On debate, disruption, and hostage takings
A mayoral debate on poverty and hunger featured the assault of a man who has campaigned on such issues for decades
By Desmond Cole
Security guards grab mayoral candidate Kevin Clarke as he tries to speak at Monday night’s debate without an invitation. Image taken from a CTV News Youtube video
I was falling asleep watching the video of Toronto’s first major mayoral debate when the sound of a familiar voice jolted me back to consciousness. A man wearing a salmon-coloured fedora, a taupe button-up shirt and matching blazer had marched onto the debate stage and announced, almost comically, “I’m here,” before launching into what sounded like a campaign speech. It was Kevin Clarke, of course.
The five invited mayoral candidates—Ana Bailão, Brad Bradford, Josh Matlow, Mitzie Hunter, and Olivia Chow—looked over in confusion as Clarke, who is also running for mayor but wasn’t invited to debate, tried to take centre stage. He barely got a sentence out before two people wearing yellow vests confronted him and muscled him off the stage. As Clarke struggled and demanded that security personnel stop touching him, the trio stumbled off the back of the stage and nearly crashed to the ground. Clarke grabbed hold of a black curtain immediately behind the stage and nearly pulled it down.
The debate audience gasped as candidates rushed to keep the curtain from falling. Two cops arrived and pulled Clarke out of the debate hall. Barely three minutes after Clarke had marched onstage, the debate had resumed. No one had time for the outbursts of a candidate who wasn’t invited to debate, and who stands almost no chance of winning next month’s by-election. Yet Clarke’s disruption exposed a political culture that can’t bear to listen to the very people and problems it claims to be addressing.
Kevin Clarke has been running for municipal office in Toronto for almost thirty years without really coming close to winning. Most people who pay attention to local elections know of him. Clarke has been extremely public about his personal experiences with poverty, hunger, lack of housing, drug use, and mental health—many of the same issues featured during Monday’s Daily Bread Food Bank debate.
Clarke, who grew up in Scarborough after immigrating from St. Ann’s Bay in Jamaica as a boy, campaigned in a 2001 by-election while living in a homeless shelter. He currently lives in Toronto Community Housing among many immigrants and elderly folks. He told me in a phone interview that his building is overrun by mice and cockroaches. While he wasn’t invited to Monday’s debate, he has lived and is living its subject matter.
I was at a mayoral debate at University of Toronto’s Hart House in 2006 involving the incumbent mayor, David Miller, and challengers Jane Pitfield and Steven LeDrew. Clarke arrived and shut that event down too, again because he was running but not invited, but no security or police came to remove him. A Hart House policy at the time stated that as long as someone who disrupts an event is not dangerous, they cannot be removed by force. Clarke held up the event for the better part of an hour before finally leaving on his own. After he was gone, LeDrew remarked, “I am surprised so many people could be held hostage by one person.”
Clarke is often loud, vulgar, and indifferent to decorum when he wants to say something, but I’ve never seen him take anyone hostage. It’s interesting that LeDrew, a lawyer and longtime political insider, would compare an excluded man’s disruptive words to being held at gunpoint. As the class divide in Toronto expands, rich folks (and those who envy them) increasingly treat poor people’s demands for dignity as threats. The person begging or sleeping outdoors becomes an extortionist simply by expressing a need.
I spoke with Clarke yesterday by phone. He said his body hurts from getting roughed up by police and security, that he’s getting old (he turns 60 next year). He forwarded me an e-mail he wrote demanding the resignation of the leader of the Daily Bread Food Bank over his treatment. The e-mail notes that despite there being just over 100 candidates registered in this race, only six mayoral candidates were invited to debate. Clarke believes he should have been allowed to replace Mark Saunders, who was the sixth invitee but decided to no-show.
In an apparent response to comments about his mental health, Clarke’s e-mail continues, “Everyone in the world has Mental health issues depending on their experiences in life, does not mean they are crazy or less capable, It is not the mental health perception of an individual that makes a good loving helpful person it is the content of their character and the goodness they express and give to others.”
It’s worth considering that Clarke’s been in the same local political space for decades. Many people who try to ignore him know exactly who he is. They should also know that he has no big donors or campaign resources, and is simply looking to get his message out. There’s no reason to treat him like someone with a bomb strapped to his chest. He’s an older Black man with no money, who fights for what he believes in using a few very predictable and harmless methods.
When I asked Clarke what he would have spoken about at the debate if he’d been invited, he brought up the poor living conditions in social housing. “Toronto Community Housing contributes so much to crime, and so much to hunger. A lot of these people, they don’t really wanna get into drugs, but the conditions they’re living in, and the fear they’re living in when they try to go back and forth from their home, is so atrocious that they end up into drugs. And when they get into drugs, they don’t have money enough for food.”
This sort of candour and insight was missing from the debate stage. Yet I doubt much would have changed if Clarke had been given the chance to speak. The problem with political debate is its game-show speed and banality, its rehearsed sincerity and staged combativeness. Only the most polished and media-savvy speakers can look good in this environment. Even if Clarke had been included, he still has relatively no money, social status, or name recognition compared to his rivals. He could look and sound great but still be recognized as having little chance of winning.
In 2018, my friend D!ONNE Renée was running for mayor, and was excluded from a debate on the issue of affordable housing, with which she has personal experience. Renée decided to get onstage anyway, but when the police came for her, moderator Angela Robertson intercepted them, and allowed Renée to participate even though she hadn’t been invited (Clarke was present at this debate and protested too, but police threw him out).
The approach that Robertson took with Renée, and the rule that allowed Clarke to eventually see himself out at Hart House in 2006, takes time, patience, and discussion. It’s an unpopular approach in a city that has no time for oppressed people, even at a debate about their struggles. Those in power, and those who aspire to power, equate disruption with violence. They imagine themselves, as LeDrew put it, being taken hostage by someone else’s experience of suffering or outrage.
LeDrew’s expression of surprise at being “held hostage” was more likely surprise that no one made an example of Clarke for disrupting a presumably important event. But images of cops and security forces putting their hands on Black people for expressing ourselves in this city have become more frequent and expected in the last decade.
After reading news and social media reactions to the debate, I sensed that people were numb to the fact that they’d watched Clarke getting assaulted by security and police for speaking out of turn (almost no one described what happened as assault). The permanent damage done to Clarke and to those who watched is so easily dismissed. The level of violence our city can tolerate against Black people remains depressingly high.
The inclination to justify the assaults on Clarke—because he was physically close to people deemed more important than him, or because someone feared he might have suddenly become violent—are the same justifications police use in situations that we recognize as unacceptable. Some of us have learned to advocate for dialogue in theory, but to continually condone violence in practice. Far too many of us are okay when police come for our enemies and those we find annoying, but become angry when it happens to someone we see as reasonable or undeserving.
Clarke told me during our call that if the debate organizers had simply asked him to leave the stage, he would have listened. I don’t know if that’s true, but I know he deserved to be asked. I still remember how gently the organizers treated him at Hart House 17 years ago, how he greeted me mid-rant as he finally agreed to walk out of the auditorium past hundreds of annoyed guests. I don’t remember a damn thing the candidates said during that actual debate. I only remember the decision to make space for someone, and how much better it felt than the alternative.