The Dominion - Canada

Canada’s Spy Groups Divulge Secret Intelligence to Energy Companies

Miles — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 13:03:11 +0000

Documents raise fears that info on environmentalists, Indigenous groups and more shared with industry at biannual, secret-level, briefings.

TORONTO—The Canadian government has been orchestrating briefings that provide energy companies with classified intelligence from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the RCMP and other agencies, raising concerns that federal officials are spying on environmentalists and First Nations in order to provide information to the businesses they criticize.

The secret-level briefings have taken place twice a year since 2005, and are detailed in documents obtained under the Access to Information Act, and in publicly-available government files.

The draft agenda for one of the briefings, acquired by The Dominion, shows that the RCMP and CSIS assisted the department of Natural Resources in organizing a daylong event on November 25, 2010, at CSIS headquarters in Ottawa, and a networking reception the previous night at the Chateau Laurier.

The focus of the classified briefing was on "the geopolitics of the Arctic," but there were also presentations on topics including cyber-security, intellectual property rights and the Toronto G20 summit. Speakers at the event were from the RCMP and CSIS, as well as the Department of National Defence and Public Safety Canada. Two presenters had their names and affiliations redacted from the document.

Attendees were also given the option to review selected classified reports. However, note-taking at the event was prohibited.

Natural Resources spokesperson Jacinthe Perras stated that the classified briefings enable the owners and operators of energy infrastructure, “to plan and develop measures to protect their facilities.”

In an email to The Dominion, Perras explained that the department is mandated to “engage with partners and key stakeholders” by federal policy such as the National Strategy and Action Plan for Critical Infrastructure.

This plan is based on the concept that some infrastructure is so vital to the functioning of the country that it deserves special protection. Ten critical infrastructure sectors are identified including finance, transportation, health care and energy. For each sector a government department has been charged with fostering relationships with partners, including through the sharing of information. Natural Resources is the lead department for the energy sector.

"These forums provide excellent opportunities for energy sector stakeholders to develop ongoing trusting relations which facilitate the exchange of pertinent information 'off the record,'” writes Felix Kwamena, a director of energy infrastructure security at Natural Resources, in a 2010 summary of various governments’ efforts to protect energy installations.

But groups protesting energy projects such as the tar sands have misgiving about this cozy relationship.

“I see a worrying trend of blurring the lines between government security apparatus and the private sector,” said Keith Stewart, a climate campaigner with Greenpeace Canada. “What we are seeing is government working at the behest of these big multinational corporations, rather than seeing themselves as a regulator of those companies in the public interest.”

“They have created this security culture where there is no separation between the federal government, and the fossil fuel sector,“ said Clayton Thomas-Muller, an organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network, a group fighting for the rights of Indigenous people around the world and a vocal opponent of tar sands projects.

Thomas-Muller and Stewart both told The Dominion that they are concerned that groups opposing energy projects may be spied upon by intelligence agencies that report on their activities to energy companies.

“We know [Greenpeace] have been surveilled...and we also know we have had undercover officers attend our trainings,” said Stewart. “The concern for me is if they are doing this to hand over information to the private sector.”

“Natural Resources Canada does not monitor these groups nor does it provide information on them to private companies,” Perras asserted.

However, the perceived threat to energy infrastructure by organizations and First Nations opposing energy projects was revealed in an academic paper by Jeff Monaghan and Kevin Walby who exposed a CSIS document from 2008 that claims, “Multi-issue extremists [including environmental groups] and Aboriginal extremists may pursue common causes, and both groups have demonstrated the intent and the capability to carry out attacks against critical infrastructure in Canada."

“I have no doubt whatsoever that there are active files on dozens and dozens of First Nations who are quite simply asserting their rights to title over their traditional lands,” said Thomas-Muller.

He pointed to revelations that an RCMP unit was tasked with monitoring First Nations communities with the potential to engage in protests. Operating between 2007 and 2010, the unit sent their weekly report to roughly 450 recipients, including energy companies.

The Mounties say they’re just doing their job.

“The RCMP is required to produce and disseminate criminal threat assessments and other criminal intelligence related to critical infrastructure protection,” explained Greg Cox, a spokesperson for the RCMP. He maintained that “no personal information is shared,” and that “the sharing of criminal information between law enforcement and the private sector is nothing new.”

CSIS declined to comment for this story.

However, documents released to The Dominion show that a component of CSIS, the Integrated Threat Assessment Centre (ITAC), has been writing intelligence reports on environmental groups.

An August 2010 ITAC intelligence document on the 2010 World Energy Congress, which took place in Montreal the following month, notes that "companies such as Shell, Encana, Enbridge, to name a few are amongst conference participants who have been subject to demonstrations in the past."

It goes on to state that "pro-environmental groups...intend to stage what they refer to as an 'emergency forum on energy,'" specifically naming the group Mouvement Sortons le Quebec du Nucleaire, an organization challenging nuclear energy plans in the province. The document also names Climate Action Montreal, a group that held a climate camp to train activists opposed to the tar sands.

The ITAC documents were of a lower security clearance than the classified information being provided at the Natural Resources briefings.

“There should be a lot more transparency,” Stewart said. “We are not saying they need to be publicizing all of the results of their investigation, but if they are going to be working closely with the private sector and sharing that information with them and granting them security clearance, Canadians have a right to know.”
The names of the companies invited to attend the classified briefings have never been revealed. However, the former Minister of Natural Resources, Gary Lunn, boasted at the 2007 International Pipeline Security Forum that his ministry had “sponsored over 200 industry representatives in obtaining Secret Level II security clearance. This enables us to share information with industry and their associations.”

A 2006 report by Natural Resources names the industry associations with which its energy infrastructure protection division liaised. These included the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, which represents nearly 100 oil and gas companies including Shell and Suncor; and the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, which represents companies such as Enbridge and TransCanada and the Canadian Nuclear Association.

In addition to holding briefings, Natural Resources also distributed reports to the energy sector that contained “unclassified information and intelligence” and were shared with “approximately 300 stakeholders three to five times every week,” according to an internal review.

The classified briefings even touched on seemingly unrelated topics such as the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto. An internal RCMP email dated October 21, 2010, reveals that Natural Resources requested the RCMP provide a review of the G20 summit at a briefing taking place the following month.

“This didn't make a lot of sense to me because of course the G20 and the protest against it happened in Toronto, and the energy companies are based in Calgary. There isn’t any energy infrastructure in downtown Toronto,” said Stewart.

During the classified briefing, held November 25, 2010, RCMP Staff Sergeant John Shoemaker reported to energy companies on intelligence efforts to protect the Summit.

The G20 intelligence unit employed surveillance, monitoring and undercover infiltration of protest groups including First Nations and environmental groups. They showed a keen interest in Greenpeace’s activities. However, PowerPoint slides from Shoemaker’s presentation made no direct mention of Greenpeace or any other environmental or First Nations group, beyond listing “issue specific extremism/activism” and “Aboriginal activism” as a “public order” threat.

Although the presentation did not deal specifically with energy infrastructure, Perras said the “report helped inform the development of an all-hazards approach to critical energy infrastructure protection.”

Stewart doesn’t think that intelligence agencies should be focusing their energies on non-violent groups like Greenpeace.

“The only threat we pose is the threat to change peoples minds, and changing public opinion—and I understand why oil companies might be worried about that. I understand why government might be worried about that, but I think that is a fundamental part of democracy and they just have to learn to live with free speech,” declared Stewart.

He believes the Harper government is trying to demonize groups opposed to energy projects. He pointed to legislation that was introduced to increase the budget for the auditing of environmental organizations, a document that lists “environmental NGOs” and “Aboriginal groups” as adversaries, an increased budget for the auditing of environmental organizations, and a commentary by Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver, who warned that environmental groups ”threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.”

“In terms of democracy, you need a separation of oil and state. We need to separate the private interest of corporations from [the] interest of Canadians, and we’re seeing a lot of blurring of that line,” said Stewart. “The government seems to be saying what is good for companies like Shell or Enbridge is good for Canada. We think that is an important debate in a democracy."

Tim Groves is an investigative researcher and journalist based in Toronto. He can be reached at timgrovesreports [@] gmail.com. For more information on his work and writing, click here.

Oilspy

Funding Evaporates for Freshwater Science Research

Miles — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 11:06:44 +0000

Proposed closure of experimental lakes threatens important, ongoing research

WINNIPEG—Freshwater science researchers in Canada could soon find themselves without a world renowned, one-of-a-kind facility in Northwestern Ontario to conduct their studies. If the federal government goes through with plans to cut the $2 million in annual funding to the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA), the research station will close its doors on April 1, 2013, leaving many graduate students stranded mid-project.

The decision has been lambasted in the media by scientists, who see the move to cut $2 million in annual expenditures as shortsighted, to say the least. Researcher David Schindler of the University of Alberta, a freshwater science expert who has done extensive work researching the effects of tar sands developments downstream on the Athabasca River system, considers the funding cut to be symptomatic of a larger issue. “The real problem is we have a bunch of people running science in this country who don’t even know what science is,” he told reporters at a June 15 press conference.

Researchers at Trent University are currently in the early stages of a project that monitors the effects of nanosilver on a whole lake system level. One of the fastest growing substances in the marketplace today, nanosilver is a minute particle that is added to hundreds of consumer products including clothing, bandages and bug spray. As these products enter the environment, the products breakdown and particles are released into freshwater systems. Early lab studies discovered negative impacts on marine life.

Just last year, the project, which is under the direction of Chris Metcalfe at the Institute for Freshwater Science at Trent, received a $750,000 grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) to conclude the three-year study. Metcalfe told the Winnipeg Free Press that with the NSERC grant, he and his team of graduate students would have been able to test the whole ecosystem effects of these particles at the ELA—tests that cannot be conducted in a laboratory setting. The results of the research are now in jeopardy.

At the University of Manitoba, a study on the behavioural and physiological differences between escaped farmed and wild rainbow trout had just been completed when news of the impending closure came out in the federal budget.

“I was probably one of the few lucky ones that had actually completed the field component of my research at the time of the closure announcement,” Master’s student Matthew Martens recently told the Gradzette, the University of Manitoba’s graduate student newspaper. “A number of Master’s, PhD students and postdoctoral fellows were in the process of designing and implementing experiments at the ELA. Since fieldwork is an huge component to ecology and life sciences in general, closing the ELA in the midst of active student research, leaves students with little options to salvage invested time and data that went into their research.”

Jason Venkiteswaran is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Waterloo, where he also did his graduate work studying the effects of flooding due to hydroelectric development. His current research is on eutrophication, a hydrologic process where high nutrient levels, often from agricultural runoff, lead to excessive plant growth, causing detrimental effects on the natural ecosystem.

“This work is on Lake 227,” he told The Dominion in an interview. “It’s the longest running experiment at the ELA. It’s been eutrophied since 1969 or 1970. [The research] would end. So the lake with the greatest amount of eutrophication data, probably the most studied lake in the world with regard to eutrophication, would simply stop being the place where everybody would want to come to study eutrophication.”

Venkitsewaran is concerned that losing the ELA as a place to conduct research will have a detrimental effect not only on Canadian universities attracting top students, researchers and faculty, but also on freshwater science in Canada itself.

“The results from the ELA are useful across the country,” says Venkitsewaran. “It is a kind of national program that every place in the country has a stake in—the acid-sensitive lakes in Nova Scotia, acid-sensitive lakes across Northern Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador. It’s the same with lakes in the northern Prairies, in the boreal forest. All these places face similar issues like eutrophication, mercury deposition, acid deposition. A place like ELA can handle research that covers all those places.”

Without the current funding from the federal government, that research will become increasingly difficult to conduct, if not cease altogether.

Frank Stanek, a spokesperson for Fisheries and Oceans Canada, told The Dominion in an email that other facilities are better aligned with the research mandate of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO).

“We understand that science is the backbone of Fisheries and Oceans Canada and we recognize that important work has been done at the facility, but we are now focussing on work being conducted at other freshwater research facilities across the country, which will more than adequately meet the research needs of DFO,” wrote Stanek.

According to the DFO, the “work being conducted at the ELA is not directly aligned with the Department's core mandate of research that supports decision-making on habitat and fisheries management.” Stanek suggested that other sectors, such as universities or private interests, are better suited to run the facility, “as they are better positioned to undertake the type of studies requiring a whole-ecosystem manipulation.”

However, Venkitsewaran does not believe that universities will be able to fund the facility, citing the manner in which universities fund studies.

“The way that university granting systems [work] is you’re only looking at three or four years at a time,” says Venkitsewaran. “You can’t run a long term facility that way. It means every two or three years you go into panic mode trying to find money to keep going.”

With no clear alternative to the current federally funded model in place, it is possible that graduate students and researchers currently working out of the ELA across the country will find themselves high and dry come April 2013. However, it is Canadians, as beneficiaries of that research, who will truly be the ones who are losing out.

Sheldon Birnie is a writer, editor, and song & dance man living in Winnipeg, MB.

Experimental lakes

Canada's Punishment Agenda

dawn — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 18:52:00 +0000

Omnibus crime bill will mean more prisons and more prisoners

MONTREAL—If you grow pot at home for personal use, here’s a tip: keep it to five plants or fewer.

Come November, getting caught growing between six and 200 marijuana plants deemed to have been produced for the purpose of trafficking will trigger a mandatory minimum of six months in jail. The maximum sentence for growing upwards of five plants will also double, to 14 years in prison.

These are just a couple of examples from a gamut of changes to Canada’s Criminal Code under Bill C-10, which the feds have dubbed the “Safe Streets and Communities Act,” commonly known as the Omnibus Crime Bill.

“Bill C-10 will require new prisons; mandate incarceration for minor, non-violent offences; justify poor treatment of inmates and make their reintegration into society more difficult,” reads a critique of the legislation prepared by the Canadian Bar Association, which represents more than 37,000 jurists in Canada. “Texas and California, among other jurisdictions, have already started down this road before changing course, realizing it cost too much and made their justice system worse.”

Bill C-10, which the lawyers' group says will change Canada’s entire approach to crime at every stage of the justice system, was approved in March. From policing to wait periods between parole applications, changes linked to C-10 are being phased in through to the end of 2012. The bill also gives border guards discretion in the granting of work permits to migrants they deem to be "vulnerable to abuse or exploitation."

“The government keeps talking about how this is an agenda to address victimization,” said Justin Piche, an Assistant Professor in Criminology at the University of Ottawa. “In my view this is a punishment agenda, and should be viewed accordingly."

Piche’s research focuses on prisons and prison construction in Canada, and he predicts C-10 could trigger a new wave of prison construction in Canada.

“In the Canadian context, the provinces and territories have built or are in the process of building 22 new prisons and 17 additions to existing facilities since 2008 that added over 6,000 new prison beds at a construction cost of nearly $3 billion,” Piche told The Dominion. “These prisons were built in a context where provincial and territorial governments were trying to largely address the remand demand, the surge in the proportion of remand prisoners that they were housing in the last decade and a half.”

The majority of the 24,000 adults who are in prison on a given day in Canada are remanded prisoners, meaning that even though they haven't been convicted, the courts have ordered that they be held in jail while awaiting a court appearance. The number of adults in remand has been steadily climbing since the 1980s. “In 2009/2010, adults in remand accounted for 58 per cent of the custodial population while those in sentenced custody comprised the remaining 42 per cent. Ten years ago, the proportions were reversed, at 40 per cent and 60 per cent, respectively,” reads a document prepared last year by Statistics Canada.

The rise in people held under remand is connected to the current wave of prison construction and expansion, but new moves to implement mandatory minimums could lead to filling up the very provincial and territorial prisons built supposedly to prevent overcrowding because of remanding.

“What we’re seeing in terms of the mandatory minimums, more of them being introduced, particularly in C-10, [is that] a lot of them are going to have an impact on the provincial and territorial prisons, which may trigger a new subsequent wave of prison construction,” said Piche.

Mandatory minimum sentences for narcotics possession is one of the most controversial elements of the Conservatives’ Crime Bill, because it copies similar legislation in some US states that has been shown to increase the amount of prisoners without decreasing the supply of drugs.

“Bill C-10 is solidifying trends over the past decades with CSC [Correctional Services Canada], and will result in more people being imprisoned for more time,” according to Marie Dennis*, a prisoner solidarity activist based out of Montreal. “At the end of the day Bill C-10 doesn’t change that much for people in terms of people who are already inside, especially with life sentences, but what it does is solidify into law certain practices that have already been in place, which makes it harder for those practices to change at all if you have a slightly liberal warden or something like that.”

However, there are still a few important ways C-10 will impact people who are currently imprisoned, as well as those who are on parole. Waiting periods for people denied parole to re-apply will jump from six months to one year, ensuring more people will spend a longer time in jail.

“One thing that does change that hasn’t been in the law before is that now if you are on parole, the government can put electronic bracelet on you, in terms of tracking where you’re going and trying to figure out exactly where you’ve been,” Dennis told The Dominion. “That wasn’t something they were able to do before, [something] that has been written into Bill C-10, that a lot of people don’t know about.”

*Marie's name has been changed at her request. Dawn Paley is a freelance journalist and co-founder of the Vancouver Media Co-op.

Prison Print

Reconciliation Takes Two

dawn — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 09:43:57 +0000

Residential school survivors gathered in Saskatoon critical of federal government's actions

Note: This article may be triggering. For immediate emotional support, the 24-hour Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line is available toll-free at 1-866-925-4419.

SASKATOON—The thunderclouds had scattered by morning when the sounds of footsteps, engines and drumbeats converged in Saskatchewan last month. Thousands of Indigenous residential school survivors, their relatives and people from different walks of life gathered in Saskatoon, traveling from all four directions.

From June 21 to 24, laughter, tears, songs and stories were in the air at Prairieland Park, where the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada held its fourth national event. Survivors who gave statements about their experiences and participants who witnessed the event reiterated the importance of documenting and understanding the truth of residential school history. But on the reconciliation of that history, consensus was not even on the horizon.

"There were approximately 15,000 survivors registered for this event," Commissioner and residential school survivor Chief Wilton Littlechild told the crowd gathered for the closing ceremonies of the national event. "And there has been a lot of truth-telling."

Half the estimated number of residential school survivors in Saskatchewan, the registration was the largest to date. Countless others also attended the event and more than 5,000 viewers from countries around the world tuned in to the live webcast.

The event's Education Day also had the highest participation on record. Nearly 2,000 grades seven and eight students from public, Catholic and First Nations schools attended the national event to hear from survivors and learn about residential school history. Over 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children attended residential schools operated by the federal government and various churches from the late 1800s until the 1990s. Their languages and cultural practices were forbidden. Many suffered physical, sexual and emotional abuse.

The event in Saskatchewan marked an important midway point in the commission's activities, said Littlechild. Statement-gathering, research and outreach events are ongoing across the country, but the commission must also hold seven national events, according to the mandate established by the 2007 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. Winnipeg, Inuvik and Halifax hosted events during the first half of the commission's five-year mandate, with Saskatoon marking the mid-point before Quebec, Vancouver and Alberta.

"We shift our focus now from an emphasis on truth to an emphasis on reconciliation," said Littlechild.

But whose emphasis will be in focus remains to be seen.

Representatives of various churches and the federal government, parties to the Settlement Agreement along with survivors of more than 130 residential schools, have made apologies and often speak of reconciliation in the present tense. References are often made to "a new chapter" in Canadian history, placing the "sad chapter" of residential schools mentioned in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s 2008 statement of apology firmly in the past.

Many residential school survivors have publicly expressed skepticism, anger and doubt about reconciliation. But another critical perspective is found within the commission itself, in Lead Commissioner Justice Murray Sinclair.

At a regional event in Victoria this past April, Justice Sinclair said that the role of the commission is to begin a conversation with Canada about what reconciliation means. The commission fully expects that reconciliation would take at least as long as the 130 years during which residential schools operated. The issue is about more than the abuse many suffered, he added.

"This is a conversation about an attitude about a whole race of people," said Justice Sinclair, echoing a view that many survivors have expressed about the continuity of attitudes, policies and legislation from the residential schools and the founding of Canada through to today.

"You don't have to forgive your perpetrator to begin your healing," he said, addressing the residential school survivors gathered in Victoria. "Coming to terms does not necessarily require forgiveness."

Frustration and doubt about reconciliation with Canada have also been expressed by members of the commission’s advisory Indian Residential School Survivors Committee.

A member of the Survivors Committee from Saskatchewan, Eugene Arcand played a key role throughout the Saskatoon event. He seemed to be everywhere over the course of the four days, addressing the students at Education Day while accompanied onstage by his granddaughters, speaking at the opening and closing ceremonies, and greeting just about everyone.

Arcand is affectionately referred to by many as any number of variations of the nickname Bird. Like Big Bird, he towers over almost everyone else, but many in Saskatchewan look up to him for more than just his height. Other residential school survivors at the event would tell each other if the Bird was coming their way and wait to shake his hand, meet his family or thank him for the work he has done.

Arcand spoke of his own experiences with truth and reconciliation at a Circle of Reconciliation panel on Friday afternoon. Residential school survivors were seated in a semi-circle alongside representatives of the parties to the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. The Métis Nation was also represented onstage, although its members were largely excluded from the agreement.

"The truth is somewhat easier, when you can come to it," said Arcand. "Reconciliation has been difficult. It takes two sides."

"I was there at the apology," he said of the Primer Minister's statement of apology to former residential school students in June 2008, on behalf of all Canadians. "I was a little boy the night before, crying in my room."

"It's been difficult to talk out of one side of my mouth about truth and reconciliation when in another side of my heart I have very strong feelings about the actions of the federal government," said Arcand, mentioning the Canadian government's halt to funding for the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, mandated by the Settlement Agreement.

"Actions speak louder than words," he said. When he explained that leaders—not only those of the federal government, but also First Nations leaders—must be evaluated not by what they say but by the legacy they leave behind, the room erupted in applause, whistles and cheers.

Arcand was the first of ten people to speak during the Circle of Reconciliation. Seated directly to his left was former Assembly of First Nations (AFN) Grand Chief Phil Fontaine. Directly across from him was current AFN Grand Chief Shawn Atleo. John Duncan, Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada (AANDC, formerly INAC), was also present onstage.

In his own presentation about reconciliation, Duncan followed the path other institutional representatives have sometimes taken at commission events and told personal stories. He spoke of the dislocation of his home community in a coal-mining region in BC's interior. He told of his childhood confusion when his mother told him that his Squamish best friend Richard from the neighbouring Capilano reserve might not be returning to public school in North Vancouver for grade five.

Duncan had a ten-minute opportunity to respond to direct challenges from survivors regarding federal funding cuts to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation and other organizations, the exclusion of the Métis from the agreement, and other relevant actions taken by the Canadian government. He did not take it.

No one participating in the Circle of Reconciliation mentioned that the court-mandated Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement that ended the largest class-action lawsuit in Canadian history is only an agreement until it is broken. If any party to the agreement—such as the Government of Canada, for example—does not fulfill its obligations, representatives of the original plaintiffs—residential school survivors—can return to court.

Many residential school survivors not participating in the panel sessions or in the event in any official capacity were also critical of reconciliation, both in their statements to the commission and in conversations offstage.

Paul Sylvester was enjoying his pancakes on Saturday morning, sitting in the sun at the edge of a long table under the food tent in Diefenbaker Park. The free breakfast was served before the long 12-hour day ahead at the national event across the street. Finishing his pancakes, Sylvester set up an impromptu smoking section while speaking about the land near his community of Turnor Lake. A Dene residential school survivor, he also shared his thoughts about the event and reconciliation.

"It'll never be forgotten or forgiven, no matter how big a conference you set up," Sylvester told the Vancouver Media Co-op. "To me, here, it's just a gathering. Numbers, that's all."

Sylvester gave statements to the commission earlier this year, at regional hearings in both Prince Albert and La Ronge, in northern Saskatchewan.

"The first one was pretty rough. It was just tears," he said. "Between the first and the second one, I felt a lot lighter. After the second one, it don't bother me no more."

Sylvester takes strength from the memory of his mother, he said. He is the eighth of 23 children, although eleven passed away, most as infants, from malnutrition. Despite all of the loss and everything she went through, his mother always told him to stand tall and keep his head up.

He has been retired for a decade, but Sylvester continues to be active in grassroots political activity in his own territory and beyond. In spite of his own experience in the residential school system, he believes in the importance of education. He is currently working with the Office of the Treaty Commissioner in Treaty 10 territory on a "Teaching Treaties in the Classroom" project, developing curriculum for elementary and high school courses.

"There's not too much curriculum in the classroom about the lifestyle of the Dene People, of our survival on the land, or the history," said Sylvester. The First Nations history currently taught in the province is largely focused on southern Saskatchewan, he said, and it has not been easy to advocate for revisions.

"It's a give and take," Sylvester said of the struggle to change curriculum in order to include Dene history, Treaty history, and the issue of self-government. "It's viewed as a thing of the past."

But the passion that Sylvester has pursued throughout his life is getting to know Dene territory directly on the land. As a young boy before attending residential school and as a youth after he returned home, Sylvester accompanied his father along his trapline, taking notes and drawing maps. He prides himself on continuing to live off the land, tracking and hunting animals, working the trapline, and using local resources to make his own canoes and snowshoes.

And to deal with the trauma of his residential school experience, Sylvester turned to the land he has known since childhood.

"I did my reconciliation already," he told the Vancouver Media Co-op. "I done my healing on my trapline. When I go out on my trapline, there’s peace."

Fred Sasakamoose also found some healing in walking on the land. He led a three-and-a-half-day Indian Residential School Survivor Walk from the residential school he attended as a child to the national event in Saskatoon.

"I walked to get here," he said, seated in the middle of Friday's Circle of Reconciliation panel. "I walked 130 kilometers."

Sasakamoose, 78, now has more than 40 grandchildren and 40 great-grandchildren. He took five of his grandchildren with him along the walk, which began at the place where St. Michael's residential school once stood, in Duck Lake, Saskatchewan.

The building is no longer there. He had to use old stones and memories from over 60 years ago to attempt to answer his grandchildren’s questions about the location of the building and the makeshift hockey rink where he learned the skills that would later propel him to a brief professional career in the NHL.

"I thought I would hear screaming and crying, because that's all I knew," said Sasakamoose of his visit to the grounds. He was sent to residential school in 1940 at the age of six, along with his eight-year-old brother whose abuse he witnessed before being himself sexually abused at the school. He gave his statement to the commission at a regional hearing earlier this year.

"I thought I would leave everything behind. I told the story so many times. I told myself I'm never going to do it again," he said. "I want to leave it behind me now. I want to be healed. I no longer want to carry that load."

But he still carries the memory of five children from his reserve who were sent to St. Michael's and never came back. They are buried somewhere on the grounds that he visited, he said.

"Every footstep that I've made, it was for the people that never told their story, that are gone," said Sasakamoose.

As the event came to a close on Sunday evening, the sky began to cloud over as people prepared for the journey back to their families, communities and territories. Many will gather again at the commission’s remaining national events in Quebec next spring, Vancouver in the fall of 2013, and later in Alberta. Others will turn to their families, communities, or back to the land for healing.

The discussion about reconciliation will continue. The truth-telling will continue. And the memory of the thousands of children who never lived to tell their stories remains ever-present.

"When we leave here it’s going to rain, just for a little bit," said Eugene Arcand during the closing ceremonies. "Those are going to be the tears of those who couldn't be here, transformed into raindrops."

As people left the event and began to make their way home, in all four directions, the raindrops began to fall.

Sandra Cuffe is a Vancouver-based journalist and went to Saskatoon to cover the national event. This article is the fourth in a series funded and published by the Vancouver Media Co-op about the TRC and the residential school system and legacy.

TRC Saskatoon

Canadian Bomb Spending Soars

Tim McSorley — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 09:01:19 +0000

CanBomb8d.jpg

Harper's Assault on the Past

Tim McSorley — Mon, 21 May 2012 15:20:36 +0000

Cuts to Library and Archives Canada fighting words for archival community

WINNIPEG, MB—While federal departments across the board are reeling from cutbacks in the recent budget, a fiery call to arms is ringing from unlikely sources. Librarians, archivists, historians, and antiquarian booksellers across the country— not generally known for raising a ruckus— are sounding a battle cry against the Conservatives' “war on culture, history, and ultimately, Canada.”

“Our history is in danger, and our culture,” says John Lutz, historian at the University of Victoria and council member of the Canadian Historical Association.

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) is expected to cut approximately 10 per cent of its budget and almost 20 per cent of its staff. This alone is frustrating to the archival community. Already, services at LAC have suffered as belts have tightened. However, it is the elimination of the National Archives Development Program (NADP) that was the final straw for the generally reserved caretakers of Canada’s historical and cultural documents and artifacts.

“It all comes down to archives in Canada being able to help Canadians find their history,” says Lara Wilson, archivist at the University of Victoria and Chair of the Canadian Council of Archives (CCA). The CCA, who have administered the NADP for its duration, recently wrote an open letter to Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages James Moore protesting the cutbacks.

“By cutting these relatively small funds to local archives they are in danger of becoming no longer accessible,” Lutz believes. “Local archives have been using these funds to make their materials secure, to protect them from degradation, and making them available online.”

With a modest budget of $1.7 million, the National Archives Development Program has supported small, local archives across the country to preserve local history for 26 years. The program’s overall cost to taxpayers is a drop in the bucket compared to the $28 million budgeted for celebrating the War of 1812. This doesn't sit well with Lutz.

“A certain kind of history that is pompous [and] jingoistic is getting all these resources,” says Lutz.

While cultural institutions like the Canada Council and national museums and galleries were spared cutbacks in this year’s budget, these institutions will still be affected by the cutbacks at LAC.

“I think what Canadians might not appreciate is that other cultural institutions like galleries and museums use archives to create their exhibits, do their research and so forth,” explains Wilson. “A blow to archives is a blow to museums.”

Even before these cuts were announced, antiquarian booksellers across Canada—who often act as “on the ground” scouts in the acquisition of cultural and historical texts—were feeling the freeze.

“Archives budgets have been cut back so badly it’s hard for them to acquire new material,” says Lutz, “which is impacting the antiquarian book market.”

Burton Lysecki of Burton Lysecki Books in Winnipeg, which specializes in western Canadian and local Manitoban history, has seen these impacts first hand.“We are the fetchers in the process of providing the books that need to be preserved for our national heritage,” he explained to The Dominion. “We’ve been let down on that subject.”

However, “Library and Archives Canada has the money to fulfill its mandate,” a spokesperson for Minister Moore told The Dominion via email. According to Minister Moore’s office, “LAC continues to modernize its operations to digitize its content and make it available to more people.”

While antiquarian book dealing is only a part of Burton Lysecki Books’ business, it is a part of the business that Lysecki and part-owner Karen Sigurdson take very seriously.

“Customers come and go,” explains Sigurdson. “What’s bothersome about losing this customer is the kinds of things we were selling to them. Those are important things that belong in our country.”

If the historical texts are not purchased, there is a strong chance that they will be lost, sold at garage sales or thrown out.

“The point is it’s important that these things be captured and preserved in the national archives,” says Lysecki.

“Countries really only hold together if they have a national story that is available to all of us,” Lutz believes. When the infrastructure and funding to enhance, preserve, and display our national story is eroded, ignored or dismantled piecemeal, Lutz believes it bodes ill for future generations.

“This is, it seems to me, a part of a larger assault on the past,” argues Lutz. “It is part of a series of cutbacks that are going to affect historians and archivists adversely.”

Combined with deep cuts to the information economy and to cultural institutions such as Parks Canada, Lutz agrees that what we are seeing could very well be described an aggressive restructuring of culture, history, and Canada.

“History is under attack from many directions,” he says. Whether anyone will be able to read about this battle in the archives of the future, however, has yet to be determined.

Sheldon Birnie is a writer, editor and song & dance man living in Winnipeg.

Burton Lysecki

Aboriginal Peoples' Stories Remain Unheard

stephlaw — Wed, 09 May 2012 10:13:37 +0000

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has travelled across the nation, but few have paid attention

Note: This article may be triggering or distressful. To access the Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line, dial toll-free 1-866-925-4419.

VANCOUVER—The national Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools, which started over two years ago, has been largely ignored by the Canadian public, despite the participation of thousands of residential school survivors and countless others, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous.

In fact, the first and only history lesson many Canadians ever received about residential schools was through the Prime Minister of Canada's "Statement of Apology to Former Students of Indian Residential Schools," issued in June 2008 and broadcast from coast to coast.

The commission is now over halfway through its five-year mandate. Although the government established the commission in 2008, it took until July 2009 before Head Commissioner Justice Murray Sinclair, Commissioner Chief Wilton Littlechild, Commissioner Marie Wilson and a ten-member Indian Residential School Survivor Committee began gathering statements and documents.

The core of the commission’s mandate is to establish the truth about the schools, educate all Canadians about that history and begin a dialogue about reconciliation.

"Residential schools were part of an overall approach toward Aboriginal people in this country," Head Commissioner Justice Sinclair told reporters in Vancouver at a press conference in February, when the commission issued an interim update on its activities and released several preliminary recommendations.

"It is commonly said that it takes a village to raise a child. The Government of Canada took Indian children away from their villages and placed them into institutions that were the furthest thing away from a village that you could expect," he continued. "Then on top of that, the Government of Canada set out to destroy their villages, so when they got out of those institutions, they didn't have a village to go back to."

Thus far, the commission has held statement-gathering and outreach events in over 500 communities across Canada—including a prison in the Northwest Territories—and national events in Winnipeg and Inuvik.

It has not been easy for survivors to get to a microphone and relive their experiences at these events. But the commission has helped them realize what they’ve overcome.

"I think if you document something, you can't say it didn't happen,” Kecia Larkin, 41, told The Dominion, after speaking at the commission’s regional event in Victoria in April. “And if people who have spoken find some pride in themselves, in the courage to speak out, then that's something that has been accomplished.”

At the regional event in Victoria, 158 residential school survivors and other affected people shared their experiences. More than 2,000 people attended the event and another 3,300 people from 16 countries tuned in to the live webcast.

The commission is not only examining the history of residential schools, but also their ongoing impact on communities as a whole, and on intergenerational survivors like Larkin—the residential school students’ children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so forth.

"I've seen a lot of pride there," said Larkin. "But it was very painful for a lot of people. It was very heart wrenching. It made people cry out loud."

From the 1860s up until the 1990s, more than 150,000 First Nations, Metis and Inuit children attended residential schools. Some schools were operated directly by the Canadian government and some by Canada through partnerships with church organizations.

Cut off from their families and communities, students were forbidden to speak their own language or engage in their own cultural and spiritual practices. Many children experienced emotional, physical and sexual abuse.

Larkin’s mother and grandmother attended residential schools, and her father attended a boarding school. As a young child, she traveled around North America with her mother, who was involved with the Red Power movement in the early 1970s, which came out of the American Indian Movement and a growing sense of pan-Indian identity. It was not until they moved to Alert Bay when Larkin was four years old that she experienced the legacy of the schools. After being caught for years in cycles of familial violence and abuse, amidst a community dealing with youth drug use, suicides and sexual abuse by the local school principal, she left her home at the age of 15.

Larkin moved to Vancouver and wound up in the child welfare system, which she considers a modern-day extension of residential schools, and on the streets in the Downtown Eastside. After experiencing multiple traumas, she became a heavy drug user and later tested positive for HIV.

Months after discovering her HIV-status, Larkin was able to leave the streets and settled in Victoria, on unceded Coast Salish territory. Over the past decade she has spent much of her time doing advocacy work in the medical system and is co-chair of a group of women that created the first Aboriginal Women’s HIV and AIDS Strategy in Canada.

“Because of colonialism, our experience is very different, which is tied to not just violence but also residential school, and it’s intergenerational,” Larkin said.

Larkin now has two children of her own and has made a conscious effort to give them a better environment to grow up in than the one she had.

"I don't have a lot of connection with my community and culture, and I think that's how it's impacted me directly, and my children, and my family,” she said. “I tell my children what I can, what I know."

The idea that Canadians need to change the way they think about Aboriginal people’s history and experience is one that the commission emphasizes.

"In talking about residential schools and their legacy, we are not talking about an Aboriginal problem, but a Canadian problem," reads the commission's 2012 report. "It is not simply a dark chapter from our past. It was integral to the making of Canada. Although the schools are no longer in operation, the last ones did not close until the 1990s. The colonial framework of which they were a central element has not been dismantled."

The commission was created through the ratification of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement in 2007. It was a result of residential school survivors launching the largest class-action lawsuit in Canadian history against the government, churches and individual school staff for the abuses they endured.

The agreement also established a nominal “common experience payment” for all students who attended the 134 schools and residences identified in the deal, as basic compensation for the people’s sufferings under the residential school system.

But there are many survivors who feel dissatisfied by the compensation offered. Perry Omeasoo, a Cree residential school survivor, told the commission that he was raised by his grandparents as a young child. After his mother’s prior residential school experience, she was unable to parent him and was mostly absent throughout his life.

"It was almost nothing,” Omeasoo said of the compensation payment at a Commissioner Sharing Panel. "I would have rather had my mother. And for that, I will always be resentful."

Not only do some survivors not find the payment healing, but the forms that survivors had to fill out to qualify for payment triggered mental breakdowns in some.

"Amazing how sheets of paper can be so re-traumatizing," said Kat Norris, a Salish residential school survivor and the spokesperson for Indigenous Action Movement. "I had previously gone through years of counselling, so I assumed I was going to be fine. Instead, I totally backtracked, put it on the shelf, and went into a depression."

Norris is a survivor of the Kuper Island Residential School, which she calls the “Alcatraz of residential schools.” She was sent to the school with her two younger brothers and her sister, as young children. When they arrived at the school in the evening, her brothers were taken away from her, straight out of her hands, because of the strict gender segregation.

"The common thread we survivors share is sibling separation," she said.

"It's one of the biggest painful memories of my whole life, seeing them both walking down the hall, looking back at me, not knowing where they were going and I couldn’t do anything," continued Norris. "We only learned, as adults, about how much we all suffered at that school."

There are diverse opinions about the 2008 statement of apology among residential school survivors and other Indigenous people, Norris said. She herself expresses mixed reactions.

“For me, it acknowledged our Indigenous Holocaust," Norris said. "Immediately, I felt I could breathe, I felt free. And it's because our experience was acknowledged."

At the same time, she explained, “it isn't enough. It is a token apology, trinkets, again, from a government that continues to barrage our people with ingenious legislation bent on keeping our land and destroying it forever. It is felt that we can simply be paid off and silenced forever. Realistically, our pain carries on throughout our lives, as shown by intergenerational impact.”

Norris is planning to give a statement of her own experiences at the commission’s national event in Vancouver next year.

While statement-gathering and outreach activities are ongoing across the country, the commission also has several national events left in its mandate: June 21 to 24, 2012, in Saskatoon; September 18 to 21, 2013, in Vancouver; yet-to-be-determined dates and locations in Quebec and Alberta; and a closing Ceremony in Ottawa.

"We know that the damage continues," Commissioner Justice Sinclair told those gathered at the event in Victoria. "In two years this commission will no longer be around, but this conversation must continue."

Sandra Cuffe is a freelance journalist and researcher currently based in Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish territory. She hopes to make it to Saskatoon in June.

IRSSS

Budget Axe Falls on Retirement Supports

Miles — Fri, 04 May 2012 09:53:00 +0000

Feds continue burden-shifting onto the 99 per cent

VANCOUVER—The federal government recently raised the age threshold for Old Age Security benefits from 65 to 67. This new age requirement will come into effect in 2023. The Harper government says that the OAS in its current form is an untenable strain on resources as Canada’s population ages. But, as critics point out, the fiscal case presented for the cuts has been deeply flawed and misleading.

The federal government argues that the OAS cuts are necessary to stem “unsustainable” program expenditures that are rising from $39 billion in 2011 to $108 billion in 2030 (and Canadians are left to simply imagine how quickly costs will rise in later years).

The government's projections, however, do not adjust for inflation or economic growth. They were stated in nominal rather than proportional terms, creating a “sticker shock” effect. Put in more meaningful numbers, the cost of OAS will rise by 2.4 per cent to 3.2 per cent of the GDP between 2011 and 2030.

The government case also omits that these cost increases are projected to peak in 2031, then plateau and ultimately reverse, falling back to 2.4 per cent of GDP by 2060 (according to the government’s own actuarial report on OAS).

The more sober assessment of the OAS situation is supported by the non-partisan Parliamentary Budget Officer, Kevin Page, who said that the program was already on sustainable long-term fiscal footing, “even under the baseline assumption that there is some additional enrichment to elderly benefit payments.”

Even evaluated on the grounds of the modest budget savings they appear to offer, the OAS cuts are problematic.

The lost income resulting from the OAS cuts is substantial for individuals. The exact amount varies depending on the year of retirement. For example, a person who is 35 years old today stands to lose a total of $24,451 as a result of the changes.

“Canada’s public pensions are already too meager. And I fear, if they are raising the age, that it won’t be long before we see further cuts in these inadequate pensions,” said Gudrun Langolf, first vice president of B.C.’s Council of Senior Citizens’ Organizations.

Cuts to retirement income will push more seniors into low-income status, and degrade the quality of life of others, particularly at a time when employment-based pensions are increasingly scarce and also facing cuts.

Workplace pensions are rapidly being converted into “defined-contribution” plans. These plans offer weaker income security, largely because they channel retirement savings into individual investment accounts that are vulnerable to the short-term fluctuations of the market.

The burden of the OAS cuts, as is all too often the case, will be borne disproportionately by low-income seniors, as well workers in what the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives calls physically demanding or stressful occupations (for whom delayed retirement is especially burdensome).

As Michael Wolfson, the former Assistant Chief Statistician at Statistics Canada, has noted, the costs will also inevitably be carried by taxpayers through provincial governments, which will have to fill the income gap left by OAS cuts from their welfare budgets and through other forms of social assistance. Since OAS benefits are taxable, any potential fiscal savings from the cuts will be further offset by a drop in federal and provincial income tax revenue.

Some Canadians will manage to sock away more money in private retirement savings programs such as RRSPs, but ownership of these plans is already highly skewed towards the top of the income distribution. Participation rates in private retirement savings plans in 2008 were 86 per cent for the top fifth of income earners and 9 per cent for the bottom fifth, according to Statistics Canada.

Private retirement savings programs also carry far higher administrative costs than public pensions, reducing the overall efficiency of the retirement system, even while increasing income inequality in retirement.

The OAS particulars aside, Canadians might also ask why their future incomes must be targeted for belt tightening, while corporate tax rates continue to fall (to 15 per cent federally this year, down from 28 per cent in 2000). This is to say nothing of billions spent on the war in Afghanistan, over $600 million planned spending on building new prison cells, and an estimated $25 billion on new fighter jets.

Perhaps unsurprising in this context, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has taken particular note of Canada’s growing inequality, which has seen the incomes of the top 0.1 per cent more than double over the past 30 years, while their tax rates have fallen precipitously (and median Canadian wages have stagnated).

Cuts to OAS appear to be just one more turn of the vice-grip that places the burden of government austerity measures onto the backs of those who can least afford it. What remains to be seen is how communities and citizens will respond to this set of policies in an era of majority government and renewed activism in Canada.

Alex Hemingway is a Vancouver-based educator and PhD student in Political Science at UBC. He received master's degrees in Global Politics and Social Policy at the London School of Economics.

OAS umbrella

Occupy Pensions!

The CETAstration of Canadian Municipalities

Miles — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:41:23 +0000

Pending trade agreement with EU only benefits big business

CHARLOTTETOWN—As Canada negotiates its furthest reaching free trade agreement to date, cities and towns across the country are sounding warning bells that it could change local governance as we know it.

The Canadian government is negotiating a Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with the European Union. The accord goes far beyond the reach of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), offering unrestricted trade in goods, services and investments between the 27 EU nations and all levels of Canadian government.

“The first thing to realize is that it [CETA] involves far more than trade,” says Scott Sinclair, Senior Research Fellow with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA). He warns of the potential for the deal to greatly affect municipalities’ ability to govern.

The agreement has become known as the “next-generation” deal because of the degree to which it includes all aspects of trade, covering intellectual property, standards and regulations, settlement dispute resolutions, services, investments and government procurement.

The biggest business leaders in Canada and Europe have been the driving force behind the negotiations. They stand to profit, particularly through the agreement's offer of sub-national procurement contracts, which is creating worry and opposition within municipalities.

Municipal-level governments traditionally use procurement contracts to benefit the local economy, opening bids, or a tender contracts, that target local businesses. These local contracts create jobs and opportunities in the region, and and can promote certain kinds of development policies.

But under CETA, non-federal contracts, formerly exempted from free trade agreements, will soon be open to any and all competition, and not limited to local businesses or groups.

Example: the City of Charlottetown, PEI, recently announced an $18 million combined sewer contract that will be opened up to local Maritime engineering, construction and water treatment companies.

For a major project such as this, Charlottetown might look to local contractors for the construction services in order to create jobs in the community. The project may also use the tenders to support environmental or other development initiatives.

However if CETA becomes law, Charlottetown would lose its authority to choose to hire locally and to choose to which parties to grant the procurement contract.

The EU is pushing for a “non-discrimination” clause within the CETA agreement that would mean the procurement terms would apply to all levels of government: when any government calls a bid, it must be open to foreign investors as well as local or national ones.

Minimum limits (or “thresholds”) are in place to distinguish projects and services that are worthwhile to open to foreign investors, which allow smaller contracts to remain outside the purview of the CETA. These limits have been criticized as being too low; they are modelled off of World Trade Organization figures and are set at $340,600 for goods and services and $8.5 million for construction projects.

Charlottetown city councillor Cecil Villard admitted that while the thresholds pose little to no threat for a municipality the size of his city, larger municipalities have much to lose. “My first reaction was that I would be more concerned about the level of thresholds if I were a big city. Toronto’s, Vancouver’s, and Montreal’s are sure to feel the impact,” Villard told The Dominion in an interview.

In fact, municipalities have been calling for a complete exemption from the agreement. The City of Toronto passed a resolution on March 6 demanding its exemption from CETA. And Toronto is not alone: Montreal, Hamilton, Burnaby, Prince Albert and Kingston have all passed resolutions to safeguard their rights to local governance.

The Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) has submitted seven principles to International Trade Minister Ed Fast and the negotiating team. The principles lay out the protections it would like to see in CETA. The Council of Canadians and the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) have also launched a major national campaign to educate and empower the public on the potential consequences of CETA.

As pointed out in a recent NDP report, CETA “deprives provincial and municipal governments of crucial economic levers, particularly during economic downturns, to use government purchasing to stimulate the economy and encourage local spinoffs.”

CETA fails to recognize the autonomy of municipalities and is solely playing to the interests of big businesses, say its critics. “It's a bill of rights for corporations,” according to Leo Broderick, Vice Chair of the Council of Canadians.

Inspired by the concept of social justice, Chera-Lee advocates for human and environmental rights through community and legal initiatives from Charlottetown.

CETA versus Canadian Municipalities

Red Squares Sweep Montreal

Tim McSorley — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:10:38 +0000

Hundreds of thousands took to the streets to protest tuition hikes in Quebec

MONTREAL—On March 22nd, over 250,000 people marched on the streets of Montreal, making it possibly the largest demonstration in the province's history—comparable in numbers to the February 2003 march against the looming war in Iraq.

People came from across the province to denounce the 75-per-cent increase in tuition fees over five years to be implemented by the provincial Liberals. Premier Jean Charest has said that the increase is meant to ensure students pay their fair share, and has repeatedly stated that the government's decision is final.

The tens of thousands in the crowd, and who continue to support the strike, are hoping to call his bluff. The strike has been ongoing since early February, and shows no signs of stopping: in the days following this march, actions across the province have multiplied.

The students have summoned a broad range of support for their movement. Those on the streets of Montreal include unions, community organizations, teachers, grandparents, parents, high school students, and many others.

While Charest and Education Minister Line Beauchamp claim students are isolated in their demands and are up against a silent majority, those in the crowd—and many of those standing on the sidewalks as the procession stretched by them —clearly feel otherwise.

Tim McSorley is an editor with The Dominion and a member of the Montreal Media Co-op.

March 22 tuition fee protest 1

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"What They Call Development, We Call Destruction"

Dalia Merhi — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 09:18:20 +0000

Grassy Narrows resistance to corporate logging continues

WINNIPEG—In December 2011, Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) released its “Long Term Management Direction,” a ten-year “development plan” for the Whiskey Jack Forest. Located in Treaty #3 territory of northwestern Ontario, this forest is critical to the economic and cultural survival of Asubpeeschoseewagong Netum Anishinabek, also known as Grassy Narrows First Nation.

“This document was developed without our participation or consent and is entirely outside the good faith negotiations we have undertaken with MNR since the 2008 Process Agreement,” said Grassy Narrows Chief Simon Fobister in a release. “It sets the stage for more clearcutting throughout our traditional lands, contrary to our Treaty and inherent rights. And we have not given our consent.”

The 2008 Process Agreement was created to guide forest management discussions between MNR and Grassy Narrows after the previous license-holder, Abitibi-Bowater, withdrew in 2008 due to community resistance and public pressure.

Grassy Narrows has struggled for decades with the destruction of the Whiskey Jack Forest from logging, while facing the legacy of residential schools and mercury poisoning in the English-Wabigoon river system.

In 2002, Grassy Narrows’ residents established a blockade of a logging road into the Whiskey Jack Forest. Initiated after years of protest and petitions, the blockade became the longest standing in North American history and an inspiring site of learning, empowerment, and self-determination.

In the Rainforest Action Network’s report, American Dream, Native Nightmare, Roberta Keesick, a blockader, trapper and grandmother, explained the necessity of the blockade: "The destruction of the forest is an attack on our people…The land is the basis of who we are. Our culture is a land-based culture, and the destruction of the land is the destruction of our culture; we know that…they want us out of the way so they can take the resources. We can't allow them to carry on with this cultural genocide."

Before the blockade began, a group of trappers—Andrew Keewatin, Joe Bill Fobister, and the late Willie Keewatin—sought a judicial review against the paper giant, Abitibi-Bowater, and MNR. They argued that their treaty rights to hunt and trap were being infringed by decreased animal habitat and population. Eleven years after the trappers first presented their case, JB Fobister summarizes the 2011 court ruling: “[The Province] could not interfere with [their] right to hunt and trap.”

Abitibi-Consolidated Inc., MNR, and the Attorney General of Canada have since appealed this ruling. Pending the outcome, the Ontario Court of Appeal recently ordered that MNR not authorize the harvesting of wood in the Whiskey Jack Forest north of English River without the consent of Grassy Narrows.

Fobister illustrates the conflict between the interests of industry, the provincial government, and Grassy Narrows: “We are in the way of what they call development. What they call development, we call destruction,” he said. “Whatever happens on the land,” he added, "Grassy should get all the benefits.”

In July 2011, KBM Forestry Consultants Inc. released an audit they conducted of forestry management in the 964,000 hectare Whiskey Jack. Validating concerns of forest mismanagement, the report produced 21 recommendations based on “observations of material non-conformances” to a law and policy as well as ineffective planning and execution.

Some forest product manufacturers, such as Boise Inc. and Domtar, have publicly agreed not to harvest or purchase wood from Grassy Narrows' territory until the MNR obtains community consent. In 2009, Calvert Investments removed Weyerhaeuser from its social index of sustainable and responsible companies due to Weyerhaeuser’s failure to respect the rights of Indigenous peoples.

With only 30 per cent of the forest remaining intact, the Weyerhaeuser mill in Kenora, ON, continues to create a demand for wood harvested from the Whiskey Jack; since 2002, the forest has supplied at least 40 per cent of the mill’s wood, accounting for 42 per cent of the total timber harvest from the forest. The mill produces Trustjoist Timberstrand product, an engineered lumber used for home building.

In 2010, Weyerhaeuser pressured the MNR to approve “contingency” logging areas in the Whiskey Jack Forest without the consent of Grassy Narrows. Chief Simon Fobister issued an open letter to logging companies, retailers, contractors, and investors at the time, calling “for the boycott and divestment of Weyerhaeuser Corporation due to their violation of our human rights as Indigenous Peoples.” With approximately 70 per cent of the mill's product being sold in the United States, a successful boycott would require increased support.

Since the beginning of the blockade, local organizations, such as Winnipeg Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Movement (WIPSM, formerly Friends of Grassy Narrows) and Boreal Forest Network, have stood in support of the blockaders to stop logging in their territory. Together with other allies, they are petitioning Weyerhaeuser and approaching home builders and retailers for a boycott “until they cease all logging and sourcing in the contested traditional territories of Grassy Narrows First Nation.”

“A 'no' from Grassy means, no, stay off their traditional territory—no logging and no resource extraction," said Thor Aikenhead, member of WIPSM.

Damage to the community by corporations and the provincial and federal governments over the decades has taken a great toll, but the determination of Grassy Narrows and its allies could force this corporate giant out. “Grassy's demands must be respected," he adds.

News items and suggestions for supporting Grassy Narrows can be found at freegrassy.org. To sign the petition for Weyerhaeuser to stop sourcing wood from Grassy Narrows First Nation territory, visit: borealforestnetwork.com.

Chuck Wright was a Christian Peacemaker Team delegate to Grassy Narrows in the fall of 2011. He lives in Winnipeg, MB, where he teaches literacy and studies radical adult education. He may be contacted at polepole_w@yahoo.ca.

The Trusjoist Timberstrand plant in Kenora, ON

The Case of Wally Fowler

Tim McSorley — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 09:05:20 +0000

Racism and possible cover-up in Canadian military see light of day with exclusively released documents

HALIFAX—In 2001, with a wife and her three children in tow, Private Wally Fowler, an African-Nova Scotian, was assigned to Traffic Tech training at Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Esquimalt, on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. It was not an auspicious match by any account, and since then Fowler has clung tirelessly to the assertion that he and his family were the frequent victims of racism and discrimination in Esquimalt.

The experience has cost Fowler dearly. He lost his wife, his career and in 2004, after leaving the military, he became mentally unstable and was hospitalized for an extended period.

Fortunately, an encounter in 2011 with Sergeant Rubin Coward, a military administrative specialist known to some as “the only man who can beat the military,” has given the Fowler case new life and a new direction.

Coward’s reputation can be traced back to 1993 when he single-handedly fought and won his own discrimination case at CFB Greenwood, where he was the first African-Nova Scotian Non-Commissioned Officer to be the chief clerk in 404 Maritime Patrol and Training Squadron. It took Coward over six years to advance his own case and he is adamant that the chips are stacked against anyone who tries to take on the military with charges of discrimination.

Coward's administrative acumen has yielded a trove of documents on Fowler’s case under the Privacy Act. These documents show that Fowler's initial accusations of racism were well known and corroborated by his military superiors at CFB Esquimalt. These documents also point to a series of mishandled opportunities and a possible cover-up that implicates a wide swath of persons, some among the upper echelons of the Canadian military establishment. If the nation had known what some within the military had known, Wally Fowler’s story would have become a national scandal.

In Esquimalt, in 2001, Fowler and his family attracted all manner of attention—but of the negative, racist sort. His daughter was spat on in school. The bus driver called his young son a “nigger.” His wife had bananas thrown at her while walking home from work and was frequently refused service at local stores. For several months, Fowler filed complaint form after complaint form with the military, but nothing came of them.

“He filed these forms with the appropriate military administrators,” says Coward. “As of late 1990, we have a policy of 'zero tolerance' within the military. Several of these instances happened on the base, and involved members of the PMQ [Personnel Married Quarters]. So these should have been investigated.”

Fowler says no resolution ever came.

“It was always just 'being looked at,'” says Fowler. “Even the bus driver was only relocated to a different route. That was it.”

As the racist incidents and the inaction of the military continued, Fowler requested that he and his family be transferred back to Atlantic Canada, where they would have support of the African-Nova Scotian community. In response to Fowler's request, a variety of sources, including Fowler's military superiors at CFB Esquimalt, began to confirm in writing what Fowler had been saying all along. There was racism at CFB Esquimalt and Private Fowler had felt its effects. In a social work report dated May 1, 2002, Captain DH Wong, the base's Formation Social Work Officer, noted:

“Pte Fowler and his family appear to have been victims of racial discrimination on a number of occasions...It is recommended that Pte Fowler be posted to a Halifax area unit and that his employment be restricted such that he be available to provide his family with a stable home environment, and facilitate their attendance in a program which would heal the harm done by the racial discrimination experienced in his current posting.”

In a move request dated May 31, 2002, Commander RK Taylor, the Base Administration Officer, confirmed Captain Wong's assessment.

“[Fowler] and his family have consistently experienced racial discrimination outside of the military workplace. Specifically, his children have been taunted and harassed at school and in the PMQ area where they live...Such unpleasant living circumstances have greatly affected the quality of life of this serviceman and his family...I wholeheartedly support the recommendation that he and his family be posted to Halifax or as a secondary preference another base in the Atlantic region...While he and his family will undoubtedly need to heal and learn coping skills, it is my assessment that the Fowlers will achieve this goal without career restrictions placed upon him.”

Lieutenant Commander DF Ohs, the Chaplain BRT, also confirmed the situation. In a memo dated July 3, 2002, Ohs noted that Fowler had provided him with “ample evidence that this is not just a hunch or a personal feeling, but in fact a reality.” He went on to express his concern for the family's well-being:

“They are not coping well with their present reality. Their trust level with the local community is non-existent and they are truly miserable...For all our good intentions, our national and world image could be deeply stained on just one accusation of failing to take care of one of our own families, facing severe discrimination [to them] because they are from a visible minority, and because 'no one would listen to them.' If the member were to seek the assistance of his racial community, I believe this could be perceived a national scandal.”

David Wong, now retired from the military, does not remember the details of the Fowler case, a case he dealt with 10 years ago. The retired captain does, however, remember what he would have done in order to have written the aforementioned social work report.

“I would have verified the instances of discrimination that he and his family would have reported to me,” said Wong in an interview with The Dominion. “I would have followed up on that, making an assessment on whether they had in fact suffered this discrimination, and tried to assess the impact...that it was having on the family...I would have written that in a report to his commanding officer, with a recommendation in his case of a posting to a community where he could get the support of...a community which was probably more multicultural, more accepting of people of colour.”

When asked if Fowler's case would have been unique in the Canadian military in 2002, Wong replied, “Hardly. That would be naive to say that. There's no doubt that other people were subjected to racial slurs and racial comments, racial insults, and racial discrimination of one sort or another.”

In May and June of 2002, National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa began to take interest in the events unfolding at CFB Esquimalt. On June 24, 2002, Chief Warrant Officer Levesque from Human Resources in Ottawa, sent an email to Captain Wong, asking him if he knew of any “other persons in similar circumstances in the Esquimalt/Victoria area.” That same day, Wong replied:

“I can count myself in that number...How many such people do we have here? I can't give you a number. However, colleagues tell me that they have recently started to take notice and ask the question, and they are alarmed at the high number of people who are reporting having suffered instances of prejudice and discrimination.”

Fowler's original request, dated April 16, 2002, was for a “compassionate posting” and not a “contingency move.” The difference between the two is important. A compassionate posting implies that there may be something wrong with the requester, rather than the circumstances. A compassionate posting risks affecting a soldier's career in that a caveat will be applied to their file.

A “contingency move” is granted when the military acknowledges that the requester is dealing with circumstances beyond the capabilities of the individual involved. So it is telling that when Commander RK Taylor, the Base Administration Officer, made his recommendation, it was for Fowler to receive a contingency move, rather than a compassionate posting.

As National Defence was considering what to do with Wally Fowler, a tangled thread of internal emails circulated. On July 8, 2002, Colonel Wauthier at National Defence Headquarters suggested a half-dozen possible locations available for transfer, including Greenwood, Nova Scotia. In the same email, Wauthier noted that should Fowler insist upon a move to Halifax, “we will consider [it] at that time.”

In correspondence the following day, all but two of those locations seemed to have disappeared. In an email dated July 9, 2002, Master Corporal Guy, stationed at CFB Esquimalt, noted:

“I received a phone call from CWO Levesque [Traffic Tech career manager] and he told me that in regards to Pte Fowler, he did not have any positions available in the East Coast and the only choices are Winnipeg and Trenton...Pte Fowler said that he would not want Winnipeg as he feels he would be harassed again there. The CWO said now that the options are now limited to simply Trenton.”

This transpired in spite of the fact that CWO Levesque was copied in the original Wauthier email. Clearly, as of July 8, Levesque was aware that there were postings available in Greenwood, NS. Levesque would have been aware that Commander Taylor from CFB Esquimalt and others had specifically requested that Fowler be posted to Halifax, or at the very least to Atlantic Canada.

The final decision was made by Fowler's “career manager,” Chief Warrant Officer J. Melancon.

Instead of honouring the recommendation coming from CFB Esquimalt to re-post Wally Fowler to Atlantic Canada, CWO Melancon confirmed that Fowler had only two possible transfer options. Fowler was told to chose between CFB Winnipeg or CFB Trenton, Ontario.

Rubin Coward finds CWO Melancon’s decision troubling, especially considering the extenuating circumstances that led to Fowler's request for a move.

“In totality, the reasoning behind Commander Taylor's strong recommendation to send Wally and his family back east was twofold,” says Coward. “One: to allow the member to be reintegrated with Black people in his own milieu. And secondly: to allow the individual a chance to heal. And I would say, under normal circumstances, having put sixteen years into the system myself, there's no way normally that a Chief Warrant Officer could veto the recommendation of a Commander, unless he himself had an agenda.”

In the summer of 2002, faced with what he perceived as his only option, and wishing to be as close to his support network in Atlantic Canada as possible, Fowler chose the location farthest east: Trenton.

Then something even more curious happened.

CWO Melancon transferred himself from his Ottawa office, and posted himself as Base CWO of CFB Trenton. The former Base Chief Warrant Officer in Trenton transferred into Melancon's position in Ottawa, inheriting Fowler's career file. The logic behind such a transfer, in effect a self-demotion for Melancon, is difficult to understand.

Very little documentation is on hand concerning Fowler's posting at CFB Trenton. Coward suspects that staff at CFB Trenton may have “closed ranks” and that future information requests may yet reveal another series of documents from this time period. The only documentation available is Fowler's own testimony about his treatment, which he describes as “hell.”

“Melancon's puppets were everywhere,” claims Fowler. “I was starting to get written up over everything. They'd keep a log on my actions, sometimes minute-to-minute. They kept me in a basement, ironing flags. Or I'd be driving around, sorting through trash.”

At present, no documentation can confirm these allegations.

Coward suggests that even before Fowler’s transfer to Trenton, Fowler was suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of racist treatment while at Esquimalt, and he was in an even more fragile mental state in Trenton.

In fall 2002, Fowler began to experience a steady mental break down. In December 2002, he went on extended sick leave. In mid-January he was examined by Dr Bodden, a psychiatrist with Area Support Unit Toronto.

In a consultation report, dated January 16, 2003, Dr Bodden noted:

“Wally identifies a number of problems with his mood. Since arriving at Trenton, he has experienced a number of difficulties which have ultimately culminated in his mood being down most of the time, frequent ruminations about his difficulties, impaired concentration, decreased energy, decreased interest, significant initial insomnia of four to five hours duration...increased appetite with a 45-pound weight gain, and feelings of guilt. He denies suicidal ideation. He feels very helpless and hopeless.”

Notably, Dr Bodden mentioned that Fowler's posting to Trenton, and not Atlantic Canada, was possibly “redressable.”

“In other words,” says Coward, “if Wally were to have the knowledge and had somebody who would assist him in putting together a redress, he could have very easily been moved to Nova Scotia. But being a private, and not having that knowledge, he was subjected to whatever agenda Chief Warrant Officer Melancon had.”

A social work report, dated February 3, 2003, noted that members of the military consulted Captain DN Penley (a Social Worker stationed at Trenton) about Fowler five times between November 2002 and January 2003. In one communique between Penley and the Commanding Officer of 2 Air Movements Squadron, 8 Wing Trenton, Penley notes:

“Several other helping professionals involved in this case were consulted by WSWO [Wing Squadron Warrant Officer]...CFMAP [Canadian Forces Member Assistance Program] counsellor indicated that racism experienced by s/m and family in Esquimalt was highly traumatizing, which may have disadvantaged s/m's introduction to his military career at a critical juncture.”

With his mental state beginning to suffer greatly, and his family becoming increasingly depressed, in early February Fowler requested discharge from the military.

Captain Penley, in a communique written on February 3, again suggests:

“[A] compassionate posting to Nova Scotia could be considered as an alternative in order to attempt salvaging the s/m's career.”

CWO Melancon's motivations in blocking recommendations to post Fowler to CFB Halifax or Greenwood, and then re-posting himself to CFB Trenton once Fowler was posted there, remains a mystery unlikely to be resolved. On February 13, 2003, Jean Melancon passed away suddenly while stationed at CFB Trenton.

Once dismissed, it appears that the loose ends of Fowler's file were quickly “cleaned up.” By April 2003 there was no trace of the original documents from CFB Esquimalt, documents that suggest mistreatment of Wally Fowler and his family, and a subsequent mishandling of their case. In April of 2003, in response to discrimination charges brought to him by Fowler, Lieutenant Colonel Romanow noted in a memo:

“Pte Fowler alleges that he and his family have been subjected to discrimination and racism at each of the postings (Borden, Esquimalt and Trenton) he has had since rejoining the CF in 2000. It is noted that there is no substantiation or evidence supporting his allegations on the file. Consequently, there does not appear to be any immediate risk to the CF of having to respond to a grievance or human rights complaint, based on discrimination...It is recommended that Pte Fowler be released from the CF under item 5d as proposed.”

Romanow's statement that no substantiation or evidence supporting Fowler's allegations flies in the face of what is now known: Captain Wong had undertaken an investigation and came to the conclusion that Fowler was the victim of racism; Base Command had interviewed Fowler, was attempting to resolve one specific incident and was taking steps to “reinforce the Good Neighbour Policy to include racial tolerance” on the base; and, in 2003, the Canadian Forces Members Assistance Program counsellor had found the racism that Wally Fowler had experienced while at Esquimalt was “highly traumatic.” According to Romanow, however, as of 2003, all this evidence had disappeared.

It is troubling to contemplate where the original documents from CFB Esquimalt might have gone. Retired Captain Wong is equally baffled.

“Good question,” said Wong to The Dominion, when asked where the documents might have gone. “I guess it would be relevant to a subsequent investigation, wouldn't it? I couldn't tell you...I suppose as a journalist you can put that question to the Minister [of Defence].”

At press time, neither the Minister of Defence nor the Department of National Defence had any comment regarding the missing evidence.

In June of 2003, with his step-children still attending public school, Wally Fowler was given a 5d dismissal—a dismissal with no pension attached. He was given seven days back-pay, although he had to wait to move until the end of June in order for his step-children to complete their school year.

Three years after the move to Esquimalt, Fowler and his family returned home to Halifax, to the support of his community. For several months Fowler attempted to get compensation or a pension from the military, but to no avail. He solicited then-Minister of National Defence David Pratt. Fowler penned a letter to Pratt on February 2, 2004. Pratt responded on March 12, 2004, saying he was “disturbed” by Fowler's account of the racism he had “allegedly suffered,” and said he had ordered a review to determine if Fowler's treatment by the armed forces negatively impacted his career, and whether this treatment was related to Fowler's “ethnic origin.”

There is reason to believe that a review of Fowler's career would have turned up the original documents from Esquimalt—documents that show the extent of the racism to which Fowler and his family had been exposed. A review would have also found the potentially redressable posting to CFB Trenton, and the decision of CWO Melancon to go against Commander Taylor's recommendation that Fowler be posted to Halifax, or elsewhere in Atlantic Canada.

Nothing was found.

On February 12, 2004, as the military began to search for information on Fowler in response to Pratt's career review, a flourish of internal emails erupted. All of them were written by individuals looking for Fowler's case file, but none of them being able to find it. A message from Captain Jackson noted:

“I looked in NGRS and Excel and could not find it. How about you?”

To which Warrant Officer Laing replied, 11 minutes later:

“Not at this level. Nothing in the “I” drive either.”

Lost files notwithstanding, the case continued, slated to be addressed in the House of Commons on April 19, 2004. That month, another flourish of inter-departmental emails ensued.

On April 5, Lieutenant Navy Green asked CFB Esquimalt:

“Nothing in your records for anything relating to the Fowler family in Mqs out there?”

MWO Ennis, in Esquimalt, the same day, replied:

“A records check does not indicate any investigation files/reports involving Pte Fowler at CFB Esquimalt. As noted below one file was noted CFB Trenton involving a Breach of Probation issue.”

Without the proper documentation, the case before the House of Commons was weak. Fowler, unhappy with the results of the investigation, solicited Pratt once more. Pratt again sided on paper with Fowler; writing to the National Defence Ombudsman on Fowler's behalf, he noted:

“I am informed that your investigator did contact Mr Fowler, but that he may not be prepared to fully support your investigation. Nevertheless, it is requested that your office conduct a viability assessment for the conduct of this investigation and provide your recommendations to me.”

On July 2, 2004, the final results of the investigation arrived in the form of a letter from Captain DJ Kyle, the Base Commander at Esquimalt, to the Director of Military Careers at NDHQ:

“A search of all documents relating to the investigation of racism and/or harassment concerning Private (Retired) Fowler has been conducted with negative results. The supervisor of Private (Retired) Fowler has confirmed that the Private was not involved in any investigation concerning racism and/or harassment during his posting to Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt.”

Every trace of wrongdoing in the Fowler file had vanished.

Wally Fowler then suffered a mental breakdown. In the late summer of 2004 he was found on the highway outside of Halifax, wandering naked. When the police cuffed him, he attempted to gouge his eyes out on the window of their cruiser. He was taken to the Nova Scotia Hospital, where he was kept under intermittent restraint and constant surveillance for the following month and a half.

Without a military pension, and with no income, Fowler's vehicle was repossessed; his mortgage also spiralled out of control. Fowler's partner and her three children, whom Fowler was raising as his own, left him. The psychiatry team at the Nova Scotia Hospital diagnosed Fowler with schizophrenia and asked the Department of National Defence to provide him with a pension. Finally, in winter, 2004, Fowler was granted a limited pension. At this point, having moved back with his parents, his life was in shambles.

Fowler, in a fragile mental state, continued his attempt to get a full medical pension, but to no avail. On July 28, 2005, the Canadian Forces Grievance Board (CFGB) recommended that Fowler's application for redress of grievances be denied. Notably, the CFGB's investigation justified Fowler's 2003 posting to Trenton, as Major Lionais noted:

“[I]did not support a posting to Halifax due to the fact that the city achieved notoriety in the late 1990s for racial conflict issues in one of its high schools.”

What a racial conflict at a high school in Halifax had to do with refusing the recommendations from CFB Esquimalt that Fowler be moved back to his community on a contingency move is not known.

In 2005, Fowler received a letter from the Chief of the Defence Staff, General RJ Hillier; it was a final response to Fowler's application for a redress of grievance. In the letter, Hillier noted:

“In its analysis, CFGB found that there was no substantiated racist conduct or harassment on the part of any Canadian Forces member towards you. I agree with the CFGB. I believe that the CF, given the circumstances, was sensitive and responsive to your situation...I am not prepared to grant the redress you are seeking. I am satisfied that you were not discriminated against and that you took your voluntary release.”

It was the same story as before, now handed to Fowler by the Chief of the Defence Staff himself. Fowler began to vacillate between continuing his pursuit of redress of grievance and giving up on what seemed to be a hopeless endeavour. His mental state again wavered; he suffered another breakdown in 2005. He began to shred much of the original documentation related to his military career, as it made him angry. He took work as a community service worker and drifted between jobs.

Years went by and nothing advanced beyond a bureaucratic shuffle. Finally, in 2011, Fowler met Coward. Coward believed Fowler; with 16 years in the system, Coward says he’s seen it all before.

“[In the military] racism is both systemic and institutional,” says Coward. “And it's clear to see how they operate. What they do at the end of the day, they inundate the individual with a plethora of documentation, in Wally's case some 4,000 pages, and most of it is fluff. And of course, even when Wally took it to his lawyer, the first thing the lawyer said was, 'I can't go through all that,' unless Wally had a quarter million dollars in his back pocket. And the military is acutely aware that there's a significant financial uphill battle to fight these buggers.

“The area where they try to defeat you is in administration. And if you're not as sound an administrator, you're easily defeated. Because you just don't know the system. For people like Wally who don't have that knowledge? They're dead in the water, and the system knows it.”

Armed with the “vanished” documents from CFB Esquimalt, Coward is confident that Fowler's case merits a second look. He wants a Ministerial Inquiry. He also wants a review of the Human Rights Commission, the means by which racism is reported on in the Canadian military. He wants compensation for Wally Fowler, who he says should have been enjoying a long and illustrious career with the Canadian military by now. According to Coward, Veterans' Affairs is now offering Wally Fowler a full medical pension. But at this late date, after years of disappearing documentation, a pension is not enough for Fowler and Coward.

“They're now offering a bun,” says Coward. “And what they don't know is he can get the whole bakery.”

Miles Howe is an editor with The Dominion and a member of the Halifax Media Co-op.

Questions? Comments? Drop us a line: info@mediacoop.ca

Wally Fowler and Rubin Coward

Scoring for Information

stephlaw — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 09:32:45 +0000

Police infiltration tactics viewed as a violation of women's bodies and rights

TORONTO—With the rise of modern technologies, most of us are at least peripherally aware that our lives are becoming increasingly monitored. We casually brush away the uncanny feelings conjured by Google ads culling search terms from our emails, and gently ignore the bubble cameras that watch the perimeters of offices, schools and public spaces in metropolitan areas. But state surveillance penetrates even more intimate aspects of life than your email inbox and your child’s schoolyard.

The use of sexual deception in intelligence gathering is neither new nor uncommon, said Gary T. Marx, professor emeritus from MIT, Harvard University and University of Colorado, and author of Protest and Prejudice and Undercover: Police Surveillance in America.

While agencies generally have rules against sexual deception in intelligence gathering, and will be careful not to document instances of it, supervisors will imply that agents should use sex in order to gain intelligence. The secretive nature of undercover operations presents a roadblock to any kind of future accountability, he said.

“What's the difference between having sex through threat or coercion and having sex through lies?”

Recent stories of police infiltration appearing in the news have drawn this scenario out of the realm of James Bond fantasies and into public discourse.

Eight women in the United Kingdom are currently pursuing a human rights lawsuit against the Metropolitan Police, after they discovered that five of their former romantic partners were undercover agents. These cops were assigned to spy on environmental activists starting in the mid-1980's. At least two of these police spies have fathered children with an activist while undercover, and one of them, Jim Boyling, even married the mother, according to Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

In Canada, allegations have arisen against a police officer who had sexual relations with women in the community he infiltrated during the lead-up to the 2010 G20 Summit in Toronto, activists in southern Ontario told The Dominion.

Shailagh Keaney, an activist and independent journalist in Ontario who knew the G20 infiltrators, said that gendered biases were at play in the tactics used by infiltrators, as well as in the actions of uniformed police during the protests.

“Women's bodies are perceived as less violent but more violate-able," she said. "Men were generally beaten more brutally [during the G20] but women were routinely strip searched without even having their pockets checked.”

For marginalized women whose communities have historically been harmed by governmental powers, the thought of having been intimate with someone who represents state authority is profoundly violating, said Jen Meunier, who identifies as Algonquin and a womyn of mixed descents. “Sexual consent means being fully aware of the circumstances, being aware of everything that is necessary for your safety.”

Indigenous communities in Canada have understood surveillance and infiltration to be a concrete reality for many decades now, Meunier said.

Rachelle Sauve, a cook and community organizer in Peterborough, Ontario, who knew people who were affected by direct interactions with infiltrators, believes undercover agents strategically take advantage of characteristics that are traditionally stereotyped as being feminine, such as compassion, nurturing and emotional receptivity.

“That, in itself, is gendered violence,” she said. “This is coercion, this is manipulation, and this is rape—the criminalization of dissent is the only reason it is seen as acceptable.”

Like in any war, the women of subordinate groups—such as Muslims, Arabs, activists and Indigenous peoples—find the oppression they already face on the basis of gender exacerbated by their status as targets of state repression.

Sauve views the use of sex in intelligence gathering as part of the broader historical picture of gender violence, often used as a tool of control and domination.

“This contains a certain depth of psychological warfare that is particularly pernicious,” she said. “You can destroy an entire culture by raping its women.”

According to Professor Marx, the role of secrecy is the key structural enabler of sexual misconduct in undercover operations. In addition, cases of infiltration are rarely made public if they do not succeed in gaining grounds for arrests. Most of the people who have had interactions with infiltrators may never find out the individual's true identity.

The best devices for preventing sexual misconduct by police are transparency, pluralism of powers in the state and continual institutional review, Professor Marx said.

Human rights law may be an excellent emerging tool for seeking redress in cases like these, which have no clear precedent. Judiciary law also contains tools for pursuing accountability, such as suing perpetrators for mental harm.

For Meunier and Sauve, the solution for activist communities involves a stronger acknowledgement of the gendered aspects of state repression.

“We need to collectively address gender issues and heal our vulnerabilities all the time—not just when something bad happens."

Kelly Pflug-Back is a poet, writer, student and activist. You can find her newest stuff in upcoming issues of Goblin Fruit, Ideomancer Speculative Fiction and Iconoclast.

Questions? Comments? Drop us a line: info@mediacoop.ca.

Spooks using sex

February in Review

stephlaw — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 06:59:25 +0000

Vikileaks tweeted, robocalls investigated and students strike out against fees

The federal Conservatives came under fire for allegedly making ‘robocalls,’ or automated calls, to Liberal voters in up to 18 ridings to falsely advise them of a change in location of their polling station. An investigation has been launched by Elections Canada and the RCMP to examine reports of these calls. The Liberal Party and New Democrats have both been blaming the Conservative party for the scandal. Liberal interim leader Bob Rae likened Prime Minister Harper to impeached former US president Richard Nixon: “We are entering into a kind of Nixonian moment in our political culture, where all kinds of dirty tricks seem to be possible, all kinds of dirty tricks seem to be encouraged.”

Nearly 100,000 university and CEGEP students in Quebec went on strike against the provincial government's increase of university tuition fees. The movement may well continue to grow as more student associations vote on their respective strike mandates throughout March. The Provincial Liberal government has implemented a tuition fee increase of $1625 over five years, which would nearly double the current fees.

Across Canada, thousands of students took part in a national day of action against rising tuition fees and decreased Education funding, with 1,000 coming out in Halifax alone.

Twitter account Vikileaks sparked huge controversy across Canada. The account, which was created by a Liberal party staffer, exposed private and embarrassing details of Public Safety Minister Vic Toew’s divorce. The staffer considered it part of a campaign against the online surveillance Bill C-30.

Email evidence has surfaced to suggest Defense Minister Peter MacKay enlisted military personnel in order to dig dirt on opposition MPs. These instructions allegedly came about after MacKay was found to have used a search-and-rescue helicopter during a fishing trip in 2010. MacKay dodged questions on the incident, saying he “would not comment on whether military personnel had been inappropriately used for political purposes or whether an investigation would be launched.”

Defence Minister MacKay’s announcement that a small military base was to be built at Germany’s Cologne-Bonn Airport backfired when German politicians and members of the public rejected the plan. They said MacKay never consulted them about the small base. "The airport of a major city is not the right location for additional military air traffic," Cologne Lord Mayor Jurgen Roters said.

Newly released data revealed that Canadian arms companies sold $4 billion worth of military weapons and ammunition to Saudi Arabia, which is believed to have been used to quash anti-government protests in Bahrain during the Arab Spring. The 2011 sales were more than 100 times higher than the 2010 amount of $35 million. During the protests in Bahrain, more than 30 protesters were killed, hundreds were wounded and nearly 3,000 were arrested.

New information surfaced suggesting the federal government has been instructing CSIS, Canada’s spy agency, to use information obtained through torture. These instructions are contrary to the government’s policy which says CSIS would discard any information that could be tainted, for instance, through torture. Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has been quietly telling CSIS to use any information obtained in whatever way if public safety is at stake. "Information obtained by torture is always discounted. But the problem is, can one safely ignore it when Canadian lives and property are at stake?" Toews said in question period on February 7.

A new report released on February 28 by the Parliamentary Budget Officer estimated that the controversial omnibus crime bill, Bill C-10, would cost $8 million for the federal government and $137 million dollars for provinces and territories to implement. The report, "The Fiscal Impact of Changes to Eligibility got Conditional Sentences of Imprisonment in Canada,” based its estimates on data from 2009-2009.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s department was accused of misusing personal information of hundreds of new Canadians in order to organize a staged citizenship ceremony for Sun News during with ministry workers posed as recent immigrants.

Kenney also re-introduced immigration reform proposals that failed to pass before the 2011 federal election. Opposition MPs and immigrant rights advocates decried the package of policies, including the establishment of two-tracks for asylum-seekers that would categorize some countries as 'safe.' Critics claim this leaves the refugee application process open to political interference. It will also allow for refugees to be stripped of their residency status should their country become 'safe' in the future.

New figures released by the Immigration and Refugee Board showed that, nearly two years after their arrival on the ship the MV Sun Sea, only three Sri Lankan refugee claimants out of 600 have had their requests for refugee status accepted. Another 13 claims were withdrawn and five were abandoned. The hundreds of refugee claimants have been detained since their arrival in 2010.

The 21st annual Women’s Memorial March drew hundreds of people on to the streets of Vancouver. In addition to remembering women who have gone missing or lost their lives in the Downtown Eastside community, on the Highway of Tears and across Canada, this year’s march also protested the ongoing Missing Women Commission of Inquiry that has excluded the voices of many indigenous and women’s groups.

First Nations in Canada sent an open letter to Chinese President Hu Jintao, and to the Chinese media, urging China to criticize human rights issues related to the treatment of Indigenous peoples in Canada.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada released its interim report. The commission made 20 recommendations, including a call for residential school education material to be included in public school curriculum. The commission was set up to help First Nations heal from their abusive and traumatic experiences at residential schools.

A new study revealed that Canadian police agencies have been actively suppressing and hiding racial data from their annual crime reports to Ottawa. The study, published in the Canadian Journal of Law and Society, said that the deliberate concealment of racial data makes it impossible for researchers to determine whether police forces have been dealing with racial and ethnic minority groups in an equitable manner.

More than 600 Huichol Indians, an Indigenous group of western central Mexico, trekked to their sacred ground, the Cerro del Quemado—or the Burned Mountain—to pray to the gods and ask for help in fighting against Canada-based First Majestic Silver Corp.’s $100-million mining project. This mining project is earmarked to start this year in the area after the Mexican government granted a mining concession to the Canadian company. The reserve is one of UNESCO's World Network of Natural Sacred Sites.

Hacker group Anonymous launched attacks on the Mexican mining industry in solidarity with Indigenous groups whose sacred lands are being threatened by mining developments. Of the many sites targeted by the hacking campaign, one is a site developed by Canadian-based mining company First Majestic Silver Mine.

The Harper government successfully derailed an environmental lobbying effort to make refiners worldwide pay financial penalties for using the carbon-intensive crude from Alberta’s tar sands. An EU vote on a proposed regulation to label oil sands as being more carbon-intensive than other crude sources, which would effectively ban oil sands crude, failed after France and Netherlands abstained in a February 23 vote in Brussels.

A Quebec court slowed down a pipeline project that would allow crude to come from the Alberta tar sands. Based on findings of the Commission de protection du territoire agricole du Québec, the court has requested that Pipe-Lines Montreal needs to justify its proposed pumping station in the Eastern Township town of Dunham before it could be permitted to develop.

An economic report commissioned by the Ontario government proposed sweeping cuts to public services. The report was issued by Don Drummond, a former assistant deputy minister for the federal department of finance in the 1990's and the former chief economist for the Toronto-Dominion Bank. Opponents of the proposal claim the report is a set of "1% solutions, that benefit the 1%."

Palestinian political prisoner Khader Adnan ended his 66-day hunger strike on February 21. Adnan was arrested without charge by the Israel military and he was protesting this inhumane practice against political prisoners. But while his strike was going on, there was little to no mention of it in Canadian media.

Mohamed Harkat, a Montreal resident who has been charged under Canada's security certificate laws as being a member of a terrorist organization, launched the first challenge of the Canadian government's new security laws since they were introduced in 2008. In 2007, the Supreme Court overruled the previous version of the laws, saying they were too secretive to allow for a proper defense. Harkat's lawyers are arguing that a 2010 judgement against their client shows the new laws do not go far enough in remedying the situation.

The Spirit Lives On 1

Bloquon la hausse

More Prisons, Higher Profits

Miles — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 09:51:02 +0000

Inmates have little power in challenging prison work conditions

HALIFAX—Criticism of cheap prison labour is something often aimed at privately owned U.S. super jails, but here in Canada, thousands of imprisoned people form a labour pool where wages dip below a dollar an hour.

“Motivated workers. ISO-certified plants. Flexible contracts. Your partnership with CORCAN will build your business and boost your productivity,” reads a pitch from CORCAN—a branch of the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) that coordinates inmate work programs in over 50 shops in manufacturing, textile production, industrial laundry, and other industries.

Every year, about 4,800 inmates across the country participate in CORCAN work programs. Inmates are paid a maximum of $6.90 per day, have no vacation time or vacation pay and need clearance from a health professional to take a sick day. Overtime pay is just over $1 per hour and inmates are required to hand over 25 per cent of any earnings over $69 biweekly for room and board.

Prison wages have not increased in about 25 years; however, according to a 2008 report from Howard Sapers, the Correctional Investigator, the cost of the average basket of canteen goods inmates require has increased from $8.49 to over $60. In the 2008-09 fiscal year, inmates worked about 2.8 million hours collectively.

CORCAN sells most of its goods and services to government departments such as CSC and the Department of National Defence. In 2008-09, CORCAN had about $70 million in sales, with $10 million of those sales to the private sector. If the 4,800 inmates who worked in CORCAN shops were paid at the top rate of $6.90 per day, CORCAN would have spent just $2.4 million paying prisoners—3.45 per cent of its total sales.

In March of last year, inmates at Mountain Institution in Agassiz, BC, announced that they were attempting to organize an inmate labour union in order to improve working conditions for prisoners. It is unclear what the current status of the inmate union is, but prisoner worker action has been reported at prisons across Canada and the US over the past year, including work stoppages and hunger strikes.

"Prisoners are tremendously resourceful organizers, despite the huge barriers they face [such as] censorship, isolation, lack of funds, [and] retribution by staff/administration," says Sara Falconer, a prisoner justice activist involved with the prisoner-edited zine, Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar.

In some cases, inmates have also been able to turn to the courts to access the rights and freedoms they have been denied. In the 1993 case Sauve v. Canada, the courts struck down laws that stripped prisoners of the right to vote. Prisoners have also argued, with some success, for the right to legal counsel in disciplinary hearings and fought arbitrary transfers and disciplinary measures such as segregation.

“Imprisonment and engagement with the criminal justice system correlates to poverty and other forms of social disadvantage, and even if it doesn’t, it is still a group of people that has human rights. It is still important that our society is held accountable for how it treats them,” says Dr. Debra Parkes, an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Manitoba who has written substantially on prisoner rights and why it is important prisoners have access to the courts.

“Groups [such as prisoners] that don’t always have access to the political process and to making change through that need some avenue to address [the] rights abuses that often happen when you have a majority making rules and laws [that] affect the unpopular minority,” she adds.

When it comes to labour issues though, significant barriers prevent prisoners from using the courts to challenge working conditions. Unlike rights granted under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that are intended to apply to all people, inmates are excluded from the statutes and regulations that define labour laws.

“These challenges would face uphill battles in the courts,” says Parkes, “especially because in other instances, the courts have ruled that full collective bargaining protection and labour rights do not need to be extended in every case to all people.”

A lack of labour rights for prisoners leaves inmates susceptible to exploitation in the face of prison expansion. According to Parliamentary Budget Officer, Kevin Page, CSC will require at least an additional $3.5 billion in funding in order to address the increases in inmates due to the Truth in Sentencing Act, which limits the credit a judge can give an inmate for time served before sentencing. Page estimates that the Federal government would need to build two low-security facilities with 250 cells each, six medium-security facilities with 600 cells each, four high-security facilities with 400 cells each, and one multi-level-security facility with 400 cells each. Bill C-10, known commonly as the omnibus crime bill, will further drive prison expansion through the use of mandatory, minimum sentences and increases in the number of criminal offences.

Prison expansion also allows for a larger inmate workforce.

Prisoners are assigned to work programs in their correctional plans. A correctional plan is an outline of a program that determines the work, training, and activity for an inmate’s sentence. Inmates have little ability to refuse to work, even in poor conditions, because an inmate’s adherence to their correction plan influences decisions on inmate privileges and parole.

While its mandate is said to be centred on work programs that work for prisoners, decisions ultimately come down to dollar figures. In 2009, CORCAN announced it would be closing six prison farms across the country because the farms had been losing money. CORCAN's 2008-09 annual report states that farms had lost $4.1 million that year. Prison farm supporters, including prisoners, correction workers, prisoner justice activists and community members cited the role of the farms in providing local, fresh food to prisons, and in providing meaningful work for prisoners.

Closures were complete in 2011, despite opposition.

For Falconer, prisoner solidarity like that demonstrated around the closure of prison farms will be essential to successful prisoner resistance.

"There have been some inspirational groups over the years...but this kind of organizing can’t really take off without outside support—otherwise it’s easily silenced by the prison administration," says Falconer. “Outside labour unions also have good cause to support prisoners in these struggles—in Wisconsin and elsewhere, union workers have been replaced by prisoners.

"We need to raise prisoners' voices in our everyday lives and movements—from labour unions to schools to community groups to families," she says. "Those of us on the outside have the resources and relative freedom to spread the word about the conditions prisoners are facing and what actions they want us to take."

Kaley Kennedy is a journalist and activist living in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

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Prison labour Canada