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University of Glasgow Conference: Securing the Urban Renaissance: Policing, Community and Disorder Hegel in Parkdale David MacGregor King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario [email protected] Joe Hermer Department of Sociology University of Toronto [email protected] Unfortunately, my colleague Joe Hermer could not be here today – so this means that with your indulgence, I am going to have to give a quite modified paper. The original idea for the paper was to work together blending in Joe Hermer’s work as a criminologist on the regulation of begging, reciprocity and public compassion on public pavements –what Joe has referred to as a gift encounter—with my work on political theory. The paper was meant to address attempts by government in the UK to govern homelessness, and specifically begging, through visual advertisements that are consistent with city centre rejuvenation projects. What I am going to do instead is twofold—and still, I think, relevant to our theme today. First, I want to outline some of the political shifts that have taken place in our province of Ontario in terms of social assistance to the poor generally. And, secondly, link these to some of the changes that have occurred in the Toronto neighbourhood that we both live in, South Parkdale. This exploratory paper is part of a project Joe and I are working on called, Hegel in Parkdale. We want to explore how Hegel (if he were alive today) might react to the new urban realities in the rapidly changing neighbourhood in Toronto called South Parkdale—or the Village of Parkdale, 1879, as some gentrifiers would like to call it. (Indeed few residents—gentrifiers or not—use the phrase, South Parkdale. The neighbourhood is almost universally called Parkdale.) Our project will likely benefit from a massive five-year research initiative called “Community Gentrification and Building Inclusive Communities from Within: A Case Study of Toronto’s West-Central Neighbourhoods.” This is a five-year million-dollar research program funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Resarch Council of Canada that will involve St. Christopher House in Toronto and the Centre for Urban and Community Studies at the University of Toronto. David Harvey1 observes that Hegel privileges space in his philosophy compared to Marx’s emphasis on social class. Hegel’s spacialized conception of the state at the end of history offers a geopolitical perspective that emphasizes linkage between place and the social sense of personal and community identity. Hegel captures the local and the global, the particular and the universal, without collapsing one into the other, or destroying the vital linkage between these dualities and individual experience. Hegel also introduced the concept of civil society as a partial element of the state. Within civil society he identified the three parallel and interacting structures: (i) the economy (or system of needs), (ii) the administration of justice, (iii) the police and the corporation. Anglo-American philosophical encounters with Hegel once tended to conflate his concept of the police with the notion of authoritarian regulation by agents of the law. But Hegel was referring to the great wave of social regulation that started in the German states and spread across Europe. Before Hegel’s death in 1831 Britain proceeded to adopt European notions of the police and applied them in revolutionary ways. The 1 The Condition of Postmodernity, 1989, p. 273. birth of the modern concept of childhood likely coincided with the Factory Acts of 1832 and the attempt to determine exactly the scope of application of the law. As Joe argues in his Oxford PhD thesis another arm of this nineteenth century push for regulation was the transfer of focus in regulation of begging from the beggar to the gift-giver. Compassion became a new site of regulation Taking advantage of this Hegelian framework, the paper will discuss how recent political events in Ontario have deeply affected Parkdale, a community undergoing a process of gentrification hinged to neoconservative values and neoliberal strategies. First, and very briefly, what we saw in Ontario, beginning a decade ago, with the election of the Progressive Conservative government of Mike Harris in 1995, was a set of neoconservative reforms. Simply put, in the context of poor people, we witnessed an unraveling of both the symbolic and material means by which society collectively organizes our responsibilities to others. The high point of this era (or the lowest one) was the Safe Streets Act, a piece of legislation meant to increase the re-election chances of the Mike Harris government. Following its overwhelming victory in the polls, the government put this generally popular legislation in place on January 31st 2000. I will talk further about the Safe Streets Act in a moment. In a dialectical reversal Hegel might have appreciated the year 2000 also brought the Walkerton disaster. During the Victoria Day weekend at the end of May—perhaps the biggest secular holiday of the year—water runoff from manure coated farmers’ fields poisoned with deadly e-coli the wells of a prosperous small town called Walkerton, just north of Toronto. With the authorities paralysed for three horrific days, tainted water caused a number of deaths and poisoned more than 3000 people. Kidney failure was common; for weeks little children were helicoptered out of the beleaguered town and sent to London, Ontario hospitals. Even today, many citizens in Walkerton remain critically ill. Why should this affair in a small town five years ago have any relevance for the urban renaissance we are discussing today? Walkerton may have signalled the beginning of the decline and fall of neoliberalism in Ontario. The public blamed the e-coli outbreak on cutbacks in services, particularly the public regulation of the water supply. Walkerton became a sign that government costcutting of all sorts associated with neoliberalism were untenable. But Walkerton also, I believe, undermined the moral authority of neoconservatism, its connection with probity and self-righteousness, its assumption of superiority to lesser beings. Within two years Mike Harris resigned from office, replaced by Ernie Eves, whose government was soundly defeated in October 2003 by the Ontario Liberals under Dalton McGuinty. Later I will discuss the extent to which the McGuinty Liberals have changed the political climate in Ontario and the possible effect of such changes on conditions that are the subject of this conference: crime control, policing, security and safety within urban spaces. First I return to the glory days of neoliberalism in Ontario, before Walkerton. The bloody debut of the Mike Harris government came at a contested park called Ipperwash, formerly a native burial ground turned army explosives range. Here in summer 1995 a police sharpshooter shot in cold blood a native protestor, Dudley George—the first official shooting of an aboriginal protestor in Ontario. Meanwhile, Mike Harris cut personal income tax 20 percent to pay back ‘honest’ and ‘hardworking’ taxpayers. As with the murder of Dudley George, the government targeted the most marginalized people in society – demonizing them as disorderly, immoral, and criminal; slashing social assistance rates by 21.6 percent, and passing the ‘safe streets act’, a sweeping and mean spirited modern vagrancy law that targets a range of subsistence activities that poor people carry out on the street to survive. A corollary movement to this re-arrangement of a political economy of obligation is how much of the sphere of social policy generally, and particularly that of social welfare, was re-inscribed as a crime control problem. Those in need were constituted as “disorderly people,” who must be policed. The conflation of social assistance administration with the fight to ‘crack down’ on welfare fraud was an exemplar of this shift. The Safe Streets Act represents the first time a modern Ontario legislature (as opposed to a municipal by-law) has enacted a statute against vagrancy. Its key target was squeegee kids, street youths who earned money by washing the windshields of cars in traffic. But in effect the law extended to anyone who appeared to be indigent and was requesting money or an equivalent in an “aggressive” manner from a “captive audience”. The outcome—and the likely intent—of the statute were to restrict begging in all public places. But as Joe Hermer notes, the intent of regulation of begging is not really to control the action of the beggar, but to “police compassion”—that is to regulate the action of the person on the other side of what Joe calls, the “begging encounter”. There is within the formulation of neoliberal legislation in this area the germ of what Joe calls “a personal ethic of generosity, a private policing of the self where expressions of compassion are subject to rational order.” A paradox arises where the presence of begging brings into question not only the moral character of the beggar but also that of the importuned passer-by. The new Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty has enormously altered the political terrain in Ontario, though we can only speculate on the ultimate effect of its policies on the process of gentrification in South Parkdale. Before looking more closely at South Parkdale, I want to describe briefly some of the political changes associated with the Ontario Liberal government, now barely 20 months old. Let us admit that many of the punitive reforms made by the Mike Harris government are untouched. The Safe Streets Act remains in force. Indeed, as Joe’s concept of policing compassion would predict, Torontonians are noticeably more reluctant to give to the poor from their motor vehicles than they were prior to introduction of the act. Hegel would reinforce this observation: people respond more fully to the moral authority of government than most of us are prepared to admit.

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