tag:raisethehammer.org,2023-09-30:20239302023-09-30T12:00:00-05:00Raise the Hammer Newsfeed - Articles BlogsRaise the Hammer is a non-partisan citizens group dedicated to sustainble downtown revitalization in Hamilton, Ontario.http://raisethehammer.org/article/38092021-06-30T12:00:00-05:002021-06-30T12:00:00-05:00Justice for Indigenous Peoples is Long Overdue
<p><em>TW: this article refers to traumatizing colonialist violence committed against Indigenous peoples in Canada.</em></p>
<p class="initial">I am writing this on the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Anishinaabe and Mississauga nations.</p>
<p>This territory is governed by the Two Row Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement dating back to 1613 that First Nation and settler communities should travel the river of life side by side as equals, each with their own laws, customs and traditions.</p>
<p>The Two Row relationship between nations was meant to be characterized by mutual respect and friendship, not by interference and domination.</p>
<p>This territory is also governed by the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, a treaty to share and protect the land made between the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee nations in the Great Peace of Montreal agreement of 1701 CE. </p>
<p>The dish represents the land and its abundance. There is only one dish and we are all responsible to take care of it and ensure it is shared equitably. That means protecting common hunting grounds and sharing the harvest.</p>
<p>Likewise, there is only one spoon that we must take turns using to take what we need and then pass the spoon along to the next person. It's a spoon, not a knife, because we are committed to resolving our conflicts without violence.</p>
<h3>We Are All Treaty People</h3>
<p class="initial">The Dish with One Spoon treaty of 1701 was based on the law that <a href="https://meridian.allenpress.com/aicrj/article-abstract/21/2/105/211735/A-Sign-in-the-Sky-Dating-the-League-of-the?redirectedFrom=fulltext">dates back to 1142 CE</a>. In 1764, the treaty was extended to settlers as part of the Treaty of Niagara, which represents the Indigenous nations' understanding of their relationship with the British settler government following the 1763 Royal Proclamation, which committed the Crown to guaranteeing the rights of Indigenous peoples and dealing with Indigenous nations on a nation-to-nation basis.</p>
<p>The Two Row and Dish With One Spoon treaties were never repealed. They are still in force of law. Today, all settlers are treaty people living on treaty land, and we have a solemn duty to understand what it means to live within the terms of these covenants.</p>
<p>That, in turn, entails confronting and reckoning with the violent, genocidal legacy of settler colonialism that continues unreconciled to this day.</p>
<h3>Logic of Colonial Oppression</h3>
<p class="initial">One way that colonial systems of domination persist is by relentlessly compelling people to accept and internalize the logic of oppression. If people are forced to compete for positional advantage in a zero-sum hierarchy, that precludes them from working together to dismantle it.</p>
<p>This logic of oppression underlies the Indian Act in its many genocidal directives. It wasn't enough to colonize the land of Turtle Island, negotiate in bad faith and displace its inhabitants. The government of Canada has also been determined to colonize the very minds of Indigenous people through forced assimilation.</p>
<p>One of the precursors of the Indian Act was literally called the "Gradual Civilization Act" of 1857, which violated the Royal Proclamation by trying to assimilate Indigenous peoples to European settler customs.</p>
<p>The Indian Act, first introduced in 1876, was a sweeping framework that denied Indigenous people their languages, religions, traditions, customs, freedom of self-governance, assembly, movement, expression, even their very names.</p>
<h3>Residential Schools</h3>
<p class="initial">The Residential School system, mandated and funded by the federal government and operated by various Christian organizations, primarily the Catholic Church, was an extension of the genocidal mandate of the Indian Act. They existed to extinguish the cultures of the children forced to attend them.</p>
<p>The objective of the Residential Schools was to forcibly separate Indigenous children from their families, communities and cultures, and substitute the culture of domination of their colonial oppressors.</p>
<p>The neglect, abuse and trauma that characterized these schools was not a side-effect or a by-product, it was central to their explicit mission of cultural genocide.</p>
<p>At least 150,000 Indigenous children were forced into Residential Schools where they were abused and traumatized. Thousands of children were murdered in these places, and too often their remains were buried secretly on school grounds instead of returned to their families to mourn.</p>
<p>The recent discovery of 215 children's bodies at the Kamloops Residential School happened because the T'kemlups te Secwepemc nation took it upon themselves to undertake a ground-penetrating radar investigation to search for their missing children.</p>
<p>The Kamloops Residential School was not atypical, and Indigenous people are only too aware that it is not the last mass grave that will be uncovered.</p>
<p>Since then, the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan has discovered another 751 unmarked graves at the Marieval Indian Residential School.</p>
<h3>Cultural Genocide by Other Means</h3>
<p class="initial">The Residential Schools began to recede in the 1960s, but they were quickly replaced with a social services infrastructure that continued the policy of cultural genocide by other means through the forced removal of children from their families by social workers.</p>
<p>During the "Sixties Scoop", which ran from the late 1950s into the 1980s, social workers seized some 20,000 Indigenous children from their families and forded them into foster care to be adopted by white families.</p>
<p>The last Residential School closed just 25 years ago. This is not ancient history, and it is not time to 'get over it' as some colonial apologists have dared to suggest.</p>
<p>For a century, the RCMP enforced the mass kidnapping of Indigenous children into Residential schools. Today, the same system of colonial oppression continues to exercise the racist, violent policing of Indigenous, Black, Racialized, Queer and marginalized communities.</p>
<p>Indigenous children are still vastly overrepresented in foster care, and Indigenous people are still vastly overrepresented in Canadian prisons. Indigenous people comprise five percent of the population in Canada but 30 percent of the federal inmate population. Colonialist policies and intergenerational trauma persist to this day.</p>
<h3>Self-Governance Denied</h3>
<p class="initial">On Reserves - the slivers of land set aside for Indigenous people after colonizers displaced them from their homes - the Indian Act replaced traditional self-governance with the band council system, mandated not to represent the community but to enforce the terms of the Indian Act.</p>
<p>Nor were Indigenous people allowed to participate in Canadian federal or provincial elections, unless they renounced their own cultural identity and agreed to assimilation. (This was called "enfranchisement".)</p>
<p>Conversely, the Indian Act mandated automatic compulsory "enfranchisement" - meaning the loss of Indian status - for any Indigenous person who obtained an undergraduate, medical, law or seminary degree. </p>
<p>Indigenous communities weren't even allowed to hire lawyers or launch legal land claims without the consent of the federal government.</p>
<p>The statutory right to vote in federal and provincial elections was not extended generally to Indigenous people until the 1960s. Universal suffrage was not guaranteed to all until the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982.</p>
<p>The first Indigenous person elected to the federal government was Leonard Marchand, of the Okanagan Band, who was elected as a Liberal MP for the Kamloops-Cariboo riding in 1968. (If you are wondering: yes, he was forced to attend the Kamloops Residential School.)</p>
<p>Yet Ottawa remains profoundly hostile to Indigenous people to this day. If you haven't already, please take the time to <a href="https://cbc.ca/news/politics/parliament-farewell-speeches-1.6067283">listen to the farewell address by Mumilaaq Qaqqaq</a>, NDP MP for Nunavut, on why she not running for re-election.</p>
<h3>Survival, Resistance, Perseverence</h3>
<p class="initial">The long arc of settler colonialism in Canada is a story of domination, displacement and attempted assimilation and cultural genocide carried out with callous disregard and perpetuated by white supremacist colonialist mythologies and a vast quantity of ignorance and denial.</p>
<p>But it is also a story of survival, resistance, perseverance, and the persistence of cultural identity and solidarity in the face of intolerable oppression.</p>
<p>It is a story of languages and customs reclaimed from persecution, of potlatches and sundances and powwows and harvest festivals held in defiance of colonial edicts, of oral histories passed down and long cultural memories held in sacred trust.</p>
<p>In Haudenosaunee territory, where I live as a settler, it is a story of 13 ceremonies to mark 13 moons: Thunder Dances, Sun and Moon, celebrations of maple and strawberries and corn and string beans and harvests from Midwinter through End of Seasons.</p>
<p>It is a story of six nations that came together, worked through their differences and formed a confederacy that has lasted centuries, sustained a bulwark against oppression and provided a foundation for <a href="https://twitter.com/1492LBL">meaningful resistance against ongoing colonialism</a>.</p>
<p>It is a story of deep legal principles - like the Dish With One Spoon law - that have sustained alliances and fostered solidarity through centuries of disruption and dislocation.</p>
<p>It is a story of people who refuse to be extinguished, who refuse to be assimilated, who refuse to give in to intolerable terms from settlers who issued a Royal Proclamation promising nation-to-nation relations and then broke that promise repeatedly over the next 258 years.</p>
<h3>Justice and Reconciliation</h3>
<p class="initial">If you are a settler, I invite you to commit to the work of learning the real history of colonialist oppression that wasn't taught in school, and to dedicating yourself to the cause of justice and reconciliation.</p>
<p>Indigenous peoples comprise more than 50 nations living in over 630 Indigenous communities, as well as every settler community in Canada. Learn about the specific Indigenous nations and treaties that govern <a href="https://native-land.ca">the land you're living on</a>. </p>
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/native_land_map.png" alt="Map of Indigenous territories in southwest Ontario (Image Credit: Native-Lanc.ca)" title="Map of Indigenous territories in southwest Ontario (Image Credit: Native-Lanc.ca)"><br>
Map of Indigenous territories in southwest Ontario (Image Credit: Native-Lanc.ca)</p>
<p>Read the <a href="http://trc.ca/about-us/trc-findings.html">final report</a> of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which determined in unequivocal terms that colonial policy toward Indigenous People in Canada constitutes cultural genocide:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Cultural genocide</em> is the destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue
as a group. States that engage in cultural genocide set out to destroy the political and social institutions of the targeted group. Land is seized, and populations are forcibly transferred and their movement is restricted. Languages are banned. Spiritual leaders are persecuted, spiritual practices are forbidden, and objects of spiritual value are confiscated and destroyed. And, most significantly to the issue at hand, families are disrupted to prevent the transmission of cultural values and identity from one generation to the next. In its dealing with Aboriginal people, Canada did all these things.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Read the <a href="http://trc.ca/assets/pdf/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf">Calls to Action</a> and find ways to address them in your life and your networks.</p>
<p>Read <a href="https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/">Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls</a>, which determined:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[H]uman rights and Indigenous rights abuses committed and condoned by the Canadian state represent genocide against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people. These abuses and violations have resulted in the denial of safety, security, and human dignity. They are the root causes of the violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people that generate and maintain a world within which Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people are forced to confront violence on a daily basis, and where perpetrators act with impunity.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Study the <a href="https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Calls-Web-Version-EN.docx">Calls for Justice</a> in that report.</p>
<p>Explore the <a href="https://www.nfb.ca/indigenous-cinema/?&film_lang=en&sort=year:desc,title">rich and powerful collection of documentaries and films by Indigenous filmmakers</a> hosted by the National Film Board.</p>
<p>If you are living in Haudenosaunee territory, contribute some money to <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/legal-fund-1492-land-back-lane">the Land Defenders of 1492 Land Back Lane</a> so they can continue their anti-colonial resistance and mount a legal defence of their right to self-governance and self-determination.</p>
<p>If you would like to learn more about the Indian Act, read the book <a href="https://www.ictinc.ca/books/21-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-indian-act"><em>21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act</em></a> by Bob Joseph. It provides essential insights into the corrosive effects of the Act in a highly accessible format.</p>
<p>The cause of truth is long overdue. The time for excuses and denials and deflections is long past. There can be no reconciliation without authentic justice.</p>
<p>As the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls noted, "The fact that this National Inquiry is happening now doesn't mean that Indigenous Peoples waited this long to speak up; it means it took this long for Canada to listen."</p>
Ryan McGreal http://raisethehammer.org/authors/1/ryan_mcgreal2http://raisethehammer.org/article/38082021-06-29T12:00:00-05:002021-06-29T12:00:00-05:00Third-Party Election Advertising Ban About Silencing Workers
<p class="initial">Why are unions and other progressives so upset about Ontario Premier Doug Ford and his government invoking Section 33 of the <em>Charter of Rights and Freedoms</em> (the "notwithstanding clause") to shut down third-party advertising for a full year before a provincial election?</p>
<p>First, this law wasn't intended for this purpose. But that's not the prime reason.</p>
<p>Unions are a collective voice for working people. Are they perfect? No. Far from it. But in general, they provide a collective counterpoint to the power of big business, despite that Conservatives like Ford like to paint their elected leaders as 'union bosses' in order to distract from the <em>actual</em> bosses who control worker salaries and working conditions. </p>
<h3>Widening Inequality</h3>
<p class="initial">We know that income inequality has ballooned. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and workers' share of the economic pie has shrunk significantly with overall union decline (particularly in the private sector).</p>
<p>But the power of big business and the rich has grown. They have way more individual and collective resources than workers, way more to donate during elections. Ford has made this easier for wealthy corporate executives and owners, by tripling the personal campaign donation limit.</p>
<p>Unions represent an organized, institutional framework for pooled worker resources. They are a collective voice for workers. And when they take on broader social issues, they help marginalized people beyond their own ranks.</p>
<p>So no, we're not debating 'equal access' to third-party advertising here for corporate interests too. Because that assumes corporations - and the rich people behind them - are on the same playing field as workers.</p>
<p>They're not. </p>
<h3>Workers Need Unions</h3>
<p class="initial">At the individual level, workers have significantly less power. They need unions. And unions need to be their voice during elections.</p>
<p>They need this voice because governments become beholden to corporate interests and profit for the rich. Because the rich use their power to elect governments that guard their wealth at the expense of things like labour, racial, environmental and social justice.</p>
<p>We need governments that care about people first, not corporate profit. And if unions can't engage in independent third-party advertising to get the issues into the public, getting the message out is left to individuals. And only those with resources have any opportunity.</p>
<p>So Ford's stunt isn't about 'protecting democracy'. It's about suppressing the voices of those who have the least power, by silencing the organizations that collectively represent them.</p>
Chantal Mancini http://raisethehammer.org/authors/573/chantal_mancini2http://raisethehammer.org/article/38072021-06-29T12:00:00-05:002021-06-29T12:00:00-05:00Did Doug Ford Test the 'Great Barrington Declaration' on Ontarians?
<p class="initial">It's summer, COVID cases are falling steadily, vaccination efforts are proceeding well (67 percent of Canadians have had at least one dose and 28 percent have had both doses) and Ontario is moving into Stage Two of the provincial reopening plan.</p>
<p>So it would be tempting to adopt a forward-looking, let-bygones-be-bygones stance and stop dwelling on the policy failures of the (very recent) past. But this won't be our last pandemic - or indeed, our last public health emergency - and it would be doubly tragic to ignore the lessons of those failures and go on to repeat them.</p>
<p>Either by deliberate design or dogmatic default, this past Spring the Ontario government essentially conducted a large-scale test of the central premise of the "Great Barrington Declaration" in its pandemic response.</p>
<p>Spoiler alert: it didn't go well.</p>
<h3>Great Barrington Declaration</h3>
<p class="initial">The <a href="https://gbdeclaration.org">Great Barrington Declaration</a> is a scam that was cooked up by the <a href="https://www.aier.org/">American Institute for Economic Research</a>, a libertarian propaganda outfit disguised as a research institute and funded by <a href="https://bylinetimes.com/2020/10/09/climate-science-denial-network-behind-great-barrington-declaration/">the usual right-wing billionaire plutocrats</a>.</p>
<p>They <a href="https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/89204">scrounged up a few contrarian scientists</a> to sign their names onto the declaration and published it with a big splash last October. </p>
<p>The thesis is that emergency measures to stop the spread of COVID-19 are more harmful than the pandemic itself, and that governments should shift to a "focused protection" model that insulates seniors at high risk of death.</p>
<p>The scientific community immediately objected, presenting clear, evidence-based arguments against the thesis and challenging the notion - never spelled out in detail - that you can somehow insulate high-risk populations while letting everyone else go about their business.</p>
<p>A major problem is the idea that you can reach herd immunity by letting everyone get infected, which is a core premise of the GBD.</p>
<p>Scientists countered: (a) infected people lose their immunity over time, (b) widespread transmission raises the risk of more dangerous variants emerging, (c) there are lots of bad outcomes short of death, and (d) a small percentage of a very big number is still a big number.</p>
<p><em>The Lancet</em> published the <a href="https://johnsnowmemo.com">John Snow Memorandum</a>, a counter-argument that outlined the evidence-based case against the GBD. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Any pandemic management strategy relying upon immunity from natural infections for COVID-19 is flawed. Uncontrolled transmission in younger people risks significant morbidity and mortality across the whole population. In addition to the human cost, this would impact the workforce as a whole and overwhelm the ability of healthcare systems to provide acute and routine care.</p>
</blockquote>
<h3>Ontario Tested the GBD</h3>
<p class="initial">It occurred to me this spring that the Ontario government effectively conducted a large-scale test of the GBD when they decided in March to prematurely roll back the emergency measures that were wrestling community transmission under control after the second wave crested in mid-January.</p>
<p>The government ensured that high-risk seniors and health care workers were vaccinated and then relaxed emergency measures for the general population.</p>
<p>How did that work out?</p>
<p>Surprise! The global scientific consensus was right and the climate science denying, right-wing billionaire-funded propaganda outfit was wrong.</p>
<p>The worst wave of infections and hospitalizations in Ontario came <em>after</em> seniors and health care workers were vaccinated.</p>
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/chart_daily_covid_cases_2021_06_28.png" alt="Chart: New daily COVID cases in Ontario" title="Chart: New daily COVID cases in Ontario"><br>
Chart: New daily COVID cases in Ontario</p>
<p>Relaxing emergency measures led to exponential growth in community transmission and overwhelmed hospital ICUs across the province. </p>
<p>The number of people in hospital with COVID peaked on April 20 at 2,360, far higher than the wave two peak of 1,701 people in hospital on January 12. The number of people in ICU peaked on May 1 at 900, far higher than the wave two peak of 421 people in ICU on January 16.</p>
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/chart_hospitalized_2021_06_28.png" alt="Chart: Daily hospitalized, ICU and ICU with ventilator in Ontario" title="Chart: Daily hospitalized, ICU and ICU with ventilator in Ontario"><br>
Chart: Daily hospitalized, ICU and ICU with ventilator in Ontario</p>
<h3>Younger People Getting Sick</h3>
<p class="initial">The Alpha variant (formerly referred to as B.1.1.7) was rampant in Ontario and had a much higher rate of transmission and serious illness than the original variant.</p>
<p>Most of the people in hospital during Ontario's third wave were in their 60s, 50s and 40s. Some were as young as teenagers. A <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/covid-19-claims-teenagers-life-1.6002023">thirteen-year-old girl named Emily Victoria Viegas</a> died on April 22 after her entire family contracted COVID.</p>
<p>Her tragic story encapsulates the systemic failure of the Ontario government to protect vulnerable people, especially working-class and racialized communities. She lived in Brampton, a persistent COVID epicentre with a high proportion of essential workers for whom the government adamantly refused to provide paid sick leave - and her father was one of those workers.</p>
<p>The very day Ms. Viegas died, the Ford government voted down the latest in a series of opposition bills trying to guarantee paid sick leave for essential workers.</p>
<p>Ford's refusal to adopt the various policy tools the Ontario Science Table had spent months begging the government to adopt - maintain emergency measures to stop transmission, concentrate vaccines on hotspots, engage proactively with high-risk communities, protect essential workers with paid sick leave - was precisely the policy failure that enabled this tragedy to happen.</p>
<p>Indeed, the call for worker protection echoed an earlier call by health experts begging Ford to restore the paid sick leave he cancelled as one of his first acts in office: "If you are going to work sick, not only are you putting your own health in danger by not resting, but also you are putting in danger the health of the people you work with."</p>
<p><a href="https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5364177">That prescient message was delivered</a> on November 18, 2019.</p>
<h3>Ford Ignored the Experts</h3>
<p class="initial">The essential public health facts that drive pandemic measures bear repeating: </p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>If there are too many infections at once, the hospital system gets overwhelmed and has to ration or delay treatment for everyone. That results in worse outcomes for people with serious illness (as well as leading to higher risk of illness and burnout for health care providers).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>A small percentage of a very big number is still a big number. Allowing the virus to circulate freely results in more serious illness and more deaths.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Death is not the only negative outcome from COVID infection. Thousands of Ontarians will struggle with various long-term, chronic ailments as a result of having contracted COVID.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>These essential facts underwrote the expert advice Ford received throughout wave two and into wave three.</p>
<p>On February 11, the Science Table <a href="https://twitter.com/CBCOttawa/status/1359959260638109700">warned</a>: "Aggressive vaccination and sticking with stay-at-home order will help avoid a third wave and a third lockdown." Ford ignored them and lifted the stay-at-home order.</p>
<p>Throughout March, Ford's experts begged him to pay attention to the modelling and implement policies to protect workers and reduce transmission. Instead, he continued to relax the emergency policies and refuse to implement paid sick leave.</p>
<p>At the start of April, the Science Table presented new modelling showing exponential growth in cases that would overwhelm hospitals by the end of the month. Ford and his cabinet actually decided to wait another two weeks to see if the actual case numbers matched the modelling.</p>
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/science_table_2021_04_01_modelling.png" alt="Chart: Science Table COVID modelling from April 1, 2021" title="Chart: Science Table COVID modelling from April 1, 2021"><br>
Chart: Science Table COVID modelling from April 1, 2021</p>
<p>In mid-April, facing a public health catastrophe of his own making, Ford announced a panicky jumble of half-baked measures like closing playgrounds and trying to give the police the power to arbitrarily stop people - literally anything to avoid actually protecting vulnerable essential workers.</p>
<h3>We Deserve the Truth</h3>
<p class="initial">Was the Ontario government's decision to adopt a policy that had the effect of testing the GBD at scale deliberate, or was it just a coincidental side-effect of the general corporate libertarian bias of the Conservative Party? </p>
<p>Is it realistic to think the government hadn't heard of the GBD? After all, it is very popular among Conservatives.</p>
<p>I hope some investigative journalists are still digging into the decision to open the economy when the Science Table was begging them to tighten restrictions and to wait and see whether hospitalization followed the projections before finally, belatedly taking action.</p>
<p>For months, Ford refused to listen to his own health experts. Who did he listen to instead?</p>
<p>As a result, tens of thousands of additional people were infected who would not have been infected if the government had listened to its own science advisors. Thousands of those people required hospitalization. Hundreds of those people died.</p>
<p>All of it was predicted and preventable.</p>
<p>Did they get sick, did they need to be hospitalized, did they die because the Ontario government wanted to test a right-wing libertarian declaration that contradicted the global scientific consensus? </p>
<p>We deserve to know the truth. </p>
Ryan McGreal http://raisethehammer.org/authors/1/ryan_mcgreal2http://raisethehammer.org/article/38062021-06-28T12:00:00-05:002021-06-28T12:00:00-05:00An Update on Raise the Hammer
<p class="initial">As you may have noticed, Raise the Hammer has been on hiatus for the past few months, and readers deserve an explanation and some sense of what to expect next. I have been struggling over what to do about the site, and I want to share some reflections on where I am and what to expect in the future.</p>
<p>To begin with, various changes in my personal and professional life have left me with less time to focus on RTH, while at the same time shifting my interests and attention away from the bread-and-butter topics the site has traditionally focused on. </p>
<p>More broadly, for quite some time I have been feeling restless with the format and legacy of RTH, an entity that grew out of a specific cultural context in the mid-2000s and feels increasingly ill-suited to the challenges of today and tomorrow.</p>
<h3>Narrow Cultural Context</h3>
<p class="initial">RTH launched as an urbanist movement to expand the boundaries of mainstream discourse on municipal policy in Hamilton beyond the suburban postwar status quo of single-use sprawl development and car culture. </p>
<p>I still think that's a laudable goal, but the way we went about it had the effect of excluding as well as including. It's fair to point out that the loose group of people who coalesced into RTH were mostly white, mostly male, mostly middle-class and reflected the cultural biases and blind spots implied by those lived experiences.</p>
<p>It's also fair to say the idea for RTH grew out of the outrage of a group of very privileged people who had a sense of entitlement to be heard and taken seriously. Of course, <em>everyone</em> has the right to be heard and taken seriously - but that right is not distributed in any way resembling equally or fairly.</p>
<p>That is particularly the case when it comes to the kinds of municipal policies that shape the ways people experience life in a city. Failing to understand the systemic factors that stratify access to public space and community resources has the effect of making those stratifications and inequities <em>worse</em>.</p>
<h3>Action Without Equity Reinforces Inequity</h3>
<p class="initial">If, say, a high-income community succeeds in preventing a waste incinerator from opening in their neighbourhood and the incinerator just moves to a low-income community that has been denied the capacity to influence policy, the result is actually a deepening of inequality.</p>
<p>Or, let's say a group of tactical urbanists undertakes DIY "intersection repair" activities at dangerous intersections, as happened in Hamilton in 2013. The City's response diverged sharply along class lines: the guerrilla bumpouts at Locke and Herkimer were quickly made permanent, whereas the crosswalk on Cannon at Mary was simply removed. </p>
<p>When improvements to safety and accessibility only happen in communities that are already wealthy and well-connected, those improvements have the effect of sharpening disparities. </p>
<p>In a city that has a 20+ year gap in average life expectancy between its highest-income and lowest-income neighbourhoods, that's not just unfair, it's literally a matter of life and death.</p>
<p>Over the years, RTH has not done enough to undertake its advocacy in an inclusive, equity-seeking manner. Equity requires <em>directly confronting inequity</em> in the specific circumstances where inequity occurs. If you are not confronting inequity, you are by definition supporting inequity. There is no middle ground, no neutral stance.</p>
<h3>Equity and Accessibility</h3>
<p class="initial">Perhaps RTH would have been more in tune with accessibility and equity if the site itself was more accessible and equitable. It took me a long time - too long - to understand how the policies we adopted for participation in RTH failed to create a truly safe, inclusive space for people to participate in the project of city building.</p>
<p>For a long time, the site's commenting policy erred on the side of giving trolls too much power to abuse and harass and intimidate more vulnerable contributors. We were so wedded to the abstract idea of 'free speech' that we failed to see how abusive people were exploiting that abstraction to bully vulnerable people into silence - the opposite of free speech! </p>
<p>The site's commenting policy evolved incrementally over time, but I'm not proud of how many times people from equity-seeking groups had to try and tell me how they were experiencing the site before I came to understand what they were saying.</p>
<p>(In any case, even as RTH incrementally applied more rigorous standards for civility in the comments, the centre of gravity for public commentary was already busy shifting to social media - for better and for worse.)</p>
<h3>Intersecting Crises, Inflexible Format</h3>
<p class="initial">In a world struggling with wicked and intersecting problems - the accelerating global climate emergency, the horrific perpetuating legacies of slavery and Indigenous genocide, widening income and wealth disparities, the rising threat of authoritarian populist fascism, the crisis of biodiversity collapse - it just seems absurd to consider local civic matters in blinkered isolation. </p>
<p>I mean, the global climate emergency is the most all-encompassing existential crisis facing humanity, and it seems to me that every story about how we live and how we get around should be framed in terms of the climate impacts. This becomes even more important when we consider the ways global warming and inequity combine to visit the harms of climate chaos disproportionately upon marginalized equity-seeking groups.</p>
<p>These concepts have existed within the realm of RTH, but the site has not been particularly good at integrating them in a consistent, thoughtful manner. Articles are categorized in a unitary and often arbitrary way and difficult to cross-reference. </p>
<p>And in an online media landscape that has expanded to embrace podcast and video, RTH remains stuck in a typographic box. It is a website built in and for the first era of the internet, a time when a website was essentially a virtual magazine.</p>
<h3>So What's Next?</h3>
<p class="initial">Between the astonishing rise of social media in the 16 years since RTH launched and the proliferation of new local media organizations in Hamilton, RTH has in many ways come to feel more like a relic than a vital organ.</p>
<p>All of these factors, and others I haven't touched on, point to the need for a broader, more inclusive, more urgent set of first principles, and perhaps a new entity that reflects those principles more faithfully.</p>
<p>But in the interim, I am mindful that RTH still occupies a niche in the Hamilton media landscape, however imperfectly. And in recent weeks, a number of people have reached out to me to ask if I might be willing to publish their contribution. That suggests it may still have a role to play.</p>
<p>So I will be taking RTH out of hiatus and back into active publication, effective immediately, and for the near future - but with the understanding that it will need to retire permanently at some point and perhaps make room for a better, more inclusive entity to take its place.</p>
Ryan McGreal http://raisethehammer.org/authors/1/ryan_mcgreal2http://raisethehammer.org/article/38052021-02-23T12:00:00-05:002021-02-23T12:00:00-05:00Nestlé Selling North American Water Bottling to an Private Equity Firm
<p class="initial">Nestlé, the world's largest corporate water bottler, <a href="https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/nestl%C3%A9-in-talks-with-one-rock-consortium-on-bottled-water-sale/46340796?utm_campaign=swi-rss&utm_source=multiple&utm_medium=rss&utm_content=o">is planning to sell</a> its North American bulk bottled water business to private equity firm <a href="https://www.onerockcapital.com/">One Rock Capital Partners</a>. </p>
<p>Wellington County, Ontario will be particularly hard-hit by this pending sale, since Nestle currently owns three wells in the area that supply its Aberfoyle bottling plant.</p>
<p>Wellington Water Watchers (WWW), a non-profit organization founded in 2007, has dedicated its efforts to the protection, restoration and conservation of drinking water in Ontario. The group wants to ensure water remains part of the public common rather than being commodified for profit.</p>
<p>"Rural communities cannot afford to compete with Wall Street speculators for Ontario's groundwater", says Rob Case, chair of WWW. </p>
<p>"Jeff Yurek [Minister of Environment, Conservation and Parks] must cancel Nestlé's permits to take water for bottling in order to prevent them selling to a private equity firm. This massive transfer of 'water wealth,' estimated at $4 billion, is an especially ominous development in light of Wall Street's accelerating interest in <a href="https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/361135">'water futures' trading</a> and must be stopped," added Case. </p>
<p class="initial">The moratorium on new permits to take water for bottling in Ontario is set to expire April 1, 2021. Nestle currently extracts hundreds of millions of litres of water every year from the aquifer in Wellington County.</p>
<p>"Water privatization is anti-democratic," states Arlene Slocombe, Executive director of WWW. "Water is a unifying source of life that connects all of us together. It should not be negotiated away behind closed doors or exploited by corporations for profit. It's time for the Ontario government to protect the waters here for future generations."</p>
<p>WWW is a member of a bi-national coalition of national advocacy groups and communities impacted by Nestlé's water extraction and bottling in the US and Canada. </p>
<p>The coalition demands that state, provincial and national authorities exercise their authority to declare all of Nestle's current permits to take water to be void. They also want assurances the transfer of current permits to potential purchasers will be prohibited.</p>
<p class="initial">WWW is advocating for community-based just transitions for workers in the water bottling industry as well as economic transition plans for communities reliant on tax revenues from water bottling facilities. </p>
<p>The group also encourages renewed <a href="https://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/change-gonna-come/2020/08/public-private-partnerships-de-democratize-water">public investment</a> in water infrastructure to ensure affordable, accessible clean water for all.</p>
<p><em>This article was <a href="https://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/change-gonna-come/2021/02/ontario-needs-ensure-water-remains-public-common">first published</a> on Rabble.ca.</em></p>
Doreen Nicoll http://raisethehammer.org/authors/329/doreen_nicoll2http://raisethehammer.org/article/38042021-02-19T12:00:00-05:002021-02-19T12:00:00-05:00Jolley Old Sam Lawrence
<p class="initial">What if we could create a safe path for pedestrians and cyclists from lower Hamilton to Concession Street and beautiful Sam Lawrence Park, which would cost very little to build? With the recent improvements to Claremont and upcoming changes to the park itself, it turns out we can. And the best part is, the project would improve access for drivers as well.</p>
<p>Much has changed since I <a href="/article/943/a_jolley_cut_for_everyone">first wrote about</a> the potential for a better Jolley Cut for all road users in 2009. The overpass section crossing the Claremont was <a href="https://www.thespec.com/news/hamilton-region/2011/04/21/construction-resumes-on-the-jolley-cut.html">reconstructed</a> in 2011. </p>
<p>As part of this work, 280 m of sidewalk was rebuilt to include a physical barrier. But there still remains 540 m of unprotected narrow sidewalk (orange) between the bottom of the separated section (blue) and St. Joseph's Drive. There is also no sidewalk above the "hairpin" (red).</p>
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/burak_jolley_cut_map_segments.png" alt="" title=""><br></p>
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/burak_arkledun_street_view.png" alt="" title=""><br></p>
<p>In 2020, the Keddy Access Trail (KAT) was completed along the full length of the Claremont Access. As part of this, a connecting trail was built between the KAT and St Joseph's drive. Connections to the Jolley Cut were also included.</p>
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/static/images/burak_keddy_access_exit_to_jolley_cut.png" alt="" title=""><br></p>
<p>Things on and around the Jolley have certainly improved. But these improvements haven't solved the fundamental problem of pedestrian and cycling access to Concession Street. In my previous proposal, I suggested converting a single downbound lane to a protected multi-use path. </p>
<p>However the new addition of the Keddy Trail, and the <a href="https://www.hamilton.ca/parks-recreation/improving-our-parks/sam-lawrence-park">forthcoming Sam Lawrence Park upgrades</a> have created a perfect opportunity to revisit the needs of the Jolley, and now a direct connection to the park is possible without pouring any new asphalt or altering any existing road edge barriers.</p>
<p>As part of the Sam Lawrence renovation, the two slip ramps at Concession and Upper Wellington are thankfully being removed (A, B). This is great news for pedestrians and cyclists navigating that intersection. </p>
<p>The colloquially named "jug handle" (C) is currently slated to remain as-is. It is this superfluous car infrastructure combined with the Keddy connection that has opened up the possibility for a better Jolley.</p>
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/burak_jolley_cut_top_schematic.png" alt="" title=""><br></p>
<p>The traffic counts at this intersection indicate that both the North-South and East-West volumes at Wellington and Concession are less than 20,000 vehicles per day, making them candidates for a <a href="http://carfreeamerica.net/road-diet-guide/">road diet</a> - that is, the reduction of car lanes from two in each direction to one.</p>
<p>Understanding that uphill travel has unique challenges, a full two lanes of traffic could be maintained in the upbound direction, allowing for passing slow vehicles and adequate queueing space at the top. </p>
<p>Downhill traffic on the other hand, does not have the same needs. Providing a passing lane for cars creates <a href="https://twitter.com/jdavey_2/status/1270068084137754628">uncomfortable</a> (and unsafe) experiences for pedestrians and cyclists.</p>
<p>The summary of the proposal is that a single downbound lane of the Jolley be converted to a higher use - as a turning lane for cars where necessary and as a separated multi-use path (MUP) from the Keddy to Sam Lawrence Park.</p>
<p>The proposal comprises 3 sections, with advantages for all road users.</p>
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/burak_jolley_cut_design.png" alt="" title=""><br></p>
<h3>Section A</h3>
<p class="initial">Proposed change: Two lanes up, one lane down, centre turn lane.</p>
<p>In this section, a new turn lane is provided for drivers who need to access driveways that enter Arkeldun from both sides.</p>
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/burak_jolley_cut_section_a.png" alt="" title=""><br></p>
<h3>Section B</h3>
<p class="initial">Proposed Change: Two lanes up, one lane down, one lane converted to physically separated Multi Use Trail. To avoid excessive construction costs, jersey barriers can be implemented for
the separation.</p>
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/burak_jolley_cut_section_b_bottom.png" alt="" title=""><br></p>
<p>The connection at the bottom of Section B allows pedestrians to access the new multi use path from both sides via the new KAT underpass, and gives access to cyclists from John Street below via the KAT side trail to St. Joseph's Drive. </p>
<p>Because of the wonderful job that the city did on this KAT connection, cyclists and pedestrians can choose not to navigate the bottom section of the Jolley at all. It also means that there is no requirement to alter intersections at the bottom of the new Jolley multi-use path. </p>
<p>As an added bonus, a MUP on the escarpment side of the Jolley unlocks the ability to create an access stairway to Sam Lawrence halfway up, so pedestrians do not need to detour to Concession to reach the park.</p>
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/burak_jolley_cut_staircase.png" alt="" title=""><br></p>
<p>At the top, the new multi use path would use the "jug handle" to terminate at Concession giving access Eastbound to the business area Westbound to Sam Lawrence Park. This termination happens at a low volume intersection and does not require any bicycle signals.</p>
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/burak_jolley_cut_cycle_track.png" alt="" title=""><br></p>
<h3>Section C</h3>
<p class="initial">Proposed change: Provide high capacity double left turn lanes to accommodate upbound traffic access to Concession. This replaces the unintuitive (and unsafe) "jug handle" which currently bisects the park.</p>
<p>Uphill of the divergence of the multi-use path from the vehicular traffic, the road has four full lanes available for cars. Of these four, one would be for upbound straight and right turn, one for upbound straight and left, and a third for upbound left only. The fourth would be for downbound traffic.</p>
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/burak_jolley_cut_section_c.png" alt="" title=""><br></p>
<p>In order to accommodate upbound and downbound traffic, the double left turn lane will allow ample queueing on the upper section of the Jolley where the grade is minimal. The signal would be converted to three phases. </p>
<p>First, upbound traffic priority (with right turns allowed from Westbound Concession). </p>
<p>Second, downbound traffic priority. </p>
<p>Third, east-west normal green phase (the requirement for advanced left turn priority to be determined by traffic needs). </p>
<p>By using intelligent dynamic signalling, upbound and downbound phases can be shortened or lengthened based on time-of-day needs.</p>
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/burak_jolley_cut_turning_movements.png" alt="" title=""><br></p>
<p>This project would create a unique opportunity for two upper and two lower Hamilton councillors to piggyback off of the upcoming park rehabilitation and collaborate on an inexpensive project that can unite residents from above and below. </p>
<p>Will you join my call to Councillors Jason Farr, Nrinder Nann, Esther Pauls and John-Paul Danko to invest their discretionary funds into this project?</p>
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/burak_jolley_cut_ward_boundaries.png" alt="" title=""><br></p>
Sean Burak http://raisethehammer.org/authors/77/sean_burak2http://raisethehammer.org/article/38032021-02-18T12:00:00-05:002021-02-18T12:00:00-05:00Right-Wing Extremism is a Driving Force in Modern Conservatism
<p class="initial">Let's talk a little bit about Hunter Biden. not too much, but just enough to make the jumpoff into the real story underneath.</p>
<p>As you may remember, Trump and his proxies tried repeatedly to promote a conspiracy theory about Hunter Biden, the Ukrainian energy company Burisma and American aid to Ukraine. It didn't gain much traction in the mainstream beyond its role in Trump's first impeachment. </p>
<p>But in the right-wing parallel media universe, it has become an article of faith that Joe Biden and his entire family are thoroughly corrupt and that every diabolical insinuation about them is probably true.</p>
<p>In all likelihood, Hunter is exactly what he appears to be: an unremarkable man who managed to land a lucrative career in investing, consulting and lobbying based on his family connections and class privilege. </p>
<p>However, the Trump-era Justice Department started investigating him in late 2018 over income earned from his business dealings in China and other foreign countries. According to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/us/politics/hunter-biden-tax-investigation.html">credible media reports</a>, the FBI began by searching for evidence of money laundering but then switched to investigating his taxes for evidence of tax violations.</p>
<p>Maybe they will end up finding something, maybe they won't. But in the event that the investigation is closed without any charges, the right-wing will automatically insist that the decision <em>must</em> be the result of political interference by President Biden to protect his son, regardless of what the evidence says. </p>
<h3>Russian Disinformation</h3>
<p class="initial">Here's the thing: the propaganda effort to cast Hunter Biden as a wildly corrupt criminal agent has <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/19/hunter-biden-story-russian-disinfo-430276">every sign of a classic Russian disinformation campaign</a>, amplified and abetted by American far-right propagandists.</p>
<p>In this recurring model, Russian spies hack into or manufacture foreign data sets (like the DNC emails in 2016, Emmanuel Macron's emails in 2017, or the infamous laptop purported to be Hunter Biden's in 2020) and then generate a cloud of vague but sinister-sounding allegations based loosely on the contents of those data systems - which they know 99.9% of people will never independently read and verify. </p>
<p>To this day, you can say "Podesta emails" to a group of American conservatives and they will nod their heads knowingly - but either won't be able to articulate precisely what they mean by it or will refer vaguely to Pizzagate and the QAnon conspiracy cult that grew out of it.</p>
<p>American conspiracy theorists take this Russian disinformation and run with it, amplifying, circulating and spreading the allegations widely. They introduce the allegations into the right-wing media ecosystem through <a href="/article/3593/how_right-wing_radicals_are_gaslighting_liberal_democracy">extremism-laundering</a> intermediaries like Breitbart, Newsmax and OAN. </p>
<p>It then gets picked up by more 'legitimate' agencies like FOX News, whose on-air personalities boost the allegations and whose 'straight news' journalists generate further noise by reporting the fact that politicians and pundits are talking about the allegations.</p>
<p>This is technically "reporting" in the sense that the politicians and pundits did say the things being reported, but it's also extremely self-referential and incestuous. It's getting a baseless allegation into the public consciousness by convincing people to talk about it and then reporting the fact that people are talking about it.</p>
<p>Voila - a pure fabrication is transformed into a news story and people who have no idea where it originated are left with an emotionally resonant sense that the most nefarious corruption must be going on.</p>
<h3>Common Belief in Shared Reality</h3>
<p class="initial">Those mainstream journalists who refuse to take the bait blindly and instead actually investigate the claims are then accused of protecting the targets of the conspiracy theories by 'suppressing' the propaganda. That, in turn, further erodes the trust of people who get their news from the right-wing propaganda outfits.</p>
<p>It's an insidious, corrosive strategy that has already fractured the common belief in a shared reality between the centre and the right in the American (and Canadian, and European) public. But it is a con - indeed, it's a classic con in the vein of the fascist propaganda organs of the 1930s.</p>
<p>The mainstream media dug into the Hunter Laptop story and <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/here-s-what-happened-when-nbc-news-tried-report-alleged-n1245533">could not corroborate</a> any of the right-wing claims being made about it. But they were able to identify lots of direct linkages between the people promoting the story - like Rudy Giuliani - and the Russian spies who manufactured it.</p>
<p>Of course, the mainstream media's refusal to validate Trump's effort to smear his opponent just became more grist for the mill, with Trump and his proxies insisting that the media were trying to protect Biden and couldn't be trusted. That had the effect of further insulating Trump's base against any and all evidence that contradicted Trump's propaganda.</p>
<h3>The Big Lie</h3>
<p class="initial">The thing is, it's a lie. It's all a lie. In fact, it is a Big Lie in precisely the vein of the charismatic 20th-century fascists. I think we're at the point in recent events where we can fairly make comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis, so I will direct you to a report on Hitler by the US Office of Strategic Services in 1943. Here's <a href="https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hitler-psychological-profile/">an excerpt</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yes, this is also a perfect description of Trump, his enablers and proxies, and their relentless media assault on the American public.</p>
<p>The consumers of right-wing propaganda are being systematically lied to, in a specifically fascist way that is radicalizing them to accept dangerous fascist propaganda while also being inoculated against all contrary evidence that might dispel the propaganda.</p>
<p>The swirl of lies about Biden serves to cement the pervasive feeling that Biden is so corrupt that he would do anything to gain power - like steal an election.</p>
<h3>Trump's Big Lie</h3>
<p class="initial">In Trump's second impeachment trial, his lawyers tried to argue that Trump was no worse than Democrats who have also said variations on "We need to fight" in their speeches, but that that's a ridiculously fatuous argument. All politicians talk about "fighting" for their principles and policies. </p>
<p>Trump's crime was not saying "fight". His crime was spending six solid months systematically convincing his base of the Big Lie that there was a massive conspiracy of classic fascist bogeymen (liberals, globalists, foreigners) to rig the election and steal it from him, and that the only way to stop this from happening was for "real Americans" to march into the Capital and physically "stop the steal". </p>
<p>It was always an outrageous lie. But that's how the Big Lie works. And Trump, his goons and propagandists, and his media enablers in the right-wing echo chamber kept repeating the Big Lie over and over again until the base was whipped into a murderous frenzy. </p>
<p>This is <em>exactly</em> how fascist movements operate. It is classic textbook fascism, every single step of it - the cult of personality, anti-mainstream disinformation, accusations of "fake news" while peddling actual fake news, paranoid conspiracy theories, false allegations of 'rigged' elections, promotion of paramilitary terrorist groups (like telling the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by"), accusing everyone who stood up to him of being a traitor, and instigating a violent putsch when the system persevered through his efforts to undermine and sabotage it. </p>
<p>Trump's fascist overthrow failed, in part because American democratic values remain entrenched (a few key Republicans, like Georgia Attorney General Brad Raffensperger, ultimately chose their country over their party) and in part because Trump himself is lazy and incompetent and surrounded himself with sycophantic idiots like Rudy Giuliani.</p>
<p>But he opened a door, and it's only a matter of time until a smart, motivated, charismatic fascist strides confidently through it. </p>
<h3>Mainstream Radicalization</h3>
<p class="initial">As I keep trying to argue, this isn't just a far-right fringe problem. Three-quarters of Republicans believe the fascist lie that Biden stole the election. They believe the current president is illegitimate. </p>
<p>Let us be completely clear on what that means: three-quarters of the members of one of America's two major parties have already been radicalized into the outrageous false belief that there was a massive conspiracy to rig the election for Biden by manufacturing millions of fraudulent votes, and that the conspiracy includes Democratic leadership (obviously), thousands of poll workers across several states, all the major news media (including Fox News), plus key Republican governors and secretaries of state and Republican federal judges.</p>
<p>A <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/02/10/most-republicans-see-democrats-not-political-opponents-enemies/">poll came out recently</a> finding that most Democrats still regard Republicans as "political opponents", whereas most Republicans now regard Democrats as "enemies". </p>
<p>Again, this is not just a matter of political disagreement. Believing that entire categories of your fellow citizens are "enemies" rather than just opponents is the very foundation for fascism. And sooner or later, a smart, motivated, charismatic fascist will seize the reins of that fascist movement and use it to drive a hole right through the republic.</p>
<h3>It's Happening in Canada</h3>
<p class="initial">It's happening here in Canada as well. Canadian Conservatives are not nearly as blatantly extremist as American Republicans - so far. But the conservative base in Canada is subject to the same media propaganda as its American counterpart, and the leadership's pandering to that base is trending in the same direction by trading in the same inflammatory, radicalizing language. </p>
<p>Just as in America, our conservative party is <a href="/article/3621/right-wing_politicians_are_encouraging_stochastic_terrorism" >actively engaging</a> the people who are being radicalized by right-wing media. It's no accident that O'Toole called his policy platform, "Our Country: A Call to Take Back Canada".</p>
<p>Who, exactly, "took" Canada? And who gets to be counted among the people taking it back? </p>
<p>O'Toole's fundraising efforts rail against "vandals and left-wing agitators" who are "defac[ing]" the "statues to Canadian heroes and national builders." He hails "our proud traditions" and promises to "stand up to left-wing mobs". </p>
<p>Last May, Erin O'Toole pushed out a fundraising appeal with inflammatory language: "help to send Justin Trudeau a strong message that we're coming for him!"</p>
<p>His tagline, cribbed directly from Donald Trump's xenophobic nationalism, is "Canada first". </p>
<p>The Conservative Party even went so far as to accuse Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of "rigging" the election against Conservatives. (They took the page down after the January 6 Capitol insurrection.)</p>
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/cpc_trudeau_rigged.png" alt="Screenshot from Conservative Party of Canada website" title="Screenshot from Conservative Party of Canada website"><br>
Screenshot from Conservative Party of Canada website</p>
<h3>Pandering to Right-Wing Extremists</h3>
<p class="initial">O'Toole knows exactly what he's doing. He is appealing directly to Canada's version of Trump's MAGA base.</p>
<p>He's appealing to the people who get their information from Rebel Media and The Post Millennial and The Sun and other unabashedly right-wing propaganda organs pushing a paranoid, conspiratorial worldview of grievance and dwindling privilege.</p>
<p>He is speaking to white nationalist grievance when he <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/7524370/otoole-residential-schools-eduction-horrible/">awkwardly tries to defend residential schools</a> and their program of cultural genocide against Indigenous Peoples.</p>
<p>That's why he defends the "heritage" of genocidal colonialism while sparing not a word for the systemic racism, institutionalized violence and generational trauma that underwrote those "proud traditions" he promises to stand up for while "taking back" the country.</p>
<p>O'Toole's pandering is more subtle than, say, Derek Sloan's, but is all the more effective for that. When Sloan <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/tam-sloan-china-caucus-apology-ontario-1.5550103">openly attacked</a> the patriotism of Canada's chief public health officer, the party shrugged and mostly remained silent.</p>
<p>O'Toole certainly didn't go directly after Dr. Tam. He doesn't have to. He relentlessly goes after "the Chinese regime" instead, as part of his "Canada First" messaging, which directly echoes Trump's racist "America First" rhetoric. He knows his base will connect the dots for him.</p>
<p>Sloan became a bigger problem for the Conservative Party after the Capitol riot, and the party quickly <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/white-nationalist-donation-derek-sloan-1.5878070">found a pretext</a> - accepting a donation from a notorious white supremacist - to <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/7588477/derek-sloan-conservative-caucus-membership-vote/">oust him from the caucus</a>. But they did so without ever acknowledging that they've been playing the same game, albeit more carefully.</p>
<h3>Normalization of Extremism</h3>
<p class="initial">This stuff matters. It has real-world consequences. Principled conservatives need to speak up before it's too late - you are in serious danger of losing your entire political movement to fascist radical extremists. </p>
<p>I swear I am not engaging in hyperbole here. As Jason Stanley explains in his book "How Fascism Works", the incremental normalization of fascist acts means that warnings about a fascist movement will <em>always</em> come across as an overreaction:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"What normalization does is transform the morally extraordinary into the ordinary. It makes us able to tolerate what was once intolerable by making it seem as if this is the way things have always been. By contrast, the word 'fascist' has acquired a feeling of the extreme, like crying wolf. </p>
<p>"Normalization of fascist ideology, by definition, would make charges of 'fascism' seem like an overreaction, even in societies whose norms are transforming along these worrisome lines. Normalization means precisely that encroaching ideologically extreme conditions are not recognized as such because they have come to seem normal. </p>
<p>"The charge of fascism will always seem extreme; normalization means that the goalposts for the legitimate use of 'extreme' terminology continually move."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Trump spent four years subjecting his base to a steadily-escalating series of obedience tests. Nearly all of them stayed for the entire ride and continue to support him. Again and again, over the past four years, we have watched prominent Republicans stand up and defend practices - like systematically treating every refugee as a criminal and cruelly separating children from their parents - that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier.</p>
<p>The fact that Biden's victory was allowed to be confirmed is an encouraging sign that the system is still holding, but Trump's base is not going away. It still controls the Republican Party - either directly through unhinged proxies like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, or indirectly through calculating hypocrites like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, who understand that to reject Trumpism is to risk getting primaried.</p>
<p>We remain in very dangerous times, and the right-wing media ecosystem, if anything, is becoming <em>more</em> radical. FOX News's audience, primed for Trumpism through decades of fearmongering, is bleeding over to more extremist outfits like OAN and Newsmax that are even more shameless in their propagandizing. The worldview gulf between the right and everyone else is only going to keep getting wider. </p>
<p>And there are already smart, motivated, hardworking fascists waiting in the wings to seize the base and leverage it for their own ambitions. What the Republican Senate's decision to absolve Trump of his insurrection (notwithstanding just seven members who broke with their party) tells the next generation of fascists is that they absolutely will be allowed to get away with it.</p>
Ryan McGreal http://raisethehammer.org/authors/1/ryan_mcgreal2http://raisethehammer.org/article/38022021-02-16T12:00:00-05:002021-02-16T12:00:00-05:00Municipalities Need to Unite against Ford's Firehose of Land Use Changes
<p class="initial">Hamilton Community Energy and Emissions Plan (CEEP) consultant <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=129088849041177&ref=watch_permalink">Yuill Herbert explains</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>"The most powerful mechanism municipalities have is land use planning. Land use planning locks in patterns of a lot of emissions or patterns of very little emissions." </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Hebert's bold statement should be informing Hamilton's growth plan. Unfortunately, the province's Land Use Growth Plan for Hamilton is ready to go in April 2021, while the CEEP is only going through preliminary stages.</p>
<p>The City of Hamilton needs to hear the advice of the final report of the CEEP consultant before submitting to any provincial Land Use Growth Plan: and the public needs an opportunity to give in-person input. </p>
<p>Right now, some in our community lack internet resources to participate in City and Regional Zoom meetings. Instead of rushing through its plan, the province should be asked to wait until COVID restrictions lapse.</p>
<p class="initial">In 2019, Ford's government made many changes to land use planning through a variety of provincial statutes and policy documents (A Place to Grow), and, most notably the changes to Conservation Authorities and MZOs."</p>
<p>Essentially Ford's government has watered down smart growth intensification plans favouring, instead, a profit-driven sprawl approach. As Councillor Jane Fogal of Halton Hills says, "It is death by a thousand cuts, all sanctioned by the provincial government that only sees the economic value of buildings." </p>
<p>With the Ford approach, cities and towns will encroach beyond their boundaries, and be allowed to develop single home suburbs on large lots 1970s style.</p>
<p>While Land Use planning may seem like an unlikely lever of climate impact, land use plans represent a way to preserve our environment and save our fragile, indispensable farmland. Why do the new changes to land policy seem to contest the sound, reasoned, existing smart intensification goal targets?</p>
<p class="initial">How can we plan population and economic plans for a distant future without adequate farmland? Why are we using mid-century, car driven, laissez faire plans to get us there?</p>
<p>Hamilton needs to follow the lead of Halton Hills Council. In a motion passed on February 1, Halton Council is requesting more time from the province to consult and engage residents regarding the Growth Plan. </p>
<p>Despite restrictions from the pandemic, public consultations are absolutely necessary: the Ford land use plan will lock in decisions until 2051. </p>
<p>Farmland is not being considered as the resource it represents for the province. In fact, these farmland properties are treated in these documents as 'empty lots' without the consideration that less than five percent of Ontario land is actually arable. </p>
<p>With the Ford approach, Class 1, 2, and 3 farmland could be destroyed permanently. Much of the best farmland in Canada is right here in Southern Ontario. Why allow low-density sprawl to eradicate one of our most precious resources, arable land? </p>
<p>Already, 179 hectares of agricultural land in Ontario are lost daily to urban growth (OFA). De-regulation of land use by Ford "will accelerate agricultural land losses across the Growth Plan area, hamstringing Ontario's productive agri-food sector." (OFA.) </p>
<p class="initial">Fixed urban boundaries, and re-establishment of smart growth intensification can protect finite and shrinking agricultural land resources. But these reasonable ideas are lacking in the Ford government's fire hose of recent policy changes. </p>
<p>As Lynda Lukasik of Environment Hamilton <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/conservation-authorities-1.5880448">has said</a>, "We don't have time to be messing around with this ridiculous sort of undoing of good policy changes that have been built up over multiple years."</p>
<p>Our cities need vital investments in our downtown and urban areas. As London, Ont. (pop. 410,000)'s <a href="https://london.ca/sites/default/files/2020-11/The-London-Plan-Policies-Effect-Nov18-2019_0.pdf">municipal plan states</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>"A very compact form of growth could save billions of dollars in infrastructure costs and tens of millions of dollars in annual operating costs compared with a highly spread-out form of the same growth over the next 50 years." </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Rural low-density sprawl costs more as Emergency and Community services, utilities and roads needed to be added to an ever-expanding city footprint. Do Hamilton City Councillors really want our taxpayers to subsidize low-density future growth which will increase pollution, car commute times, impact our emissions and pave over farmland? Who really benefits from low-density sprawl? </p>
<p class="initial">The <a href="https://pub-haltonhills.escribemeetings.com/filestream.ashx?DocumentId=9578">courageous motion by Halton's Jane Fogal</a> needs to be replicated by all of the municipalities in the Greater Golden Horseshoe. Councils in the region must band together against this assault on farmland and climate targets. </p>
<p>The province should suspend the timetable for municipal conformity to the Growth Plan to ensure that the public can fully participate in the process of planning their communities for the next 30 years of growth.</p>
<p>Solidarity amongst our municipalities is necessary to protect our farmland, soils, and to have any hope to reduce emissions.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"Humans, despite all their accomplishments, owe their entire existence to six inches of topsoil and the fact that it rains."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>--Middlesex Federation of Agriculture Message Board</p>
Michelle Silverton http://raisethehammer.org/authors/572/michelle_silverton2http://raisethehammer.org/blog/31902019-08-16T12:00:00-05:002019-08-16T12:00:00-05:00Leila Live!
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/fringe_2019_leila_live.jpg" alt="" title=""><br>
</p>
<ul>
<li>Cast: Leila</li>
<li>Playwright: Leila</li>
<li>Director: Leila's Mother</li>
<li>Designer: Leila</li>
<li>Show Type: Comedy</li>
<li>Audience: Parental Guidance</li>
<li>Running Time: 60 minutes</li>
<li>URL: <a href="http://hamiltonfringe.ca/shows/leila-live/">http://hamiltonfringe.ca/shows/leila-live/</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Izad Etemadi has been bringing his Persian Princess character named Leila to Hamilton Fringe stages for five years now, and for five years audiences have been falling in love with her.</p>
<p>As someone who first met Leila (and Izad) five years ago, it was fun to watch the people in the audience who had never seen her before discover the joy that comes from watching Leila work an audience. Though I have seen Leila's shows before, it never gets boring. Izad finds ways to keep Leila fresh and interesting, while keeping that which is familiar and endearing. </p>
<p>This performance by Leila is a one woman cabaret with singing, dancing, stand up, monologue, tableaux, and cultural exchange moments where Leila shares interesting aspects of Persian culture. Leila self-identifies as a Persian princess from a working class family. This show has a little bit of food, some voluntary audience participation, a lot of laughs and a whole lot of heart.</p>
<p>Leila is a delight to watch and Izad is a pleasure to know. Unfortunately, this year The Cotton Factory only runs shows from Thursday to Sunday the first week of Fringe. But keep an eye out and your heart open for the next chance you get to see Leila and/or Izad as their love for Hamilton keeps them coming back.</p>
Marianne Daly http://raisethehammer.org/authors/422/marianne_daly2http://raisethehammer.org/blog/31892019-08-06T12:00:00-05:002019-08-06T12:00:00-05:00"Equity Rules"
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/fringe_2019_equity_rules.jpg" alt="" title=""><br>
</p>
<ul>
<li>Cast: Cortnee Pope, Joshua Perry Fleming</li>
<li>Playwright: Jason Sherman</li>
<li>Director: Brian Morton</li>
<li>Stage Manager: Larry Smith</li>
<li>Show Type: Theatre</li>
<li>Audience: Mature</li>
<li>Running Time: 17 minutes</li>
<li>URL: <a href="http://hamiltonfringe.ca/shows/equity-rules/">http://hamiltonfringe.ca/shows/equity-rules/</a></li>
</ul>
<p>This is my last review for Fringe 2019. The shows only live on in our collective memories at this point. I'm ending with "Equity Rules" </p>
<p>For those of you who don't know, "Equity Rules" is a very short play by Jason Sherman, one of the country's most lauded playwrights, written during the height of his playwriting career in the mid-1990s. The play deals with nudity in auditions, which Brian Morton claims is based on an incident where he was the casting director. (All of this is available on YouTube, including a complete version of the short play by a different production team.)</p>
<p>Morton's version of the play is done well, and the actors (Cortnee Pope, Joshua Perry Fleming), but the reason to see this play is of course that it is put on by Brian Morton, who is purportedly the inspiration for the play.</p>
<p>Is this play a sincere apology by Brian Morton for actions he took thirty years ago, or a exploitative cash grab...or both. </p>
<p>I had an email interview with Morton, and his responses are below. I've cut nothing, so feel free to read at your leisure.</p>
<p>I hope that this year's Fringe has made you laugh and cry and given you a lot to think about. It certainly has for me. Until next year...but you don't have to wait until 2020 to see powerful Hamilton theatre...</p>
<h3>Interview with Bryan Morton</h3>
<p><strong>Bryan Boodhoo (BB): Why this play now, given that it's been 30 years since the incident and more than two decades since it's been written.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Brian Morton (BM):</strong> The idea to do a production of Jason Sherman's play sprung from a conversation I had last summer with local playwright Erika Reesor at the Fringe beer tent. She told me the story of a particular moment in her life that was painful to her. She was angry that a playwright had heard a story about what happened to her and then had written it up as a stage play. She felt ownership of the story, and that no one else should be able to tell that particular story except her. (I won't describe the details of what she told me, as that is her story to share or not share publicly).</p>
<p>I countered with the story of "Equity Rules" and a quick version of what happened back in July of 1989. So we had that in common that both of us had some part of our lives turned into a play by someone else.</p>
<p>I had a full length project that I wanted to do for the 2019 Fringe but we did not get past the lottery. There was still the opportunity to get a 20 minute slot, so I applied and got in.</p>
<p>I had just finished a short play that pilloried Doug Ford for HamilTEN that was my "plan B" for the slot, but in the end, it took just a few days to get the performing rights to Jason Sherman's play. Also, I feel a certain resonance about anniversaries. For thirty years people have been telling a version of the events of July 1989, often a very inaccurate version of those events. I thought it was time to publicly acknowledge what had happened and make some amends for it.</p>
<p><strong>BB: Is there anyone to corroborate that the play is actually about your actions, given that you do not have a relationship with the playwright?</strong></p>
<p><strong>BM:</strong> As I keep saying, "I believe" that the incident at Theatre Terra Nova in July 1989 is the real life inspiration behind Jason Sherman's play. But as Sherman and I have never had a conversation about it, I can never know for sure.</p>
<p>I asked him, through his agent, to write me a short program note, and this is what was sent to me.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Many years ago a friend of mine told me about a recent audition experience of hers: she had been asked by a director to prove her mettle for a particular role by exposing her breasts. My friend declined the invitation, pointing out that there were union rules around such things, and that asking her to remove her shirt and bra on the spot (and with only her and the director in the room) ran counter to those rules. Rumours soon began to circulate that the director was at it again, only this time with non-union women, to whom the written code of conduct did not apply. I wrote the play, in one outrage-fuelled session. It came out whole cloth, and I haven't changed a word since. Sadly, I haven't needed to. </p>
<ul>
<li>Jason Sherman</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p>From what he wrote, I can only assume that his friend was one of the seven women, or three men, who were part of the callbacks for "Unidentified Human Remains", in late July of 1989.</p>
<p>Another reason why I believe that I am the real life inspiration behind the play has to do with my production of Marlene Meyer's play "Etta Jenks", on the stage of the Tarragon MainStage in June of 1993.</p>
<p>Jason Sherman was the playwright in residence at the Tarragon, at the time. I was in and out of the building for three and a half weeks and always thought it likely that someone told the story to him at the time.</p>
<p>Also, "Etta Jenks," a feminist play about pornography, was sexually explicit, and we went to great lengths to cast it correctly, and without a repeat of the mistakes that I had made back in 1989. The one thing that I have never, ever repeated was asking anyone to disrobe as part of an audition for a play.</p>
<p>I now think it grossly unfair to ever ask someone to do that, unless you have actually cast them in the play. I do not like holding auditions in general, and prefer to just reach out to actors that I know and have worked with before or actors that I have seen in a production that I liked. Being a local drama critic means that I get to see quite a few productions every year.</p>
<p>In fact, to this day I still put "No one will ever be asked to disrobe as part of the auction process" on the bottom of every audition questionnaire for plays that I direct. Despite this, actors often come in to audition for me with a great deal of trepidation.</p>
<p>The Globe and Mail published an article in June 1993 about Nudity in the theatre as a trend. Both Sky Gilbert and I were interviewed for the that article. There are a few references in Sherman's play, that seem, to me anyway, to be sourced from that article.</p>
<p>Finally, there is the timing of the play. It debuts as part of the Tarragon Spring Arts Fair in March 1994 as an "office play" performed in Andy McKim's office. That is nine months from when I had been working in the Tarragon Space. I did not see it, although Trevor Copp mentioned that he had attended that production in 1994. That cast ended up being a part of a short film adaptation of the play that Sherman directed for BRAVO a few years later. It is up on youtube if you want to see it. It is much shorter then the stage version, which I think magnifies its impact, when you watch it.</p>
<p><a href="https://youtu.be/rgQi-BIImbU">Here is a Youtube link to the video.</a></p>
<p>I first encountered the play when it was remounted as part of the 1999 Summerworks Festival in Toronto. There was a preview about it in NOW Magazine and I was shocked to discover that it seemed to be retelling the story. I saw the play, which was performed at the Tarragon Extra Space. I sat in the third row and basically had a mild heart-attack while watching it.</p>
<p>But all of these years later, if someone was going to write a play about a painful moment in my own life, then I am grateful that the writer was someone as talented as Jason Sherman is. There are many layers to the script, and while it does eventually come down on one side of the issue, it presents more than one point of view on the scenario.</p>
<p>Why should we do Canadian plays from twenty five years ago? Hopefully, because the still have something to say about the present day. I was the artistic director of a theatre, that only did the work of Canadian playwrights. I have read a huge number of scripts by Canadian writers, particularly those who were active in the 1970s and 1980s. Thos[e] plays are rarely staged anymore, which I think is a real loss.</p>
<p><strong>BB: How did you get the rights to this play, given that you are the real life inspiration for the villain character?</strong></p>
<p><strong>BM:</strong> I got the rights to the play the same way that anyone else would get the rights to it. By emailing the author's agent and presenting a production proposal listing the number of performances, the specific dates, the seating capacity of the venue, and the proposed ticket price. That leads to "a quote" for what it would cost, which I accepted, and then you write them a cheque. You sign a contract that details billing and what must go in the program. </p>
<p>I am legally obligated to always include Jason Sherman's name next to the title of the play - i.e. "Equity Rules" by Jason Sherman. There is a $500 penalty if I fail to do that. I also cannot make any changes to the official text of the play. So what I presented, as part of the Fringe, is Sherman's version of what happened, which in the end is a work of fiction.</p>
<p>The decision to "out" myself, as the "asshole" director in the play came much later, when we started promoting the production and I recorded a video for the CBC. I was hesitant about playing the role of "Bill" myself, although I toyed with the idea for a bit. In the end, I think it was a much better idea to give the opportunity to Joshua, who did a lovely performance of it.</p>
<p><a href="https://youtu.be/-iuP_1RJLz4">YouTube link here.</a></p>
<p>That script for the video then became the core of the 90 second commercial at the Fringe launch. I also talked at length with Carissa and David on the Notapom Podcast about this. I have made the decision to be as honest as I can, about all of this, although it is not easy for me, and at times I have gotten quite emotionally overwhelmed while doing it.</p>
<p><strong>BB: How does the fact that you're staging this play make things better for women in the industry?</strong></p>
<p><strong>BM:</strong> I think is a valuable play for women in the industry to see, as it allows you to ask yourself what would you do in that particular situation. Also, as since the Harvey Weinstein scandal last year, there was been a very important conversations going on about male privilege and the control of casting authority in the industry by men. There are relatively fewer female directors, particularly in the film industry. Anytime you deal with projects that involved nudity or sexuality, these conversations about what is and what is not acceptable come up.</p>
<p>ACTRA puts out a "<a href="https://www.actra.ca/resources/nudity-survival-guide/">survival guide to Nudity</a>" for its members. As a film is a permanent record, it is perhaps more vital that people have knowledge of what to expect.</p>
<p><strong>BB: Why should you ultimately be rewarded with ticket sales, if indeed you were the impetus for the play?</strong></p>
<p><strong>BM:</strong> I am the easiest person in the world to get a comp out of, so believe me, this project was not about making money. We were the very first company to share an artist password to the closed Fringe productions group, as I wanted people to see the work.</p>
<p>I suspected that certain members of the theatre community would choose not to attend the production, and I found them to be the exact same people who did not attend "UNDER THE APPLE TREE" last year up at the Zoetic.</p>
<p>We were the second highest grossing production in the Hamilton Fringe festival in 2018; only B!TCH ISLAND outsold us, and there are no prizes for second place.</p>
<p>I have some insight, as a result of these experiences, of how poorly actors can get treated. The play is a "cautionary tale", a warning, if you like.</p>
<p>None of the six productions in the Tourism Hamilton space, an all-new venue for the Hamilton Fringe, did very well. MY BREAST SELF, which won best in Venue, and Mark McNeil's HAMILTON FOR BEGINNERS, based upon anecdotal evidence, did the best. But I think all of us played to smaller houses than we would have liked.</p>
<p>I brought in my own sound, lighting and curtains to make the space more theatrical to perform in. I think it helped the other productions in the space.</p>
<p>I put the lack of audience down to a few factors. So I did not think that anyone objected to the content of the play itself.</p>
<p>There were 58 shows in the festival in 2019 - so there was lots of competition for an audience. Also the Fringe raised the prices on the mini-series shows to $9, from last years $8. I am Scottish, by cultural background. So if a regular hour long show is $12, then a 20 minute one should be $4, in my mind.</p>
<p>I know the Fringe organization just wants to help artists make money, but in this case, I think that it may have pushed people away from these smaller shows. I would like to see an $18 one day mini-series pass that gets you into all of the shows in a single performance day.</p>
<p>I have not seen a final box office talley for the show, but I know that it did not meet its production expenses. There was a small loss ($300?) in producing it.</p>
<p>My best guess at this point is that 75 people saw "Equity Rules", an average of about 10 people per show. I will contrast that with just a single performance of "UNDER THE APPLE TREE" last summer that had 185 people in the seats.</p>
<p><strong>BB: Did you consider donating the profits from the show?</strong></p>
<p><strong>BM:</strong> Again there must be a profit in order to donate it to anyone. Had there been any profit, it would have gone to my two actors. I am so grateful to Cortnee and Joshua for taking on this project, I literally could not have done it without them.</p>
Bryan Boodhoo http://raisethehammer.org/authors/506/bryan_boodhoo2http://raisethehammer.org/blog/31882019-08-06T12:00:00-05:002019-08-06T12:00:00-05:00Clit Wit! A Feminist Rude Awakening / Shoddy Feminist
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/fringe_2019_clit_wit.jpg" alt="" title=""><br></p>
<ul>
<li>Cast: Colette Kendall</li>
<li>Performer/Playwright: Colette Kendall</li>
<li>Show Type: Comedy</li>
<li>Audience: Parental Guidance</li>
<li>Running Time: 60 minutes</li>
<li>URL: <a href="http://hamiltonfringe.ca/shows/clit-wit/">http://hamiltonfringe.ca/shows/clit-wit/</a></li>
</ul>
<p>If you've never seen a show by Colette Kendall, the steady hand behind the Staircase Theatre, among other things, you may be in for quite a shock. There are graphic descriptions of sex, and not just regular sex - it's pretty inventive intercourse, on the raunchy scale close to John Waters, Sky Gilbert or Margaret Cho. </p>
<p>But really, did you expect to bring your children to a show called "Clit Wit!"? </p>
<p>Kendall is a master storyteller, who has developed her comic timing by countless shows on the fringe circuit and beyond. Her experience shows and she's able to keep the pace moving along very well. She uses multimedia very well. It never feels like a power point presentation, but rather the screen is used to enhance the acting, and probably give Kendall a few seconds of rest in-between scenes.</p>
<p>There's more to the show than just being funny. Kendall connects to her childhood and what it was like to grow up as a white female in Ontario. And, yes, she acknowledges both her disadvantage as a female and her privilege compared to other marginalized groups.</p>
<p>I was most impressed by the way Kendall balances a lot of different forces, thoughts about gender, comedy, and personal history, just to name a few. This is not an easy task, and it's well done. With fringe over, you've missed your opportunity to find this show at the festival, but if it's anything like her previous shows, then you should keep an eye out for it when it comes back.</p>
Bryan Boodhoo http://raisethehammer.org/authors/506/bryan_boodhoo2http://raisethehammer.org/blog/31872019-08-06T12:00:00-05:002019-08-06T12:00:00-05:00Back Home
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/fringe_2019_back_home.jpg" alt="" title=""><br>
</p>
<ul>
<li>Playwright/Director: Tien Providence</li>
<li>Producer: Malinda Francis</li>
<li>Cast: Jennah Foster Catlack and Dayjan Lesmond</li>
<li>Show Type: Theatre</li>
<li>Audience: All Ages</li>
<li>Running Time: 58 min</li>
<li>URL: <a href="http://hamiltonfringe.ca/shows/back-home/">http://hamiltonfringe.ca/shows/back-home/</a></li>
</ul>
<p>I saw this show on the last day of the Fringe, and there were a handful of people in the audience. The show was well done and deserved a better audience, but there were a lot of reasons it didn't get it.</p>
<p>The play itself is about an alcoholic father who has lost custody of his child and we watch his life slowly unwind. This isn't exactly light summer fare. </p>
<p>The play is well written and competently directed by Tien Providence, and the acting is well done by both Dayjan Lesmond playing Forbes the father and Jennah Foster Catlack playing the daughter, Keenya, and the Judge. However, Lesmond's concentration on his accent seemed at points to get in the way of his acting. Also, given that Lesmond and Catlack are close in age, it was harder to believe that they were father and daughter, especially given that Catlack was playing a fourteen-year old girl.</p>
<p>What sets this play apart is that it's a Caribbean story. And it's the first time I've ever seen a Caribbean play at the Fringe, which is particularly important to me being of Caribbean descent. This is the most important thing to know about this play, so why am I writing about it in the fourth paragraph of my review? </p>
<p>Why am I burying the lead? Quite simple, because this theatre company did just that. The only clue that this play is from the Caribbean or deals with Caribbean issues is the picture of dominos as their Fringe image and perhaps the names of the characters in the description (and that's a big assumption one would have to make). The description of the play states the following: "She watched as He misquotes Shakespeare in a staggering, stuttering ode to love and remembers his drunken behaviour in family court." Although this did happen, this isn't really the reason why you would see this show.</p>
<p>The play itself has been around since 1997, although I had to dig for that fact on <a href="https://thingsfallingapartevents.wordpress.com/">the company's website</a>. I'm not sure what the theatre company's connection is to Hamilton (their website states that they "are looking to populate the stages of Toronto Theatres"), but it could undoubtably be strengthened. I certainly am not the only person in Hamilton of Caribbean descent craving to see that content on stage.</p>
<p>In the end, the play seemed rushed to production, with one of the leads not even appearing on the Fringe's website, and no unifying brand for the show. </p>
<p>If there's one lesson that Fringe teaches us it's that producing a piece of theatre isn't just about getting actors to learn their lines and act, getting the script down and getting all the lighting clues - although those things are fundamental - it's also about finding your audience, sometimes one body at a time. </p>
<p>If that seems like too much to ask, consider the alternative, which is having worked quite a bit on the technical aspects of the show, only to have a handful of people in the audience for closing. No doubt the actors and other theatre creators were a little dismayed. I've been there; I've felt it.</p>
<p>There's always next year...but there's always a next year. I hope that Things Fall Apart theatre manages to connect to its audience so that at some point next year becomes this year.</p>
Bryan Boodhoo http://raisethehammer.org/authors/506/bryan_boodhoo2http://raisethehammer.org/blog/31862019-08-06T12:00:00-05:002019-08-06T12:00:00-05:00THE EASTER BUNNY
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/fringe_2019_easter_bunny.jpg" alt="" title=""><br>
</p>
<ul>
<li>Show Type: Theatre</li>
<li>Audience: Mature</li>
<li>Running Time: 60 minutes</li>
<li>URL: <a href="http://hamiltonfringe.ca/shows/easter-bunny/">http://hamiltonfringe.ca/shows/easter-bunny/</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Admittedly, I expected to hate this play. Now Magazine gave this show <a href="https://nowtoronto.com/stage/theatre/fringe-review-the-easter-bunny/">one N out of five</a> when it was at the Toronto Fringe last year, and Tommy Jeff McAteer's previous play "Headless/The Play" was called a "mess" by My Entertainment World and <a href="https://www.myentertainmentworld.ca/2015/07/toronto-fringe-15-part-x/">given an "F"</a>.</p>
<p>I wasn't just worried about the quality of the play, but also its content. The play is billed as allowing the audience to "share in the inner thoughts of serial sexual predator". Additionally, McAteer did not attach his name to the show at Hamilton Fringe. Nor is anyone else attached to the show, other than the nameless Marbles Theatre. I braced myself for what I thought would be a misogynistic rant. </p>
<p>I planned to write about the question of whether this show was so "bad" that it shouldn't be at the Fringe. (And the answer is yes, McAteer deserves to be there, like any other theatre artists who puts their sweat and money on the line to make theatre). However, that's not what this review is about.</p>
<p>Why? Because the misogynistic rant I was expecting didn't come. In fact, from the beginning McAteer acknowledges the nature of his show and its ability to re-victimize people, and he goes out of his way not to exploit the victims. Additionally, through the show and the program, McAteer addresses a number of academic resources about sexual assault.</p>
<p>McAteer has something to say, but here's the problem: the show is so convoluted it's hard to determine exactly what that is. Added to that, there are times when McAteer seems to be on a journey and the audience is not following him. </p>
<p>Case in point, McAteer brings three knifes on stage with different neon coloured handles. He takes turns yielding each of them and waving them at the audience in a very excited way. I was much too concerned with my personal safety from a potentially flying knife to pay attention to what McAteer was saying. By the end of the show, it was never explained why there were three knifes on stage, as opposed to the more obvious choice of just one. </p>
<p>There are many more examples of this, but needless to say, McAteer would benefit from the help of a quality dramaturg and director, if he continues to create theatre. With the number of academic references in his program, I was left to wonder if McAteer was looking for an intellectual conversation about the topic of sexual predators rather than putting on a theatre show. Theatre, at its heart, is supposed to make you feel and McAteer appears to be well aware of the injustice of making his audience feel like it's the victim of a sexual predator.</p>
<p>Fringe isn't always about ticket sales and awards. It's supposed to be a sandbox to allow theatre creators to grow, and to this end, the measure of success may be what an artists has learned over the course of the Fringe. Although THE EASTER BUNNY is confusing, and has a large number of technical flaws, there's a lot to think about and learn from this piece from everyone involved. </p>
Bryan Boodhoo http://raisethehammer.org/authors/506/bryan_boodhoo2http://raisethehammer.org/blog/31852019-08-06T12:00:00-05:002019-08-06T12:00:00-05:00My Breast Self
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/fringe_2019_my_breast_self.jpg" alt="" title=""><br>
</p>
<ul>
<li>Cast: Emanuela Hall</li>
<li>Sophie: Emanuela Hall</li>
<li>Playwright/Director: Emanuela Hall</li>
<li>Show Type: Theatre</li>
<li>Audience: Parental Guidance</li>
<li>Running Time: 15 minutes</li>
<li>URL: <a href="http://hamiltonfringe.ca/shows/my-breast-self/">http://hamiltonfringe.ca/shows/my-breast-self/</a></li>
</ul>
<p>I saw a version of My Breast Self earlier this year at the HamilTEN festival. It was powerful then, but it did seem to get a little lost in that festival, sharing the stage with a number of shows that had very different tones.</p>
<p>Since then Emanuela Hall, as triple threat actor/writer/director, has expanded the play a little and pulled her own audience. When I saw the show, the house was packed, and she did go on to win best of venue at the Fringe, meaning she sold more tickets to a gallery show than anyone else.</p>
<p>The story itself is a self-examination of breast feeding. It honest and raw, and struck a chord with many around me, who were mostly made up of people who looked like they had already been through the breast-feeding stage of parenting. Indeed, this seemed to be the target audience. Indeed, there is a demand for these stories to be told, and there are only a few shows that keep this audience in mind at the Fringe. </p>
<p>Hall's acting is very good. She has great stage presence, and the story telling always seemed authentic. We'll see what's next for Hall. She's certainly one to watch.</p>
Bryan Boodhoo http://raisethehammer.org/authors/506/bryan_boodhoo2http://raisethehammer.org/blog/31842019-08-06T12:00:00-05:002019-08-06T12:00:00-05:00Hamilton for Beginners
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/fringe_2019_hamilton_for_beginners.jpg" alt="" title=""><br></p>
<ul>
<li>Cast: Mark McNeil</li>
<li>Show Type: Comedy</li>
<li>Audience: All Ages</li>
<li>Running Time: 20 minutes</li>
<li>URL: <a href="http://hamiltonfringe.ca/shows/hamilton-for-beginners/">http://hamiltonfringe.ca/shows/hamilton-for-beginners/</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Mark McNeil came to Hamilton from Toronto in the 1990's pre-dating the current wave of Toronto emigrants. He originally moved to Hamilton for work, namely to be a report for The Hamilton Spectator. Needless to say, he's seen a lot. He also has the benefit of being both an insider and outsider to the City.</p>
<p>Through storytelling and songs with his ukulele, McNeil entertains the audience with nostalgia about Hamilton, and reminds us what a truly bizarre and beautiful place this is, be "the biggest small town on the planet".</p>
<p>Kudos must be given to McNeil for not only rendering a completely entertaining performance, but for also giving us a show that perfectly matched the format of the gallery series. At twenty minutes, this was the right about of nostalgia. Any more, I'm not sure I would have had such a sympathetic view of the ukulele. And less, and I question whether it's worth my time and money to come to this show. </p>
<p>Hamilton for Beginners is more a whimsical presentation about Hamilton, but it is very much enjoyable and worth watching. It is always nice to see our City reflected in our culture. </p>
Bryan Boodhoo http://raisethehammer.org/authors/506/bryan_boodhoo2http://raisethehammer.org/blog/31832019-08-06T12:00:00-05:002019-08-06T12:00:00-05:00Clit Wit! A Feminist Rude Awakening/Shoddy Feminist
<p class="photo">
<img src="/static/images/fringe_2019_clit_wit.jpg" alt="" title=""><br></p>
<ul>
<li>Cast: Colette Kendall</li>
<li>Performer/Playwright: Colette Kendall</li>
<li>Show Type: Comedy</li>
<li>Audience: Parental Guidance</li>
<li>Running Time: 60 minutes</li>
<li>URL: <a href="http://hamiltonfringe.ca/shows/clit-wit/">http://hamiltonfringe.ca/shows/clit-wit/</a></li>
</ul>
<p>I can't remember a time when I was not influenced by feminism. Shirley Chisholm, Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan (my Mum read The Feminine Mystique) were household names when I was graduating high school. These woman with others formed the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971 and their influence is still felt today. </p>
<p>Those of us who grew up in the "burn the bra" movement became inspired again with the recent Me too and other women's gatherings. It's like we are earnestly recovering what got us all fired up in the first place. Clit Wit embraces the ideals with a sense of realism which were not a free pass for all and failed often women of colour and the LGBTQ2S communities. </p>
<p>The main stage provides the opportunity to use the large screen and for the most part Colette uses it to an advantage. The audience moves into her active imagination on ripples of calm blue like the lapping of water on the shores. Visuals are often tricky and like using a prop or an accent, consistency becomes key. </p>
<p>Kendal delivers her memories with rapier wit, from the perils of pubescence to maternal madness. Squeezed between her mother and daughter, she claims her space in what we refer to as the sandwich generation. There is an internal dialogue here that draws on her own understanding of feminism and where it intersects with both her mother and daughter. </p>
<p>As a fledgling, her daughter is about to embark on her own life and the wisdom imparted is just as important to the Mom as it is to the grown child. The audience gets this and many of us can identify with the growing pains of fighting for our own autonomy. </p>
<p>Letting it all hang out, Colette reveals every grey hair earned and she is damn worth it, contrary to what the beauty industry has to say. Colette stands out as not only a great comedian and writer but a guiding force among women in the community. New emerging writers benefit from her mentoring and encouragement. </p>
<p>The Staircase was a showcase to "must see" acts in this years' Fringe, for which in no small part Colette is responsible. This venue was always a buzz of gathering, conversation and cold beer on a hot day. </p>
<p>Clit Wit demonstrates a woman coming to terms with a new chapter in her life, much like previous Fringe performance <a href="/blog/2886/fringe_2015_review:_the_cockwhisperer_a_love_story">The Cockwhisperer</a>, which makes one ponder what Colette has in store for her audience in the future. I want to be there. </p>
Alison Nicholson http://raisethehammer.org/authors/533/alison_nicholson2