I rarely update this any more. I am occasionally writing for the Coast but my newest project is co-hosting a podcast on Halifax, politics, work, culture, etc. called Dog Island. You can listen on Libsyn or subscribe via iTunes, GooglePlay, etc.

A CBC piece about a billionaire named Victor Dahdaleh who received an honorary doctorate from York and who was also named in the Panama Papers is making the rounds.

In case you missed it, the Panama Papers are a massive leak by an insider at a shadowy Panama-based law firm which was founded by a nazi-turned-anti-communist-wannabe-spy that now specializes in helping the wealthy hide their money in overseas accounts. A massive consortium of investigative journalists sorted through the unprecedented leak and revealed a huge web of tax evaders and criminals (as well as lots of people who got awful tax advice from their lawyers). What they managed to show was the ways in which the super-wealthy use an intricate web of shell corporations, shadowy law-firms and secretive off-shore banks to hide financial transactions, shelter their untold wealth from taxation, payout bribes, run guns, and generally avoid the rules that the rest of us have to play by.

The Panama Papers were big news and led to the fall of Iceland’s president so you probably heard of them, but I will forgive you if you didn’t hear about Victor Chu getting an honorary doctorate from my alma mater, the University of King’s College. The awarding of that doctorate happened this spring, a month and a half after the Panama Papers leaks were made public. Apparently he also gave the commencement address and told the graduating class to make sure that robots always serve humanity and that humanity is never forced to serve the robots. This is just what I was told, I wasn’t there.

Victor Chu

Chu has absolutely no connection to King’s and a very tenuous connection to Nova Scotia. It’s also not entirely clear what sort of contribution to academics or culture he’s made or how he’s related to the academic mission of King’s. The other recipients of honorary doctorates this year were noted French poet/philosopher/theorist Michel Deguy whose work is often taught in the Contemporary Studies program and successful King’s alum/poet/editor/McCain’s heir Gillian McCain; two people with obvious connections to the academic mission and/or history of the College. (Who knew that one of the authors of  Please Kill Me went to King’s?!)

Chu’s biography on the other hand touts his first million dollar financial transaction at age 12, his role on corporate boards and his various investment successes. King’s of course awards degrees in the humanities & social sciences, science, and journalism and has no business school. (but hey, as another Asian dude who graduated from King’s: big shout to Asian dudes getting that parchment. I guess.)

His biography also mentions two of the companies that he owns: First Eastern Investment Group (a private equity firm) and Victor Chu & Co.. Which is where the Panama Papers come in: First Eastern was a client of Mossack Fonseca from 1991 until 2013 and used the firm to register in the notorious tax haven of the British Virgin Islands. Chu is also an officer of a real estate holding company called First Eastern that used the law firm to register in the British Virgin Islands (this company was still actively registered there as of 2015 – the last year that the consortium was able to obtain data). He is also an officer of Kwong Wah Investment which used Mossack Fonsesca to register in the Virgin Islands (that business is also still active as of 2015). One of the two other officers of Kwong Wah is the not-at-all-shadowy-sounding “Deep Bank Limited.” Chu is the founder of CMEC GE Capital China Industrial Holdings Ltd. which used Mossaca to register in the British Virgin Islands until 2000. In case you feel like his connection to grey-market offshore banking isn’t explicit enough: the clearly named Victor Chu China Investment Limited was registered in the Virgin Islands in 1992 and was active as of 2015. Chu appears to be directly connected to at least five businesses who registered in the Virgin Islands using Mossack Fonseca, three of which are still registered there. He is listed under two slightly different names that share the same address. None of this was particularly secret and he was mentioned in a Guardian piece on the leaks nine days before King’s graduation.

Sinochem and the Chinese State

People I’ve talked to have said that Chu was very nice and so far my very limited research has turned up no suggestion that his companies were directly involved in the worst kinds of criminal activity associated with the Panama papers. I do want to make it 100% clear that I am not suggesting he has done anything at all illegal.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that Chu is the founder and CEO of Sinochem Investment LTD. (the biography on the King’s website does not mention this company) As far as I understand it – and I am not at all an expert on the corporate structures of private equity firms trying to work in China in the 1990s – Sinochem Investment LTD is a venture capital firm that’s main function is to provide western investors with private equity opportunities in China. In order to reduce red-tape and transaction costs firms like Sinochem Investment LTD enter into relationships with existing Chinese firms (usually state owned), sacrificing some autonomy for the opportunity to provide investors with cheap access to Chinese markets. The liberalization of the Chinese economy means that this is less of a necessity now, but I understand that it was basically the only way for private equity firms to be able to get foreign capital into China during the 1990s.

Anyway, as I understand it Sinochem Investment LTD (under a different name until 2003) was a partnership between First Eastern Capital and the state-owned Sinochem Group (known as China National Chemicals Import & Export Corp during the 1990s), a similarly named but separate business. I believe but can’t confirm, that Sinochem Group was ultimately the owner of Sinochem Investment LTD. Sinochem Group is a vast conglomerate that owns several hundred subsidiaries and manufactures a ton of different things: its one of the largest oil companies in China, it produces fertilizer, latex gloves, all kinds of stuff. There are nine companies with the word Sinochem in their name in the Panama Papers database. Sinochem Investment LTD is not one of them.

The Sinochem connection is worth noting for a few reasons. First, like most Chinese state-owned companies in the last 30 years Sinochem has terrible track record on just about everything other than making money. In 2005 the company was implicated in an oil-for-food scandal in Iraq and a 2015 explosion in Tianjin at a warehouse owned by two Sinochem subsidiaries killed over 100 people after company officials found a corrupt safety inspector to okay their dangerously unsafe facilities. (There is no evidence and no one has ever suggested that Chu had any involvement at all in either of these incidents)

Second, part of the fallout of the Panama Papers was a deep crackdown on dissent and journalism in China as the Chinese elite try to head off any discontent caused by the revelation that well connected businessmen and Communist Party officials and their family members were using offshore banking to hide their obscene wealth from a citizenry which has largely seen their lives get worse from China’s rapid embrace of capitalism in recent decades. The Chinese government ordered newspapers and other media outlets to not talk about the leaks and even went so far as to block all online discussion of the Panama Papers. On a related note, King’s is very proud of its journalism school.

Honorary Degrees

Real graduates who study hard, participate in the social and academic life of their institutions, take on massive and unsustainable debt and earn their degrees have their name and degree title mentioned briefly. People with no connection to the institution have long citations of their accomplishments read out in an attempt to impress the crowd and stroke the egos of these potential future mega-donors. One honorary degree recipient’s citation often takes as long to read as it takes the entire graduating class of the History of Science Program and the Early Modern Studies Program to have their names read and to cross the stage. At a time when the people who actually make up the university community ought to be honoured, universities are trying to make fundraising pitches.

Of course, receiving a degree at the same time as someone like Michel Duguy or Stephanie Nolen (who is a fantastic and decorated journalist and who received an honorary doctorate and gave a very nice commencement address during my own graduation from King’s in 2009) can add something special to the occasion for many graduates and it can allow a university to publicly define its academic and social mission. However, these worthy attempts to recognize the contributions of great scholars, journalists and public servants are no more common than pandering to the rich in the hope that they may drop some crumbs.

Universities increasingly use honorary doctorates to try to grease the fundraising wheels and get wealthy individuals, their companies and their friends to donate some money. Money the universities need because of a decades long decline in public funding caused by governments crying poor due to a lack of tax revenue. So our institutions of higher learning give honorary degrees to the world’s richest people to try to convince them to donate some money to survive a funding crisis which is caused by rich people actively working to avoid paying taxes. Sometimes they dodge these taxes through off-shore banking, sometimes they don’t have to because they can strong arm elected officials into setting marginal tax rates for the rich and large corporations at constantly decreasing levels.

Sometimes the universites even accidentally end up giving an honorary Doctorate of Civil Law to some random businessman with no substantive connection at all the College or its academic mission but at least five connections to a shadowy law firm implicated in a global banking scandal that brought down a president and caused a government to double down on squashing dissent. I guess these things happen.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

Note:

I am not a journalist. I would love for a real journalist to dig deeper into Halifax’s connections to the Panama Papers, but I am not the person to do that. 

I also want to make it 100% clear that I am not suggesting that Victor Chu or anyone else did anything illegal or that there is any evidence to suggest that they did.

For the third time in nine months the provincial government in Nova Scotia has moved to revoke the right to strike from unionized workers in Nova Scotia (in July 2013 the NDP government shamelessly did it to paramedics while the NSGEU silently watched, and in early March of this year the new Liberal government used coercive legislation to break the NSGEU’s own strike at Northwood Manor’s homecare division). The Liberals are introducing Bill 37 to crush a work stoppage and force nurses represented by the NSGEU in the Capital Health district off picket lines and back into understaffed nursing units.

(It is currently being stalled in Law Amendments committee through a combination of rank and file nurses stacking the speaking list and the NDP finally finding the vestigial backbone that had not seen use since 2008 and using procedural wrangling to keep the bill in committee)

The draconian overreaction by the state and the surprisingly militant response from the normally very conciliatory NSGEU has created a crisis for labour and the state in Nova Scotia. There’s no doubt there’s a showdown brewing with the province and capital on one side and the labour movement and its allies on the other. It’s a test for labour and the broader left in the province and for anyone interested in understanding politics, political economy or the nature of work in the province it’s a moment where a whole pile of problems, developments and dynamics are now laid out quite clearly.

The realities on the ground in Nova Scotia are startling: the province is threatening to revoke the most basic labour right (the ability to collectively organize and withhold your own labour) from 33,000 workers – almost half the union membership in a province where the labour movement is overwhelmingly concentrated in the public sector. The NSGEU, one of the largest unions in the province, have favoured binding arbitration and rejected militancy in recent years yet its rank and file are largely fed up and many of its members – mostly young, well educated women  – are fired up and willing to push its leadership. To their credit, the union, like the Chicago Teachers Union before them, has made this strike about more than wages and instead focused the the role of properly funded public services, a strategy that is necessary for the survival of public sector unionism. The broader labour movement in the province has been quick to recognize the importance of this battle and is more progressive, more militant and better organized than it has been in years. Halifax’s left has consolidated in recent years and the socialist oriented Solidarity Halifax have had two years to consolidate its organization and its ability to intervene in this struggle may largely determine the viability of its project. The NS NDP, recently decimated in a general election, used back to work legislation in the sector less than a year ago but seem to be willing to provide parliamentary opposition to the Liberal’s plans.

 

Among all the dynamics that make this bill and the left and labour’s response to it so important is that the actions of this government are not simply an assault on the rights of organized labour. Bill 37 is an assault on the rights of women.

There is no way to look at this bill and the view that this government and its supporters take and not see this as based in large part on a gendered understanding of work. A legislature which is overwhelmingly male is sitting in a legislative chamber trying to make it illegal for health care workers – an overwhelmingly female workforce – to withhold their labour.

Bill 37 does not restrict the right to strike of a narrow band of emergency healthcare professionals – it restricts the right of a wide variety of people who engage in carework and jobs in the caring professions are overwhelming held by women (to say nothing of the unwaged carework of the home where women still carry the vast majority of the burden). The list of workers who lose the right to withhold their labour doesn’t just include nurses and paramedics: it includes home care, home support and even child care workers. This isn’t about over regulating the labour of essential emergency workers, its about destroying the labour rights of anyone engaged in care work and the vast majority of those people are not men.

In a recent-ish piece for Jacobin Magazine, American labour journalist Sarah Jaffe wrote that “While bosses, administrators, and politicians expect and tout the natural “caring” that women who work in care fields provide, [daycare worker Nancy] Harvey points out that it adds to their exploitation. “Kindness is taken for weakness,” she says.”

Just reading the comments sections on the Chronicle Herald or CBC websites makes it clear that these assumptions about women, work and care underpin the false outrage that justifies withholding the rights of an overwhelmingly female workforce: the women on strike would not go on strike if they really cared about their jobs or their patients. The women who are walking picket lines all night in front of province house in an April ice storm in order to demand that their new contract includes nurse to patient ratios do not really care about patients. The women who have dedicated their lives to a profession that puts them on 12 hour shifts with the sick, the dying, the elderly and the suffering do not really care about patients. Demanding fair wages, the right to control your own labour or the ability to ensure that your work place is safe is incompatible with caring because care work is not real work. And as we all know, women are naturally more into the caring part than the working part.

But in a world (and a province) where a larger and larger part of the work force is female and where most of the very few growth areas for employment are female dominated care professions the continued belief that care work is not real labour – or at least not the sort of labour that one can withhold, bargain over and receive a fair wage and adaquate benefits to perform – is increasingly incompatible with a desire to create a more just world. Workplace control, fair compensation, gender equality and respect for the dignity of all labour require us to recognize that work is gendered and that all people – regardless of their gender – ought to have absolute control of their work, including the right to organize together and to collectively withhold their labour.

The gendered dynamics of work and labour rights don’t exist in a vacuum. The context, particularly the regional context, also matters. And in Nova Scotia this has been a horrible year for gender politics: a high profile gang rape led to a teenage taking her life, an inexplicable tradition of “rape chants” at Saint Mary’s University became public, anti-choice ads appeared on public busses and in general it felt like there was a war being waged on anyone who wasn’t male. The general misogyny of our times is reflected in Bill 37.

The same logic that says women aren’t in control of their labour also underpins rape culture and the anti-choice assault on reproductive rights: the bodies of women – labouring bodies, libidinal bodies, reproductive bodies, living bodies – do not belong to women. The right to control those bodies and to decide when they labour, when they carry children to term and when and with whom they have sex are decisions not to be left to women. Instead bosses and men and the state are believed to be better arbiters of what is best for women and what women ought to be permitted to do.

 

The fight over Bill 37 tells us a lot about the world we live in: a world where the state can simultaneously tell us that public services are too expensive to fund in times of austerity but are so important than we need to take away basic rights to protect them. A world where the state and industry demand that labour maintain its end of the post-war labour settlement and abide by strict regulation but refuse to recognize the right to strike that helped define modern industrial legality. A world where rank and file members of unions are starting to force their leadership to abandon concessions and arbitration as a strategy.

It’s also a world where some work is more highly valued than other work and the ways in which we evaluate whose labour is really labour is always refracted through the lens of gender. Where you stand on Bill 37 says a lot about whose side you’re on – not just if you support bosses or workers, but also if you see care work as work worth defending and women as workers worth respecting.

I don’t have time to write anything smart about this, but it is too long to cram into a twitter post. So some quick facts which might not immediately appear related but actually are:

– Today the New Brunswick NDP has not only supported the RCMP’s brutal crackdown on the provinces First Nations and their allies, but actually called on Conservative Premier David Alward to refuse to negotiate with anyone resisting fracking until either activists remove all blockades or law enforcement clear them by force. So the NDP are not only failing to stand in solidarity with the province’s social movements, they want the provincial government to intensify the crushing of opposition to fracking.

– The Assembly of the First Nations Chiefs of New Brunswick have thus far actively called for more oil and gas exploration in the province and have refused to lend full support to the members of their Nations who have been protecting the commons along with their non-indigenous allies. Even gone as far as to criticize the activists on the ground for potentially costing the province and the First Nations monetarily. They have not (as far as I have seen) openly been critical of the role of private security forces or law enforcement in escalating the situation,

– The lawyer for the AFNCNB is Kelly Lamrock. For some inexplicable reason, the white politician has also been serving as the organizations primary spokesperson.

– Kelly Lamrock is a former Liberal Party cabinet minister who lost his seat and then joined the NDP. He is widely thought to be a key advisor to the NDP party leadership with the hope that he will both run in the next election and be able to move the party further to the centre-right to train to gain some ounce of political viability in New Brunswick.

– While still a student in New Brunswick, Kelly Lamrock was a central figure in fracturing the Canadian student movement in the mid-90s by organizing the Canadian Alliance of Student organizations in order to try to fracture opposition to the Liberal Party’s social policy review. Lamrock (along with at least one key figure in the Nova Scotia NDP) helped fracture the student movement in Atlantic Canada an attempt to separate it from its social movement routes and align more closely with small-l liberal lobbying efforts in the midst of a radical economic re-structuring of the Canadian welfare state to re-allocate more and more money to capital in the form of the Liberal Social Policy Review and the Harris Conservative’s reign of terror.

– So in the midst of the start of widespread austerity in the 1990s Lamrock helped lead an assault on a social movement that was at the centre of opposition to re-structuring by helping to organize a rival organization which would side with the state and condemn movement activists in exchange for a metaphorical seat at a non-existent table. In 2013 he is serving as lawyer, spokesperson and political strategist for an organization of leaders who are selling out their own members and trying to use this as an opportunity to push his new political party to the right and disassociate them from on-the-ground struggle and resistance.

Those are facts. Below us opinion, but it is opinion which is rooted in spending too much times in rooms with my generation’s Kelly Lamrock and from spending far too much time thinking about how people of my generation can look at the strategic disasters of the segment of 90s social democrats and liberals who truly believed that capitulation could be traded for access and that access could be traded for social change.

Lamrock is a thread that runs through the politics of our region from 90s to today. And he isn’t a bad guy – I have met him a few times and he is not a bad human being. For the purpose of trying to explain what I think is going on politically, I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he believes that his political choices have been the best option for everyone they had an effect on, not just for him. What I am critical of is not his morality, but his political strategy. Even more than that, I am critical of the political strategy that he so perfectly represents.

There isn’t a singular villain here, but Lamrock is emblematic of the kind of liberal politics that he has practiced for decades: he sees social movements not as a vehicle for change but as a wedge. The Canadian Federation of Students of the early 90s and its social democratic positions against imperialist wars abroad and the slashing of corporate taxes and social spending at home was a tool to be use to make him and his policy wonk, big and small-L liberal cohort look reasonable. They wouldn’t just climb to the top of the latter, they would use the backs of the people doing hard organizing to get there.

Likewise, there seems to be a logic at play within the hyper-marginalized NB NDP that has led Lamrock, Cardy and their ilk to believe that the quickest way to convince the electorate that they aren’t radical is to be more opposed to the radicals than the government is. And remember, Thomas Mulcair and many of his provincial counterparts see the 2009 NS NDP’s victory as proof that if you can be un-radical and bland enough you can get enough votes to win. (In the defence of those still clinging to this belief, the Chronicle Herald’s new pay wall may mean that they haven’t actually realized that the voters of Nova Scotia decided that if you want bland and unprincipled you just vote for the real deal and elect the Grits. You get ten more free articles next month, so hold tight, fellas)
The lives of hundreds of people on the ground be damned, Lamrock is going to get his seat at the table. Even if he got there once (a real table! A cabinet tabe!) and did not manage to improve the lives of NB’s most vulnerable one bit.

The sad thing isn’t that he is at it again, it is that he is taking other people along for the ride. The leadership of the New Brunswick NDP want this and they deserve what they’re going to get. Desperation and no direction will take you to crazy places – an few places are crazier than alleged social democrats complaining that a Conservative premier isn’t clearing blockades fast enough.

But shame on the Chiefs of NB’s First Nations for letting the province’s Worm Tongue whisper in their ears and convince them that they can’t control the tide capitalist exploitation and that they just need to use the bodies of the members of their nations to ride it out for some sweet royalty checks down the road. It is obvious that it takes a special kind of heartless to see the people you claim to represent standing and singing for months on a road with the guns of a militarized law enforcement agency pointed at them and to still do nothing. But even if their wager is that selling out the most principled of their people will help them get to the mystical table then they are fools. The grass roots in their communities have had enough, the tides are shifting and they’ve misread them. And they’re following the advice of a man who not only has split loyalties at best, (it is possible to believe that their lawyer has shown throughout his political life that he has few loyalties, split or otherwise) but who has also spent two decades showing the strict limitations of exactly the kind of politics they’re engaging in.

The NB NDP and the Federation of the First Nations Chiefs of New Brunswick have dug deep into the 90s to find a political path, and they both hired the same guide: one who has walked that path his whole political life. But neither the chiefs nor Dominic Cardy have bothered to look at where that path leads, even though the answer is right there, whispering in their ears.

And just like so much of what passes for 90s nostalgia these days, the strategic snake oil they are being sold is flashy and bright but devoid of any real political content.

There are lessons to be learned from the past, but you don’t learn them by repeating the same unprincipled, unsuccessful errors that were so central to the success of the counter-offensive which beat back the first wave of Canadian opposition to neo-liberalism. But just like when students fought austerity alongside trade unionists, anti-war activists, welfare recipients and public healthcare advocates, there are still ambitious, white men with ill-fitting suits and vague politics whispering in ears and claiming that the first ones to capitulate will get the first scraps that fall from the table.

(Good lord, don’t sue me)