Errol Young is a long-time activist in the community. He was a former Toronto School Board Trustee and he is a talented photographer who generously shares pictures captured at events and meetings in the community. Errol is passionate about the living conditions of low-income and working people in the community as demonstrated through his active participation on Jane Finch Action Against Poverty.
Please tell me a bit about yourself and how you came to live in the Jane-Finch community.
In 1979, I moved to the Keele and Wilson area with my boys and then we were able to buy the house up here relatively cheaply in 1985. So, I moved into this area. We moved from Halifax where both my boys were born in the Grace Maternity Hospital, so we got them from the Sally Ann!
At that time, I was canvassing for School Trustee and I saw the area and was very impressed by it because it was nothing like any other area of the ward that I was running in. It has a traffic-free concourse or promenade and it looked like a great place to bring up kids. The townhouses were very spacious and well-built, and the corporation was looking like it was doing well.
I became the School Board Trustee for the area of Keele to Black Creek and Steeles to Wilson. I was unemployed and it was one of the things I could do as I had time on my hands. No one seemed to want to really hire me, so I ran for the position, I spent a lot of time going door to door and learning about the ward which was very important. I was the Trustee for 15 years.
In terms of the School Board, what kind of issues were you facing?
There was issue after issue. I was on the Board with Maria Augimeri (past City Councillor) and she was also elected in 1982 as a trustee but she was a trustee for the Separate Schools on the Public Board. The reason is, is because education was then funded on the Catholic board only up to grade ten. Eleven, twelve and thirteen, they had to transfer to the public board or stay in the same school and pay private school fees. That comes from an old law – an old education law of the ministry where public schools could go up to grade ten in rural areas on reserves. Public schools were funded up to grade ten. So, kids, when they had to go to residential schools or leave the area, they only left for eleven, twelve and thirteen. But the separate school used it to take their funding up to grade ten. In 1985, Bill 20, or something like that, the funding was extended to the full secondary for the separate schools. That was one issue.
One main issue was that we were closing schools. Population was dropping but also the separate school was being predatory, and they’d go around – the priest would go around – people would go around and say they could get their catechism at the local school so why don’t you change to separate schools. So, a lot of the Catholic’s who were using public schools moved on. We still had Catholics in the public school, but they were actually scouted and that brought our numbers down, especially in elementary schools at that time and we closed about 35 public schools in the former North York.
In this Ward, Lamberton got closed. Lamberton was an interesting school building – it is. It is one of the few all air-conditioned schools – a modern school and it was turned into a sub-administration centre because the administrators would have air conditioning – quite nice! Ten years later, almost to the date, all of the schools in the area were over-populated like Derrydown and they needed to have portables put in and everything like that, so I was able to push the Board to reopen Lamberton. And it did and its open today.
Apartheid sanctions were interesting. Augimeri and I moved that the Board not support apartheid, not buy apartheid stuff like oranges and not that the purchase were the major issues, but the Toronto Board had done this and I started thinking, “why isn’t our Board doing this?” So, I talked to Augimeri and said that I wanted to do this and we put together a motion and put it to the Board and there were two or three meetings where we had people from all over Toronto talking to the Board about why they should do this. And it passed.
This issue was similar to the school issues in the Jane-Finch ward because there was poverty everywhere so the kids going to Highview on Wilson and Tumpane – those are not affluent areas. Plus C.W. Jeffery’s was in the ward and Downsview Secondary School and Downsview Public School – talk about a working-class school – that is one. So, yes, they were very much the same. We think of Westview school but the shooting (Jordan Manners) was in Jeffery’s.
Instinctively, I believe that the more committed adults you have in the school, secondary school especially and elementary school, I mean the higher the ratio of adults to students, the better off the learning environment is. I fought to keep that going. I fought to keep outdoor education well-funded so that all kids had three nights at Mono Cliffs (provincial park) and kept Forest Valley open. Those were important things to me. I certainly wanted computerization – kids to get computers and stuff like that because I was learning computers at the Board and it was overcoming some of my learning disabilities. I wanted to make sure that was going.
The position of trustee was part-time, in fact we had wage and price controls on I think it was $7,500 a year. It did go up by about $32,000.
What are the issues in the schools today?
Today, the neo-liberal agenda and Doug Ford - he’s not that smart but he clues into it instinctively. He’s looking to cut down government and schools boards and education is government. The only way you can cut down in major ways – you’re not going to cut down in roads and traffic, but they are going to cut down services to students. That’s a cheaper thing and the same with healthcare. The Board is one of the two major expensive prongs – sacrificial prongs that they were willing to go after and that’s what they did. That’s what they have been slowly doing. With Mike Harris, I quit the Board because of Mike Harris, I knew the he was going to slowly starve schools with firing staff, lowering building standards and making schools more dangerous and less effective.
In 1997, Mike Harris took all funding powers away from the Board. When I was a trustee, I was a fully elected official. What that means is that you have the ability to tax and spend. Right now, trustee’s have no ability to tax, just spend. The budget is set by a formula set by the province. So, if they spend too much money on something, they have to give it up somewhere else and while you always have to do that in a budget, they have a smaller and smaller budget per student every year. That is what Ford is doing by increasing class sizes. Ontario will lose over a thousand teaching positions in the next few years. That’s a normal neo-liberal strain that we have to resist and that is cutting resources to education.
When I was a trustee, I always tried to nudge up the amount going to school boards – a little bit above inflation or something like that, sometimes successful, sometimes not – mostly not. I sometimes tried to shame Trustees into keeping the budget reasonable. So, I quit in 1997 because I didn’t want to become a functionary of the province and that’s what trustees are now. The last Education Committee meeting we had, the Trustee stood up (Chris Mammoliti) and said, “We had to do it – we had to balance the budget.” No, you don’t have to balance the budget. If you don’t balance the budget then you are making a legitimate protest bringing attention to the issues that are going to happen with the new budget and you force the province to come in to take over the Board and when the province does come in to take over the board, the supervisor has a more affluent budget. Maybe Mammoliti doesn’t want to lose his job or maybe he doesn’t see himself as having an effective voice for education – he doesn’t. I don’t think he understands a damn thing about schools, and about politics.
What prompted you to get involved in the community?
It was always something I wanted, and I wasn’t sure I could do it because I come from a white privileged background – not so privileged but eventually privileged, I mean I bought a house. On October 17th 2008, when Jane Finch Action Against Poverty (JFAAP) formed on the corner of Jane-Finch, I was one of the people who formulated it. I helped formulate the structure of it in that it has no real leadership, even though it has leadership. JFAAP doesn’t go after grants because I saw what happens to organizations going after grants, after grant, after grant. You get no central funding or very little and you are being pushed in certain political ways that may or may not be yours. The people there were so incredible and accepting – they accept me.
I found out about the protest, I’ve been sort of photographing community activity anyways, so I went to do it there and liked what I saw. I met Butterfly, met Farid, met Suzan, met Ama – unbelievably, brilliant, beautiful and wonderful people.
How did the community respond to the issues?
JFAAP is a reactive organization in many ways so for example, Harris wanted to close schools – schools cost money and when you close a school, that means that a parent with two kids, they can’t get their kids to kindergarten everyday and that’s wrong. Poor people need it more than anybody because the walk to school may be too long – so keeping a school open is a serious matter of access to education. When it came to closing Shoreham school – they said they were looking at all five or six schools but no they just wanted to close Shoreham. I took it to JFAAP – I said here’s what’s going to happen because I knew the process. They got really interested in it and they basically led the community to protest against it and closed down the whole process and it was the only one of two schools, targeted schools in the area that didn’t close. The other one was in Forest Hill, or something like that.
How did government or influential people respond to issues in the community?
People like Barry Rieder (Community Minister) is very supportive. As far as elected representatives are concerned, they don’t know a damn about anything. Augimeri doesn’t know what happened when they closed down the arts program at the library – she doesn’t know anything about that. Anthony says, “Oh, it was terrible” – he spouts the company line but neither of them really know. They don’t know what happened at San Romanoway and the arts program there. Those are levels of politics that these people don’t know a damn thing about, and they are not all that interested because they don’t see them as effective, perhaps. Meanwhile, we stopped the school from closing, we demonstrated in front of the police station because of violence against youth. We supported and continue to support the community farm as part of food security – not that its going to feed everybody but its an example and it’s a wonderful place for the community. I was up there with some seniors visiting from Brookland and they were wondering around the farm and there was this old lady in the field who said, “This is a wonderful place.” “You want some vegetables – here you can have some.” It was just really, really great. They really enjoyed that.
You’ve been JFAAP’s photographer over the years. What impact do pictures have?
The history of photography is all about taking pictures of people – I mean, sure, Ansel Adams takes pictures of mountains but when it comes down to it, the portrait or person, the activity is the value of photography. And they ask – why are they doing it? Pre-photography, people only got their picture shown if they were rich except for Van Gough painting workers. Why would a rich person support or pay somebody to paint them and sit there for hours while they were painted - its about human dignity. Photography was a short cut to that. Now you can just sit there, he opens it, focuses it, puts the film in, opens the camera and for 3 seconds, you don’t say anything – no smiling, you couldn’t keep that up and then bang, that’s it. That’s how photography was done in the beginning.
Why did people do that – you see Billy the Kid, famous Indian Chiefs back in those days submitting themselves to that process because of dignity. I can do that in one hundredth of a second – I can have people smiling. I can have people thinking about how good they look. I can photograph their children and show them how beautiful they are. There’re issues about a person’s self worth with photography but also recording the historical events. Its so important because again, its about human dignity.
The Precarious Workers Report has all my pictures in it. Its been a very frustrating thing for me because I’m the centre of it – I’m the designer. I have the design program on my computer, called the Affinity Publisher like Quark or In Design – its as good as those programs. After many revisions from the community it is now finished. I’ve been to the demonstrations outside of Fiera Foods where the workers were killed – I’ve supported it in those ways – taking pictures and demonstrating and getting arrested for trespass in Doug Ford's constituency office.
What are the issues facing the community today?
Housing has always been a major issue for working-class and immigrant people. After the 2nd world war, one of the most remarkable things in North America was the support for the soldiers and the community afterwards – that the government gave. Low-income interest rates, building programs – it wasn’t just for the veterans (my father wasn’t a veteran), but he still got in on it. He bought a house cheaply. That was structured by the government.
This was unusual. After the first world war, after the second world war, after the revolutionary war, after the Spanish Armada or every other war – veterans were always treated like dirt. For some reason, for good reason, the rich put money into working people and veterans after the 2nd world war. I can only see that as one thing – the Soviet Union. They were scared that people would use the Soviet Union as an example and rise up against them. And, they realized that – and they were right, as crude as it is, people who have equity, they don’t revolt.
Today, they don’t give a damn about the working-class and them revolting. The Soviet Union is no more. The only way you can get housing as a working-class person is if you have a good job, affordable homes and reasonable mortgages. This has changed, enriching the rich – it is called neo-liberism. There’s no attempt by the government to spread the wealth and to share the wealth. The neo-liberal idea of trickle-down and everything goes to the top, prevails. That creates incredibly human misery. People are paying exorbitant rents to very rich people who don't need the money. Renters are sacrificing food, medicine and other basic needs to pay rent. This effects women more than men. They are, for the most part, the ones bringing up the children of our future.
Getting a variety of affordable good food – we’ve seen in our area that they charge more because people who don’t have cars have to walk to the nearest grocery store to get your food. That’s one issue. The farm is standing as an example that it can be done in another way. Food security is important.
It’s a fact that police are used as an occupational army here – especially for youth. We recently had a 14-year-old who was assaulted by police officers - punched, kicked, thrown down and he may have had a bit of marijuana on him which is pretty much a misdemeanor. He was threatening no one and that’s the way they decided to handle that. They were the total aggressors on it. Right now, he is charged with assaulting police and things like that and among the evidence police were offering – absence from that evidence was the security tapes that showed the police assaulting the boy. That is not unusual. There is a culture among police that is gang like. They need to have control, they want control, they are told to have control and they are given guns to have control.
My objection to the Jordan Manners report (a report that was solicited as a result of Manners being shot and killed in a school) and I said this at meetings, that nothing will be done about this. Nothing has changed in those schools. The important thing about that report – the most effective thing was to point out the amount of sexual assaults that girls were suffering from. To me, that was more important than anything the report had to say about policing or guns. Basically, girls go to school to get assaulted – boys do to.
You can’t blame the community for how the structure is set up, but you can use the community to change that structure. There has to be another view of how the world should work. For me, economically, I would go back to the 1950’s where people could get equity for very little input. There were good paying jobs in manufacturing. There was a growth of unions. A company should not be allowed to use temporary workers beyond a few weeks without hiring them and the companies should be forced to hire somebody (internally) instead of hiring a new person. Those structures could be in there. The Precarious Workers Report is a response to this community issue. Of course, those were times of great inequity for people of colour and women so I would not want to replicate that.
Tell me our perspective as a resident with regards to the “politics” of this community?
I do know there are people here, like Butterfly, Ama, Farid – they are very clued into what’s happening. They have a Marist view and that the best way to look at power structures and things like that. Locally there’s a population who voted for Rob Ford and then Doug Ford. I don’t know what to do about that – it’s the reality of life here.
I think we need to keep resisting, not violently resisting but I broke the law last week. Because this worker was killed, crushed in a machine at Fiera Foods, we eventually occupied Doug Ford’s office on Wednesday and a number of us were committed to staying in the office and trespassing. Doug Ford was not there – I’m not sure his office even wanted him there. The police invaded and they took over and they negotiated with us for about two or three hours and then they finally arrested us which meant just giving us a ticket and releasing us. Every major media was there and covered it. There were over 100 people on the sidewalk – the unions and people like that. In the end the police could just ticket us and let us go which is the best thing to do because once they ticket us, they can force us out. Or, they could have violently arrest us. If they did, they would have to take these limp people through the demonstrators out front. For the police, it would have been one of the worse outcomes. We sort of knew what was happening, but they are police with guns, and they could have said, “To hell with this, we’re going to bring 50 cops in and just do it.” They could have and it was a chance we were taking, and I was willing to take the chance. We ended up with the equivalent of a parking ticket.
Social justice, equity, racism are important issues for you, but it doesn’t seem like things have changed enough to make a difference. As an activist in the community, how do you deal with that?
There are things that have changed but not enough. As a photographer of 36 gay weddings, I think things have changed and I think that makes a difference. I think it makes a difference that we had an election and a hell of a lot of liberals who got elected, almost anointed, are people of colour and racialized people. Even though they might be right-wing, that says something. And, a number of them are Native – that says something. There is a slow and almost incremental progress in the world – I believe that. The fact that the street can be full of 10 – 20 thousand students on environmental issues says something.
From JFAAP’s point of view, we’re very reactive. We can in almost a minute pull something together and hopefully, that makes officials more gun-shy – I don’t know. Overall, I don’t think we’re the saviours of the world at this point. We’re not the big Trotskyist or Communist Party that’s going bring the revolution – not yet. I don’t foresee it, really.
Tell me about a few of your proudest moments or memories?
Well, the fact that we shut down the school closing was important. But, its my kids – my boys.
Evan is a public-school teacher – right now teaching a regular class. For years, he taught autistic kids, he taught gifted, taught some of the most difficult kids in a classroom. He does it with a style. He tells a story this year, his first year in a regular classroom. All the kids in grade 5 wanted to be in his classroom, because throughout the school, he’s one of the bright lights in the school – humorous and everything like that. They get in the school and he said on the first day, “I expect you to read. I expect you to read everyday. Don’t tell me you don’t have time to read – you have time to read comics, you have time to play video games, you have time to talk on the phone so you have time to read. Don’t tell me you didn’t have time. You sat on the toilet – I know you did….and you didn’t read? I expect you to read.” I love that story!
What has this community taught you?
A lot! The level of politics I was at before then was sort of the Vietnam War stuff and demonstrating against the Vietnam War.
Its politics on the personal and community level. Its good people with good minds, its me adding to the situation but only every once in a while, mostly because its done by everybody else - I can sometimes add something. I consider that I got my most serious political education from 2008 when JFAAP was formed because of the remarkable people who are there. They taught me well.