent resistance. The state response was varied and ranged from making concessions to co-optation or violent repression. Some progress has been made but many of the problems facing Aboriginal peoples remain unresolved; their struggles continue to this day.

Left legacies

While Palmer is obviously sympathetic to the movements of the day, for the most part he avoids romanticizing them. He takes note of the crude formulations, the anti-intellectualism, the disdain for theory and organization and the naïveté of elements of the New Left. He notes the macho posturing and left adventurism common to elements around the FLQ and other organizations. He quotes Métis radical Howard Adams on the dangers of opportunism and corruption in Aboriginal organizations. Palmer tells it like it was, warts and all.

I would be remiss in not mentioning a few criticisms of Palmer’s book. He could have put more emphasis on the anti-imperialist and class dimensions of the left nationalist movements, many of which were informed by a broadly Marxist analysis. I would argue that the Waffle (and similar tendencies in some trade unions and other sectors) had a more sophisticated class and anti-imperialist analysis than either the preceding New Left tendencies or the Marxist-Leninist groups that succeeded them. This analysis was buttressed by an organizational sophistication that managed to engage a much broader base in progressive politics. The evolution of trade unions in Canada might also have received more attention in the section on workers’ revolts.

A little more on the legacy of the 1960s would also have been useful. I would contend that much of what began in the 1960s bore fruit in the 1970s; this was true among women, labour, Aboriginal peoples, the intelligentsia and artistic communities. Palmer himself is an example of that legacy: he is now editor of Labour/Le Travail and one of Canada’s pre-eminent labour historians – a field of study that barely existed in this country before the 1960s.

But the above are minor criticisms indeed of a work that will be a standard reference for scholars, students and activists for years to come.

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Review – Fight Back: Workplace Justice for Immigrants

November 2, 2009 in Briarpatch Articles, Nov/Dec 2009: Work & the green economy by briarpatch | No comments

By David Koch
Briarpatch Magazine
November/December 2009

A review of:

Fight Back: Workplace Justice for Immigrants
By Aziz Choudry, Jill Hanley, Steve Jordan, Eric Shragge and Martha Stiegman (The Immigrant Workers’ Centre Research Group)
Fernwood, 2009

“A lot of Filipinos and others are silent in their jobs. . . . They are scared that if they do something for change, they will be deported. . . . They feel held at the blade between life and death.”

The migrant worker who spoke these words, quoted in Fight Back: Workplace Justice for Immigrants, is talking about an experience that is becoming increasingly common in Canada. Workers from countries across the global South are seeking decent work in Canada, yet when they arrive here, they often find themselves chained to the bottom of the labour market, and reluctant to speak out for fear of extradition. Fight Back, written by five politically engaged academics who work with the Montreal-based Immigrant Workers’ Centre (IWC), helps to counter the exploitation of migrant workers by documenting their struggles.

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Review: Norman Bethune

September 1, 2009 in Briarpatch Articles, Sept/Oct 2009: Education by dave | 1 comment

By Ruth Latta
Briarpatch Magazine
September/October 2009

A review of:

Norman Bethune (Extraordinary Canadians series)
By Adrienne Clarkson
Penguin, 2009

Was Dr. Norman Bethune truly an extraordinary Canadian? In a new biography of the medical pioneer who died in China in 1939 while serving Mao’s forces, Adrienne Clarkson takes the view that Bethune was profoundly Canadian in his world view, and that his work indeed had an extraordinary impact on the world.

In Norman Bethune, a recent addition to the Penguin Extraordinary Canadians series, Clarkson writes extensively of Bethune’s early life in Northern Ontario hinterland communities, where he worked in lumber camps while teaching his co-workers as a Frontier College Labourer/Teacher. She also deals at some length with the influence of his Presbyterian upbringing on his future life and work. The Presbyterian emphasis on service to others led some to missionary work in foreign lands, others to settlement work in slums and Bethune to his own unique ways of putting faith into action. Growing up in the rugged, beautiful Canadian Shield landscape, leading an outdoor life with plenty of freedom and fresh air, Bethune found modern urban civilization jarring. The transition to the University of Toronto, where he studied medicine, and then to the thick of World War I, where he served as a stretcher bearer, was not easy for him.

Postwar, furthering his medical studies in Edinburgh, Bethune entered a disastrous marriage and had the kind of rip-roaring good time in Europe that reminds one of the Lost Generation in Paris, trying to come to terms with the carnage of the “war to end all wars.”

In 1924 he practiced medicine in Detroit but caught tuberculosis while serving at a free clinic for the poor. Hospitalized at a sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York, he took an active interest in his treatment, pursuing art as therapy and developing new thoracic surgical instruments.

Later, recovered, he left a prestigious position at Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital to head the surgical team at Sacré-Coeur, a French-speaking hospital where he was welcomed and valued. During the Montreal years, he ran a free clinic and founded a children’s art school with artist Marion Dale Scott, whom Clarkson considers to have been the “unique love of his life.” But he had goals and plans and Marion was married, the mother of a young son and had her art to pursue, so they regretfully broke things off.

Bethune was frustrated by the effects of Depression-era poverty on public health and the official apathy that greeted a public medicare plan which he and his associates put forward in the Quebec provincial election of 1936. Meanwhile, the world political scene was deteriorating, with the latest flashpoint being Spain, where the liberal/leftist elected government faced a fascist revolt supported by Hitler and Mussolini. Bethune’s response to these developments was to join the Communist Party and go to Spain to serve the government Loyalist side.

In Spain, Bethune originated a mobile blood transfusion service, taking blood supplies in vans to the front lines to provide on-the-spot transfusions for the wounded men, many of whom would otherwise have died of loss of blood before reaching a hospital. Unfortunately, his stresses led to an emotional breakdown, and he returned to Canada where he embarked on a speaking tour for the Loyalist cause that took him all over North America.

In 1938 Bethune volunteered to work as a field doctor with Mao’s Red Army in China in its resistance to the Japanese invasion. He wrote to friends that he was happier in this work than he had ever been in his life. He trained peasants as paramedics and treated the wounded under extremely harsh conditions. When he accidentally nicked his finger and the cut became infected, there were no resources to fight infection and he died at 49. Clarkson’s research took her to China and to hitherto-neglected sources such as a book by Jean Ewen, the Canadian nurse who accompanied Bethune to China. In reading Bethune I felt that Clarkson probably had enough material for a much longer book but was constrained by the limitations of the “Extraordinary Canadians” series. Like the Penguin “Lives” series, the Extraordinary Canadians biographies are intended to be short and reader-friendly.

Chairman Mao and Bethune met once, and after Bethune’s death, Mao singled him out as an example of selflessness and internationalist spirit in his essay, “In Memory of Norman Bethune.” Consequently, over a billion Chinese continue to this day to see Bethune as a hero. While his heroism is undeniable, he was also a fallible, sometimes egocentric human being, as Clarkson shows, and one whose urge to serve others stemmed from his Canadian roots. Few Canadians, however, ever voluntarily endure such hardship or give their own lives to save others in the face of great odds. Those who do are extraordinary and deserve honour in their own country.

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Review: Dark Days

May 1, 2009 in Briarpatch Articles, May/June 2009: Crime & punishment by Andrew Angus | No comments

By Lorne Brown
Briarpatch Magazine
May/June 2009

A review of:

Dark Days: The story of four Canadians tortured in the name of fighting terror
By Kerry Pither
Foreword by Maher Arar
Viking, 2008

Dark Days is about the imprisonment and torture of four innocent Canadians in Syria in the furtherance of the so-called “war on terror” launched by George W. Bush. The four men, all Muslims, are Maher Ahar (361 days in Syrian detention), Abdullah Almalki (more than 22 months in Syria), Ahmad El Maati (two years, two months and two days in Syria and Egypt) and Muayyed Nureddin (34 days in Syria). Not one of them was ever charged with any crime. Not one has ever had any connection to or any sympathy with al-Qaeda or any similar group. All are against terrorism in principle.

The book is based on almost five years of interviews, the findings of the Arar Inquiry report, documents and testimony presented to the Inquiry and other public documents. While Dark Days tells the story of the four men it also does an excellent job of relating their fate to a deteriorating political and human rights climate and demonstrating the culpability of Canadian officials.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, anti-Muslim hysteria was whipped up in the United States. This hysteria took the form of the Patriot Act, the harassment and imprisonment of thousands of American Muslims, the imprisonment and torture of people of various nationalities in secret CIA prisons around the world and in Guantanamo, and the “extraordinary rendition” of people to Syria, Egypt and other countries where torture was a regular feature of the penal system.

Canada responded with a lower-profile parallel of what happened in the United States, joining the invasion of Afghanistan and rolling back civil liberties on the domestic front. Those measures were driven by purely economic considerations. As then-Deputy Prime Minister John Manley said on more than one occasion, “we can’t have them build a wall around the United States and us be on the outside of it. . . . We’ll need to satisfy them.” The result of the need to “satisfy them” was the Canadian Anti-terrorism Act (ATA), which was an all-out assault on civil liberties and totally unnecessary to deal with actual terrorism. The many and diverse critics of the Act were ignored. With the enthusiastic support of the business elite and the Conservatives, the Liberal majority quickly passed the ATA with little debate.

The ATA was buttressed with a Canada-U.S. action plan which, among other things, integrated border and national enforcement teams, “effectively merging the FBI and RCMP, the CIA and CSIS, and American and Canadian border officials, complicating any possibility for effective civilian oversight of their work,” Pither writes.

The legislation was accompanied by a huge budget of $7.7 billion for CSIS, the RCMP, immigration and refugee screening, military spending, airport security and border initiatives. Pither asks the pertinent question and provides the obvious answer: “Did all this spending make Canadians feel safer? That seemed beside the point – the budget, like the ATA, was about making the United States feel better about Canada.”

Pither details how CSIS and the RCMP were only too happy to collaborate with the CIA and the FBI. They began with the type of harassment of the Muslim community that should never be tolerated in a democracy. Maher Arar refers to some of this harassment in the book’s foreword: “Most preferred to keep silent about the harassment they experienced: frequent and invasive visits from CSIS officers to interview them, often at odd times of the day, or unexpected visits at their workplace. These visits would often include the officer’s advice that it would be better not to seek the professional help of a lawyer.”

This generalized harassment, however, was mild compared to the treatment meted out to Arar, El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin once they became “subjects of interest” to CSIS. They were badgered for interviews, followed everywhere night and day and generally hassled until their lives were seriously disrupted. The RCMP were brought into the picture in the hope that they could arrest the “suspects” and prosecute them as “terrorists”, but there was utterly no evidence to support such actions.

Then-RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli and Jack Hooper, formerly of CSIS, informed a Senate Committee that, “particularly since 9/11, we have had to accept going to a disruptive mode” and “at the end of the day if prosecution is not viable, there are other techniques.” The “other techniques” included the harassment mentioned above, as well as supplying false information to the FBI, the CIA, and Canadian and U.S. Customs. For instance, without an iota of evidence, they issued a “border lookout” describing Maher Arar, his wife, Monia Mazigh, and “other individuals” as “a group of Islamic Extremist individuals suspected of being linked to the al-Qaeda terrorist movement.” There would be many more such falsehoods fed to American authorities about Arar, Mazigh and the others by CSIS and the RCMP. When U.S. authorities “rendered” Arar to Syria for torture they made it clear that they were acting on information supplied by the Canadians.

Ahmad El Maati was detained on November 12, 2001; Abdullah Almalki on May 3, 2002; Maher Arar on September 22, 2002; and Muayyed Nureddin on December 11, 2003. All four spent most of their prison time at a notorious prison in Damascus known as Far’Falastin, where they were held in underground cells and tortured and interrogated with information from Canada.

The parts of the book dealing with this imprisonment and torture make for difficult reading and should make any Canadian ashamed that officials of our government were accessories to such barbarity. The cells were more like graves. They were three by six by seven feet with no light, heat or mattress. They were overrun with insects and rats. Prisoners remained constantly in their cells except for a two-minute bathroom break per day and for interrogation sessions often accompanied by torture. They did not see other prisoners and could communicate only by whispers between cells – they were beaten if they were caught doing so. The food was inadequate and often rotten. The torture sessions were frequent and horrendous, and often lasted hours at a time. Whipping with a steel cable was common, especially on the soles of the feet. Being suspended in a tire and whipped on various parts of the body was common. Electric shocks were used. Punching and kicking were common even when prisoners were not being interrogated.

While these horrors were going on in Far’Falastin, CSIS was attempting to get permission from Syrian intelligence to interview Canadian prisoners and, when this was denied, sent intelligence-gathering questions to be asked on their behalf. CSIS and the RCMP also did their best to create the impression with the Syrian authorities that Canada would prefer the four be kept imprisoned in Far’Falastin.

Had Maher Arar not been so fortunate as to be married to Monia Mazigh, he and the others might still be in prison or worse. Monia did not buy into the “quiet diplomacy” argument some Canadian diplomats were then mouthing and began a courageous and sophisticated public campaign to bring Maher Arar back to Canada and establish his innocence. She was soon joined in this campaign by Alex Neve of Amnesty International, Riad Saloojee from the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations, Kerry Pither and many others.

Monia Mazigh and her supporters waged a campaign which eventually rallied enough people to force the government to call for the release of the prisoners and their return to Canada. Maher Arar was the first to be released; he and Mazigh then began a campaign to demand a public inquiry which would clear his name and determine what role Canadian officials played in the outrage. It was an uphill battle in which volunteers with few resources were pitted against the resources of the state and a milieu in which much of the media was hostile. The government relied on “leaks” of false information, much of it obtained under torture, to co-operative journalists. The purpose was to destroy Arar’s reputation and make it impossible to get to the bottom of what actually happened.

The vicious campaign backfired, however, and the government eventually bowed to public pressure. In February 2004 they appointed Justice Dennis O’Connor, Associate Chief Justice of Ontario, commissioner of the Arar Inquiry. O’Connor would prove to be an honest and conscientious commissioner who tried to get to the bottom of things despite being blocked at every turn by CSIS, the RCMP and officials from other government agencies. Many of the documents he did obtain were heavily redacted.

Despite the obstacles, O’Connor’s report completely exonerated Maher and was sharply critical of the RCMP, CSIS, elements of the media and the role of some Canadian diplomatic officials in contributing to the outrage. O’Connor recommended that there be a separate inquiry into the cases of El Maati, Almalki, and Nureddin. He also recommended that the government implement a program to better oversee the RCMP, CSIS and other agencies to prevent such abuse in the future.

So far only a few of O’Connor’s recommendations have been implemented. The government accepted that Arar was completely innocent, issued an apology and paid compensation, though no amount of money can restore what they helped destroy. In December 2006, retired Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci was appointed as commissioner of an “Internal Inquiry” to examine the role of Canadian officials in the imprisonment and torture (the government calls it “mistreatment”) of El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin. Unfortunately the word “internal” has governed the workings of the Iacobucci Inquiry on the specious grounds of “national security.” There have been only two days of public hearings and the victims, their lawyers and other interested parties have not even been allowed to see the key documents. The report of the Iacobucci Inquiry may yet prove useful, but in the meantime El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin continue to live broken lives, hoping for redress.

Meanwhile, CSIS, the RCMP and the Canadian government have shown few signs of changing their ways. No action has been taken on O’Connor’s recommendations for improved oversight of security agencies. CSIS and the RCMP are both completely unrepentant and continue in their old ways. Both agencies think they’re above the law and complain bitterly that they should be subjected to any accountability. RCMP Chief Superintendent Ben Soave, crucially involved with this dirty work for the RCMP, has dismissed the scrutiny arising from federal inquiries as “judicial terrorism.” Jack Hooper, former deputy director of CSIS, describes it as “legal jihad.” Pither points out that cases similar to those detailed in her book have come to light more recently. One still unfolding right now is that of Abousfian Abdelrazik, who was detained and tortured in Sudan at the request of CSIS. He has now been cleared by CSIS, the RCMP and the Sudanese authorities but the Harper government continues to obstruct his return to Canada. Presumably they fear what he might have to say.

The final outrage is that the perpetrators of these crimes have not been brought to justice. Those responsible have broken several Canadian and international laws and international conventions signed by Canada. Fortunately, torture is illegal and so are actions aiding and abetting the practice. There are now people in the United States preparing legal cases against members of the former Bush administration for torture. Hopefully some progressive and enterprising lawyers will initiate a similar process in Canada.

All of the author’s proceeds from the sale of Dark Days will go to Amnesty International Canada.

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Review: Less Law, More Order

May 1, 2009 in Briarpatch Articles, May/June 2009: Crime & punishment by Andrew Angus | No comments

By Reuel S. Amdur
Briarpatch Magazine
May/June 2009

A review of:

Less Law, More Order: The truth about reducing crime
Praeger, 2007

Irvin Waller, a professor of criminology at the University of Ottawa, has made it his career and mission to get governments throughout much of the world to shift their emphasis from law enforcement to prevention, with some limited success. His book is a plaintive cry for movement by government in the direction of more attention to crime preventive approaches. There is something of an undercurrent of frustration: can’t you politicians learn from the clear scientifically proven evidence? It’s all there. Why don’t you do what is so clear?

He has a point.

What Waller shows is that huge expenditures on enforcement do not lead to substantial decreases in crime. Instead, they eat up the money that could better be spent to prevent crime and they lead to correctional facilities bursting at the seams. He points to strategies that are more effective.

Focus, he says, on public health nurses visiting new mothers, on good child care, on programs to cut down on dropouts and bullying in schools. Follow Vancouver’s lead in providing safe injection sites and Amsterdam’s approach to getting prostitution off the street. Buildings and communities can be planned to prevent crime through such measures as good lighting and neighbourhood watch programs based on a community development model, as opposed to the usual police-initiated approach.

Waller calls on cities to take the lead in the fight against crime by developing co-operative and targeted strategies among the various players – police, city planners, social agencies and schools – to identify the hot spots, diagnose causal factors and institute programs to address problem behaviour, setting specific targets for change. Cities, he argues, must lead the way.

One can pick at a point here and there in his presentation. For example, the savings Waller sees accruing from his approach occur over time, but they demand major expenditures here and now – a significant commitment that Waller underplays.

While the kind of co-operative approach to local prevention advocated by Waller can help alleviate the crime problem, the governmental structures we have in place do not make the task any easier. Local governments are severely hampered in their capacity to raise revenues. Provinces are unwilling to give municipalities the power to levy an income tax, a power that a number of American cities exercise.

All that said, Waller’s approach makes good sense. It would reduce crime and save money that could better be spent on programs to improve conditions in our cities and our nation.

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Chow Now: Three indictments of a broken system (review)

January 16, 2009 in Briarpatch Articles, Jan/Feb 2009: The New Food Revolution by Andrew Angus | 1 comment

By Aruna Handa
Briarpatch Magazine
January/February 2009

A review of:

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
By Michael Pollan
Penguin, 2008.

The End of Food
By Paul Roberts
Houghton Mifflin, 2008.

The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food
By Wayne Roberts
Between the Lines Press, 2008.

Reading these three books was a humbling experience: Michael Pollan’s for his ability to bundle big ideas into digestible bites that would be easily remembered at the grocery store; Paul Roberts’ for his exacting detail about how nearly everything about the food system has gone so terribly wrong; and Wayne Roberts’ for the exciting thinking behind his policy suggestions on how to reorganize the food system.

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The Herbivore’s Dilemma (review)

January 16, 2009 in Briarpatch Articles, Jan/Feb 2009: The New Food Revolution by Andrew Angus | 7 comments

By Aric McBay
Briarpatch Magazine
January/February 2009

A review of The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability
By Lierre Keith
Flashpoint Press, 2009

The Vegetarian Myth argues that strict vegetarianism is not the best diet for our health, for animals or for the planet. The stance is controversial in environmental and animal rights circles, but the subject matter is thoroughly explored, exhaustively researched and very persuasive. Keith is adamantly opposed to fast food and factory farming, but believes that strict vegetarianism isn’t the answer either, arguing instead for a sustainable food system based on mixed farming and a diet that includes moderate amounts of animal products.

Lierre Keith does not come to this issue as an outsider. She spent 20 years as a vegan, eventually developing a degenerative illness – which she attributes to veganism in the book – before finally changing her diet and life to become a chicken-raising omnivore. If anyone is qualified to write this book, she is.

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Review: Economics for Everyone

November 1, 2008 in Briarpatch Articles, Nov 2008: Work by Andrew Angus | 1 comment

Economics for Everyone
A short guide to the economics of capitalism
By Jim Stanford
Fernwood, 2008

Reviewed by Nick Bonokoski

The day after I was assigned this book review, I was talking with two friends, Derek and Corbin. Lehman Brothers had just gone bankrupt and Merrill Lynch had been bought out by Bank of America. Derek was somewhat upset by all the coverage he had seen about this. “The Dow is at its lowest in six years,” he complained. Corbin replied, “Since 2002? I don’t remember things in 2002 being all that bad.” The following week I was talking to a co-worker about this and she said, “2002 was awful.” Her husband is a financial adviser. Those conversations amount to a confirmation of one of Jim Stanford’s key points: everyone has a different stake in how capitalism works.

Stanford’s Economics for Everyone does for economics what bell hooks’ Feminism is for Everybody did for feminism. In her book, hooks makes the point that everyone has an interest in the struggle to end white supremacist capitalist patriarchal oppression. Similarly, Stanford makes the point that everyone has a stake in understanding how capitalism works and working to reform and/or overthrow it.

Stanford’s book allows readers to develop their understanding of economics through concrete examples of how capitalism affects their lives. He asks readers to begin by taking a walk through their neighbourhood and asking some basic questions. What kind of work is happening in your neighbourhood? Who is doing it? Who is benefiting from it?

Focusing the bulk of the book’s introductory section on the concept of work is an effective way of allowing people to develop a concrete understanding of capitalism by connecting it to their everyday experiences. Stanford makes it clear that the sum total of our everyday work (paid and unpaid) makes up what is called the economy. Workers, paid and unpaid, need to understand how our work fits into the capitalist economy to understand the pressures that can worsen their working conditions, as well as what leverage they have for improving their working/economic conditions.

Economics for Everyone is the cornerstone of an ambitious educational project that aims to provide working people with the opportunity to develop a nuanced understanding of capitalism. The book’s website (www.economicsforeveryone.ca) provides extra resources and lesson plans that social justice groups and community activists can adapt to their purposes, thus further democratizing the study of economics by putting the tools of analysis into readers’ hands.

Economists mystify the economy. The study of economics has become so mystified that the fact that there are other viable economic models besides capitalism isn’t even on most people’s radar. To address this deficiency of options, Stanford concludes by outlining some socialist alternatives to capitalism. He points out, importantly, that socialism will only come about through struggle, analysis, experiment, organizing, and lots and lots of hard work.

Economics for Everyone is a great example of just the kind of hard work needed to generate the class consciousness that can challenge capitalism’s grip on our economy and our imaginations.

Nick Bonokoski works for the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses, is a member of CUPE 3761, does social justice work inside the labour movement, wants to do more social justice work outside the labour movement, and is trying to finish his M.A.

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“Now I am the Vietcong”: A Review of Stan Goff ‘s Full Spectrum Disorder.

November 1, 2005 in Briarpatch Articles, Nov 2005: Sympathy for the soldier by Andrew Angus | No comments

“Everywhere I turn – past, present, and future – I am inside imperialism, and not just positioned somewhere in it, but slipped like a little plastic dustcover over the barrel of its gun. Former instrument of it, enemy of it, parent of one of its fresh tools – unable to rejoice at either its advances or setbacks in this new Vietnam.”

- Stan Goff

On a greyhound bus from Texas to Saskatchewan in April 2004, I met an ex-soldier named Mike. Mike had just retired from the military after 16 years of service, much of it overseas. His wife, who was recovering from breast cancer, had recently convinced him to retire from the military. He was going out of his head trying to figure out what to do with his newfound freedom. “What do you do with your spare time?” was a question he asked everyone he met, as if he were compiling a list he could refer to later.

Mike could inflict seven lethal wounds (he told me) with a set of keys in under three seconds, and was struggling with the fact that there was no place for his skills in civilian life. He wanted nothing more than to feel useful, productive. He was staunchly right-wing, and deeply indoctrinated, but smart, too – smart enough that the deteriorating situation in Iraq was forcing him to finally confront some uncomfortable questions about US motives, and the way the military was being used by the Bush administration. Mike still had close friends fighting in Iraq, and the downward spiral of the occupation was hitting him pretty hard.

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