Tag: Ontario

Confidence Courage Connection Trust: A proposal for security culture

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When we talk about security culture, people tend to have one of two kinds of experiences. The first is of building walls and keeping people out, the second is of being excluded or mistrusted. Both of these come with negative feelings – fear and suspicion for the former and alienation and resentment for the latter. I would say that they are two sides of the same coin, two experiences of a security culture that isn’t working well.

I want to be welcoming and open to new people in my organizing. I also want to protect myself as best I can from efforts to disrupt that organizing, especially from the state but also from bosses or the far-right. That means I want to have the kinds of security practices that allow me to be open while knowing that I’ve assessed the risk I face and am taking smart steps to minimize it. Security culture should make openness more possible, not less.

This proposal for security culture is based on reframing — on shifting our focus from fear to confidence, from risk-aversion to courage, from isolation to connection, and from suspicion to trust. Read More …

Legal Aid Board Chair Serves Landlord Class

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Last week Legal Aid Ontario (LAO) made front page news when it announced a major attack on Parkdale, cutting 45% of its funding to Parkdale Community Legal Services (PCLS). What wasn’t reported was LAO’s Board Chair Charles Harnick’s connections to Toronto real estate interests. We think they go a long way to explaining the decision to target PCLS.  Read More …

Answering Back: The World Just Needed A Man

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While Justin Trudeau was in Hamilton yesterday (April 20) handing out free lunches at St-Patrick’s church, notorious for its anti-abortion activity, our beloved local paper The Hamilton Spectator decided to republish a long article from the New York Times entitled “What’s a Feminist Government? Canada, and Trudeau Grapple With the Question”. I was reading the morning paper with six or seven friends, and over waffles we read the article out loud and had a go at the questions it raised with a fair bit less bullshit than its author. Read More …

Roundup of May Day events!

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There are a number of May Day events happening across the region on Wednesday May 1 2019, marking International Workers’ Day by taking the streets, celebrating in parks, and remembering the ways that capitalism underpins so many of the problems people face every day. From east to west, here are the events we’ve received details about from their organizers and a short excerpt from each callout. Got a May Day Read More …

Ontario Labour Minister’s Office Trashed

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Ontario Labour Minister Laurie Scott says her constituency office was broken into and vandalized overnight after the Progressive Conservative government introduced workplace reforms, including a minimum-wage freeze.

Ms. Scott’s office in Lindsay, Ont., was broken into, the windows were smashed and a fire extinguisher was used to break items in the office, a spokesman for Premier Doug Ford told The Globe and Mail. Photos show broken windows and a worker cleaning up the glass.

Spray-painted on a wall outside the office were the words, “Attack Workers We Fight Back $15,” a reference to the provincial government’s decision to freeze the minimum wage at $14 an hour. Read More …

Bryan Trottier: the racist, misogynist leader of the English-Canada branch of La Meute

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In a desperate attempt to influence the recent Quebec elections, La Meute has been popping up in the last few weeks with small, decentralized actions. Though the mainstream media has been giving them far too much attention for their size, the extreme-right group’s actions haven’t gained much popular support, in stark contradiction to their leader Sylvain ”Maikan” Brouillette’s slogan: “40,000 members, 40,000 votes”.

It’s within this context that, on the 15th of September, Steeve “L’artiss” Charland (Maikan’s potential rival) led a “mobile protest” which was, in reality, simply a bunch of cars driving around with La Meute flags or stickers. The meet-up for the dozen or so La Meute members was Oka, right next to the Mohawk community of Kanesatake. Upon their arrival, members of the Kanesatake community mobilized to kick them out, subjecting them to boos and insults as they left, and in so doing, refusing to allow their community to be used in the way the extreme-right group have been attempting to use them during the past few months. Read More …

North Shore at Six Months: Trends so far and call for submissions

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North Shore Counter-Info launched six months ago with the goal of serving as an online hub for anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist ideas and actions in Southern Ontario. In that time, we’ve published 80 articles and dozens of events and comments, which feels like a pretty good start. The project launched the weekend of the Hamilton Anarchist Bookfair on March 3rd 2018 and proved its usefulness almost immediately, as the mini-riot that Read More …

Shane: an undercover cop in Hamilton, ON

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He was here – on and off – for about 2 years, first appearing in the Summer of 2016.

His name is “Shane”.

That’s his undercover name, and his real name. “Shane Bond”, is what he told us – with “us” being the different communities and circles in Hamilton he tried to infiltrate. Read More …

Calling It Terror: On recent attacks in Southern Ontario

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Unfortunately, the word “terrorism” has been getting thrown around a lot in Ontario these past few months. […] Terrorism is a strategy that’s been used by almost all political tendencies at different times. As a strategy, it’s not desperate or insane, the way the specific attacks often appear; terrorism has specific goals and groups using it aren’t shy about articulating them. The goal of this text is to look at terrorism as a strategy, as a choice that rational people might make to achieve their goals. This gives us a stronger basis for rejecting it and also gets us beyond the shocked and decontextualized reactions we understandably have to scenes of violence, like the two attacks in Toronto. Read More …

Educate Me: On Canceling the Sex-Ed Reform

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Only a few weeks into his time as Premier, Doug Ford has already moved on a key promise he made to social conservatives while securing the Progressive Conservative party’s leadership nomination. By canceling the sexual education reform and restoring the 1998 curriculum, Ford has provoked some significant popular anger. This is interesting because the level that people feel impacted by this is much more than at other moments around the same issue, for instance, in 2010 when Dalton McGuinty’s government proposed and then withdrew a very similar reform, or in 2015 during consultations by the Wynne government to write the new curriculum. Read More …