Illustration by Dave Donald

In some circles these days, talking about reading is tantamount to announcing you have leprosy. Once, I was greeted by plaintive laments and guilty, apologetic admissions: I wish I had time to read or I honestly can’t remember the last time I read a book. Now, my mentions of books are more often met by defensive, self-affirming declarations: Who in the world has time to read! These rhetorical questions seem to imply a reader’s contribution to society decreases with every page he or she turns. Increasingly, it feels like the fact of taking the time to read a book is no longer coveted, it’s under attack.

Imagine, then, the kind of vitriol the act of rereading might inspire. To take the time not only to read a book once, but to pick it up a second time and read the exact same pages over again. Should you even admit to something like that in public? What possible argument could be made for re-reading a book when so many more out there yearn to be read? Few things—creating a brand new Friendster page, maybe, or making your own wallpaper—seem less productive.

Yet in the tireless thrust forward, there have recently been a few voices earnestly—though not unapologetically—praising the act of re-reading. The scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks recently published an entire book about rereading called On Rereading, in which she captures the pleasure of rereading by she revisiting everything from children’s tales to Jane Austen and Doris Lessing. In an essay on the literary website The Millions, Lisa Levy explored the different reasons people have for returning to familiar books. Contributors to the Rereading column in the Guardian and its now-defunct sibling in The American Scholar are well-versed in rereading as an act of criticism and memoir, the latter a genre that continues to experience a popularity breakaway right now.

I got to thinking about the strangeness of rereading while reading (for the first time) Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, a novella driven wholly by the unreliability and selectiveness of memory in which rereading plays a central role. In many ways, the fallibility of memory is precisely what makes rereading books so viscerally pleasurable. At first glance, rereading is revisiting a familiar and comforting conversation. But it is so much more than that. Rereading is time-travel, putting the pieces of a conversation with a former self back together in a different yet familiar context. People talk about books being staid, immutable artifacts, but they are nothing of the sort.

I recently reread Michael Redhill’s Martin Sloane, a graceful novel about a love affair between a self-destructive older artist and a younger woman that I spent a long and intimate afternoon with a few years ago, shortly after the break-up of a relationship. I’ve carried the story and its rhythms with me ever since, and I decided to go back to the novel to find those comforts again. But what I discovered on rereading was that I was a liar. While the tone was as I remembered, the scenes I loved were not scenes in the book. I had made them up. I’d also taken the liberty of jettisoning characters, as well as most of the plot. For years I have felt an affinity with something that never existed. But somehow, finding that out didn’t make it any less real. The book I remember and the book I reread exist separately in my imagination now, linked by a liminal space.

The inaugural issue of the Edmonton-based literary journal Eighteen Bridges featured an essay on rereading by American novelist Richard Ford in which he described the act as “what we originally meant by reading—an achieved intimacy  …  the chance of glimpsing (but not quite possessing) the heart of something grand and beautiful we might’ve believed we already knew well enough.” That something grand is the story, of course, and all of its implications, but also the knowledge of ourselves or, more aptly, the knowledge that we cannot know ourselves at all.

That’s maybe a bit harsh. Perhaps William Hazlitt, incorrigible rereader, had it right. In his essay “On Reading Old Books,” he explains that he values re-reading both for the comfort of knowing what to expect and for “the pleasures of [having] memory added” to the experience. For Hazlitt, rereading was less about the act of reading, and more about the act of remembering, of exercising the faculty of memory through the lens of the text.

Maybe the popularity of the personal memoir and the ease with which e-readers allow us to search out favourite passages or chapters will lead to a more established subgenre of rereading memoirs. Maybe rereading book clubs will become a trend. Maybe our culture’s obsession with confession could be the thing to get people talking about reading again.

THE INVESTIGATION: Bioplastics present a number of complex challenges. “There is a risk that a rather complicated issue is being oversimplified,” says Scott McDougall, president and CEO of TerraChoice, an Ottawa-based environmental marketing and consulting agency. In 2010 the company released a report called The Sins of Greenwashing: Home and Family Edition. McDougall says many bioplastics commit at least two of the seven sins.

First, the sin of the hidden trade-off: suggesting a product is green based on one set of attributes, while ignoring its wider—and possibly negative—effects. Take the ongoing “food vs. fuel” debate. Critics argue that bioplastics are contributing to the global food crisis by taking over large areas of land previously used to grow crops for food—raising the question of whether their potential damage outweighs their potential benefit.

Then, there’s the end-of-life issue. Many people assume a “biodegradable” product will break down no matter where it ends up. This is known as the sin of vagueness: a claim so poorly defined or so broad that its real meaning is likely to be misunderstood. In truth, most biodegradable plastics won’t decompose in landfills because the artificial environment lacks the light, water and air required for the decay process to begin. Even worse, bioplastics can contaminate the recycling stream if mixed with other recycled plastic.

Biodegradable plastic that carries the “Compostable Label” created by the New York City-based not-for-profit Biodegradable Products Institute are the exception. The logo identifies products that will perform satisfactorily in well-managed municipal and commercial facilities; home composts don’t generate the high temperatures needed for proper biodegradation.

THE VERDICT: Bioplastic packaging may seem like a magic solution, but it’s still an imperfect technology. While the demand for renewable materials, such as PLA, is a move in the right direction, these products can’t make a real difference until waste management systems are in place to support them. If you really want to reduce your carbon footprint, forget the plastic and try a reusable container instead.

Orange shows oil and gas licences granted under the New Brunswick government. Illustration by Dave Donald

Yes, natural gas development is good for New Brunswick’s flagging economy

When the New Brunswick government granted Southwestern Energy its first natural gas exploration permit in March 2010 hundreds of angry citizens set up blockades and held rallies on the lawn of the Legislative Assembly. Two years later, the debate is just as explosive. In fact, a survey released in December by Corporate Research Associates shows a province in complete divide. Of the 400 New Brunswickers surveyed, 45 per cent are in favour of natural gas exploration, and 45 per cent are opposed. The remaining 10 per cent are not sure what the government should do.

The New Brunswick government, meanwhile, continues to heavily support the industry. There are already 71 oil and natural gas agreements in place, spread between nine companies who pay rental fees totalling more than $1 million annually for their piece of the more than 1.4 million hectares allocated for exploration. The government predicts annual royalties will reach $225 million once the wells are fully functional – and the province’s proximity to the United States suggests promise for exportation. All that, it argues, will help pay for numerous social programs and to create new jobs in side industries from construction to accounting—a persuasive argument considering the December 2011 unemployment rate of 9.4 percent.

No, we need to know more about what fracking can do to the environment

In December, the New Brunswick government voted to move forward with “responsible” and regulated development of natural gas. It did little to dampen the furor. That same month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a high-profile report that found hydraulic fracking had severely contaminated water at an Encana company site in Wyoming. While the Calgary-based natural gas giant has angrily disputed the findings, the study cast even deeper doubt on whether the industry was being properly regulated—or honest about fracking’s potential to damage the environment.

Currently, about five per cent of natural gas wells in Alberta are leaking—and there is potential that number could grow to 15 percent in the coming years. This has convinced many anti-fracking advocates that more non-industry research is vital before the province reaches a full boom. As program coordinator for the Shale Gas Alert Campaign, Stephanie Merrill educates New Brunswickers about the industry’s dangers. There are guaranteed negative effects, she says, such as rural industrialization and threatened water sustainability. But there are also risks: contamination of drinking and ground water,  respiratory illness—it’s hard to say how far the list goes on without the right research. “We really need to know a lot more,” says Merrill. “We’re not willing … to be the guinea pigs for this experiment.”

Photo by Jill Kitchener

Imagine 60,000 Band-Aids stuck together in small wagon-wheel patterns, draped over a mannequin in an art gallery. Now, imagine a person wearing this cloak in the middle of a downtown street, who if feeling confrontational, sticks Band-Aids on passersby.

Hamilton-based artist Andrew McPhail’s installation and performance all my little failures explores obsession, humour and disease. Most recently presented at the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto, his Band-Aid cloak was included as part of Veiled, a group show that examined the act of covering the body.

“In a gallery there’s a level of distancing, you know how you are supposed to respond,” says McPhail. “When you are confronted on the street wearing it, you don’t have any context for it. I get a lot of very different kinds of reactions.”

McPhail says strangers often mistake him for a woman because of his diminutive height, but his hairy legs draw suspicion. “I don’t speak when I am wearing it. No voice cues,” he says. “This unbalances people.”

For the past four years, McPhail has purchased all his Band-Aids at the local drugstore. Cashiers rarely question why he requires so many peel-and-stick patches; they just keep replenishing stock. “Band-Aids are about healing and also covering up, covering the wound,” he says. “Covering it ineffectively. People use ‘Band-Aid solution’ for the short term, for a solution that doesn’t really solve anything.”

McPhail’s obsessive assemblage of first-aid staples creates an almost flesh-like veil. Part manifestation, part conversation, all of my little failures is also a point of entry into the artist’s struggle with HIV, which he’s been living with since 1993.

“It’s so overwhelmingly sad that it’s funny, I thought,” he says. “Without seeing the piece in action it’s harder. Just seeing it as an artifact it’s hard to get the weird humour of it.”

Textile Museum of Canada curator Sarah Quinton views the piece as a balance of humours, straddling both the nature of veiling and unveiling.

“The flesh-like physicality of the Band-Aids suggests matters of healing, touch, protection and futility,” says Quinton. “The labour-intensive patchwork of this veil or shroud, consumed with precious and limited time, forms a protective space for the wearer. The lacy perforations, however, render it permeable to the outside world, displaying the impossibility of separating public and private realities.”

When he’s not stringing Band-Aids together, McPhail’s working on Cry Baby, a piece made of over 2,000 hand-stitched Kleenex, inspired by when he was on a flight and the passenger beside him died of a heart attack. McPhail folded an airplane out of snot-rags he wet with artificial tears to suspend over a pile of fluffy tissues on the gallery floor.

“It’s about the overwhelming nature of grief,” he says. “There is the flip side to dealing with really overwhelming emotions without blame or self-shame, they are so hard to face. If it takes 60,000 Band-Aids, I’ll keep it together.”

Illustration by Nick Craine

For the past three years urban gardener and author (City Farmer: Adventures in Urban Food Growing) Lorraine Johnson has kept chickens in her Toronto west-end backyard. As Toronto considers ending its current ban on urban fowl, Johnson, 51, serves up her reasons for overturning the bylaw.

THIS: What inspired you to get chickens?

LJ: I had been visiting my sister in Australia and I encountered a lot of people in the city who had chickens. It seemed normal. Nobody commented on it. It occurred to me that I wanted chickens too, for the eggs. The fact it was illegal in Toronto seemed (she pauses for a moment) surmountable.

THIS: Where did you get them?

LJ: I got three from a farmer outside the city. She has Heritage breeds, which means they aren’t raised commercially very much. It’s small-scale, usually organic folks, who are keeping these breeds going.

THIS: What do they cost?

LJ: I have a feeling—and I’m not referring to my farmer friend—that a lot of farmers who live in the country are sort of scratching their heads at the ridiculous amount of money urban chicken keepers are willing to pay. Because you can go to a farm coop or auction and get a chick for 10 or 25 cents. I paid $10 to $25 [each] for Heritage hens that were just at the point of laying eggs.

THIS: How many eggs do they lay?

LJ: From three chickens I get roughly 18 eggs a week. That kind of production is when the hens are in their prime. It’s pretty well that much from spring to fall. The production lowers in response to light levels. Some people put lights in their coops but I don’t.

THIS: What do the eggs taste like?

LJ: It’s hard to describe. Because the chickens are eating worms and lots of greenery and are running around, their yolks are a brilliant, brilliant orange and the whites are firmer. For me, it’s also that I know I’m getting the freshest, most
delicious, organic eggs that are humanely raised. These chickens have a great life. I have no kind of doubts about their happiness.

THIS: Are they outside 24/7?

LJ: Yeah, in something called an eglu. It’s made by a UK-based company called Omlet. There are so many bad puns in the chicken world; it’s so tempting.

THIS: The eglus are not cheap.

LJ: It cost me about $600 plus $80 duty when I brought it into Canada from Buffalo, where I had picked it up. Again, I think it makes any farmers living in the country shake their heads. They would just build one themselves.

THIS: The hens are OK in the winter?

LJ: It’s not a problem. I put bubble wrap around the coop and bought a reptile light for inside but I never even had to use it.

THIS: How do your neighbours react?

LJ: I’m lucky in that the two places I’ve lived I’ve had great neighbours who love the eggs.

THIS: So you bribe them.

LJ: Totally.

THIS: But you have been busted.

LJ: It’s quite ironic because it was the day I was moving [about a year and a half ago, to my present address]. I wasn’t ratted out, which is how most bylaw infractions are triggered. No one complained. It was likely because a chapter in my book dealing with chickens had been excerpted in The Star, and there was an article about me and a picture of the chickens in the Globe. So I think it was someone within enforcement saying I’ve been too brazen about it.

THIS: What happened?

LJ: I was given 30 days to get them out of the city. I was going away for a while soon after I moved so let’s just say they went on a vacation and when I came back I got more chickens.

THIS: Why is it illegal in Toronto? It’s not in many other places.

LJ: It’s not in Brampton, Niagara Falls, Vancouver. Or in almost any major US city. I think it goes back to the ’80s when there were concerns about the health of chickens in Kensington Market. To deal with the problem the city just banned all of them.

THIS: But that might change?

LJ: Yes. There’s a motion going before the Licensing and Standards Committee that, if passed, would have city staff write a report on how Toronto could accommodate backyard chickens. If that report is written then it would likely go before council for debate.

THIS: What if the bylaw isn’t changed?

LJ: That would be sad and tragic. A group of us are working to make sure that doesn’t happen. We’ve invited politicians and bureaucrats to come and visit us to see what it’s like for themselves. So far I’ve had senior public health and animal services people come and I’ve met with four politicians.

THIS: The concern, I guess, is noise, smell, things like that.

LJ: But they are misconceptions! They’re quieter than dogs. You don’t need a rooster, so that problem isn’t there. And, yes, if you have 5,000 chickens in a commercial building it will smell. But not three or four in your yard. The feces decompose quickly. And as long as you take care of the coop, as you need to take care of any pet, there’s no problem with smell at all.

THIS: Will you continue to have chickens no matter what?

LJ: Yes.

THIS: You’ll be a scofflaw?

LJ: Yes, me and many, many others, from all walks of life and backgrounds and motivations [for having chickens]. There is no stereotypical person.

THIS: How many of you are there?

LJ: No one is able to estimate accurately because it’s such a hidden activity. But you don’t have to scratch very deep to find a chicken in the city.

In January 2012, Toronto’s Licensing and Standards Committee voted to indefinitely defer the motion to commission a report on the feasibility of legalizing backyard chickens.

Organic regulations give value to everything from animal welfare, soil systems, and biodiversity to watersheds and air quality—concepts of sustainability focused almost exclusively on the physical environment. Farms go to extreme lengths to close the gap between farmer and eater: consumers are invited to open farm days for tours, food is meticulously labeled and sourced, and farm owners are no longer faceless, appearing on websites, packaging and TV commercials. In all this effort to exist outside conventional food practices and eat guilt-free, however, there is one link in the food chain consumers know shockingly little about: the migrant worker producing all this wonderful food.

The myth of the family run, locally staffed farm has somehow remained despite fundamental changes to both the scale and style of organic agricultural production in Canada. While many farms are still family owned and operated, the labour usage line is blurring between large-scale organics and conventional agriculture. Some of the country’s largest organic farm operations already employ migrant labourers—and many farmers and workers believe migrant labour will become necessary to churn out organic food at a production scale that meets growing consumer demand and allows farm owners to make a profit.

Short of visiting every organic farm in Canada, there is currently no way of knowing how many migrant workers are on organic farms, or how they’re all treated. Migrant labour employment numbers for organic farms are undocumented—partially because labour isn’t regulated under organic certification standards. The best that can be said of organic farms is that some migrant workers have good working conditions and relations with their employers, and many do not. Mistreatment ranges from discrimination, to the inability to form unions, poor safety training, and, in some cases, negligence so extreme it results in death. With little recourse for even the most severe violations, bad behaviour is often ignored, if not actively covered up. If such bungles are discussed at all, the conversation is often automatically centered  on conventional agriculture—and many proponents of organic farming are happy to remain silent.

Farming in Canada is in a crisis. A 2011 brief released by the National Farmers Union (NFU), one of the major lobbying organizations for farmers in Canada, lays out a perfect storm of social, cultural and political factors. The trend across Canada, is towards larger farms, operated by an aging, farmer-operator (2011 statistics Canada pegs the average at 51). At the same time, profit margins have been narrowing for farmers across Canada–and many farmers are under the pressure to scale up and take on more debt. While the gross revenue, or total amount a farm takes in a year, has increased the net income, the amount the farmer realizes as profit, has decreased. This can be partially explained by the instability of farm product prices versus stable (and increasing) farm expenses like seeds, machinery, and labour. As Canadian farming has become increasingly competitive and financially focused, there is a growing demand for reliable, available and affordable farm labour—especially as more rural Canadians move to cities.

Organic farms are no exception. In fact, thanks to its growing popularity and labour-intensive production process–workers can’t use chemicals to spray weeds and must pick out weeds by hand–organic farming often needs more human power than conventional farming. Good agricultural workers that won’t skip town to ditch farm life are a must. “We need a reliable source of labour. Canadian labour is unreliable,” say Colleen Ross, NFU vice president and co-owner of Waratah Downs, an organic farm located in the Ottawa area, “We’ve also had people flake out on us during the middle of the season. We really can’t have [that] as an organic production farm.” Short season fruit and vegetable crops, in other words, do not stop or slow down for the whims of a worker.

The first government-initiated response to the growing demand for farm labour came in 1966 with the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). SAWP was originally a bilateral (country to country) agreement with Jamaica to employ workers on up to eight month contracts to work for a single farm. The program is still under the federal provision of Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC) and has expanded to include new participant countries, most notably Mexico. The HRSDC has also expanded the use of migrant farm labour through the Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP), which is designed to fill in the gaps of SAWP by including more participant countries and requiring less education, training, and monetary investment, making the TFWP a more flexible labour source for farmer-owners.

A farmer-owner looking for SAWP participants applies through the HRSDC, which ensures that the farmer tried to use local labour before using SAWP. Once approved by the HRSDC, the provincial government regulates the working, living and processing of foreign workers to Canada. In Ontario, this is through a third party organization called Foreign Agricultural Resource Management Services (FARMS), which acts on behalf of the employers. FARMS works with foreign recruiters, based in host countries to bring migrant labourers to Canada as well as coordinate transfers and terminations during their contract periods.

Originally conceived as a Band-Aid solution to shortages in farm labour, the migrant labour pool in Canada has grown to over 28,000 migrant workers through SAWP and TFWP across Canada. Estimates for Ontario, the largest participant, are roughly 18,000 with the majority, half of which hail from Mexico. Most workers are employed at fruit, vegetable and tobacco farms that range in size from small family run teams of four employees to large multi-million dollar operations employing more then one hundred migrant labourers. As Rachel Currie, a migrant labourer advocate and researcher with Wilfred Laurier University points out: “There is no typical farm that employs migrant labour.” SAWP and TFWP participants are responsible for growing food throughout Canada, from large-scale mono-crop conventional farms to small- to mid-scale organic vegetable farms.

Organic and alternative food systems are presented and defined as separate from conventional agriculture. Organic farming’s biggest goal—to push Canada’s food system toward a more sustainable framework— is commendable. So are its principles of equity and justice. Unfortunately, these things are exactly what makes the silence surrounding farm labour and migrant workers most troubling. As it stands, SWAP has remained largely unchanged since 1966. Talking with agricultural workers, migrant labourer rights advocates and support workers across Ontario, the consensus is that the system is broken, allowing for stunning human rights violations.

Under organic production methods, there’s a fundamental need for labouring bodies—the usual figure cited is one person per acre. Small to mid-sized organic vegetable farms often use a combination of volunteers, interns, apprentices, local labour and on-farm help. With organic farm expansion and increased demand there’s now a more pressure for labour then ever before. With the overall farm labour shortage in Canada, and declining rural population, more and more farmers are turning to migrant labour, including organic ones.  While Ross does not currently use migrant labour, she says she would definitely consider it–and makes no apologies for saying so. “We are a production farm. We need to be able to scale up and make money in order to have a life and raise a family,” she says, “Migrant labour is not hands down bad—it doesn’t have to be that way.”

Ross has hit on a growing split in the organic farming community. Some farmers see the migrant labour system as flawed and not one they would even consider participating in—opting to meet their growing production goals with apprenticeship programs that pay lower wages in exchange for housing and learning experience. Other farmers, like Ross, are willing to employ SWAP and TFWP participants and feel, as Ross puts it, that they should not be judged harshly for it. She thinks of it this way: She would rather migrant labourers work with good quality organic farms than on a conventional farm with chemicals. “People working on the land is one of the oldest parts of human history,” says Ross, “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with your career being farm work.”

Unfortunately, there is something wrong with the way migrant labour is used in much of Canada’s organic agricultural sector. There are a number of large scale systemic and structural issues embedded in seasonal migrant labour that perpetuate an unbalanced and inequitable labour system. To start with, workers have no way to obtain status in Canada. Participants of both migrant programs pay into the Canadian pension plan, employment insurance and may rack up years of living experience in Canada. However, because workers are categorized as ‘unskilled labour’ by the federal government, and required to return to their home country at the end of their contracts, they cannot gain status in Canada.

This lack of recognized status is often (but not always) compounded by the social exclusion many labourers experience in Canada. Selena Zhang who worked on an asparagus farm alongside a number of migrant labourers in Leamington, Ontario during 2009. In Leamington, the population is about 35,000, with roughly 5,000 – 6,000 migrant workers in town each year. This makes for a big racial divide, says Zhang. Many locals won’t go to banks or grocery stores on Fridays, when the thousands of migrant workers had their days off and travelled to town. “Most Canadians, weren’t very accepting,” says Zhang, “[Workers] often get called names and aren’t welcomed in certain areas.” This tense dynamic is unlikely to change just because the workers are coming from an organic farm.

Under Ontario law, agricultural workers are not allowed to unionize or collectively bargain. In late 2010, the United Nation’s International Labour Organization (ILO) criticized Ontario’s Agricultural Employees Act, 2002 which makes collectively bargaining illegal for agricultural workers. The ILO said both Ontario and Canada as a whole were guilty of a discriminatory attack on human rights. Its comments reinforced a 2008 Ontario Court of Appeal ruling that found the Act in violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That ruling was overturned in April 2011 by the Supreme Court of Canada. Questions on the usefulness of unions for migrant labourers aside, not having a unified voice makes it difficult for labourers to advocate for their rights and communicate within their home countries and in Canada. “Ontario must end its blatant abuse of the rights of the workers who grow and harvest our food,” said Wayne Hanley, president of Canada’s United Food Commercial Workers Union, at the time, “These are farm workers, not farm animals, and people have human rights.”

Perhaps the most glaring gap, however, is the lack of protection for migrant labourers at their work places. It was not until 2006 that agricultural work was incorporated under the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA), and the industry standards are still vague. In Alberta agricultural work is still not under OSHA. The result is little to no training, protocol, or safety precautions for workers who are often using equipment and chemicals that are dangerous and toxic. When provided, instructions and training are often inappropriate as most workers do not speak or read English. One worker in Leamington, who was not trained properly on using a power-washer accidentally blew a dime-sized hole in his leg. When he went to get health services, his employer had him sent back to Mexico.

Being sent back, or the practice of repatriation, is all too common for SAWP and TFWP participants. Without providing reason or excuse, an employer can send a labourer back to their home country, terminating their contract immediately. Repatriation leaves the workers in a legal grey area as they are denied pursuing their case under federal or provincial law, as workers are not considered permanent residents. They are often sent home fast, too, leaving no way for many activist to contact them in time to intervene on the worker’s behalf. Even if never used, the stories and threat of being ‘sent back’ hangs over the work environment on many farms; the attitude is work hard, do not rock the boat and you can stay.

With no set standards, the resulting accidents and incidents only become visible in the courts. Take the death of two Jamaican workers at Filsinger’s Organic Food and Orchards in Ayton Ontario. Paul Roach, 44, and Ralston White, 36, suffered from environmental asphyxiation (fumes) trying to fix a vinegar tank pump in September 2010. This particular case was investigated by the Ontario Ministry of Labour, who eventually laid multiple charges on the farm’s three owners and a supervisor, including failure to provide training, equipment, and a rescue plan for working in a dangerous, confined space. The day before the case was supposed to go to trial this January, the Crown agreed to drop all but one charge. The farm supervisor, stuck with the last charge, pleaded guilty and was fined $22,500 for not preventing the workers from entering the vinegar tank where they became trapped and eventually died.

The case is one of the first ever related to migrant labour brought before the Labour Ministry and the $22,500 fine is the lowest ever given. Since the charges were dropped, the case will not be subject to a full criminal investigation, leaving many details surrounding the conditions Roach and White worked under unknown and even more questions about what precautions and training were provided to the workers to ensure their safety. It’s tough to believe much was: According to reports, the workers weren’t removed from the vats until they’d already lost vital signs–and even though they were revived, both died at the hospital. This case is also one of the first migrant labour legal actions taken against an organic farm, forcing organic farming to acknowledge its position in the nation-wide migrant farm labour system.

What this case also indicates is that the working conditions and culture of silence on many Canadian farms will continue without change. The low fine and the lack of policy or law change for the agricultural industry suggests that the crown is willing to let the program stay as it stands: as a piecemeal and reactionary system that hopes to do better next time. At the time of the decision Tzazna Miranda Leal, an organizer with Justicia for Migrant Workers, told the Toronto Star: “This decision implies that employers have carte blanche to engage in health and safety violations, and that the legal mechanisms meant to protect workers in fact shield employers from any form of accountability for deaths of their employees.”

The silence and invisibility of migrant labourers is partially due to the power imbalance in the way the program is set out and their precarious citizenship and employment status. “It’s vulnerable for any of the stakeholders to speak up,” says Currie, pointing to farmers, workers, host countries, and the Canadian government, “There’s a big question mark as to who defines the rules of the program. The whole [Seasonal Agricultural Workers] program is enshrined in fear. Everyone has such a big stake.”

It’s debatable, however, how much the different stakeholders have their hands tied—especially when the Canadian government has only moved to protect migrant labourers in the face of legal action. The silence and lack of accountability perpetuates a broken, unmonitored system—especially considering workers’ legal and social vulnerability. Many have not been given any tools to form a voice and are treated as if they used to handling tough, post-plantation work climates. “Migrant labourers are indentured. They are tied to one employer and one site,” says Chris Ramsaroop from Justicia for Migrant Workers, “They have no labour or social mobility.”

Using migrant labour should not be immediately viewed as a black spot on a farm’s record. While SAWP and TFWP are fundamentally flawed and implicated in problematic global structures, the programs have the potential to benefit all of the stakeholders—if they’re used with better protection for workers. For organics, the contradiction lies in not addressing migrant labour rights and farm labour issues, while concurrently claiming sustainability and justice as food system virtues. Part of the silence, can be explained by the fairly recent boom: Canadian labour—whether through volunteer and intern programs or the local rural population—can no longer meet demands.

As for the rest? Ramsaroop admits there haven’t been many attempts to work with food justice and local food organizations, but adds that there is potential. “A lot of it is about challenging peoples assumptions,” he says, “and highlighting why it’s important to talk about migrant workers in the context of local food.” Current attitudes aren’t enough to bring about real change to the Canadian food system. By not acknowledging the use of migrant labour in producing food, organic and alternative agriculture advocates are arguably in complicit agreement with the exploitative status quo maintenance of SAWP and TFWP.

“There needs to be rules and regulations that ensure that people are being treated with dignity and respect,” says Ross. Groups and stakeholders in relative positions of power, like the Canadian Organic Growers and more localized groups like the Toronto Food Policy Council, need to take an active stance. A lack of knowledge or ignorance is only excusable to a point. Propping up a localized food system with a broken, exploitative and imbalanced labour system is simply not sustainable, nor is it just.

B.C. Environmental iconoclast Tzeporah Berman. Photo by Dina Goldstein

Canadians who care about climate change have good reason to be depressed about our history of climate change politics, which goes something like this: Jean Chrétien promises a lot, does little; Paul Martin promises more, does a bit, but not much; Stephen Harper promises nothing, and delivers.

What explains this pattern? The answer has a lot to do with a woman from Vancouver named Tzeporah Berman, and her spectacular failure to make a good idea succeed.

Tzeporah Berman is probably Canada’s third most famous environmentalist, trailing only grandfatherly CBC host David Suzuki and Green Party leader Elizabeth May. She made her name in the early 1990s during the Clayoquot Sound anti-logging protests in British Columbia. She was such an effective organizer and gadfly that the then Premier branded her “an enemy of the state.” She was instrumental in convincing 86 per cent of Canadians that logging in Clayoquot should be stopped. An irritated Crown prosecutor charged her with 857 counts of criminal aiding and abetting (all dismissed by a judge shortly thereafter). After a few years working for Greenpeace in Europe, Berman returned to B.C. to found ForestEthics, a group committed to pressuring businesses to reduce their impact on forests by alerting consumers to dubious corporate supply chains. For example, in 2005, she became appalled by the environmental impact of millions of Victoria’s Secret catalogues made from rare boreal forests—tiny pieces of lacy underwear printed on huge numbers of dead trees. Berman launched a campaign called Victoria’s Dirty Secret with a full page ad in the New York Times featuring a scantily clad blonde bombshell toting a chainsaw. Berman emerged, as usual, with concessions from a contrite corporate giant.

An epiphany in late 2007 convinced Berman to switch her focus from forestry to climate change. “I realized fighting for forests without taking on climate change was like repainting the Titanic after hitting the iceberg,” she said. Loggers were less of a threat to Canadian trees than rising temperatures and a resultant onslaught of ravenous pine beetles.

Berman watched Canada’s 2008 federal election in horror. Liberal leader Stéphane Dion proposed a carbon tax, the most fervent wish of climate change activists. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives savaged the “Green Shift” plan, and Dion’s salesmanship flopped. When Dion talked policy, Harper talked price. Dion reassured voters the plan was “revenue neutral,” discouraged pollution, gave tax breaks to low-income families, and so on, in an incomprehensible wonkish muddle. Harper said: Liberals want to tax everything, “screw everybody,” and raise gas prices. Harper won the debate.

While Dion flailed, the champions of environmentalism stood on the sidelines. Some of the larger non-governmental organizations issued press releases to tepidly commend the Green Shift platform, but nothing more. Said a former senior advisor to Dion: “We certainly expected more from environmentalists.”

Berman imagined an alternate future. Her diagnosis was simple: environmentalists were failing to organize themselves in a politically effective way. “We have never had a politically relevant infrastructure,” she says. “We need people who are trained as organizers, with coordinators in critical ridings. We need money for polling and focus groups. And we need volunteers trained to do electoral gruntwork.”

Canadians consistently prioritize climate change in poll after poll, but this concern has not been harvested and channeled in the right way and in the right electoral ridings to impact elections. Environmentalists have succeeded in raising awareness, but failed at changing votes. The best-resourced organizations spend much of their time and resources researching and writing policy reports, advising conscientious citizens on how to green their lifestyles, and jockeying for visibility in major news outlets. They are non-partisan, and don’t address Canadians as voters—which is why they are ineffective at affecting elections, and therefore politicians. So Berman decided to create a climate lobby with enough electoral muscle to force politicians to listen.

Her plan was simple but ambitious: pick 40 swing ridings with small margins of victory in the most recent federal election, and doggedly target them with polling, volunteers and advertising. Berman wanted a whole new political infrastructure to mobilize Canadians around climate change, built to reward green politicians and punish dirty ones. Organizers would be trained to make calls, knock on doors, produce intelligible materials and learn to talk to such constituencies as the God-fearing Tim Hortons-drinking suburban soccer moms.

In the United States, this kind of on-the-ground in-your face organizing is a proven model, for good (the League of Conservation Voters) and ill (the National Rifle Association).

Berman also drew lessons from Australia’s 2007 election, in which an environmental group called the Climate Institute raised gobs of money to help defeat the incumbent, carbon-loving John Howard. To do this, they sponsored the political campaign of a grade 4 student, Jack Simmons, who took some time off school to run for Prime Minister. He coiffed his hair just so, donned his first suit, filmed some advertisements, and hit the road to meet voters. His novelty—and the free ice cream he gave out everywhere he went—attracted voters and media alike. Of course, he couldn’t get his name on the official ballot, or even vote himself. But it didn’t matter much, because he was the perfect spokesman for climate change politics, a vehicle for present concern for future consequences. “I can’t vote, but you can. Vote climate,” he squeaked. His ice cream truck carried a sign rating the party platforms, signaling clearly to voters that the ruling Liberal Party had an abysmal climate change record. All told, picking a cute kid to talk about environmental apocalypse was a slick move. It also helped that the cherubic set piece was backed by a savvy media campaign sitting on a war chest of a few hundred thousand dollars.

It was the kind of campaign Berman thought Canada desperately needed. In 2008, the Conservatives won 143 seats, the Liberals 77, the NDP 37. Even as a minority government, it looked like a solid Conservative victory.

Or was it? Guess how many votes separated the Conservatives from a Liberal-NDP coalition? 7,189. Yes, if a mere 7,189 Conservative voters had changed their minds in fifteen key ridings, a Liberal-NDP caucus would have had 129 seats, and the Conservatives 128. This calculation is part hocus-pocus—it assumes a coalition and 29 ridings with one-vote victories. The point is that winning margins in certain ridings are consistently small, and political organizers could target a relatively small number of voters to have a large electoral impact.

Berman vowed next time would be different. She founded a new advocacy group, PowerUp Canada, and set out looking for funding to enact her vision. She projected it would take $3.7 million across 40 ridings to prepare the ground for the next federal election. It was a big idea, big enough to transform Canadian environmental politics.

Perhaps at this point you are wondering why you have never heard of PowerUp Canada. That is, quite simply, because it was a dismal failure. Over time, as it failed to attract donors and support, its ambitions receded. Berman stopped talking about 40 ridings. They would target just 10. Later, they abandoned the federal scene altogether, and focused on promoting the carbon tax and renewable energy policy in the 2009 B.C. provincial election. After that, they settled for a blog, ZeroCarbonCanada.ca. Some high profile endorsers signed a pledge. A handful of people wrote policy-focused blog posts, but the grassroots never showed up. PowerUp Canada became exactly the kind of toothless think-tank it had criticized, and then it folded altogether shortly thereafter. What went wrong?

For starters, Berman’s timing was impeccably bad. She launched her fundraising drive as the markets crashed in 2008. But more than that, and more frustratingly, PowerUp received lukewarm support from Canada’s other established environmental groups. There was little willingness to pool resources around a new political campaign. As Berman says, “the sad fact of the matter is that we couldn’t get environmental groups to invest in it and set aside their own brands.” This is a troubling explanation, though unsurprising. Canada’s environmental NGOs compete for limited resources, defend issue turf and hoard donors. Most were cautious when faced with Berman’s ambition. They adopted a wait-and-see attitude, and as they watched PowerUp shriveled up and died.

Chris Hatch, PowerUp’s onetime organizational mastermind (and Berman’s husband—they met in 1993, protesting in the woods of B.C.), gives a more expansive diagnosis of the failure, and a damning one: “Environmental groups are staffed by do-gooders, and political operatives are a different breed of people. This means there are very few people in the environmental movement who have experience in politics, and those that do get a hard time from the rest.”  Asking environmentalists to electioneer is like asking stones to swim. The notable and major exception is the Green Party, though what Hatch and Berman have in mind is creating a political force with the flexibility to support any party at a given time.

Hatch observed that the environmental movement exists largely as a subset of the political left. “If becoming politically relevant means becoming relevant to parties across the spectrum, there is almost no interest,” Hatch says. “Every group says they want to be politically relevant, but they don’t take the necessary steps to achieve this.”

Pragmatism is a defining feature of Berman’s career—much to the chagrin of some of her purist colleagues. During her time at Forest Ethics, she engaged with major corporations and earned a reputation as a realist negotiator who helped businesses choose lesser evils. On the eve of the 2009 B.C. provincial election, Berman publicly criticized the NDP, and praised Liberal Premier Gordon Campbell for his carbon tax and renewable energy policies. Later, at the 2009 UN climate talks in Copenhagen, Berman presented Campbell with an award.

The response from within the environmental movement was swift and vitriolic. After all, B.C.’s carbon emissions had risen in 2009, carbon tax or not. Campbell was building more highways for carbon-spewing cars for the 2010 Olympics, investing in more oil and gas extraction, and, expanding hydropower development. Campbell was no ecological saint, and didn’t his plan for more river hydropower disrupt the wildlife and forests Berman supposedly cared so much about? Berman was called a co-opted naïf, a shameless sellout, and worse.

“I am not saying that I agree with everything that the Liberal government is doing,” she said in an interview at the time. “I’m saying that we need to prioritize leadership on climate change, because we’re racing against the clock…the greatest threat to British Columbia’s biodiversity and wilderness today and our kids is climate change. I think that the time for purely oppositional politics is over. We need to look for climate leadership and support it when we see it…And there is no perfect party.”

She concluded with an uppercut to her critics: “I thought I was part of a movement, not a cult.”

Lacking the resources—and, increasingly, the goodwill of her former comrades-in-arms—to continue operating PowerUp Canada, Berman shuttered the group in summer 2010 and left for Amsterdam to work for Greenpeace International as their chief climate change campaigner. When she left, Canada arguably lost its most promising visionary for a new approach to climate change advocacy. It seems Canadian environmentalists weren’t ready to embrace Berman’s style of environmentalism, or her embrace of politics.

“Tzeporah raised a lot questions that haven’t been answered,” says a senior environmentalist from a respected climate think tank, who requested anonymity because she was not authorized to comment. “When we talk about what’s the problem with climate change, why our government is so timid on this issue, fundamentally it is a lack of political will. We all know that what motivates politicians is votes. If you have the ability to move votes in ridings, if political candidates hear about the environment on people’s doorsteps, then you can be influential.” Some environmental problems do not require broad-based popular support, and savvy lobbying and media work can suffice to make a minor regulatory change. Climate change is not one of those problems.

Graham Saul, the Ottawa-based head of the Climate Action Network, a sprawling coalition of environmental NGOs, notes the same basic problem that Berman built PowerUp to address: “Canadian environmentalism has developed a base in places that are not political battlegrounds. These people are mostly urban, wealthy, and white—most of the voters in Canada’s swing ridings are not.”

Karel Mayrand, the Quebec director of the David Suzuki Foundation, echoes Saul’s observation. “Basically, we recruit at university campuses and at Starbucks.” He adds that the basic challenge with climate change politics is that its primary political constituency is the unborn, the people who will suffer the future (and worse) consequences of climate change. In the meantime, environmentalists struggle to figure out a way to build political clout.

The failure to do so is producing mounting disappointments and embarrassments. In December 2009, the David Suzuki Foundation persuaded 10,000 Canadians to contact the Prime Minister urging action on climate change, but to little effect: this convinced Harper to “take three days out of a busy schedule to go to Copenhagen to appear to do something,” says Mayrand, “though he did nothing.” Copenhagen was widely regarded as a failure; the following year’s summit in Cancun barely drew notice. In December 2011, Canada announced it would become the first country to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol. That decision took a lot of the shine off an admittedly timid global climate plan, agreed just days earlier at another UN summit in Durban, South Africa.

How do Canadian environmentalists plan to turn the tide? “We have no real game plan,” says Mayrand. “It really bothers me. We are weak.” He adds, “When environmentalists win a battle in Quebec, it’s because the artists or the unions join us.” If it were up to him, “my goal would be to reach out to the people in the suburbs, where elections are won and lost. We need to go to work on the ground to reach the people who don’t follow us yet. In the medium term, in a couple years, like bodybuilders, we will build our muscles.”

Desiree McGraw, co-founder of Climate Reality Canada, a group that trains speakers to deliver Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth talk, shares the feeling that something is amiss with the Canadian environmental movement. “We have failed to translate enormous concern for the environment into action,” she says. “We, as environmentalists, have to assume some responsibility for the fact that our climate change policy and our emissions are a mess. We have failed to hold our governments to account in a way that translates into Canadians making this vote-worthy.”

Last spring and summer I spoke to a number of other senior Canadian environmentalists, and all agreed that building some political infrastructure like what Berman had envisioned would be helpful. And yet none had any plans to do much about it. The lone exception was a commendable campaign during the fall 2011 provincial election in Ontario, which featured a young girl named Penelope campaigning in the mould of the young Jack Simmons in Australia.

What explains the seemingly gaping hole in environmental strategy Berman failed to correct? A want of imagination and ambition is certainly part of the problem, but there are significant financial, legal and regulatory hurdles as well.

Professional political organizing is expensive. As one veteran political organizer from Ontario estimated, a local campaign intending to “move a few hundred votes” in a relatively compact urban riding can cost upwards of $25,000 over the course of a few months. Leaflets, staffing, databasing and, yes, robocalling (at 2 cents per call) cost money. And that doesn’t include the capacity to “buy eyeballs,” through television or newspaper advertising.

Even with a treasure chest on hand, there are limits on how to spend money in politics. Most Canadian environmental organizations are charities, and charities must abide by rules: they are legally bound to restrict “advocacy” to 10 percent of their spending, and strictly barred from any partisan activities. This is why the Pembina Institute, though it craves a national carbon tax, could offer only vague support for the ideas in the 2008 Liberal “Green Shift” platform, and certainly couldn’t instruct voters to support the Liberals. It’s also why the David Suzuki Foundation can ask people to call the Prime Minister demanding leadership in UN talks at Copenhagen, but falls silent during elections. A group like Greenpeace does not register as a charity precisely for the political latitude this affords.

There are further legal limits to what “third parties” (that is, groups not registered as official political parties) can do during elections. During a federal election, a third party is not allowed to spend more than $150,000 nationally and no more than $3,000 per riding on “election advertising”—a loosely defined term. There are also restrictions on spending during provincial elections, though these tend to be far less strict.  Of course, organizing, advertising, and door-to-door campaigning can happen outside of the election cycle (and they do), but the bottom line is that Tzeporah Berman could not buy an election, even if she wanted to.

The regulations exist for good reason: they are intended to stop deep-pocketed groups and individuals from exercising undue influence. In theory, this is a good thing. In practice, it means burnt-out activist volunteers lurch from one campaign to the next, while corporate giants smoothly and continuously leverage political power in less overt ways.

Perhaps the greatest barrier of all lies in the nature of the Canadian political system, which, by design, is insulated from grassroots lobbying. Even if a determined environmental group could muster the clout to swing a few dozen ridings and elect suitably carbon unfriendly Parliamentarians—itself a herculean task—ultimately most political power would remain with the Prime Minister. Leverage over local candidates translates into remarkably little influence over the all-important Prime Minister’s Office. This equation changes somewhat in minority Parliaments, but only to a degree. In this respect Canada differs markedly from our Southern neighbour, where grassroots organizing proliferates precisely because individual members of Congress wield far more power and independence than Canadian MPs.

Finally, Canadian environmentalists simply don’t agree that climate change should be their top priority, and different environmental priorities conflict. To take the most obvious example: nuclear power is carbon free, but nuclear waste is toxic. What’s the virtuous environmentalist to think? People like Tzeporah Berman argue that climate change is the mother of all environmental problems, worthy of prioritization, focus, and pragmatic sacrifice. Some of them, notably British firebrand George Monbiot, are willing to hold their noses and accept nuclear as a necessary evil. But far more disagree. What is the way forward? An expansive environmental agenda remains contradictory. Rallying environmentalists around climate change is like rallying the righteous with realpolitik.

Of course, even if Berman created her green political machine, it may still fail spectacularly. It would still face the entrenched political and economic interests of Canada’s growing fossil fuel juggernaut.  Perhaps Canadians cannot be persuaded to care enough about climate change to put their votes where polls say their hearts are. The consequences may still seem too remote, the sacrifices too large. Perhaps we need an environmental catastrophe of sufficient calamity at home to capture our attention—the rampaging pine beetle and the melting of the far North being inadequate, obviously—like a ragtag flotillas carrying climate refugees reaching our shores.

Then again, according to the most recent serious poll on Canadians and climate change by Sustainable Prosperity, 80 percent of Canadians believe climate change is real, 73 percent think it is a “serious” problem, 65 percent think the federal government has “a great deal of responsibility” addressing it, and 55 percent support a carbon tax, and the majority are willing to pay $50 each month in increased energy expenses. This should not be a lost cause. But without political influence—at the ballot box, in the House of Commons, and at the climate negotiation table—failure is likely.

Rick Smith, head of Environmental Defense Canada and one of Berman’s former co-conspirators, acknowledged the many explanations that might explain the failure of PowerUp, but added: “Those are all excuses. We desperately need more organizations working in a politically relevant way, period. We’re activists. If something doesn’t work, we have to try to find another way around. It couldn’t be clearer that climate change is the challenge of our generation. We need to find another way to win.”