The Courage Coalition’s West Coast Sprout is excited to announce its #6CourageousResolutions initiative, highlighting six ambitious resolutions submitted by Electoral District Associations and trade union affiliates to the November 2021 BC NDP Convention.
The list of resolutions can be found here.
To get involved in this grassroots campaign, join the 6 Courageous Resolutions Discord server! (Link also in bio.)
Alors que les images de violence coloniale en direct de Fairy Creek – qui est sur le point de devenir le plus grand acte de désobéissance civile de l’histoire du Canada – se font de plus en plus nombreuses, nous voulons exprimer notre engagement en faveur du DÉFINANCEMENT DE LA GRC. Carrie Saxifrage, dans son compte-rendu choquant et descriptif de ce qui se passe au camp de protestation, détaille plusieurs exemples d’actions inacceptables menées par la GRC qui visent les défenseur·se·s de la forêt. Nous sommes solidaires des défenseur·se·s des forêts anciennes.
La Coalition Courage se joint au Wilderness Committee afin de condamner les injonctions illégales de la GRC et de faire appel au chef néo-démocrate de la C.-B. John Horgan et au gouvernement provincial pour qu’ils s’engagent à respecter les 14 recommandations formulées par le panel de spécialistes indépendant·e·s sur les forêts anciennes en C.-B.
Historiquement, la police a été un outil capitaliste servant à accabler la classe ouvrière, ainsi qu’un outil colonial d’oppression. Le système policier américain est issu des patrouilles d’esclaves et la GRC du Canada n’est guère différente. Tout au long de son histoire, la GRC a harcelé et assassiné des Autochtones tout autant que ses homologues urbains. Les Autochtones représentent 40 % de la population carcérale alors qu’ils ne constituent que 4 % de la population du Canada.
La violence coloniale et capitaliste canadienne n’est pas chose du passé et fait beaucoup de mal aux gens en ce moment même.
La Coalition Courage a fait pression afin de définancer la GRC lors du congrès fédéral du NPD et nous nous engageons à continuer de lutter pour cette revendication jusqu’à ce que la GRC soit complètement abolie.
La police est un engrenage du système qui continue d’accabler nos communautés BIPOC à travers le pays. Même si l’abolition de la GRC, de la police provinciale et des forces de police municipales ne marquera pas la fin de la décolonisation et de la réconciliation, il s’agit d’une étape cruciale qui doit rester au premier plan des discussions.
La Coalition Courage encourage d’autres organisations et personnes à se joindre à nos efforts visant l’abolition de la police et des prisons au niveau fédéral.
Nous vous invitons à vous renseigner davantage en consultant la liste non exhaustive de ressources ci-dessous.
Faites un don au Fonds pour les défenseur·se·s de Fairy Creek (en anglais seulement)
Page Linktree du Rainforest Flying Squad (en anglais seulement)
Wilderness Committee condemns RCMP violence against forest activists at Fairy Creek, calls on province to honour commitments on old-growth (en anglais seulement)
Comptes à suivre :
Sii-am Hamilton (@siiamhamilton) • Photos and vidéos Instagram (en anglais seulement)
657*****03 (@auntie.katigeorgejim) • Photos and vidéos Instagram (en anglais seulement)
Fairy Creek Blockade (@fairycreekblockade) • Photos and vidéos Instagram (en anglais seulement)
@savefairycreek Fairy Creek Blockade | Twitter (en anglais seulement)
Ressources additionnelles :
Defund.ca – Defund The Police Canada (en anglais seulement)
Noprisons.ca (en anglais seulement)
Fairy Creek explained: What’s at stake | Ricochet (en anglais seulement)
BC government avoids questions about RCMP conduct at Fairy Creek | Ricochet (en anglais seulement)
Fighting for the future: The faces of Fairy Creek | Ricochet (en anglais seulement)
Fairy Creek: Midnight raids and police aggression stoke tensions | Ricochet (en anglais seulement)
Watchdog gets over 90 complaints on RCMP enforcement at Fairy Creek | Times Colonist (en anglais seulement)
Courage Coalition Statement in Support of Fairy Creek Defenders
As we bear witness to more and more footage of colonial violence happening at Fairy Creek, which is now the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history, we express our commitment to DEFUNDING THE RCMP. Carrie Saxifrage, in her shockingly descriptive account of the goings-on at the protest camp, details several unacceptable activities carried out by the RCMP on forest defenders. We are in solidarity with old-growth forest defenders.
Courage joins the Wilderness Committee in their condemnation of the RCMP’s illegal injunctions and in their call to the BCNDP to commit itself to the fourteen recommendations made by the independent panel on old-growth forests in BC.
Historically, police have been tools for capital to oppress the working class, as well as colonial tools of oppression. America’s police system originated in its slave patrols — Canada’s RCMP are no different. Throughout its history, the RCMP has harassed and murdered Indigenous people just as much as their municipal counterparts in city police divisions have. Indigenous people make up 40% of the prison population while only making up 4% of Canada’s population.
Canadian colonial and capitalist violence is not a thing of the past, and it is causing great harm to people at this very second.
Courage pushed for Defunding the RCMP at the NDP federal convention and we are recommitting ourselves to pushing for this position until the RCMP is completely dissolved.
The police are one part of the system that perpetuates harm toward our BIPOC communities across the land. While the abolition of the RCMP, provincial police, and municipal police forces will not be the end of decolonization and reconciliation, it is a crucial step and must remain at the forefront of the conversation.
Courage calls upon other organizations and individuals to join our efforts in police and prison abolition at the federal level.
We invite you to learn more through the non-exhaustive list of resources below.
Accounts to follow:
Additional Resources:
The narrative that has emerged in the current election from all political corners has given eco-socialists an opening that is unprecedented. Government activism has never played such a starring role in a federal election. Austerity, lower taxes, cutbacks—the usual themes on the electoral political stage—have been written out of the campaign scripts and the loosening of public purse strings now implies placing the public interest above private greed. In the midst of this political paradigm shift, proponents of the labour movement and advocates of systemic change have the opportunity of writing the next chapter.
We can thank the clear and present danger of the global pandemic for setting this new ideological stage. Covid-19 has revealed and exacerbated all the festering dangers and injustices of neoliberal politics and economics: the deterioration of the public health system, the ever-rising cost of housing, the vulnerability of BIPOC communities, the disabled, and the homeless, the lack of health and safety protection for workers, the widespread existence of income precarity, and so much more.
The pandemic has lifted the curtain on the opaque and complex network of corporate profiteers who use tax havens, trusts, shell companies, lax government supervision, market manipulation, public subsidies, and shortages and disruptions to drive income inequality to dizzying heights. As usual, the old and young, the racialized, and the income-precarious are forefront victims.
NEOLIBERAL CLICHÉS DELEGITIMIZED
At the same time that government interventionism has been given a new lease on
life, the rapidly escalating climate crisis has afflicted vast regions of Canada with floods, droughts and forest fires, and dramatically underscored the failure of global and Canadian governments to seriously limit carbon emissions and to chart a way out of fossil fuel dependence. The climate has now made its way to the top of concerns among Canadians. Added to this is collective shock and grief now being expressed at the discovery of the bodies of thousands of Indigenous children destroyed by the colonial legacy of genocidal residential schools.
These traumas have delegitimized the neoliberal clichés traditionally advanced in favour of lean and mean governments and the sanctioning of massive investment in the public realm. This change has created fertile ground for ideas that point the way to a large-scale transition of the social order from one controlled by profit to one based on sustainability, ecological restoration, shared resources, justice, equality, Indigenous sovereignty, and workers’ rights.
Such a vision contrasts sharply with the Liberal government’s promotion of cosmetic incremental change and an inadequate social safety net designed to alleviate the worst consequences of capitalism, masked by the contrived rhetoric of progressivism. This has resulted in narrow commitments to climate mitigation targets and in much handwringing about the wrongs done to Indigenous peoples, while incursions on First Nation lands continue apace. The polished empathetic language of the Liberals amounts to old-style politics at its worst, where words are cheap, promises are empty, key details hidden, and concrete action is replaced by the spouting of values and platitudes.
THE NDP’S DEMANDS REFLECT THE SPIRIT OF THE LEAP MANIFESTO
The NDP, the traditional voice of the labour movement and the working class, has developed a spate of critically important proposals, and a trenchant critique of corporate profit-hoarding. The Party’s Ready for Better program includes unqualified support for UNDRIP’s “free and prior consent’’ requirements, an end to profit-driven long term care facilities, a one-million-jobs campaign with a green filter, a wealth and excess profits tax, a public pharmaceutical enterprise, free dental care, electrification of federal vehicles, public inter-city bus lines, mass transit, $10-a-day public childcare, commitments toward fare-free transit, a youth Civilian Climate Corp, expansion of the Indigenous Guardians Program to protect sustainability, an end to fossil fuel subsidies, and a Climate Bank to fund alternative energy projects. Such proposals represent a widespread and deepening turn to the public sphere, and a major shift to climate justice in the spirit of the Leap Manifesto.
Yet there is a basis for concern as to whether this program is distinct and visionary enough to distinguish the NDP, given the broad sweep of reformist promises inundating the airwaves and social media.
In its Green New Deal of the North, Courage outlines the parameters of an authentic transition to a just, green economy from “wasteful consumerism to the communal luxury of free time; from private ownership to public and cooperative ownership models; from authoritarian corporate structures to workplace democracy; from enclosing the commons to expanding the commons.’’
It continues: “We need a clear plan to transition away from our current destructive energy and economic systems, which are based in exploitation and extraction, and into systems that are sustainable and just. We can’t afford to furnish huge profits to corporations every time we meet basic human needs. We need to start bringing essential aspects of the economy under community and worker control.”
It’s against these inspirational concepts that we measure the NDP’s Ready for Better platform.
NDP FAILS TO OPPOSE JET PURCHASE OR CALL TO RETOOL THE ARMS INDUSTRY
The NDP plan calls for a million new jobs in energy retrofitting, childcare, housing construction, transit, renewable energy—all important items and happily faithful to the environmental movement’s call for a low-carbon economy, but the document doesn’t discuss the criteria governing this new employment, or its function in changing economic structures. On the other hand, the Green New Deal of the North urges that “all new green jobs [be] unionized and public, or administered under community-owned or cooperative models, so that profits benefit everyone.”
In fact, the NDP’s Ready for Better platform seems uninterested in a wholesale conversion of the current predatory economy, as witnessed by its support for the purchase of fighter jets, with its estimated $19 billion initial price-tag, and its failure to call for Canada to withdraw from NATO and end Canada’s alignment with U.S. military interests. While the Party’s election program aims to ensure “Canadian arms are not fuelling conflict”, and talks up peace-keeping and humanitarian missions, no concept of converting the country’s weapons-and-component industry into socially useful production is on offer.
Courage’s GND of the North, alternatively, demands we “massively reduce spending on military hardware and retool Canada’s growing arms industry toward green-tech production because war and instability caused by corporate profiteering is a massive source of climate emissions on its own.’’ Canada, it points out, has to “radically change its approach to foreign policy, emphasizing solidarity over our current model of extractive colonialism.”
AN ECO-SOCIALIST VISION OF CLIMATE JUSTICE NEEDED
Other shortfalls of the NDP program include the fact that it does not commit to a freeze on all new oil and gas projects nor sets a timetable for the end of fossil fuel production, a glaring omission pointed out by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. And while the platform promises to forgive up to $20,000 in student debt, remove interest from student loans and move towards grants, it does not advocate the much more transformational move towards free tuition.
As members of Courage we have to think critically about what proposals would best express the holistic integration of all the social, political, and economic changes needed for structural transition. We find this shift best expressed in the concept of our own Green New Deal of the North, the basis of an eco-socialist climate transition that is a stark contrast to the band-aid promises of the Big Business parties.
Still, Courage calls for active and critical support and engagement with the NDP in this campaign. As the voice of organized labour, the NDP is a class alternative to the two Big Business parties enmeshed in implementing the corporate agenda. The limited concessions they made and are making to working Canadians and their allies only further the interests of the corporate giants whom they faithfully serve. It took the pandemic to remind us how powerful are the forces that maintained their operations—mines, manufacturing, construction, warehousing—without government constraint, as workers contracted Covid in the workplace, struggled to breathe, and sometimes died.
Ultimately, the NDP is the political arm of working people—it will need to take the reins of government to preserve our planet and the health, safety and security of this and future generations.
The Courage Coalition
September 4, 2021
