This web site is intended to perform a public service which is necessary and lacking in Toronto. It will serve people who would like to be politically active in Toronto but who do not want to be manipulated, intimidated, or excluded by the local political networks.
If you are a person of character who would like to advance the cause of human progress and freedom in some way, and you have tried working for that in Toronto, you know what I mean. Also, you are a rare and valuable person who society needs, and who other good people need as a collaborator.
It is a tragedy when good people who want to work for a good cause are corrupted or demoralized and driven away by the cause pimps who glom onto every public issue in Toronto. People keep asking why Toronto is such a dead zone for social activism but it is not a mystery.
It is easy to see the manipulation going on. But as soon as it is seen that you see the manipulation, great efforts are made to isolate you. If you call things what they are, the 'paranoid' label is hung on you. It is hard to find other good people, to work together on something meaningful.
It is widely noticed that there is all sorts of political activism going on in Toronto, but most of it deals with things going on far away from Toronto. We are supposed to worry about poverty in Africa but not on our own streets. We are supposed to worry about corrupt political processes in Iran but not in our own city.
There is some malign influence which wants to keep the public in Toronto disempowered. You will find the same malign influence almost everywhere, to a greater or lesser degree. But it is stronger in Toronto than in many places.
Many reasons are given for this. Some say that this is because so many Torontonians are recent immigrants, who "do not know how things work in Canada". But immigrants have traditionally been the core of social movements in Canada. Many immigrants in Toronto were effective community leaders in their home countries, but are stymied in Canada.
Some say that Torontonians are simply more cautious and deferential to authority than people elswhere. This begs the question of why they are so. Is social control more pervasive in Toronto because people are more submissive to it, or are people made more submissive because the control system is more pervasive?
Did the chicken or the egg come first? The point is to challenge and push back both the passivity and the intimidation.
The control system seems to work at three levels. The rawest is the police/judicial complex which is widely said to be run by the Masons. The Toronto police headquarters is surrounded by Masonic symbols.
Anyone who has tried to get justice done through either the civil or criminal courts has become aware of a seamless system of denying justice. It runs from the cop on the beat through the legal aid system to the court staff to the judges to the attorney general's office. If the Masons are not the coordinating system in this, then it is some group much like them.
In the poor areas of Toronto, there is no one more despised than the 'cop caller'. Such people seem to have some sort of 'in' with the cops as some sort of informer. These people will settle any personal vendetta, deal with any inconvenient person, by making a spurious claim to police. The police will have no interest in hearing the other side of the story.
'Cop callers' among social activists also need to be ostracized. Politicians and bureaucrats of all kinds who try to use the police as their own praetorian guard must be challenged en masse. Victims of this kind of attack must be rallied to.
The Toronto police are as odious in what they fail to do as in what they do. They are remarkably uninterested in responding when any type of public assembly is disrupted or when people going about their business on behalf of public causes are followed and harassed.
Criminal libel or 'defamatory libel' in the Canadian criminal code is maliciously spreading false information about someone to bring 'hatred, contempt and ridicule' on them. This is one of the main methods of attacking someone which the 'left' political networks want to eliminate. This does not lead just to hatred and ridicule, but to assaults, mobbings, wrongful arrests, and suicides. It is enormously destructive and it is almost impossible to get police to act on it.
And finally, Trotskyite and revolutionary anarchist groups are famous for having more police snitches among them than actual radicals. When such groups seek to disrupt other groups, they might as well be thought of as undercover police agents.
The second level of the control system are the non profits; the Quangos and Cause Pimps. Quango is a term commonly used in the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand, which has not caught on in North America but should. It means "quasi autonomous non governmental organization".
These are organizations whom government has delegated its power to, which should never happen in a democracy. They are able to do the dirty work with much less scrutiny. It is never clear exactly who controls them and to what ends.
They usually have a halo over themselves. If you criticize them, you are attacking the poor and hindering the quangos 'good work'. They are mere apparatuses of social control and their clients would be better off if they did not exist.
The term "poverty pimp" has more currency in North America. It was first used in Vancouver. It refers to people and agencies who pretend to help the poor in order to create incomes for themselves. I expand the term to "cause pimp" to include those persons and organizations who latch onto every public cause and try to 'own' it as an income source for themselves.
Quangos and cause pimps preempt democracy and take over the functions of a democratic community. A principle of the Canadian ruling elite from colonial times; the family compact and its heirs, has been to prevent growth of democracy by restricting local, community based government in every way possible. Non governmental organizations in general amount to a fake public which does what our rulers want and tell them what they want to hear.
More importantly for our rulers, they act as a 'social police' against any attempts by actual publics to speak for themselves and to act in their own interests. If you do that you are a threat to some cause pimps incomes and things start happening to you.
The money given to quango and cause pimp outfits by governments and funding agencies should go instead to legitimate community representative groups. That is, groups elected fairly by all the people they are representing, who thus a real mandate to speak in that group's interests.
The third significant level of control we see is the colonial political system in Canada. As I have said, the heirs of the family compact see local government and especially any form of community organizing as a threat. Local government must be restricted. Community organizations must be of the paternalistic variety that decides for the people what is good for them.
The fight over voting reform is really a fight about getting rid of the clientelist system in Canada. That is, a system where a single 'ward heeler' type of politician is elected in each district at intervals, and everything must go through him of her. Politics is simply about trying to get someone from your clique elected, or if you are not from the political elite, wheedling dispensations from those with power.
This is an extremely corrupt and corrupting system. It has been abandoned almost everywhere in the world. But it is worse in local government, where there are no political parties, or rather, secret parties.
We need voting reform at all levels of government. We need a devolution of power to local government. We need the fundamental laws of Toronto to be drawn up and ratified by the people of Toronto, not by a provincial legislature.
We need to have community levels of government established and empowered. We need systems of participatory governance established for local government. We need representative councils on all important public issues, similar to the 'thematic' councils developed under participatory governance in many parts of the world.
This is how the public speaks to the governance apparatus in a real democracy; through delegates chosen and directed by it, not through some self appointed cause pimp group. The way social services are administered in a democracy is for the funds and authority to be devolved to local councils to administer, and not given to agencies answerable to nothing apparent.
There is a world wide trend to demand local, direct democracy. As with most advances in the human condition, it is coming to Canada almost last among developed countries. Toronto is even slower to wake up to it. But a serious movement for local democracy will eventually get rolling here too.
Toronto has been asleep for ten years, ever since the 'Megacity'. It was not Mike Harris who did that to us, but an arrogant Toronto elite who opposed amalgamation only because they saw it as a threat to their own power. They assumed leadership of resistance and then shut down resistance when they thought it was getting out of their control. This is an example of the harm done by cliques presuming to speak for the public.
People in Toronto are becoming more aware that progress requires that something be done about vicious personal attacks on active people who will not conform, and raids on good organizations. The timorous responses to it must stop. The people responsible for this must begin to be exposed. This is what this web site is for.
The kind of people and organizations who you will be given intelligence about on this site are really, really not going to like it. We expect intense efforts to try to take this site down. Let them try.
A new kind of ethics must begin to be practiced among active citizens in Toronto. We do not like the term "activist". It implies that only a specific class of people can be "active". Everybody should be active in public governance as a right and duty of citizenship.
Active citizenship involves a refusal to tolerate cause pimps and people abusing authority or trying to exert authority they do not have. It is about immediately coming to the assistance of anyone challenging these. It is a refusal to tolerate slander as a weapon against people of character, a willingness to report the slander to the person being slandered, and to support any legal actions resulting from this.
This web site will be a registry of people and organizations which honest people need to be warned of. At best they can cause you to waste a lot of your time and money on goals that were not what you thought they were. At worst, they can get you followed, mobbed, assaulted, and falsely arrested.
This site will depend on volunteered information which will be carefully checked. The main focus initially will be on poverty and housing issues, because that is where people are most powerless and most harmed by cause pimps.
We also hope that the web site spurs some discussion. One topic which needs to be developed is the difficulty citizens have in bringing cases of abuse before the courts and getting correct responses from them.
Another is the topic of psychopathic bullying behavior in the so called 'third sector' of society. There is plenty of discussion about workplace bullying and school bullying, but not much yet about bullying behaviors in relation to non profit or community organizations.
The way to begin making Toronto a safe place in which to practice democracy is to begin exposing the creeps who make it unsafe.