This is the year.

Good morning: This election, I am helping run an election campaign for the NDP and our champion candidate Melissa in my Toronto riding of University-Rosedale. I am writing to you today as a committed organizer and friend, to share why I see this political involvement as an extension of my social justice movement work, and therefore why I’ve decided to commit myself fully to organizing around this incredibly important Canadian election. I hope you will choose to get involved as well.   Some background... I moved back to Canada after many years doing human rights and racial, economic, and basic freedom legal work and organizing in the United States. I love being back in Toronto. I feel a commitment from communities I am connecting back into to building a society where we can all thrive - because of our differences, because of government action to remove barriers and create a more equitable playing field, because of collective commitment to support each other. ...

He was 15 with the most hopeful and cheerful attitude. He was excited to go back to school and when we met in a make-shift temporary shelter for migrants along the US-Mexico border, he asked me to bring him books so he could learn English. Over the days I spent at the border giving people legal information about the refugee process, he slowly opened up to me about the violence he had been threatened with because he wouldn’t join the gangs back home in Honduras. “I want to come to the US to go to school, but also, I really just want to live.” I lost him for months in the US immigration system—a system designed to exact suffering to deter unwanted migration. This child would spend over 4 months incarcerated. He was released in the middle of the night having been transferred to New Jersey, with an ankle monitor and a paper with his next court date. We found each other through Facebook in April and he shared over breakfast: “I’ve had to take a job washing dishes a...