Global recession is here and the "free-market god" who caused it is on vacation.
That "god" - unregulated capitalism - will be back, but its temporary absence is a chance for common people to build a better future for themselves, a meeting launching a Recession Relief Fund Coalition heard this week.
The recession could also be a time when inequality grows and more scapegoats are found, members of the Toronto-based group, which represents some 250 organizations, were told at the University of Toronto.
People must use the crisis to make the economy "work for us" instead of giving in to demands for wage cuts, said Peggy Nash, a former Parkdale-High Park MP representing the Canadian Auto Workers.
"We know that if we cave and walk backwards then it will be a race to the bottom for everyone."
Author and journalist Naomi Klein said it's time everyone who opposes free-market ideology to join together and "start thinking big." Current government intervention in the economy is the largest in her lifetime but it's taking place "in the interest of the elites," she warned.
"This is a moment when you get trampled or you transform."
How a transformation could happen wasn't clear, though Klein said people should teach their friends economics, so they no longer have to "trust the experts" whom she said helped create the crisis.
We may also see Canadian workers occupy factories, their stories similar to one Klein and husband Avi Lewis documented in Argentina in their 2004 film, 'The Take', she suggested.
It's important workers who take that risk know the community is behind them, Klein said.
"If the workers are alone in this, they'll get crushed. If it becomes a social movement, it's a winning battle."
Governments, she said, should change bankruptcy laws to make it easier for workers at closed businesses to re-open them as co-operatives.
Workers at Collins and Aikman, a Scarborough car parts plant, seized their factory two years ago after hearing it was scheduled to shut down. Employees ended their occupation after General Motors promised more money for their severance packages.
Occupying a plant takes courage, Nash said, adding though "I have seen plant occupations go very badly," there's potential for them "to go very right."
Think of tool and die markers and others in the auto parts industry, she said, and imagine if "the productive capacity of these people" could be marshalled "to reduce environmental degradation."
Uzma Shakir, representing the Colour of Poverty campaign, said visible minorities have been "suffering recession" for 30 years, since they haven't benefitted as much as other Canadians from good economic times.
Immigrants, refugees and people of colour are forced into temporary, precarious jobs, making them "first in line to be unemployed," said Shakir, executive director of South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario.
In a remade "green economy," such people have reason to fear "we'll be too brown to be green" unless programs translate their skills into jobs, she said.
Meanwhile, Toronto's food banks, for the first time in a long time, will see food bank users who live in condominiums or pay a mortgage, said Gail Nyberg, executive director of The Daily Bread Food Bank, whose client groups are 15-per-cent busier this year.
Many of the new faces, she said, are people who had worked for decades in manufacturing or construction jobs and never had to improve their poor English skills. They may now find themselves permanently shut out of the workforce, Nyberg said.
"There really is no answer for them to get back in."