Montreal Serai

Literature has always been important, is still important and will continue to be important for as long as human beings have a speech centre in their brain. And were an errant blood vessel to flood this important area of the command centre of the human body,  we might survive as living organisms but  our life would be immensely impoverished for there isn’t a sadder sight than that of a human being who can no longer communicate -or commune- with fellow human beings. Because literature is all about communion,  memory, beauty, need, desire, feelings, conviviality and expression,  most importantly expression.  As a species we call ourselves homo sapiens, the human who knows, but we might as well call ourselves  homo affabilis , the human who communicates. In other words, we are chatterboxes who, for the sake of expediency and a larger audience,  invented writing which then morphed into literature.

The Bible, one of the most-often published and translated books in recent millennia and more, got it right when it pronounced: In the beginning was the word. Those who  are a  product of the Judeo-Christian tradition might take all its pronouncements as a literal or metaphorical explanation of life on earth and beyond, or  not. That is their privilege. However, simple lovers of literature recognize that its endurance is due to its ability to capture our imagination and to understand the trials and tribulations of a  wandering people who lived long ago and far away. And if we don’t quite agree with what it has to say, we can always turn to another magnificent piece of literature called the Koran which also calls for empathy and love for our fellow human beings. And yet again, if we can’t read from right to left, and like our letters to hang down from the line instead of being perched on top of it, we can always light an oil lamp in front of an image of Lord Ganesh hoping that he grants us the gift of imagination. After all, Ganesh, besides presiding over weddings and other auspicious (or potentially difficult!) endeavors, is the most prolific author of them all. It is said that he wrote the whole of the Mahabharata, the great epic of the Bharat dynasty that ruled India in a distant past. Some refine this tidbit of information by explaining that  Vyasa, a great Sanskrit poet, was the true author of the Mahabharata and that Lord Ganesh merely took  down his dictation. Closest to the truth is the version that states that this epic poem, the longest in the world with its 90,000 verses, was really an accretion of accounts written across generations. Its structure is that of a story within a story, one of the most complex -and satisfying- literary genres. Be it as it may, every time I turn my computer on, a  jovial bronze Ganesh holding the tip of his broken tusk in his right hand  and scribbling away on a book in his left hand stares at me from the screen  daring  me to do likewise. 

Bedtime Reading Susan Dubrofsky

There are other examples of great literature from other continents. The Odyssey and the Iliad tell the story of gods who mingled with humans and warriors who went on long voyages leaving their wives behind busy at a loom. The  Popol Vuh explains to  the Mayan people from the Yucatan Peninsula  how the world was created.  The Kalevala, an epic poem of the Finnish people, actually inspired them to become independent from the Russian empire and establish modern Finland. The Altjeringa or Australian Aboriginal Dreamings,  map out the path Aboriginals must take  in their long journeys across the continent  and the griots or story-tellers  from Africa keep the culture alive. Literature is the vessel that contains the immense story of humanity across  time and space.

 Modern society has the internet, that network of electronic highways, by-ways and lanes that move the word around with electronic alacrity. The down side is that it is giving rise to another form of literature that is concentrating memory in virtual spaces away from physical supports like stone, parchment  and paper and most importantly, debilitating the  synaptic  resiliency of the human mind. But it has brought about other advantages. The internet revolution has actually made it possible for lovers of literature to immediately disseminate the work of and rally around the cause of writers who are threatened by their governments because the latter feel threatened by them. This proves that the pen -read literature- continues to be mightier than the sword. Writer Vaclav Havel, who as last president of Czechoslovakia and first president of the Czech Republic led his country through a difficult transition without shedding blood, validated this saying. Literature was also a life-saver for Shehrazade who survived thanks to her ability to tell a thousand and one enthralling tales.

It is difficult for a writer to get started but once on a roll, it is difficult to know when to stop. One can go on and on about the importance of reading and writing since writers have examined their profession more intensely than any other professional group. So  I will  arbitrarily stop here with a quote from Canadian author Yann Martel. When interviewed about his obstinacy in sending Canadian Prime Minister Harper a novel every two weeks for two years in the hope of eliciting a reaction, he explained that he would have liked to know what Harper read, because he would hate to have a leader whose bedside book is  Mein Kampf. Know your enemy by the friends he keeps and the books he reads!  He also suggested that the importance of literature resides in its ability to open doors and make us more empathetic. “You read a story about a boy soldier in Afghanistan and it opens your heart, even if you’ve never been to Afghanistan”.

Ergo, literature is still important because the hard times we live in require that we open our  hearts, and open them wide.

Often inflated and possibly misleading, the titles I chose for my college Lit essays were always picked last and were usually the invention of unpardonable puns and last-minute panic. In my first and second year, those amateurish instincts did not end there; my essays though full of conviction and argument, failed to translate what it was I meant to say. Words were words were words were words. What I didn’t know then-though it seems stock to say, ‘…but what I do know now,’ considering I’m only six months out of college-is how to read. Writing came after. In Howard Bloom’s book, whose title inspired my last sentence, How to Read in Why, Bloom quotes Sir Francis Bacon in the prologue, and begins to answer the Why: “Read not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.” Bacon’s counsel, to weigh and to consider, behaves in life as a slowing down; to absorb, appreciate, question, expand, feel, and ultimately grow. Though reading was done quietly and alone, and only sometimes in the company of others, literature became my way of reconciling with everything around me and widening my scope. As Bloom urges, although we read for varied yet familiar reasons, to “read deeply,” is the truest motivation.

And so with the right guidance, a couple of teachers endowed with that mentoring eye-half warmth, half craze-and the sort of vitality that a student who first appears brittle and unimpressionable, me, but who is utterly vulnerable and seeking, latches onto, I soon abandoned the impulse to empty the library’s shelves of secondary readings, and embrace the book alone. I began to read a novel’s first sentence as if it were its overture, and soon discovered that unwitting instinct to treat the first page as if were a foundation, securing and revealing, both, the novel’s path. Of course there was no formula for reading, no checklist to follow, instead, after having deserted the option of reading others’ thoughts and studies, I began to understand pattern, to notice as themes and ideas recurred and connected, as if in certain parts the letters themselves were thicker and bolder on the page. I started appreciating what was being inferred, learning the subtleties of a writer who often describes things as they appear or seem as oppose to the writer who claims to capture everything as it is.

 It was once this phenomenon started happening, that I really became a reader. To think that this only ensued in college is unfortunate, though I’m not sure any time before would have made much sense. These were the years allotted for me to inquire, to be more drastic and to create. I was filling myself with influences and memorizing favourite passages, and romanticizing characters only to recreate them in my own writing; I was, in my own art, “deforming the model,” as Barthes states. Suddenly, despite earlier resistance, I was turning to my parents for their take on things and finding solace in shared journeys. But more crucially, these were the years I chose to read as much as I could; the 19^th century novel, French lyrical poetry, Greek Tragedy, Proust, Contemporary American short fiction. Invariably, my certainties shifted frequently. With each writer, came an era or war, came revolutions-French, sexual, student. But more significant was when I began to understand that certainties were needless, preventable even.

Prior to graduation last May, I made a list of books I hoped to read, ones I had no time for in the year. It was the only thing I’d planned to do; I had yet to find a job, or an apartment, or even consider something more classic , like a road trip with friends or a summer class, something light and indulgent, like printmaking or cooking. Instead, I was excited to begin devouring my reading list, each book, one by one, in no particular order. Somehow, having choice was order enough. I should have predicted what happened instead. My first months this summer were spent re-reading. Some books were still fresh in my mind and I caught myself anticipating favourite parts. Others, short fiction or essays, I hadn’t returned to in a couple of years, yet those too were suddenly alive again; that haunting perfection of a great short story, its timing matching my ride into the city. I found myself assigning my fellow passengers Dickensian names to pair with their Dickensian quirks: the way they sat squished in their seats, sweaty, even grotesque.

Each book was animated in a new way, as if cohering somehow with my daily thoughts and interactions. That nervous, existential post-college fear was quieted one afternoon as I re-read a Raymond Carver essay on writing. I read it three times, as if asking it to accompany me until I’d calmed down a bit. I learned the pleasure of returning to a book, of reading sentimentally and wistfully, with all of me. To be once again in the throes of a narrative, a romance, a familiar pursuit, reminded me that reading was something I had learned to do and that it needed practice and attention, and that despite the years each book had on me, I too was bringing something to the page. “Find now what comes near to you,” Bloom reminds-weigh and consider, weigh and consider.

The novel encourages - a form of storytelling that promotes our sense of being individual, but never forgetting the bond of our “common humanity” and of the “universal experiences” that we believe the best novels elucidate and comment on. - From Noah Richler’s blog

Like most candidates for a Masters Degree in Communication and Theatre, I searched for a text that summarized some obscure, but relevant information. I found Kenneth Burke’s Philosophy of Literary Form. It gave me way of thinking about literature and a reason to start writing.

Burke began by analyzing proverbs “Proverbs are designed for consolation or vengeance, for admonition or exhortation, for foretelling.”  They describe recurring social relationships and events and provide advice for surviving almost anything. Proverbs are essentially “equipment for living”. Literature is” proverbs writ large.”

The books that we read, the poetry and the plays and films that we view, are there to provide in a post technocratic society, what existed in the one-liner proverbs of a pre-literate world. Marry in haste regret at leisure becomes Pride and Prejudice. Red sun at night sailor’s delight, red sun in the morning sailor’s warning becomes Moby Dick; the higher up the monkey climbs the easier to see its ass becomes the Great Gatsby.

There is also my mother’s philosophy of literature which sounds like a proverb. She used to say that books are like food. Some books are great appetizers, others the meat and potatoes and there are lots of desserts. She said that we have a little of everything in our cupboards. To this day I read research books in the morning, meat and potatoes during the day and dessert books are piled untidily by my bed. 

My mother used the books that she had read as a girl to keep my brother distracted from the horrible hunger of a war time sojourn in Siberia and Kirgizstan. She told him the plots of Dickens and Victor Hugo. When he finally learned to read, my brother went through the entire library of the refugee camp in Germany so quickly that Eleanor Roosevelt gave him a prize.

I have written screenplays and theatre plays and short stories and there is a big difference between them.  In film and theatre, the subtext or motivation and thoughts and deepest feelings of the persona, are left to the actor. One writes the dialogue on the surface and prays for intelligent interpreters. I realized when writing stories that subtext was my responsibility.  The only way the reader would know what some event felt like was when I described those feelings. It seems so obvious but it really is the most difficult thing to learn. The performing texts need narrative drive, atmosphere, believable personae and dialogue. A good novel provides feelings, thoughts and subtle changes in attitude so that the journey of the characters remains engaging. Great literature provides ways of thinking about the unthinkable. It addresses the most difficult situations that human beings might experience. Literature makes us laugh out loud, helps to ease our pain, provides clues about human nature and teaches how to surmount desperate times.

A novel can take you anywhere in any timeframe on any personal or social journey. We enter the reality of the anthropological “other”. A good book transcends the limitations of our own circumscribed time and space. It can change or enhance the difficult challenges we face.

A friend of mine from Turkey had just enough English to discover Margaret Laurence. He spent weeks alone in the cab of an eighteen wheeler and he fell in love with Canada as he crossed it while struggling painstakingly through “The Diviners” by Margaret Laurence.

Everyone wants to survive and to live better. In agrarian societies, the proverb served as a textbook rich with life enhancing advice. Today we need proverbs with greater subtlety and complexity to provide us with strategies for living. Notwithstanding the information bombardment of internets and multichannel television, we continue to seek the beauty and intricacy of a Huckleberry Finn, Wuthering Heights, Fifth Business, Cat’s Eye, Tom Jones, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina or The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.

There are theories about the loss of the habit of reading. The internet and Google fast information bites, face book and twitter cause our brains to multi-task and condition them in ways that make it difficult to concentrate on large bodies of print. Yet, when we are most at risk or stressed, there is one remedy that can serve us better than any chemical panacea - a good reading light, a long and ample sofa and an engaging book. Literature matters and it survives when parents can keep their children distracted from pain and hunger with the tales of David Copperfield and the Hunchback of Notre Dame. It survives so that we can know each other. It allows us to internalize the global collective wisdom that lives in great books.

If homelessness of an individual or family is a tragedy, homelessness of millions of people must multiply that tragedy millionfold, mustn’t it?

Here’s a recipe for disaster.  Take a city of eight million people, destroy forty per cent of its housing stock - nearly  one and a quarter million homes - in less than eighteen months and make more than forty percent of its population technically homeless. 

That, in World War II, was what happened to London, England just one of hundreds of cities around the world faced with similar calamities.  In London, it was largely the consequence of the Blitz, concerted German aerial bombing of Britain’s capital between 1939 and 1941.  In Dresden, Germany, the British wrought similar destruction.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, were devastated by the USA exploding the world’s first nuclear weapons.  Yet within just a few years, in these and countless other shattered cities, destroyed infrastructure had been restored and homelessness was virtually unknown.. 

Worldwide in 1945, almost irrespective of political system, there was a high degree of social consensus.  Housing the homeless was seen as a community challenge, a responsibility taken up with alacrity.  Multiple approaches were applied.  Overcoming the personal and social tragedy of mass homelessness transformed cityscapes and social expectations.  One consequence of meeting that challenge successfully was the remarkable fact that by the early 1950s absolute homelessness, people living rough on London’s streets, was almost unknown. 

We know it could be done then.  So why not now?  Why does solving the problem of homelessness now feel like an unattainable dream?  Do the people who tell us to be ‘realistic’ know something we don’t?  Well, many lessons have been learned and, to mix metaphors, a lot of bucks have flowed under a lot of burning bridges and the bucks don’t stop flowing.

 To answer that ‘why’ question, jump forward fifty years to 1992.  Two stories in one issue of the Wall Street journal provided a fascinating snapshot of 90s “reality”.  One explained how India, a country with a population then approaching one billion, was denied a development loan of $200 million, less than twenty cents per head.  The banks, the newspaper explained, could not be sure India would repay that loan.  The other reported that, for reasons not unrelated to preventing the possible collapse of several major Canadian and US banks, three property-developer brothers from Toronto were about to be bailed out with a twenty-billion dollar rescue package, almost seven billion dollars per head.  Less than two years later the Reichman brothers’ construction company declared bankruptcy owing seventeen billion dollars.  Interestingly, they ended up neither homeless nor even penniless.

It was no news for that day’s Wall Street Journal that by 1992 for well over a decade, thousands of people had been living and some were dying on London’s streets, the very streets from which homelessness appeared to have been eradicated in the 1950s.

Logically, morally, housing must be a human right, mustn’t it?

Not without justification, Canada is proud of its Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Canadians who know are doubly proud because the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN’s model which has been used so successfully to invoke human rights and inspire progressive legislation around the world since 1948, was drafted by Canadian, human rights lawyer John Peters Humphrey. 

Check out the Canadian Charter or the Universal Declaration online.  Do a word search.  The words ‘house’, ‘housing’ or ‘home’ appear nowhere. 

Yet a 1998 travelling exhibition to mark the Universal Declaration’s fiftieth anniversary showed that in his preparatory notes and first drafts, Humphrey had included the right to housing.  Eleanor Roosevelt  who championed the Declaration and chaired the UN committee which ultimately approved it was also sympathetic.  So how was that crucial right omitted?

Jump forward two years from the WSJ article to 1994, then a further fifteen years to 2009.  Look at what was and is happening in the United States.  Publicly reported hysteria reached levels associated with the McCarthy era and the height of the cold war.  The focus of the frenzy?  The idea that Americans might have a human right taken for granted in the majority of what are often labelled “advanced democracies”, the right to healthcare irrespective of their wealth or poverty.

In the late 1940s the witch-hunt target was different - housing then, healthcare now - but the motive was the same.  The Soviet Union, the embodiment for the USA of the evils of Communism, had a constitution guaranteeing its citizenry the right to a home.  How it was to be achieved or even what that guarantee meant were never spelled out.  But the knowledge that Communists assured that right was enough for its opponents to mount an attack on the very concept. 

As today’s rentayanks appear on television, run weblogs, write articles or take to the streets to vent rage at the imposition of “socialism” on their market-oriented lives, much work takes place behind the scenes to ensure that the usual beneficiaries, the corporations, will continue to benefit.

In the USA of the late 1940s housing was hardly a high profit investment.  From the 1915 recession, until shortly after Word War II, US house prices remained virtually unchanged.  Action was needed to turn housing into a sure fire winner.

 For nearly three decades post-war British governments of all colours competed to outplan and outbuild each other in housing provision.  Although publicly funded housing for the poor could be traced back a millennium, a local authority model that had emerged in the early 20^th Century prevailed.  It came as no surprise to anybody that in a 1959 General Election campaign a British Conservative Prime Minister promised that his government would build three hundred thousand publicly subsidised new homes - social, , not private, market housing.  The 1945 Labour government had started a massive programme of house-building, developing on schemes underway since the 1930s.  Those were intended not just to rebuild the shattered housing stock of the World War I era and provide “homes fit for heroes”, they were a Keynesian strategy to kick-start the economy which had been left in shreds.  Much of the work was carried out by local council or government labour forces.  Many materials and components were produced in publicly funded and operated factories.  The schemes provided remarkably high quality housing at a cost with which the market could simply not compete and make profits.  Housing was treated not as a commodity but a basic right, even though no constitution guaranteed that right.  It created political consensus and social cohesion. 

Socially mixed housing estates, even entire towns were planned and built, providing not only houses but also social, educational, recreational, health, commercial and transport infrastructure. Minimum space and amenity standards were introduced.  Planning was the key.  The model was soon widely emulated around the world.

Globally over the next decades the expertise acquired in rebuilding after wars and natural disasters led to massive programmes of publicly planned and administered, semi-public, co-operative, community and voluntary-organisation-managed social housing schemes.  Hundreds of millions of people were housed, infrastructure provided.  It looked as though the scourge of homelessness could go the same way as smallpox.  House and community building boosted construction and other industry, created employment, improved social conditions.  With governments of all types supporting housebuilding, the United Nations promoting its construction and providing training, skills and experience, the World Bank providing support funding and the International Monetary Fund offering expertise, the future looked as if it could be rosy.  The UN declared 1986-7 International Year of Shelter for the Homeless and the UN Centre for Human Settlements encouraged governments to work towards a target of decent housing for all by the year 2000.  But by the time the International Year of Shelter for the Homeless arrived, there had been a sea change.

Where did it all go wrong?

Opposition to making housing a universal human right in 1948 was more, much more, than just an ideological stance.  It was part of a strategy to create scarcity, allow market prices to soar and make money for banks and corporations.  For a while it appeared to work.  The stated ideological underpinning was that old familiar song, only the market can provide housing in the most efficient way and social provision can never compete with the market.  In truth markets would only ever provide mass housing if there are guaranteed profits to be made.  To make their profits the opponents of social housing would do anything to manipulate the market.

In Britain the first changes arrived in 1951 with the first post-war Conservative government.  Instead of local authorities and government being allowed to fund housing and infrastructure construction directly from revenue and taxation, new laws forced them to borrow the money needed to build housing from specially constituted financial institutions and pay it back with interest over a number of years, twenty five or forty.  It would end up costing far more.  Now the banks were interested.  House and city building could mean big money for them.  Gradually commercial banks got their hands on the loans.  Initially low interest rates rose over time.  The new model was established. 

In the United States, promising mass social housing projects started to face opposition, singled out for concerted Republican attack.  As economies started to boom in the 1950s there was a lot of money to be made out of financing housing construction although regulations introduced to prevent a repeat of the 1929 crash limited potential profits for speculators.

It took the arrival of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the USA, both believers in the Chicago School of Economics, followers of the philosopher Friedrich Hayek and advocates of free enterprise to take the new model global.  Both expressed visceral hatred for the concept, even the word, “planning”, then carefully planned and orchestrated their actions.  Both professed unwavering belief in “free markets”, then worked ceaselessly to manipulate markets, ensuring they were anything but free.  The idea of housing being provided on the basis of need was replaced by the insistence that housing was to be available only to those who could afford it.  To support this changed concept, transformation of social attitudes to housing became essential.  Henceforth housing would be promoted as “an investment”.

Margaret Thatcher struck the first death blows for publicly owned and managed social housing in Britain, introducing the attractive sounding “right to buy” while acting to block public building of housing by withdrawing its funding.  She introduced a range of short-term alternative models, support to housing associations and co-operatives, gave them some of the money taken from the public sector, then over time, progressively withdrew that funding.  To accompany these changes, new tax provisions incentivised an entirely new market, to be known as “buy-to let”.  Individuals could make their fortunes there.  Neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown, believers in the magic of the market, would challenge the Thatcher model.  For good measure, arguing that a healthy private housing market would eliminate homelessness, Margaret Thatcher sold off most of Britain’s homeless shelters, solid older buildings in good locations, to developers to turn into luxury apartments or boutique hotels.  They were not replaced.

In the US Ronald Reagan appointed Vice-President George Bush as his czar for deregulation of the main housing finance sector, the Savings and Loans banks.  This led in 1988 to the then biggest financial sector failure since the 1929 crash and the Great Depression.  In 1989, then President George Bush was forced to rush through a 165-billion-dollar rescue package for the S&Ls.  In 1990 Stanford University estimated that the true cost to the American public over the life of that rescue scheme would reach 1.4 trillion dollars.

Despite this minor setback, the US continued to push internationally for a series of co-ordinated actions in just one direction.  One major step in globalising the strategy of a shift from public to private provision was something apparently unconnected.  The United States started to withhold its contribution to various parts of the UN system and demand internal reforms.  These were followed by demands for changes in the policies the UN could promote.  Programmes were cut, staff sacked, future projects shelved.  For the UN Centre for Human Settlements, co-ordinating International Year of Shelter for the Homeless, projects based on  self-help, community initiative or public provision were out.  When, a few months later, the World Bank rode to the rescue with new funding, it imposed on the UN agency policy changes already familiar to many poor countries, recipients of World Bank loans.  Publicly owned housing - alongside other public assets - was to be sold off “to reduce the public debt” and “realise public asset values”.  Across Africa, model housing estates based on British council housing were put onto the market.  Most had been housing not for the population at large but for civil servants.  Suddenly they could no longer survive on their already low and frequently unpaid salaries.  They were forced to look for second or third jobs just to meet housing costs.  Opportunities for corruption increased exponentially.

The UN no longer supported public provision, self-build, community or co-operative housing,.  Governments were to switch from provision programmes to “enabling strategies”.  “Enabling” meant advising individuals and governments at all levels on how to contract loans, read ‘get into debt’. 

To be fair, the World Bank recognised its ‘enabling’ policies were not within everybody’s reach.  It had the decency to acknowledge that one of its buzzwords of the 1980s and 1990s, “affordability”, did not apply to the lowest-earning tenth population percentile, that part of the population on ten percent or less of average national income.  It played down the fact that in many countries, massive inequality meant that the lowest tenth percentile could constitute as much as ninety per cent of the population.  For them, the World Bank and the UN offered - nothing!  Homelessness rose exponentially.

UK homelessness may not have figured prominently in  the Wall Street Journal but over the years The Economist published a series of graphs showing that from 1979, as construction of publicly funded housing in Britain fell, official homelessness rose at almost exactly the same rate. 

Meanwhile one further element of the co-ordinated plan was working its way through the system.  Manipulation of housing shortages, management of an international media message that housing was not just a place to live but a long-term, iron-clad investment that for many people could become their retirement pension.

People who looked beyond what became known as the Anglo-Saxon model of economics grasped that these policies had led to a frenzied bidding upwards of house prices.  By the 1980s, in the world’s second largest economy, a country which ought to have been able to provide adequate housing for all, it was only affordable on five-generation, 125-year mortgages.  In the late 1980s Japan’s housing market collapsed taking down major banks in the process and leaving the country in a crisis from which it has yet to emerge nearly twenty years later.  Homelessness there hit new peaks.  Even now, people are living in tent cities in places like Tokyo.  Will Japan’s new government dare consider real change?

Manipulation of the “free market” depended on generating a climate of fear.  If people didn’t get onto the “housing ladder” they risked becoming homeless.  Rediscovered Victorian values divided the poor into “deserving” and “undeserving’.  The homeless, irrespective of how they had become so, were treated as feckless.  In Margaret Thatcher’s Britain people who had not earned their first million pounds by the age of thirty were viewed as failures.  It took time but over the next decade and a half the Anglo-Saxon model engineered housing price rises of several hundred percent.

In the USA extensive understanding of the dangers of overheated housing markets, based on the 1980s experience of the Savings and Loans collapse was not just ignored, it was systematically suppressed.  People who knew and wanted to regulate finance to prevent a repeat of the US and Japanese disasters  were fired and made unemployable.  Regulators were swept aside.  What were known as Recognised Accounting Practices or RAP were replace by something that favoured the fantasy that “no regulation is good regulation”. In came Creative Recognised Accounting Practices or CRAP.  The CRAP regime ushered in the era of the sub-prime loan. 

To compete and stay in business in a globalised world, banks and financial institutions were forced to participate in the CRAP race to the bottom.  Easy access to credit and the promise that rising prices ‘ensured’ that however high interest rates rose, the rising value of property would make “investing” in property worthwhile.  When that myth crumbled last year, not just banks but entire countries became technically bankrupt.

Have the collapse of housing financing institutions around the world over the past two years and the massive increase in homelessness sounded a warning to the world at large?  Far from it!  As major banks start laying claim to massive profits again, it looks as if they will be returning to “business as usual” meaning more homelessness.  British and US media are heralding new increases in housing prices as being a good thing. 

The next collapse will come much sooner and have an even more devastating effect on housing and homelessness than the last. 

Individuals faced with homelessness rarely have the resources to provide decent housing.  Local communities can pool and co-ordinate their limited assets but post-war experience showed only governments can mobilise all the resources needed to build their way out of mass homelessness. 

By promoting monetarism through the World Bank, IMF and UN, the US government forced one choice on all governments, mortgage and debt-based private housing, often benefiting US financiers.  That created homelessness and failed the poor.  Governments recently co-ordinated and marshalled far more than the cost of housing everyone in the world to protect failed bankers’ bonuses.  Without another world war, will we ever see them mobilise as effectively to house the needy and homeless?

The Victorian pauper, with tuppence in his pocket, might gloat: “You pays your money and takes your choice”.  Today’s homeless can only bemoan, “We pays our money, they takes our choices.”

Twenty five years ago a man strolled by me on Viger Street in Montreal. I figured he was a drifter. He looked straight ahead through his round John-Lennon glasses.  He had a slight stoop to his walk. For a split second, he had looked at me and I had looked at him, as well. His long hair had been cut in awkward clumps and it seemed like they had just fallen off. He had a straight line walk. He did not look to the side. He did not want his eyes to meet anyone else’s. His shoulders drooped. Very little of his cheeks were visible.  His black and white beard hung down to his chest. His jeans were dark and tattered around the edges and at the knees.  He wore a dark jacket, whose pockets were weighed down by stuff that he had put in, in plastic bags. I noticed all this in the few yards that we passed each other by. Something about his eyes and his face, however, made him remarkably familiar. I turned around and looked at him and he kept walking away towards the east and I kept turning around to see if he would stop and turn around and he did not and he kept getting smaller and smaller in the distance.   I could sense that he was getting swallowed by the huge structure that was the Jacques Cartier Bridge in the distance. His face kept haunting me. Unlike the folks, known as panhandlers,  around Viger who perform silly antics to draw attention, do a little jig, or make strange faces and put their hat out, this man kept walking, never looking sideways.

I saw him again about a week later at another spot, near Chinatown. This time he did not see me. I was determined to see his face in an unobtrusive manner. He sat down after about five minutes of my following him, at a bench in a park built by the city on top of the Ville Marie tunnel. I stood in a bus stand and watched him. Doves, seagulls or pigeons were flocking around him. He took bread crumbs out of his bag and threw them around. He watched the birds for a while and then he sat up straight, pulled his hair back and stared out. I recognized him then. I could not quite figure out, whether I should go and talk to him. After all, this was a guy who hung around a group of students who went to McGill in the mid seventies. He was doing his MBA in Finance and he was a lively, cheerful guy, who always had some nasty humour to share with the whole gang. I did speak to him a few times and I knew he had a huge crush on one of the women who was also in this rather talkative and disco-loving group that I had run into.  He was possibly from Bombay, the old name for Mumbai.  I asked a mutual acquaintance about him and she said that he had either had some psychological problem or he had an affair that had severely traumatized him. He left his academic life, walked out of his apartment and had simply started walking the streets. His parents had tried to find him and they never did. I saw him a few times later and then never saw him again. He disappeared and was never heard of and seen again by anybody. What is remarkable about this young and bright man, as I was told later by others who knew him, was that he came to do graduate studies in McGill, submitted his thesis but never came back to see his professors or pick up his degree. He came from a fairly well established family and refused to recognize anyone from his past. While he was seen taking meals at the Old Brewery Mission, he did not panhandle and did not ask for money. He did not also talk to anybody.  He left no trace. No address.

A few years ago while on a trip to Kolkata, where I was born and lived for twenty years, I headed up to the main street from the side street where I had lived, and I realized that the long time rag pickers there had become pavement dwellers. They had not only taken over a large section of the main pavement along the main thoroughfare, but they had built shacks, tea stalls, erected a small temple-like obelisk, where people gave donations and a small TV set was also tucked away in one corner, under a tent-like structure. This was their home. They were no longer homeless. They were pretty vociferous, confident and did not care about the fact that the bus stand was no longer usable, because they had used it to build some structures and had created a variety of sleeping arrangements in and around the bus stop. As much as one could be disgusted by the squalor and cockiness of these people, you would realize after some reflection that after more than sixty years of India’s independence from the British Empire, 38% of India’s population live in extreme poverty. They mostly come from the rural areas, running away from drought and starvation, looking for work, either as rag pickers, cleaners or resort to begging. And when they come to the city, they learn to hustle, because as they are mostly minorities or people belonging to the lower rungs of the caste system, they cannot even be considered for all of the jobs that they are prepared to take. There is however a perception amongst those who walk by them, holding their noses, that they are born smugglers, thieves, crooks, prostitutes and petty criminals. The police constables are frequently seen taking bribes from them, so that they can store their rag baskets in huge mountains in various stretches of the pavement, never mind the illegal structures on the pavements themselves, for which the local councillors are reportedly taking the “licensing ” fees. Years ago, on that same pavement, I met a nearly blind man, who sat down on the pavement with his arms outstretched. The pavement was then clean, no squatters, no pavement dwellers. I had gotten to know the blind man. He was always well-dressed, clean shaven and he wore a pair of dark glasses. Sometimes I had helped him cross the main avenue. From time to time people walking by would drop a few coins into his palm. He would give them a salaam and smile. He had a Bachelor’s degree, but could not get a job, so he had learned welding. While working at the docks, he got blinded in an accident and had no option, other than to beg. He told me his story and I listened. There was nothing I could do, other than introduce him to my friends. He remained well shaven and well dressed always, sitting on the pavement. Two years ago, I found out that a taxicab had run over him. I asked around where he had lived and found out that he had no home. He slept on the ramp to a garage, along an edge. He washed himself clean every morning, put on the same pair of clothes and sat down all day in the sun, until he had enough money for a meal.

All the hype, all the rockets in space, all the software sexiness and all the corporate posturing cannot fig leaf the nakedness of India’s poor. All the tall claims of growth, the technical arrogance, the rising number of Indian billionaires, the nuclear powered attack submarines and still some 297 million people, in a study done recently by a committee commissioned by the government, live in absolute poverty! 

A news story now. London, July 24: More than 20 people aged between 5 and 74 slept rough on paving stones and gravel outside a park at Hampstead in the UK capital and raised 8,000 pounds for a Kolkata based charity.

People slept at Rosslyn Park Unitarian Chapel to “experience” what homeless in Kolkata feel like. ‘Kolkata Rescue’ provides healthcare, education and vocational training to homeless in the Indian city.

American-Dutch businessman Glen Kendall, who worked for a year as the administrator of the charity, decided to raise funds for the organisation by planning the “Big Sleep in Hampstead” to mark the 30th anniversary of the organisation.

Kendall said they wanted to build a ‘bustee’ for the Big Sleep, but realised that they could not source authentic materials to make such a ‘bustee’ in London.

He said the volunteers, in the age of 5 to 74, braved cold wind, discomfort and noise on the pavement along with worrying about police asking them to move from the pavement. End of Story.

Canada? Well, here is the end section of a rather informative piece in Wikipedia.

“Canada is one of the few countries in the world without a national housing strategy (United Nations, 2009). Many of the federal governments’ expenditures are cost-sharing, one-time only funding initiatives that lack long-term leadership on homelessness. The United Nations has also noted the lack of information on these expenditures, including the number of houses produced. Housing has been declared a fundamental human right. Canada helped to draft the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights that includes a right to access housing in Article 25. Canada also ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in 1976, which recognizes an adequate standard of living, including housing, in Article 11. Currently, there is a court challenge stipulating that the crisis of homelessness violates the right to security of the person and to equality for disadvantaged groups under sections 7 and 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.” 

The debate about homelessness, as also about poverty, can go on forever. There are those who feel that it is only individual actions and “misfortune” that cause homelessnes and therefore it is only individual remedial actions and charity that can resolve a part of these situations. It can never be resolved totally. There are others who believe that the concept of a society includes a provision to care for and take responsibility for the disenfranchised and impoverished. That social safety net is fundamental to the concept of a caring society. This is as opposed to a society where only the highly aggressive and competitive can survive. Without government policy firmly in place for low cost social housing and redistribution of wealth, without a fundamental belief that having a home is a constitutional right, in this fast changing economy, homelessness is inevitable.

Art is Democracy !

Acknowledgements:

1)The Design of Dissent, Milton Glaser and Mirko Ilic, Rockport Publishers Inc. www.rockpub.com

2)Paper, Paper Publishing Company, New York, www.papermag.com

3)Jean-Michel Basquiat, by Richard Marshall, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

          I am strolling past a a well-known Tea and Chocolate store in Broome Street, Soho, New York.  And I catch a glimpse of a magazine called Paper.  On the cover is Gael García Bernal.  The Mexican new wave actor, who played Che in the Motorcycle Diaries. I thought it was a great flic. Very inspiring. Of course on this cover feature, he is modelling clothes  or occassionally talking a bit about Tarkovsky, Buñuel and Antonioni. All the films he mentions are my favourites as well, especially Zabriskie Point and Los Olvidados.  It spurs my interest in the magazine.  He is branded as a great thinker. “ More like García Lorca than George Clooney—(he)  has the mind and soul of a poet.” But, of course!  One would expect so, from a person who has acted in a few thoughtful plays and movies and in one or two esoteric /quirky ones, as well. Thinking artists provoke notions of the democratic process in the roles they play. Benicio del Toro does the same. Warren Beatty, Marlon Brando have done the same, at times. And directors like Gilo Pontecorvo, Mrinal Sen, Costa Gavras, Ken Loach and Montreal documentarist Mary Ellen Davis and Indian documentarist Anand Patwardhan (the latter two interviewed in Montreal Serai, previously) maintain this thoughtful process of interrogating democracy through their Art.  

I am compelled to sit down at the café, notwithstanding the legendary reputation of the chocolates and teas served here,  and breeze through this rather well produced magazine and then I notice there is a very interesting feature on rebranding America.  It’s put together by Kim Hastreiter. Kim has invited several well-known American designers to take a fresh look at a post-Bush America. What has changed? What can be changed?  What are the new ways of looking into the future? And the designers have done a superlative job.  The mandate is to turn the United  States into a new U.S.A. The tone is set by a graphic which has the stars taking the place of the stripes on the flag.  A caption says “ A new US.” This one is done by Ivan Chermayeff.  “Rebranding means changing the values of the United states,” he says. Banal? Simplistic? Or, hopeful? I would say it is Art  for Democracy!  A valiant and hopeful expression, a  way forward and only artists and designers can practice this democracy. They are not constrained.  They are not fearful of litigation, despite it being the US of A. They are not shackled by lobbies. Like the new President of the US seems to be more and more, every day. But that was not a surprise, anyway. He is a utopian and as well an excellent  brand manager to boot, who believes that the philosophy that has governed the US for a century can still be made to work, somehow. He is handcuffed to the Pharmaceutical lobby, the Israel lobby and even to the Military lobby. He has waffled on Health Insurance, on Palestine and now even on the torture photos and Gitmo. An Artist is not shackled, tongue-tied and hamstrung.  An artist is fundamental to Democracy.  I turn the page and another great design catches my eye. It is an outstretched hand of the world gripping a hand-sketched outline of the US map. The caption says “Nice to meet you again.” It is made by Weiden + Kennedy 12, a creative school based in Portland, Oregon.

The next one that catches my attention is  a “SORRY” carved out of the US flag on a plain white background, with a diminutive  US bald eagle emblem  saying Humble, Strong, US in a very small caption instead E Pluribus Unum.  It is done by Andy Spade. He says the following- “Our thinking behind the assignment’s solution is that by offerring a simple apology, we acknowledge our mistakes with the hopes of restarting our relationship with the rest of the world.” Indeed!

I flip the page, as my interest is definitely aroused.  There is now a rather well done rendition of a US one dollar bill. In a text note  attached to it, it says that Benjamin Franklin questioned the choice of the Bald Eagle as the national symbol of the US, claiming it was “ a bird of bad moral character.” It was, he suggested, too lazy to fish for itself, survived by robbing smaller, more vulnerable birds.  So instead of the bald Eagle, the artist has changed the bird to a dove.  Look carefully!

 What a potent message in 2009, indeed for the US, to live up to! It is done by Kevin Roberts, the CEO  of Saatchi and Saatchi, the same people who have clients like Toyota, Lexus and JC Penney! The Bush era really pissed off so many layers of people and classes that even the handful at the top feel the need for some sort of “change.” And Mr. Obama, sure knew how to capitalize on that.   And then there is another one by Roberts, that says in bold letters on a white background “No more US  and THEM.” The US is made out of a US flag.

New York is where Jean-Michel Basquiat, exploded on to the scene and then disappeared so painfully at the age of twenty seven only.  Basquiat, it is said, painted with the militant emotions of Malcolm X and the subtlety of Miles Davis. Montreal Serai covered his works, a few years ago. I am back in Montreal and I am leafing through a book on his works, brought out by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The picture that I notice, is not by Basquiat. It is a conceptual photograph by Renee Cox. It is entitled, The Wall: They Say a Mad Man Wrote This, 1992. 

 A sublime rhyme  says it all “They never taught Marcus Garvey in our school, Christopher Columbus is their golden rule.”

Finally, I dust off a book I got as a present, three years ago. The Design of Dissent. It is an excellent catalogue of wall art, posters, guerilla stencils from all over the world, both before and after the Cold War, and also into the eight hellish years of George Bush. Extraordinarily well annotated and curated, it is a work of art by itself. It propels you into a sense of imminent reactiveness to the world around you.  Here, I find the essence of democratic dissent and art! For a start, using the format of the Arm and Hammer logo for selling Baking Soda, the artist Dejan Krsic from Croatia proclaims, Art is not a Mirror, it is a Hammer! 

Finally, in the wake of Roe V Wade the same publication has this graphic poster by Trudy Cole-Zielanski entitled Preserve the Right of Choice.  As per Wikipedia, Roe v. Wade , 410 U.S. 113 (1973), is a United States Supreme Court case that resulted in a landmark decision regarding abortion. According to the Roe decision, most laws against abortion in the United States violated a constitutional right to privacy under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision overturned all state and federal laws outlawing or restricting abortion that were inconsistent with its holdings. The note from the artist says “This poster was designed to promote the understanding that a woman’s body is her own, and she has the ultimate right to say what she does with it.” 

Finally, in these times of rabid Islamophobia and incoherent terrordom politics,  Anatoly Omelchenko has the over-used and cliched  Che stencil of Korda on a Muslim green background, but alongwith the star on his beret is also a crescent moon. “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” says the artist.

Democray without Art? Like humankind without O_2.

A cosmic motherly-sounding voice has always told me that even the darkest of clouds have silver linings. The past two weeks have forced me to now wonder if the same idea of a silver lining applies to clouds of white phosphorous.

In an arbitrary 15 years from now, the past two weeks (and, unfortunately, the remaining time to come) will be remembered with images of disturbing death and injury, reports of complete destruction of an already weakened Gazan infrastructure; thousands of IDPs; an unreachable humanitarian crisis and stories from survivors. Yet there is another memory which may leave an impact on the dynamics of the region and the North American perception on the entire 60-year-old conflict.

Without question, the North American media has often shown sympathy with one side more so than the other – an unfortunate, but natural occurrence. At the same time, however, a digression from such a grievance is vital. The aforementioned complaint does not take into consideration the surprising slight shift in the coverage of the war and humanitarian crisis. Oft-repressed opinions and oft-ignored facts are being given the opportunity to be expressed. Fierce criticisms of Israel and piercing predictions of the ramifications of the war are flooding major newspapers.

Unapologetic opinion pieces about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are being published every day. Aside from asserting truths about the conflict during an extremely pertinent and bloody time, a common cause cannot be found amongst the authors. The claims of the Israeli government in regards to the operation and the facts about the humanitarian crisis are two points of contention which have been repeatedly brought up. The commentary has also, unsurprisingly, treaded outside the proximity of the current conflict. It is extremely hard to discuss this war without considering 60 years of context. And it is this particular tangent which may leave a legacy in popular discourse and thought about the conflict at large in North America – a region in dire need of another perspective. Underdog ideas seeping into the mainstream allow for a slim, but potentially momentous opportunity for the balance to be tipped toward a more equal and fair footing.

The rise of commentaries has also thrown out a rather pathetic and almost saddening punch to Israel’s public relations monopoly. Active writers, in print or online, have rushed to assist in and showcase the “unravelling” of Israel’s claims of self-defence and cries of moral responsibility. Fingers are viciously being thrust toward the direction of the political timing of the war, the Israeli breach of ceasefire; the failures of Israel’s propaganda machine this time around, and the unfathomable denial of the existence of a humanitarian crisis. Even the International Red Cross, a thoroughly neutral organization, came out with a statement which condemned and criticized Israel for its complete lack of compliance (and fatal defiance) of the organization’s attempt to reach injured and starving Gazans.

There generally seems to be an air of exasperation, as though the war has become one of the final pieces in a long and painful Jenga puzzle, with the prophetic early quivering of the tower just beginning. These sighs of being fed-up most poignantly found within the brief titles of the daily commentaries.

American historian Mark LeVine’s seething article “Who Will Save Israel from itself?” featured in Al-Jazeera discusses the gun with which Israel has shot itself in the foot, albeit with an extremely unsatisfactory answer to the title question. Robert Fisk’s repeated commentary in The Independent has asked and answered age old questions from an insightful and firsthand perspective, in such pieces as “Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask,” and “Why bombing Ashkelon is the most tragic irony.” Gideon Levy’s “The Time of the Righteous” in Haaretz unwaveringly with silent solemn anger lashed out against all supporters of the Israeli so-called “defensive war,” claiming that “anyone who justifies this war also justifies all its crimes.”

The BBC’s Paul Reynolds brought to the public’s attention, early on, the question of Israel’s propaganda in “Propaganda war: trusting what we see?” Khalid Rashidi’s “What you don’t know about Gaza” in The New York Times wrote a quick and to-the-point piece with “a few essential points that seem to be missing from the conversation [in the press] about Israel’s attack…”

Former Israel Defense Force soldier and now Oxford professor Avi Shlaim’s furious article in The Guardian, “How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe” labels Israel as a rogue state. Just recently, the Times Online reported that Israeli soldiers coming back from the frontline were revealing the sort of “ruthless tactics against Hamas” being used. One soldier claims that he was shocked to see the neighbourhoods in Gaza as though “we [had been] bombing them for years.” Naomi Klein also got in on the action when she posted “Israel: Boycott, Divest, Sanction” on her online blog. And the list continues tirelessly.

This proposed shift is not solely about politics, just as the situation in Gaza is not. To approach the conflict as such is to approach it with a narrow and propaganda-cluttered ideological mind. The Palestinian issue is about a mounting humanitarian crisis which has existed for far longer than 18 days. Our governments (save for the Venezuelans) may not be taking the appropriate action required to address the atrocities being committed by Israel, but challenges to the mainstream discourse through the mainstream discourse allow for the general populace to gain the critical information necessary for change in the policies of our own states toward any country oppressing another people. On January 14, the president of the United Nations General Assembly, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, described the slaughter of the Palestinians as genocide. The tower begins to sway a bit more.

This is the silver lining in the clouds of white phosphorous over Gaza.

All militarization has environmental consequences.  All of which have little to do with democracy.

The other day, Montreal economist, writer, publisher and social ecologist, Dimitri Roussopoulos, took M/S on an amble through the four categories of militarization and environment, and its most undemocratic nature.

The four categories can go like this:

1. The production of military hardware, chemicals, biology, conventional and nuclear weaponry.
2. Military research involves testing, nearly all of which is done secretly.  All the stages of such testing have environmental consequences.  Take the Sheffield Plant in Alberta. Check out the landscape; not healthy.
3. Space exploration, most of which has a military agenda to secure the upper hand and a commanding view of planet earth, from a space station or a planet.  An estimated 10-50,000 space vehicles circulate the planet and eventually become space debris with virtually un-discussed impacts on the earth’s atmosphere.
4. Warfare: E. P. Thompson observed that the new generation of weaponry had to be shown to be operational, a factor which triggered the 80’s arms race between the US and Russia. The US installed Cruise and Pershing missiles aimed at Russia and the Russians installed SS20’s and a whole new era of cold war and geopolitical power play ensued.  However, the environmental impacts of wars prove the true testing ground, the 1^st and 2^nd Iraq wars are the cases in point, the bombardment of the oil fields inflicting incalculable environmental damage.  Treaties have failed to draw environmental connections with the four categories above so that the various powers involved can avoid accusations of ecocide.

M/S How could the environment, from the point of view of military research, production, and warfare be brought into a democracy?

Dimitri Roussopoulos replies:

In the rush of city life, it is exceptional for a large gathering of people to get together to discuss, face-to-face, concerns that affect their quality of life in their neighbourhoods and urban environment. In discussing their experiences and comparing notes as to what can be done to improve their daily lives,  such conversations can be a transformative. A subtle process of empowerment begins changing people into citizens.

There is nothing mystical about the problems of air and water pollution, heavy traffic on residential streets and public transportation, the lack of social housing, green spaces, urban poverty, gender discrimination in hiring practices, community economic development vs. mega construction projects that disrupt, the lack of public consultation and local democracy, the inadequacies of our electoral system…the list of our concerns is long.  There are solutions. But faced with our human need to balance our private lives and a public life, the challenge can be daunting.

How exciting then that in Montreal, there is a current of citizens who over the years, having been laying the foundations for a multi-issued urban movement. The attempt seeks to bring individuals and various community organisations together with the view of sharing insights, experiences, networking and thus establishing a human link of solidarity with which to face together the political and economic elite of Montreal to say, yes, no, or maybe if…

            Past and Present

Since 2000 a series of citizen summits have been organised on ‘the future of Montreal’. The social forum format was adopted, which meant that these summits did not have decision-making powers like a formal assembly. Instead people as citizens have gotten together to converse, debate and determine their common concerns on a whole variety of public issues with a view towards establishing horizontal links as a means of working together on various campaigns. The citizen summits have been local gatherings in the style of the magnificent World Social Forum which in January met for the fifth time in Belem. Some 100,000 people came together from all over the planet and talked and embraced each other in hundreds of workshops and panels on a wide variety of issues. From 2000, when the first citizen summit met some 248 people came together from across the island, here in Montreal. It was such an enriching experience that participants immediately wanted another summit a year later. The second citizen summit brought together 335 people, the third summit 528, and the fourth, last year over 600.

The idea of a new urban movement has been slowly and steadily gaining ground as those with active concerns seek to break their isolation as individuals and  neighbourhood associations, to express a common desire to reach out to others across the city. Each summit has contributed to the larger public debate. From the different summits, came the idea of Montreal’s city council adopting the Kyoto protocol on climate change and starting a sustainable development plan , the idea of a Montreal Charter of Rights and Responsibilities (a local Declaration of Human Rights). This remarkable document was adopted by city council– the idea of democratizing democracy by advancing the practice of participatory democracy and most recently the idea of a participatory budget as practiced now on the Plateau and in scores of cities around the world. All of this political mulch and much more has emerged from the Montreal citizen summit process.

2009 is a municipal election year. November is when we are called upon to vote. What is our place, apart from casting a piece of paper in a box? We can set the agenda! The agenda of public debate can be influenced, but more so by drafting our common demands of what we want changed, improved, or dropped. Thus we can tell the political and economic elite what our priorities are. The political parties parade their promises during elections, we can reverse the process and oblige them to respond to our citizen’s demands.

            How

How? The fifth Montreal citizen summit will be held from June 5-7, 2009 where over 1000 citizens are expected. There will be scores of workshops and panels on such themes as: democracy; the environment, economy, social justice, and  culture all set within the urban context of our city. But most importantly as of now, a Citizen Agenda is in the process of being drafted. Hundreds of people and organisations from across the city are in the process of contributing their ideas on what Montreal’s priorities should be. By visiting the citizen summit web-site at www.5sc.ecologieurbaine.net or by picking-up a well designed postcard at the Urban Ecology Centre at 3516 av. du Parc, corner of Milton,  everyone is invited to submit their concerns. Hundreds are doing so already. The draft of the Citizen Agenda will be presented to the June summit for discussion, and the politicians are going to be called upon to make their choices accordingly. In this way, we set the parameters of what we, as citizens want in a pro-active manner. On June 7th in an assembly concluding the citizen summit, we hope to tie the ends together and launch an ongoing new urban movement of solidarity.

            Beforehand

In the meantime, all associations are invited to hold activities of their own to discuss the future of their neighbourhoods and the city, in relationship to the June summit. Resource people are available to help in whatever way is needed. The Citizen Agenda project could be discussed at all such occasions. One of the exciting pre-summit activities is the holding of the first environmental film festival on “The Environment and Montreal”. From May 22 to June 4, at Cinema du Parc. There will be a series of very interesting films shown, every evening with resource people present and all sorts of documentation. All this culminates with the opening of the 5th Citizen Summit, June 5th which happens to be U.N. World Environment Day. There will also be people from other cities and countries attending giving us their insights and experiences.