Tari Ajadi, El Jones & Julia Rodgers define democracy as trusting the public & investing in care

Tari Ajadi is an Assistant Professor in Black Politics at McGill University. El Jones is an Assistant Professor of Political and Canadian Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University, and Julia Rodgers is a PhD Candidate studying patient-oriented healthcare and public engagement in the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie. They are three of the four lead authors of the high profile and politically impactful report Defunding the Police: Defining the Way Forward for HRM. (https://www.halifax.ca/sites/default/files/documents/city-hall/boards-committees-commissions/220117bopc1021.pdf) In our discussion we unpack that important document, but we also try to look at some of the historical roots of defunding and divestment as tools for achieving social justice, the complicated challenge of trying to gain public support for policies that strike the public as “too radical” because a prior set of cultural assumptions, ideologies and biases blind many of us to the need to go radically in a different direction from the system that we have: which blindly wastes a fortune in public funds financing a broken status quo. We talk about the ongoing fiasco of the so-called “Freedom Convoy” that has terrorized Canadian cities, and especially Ottawa, for the last several weeks. They make it clear that the public’s disgust with the response from political leaders and law enforcement should not be read as necessarily about a desire for more authoritarian measures to keep the peace–though there is likely a lot of that within Canadian public opinion–it should be seen as, first off, a moment where the police demonstrate they are here to “uphold the social order,” as El puts it, to protect “white conservative movements,” but it should also be interpreted as another example of a “long history of ignoring white nationalism” in Canada, in Julia’s words. In many instances, social movements and counterprotests organized by communities–these forces that “exist outside the system”--were able to accomplish what the police couldn’t. This just confirms, from their perspective, that we need an alternative model of public safety, one that trusts communities enough to work “in concert for the good,” to quote a particularly powerful turn of phrase from Tari that he makes near the end of this discussion. He makes that turn in the context of describing the Defunding the Police report as a “love letter to the city.” And admits that love can be “complex” and “conflictual,” but due to the fact that the evacuation of love from the social in a carceral nation allows “space for domination to exist,” we need to reengage with the public as an act of redemptive love. Things did not have to turn out this way, and they could still change. But achieving that alteration of social reality will necessarily mean, as El teaches us, working to achieve that change at the social level. It’s not going to happen without knowledge translation and civic engagement. As Julie succinctly puts it at one point: “language matters so much” in negotiating the attachment to authority that prevents many people from imagining a more radically democratic means of fostering healthy communities. So often the struggle is less about evidence and data and more about arguments, established doctrines, ideas that have been embedded in institutions for so long they come to count as unreflexive forms of common sense. Moving forward in a transformative way, they stress, might mean looking back in time at misremembered or deliberately forgotten movements, the voice of black women, for example, who Tari tells us “were truth-tellers in their time;” taking up their words and recognizing the prescience of their ideas rather than just “producing the same violence while citing [their] names.”