This dissertation contributes to the study of social justice organizing as it relates to municipal political governance. It is based in and through the authors active participation in the Chinese Canadian National Council - Toronto Chapter. It demonstrates how public, private, and third sector institutions incorporate community-based ethno-racial social justice activism. This incorporation exhausts and contains activist organizing and defers and postpones social justice as it helps reproduce relations of governance. The Working Group on Immigration and Refugee Issues, Alternative Planning Group, and the Toronto Social Development Network are used as illustrations of this cooption. The use of Lefebvre and Foucault enable this research to pose the question as to how community-based advocacy becomes absorbed into acceptable forms of consultative activism and governmentality. The result is that social justice is perpetually deferred. A politics of demand inadvertently transforms itself into a politics of deferral leading to a politics of co-option and exhaustion. Methodologically, this dissertation develops a community-based activist research model where research is shared and linked with its interlocutors. It practices an active mobilization of both community and academic research.