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Why Bill 32 is actually good + Down the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator rabbit hole
80 Plays4 years ago
Our guest Abdul Malik makes the case for why the UCP's new union busting bill is actually good. Plus Duncan follows up on his story about the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator war criminal statue by going down the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator rabbit hole.
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Further reading:
- Opinion: Alberta labour needs the UCP’s union busting bill
- Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex denies that statue they have of a Nazi collaborator war criminal is a Nazi collaborator war criminal
- What does a worker look like?
- How a network of Ukrainian ultra-nationalists penetrated Canada’s Conservative Party to lobby for military conflict
- Long-Distance Nationalism: Ukrainian Monuments and Historical Memory in Multicultural Canada
- INCO imported ex-Nazis, RCMP report says
- War Criminality: A Blank Spot in the Collective Memory of the Ukrainian Diaspora
- Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations
- The Jakarta Method book review
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Overview of Bill 32
00:00:12
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinne, recording today here in Miss What You Was, Skuygen, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta. So, Jason Kinne and the UCPR flooding the zone with disaster capital legislation that will finally allow me to both shoot a sand hell crane and employ a 13-year-old.
00:00:32
Speaker
maybe to do both at the same time. Kenny has just in the past few weeks brought in laws that have criminalized protest, allowed dark money to wash over municipal elections and referendums, and his piece de resistance, Bill 32, what we're calling the Union Busting Bill. Joining me today to talk about why this Union Busting Bill is actually really good
00:00:55
Speaker
Uh, is Abdul Malik Abdul, you know, companies Duncan are like families. Um, and in those families, we don't allow each other to unionize. We, uh, you know, work out our problems like a family should. Exactly. Yes. This is a union free zone. Progress Alberta is famously non unionized and I will never allow a union here. So I'm in favor of bill 32, you know, actually when it gets down to it.
Impact and Critique of Bill 32
00:01:22
Speaker
Yeah, no, I'm Abdul. I work in and around the labor sector in Edmonton. My views on this podcast are not representative of anyone but my employer, or the views of Kino Left or LLC, a registered corporation within the territory of so-called Alberta.
00:01:43
Speaker
Yes. Thank you for doing your own intro Abdul. I'm very grateful. Yes. Uh, he's a writer and a filmmaker. He's, he's been on the podcast before. This is your second appearance. I think for your third appearance, you get a challenge coin. So, um, so just so you know, Hell yeah. Point check.
00:01:59
Speaker
So you recently wrote a story for us explaining and kind of telling the world why you think Bill 32 is actually good. And I think we need to explain why that kind of clickbaity headline exists. So let's get into the details of like Bill 32 before we explain why it is good. So what is Bill 32?
00:02:22
Speaker
I mean, Bill 32 is a bill introduced by the UCP that effectively puts extremely hard limits, for example, on where you can pick it. That's a huge one. So in a traditional unionized picket line, you're allowed to stop people who are crossing that picket line for X amount of minutes. That's part of the process of slowing down the work.
00:02:48
Speaker
and preventing scabs from being able to scab effectively, among other things. Secondary picketing, which was enshrined in a 1990 Supreme Court case, RWDSU versus, I'm trying to remember, I think it was a Coca-Cola bottling factory, but don't quote me on that.
00:03:07
Speaker
Okay, I won't. Where they were secondary picketing the homes of their employer and it did go to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said, actually secondary picketing is okay. But the, you know, UCB has decided to once again challenge that and in a court decision that they will almost certainly lose because the legal precedent does exist.
00:03:27
Speaker
Um, and, uh, more importantly, they pulled, uh, one of those incredible, um, labor platforms that's not even like fully implemented, like less labor front friendly countries like the U S which is, uh, an opt-in for union dues going to political activity, which, um, as far as I know, I've asked again, like I work in labor, I've asked a bunch of people, I know what constitutes political activity. Have you gotten any information on this yet? And their answer was no. Um,
00:03:57
Speaker
This is the latest and greatest in union busting technology from the ghouls who are in the anti-union industry and legal community? Yeah, pretty much. It really is a good summation of a bunch of draconian anti-labor legislation combined altogether.
Economic Challenges and Investment in Alberta
00:04:21
Speaker
to achieve this one effect, which is to cripple labor power in Alberta, Alberta, a province with famously the lowest union density and arguably the weakest labor power, just sort of looking at it holistically for its entire existence, right? Like for many years at least.
00:04:41
Speaker
Uh, which is in the modern era. I think we had like militant union. I mean, the one big union was a big deal back here. Like, you know, like Croesus pass and the coal miners. And I mean, like, don't get me wrong. I'm not denigrating the work that Alberta labor unions have done. Um, no, no, but the staff, the union density stats are the union density stats. Yeah, pretty much. Um, and it's not, it's no fault of there. No, I mean, it's the fault of labor, I think is a concept that we got this far, but like.
00:05:08
Speaker
The unions do a lot of good work, and they're continuing to do good work. Union density has largely been on the upswing since the 90s, which is extremely promising. Actually, we were ahead of the curve on that, as opposed to there were still declining rates into the early to mid 2000s, whereas Alberta was actually coming way back up for a variety of reasons.
00:05:32
Speaker
Hey, so signing on to support this legislation are the kind of usual ghouls you would expect. You had the president and CEO of the Merit Contractors Association standing on his hind legs and congratulating the government of Alberta for, quote, returning balance to employers and their employees through revisions to the Labor Relations Code and Employment Standards Act. These positive changes send a message to investors and job creators that Alberta is open for business, unquote. Great. I mean,
00:06:02
Speaker
The myth of Alberta excellence is really on display here because it's not our labor laws that are keeping people from investing in the province. It's the fact that we're Alberta. This is one of the things that it's always crucial to remember is the reason Waterloo could never compete with Silicon Valley is because no one wants to live in Waterloo.
00:06:23
Speaker
And they ended up recruiting a lot of like second and third tier IT and tech people because given the choice between, you know, living in beautiful, sunny, you know, San Francisco or Silicon Valley, or living in a frozen waste suburb of Toronto, Waterloo, people picked obviously the first one, right? And it's the same thing with Alberta. Like, you know, we're not competitive with a lot of US states, let alone
00:06:54
Speaker
other provinces in terms of people wanting to just come and live here, which I think is crucial to understanding the future of Alberta's economy. Diversification actually has to come from within, not from attracting outside investors. Building any sort of economy has to be a project that's backed by
00:07:15
Speaker
the government and the state, not a project that's backed by, I don't know, praying Amazon builds an HQ here or something, which is like- No, we're going to get TD Bank and Bank of Nova Scotia and Bank of Montreal to relocate their headquarters and head offices to Calgary. Jason Kenney is going to remind them that it would be irresponsible for them to do so because of our low corporate taxes.
00:07:39
Speaker
The reason we even had a tech industry to begin with in Edmonton was because of schools. It was because we had the education to support it, and then people started businesses here. In fact, that's a lot of our homegrown industries. That's a lot of the Alberta Innovate stuff that was developed here, was developed by people who were born, raised, and educated here, not people who moved here to work for fucking Alberta Innovates.
00:08:05
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I will bet a substantial amount of money that none of those big five banks will ever move their
Organizing Opportunities and Labor Resistance
00:08:11
Speaker
headquarters to Calgary. For one very simple and obvious reason. I mean, you've laid out supplementary reasons, right? Like it's cold here.
00:08:19
Speaker
Calgary is not Toronto, especially in the context of Canada, but those bankers at working at those head offices in Calgary would literally have to wake up at four in the morning to get to the office for five o'clock, which is when the markets open on the East Coast. It's just never going to happen.
00:08:36
Speaker
Yeah, like the only good thing about the time zone difference here is that I get to watch basketball at 5 p.m., right? Like that is. That rips. I can come home from the office and pop on a Raptors game. And yeah, you don't have to like eat dinner, wait around like a chump, go to bed at like 11 o'clock. It's like done at seven o'clock.
00:08:52
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. It's great. And then you can just sort of live out the rest of your night, have a late dinner, you're good to go, right? But yeah, I don't know. There's a lot of interesting fallacies within the job creation myth of Alberta. And I'm not saying big corporations don't look at labor laws when they move places. That's the reason we've outsourced half our manufacturing to East Asia is because of the cheaper cost of labor, right?
00:09:20
Speaker
The kind of corporations you're trying to, like you're not asking for a manufacturing sector, you're asking for an enlarged and improved professional sector, right? And that is a much tougher sell here in Alberta than anything. Like maybe, maybe, I'm saying this like with an immense grain of salt, there would be some credence to this idea of job creation that the UCP is pushing if
00:09:47
Speaker
they were like yeah you know we're gonna convert all the coal mines and i'd know factories to build cheap new balance or something right which i mean even then i have a hard time believing it because they're like shipping infrastructure is even up to par in terms of import export like.
00:10:02
Speaker
Uh, you know, maybe that would carry a bit more, uh, weight if, if that's what they were saying, but they're like, no, we're going to be, uh, you know, Silicon Valley or Toronto or some sort of professional, professionalized, um, province, which is, you know, it's completely untrue and everyone knows it's untrue. They know it's untrue. Right. Yeah.
00:10:21
Speaker
So okay, we are going to get to your story, but I do want to kind of sum up some of the other terrible things in Bill 32. And this bill really is the kind of collection of every single thing that every small business tyrant in Alberta has kind of ever wanted. It is like,
00:10:37
Speaker
literally like a wet dream for the CFIB. And then stuff that doesn't have anything to do with unions, it's just, you know, they're just fucking with every single worker in Alberta through the labor code, right? So there's a there's a potpourri here, a real bag of shit when it comes to this, but 13 and 14 year olds can now be hired for some jobs without youth employment permits.
00:10:56
Speaker
And as Jason Kennedy famously did a few months back, he's also lowered the minimum wage for people under $18 to $13 an hour. Employers have gained more power to deduct from paychecks, primarily in cases of previous payroll errors. Not at all wage-thefty at all. Long shifts or extended work schedules no longer require an urgent or emergency nature. Shift changes no longer require eight hours of rest or 24 hours of notice in all cases.
00:11:24
Speaker
The wording of how rest breaks after X hours of work how those are determined has now been altered and has put the timing of those breaks more clearly in the employer's control. Shifts of 24 days on no longer require minimum four days off in all cases.
00:11:43
Speaker
Yeah, like, it's really bad. Periods, notices of mass layoffs to the minister no longer have requirements that are attached to large layoff notices. All mass layoffs is a 50 or more now of a flat four week notice to the minister. No notices required to layoff seasonal workers on mass.
00:12:02
Speaker
Um, yeah, this is a giant bag of shit. Anyways, that's, that's, if you have anything else that you've, that, that about both bill 32, that's bad about bill 32 speak now, uh, before we get to, to your argument, you know, in, in between this and reopening the coal mines, like I'm really excited to see, you know, faces of soot face children, um, again, you know, a hundred years later, only this time, I don't know, they're wearing khakis, um, uh, a new era hats instead of, you know, um,
00:12:32
Speaker
burlap sacks or whatever. We just got them on Metallical Kurt Turk and are clicking shit online for us. Yeah, it's going to be great. This bill really is the bot farm economy. We could easily be the DDoS capital of the fucking world if we wanted to be with these labor laws.
00:12:56
Speaker
here's helping army of people just you know commenting on things on twitter for ten cents an hour yes not a dystopia at all okay so
00:13:07
Speaker
You wrote a piece for us, Abdul, and we've referenced it. But now I think it's time to talk about it. The title of this or the headline of this piece is, Alberta Labor Needs the UCP's Union Busting Bill. The essential thesis of your piece is that Bill 32 is actually good. Why is Bill 32 actually good? After all, that shit we just said.
00:13:29
Speaker
I mean, so I want to clarify, good is a, if this was coming, it is the best thing that could have come. Obviously the solution would have been, maybe this shouldn't have happened, but if it's here, it's actually an incredible opportunity.
00:13:44
Speaker
And I mean, I want to hone in on the word opportunity here in terms of why it is good, right? We've had a couple of anti-labor bills so far. Bill 21 famously restricted collective bargaining power. And Bill 9 sort of delayed arbitration that was intended to be guaranteed by the outgoing government regarding wage reopeners for the big three public sector unions, HSAA, UNA, and AUPE.
00:14:15
Speaker
Now, both of those bills while, uh, you know, devious and evil are largely technocratic in nature, right? It's hard to get people excited about fighting back against a bill like bill 21, which is, you know, which will have material impact on their lives, but, um, not anything tangible. And I think that that's really in the streets for wage arbitration hearings or whatever stuff, wage arbitration stuff that was negotiated in a past contract or whatever.
00:14:41
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And people were rightfully pissed. But especially given the threat of this government, my personal estimation of what was on the ground is that, yeah, people are pissed. But the other side of it is perpetual rumors of mass layoffs in large public sectors. So if it's a choice between taking a zero or getting laid off, why would you want to rock the boat?
00:15:07
Speaker
And I know all the big unions were, of course, organizing pretty decent fightback campaigns against it, et cetera, et cetera. But where Bill 32 might have been an overplay of the hand is Bill 32 has a materiality to it that can't be ignored. It has a massive impact. Each of the components of Bill 32 could have been a bill in its own right. But they decided to let's do it all at once, which
00:15:37
Speaker
On top of you know the increasing economic precarity we're living under the threat of a pandemic the sort of frustration with government response the anxiety around reopening while cases seem to be going up and up and up worldwide, and you know the many hundreds of thousands of people who are now on serve.
00:15:56
Speaker
Combined to create an opportunity for organizing and fight back that I think the other bills could not, and something the Alberta Labor Movement holistically really needs right now, is this sort of very material enemy, something that says, actually, no, we're not going to take this because I liked yelling at my boss on a picket line. I liked being able to have this power to get some wages, and also I liked that my 13-year-old kid could not be young.
00:16:24
Speaker
conscripted into a press gang to fight the French during the Revolutionary War or whatever. These are all things I enjoyed having and now those things do not exist. Therefore, good luck trying to arrest me for marching on the streets against this fucking bill.
00:16:46
Speaker
And using bill one obviously to justify that arrest. I mean the two go hand in hand But yeah, like that's sort of where I think this has a really great space for you know unions and workers to And non unionized workers to to organize and fight back and say actually no you're gonna fucking retract this or we're going to Make your life hell for as long as you're in power and we're not going to stop right and there is a capacity for sustained
00:17:16
Speaker
power here. As I said in the piece, I think that that starts with framing the conversation around Bill 32 as not as an attack or a threat, but as an opportunity for workers to demonstrate the power they've always had. Very often, we play workers as victims. We portray workers as under threat.
00:17:40
Speaker
when really it should be and it always has been workers doing the threatening, right? Like this bill is not an attack on workers, it's a response to the perception of worker power and ways to try and cripple that. Which is, again, it's crucial to understand these bills are not attacks, they're responses to an understanding that there is a power imbalance and
00:18:05
Speaker
The UCP will do whatever it can to suggest that they have the power, but they understand more than anyone, as evidenced by these and other bills, that they actually have very little power at all. Workers have the power, and they're trying to mitigate and cripple that and create this sort of perception that, actually, no, it's us. It's us. We exert complete control.
00:18:28
Speaker
you have 500 workers, you know, to every boss, let's say. I made that statistic up, but I'm pretty sure it's somewhat accurate. But you get what I'm saying, right? Yeah, like now is the time to kind of really fully internalize the line from Solid E forever, right? Without our brain and muscle, not a single wheel can turn. Like if the labor movement actually decides to fuck shit up and to get on the streets and to like actually wildcat and strike, like labor law is irrelevant, right?
00:18:56
Speaker
What happens to society when labor decides to withdraw from the workforce is cataclysmic. It's really a case of actually putting in the organizing work to make that situation a reality.
00:19:14
Speaker
Yeah, and like, it's important to recognize that laws are only as good as their capacity to be enforced, right, which is why, you know, in the social uprising in the US in the last couple of months and their response to you know police.
00:19:29
Speaker
You see what happens when 10,000 people get into a street and start fucking shit up, right? It's like, what effective state response exists to that? Nothing. You could roll tanks into Atlanta and people won't stop, right? Even in the White House, right? Hey, Trump, you can't do this. It's illegal. He's like, okay, I'll do it anyway. And everyone's like,
00:19:49
Speaker
Oh, I guess we have to let you do it now. There's no precedent for you just not complying with the law. And both of those things are actually very good evidence of the fact that laws are pretty toothless if you play your cards right. You know what you're doing, or you just have the numbers to back up the fact that you're not going to accept this law.
00:20:11
Speaker
I mean, I think the other reason why it's an opportunity too is something that people have talked about in regards to the kind of Black Lives Matter and police brutality uprisings across the United States, which is simply the kind of like geographic availability of humans at the moment, right?
Social Conditions and Labor Power Dynamics
00:20:27
Speaker
With so many people
00:20:29
Speaker
out of work or underemployed or working from home or whatever, that when something like this crops up, that like it is just simply easier to get people into the streets in a time like this than it would be if, you know, they weren't already in this fucked up pandemic situation, right?
00:20:48
Speaker
Yeah, and I mean like this sounds like a bit woo-woo or whatever, but if George Floyd had been killed by cops I think a month later than when it happened, the US might not be a functional state right now. We are in a space where
00:21:09
Speaker
precarity is climbing. People are getting sicker and sicker due to COVID and also heat, right? Like heat generates social unrest. That's- You've got a thesis on this, isn't it? Like the hotter, the wetter, the like- Not the fucking solar flare theory. That's bullshit. But like civil unrest is definitely has an uptick in the summertime because of heat, right? Like there is a relationship to
00:21:36
Speaker
And probably geographic availability as well, right? People are just outside of their houses more often or more willing to be outside of their houses, right? Absolutely. And like, you know, there's something about temperature that does affect our cognitive function, right? Like it does affect our sort of emotional response to things, as we all know, and stuff like that. So I mean, like, yeah, it is a great time for this to be happening sort of in general.
00:22:00
Speaker
And it's one of those things that's fairly inexplicable. Everyone knew this bill was coming. There's a single person involved in any capacity with labor who didn't get rumblings that this was on its way. I think the severity of it threw a lot of people off guard. I think a lot of people had
00:22:22
Speaker
panicked and reactive and tepid responses to it to sort of kick off and stuff like that. But I think that the understanding that this is, again, it is the most material bill they could have introduced. It is the one that has the most profound impact on
00:22:39
Speaker
people's material conditions on people's ability to fight for better material conditions on people's ability to raise families and take care of their kids and be able to, you know, live a life that's divested from the exploitation of their labor.
00:22:55
Speaker
I'm genuinely of the opinion that if the organizing goes right, people won't take this line down. We have to stop seeing these things as attacks. They are not attacks. They are responses to a perception of increasing labor power. It's entirely up to labor. I'm not saying organized labor. I'm saying the labor workforce, the labor
00:23:16
Speaker
comprehensively to understand that these things are defenses and bulwarks against the power that you as a worker hold.
00:23:27
Speaker
Um, and therefore you have the capacity to make sure this never happens. Right. Uh, like the framing of workers as victims is really poor because it's, it entirely feeds into this perception that workers must perpetually be on the back foot, which no, they should be the ones, you know, striking preemptively against, uh, bills like 32.
00:23:49
Speaker
Yeah, there was an article recently written by Nick Drieger at organizing.work, which kind of talked about these perceptions that unions have of
00:23:58
Speaker
the workers. Back when the labor movement was kicking ass and taking names and was super organized and winning foundational fights for labor rights, eight hour work day and all that shit in the 20s and 30s and before that workers were represented as strong and massive and powerful and the bosses were these
00:24:23
Speaker
you know, round, dumpy losers and top hats. And now in modern day, you know, 80 some years later, unions are kind of framing their members as, you know, beaten down and, and, you know, put upon and victims of the boss as opposed to the ones who should be just putting the boots to their boss. Right. Absolutely. And I mean,
00:24:46
Speaker
I think that in general, this is coming out of a place of unions comprehensively
00:24:58
Speaker
identifying themselves as part of institutional power. Because, you know, in the institutionalization of unions, pass the IWW, whatever, whatever, they became a part of institutional power, right? Especially in the US, which of course trickles into Canada, you know, labor, well, actually, it's 100% as part of Canada, because like, you know, labor unions relationships with the NDP, for example, or labor union, labor unions being a key factor in the Democratic Party, both in terms of donors and volunteers.
00:25:28
Speaker
and stuff like that is really crucial to think about where labor sort of sees itself as within the house of institutional liberal democratic power when, in all honesty, they were never really at the table to begin with. They just hitched their horse to the best possible people to keep perpetuating them. And that is sort of where this idea of being under attack comes from because it
00:25:53
Speaker
you perceive it as an attack on the institution you think you're a part of when it's in labor's best interest to identify itself as separate from those institutions. In fact, labor's ultimate goal should be to hold institutions of power accountable and emancipate people from those institutions. That is the functional goal of an effective labor movement is
00:26:20
Speaker
is to break the illusion that those institutions have any control or would even dare to make people's lives worse. And that's one of the reasons the 1920s and 30s crackdown on labor unions was so
00:26:38
Speaker
intense, right? Incredibly violent and brutal. Yeah. And I think we're in a space now where, you know, under, I would say a pretty resurgent labor movement. It's obviously not where it was at. It won't be for a long time, but like where you're able to start framing labor that way again, right? Where you have a hundred years of history to look back at and say, okay, this is an ongoing war and
00:27:05
Speaker
We've lost a few fights, but what's going to be your Gettysburg? Right. And I think that that you should always be thinking about what that Hill is, what that space is, where you're going to to sort of lay that line, how you're going to win that fight rather than, you know, perceiving yourself as.
00:27:21
Speaker
under siege, because we've always been under siege. It's not a particularly new concept. No one should pretend to be outraged or surprised by Bill 32. It was inevitability. It's not a particularly fresh set of political ideas on the UCP's part, right?
00:27:39
Speaker
Yes, exactly. The piece is really good. We will link to it in the show notes and definitely give it a read. It is some analysis and some opinion. You're not going to get anywhere else. You've thought about this in a way that I think is refreshing and new. There's just one final quote I want to read out from your piece that I want to reflect on before we move on to the next thing and that is this.
00:28:02
Speaker
Quote, I'll bet that this bill will never be respected. It'll lose on the streets before it loses in court. It'll lose to the people marching en masse, mobilizing outside workplaces and standing before their employers homes and offices by the hundreds or thousands. Looking down, the UCP's proverbial face is saying, come get us fuckers. I dare you. Unquote.
00:28:21
Speaker
Good luck arresting 5,000 workers on the street. I mean, best of luck to you. And I will say this is where solidarity unionism is the most important. And we saw it in Regina at the co-op line. We're going to see it everywhere else. But if you have a site, say a private health care site of 25 people that goes on strike and decides to not comply with Bill 32,
00:28:48
Speaker
The the you know you can you can arrest 25 people and you can say hey This is now an illegal strike because of blah blah blah you know you didn't comply But you get 500 people out on the line and support you get a thousand people online support a that strike will be over very quickly I mean it doesn't matter if they're all workers there or not and
00:29:08
Speaker
But B, good luck. The UCP, good luck sending cops to bust it, right? Good luck winning in the court of public opinion. Good luck trying to disentangle the optics of laying off 25 workers at an old folks' home. And good luck somehow declaring the union illegal if they're still going to show up day after day with 1,000 of their best friends being
00:29:37
Speaker
And actually, no, fuck you, give us our jobs back, right? Like these are all, I think, vital things to consider because, you know, it's, it, laws are not, are not some sort of immutable hallowed object. They are as transient and as like, and as temporary as a fucking ice sculpture. You know what I mean? Like they exist and then they don't exist. And like, it's up to you to like, take the ax to them or not. Mm-hmm. Agreed. And again, go and read the piece. The title is, uh,
00:30:08
Speaker
Opinion Alberta Labor needs the ucp's union busting bill. It's on the progress report dot ca and it'll be in the show notes Okay, the other big thing I wanted to talk about on the pod was I've really gone down the rabbit hole on this issue Late last week. I wrote a piece with the headline somewhat cheeky headline
00:30:29
Speaker
being a Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex denies that statue they have of a Nazi collaborator war criminal is a Nazi collaborator war criminal.
Historical Controversies and Immigration in Canada
00:30:43
Speaker
And so we've talked about this on the pod before, and if you're not familiar with it, I'll give you kind of a very quick pre-c, but
00:30:50
Speaker
Essentially, the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex in North Edmonton has the statue of a man named Roman Šukiewicz outside of it. This is a man who was trained by the Nazis, and he was a military commander under the Nazis, and military units under his control massacred between 10,000 to 15,000 Jews in various kind of pogroms and massacres, as well as somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 Poles.
00:31:15
Speaker
Uh, yeah, he's a, he was a Nazi collaborator, war criminal. That is an accurate description of him. And, uh, so there you go. You're all kind of caught up on who this guy is and.
00:31:27
Speaker
Okay, so writing this story was interesting because I kind of reached out to the people who have this statue. And they're like, I got I got a quote from Benai Brith and Benai Brith, which is not an organization that I'm typically a fan of. Their manager of public affairs for Alberta is actually working on this issue and is, you know, you can read the quotes in the piece, he's taken quite a strong stand against the fact that this statue exists. And his solution that he's asking for is, you know, he's looking for some kind of type of
00:31:56
Speaker
acknowledgement that this man massacred 10,000, 15,000 Jews. But all that the response that you get out of the kind of Ukrainian organizations that are responsible for this are, this is all Russian disinformation, Skaia. This is all an op.
00:32:11
Speaker
It's so fucked because like, and I'm going to preface this by saying I do believe the Holodomber happened, right? But this is the same argument that people who engage like Holodomber denialism say about the Holodomber, right? Oh, it was Nazi propaganda is what they say about that stuff, right? And why they use that as like to lay claimed like, oh, this didn't happen or whatever.
00:32:39
Speaker
um and and you're engaging in literally the same behavior about the holocaust here by saying oh this is this is soviet communist propaganda right which is um like a it takes like a special kind of like lack of awareness to see you know the behavior you're engaging in but also it's like historically cited pretty intensely like there isn't
00:33:03
Speaker
really a dioda of disinformation about the fact that this guy was a massive piece of shit, right? No, multiple like disinterested academic sources have kind of done the work. And it's pretty accepted scholarship that Roman Shukovich was responsible for these massacres and that units under his control killed all these people.
00:33:27
Speaker
And yeah, like the kind of furious posting and responses by kind of far-right Ukrainian nationalists on this issue are, you're never going to convince them. It's like, it's all an op to them. You know, this guy is a hero. But it's also worth considering how the statue got here in the first place.
00:33:47
Speaker
And there have been multiple waves of Ukrainian settlement in Alberta. There was a wave of Ukrainian settlement before the Habsburg Empire still existed, pre-World War I. And the people who came then, obviously, are not part of this wave of ultra-far-right Ukrainian nationalists. There was a settlement post-World War I, there was a settlement pre-World War I, post-World War I, and then post-World War II.
00:34:14
Speaker
And this post-World War II wave of settlement from Ukraine, the anti-communists were very much favored when they showed up on our shores. And the funny thing about kind of violent anti-communists is that they tended to have collaborated with the Nazis.
00:34:35
Speaker
Yeah, and I mean, like, you know, history, like history in general, I would I would argue has not been kind to the region of Ukraine, you know, in general, and it's led to an immense amount of like, you know, sort of reactionary tendencies within the country itself, you know, even up to today, right? Like, like Ukraine has a incredibly effective and well mobilized
00:35:01
Speaker
extremely far right party that I believe is one of the major parties in their legislative process and stuff like that. I have no idea, but I would surprise me considering the people they have over here in Canada helping them.
00:35:16
Speaker
Yeah, and this is the, and this is sort of the outcome of that sort of like reactionary history, right? Like, I think it's important to recognize why these sort of reactionary elements exist out of a, out of a historical perspective and to understand that they don't happen in a vacuum, but that doesn't change the fact that, you know, you sort of have to have to, you know, acknowledge within your own sort of fold that there are
00:35:42
Speaker
many fascists and Nazi collaborators, right? That's not an indictment of Ukrainians at all, not even in the slightest. That's an indictment of many, many people within that country and many people who came here who had those ties and were honestly fairly unapologetic about those ties, right?
00:36:02
Speaker
And again, it's the same thing that that far right nationalists love to do with like people like Muslims is like, well, I get that you're not a terrorist, but you should acknowledge that there are, you know, lots of Muslim terrorists, right? It's like, motherfucker, like, you know, you have to, you have to hold yourself accountable to the same stripe. Obviously, you know, with the mental gymnastics involved, they won't. But that's why, you know, you have to come in, write an article doing it for them, right?
00:36:31
Speaker
Yeah, like, just to give you a sense of the scale of kind of like, former Nazi collaborator, like, like soldiers who showed up. This, these quotes are from a book called Long Distance Nationalism, Ukrainian Monuments and Historical Memory in Multicultural Canada. This is a chapter in a book written by a pair Rudlin, who again is that Swedish professor of history. Here it is.
00:36:56
Speaker
A significant group consisted of former combatants of its paramilitary wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, known under its Ukrainian acronym UPA. In 1950, the Ukrainian nationalist community grew further as Canada admitted 1,200 to 2,000 veterans of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS.
00:37:19
Speaker
As only a cross-section of the veterans were subjected to security screening, which was sketchy and incomplete, recurrent allegations of war criminals amongst them triggered intensive discussions. This is like, there's citations for this, which you can go and click. So what year was this? These were between 1947 and 1951. Oh, in 1951, no, sorry, in 1950, the Ukrainian nationalist community grew further.
00:37:46
Speaker
But like the numbers are, I mean, like, here you go. This is another quote from this pair ruddling scholarship on this. In the immediate post-war years, Canada received 165,000 political refugees, otherwise called displaced persons. Anti-communist applicants were favored over others. Poles and Ukrainians constituted 39% of this group.
00:38:09
Speaker
as a total of 25,772 refugees of Ukrainian origin arrived in Canada between 1947 and 1951 through the efforts of the International Refugee Organization. Followers of Stepan Bandera, the leader of the radical wing of the far-right Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, constituted the largest political party, supported by 75-80% of the West Ukrainian displaced persons.
00:38:34
Speaker
Then we get to the quote about how the 1,200 to 2,000 veterans of the Ukrainian SS division showed up in Canada. It's fucking wild because how many Jewish refugees did Canada turn back? None is too many, maybe. Yeah, the MS St. Louis in like 39, which what was it called? The Ship of the Damned or whatever?
00:38:59
Speaker
Um, that, that carried, you know, about a thousand Jewish refugees, flowing a persecution from the Nazis was turned back by Canada. And what year did they apologize? Let's just Google 2018.
00:39:14
Speaker
There's a very good book on this called None is Too Many, Canada and the Jews of Europe, which goes into detail about both Mackenzie King's racist and anti-Semitic immigration policies, as well as the specific incident that you're talking about, the MS St. Louis.
00:39:33
Speaker
During the 12-year period of Nazi rule here, I pulled up the Canadian Council for Refugees stat. Canada admitted less than 5,000 Jewish refugees. It says a lot about our own country's history and stuff like that.
00:39:52
Speaker
We weren't Argentina, but anti-Semitism is coded in Alberta's history as well. We had a major political party that ruled for a very long time for the Conservatives that was... Oh, the Social Credit Party was the most anti-Semitic political party probably to have ever existed in Canada.
00:40:13
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely, right? That was one of those things that's just like, you know, it's important to understand the historical context of this monument because I think it says so much about Canada holistically and does a lot in sort of deconstructing Canadian myth.
00:40:31
Speaker
particularly in our popular conception as a piece in love country, which everyone listening to this knows is a lie. But something like this becomes a flash point for, I think, a much larger conversation about what Alberta and what Canada actually is.
00:40:54
Speaker
I mean, you go down, I mean, that does lead directly into the hilarious, like the next thing that kind of related to this thing got dug up, which relates to the joke of Canada just being three resource companies in a trench coat. But this came out at roughly this just in the past week or so of some investigative journalism done back in the 90s. The headline of this 1995 Sudbury Examiner piece is, Inco-imported ex-Nazis, RCMP report says.
00:41:20
Speaker
This was in the Sudbury Star, investigative reporter Terry Pender and another journalist, Peter Vronsky, discovered some smoking gun documents that revealed the process of how a little-known US finance group in Canada called the Canadian Christian Council for the Resettlement of Refugees privately lobbied the Canadian government in the 1950s to admit former Nazi Waffen
00:41:43
Speaker
SS, Nazi Waffen SS, foreign legion volunteers, like the Muslim, Bosnian, Albanian, Nazi SS troopers, Ukrainian SS volunteers, and others to come to Sudbury Wholesale to work in the mines. In August 1961, these former Nazi troops, now employed in the mining industry, were mobilized to riot by INCO in a campaign to destroy Canada's largest independent union, the Mine Mill and Smelter Workers, which was being taken over by an American union, the Steelworkers.
00:42:10
Speaker
It was thought by the U.S. strategically vital to ensure that Sudbury nickel mining was controlled by a U.S. Union rather than an independent Canadian commie union. Most of the U.S.'s strategic nickel necessary for the construction of warships, artillery, armored vehicles, and nuclear weapons comes from Sudbury, Ontario, and there was a fear that an independent Canadian Union might interfere in the nickel supply to the American military.
00:42:34
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's capitalism all the way down. And I think, again, it's nothing new. That's the part about this I think I find the most frustrating is that none of this is a particularly new or shocking or as yet unheard of revelation. You know what I mean? It's just like, man, this sucks.
00:42:56
Speaker
I mean, if you're a leftist, you're probably kind of dimly aware that this exists, but you start reading the details and you kind of understand the enormity and how much they've penetrated society. Peter Savran, who was the president of the Tories here in Alberta, the Progressive Conservative Party for many years,
00:43:17
Speaker
He was the chancellor of the University of Alberta. He was the chair of the organization that essentially fundraised to build a war memorial monument to this like 14th Waffen SS Ukrainian division.
00:43:31
Speaker
Like, this guy is, by any stretch of the imagination, a member of the elite, a member of, you know, the Canadian Uppercross Society, and he is deeply embedded in this Ukrainian far-right nationalist movement. And even Krista Freeland, I mean, if she succeeds Justin Trudeau, I mean, I think we are going to have very many, a lot of very interesting conversations about her Nazi collaborator grandpa.
00:43:59
Speaker
And this is like something that ties back into, you know, sort of the idea of people power as well. Like institutional power won't, you know, unless under extreme duress, which doesn't really apply to this because I believe that monument is technically on private property.
00:44:16
Speaker
um you know like like we'll not ever do these things for you right it's up to you to do it for yourself and you know organize for it um and nowhere is that more clear when it comes down to like you know challenging um so to speak uh challenging nazi monuments uh you know in your city or you know holding people accountable to you know
00:44:39
Speaker
Yeah, their history of, for example, Nazi collaboration or, you know, maybe letting, you know, SS members into the country while turning away a ship full of, you know, 900 itinerant Jews and stuff like that.
00:44:54
Speaker
all in all just like a very it's just it's a very frustrating thing to witness it's just like man this again this sucks cuz like it takes nothing to just acknowledge that these things happen right even if you do not currently self-identify as a Nazi it's not a particularly difficult thing to say grandpa was a Nazi yes you know yeah my ancestors were bad people
00:45:19
Speaker
Yeah, we live in a settler state. It's not a difficult thing to acknowledge. You might be a woke settler who's pro decolonization, but, you know, Gramps wasn't. In fact, Gramps might have been extremely racist, right?
Global Anti-Communist Movements and Cold War Impacts
00:45:32
Speaker
Yeah, my grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents definitely benefited from free land on the prairies and throughout North America given to white settlers. That's not even disputable and not even disputable for a huge chunk of settlers here in Canada. But I've got two final thoughts on this. One is that if you want to get further down the rabbit hole on this, we've got lots of links in the
00:45:59
Speaker
in the show notes. But there's this recent piece that came out by a person named Moss Robeson. And the headline is how a network of Ukrainian ultra nationalists penetrated Canada's Conservative Party to lobby for military conflict. And it really does go into the kind of really in quite exact detail, just how deeply enmeshed and embedded
00:46:18
Speaker
these Ukrainian far-right nationalists are with the Conservative Party, and particularly with Stephen Harper, who they fucking love. And so that's a good piece. And finally, I don't know if you've had a chance to read the Jakarta Method yet, Abdul, but if you're familiar with its kind of general thesis.
00:46:38
Speaker
And for folks who haven't read it, it's like, essentially, Indonesia had essentially a genocide or mass massacre of around a million or so communists or suspected communists, and they rounded up another million people and put them in concentration camps. And this was essentially the reason why the most popular, one of the most popular and most kind of like effective communist parties in the world, the Indonesian Communist Party was defeated. They essentially just disappeared all of their political enemies into the river.
00:47:08
Speaker
And this Jakarta method kind of is part of this broad kind of like anti-communist international
00:47:18
Speaker
group, and I just wonder where the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators fit into that. Do they go to the same meetings? Do they go to the same parties? Do they know? Were they familiar with the Jakarta method when it was happening? I just have so many questions, and now that I'm aware of this, and there is this organization called the Anti-Bolshevik Union or Group of Nations, I can't remember the exact title, but was essentially one of the
00:47:44
Speaker
most viral and anti-communist and pro-Nazi kind of groups post-World War II. And I just want to dig into them and their involvement in Canada and their involvement in these other kind of anti-communist movements worldwide.
00:47:57
Speaker
Overall, Canada's relationship and our intelligence agency's relationship to CIA backed coups and stuff like that across the world is pitifully underestimated.
00:48:16
Speaker
under-examined because Kanda was definitely a player in the Cold War to no small degree. I haven't read The Jakarta Method yet. I know what the book is about, but a good companion to the book from what I understand are films like The Act of Killing,
00:48:33
Speaker
Um, you know, the look of silence, which are two companion documentaries, uh, that came out a couple of years ago about, uh, sort of, uh, the Indonesian, um, I would, I would call it a genocide, right? Um, in terms of how many people were, were disappeared and very specifically, which ones and stuff like that, um, that are, are worth examining to understand the fucking sheer scale of brutality.
00:48:58
Speaker
But then additional to that, like, you know, look at the, the quote unquote failure of socialist projects in the Middle East and Africa. Right. The sort of hard tipping point it wasn't gladio but it was gladio adjacent.
00:49:13
Speaker
downfall of the Turkish socialists, right? And also it's happening in like Kurdistan right now, right? It's a very particular kind of organizational doctrine that, you know, seeks to create the end of history, which is, you know, at this point should be acknowledged to be like a fallacy that will never exist.
00:49:38
Speaker
Um, and, and also acknowledge the bedfellows that we've made along the way, right? Both good and bad because like to, to sort of decode the relationships between various factions, you know, at certain points, the CIA was collaborating with one left factionist and other left factions, stuff like that. Right. Um, specifically to sort of continually disenfranchise, uh, sort of the global left movement as a whole and stuff like, it's very worth looking at. Um,
00:50:08
Speaker
And again, relating back to the idea that, you know, sometimes you don't need a surreptitious movement that organizes on signal. Sometimes you just need numbers on the fucking streets, right? Like, we also don't have to overcomplicate, you know, insurrection in our liberal democracy to that kind of degree. Sometimes it's useful. I would argue in the case of like, you know, tearing down the mechanisms of state, it's probably not.
00:50:38
Speaker
Yeah, and I think kind of one final thought I have on this is that like when when kind of idiot normie liberals say, you know, socialism or anarchism has never worked. It's like, I mean, yeah, when you look at Indonesia, they had to disappear a million people put another million people in concentration camps to make sure that the most popular political party in Indonesia didn't win the election. Like, we're talking about we're talking about six inch
00:51:04
Speaker
uh six inch pools of blood in like on like rooftops and stuff like that right like when we're talking about indonesia we are talking about uh a system that actually rewarded people like you know uh people who carried out the executions as
00:51:23
Speaker
um heroes right they i don't know if you've seen video of the indonesian like youth league and they're like you know it's psycho stuff you can't even talk about like the genocide in like any way in indonesia like with any amount of truth well you can you can talk about it but you can only talk about it from a perspective of it was good that we killed them right yes like that that makes up the rhetoric and like you know my i have a lot of family who's done a lot of work and and you know
00:51:50
Speaker
is very involved with Indonesia and stuff like that. It's not a bad country. I will say, people there are just very kind and living their lives, making the best of the position of the global south they've been given. But ultimately, what you're looking at is an outcome
00:52:11
Speaker
of a state that, you know, was usurped by a global capitalist project in the most ultraviolet way in order to serve a function as like a cheap base of like labor and manufacturing, rather than a nation that could conceivably stand on its own as like a sovereign power against, I don't know, the encroaching power of the US and global capitalism, right?
00:52:35
Speaker
Yeah, I mean we could talk about this for a long time, but like Sukarno and the Non-Aligned Nations and what was up there before it all got taken away by kind of the CIA and collaborating with the army and
Police Brutality Update and Podcast Conclusion
00:52:45
Speaker
the coup there. Anyways, there is a final thing I want to talk about real fast, just the kind of the abolishing the police update. Just a few, I just kind of want to run through the headlines and I have a final thing that involves us. So as you may have seen, this latest police brutality incident in Edmonton is extremely fucked. Six cops rolled up on...
00:53:05
Speaker
Person of color in a downtown max or circle K and beat the shit out of him spit bagged him hog tied him and dragged him out of there all for the crime of having his license plate stolen And then they also arrested the guy who filmed it
00:53:18
Speaker
Um, just the latest instance of Edmonton police being, um, um, shitting and needing to be abolished. Uh, we just recently put out a piece by an ex-cop who says that, uh, cameras don't do shit to stop, uh, racism, systemic racism or police brutality. And that any kind of police chief or police force talking about cameras as any kind of meaning for reform just needs to be ignored and you just need to.
00:53:41
Speaker
organized around defunding them. Hearings in Calgary are underway right now. These are very similar to the hearings that happened in Edmonton where a lot of mostly people of color and well-meaning seller allies show up and yell at the city councilors to disband, defund the police.
00:54:01
Speaker
or tell really heart-rending, kind of traumatic stories about their own personal experiences with police. Much like how it went down in Edmonton, I expect the vast majority of those stories to be summarily ignored and for some tiny piecemeal bit of reform to happen.
00:54:16
Speaker
Um, SROs, we are getting, we will, the school board of Edmonton will vote on whether to have, whether to suspend the SRO program in September. That got delayed until then. And we've got a story coming on SRO. So keep an eye out for us. I'm working on something that, uh, shows us some pretty fucked up, uh, cops continue to be SROs even after they did fucked up shit.
00:54:35
Speaker
Finally, we are currently in negotiations, I don't know how you would frame it, contact with the Edmonton Police Service. Over the past few weeks and months, we have made multiple requests to the media relations unit at the Edmonton Police Service and sometimes they've answered us and sometimes they've foisted us off on the FOIP unit. Last week, we officially got noticed that they would no longer be treating us as media
00:55:01
Speaker
And, uh, that was extremely fucked. So we wrote back to them and we were like, we defeated the UCP in court when they said that we weren't media. Uh, here's our affidavit. Here's our, here's the judge's decision. Worse. I apparently have to apply and write a very nice letter that says we are in fact media. So we're in the process of kind of mediating that. Uh, so keep an eye on that. And, uh, I think that's, that's the abolish the police update. Abdul, we are done for the pod. What do you have to plug?
00:55:31
Speaker
Uh, yeah, you can, um, follow me on Twitter at socialist Raptor. Um, you can follow my podcast, which, uh, is a left wing movie podcast, uh, at Kino left her on Twitter or just search Kino left her in your podcaster of choice. That's K I N O L E F T E R. Um, you can find partner. My partner loved your Hamilton episode, by the way.
00:55:59
Speaker
Oh, that's great. I'm very happy to hear that. The Hamilton episode was a boatload of fun. It was noodles of fun, if you will. Yeah, you can find my writing. We know a lot of places. I have AbdulwaiMalik.com for my personal essays. You can Google my name, Abdul Malik Edmonton. You'll see my stuff in like Briar Patch and the Narwhal, a couple other places.
00:56:24
Speaker
Yeah, I guess I have a movie coming out in late 2020, early 2021 about Syrian refugees. That's going to be fun. Does it have a title yet or is it still in development? It's Peace by Chocolate. It's in post-production. I wrote it, funded by Telefilm Canada. It was a fun two-year process of writing it and getting it made.
00:56:46
Speaker
the director, I think, did a very good job with it. So, yeah, like, hopefully, hopefully we'll be back in theaters by then safely and maybe we'll have put COVID behind us, probably not, but one could dream, and you can probably go see it in the theater once it finds a buyer. So, yeah, you know, that's sort of all I have to plug. But, yeah, that's kind of where I'm at.
00:57:08
Speaker
Awesome. Yeah, and follow Keynel after it's a very good podcast. I do listen to it on my way to work quite often. But enough about other people's podcasts. If you like this podcast and you want to keep hearing more like it, there's a few things you can do to help out. I mean, one of the biggest things is to share it with your friends, your family, your neighbors. I don't care how you do it, but whether you text to them, post it on your wall,
00:57:31
Speaker
word of mouth is the best advertising. So please, if you like what we do, please share it with your networks. The other kind of very big thing you can do, if you like this podcast and you want to continue to support this independent media project that we have going on,
00:57:46
Speaker
You can donate, and you can go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons, and you can join the 300 or so people who regularly give us money every month. Thank you so much to all the people who recently joined. We had a bump of around 30 or 35 patrons who recently joined, thanks to an email that we sent out. So thank you so much to them. But yeah, theprogressreport.ca slash patrons, putting your credit card number and contribute, we would really appreciate it. One last note, Jim.
00:58:14
Speaker
Our colleague, our boy, our absolute dude Jim is in the hospital right now and he needs good vibes. He's not doing so hot. He's scheduled to go in for surgery soon and our thoughts are with him. Also, if you need to get a hold of me, I am on Twitter at Duncan Kinney. You can reach me by email at DuncanK at ProgressAlberta.ca. Thanks so much to Cosmic Family Communist for the amazing theme. Thank you for listening and goodbye.