At various times in the run-up to Canada’s 41st trip to the polls, the Conservative Party was the target of accusations—most of them confirmed—which should, in theory, have been sufficient to bring down any government. There was the scandal when Bev Oda directed the doctoring of ministry documents to deny funding to humanitarian group Kairos* and then misled parliament about the origins of that change. Then, there was the revelation that the Conservatives had, under the guise of preparing for the G8 conference in 2010, provided slush money to valued Conservative ridings like industry minister Tony Clement’s, some of which were not even affiliated with the conference. That scandal was followed shortly by an announcement from Auditor General Sheila Fraser saying that a Conservative report on the G8 and G20 summits had used a quote of hers out of context. Way out of context.

(Fraser had, in 2010, said that the Liberal party’s security expenditures in the wake of the 9/11 World Trade Centre attacks had been “spent as they were intended to be spent.” The Conservatives’ report, however, claimed that Fraser had made that statement in reference to their own party’s summit spending, supposedly absolving them of the slush fund allegations.)

On top of those scandals, of course, there was also the spectre of the Conservatives’ recent contempt of Parliament charge, which had been predicted to be a pall that would loom over the entire campaign.

And yet, just when it was beginning to look as though the Tories’ controversies would have a significant impact, they didn’t. Harper was re-elected, Clement was re-elected, Oda was re-elected, the Conservatives were handed a majority, and any scandals surrounding the party seemed to quickly dissipate, having had little to no effect on the election’s outcome.

So let’s take the long view: political scandals aren’t always as toxic as they may seem. But, with that being the case, it is absolutely worth questioning why Brosseau has undergone so much public scrutiny in the last few days.

Relative to allegations of partisan slush funds, lying about Auditor General reports, and directly disobeying parliamentary law, questions about the vacation plans and postsecondary achievements of opposition backbenchers seem less earth-shattering. And yet while Canada’s media outlets are abuzz with Brosseau updates, the scandals surrounding the Tories have not only gone away but, in retrospect, were scarcely this well-discussed even in the thick of the election run-up.

It is unfair to politicians and voters alike to suggest, as some commentators have, that Brosseau is facing this criticism simply because she is a woman, or young, or attractive. Yes, Brosseau is an outsider on Parliament Hill, but in the wake of a race which saw massive turnover in ridings all over the country, it is difficult to make the case that Canadians are opposed to seeing new faces in government.

Instead, it seems more likely that Brosseau is merely a hot story in the post-election news vacuum, a victim of circumstance rather than prejudice. She’s a convenient foil in a slow part of the news cycle.

During this comparatively inactive post-election period for domestic political news, the media and the public have the time to pick apart cases such as Brosseau’s. Harper and the Tories, meanwhile, had the benefit of having their scandals revealed during the campaign. Already flooded with elections coverage and mudslinging from all sides, Canadians found it harder to keep up with the scandal stories as they developed.

As bigger stories begin to float in again, Brosseau and her introductory mini-scandal will eventually be pushed out of the spotlight. What is required in the interim is a little perspective. Brosseau’s is not a major scandal—certainly not when compared to the recent scandals surrounding other politicians. If the Canadian public wants to examine political issues with such depth, and it should, the big issues, the ones that were largely glossed over during the campaign, ought to be first in line. In time, they will be.

*Disclosure: Kairos is an occasional advertiser in the print edition of This. – ed.

February 4 anti-Mubarak protest in Alexandria, Egypt. Creative Commons photo by Al Jazeera English

In Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, even Italy, citizens are rising up, risking their lives to protest their corrupt governments. Egyptians, in a historical event, have proven they can be successful in overthrowing years of dictatorial leadership. Canadians were mostly cheering along (though our government wasn’t), but’s hard to put ourselves in their place—Canada, flawed though it is, is simply not Egypt. Corruption here is less pervasive; the military less present in our everyday lives; we have a functional political opposition. But since freedom, democracy, and human rights are on everyone’s mind right now, perhaps it’s time for a little self-evaluation session.

The uprisings in the Middle East should prompt Canadians to take a closer look at the state of our own politics. For just one recent example, see the recent KAIROS “not” scandal and assess how democratic our government’s behaviour truly is. Murray Dobbin on Rabble stopped just short of comparing Steven Harper to ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and called Harper’s Conservative cabinet a squad of “hit men.”

But would Canadians ever reach the point where we just couldn’t take it anymore? Could we rebel in  Egypt-like protests? Would our rants to friends or angry blog comments ever manifest as rebellion in the street?

Stereotypically, Canadians are polite and retiring; unconfrontational if you’re being nice about it, apathetic if you’re not. But there’s data to prove that we really don’t like things to get politically messy. Besides our dismal-and-getting-worse voter turnout rate, A 2000 General Social Survey by Statistics Canada found that only 9 percent of Canadians (age 15 and up) had participated in a public debate that year (things like calling radio talkback shows or writing letters to the editor). Half of those individuals researched information on political issues, and 10 percent volunteered for a political party. We also seem naturally more inclined to express our opinions with a group that we know will share or agree with our own opinions.

Historically, if Canadians take the time to understand a politcal issue, then get mad about it, we will find a way to express it. Like the time time the Conservative government decided prorogue parliament; a 63 day break while 36 government bills lay untouched. While plenty of us apparently didn’t know what the heck that meant, 200,000 Canadians got angry, logged onto Facebook and joined a group called Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament. Many attended actual rallies across the country.

If you were in Toronto in the summer of 2010, you witnessed Canadians in a more traditional form of protest during the G20 conference. Over 300 people were arrested and the images of Toronto streets seemed almost unrecognizable, as if it were a different country altogether.

The erosion of Western democracy seems to be everywhere you turn lately. Paul Krugman identified the union-busting tactics of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker as just the latest example of a hemisphere-wide push by anti-democratic forces: “What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy,” Krugman wrote.

Dobbin’s Rabble column sounds the same alarm for Canada: He calls Minister of International Cooperation Bev Oda’s corrections of the CIDA report “political thuggery worthy of a dictatorship.”  This seems to be just one example of our democracy moving backwards while citizens of Italy, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen are actively involved in taking back control of their respective countries.

Protests outside the British parliament in London. Creative Commons photo by Selena Sheridan.

Almost five months to the day and I’m just now realizing that I didn’t learn my lesson from the G20.

Sure, I found out first had the power and importance of community organization and activism; and I was forced to come to terms with the tragic ease with which our government could abuse our fundamental democratic rights when it suits them.

But neither of those lessons, important though they are, concerned me last Wednesday evening.  As I stood huddled with several thousand other angry, frustrated but mostly just cold students in between two immovable walls of police officers, I wondered how I hadn’t learnt my lesson about kettling the first time.

After being held for hours in the rain at Spadina and Richmond by riot police this summer, I promised I’d never let that happen again. I never wanted to feel so violated and so helpless—as you stand there and stare into the faceless wall of riot police you can’t help but feel impotent, vulnerable and exposed.  And yet, here I was again, hopping from foot to foot to maintain feeling in my toes standing in front of a feeble fire of placards and protest posters trying to fend off the cold London night.

How did it come to this: thousands of students–a large minority of whom were under the age of 16–held for eight hours without food, water or access to washrooms outside the houses of British government on Whitehall?

I suppose it starts with the cuts: devastating austerity measures that will affect every aspect of British life, but will prove particularly ruinous for higher education in the U.K. Under the scheme, government funding for universities will be cut by 40 percent (around £4.3 billion) and will raise the current cap on tuition. For a country that in recent memory offered free university education (universal free higher education was only ended in 1997) the prospect of tripling the fees from roughly £3,000 to more than £9,000 per year has many concerned that the halls of higher education will soon become the domain of the rich exclusively.

But the anger stems from something more emotional then merely the cuts.  Many of the estimated 50,000 students and protesters who walked out of classes and took to the streets across the country recently voted for Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democratic party in the last election; he promised, in light of the Tories’ proposed fiscal austerity, to oppose any increases to education fees.  And yet, here we are, not six months later, with the Tory/Lib Dem coalition government poised to pass legislation that will gut much of the social service sector and force universities to hike their tuition fees.

It’s understandable, then, why “Nick Clegg, shame on you, shame on you for turning blue,” is such a popular chant here, and why central Londoners awoke to find an effigy of Clegg burning Tuesday morning. Students expected this from David Cameron and his Conservatives; from Clegg and the Lib Dems, it feels more like personal betrayal.

This passion, so evident in the November 10th protest that saw “lawless riots”—to quote one sensationalist, though representative, retelling—has traditionally been hard to maintain in British protest movements in recent years.  “Brits just don’t demonstrate,” one protester told me during the march; the only conclusion, he went on, is that “this is something special.”

In a moment of depressing deja vu, I watched as students vented their frustration and anger on a police van left abandoned in the midst of the protest march and recalled how police had similarly left patrol cars on Queen Street this past summer, allegedly for protesters to vandalize.  The three destroyed police cars were used as justification for the authoritarian crackdown the following day in the streets of Toronto; likewise, the vandalized police van became the spurious excuse used for the mass kettling near Parliament Square that I was caught in, along with thousands others.

So there we stood—for hours.

There was something ominous about the entire experience: thousands of people surrounded, towered over by the imposing facades of the buildings of British government and hemmed in by lines of riot-armoured police, yet with plenty of space to move around—the atmosphere ranged from block-party and frenetic to frustrated and lethargic.  As the hours wore on and the cold set in, a few protesters with guitars milled about feebly singing “Give Peace a Chance” but were easily drowned out by the whirl of the helicopters circling overhead, the police sirens’ near constant wailing and, fittingly for London, the reverberating deep bass of the dubstep blaring from the sound system brought for the Carnival of Resistance.  The entire scene was illuminated by sporadic and dying fires of placards, posters and the remnants of a bus-stop lit more for their warmth then their menace (despite what the papers said) and the roving police spotlights.

Eight hours of standing still is a long time—and when your fingers are too cold to play on your smartphone and your mind too numb to do your school readings, you get to talking. The topic du jour was, of course, the cuts and the protests.  Several hours in, the dominant sentiment was frustration bordering on complete exasperation. If the intent of the police kettling had been to intimidate the protesters into silence, it failed; we were given free rein on the street and the non-stop music led to an impromptu dance party. But if they wanted to prove a point about how futile protest can feel in the face of heavy-handed police measures, well, they certainly made an impression.

The question that kept on creeping into the conversation: where was the space for autonomous dissent?

When we were finally let out at 9 pm, eight hours after the kettling began, most were too cold and angry to be anything but amenable.  When the Clash’s “I fought the Law” came on over the speakers, everyone joined in for the chorus, “…and the law won.”  Whether it was intended to be ironic or not, it was fitting.

It was, in short, a low-point.

Many who had been passionate and energetic at the start of the day felt their spirit sapped by the process, and, even more discouraging, many felt despondent about the prospect of an effective protest movement in Britain, myself included.

No matter how special this mass movement is—and you can’t help but marvel at  the sheer size of the country-wide protests—we have to acknowledge the limitations of peaceful protest when the police reaction to the first sign of trouble (graffiti, for instance) is mass kettling. But violent protest doesn’t strike me as being the answer either. For one, it merely galvanizes people away from the cause and serves to justify more repressive police tactics (many see the election of Rob Ford as Toronto mayor, complete with his promise for 100 new police officers, as a knee-jerk reaction to the “mayhem” during the G20).

But if you’ll excuse my use of a tired adage: the night is darkest right before the dawn.

The following day, still numbed and disheartened from the kettling, I joined the student occupation already in progress on my campus at the School of Oriental and African Studies. I admit, I initially opposed the occupation and voted against it in the emergency general meeting on the cuts; I felt like it would channel student anger at the wrong target: our school administration as opposed to the government. But sitting with students and staff members in the reclaimed space–open to anyone who wanted to join and used as a lecture space, music venue, forum for discussion, or simply a place to hang out—showed the dynamism of the student movement and wiped away the ennui I’d felt the day before.

The students’ demands are straightforward: financial transparency in the school’s decision-making; a commitment not to raise tuition fees; and a statement opposing the proposed cuts. If these demands seem overambitious (the school is, after all, at the mercy of the government if they do decide to go through with the cuts) their protest techniques are equally enterprising.  They propose more creative responses: instead of one protest of 5,000 people, which will inevitably be kettled, violent or not, they organize 500 people in 10 separate marches—”flash mob” protests that garner positive media attention. And they’eve built international solidarity networks with students facing similar cuts in other countries such as France, Spain and Italy.

Most of all, British students talk of retaking the means of their own presentation outside of the parameters of the police/media stranglehold on their image.

The school administration served the occupying students with an injunction last Thursday, making their presence in the building illegal as of 7 pm.  I was there as the clock ticked down and more students, staff and supporters kept pouring into the room in solidarity.  As the clock neared 7 and the threat of arrest became ever more real, we voted on defying the High Court Injunction and maintaining the occupation.

Every protest movement has its song: the anti-war movement of the 1960s had countless anthems from Bob Dylan, Helen Reddy’s “I am Woman” became an anthem for the women’s liberation movement and the G20 in Toronto this past summer had “O Canada.”  In a poetic turn of events, as the clock struck 7 and the occupation became illegal, students in occupation echoed those kettled the day before and began singing The Clash’s song once more, with fittingly altered lyrics: “I fought the law AND I WON” resounded through the hall.

It may seem merely symbolic; but the student movement is alive and well in London.

"High fives, anyone? Anyone?"

News of Black’s bail-granting in Chicago broke on Monday, overshadowing the results of another bail hearing, which took place in Toronto and which was generally overlooked by large media outlets. Byron Sonne, who was arrested on June 22, three days before the beginning of the G8/G20 Summits, faces charges of mischief and possession of explosives, among others, and was denied bail on Tuesday. Due to a publication ban, the reason for the denial of bail can’t be mentioned here.

Sonne’s arrest preceded a number of other preemptive arrests that took place before the G20; that police shakedown targeted community organizers. Some of those organizers were dragged out of their homes in the middle of the night, or snatched from street corners by plainclothes cops and thrown into unmarked vans in broad daylight. They were held in maximum security prisons until their bail hearings, which began on July 6th and continue today, and many of them are facing serious conspiracy charges.

Conspiracy charges are slippery things. It seems as though they should be both extremely easy to prove and extremely hard to prove: one doesn’t have to do the thing they’ve agreed to do, as long as they’ve talked about doing it, they can be found guilty of conspiracy. A quick review of Canadian Criminal Law 101 indicates that past rulings ultimately rested upon the efficacy of the arguments presented by the lawyers, and the legal knowledge and general whim of the presiding judges.

At the maximum security prison where the community organizers were being held before their hearings (and where two currently remain), there was little available to read, nothing much to do, and visits were limited to twice a week. Sometimes the phones, which allowed them to speak to their visitors on the other side of three-inch thick plexiglass, were broken, and there was nothing they could do but stare at each other until their time was up. In his minimum security prison, Conrad Black, (stealer of six million real dollars, friend and business partner of weasels and turncoats) was able to roam the grounds freely, read a wide array of periodicals and books, or listen to the radio on headphones during recreation time. He penned articles and gave interviews, all with the air of indignation that one would expect of a hardened Lord doing soft time.

The bail conditions on the “G17”, as some media outlets are calling them, are essentially designed to keep them separated from their communities and punish them for exercising their political right to protest. There’s something perverse about Conrad Black—actually convicted of a crime in a court of law—returning to his $32 million Palm Beach estate, while a G20 protester—innocent until proven guilty, not yet tried in court, and held on the basis of secret evidence—is denied bail and kept behind bars.

The police knew that social media was going to play a prominent role in the protests, and so they had a presence on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, to communicate and to try to exert some measure of spin control. On Saturday, after protesters engaging in Black Bloc tactics broke windows and set fire to several damaged police cars, the Integrated Security Unit tweeted their awareness and reassured followers that the police reaction would be “balanced”:

But it was not to be. Police actions just a few hours later got wildly out of hand. Steve Paikin, host of The Agenda on TVO, was at the Novotel demonstration on Saturday night and his tweets showed that you can still shock a veteran news reporter who’s seen it all. After his experience, he wrote a now-widely-cited blog post that pulled no punches with its blunt headline, “An Awful Night for Democracy in Toronto“:

You don’t have a social media news revolution, of course, without some social media internet-meme jokesters coming along for the ride. Riding the coattails of @MontrealCopCar—the Twitter account that instantly popped up after spectators burned 16 Montreal police cars in April 2008 to celebrate a hockey victory—@Torontocopcar was online before the flames were extinguished.

The mood was considerably darker Sunday afternoon when security forces cordoned off the corner of Queen and Spadina, saying they had evidence there were people within a small group of marchers along Queen West intent on committing more vandalism. As storm clouds loomed, ranks of riot police “kettled” everyone in the intersection, including several tourists, passers-by, people waiting for the streetcar, and more. Among the crowd was Globe and Mail writer Lisan Jutras, who quickly felt the vibe change…

…While Justin Stayshyn also tweeted from inside the kettle that many of the people being detained were curious onlookers, not troublemakers:

Not that it mattered. Police ultimately kept the majority of people inside the cordon, in a torrential downpour, for roughly five hours. News of the baffling police action travelled fast and far, prompting Roger Ebert to make the historical connection that the kids and their iPhones couldn’t:

Shortly after, Tony Clement, Canada’s minister of industry, merrily chirped what a grand and successful affair the whole thing had been, taking the prize for Most Fatuous Public Statement Of The Evening:

One of the most notorious images from Saturday was a Twitpic of a burning police cruiser, snapped by Alex Posadzki, which as of this morning had been viewed more than 18,000 times. As many commentators pointed out, the G20 saw four police cruisers burnt, compared to the 16 destroyed in Montreal by celebratory rioters after the Montreal Canadiens won a hockey game in April. But this has still become an indelible image, and footage of burning police cars quickly became a recurring motif of the television coverage over the weekend.

The sense of creeping anxiety didn’t start for most of us until Friday afternoon when Jeff Robson tweeted this photo of riot police crammed dozens deep in an alleyway as peaceful protesters went past on College Street. In hindsight, it was a harbinger of things to come:

The strange juxtapositions came hard and fast this weekend; while protests and a record 900 police arrests continued outside, reporters from the foreign press were a the international media centre at the CNE, where the Toronto Star‘s Richard Lautens found them watching the Germany-England match at the World Cup. For big-media skeptics (like us!) this photo says a lot about the failings of the mainstream media covering the G20.

And lastly, from the Department of Grimly Hilarious Symbolism came this Torontoist photo of the “eternal flame” at Metro Hall—a symbol of the “hopes, aspirations and triumphal achievements burning within the human spirit,” says its commemorative plaque—extinguished and encased in a plywood cover. It’s been lit since May 1996, but the G20 was enough to snuff it out:

Monday‘s events were focused on Migrant Justice and Economic Justice, but the message that came out of the day was a mixed bag. A rally at Allen Gardens featured United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and anti-poverty activists speaking on behalf of workers affected by G8/G20 policies in the global south. They also spoke about the failure of all levels of government in Canada to provide meaningful support to low-income people during the current economic crisis. 50-100 demonstrators made their way along Dundas, where an Esso station was briefly occupied to show disdain for government bailouts (Esso was one of the 70 corporations that received money from the US government). The march progressed up Yonge Street and ended at  Children’s Aid Society headquarters to emphasize that the well-being of children is being threatened by all levels of government in Canada, due to unfriendly policies and funding structures for women’s organizations and organizations that deal with maternal health.

Things got steamy on Tuesday when the crushing humidity and the political sexiness of the Gender and Queer Justice march collided at Queen and Yonge. A crowd of 100-200 people took up all lanes on Queen street and stopped at various points to engage in a kiss-in, a declaration from lesbian bankers about Pride funding, and a little bit of good old fashioned street theatre—”Harper Don’t Preach,” sung and danced to Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach.” Even Perez Hilton took note.

The atmosphere on Wednesday morning was tense, but resistance was fertile. The unusual 5.0 earthquake literally underscored the theme of Environmental and Climate Justice. Groups including the Council of Canadians, the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) and the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition (CYCC) led a toxic tour of the city.

Oil dragon at toxic tour in Toronto. Copyright flickr user onlyandrewn 2010.

300-400 people marched with the tour, which was filled with floats, rebel clowns, smiling banner-toters, and others who simply got swept into the crowd as it progressed throughout the city. The crowd stopped first at a Royal Bank branch, where speakers noted that RBC is the biggest funder of the poisonous and destructive Tar Sands project.

The route continued along until the tour arrived at the doorstep of the U of T mining building, which had recently been given a gift from Gold Corp, the second-largest gold producing company in the world. Gold Corp routinely engages in mining operations that create environmental destruction and human rights abuses—in fact, they were just told by Guatemala to stop operating the Marlin mine because of such issues. Speakers from communities affected by mining companies took a moment to call out the corporation and the government of Canada, which has little or no regulations in place to prevent Canadian companies from causing such damage.

The toxic tour ended in front of the courthouse at University and Armory, where progressive lawyers spoke about suits brought against the TSX and the Copper Mesa mining company by three Ecuadorean villagers.

Huge banner and hundreds of protestors block road on Thursday. Copyright Oren Ziv/Activestills 2010

Thursday saw the biggest turnout yet. Indigenous Sovereignty was the theme of the day, and groups from across the country converged in the city to bring a firm message to the leaders of the G20. Two thousand people marched in the event, which was planned by Defenders of the Land, to protest Canada’s record on the treatment of Indigenous people. One purpose of the march was to call attention to Canada’s refusal to sign on to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Today, the Themed Days of Resistance  have ended, and the days of action have begun. A rally and march held by several groups including Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and No One Is Illegal started at 2:30 pm at Allen Gardens. “Justice for Our Communities” is the concept, and the march will culminate in a tent city and night-long party. More to come over the weekend!

AIDS memorial at 519 Church Street Community Centre, Toronto. Photo courtesy of Kenn Chaplin at Flickr.

Although Pride Toronto decided to reschedule its week-long festivities in light of the G20 circus coming to town, the committee for the AIDS Candlelight Vigil, an event associated with Pride Week, decided it would take advantage of the politically charged atmosphere.

We took the opportunity to speak with Kay Roesslein, co-chair of the AIDS Candlelight Vigil planning committee, about the significance of the event, the decision to keep the original date, and what to expect at this year’s event, which is tonight.

Q&A

Natalie Samson: I was hoping you could tell us about the history and background of the event.

Kay Roesslein: This is the 26th vigil and it truly began for honouring, remembering and celebrating. When it began in the 80s there were so many losses, especially in the gay circles, significant numbers were lost. We saw then over the years [the vigil] become impactful in other communities, including in those wherein substance abuse is a challenge, mental health communities, populations from various countries—that would be the slow progression over the years where losses started to impact [these and] other communities. It really was an opportunity to remember significant losses and to make a statement, to talk about awareness and to raise the flag that HIV is impactful and it can effect us all.

Natalie Samson: So it’s very much a political statement.

Kay Roesslein: Absolutely.

Natalie Samson: Has there historically been any kind of political presence at these vigils?

Kay Roesslein: Not as a rule. June Callwood was here one year and was a host…I know Kyle Rae has attended over the years, George Smitherman has. It’s really a community event. We have strived over the years to keep it a community event. We get sponsorship, yes, but it tends to be sponsorship from [not for profit and related organizations like] Casey House, LOFT Community Services, it’s from ACT [AIDS Committee of Toronto], from the Elementary Teachers Federation. But it’s not from big pharmaceuticals—and that’s intentional. The intent is to keep it a community event.

In fact, the planning committee, all the organizers, are representative from different community agencies or are individuals within the community. That way we stay true, we don’t end up with the politics that we see elsewhere, like Pride, for example.

Natalie Samson: Have you seen questionable sponsorship or politics at other vigils?

Kay Roesslein: I can’t cite any personal examples, no. I am aware though that it came up often in conversation when we looked at our programming, especially with the International AIDS vigil we had during the International AIDS Conference at Yonge and Dundas Square. We invited our local politicians to participate and they did. But again, it’s who do you invite and why, and what’s the message behind it—are we still reflecting our community.

I think one interesting area of growth is the increase in diversity. It speaks to how HIV has grown and impacted so many different communities now. Culturally, it’s all over. So what we’ve done this year, we had to make a decision. We had to decide, because Pride Toronto changed its date, it moved Pride week. Well, if we continued to do the vigil on the Thursday of Pride week, we’d be on Canada Day.  We really thought hard about this. Part of us still remains true to the grassroots cause—I mean really it’s still about honouring, celebrating, remembering and awareness. This year, we had wanted to honour those who had died or were affected by HIV/AIDS in those countries where it’s endemic. Of course with the G20 suddenly in town, we had an opportunity to marry our themes. So we are including universal access and human rights as our theme this year. So this year, given that direction around HIV in countries where it’s endemic, the G20 just made sense.

It also influenced our choice around our priority. Our priority is awareness. Our priority is human rights and universal access [to medical treatment]. And given that really we’re talking about HIV, which goes beyond a Pride event, it was appropriate to hold it this Thursday. So we did introduce the G20 [to this event] in this sense. We’re really raising the flag around awareness, saying HIV touches us all; it’s global. We need to look at ourseves in Canada, because there isn’t universal access in Canada. You can ask many aboriginal communities if they feel they have universal access.

Natalie Samson: What’s been the response to keeping the original date?

Kay Roesslein: I think there was consensus by the committee and by the community there’s been absolute understanding. In terms of it being on Canada Day, people understood not competing with that. And as people unraveled the theme of the vigil, especially with our increased diversity on our committee and in our community, it really made sense. If anything has changed over the years, it’s the diversity of our community and the diversity of the board.

Natalie Samson: Is the event run by any particular organization?

Kay Roesslein: We are a Pride event, although that was a little trickier this year because we are not fitting in their calendar since we’re happening just prior to it. So we’re an associated event. We’re associated with the 519 [Church Street Community Centre]. We hold it at the 519 at the AIDS Memorial. We read out the names each year of those who have passed each year and have been put up on the wall.

Natalie Samson: What is the AIDS Memorial at the 519?

Kay Roesslein: It’s a series of upright standing concrete slabs arranged in an arch. There’s a garden around it and it creates a semi-circle. In front of that semi-circle is a flat cemented area and all of this is raised. On each slab that goes around in a semi-circle are metal plaques engraved with names going back to ’84, I believe.

Natalie Samson: How is it decided which names go on the memorial?

Kay Roesslein: We don’t decide. Any name put forward to the AIDS Memorial Committee [through the 519] usually goes up.

Natalie Samson: And it can be an AIDS-related death from any year?

Kay Roesslein: That’s correct. So tonight, for example, we’re reading out names from 1994, 2003, 2007, 2008, and from 2009 and 2010. There are 23 names added this year. They ask for a fee, but where you can’t there is consideration.

Natalie Samson: What can someone expect tonight?

Kay Roesslein: We have Glad Voices that we start with and we end with Singing Out, a huge community choir, and we’ll have about 50 to 60 people on stage at the end. In between we’ll have individual performers on stage…pieces that are really quite touching. But we end with Singing Out on a very hopeful note.

We invite the audience to go on a journey with us wherein first we acknowledge the facts, the gaps, the things that may upset us and make us angry, our call to action and awareness, then we move towards remembering. That’s when we note all the names. And then we move towards honouring with the candle lighting and we move the flame into the audience. It’s quite beautiful.

The AIDS Candlelight Vigil in Toronto will be held tonight, June 24 at 519 Church Street, Cawthra Square Park, from 9-10pm.

Protestors march down Toronto's Yonge Street as part of anti-G20 All Out In Defense of Rights Rally, Monday June 21 2010. Photo by Jesse Mintz.

The Toronto Community Mobilization Network kicked off its themed days of resistance to the G20 on Monday with activists converging around a mixed bag of issues including income equity, community control over resources, migrant justice, and an end to war and occupation. It’s an ambitious start­ for the week-long campaigns. On their own, each issue is complex. So wouldn’t combining them create one massively hopeless problem? Not necessarily.

Uniting the struggles sends a clear message:  justice for one means justice for all. Organizing in solidarity weaves together the various conditions of oppression and injustice affecting populations around the world. It gives us a deeper understanding of these conditions, and how to act against them.

In effect, you can’t talk about income equity without addressing migrant justice. The fact is, so-called developed states have built their economies on the labour of underpaid and overworked “temporary” migrant labourers. A recent Stats Can report suggests that throughout the 31 countries that make up the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (compare these to the countries that have ratified or signed the UN Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Their Families, or to the G20 roster for that matter), the “temporary migration of foreign workers has increased by 4 percent to 5 percent per year since 2000.”

The same report states that over 94,000 non-permanent residents worked in Canada full time (30 hours per week or more) in 2006. Many came to this country as part of temporary foreign worker programs, such as the Live-in Caregiver Program or the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program. Activists, academics, journalists, filmmakers, politicians—pretty much everyone—have denounced the current state of both programs for their exploitative policies, racist legacies and harmful social effects. And it only seems to be getting worse for migrant workers as third-party recruiters become increasingly popular.

The fact that business is booming for recruiters means there’s a pool of people willing to put up whatever money they have for the promise of work abroad.  And here’s where we connect the dots from migrant justice to ending war and occupation and restoring control of resources to the people—what has compelled, and continues to compel, the estimated 214 million migrants of the world to leave their home countries in the first place? That’s what migrant justice group No One Is Illegal wants us to think about:

Government and public discourse fails to address root causes of forced migration. On the one hand, because of free trade policies—including Canadian free trade agreements—and structural adjustment programs, governments throughout the global South have been forced to adopt neoliberal policies that have restructured and privatized their land and services, resulting in the displacement of urban and rural workers and farmers. On the other hand, capital mobility has led corporations to create millions of low-wage jobs and to seek vulnerable workers to fill them, both in sweatshops in the global South and exploitable labour sectors in the global North.

Sure, not all migrant workers are explicitly forced to come to Canada as a labourer, as one analyst with the Fraser Institute griped in an interview with The Dominion, but then again lots of people are. Forced migrants are refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced and trafficked people, as well as survivors of developmental displacement, environmental and manufactured disasters.

Huge construction projects like dams, roads and airports squeeze people out of their homes. Stephen Castles, the former Director of the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University, writes that many of these initiatives are funded by the World Bank and displace as many as 10 million people annually. Though World Bank offers compensation for resettlement, Castles concludes:

Millions of development displacees experience permanent impoverishment, and end up in a situation of social and political marginalization.

People displaced by environmental change, by industrial accidents, and toxins generally face similar fates.

That’s why war and conflict, immigration and refugee flows, jobs and wages, and global economics are, together, a “focus” of protest. Far from being separate and unrelated problems, they’re inextricably entangled. And the solutions will be too.

People sporting the G(irls) 20 "Pangaea" T-shirt.

We’ve talked a lot about what’s going wrong so far with the G20 and G8 meetings taking place in Ontario this year. And lord knows there are plenty of problems: aside from the lack of discussion surrounding women’s health we’re now chopping down trees in an urban jungle and searching around for supposedly stolen police uniforms.

But for just a few minutes, let’s take a look at what has come out of these meetings. This week Toronto’s welcoming another delegation—a group of 21 young women who are setting out to discuss women’s rights. The G(irls) 20 Summit is going on from June 16- 25, and it’s sponsored by the Belinda Stronach Foundation. Yes, that Belinda Stronach.

According to a press release, the girls represent each of the G20 nations, as well as one member from the African Union. They’ll be discussing a number of issues that affect women around the world, but if you ask me, this is the perfect chance for these girls to tell their leaders what’s what.

Apparently it has become necessary for the world’s youngest citizens to educate their own governments on what’s important. These girls have the opportunity to speak out about adequate women’s health services and maternal rights. They have the power to talk about what they need and what they deserve. And I hope to God they’ve got megaphones.

Of course, women’s health isn’t the only important issue, but it’s one almost everyone can stand behind. It’s hard not to support a woman’s right to birth control, or abortion, or prenatal care, or even just regular pap smears. And hey, if you can’t, you’re probably invited to the big meetings anyway.

So sing it loud, girls. Now’s your chance.