No one is illegal toronto by FTGU
Partial transcript of interview:
No One Is Illegal-Toronto is a volunteer grassroots migrant justice organization that has been fighting for access to city services without fear for all residents. They won the campaign to implement the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy at the Toronto District School Board, and have been working to have this policy in all city services. The cuts to city services will make life more difficult for undocumented and migrants. I’m joined by Hussan to talk about the impact these cuts will have on migrants and about their work around the Stop the Cuts campaign.
Q: Can you tell me about the work NOII has been doing to mobilize against these cuts?
H: No One is Illegal, in its May 2011 demo, dropped a large banner in Parkdale which proclaimed ‘Stop the Cuts!’ As part of our campaign against cuts at the provincial, municipal and federal level, we joined forces with other local organizations in the city. We already started mobilizing against Ford as far back as December 2010.
So by May 2011, we were ready to make this a major issue. We initially started with local community organizations and established a committee in Parkdale where we had our May Day. OCAP set one up in the Downtown East Side and another group started one in the Davenport Perth area.
Together we began to lay out what is now Stop the Cuts Network which is an organization comprising of ten neighbourhood chapters with an average number of 13 to 50 members in each group.
Q: NOII has been working for several years to expand city services for all. How will these cuts affect the fight for access to city services?
H: For about eight years, we’ve been mobilizing around three key things one is organizing against deportations and changing unjust immigration policy, the second is indigenous sovereignty, and the third is expanding services for undocumented people and migrants in the city.
When we see this age of austerity, at a time when we have build relationships across different service sectors and actually been able to expand services, access to undocumented people into schools, some access to shelters, and some access to health care, these cuts would have a dramatic impact on our communities.
It became imperative that we were part of mobilizing a force that not only could stop the cuts, but also expand services towards a broader campaign of creating a city where workers at the site of service provison and people that access them have the ability to determine what happens to those spaces.
So that means community control over a community resource and this idea that city council or a group of private consultants or some rich politician can determine what happens to a bus in a particular neighbourhood, or at school during a breakfast program didn’t make sense to us.
That’s why we helped establish and have continued to fully support Stop the Cuts. It was also a moment to really reach out to all the people that were beginning to come together in their hatred for Ford and beginning to notice city services, to say hey yes it’s important to stop the cuts, but these services are still inaccessible to a lot of people even if these cuts were stopped.
Q: How will these cuts impact migrant communities?
H: Nutrition programs at schools provide food to all children and because the work us and our allies have done, undocumented children in Toronto can go to school and that would be food they’re accessing. TTC, Libraries, community services -these are services that are used by poor people, people of colour and by undocumented people.
Every time there are fees, there are ID requirements that’s another gate that will push out undocumented people.
From the very onsite it was important to say not just protect what we have. But realizing what we have has been insufficient. But the necessity to fight back and say we need more services.
But it is also to talk about who control these services and how these services are controlled. So yes we’re talking about expansion of services, but we also talking about the decent realization of them.
If individual health centres, individual shelters, individual food banks, individual child care centres could, with feedback from the community, workers and those accessing it, create a space that was accessible to the community.
It would be in a much better position to be part of a healthy community and to ensure undocumented people, the queer communities and the disabled people to access them without fear.
Q: What are the advantages of organizing in decentralized committees in neighbourhoods?
H: First, it allows people to come together in a neighbourhood and talk about what it is that they need in their community and how are they going to defend it.
If there’s a child care centre closing in a community, there’s a group of people that can go there and say no we’re not going to let it close. By organizing in a neighbourhood, you allow all kinds of people to join. Unionized workers can be part of it, people who are not part of other political projects can be part of it.
It’s in your neighbourhood, you can walk to the meeting. You have these really shared interest that your mobilizing around.
That’s the key critical part of building grassroots power. The other part of it is we don’t want to substitute one city hierarchy for another, we don’t want to substitute a bureaucracy for another.
So by having power concentrated in the neighbourhood chapter, the network really being a place that just directs resources towards different groups, does research or helps do media, helps direct some action support, that we can create a base of power.
It’s a model. It’s a radical experiment one at least in Toronto. We can mobilize this network to fight provincially and federally.
Q: What are the challenges?
H: There’s an issue around sustainable. The real test will be in February. What happens after the city council budget meeting on Jan 17 to 19?
Q: How are these cuts racist?
H: Predominately the cuts are in communities that are poor and racialized. When night buses are being cut or when community centres are being cut, when food and nutrition progam are being cut, when shelters are being closed, it’s affecting the poorest of the poor. In this country the poorest of the poor are indigeneous people and people of colour.
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