Today many within the social movements are looking for the means to move past token protest and adopt methods of resistance that actually challenge the austerity measures and social dislocation that are being inflicted on us. In just this spirit, a series of bold squatting actions have been undertaken in several parts of the country. Over the last couple of weeks, the authorities have struck back, with squats being shut down in Vancouver, Quebec City and at Toronto's "Tent City."

The fact that three major squats were raided across the country in the space of a few days should not be a reason for pessimism. It is obvious that governments are alarmed that homeless people and their allies are responding to the desperate lack of housing by simply reclaiming it themselves. The danger that such forms of direct action might take on the dimensions of a mass mobilization is not lost on them.

It is also quite clear that the recent round of repression has not been able to cower people involved in this nascent squatting movement. The evicting of the Woodwards squatters in BC has led to great community anger and ongoing demonstrations at the site. The Quebec movements are hardly likely to be intimidated. Private goons and cops moved on Tent City in Toronto with great brutality and arrogance. People were evicted without warning, given no opportunity to gather up belongings, attend to their pets or even grab their medication. It was obvious that the City simply intended to return the site to its corporate owner and dump the homeless squatters on the street. So great was the anger at this behaviour, however, with their self-congratulatory press conference being shut down by protesters, that they have had to come up with some concessions to provide subsidized accommodation to those they intended to abandon.

As this is written, the OCAP Pope Squat in Toronto's West End is still standing as a place of shelter for homeless people, as a symbol of resistance and as a living demand for housing. While the municipal and provincial levels of government pass the buck and stall on the question of providing social housing at the site, OCAP is moving forward with the struggle. During October, we shall take over another empty building in Toronto, open it for the homeless and launch a series of support actions in a number of Ontario cities to drive home the message that communities are ready to take the housing they won't provide.

Give It or Guard It!

On October 26, a range of community-based and labour organizations will join with OCAP in coordinated actions under the slogan "Give it or Guard it!" Plans will be announced in several communities to reclaim housing for the homeless. Times and locations will not be a secret. In fact, mayors and police chiefs will be sent letters telling them exactly what is going to happen. They will then have a choice to make. They can either stand aside while places of safety and shelter are created or they can muster their police to "serve and protect" empty buildings and the social criminals who own them. If they choose the latter course, however, they will have to pursue it with the whole community watching. Only the most faithful followers of the Cult of Property could fail to be disgusted by such a sight.

In the event that they do elect to guard the buildings we lay claim to, the October 26 actions will not be simply symbolic. We will use the day as a means of mobilizing in communities effected by the housing crisis and we will organize it as a way of building to multiple full-scale takeovers next year. In our view, there is every prospect that 2003 could see a wave of housing actions from coast to coast.

If it proves possible to generate a mass movement in Canada to reclaim the property left empty by landlords, speculators and developers, it will have enormous possibilities. Thousands of such sites exist across the country and each and every one of them can be viewed as a particle of all that is ugly and irrational about this society and as a site of important resistance. No concept of "squatters' rights" has ever become part of the legal and social fabric in Canada precisely because no generalized resistance to the "property rights" of the greedy and socially destructive has emerged. The acute housing crisis of today, however, creates conditions for the acceptance of such injustice to break down. As the numbers of under-housed and destitute people increase, the reclaiming of so precious a resource as abandoned housing is such a glaring and obvious way forward that it is almost a given that major actions along these lines lie ahead. If the scale and tenacity of such actions reaches a high enough level, governments will have to accept large scale squatting or themselves act to turn these properties into housing.

A mass squatters' movement in Canada would be a crash course in practical anti-capitalist resistance. Their sacred "property rights" and "rule of law" would have to give way to the much more meaningful right of communities to act in their own defence and to win the basic human right to shelter. If we can take housing, why not banks and factories?