Episode Transcript
Episode 34 — From the Street to City Hall w/ Diana Chan McNally
Matthew Remski: Hey everyone, this is Matthew Remski, host of Antifascist Dad podcast with episode 34, From the Street to City Hall with Diana Chan McNally.
Diana Chan McNally: Residential real estate is the world's largest store of wealth. It's actually valued at, I think, like $290 trillion around that, which is globally far, far more than all the global GDP combined. So you realize that, and I think that fact is pretty invisible to people, even though we talk constantly about real estate, but we don't realize the extent to which our economies are reliant on the buying and selling of land. So there is this real financial interest in continuing to push policies that view housing as a financialized asset as opposed to a basic human right. I've watched dozens of, maybe at this point hundreds of, people's lives end early just because we uphold this market, essentially. So it really is just about capital. That's what it comes down to. And we are willing to extract from people through their rents, through mortgages, and let them fall through the cracks and frankly get sick and die on the streets rather than change our reliance on this economic situation that we've created.
Matthew Remski: So that's coming up. You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name. I'm on YouTube and TikTok as AntifascistDad. And the Patreon for this show is AntifascistDadpodcast, where subscribers get early access to a second weekly episode. Now, sometimes it's the second part of the main feed topic, sometimes it's a continuation of the interview. But today it's a brief note on some recently published research that confirms something I speculated about in my book, which is that the work of figures like Jonathan Haidt on teens and mobile phones, which in some cases amounts to moral panicry, isn't all that it's made out to be. And it turns out that phone bans don't solve all problems and that teen mental health is actually more complex than liberal finger wagging makes out. Now remember, if you can't afford to support the show, those Patreon episodes all eventually get unlocked on this educational platform.
I'll also remind you that my book is available for order now. It's called Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times.
At one point in her life, my guest today, Diana Chan McNally, was unhoused and a teen mother. Now, everyone who survives conditions and oppressions like that has a different story. But what Diana has turned hers into is a pay-it-forward dedication to the most vulnerable people in the city we share together, Toronto. And it's about as hard to keep track of her projects and side quests as it must be to remember all of the records she has in her DJ crates. But they include museum curation, arts facilitation, social work with the unhoused, and dozens of journalism pieces on the need for socialist policy and bearing witness as a frontline worker.
Now she's also running for city council in Ward 4. And when she wins, she'll be going toe to toe with the forces and figures who might have left her for dead all those years ago, including our Ontario premier, Doug Ford, who's defunding shelters and criminalizing encampments, and my own Ward 19 councillor, Brad Bradford, who's basing a significant part of his run for mayor on inflaming disgust for the unhoused.
Now, I did an episode a while back called Pessimism of the Intelligence, Optimism of the Will, which is a phrase usually attributed to Antonio Gramsci, but it has deeper history than that. I think it stuck to him because so many of us think of him as disabled, in pain in a fascist prison, scribbling out words that would inspire the generations. The phrase has circulated for decades as a validation for political realists who refuse both naive hope and also despair. It tells activists, organizers and leftist intellectuals that clear-eyed analysis of hardship and defeat is never a reason to stop. And hearing Diana's story, I couldn't stop thinking about the phrase, because the optimism shines through. But there's also an edge to it, an urgency that comes from knowing how ruthless capital is, knowing that no one is dreaming for the sake of dreaming, but they're dreaming and acting because death is around the corner. And also, who is more optimistic than a DJ?
Here's my conversation with Diana Chan McNally.
Diana Chan McNally, welcome to Antifascist Dad.
Diana Chan McNally: Hello. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Matthew Remski: Okay, big questions. First, I need to know, how is DJing like community organizing? Secondly, like sliding between activism, journalism, and being a bloodhound on city and provincial budgets, and maybe gaining fluency in all of the cultures of Ward 4?
Diana Chan McNally: Okay. I thought about this for a while, and so I actually have to backtrack to another part of my sordid past — not sordid at all. I have a master's degree in museum studies, which — yeah, I don't know. I do. I was really — I am an art historian by trade. I was very interested in museums and how we interpret culture. And it's really interesting because there's this odd pipeline of people who are museum studies graduates who turn into community organizers. So I'm not the only one.
Matthew Remski: Wow.
Diana Chan McNally: So there is Amanda Burrows. She's executive director of First United in Vancouver. Also very politically engaged, also working in homelessness like I am, which is so fascinating to me. There's Megan Key, who's with No Demo Evictions and is organizing tenants. So I don't exactly entirely understand why there is this connection, but I have some thoughts about it and actually how DJing is related. A museum is how we organize and interpret tangible culture, sometimes intangible culture as well, and natural heritage. So I actually think that it lends itself to community organizing because it's really about just being very analytical and organizing things — artifacts generally, but that also can be extended to people. So there is this kind of innate need to organize that's embedded in the minds, I suppose, of museum studies graduates. And we sometimes see ourselves doing that with people instead. So DJing — and you can see all the records
Matthew Remski: behind you, speaking of organization and putting things in the right order.
Diana Chan McNally: Right, okay, exactly. So it actually oddly all makes sense. Although I think if you just mention museum studies, DJ, community organizer, that loop probably wouldn't be closed for most people until I kind of put it that way.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Diana Chan McNally: I will say also, writing an op-ed is not unlike writing a curatorial statement. It's actually quite similar in nature. It's an interpretation of political events, of the situation at large, versus culture and artifacts, but not different in terms of the analysis that is actually involved. And you look at government budgets — it's also not unlike understanding and interpreting artifacts. So it is all oddly interrelated. But again, I think most people are like, what in the world is museum studies? So to me, it actually is a very transferable skill, even though it sounds really esoteric.
Matthew Remski: Well, okay, so you've done the organizational part, but the third part of my question was about moving between track and track. And that's about how does it help — or does it help — you think about gaining fluency in all of the different types of culture and personality and income brackets and just all of the demographics of a ward like Ward 4?
Diana Chan McNally: I think so. I think it is related, certainly with something like DJing. It's very commercialized. We have this kind of innate war going on between DJing as this ultimate capitalist exercise of exploitation and spectacle and the practice of taking someone else's music and then taking ownership of that just because you played it. I've always been at odds with that. I really respect the records I own and the artists themselves. And so I always give out a track listing. I always shout out who it is I'm playing, because I think it's important that we respect the cultures that we're engaging with as opposed to taking ownership of them. So in that sense, DJing can transpose into that space of gaining cultural fluency in Ward 4 and beyond, because it is about researching — for me, learning about where this music comes from, where people come from, and then respecting that and working with it.
Matthew Remski: Well, speaking of respect and working with various cultures, on one of your Instagrams, I heard you give a bunch of greetings in a number of languages, including Chinese and Tibetan, side by side I think. And I realized, oh, part of what you have to do is to understand and live with and serve communities who are sometimes even coming from places where they are in conflict with each other. And so I'm wondering, is there a learning curve for you in figuring out how to represent many peoples as you look towards City Hall?
Diana Chan McNally: Yeah, absolutely. But I'll start by saying it seems like I'm a polyglot — I'm a monoglot. It's sad. It's sad. It's sad. I'm second generation. I'm an elder millennial. My mother came to Canada from Hong Kong via Macau, via Taiwan in the early 1970s — so one of the first people to come to Canada after we opened up immigration to the rest of the world. And for a lot of people my age whose parents come from that kind of history, there was a real sense that we should assimilate. So it's funny, because now she'll be like, well, you don't really speak Cantonese. I can understand a lot of it, but I have a hard time replying. And I'll say to her, Mom, you're the only one here who speaks that. I can't learn it unless you teach me. So we don't often speak our ancestral languages. My partner's the same — he does not speak Hindi or Punjabi. We're about the same age, so it's not unusual, and I deeply regret it. Although now it's so nice to see that future generations are actually learning their languages. My niece and nephew are learning Bulgarian as well as Hindi. But it's also relatively new. I think there's a lot of this sense of you must assimilate in the 80s and 90s among the diaspora. So that said, yeah, it's going to be a learning curve for sure.
But I also approach my advocacy work — basically all the work that I've ever done — and I sit on a human rights focused committee at the City of Toronto, and that's the lens that I use. It's a human rights lens. I know how that sounds to people. I know it sounds really pie in the sky, but I actually think it imbues you with this really effective guiding principle to ensure that there is equity, that there's balance when you are working with people who are in conflict or who do have competing interests. So to me, it's an exceptionally practical framework for mitigating how these conflicts might arise. The principles are always: we are upholding and respecting everyone's human rights, and we are looking very closely at what's equitable in the situation.
I'm not a legal expert on this. I'm not a lawyer. I think if I fail at city council, I might go to law school — I've thought about it. I do know, however, that human rights are very, very, very poorly understood and very, very, very poorly realized in Canada, which I don't think people really get because they don't really understand what human rights are. So there's going to be a lot of decisions that will be challenged. I think on my part I'll be challenged in debates, but with those guiding principles I think I can start to mitigate that. It's not about — I think we see this on council — adhering to the loudest voice in the room. Those tend to be people with the time and capacity to come out, and they're not necessarily using that equity framework. So I think I have a duty to all of my constituents to apply that, to make sure that we are fair and just in how we act.
Matthew Remski: Speaking of your human rights perspective, I think that's what you bring to all of your work around the unhoused, which you have lived experience of. And I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about what that experience taught you. How did people treat you? Where did you find solidarity? Yeah, what was that like?
Diana Chan McNally: Horrible, as it is for everybody. And I had a much easier situation than many, many, most of the people that I've ever worked with. So I was a teenager at the time. I was pregnant, teen mom. And so in that process, there were people who really wanted to push me in certain directions, and that included the Children's Aid Society and my principal at my school. I give my parents a lot of rope here because I didn't tell them. I didn't tell them until I was forced to tell them by my school, and that was two weeks before I was actually going to give birth. So their reaction I empathize with. If I had been in their position, especially with the kind of morals that my mom has, that would be really hard. So I'm like, cool, cool. Okay, we're good, and I love them.
But I would say overall, the institutions that I was dealing with, which I actually went to voluntarily — I went to Children's Aid voluntarily — treated me like a criminal, essentially. And I remember my caseworker at the time, and this is kind of post-Harris years, talking very much about, my caseload is too big. Why are you telling me that? Why am I the one listening to this? I understand your job is hard, I know that now, but this is so inappropriate to be focusing on when you're supposed to be helping a minor who has a child.
Matthew Remski: So there was not only the sense that your condition was being criminalized, but also the caseworker was sort of blaming you or confiding in you that they were somehow victimized?
Diana Chan McNally: Yeah. And I have a much better lens on this now, as somebody who has worked in social services for over a decade. But I think my immediate feeling coming out of that, and for years to come, was of anger. And it's really interesting because I obviously work with homeless people now and have for a long time. That is not where I had ever thought about going. It's something that I didn't want to talk about or think about again for years. I was just so seething with anger. And I have to really admit that I really thought that I was special. I had gotten out of this situation because I did something that was better, perhaps, than other people, because you don't want to believe otherwise. Your ego often can't handle that. But I try to constantly be better in my life as a person, as a human being. And it took me a long time to realize I didn't do anything special. I just had a network of people who were there for me — that included my teachers, it included my friends, included their parents who would take me to appointments, who showed up at the hospital, who fought for me to come back to my high school because they wanted to ship me out to another one. But that's where my support network was. So I now fundamentally understand that those networks are often what buoy you — obviously your community. And in the absence of that, which is the case for many, many people who are unhoused, there are people like me. And we should and can actually step up for people in the way that my community stepped up for me when I was much, much younger.
Matthew Remski: Let me try to understand one connection, because it sounds like you're describing some kind of survivor's pride almost connected to feeling angry or resentful after the fact, and that these two things maybe for a while prevented you from seeing that, oh, actually, this is a social and a collective issue, and you somehow decentered yourself from that context. Is that how it worked?
Diana Chan McNally: Absolutely. I was a teacher before. I'm a millennial — I've had a thousand jobs. But I was teaching at TMU. I was teaching at Centennial College. Later I taught at George Brown College. And I had students coming into my program right before the Ukraine war, coming from Venezuela. They're coming from places where we know there are conflicts now, but there was a preceding period up to that point which made it unsafe for a lot of people to be there, but they also couldn't claim refugee status. So they're coming to my program, especially at Centennial, because it was the cheapest in the city. It was a way out. And so they were scraping money together to study ostensibly, but really to find safety and security in Canada. And I just ended up case managing people. And that's when I really started to rethink what was going on. It was that process, and I realized I quite like doing that support work. And it's also what I liked about being a teacher. So at a certain point you're like, well, academia is a failure — let's be real. Who's getting tenure? Nobody's full time anymore. I decided to go back to college instead of working on a PhD and all these illustrious things that people do as academics, and wanted to just work directly with people on the street as a result of that. So that's the kind of trajectory that I've had.
Matthew Remski: Why do governments let homelessness happen and continue and grow worse?
Diana Chan McNally: Well, residential real estate is the world's largest store of wealth. It's actually valued at, I think, like $290 trillion around that, which is globally far, far more than all the global GDP combined. So you realize that, and I think that fact is pretty invisible to people, even though we talk constantly about real estate, but we don't realize the extent to which our economies are reliant on the buying and selling of land. So there is this real financial interest in continuing to push policies that view housing as a financialized asset as opposed to a basic human right. So I think at its core, that's what's going on. And it seems to be that it doesn't matter what damage we cause to people in the interim through that process, even though it actually does cost us fiscally as well, and it costs us obviously morally — even though we know governments aren't often persuaded by moral arguments. So I've watched dozens of, maybe at this point hundreds of, people's lives end early just because we uphold this market, essentially. So it really is just about capital. That's what it comes down to. And we are willing to extract from people through their rents, through mortgages, and let them fall through the cracks and frankly get sick and die on the streets rather than change our reliance on this completely immoral kind of economic situation that we've created.
Matthew Remski: Yeah, well, I have never considered even the math of what the sort of global holdings might be. But I guess what you're saying is that as some kind of bizarre, absurd amount of concentrated wealth, it's actually impossible for a capitalist system to not rely on it and to apply its fiercest logic to its expansion.
Diana Chan McNally: Absolutely. This is the end game. And human life, all life, the planet itself, are forfeit in the pursuit of this capitalist expansion. So it's egregious because I've seen every single day the kind of sustained violence that we enact against people, but we turn a blind eye to that. Or even worse, we blame people who are homeless for the situation that they find themselves in, as though it's a personal failing and not actually a systemic issue. So I don't know how you can look at that and not be heartbroken and angry. But we do it every day. So I feel like I'm in the minority sometimes.
Matthew Remski: Well, we do it every day. And the double edge of the individual blame is the fact that homelessness, houselessness, disciplines the person who has housing. It says to the person who walks by, this is what could happen to you. In fact, you should be lucky that it's not happening already. Just a few wrong turns and this is where you could be. And I think that's incredibly powerful. I think the way it is meant to work — not to be conspiratorial about it — is to drive people into avoiding their own empathy. And yet there's something about what I have found in my life as I have reoriented myself very consciously towards, oh, who are the unhoused people in my neighbourhood and in my community and what can I do for them, and how am I going to interact and how am I going to just make eye contact or do whatever I can — that there's a possible fissure in the capitalist system if somehow we look clearly at unhoused people and recognize ourselves, that just seems possible because they're right there.
Diana Chan McNally: Yeah. And the right wing has started leveraging a term for this — suicidal empathy — as though it's against our own interests. It's like, no, this is a collective survival issue. There's no reason, especially in a wealthy country, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, one of the wealthiest cities in the world, that we should have this situation. But these are not rational reactions.
Matthew Remski: Yeah. Well, on this somewhat conspiratorial angle, I'm wondering if the recent spate of criminalizations of the unhoused actually speaks to the fact that the discipline isn't working anymore.
Diana Chan McNally: Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. We saw during the early pandemic — and I did a lot of work with people who were camping out in downtown parks, still do, did before, did after — there was a lot of empathy that people expressed. Especially early in the pandemic, a lot of people that I know, they're artists, they're relatively low income. We all had the sense that we're fairly precarious. But I don't think people realize that one month of not earning any income meant that you would lose your house. And so before CERB was actually rolled out for a lot of people, I think that precarity was very, very deeply felt in that moment. And so I knew a lot of people, especially artists, especially musicians, who were providing outreach supports to people. In fact, they created a movement by doing this that was popular and supported. And I've watched as the narrative has flipped back where now it's this kind of everyone-for-themselves survival instinct kicking in. There's a selfish motivation to that, and I understand wanting to protect yourself — I'm also very precarious. But there's a sense that society is going to keep existing only if we don't just allow the city to push everyone out. I've been to Detroit, years and years ago. And you actually see that manifesting where very, very poor people couldn't leave — still there — and then you have very, very wealthy people just kind of moving out to the outskirts, and then the downtown itself for many years was pretty empty. So that's not a society, it's not functional. There is no self-protection without protecting everybody.
Matthew Remski: You know, this entire part of the conversation makes me realize that actually Maggie Helwig's supervision of, and aid given to, the encampment at St. Stephen-in-the-Fields had to be crushed, actually, because you can't really have that on display. You can't have an Anglican minister actually welcoming people into the courtyard of the church and saying, yes, we're going to make you at home. Because what kind of example does that set?
Diana Chan McNally: Yeah. And we often see faith-based leaders who are very empathetic and putting time and resources and space into making sure that people are okay. Sanctuary, for example, in the downtown east end also had an encampment on site. That encampment was also removed. So there is a very, very targeted push against these faith leaders, against these faith groups who are doing that kind of work, to undermine them. You can't have it on display because it shows that the government itself is not moral.
Matthew Remski: And then the government will do — or the institutions will do — sneaky things where Maggie will write a book and it will get a wonderful award, and then the day after, the cops will come in and clear the camp.
Okay. You have had mixed experiences with legal protections and remedies for the unhoused. And I'm wondering if you can walk us through what our laws can and can't do.
Diana Chan McNally: Oh my. Yes. So on paper, the right to housing is actually enshrined in law. We have the National Housing Strategy Act, which says that housing is a human right. It's embedded in federal law, which obviously bylaws and provincial laws fall underneath. But whatever's on paper is not actually being enacted in terms of policy and practices. I think that's pretty clear broadly across the country.
The City of Toronto's housing charter also embeds the principle of housing as a human right. It's in the charter — we ratified this. This is under John Tory even, who notoriously led police-led encampment evictions in 2021.
So I would say we don't realize positive rights very well in Canada — just a little bit of Isaiah Berlin in there, where we think, oh, we can't possibly give somebody a resource, but we're better at recognizing negative rights, meaning that we don't encroach on them, we don't infringe on people. So in terms of encampments in Toronto or Ontario, the best that we've actually won in the law is the right for people to not be removed from their encampment if there is inadequate shelter space.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Diana Chan McNally: This is negative rights being sort of
Matthew Remski: torqued into a positive right.
Diana Chan McNally: Yeah, but the law doesn't compel municipalities to actually build shelter space. It just says that we can't evict them. And so this comes out of a Waterloo ruling where basically people won the right to live in a parking lot. That's a sad, sad metric of success, but that's actually the best that we have won in the province. And so Doug Ford has tried to find ways to move around this. He can't strike that decision down, but he has enacted Bill 6, the Safer Municipalities Act, which has now been extended —
Matthew Remski: Fuck that, man.
Diana Chan McNally: I just think there's always some guy in a tiny little booth of an office who's coming up with these just transgressive — yeah. So the names of all the legislation. It says that if you are living in an encampment, we're going to conflate you as somebody who uses drugs, which is not true — these are separate but intersecting categories of people. But if you are believed to have drugs, if they think maybe there might be some in your encampment or that you might use drugs, they can actually seize your belongings, they can arrest you, and you can be jailed for six months or fined up to $10,000. And so this is now being extended onto public transit systems as well. So we have these competing functions — one, a provincial ruling and also a provincial law in place — which I see in the city of Toronto, where transit police in Union Station, for example, are operating under a mandate of we must remove and fine people who are sheltering there, and we have many City of Toronto programs trying to provide support, sometimes with mixed results. But I laud that they have a support-first approach, although I think there should never be enforcement — that's my personal feeling — but at least it's not enshrined as we're going to enforce and remove everybody. It's a bare minimum, but it's a good minimum to have.
So I always think about an encampment and say this all the time: this is us downloading the responsibility for housing directly onto the person without a home. From the federal level doing all the cuts to housing programs in the 90s, to the province shirking the responsibility there, to municipalities that don't have the funding and resources much of the time to actually enact this. And it's ludicrous that we have all these levels of government with resources and we've downloaded it directly onto people to make their own housing, and we're criminalizing them for that act of survival.
Matthew Remski: The way that you're saying that is kind of extraordinary to me, because you're describing a population that literally has to cobble together the physical resources for shelter in a way that in an adventure story would be heroic — in a way that you would be proud of anybody who was able to be dropped in the middle of a city and gather together the things that they needed to survive the night. And somehow — on the entertainment level, if it was limited to the story, if it was The Great Escape or something like that, then we could watch it. But because you're saying we're downloading the responsibility of housing to the individual level, and the amount of effort that it takes to actually do that is incredible — and then I think the most enraging and morbid things I've ever seen have just been the collection of the belongings, and the carting off of possessions, and realizing there's no place for the basic materials of life that these people have gathered together. And what does that say about us?
Diana Chan McNally: And I find it so fascinating because we are a highly materialistic society — our material selves are bulked up, whereas our other sense of self, our identity otherwise, is often minimized. And with people who own more stuff than anyone else in history — all my records behind me — how can you not relate to that facing of the material self of people on the streets? I know a couple of people who've lost their husband's ashes, their friend's ashes, because those were seized.
Matthew Remski: Sorry. Wait a minute. The ashes were seized?
Diana Chan McNally: Yeah. And disposed of. It is painful to know this. This is not just, like, an extra T-shirt or anything like that. These are precious belongings.
Matthew Remski: It reminds me of very impatient parents who cannot abide the mess, and so they go on a tear and throw everything away instead of actually figuring out how to take the time to reorganize things — not to infantilize the people that I'm talking about, but it's just an attitude of why would you be so cavalier about people's things?
Diana Chan McNally: Yeah, absolutely. I cannot fundamentally understand that. And I've worked not just with people who are on the street, but people who have moved into housing. I ran an eviction prevention program. Hoarding is a trauma response for a lot of people. When you have your material self so violated, you just collect everything, because that's just your reaction to that. So when people see the mess, they just see a mess. They don't see the underlying trauma of having that constant violation of your sense of self. And it's hard to make that argument to people. They don't get it. They just think it's messy and unhygienic and it's a safety issue. Well, there are ways to work with people who hoard — I've done it, that was a lot of my job — and it is about providing emotional safety and security and support to people, not about telling them to clean something up.
Matthew Remski: Your sights are set on City Hall. We've already brought up his name, but are you going to have to flurry-rush Doug Ford every day of your tenure there?
Diana Chan McNally: I mean, at this point, what hasn't he done? I'm joking. But it is outrageous how much our local democracy has been encroached upon, not just in Toronto. This is true of all municipalities and now regions as well, where we are going to appoint people, not elect them. It's outrageous. And yet I feel like the rage that should be there is a little bit more subdued — people are just heads down, trying to get by. But we slashed city council in half. And it's so funny that I'm running for council because I also know that when you have 110,000 constituents, how do you represent people? You have to make choices. And that's going to be difficult — how to best represent that many people with very, very limited resources and time. And that was by design. That's why we slashed city council, so that councillors could not adequately represent their constituents. That was the goal.
So there's that piece. There's overriding municipal policies, the ability of municipalities to enact their function around things like bike lanes — there's an injunction right now, we have a moratorium, but who knows what's going to happen?
Matthew Remski: This is a moratorium on taking them out.
Diana Chan McNally: On taking them out. And is that going to be appealed? Are we going to see the use of the notwithstanding clause to move forward with it? I don't know.
Matthew Remski: Can you imagine pulling the notwithstanding clause over bike lanes?
Diana Chan McNally: I think that would just be the best possible argument for the federal government to be like, maybe we should have stipulations around this. It's abusive to do that, to violate the fundamental rights people have in the Charter — the right to life. I think bike lanes uphold that. That's part of the injunction argument. And you're using the Charter to undermine those rights. Ludicrous. So bike lanes, development — we've had so much encroachment, taking away affordability requirements, taking away community benefits, the ability to enact green space with developments. Everything is benefiting developers and giving communities very limited ability to have feedback. And we are, again, to speak to that almost $300 trillion in the global real estate market — this is at a very local level how we are seeing that being enacted.
Seizure of our waterfront. I hope this isn't something that he'll drive forward, but his ideas are ludicrous — an artificial island which might be off Sunnyside Beach. No one wants that. But we also, as a municipality, as councillors, have the least amount of power, and we don't have the federal government on our side about the airport — they're saying mum about that. So yeah, there's going to be a lot of battling. I have a history of fighting Ford. I grew up in Ford country. It's been an entire lifetime of me dealing with these guys. I just want to live part of my life where I don't have them around. That's my goal.
But I have made wins from the provincial government before. I wrote an article in the Toronto Sun because I'm wily enough to talk to the conservative base and be like, why are there so many encampments? You don't want to see those. What if the Ford government actually dispensed the money they said they were going to, to provide rents for people?
Matthew Remski: You code-switched for the Sun?
Diana Chan McNally: I sure did.
Matthew Remski: Oh my gosh. Did you use a pseudonym? Like, did they look you up when you sent it in?
Diana Chan McNally: I don't know how that happened, but that's amazing, right? I was kind of like, I didn't think they would go for it.
Matthew Remski: But you put your name on it.
Diana Chan McNally: I did. And the NDP then negotiated with the government to let the money flow.
Matthew Remski: Nobody likes seeing this — let's just really point the finger where it belongs.
Diana Chan McNally: I am of the mind that the focus is always on the outcome. I have my own principles. I didn't violate my principles in writing to this audience, but this is a thing that people need to think about as advocates as well — who's delivering the message, where are you delivering the message? Those things are as important as the message itself. And so I was like, let's go to the conservative base with this one. And it worked.
Matthew Remski: You're going to be going toe to toe with some politicians who either have outright imperialist and racist politics or they're willing to pretend that they do for votes. So Brad Bradford is my councillor here in Beaches–East York — so sorry. And he's going to try for a mayoral run again. He doesn't seem to have any policy backbone. He's flip-flopped on a bunch of issues. But I was enraged that he came out to support Doug Ford seeking an injunction to halt the Al Quds Day parade recently. And they together falsely claimed in this injunction that the gathering has been a terrorist threat in the past, which is not evidenced — so it's not something we can risk during this time of genocide, which was in parentheses. Now, federally, Mark Carney is edging towards criminalizing legal protests with Bill C-9 just in general. But in my ward here, Ward 19, I have 10,000 Muslim neighbours, and Bradford seems to be fine with opportunistic Islamophobia. So how are you going to deal with guys like that?
Diana Chan McNally: Not easily. And I will say this stems from the fact that people don't understand what is legal and just what is uncomfortable for them. What is uncomfortable is not inherently violent or harmful. And I think that's been underpinning a lot of the rhetoric that we've seen from people like Bradford. They're capitalizing on people's fear and discomfort and suggesting that they're legally correct, which is absolutely not true. I'm a huge defender of the right to protest. I'm always protesting. This is what I've done. I don't just talk about stuff — I give resources, I support people to access resources, and then I'm also engaged in direct action. I think you need all of those things in order to push for change. And normally you don't have one person doing all of that. But I look at the issue, I look at what the outcome we want is, and I find the best position to push something forward.
So I really, really, really fundamentally oppose municipalities creating these protest bubble zones. We've done that in the city of Toronto — that was based on what happened in Vaughan — and we're seeing other municipalities do the same thing. This kind of legislation is absolutely coming out of a means to dismantle Palestinian solidarity movements. That's what it's about. But it's also the excuse that they're using, saying that it's dangerous, it's terrorism — they're using that as an excuse to clamp down on all of our rights, our collective right to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly, which is essentially how we enshrine the right to protest under the Charter. So protest can be legal, and it can be both uncomfortable and disruptive. In fact, it should be disruptive in order for it to be effective. That's the point. Because who would listen to you otherwise, if you're being polite about it? But I think that we get socialized to this idea that good protest, effective protest, is when we're nice. Well, we don't have governments treating us with the dignity that we deserve. They're not giving us the resources that we need. Why do we play the game when they're not expected to? So I fully — and I've written about this as well — fully, fully, fully support the right to protest, especially around genocide. This is not controversial. I mean, I guess it is, but I don't think it should ever have been controversial.
Matthew Remski: It's maximally controversial because it exposes, I think, what global capital is.
Diana Chan McNally: Yeah, well, that's exactly it. And yet at the same time the vast majority of Canadians are not on board with this, and we know that. But it's not about the popular sentiment here. It is about the protection of wealth and exploitation of imperial interests, of capitalist interests. That's what underpins it. But even just regular day-to-day people who would espouse themselves as being fairly apolitical — how can you look at what we've seen and not think that that is disturbing and disgusting and absolutely atrocious?
Matthew Remski: You know, this was one focus of Bradford's recent policy interventions. But like most of his stuff, it's in your lane actually — how can we get rid of the eyesores of encampments and how do we make our parks safe for middle-class children? And so I would imagine there's going to be an intersection of issues that you're going to argue about. And it'll probably start there.
Diana Chan McNally: Oh, absolutely. And in fact, one thing that Bradford did not that long ago was put forward an encampment motion not to committee — because he didn't want public consultation on it — he brought it directly to council. That created more bubble zones. I don't know why this is a tool that governments keep using. Infrastructure doesn't have rights. There's no rights attached to a building — they're attached to people. So a bubble zone doesn't even make sense because it's an assumption that a certain group of people will only exist within that bubble, which is absurd, or that institutions themselves don't cause harm, which we know they do. So I'm fundamentally opposed to that because it isn't legal, actually. And it's also completely illogical.
So anyway, he created these bubble zones around infrastructure for kids — playgrounds, that sort of thing — where any encampment within that bubble would be prioritized for removal. And again he bypassed public input on something that so fundamentally impacts human rights. And I'm a member of the Housing Rights Advisory Committee, and I was pissed off. I was like, what the fuck is this? Honestly. So the best that I could do, because I have limited power, was to kick a motion up to executive committee to at least, after the fact, let everybody hear everything that was wrong with that. And so we had a couple dozen deputants, and I hope the message was clear — and a lot of people there were actually supportive and on side — but I hope it was clear that you can't do that. This has to go to the public for review and debate. We need to be able to depute on this. And not even just around encampments — anything like this that truly can cause harm to people should not be blithely brought just to council. There should be public discourse. So even if it was after the fact, I tried to make that space, and I think that's what you're going to see from me as a councillor — to make as much space as possible, using that human rights lens, that equity lens, to ensure that people do have that ability to speak to what's going on for them.
And I'm someone who for a while was not very welcome at council. John Tory, I will say, was not a big fan of mine. I currently have a lifetime ban from the Ontario legislature.
Matthew Remski: Lifetime what?
Diana Chan McNally: Yeah, it's indefinite. You can get an indefinite ban. It was so interesting because I was invited for budget day to attend and watch, and I wasn't planning to do anything. I was there to just watch and analyze and consider what was being said. And the minute I get to the security booth, I get this huddle and I get served this notice — well, I get detained and I get served this notice that says that I'm banned. Because I protested months earlier. And was very proud of that fact. I was thrown out of the chambers along with many other people, but I was the only one served a ban, if you can believe that.
Matthew Remski: Just to get back to the bubble zone around the buildings. I think this is a very disgusting but also elegant sort of extension of the logic of private property, because the building becomes endowed with — I think you actually said it — with the rights of the person.
Diana Chan McNally: Yeah, absolutely. Again, it's inert, it's infrastructure. But we do understand property rights a lot better than human rights. So we humanize these institutions, these arbitrary land masses, and say we can't exercise our rights as human beings within these dedicated spaces. It's a fundamentally absurd legislative tool, and I will always oppose it no matter how it's being utilized. It doesn't make sense.
Matthew Remski: What is the most valuable mentorship that you've received, and what's the best advice you have for the tween, let's say, who wants to work with others to change the world?
Diana Chan McNally: Yeah. The most valuable mentorship I ever received was from the first person who ever supervised me when I was still a placement student. And his name is Bob Rose, and he actually lives not very far from me in Parkdale.
Bob does not do anything according to the book. I think there's a lot of siloing of different forms of advocacy these days without building solidarity movements, unfortunately. And I even just wrote an op-ed about this for Briarpatch about how the intersection of tenant advocacy and homelessness advocacy is almost none, and that's been the case in the past few years. But we used to have anti-poverty work, anti-poverty advocacy, that understood and married these issues as the same issue. And I fundamentally believe they are the same issue, except that we articulate class differently — tenants versus people without housing altogether. So Bob taught me about all of those intersections. He taught me to be a shit-disturber. And what we do as community workers is build relationships. That's the foundation of everything. I don't know the answer to everything, but out there in the community we do. So if you build the relationships, you listen to people, you work with them, you work towards solutions — that's how we advance, that's how we move forward. And that's what he taught me, and that is how I've always tried to work.
In terms of advice, it's the same thing essentially — you can't do this by yourself. We have this kind of mentality of the cult of personality, the leader who will drive us forward. I cannot disagree with that more. I also think it takes the onus off of people to get involved. We have rights, but we also have responsibilities. And if we want a healthy democracy, then we do have to get involved. So for people who want to do this work: listen, be open to your communities, work with your communities. Be mindful that none of us is perfect, none of us is wholly moral, we're all fallible and we have all made mistakes. And accountability is really important — we need to build that into our processes as well. But we also learn and we grow and build relationships with one another, and that works. So that relationship building, that community building, should and will underpin everything that you do. Let it guide you to where you actually need to push for change.
Matthew Remski: Diana, thank you so much for your time. It's great to talk to you. And when's the election?
Diana Chan McNally: October 26th.
Matthew Remski: Amazing. All right, well, we will follow up.
Diana Chan McNally: Yeah, please. Thank you. It's been such a pleasure.
Matthew Remski: Thanks for listening, everybody. That's the show for this week. And thank you to Diana again for stopping by. I'll just remind you that up on Patreon right now is my little bonus episode for this week that looks at the work of Jonathan Haidt and The Anxious Generation in light of some new research. It's called Looks Like Jonathan Haidt Did a Moral Panic, and it actually starts out by quoting from my book. Here's one little paragraph:
There are real problems in the online world, and most teens can probably see them already. What they don't need is a bunch of olds coming in and telling them how to manage this world they spend no time in and who can't understand its benefits. The internet is still a strange place to everyone over 40 years old. We didn't grow up with it. For us, it has shaken the world. But we are a single generation, and our concerns may be misaligned with what kids actually need to do to figure out their online life.
So you can catch that on Patreon now, or you can hang around — it'll show up here in the main feed. And until then, take care of each other.
