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Ce mémoire de maîtrise traite du rapport qu’entretiennent les grandes entreprises minières avec les collectivités locales, dans un contexte nordique. À partir du cas québécois de l’exploitation du minerai de fer, nous tentons d’apporter un éclairage nouveau à l’idée communément admise selon laquelle l’implantation, sur des territoires enclavés, de grands projets extractifs, constitue un vecteur de développement régional important. La démarche d’économie politique proposée prend pour objet les modes de gestion des ressources humaines et financières privilégiés dans le secteur minier de la Côte-Nord. Les données recueillies dans le cadre d’une analyse documentaire et d’une série d’entretiens semi-dirigés, menés à l’hiver 2019, convergent vers la thèse suivante : la diminution des retombées économiques constatée dans cette région est attribuable à la déterritorialisation de l’organisation contemporaine du travail dans les mines ainsi qu’à l’émergence de stratégies de restructuration épousant la dynamique du cycle de commodités.

Over the past forty-seven years, thousands of temporary foreign migrant workers have been arriving in Canada annually, to labor in sectors of precarious work including farming, caregiving and the service sector given the demand from employers seeking cheaper sources of labor or for work that Canadians are not available to do or are unwilling to do. Given the context of 21st century neoliberal capitalist globalization which has transformed the international division of labor, there has been an increase in the demand for migrants as a flexible source of cheap labor. Canada’s dependence on migrant workers has been facilitated through bilateral and unilateral programs with countries of the Global South to provide a steady stream of workers for its workforce. The purpose of this research was to critically explore and develop an understanding of precarious migrant worker exploitation and concerns pertaining to the Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP) in Canada to inform advocacy undertaken by migrant organizations. Utilizing a race-gendered neo-Marxist perspective on capital and migrant labor a case study strategy was adopted and developed pertaining to the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) and the Caregivers Program. Data collection included in-depth and focus group interviews with 17 farm and caregiver migrant workers and advocates, document reviews and analysis of web materials. Thematic analysis suggests temporary migrant work is marked by coercion, misrepresentation of contracts and bonded contractual arrangements. Migrant work and living in Canada are characterized by increasing levels of labor unfreedom experienced as domination, subordination, and race-gendered exploitation. Temporary foreign migrant workers are being driven further into debt, endure substandard working conditions and a social experience in Canada marred by prejudice, discrimination, and oppression. These preliminary critical exploratory findings inform advocacy work for migrant workers by contributing to new ways of "knowing and doing” and to challenge existing predatory precarious migrant work policies, processes, and experiences in Canada and internationally.

Dans notre thèse, nous étudions la période de « flottement » et de réorganisation du mouvement ouvrier entre le déclin de l’organisation des Chevaliers du Travail et l’ascension du syndicalisme catholique. Notre étude révèle que cette expérience de transition, entre les années 1896 et 1914, est formatrice pour le mouvement ouvrier de Québec et Lévis. L’analyse de ces années s’avère essentielle mieux saisir et caractériser la suite des évènements dans le monde syndical de cette région. Notre regard nouveau sur le mouvement ouvrier de Québec et Lévis permet d’éclairer le rôle actif des travailleurs et de nuancer le misérabilisme contenu dans une partie de l’historiographie ouvrière. En effet, nous montrons que les travailleurs de Québec et Lévis s’activent dans le monde du travail, mais aussi sur la scène politique, entre 1896 et 1914 afin d’améliorer leurs conditions de vie et de travail. Notre thèse indique aussi que, contrairement au contexte montréalais, Québec devient le bastion du syndicalisme national durant cette période. Cette conjecture peut trouver racine dans la relation particulière qui se développe à Québec et Lévis entre les patrons, la classe ouvrière et l’Église. En effet, l’Église de Québec et Lévis se montre un acteur important entre 1896 et 1914 ; la classe ouvrière doit ainsi négocier avec cette dernière pour se développer. Notre analyse permet ainsi d’expliquer le cheminement particulier des ouvriers de Québec et Lévis entre 1896 et 1914 et de mieux saisir leurs idéologies et leur conduite.

This dissertation critically examines the history of the government of Ontarios policies towards the mining industry to analyze the impact of concentrated economic power on political processes in liberal democracies. It is the first comprehensive study of the political power of one of the provinces largest and most influential industries. Drawing on critical theories of business power, this dissertation examines policy developments across four contentious issue areas, namely fiscal policy, air pollution control, occupational health and safety, and access to mineral lands. Employing a qualitative historical narrative, the study draws on data collected from the Public Archives of Ontario, newspapers, published reports and secondary academic literature. Challenging those theoretical perspectives that downplay the direct influence of large business enterprises over public policy, this dissertation argues that the mining industry has exercised a predominant influence over the government of Ontarios public policies. While the industry disposes of several political resources that privilege it in relation to its opponents, two in particular deserve special attention: First, minings commanding economic presence in the provincial North where alternative investment opportunities are generally absent, and second, the industrys deep-seated linkages with the provincial mining ministry in terms of personnel and ideology. In sum, the mining industrys structural power over the Northern economy together with its close working relations with the provincial ministry of mines have rendered provincial policymakers particularly vulnerable to the industrys lobbying, allowing the industry to play a predominant, though not monolithic, role in shaping provincial public policy.

Increasing processing times for immigration applications and increasing numbers of people admitted on temporary visas mean that more newcomers spend longer periods of time living in Canada with restricted rights and uncertain if they will be able to remain. This has contributed to an increase in precarious immigration status, which refers to a sense of insecurity caused by ones formal immigration status. The purpose of the dissertation is to examine how people are affected by living for prolonged periods of time with uncertainty about future residence and how these effects vary across space and time. The study, based on qualitative research with migrants in Toronto and people who work on migration issues, investigates how immigration status is performed in everyday life and how immigration status intersects with other social relations to produce distinctive affective textures of life in Toronto. The research shows that formal immigration status affects people differently depending on their migration motivations, capacities, and community support networks. Lack of reliable information about the time required to become eligible for permanent residence and application processing times make it more difficult for people to make decisions about how to orient themselves towards the future, the present, and the passage of time in ways that meet their needs. It identifies two salient temporal orientationssuspending or embracing engagement with everyday lifeeach of which comes with benefits and risks. Finally, the research suggests that contemporary practices of immigration control can lead to an internalization of discourses that construct people with precarious immigration status as unworthy of membership in Canadian society. Participants sought to undermine these discourses through narrative redefinition of themselves as people who have something to contribute but are stopped from doing so. I find that this resistance is necessary to peoples ability to persist, yet it has a limited effect on the harm done. The research findings contribute to scholarly understandings of formal immigration status and the slow violence of living with precarious immigration status.

This study analyzes the new sophistication of the organized labour movement and labour’s relationship to politics in a period of rapid change for the Lakehead. ““The CCF is not a Class Party”” argues that, between 1944 and 1963, the organized labour movement and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) at the Lakehead underwent parallel structural developments against the backdrop of conservative social forces in the postwar period that, by the end of the 1950s, necessitated a merger of the two formally distinct entities. The amalgamation of labour and politics, resulting in the formation of the New Democratic Party (NDP), is best examined through the political career of Douglas Fisher, who first represented the CCF and, later, the NDP in Port Arthur. The debate surrounding the ‘New Party’ idea in the late 1950s at the Lakehead is reflective of the uneasy relationship between labour and politics that had formed throughout the postwar period.

Cette thèse retrace l’itinéraire collectif d’un groupe de militants communistes libertaires de langue française pendant l’entre-deux-guerres à Montréal rassemblés autour d’Albert Saint-Martin (1865-1947). Figure importante du mouvement ouvrier au Québec, l’itinéraire politique de Saint-Martin est multiforme : on le retrouve associé au Parti socialiste du Canada, à la One Big Union, au Parti socialiste (communiste), à la Ligue des sanstravail, à l’Association révolutionnaire Spartakus, à l’Université ouvrière, à l’Association humanitaire, à la Ligue du Réveil féminin et à de nombreuses coopératives de consommation et de production. Saint-Martin est entouré de camarades provenant de divers horizons politiques. Notre thèse nous a permis d’identifier plus de 300 individus ayant pris part à des activités militantes à ses côtés. À travers l’analyse croisée de leurs parcours individuels, nous cherchons à mieux comprendre les modalités de leur engagement collectif avant, pendant et après la Première Guerre mondiale, leur représentation de la société idéale et les moyens d’y parvenir, la nature et la diversité de leurs liens de sociabilité, les territoires où se déploient leurs réseaux, la fréquence et les thèmes de leurs réunions de même que les symboles et les rituels qui y sont rattachés. Nous faisons l’hypothèse que celles et ceux qui participent aux activités de ce milieu partagent une même culture révolutionnaire articulée autour des notions de communisme, d’anticapitalisme, d’anticléricalisme et d’internationalisme, débouchant sur une critique des institutions autoritaires : l'État, l’Église catholique, la propriété privée, l’armée, le mariage, etc. Les stratégies d’émancipation individuelle et collective mises de l’avant par ces militants et ces militantes reposent sur l’éducation et l'action directe. C’est cet ensemble de principes théoriques, stratégiques et tactiques que nous regroupons sous le terme de communisme libertaire.

This dissertation examines prisoner-worker organizing in Canada by considering three case studies in detail: first, the successful unionization of an experimental privately managed abattoir at the Guelph Correctional Centre, a provincial jail in Ontario, in 1977; second, efforts by federal prisoners to unionize, with a particular focus on the efforts by the Prisoners Union Committee in 1975 and the Canadian Prisoners Labour Confederation, between 2010-2015, and; third, the nation-wide federal prison strike in response to prisoner wage cuts in 2013. Through these cases, this study examines the similarities and differences between prisoner-workers and their non-incarcerated counterparts, and considers the methods and motivations of prisoner organizers, as well as the substantial legal and organizational barriers that Canadian prisoners face in their organizing efforts. Working prisoners are one of many groups who labour on the margins of society and the economy, and who have been largely overlooked or dismissed by both scholars of work and labour and the labour movement. This study seeks to expand conventional definitions of who is a workerand what constitutes the working classby demonstrating ways that prisoners have asserted their rights as workers and the legitimacy of their organizations and struggles. Through these struggles, which have been conceptualized not only as economic, but also as political struggles, prisoners have contested their state of privation and laid claim to new sets of rights. At their most successful, the organizing efforts of working prisoners have resulted in not only improvements to their working lives, but also expanded rights and freedoms in relation to their incarceration.

This Master’s thesis examines tradeswomen’s experiences of and responses to gendered harassment at camp-based work in resource extraction industries in western Canada. This study predominantly features women working in the Alberta oil sands industry. Gendered harassment at work has been identified as a major issue in recent years (Curtis et al., 2018; Denissen, 2010; Wade & Jones, 2019) and this study aims to better understand tradeswomen’s day-to-day experiences of harassment in work camps. I utilize constructivist grounded theory methodology and critical feminist geography as the theoretical framework for the project. I find that tradeswomen employ a wide range of affective, material, and social strategies to manage harassment. I introduce two concepts, “just go to work” (JGTW) and “me vs. other girls,” to illuminate these strategies for self-preservation in the masculine occupational culture of work. This is labour that tradeswomen must perform in addition to their demanding work duties and schedules. JGTW demonstrates how gendered harassment is embedded into the masculinist culture of work of the trades. This study begins to address this gap in scholarly literature to capture the shifting cultural context of the oil sands industry and identifies new areas for future research.

In 1893 the Keewatin Lumber and Power Company planned the first hydroelectric generating station on the north shore of Lake of the Woods (near present-day Kenora, Ontario). Approximately fifty years later, federal officials seeking employment for Canadian veterans turned to Northwestern Ontario and its underutilized water resources, envisioning a manufacturing hub on the Precambrian Shield. Between 1950 and 1958, the Hydroelectric Power Commission of Ontario remodeled the Winnipeg River drainage basin to produce power for federally-sanctioned peacetime industries, namely pulp and paper production. To redesign the Winnipeg River drainage basin, however, hydro officials needed to encroach on Anishinabek lands: both federally-recognized reserves and unrecognized, but heavily occupied, ancestral territories. This dissertation tells the story of how Anishinabek families used a diverse array of strategies adaptation, cooperation, and passive resistance to manage environmental change caused by Whitedog Falls Generating Station. Anishinabek families worked to stabilize their communities in an era of imposed environmental and economic change. Historians have long argued that hydroelectric development is necessarily at odds with Indigenous culture and subsistence economies. This dissertation provides a counter-narrative, arguing that cultural and economic damage, although linked to environmental damage, correlated more strongly with Anishinabek exclusion from resource negotiations. Moreover, this work complicates historical representations of a uniform Indigenous response to development. Given limited negotiations between the Hydro-Electric Power Commission and local First Nations, Anishinabek families did not respond to industrial incursions with one representative voice. The process of development itself, I argue, prevented a unified community response. As a result, Anishinabek communities fractured in response to hydroelectric development.

Through two-part intergenerational oral histories, this thesis explores the intersections of labour, gender, and lived religion in the lives of twelve Southern Alberta, Dutch Reformed women from family farms from the 1950s to 2019. By focusing on the broader lived experience of the women interviewed, and not just their physical labour on the farm, this thesis argues that women’s roles on the family farm were crucial, while complicating the narrative of farm women’s roles to show their multiple and often conflicting identities.

Background and objectives: Globally, sex workers experience labour rights abuses, disproportionate burdens of workplace violence, and restrictions on safer ways of working (i.e., collectively and in indoor venues) due to criminalization. These inequities are often exacerbated among im/migrant sex workers, who may additionally face precarious legal status, restrictive immigration policies and racialized policing. Despite implementation of “end-demand” legislation (legal models aimed at ending clients’ demand for sexual services) in dozens of countries, little empirical research has explored how end-demand laws impact sex workers’ labour conditions. This dissertation sought to explore how end-demand laws and prohibitive immigration policy impact labour conditions, health and rights among im/migrant and indoor sex workers in Vancouver. Methods: This dissertation drew on quantitative and qualitative data collected from AESHA (An Evaluation of Sex Workers’ Health Access), a community-based open prospective cohort of 900+ women sex workers across Vancouver, Canada, who complete bi-annual interviewer-administered questionnaires and voluntary sexual health testing. Mixed methods (explanatory and confounder bivariate and multivariable logistic regression analyses; interrupted time series; coding of semi-structured interview data) were used to elucidate the impacts of end-demand laws and resulting law enforcement practices on indoor and im/migrant sex workers’ labour environments. Results: This dissertation found that end-demand legislation in Canada failed to improve sex workers’ access to justice, restricted access to supportive third parties and safer indoor venues, heightened the vulnerability of sex work venues to violence, and limited access to occupational health resources (condoms, community-led services); with negative implications exacerbated among im/migrant sex workers. Conclusion: These findings extend limited existing research on the impacts of end-demand legislation, and demonstrate that end-demand criminalization reproduces the harms of full criminalization models. These results have important implications for legislative, policy, and law enforcement reforms towards enabling safe labour environments among im/migrant and indoor sex workers. This dissertation calls for the decriminalization of sex work; removal of prohibitions on im/migrant sex work; sensitivity and anti-stigma trainings among authorities; dedicated efforts to address systemic racism in sex work policing; promoting rights-based municipal occupational health standards; and increasing support for sex worker-led outreach; to promote sex workers’ labour and human rights.

This thesis is a critical analysis of the multimedia project Piece Work (2017) by Toronto-based, Italian Canadian artist Sara Angelucci (b. 1962). Focusing on Coppley Apparel, a garment factory in Hamilton, Ontario, the project explores the process of making business suits through the digital collage Coppley Patterns and the photographic series Mano d’Oro. The sound installation A Sewers’ Chorus features the voices of the garment workers who recall positive and negative memories of their work experiences and personal histories, while the video installation Suit Elevator depicts the business suit in its final form. The majority of Coppley Apparel’s employees are women from non-white racialized groups. Deploying an intersectional feminist approach, this thesis argues that Piece Work reveals the complex lives of these factory workers from immigrant backgrounds in ways that speak against persisting discourses and practices of racialized and gendered labour in the garment industry. It begins by providing an overview of the history of the Coppley Apparel factory in relation to the history of migrant garment factory workers in Hamilton, and the broader history of racialized and gendered factory labour in the city. This thesis also acts as a record of the migration story of Nina Acciaroli, the artist’s mother, whose first job in Canada was at Coppley Apparel. It then examines A Sewers’ Chorus and its use of oral history, providing a discussion of the different stories shared by the interviewees, which range from happy childhood memories and nostalgic flashbacks to accounts of traumatic experiences. The thesis provides a comprehensive discussion of the process of making Piece Work, contextualizing it within Angelucci’s larger artistic practice of incorporating voices in the exploration of her family’s immigrant experience. Ultimately, Piece Work recognizes the employees of Coppley Apparel as people with singular voices and unique experiences and highlights their agency by including the complexity of their voices and identities as women, garment workers, racialized minorities, and contributing members of Canadian society.

Canadian theatre designers share many similarities with other freelance, creative workers in Canada. The conditions of precarity that define their working relationships are similar to those that affect workers in other sectors, such as film, music, television, and visual arts. This thesis begins by examining the existing literatures and research concerning creative and precarious work, primarily in Canada, but also internationally. Drawing on in-depth interviews of 55 designers from within the relatively small community of Canadian theatre designers, approximately 500-700 workers, I examine the working conditions that designers find challenging and seek suggestions for how they can be improved. Additionally, I explore the different models that designers have used to organize in Canada, Quebec, and the United States. By comparing these models with the interviews from designers, I conclude that the best way for Canadian designers to improve their working conditions is to build a closer relationship with IATSE [International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees], the union that represents stagehands and technicians. Finally, I identify some questions for further exploration, including the tension between artistic and worker identities, while also touching on the present circumstances of the Covid-19 crisis and the current conversations concerning racism and white supremacy within Canadian society.

This dissertation examines Canada’s program to employ prisoners of war (POWs) in Canada during the Second World War as a means of understanding how labour projects and the communities and natural environment in which they occurred shaped the POWs’ wartime experiences. The use of POW labourers, including civilian internees, enemy merchant seamen, and combatant prisoners, occurred in response to a nationwide labour shortage. Between May 1943 and November 1946, there were almost 300 small, isolated labour projects across the country employing, at its peak, over 14,000 POWs. Most prisoners were employed in either logging or agriculture, work that not only provided them with relative freedom, but offered prisoners unprecedented contact with Canada and its people. Work would therefore not only boost production but, it was hoped, instil POWs with Canadian mores and values through interaction with guards, civilians, and the natural environment. Rather than attempt a narrative encompassing almost 300 labour projects, this dissertation examines POW labour through a series of five case studies. The first examines prisoners cutting fuelwood in Manitoba’s Riding Mountain National Park while the second and third examine POWs cutting pulpwood in Northwestern Ontario for the Ontario-Minnesota Pulp & Paper Co. and Abitibi Power & Paper Co., respectively. The fourth case study examines POWs employed by Donnell & Mudge in its tannery in New Toronto, Ontario and the fifth examines the practice of employing POWs in farm work in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec. Through these case studies, this dissertation examines how how internment officials employed remote parts of Canada as a physical boundary to prevent escape attempts, while also using it as a space to provide POWs with relative freedom as an inducement to work, and how work challenged definitions of who or what was the “enemy”. With significantly more freedom than the typical internee, POWs interacted with civilians and guards on a more familiar level, resulting in illicit fraternizations and relationships between POWs and Canadians. Although such fraternization also triggered considerable protest, these interactions reveal a great deal regarding POWs’ opinions of and attitudes towards Canada and its people as well as Canadian attitudes towards POWs.

I locate this study within the context of my own work and experiences as an academic librarian and the disconnect that I have often felt between what I consider my role and the value of my work to be versus the perception and understanding of that role, the work, and its value by others. Overwhelmingly, librarians working at Canadian universities are considered academic staff, if not faculty. However, the role and fit of the academic librarian within the academic enterprise is overshadowed and frequently misunderstood. As the subaltern, librarians’ expertise and contribution to the university’s academic mission is often sidelined: the nature of the work too frequently viewed through an organizational rather than an academic lens and characterized as preoccupied with a structured set of regularized responsibilities. The goal of this study is to make visible the processes that shape the work experiences of academic librarians such as they are. Two research questions served as the impetus for this study: How is it that the academic librarian’s lesser status is the ideal at Canadian universities? What are the social processes that shape this ideal? This study is informed by the epistemological, ontological, and methodological assumptions of institutional ethnography: a research approach developed by the Canadian social theorist and sociologist, Dorothy Smith. Institutional ethnography considers the everyday, lived experiences of people as the research problematic—a term used by Smith to focus the inquiry on the actual, social, and active world as it is lived and experienced by people. An institutional ethnography progresses through layers, in this case the progression is from the academic librarian, to the library, to the institution, and beyond, to reveal how power structures external to the local setting influence daily life. To understand how the everyday world is put together so that things happen as they do, the focus of the investigation is on individual experiences and what people are doing relationally. However, in institutional ethnography the actions and experiences of people within a particular setting are not regarded as representative. Rather, the local experience is regarded as a window into the role of power. It is a politically charged and activist type of scholarship. Because institutional ethnography is concerned with explicating the actual rather than formulating or advancing the theoretical, the emphasis is on discovery rather than hypothesis testing. The findings of this study reveal how the value of librarians’ work is socially constructed and based on work that is perceived as women’s work; how the work of librarians is organized as library work rather than academic work; how accreditation bodies and the professions privilege the library over the librarian; and how institutional policies and practices position the librarian as academic on the margins of the academy. These social processes reveal how things come about so that librarians’ experiences as academic staff are such as they are. However, it is ideologies that help us understand why things are the way they are. I propose that two ideological codes—women’s work and the library—permeate our social consciousness, including speech, text, and talk, and infuse librarians’ work with particularizing characteristics. Ultimately, the findings of this study tie librarians’ work experiences to the necessary and gendered exploitation of labour that happens within a capitalist mode of production.

This thesis uses anti-racist and feminist political economy of health perspectives that intersect with immigrant status, in order to analyze the findings from a single-case study investigating the social determinants of health and work precarization in a residential long-term care (LTC) facility in Toronto, Ontario. Throughout this dissertation, I use mixed methods case study to investigate social, political, and economic implications in the lives of health care workers. Observation, interview, and survey methods were utilized to investigate workers health in relation to the precarization of work. Specifically, I used the concept of precarization as a lens to track the ways in which work relations impact the other social determinants of health. The main areas of focus include the intersections of gender, work, and occupational health with race, immigrant status, and culture; the ways in which precarization affects employees in this specific health care sector; the implications of precarization in the health and wellbeing of workers and their families; the role of (un)paid care work and social support provided by family members; and the exercise of strength, resilience, resistance, agency, and coping strategies. Broadly, I will argue that precarization in LTC is an increasingly experienced phenomenon, and that various levels of precarization are experienced by particular workers who are women, racialized persons, and immigrants. This study contributes to our understanding of racialization as a social determinant of health, and analyzes the health impacts of workplace inequality through the lens of precarization. The study makes the case for closer attention to racism and precarity both on and as social determinants of health.

Poor peoples organizing can be effective even in periods of neoliberal retrenchment. This dissertation examines ruling relations and the social relations of struggle from the standpoint of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. With political activist ethnography as my central theoretical framework and methodological approach, I conducted field research, interviews and textual analysis of City and organizational documents. Focusing on OCAPs homelessness campaigns, I examine the social relations of struggle in three campaigns in Toronto: a campaign to stop the criminalization of homeless people in a public park by private security, a campaign to increase access to a social assistance benefit for people in emergency housing need, and a campaign to increase the number and improve the conditions of emergency shelter beds. My research demonstrates the active and ongoing research and theorization that anti-poverty activists engage in as well as the practices of delegitimization, excluding critique, testimonial injustice and epistemic violence that ruling relations engage in to counter activist research and theory. Some of this research and theory has regarded both Housing First policy and philosophy and Torontos emergency shelter system which OCAP, homeless people and other advocates have been decrying as unjust and inept for years. This dissertation explicates some of the ways that the City works to delegitimize its challengers and demonstrates the validity of many of the longstanding critiques of the ruling regime. While the City of Toronto has worked to contain homelessness organizing in Toronto, and deployed numerous demobilization tactics to do so, each campaign was fully or partially successful. Full or partial victories were secured by anti-poverty activists through the use (or threat) of direct action tactics.

Poor peoples organizing can be effective even in periods of neoliberal retrenchment. This dissertation examines ruling relations and the social relations of struggle from the standpoint of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. With political activist ethnography as my central theoretical framework and methodological approach, I conducted field research, interviews and textual analysis of City and organizational documents. Focusing on OCAPs homelessness campaigns, I examine the social relations of struggle in three campaigns in Toronto: a campaign to stop the criminalization of homeless people in a public park by private security, a campaign to increase access to a social assistance benefit for people in emergency housing need, and a campaign to increase the number and improve the conditions of emergency shelter beds. My research demonstrates the active and ongoing research and theorization that anti-poverty activists engage in as well as the practices of delegitimization, excluding critique, testimonial injustice and epistemic violence that ruling relations engage in to counter activist research and theory. Some of this research and theory has regarded both Housing First policy and philosophy and Torontos emergency shelter system which OCAP, homeless people and other advocates have been decrying as unjust and inept for years. This dissertation explicates some of the ways that the City works to delegitimize its challengers and demonstrates the validity of many of the longstanding critiques of the ruling regime. While the City of Toronto has worked to contain homelessness organizing in Toronto, and deployed numerous demobilization tactics to do so, each campaign was fully or partially successful. Full or partial victories were secured by anti-poverty activists through the use (or threat) of direct action tactics.