By Alex Sweet
On July 25, Toronto mayor Olivia Chow welcomed via a video call a family of refugees from Gaza to Pearson international airport. The contradictions here couldn’t be more glaring.
For starters, Chow has repeatedly catered to police budgets demanding more funding. These increases then materialize as increased personnel numbers and militarization to surveil, harass and bully peaceful protesters and peace advocates, or any other working person the state or capital deems as a threat.
Then there is the specific issue of Palestine solidarity. At a recent Toronto street festival, activists asked Chow why the most recent Palestine solidarity protest had security measures heightened to the point that the protesters were essentially outnumbered. On that particular occasion, in addition to police other emergency services including fire and paramedics were called into the line of duty while protesters were cut off repeatedly by officers and 11 eventual arrests were made – once again after an arbitrary and spur of the moment police instigation and crackdown.
Echoing Toronto’s previous mayor John Tory, Chow responded that she doesn’t direct the police. During Tory’s mayorship, police retorted something to the effect of “we don’t make our own decisions – we follow that of the mayor and the city.”
Whether such crackdowns are the result of directives or spontaneous initiatives, it is blatantly clear that the inflated police budget paired with increased policing powers is a recipe for overzealous force bullying peace advocates.
Chow herself has championed some efforts to further bolster the power and recklessness of the police and silence dissent. For example, she voted for the protest bubble zone bylaw which can make protests essentially ineffective for any cause be it labour, women’s or Queer rights, or Indigenous solidarity.
Forced starvation in Gaza has reached rampant and critical levels for many Palestinians, while abundant food and aid waits outside at a border Israel refuses to open. Attempts to avoid this border via aid drops in international waters has been illegally thwarted by the Israeli military, while a US-Israeli coalition controlling slow food releases inside already is contributing to hundreds of deaths as Israeli militants open fire on famished Palestinians scrambling for sustenance.
Of course, Olivia Chow has no direct power to influence the situation in Gaza. But severely limiting peaceful protesters advocating for this cause, while at the same time posturing with a broken family stricken by this ongoing genocide, is shameful and deplorable.
While corporations, the police and Zionist lobbies continue to sway politics at every level of government, the working class and people’s and labour movements must continue to build a broad cross-sectional alliance to prevent further hampering of our liberties in a so-called “free democratic” country.
We can follow the many international examples – sanctions imposed by Spain, blockades by dock workers in Greece, solidarity from national labour unions in Britain, and beyond – that can hinder the war and occupation machine that Israel continues to operate on Palestinians.
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