The Dominion - 42

February Books

hillarybain — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 11:58:14 +0000

Kingdom, Phylum
Adam Dickinson
Brick Books: London, Ont., 2006

Dickinson’s second collection is an impressive, if heady, look at our classification systems, with poems ranging from “Precambrian” to “The Humours” to infinity itself. “Density,” the opening poem, spans four pages without a single stanza break. Though stunning, it sometimes suffers from over-density, and could benefit from a good edit without losing anything essential. Still, it marks a new direction for Dickinson, one that places him alongside poets like Don McKay and Ken Babstock in scope. In “Kingdom, Phylum, Class” we see Dickinson at his best: playful, funny, genuine. “Maybe commitment is love that has discovered taxidermy, or taxonomy, I could never keep them straight. Maybe it is both—thinking that is stuffed and sorted.” For a poet concerned with how language separates us from the natural world, it must be said that Dickinson sometimes exacerbates the problem, with poems that must first be decoded in the mind, and then, if we’re lucky, the heart. Halfway through the collection, Dickinson’s abstract thinking finds a more embodied expression, and these poems are ultimately more successful. The closing poem, “Great Chain of Being,” is sure to be dog-eared and mailed to friends.
--Bren Simmers

TYPES OF CANADIAN WOMEN AND OF WOMEN WHO ARE OR HAVE BEEN CONNECTED WITH CANADA VOLUME II
K.I. Press
Gaspereau Press: Kentville N.S., 2006.

Press makes clear from the index of key words, including “obscurity”, “quiddity”, “penises”, and “herrings, red,” that the rigidity of the original Types of Canadian Women, published in 1903, has been left behind. Rather than the Who What Where of the original text, Press uses her cheeky, terse sense of humour to explore the wilderness of the personal lives she's imagined from photographs of nearly fifty typical Canadian women of the period. The poems range from journal entries: “16th May/ I dreamt a wildcat swimming with its baby in its mouth./ I think Maria is stealing the candle-ends./” to an admission in prose by a “Daughter of witches”: “We came to where the men are tied to trees, tied down in animal sinew and smothered in furs, tied on a tether so long sometimes we hang them kitelike in the black skies, waiting.” Though the satirical construct does at times limit the potential for emotional connection to the work, Press’ artful and fearless imagination lifts the poems out of mere cleverness.
--Sheryda Warrener

Home of Sudden Service
Elizabeth Bachinsky
Nightwood Editions, PLACE, 2006.

Elizabeth Bachinsky’s second poetry collection is an unsettling little book about surviving adolescence on the border between the suburban and the rural. It describes “the landscape of my youth: freeways superb in all their trash and glam,” a world where “our fumbling rose, not out of desire, but desperation.” Bachinsky’s simple, often gritty diction is coupled with an unusual yet assured use of form. Her villanelle, “For the Pageant Girls: Miss Teen Motel 6, Et Al,” demonstrates Bachinsky’s retrospective take on adolescent understanding: “Unfair! What did we know / but that our loves seemed dull and strange.” Her prose poem “Near Miss,” on the other hand, promises the escape routes of time and humour. The collection’s first three sections present a series of points of view, though the subject matter—a relentless reality in a harsh environment—remains constant. Bachinsky’s cool tone slips subtly between earnestness and irony, and this coexistence is at the heart of the matter. Through its young characters, Home of Sudden Service explores suspension and suspense, anticipation and futility. This restless, elegant book suggests further accomplishment to come.
--Jane Henderson

Hitch
Matthew Holmes
Nightwood Editions: Gibsons Landing, BC, 2006.

Hitch, a debut collection from New Brunswick poet Matthew Holmes, stands up confidently to take its place in the ranks of Can-Lit poetry. While not startlingly original, Hitch offers a near-perfect balance of poetic styles and subjects. There are prose poems about famous scientists and their theorems – “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle” is brilliant – and poems which range in form from the “ghazal of July storm” to the more formally daring section “Hitch,” an exploration of knots. While in no way strictly ‘regional,’ readers familiar with the Maritimes will recognize familiar place-names like Memramcook. Holmes is not a poet who wallows in the confessional mode, but pieces like “beth seeking poems” let the reader glimpse the interior life of the author while rising to a more elevated level of meaning, something beyond the personal. Some of the best pieces in the collection muse on household objects: fridges that get discarded and eye their nervous replacements from the porch, or the mathematical theory for dust bunnies, “where t is time between/ and the existence of brooms is a given.” Hitch is an adeptly executed knot of poetic skill and engaging thought.
--Matthew J. Trafford

Issue #42

dru — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 20:56:32 +0000

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February 2007

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Cable Cutters

hillarybain — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 15:36:46 +0000

What the cable companies don’t want you to know about radical television in Canada

There’s a big little story in Canada about radical possibilities for television that cable companies don’t want you to know. It’s a story worth close to a billion dollars -- money that should have been spent on creating community access television in every neighbourhood where cable companies sell cable. A few communities have claimed some of their share, but in most of Canada, the money goes into the pockets of the cable companies. What would happen if more communities demanded the community access funding that is their right under federal regulations?

The story of community television is in many ways the story of cable television. It begins in the early 1950s, with amateurs tinkering with televisions in their backyards. What they discovered is that a clear television signal could be easily redistributed with ground wire into areas where reception was poor. Their next discovery was that people would pay for this. Amateur curiosity became entrepreneurial enthusiasm, and by 1958 the ironically named ‘community antennae television systems’ (CATVs) were born: Canada’s first cable companies.

Cable’s promising financial future was not immediately apparent. At the time, asking households to pay for television was a weird and distasteful idea _ why pay for what you get for free? Even as late as 1968, when the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) was created by the federal government to regulate communications in Canada, cable subscription rates represented only small fractions of available viewers. One of the reasons this changed was the introduction of a new kind of television -- community access programming (television made by non-professional local residents in neighbourhoods across the country). Cable was the only way to see public access television.

Public access television was truly a creature of its time, a product of a unique set of historical circumstances. There were the fledging cable services selling programs on closed-circuit networks. There was the rebellious social turmoil of the late 1960s. And in 1967, Sony introduced the first portable video recording unit, the Sony Portapak, a 1/2 inch reel-to-reel black and white video camera. Portable video was more accessible than film because of costs, ease of use and immediacy of results.

Artists and activists quickly incorporated video into their creative and anti- establishment antics. It allowed the production of television outside of commercial venues and thus challenged network television’s monopoly over programming. It was television by the people, for the people, and in the politically charged techno-utopic fervor of the times, public access television offered an exciting glimpse into local culture and exposed mainstream households to a new form of social commentary.

No one knows for sure where it began - it could have been in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where, in 1968, local youth were taught how to make video using the new Portapak, and then their programs were aired on local cable. (This was a project of the National Film Board’s Challenge for Change, a video and film activist training program operating from 1967 to 1974.) It could also have been in New York City, where, in the same year, a community programming model was being experimented with by the Ford Foundation. And it could have been in Dale City, Virginia, also in 1968, where the local municipal government created a short-lived community cable channel. In all likelihood, they happened independently and simultaneously, products of the technology and temperament of the day.

Communities across Canada quickly became hooked on the quirky, amateurish but undeniably immediate and locally-oriented programming. By 1972, most cable companies were voluntarily providing some kind of community access. They had discovered that people liked seeing their neighbours, their families and themselves on television, and they liked the local coverage and innovative programming that was and remains the mainstay of community access programming. Community access programming was inadvertently helping cable companies to sell cable.

In 1975, the CRTC introduced the first comprehensive community channel regulations. Cable companies over a certain size were required to allocate 10 per cent of their gross revenues to access television. The CRTC did this for two reasons: to standardize the kind and quality of access that was available to communities across Canada and also to help justify the creation of regional cable monopolies.

This latter strategy was in direct response to cable company demands for guaranteed rates of return to compensate for the large capital investment required to build cable infrastructure. Community television was the CRTC’s way of extracting from cable companies a contribution to Canadian culture (in exchange for monopoly power) and to justify the creation of the monopolies to critics and the public.

Activists and artists across Canada soon got in on the game of making television. In Vancouver, video artists led the way, recognizing the potential for community television as a means to circumvent traditional political economies of galleries and commercial art markets and as a means of directly countering mainstream programming. Shows like The Gina Show (John Anderson) and Images of Infinity (Byron Black) used community channel airtime to challenge dominant ideas while creating extended video art riffs on the political themes of the times: techno-utopic ideals, radical political change, protest and direct action, the alleviation of poverty and multiculturalism. Early video policies at the Canada Council recognized community television as an important site for artistic production and distribution.

The early freedom experienced by artists and activists was not to last. Cable companies began to censor programming. Some cable operators began to illegally charge fees for access, and to use the community channel for advertising. The cable operators erroneously believed that the community channel was their property and they appointed themselves keepers of the channel and gatekeepers of community politics and taste. By the 1980s, most artists and many activists had withdrawn completely and programming was largely dictated by cable company employees. Programmers and community groups who remained found themselves begging on the steps of the CRTC with their growing lists of complaints.

After a decade of complaints and inaction, the CRTC initiated a review of community channel practice and policy in 1990. There were thousands of written submissions. The CRTC’s response was problematic and progressive. Problematically, the new regulations prohibited cable companies from charging fees for access and they allowed a limited form of advertising called sponsorships (text graphics over a still image). In addition, they reduced the amount cable companies had to spend in access television by half. But the CRTC also articulated a new set of goals and objectives for community television in Canada, a policy statement that today continues to have resonance.

The CRTC stated that community television in Canada should: (i) engender a high level of citizen participation and community involvement; (ii) actively promote citizen involvement and promotion of training opportunities; (iii) seek out innovation and alternative points of view; (iv) provide balanced opportunities for differing views; (v) reflect bilingual and ethnic diversity; and (vi) provide coverage of local events.

It’s worth thinking about these roles and objectives carefully. Despite the fact that the 1991 regulations reduced mandatory spending on community programming in half, community channel allocations have grown to between $50 and $80 million annually. That means that since the early 1990s, cable companies have collected between $700 million and $1 billion that should have been spent on achieving these roles and objectives. You wouldn’t be alone in catching your breath at the staggering failure of community television to live up to this potential, especially with such generous resources at the ready. Worse, no one knows what the cable companies have been spending all this money on. In 2005 the parliament of Canada (in its report Our Cultural Sovereignty:The Second Century of Canadian Broadcasting) stated that it was “frustrated by the absence of data on community television and is dismayed that virtually no information exists on what happens as a result of cable company expenditures (approximately $75 to $80 million) in support of community television each year.” The cable companies are not meeting the stated goals and objectives for the community channel (this, too, was indicated by Parliament in the report), and no one knows what they are doing with the money.

The next assault came a few years later, once again under the guise of regulatory reform. In 1996, the CRTC initiated a policy review - not of community television, but of cable regulations. What the CRTC proposed for community television was a voluntary commitment from the cable companies. Only if a cable company voluntarily chose to do so, would it have to allocate resources to a community channel. It was the de facto deregulation of community television in Canada.

As if Christening a ship, the CRTC boldly declared that the “community channel has achieved a level of maturity and success that it no longer needs to be mandated” and that “apart from the benefits to the public through local reflection, the community channel provides cable operators with a highly effective medium to establish a local presence and to promote a positive image for themselves.” In effect, the CRTC gave cable companies their own television channels, while at the same time circumvented the public hearing process that every other channel operator in Canada was required to go through.

The cable companies all but declared war on community access, setting into motion a series of changes aimed at eliminating programming that originated in the community. In one particularly egregious example, Vancouver’s Shaw Cable eliminated three hours of community-produced original programming (produced through a non- profit television group ICTV Independent Community Television Co-op, a group the author was involved with at the time), offering instead two minutes per week. Shaw’s community channel program manager told a CBC news reporter that “access is an evil word,” a comment that captures the cable industry’s hostility to community participation under the new regulations. By 2000, in many areas, independent community programming had been entirely eliminated from the new cable company channels.

What replaced community programs were shows produced by cable employees in service of the company’s needs. Corporate advertising appeared with increasing frequency as cable companies took the opportunity to cross-promote corporate products. The programming, having lost regular community input and now being produced entirely within a ratings- motivated framework, increasingly resembled commercial programming.

Community channels grew crowded with glib talk shows, sports programming, cooking shows, travel shows, home fix-it shows, fishing shows, and so on. Voices marginalized from mainstream television were just as efficiently marginalized under the new format. Representation from First Nations, the poor, local artists, ethnically diverse communities, opinions questioning status quo positions, and even local news coverage all but vanished.

Community channels began to look, smell and taste so much like commercial stations that commercial broadcasters started to complain to the CRTC, arguing that the new regulations were allowing cable companies to compete for local advertising and views without any sort of public review. Rogers Cable, in its own submissions on the subject to the CRTC in 2001, stated that earnings from community channel sponsorships were over $1 million and that there was an additional $1.7 million to be had if sponsorships (then text over still images) could be expanded to include moving images. Good-bye community voices, hello to the quiet whisper of dollar bills, as many as could be squeezed from the cable companies’ new-found toy.

Every action, they say, has an equal and opposite reaction. In this case, the reaction came in the tireless political and public relations lobbying of activists across the country. Organizations like ICTV and CMES in British Columbia and the Federacion du Television Communitaire du Quebec pushed back against cable company hostility and greed. Once again, the CRTC put into motion its increasingly creaky policy review process and, in 2001, launched a major review of community- based media regulations.

Over the course of 18 months, two draft policies and over 1,000 interventions from members of the public, community groups, cable companies and broadcasters, the message that Canadian communities want their community channels back finally got through. In 2002, the CRTC re-regulated community access television by reasserting cable companies’ obligations to provide a community channel that encourages access, training and meaningful volunteer opportunities, and that up to 50 per cent of the community channel must be made available for independently produced community programs.

To put this another way, the only reason your local community channel continues to resemble the unimaginative and money- grubbing gestures of commercial television is because you haven’t asked the cable company for the training, equipment and air time that you are legally entitled to. That’s the law.

Cable: unfulfilled radical potential?

Support the Troops or Support the War?

hillarybain — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 14:42:58 +0000

In Afghanistan, it might be difficult to do both

GAGETOWN, NB -- When some 2,500 people braved snow and ice to form a massive Canadian flag at CFB Gagetown as a part of an emotional farewell to soldiers departing for Afghanistan, it seemed like patriotism at its best.

There was only one problem: many attendees were forced to participate in the rally.

An email to base employees obtained by the Dominion states, “All military and civilian personnel not in an essential service position or undergoing training are required to attend the ceremonies.” On January 26, 708 soldiers from CFB Gagetown will start deploying for Afghanistan as part of Canada’s third rotation.

“I support the military 100 per cent, but when someone tells me I am required to do something, I get up in arms,” said one long-time base employee who didn’t want to be named for fear of professional reprisal. “I will not support our men going over to fight and die in a war we have nothing to do with,” added the employee.

“A lot of the time they [soldiers] don’t have a choice,” says 17-year-old Shayley Jestin as she volunteers at a table passing out yellow ribbons. “Supporting the troops is different from supporting the war,” says Jestin, whose father is in the military.

At the January 19 rally, scampering kids munched hot dogs and blue cotton candy, politicians made pro-war speeches and soldiers held their loved ones. For some families, this will be a last caress. Word around the base is that one in 10 soldiers will die in Afghanistan; media reports say one in six is expected to be injured.

“It’s like feeling every emotion at the same time,” says Sapper Bruce MacCleary who will be deployed to Kandahar in February. “Anyone who says they aren’t worried is lying,” says MacCleary while holding his 16-month-old daughter.

During my interview with MacCleary and his wife Samantha, public affairs officer Lieutenant Desmond James, a clean-cut navy man with sharp eyes, watches closely. After asking the standard questions about training, feelings and worries, I try something a little different.

“In 2005, Major General Andrew Leslie went on record saying ‘Afghanistan is a 20-year venture’, because ‘every time you kill an angry young man overseas, you’re creating 15 more who will come after you.’ By this logic, don’t you think the occupation is misguided?” I ask.

Sapper MacCleary answers the question.

We shake hands and walk our separate ways. MacCleary starts talking to public affairs officer Lieut. James. Moments later MacCleary returns and asks to withdraw his answer.

“Soldiers don’t comment on policy or rules,” said public affairs officer James when asked why MacClearly wasn’t allowed to give his opinion on the subject for which he’s risking his life.

It’s ironic that average soldiers, support staff and their families can’t talk about the politics behind the mission when at times they likely understand the situation better than politicians and generals.

Take this statement from Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor’s Gagetown speech, “The Afghan economy has tripled over the last five years.” This may be true, but only one domestic sector is growing: heroin. According to American government figures, last year Afghanistan produced more drugs than ever before.

According to The Washington Post, the country now supplies 90 per cent of the world’s heroin.

“The Taliban don’t want heroin production to be brought low,” said Veterans Affairs Minister Greg Thompson who took the stage after O’Connor. Thompson would do well to remember that the Taliban, while imposing fundamentalist religious law, were the ones who curtailed heroin production in the 1990s.

Western forces haven’t embarked on a Colombia-style aerial eradication campaign on heroin poppies for fear of crippling the Afghan economy and driving tens of thousands of average farmers towards the insurgency.

“It’s in our national interest to deal with terrorism where it is bred,” said Gordon O’Connor, as Canadian flags wave on tele-screens behind him.

The terrorists operating in Afghanistan were once part of this national interest: Osama Bin Laden and his mujahedeen were trained and armed by the CIA and its western proxies during the 1980s when they launched Jihad against Soviet occupiers.

“I believe the media has been emphasizing the negative stuff too much,” says Sapper MacCleary, as the public affairs officer nods in agreement.

“Families would like to see and hear more about the reconstruction,” said MacCleary.

Afghan families would also like to see more reconstruction.

But the money hasn’t been forthcoming to make this happen. According to the NDP’s Jack Layton, “For each $1 we’re spending in Afghanistan, only 10 cents goes to aid and reconstruction, while the other 90 cents goes into combat.”

“Five years after the overthrow of the Taliban, Kabul has only three hours of electricity per day and unsanitary and inadequate drinking water,” writes Christian Parenti, who reported from Afghanistan for The Nation in 2006.

Canada’s core strategy for subduing Afghanistan is based on the ‘three block war’: defence, diplomacy and development. However, according to NGOs working on the ground, the focus on defence is undermining the other aspects.

The fate of Doctors Without Borders (MSF), one of the world’s most respected humanitarian groups who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999, illustrates this situation perfectly. MSF assisted the people of Afghanistan from 1980 – 2004, until they were forced to pull out after five of their staff were murdered.

According to MSF, “The violence directed at humanitarian aid workers in Afghanistan comes amid consistent efforts by the US-led coalition to use humanitarian aid to build support for its military and political aims... The organization has also spoken out against the military’s attempt to usurp humanitarian aid.”

Towards the end of the Gagetown event, I slip outside for a smoke and a coffee and start chatting with a mother whose son is going to Kandahar next week.

“There are a lot of sides to it,” she says, as the snow pelts down. The woman, who didn’t want to be named, drove up from Nova Scotia to attend the event. She’s worried about her son, but “it’s his job. We can’t be all doctors and lawyers.” When asked about the occupation itself, she takes a classic unassuming tone.

“I’m really not educated enough to say if I am for or against it,” she says, “but I wouldn’t want foreign soldiers coming here and telling us what to do.”

Sapper Bruce MacCleary

Land Claims and the People of the Great River

hillarybain — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 13:25:21 +0000

An interview with Paula Lapierre of the Kichesipirini Algonquin Nation

Artist Paula LaPierre is a principal Sachem of the Kichesipirini Algonquin First Nation, based in Pembroke, Ontario, and serves as the First Nation’s elected representative.

LaPierre has been employed by the governments of Ontario and Canada in the delivery of social services, including employment services and the development of human resources.

LaPierre recently contributed to a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada research project with York University in Toronto, compiling and preserving oral interview information on family and lineage continuity in Aboriginal and Algonquin communities.

She has volunteered for positions on the boards of directors of Renfrew County Children’s Council, Pembroke and Area Association for Community Living and Renfrew County Children’s Mental Health Services.

LaPierre is the mother of three daughters and one son, and grandmother of five, and she is expecting two more grandchildren. In her spare time, LaPierre is writing a book on the history of Kichesipirini Algonquin First Nation and their land-base on Allumette Island.

Stephen Salaff: Paula, what is the current status of your struggle?

Paula LaPierre: Our Kichesipirini Algonquin First Nation seeks to gain full participation rights in negotiations on the Algonquin Land Claim. Representatives of Algonquin communities, Ontario and Canada are now meeting monthly to negotiate Algonquin historical and constitutional-based claims to ownership of the Ottawa River watershed in Ontario and its natural resources.

Our community name Kichesipirini means “People of the Great River.”

We are encouraged by recent statements from semi-official lawyers in Ontario that KAFN can soon anticipate a place in the Land Claim negotiation, short of a KAFN legal challenge.

We plan to act quickly to secure the substantial financial sums owed to us by the two governments for unjust denial of our participation rights until today. We will be investing these resources in community initiatives, establishment of downtown Pembroke offices and developing responsible environmental and sustainable development priorities for the Ottawa River watershed, including Pembroke.

We believe that a comparative cost analysis of the administrative expenses of running a “Reserve” versus an even larger community such as Pembroke will demonstrate that the “Reserve” system has contributed to the poverty and deprivation of registered “Indians.” At the negotiating table, we will seek improved new models of Algonquin and Aboriginal governance.

In your land claim you refer to Kichesipirini historical traditions and entitlement. Can you please describe your approach to documenting this history?

In addition to extensive genealogy and proven historical attachment to well-defined territories, I employ the “totemic” research methodology explained and illustrated by University of Toronto law professor Darlene Johnston in her recruited presentation “Great Lakes Aboriginal History in Cultural Context” to Day One of the Ipperwash Inquiry in April 2004. As an Aboriginal-origin legal scholar, Darlene argues that evidence of identity should not depend upon the language of the record-maker. Algonquin and Aboriginal history is recorded in identifying symbols that our ancestors marked on physical objects like trees, canoes, houses and clothing. When the Europeans arrived with ink and parchment, these marks were used by Algonquin and Aboriginal leaders whenever their “signature” was required. These identifying marks are called “totems,” or “dodems,” and my approach to our written history is totemic in essence.

I have learned through collection of oral histories on the continuity of family and lineage in Algonquin culture, and through written sources, including The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 1959, that the Kichesipirini Algonquins once flourished on present-day Allumette Island in the Ottawa River and in nearby areas on both sides of the river.

However, the Kichesipirini Algonquins were badly decimated in conflicts brought by the French and British. From my reading and apprehension of our history, I claim that the Kichesipirini Algonquin First Nation was the victim of European-originated genocide.

Our nation is currently regrouping and re-establishing its identity. My personal identity is the symbolic crane dodem.

Our path is hindered by dismissive procedures of governments under the federal Indian Act, who prefer to “recognize” and financially support an inland “Reserve” established before 1850.

Speaking of the Ipperwash Inquiry, Peter Rosenthal, counsel for the cousins of Aboriginal activist Dudley George, who was killed on an Ipperwash community burial ground, told me recently that the Inquiry Report may appear in early 2007 and will “increase public awareness of the situation of First Nations people and will include many recommendations designed to combat racism and to treat land claims with appropriate respect.”

That sounds helpful. I believe that the family and burial ground traditions of Dudley George’s community at Ipperwash are quite similar to ours. In her evidence to the Ipperwash Inquiry, Darlene Johnston recalled French explorer Champlain’s 1613 description of a Kichesipirini Algonquin cemetery on Tesouat’s Island (present-day Morrison’s Island) in the Ottawa River. Darlene also quoted Jesuit Father Baird in Volume One of Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: “[the Algonquin people] are very reluctant to be separated from the tombs of their ancestors; their graves and cemeteries are well-marked and well-tended.”

Paula LaPierre

The Freedom of the Press Barons

hillarybain — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 18:56:45 +0000

The media and the 2004 Haiti coup

In February 2004, the US, Canadian and French governments supported an illegal coup d’etat that overthrew Haiti’s democratically elected government of the Lavalas party, led by Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In late 2003, “civil society” groups--financed and supported through US and Canadian government-funded “democracy enhancement” programs--began calling for Aristide’s ouster. They were joined in early February 2004 by armed terror squads. In the pre-dawn hours of February 29, 2004, President Jean Bertrand Aristide, who had been elected with 92 per cent of the popular vote, was forcibly removed from Haiti on a US government airplane, while Canada’s Joint Task Force 2 secured the airport.

Critics of the 2004 coup d’etat in Haiti have argued that biased international media coverage played a role in justifying the coup and Canada’s involvement. However, in interviews that I conducted as part of a research trip to Haiti in late 2005 and early 2006, many of the leaders of the US, Canadian and French government-backed movement that toppled Haiti’s elected government went much further in their assessment of the media’s role of the media in the coup.

In the eyes of Guy Philippe, the US Special Forces-trained commander who led the armed movement against Aristide, the “international media, the media leaders helped us a lot. And thanks to them we were able to overthrow the dictator. And without them I don’t think that we could have.” Leaders of the aforementioned “civil society” groups also emphasized that the media were very important in their movement. The Association National des Medias Haitiens (ANMH), an association of the owners of the largest Haitian commercial media stations in Port-au-Prince, was formally a member of the anti-Aristide “civil society” coalition. In the lead-up to the coup, the ANMH, which meets weekly, acted as a space of “co-ordination, decision making, enabling the different commercial media outlets to forge agreements” and enabling a “very strong impact on public opinion,” according to one of its members. As the association’s vice president explained, “It was our own way as the media to combat the dictatorship”. She added that the ANMH media owners "made it our job to cover all the demonstrations" against Aristide.

Many anti-Aristide demonstration organizers report that they were able to advertise their events for free on these stations, and many of the 184-affiliated media organizations had a policy of refraining from identifying the anti-Aristide demonstrators’ numbers (particularly if they were not impressive). As one ANMH media owner explained, “we always support the pro-democracy demonstrations,” and “sometimes we advance fantastical numbers because we don’t want the public to draw the wrong conclusion.” He added that if a group has 10 people but they want you to say 2000 or 300,000, if you say 10…you can make enemies, you can damage the group and their credibility. It can create animosity, so it’s better not to talk about…if the media are interested in the greatest number of people coming out…they will talk about how [the demonstration] is just starting.

In this context, one anti-Aristide demonstration organizer reports that at one demonstration in January 2003, “we were 20,” but when they called in to the radio, “we said we were thousands.”

In contrast, many Haitian commercial media organizations did not cover the pro-Lavalas demonstrations that were taking place around the same time and which were, according to independent journalist Kevin Pina, often much larger in size. In fact, in the lead-up to the coup, they instituted an ANMH-wide ban barring Aristide, the president of Haiti, from speaking on the airwaves. When the ANMH stations did provide coverage of pro-Lavalas events, meaningful media access for Lavalas-affiliated organizers was completely precluded. The ANMH’s Radio Signal FM continued to report on Lavalas events; however, the goal of this coverage was, in the words of one of its journalists, “to be there at the chimere’s[an epithet commonly used to refer to Lavalas supporters as gangsters] demonstrations because [we] had to inform the population that there was a risk…Aristide’s partisans are known to be violent and we described their violence—that’s all.” ANMH journalists whom I interviewed reported heavy editorial pressures from their bosses.

Several Canadian and international newswire journalists told me they relied on the ANMH radio stations, particularly the association’s Radio Metropole station, around the time of the coup. One deputy bureau chief at a major international newswire agency stated that the agency’s staff reporter in Haiti “relied heavily on Radio… Metropole, [sweatshop owner and coup leader André] Apaid’s radio stations;” it made him “wonder if we could trust any of what we’d been reporting.” However, many international journalists, including Canadian journalists, were relying on this wire service in the lead-up to the coup.

Canadian journalists’ reliance on ANMH sources has a broader institutional dimension. The Haitian media owners’ association has a longstanding relationship with Reseau Liberté, an NGO whose staff includes CBC and Radio Canada journalists, and which is financed by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). According to CIDA, this Canadian tax-payer funded alliance between Canadian journalists and the anti-Aristide media owners cartel is sowing the seeds for the development of “professional journalism,” which is a cornerstone of the Canadian government’s promotion of “democracy” in Haiti. US and Canadian government-sponsored “democracy promotion” is generally acknowledged by critical researchers to promote a model of rule by elites, in which popular participation is curbed. In other words, these programs seek to export the very same undemocratic systems that are a hallmark of political life in the US and Canada. It could be said that Canada promotes the “professional journalism” needed for “democracy” by supporting the Haitian equivalents of Conrad Black.

Anne-Marie Issa

This Is What Media Looks Like

hillarybain — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 16:52:53 +0000

A positive agenda for media reform in the USA

At the 2005 National Conference for Media Reform, media reformers were preparing for what they called “the perfect storm.” It was a reference to then-upcoming crucial decisions facing the FCC and Congress about future of the media--specifically the future of the Internet. Activists at the 2005 conference expected the powerful telecommunications lobby to aggressively push these decisions to their favour, while the public (rallied by media reform groups and independent media) would continue to mobilize thousands of citizens to counter their influence. Conference organizer Robert McChesney called it “a moment of danger and a moment of spectacular opportunity.”

The perfect storm has arrived. It was in evidence with the explosive atmosphere of the 2007 National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR) that took place in Memphis, Tennessee from January 12 to 14. Media activists, educators, journalists, policymakers and concerned citizens from many countries--and nearly every state in the US--attended the conference, which aimed to move media issues to the forefront of public discourse in the United States.

Extensive growth and Celebration

Conference organizers estimate this year’s conference attendance at 3,500, up from 2,500 in 2005 and 1,700 in 2003. Organizers also estimated an increase of 3,000 more people watching major conference presentations online and many thousands more watched video coverage uploaded to Youtube. NCMR speakers included Rev. Jesse Jackson, Bill Moyers, Phil Donahue, Amy Goodman, Danny Glover, John Stauber, Helen Thomas, Jane Fonda, Geena Davis and many others.

The ranks of a growing media reform movement swelled recently with the fashionable issue of Net neutrality. Telecommunications companies have sought to gain the power to give preferential treatment to some internet sites over others. The ensuing battle galvanized many citizens who had previously not been involved in media issues, creating one of the most successful grassroots campaigns in recent US history.

Many conference speakers celebrated the recent success in securing Net neutrality for two years, while encouraging reformers to stay vigilant on the issue. As keynote speaker Bill Moyers put it, “What happened to radio, happened to television, and then it happened to cable. If we are not diligent, then it will happen to the Internet, [creating] a media plantation for the 21st century dominated by the same corporate and ideological forces that have controlled the media for the last 50 years.”

“This is the great gift of the digital revolution and you must never let them take it away from you,” said Moyers. The veteran broadcaster also took the opportunity to put his detractors on notice, announcing that he would be hosting a new news show on PBS in the coming months.

Other speakers celebrated the growth of key independent media outlets such as LinkTV, Democracy Now! and the up-and-coming The Real News. Touted as the “largest public media collaboration in the US,” Democracy Now! broadcasts on 500 radio and television stations, reaching an audience some estimate in the millions, surpassing many so-called “mainstream” outlets. The Real News expects to begin airing regular newscasts in March.

The demise of the Independent Press Association (IPA) served as a counterpoint to these success stories. The IPA advocated and provided resources for independent magazines. IPA’s collapse has hurt many independent magazines and was a factor in the recent closing of some magazines, most notably Clamor.

A Positive Agenda

One of the major themes of the conference was the move away from merely defending against media deregulation, towards advocating policy that will advance media democracy.

“After years of fighting to prevent further consolidation of media ownership and the dumbing down of our airwaves, the movement is ready to pursue reforms that will transform American media,” Robert McChesney, president and co-founder of Free Press, told attendees. The SavetheInternet.com Coalition (Founded by FreePress; the conference organizer) unveiled the “Internet Freedom Declaration of 2007” which sets forth its plan not only for winning Net Neutrality in Congress, but establishing faster, universal and affordable broadband for everyone. The declaration calls for “World Class Quality through Competition,” “An Open and Neutral Network,” and “Universal Affordable Access.” The declaration is hailed as seizing control of the terms of debate, shifting the agenda from defending against further media deregulation, to demanding a truly public media infrastructure.

Even before the declaration was unveiled, Senators Byron Dorgan (a Democrat from South Dakota) and Olympia Snowe (a Republican from Maine) announced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2007, which would protect Net neutrality.

Reformers energized

In addition to recent media reform success and the burgeoning positive agenda, conference attendees also railed against dismal coverage in the corporate media. Robert McChesney summarized this situation well in his address.

“We need to battle the ever-increasing commercialization of our media. We need to fight thinly disguised payola fuelling homogenized corporate music that leaves no room for local and independent artists; we need to fight video news releases masquerading as news, with PR agents pushing agendas that squeeze out real news coverage and local community concerns; we need to fight product placements turning news and entertainment shows alike into undisclosed commercials; and we need to fight rapacious advertisers preying on the unsuspecting minds of our young children,” McChesney told an energized crowd.

Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman put it more concisely, telling activists about the need to stop a media system that produces “the lies that cost lives.”

At the closing of the conference, support for media reform was higher than every before in recent memory, and the record number of attendees left energized to work for a democratic media system.

National Conference On Media Reform

“Our Piece in the Jigsaw Puzzle”

hillarybain — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 15:07:29 +0000

A Review of <em>Upping the Anti</em> no. 3

Upping the Anti…a journal of theory and action… was started as a project of the Canadian-based Autonomy and Solidarity Network. The publication positions itself within contemporary social justice struggles, serving as a catalyst and forum for debate. The journal draws upon Marxist and (if quite contentiously) anarchist frameworks, highlighting the importance of collective action, individual reflection and analysis in activist projects.

Canada, as a nation, is positioned throughout the journal as an agent of oppression in both domestic and international struggles, giving rise to questions of global solidarity, the localization of activist struggles in the Global North and the ways in which movements can inform each other. The journal’s commitment to “theory and action” is demonstrated through its focus on building conceptual tools, its poaching of analytic devices from a multiplicity of academic disciplines and its attention to questions of accessibility, language and ‘insider speech.’

Issue three’s editorial, entitled ‘Growing Pains,’ argues that anti-capitalists need to work within the anti-war movement to insist on broader analyses of imperialism. The authors contrast “united front” politics with the “pedagogy of confrontation.” Where united front politics enable a broadly endorsed action around generalized demands, the pedagogy of confrontation reacts directly, aggressively targeting agents of power. While anti-capitalist struggles of the late 1990s (Seattle) and early 2000s (Quebec City) were marked by a combination of these forms of protest, the anti-war movement has been dominated by the united front approach. In an insightful and provocative attempt to bridge these two modes of political resistance, the authors argue that both approaches share a concern with the question: “What is my responsibility to the Other?”

This question shifts the focus away from debates about the effects of tactics, towards a concern over motivations for acting. Regardless of where on the spectrum of tactical diversity one falls--be it aggressive confrontation (destroying military records), or generalized demands (marching for a ceasefire)--what happens if we start by addressing questions of why we care and what it is we want to transform or eradicate? This call for more thorough and complex analyses of the imperialist motivations for war in the current anti-war movement echoes concerns and dissent that has been lodged since mass demonstrations in 2003, as well as debates that occurred throughout the Cold War period. (See for example “An Open Letter To Activists Concerning Racism In The Anti-War Movement”)

Moving to issues of micro-resistance, AK Thompson offers a critical response to Richard Day’s book Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements. Thompson addresses the current state of anti-globalization movements, capturing the melancholic hope of “activists’ come-down” after large mobilizations in the late 1990s/early 2000s. Here, the writing stands out. Thompson’s lucid essay offers a poetic and highly critical engagement with Day’s genealogy of anarchist affinity. Day promotes a “politics of the here and now” in the Global North that is inspired by movements in the Global South. Entirely unconvinced, Thompson argues that this obscures political organizing in the Global South, such as that of the Piqueteros in Argentina. While Piqueteros began locally, the movement became broad-based, blockading streets, occupying ticket stations and government buildings to win back jobs, make demands regarding working conditions and shut down the flow of capital. Thompson says that Day’s proposal serves as a “salve for the wounded,” making false promises about the potential for anarchist resistance that mask the kinds of confrontation with failure that activists and organizations in the Global North need to address in ongoing projects.

More implicitly critical of anarchist affinities, Aijaz Ahmad offers an historical analysis of revolutions of the right and the left in his interview in Upping the Anti. Ahmad situates party politics in relations to both reformed and transformed class relations, taking us through struggles in Afghanistan, Iran, Venezuela and Bolivia. Interviewer Keerey’s questions at times seek reaction from Ahmad (“Is there a clash of civilizations?”) and prompt informative distinctions (between European social democracy and Indian parliamentary communism) that give room to the breadth and depth of Ahmad’s position that a revolution that shifts class power requires a party to meet the infrastructural, daily needs of the mobilized masses.

RJ Maccani’s article on the Zapatistas aims to be “more informational and inspirational than prescriptive.” Maccani also situates struggle in relation to the Global North, taking care to credit the thoughts of activists and theorists in Mexico by speaking openly and self-reflectively in what comes together as a dialogical (if overly zealous) exploration rather than a polemic. With this tone, it stands out from pieces in the issue. Maccani describes the Zapatista movement as blurring Western distinctions, re-imagining a homogenized class struggle as a movement of diverse marginalized populations whose Other Campaign reaches out to “workers, indigenous farmers, women, youth and queer folks.” Maccani details the Zapatista role over the past 12 years in facilitating and shaping global resistance to neoliberalism from the First Encuentro to the first World Social Forum in Brazil in 2001, addressing the Zapatista approach to elections as well as the role they have played and might further play in Latin American and the United States. Maccani discusses how the Zapatistas at times allied with larger NGOs and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), but ultimately, as outlined in the Sixth Encuentro released in 2005, they look toward “the humble and simple people who struggle” as the agents of social change, while continuing “to extend their ear and their solidarity” to the people of Latin America.

Moving to domestic contestations, this issue’s roundtable is on the Six Nations Land Reclamation struggle. Tom Keefer’s introduction to the conflict traces the Six Nations occupation of the Douglas Creek Estates from February 28, 2006 until fall 2006. Keefer explains how the dispute is over both the land itself and the sovereignty of the people of Six Nations (who function as an independent state through their constitution and international law). Here, he maps the struggle through encounters with the police, reactions from Caledonian residents who want Six Nations off the land and the various forms of solidarity and support networks that have emerged.

Issue three also features articles on activist burnout, Canadian abuses in Haiti, an interview with William Robinson and a book review section. Notable too is the striking cover-art by Vrinda Conroy, illustrating Marx’s statement that, ‘Capital is dead labour.’ This, along with the sleek, silver exterior set against more classical typesetting, makes the journal an aesthetically seductive read in public spaces.

Overall, Upping the Anti provides a critical, engaged and provocative read. Perhaps more importantly, it offers those of us actively engaged in struggles a tool for reflection and a feeling that we’re not alone in moments of impassioned “over-processing.” I think the publication might further its potential by risking more experimental forms of writing and loosening some of its Canadian reserve to embrace personal, specific accounts of struggles with solidarity work, academia, and how to remain hopeful.

Upping The Anti #3

Gaining Ground

hillarybain — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 20:43:51 +0000

"A monumental year" for the people of Six Nations

On January 1, 2007, the people of Six Nations arrived at their Council House, and walked inside.

The event did not make media headlines, but the significance of the day was not lost on those crowded into the long line of cars, bearing Iroquois Confederacy and Unity flags, that lead up to the Council House.

“Even before Canada declared itself a country, we had a meeting place down here for traditional governance,” says Janie Jamison, one of the spokespeople for Six Nations. For generations, Chiefs representing the Confederacy Council gathered in the Council House to make decisions by consensus, a process often called the oldest participatory democracy on Earth.

In 1924, however, Canada instated the Indian Act and the RCMP raided the Council House, removing the traditional chiefs and clan mothers. In its place the band council system was set up, acting as an arm of the Canadian government.

For Jamison, who has never seen herself as Canadian, destroying the traditional government and imposing a new one was Canada’s way of declaring that her culture, her nation, her people “no longer existed.”

“What people don’t understand is that we weren’t defeated at that point,” says Jamison. “Our traditional government went underground.” For decades it continued to operate, unrecognized by the federal government. In 1959 an attempt was made to take back the Council House, remove the band council and reinstate the traditional governance system. The RCMP moved in again. “Men, women and children were beaten,” says Jamison. “Our people weren’t successful then.”

But on New Year’s Day, “Eighty years after being told we don’t exist,” says Jamison, “here we are.”

The people of Six Nations made their existence difficult to ignore starting February 28, 2006, when a blockade set up near Caledonia, Ontario, halted the construction of a subdivision that many said was being built on unceded Six Nations’ territory. Almost a year later, the people of Six Nations are holding their ground and, according to spokesperson Hazel Hill, making “leaps and bounds” towards the reinstatement of their traditional government.

The first leap came shortly after April 20, 2006, when the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) performed a pre-dawn raid on the blockade site. The raid, meant to clear the site of protesters, backfired when hundreds of Six Nations’ people and their supporters peacefully took back the site within a few hours. The resolve and determination of those holding the site was strengthened, and media coverage of the raid ensured that people across the country and around the world knew about the standoff.

Shortly after the police raid, the Six Nations’ band council, which had previously refused to support the blockade (though it did support the land claim), endorsed the leadership of the Confederacy Chiefs.

The move was significant. “Eighty to eighty-five per cent of [Six Nations] people support the traditional government,” says Hill. For the first time, the leadership that had always been recognized by the people of Six Nations would be the leadership that government would be forced to negotiate with.

Another leap came when – after months of calling the standoff a provincial matter – the federal government came to the table. “It’s the first time the federal government has sat down with the traditional government,” Barbara MacDougal, Canada’s representative at negotiations, told the CBC in September 2006, adding that it was a “tremendous breakthrough.”

The breakthrough may have been spurred on by Six Nations representative Doreen Silversmith when she spoke to the United Nations’ Permanent Forum on Indigenous People in Geneva, Switzerland, on May 1, 2006. Referring to the raid, Silversmith said, “Canada has clearly portrayed the message that ‘might is right.’ When a situation of ownership is challenged, their laws allow them to continue to reap the benefits of our Land, destroy our environment, and clearly ignore the truth of the Onkwehonweh [First People] … who hold title to the Land.” At the end of her speech, she called on the international community to intervene at Six Nations. “The Onkwehonweh require your assistance, with respect to our Law, our Treaties, including the Two Row Wampum, and in effect, the Authority with respect to our Land, Our Law and Our People.”

“To have the confederacy recognized at the international level for the traditional government that they are, that they always were, and always will be,” was important says Jamison. She feels that recognition from the United Nations forced Canadians to appreciate the legitimacy of their struggle. “We aren’t making these things up,” she says. “We are a government of people, a nation of sovereignty.” This, she says, is something Canada is going to have to deal with.

Jamison has been living with the legacy of Canada’s denial for too long, she says. “My family has had too many things stolen from them.” And she’s not just talking about land. “When I was three years old, I was home alone with my mom and she shot herself–. She was a victim of residential school system,” says Jamison. Her aunt was one of the thousands of native women in Canada who have gone missing; her raped and brutalized body found later. Jamison’s sister was put in an orphanage at birth and remained there until she was two. “She could have ended up on a pig farm like so many others, but somehow she made it back to us,” she says. And finally, a year and a half ago, her 17-year-old son crashed his car while he was driving drunk. “We watched him die a slow death after his car rolled. He died last April.”

Her family isn’t just the victim of bad luck, says Jamison, but of deliberate government policies that have driven so many of her people to despair and death. “That’s why I made that decision to take that stand. No more. No more to make us become something that we never will be” she says. “We need to learn truth, acceptance and understanding to be able to coexist together.”

For Jamison, that starts with “Canada finally taking responsibility for what they’ve done and starting to pay back some of the money they owe our people.” These are “not handouts” emphasizes Jamison, but payments that are owed to the Six Nations from lease agreements that were never honoured. In terms of the piece of land at the heart of the dispute today: it’s not for sale.

“We’ve always said we’re not selling that land,” says Jamison.

This doesn’t mean that those living on the land now will have to move says Hill – though she notes that her people have been forced to relocate many times in their history. “But we’re not going to do it to them,” says Hill. “There’s a lot of that land that’s undeveloped, unceded. There’s a mechanism for returning that.”

“To me, it’s about continuing what we’ve started,” she says. “This isn’t just about Six Nations or that little piece of land. This is about sovereignty and the unity of the Original People of the land that have a right to live in harmony. To have clean air and green grass where you don’t have to live with landfills and concrete everywhere you look.”

We need homes, says Hill, “but not concrete jungles. There’s a difference.”

Six Nations Blockade

Peter MacKay in Israel and Palestine

dru — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 02:50:20 +0000

What the Foreign Minister did not see or discuss during his visit

GAZA CITY, GAZA -- Despite the impression cast by corporate news coverage, there is never anything like "calm" here in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The casualty count for 2006 released by Israeli human rights group B'Tselem reports that Israeli forces killed 660 Palestinians, while 17 Israeli civilians were killed, 13 of them in the West Bank [pdf]. The violence is often spectacular, as during the summer and fall siege operations in Gaza that killed more than 450 Palestinians under withering aerial bombardment, artillery barrages and two major ground invasions. But, as an unusually frank headline in the current edition of the Economist rightly stated, "It's the little things that make an occupation."

When Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay visited Israel this week, it was these "little things" that he missed--like the more than 530 fixed checkpoints and roadblocks identified in a joint UN-IDF count in the occupied West Bank. These obstacles make simple travel between neighbouring Palestinian villages often impossible, particularly when added to the more than 7,000 "flying checkpoints" that spring up at the whim of the Israeli army, anywhere and at anytime. As the Economist pointed out, "arbitrariness is one of the most crippling features of these rules."

The checkpoints and closure regime enforced by Israel is more than inconvenient; all too often, it is deadly. On Friday, as MacKay met with President Abbas in Amman, Israeli soldiers at the Hawara checkpoint outside of the West Bank city of Nablus refused the Israeli-issued permits of a patient returning from liver surgery in Palestinian East Jerusalem. The soldiers forced Tayseer Al Qaisi out of the car and ordered him to walk across the checkpoint. Al Qaisi, a father of eight, was weakened critically by the surgery and collapsed only a few hundred feet into the checkpoint. As reported by David Chater of Al Jazeera International, a Palestinian ambulance was prevented from entering the area for two hours. Mr Al Qaisi died while waiting for help.

In meetings with top Israeli cabinet ministers, Peter MacKay did not mention the more than 2,200 hours of strict curfew enforced by tanks and gunfire over the last two years, or the more than 5,400 Palestinians who were arrested or detained on Palestinian land last year [pdf]--including more than half of the elected Palestinian cabinet, the Speaker of Parliament and scores of local and municipal officials. He did not ask about the Palestinian prisoner who died in Israeli custody this week, or about the hunger strike being waged by political prisoners at Ansar III in the Negev desert in response to an attack by guards with police dogs and tear gas. While MacKay gave ample notice that he would be discussing the Israeli soldier captured on the Gaza border in June, he almost surely did not bring up the 11,000 political prisoners being held by Israel, some 400 of them children.

Nor did MacKay talk about the more than 30 incursions into Palestinian cities and villages by the Israeli army in the last eight days, or the 14 fisherman shot off the coast of Rafah last week as they fished in Palestinian waters. He didn't talk about the 15 Palestinians injured by Israeli forces in protests this week, or of 10-year-old schoolgirl, Abir Aramin, who died on January 20 as she left the grounds of her school in Anata. According to witnesses, Abir was pursued by Israeli forces as she tried to run awayand was shot in the head with a stun grenade or tear gas canister at close range.

It's doubtful that MacKay raised the issue of last week's bulldozing of the entire "unrecognized" Bedouin village of Twail Abu-Jarwal in the Negev Desert. The Bedouin were displaced because they were illegally "trespassing" on the land of the Jewish state, despite the fact that their presence in the desert long predates the State of Israel. They are being forcibly relocated to urban reservations, while the Negev is prepared for settlement by the Jewish National Fund. In the "only democracy in the Middle East," at least 75,000 Bedouin live in more than 40 villages that are officially "unrecognized," where, like in Palestinian areas, building permits are denied and demolition orders are routinely carried out. The unrecognized villages have no infrastructure--no sewage, no water or electricity, and often no health or education facilities.

While Arab and Bedouin homes are destroyed, Jewish ones are being built. On the same day that MacKay arrived in the region, the Olmert government announced that 44 new housing units would be built in the Maale Adumim settlement near Jerusalem, a settlement which effectively, if not absolutely, severs the West Bank in two. In fact, MacKay won't deal with the issue of settlements at all--not the 121 illegal settlements and 100 outposts in the West Bank, nor the scores of settlements in occupied-East Jerusalem, beyond acknowledging the massive infrastructure of permanent dispossession as a "hindrance." In fact, along with their Jewish-only roads and attendant security footprint, these settlements render a Palestinian state an impossibility. Rather than fortified colonies on illegally occupied land, the Canadian government calls the settlements "facts on the ground." Not to be outdone, Stephen Harper referred to the settlement blocs as "democratic realities" in addressing a Zionist advocacy group in early 2006 [pdf].

MacKay did not address the substance of the 700 km-long barrier of sniper towers, concrete walls and deadly electronic fences snaking deep into the West Bank (80 per cent of the wall is built on UN recognized Palestinian land) in order to annex the massive settlement blocs into Israel and isolate the Palestinians into enclaves. He did not visit the machinery of settlement and dispossession created by the wall, the checkpoints, the settlements, the settler-only roads. John Dugard, South African human rights lawyer and UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory told the UN General Assembly, "In other countries the process would be described as ethnic cleansing, but political correctness [forbids] such language where Israel was concerned."

MacKay certainly did not visit Gaza, where 1.5 million people (one million of whom are refugees) are sealed off from the rest of the world, teetering on the edge of total social and humanitarian collapse because of the cruel and comprehensive sanctions regime that he so proudly vanguards. MacKay boastfully declared "not a red cent to Hamas" when the movement won the Palestinian elections early last year, but failed to see what that means on the streets of Gaza. He did not visit the EU-funded power station that was destroyed by the Israeli Air Force in June, nor did he visit the refugee camps where a million of the world's poorest people have been condemned to endless months of crippling power shortages, random blackouts and Israeli-imposed shortages of cooking and heating gas.

He didn't see the rubble left from thousands of aerial bombing raids and tens of thousands of artillery shells. He didn't see the roads shredded by tanks, or the pile of gravel in Beit Hanun that used to be an 800-year-old mosque. He didn't see the graffiti on the demolished houses that reads "we will never forget." He didn't walk in the refugee camps as winter rains and sewage run in rivers down the unpaved streets, or visit the beachside picnic site where the Ghaliya family was massacred in front of the eyes of seven-year-old Huda, whose horrified tears were broadcast around the world. He didn't visit the ambulance workers at the Red Crescent, four of whom were killed by the Israeli army since June. Where does Canada stand on the killing of medical relief workers, Mr. MacKay?

And what about the home of the Atamna family in Beit Hanun, where blood still covers the walls and pieces of shrapnel are scattered on the floor and embedded in the cinderblock walls after an artillery barrage by the Israeli army? The IDF had used the family's home as a forward operating base in the November operation during which more than one hundred Palestinians were killed; the Atamna family was cordoned into one room and guarded by soldiers. The morning after the army left their home, the shells came. Within moments, 60 members of the extended family lay in the street, either maimed or dead. When asked what they would say to the Canadian government, defending Israel's atrocities as it does time and again, Iyad Atamna said: "We don't want your money or your political support, just come here for one day before you speak about justice."

Jon Elmer is in Gaza City.

Mother Tutoring Daughter, Beit Hanun

Fishing Boats, Gaza

Corruption, Impunity Pervade Afghan Government

dru — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 22:15:42 +0000

Police part of insecurity problem: victims, human rights groups

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN--Zohra Madadi represented everything the new Afghanistan should have been about. She was a young, intelligent woman who believed in democracy and dreamed of becoming a politician.

Then someone kidnapped the 16-year-old, stuck a gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger. Her dead body was dumped in the wilderness.

“She was a very open-minded girl and she studied very hard. She didn’t care about TV, she just listened to the news and then kept busy with her studies until 11 o’clock at night,” said her father, Abdul Hussain.

“She kept telling me: ‘Dad, don’t worry about the current situation in Afghanistan. One day it will be good here.’”

Hussain is not expecting justice because he knows that is not the way things work, not when the chief suspect is a leading member of the intelligence services.

“They blame the Taliban, but it’s actually the police doing these things,” he said. “I am not frightened. Because I have lost my daughter, life and death mean nothing to me.”

Zohra lived in the southern province of Ghazni and her corpse was dumped there last summer, on the road to Kandahar. She might have been murdered because her older sister is involved in local politics, or perhaps it was just because she caught the eye of the wrong man.

Whatever the reason, no one should be surprised that an official meant to enforce the law is accused of violating it in the cruellest of ways.

Sayed Hussain was arrested in Kabul for allegedly bringing teenage girls back to his house for sex. Rather than go through the legal system, the police simply beat him to death. Ten months after the event, his elderly-looking wife, Bibi Gul, cried as she remembered what happened.

“They said, ‘Let me tell you the bad news. Just go to the hospital and you will see the dead body of your husband.’ When I complained that he was alive when he was taken, they said I had signed a document that said he had a heart attack,” she recalled.

The Dominion has seen photographs of Sayed Hussain’s blackened corpse, along with other pictures showing the results of police abuse on a number of prisoners.

Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) recorded 290 cases of torture by the security forces between June 2005 and June 2006.

That is 200 less than the year before, but it is still more than enough to stoke the widespread public anger now fuelling the Taliban-led insurgency. Talk to people on the street and they will tell you they do not trust the police. They will tell you uniforms stand for violence, bribery and corruption.

“There is not a very strong rule of law and the government is not keen to follow the law. Also, in the criminal court there is not a very strong and clear code for prosecuting police action,” said Ahmad Zia Langari, a commissioner at AIHRC.

“The main problem in Afghanistan is the culture of impunity. The government is not powerful. When a governor, for example, has committed violence or he has been very corrupt, he is not prosecuted. The president just changes his position.”

A joint report released last month by the Pentagon and the US State Department was hugely critical of the American-trained Afghan police. It said the force was ‘far from adequate’ at carrying out even conventional responsibilities, with illiterate recruits and pervasive corruption cited as some of the key problems. The report also revealed that it is unclear how many officers are actually on duty.

Mohammed Yahya’s lower right leg looks like it has been ripped off by an animal, with bone sticking out from the bloody flesh above his severed foot. The photograph showing this wound was taken in 2005, soon after he refused to pay the police in Kabul a bribe.

“They came to me and said, ‘Stop working. We will go away and come back and if you want to work, give us some money.’ Then when they came back, they started beating four old people who were working with us,” the 19-year-old said.

“I told them if I had money I would not be working here, then they opened fire. I can’t remember anything from that moment on.”

An entire magazine from a Kalashnikov was emptied into Mohammed, with one bullet shot into his left leg and the rest blowing away the bottom half of his right leg. Although the policemen who attacked him have been jailed, his family still regret giving up their lives as refugees in Iran.

“Everyone in the government is proud of themselves, but who cares about the poor people?” lamented his mother, Zahra Azimi.

When The Dominion contacted the Ministry of Interior, it was referred to Colonel Haq Nawaz Haqyar. He acknowledged some police officers were still under the control of warlords and happy to commit human rights abuses. But he insisted he would never sanction torture.

“Whatever the chief of police says and does, his staff will do the same. Everything depends on him. The Taliban tortured me and it had a very bad effect on my mind,” he said.

“Once a week I talk to my staff about human rights and respecting the people. I tell them, ‘If you care about human rights, the people will co-operate because you will have left them with good memories. But if you torture them, they will never join you; they will join outsiders like the Taliban.’”

Last summer, the police in Ghazni beat Rahullah Amiri’s 22-year-old brother with their guns and some kind of cable.

“Two or three of his teeth were missing, his nose was broken and his back was as black as your coat,” said Rahullah.

“I can’t describe my feeling; it’s very hard. But let’s say at that time I hated the Karzai government and I decided to join the Taliban. When the Taliban were here everything was okay. At least when they arrested people, they had allegations against them. They were not arresting people without any reason. Now all the countries of the world are here -- the Americans are here, the UK is here -- how can this happen?

“Even now I don’t know why they beat him. The only thing I can think of is that it was because of our low culture and the culture of war. For three decades we have been at war.”

With the words flowing from him, he continued: “Please pass my voice, my words, onto your officials, your newspapers. Tell the world you are coming here, you are losing your young people [soldiers] in the fighting and it’s a waste because the government is nothing. Karzai has failed, everything has been lost. Five years have passed, there is no security here; there are a lot of explosions, a lot of suicide attacks.

“So what can the people do? My brother was beaten so I want to give up my life here, I want to sell my factory and leave this country because there is no security.

I am not a jihadi and that means I can’t get a high position in the government, so I want to leave the country. I want to tell the world Karzai has failed, it’s a waste of time.

“There is only one way for us now: leave the country or join the Taliban. I really feel like joining the Taliban and fighting the government.”

Mohammed Yahya

Protesters Denounce Illegal Occupation of Somalia

dru — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 22:28:12 +0000

Coalition of Concerned Somali-Canadians calls for immediate withdrawal of Ethiopian troops

On January 20, several hundred people protested in front of the US consulate in Toronto to demand the immediate withdrawal of Ethiopian troops from Somalia. “Somalia should not be a theatre of proxy wars and the hidden agenda of Ethiopia and its American allies,” said Shukria Dini, an organizer with the Coalition of Concerned Somali-Canadians (CCSC), the group that organized the demonstration. The CCSC emphasizes the illegality of the occupation, which violates the principle of state sovereignty enshrined in the UN Charter, as well as UN Resolution 1725, which forbids neighbouring states from deploying troops to Somalia. The occupation is also a violation of the African Union Charter. Dini emphasizes the gendered impact of the occupation, citing reports of Ethiopian soldiers raping women in Somali towns and villages.

CCSC demands an immediate end to US diplomatic and military support for the occupation, and a halt to the US bombing of Somalia. The coalition also demands that the Canadian government join the international community in denouncing this illegal aggression against Somalia.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has not made any official statements about Ethiopia's occupation of Somalia.

The rally included speakers from the Trade Unions Against the War, the Canadian Arab Federation, the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid, the Canadian Peace Alliance and the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War, as well as an anti-occupation coalition of people from one of Ethiopia’s largest ethnic groups, Oromos Against the Ethiopian Invasion of Somalia.

Acting with US support and funding, Ethiopia invaded Somalia in the last days of 2006, replacing the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) with a government led by US-backed warlords. The ICU, which took power in Somalia six months before the Ethiopian invasion, were credited with restoring stability for the first time since civil war tore the country apart in the early 1990s. The ICU had been criticized for imposing unpopular religious rules in the country, but remained popular for its stabilizing effect; during its brief reign, the Mogadishu airport had been opened for the first time in over a decade.

Former CNN and BBC producer Tim Lister reported that, "When the Islamic Courts were expelled, some residents of the capital were relieved that strict Sharia law, which had forbidden movies, televised soccer and the chewing of the narcotic qat leaf, was gone. But for most, apprehension was the dominant sentiment."

Last week, the Washington Post reported that US Special Forces had participated in the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia.

Immediately following the invasion, US-backed warlords staged a crackdown on media outlets, including one founded by Somali refugees who lived in Canada but who returned in 1999.

US planes bombed Somalia several times, claiming to target Islamic terrorists. A reported 70 people were killed by the air-strikes, with hundreds reported injured. Hundreds of families have fled the area of the bombings, fearing more attacks.

"The answer to terrorism is stable, democratic states, not rule by army warlords," Africa Action director Nii Akuetteh told the New York radio and television show Democracy Now! "Some of these people that the US has armed are actually terrorists, so even if the US is trying to protect its interests in the region, it is going about it in a terrible way... It seems to me it will make the situation much worse."

Speaking on the same program, Salim Lone, former spokesperson for the UN mission in Iraq, said that, "The US has been trying for many months now to try to undermine the Islamic Courts Union. They have been violating the existing UN resolutions since 1992, which forbid any armed assistance to Somalia... the US has been violating the arms embargo, over the UN, and using private contractors to funnel arms to the warlords."

In 1993, Canadian troops operating in Somalia tortured and killed Shidane Arone, a 16-year-old Somali, and tortured several other Somalis, many of them children. The ensuing scandal was known as the Somalia Affair, but a commission charged with investigating the incidents was shut down before it finished its work. No one was ever officially held responsible.

It is estimated that 100,000 Somalis now live in Canada.

Background:

» Dominion: Whose Trauma? The "Somalia Affair" and Canadian mythology

» Democracy Now: Conflict in Somalia

» World Politics Watch: Is Somalia Doomed to Repeat History?

Toronto: Protesting Proxy War in Somalia

Toronto: Protesting Proxy War in Somalia #3

Toronto: Protesting Proxy War in Somalia #2

Microcredit and Women's Poverty

dru — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 18:54:00 +0000

Granting this year's Nobel Peace Prize to microcredit guru Muhammad Yunus affirms neoliberalism.

DOLLARS & SENSE--The key to understanding why Grameen Bank founder and CEO Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize lies in the current fascination with individualistic myths of wealth and poverty. Many policy-makers believe that poverty is "simply" a problem of individual behavior. By rejecting the notion that poverty has structural causes, they deny the need for collective responses. In fact, according to this tough-love view, broad-based civic commitments to increase employment or provide income supports only make matters worse: helping the poor is pernicious because such aid undermines the incentive for hard work. This ideology is part and parcel of neoliberalism.

For neoliberals the solution to poverty is getting the poor to work harder, get educated, have fewer children, and act more responsibly. Markets reward those who help themselves, and women, who comprise the vast majority of microcredit borrowers, are no exception. Neoliberals champion the Grameen Bank and similar efforts precisely because microcredit programs do not change the structural conditions of globalization—such as loss of land rights, privatization of essential public services, or cutbacks in health and education spending—that reproduce poverty among women in developing nations.

What exactly is microcredit? Yunus, a Bangladeshi banker and economist, pioneered the idea of setting up a bank to make loans to the "poorest of the poor." The term "microcredit" reflects the very small size of the loans, often less than $100. Recognizing that the lack of collateral was often a barrier to borrowing by the poor, Yunus founded the Grameen Bank in the 1970s to make loans in areas of severe rural poverty where there were often no alternatives to what we would call loan sharks.

His solution to these problems was twofold. First, Grameen Bank would hire agents to travel the countryside on a regular schedule, making loans and collecting loan repayments. Second, only women belonging to Grameen's "loan circles" would be eligible for loans. If one woman in a loan circle did not meet her obligations, the others in the circle would either be ineligible for future loans or be held responsible for repayment of her loan. In this way the collective liability of the group served as collateral.

The Grameen Bank toasts its successes: not only do loan repayment rates approach 95%, the poor, empowered by their investments, are not dependent on "handouts." Microcredit advocates see these programs as a solution to poverty because poor women can generate income by using the borrowed funds to start small-scale enterprises, often homebased handicraft production. But these enterprises are almost all in the informal sector, which is fiercely competitive and typically unregulated, in other words, outside the range of any laws that protect workers or ensure their rights. Not surprisingly, women comprise the majority of workers in the informal economy and are heavily represented at the bottom of its already-low income scale.

Women and men have different experiences with work and entrepreneurship because a gender division of labor in most cultures assigns men to paid work outside the home and women to unpaid labor in the home. Consequently, women's paid work is constrained by domestic responsibilities. They either work part time, or they combine paid and unpaid work by working at home. Microcredit encourages women to work at home doing piecework: sewing garments, weaving rugs, assembling toys and electronic components. Home workers—mostly women and children—often work long hours for very poor pay in hazardous conditions, with no legal protections. As progressive journalist Gina Neff has noted, encouraging the growth of the informal sector sounds like advice from one of Dickens' more objectionable characters.

Why then do national governments and international organizations promote microcredit, thereby encouraging women's work in the informal sector? As an antipoverty program, microcredit fits nicely with the prevailing ideology that defines poverty as an individual problem and that shifts responsibility for addressing it away from government policy-makers and multilateral bank managers onto the backs of poor women.

Microcredit programs do nothing to change the structural conditions that create poverty. But microcredit has been a success for the many banks that have adopted it. Of course, lending to the poor has long been a lucrative enterprise. Pawnshops, finance companies, payday loan operations, and loan sharks charge high interest rates precisely because poor people are often desperate for cash and lack access to formal credit networks. According to Sheryl Nance-Nash, a correspondent for Women's eNews, "the interest rates on microfinance vary between 25% to 50%." She notes that these rates "are much lower than informal money lenders, where rates may exceed 10% per month." It is important for the poor to have access to credit on relatively reasonable terms. Still, microcredit lenders are reaping the rewards of extraordinarily high repayment rates on loans that are still at somewhat above-market interest rates.

Anecdotal accounts can easily overstate the concrete gains to borrowers from microcredit. For example, widely cited research by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) reports that "Women in particular face significant barriers to achieving sustained increases in income and improving their status, and require complementary support in other areas, such as training, marketing, literacy, social mobilization, and other financial services (e.g., consumption loans, savings)." The report goes on to conclude that most borrowers realize only very small gains, and that the poorest borrowers benefit the least. CIDA also found little relationship between loan repayment and business success.

However large or small their income gains, poor women are widely believed to find empowerment in access to microcredit loans. According to the World Bank, for instance, microcredit empowers women by giving them more control over household assets and resources, more autonomy and decision-making power, and greater access to participation in public life. This defense of microcredit stands or falls with individual success stories featuring women using their loans to start some sort of small-scale enterprise, perhaps renting a stall in the local market or buying a sewing machine to assemble piece goods. There is no doubt that when they succeed, women and their families are better off than they were before they became micro-debtors.

But the evidence on microcredit and women's empowerment is ambiguous. Access to credit is not the sole determinant of women's power and autonomy. Credit may, for example, increase women's dual burden of market and household labor. It may also increase conflict within the household if men, rather than women, control how loan moneys are used. Moreover, the group pressure over repayment in Grameen's loan circles can just as easily create conflict among women as build solidarity.

Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize because his approach to banking reinforces the neoliberal view that individual behavior is the source of poverty and the neoliberal agenda of restricting state aid to the most vulnerable when and where the need for government assistance is most acute. Progressives working in poor communities around the world disagree. They argue that poverty is structural, so the solutions to poverty must focus not on adjusting the conditions of individuals but on building structures of inclusion. Expanding the state sector to provide the rudiments of a working social infrastructure is, therefore, a far more effective way to help women escape or avoid poverty. Do the activities of the Grameen Bank and other micro-lenders romanticize individual struggles to escape poverty? Yes. Do these programs help some women "pull themselves up by the bootstraps"? Yes. Will micro-enterprises in the informal sector contribute to ending world poverty? Not a chance.

Susan F. Feiner is professor of economics and women's studies at the University of Southern Maine. Drucilla K. Barker is professor of economics and women's studies at Hollins University. They are co-authors of Liberating Economics: Feminist Perspectives on Families, Work, and Globalization (University of Michigan Press, 2004).

SOURCES: Grameen Bank, grameen-info.org; "Informal Economy: Formalizing the Hidden Potential and Raising Standards," ILO Global Employment Forum (Nov. 2001), www-ilo-mirror. cornell.edu/public/english/employment/geforum/ informal.htm; Jean L. Pyle, "Sex, Maids, and Export Processing," World Bank, Engendering Development; Engendering Development Through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources, and Voice (Oxford University Press, 2001); Naila Kabeer, "Conflicts Over Credit: Re-Evaluating the Empowerment Potential of Loans to Women in Rural Bangladesh," World Development 29 (2001); Norman MacIsaac, "The Role of Microcredit in Poverty Reduction and Promoting Gender Equity," South Asia Partnership Canada, Strategic Policy and Planning Division, Asia Branch Canada International Development Agency (June, 1997), www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/index-e.htm.

Microcredit Celebration in Vanuatu

Microcredit Conference in Luxembourg

"We are not a 'Special Interest' Group"

hillarybain — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 15:58:51 +0000

Feminist organizations nationwide are protesting the latest in a series of attacks on Status of Women Canada (SWC).

On October 11, the Dominion reported that the Conservative government imposed a 40 per cent reduction of SWC's operating budget over two years, as well as new restrictions on the agency's grant program. In what might be described as an effort to de-politicize SWC, the government has forbidden the agency from funding groups that undertake advocacy or lobbying for women's rights. It has also removed the word "equality" from the agency's mandate.

Following these cuts and restrictions, on November 28, Bev Oda, the minister responsible for SWC, announced the closure of 12 of 16 SWC regional offices, to take effect on March 31, 2007. Almost half of SWC's employees -- 61 of 131 -- will lose their jobs. The four remaining regional offices (in Edmonton, Montréal, Moncton and Ottawa) will be required to provide services to expanded -- critics say unmanageable -- jurisdictions. In the most extreme case, the Edmonton office will serve women and women's groups across British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon, in addition to those based in Alberta. This is an area of over 4.7 million square kilometres, constituting almost half -- 47 per cent -- of the total territory occupied by Canada. Despite the foreseeable increased workload, there are no plans at present to hire additional personnel to staff the Edmonton office, according to a SWC official. The Moncton office will serve Atlantic Canada; the Montréal office will serve Québec and Nunavut; and the Ottawa office will serve Ontario and national feminist and women's organizations. Justifying this decision, Oda maintained that the regional office closures will help the SWC remain within its severely restricted operating budget, saving approximately $700,000 in rent and utility bills.

Implying that the SWC is a "special interest" agency, Oda told the CBC that "[we] don't need to separate the men from the women in this country." However, on January 18, 2006, during his campaign, Stephen Harper vowed, if elected, to "take concrete and immediate measures [...] to ensure that Canada fully upholds its commitments to women in Canada." Now, the Conservative government is claiming that downsizing SWC will actually better serve the goal of achieving women's equality. As quoted in the Ottawa Citizen, Oda suggested that running a separate agency devoted to researching and mobilizing to improve conditions facing women's issues actually "weakens the ability of the equality of women to be instilled throughout the government departments, agencies, and offices."

According to Joyce Arthur of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, Oda's claim that the SWC "ghettoizes" the task of achieving women's equality "reveals a fundamental misunderstanding" of the agency's mandate. Arthur, who is working on the B.C. Campaign for Women's Equality and Human Rights in Canada, explains that the SWC was set up to "help women mount campaigns and do research on particular issues affecting women, so that they can then take this work and lobby the relevant government ministry or department to make changes that will benefit women. The point of SWC funding is to help ensure that [the] government examines [its] policies and legislation through a gender lens. The SWC [is] a conduit that allows women access to government in general and to lobby for women's equality at all levels."

Opposition MPs have joined feminist groups and labour unions in calling for Oda's resignation, who is responsible for what Liberal MP Maria Minna (Beaches--East York) calls "the single largest attack on women's services in the history of this country." At the same time, Shauna Paull cautions against "personalizing these cuts to SWC to [Oda]." Paull, a feminist organizer active in the B.C. Campaign, argues that the cuts, restrictions and office closures are part of a systematic, "ideological demolition of [women's] equality." Arthur agrees: "[The] government has effectively removed women's Charter right to equality, by removing the mechanisms for achieving it."

Arthur sees restricting the role of SWC to "service provision" (barring it from funding "political" groups, research or campaigns) as an effort to de-politicize gendered oppression. "It simply doesn't make sense to restrict SWC funding to provide services directly to women, since that does nothing to address the systemic inequality that causes the need for those services to begin with," she says. "For example, women's groups fighting against domestic abuse combine their efforts at both helping individual abused women at transition houses and lobbying the government on ways to address and reduce domestic abuse in general. The two activities cannot be separated." Barb Byers, executive Vice-President of the Canadian Labour Congress, quoted by CTV.ca, echoes this view: "It's not good enough for this government to say we'll give you more money for shelters but we won't let you question why women are there in the first place."

Feminist and women's organizations have not stood by silently as Harper's Conservatives "turn their backs on [...] women in Canada," as Arthur puts it. No sooner had the cuts been first an-nounced in mid-October, Pam Kapoor and Audra Williams, together with a network of feminist contributors, launched StatusReport.ca, a website serving as a centralized source of information and calls for action, which has reportedly received over 40,000 "hits" since its inception.

On November 13, an ad-hoc coalition of women's and feminist organizations, led by the Feminist Alliance for International Action (FAFIA), began the "One-Month Campaign for Women's Equality and Human Rights." In addition to the cuts and restrictions to SWC, the campaign opposed the cancellation of the Court Challenges Program; the government's refusal to adopt improved pay equity legislation; and the cancellation of a pan-Canadian childcare program, effecting cuts of $1.2 billion annually to provinces and territories for childcare services.

Demonstrations against the cuts, restrictions and office closures have been held across Canada. On December 10, over 1,000 demonstrators rallied in support of the SWC and women's equality in Ottawa, marking the 25th anniversary of Canada's ratification of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). (See a video-reportage of the demonstration, which received little mainstream press coverage, here).

On this day, the National Association of Women and the Law presented a declaration, signed by 430 feminist and women's organizations and by thousands of individuals, calling on the Harper government to renew Canada's commitment to CEDAW, specifically "by improving the living conditions and respecting the human rights of Aboriginal women, effectively addressing violence against women and women’s poverty, improving maternity and parental benefits, funding civil legal aid, changing immigration laws to respect the rights of live-in caregivers and ensuring a more equitable participation of women in the political institutions."

Elsewhere, 300 people from throughout New Brunswick converged on Moncton for a rally, while in the Northwest Territories, an "old-fashioned bra-burning" was held in front of the federal building in Yellowknife. "Mourners" gathered at a "funeral for women's equality” in Winnipeg on December 8, and in Saskatoon, Iskwewuk E-wichiwitochik (Women Walking Together) held a discussion on the impact of the cuts on First Nations women's lives.

Protesting Cuts to Status of Women Canada

Marching in Ottawa to Protest Cuts to SWC

Confessions of a Spam Crafter

hillarybain — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 15:40:22 +0000

A designer of "junk mail" reflects on the 2006 Art Center Design Conference

In her opening remarks at the 2006 Art Center Design Conference "Radical Craft," Chee Pearlman dissed my job. The esteemed former editor of I.D. magazine (and the conference's Guest Program Director) compared "junk mail" -- form letters that try to look like personal correspondence -- to a hand-written thank you note from her niece, disparaging the former as "fake craft." While it's hardly a fair comparison -- pitting a corporation against a relative -- the distinction immediately disappointed me. I make my living designing "junk mail" and "spam." The conference was only minutes old and already I had learned that my craft was "fake."

Of course, Pearlman's comment was not the only indication that perhaps I didn't belong there. The Art Center Design Conference was a very expensive (standard conference fee: $1,250), corporate-sponsored event that lured an audience with luminaries such as fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, Apple product designer Johnny Ive, Pulitzer-nominated author Dave Eggers and graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister. The venue was accordingly showy, even a little Las Vegas. Walking into the main session hall, you passed through a rainbow-coloured curtain of mist glowing with the GE logo. Steelcase supplied all of the conference seating -- rows and rows of brand-new, high-tech task chairs and stylish leather armchairs -- and the souvenir conference tote was a full-size messenger bag from Timbuk2.

It was odd then, in a venue so pumped up on high-tech and corporate endorphins, that the conference theme was a re-valuing of "craft," a word usually reserved for basket-weaving and needlepoint. Keynote speaker and The New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik described craft as an almost Zen-like, spiritual undertaking: something learned by doing, intelligent without being intellectual. Jane Olson of Human Rights Watch related how knitting enabled her to find common ground with traumatized Bosnian refugees while providing them with a means of income long after her visit was over. Martin Fisher of non-profit KickStart discussed how the company's portable, human-powered irrigation pump is helping sub-Saharan African farmers out of poverty. Radical craft indeed, these practices are actually changing people's lives in substantive ways.

As much as I was in awe of the parade of spacecraft designers, oceanographers, inventors and Academy-award-winning filmmakers who rounded out the first day, I couldn't help but wonder how any of this marvelous stuff applied to my own design practice. With the possible exception of advertising (which is much sexier), direct marketing is the most bald-faced and disposable form of marketing. A direct communication from the corporation to the consumer, it's one step up from telemarketing and low on the totem pole of design disciplines. If "radical craft" is, as it was defined throughout the conference, the act of creating something that solves a problem for someone else, then direct marketing is its ultimate perversion. Not only does it substitute a corporation for a person, but it inverts the relationship so that the only problem it solves is the company's need to make a buck. By the end of the first day, I felt like a shallow poser, a huckster, a hack. Yes, design could change the world, but by that standard, I could hardly call myself a designer.

Thankfully, the second day of the conference included some less weighty presentations: Claudy Jongstra's incredible felt creations, made from the wool of her flock of 200 rare sheep; advertising guru Jeff Goodby's impressive reel of hilarious television spots; Isaac Mizrahi working the room like a manic talk show host and the achingly lovely everyday poetry of former United States Poet Laureate Billy Collins. At times, the conference's reach was so broad, that it risked turning into an overly grandiose survey of all of human creation, without respect for important differences. For example, it seemed disrespectful to frame both the subsistence needs of poor farmers and the haute couture demands of rich socialites as "design problems." Some projects are clearly more vital and necessary than others; but some hierarchies, such as those between the disciplines, could use debunking. Is there necessarily more craft in a poem than in a piece of felt?

It was this idea -- that every kind of design has its own “craft"; that there is artistry in even the lowliest of tasks -- that redeemed my conference experience. I was even inspired to stop joking that I design "spam." Direct marketing is actually the most customizable one-on-one form of mass communication. It only seems "fake" when it hasn't been delivered to the right person. And it doesn't have to be ugly or cheap-looking. Like anything else, it can be "crafted" to show care and consideration. The best design advice came from Jonathan Ive talking about his own practice: "We focus on a small amount of stuff and care about the few things that we do." It's easy to lose that focus in the daily flurry of deadlines, difficult clients and office politics. The conference helped me see that underneath all of the details, my obligation as a designer is to get down to the root of the problem, in order to see it anew. Now that's radical.

This article originally appeared in the Summer-Fall, 2006 issue of CMYK. Reprinted with permission.

Junk Mail

Can junk mail be art?