Workers' Rights Are Neighbours' Rights

Hadih, Taanishi, Hello friends

I got an email yesterday that I have read about nine times, and now I will share it

The Victoria Labour Council has endorsed me for Saanich Council!

I want to tell you why this means so much to me, because it is not just a logo on a flyer. It is kind of the whole story of how I ended up on a ballot in the first place.

A couple of years ago, as my kids became full time students, I found myself sitting with a question I had not expected. Who am I now, if I am not going to spend the rest of my working life in film and television? I went looking for the answer in my past union work, my credentials, and the things I found joy in. What I found surprised me.

Because it turns out I had not just been a labourer on set for twenty years. I chaired my department, served my local, volunteered my time and sat on bargaining, which meant years of budgets, grievances, and sitting across a table from people who did not want to give me what I was asking for. I was there at the start of our Women's Committee, and I am still involved as the Recording Secretary. I helped bring mental health first aid into our local. I had actually done a lot, all while working full time in film and making a life for my kids.

I had been doing this work for years and somehow still thought of myself as the person who kept people fed and safe on set. Which I was. But I was also learning exactly how decisions get made, who is in the room when they get made, and who gets left out when they get made badly. That is not a small thing to know, and I did not give myself nearly enough credit for knowing it.

Last summer I went to an international convention, and it was where I found myself sitting that got me first. A woman from a local out east on one side of me, a guy from the midwest on the other, and me somehow holding a seat at that table. Then Bea Bruske spoke, and other leaders after her, and they shared their stories with everything they had. That lit the fire.

Because in those rooms, workers from locals all across North America were all describing the same thing. Different jobs, different cities, different countries. Wages that stopped keeping up years ago. Rent going one direction while the paycheque went nowhere. Kids moving back home in their thirties. The people doing the work cannot afford to live near the work, anywhere. And underneath all of it, the same quiet fear, that the world is speeding up and leaving them behind in it.

I hear that same fear here at home, it just wears different clothes. It sounds like the property tax notice landing in the mailbox. It sounds like someone at a public hearing who has been on their street for forty years and is worried about what comes next. It sounds like a young family running the numbers on a place three streets over and coming up short again. Same fear, different room.

Then I came home, and almost exactly one year ago at a Labour Day event, I signed up for Union 101, a course put on by the Victoria Labour Council. That course changed the direction of my life. It led me to the Labour College of Canada, where I am a student right now, halfway through fifteen months of studying how working people organize, govern, and take care of each other.

And the whole time, I kept seeing a similar story right here in Strawberry Vale and our community. Two houses a block apart, one family building equity and the family renting beside them one rent increase from leaving. School staff driving in from the western communities every morning because there is nothing here they can pay for. Families using summer camp as childcare because that is what the math allows.

Here is what all of it taught me, and it is the reason this endorsement matters to me so much.

You are a worker. Whatever you do all day, whether you are in a union or have never thought about one in your life, whether you are on a job site or behind a desk or on your feet in a school or doing the invisible work of looking after your own kids at home. If you work for your living, you are who I am talking about.

Workers are not some special interest group over there somewhere. Workers are you, and your neighbour, and the person pouring your coffee, and the EA helping your kid through the school day, and the crew out fixing the water main in the rain, and the firefighter, the librarian, the care aide looking after your mum. When someone says what is good for workers, they are saying what is good for you. A healthy Saanich is one where the people who keep it running can build a livelihood, raise their kids, retire. That is what I want for us, and it is worth working for.

Which is why I do not think of this as a labour campaign at all. It is a community campaign. The labour movement is simply where I found the language for what I already believed, and the people who believe it too. That is where I got my education in what community actually takes. It takes showing up. It takes sitting with people who see it completely differently than you do and finding the five votes anyway. It takes looking after each other on the hard days, which I have done for twenty years and have no plans to stop doing.

I am a mixed Indigenous mom raising two kids in Strawberry Vale. I was born in Cordova Bay. I have no developer ties, no contract waiting for me, nothing to gain from any of this except a Saanich my kids can afford to stay in and be proud to build their lives in. The Victoria Labour Council looked at all of that and said, we are with her!

Thank you to Kirk, and to the whole Executive, for the questions you asked me and for the answer you came back with. And congratulations to the other candidates endorsed right across the region. Whoever ends up around those tables in October, there is a lot of work waiting for us.

I am honoured, and I intend to earn it every single day between now and October 17, and beyond, because an endorsement is not a finish line. It is people telling you they are counting on you.

And you should count on me too. Not just on election day. Ask me where I stand on something. Tell me when you think I have it wrong. I am not hard to find.

Workers are our neighbours!

Let's move past division. Let's get things done.