The cancellation of Ontario’s basic income project not only violates our obligation as a society to ensure economic security for all. It also breaches the ethical obligations we have to those participating in research, and underscores the need for a multi-faceted research methodology in designing better income security programs.

The new Conservative government in Ontario led by Doug Ford has cancelled the Ontario Basic Income Pilot—an initiative of the former Liberal government of Kathleen Wynne.

The pilot promised a comparison of those receiving a monthly basic income in test sites in three areas of Ontario with those who did not. The research was aimed at ascertaining “whether a basic income helps people living on low incomes better meet their basic needs and improve their education, housing, employment and health.”

The Liberals put their faith in an evaluation design that approximated a randomized controlled trial. In research like this, a discrete variable (the basic income payment) is received only by those in an “experimental” group, and a comparison is done with a similar “control” group (who do not get the payment) to see if different, and potentially better, outcomes accrue to the experimental group.

My colleague at the University of Manitoba, Prof. Gregory Mason, recently made the made the case that it was time to abandon the project.

He argued that because the basic income pilot encountered several practical problems when setting up its evaluation methods as a more or less “pure” randomized controlled trial, there was scant valid and useful data to be garnered from the project.

Moral, ethical consequences

But, respectfully, I believe that a great deal was lost with the cancellation of the project. The moral and ethical implications of scrapping the program must not be ignored.

Some 4,000 recipients of benefits in the pilot—the members of the “experimental” group—are now without the financial support that was promised to them.

This abrupt and unexpected cancellation of the pilot by the Ford government amounts to a profound moral violation of the responsibility we have towards those who participate in research. This obligation is consistent with, but also goes beyond, the responsibility of narrow ethical research techniques as approved by research ethics boards.

The negative impact on those people has been extensively reported in the media, including in the pilot sites of Hamilton, Thunder Bay and Lindsay.On the campaign trail in the spring of 2018, Ford committed to allowing the three-year basic income pilot run its course. But Ford broke the promise less than two months after he was elected. The cancellation was an act of bad faith on the part of the new government to Ontario voters, and more importantly to the individuals already receiving basic income payments.

While these stories may be anecdotal, they describe real and significant hardships for those who had been promised a chance for a better life. The cancellation of both the pilot project, and of data collection and analysis from the three pilot communities, is a profound failure to uphold an ethical and moral obligation to research participants.

This ethical breach is not the fault of the team of academics and program evaluators who were in place to carry out the research. The blame must be assigned to their new political masters.

More than one tool in research toolkits

Prof. Mason’s argument suggests that the only worthwhile research design for the Ontario basic income pilot was a randomized controlled trial (RCT). But there are several tools in the research methodology toolkit besides a RCT design. Other methods could have been used to gather meaningful and useful data on the Ontario basic income pilot.

For instance, researchers might have amassed systematic data from those receiving a basic income payment in order to better understand the advantages and disadvantages, from the recipients’ point of view, of this new design for income assistance.

Quantitative techniques such as surveys, and qualitative techniques like interviews and focus groups, could have provided in-depth and nuanced evidence directly from the research participants themselves, even in the absence of a control group.

Comparative research could have also been done on the costs and benefits of a basic income payment compared to existing social assistance and disability support benefits using aggregate program, administrative and financial data.

All research methods have advantages and disadvantages. In certain contexts (for example, pharmaceutical testing), RCTs might be seen as the most rigorous and desirable methodology. But when tackling social scientific questions that are inherently complex and in constant flux, RCTs may not only be impractical, they may also have inherent drawbacks.

Alan E. Kazdin is a past president of the American Psychological Association, and (as quoted by Rebecca Clay in 2010) cautions that “overreliance on RCTs means missing out on all sorts of valuable information.” A 2016 study delved into the difficulty of applying the RCT method specifically to economic questions, making the point that “an RCT cannot simply be a matter of simple extrapolation from the experiment to another context.”

We need new approaches

One thing seems clear—the dysfunctional and oppressive nature of our current “last resort” income assistance system makes research into better approaches absolutely imperative.

Not proceeding with the basic income project, and not collecting available data from it, means that we are passing up a golden research opportunity.

Even if it were possible to run a highly rigorous RCT research design in a basic income project, there’s one big problem.

Research subjects in a pilot know that their benefit will cease when the research project ends. The recipients of an actual, operational basic income program, however, would know that there is no end date for the benefit—they will receive it for as long as they’re eligible.

So it would be reasonable to assume that the economic and social choices of basic income recipients (on questions such as employment, education, accommodation and fixed household expenditures) would differ between these two conditions.

Those with long-term assurance that their financial safety net is in place might take more risks and make longer-term plans to improve their economic situations. Thus, extrapolating from a time-limited basic income experiment run as a RCT to a real-world scenario seems an artificial and potentially misleading exercise.

Ways forward

While it’s important to make the case for a variety of methods (beyond just RCTs) in basic income research, this may be a moot point in regard to Ontario’s pilot. Despite national and worldwide dismay that the project is being cancelled, Ford seems committed on ideological grounds to stop the payments and halt the related research.

It can only be hoped that those who have been receiving basic income payments in the project will be given “a lengthy runway” to adjust to their new circumstances. Ontario’s minister of Children, Community and Social Services has given, so far, only a vague commitment that this will be the case.

Hopefully the project’s participants can also continue to tell their stories in the media and to academic researchers. We researchers need to gather evidence in a variety of ways if we are to contribute to the design and delivery of better income security programs.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Simeonie Tuckatuck, 58, who has been living homeless in Montreal for three years, panhandles indoors at the Promenades Cathédrale near the McGill metro station in Montreal. Photo by Dario Ayala / Material republished with the express permission of: Montreal Gazette, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.

At any given time there are 150 to 200 Nunavik Inuit in Montreal accompanying a loved one receiving medical care. The lack of basic services in their northern communities forces a vast number of Inuit to fly south to receive treatment in the city. Once they arrive, many Inuit opt to stay in Montreal in an effort to avoid negative social situations at home.

After decades of horrific government programs targeted at altering the Inuit’s way of life, social and economic issues have inevitably arisen in formerly prosperous communities. Devastating repercussions stemming from residential schools, widespread sled dog slaughter, forced sedentism, and seal bans have shaken communities. For many, mental health has been severely affected; addiction, domestic violence, and alcohol abuse are symptomatic of the hardships experienced by many. Already difficult social situations are exacerbated by lack of adequate modern housing—almost half of families live in overcrowded or deteriorating homes.

Both positive and negative forces have led many Nunavik Inuit to seek new lifestyles in Montreal, be it for opportunities in education and employment, or to escape overcrowded or abusive homes. However, many find themselves in vulnerable situations in a new city vastly different from home, which has led to a disproportionate number of Inuit represented in the Montreal homeless community.

49% of Nunavik Inuit live in crowded homes. The housing crisis in Nunavik exacerbates health concerns and creates tension in families where abuse and addiction may already be a problem.

55% have a food insecure household. Fly-in only communities pay an exorbitant amount for imported food, and it is becoming harder to rely on traditional food sources.

39% have a regular family doctor. Most communities only have access to an outpost nurse, and hospitals and doctors’ offices often care for multiple communities at once.

446 sexual assaults were reported in 2017, almost 4% of the population. Many women report situations of domestic violence and sexual abuse to be the main reason they decide to migrate south.

60% of Nunavik residents flew to Montreal for health care-related reasons. About 8,000 people travelled south for things like cancer treatments, CAT scans, or surgeries that are simply not available in Nunavik.

10% of the Indigenous people in Montreal are Inuit. But Inuit people make up 45 percent of the Indigenous homeless population in the city. A disproportionate number of Inuit slip into homelessness after landing in Montreal.

71% of homeless Inuit said they would return home if housing conditions improved.

Photo by the Canadian Press/Paul Chiasson

The federal government is preparing to offer rental subsidies to homeless veterans as part of a draft strategy called Coming Home.

The plan is meant to address the staggering reality that almost 2,250 veterans use emergency shelters on a regular basis, according to a 2015 study by Employment and Social Development Canada. That amounts to almost three percent of the total Canadian homeless population.

Of the veterans who become homeless in Canada, factors such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), other mental health issues, and substance abuse typically play a role. What’s more: research from the University of Western Ontario shows that veterans are most vulnerable to homelessness one decade after leaving the service.

To tackle the problem, Veteran Affairs Canada (VAC) is hiring 309 new permanent staff across Canada between now and 2020. This includes 167 case managers and 101 disability benefits staff. “Additional staff will mean that the needed case management services will be able to be provided to more veterans, including those who are homeless or in crisis,” Kent Hehr, Minister of Veterans Affairs and Associate Minister of National Defence, told This in an email.

While details are scant on how VAC plans to tackle homelessness, we can look south of the border to a similar initiative that’s garnered some success.

In 2010, U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs launched Opening Doors, a federal strategic plan to end veteran homelessness. Opening Doors boasts health, housing, and job support for veterans using the housing first model. The idea is that once veterans have stable, permanent housing, they are better equipped to deal with factors like unemployment, addiction, and mental health challenges. Many studies show that housing first programs drive significant reductions in the use of crisis services, and ultimately help people improve their health and social outcomes. The U.S. veteran homelessness rate has dropped 50 percent since Opening Doors launched.

Canada has even further to go to end veteran homelessness. On top of housing subsidies, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised almost $300 million for a new plan for veterans, and also promised to re-instate pension programs, which were replaced by a lump-sum payment in 2006. With a draft of Coming Home expected to be made public by the end of 2016, it remains to be seen how bold Canada will be in its plans to house veterans.

Alexandra Shimo, left, and Lia Grimanis. Photo courtesy of Lia Grimanis

Uncommon rain and no wind in April 2014 in the mountains of Pokhara, Nepal, nearly halted Lia Grimanis’ elaborate wedding proposal to award-winning author, Alexandra Shimo. After planning the para-hawking proposal (a combination of paragliding and falconry) for three-and-a-half years, Grimanis couldn’t back out now. She took advantage of a short clearing in the weather and plunged off a mountain with Shimo. But the falcon tore off the paper message meant for Shimo tied to its ankle reading: “Say yes.” Then the walkie-talkie malfunctioned.

“I just started screaming to Alex, ‘We’ve been together over three years….’ And Alex yelled, ‘What?’” Grimanis laughs. “Luckily, she understood ‘Will you marry me?’”

The extreme gesture is typical of Grimanis, who holds two Guinness World Records for being the first woman to pull a tractor-trailer 100 feet in high heels. Grimanis uses these feats to remind female survivors of violence, homelessness, and poverty that they are stronger than they think.

As a teenager, Grimanis fled a violent home, lost her virginity to rape, and dropped out of high school. Driven by a promise she made on a shelter bed to give back to other women in need, Grimanis has clawed her way out of homelessness and, for the last 25 years, has helped other women do the same. “Nobody ever came back to help me and said, ‘Look at me, I’m a doctor, lawyer, astrophysicist after being homeless.’ I needed to be that story,” says Grimanis.

She landed a corporate IT sales jobs she was under-qualified for by being the most enthusiastic, well-researched candidate. By 2006, she had saved enough to invest $50,000 to found Up With Women, an organization dedicated to providing formerly homeless and at-risk women and children with strategic leadership, career, and business development services, and mentoring for youth. Shortly after meeting Shimo in 2011, Grimanis left the corporate world to focus on Up With Women.

Both women work at reframing their negative experiences and are fiercely committed to social justice. Shimo, who is of Caucasian and Japanese descent, lived with her mother in a run-down home in North London with no immediate family nearby, no heat, phone, or hot water. The house was eventually condemned, and they moved into social housing with her mother’s emotionally manipulative boyfriend.

“Each night, [my mother] came home from whatever job she had and cried,” Shimo recalls. “Sometimes we would pack up our suitcases and get ready to leave. Then we would unpack again; my mother didn’t want to move into a homeless shelter. I think that those experiences of feeling helpless and trapped by poverty have undoubtedly shaped me and all that I do.”

Shimo sits on the advisory board of Up With Women and volunteers with First Nations youth organizations. Her latest book, part memoir and part history, is called Invisible North: The Search for Answers on a Troubled Reserve. It is inspired by the injustice and hope experienced by those on the Kashechewan First Nation, and is slated for publication this fall.

As for Grimanis, she’s preparing for her third and final Guinness Book of World Record as the first woman to pull a jet plane. She’ll attempt the feat on May 14, 2017—Mother’s Day—as a testimony to mothers’ resilience.

“It’s hard enough being in a shelter as a single person feeling broken and like there is something wrong with you, but these mothers feel incredibly guilty,” says Grimanis, noting that many mothers unfairly blame themselves for having their children in a shelter, when often they’ve fled home to keep their children safe. She and Shimo just had their first child, and, fittingly, their anonymous sperm donor wrote on his intake form that homelessness is the thing that bothers him the most.

It’s the same feeling of anger and frustration that drives Grimanis to help other women with lived experience of poverty. “You can be incredibly traumatized from what happens to you, or you can use that pain, anger, and memory of loneliness and make it your fuel,” she says. “This is what will drive you harder than anything else and bring you the opportunity to change other’s lives as well.”

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

It’s time to re-envision housing in Canada. Many of our challenges can be solved through innovation: we must not look to old models to solve our current problems. After all, it’s our current model that’s leading to mass homelessness.

No civilized group of people should allow that to happen to their neighbours, and we shouldn’t tolerate inaction. Let’s make our number one priority to help every homeless person in Canada. Some will need mental health support, some will need an economic solution, others will be suffering from addiction or abuse. Housing should be a right in Canada, like health care or education. It’s ridiculous that we will pay tens of thousands of dollars in hospital costs for a homeless person, over and over again, but do not help them pay their rent and end that cycle.

Secondly, let’s acknowledge there’s a growing population whose housing needs are not being served by the private sector, non-profits or government. Sadly, among this group are average working-class families, particularly young families, but it also includes immigrant and refugee families, students, First Nations, and single mothers. The cost of land in urban areas has made home ownership unattainable for many and increased the pool of renters. Worse yet, because there have been few incentives to build rental housing, low vacancy rates mean renting has become expensive, inadequate, or unavailable. Non-profit affordable housing or public housing should assist those who have fallen through the cracks. Yet, the abandonment of government funding for housing creates wait lists so long they defy credulity—too many end up homeless.

The confluence of these events has meant that much of the new private supply generated in both ownership and rental has been in high-end studio and one-bedroom suites. With their high costs and small size, these options aren’t suitable for many of the population types mentioned above. As we embark upon a new national housing strategy, an expanded non-profit housing sector could be the answer to many of these challenges. By removing the profit motive, the cost of developing housing is instantly cheaper, and by placing the burden of developing this housing into community groups there is an incentive to respond to the needs of families and others unserved by the market. In addition, unlike government-run housing, nonprofits have less bureaucracy, decisions are less political, and they have the ability to raise money from donations and volunteers. Expanding this model to serve average families, immigrants, and students instead of just vulnerable populations could be the key to ensuring that we have diverse, affordable, community-connected housing in the long-term.

Innovation will also mean looking to the sharing economy and assessing whether more communal living options could become mainstream. While shared gyms, pools, and laundry have been commonplace for years, we must now explore the limits of what level of sharing is marketable and attainable. Would tenants and owners be willing to accept quality over quantity by sharing their kitchens, living rooms, and more? Perhaps everything other than bedrooms should be reconsidered and we should look to new design options to maximize the utility of those spaces. Many of these things happen organically in repurposed homes or for roommates, but it’s time to re-examine it through a design and zoning lens in purpose-built rentals or condos.

Innovation in housing has to mean more than renting out your spare room or adding a Murphy bed. The next era is ripe for ideas on finance, design, and management. However, it’s going to take cooperation from all levels of government and a willingness to uncouple ourselves from some centuries of nostalgia about what a house looks like, what ownership looks like, and what our basic rights and entitlements are. If so, we may find a new era of opportunity, innovation, and our most important new social program.

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

Jostling academics, lawyers, reporters, coalitions, and religious groups who identify as anti-poverty fighters have not come up with anything substantive or evolutionary in decades. We are treated to the same tired approaches: demonstrations and denunciations; op-eds that vault the writer’s ego but quickly disappear from public consciousness; political parties that “own” the issue castigating their rivals; and obligatory feature articles on sympathetic poor people, but not too poor, not too facially marred by their lived reality—it must be inoffensive and calculated to spark pity, if not action.

And those who work at agencies that “serve” those in need? They feel good at intervening in the latest crisis, unaware that their clients experience a 24/7 crisis, impacting their health and hearts as their lives are wasting away or brutally ending. Staff police crowded spaces, dirty, chaotic, and grim, where hope and change never enter. They need to feel they do right by their clients, postponing evictions or handing out TTC tokens, although, at the end of the day, only they have their lives enhanced by salaries and offices and cars to whisk them out of bleak communities to more middle-class living.

Staff and experts don’t really know the entrenched poor. They certainly don’t socialize or spend any time with them outside work hours. We can see this in their asks: a bit more food, a few more dollars, and more and more social supports that infantilize, control, and maintain people in poverty. To justify this usurpation of voice it is often said that the poor have no time or energy to spend on their own liberation.

But in the end the question is: Whose poverty is it? It belongs to those who live it, know it, and struggle to survive it.

We have stumbled on a way to eliminate the class ceiling, and have found support from foundations and government to do so. But experts seem never to have thought about actually paying people to participate—relieving them of the burden of poverty for the time they spend learning from each other. Experts haven’t thought about letting them get used to having more, being more than simply a problem.

Those of us with lived experience of poverty, mental illness, single parents, refugees, homeless folks, people with addictions or physical disabilities are stepping out of our separate silos, re-integrating ourselves, telling each other our stories, and understanding through the process that poverty is the overriding issue—but poverty can be fought. The separate labels we carry serve only to keep us apart and in thrall to agencies. Yet once people start talking to each other about their experience of poverty, its shattering effects, how hard it is to escape, they can see how the agencies set them up to fail, and how they don’t see their potential, their ability. It’s not simply about complaining; it’s about identifying systemic issues and proposing solutions. It’s learning to speak in ways that those in power can hear and respond to. It’s recognizing that change has to start in our own lives, and that taking responsibility for mistakes made is part of that change. It’s about caring for the communities we come from, and working for all our benefit.

We need to start doing this in ways that are constructive in tone and substance. Let’s start fighting for ourselves and for lives that are worth living—a hearts-and-minds approach that takes us to tables around the city and circumvents both the experts and external advocates who would rather we simply attend and validate their events, cynically offering lures of watery soup, T-shirts, and stale sandwiches.

We must speak for ourselves and to policy makers, politicians, businesspeople, police, doctors, and funders—people who are affected by our presence, who have to revise their view of who the poor are, what they want, and how effectively they self-represent. We must ensure we take a holistic view of those living in poverty, no longer dividing them up according to funding mechanisms, but bringing people together so that we can support each other moving forward.

In my future Canada, we will talk about opportunity, whether in education, or employment; we will talk about wanting to work side-by-side with those with paper credentials to improve what is a failing system; and we will be welcomed. Already, we are building allies, people outside systems, who ensure we have doors opened that previously were closed. We are believing again in our own potential.

This is seismic change, not welcome everywhere, but change that will revolutionize how we see and treat the poor. Maybe, within the next decades, we can show that the poor will not always be with us, but will move up and out of what was thought to be forever.

OCAP image for the July 16 rally and march.

The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) led a rally and march last weekend in protest of Toronto’s Pan Am Games. As the event page description reads, “If there is money to spend on circuses, then the resources can be found to end the need for food banks, tackle the mounting problem of homelessness and ensure that everyone has decent, affordable and accessible housing.”

It’s a reasonable point—especially considering whenever there is a demand for shelter and livable wages, the counter argument is always the excuse that there isn’t enough money. Yet, more than $700 million was spent on the athlete’s village and another $10 million was allotted for the province’s Pan Am secretariat. Neither of these costs are included in the games’ $1.4-billion budget.

So, just so we’re clear: Our governments didn’t have enough money to put services in place to mitigate against 18 reported deaths from amongst Toronto’s homeless population, but Pan Am execs will receives $7 million in bonuses. (But hey, they have to split it.) Oh, and let’s not forget the unnecessary infrastructure added to the public’s bill, or the $3.8 million that was spent on lighting up a bridge.

Photo taken at the rally and march July 16.

In Toronto, insufficient shelter, unlivable wages, and empty food bank shelves are all issues that have been shoved under the rug during the games. Instead, we get the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) working alongside Pan Am games security to protect tourists from, well, the homeless, apparently. The attack on the poor—like dislocating low-income families and the homeless or making arrests for petty crimes—happens years in advance. “People don’t want to see unsightly people on the streets when they’re trying to sell an event,” as Sophy Chan, an activist and community engagement co-ordinator at SPORT4ONTARIO told Now in March.

And yet, all this is not what city officials see as embarrassing. Concerns are directed on more important matters, like pretty floors for the housing in athlete’s village. “Unfinished floors and ragged walls without baseboards would reflect poorly on our region’s reputation as hosts. Quite simply, the village wouldn’t look finished,” TO2015 spokesperson Teddy Katz tells The Star.  And here was me thinking that an embarrassing host was someone who couldn’t take care of their own residents. But, Ontario is “helping” students who volunteer for the games—the population who the province makes poor. So that makes up for it (but not really).

My daughter attends a city-run daycare which received an overabundance in free tickets for the games. When I attended an event I saw overpaid security (police are making $80 an hour) thoroughly check daycare children, in unorganized line-ups, leading to under-attended games. Public money could have been spent better elsewhere, but that’s just my hunch.

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her second year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

Ontario hasn’t had a minimum wage increase since 2010, when the per hour wage rose from $9.50 to $10.25. The wage freeze in the three intervening years means that while the cost of living continues to rise, wages stagnate, and those costs of living cut into already modest wages.

The Campaign to Raise the Minimum Wage calls for an increase to 10 percent above the poverty line in Canada, or $14, which would make Ontario’s hourly wage the highest in Canada.

Currently, Nunavut sits in first place, at $11/hr, with the Yukon a close second at $10.54. Ontario and B.C. come in just under Manitoba and Nova Scotia, and are closely followed by Quebec. Saskatchewan and four other provinces and territories come in at $10, with Alberta a dismal $9.75 in last place. In contrast, the American federal minimum wage is $7.25, and has been since 2009.

While there are arguments against a wage increase from many factions, it is possible, and even likely, for full-time workers in this country to remain below the poverty line.

The proposed $14 would ricochet Ontario to the top of the provincial pile, and would likely pull the wages of many provinces up with it.

WAC and the Campaign to Raise the Minimum Wage will be holding their next day of action in Ontario on September 14.

Fort Chipewyan residents are increasingly afraid to consume the fish pulled from Lake Athabasca.

Canada’s oil sands are the largest and most environmentally destructive industrial project in the world. So far, oil sands development has eliminated 602 square kilometers of Boreal forest and emits 29.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gasses annually. The process involves strip-mining bitumen, a tar-like, sandy earth also known as “tar sands,” then processing it into various petroleum products. This process produces 1.8 billion litres of liquid toxic waste every day, which is stored in man-made “tailings ponds.” These ponds currently hold enough toxic waste to fill 2.2 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.

The First Nations community of Fort Chipewyan is located 300 kilometres downstream from the oil sands. In 2006, Fort Chipewyan’s family physician, Dr. John O’Connor, reported that alarmingly high rates of rare and aggressive cancers were killing local residents. As of 2010, band elders reported that cancer had become the leading cause of death in the community. Fear and grief consume Fort Chipewyan as fishermen are finding tumour-laden fish in Lake Athabasca and residents continue to lose their friends and family to cancer.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers continues to tell Canada and the world that there are no lasting impacts upon human health or the environment from the oil sands. Conflicting statements from CAPP, the Government of Alberta, scientists, environmentalists, non-governmental organizations and First Nations people have led to widespread public confusion over the true effects of the operation. Meanwhile, the people of Fort Chipewyan continue to die. Those who survive are afraid to consume the moose, fish and water that have sustained their families for generations.

Pollution from tailings ponds.

Tailings ponds line both sides of the Athabasca River near the oil sands—their toxic contents held back by man-made sand dikes that are hundreds of feet tall. A 2008 study by Environmental Defence showed that the tailings ponds were leaking 11 million litres of liquid into the surrounding environment every day. The Athabasca River runs past the oil sands, through Lake Athabasca, past several indigenous communities including Fort Chipewyan, and eventually empties into the Arctic Ocean.

Cherie Wanderingspirit worries about her children's health.

The abandoned Holy Angels Residential School in Fort Chipewyan.

Young people in Fort Chipewyan are increasingly disconnected from their traditional culture.

Like many Fort Chipewyan parents, Cherie Wanderingspirit (above) is worried about her children’s health. Today’s younger generations in Fort Chipewyan not only face the threat of cancer, but also live with the social trauma passed down to them by family members who lived at Fort Chipewyan’s Holy Angels Residential School (above) which closed in 1974. The torture and sexual abuse endured by the aboriginal children who attended the school have left lasting wounds upon the social and cultural fabric of Fort Chipewyan. Substance abuse, sexual assault, depression, and suicide are ongoing problems within the community. As a result, young people here are largely disconnected from their traditional First Nations culture. Rather than leaning to hunt, fish and trap, the youth (above) are often more interested in video games and urban fashion.

A willow branch marks the passage from Lake Athabasca into the Athabasca Delta.

Other than working in the oil sands, commercial fishing is one of the last ways to make a living in Fort Chipewyan.

Lake Athabasca fish being smoked.

Fish that can't be sold are thrown to the sled dogs.

A young willow branch (above) stuck into the mud by a boater, marks the deepest passage from Lake Athabasca into the Athabasca Delta. Fort Chipewyan’s band elders are concerned that water being taken from the Athabasca River to process bitumen into oil is contributing to declining water levels. Tar sands processing requires almost four barrels of water for every barrel of crude produced; Alberta Energy projects production will reach 3 million barrels of oil per day by 2018. Aside from employment in the oil sands, commercial fishing is one of Fort Chipewyan’s last viable means of making a living. Over the last five years, more and more fish with golf-ball-sized tumours, double tails, and other abnormalities have been caught in Lake Athabasca by commercial fishermen. In 2010, fishermen in Fort Chipewyan were unable to sell any fish commercially due to growing concerns over contamination from pollution, according to Lionel Lepine, the traditional environmental knowledge coordinator for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation. Most of the fish caught during 2010 were smoked  or thrown to sled dogs.

Band elder Wilfred Marcel lost his daughter to cancer in 2003. She was 30 years old.

After more than forty years of chiefs and band elders complaining about the effects of pollution from the oil sands and tailings ponds, it took the publicly stated opinion of Dr. John O’Connor and independent environmental assessments by Dr. David Schindler and Dr. Kevin Timoney to finally draw media and public attention to Fort Chipewyan’s health and environmental concerns. The chief and council of Fort Chipewyan have called upon the Canadian government for an independent public health inquiry for over a decade. In that time, hundreds of Fort Chipewyan’s residents have died of unexplained cancers. Band elder Wilfred Marcel (above) lost his daughter Stephanie to cancer in 2003. She was 30 years old.

The cemetery in Fort Chipewyan. Hundreds of residents have died of unexplained cancers.

Day 14 of the Occupy Wall Street protest. Photo by David Shankbone.

[Note: this editorial appears in the November-December 2011 edition of This Magazine, which will be on newsstands and in subscribers’ mailboxes in early November.] 

Looking back on autumn 2011, it seems increasingly clear that the movement known as “Occupy Wall Street” will be viewed as a genuinely important historical moment for the West. The idea, first floated by the contemporary masters of agitprop Adbusters in July, quickly developed a life of its own, attracting thousands of people to a makeshift encampment in New York’s Liberty Square. They came for a variety of reasons, but their slogan was, and is, a simple and powerful fact: “We are the 99 percent.” As in: regardless of political affiliation, personal attributes, or occupation (or lack thereof), we are united by our opposition to the predatory economic behaviour of the top-earning one percent.

The “Occupy” meme spread quickly, with new demonstrations popping up across the United States and Canada. The language explicitly drew parallels with the Arab Spring revolutions still roiling the Middle East; the selection of Liberty Square, an echo of Egypt’s Tahrir, or Liberation Square, was no accident. (It should be noted that some fairly objected to the militarist and colonialist overtones of “occupying” anything.) This being the internet age, variants and jokes swarmed around the event too, with “Occupy Sesame Street” casting the Muppets as revolutionaries, and “Occupy Occupy Wall Street” satirically imagining hedge fund managers and investment bankers sitting in on the sit-in.

Many observers, particularly reporters from larger media outlets, were either openly scornful or simply missed the point. They got their footage of some “anarchists”—one of the laziest catchalls in contemporary journalism—looking angry or shouting slogans, and spoke in ominous tones about arrests and scuffles with the police, frequently omitting the fact that the police were the aggressors.

In fairness, Occupy Wall Street, for all its catchy slogans, actually is hard to summarize in a 60-second slot on the evening news, and thank goodness. People showed up for all kinds of reasons: jobs lost to globalization, homes lost to foreclosure, health lost to the U.S.’s senseless farce of a health care system (here in Canada, where unemployment is lower, banks more regulated, and health care still mostly public, the list of grievances was slightly different but still passionately felt). The point was never to hammer out a unified, focus-grouped electoral platform; it was to finally articulate a widespread anger and dissatisfaction with the status quo. Reporters asked “Why are you here?” as if they expected a camera-ready soundbite. But many of us asked, “What took you so long?”

The latest economic crisis had its roots in the investment bank collapses of 2008, and the last three years or so have inflicted a series of indignities on millions of people around the world. Most of them bore their burdens in silence, working- and middle-class citizens feeling shame for suffering the effects of an economic calamity they didn’t cause. Crucially, they are the constituency who are now shrugging off that humiliation and focusing their anger on the ones who are truly to blame. Critiques of globalized capitalism are nothing new; thousands of previously unradicalized protesters in the street certainly is. They’re mad as hell—you know the rest. What will come of it, no one can say conclusively. But naming the problem is the first step, and the Occupy protests have done an admirable and necessary job.