The Dominion - Prairies

Hundreds Protest Block's Message

Tim McSorley — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 09:00:00 +0000

Saskatoon rallies in response to MP Kelly Block's newsletter boasting of cuts to health care for refugee claimants

SASKATOON—Hundreds of Saskatoonians gathered at Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar MP Kelly Block's office in the city on Saturday, protesting her latest newsletter about cuts to health care for refugee claimants. People have called the item anti-immigrant, xenophobic and racist.

Block's newsletter, entitled, "Ending Unfair Benefits for Refugee Claimants," states, "New arrivals to Canada have received dental and vision care paid by your tax dollars. They've had free prescriptions. Not Anymore."

Some see the message as an early attack on medicare and as an attempt to divide Canadians. Others see it as an attack on Canada's long history of generosity and caring for those coming to the country as refugees.

Dr Ryan Meili, Family Doctor at the WestSide Community Clinic, spoke of caring for refugees and recognizing their special needs as well as requirements for general health care. Meili called Block's publication a "divisive and inflammatory action" through which she was attempting to divide Canadians. He called on the federal Conservative Party to "stop abdicating its responsibilities for health care."

On June 30, 2012, the Conservative government implemented changes to the Interim Federal Health Program. The new directives mean that refugee claimants waiting on appeals, or from a list that the federal government deems safe, no longer have access to important medical services, ranging from insulin for diabetes to treatment after heart attacks.

While the government scaled back some of its proposed cuts on the eve of implementing the changes, advocates for the program have said that the services which continue to be covered account for only two per cent of the former budget.

Speaking at Saturday's rally, Meili also said the western provinces, other than Saskatchewan, have agreed to cover the costs of treating refugee claimants. He said Saskatchewan people should encourage their provincial government to take on the care of the refugee claimants as well.

Meili lives in Saskatoon's Riversdale neighbourhood, which is part of Block's constituency. He is running for the leadership of the Saskatchewan New Democratic Party.

Meili's wife, Dr. Mahili Brindamour-Meili, also spoke. She is a pediatric resident studying at the University of Saskatchewan and working in the Saskatoon Health Region. She is also Co-Chair of the Immigrant and Refugee Health Committee at the University of Saskatchewan.

The committee organized a protest last week which drew doctors, nurses, other health care providers and students. It was called the "59 cent protest" because the money that it cost to provide care for refugee claimants is about 59 cents per taxpayer per year. She said refugee claimants, like all people, "need acceptance and compassion," particularly because of the violence many have experienced.

Brindamour-Meili told the story of a caller who attacked her for supporting the needs of refugees. She added that in the end, the caller told Brindamour-Meili she should go back to where she came from.

Mark Bigland-Pritchard, a member of a Mennonite congregation, spoke on behalf of his daughter, a university student in Winnipeg. Reading from her letter, Bigland-Pritchard called the statements contained in Block’s newsletter "unhelpful, dishonest and biased."

A psychologist with the Saskatoon Community Clinic, Dr. Nayyar Javed, described Block as "taking up where Jim Pankew left off." Pankew is a former Reform Party Member of Parliament. He is best remembered as having made a number of very racist remarks in conversation and writings. Javed went on to say that Block was "not elected to spread hatred."

Other speakers included representatives of the legal community and labour.

The event, which attracted approximately 500 people, took place under the watchful eye of Saskatoon Police. The crowd was so large that on several occassions it spilled onto the street in front of Block's office.

Rob is a retired career journalist based in Saskatoon. He has worked in both electronic and print news. This article was originally published on the Media Co-op.

We Disagree full file

Stopping Nuclear Waste in its Tracks

Sandra — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 10:10:27 +0000

Communities, Indigenous organizations pass resolutions against transportation and storage of nuclear waste in Saskatchewan

BEAUVAL, SK—Three places in northern Saskatchewan may be on the map in Canada's search for a high-level radioactive waste dump site, but the spent nuclear fuel bundles may be stopped in their tracks. Communities and Indigenous organizations along potential transport routes and beyond have been passing resolutions against nuclear waste.

The Northern Village of Pinehouse, English River First Nation and the town of Creighton are all currently in the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) site selection process to find a "willing host community" for a deep geological repository to house the waste piling up at nuclear reactors in Quebec, New Brunswick and especially Ontario.

Canoe Lake First Nation, the town of La Loche, trappers from the Fur Block near Beauval, the Métis Nation of Saskatchewan, the Saskatchewan Aboriginal Women's Circle Corporation (SAWCC) and the Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC) have all formally opposed the transportation and storage of nuclear waste in Saskatchewan. Others criticize NWMO for refusing to deal with site selection process on a regional basis, even though a decision would affect much more than a single community.

Emil Bell has been educating Band and town councilors about the Nuclear Waste Management Organization process and the dangers of nuclear waste. A Cree grassroots activist, he lives in Fire Lake, outside of the Canoe Lake First Nation reserve.

"Canoe Lake is against this whole thing," Bell told the Media Co-op. Located in northwestern Saskatchewan, east of the Cold Lake Air Weapons Range and tar sands exploitation, the First Nation passed a Band Council Resolution against the transportation and storage of nuclear waste.

"I was the one that was going around, getting all the signatures of the councilors," said Bell. "They are dead set against the nuclear dump. It goes against our Treaty rights, our inherent rights. If we get a major disaster wherever they put the nuclear dump, our waterways are, you know, shot. Animal life, the plant life, are going to be drastically affected."

Bell has been traveling up and down the province, meeting with other First Nations, municipal authorities and groups and urging them to take an official stance against the transportation and storage of nuclear waste. "There's a few of us that are going around, doing a lot of work, and we do it out of our own pocket," he said.

But northern activists are not the only ones speaking about nuclear waste in the region. "The nuclear industry people, NWMO, have a lot of money. They're also going around, trying to convince people to, you know, accept the nuclear dump [with] the promise of a lot of money, the promise of jobs...they keep telling people 'oh yeah, it's safe, it's safe,'" Bell told the Media Co-op.

The predominantly Métis community of Île-à-la-Crosse has yet to take an official position on nuclear waste transportation and storage and will likely revisit the issue after the October 24 municipal elections. Île-à-la-Crosse Mayor Duane Favel says he and others requested that NWMO communicate and deal with municipalities in northwestern Saskatchewan collectively because a nuclear waste repository in the area would impact the entire region.

"Our proposal was, as Northwest municipalities, that we try and get NWMO to deal with us as a region, as the Northwest municipalities. We drafted up a letter [and] we tried to get the signature of every mayor—I believe there's 17 municipalities on the northwest side—[so] that NWMO would have to deal with us collectively, if they were, you know, to talk about nuclear waste within their region," Favel told the Media Co-op in an interview in the Île-à-la-Crosse village office.

"However, that got kind of sidetracked," he said. "They started meeting with municipalities individually and convinced, you know, one or two municipalities to agree to—for NWMO to go into their communities and start this process that they talk about."

Many mayors did sign the letter and a copy was given to the Northwest municipalities and to NWMO. But NWMO declined to pursue the regional approach requested by the municipalities.

"They didn't want to deal with that as a collective organization. They wanted to deal with specific municipalities. And I believe some of the reasoning was, you know, the areas that they were looking for, that would be good for this deposit of nuclear waste, wasn't throughout this region," said Favel. "However, that was not our argument. Our argument was if nuclear waste was to be stored in the northwest side of Saskatchewan, that they should be dealing with us collectively and we should vote as a region whether or not we want nuclear waste stored within this area."

The communication between Île-à-la-Crosse and NWMO is currently non-existent, Favel told the Media Co-op.

"I'm still kind of baffled in terms of why they didn't use that approach and actually consult with everybody within the region and try to, I guess at least in the beginning, have a good working relationship in terms of addressing the issue with the people of Northwest Saskatchewan," he said. "I thought it was a completely disrespectful approach."

While Île-à-la-Crosse and other municipalities consider whether to take an official position on the issue, some locals of the Métis Nation of Saskatchewan have been actively organizing opposition to the transportation and storage of nuclear waste. Bryan Lee and other members of the Fish Lake Métis local began looking into the nuclear waste storage issue a few years ago, when they heard locations in northern Saskatchewan were under consideration.

"Once we heard this, then we started looking into the whole issue ourselves because we had heard some things in [the] press, that the NWMO was looking for a 'willing host community' in northern Saskatchewan," Lee told the Media Co-op. "We brought forward a motion within our local to take a position...to oppose the storage and transportation of high-level nuclear waste."

After passing at the Fish Lake Métis local, the resolution was taken to Western Region 2, where it passed as well. A motion for the resolution to be adopted at the provincial level by the Métis Nation of Saskatchewan did not succeed in 2010, but Lee presented it again in 2011.

"I reformatted the resolution and I brought it forward to the annual general assembly November 5, 2011. And in the presentation, we were successful in getting a two thirds majority approval at the assembly, for the Métis Nation of Saskatchewan to take the official position to oppose the storage and transportation of high-level nuclear waste anywhere in Saskatchewan," said Lee.

The Saskatchewan Aboriginal Women's Circle Corporation of Saskatchewan also passed a resolution last year, opposing the transportation and storage of nuclear waste in Saskatchewan. The resolution was then adopted by the Native Women's Association of Canada at its annual general assembly held in Saskatoon in August 2012.

The town of La Loche and the trappers' organization from a Fur Block in the Beauval area have also passed similar resolutions. More communities and organizations are currently considering taking an official stance against nuclear waste in the province.

NWMO is moving forward in its search and Pinehouse, English River First Nation and Creighton are still under consideration. But with all the resolutions against nuclear waste transportation, whether the high-level radioactive waste would ever make it to a storage site in northern Saskatchewan without roadblocks along the way is beginning to look increasingly unlikely.

Sandra Cuffe is a freelance journalist and member of the Vancouver Media Co-op. She recently returned to the west coast after eight weeks in Saskatchewan. This article was originally published on the Media Co-op.

Saskatchewan Nuclear Dump

Intimidation, Irregularities Cloud Pinehouse Election

Tim McSorley — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 13:24:54 +0000

Northern Saskatchewan residents report infractions, climate of fear in municipal election process

PINEHOUSE, SK—Something is rotten in the State of Denmark, according to people in the northern village of Pinehouse, Saskatchewan. Residents contacted provincial officials to report irregularities and acts of intimidation at last week's advance poll in an effort to ensure a free and fair municipal election today.

Longtime Pinehouse resident John Smerek sent a letter to provincial government officials reporting irregularities in the advance poll held September 12. In the letter sent Monday via email to Minister of Government Relations Jim Reiter and carbon copied to several other provincial authorities, Smerek highlighted process infractions such as the failure to abide by new voter ID requirements and acts of intimidation.

"I would like to see the people here have a free and democratic opportunity to vote without the fear or intimidation or false promises offered to them by the individuals that are sent out or hired by our leaders to intimidate the democratic process," Smerek told the Media Co-op in an interview in Pinehouse.

One of the individuals in question is Vince Natomagan, who acts as a community liaison to the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO). He has an office in the village office building and works closely with the Pinehouse council.

Along with two other locations in northern Saskatchewan and more than a dozen in Ontario, Pinehouse is currently part of NWMO's search for a "willing host community" for Canada's high-level radioactive waste. In 2010, Pinehouse Mayor Mike Natomagan sent NWMO an Expression of Interest, initiating the community's inclusion in the site selection process for a deep geological repository for the used nuclear fuel bundles currently stored onsite at nuclear reactors in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick.

Five hundred kilometres north of Saskatoon, the northern village of Pinehouse is a predominantly Cree-speaking Metis community of approximately 1,000 people near the boundary between the Canadian Shield and Boreal Plain regions. It used to be the end of the road. Trucks now travel another 220 kilometres past the turnoff to the community up to the Key Lake uranium mill. Operated by Saskatoon-based uranium mining giant Cameco, the mill processes ore from the McArthur River uranium mine 80 kilometres further north. Open pit uranium mining at Key Lake itself ended in 2002.

Today, tensions in Pinehouse run high with the municipal election taking place. Some residents are concerned that despite secret ballots, there may be negative consequences if they cast a ballot and the councillors who end up elected believe they voted for other candidates—whether they have or not, said Smerek.

"Our current leaders have hired people that work for them that go around making offers and directions that sound like a threat—that they won't be able to service the people if they don't vote for the current leaders. And they'll try to lead them directly to the polls," he said.

In one case identified in Smerek's letter, voters were threatened on their way to cast a ballot in the advance poll last week. According to an account of an incident by another resident who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal, residents walking to the polling station were told by an individual affiliated with the current council not to expect anything at all from the village in the future, after they alluded to their plan to vote for candidates not currently on council.

The Executive Director of Communications for the Ministry of Government Relations, Jeff Welke, responded via email to the Media Co-op's request for comment on the allegations of intimidation contained in Smerek's letter.

"References to attempts to bribe voters and/or otherwise influence for whom voters would cast their ballot are very serious allegations, and pertain to legal matters that are outside the Ministry's authority, as well as outside the authority of election officials, to deal with," Welke wrote to the Media Co-op. "Any person or persons who have experienced an attempted bribery, or who have witnessed such an attempt should consider contacting the nearest detachment of the RCMP as soon as possible. Alternatively, they could also proceed under the provisions of The Controverted Municipal Elections Act by contacting a judge and swearing out a complaint."

Smerek's letter also identifies an infraction in the advance poll process itself. At least some residents were not asked to produce identification, despite reforms to the Local Government Elections Act passed in 2011, requiring all voters provide identification. In an affidavit sworn before a Commissioner of Oaths, a resident who has requested that their name be withheld due to fear of reprisal stated that at no time was he required to produce identification when he voted at the advance poll.

"I pulled out my wallet and asked, 'Don’t you need two pieces of ID' to which [polling clerk] Nancy Misponas replied, 'No, don’t worry about it,'" states the affidavit, according to a copy of the text obtained by the Media Co-op. "None of the people lined up in front of me while I was there were asked to produce their identification.”

In his response to the Media Co-op, Welke explained that "province's role in the municipal election process is to provide for and maintain the legislative framework under which the elections are run and to provide training, resources and advice to local election officials." Conducting elections in keeping with legislation is a municipal responsibility with no direct provincial oversight. However, he stated that local officials have been made well aware of elections procedures, including the new voter ID regulations.

"Prior to any round of municipal elections the Ministry holds workshops around the province for election officials...Pinehouse attended the May 9 session in Prince Albert. As well, the Ministry took extra measures to try and ensure that local election officials were aware of the new requirements including articles in 'Municipalities Today', guides and resources on the Ministry's website and the production of promotional materials that could be downloaded and used at the local level to help citizens become familiar with the voter ID requirement," wrote Welke.

"Ministry officials have also been in direct contact with local election officials in Pinehouse to reinforce the need to abide by all election procedural rules, including the new voter ID requirements," he wrote.

This year's municipal election is not the first time a resident has voiced concern about local governance and requested the intervention of the provincial government. In 2011, Fred Pederson wrote to Municipal Affairs officials requesting an investigation into the actions of mayor and council. He highlighted the alleged misuse of village funds, the appropriation of a youth centre, housing issues and intimidation.

"People feel threatened about losing their jobs because council sit on every board in town. So it influences people from feeling free to speak out or even votes during an election," wrote Pederson in his undated letter. "[The village] office is being used for their own benefit [and] every rule has been broken...all of them have [quit] their jobs to live off of the Village."

Pederson received a response from Colleen Digness, Manager of the Northern Municipal Administration, based in La Ronge. Her letter, dated November 30, 2011, outlines and includes the relevant sections of The Northern Municipalities Act, 2010, including section 128: "No member of council is eligible to be appointed as an employee of the municipality or of any committee or controlled corporation of the municipality in which he or she serves as a member of council."

After last week's advance poll, Pederson again contacted Municipal Affairs officials—this time by telephone—to report irregularities and request intervention. The response from the central office in Regina indicated that the issue was a matter for the La Ronge office. When Pederson contacted the Northern Municipal Administration in La Ronge, he was informed that his concerns should be raised with the local village council implementing the elections process.

Pederson is running as a candidate in today's election, on a platform based on honesty. He has been an outspoken critic of the potential selection of northern Saskatchewan for a nuclear waste storage site and of the process the council and the industry-led Nuclear Waste Management Organization have been pursuing during the site selection phase. They meet behind closed doors and the community is not informed of the meeting dates, Pederson told the Media Co-op in an interview last month.

Pinehouse is not the only place in NWMO's site selection process where a council has come under fire for undisclosed meetings with NWMO. Shannon Quesnel reported in the Elliot Lake Standard that a meeting between NWMO and the city council of Elliot Lake was the subject of a complaint to and ruling by Ontario's ombudsman. In her September 5, 2012 article, Quesnel cites Elliot Lake City Clerk Lesley Sprague: "The mayor and five members of this city’s council attended [the NWMO meeting]. The ombudsman stated despite the fact the meeting was arranged and hosted by a third party, this does not relieve the municipality from giving notice of the meeting. And despite the fact the meeting was not closed to the public it is still considered to be a closed meeting because of the lack of public notice."

Back in Pinehouse, Smerek is an outspoken opponent of Pinehouse and northern Saskatchewan being considered for the site of a nuclear waste repository. "Say No To Nuclear Waste" reads a sign on the front of his house, a stone's throw from the shore of Pinehouse Lake.

For now, though, Pinehouse residents are focused on today's election. Smerek hopes his letter will result in the presence of an outside election monitor to ensure due process—including the chain of custody of the ballots—is respected. He has also requested the presence of an RCMP officer to ensure no intimidation or threats take place at the polling station.

"I'm trying to get free and fair voting opportunities for our community," said Smerek.

Sandra Cuffe is a freelance journalist and a member of the Vancouver Media Co-op. She is currently in northern Saskatchewan. This article was originally posted on the Media Co-op.

Pinehouse Map

A Dead Man’s Prints

Tim McSorley — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 02:03:34 +0000

RCMP request to fingerprint Wiebo Ludwig's corpse refused

HYTHE, AB—The day after controversial eco-activist Wiebo Ludwig died, the RCMP wanted to open his coffin and take his fingerprints one final time. His family refused.

The media-savvy reverend was seen as an "eco-warrior" by his supporters; to his foes he was an "eco-terrorist." He was best known for his run-ins with the oil and gas industry—and the police—because of his objection to poisonous leaks.

The Dutch-born preacher died from cancer of the esophagus on April 9 at his log cabin near Hythe, in northwestern Alberta. Ludwig was 70. The ink had barely dried on his death certificate when his casket was carried to a small cemetery in woods nearby and placed in an above ground concrete crypt. The previous fall I’d walked with Wiebo on a path that curves through the graveyard. At one point he stopped and, pointing with his cane, said, “This is where I’m going.”

The graveyard is a short walk from Trickle Creek, the small Christian community Ludwig founded 26 years ago. Today it’s home to nearly 60 people, a sprawling complex of chalet-type homes, machine shops, greenhouses, barns, woodsheds and a dental office.

Richard Boonstra, Ludwig’s long-time friend and a resident at Trickle Creek, called the RCMP’s request to fingerprint his corpse “odd,” “invasive” and “a terrible disrespect and interference” with human remains. Boonstra suspects the Mounties wanted to see for themselves that Wiebo Ludwig was actually dead. The request showed authorities’ discomfort with Ludwig, according to Boonstra, because, he said, Ludwig had embarrassed the "establishment."

Doris Stapleton of RCMP Media Relations says “a fingerprint is the best way to positively identify someone, and if that person has a criminal record the fingerprints are sent to Ottawa so they’re able to take the record off CPIC.” CPIC is the Canadian Police Information Center where criminal history files are kept.

The family’s attorney, Paul Moreau of Edmonton, informed the RCMP “that wouldn’t be happening.” The Mounties dropped the matter, and the heavy top covering the crypt was never raised. Moreau, a veteran criminal defence lawyer, says it was the first time he’s heard of police lifting prints off convicted criminals to close a file.

The request to fingerprint a dead and buried man came as news to recently retired correctional officer Rick Dyhm. In his 34 years as a guard at federal prisons—where numerous inmates have died—Dyhm says police never showed up to take prints off a dead inmate.

In 2001, an Edmonton judge handed Ludwig a 28-month prison sentence after finding him guilty of oilfield vandalism. He was found guilty of attempting to possess explosives and “public mischief” over $5,000 after two gas well-heads nearby Trickle Creek were damaged. One had been dynamited; the other encased in concrete. Ludwig was released after serving two-thirds of his sentence. What precipitated the vandalism was a series of sour gas leaks that poisoned people and animals at Trickle Creek. The Ludwigs say when they complained to the authorities, nothing was done. The leaks continued and the people of Trickle Creek put duct tape around their doors and windows to try and keep the toxic gas at bay.

Two years prior to his conviction, tensions reached a boiling point when a local girl, 16-year-old Karman Willis, was shot and killed at Ludwig’s farm. Willis had been riding in one of three pick-ups that tore around Trickle Creek in the dead of night. Drivers did doughnuts and tossed empty beer cans, with one truck coming to within a metre of plowing down four children sleeping in a tent. A bullet hit the radiator of one truck and ricocheted off the frame, striking Willis. No one was charged with the shooting; neither were any of the intruders charged with trespassing at night, or impaired or dangerous driving.

In January 2010, about 200 RCMP officers raided Trickle Creek to search for evidence in the bombing of a gas pipeline near Tom’s Lake, BC, about an hour’s drive from Ludwig’s farm. Mounties told reporters they had proof—DNA evidence—that Wiebo Ludwig was connected to the bombings. Ludwig was tricked into thinking he was just meeting with Mounties in nearby Grande Prairie, but was arrested and locked up for 24 hours. He was never charged with the Tom’s Lake bombings.

Boonstra finds it odd the Mounties didn’t get around to meet with Ludwig in his final days. If police believed Ludwig shot Willis—or was behind the BC bombings—Boonstra wonders why investigators wouldn’t want to see him in the hope they might get a deathbed confession.

Ludwig, a carpenter, built his own coffin in February when he realized his battle with cancer was going south.

In his final media interview, published in The Dominion, a weakened Ludwig revealed he was looking forward to what he called crossing over. “[Death] doesn’t bother me,” he offered. “It is apparent to everyone there is an afterlife, even though we repress that in our anxieties. I am eager for redemption, eager to see what’s there. I just hope I die without too much pain.”

He got his wish, thanks to a combination of herbal medicine, oxycontin and morphine. Right up to the day he died, Ludwig went for walks, often arm-in-arm with Maime, his wife of 43 years.

In his last hours, family members made their way to the log cabin where their leader, frail and lying on a couch, blessed them one by one. Wiebo Arienes Ludwig took his final breath at 11:30 am on Easter Monday. On his last day he said “...Think I’m afraid of dying? Hardly.” His last words were a request: that family members not quarrel and that they keep the faith.

No outsiders were permitted at the funeral service, held in the family’s large dining hall. I first learned of Wiebo’s death when Josh, one of his sons, phoned late that afternoon.

Family members wept openly when I played back recordings of the final interviews with Wiebo. I had called Trickle Creek on April 2 for an update on his condition. Ludwig managed to get to the phone. “Why are you calling?” he queried. I joked I was curious to see if he’d died on April Fools Day. Ludwig chuckled. It was the last time we spoke.

What has changed at Trickle Creek since Wiebo Ludwig’s death? Plenty, but much remains the same. Trickle Creek continues to be managed by a council of eight family members, its spiritual core much the way it was when Wiebo was alive.

Trickle Creek remains a strong Christian community, bordering on Old Testament-like values. Meals are followed by readings from the Scriptures. No one is addicted to cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, gambling, or television. The adults work every day except Sundays. Food and herbs are home grown, no one in the community suffers from obesity. The children have chores; they pick berries, help with the harvest, feed the chickens and milk the goats and cows. For kicks, they ride bikes, collect cattails, learn pottery and play volleyball, soccer and hop-scotch.

There are no video games at Trickle Creek. Put it this way: the apple products they admire hang on trees and the twitter comes from birds.

But a few changes have taken place. Wiebo’s log cabin was moved closer to the forest; the inside is now being refurbished and a second floor added. Plans are underway to build another multiple-story house, complete with a turret and an aerial walkway; the idea is that in cold weather people can travel between buildings without having to don extra clothes. A huge barn was recently constructed to store five thousand bales of hay and to give livestock shelter on cold winter days.

Before I pulled out of Trickle Creek I chatted with beekeeper Fritz Ludwig. “Sorry if I seem out of place here,” I explained, “I don’t go to church.” Holding a young child in his arms and swaying from side to side, the bearded Fritz smiled and replied, “neither do we.”

Byron Christopher is an award-winning freelance journalist based in Edmonton, Alberta. For more on his career, click here.

Wiebo Ludwig’s last interview was published in The Dominion on March 16, 2012. See Wiebo’s Final Battle.

Wiebo's Crypt

Wiebo Ludwig, November 2011

"Green Bitumen?!"

Sandra — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 12:39:24 +0000

Nuclear reactors in the tar sands

SASKATOON—What do you get when you cross a nuclear reactor with a hydraulic shovel-full of tar sands? The answer, according to the Canadian Energy Research Institute, is "Green Bitumen."

The brainchild of the nuclear industry, this novel concept of deploying small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) to replace natural gas is being sold as a solution to the tar sands' reputation for producing the largest carbon footprint on the planet. Nuclear is being touted as an environmentally friendly, "clean" energy source for the extraction process. But in order to make that claim, one must overlook the substantial carbon emissions in the nuclear "fuel cycle," from mining to ultimate disposal; the risks of weapons proliferation; the toxic radioactive footprint; and the legacy of highly radioactive waste left behind for many generations to come.

Several key players have expressed interest in deploying nuclear reactors in the tar sands, including: Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL), a federal Crown corporation; SNC Lavalin Nuclear and its subsidiary Candu Energy Inc.; Bruce Power, one of Ontario's largest nuclear power generators and its parent company Cameco, the world's largest supplier of uranium; Toshiba, builder of the Fukushima Daiichi 3 power plant; Westinghouse; Aitel; Gen 4 (formerly Hyperion); and General Atomics. The governments of Canada, Alberta and Saskatchewan have at times all actively promoted this agenda. Also involved is the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), a major US Department of Energy nuclear research facility.

The nuclear industry, government and academia are pitching "Green Bitumen" to the tar sands industry and anyone else who will listen. Dr. Warren Bell, founding president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, sees wide and grave implications for the environment and public health should this message resonate with its target audience.

"The federal and provincial governments are intent on tying the tar sands to nuclear power. Their forlorn hope is that the putative 'greenness' of the latter will counteract the overwhelming 'blackness' of the former," Dr. Bell told The Dominion.

Nuclear reactors have been proposed for three different functions in the tar sands. They could produce high-pressure steam to heat up the underground deposits, inducing bitumen flow from Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) mines. They could supply electricity to the mines. And they could generate electricity to produce hydrogen from water. The hydrogen is used to "upgrade" bitumen into a product similar to conventional crude oil.

But attention is currently focused principally on high pressure steam production. Single-mine electricity requirements are too small to justify reactor purchase, and current hydrogen production methods—from natural gas—are much cheaper. Since the high reactor temperatures required for high pressure steam production exclude conventional designs, the nuclear industry will look to universities for taxpayer-subsidized research and development based on as-yet unproven, "fourth generation" SMR designs.

A reactor would serve one tar sands mining complex, producing at most 30,000 barrels/day; a 375MW-thermal reactor would provide sufficient steam. The same size of reactor would be rated at about 150MW if used to generate electricity, with the other 225MW lost to the atmosphere. For comparison, modern full-size reactors generate 1000 to 1500MW.

The first sign of a concerted effort towards nuclear reactors in the tar sands came in 2006, when the Alberta Energy Research Institute, the energy-technology arm of the provincial government, announced plans to participate in a study with the industry to define nuclear options for the tar sands. This was followed by a private presentation by AECL and Energy Alberta Corporation—a company later linked to Ontario's Bruce Power—to the provincial Conservative caucus in 2007. Two days later, the Alberta Conservative convention passed a resolution to explore using nuclear power plants to assist oil sands development.

In 2008, the provincial government established the Alberta Nuclear Power Expert Panel to study the proposals. Three of its four members were drawn from the oil and nuclear industries. In 2007, with support from their federal counterparts, provincial government officials had already entered into discussions with the Idaho National Laboratory and had reached an agreement to study ways to use nuclear energy in Alberta's oil and gas industry.

The Peace River Environmental Society and other concerned citizens began an intensive public campaign to resist Bruce Power’s application to build a large-scale nuclear reactor in Peace River country, in north-western Alberta. They argued that the application and review process was riddled with a lack of transparency and integrity, undermining its credibility.

"It's a sad commentary on our society when government institutions meant to protect and inform us become puppets of the industries that harm us. Their obstruction of the truth compromised the best interests of Albertans for the benefit of an industry that has created massive debt and contamination for Canadians for the past forty years," Peace River anti-nuclear activist Pat McNamara told The Dominion in an interview.

Faced with effective public opposition, Bruce Power finally withdrew its application in December 2011. But by then the focus had already moved on to Saskatchewan.

Even before the election of his Saskatchewan Party government in 2007, Brad Wall had decided to embrace a nuclear future. "Small reactor technology is coming on fast and may present an opportunity for our province to develop our oil sands in an environmentally responsible way as the new technology produces much-needed steam as well as energy," Wall said in May 2007, six months before his election as Premier, according to a Saskatchewan Party Caucus news release. In 2008, Bruce Power made a pitch to SaskPower, a provincial Crown corporation, extolling the benefits of a large-scale nuclear reactor in Saskatchewan, with the potential to export electricity to the Alberta tar sands and beyond.

The Uranium Development Partnership, a Saskatchewan review panel comprising university and industry representatives, was keen on moving the nuclear agenda forward. Its report with 20 recommendations to "revitalize and capture growth opportunities across the uranium value chain" was released in April 2009 and followed by a public consultation process over the summer months. Just as had happened in Alberta, the Saskatchewan government had already signed an agreement with the Idaho National Laboratory, in March 2009. According to a Saskatchewan government news release, the Memorandum of Understanding would provide "a mechanism for the government and INL to consider research and demonstration projects on a variety of energy sources and resources, including uranium, nuclear energy, heavy oil, oil shale and oil sands."

Public reaction and opposition to the nuclear proposals was swift. The Saskatchewan government ultimately had to retreat from the Bruce Power proposal, but then pursued a different strategy from Alberta. Public funds were made available for nuclear research and development at the University of Saskatchewan. Largely outside public purview, and in close collaboration with the University administration, the Canadian Centre for Nuclear Innovation (CCNI) was established in 2011 with $30 million of government seed money, as was reported in Briarpatch earlier this year. In the CCNI Business Framework, the government establishes that CCNI must meet expectations for nuclear industry enhancement over the next seven years. In a linked move, the Hitachi business group was also funded to conduct "research into the design and feasibility of small reactor technologies," according to a 2011 Saskatchewan government news release.

In the short-term, nuclear reactors cannot compete with natural gas in the tar sands, but there is much dispute over the extent of gas reserves, adding uncertainty to plans for rapid gas-fuelled tar sands expansion. Industry experts worry that by 2030 there might not be sufficient natural gas to fulfil requirements, according to a 2006 Oil Sands Experts Group Workshop report by Len Flint. Studies continue to explore just when nuclear might become a viable option.

Irrespective of the economics, environmental journalist Andrew Nikiforuk told The Dominion that using nuclear power to produce bitumen is an absurd plan. "It's an insult to basic energetics and thermodynamics," he said.

This is not the nuclear industry's only target. In Saskatchewan, rapid, minimally regulated expansion of the oil, gas and potash industries will massively increase electricity consumption. SaskPower forecasts an 83 per cent increase in heavy industry's consumption by 2019, with 3750MW of new generating capacity required by 2033, citing nuclear as a long-term option, post-2023. SaskPower's grid management methodology would favour smaller (200 to 300MW), modular applications of existing reactor types. Hitachi has proposed to adapt a small conventional reactor design under the Saskatchewan agreement.

It is also important to recognize that the conventional power industry—nuclear, fossil fuels, pipelines and electricity—is becoming increasingly integrated. Along with Cameco and BPC Generation Infrastructure Trust, TransCanada Corporation is a one-third owner of Bruce Power. Its proposed Keystone XL pipeline represents an important synchronicity of investment between oil and nuclear expansion. SNC Lavalin is already active in the tar sands, and dovetailing that business with their Candu nuclear interests could be a next step. SNC Lavalin now also owns AltaLink, the private electrical company operating most of Alberta’s electrical grid. Planned and existing tie lines into Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Montana will enhance that export capacity.

Some argue that the Western Energy Corridor proposal, designed to export electricity across the border into the United States, is an even bigger opportunity for nuclear expansion in Alberta and Saskatchewan. This explains the keen interest of the Idaho National Laboratory in collaborating with government and industry in Canada. INL sees potential for nuclear reactors in western Canada to fulfil future U.S. energy demand. It is not, however, clear how any nuclear reactor could be built without public subsidy.

But the tar sands, perched atop the federal agenda, remain a much-desired prize. SMRs constitute one of very few technologies that tar sands corporations can use to misleadingly promise a smaller future carbon footprint. Even if ultimately non-viable, the argument serves to promote continued rapid expansion of tar sands extraction.

While European countries such as Denmark and Germany are increasingly moving to a renewables-based future, few North American utility and grid management companies are working to overcome the technical challenges involved in making that transition. Unless this changes, many regions are left with a choice between coal, gas and nuclear. The high greenhouse gas emissions of fossil fuels provide the nuclear industry with an opportunity to promote itself and revive its flagging fortunes despite its prohibitively high price tags.

David Geary, an anti-nuclear activist in Saskatchewan, says there can be no "Green Bitumen" in an environmentally sustainable future.

"Nuclear energy is not clean or green – it uses up huge amounts of fresh water, routinely spews out numerous pollutants and carcinogens into the air and water, and leaves behind a legacy of highly toxic, long-lived wastes," he told The Dominion.

Time will tell whether the organized struggles against well-funded vested interests in western Canada will overcome the proposed publicly-subsidized proliferation of small nuclear reactors in the tar sands or anywhere else. The battle between truly sustainable energy options and the "Green Bitumen" of the conventional energy industry continues.

D'Arcy Hande is a retired archivist and historian, living in Saskatoon. Dr Mark Bigland-Pritchard is a Saskatoon-based applied physicist working as a sustainable energy and green building consultant.

Green Bitumen?!

Funding Evaporates for Freshwater Science Research

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

Proposed closure of experimental lakes threatens important, ongoing research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Experimental lakes

Defending the Land from Nuclear Waste

Sandra — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 09:23:31 +0000

Indigenous community elders, activists gather in northern Saskatchewan against nuclear waste site

SOUTH BAY, SK—The storm clouds had moved on by the time people arrived at South Bay on lake Ile-a-la-Crosse last Friday for a grassroots gathering against a potential nuclear waste site in northern Saskatchewan. Dene, Cree and Métis elders from affected communities, grassroots activists from around Saskatchewan and others from as far as the west coast and Germany shared coffee, songs, experiences and a whole lot of moose meat from August 3 to 6 at the Survival Celebration Camp for Sustainable Earth.

"We have to protect the land," Jules Daigneault told those gathered in a sharing circle around the campfire. When the 70-year-old elder heard about the gathering happening in South Bay, he travelled across the lake to the camp from his home in Ile-a-la-Crosse in a boat he made himself. "Everything comes from the land. All our food comes from the land."

Gunter Wippel traveled to the camp from Germany, where he has been actively involved in anti-nuclear activism for decades. Wippel has been visiting northern Saskatchewan since the late 1980s, involved with struggles against the expansion of the uranium mining industry. He was also in the province in the mid-90s for the Seaborn panel hearings on nuclear waste management in Canada.

"I can't believe that we still have to protest that same shit," Wippel remarked during the closing circle on Monday.

As is the case in most countries with nuclear power production, spent fuel bundles are stored onsite at reactors in Canada—in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick. The federal Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) is planning a deep geological repository to place all of Canada's nuclear waste underground in the rock. No permanent waste storage facility exists anywhere in the world, largely due to opposition from scientific, environmental, activist and other communities.

In the latest stage of the decades-long search for a long-term nuclear waste disposal site, NWMO has received expressions of interest to host the site. Although Saskatchewan is already host to the tailings and waste from the uranium mining industry producing the uranium to be refined and processed for nuclear energy elsewhere, the province was included in the search for a willing host community. Along with several places in Ontario, NWMO has three locations in northern Saskatchewan on the map: Pinehouse, the English River First Nation and Creighton.

But elders and community members from Pinehouse and the English River First Nation say that their communities are largely opposed to hosting nuclear waste in their territories. Despite the money that NWMO and Saskatchewan-based uranium mining giant CAMECO have recently been pouring into the local councils, community promoters and other programs, they say that they did not initially even know that their own councils—municipal in Pinehouse and Band in English River—were advocating for the multi-million-dollar proposals.

"The Chiefs there don't say nothing to us. They just talk about money, budgets," Dene elder Louis Wolverine told The Dominion. Wolverine, 84, was one of several elders who attended the camp from Patuanak, near the part of the English River First Nation seemingly identified for the waste site.

"They say that it's okay, that nothing's very dangerous," he said of CAMECO and NWMO. The people in Patuanak don't want nuclear waste, he said. "The elders too—they don't want it."

Elder Mary Jane Wolverine spoke to people attending the elder's circle in Dene, with translation into English by another elder from Patuanak. Several elders spoke of the impacts of uranium mining on fishing, hunting and gathering grounds. Some had traplines and seasonal camps where the Key Lake mine is now located. They are now speaking out to protect their traditional territory, the interconnected lakes and waterways, the animals and the medicinal plants from further destruction.

"We have our children, our future grandchildren growing up...Myself, I don't want it in our country," she said. "All the elders are saying the same thing, that we don't want anything to do with nuclear waste."

In Pinehouse, a town located along the road up to the Key Lake uranium mine, the mayor and municipal council have been meeting with NWMO behind closed doors, says Fred Pederson, an outspoken Cree elder from the community. NWMO has a group of paid promoters, an elder's group and access to young students, says Pederson.

But 60 per cent of eligible voters in Pinehouse signed a petition against nuclear waste disposal in northern Saskatchewan, without the petition even having reached the whole population. The Committee for Future Generations, a grassroots organization in the region, presented the petition with more than 12,000 signatures to the provincial legislature last year. Opposition continues to grow in Pinehouse and around the province.

"It's not the people that want it. It is just our leaders that are promoting it," Pederson told The Dominion. He and several others at the gathering also raised the issue of systemic racism by the provincial and federal governments in their search for a nuclear waste disposal site in northern Saskatchewan, in Indigenous and Metis traditional territories. "It's just like we don't count, like they can kill us off."

When the nightly conversation and music around the fire continued into the wee hours of Monday morning, those who stayed awake extending their time together on the last night of the gathering were rewarded. The northern lights made a surprise appearance in the night sky, with shimmering green lights dancing overhead as the last people wandered off to their tents, campers and the beach.

Elders from affected northern communities, the Committee for Future Generations, and others who attended the camp from further away reiterated their commitment to the struggle against nuclear waste in northern Saskatchewan. Revitalized by the camraderie, inspired by the elders, and energized by the young children playing along the beach, those involved with the gathering have plans well underway to continue the campaign over the next few months.

"If we band together, people produce power," said Pederson. "We can stop all of this. We can stop the destruction."

Sandra Cuffe is a Media Co-op editor based in Vancouver, and a member of the Vancouver Media Co-op.

Survival Celebration

Bye, Bye, Wheat Board?

Tim McSorley — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 05:27:59 +0000

Small farmers raise concern as Conservatives prepare to cut board's monopoly

WINNIPEG—Stephen Harper’s Conservative government is preparing to pass legislation to end the Canadian Wheat Board’s monopoly on exports and milling of prairie-grown wheat and barley.

“The Wheat Board was brought into place, basically, so that grain buyers wouldn’t take advantage of farmers,” explained Jo-Lene Gardiner of Manitoba Agriculture, Food, and Rural Initiatives, which is based out of Pilot Mound, MB.

From it's offices in Winnipeg, the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) markets Canadian grain to world markets and for domestic consumption.

Opinions among grain farmers are divided on the issue. As it stands, grain farmers in western Canada can only sell wheat and barley to the CWB. The Wheat Board therefore decides which varieties of wheat and barley farmers can grow, buys grain from farmers and markets it to buyers domestically and around the world.

One benefit to farmers under the current system is that payment of grain is meted out over a year period, and the CWB attempts to provide farmers with the best price possible for their grain by paying them the average price of grain on the world market over the year.

“If when you sell your wheat, [the] price is five dollars a bushel, and by the time the end of the year came along the price was nine dollars a bushel, under the new system you’re stuck with five dollars, end of story,” said Jan McIntyre, a mixed cattle and grain farmer near Cartwright, MB. “Under the Wheat Board, you would get the average price, which would be the difference between your five dollars and whatever the final average was.”

Currently, the CWB provides all grain farmers with the same price for their grain, "no matter if you have 100 bushels or 100,000,” said Gardiner. “If you have No. 1 wheat at 14 per cent protein, you would get the same price [per bushel] as the next guy. Everybody is treated equally under the system.”

“[The Wheat Board] takes a certain percentage [of wheat] right off the combine right to their elevator,” Derek Marvin told The Dominion. Marvin is a 31-year-old elementary school teacher in Winnipeg, but during the summer months leading up to harvest, he returns to his family’s farm in the rural municipality of Elton, MB, to help his father run their 2,300-acre operation.

“Without it, farmers are going to have to bring it back home in their own storage bins on the farm, and so you’re going to have to buy new bins and find more storage and find more space for it all," he said. "A grain bin holds 40,000 bushels, and that’ll cost you $100,000. That’s like buying a house!”

Opponents of the CWB’s monopoly argue that farmers ought to have the right to market their own grain, and decide which varieties to grow and when.

“An open market will increase the number of buyers bidding on our wheat and barley,” federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz said told reporters in October, according to the Globe & Mail. “Unlike what some people may claim, the sky will not fall in an open market. Instead, the sky will be the limit.”

“I think it’s going to be a positive change,” said Barry Critcher, who has been farming grain for 28 years. Critcher farms 3,200 acres between Dawson Creek and Fort St. John, BC, one of British Columbia’s most productive grain growing regions. “I think it’s going to be positive to my farm, because I can sell my grain to who I want, when I want, and I can do the things I want to do on my farm without having to worry about letting somebody else do the marketing for me."

The prairie provinces have been experiencing a rural demographic shift since at least the 1970s, which kicked into high gear since the 1980s. Rural populations are diminishing, small towns are dying, and economic control over food systems is held by an increasingly smaller number of players, with money flowing out of small communities and into corporate headquarters, such as those of agribusiness giants Vittera and Cargill, in urban centers.

How will the changes to the CWB affect this demographic and economic transition?

“I think it will perpetuate the problem,” said Marvin, whose family has been farming grain in Elton, MB area for three generations. “It’s already to the point where rarely can a small family farm exist on its own. It needs other income. When I think of all the farms around my community, all the farmers who were farming smaller acreages than us have dropped off. They’ve sold a few acres to us, a few to the Hutterites, a few to some other neighbors, because it’s just too tough to keep up.”

While it is impossible at this juncture to confidently predict what effects the changes to the Canadian Wheat Board will have on farmers and rural communities, there is no doubt that grain farmers and farming communities in western Canada will have to adapt to the new economic reality—and fast.

Most expect that the proposed legislation will go through; if it does, as of August 1, 2012, the Canadian Wheat Board as we know it today will be gone.

Sheldon Birnie is a writer, editor, and musician living in Winnipeg.

Golden Wheat

A Town Without Poverty?

Martin Lukacs — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 10:08:24 +0000

Canada's only experiment in guaranteed income finally gets reckoning

WHITEHORSE, YK—Try to imagine a town where the government paid each of the residents a living income, regardless of who they were and what they did, and a Soviet hamlet in the early 1980s may come to mind.

But this experiment happened much closer to home. For a four-year period in the '70s, the poorest families in Dauphin, Manitoba, were granted a guaranteed minimum income by the federal and provincial governments. Thirty-five years later all that remains of the experiment are 2,000 boxes of documents that have gathered dust in the Canadian archives building in Winnipeg.

Until now little has been known about what unfolded over those four years in the small rural town, since the government locked away the data that had been collected and prevented it from being analyzed.

But after a five year struggle, Evelyn Forget, a professor of health sciences at the University of Manitoba, secured access to those boxes in 2009. Until the data is computerized, any systematic analysis is impossible. Undeterred, Forget has begun to piece together the story by using the census, health records, and the testimony of the program's participants. What is now emerging reveals that the program could have counted many successes.

Beginning in 1974, Pierre Trudeau's Liberals and Manitoba's first elected New Democratic Party government gave money to every person and family in Dauphin who fell below the poverty line. Under the program—called “Mincome”—about 1,000 families received monthly cheques.

Unlike welfare, which only certain individuals qualified for, the guaranteed minimum income project was open to everyone. It was the first—and to this day, only—time that Canada has ever experimented with such an open-door social assistance program.

In today’s conservative political climate, with constant government and media rhetoric about the inefficiency and wastefulness of the welfare state, the Mincome project sounds like nothing short of a fairy tale.

For four years Dauphin was a place where anyone living below the poverty line could receive monthly cheques to boost their income, no questions asked. Single mothers could afford to put their kids through school and low-income families weren't scrambling to pay the rent each month.

For Amy Richardson, it meant she could afford to buy her children books for school. Richardson joined the program in 1977, just after her husband had gone on disability leave from his job. At the time, she was struggling to raise her three youngest children on $1.50 haircuts she gave in her living room beauty parlour.

The $1,200 per year she received in monthly increments was a welcome supplement, in a time when the poverty line was $2,100 a year.

“The extra money meant that I was also able to give my kids something I wouldn't ordinarily be able to, like taking them to a show or some small luxury like that,” said Richardson, now 84, who spoke to The Dominion by phone from Dauphin.

As part of the experiment, an army of researchers were sent to Dauphin to interview the Mincome families. Residents in nearby rural towns who didn't receive Mincome were also surveyed so their statistics could be compared against those from Dauphin. But after the government cut the program in 1978, they simply warehoused the data and never bothered to analyze it.

“When the government introduced the program they really thought it would be a pilot project and that by the end of the decade they would roll this out and everybody would participate,” said Forget. “They thought it would become a universal program. But of course, the idea eventually just died off.”

During the Mincome program, the federal and provincial governments collectively spent $17 million, though it was initially supposed to have cost only a few million.

Meant to last several more years, the program came to a quick halt in 1978 when an economic recession hit Canada. The recession had caused prices to increase 10 per cent each year, so payouts to families under Mincome had increased accordingly.

Trudeau's Liberals, already on the defensive for an overhaul of Canada's employment insurance system, killed the program and withheld any additional money to analyze the data that had been amassed.

“It's hugely unfortunate and typical of the strange ways in which government works that the data was never analyzed,” says Ron Hikel who coordinated the Mincome program. Hikel now works in the United States to promote universal healthcare reform.

“Government officials opposed [to Mincome] didn't want to spend more money to analyze the data and show what they already thought: that it didn't work,” says Hikel, who remains a strong proponent of guaranteed income programs.

“And the people who were in favour of Mincome were worried because if the analysis was done and the data wasn't favourable then they would have just spent another million dollars on analysis and be even more embarrassed.”

But Forget has culled some useful info from Manitoba labour data. Her research confirms numerous positive consequences of the program.

Initially, the Mincome program was conceived as a labour market experiment. The government wanted to know what would happen if everybody in town received a guaranteed income, and specifically, they wanted to know whether people would still work.

It turns out they did.

Only two segments of Dauphin's labour force worked less as a result of Mincome—new mothers and teenagers. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies. And teenagers worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their families.

The end result was that they spent more time at school and more teenagers graduated. Those who continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work they did.

“People didn't have to take the first job that came along,” says Hikel. “They could wait for something better that suited them.”

For some, it meant the opportunity to land a job to help them get by.

When Doreen and Hugh Henderson arrived in Dauphin in 1970 with their two young children they were broke. Doreen suggested moving from Vancouver to her hometown because she thought her husband would have an easier time finding work there. But when they arrived, things weren't any better.

“My husband didn't have a very good job and I couldn't find work,” she told The Dominion by phone from Dauphin.

It wasn't until 1978, after receiving Mincome payments for two years, that her husband finally landed janitorial work at the local school, a job he kept for 28 years.

“I don't know how we would have lived without [Mincome],” said Doreen.“I don't know if we would have stayed in Dauphin.”

Although the Mincome experiment was intended to provide a body of information to study labour market trends, Forget discovered that Mincome had a significant effect on people's well being. Two years ago, the professor started studying the health records of Dauphin residents to assess the impacts of the program.

In the period that Mincome was administered, hospital visits dropped 8.5 per cent. Fewer people went to the hospital with work-related injuries and there were fewer emergency room visits from car accidents and domestic abuse. There were also far fewer mental health visits.

It's not hard to see why, says Forget.

“When you walk around a hospital, it's pretty clear that a lot of the time what we're treating are the consequences of poverty,” she says.

Give people financial independence and control over their lives and these accidents and illnesses tend to dissipate, says Forget. In today's terms, an 8.5 per cent decrease in hospital visits across Canada would save the government $4 billion annually, by her calculations. And $4 billion is the amount that the federal government is currently trying to save by slashing social programming and arts funding.

Having analyzed the health data, Forget is now working on a cost-benefit analysis to see what a guaranteed income program might save the federal government if it were implemented today. She’s already worked with a Senate committee investigating a guaranteed income program for all low-income Canadians.

The Canadian government's sudden interest in guaranteed income programs doesn't surprise Forget.

Every 10 or 15 years there seems to be a renewed interest in getting Guaranteed Income (GI) programs off the ground, according to Saskatchewan social work professor James Mulvale. He's researched and written extensively about guaranteed income programs and is also part the Canadian chapter of the Basic Income Earth Network, a worldwide organization that advocates for guaranteed income.

GI programs exist in countries like Brazil, Mexico, France and even the state of Alaska.

Although people may not recognize it, subtle forms of guaranteed income already exist in Canada, says Mulvale, pointing to the child benefit tax, guaranteed income for seniors and the modest GST/HST rebate program for low-income earners.

However, a wider-reaching guaranteed income program would go a long way in decreasing poverty, he says.

Mulvale is in favour of a “demo-grant” model of GI that would give automatic cash transfers to everybody in Canada. This kind of plan would also provide the option of taxing higher-income earners at the end of the year so poorer people receive benefits.

A model such as this has a higher chance of broad support because it goes out to everybody, according to Mulvale. GI can also be administered as a negative income tax to the poor, meaning they'd receive an amount of money back directly in proportion to what they make each year.

“GI by itself wouldn't eliminate poverty but it would go a heck of a long way to decrease the extent of poverty in this country,” says Mulvale.

Conservative senator Hugh Segal has been the biggest supporter of this kind of GI, claiming it would eliminate the social assistance programs now administered by the provinces and territories. Rather than having a separate office to administer child tax benefits, welfare, unemployment insurance and income supplement for seniors, they could all be rolled into one GI scheme.

It would also mean that anybody could apply for support. Many people fall through the cracks under the current welfare system, says Forget. Not everybody can access welfare and those who can are penalized for going to school or for working a job since the money they receive from welfare is then clawed back.

If a guaranteed income program can target more people and is more efficient than other social assistance programs, then why doesn't Canada have such a program in place already? Perhaps the biggest barrier is the prevalence of negative stereotypes about poor people.

“There's very strong feelings out there that we shouldn't give people money for nothing,” Mulvale says.

Guaranteed income proponents aren't holding their breaths that they'll see such a program here anytime soon, but they are hopeful that one day Canada will consider the merits of guaranteed income.

The cost would be "not nearly as prohibitive to do as people imagine it is," says Forget. “A guaranteed minimum income program is a superior way of delivering social assistance. The only thing is that it's of course politically difficult to implement.”

Vivian Belik is a freelance journalist based in the frozen northlands of Whitehorse, Yukon. She was, however, raised in Manitoba where she has spotted many of the provinces small-town statues including the giant beaver in Dauphin.

Mincome

Water is All of Us

dawn — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 09:35:52 +0000

Report from the fifth annual Keepers of the Water gathering

LAC BROCHET, MANITOBA—Words flowed like water from Indigenous Elders gathered at the fifth annual Keepers of the Water gathering in Lac Brochet, Manitoba, this August.

The gathering of the Keepers—an organization made up of of First Nations, environmentalists, and concerned people who want to protect the Arctic Ocean drainage basin—was hosted by the Northlands Denesuline First Nation. It stressed the importance of unity and action to protect waters from being polluted and poisoned.

With a population of fewer than a thousand people, Lac Brochet can be reached only by airplane or by water, and a delegation from Hatchet Lake, SK, took four days to canoe to the gathering. There were also various scholars, representatives, and leaders, including MLA Gerard Jennissen, who said “Water is a horrible enemy but a great friend.” Throughout the gathering, participants shared their thoughts and knowledge about the preciousness of water and how it might be better protected from human destructiveness.

Sam Gargan, who is Grand Chief of the Dehcho in the Northwest Territories and a co-founder of the first Keepers of the Water gathering in 2006, explained how De means river, and Ne means land, together making the word Dene, which signifies how the Dene people are defined by their reciprocal relationship with land and water.

Gargan also described how “western” concepts of democracy are historically derived from Indigenous cultures, and discussed how a holistic relationship with the earth can lead to the protection of both the land’s surface and subsurface. At a time when mining threatens the long-term well-being of future generations in many places, Nahanni Park stands as an example to emulate. Part of the Dehcho people's traditional lands, Nahanni Park began as 4766 square kilometers in 1972, and has since expanded to roughly 28,000 square kilometers through the efforts of the Dehcho people in the NWT. The park draws its name from the South Nahanni River, which feeds Canada's longest river, called the Deh Cho by the Dene and also known as the Mackenzie River.

The defining question for the gathering was centred around asking what this generation wants to pass on to future generations.

The history of industrial mining has shown over and over again—from Uranium City in northern Saskatchewan to Navajo homelands in the US—that mining jobs are temporary but that pollution remains long after the mines have closed.

For this reason, sustainable economic models are urgently needed. These may range from solar and wind projects to the protection of caribou habitat, which is crucial for the survival of Indigenous communities. Caribou are a traditional and essential food source for these communities. The well-being of the caribou depends on clean, healthy watersheds and lands.

It is challenging to think of water not merely as an external object in need of protection, but as that which literally constitutes our bodies and also lives, as it constantly moves within and through us, linking us to the watersheds that we are part of. This kind of thinking is key to water stewardship. It is demonstrated by Cree Elder D’Arcy Linklater's comment that when he refers to the water, he does not merely mean rivers and lakes, but women themselves.

The passionate words of First Nations elders were complemented by visitors like Dr. Radha D’Souza, who drew connections between Indigenous peoples in Canada and the struggles of India’s 67 million Indigenous people. D'Souza gave an overview of shifts that have been happening at the United Nations, and asked a critical question: are we serving the economy or is the economy serving us?

She also noted that there is a serious tension between the language that exists in declarations and the way they are actually implemented, which can undermine or even nullify the goals and values of the declarations.

Robert Patrick from the University of Saskatchewan noted the inequities that continue for First Nations communities. For instance, they have a boil water advisory rate that is two-and-a-half times higher than in non-First Nations communities. Patrick observed that a number of reserves have the wrong technologies for the water issues they face, such as infrastructure that is often too high-energy or high-maintenance for the community’s needs.

Patrick noted that building small can lead to better living. He suggested that considering a community's proper scale in conjunction with a long-term view that anticipates the effects of climate change (such as drastic weather extremes, and more unpredictability in the amount and timing of rains) will more deeply connect human societies to mindful watershed protection.

When the Keepers first met in 2006, they drafted a declaration that continues to resonate strongly. It reads:

“Water is a sacred gift, an essential element that sustains and connects all life. It is not a commodity to be bought or sold. All people share an obligation to cooperate to ensure that water in all of its forms is protected and conserved with regard to the needs of all living things today and for future generations tomorrow.”

It was heartening to witness that the Keepers are staying on track, guided by the waterways themselves, navigating the many dangers that face us today.

Rita Wong is a poet who lives on the unceded Coast Salish lands also known as Vancouver.

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Witnessing the Tar Sands Dead Zone

dawn — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 05:48:05 +0000

Asserting the need to heal

FORT MCMURRAY, AB—In the face of the enormous devastation that is destroying forests across northern Alberta, a peaceful group of people are steadfastly asserting the need to heal the land and waters. On June 25, 2011, the second annual Healing Walk for the Tar Sands brought together Indigenous people, Keepers of the Athabasca, elders, children and supporters, who walked 13 kilometres through the heart of where Syncrude and Suncor extract bitumen on a massive scale.

Bitumen, a tar-like substance that holds petroleum, sits below what the industry, in an Orwellian turn, calls “overburden”—not forest

The destruction we saw is so vast it goes far beyond the visible horizon. The urgent need for healing is evident to anyone who visits this barren expanse. People from many places came to support and join in—including activists who participated with Zapatista Indigenous communities and the movement in Oaxaca, Mexico. Together they chanted, “Zapata vive! La lucha sigue!”

The Healing Walk for the Tar Sands was led by elders such as Lillian, a Cree woman, and Violet, an 83-year-old elder and the oldest woman in the community of Fort McMurray First Nation. These elder women possess a wonderful sense of humor and sharp minds, and with other elders, guided the traditional prayers, smudge and ceremonies. This walk faced the enormity of the land stolen from Indigenous peoples that is now destroyed, lifeless, and empty save for ugly scarecrows called “bit-u-men” to keep out the birds from its poisoned soil. Horrid continuous booms from sound cannons scare the birds from landing in the enormous reservoirs of toxic waste. We marched beside the machinery of destruction, the surreal gigantic Tonka trucks, cranes and pipes. The air pollution, a putrid stench, gave a headache to many of the people who participated in the healing walk.

The day was rainy with occasional bursts of sun, but the walkers were not deterred by the weather. A couple walkers had brought protective dust masks, remembering how terrible they felt last year after the six-hour walk, their lungs absorbing toxic dust from the tar sands. However, it was not appealing to wear wet masks so we continued, mostly mask-less, through the rain along the shoulder of Highway 63, accompanied by a heavy police presence.

This walk was started by people heartbroken by what has happened to their traditional homelands. One of the organizers, Cleo Reece, helped to start the Memorial March for the Murdered and Missing Women when she lived in Vancouver years ago. She spoke of the murdered and missing waters in northern Alberta: an eerie, disturbing connection between the violence against Indigenous women and against Indigenous land. Colonization is not a thing of the past; it continues today in virulent, violent forms and materializes in the increased rates of cancer found in communities downstream from the tar sands.

Resistance and commitment to peace also continue, as they have for the past 500-plus years. This is a form of power that is based in love for community, a community of the living that includes not just people, but bears, eagles, rivers, wind and forests. It is a deeply humble, peaceful power that stands in ethical contrast to the forms of power that greedily exploit and forcefully violate the land and those who live on it. It is a power that cannot be bought or sold because it is freely shared, residing in a respect and a grief for the land that gives us life.

We began and ended the day at the Nistawoyou Friendship Center in Fort McMurray where a feast for the walkers had been prepared by a chef with a joyful laugh and a team of dedicated volunteers. At the closing circle, Cree Elder Lillian Shirt was presented with tobacco in gratitude for her leading the day’s ceremonies, and she shared with us stories of survival and creativity.

We learned a lot from the tar sands healing walk and from visiting the surrounding Indigenous families, some who live in crowded old trailers, accessible by unpaved, muddy roads. The living conditions on some of the reserves are not unlike those in poor communities in Latin America.

Where are the economic benefits of the tar sands to these communities? What have they gained from these industrial projects? Witnessing the poverty, health problems and environmental destruction in person helped us respond to these questions. A huge economic gap remains between the living standards of Caucasian and Indigenous communities. Indigenous communities are marginalized in Canadian politics and are fighting institutional racism as their long-term interests are undermined.

On the walk, an elder weighed the cost of lost culture, water and foods and asked what all this destruction has been for. The question points to the global interests that have developed the Alberta tar sands in order to sustain a privileged way of life for some at the expense of others. We had travelled from Vancouver, a landscape dramatically different from the tar sands wasteland but which is nonetheless endangered by the latter's economic grip on land. Our Pacific Coast is threatened by proposed pipelines, with their inevitable spills, and a rapid increase in tanker traffic. In an era of climate change, those of us who live in urban centres cannot afford the disconnect between our cities that reap the temporary benefits of this destruction and the Indigenous homelands that have been desecrated. Through global waters, winds, and ethical human relations, we are linked with the people who are witnessing the eradication of their boreal forests, traditional hunting grounds and once-pristine waters.

On the edge of the dead land and toxic reservoirs, wild flowers, forests and Indigenous families live in trailer homes. Life here is simple, humble and warm, filled with good humour and jokes. Inside, Indigenous artwork on the walls portrays wolves, traditional carvings and pictures of ancestors and grandchildren.

In this community, women, men, children, young people and elders resist their displacement and speak up about the destruction of their land, water and wildlife.

“Giving up is not an option,” said Dene Suline Elder Warrior Brian Grandbois from Cold Lake, Alberta. Brian’s community is struggling to protect Berry Point at English Bay in Cold Lake, the land where they hold ceremonies and sacred burials, smoke fish and gather medicinal plants. This sacred land is threatened to become an RV park by ministerial order. Indigenous peoples of the area have set up their peace protection camp with tipis, tents and campfires, even though police are pressuring them to leave. Colonialism, Eurocentrism, and capitalism are killing Indigenous peoples, destroying our planet, La Pachamama—our Mother Earth.

That the pollution from tar sands extraction projects has spread to affect the waters of the Athabasca River and Fort Chipewyan is no secret. Beginning in the 1990s, these waters became unsafe to drink, and people are sick as a result of their toxicity. These polluted waters empty into the Arctic. This is a fact of hydrology. Tar sands pollution as a source of acid rain in Saskatchewan is a meteorological certainty. Airborne pollutants are also reported to be concentrating in lake water in neighboring Saskatchewan, reducing the availability of certain fish species.

While the ailing of these once-healthy waters is cause for alarm, corporate negligence has been responsible for at least three recent pipeline spills in Canada and the US. In July 2010, Enbridge spilled 3.1 million litres of oil into Tallmudge Creek and the Kalamazoo River, Michigan. In May 2011 in the Plains Midwest, 4.5 million liters of oil were spilled in Lubicon Lake Cree territory, the homeland of Melina Laboucan-Massimo, a young woman from the Lubicon Cree Nation who spoke eloquently at the Friendship Center. She described the horror of experiencing 28,000 barrels of oil spilling right beside her family’s homes, in the largest oil disaster in Alberta since 1975. In June 2011, Enbridge was also responsible for about 1,500 barrels spilled near Wrigley in the Northwest Territories. This last spill is said to have been kept out of waterways, but still seeped into the soil.

Horrific spills are not the only danger posed by industrial activity in Northern Alberta. In December 2010, a gushing saltwater aquifer at Shell’s Muskeg River operation raised questions about ground water contamination. This incident was preceded by another round of duck deaths in October 2010 in a Syncrude tailings reservoir. It’s a tragic irony when cultures that see water as something that comes from a tap have to learn about the interconnectedness of the earth’s waters through violent corporate operations that destroy Indigenous people’s homelands and cultures.

The Second Annual Healing Walk in Alberta’s Tar Sands was deeply inspiring. In the midst of massive greed and destruction, a community gathered to transform ground zero into a place of solidarity and social change. The call for healing is compelling, as simple and as necessary as breathing clean air and drinking clean water. The walkers shared an understanding—respect for ecological integrity must come first.

Aidee Arenas subscribed to the Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona, Christine Leclerc organizes enpipeline.org, Choo-kien Kua is an artist and Rita Wong is a poet. They are all based in Vancouver. This article was originally posted on the Vancouver Media Co-op.

Tar Sands Healing Walk

Tar Sands Healing Walk II

March Against Racism Takes Vancouver's Streets

Tim McSorley — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 12:57:56 +0000

VANCOUVER—Hundreds of people took to Vancouver's streets last week to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Racism.

Representatives from Coast Salish Territories and the grassroots anti-colonial immigrant and refugee rights collective No One is Illegal rallied close to 500 supporters under the shadow of the Price Waterhouse Cooper building in downtown Vancouver.

Once the march got underway, the streets were electrified with speakers and music. Organizers denounced Canada’s genocidal legacy, the occupation of Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s modifications to Bill C-50, the
Live-in Care Giver Program and the $53-million budget cuts to immigrant and refugee servicing agencies.

Announced in December, those changes empowered Kenney to decide who can and cannot stay in Canada, while the budget cuts were meant to reduce government spending and redistribute the "savings" across the provinces.

Stopping at the Canadian Department of Immigration on Burrard and Robson, march organizers called for a stop to the theft of Indigenous lands and freedom from police violence, imprisonment and deportation.

Immigrants and Indigenous peoples remain over-represented in the Canadian criminal system, are subject to a high child apprehension rate, low education and income levels and often dwell in substandard
housing.

Adriana Paz, of Justicia for Migrant Workers, denounced the myth that Canada embraces multiculturalism, and that Canada is a multicultural paradise where everybody gets along.

"Why is it that the poorest people in this country are indigenous people, why is it that immigrants of color still earn the lowest wages, why is it that in Canadian institutions, organizations and universities it's
only white people that have the power and privilege to make decisions for everybody else?" she asked

The march continued down Hornby Street before wrapping up with music, food and speeches behind the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Photos by Murray Bush/Flux Photo.

This article was originally published the Vancouver Media Co-op.

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Hemp Wanted

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

Once illegal material promises dizzying array of green energy uses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Truso also points to hemp's potential energy efficiency.

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

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

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

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

Truso talks about one that got away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Fortress G8

Moira Peters — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 05:16:30 +0000

Briefly, the G8 summit in Kananaskis, 2002

Large summits are nothing new. The 36th G8 summit will set up shop in Huntsville June 25-26. Toronto, a past host, will this time welcome the 4th G20 summit June 26-27. The following is the fourth in a six-part series of briefs looking back on past G7/G8 summits and protest. Check back each Sunday for a blast from the past when we recap a different summit's official agenda and civilian and activist responses.

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The G8 summit in a remote ski resort in Alberta signaled a shift in G8 summits in several ways. It was now seen as necessary to make summits inaccessible to protests and members of civil society. Kananaskis was also the first summit to take place after 9/11. Security costs ballooned to $96.5 million, or one-third of the summit's overall budget.

The summit was short, both in length and content. Lasting only a day and a half, it produced no final agreed-upon communique, despite the looming agenda items of terrorism, Africa and economic growth. Prime Minister Jean Chretien hoped to highlight aid to Africa as his "legacy issue," but much of the summit's agenda was overshadowed by the push for anti-terrorism measures.

While the RCMP promised “free speech zones” at the summit, the choice of Kananaskis—150 kilometres from Calgary—made it clear that mass mobilizations at the summit site would not be feasible, with a 6.5-kilometre perimeter and 13 checkpoints which kept dissenters away. A 150-kilometre “no fly zone” was guarded by 18 fighter pilots and three aircraft missile batteries. More than 6,000 Canadian Forces personnel were deployed in Kananaskis and Calgary during the summit. Chretien attempted to amend the National Defense Act to declare the summit area a "military security zone" but the provision was withdrawn following widespread public outcry.

Protests were quieter at this G8 Summit. A "G6" counter-summit, representing the 6 billion people living on the planet, was hampered by Canadian officials who refused visa requests from the vast majority of African delegates hoping to attend. Protests concentrated in Calgary, with a diversity of tactics and strategies, such as a nude anti-sweatshop rally in front of a GAP store, the “Showdown at the Ho-Down” (a street party outside an official summit function hosted by the mayor), and anarchist street soccer games that challenged police officers to a game (they declined to play).

The largest protest (“J26”, named for its date, June 26), a snake march through the downtown core, attempted to disrupt businesses and some G8 meetings taking place in Calgary.

The Kananaskis summit contained many of the refrains and promises heard at previous summits. This time around, there were no protesters within earshot to challenge them. The events of 9/11 seemed to drastically shift the space for protest and dissent, with governments using them as an opportunity to clamp down on civil disobedience and resistance.

Amanda Wilson is a researcher and writer based in Ottawa.

This story was published in The Dominion's special issue on the G8 and G20 summits in Ontario. We will continue to publish independent, investigative news about the G8 and G20 throughout the month of June.

For up-to-the-minute G8/G20 news from the streets of Toronto, visit the Toronto Media Co-op.

Briefly, the G7 summit in Toronto, 1988

Briefly, the G7 summit in Halifax, 1995

Briefly, the G8 summit in Genoa, 2001

Delta Lodge

First Nations Students Live In University

Moira Peters — Fri, 07 May 2010 05:22:50 +0000

Protest funding cuts that will lead to school's death

REGINA—Federal Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs Chuck Strahl has killed First Nations University of Canada (FNUC), according to the Canadian Federation of Students media release of March 31. More accurately, according to Diane Adams, president of FNUC students' association, FNUC is being left to slowly bleed to death over the summer.

Minister Strahl announced March 30 through the federal government’s Canada News Centre that FNUC will receive $3 million through the Indian Studies Support Program (ISSP) for expenses related to programming for students, “so that students can finish their academic year which ends August 31, 2010.”

"It's purely a tactic to slow the death of the [school],” Adams said in a CBC news report.

Students, anticipating the federal decision, began a Live-In on March 23, staying in the universities at all three campuses—Regina, Saskatoon and Prince Albert.

Earlier this week, university president Shauneen Pete announced the closure of the Saskatoon campus, and lay-offs of faculty and staff at the Regina and Prince Albert campuses. The Saskatoon campus will be put up for sale immediately, said Pete. Students, faculty and staff, who will have to relocate to find jobs and finish their degrees, expressed shock at the announcement.

A long-standing dispute between the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations (FSIN)—which appoints the Board of Governors to FNUC—and the provincial government of Saskatchewan—which partially funds the university—has played into the hands of the federal Conservatives, who subsequently pulled federal funding from FNUC.

FNUC is a university of a colonized people. As Blair Stonechild has pointed out in The New Buffalo: The Struggle for Aboriginal Post-Secondary Education in Canada, "Creating, operating, and maintaining an Aboriginal post-secondary institution within a colonialist environment that produces more failures than successes is a daunting task.”

FNUC is a chronically under-funded post-secondary institution with roots in the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College (SIFC) of the University of Regina (UofR) in May 1976. The first board chair, Doug Cuthand, said the board intended for Aboriginal chiefs to replace administrators once the path for Aboriginal education had been established.

In February 2005, FSIN board chair Morley Watson brought forward allegations of financial mismanagement and corruption against university administrators resulting in the suspension of three senior university officials. He placed Indian Nations people into various positions of power. Many interpreted this action as a political takeover of the university by the FSIN.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) and the Saskatchewan government were insistent that the FNUC Board of Governors be depoliticized from the Indian Nations, and instead operate with a structure of governance similar to other Canadian universities, with an independent Board of Governors as well as appropriate representation from the institution's external stakeholders.

The university’s Board has been dominated by Chiefs appointed by FSIN, a structure that didn’t fit with the familiar settler nation model of university governance, and numerous reviews by settler nation people have agreed. CAUT decided December 1, 2008, to censure FNUC—the first such action by the organization since 1979.

Ongoing resistance by the Indian Nations to provincial and CAUT demands, coupled with allegations of financial mismanagement of the university, resulted in a decision February 3 by the provincial government to pull its $5.2 million annual contribution to the university. On February 10, the federal government pulled its $7.2 million annual funding.

“Yanking FNUC funding [was] the right choice," wrote right-wing talk radio host John Gormley in an op-ed he ran in Canwest newspapers February 5. Producer of Gormley's show, Tammy Robert, titled her February 4 blog "Close the FNUniv Chapter, Please." Conservative blogger The Phantom Observer posted under the heading “Ralph Goodale Flogs A Dead Aboriginal Horse,” and wrote, “I was sorta wondering, which MP would be monumentally ignorant enough, intellectually blind enough and catastrophically stupid enough to try to argue for continued support for First Nations University, despite the fact that everyone was fed up with its governance problems and that the government was quite right to pull its funding.”

Students have vowed to continue the Live-In until the federal government restores funding. Saskatchewan has restored funding to the university.

Garson Hunter is an Associate Professor at the University of Regina. He researches marginalized people achieving power including pregnant intravenous drug users, panhandlers, street workers and the most desperate poor.

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