Suzanne Narain grew up in the Jane-Finch community in a home with a large extended family from Guyana. She attended the local schools and is currenting completing her PhD at the University of Toronto. Suzanne is a long-time community activist with an aim to work with the community to improve conditions in the Jane-Finch community. She is a passionate social justice advocate and firmly believes in the folks who call Jane-Finch home.
Please start by telling me a bit about yourself and how you came to live in Jane-Finch?
Well, I guess it was mostly my parent’s decision. They immigrated to Canada in the late 70’s from Guyana and they came with a student visa like many people at that time. They couldn’t afford to go to school when they came so they started working and eventually, their visa’s expired. We were living here out of status for awhile. It was kind of difficult living in Canada with no status, so they moved around the city quite a bit because people were actually reporting people who were out of status and they were getting awards by the Canadian government. So, they were frequently moving – they lived all over, living in Parkdale, living out by St. Clair and eventually, one of my moms’ sisters got deported and then they moved out to Grandravine (Jane-Finch). My mom and her brother and my dad moved out to Grandravine and we were living in the buildings out there. Pierre Trudeau was in power at that time and changed some of the immigration policies and they were able to gain status. She sponsored her mom to help with my brother and I and she also sponsored some of her younger siblings who were able to come through the Family Reunification, so they all came. There was about fifteen of us in a two-bedroom apartment or even a one-bedroom. I was little – only about a year or two.
We eventually moved down by York Gate in a home. There were nineteen of us living in a home for about my entire life. Eventually, everyone started to work and get enough money to move out, but it was close quarters for a long while. I guess that was the early to mid-eighties. So, we’ve been living in Jane-Finch ever since.
At that time there were a lot of Italian immigrants in the neighbourhood and they would constantly call the police on us for various things like the grass wasn’t being cut or the kids were running outside in their underwear and the music being too loud or cooking food that smelled. At that time, we didn’t have the vocabulary to understand it as racism. My parents were very kind people and see Canada as a safe haven and just saw those people as just not being nice people, not racist. They worked and still work as cleaners, so they worked in the evening and were at home during the day, while I was at school in the day. My grandma and extended family helped take care of us. We saw a lot of people move out of the neighbourhood I guess in the mid-eighties and early nineties, there was a lot more….I mean Jane-Finch has always been a high immigrant destination but a lot more immigrants were moving into the neighbourhood or racialized immigrants and I guess it forced a lot of the Italian, white passing immigrants to move out so our neighbourhood now has….. about 80% of our street is actually Guyanese immigrants currently. One of the biggest populations in this area is from Guyana and Jamaica, Vietnam and Sri Lanka.
A lot of people are working really hard to gain home ownership but that doesn’t mean that people aren’t living in poverty. It just looks differently. It looks like there are nineteen people in one home to make ends meet and it looks like people are working two or three jobs. It has different ramifications, but people are still struggling but in different ways –we don’t think of it in terms of home ownership or homeowners. More than 75% of a lot of people’s income goes towards rent or mortgage. I think that’s a struggle, but the beauty of our neighbourhood and the cultural diversity is that people really use their supports, their networks to survive.
When and why did you initially get involved in the community?
I guess I have always been involved. I went to Gosford, Brookview and Westview then I guess around middle school is when I started to understand the perception of the community or understand what people thought of us. In elementary school, you’re very much innocent in your childhood and your concerns are very different but in middle school you become more aware the media, more aware of the perception of the neighbourhood, more aware of what’s happening to some of your friends and things like that so I think I’ve always been kind of concerned with how people were thinking about the way in which the media was presenting folks in the community and the reality or it was contradictory of the reality that I knew of, that people who were bright or people who were successful and were not just violent or drug dealers or these awful things they say about our neighbourhood. Even then, my friends and I, we would mobilize little campaigns in our school or have meetings, and mentorship programs. Its something that I’ve always been involved in various capacities or that was my first memory of being involved. In high-school, I was the student council president in Westview in grade 12 so we also did lots of campaigns to kind of debunk the myths and stereotypes of our community to really show that there are positive and wonderful things happening in our neighbourhood.
I left a bit for school because my circle kind of moved from like Gosford to Brookview to Westview to York University, so I just felt my concentric circle was really, really small. But also, my friend actually got killed – she was nineteen and that was my first year of university. She got killed by her boyfriend. I kind of felt like I needed some time away from the neighbourhood and my family and I just needed a little bit of space to gain some perspective. So, I left and went to McMaster to finish my undergrad and I came back and then went to Teachers College at York.
At that time, they were starting to close schools in the neighbourhood so I got involved with Jane Finch Action Against Poverty (JFAAP) and at that time, there was a coalition, called Save Our Schools so we started to rally around preventing the schools from being closed. I know my family – they worked so hard to educate us. They were not able to go to school, but education has been such an important part of why they came here, why my family has come here, why many other immigrant families come here is to be able to go to school and to access education. So that the fact they are going to eliminate a school, or several schools or amalgamate schools felt like such a disservice to our community. We were successful in stopping the schools from closing. That was the first year that JFAAP was started so one of their early initiatives.
What other issues were residents facing at the time?
I think poverty has always been a huge issue. There are people talking about things like do we buy our medications this month or do we buy groceries. Food, adequate income, housing have definitely been key issues. Police violence or police surveillance or hyper surveillance on profiling has been an issue. We’d get stopped all the time in high school or get pulled over, get our backpack searched. That’s always been an issue in our community and I don’t think people were taking us seriously until the Toronto Star did that report a long while ago – about the police racial profiling in the police service in particularly in the communities and that was back in the early 2000’s. We’d always talk about these things happening, but nobody was really paying attention. They would rather see people in the neighbourhood as gang-bangers than victims of police violence and profiling.
Housing and security and employment was limited jobs for young people and gentrification in the neighbourhood at that time were issues. I wrote my master’s thesis on the changes in the community. We knew, we anticipated that these changes were unfolding. I think for me also, leaving and coming back was great because sometimes when you are so close to it, you don’t necessarily see what’s happening. I left for a few years and came back and said, “what are these signs, like what’s happening, and it was so stark, the differences. Maybe at the time it seemed like really mild changes like what are these signs on the streets – what’s all of this rebranding that’s happening. I think it happens so subtly that when you’re here, it just becomes this thing that’s happening – just another thing. For me, it seemed huge.
Can you please tell me more about your involvement with the Jane Finch Action Against Poverty (JFAAP) group – its challenges and accomplishments?
One of our accomplishments would definitely be saving the schools for the neighbourhood from being closed – that was really big. Working on the 15 and Fairness Campaign which I’m sure now is stalled because of Doug Ford or we’re going to see some retroactive action to dismantle some of the things that we’ve really worked hard for. But pushing that forward was a big win for us. Working toward food security – I think we did a lot of work in raising awareness of the lack of healthy food in our community. Really supporting the Black Creek Community Farm, creating, building and a lot of the people who are part of JFAAP have been really fundamental in helping to grow the Black Creek Community Farm. Leticia is one of the founding members of JFAAP, Butterfly as well and right when the farm started many people in JFAAP pushed for there to be a Residents Council at the farm. The Residents Council, as you know, there is a transition of management and leadership at the farm but really, I think this has been under the guidance of the Residents Council wanting this farm to be a part of the community, not just part of the community but run and led by the community. Its really been much of the energy and force behind the farm and it was initially folks from JFAAP.
Some of the challenges have been living under a neo-liberal regime and having so many cuts, so many of our politicians who really don’t listen to us, the change of government, the move to the more conservative government. I think a deeper challenge or more intimate challenge is the fact that a lot of the people who are part of JFAAP are residents in the community and already have jobs or families and lives to take care of and they are the ones who have to advocate, we are the ones who have to advocate for the needs of our community after already being so, I guess exhausted or overworked and under paid. I think one of the challenges is that it takes a real toll on your personal health and well-being.
Tell me about your perspective with regards to the politics of this community or your viewpoint in terms of how government treat communities like Jane-Finch.
They don’t care about us! They really don’t care about us. The only time we see politicians is when there are elections or there is a big event where they want to pat themselves on the back. They come for the photo-op and they leave. I don’t feel like we have ever had a representative, a political representative in this community who has actually really cared about the most marginalized and disfranchised people that live in this community. Its quite unfortunate and I feel like in this community, like many other communities, we have career politicians who stay there for ten, twenty years and it just becomes so comfortable in their role that they become complacent to the needs and the only time you hear from them is when you have to go through hoops to even try to get a hold of them. I can’t even tell you the amount of times JFAAP held an event in front of Mario Sergio’s (MPP) office and he was never there. I think there were changes to the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) and we had a rally in front of his office. We came to present him with a letter, like a petition and no one was there. The office was closed or else they saw us, and they locked the door and closed the blinds. That wouldn’t be the first time.
We went to York University when they published something in the Excalibur about our community saying don’t go over there (Jane-Finch), it’s a terrible place. We showed up there at the University and they also closed the doors and closed the blinds, so we couldn’t get in. Of course, we’re not being violent, we just came with a group of people to present them with a letter and asked them for an apology. In the case of our politician it was that we wanted him to represent us better and not make these cuts to our community because people were having to choose between buying food and getting their medication. No one should have to choose between eating or living. Unfortunately, the politicians are here for the photo ops and for their paycheque. They don’t really care about the people in the community or the poor, racialized, and marginalized people in the community.
There are some things that Anthony Perruzza, the city councillor cares about – he’s not the best but he’s not the worse. I did watch Tom Rakocevic (new MPP) during the debate – I stayed up that night and watched that whole debate and I do think that Tom, out of all the people who have worked out of Anthony’s office, I do feel that Tom is the most genuine of them all there. I don’t like monopolistic - the politics in this community are where Anthony is the councillor, its like cronyism, like his admin assistant then is vying for school trusteeship, Tom went to become the MPP. Its too much cronyism in my opinion.
Butterfly and I were talking about this and its not just Italians voting for Italians, but I think that a lot of immigrants actually trust the white representatives. Its not necessarily white supremacy but the function of the nation that makes you believe that this white man or white middle-age man is the representative that we should trust and knows best who like Anthony is arrogant, who is vociferous, who is these things as opposed to a young racialized woman? Its not just Italian immigrants voting for Anthony or let’s say Doug Ford, its also racialized people who trust in some ways, middle aged white men. My parents will be die-hard Liberals for their entire life. I had to convince my mom to vote NDP and then I felt bad. I don’t want to force her to vote for somebody who she doesn’t want to vote for but no, I said, you must vote for Tom!
There is this moment also of their needing to be more representation – more women, more racialized people, not just the status quo at City Hall or Queens Park or at any other level of government. I think its important, especially in our community for representation not just to check off identity boxes, I think we need representation that will in some way be left-leaning, will in some way protect the social well-fare of this community and sometimes we have racialized people vying for positions in the community who don’t necessarily identify with protecting or advocating for services for marginalized people. For example, the person who ran for the conservative party in the provincial election – Cyma, she’s a racialized woman who is conservative. We don’t just need racialized women and representation in that way, we need representation that will be left-leaning. Its tricky to talk about these things because your critique easily gets read as being racist, or anti-Black and its not that, its that conservative policies do not actually help poor people.
JFAAP is non-partisan so there’s no telling who to vote for but I think we used some of Social Planning Toronto and TTC Riders material that had a lot of good overview of what the positions stand for. So, we use some of their materials to distribute on the street corner of Jane-Finch. We have a lot of our actions right there and its important to meet people where they are at to talk about politics and these things and lot of the people are like, “no we’re not voting for Doug Ford because we don’t want another one like Trump here”. Its great seeing some people making those connections but even talking to people about what it means to vote for conservatives. The education piece really matters.
Please tell me what it was like attending the local schools as a racialized person growing up in Jane-Finch and then going into the schools as a teacher.
For me, its interesting that there is this perception that I did well in school and I did do well in school and still doing great and to some degree, that is true. I’ve always been a fairly smart kid but that’s not to say that there weren’t obstacles or challenges or that I didn’t experience things that youth in the community experienced. I started skipping school in grade 6 and going over to York University to the arcade and doing all these things that we shouldn’t have been doing but we were still doing. I knew someone who got pregnant in middle school and it was tough. There was a lot going on for young people with very limited support. I was really lucky to have a really solid teacher who supported me a lot. My parents worked evenings and there was family around but no one necessarily checking in and checking up on me. So, I had a lot of space to do whatever I wanted. Sometimes it wasn’t the best thing and I think that one of the difficult parts of having to work a lot in this country is that parents don’t necessarily get to parent. I feel like in many ways I was searching for a kind of family or a kind of support and I found it in friends who were there but were not necessarily following a path that was right for me. At that time, I didn’t know that, and I was doing the things that young people did at the time. I went to high school and I was a rebel just like any other teenage like skipping school and doing all of these things. I think it got to the point that I skipped so much school that they tried to kick me out of school, but they couldn’t find me to kick me out of school. Sometimes I see that Vice Principal, Miss Palermo and oh my gosh, I don’t even know if she remembers me, being a teacher now! There was a teacher in high school who kicked me out of her class and she said, “if you don’t like it, you can leave” and I left! I left and handed in my work and she thought it wasn’t mine. I think that by luck I’ve always been a smart kid so even though I didn’t go to school, I was finishing my work and still getting good grades. I think if I didn’t have that, and it wasn’t like anyone was helping me at home – I don’t think anyone took any interest in my learning and maybe if they did and maybe if I was challenged a bit more but there were lots of other things to do.
I think, at one point in Elementary school, I was meant to go to Claude Watson, but my parents just didn’t know, or it just didn’t happen for me. So, in high school I would do my work, but I just didn’t go to class. So, I handed in this paper to the teacher and the next time in class, she wanted to know who did this for me. I was like, “I did it myself” and this is not your work and she accused me of plagiarizing and I’ve never plagiarized in my life. Its funny at my first year teaching they do this teacher mentorship program and maybe this is 10 – 15 years later I see this same teacher at this meeting who’s a mentor for another teacher and its like, “Suzanne Narain – you are here?” And I was like you never really believed that I could do it – here I am! I guess for me in high school or mostly in middle school there were people who were way more smarter than me and in middle school I was started to see the people who were way more smarter than me getting arrested, being in jail, getting killed, getting pregnant, all these things. Like so many different things were happening in my life and I was like dating someone at the time and we broke up and realized that if I didn’t change or if I didn’t try to change that this would be my life as well, I knew that nobody was actually taking an interest in my life so if I didn’t choose to change things myself that - I think that many of the people that I grew up with had a similar homelife but I think that I was fortunate to have one or two teachers or people or adults who believed in me.
In high school there was a teacher who believed in me so much and every time I see her, her name is Rosalie Griffith, she’s a wonderful woman that I tell her every time that I see her that “I wouldn’t be here, if not for you”. I would not be here doing this, and I guess that’s one of my motivations to teach that reminding and being there in young peoples lives and reminding them and believing in them – that and so much more. If someone believes in you, there’s no telling what you can do. I think that has been my biggest motivation, that if I don’t get it together or I don’t make a change or try, no one is going to be out here saying that you could have done better or yes, this is what we expected of you. I knew that I didn’t want to be the status quo or be what everyone thought of people in the community. In some of the interviews I’ve been in with my participants, some people who are working with young people say that young people start embodying that image so that if you think they are a bad person, they start acting like a bad person or acting that they should be a certain way but this teacher who has been a mentor, she always treated everyone as if they were her child or they were the sweetest and purest and most gentle person and everyone reciprocated that so if you treat people like their thieves or liars and gangsters, they are not going to be nice to you. They are not going to be their best – kind of like this deficit model thinking. I think its really important to think highly of people and really believe it because especially with children and young people, they can smell people being fake from a mile away.
The kids today, I teach from Kindergarten to grade six, are definitely not being supported to the degree they need to be supported. Its really tough. Let’s say you have a kid where their family is going through a divorce, their parents are separated, or the kid is going through some things, there is one social work to deal with five schools. This is just an arbitrary example like parents getting separated, that’s the least of the worries. I’m talking about kids who are actually living in shelters, their sisters are getting molested, they seen their fathers die, they have seen their brothers get shot. Kids who have gone through more, in their five years of life, than most people do in their entire life time. So, you have one person supporting 5 schools who may or may not come in once or twice a week and get 30 minutes max with a kid, if that. There are such limited supports. And then you have teachers who have a career politician mindset who stay in the community who don’t necessarily want to be here.
They don’t really understand what’s happening with these kids and then are hard on them for not doing their homework when they don’t know they have been up all-night taking care of their sibling or whatever their circumstance was. Sometimes there is very little empathy. Don’t get me wrong as there are some great teachers who do care but there are some of them that really just there doing a job. I feel like especially in this community, we don’t’ need teachers just doing a job, we need teachers who are passionate and really care what you do. It hard because there is so much stacked against teachers and any public sector employee – there are so many cuts, the classroom sizes are so big, poor infrastructure, very limited resources, so its tough. Teachers, like anyone else, they are frustrated as well. I’m sure they do care, somewhere they do care, they care about the kids, but they are not walking around the community - they go home at night. A lot of people, especially immigrant people, like I said before, many of them are coming from colonized countries where there is so much respect for teachers and educational institutions that they would not go into a school and critique or criticize a teacher and if a teacher says something, they are going to believe it. They don’t think they can go into a class or demand things or request things.
What issues are residents facing today?
You know, similar to ten years ago – housing insecurity, job insecurity, police profiling, poverty more broadly, gentrification with the housing being in a state of disrepair, the cuts to basic income in ODSP, the potential of minimum wage being cut again or freezing, there’s a lot of temp agency work – people not being paid fairly at these agencies.
Social justice, equity, racism are important issues for you, but it doesn’t seem like things have changed in the way we would have wanted them to. As a resident and as a worker, how do you deal with that?
I think we have to keep advocating, we keep pushing, we get better people in our schools, we get better politicians elected, we get better community workers and its not just better, its about doing the training, having anti-oppression workshops. Its everyone playing their role – not like we’re going to have a politician in and then everything is going to change and trickle down and be better, I think that it takes many people to make us go forward and I think that we just need to keep pushing in various ways they were pushing whether its community advocacy or in the education system or the health care system. I think that everyone has their role to play and we need to keep pushing for change that looks better and feels better for the community. I think we need to believe - if there’s not hope than we might as well all give up. I guess the bigger answer is the fall of capitalism! I think that there is a need to be hopeful and imagine a different kind of future for ourselves, in our neighbourhood and in neighbourhoods like ours or else there is no real reason to keep fighting. We need to keep fighting. RAD TO is a new group that has formed around municipal elections advocacy and city issues. We’ve been working with them and they have a platform for a city that we fight for – for better transit, better health care, food access. Just imagining what a different kind of city could look like for us. One of the things that is difficult in doing front-line work or advocacy is that there is always a new challenge, there’s always a new fire to put out, there’s always something happening that you don’t get the kind of time to imagine what you want this future to look like. How you want it to be different because you are always in a struggle, you’re always fighting for something.
What are you most proud of?
I think that I’m most proud of the fact that we prevented the schools from being closed in the neighbourhood because its such a pivotal place. Education is one of the major factors in breaking the cycle of poverty, so I think I’m most proud of saving those institutions from the place of being closed. And also, in terms of my personal life, I feel like there’s this kid from Jane-Finch out in the world doing a PhD and I feel pretty proud of that. There are three of us who are doing PhD’s – Sam, Rahma and myself. I think like .6% of the population has PhD’s and that there is this perception that people in this neighbourhood don’t finish high school and the fact that we are here aiming at one of the highest levels of education – it’s a really big deal and all of us having such firm grounding in this community matters.
What has this community taught you?
Definitely to be resilience and persistent and to fight in what I believe in, to know that its takes a village and the village always has you and to know that this will always be home. We have to just keep pushing forward. There’s a saying, “if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together”. Essentially, what it taught me is that in this journey, I’m not alone, I come with the community. I couldn’t be here doing the work I’m doing if not for the community, if not for the people who believe in me, if not for my family who have sacrificed so much for me to be able to go to school and take on this huge endeavour. Or, for the community that also struggles and works hard. It encourages me in this work. Every time I want to quit, I am reminded that I can’t do that. Even when I was running last time (for city councillor), the amount of support that we got from community just makes me feel so humbled and gives me so much strength in all that I do.
Is there anything you would like people to know about our community or anything you would like to add?
Yes, to know that Jane-Finch is a really beautiful place with a rich history, with diverse people from almost everywhere in the world. You can almost eat anywhere in the world in the community. There is an infinite amount of resources – the beautiful farm, young people with so much potential and so much ancestral knowledge. Its really such a place of resiliency in change and strength. I think what’s really great about the Jane-Finch community is that there are different pockets, but we are a very organized community who unlike other communities across the city, we are really able to mobilize really well because we have, over so many years, encountered various levels of injustice, discrimination and you name it. It has taught us, we’re on the offence a lot but we’re very mobilized, organized and able to speak.