Episode Transcript
Antifascist Dad — Episode 31
Voices of Kensington Will Ring in Ottawa
Guest: Serena Purdy
Matthew Remski: Hey, everyone, this is Matthew Remski with episode 31 of Antifascist Dad podcast: Voices of Kensington Will Ring in Ottawa, with Serena Purdy.
Serena Purdy: Certainly our parents out of the 70s had this idea that more of the world would look like us, more of the places in the world would be more diverse and mixed, just like Kensington. And that there would be more Kensingtons. That we would learn something from the chaos of Kensington and try to replicate it in other places. Give people that freedom to build their own lives and the space to live with and around each other and fight and dance and sing the way we do in Kensington. But we see it really eroding. And I will say, everything we have in Kensington we fought for. And all of our neighbors know that.
Matthew Remski: So that's coming up. For housekeeping: you can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, and I'm on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad, all one word. The Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast, and subscribers get early access to every part two of these main-feed episodes, including this one. And also in the show notes you'll find a link to purchase my new book. It's called Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times. It's out now, and I'm getting some lovely feedback on it. I'd love to hear yours if you've got it. Whenever you get it, try to leave a review in the appropriate places because that really helps. And also just drop me a line because I'd love to hear how it strikes you.
Okay, this show is many things. It's a meditation on antifascism through the generations. And that means it has to pick away at the building blocks of fascism in a descriptive way. That means it also has to be a study of the socialist and communist movements that predict and analyze and resist fascism. And that means it has to look at broad arcs of history, but also acts of resistance and care down to the level of the home. It has to be international, but also local. It has to recognize that the liberal democratic institutions we try to make work have failed to fend off the cruelties of capitalism, because the modern state arose to protect capital. And that means recognizing the possibilities but also the limits of electoral politics.
Today is about the possibilities part, because I'm joined by Serena Purdy, a comparative health policy academic who recently ran and lost in a downtown Toronto federal byelection that unfortunately sealed a majority government for Mark Carney's austerity and proto-fascist government.
Talking with Serena about her campaign made that possibilities-and-limits threshold really clear, because working for votes means educating voters, expanding ballot access for the marginalized and unhoused, raising the alarm over Carney's neoliberal aggression and what it means for socialized medicine.
There is so much work to be done, so many obstacles, so much power in the way. And as a cynical Marxist, I find myself nodding in grim recognition of how powerful capital is. But as a creative Marxist who is also a parent responsible for providing a not-hopeless vision of the world, I find myself nodding in admiration of the attitude it takes to run in such a climate, and how immature it is to give up on electoral politics when that's how the majority of people engage with their conditions.
Do I personally believe that electoral politics in capitalism has the resilience to correct our course before climate collapse? Not really. But I also believe that electoral politics is the best training ground for learning how to organize ourselves for whatever comes next.
And that's why the heart of this conversation is on the subject of Kensington Market, where Serena lives, and which is also at the center of the University-Rosedale riding she door-knocked for months. What is Kensington Market for international listeners? You can think Brick Lane in London, Le Marais in Paris, Kreuzberg in Berlin, the Mission District in San Francisco, Vesterbro in Copenhagen, Exarcheia in Athens, and Red Hook in Brooklyn. Kensington is Toronto's version of those places — a living improv theatre for immigrant working-class communities who build urban life on the margins of capital. From its Jewish socialist garment-trade origins through successive waves of Portuguese, Caribbean, Latin American, and East Asian settlement, the neighbourhood has survived by converting affordability into community through a DIY spirit, storefront by storefront, institution by institution. Kensington demonstrates that urban vitality and solidarity can be made by people without capital, and not by developers with it.
I was so taken with the Kensington part of Serena's story that I dedicated the episode coda to it. That's what's up on Patreon now. It's called Kensington Market Palimpsest, and you can listen there on early access, but it'll be released to the wider world in a few weeks.
Here's my conversation with Serena Purdy.
Serena Purdy, welcome to Antifascist Dad.
Serena Purdy: Nice to be on the show.
Matthew Remski: I wanted to orient our international listeners to a few broad things. You just ran in a federal byelection and you lost to a candidate from the party currently led by the Darling of Davos, Mark Carney, who now has a majority. So I wanted to hear first what your elevator pitch is on what we can expect over the next three years. And I wanted to start here so that everyone has a sense of what's at stake and how it's reflected in the microcosm of your riding, which we'll talk about in detail.
Serena Purdy: He himself has been very clear that he wants to run an austerity government, that there will be cuts, we'll be tightening our belt on a lot of the social services that we rely on, but that we're going to be heavily investing in things like the military. So what I'm seeing in my community and what I'm really concerned about are cuts to health care and housing. He's already, over the last year, cut the interim federal health act to reduce coverage and introduce co-pays for refugees and migrants, and he's also cut housing. So we're already seeing it. We're going to continue, and I'm afraid, as somebody who studies health systems, that our single-payer system is not going to make it through another three years of a majority austerity government.
Matthew Remski: So we'll get to that, especially the public health issues, in a bit. Let's go to the electoral experience itself. I wanted to say that all of the Moneyball polling experts would say — and are probably nodding their heads now — that your University-Rosedale riding is just unwinnable for any NDP or leftist or socialist candidate. But watching your campaign drove home for me that that really can't be front of mind, perhaps ever. Because a big part of electoral work is educational, and I'm wondering if that's how you looked at it.
Serena Purdy: Well, there are two things there. One, I don't think it's unwinnable.
Matthew Remski: Okay.
Serena Purdy: In both the last election and in this election we had the shortest possible campaign period allowed. And they were much more aware of the election timelines than any of the other parties could have been. So they had a chance to prepare. The Liberal candidate in this case was door-knocking a full month ahead of the other parties because they knew — they had that information where we didn't. And so I think given how we vote provincially, we're overwhelmingly NDP supporters provincially; we have two NDP MPPs. Particularly given what we call redistricting — federally the boundaries moved, so we actually got more NDP supporters and it took off a chunk of Conservative support — I don't think it's unwinnable at a federal level if we make the case for why we need that kind of representation and voice there. But I do agree education is part of it. And when I started, I set myself some reasonable, attainable goals.
Matthew Remski: That's always good.
Serena Purdy: Those two main goals were: to give voters the information they need to make an informed choice in an incredibly short period of time — given that I have that education and that I do pay attention, I wanted everyday people who are busy living their lives, many of whom are being crushed by poverty, to just have those easy, accessible pieces of information that are critically important. And I also wanted to get people who struggle to access the vote to access it. That was my integrity piece. I serve a lot of people in the shelter system who are precariously housed, who are in encampment settings. Many of them don't even know they have a right to vote if they're unhoused or if they've been displaced. So we made some progress on that in the last election, and I'm really proud to say that working with Elections Canada we made a lot more progress on that this year.
Matthew Remski: That's amazing to hear. Does that mean you have numbers you can point to about an increase in the unhoused vote for your riding?
Serena Purdy: I wish I did. I can probably follow up with Elections Canada. I did have groups who were unhoused that had our campaign information if they had any trouble. And I followed up with them afterwards, and they said that their experience overall was much better this year than it was last year.
Matthew Remski: I wonder too whether the challenges involved with that might be wrapped up in whether or not there are enough safe injection sites that can be mobilized as electoral centres as well. There are so many infrastructure issues involved with a challenge like that.
Serena Purdy: So right now, the way it's set up is: if you don't have a fixed address, or if you're in the shelter system and don't have ID, you can go to one of the administrators — one of the staff at the shelter you're staying at, one of the staff at the community centre you regularly attend to get resources, one of the staff at the food bank you regularly go to, or if you go to a safe injection site — and they can sign off on a form that says, yes, this is who they say they are, yes, this is the area they're in, they do reside here even though they have no fixed address. So it kind of already works that way. And then they can go to their polling station. In this case, some of the polling stations are community centres that a lot of the population we're talking about would already be accessing, so they can get it done in the same place.
Matthew Remski: It's kind of incredible though, because you're also asking that person to leave their belongings wherever they are and do another trip. That's a high bar.
Serena Purdy: It is a high bar, but we're lucky to have some really strong organizing. There are groups that will go out and make it like a field trip — you can come, you can bring some of your stuff, or we can go in two waves, and there will be snacks.
Matthew Remski: You're doing all of that. But you've got an incredibly diverse riding. It's a newish riding and it covers this huge range of neighbourhoods — Rosedale mansions, Yorkville condos and boutiques, the Annex, Upper Chinatown, rooming houses around Grange Park, and of course Kensington Market. It's like the whole city in the riding. How many different registers did you have to speak in?
Serena Purdy: I know it seems really daunting for people who aren't used to living in places like Kensington, but Kensington is a microcosm of the riding too. We are diverse by class, by religion, by country of origin, by language. And a lot of that I navigate by remembering that — and this sounds weird for a politician to say — it's not about me. I am not just me in a community and in a well-organized campaign; I'm also all of the people who work on my campaign. So having a diverse group of people who understand who I am and what I stand for, and who are really on board, helped us reach across so many barriers very quickly. I had one volunteer — I'm going to shout out to Zichen — who was translating in pretty much any language he encountered. He just picked it up. If he encountered a new language at the door, he'd go home and practice, and he'd have a solid grasp of a new language fairly quickly.
Matthew Remski: That's amazing.
Serena Purdy: He was translating in Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese. At one point he was speaking Japanese, and I was like: when did you learn that, Zichen?
Matthew Remski: There's a guy on Instagram whose whole thing is that he goes to different cities around the world and confronts strangers on the street and says, I think I can probably speak your language. And you had that guy on staff.
Serena Purdy: Yeah. And as somebody who regularly goes back and forth between the ivory tower at the University of Toronto and almost immediately jumps into encampment support — I'm trained with vulnerable populations, but I'm also fine class-passing. I don't mind walking into rooms, probably especially if they don't want me there. But yeah, I don't mind it too much. And I think people overthink it. You just have to meet people where they are. You just have to listen and bring something useful to the table for them to make sense of something with. And I think we can do that across all classes and even across religions.
Matthew Remski: Speaking of diversity — can we just pause for a moment and talk about how much we love Kensington Market? Because I think it's at the heart of your sense of place in the city. For me it's the essence of old Toronto, with one decade built over the last, in this jumble of construction — probably most of it uncoded — and every ethnicity up in each other's business. It's our son's favourite part of the city. Our oldest submitted a painting of Pho Hung Restaurant for his application to Rosedale Arts, and he got in.
Serena Purdy: Congratulations.
Matthew Remski: But I'm afraid that, like so many things in our era, it's going to be leveled at some point by Galen Weston. And I know this is on your mind too, because you do things like fight Airbnb in part because of neighbourhoods like this. Do you think we'll be able to preserve this part of our shared history and vibrant culture?
Serena Purdy: It has always felt like we're losing that battle. When I first moved to the city — as somebody who's pretty mixed — there wasn't an easy place for me. There wasn't necessarily one group that was going to adopt me, but Kensington did. And I think certainly our parents out of the 70s had this idea that more of the world would look like us, more of the places in the world would be more diverse and mixed, just like Kensington, and that there would be more Kensingtons. That we would learn something from the chaos of Kensington and try to replicate it in other places — give people that freedom to build their own lives and the space to live with and around each other and fight and dance and sing the way we do in Kensington. But we see it really eroding. And I will say, everything we have in Kensington we fought for. And all of our neighbours know that. The group that I've worked with for many years, Friends of Kensington Market, knows that because it's the work that we do. It is the neighbourhood of neighbourhoods. It's a unique place to speak from as an advocate because so many other communities see themselves in the struggles that we face. And that gives me hope, because that means we can advocate on things. We can take on a company as big as Airbnb, which is known to be such a wonderful corporate actor around the world.
Matthew Remski: I also just wanted to note that the cultural values of Kensington Market are not invisible or illegible to the neoliberal gentrifiers. Because often what will happen — what Weston would do — is not only buy up whatever he needed and level it, but take bits of graffiti from the old buildings and put it into the new condos, or brand the new shopping centre as some kind of new bohemian downtown destination. Everybody knows this, including the people who would appropriate it. That's why actually living there and having your body between that and neoliberalism is so important.
Serena Purdy: We don't win every battle, but we win our fair share, and we plant our roots just a little bit deeper. Where it's the tradition for artists to make a place cool and then developers to come in and take over, we have community members who own buildings and make sure that it's affordable artist and rental space and studio space — as long as they own it. That's not going to be displaced. They own a number of buildings around the neighbourhood. It's also built into the land trust model. The more it's community-owned, the less likely it is to be bought up and leveled like that. And so we can disrupt land assemblies. And even individual neighbours — even if they're surrounded by people who've been playing Monopoly for a while — my house is like that. I've got my little spite house in the middle of the Market. As long as I'm there, nothing's going up on that corner. So it's interesting. We fight back in little ways and we fight back in big ways, but we also fight back in deep ways that are really tough to commercially exploit or displace.
Matthew Remski: Okay, before we get to the deeper issues of health policy — I've got two lighthearted questions. One: I was looking up the history of orange in the NDP, and nobody seems to know how that happened. But if you go any farther with that trench coat, Serena, you're going to have to create some kind of OG myth for it. I wanted to comment on it because it was such a vibrant choice. Did you find it somewhere or have it made?
Serena Purdy: I love origin stories, and this assignment is something I'm going to take very seriously.
Matthew Remski: We're going to need it.
Serena Purdy: I also wanted to shout out a local designer: Katerina Mior, Bone and Busk, actually based in Kensington Market, designed that trench coat for me. The design is actually called the Serena, so get out of here. You can get one — you don't have to get it in orange, you can get it in other fabrics however you want.
Matthew Remski: It does not exist except in orange, I have to say. Are they on Augusta or on Kensington?
Serena Purdy: They're on Nassau now. They just moved into one of the buildings owned specifically for artist spaces. They have a runway show on the first day of Toronto's Own Fashion Week — I encourage people to go. I think the line is called Usque ad Mortem, meaning until death. It's eight o'clock on May 15th, day one of Toronto's Own Fashion Week.
Matthew Remski: Socialist fashion going hard. Usque ad mortem.
Serena Purdy: Bone and Busk is kind of a couture brand. They do a lot of weddings, but because they're my neighbour they made almost my entire campaign wardrobe in about a week.
Matthew Remski: Amazing.
Serena Purdy: And I felt like I was walking around in pyjamas. I felt like I was getting away with something. It's very, very comfortable clothing.
Matthew Remski: Next funny question: did you knock on Jordan Peterson's door and get invited in to see his Nazi art and drink beef tallow whiskey?
Serena Purdy: I love whiskey. But I have a feeling he's offering everybody just a jar of his own tears at this point. Too salty for me. I didn't run across him, but if I ever do, I'll let you know.
Matthew Remski: I think he's not doing very well. Probably hospitalized somewhere in the States right now.
Serena Purdy: Every time I check in, I feel like it's just a really sad story. I was at U of T at the same time, and I know that he did a lot of cultural damage. I'm not sure where in the world he is.
Matthew Remski: There's a very small 2% of me that thinks: damn, you used to walk for two hours every day through the city, through the Annex. He probably walked by your house a bunch of times. And what did you not get about people living together? Real mystery to me.
Serena Purdy: Yeah. No comment.
Matthew Remski: All right. Tell me about the basics of your health research area, and are politics and public health joined at the hip for you?
Serena Purdy: So I study comparative health policy analysis. I study policy interventions across jurisdictions and see what worked, what worked where, what didn't work, and whether there's a reason it wouldn't work here. That's part of why I wanted to run at a federal level, because I think there's a huge disconnect between federal policy decision-making and the lives of the people affected by those decisions. And it's also difficult for people at a community level — particularly when they're getting squeezed to death — to understand all of the federal mechanisms that have been leveraged against them over the last number of years. So to me they're necessarily intertwined. I hear, especially when I talk online at a high-level policy level, people in community being like: well, that's not going to help us, you've got to get out there and do the community work and the mutual aid. And I'm like — I do that. I also do that. It's not one or the other, it has to be both. Because otherwise we're not going to make the connection, we're not going to rehumanize federal policy decision-making. And that decision-making is not going to be informed by the lives of the people it affects. So that's why it's critically important to me. And it's also important because I saw all of these brilliant, caring researchers in my field painstakingly write evidence-based policy that sat on shelves. And a lot of decisions end up being these massive, increasingly omnibus bills that blow past evidence and go directly for interest and advertising.
Matthew Remski: Is it your sense, because you do comparative analysis, that social-democratic liberal democracies that have decent socialized medicine — the Nordic model, the UK, Australia, here — are all under the same type of privatization and capitalist assault? And is there reformist room in any of those spaces for improvements to be made, or do we just really have to elect socialist governments?
Serena Purdy: All of them always were and always will be. Even our own system was under attack from day one. Even during the formation process. But it was still possible to build up a robust social safety net. And I've been talking a lot with my friend James Maskalik, an ER physician and author who lives in the neighbourhood. We've been talking for years about not just fixing the healthcare system, but what it would be like to build a beautiful healthcare system — a healthcare system that isn't siloed inside hospitals, but actually reaches out and supports frontline workers doing social work and caregiver support and community care. What would that look like if it was properly integrated into supportive housing? Not just begging for scraps or trying to pull something together with whatever you can reach, or dealing with increasing exhaustion. What would it look like if we had appropriately staffed nursing? And how do we get there? Because if you're always just trying to play catch-up, you'll never build something. And they're breaking things very quickly. Once it breaks, it's so much harder to build up. So having a comprehensive sense of a health system that functions — that integrates, that uses all of the pilot studies that we've had, that uses the examples of programs like our safe injection sites that we know are effective, that we're still dismantling, and the damage that that does, that doesn't save anybody any money, doesn't make anybody any safer, if anything makes both of those situations infinitely worse and overloads our healthcare system, ERs and ambulance wait times, and public health safety, certainly for injection drugs and HIV risk. So yeah, I think that's what I would want to see built, and that's what I will keep in mind as I move forward. I think it could only be done really properly with a socialist government. The advances we have made with the Canada Health Act have all been really the NDP holding Liberal feet to the fire. I don't think the Conservative government has any interest whatsoever in ending privatization. If anything they've been very clear that they have an explicit interest in private clinics and increasing private delivery of care. So yeah, I'd like to see some collaboration. I talked to our new treasurer, Akira Gunn out in Alberta, recently about connecting some of the group work here with Friends of Medicare out in Alberta, and seeing what we can do across provinces — hopefully some groups from Vancouver, all of these major provinces where we're seeing the big swings at healthcare privatization — to work together to fight it and make sure that the federal government starts enforcing the Canada Health Act and does something meaningful.
Matthew Remski: I think the question around socialist governments really brings up this problem with liberal proceduralism and compartmentalization. You can go to the Liberal government and say we need to strengthen the Canada Health Act and how it interacts with the provinces. But there is no incentive for the person listening to you to say: oh yeah, and then there's something called the social determinants of health, which means that all of the other things that surround the healthcare system — that prevent it from being overloaded, or actually support people when they're coming out of it, or bridge the difference between acute care and sustained chronic care — are always treated as discrete technocratic problems that can be tweaked independently. And then you can say that you tweaked them. But there's no coherent overall vision.
Serena Purdy: That's why I like using examples. In the last election I did a video on the DinoLife scandal and what happened in Alberta. But it's also good to use examples like: if you look across health systems, this is the cost of a procedure you just had done. Would you rather wait a week or pay $10,000? Given the choice, the average person who doesn't have $10,000 would say: I'll wait, thank you. And I was talking with the Friends of Medicare folks, and they were saying that even people who generally vote Conservative — when you sit them down and talk them through it, this is the wedge issue. This is where they say: absolutely not, that is where I put my foot down. Canada's healthcare system and being able to access it. So people really broadly understand what privatization is and does. And for all of the efforts that have been put into mis- and disinformation, people still really hold onto that as part of their identity here. So I think there's a lot of room to grow there.
Matthew Remski: Speaking of mis- and disinformation: it's probably been about 40 years that the United States has used a defamatory characterization of the Canadian healthcare system to try to convince its public that they wouldn't want socialized medicine at all. Do you think that general discourse has just flowed across a very porous border into Conservative and Liberal ears, and somehow we've come to doubt our own values here?
Serena Purdy: I've always referred to that ideological shift as America's ugliest export. I do think it's targeted, though. You'll see much higher concentrations of disinformation like that around resource-rich areas — in Alberta, in Saskatoon, out east. It's definitely strategic political destabilization in resource-rich areas. From my perspective, we saw that with pandemic disinformation. It was very easily tracked — you can see exactly what groups they were targeting and what areas. And I saw it even when I would go out to the country to visit my parents: my algorithm would change pretty rapidly. And it's really shocking what gets normalized, and just how sophisticated they've gotten at targeting people, particularly in rural areas and in resource-rich areas.
Matthew Remski: Okay, so: you are going to win in 2029. You're going to pack up that trench coat, move to Ottawa, join Avi Lewis's minority caucus. He hands you the Shadow Health Minister portfolio. Alberta has fully implemented a two-tier system because Carney let it happen. Here in Ontario, Doug Ford has done nothing about the family doctor shortage, but he's offering coupons for massages at a spa on Toronto Island. What are you going to work on first?
Serena Purdy: I've found that successful campaigns can either follow a wave of existing momentum or they can build it. And a lot of what I've heard from other elected representatives is that they followed a wave. What we did with the Ghost Hotel campaign was we built the wave. So it depends on what wave we've built by then. There's already a lot of work on universal basic income. There's going to be more work on elections and electoral reform, and really helping people understand what floor-crossing means for them, what very short byelections and the number of byelections mean for them. So I think I would really want to focus my energy, particularly given my expertise, on helping people understand the federal role in healthcare. Because I see constantly in the comments section — and it's the same in housing — people saying: well, healthcare is a provincial responsibility. And I'm like: our first federal minister with health in their portfolio was in 1867. We're responsible for the Canada Health Act. We're responsible for harmonization of policy across provinces, for public health, for Indigenous health, for migrant health. Of course it's a shared federal responsibility. But it's so misleading, because it is also a provincial responsibility, and when people say it like that, it sounds like you're just uninformed, you don't know what level of government you're talking about. It's actually shared responsibility.
Matthew Remski: I even wonder whether that's somehow propagandized, because it reminds me of the knee-jerk response you'll hear in American politics around states' rights — the state takes care of that thing, we have local control over such and such, we don't really have the federal government interfering in how we manage this local issue. Like people are quoting something very basic from grade six civics. But I'm not sure why that became so common.
Serena Purdy: I've only really noticed it over the last two years. And I pointed it out in the last federal election as well. There were infographics going around about what was the responsibility of the provinces and what wasn't a federal responsibility, and of course it was completely wrong.
Matthew Remski: You mean infographics on the internet were wrong.
Serena Purdy: What's missing here? So it does seem like — if I put on my conspiracy hat — it seems like an effort of federal governments to avoid responsibility for very serious things like healthcare and housing, because why else would it be going around?
Matthew Remski: Okay, two more heavy questions. If Carney is tripling the military budget, and we're pretty sure that our military will continue to be a robust supporter and enabler of US foreign policy, is there anything on the books — from a public health or human rights perspective — that can be used to challenge that? Is there any legal framework that can challenge militarism from a public health perspective?
Serena Purdy: I feel like Carney has already kind of ignored international law a little, so I don't know that laws really apply all the time, even if you have them — particularly with a government that has the level of majority that it has. We're going to find it much tougher to push back from pretty much any direction. I think it has more to do with political will and popularity. The only thing I think he would listen to — to really push back on that — is to make him really unpopular as a result. He would have to see it in the polls. He would have to lose confidence from his party, lose confidence from the voters.
Matthew Remski: So the numbers. Last issue: Carney has just announced the creation of a new sovereign wealth fund. I'm wondering, is it going to operate as a kind of parallel budget with no parliamentary oversight? Because it's taking from public funds to seed itself, and apparently he's going to spend it on national-building projects. What's your sense of it? It sounds dodgy to me.
Serena Purdy: The Canada Strong Fund — Mark Carney has called it a sovereign wealth fund to echo the model we see in Norway, but it's very clearly not built the same way. And two, we already have what's called the Canada Infrastructure Bank — an infrastructure bank that was aimed at aligning investment from private investors and fund managers with infrastructure projects. And it has ostensibly failed, because what those investors and asset managers are interested in building in order to make lots of money tends not to be in the public interest. So it's misaligned, and actually the Parliamentary Budget Office — in 2022, I think — recommended abolishing the CIB because they couldn't see those interests being realigned. So we have tried this, it didn't work. What's different this time? A sovereign wealth fund as structured in Norway takes windfall taxes or excess profits from the oil and gas industry and invests them overseas to get returns back into the country. The way this is structured — from what we've seen so far; we haven't gotten all the details yet — is that it would use investments from everyday Canadians, like the previous Canada bond structure, and take on debt. It's not clear who they would be borrowing from.
Matthew Remski: Can we just pause there? It's not clear who they would be borrowing from. Let's just underline that for a moment.
Serena Purdy: We don't know yet, at least not from what I've seen. If you know, please put it in the comments. But then the idea is that that money would be reinvested in Canada, in Canadian infrastructure and Canadian companies. And the reason that model isn't used in Norway is because then you have clientelism, where domestic companies can influence government spending. I talked about windfall taxes in the last election as an option. Basically, it's a tax that cannot be passed down to the consumer because it wasn't a projected profit — it's above the projected profit margin. It's also often called the profiteering tax. I talked about it in the context of groceries, but in this case doing that with oil and gas would be a brilliant idea. But that's not what's happening here. What's happening here — as far as I can tell, and at least this is my concern — instead of leveraging a tax against lower and middle income people to pay for infrastructure projects, they're asking them to voluntarily donate and promising a return on investment. It's a roundabout way of continuing to use the same public-private partnership model — the P3 model — that we know results in overspending and under-delivery, like a lot of delays for infrastructure projects. To me, even if we pretended the Liberal government didn't have a problem with procurement scandals — and this is exactly the kind of model that leads to that — even if we pretended this was a fair taxation model or replacement for a fair taxation model, it still hasn't resolved that misalignment between the investors it's supposed to be bringing in and the projects we actually need the money for.
Matthew Remski: It's another banker-type instrument that seems to have no reference to the common good or what working people need. There's a lot of obscure verbiage around it, and we can have lines like: well, we don't know where the money's going to come from.
Serena Purdy: And sovereign how, exactly?
Matthew Remski: I have to ask this last question. The podcast is called Antifascist Dad. I don't know how old you are, Serena, but I think it's safe to say you're at the earlier part of your career. If you were to speak to a group of young people who wanted to seriously consider using their time and energy to fight for a socialist future, what kind of advice would you give them about self-care, emotional wellbeing, their relationships?
Serena Purdy: It is heartbreaking. And a lot of people think that the work I do is really hopeful, like it's done from a place of hope. People use words like inspiring. The drive comes from a place of imperative. It comes from knowing the consequences, from knowing what it's like to watch a friend die of the violence of poverty over and over and over again. When you see it, defeat isn't an option. And if I'm going to go down, I'm going to go down swinging. So I think you just have to have a mindset that helps you make sense of what you're doing. Because a lot of people fall into apathy. Apathy was never going to help us. So be kind to yourself. Be kind to other people in the movement. Not everybody is where you are. And build bridges where you can, because we're going to need a lot of voices to really push back against the level of inequality that we're seeing — just increasing and increasing power imbalance. So we need to get more and more organized.
Matthew Remski: Serena Purdy, thank you so much for taking the time, and I wish you all good luck and support in everything that you do.
Serena Purdy: Thank you.
Matthew Remski: So that's the show, folks, for today. Remember that the coda is up now. It's called Kensington Market Palimpsest, and it is a walk through the Market's history through the framework of the palimpsest — the medieval manuscript practice of writing over earlier texts that never fully disappear — from Indigenous territory through colonial land theft, Victorian working-class housing, Jewish Bundist labour militancy, and successive immigrant waves. Kensington's layers remain visible in its improvised architecture and cracked walls. The palimpsest shows that nothing is ever fully erased. The labour passion, the anarchist organizing, the garment-trade solidarity are all still palpable in the brickwork and the cracked plaster, waiting for the conditions that call them back into action. Take care of each other, everybody. Until next time.
