The Politics of Compassion: An Interview with Matthew Green

I met with NDP MP Matthew Green last weekend, Easter Sunday actually. We met at his riding office in the east end of Hamilton by Kenilworth Avenue, an area in desperate need of redevelopment.

Hamilton Centre covers a lot of ground: low-density suburban and high-density inner-city residential living, large industrial enterprises, small businesses and more than its share of not-for-profit social service agencies. Hamilton-Centre has it all and serves as a microcosm of the issues facing Canadians across the country: lack of affordable housing, high rents, low wages, changing workplaces, inadequate disability supports, and an exploding mental health and addiction crisis all operating within a cracked and bleeding public health care system. Oh - and the effects of climate change.

Matthew Green is an articulate and engaging conversationalist. A passionate supporter of the people in his riding, Green can be found on the streets with the people protesting against police overreach and corporate exploitation, and in support of a free Palestine, the rights of workers, disabled people and tenants, and against racial injustice. Although outspoken and unapologetic, at times our talk felt like a therapy session.

But first, a little background.

The night before, I was travelling back from Grimsby on GO Transit. Under-dressed as I often am in the spring, I was looking forward to the bus shelter while I waited for the Burlington bus to take me into Hamilton. As the GO bus approached the station, I could see the shelter was filled with a group of people, which I took to be a positive sign the bus would soon come. But when I entered the shelter, I was struck by just how wrong I was. They weren’t waiting for the bus; they were homeless people smoking crack. In Burlington.

I live in downtown Hamilton where it’s not uncommon to see someone smoking crack on the street. But in a suburban bus shelter in Burlington? The middle-class capital of Ontario?

Two overwhelming emotions came to bear: a surprisingly deep sadness that slowly unreasoned itself into a seething anger. Sad that they didn’t have a kitchen table where they could do their drugs; or a living room where they could listen to music or watch tv while getting high. They were just looking to escape, like so many people do who enjoy mind- or mood-altering substances in their own homes. No judgement here.

My anger, however, was fed by their choice to get high in a public bus shelter at 8:30 on a Saturday night when people are still out and about with kids. No attempt to hide or otherwise conceal their activity. Could their cry for help be any louder? Could their “fuck you” to the rest of us be any more obvious? Does anyone care? I curiously considered how easy it was for compassion fatigue to set in and seriously worried for my soul.

But before that…

A couple of weeks prior, while on my way to Green’s launch party I came across a Shroomzy magic mushroom outlet next to The Beer Store on Main Street. I usually find them after they’ve closed up, so I thought I’d see if this one was open. It was. I had an illuminating conversation with the man behind the counter. I asked him how they could sell an illegal product, if he wasn’t worried about getting busted, going to jail, getting a record? Did they get a lot of customers? I thought if I get a chance, I’ll ask Green what’s up with NDP drug policies and whether the NDP would legalize psilocybin given its newfound promise to help people not only manage depression but also as an intervention in the opioid crisis.

No one’s talking drug policy this election. So that was the jumping off point in our discussion that ranged from drug policy and the commodification of health care to the corporate capture of housing and the rise of right wing populism. Underscoring our conversation was the understanding: We listen and we don’t judge. Harder for me than for him.

As a city councillor, back in the days before cannabis legalization, during the grey period of enforcement, Green says Hamilton had so many illegal pot shops people were calling it “Hamsterdam.” In fact, he says, Hamilton had more pot shops than Amsterdam had cannabis cafes.

Green used the example of the grey area in which pre-legalization cannabis stores operated to illustrate where psilocybin access is now and the lessons to be learned from a flawed process that he says “left a lot to be desired in terms of what could have been restorative justice for people who otherwise had been previously stigmatized.”

I get that. I know people whose lives were forever altered by a criminal record for being caught with cannabis product when they were a young adult. How the criminality surrounding cannabis culture ruined family relationships. How a criminal record affected job and career opportunities. Many of the people who pioneered the sector paid the price with a record and are excluded from participating in it because of those records. But if you didn’t ever get caught, well, you could be the Premier of Ontario.

Meanwhile, Green continued, former chiefs of police, Liberal insiders and operatives turned out to be the “biggest hypocrites” and made out like bandits in the new cannabis economy. It’s an example, Green says, of the “role that capitalism plays in determining who’s legitimate and who’s not” and how racial, low-income and Indigenous people are set outside the white, male corporate elite.

Green says the process to have a person’s criminal record expunged has too many barriers, including cost, for most people to jump through. Besides many of those who partake of the culture aren’t interested in caving to government control, giving it any more of their money, or jumping through those hoops anyway. Rebel, rebel.

The result is as he says: “the people who were ostracized for it, continue to be ostracized for it” and calls it a “lost opportunity for restorative justice.”

This was all background to the situation where psilocybin is now. That grey area is a battle ground between the underground market supplied by organized crime, and the pharmaceutical lobbyists who are protecting the profits of a synthetic pharma industry from the threat of naturally occurring therapies. He calls it part of the “capitalist commodification of health care.”

Green also says that when fentanyl hit the streets, it changed everything. He emphasized that none of those legitimate sources of opioid addiction, the doctors, scientists, businesspeople and lawyers who profited off the opioid crisis have gone to jail. When it’s a substance more addictive than heroin or crack, he believes there’s a “moral imperative to treat this as a health care crisis.” As a city councillor, Green fought to bring in the use of NARCAN and for safe injection sites.

The NDP supports the Portugal model, where the acquisition, possession and private use of all drugs is permitted. Drug use is treated as a health issue.

Green referenced Harper’s 2015 Respect for Communities Act which “raised the bar for applications” for supervised consumption sites that require an exemption from Health Canada under section 56 of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. This includes input from a wide range of stakeholders: local law enforcement, municipal leaders, public health, and provincial health ministers. Evidence regarding impacts on crime rates as well as public health evidence supporting the site and resource sustainability is required. Lots of hoops to jump through.

Safe consumption sites, with the appropriate support services, get drug use out of the parks and off the streets. They could be the gateway to a wholistic, funded and fully accessible mental health and addiction care system. But what’s really missing is housing.

I asked him, plaintively - Really - what can the federal government do when health care and housing are provincial responsibilities?

Green laughed a said ha, ha: “the biggest hustle is the idea of the division of provincial and federal jurisdiction” which underpins the belief that the federal government has no influence in health care or housing. That’s just wrong.

The federal government transfers funds to provinces for both health care and housing, which are shared responsibilities. Green emphasized “shared”, while noting the federal government has cut health care funding from 50 percent to 30 percent. But what the government hasn’t done is tie funding to outcomes. He calls it “The Quebec Question” where prime ministers are afraid of pissing off Quebec, who will most certainly resist any conditions, with every other province lining up behind them. He says, “there is no political will to deal with this in a meaningful way.”

I get that too. Can you imagine? Not only Quebec. Alberta would lose its mind. Petitions for secession would come flying thick and quick.

That’s how Ontario is able to take money for health care and not spend it on health care. Or why the Liberal government set up a program to deal directly with municipalities to encourage housing. There’s nothing “shared” about it when it’s just one side giving to the other with no accountability, no shared goals or standards.

The NDP would tie national standards of healthcare, tenant rights, and housing to federal funding transfers. It’s the only way to ensure provinces provide a national level of support and access across the country to all Canadians.

We talked taxing, capital gains and hoarded wealth. Green blamed the back-tracking on capital gains tax changes to poor Liberal communications that failed to counter the hysteria driven by the ultra-wealthy, but channeled through small business owners and people with cottages who believed their life savings were in danger. Green also blamed a failed communications campaign as the Liberals succumbed to the pressure from the Conservatives to “axe the tax”, a climate-change policy which put carbon tax money back in the pockets of average Canadians.

In arriving at the outcome of the Liberal’s failure to explain or defend their policies, he says:

“There’s so much that went wrong over the last nine years, the carbon tax is an example, of all these different things [the Liberals] rolled out and then [backtracked] on simply because they didn’t have the courage to defend it or because the defense they would use didn’t coincide with people’s existence. In other words, they would always talk about how good we were doing in the G7 and how the economy was great. That elitism is disconnected from the lived reality of the people … in the bus shelter or the working-class person in Hamilton working 45 – 50 hours a week, still living in poverty. That’s the stuff that creates right-wing populism because it enrages people to hear that.”

Enter Pierre Poilievre, the Conservatives, and techno-fascism.

This generation, Green says, referring to the young people coming into adulthood, the emerging generation of workers, home owners, and parents, “has had the rug pulled out from under them.” They are expected to work at an inhuman pace and yet they still lag behind in real wages, at the mercy of a “pernicious and predatory banking system.”

Compassion fatigue is a destructive phenomenon. I have to believe that we’re hard-wired to care for our neighbours at least to the minimum degree of not wanting to see anyone suffer through poverty or neglect. It’s the basis of community and all world religions.

The homeless situation, always present but exacerbated over the last five years by COVID, rising rental costs and legislated poverty, and the corporate capture of housing, has tested the staying power of people’s compassion in areas where property crime has increased and the feeling of personal safety has become compromised. When solutions from the government aren’t forthcoming, it’s tempting to turn against the people who are suffering and blame them for the systemic failures the government creates.

An hour with Matthew Green talking about the sources of social inequalities and the opportunities that exist “outside the box” of corporate capitalism left me uplifted that at least some candidates are talking about solutions that will help the least among us, not just profit the “middle-class and those that what to join it” to quote a tired Liberal tagline.

The NDP don’t expect to win the election. But Green reminds us that their voice is needed now more than ever to serve as what he called at his launch campaign as the “conscience of Canada” in a world becoming less and less compassionate toward the poor and vulnerable.

Elbow up! Vive le Canada!