Tag: Ontario-wide

Female Keep Separate: Prisons, Gender, and the Violence of Inclusion (version française disponible)

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When finally the cell door closes, when the jangling keys recede, you’ve arrived as far as you’re going that day. Then you can exhale alone with your mattress and be in your own body again, your body no longer a problem to be solved or a question to be answered. Just your own familiar weight under the blanket, where you can just shake and shake and try to sleep and get ready for whatever happens next. Read More …

Who Arms The Police? A Short List of “Canadian” Companies

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People in the so-called US have been rising up against white supremacy and the police, and for Black liberation. People in so-called Canada have been in the streets too – naming genocide against Black and Indigenous people, calling out police murders here, and making their opposition known. Many of these demonstrations, occupations, and riots have been met with more police violence. The police in the “US” and “Canada” regularly use tear gas, rubber bullets, tasers, batons, and sound weapons to suppress our presence in the streets and to harass marginalized communities on the daily. Read More …

Peaceful Protest, Outside Agitators, and the State: A Letter to BIPOC Comrades

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It’s been a week of intensity nearly unknown in our lifetimes. I, like many of you, have been glued to my phone for updates from the streets. I watched in both horror and unbridaled joy at the images of burning cop cars and precincts, the gutted Targets and Footlockers. Joy because I think it is a beautiful thing to see such complete antagonism towards a system that has oppressed Black and Brown communities for so long. Antagonism not tempered by liberal notions of “peace” or “civility”. But also horror at the images of the police shooting medics with “less lethal weapons” at close range, or shoving an old man  backwards and walking by him without notice as he convulses on the ground. I watched. I beared witness. I allowed myself to feel the seething anger. Read More …

Opportunity in Every Crisis: A Call For Decentralized May Day Actions

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However you tell the tale of May Day, one thing is consistent: it is a time people gather together, to march in the streets or to celebrate a new spring. Although most of us are enjoying the warmer weather blowing in, we are mostly stuck in our homes. Reading the news, trying to figure out the right thing to do, watching May 1st creep closer and wondering what it will look like this year if we can’t take over downtown and revel in May Day as we have come to know it: a celebration of anticapitalism. Read More …

#FreeThemAll: Email campaign to release federal prisoners

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SUPPORT ALL PRISONERS NOW! NO ONE SHOULD SPEND A PANDEMIC IN PRISON!

The situation facing prisoners during the COVID19 pandemic is terrifying. It is widely understood that prisoners are in a dangerous position during this pandemic due to the close living quarters, lack of health care, and lack of access to sanitary supplies. Correctional Services Canada has done little to address the risks inside, aside from cancelling all visits, temporary work releases, and trailer visits. Predictably, COVID19 has already started to spread in the federal prison system with prisoners and staff testing positive in more and more institutions. Read More …

Lambs to the Slaughter: An Ontario prisoner on COVID-19 behind bars

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For the past two weeks, we have heard from dozens of prisoners locked up behind the walls of the Hamilton-Wentworth detention centre. People are feeling scared about catching the virus, concerned for their families, and angry about the myths that are being reported about the conditions that they’re living in.

Some prisoners, despite fear of reprisals from guards, have decided that it’s worth risking their own safety to get their stories out. As one put it, “this is bigger than me”. Read More …

For Autonomous Communication: North Shore Counter-Info at Two Years

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North Shore Counter-Info launched just over two years ago, at the start of March 2018. Since then, we’ve published 302 texts with the goal of providing a platform for autonomous communication and connecting related struggles across the region. We’ve had a lot of feedback that the project is useful – starting from the repression in Hamilton around the Locke St affair in the project’s first days to the Wet’suwet’en solidarity movement this winter. This text is written by some members of the collective to share a few thoughts about what North Shore has been able to do so far and offer some directions for future growth. Read More …

Keep your Rent, Help Each Other: Roundup of rent refusal and mutual aid organizing

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Across Ontario, many tenants across the region will withhold rent from their landlord. Even though we are constantly told we are all in this together, the social impact of the virus will be hugely uneven and intensify existing inequalities. Whether tenants still have the means to pay this month or not, this movement shows solidarity with those who can’t and recognizes that few people can last long without the income they’re counting on.

Alongside this, people across the region have organized to help out their neighbours autonomously.. We are highlighting mutual aid projects that try to go beyond a social media page to build lasting independent strength in their neighbourhoods. Read More …

Ask a Different Question: Reclaiming autonomy of action during the virus

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The situation changes quickly. Along with everyone else, I follow it avidly and share updates, watch our lives change from day to day, get bogged down in uncertainty. It can feel like there is only a single crisis whose facts are objective, allowing only one single path, one that involves separation, enclosure, obedience, control. The state and its appendages become the only ones legitimate to act, and the mainstream media narrative with the mass fear it produces swamps our ability for independent action.

Some anarchists though have pointed out that there are two crises playing out in parallel — one is a pandemic that is spreading rapdily and causing serious harm and even death for thousands. The other is crisis management strategy imposed by the the state. The state claims to be acting in the interest of everyone’s health — it wants us to see its response as objective and inevitable. Read More …