Dire Straits

In the twenty-first century, we are beset by crises, large and small. Personal ones, such as unemployment, illness, and relationship turmoil, jostle with environmental, social, and political crises of global scope. We use the same word in so many different contexts that at times we might well wonder if we are robbing it of all meaning.

The word “crisis” welds together the subjective, the intersubjective, and events, forces, and powers that threaten life as usual. The Chinese character for it, a combined one often mistranslated as “danger and opportunity,” is more accurately rendered as “danger and inflection point,” which brings a little stability to the term. The old Hegelian Marxist idea of the abrupt transformation of quantitative into qualitative change or the concept of historical rupture described by Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, and many others originates in and indeed defines various crises.

James Cairns, a professor of Indigenous studies, law, and social justice at Wilfrid Laurier University, asks, “What work is done — what is intended, and what is achieved — by talking about crisis in different situations, big and small?” In a collection of eleven loosely linked essays, he attempts to come to grips with his slippery topic. But he concedes at the outset that “you cannot determine a crisis by any objective measure.”

This book is in no way a rigorous treatment of the theme. “Maybe I’ll write a scholarly tract on crisis one day,” Cairns suggests, but here he presents readers with an experimental inquiry “that moves between levels of abstraction more fluidly than what is permitted by my research constrained by the disciplinary conventions of social science.” He cites numerous others who have engaged in what he calls “crisis thinking,” but too often his approach amounts to a survey of the literature rather than specific references to buttress arguments or conclusions of his own.

A crisis is not necessarily a crisis for everyone. “Crisis? What Crisis?” the Sun facetiously asked on January 11, 1979, when the British prime minister, James Callaghan, arrived home from the tropics to a country battered by massive storms and widespread strikes and didn’t seem very concerned. The erosion of liberal democracy isn’t a problem for those who never thought much of it in the first place (consider Donald Trump and his MAGA movement in the United States, for instance, or Viktor Orbán in Hungary). Even climate change, perceived as an existential threat by many the world over, is not characterized that way, at least publicly, by sundry right-wing politicians and petrochemical interests. Cairns suggests that our crises depend very much upon where we live and how we’re placed.

Much of In Crisis, on Crisis deals with individual predicaments: parenting, a mid-life crisis, moving house during a pandemic, and the author’s own bluntly described battle with alcohol. His attempt to link the personal with the crisis landscape on a global scale, however, is not overly persuasive. In his concluding essay, “Blackout,” he invokes Walter Benjamin’s view of history as a parallel to his own life of addiction:

Cairns concedes that “my use of Benjamin’s model turns on analogies and metaphors, not literal interpretations, not clones.” But for him, “the question is whether combining different materials creatively lights new sparks by which to see better.”

“The Real Crisis of Truth” is one of the more stimulating essays in the book. Do we now live in a “post-truth” era? Does “truth” even matter? If social media is any indication, it seems not to. Trying to follow the Trumpian mix of mad fantasies and deliberate falsehoods is like falling down a rabbit hole with no bottom. Much of the hand-wringing liberal panic, though, harks back to a pre-Trump golden age where truth allegedly meant something. Did it?

In this connection, Cairns calls on Naomi Klein, describing her view of post-truth as “an outgrowth of a politically diverse range of mainstream institutions that have espoused the principles of democracy, community, inclusivity and compassion, while enacting policies and acting in ways that are anti-democratic, unfair, inhumane.” Liberal democratic freedoms are largely formal, Cairns continues. Untruths can reproduce “mass consent for the official political and economic systems of the modern era.” (Here he might also have admitted his debt to Noam Chomsky.)

Rights in a liberal democracy often exist only until one tries to exercise them. Air Canada’s flight attendants supposedly had a right to strike, but the Liberal government ordered them back to work in less than two days. Free expression, in too many instances, doesn’t apply to advocates for Palestine: a trail of censorship, harassment, firings, and ruined careers provides proof. Economic myths are part of the package, too. Austerity is supposed to bring prosperity, but it has been an utter failure for decades. Inequality is worsening, poverty is all around us, and our young people face bleak prospects of finding decent jobs or even a place to live.

More of us are recognizing the facade, but too few are seeing through it: hence the “post-truth” crisis. The impulse to resist is everywhere, but resistance doesn’t always push in the direction some might like. A corrosive distrust renders increasingly angry, cynical, and often ill-informed people incapable of doing more than reacting. All expertise is a lie: Take ivermectin to cure your bout of COVID‑19. Big this-or-that is behind everything. Our kids are being corrupted by the education system.

The current swill of bad and worse ideas will not be countered by a return to business as usual, which rests upon its own edifice of lies. Moving forward requires a truth seeking that goes beyond ideas to concrete action for democracy and social justice — what Cairns calls “embodied disruption.” Transcending the real crisis of truth, he concludes, leaning heavily on Klein’s views, is “a social process requiring collective action.”

Cairns argues for hope, even amid the vertiginous despair a crisis can engender on both the personal and the social levels. “The primary political question is not what crises do to people,” he writes, “but what people do with crises when crises break out.” When things are out of our hands, when we’re caught in the maelstrom, when cataclysmic changes are taking place, we want to feel hopeful, but we also feel the lure of surrender, of simply quitting.

With an essay on Sylvia Plath, “Against Fatalism,” Cairns confronts the idea that nothing can be done about a foreordained future. In the case of the American writer, Cairns makes a convincing case that we should avoid reading a life that ends in suicide as a tale of inevitability; in general, we should refuse to construct such narratives after the fact. Fatalism is a kind of paralysis, a call to inaction. Cairns wants us to imagine a future in which the possibility of choices is always present, even when circumstance overwhelms us. This he calls the “open, promising side of crisis.”

If there are no startling insights in this book, it’s a fascinating read nonetheless. It faithfully reproduces the turmoil in the mind of a reflective, well-read, socially engaged author at the confluence of multiple crises. The essays reveal his attempt to navigate, or at least stay afloat, in rough seas that perpetually threaten to swamp him and the world we live in. As Cairns continues to weather his sometimes devastating personal storms, they are fragments he has shored against his ruins.

Specializing in labour relations, pensions, and urban policy, Tom Fraser is a researcher with SEIU Healthcare, which represents some 65,000 workers in Ontario. His Invested in Crisis is a meticulously documented account of that province’s public sector pension plans, their heavy investments in real estate and infrastructure around the world, and the crises that such investments engender. With this book, Fraser attempts to answer three questions: “How did we get here, why is here bad, and how do we get out of here?”

That we are confronting an ongoing housing crisis there can be no doubt. Homelessness has increased since the 1980s. Government-assisted housing has years-long waiting lists in many cases. The federal co-operative housing program was terminated in 1992. The recently announced Build Canada Homes initiative will certainly benefit private capital, but it remains to be seen if it makes a dent in the current shortage of affordable stock.

Shelters are full to bursting these days, and tent encampments are routinely dismantled by police, their occupants hounded, their few belongings destroyed. Austerity regimes imposed by successive neo-liberal governments continue to hack away at already vitiated social services — hence at the general standard of living. Rents (and evictions) have skyrocketed. In Toronto, it now requires an income of $45 an hour, surpassing the average Canadian wage, to afford a two-bedroom apartment. Home ownership has become a forlorn dream for most. Gentrification and so‑called renovictions continue apace.

Fraser focuses on two megafunds, those of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, to illustrate the connection between this socio-economic immiseration and pension investment. “Canadian workers’ retirements,” he argues, “hinge upon gentrification and wealth extraction, the result of an economic system that views peoples’ homes as assets to be managed rather than as places to live.”

Forty years ago, OMERS had just over $7 billion on hand, and OTPP had $10 billion in government bonds. But pension reform permitted them to move into the commercial market, where real estate had become a growing attraction. The deindustrialized landscape here and elsewhere offered attractive bargains for speculators. For example, New York City’s Hudson Yards, once just a stretch of railroad tracks between Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen, is now the site of a $25-billion commercial and residential behemoth. OMERS has a 50 percent stake in it. OTPP expanded its own real estate holdings by $10 billion in the 2010s through its subsidiary Cadillac Fairview, which owns, among other properties, Toronto’s Eaton Centre. These two pension plans control funds of staggering size: $128 billion (OMERS) and $248 billion (OTPP). In Canada as a whole, public sector pension funds in 2023 amounted to $1.8 trillion, which, as Fraser notes, is just shy of our GDP.

Infrastructure projects were an enticing target as well, as neo-liberal privatization took hold around the world. That, too, has produced its share of social and economic fallout. The two funds embarked upon an investment spree that included airports and seaports in the United Kingdom, as well as Thames Water, a utility that has overcharged customers and spilled raw sewage into London’s waterways. Ventures have included gentrification projects in New York, pipelines in Texas, rapidly expanding private-sector health care facilities in India, and privatized utilities in Chile.

The unions, in short, have been caught in a cleft stick. They fought hard for pensions for their retired members, but the vehicle for providing them now requires the gross exploitation of other workers at home and abroad. Their members and their pensioners, ironically perhaps, are victims of the same economic forces. But pension boards, at a safe remove from the unions that help to fund their capital pools, continue to concentrate more on ROI than on social investment. The results have been devastating.

As to Fraser’s last question —“How do we get out of here?”— the challenges appear almost insurmountable. The unions aren’t at fault, he points out. The privatization of social welfare is. Fraser has no doubt about the long-term solution, as phantasmal as it sounds: “We must disentangle pension funds from webs of extraction while simultaneously guaranteeing a safe and comfortable retirement to pensioners — no small task.” The choice he poses is indeed stark. Either install a comprehensive public social insurance system that will one day make personal pensions obsolete, or workers and pensioners alike will continue to live in the belly of the beast — one that they themselves are feeding.