"Helping" And Its Stories

A couple of Saturdays ago, I had a bit of an unusual encounter. It wasn't unusual in the sense that it shows anything at all surprising about our world, but rather in that it was not a common experience for me. It is the sort of encounter that often gets turned into a story in very particular ways, especially at this time of year, and so I thought it was worth presenting in ways that challenged that type of story.

Here are the details: I was walking in downtown Sudbury. There was lots of snow on the ground and it was cold enough that in the ten minutes since I'd left our front door, moisture from my breath had already led to plenty of ice buildup on my whiskers. I was walking on the main street that goes through the downtown, in front of the downtown mall, and getting ready to cross to the other side. As I was crossing, I noticed someone that I do not know but that I recognized from seeing around the downtown and from an agency that provides emergency food and drop-in services to people living in poverty (which also provided meeting space to the anti-poverty group that was active during my first couple of years in Sudbury). My past interactions with this individual have not gone beyond giving him a few dollars a time or two when he has asked me on the street, and have never involved having a conversation or anything like that. So I prepared to be asked for change. When I got closer, however, it became apparent that he was in pretty bad shape -- not unconscious but still pretty out of it, and seemingly in quite a bit of pain. He had moved to lying on his side (and remember, it is snowy and very cold) and grimacing.

I asked if he was okay. He indicated he was not. I asked if he wanted a doctor. He indicated that he did. I dithered for about thirty seconds or a minute, reconfirmed his lack of okayness and his desire for medical help, and went to the nearest available phone, which was just down the block at the bus station. I used the phone at the information booth to call 911 and had them send an ambulance. At the request of the 911 operator, I returned to what she had labelled "the scene." I told this guy the ambulance was coming, though it wasn't clear that he understood me. In the few minutes it took to arrive, he went from sitting propped against the wall (something he had presumably accomplished while I was on my journey to find a phone) and back to lying on his side. When the paramedics got out, it became clear that they knew him by name. I hung around for a couple of minutes and then continued with my errands.

There are a few things about this fairly straightforward incident that strike me as interesting and relevant. They roughly divide into two areas: the decision to act and the consequences of acting.

The first thing that this got me thinking about was the conditions under which help gets extended by people who are seen and who see themselves as "respectable citizens." For example, I suspect that this man's physical appearance would usually be read as putting him in the categories "not white", "very poor", and "homeless", though I hasten to point out that I don't know anything about his background or about his current housing situation. But that's how he gets read, I think. I suspect this relates to the answers to questions like, how long had he been in the state that I found him? How many people had walked by and seen/not seen him, without doing anything? He is effortlessly read as Other, which makes him less likely to be noticed and less likely to be offered help when his appearance is giving evidence of distress.

In saying those things, I am quite conscious of the way in which encounters like the one I described can be read into particular narratives that serve to construct the person playing the role that I played as a "good one" -- I'll talk more about that below, but I'll start trying to counter it here by admitting that I am asking this question not to perform good-person-ness but because in that moment I felt the pressure not to see and not to act. I remember from Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series a thing called the Somebody Else's Problem Field, which was used to make things more or less invisible by convincing any sentient beings in the vicinity that, really, they didn't have any reason to notice or be concerned with the object in question. And as shameful as it is, I felt my mind instinctively grasping for reasons not to have to see this man's distress or not to have to act on it. Perhaps, if I was in a different emotional place and/or some details of the circumstance had been a bit different, those graspings to make it somebody else's problem might have succeeded. I'd certainly like to think not, but frankly, developing a hefty box of internal tools for not noticing and not acting on horrific things which are right in front of our noses is a key part of socialization into privilege of various flavours, and having a self-image as "compassionate" or "progressive" or "radical" (or "Christian") doesn't make all of that training just disappear. To be honest, I have a feeling that performing the pretence of smooth functioning in our society absolutely requires people with privilege to have such a toolbox and to use the tools it contains to deaden parts of our humanity.

The question of the decision to act is also relevant to the period immediately before the paramedics arrived. As far as I could ascertain, in the unknown length of time before I initially ran into this guy, and in the few minutes I was away from "the scene," no one else decided to notice and to act. Yet in the few minutes between when I returned to "the scene" and when the ambulance showed up, three passers-by indicated by their interactions with me that they read the scene as a person in distress needing help. What difference did my presence make? I think my relatively privileged body arranged in ways as to demonstrate concern served as a bridge, a way to make the Otherness of this fellow less apart from the world of the other pedestrians. My presence pushed a reading onto the situation that made seeing and offering to act more reasonable, that reduced the fear (or guilt or anxiety) that people of relative privilege experience in response to Others in such situations, and that also reassured people that even if they noticed, it would remain somebody else's problem.

The action itself and its consequences are also interesting.

You see, though there is a definite push not to see in this specific class of instance, once seen and acted upon it enters a more general sort of story that is very common in our culture. The right sort of smartypants could probably trace this story's origins back to important features of Christian thought as well as to the emergence of the ideology of "community" that came along with the emergence of capitalism. I'm not going to attempt that. But it is a story all of us will recognize -- a story of "helping," of "doing good," of "the Good Samaritan." Especially at this time of year, you see it sprinkled through the media. It warms hearts, it builds cheer, it fills that thirty seconds between death and advertising. In its more collective variants, it calms guilt at First World privilege and sells wars to an unwary public.

The general form of the story is this: An individual (or group) A meets, sees, reads about an individual (or group) B. They have no previous connection. A sees B is in distress. A provides assistance to B. The interaction is win-win, perhaps even a trade of sorts. B emerges materially better off, or perhaps more free. A emerges with a kind of immaterial boost -- flaunted, downplayed, or denied; based in being able to see one's self, through the act of helping, as a "good Christian" or a "good neighbour" or a "good person" or just "nice;" gained through mirroring from others who know or just knowing one's self.

In this story, two transitions occur. B goes from "in need" to "not in need," if not absolutely then in some critical respect. This occurs by the agency of A, and because of this A gets to make a transition from their starting point -- "innocence" -- and into an elevated state -- "virtue."

There are several things wrong with the way this story gets applied to most situations, including the one that I began the post with. Mostly these problems revolve around the fact that this story does not accurately characterize most of the situations to which we learn to apply it. It is, to be blunt, most often a lie.

For one thing, it assumes that A and B come into relation at the point when A notices B and acts. This is almost invariably false, in the current world. In real, material, traceable ways we are in already existing relationships with everyone around us. The relations are often not directly observable, not interpersonal in character, not experienced as part of our local everyday realities, but we can show in very practical ways how they happen. This is not the place to try and characterize in detailed ways the nature of those relations, in general or in the specific instance that began the post, but it is possible to say a few things without having to say everything. It is most common in the way this story gets used that A has power in an area where B does not, so instead of beginning from innocence, the relation between A and B is one that benefits A and hurts B. Often the very capacity to "help" comes from the privilege that goes along with this oppressive relationship. Certainly this was true in my encounter of the other week, where racialization, colonization, and class relations (among other things) have helped make my life a pretty privileged one, which put me in the position to notice and act in the ways I did to a person for whom racialization, perhaps colonization, and class relations have made life a hard, hard thing, and have created the need to which I was responding. The narrative of helping often functions in the culture to allow us to pretend, however, that this sort of oppression is not the grounding for everything that we do.

Of course, A having some form of privilege where B is oppressed is not an absolute requirement for this story. It also gets used in cases where A and B experience much the same oppression, or even when B has power over A. The details differ, but it still usually functions to erase the pre-existing relations between them and to make the point (subtley or not) that "good" people don't begrudge the privileged their privilege and can't we all just get along?

So even if we leave the character of B's movement over the course of this story unquestioned for a moment, it is clear that since A doesn't really start from innocence, understanding their move as being a simple one towards virtue doesn't really make any sense. At best, it is a human being just doing what human beings should do for each other when they see an acute need. At worst, it is hypocrisy: performing and reinforcing a refusal to see the relations creating the context for the need and the context for the capacity to help, and more importantly using it as a screen to refuse responsibility for working to change those underlying relations.

Except the move for B is not usually that simple either. Take my encounter, for example. In that case, and in lots of others like it, the "helping" took the form of connecting a desperately poor person to services for which they were experiencing urgent need. The usual middle-class Canadian understanding of services is that they are adequate, perhaps generous, perhaps even too generous. Generally speaking, it is very easy for those of us who can pretend not to need socialized systems of support to attribute any unmet needs in people who have been connected to services to some flaw in those people. Social services are a material expression of the construction of Canadianness as compassionate and virtuous, so there is significant psychological investment in seeing them as adequate, even for people who don't strictly approve of them. It allows middle-class Canadians to see ourselves as "we who help", positioned as superior to those who need our help through the very hierarchical act of helping itself, and with the convenient distancing effect of bureaucratic services to actually do the helping so we don't have to encounter the Other ourselves, most of the time.

Even many privileged folk who are aware that services are inadequate in terms of quantity don't really get the qualitative problems with them. So the unproblematic "helping" via services that is read into this story is very much from a middle-class standpoint. In fact, services are far from uncomplicated "help" for those whose lives depend on them. Though they are an improvement over an absence of services, i.e. needs that remain urgent and unmet, they tend to function as a sort of exchange -- they use their capacity to meet real, urgent needs as a way to force the people whose needs they can (partially) meet to accept heightened surveillance and control over their lives. Though it provided a way for him to get his immediate hurt attended and to get out of the cold, my "helping" also cast the guy I "helped" back into a net of interactions with professionals and bureaucrats, and each such interaction is a reminder of their power over him, of his dependence on them. Like more direct forms of "helping", bureaucratized "helping" through services may or may not succeed at meeting one facet of immediate need but it leaves underlying relations of power largely untouched in most circumstances. So it really is a much more partial form of support than middle-class progressives who enthuse about services as the answer to everything, rather than actual social justice, usually like to think.

Though the details vary depending on the kind of "help" that is read into the narrative outlined above, usually it is a lot more mixed than the pure form the general form of the story requires.

Genuine, human responses to human need on a human scale are essentially manifestations in the present of the better world that we want to create. Our movements for change will go nowhere without making mutual aid central to what they do. But "help" of the sort that usually gets read into such heartwarming stories is usually a way of affirming power-over and avoiding any icky guilt -- and, more importantly, any sense of responsibility to act -- in response to that fact.

All of which is to say, it is important for all of us to constantly be aware of how the ways we are trained to see others as Others can result in us seeing our fellow human beings as less than human in very gut-level, everyday ways. We must see need and respond to it. But it is also important to question and challenge narratives of "helping" when we ourselves are a protagonist and when they are used to build a sense of generalized, apolitical goodwill, associated with the "holiday season" or not, in the media, from pulpits, and in conversation.

Employment

How strange. I seem to have accidentally become employed.

Well, perhaps it wasn't a complete accident. But it has happened considerably sooner than I had expected. A few tiny pieces of paid writing aside, I haven't sold my labour directly for the ability to purchase the results of other people's labour since L's birth, more or less -- it has all been about being a stay-at-home dad and trying to write a book with whatever time was left over. Though my book is neither completely written nor sold, I am expecting that the former goal will be reached in the coming year and I am hope-hope-hope-hoping that the latter is achieved as well. I certainly haven't been harbouring feelings of inadequacy about depending on my partner's income -- like many many people socialized into masculinity, my sense of self and my work are too tightly intertwined to be strictly healthy, but unlike many of my compatriots, my ways of valuing that work have little to do with money -- but I have still thought it would be a good thing to return in a small way to paid employment as the book gets close to done. I had expected that would mean I would perhaps start keeping my eyes open for opportunities starting, say, next summer. But an opportunity came along that I couldn't say no to, and I took it.

I am far from anonymous on this blog, so I'm not going to blog about this job. However, I will say that it is few enough hours that I will still have plenty of opportunity to write and to parent, but those hours are better remunerated than you can usually expect to find for part-time work. The job will make use of skills and expertise that I have obtained in a few previous pieces of my life, but it will apply them in a combination and a context that are new to me, so it will also be an interesting challenge, particularly at first.

It still feels weird and sudden, however.

Secret Trials Legislation Stalled; Keep The Pressure Up!

This is another update on the Conservative attempt to resurrect secret trials in Canada, after the Supreme Court struck down the legislation authorizing them earlier in the year. This time there is some good news, at least temporarily. Though there had been plans to give the legislation (Bill C-3) third reading and pass it in the House of Commons the other night, the government changed its mind. It seems that the legislation has been stalled until late January, likely due to the public pressure against it, and to the growing awareness that most major Canadian legal associations have advised that the new version would not pass a Charter challenge. There are signs that government spin-machines are kicking into gear to get public opinion onside so it can be passed at that point, perhaps with a few more small changes but with essentially the same two-tiered, racist, deprivation of due process at its heart. This means that it is important to keep the pressure on our MPs, especially Liberals, most of whom apparently plan to vote in favour of this injustice.

Here are some details from the Campaign to Stop Secret Trials in Canada:

Secret Trials Bill Stalled in House Likely Due to Public Pressure!

Update and January 25-26 Days of Action to End Secret Trials in Canada

UPDATE AND CALL TO ACTION
The final Parliamentary vote on the "new" security certificate process, Bill C-3, expected to take place earlier this week, was postponed at the 11th hour, and will not be considered until the week of January 28, 2008.

Congratulations to everyone who marched, participated in community delegations, sent emails or phoned MPs - together, we have won the first round in the fight against new security certificate legislation! But there is still much to do.

PUBLIC OUTRAGE STALLS THE BILL!
After the Conservatives made a major point of trying to ram the bill through the House before the holiday break, one might conclude that their apparent reticence to put the bill to a final vote was in part due to public outrage and pressure and perhaps what the polls were telling the government (the Conservative Party, it was revealed yesterday, has spent $31 million on polling since coming to office, an average of two polls per business day while in office).

MPs' offices were reportedly fielding 'dozens and dozens' of calls last week from people all across the country, coming on the heels of several months of popular action against the new legislation.

The conclusion of most major Canadian legal associations, civil society groups, and advocates that the bill would not even pass a Charter challenge may also have left the Conservatives (and their Liberal supporters) with cold feet.

NEW BILL ALMOST A MIRROR OF THE OLD LAW
C-3, like the old security certificate section of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, will still allow for continued use of arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention without charge on secret suspicions, and deportation to torture. It addresses none of the core demands of the public campaign.

The minority Harper government took almost eight full months to come up with C-3. In a vote supported by both the Bloc and the Liberals, Parliament handed the bill to the "Public Safety" committee for a review that lasted only two and a half weeks. Only as a result of public protest were the hearings slightly opened up, but, in the end, there was not enough time to seriously ask why the law was necessary, or explore the outstanding submissions of groups calling for abolition of the security certificate. Before passing it back to Parliament for third reading, the committee made three token amendments which did not change the fundamentally flawed nature of the bill.

Parliament will not open again until January 29. If Bill C-3 then passes Parliament, it will go on to Senate, where it will pass through the same process - first reading, second reading, hearings in a committee, and then third reading and the final vote. Regardless of whether the new law is ready, the Supreme Court's suspended decision will finally go into effect on 23 February and the old security certificate process will die.

NEXT STEPS: THE FEAR FACTOR AND A CAUTION AGAINST C-3 "FIX-IT"s
After six years of public campaigning to end secret trials and two-tier justice, during which the Supreme court declared the security certificate process to be unconstitutional, the detainees and their families are now facing new legislation which, if implemented, will only prolong the extended suffering they have already experienced, and ramp up the fear that they will be deported to torture.

Given that the Conservatives may now have awakened to the fact that it is untenable to pass a law that has already been evaluated as unconstitutional by so many individuals and groups, they may try to tinker with it and add a few more pieces of window-dressing related to the "special" advocate. It is important to resist attempts to "fix" what is a fundamentally flawed and unfair law. Adding in "protections" will help get the bill through the House, but do nothing to help those who are subjected to this draconian process.

In calling and lobbying MPs, it is important to reject the notion that "special" advocates will save the day. Discredited in the UK, the special advocate system not only sets a dangerous precedent that opens the door to further secrecy in a variety of government proceedings, it also fails to meet the basic challenge the Supreme Court of Canada launched last February when it declared the security certificate process unconstitutional: How does one meet a case that one does not know?

MPs and "special" advocate supporters may bring in the fear factor that, should the law expire, chaos will erupt and the "security" of Canadians will be at risk. This is total nonsense. If those subject to the security certificate are suddenly free from detention or without the draconian restrictions that keep them and their families under house arrest, the government can do what it should have done all along, and what it would have done if they had happened to be citizens: if there is a case against them, charge them under the Criminal Code, allow them to see the case against them, and provide them with a fair and open trial.

C-3, however fixed, will only continue two-tier justice in Canada, and continue to subject some people to indefinite detention under threat of deportation to torture.

JANUARY IS THE MONTH!
Over the next month and a half, it is vital that we put greater pressure on the MPs - particularly Liberals - who will be voting at the end of January, as well as make a popular approach to the unelected Senate.

All the resources you need for the actions below, from petititons to backgrounders, flyers, and to responses to the form letter of response being sent by the Conservatives, are available at www.jerome.koumbit.org/adil/.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:
1. Contact the MP for your area, continuously. (The NDP is completely opposed to C-3, so please focus on Liberals, Bloc, and Conservatives). Warn them that a "special" advocate is simply unacceptable and will only continue two-tier justice in Canada, as well as create a dangerous precedent for a greater 'legitimate' use of secret information in other areas of law. Try and get them to make a public statement of opposition, and put it to them clearly: are they in favour of a bill that allows for arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention, secret suspicions, and deportation to torture? Are they in favour of two-tier justice? Send responses to justiceforadil@riseup.net to add to a record of public positions taken by MPs (soon up on www.jerome.koumbit.org/adil).

Friday, January 25 is check-in day with MPs: if you haven't received a response to your questions, consider sending a delegation or organizing a call-in day in your area.

2. Find out what Senators come from your area by going here. Get in touch with that Senator regarding your concerns, given that C-3 will go to the Senate if passed by the House.

3. Saturday, January 26 is our next call for a pan-Canadian day of action against secret trials, deportations to torture and two-tier justice. Please consider organizing a public event (march, picket, vigil, educational forum, visit to an MP's office, letter-writing day). Contact tasc@web.ca to let us know about your plans.

4. If you are in or near Ottawa, please join us for activities around Adil Charkaoui's second Supreme Court challenge on 31 January. This challenge is based on CSIS's destruction of evidence in his security certificate file. This case is likely to expose some of the weakness of the CSIS 'information' (hearsay, rumour, profiling, CSIS summaries and assessments, torture information) in these files. Contact justiceforadil@riseup.net to find out more.

Thanks!

More info:
Toronto: Campaign to Stop Secret Trials in Canada, tasc@web.ca, www.homesnotbombs.ca
Ottawa: Justice for Mohamed Harkat Committee, justicepourmohamedharkat@yahoo.ca, www.justiceforharkat.com
Montreal: Coalition Justice for Adil Charkaoui, justiceforadil@riseup.net, www.jerome.koumbit.org/adil

Review: Home Economics

[Nandita Sharma. Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of 'Migrant Workers' in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.]

Despite my reluctant reference to nation in the name of this blog, anyone who reads it on a regular basis will know that I am no fan of Canadian nationalism in any of its flavours. Despite my disdain for left nationalism, and the fact that I read plenty of political writing, I'm not sure I've ever read a book like this one that combines an academic approach with radical anti-racist no-borders politics.

I definitely like it.

In the regular course of our swim through North America's political culture there is almost nothing to suggest that borders between states are anything other than natural, eternal, even apolitical in important ways. This is despite the fact that it is easily demonstrable that borders are not the least bit eternal and shift over time, and that their political impact is strikingly different for different people. Borders are vital tools for the maintenance of the nation and the state, which are in turn integral to capitalist social relations.

One of the central themes of this book is the importance of the construct of the nation in creating a sense of certain places as home for certain people but not others. This sense of home shapes our consciousness of the relationship between place and belonging and is used to organize difference among categories like "indigenous", "citizen", "immigrant", and "migrant worker". The modern liberal-democratic state cultivates a sense of home in its citizens in ways that encourage said national subjects to develop a commonsense understanding in line with the needs of ruling relations. This commonsense accepts as natural and inevitable the highly differential treatment of people who are denied entry into the category of "citizen" -- people like "migrant workers" -- in cases that would lead to widespread reactions of horror if (at least certain) citizens were treated the same way.

This sort of nationalist common sense is further entrenched by thought and action from much of the left, including many left-liberals, many social democrats, even many marxists and other radicals of various persuasions. One of neoliberalism's goals is to entrench all capital as at home within the bounds of Canada (and any other state) while sharpening the division between workers who are truly at home here and those who are not. Left nationalism seeks to resist this trend not by objecting to the construction of some workers as inherently more exploitable, as Other, as apart from the nation, as reasonably deserving of lesser treatment than Us, but rather by sharpening the national boundaries even further by making sure they apply to capital as well.

In understanding why this is a problem, it is not only important to look at how borders maintain apartheid at a global level -- how they are a tool for ensuring that mainly racialized workers in the global south face greater exploitation than mainly white workers in the global north. We must also recognize that they are one way in which differential experiences of oppression and privilege are maintained among people who are physically within the boundaries of a given rich state. In other words, 'foreignness' and the functioning of the border doesn't just keep some people out, it also serves to marginalize some who are let in.

Sharma makes some interesting points about how separation is a particularly capitalist approach to social control. In the development of capitalism in Europe you can see this with the gradual separation of 'work' from 'home', of 'public' from 'private', and the creation of the isolated nuclear family under patriarchal control in the service of capital accumulation. You can also see it in the way that capitalism has given rise to much sharper physical boundaries regulating movement between states, such that migrants have increasingly become understood not just as travellers but as trespassers. These divisions are among the many divisions that function to keep workers divided and less able to resist their exploitation.

I was also interested to read some of the points she makes about how racism in the West has shifted in the last few decades. It has moved from justifications that openly invoke (highly inaccurate) biology to more of a focus on "culture" -- how 'those people' do things differently and therefore wouldn't fit in and therefore must be excluded. She links this to an increase in the relevance of nationalism to the functioning of racism, and to a shift in focus from the inferiority of the Other to the undesirability of the Other.

The cluster of relations and practices we usually understand as "the state" depends on the idea of nation fostered by this shared but bordered sense of being at home, and on the idea that the nation is or at least can be a comfortable home for all.

It conceals the fact that the exclusions organized through it are integral -- not tangential or merely contingent on historical -- processes... The existence of a group of people considering themSelves to be part of the nation (or civil society) and therefore regarding themSelves not as ruled over but as ruled for helps to secure ruling relations and the continued existence of the national state. In other words, the construction of a civil or social sphere becomes a way to naturalize the power of the state to rule.

...

Concepts of citizenship are the ideological glue that bonds the nation to the state. Citizenship provides the legal framework through which the state performs its role as ruler for the nation. Together they legitimate the power of the state to subordinate foreigners. Denying the rights, entitlements, and protections that citizens have to those positioned as non-citizens is a crucial feature of how hegemonic conceptualizations of nations as homes operate within today's global capitalist economy. In this, citizenship and immigration policies are the key avenue through which nationalism is performed. [17-18, emphasis in original]

Sharma links this in concrete terms to the creation of 'migrant workers' in Canada. Before 1967, Canada's immigration system explicitly demonstrated preference in terms of race and nation. In that year, the 'points system' was inaugurated. It assigns a certain number of points for characteristics mostly related to labour market needs rather than explicitly discriminating. For the first few years, it actually functioned in relatively open ways. As white Canadian anxieties mounted about increasingly racialized immigration after 1967, the federal government decided to maintain the points system but to tighten the requirements for qualifying to become a full immigrant -- a 'permanent resident' on her/his way to becoming a 'citizen'. At the same time, it created the category of 'migrant worker', which is a group of people admitted to the country, ostensibly on a temporary basis, and denied in law access to most of the rights, entitlements, and protections given to those qualifying as 'citizens' while at the same time functioning as a source of highly exploitable labour in the service of capital accumulation. Since the mid 1970s, more of the (mostly racialized) people who have entered Canada destined for labour force participation in most years have done so under conditions that essentially make them indentured labourers than have done so in categories rendering them eligible for permanent residency and ultimately citizenship. Though the program constructs these people as temporary and as coming in response to temporary needs, in fact it is often the same (mostly racialized) people that come recurrently, filling positions that remain largely constant.

This history is examined in detail over two chapters. Along with tracing the shifts in legislation, Sharma examines the shifting discourse of nation and related concepts in Parliament during the period of the initial debates on the migrant worker program. This is very powerful stuff, though I didn't feel I got as clear a sense as I might've liked of the larger patterns of what MPs were saying and how they said it -- I get the feeling that perhaps these findings had already been presented elsewhere in another form, and the author did not want to include the whole formal rigamarole yet again. Or it may be that I am just unfamiliar with the expectations in presenting this sort of analysis. The other chapter dealing with the program examined in detail the shifting numbers of who was allowed entry into Canada and under what conditions over the intervening decades.

The rest of the book explored related themes in different ways. One chapter and part of another, for instance, focus on an examination of discourse produced by different theorists identified with "anti-globalization" in Canada. She demonstrates that despite important differences in various schools of thought, those which oppose globalization in nationalist ways all serve to reinforce the legitimacy of tools of ruling related to borders and distinctions in state and nation. I quite appreciated her point that one of the flaws in the nationalist anti-globalization positions that rarely gets identified is that they all erroneously assume that there was some point in the past when states were, in fact, sovereign expressions of popular will.

Regarding national states as having once been sovereign simply belies the historical record of how state practices have been a part of, and not a populist response against, global capitalist social relations. Historically, the nation-state system has not been predicated upon sovereignty, but upon its linkage to a global capitalist system and the structural interdependence that national states -- and the people living within their boundaries -- have with each other. [44, emphasis in original, references in original]

Responses to neoliberal globalization that treat it as something new and try to counter it with left nationalist nostalgia for some imagined social democratic golden age are, she says, fundamentally a white nationalist project. She relates having seen many instances of puzzlement and even hostility from white left nationalists when indigenous and non-indigenous racialized people speaking at public events in the last decade have put neoliberal globalization in the context of the last 500 years. It is an important form of the age-old devil's bargain of privilege.

In a world where the capital of investors has increasingly been granted 'national treatment' (i.e. citizenship) rights...the denial of exactly this to people categorized as migrant workers is very much part of how state practices reconstitute competition between and within nationalized labour markets. Ideological state practices that are productive of the nation enable processes of globalization precisely because nationalist ideological frames not only organize the super-exploitation of foreigners but also conceal the otherwise obvious fact that both those represented as foreign-objects and those seen to be Canadian subjects work within the same labour market, a market made more competitive through the hegemony of nationalist ideologies. Thus, while notions of Canadianness continue to legitimize the rule of White Canadians over non-White and non-Canadians, other ruling relations are buttressed, including those social relations through which most Whites are themselves oppressed and exploited. In fact, the exploitation of all workers, including White workers in Canada, hinges upon the commonsensical acceptance of extra-coercive state action against those rendered as foreign-Others. [149, emphasis in original, references in original]

Another chapter tackles Marxist understandings of "free" and "unfree" labour. Marx and many followers have argued that free labour is a fundamental characteristic of capitalism. Sharma argues that unfree labour is now and has always been integral to capitalism, and migrant workers in Canada are one instance of that. The "freedom" of some workers, though certainly won and enlarged by struggle at various points, often functions as a way of gaining a mass base of acceptance for a system that both exploits "free" labourers and depends inherently on many others being bound to unfree labour. She also points out how the association of unfree labour with racialization helps more privileged participants in these relations see unfreedom as more about inherent flaws in "those people" than as a necessary feature of capitalism.

The final half chapter of the book goes beyond just questions of nationalism and borders and wrestles with questions of the political meaning of difference and sameness and diversity more generally. Sharma uses "difference" and "diversity" in very particular ways. By the former, she means those aspects of human diversity that have social meaning because of relations of power. By the latter, she does not mean the way that it is used in liberal discourse -- that is, as a way of masking the the power imbalances of socially created and enforced difference -- but rather as Vandana Shiva would use it in both ecological and social contexts as a radical, fine-grained, heterogeneity that flows from lived experience and undermines rather than masks relations of power. The book paints a very seductive picture of a world in which what is in common flows from lived experience, not from ideological categories, and in which commonality is imminent rather than transcendental or imposed and based on practice rather than identity. She points out how this socially organized difference tends to enforce homogeneity and hierarchy within the two massive samenesses that are opposed to one another and it "does not produce diverse and varied ways of living so much as it shapes our consciousness of the authenticity, and therefore naturalness, of parochial forms of power" [158]. She calls for us to "rid our imaginations of the negative dualities of always-colonizing systems and the identities that they produce" and heed "the call to base our feelings of commonness on shared experience" [165].

I find this vision of liberatory, anti-normative heterogeneity -- a form of difference-from-below, if you will, as opposed to the difference-from-above of multiculturalism and other illusions of oppression-hiding liberal plurality -- to be very, very attractive. Yet I am deeply concerned about it, particularly with the hostility expressed towards active embrace of the oppressed half of privilege/oppression binaries by those forced to live within them. I mean, it is easy to see plenty of examples in history of that embrace being homogenizing, oppressive to some while it is liberatory to others, and a social product of the work of elites within the oppressed group to maintain their own power and functionally collude with dominant elites, whether that is conscious or not. Yet it feels that at this point in the book, as wonderful as I find the vision of liberation to be, it slips away a bit from practical grounding. There is mention that radical diversity is "a lived reality, a goal, and an organizing strategy aimed at achieving social justice" [160], but I think it does a disservice to those who have fought hard by rallying around the socially created and enforced oppressed identities to advance such a vision without a much, much more comprehensive and practical discussion about what it really means for it to be "an organizing strategy."

Beyond what I've noted above, I have two areas I would have liked to see explored more fully in the book. The first is a more full engagement with indigenous nationalisms on Turtle Island. I think the importance that nation can have as a basis for resisting colonization and capitalism in an indigenous context needs to be given greater consideration. As well, in my limited understanding, traditional indigenous understandings of what a nation is can be quite different from those European-derived approaches that shape the nations (both European and not) currently existing in symbiosis with states. Engaging with these understandings might provide insight into different, perhaps less difference-making, ways in which human collectives can be organized.

The other area that I thought could have been addressed more completely was the role of exclusions not between "citizen" and "non-citizen" but within "citizen" via the workings of things like race and gender and sexuality. Sharma acknowledges that these are important. There is also nothing wrong with the fact that the focus of her work is the understudied importance of the former. Still, I think more discussion of exclusion among those admitted to the legal category of "citizen", and of the non-legal mechanisms by which social relations generate and depend on difference infused with power, would round out the book in important ways.

If any of you are still reading after this many words, you probably don't need to be told that I liked the book and think it is an important one for developing a radical understanding of what it means to live in what currently gets called "Canada".

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Urgent Action Alert Against Secret Trials in Canada

Bill C-3, new legislation authorizing secret trials based on secret evidence, is up for a final vote in the House of Commons today. In recent years, secret trials have been used in Canada to target Muslim men of colour as part of larger campaigns of harassment and profiling against their communities. Please see the urgent action alert received from the Campaign to Stop Secret Trials in Canada:

Today, Wednesday, December 12, Parliament will vote on whether to rubber stamp new legislation to allow for continued secret trials, indefinite detention, two-tier justice, and deportation to torture.

The Canadian Bar Association, the Quebec Bar Association, and the Federation of Law Societies of Canada have already stated that the legislation, Bill C-3, will NOT pass a constitutional challenge. Why, then, is the government prepared to bring in such an unconstitutional law? The Bloc and NDP have stated they will vote against. Hence, the fate of those currently subject to indefinite detention without charge and deportation to torture now sits with the Liberals, most of whom have shamefully caved in. If C-3 passes Parliament, the law will go to Senate.

Certain Liberals may be open to voting against the unjust and unconstitutional law (only 2 Liberals, Andrew Telegdi and Colleen Beaumier, voted against C-3 at second reading), so please make an effort to make a few last minute telephone calls to urge them to vote against C-3, and to ask them to speak to others in the party to do the same.

Below: list of priority MPs; model letter/talking points; link to a backgrounder.

:::PRIORITY MPs:::

If your MP is not liberal, you could focus on:

Omar Alghabra AlghaO@parl.gc.ca (613) 995-7321
Sue Barnes barneS@parl.gc.ca 613-996-6674
Colleen Beaumier beaumC@parl.gc.ca 613-995-5381
Bonnie Brown BrownB@parl.gc.ca 613-995-4014
Ruby Dhalla DhallR@parl.gc.ca 613-995-4843
Ujjal Dosanjh dosanU@parl.gc.ca 613-995-7052
Raymonde Folco FolcoR@parl.gc.ca 613-992-2659
Hedy Fry HedyF@parl.gc.ca (613) 992-3213
Albina Guarnieri GuarnA@parl.gc.ca (613) 996-0420
Mark Holland HollaM@parl.gc.ca (613) 995-8042
Marlene Jennings JenniM@parl.gc.ca (613) 995-2251
Bernard Patry PatryB@parl.gc.ca 613-992-2689
Jasmin Ratsani RatanY@parl.gc.ca (613) 995-4988
Pablo Rodriguez RodriPa@parl.gc.ca 613-995-0580
Francis Scarpaleggia ScarpF@parl.gc.ca (613) 995-8281
Navdeep Bains BainsN@parl.gc.ca 613-995-7784
Stéphane Dion dions@parl.gc.ca
Borys Wrzesnewskyj wrzesb@parl.gc.ca

Contact details for MPs: www.parl.gc.ca
How the MP voted at second reading: www.jerome.koumbit.org/adil/en/node/219

:::MODEL LETTER/TALKING POINTS:::

Dear xxx,

I urge you to vote against Bill C-3, the new security certificate law, for the following reasons.

1. A two-tiered justice system
Bill C-3 perpetuates a two-tiered system of justice, one for citizens and the other for the hundreds of thousands of permanent residents and refugees who are in the process of becoming Canadian citizens. It is based on the unspoken premise that non-citizens have fewer rights and are more dangerous than citizens, and that it is somehow justified to subject them to procedures that we would immediately condemn as unjust if used against citizens: indefinite detention based on secret allegations, denial of the right to know and challenge the evidence used to justify detention, and so on.

2. Deportation to torture or execution
As the government has repeatedly stated, deportation is the primary goal of the security certificate process. The men currently under security certificates are now branded with the label "suspected terrorist". Deporting them to their countries of origin - Syria, Egypt, Algeria and Morocco - inevitably means torture, possibly death.

In Adil Charkaoui's case, Immigration Canada's latest pre-removal risk assessment (PRRA), completed in 2007, evaluated Charkaoui to be at risk of cruel and unusual punishment, torture or death if deported to Morocco. In a decision rendered October 16, 2006 [2006 FC 1230], Justice MacKay of the Federal Court ruled that, "Mr. [Mahmoud] Jaballah faces a serious risk of torture or worse if he were removed to Egypt". On December 14, 2006 [2006 FC 1503], Justice Tremblay-Lamer of the Federal Court found that there was overwhelming evidence that Mohammad Mahjoub would face a very serious risk of torture if returned to Egypt, notwithstanding Egypt's diplomatic assurances.

3. Violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
During Public Safety Committee hearings on November 29, representatives of the Canadian Bar Association, the Quebec Bar Association, and the Federation of Law Societies of Canada expressed the opinion that Bill C-3 is probably unconstitutional:

Hon. Sue Barnes (Lib.):
For the record, I'd like your opinion, if you care to give it, of whether the bill as it currently stands would pass a constitutional challenge. I will ask each association to respond, if you care to.

Ms. Isabelle Dongier (Lawyer and Member, Citizenship and Immigration Law Section, Canadian Bar Association):
Well, according to the CBA review, the bill does not pass the charter's test right now. It definitely needs to be amended, on various accounts.

Mrs. Frederica Wilson (Director, Policy and Public Affairs, Federation of Law Societies of Canada):
I don't claim to be an expert in constitutional law, but I think there's a very serious question about whether it would pass. It does not provide the safeguards that the Supreme Court indicated would be required. Under the
circumstances, one can assume it would have a rough ride.

Mr. Pierre Poupart (Lawyer, Member of the Committee on Human Rights and Member of the Committee on Criminal Law, Barreau du Québec):
At the Barreau du Québec, our opinion is that, as currently drafted, this bill is not different enough from its predecessor to be considered constitutionally valid.

It is no small matter to vote in favour of a law which, according to leading legal experts in the field, is in all likelihood contrary to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This implies deliberately voting for a law while knowing that there is a very strong likelihood that it violates fundamental rights and freedoms enshrined in the Charter, particularly due process guarantees (s. 7) and the guarantee of equality before and under the law (s. 15). These rights are guaranteed to 'everyone', which, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly stated, includes non-citizens living in Canada.

A vote in favour of Bill C-3 also means actively endorsing the continued imprisonment or house arrest of the men currently held under security certificates for a period of several more years under a law that, in all likelihood, will eventually be judged unconstitutional for a second time by the Supreme Court.

Again, for all these reasons, I would urge you to vote against Bill C-3. If the Bill is adopted in the House of Commons, I would further ask you to encourage your colleagues in the Senate to oppose the Bill. Please send a strong message to Canadians that you are prepared to stand up for equality and human rights.

Name, address



:::BACKGROUND:::

For full background on C-3 by the Coalition Justice for Adil Charkaoui, see here.

Quote: Racism in Canadian Law

A number of scholars have found that the legal system was 'implicated' in the country's racist past. The key point, however, is not that the law was discriminatory and that racism can be found in its rulings, but that the Canadian legal system is a regime of racial power. The law upheld the rights of nationals over those of Aboriginal peoples time and time again, and in this process, it extended its own legitimacy as the sole 'authorizing authority' within the settler colony. It institutionalized the violence of the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples in their daily encounters with Canadians. Parliament's criminalization in 1927 of Aboriginal peoples who raised money for litigation for their claims to sovereignty without the written consent of the Department of Indian Affairs can certainly be described as racist. However, the very coming into being of a Parliament that claimed the authority to act in this manner, the existence of such a sovereign authority in the context of the ongoing colonization of Aboriginal peoples, reflects the deeply racialized nature of this sovereign power, its politics, and its laws.

-- Sunera Thobani, emphasis in original, references in original

Review: Community Organization and the Canadian State

[Roxana Ng, Gillian Walker, Jacob Muller, eds. Community Organization and the Canadian State. Toronto: Garamond Press, 1990.]

As far as acts of everyday politics go, I think one of the least understood is that of prodding ourselves and each other to think more deeply about how we use language. I don't just mean the more obvious aspects of this -- things like challenging language use that invokes oppressive histories or paring away usages that obscure rather than reveal what is actually going on in a situation. No, those are important, but I'm increasingly convinced that there is political value in embracing and encouraging a comprehensively different relationship to language. We need to move away from seeing challenges to language as being about movement towards some kind of purity and instead gradually edge towards a sort of perpetual, creative, playful unsettledness with our words. The discomfort and rough edges we often feel when trying to figure out our way past some embedded nastiness in the words we have to choose from are not just unpleasant side effects, they are part of the point. Even the most incisive terminology can cause our brains to calcify over time if held too tightly. It seems to me that embracing that feeling of unease and holding even our most cherished words lightly in our minds just kind of goes along with larger projects of questioning and challenging.

My reasons for deciding that I needed to read this book at this time were kind of diffuse and reached a critical mass through the help of the periodic clutch of anxiety that I experience over not feeling that I know enough background or context to write a given chapter in my main project. I think it was the essay "The Politics of Minority Resistance Against Racism in the Local State" by Daiva Stasiulis that initially caught my attention -- from wherever it was that I came across the reference, it seemed like it might be relevant to the chapter I'm currently working on, and possibly others. It isn't as useful as I'd hoped in some ways, but I'll be able to use it as a reference in two other places. It talks about community struggles against racism at the Toronto School Board and at the Toronto Police Services in the '70s and '80s; the former will fit in nicely in a footnote for a chapter I've already written, and the latter talks about struggles involving one of my participants whose words are featured in another chapter, though not struggles that are the focus of what he talked about to me.

Beyond that, though, there's lots of great Canadian history from below in this book. Not all of it was necessarily written as history, but when read 17 years later, all of it is. George Smith's "Policing the Gay Community" on the bathhouse raids in Toronto in the early '80s is a classic look at a crucial moment in queer history in northern North America. There are at least a couple of the essays that look outside some of the usual limitations that often blind urban central Canadians such as yours truly even while we look for histories of resistance -- there is one about an environmental struggle in central British Columbia, for example, and another about community resistance that I was completely unaware of to the state-supported triumph of big capital in the fishing sector. Other topics include an example of Alinsky-style organizing in a Vancouver neighbourhood and the role of mothers in educational reform in early 20th century Ontario.

Only a couple of the essays made me raise my eyebrows in discomfort at some of their political choices. "Ladies, Women and the State: Managing Female Immigration, 1880-1920" by Barbara Roberts was a fascinating look at the role of voluntarism by ruling-class women in a sector we see as exclusively a state responsibility today. It wasn't that this essay was completely unaware that it was really writing about the agency of elite women as oppressors, exactly, but there was this strange discontinuity in which it seemed much more interested in the relations between these elite women and elite men than anything else. Even more concerning was the essay looking at the evolution of women's political involvement across the 20th century in an indigenous nation located in what is now British Columbia -- it is interesting history, and not unaware of the impacts of colonization, but in my estimation as someone who like the author is a white settler struggling with these issues, it does not take that awareness nearly as close to the heart of its politics as I would see as appropriate.

I was both challenged and pleasantly surprised, however, by the way the collection as a whole and a few of the essays in particular not only took terms like "community" and "state" as references for choosing content, but spent considerable energy in questioning and destabilizing them. The editors and the essays that were most interesting in this regard (though not all of the essays in the collection) took approaches based in the epistemological and ontological frameworks of Dorothy Smith's institutional ethnography. The Introduction and Conclusion written by the editors take a position of academically tactful but artificial indecision between more traditional Marxist-influenced analyses that tend to reify "state" and "community" and make abstract pronouncements about them, and those that follow Smith's reading of Marx and others into seeing those two terms as representing collections of practices and relations that must be investigated empirically. Perhaps this was because some of the essays take the former approach, and the editors did not wish to be disrespectful of the authors; still, is quite obvious that their allegiance lies with the latter.

The essay that opens the book is by one of the editors (Walker), and she traces the origins of the idea of "community," particularly as it gets used in the context of things like "community development" and "community economic development." She argues that emphasis on geographical communities and communities of interest in talking about how individual human lives are orgainzed into collective contexts tends to work towards ends of social control by distracting us from the fact that "our lives are not in any simple way organized communally. In fact, they are structured by wage and commodity relations and by ideological forms so that common features are actually experienced individually and the commonality of the features of that experience are obscured" [40].

She goes on to conclude that

The notion of community, when presented in the neutral, objective, apolitical, ahistorical manner of ideology, obscures under the guise of individual and group interests the whole network and structuring of people's lives in terms of class, gender and racial features that are embedded in particular relations of production. It also depoliticizes issues, or excludes those which are unequivocally political in nature. [42]

She concludes not with a settled program of action but with further questions to explore -- questions related to "community", to its relationship to our reified understanding of "economy", and to how people, especially women, can best organize for change.

The other two essays in the first section continue to look critically at the idea of "community", one in the context of the study of mothers and school reform mentioned above, and the other examining how the ideology of "community" in models of "community care" for people with serious disabilities of various sorts tends to mask the unpaid caring labour of women.

The examination of "the state", which again occurred in both Introduction and Conclusion as well as in the second section of essays, felt less original to me, but was still useful in helping me get used to thinking of it as practices and relationships -- I find reification particularly easy to fall into in this context. On the more practical side, I particularly appreciated the three or four essays investigating instances of state-funded work that progressives would generally see as positive. Partly this was because they made me think about my own time employed by a para-state reform-focused social service agency. Partly it was because Roxana Ng's "State Funding to a Community Employment Center: Implications for Working with Immigrant Women" and Alicia Schreader's "The State-Funded Women's Movement: A Case of Two Political Agendas" are both directly relevant to the last couple of chapters I've been working on. All of them are relevant to dealing with questions about the influence of state funding in ways that are not abstracted or fundamentalist but that seek to understand exactly how that funding has political influence, how it can coopt, and how it can be skillfully used by activists.

Though some of the basics in which its best pieces grounded themselves were not new to me, this volume was still quite useful in helping destabilize my relationship to two words that play prominent roles in a lot of political writing. And that was, according to the editors writing in the Conclusion, part of the point:

We suggest that the way in which these concepts are traditionally defined have restricted our ability to look beyond the confines of what constitute "the community" and community development. It has restricted our ability to develop resistance and build alliances across traditionally defined community boundaries. In closing, we want to emphasize the fluidity of the boundaries between communities and the state. How these boudnaries are defined and constituted must be a subject of critical exploration at all times.

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Sudburians Demand MP Vote Against Secret Trials

As part of the December 7th national day of coordinated actions against secret trials focused on Members of Parliament, a small delegation from Sudbury Against War and Occupation paid a visit this morning to the constituency office of Diane Marleau, MP. Marleau, a member of the Liberal Party, voted in favour of Bill C-3 at second reading, and as residents of her riding we wished to deliver a strong message that support for this unjust and racist legislation was not something we were prepared to accept. She herself was unavailable to meet, but we spoke to a senior staff member in the office and presented our statement and a fact sheet (both included below, as sent to the media last night) on secret trials.

Later in the day Marleau left a voice mail for one of the SAWO members who had visited her office. She claimed not to like "these secret things because they are unfair" and explained the Liberal support at second reading as a tactic to buy time and get it to committee. She said, "I don't know what is going to end up happening with this bill." She did not, however, commit to voting against it at third reading or to speaking up in caucus against it.

Though the delegation was a short and low-key affair, we are happy to have done it as it is likely, given the demographic of the riding and lack of history of local organizing on this issue, that Marleau had not expected any of her constituents to be aware of Bill C-3. By visiting her, we let her know that we are concerned and we are watching. We are encouraging all people in the Sudbury riding who are opposed to secret trials to phone her office and encourage her to vote to abolish them.

######

Media Advisory -- For Immediate Release

Dec. 6, 2007

SUDBURY AGAINST WAR AND OCCUPATION/Sudbury contre la guerre et
l’occupation

Sudbury to Participate in Dec. 7th Cross-country Day of Lobbying
Against the New National Security Certificate Legislation

Anti-war activists in Sudbury will join in a cross-country day of community delegations to Members of Parliament in their home ridings tomorrow. The day of action is co-ordinated by the Campaign to Stop Secret Trials in Canada. Members of Sudbury Against War and Occupation (SAWO) will be delivering the attached letter to MP Diane Marleau, who voted for the latest version of the national security certiificate legislation at 2nd reading, and will be visiting her office to speak to her staff about this urgent matter. SAWO is calling on Marleau to withdraw her suport for this legislation and to speak out against it.

Also find attached a Secret Trials Fact Sheet which provides background information on this legislation and details why this legislation is a denial of basic human rights and is being used in racist fashion.

For further information call XXX-XXXX.

###########

SUDBURY AGAINST WAR AND OCCUPATION/Sudbury contre la guerre et l’occupation

Diane Marleau, MP
30, Elgin St
Sudbury, Ontario
P3C 5B4

December 7, 2007

Madam Marleau,

Sudbury Against War and Occupation/Sudbury contre la guerre et l’occupation is a group of Sudbury residents that are opposed to war and occupation and all consequences related to them.

We see secret trials in Canada as a domestic consequence of our involvement in war and occupation. The legislation creating the secret trials process has been used by the government to target primarily Muslim men of colour for imprisonment based on secret evidence and without due process. A number of these men face deportation, despite the government admitting that this would put them at risk of torture. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled this law unconstitutional. Sudburians, along with many thousands of individuals, community organizations and networks throughout Canada believe that the entire secret trial process must be abolished. Instead, the government has proposed a new law, Bill C-3 that tinkers with the process by the addition of such things as “special advocates.” This small change would still prevent targeted individuals from knowing the charges and evidence against them and from mounting a meaningful defense, and it leaves in place a system of justice that is two-tiered and discriminatory - in which some people in Canada are denied the right to a fair trial, even though their liberty and very lives may be at stake.


If the government has evidence of wrongdoing by those held on security certificates, the individuals should be charged, allowed access to the case against them, and given a fair and open trial in court. As human beings, justice and even international and Canadian law requires that their fundamental rights to life, liberty and security be treated with every bit as much respect as the rights of those who happen to have Canadian citizenship.

Only two Liberals stood up to oppose the new bill at second reading, while other Liberals (even those who have previously expressed rejection of secret trials) were missing in action. You, Madam Marleau, voted for it. This is quite troubling to many people who have been campaigning against the secret trial process in Canada, including many of us here in Sudbury. As the representative from our riding it is imperative that you take a stand against the passage of this new law that allows for indefinite detention without charge, secret hearings without the detainee or their lawyer of choice present, draconian house arrest, and deportation to torture. It is imperative that the Liberals take a principled stand against secret trials under any circumstances and block passage of Bill C-3.

End Secret Trials in Canada!

Sudbury Against War and Occupation/Sudbury contre la guerre et l’occupation

#######

Secret Trials Fact Sheet
prepared by Sudbury Against War and Occupation/Sudbury contre la guerre et l’occupation, Dec. 7/07

What are “national security certificates”?

A security certificate is part of immigration law which allows the government to detain and deport people without due process, supposedly on the grounds of “national security.” The certificate is signed by two cabinet ministers on the basis of information presented in secret by Canada's spy agency, the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS). While the named person waits in jail, the certificate is reviewed by a Federal Court judge. Precise allegations and the evidence to support it are kept secret throughout the process, even from the detainee and their lawyer. Key terms in the legislation like “national security” and “membership” are not defined. If, through this process, the judge decides that the government had “reasonable grounds to believe” that it should issue the certificate, the certificate becomes a deportation order and there is no appeal. In practice, the measure has allowed the government to keep people in prison or under house arrest for years without charge, and to threaten them with deportation even if they are at risk of being tortured. In brief, this is a process that draws on racism and fear to treat certain people as outside the norms of justice.


Who is being subjected to this process today?

There are currently five men who are being targeted by security certificates. All are Muslim men of colour. One, Hassan Almrei, is in prison in Kingston, while most of the rest have been transferred from prison to a humiliating form of house arrest with the toughest bail and surveillance conditions in Canadian history. One, Adil Charkaoui, was first arrested under a security certificate in 2003 and his certificate has yet to undergo any judicial review whatsoever. None of these men have been charged with a crime, none of them have had an opportunity to clear their names, and all are being threatened with deportation, with a risk of torture or death for some.


What is wrong with this process?

• Despite the fact that almost all rights under our constitution - including rights to due process - apply to all people in Canada and not just citizens, this law guts due process specifically for non-citizens.
  
  
• In practice, this legislation has been used in recent years exclusively against Muslim men of colour, as part of larger campaigns of harassment and profiling against their communities.
  
  
• The targeted individuals and their lawyers of choice never get to see the evidence against them.
  
  
• The supposed evidence presented by CSIS can include information gathered by foreign intelligence services through coercion and torture.
  
  
• The standard of evidence for this process, despite the harsh consequences for those who are subjected to it, is extremely low - far lower than in criminal trials.
  
  
• There is no appeal.
  
  
• The endpoint of this process is deportation, and the government has shown a willingness to proceed even when their own assessment process shows that the targeted individuals will be at risk of torture and death.

What about the 'special advocate' provision in the new legislation?

One change introduced in Bill C-3 is the creation of 'special advocates.' Under this provision, the government gets to screen and select lawyers that it will allow to see the secret evidence in national security certificate cases.


What's wrong with that?

The targeted individual must accept a lawyer approved by the government that is targeting them. The targeted individual still never gets to see or hear about the evidence themselves. The mandate for the government-screened lawyer to maintain secrecy essentially forbids them from engaging in most of the sorts of routine information gathering activities that might allow false accusations to be refuted. The British system upon which it is modelled has been criticized by lawyers who have been a part of it and, more recently, by the Joint Committee on Human Rights of the U.K. House of Commons and House of Lords.

What should we do instead?

• Abolish the security certificate legislation instead of trying to reform it.
  
  
• Release the five men who have been currently targeted, or provide them with fair and open trials.
  
  
• End deportation proceedings against the five currently targeted men.
  
  
• End all deportations that might result in torture.
  
  
• End all harassment and profiling of communities of colour and Muslim communities in Canada.

Sign the Housing Not War Declaration

The Toronto Disaster Relief Committee, a longstanding anti-poverty and anti-homelessness group in Toronto, and the Canadian Peace Alliance, the largest peace movement coalition in the country, are calling on individuals and organizations in Canada to sign on to a declaration supporting a withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan and a redirection of government-controlled resources from militarism to housing. This page has a good detailed explanation for this position, but the declaration itself reads in full:

The Housing Not War Declaration

I/we support the demand that the federal government implement a Housing Not War strategy. Canada is at war in Afghanistan. Homelessness remains a national disaster in Canada. Canadian troops should come home, and funding directed towards war and militarism should go towards housing and other peaceful purposes.

As homelessness worsens in Canada, the federal government can no longer justify spending untold billions of dollars on war. We call for the 1% solution – an additional 1% of the federal budget to be allocated towards social housing. This would bring spending to $4 billion per year.

Please sign it as an individual and solicit support for this position from any groups of which you are a part!

Parliamentary Committee Puts Speed Ahead of Rights

In a comment to a recent post, thwap was asking how the opposition parties are reacting to the Conservative government's decision to shut many individuals and groups that have been heavily involved in the issue of security certificates in Canada out of the hearings process for the new proposed legislation on the subject. Here's a column from Thomas Walkom that talks a bit about that very thing:

How casually we take civil rights. A Commons committee is examining the government's plan to fix an unconstitutional law that allows it to lock up non-citizens indefinitely without charge. But committee members won't let lawyers for the six men detained under this law appear before them because –given a tight February deadline set by the Supreme Court, plus the six weeks of Christmas holidays that MPs allow themselves – there just isn't enough time.

"We break in mid-December and don't come back until the end of January," explained Liberal MP and committee vice-chair Roy Cullen. "We could sit in January, but I'll be in New Zealand."

Don't be too hard on Cullen. He at least returned my phone call. Conservative MP Gerry Breitkreuz, the committee chair, was too busy, saying only (through an aide) that the agenda was set "by all party-agreement." Liberal MP Sue Barnes routed me to fellow Liberal Ujjal Dosanjh, who did call back. New Democrat Penny Priddy, another vice-chair, was also happy to talk

At issue are the controversial security certificate provisions of the immigration act. These allow the government to lock up and eventually deport non-citizens on the basis of secret evidence that neither the detainees nor their lawyers can see. Currently, six Muslims are being held for alleged links to terrorism – five under various degrees of house arrest and one in prison.

None has been charged with any crime. All say that if they are deported to their homelands they face torture or death.

On Feb. 23, the Supreme Court ruled that parts of the law were unconstitutional and gave the government a year to fix it.

Bill C-3 was the government's answer.

It proposes to let security-cleared special advocates hear secret evidence and argue detainees' cases in closed hearings. But, at the same time, it would severely limit the ability of these advocates to gather evidence that might counter the government's allegations.

In short, it is a bill larded with pitfalls.

Yet the committee's approach has been to focus on speed alone.

Bill C-3 went to committee Nov. 21.The next day, without notifying the public, MPs quietly decided on a list of 22 witnesses. When two major human rights organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, applied to be heard on Nov. 23, they were told they were too late.

Even more curious was the committee's decision not to hear from the six detainees.

Toronto lawyer Paul Copeland, who represents two of the six, said he applied before the witness list was closed off yet still didn't make the cut.

"I was told they had a lot of people to hear from," he said.

Well, not that many. In its two days of hearings last week, the committee heard from 19 witnesses, including Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day and five of his bureaucrats.

On Tuesday, it is slated to hear from just three more. And that will be that.

Dosanjh said he would like to hear more witnesses over Christmas but will be on vacation. "I haven't had a holiday since 2004," he said. A few minutes later he called back to say he now plans to make a formal motion on Tuesday asking the Supreme Court to extend its deadline by two months.

New Democrat Priddy said she's willing to cut her Christmas holidays short.

"I don't want to. Nobody wants to. But this is important.

"If we were talking about the colour we were painting a new bridge, it wouldn't matter. But what we are really talking about here is people trying to get on with their lives."

Not an encouraging picture, is it?

Quote: On the Backs of Others

The welfare states of the North have been and continue to be funded, in part, from the enormous transfer of wealth from global South to the North. According to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), approximately $500 billion is transferred from the South annually in the form of interest payments on debts and the results of unequal terms of trade. Only about one-tenth of that, approximately U.S. $50 billion, flows back to the South in terms of highly condition-laden aid from the North. These enormous shifts in wealth take place through the interwoven practices of both private (corporate) and public (national states and international bodies, such as the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank) actors.

-- Nandita Sharma, references in original