Letter to my neighbourhood organization around affordable housing
Posted Thu 16 June 2011, 10:34am

Hi Glen,

I live on Simcoe street and was part of DMSMCA's housing committee for over a year, though I haven't had time to participate recently. I was hoping to raise the issue of housing at the AGM the other day, but I think the "questions & comments from the floor" agenda item was skipped over. At least I won a Tofurkey!

I always tried to raise the issue with the committee, and by the end Heather Stewart was starting to share my concerns as she tracked the disappearance of over 100 units of affordable housing from our neighbourhood over 18 months alone. Since then we've plunged into a serious housing crisis, with an 0.7% vacancy rate.

As far as I know no concrete action has been taken by the DMSMCA to address this, apart from passive membership in the Right to Housing Coalition. I think this needs to happen, or the DMSMCA will face serious credibility problems, as it appears to be serving the needs of property-owning, more affluent residents at the expense of poorer people and tenants, who still make up the majority of the neighbourhood while being severely underrepresented within the DMSMCA.

Can you provide me with any details about how this is being addressed in the upcoming five year plan, or in other ways by the housing committee? I would like if there were some way in which I could contribute, though I'm going to be mostly unavailable starting September.

Thanks for your time,

Macho Philipovich

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Sane password practices
Posted Wed 8 June 2011, 11:07am

Reading about the recent security breaches at Sony, Lockheed and HBGary/Bank of America, etc., as well as the apparent over-reaction by the Pentagon has got me thinking about my own day-to-day security practices. It was incredible how often those breaches could have been mitigated or prevented altogether by exceedingly basic security practices. I'm obviously not expecting to raise the ire of Anonymous any time soon, but I value privacy, and there are some real concerns.

The main one is that various state entities have made it clear they would like unimpeded access to everyone's data. Less than a year ago a US Wikileaks volunteer was flying back into the country when his encoded laptop was seized and authorities demanded he decode for them to read. He refused.

In Canada, the Harper regime is preparing to force all internet providers to develop means to let the police spy on all our online activities without needing a warrant, under a so-called "Lawful Access" provision.

To drive the point home further, one of the websites I host for a community group was compromised last year, luckily only by a spammer, who had invisibly injected Viagra ads into the site's source code.

After taking all this in, and reading an interesting but pretty heady Wikipedia page on password strategies, I remembered uneasily that all my email accounts, all my web forum logins, all my bank info for that matter, basically used variations on one of three passwords I had memorized, none of which was exceptionally strong. If someone gets ahold of a web forum password you use, which are often poorly protected, and it's the same one used for banking, that could be a bad thing. With Lawful Access (mentioned above), it's going to be dead simple for the Canadian government to gather any passwords transmitted as cleartext, as many are. For me to reliably remember more than about three passwords, I'd have to write them down, which leads to other problems.

I've now switched over to a piece of free password management software called KeePass (or rather KeePassX, which also runs on Ubuntu), and I only have to remember one password, the one to decode the KeePass database I created. That database stores all of the passwords to my other sites. Better still, it generates passwords automatically for you. Unique, 30 character passwords that use mixed case, numbers, and random punctuation (where allowed) have me feeling much better. Best of all it's fairly straightforward to install and use, and following some simple steps you can use it with a free Dropbox account, as described here, to have access to your passwords on any computer.

As is always the case with security, there is a tradeoff between advantages and drawbacks, so read the documentation before installing. The big drawback is that if you forget the password to your KeePass database, or lose the database, all of your passwords are gone forever.

I may at some point go further still and, like the Wikileaks guy, encode my entire laptop... if I ever own one.

Update 1:43PM: And just hours after posting this, the Dominion published an article titled How community organizers are working together for more secure online communications.

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Rhetoric, polemics, ratiocination
Posted Thu 19 May 2011, 12:38pm

Unappealing as it may be to many of us, the study and practice of publicly defending ideas is just as unavoidable. It can be a humbling—even crushing—experience to go through when we're not prepared, so I'm offering up here a few recent examples worth watching. The first is No One Is Illegal-Toronto member Luam Kidane talking about Canadian immigration policy on SunTV on Tuesday (click through for video).

On Monday, the Daily Show's Jon Stewart debated Bill O'Reilly on Fox about President Obama's White House invitees.

Finally, from over forty years ago, here's Noam Chomsky staying calm and assertive against an obnoxious and condescending William F. Buckley while discussing US imperialism.

If you enjoy the Chomsky video, see also his debates with

  • president of Boston University John Silber on Nicaragua (1986)
  • Ronald Reagan adviser Richard Perle (1988)
  • Alan Dershowitz on Israel/Palestine (2005)
  • Australian politician Gareth Evans, more of a spat than a debate, while on a UN panel on the "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) doctrine (2009)
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RSS feeds I follow
Posted Sat 7 May 2011, 1:22am

Someone recently asked me what RSS feeds I'm following in my newsreader. Here's what they are right now.

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A couple of thoughts on democracy, proportionality, and class
Posted Tue 3 May 2011, 1:04pm

The concerns about proportional representation being raised about yesterday's election are all fair, but I think we should recognize the root of the problem with our political system. The CCPA's Armine Yalnizyan has recently described our country as being in a "neo-gilded age." A large amount of wealth has been generated in this country over the last two decades, and the overwhelming majority of it has been claimed by the very richest. The gap between rich and poor in Canada has now reached historic highs, with huge concentrations of wealth at the very top, and is set to increase much further, especially with Harper's help, to unprecedented levels.

In terms of 'proportionality,' those numbers are far more staggering than the ones at the polls. The richest 0.1% of Canadians are taking home 5.5% of the income, a ratio of 55:1. The figures on wealth, if they were available, would be starker still. These concentrations have a far more serious impact on the prospects for democracy.

That tiny class of wealthy Canadians alone owns the media, who tell us how to vote and what issues are important. They own the country's industry, and the surging financialized sector of the economy which led to the meltdown, as well as massive resource extraction projects in poor countries. Through aggressive campaign financing and lobbying, they even own our elected officials themselves.

At the same time, people in both the highest and lowest income groups in Canada are now identifying themselves as "middle class," making this identity as ubiquitous as it is meaningless. We're left with only the possibility of identifying as "Canadian," opening the door for the media, who can play on racialized fear of India and China's emerging economies to distract us from the worsening condition at home where, for example, Canada recently dropped from 6th to 31st place in the world as far as infant mortality rate.

The graph shown here, adapted from Yalnizyan's report, makes it clear there's already a very determined class war going on in this country. It's up to us to decide now whether we'd like to fight back.

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Canadian Wikileak sneak peek
Posted Fri 29 April 2011, 7:37am

Wikileaks released 1800 cables about Canada yesterday, mostly sent from US consulates back to Washington. They give some idea of what the US is keeping tabs on. Here's a quick overview of some things you'll find.

As far as social justice organizing in Canada:

  • The US has monitored the work of the Halifax Peace Coalition.
  • 18 "situation reports" on the 2010 Vancouver Olympics were sent, covering a number of actions, from the Heart Attack march, a Critical Mass bike ride, the Mother's Day march, and more.
  • The US worried about public outrage around the closing of a Wal-Mart in Jonquière, Quebec, after workers tried to unionize it.
  • Cables repeatedly mention the 2009 demonstrations of Tamils in Canada, as well as the human rights situation they're protesting in Sri Lanka, where the Sri Lankan government was, for example, cluster-bombing a hospital that was in an area designated as a non-conflict zone. The cables give the impression that it's assumed most Canadian Tamils are terrorists, and one cable mentions consultation with Canada about an IMF loan to Sri Lanka at the exact time of the atrocities, that seems to have been approved.
  • The US is tracking critical discussion of its human rights record in Canadian universities.
  • There was interest in uranium mining in eastern Canada, but fear that popular protest may make it infeasible.
  • There's a report on a Winnipeg "Stop Sex with Kids" event, that also dealt with the epidemic of missing & murdered aboriginal women. The US seemed concerned that "[s]ome claimed that the problems of trafficking and prostitution are a result of the colonial legacy - one presenter referred to herself as an aboriginal woman living on occupied territory - as well as capitalism, poverty, and cultural oppression by mainstream society," and also that none of the blame was placed on "aboriginal leaders" or "aboriginal gangs," but still, they thought the event was "a good first start at getting the issue out."
  • The US is closely monitoring legal issues in CSIS's warrantless wiretapping, as well as preventive detention, and security certificates.
  • Following disputes in Akwesasne, the US is taking careful note of legalities around aboriginal title, self-government, and sovereignty.
  • They're also tracking the bio of at least one of the more progressive Members of Parliament, Megan Leslie, in Halifax.

In international treaties,

  • The US was scared that Canada might stop supporting its efforts to wipe the term "harm reduction" off of any UN General Assembly action plan or political statement in 2009. They complained the EU was on a "crusade" for harm reduction, but were confident in Colombia, Russia, and Japan's backing. The cable flatly states that "[t]he USG cannot accept including the specific term 'harm reduction' in any part of the action plan" and suggests actions to be taken to make that a reality.
  • The US said in 2007 that Canada shared its view that the OAS Indigenous Rights Declaration was "ill-conceived and is headed for a 'train-wreck.'" The implication being that Canada and the US would not accept any compromise and the declaration would fail.

On the world stage,

Many cables deal with Haiti, where Canada participated in a 2004 coup against a popular Haitian government.

  • In 2004 at the Montreal Conference with the Haiti Diaspora Canada was "upset with a band of persistent pro-Aristide supporters protesting outside the conference venue."
  • Who was represented at a 2005 Montreal conference on Haiti? The coup government, including the Haitian National Police, MINUSTAH, as well as "[t]he OAS, World Bank, IMF, [and] IDB." Generally it was felt that police forces needed to grow, and there was "a call for a better public information campaign... to bolster support for MINUSTAH." "[T]he police largely crumbled in February 2004, with many fleeing the force and taking their weapons with them. The current HNP has basically started from scratch to rebuild the force." As for Pierre Pettigrew, "a demonstrator attacked him with a red dye before he was pulled out by police.... The Pettigrew attacker was not a Haitian exile, but rather a failed student with a record of participation in violent demonstrations."
  • Quebec was still anxious to gain access to the spoils in 2005, beyond the policing and Hydro contracts it had already secured. Elections and other sectors were unavailable, since the Canadian federal government had won those. The US nixed Premier Charest's interest in visiting Haiti with Florida governor Jeb Bush.
  • In 2006, Canada imposed economic sanctions to restore democracy, "[f]rom a flawed election to the continued imprisonment of democratic supporters"... in Belarus. The approach in Haiti at the same time to the same conditions was quite a different story.
  • In 2007, Canada donated $20 million to to allow for an insurance policy "similar to business interruption insurance to provide immediate cash payments after a major earthquake or hurricane."
  • Canada was grateful to be allowed to attend the Haiti Key Players Meeting in New York, they sent Lawrence Cannon and Peter Kent.
  • It's noted that prior to the devastating 2010 earthquake that "some of the larger Canadian businesses operating there had been Gildan Activewear (textiles), Scotiabank and Desjardins Group (financial services), and Somine (mining)."
  • Earlier it was revealed that Canada's biggest fear at the time of the earthquake was popular democratic uprising, which may explain why their response was to send in the military.
  • Following the earthquake, "Canada's Joint Task Force Haiti was fully deployed with 2,046 soldiers, sailors, and air force personnel."
  • "As of February 11, [2010,] there were 1,979 [Canadian Forces] on the ground in Haiti."

I'm sure more detailed analyses will follow. I completely skipped a great number of cables on Afghanistan, the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), and many, many others. Michael Geist is already doing a tremendous job unpacking Canada's attempts to push through laws against internet freedom, especially around copyright and intellectual property.

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Canada's continuing support for the Honduras coup government
Posted Thu 14 April 2011, 9:40am

Here's a letter I just sent to my Member of Parliament. If anyone else is considering taking action on this, please do.

Hi Pat,

I have two questions for you about Honduras. The Lobo government is holding a conference called "Honduras is Open for Business" at the start of May.

Honduras has still not been re-admitted into the OAS since the 2009 military coup, and for good reason; their elections were neither free nor fair. Human rights abuses have been harsher under the current Lobo government than under the military government. Teacher's strikes have been broken up, and some of the teachers killed, along with harsh repression of members of the LGBT community and political dissidents, including extrajudicial executions.

There has been an attempt by the government to whitewash its own atrocities to get readmitted into the OAS. My questions are:

  1. Is Canada in any way participating in the "Open for Business" conference?
  2. Will Canada allow Honduras to be readmitted into the OAS before it holds legitimate elections and stops repressing civil society?

I would like to encourage you to prevent the Canadian government from allowing either of those to happen. There are so many other Latin American countries to build relationships with, yet Canada seems intent on cultivating ties with the worst rights abusers: Honduras and Colombia.

I look forward to the answers to my questions, and good luck with your campaign,

Macho Philipovich

Simcoe Street

Winnipeg

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Laurence, Luigi, Law & Ali
Posted Fri 8 October 2010, 12:47pm

     

I finished a few books recently, the first of which was Margaret Laurence's A Jest of God (1966). Even though The Diviners is probably my favourite novel, I've had trouble getting much out of her other writing.

Rachel is trapped in Manawaka, Laurence's recurring stand-in for her hometown of Neepawa, Manitoba. She's a single thirty-something grade school teacher living with her widowed mother. Their relationship has reached a level of passive-aggressiveness only attainable by Manitobans. Like so much of Laurence's work, it deals with gender, class, ethnic, sexual, religious and generational dynamics in the prairies. Her trouble with interpersonal relationships throughout the book fell so heavily on me that the ending, even if hard to swallow, was a tremendous, almost necessary, relief.

Bourgeois Influences on Anarchism (1917) was a great quick read by Luigi Fabbri, a friend of Malatesta. It's a set of three connected essays. The first is an esoteric consideration of mostly Italian literature of the time, and its misrepresentation and false glorification of anarchism as individualist. The main problem explored by the book, though, is that of violence in revolutionary movements and is taken up most directly in the second essay. Fabbri takes a similar perspective as the Australian 1970s pamphlet You Can't Blow Up A Social Relationship: The Anarchist Case Against Terrorism, but does a better job at making the case that adventurist violence and its glamorization are counterproductive while still rejecting a pacifist approach. It's a good counterpoint to books like Pacifism as Pathology and How Nonviolence Protects the State, which seem to be the predominant texts influencing anarchists on this question these days.

For those interested in the topic, though, Malcolm X's 1964 speech The Ballot or the Bullet is completely indispensable. He's been painted so often as "violent" that it can be surprising to go back to his words and see that he only ever advocated self-defense. It quickly becomes clear that the "violent" label was applied by a white supremacist warmongering society terrified of a black man mincing no words in calling on others to eliminate systemic violence by any means necessary.

I've been pretty interested in what people are calling the "Pink Tide", the resurgence of leftist government in Latin America over the past ten years or so, while keeping a critique of state power in mind, as well as the desires of many "first world" socialists to vicariously live through whatever's happening in Venezuela, in Greece, or wherever. Still, I was excited to pick up Tariq Ali's Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope (Revised Edition, 2008). Even though the cover features four presidents, the book really centres on Chavez and his defiance of the Washington Consensus. It's a mixed bag, though, at times history book, travelogue, political tract, even sometimes verging on spy novel. The first half turned me off with its seemingly uncritical defense of Chavez. That softened in the second half, and some really interesting narratives were drawn out, including Bolivian labour history, perspectives on the arts, a biographical sketch of the "great liberator" Simón Bolívar, all kept within a continental and even world context.

Law: Key Concepts in Philosophy (2007) was a pretty big disappointment. From the description on the back, I was to believe I'd be getting an overview of legal thought, including that of Locke, Hegel, Marx, Habermas, Dewey, Foucault, and Derrida, among others. You'd think based on that list you'd end up with some challenging, radical, maybe even insightful ideas. About half the book was spent on old-school traditional justifications for the application of the law, and the rest seemed to use all of the philosophers as foils or straw men to prove that Habermas really had the best ideas. Worse still, even his ideas weren't drawn out very well. I understand that an intro level book like this necessarily needs to gloss over a lot of detail, but I was still left feeling more unsatisfied than I expected.

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Photos from the teacher's strike in Honduras
Posted Tue 31 August 2010, 11:38am

The photos above come from Quotha.net, the People's Daily Online -- English, and the one of the young child who's been tear-gassed is by Karen Spring.

Canada was the quickest country to start making excuses for the coup government that took power in Honduras last summer. We're seeing the results now: murdered journalists and police repression that started late last week of the weeks-long teacher's strike. The strike followed a struggle that included a student occupation of the National Autonomous University. The occupying students and allies were able to repel the police from the university grounds.

The US is making a push to whitewash the human rights situation in Honduras so they can be readmitted into the Organization of American States (OAS). Rights Action have some suggestions (bottom of the page) about what can be done to show solidarity with people in Honduras.

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What could be more noteworthy than Wyclef?
Posted Wed 25 August 2010, 3:08pm

Over the past few weeks the media have been closely following the ups and (mostly) downs of Wyclef Jean's bid for candidacy as the next president of Haiti. Maybe they think fluffy stories about the hip-hop singer help make the Haitian election more interesting to the Canadian public, who'd otherwise see it as largely irrelevant.

In fact, all the media have shown is that even with ample opportunity, they've still managed to erase that this election is quite relevant to Canadians; Fanmi Lavalas, by far the most popular political party in Haiti, have once again been banned from participating, as they have in every other election since Canada helped carry out the 2004 coup d'état against then-Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

They've also chosen to largely ignore the question of what exactly, if anything, Canadian aid is doing in Haiti.

Instead they've chosen to give space to other pop culture icons to spread ignorance and perpetuate myths about the country. Arcade Fire were on the CBC last week criticizing Wyclef for not speaking French. In fact, only the most wealthy Haitians tend to speak French. Haitian Kreyol is the language spoken by almost all Haitians.

The man pictured in this post is Yvon Neptune, who was Haitian Prime Minister at the time of the 2004 coup. The photograph is taken post-coup, when he became a political prisoner. He's been approved as a presidential candidate with the "Haitians for Haiti" party and will be interesting to watch. Haitians are not easily fooled. If they choose to elect him, hopefully he's less of a disappointment than the current Prime Minister Réné Préval, who Haitians initially had been excited about.

The one spot in the media the debate around Lavalas has turned up is right here in the Winnipeg Free Press. The article, simply titled Keep Aristide's party out, is an exercise in wilful amnesia and ideological contortions. That they even let the topic surface shows they're feeling confident enough to try to see if it'll fly. Luckily, the commenters have no illusions about what's going on, tearing the pundit apart, so it's likely they'll crawl under a rock again for some time, hoping to quietly maneuver an election victory for any of a number of business-friendly candidates.

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