Denise Hansen examines the Black Lives Matter movement in Canada—and why there’s cause for anger and hope here, too

PROTESTS AND MARCHES AND SIT-INS have never really been my chosen course of social action. I can remember my dear family friend Kathy, a valiant social justice advocate, trying over the years to introduce my tender, elementary-aged sister and me to the world of social action. She’d drag us to women’s marches and tuition rallies but somehow, we always became so besieged by the noise and the cold (this is Canada, after all) that after a mere hour we’d end up at the nearest Tim Horton’s, clutching hot chocolates and talking through alternative ways we could create social change. Still today, I deeply admire the committed and resilient spirit of protestors (and my dear family friend for fearlessly trying to involve us in that world!) but have decided that for me, social justice is best pursued in other ways. So I write.
But that was before Michael Brown.

The night it was announced that a St. Louis County grand jury had decided not to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, I was in bed under the covers, glued to the light of my phone, slowly scrolling through news report upon news report, tears falling down my face at the same pace. I fell asleep that night feeling emotionally shattered, and like nothing mattered. It was an indescribable feeling of despair with society that I had never experienced before.

The same week I, along with hundreds of other Torontonians, converged at the U.S. Consulate General in downtown Toronto to express anger and frustration with the non-indictment decision and to protest the systemic oppression black communities both in America and here at home continue to face at the hands of police and the state. At the end of the rally, organizers asked us to turn to the person next to us, take our hand, place it on their back, and say the words “I got your back.” I biked home that cold November night feeling everything but what I had felt earlier that week. The protest made me feel that I, my community: we mattered.
I think there comes a time in every black person’s life where the straw simply breaks. You take it and you take it, and you take it and you see your family take it and your friends take it, and people you don’t even know take it, until one day the load becomes too much. For millions of people, that day came with the events surrounding Michael Brown and Ferguson. A year after Brown’s death and the #BlackLivesMatter protests (unofficially) began, I wanted to find out how far the Black Lives Matter movement had come in turning hearts and minds—in America and here at home—to the supposedly revolutionary idea that black life does, in fact, matter.
Does my black life matter more now, one year later?

PEOPLE OFTEN QUESTION what it was about the Michael Brown shooting that spurred millions of people around the world, black and otherwise, to pay heed to the unjust policing practises afforded to black communities in America. After all, since Trayvon Martin’s death in February 2012 and before Michael Brown’s death in August 2014,countless unarmed people of colour have been killed by police in the
U.S. These are just some of the names of black individuals that were killed by police or vigilantes only one month after Trayvon Martin died: Raymond Allen (age 34), Dante Prince (age 25), Nehemiah Dillard (age 29), Wendall Allen (age 20), Shereese Francis (age 30), Rekia Boyd (age 22), Kendrec McDade (age 19), and Ervin Jefferson (age 18).

“The community response set things off, the way people in Ferguson decided to rise up and come together as a community,” says 25-year-old Tiffany Smith, explaining what galvanized America around Michael Brown. “That really showed all of us that we could do the same.” Seeing the courage of the Ferguson community to come together and revolt spread action like wildfire across the U.S., she adds. She herself has been part of the Black Lives Matter movement since it began last year, protesting and organizing in Atlanta, Georgia.

After Brown’s death, protestors flooded the streets of Ferguson and other cities across America. When the first report came out of Ferguson that police tear-gassed peaceful protestors, the community, understandably, retaliated. In response, President Barack Obama addressed the nation and urged an “open and transparent investigation” into Brown’s death while calling for calm and restraint. But then Officer Darren Wilson’s name was released. National protests intensified, calling for police reform and the immediate arrest of Wilson. A state of emergency was declared in Ferguson. Every night as I turned on the news, I knew I was watching a revolution unfold before me.

As protests strengthened, the Black Lives Freedom Rides—organized by the same three women who began the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag—reportedly brought more than 500 activists from around the country and Canada to Ferguson to join thousands others for Labour Day actions and protests. Highways were stopped, football and baseball games and symphonies were disrupted, Walmarts were shut down, and hundreds of protestors staged die-ins in cities across the country. Black Lives Matter made its way into my conversation circles with friends, colleagues, and people on the street. I felt like a kid in a candy store when the subject came up. For the first time, I was discussing race relations—no! I was discussing anti-black racism!—with people I had known for years. Please, please, please let us hold on to this moment a little while longer, I thought.

In November, with the nation bracing for the Michael Brown grand jury decision, the city of Ferguson became a military war zone with police outfitted in riot gear, body armour, tear gas, and other militarized crowd control items. When the devastatingly predictable nonindictment decision was announced, thousands of people rallied to protest the verdict in more than 170 cities across America and massive protests were launched, shutting down malls and highways to boycott Black Friday.

“But what does asking poor, black families to stop shopping on Black Friday do?” my American friend asked me one day, referring to the Black Friday shopping boycotts. “These are the same families that, because of generations of systemic racism and oppression and as a result, limited financial means and economic wealth, are just trying to save a couple of dollars on their kids’ Christmas presents.” She made a good point. We talked for hours more about protest, boycott, and its place in revolution.

Then in December, another injustice made it to news broadcast. It was announced that a New York grand jury would not indict police officer Daniel Pantaleo for the death of Eric Garner, a 350-or-sopound, asthmatic, married father of six, who was harassed, mobbed, and eventually died at the hands of police via chokehold for selling cigarettes. I was getting ready for work the morning I heard the news. Listening to the audio of Garner desperately plead for his life is something that will stay with me forever. Shaken, I turned the radio off halfway through the audio, only able to muster up the courage to watch the full video a couple of days later.

The Garner non-indictment announcement incited a surge of protests in New York City and across the nation. Basketball teams donned “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirts at games; a Black Lives Matter protest filled the Mall of America; and black congressional staffers walked out of Congress staging a powerful “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” protest. I felt a strange sense of relief when incidents of police violence were still making the evening news and daily newspapers. How strange it is to feel relief when black people—my community—were still the victims of violence and death at the hands of police. But I guess I was just relieved that the struggle still mattered enough to popular media.

With the start of 2015, the most powerful image: a diverse crowd of over 50,000 people marched through New York City. Titled the Millions March NYC, it brought together people of all races, ages, and backgrounds to protest ongoing state-sanctioned violence against black communities. Thousands upon thousands of people protesting anti-black racism; these were images I had never seen in Canada, outside of school textbooks during Black History Month. Then in Baltimore this spring, more outrage as people poured into the streets after 25-year-old Freddie Gray died in police custody after being illegally arrested and detained.

In so many ways, it has been a defining and transformative movement highlighting North America’s fractured race relations and broken criminal justice system. In just one year, the movement has been able to bring international awareness to the systemic dehumanization of blackness that occurs at the hands of the state, most visibly by the police, every day, every hour, and every minute. Similar in size and scope to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Black Lives Matter has brought race relations and the heartbreaking understanding of how disposable black life is in America to the fore.

Even in places as far away as Australia, Japan, Palestine, the U.K., Cuba, and the West Indies, Black Lives Matter has mobilized people not just to take to the streets in solidarity but also, and more importantly, has mobilized international communities to examine their own practises of policing, race relations, and anti-black racism. Outside of the important conversations it has sparked, Black Lives Matter has seen successes in the policy arena too. In less than one year the movement has seen seven bills aimed at police regulation and accountability introduced to Congress including the Jury Reform Act, the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act, the Right to Know Act, and the End Racial Profiling Act. A federal civil rights investigation has been launched in the death of Eric Garner and its subsequent grand jury decision. The U.S. Department of Justice opened an investigation into the conduct of the Ferguson Police Department and found that the force regularly engaged in conduct that violated the constitutional rights of its black residents (the Department of Justice is now investigating police conduct in other U.S. cities including Baltimore, North Charleston, Cleveland, Albuquerque, and St. Louis).

In August 2014, a petition to create the Michael Brown law, which requires all state, county, and local police to wear a body camera, received well over 100,000 signatures (the threshold required for the Obama administration to respond). The petition also spurred the NYPD to equip police officers with body cameras for a three-month pilot program, have 7,000 body cameras supplied to the LAPD over a two-year period, and have President Obama propose a plan that includes funding over 50,000 body cameras for American law enforcement. The Death in Custody Reporting Act was signed into law and we saw rightful police indictments retained in the deaths of Rekia Boyd, Levar Jones, Bernard Bailey, as well as six police officers indicted in the death of Freddie Gray.

On the grassroots level too, Black Lives Matter has triumphed. Protestors have been able to create and distribute resource toolkits for organizing protests and other actions; nationwide, conferences have been hosted; conference calls regularly occur between groups across the country to share actions and next steps; and Black Lives Matter organizers named 2015 the Year of Resistance. Taken together, we are seeing how, in just one year, grassroots community work can directly shape and inform public policy work.

“That report that came out about Ferguson of how black folks are over-policed,” says Smith, who believes that Black Lives Matter has highlighted the importance of data and the power of information. “That report would have never come out if people weren’t in the streets.”

Rick Jones is lawyer and a founding member of the Neighbourhood Defender Service of Harlem. The NDS is a community-based public defence practice which provides legal representation to residents of Harlem and other historically underserved and over-policed communities in north Manhattan where it’s not uncommon for some of his clients to be stopped by police two to three times a week. Jones agrees that what Black Lives Matter has done best is bridge the worlds of policy and protest (although he’s not sure it’s yet been successful). In his own work, he notes that the action that Black Lives Matter in New York City did to protest Stop-and-Frisk on the streets concretely helped in highlighting the work NDS and other practices did around
Stop-and-Frisk litigation at the policy level.

When I ask Jones how the Black Lives Matter movement has impacted the work NDS does, he tells me, “We’ve been able to help our clients understand that the constitution applies to them, to help them understand that it’s not okay for the police to just throw you up against the wall and go through your pockets for no reason.” This is important work, he stresses, adding that when generational oppression is present—“granddad was oppressed and dad was oppressed and now son is oppressed”—this education becomes a lot more difficult. Even in a country like America where race is talked about often, making the connection between people’s personal struggles to systemic injustices becomes hard because racism has been the status quo for so many generations.

Even harder is asking these same communities to act and expose themselves to a system (police, etc.) that has wronged them in the first place. Black Lives Matter is so remarkable because it has done both: made the link between individual disenfranchisement and systemic oppression and convinced affected communities the fight is worth it. Yet, then, what happens in a place like Canada where race and anti-black racism is almost never talked about? How has Black Lives Matter permeated the Canadian landscape? Has it at all?

ONE YEAR POST-FERGUSON Black Lives Matter has been instrumental in providing Canadian justice organizations and black groups legitimacy when speaking out about how our own black communities are treated by law enforcement. The protests and marches and sit-ins we saw planned by Black Lives Matter organizers across Canada came about not just to show solidarity for black men and women in America who contend with a racist criminal justice system, but also to protest and rally around the racial profiling, suspicion, and institutional anti-blackness that is present in Canadian policing practices.

“In Canada, we maintain a kind of smugness so that when we talk about police and black communities, often we revert to experiences going on in the States,” says Anthony Morgan, a lawyer at the African Canadian Legal Clinic, a not-for-profit organization that advocates for and represents African-Canadians in a number of legal forums. Morgan asserts that the movement has created space to acknowledge how Canada’s black communities experience policing institutions and practises. To him, Black Lives Matter has allowed Canada to critically assess the Special Investigator’s Unit (SIU.), a civilian law enforcement agency that conducts independent investigations to determine whether a criminal offence took place whenever police officers become involved in incidents when someone has been seriously injured, dies, or alleges sexual assault.

Morgan says Black Lives Matter has also allowed us to critically assess the Office of the Independent Police Review Director (OIPRD), an independent civilian oversight agency that receives, manages, and oversees all complaints about police in Ontario. And it has especially engaged people in critically assessing the issue of carding, the practise whereby Toronto police officers stop, question, and collect information on people without arresting them.

While black communities make up only 8.3 percent of Toronto’s population, they accounted for 25 percent of the cards filled out between 2008 and mid-2011. Research shows that in each of Toronto’s 72 patrol zones, blacks are more likely than whites to be stopped and carded and the likelihood increases in areas that are predominantly white. This in Canada’s most multicultural city and a global beacon of what a post-racial society looks like.

Morgan adds that the Black Lives Matter movement has also been effective in raising awareness about the SIU and how many times it has exonerated a police officer who has killed a civilian. Black people are overrepresented in these encounters as well. Jermaine Carby, a black Toronto man, was shot and killed by police last year after being pulled over by police for unknown reasons. Rather than providing answers and support to the Carby family, the SIU is still withholding the suspect officer’s name and details of the incident. “What systems do we have here in Canada that try and justify or explain the killing, harassment, and violence black civilians experience at the hands of police?” asks Morgan. “These are important questions that we’ve finally been able to get at.”

THE SUCCESS OF BLACK LIVES MATTER has had as much to do with its origins as its message. Here is a movement that began as grassroots in nature, had its origins in female leaders and youth, lacked centralized leadership, and used social media as an organizing tool. By virtue of all these characteristics, the movement has wildly succeeded. Black Lives Matter has also wildly succeeded because of its universal message— Black Lives Matter. It’s not only a powerful message, but one that is easily understandable and irrefutably cannot be denied. “One of the realities of protest movements is that unless those who are protesting frame their protest in a way that is not threatening and that is easily understood by the very society that is oppressing them, the protests don’t go anywhere,” explains Ken Coates, Canada Research Chair of Regional Innovation and author of #IdleNoMore: And the Remaking of Canada. In his book, Coates argues that the basic assertion of #IdleNoMore as aboriginal people engaging with their identity and feeling empowered to be a part of the future of Canada was a success in its own right.

“It’s hard for governments and the public at large,” he adds, “to ignore movements that start off with an assertion that cannot be rejected.”

The Black Lives Matter movement has worked in much the same way. Protestors have found a concept that no sensible person can reject. In this way, when government or policing institutions don’t deny that black lives matter, they at the same time are forced to question why then they continue to over-police and over-criminalize black communities; or why they continue to use poor, black populations as revenue tools; or in Toronto, why they continue to unduly target young black men in carding stops (though the city’s mayor recently vowed to end the practice). If black lives matter, why continue to apply these unjust practises to black communities? With three simple words, the Black Lives Matter movement has exposed the hypocrisies and, thus, has been able to rally for change.

“The protestors won as soon as they started organizing,” explains Coates who says that Black Lives Matter protests have spurred a similar paradigm of revolution to Idle No More, where people were equally as excited about being aboriginal and showing their country that aboriginal people were alive, engaged, vibrant as they were ready to assert their presence. “In the same way, Black Lives Matter is as much a conversation among African Americans as it is with African- Americans and the rest of the American population,” he adds. “And that part is really powerful.”

Arguably, the greatest success of the Black Lives Matter movement is that it has made people excited about being black again—a feeling we haven’t seen since the 1960s in America, or in Canada, ever. One year later, Black Lives Matter is and continues to be a powerful assertion of black identity and confidence whereby black communities, especially young black people, have found their voice, realized the future of their communities lay in their hands, and have demanded public attention in this regard. “Black folks who may have not thought about their lives as something that mattered are now reminded,” says Smith, who adds that when Michael Brown was killed, it opened up a new space for young, black activists who saw their involvement in the movement as an act of necessity. “For me being a part of this movement is about my livelihood. I felt like how can I not be a part of this? Black Lives Matter encompasses all of my lived experience: as a black person, as a woman, as a queer person. For me, Black Lives Matter has been this constant reminder that I do matter.”

Popular media feeds us so much bad news coming out of the black community: our crime rates, our lack of involvement in the economic, social, or political dimensions of the wider (whiter) society. In the face of one of these bad news pieces —the excessive violence and death of black individuals at the hands of police—Black Lives Matter has, in Lauryn Hill’s words, turned a negative into a positive picture. It has reminded black people of the simple notion that we do matter. In just one year, the movement has turned the tragic and violent death of Michael Brown into a sense of shared identity and purpose for millions of black people across America, here at home, and across the world.

I remember that cold, November night biking home from a Black Lives Matter protest feeling like I, my community: we mattered. Many gains have been made by Black Lives Matter, but even if the movement does have a long way to go in reforming policy, transforming the school-to-prison pipeline and creating equal opportunities for black populations across social, economic, and political dimensions, thanks to Black Lives Matter, I know my life matters. More than I did last year. And millions more do too.

I matter. A simple and most powerful revolution. If this is just one year in, the Black Lives Matter revolution has only just begun.

Straight, white, men still dominate the technology industry. In our May/June issue, This Magazine contributing editor RM Vaughan introduces us to LGBTQ activists around the world who are fighting for change. Also in this issue: Sam Juric tells us why we should stop painting foreign adoption as a Brangelina fairytale, and instead focus on the  not-so-happily-ever-after of trauma, mental health crises, and isolation that many adoptees and their families face; Nashwa Khan asks “Why is CanLit so white?” and challenges the default narrative in our current education system and literary communities; plus new fiction from Jowita Bydlowska, an essay in defence of Kanye West, and much more!

If you’re having trouble finding This Magazine at your local newsstand or bookstore (so many copies of US Weekly! So very many!) email our publisher Lisa at publisher@thismagazine.ca and she’ll help you find a store near you. Or better yet visit this.org/subscribe and get the magazine delivered right to your door.

Our March/April issue is now on newsstands, and we’re super excited. Check out the editor’s note from Lauren McKeon, where she shares our motivations for publishing the issue, and also what you can expect to see inside its pages and online at this.org!

I cannot remember a time when I didn’t identify as a feminist. From the moment I first heard it, the word feminist fit me like the perfect pair of jeans. I learned it as if by osmosis, the way geese know to migrate south for the winter or dogs to bark at strangers. I know many people who feel the same way I do, and many who don’t. Some days, lately, I’m not sure which side has the higher tally.

Feminism has taken over our national conversation and the results are both encouraging and discouraging. As feminists get more ink and airtime, so too do anti-feminists—our current clickbait-centred media culture ensures it. We debate merits and viewpoints, all the while obscuring this pervasive attitude that women’s life experiences aren’t worth being taken at face value. It’s not enough to simply testify these things are happening to us, to say we are oppressed, abused, and disadvantaged: we must prove it. Again and again and again.

Well, f*@k that. Here at This Magazine, we believe Canada needs more feminism—now. In this issue, we also give a big f*@k that to the popular culture that fostered Jian Ghomeshi, Bill Cosby, and the boys at Dalhousie’s Dentistry school; the one that cultivated mansplaining, manspreading, and street harassment; and the one that encourages apathy toward threats to abortion access, the pay gap, and our country’s Indigenous murdered and missing women.

But it’s not all raised fists: We also explore what we need from feminism now, and ask the tough questions: Is feminism too middle-class and white? (Answer: Yes. “The trouble with (white) feminism” by Hana Shafi) Where do men fit into the movement? (“Allied forces” by Hillary Di Menna) Does hashtag activism work for feminism? (“#Feminism” by Stephanie Taylor) And more.

While we can’t cover all the myriad ways in which we need more feminism, we hope this issue can add to our great Canadian feminist conversation, as well as spark a few new conversations. Because now, perhaps more than ever, we need to examine the current state of—and need for—feminism. We need to look at what we can do better. So, please, pick up up a copy of This and stay tuned to this.org and, where you can join us in saying, “F*@k that.”

Can’t find This on newsstands? Contact publisher Lisa Whittington-Hill at publisher@thismagazine.ca

Illustration by Nick Craine

Fearless environmental activist Ada Lockridge leads her First Nation’s charge against oil giant Suncor

ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST AND RABBLE-ROUSER Ada Lockridge is the recipient of many whispers. Through her work trying to stem the petrochemical pollution surrounding her home of Aamjiwnaang First Nation, she has become equal parts private detective and confessor. Whether it’s a plant worker letting her know about an industrial accident or an apology to Aamjiwnaang for bearing the brunt of the area’s pollution, Lockridge is frequently told things in a hushed voice.

Over the past decade, she has found ways to turn those whispers into a sustained campaign of environmental activism. Her history of getting things done has made her a fixture at community meetings and provided her insider access to CEOs and government officials alike. Whenever she meets someone important she likes to jokingly ask, “Are you sure you want to give me your number? Because I will call you.”

Her latest battle is with the Ontario Ministry of the Environment and oil giant Suncor—and it’s one that will take all of her dogged persistence to succeed. In southern Ontario, more than 60 petrochemical facilities are clustered along the St. Clair River south of Sarnia, earning it the nickname Chemical Valley. In the middle of this valley is Aamjiwnaang. The area around Lockridge’s home was one of the first in North America to have its oil reserves exploited. In the 1850s, companies such as Imperial Oil got their start in the new market. The neighbouring town of Sarnia became a hub for the fledgling industry thanks to its proximity to both oil reserves in towns like Petrolia and Oil Springs, and the Great Lakes waterway. With the concentration of facilities came pollution and new health problems for local residents. Lockridge describes the pervasiveness of illness in the community saying, “When someone around here is sick, we ask ‘What kind or cancer do you have? How much time do you have?’”

So when Lockridge and her fellow Aamjiwnaang community members heard in 2010 that the Ministry of the Environment had approved a 25 percent increase in production at Suncor’s desulphurization plant, they decided they’d had enough. It was time to do something. Together with her neighbour Ron Plain and the national non-profit Ecojustice, which mobilizes lawyers and scientists to defend Canadians’ right to a healthy environment, Lockridge decided to launch a legal challenge against Suncor and the ministry.

The case, often dubbed the Chemical Valley Charter Challenge, is part of Ecojustice’s right to a healthy community campaign. If successful, it could see a radical change to the permitting process for industry. Essentially, Ecojustice lawyers argue the ministry broke the law when it green-lighted Suncor’s increased production. The ministry, they add, failed to consider two main factors: the cumulative effect of the industry’s emissions, which they say violates both the “right to life, liberty and security of the person” enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and also the “right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination.”

The latter largely refers to Lockridge and Plain’s status as First Nations community members. As Kaitlyn Mitchell, an Ecojustice lawyer working on the case, says: “Ron and Ada have particular ties to their community, so it’s certainly not easy to just get up and move.” The ministry, she argues, is not recognizing the First Nations’ connection to the reserve lands—something she, and others, believes constitutes an act of discrimination.

To date the lawyers have submitted over 2,000 pages of supporting evidence (about everything related to environmental health, cumulative pollution, and the vulnerability of people living on reserve), as well as defended against Suncor’s attempt to have the case dismissed. Much of 2014 was spent cross-examining the 19 witnesses sighted.

While the Suncor case could prove monumental, it’s far from Lockridge’s first act of environmental activism. She harkens back to 2002, when Imperial Oil had a major “process-upset” that caused a sand-like catalyst to spew from their emissions stacks. The cloud of industrial pollution was blown south from the plant, across Aamjiwnaang, to the neighbouring town of Corunna. This was the first time Lockridge decided to do something. After the accident and the subsequent struggle to have Imperial Oil include Aamjiwnaang in their cleanup plan, Lockridge decided she could no longer be passive. She dedicated her evenings and weekends to fighting against the constant pollution around her.

In the first few years of her activism, Lockridge learned how to do air sampling using filters on plastic buckets, compiled data for researchers, and worked with biologists, such as Dr. Michael Gilbertson from the International Joint Commission (a Canada/U.S. government initiative that investigates issues related to the countries’ shared waterways). Together, she and Gilbertson re-examined a 1996 Ministry of the Environment study which was completed three years after Suncor had a large on-site accident. The ’96 study showed high levels of mercury in area plant and marine life—a startling discovery that caused Gilbertson to wonder how such things might affect the community’s birth ratio. Similar compounding questions arose as more studies were completed. Eventually, Lockridge began to wonder“My god, what did we start? I think there’s more to it than we realize.”

Although Aamjiwnaang has many forested areas, it’s the countless smoke stacks and flares that dominate the horizon. Among these stacks are warning sirens, which send the alert of an accident, usually resulting in an increased amount of pollution being released. Some of the factories are so close to Lockridge’s house that she hears their sirens and sees workers running to their cars—how can the danger possibly be contained within the company’s chain-link fences? Since 2004 Lockridge has been keeping a detailed calendar charting the “releases” and “upsets”, as the industry euphemistically calls them. In the decade since she started keeping track, she can count only two months without a notation; some months show as many as 15.

Even when the sirens are silent, government-approved emissions from many of the plants contain a host of toxic chemicals, the exact make-up of which is kept from the public (it’s considered a trade secret, and thus protected). Although the individual emissions of each of the 60-plus facilities are within the Ministry of Environment’s parameters, many, like Lockridge, believe the cumulative effect poses a serious problem.

High levels of mercury have been found in the blood, hair, and urine of some Aamjiwnaang members, and a community-led body mapping survey showed asthma levels in adults and children far exceeding that of the surrounding communities. In 2005, prompted by Gilbertson’s questioning on mercury effects, Lockridge co-authored a study of the on-reserve birth ratio. The result? Since the mid-’90s, two girls were born for every boy, helping to explain why there were so many girls’ softball teams in Aamjiwnaang. Many scientists believe that endocrine-disrupting chemicals such as toluene and benzene are the probable cause of the skewed ratio. These chemicals are frequently emitted by the area’s industrial neighbours. But it’s challenging to establish a baseline for air quality testing in the area, says Lockridge.

She once took a sample on what seemed like a clear day—one where there had been no recent sirens—but even that “good day” sample recorded low levels of carcinogens. Frequently, when studies are compiled and presented, little action is taken. Government and industry officials say the results need to be further tested. This frustrates Lockridge. In 2013, when yet another county-wide health study was proposed she asked “Will this be the scientific proof that is needed to say, ‘Yes, it is indeed the chemicals in the industry that are causing the health effects here?’” The representative from Health Canada, she says, responded, “‘No, it’s not.’” She sees the court case as a way to finally force the government into action.

Unfortunately, Suncor and the government have the resources to drag out the case—although Lockridge’s reputation and no-nonsense approach have helped counter the imbalance. She recounts one incident where both have helped. The Ministry of the Environment had been slow to cough-up an important document and when Lockridge found out she simply phoned the ministry and said, “It’s Ada Lockridge calling, I’d like a copy of the report and I’ll be there in 15 minutes. Can you have it ready at the front desk?” Sure enough, it was.

As of December 2014, it seemed likely that the hearing portion of the case wouldn’t start until spring 2015. A ruling could take many months more, and an appeal is likely if the decision is in favour of Lockridge and Plain. The slow pace of the judicial system works to the benefit of Suncor—the company is able to maintain its contentious operations for as long as it takes for a final decision to be heard and enacted. Meanwhile, Lockridge and many others in Aamjiwnaang will continue watching the smoke stacks, charting the releases, sampling air in plastic buckets and demanding their rights. And people will continue whispering tips and apologies to Lockridge.

Photo by Benoit Rochon

We know we missed many of the amazing Canadians who out there doing great social justice work in this issue, so we’ve decided to feature new all-stars online at this.org throughout January and February. In our first online-only profile, we introduce you to Courtney Cliff, a 23-year-old activist who is doing amazing social justice work with gay straight alliances in Alberta.

Know an all-star who didn’t make the list, but you’d like to see featured? Tweet us your nominations at @thismagazine or send editor Lauren McKeon an email at editor@thismagazine.ca. We can’t wait to see who you pick so we can be even more inspired! Also stay tuned for more content from the magazine. 

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Waiting outside a meeting room at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Courtney Cliff is only pretending to look at her phone. It’s 2011, and Cliff is in the first year of her sociology degree. She’s seen the rainbow-coloured posters for InQueeries, a student group that welcomes LGBTQ, straight, and allied students, all over campus. Today is the group’s first meeting of the year and though she wants to join, Cliff is too nervous to go inside. At 19, she identifies as queer, but has never been part of a LGBTQ community—growing up in a conservative Alberta town, Cliff’s peers bullied her because they suspected she wasn’t straight. At Cliff’s high school, support groups for LGBTQ students were non-existent. Outside the InQueeries meeting room, she feels like she’s about to jump off a diving board in front of a huge crowd. Twenty minutes pass before Cliff finds her courage and steps inside. “If I don’t do it now,” she thinks, “I probably never will.”

It’s an instant fit. Within a year, Cliff is the president of InQueeries, and is also involved in other activist groups, including the MacEwan Sexual Health Club and the Feminists of MacEwan Club. Now 23, Cliff is fully entrenched in the advocacy world. Still located in Edmonton, Cliff works part-time with as the community liaison worker for the altView Foundation, a charitable organization dedicated to making Strathcona County a better place for LGBTQ citizens. Her job is to work with youth and teachers in the area’s public schools to create Gay Straight Alliances (GSAs)—groups like InQueeries that, as official student clubs, serve as a safe space for LGBTQ students and straight allies. Cliff says she hopes she can do the job forever. She adds that she lives vicariously through the students, who have—positive—opportunities she didn’t at that age. With her work today, she believes she is seeing what her high school experience would have been like if there were a GSA: so much better.

Kiyl Fairall, who co-founded the MacEwan Sexual Health Club in 2013, says that Cliff looks at things from a broad perspective to see who’s missing from important conversations and why. It doesn’t matter what’s happening with Alberta’s political climate, Fairall adds, Cliff doesn’t get discouraged—she keeps fighting. “She continues to show up for and support the kids she works with through her job at altView,” Fairall says. “She tells them that despite pushback, your experiences, stories, and identities are valid.”

Living in Alberta can be challenging for LGBTQ activists and youth. Cliff has faced—and continues to face—obstacles while she fights for equality in the province’s conservative climate. On April 7, 2014, the Liberal party urged the Alberta government to create legislation that would require school boards to develop policies to support students who wanted to form GSAs. The province’s Progressive Conservatives (PC) responded in December by introducing the Act to Amend the Alberta Bill of Rights to Protect our Children, otherwise known as Bill 10. The bill would give Alberta school boards the option to reject students’ requests to create GSAs, although the students would have the “right” to appeal to their school board and then the courts. The bill has created a divide amongst parties, and some PC members resigned in face of the ensuing criticism. The bill has passed its second reading, but is currently on hold.

With the possibility of the bill looming, however, Cliff says she and her students are “resilient” and “fighting” for youths’ rights to have a GSA without barriers. The students are taking action, and a group has started a letter writing campaign to support one another from school to school. Cliff believes that if these kinds of support systems had been there for her in high school, things would be a lot different today. To imagine how different, she only needs to look at the youth she works with and their shifting attitudes toward themselves. It amazes her, especially when she reflects on her own self-perception as a teenager. “It’s cool to see them be so aware of themselves,” Cliff says. “They have found a way through their identities to become activists at such a young age.”

Illustration by Nick Craine

Dedicated anti-poverty activist and doctor Ryan Meili tackles the root causes of illness and addiction

IN 2010, RYAN MEILI STOOD in the medical clinic where he worked, on the west side of Saskatoon. A girl named Maxine walked in. She was a 20-year-old from the streets who moved as if she were 91. She wanted antibiotics, but really needed a hospital. With a case of full-blown AIDS and a drug addiction, she was getting weaker. Meili remembers the sound of her lungs through his stethoscope, like a rubber boot being pulled from the mud. There was only so much he could do—the damage was done. Maxine’s life had been tragic, full of poverty, dysfunction, and abuse of all sorts. He finally got her to a hospital, where he visited twice a day, but she came and went, often scoring drugs in between.

Meili says stories like Maxine’s are much too common in Canada, and the 39-year-old Saskatchewan-based family doctor is fiercely determined to break the pattern. “What we can do in response as health care providers is really limited,” he says, “because we’re not really able to impact the root cause of illness.” But Meili decided to try anyway and in 2013, he created Upstream, an organization that seeks to address the social determinants of health, such as poverty, nutrition, education, and housing.

In just a few short years, the movement is already making strides: sparking conversations on social media via Facebook, writing blogs and articles for national news outlets, and creating partnerships to deliver awareness on determinants in powerful ways. In 2013, Meili learned that Saskatchewan and B.C. were the only two provinces in Canada without a poverty reduction strategy, so Upstream helped spearhead the recent Poverty Costs campaign, working with the Saskatoon Anti-Poverty Coalition, Saskatoon Food Bank, Saskatoon Health Region and other groups keen to implement a plan.

Through sharing hard facts (the economic cost of poverty in Saskatchewan is $3.8 billion due to increased health and social services), a fierce letter-writing campaign, and asking disadvantaged men and women to share their stories online, Poverty Costs turned out to be a big win, with the Saskatchewan government committing to a poverty reduction strategy in October 2014.

“It’s about taking what we know, getting people aware of it, turning that awareness into real policy change and, ultimately, improving the health of Canadians,” says Meili, who realized he wanted to work with under-served communities when he started practicing medicine. He felt it mattered more to service patients most in need. Then, during his first year of medical school in 2002, he met Dr. William Albritton, professor of pediatrics and then dean of the College of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan, who further inspired him with the idea of social accountability—that doctors should be mindful of growing social concerns.

The following year, Meili and two friends approached Albritton with the idea to start a student-run clinic in Saskatoon’s inner city. “When he first got started, I told him the problem is not going to be setting up the clinic, because you’re committed and have that ambition,” remembers Albritton. “The success of the clinic will depend upon attracting people who will follow you, who will maintain that same degree of commitment. And he’s tenacious; he’s done a very good job of finding
people with those same world views.”

Eleven years later, Meili is now a supervisor at the Student Wellness Initiative Towards Community Health (SWITCH) clinic that sees about 50-plus clients every shift, three times per week. “Some days are tougher than others. Some days you take a story home, you get touched by people. It’s really hard,” he says. “But it’s even tougher to not be there. It’s tougher to walk away. Once you’re aware that there are these injustices and people who are struggling, you want to be there to help.”

Meili would surprise a lot of people if he ever did walk away. “He’s always had this intense, clear vision of the world that he believes we could have, with no sense of exhaustion in pursuing that,” says Liz James, a longtime friend who met Meili while the two were involved with the student activist network at the University of Saskatchewan. “Things seem possible to Ryan that not everybody believes are possible.”

Take, for instance, the time he was living in Halifax in 1999. He was working at the Big Life Café as a cook and server and heard about an initiative out of the Falls Brook Centre, a local community hub. People were casually tossing around the idea of delivering prosthetic limbs to poor communities in Central America as part of the Limbs to Light campaign. That summer, Meili tore out the seats of an old yellow school bus he rented, strapped himself in and drove from Saskatoon to Halifax, collecting unwanted limbs along the way. Loaded to the roof with arms and legs, he drove down the east coast of the U.S., until he reached Nicaragua. In local villages, victims of landmines had been fashioning scraps of homemade material into limbs. Meili dropped off his stash to the Red Cross and, one month later, headed back home.

Travelling back and forth between run-down areas of Central America, and disadvantaged communities in Saskatchewan, Meili witnessed the same kinds of injustice, gaps between rich and poor. So began the shift from a direct hands-on, people-helping person (which he still is) to thinking more in terms of the system as a whole, rethinking not only about health care, but how we make decisions as a society.

In his early days with the SWITCH clinic, in 2006, Meili was invited to speak at a New Democratic Party (NDP) Convention where he challenged the ruling government to do a better job of balancing resources. “I think from that experience, I realized if I wanted politics to work that way, I needed to get more involved.”

So he did. He ran twice for leadership of the Saskatchewan NDP, first in 2009 when he finished a close second, and then in 2013 when he lost by 44 votes. He’s not sure he’ll run again, but it’s possible. “It would have been an excellent place to bring these ideas forward, but right now, what I’m able to do with Upstream in practice and research is valuable,” he says. “The challenge now is to try and accomplish something dramatic. What we’re really trying to do is apply a new lens to our political decision-making and to do that is pretty ambitious.”

Meili hopes to steer what he calls “an issue that cuts across political lines” and move away from a system that “flounders from crisis to crisis” to one that presses societal concerns—such as the life circumstances of young girls like Maxine.
Maxine never had chances, and her fate isn’t difficult to predict; it’s right there in the first chapter of Meili’s book, A Healthy Society, published prior to his second political run. Meili had been working with a First Nations community in rural Saskatchewan when he got the news. Maxine ran back to the streets she’d known since she was 13 and was hit by a car that shattered her pelvis. Back in the hospital, she contracted pneumonia. She never recovered and died just before her 22nd birthday.

“What often escapes our attention when considering the tragic story of one individual is how intimately it is connected to all of us, to the collective decision-making process that is electoral politics,” says Meili. “It is politics that decides whether young women like Maxine live or die.”

Photo courtesy of the Rainbow Chard Collective

LGBTQ farmers unite to create a safe rural space

All the queers I knew were leaving small towns for the city. And here I was, along with a small handful of others, living in Victoria, B.C. and working on a farm—all of us tending dreams of being out on the land. We got to do it part-time; transitioning between the worlds each day.

I was lucky. As I set foot on that south-facing slope every morning that led gently up to the wood-panelled farmhouse through dewy rows of beets, carrots, lettuce, edamame, raspberries—I knew I’d found a kind of home. There was something brewing on that farm in Central Saanich. And it wasn’t just the fierce love of healthy soil and food, or the warm sense of community shared between the three women who ran their farms together. It wasn’t only the intoxicating beauty and abundance of Southern Vancouver Island. It was something deep, something political. And it was something that had the space to be queer.

It was this soil that gave the Rainbow Chard Collective root.

Let me back up a little.

International Women’s Day, 2007, Victoria, B.C. I told a woman at a bar I wanted— needed—to work at a farm. I told her I missed it; that I had experience. I’d spent two years farming all over Britain before moving to Victoria. She walked me over to her partner. The farm in question was run by a straight woman, but had what could be called a burgeoning lineage of queer women apprentices. I joined the crew. My first week on the job, I changed my name to a male name. Without knowing it at the time, I represented the first in a line of queer trans farmers who were going to become involved.

There’s a lot of time to talk while you do farm work. One day, the year before I joined the farm, too hot and delirious in the greenhouse, and thinking about their unique situation in farming with other queers, a couple of soon-to-be friends of mine laughed and joked. “We should form the rainbow chard collective!” It stuck.

The first year I joined the farm, we were reaching critical mass. The dreams and schemes got bigger. We decided Victoria Pride should be our first target. All the clean gays with tight bodies and corporate floats were about to get a taste of filthy, dirty working queers of all shapes and genders. With our newly-painted banner proclaiming: “Rainbow Chard Collective: redefining the family farm,” we stood in line waiting for the parade to begin. My painted T-shirt said, “gender modified not genetically modified,” with a big trans pride symbol beside it and “fag fresh” printed on the sleeve. Other collective members in dirty work pants and plaid, rolled-up-sleeved shirts raised signs high declaring “Homo Grown,” “Squash Industrial Farming,” and “Lettuce Rise Up.”

We were ready. With our wheelbarrow and pre-mixed mud bucket we ventured into the crowd offering mudspankings (and demonstrated freely on each other). Playfully irreverent, we celebrated our lives as queer farmers publicly, whipping each other with garlic scapes and offering bunches of rainbow chard from our wheelbarrow to the crowd.

Our function was twofold: to show the world queer farmers existed (despite popular conceptions of the farmer as a straight, white, married man in his 50s) and to show the queers and gays too where their food comes from—or has the potential to, anyway. Our hope was to model an exciting queer alternative, one where connection to the Earth and our food is primary, and just as important as our queer identity in making up who we are. The farm owner was with us that day, along with two of her kids and a handful of straight farmhands, one of whom sported a pink tutu and rainbow suspenders, and nothing else but his straw hat and work boots.

Like I said, I was lucky.

Speaking of attractive farmers, that year Rainbow Chard published its first queer farmer calendar, both because it was fun and to raise awareness and make connections. “Farmer Tans” featured many of southern Vancouver Island’s queer farmers and allies, photographed with strategically-placed sunflowers, corn leaves, tools and more. The calendar was a huge success: were heard from queer farmers all over Canada and the world—so excited to discover they were not alone.

It’s not easy being a queer and a farmer.  Farming collectives like Rainbow Chard, where queer farmers can be themselves and flourish, are sadly rare. Too often queers have to choose between their deep-seated desires to be on land and a community that accepts and understands their sexualities and genders.

We all know how queers leave small towns because it’s dangerous. Amplify that by the ratio of straight-versus-queer in rural areas and you’ll understand how limited queers’ access to rural life can be. And sometimes those small places can feed other parts of a person that a big city just can’t. Not all gays were built to survive encased in concrete. I know this one wasn’t. I’m still working on how to be on land in this country that’s affordable and where I can be at ease as a trans gay man.

After nearly a decade dedicated to farming and gardening, my focus these days is on learning about wild foods, herbalism and wilderness living. Food and social justice remain central to both my own and Rainbow Chard’s vision.

Another calendar, a queer youth workshop on food, and a couple of zines later, Rainbow Chard is still going strong. In the coming year we’re starting work on a queer and queer-friendly farm directory to help direct apprentice farmers to spaces that will be supportive to them. If you’d like to be in touch with the group you can visit our website rainbowchardcollective.wordpress.com.

Here’s to queers finding space in the places that feed them, wherever those may be.

Larkin Schmiedl is a freelance journalist living in Vancouver, B.C. who loves to write on issues of social and ecological justice. You can find more of his work at larkinschmiedl.wordpress.com.

Cover illustration by Matt Daley

For the past three years, This Magazine has waded deep into the bad deeds of our country’s corporations. Each time, we scour hundreds of public records, court cases, company filings, and media reports to find our country’s most shameful corporate citizens. For 2013-2014, we found more than enough to enrage us. The now (unfortunately) familiar list of bad deeds included everything from shady ethics to eco disasters, and from oppressive labour practices to chilling human rights violations. There are also animal rights horror stories, bad aboriginal relations, and pukey corporate spin.

But, through all of it, this year we also found one thing to make us cheer: people are fighting back. They are protesting and marching, taking companies to court, and launching impressive awareness campaigns. They refuse to be silent. Ready to hold these companies to account? Go on and pick up This Magazine’s second annual Corporate Hall of Shame, on newsstands until the end of October!

In the late ’90s, the Canadian government debuted what was supposed to be a new, golden era of rehabilitation in women’s prisons. Yet, less than two decades later, the dream has failed. What one former inmate’s struggles and successes tell us about a broken system

RIGHT BEFORE WE MEET FOR THE FIRST TIME, AVA* SENDS A TEXT. “I got here early.” She includes a description: the blonde woman wearing black. My bike bumps along Toronto’s Dundas Street bringing me closer to the café where we’ve agreed to meet. It’s an airy café, fairly full. Neatly framed artwork has been arranged, carefully decorating its walls. On this late October 2013 evening, it’s about a half hour until sunset. Nearly golden light streams in and coffee cups clink on saucers as I walk down the row of tables looking for Ava. A blonde woman sits alone. I see her from the back first. She’s wearing black. It’s her.

We introduce ourselves politely. When Ava smiles the corners of her eyes crinkle a little. Her blonde hair falls in soft waves just past her shoulders. She wears a freshly scented fragrance and subtle makeup. At 41, she wouldn’t look out of place lecturing behind a university podium, dashing down Bay Street in the morning, or picking a child up from school. Ava starts our conversation with, “I like your nail polish,” and in the same girlish raspy voice she says, “My story is complicated.” For the past several years, Ava has been a prisoner inside Grand Valley Institute, a Kitchener, Ont.-based federal institute for women. She began serving her sentence in 2007, and was released on early parole in 2008; by 2009, she’d re-offended and was back in prison. In May 2013 she was released on parole again, a series of drug trafficking and fraud charges behind her—or at least starting to be.

While at Grand Valley, Ava earned a degree from Laurentian University. She is now going to college, planning a career helping women who have been abused. On the surface, it all sounds good, but as Ava has told me, her story is complicated. While she’s believes she held privileges in prison—being white-skinned and educated— in many ways, she also thrived despite the criminal justice system. She’s a rare success story born from a poorly-run prison, where the system is anything but conducive to rebuilding women’s lives—even though, as a rethink of the punitive model, it was designed to do exactly that. In a very real sense, she is one of the lucky unlucky ones. Ava tells me she recently moved out of the halfway house, where, as part of her parole, she was mandated to live from May until October. The server brings her a mug of chai tea and almond milk as I do the math: This is her fifth day of complete independence in years. Ava looks up at the server. “Can I have two sugars, too?”

A CANADIAN WOMAN with a sentence of two years or more serves her time in federal prison. Orange is the New Black may have viewers captivated by the idea of what serving time is like but there’s more going on between scenes—in the Canadian system and at Grand Valley in particular. Between March 2010– March 2012, the population of federally sentenced women topped 600 for the first time, representing a 21 percent increase in just two years. Inside the grey of Grand Valley, women live packed like maraschino cherries in a jar. There, the population is about 180, or three times what the institution was originally designed to accommodate. Gymnasiums, visiting units, and the interview room of the maximum security unit have become makeshift cells. The max unit, where high-security offenders stay, now has two beds in cells that were only designed to hold one.

On top of this, Canada’s prison ombudsperson, Howard Sapers, is concerned about violence in Canada’s women’s institutions. Inmate fights, use-of-force interventions, self-harm, and charges during prison stays and are all trending in the wrong direction. About 69 percent of women offenders also needed mental-health treatment in 2010–2011. Most of the women, 85 percent, have physical abuse in their past and 68 percent have been sexually abused. Family visits are rare—there are only five female-only prisons in Canada (plus a healing lodge) and many incarcerated women have been transported great distances. Sometimes prisoners’ families are even blocked from getting inside.

Grand Valley wasn’t supposed to be like this. Opened in 1997, the prison was designed to be an alternative to the Kingston Prison for Women’s (P4W) rigid and inhospitable environment. Until its closure in 2000, the Kingston prison housed every woman convicted of a federal offence in the country, no matter which corner of Canada she came from. During its 66 years, the prison was under constant scrutiny. From its opening until 1993, it faced 13 investigations commissioned by the government, many of which suggested the prison be shut down. Lack of programming, education, and therapy combined with distance from family lead to inmate despair, depression, claustrophobia, self-harming, and suicide. Between 1977–1991, at least 12 women committed suicide while incarcerated.

In response, the Task Force on Federally Sentenced Women, including members of the government and advocacy groups such as the Elizabeth Fry Society and the Native Women’s Association of Canada, released a report called “Creating Choices” in April 1990. It outlined areas that needed to be improved for women serving their sentences. After its release, it was decided the Kingston Prison for Women was unfit and would close (at least in theory) in 1994. Then, in the year it was supposed to have closed, a video surfaced, showing an April incident in which male guards brought eight inmates out of their cells for strip searches; they cavity searched seven of the eight the following day. At one point, inmates were also left in empty cells wearing nothing but paper gowns, and in restraints and leg irons. It was a pivotal point in garnering media attention—and even more criticism. It took from 1990–2000 for every single woman to be moved out of the prison and then it finally shut its doors for good on May 8, 2000, when the last woman left.

Kingston’s closure was meant to mark a move toward the new values outlined by the “Creating Choices” document. As the title suggests, it said new values would help create choices for women inmates, operating under the premise they would then be better functioning members in the community upon their release. “Creating Choices” identified key problems facing federally-sentenced women: they were among those who had most suffered from sexism, racism, physical, and sexual abuse, plus poor education and employment. The report’s authors concluded these women didn’t need more punitive measures, but empowerment, programs, and work options to take responsibility for their lives inside prison—positive behaviour that would
ideally extend beyond prison life. In addition to promoting rehabilitative-focused programming, the report declared women were housed with little access to fresh air, light, and social interaction, all detrimental factors to healthy rehabilitation.

When Grand Valley first opened, things were optimistic. It embodied the five principles of “Creating Choices” (empowerment, meaningful and responsible choices, respect and dignity, a supportive environment, and shared responsibility), right down to the cottage-style buildings, where a woman’s children and family could come and live for
extended visits. Back then, it only housed 64 women. For incarcerated women’s advocates, it was a much needed change for Canada. “It opened under a whole new vision for how correction for women in Canada was going to operate,” says Father Con O’Mahony, a former Grand Valley chaplain. “It was geared towards a much more
integrated experience for the woman.” One, he adds, that worked well for the first few years.

O’Mahony finally left Grand Valley in 2009, after spending 13 years watching its once great plans disintegrate. He first began to see things change after the federal Conservative government began to implement the first wave of “tough on crime” policies in the mid-2000s. O’Mahony became further disquieted when he noticed inmates’ mental health issues had began to largely be addressed through medication, and nothing else. Then, there was the overcrowding—and worse. Programming was cut. In 2010, the inmates at Grand Valley filed over 120 formal complaints with the Official of the Correctional Investigator, more than any other women’s prison in Canada. In 2012, the Conservative government sliced $295 million from CSC’s overall budget over a two year period. But, there were little things, too.

Guards who once wore casual clothes came dressed in dark navy uniforms. They began to carry what O’Mahony says looked like tasers. Before things started to change, he was buzzed through only one door before entering a main area where women would approach to talk. “I think it encouraged adults to be adults and it encouraged adult conversation,” he says. Now though, there are two levels of security before reaching the entry area. Everybody gets screened. When he went in for mass, often his Bible or his identification were swabbed for drugs. “It was a very different feel,” he says. Now, a disoriented Grand Valley has lost its sense of direction and is heading backwards, fast—taking most of its female inmates along with it.

BEFORE SHE WAS AN INMATE, Ava cross-country skied along Sudbury trails. She studied religious studies at Laurentian University. She made gift baskets to sell in the café she coowned with her boyfriend. But these are the highlights. When I first met her in October, Ava described her life as “dark and bleak” but left it there. Seven months later, she fills in her story. “I had several experiences of sexual abuse starting from the age of four.” She notes that the majority of incarcerated women have been sexually abused—that’s a common theme. “To be brutally honest, yes I mean rape.”

Her relationship with the boyfriend who she owned the café with started in her mid-20s and lasted roughly five years. It became violent in the early stages. Ava’s mother was also abused. So was her grandmother. Still, Ava says she found her place in the café, and loved it. She got along well with the customers and liked making their gift baskets. But slowly, the abuse became too much. She left the relationship and, shortly after,
her northern Ontario town, heading to Toronto for a fresh start. But things continued to go in the same direction. “I’d escape from one abusive relationship to another and leave with nothing but the clothes on my back and try to start over,” she says. “Eventually I just kind of gave up.” In one of our interviews, she tells me it feels like it was inevitable for her life to go in the direction it did, but then adds: “what’s different for me is that I was able to move past it.”

In Toronto, Ava got a reputation for being impulsive. She moved to the city at age 30. There were times when she abandoned her apartment, not giving her lease a second thought. She got involved in another abusive relationship. She kicked him out; he stole everything from her. He was a con man and had ripped off a lot of people already. “They came looking for him and raped and beat me. I got evicted from my apartment.”

From there, Ava turned to crime for the first time. In 2001, she started selling cocaine, then got into sex work, then started using the cocaine to recover from the sex work, then made her way to heroin which she both used and sold. At one point, right before she got arrested, she tried to pull away from her lifestyle and had even started making gift baskets again. But just a few months after she was arrested for selling drugs to an undercover police officer and possessing firearms. Found guilty, she was sentenced to five years in prison. After a year, she was released on early parole. She returned to crime and violated her order within days. “I was like, ‘I don’t give a shit,’” she says. “Everyone’s told me I’m a piece of shit so that’s what I am and that’s what I’ll continue to be.’” After her parole violation, she was sentenced to an additional three years and four months.

“I work hard to achieve things and then I just fuck them up,” Ava says. “While I’ve been impulsive, I’ve also been the kind who likes to lay down roots and build things. I’m self-destructive and destroy them, which probably led to the impulsivity … That’s why I have this tattoo.” She rolls up her sleeve and inscribed in cursive is a message about not tearing down what you’ve built for yourself. She got it in Grand Valley.

AVA’S FIRST STOP ON THE WAY to Grand Valley was the Vanier Centre for Women, a provincial jail in Milton, Ont. If a sentence is less than two years, a person stays in a provincial jail, but many women are also held in custody in a provincial jail as they await their sentence. Ava lived in the high security area of Vanier from March 2009–March 2011 before being transferred.

“It’s actually so scary,” she says. The first time she entered the doors of Vanier she says, women were in her face: “What have you got? Do you have a package?” They meant drugs. In provincial jail, there’s no methadone treatment. You wait until you get out or get to federal prison. On her first stay, Ava walked past plenty of women who were throwing up or had diarrhea. Withdrawal. It’s a dirty place. There is no soap for your hands. When someone left the bathroom, someone else would say, “so and- so’s been smoking crack again.” Some women tucked drugs into their bodies; other women knocked them out in the shower to get them. One day, while being escorted out of the high security range to visit a social worker, a guard looked at her and said, “She’s a fucking waste of time.”

Every day for every meal, she would line up for a spoon. She lined up to give it back. She usually didn’t hand it back. Instead, she stuck it through a hatch. Most guards wouldn’t touch it, but some would take it from her with a glare. At night, she would go back her cell, back to her mattress on the floor. Clean laundry was still dirty. Sometimes, there would be no socks for a week. The metal door with the slot for meals stayed shut. “It’s a relief when you get to Grand Valley,” she says. “Believe it or not.”

IN GRAND VALLEY, Ava lived in a unit with 10 women. Everyone at the prison receives a food budget of $35.56 per week. While there, Ava would make her list and then another woman picked up the items at the prison’s industrial food area. On a typical day, she would wake-up at 5:30 or 6 a.m., make breakfast, and go to work. During her time there, she filled a number of positions—librarian, photographer, and member of the inmate committee. She received a release to work at the Humane Society. The highest a woman can earn at Grand Valley is just shy of $7 per day, a
wage that has been static since 1981. Pay is situation-dependent and can be as low as $1 per day. Women use the wages to buy basic hygiene needs and pay phone fees to call family. (Just this past fall though, a new rule was established requiring inmates to give 30 percent of their pay back for room and board.) Ava likes buying shoes. She would save her $6 daily wage for months and months, eventually picking the exact right pair from the prison’s Nike catalogue.

While many women at Grand Valley worked, others slept away their sentences, she says. At Grand Valley, there is a 90-day evaluation period before an inmate can be entered in core programming. Oftentimes, though, there’s a waiting list for programming as well, and there is no guarantee a woman will start programming after the evaluation period. Inmates cannot apply for parole until the programming is complete. Ava has seen women begin their mandatory programming so late, they miss their chance to do so. “The beds are staying full,” she says, “and nobody’s moving.”

The work day for inmates lasts the full morning. After work, Ava would head back to her unit in time for the guards’ regular 11:15 a.m. headcount. Ava’s clearance came each day at about 12:30 p.m. From there, she went to programs until 4 p.m. Then,
another count. It cleared at 5:30 p.m. After that, free time until 9 p.m. Ava would usually head to the gym. “That was my sanity place,” she says. “That’s what I loved to do.” In the beginning they had a weight room, but it was later turned into a guard’s office. At one point, there was a step aerobics class. The steps broke, but they used them that way anyway—until they got taken away. Eventually the women received a new shipment of cardio equipment: one elliptical, two treadmills, and two bikes. Ava says the women fought over them constantly. Sometimes Ava would watch TV after. Inmates are allowed 15-inch sets in their cells. They have to pay for cable, whether they have a TV or not.

At Grand Valley, there was one thing that Ava could use to move herself forward. Ava had started a degree in 1992, but says she quit one credit short of graduating. Initially, she just wanted to finish that credit, and decided to take a women’s studies course through correspondence. “Then I was like, ‘Hey, I would really like to continue studying this.’ So I had to do 36 credits in women’s studies.” While many of Grand Valley’s once-big ambitions have shrunk, it still offers post-secondary correspondence courses through Laurentian University, as well as the Inside-Out program. Facilitated by Wilfrid Laurier University in the case of Grand Valley, the program trains professors from across Canada to go into institutions to teach a class that is a mixture of students from the university and students from the prison.

Inside-Out started in the U.S. in 1997 and runs in 25 states. It started in Grand Valley in 2011 with 10 “outside” students and seven “inside” students. The program offers courses through the faculty of social work and the faculty of arts at Wilfrid Laurier and receives funding from the Lyle S. Hallman Foundation, which gives grants to support education and children’s initiatives in the Waterloo region. Wilfrid Laurier University provides texts and bursaries for incarcerated students. For Ava, it was intimidating, especially her first day of class. “On our end,” she says, “we’re like ‘Oh my God these are university students, they are going to think we’re dumb.’”

She also worried the students would notice she only had blue, stained institute T-shirts to wear. What about her pants? Would these students judge her for wearing the same ones every week? “Sometimes it sounds really vain, my worries in there,” she says. “It makes you feel like you stand out and all you want to do is just blend in.” Her worries didn’t turn into reality. She began to look forward to her Inside-Out classes every week. Inmate students didn’t want class to end and for the outside students to leave. “It was really over and above anything we had hoped for,” she says. And between those classes and her correspondence courses, she managed to finish her degree and graduate on June 8, 2013. “It felt absolutely amazing,” she says. “I am the only woman in the history of GVI to have completed a degree while being there.”

AVA WAS RELEASED from Grand Valley on May 22, 2013. She went into prison with few chances for a successful future—and doesn’t downplay her degree. “Unless you’re released from prison and learn something new, you’re exactly where you started,” she says. “The fact that I was able to work on my degree, get involved in Inside-Out, I’m now in college full-time— that’s given me all the direction I needed to try and change. If none of that happened, I don’t know what I’d be doing right now. I really don’t know.” That might make it seem like Creating Choices is still alive. Not quite.

“The GVI that opened in 1997 is not the GVI we have today,” says O’Mahony. Ava points to one, big roadblock on the way to education: If women at Grand Valley want to take university correspondence courses, they have to find a way to finance them— something that’s incredibly difficult to do on a salary of less than $7 a day. At one point, inmates could get an Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) bursary called Ontario Special Bursaries which awarded a student up to $2,500. Those were last offered for the 2010- 2011 year though before they were cut from the Ontario budget. Before the bursaries were cancelled, says Ava, 30 women were studying post-secondary inside Grand Valley via correspondence. The next year, that number dropped to two. Ava paid for school through scholarships, a $500 grant from the Elizabeth Fry Association (a group that helps incarcerated women) and a different grant from OSAP.

Outside of Grand Valley, Ava says she’s lonely, that she has no friends, and has only been to the movies once. She’s not allowed to talk to anyone from prison because
she’s on parole. She feels displaced. Prices have changed. Muffins used to be $1, now they are $2. She took a trip to Shoppers Drug Mart recently, but left. The tattoo underneath her sleeve is a reminder to stay on course. She talks about these things and about her life of abuse and drugs and her women’s studies degree that she had to fight so hard for inside a penitentiary that has become hardened and strict. Somewhere on a bridge above the Don Valley River on our way to her boxing class, she stops and says “I like walking across bridges.”

Before we walk through the gym’s doors, she stops again and tells me she’s wearing two pairs of pants. She says quickly, her tone hushed: “It’s a habit from prison,” where the cells were cold and an extra pair of pants meant an extra layer of protection between her skin and filth. Months later, she tells me she’s always worried that something will send her back to Grand Valley—that everything she’s worked for is all hanging together by a string and that it could snap so easily. Sometimes in the city, she comes face-to-face with women from her prison days, still stuck in the cycle.

The other boxers don’t know about Grand Valley yet (although, tired of living a double life, she will later tell them).During the workout she’s smiling, making wisecracks. “It looks easier than it is,” she says, even though she jumps at the chance to use the weighted ball. With every exercise she adds a twist making it more challenging. The gym blasts OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” and has a brown-haired, freckle-faced coach who says that every woman needs a heavy bag to punch. “Better out than in,” she says. Throughout the gym the sound of gloves hitting and bouncing off punching bags echo. Here, at least, Ava moves with ease.

 *name changed to protect privacy

What would happen if housing were enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms? One activist’s inside account of the radical new fight to end homelessness

In 1996, fresh out of high school, I co-founded the Calgary chapter of the anti-poverty activist group Food Not Bombs, together with a group of youth active in the local punk music scene. We collected donations of food and served vegetarian meals to the hungry and homeless in front of City Hall, an outdoor soup-kitchen and weekly protest rolled into one.

We couldn’t stand by as the number of people without homes in boomtown Calgary continued to rise; by 1999 estimates put the number of homeless at almost 4,000 people.We sent letters to politicians, held rallies, and spoke to the press. No one should go hungry, we argued—after all, food did grow on trees. And we knew without a shadow of a doubt that housing was a human right.

Canada prides itself as “a consistently strong voice for the protection of human rights,” and has signed onto many international human rights covenants. It was a Canadian, John Peters Humphrey, who was the principal drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Together with the UN General Assembly, Canada adopted the historic document in 1948, which guarantees everyone the right to “a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.”

Despite this guarantee, the numbers of homeless people in Calgary has remained largely unchanged; in 2008, the city counted 3,601 people without a home. In 2014, that number sits at 3,533—and many other Canadian cities face the same high, stagnant rates.

Almost 15 years after those first small actions, I was privileged to stand outside a courthouse in downtown Toronto as four individuals and the Centre for Equality Rights in Accommodation (CERA) filed a historic legal challenge against the Canadian and Ontario governments. The housing and homelessness crisis had only deepened over the years, and these activists intended to hold Canada to its 1948 promise. They wanted the Court to declare homelessness itself a human rights violation and to rule that under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the government had a responsibility to end it.

“Across the county and in Toronto, various activities have been employed to end homelessness, from research on the health effects of homelessness to meetings with politicians and protests,” says Cathy Crowe, a street nurse and voluntary executive director of the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee. “It’s hard to imagine one thing that hasn’t been tried, and done really well, by groups across the country.” Crowe is one of 12 expert witnesses who provided evidence in support of the legal challenge. “It felt to us way back, that we should go to court.”

The legal system isn’t the only avenue for marginalized people to seek justice. But, after years of organizing to end homelessness with few victories to celebrate, the possibility of a court ruling that would force the government to act was an exciting prospect.

Supporters have since dubbed the CERA-led case the “Right to Housing” challenge. Unlike past legal skirmishes led by anti-poverty activists, which targeted specific laws—such as those that banned panhandling or sleeping in parks—it is a broad, all-encompassing challenge to government policy. A shared experience of living without adequate, affordable housing brought the applicants together. They deeply wanted to help prevent others from facing the same challenges. Together with the non-profit organization CERA, they argued that the federal and provincial government had failed to implement effective strategies to address homelessness and inadequate housing. As a result, the applicants argued, the governments had deprived them, and others, of “life, liberty, and security of person”—a violation of section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

The case also relies on the rights to equality found in section 15 of the Charter. Women, people with disabilities, aboriginal people, new immigrants, youth, and people from racialized communities experience inadequate housing and homelessness at greater rates than the general population. The applicants argued that by failing to effectively address the housing crisis, Canada and Ontario were “creating and sustaining conditions of inequality.”

“I lost my husband, my children, my home,” says Janice Arsenault, one of the four applicants involved in the legal case. In 2003, her husband, who owned their Pickering, Ont., house together with his mother, died during a routine operation. Heartsick and homeless, she was forced to relinquish custody of her children to her parents. Arsenault ended up living on the street, and then in a series of poorly maintained apartments where she faced abusive roommates and drug-dealing neighbours. “I’m 45 years old. I don’t want to wait ten years to live in a safe place,” says Arsenault, who has struggled to find a decent apartment that she can afford with the money she receives in provincial disability benefits.

In Canada, 200,000 people experience homelessness each year, and at least 1.3 million have experienced homelessness or extremely insecure housing in the past five years. People without adequate housing suffer from a range of health problems, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, tuberculosis, skin and foot problems, and others. These conditions are a direct result of, or made worse, by their housing experience. They also face increased risk of violence: a 2007 Toronto-based survey found that 35 percent of homeless individuals experienced physical assault and 21 percent of women experienced sexual assault in the previous 12 months.

Without stable housing, life expectancy is significantly reduced. A 25-year-old woman living in shelters, rooming houses or hotels has a 60 percent chance of living to 75. For men, that chance drops to 32 percent. Even those who have a place to call home face serious challenges. Finding a good, affordable apartment is difficult. Forty percent of renters in Canada spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent; over 400,000 tenant households are living in overcrowded conditions; and at least 370,000 rented homes are in need of major repairs. People wait years to access affordable housing: In Ontario there are 158,445 households on the social housing wait list.

The housing crisis in Ontario hasn’t always been this bad. “Canada has always had many people living in poverty,” University of Toronto researchers noted in their 2009 book Finding Home: Policy Options for Addressing Homelessness in Canada. “But it was only in the 1980s that more and more people found themselves not only poor, but unhoused.”

This trend, caused by the erosion of social programs, grew more exaggerated when the Liberals withdrew all permanent federal funding for social housing in the early ’90s. Since then, successive governments have granted ad hoc funding for programs and new social housing, but none have re-established an ongoing program to support social housing.  “There’s a sort of collective amnesia among people about the loss of the national housing program in 1993,” says Crowe. “The current reliance on the charitable sector is problematic, and it’s a result of the underfunding of social services.”

But, there are others, like Crowe, who haven’t forgotten. In 2010, supporters of the legal case formed the Right to Housing (R2H) Coalition of Ontario. The R2H Coalition included individuals with lived experience of homelessness, as well as academics, workers, and community activists from over a dozen organizations and agencies. In the long periods between court appearances, we organized workshops and rallies to build awareness of Canada’s housing and human rights obligations. On November 22, 2011, R2H joined with the Occupy movement in Toronto to mark National Housing Day. The mood was sombre— the Occupy encampment had recently been served with an eviction notice by Toronto Police, but spirits lifted as the crowd grew in St. James Park. It was clear to me and many of the young activists sleeping in the park that homelessness was one of the starkest examples of the increasing inequality in our society which had sparked the Occupy movement. This event was one of many organized by anti-poverty activists, social service agencies, and tenant groups over the years of the housing crisis.

This sustained advocacy has not gone unnoticed by politicians, both within and outside the governing parties. In May of 2012, members of all federal parties voted in favour of a non-binding motion that acknowledged that the government has an obligation to “respect, protect and fulfill the right to housing.” A few months prior, in February, the federal NDP had introduced the Act to Secure Adequate, Accessible and Affordable Housing for Canadians to create a national housing strategy to fulfill that obligation. Members of the Liberals and the Bloc Quebecois vowed to support the bill when it came time for its second reading vote on February 27, 2013. In the lead-up to the vote, advocates called and wrote to backbencher Conservative MPs from across the country, who were free to vote with their conscience. There was hope that a few MPs, seeing the problems that lack of affordable housing were causing in their ridings, might vote in favour of the bill.

Yet, on the morning of the vote, Conservative MP Tony Clement, president of the treasury board, held a press conference and characterized the private member’s bill as a “dangerous and risky NDP spending scheme.” This statement was intentionally misleading, as private members’ bills cannot allocate funds without government approval. In the end, Clement’s message found its mark, the bill was defeated 153 to 129, with all Conservative MPs voting against it.

Housing advocates have long argued the idea that it is too expensive to end homelessness is a red herring. Take, for instance, a 2008 Government of Alberta study that concluded it would cost twice as much to maintain homelessness as it would to end it by building affordable housing and providing social/health supports to those who needed them.“Moving 11,000 individuals and families out of homelessness will require investments of $3.316 billion,” reads “A Plan for Alberta: Ending Homelessness In 10 Years.” “This is far lower than the cost of simply managing them.”

Outside of Canada, there are examples of countries addressing homelessness and the right to housing. Decades of organizing and public education in Scotland paid off when the government passed a law in 2003 ensuring that anyone who is unintentionally homeless has a right to settled accommodation. Individuals without housing can apply to a regional council which has a legal duty to provide them with permanent housing. If there aren’t any units available at the time, the council must provide them with temporary housing—a bed in a shelter is not enough. France passed a similar piece of legislation in 2007. Section 26 of the South African Bill of Rights declares: “Everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s precisely the kind of legal obligation seen in other countries that the governments of Canada and Ontario oppose. This attitude has made the Right to Housing case a hard fight. In 2012, the governments brought forward a motion to strike the case before it began. Rather than debate the evidence and present their own counter-arguments, they wanted the case to be thrown out without any of the evidence being heard by the Court.

“The use of a motion to strike by the government in an important Charter case like this is deeply troubling,” explains Tracy Heffernan, from the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario, one of three lawyers who represented the applicants. “It can serve to quell dissent and prevent the voices of marginalized groups asserting Charter violations from being heard before the courts on a full evidentiary record.”

On May 27, 2013, three years after the case was filed, I sat in a packed courtroom watching Superior Court Justice Thomas R. Lederer preside over the motion. At the end of the three-day hearing, the Justice reserved judgment. He needed time to carefully consider the arguments put forward by both sides.

The judgment arrived four months later, on a Friday afternoon in September. The Ontario Superior Court of Justice agreed with the government. Lederer ruled that it was “plain and obvious” that the case could not succeed, and struck the case. Contrary to Canada’s pledge under the Declaration of Human Rights, it seemed, this decision made it plain that there is no right to housing in Canada. “This will come as a shock to those in Canada and the international community who have been assured that Canada recognizes access to adequate housing as a fundamental human right and that the most marginalized are protected under the Charter,” Leilani Farha of CERA said at the time.

The ruling was a clear setback, but we refused to mourn. The court is one venue to assert the right to housing, the streets another. In November 2013, the R2H Coalition helped organize a week of actions from Victoria to St. John’s in support of social housing funding and a strategy to end homelessness. In Toronto, over a 100 people gathered in the rain at Yonge-Dundas square, and our cries of “housing is a right, we won’t give up the fight” echoed off the buildings around us.

The Right to Housing applicants appealed Lederer’s decision and the Ontario Court of Appeal heard the case at the end of May 2014. In addition to arguments from the applicants and the governments, a panel of three judges considered submissions from eight intervenor groups who supported the case, including Amnesty International, the Ontario Human Rights Commission and the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund. “The proper role of the Court in this case,” wrote the Charter Committee Coalition in its intervention factum. “[Is] to provide the ‘last line of defense’ for some of the most marginalized and powerless members of Canadian society.”

As of June, there’s no way to know how long we will have to wait for the Court of Appeal decision. A positive Appeal ruling would mean that the case could continue, and Arsenault and the other applicants could finally present evidence that shows the depth of the housing crisis and its impact on human rights. It could be years before we see a final ruling, unless the applicants lose at the Court of Appeal. A negative appeal decision could mean the end of the case; the applicants would pursue a Supreme Court of Canada appeal, but there is no guarantee such an appeal would be allowed, let alone successful.

Regardless of the final outcome of the legal case, Arsenault remains steadfast in her conviction that no one in Canada should be without a safe, affordable place to live. “As a human being, I have a right to adequate housing,” says Arsenault. “It’s not just for myself. I want to fight for everyone.”

Yutaka Dirks lives in Toronto. His writing has been long-listed for the CBC Literary Prize for Creative Non-Fiction and his fiction and non-fiction work has appeared in Briarpatch, Ricepaper Magazine, and Rhubarb Magazine. A long-time social justice activist and community organizer, he contributed essays to Beautiful Trouble: A toolbox for revolution, published by O/R Books in 2012.