WORLD WORLDWIDE CANADA - news journal UPDATE - (en) Canada, Collectif Emma Goldman - The automobile that is eating away at us (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The democratization of the automobile in the post-war consumer society

was accompanied by beautiful promises of a changed life. By going
faster, we would have free time to take care of ourselves and our
families. These promises quickly turned out to be vain illusions. The
new temporality chained us to an infinite growth in productivity and
even more dehumanizing social relations. However, apart from finding a
roof over our heads, the car is one of the most expensive goods in a
worker's life. An astronomical number of hours are spent in a year
working to pay for it or repay it, in addition to interest, insurance,
gas, repairs, etc. To get to work (outside the home), it took, according
to Statistics Canada, 26.4 minutes on average in Canada in May 2024[1].
This duration, to be calculated twice in a day, further reduces the 24
hours in a day and is added, without being paid, to the working time, a
considerable proportion of the income of which will be devoted to the
car. When we add to this that our real incomes have only been decreasing
for several decades, we see that the car allows us to go less and less
quickly.

In peripheral regions, small towns and villages, the car is today a
necessity to travel over distances of several dozen kilometers. After
decades of transportation spending focused almost exclusively on the
car, it would be difficult to do otherwise. Trains, bus services and
other modes of public transportation appear to be aging, but it is a
series of political decisions that have ensured that their funding is
not up to the level of making them a viable collective means of travel.
Social relationships of conviviality, sharing and mutual aid have also
suffered from a profoundly individualistic and productivist temporality.
Recently, Éric Duhaime and the Conservative Party of Quebec made
headlines with a rally in Beauce. With the theme "My car, my choice" (a
stupid appropriation of a feminist slogan), Duhaime sought to
demagogically rally the local population against a government decision
to ban the sale of gasoline vehicles as of 2035. In front of the camera,
a man talked about how important it was for him to participate because
he didn't see how he could do without his old gas car, because he
couldn't afford to buy a new electric car. Of course, we're all pretty
much stuck like that. Stuck, really stuck with old cars that we don't
like any more, that we always have to get repaired, with the stress of
unexpected costs at the garage and the anxiety of the vehicle's end of
life. As if we couldn't hope for better than being stuck with our old
tanks... This is indeed the reality, as the man in front of the camera
at this rally testified, but it is no less shocking to hear Duhaime's
gang, a former lobbyist for the oil industry, trying to make us believe
that he is doing these pirouettes to defend the interests of workers and
the less well-off (while his program advocates privatizations and
massive cuts in services). It is obvious that in the current state,
without a car in the region, we are very restricted in our mobility and
with a family, this can be very difficult. But the opposition that is
often made between "life in the region" and public transportation is
only a symptom of the lack of interest given to public transportation by
successive governments and of an entire system that has enriched a
handful of people while destroying the planet.

Finally, the same trend is emerging almost everywhere on Earth: we live
further and further away from our workplaces. The housing crisis is
forcing us to move even further away from them. The housing construction
that is increasingly expanding cities, the lack of promotion of public
transportation, as well as the gentrification of city centers (with
streets dominated by the transit traffic of busy employees) are further
aggravating the problem. The idea that climate change requires us to
take action now is now a consensus. Nevertheless, it is clear that we
have nothing to expect from the State, which is more concerned with
ensuring the primary purpose of its existence: to offer the best
conditions to financial and industrial capital. Then, we saw how one of
its devices, the judicial system, treats the activists who climbed the
Jacques-Cartier Bridge in Montreal a few days ago to demand an urgent
end to the exploitation and use of fossil fuels. Two activists remain in
prison while one activist was released with drastic conditions: she
cannot be in the company of more than three people in public, she can no
longer participate in any demonstration, she cannot talk about this case
on social media and she cannot talk about this case with the media. This
is the authoritarian face of the State. A crowdfunding campaign to cover
legal fees can be found at this address:
http://www.chuffed.org/project/support-collectif-antigone-and-last-generation-canada
.

Steeve

[1]https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/240826/dq240826a-eng.htm

Also read:

The automobile, a factor of death
https://ucl-saguenay.blogspot.com/2021/11/9e-edition-du-bulletin-regional-le-pic.html
Neighborhood residents, let's take back our streets!
https://ucl-saguenay.blogspot.com/2021/11/habitants-and-inhabitants-of-the-neighborhood.html
The social ideology of the car
https://ucl-saguenay.blogspot.com/2021/07/archive-lideologie-sociale-de-la-bagnole.html
Parking fetishism
https://ucl-saguenay.blogspot.com/2021/05/le-fetichisme-du-stationnement.html

by Collectif Emma Goldman

https://ucl-saguenay.blogspot.com/2024/10/lautomobile-qui-nous-ronge.html
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