Mayor Rob Ford says he and his supporters want to run a slate of candidates in the next municipal election to take control of the agenda at City Hall.
Still stinging from his defeat over light rail transit, Ford used his radio show to invite potential candidates to call him. He then read out the phone number of the mayor’s office at City Hall.
“Doug and I and the 19 councillors who want to change the city are doing everything we can,” Ford said, referring to his brother, Coun. Doug Ford (Ward 2, Etobicoke North).
“But you know what? We need to run a slate next time,” Ford said.
“We have to get rid of these other 24 councillors.”
He was referring to the 24 councillors who backed light rail over Ford’s proposal to extend the subway system.
Doug Ford said it would take very little to change the balance of power on council. “There are eight or nine councillors that won by only a few hundred votes, and those eight or nine councillors are left-wing councillors that are dictating the way we have transportation, the way we’re spending the money,” he said.
“All you need is two or three or four of these councillors to get in, and it’s a game-changer.”
Thomas Mulcair has taken control of the New Democrats in the same way that Stephen Harper took control of the Conservatives: by appealing to the party membership in the face of opposition from the old guard.
Now, like Mr. Harper, Mr. Mulcair must transform that party from a protest movement into a government.
Make no mistake about the importance of what happened in Toronto last weekend: Tens of thousands of New Democrats rebelled against the party establishment – a cabal of union leaders, academics, journalists and party apparatchiks – to elect an outsider.
They did it, in the words of one NDP supporter who was at the convention, because they no longer wanted to be led by “a comfy sweater.” Mr. Mulcair and Brian Topp, who finished second, were both seen as bare-knuckle politicians who could take on the Conservatives and win.
Mr. Mulcair, a Quebec MP and former provincial Liberal cabinet minister, defeated Mr. Topp, the party’s canniest strategist, because Mr. Topp was favoured by the party elders, and among those elders there are too many comfy sweaters.
In appealing to the base through the one-member, one-vote system to displace the NDP elites, Mr. Mulcair was following precedent: Stephen Harper did the same to smother the Progressive Conservative influence within the new Conservative Party in 2004; he in turn was imitating Mike Harris’s coup against the old guard of the Ontario Conservatives in 1990.
Manitoba MP Niki Ashton defined it best in the last NDP candidates debate, earlier this month.
“You’ve attacked our opposition to unfair trade deals, our links with the labour movement, our championing of ordinary people,” she accused Mr. Mulcair.
To which Mr. Mulcair replied: “Between the Ontario border and the B.C. border we now hold a grand total of three seats.” Principle, meet the will to power.
[W]hat can you expect of a government run from an alternative universe? The Ford administration exists within a hard right template established by American talk radio and Fox television. People with dissenting views are the enemy. Expertise is suspect. Everything can be had for nothing. This is a world in which budgets are balanced by cutting revenues and what one knows in one’s gut trumps established facts.
To be fair Ford had a good first six months. He cut a tax, followed through on a promise to privatize garbage collection and passed a raft of small but symbolic spending cuts including canceling free muffins and coffee for council meetings. Where he hit the wall was on transit. The details are too tedious to burden a non resident with but suffice it to say the battle that proved to be Ford’s Waterloo was about subways versus light rail surface transit. Ford wanted subways. He insisted everyone wants subways. Of course he’s right but I want a pony and no-one seems to be willing to buy me one.
The money simply wasn’t there. Undaunted Ford proceeded to go to war against reality. When the head of the Transit Commission said the city couldn’t afford subways the mayor had him fired. When studies failed to support a case for subways Ford found his own study. When the financial numbers didn’t add up he simply claimed that money would magically appear once a shovel was put in the ground. At a town hall meeting he declared “You’re either with us or against us” and before council he emphatically shouted “The people of this city have spoken loud and clear, they want subways folks, they want subways, subways, subways”.
That’s the ethos of the Tea Party movement: the insistence that something can be had for nothing and the belief that government programs are a waste of money….except if one happens to be benefiting from a particular program. Rob Ford’s administration in Toronto has proven to be a controlled experiment in hard right politics in power. His no compromise approach has left him almost without allies. His rejection of expertise leaves him on the wrong side of facts and evidence. His insistence that “real people” can’t have the things they want because of downtown snobs has left a foul taste in many mouths.
Ontario's Court of Appeal has ruled that sex workers should be able to legally take their trade indoors and pay staff to support them, steps that many in the industry have already taken to make their work safer.
The court released a decision Monday on an appeal of Superior Court Judge Susan G. Himel's high-profile ruling that three provisions of the Criminal Code pertaining to prostitution should be struck down on the grounds that they are unconstitutional.
The Ontario appeal court agreed with two-thirds of Himel's ruling, namely that the provisions prohibiting common bawdy-houses and living off the avails of prostitution, are both unconstitutional in their current form.
But the court disagreed that the communicating provision must be struck down, meaning that it "remains in full force."
The court said it will strike the word “prostitution” from the definition of "common bawdy-house," as it applies to Section 210 of the Criminal Code, which otherwise prevents prostitutes from offering services out of fixed indoor locations such as brothels or their homes.
However, the court said the bawdy-house provisions would not be declared invalid for 12 months, so that Parliament can have a chance to draft Charter-compliant provisions to replace them, if it chooses to do so.
[. . .]
The court will also clarify that the prohibition of living off the avails of prostitution – as spelled out in Section 212(1)(j) of the Criminal Code – should pertain only to those who do so “in circumstances of exploitation.”
The changes to the "living-off-the-avails" provision will not come into effect for 30 days.
In the preamble to its judgment, the court said prostitution is legal in Canada, with “no law that prohibits a person from selling sex, and no law that prohibits another from buying it.”
While the court acknowledged that “prostitution is a controversial topic, one that provokes heated and heartfelt debate about morality, equality, personal autonomy and public safety,” it said the questions before it were about whether the laws being challenged were unconstitutional or not.
Pamela Bridgewater’s argument, expressed over the past several years in articles and forums, and at the heart of a book in final revision called Breeding a Nation: Reproductive Slavery and the Pursuit of Freedom, presents the most compelling conceptual and constitutional frame I know for considering women’s bodily integrity and defending it from the right.
In brief, her argument rolls out like this. The broad culture tells a standard story of the struggle for reproductive rights, beginning with the flapper, climaxing with the pill, Griswold v. Connecticut and an assumption of privacy rights under the Fourteenth Amendment and concluding with Roe v. Wade. The same culture tells a traditional story of black emancipation, beginning with the Middle Passage, climaxing with Dred Scott, Harpers Ferry and Civil War and concluding with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Both stories have a postscript—a battle royal between liberation and reaction—but, as Bridgewater asserts, “Taken together, these stories have no comprehensive meaning. They tell no collective tale. They create no expectation of sexual freedom and no protection against, or remedy for, reproductive slavery. They exist in separate spheres; that is a mistake.” What unites them but what both leave out, except incidentally, is the experience of black women. Most significantly, they leave out “the lost chapter of slave breeding.”
I need to hit the pause button on the argument for a moment, because the considerable scholarship that revisionist historians have done for the past few decades has not filtered into mass consciousness. The mass-culture story of slavery is usually told in terms of economics, labor, color, men. Women outnumbered men in the enslaved population two to one by slavery’s end, but they enter the conventional story mainly under the rubric “family,” or in the cartoon triptych Mammy-Jezebel-Sapphire, or in the figure of Sally Hemmings. Yes, we have come to acknowledge, women were sexually exploited. Yes, many of the founders of this great nation prowled the slave quarters and fathered a nation in the literal as well as figurative sense. Yes, maybe rape was even rampant. That the slave system in the US depended on human beings not just as labor but as reproducible raw material is not part of the story America typically tells itself. That women had a particular currency in this system, prized for their sex or their wombs and often both, and that this uniquely female experience of slavery resonates through history to the present is not generally acknowledged. Even the left, in uncritically reiterating Malcolm X’s distinction between “the house Negro” and “the field Negro,” erases the female experience, the harrowing reality of the “favorite” that Harriet Jacobs describes in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
We don’t commonly recognize that American slaveholders supported closing the trans-Atlantic slave trade; that they did so to protect the domestic market, boosting their own nascent breeding operation. Women were the primary focus: their bodies, their “stock,” their reproductive capacity, their issue. Planters advertised for them in the same way as they did for breeding cows or mares, in farm magazines and catalogs. They shared tips with one another on how to get maximum value out of their breeders. They sold or lent enslaved men as studs and were known to lock teenage boys and girls together to mate in a kind of bullpen.They propagated new slaves themselves, and allowed their sons to, and had their physicians exploit female anatomy while working to suppress African midwives’ practice in areas of fertility, contraception and abortion.Reproduction and its control became the planters’ prerogative and profit source. Women could try to escape, ingest toxins or jump out a window—abortion by suicide, except it was hardly a sure thing.
This business was not hidden at the time, as Pamela details expansively. And, indeed, there it was, this open secret, embedded in a line from Uncle Tom’s Cabin that my eyes fell upon while we were preparing to arrange books on her new shelves: “'If we could get a breed of gals that didn't care, now, for their young uns…would be ’bout the greatest mod’rn improvement I knows on,” says one slave hunter to another after Eliza makes her dramatic escape, carrying her child over the ice flows.
The foregoing is the merest scaffolding of one of the building blocks of Bridgewater’s argument, which continues thus. “If we integrate the lost chapter of slave breeding into those two traditional but separate stories, if we reconcile female slave resistance to coerced breeding as, in part, a struggle for emancipation and, in part, a struggle for reproductive freedom, the two tales become one: a comprehensive narrative that fuses the pursuit of reproductive freedom into the pursuit of civil freedom.”
[. . .]
Bridgewater argues that because slavery depended on the slaveholder’s right to control the bodies and reproductive capacities of enslaved women, coerced reproduction was as basic to the institution as forced labor. At the very least it qualifies among those badges and incidents, certainly as much as the inability to make contracts. Therefore, sexual and reproductive freedom is not simply a matter of privacy; it is fundamental to our and the law’s understanding of human autonomy and liberty. And so constraints on that freedom are not simply unconstitutional; they effectively reinstitute slavery.
The courts and Congress of the nineteenth century understood contracts, and even a little bit about labor. Women they understood wholly by their sex and wombs, and those they regarded as the property of husbands once owners exited the stage. It is not our fate to live with their failings. It is not our fate to live with the failure of later courts to apply the Thirteenth Amendment to claims for sexual and reproductive freedom or even to consider the historical context out of which the Fourteenth Amendment also emerged. It is not our fate, in other words, to confine ourselves to the pinched language of choice or even of privacy—or to the partial, white-centric history of women’s struggle for reproductive rights.
In the Morocco of the 1980s, where homosexuality did not, of course, exist, I was an effeminate little boy, a boy to be sacrificed, a humiliated body who bore upon himself every hypocrisy, everything left unsaid. By the time I was 10, though no one spoke of it, I knew what happened to boys like me in our impoverished society; they were designated victims, to be used, with everyone’s blessing, as easy sexual objects by frustrated men. And I knew that no one would save me — not even my parents, who surely loved me. For them too, I was shame, filth. A “zamel.”
Like everyone else, they urged me into a terrible, definitive silence, there to die a little more each day.
How is a child who loves his parents, his many siblings, his working-class culture, his religion — Islam — how is he to survive this trauma? To be hurt and harassed because of something others saw in me — something in the way I moved my hands, my inflections. A way of walking, my carriage. An easy intimacy with women, my mother and my many sisters. To be categorized for victimhood like those “emo” boys with long hair and skinny jeans who have recently been turning up dead in the streets of Iraq, their skulls crushed in.
The truth is, I don’t know how I survived. All I have left is a taste for silence. And the dream, never to be realized, that someone would save me. Now I am 38 years old, and I can state without fanfare: no one saved me.
I no longer remember the child, the teenager, I was. I know I was effeminate and aware that being so obviously “like that” was wrong. God did not love me. I had strayed from the path. Or so I was made to understand. Not only by my family, but also by the entire neighborhood. And I learned my lesson perfectly. So deep down, I tell myself they won. This is what happened.
[. . .]
It all came to a head one summer night in 1985. It was too hot. Everyone was trying in vain to fall asleep. I, too, lay awake, on the floor beside my sisters, my mother close by. Suddenly, the familiar voices of drunken men reached us. We all heard them. The whole family. The whole neighborhood. The whole world. These men, whom we all knew quite well, cried out: “Abdellah, little girl, come down. Come down. Wake up and come down. We all want you. Come down, Abdellah. Don’t be afraid. We won’t hurt you. We just want to have sex with you.”
They kept yelling for a long time. My nickname. Their desire. Their crime. They said everything that went unsaid in the too-silent, too-respectful world where I lived. But I was far, then, from any such analysis, from understanding that the problem wasn’t me. I was simply afraid. Very afraid. And I hoped my big brother, my hero, would rise and answer them. That he would protect me, at least with words. I didn’t want him to fight them — no. All I wanted him to say were these few little words: “Go away! Leave my little brother alone.”
But my brother, the absolute monarch of our family, did nothing. Everyone turned their back on me. Everyone killed me that night. I don’t know where I found the strength, but I didn’t cry. I just squeezed my eyes shut a bit more tightly. And shut, with the same motion, everything else in me. Everything. I was never the same Abdellah Taïa after that night. To save my skin, I killed myself. And that was how I did it.
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