Main content

Toronto's poor : a rebellious history

Available Formats:

  • Accessibility:
    • Described images
    • Customizable display
    • ​Print page numbers
    • Heading navigation
    • Table of contents navigation
    Publisher:
    Between the Lines, 2016

Details:

  • Author: Héroux, Gaétan; Palmer, Bryan D.
    Date:
    Created
    2016
    Summary:

    Toronto's Poor reveals the long and too often forgotten history of poor people's resistance. It details how the homeless, the unemployed, and the destitute have struggled to survive and secure food and shelter in the wake of the many panics, downturns, recessions, and depressions that punctuate the years from the 1830s to the present. Written by a working-class historian and a poor people's activist, this is a rebellious book that links past and present in an almost two-hundred year story of struggle and resistance. It is about men, women, and children relegated to lives of desperation by an uncaring system, and how they have refused to be defeated. In that refusal, and in winning better conditions for themselves, Toronto's poor create the possibility of a new kind of society, one ordered not by acquisition and individual advance, but by appreciations of collective rights and responsibilities.

    Contents:
    • Part 1 Introduction: The Long History of Toronto's Poor: Conceptualizing the Dispossessed
    • Capitalism, Crisis, and Class: Why Have the Poor Always Been With Us?
    • Dispossession: The Nursery of Class Struggle
    • Capitalist Crises: Class Conflict From Above and Below
    • Toronto: A Locale Within the Global
    • Class Struggle in Our Times: Bringing the Dispossessed into the Picture
    • Class Politics and Dispossession: The Left and the Wageless
    • Part 2 "Cracking the Stone": The Origins of Toronto's Dispossessed, 1830-1928
    • Land and Labour in Old Ontario
    • Toronto's House of Industry
    • In the Era of Confederation: Capitalist State Formation and the Poor
    • The Underside of the Great Upheaval, 1873-1896
    • Protesting "Labour Tests"
    • The Black Flag Remembered; The Tramp Reviled
    • Capitalist Consolidation and the Left-Led Unemployed Movement in Pre-Second World War Toronto
    • The Left and the Toronto Jobless Before the Great Depression, 1915-1925
    • Part 3 "United We Eat; Divided We Starve": The Toronto Unemployed Movement, 1929-1939
    • Reds and the Unemployed in Canada's Great Depression: From Third Period to Popular Front
    • The Single Unemployed and Toronto's Communist Battle for the Streets: Heroes 1914-Bums 1933
    • The Single Unemployed: Bound for Anything But Glory
    • Laver vs. The Lodge: The Voucher War of 1932-1933 and the Consolidation of a Regulatory Order
    • On the Trail of Harvey Jackson, William M. McKnight, Clifford Mashery, and George Haig: The Single Unemployed Present at Their Own Remaking
    • Marginalizing the Marginal: Single Unemployed Women Toronto Trekkers
    • Depression's Denouement: The Winding Down of the Struggles of Single Unemployed Men, 1937-1939
    • Crisis of Unemployment = Housing Crisis Evictions: "They Shall Not Pass"
    • The Jobless Take Job Action: Early Relief Strikes, 1932-1933
    • A "Red" Among Relief Recipients: Long Branch's Ernest Lawrie
    • Reds, Riots, and Raising the Relief Rates: March-May 1935
    • Upping the Ante: The Hepburn Offensive and the Militancy of the Unemployed, 1936
    • Lakeview Militancy and a Hepburn Ambush, 1938
    • Closing Out the Decade: Relief Strikes and the Call to Abolish Relief Work. Part 4 "A Hopeless Failure": The Limitations and Erosion of the Modern Welfare State, 1940-2015
    • The Uneven Origins of an Incomplete Welfare State
    • In the Shadow of the Great Depression, War, and the Emerging Welfare State: Episodic Struggle in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s
    • A Sixties Turn: The Just Society, the New Left, and the "Discovery" of the Poor, 1965-1975
    • Hard Times: Capitalist Crises, Ideological Initiative, and the State Assault on the Dispossessed, 1973-2015
    • Part 5 "Fight to Win!": The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and the Return/Revenge of the Dispossessed, 1985-2015
    • Marauding Through the 1980s and into the 1990s: The Many-Sided Attack on the Poor
    • Mobilizing Against the Marauders: The Revival of Poor People's Agitations in the 1980s
    • Marching to Mobilization: The Beginnings of OCAP
    • Mulroneyville, NDP Welfare Cheats, and Operation Desert Gypsy
    • Revolution from Above, Against Those Below: The Poor Fight Back
    • Homelessness and the Freezing Deaths Inquest, 1995-1996
    • Squats and NIMBYs: OCAP Escalates the Struggle
    • More Deaths, More Protests, More Complacency (And Worse)
    • Squeegees, Soliciting, and the Safe Streets Act: OCAP Continues to Counter
    • Ottawa Bound and Bringing the War Against Poverty Back Home to Queen's Park
    • "The Long Retreat is Over": Common Fronts
    • Evicting Flaherty, Snake Walking Through Toronto's Financial District, and Squatting for Affordable Housing
    • Squatting With the Pope and the Tenants of Tent City
    • Miller Time: Streets to Homes and the Death of Paul Croutch
    • Two Faces of Social Cleansing
    • A Women's Squat
    • Raise the Rates! The Special Diet Supplement
    • Turning on the TAP: Toronto Against Poverty
    • Another Demolition Job: The Community Start Up and Maintenance Benefit
    • Hostels Under Attack: OCAP Fights Back
    • Part 6: Conclusion "Bread I Want, And Bread I Will Have."
    Genre:
    History and geography, Canadian nonfiction
    Subject(s): Poor | Poverty | Social conditions | Urban poor
    Original Publisher: Toronto, Ontario, Between the Lines
    Language(s): English
    ISBN: 9781771132817, 1771132817, 9781771132831, 1771132833