Vancouver Deserves Better Than Kennedy Stewart
Socialist Spooky Season
Local
Vancouver City Council votes against new parking permit program & pollution charge
On Wednesday, October 6, Vancouver City Council voted against the Climate Emergency Parking Program by a 6-5 margin. The plan would have expanded the city’s existing parking permit program to every neighbourhood in the city and implemented a pollution charge of up to $1,000 on high-emission vehicles, though vehicles from before 2022 were to be exempted. The plan would have helped to reduce carbon emissions by disincentivizing both the purchase of new gas-guzzling vehicles by Vancouverites and car trips into Vancouver by non-residents, encouraging walking, cycling and public transit instead. The plan did not address the massive emissions from luxury yachts or from the cruise industry, the return of which BC Premier John Horgan has identified as his number one priority post-pandemic. Mayor Kennedy Stewart teamed up with the five councillors elected under the NPA banner to vote against the plan. The votes against the motion by the five councillors elected under the NPA banner comes as no surprise However, Kennedy Stewart’s vote against the motion comes as something of a shock, given that he ran for mayor as a progessive. Opponents of the program decried the increased cost for residents. They ignored the fact that the parking permit would only cost $45 per year, or $3.75 per month. Low income people would pay a reduced fee of only $5 per year, or 42 cents per month. Nobody would pay more than this unless they purchased a new gas-guzzling car. They also ignored the fact that many neighbourhoods in Vancouver already have parking permits.
Meanwhile, tiny studio apartments are renting for $1,800 in Vancouver, a real outrage that these folks chose to ignore.
Vancouver holds Global Climate Strike event
About 500 people showed up to the Vancouver Global Climate Strike event on September 24, held at the Jack Poole Plaza next to the Vancouver Convention Centre. Multiple indigenous speakers spoke at the event, with opposition to the Trans-Mountain pipeline project being a major theme. Seth Klein from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives spoke about electing “climate champions” and in favour of transitioning from gas to electric heating. Participation appeared to be strongest from young people of high-school and university age, as well as older retired folks. Visible representation from the labour movement was absent, although individual union members may have been in attendance. Many people were there with signs and banners. Some notable banners included two that said “Normal was a crisis,” a reference to push from capitalists and their governments to get back to ‘normal’ as soon as possible following the COVID-19 crisis; a “Stop Destroying Our Future” sign held by a dad and his two school-aged daughters; a “Solidarity with Indigenous Land Defenders” banner toted by a group of youth in their late teens; and a banner from “Doctors for Planetary Health,” a newly formed group that has taken out billboards on Vancouver Island to oppose fracking in BC.
Participants created sidewalk chalk art on the ground.In addition to general messages against climate change and fossil fuels, messages of opposition to the Trans-Mountain pipeline and to logging at Fairy Creek were also written.
The rally was followed by a march up Thurlow Street. There were multiple intersection occupations along the march, most notably at Thurlow and Georgia.
Provincial
Judge strikes down injunction against protesters at Fairy Creek, but the struggle continues
On September 30, Justice Thompson ruled against extending Teal-Jones’s injunction that enabled the RCMP to arrest peaceful land defenders at Fairy Creek. Over 1,000 people have been arrested at Fairy Creek since April in what amounts to the largest series of mass arrests in Canadian history. In making his decision, Justice Thompson noted that, of the countless interactions between police and protesters, “Most have been respectful, and nearly all to this point have been non-violent. This is consistent with what I have come to know during many bail applications by even the most militant of the protesters.”
He added that “They are respectful, intelligent, and peaceful by nature. They are good citizens in the important sense that they care intensely about the common good. The videos and other evidence show them to be disciplined and patient adherents to the standards of non-violent disobedience.
In response to the announcement, dancing broke out at the roadside and protesters reoccupied the gravel pit at Fairy Creek HQ.
Despite the court victory against the RCMP, the struggle to prevent logging at Fairy Creek continues. The next day, October 1, blockaders at Fairy Creek were assaulted by Teal-Jones employees while attempting to stop an excavator from tearing up one of two entrances to Granite Main, the road to the Fairy Creek watershed.
Also on October 1, the main access road in and out of the Ditidaht coastal village, on whose unceded territory Fairy Creek is located, was flooded by Teal-Jones, preventing members of the nation from leaving the reserve.
In spite of John Horgan’s denials that any logging is taking place at Fairy Creek, trees keep falling every day.
Read more: ‘Unlawful’ RCMP actions at Fairy Creek harm court’s reputation, says judge who quashed injunction -- Ethan Cox in Ricochet
Fairy Creek is an argument for abolition
By Nick Gottlieb
As a climate writer, I focus my work on drawing connections, painting a picture of the climate and ecological crises that encompasses their full, systemic causes and the complex feedback loops between human and natural systems.
At Fairy Creek, the RCMP have done that work for me by drawing painfully clear connections between the modern institution of policing and climate change. They are making the case that abolition -- the movement to “defund the police” -- is climate policy.
Footage released from Fairy Creek over the last month shows police pepper spraying groups of unarmed, peaceful protestors; attacking media; and even appearing to beat someone who was already restrained on the ground. In his welcome ruling last week against extending Teal-Jones’s injunction, Justice Thompson argued that the police were violating civil liberties and contributing to “substantial risk to the court’s reputation” -- that is, to the perception that we are governed by some “rule of law.” He’s absolutely right that police actions at Fairy Creek have threatened that perception, but unfortunately for all of us, that perception is fundamentally wrong. What’s remarkable about the violence at Fairy Creek is who the police are attacking and how much media coverage it’s receiving, not the violence itself. Police violence and harassment is a daily lived reality for Indigenous and other racialized communities across Canada.
The obvious connection between racialized violence and climate change at protests against deforestation may obscure the more pernicious one: that modern policing is and has always been about racialized dispossession and exploitation in the service of wealth accumulation.
Critical geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore once said, “Capitalism requires inequality. Racism enshrines it.”
When the police violently remove protestors against old growth logging or fossil fuel pipelines, they are doing so in service of the extractive industry. When they violently remove unhoused people from parks in Canada’s cities, they are doing so in service of real estate investors and the property-holding class. When they killed Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, it coincided with - and may have been directly coordinated with - a city economic development plan to gentrify the neighbourhood. We’re deluding ourselves if we think Canada is any different.
Police violence is almost always deployed to protect economic interests (and the uniquely Western notion of property rights), but even more, it is deployed along racial and socio-economic lines to reinforce divisions and create the “othering” that justifies extreme wealth accumulation. It allows us to judge people as more or less deserving of a good life -- a judgement that capitalism can’t function without.
We othered (and continue to other) Indigenous peoples when we first came to Turtle Island, allowing us to justify taking their land for our own profit. We other racialized communities, drug users, and the homeless to justify the outrageous inequality and pain that capitalism creates. We other countries in the Global South that bear the brunt of the impacts of climate change to allow ourselves to pretend it’s a “future problem.” And we other nature itself, in direct contradiction with virtually every non-Western cultural tradition, so that we can colonize, extract from, and destroy life without thinking twice.
The results of this othering have been almost unimaginable wealth accumulation for a few and absolute devastation for everyone else -- and for our future on this planet. From their origins as the North-West Mounted Police - created to control and dispossess Canada’s Indigenous peoples - to the present day, the RCMP has been at the forefront of this project, leveraging violence to marginalize and justify extraction.
What we are seeing at Fairy Creek as the RCMP turn their aggression on a settler population historically insulated from (and served by) their violence should be a wakeup call. As newspapers around the world reported earlier this year, “Nowhere is safe” -- not from the escalating impacts of climate and ecological catastrophe, nor from the violent arm of extractive capitalism that continues to exacerbate those catastrophes.
The continued devastation of our ancient forests - in the face of science, mass protest, and nearly universal support for protection - and the rampant RCMP violence serving to perpetuate it makes one thing clear: You’re either on the side of the police and the extractive paradigm they exist to serve, or you’re on the side of life. You can’t be on both.
You can read more about the recent events at Fairy Creek here in the Tyee
DSOV Hosts first AGM
The Democratic Socialists of Vancouver (DSOV), which has been organizing since early 2020, held their first AGM Oct 3. The AGM for the group, which now has over 150 members, featured reports on accomplishments to date as well as a Call to Nomination for their inaugural Steering Committee.
The DSOV began, as many great ideas do, with a few sketches on a napkin at a comrade’s kitchen table. Over the following 18 months the group has accomplished many things including branding, website, and social media presence; organization structure including Statement of Principles and Bylaws; and working groups and campaigns that include We Endorse (BC Elections Candidates; Housing for All Now, and Defund the VPD). Members of the DSOV were also key players in the founding of the Socialist Unity Assembly and The Thorn newsletter.
The new Steering Committee members will be posted on the DSOV website.
Membership in the DSOV is open and free. Interested persons can visit the DSOV website and click the Join the DSOV button.
International
Global Climate Strike calls for meaningful action on climate change
The second coordinated Global Climate Strike took place on September 24. Though not as massive as 2019’s largest day of protest in human history, the event still saw hundreds of thousands of people in 99 countries show up to demand meaningful action on climate change.
Of note are both Montreal and Berlin, which saw 100,000 people show up to their respective Global Climate Strike events. Climate activist Greta Thunberg spoke at the Berlin event, which took place two days before the 2021 German election.
Global climate strike: thousands join coordinated action across world
Berliners vote to expropriate corporate landlords
In a referendum held concurrently with German elections on September 26, Berliners voted yes to expropriate 3,000 apartments owned by corporate landlords. The apartments were built as public housing by the Communist government of East Germany but were privatized following German reunification in 1989. Housing activists in Berlin worked hard to get the referendum on the ballot, and if implemented, the referendum will help to keep rents down in the city. In 2020, Berlin implemented a five-year rent freeze on apartments built before 2014. The vote is non-binding, so it’s up to Berlin’s government, also elected on September 26, to decide whether to move forward.
Full Story: Berlin’s vote to take properties from big landlords could be a watershed moment
Upcoming Events
Socialist Unity Assembly Monthly Meeting
Oct 17 from 7-9pm Online via Zoom
Host: DSOV
Topic: The Intersection between Climate Action and Social Justice
Speakers: Avi Lewis, Yvonne Hanson
Followed by discussion
Facebook Group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/socialistunityassembly
Upcoming Events|ecosocialistvancouver.org -- Roundup of relevant events both online and around Metro Vancouver.
Media Roundup
BC's first unionized animation studio as workers ratify collective agreement -- Titmouse Unionized in the CBC
Vancouver police consider expanding ‘trespass prevention program’ city wide -- Mike Howell in Vancouver is Awesome
Private market sale threatens hundreds of affordable co-op homes (in Burnaby) -- Co-Operative Housing Federation of BC
New West opposes proposed Tilbury LNG expansion in Delta -- Theresa McManus in the Delta Optimist
Pipeline Standoff: Wet’Suwet’en Block Effort to Tunnel Under Morice River -- Amanda Follett Hosgood in The Tyee
An Open Letter: BC Must Act Now to Confront Our Climate Emergency -- BC Climate Emergency Campaign in The Tyee
Far Right extremists in Ukraine brag they have received training from the Canadian Forces: Report -- David Pugliese in the Ottawa Citizen
Wave of labor unrest could see tens of thousands on strike within weeks -- Michael Sainato in The Guardian
Mass protests in Brazil call for Jair Bolsonaro’s impeachment -- Tom Phillips in The Guardian
Abolish the Organization of American States -- Cindy Forster in Jacobin Magazine