Toronto’s working people need an excellent public transit system to bring them to work, visit their friends, and get their children to school. Yet, year after year, public transit is defunded so the wealthy few can keep their taxes low. Due to decades of neoliberal austerity policy, Toronto’s transit lines are overcrowded, over-priced, and inefficient. The ActionKeele campaign is organizing riders of the Keele 41 route to improve service on this line. By organizing working people who depend upon this line, we put our socialist theory into practice. We hope to officially launch the ActionKeele campaign in early October, in collaboration with RadTO, the TTC Riders, and the amalgamated transit union’s (ATU) “Keep it Public.” Together, we aim to build a class-based campaign to win accessible, dignified, and green public bus service on the 41 Keele route! As the ActionKeele campaign develops, we need your support! At this Sunday’s strategy meeting, Stefan Kipfer (Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University) will present an overview of transit politics in the age of neoliberal austerity. This will be followed by a series of collaborative group discussions of the current strategic terrain and the experience of other transit organizing efforts in the city and beyond. These discussions will help us contextualize what we’ve learned in our weekly canvassing of working people on the Keele 41 route. Then, all attendees will think through concrete organizing strategies over a yearlong horizon for the development of the campaign.

Materials:

Stefan Kipfer et al. (2013, August 7). Free Transit. The SP Interventions Pamphlet # 12.

Cohen, Josh. (2018, June 14). Who’s Afraid of Fare-Free Public Transit? The Bullet.

Wojciech Keblowski (2018, August 24). Public Transport Can Be Free. The Jacobin.