Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians: Chapter 24, Part Three by Dave Jaffe

         A Sometime Fighter For The Disabled: Part Three


    In the mid-1970's, Ron Malevich went back to reading books. Ye now he dipped into books that could help him in his quest for justice for disabled people. He read books by the 1960's yippies namely Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman,. He re-read 'Reveille For Radicals' by the Chicago-based organizer Saul Alinsky. He thought about what he'd read. Then he went to work.
     Ron Malevich   won some big victories. Using the media and sympathetic allies, he stopped the Canadian Institute for the Blind from evicting blind people from a building it owned and had rented out to visually impaired tenants. Malevich also halted the Social Credit government, which was now back in power, from limiting the use of the disability transit pass. In the Year of the Disabled in 1981 Malevich persuaded a blind man to print in Braille parts of the British North American Act, which was one of the founding documents of Canada.
    Here Malevich was making an important point. "A lot of our laws aren't in Braille," he said to the assembled media. "So blind people can't read them." This has got to change, he continued. The federal government took note. Now all of the federal laws are made accessible to all visually impaired people and all other disabled citizens.
    Of course, Malevich didn't win all the battles he took part in. He failed to prove that a housing co-op he applied to join was discriminating against people like him. Sometimes he used politically incorrect language. He called one of his campaigns against the aging female head of Human Resources 'Old Hag'. He picketted New Democratic Party offices when the N.D.P. squashed the 1983 Solidarity movement. The movement was born out of anger when Social Credit premier Bill Bennett scrapped many progressive laws in the late summer of 1983.
     "We had to get rid of the Solidarity Movement," Tom Fawkes a trade union official and N.D.P. supporter said in effect to a meeting a few years later. "Bill Bennett would have called another election and would have won a far bigger majority than he'd won earlier in the year. So we closed it down." Malevich never forget or forgave the N.D.P.'s actions here. Yet from the mid-1970's to the late 1980's, he won some big victories. Yet then things changed. Many Chinese people mostly from Hing Kong started to arrive in Metro Vancouver.
   Racism has run like an ugly thread through a large part of Canadian history. Some of this has been violent. White people rioted in Vancouver in the early 20th century several times against immigrants from China, Japan and India. French Canadian mobs attacked Jews in east end Montreal in the 1930's and 1940's. Japanese-Canadians were thrown into detention camps in the early 1940's, when Japan attacked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbour. Nor was all racism targeted at Asians or Jews.