Photo by Patrick Sicotte

A late summer day in 2008 changed everything for the community of Montréal-Nord, a multicultural suburban borough in the city’s north end. Fredy Villanueva, an 18-year-old Honduran refugee, was shot and killed by a police officer in a park. The shock of his death rippled through the tight-knit neighbourhood, sparking immediate outrage, rioting, and protests.

Cassandra Exumé, currently the General Coordinator at Hoodstock, was the same age as Villanueva at the time. She remembers watching the borough she associated with childhood summers on the news, erupting in pain. Montréal-Nord was at a breaking point.

“The same day that there was the demonstration here in Montréal-Nord, Guillaume Hébert, Nargess Mustapha, and Will Prosper [Hoodstock’s co-founders] were just like, okay, we’re talking, we’re sad—but let’s build something from that sadness,” says Exumé. “We’re in pain right now. Just to make sure that this never happens again, what can we do?”

Out of those urgent conversations, Hoodstock, the grassroots neighbourhood collective, was born. It was first called Montréal-Nord Républik, Exumé explains, raising a little fist with a smile on “Républik.” The current name proudly puts “hood” at the front, riffing off the collective and the musical association of Woodstock for the rhyme.

Montréal-Nord, the neighbourhood Hoodstock calls home, has long been stigmatized, overlooked, and underestimated. Many residents are low-income and/or people of colour, with 42 percent of the community identifying as immigrants, according to the 2016 census. While the borough is strongly francophone, many members of the community are multilingual.

The organization runs on a “for us, by us” philosophy, with a BIPOC and immigrant-led team. Hoodstock organizes community meetings, consultations, and projects, often does workshops in schools, and organizes social events. They’ve recently moved into an open-door neighbourhood office, responding to their neighbours’ needs (such as helping them register to get a provincial healthcare card, enroll in government French classes, or resolve conflicts) as they arise or as they stop by. In the past year and a half, those needs have shifted dramatically.

Over the course of the pandemic, Montréal-Nord has experienced the highest concentration of COVID-19 cases in the city, with 12,199 cumulative cases per 100,000 people. In spring 2020, Hoodstock saw that many community members were being left behind by the federal and provincial government’s pandemic response, so they sprung into action.

“Could you imagine [experiencing the pandemic as] someone who doesn’t speak French or English, who is new to the country?” says Exumé.

The team went door-to-door distributing PPE and talking with people cooped up in their apartments. They organized a grocery delivery program for elders and the vulnerable, as well as connecting families with tablets and laptops for online schooling. “If we’d stuck to our original plan for 2020, we wouldn’t have helped so many people,” she says. “We have our vision, but we really are flexible with the changes of the world.”

Hoodstock works to fill in the gaps left by a systemic lack of resources and support for the borough. Current projects include Le Hood Stop, which will engage local youth in conversations around sexual assault and consent, a similar effort to talk to teens about gun- and gang-related violence, workshops to maintain momentum in the wake of George Floyd’s death, and connecting low-income households with affordable Wi-Fi plans.

It’s difficult for an organization like Hoodstock to plan too far into the future, as their work is determined by the ever-changing needs of their community, but Exumé sees this as the grassroots collective’s strength. “There are a lot of things we are not responsible for, but the systems are not taking care of us,” says Exumé. “How come a young, small organization has to do the work of a big government?”

Inside Vernal Small’s tailor shop, Jamall Caribbean Custom Tailor, near Eglinton and Oakwood. Photos by Sharine Taylor

Living in Toronto means I’m not too far from Jamaica. Not because geography affords proximity, but because the presence of the diaspora has made itself known. Over 200,330 people of Jamaican descent reside in Toronto alone, and that’s evident by the countless restaurants, small businesses, specialty shops, and grocery stores that populate the city. Though people who have migrated from the island have settled all over the country, in the 1970s during a heavy period of migration from the Caribbean, select pockets of neighbourhoods in Toronto were concentrated with people from the region. One of those neighbourhoods was Little Jamaica.

For a few months, when I was around seven years old, I lived right off Trethewey Drive, a street in Toronto’s west end, inside a low-rise, yellow-brick apartment with my mom, aunt, and cousin. Every other weekend, my aunt would drag us to Eglington Avenue West to get her nails and hair done, and over time it became my favourite spot to grab pan chicken cooked in the recognizable repurposed oil drums just like back home. The Little Jamaica community, which stretches from Eglinton Avenue West and Keele Street to Eglinton Avenue West and Marlee Avenue, was known for its vibrant Caribbean community and the proudly Black-owned businesses that once lined its streets. However, due to the almost eight-year, ongoing construction of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, with aims to make travelling between the east and west end of the city easier, the area has been subject to a decline in business, and questions about the preservation of cultural heritage and legacy are being raised.

I began thinking about preservation and archiving. How many first-gens who share complicated hyphenated identities have to explore the histories of where they come from outside our home and native land, have to do so of their own accord, even if those seemingly distant histories are deeply bound up in the Canadian experience. Canada’s 1955 West Indian Domestic Scheme? The Jamaican Maroons in Nova Scotia during 1796? Those histories exist outside of our educational curriculums, and if we’re not aware of our own stories, whose job will it be to pass these narratives on to the generations that come after us?

Last summer, I was granted an opportunity to add to the ways we chronicle our histories. Fabienne Colas, a Montreal-based Haitian actress, asked, “What does it mean to be Black in Canada?” Through the Being Black in Canada program, run through her self-titled foundation, she gave emerging and first-time film directors an opportunity to explore what those answers could be. There was an unshakeable sense of urgency that made me want to focus on Little Jamaica, which had rapidly turned into a neighbourhood that was in a perpetual state of uneasiness and erasure.

I didn’t anticipate my film, Tallawah Abroad: Remembering Little Jamaica, becoming a project that consumed me in the ways that it did. Not because filmmaking was a daunting and challenging feat, but because I knew that, beyond filming, the people who lived, worked, had families, and were part of this community still had to contend with their realities. Despite documenting what this neighbourhood looked like two summers away from its scheduled completion date, people still had rent to pay, people still had mouths to feed, people still needed to survive. The almost eight-year task that has been creating an extended LRT line has entirely depleted the character of a community. What will be left of what we’d made of that space beyond a mural, a stationary roadside plaque, and the renaming of a back alley to Reggae Lane? In the eight months since I’ve filmed, shops have closed, lives have changed, and an important pillar of the community—Ronald “Jimmy” Ashford Wisdom—has died.

This all made me begin to think more about who gets archived in the collective Canadian, or even Toronto, memory. Whose cultural legacy and heritage are etched into our public and national consciousness? Canada touts diversity, by virtue of its immigration policies and the many Black people and people of colour who benefit from them, as its biggest asset. But it simply sees diversity as something to be achieved, a checkmark made to signify completion—and little thought is reserved for thinking about how and what diversity looks like in practice, beyond nation building or adding onto the national mythology. When we’re no longer of use for domestic labour, seasonal agricultural work, or any other surface reasons, are we not still worthy of being remembered?

I’ve discerned that much of the Black experience historically has been living in transit. We were kidnapped from the continent and brought to foreign land by force, through blood, and over hills and valleys too. We seem to be forever engaged in a never ending race towards freedom both literally and metaphorically. And this hasn’t changed from our contemporary realities as we come to know them through the plights and familiar stories of our migration. Though we may leave any area we’re in for an array of reasons, we seem to be a restless people, always running towards or away from something, but always with the ability to recreate home in the most innovative ways. Is it cruel irony that in the case of Little Jamaica, a transit line largely for other people is prioritized over our own sense of belonging? Perhaps.

I realized the process of etching who we are and what we’ve done into a collective national imagination is a bank of knowledge that is to be created by our own hands and powered by our own voices. I mean, who can tell the story of the paradoxical Black experience better than us? We’re made to feel both hyper visible and invisible. Our community is everywhere, but nowhere. We are known and unknown, and maybe that aspect of our identity makes us unique.

Perhaps Canada shouldn’t rest on its diversity and multicultural laurels too much if it means we don’t actively preserve the cultural legacies of the people who colour the nation. When the people who have been responsible for documenting the history of this nation are not intent on honouring the lives of people who have contributed to its tapestry, they take away from the possibilities and power of what could become should those stories be heard. The table’s big enough, and we should have a seat too.

“Smile! You’re on fare evader camera.” Such is the message of the Toronto Transit Commission’s (TTC) ad campaign, which was rolled out in May 2019. The campaign follows a scandal that broke a few months earlier, when Toronto’s auditor general released a report estimating that the TTC had lost upwards of $60 million from fare evasion. It inspired an entire genre of articles that focus on describing the different ways that people manage to skip fares, often including photos and videos as public shaming. The bottom line is: your fellow riders, unlike you, are riding for free— and you’re paying the price.

Both the report and the ad campaign sparked their own iterations of an age-old debate: whose fault is it when public transit fails? The question pokes at a bruise: transit has long been a comically sore spot for Torontonians, who’ve been waiting for a much-promised relief line, intended to provide an alternative to the city’s overflowing Yonge line, since before the city’s first subway route was built in 1954. The transit system is so bad and frequently delayed that transit delays have practically become a part of Torontonian identity—but Canada’s largest metropolis isn’t alone in the issue.

As it turns out, Torontonians’ transit grievances are not only older than transit itself, but also endemic to Canada’s national approach to public transit. Overcrowded trains, late buses, crumbling infrastructure, and infinitely delayed construction projects seem to be recurring problems for Canadian cities. Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Winnipeg all have the same symptoms—and the fare-evasion rhetoric to go with it.

What Canadian transit woes have in common is a substantial lack of federal funding and supervision. When funding is earmarked for public transit, it is usually earmarked for the broader issue of infrastructure—a term which means the money may go toward public transit, but may also go toward building or maintaining highways, meaning that local transit commissions still have to fight for their share of the funding. Cities throughout Canada are facing the same problems and symptoms, because they are facing the systematic issue that Canada’s transit economy is built for cars and private transportation—but they are having to face it alone. That leaves transit planning to municipal and provincial governments, making transit funding a deeply partisan issue that depends on the election cycle.

Toronto’s relief line has been the subject of so many different proposals, many of them tied to elections, that they’ve been compiled into a book. The most recent iteration of these antics is Premier Doug Ford’s decision to shelve the line altogether in favour of a different route that would conveniently take riders all the way to a casino he would build in an already accessible and scarcely populated neighbourhood. (The casino plan has since been scrapped.)

There have been additions, even in recent years, like the UP Express connecting Toronto’s downtown to the airport, which originally flopped and then became a commuter success after slashing its fare in half. But even so, the system is failing to keep up with the city’s rapid population growth, leaving large areas sorely underserved. Poorer neighbourhoods receive substantially less service, leading to substantially longer, more stressful, and overcrowded commutes. This substantial burden makes transit least accessible to those who need it the most. When Presto, the Greater Toronto Area’s (GTA) universal transit access card that the province began rolling out in 2007 in an effort to make public transit more seamless, first started selling discounted fares for low-income people tied to Ontario’s disability programme, they found that half of those passes went entirely unused because it was very difficult to access.

Inaccessibility is perhaps theTTC’s most important problem, but it’s not its only one. Public transit advocates like TTC riders point towards aging infrastructure as one of many causes of the system’s frequent and long delays, which have been estimated to cost the city between $7 and $11 billion in productivity—including wages for people who weren’t able to work as many hours as they had planned. New infrastructure is also a problem: the Presto card is now infamously prone to glitches. The cards frequently fail to function, leaving riders no choice but to evade fares or let their bus leave without them. The system continues to grow more expensive to the province, which has now spent well upwards of $1 billion trying to implement it.

Despite these issues, the public service has only become more expensive: the monthly metropass was among the five most expensive in the world as of 2017, and its cost has only gone up since then. As the cost of transit becomes accessible to fewer and fewer people, the TTC ad campaign pulls on a lot of heartstrings: the TTC runs mostly on fare collection, and so the $60 million loss is an important cause of the system’s shortcomings. “I hear from residents daily who are frustrated by the cost of fare evasion,” TTC Chair Jaye Robinson says on the TTC website. “Riders who choose not to pay their fares are impacting our ability to deliver transit service to the entire city.”

But Robinson’s approach, which is endlessly recycled for clickbait articles, individualizes a systemic problem. TheTTC has the third biggest ridership of any North American transit system, yet it receives the least amount of subsidies, relying almost entirely on fares to continue functioning. Experts have for years pointed to this fact as the starting point for the vicious cycle by which low-quality service begets increased fare and vice-versa.

To say that these frustrations have gone entirely unanswered would be wrong: many transit systems have responded to the increasingly popular gripes with fare evasions through increased penalties. Toronto has recently hired more fare inspectors. Montreal is seeing widespread calls for a comprehensive audit and an increase in fare inspectors to go along with it. Transit coverage in Vancouver frequently follows the same path.

This goes hand-in-hand with coverage of the transit crisis that puts the blame on fare evasions, like an article on CityNews Calgary that points towards fare evaders “cheating” the transit system. With this kind of coverage, the blame for a systemic issue on a national scale that has been shifted onto provincial and municipal governments gets shifted even further onto individuals.

It also ignores a core purpose of public transit: to provide mobility, and thus access to healthcare, work, education, and other facets of life, to those who don’t use private transportation.

Advocates oppose raising fares and resent the increased funding allocated to fare inspection. A fine in Toronto can cost a whopping $425; in Vancouver, where fare evasion fines have been found to put youth in debt, you’d be looking at $173. In both cases, critics have pointed out, fare evasion will cost you more than a parking violation.

Increased policing in transit has been a controversial move, as it also increases opportunities for police brutality. This was the subject of the mass transit protest in New York in October 2019. It puts people of colour at a higher risk of encountering police brutality; it actively punishes people who can’t afford the fare but need to commute, thus making medical appointments, work, and other necessities even less accessible. At the same time, it spends money on fare inspectors’ salaries that could instead be put toward making the system more accessible.

And this is if the fare collection system works: for Canada’s showy but often-glitchy fare cards, that’s not a guarantee, and people throughout the country often find themselves facing fines after having already paid the fare.

“Municipalities don’t have that many options for [public transit] funding, unfortunately, under our system,” former Vancouver chief planner Brent Toderian told the Globe and Mail about the city’s 2015 vote on a 0.5 percent increase in tax sales to cover transportation infrastructure renewal. This “last-ditch attempt,” as the Globe and Mail called it, at giving TransLink, the authority responsible for transportation in Metro Vancouver, a functioning budget, was overwhelmingly rejected. The only other option to provide more funding, a hike in property taxes, was, again in the Globe and Mail’s words, “politically unsavoury” for the incumbent mayor.

In 2015, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities requested that Ottawa grant Canadian cities at least $1 billion in the yearly budget earmarked for new infrastructure spending. In 2017, their request was granted— a sure victory for city mayors, but not necessarily for transit advocates.

“There was this consensus that the majority of transportation planning and funding should be oriented toward accommodating more cars,” Victoria Transport Policy Institute director Todd Litman told the cbc. “What it boils down to is that it’s much easier for local governments to get funding for a highway improvement or new bridge than it is for a public transit project, even if public transit is the more rational investment.”

Public transportation is an investment that often requires a lot of money up front, and a lot of time to build before people can see the results—less traffic, faster and less stressful commutes, easier access to neighbourhoods throughout the city. What Canada’s lack of a federal public transportation policy does is pin this deeply necessary but controversial issue on municipal and provincial governments, allowing for it to be taken hostage by local party politics.

The poverty-shaming rhetoric that a lot of fare evasion clickbait adopts feeds into this. It pits people who use public transit and those whose interest it is to improve public transit and make it more accessible to all against each other. It makes the failure of public transit systems seem like an individual failure, a moral failure on the part of those who can’t pay their way. It ensures that Canadians continue dealing with chronic public transit underfunding simply by isolating cities and people from one another and pretending the shortcoming is personal rather than systemic.