Labour Of Love

Performing Arts & Entertainment in Canada, Wntr, 1999

MAYWORKS, a week-long forum for union activists and labour-positive artists, was timed to coincide with International Workers' Day (May 1).

At this year's Mayworks in Toronto, poetry readings and book launches combined with visual art, cabaret and street theatre to produce an engaging showcase for working people.

Mayworks also included Reels of Change, an international film/video collection in which Canadian entries such as Dans la guele du crocodile by Catherine Larivain and Lucie Ouimet were screened alongside films from Morocco, France and China. Dans la guele du crocodile follows twice-exiled Haitian activist/musician Manno Charlemagne, who ran for mayor of Port-au-Prince and won, despite (or perhaps because of) a campaign that consisted of a single concert held two days before the election.

Making Change is Colina Phillips' cinematic tribute to her father, an African-Canadian jazz musician who worked as a coal miner in Nova Scotia.

The powerful and thought-provoking Turbulences by Montreal filmmaker Carole Poliquin documents the unprecedented power of the financial markets and the threat they pose to the working people. Ironically, Turbulences predicts an increasingly totalitarian existence for us all if today's brand of capitalism goes unchecked. A series of remarks from traders and stock analysts explains how today's stock market investors drive companies to maximize profits, leading to global markets and free trade, which in turn leads to high unemployment in the west and worker exploitation and environmental pollution in third world nations. Poliquin circled the globe, speaking to squatters in Paris, welfare families and unemployed auto workers in Quebec, teachers in Ontario, factory workers in Thailand, Senegalese fish processors and debt-ridden Mexicans.

The film suggests a solution: the power of financial markets (which create massive wealth, but only on paper) must be curtailed and allowed to reside once again with governments, which can act for the common good. Not good for your mutual fund investments, but necessary for everyman's quality of life.