Canada, Common Cause, MORTAR #3 - Canadian Bacon: Opposing Police and State Power by One Toronto Member, One Hamilton

The past year has witnessed the emergence of a popular movement whose scale and intensity 
has surprised radicals and social conservatives alike, and which has provoked shock waves 
of reaction in the ranks of police agencies across North America. In the wake of the 
protests that erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, and subsequently spread to dozens of major 
American cities, there has been a corresponding increase in public awareness of police 
violence and its relationship to racial dynamics in Canada. Anti-police sentiment is on 
the rise. ---- When flagship liberal publications like Rolling Stone are publishing 
articles envisioning a world without cops, and tens of thousands of first-time 
demonstrators are taking to the streets across the continent to protest police violence 
and demand racial equality, something is definitely in the air. These are exciting times 
for anarchists, and all those who have long viewed the police as the violent goon squad of 
a white supremacist, capitalist state. But public perceptions are a fickle thing, and 
mobilizations themselves will not address systemic racism or police violence any more than 
much larger demonstrations were able to stop the Iraq War. While it is important for 
anarchists and other anti-authoritarian revolutionaries to actively participate in this 
developing movement for police accountability, we also need to consistently and 
emphatically push for a long-term organizing strategy with abolition as its goal.

Significant numbers of anarchists in Canada tend to either pay lip service to community 
organizing, or else dismiss it as an inherently liberal, reformist, or even authoritarian 
affair. This latter sentiment often dovetails with a counterposing tendency towards 
building an insular "anarchist community," often conceived of as an island of radical 
politics separate from the rest of the working class. Anarchists such as Lorenzo Kom'boa 
Ervin and Joel Olson have cited similar dynamics in the United States, and have noted that 
despite anarchists' ostensible, yet often rhetorical solidarity with racialized victims of 
police terror, this is a big reason why our ranks tend to be filled with white, 
middle-class twenty-somethings. This inward focus also reinforces a delusional 
understanding of our relative significance, both as agents of social ruptures and as 
primary targets of state repression.

The 2008 Canadian Forces field manual on Counterinsurgency Operations lists five possible 
forms that an insurgency can take, noting that "[t]he most potentially dangerous... is 
that of an anarchist group which sets out to eliminate all political structures and the 
social fabric associated with them." Yet while it is oddly validating to be appraised in 
such terms by the military tacticians of the Canadian state, a subsequent comment pointing 
to anarchism's current lack of public support should clarify that it is the potential of 
anarchist ideas, strategies, and tactics becoming the leading force behind a popular 
uprising that they find threatening. The truth is that despite significant advances made 
over the past decade, materially and organizationally, anarchists remain a marginal 
political force in North America, outside of pockets of Québec and Mexico. If we are 
serious about taking on capitalism and the state, more anarchists need to start seeking 
out and making strategic alliances with groups and individuals already organizing against 
their most visible excesses, in order to help push these struggles to their logical 
conclusions.

Any effective organizing strategy depends on a sober assessment of local material 
conditions. In Canada, public perceptions about police are heavily influenced by their 
institutional equivalents in the United States. While there exist numerous social, 
cultural, economic, and geopolitical similarities between the two countries, and while it 
could be argued that police forces ultimately fulfill the same role everywhere, 
understanding national distinctions is nonetheless an important task for revolutionaries 
here in Canada. Even within the United States itself, militants in Ferguson reacting to 
the murder of Michael Brown operated within a radically different context than those who 
took to the streets in New York to protest the murder of Eric Garner; the same could be 
said, to a lesser extent, about the protesters in Oakland and Los Angeles. These 
distinctions are based on a host of local factors, such as a specific region's history, 
culture, class composition, urban geography, political terrain, and of course, the 
brutality and tactical competence of its local police force. With this in mind, this 
article seeks to make a modest contribution to understanding our context here in Canada, 
particularly in the areas of southern Ontario in which our members live and organize.

I. Understanding the Canadian Context

On November 24, 2014, a grand jury in Ferguson ruled against indicting Darren Wilson, a 
white police officer, for the murder of Michael Brown, an eighteen year old Black youth. 
In the weeks and months that followed, a flood of articles were published comparing racial 
dynamics in the United States and Canada. While many were sanctimonious fluff pieces, 
mindlessly praising Canada as a bastion of cultural diversity and racial tolerance, a 
number of more progressive commentators used the opportunity to point to systemic 
anti-Indigenous racism as a national corollary to anti-Black racism in the United States. 
Others used the spotlight cast on racial divisions in Missouri to note that Black people 
are harassed and killed by police at disproportionate rates in Toronto, as well. While 
these efforts to shed light on the existence of structural inequality and deep-seated 
racism in Canada were often well-intentioned and factual, they also tended to reinforce 
the myth of multiculturalism that lies at the heart of the modern Canadian national 
identity, while obscuring the specific manner in which the Canadian state has been shaped 
by white supremacy in the interests of its ruling class.

If we conceive of the state, using Max Weber's popular definition, as a monopoly on the 
legitimate use of physical force, then deepening our understanding of the Canadian state 
means looking at the historical process by which this monopoly was established. Central to 
this history is, of course, the development of the police as a primary institution endowed 
with the responsibility for effecting state-consolidating violence. But also of crucial 
importance is the manner in which this legitimacy was established, and how it's 
maintained. With this in mind, we will begin by examining the historical development of 
the Canadian state, before moving onto a more detailed examination of its police.

Building on Different Foundations: Primitive Accumulation [1] in the US and Canada

Everywhere that capitalism has developed, it has done so by violently imposing a national 
system of gendered, class, and race-based social relations, sanctified by a legal regime 
of private land ownership and property rights. The specific character of these social 
relationships is dynamic, and shaped by a history of struggle. In the United States, 
capitalism was built on the stolen labour of millions of enslaved Africans, violently 
subjugated into the nation's vast southern plantation system of forced agricultural 
production. The roots of Canada's particular brand of resource extraction-based 
capitalism, on the other hand, are to be found in the transatlantic fur trade, which was 
based on the mass exploitation of Indigenous knowledge and labour. This Canadian system of 
primitive accumulation was first instituted in the early seventeenth century by French 
merchant-traders operating out of early settlements along the St. Lawrence river, in 
modern-day Québec and New Brunswick. Following the arrival of the British, this trade 
gradually came to be dominated by the monolithic Hudson's Bay Company (HBC).

Both groups of European settlers were largely dependent on Indigenous trappers and hunters 
for animal pelts, and so they formed relationships and alliances with various opposing 
tribes in order to maintain their share of this lucrative market. Each had an interest in 
limiting the size of their respective settlements, in order to maintain the surrounding 
territories as a sort of expansive hunting/trapping grounds. This policy caused 
significant tensions between the European colonial powers and their respective settler 
populations, particularly the British colonists, who were constantly seeking to expand 
their settlements, often sparking conflict with surrounding Indigenous nations. In 1676, 
this tension was a leading cause of Bacon's Rebellion, an uprising in the Virginia 
colonies carried out by a combined force of European settlers, indentured servants, and 
enslaved Africans. In the aftermath of this failed rebellion, slavery was officially 
codified into a racially-based caste system; from then on, even the poorest European 
descendents were granted a privileged legal and social status over their African 
counterparts, in order to help ensure that the two races would never join forces again.

In 1763, following its victory in the globe-spanning Seven Years War, Britain acquired the 
colonies of New France, in exchange for agreeing to return France's more lucrative 
Caribbean colonies, Martinique and Guadeloupe. After this treatise was concluded, 
England's King George III issued a Royal Proclamation aimed at consolidating Britain's 
North American colonies, and putting a halt on their rapid westward expansion. This 
proclamation, which recognized Indigenous title over all lands not yet ceded via a formal 
treaty process, laid the legal basis for future Indigenous land claims in Canada, and set 
the clock ticking on the American Revolution.

Confederation and its Discontents

The great aim of our legislation has been to do away with the tribal system and assimilate 
the Indian people in all respects with the other inhabitants of the Dominion as speedily 
as they are fit to change.
John A. MacDonald (1887)

A century later, alarmed by developments in the American Civil War and repeated incursions 
into its remaining North American colonies by Irish Republicans, Britain hastily granted 
Canada its independence through the British North American Act of 1867. The new Canadian 
state was structured as a federated parliamentary democracy, initially composed of four 
provinces: Ontario, Québec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. In order to stave off the 
prospects of annexation by the United States, Canada's political elite turned their 
immediate attention to consolidating those North American territories still under the 
nominal jurisdiction of the British Crown and its commercial agent, the HBC.

However, legal issues soon arose following the establishment of the province of Manitoba 
in 1870, as it was determined that there was no legal basis for land ownership under 
existing British common law; in fact, the individual practice of buying or selling land 
outside of the previously-established colonial borders had been explicitly outlawed by the 
Royal Proclamation of 1763. In an attempt to close this legal loophole, and to facilitate 
increased European settlement of what is now central and western Canada, the federal 
government began renewed treaty negotiations with local Indigenous nations, even as it 
continued to incorporate new provinces, such as British Columbia, into its nationalist 
project.

The result was eleven numbered treaties, outlining the legal rationale for the territorial 
integration of the modern Canadian state. Signed over a period of six years, the first 
seven of these treaties revoked Indigenous title over massive swathes of land in 
modern-day Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. The remaining four treaties, 
signed over the years 1899-1921, covered pockets of British Columbia, northern Ontario and 
Alberta, and the majority of the Yukon and Northwest Territories. These treaties also 
identify, through their absence, large tracts of land that were never legally ceded by 
their original inhabitants -- including much of modern-day British Columbia.

These numbered treaties, beyond being simple land-grabs, were part of a broader genocidal 
campaign of assimilation that sought to "civilize" Indigenous populations and transform 
them into proper British subjects. This practice of forced civilization, officially in 
place since 1830, was inherited by the federal government at confederation. The 1857 Act 
to Encourage the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes in the Province had been an 
earlier attempt by the colonial government of Upper and Lower Canada to enfranchise 
Indigenous adults by offering them a Christian, or European name and their own plot of 
land. To the frustration of colonial administrators and Christian missionaries alike, by 
1863 not a single individual had been voluntarily enfranchised under this legislation.

The new Canadian government's solution to the failed policy of voluntary assimilation was 
swift and brutal. First came the Indian Act of 1869, which established a national system 
of Indian Reserves and replaced traditional systems of Indigenous self-governance with an 
elected Band Council system; second came a campaign of mass starvation, aimed at weakening 
the wills of those tribes who refused to cede title over their lands and move onto a 
system of reserves; third came the national Residential Schools system, a horrific 
institution of mass religious and cultural indoctrination that set out to "kill the Indian 
in the child."

The Canadian Residential Schools system operated for over a century, from 1884 until the 
last school was closed, in 1996. During this period, generations of Indigenous children 
faced rampant and severe physical, psychological, and sexual abuse at the hands of 
Catholic and Anglican priests. Thousands of others died, as a result of poor conditions 
and lack of proper medical attention. The resulting intergenerational trauma has 
contributed to disproportionate levels of horizontal and domestic violence, increased 
economic and social marginalization, and significantly higher rates of substance abuse and 
suicide among Indigenous communities. These factors, in turn, reinforce a racist narrative 
that places Indigenous lives at increased risk of dehumanizing violence from police, and 
contributes to a climate of official indifference towards the unresolved murders of 
Indigenous women.

Racialization of Immigration: Business as Usual

There are continual attempts by undesirables of alien and impoverished nationalities to 
enter Canada, but these attempts will be checked as much as possible at their source.
Canadian Immigration Official (1923)

In 1971, Pierre Elliot Trudeau announced multiculturalism as an official policy of the 
Canadian federal government. This decision emerged out of recommendations made by the 
Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, a commission tasked with helping to 
ease tensions between Canada's "two founding races" (French and British) in the wake of 
Québec's Silent Revolution. Trudeau's decisions to move beyond biculturalism towards an 
embrace of multiculturalism effectively placed the rights of all Canadians to speak their 
own language, and to practice religious and cultural customs of their choosing under the 
paternalistic protection of an officially bilingual, English/French state. This principle 
was enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms ten years later, and further 
cemented into law by the Multiculturalism Act of 1988.

For decades now, multiculturalism has been both a steadily-increasing demographic reality, 
and a defining political characteristic of Canada's national identity. Toronto, Canada's 
most populous metropolis, is regularly cited as one of the most multicultural cities in 
the world. According to Statistics Canada's 2011 National Household Survey, 48.6 per cent 
of the city's 2.6 million residents are immigrants (71.7 per cent of whom immigrated from 
Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean [2]), while Canada's national figure sits at 
22 per cent - the highest among G8 countries. The widely-accepted perception of Canada as 
a welcoming home for immigrants and refugees is a contributing factor in its own 
particular brand of nationalism, and a smug, largely unfounded point of distinction from 
the United States. So-called "Canadian values" rest on a bedrock of progressive 
secularism, universal health care, and a grossly inflated sense of moral superiority on 
the world stage. This latter sentiment persists, despite the destructive role that 
Canadian corporations play in the Global South, the government's persistent efforts to 
sabotage international conventions aimed at reducing global carbon emissions, and its 
traditional position as a junior partner of Anglo-American imperialism - all of which are 
major factors fueling global patterns of displacement and migration.

Canada's ostensible celebration of ethnic and cultural diversity also functions as an 
ideological cover for its long history of exclusionary immigration policies. Understanding 
the implications of this racist legacy is crucial for understanding the structural 
operation of white supremacy in contemporary Canadian society, which is intimately linked 
to notions of citizenship and the more precarious, racialized "Other."

In the United States, slavery provided the grotesque scaffolding upon which an entire 
system of racialized class relations was built. The lack of a Canadian equivalent to the 
southern plantation system doesn't reflect a more enlightened attitude towards the 
inherent equality of Europeans and Africans on the part of Canada's colonial forebearers, 
so much as it points to different histories of economic and political development. While 
state-funded television spots proudly play up Canada's role as the final destination of 
slaves escaping the United States via the Underground Railroad, there are no similar 
television spots celebrating the collusion between Canada's colonial masters and 
Confederate forces during the American Civil War, the sordid history of racial segregation 
and neglect experienced by residents of Africville, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, or the 
disproportionate levels of police violence that continue to afflict Black residents of 
suburban Toronto neighbourhoods such as Jane and Finch, Malvern, and Jamestown.

The absence of a large population of enslaved Africans meant that the early development of 
race in Canada, as a social construction based on material power relations, was rooted in 
other social divisions, such as those found between the country's Indigenous population 
and European settlers, French and English colonists, Catholics and Protestants, and 
"Aryans" and "Asiatics." As the most heavily racialized ethnic group to settle in Canada 
in significant numbers prior to the twentieth century, Chinese immigrants were viewed with 
hostility and suspicion, refused the right to vote, and systematically denied the 
opportunity for cultural assimilation. Chinese Canadians were forced to live in segregated 
neighbourhoods and encampments, and ruthlessly exploited by mining and railroad companies, 
who forced them to do the most dangerous and physically demanding jobs, for the least pay. 
They also faced racist violence from their white working-class counterparts, who accused 
them of stealing white jobs and undercutting wages. Following the completion of the 
Canadian Pacific Railroad, in 1885, federal politicians began to curb Chinese immigration 
through an escalating series of head taxes, before all but banning it through the Chinese 
Immigration Act of 1923.

It wasn't until 1967, one hundred years after Confederation, and less than five years 
before adopting an official policy of multiculturalism, that Canada finally opened its 
borders to large-scale immigration from the Global South. The so-called "Points System" 
was motivated by the need to expand Canada's domestic workforce in the face of a 
precipitous decline in European immigration. Amidst the changing geopolitical landscape of 
the 1960s, Canada's immigration policy had also begun to come under fire from increasing 
numbers of newly-independent states, many of whose governments had taken power following 
the success of formal decolonization struggles. Since the establishment of the Points 
System, immigration from countries in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean has been a leading 
factor in Canada's overall population growth. Accordingly, most racialized Canadians are 
first or second generation immigrants, the vast majority of whom live in the suburbs of 
Greater Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Racialized, working-class youth from these 
neighbourhoods are much more likely to live in substandard housing, attend underfunded 
schools, be discriminated against by prospective landlords and employers, and face the 
highest rates of horizontal violence--all while being harassed, beaten, murdered, and 
imprisoned by police at grossly disproportionate rates.

As Canada's national security interests have become further integrated with those of the 
United States, both through the increased globalization of capitalism and the broader 
security framework of the War on Terror, this has led to increased scrutiny and harassment 
of immigrant communities from regions of the world targeted by western imperialism. Under 
the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, recent years have seen a tightening of 
Canadian immigration guidelines, a sharp rise in immigrant detention, a militarization of 
immigration enforcement agents, and sweeping increases to the federal government's ability 
to deport permanent residents, and even immigrants with Canadian citizenship. This 
restructuring of Canada's immigration regime has been accompanied by a corresponding 
increase in Temporary Foreign Workers programs, which provide corporations, agribusinesses 
and individual wealthy households with a seemingly endless pool of hyper-precarious 
workers, who are required to pay taxes that fund public services that they are not 
permitted to use.

II. To Serve and Protect Whom?: The Development of the Police

The history of policing, as it exists in its modern institutional form, is intrinsically 
linked to the development of industrial capitalism and the consolidation of state power 
that began to occur in the late eighteenth, and early nineteenth century. The spread of 
capitalist social relations, and the rapid growth of urbanization required that one 
segment of the working class be tasked with maintaining the compliance of the whole. Just 
as the development of capitalism faced unique obstacles and local conditions in different 
parts of the world, so too was the development of police shaped by local conditions.

The job of the police has always been to maintain the "rule of law" through the targeted 
application of violence. The laws that they are tasked with enforcing are drafted by 
politicians to secure the political interests of the ruling class, who are able to 
influence the structural operation of power in society through their financial control 
over, and direct representation within the political class, and through the skillful 
manipulation of social divisions to manage public opinion. For years, successive waves of 
class struggle have dramatically altered the political framework tied to the maintenance 
of social control. From the city watch and mounted riflemen of yesteryear, to today's 
community liaison officers and militarized tactical squads, the police have adapted 
accordingly.

Slavery and the Genesis of American Policing

If we insist on viewing the police as crime-fighters, profiling can only be seen as a 
mistake, a persistent disaster. But if we suspend or surrender this noble view of police 
work, and look instead at the actual consequences of what the cops do, profiling makes a 
certain kind of sense; it follows a sinister logic. Racial profiling is not about crime at 
all; it's about controlling people of colour.
Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue

The history of policing in the United States is one of the assertion and maintenance of a 
regime of social control anchored in the cross-class alliance of white supremacy. During 
its early colonial period, the United States inherited an informal system of sheriffs and 
town watches from England, and within the colonies, this system developed in a manner that 
was adaptively contextual. In his excellent account of the history of American policing, 
Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, author Kristian Williams argues that the 
earliest iteration of the police, as an institution characterized by internal cohesion and 
popular legitimacy, developed in southern states in order to defend slavery. From the 
seventeenth to the nineteenth century, slave patrols represented the security arm of 
property owners and eventually the state, by capturing runaways and preventing gatherings, 
and revolts by both free and enslaved Blacks.

Increased urbanization in the late eighteenth century presented new challenges for the 
local political elite, which led to the creation of a more cohesive system of city guards. 
Unlike individualized watchmen, city guards patrolled as a unit, and were granted 
increased authority. These measures were aimed both at imposing Protestant moral values on 
newly proletarianized whites, as well as maintaining control over higher concentrations of 
slaves and freed Black labourers. In 1785, in Charleston, South Carolina, the longstanding 
town watch, which had "defended" the town against fires, Indians, Black gatherings, and 
vagrants, amalgamated with a volunteer slave patrol organized by the local militia, 
thereby creating the Charleston Guard and Watch. Williams argues that this point 
represents the first example of a modern police force, which he characterizes as an 
institution that is publicly controlled, authorized to use force, possesses an internal 
chain of command, and whose members wear identifiable uniforms.

The suppression and control of Black populations has remained a lodestar of the policing 
project in the United States ever since. Following the American Civil War, the economic 
necessity of such a strategy developed more of a political character, as the state sought 
to control Black communities that, despite being granted formal emancipation, were 
nonetheless denied equal social and legal standing with their white counterparts. From the 
post-Civil War Reconstruction period until the political reforms of the Civil Rights era, 
southern white supremacist militias such as the Ku Klux Klan operated with the passive 
support, and often active participation, of local and state police. This tidy arrangement 
represented a continuation of the slave patrol function of policing, and ensured police 
forces could perform "racially neutral" law enforcement duties, while leaving the more 
overtly violent terrorism of white supremacy to the Klan.

Police partnerships with extremist white supremacist organizations such as the Klan 
persevere, but have become intentionally obscured over the years, as overt racism has 
become less publicly acceptable. The largely cosmetic nature of this shift is most starkly 
evidenced by the shocking number of Black citizens who continue to be murdered at the 
hands of white police officers, who then seek to justify their use of lethal force as a 
necessary and defensive measure, despite its often clearly aggressive and racist character.

Engines of Oppression: The Toronto Police Services

The authority legally invested in these men, their habitual intercourse with the lower 
classes, the impression that they possess the ear of their employers, the favouritism they 
may be enabled to suggest, the petty and indirect tyranny they may be permitted to 
exercise, all combine to degrade a force of this nature into formidable engines of oppression.
United Province of Canada Commission Report (1841)

Canada's municipal police forces, like their counterparts in the United States, grew out 
of an informal system of citizen patrols imported from England. These civilian watch 
services performed basic duties during evening hours, often limited to keeping an eye out 
for trouble, and informing others of any crimes or attacks that they witnessed taking place.

In 1834, Toronto became the first major city in North America to adopt a modern police 
force. At its founding, the Toronto Police Services (TPS) was composed of five paid 
constables, appointed by the city's mayor and aldermen. For the first decades of its 
existence, the TPS functioned as a notoriously corrupt appendage of the local political 
establishment, upon whose patronage they depended for their jobs. Its ranks were largely 
drawn from the Orange Order, a not-so-secret society of conservative Irish Protestants 
that made no effort to hide its sectarian rivalry with the city's Catholic residents. This 
unapologetic sectarianism was an aggravating factor in the Circus Riots of 1855, in which 
members of the TPS refused to intervene to break up a massive brawl between a travelling 
troupe of circus clowns and a local brigade of firefighters and their supporters--many of 
whom also happened to be Orangemen. The resulting public outcry led the incoming mayor to 
fire the entire police force and introduce a new regulatory oversight body. After a study 
of other North American police forces, the Boston Police Department was chosen as the 
model for implementing a series of structural reforms.

As part of this shake-up, former British Army Captain William Stratton Prince was 
appointed as Toronto's new Chief Constable. Prince immediately began to impose a strict 
military discipline on his men, and sought to stamp out the force's culture of endemic 
corruption, which he saw as an undue hindrance to its public legitimacy. Under Prince's 
fourteen year tenure as Chief, the TPS became Canada's first intelligence security agency, 
operating a network of spies that monitored the activities of Fenian cells operating out 
of Buffalo, New York City, Detroit, and Chicago.

As the city of Toronto continued to grow over the following decades, so too did the size 
of its police force, and the scale of their responsibilities. The swelling ranks of the 
"dangerous classes" necessitated an increased focus on what Helen Boritch has described as 
"class control" policing. This meant breaking strikes, when necessary, but also a heavy 
emphasis on offences carried out against the "public order," such as vagrancy, public 
drunkenness, and prostitution, which were (and are) almost exclusively committed by poorer 
sections of the working class. As part of a more expansive understanding of "public order" 
that foreshadowed later advancements in community policing, during these years the TPS was 
also tasked with running a variety of social services, such as ambulances, homeless 
shelters, and even a child protection service, which served as an early forerunner to 
today's Children's Aid Society. The TPS also enforced Sabbath and Public Order Bylaws, and 
were responsible for regulating a host of small businesses, such as taxi drivers, 
laundry-operators and street vendors. In order to help ensure their upstanding moral 
character and loyalty to their bourgeois pay-masters, officers were forbidden from living 
in working-class neighbourhoods, or consorting with poor people during their off hours.

During the interwar period, fears of anarchist and communist subversion, stoked by the 
Russian Revolution abroad and increased labour unrest at home, provided the impetus for a 
renewed focus on domestic intelligence gathering and a more targeted system of political 
repression. Toronto's "Red Squads" kept a particularly close watch on organizing efforts 
taking place within immigrant communities from Central and Eastern Europe, and on 
well-known anarchists such as Emma Goldman, an intermittent resident of the city from 
1927, until her death in 1940.

Successive waves of amalgamation to the city of Toronto have swallowed up other smaller 
municipal police forces, and today the TPS is the third largest police force in Canada, 
with 5,800 officers spread across seventeen numbered divisions and a range of specialized 
departments and task forces. They are supported by 2,500 civilian employees, an untold 
number of volunteers, and a bloated annual operating budget of over $1 billion.

The RCMP

One of the most enduring Canadian cultural stereotypes is the red-clad, mild-mannered 
"Mountie," popularized by fictional characters such as Dudley Do-Right, of Rocky and 
Bullwinkle fame, and Benton Fraser of Due South. It should come as no surprise that the 
actual history of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) is considerably more brutal 
than these pop culture depictions might suggest, as it is intimately linked with the 
colonial expansion of the Canadian state.

The RCMP's roots lie in the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP), a paramilitary police force 
modelled after the Royal Irish Constabulary, and staffed by horse-mounted riflemen drawn 
from cavalry divisions of the British Army. The NWMP was created by parliamentary decree 
in 1873, for the explicit purpose of extending the rule of law to Canada's restive 
Northwest Territories (a huge expanse of land that included the northern regions of 
modern-day Ontario and Québec, as well the entirety of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and 
Alberta), which the federal government had recently purchased from the HBC.

As part of its mandate to tame Canada's wild west, in 1885 the NWMP assisted in putting 
down the North-Western Rebellion, launched by a Métis force led by Louis Riel, and a 
parallel force of insurgent Cree and Assiniboine warriors. The resulting victory paved the 
way for the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which consolidated Canada's 
territorial continuity, linking the country's eastern and western population centres and 
facilitating the further settlement of the Prairies. The NWMP was deployed to the Yukon in 
1895, to establish order and collect customs duties from prospectors drawn to the region 
by the Klondike Gold Rush. In 1905 it was granted jurisdiction over the new provinces of 
Alberta and Saskatchewan, and in 1912 over the territories annexed into the province of 
Manitoba.

Though its formative role in Canadian history was its contribution to colonial 
nation-building, the NWMP also served more traditional policing functions, a notable 
example being when it was called in to violently suppress the 1919 Winnipeg General 
Strike. In 1920, it was merged with the Dominion Police, a federal agency tasked with 
maintaining Canada's earliest forensic and criminal databases, and with protecting 
sensitive public works, such as government buildings, crucial national infrastructure, and 
royal navy yards. The result of this merger was the RCMP.

As Canada's primary federal policing agency, the RCMP is sometimes roughly understood as a 
national equivalent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States. A 
more accurate description, however, would be to say that it has served, at various times 
in its history, as a combination of the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the Bureau 
of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the 
Secret Service, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and various state, highway, and 
local police departments. Today, the RCMP operates a national network of nearly 30,000 
officers and civilian employees, and serves as the primary police force for 180 
municipalities, 184 Indigenous communities, all three northern territories, and eight of 
Canada's ten provinces (with the notable exception of Ontario and Québec).

The OPP/SQ

Rounding things off, the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) and the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) are 
the provincial police departments for Ontario and Québec, two provinces that contain a 
combined 62 per cent of Canada's total population. Both police forces have jurisdiction 
over hundreds of small towns and municipalities, and thousands of kilometres of highway. 
The OPP, through the Aboriginal Policing Bureau, serves as the primary police force in 
nineteen Indigenous communities, and provides logistical support and training to First 
Nations Police Services in eleven Indigenous reserves. Both provincial departments are 
often the first responders to highway blockades, and as such have been responsible for 
escalating tense standoffs with Mohawk warriors in Oka, Québec, in 1990, and members of 
the Haudenosaunee Six Nations Confederacy in Caledonia, Ontario in 2006.

The Shift to Counterinsurgency

Counterinsurgency is those military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and 
civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency.
US Army Field Manual - Counterinsurgency Operations (FMI 3-07-21)

Near the end of the 1970s, after a decade of industrial turmoil, capitalism began to 
restructure itself, both economically and socially. Neoliberalism, with its attendant 
relocation of formerly high-paying manufacturing jobs to low-wage regions, and steady 
erosion of social welfare provisions, has severely diminished working-class living 
standards in North America. As they have retreated from their traditional role as service 
providers, governments have steadily reoriented their focus towards managing domestic 
unrest. By trading the carrot for the stick, the social welfare state has redefined itself 
as the modern security state.

The institution of policing has always been an evolving experiment, and under 
neoliberalism it has taken on a new dimension. Faced with an influx of popular and often 
militant social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, western elites began to come up with new 
strategies aimed at containing political dissent and ensuring sustained social stability. 
Domestic counterinsurgency models were developed, drawing heavily upon the British Army's 
experiences in Northern Ireland, and British, American, and French efforts to quell 
anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist insurgencies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. 
These new strategies expanded on some of the more covert and intelligence-driven domestic 
policing methods that had been developed by the now defunct Red Squads in decades prior.

The 1970s were a decade characterized by public distrust in government bodies. This 
tension was exacerbated by the exposure of the fact that illegal tactics were being 
routinely employed by state security forces in their efforts to crush dissent. In 1976, 
the so-called Church Committee, a United States' Senate review of national intelligence 
practices, sought to ease public concerns following the release of a leaked dossier 
related to the FBI's infamous COINTELPRO program. The following year In Canada, the 
McDonald Commission completed a similar investigation into the practices of the RCMP's 
counterintelligence agency, after it was determined that they had illegally spied on 
Québecois separatists, and had gone so far as to burn down a barn intended as a meeting 
place between members of the Black Panthers and the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ). 
As a result of the commission's findings, the RCMP's intelligence wing was disbanded, and 
restructured into the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). In the years that 
have followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, many of the practices that were 
once considered illegal, and which when exposed, caused legitimate public outrage, have 
been formally adopted into the legal framework of policing, in the name of fighting 
terrorism. Moreover, in the decades since the 1970s a massive shift in the allocation of 
public resources towards state security, technological advancements and resulting 
strategic and tactical innovations in counterinsurgency have dramatically refined the face 
of modern policing.

Bringing the War Home: The Militarization of Police

Responding to the intense social and political upheaval of the 1960s, the Los Angeles 
Police Department introduced a new, heavily militarized task force known as Special 
Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team, the first of many subsequent tactical paramilitary police 
forces, collectively classified as Police Paramilitary Units (PPU). These units blur the 
lines between policing and traditional warfare, by allowing the state to bring military 
equipment and tactics to bear on domestic law enforcement situations. The application of 
paramilitary techniques to situations that have previously been handled by traditional 
policing practices signifies an important component of the normalization of militarized 
law enforcement. As one component of a broader counterinsurgency framework, the role of 
these agencies is to crush armed, or otherwise dangerous combatants through the targeted 
application of overwhelming force.

Although they are not nearly as normalized into the framework of traditional policing as 
their American counterparts, most Canadian police forces have developed their own PPUs, 
and deploy them in response to situations that pose a high risk to officer safety, or when 
a strong show of force is required to crush a challenge to state authority, or to the 
smooth functioning of capitalism. These units are embedded within municipal police 
departments, such as the TPS's Emergency Task Force (ETF) or the Hamilton Police Service's 
Emergency Response Unit (ERU), as as well as in their provincial and federal equivalents 
such as the OPP and RCMP, which are each outfitted with Emergency Response Teams (ERT). 
These elite units are composed of small teams of heavily trained officers, comprised of a 
squad leader, several sharpshooters, and agents trained in a combination of surveillance, 
hostage negotiation, tactical entry and frontal assault techniques. In October 2013, the 
RCMP deployed an ERT in a pre-dawn raid aimed at dismantling a Mi'kmaq-led anti-fracking 
blockade in Elsipogtog First Nation, located near the town of Rexton, New Brunswick. A 
leaked copy of an RCMP report on the raid indicated that the operation was planned using 
intelligence gathered through the use of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), equipped with 
infrared and thermal recognition systems.

Front-line municipal police officers are also finding themselves increasingly equipped 
with military grade hardware. In 2013, as part of a "pilot project," three divisions of 
the TPS were issued C8 carbines, which are compact assault rifles designed for urban 
combat. These included 51 Division, located in the city's downtown east, where long-time 
residents are contending with intense and ongoing gentrification efforts; 43 Division, 
which covers an area of south-eastern Scarborough associated with several recent 
high-profile, gang-related shootings; and 31 Division, a notoriously brutal department 
that occupies the heavily racialized working-class neighbourhood of Jane and Finch. In 
addition to new guns, municipal police departments are also being equipped with armored 
military vehicles, either acquired second-hand from the Canadian Forces, or purchased 
directly from private military contractors. This practice has not yet assumed the scale 
seen in recent years in the United States, where seemingly every small town police 
department has acquired its own second-hand armored personnel carrier, left over from the 
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nonetheless, it is a growing trend, with police forces from 
Vancouver, British Columbia to New Glasgow, Nova Scotia unveiling their own Tactical 
Armored Vehicles (TAVs) in recent years. Many of them have never been used, and it is 
uncertain what practical purpose they would even serve, outside the context of a 
full-fledged civil war.

And military hardware isn't all that is being imported from the War on Terror. In February 
2015, news broke of a warehouse in Chicago's west side that has been repurposed into a 
domestic black site, where suspected criminals are denied recourse to legal representation 
and subjected to "enhanced" interrogation techniques. Unlike a precinct, suspects in this 
facility aren't booked, and face a militaristic environment said to house military-style 
vehicles, interrogation cells, and cages. It can be assumed that sites like these will 
become a normalized destination for those eventually charged under Illinois' amped up 
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, which has been enhanced to give 
police the legal authority to round up Chicago's gang members en masse. The principles of 
the RICO Act, originally implemented in 1970 to help fight organized crime, provide an 
effective political tool to criminalize and break down any organization or group that 
poses a serious organized threat to the stability of the state. In Canada, the RCMP 
enforces regulations that are cumulatively similar to the RICO Act, but which tend to fall 
under the classification of criminal conspiracy charges.

In January, 2015, following widespread and sustained protests against the police murder of 
Eric Garner, and the apparent revenge killing of two police officers, New York Police 
Commissioner William Bratton unveiled a new Strategic Response Group (SRG), a 
specially-trained unit of officers tasked with counterterrorism and the policing of 
large-scale protests -- a practice he termed "disorder policing." While Bratton's casual 
conflation of anti-police demonstrations with terrorism, and his announcement that these 
officers would be equipped with automatic weapons represent a particularly chilling 
development, specialized crowd control units such as this are not uncommon in North 
America, and this trajectory towards militarization is only poised to continue.

In Canada, the police departments of every sizeable city are equipped with riot gear, and 
often contain crowd control and public order units with specialized training in crowd 
psychology, martial arts, pain compliance, and the use of non-lethal weapons. The Service 
de Police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM), Montreal's municipal police force, has 
developed, over the years, into a North American leader in protest policing. It has 
acquired this unique expertise, in part, through its relatively frequent exposure to 
militant black bloc tactics, and its willingness to experiment with different forms of 
crowd dispersal and mass arrests. The SPVM has been known to use the city's annual March 
15th protests (held each year on the International Day Against Police Brutality) as an 
opportunity to train other Canadian municipal police forces in riot suppression tactics.

Community Policing: To Protect and Sever

As we've noted, one of the ways that the state maintains its legitimacy is by crushing 
threats to its rule through the targeted application of overwhelming force. Yet a far more 
insidious, and arguably more effective application of these principles can be found in the 
spread of community policing, a complementary strategy focused on developing stronger ties 
between police and the communities that they occupy. This approach offers a contrast to 
aggressive paramilitary style policing, yet remains part of the same project.

In Toronto, a focus on "community mobilization" has been a core principle of the Toronto 
Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS) program, unveiled in 2006, after residents of 
the city were shaken by a spate of gun-related violence that killed fifty-two people over 
a one year period. This program was expanded, in 2007, into the Provincial Anti-Violence 
Integration Strategy (PAVIS), which provides provincial funding to seventeen regional 
community policing initiatives, such as the Addressing Crime Trends In Our Neighbourhoods 
(ACTION) Team in Hamilton, and the Taking Action on Guns and Gangs (TAGG) project in 
Greater Sudbury. While these initiatives have often been championed for their success in 
decreasing rates of violent crime, there is little evidence to back up such claims. What 
is beyond dispute, is the fact that they represent a new level of police penetration into 
the everyday lives of racialized youth, specifically, and "priority neighbourhoods" more 
generally.

Bogus community meetings, citizen surveys, after-school basketball programs for "at-risk" 
youth, and quaint "Coffee with a Cop" programs designed to portray police as good-natured 
neighbours make it feasible to gather useful intelligence on a targeted community, while 
establishing and maintaining relationships with its individual members. Sympathetic 
citizens and community organizations can then be more relied upon to share information 
with police, and to turn to them to resolve conflicts. This sophisticated approach to 
repression enhances police power by allowing them to work through community agencies, as 
well as over them, with the ultimate aim of maintaining social control.

In a February, 2015 article published in the Intercept, investigative journalists Murtaza 
Hussain, Coan Courrier, and Jana Winter broke a story on a program being run by the United 
States National Counterterrorism Centre, which aims to spot early warning signs of youth 
radicalization. A leaked thirty-six-page report, entitled Countering Violent Extremism: A 
Guide for Practitioners and Analysts included a survey and accompanying rating system that 
police, teachers and social workers can use in order to help determine an individual 
child's "susceptibility to engage in violent extremism." The report also included 
suggested interventions that parents could be encouraged to take in order to halt their 
children's path towards further radicalization. In Canada, the state broadcaster CBC has 
run a number of programs and articles on youth radicalization, citing the spectre of young 
Muslim men travelling to Syria to fight with the so-called Islamic State as a 
justification for calls for a more invasive regime of community policing. As with other 
calls to expand state powers, these appeals are currently aimed at exploiting Canadians' 
racist fears of Islamic terrorism. Once adopted, these tactics will be applied to any 
group of so-called "extremists" that the state deems a threat.

Community policing initiatives often work alongside efforts by municipal politicians and 
developers to gentrify neighbourhoods, by effectively seizing on fears over crime and 
safety. In Toronto, Police Community Liaison Committees regularly issue recommendations to 
evict undesirable tenants, as the "community stakeholders" chosen to sit on these 
committees are almost exclusively drawn from the ranks of local business and property 
owners. These committees also regularly champion policing initiatives and community 
partnerships aimed at cracking down on "quality of life" crimes, such as graffiti, 
trespassing, vagrancy, prostitution, and drug dealing, which in turn provides a mandate 
for an increasingly heavy-handed police presence. The Toronto Community Housing 
Corporation (TCHC), which manages the city's diminishing public housing stock, often works 
directly with the TPS to evict tenants. In 2005, following a series of raids in the 
heavily racialized neighbourhood of Jamestown-Rexdale, TCHC punitively evicted the 
families of many of the arrested youth before their trials even began. While this is a 
specific example, the process is quite commonplace.

In 2008, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) began assigning full-time, armed police 
officers, or "school resource officers" as they are euphemistically called, to dozens of 
Toronto high schools. This initiative was inspired by a report on school violence prepared 
by Toronto lawyer Julian Falconer, who has since then, ironically, built himself a career 
representing the families of individuals killed by police. The following year, a sixteen 
year old student at Northern Secondary School, located in the neighbourhood of Jane and 
Finch, was approached and questioned by the school resource officer, who had seen him 
lingering in the hallway and thought that he looked suspicious. The teen responded by 
mockingly referring to the cop as "Bacon." The officer then proceeded to physically 
assault the teen, after his demands for identification went unheeded. To top things off, 
the student was charged with assaulting a police officer while resisting arrest. Programs 
similar to this one have been implemented in other major Canadian cities, such as 
Edmonton, Vancouver, and Winnipeg. While these programs often attempt to justify 
themselves with rhetoric about crime prevention, and the social worth of building positive 
relationships between police and at-risk youth, the reality is that they represent yet 
another violent incursion of the state into racialized working-class communities.

With the rise in already high transit fare prices and a new proof of payment system being 
rolled out this year, the TPS have restored special constable powers to the enforcement 
agents of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC). TTC Special Constables have more policing 
authority than regular fare inspection officers, and come equipped with handcuffs, batons, 
and pepper foam. A rather violent altercation recorded in January of 2015 between a 
passenger and constable at Union Station, and subsequently uploaded to YouTube, is already 
under investigation by the TPS, and is sure to be one of many, as simple disputes get 
blown out of proportion by volatile transit security enforcement agents.

The development of community policing is not confined to the neighbourhood, but has 
extended throughout the broader economy, as well. According to a 2007 report by economists 
Samuel Bowles and Arjun Jayadev, a whopping 25 per cent of the American workforce is 
employed in "guard labor," meaning that their primary economic function isn't to produce 
value, but rather to help protect wealth, manage other workers, or otherwise smooth the 
process of capital accumulation. When describing exactly what jobs constitute guard 
labour, Bowles and Jayadev include obvious examples such as police officers, soldiers, 
prison guards, private security, and court staff, as well as all those employed in other 
positions within the military and prison-industrial-complexes, secret shoppers, quality 
assurance monitors, supervisors, and managers. They also include unemployed and imprisoned 
members of the working class, whose primary economic function, they reason, is to maintain 
worker discipline by way of offering a negative incentive. When the somewhat dubious 
inclusion of the latter two categories is factored out, the rate falls from one in four 
workers to one in five, which is still a staggering figure. Furthermore, this percentage 
would be significantly increased if the category was expanded to include other workers who 
may be compelled to work with the police as part of their job description, such as nurses, 
cab drivers, retail workers, and teachers. While no similar figures exist for Canada, the 
point remains that under late capitalism, the responsibility for policing the working 
class is increasingly falling on its own members.

Anticipating Resistance: Intelligence-led Policing

The never-ending crisis of the War on Terror has presented western governments with a 
self-perpetuating justification for increasing the state's domestic security capacities. 
Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Liberal government of Jean 
Chrétien passed the Canadian Anti-Terrorism Act, which massively expanded the Canadian 
state's powers of surveillance and detention and legally sanctified the practice of 
extraordinary rendition and the use of secret trials. This was followed by a vast overhaul 
of Canada's immigration and border security framework, including the creation of the 
Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) in 2003.

If anything, the pace of these reforms has only sped up under the Conservative government 
of Stephen Harper. Ever the opportunist, Harper has repeatedly exploited public shock and 
outrage over terrorist acts to cynically pursue his agenda of speeding along Canada's 
transformation into a heavily militarized petro-state. On April 19, 2013, in the wake of 
the Boston Marathon bombing, Conservative lawmakers put forward a motion to fast-track the 
Combating Terrorism Act, which was then hurriedly approved and passed into law. On October 
23, 2014 the day after the murder of Canadian Forces Corporal Nathan Cirillo by a lone 
gunman in Ottawa, Harper gave a speech pledging to further expand Canadian intelligence 
agencies' power of surveillance and detention. In January 2015, he made good on this 
pledge by introducing the Anti-terrorism Act, more commonly known as Bill C-51. The 
current vague phrasing of this bill will, if and when it is passed, grant CSIS, Canada's 
federal intelligence agency, the legal authority to "enter any place or open or obtain 
access to any thing... to copy or obtain any document... to install, maintain or remove 
any thing.... [and] do any other thing that is reasonably necessary to take those 
measures." This incredibly broad language essentially gives CSIS agents unlimited legal 
authority to do anything they want, to any and all individuals who they remotely suspect 
may cause "interference with the capability of the Government of Canada in relation 
to...the economic or financial stability of Canada...[or] interference with critical 
infrastructure." The language in this proposed bill echoes that found in a RCMP report 
leaked in February of 2015, warning that "violent anti-petroleum extremists" pose a 
"criminal threat" to Canada's national oil and gas sector. It is clear that Bill C-51 is 
less about protecting Canada from Islamic terrorism than it is about giving the state more 
power to crush resistance to planned pipeline projects, such as the ecologically 
disastrous Trans-Pacific Pipeline, which is currently on a collision course with the 
dug-in Indigenous land defenders of the Unist'ot'en Camp, located on unceded Wet'sewet'en 
territory, in central British Columbia.

Thanks to Edward Snowden, we now know that signals intelligence agencies like the National 
Security Agency (NSA) in the United States, and the Communications Security Establishment 
(CSE) in Canada intercept and store absolutely all electronic communications that travel 
across the Internet and cellphone towers, and that this massive, endlessly growing pile of 
data is stored and accessible from centralized databases for years after it's been 
collected. The implications of this fact are staggering, and frankly, difficult to wrap 
one's head around.

And federal agencies are not the only entities collecting intelligence on us. Facebook and 
Google are both multi-billion dollar companies, precisely because they collect obscene 
amounts of data from millions of users every day, which they then sell to advertising 
firms and routinely hand over to law enforcement agencies upon request. A June 2014 
transparency report released by telecommunications giant Rogers Canada revealed that 
during the previous year, approximately 175,000 warrantless requests for customer data had 
been made by Canadian federal agencies, such as the RCMP, CSIS, and CBSA.

Municipal police forces also readily admit to using publicly available digital data, such 
as social media activity, and internet traffic, as part of their intelligence gathering 
efforts. This practice is a small part of a strategy known as "predictive policing," which 
has, over the past several years, quietly revolutionized the way that many police 
departments make strategic decisions, such as planning the allocation and deployment of 
staff and resources, and drafting neighbourhood-specific crime reduction strategies. 
Predictive Policing techniques focus on the identification of potential criminal activity, 
in a practice foreseen by a sadly prescient Philip K Dick, over a half century ago. At the 
first Predictive Policing Conference, held in Los Angeles in 2009, spokespeople from 
various private security tech firms preached to assembled representatives of police 
departments from across North America on the benefits of integrating "business 
intelligence and business analytics" into their traditional policing framework. Special 
emphasis was placed on the crime fighting potential of implementing cutting edge practices 
such as advanced data mining, geospatial prediction and social media analysis. For a 
price, police departments can purchase a wide variety of software solutions, ranging from 
basic number crunching and analytics programs, to sophisticated crime forecasting models 
based on complicated mathematical algorithms that can help organize and interpret 
intelligence as it's gathered in real time.

IV. Fighting Back

The state's capacity to spy on, disrupt, discredit, arrest, and if need be, murder anyone 
that it wants is absolutely terrifying. If you consider yourself a revolutionary and the 
police don't scare you, then you're either posturing or deluding yourself. We may laugh at 
the idea of the hapless, bumbling cop, but what many officers lack in critical thought, 
they more than make up for in discipline. This also happens to be a trait that many 
anarchists in this part of the world severely lack.

Aside from the vast array of military hardware at their disposal, paid for and supplied by 
the fruits of our labour, police carry a promise of protection that legitimizes their 
entire institution, no matter how abusive its individual members may sometimes act. Police 
promise to protect the working class from itself. To protect those who have little, from 
those who have even less. And the fact that, sometimes, they do just that, serves as an 
effective cover for their ultimate political function, which is to protect those who have 
a lot.

It's true that the police are incredibly powerful. But our communities are also a great 
source of power, which when collectively grasped and wielded, can be even stronger than 
theirs. This power is evidenced by their relentless efforts to harness and redirect it to 
their own ends. The role of revolutionaries should be to help spread an awareness of the 
potential of working-class dual power, and to participate in building it. As the military 
strategists of social peace are well aware, class struggle is not a zero sum game, but a 
gruelling war of position. Waging this war effectively requires a serious commitment to 
organizing that strengthens the social fabric of our communities, and which seeks to 
popularize a reflective, common sense understanding that the police are our enemies.

Countering Counterinsurgency

Counterinsurgency strategies were developed in conflict zones, in which occupying armies 
were called upon to police a restive, foreign population. During the post-WWII era of 
formal decolonization, and in the more recent military campaigns of the War on Terror, the 
practice of counterinsurgency has been premised around imposing and then propping up a 
government that, while often unpopular, can ultimately be counted on to act in the 
interests of imperialist, transnational capital. Practically, this means simultaneously 
helping to establish the popular legitimacy of a client regime, while suppressing armed 
opposition through the use of overwhelming firepower, and withdrawing military forces as 
soon as they are no longer needed. History has shown that this process often doesn't work 
very well. People generally don't take kindly to the idea of being ruled by a puppet whose 
legitimacy stems from the presence of a foreign army that bombs and kills their friends, 
families and neighbours. The longer an occupation goes on, the more people are willing to 
drop everything and sacrifice their lives to fight against it.

These troublesome dynamics apply far less to domestic counterinsurgency operations. By and 
large, police officers are not seen by most people as the footsoldiers of an occupying 
army, but as fellow community members, and as the real-world versions of characters from 
their favourite television shows. As representatives of the state, police are imbued with 
all the legitimacy of a democratically elected government, and a political and cultural 
tradition that goes back hundreds of years. The truth of the matter, however, is that 
nations aren't real, and the cop on your block isn't McNulty from the Wire, but an armed 
agent of a class that sees national borders as barriers to investment.

As this article has attempted to demonstrate, contemporary policing is a 
mutually-reinforcing balance of overwhelming force, on the one hand, and an insidious 
fostering of misguided community trust, on the other. Decisions on exactly which approach 
to take in a given situation are informed by intelligence gathered by an invisible, yet 
omnipresent web of surveillance, with capacities heretofore undreamed of at any other time 
in human history. This situation is similar to the tried and tested "good cop/bad cop" 
routine, where agents take turns interrogating a suspect before retreating behind a 
one-sided mirror to collectively discuss how they want to proceed. Those organizing 
against police should be aware of this dynamic, and should seek to engage situations 
strategically.

Community policing is an attempt to build and maintain popular legitimacy. It follows, 
then, that anti-police organizing should aim to disrupt and discredit community policing 
efforts, and help reframe police forces as an occupying army, which, particularly in 
Indigenous and racialized communities, they are. White revolutionaries, in particular, 
have a responsibility to confront community policing initiatives, as they are often 
tacitly or explicitly rooted in the unspoken or coded language of white supremacy. A 
refusal to make strategic use of the unearned privileges and social capital granted by 
skin colour is not only a squandered opportunity, but a betrayal to one's class.

Precisely because they hold the advantage of overwhelming force, it is important to avoid 
giving police the opportunity to use that force without consequence. Militancy is a 
collective phenomenon, and so while organizing, it's important to avoid tactics that will 
unduly injure or alienate large groups of people who might otherwise be supportive of your 
aims. This is not to say that violence has no role in struggle, or that anarchists should 
only act in accordance with the moral norms of dominant society, but that there's a 
difference between violence that increases collective militancy, and violence that makes 
it easier for the state to isolate us. An asymmetrical response to state violence, which 
takes a measured approach to escalation is often the most effective way of increasing the 
level of militancy of all participants.

Lastly, we should cultivate and spread a collective practice of security culture, not just 
among insular anarchist circles, but as a part of all our organizing efforts. Mass 
surveillance is premised on the universal expectation of constant convenience and 
instant-gratification fostered by living in a touch-button society. It's unnervingly 
common for people who consider themselves serious revolutionaries to fall victim to this 
trap. It's not that we shouldn't use facebook, or shouldn't own cellphones, but that we 
should at least try to understand how the state gathers intelligence, and attempt to make 
this process more difficult for them. Despite a vague understanding that the government 
runs mass surveillance programs, people who openly self-identify as an ideological enemy 
of that very same government, somehow seem to be constantly unsure as to whether or not 
they are being surveilled. You are. We all are. The state "taps" our phones, because they 
"tap" all phones, all the time. Operate under the assumption that every email you send 
will be read by a signals intelligence analyst at the CSE, or the NSA, or any other number 
of foreign intelligence services, because if you're actively involved in organizing, or if 
you become active at any point in the future, it will be. There is no way to completely 
avoid the watchful eye of the state and do effective organizing at the same time, but 
there are certainly practical steps that can be taken to make their job more difficult, 
and they should be followed in a systematic and disciplined manner by anarchists, 
integrated into the culture of organizations, and spread throughout the working class more 
generally.

Organizing Towards Dual Power

Whenever anarchists talk about a world without police, we are immediately and inevitably 
confronted by questions about how we propose to resolve conflicts without them. These 
concerns are as prevalent as they are valid. They point to the need to further 
delegitimize the police as an institution, on the one hand, and empower communities on the 
other. This is not simply a matter of theory, but of theory being put into practice. The 
continuing appeal of police, even among the communities that they brutalize, arises from 
entirely legitimate demands for justice and security. People want to live in communities 
that aren't plagued by rampant horizontal violence, with parks that we can let our kids 
play in without fear of hypodermic needles, and where mutually agreed-upon standards of 
basic decency are enforced.

It is not enough to simply advocate for the abolition of police and prisons, and then 
point vaguely to historical examples where cops have been replaced by armed self defense 
committees. The suggestion that we leave the dispensing of justice to groups of armed 
individuals is, to put it mildly, not exactly an appealing proposition to people who 
already deal with the reality of gang warfare in their neighbourhood. Besides, history has 
shown that when an armed faction of a popular movement, such as the Black Panther Party 
(BPP) or the Irish Republican Army (IRA), have decided to take it upon themselves to 
resolve interpersonal conflicts without the broader participation of the community, the 
results have been disastrous.

More important than stockpiling arms, a strategy of building community-based systems of 
working-class dual power requires collectively identifying community standards and 
definitions of justice. This is the guiding principle behind restorative justice, a 
framework of conflict resolution that focuses on healing and reconciliation between two or 
more parties through reaching a mutual understanding of what occurred, what contributed to 
it happening, how the community as a whole is impacted, and how, if necessary, restitution 
should be allocated.

Restorative justice differs widely from state judicial systems, not only because of its 
emphasis on collective healing over individual punishment, and restitution over 
retribution, but also because it seeks to resolve conflicts directly within the 
communities where they occur. This contrasts to what radical criminologist Nils Christie 
calls the "theft of conflict" perpetrated by specialists who not only deny the involved 
parties their right to confront one another directly and, if possible, come to some sort 
of resolution, but also deny the community a participatory role in deciding what 
constitutes the "law of the land." This is something that top-down attempts at 
implementing restorative justice frameworks in Canada or the United States can never 
achieve. Whether through the so-called Aboriginal Sentencing provisions established by the 
R v. Gladue Supreme Court ruling, or the John Howard Society working with juvenile 
offenders through a diversion program, the state's primary concern is the management of 
conflict, not its resolution. Although individual judges may choose to apply "alternative 
justice" principles into their sentencing provisions, at no point does the state 
relinquish the authority to define what is just and what is not, what is right and what is 
wrong.

Despite their broad participatory potential, emphasis on collective healing and utility 
for defining social norms and values outside an imposed state framework, community defence 
forces, and restorative justice, as revolutionary alternatives to the police and the court 
system, are still hamstrung by a number of serious shortcomings in common sense. Three 
fundamental misconceptions surrounding conflict resolution, which are particularly 
prevalent among some advocates of restorative justice, are:

All conflicts can be resolved
The voluntary, consensual participation of both parties is a must
Violence, even in extreme situations, is unacceptable
Not all conflicts can be resolved. Some we are forced to live with, and others are dealt 
with as best as imperfect people in a broken society can manage. The process of healing is 
solely the right of the victim(s), and should not be conditioned upon the equal 
participation and continued emotional well-being of perpetrators. Forgive and forget is 
just as much of a backward Judeo-Christian concept as punishment for the sake of 
punishment. Likewise, without either an implicit or explicit threat of ostracization or 
violence, restorative justice simply does not work, because there is nothing to ensure 
that the transgressor will consent to the process. The vast majority of successful 
accounts of restorative justice in North America have occurred by way of court-ordered 
diversion programs, meaning that an assurance of imprisonment was held over the heads of 
perpetrators if they did not comply. Within a community-led restorative justice framework, 
some form of coercive mechanism, imbued with the authority of broader community 
legitimacy, is required.

Autonomous, community-led alternatives to the police and the courts are still a long way 
off. In order to function with any significant level of social legitimacy, systems of dual 
power require a degree of social cohesion and a level of popular distrust in official 
state institutions that is largely foreign to the experiences of those living in modern 
day Canadian cities. Particularly within an urban context, extra-judicial systems for 
conflict resolution and community defence have historically tended to grow out of a power 
vacuum, in which high levels of insecurity exist side-by-side with an absence of state 
authority. With the possible exception of several remote Indigenous communities, these 
conditions don't exist in Canada. On the contrary, the authority of the state is often 
most keenly felt in the very same neighbourhoods that face the highest levels of 
horizontal violence.

These are serious problems, and we shouldn't pretend that we have the answers. Yet it 
stands to reason that our efforts to evict the cops from our communities will only be 
successful to the extent that they are accompanied by a competing framework of community 
self-defence and conflict resolution that regular people choose to participate in. In 
other words, a prefigurative approach to abolishing the police means that we have to 
actually start building alternatives.

Building a Culture of Working-class Resistance

Some of the most iconic and inspiring images of popular resistance come from riots and 
insurrectional moments which, to outside observers, appear on televisions and computer 
screens as spontaneous reactions to a singularly egregious incident of police brutality. 
Yet for every anti-police riot that grabs the media's attention, there are countless daily 
acts of oppression and defiance that may not make the news, but which all play a 
contributing role in kicking things off. Rather than morbidly waiting around for the 
police to kill someone before springing into action, anarchists and anti-authoritarian 
revolutionaries who want to see more anti-police uprisings should seize every opportunity 
to exploit the daily social tensions that produce them. This means actively participating 
in building a culture of opposition and hostility to police that permeates all aspects of 
working-class life.

Organizing against the police can, and should be incorporated into community struggles 
around housing, and against the violent gentrification of our neighbourhoods. Police 
Community Liaison Committees should be systematically infiltrated, and business and 
property owners who zealously collaborate with police to push out poor and racialized 
neighbourhood residents should be made to understand that this practice is unacceptable. 
Community meetings of parents and teachers should be organized, and campaigns should be 
launched demanding that police be removed from public schools. Building committees and 
neighbourhood watch programs should be organized, and militants should make the case that 
neighbours not collaborate with police and immigration enforcement officials. Raising this 
demand should open space for building a more expansive definition of collaboration that 
includes any activity that increases social divisions, and allows the police to justify 
its presence in the community.

Our principled opposition to police should spill into our workplaces, as well. Anarchists 
should be talking to our co-workers about police on smoke breaks, and in the lunch room. 
Retail workers should organize with their co-workers to demand that their store enact a 
"no-chase" policy, or barring that, for an informal agreement among staff that nobody 
calls security on shoplifters, because nobody should have to bear the responsibility of 
someone getting arrested and potentially going to jail, just for stealing from the boss.

Finally, anarchists should also actively participate in organizations that focus 
exclusively on combating police violence in ways that go beyond organizing one-off rallies 
and demonstrations. In Toronto, a number of anarchists, including several members of 
Common Cause, are active within the Network for the Elimination of Police Violence (NEPV), 
an organization that conducts community outreach and education on a variety of topics 
related to policing, and which provides material support and assistance to grassroots 
anti-policing initiatives based in the city's most marginalized neighbourhoods. While its 
methodology for community organizing, and internal political education program is still a 
work in progress, NEPV has witnessed significant growth and development over the past 
year, and its model is one with potential to spread to other cities across southern 
Ontario, and beyond.


1. Primitive accumulation is a Marxist term that refers to an initial phase of capital 
accumulation, whereby the conditions are created for the further spread of capitalist 
social relations. Contemporary Marxist theorist David Harvey (citing Rosa Luxemburg) has 
argued that this process is not simply a historical transitional stage to capitalism, but 
remains a vital component of capital accumulation today (notable examples being the 
privatization of public services and infrastructure, the commodification of natural 
resources, and the patenting of genes), and that a more descriptive term for the 
phenomenon is "accumulation by dispossession."
2. Despite the fact that in Canada, the two concepts often overlap, it is nonetheless 
important to distinguish between immigration and racialization. In 2011, Toronto had 
1,264,395 racialized residents (or "visible minorities"), which works out to approximately 
49% of the population. 1,252,210 of its residents were immigrants (or 48.6% of the total 
population); 897,920 of these immigrants came from Asia, Africa, or the Americas (minus 
the United States). Using these less-than-ideal categories (given that nationality does 
not always correspond with race), it could be projected that racialized immigrants 
comprised approximately 71.7% of total immigrants and 34.8% of the total population. (2011 
National Household Survey, Statistics Canada).

http://linchpin.ca/?q=content/canadian-bacon-opposing-police-and-state-power

Canada, Common Cause, MORTAR #3 - Active Corrosion: Building Working-class Opposition to Pipelines by Two Toronto Members, Two Kitchener-Waterloo Members

(en) Canada, Common Cause, MORTAR #3 - Active Corrosion:
Building Working-class Opposition to Pipelines by Two Toronto Members,
Two Kitchener-Waterloo Members

Pipelines transport approximately 95% of Canada's crude oil and natural gas, and are 
crucial to the viability of the petroleum industry. New pipeline construction is essential 
to the distribution of oil to other markets and in the profitability of an increased rate 
of oil extraction. This makes pipelines a linchpin in the struggle against climate change, 
not because of the act of construction or the transport of oil itself, but because of the 
increase in oil extraction that will occur throughout Canada if they are built. As the 
petroleum industry makes considerations about their growth, they trouble only one thing: 
can they build more pipelines? The industry's predicted expansion is entirely dependent on 
whether or not pipeline projects will go forward, a process called "market 
diversification". In The Decade Ahead: Labour Market Outlook to 2022 for Canada's Oil and 
Gas Industry, a report put out jointly by the Canadian government and the Canadian 
Association of Petroleum Producers, a lack of community support is identified as the main 
impediment to pipeline construction. They seek to engage community stakeholders and 
strengthen their "relationships with Aboriginal communities," as this is "key to the 
sustainable growth of this sector." Of course, increased profitability and not 
environmental stability is the "sustainability" desired here.

In 2016 construction is slated to begin on the Energy East Pipeline: 4600 km of new and 
converted pipeline stretching from Hardisty, Alberta to Saint John, New Brunswick moving 
1.1 million barrels of oil daily. Workers are being trained to complete this work by their 
union, United Association, with financial support from TransCanada and the Energy East 
Pipeline Project team. Training facilities are located in Toronto, Edmonton, Winnipeg, 
Thunder Bay, Sarnia, Montreal, Miramichi, and Dartmouth. The challenge faced by capital is 
to "gain the social license to expand and operate." Our challenge is to shut them down.

Despite global capitalism's complex market structure, resource industries have key 
strategic vulnerabilities. While it's possible to offshore manufacturing plants, the same 
is not true for mines or oil patches. Mainstream economic and political academics 
(fulfilling the intellectual needs of capitalism) understand this strategic vulnerability 
and the study of geopolitics is founded on it. An often-unrecognized facet of this reality 
is that the point of production is not the only weak point. The success of port blockades, 
as well as the strikes of truck drivers, longshoremen, baggage handlers and pilots, and 
railway workers prove that global capitalism's supposed strength--the replaceability of 
any source for parts, materials, resources, or commodities flowing down the chain--also 
introduces serious weakness. Obstructing the transportation of goods could be as effective 
as shutting down production at the source.

Unlike the tar sands, Energy East and other projects are still mostly unrealized and 
require a significant investment of labour hours and capital to make fact. In particular, 
the sort of labour required for pipeline construction is fairly specific and draws on 
small, readily-employed and well-paid labour pools. Hindering the supply of labour to 
pipeline projects is, therefore, one of the potentially more effective, yet largely 
untested methods of opposing pipelines and by extension the entire tar sands megaproject.

The past decade has given rise to a number of environmental struggles centred around the 
alarming growth of Canadian oil and gas production and the construction of pipelines 
essential to the industry's heady and environmentally unacceptable goal of tripling tar 
sands production by 2030. Waged at local, regional, and national levels, these often 
intertwining struggles have varied in orientation and effectiveness. While anti-pipeline 
organizing at large has certainly led to pressure on policymakers to delay approval of 
these projects, political will at the highest levels of Canadian governance is firmly in 
support of their eventual construction. An environmental assessment here, a 
slap-on-the-wrist fine there, perhaps. But flat out denial of all tar sands pipeline 
projects remains impossible under the existing political framework, notwithstanding which 
party is in office.

Many activists and organizers have rightly determined that targeting pipeline construction 
is a key strategy to prevent the expansion of the tar sands industries. Much attention has 
deservedly been focused on First Nations situated directly on pipeline routes, who have 
made clear their principled and vigorous refusal to allow pipeline construction on their 
lands. Additionally, anti-pipeline activists have pointed out how pipeline resistance is a 
way for people to fight the tar sands in their own localities, protect shared water and 
soil commons, and join the overarching movement against climate change.

The tar sands are as much the oil fields of Athabasca, as they are its geographically 
expansive distribution network of critical infrastructure. Critical infrastructure that is 
susceptible to blockage and interruption. In this case the flow of capital is likely more 
viable than targeting the point of production. Unlike Enbridge's Line 9, Energy East will 
require a significant amount of pipeline construction or conversion in Ontario and Quebec. 
To help legitimize their project, TransCanada seeks to recruit local workers to build the 
pipeline, which fits well with their pioneer-esque, nation-building propaganda. If 
completed, Energy East will be the largest pipeline on the continent. It is being pushed 
by Canadian politicians and sits only a few rubber stamps away from being approved.

The growing prominence of anti-pipeline activism draws together the more radical remnants 
of Canada's environmental movement as well as a growing network of Indigenous solidarity 
activists. Anti-pipeline activism has become a hip and radical alternative to tired 
liberal environmentalist consumer campaigns and the vague rhetoric of "Native rights" in 
favour of at least moral support for Indigenous land claims and land defense. At the same 
time and as discussed above, it does offer the promise of strategic intervention against 
the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure and the Canadian state's wholesale support and 
underwriting of this effort. Further, it has become a radical imperative to oppose 
pipelines given the current state of the climate crisis.

Unfortunately, the efforts of anti-pipeline activists have so far largely resulted in 
failure, having done little to nothing to stop or even meaningfully delay pipeline 
development. While awareness of the issue is at an all time high, the projects are 
continuing largely unrestrained. Believing that the building of working-class 
self-organization is a crucial component in the fight against capitalism, and therefore 
the ecological destruction and injustice it necessarily creates, we identify and analyse 
the shortcomings of existing anti-pipeline activism. Further, we then outline a possible 
alternative strategy for confronting environmentally destructive industries in Ontario.

We propose that to have a successful ecological movement revolutionaries need to reorient 
our strategy and focus on building well-rounded locally-based organizations of the working 
class that have the power to contest destructive policies brought on by capitalists and 
the state. In other words, it is our view that environmental activism on its own is a 
non-starter that will fail unless interwoven within a broader emancipatory, revolutionary 
politics.

I. Towards Meaningful Solidarity and Joint Struggle

The extraction economy at the heart of the Canadian colonial state simultaneously robs 
Indigenous people of their traditional territories and the resources within them while 
ensuring the most severe health and environmental impacts are visited first and foremost 
on Indigenous communities. Indigenous territorial claims and way of life are an impediment 
to the Canadian ruling class's accumulation of wealth; outright resistance by Indigenous 
communities is a powerful external threat to the ongoing stability of the entire economic 
system of Canada. That being said, the economic system of Canada is still capitalism, and 
capitalism thrives on instability - to a point. Capitalism is a system that survives on 
crisis; the question is always only whether this is the final crisis. Instability that 
doesn't produce destruction breeds innovation within capitalism, and innovation often 
gives rise to further consolidation and new eras of stability. Simply put, it is often the 
case that what hasn't killed capitalism has made it stronger. If the counter-forces to the 
Canadian ruling class are not sufficient, the working class loses more than its chains. 
Revolutionary support of Indigenous struggles is not only a moral imperative but a class 
imperative.

Non-Indigenous members of the working class, especially in southern Ontario, must explore 
alternatives to the now-common patterns of behaviour in "Indigenous solidarity activism." 
For instance, the commonly expressed desire (less frequently acted upon) to join 
Indigenous blockades, contribute money or basic labour to supporting a geographically 
distant community whose struggles they are largely unfamiliar with, or most commonly, 
joining solidarity marches alongside "outraged" NDP members and other assorted liberals, 
which amount to lobbying and government pressure tactics with a radical veneer.

Instead we argue that anarchists and radical environmental organizers need to build 
organizations in their own neighborhoods that are able to construct their own blockades. 
If the climate crisis and the genocide of Indigenous people in Canada is as dire as we all 
claim (spoiler: it is), we must all act to subvert, repurpose, or render defunct all 
capitalist and state infrastructure that contributes to the Canadian colonial project.

The best way for non-indigenous members of the working class to support Indigenous 
struggles isn't to peel potatoes at a barricade or send out tweets in solidarity. It's to 
build resistance within the non-Indigenous working class rooted in our own communities; 
resistance that is firmly grounded, widespread, and capable of contributing to bringing 
the national economy to a halt.

We can't abandon Indigenous people in remote areas as the only concrete sites of 
resistance to environmentally harmful projects like the tar sands and its attendant 
pipelines. No one can dispute the legitimacy of land defenders like those at the 
Unist'ot'en blockade, and we fully support their efforts to stop pipeline intrusion on 
their territory. However, the best form for that support to take is for those of us living 
in the urbanized south of Canada to build up our capacity to make our own blockades 
throughout this economy. We're proposing multiple fronts, not a siege mentality.

II. The Lay of the Land

In researching the position of leftist groups for this article, we were greeted with a 
bevy of environmental solutions for both a capitalist and a post-capitalist world. We are 
told to replace furnaces with solar panels; close factories and provide those workers with 
jobs of equivalent pay and content; voluntarily "simplify" our lives while dismantling 
capitalism; and nationalize the pipelines, to name a few. These remedies betray a 
significant focus on consumption, and arguments over guilt, innocence, or absolution 
through our lifestyles with little time spent discussing production and how to address 
workers' participation in environmental destruction. There are the assertions of Earth 
First!-types, as expressed by the organization's co-founder Dave Foreman that it is "the 
bumpkin proletariat so celebrated in Wobbly lore who holds the most violent and 
destructive attitudes towards the natural world (and toward those who would defend it)." 
In contrast, there is the commitment of the Wobblies', otherwise known as the Industrial 
Workers of the World, Environmental Unionism Caucus to strategize about, "how to organize 
workers in resource extraction industries with a high impacts [sic] on the environment", 
which lacks a broader vision of addressing industries which cannot exist in their current 
form or at all, if we are to prevent crisis.

Both of these sides, however crudely expressed here, left us wanting for their lack of 
specificity, clarity, and dynamism. In discussions about the culpability of workers in 
environmental destruction or crisis, we found ourselves sliding between the two 
dichotomous tropes existing in their purest forms within primitivist and workerist 
tendencies: they are the evil or noble workers, class traitors or economic draftees. Aside 
from the obvious oversimplification, these views shed light on a particularly troubling 
environmentalist orientation to workers that denies their agency.

Inherent to the solutions put forward by environmentalists, both reformist and 
revolutionary, is that on the job, working-class people will remain powerless. While it is 
explained, for instance, that the factory should be closed and the workers should be given 
another job or that a post-capitalist environmentally-friendly world has already been 
figured out right down to your new biogas toilet, there are no illusions of collective 
decision-making. The glut of knowledge and skill in the hands and minds of working-class 
people throughout the world will remain unacknowledged. It is, at best, a liberal 
framework of action where your only input is your purchasing power or the ability of your 
physical presence at a rally to bolster another's lobbying efforts. It is, at worst, an 
authoritarian and technocratic vision that leaves the position of the worker unchanged as 
an interchangeable cog in the overall system of society.

Both environmentalism in its current form and the climate change-denialist 
counter-narrative to it depend on the supposed gullibility of working-class people. The 
working class are presented with disprovable narratives from both capital and 
environmentalists: either everything is under control or it is the end of the 
world--again. The limited traction of Chicken Little cries-to-action that involve nothing 
more than a signed petition or a march through New York to appeal to the United Nations' 
sensibilities belies the liberal environmentalists' assumption that the regular 
working-class person doesn't care about the environment. We don't care about our air, our 
water, our climate or our future. Ordinary people are portrayed as either stupid ("It's 
too abstract") or weak ("they love their cars") and refuge is taken in misanthropy: even 
if the masses don't do something about the Earth, the environmental activists can. For 
this article, we will choose a different starting point: people are not as naïve as 
environmentalists would have us believe. Perhaps people object to being pawns for a 
useless and self-aggrandizing movement. As we engage with the politics of ecological 
struggle, we must move away from disempowerment and the false dichotomy of the economic 
draftee or the class traitor, and move towards analysis rooted in reality.

Reality?

The picture is a compelling one: with few options for survival, poor young men from the 
East Coast take jobs out west to support their families. No other viable future open to 
them, tossed up on the seas of global economic and ecological forces, they land on 
Alberta's tarry shores. We have sad news for the workerists looking for the guilt-free 
worker: this sad tale does not appear to be based in fact. In other words, there is no 
economic draft in Canada and the Canadian working class are not eternal victims. People 
who work on the tar sands or the pipeline are primarily doing so because it is a way to 
make more money and they see no reason not to. Those who make high wages on pipelines or 
oil fields would be making high wages elsewhere as well.

The recruitment of new, inexperienced hires to work on pipelines is near non-existent. 
When one author of this article enquired about getting a job on the Energy East Pipeline 
they were informed that only certified journeymen who have completed their five-year 
apprenticeship are able to apply for, let alone get, a job. This anecdote provides some 
insight regarding who is actually eligible to participate in the construction of the 
pipeline. The skill and experience that qualifies one for this job does the same for many 
other, also well-compensated positions.

The Energy East Pipeline is expected to employ over 1,000 people per year for planning and 
building the Pipeline during its construction phase. After construction, it predicts 900 
permanent jobs for maintenance. Predominantly male, these workers currently make above the 
provincial average. Concerned regarding the aging of their existing workforce, marching 
imminently towards retirement, TransCanada has been investing in schools and training 
centres to guarantee the availability of replacements. Whether or not individual 
pipefitters work on pipelines, they are highly employable and will have good jobs. As our 
demographic study shows, they don't have much to lose by refusing to work on tar sands 
pipelines as they will be easily employed in another sector in the same trade. Luckily for 
us, organizing among workers to encourage refusal to build pipelines does not imply a 
choice on their part between working to expand the tar sands or unemployment.

Demographics

In Canada, the petroleum and other resource industries are highly concerned with 
increasing aging-out of skilled workers in crucial trades, such as welding. This scarcity 
has given welders and other tradespeople an advantage in the labour market, helping to 
preserve their craft unions and inflating their wages. Research done by the Petroleum and 
Mining Industry Human Resources Councils of Canada indicates that while average wages at 
the Athabasca Tar Sands are relatively high, this represents a handful of highly paid 
certified tradespeople who are overwhelmingly outnumbered by much lower-waged workers 
including truck drivers and machine operators, occupations which are paid only slightly 
above the provincial and national averages.

This disparity highlights a serious demographic difference between the two groups; for 
example, while no occupation at the tar sands even remotely approaches gender parity, the 
"unskilled" occupations do have a greater proportion of women than the "skilled" ones. The 
proportion of Indigenous people working in these "unskilled" occupations is far above the 
Canadian national average; the proportion of immigrants is much lower. These trends are 
reflected in the "skilled" trades as well, but these trades conform with national averages 
to a greater degree. It could be hypothesized that a greater proportion of the "unskilled" 
workforce is local, and reflective of the demographics of the area, with 10% of the 
population of Fort McMurray being Indigenous, and with many reserves in the surrounding 
area; however, this has not been demonstrated.

Extraction industries are committing large amounts of resources to recruitment and 
training for younger trades workers, and in some cases are specifically targeting 
Indigenous people for recruitment. This paves the way for a potential wave of recruitment 
into these industries of a more diverse group of young Canadian workers, especially as 
employment prospects for other forms of post-secondary training and education seem to decline.

In order that we could premise our ideas on reality, instead of a politically-convenient 
"just so" story, we researched the population demographics of tar sands workers, as well 
as those involved in pipeline construction and maintenance. The main community in Wood 
Buffalo, Alberta is the city of Fort McMurray. It is dominated by the petrochemical 
industry and, as of 2012, out of a population of just over 100,000, around 40,000 are 
non-permanent residents. In 2001, its total population was only just above 40,000, so in 
ten years its population has close to tripled. A direct result of the continued expansion 
of the Athabasca tar sands, we infer that much of the new local population is economically 
connected to the tar sands projects and have few social ties to the area. The population 
is approximately 80% white, 10% Aboriginal (an almost even split between Métis and First 
Nations), and 10% "other" (with South Asians as the only non-Aboriginal racial minority 
with over a thousand people). Almost 85% of residents identified English as their first 
language, while only 3% identified French as theirs. Only a few other minority languages 
break 1%, but these notably include Cree, Spanish, and Arabic.

Demographic research found an obvious split between "skilled" and "unskilled" workers. 
Workers with "skills" included pipefitters and millwrights with a trade school education. 
Workers without "skills"--machine operators and truck drivers for instance--with only 
their bodies and time to offer for sale, were much more numerous, more likely to be 
female, and unlikely to have anything above a high school diploma, if that. Compared to 
the Canadian average, Indigenous people are over-represented and immigrants are 
underrepresented, particularly in the "unskilled" sectors. As for wages, skilled workers 
make above the Albertan average, while somewhat surprisingly the unskilled workers' wages 
are comparable to the Albertan average wage.

III. Organize the Recruits

When organizing workers in environmentally harmful industries is proposed, the name of 
Judi Bari is necessarily bandied around. Aside from holding some questionable beliefs 
about femininity, communion with the Earth, and the scientific method, Bari was a 
dedicated organizer who seems to have been on the right track. She proposed that 
environmentalists work with the lumber workers and tried to agitate them against their 
employers. She argued that the largest threat to the jobs of the lumber workers' was not 
environmentalists, but their employers, who would necessarily lay off workers when the 
clearcut was complete. Most significantly, she argued for community-based struggle over 
the nomadic nature of Earth First!. Generally we are friendly to all of this. In hindsight 
however, the issue was not that she was wrong but that she and others had arguably waited 
until too late in to the struggle for the redwood to lay the groundwork that was necessary 
for victory. Her arguments were unclear, her strategy was not well-formulated and her 
organizing was not able to came to fruition before she was singled out and targeted for 
repression.

In February 2015, US oil workers went on strike for the first time since 1982. This strike 
included over 5,000 United Steelworkers members who walked out of a chemical plant, a 
cogeneration complex and eleven refineries, together accounting for 13% of the United 
States' fuel refinement capacity. This strike has been framed by "green" groups and 
unionists as a prime opportunity to engage the state, and oil refinery workers, with an 
environmental agenda. Statements made by from those doing picket-line support have 
identified this as a chance to engage in "green syndicalism." Though they are not 
inherently wrong about the possibly catalytic nature of strikes, and the importance they 
can play in consolidating struggle from a pre-existing movement, providing picket-line 
support in this context shows a lack of insight regarding the state of their own movement. 
This opportunistic, magpie-like approach to organizing, which brings to mind "ambulance 
chasing," is reactive rather than strategic, and gives few opportunities for the critical 
work of building long-term organizational structures.

The disappointing truth is that the groundwork has not been laid to take advantage of this 
opportunity. Long-term organizing cannot be faked and without this foundation, picket-line 
support for these workers is not just a well-intentioned, harmless or pointless 
demonstration of abstract solidarity; it is politically questionable. In essence, it 
involves well-meaning outsiders entering into a conflict between the workers and their 
bosses with their own agenda--an agenda that the workers have no immediate reason to 
support--and that they are not prepared to discuss and decide upon. In this strike, 
environmentalist support, if it has any effect, only serves to make environmentally 
harmful jobs more appealing without successfully directing the conversation towards the 
utility of the job itself. All too often the Left will place itself in these "no-win" 
situations by organizing too little and too late, such as by trying to organize 
communities around imminent pipeline projects, giving an impossibly narrow window in which 
to organize successfully, and no time to build power. A contrast would be revolutionaries 
organizing communities before imminent threats appear, which would prepare working-class 
communities for larger battles over regionalized environmental destruction and pollution.

A principled environmentalist approach to workers in these industries is not for them to 
make the industry more "sustainable," but to organize for its abolition, or at least 
something more substantial than better PR. To work towards this challenging goal, there 
must be broad support from organized neighbourhoods, as well as a cultural shift caused by 
organizing in recruitment halls, colleges, universities, and all other appropriate spaces, 
such that the workers at the point of production are the last pin to drop. Thus, though we 
would agree that moments like this are crucial points for intervention, revolutionaries' 
lack of preparation makes it just another missed opportunity.

The workers who are essential to fossil fuel production are predominantly skilled trades 
people. They have gone through years of schooling, training and apprenticeships to get to 
a point where they are of use to companies like TransCanada. Though these fossil fuel 
projects are advertised as something that will benefit many through the creation of jobs, 
they hire relatively small numbers of highly specialized workers. Organizing against 
recruitment or participating in counter-recruitment is a relatively untested idea in the 
arena of environmental struggle, possibly because, as we previously pointed out, the 
environmental movement has tended to demonize these workers rather than work with them. 
What we know is that these skilled workers spend a lot of time in schools and training 
facilities: engineers in universities and plumbers, pipefitters and welders in colleges 
and trade schools. This is a potentially opportune time for intervention. There is a 
relatively long period of time in which to engage with them and for them to switch 
trajectories and to acquire employment elsewhere. In making this decision, workers will 
not likely find themselves unemployed, but nevertheless a lot is being asked of 
them--certainly more than the environmentalists are asking of themselves. How is it that 
we propose to reach these workers? Surely picketing or flyering sites of recruitment or 
education is not enough.

While we refute the fallacy of identifying employment in these industries as being 
tantamount to an economic draft, the ways in which these industries secure employees does 
share qualities with the ways in which the military recruits. They function through 
partnerships with educational institutions, including high schools, colleges, trade 
schools and union halls. Though these locations are physically available to us, whether or 
not we see these spaces as politically available to us is up for debate. The question is 
whether we can position ourselves, as leftists, within educational institutions outside of 
humanities and social science programs. Do we have the ability to put forward an 
environmentalism that caters to trade schools and not graduate-level environmental studies?

For guidance, we look to the only substantial examples of counter-recruitment we could 
find: military counter-recruitment in the United States. Military counter-recruitment in 
the early to mid 2000s predominantly took the form of lobbying municipal levels of 
government to mandate that equal access be given to counter or anti-recruitment in high 
schools or colleges. This tactic was taken because it is federally mandated that the 
military have access to these educational spaces. In fact, No Child Left Behind 
legislation mandates that student tests, which apparently identify students who are of use 
or likely to join the armed forces, be shared with recruitment agencies. Anti-recruitment 
entails anti-war organizers or former military going into schools and making the pitch 
that the armed forces are lying. They provide a more accurate view of what war is like 
while identifying the misdeeds of recruiters.

The relative absence of counter-recruitment or recruit organizing in comparison to the 
prevalence of anti-war mobilizations can likely be blamed on similar tropes as those 
assigned to the worker in the environmentally-harmful job: either they are murderous 
traitors to the working class or pitiful destitute small town boys who have been 
hoodwinked into being cannon fodder for imperialism. The existence of these tropes in 
either context is largely irrelevant at low points of conflict; they are not apparently a 
problem, as they are only rhetorical in nature. However, at times of heightened 
imperialist aggression or the expansion of resource extraction or transport, they become 
detrimental to our ability to wage struggles and something that must be overcome. This was 
the case with a noteworthy experiment in anti-war organizing: Vietnam War coffeehouses and 
GI newspapers.

The Vietnam War coffeehouses began in 1967 as civilian-run off-base spaces of 
counterculture. Initially designed with a semi-bohemian culture in mind and with the goal 
of turning new recruits before they became effective killing machines, coffeehouse 
organizers soon discovered problems with their plan. The hippie-esque aesthetic of the 
spaces, though designed to attract the most organizable, tended to attract instead GIs who 
were becoming interested in the dope scene, and not necessarily in organizing. Second, 
their strategy of focusing on new recruits ignored the realities of those they were trying 
to organize with: basic training involved high levels of isolation, including from other 
GIs. Further, it was experience in service itself that tended to produce dissent. The 
flexible nature of the project, however, did allow these civilian leftists to adapt the 
project to the needs of the GIs on the bases near them.

A critical point in the coffeehouse projects was when they abandoned their orientation to 
cultural alienation and consciously set out to do direct political organizing. Only then 
did coffeehouses become an off-base meeting point for GIs; it was their anti-brass 
atmosphere, not bohemian culture that kept GIs around long enough to read anti-war papers 
and to be introduced to leftist ideas. Many had been so shaken by their experiences 
fighting overseas that they actively sought a new framework for understanding the world. 
The most common next-step for action in these spaces was the creation of GI newspapers, 
frequently produced with the support of civilian leftists. Hundreds of GIs worked to 
create these papers, thousands more distributed them on-base and tens of thousands read 
their content. Despite the conflicts occurring overseas and on-base, the war continued and 
people sought out a way to achieve higher levels of struggle. This began to take the form 
of base wide actions that led to significant consequences for the GIs involved. With the 
general failure of off-base actions, struggle then turned to localized unit-based 
organizing in their barracks.

The forms of GI organizing discussed here were predominantly run by and directed at white 
working-class GIs despite the high percentage of working-class Black and Latino men who 
served. Radicalized white GIs focused on the near non-stop production of agitational 
propaganda in order to reach their not-yet-radicalized fellow white GIs. To contrast, 
racialized GIs were more likely to take part in direct confrontations, work refusals, and 
fighting back against riot controls because they were generally more politically 
developed. Thus, they were more likely to participate in collective actions occurring 
around them without requiring remedial agitational propaganda. This racial dynamic of 
resistance and politicization within the American Armed Forces should come as no surprise 
as it existed within a context of colonized and racialized working-class people within the 
United States already joining the fray of uprisings and rebellions taking place across the 
world. The movements of struggle Stateside had already done much to prepare racialized GIs 
for resistance within and against the American Armed Forces. What those resistance 
movements also imbued in them was a healthy understanding of the violent and dangerous 
role white Americans can play in suppressing movements of class struggle. It took little 
more than an indication that the edifice of class collaboration between white GIs and the 
American ruling class was unstable for racialized GIs to join the fight in earnest. This 
is not in any way to imply that radicalized white GIs lead the way for GI resistance in 
the Vietnam war. Racialized GIs were essentially waiting for their white comrades to get 
their shit together so that the full force of white supremacist countermeasures to 
resistance wouldn't have all of them shot in the back.

The lessons we draw from these organizing experiences are that, with assistance, vet and 
GI newspapers led to political development. Those that were successful and interesting 
were such because they endeavoured to engage, intervene, and assist organizing with GIs as 
actual people. The civilians involved examined and familiarized themselves with whom they 
were actually organizing. This all took place within a context of broad, global resistance 
to the US' actions in southeast Asia. When they began their struggle, the context was 
vaguely similar to that of environmental struggle today. There was not unanimity over 
Vietnam, as there is not over climate change or the importance of ecology-based struggle. 
At the same time, outside of capital, there is seemingly not broad support for oil 
companies, just tacit acceptance.

Within the broader struggles against the Vietnam War, there was a willingness on the part 
of organizers to go beyond the usual tropes. This is required in environmentalism as well. 
As it stands, environmental activists have something to say to politicians, to consumers 
and even to corporations but they seemingly have nothing to say to the people who are 
employed in these industries. It is a glaring hole in environmental strategy that betrays 
a bourgeois understanding; again the worker lacks agency. Though environmental activists 
are happy to state that they would rather use workers for installing solar panels than 
processing fossil fuels, they are unwilling to engage the worker in those decisions.

An understanding of the uneven political development of GIs in Vietnam along predominantly 
racial demarcations is not an insignificant matter to our considerations of pipeline 
resistance. The context in which Canada's extractive economy - and resistance to it - 
operates is that of colonialism. Anti-colonial resistance is a centuries old tradition of 
Indigenous life. The matter before non-Indigenous revolutionaries is not one of supporting 
Indigenous political development and struggle but of catching the non-Indigenous working 
class up on that development and waging its own struggle against the Canadian ruling 
class. The non-Indigenous working class poses more of a threat to Indigenous land 
defenders than it does to the ruling class in clashes between the two. This is true 
whether we are talking about the oil fields of Athabasca, pipeline routes of northern 
Ontario and Quebec or the streets of Caledonia. This truth today should not be left to 
stand tomorrow by any non-Indigenous revolutionary. The task before non-Indigenous 
revolutionaries is to bring the non-Indigenous working class into direct conflict with the 
Canadian ruling class and into solidarity with the Indigenous communities that continue 
their struggle against our mutual class enemies.

We don't claim to have a quick solution to a problematic orientation that has developed 
for decades within the Left but here is our starting point: the place where workers most 
strongly feel the effects of environmental destruction is in their neighbourhoods. Impacts 
may manifest as tailing ponds, skyrocketing heating bills, water shut-off plans like those 
in Detroit and now Baltimore, or water restrictions to which industry is exempt, as in 
California. These are issues against which the working class can and must organize. Our 
goal then is that workers become environmental organizers in their own right so that this 
understanding can be carried over into their workplaces.

IV. Organize the Neighbourhood

A favoured strategy of the environmental movement has been "building awareness," 
particularly within the sphere of reform. The concept of awareness would make sense if 
ignorance was the problem and not informed reaction. To "build awareness," the first step 
entails visibility and supposed "presence" rather than action, and reaction is 
characterized as being based in ignorance rather than genuinely contradictory interests. 
This does not distinguish between the opposed interests of the classes and, moreover, is 
not conscious of how capitalism creates unequal degrees of environmentally-caused 
suffering (whether through intense disasters or slow decline), such as the virtual 
inevitability of localized pollution having a greater effect on working-class communities.

There is no environmental struggle with greater stakes than climate change, yet 
environmentalists have proven unable to motivate significant numbers of ordinary workers 
in North America to take effective action. This fault lies both with the attitudes toward 
the workers, and the attitudes toward organization and action. The failure of "building 
awareness" is arguably a contributing factor to the environmentalist turn to "green 
capitalism" and an explicit orientation toward venture capital, demonstrated by the 
appearance of schools of thought such as the "Bright Greens." Implicit in this is a 
rejection of the working class (whose labour power causes polluting industry to function) 
as a political actor rather than a consumptive economic one.

The reality is, however, that ecological disaster is not just possible, but inevitable, 
for the Canadian working class, a working class which is intensely subjected to propaganda 
which denies global warming or argues in favour of "green jobs" and weak reforms rather 
than serious change; it is a working class which will be spectacularly unprepared both to 
understand and to materially endure disaster when it comes. What is needed, then, is a 
different kind of "awareness" based around neighbourhood organization and the idea that 
workers can band together to improve their situation. Environmentalism, then, is simply 
good sense.

It also calls for a new kind of action, rarely tried in the environmental movement: 
genuine collective action from organized neighbourhoods which have informed themselves and 
made a collective decision to intervene in a situation, rather than informal activist 
cells or dictates from large NGOs. Rather than abstract talk about a "new social movement" 
(echoing the New Left obsession with national campaigns and single-issue movements) or 
affinity groups, this would represent autonomy and communitarianism, not a "social 
movement" guided by the velvet-gloved fist of NGOs where those who object to the set 
narrative are jeered at by well-trained media commentators.

Nearly every left-liberal journalist's, academic's, or activist's prescription for what to 
do about climate change hinges on an ill-defined hope for a social movement capable of 
effectively confronting the combined powers of state and industry. The loudest voices in 
this milieu, from Chris Hedges to Naomi Klein, have made variations of the claim that 
"only social movements can save us now." Certainly, there's a kernel of truth here; it's 
impossible to conceive of a way out of this mess that does not rely on mass movements to a 
certain extent. At the same time, this follows the usual liberal pattern of an ideological 
or moral battle for hearts and minds of policymakers and the "general public," rather than 
acknowledging the total lack of interest capitalists have in solving the problems they 
have caused. Additionally, the populist appeal to "the public" to do something about 
climate change seems to always follow the dead-end narratives of elections, lobbying, and 
"citizen action," rather than the broader fight waged by truly emancipatory politics; 
neither will a mass movement capable of actually implementing the "alternatives" these 
writers are so fond of hinting at just sprout up from nowhere.

On the other side of the coin, anarchists more sympathetic to insurgency will advocate for 
small groups of people to monkey-wrench ecologically harmful industry. These clandestine 
affinity group proponents may argue that only a few committed people are required to 
damage a pipeline project enough to stop it. This tactical short-sightedness goes beyond 
the fact that actions such as these can trigger broad sentiment supporting the state 
pushing back against "violent" anarchists and anti-pipeline struggles, generally. It's 
also simply not true. A primary industrial infrastructure project that crosses a 
gargantuan area of land with multiple international financial stakeholders would not be 
waylaid by the "propaganda of the deed" of rootless environmental radical playing 
asymmetrical warrior. This is not a debate about "true anarchist principles" or about 
whether you can blow up a social relationship. This is simply about tactical efficacy. It 
is far more effective for revolutionaries and environmental radicals to build 
organizations that can give working-class people agency in determining their lives. The 
building of these organizations is done through immediate struggle - which could include 
opposition to pipeline construction - while not losing sight of the long game. When these 
organizations unite with others of similar intention to wage struggles together, we will 
have something worthy of being referred to as a "movement." While it is imperative for 
current financial interests in the Canadian fossil fuel industry that pipelines be built, 
it doesn't mean the clock is ticking on the defeat of the working class and that at hour 
of pipeline completion the fight is lost. This frantic, apocalyptic thinking clouds the 
mind and makes us prone to self-involved lashing out and not the self-sacrificing and 
deliberate organizing our class' situation requires.

Where would these movements come from? Any workplace struggle that has a chance of 
succeeding relies upon deep support from the communities where the workers live. On the 
other hand, community struggles often falter when they are unable to exert any real 
pressure on the powerful entities harming their common interests. Clearly, any successful 
approach to organizing in neighbourhoods directly or indirectly threatened must recognize 
and root its politics in the interwoven nature between workplaces and their surrounding 
communities.

Obviously, neighbourhoods which are presently situated along pipeline routes or near 
dangerous resource development projects are those with the most apparent material interest 
in opposing these developments. However, these groups cannot bear the weight of such a 
difficult struggle alone. Far too much solidarity activism in support of Indigenous 
communities and blockades rests on passive support from afar. While this moral support is 
all well and good, it does little to support these communities and their struggles. At the 
same time, while these neighbourhoods may have use for bodies on the line when their 
situation reaches a crisis point, it doesn't do that much good for urban activists to 
travel up north and sit on the sidelines. What we propose as a strategic imperative to 
this type of solidarity work involves a much longer, more arduous approach rooted in the 
neighbourhoods where we presently live and work. This is difficult, but a worthwhile and 
necessary foundation for building towards a revolutionary situation in Canada, however 
unlikely it may seem. In other words, we are talking about organizing to win.

An important first step is to move away from the reactive stance most of the Left is 
currently mired in. Individuals and groups who are seriously committed to revolution as 
well as environmentalism should avail themselves of the multiple proactive strategies of 
organizing in their neighbourhoods which could provide a strong basis for future 
environmental action, as opposed to the normal leftist approach of crisis mobilization. 
Engaging in environmental organizing as an aspect or result of building these stronger 
communities and organizations means making the same case to workers for taking action on 
the environment as for taking action against landlords or bosses--that it is in their 
collective material interest. This appeal must also be interwoven with a broader plan 
towards social and economic empowerment.

What does an organized neighbourhood look like, and how do we differentiate mobilization 
from organization? Common activist modes of behaviour involve primarily one-sided 
conversations, a battle of ideas, and "converting" people to a particular way of thinking, 
then, if successful, to get them to sign onto your specific issue or cause. We would 
contrast this mobilization pattern with an organizing pattern, which we centre on the 
establishment of democratic spaces to make decisions and take collective action. Effective 
decision-making and action strengthen the organization and neighbourhood and, ultimately, 
the neighbourhood organization is more capable of enforcing its decisions and building its 
power. Environmental activism tends to skip these steps, steps which we believe are 
prerequisites to effectively contending with environmental issues, and which also 
contextualize environmentalism within a broader struggle toward revolution, rather than 
treating it as a standalone set of ideas in the style of the New Left. It also provides an 
opportunity for environmentalism to contribute to a popular understanding of, and 
opposition to, capitalism, and to build that understanding among the people who are 
uniquely positioned to end capitalism: the working class as a class.

When we write about neighbourhood organization, we don't mean independent and isolated 
neighbourhoods or a sort of socialism-in-one-neighborhood. We envision federated 
neighborhoods that work together on issues that could span large geographical areas. We 
aim to build neighborhood organizations that are independent and directly democratic. A 
starting point that could build common struggles between neighborhoods would be ecological 
issues, and they could further work together in struggles against, for example, police 
violence.

Moreover, it is our imperative to build environmentally-conscious working-class power in 
southern Ontario, both because this is where we stand and because to do otherwise would 
mean leaving small, remote communities to fight these battles on their own, against the 
might of Canadian and global capital. There are few other effective ways for us to engage 
in environmental struggle outside of merely acting as allies or riding someone else's 
bandwagon. The current pattern of environmental struggle largely follows the pattern of 
high-profile, high-energy, high-risk blockades and protest sites. These function as focal 
points for both the state and the activist Left, which flock to them. This activist 
attention is dubiously helpful at best. At any rate, these blockades indicate decisive 
action taken by strong communities. Yet, even these communities cannot stand against 
capital on their own. What is needed is connected struggles, both rural and urban, which 
are more difficult to suppress and which build a true sense of common cause against a 
common foe.

V. Conclusion

Many members of Common Cause, and certainly the members of this writing group, began to 
explore revolutionary politics because of our interest in environmental defense. A few of 
us even joined this organization because of our immense dissatisfaction with the 
environmentally-focused organizing that we had struggled to make potent for years. One 
thing that we learned was that, while participating in environmental organizing, we must 
ensure that we have not developed the same orientation to both Indigenous and 
non-Indigenous working-class people as the oil companies. Working-class people are not 
stakeholders from whom we must gain enough tacit support that we can achieve our 
predetermined goals.

Given the stakes of unmitigated and irreversible climate change, and the power of state 
and capital to firmly oppose efforts to improve our collective lot, the only strategic way 
forward lies in organizing among the working class. What is urgently needed is a wholesale 
effort to build working-class organizations that are capable of presenting concrete 
opposition to these projects. We have tried to outline here a viable and enactable vision 
of environmental struggle which is rooted in working-class organizing. This must 
necessarily be a vision founded in practicality and the need to launch the most effective 
attacks possible, rather than relying on moralistic arguments.

Throughout this article, we've tried to make the case that the current state of 
anti-pipeline and environmentalist politics is at an impasse, and that in order to 
seriously change the situation in Canada, activists struggling on this terrain must pivot 
towards organizing among the working class at a local level. For all the talk of "Chicken 
Littles" in this article, it is right to be genuinely concerned about the disturbing 
emissions trajectory the world is on and the unprecedented scale of human misery and 
environmental collapse that will follow. Moreover, the chasm between the emissions cuts 
that science tells us are needed and the rapacious growth of state-abetted fossil fuel 
industries shows us that the entire rotten edifice of the global economy is at odds with a 
liveable future for all. However, it is patently clear that with its current strategy and 
composition, the overall movement against the tar sands and for climate justice in Canada 
is bound to fail.

We wish to see the recomposition of a bold and capable working class in Canada with a 
clear understanding of its general interests regarding the environment and the trashing of 
the commons as a function of capitalism. We wish to see communities capable of standing up 
to pipeline companies and their allies in government, confident that their resistance will 
be echoed throughout the country. We wish to see Indigenous blockades strengthened and 
supported not only in words, but in strong, disruptive action throughout the economy.

But wishes don't amount to much. And though we spilled a lot of ink trying to think of 
some ways forward, the fact is most of the organizing we discussed is theoretical and 
untried. Further, it promises to be a fraught and difficult process. That said, if you 
consider yourself a revolutionary, isn't this approach more palatable than writing your 
objections to the National Energy Board, clicking "like" on the Unist'ot'en Action Camp 
page, or milling around with a bunch of liberals carrying a sad, inflatable pipeline?

There is still time to start the challenging work of organizing. While times will no doubt 
be harder in the future due to climate change, there is no sign of a coming apocalypse, 
especially for those of us in southern Ontario. Pipelines are intimately tied to the 
structure of the Canadian economy and the expansion of the tar sands but if we lose the 
battle against Energy East that does not mean that we should give up. Capitalism will find 
new ways to grow and we will find ourselves participating in new struggles. Powerful 
working-class organizations are part of a long-term strategy to win real and revolutionary 
gains, and will take years of hard work. However, with 2015 set to be another 
record-breaking year in the crescendo towards runaway climate change, and a number of 
Indigenous struggles like the Unist'oten blockade set to come to a head, there's no time 
like the present.

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