Racist hate crimes in Vancouver mobilize community

With three alleged white supremacist hate group members facing trial,
several groups are building an anti-racism campaign.
David P. Ball
Posted: Jan 26th, 2012

After a series of high-profile hate crimes in B.C., including damage to a
Jewish cemetery in Victoria last month – and recent criminal charges for
the burning of a Filipino man and assaults on Black, Hispanic and Native
people several years ago – anti-racist activists are organizing a renewed
drive to stamp out racism in Vancouver.

With three alleged members of the hate group Blood and Honour facing trial
– one of them tomorrow – for a string of attacks on people of colour,
several groups are organizing around the upcoming February 13 trial of
Alistair Miller and Robert de Chazal.

The pair – who were arrested in December – are accused of pouring kerosene
over a sleeping Filipino man and lighting him on fire in 2009, and then
attacking a black man who intervened. Tomorrow's trial centres around
another alleged Blood and Honour member, Shawn MacDonald, charged with
separate attacks on an Indigenous women, a Hispanic man and a black man in
Vancouver.

“We're interested in building an anti-racist campaign,” said Krystle
Alarcon with the Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance (FCYA). “People think of
multicultural Canada, and of Vancouver as a beautiful and diverse city.
But racism exists in Vancouver.

“These were very clear acts of outright racist ideology.”

Read more here.

No One Is Illegal Statement on Blood and Honour White Supremacist Hate Crimes

No One is Illegal-Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories is a grassroots
anti-colonial and anti racist migrant justice group. As a multiracial
movement led by people of colour, we are outraged to hear of the rise of
overt white supremacist groups in the Lower Mainland. In the past month,
it has come to light that at least three men, Robertson de Chazal, Shawn
Donald Finlay MacDonald, and Alastair Miller with known links to Blood and
Honour are being charged in a number of violent assaults and hate crimes
from 2008-2010 against a Filipino man who was set on fire, a Black man, a
Latino man, and an Indigenous woman.

Racism manifests itself in (under-reported) hate crimes, such as the
violent assaults of these four people of colour, as well as daily forms of
racist harassment, such as racial slurs. These forms of individual/overt
racism do not and cannot exist in isolation from more systemic/covert
forms of racism. A glaring example of this is the Asiatic Exclusion
League, formed by white supremacists and union leaders, along the West
Coast in the early 1900’s. In 1907, the Vancouver Riots saw thousands of
people chanting racist slogans through Chinatown and vandalizing Chinese
homes and businesses. The racist sentiments expressed and fostered by the
League eventually contributed to the passage of the Chinese Immigration
Act of 1923, which prohibited almost all Chinese immigration to Canada.

The crimes of white supremacists are not exceptions, because they exist
amidst an underlying racism that continuously places people of colour as
Outsiders from an imagined White Canadian identity. Within Canada, people
of colour are three to four times more likely to be poor. We are
over-represented in low-income jobs such as garment and janitorial work.
Institutional racism is embedded in public bodies such as the criminal
injustice system and educational system, as well as the laws and policies
that govern these lands and our lives. Over the past few months alone,
there have been numerous examples of state-sanctioned racism– from Jason
Kenney’s niqab ban during citizenship ceremonies to Harper’s response to
the Attawapiskat crisis – with real consequences and impacts for the
self-determination and dignity of our communities. They also highlight the
normalizing of public racist discourse that tends to take the form of
“immigrants stealing jobs/not integrating” or “natives getting a free
ride” or “black/brown men or youth always being violent” etc.

We are not holding our breath for any politician to declare white
supremacist organizations like Blood and Honour “the enemy within” or “a
danger to public safety”, or for any public official to single out white
communities “to report any suspicious behaviour of homegrown extremism”.
We do not expect all young white men to start getting racially profiled at
schools, airports, libraries, coffee shops, or walking down the street.
There will be no slew of media articles psyscho-analyizing the
peculiarities of White Culture that inherently preaches such hatred and
violence. And we are sure that the Society of Moderate Whites will not
need to issue a statement condemning such unacceptable intolerance from
within their own community.

Let us not forget that Canada is built on the white supremacist crime of
colonization. Based on racist assumptions about the “inferiority” of
Indigenous people, Canada has dispossessed Indigenous people of their
traditional lands, resources and cultures. This continues today with the
over-representation of Indigenous people, disproportionate rates of the
apprehension of Indigenous children, extreme poverty amongst Indigenous
communities, and the tragedy of missing and murdered women.

On the global stage, Canada has lent its support to imperialist
interventions in Vietnam, East Timor, Afghanistan, Haiti, and Iraq. The
current War on Terror is an incarnation of a very old phenomenon of
crusading in defence of so-called Western civilization. Despite the
current occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine are devastating
the lives of millions of people, they are justified (as parroted by the
mainstream media) through the racist dehumanization of brown bodies as
collateral damage. Canada also supports international free trade
agreements that allow the free movement of capitalism and corporations to
devastate the land, privatize public services, slash labour standards, and
displace people all over the world.

Of the millions of people forcibly displaced across the globe, only a few
hundred thousand even make it to Canada. Of these, tens of thousands are
deported out of Canada each year and families are forced apart. Precarious
legal status, deportations, detentions, and security certificates all
contribute to making migrants vulnerable to poverty and insecurity. Many
Canadian businesses rely on the exploited labour of migrant and non-status
workers, thus maintaining a social and economic system that has created
two classes of people.

Which is why we assert that from historic injustices – such as
Japanese-Canadian internment camps and residential schools – to the
current mass imprisonment and impoverishment of racialized people and
refugees under the War on Terror; Canadian corporate mining from the
Alberta tarsands to Barrick Gold in Guatemala; the expansion of
exploitative migrant worker programs; the tragedy of missing and murdered
Indigenous women, and military occupations from Afghanistan to Haiti –
racism is an ugly truth about Canada.

We encourage our friends and allies to remain vigilant, to be pro-active
in countering racism, to strengthen our communities of solidarity and
resistance, and to never let the haters have power over us.

No One Is Illegal, Power to the People!

http://www.nooneisillegal.org
https://twitter.com/noii_vancouver
https://www.facebook.com/nooneisillegal

Enbridge's pipeline of distortions

By Harsha Walia, Vancouver Sun January 19, 2012

With President Obama's rejection of the Keystone XL pipe-line yesterday, tarsands lobbyists in Canada are frantically trying to spin-doctor and sell the Enbridge pipeline.

Delightful commentaries over the past few days have taken Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Natural Resource Minister Joe Oliver to task for their desperate theories about radical foreign environmentalists and socialist billionaires hijacking the Enbridge Joint Review Panel hearings.

These attacks are largely laughable because their hypocrisy is so obvious. The oil industry is a multi-billion trans-national industry backed by a Tory government that peddles the tarsands to any foreign buyer who will bite - from Canadian diplomats in Washing-ton hustling the Keystone XL pipeline, to another upcoming visit to China by Harper and his corporate entourage. At the Enbridge Joint Review Panel hearings, 10 out of the 16 intervening oil companies have foreign-based head-quarters, for example America's Exxon Mobil, Britain's BP, France's Total E&P, and Japan Canada Oil Sands Ltd.

On the other hand, Environmental Defence reports that all of the intervening environmental organizations are based in Canada, and 79 per cent of those registered to speak are B.C. residents. Given colonial governance over indigenous peoples, Nadleh Whut'en Chief Larry Nooski's quip is most apt "We're not foreign - these are our lands."

Read more here.

Decolonizing together Moving beyond a politics of solidarity toward a practice of decolonization

BY HARSHA WALIA • JAN 1, 2012 • SOCIETY, ACTION

Canada’s state and corporate wealth is largely based on subsidies gained from the theft of Indigenous lands and resources. Conquest in Canada was designed to ensure forced displacement of Indigenous peoples from their territories, the destruction of autonomy and self-determination in Indigenous self-governance and the assimilation of Indigenous peoples’ cultures and traditions. Given the devastating cultural, spiritual, economic, linguistic and political impacts of colonialism on Indigenous people in Canada, any serious attempt by non-natives at allying with Indigenous struggles must entail solidarity in the fight against colonization.

Non-natives must be able to position ourselves as active and integral participants in a decolonization movement for political liberation, social transformation, renewed cultural kinships and the development of an economic system that serves rather than threatens our collective life on this planet. Decolonization is as much a process as a goal. It requires a profound recentring on Indigenous worldviews. Syed Hussan, a Toronto-based activist, states: “Decolonization is a dramatic reimagining of relationships with land, people and the state. Much of this requires study. It requires conversation. It is a practice; it is an unlearning.”

Indigenous solidarity on its own terms

A growing number of social movements are recognizing that Indigenous self-determination must become the foundation for all our broader social justice mobilizing. Indigenous peoples in Canada are the most impacted by the pillage of lands, experience disproportionate poverty and homelessness, are overrepresented in statistics of missing and murdered women and are the primary targets of repressive policing and prosecutions in the criminal injustice system. Rather than being treated as a single issue within a laundry list of demands, Indigenous self-determination is increasingly understood as intertwined with struggles against racism, poverty, police violence, war and occupation, violence against women and environmental justice.

Read more here.

Jails don’t keep people out of jail

john edwards, willie gibbs AND ed mcisaac
The Globe and Mail
Thursday, Jan. 05, 2012

[This opinion piece was written by John Edwards, former commissioner of Correctional Service Canada, Willie Gibbs, former chair of the Parole Board of Canada, and Ed McIsaac, former executive director of the Office of the Correctional Investigator.]

Collectively, we have nearly 10 decades of experience in the area of corrections and conditional release. There are many issues we have disagreed over, but we are united in our concerns with the direction of the Harper government’s “tough on crime” agenda.

In a country that prides itself on fairness, compassion and the pursuit of equality, why do we accept the idea that community safety will be enhanced through increased incarceration?

At both the federal and provincial levels, Canadian jails are overcrowded. It is becoming common to see double- and triple-bunking of inmates in cells designed for one. This overcrowding limits access to already scarce rehabilitative programming and increases the incidence of institutional violence. The fastest-growing portions of the inmate population continue to be those most marginalized within our society: the mentally ill, women and aboriginals. Decades of reports have detailed our correctional systems’ failure to reasonably address the needs of these offenders and limit their numbers.

Read more here.

At home pilot project belies Harper’s hard line reputation

HEATHER SCOFFIELD
TORONTO— The Canadian Press
Monday, Dec. 26, 2011

The government’s response to the Attawapiskat housing crisis may well have underscored Stephen Harper’s reputation for his hard line rather than his heart, with his focus on the aboriginal reserve’s financial problems, not its social ones.

But in other parts of the country, the Prime Minister’s government is also quietly bankrolling one of the largest social pilot projects ever seen in Canada, paying generously for cutting-edge research that is changing the lives of hundreds of homeless people.

The project may scream out for a new, national social program – the kind that has been anathema to Mr. Harper in the past.

But it is producing results that suggest federal involvement in funding homes for the homeless can be smart and save money.

The At Home/Chez Soi pilot project is now halfway through its five-year life span, backed by $110-million of federal money channelled through the Mental Health Commission of Canada.

Read more here.

Leading Canada's public healthcare to the free-market guillotine

BY STEFAN CHRISTOFF

| DECEMBER 22, 2011

National discussion in Canada on the Conservative government's new healthcare financial ultimatum, a take-it-or-leave-it-style proposal, largely revolves around myths. First that financing alone is key to securing a sustainable public healthcare system and second that free-market economic winds will provide sustainable guidelines, via GDP, for viable future government healthcare financing.

A surprise delivery from Conservative Finance Minister Jim Flaherty to provincial finance ministers, over a fancy lunch-in at the Chateau Victoria Hotel this past Monday, the plan offers no space for negotiation toward collective national solutions for public healthcare.

Essentially, the Conservative proposal works to strip federal responsibility in crafting, via national negotiations, coherent and sustainable healthcare systems in Canada's provinces and territories. A clear move away from the flawed but important Canada Health Act and a political node to provincial governments already working to allocate federal healthcare financing toward enhancing the corporate, for-profit sector role in delivering healthcare, as already seen extensively in Alberta and Québec.

In reality, the Conservative plan will see six per cent healthcare funding increases until the 2016-17 fiscal year, with little regulation over provincial governments increasing experimentation with public-private partnerships. Beyond 2016-17 the plan is to bind federal healthcare spending to GDP growth, a fundamentally dangerous move toward codifying Canada's public healthcare into capitalist economic terms.

Essentially, the Conservative deal stands as cash for healthcare in the near future and uncertainty for the long term. Cash solutions are never long-term solutions to collective challenges, fast money and free market thinking will not solve the deep problems facing public healthcare in Canada.

Beyond important calls for the Conservative government to negotiate viable terms to sustain public healthcare in Canada, with politicians from provincial and territorial governments, also note that zero official opportunity for the people of Canada to contribute ideas toward the future of public healthcare have been outlined.

In reality, a viable and democratic process in Canada, relating to public healthcare's future, would encourage neighbourhood assemblies and participatory political processes coast-to-coast, similar to the general assembly model celebrated by the Occupy movement.

Read more here.

"I Cannot Eat Your Prayers": How Student Debt Changed One Woman's Mind on "Christian Charity"

By Kristin Rawls, Killing the Buddha
Posted on December 19, 2011, Printed on December 23, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153485/%22i_cannot_eat_your_prayers%22%3A_how_student_debt_changed_one_woman%27s_mind_on_%22christian_charity%22

I’m going to tell you a story. It’s the story of a good girl from a quiet town who prayed, studied hard, said no to drugs, and otherwise did everything she was told—and then went on to become Sallie Mae’s bitch and lost just about everything. This story is mine.

I grew up in an evangelical home, and was an earnest “liberal-evangelical” into my early twenties. Now I think that my former religious faith—not unlike my faith in the U.S. higher education system—gave me a warped sense of optimism about the way the world works. I believed in faith-based platitudes, plus a few secular ones. Examples:

1. God has a plan for my life.
2. My whole future is ahead of me.

Until a few days ago, I was too ashamed to talk publicly about what happened to me. That’s when I saw Natalia Antonova’s incredibly brave piece at Alternetdetailing her pending student loan default. This issue is so cloaked in shame and humiliation that many of us stay silent. Check out Natalia’s post-articleblog post if you don’t think stigma and shame are deeply intertwined with defaulting on debt out of necessity: she has been contacted by people who say they hope her lenders drive her to suicide.

Read more here.

Taking Liberties: Canada's secret trial cases built on torture

By Matthew Behrens
| December 21, 2011
rabble.ca
Four years after the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously found them
unconstitutional, secret hearing "security certificates" are still in
use, with a number of Muslim men fighting unseen allegations while
under threat of deportation to torture.

Security certificates have long been used by Canada's scandal-plagued
spy agency CSIS (the Canadian Security Intelligence Service) to tar
refugees and permanent residents as national security threats without
having to explain the allegations against them. Those detained under
the process are never charged, and subjected to lower standards than
those applying to any citizen facing similar accusations. Indeed, the
law governing the procedure allows for the introduction of any piece
of information "even if it is inadmissible in a court of law."

For the past decade, five Muslim men -- dubbed the Secret Trial Five
-- have endured this Kafkaesque process both behind bars and under
humiliating house arrest. Last month, the release of two formerly
classified documents indicates that the national security secrecy
claims that form the bedrock of these cases have in fact served as a
cover for illegal and unethical acts by CSIS.

Indeed, the documents reveal the secret trial regime relies almost
entirely on information gleaned from torture. A 2008 letter written
by Jim Judd, then head of CSIS, bemoans legislative changes then
being proposed that, in raising the bar on the admissibility of
information possibly extracted under torture "could render
unsustainable the current security certificate proceedings."

Read more here.

Six weeks on hungerstrike, six years in detention

Nader is a 46 year old Iranian refugee who has been detained and
imprisoned by Canadian Border Services Agency since 2005. Nader has spent
over SIX years behind bars, without any substantive charges, under the
jurisdiction of the Immigration Act.

His length of detention is unprecedented in Canada and Nader has now been
on a six-week hunger strike to protest his ongoing, essentially indefinite
detention.

On Thursday December 15th, Nader appeared via teleconference for a
detention review at the Immigration and Refugee Board Offices. A decision
on the review has been reserved and further legal submissions were made
amidst a room of supporters.

NOII will have further updates early next week but we wanted to keep
everyone updated about this critical situation here in Vancouver, Unceded
Coast Salish Territories which the Canadian authorities have kept from
public view. In the context of increasing detentions and deportations
facilitating prison expansion and a government that insists on treating
racialized migrants as expendable commodities, we re-affirm dignity and
self-determination in the movement for migrant justice.


BACKGROUND:

http://noii-van.resist.ca/?p=4579

Hunger striking refugee detained for SIX years

Nader is a 46 year old Iranian refugee who has been detained and
imprisoned by Canadian Border Services Agency since 2005. Nader has spent
over six years behind bars, without any substantive charges, under the
jurisdiction of the Immigration Act.

His length of detention is unprecedented in Canada.

Nader arrived to Canada from Iran with his wife and young son in 1997 as
political refugees. At the time they made a claim based on her persecution
in Iran as a dissident. The family’s claim was initially rejected by the
Immigration and Refugee Board in 2000 and shortly after Nader and his wife
separated. His (now ex) wife and son subsequently were granted legal
status but Nader was ordered removed from Canada.

The unjust and cruel rationale provided for his ongoing detention by the
Immigration and Refugee Board is simply the fact that he refuses to sign
documents for his own deportation to Iran. Canadian Border Services have
argued for ongoing (essentially infinite) detention because Nader is
deemed to be “non cooperative in signing documents”. They want him to sign
a document which states he is returning ‘voluntarily’, absolving Canada of
its complicity in his involuntary removal and using detention to pressure
him to lie about his own deportation!

For six years Nader has been incarcerated at Fraser Regional Correctional
Centre, a maximum security provincial facility. This facility is mandated
for short-term offenders whose sentence does not exceed two years. Short
term facilities such as FRCC lack the infrastructure and resources to
house and accommodate long-term inmates. Nader has reported that he has
been subjected to a poor diet and lack of quality health care at FRCC.
Without internet and law library materials (which are available at other
federal facilities), he has been unable to defend and advocate for
himself.

Nader continues to face risk in Iran – a similar risk to what his (now ex)
wife and son were granted asylum for in Canada. Nader has never even had a
refugee claim heard on the basis of his own experience in Iran and fear of
persecution if deported back to Iran. Nader has recently filed a Pre
Removal Risk Assessment and will be pursuing other legal avenues given the
trauma he has suffered in Iran and now in Canada.

According to Nader, “The length of my detention has not been predicated on
any evidence that I am a ‘threat to national security’ or that my release
poses any ‘risk to the public safety’. Yet I have endured the
psychological trauma of confinement and the emotional suffering and
anxiety of being separated from my son (who has since been granted asylum
in Canada).”


For more information please email noii-van@resist.ca or call 778 552 2099
http://noii-van.resist.ca

Bill C-4's Doubtful and Ineffective Future Grassroots Australian activist warns against jailing refugees

by Stephanie Law

The Dominion - http://www.dominionpaper.ca


VANCOUVER—Refugees who flee persecution and look for safety might want to
think twice before coming to Canada through smuggling operations—at least
that’s the message the Conservative majority government seems to be
sending.

The federal parliament is set to pass Bill C-4 (formerly Bill C-49 and
commonly known as the “anti-smuggling bill”), which would impose a
mandatory one-year detention on any person who arrives in Canada via
unconventional means. This could mean imprisonment of men, women and
children who, facing desperate situations, failed to apply for and obtain
refugee status before escaping their home countries for Canada.

The bill has received little support outside of the Conservative Party.
Canada's three other political parties in the House of Commons, as well as
human rights advocates and critics, are hoping to fight it off.

The Conservative Party has repeatedly said the bill is meant to protect
Canadians and criminalize smugglers and smuggling operations, not to
demonize refugees.

Critics of the bill, including Canadian Civil Liberties Association and
Amnesty International Canada, disagree. Amnesty International says that
the bill “will in reality punish people seeking protection in Canada.”

Before the bill comes into effect, concrete evidence is scarce as to
whether the proposed legislation would protect or punish refugees.

Read more here.

Conservative senator says he can't support government crime bill

By: The Canadian Press

Posted: 12/16/2011 3:54 PM | Comments: 2 (including replies) | Last Modified: 12/16/2011 4:01 PM

·

OTTAWA - A Conservative senator is speaking out against his own government's omnibus crime bill.

Quebec Senator Pierre Claude Nolin says he can't support the massive Bill C-10 mainly because of a section that deals with growing marijuana plants.

The proposed legislation has just passed second reading in the upper chamber, and will land in a Senate committee when Parliament resumes at the end of January.

Nolin has been a longtime advocate for ending the prohibition on pot. He was the chairman of a landmark Senate committee in 2002 that called for the substance to be legalized.

The omnibus crime bill covers nine distinct pieces of legislation, and introduces mandatory minimum sentences for a number of new offences.

Growing anywhere between six and 200 pot plants can land a person in prison for a minimum of six months — nine months if there are extenuating circumstances such as growing near young people.

Critics have pointed out the proposed penalties are stiffer than some mandatory minimum sentences for child sex crimes.

"The courts and the police already have the tools to face the major problems of trafficking and the gangs, they all have those tools," Nolin said during second-reading debate of the bill Friday.

"But don't get into the business of changing the CDSA (Controlled Drugs and Substances Act), it's bad. The idea of prohibition is not good, it does not work, it's going to create more problems than anything else."

Nolin says many among the estimated one million Canadians who use marijuana for medical purposes and grow their own plants will be forced to turn to criminal sources of cannabis to get their supply.

"So C-10 will exactly do the reverse of the intent of the bill. By the way, the criminal world is already laughing all the way to the coffers because definitely the amendments to the CDSA in C-10 will provoke a bigger market for them...," Nolin said.

"I'm sick, I want to alleviate my pain, and instead of growing it myself I'll buy it from a friend of a friend of a friend. Is that what we want? Me, I don't want that."

Nolin says he's also concerned about the impact on young offenders. He points out that a majority of young people between the ages of 12 and 17 have tried cannabis, and that some will grow plants at college or university campuses.

He says sending a young person to prison for six months because they are convicted of a serious drug offence and tried as an adult is not good policy.

"There's only one solution, a long-term solution. Get rid of prohibition," Nolin said to applause in the Senate.

"At least use the short-term solution, don't touch it, keep the status quo, don't amend the CDSA. The CDSA is not good, but at least it's there, and we haven't figured out what we're going to do, that's the long-term solution, but don't touch it."

Prison watchdog probes spike in number of black inmates

52% increase in proportion of black offenders in federal system since 2000

By Alison Crawford, CBC News

Posted: Dec 15, 2011 5:31 AM ET

Canada's independent prisons ombudsman has launched an inquiry into a 50 per cent spike in the proportion of black offenders filling federal jails over the last 10 years.

Howard Sapers, the federal correctional investigator, wants to study the possible causes behind the increase, which saw the proportion of black offenders in federal incarceration jump to 9.12 per cent in 2010-2011, from less than six per cent a decade earlier.

It amounts to a 52 per cent leap, with the most dramatic increase occurring over the last five years.

Black people make up roughly 2.5 per cent of Canada's population.

More than 1,300 black offenders are currently serving time in federal penitentiaries.

Most of them are in Ontario, where 20 per cent of the entire federal prison population of 14,312 inmates is black, according to new statistics.

Saper will explore why the numbers have increased so rapidly. If there are gaps in the system that must be filled, such as a possible need to hire more visible minority staff, he hopes to identify them.

Read more here.

Low-cost Downtown Eastside hotel rooms disappearing

Wendy Stueck
VANCOUVER— Globe and Mail, Thursday Dec 15, 2011

Redevelopment and rent hikes are eating in to the supply of low-cost hotel rooms in the Downtown Eastside, according to a report prepared by a community group.

The report, prepared by the Carnegie Community Action Project, found fewer rooms available for rents of $375 or less (the monthly shelter allowance for people with disabilities), more rooms renting for $600 or more per month and some hotels charging an extra $200 to $375 a month when two people share a room.

The survey was prepared with information gathered by volunteers who posed as would-be renters at neighbourhood single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotels, which have long served as the housing of last resort in the neighbourhood.

Read more here.

For the CCAP Report "Upscale: the downside of gentrification", see here.

The Mass Incarceration Agenda

by Aiyanas Ormond

Housing is an issue that preoccupies Vancouver. The local ruling elite is dominated by real-estate developers who fund both of the major civic political parties. Urban professionals seem to spend most of their time talking about their mortgages. The rest of us are desperately clinging to affordable housing if we have it, juggling jobs to pay exorbitant rents or mortgage payments, or living in substandard housing or on the streets.

While the political elites meticulously avoid any kind of coherent action on housing – beyond paying lip service to 'homelessness' - the Provincial government is implementing its housing plan for the poor: two new remand centres with 700 cells between them. The expanded jail capacity is the lynchpin in the mass incarceration agenda – the new approach to dealing with the ‘surplus population’ as the welfare state continues to be dismantled and economic crisis mounts. Incarceration rates are already rising after a decade of decline and the federal “Omnibus Crime Bill” will significantly ramp up this process. Meanwhile, the Vancouver Police Department, and other forces across Canada, are ready and willing to dig the criminals out of the poor urban neighbourhoods, expanding their bloated budget and building successful police careers as they go. The number of police in Canada, and the expenditure on policing, over $12 billion in 2009, have been increasing steadily despite a falling crime rate.

This paper starts with examining the components of the mass incarceration agenda - federal legislation, provincial construction of private prisons and the on the ground practices of police. The second section focuses on the structural factors shaping the mass incarceration agenda, as a new form of social control in the wake of the declining welfare state and as a successor system to the colonial residential schools.

Read the full text in the "Papers and Podcasts" section.