Ottawa People’s Commission presentation

I would like to thank the Commission for the invitation to speak today and more importantly, I would like to commend the decision to devote a hearing to the experiences of disabled residents. This hearing comes at a time when disabled people are being told more explicitly than ever before in my lifetime, that our lives don’t matter, that simple safety measures to protect us during an ongoing pandemic are too cumbersome, that our governments will fund our deaths but not our lives.

It’s critical to talk about disabled experiences in both the context of the Freedom Convoy and the broader context of rising right-wing extremism and white supremacy in Canada. Disabled people have historically experienced disproportionate rates of violence. But over the course of the pandemic, we’ve seen an intensification of the systemic, codified, and legislated forms of violence against disabled people.

Stats Canada reports that 1 in 5 Canadians is disabled. For every 5 reported instances of robbery, physical or sexual assault in this country, 2 involve a disabled victim. In 2018, people in Canada with mental health-related disabilities were three times more likely than those without disabilities to have been physically or sexually assaulted in the previous 12 months. Disabled people are disproportionately impacted by violence in Canada. 

This year, the provincial government announced a $58 increase to the payments received by Ontario Disability Support Program recipients. The rate had frozen since 2018, but when factoring in inflation, the monthly amount that disabled recipients receive has been falling since 2009, when recipients were receiving what would equal $1386 in 2022.

Disability is not a moral state. It is not an existence that awaits only lesser people. And yet, time and again, disabled people in this city, province, and country have been told that they are undeserving.

That was the context in which disabled residents entered the pandemic, and later experienced the Freedom Convoy.

Early in the Occupation, well known Canadian activists took to Twitter to admonish Ottawa residents for not physically confronting Freedom Convoy participants. This idea, that there is only one way of demonstrating resistance, is itself rooted in the binary thinking that is intrinsic to white supremacy culture. It also spoke to a specific level of privilege and disregard for safety.

As a lifelong community organizer, I have had many experiences on the frontlines of protests. I have also been arrested while organizing. Having seen the social media posts of Ottawa Police officers fist bumping, praising, and delivering goods to occupiers, it was my assessment that if there was to be a frontline confrontation and the police got involved, the convoy participants would not be the ones to experience police violence. It would be the most marginalized members of our community. I would not support any event that created that level of risk.

Due to my chronic illness, I am at a high risk for a severe covid outcome. Having read accounts of people having their respirators pulled off in public, and knowing the state Ontario’s carceral system, I knew that both being in public spaces where my respirator could be removed, or risking arrest that could result in me losing my respirator, created too severe an infection risk for me.

It was painstaking to stay home. And that is a big part of why I began the Ottawa Community Cooks project. I believe that there are many ways to build, nurture, and demonstrate resistance. And I believe that community care is a critical component of all resistance work.

I cooked my first meals on the weekend of February 5 when it became apparent that the Occupation was going to be a longer event. The first person I delivered to lived deep in the red zone. They messaged me when they ran out of groceries. I packed up five days worth of food for them, knowing that given their location, they would not be leaving their home for the foreseeable future. And that was the start of Ottawa Community Cooks.

From there, we were given our own channel on the Centretown Helpers Discord to coordinate cooking and driving schedules. Requests for meals came in through the Centretown phone line, the admin’s email, the OCC Instagram, and the Discord channel. I would organize the meal requests for each day, let the person cooking that day know how many orders we had, and then coordinate our delivery drivers and determine a meeting spot where the cook and drivers could arrange their hand off.

We managed to sustain a cooking program that ran six days a week through the Occupation and the police barricading that followed. We actually saw an uptick in requests on the weekend that the barricades were erected.

In order to receive food from OCC, you just have to ask. You don’t have to provide any information other than your dietary restrictions and a delivery address. For that reason, we don’t have spotless analytics on who used our services. But many of our recipients did share some information with us which helped us understand who we were serving.

Roughly 50% of our requests came from ODSP recipients. Many of our recipients had limited mobility and used mobility devices like wheelchairs and walkers. What these recipients told me when we would check in was that the Convoy made the city unsafe for them. For me, when I saw the video of Convoy participants assaulting a wheelchair user in Lowertown, it drove home how unsafe this situation was, particularly for disabled people. 

One OCC recipient told me that they had been homeless through their youth and early adulthood, but this was the first time that they felt scared for their safety. 

Most of the time, I just felt angry and inadequate: I was angry that so many of our leaders did not prioritize the safety of vulnerable residents, preferring to genuflect to a convoy rooted in hatred. And I felt inadequate because, while I remain so proud of Ottawa Community Cooks, it often feels like a drop of water on scorching hot pavement. We are providing meals in the blast radius of neoliberalism. The need is so great and our capacity is limited. In November, we will deliver our 500th meal. It is both a lot and not enough.

Despite these limitations, this kitchen project is special. It is, in my mind, the definition of a disabled organizing project. Disabled people know the importance of community. One of the freeing things about capitalism having less use for you is that it encourages you to prioritize community care. 

I think the strength of the community kitchen project was its ability to reach people of all ages and help remove the stigma around accepting help. Starting a food project forty years into neoliberalism was incredibly tough. There are entire generations of people, myself included, who have been raised to believe that it is never okay to show weakness or ask for help. Generating the level of social cohesion that we did as quickly as we did was only possible because of the situation we were in. 

But we didn’t leave February uninjured. When Rolling Thunder was announced and OCC started planning our outreach for the weekend, I realized how I tired I am throughout my entire body. I am tired of convoys. I am tired of rising right-wing extremism. I am tired of media outlets and political leaders giving convoy organizers the benefit of the doubt and the space to cause harm.

The elements that led to the occupation this past winter and subsequent convoys have not dissipated since. If anything, they have gained ground. The only difference is that they are not in focus now. I am very concerned about what the next year, five years and decade will look like. This is not only because of the occupation, but because of how disabled people are being treated in Canada right now. As disabled activist Katriel Nopoulos explains, the rising use of eugenics-like programs against disabled people (for example, removing all public health measures during a pandemic, expanding access to Medical Assistance in Dying but not expanding access to supportive housing, food, etc.) signals the arrival of right-wing extremism. “Disabled people hold a role in society where we are interdependent with other people and when that breaks down it is a warning sign of a bigger breakdown in society.” 

We need to fight to ensure that what happened this past winter never happens again, yes. But more so, we must fight to uproot the systemic and legislated ways by which life continues to become increasingly unsafe for Ottawa’s disabled residents. We were not safe then. We are not safe now.

In the absence of political will, it is my belief that the only thing that disabled residents can rely on to create meaningful safety at this juncture is one another. And this is a critical time to be investing in, nurturing and growing our communities.

As Alice Wong wrote in Disability Visibility, “Community is political. Community is magic. Community is power. Community is resistance. We all should expect more. We all deserve more.”

Thank you for your time and your consideration. I’m humbled to be here to share my experience as a disabled resident on behalf of my vibrant, strong, and worthy community.