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With @legault hinting at re-opening schools, we r seeing a shift in Quebec toward the disastrous "herd immunity" approach of the UK government: warehoused senior populations & disregard 4 disabled, chronically ill & immunocompromised people, multi-generational families.
This is obviously able-ist fuckery, but it's also a good opportunity to analyze the interlocking nature of different systems of domination. In this case, able-ism is being promoted in the interest of real estate capital, the active urban mechanism of colonial dispossession.
Yesterday, an anonymous @MTL_Ville city councillor testified 2 the immense pressure from the business sector & construction industry to begin building again. For this to happen, according to the Conseil du patronat official cited, schools have 2 re-open. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1692678/coronavirus-deconfinement-scenarios-quebec-montreal-reprise
This is not because the Conseil du patronat and the government are concerned about the incomes of construction workers, an industry where they generally wished they had more control and labour was paid less.
https://iris-recherche.qc.ca/blogue/comprendre-le-conflit-de-travail-en-construction
https://iris-recherche.qc.ca/blogue/comprendre-le-conflit-de-travail-en-construction
So why is residential construction important enough to endanger the lives of students, teachers, and all their families?
As @mostafah reminded us in 2013's "Capitalism On the Edge," other than the all-important resource extraction, "Canadian economic growth is dependent on ever-increasing private household debt." https://freecityradio.org/post/90996459230/capitalism-on-the-edge-in-canada-mostafa-henaway
This household debt is primarily filtered through the housing market. @mostafah cites the IMF: "A sharp or sustained decline in house prices could seriously set back the leveraged household sector and domestic demand."
In Montreal, as Louis Gaudreault and Manuel Johnson of @IRISrecherche have demonstrated, this push for the creation of household debt has driven a massive construction boom in the 20 years since the turn of the century.
Banks, in turn, extend mortgages, and centralize these personal debts and sell them as securities on the stock market, making huge, unimaginable profit.
http://clvm.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/61-Logement-sociaL-le-jeu-risqu---de-la-SCHL.pdf
http://clvm.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/61-Logement-sociaL-le-jeu-risqu---de-la-SCHL.pdf
And here's where we come back to the settler colonialism aspect. @apihtawikosisan has defined it as the "deliberate physical occupation of land as a means of asserting ownership over land and resources."
Capitalism needs 2 dominate an ever-expanding territory 2 maintain profits. In today's global economy, this often means that settler countries like Canada are repeatedly re-"conquering" Indigenous territory, re-occupying through processes of gentrification & internal displacement
So in the settler colony of Quebec, the capitalist economy is hinged on this commodified, perpetual process of domination and settlement, filtered through the real estate market, and hence new-build construction.
Bringing us back to interlocking systems of domination and oppression. The CAQ is veering full eugenicist because the survival of capitalist imperialism depends on being able to write off sick, disabled, aged, bodies in favour of accumulation.
