Hot Tubbin' For Justice

BCNDP Women's Rights Committee Convention We started our BCNDP convention experience off by attending the Women's Rights Committee (WRC) convention which occurs prior to the opening plenary.  We were fortunate to have Rhiannon Bennett, from Delta, give the territorial acknowledgement. She started off by holding up a purse and a scarf, and acknowledged that both of which belonged to Maurine Karagianis. She asked "is it enough to acknowledge these items of Maurine's if I have them, for her to access the economy ?" Nope. We, the NDP need to do better - it's not about shame or guilt, but about acknowledging the privilege of what we've been given. She talked to us about the resilience of indigenous peoples and how they've been able to save their languages in the face of being being jailed for speaking their languages, having needles poked into their tongues in residential school, and other horrific things. Rhiannon brought humour and heart to her te

"Where I come from we are not called troublemakers or shit disturbers, we are human rights defenders. When we stir some shit it's for the working class!" Chris Sorio, Migrante BC So in April 2018 I went to Chicago and attended the Labor Notes Conference for the first time and it changed my life. It was the first time I had gone to a conference so big, so unapologetically socialist, so full of a class analysis, focusing on organizing, on movement building, on workers' power! To put the "movement" back in the labour movement! It was not about which position you held in the union, it was about the collective working together to fight against the right and the boss and workers to take ownership of their unions. I wrote extensively about it on this blog - here , here , here  and the session with the West Virginia Teachers got their own post . It was at that conference I met a ton of awesome activists from BC. The Vancouver crew met at the Canada caucus a