\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Dionne Brand\u2019s piercing<\/span> article<\/span><\/a> \u201cOn narrative, reckoning and the calculus of living and dying\u201d teaches us that \u2018normal\u2019 is an anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and capitalist ruse:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n What the COVID-19 pandemic has done is expose even further the endoskeleton of the world. I have felt tremendous irritation at the innocence of those people (mostly, but not only, white) finally up against their historic and present culpability in a set of dreadful politics and dreadful economics \u2014 ecocidal and genocidal. Their innocence is politically, economically and psychically lucrative. . . .Was the violence against women normal? Was the anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism normal? Was white supremacy normal? Was the homelessness growing on the streets normal? Were homophobia and transphobia normal? Were pervasive surveillance and policing of Black and Indigenous and people of colour normal? Yes, I suppose all of that was normal. But, I and many other people hate that normal. Who would one have to be to sit in that normal restfully, to mourn it, or to desire its continuance?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n What Billy-Ray Belcourt<\/span> calls<\/span><\/a> \u201ca new grammar of living,\u201d what Jody Chan<\/span> calls<\/span><\/a> madness, what Audre Lorde calls \u201cpoetry as illumination,\u201d what many call disability justice, is prefigurative work that often begins with a sigh. Which is to say, a breath, an exhale, and acknowledgement that we are still here, and when we are here, we also speak (or sign, or finger spell, or mumble, or type, or use AAC) to the many who are not, and when we tell our stories, when we make art, when we protest, when we scream, we are also calling into the room all we have lost who, despite no longer being here physically, still buoys us (through the love we have for them) into living a life they would have wanted (or that the world convinced them they should not get to live) and, in turn, wanted for us. A sigh: this is not the life we owe one another. A sign\u2014it\u2019s not too late to demand a different one.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This pandemic is one where rituals and traditions communities have cultivated for mourning have also been interrupted. Despite estrangement and disconnection, I have felt called to translate and rework these rituals into other ways to mourn\u2014poems, art, memes, bouts of madness, the absence of productivity, mutual aid, reflection, organizing. After all, despite being an ocean away from one of my hometowns (Shanghai), soundwaves of aunties\u2019 wails\u2014heard from videos uploaded to Twitter and Youtube\u2014still register as grief, as hunger, as anger, as relation. This fraught and tenuous digital room is a temple wall echoing in multiple languages and dialects: <\/span>no more, no more, no more<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n In <\/span>\u201cWho Could Have Lived,\u201d<\/span><\/a> Erin Soros asks \u201c[b]ut what if we are neighbours, not just those of us who inhabit our stationary homes beside one another but all those of us travelling by foot and bicycle, wheelchair and subway, taxi and even car through our cities?\u201d The movement in this scene reminds us how our lives overlap and intermingle, that despite the state\u2019s attempt to hide, silence, suppress, or kill us, we who fail normal will always make ourselves known, if not in an article, in a scream, if not at a march, in the wave of<\/span> a sword<\/span><\/a>, if not on the tracks of a<\/span> subway<\/span><\/a>, in care work, if not in blockades, in virtual performance art, if not in a public hearing, in a <\/span>disability filibuster<\/span><\/a> on Zoom, if not in a suit, in the long drag of a pipe.<\/span><\/p>\n To be unmoved in the face of ongoing genocide, in a <\/span>heat dome<\/span><\/a>, in floods, in a poisoning massacre, in the sixth wave of an uncontrolled pandemic, throughout global vaccine disparity, is the cruelty of watching all sacred sites burn in a climate catastrophe while insisting only on the church of white supremacy and business as usual. Rejecting this worship also rejects how capital insists we move. In<\/span> \u201cEverything is Waiting,\u201d<\/span><\/a> J\u00f3n\u00edna Kirton \u201c<\/span>long[s] for a world where we go as slow as the slowest person in the room, where those who are fast and efficient sit down and listen.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The room is as wide as the universe. The room includes those who died.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Dr. Bonnie Henry, British Columbia\u2019s Provincial Health Officer, built her career first as a naval officer and grew up in a military family. In 2003, she was associate health officer in Toronto, where she\u2013along with other medical experts\u2013made a<\/span> \u201ccostly error\u201d<\/span><\/a> that failed to contain SARS cases despite insisting otherwise, \u201ccompounded by a dire, patriotic urge to prove to the rest of the world that Toronto was free of severe acute respiratory syndrome.\u201d On March 10th, 2022, Dr. Henry announced that the <\/span>mask mandate<\/span><\/a> in British Columbia would drop a day later, on March 11th, and that the vaccine mandate would also drop on April 8th, 2022.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This year, Canada tops up its military spending by $8 billion CAD, adding to their<\/span> ten-year defence budget<\/span><\/a> of $32.7 billion. While making it easier for poor disabled people to die through an expanded Medical Assistance in Dying <\/span>law<\/span><\/a> (Bill C7), 2022\u2019s federal budget squeezes out a meagre $272.6 million CAD for employment involving people with disabilities for the next five years. Canada\u2019s 2022 budget makes no mention of the Disability Benefit Act, or the Canada Disability Benefit that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau\u2019s Liberal Party campaigned on. <\/span>In British Columbia, the provincial government temporarily created a <\/span>$300<\/span><\/a> COVID-19 crisis supplement to their disability assistance program in April 2020 before cutting half of it in February 2021. The province offers nothing to those who spent more than 90 days in prison.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In lockstep with the federal Liberals\u2019 bootstrap disability budget, Ontario\u2019s Premier Doug Ford\u2019s <\/span>response<\/span><\/a> to questions on raising the Ontario Disability Supports Payment (ODSP) program imagines support exclusively through the lens of capacity to work: \u201cthe best way to help someone who can work is to get them a job.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Tracey Thompson, a former chef who contracted COVID after a physical attack, tells me of where these budgets leave her:<\/span><\/p>\n As long COVID is not yet a recognized disability, I\u2019ve been depending on<\/span> crowdfunding<\/span><\/a> for housing & healthcare. Two years of being bed\/housebound has run through my savings.<\/span><\/p>\n There\u2019s nothing in place for people incapable of working, whether it\u2019s from Covid or other health issues. Without the ability to supplement the ODSP, you cannot survive. The current climate here seems more focused on lining the wallets of the<\/span> already wealthy<\/span><\/a> & leaving those on the bottom to scrape by or die by attrition.<\/span><\/p>\n War, like the pandemic, is a mass disabling event. Between 2001-2014, Canada <\/span>spent<\/span><\/a> $18 billion on the war in Afghanistan.<\/span><\/p>\n Tristen Wybou, a Ts\u2019msyen community and social service worker, tells me that while the healthcare system in the lower mainland is absolutely strapped, many parts of the province of British Columbia don\u2019t even have it. In remote areas, getting to the nearest hospital can take over an hour; often, patients can only get to them via seaplanes or helicopters. Within Indigenous communities in the North, Wybou insists on having \u201ctruly compassionate, heavy, difficult, trauma-laden conversations\u201d: without accessible and Indigenous-led services, vaccination rates will continue to be low. Ongoing legacies of <\/span>Indian hospitals<\/span><\/a> and segregation means that vaccine hesitancy comes not from <\/span>the racism of anti-vaxx movements<\/span><\/a>, but from the violence of colonialism:\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n For something that seems as tiny and simple as a routine vaccination for the rest of us is not if you have faced sterilization or medical experimentation, or if that\u2019s history held in your family. It\u2019s someone putting something that is painful and scary and unknown into your body and all the information about why has also just come from the government that hurt you to begin with.<\/span><\/p>\n While the fascist convoy that <\/span>occupied Ottawa<\/span><\/a> and other parts of the country used the opposition to pandemic mandates as a rallying cry, their political goals are diametrically opposed to the well-being of Black, Indigenous, and racialized communities, many of whom experience vaccine hesitancy and are at a greater risk of hospitalization and death from COVID from working in frontline jobs. In British Columbia, organizations like <\/span>Hogan\u2019s Alley Society<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Bao Ve Collective<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>South Asian Mental Health Alliance<\/span><\/a>, and <\/span>Yarrow Intergenerational Society for Justice<\/span><\/a> have responded to the deep systemic barriers within the healthcare system which lead to mistrust and exclusion.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n RL, a non-binary East Asian Deaf person living in Vancouver, also tells me that d\/Deaf and Hard of Hearing people need live, culturally appropriate, anti-racist interpreters within medical settings, not just video relay services, which often fail to consider clients privacy when accessing healthcare. As of now, there is a shortage of live medical interpreters in \u2018Canada,\u2019 and pandemic safety concerns make in-person interpretation challenging. While the convoy called for an end to the mask mandate, their concerns have nothing to do with the fact that some d\/Deaf and Hard of Hearing people rely on lipreading and facial cues to communicate and face <\/span>language deprivation within the medical system and beyond.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Wybou argues that more work needs to be done to ensure these services are not only concentrated in better-resourced urban centres and respond to low vaccination rates in remote parts of the province and country.\u00a0 <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The compassion Wybou offers to his community is one frequently denied people who use drugs. Eris Nyx tells me that<\/span> Drug User Liberation Front<\/span><\/a>, the group she founded with Jeremy Kalicum, is \u201c<\/span>a public health intervention that aims to deal with this ever-increasing pile of bodies of drug users.\u201d Along with other harm reduction groups in Vancouver, DULF uses tactics learned from the Black Panther Party and other civil rights activists in the 1960s to challenge and confront governmental neglect and the inherent conservatism of drug policy reform. Giving <\/span>out free, tested heroin, cocaine, and meth amidst a deadly poisoned drug supply, in other words, is necessary direct-action work in the face of \u201chorrendous, AIDS-level numbers of people dying, especially in the Downtown Eastside.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Despite this parallel pandemic, poor drug users are reviled and feared, often treated as though they will infect others with AIDS. Nyx tells me in our interview, \u201cPeople get afraid of each other, and especially, you know, drug users. There\u2019s so much compounded stigma and hatred and ignorance in that statement: \u2018you\u2019re going to give me AIDS.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In Elle-M\u00e1ij\u00e1 Tailfeathers\u2019 documentary <\/span>K\u00edmmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy<\/span><\/i><\/a>, the broader societal rift which pushes racist, colonial policies and attitudes onto Indigenous substance users is met with truth-telling, grace, and the difficult work of holding grief. Recounting how the Indian Act, the residential school system, the slaughtering of buffalo on Blackfoot territory, as well as the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway impacted the Blood people, stories on the reserve are situated within the broader violence of settler colonialism in Canada.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n As is the case in the Downtown Eastside, drug toxicity from fentanyl has amplified on reserves in recent years. Like Indigenous-led vaccine clinics, Indigenous-led harm reduction-based detox centres and Indigenous doctors provide vital, culturally safe and non-judgemental care to Indigenous substance users and reserves and beyond. In the film, Tailfeathers\u2019 mum Esther Tailfeathers prescribes methadone and suboxone to community members young and old; she and other healthcare practitioners also learn from harm reduction organizers in the Downtown Eastside.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n To adapt and learn from one another amidst ongoing colonial violence is a necessary lesson in this pandemic. Without the governmental mandates, how do we collectively respond?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In the first few weeks of the pandemic, a white woman ran away from me as I walked across the street toward the park while wearing a mask. After various waves of changes in pandemic protection policies, after so many deaths (not only from COVID), after so many police murders, after so many people in my communities continue to fall ill, what persists when this fear is placed on me is the trauma of racialized violence, ableist neglect, and the pernicious feeling that taking up space in the world is both impermissible and unsafe. For me, safety is not the <\/span>co-opted notion<\/span><\/a> of the state, police, or white feminism, but a sense of peace within myself: that I am not too much, or doing too little.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Thy Phu<\/span><\/a> argues that the \u201cracialization of disease can be seen in discourses about SARS, for even though infections were confirmed on several continents, and although it is no longer acceptable to name a disease according to the place of its apparent emergence, as in the cases of Ebola and Spanish flu, the contagion nevertheless remained associated with Chinese and, more generally, with Asian bodies.\u201d Chinese migrants had been first useful to the Canadian state as lower-wage labour to build the Canadian Pacific Railway and to work in mines. Paul Yee\u2019s <\/span>Saltwater City<\/span><\/i><\/a> recalls how John Robson, British Columbia\u2019s provincial secretary in 1885, declared that Chinese migrants\u2019 habits were as filthy as they were immoral. This prevailing attitude about Chinese migrants justified their mistreatment as workers: many died in landslides, from malnourishment and the absence of medical care.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In 1908, a year after the anti-Asian riots in Vancouver, former prime minister and then deputy minister of the Department of Labour Mackenzie King adopted the Opium Act, thus launching prohibitionist drug laws still in effect today across Canada. Using broadscale associations of Chinese bachelors with opium-use as a lynchpin, King <\/span>argued<\/span><\/a> that some good came out of the riots after all.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In their current form, prohibitionist drug laws are <\/span>killing<\/span><\/a> thousands of people every year. It is impossible to fight against anti-Asian racism without also fighting the ways our pathologization is intertwined with the pathologization of people who use drugs, of poor folks who live in ghettoized neighbourhoods, of fat people, of sex workers, of Black and Indigenous people, including in <\/span>the South<\/span><\/a>, who are criminalized in drug wars and swallowed by prison systems.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In the city of Vancouver, as well as the suburb of Richmond where I grew up, mainstream fights against anti-Asian racism often fail to account for systems that make violence against migrant, poor, working-class, and disabled Asians permissible in the first place. In \u201cOrganizing the suburbs,\u201d Justin Kong, Edward Hon-Sing Wong, and Veronica Yeung <\/span>situate<\/span><\/a> the de-clawing of the left in Ontario with the rise of the non-profit industrial complex:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The model of \u201cservice without organizing\u201d \u2013 of providing support without talking about how issues like homelessness, poverty, and domestic violence are structurally reproduced \u2013 is ultimately a recipe for disaster. It perpetuates the power of middle-class brokers, and fails to politicize new migrants. As a result, beginning in the 1980s, there was a political vacuum in the Chinese community where the grassroots left used to be, which the right has been only too happy to fill.<\/span><\/p>\n Of course, Chinese communities also immigrate with conservative beliefs and an interest in building and preserving middle-class and upper-class interests.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In <\/span>BlackLife: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom<\/span><\/i>, Rinaldo Walcott and Idil Abdillahi astutely observe that \u201c[t]oday we speak of immigrants or immigration; guest workers or various kinds of worker programs; \u2018illegal aliens\u2019, their undocumented\/non-status, generations of immigrant children and so on. But all of these terms reference some kind of movement and reordering of the globe under Europe\u2019s terms or conditioned by those terms. Thus, movement as a condition, even more than a practice, is fundamental to modernity in its very conception and its practices and based in Black debasement.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The <\/span>relative upward mobility of Chinese labour across history is rooted in anti-Blackness and the ongoing presence of transatlantic slavery. As Moon-Ho Jung <\/span>notes<\/span><\/a> in \u201cMaking sugar, making \u2018coolies\u2019: Chinese laborers toiled alongside Black workers on 19th-century Louisiana plantations,\u201d \u201c[i]mporting indentured labor from Asia emerged as a potential way to maintain the British Empire\u2019s sugar plantation system\u201d in the aftermaths of slavery\u2019s so-called abolishment. Ableist, ageist, and anti-Black conceptions of work positioned Chinese workers as superior to their Black counterparts: according to Jung\u2019s research, the New Orleans Times noted that Chinese workers were \u201cyoung, athletic, intelligent, sober and cleanly.\u201d Such hierarchies of racialized labour pervade how we continue to live and organize, casting some as unworthy of care, love, and solidarity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In the 21<\/span>st<\/span> century, Canada\u2019s Express Entry program, also known as the points system, magnifies Black debasement through the criterion of qualification where migrants are deemed only as useful as their <\/span>replaceable<\/span><\/a> labour. If you aren\u2019t the right kind of newcomer, if you aren\u2019t young, athletic, intelligent, sober, or clean enough for Canadian labour markets, you face the threat of deportation and ongoing violence within precarious labour. These standards are inherently impossible to fulfill if you are already deemed unqualified.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In the context of Canada\u2019s collapsing healthcare system, migrant labour exploitation lies at the heart of the crisis. As Harsha Walia <\/span>recounts<\/span><\/a>,<\/span><\/p>\n Many migrant workers and migrant domestic workers have consistently said the temporary foreign worker program is basically a privatized system of care\u2014that the state gets off the hook from providing elder care services, childcare services, daycare services, by having this program. Many migrant domestic workers have also been very clear that in their home countries, they\u2019re actually accredited to be healthcare workers, to be childhood educators.<\/span><\/p>\n The deskilling of migrant domestic workers, ER and ICU nurse Birgit Umaigba<\/span> argues<\/span><\/a>, has led to severe nursing shortages in recent waves of the pandemic in Ontario and elsewhere. Without offering permanent residency to internationally-educated nurses, Canada\u2019s collapsing medical infrastructure will continue to fail to meet the needs of everyday people as well as respond to incoming waves of the pandemic. By design, migrant workers are needed to take care of its aging population as an extension of slavery, Black debasement, and settler colonialism.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Disability justice calls to<\/span> abolish long-term care<\/span><\/a> is thus also migrant justice.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Nyx observes that \u201cdrugs transcend class. Every class uses drugs. Not every class lives in the ghetto. And the ones that have enough money not to can choose to leave whenever they want.\u201d Similarly, while everyone\u2019s impacted by this pandemic, not all disabled people face the same risks: those who can work from home, have a car, and don\u2019t live in crowded, congregate settings have not experienced the same forms of exploitation, neglect, and devastation. <\/span><\/p>\n Had the pandemic arrived only a year or two before, my own risks would have been far greater when I was living with roughly eight other poor and working-class queer folks. The mouldy, pest-filled walls of the house we lived in, now in heaps at its intersection along Kingsway, contributed to a worsening cough that often makes me an object of fear in this pandemic. Such external interpretations of health status askews the reality of where a chronic cough may come from: the impacts of global capitalism, accelerating climate catastrophe, and the specific effects of pollution in urban Chinese cities. While those who live above the heap of my former home complain about its unsanitary, unsightly quality on a Reddit forum, I wonder where Canada\u2019s so-called universal healthcare really is and why it costs so much to live in a place where my health is not devastated.<\/span><\/p>\n Sean Strub\u2019s concept of the viral underclass\u2013used originally to understand the criminalization of HIV positive people\u2013also helps<\/span> Dr. Steven Thrasher<\/span><\/a> to explain what makes the most vulnerable even more vulnerable in this pandemic. This concept also highlights glaring inequities within disabled communities.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n For low-income Chinese seniors in Chinatown, the absence of language appropriate long-term care homes and home care services means that many seniors are stuck in poorly ventilated and cramped buildings with no elevators. Beverly Ho, Operations Coordinator at <\/span>Yarrow Intergenerational Society for Justice<\/span><\/a>, tells me in our interview that they know \u201ca senior who didn’t come out of her unit for at least half a year, because she wasn’t able to make it up and down the stairs. And so her elderly partner was doing most of the caretaking because he’s more mobile. But you know, he’s close to 90 as well.\u201d For seniors who are themselves undocumented, fewer choices exist outside crowded and pest-filled SROs (single room occupancy hotels or buildings). The choice to enter long-term care homes, where <\/span>more than twenty thousand people have died<\/span><\/a> in this pandemic, is no replacement for systemic overhaul within Canada\u2019s aging population, but for now, seniors who aren\u2019t fluent in English face barriers to even having that option. When I think back to the house I lived in, I notice how absence of available affordable housing pushed me to accept what I had out of survival. When Beverly tells me that many seniors in Chinatown share this resignation, I grieve conditions that make\u00a0 aging comfortably as multiply-disabled racialized people a fargone luxury.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This pandemic, then, is also the pandemic of the housing crisis. Wybou reflects that in the port town of Prince Rupert:<\/span><\/p>\n and in surrounding areas, because of things like displacement, LNG, inflation, [and] Vancouver landlords buying property in remote and isolated communities in the province, full and entire families have lost housing for years now and there is an absolutely cacophonous waitlist to be able to access housing. In these remote areas where there\u2019s minimal vaccine education, minimal COVID education, very, very high fear of the government from abuses in the healthcare system, we now have all of those things combined together sometimes with twelve people all sharing very very small households. It will be you, your aunties, your uncles, your cousins, your friends, your coworkers, because everyone\u2019s lost housing. They\u2019re having to convert hotels now into single room occupancies, with shared common areas, shared bathroom areas, because there\u2019s just not enough housing.<\/span><\/p>\n Within her work at DULF, Nyx situates the viral underclass within a cascade of systems: \u201cthe prison industrial complex feeds into the housing industrial complex, which feeds into other kinds of resource industrial complexes.\u201d For criminalized and unhoused Indigenous substance users interviewed in <\/span>K\u00edmmapiiyipitssini<\/span><\/i>, housing is at the highest priority of their needs. For Thompson and many others whose finances have been devastated by both pandemic closures and the impact of long COVID, homelessness has become an ever-looming reality dependent on access to income support that the Canadian government has no plans on increasing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n![\"An](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/immunoc.png?resize=1024%2C1024&ssl=1\")
Calculus<\/b><\/h3>\n
![\"An](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/pandemicboundaries.png?resize=1024%2C1024&ssl=1\")
Compassion<\/b><\/h3>\n
![\"An](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/drug-users.png?resize=1024%2C1024&ssl=1\")
Culpability<\/b><\/h3>\n
![\"An](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/youth-.png?resize=1024%2C1024&ssl=1\")
Complex\u00a0<\/b><\/h3>\n