Trickling up to Canada?

I’m interested to see how Dean Spade’s suggestions of centring the attention of social justice to those who are most vulnerable could play out in Canada. Namely, I’m curious of how this framework could be applied to sexual violence within the Canadian colonialist, or if it’s even relevant or applicable to racialized issues. 

What social justice movements need, Spade insists, is “more than a single-issue identity politics” — i.e. more than just voting for pro-gay politicians, who may just as easily “hate” people on welfare or vote in favour of building prisons. Instead, social justice needs to be based in “a commitment that understanding that social justice doesn’t trickle down.” Rather, we should centre the attention of the people who are most vulnerable, he says. 

Spade expands on this concept of “trickle-down social justice” in a 2012 interview with the Laura Flanders Show. He speaks about how he is most excited by decriminalization movements in the States, such as challenging the criminalization of immigration, and stop and frisk laws. These attempts to disrupt oppressive structures, he says, dismantle, “brick by brick,” the systems that are making communities unsafe and, in turn, incarcerated.

I think this is a really interesting approach to addressing a myriad of social issues: by questioning the state and the necessary criminalization and surveillance of “deviant” peoples, what effect would it have on the policing of deviant bodies? This framework rethinks the centrality of legality. After all, Spade says, all of us break laws all the time, but some people are criminalized more and some people’s communities are policed more.

I’m trying to find a Canadian parallel to the “gay and lesbian” social movements trumping queer and non-binary social movements described by Spade. I feel as if Canadian discourses are not really budging on uplifting any vulnerable groups, let alone “the least vulnerable” margin of the vulnerable group. While the States recently legalized gay marriage, have we had any notable legal change in uplifting any vulnerable group? The only close examples I can think of is how universities give scholarships to aboriginal youth (who are attending university), or how many sexual assault centres in universities tend to attract a white, cisgendered crowd.

Or, I wonder if it’s even necessary to try and parallel the two country's problems to apply a similar solution (it’s probably not). I just think trickle-up social justice is a neat concept, and I’d be interested to see how we could apply this in Canada.