"An essential pleasure of white liberal identity in Canada is the schadenfreude of looking down our noses when we consider what’s south of us. It’s an unearned pride that says: “We’re not like that.” It’s delusional. We are absolutely like that, with tougher gun laws and the moderating effect of the Parliamentary process—but absolutely like that. We want to say “QAnon wouldn’t find a foothold here.” and it does. We want to say “We’re a long way off from Jan 6,” but we’re not. Democracy is as fragile as the human body."An editorial piece from Matthew on a harsh awakening in the Great White Liberal North.Show Notes Land acknowledgments meant to honor Indigenous people too often do the opposite – erasing American Indians and sanitizing history instead Harsha Walia on historical continuity Ottawa police discover children living in protesters' trucks | The Star Land Acknowledgement – City of Toronto Toronto Cops Say They Did 'Tremendous Job' After Beating People, Destroying Homeless Camp Nearly $2 million spent on clearing encampments should have gone to housing, advocates say300 people trapped. 4 hours. Pouring rain. The day I was kettled by police in Toronto.'We regret that mistakes were made': Toronto police acknowledge 'unacceptable' mass arrests at 2010 G20 protestsLawsuit filed against convoy organizers, seeking damages on behalf of downtown Ottawa residents We're not Tragically Hip fans — and yes, we're Canadian
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Spiritual, um, oh, sorry, Canadian bypassing.
Hey everyone, and welcome to a Conspirituality Podcast bonus episode.
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So, it's Matthew here, coming to you from the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples, and what is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples.
Okay, having said all that, it feels a little conflicted to open with a land acknowledgement in these times.
It feels necessary on one hand because the civil unrest here, predominantly in Ottawa, has explicitly ethno-nationalist roots, as I discussed with Elizabeth Simons on Thursday's episode.
It feels a little bit meta because the Ottawa police are now openly describing the occupation that paralyzed the downtown core as an occupation, which makes it an occupation of an occupation.
It also feels bitter because the reality is that land acknowledgements from middle-class white settlers like myself are a kind of paper mache over the Canada that has always been staring at us in the face.
There's a sick feminist writer on the West Coast named Harsha Walia, and she posted the following on Twitter, and I think it's right on point.
She wrote, quote, It is possible to both be aware of how none of this is new and is, in fact, a historical continuity of Canada, and also be outraged and fearful of the blatant escalation of white supremacist, colonial, gendered, ableist, far-right fascism.
So, just for context, the land acknowledgement I just read is used by the City of Toronto.
And just this summer, as Elizabeth Simons mentioned, the city spent $2 million on the police bill for violently dismantling camps of unhoused people in Lamport Stadium and also Trinity Bellwoods Park.
They trampled people with horses.
They ripped up tents with their bare hands.
They used clubs and pepper spray.
As she put it, they beat the shit out of people.
In Lamport Stadium, there were less than 20 unhoused residents.
And the photos on Twitter that morning showed a centurion of cops showing up for duty.
It's the same land acknowledgement used by the same city of Toronto that in 2010 authorized the police services to take military-style action against mostly peaceful G20 protesters.
But also bystanders who wound up all being kettled together at Queen and Spadina for four hours in the pouring rain and then locked in cages without food or water until many of them soiled themselves.
Now, the police services has paid out about $16.5 million in class action penalties to those they traumatized that day, and that comes out to about $25,000 a piece, which is really nothing for some of the people I've heard of whose lives were completely changed that day.
Now these days, a similar land acknowledgement is used during federal proceedings in Ottawa, which is just 450 kilometres down the road from here, where several hundred mostly white protesters, if you haven't heard, have been allowed to occupy the downtown core.
To terrorize local residents, to build wooden structures, and to wheel jerrycans of diesel fuel into and out of the blockade.
This is the piece that blows my mind the most, I think.
We've seen wheelbarrows and children's sleds bringing in the cans.
We've seen an Amish guy try to bring in jerrycans on a cart pulled by four horses, but he was turned around and so he went and got a wheelbarrow.
And let me just repeat that this is in order to refuel idling rigs parked illegally, kept idling in shifts because the occupiers need warmth and they need power for their aftermarket air horns with way higher decibel counts that are leaving some residents with permanent hearing damage.
So they're wheeling the diesel in jerry cans past government buildings.
Now, by day seven, they had set up bouncy castles for the kids they brought with them.
Yeah, bouncy castles for the kids.
And on February 8th, Ottawa police counted about a hundred children living in the 419 trucks that were still blockading.
The children are effectively being used as human shields, which makes police action really difficult to conceive of, if it's even the right thing to do.
Now, Ottawa residents are also reporting shipments of paper towels, toilet paper and wet wipes coming into the occupation zone on trucks.
And then on Day 8, there was a photograph of a neatly stacked row of what looked like about 10 cords of dry firewood.
As for the noise, it's not just air horns.
There's one Twitter report from Day 7 that said that the occupiers had brought in an air siren.
Now Ottawa is full of foreign nationals and diplomatic officials who would have lived through that sound in literal war zones.
The occupiers have also brought building cranes to position porta-potties.
They've left cars in the middle of intersections without their wheels on.
They're confronting and assaulting residents who are wearing masks.
They're harassing women.
They're throwing their feces on wheelchair ramps and on the porches of houses that are flying pride flags.
I remember being taken aback by the stories of the January 6th insurrectionists smearing their shit on the walls of the Capitol in Washington.
But the Ottawa scene is less symbolic and more brutal in a way, perhaps because they haven't breached the building, so the full mask-off cruelty can land where even the January 6th insurrectionists couldn't really throw it, which was right onto the bodies of the vulnerable.
The police lost control of the situation almost immediately, perhaps from the moment they allowed the trucks to park on Wellington.
Whereas when massive pipelines are ratified without First Nations consent, and then construction begins on unceded First Nations territories, and then the people attempt to stop the construction by camping out and obstructing equipment after they've exhausted all legal remedies, they are met with extreme force.
In both cases, the fuel keeps flowing, because nothing seems to be able to stop capital.
It might sound like this take makes more capitalist sense in the pipeline scenario, whereas the guys with jerrycans are actually inhibiting commerce in the downtown core, so why is that allowed?
Because I think that beneath the policing answers or non-answers, the symbolic answer is that the jerrycanners aren't, in the long run, obstructing capital at all, but actually expressing the most logical conclusion of a hyper-individualist COVID policy that has turned the pandemic into a choose-your-own-fate and keep-your-own-vehicle-fueled game.
It's one of the clues that this general everyone-for-themselves stance that neoliberal governments have taken may be their downfall.
The occupiers say they are protesting lockdown.
But something that might be more true is that they are protesting a lockdown that has been organized like the Hunger Games, that has exposed them fully to the brutality of capitalism, and that has backed them into the typical right-wing corner of having to blame someone else.
And then, of course, they find plenty of right-wing influencers to lead them in their charge.
And, from one perspective, they are not entirely wrong.
The lockdown did, in fact, unfairly impact small businesses while the sports arenas were still up and running.
So how hard would it have been to pay everyone adequately, with no questions asked, to really stay home until there was safety?
Why was anyone put in the position to go bankrupt for doing the best thing we all could do together for public health?
So, that was a very long way of saying I don't think the land acknowledgement can be uttered with real clarity.
Perhaps ever again, at least for me.
Especially when, on cue, the occupiers are LARPing with First Nations discourse on sovereignty and staging fake drum circles around their oil can fires.
