Wendell Fields
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Wendell Fields is a veteran anti-poverty activist in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He was the founder-director of Hamilton Against Poverty, and has twice campaigned for the Canadian House of Commons as a candidate of the Communist Party of Canada - Marxist-Leninist (CPC-ML).
[edit] 1984 trial
Fields was involved in an unusual court trial in 1984. He was charged with assaulting three police officers during a trust company workers's strike in Waterloo, and counter-charged that two officers had assaulted him. The counter-charges led to a trial, and Fields (who was not one of the strikers) was asked in court to explain why he was on the picket line. He repeatedly refused to answer whether or not he was a member of the CPC-ML, and was sentenced to thirty days in jail for contempt of court. Fields's lawyer described him as a political prisoner after the decision, and launched an appeal the following day (Globe and Mail, 13-14 December 1984).
Available media reports do not indicate if either assault charge resulted in a conviction.
[edit] Activist
He was laid off from his job as a moulder in 1990, and subsequently moved from Cambridge, Ontario to Hamilton. He became a part-time student to upgrade his skills, and entered public life by forming the pressure group Hamilton Against Poverty (HAP).
Fields testified before a federal House of Commons committee in 1992 as an HAP representative, speaking in opposition to a proposed child benefits bill introduced by the government of Brian Mulroney. His position was that the bill did nothing to benefit single mothers and low-income women, and deserved to be scrapped (Hamilton Spectator, 15 July and 9 October 1992). He was also involved in protests against homelessness (Spectator, 5 June 1993). In 1994, he acknowledged to a reporter that HAP had only five or six members (Spectator, 10 August 1994).
Fields was also secretary of the Landsdale Foundation, a Hamilton organization which solicited money in support of various social causes. In 1994, the Hamilton-Wentworth police fraud squad and the Better Business Bureau of Hamilton both launched investigations into the foundation, following accusations that its money was being directed toward non-existent charities (Spectator, 10 August 1994). Media reports do not indicate if any charges were laid.
Fields was arrested in 1995 following a demonstration by McMaster University students against government cutbacks to education (Spectator, 26 January 1995). The following year, he spoke out in opposition to the provincial government's workfare policies (Spectator, 19 April 1996).
He was charged with trespassing in 1999, after protesting a display of fighter aircraft at the Hamilton International John C. Munro Airport (Spectator, 19 October 1999). The following year, he was charged with failing to leave a premise after joining other protesters in occupying the office of Progressive Conservative Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) Brad Clark to oppose the policies of Clark's government (Spectator, 21 July 2000).
[edit] Candidate for office
Despite his long history of activism, Fields did not run for public office until the 1997 federal election when he campaigned in Hamilton West for the CPC-ML. He also campaigned for municipal and provincial office in the late 1990s, making a bid for Mayor of Hamilton in 1997. During his mayoral campaign, he recommended the creation of neighbourhood groups to make surprise inspections of polluting industries (Spectator, 5 November 1997).
He campaigned for the Canadian House of Commons a second time in the 2000 federal election. A media report from this period lists him as 43 years old, and indicates that he had received social assistance since losing his job ten years earlier (Spectator, 16 November 2000).
He remains active in the Hamilton activist community as of 2005 (Spectator, 31 January 2005).
