Sarah Vance, Consuela Rubio and Sima Zerehi represented three different causes — poverty, labour and the detention of immigrants and refugees — at an event last evening in Toronto hosted by the New Socialist Group. Labour, anti-racist, anti-poverty, student and anti-occupation activists gathered to talk about the current political terrain, common struggles and what to expect in the new year.

The New Socialist Group, whose event was called Fightback 2004! is an organization of activists working in solidarity with unions and social movements committed to making positive changes in society.

On poverty

Sarah Vance will be fighting poverty in many places this year, but the boardroom will not be one of them.

Since David Miller became Toronto’s new mayor late last year, Vance and her colleagues at the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) have managed some significant victories. The city reopened a homeless shelter at the Fork York Armoury for the first time since 1999. Municipal workers stopped forcing out and destroying the possessions of young people sleeping under the Gardiner Expressway.

But Vance isn’t sure the Miller regime represents a change in outlook so much as a change in tactics. That’s why she, along with those fighting a variety of other causes, is sticking to the streets.

“It’s an opportunity as well as a challenge,” Vance said, of dealing with the new city hall. “Miller doesn’t want a big confrontation. He wants things done quietly, behind closed doors . . . dealing that way on the municipal level can take our ability to focus and organize off the streets pretty quickly.”

Vance said she has a full slate of activities at OCAP this year. At an upcoming meeting of Toronto’s Community and Neighbourhood Services, for example, the group will be presenting a 10-point plan proposing changes to the way welfare is administered, the abolition of certain user fees around recreation centres, and a policy that would forbid municipal workers and Toronto community housing officials from asking individuals about the status of their immigration claim before giving them social assistance.

On the front lines, she’ll be part of a hotel workers’ rights campaign that will lead a delegation straight to the home of the Metropolitan Hotel’s owner on Toronto’s Bridle Path, one of the cityâe(TM)s most exclusive addresses.

“We’ll start out downtown and we’re going to go right up to his doorstep,” she said.

This action is a follow-up to a demonstration in early December in support of two workers who lost their employment at the hotel on what were seen to be dubious grounds.

On strike

Consuela Rubio has had no choice but to fight her battles in the bitter cold. Rubio has been on strike for more than two months with co-workers from the Centre For Spanish Speaking Peoples (OPSEU 512), a 30-year-old organization serving the needs of Toronto’s 200,000-member Hispanic community.

Although the Centre has only a small staff of fewer than 20 employees, Rubio said they were thrown into upheaval following changes to its board of directors, who wanted programs tailored to developing business opportunities for professionals. Founded in 1973 by political refugees, the Centre has traditionally played a very different role in providing assistance to abused women, people with AIDS and settlement programs for immigrants. The workers balked at the change in direction, and were soon presented with an agreement that would mean wage reductions of 30 to 50 per cent. Rubio said she and her colleagues felt they were being forced out.

“I can’t tell you how dirty this has been,” she said. “This is our own community oppressing us.”

Centre workers have had their activities monitored by security guards and were accused of vandalism, Rubio said. She and her colleagues reacted by filing charges of bad faith with the Ontario Labour Relations Board, but she said their best results have come from appealing directly to their former clients, who have donated to a strike fund and have joined in the pickets.

“Some of the professionals didn’t like it when we were out there handing out leaflets, telling people, ‘Did you know this is your neighbour doing this to us?’” she said.

On detention and abuse

Forming closer relationships with the community has also been a key strategy in the evolution of the No One Is Illegal (Toronto) chapter, which originally formed as a coalition of several different groups to combat the detention and abuse of indigenous peoples in Canada and abroad. The group has championed the cause of people in Algeria and Somalia as well as Aboriginal Canadians, but it needed more concrete action, according to member Sima Zerehi.

“The wall that we kept on hitting was a lack of knowledge about what was going on,” she said, including Canada’s plans for a permanent residence card and the plight of Canada’s Middle East community. “We weren’t getting out there.”

No One Is Illegal ended up taking a creative approach by focusing on detention centres where immigrants and refugees are held for a number of violations. One of these centres is at the Celebrity Inn Hotel, located near Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, where Zerehi said about 100 people might be held at any given time. As a way in, No One Is Illegal has been teaching art classes for women in the centre every second Saturday.

“It’s a really squishy liberal thing where we sit around and make art,” she said, “but it’s been important in that you can connect with people in a very real way, and learn first-hand about what they’re dealing with.”

While all three women use different means to conduct their work, Vance said it was important that activism remains something visible in the public eye, in order to provide inspiration to those affected by the issues.

“We are committed to staying outside,” she said. “Real power is the power of disruption.”