It has been a long year. We can’t pretend, dear reader, that everything is okay. Tensions are running high, and a lot of blame is going around for various problems in the GTA and beyond.
It has, of course, been a shocking and difficult year for everyone watching what is happening in Palestine, especially for Palestinians.
Our cover for this issue features a portrait of Prof. Ahmed Abu Shaban, one of very few people who escaped Gaza and is in Toronto now. His university in Gaza was completely destroyed by the Israeli military. He was able to get to Egypt with his family and is now working here as a visiting scholar. (See “On The Cover” box for more.)
Perhaps part of what has made this year feel so long is just how disorienting it has been.
On the ground, it seemed that the movement for Palestine was gaining strength. There were large demonstrations in the streets, encampments on several Canadian university campuses, boycotts and many other acts of resistance.
But despite the groundswell, the Canadian government has hardly budged on its positions, refusing to leverage its diplomatic strength to really push for a ceasefire. Instead, the government continues to export military arms components to Israel via third countries like the U.S.
Meanwhile in Toronto, people who take to the streets after work and between classes to try to stop a genocide continue being targeted by pundits and the police. As The Grind reported, one night in September after a protest, the police even pushed demonstrators onto a street with live traffic and punched, pepper sprayed, tackled and arrested many. No other media outlets
reported this, and we didn’t see a word of criticism of the police from politicians.
We also remember this spring when tens of thousands of people across Canada were outraged by Loblaws’ price increases and found common ground in trying to boycott the company, if only momentarily. What started in a Reddit group online called Loblaws Is Out of Control became a campaign that made national news and pressured the company to commit to freezing certain prices for a while.
But that hasn’t helped us very much.
In fact, as the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives recently found, nearly half of every dollar of inflation (a.k.a. the increase in prices) has actually gone to corporate profits, mainly benefiting companies in oil and gas, mining, real estate and banking.
Landlords, especially the giant corporate ones, are making huge stacks of money from renters who are just scraping by. Real estate investors have allowed many condos to remain empty during the “housing crisis” as they wait for prices to go up.
Yet somehow we’re repeatedly told that — you guessed it — someone else is to blame.
In the months since the Boycott Loblaws campaign, what we’ve witnessed is a shifting of responsibility away from CEOs, investors, and government toward migrants, protesters and the poor.
The endless search for someone else to blame for precarity, high rents, high tuition, unemployment, and all other social problems has contributed to a time of elevated racism, especially for people of colour who speak out and refuse to just go along with things.
We’re seeing how quickly a racist mobilization can happen now, like in the U.K. where race riots against Muslims broke out after a single misleading news story and in the U.S. against Haitians, again due to rumours in the news.
Similar blaming is happening here, targeting Sikhs, Palestinians and others.
At The Grind, we have spent the past two years bringing you stories from the ground because it is people on the ground who really see what is going on. They (likely including you, dear reader) understand who is taking advantage of them, making it harder to afford rent and groceries. And they are fighting back.
In this issue, our 11th, we invite you to join us in resisting the rhetoric of whichever powerful person tells us to blame those who have little power. Keep pushing for better for everyone.
A note on The Grind financesOTE ON THE GRIND’S FINANCES
This edition marks two years of The Grind being in print! We’ve heard from many of you how much you appreciate our coverage of the city’s arts scene, housing issues, transit woes, elections, Palestine and much more. Financially, we’ve been able to (just barely!) make it this far because of your support. To keep at it, we’ll be running two monthly donor campaigns each year, and one of those is happening this fall. We need 50 new donors to sign up in each campaign for the publication to become financially stable
in the next two years. Become a monthly donor today to keep The Grind alive.
On the cover
Prof. Ahmed Abu Shaban is a visiting scholar at York University in the faculty of environmental and urban change. Last fall, early
in Israel’s bombing campaign, he was able to flee from Gaza, where he worked as associate professor and dean at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. The university has since been completely destroyed by the Israeli military and many of his colleagues have been killed.
We chose Prof. Shaban for the cover because Palestinians, especially older Palestinians and those from Gaza, are rarely given space in North American media to be themselves and say their piece.
Read more about his experience and reflections, as well as those of other Palestinians in Toronto.
Photographed by Joshua Best.
This article appeared in the 2024 Oct/Nov issue.