DONAIR Your Dirty Laundry: Morning File, Saturday, December 5, 2015

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1. Pushed Out

The Chronicle Herald covered this story about women being evicted from housing in the North End.

I have talked to women in housing on Brunswick Street whose rent has risen from $250 dollars to over $900 dollars a month. In other housing units, arbitrary and petty rules have been put in place in order to  evict residents: for example, residents have been threatened with eviction if they make noise after 9pm. Women have also been allegedly targeted for having children charged with a criminal offence. The collaboration of housing policy, policing and incarceration, school closings and the marginalization of Black teachers in the community, gentrification, lack of access to medical and mental health services that further impoverish single women in particular, are all working together to target Black residents in particular, to “clean” the North End of Halifax and relocate residents to the North End of Dartmouth.

Eviction and housing policies force people out. When people can’t school their children in the community, and when the schools are hostile towards Black teachers ensuring that the people best positioned to advocate for students are not living and working in the community, then housing also becomes untenable for parents. Profiling and other forms of police coercion — such as charging mothers with accessory to crimes as a tactic to force pleas from their children, a strong-arm tactic that results in job and housing loss for women — as well as parole and release conditions that may place an entire community off-limits (for example, if a condition is to not associate with people with criminal records, that is an impossible condition for people who already come from heavily incarcerated communities when those people with records are likely their family members, childhood friends, neighbours, etc.) also work to push people out of their communities. Women in particular are impacted by unstable housing, and become far more vulnerable to things like assault, rape, and violence when they do not have a safe place to live. The health impact of unstable housing is also acute.

I was reading this article about the criticism surrounding Spike Lee’s new movie Chiraq. One of the points made by activists is that housing policy in Chicago (inevitably) created the conditions of violence that are now blamed on “self-inflicted genocide.” As Aja Monet argues in the article:

Capitalism reinforces a geography of violence. Black people have been experiments of a failed democracy. Chicago was site of violent housing experiments that left many Black families displaced. Six million Black Americans fled the rural South to escape slavery and the war on Blackness during The Great Migration. It is, in fact, a war. We have been perpetually migrating. It has destabilized entire communities. We see it in land theft, policing, education, gang violence, drug abuse, mass incarceration, gender violence, media, literature etc. The war waged against Black people started long before Chicago’s current violent murder rates. Black skin is a uniform of war.

It struck me as I was reading the article that the seeming push to gather low income and racialized residents in the North of Dartmouth is setting up the conditions for violence and crime that will then be blamed on Black pathology, single mothers, hip hop, and so-called Black-on-Black crime. While Halifax’s North End provides a community feel, including green space, closeness to downtown, units that permit interaction between neighbours and space for the community coming together outdoors, the strategy of pushing residents further into North Dartmouth, often into high rise buildings hemmed in by highways with a lack of the same recreational and community spaces, seems designed to re-create the terrible conditions of violence associated with US ghettoes and projects. These are not simply issues of development, they are issues of what amounts to ethnic cleansing of communities that creates life threatening conditions.

Every time I talk to women in the community they tell me about the lack of help and services, the inability to seek mental health treatment, the stress-related diseases, the lack of advocacy around legal issues, their powerlessness in the face of housing and lack of tenancy advocates, the violence and abuse they have suffered from being made vulnerable, PTSD because of these conditions, and so many more problems. We are not just pushing people out, we are wiping them out, and nobody seems to be listening.

2. I’m Dreaming of a WHITE Christmas

Affirmative action has clearly infiltrated Mahone Bay’s Christmas celebration.

Hopefully those are Santa’s slaves.

I don’t know about you, but I want my Christmas “traditional.” Santa is WHITE.

Is this “inclusive” display intended to portray the Wise Men? Can white men not even be the Wise Men anymore? It’s bad enough that white people can’t even get into Ivy League universities because of Affirmative Action policies, now we’re supposed to believe the Wise Men are “diverse” too? Like Black people are even smart.

Clearly the figure on the left is a Muslim, proving that you’re not even allowed to be Christian at Christmas. This is obvious propaganda in the war on Christians, in the hope that children will see this Muslim figurine and support the flooding of Canada with terroristic refugees and the elimination of the white race.

I’m outraged that children will be subjected to this liberal propaganda, promoted by guilty self-hating white people. What’s next, eliminating European history in schools? Teaching children about “Mother Christmas” because Father Christmas is considered “patriarchal” and “sexist?” (Another feminazi attack on fathers and men.) Banning the nutcracker because of nut allergies and peanut sensitivities? Claiming that Santa Claus is racist?

It’s sad to see this “progressive” agenda imposed on our Christmas celebrations. Bring back old school Santa and stop the madness!

3. HRP VS. THE RCMP

Halifax Regional Police won the contract over the RCMP to provide security at the Halifax International Airport.

[Airport spokesperson Peter] Spurway confirmed Thursday Halifax Regional Police won the contract, though he wouldn’t disclose the winning bid, or how many other bids were submitted…

If council approves the contract, Spurway said Halifax Regional Police will have to provide “armed response to (the airport’s) primary security line” within five minutes, and will have a drug-sniffing dog on site.

It’s okay, RCMP, though. You still have the musical ride.

I’m curious about the possibility of these “other bids.” Like, now I’m picturing there were all these random bids…

Like, ahoy there! I’d like to bid on the airport security contract! I’m armed and I have my drug sniffing cat.

This bid cuts out the middle man. Just arm the dog.

I was going to make a joke about HRP response times, like “5 minutes response time should be fine. It’s not like you’re responding to a 911 call from the Square.” But then I actually found a map of Halifax Police response times, and apparently they do average 5 minutes, so facts, I guess.

There’s also legal discussion around the use of drug sniffing dogs.

I actually bizarrely once did a Black History Month poetry performance at the airport for security staff, and afterwards they took me on a tour and I saw the drug sniffing beagle and the special toilet that they make you poop your drugs into. They had just got the new toilet in the cells and they were glad that they didn’t have to go through the poo by hand anymore.

I guess I should have bid on the contract since I’m basically like an expert on airport security now.

4. The Powerful Donair Lobby

ONLY THE MAYOR can make Donair the official food of Halifax.

Does Bill Karston HATE HALIFAX?

There was opposition to making Halifax’s so-called claim to fame the official food, though, as councillor Bill Karston called the whole discussion “random.”

“Let’s not get it confused and say ‘the donair’ was invented in Halifax,” he argued.

“‘The Halifax Donair,’ as made by those in the business here is very, very special to Halifax, but donairs are being served in Turkey and Syria and in countries abroad for centuries, different version, but a donair none the less.”

Whatever, communist. Go join the Heritage Trust and Tim Bousquet and the rest of the people who just don’t want Halifax to be great. I’ll be eating my donair over in the Nova Centre happily not seeing the view from Citadel Hill because I don’t live in some “freeze-dried Brigadoon” fantasy, okay?

This guy on the LEFT agrees with you, Karston.

Maybe you should change your name to “Horse and Carriage-ston” since you’re so opposed to progress. DONAIR your dirty laundry in public, get on the positive train!

Dude, we have ARCHIE COMICS which are totally cutting edge and up to date on our side, okay?

Hey, Evan Coole! I don’t see anything in your platform about Donairs. Get with the times, okay? Like, I bet you’re all campaigning about Marxist things like “food insecurity” when you should be talking about Donairs. You probably want acorns to be the official food of Halifax.

Haters.

Views

1. There’s no racism in Canada!

CBC has temporarily closed comments on Indigenous stories.

I can’t embed it, but if you follow the link you can see a video of Indigenous staff reading comments left on CBC stories.

2. Landon Webb Speaks

The Chronicle Herald has an interview with Landon Webb challenging his “incompetency” label.

3. Being all up in other people’s grills is also distracting tho

Cranky letter from the Cape Breton Post:

Cell phones are distracting.

This is what I am hearing coming from the mouths of many people in the past few months. Cell phones cause distracting only when they are used improperly, by talking or texting while operating a motor vehicle.

The RCMP are patrolling our highways on their daily duties and stopping the guilty persons misusing their cell phone while driving their vehicle. Tickets are issued but as we all know many cell phone users on our highways slip by unnoticed except for the drivers you and I see from day to day.

When you or I become a witness to a motorist misusing his or her cell phone while operating their vehicle on a public highway it is a difficult case for us to report this person to the RCMP. At whatever speed we are traveling when we see a cell phone user he or she is usually traveling in our opposite direction. The few seconds we have looking through our side or rearview mirror isn’t enough time to memorize a license plate number.

A change in the law may be an answer to the growing unsafe practice of driving while using a cell phone. New changes could be considered along with a higher fine and having the cell phone suspension for a period of time. Hoe about first offense seven days, second offense three months and third offense 12 months.

This may or may not work , but I’m sure I wouldn’t want my cell phone taken away from me for any period of time or with any extra cost.

Cell phones become a useful resource in any type of emergency and they have many other useful uses. We live in an age of technology so let us use our cell phones wisely and not distractedly.

Clarence Landry, St. Peter’s

4. Hugs 4 Hitler?

Cranky letter 2 from the Digby Courier

Wangersky’s view naïve

I read the column by Russell Wangersky in the (Digby) Courier for Nov 19. I appreciated his act of remembrance and it obviously was personal and solemn.

But his opinion in closing is completely offensive and naïve. Who does be think would have thwarted the Nazi regime? Hugs and positive thoughts? I served in the military for 20 years, I had several friends die on missions overseas and at home. It was awful to experience that, but those that were there knew we were making a difference, and if we didn’t who would?

War is patently ugly, unfair and obscene. But it does happen and can’t be ignored, if so, at your peril.

So who should go fight for our freedom and rights? It will always be the young generation who grabs the torch and runs with it.

That is why we remember, we remember their supreme sacrifice, also the sacrifices of those who did return after many years of war or conflict.

Maybe Russell should experience a country tearing itself apart. Watching men fight to save their way of life and their families. Should they have had to do that? Of course not, but we don’t live in Russell’s utopia with no conflict.

Andrew Eaton, Digby