I arrived in Toronto quite late on the bus from Detroit after another uneventful border crossing. When crossing on the bus, everyone takes their possessions from inside the bus and lines up to go through customs, one bus load at a time. When driving, I had slight anxiety about my two border crossings into Canada since I was borrowing a car. However, as a young, white, semi-professional looking female who can in honesty answer that my work is as a barista, I was waved through as a decided non-threat. If I had shared that I was traveling to the country to interview radicals and activists and land defenders, would I have received the same treatment? Who knows, but it was a very distinct experience of the privilege that I carry by looking the way that I do in these two countries. Waiting in the line to enter from the bus, a man in front of me was being grilled by the customs official. He was an older black man with one large duffel bag. He was immediately treated with hostility and I listened from a few spots back in the queue as he was asked about his son he was visiting. What’s his name? Where does he live? How much money does this man have with him? The answer was almost none, and that he was hoping to stay with his son and get back on his feet for a couple weeks before returning to the U.S. His bag was rattled through by other guards and he shared that its contents are all that he has right now. He was turned away from crossing as there wasn’t enough evidence that he’d have the resources to return to the U.S. That may be true, but to me it just points to the absurdity of borders and the ways we trade our humanity for ideas of safety, identity and protection.
Though, I too, had a dwindling supply of resources, I wasn’t asked how much money I have nor who I’d stay with nor what my business in Canada was. The same official barely even looked at me save to check that my photo on the passport matched my face. I had one bag of all of my current possessions, too, had a little more money than this man (though not by much at this point), and am traveling to talk with anarchists, artists who dismantle the narratives of the state and our culture, and people breaking Canadian and U.S. law to protect the places they love and the people who are threatened by bad policies, to go and stay with a stranger who I met on the internet the day before. I couldn’t remember his name, and didn’t have his address yet, and didn’t have a return ticket purchased yet to the U.S. Objectively, I was probably a sketchier prospect to let into the country than this man who had rallied the last of his resources to attempt to turn his life around, but I sailed through the border on the basis of being–at face value–more valuable, trustworthy, and non-threatening.
My Couchsurfing host, Chelson, stayed up late to let me in and was a great host for that night and the following. He had been worried about space and comfort since he was already hosting two young men traveling from the Czech Republic, but I assured him that I didn’t mind sleeping on the floor and was really just looking for a home base for the next couple of days. I think that the guys were rather surprised when they woke up in the morning and saw a strange woman who hadn’t been there when they fell asleep in a sleeping bag on the floor, but life is full of surprises, right? I headed out that morning to get some work done and begin following up with some connections I had made previously in the trip after talking with them a bit about their experiences traveling and about their home.
One connection I had hoped to make in person while in Toronto was with Kelly Rose Pflug-Back, part of the editorial team at Fifth Estate magazine, poet, and part of the 2010 G20 protests in Toronto. She was charged with six counts of mischief and one of wearing a disguise with criminal intent and served 11 months in prison for these charges. We talked online and planned to meet up for an interview, but ended up having poor timing mostly due to health concerns for her. At some point, I’d like to do a full interview with her about her work, the G20, and her time in prison, but I am trying to limit the amount of phone interviews that I do from the road due to unpredictable audio quality and follow up with people I can’t meet in person when I have access to a proper studio again in the fall.
That afternoon, I met up with Chelson, my host, and he gave me a walking tour of Toronto. We walked through the main financial district and general downtown area, which was freshly “cleaned up” for the Pan Am Games. He explained how much infrastructure was added and how many people were displaced as resources went toward courting the huge international event–a pattern that we see over and over again in cities hosting the Olympics and other large-scale sporting events. This article has a good summary of the problems related to policing, security, and gentrification that arise in these situations and while I hadn’t seen the city beforehand, the immediate after-effects were noticeable. We walked into Kensington Market, a neighborhood full of art, excellent food, and some of the more countercultural tones of the city. Like many neighborhoods like it, gentrification constantly looms and longtime residents and business owners strive to battle it back.
Everywhere in Toronto, and previously during the trip in Alberta and BC, I saw “Stop Harper” signage, mostly on stop sign shaped placards in cars and windows. Stephen Harper’s time as Canadian Prime Minister has marked a shift in Canadian politics that moves the country much closer to the extreme conservative and proto-fascist politics of their neighbors, the U.S., and the reaction is reminiscent of the widespread hatred of George W. Bush that I grew up steeped in here. It was interesting to talk with Canadians, particularly radical ones, about the perceptions that we tend to have in the U.S. about Canada–friendly, soft-spoken, more socialist-y than we are, peaceful, idyllic northern neighbors–and the ways that those stereotypes mask a story that is still one of colonization and widespread state oppression, though with a historically softer hand. Particularly disturbing and a popular target of dissent is the Harper government’s xenophobic stance on immigration, which we are all too familiar with in the U.S. and I heard constantly about Bill C-24 and the ways that the rhetoric of terrorism has been used to enforce often racist and unfair practices throughout the country. Just while walking that day, we saw a small but impassioned group of protesters marching against said policies.
A second group I made connections with but have yet to interview by phone is the Toronto chapter of the War Resisters Support Campaign. One aspect of the relationship between our two countries that is more known than others is the story of Vietnam “draft-dodgers”, or conscientious objectors, who fled to Canada to avoid participating in that war. A continuation of that story that I wasn’t familiar with until this summer is related, but much more recent. A significant number of enlisted U.S. soldiers sought asylum in Canada when the U.S. illegally and on morally dubious grounds invaded Iraq in 2003 and were again welcomed by the majority of Canadian citizens, but faced a more conservative and anti-immigrant government forty years after Vietnam. The War Resisters Support Campaign helps these objectors, deserters, and resisters keep their Canadian homes as deportation looms. You can read some of those testimonies here on their site.
I also completed a phone interview with Alex Hundert, currently working with Grassroots Indigenous Water Defence and Anishinaabe Water Walk about the ways that indigenous people in Canada are organizing to defend water, something that is understood as more than a resource to be used or exploited, but part of the very fabric of life. Clean water is not optional, but through mining, other industrial pollution, wasteful consumption, and the breaking of systems along the water cycle, it is ever more threatened. We talked about the Anishinaabe Water Walk and that interview will be posted in full here. However, it was the first phone interview that I recorded from the road and while the quality is listenable, it isn’t at the caliber that I would like to produce for radio broadcast. I am trying to balance contacting as many people as possible with the workload I can manage in live interviews while keeping in touch for future interviews by phone when I can use a proper studio and a steady phone line to record them.
I spent my last afternoon and evening in Toronto picking up my Greyhound ticket and wandering around. I met a young man traveling from France, Ramzi, and we talked about his visit to Canada and his curiosities about the U.S., where he has yet to visit. He asked about Black Lives Matter and the general movement around police brutality in the U.S. and wanted to know whether it was really that bad. I told him that if he visits, he needs to be careful (as a twenty year old black man, and with a foreign accent to boot) and should, if possible, just stay away from cops. It was a reality check for me that while racism in some form exists around the world, he hadn’t had to be told these things by his parents from a young age the way he would have in the country where I’m from. It made me really sad to have to intersperse a political addendum or two into what would otherwise have been a wholehearted endorsement of the natural beauty and vibrant cities of the place I was born and am still part of, whether or not I like it. It was refreshing to meet a fellow wanderer and to just sit for a while during a fairly hectic adventure, reading and watching boats, and eventually walking back through Toronto to take an overnight bus to Montreal.
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