Episode Transcript
Antifascist Dad Episode 48: "We Bring Everything We Have" to City Hall w/ Jennie Worden
Matthew Remski: This is Matthew Remski with Antifascist Dad podcast episode number 48.
We bring everything we have to City Hall with Jennie Worden.
Jennie Worden: The thing that fixes a housing crisis or a homelessness crisis is appropriate housing.
The thing that fixes an addiction crisis is not forced treatment, but it's making treatment readily available when people want it so they don't have to wait. Because those windows of hope are really rare and precious and you need to move on them when they happen.
We have created a place where people are losing housing more quickly than we can build it, and then we're blaming them for doing whatever they can to survive that situation.
That's just messed up.
Matthew Remski: You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name and I'm on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad. The Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast. Subscribers get early access to a second weekly episode and this week on the main feed I am interviewing my socialist City Council candidate for the October 26th municipal election, Jennie Worden.
But on Patreon, I'm summarizing for the record everything that's gone down since Sept. 20, when federal NDP Leader Avi Lewis posted a Yom Kippur prayer of atonement for him and his comrades who had not done enough, in his words, to stop genocide in Gaza, which is being committed in the name of Jewish safety.
The pro-Israel lobby immediately linked his statement to a shooting incident at a Belleville synagogue that evening, even though, as it turns out, the shooter held right wing antisemitic COVID conspiracy views. Now the attacks against Lewis reached a fever pitch with the National Post publishing a column by Yoni Goldstein that referred to biblical and Talmudic violent remedies traditionally applied to Jews considered to be traitors. And he wrote that piece under the title Jewish Law Tells Us How to Deal with Avi Lewis. So that is published now to Patreon for early access for subscribers, but it's going to be unlocked and published here within a few weeks. I'd also direct you in the show notes to the link for my book Antifascist Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times.
So today I'm continuing my Toronto Municipal Election Antifascism Support series with an interview with Jennie Worden, who's running a fun and inclusive and hopeful and incisive campaign in my ward, 19 Beaches-East York.
She, like Diana Chan McNally, is another music nerd who's gunning for a City Hall chair. And like Chiara Padovani, who I interviewed last week, she's got a lot of experience with the tenants rights movement, so I'm just going to run this interview and let Jennie speak for herself. But I'll just note that I was originally going to call this episode Hating on Brad Bradford and Kicking His Ass Isn't Enough in honor of the fact that Jennie is about to win my old councillor's seat. Bradford has just been the worst representative running for mayor and avoiding his constituents for years while taking every execrable reactionary position available, from trying to ban a Muslim parade to involuntary commitment of unhoused people with substance disabilities.
It's actually kind of hilarious to see whole Instagram accounts dedicated to interviewing people in my neighborhood who want to rant about what an opportunistic asshole this guy is. But Jennie is on a higher plane of consciousness, and she wasn't going to let me just muckrake because there's such a lot of positive work to be done and many generous and caring people to motivate. And so I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did.
Jennie Worden, welcome to Antifascist Dad.
Jennie Worden: Thank you so much. I'm so glad to be here.
Matthew Remski: A note of seriousness to begin, there are some folks who are getting a little bit concerned about a growing insurgency of music nerds set to turn City Hall into some sort of communist musical theater space. There's Diana Chan McNally as a DJ, you've been in the Mendelssohn Choir since, like, 2011 doing who knows what and directing Orchestra Toronto.
What has music taught you about community and hope and organizing?
Jennie Worden: First of all, let's correct the record. I did not direct Orchestra Toronto. I did not stand at the front and conduct. I was the executive director, which means I mostly sat in an office and did a lot of paperwork, right?
Because that is the skill that I could bring to the orchestra. But more to your point, what has music taught me about community and hope?
Choral music in particular, which is what I've spent my life doing, is about taking a group of people and their individual voices and building them into a collective whose sound is greater and more complex and. And more interesting and richer than the sum of its parts. And everybody brings their own skill, their own years of practice, their own abilities, their own understanding to this goal.
And then we get together, we work at it, and it's painstaking sometimes, and we create something that is glorious, that is transcendent, that is moving. And I can't really think of a better metaphor for the project of politics.
We make something together. We bring everything we have, and it is better than anything we could do individually.
Matthew Remski: I'm so glad to hear this from you because I had a choral experience for a very long time in a very different context that wasn't really about gathering together and creating sort of community empowerment. It was at St. Michael's Choir School, which is where I went to school.
So the grade three to the 11th or 12th grade or something like that.
And that was much more about regimentation and performing something for the institution of the church and making sure that your uniform was on correctly and making sure that you were standing up straight in a very particular way. And I think you're describing something very different. A lot more sort of willful or purposeful and consented to.
Jennie Worden: I mean, I'm coming to this as an adult. I did sing in the Toronto Children's Chorus as a child, and it was a lot more regimented.
And I think that. I think you're presenting a very valid picture of choral music and one that a lot of people have experienced.
And like anything, like any human endeavor, we can make multiple things out of it. It can be one person's vision where they're molding a bunch of young or old singers into their vision. And it's very great, man led. And certainly the arts have a terrible history of great, mostly men using people as their playing pieces.
And we have to be cognizant of that. And that's a conversation we have in the choral music a lot.
Matthew Remski: It's also a politics as well, right?
Jennie Worden: Yeah, yeah. And the metaphor continues, extends there as well. Politics can be, and often does have a great man or great person problem where we're looking for a superhero to solve our problems. We're looking for a Heldentenor to come out and just blast us into submission.
Matthew Remski: They're the worst too, right? They're the worst, worst personalities, some of them.
Jennie Worden: There have been some lovely ones.
Not all Heldentenors, hashtag.
But when it's good and when it's done thoughtfully and when it's done with consent, any sort of large musical project can be about that joining of forces, that joining of voices, lifting every voice to sing and creating something absolutely stupendous.
And the orchestras are the same. Orchestral musicians create something very different when they play individually than when they all play together harnessed. And sometimes it does take somebody directing the flow. That's another conversation that we're having in the arts of how much do we need that one person on the podium?
What can we do that's different?
But for me, I think what music and community bring what choral music has been about is creating those communities of intention where we believe in something that we all do together.
Matthew Remski: Okay, so speaking of communities of intention and coming together, I just interviewed Chiara Padovani. She's running on Ward 5.
I talked with her about her life in tenant union organizing. And you've done a lot of that as well with Toronto ACORN.
And I want to ask you what I asked her. Why is tenant organizing so powerful? Like, why is every democratic socialist organizer in the global north or like maybe everywhere talking about tenant union organizing and working on it?
Jennie Worden: For myself, I started working on it because I was a tenant and it needed to be done.
So let's start there because the power differential between landlords and tenants was so great, and yet there are so many more tenants than there are landlords.
And when something goes wrong with a landlord tenant situation, it's hitting people right where they live.
So they can't ignore it. They can, oh, something's, you know, I'm going to just get a different job or move house, because that's not available to most people. And I think really what, you know, organizers are starting to understand is that when things affect people where they live, the motivation for change is powerful.
And when you have a bunch of people in a building, it's really hard to stop them from talking to each other.
Matthew Remski: Right?
Jennie Worden: So if you create a way that they can talk about their issues, if you encourage them to talk about your issues. The person with a mold problem in apartment 310 talks to the person with a mold problem in apartment 410, and suddenly it's not a personal problem, it's a shared struggle.
Matthew Remski: You know, I asked Chiara about that specifically and about how whether or not the actual modern tenant apartment building is taking the place of the industrial factory in a.
A site in which people are naturally able to gather and know each other and understand each other's problems and complain about them together with regard to who's responsible. That seems to be really a powerful site.
Jennie Worden: When you're waiting for the elevator and you have three elevators and one is down, you're waiting a lot longer. That tendency to complain comes naturally.
I've witnessed it in my own building. I've witnessed it in buildings around the city, and it's a valid complaint. Your life is being made measurably more difficult by somebody else's negligence, and elevators break. But in good buildings, they get fixed quickly, and you've got a ready ear there. The trick, or the important part is not stopping at complaints.
It's providing tenants with the tools to address their complaints and building that, understanding that if we do it together, if we do it collectively, we have so much more. More power than the tenant in 310 complaining on their own to their landlord and being put off and put off and put off.
Matthew Remski: Have you felt the actual social, I don't know, feeling change in this experience of waiting for the elevator where everybody is kind of looking at each other with, this sucks. And it's. We kind of live in a crappy place and we're being neglected to. Waiting for the elevator and people looking at each other saying, we know what to do.
Jennie Worden: Now it's starting to change. It's starting to change here in Beaches-East York, building by building. So now when I'm knocking on doors in buildings, I'm meeting tenants who say, how do we fix this?
And I think that is a much more powerful question than either what can you do? Or just the complaint that this is broken. How do we fix this?
Can you help us?
What are the tools that are there?
Who is responsible?
That is a change that I have seen.
The tenants of 500 Dawes are now used to people knocking on their doors, and they're used to talking about it, and they're used to asking what the next step is. That's a change as well.
This idea that we have tools, they're imperfect.
They're not always the tools we need, and sometimes they're a little confusing, but we can collectively change things together.
That is the mood that is starting to change. At the same time, you know, there is growing frustration with the lack of options.
Matthew Remski: Speaking of 500 Dawes, can you tell us all about Carolyn Krebs and her family and how landlord tenancy laws enable abusive behavior to continue for decades? What's going on there?
Jennie Worden: Carolyn Krebs, who's also Marian Linton, who is a woman of a thousand names.
Matthew Remski: She has different names.
Jennie Worden: She has different names on different pieces of paperwork. Yep, yep.
She has a very convoluted story about how she uses some names for some things and some names for another thing.
Matthew Remski: Various levels of law or whatever. Or jurisdictions. Okay, right.
Jennie Worden: And so she and her husband, who is now deceased, owned several buildings in Toronto between them. Apparently, she received 500 Dawes as a birthday present, which. I'll let you think about that for a moment.
Matthew Remski: Sure.
Jennie Worden: Right, sure, sure.
And now she's, you know, managing the rest of her deceased husband's portfolio. Her kids are involved in the management, and when I say management, that is a term of art.
She owns the buildings. She does paperwork.
And they are some of the most poorly managed buildings in the city of Toronto.
And the combination of landlord tenant law and the primacy of private property over the rights of tenants or anybody to live in dignity have created a situation where her buildings have been allowed to fester for decades.
500 Dawes was the worst because it was the one that she owned longest.
Once upon a time it was a luxury building. It has beautifully big size, beautifully large units. It's in a nice setting, there's a school nearby, there's a park out front, and it has been allowed to molder to the point that the parking garage is not allowed to be used because it's in danger of crumbling. The building sits on top of the parking garage, so we can guess what's.
Matthew Remski: Oh, geez. So it's actually condemned, the parking garages. So does that mean that people who rented apartments under lease agreements that had parking just don't have that anymore or
Jennie Worden: they don't have that anymore? They're all scrambling for the small number of formerly visitor parking spaces. And when I first met with the tenants, many of whom have disabilities, many of whom are older, that was a huge area of frustration and concern.
Matthew Remski: Exactly.
Jennie Worden: You know, it also meant double parking, meant that emergency vehicles couldn't get through. And there's 500 and some odd units in that building, which means that emergency vehicles are there with relative frequency.
The way that the landlord tenant laws enabled the kind of neglect is that Landlord Tenant Board and the Residential Tenancies Act is set up on the presumption that tenants have choice, that if your building is unsuitable, you can just take your tenancy dollars elsewhere.
Matthew Remski: You're a consumer of a product, you're
Jennie Worden: a consumer of housing.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Jennie Worden: Which is not how any of us, I think, view our homes.
Matthew Remski: No.
Jennie Worden: Right. We live in our homes, we build our communities in our homes. And economically speaking, there is a penalty to switching apartments. We don't have vacancy control built into the Residential Tenancies Act, we don't have it built into the Toronto bylaws. And by that I mean every time you move, the landlord can, every time a tenant leaves, the landlord can raise the rent. So anytime you move apartments, you're looking at a financial penalty.
And what that has meant is that tenants are trapped in these rent controlled apartments with a landlord who is downright abusive, who has allowed a criminal element to move in, who doesn't take an interest in fostering a healthy community, and who doesn't do interest. The most basic upkeep in the building.
If you've heard Mayor Chow talk about it. If you've heard any of the news reports, vermin pests were a problem. There are apartments that have significant mold because the apartment above caught fire. The sprinkler system initiated as it was supposed to, but then moisture got trapped in their walls. There are tenants with black goo coming out of their plumbing system. And it's horrific.
And what the Residential Tenancies Act says is that you as individual tenants can pursue individual remedies for these deficiencies at the Landlord Tenant Board, which will then issue an order for the landlord to comply, which she may or may not listen, may or may not obey. And then tenants have to go back. And they have to go back.
Matthew Remski: And each appointment takes months and months and months to secure, right?
Jennie Worden: Yeah, takes months and months and months to secure. When you get a hearing, you have to spend all day waiting for it to happen. And it's an online hearing.
Matthew Remski: And let me just note something which is that it would seem that the focus of landlord tenancy laws being about sort of individual consumerism, you can go somewhere else. That would actually encourage and accelerate the churn of moving and rent hikes. So in fact, there's a way in which landlord tenant law structure is exacerbating rental increases just through its own mechanism of supposed protection. Yeah.
Jennie Worden: Yes, I would agree. Now, that said, if I were a pro landlord tenant Residential Tenancies Act spokesperson, I would say, oh, but for apartments or buildings inhabited before 2018, you know, the rent is capped at the guideline increase per year, which keeps pace with, you know, keeps pace with the rate of inflation. And there is security of tenure in that landlords cannot just evict willy nilly or to raise the rent.
There has to be a reason, and there is a finite number of reasons that a landlord can evict.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Jennie Worden: That's what I would say if I were an RTA apologist. So for the sake of accuracy, let's say that and then let's talk about the reality, which is that, yes, a landlord can't just evict willy nilly, but they can issue an eviction for something as nebulous as interfering with the enjoyment of fellow tenants.
And then you have a hearing and then you have to determine whether their claim is correct. In the case of Carolyn Krebs, we had several instances where she, she said that she had issued a notice of a legal rent increase which the tenants had not paid and she was able to evict for inadequate payment of rent and the tenants certainly did not have any recollection of receiving those increases. And we're not sure how she is, how that documentation could possibly be accurate.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Jennie Worden: There are ways that unscrupulous landlords can make the system work for them. And it is always incumbent on the tenant to defend themselves from these claims in a system that is rigged against them.
Matthew Remski: So are you doing a lot of door knocking in the apartment buildings of Beaches-East York now? And what kind of successes are you starting to see from union organizing?
Jennie Worden: I am doing a lot of door knocking in the apartments in Beaches-East York, just across the street in Main Square. We've knocked on every door, and that's a lot of doors.
I started our door knocking with 2 Secord and 90 Eastdale, which are buildings owned by an REIT that are having new buildings placed by them. And of course, I'm up at 500 Dawes. I'll be heading into the north part of the ward a little bit later this week. But we're starting to see that tenants are interested in organizing. They're interested in coming to meetings. We had a tenant rights workshop here in the office just last week.
Matthew Remski: Just in the campaign office.
Jennie Worden: Yeah.
Matthew Remski: That's awesome.
Jennie Worden: We have this giant campaign office.
And what I have wanted for years is a space where I can do this organizing. Because when you go door to door in certain buildings in this ward and try to organize a lobby meeting, the landlord takes all the furniture out of the lobby.
Matthew Remski: Seriously.
Jennie Worden: Seriously.
Matthew Remski: They know you're coming, and they're like, let's put those couches into storage.
Jennie Worden: Let's clean the couches. These are the cleanest couches in the history of apartment furniture.
Matthew Remski: You know, when Chiara said that tenant union organizing is like labor was 100 years ago. A lot of this stuff reminds me of.
I mean, it's not too far off from Henry Ford sending in people to rough people up or.
I mean, there's a very sort of visceral conflict that is. It's quite material and palpable. Right. And I think that's what makes this entire sort of milieu, like, extremely potent.
Jennie Worden: So we are starting to have, again, we are starting to have successes here.
The buildings I'm in, they're not at the. Let's have a rent strike. And that's okay. We need to build some time and some capacity and understand the full situation.
But we're starting to have, you know, people coming out to workshops, starting to fill out their own notice, you know, their own forms for the Landlord Tenant Board, understand? And starting, most importantly, to talk to each other and talk about joint submissions and what we can do collectively, right. That if you have mold and your neighbor has mold, your building probably has mold, and you can file a joint application with the Landlord Tenant Board for that mold remediation and then you can support each other through that process. And then maybe only one of you has to attend a hearing, not all of you, but you can collect everybody's statement.
And that is what we're starting to see here in Beaches-East York. People are starting to understand that their landlords do not have the final say necessarily in their living conditions.
Matthew Remski: Aside from predatory landlords, Ward 19 also has like a racism problem. And it was recently inflamed by our former councillor, Brad Bradford, who recently teamed up with Doug Ford to I think really co-opt the Iran war news cycle. This is back in February by seeking an injunction against the gathering of Al-Quds Day with this lie that this is a decades old parade that they called a breeding ground for hate and antisemitism that glorifies violence and celebrates terrorism. This is not true.
He's talking about a family parade that many of our ward's 10,000 Muslims attend. So I'm just wondering what your thoughts are on that.
Jennie Worden: I think it's really rich of somebody who in 2022 touted loudly his connections with the Bangladeshi community, the community that I live in, and made a great deal about how well supported he was in that community, spoke to many of my neighbors at the mosque to then turn around and call a family celebration that a lot of our neighbors attend a breeding ground for antisemitism. If his connections with our community were that strong, wouldn't he have started with a conversation with the people in the community?
Wouldn't he have started with the spirit of inquiry and curiosity and a goal to bring people together rather than to sow division and discord and to capitalize on the news cycle in this way.
Matthew Remski: I do want to do a little bit more on this, you know, Bradford is an asshole part of our discussion because I think it's important to understand that here's a guy who's now running for mayor and he's doing so under a very particular purview, which is an alignment with Doug Ford on a bunch of things, including austerity measures.
And they're also aligned in their contempt for the unhoused and people with substance disabilities.
So what's the approach that you want to counter all of that with?
Jennie Worden: We had austerity in Toronto. We had 15 years of it under Rob Ford and under John Tory. And Brad was aligned with John Tory as well, like let's not forget that 98% vote record in alignment with John Tory. And those policies are what brought us to communities that are in crisis today. Right. We did not invest in supportive or affordable housing. We did not invest in shelter services.
We did not invest in transit. We did not invest in communities. And now that we see that our communities are experiencing the logical outcome of that lack of investment, which is that we have unhoused people being unhoused in public and on transit and in our parks and doing their best to exist in a world that has told them that there is no place for them.
Nothing, no austerity measure is going to fix that. The thing that fixes a housing crisis or a homelessness crisis is appropriate housing.
The thing that fixes an addiction crisis is not forced treatment, but it's making treatment readily available when people want it, so they don't have to wait because those windows of hope are really rare and precious and you need to move on them when they happen.
We have created a place where people are losing housing more quickly than we can build it. And then we're blaming them for doing whatever they can to survive that situation.
That's just messed up.
Matthew Remski: There's a grift cycle, a long term grift cycle involved and at play, I think, which is that you commit to pleasing property owners or people who feel like their tax bills are too high by engaging austerity measures for 15 years.
Services decline, you see the impacts of that. And then you can come in and play the savior and say, well, obviously we have to hire 1,000 more cops.
Jennie Worden: First of all, those cops don't exist, so there are a thousand imaginary cops.
Secondly, what are they going to do?
What are they going to do? Just arrest people for being homeless?
Okay, then we build some prisons. Then that costs more money because prisons are a hideously expensive way to house people and unjust and ineffective. But if we're just talking pragmatics, and we shouldn't, this is the least cost effective way to handle a housing crisis that I can imagine.
Or we could build affordable supportive housing.
We could hire housing workers. We could invest in treatment and support for people struggling with addiction, and we could provide the social programming that keeps people housed in our communities in the first place and just not have this problem which would be more compassionate, more effective, more cost effective and get us out of this horrible cycle of decline, panic, grift that we find ourselves in.
Matthew Remski: So you are not running against Brad Bradford because he gave up his seat, he's running for mayor. He's been running for mayor for, like, three years or whatever.
You are running against the name recognition of Nate Erskine-Smith. He's the former MP under Trudeau.
What did he accomplish with the Federal Liberals? And doesn't that give him the right to a lifetime seat in politics? Like, don't you just want to step aside for Nate?
Jennie Worden: As an early member of Women in Toronto Politics? Do you think I'm gonna step aside?
Matthew Remski: I don't.
Jennie Worden: For a dude.
Like, thousands of. Not thousands, but legions of WiTOPoli women would be right down my. On my back for that, and justifiably so. But Nate's. Look, Matthew, Nate's record is out there in public. It's on Wikipedia. It's the record of the Trudeau government, and I don't really want to talk about it, because your listeners can look it up. It's right out there. He's done some stuff, and it's public record, and he'll happily tell you about that himself.
But each office is a different office, and he's run for a couple of other offices, and voters have decided that he wasn't the guy for that. Yeah, and voters in Beaches-East York deserve the opportunity to have a really robust, thoughtful conversation about the kind of city that we want and the kind of solutions that we're proposing and who's most likely to deliver those.
Of course, getting elected once is not a guarantee that you get a lifetime in politics. Neither is, you know, 11 years of service, because every office is a different office.
And while Nate has spent a long time serving Beaches-East York in Ottawa, I have spent a long time serving my communities right here, working on tenant rights, working on road safety, working on building new schools right here in Beaches-East York from the outside.
And it's up to the voters to decide whether I deserve a chance to do that from the inside where I can actually be more effective.
Matthew Remski: What are you hearing most as you knock on doors?
Jennie Worden: What am I hearing most? People want to see change. They're really glad that Brad Bradford isn't running again.
I knew we weren't gonna talk about him, but they are really glad to see the end of him.
Matthew Remski: So that's when his name comes up.
Jennie Worden: Yeah, literally. They'll be like, it's not Brad Bradford, is it? And we'll say, no, he can't be your city councillor. And they'll say, oh, thank goodness.
What do you want to tell me about? And then what we talk about is the change that we've seen in the city. People are concerned about the changes that they've seen in the city, and that is the one through line from the Beaches up to the north end of East York that we've seen, is that people, things are getting harder. Things are feeling grimier. They're feeling harder. The visible signs of social deterioration are around us, and people want some kind of security and some understanding that help is on the way, that somebody's gonna listen to them, and that somebody understands their concerns and their fears and their insecurities.
Matthew Remski: So the description that you just gave, like, it is very poignant, and it is also vulnerable to a type of weaponization, because I might have. I know this is not where you're coming from, but when somebody like Joe Warmington walks down Danforth, where we've got all that construction going on, and there's an unhoused population there that's found a little bit of safety, and he's got his phone out, and his basic message is, look at how disgusting this place is. The city is collapsing under the weight of neglect, or something like that. And so you have the very difficult, and I would say opposite task of listening to and being sober about the effects of neoliberal austerity on the city and recognizing the suffering that people are in without turning it into a kind of reactionary populist sentiment that's like, well, we really just have to get the scrubbers out and bleach the entire city.
How do you cut that? How do you walk that line? Because, you know, as you were describing, what you're hearing, that can lead people in different directions. Right. Depending upon the resources that they have.
Jennie Worden: First of all, what Warmington doesn't do is they don't talk about how we get out of this.
Matthew Remski: Well, they also don't talk to the actual people, which is so disgusting.
Jennie Worden: They don't talk to the actual people.
Matthew Remski: Yeah, well, the people don't want to talk to them because they're harassing them. Yeah.
Jennie Worden: You know, and I walk down that stretch of Danforth every day.
Matthew Remski: Yeah.
Jennie Worden: The construction fencing has gone down, and so it feels a little less like a canyon of despair than it did. But when I talk to neighbors, we talk about what's changed in our community, and in particular in the past six months or to a year, because that's when that concentration of desperation and homelessness really happened, because that shelter has been there for a lot longer, and we talk about what we can do about it collectively.
And what I find, there are some people who just.
They're entrenched in a very punitive mindset, and they just want somebody to fix the problem, and they want the police to come in and do what they have been. You know, what the propaganda tells us police do all the time, which is just fix things. And some of those people, I have to say, you know, I hear your concerns, and I'm working with the local shelter to re-establish the community liaison committee so that we can talk about ways that we can work with our unhoused neighbors to find a better way of being together.
Some of them aren't going to listen, and that's okay for now. I don't have to convince everybody, but the people who are, who are asking questions, who are saying, what can we do? We can present a different vision of what we can do together. And those are the people who are open to listening. And if we say things like, look, the solution to having unhoused on the people on the street is giving them a place to be that isn't the street, they'll say, huh, yeah, maybe. And sometimes they want to know, but isn't that just rewarding people for being addicted?
Matthew Remski: Right?
Jennie Worden: And I can say, look,
Matthew Remski: But at least that conversation is starting to happen within the purview of like, oh, we have some kind of human empathy for what we're seeing. And that's what's missing, I think, from the reactionary view, or it can't coexist with a reactionary view which says, you know, our city's being infected by people who are, you know, subhuman and we need to get rid of them.
Jennie Worden: And sometimes we can talk about the circumstances that have created this particular micro crisis in the larger crisis. We can talk about the fact that there was an encampment quite nearby that our city councillor had, you know, removed recently, and people now congregate in a different place. Because the people didn't disappear. Of course, the place that they gathered was disrupted. We can talk about the fact that many of the people who are openly using drugs outside the shelter used to go to a safe consumption site, and now they don't have a place to be.
And so they're going to a place where they feel safe. And we can talk about how as a community, we can't make people disappear.
Matthew Remski: Well, when Bradford goes out on a limb or floats, the idea that maybe involuntary incarceration or involuntary commitment is the next step. He's out actually sort of testing that line that, yeah, maybe we can make people disappear.
Jennie Worden: I can see how that is a seductive idea to people who are feeling afraid and frustrated.
But we know, you and I know that it is, number one, terrifying and brutal and number two, expensive and ineffective.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Jennie Worden: You know, unless you're going to lock people up forever until they die. And like, maybe that's what he wants or maybe he hasn't thought this all the way through. I don't know. And I really actually don't interrogate his thinking that much.
Matthew Remski: Does Brad think things through? Hmm. Okay. The social relations of. We can talk with our community members about what we can do to press for the changes that we need that happens in this organizational plane that may or may not intersect with what you're gonna face in on council when you're dealing with strong mayor powers and the interventions of the provincial government. So in addition to everything that you've had to learn about, are you also having to get nerdy on bylaw stuff and the separation of powers on council and all of these things that are over my head.
But I know people have to really study up on to figure out, okay, well, is there going to be any avenue around Ford when he tries to do X?
Jennie Worden: Yeah. That is something that I have gotten far nerdier on than I really thought I was going to.
Matthew Remski: Yeah.
Jennie Worden: And you know, to reduce it to a very simple, you know, very simple equation there, ultimately, we need to vote those clowns out.
Matthew Remski: Yeah.
Jennie Worden: Thing number one, we need to vote those clowns out. Thing number two, and this is a much longer conversation with people who have much more learned political brains than me, we need a new way of organizing our higher order municipalities. They need the power to oversee their own affairs. And that probably, I hate to say it means opening up the constitution.
Matthew Remski: Yeah.
Jennie Worden: And that's where I tap out.
Matthew Remski: Maybe.
Or maybe there's a role for a choir in there. Right.
Jennie Worden: Maybe there's a role for a choir or a choral singer. Maybe there's a role for a symphony.
Maybe there's a role for some big complicated thinking where we bring together, you know, the threads of sound and the weight of history to solve a problem that was created for us by people who never anticipated that cities would get this big and this complicated and never anticipated that provinces would be this corrupt.
Matthew Remski: Finishing up.
I've interviewed Diana Chan McNally. I've talked with Chiara. Are you networking with other socialist minded candidates? And you know, is that what it's gonna take to face off against, you know, the constraints that you find when you, when you go to City Hall?
Jennie Worden: Yes and yes.
Back after I ran in 2022, Chiara reached out to me to talk with me about how it had gone and start a somewhat regular gathering of people who had done well.
Matthew Remski: Oh, that's great.
Jennie Worden: Socialist minded candidates. We called ourselves the Best Losers.
Matthew Remski: That's so cool.
Jennie Worden: It really was. It really is. And Chiara, that should be a cafe.
The Best Losers Cafe.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Jennie Worden: I tend to think of.
I have been networking a lot with what I call the progressive constellation.
There are some amazing candidates, people like Chiara, people like Diana Chan McNally, people like Diana Yoon, whose visions of the future are optimistic, expansive and grounded in our collective struggle and our collective liberation.
And I am really, really excited to keep working with them in whatever capacity we can, because I think what we need are people who really embrace the challenge of imagining the beautiful tomorrow and then building it together with whoever we find who wants to swing a hammer, lift a brick or raise their voice in song.
Matthew Remski: Okay, so as of recording anyway, it's. I think it's 27 days until we vote October 26th. I hope that you are able to sleep a few hours between now and then.
I hope that you have a great time knocking on doors and, you know, I think that whatever happens, what I love about talking to, you know, people like you, doing the work that you do, is that whatever happens, you're going to continue being in service to your community afterwards and like.
And I can't think of another way of spending one's life. So I'm just really happy to interview you and get to know you a little bit. And I wish you all the luck in the world.
Jennie Worden: Thank you so much. Yep, I sure have a list for after the election, one way or another. Thank you, Matthew.
Matthew Remski: Thank you, Jennie.
Thanks for listening, everybody. Toronto, October 26th. Get out and vote socialist. And wherever you are, help out in local campaigns. It's a lot of fun. It is, you know, engaging.
It'll make you feel great.
And remember that on Patreon. Right now I've got that rundown on attacks against Avi Lewis. I think it's a crucial issue because basically attacking critics of Israel genocide and neocolonial brutality as antisemitic is becoming the same thing as attacking the political alternative to capitalism and imperialism. During this last shrinking moment in which we have the opportunity to bring the planet back from the brink. In the US, the accusation of antisemitism is used against the DSA by the democratic elite. It's being used against Zack Polanski in the UK.
I think we really have to understand this and not be afraid of it, take care of each other.
