Migration is often a story about loss and struggle as much  as new beginnings. In spite of ideologies of multicultural acceptance in Vancouver, migrants from sub-Saharan Africa have experienced exclusion and marginalization even as they build new spaces of belonging. Migrants from sub-Saharan Africa are a small but growing part of the metro Vancouver population. In the 2006 Census, 27,260 Vancouver residents were born in Africa, constituting just over 1% of the population. The small African diaspora is spread out in the municipalities of Surrey, Langley, Coquitlam, Vancouver, New Westminster, and Burnaby. This dispersed residential pattern makes it more difficult to develop connections within the community. Nevertheless, community building practices are occurring across these spaces.

Last week, Pidgin co-owner Brandon Grossutti stole the satirical mascot known as "the People's Pickle" from the protest picket outside his restaurant. According to one witness, picket organizer Kim Hearty attempted to retrieve the mascot from the back of the restaurant when Grossutti physically assaulted the community organizer.

Grossutti then relayed his own version of events to the Vancouver Police Department. Based on his allegations, on Monday of this week the VPD arrested Kim Hearty outside her home in East Van. After being held in jail, Hearty was released on condition that she not go within a two-block radius of the Pidgin picket.

Hearty is one of the main organizers of a legal picket action that the VPD have been seeking unsuccessfully to shut down for months. In April the police moved to arrest Pidgin picketers, announcing plans for an undefined number of premeditated arrests at the site of the picket. After a public outcry and strong show of support for the picket by Downtown Eastside residents, the VPD was forced to temporarily shelve their arrest plans.

Public Event with Jackie Wong, Henry Yu and Pablo Mendez

The Foreign Investment Myth: Understanding the Housing Crisis & Confronting Racism in Vancouver

On Monday hundreds of people, including many Turkish Vancouverites, gathered outside the Vancouver Art Gallery in solidarity with the ongoing protests in Turkey. Addressing the broad anti-government protests in Istanbul and throughout Turkey, speakers at the VAG condemned the Turkish government’s undemocratic tactics, police brutality against the protests, media blackouts, and religious fundamentalism.

Some organizers drew attention to the original event that sparked the movement. “What started everything was a public space, Gezi park in the city centre...The government decided to turn that into a shopping mall and that wasn’t even a lawful decision. There’s a court decision against it,” said Ozgur Sapmaz, a volunteer organizer of the rally at the VAG.

“People occupied the park to prevent construction machinery from getting in there, which was about to start chopping down the trees. There were about 100 protesters there, who started sitting in, setting up tents. Cops came and tried to kick them out, and they used really brutal force...It started getting attention from the artist community. It became this massive resistance against the construction effort.”

Despite the distance between Vancouver and Turkey, the events in Gezi park bring to mind local history. There was the fight to save the entrance of Stanley Park in 1971, the Crab Park occupation in 1984, the successful UBC student campaigns from 2007 - 2009 to stop the privatization of the centre of campus and the UBC Farm, the Olympic Tent Village, Occupy Vancouver, and many other squats and tent cities. If the destruction of Gezi Park -- a seemingly innocuous and unexceptional event -- can spark such an uprising in Istanbul, could the same not happen here?

The City of Vancouver has recently announced that it will be using four city-owned sites to develop affordable housing. The announcement has been widely praised even though the policy contains no guarantee that the rents will be affordable.

The four sites proposal approved by council does not specify rent levels or rental mix in the proposed buildings. Like previous Vision Vancouver initiatives, the project is clad in vague and uncertain terms that prioritize market profits over affordability. Worse still, the affordability requirements will be decided behind closed doors and hidden in a private “operating agreement.” This means that the public will never know how many units will be affordable or what the rents will be.

Sophie Fiennes' new film, The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, follows Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek on a Virgilian tour through the labyrinths of popular culture. As in many of his seventy or so books, Žižek deploys the ideas of Jacques Lacan, Karl Marx, and Walter Benjamin to shed light on the intricate operations of ideology in cinema, TV ad campaigns, and popular music. Here, the emphasis on pop culture serves a two-fold purpose: it exposes the extent to which we denizens of a supposedly "post-ideological society" are entangled in the cobwebs of ideology, and it makes abstruse psychoanalytic and philosophical optics thoroughly palatable to large audiences (a tactic that in large part accounts for Žižek's veritable intellectual guru status both inside and outside of academia).

For Žižek, following French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (whose revival in academic circles Žižek has played no small part in instigating), ideology is not merely a false screen that obstructs our perception of the way things really are. Reality, for Lacan, necessarily “takes on the structure of a fiction.” We understand the world around us and our roles within it primarily through fragmentary narratives that permeate the cultural sphere. As such, television, film, advertising, and the social networking sites to which so many of us are addicted teach us not just what to desire, but how to desire in an increasingly virtual world.

This week the city approved a subsidy exceeding 1 million dollars to a real estate corporation for a market housing development. The project, located in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighborhood, will not be affordable but has been put forward by city council under the false guise that an unregulated rental market is inherently affordable.

The new housing development was approved under the city’s Rental 100 program, formerly called the STIR program. The five story mixed-use building in Kitsilano will offer 83 units of market rental housing, located at 3002-3036 West Broadway. Following the STIR model, the Rental 100 program offers the developer subsidies in return for the construction of rental housing, with no upper limit on rents.

Over the past decade, the Canadian economy has become increasingly dependent upon exploited temporary foreign workers, in large part through the Canadian government’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), an arm of the government's Temporary Foreign Worker Program. A new book, titled Tomorrow We're All Going to the Harvest: Temporary Foreign Worker Programs and Neoliberal Political Economy, explores with scholarly attention and detail many of the problems inherent in this program.

Written by Leigh Binford, professor of Sociology at the City University of New York, this timely book weaves together compelling evidence from the past ten years to show how the SAWP scheme has created an economy based on oppression -- providing Canadian employers with a steady stream of cheap labourers who are themselves silenced by the constant possibility of capricious deportation.

In addition to being denied labour and political rights, temporary workers are forced to endure unsafe conditions. Binford points out that SAWP participants “are sometimes poorly housed, frequently overworked, occasionally maltreated, exposed to dangerous chemicals without adequate training and/or protective gear, socially excluded from active participation in community life, and told to “aguantar” (endure) by the very officials charged with defending their rights.”

Adrian Dix and the NDP have been defeated in an election that was widely expected to yield a comfortable win for the centre-left party. Over the course of the month-long race, BC politics threw off the political intensity often associated with battles of left and right. Instead of attacking the BC Liberal record, Dix and the NDP chose a strategy of passive precaution, waiting for the other side to falter.

Even if the campaign was marked by few highlights, Dix framed his party’s approach in both lofty and strategic terms, arguing that the new BC NDP had risen above partisan bickering and the petty politics of the BC Liberals. Supporters framed this “21st century” approach as a necessary path for winning government. Beneath the media strategy -- the story went -- a progressive platform was held waiting to be implemented once in power. ]]> http://themainlander.com/2013/05/15/why-did-the-ndp-lose/feed/ 19 http://themainlander.com/2013/05/08/another-round-of-evictions-in-vancouver-cope-gen-why-vivo-and-spartacus-among-groups-evicted-in-may/ http://themainlander.com/2013/05/08/another-round-of-evictions-in-vancouver-cope-gen-why-vivo-and-spartacus-among-groups-evicted-in-may/#comments Wed, 08 May 2013 21:39:31 +0000 Maria Wallstam and Nathan Crompton http://themainlander.com/?p=7105

Several non-profit organizations across Vancouver have received eviction notices this month. Evictions include COPE in Chinatown, VIVO Media Arts, Spartacus Books in Strathcona and the Junction in Gastown. The high-profile evictions point to the deteriorating security of tenure for renters in Vancouver, including non-profits and cultural organizations renting in commercial spaces.

This month’s evictions come as part of a long trajectory of art and social spaces evicted in the city, particularly for organizations with roots in low-income areas facing rapid gentrification. Spartacus Books, based in the DTES area for 40 years, was pushed out from its previous location across from Victory Square due to “staggeringly high rent.” Spartacus was only one of a number of groups pushed out and evicted from the one-block radius of the Woodward’s mega-project, including W2, Red Gate, Dynamo and “151 E Hastings.”