Notes

1. In the decade leading up to the 2014 Gap campaign, clothing industry production doubled, with consumers purchasing 60 percent more garments and keeping them for half as long (Remy et al. 2016).

2. Much of the cultural authority that medicine gained throughout the nineteenth century was a result of normalizing discourses around the laboring body and social deviancy. That is, medicine, in relation with the emergent discipline of statistics, worked to explain that the inability to labor efficiently under capitalist relations was a natural consequence of physical, intellectual, and psychiatric deviance.

3. The average fast-fashion garment is worn only seven to ten times before being discarded (Remy et al. 2016).

4. In the years following the fire, Oporajeo was re-formed as a private company as a result of governmental barriers to cooperative ownership. However, while Oporajeo is not a traditional workers co-op, it remains a workers initiative and a unique kind of garment factory within Bangladesh: Workers still receive a living wage and a share of the company profits, are involved in the decisions of the company, and receive support with medical and schooling costs (Sanctus Propaganda 2021).

1. For example, in 2019, Ontario Premier Doug Ford made headlines after publicly referring to a person who had escaped a locked ward of CAMH as an “animal” and a “nutcase,” stating: “It’s about time politicians stop hiding behind podiums and being politically correct. . . . We’ve got to put these people away and if they have mental health issues they can be dealt with in jail—simple as that” (quoted in Jones 2019). Likewise, several years before, Ford, then a Toronto city councilor, claimed a local group home for people with developmental disabilities was a “nightmare” for the community, having “ruined the neighborhood.” Speaking at a meeting with group home staff and other local residents, Ford stated: “People have worked 30 years for their [private residential homes in the neighborhood]. . . . My heart goes out to kids with autism. But no one told me they’d be leaving the house” (quoted in Jones 2014).

2. For example, after just one year in office, Ford’s government had already canceled all new planned drug overdose prevention sites, set public hospital funding at less than the rate of inflation, and passed legislation that eliminated $200 million of public health funding per year, amounting to $1 billion in cuts over ten years (Gray 2019). As reported in the Toronto Star (2019), they also canceled the province’s universal basic income pilot, reduced access to prescription medication subsidies, illegally capped public sector wage increases at 1 percent, and slashed by half an already completely unlivable disability income support increase.

3. While this government’s austerity measures have eviscerated public health care, education, and social services and supports in the province, it is nevertheless important to note that these sectors were already at a breaking point prior to this government’s election due to decades of bipartisan socioeconomic abandonment.

4. As of 2019, more than 2,400 Ontario schools and daycares exceeded the federal guideline for lead in drinking water, and at least one public high school recorded lead levels at 1,300 times higher than the limit (Cribb et al. 2019); 70 percent of Ontario school custodians reported asbestos present in their place of employment (Silliker 2019); and in Toronto alone, 99 schools were recorded as having no mechanical systems, relying solely on windows for ventilation (Swyers and King 2021). Furthermore, as of 2021, only 28 percent of Toronto District School Board schools met provincial accessibility codes (Ricci 2021).

5. School Mental Health Ontario is a provincial organization working with the Ministry of Education to provide Ontario’s school boards with resources, programs, and professional training to enhance student mental health and implement the Ministry of Education’s policies.

6. To be clear, not all U of T buildings—or buildings at Ontario public universities more generally—are similarly well maintained. Just as we are seeing in elementary and high schools across the province, public colleges and universities are being starved by the state, leading to tens of billions of dollars in deferred maintenance, among other slow-motion disasters, such as an overreliance on precariously employed and poorly compensated contract faculty. This has resulted in schools developing a troubling reliance on private revenue streams, including on increasingly exploitative international student tuition fees, as well from private donors like U of T alumnus John Bahen, after whom the Bahen Centre was named. The university’s reliance on private donation highlights a tension between the allure of innovation and the less glamorous but essential durational work of maintenance and repair. As Paul Davidson, then president of Universities Canada, reminds us, corporate and private donors “would rather put funds toward a new building than toward helping to repair a building that may already have someone else’s name on it” (quoted in D. Johnson 2020). He quips: “You don’t exactly put a plaque or a name next to your HVAC system.”

7. This includes proactive health promotion (e.g., general awareness and antistigma campaigns), self-directed and informal information acquisition (e.g., online wellness articles, mindfulness videos, self-directed skill-building workshops), peer-mediated interventions (e.g., online group chats or Instagram live sessions focused on positive coping strategies), and guided self-help (e.g., virtual or telehealth services and web-based cognitive behavioral therapy programs), as well as more intensive forms of therapeutic care addressing chronic or acute mental distress (e.g., one-on-one counseling, urgent clinical care, hospitalization referrals).

8. The report went as far as to directly name Morneau Shepell in their recommendations, framing this as a student desire: “Students would like to see the University collaborate with community partners (such as CAMH, local hospitals, Morneau Shepell, etc.) to provide counselling and support services on campus for groups and individuals” (University of Toronto 2019, 16).

9. Many people have been killed or seriously harmed by police as a result of the police interpreting people in crisis to be threats to both public and officer safety (Mukherjee 2022). Indeed, between 2000 and 2018, 70 percent of Canadians killed by police were in crisis, most of whom were Black, Indigenous, and people of color, highlighting the ways ableism and sanism intersect with racism in deadly ways (Nicholson and Marcoux 2018). Mukherjee (2022, 160) argues that “the contemporary call to defund the police is a worthy one, even if it’s not new. It opens the door to a serious and urgently needed conversation about alternative models of community safety and wellbeing.” And while some promising alternatives mobilizing community-based and nonpolice models of crisis response are increasingly being funded and piloted in cities across Canada and elsewhere, Mukherjee also notes that “the reality is that these programs are still in the form of crisis response and operate within the existing institutional and systematic arrangements. They challenge neither the dominant sanist perspective through which mental health issues are viewed nor the neoliberal political economy within which response to mental health is currently situated” (161).

10. As per the headline from Campus Safety’s official press release: “New Name. New Look. Same Commitment to Service” (Campus Safety Special Constable Service 2021).

11. Many argue that the best way to mitigate deadly and racist police encounters with people in distress is to instead deploy social workers and psychiatrists engaged in individualized forms of risk assessment and equally individualizing mental health therapeutics. Rather than a radical rethinking of how we interpret and respond to madness and distress or a deep engagement with how those living at the intersection of racialization and madness are routinely made targets of interpersonal and state violence, the reformist “fix”—swapping police officers as first responders for psychiatrists or social workers—risks diverting attention and resources away from the urgent work of dismantling systemic racism, carceral ableism, and its institutions, which include the police but also social work and psychiatry. As the Abolition and Disability Justice Collective (ADJC, n.d.) argues, the work of transformative justice is “not just about creating new responses to crises but creating a new world in which we thrive such that less crises happen in the first place.”

12. For example, on May 14, 2024, sixteen-year-old Landyn Ferris was found dead in a sensory room at Trenton High School in Ontario after being left unsupervised despite having a protocol in place that requires his full-time monitoring (Lim 2024).

1. According to the state government website, while “historically, electric utility infrastructure has been responsible for less than 10% of reported wildfires . . . wildfires attributed to electrical infrastructure consist of roughly half of the most destructive wildfires in California history” (California Public Utilities Commission, n.d.). Yet, as Tim Arango, Jose A. Del Real, and Ivan Penn (2019) report in The New York Times, power shutoffs were not 100 percent effective: PG&E electrical equipment still caused as many as five fires, despite the shutoffs.

2. As Theodora Danylevich and Alyson Patsavas (2021) note: PG&E’s “drastic approach did not actually prevent the company’s equipment from starting several fires.”