Dispatches from the Left
Welcome to the Sask Dispatch’s inaugural newsletter!
Late last year, we ran a fundraiser for the Sask Dispatch – we told you if we raised $10,000 we’d build a new website, publish more reporting, and start an email newsletter. To our surprise and delight, we passed our goal and raised $10,800. Thanks to you, our new website is in the works, we’re preparing to publish some amazing stories, and we’re now launching our e-mail newsletter. We’re excited to start bringing anti-capitalist, anti-colonial analysis of all things Saskatchewan to your inbox every other week.
If you have feedback or suggestions, email sara@briarpatchmagazine.com! We love to hear from you.
Here are some of the stories we’ve been following this week.
Prison strike - the prison hunger strike that began on January 6 in response to the unchecked spread of COVID-19 in Saskatchewan jails (not to mention the overall conditions in the facilities where human beings are warehoused for such heinous crimes as “being poor,” “being Indigenous,” and “having trauma”) is now into its second week and organizers report that the movement has spread to Drumheller Institution in Alberta, where prisoners have gone on a hunger strike in protest of the inhumane lock down conditions they are enduring.
Forcibly separated from their communities, hunger strikes, in which prisoners organize together to refuse food en masse until their demands are met, are one of the few tools prisoners have at their disposal when it comes to protesting the conditions they live under. In 2013, hunger striking prisoners in California won public hearings into the state’s solitary confinement practices, which ultimately resulted in changes, although inmates (and the court system) point out that the state still routinely violates prisoners’ rights.
Imagery ©2021 Maxar Technologies, map data ©2021 Google Maps.
So far, the Saskatchewan government has refused to acknowledge the validity of the hunger strikers’ complaints or accept any of their demands, which include a public apology from the government for failing to prevent outbreaks in facilities that are completely under their control; the release of all prisoners possible, including the medically vulnerable and the nearly 1,000 adults and youth on remand who have not even been convicted of an offense; and the resignation of Corrections and Policing Minister Christine Tell. The government, unable to defend their position on moral or logical grounds, has resorted to using dehumanizing language, calling prisoners “criminals” and saying that COVID is “not a get out of jail free card.” No word from Scott Moe, who once killed a woman during the course of committing an automobile-related crime, if he thinks he should have been left to take his chances against a deadly virus. Of course, he never served a day.
Read more: On the day that Saskatchewan prisoners began their hunger strike, the Sask Dispatch published this letter from Cory Charles Cardinal, a prisoner justice advocate incarcerated inside the Saskatoon Provincial Correctional Centre who organized the hunger strike.
Long term care homes - The pandemic has revealed long-term care homes across the country, and here in Saskatchewan, to be in crisis. Mass casualties at facilities like Parkside Extendicare in Regina, where 44 of the home’s 200-plus residents have died from COVID-19, show that outsourcing care to for-profit companies has devastating social costs that residents should not be expected to bear. The circumstances are horrific, putting both residents and workers at risk of infection and death, and we should view them as an impetus to radically alter the way we live and understand community.
Everything possible should be done to ensure seniors who can no longer live completely independently can stay in their homes for as long as possible. That means devoting significant resources to expanding home care services. It could even include incentives to build homes that are accessible and safe for people with limited mobility, something that would benefit everyone. But as much as the government has a responsibility to provide a robust social safety net for all people of all ages, we also need to look at attitudes and infrastructure when it comes to how we build our homes and our cities. What is preventing people from living in multigenerational and multi-family homes where we can care for one another? The post-war world brought us the nuclear family, leaving many of us, as Noam Chomsky wrote, “isolated, atomized, and alone.” The pandemic era, with its crisis of long term care and its epidemic of loneliness could allow us to re-evaluate that model of living and build new communities of chosen families, where we don’t have to rely on profiteers for care.
In the present, the opposition NDP has called for a public inquiry into the situation at Parkside, but the government has so far rebuffed this suggestion.
Keystone XL - As US President Joe Biden cancelled the controversial Keystone XL pipeline his first day in office, Premier Scott Moe has vowed to continue tilting at windmills. Along with his pointless fight against the carbon tax, Moe Quixote has promised to fight for the pipeline, which has already cost Canadians billions. Moe’s biggest argument for the pipeline has always been about “jobs” – something that wasn’t a concern when his government killed Saskatchewan’s burgeoning solar industry by ending SaskPower’s net metering program.
As feminist scholars and activists have pointed out - notably in a report on Saskatchewan’s staggering rates of sexual assault and domestic violence published by Sexual Assault Services of Saskatchewan last spring - the coveted jobs created by oil and gas projects are heavily weighted towards providing income for white men, securing their position of power in the provincial economy. The defense of oil and gas projects, which seems baffling in light of catastrophic climate change, is a defense of settler colonialism and the capitalist status quo.
We should celebrate the end of Keystone XL, not only as a blow against extractive industries, but as an opportunity to look at the ways that our current economic structure reproduces social injustice.
Read more: How Saskatchewan’s extractive economy contributes to sexual violence, the fight for renewable energy in the province, and this long-read from our sister publication, Briarpatch, on socializing Saskatchewan’s oil industry to wind it down.
Saskatchewan needs more independent journalism. But without the backing of corporations like Postmedia, we rely on your support to keep producing high-quality journalism that challenges the mainstream media consensus. Donate now to help us sustain and expand our work.