The Dominion - Miles Howe

Was the fix in for Mi'kmaq Warriors at Elsipogtog?

dawn — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 15:56:49 +0000

Signs point to some having prior knowledge October 17th was 'take down' day

MONCTON, NB–Coady Stevens, the first of six Mi'kmaq Warrior to appear on charges related to the anti-shale gas encampment along Highway 134, has been denied bail.

As bail hearings today continue for the five remaining incarcerated members of the Mi'kmaq Warriors Society, enough information is beginning to surface to suggest that the vicious pre-dawn RCMP takedown of the anti-shale gas encampment on the morning of October 17th was a well known fact among some before it happened.

This is not to suggest that these people necessarily knew of the severity or magnitude of the RCMP raid, or even what it would look like. On the other hand, the possibility that others knew of the raid on October 17th is becoming too real to ignore.

Not only this, but there is a clear possibility that the greater narrative behind the raid is the measured destruction of the Mi'kmaq Warriors Society, to be replaced in their stead by a joint Assembly of First Nations/RCMP force.

Did Elsipogtog First Nation Chief Sock know that Thursday was the day?

Much has been made of the fact that Chief Sock and members of his council were arrested on the morning of October 17th. Sock and council were arrested in the second confrontation with RCMP, after the police had swept through the encampment, making numerous arrests, with guns drawn in the pre-dawn hours.

What brings Sock's pre-awareness of the events of the 17th into question is a series of notes obtained by APTN journalist Jorge Barerra.

The notes, which Sock has since admitted to Barerra that he penned, were taken during a meeting between Chief Sock, Robert Levi and 'Jumbo' Sock, who are both councillors from Elsipogtog First Nation, Tobique First Nation member John Deveau and Listuguj First Nation member Wendell Metallic, and two provincially-appointed advisors and other members of the New Brunswick provincial government, which included premier and Aboriginal Affairs Minister David Alward, as well as Energy minister Craig Leonard.

The Sock notes suggest that the talks focused, at least for a period, on a timeline of when to take down the ongoing blockade.

Point '8' on page one reads: “Blockade down, protest continues.”

Point '3' on page two of Sock's hand-written notes says: “Week – time limit Monday to next Wednesday.”

Point '4' on the same page reads: “Equipment out Thursday?”

These notes were written on Monday, October 7th, so it is reasonably safe to conclude that the “next Wednesday” in question refers to Wednesday, October 16th. The Thursday in question is October 17th, the date of the vicious raid.

Granted, Sock does continue to publicly denounce SWN Resources Canada's seismic testing in the area. In an attempt to patch up relations between his community and the RCMP, he even helped clean up the wreckage of six torched police cars. But based on his own notes, one must consider the possibility that he was aware that there was a plan in motion to dismantle the encampment and end the peaceful anti-shale gas encampment on Thursday, October 17th.

A blockade of millions of dollars of seismic testing equipment, without which SWN could not work, is one thing. A peaceful protest alongside the highway, where people can vent their indignation without actually stopping the Texas-based company from testing for shale gas deposits, is quite another.

One is effective, albeit potentially illegal in the eyes of the Crown. The other is a co-option of energy towards ineffective means, that is, if you actually want to stop the company from working.

The fly in Sock's ear: John Deveau, heir to the director's chair of the joint AFN/RCMP crisis response team in New Brunswick

Deveau, one of Sock's provincially-appointed advisers, is an intriguing character and no stranger to the anti-shale gas protests in Elsipogtog. We have written in more detail about him here.

But to fully understand his role in the current anti-shale gas movement – and it is a big one – we need to back up for a moment to late June of 2013, when Elsipogtog's anti-shale gas movement was being led by Elsipogtog 'War Chief' John Levi.

After 12 anti-shale gas arrests occurred on June 21st, 2013, along Highway 126 in Kent County, the community of Elsipogtog was understandably up in arms. A eight and a half month pregnant woman had been arrested, and an elder had been roughed up enough by RCMP that she was bleeding from the mouth by the time they zip-strapped her and tossed her in their wagon.

In response, on June 23rd, two new players were introduced to the community during a town hall-style meeting in Elsipogtog.

The first was the Mi'kmaq Warriors Society. The second was Tobique First Nation member Wendell Nicholas.

When first brought before the community of Elsipogtog, Nicholas was introduced as a 'UN Independant [sic] Observer'. His rather vaguely defined mission at the time was related to making observations and preparing an upcoming report for a branch of the United Nations.

Claire Stewart Kannigan, working for rabble.ca, identified a mis-print on Nicholas' shirt and started snooping. When Kannigan couldn't find an established connection between Nicholas and the United Nations, and proceeded to out him on rabble, Nicholas promptly re-branded himself - with the assistance of a Chief Sock-led press conference - as the leader of a new 'peacekeeping' team known as the 'Elsipogtog Peacekeepers'.

In the midst of a heated summer of protests, with residents tired of watching their community members being roughed up by the RCMP, the press conference introducing Nicholas was awash with hand shakes, ceremony and praise for Nicholas' new team – even if his role wasn't entirely understood beyond being something of a liaison between Elsipogtog band council and the RCMP.

As it turn out, Nicholas is something of an old hand in the game of liaising between First Nations communities and the Royal Colonial Mounted Police. In fact, he is the brainchild behind the Public Safety Cooperation Protocol (PSCP).

At the very least co-authored by Nicholas in 2004, the PSCP is amongst the modern day memorandums that facilitates sharing information between Indian Act chiefs and the RCMP on Indigenous unrest across Turtle Island. It is, in essence, an agreement between then AFN Chief Phil Fontaine and RCMP Commissioner Zaccardelli – on behalf of the Queen – to spy on and squash Indigenous grassroots unrest before it starts. The terms used in the PSCP are more flowery and bureaucratic than that, but the song remains the same.

Fontaine found himself outed and discredited when he collaborated with the RCMP to quash Indigenous unrest in 2007. His intelligence sharing with the police smacks of the Nicholas-penned PSCP agreement.

As for Nicholas, he hired members of the Elsipogtog community on as peacekeepers, and also hired people from outside of the community.

Suddenly summertime anti-shale gas protests alongside of the highways in Kent County were highly monitored affairs, with people wearing bright orange 'Elsipogtog Peacekeepers' t-shirts wandering around everywhere, some speaking to the police, some taking notes on clipboards.

One of those bright-shirted protest monitors was former US National Guardsman and police officer –and Nicholas' cousin- John Deveau.

At some point, possibly due to failing health or prior commitments, Nicholas stopped being the public face of the Elsipogtog Peacekeepers. Handing over the daily duties to Deveau, Nicholas retired to a behind-the-scenes roll as Elsipogtog's Public Safety Advisor, where he appears to remain.

Deveau, for his part, took over the directorship of the 'peacekeeping' team, and is actively drawing a salary of $60,000 a year as the director of the 'Wabanaki Peacekeepers', essentially version 2.0 of the Elsipogtog outfit, but with better equipment and full-time salaries.

Make no mistake. This is the pleasant name given to the Deveau-run joint AFN/RCMP crisis response team, the team that all summer long was liaising with SWN, the RCMP and Elsipogtog Band Council – all the while presenting itself as a neutral negotiating body to grassroots activists actually on the ground.

October 16th, 2013: John Deveau gets outed by the grassroots.

On Wednesday, October 16th, a crew of grassroots activists from Elsipogtog, as well as members of the Mi'kmaq Warrior Society, broke in on a John Deveau-chaired meeting. Present were numerous members of the RCMP, Elsipogtog 'War Chief' John Levi and several members of the Elsipogtog community.

Elsipogtog elder – and Levi's aunt – Norma Augustine requested that Deveau, as well as bad-faith RCMP negotiator “Dickie” Bernard, be escorted out of Elsipogtog First Nation.

And by now the entire nation knows what took place on Thursday October 17th.

A tale of two Johns. Dividing camps, co-opting a movement

Elsipogtog 'War Chief' John Levi's influence upon the autumn anti-shale gas blockade along Highway 134 was virtually non-existent before October 17th. Levi, a clean and sober sun-dancer, has made much of what he perceived as the Mi'kmaq Warriors less-than-puritan lifestyle, and has privately used this as his reasoning not to attend the blockade.

It is possible that some of these disparaging remarks were fuelled by the general misunderstanding over Levi's role as Elsipogtog's 'War Chief', and where exactly that placed him within the Mi'kmaq Warrior Society.

In effect, it placed him nowhere.

The Mi'kmaq Warrior Society operates as an independent body, with it's own Chief and ranking system.

For his part, Levi was appointed 'War Chief' of Elsipogtog by Noel Augustine, Keptin of District 6 of the Migmaw Grand Council. The Grand Council is a modern day facsimile of a traditional Mi'kmaq government style that does not appear to wield much more than figurehead-style power. Noel Augustine, for example, has issued a variety of eviction notices to SWN Resources Canada, all of which have fallen upon the deaf ears of the Texas-based gas giant.

The more nefarious possibility is that Levi, under the influence of Deveau, could not infiltrate the encampment to any degree of information-gathering success, and thus reverted to a public smear campaign against the Warriors.

In any case, with the violent takedown of the Warrior Society out of the way, Levi is once again a common sight at the quickly rebuilding camp along Highway 134. It has been reported that Levi's main aim at Highway 134, however, is in actively trying to encourage activists to move towards last summer's encampment along Highway 116.

To boot, it has been reported that Levi is in negotiations with RCMP, offering the police that he can move the camp to the out-of-the-way Highway 116 location, in exchange for the police grounding their ever-present spy plane that continues to monitor the encampment along Highway 134.

Despite the destruction of the encampment during the raid of the 17th, the Highway 134 encampment by far remains the more tactical of camps.

SWN's seismic testing lines are slated to be near Highway 11, one of the main arteries of transport in New Brunswick. Snap highway blockades, as occurred on October 19th as a show of defiance in the face of the RCMP's raid, are also a quick and potential technique when the encampment remains on the 134. The 116 camp, arguably safer due to it's proximity to Elsipogtog First Nation, is tucked far out of the way of any action save the falling of leaves.

Sadly, especially considering the very real legal costs now being incurred by the five Warriors who remain without a bail hearing, Levi's camp division has also reached a financial level.

Splitting up donations from well-intention sources, including accepting money from the popular group The Indigo Girls, and then funnelling this money towards other side-projects, rather than towards the immediate legal costs of the Mi'kmaq Warriors, is only the tip of the iceberg.

At the Wilsons' gas station in Elsipogtog, there are now two donation jars side by side. One for donations to the Highway 134 encampment, and one for the Highway 116 encampment. Social media has also begun offering a variety of sources for donations. Most appear to agree that the Warriors' legal defence fund, which has already paid out a retainer to lawyers Lemieux and Menard, is the grassroots choice for donations.

APTN reported Monday that Chief Sock may well give the Elsipogtog band seal of approval, as it relates to anti-shale gas protests, to Levi. What exactly this means is entirely unclear.

With a summer's worth of experience in leading blockade-free anti-shale gas protests on the side of the highway, and with close friend John Deveau there to guide him, Levi may well be the front-runner for the band's endorsement.

The case of the missing van – and the missing Christian Peacemaker Team

At the rebuilding encampment along Highway 134, rumours continue to circulate of pre-October 17th tip-offs to the effect that Thursday would be a bad morning to be there. None of these rumours have been validated, yet, except for one.

On the evening of October 16th, Lorraine Clair, whose van originally had been blocking the entrance to the compound where SWN Resources Canada's seismic testing equipment was being held, left the encampment. She left with her van.

It is unclear whether she had some kind of verbal altercation with members of the Mi'kmaq Warriors Society before she drove off.

In any case, before leaving the encampment, Clair contacted Chris Sabas Shirazi, the senior member of the Christian Peacemaker Team that had been monitoring the Indigenous anti-shale gas activists from Elsipogtog since the summer. Clair asked Shirazi to leave the encampment with her.

Shirazi then asked Elsipogtog elder Kenneth Francis, who was on the scene to give Clair's dead van a battery boost if she should leave. Francis concurred that the CPT team should leave the encampment.

In her attempt to justify fleeing a scene that in hindsight was in desperate need of some kind of independent monitoring to counter the RCMP narrative that is seeing multiple charges being levied at all six incarcerated members of the Warrior Society, Shirazi noted that Clair – after John Levi became a non-factor at the Highway 134 encampment – was her “community partner from Elsipogtog.” Rather than seeking a new “community partner” at a live situation with the very real potential for confrontation to erupt, it appears that the CPT's partnership chain ended with Clair.

So on the night of the 16th, at the request of Clair and Francis, the CPT left the as-yet peaceful encampment on Highway 134.

In her defence, Shirazi did attempt to return to the site in the morning. She also took some great video – amongst many other great videos – of the secondary confrontation with RCMP on the morning of the 17th.

Of the initial conflict, precious little footage exists that is not in RCMP hands.

Clair, for her part, appears to have located a computer on the evening of the 16th. She wrote a short message, all in caps, and posted it on the most visited of social media sites. The message mentioned that the “peaceful” part of the protest was over, and encouraged all supporters to meet her and others at the Highway 116 encampment for a noontime ceremony on the 17th. It cannot be determined what Clair was basing her assessment on; as a first-hand observer I saw no violence break out at the encampment on the night of the 16th to suggest that the peaceful part of the encampment had ended.

Confrontataion at Elsipogtog

SWN rebuffed in New Brunswick back woods

Miles — Mon, 24 Jun 2013 13:42:41 +0000

Local families chase off ATV, security truck hit and run, UN observers arrive

BROWNS YARD, NEW BRUNSWICK – By Sunday, June 23rd, SWN Resource Canada’s highly contested and protested seismic testing along highway 126, in Kent County, New Brunswick, had almost wrapped up.

But the seismic test along the highway is only one of several planned testing lines, and the company’s attempts to begin another line of seismic testing - this time along the back roads of Kent County - was yesterday halted in its tracks by community members living in the vicinity of Browns Yard.

SWN’s seismic testing of the back roads areas of Kent County – conducted with All-Terrain Vehicles known as ‘Bombadiers’, and dynamite charges – is slated to be extensive, with approximately 150kms of testing expected to take place.

Yesterday’s resistance, conducted firstly by local families and the action group known as ‘Upriver Environment Watch’, suggest that SWN’s task in the woods of New Brunswick, where there is local knowledge, deep forests and intense opposition to the testing, will be a tough slog indeed.

At about 2pm, an SWN-contracted truck with a trailer parked itself along highway 490. The truck was abandoned by the SWN-contracted workers, but it was an announcement of their presence to the vigilant community.

A small group of local familities - about 15 people in all, including young children - then gathered. A Bombadier, two geophones, a surveyor's tripod and a SWN antenna, were spotted. Whoever had positioned the equipment had done so on a private piece of land adjacent to the dirt highway.

The driver of the Bombadier approached the surveying equipment, potentially to recover it from the gathering crowd, only to be chased away from the equipment by the crowd. The driver sped south along a dirt road and did not return to the scene.

An SWN-contracted security truck appeared on the scene about ten minutes later. The driver of the truck did not speak to the gathered crowd, but as he was driving away he struck local resident Dave Morang hard enough with his driver’s side mirror to bend the mirror backwards. The driver did not stop.

Morang, injured, requested that an ambulance needed to be called. An Emergency Response team later took Morang to hospital on a spinal board and a stretcher. His condition is currently unknown.

“I can’t believe they didn’t stop,” Morang told the Halifax Media Co-op before the ambulance arrived. “They hit me hard enough with his mirror that it bent it. He would have known that. How many laws can they break?”

About 20 minutes later, RCMP appeared in force, with 26 officers and 14 cars and paddy wagons stationing themselves along the dirt road. The call through social media, however, had beaten them to the punch, and by the time they arrived the gathered crowd had swelled to about 100 non-Indigenous and Indigenous people.

RCMP consulted for about twenty more minutes, before apparently deciding that the best course of action would be to pick up SWN’s antenna and geophones. Photographs indicate that SWN's equipment appears to have been somehow bent and otherwise broken.

With nothing left to do, and with a gathered crowd which now included Chief Aaren Sock of Elsipogtog First Nation, the police packed up and retreated down the dirt road from which they had appeared.

Chief Sock, whose band council late Saturday night issued a Band Council Resolution inviting United Nations Observers to Elsipogtog, was not impressed with SWN’s unwanted incursions into Kent County, or the arrests of his people while in ceremony.

“Message for SWN: You’re not welcome in my territory,” Sock told the Halifax Media Co-op. “Nothing personal.”

After the RCMP departed with SWN’s equipment, those gathered continued to cheer and drum. They then began to slowly trickle back to their respective communities.

It was later discovered that SWN’s abandoned truck - the original sign of their presence - had had its windows smashed, doors dented and bumpers knocked off. As of press time, it is not known how this damage might have happened.

A packed community hall meeting in Elsipogtog, open to the general public, took place later in the evening. The topic of the meeting was not only how to stop SWN, but how to get shale gas out of New Brunswick, and all of the Maritimes. With UN observers now in place, representatives from various Warrior societies from across the Maritimes have been welcomed to Elsipogtog. They were greeted at the meeting with a standing ovation.

SWN ATV driver flees from an angry crowd

Local man Dave Morang was injured by an SWN-contracted security truck, who failed to stop after hitting him

Police removing SWN equipment, which seems to have been bent somehow

RCMP moving SWN equipment

Backroads are tough on trucks

Anti-Fracking Protest in Nova Scotia Draws Hundreds, Shuts Down Highway

Tim McSorley — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 15:04:41 +0000

Protesters want province to halt gas exploration at Nova Scotia's largest lake

AULD'S COVE, NS—Upwards of 200 people, coming from all corners of Nova Scotia, responded to the imminent threat of exploratory oil and gas drilling on the shores of Lake Ainslie, and on September 22 staged an information picket outside the town of Auld's Cove.

Protestors, in this case assisted by the RCMP, created a colourful gauntlet of signs, strings of prayer flags, song and dance, through which passing motorists were directed. The action auspiciously took place on Global Anti-Fracking Day.

Despite the slow-down, motorists responded in an overwhelmingly positive manner to the action; thousands of pamphlets were distributed, and the afternoon resonated with the emphatic staccato of fists pumped to passing car horns. During the third hour of the action, in deference to a Mi'kmaq water ceremony to which all those in attendance were invited, the RCMP fully blockaded the highway—the only roadway on or off the island of Cape Breton—for about 20 minutes.

“I thought this was just going to be a bunch of raggedy-assed Indians,” said Elizabeth Marshall of the Treaty Beneficiary Association, conjuring the memory of Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash. “And you showed us that the raggedy-assed Indians have a bunch of raggedy-assed residents backing us up. We're not going to give up, because we love our ancestors, we love our future generations, and we love our children and grandchildren. And we know that water is sacred. Nothing, nothing can change that. So I'd like [Nova Scotia Premier] Darrell Dexter to tell me how much I should charge for a sacred spirit.”

The focus of the day's action, in a specific sense, was to protect Lake Ainslie, Nova Scotia's largest freshwater lake, from any and all fossil fuel drilling on her shores. Currently, the provincial government has only issued one exploratory well permit to Toronto-based company PetroWorth Resources Inc.; the company has promised no “fracing” [sic] will occur at the drill site.

Most likely the word “fracing” is referring to the technique of hydraulic fracturing, the water-intensive and often environmentally damaging technique of drilling for fossil fuels. “Fracking,” the commonly accepted slang term for the technique, has left a path of chemical pollution, sunken water tables, earthquakes and displaced residents across North America.

It is difficult to take PetroWorth, a company that has made its name fracking Western Canada and Nova Scotia's neighbouring province of New Brunswick, at its word, especially when that word appears to be knowingly misspelled. To Robert Parkins, closest neighbour to the potential drill site on the shores of Lake Ainslie, the question is one of semantics.

“There are three other terms that I've come across—well stimulation, well cleaning and well completion—which all fall under the heading of well alteration, which hydraulic fracturing also falls under,” Parkins told the Halifax Media Co-op. “They all use the same processes and the same chemicals.”

Parkins views the positioning of the site, which has been selected by PetroWorth due to various 19th-century finds of oil and gas in the area, as an attempt by the province and the corporation to force a "worst case" scenario situation. Essentially, claims Parkins, if a drill site can be established on the shores of relatively pristine Lake Ainslie, the province's largest freshwater lake, at the head of the Margaree River Watershed and with some of the last remaining viable Atlantic salmon spawning grounds in the province, then it can be done anywhere.

“It's one of the worst possible locations that you could ever put a drill site. So if they can get away with putting a drill site there, it's going to set a precedent in Nova Scotia that they can place them anywhere,” says Parkins.

It would appear that protest actions, which have included a partial blockade of the same stretch of highway on September 14 and 15, are beginning to have an effect on local Mi'kmaq chiefs.

Initially the chiefs appeared to sign off on PetroWorth's exploratory well permit, after being consulted by the provincial government. But the recent unrest, coupled with the effort of a group of local Mi'kmaq organizers who forced their way into a meeting of the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi'kmaq Chiefs (ANSMC) on September 20, has caused the chiefs to do something of a public about-face.

A press release, issued on September 21, notes that the ANSMC are “in support of the community's concerns on hydraulic fracturing in the Lake Ainslie area of Cape Breton.” The press release, while cause for some degree of hope, does not demand that PetroWorth's exploratory well permit be rescinded. Nor is it certain that the ANSMC would have to ability, without entering into the legal sphere, to literally change its stance mid-stream on the permit issuance.

Wilbert Marshall, chief of Chapel Island, was the only Mi'kmaq chief to attend the September 22 action. Judging from his response and the escalating public display of Mi'kmaq disapproval, it would appear that the ANSMC may soon be faced with that exact dilemma.

“From day one, we were totally against it,” Marshall told the Halifax Media Co-op. “It's just fighting against the government and all that, it's just kind of back door deals, and we're trying our best to fight it. I remember them coming down the first time, we were totally against it. We are totally against [all oil and gas exploration on Lake Ainslie]. We have to be, because it's going to ruin the water. It's just kind of hard to fight these people. They're always taking the back door, like we said. If it's not one thing, it's the other. It's kind of hard to keep track, but we've got the people behind us, so hopefully we'll fight it at the end of it. We're not going to give up.”

Ginny Marshall, one of the main forces behind the recent Mi'kmaq actions against the potential drill site, appeared willing to ensure that the chiefs don't “give up.”

“[The chiefs] don't have the last say,” said Ginny Marshall. “They work for us, so they better behave.”

Despite the presence of concerned citizens from all walks of life, noticeably absent from the day's action was the mainstream media.

“I'm really kind of disappointed that the mainstream media is not here,” said Emmett Peters, local sweat lodge keeper. “We had, at the peak, probably over 200 people here. And there's nobody to show the rest of Nova Scotia that there's a lot of support for protecting the water. We told them, so they know. They know we're having an event, they just chose to stay away.”

“The one thing I notice that is not standing here with us is the mainstream media,” said Parkins to the gathered crowd. “Why? Because they don't want people to know that there are over 200 of us protesting the fracking that's about to go on in Cape Breton. They want to keep people in the dark. Ladies and gentlemen, we are tired of being mushrooms. No longer can they feed us horse shit and keep us in the dark...This is enough and this is what we're here for today. We have to tell them, even though they say that there is no fracking going on in Lake Ainslie, we know that there's well stimulation, well completion and well cleaning. And we all know it's the same thing...So ladies and gentlemen, from today on when anybody says to you that there is no fracking in Lake Ainslie, you say, 'Of course there isn't, because we're not going to let it happen.'”

It would appear that perhaps PetroWorth, and the provincial NDP government, may well have bitten off more than they can chew in attempting to drill for oil and gas in Cape Breton. Since being taken to court earlier in the year, albeit unsuccessfully, by the Margaree Environmental Association, PetroWorth has seen its stock value nosedive from a November 2011 high of eight cents per share down to a current value as of press time of two cents per share. Resistance to oil and gas drilling in Cape Breton, if the weekend's demonstration are any indication, is riding a surge of energy, and organizers are already talking of following Quebec's recent provincial moratorium on fracking.

“Whatever it takes,” Ginny Marshall told the Halifax Media Co-op. “I'll die. And that's very, very—that's the wrong thing to say to stop an oil company. But if my children are going to get a benefit out of it, then I'm willing to put my life on the line in order to protect them. I'm a mother bear. It's born in me, and I will be doing what I have to do in order to get this done.”

Miles Howe is an editor with The Dominion and a member of the Halifax Media Co-op, where this article was originally published.

Lake Ainslie Fracking II

Lake Ainslie Fracking

What Happens in Newfoundland and Labrador, Stays in Newfoundland and Labrador

Sandra — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 13:15:20 +0000

Province passes amendment that limits access to information and protects the privacy of its goverment

HALIFAX—Despite a four-day, record-breaking, filibuster in mid-June, the provincial Conservative party of Newfoundland and Labrador passed a bill that will radically reduce public access to government information in the province. Bill 29 has drawn widespread criticism from legal experts, opposition politicians and working journalists alike, who have called the bill regressive and draconian.

“It's more of a piece of legislation that sets rules on how not to release things,” Russell Wangersky, an editor and columnist with The Telegram in St. John's, told The Dominion.

The amendment to the province’s Access To Information and Protection of Privacy Act (ATIPPA) has the potential to drastically reduce the need of the Newfoundland government to respond to, well, anything, really.

Requests that Cabinet determines are “vexatious, frivolous [or] trivial” can now be disregarded. The definition of "Cabinet confidences” has also been expanded to include documents that have been prepared for Cabinet, but which Cabinet doesn't need to have ever seen or used.

Bill 29 took its cue from a review of the ATIPPA, released in January of 2011, undertaken by career NL bureaucrat John R. Cummings, Q.C. Among other high-ranking governmental positions, Cummings has been Newfoundland's Deputy Minister of Justice, Deputy Attorney General and Secretary to the Cabinet. The new law subsequently implemented 16 of the review's 33 recommendations.

Cummings' review was supposed to rely heavily on a public consultation process, but Wangersky sees it differently.

“The review [to] our Access to Information Privacy Act...was overseen by a former civil servant who had a number of years experience turning down Access to Information requests,” says Wangersky. “[Cummings] heard primarily from civil servants and government departments and came up with modifications to the Act that substantially restrict the release of documents and put more and more of a control over what can be released into the hands of Cabinet.”

What won't be released under Bill 29 is substantial and subjective: No definition of vexatious, frivolous or trivial were provided in the amendment. Newfoundland and Labrador Minister of Services Paul Davis justified the addition of these terms into the Act by claiming that “countless” requests for information were swamping the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation subsequently weakened this argument when they revealed that the Information and Privacy Commissioner received an average of 11 requests per week from across the province.

Sections 24 and 27 of the bill are of special concern and could be potentially problematic, especially when considered in a political climate where the lines between commercial and political interests are becoming increasingly blurred. Section 24 relates to the prerogative of the 'public body,' in this case the Privacy Commissioner, to potentially refuse to disclose the release of any information that could relate to economic, technical or scientific information that is determined to have monetary value. Within this lies the potential to refuse disclosure of information related to public-private partnerships.

Section 27 applies to the disclosure of information that would impact business interests of a third-party (like labour relations or trade secrets). In these cases that the public body has the duty to refuse to disclose. In the cases applicable to section 24, the public body may also choose to do so.

When coupled with the new, wide-sweeping, re-definition of Cabinet confidences, suddenly the avenues towards accessing information stand to become quite narrow indeed.

Hugo Rodrigues, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, sees this as a step away from governmental transparency.

“When you're creating new classes of information for documents and briefings prepared for Cabinet that extend to not just what hit the Cabinet table, but to what is prepared for Cabinet but is never actually considered by Cabinet, then you're excluding that entire class of information from ever being accessible,” Rodrigues told The Dominion. “The intent there is obviously to keep information from ever reaching the public eye.”

To Gerry Rogers, Member of the Newfoundland and Labrador House of Assembly for St. John's Centre and NDP Justice Critic, there's more than just control for the sake of control behind the Conservative government's rushing through of Bill 29 just before parliament took its summer break.

“We asked a number of times during the filibuster: 'Why?'” Rogers told The Dominion. “We had a very good Act as it stood. And particularly during this time when we have huge decisions to make—why they would do this? And there was no answer.”

Rogers suspects, however, that the potential of the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric facility and the interests of numerous companies—including Alderon Iron Ore Corp—the Quebec-based mining company looking to develop thousands of hectares in Labrador, loomed large in the Conservatives' decision to rush through Bill 29.

On March 28th, 2012, Alderon provided former provincial Progressive Conservative Premier Danny Williams with a stock option for 1,125,000 shares—the same day that Alderon appointed Williams to its Board of Directors. Representatives from Alderon have argued publicly for Muskrat Falls, and Williams, now at least officially out of the political sphere since 2010, has gone so far as to publicly chastise the Public Utilities Board (the arm's length body responsible for sifting through the data around—and ultimately approving—Muskrat Falls) for requesting more data from the provincial government and more time to complete it's review.

That current Premier Kathy Dunderdale and the current provincial Conservative government, responsible for passing Bill 29, rode into another majority in 2011 on the coattails of Williams' local popularity, is an agreed upon truth among political pundits.

The interests of Altius Minerals Corporation, the Newfoundland-based company, add more shades of grey to a picture whose lines stand to become increasingly difficult to discern under Bill 29.

Altius is one of several companies whose proposals concerning the Lower Churchill Project—of which Muskrat Falls is but a part–was selected by the Williams government in 2005 for "more substantive evaluation and discussion.”

Altius Investments Holdings owns 32,285,006 common shares in Alderon, while Altius Minerals Corporation, under the name 2260761 Ontario Inc, owns 584,000 common shares in Alderon. Alderon, whose need for a source of power is one of the few missing puzzle pieces between themselves and Labrador mineral development riches, would arguably be one of Altius'–and Muskrat Falls'-main clients. With Danny Williams on the Alderon board, things begin to become complex.

Muskrat Falls, which has not yet begun construction, has a 2010 estimated cost of $6.2 billion and an estimated generating capacity of 824 megawatts. It is publicly being touted by the governments of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia as a key component towards shifting their respective grids to "renewable” energy.

The scope of the proposed project is vast and involves linking the dam from the Lower Churchill River in Labrador–via undersea cable–to Newfoundland. It will then be linked to Nova Scotia via another undersea cable and will feed the Nova Scotia grid approximately 170 megawatts. It is a massive undertaking and partners Nalcor Energy—Newfoundland and Labrador's Crown corporation—with Emera Inc, Nova Scotia's private monopoly energy provider.

While 13 contracts have been signed on the deal and clear cutting has begun near the proposed site, Muskrat Falls is awaiting federal loan guarantees to begin construction.

“Muskrat Falls...is perhaps the biggest project this province has ever undertaken aside from whether or not to join Confederation,” says Rogers. “It will be very expensive. It may have a number of players. And this government ran on a platform of accountability and greater transparency. This amendment (Bill 29) came out of the blue and it's so contrary to the platform that they ran on. The other thing is that there's huge mining and resource projects in Labrador. And there's a lot of decisions that will have to be made in that area.”

Brad Cabana, who maintains the blog rocksolidpolitics.blogspot.ca, was the first to publicly write about the potentially troublesome links between the current provincial government, Williams, mining interests, financing and Bill 29. Cabana is currently in a suit/counter-suit with Danny Williams and Alderon, but maintains that the public in Newfoundland and Labrador, and Nova Scotia, are being fleeced if they think that Muskrat Falls is in any way about them or so-called "green” energy.

“There's upwards of 13 mining developments going on in Labrador right now. And even Muskrat Falls couldn't possibly [power] all of that,” Cabana told The Dominion. “It's illogical...it makes no business sense to send power to Nova Scotia, to Emera. I propose that [former PM Danny] Williams used that strategy to hook in [federal MP] Peter McKay and company to try and get [federal] loan guarantees for Muskrat Falls...[Williams] has been trying to get the feds in and get a loan guarantee since the 2006 [provincial] election.

"I think the only way they could do it was to hook up with Emera and get that power to Nova Scotia, and I don't think it's going to happen. I think Williams is just using it as a ruse to get a loan guarantee and then they're going to find a way to get out of it. It just doesn't make any sense on any level. It doesn't send enough megawatts to earn any money for Newfoundland – 400-500 megawatts is nothing in the market. I don't even know if it replaces one coal plant down in Nova Scotia.”

Whether or not Muskrat Falls is meant to serve the potentially lucrative Labrador mines, or is truly the "renewable” energy source that the Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia populace are being told it will be, will become increasingly difficult to determine under Bill 29. It essentially ensures that the public will have to take the provincial government of Newfoundland, and corporate spokespeople, at face value, and guarantees that whatever happens in Newfoundland and Labrador, stays in Newfoundland and Labrador.

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

NL under lock and key

Rebuilding the Wabanaki Confederacy

Miles — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 10:52:09 +0000

Non-Indigenous participate in Confederacy Gathering for first time in centuries

ST MARY'S FIRST NATION, UNCEDED WABANAKI TERRITORY (NB)—For the first time in several hundred years, non-Indigenous peoples were invited to participate in the last two days of the week-long Wabanaki Confederacy Gathering this September 1 and 2.

The Wabanaki (translated roughly as "People of the First Light") Confederacy's current incarnation comprises five principal nations—the Mik'maq, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Abenaki and Penobscot—and stretches from the colonial borders of Newfoundland in the North, mid-Maine in the South, and parts of Quebec in the West.

At its zenith, the Confederacy consisted of close to 50 nations, went South to the mid-Carolinas, included most of the interior of the United States, and reached into Ontario.

Approximately 150 people attended the final two days of the almost week-long meeting, held on the shores of the Wulustuk (Staint John) river.

The open portion of the gathering, from the perspective of a non-Indigenous participant, can perhaps be described as a meeting between Indigenous and non-Indigenous environmental activists, placed into a paradigm in which environmental activism is no longer a lifestyle choice, or "something one does."

Invitation to participate in ceremony, and patient explanation on the part of the Indigenous hosts, brought about the notion of inter-connection between self and the natural world—so that the notion of 'activism' was simply replaced by the reality of "being."

"When we talk about Wabanaki people, we're also talking about Wabanaki people being the land, being the trees, being the animals, because in that cultural perspective, we're all related," says gkisedtanamoogk, the Gathering's fire keeper. "We're everything. We're not just a species standing apart from everything else."

The notion of special inter-dependence was also co-joined with the necessity of placing oneself into an historical narrative that is not static, but developing.

Portions of sacred bundles, which included ancient Wampum belts—themselves a recorded, as well as symbolic, history in bead work—and the box gifted from the French to the original Wabanaki Confederacy in 1701 upon their acceptance to participate in the Confederacy were brought out and explained, and allowed those in attendance to see themselves as part of something continuous, historic and challenging.

"Within the Wabanaki territory we're looking for allies that are going to stand against the total annihilation of our land and water and air," says jeaba-weay-quay (roughly translated from Obijway to 'The woman whose voice pierces'). "We're looking for allies who will help us to put our nation back together and put it back in order. And we're asking our allies to help us empower that. And in the process of doing that, they will be decolonizing us and they will be decolonizing themselves."

The notion of a fluid historical narrative also extends to the treaties that exist between the Wabanaki and those who have subsequently colonized their territories. The treaties that do exist are of peace and friendship, not of subservience of self and ceding of land.

The Wabanaki thus provide not only a paradigm alternative on the metaphysical sphere, but also a legal umbrella under which the real concerns to the natural environment, and thus all of us, can find sanctuary and process.

Many in attendance over the two-day period spoke of the environmental perils that are now at the doorsteps of their respective Maritime-area backyards.

To observe effort and concern on any number of particular environmental issues come together and begin to form a cohesive whole, under the watch and fostering of the Wabanaki, was as if watching pieces of a puzzle come together in an already-existent frame.

To be invited into this process, as partners with equal concern, has the potential to be extremely empowering on many fronts.

"The Wabanaki are in a far better position to defend the land," says gkisedtanamoogk. "No land was ever ceded, and that's acknowledged by both the province and the federal government. So on the basis of the treaties, what we're suggesting is that you and I have a common responsibility to the land under those treaties.

"You and I, we also have a common responsibility to each other, as holder and keepers of those treaties. Those treaties are as important to Wabanaki people as they ought to be important to you. Those are your treaties too. And under those treaties we are also invoking on international protocol, so we have a social potential of being responsible to each other's needs, but in an entirely different context. And that presents immense implications, both legal implications as well as social implications and economic implications that are more just."

Harry LaPorte, grand chief of the Maliseet First Nation, agrees.

"We're going to rebuild the Wabanaki Confederacy," says LaPorte. "We also invited some non-Natives...to come and be with us and to help us build an alliance, so that when we...come into conflict with the government and some of their decisions and policies...to have them stand beside us and to let their government know that it's not only Native people who are worried about the water, the land, the air. But it's also people from their nation that are concerned."

While some at the Gathering were eager for quick pacts and commitments, due in no small part to the urgency of the environmental issues—such as 'fracking'—that are affecting the area, this was to be sure among the first steps.

Gaps in culture, in no way limited to the most obvious identifiers of language and religion, are real, and will require concerted effort and patience to overcome. Judging by those in attendance however, the willingness to make this alliance work is both urgent and real, not only in terms of ideas shared, but also willingness to participate in ceremonies not necessarily completely understood, but partaken of in a spirit of peace and friendship.

As for the next steps of this alliance, that will be up to the grandmothers.

"The grandmothers are going to be meeting in the meantime to make sure that we keep cohesion of this alliance together and to provide that communication, and to put that wise, white hair together to sit down and talk about what needs to be done," says jeaba-weay-quay. "That's who's going to point the way...the women. The grandmothers. And then we're going to turn around and tell the men 'This is what we need to do. This is what we want. So we need you to help us.'"

"This is a preliminary investigation of what that relationship looks like," says gkisedtanamoogk. "What are the expectations? What are the long-term implications? What are some of the things we can do in the immediate? I'm really excited about this. I sense that something of this magnitude is a paradigm shift of global proportions."

This article was originally published on the Halifax Media Co-op. Miles Howe is the Halifax-based editor of The Dominion and is a contributing member of the Halifax Media Co-op.

gkisedtanamoogk

The Ground Beneath Our Feet

Miles — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 14:24:14 +0000

Despite missing grave markers, lack of map, Dartmouth cemetery is not for the dogs

DARTMOUTH, NS—A small party stands at the northwest corner of St. Paul's cemetery, staring pensively at what appears to be nothing but a grassy knoll.

We are hemmed in by the thick foliage of Giant Knotweed (polygonum sacchalinese) that surrounds the burial ground on three sides. Behind us lean a smattering of aging tombstones from Catholic families.

Here though, 100 feet away in the field next to the grave markers, there is only the whisper-silent undulation of clean-cropped, rolling grass.

A casual observer would likely not conclude that this field is part of the cemetery. But this is what Don Awalt has come today to explain.

“Lewis Benjamin Paul, Mi'kmaw Grand Chief, was buried almost right here,” says Awalt, an environmental planner with a grandfather buried somewhere in St. Paul's cemetery. “In the late 1970s, there used to be a tripod of stones here, marking his grave,” he says.

Bonnie Murphy, cemetery administrator for the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM), looks on, clutching a rolled-up surveyor's map of St. Paul's. We spread the map, but it gives no hint of Paul's final resting place. Paul, the great leader, upon seeing his people driven to starvation by British colonization, famously wrote to Queen Victoria in 1841:

“I have seen upwards of a thousand Moons. When I was young I had plenty, now I am old, poor and sickly too. My people are poor. No Hunting Grounds, No Beaver, No Otter, No Nothing. Indians poor, poor forever, No Store, No Chest, No Clothes. All these woods once ours. Our Fathers possessed them all. Now we cannot cut a Tree to warm our Wigwam in Winter unless the White Man please.”

Indeed, most of Murphy's map is nothing but blank, white space hemmed in by surveyors’ lines. There are several rows of numbered plots outlined on the map, but no more than two dozen are even named.

Murphy can't even be sure whether the nameless plots contain bodies or not.

“We've only taken it over since amalgamation [of Halifax and surrounding areas to create the HRM], and our records are very scarce,” says Murphy. “We're digging [for information] ourselves. We've contacted St. Paul's to see what we can get. We're trying to talk to people who've maintained it prior and everything's scarce.”

The wind picks up, and the map begins to buckle and crease. The group cannot determine which way is north on the map, and it is decided that an HRM survey team will be contacted to re-determine the boundaries of the cemetery.

Awalt leads the group over to a willow tree.

“This is where Napwisin We'jitu is buried, and there used to be a marker somewhere in the grass,” says Awalt. The group peers amidst the overgrowth.

“He was among the top Mik'maq warriors of all time.”

Despite HRM Parks and Open Spaces’ lack of knowledge, there is no question that this site has been a Mi’kmaq burial ground, as well as a Catholic cemetery, for a long time. It has also changed hands, and fallen into states of neglect, several times in recent history.

John Martin's The Story of Dartmouth notes that the cemetery first opened in 1835, and consecrated in 1845. Awalt says that Mi'kmaq were using the land as a burial ground long before that, and notes that the oral tradition suggests Father Thury, one of the famous French “Warrior Priests,” consecrated the land in the late seventeenth century.

A marble tablet, which still stands at St. Paul’s, was erected in Dartmouth in 1962. The tablet notes that “Hundreds of Indians and Two of Their Chiefs” are buried there—though it also says that, despite an ever-increasing number of Catholic dead in the 1800s, the cemetery was only used until 1865. (Awalt says this applies to “white” burials only, and that Mi'kmaq continued to use the area after this.)

The 1962 monument unveiling also saw an extensive clean-up of the property. A Dartmouth Free Press article notes that “20 truck loads of rubbish were carted away” before Father Michael Laba, of St. Paul's Parish, had the area fenced in.

According to Kenneth Redmond, boyscout leader at St. Paul's parish at the time, Father Laba also undertook an extensive mapping of the area to determine exactly where the “Hundreds of Indians and Two of Their Chiefs” were buried.

“Father Laba asked me to...survey St. Paul's cemetery, like record where the stones were; show where Mi'kmaw people were,” says Redmond. “And so I did that and gave him a plan. Since that time Father Laba has died, and I lost all my belongings, including [the cemetery map] in a house fire.”

That map, of which there is perhaps one surviving copy, is currently in absentia.

“We stood [the grave markers] where they were laying,” says Redmond. “They were a little bit scattered but you could see a pattern to it.”

In 1967, a re-development plan was undertaken to see St. Paul's become an active burial ground once again. But by the late 1970s, the place had become a “jungle.” Cora Greenway, writing in the summer 1980 edition of Canadian Collector, notes that when she walked the area in 1978 she found “no trace” of the shale slabs.

“The place was in a mess,” writes Greenway. “The grass was knee-high, half the stones toppled over and the walking most treacherous due to the rocky terrain.”

In 1979, as part of a neighbourhood improvement program, the City of Dartmouth remodelled the cemetery into its current incarnation. Benches were added, stones were again righted, and a paved walk was laid that connected urban development above the cemetery to Alderney Drive. It became something of a park, with a cemetery in the middle.

In 1994, with space for the deceased again at a premium in Dartmouth, the city cast an eye towards re-developing St. Paul's and expanding the cemetery onto the grassy field next to the tombstones. But a strong campaign, led by then Mi'kmaw Grand Chief Ben Syliboy, halted the expansion plans. A 1994 Daily News article notes that estimates as to the number of Mi'kmaq buried there ranged “into the thousands.”

There are now clear signs that people have been sleeping, drinking and defecating in the thick recesses of the knotweed. The shale markers are long gone, and the paved path between the tombstones and the grass, the same area where Redmond remembers righting the fallen grave markers, has become a popular dog-walking thoroughfare.

Mi'kmaw tradition speaks to allowing a burial site to reconstitute itself with native species, but the knotweed is an introduced, invasive species, and Awalt wants it removed. He also wants the HRM to ensure cemetery bylaws, which include letting no dog walk on grave sites, are enforced over the entire area. (Domestic animals defecating on graves is one of those taboos that transcends cultural boundaries.)

As we stand, a member of [the] Mi'kmaw Warriors Society, one of whose mandates includes protecting the burial places of Mi'kmaq, approaches the group. In a clear voice he promises to return to the cemetery with his Warriors, armed if need be, if the entire area is not given the same jurisdiction as any cemetery in the HRM; meaning no dogs, and no sleeping, partying, or defecating on graves, marked or not.

In 1990, a significant percentage of Warriors at Kanesatake were Mi'kmaq, and the man's words bring a stunned hush to the group.

Two weeks later, St. Paul's cemetery is undergoing another facelift.

Bonnie Murphy's survey team has put down preliminary markers. Rebar stakes, driven into the ground and spray-painted neon orange, indicate that Lewis Paul's grassy knoll, and more, is indeed now considered part of the cemetery. Knotweed is being attacked by a crew of city workers with a small backhoe.

“Since our meeting, we have had the surveyors…lay out the boundaries on the site,” says Brian Phalen, of HRM Parks and Open Spaces. “The preliminary work does show that that area that we were in, up by the steps, is certainly included in the cemetery site...We'll be posting the 'No Dogs Permitted Under The Cemetery Bylaws' signs in that section of the property.

“Certainly there are portions of that property that aren't laid out as grave sites, per se...But certainly we do know and recognize that being a traditional burial site, there were many Mi'kmaw burial sites that wouldn't be marked.”

As for the shale slab grave markers and Father Laba's corresponding map, it remains to be seen if they will ever be found. It may well be a return to tradition—in which Mi'kmaw graves went unmarked—by necessity.

"The important thing here is that a pre-contact burial ground is recognized for what it is," says Awalt. "That the grandfathers and grandmothers buried there finally receive the dignity and respect deserved...and this applies to non-natives buried there as well."

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

Marker at St. Paul's Cemetery

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

Island Hopping With Emera

Miles — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 09:58:00 +0000

Barbados is the latest Caribbean island to feel the Emera squeeze

HALIFAX—On a small island north of Venezuela, 4,500 kilometres from Halifax, Barbados Light and Power (BLP) recently issued a news release. Energy use on the Caribbean island has hit a low not seen since 1974.

“Some people are now simply just turning off all the electricity in their homes, especially when they're not home,” says Carson Cardogan, a Barbadian ratepayer. “They're pulling out everything. Every plug. Including the fridge. People are living virtually in the dark, in order to not pay Barbados Light and Power the hefty electricity bills.”

While the average Canadian might applaud such a downward shift in power consumption, this is not a question of Barbadians “going green” by choice. It is the work of Nova Scotia’s Emera, BLP's new owner.

Emera, the Nova Scotia-based company, moved fast onto the scene in Barbados, purchasing a 38 per cent share in the largely nationally-owned BLP in May 2010, and another 41 per cent in January 2011. When shares in BLP were trading at $12 on the Barbados stock market, Emera offered BLP shareholders $25 per share—an offer they could not refuse. A few dissenting voices, on call-in programs and social media panels, urged caution against selling off the national power company to a foreign interest, but the deal went through unencumbered.

Later, an investigation by the Fair Trade Commission (FTC), Barbados' regulatory body, suggested that BLP shares were devastatingly undervalued, and should have been priced in the $40 to $50 range.

Writers at “Barbados Underground”, one of the nations' most read independent media sites, suspected something was amiss with the deal. The FTC, as regulator of BLP's power rates prior to the sale to Emera, would have been well-informed of BLP's assets and net worth. To emerge post-sale saying that Emera had purchased a more valuable company than they thought they had is suspicious indeed.

This isn't Emera's first Caribbean purchase. The company already has a controlling interest in the Grand Bahamas Power Company, the monopoly service provider to about 20,000 customers on the island of Grand Bahama. Purchased in 2009, its relationships on the island of Grand Bahamas have been anything but easy. Operation Justice Bahamas (OJB), a grassroots organization, has gathered over 5,000 signatures from disgruntled customers who have cried foul over skyrocketing power bills.

OJB's actions forced the Bahamian government into an ongoing investigation into Emera's business practices, including hundreds of allegations of overpricing, “guess-timation,” and destructive power surges. Sarah MacDonald, Emera's chief officer in the Caribbean, suggested that difficulties in meter-reading were related to the fact that over 8,000 Bahamians did not have a postal address, an allegation that OJB dismisses as a “slap in the face.”

OJB is hoping the governmental investigation is the first step towards a class-action lawsuit against Emera.

“They are, in my words, driving the people into poverty. And they are causing people to lose business,” says Troy Garvey of OJB.

Emera also owns a 19 per cent equity interest in St. Lucia Electricity Services Limited (LUCELEC). While Emera’s involvement in St. Lucia seems to be developing at a slow pace, the situation on Barbados is unraveling quickly.

In Barbados, public allegations of exorbitant power bills, based on incomprehensible calculations, are running rampant, and representatives from industry agree. Sir David Seale, chairman of RL Seale & Company, one of Barbados's largest rum bottlers, has publicly railed against Emera, calling the current situation “unacceptable for industry.” Seale has had to divert company money towards developing new energy infrastructure, and has shifted to diesel generators in an effort to get off the Barbadian grid.

Meanwhile, the government, in an attempt to keep electrical power flowing into some of the more impoverished homes in Barbados, instituted a plan in October 2011, known as Energy Cost Mitigation Assistance (ECMA). The ECMA is a one-off grant of $5 million for welfare-recipient Barbadians, which was created to offset the global increase in fuel costs that are supposedly responsible for BLP's steady rise in power bills.

Before Emera purchased BLP, there was no apparent need for an emergency-style government fund for the nation's poorest to pay their power bills.

Emera’s electricity rate increases, be it in Nova Scotia, on Grand Bahamas or in the Barbados, are all approved by a “third-party” regulatory body, and are thus granted some veneer of legitimacy. In Barbados, that regulatory body is the Free Trade Commission (FTC). In Nova Scotia, the regulatory body is the Utility and Review Board (UARB).

In Barbados, Malcolm Gibbs-Taitt, founder and director general of Barbados Consumer Research Organization, has brought into question the link between the FTC and the Barbados Securities Commission, the body meant to regulate the Barbados Stock Exchange. Both are chaired by Sir Neville Nicholls. The term “regulatory capture,” by which a regulatory agency meant to serve the common good is instead co-opted by private interests, applies here: one individual is overseeing BLP's sale, and also overseeing BLP's requests for rate increases (read: profit).

“My problem with the Fair Trade Commission is that it does not seem to have the ability to get the proper information before it,” says Gibbs-Taitt, “[or] to share that information with those that are involved in the process, to the extent that we can be reasonably assured that what it is doing in the names of the people, the consumers, [is something where] you could say, 'This is a job well done.'”

A similar instance of regulatory capture is at play in Nova Scotia.

Brennan Voegel, former Energy Coordinator for the Ecology Action Centre, notes that Peter Gurnham, largely responsible for the UARB's decisions on NSPI's rate increase requests, was formerly a lawyer in the service of NSPI.

“The major problem is that [NSPI] is guaranteed a rate of return...which allows them to usurp more money out of Nova Scotians,” says Voegel. “They have to make money, but there's very few industries in the world today that still enjoy that enshrined right to profit. And if it were an open market, like it should be, then electricity provided at the lowest cost, with the greatest degree of efficiency, would be the product that people would be choosing.”

The relationship between the UARB, the Nova Scotian government, and NSPI, which Voegel calls “the golden triangle,” has worked well for Emera's top brass. Executive salaries and bonuses have never been higher, with CEO Chris Huskilson taking home over $3 million in 2011. A new corporate head office on the waterfront in Halifax, a structure currently under construction, is slated to cost between $30 million and $40 million.

Executive salaries and bonuses aside, Emera's new-found role as Caribbean power boss begs the question: What exactly is afoot in the islands? Is this a case of classic Canadian snowbird syndrome? Or is a grander scheme in the works?

All of Emera's Caribbean purchases produce the vast majority of their power by burning oil or diesel —the weakest link in Emera's control of the situation. The company is not in the oil refinery or shipping business, and so is beholden to global market trends. Emera, however, is in the gas pipe building business, and already wholly owns Brunswick Pipeline, a 30-inch, 145-kilometre natural gas pipeline in New Brunswick.

Plans for an inter-Caribbean gas pipeline, with gas sourced from Tobago, have been brewing for several years. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez initially encouraged a pan-Caribbean oil pipeline, to run oil from Venezuela, but the Tobago bid for a natural gas pipeline appears to have won out in the minds of investors.

At the time of writing, there was a flurry of activity in the Tobago project: international investors were found after several years of relative dormancy. The company with the lead in the project, Eastern Caribbean Gas Pipeline Company, shares at least one member of its board of directors, Dr. Trevor Byer, with LUCELEC’s board.

If Emera were to involve itself heavily with the construction of an inter-island gas pipeline, it would eliminate one more middleman—the distributor—from its electricity monopoly in at least two Caribbean nations. Whether this gas pipeline materializes and, more importantly, what its impact will be for Emera's Caribbean clients, remain to be seen.

“People are crying out every day” because of the skyrocketing power bills in the Barbados, says Carson Cardogan. “They're writing letters to the newspapers and the call-in programs. And it's having a very deleterious effect on the lives of many Barbadians.”

For the moment, Bahamians and Barbadians, and Nova Scotians, find themselves beholden to Emera's bottom line, a situation that to some—such as the pulp mill owned by Abitibi, and the one formerly owned by NewPage, and their hundreds of out-of-work employees—has already become untenable. Nova Scotians certainly remember that two of NSPI's largest industrial clients, prior to massive downsizing and bailouts in the case of Abitibi, and bankruptcy in the case of Newpage, made very public mention of the fact that escalating power bills were driving them to ruin.

While critics of the two companies suggest mismanagement as the more likely cause of their dire straights, it does beg the question, in Nova Scotia and beyond: Is Emera simply bad for business?

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

This article was originally published by the Halifax Media Co-op.

Bridgetown, Barbados

Stern Warning

Tim McSorley — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 10:55:29 +0000

Nova Scotia environmentalists say government must revise lease of public lands to private corporations

HALIFAX—“In 1961 we leveraged a tremendous amount of Crown Land to get a company to come to Nova Scotia,” says Matt Miller, Forestry Program Coordinator at the Ecology Action Centre (EAC) in Halifax. “The focus was only on jobs and wood supply, and we gave them complete and utter control of 40 per cent of the Crown Land in the province, one in nine acres.”

The company in question, Finland-based Stora Enso, has been gone from Nova Scotia for five years, though, having sold its key asset, the Point Tupper pulp and paper mill near Port Hawkesbury, in Cape Breton, to Ohio-based Newpage in 2007. At the time, Newpage inherited the Crown Land along with the mill purchase. Amidst slumping sales and escalating power bills, the mill went into receivership in 2011.

Enter Vancouver-based Stern Partners. Headed by multimillionaire paper mogul Ron Stern, the company is the buyer of choice for the shuttered mill. Details of the purchase are yet to emerge, but Stern has let it be known that the workforce, which at the time of Newpage's demise stood at about 600, stands to be halved. Stern will enter into negotiations with the province to hammer out the purchase, and one of the key items on the table will be the 1961 Crown Land lease, which actually expired in 2011. Many independent woodlot owners, including Miller (who is also an award-winning independent woodlot owner), would like to see the deal revisited in order to better reflect 2012 conditions.

“We are expecting this government to negotiate a new agreement that doesn't sell the whole farm,” says Miller. “That means that one company doesn't have full control over [the crown land].” It would also mean that the company takes on more responsibilities than simply managing wood supplies and creating jobs, he says. Rather, the company would need to uphold the spirit of the Natural Resources Strategy by managing Crown lands to the highest standards possible, and consulting the public on how the land is managed, argues Miller.

Phase 1 of the Natural Resource Strategy (NRS), in 2009, was the last example of public consultation, and the only one ever undertaken by the Dexter government. Many blame this recoil from a decades-old tradition of government-public interaction on the fact that when the Nova Scotia public spoke up—which they did in the thousands in the case of the NRS—they demanded something the Dexter government didn't want to hear: stewardship and accountability of the province's forests, and public involvement in the process. If there were a time to make amends with the original intent of the NRS, Dexter might seize the day and revisit the land lease that now needs their attention.

“The logic of ever-shrinking workforce, ever-expanding, ever-increasing harvesting [suggests that] the government should tear up that old lease, and develop one that's modern and based on current conditions,” including the public's expectations that Crown Land should be managed to the highest level, says Miller's co-worker, EAC Wilderness Coordinator Ray Plourde. “We should not have to compensate any new owner that's going to scoop up that mill for pennies on the dollar in a bankruptcy fire sale.”

Fire sale aside, the provincial government has committed to earmarking 12 per cent of Nova Scotia land, by 2015, as protected areas, under the provincial Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act of 2007. This puts the government in a difficult position: if the lease is not revised, the push to protect 12 per cent of the land could end up in direct conflict with Stern's stake, meaning the government would need to compensate the company for the property it would lose. Miller and Plourde agree that protected areas need to be exempted from the land lease before the deal with Stern is finalized.

As well, with the current state of Nova Scotia's “big three” pulp mills, one being in receivership (Newpage), one being responsible for one of Canada's worst environmental disasters (Northern Pulp and Boat Harbour), and one having just seen workers forced to give up many concessions, while CEOs walked away with 8 million in payoffs and the company given tens of millions in taxpayer bailout money (Bowater), it may well be time to give the smaller players in the forestry business a chance at bidding for Crown Land, according to Miller.

“There's already some existing manufacturing infrastructure in Eastern Nova Scotia. There's a series of value-added hardwood mills,” he says. “They've traditionally been shut out of any allocation of wood from Crown Land. This is a perfect opportunity for them to have access to that wood.”

“Smaller lease arrangements could be made for those local industry players that already exist,” says Plourde. “Hardwood mills that are making things like fine flooring, door and wall moldings, wainscoting, trim, and so on and so forth. They employ more people per unit of wood harvested, and they make a value-added product, so it's economically much better for the province. It would also allow for new enterprises to emerge, because they'd have some wood to access.”

Dexter actions have made it clear that the "big three" won't fail. The future of forestry in Nova Scotia suggests that now is the time to set the conditions for "small successes" that don't involve either extreme environmental degradation or a steady, continuous, flow of taxpayer bailouts.

Miles Howe is an editor with the Media Co-op and a member of the Halifax Media Co-op. This article was originally published by the HMC.

NS Jack Pine

"The River Always Wins"

JustinL — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 09:04:44 +0000

1,500 take to the streets in Fredericton to oppose fracking.

FREDERICTON—Over 1,500 people from across New Brunswick and beyond marched through Fredericton on August 1 to demand an end to hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and shale gas exploration in the province. Concern over the effects that fracking may have on the province's water, for this generation and for those to come, brought out strong representation from the province's English, French, and First Nations communities.

The march wound its way through town, finishing at the Legislative Assembly, where a range of speakers addressed the peaceful but incensed crowd.

"The Wabanaki people are not here to celebrate New Brunswick today," said Alma, a representative of the Wabanaki Confederacy. "To me New Brunswick is just a government, nothing more. You see the flag flying up there?" she said, referencing the the Legislative Assembly where the provincial flag had been replaced by the Mohawk warrior flag. "That speaks the truth."

Central to the growing concern over fracking in New Brunswick is the province's newly-hatched, and largely one-sided, partnership with South Western Energy (SWN). SWN is not the only company looking to frack in New Brunswick, but the magnitude and scope of the Texas/Arkansas-headquartered company has the locals worried. Thanks to a March 2010 deal with the New Brunswick Department of Natural Resources, SWN holds exclusive license to explore 2,518,518 "net undeveloped acres" of New Brunswick. "Net undeveloped acres" is corporate jargon for "nature."

In return, SWN has promised to invest $47 million into the province over the next three years. While that might seem like a large amount, the untold millions in gas royalties that stand to flow out of the province make it look like small peanuts. As well, the very real potential for environmental disaster is difficult, if not impossible, to put into monetary terms.

Of course, there is always the perrenial promise of job creation in exchange for resource extraction. But Derek Telasco, for one, sees this as a low-hanging fruit not even worth picking.

"People are saying there's jobs," says Telasco, co-founder of Ban Fracking NB. "Like we're going to get these jobs here. First of all...we don't have the infrastructure for drilling like they do in Texas, Arkansas or Pensylvania...this is a new industry here, so what kind of jobs are going to be here? We don't have the people trained. You're going to get low-end, sweeper jobs, and clean-up crew. You'll be out there with a mop picking up the mess underneath, leaking. We're going to sell out our grandchildren's future in this province, we're going to take that kind of risk with our water?"

On June 23, 2011, the provincial government, in an attempt to placate the masses—and perhaps to save itself from being on the receiving end of a class-action lawsuit—unveiled a framework of regulations for potential frackers in the province. Judging by yesterday's turnout, the crowd was less than satistfied by Department of Natural Resources Minister Bruce Northrup and said regulations.

Northrup's regulations call for baseline testing for wells in close proximity to fracking sites, disclosure of the chemicals used when fracking and security bonds for potential household damage due to fracking. SWN, it should be mentioned, is currently facing, and has faced, class-action lawsuits in Arkansas and Pennsylvania. When dealing with the hundreds of millions in profits, however, security bonds for damaged households in New Brunswick are most likely acceptable losses to a company with the girth of SWN. It should also be mentioned that as natural gas prices continue to fall worldwide, SWN will most likely be continuing on an aggressive production schedule.

Telasco, for his part, fears the New Brunswick government is eager to move forward on this, attempting to get their fracking dreams off the ground before the public can catch on to the risks involved. The question of clean water is understandably an emotional one and public reaction across the province has at times been heated.

"My concern is that there's a number of issues that we're fighting against in New Brunswick." says Telasco. "One is a 25 per cent illiteracy rate. [SWN is] not fracking right now, they're seismic testing. And [the people are] getting really scared. What I'm worried about is that somebody is going to go too far and somebody's going to get shot. In my opinion we can't lose that moral high ground that we have by having a non-violent means of protest. When there's fracking trucks, we don't have to go and vandalize the fracking trucks."

Atlantic Canada's public concern over fracking is not limited to New Brunswick. Solidarity rallies were also held in Nova Scotia communities Inverness, Baddeck, and Truro; Charlottetown, PEI; and St. John's, Newfoundland. Indeed, as Hazel Richardson of the Sierra Club of Canada pointed out, many in the Atlantic region of Canada have been affected by fracking. It was recently revealed that the Nova Scotia-based Debert Waste Water Facility, owned by Atlantic Industrial Services (AIS), currently handles fracking wastewater from New Brunswick. While AIS representatives have assured the public that they are operating within their guidelines in handling fracking wastewater, this news was disconcerting to many, especially in light of the fact that Nova Scotia is undergoing its own environmental assessment of hydraulic fracking.

"There is a saying," says Richardson. "In a battle between the river and the rock, the river always wins. Not because it's stronger, but because it perseveres. The rock we face seems mountainous. The mining companies have deep pockets, and the government of our province seems so keen to snatch financial crumbs from the company plate that it is rushing into action that is threatening our land, the wildlife, and ourselves. All of Atlantic Canada has been or is being negatively impacted by hydraulic fracturing. Together Atlantic Canadians stand and say 'No to Shale Gas.'"

Pulp Dreams

hillarybain — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 05:24:19 +0000

Pictou Mill is Asia Pulp Paper's latest acquisition

HALIFAX—If you thought that the Canadian pulp and paper industry was environmentally irresponsible, you were right. But the new players on the clear-cut block make them look like a bunch of patchouli-scented tree-huggers. This is the story of how Canada hopped into bed with one of Asia's worst environmental criminals, and how for the Pictou Landing Indian Band in Nova Scotia, it's just one more proverbial slap in the face.

Amidst a lack of fanfare from mainstream Canadian media, and encouragement by the federal government, a company known as Paper Excellence Canada Holdings Corporation has lately been buying up Canadian pulp mills at a rapid rate. Paper Excellence is a shell company of global pulp and paper giant Asia Pulp Paper (APP), itself the logging and pulping arm of the massive Indonesian conglomerate, known as Sinar Mas.

In 2001, APP defaulted on $12 billion in bonds, kicking the Indonesian economy, and indeed the entire Southeast Asian economy, into a downward spiral. Three independent audits have never been able to account for between three and four billion dollars, in part because APP simply re-financed itself through the financial arm of Sinar Mas. APP has illegally logged a national park in Cambodia, and makes a regular practice of creating shell companies, illegally logging, and by the time the underpaid forestry authorities figure out who's responsible...POOF! They're gone.

Richard Brooks, Forests Campaign Coordinator for Greenpeace, has spearheaded a global campaign to boycott APP products. Large-scale paper distributors, such as Xerox, Staples, and Target, have heeded Brooks' message, and now refuse to carry APP products. In an interview with The Dominion, Brooks says:

(APP) is on this mission to grow themselves into the largest paper company in the world...They're involved with illegal logging and deforestation in Indonesia, and quite a bit of their pulp and paper production is in Indonesia...These are old-growth, tropical, rainforests that are being cut down, and turned into acacia plantations and eucalyptus plantations, or are being turned into palm oil plantations, which is another division of their company.

Brooks continues:

You've got endangered species habitat that's being wiped out...orangutans, Sumatran tigers, rhinos...a lot of logging that happens outside of their legal concessions. There's evidence of them logging in protected areas...Huge amount of conflict with local communities which they are disenfranchising...basically going in, logging the hell out of the forest, putting in these (palm oil) plantations, and not asking for any approval from local communities.

If Paper Excellence/APP/Sinar Mas get their hands on the Northern Pulp-owned mill in Pictou, Nova Scotia, and all signs point to the deal being finalized shortly, it will be their fifth Canadian pulp mill acquisition in as many years. The other mills are located in Howe Sound, British Columbia, MacKenzie, British Columbia, Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, and Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.

The Canadian pulp mills in question haven't seen this much attention in years. The mill in Pictou has been surviving on a steady diet of government loans for almost a generation. The Prince Albert mill was mothballed at the time of sale. But China is entering a phase of consumerism known as the "paper-culture," and suddenly pulp is again a very hot global commodity. APP simply can't keep up with the Chinese demand for toilet paper, so it has come calling for the mills, and, more importantly, Canada's forests.

We should note that Paper Excellence is not buying any Canadian paper-making facilities. Brooks interprets this to mean that we are in fact witnessing the death of the Canadian, if not North American, paper-making industry, as Canadian pulp will now travel back to Asia, get mixed up with Indonesian hardwood pulp, be made into paper, and then travel back to Canada.

Ed Roste, Vice President of Operations for Paper Excellence, and former VP at Meadow Lake, Paper Excellence's first Canadian pulp mill acquisition in 2006, claims, in an email interview, that while the majority of Canadian pulp will in fact be shipped to China to make paper, there is still a significant North American client base for Canadian pulp. Roste speaks of the “excitement” of the new market opportunities.

The Harper government has opened the public coffers to pay for upgrades to mills all across the country. Canadian taxpayers are on the hook for the 'Pulp and Paper Green Transformation Program' (PPGTP), in which Canadian mills can access up to $1 billion in grants. If Canadian pulp and paper mills were nationalized, such a program might make economic sense for Canadians. As it is taxpayers are to pay for "greening" the mills, only to have many of them sold off to foreign investors, like Sinar Mas, with problematic environmental and financial histories. Paper Excellence's Howe Sound mill received more than $45 million, and the Meadow Lake mill received $2.6 million.

Not to be outdone, in January of 2011, two months prior to the sale being made public, Peter MacKay, Canadian Minister of National Defense, whose family handily owns sizable woodlot holdings in the Pictou area, announced that the Pictou mill would be receiving $28 million under the federal grant. In a telephone interview, Don Breen, Vice-President of Strategic Planning and Government Affairs at Northern Pulp, noted that the $28 million would be used to “reduce odour at the mill by up to 70 per cent, improve boiler performance, and invest in renewable energy initiatives.”

In Nova Scotia, the Pictou mill isn't just a taxpayer-subsidized employer to 230 mill workers, it's the home of a very dirty secret.

Opened in 1966, it is infamous for its continued use of once-idyllic Boat Harbour, a natural lagoon that is located on Pictou Landing Indian Band reserve lands, as an effluent dumping grounds. As documented by the King's College Investigative Journalist Team in 2009, an estimated 1,000,000,000,000 litres of liquid pulp mill waste has poured into Boat Harbour since then, causing untold environmental destruction.

Indeed, an indemnity agreement was signed in 1995 between Scott Maritimes, original owners of the mill, and the provincial government. The agreement guarantees that the Nova Scotia government (actually, Nova Scotia taxpayers) will swallow the costs of cleaning up Boat Harbour. The agreement is valid in transfers of mill ownership. The current NDP provincial government has no alternative plan on what to do with the mill waste, and the Pictou Landing Band is currently in a two-year-and-counting legal battle with the province to see Boat Harbour closed.

Boat Harbour is now a foul-smelling, foam-encrusted, 142-acre wasteland, largely devoid of life. Don Breen, one of the witnesses to the 1995 indemnity, makes no mention of any of the $28 million going to clean up the Boat Harbour disaster that he personally has helped whoever owns the Pictou mill wash their hands of.

In an interview with The Dominion, Kevin Christmas, Indigenous Mi'gmaw, band advisor to Pictou Landing and long-time activist against the pollution of Boat Harbour, notes that effluent-capture technology has existed for years, and that the dire straits of the Pictou Landing Band could have been avoided from the start.

“Boat Harbour is at the tail end of a beautiful reserve called Canada.” says Christmas. “What happens there is one hundred and ten million gallons of the worst possible effluent is being dumped every day, for the last fifty years, in the middle of this beautiful reserve...It's destroying and killing the people. The children...[they] don't know what's wrong with them. But they are not going to live very long lives, and probably will never have children because of base-metal contamination. It's the end of the generation at Pictou Landing.”

Charlie Parker, Minister of the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources, whose riding is located in Pictou West, site of the mill, unveiled the province's 'Renewable Electricity Plan' (REP) in 2010. The REP considers biomass burning, which can involve large-scale, whole-tree harvesting, to be a renewable source of energy.

The repercussions of this definition of 'renewable' have already been felt in Northern Pulp-owned land. In the summer of 2009, Northern Pulp made national headlines in Canada by decimating a wide swath of land in the Musquodoboit-Sheet Harbour area through whole-tree harvesting. Katy Didkowsky, of the Save the Caribou Committee, and a local tourism operator, called the scene a “purposeful massacre.”

Musquodoboit-Sheet Harbour may only be the start. Frank Magazine (Issue 611) recently reported that over 28,000 parcels of land in Nova Scotia, almost 250,000 acres, are without an original Crown grant. The archaic, neo-colonial law in Nova Scotia states that without an original grant, which may be over 300 years old, the land belongs to, and can revert back to, the Crown. Nova Scotia has one of the lowest percentages of Crown land available. That the provincial government has found this new source of potentially exploitable land is perhaps more than convenient.

In this light, it is no great stretch of imagination to interpret the $28 million grant for odour reduction, improved boiler performance, and "green" energy capture as simply implying that emissions from the mill will smell better, while processing more trees, potentially whole trees, and burning more wood as biomass. Anonymous sources in Pictou confirm the mill's preparedness for increased production, and note that boilers “which have not been active for years” are now operational.

The Pictou Chamber of Commerce has come out in favour of the mill's sale. The Communications, Energy, and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP) has also endorsed the sale of the mill in Pictou, as it has done for the other four Paper Excellence acquisitions. Representatives from the CEP were unavailable for comment on whether they knew, or cared, who the actual new owners of the mill were.

The NDP government of Nova Scotia went so far as to engage in a public meet-and-greet with Paper Excellence's VP Ed Roste, and fully endorsed the sale. When Richard Brooks questioned whether the government knew of the links to APP and Sinar Mas, the province pleaded ignorance.

All groups were shamefully mum on addressing the decades-overdue clean-up of Boat Harbour.

For the rest of Nova Scotia, and Canada, it remains to be seen whether we will see the forest for the trees.

Miles Howe is a journalist in Halifax. This article was originally published by the Halifax Media Co-op.

Pictou Mill

When Guns Go Green

hillarybain — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 11:54:21 +0000

Lockheed Martin dives into the "renewable" electricity game

HALIFAX—Tom Rand needs a trillion dollars. With that trillion, Rand, the venture capitalist with an eco-twist, believes he could wean the world off of its fossil fuel addiction, curb greenhouse gas emissions and make renewable energy financially competitive.

Rand sits on the board of several green energy companies and businesses, has designed an award-winning, low-emissions hostel in downtown Toronto and has written “Kick the Fossil Fuel Habit,” a green energy primer. Rand is also an accomplished speaker and headlined April’s “Renewable Energy Conference” in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The problem, although Rand would not call it that, is that he doesn't particularly care where his trillion comes from, so long as it comes. So while some might cringe at seeing the world’s largest weapons manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, as a sponsor of the conference, Rand lets the money talk.

“The only way we're going to be able to solve this problem [climate change],” says Rand, “is to get the people with the capacity to build this stuff at scale at the table. So, people like GE, Lockheed Martin, Siemens, BP, Duke Energy...these are all companies who could either be friend or foe. The most helpful thing for us to do is to say 'How do I make you a friend? How do I bring you on board?'...It's just not pragmatically useful to have those people not on your side. It doesn't make things any easier.”

“Past sins forgiven,” says Rand. “Come on in, help us out...I think is the approach.”

Tamara Lorincz, of the Halifax Peace Coalition, is not so ready to forgive Lockheed's sins, past or present.

“Anything Lockheed Martin might do on a renewable energy front pales in comparison to the plundering of the climate by its weapons systems,” says Lorincz. “If Lockheed Martin truly cared about renewable energy and a sustainable future, it would stop producing the weapons systems that use so much fossil fuel, and pushing for military spending and war spending that degrades the environment and contributes to climate change.”

Lorincz, the self-proclaimed mosquito in Lockheed Martin's ear, recently drew blood when her Access-to-Information request revealed that the many billions—continuously escalating, according to experts—that the Harper Government plans on spending on F-35 stealth fighters would net them 65 engine-less aircraft. The story went global.

“Each stealth fighter holds 10,000 pounds of jet fuel," says Lorincz. "Jet fuel is extremely carbon intensive and will cause climate change, and will use our dwindling fossil fuels. They have no credibility on renewable energy and they are not needed on renewable energy.”

So, while Tom Rand won't ask the question, I will.

Who the hell invited the war pigs to the table?

“I can say that our presence here is based on our interest in renewable energy, and reducing greenhouse gas consumption and environmental damage,” says Steve Marsden, Lockheed Martin’s representative at the conference. “And to the extent that our activities in renewable energy will accomplish that, I think that's a good thing.”

Things were far more black and white, good versus evil, in the days when Lockheed's F-117s were dropping thousands of tons of ordinance on Iraq, or when their Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense program had the world in American cross-hairs. Then, Lockheed Martin was simply the biggest arms manufacturer and exporter the world had ever known, a peddler of products that caused untold suffering and mayhem.

Lockheed Martin is still the world's biggest arms manufacturer and exporter. The Canadian military still consumes thousands of barrels of oil per day. But the Lockheed Martin website, aside from lauding missile defense systems and F-35 fighters, loudly toots on the suddenly-popular green horn. F-22 Raptor diagnostics systems now have a completely paperless approach, in that no paper will be used when diagnosing what ails the F-22 Raptor. Copper-beryllium, the dust of which can cause severe lung damage, has also been eliminated from the F-35 assembly line.

Lockheed Martin has also been awarded a contract by the provincial government of Nova Scotia, in consort with Irving Shipbuilding and Atlantis Resources Corporation, to build an experimental tidal turbine to be tested in the Minas Passage, near Parrsboro, Nova Scotia. The turbine is expected to cost between $10 and $15 million, and is expected to generate 1 megawatt of power. Lockheed Martin is going green, and coming to the Bay of Fundy.

So, who the hell invited the war pigs to the table?

The NDP provincial government of Nova Scotia, that's who.

The invitation comes in the form of the Renewable Electricity Plan (REP), released by the Nova Scotia Department of Energy in 2010. The REP includes a mandate to create 25 per cent renewable electricity by 2015, and 40 per cent renewables by 2020.

Ostensibly, the REP is meant to wean Nova Scotia off its dirty coal habit. Realistically, it opens a veritable Pandora's box of options that, upon closer inspection, do not appear renewable at all. These include large-scale biomass operations that threaten to decimate Nova Scotia's already fragile forests, as well as an increased interest in natural gas exploration, which most likely would involve the environmentally-catastrophic technique known as “fracking.”

Tidal power, to be gathered from the Bay of Fundy, weighs heavily in the dreams of the REP, and this is where Lockheed Martin's so-called expertise comes in.

The Fundy Ocean Research Centre for Energy (FORCE), a berthing station for turbines in the Minas Passage, can accommodate up to four tidal turbines. FORCE has been built using millions of taxpayer dollars. So far, only one turbine has ever been berthed at FORCE, and the Fundy tides knocked it off-line in only seven days. This is the place where the magic is supposed to happen.

Never mind that the old Annapolis Royal Generating Station has been chugging along in the Annapolis sub-basin, at an output of 20 megawatts, for almost 30 years. The NDP government, and now Lockheed, appear to have their sights set on the Herculean task of harnessing some of the most massive tides in the world. But as they say at FORCE, “One day the world will ask...Is it Fundy-tested?” It remains to be seen whether this line will be spoken as the butt-end of a joke.

The REP doesn't even touch on solar energy, considering it an "emerging" technology. Considering that FORCE has not generated its first kilowatt of energy to the grid, and yet is being offered an extremely favourable rate of return should it ever do so, and considering that the power-generating properties of solar energy have been well-proven around the world, the Department of Energy appears to be flagrantly selective in its use of the word "emerging." REP is also very restrictive on wind projects, another of the areas where smaller players stand to make a go of the energy game.

Neal Livingston, co-founder of Black River Ltd., thirty-year veteran in the solar, wind, and small-hydro installation business, isn't getting swept away by the tidal wave.

“The Premier is 100 per cent in bed with big business and the old boys' network in Nova Scotia in terms of designing this policy,” says Livingston. “And that's why you see tidal being so prominent in their thinking, because they've bought into a whole corporate structure that isn't about you and I having the ability to generate power. It's all restricted.”

According to Livingston, the REP stresses the notion of COMFIT (Community Feed-In Tariff), which essentially ties the hands of renewable energy entrepreneurs, and favors big-time investors. COMFIT has strict rules as to who can sell power back to the grid, and more than likely this isn't you. Communities, co-ops, universities, and Aboriginal groups are fine. But if you can't find 25 of your closest friends to co-sign with you on a small-scale wind farm, forget it.

“It’s going to be a mess in two ways,” says Livingston. “One way is that very, very few people are going to own [renewable energy sources] and thus be able to produce their own electricity. This is much like the current situation, with Nova Scotia Power owning everything,” he says. “And also, if you want to be a smaller player you have to work under a whole set of crazy rules which make it not a very interesting place to do it.”

For Lockheed Martin, however, Nova Scotia is the perfect place to get their feet wet in the renewable energy game.

Miles Howe hails from Ottawa, Ontario, and currently calls Halifax home. He has a Masters degree in Sociology, plays a wicked harmonica, and ferments a mean kimchi.

Green Guns

Sludge Storm

hillarybain — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 06:31:37 +0000

Conference organizers want biosolids out of Nova Scotia

HALIFAX—Learning that kiln-baked sewage sludge, also known as "biosolids", is being marketed and sold across Nova Scotia as fertilizer, came as a shock to Lil MacPherson. MacPherson owns The Wooden Monkey, a Halifax restaurant that emphasizes local, seasonal and organic ingredients.

“I'm out there, trying my best, through the restaurant, to promote local foods, and promote sustainable agriculture,” says MacPherson. “Then all of a sudden I get this news, that we're using seriously toxic sewage sludge spread throughout Nova Scotia, which eventually goes through our food system, and I was horrified.”

MacPherson was troubled that much of Halifax didn't know what happened to their waste once it went “flush.” Looking to plunge Haligonians into the light, she and long-time friend Ellen Page are staging an event coined The Nova Scotia Soil Conference, on March 13, 2011.

The purpose of the conference is to discuss whether Halifax Regional Municipality's (HRM) baked sludge is safe for soil application of any kind. A wide range of speakers will be on hand, including internationally renowned microbiologist, and US Environmental Protection Agency whistle-blower, Dr David Lewis, as well as President of Minas Basin Pulp and Power, Scott Travers. Travers is slated to discuss the potential for energy extraction from sludge.

Sludge is the substance that falls to the bottom of a settling tank in a waste treatment plant, and human fecal matter is just the tip of the sludge-berg. Sludge from a typical city's sewers can, and often does, contain heavy metals, pharmaceutical residues (excreted traces of the drugs that so many of us ingest on a daily basis), hospital waste, as well as an array of substances termed by the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment (CCME) as "Emerging Substances of Concern." ESOCs include personal care products, flame retardants and musks, to name but a few.

Fighting alongside MacPherson, and also slated to speak at the March 13 conference, is Jason Hoffman. A former Iowan cattle farmer, Hoffman has a PhD in plant physiology and biochemistry, and is now a Compost Consultant in the HRM. He advocates extreme caution when dealing with sludge, and certainly doesn't recommend using it, whether cooked or raw, as fertilizer.

“The problem is not with the human excrement itself,” says Hoffman, “it’s everything else. Although even if you were just dealing with the human excrement, you still have the not inconsiderable problem of pharmaceutical residues...and the scale is huge. [The] drug industry assumes no responsibility for that aspect of it.”

Hoffman also warns of the practice of applying biosolids to pasturing lands, a practice which is endorsed by Nova Scotia as safe for biosolids.

“I know how cows eat grass. They get a mouthful and they pull it up and there’s often a lot of dirt hanging on that.” says Hofman, explaining one of the ways that biosolids can enter the food system. “So it’s a direct ingestion problem. Then there’s the whole question of fat-soluble accumulation in the milk. The dairy people ought to be very concerned about that. [Milk products are] the last place you want to put biosolids.”

“Not everybody buys into the notion that what we put into our drain ends up back in our food chain. People just can’t make that connect because we are disconnected from how our food is grown,” says Marilyn Cameron, also slated to speak at the conference, and Chair of the Biosolids Caucus of the Nova Scotia Environmental Network (NSEN). “It’s going to take a long time to restructure society and get us to be more responsible for what we put down our drains.”

Cameron notes that in the meantime there are technologies for processing sludge that are “absolutely incredible.”

One of those technologies is the Canadian-developed, and internationally renowned Plasma Assisted Sludge Oxidation (PASO) system, which uses a plasma torch to oxidize the water trapped within the sludge. Heat energy, which can be potentially captured and used, is released as a by-product. Hydro Quebec developed the technology, and Fabgroups, a Quebec-based company, has signed a licensing agreement to develop, manufacture, and market it. Fabgroups has set up a test PASO system in Valleyfield, Quebec, and has been entertaining big-time investors from the US.

“Basically it reduces [sludge] to sand-like crumbs,” says Ted Mulhern, Director of Business Development for Fabgroups. “Typically you have a 20-fold reduction in volume.” Jean-Paul Gendron, Coordinator for Water and Environment for the city of Valleyfield, notes that their PASO system reduces Valleyfield's 8,000 metric tons of sludge to 900 tons of end-product.

“At a plant at full capacity,” says Mulhern, “with an oven that can handle four-and-a-half wet tons of sludge per hour, you're generating at about 12 million British thermal units per hour. That translates into about 3.5 megawatts of thermal energy every hour [and the system is] designed to run 24/7."

According to Mulhern, that's enough energy to power a conventional waste treatment plant, typically a city's largest energy expenditure, with enough energy left over to feed the grid. Given Nova Scotia's current fixation on coal of questionable origins, sludge-derived power may not be so far-fetched.

“It has great potential to generate alternative forms of energy at a very low cost,” says Mulhern. “Typically your cost of producing electricity is at about four cents a kilowatt, so it's a very interesting technology.”

While the test plant in Valleyfield is not set up for energy capture quite yet, Fabgroups is preparing to install this key piece of technology in the near future.

But while Valleyfield and other communities look towards the future of waste management, Nova Scotia remains knee-deep in its own sludge.

Since 2008, Greater Halifax’s sludge has been handed over to a company called N-Viro Systems Canada LP. NVS, whose facility is located in Aerotech Park, near the Halifax Airport, adds a hearty dose of cement dust into the mix, and bakes the whole mess in a kiln.

The end product is trademarked as N-Viro Soil, and is sold across Nova Scotia as a Canadian Food Inspection Agency-approved fertilizer. CFIA seal of approval notwithstanding, critics, including Hoffman and Cameron, claim that applying N-Viro Soil to the earth is introducing a mysterious mix of potentially harmful ingredients right into the soil.

A recent study by the CCME found that a plethora of pharmaceuticals were turning up in survey samples of N-Viro Soil. ESOCs with proven cancer-causing track records, such as Bisphenol A, were also present.

“The problem as I see it is that this material just has too many contaminants,” says Hoffman. “When you look at the CCME study, the findings are in nanograms, which is parts per billion. And it’s very easy to dismiss any one of these compounds individually. But collectively there are thousands and thousands. Doing what? We know not.”

Hoffman also takes issue with N-Viro's addition of cement kiln dust into their end-product.

“What they try to do in Nova Scotia,” explains Hoffman, “because we have acidic agricultural soil, is...promote ‘liming’ [from cement kiln dusts]. Cement kiln dust comes with its own basket of ‘what’s in it?’ and that needs to be looked at.”

The Canadian Horticultural Council (CHC) and the CFIA, the very agency that licenses N-Viro Soil as a fertilizer, agree. The CHC and CFIA developed the Food Safety Program (FSP) which is a series of guidelines that large-scale produce buyers, such as Sobeys and Loblaws, use when selecting growers to supply their stores with produce. The FSP does not allow for Canadian produce-growers to apply municipal waste, N-Viro Soil included, onto crop-growing soil.

“The concern...is with possible chemical contaminants to the biosolids,” says Heather Gale, National Program Manager of CanadaGAP, the CHC's On-Farm Food Safety Program. “That might be things like pharmaceuticals or even something like personal care products that might get concentrated in the waste.”

NVS, for its part, claims that N-Viro Soil is safe for crop application of all kinds, and that it has the science to prove it.

“The only place that [N-Viro Soil] is not being applied to agricultural crops is fruits and vegetables in Canada. Nowhere else in the world,” says Lise LeBlanc, of LP Consulting Ltd, speaking for NVS. “And NVS is going to re-debate that, because [they] recognized that it’s not based on science. It is based on what most scientists call the 'yuck factor.'”

The "yuck factor", or "wisdom of repugnance", is not why CHC has rejected N-Viro Soil, says Gale. She says they have seen NVS's science, and they aren't impressed.

“So far”, says Gale, “NVS has not been able to provide the information that our technical working group is looking for that would put their mind to rest around it.”

For the moment, only NVS knows where the N-Viro Soil goes. Cameron has filed a freedom of information request for a list of NVS's customers, but has yet to receive it. In the interim, Cameron has collected the signatures of over 400 Nova Scotia farmers who have made the promise to never apply biosolids to their land.

MacPherson, in setting up The Nova Scotia Soil Conference, and in her buying practices at The Wooden Monkey, is showing solidarity with those farmers.

"Biosolids is not for The Monkey", says MacPherson, "and we don't support that. We support and focus on buying from Nova Scotia farmers, and we will not buy any products that are grown using biosolids. Biosolids [are] not about recycling, it's just pollution transfer. It's not for the future of farmers in Nova Scotia, and we are supporting the farmers that are taking a stand with us."

Miles Howe hails from Ottawa, Ontario, and currently calls Halifax home. He has a Masters degree in Sociology, plays a wicked harmonica, and ferments a mean kimchi.

Toilet Sludge

Canada's Debt-ucation Province

hillarybain — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 05:23:32 +0000

Students in Nova Scotia fear skyrocketing tuition fees

HALIFAX—“At times, I wanted to disappear forever and not bother anyone with my stupid money problems,” recalls Jane (not her real name), who, like many other graduates in Nova Scotia, accrued tens of thousands of dollars of debt in student loans over the course of her university education. In her thirties, Jane’s debt is over $60,000 but under $90,000. She is currently filing for bankruptcy, and her financial and legal counsellors have advised her not to publicly discuss the particulars of her case.

“I made the decision to declare bankruptcy because it was the only option available to me,” says Jane in an email interview. “I owed a lot of money from student loans and debt from private institutions...I realize that yes, I did sign a contract to help me attain my education, however with a reasonable expectation that I was going to find a job and be in a position to pay the money back. Well, the fairy tale didn't work out for me and I am desperate for the chance to move on with my life.”

The average Nova Scotia post-secondary student graduates with a debt of $31,000. Under Canadian law, former students must wait seven years before they can apply for discharge from student loan debt. No other type of debt applies such restrictive discharge restrictions.

In a 2008 study of the 2003 graduating class of Maritime universities, the Maritimes Provinces Higher Education Commission found that of those who borrowed over $30,000, 79 per cent were making payments on outstanding loans five years after graduation. Twenty-one per cent of those surveyed still had outstanding debt at or above $30,000.

Forcing former students to prioritize their debt payments over everything else hurts not only students but also the larger economy, according to Elise Graham. Graham is Chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS)-Nova Scotia, as well as a student at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD).

“Students who graduate with $31,000 in debt are leaving the province,” says Graham. “They’re going to find jobs that are not necessarily in their field of study—just what pays.”

Numerous studies, including “Educational Debt Burden and Career Choice,” published in 2006, demonstrate the link between a student's debt load and the career they choose. When debt loads are high, students will opt, out of financial necessity, for higher paying career opportunities. Newly graduated lawyers with heavy debt loads are less likely to choose to practice public interest law. Heavily indebted graduates with degrees in medicine are less likely to choose careers in research or internal medicine, and will instead opt to specialize in higher paying fields.

The financial difficulties that stem from an inability to repay debt are also linked to emotional and physiological distress, according to several studies, including "The impact of financial circumstances on student health," published in 2005. As Jane’s debt load reached a proportion she could not control, she found that her own mental health was failing.

“One thing that is important to understand is the toll that these massive debts can take on a person's ego,” says Jane. “It was intimidating admitting the sheer scale of the debt to myself and figuring out how long it was going to take for me to pay it back, and those figures were absolutely insurmountable considering my current income. My self-worth took quite a beating and the stress of always worrying about money negatively affected my relationships with loved ones and close friends. I would often feel very ashamed as though I had done something terribly wrong.”

Where affordable education is a priority, governments find the money to keep tuition reasonable. In Sweden, Norway and Denmark, university is free for EU passport holders. In France, Germany, Italy and Spain, tuition for EU residents is nominal. In Nova Scotia, which flaunts itself as “Canada’s Education Province,” the average tuition is $5,495, several hundred dollars above the national average. Nova Scotia may have more universities and colleges per capita than anywhere else in the country, but tuition fees, until 2009, were the highest in the country for over twenty years running. The recently-published "O’Neill Report," as it has come to be known, commissioned by the provincial government, suggests that future students might find their debt getting bigger still.

In September 2010, Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter commissioned former Bank of Montreal executive vice-president, Dr. Tim O’Neill, to prepare the Report on the University System in Nova Scotia. The language in the report, such as “severe recession,” “fiscal responsibility” and “spending restraint” hint at a provincial government looking to tighten its belt on post-secondary education expenditures.

The O’Neill Report recommends a complete deregulation of tuition fees, while earmarking a percentage of tuition revenue increases for student assistance. This model, known as a high-fee,high-aid model, stands to drive up-front tuition fees through the roof.

In one scenario recommended by O’Neill, the CFS found that in five years time tuition and ancillary fees for Nova Scotia students would cost an average of $11,630—an increase of 86 per cent. Rates would be even higher for out-of-province and international students, who together make up 41 per cent of Nova Scotia's student population.

A complex process requiring new levels of administration would allow students to recoup a percentage of their up-front tuition payments based on their income. Many fear the high sticker price will be an immediate deterrent.

“I think sticker shock will be sufficient to divert the people who really ought to be going to university,” says Dr. Laura Penny, lecturer at Mount Saint Vincent University and best-selling Canadian author, “so the student aid top-ups are a moot point. Students have to be part of the system to access aid. But the higher tuition goes, the more the system is perceived as strictly for the elite.”

A University of Toronto (U of T) study highlighted by The Tuition Trap, a 2005 report commissioned by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA), supports Penny’s theory. The study found that over 70 per cent of students in the law department come from high-income families. Tuition fees at U of T's faculty of law are currently over $20,000 per year.

The Tuition Trap also highlights the fact that during the several-year period when tuition for medical school in Ontario increased from $5,000 to $14,500, enrollment of students whose families earned less than $40,000 dropped significantly—from 23 per cent to 10 per cent.

O’Neill, who declined to be interviewed for this story, argues that targeted assistance will offset the proven link between increased tuition fees and decreased access.

Nowhere in his 188-page report does O’Neill provide a formula indicating how this “high aid” is to be calculated or distributed. A 2005 report by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations showed that increasing public funding, not tuition, was the best way to ensure access to education for both low- and middle-income students.

In this light, the mood of unease and suspicion among Nova Scotian students, prospective students and staff is appropriate.

“Raising tuition makes our universities less competitive,” says Penny. “We're already losing Nova Scotia students to Newfoundland. Given that students and staff have a huge economic multiplier effect—especially in small college towns like Antigonish and Wolfville—this strikes me as a short-sighted economic strategy, a cheapness that may not turn out to be cheap at all, in terms of lost revenues and spin-offs.”

Elise Graham agrees.

“Newfoundland and Labrador have very low tuition fees [on average $2,500], coupled with a significant amount of government funding, and their student population is growing,” she says. “Other students are leaving other provinces and going to Newfoundland, because they can afford their education.”

“If Nova Scotia is serious about wanting to rebuild the economy, [it shouldn’t be] saddling our young people with debt,” says Graham.

Judging by the tens of billions of tax dollars that are now being ear-marking for prisons, military, and, perhaps closer to the minds of Nova Scotians, a multi-million dollar convention centre, many wonder if the “severe recession” conditions that O’Neill refers to in his report even exist.

“This government is spending millions on building a trade centre, and are cutting millions from their education budget,” says Judy Haiven, a professor at the Sobey School of Business at Saint Mary’s University. “That’s a direct subsidy to the business class, and a removal of subsidies from those who need education.”

“We as a society benefit from an educated workforce, and we need to create a tax structure where education is reasonable—or free. If higher income earners paid $800 more in taxes towards education, we could be offering free or highly subsidized education to all those who wanted to go,” says Haiven.

CFS-Nova Scotia is planning a day of action on February 2, 2010. Student activists are urging those who stand to be affected by deregulated tuition—in effect all of Nova Scotia and beyond—to show their solidarity with the next generation of university graduates. Graham is calling for “Canada-wide support in our fight against the O’Neill Report.”

As for Jane, her bankruptcy trial looms.

“I feel awful knowing that student debt is rising; and thinking about the students who may have to go through what I went through is terrible,” she says. “If education is a priority, then it should be accessible to everyone and not be a pair of concrete boots forced onto those who don't have wealthy parents.”

Miles Howe is a university graduate now living debt-free in Halifax. This article was originally published by the Halifax Media Co-op.

teach Out 2

Hemp Wanted

Moira Peters — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 05:59:20 +0000

Once illegal material promises dizzying array of green energy uses

HALIFAX—Wanda Beattie, president and CEO of Atlantic Healing Hemp, paces the floor of her flagship store in Berwick, Nova Scotia. She is a woman on a mission. The shelves around her are lined with hemp salves, hemp balms, cold-pressed hemp seed oil and vacuum-sealed bags of crushed hemp seeds. The hemp is top quality and Canadian grown, but it’s definitely not local—and that's something Beattie would like to change.

“At the moment I’m bringing in hemp oil in large quantities from Winnipeg," she says. "That’s the hemp heartland. There was an attempt to grow hemp in Nova Scotia, back in 2000, but it wasn’t feasible because there wasn’t a market for the product. There was some amateur processing being done, but nothing of any scale."

Beattie's mission: to resurrect the deep-seeded relationship between Nova Scotia soil and hemp.

Port Royal, Nova Scotia, was the site of North America’s first recorded hemp crop, in 1606.

But by 2009, Saskatchewan had 5,090 acres licensed for hemp and Manitoba had 6,015 acres. Nova Scotia had none.

“The issue is not related to soil,” says Beattie. “There is wonderful soil here in the Annapolis Valley. You can grow hemp here. Top quality hemp. In 2000, Nova Scotia farmers proved it could be done. There’s simply not enough of a market.”

The hemp plant has had many uses. Christopher Columbus swore by hemp sails. Hemp rope, even 50-year-old hemp rope, is still highly sought after for its water-resistant qualities. Anything oil, lumber or cotton can do, hemp can do better. The seeds can be eaten or pressed into oil. Both methods of ingestion are extremely healthy.

As Beattie will tell you, hemp seeds contain all the essential fatty acids. Her hemp cream also goes on smooth after a shave.

Re-education is a large part of Beattie’s campaign to get hemp back into the Nova Scotia diet and consciousness. She and her husband Brian offer weekly, one-hour information sessions out of the Berwick store. She also offers free presentations to Nova Scotia groups and businesses.

“People in the area just don’t know about the benefits of hemp. We grew up in a generation that didn’t hear anything about hemp. Consumers are looking at our products now, and they know they have a value, because they have been used for thousands of years. Younger people are using hemp as a preventative, incorporating it into their diets to stay healthy." Others use it to treat chronic health issues like sciatic nerve pain, eczema, psoriasis, arthritis, acid reflux and to lower chloresterol levels.

Hemp was banned in Canada and the US in 1938. Jack Herer, in his book The Emperor Wears No Clothes, highlights the link between DuPont’s patenting, that same year, of the processes of making plastics out of petroleum and paper out of wood pulp, and the continent-wide ban on growing hemp. In 1998, amid growing interest in textile alternatives, Health Canada lifted its ban.

Hemp requires a relatively small up-front investment for processing infrastructure. Compared to oil, pulp and cotton, hemp is of higher quality and is much cheaper. Hemp is therefore a logical alternative to many of the products the Western diet currently consumes at an alarming rate.

Travis Truso is the owner of Hemp Haven in Regina, Saskatchewan. He has been in the hemp selling business for six years, and he is the main contact for the Saskatchewan Hemp Association.

“I’ve talked to 100 farmers in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and only one of them even baled his stalk," says Truso. "The rest just burned their stalks or cultivated them back into the soil. Ninety-nine per cent of farmers are just selling their hemp seed. There is zero industry in Canada for fibre and stalk.”

The fibre and stalk of the hemp plant is where so many of its benefits are found. When processed, the fibres and hurd (stalk centre) can produce a multitude of products.

“There are quite a few encouraging things going on in Canada with hemp right now," says Truso. "Motive is a car company out of Alberta. They just created an electric car, and the body of the car is made out of hemp composite. The car has been reviewed really positively, and they want to commercially launch it by 2013."

“I see hemp fibre board as being a very promising industry with lots of room to grow," he says. "Right now the government annually subsidizes the lumber industry with $1 billion of taxpayers’ money. You cannot produce paper from lumber for the price we buy it at in the store. The entire industry is subsidized. And once you cut a forest down, your next crop isn’t ready for 100 years. Why have we built a society that takes trees for paper? It’s insane.”

Truso argues that when it comes to textiles, hemp doesn’t just compete with cotton, it’s far superior.

"The absurdity of growing cotton for textiles... Pests love it, and the only way it could have evolved was through intensive labour. Cotton needed slave labour to evolve. And then the product is just a short, brittle piece of fibre that wears out in a year. Hemp makes the strongest fibre, and it doesn’t wear out, it wears in. Levis jeans were originally made from hemp.”

Truso also points to hemp's potential energy efficiency.

“Henry Ford grew hemp, and his first diesel engine ran off hemp oil at 90 per cent cleaner and 60 per cent more efficient than fuel oil. It’s got the most biomass per crop, per acre, of anything grown.”

Hemp is also one of the greenest crops grown. “All the farmers that currently grow hemp in Saskatchewan do so keeping organic practices in mind," says Truso. "They are growing it in rotation with wheat, rye and grain crops. Hemp pulls an enormous amount of toxins out of the soil, and I’ve got it from a representative from Health Canada who says that if hemp were grown in three consecutive years on the same land, that land would be free of other weeds. You can virtually drop the seed in the soil, come back in 120 days, and combine your yield.”

Canadian law, however, makes it hard to be a hemp farmer. “Hemp is the only legal crop in Canada that requires a license to grow. You have to go through so much paper work. You need to have a criminal check, and you need to have your crops tested for THC content twice yearly. For a lot of farmers, the hassle is just too much.”

Processing the stalk, on an industrial scale, requires a processing plant, which would cost several million dollars—so far a prohibitive sum for investors. Various levels of Canadian government have had several opportunities to build a Canadian hemp processing plant, and each time they failed to seal the deal.

Truso talks about one that got away.

“In Craik, Saskatchewan, a company called Natural Alternative Technologies (NAT) approached the town with the idea of building a hemp processing plant. That was in 2004. At that point we had a New Democratic government in Saskatchewan, and they were for it. They offered up half the capital for the plant if NAT could raise the rest.

"From 2004 to 2008, NAT developed its technology, and raised its capital. In 2008 Saskatchewan elected the Saskatchewan Party, which is a far right party. In their first week of being in office they cancelled their contract with NAT. Since then NAT has gone bankrupt, and has sold its technology to Haines Underwear.”

Despite growing almost 20,000 acres of hemp, Canada remains without a plant to process it. Canadian hemp stalks, for lack of a buyer, are burned. Hemp-stalk products, among them hemp textiles, are largely imported from China.

“Almost every Canadian designer that’s manufacturing hemp clothing is getting their yarn from China," says Truso. "The floor of my store is made from hemp fibre board. It’s twice as strong as plywood and will last twice as long. I bought it imported from China.”

Without government assistance, and without a processing plant, hemp farmers across Saskatchewan are still growing over 5,000 acres of hemp. Only the seeds are being harvested.

“There are no government subsidies for hemp seed," says Truso. "The farmers need to go out on their own, and find all of their own contracts. At the end of the year, a lot of them still have 50 to 100,000 pounds of hemp seed left over.”

Truso says any initiative for processing stalk will have to come from the grassroots. “A company called Hill Agra in Ontario has invented a portable fibre extractor that can fit behind any tractor. The base model sells for $80,000. Several have been sold to Europe, and quite a few to China, but so far none in Canada. In the spring this extractor would decorticate your fibre and your hurds [process the stalk]. You’d be ready to stamp fibre boards. You’d be ready to mix hemp concrete."

"And," he adds, "hemp is still illegal to grow in America, so you’d have a huge market for your product. You’d be creating a groundbreaking industry."

For more information on applying to grow your own hemp, contact the Controlled Substances Division of Health Canada, at 1-613-948-6408.

Miles Howe hails from Ottawa, Ontario, and currently calls Halifax home. He has a Masters degree in Sociology, plays a wicked harmonica, and bakes a mean banana cake.

Hemp seeds

Hemp yarn