The Dominion - Philip Neatby

Did Canada Help Dismantle Sri Lanka’s Peace Process?

Stuart Neatby — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:00:28 +0000

"Collective grief" of Tamil community paralyzes Ottawa

OTTAWA–Canada’s 300,000-strong Tamil community, the largest Tamil diaspora on earth, has been mobilizing for months in major cities in Canada to draw attention to the dire situation in Sri Lanka.

“There is a collective grief amongst the Tamil community in Canada right now,” says David Poopalapillai, national spokesperson for the Canadian Tamil Congress (CTC). In recent months this "collective grief" has brought sections of at least two Canadian cities to a standstill.

Since Sri Lanka’s military captured the port city of Kilinochchi, a stronghold of the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the country’s northern region, the death toll within the mostly Tamil region has risen to alarming levels.

In response, Tamil-Canadians have organized fasts, parliamentary meetings, vigils, protests, and acts of non-violent civil disobedience to draw attention to what many see as a campaign of deliberate killings of Tamil civilians by the Sri Lankan government. This campaign included a march of more than 45,000 through downtown Toronto on January 30, the biggest march in Canada against an international conflict since Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon during the summer of 2006.

These actions form one of the largest and most coordinated acts of international solidarity in recent Canadian history.

On March 16, activists formed a human chain around busy streets surrounding Toronto’s Union Station, bringing swathes of the downtown core to a halt. Smaller demonstrations have taken place in most major Canadian cities.

Last Tuesday, April 7, in tandem with similar actions in England, Norway and other international communities, busloads of Tamil-Canadians converged upon Ottawa, arriving from Toronto, Montreal and elsewhere.

After a rally on Parliament Hill, approximately 500 protesters broke off into several coordinated groups and proceeded to squat several intersections in Ottawa’s small downtown throughout the afternoon and evening.

Rush hour traffic was largely brought to a halt.

Demonstrators, many of whom waved flags bearing the emblem of the LTTE, continued to block the intersections until 7:30 pm, when they were pushed back by police to the corner of Wellington and Metcalfe streets in front of Parliament Hill.

There they have remained, their numbers swelling to thousands over the Easter weekend.

“Our community is dying there, it’s going to be wiped out if we let this happen,” said Kumughan Nallarhenm, who drove from Toronto to Ottawa with his family last week to protest in front of parliament. “So I cannot sit idly reading at my home or going to the office.”

Nallarhenm’s sentiments were shared by most of the Tamils who have clogged Wellington Street in front of Parliament Hill over the last week. Many either have family in Northern Sri Lanka or know individuals trapped in the area.

Sahabthan Jesuthasan, a student at York University and member of the Coalition to Stop the War in Sri Lanka, has several family members in Kilinochchi.

“When the government ‘freed’ the area, we stopped hearing from them. We found out later that their house had been shelled and bombed,” he explained, adding that the lack of independent monitors in the most heavily affected areas of the conflict have made identifying the whereabouts of his relatives impossible.

“What’s worst is not knowing what happened to them. Nobody knows what’s going on.”

Until very recently, Canada has played a small role in Sri Lanka’s conflict.

Sri Lanka’s civil war began in 1983, following the destruction of many Tamil-run businesses during riots by Sinhalese nationalists on the eve of local elections. Tamils responded at first with non-violent protests, which were largely ignored by the Sri Lankan government. The LTTE subsequently managed to harness the frustrations of the country’s Tamil minority. Since then, violence on both sides has been responsible for over 70,000 killings along with other human rights abuses over the course of the 27-year war.

Assassinations of political leaders and bombings of heavily crowded urban areas have become a characteristic of the conflict. Prior to January, the LTTE had managed to function as a quasi-state entity in several northern cities, operating courts, tax administrative offices and even a bank.

A peace process, brokered by the government of Norway, began in 2002. By 2006, in the midst of already fragile negotiations, Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapakse began a concerted international public relations campaign focused upon casting the LTTE as the main barrier to peace.

Backed by former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Donald Camp, the campaign overlooked the Sri Lankan government’s own history of discrimination of ethnic Tamils and its funding of paramilitaries in the North. The campaign included the launching of a pro-government website modeled after the Tamil website tamilnet.com.

Canada was the first country to respond to this campaign, following the advice of lead editorials by the Globe and Mail and the National Post.

The newly-elected Harper government officially placed the LTTE on its list of terrorist organizations in April 2006. Then Minister of Public Safety Stockwell Day announced that LTTE supporters were “not welcome” in Canada during the press conference announcing the ban.

“The LTTE’s repeated use of violence,” said former Foreign Affairs Minister Peter Mackay, “is unacceptable and seriously calls into question its commitment to the peace process.”

Mackay made no mention of any use of violence carried out by the Sri Lankan government over the course of the civil war. The ban was followed by several RCMP arrests of Canadian citizens, who were alleged to have aided in fund raising for the LTTE.

No such actions have been taken to censure other nationalist elements in Sri Lanka, such as the Buddhist National Sinhala Heritage Party, which many international observers credit with pushing the Rajapakse government to adopt a more hard-line nationalist vision.

Subsequent to Canada’s decision, the EU placed the LTTE on its own terror list in May 2006.

In June 2006, the peace talks collapsed. The Rajapakse government began a renewed offensive against the Tamil Tigers. Despite UN calls for a ceasefire, the Sri Lankan government resumed its military campaign early this year.

This campaign has included aerial and artillery attacks of so-called “safe areas” into which civilians fleeing the conflict have been sequestered.

UN Human Rights chief Navi Pillay has estimated that 2,800 civilians have been killed since January, although some have claimed the toll has reached 3,500.

The Sri Lankan government has barred entry of journalists and humanitarian organizations such as the Red Cross into the region. UN officials have warned for months of a food crisis in the northern region that may affect hundreds of thousands of people. It is estimated that between 150,000 and 190,000 civilians have remained in the inappropriately named “safe areas.”

"Sri Lanka's so-called 'no-fire zone' is now one of the most dangerous places in the world," said Brad Adams, the Asia director for Human Rights Watch, in a recent report.

“What actually happened was that the LTTE ban brought about by the Canadian government and also by other governments gave a strong boost to the Sri Lankan government to go for a military solution,” says Poopalapillai.

Poopalapillai said that Canadian Tamil organizations were not consulted prior to the LTTE ban.

The CTC, along with other Tamil organizations, have called upon Canada to impose economic and political sanctions upon Sri Lanka, and to remove its consular officials from the country until a ceasefire is declared. Many in North America have also begun a legal campaign to declare an injunction against a $1.9 billion International Monetary Fund loan to the Sri Lankan government. Many Tamils believe that part of the loan would be used to finance the Sri Lankan government’s war effort.

The international protests have begun to have an effect.

The Sri Lankan government declared a two-day ceasefire over the Easter weekend, and both Conservative Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon and the leaders of the NDP and Liberal parties have made statements in recent days calling for stronger action to support a ceasefire.

Organizers say the protests, which have included several hunger strikes, will continue until Canada adopts a major shift in its policy towards Sri Lanka.

Stuart Neatby is a former managing editor of The Dominion.

Tiger and Tower

Tamils protest parliament

Amplifying Haiti's Lost Years

Stuart Neatby — Sat, 03 May 2008 23:18:35 +0000

A review of Peter Hallward’s <i>Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment</i>

The story of the international community’s role in Haiti over the last four years has been told almost solely through global independent media networks and by the alternative press. For Canadians, the story of their government’s leading role in the planning, funding and military execution of the 2004 coup d’etat that removed democratically-elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide reached its audience as a result the meticulous, diligent, and usually unpaid work of independent journalists and researchers. Meanwhile, the mainstream media, as well as the vast majority of academia, remained utterly silent during the human rights catastrophe that followed the coup. The recent reportage of the food riots across Haiti--riots that were clearly directed against the UN's presence as much as against the inaction of the Preval government in halting the rise in food prices--exhibited the amnesic symptoms consistent with the international community’s role in the 2004 coup.

The media blackout surrounding the bloodbath that followed the 2004 coup d’etat in Haiti--and particularly Canada’s clear complicity (to the point of paying the salaries of officials within the coup government)--has thus far been countered by frontline research carried out by several Canadian, Haitian and US independent journalists, such as Anthony Fenton, Yves Engler, Jeb Sprague, Isabelle Macdonald, Andrea Schmidt, Darren Ell, Kevin Pina and Jean Ristil. However, until now no single author has managed to piece together a comprehensive account of exactly how the coup of 2004 was carried out, who the actors were in Haiti and internationally, what its effects have been, and how the Lavalas movement of Jean-Bertrand Aristide has managed to weather the violence of this period.*

Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood does exactly this. Hallward’s account of how the international community pulled off the “most successful act of imperial sabotage since the end of the cold war” is a brilliant, comprehensive and courageous piece of modern history. It is also a first-rate piece of journalism.

Like many of the independent journalists mentioned above, Hallward’s interest in Haiti began with the 2004 coup. But, as Damming the Flood chronicles, the 2004 coup was not the first regime change in Haiti. Aristide, a Catholic priest whose religious teachings were steeped in the theology of liberation, was deposed in 1991, less than a year after his overwhelming victory in Haiti’s 1990 elections. These elections ended decades of US-backed military dictatorship. (Unsurprisingly, the coup was backed financially by the first Bush administration.) The ensuing three-year period was characterized by a campaign of terror directed against Haiti’s poorest neighbourhoods. By 1994, President Clinton, in need of a foreign policy success story after spearheading a disastrous international intervention in Somalia, militarily re-instated Aristide. Aristide was forced to agree to conditions, most notably that his government adopt widely unpopular IMF-oriented economic reforms and that Haiti’s moneyed elite--many of whom had supported Aristide's deposition--retain positions of power. Haiti’s democratic government then adopted many unpopular free market reforms--whose fallout in the agricultural sector is evident today--but also managed to dismantle Haiti’s hated military. The 10-year period that followed, from 1994 to 2004, saw an unprecedented drop in human rights abuses throughout the country and a modest investment in social programs.

Perhaps as a result of his widespread appeal among Haiti’s poor, whose newfound influence upon Haiti's government enraged and terrified the country's elite, Aristide remained a deeply unpopular and vilified figure among foreign policy-makers in the United States, Canada, the European Union, and even the UN.

Hallward notes in his introduction that the book is a response to the “striking difference between the international reactions to the two anti-Aristide coups of 1991 and 2004.” According to Hallward, the 2004 coup represented the “most successful exercise of neo-imperial sabotage since the toppling of Nicaragua’s Sandinistas in 1990.” Hallward also writes that the international campaign of demonization of Aristide in the years leading up to the coup was “one of the most successful propaganda episodes of modern times,” a media coup on par with the acceptance by the world press of the pretense of weapons of mass destruction as the motivation behind the US invasion of Iraq.

Throughout his exhaustively footnoted account, Hallward examines the claims made against Aristide by members of the country’s opposition parties and by the small class of moneyed elite. By analysing documented evidence, he debunks a number of still-prevalent myths, from the claim that Aristide relied upon an apparatus of gangs to repress political opponents--indeed, from 2001 to 2004, the number of political killings was miniscule and evidence linking the crimes to their perpetrators remains tenuous, while 4,000 political killings are estimated to have occurred from 2004-2006 in Port-au-Prince alone--to the assertion that the Lavalas party had lost its legitimacy and popularity among the poor--despite the fact that a Gallup poll in 2002 put Aristide’s support at 60 per cent--to the notion that Aristide rigged the parliamentary elections of 2000--even though the elections were deemed “free and fair” by the Organization of American States among others, and they occurred, not under Aristide’s watch, but during the presidency of Rene Preval.

Hallward attributes most of Haiti’s social woes to the particularly “tiny transnational clique of wealthy and well-connected families [that] continue to dominate” every position and institution of power in Haiti, and adds that they “have more in common with their corporate, diplomatic or intellectual colleagues in France or North America than they do with their compatriots in the countryside or the slums.” His book is peppered with insights about this particularly brutal social tension. “...In terms of class, struggle would be much too benign: in Haiti class differences are preserved through nothing less than full-on warfare or assault.” Hallward’s chapter on the period from 1994 to 2000, perhaps the most insightful section of the book, concludes that the most significant event to take place in this struggle was Aristide’s dismantlement of Haiti’s military in 1995. This act represented a significant defanging of Haiti’s small class of elite and accounts for much of their venal hatred of Aristide and the Lavalas political movement.

But Hallward’s chronicle is less about Aristide and more about the political force of Haiti’s poor that he represented. Damming the Flood is really a story about how the Lavalas political movement, perhaps the most persistent political movement of the poor in Latin America, managed to adapt during the first coup, how it evolved during the 10 years of democracy, and how it continues to evolve as the dominant political force in the country, despite the internal divisions and contradictions of the current “democratic” period. “Over the last 20 years,” Hallward writes, “Lavalas has developed as an experiment at the limits of contemporary political possibility. Its history sheds light on some of the ways that political mobilization can proceed under the pressure of exceptionally powerful constraints.”

Although there are some critical elements of the story of the Haitian coup that are not given the attention they deserve--particularly the significance of the Lavalas social programs and the role of international NGOs in “selling” the coup to an international audience--Damming the Flood is a truly remarkable achievement. The one drawback of this memorable work might be its comprehensive and critical attention to details; although Hallward’s propensity to name names is illuminating for those of us who have kept our eye on Haiti for years, readers unfamiliar with Haiti’s struggle may get lost in the complexity of the many actors involved in the country’s story of betrayal.

Why should Canadians read this book? Damming the Flood represents a cautionary tale for the Canadian Left, as well as for social justice movements everywhere. While thousands of Canadians have been willing to speak out against the regime change in Iraq and against the ongoing war in Afghanistan, the massacres of Haiti’s poor occurred in silence. The failure of much of the Canadian Left to respond to this violence has had enormous consequences, paid for with the blood of many in Cite Soleil, Bel Air, La Saline and other desperately poor neighbourhoods. Hallward’s account of the difficult survival of the movement of the poor in Haiti, as well as the manner in which their cries were muffled by their international enemies who disguised themselves at home as the “friends of Haiti,” holds many lessons for political movements for justice in Canada.

*Thomas Griffin’s horrifying and far too often overlooked human rights report, Haiti Human Rights Investigation: November 14-21, 2004 deserves an honourable mention as the closest candidate so far.

Damming the Flood

Dominion Radio #8

Stuart Neatby — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 19:04:35 +0000

Subhead:

The Cancer industry, Canada's legacy in Indonesia, and fighting Irving in court

Cover Image:

radio_logo1_2(2).jpg

MP3:

http://www.dominionpaper.ca/files/dominion/audio/Dominion Radio 8.mp3

Body:

Dominion Radio broadcasts grassroots news from across the country, focusing on stories and voices silenced by the mainstream media.

Episode #8:

A discussion with Taylor Gray, Energy Advisor with the Conservation Council of New Brunswick about their efforts to take on Irving's proposed LNG refinery in Saint John, NB.
An interview with journalist and Cape Breton University Professor Garry Leech about the proposed Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.
Devra Davis uncovers the sordid history of government, industry, and scientists efforts to obscure the commonly known causes of cancer such as smoking, benzene, and asbestos.
David Webster of the East Timor Alert Network looks back at Canada's role in facilitating the legacy of the late Indonesian President General Suharto, one of the biggest mass murderers of the twentieth century.

Dominion Radio #7

Stuart Neatby — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 18:21:50 +0000

Subhead:

Police Brutality in Canada

Cover Image:

radio_logo1_2(2).jpg

MP3:

http://www.dominionpaper.ca/files/dominion/audio/DominionRadio7_120107mono.mp3

Body:

Dominion Radio broadcasts grassroots news from across the country, focusing on stories and voices silenced by the mainstream media.

Episode #7:

An interview with Thomas Melenfant of the Vancounver-based Anti-Poverty Committee about resisting police violence against the poor in Vancouver.
A discussion with Mantel a resident of Halifax's north end about "community policing" in black neighborhoods.
A recorded excerpt of a discussion with Kim Pate of the Elizabeth Fry Society of Canada about the criminalization of women with mental health issues.
Natercia Coelho, the wife of Gary Freeman, who is facing extradition to the US after what he describes as defending himself against police brutality in Chicago in the 1970's.

January in Review

dru — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 03:35:43 +0000

News from social movements

Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI)-- aka "Big Trout Lake"-- Chief Donny Morris announced that he is ready to go to jail to defend his community's sovereignty. "I'm prepared to give myself up if the court decides I've disrespected the November ruling to allow Platinex on our land. I'm prepared to acknowledge that," Morris stated in a press release. Two years ago Ontario-based mining company Platinex sued the KI First Nation for $10 billion for preventing mining on their land in the far northwest of Ontario. In November 2007, KI withdrew from the legal proceedings, citing over $600,000 in debt accumulated while fighting the province and Platinex. Morris' contempt of court charges stemmed from an encounter with Platinex, where the chief escorted officials from the company back to their plane, and threatened to file trespassing charges if they came back. Observers expect the people of the remote fly-in community to continue to resist attempts by Platinex to mine their lands. Future resistance, however, is unlikely to be undertaken through the courts.

Six Nations leaders have put towns and cities along the Grand River on notice that the land still belongs to the people of Six Nations. The stretch of land, which extends from Lake Erie to the area lying to the northwest of Toronto, was granted to the Six Nations Confederacy in the 1784 Haldimand Proclamation. "There's no more of this sweeping it under the rug. It's not OK to steal land anymore and we're going to make people aware of that," one representative told the CBC.

Three hundred supporters of Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey, the first two war resisters to cross into Canada after refusing to deploy to Iraq with the US military, gathered in Toronto calling upon the Canadian parliament to pass a motion allowing them to remain in Canada. The rally was attended by Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae, as well as Toronto NDP MP Olivia Chow. Similar rallies and actions were held in 11 cities across the country. Days before, a rally of 50 Iraq veterans gathered at the Canadian Embassy in Washington urging the Canadian government to provide sanctuary to all military service personnel looking to escape deployments with the US military. In November the Canadian Supreme Court refused to hear the cases of Hinzman and Hughey, on the grounds that they had previously been turned down by the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board, which considered the illegality of the Iraq war under international law inadmissible. There are at least 30 war resisters in Canada at the moment.

A group calling itself the Wreath Underground vandalized buildings on Vancouver's University of British Columbia (UBC) campus. The group released a communiqué, taking credit for the actions and opposing commercial and Olympic-related developments that resulted in the destruction of public space on campus. The action comes in the context of an ongoing campaign by Students for a Democratic Society UBC (SDS-UBC) to prevent further privatization of public spaces on the UBC campus. SDS-UBC says the University's development plan's purpose "is to make the centre of campus a corporate/private space to which students only have access as customers or condo owners/renters." SDS-UBC is organizing a conference in March entitled "Resisting the University," which will address "privatization and commodification of education."

Hundreds rallied and marched in Montreal in support of Abdelkader Belaouni, a 40-year old blind Algerian refugee who has been living in sanctuary in St. Gabriel's Church for over two years. Solidarity pickets and embassy visits were also held in most major cities across Canada and in several cities internationally, including Tokyo, New York, Beirut, Paris, Durban, and London. Belaouni's supporters were demanding that federal Minister of Immigration Diane Finley grant a stay of the deportation order, and grant him permanent resident status in Canada. Belaouni fled Algeria's brutal civil war in 1996, arriving first in the United States. He came to Montreal in 2003 and applied for refugee status. His application was rejected by Immigration and Refugee Board judge Laurier Thibault, who had close to a 100% rejection rate amongst refugee claimants. Belaouni entered sanctuary in early 2006, and has since received international support for his case, including from Laibar Singh, currently in sanctuary in Vancouver. Said Singh in a statement issued days before the solidarity march: "The Canadian government says it raises its voice for the less fortunate around the world but if it can't see us, who can it see?"

Solomon Islands Prime Minister Derek Sikua affirmed his full support of the Australian-dominated occupation force, known as RAMSI. The force, consisting of over 2,000 soldiers, along with bureaucrats and "advisors," who took effective control of much of the Islands' state apparatus, including prisons, police, courts, public service, and central bank. Critics called the move a "neo-colonial" effort to "safeguard Australian corporate interests and maintain its regional domination." Former Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare had angered Australian diplomats when he moved to roll back some of RAMSI's powers over spending and pave the way for an eventual withdrawal. He was ousted in a parliamentary vote, and replaced with a Sikua-led coalition, which has been enthusiastically current pro-occupation.

Despite Canada's official stance of non-participation in the invasion of Iraq, another Canadian general has been sent to work with the command group overseeing the US-led occupation and counterinsurgency war. Brigadier-General Nicolas Matern of the Special Forces is the third Canadian general to serve in the command group, as part of an inter-military exchange program. According to a report from the US State Dept., "the governments of the United States and Canada collaborated on a broad array of initiatives, exercises, and joint operations that spanned virtually all agencies and every level of government."

An anti-Olympics speaking tour visited 18 cities and Indigenous communities, calling attention to destruction caused by development fuelled by the Olympics. "There is an infrastructure being created for 2010 that will result in the further destruction of mountains and valleys that are traditionally Salish, St’at’imc, and Squamish territory," said Dustin Johnson. Resistance to "Sun Peaks" development on Secwepemc lands, one of many areas affected by the Olympics, extends back a decade. There have been dozens of arrests, and government-supervised destruction of a house and two traditional sweatlodges. Johnson and Kanahus Pellkey of the Native Youth Movement are calling for direct action to shut down the Olympic Games.

Itchy the Bedbug, Creepy the Cockroach and Chewy the Rat will be the official mascots of Vancouver's Poverty Olympics. Organizers, who hope to draw attention to Vancouver's "world class poverty," decried the lack of funding for social housing and the devastating effect of rapid gentrification on Vancouver's vast population of poor and homeless.

A recent report estimated that between 8,000 and 15,500 British Columbia residents are "absolutely homeless," while an estimated 39,000 are "inadequately housed." BC Forest and Housing Minister Rich Coleman had previously estimated the number of homeless at roughly 5,000.

A Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) report warned of the possibility of "violent protests" during the Olympic Games in 2010. The heavily-censored public version of the report has raised concerns about "how far CSIS will go." "We're more than a little worried about the potential for infiltration of non-profit societies and legitimate protest groups," a representative of the BC Civil Liberties Association told the Canadian Press. The Anti-Poverty Committee (APC) is one of the groups targeted by police and intelligence agencies. APC representative Mary Claremont said, "This is what we have been protesting... the coming Olympic police state. People thought we were nuts, but look, from 40 kilometers of electric fence, surveillance cameras, civil city, CSIS... it's here."

A group of academics and media watch groups filed a complaint with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), alleging that media coverage of the attempted deportation of Laibar Singh was "not accurate... or comprehensive". CBC TV, CBC Radio, CKNW, CTV, and Global TV are cited in the complaint, which states that Singh was falsely said to have come to Canada "illegally" or that he "was illegal" in Canada prior to taking sanctuary. The complaint says that repetition of falsities despite widely available accurate information "fuelled ignorance in the public sphere and has negatively influenced perceptions of Mr. Laibar Singh and all asylum seekers to Canada."

Security Certificate detainee Mohammed Harkat was seized, then released again by Police and Canadian Border Services agents. Widely referred to in media reports as a "terrorism suspect" Harkat is being held without charges under Bill C-3, "anti-terrorism" legislation passed after September 11, 2001. "I think it's a political move," Sophie Harkat told the Ottawa Citizen in an interview, adding that the government seeks to "stir fear" in the leadup to a vote over bill C-3. If the government does not vote to renew Bill C-3 before the end of March, existing security certificates--including the one under which Harkat is being held--will be struck down, in keeping with a Supreme Court ruling that found the legislation unconstitutional.

Alberta tar sands giant Suncor has given final approval for a plan to increase output by 200,000 barrels per day in a $20 billion expansion project. The company says that the increase is part of a plan to double the company's output to 550,000 barrels per day by 2012.

Energy company TransCanada has moved forward with plans to build a natural gas pipeline across unceded territory belonging to the Lubicon Cree. In a letter to TransCanada, Lubicon legal counsel F. M. Lennarson wrote that the "response of the Lubicon people is that they are the aboriginal owners of the land that TransCanada wishes to violate with this huge new pipeline." The pipeline will transport natural gas to the tar sands, allowing for expanded tar sands processing capacity.

Ecuadorian officials revoked a total of 587 mining concessions effectively cancelling Canadian-based Ascendant Copper’s bid to the controversial Junin Project. The transnational corporation is under intense scrutiny for impacts on local communities and environmental degradation. Human rights lawyers contend that the mere purchase of the mining concession is in breach of community members’ rights, and Ecuador’s constitution.

Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra was at the center of a political scandal in the United States involving Bill Clinton and a mining deal in Kazakhstan potentially worth tens of millions of dollars. According to the New York Times, Giustra gained access to Clinton's inner circle after he donated $31 million dollars to the former US President's foundation. Giustra subsequently accompanied Clinton on a trip to Kazakhstan, where he signed a deal that "stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers," according to the Times.

George Habash, Palestinian leader, and founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), died January 26th, 2008 at the age of eighty-two after six decades of struggle. Habash dreamt of Arab unity and an end to the dispossession of Palestinians. Seen by supporters as “the conscience of the Palestinian revolution,” Habash effected his politic treating the poor for free as a medical doctor, and through the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the largest secular resistance group in Palestine. U.S., Canadian, and Israeli governments have branded Habash as a terrorist for bombings and hijackings carried out by the PFLP during the 1970’s. Many Palestinians, however will remember Habash as a man who “embodied Palestinian and Arab aspirations.”

Despite reports of rising environmental consciousness among Canadians, car ownership and usage is on the rise. A study conducted by Statistics Canada found that 74 per cent of Canadian adults made all of their trips by car. A similar study in 1998 found 70 per cent using cars for all of their trips, while the number was 68 per cent in 1992. The study found a strong connection between low density neighbourhoods and high car use, while those living in high-density neighbourhoods were relatively far less likely to use cars.

Representatives from Venezuela's grassroots social movements gathered to discuss ways to advance a grassroots socialist agenda, while addressing growing bureaucracy within the Chavez-led government. "There is a reformist sector that has been working internally to construct a force to build a counterweight to the revolutionary sector that is in the government," said one participant. Another spoke of a "return to the street," adding "we didn't realize that the bureaucracy isolated us from this reality and this deterioration in which we are living."

In response to the ongoing Israeli siege of Gaza, a convoy of Arab and Israeli peace activists held a demonstration of between 1500 and 2000 at the Eretz border crossing, calling for an end to the Israeli siege of the Gaza strip and the immediate lifting of the blockade of badly needed medical equipment, fuel, and food. The demonstration, which was organized by organizations such as Gush-Shalom and the International Coalition Against House Demolitions, was held in conjunction with the delivery of 5 tons of food aid to the border crossing near Gaza city. A demonstration of 200 Palestinians was held in Gaza at the same time, from which speeches were broadcast to the Eretz gathering via amplified cellphones. The Israeli military barred the aid supplies from entry into Gaza, ordering that they be stored at a nearby Kibbutz. Organizers have pledged to petition the Israeli supreme court in order to allow the aid supplies to be delivered to Gaza, where 83 Palestinians, including 16 children, have died due to the ongoing Israeli siege.

NYM Speaking Tour

Haldimand Tract

December in Review

Stuart Neatby — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:32:31 +0000

Halted deportations, Lakota secession, and social tension in Latin America

In Vancouver, 1500 demonstrators effectively paralysed the Vancouver International Airport and halted the planned deportation of 48-year old paralysed Punjabi refugee Laibar Singh on December 10-- international Human Rights Day. The vast majority of the supporters were members of Vancouver’s Sikh community, who had been mobilizing and campaigning against Singh’s impending deportation to India for months, while he lived in sanctuary within a Sikh temple. On January 9, a second attempt by the Canadian Border Services Agency to deport Singh was thwarted after officials showed up at the Nanak Sikh Temple in Surrey at 4AM to find 300 of Singh’s supporters blocking the entrance to the temple. Singh’s supporters have argued that he should remain in Canada on Humanitarian and Compassionate grounds due to his medical needs.

The Canadian Supreme Court ruled that the Safe Third Country Agreement-- legislation that has cut refugees' eligibility to remain in Canada-- was illegal. The STCA, enacted by the Martin government, prohibits political refugees from remaining in Canada if they have landed first in the US. The ruling declared that the United States could not be deemed a “safe” country for refugees due to its violations of the UN Convention Against Torture and the Refugee Convention.

The Lakota Sioux nation made steps to legally secede from the United States on December 20 in Washington after Lakota representatives withdrew from all treaties signed with the US. Following years of discussions amongst treaty representatives within the various Lakota communities throughout Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana, the notice of withdrawal from the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie Treaties was hand-delivered by a four-member Lakota delegation to Daniel Turner, Deputy Director of Public Liaison at the US State Department. According to delegation members, the legal basis for this withdrawa stands with the continuous violation of the 1851 and 1868 treaties by the United States, as well as the conditions of extreme poverty that exist within the Lakota communities.

Environmentalists have perhaps won a partial victory after the United States and Canada both backed down from their obstructionist positions at the UN Climate Change Summit in Bali. After the summit was extended an extra day, Canadian Environment Minister John Baird, who had been dogged by a delegation of Canadian youth activists throughout the week, reversed his original position against a binding target of 25 to 40 per cent reductions of carbon emissions from wealthy countries by the year 2020. The United States also agreed in the end to endorse the “Bali roadmap,” although only after the section requiring binding targets for all nations to collectively reduce carbon emissions was removed. Some environmentalists have argued that the summit’s key failing was the “single-minded focus on getting Washington on board,” to the detriment of actually achieving firm carbon-reduction targets.

In Haiti, grassroots leader Rene Civil was released after spending 20 months in prison. Civil was a member of the Lavalas party of former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and was also a leader of the Popular Power Youth (JPP), a grassroots organization of youth from poor communities. Civil was arrested in August 2006, shortly after organizing a demonstration calling for the release of political prisoners and the return to the country of Aristide. However, another grassroots activist, Wilson Mesilien, acting director of the September 30th foundation, a human rights organization, was recently forced into hiding after receiving death threats. Mesilien’s predecessor, Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, remains at large after he was kidnapped by unknown figures last August. The US and Canadian governments took part in the military overthrow of Aristide in 2004, and Canadian RCMP officials currently head the UN training program for the Haitian National Police, which is accused by Haitians and international observers of human rights abuses including mass murder, sex trafficking and rape.

In Pakistan, in the midst of political turmoil in the week following the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the United States government announced it would approve the nearly five-hundred million dollar sale of eighteen Lockheed Martin fighter jets to the regime of Pervez Musharraf. Although no definitive investigation has been carried out of Bhutto’s murder (the Pakistani President has refused to allow a UN investigation of the killing), many of Bhutto’s supporters, as well as Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, have expressed belief that elements of Pakistan’s military may have been behind the assassination, and have criticized the continued sale of arms to the regime.

A new report issued by the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade has found that Canadian arms sales reached $700 million, the highest levels ever recorded, in 2003. This figure did not include sales made to the US which, if counted, would have brought the total sales of Canadian arms to over $2 billion. According to Ken Epps, an arms control researcher with Project Ploughshares, many of these sales were made to countries with dubious human rights records, such as Colombia, China, and Saudi Arabia. Epps also noted that the Pakistani military purchased $250 million worth of helicopters from Canada between 2004 and 2005.

The Bush administration’s case for war with Iran was dealt a severe blow after sixteen different US intelligence agencies concluded that the country had ended its nuclear weapons more than four years ago. Despite this, George W. Bush, claimed publicly that he still believed Iran to be a threat to the United States. The completion of the report by the National Intelligence Agency had reportedly been held up and postponed by vice-President Dick Cheney for two months.

In Toronto, a new report by the provincial government has found that, despite crackdowns, 31,000 people currently receive a "special diet" supplement designed for welfare recipients with medical dietary needs. The supplement, valued at $250 extra dollars for food per month, is an obscure and often overlooked government program. The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) has publicly set up special diet clinics throughout the city and province in recent years, arguing that individuals on welfare live in conditions of state-sponsored poverty, which limits their dietary health. Over the last two years, this campaign effectively redirected over $30 million of provincial revenue into the hands of the province's poorest residents.

Recent reports from human rights organizations in Chiapas, Mexico indicate that the Mexican government is ramping up its military presence in regions under heavy influence of the indigenous Zapatista Liberation Army. According to the Centre for Political Analysis and Social and Economic Research, a human rights NGO based in Chiapas, there has been a marked increase in the presence of military and paramilitary deployments within this Southern Mexican state which, coupled with an increase in expropriations of land occupied by indigenous Mayan sympathizers of the Zapatistas, has prompted IPS News to dub this escalation “the worst onslaught by state forces in the last 10 years.” Since the 1994 uprising by the Zapatistas, indigenous self-rule has been quietly built within the region, as the Zapatistas have established their own health, education and development programmes, while forming their own governing “caracoles,” or good-government councils.

In Bolivia, clashes continued between middle- to upper-class supporters of the the Democratic and Social Power (PODEMOS) political party and the social movements and indigenous communities united under the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) of current president Evo Morales. Partisans of the right-leaning PODEMOS, which include the governors of four eastern departments, have been staging blockades, strikes, and demonstrations for months against the proposed constitutional changes championed by Morales and the social forces united under the MAS, largely movements of the country’s majority poor and indigenous peoples. The constitution would grant the central government greater control over the country’s rich natural resources, but would also guarantee expanded autonomy for departmental governments and indigenous communities. The opposition disagrees with the limitations on land ownership established in the document, as well as the redirection of departmental gas revenues to a new National Pension Fund for all citizens of the country over the age of sixty. Late last month, the opposition has declared autonomy from the central government for the city of Santa Cruz, establishing a new police force, television station and special ID cards.

The Ontario government finally announced that the province will be returning the Ipperwash Provincial Park lands to the Chippewas of Kettle and Stony Point First Nations. This announcement follows the conclusion of the Ipperwash inquiry into the 1995 Ontario Provincial Police killing of Dudley George last May. The land was originally expropriated from the Stony Point band in 1942 to allow the federal government to build a military base.

First Nations survivors of the Canadian residential school system received their first cheques as part of a $2 billion compensation settlement for the collective experience of mass sexual and physical abuse suffered by indigenous children at Catholic-run schools between the 1950s and 1980s. Eighty thousands First Nations people are eligible for this compensation, which is paid in lump sums, and which amount to an average of $28,000. This amount, however, only accounts for the federal government’s portion of the settlement; The Catholic church is also responsible for paying 30% of the settlement. Although viewed by residential school survivors as an important milestone in the process of achieving justice, the size of the settlement pales when compared to a similar settlement given to Australian aboriginals of the “Stolen Generation,” whose treatment at the hands of their government throughout the twentieth century bears many striking similarities to that of the Canadian aboriginal experience.

In New Orleans, police attacked, tazered and pepper-sprayed public housing residents who had arrived at city hall to take part in a “public hearing” about the proposed demolition of 5000 public housing units in the city. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there remains a homeless population of 12,000 within New Orleans. City Hall and private developers have nonetheless intensified efforts to demolish public housing in order to make way for commercial property and high-priced condominiums. Police had initially erected a metal gate around city hall, prohibiting public housing residents from entering the building. Fifteen were arrested in total as the council passed the motion in favour of the demolitions. Residents have pledged to continue fighting, and have called for supporters to travel to the region and take part in a campaign of direct actions against these home demolitions.

Officials in India have conceded that the construction of the World Bank-backed Narmada Dam is illegal. Shri Afroz Ahmad of the Narmada Control Authority admitted that the construction of the dam to the height of 121.9 metres has led to the illegal submergence of houses and farms, particularly those of the Bhil tribal people, many of whom have been struggling against the construction of this mega-dam for more than twenty years. Critics of the dam have demanded that its size be reduced in order to avoid flooding still further indigenous communities, and continue to fight for land for those who have been displaced by the dam’s construction.

Hundreds of trade union demonstrators gathered in Toronto to protest the proposed Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, while approximately 30-40 activists with the Canadian Union of Public Employees picketed the office of former Foreign Affairs Minister Peter Mackay in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. Critics from trade unions, human rights organizations, and ecumenical organizations in Canada have argued that this trade deal has been negotiated in complete secrecy, after a dramatically similar trade deal between the US and Colombia met with overwhelming opposition within Congress due to human rights concerns. Colombia currently has the worst human rights record of any country in the Western Hemisphere, and more trade unionists are killed in the region than in the rest of the world combined. Little has been made public about this trade agreement, nor of the timeline for its implementation, but public officials have speculated that the trade pact could be completed within the next few weeks. Many Colombian activists have argued that this trade agreement encourages para-military political violence against indigenous peoples, trade unionists, afro-Colombian communities, and poor people within resource-rich territories, and also provides the framework to “legalize and legitimize” this economic and political terrorism. Meanwhile, reports of increased military and para-military attacks upon indigenous protests against land expropriation have emerged from the Southwest Cauca in recent weeks.

African political leaders have rejected a neo-liberal trade agreement with the European Union, which would have forced punitive duties upon imported goods from the continent, such as sugar, meat and bananas, which would have competed with European producers. The “Economic Partnership Agreements” have been the subject of protests by trade unions and social movements throughout the continent, and were voted down during an EU-Africa summit in Lisbon. The increased amount of investment from China in Africa has likely provided the subcontinent with a greater amount of breathing room in negotiating such trade deals in recent years.

Lakota Map

Laibar Singh and Supporters

Hard Times Sold in Vending Machines

dru — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 18:48:30 +0000

Worker migration from Atlantic Canada to the tar sands

For Atlantic Canadians, the story of worker migration couldn't be more familiar. Leaving the region for the "boom town" of the day has practically been a rite of passage since the 1970s. The successive waves of worker migration from east to west have been many--the last Alberta energy boom in the seventies, the construction boom in Toronto in the '70s and '80s, the collapse of the cod fishery in Newfoundland, followed by the collapse of coal mining in Cape Breton--and have always resulted in a particular pull for young workers away from the region. This regional story was immortalized by Donald Shebib's classic 1970 film "Goin' Down the Road," which follows two men who leave Cape Breton in search of a better life in Toronto, only to end up bouncing from one poorly paid job to another. The shock of rural life colliding with urban poverty was aptly captured in Bruce Cockburn's song of the same name, which he wrote for the film: "I came to the city with the sun in my eyes/ My mouth full of laughter and dreams/ But all that I found was concrete and dust/ And hard times sold in vending machines."

Today, it is difficult to exaggerate the impact that worker migration to the Alberta Tar Sands has had for Atlantic Canada. Although credible estimates for numbers of workers who have been moving west are difficult to gauge, few doubt that they are in the tens of thousands. One would be hard pressed to find anyone in the region who does not know someone working out west.

But the move by thousands of Atlantic Canadians to Fort McMurray in recent years differs from past worker migrations.

"The key difference," says Reg Anstey, president of the Newfoundland Federation of Labour, "is that in the other outmigrations of significance, like when the fisheries shut down, a lot of people took pretty lousy jobs."

According to Anstey, unlike during other times of economic collapse in Newfoundland, when workers took jobs in fish or meat-packing plants in Atlantic Canada and Ontario, Newfoundland labour is now a much sought-after commodity.

"This is the first time where almost everyone who's working out there, their way up is paid and their way back is paid by the company," says Anstey.

As of 2006, the shortage of workers across the province was estimated by the Alberta government to be around 100,000 workers. Canadian National Resources Limited has begun offering three flights a week from Alberta to Newfoundland, while Air Canada has added a 'Fort McMurray Express.' The National Post reported in May that almost a third of the residents of Fort McMurray were believed to be from Newfoundland alone.

Anstey sees many advantages for Newfoundland from the oil boom. The province, like other regions of Atlantic Canada, is in the relatively early stages of developing its own oil and gas sector. Until the Lower Churchill Valley hydroelectric project and the Hebron offshore oil project are able to deliver high-paying jobs for Newfoundland's workforce, Anstey sees the migration of workers, whose return flights are likely booked in advance by their employers, as a method of training a generation of workers for these projects.

However, the pull of workers from the region is still somewhat alarming. The populations of Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia are shrinking, according to Statistics Canada, while New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island registered the lowest population growth rate of all provinces in Canada between 2006 and 2007. Newfoundland in particular, with an economy that has not yet recovered from the collapse of the commercial fishery in the early 1990s, is now in a state of population decline, with more people dying than are being born. Regional papers frequently carry stories about labour shortages for local trucking companies and fish plants. This shortage, in a startling parallel to Alberta's own industry "solution" to its own tar sands-fueled labour shortage, is prompting increasing calls from east coast business leaders to fill these positions by importing Temporary Foreign Workers.

However, for Atlantic Canadian workers travelling to Fort McMurray, the effects of this migration may not be fully known for years to come.

Steve Gaul, a resident of Halifax, worked various stints in the oil fields for a total of three years, most recently as a roughneck on a rigging crew. When asked about conditions on the job, Gaul says he discovered that exposure to harmful chemical agents was frequent.

"There's lots of Benzene and substances that you're gonna come in contact with fairly frequently. These kinds of things are very unhealthy, they even [result in] birth defects," said Gaul.

Material Safety Data Sheets detailing information about the various chemicals with which workers might come in contact were "diligently provided" to workers, but Gaul says that workers are not given time to read them.

Despite this, Gaul is quick to point out that his contractor instituted a "safety bonus" each hour for crews who maintained the safety of all members. Overall, however, he notes that rigging work is "a dangerous job by nature."

The effects of such chemicals may appear long after a worker has left a job site. As pointed out in an April 2006 column by Alberta Federation of Labour researcher Jason Foster, cancer caused by workplace exposure to chemicals like benzene are not recognized, nor even recorded by the Alberta Workers' Compensation Board (WCB)or the Alberta government.

According to WCB statistics, the WCB accepted 29 new claims for work-related cancer and recognized 38 fatalities due to occupational cancer in 2005. However, the Alberta Cancer Board estimates that eight per cent of all cancers in Alberta are work-related. This means over 1,000 new cases of work-related cancer are diagnosed and more than 400 workers die of occupational cancer each year.

Fewer than one in 10 occupational cancer fatalities are recognized by the WCB.

In addition, Alberta currently has one of the highest rates of workplace deaths in the country, and the number of workplace accidents reported in the province in 2006 was 181,159--an increase of 7.4 per cent from the previous year.

Stories of injuries and close-calls are not hard to come by. George Marshall, a 26-year-old PEI resident worked only a few days in 2006 as a labourer but "almost died twice" on the job. The first close call, according to Marshall, was on account of a fall, while the second was due to "a piece of the rig [that] disconnected and came hurtling toward me."

Jason Fraser, a 24-year-old iron worker from Chester, Nova Scotia, recently spent six weeks working in Fort Mackay. During his last week on the job, there were two serious injuries at his worksite: a structural steel worker injured both heels after a fall and a platefitter sustained facial cuts from a piece of steel. He believes that some contractors deliberately undercount the number of workplace injuries.

Fraser had difficulty adjusting to life within the work camps, which he says resembled university dorms, aside from the fact that they "basically look like a bomb dropped [on them]." After work, there was little to do within the camps.

"I've had problems with alcoholism and I just drank every night for five weeks."

Fraser also had a number of moral qualms with his work, which he believes may have contributed to his drinking.

"Nobody ever thought about the environmental impact," he says. "I had a lot of moral repression. I felt really bad for what I was taking part in."

Gaul also points out that few workers showed regard to the ethics and sustainability of the oil projects, and recalls that the subject of climate change was laughed at by instructors and workers alike during one of his training courses. He also believes that the long hours of work, coupled with the boredom of camp life, often leads to a general feeling of isolation.

"As far as the social atmosphere in the camps, it's not really the most healthy environment. There's a lot of negativity and built-up misery being shared and communicated. There are a lot of people that are in the situation where they're spending way too much time away from their family to have any kind of semblance of regular family life."

It is likely due to these "quality of life" issues that many workers from Atlantic Canada view their positions in Alberta as being largely temporary. Fort McMurray, with its overwhelming growth rate and its infrastructural inability to cope with this growth, is an unlikely candidate for long-term settlement for Atlantic Canadian workers. East Coast workers, though perhaps as naive to the hazards of the oil industry as their predecessors were to the reality of life in Toronto in the 1970s, are by now no strangers to moving to where the work is. Many recognize the higher cost of living in the West, as well as the sky-high rate of inflation in Alberta and realize that their money will stretch further on the East Coast than it will in Alberta. Some, like Anstey, see the abundance of Atlantic Canadians in the Alberta oil patch as an interim gig, as workers tide themselves over in advance of the opening of the Hibernia and Lower Churchill Valley projects. These mega-projects are likely to yield their own environmental and social impacts as well in the years to come, as the East Coast as a whole shifts its economy towards the production of oil and gas resources for export.

Still, many expect to one day see a similar job boom in the east, one that they believe might break their diet of "hard times sold in vending machines."

Acadie en Alberta

The Christian Labour Association of Canada

dru — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 02:58:39 +0000

Few subjects inspire more ire within the Canadian labour movement than the Christian Labour Association of Canada (CLAC).

CLAC's website presents the organization as an alternative to the “adversarial” relationship of other unions with employers favouring a more “co-operative approach to labour-management relations.” Although apparently not a Christian organization, CLAC's approach to workplace organization is based upon the “Christian social principles of dignity and respect for all people.” This “non-confrontational” approach is evident in CLAC's background; over the past 30 years, CLAC members have been engaged in only four strikes, the most recent of which (in 2002)lasted two hours.

CLAC was established in 1952 by Dutch immigrants, largely members of the Christian Reformed Church who were disgruntled with the Canadian Labour Congress and its member unions. Most of its locals remained in Ontario until CLAC won a breakthrough campaign to represent 2,500 workers at the Save-On Foods grocery chain throughout Alberta, through voluntary recognition by the employer. By the mid-1980s, CLAC had begun moving into the construction sector. They currently have 11 regional offices, 150 full-time staff members and a membership of 43,000.

CLAC has been roundly criticized as being a “company union.” The Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL) website criticizes CLAC's close relationship with management and questions the high rate of 'voluntary recognition' of CLAC locals by employers. Under voluntary recognition, according to AFL President Gil McGowan, CLAC locals often organize within workplaces “with the full co-operation of the boss.” The AFL believes that CLAC has been used by employers to depress wages and discourage workplace disruption. About one in five of CLAC's locals have been certified under voluntary recognition. In addition, CLAC has been criticized for its unwillingness to support employment and pay equity legislation, which they claim “undermine the foundations of such institutions as marriage and the family."

Most recently, CLAC played a key role during negotiations for the Canadian Natural Resources Ltd's (CNRL) Horizon Project, one of the biggest projects of the Athabasca tar sands. The Klein government granted this project 'special status,' which exempted most labour relations rules in construction and allowed the CNRL to negotiate almost exclusively with CLAC. CLAC, in turn, has supported the rapid expansion of the Temporary Foreign Worker program on this site, which has resulted in a rapid influx of thousands of migrant workers. The AFL and the Alberta Building Trades Council claim that the 'special status' of the project is an open attack upon organized Labour in the province and is a direct attempt to depress wages and working conditions on-site, through the exploitation of temporary foreign workers.

Dominion Radio #6

Stuart Neatby — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:34:37 +0000

Subhead:

Special Podcast Episode on the Tar Sands

Cover Image:

radio_logo1_2.jpg

MP3:

http://www.dominionpaper.ca/files/dominion/audio/Dominion6 Low.mp3

Body:

Dominion Radio broadcasts grassroots news from across the country, focusing on stories and voices silenced by the mainstream media.

Episode #6:
Our Special Podcast Issue on the Athabasca Tar Sands.

A live conversation with Tim Murphy, who was part of a bike trip organized by the Sierra Youth Coalition, that cycled from the Canada-US border to Fort McKay, an indigenous community just North of Fort McMurray , Alberta. Find out more at tothetarsands.ca
An interview with Clayton Thomas-Mueller of the Indigenous Environmental Network and whose article We Speak For Ourselves appears in the Dominion's Tar Sands issue.
Analysis from Macdonald Stainbsy of oilsandstruth.org and author of Impacting Unimpaired which appears in the Dominion's Tar Sands issue

We apologize for some of the sound quality issues in this podcast, we experienced technical difficulties in the recording of this program

November in Review

Stuart Neatby — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 04:55:15 +0000

Worker and Student Strikes, War Resistance, Climate Change Topples Howard

In France, an unprecedented strike of transport workers erupted throughout Paris, sparking waves of walkouts of public employees, students, teachers, and postal workers. The strike was the first major challenge for French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was elected in May on a free-market platform. In line with this platform, Sarkozy has proposed a sweeping reform plan of France's public sector. The strikes began after rail workers took to the streets in protest of a bill that would increase their pension contribution period. The transport workers, whose strike shut down all but 90 of Paris' 700 fast train lines, were joined days later by public sector workers, who staged walk-outs in protest of plans to lay off 23,000. By late November, after weeks of class disruptions, several student unions struck as well in opposition to plans to privatize France's exclusively public post-secondary universities. At the peak of these strikes, a multi-sector 24-hour walk-out brought hundreds of thousands into the streets of Paris on November 20th. Although the rail workers strike effectively ended on November 22nd, after 42 of the 45 committees representing the striking workers voted to suspend their work stoppage, some public sector unions have warned that new strikes could begin next month.

In Quebec, 38 Student Unions and students associations representing about 58,000 University and CEGEP students participated in multi-day strike actions in response to the de-freezing of tuition fees by the Charest government. The strikes were called by the Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Etudiante (ASSÉ), a province-wide union of student associations. On November 15th, a one-day strike was called across the province and 2000 marched in Montreal against the Charest government's post-secondary education plans. This march came two days after 300 students staged an occupation of the CEGEP du Vieux-Montréal. Police responded with overwhelming brutality, arresting 150. Other students faced police attacks after staging a sit-in at the office of Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) rector Claude Corbo. The demands of ASSE are wide-reaching, and include free and accessible post-secondary education for all students in Quebec. Organizers have hinted at further strike action in the winter term.

In Olympia, Washington hundreds of anti-war demonstrators successfully blockaded the entry of military equipment returning from Iraq. This military port town is used to ship military equipment to and from Iraq, including armoured transport 'striker' vehicles. Blockades on November 9th shut down military traffic into and out of Olympia for 18 hours. Roving highway blockades throughout the town further impeded the entry of military equipment. Civilian shipments were allowed to enter and leave the port. Police responded with force, arresting 66 in total over the week and a half of actions and heavily pepper-spraying, tear gassing, and shooting demonstrators with rubber bullets. After several more days of protest actions, another sit-down blockade brought the military port to a halt for another 13 hours on November 13th. Said protest organizer Phan Nguyen: "We also encourage other communities to look around and just see what all the possibilities are and understand that they are capable of doing this."

The Canadian Supreme Court refused to even hear the case of Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey, the first two war resisters to have publicly travelled to Canada in order to refuse to fight the war in Iraq. They are expected to face deportation proceedings. The War Resisters support campaign held protests in eight Canadian cities and is appealing to supporters to bombard Canadian MP's with letters and faxes asking for a parliamentary provision allowing Hughey and Hinzman to remain in Canada.

In Pakistan following the imposition of marshal law by military dictator Pervez Musharraf, thousands of political opposition activists, lawyers, judges, human rights activists, and political workers were rounded up and arrested within days. Musharraf's crackdown occurred as the Pakistani Supreme Court was to rule on his eligibility to run for a second term in office. The Supreme Court had shown an unprecedented judicial independence on numerous occasions, perhaps most notably in its June ruling against the privatization of Pakistan's state steel mill due to its proposed sale to a Russian-lead consortium linked to the current Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz. Despite the military crackdown, protests, particularly by students and lawyers, have continued into December throughout the country demanding the re-instatement of the Supreme Court judges and the resignation of President Musharraf. Contrary to its own rhetoric, the US government has maintained steady political and economic support to Musharraf throughout the month, despite the brutal repression being meted out. US officials later applauded the President's announcement that he would name himself president of the country for another five-year term. Musharraf has stated that the marshal law will be lifted on December 16th.

A No Border Camp organized by immigrant rights activists along the US-Mexican border was attacked by approximately 100 border control guards, who used with pepper gas pellets, tazers, and batons against 30 peaceful demonstrators. The camp was set up to challenge neo-liberal capitalism, border militarization and migration controls. Demonstrators had conducted a number of non-violent actions, including a cross-border kissing booth where activists on both sides of the border kissed through holes in the border fence separating southern California from Mexico. Three were arrested in total. Another no border camp, was held in Montreal at the Laval Detention Centre, where refugees, immigrants, and non-status people are detained by the Canadian Border Services Agency.

Anti-uranium mining activist and grandmother Donna Dillman has moved her hunger strike from Sharbot Lake to the Queen's Park legislature in Toronto. Dillman's hunger strike began in solidarity with two first nations communities, Shabot Obaadjiwan and Ardoch Algonquin, who had occupied a uranium mine on unceded land currently under the proprietorship of Frontenac Ventures. Like Dillman, the majority of non-native community members in the region were supportive of the occupation, which ended last month. Dillman's hunger strike enters its sixtieth day as of this writing, and she has pledged to remain camped out in her car in front of the legislature until a moratorium on uranium mining is enacted.

Environmentalists in Nova Scotia have won a major victory after a government-appointed panel deemed that a proposed gravel quarry near the rural town of Digby would cause irreversible environmental impacts upon the coastal eco-system. A US-based company had planned a 150-hectare basalt quarry and a marine terminal along the Digby neck peninsula. The quarry would produce gravel exclusively for export to the United States. The proposal was killed this month after the Nova Scotia government upheld the ruling of the independent panel.

In Tanzania, Canadian mining giant Barrick Gold was hit by a strike of over 1,000 of its workers, bringing the company's operations within the country to a halt. The workers were striking over a number of grievances with Barrick, including salaries, meagre healthcare allowances and non-payment of risk allowances. In response Barrick fired hundreds of workers who participated in the walk-out. The Tanzania Mines and Construction Workers Union responded by taking Barrick to court, to seek an injunction on replacing the fired workers until the company had addressed the union's grievances. The legal decision on the injunction is pending as of this writing. Meanwhile, days before the miners strike began, over one thousand marched against Barrick's proposed Pascua Lama project in the streets of Santiago, Chile

In Venezuala, Hugo Chavez has been handed the first loss of his term in office after a national referendum on constitutional reform yielded a rejection by a margin of less than a percentage point. The proposed changes to the constitution included the expansion of state cooperatives and participatory community councils, the reduction of the work-day to six hours, the creation of a new class of 'social' property, the expansion of social security benefits to workers in the informal sector, and, most controversial of all, the lengthening of the presidential term from six to seven years and a removal of term limits for President. Although Chavez still maintains overwhelming popularity within the country, the vote yielded a high abstention rate, indicating that even among supporters of Chavez's social project there were some widely-felt reservations with the proposed reforms. The opposition campaign against the amendments was heavily financed by the CIA and the US government, who continue to work to destabilize the Chavez-led government.

The British Columbian Supreme Court gave a boost to aboriginal land claims in Canada after ruling that the Tsilhqot'in First Nation be granted ownership rights of the Chilcotin region, a two thousand square kilometre region of the province. But the outcome of this legal case, which took a decade to complete, has much wider reaching implications. In his 458-page ruling, BC Supreme Court judge David Vickers deemed decisions about forestry and mining upon unceded territory to be illegitimate without consultation and agreement with First Nations communities. He also ruled that traditional hunting and trapping areas be admissible as jurisdiction of land claims. The ruling stopped short of a binding legal decision, but the provincial government has been ordered to pick up the full legal tab of the case, which amounts to $30 million in legal fees.

In Australia the government of conservative prime minister John Howard, one of the closest allies of the Bush administration, was soundly defeated in this month's elections. Climate change and Iraq were the dominant issues of the campaign. National demonstrations against the Howard government's refusal to adopt the Kyoto Protocol drew 115,000 two weeks prior to the election. In-coming Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has pledged to adopt the Kyoto treaty and withdraw Australia's 550 combat troops from Iraq by 2008, although hundreds of troops will remain in the country in 'supportive' roles. There are also no plans to withdraw Australia's 1,000 troops in Afghanistan.

In the lead-up to the international conference on global warming in Bali, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the organizing body behind the conference, released a new report revealing that greenhouse gas Emissions from the world's richest countries were "at an all-time high." The two countries with the most drastic increases in GHG emissions were also the sole two hold-outs to the Kyoto process amongst the developed nations of the world: the United States and Australia. Meanwhile, Rajendra K. Pachauri, chair of the Nobel Prize-winning Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, has called Canadian PM Stephen Harper's unwillingness to support binding GHG emissions-reduction targets, unless they apply equally to developing countries, an "opportunistic" action. Said Pachauri: "This particular government has been a government of skeptics. They do not want to do anything on climate change."

Student Strike 2007

Striker

Letting the Wildcat Out of the Bag

dru — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 03:05:31 +0000

Alberta's Averted Energy Tradesworker General Strike and the Fall Wildcat Walk-Outs

There can be little doubt that this summer and fall yielded a significant page in Albertan Labour history. For the first time in 30 years, a collection of unions representing construction workers came to the brink of a general strike. No such strike vote has been carried out among Albertan tradeworker unions since the inception of Alberta's 1979 Labour Code. The Labour Code makes a strike prohibitively difficult in Alberta due to the requirement that 60 per cent of unions with unsettled contracts agree to a strike vote in order for any union to be able to stage any work action. This means that no union can legally hold a strike vote on its own. As noted by Alberta Federation of Labour President Gil McGowan last July, the vote "speaks to how strongly rank and file construction workers feel, that they haven't been treated fairly.”

Although a sector-wide construction strike did not actually happen, there are a few significant developments from the strike vote. The first is that, in an attempt to buy off union support, industry gave the concession of agreeing to recompense employees for the unpredictable impacts of inflation upon the wages of workers under contract. Inflation in Alberta is rapidly offsetting the high salaries being earned by workers in all sectors. The fact that industry would agree to offset these wildly unpredictable rates is an indication of the alarm caused by rumours of the impending work disruptions within tar sands sites.

In addition, the fall-out from the strike vote was a series of wildcat strike actions, for the most part carried out illegally by hundreds of rank-and-file carpenters in open challenge of the Alberta government's hostile labour laws. Although this wave of worker direct action lasted little more than a week, they have prompted organized labour in Alberta to mount a Supreme Court challenge of the Alberta Labour Code, a process which has the possibility of removing one of the biggest stumbling blocks for organized labour in Alberta.

In case you missed all of this over the summer, the timeline below runs through the basic points of interest of the averted “summer of strikes,” culminating in September's economic disruption of the energy sector.

July 4 – A strike vote is held by five unions representing 25,000 trade workers at energy industry worksites across Alberta. The representative unions of boilermakers, plumbers and pipefitters, electrical workers, millwrights and refrigerator mechanics hold simultaneous ballots in Calgary, Edmonton and Fort McMurray. Points of contention are largely “quality of life issues,” including conditions at work camps and the demand that employers provide flights for workers from their homes in Calgary to Fort McMurray rather than transporting them by bus. In addition, a predominant issue is the length of the contract offered by industry to these tradesworker unions; industry has offered a contract for four years, while the traditional standard, owing to uncertainty of inflation, has been for two years. Although the contract would offer wage increases alternating between 6.5 per cent and five per cent annually over four years, the unions argue that these increases would be eroded by skyrocketting inflation--inflation has increased by five per cent over the first six months of 2007 alone.

The unions had been without a contract since the expiry of the previous agreement in May. At stake is $100 billion worth of construction projects at oil sands sites in northeastern Alberta. The ballots are sealed until after an ironworkers union can hold its vote on July 13.

July 21 – Emergency Health workers in Calgary vote by a margin of 99 per cent for a strike, citing wage rates lower than other municipal workers. This vote, coupled with the looming strike vote of tradesworkers, prompts the Globe and Mail to warn of a “summer of strikes” throughout the West after rotating wildcat strikes also begin among 6,000 civic workers in Vancouver.

July 23 – Results of the trades strike vote are presented to the Alberta Labour Relations Board. Electrical workers vote 94 per cent in favour, while the boilermakers and plumbers vote 99 per cent and 97 per cent in favour respectively. Millwrights vote 90 per cent in favour and refrigeration mechanics vote 85 per cent in favour. However, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers(IBEW) spokesman Barry Salmon downplays the idea of a general construction workers strike, suggesting that what may happen would be rotating walk-outs.

"It just shows the level of frustration among trades," says Salmon, “This is all about getting back to the table.”

August 10 – The unions representing plumbers and pipefitters, millwrights and refrigeration mechanics agree on settlement terms with the Construction Labour Relations Association, which represents construction contractors and industry. The plumbers and pipefitters, and millrights accept the four-year wage increase offer (alternating between 6.5 per cent and five per cent for the following four years), although manage to gain adjustment to inflation for these wage increases. The unions representing refrigeration mechanics enter into a memorandum of settlement.

August 14 – The unions representing electricians formalize a memorandum in respect to the settlement framework, largely accepting the same conditions as the plumbers and pipefitters, and millwrights.

August 23 – Following the settlements on August 14, and August 10, hundreds of electrical workers and pipefitters rally in Fort McMurray in protest of their union leadership's resolution with contractors. “My thoughts on a four-year contract is it’s too long,” says worker Shane Brooks, referring to the skyrocketting housing costs in Alberta, as well as the potential erosion of their wage increases due to run-away inflation. “We don’t know what’s going to happen in four years from now.”

August 30 - A settlement is reached with the Labourers' Union, based upon the plumbers and pipefitters’ settlement of August 10. This brings the number of represented tradesworker group settlements to 17 out of 25, although the carpenters and roofers have yet to vote on the offer. Under Alberta's labour laws, if 19 trades groups reach agreement, the rest are stripped of their right to strike. But union leaders who have accepted the settlement claim that the concession by contractors to guarantee indexing of wage increases to inflation is a significant victory. “There wasn't much more to get,” says IBEW local spokesman Barry Salmon.

Results of ratification votes from the electricians, plumbers and pipefitters, and labourers are expected by September 10.

September 2 – The Alberta Federation of Labour threatens to take the Alberta government to court over the the 1979 Labour Relations Code, the Alberta law that, according to AFL President Gil McGowan, "was designed to make it almost impossible for [construction] workers to go on strike." Under the labour law, no strikes can be allowed for tradespeople if agreements are reached with 75 per cent of the bargaining units in the construction industry. McGowan's warning comes after a Supreme Court of Canada ruling in favour of B.C. healthcare workers in June. The Supreme Court ruled that the right to join a union and the right to collective bargaining were protected under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

September 5 – Two months after the strike vote by the five tradesworker unions, 4,000 carpenters and 100 roofers who had not been among the five trade groups to make a strike vote on July 4 vote to strike by a margin of 97 per cent. A strike notice is served to the Alberta Labour Relations Board, with job actions scheduled to take place on September 8.

September 7 – The Alberta Labour Relations Board rules that the strike vote by carpenters is illegal, claiming that another union representing labourers had not served a strike notice at the same time as the carpenters. The Alberta Regional Council of Carpenters and Allied Workers vows to carry out work stoppages in spite of the ruling.

September 10 – Wildcat strikes, focused moreso on the Labour Relations Board (LRB) than energy corporations, begin at energy industry worksites throughout Alberta. Two hundred and fifty workers walk off the job at a Petro Canada refinery project east of Edmonton and others stage a walk-out at the Long Lake project southeast of Fort McMurray. Other walk-outs occur in Calgary. The industry-backed Construction and Labour Relations Association (CLRA) responds by obtaining cease and desist orders from the LRB. Workers continue picketing outside of the LRB offices.

Electrical workers vote 50.8 per cent in favour of the CLRA settlement, although several workers claim that they never received ballots for the mail-in ballot process. Regardless, this ratification ultimately signals that, under Alberta's Labour code, no other tradesworker unions, including the carpenters who rejected the settlement, have the right to strike until the end of the contract in 2011. Meanwhile, plumbers and pipefitters vote against ratification of the CLRA settlement.

September 11 – After hundreds of tradespeople walk off job sites for the second day in a row, hundreds converge upon the Alberta legislature to demand the right to strike under Alberta Labour legislation. Alberta Regional Council of Carpenters and Allied Workers President Martyn Piper distances himself from the wildcat strikes, claiming that he has ordered workers to return to work. Piper's back to work order comes in response to Alberta Employment Minister Iris Evans' government order prohibiting pickets “at any general construction site or maintenance site in Alberta.”

The Petro-Canada upgrader project in Edmonton remains closed after other unionized tradespeople refuse to cross the carpenters' picket-line.

September 12 and 13 – In spite of the government's 'cease and desist' order, as well as a back-to-work order from the Carpenters' Union, walk-outs and protests continue throughout the week. Outside of a Petro-Canada refinery in Fort Saskatchewan, workers stage what they call a “social gathering.” Workers wave plackards bearing the slogans “don't ever give up," “united we stand, divided we beg," and “liberate Alberta, not Afghanistan” at passing traffic. Hundreds of other union workers protest in front of Edmonton's courthouse.

Frustration with union leadership seems evident at these walk-outs. "All the workers are here by their own choice, not by the union's choice," says a scaffold worker taking part in a rally at the Edmonton courthouse. "My union told me to go back to work and let them deal with it." A speaker at the demonstration who urges workers to return to work is booed off the stage.

CBC News reports that 200 unionized employees working at a steam injection site near Long Lake have been fired after clocking off work to take a first-aid course. The workers were apparently given two hours to remove their belongings from the work camp.

September 14 – Although information pickets and protests continue in Edmonton, Fort Saskatchewan and elsewhere, including a march by 300-400 workers on the Alberta legislature, the actions are much smaller than earlier in the week. Workers have begun to return to work. Union leaders and industry negotiators both welcome the end of work stoppages.

Members of the union representating Labourers (Local 92 of the Labourers International Union of North America) vote against a strike by a margin of 66 per cent, thereby ratifying the four-year contract offer by the energy industry. This brings the total number of tradeworker unions voting in favour of the contract to 20 out of 25, well over the 75 per cent required to render a strike action by any union illegal under Alberta law.

September 22 – In a weekend demonstration, hundreds of workers stage a mock funeral of the Alberta Labour Relations Code. Says Alberta Federation of Labour President Gil McGowan: “Alberta's labour laws don't facilitate collective bargaining, they discourage it...It's not only wrong; It's now illegal.”

October 1 – Four Construction unions mount a constitutional challenge to Alberta's Labour Relations laws on the basis that it violates workers' rights to freedom of assembly.

Although most tradesworker unions, including most of the unions which had initially voted for strike preparation in July, have ratified settlements with the energy industry, carpenters, roofers, and plumbers and pipefitters remain holdouts against this contract.

Strike Vote

Dominion Radio #5

Stuart Neatby — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 02:55:59 +0000

Subhead:

Special Diet East, LNG colonization, and a NAFTA Superhighway

Cover Image:

radio_logo1_2.jpg

MP3:

http://www.dominionpaper.ca/files/dominion/audio/Dominion5.mp3

Body:

Dominion Radio broadcasts grassroots news from across the country, focusing on stories and voices silenced by the mainstream media.

Episode #5:

An Interview with Richard Vogel, Texas-based correspondent with Monthly Review Magazine, about the Security Prosperity Partnership and the 'NAFTA Supercorridor' planned to extend from Winnipeg to Mexico City.
An excerpt from Praxis Media Production's newest audio documentary Taking it Back about the Halifax Coalition Against Poverty's Special Diet Campaign.
A discussion with David Moses Bridges, traditional artist, educator, community activist, and co-founder of the grassroots Passamaquoddy campaign We Take Care of Our Land, which is currently struggling against efforts to locate a Liquified Natural Gas terminal on Passamaquoddy land near the Fundy Bay of Canada's East Coast.

October in Review

dru — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 21:34:16 +0000

Royalty Hikes, Indigenous Legal Battles, and a Landless March on Gandhi’s Birthday

After occupying the proposed Sharbot Lake uranium mine site outside of Kingston for four months, members of the Ardoch Algonquin and Shabot Obaadjiwan First Nations ended their occupation after the Ontario government agreed to step in and mediate land-claim talks between the nations and Frontenac Ventures Corp, the mining company which had been conducting test drilling on the site. The withdrawal agreement will allow for 12 weeks of mediation with the province. The protestors have moved their blockade outside of the gates of the mine, to another protest camp that had been set up by non-native supporters from nearby communities. One such supporter, Donna Dillman, has begun a hunger strike demanding a moratorium be placed on uranium exploration and mining in the area.

Canada's military spending is now higher than it has been since the second World War, according to a new study released by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. By the end of the fiscal year, Canada will have spent an estimated $7.2 billion on military missions in Afghanistan.

Canada's military exports have tripled in the past five years, according to a study conducted by the CBC. Exports of tanks, rocket launchers and other military hardware currently stand at $3.6 billion per year.

The Latin American Water Tribunal, an ethical tribunal which evaluates legal claims of environmental damage to water resources in Latin America, gathered in Guadalajara, Mexico to hold a public hearing about the practices of Minerales Entre Mares (MAM) de Honduras, a subsidiary of Canada’s Goldcorp Inc. The Tribunal ruled that the government of Honduras and Goldcorp were responsible for the exploitation and contamination of water in the Siria Valley, which damaged the ecosystem and resulted in adverse health effects for residents of nearby communities. Although this ruling is non-binding, the Natural Resources and Environment Secretariat of the Honduran government has instituted penalizing fines against MAM’s operations in the Siria Valley in the past.

In Belize, indigenous Mayan residents of the villages of Conejo and Santa Cruz have won a ten-year legal battle after a Chief Justice granted an order acknowledging that the constitution of the Central American nation upheld the customary land tenure practices of these villages. The ruling found that the recent United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples also supported the land claims of the Mayan residents. Over the past decades, the government of Belize has denied these land rights, claiming that the residents of the villages were immigrants from Guatemala, and have allowed logging and oil exploration by foreign corporations on traditional Mayan land.

Wildfires in Southern California forced over 700,000 people to evacuate their homes. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) staged a fake press conference, with staff members posing as journalists. Actual journalists were given 15 minutes notice about the event, and were allowed to listen in via telephone, but not to ask questions. Critics say US emergency infrastructure has once again been found inadequate to deal with natural disasters.

The Asia Times reported that, at the close of the Chinese Communist Party's 17th National Congress, the country's leadership has much to fear from discontent among the country's massive population of rural peasants. "Mass incidents"--the official term for riots and large protests in the countryside, are said to be a "daily occurence" as resentment about deeping inequality comes to a head.

In Oaxaca, Mexico, thousands marched on October 27th to commemorate the first anniversary of the murder of American Indymedia journalist Brad Will. Will was shot at a street blockade in 2006 while filming a battle between supporters of state Governor Ulises Ruiz and members of the Oaxaca Peoples Popular Assembly (APPO). APPO organizers have claimed that the Mexican government later used the death of Brad Will as an excuse to send in military troops to put down the popular uprising which overtook the city of three million last year. To date, no individual has been charged with this killing despite the fact that photos of plainclothes police officers firing at Will were published in Mexican newspapers the day after he was shot.

Elsewhere in Mexico, indigenous representatives attending a recent intercontinental indigenous gathering in Vicam, Sonora have called for an international boycott of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. According to a press release issued by BC First Nations representatives at the gathering, hundreds of Indigenous people plan to attend the Olympic games "not in celebration, but in resistance to the danger the Olympics poses to Indigenous lands, identity, culture, health, livelihoods, and to future generations."

A detainee arrested in September during a protest at a subdivision outside of Caledonia, Ontario, near the site of the Six Nations occupation, has allegedly been subjected to threats by correctional staff within the Hamilton Barton St Jail. According to an alert issued by Six Nations supporters, Skyler Williams, one of at least 9 people arrested during the September demonstration, has been denied working plumbing within his cell, has been threatened with denial of his legal counsel as well as detainment in solitary confinement, and has been told that he would be transferred to a unit reserved for serious violent offenders. The Six Nations demonstrators were protesting the development of Stirling Creek Estates, whose housing developments are located on Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) territory.

Twenty-three Canadian cities participated in a national day of action calling for an immediate removal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan, with the biggest demonstrations taking place in Montreal and Vancouver. Malalai Joya, the embattled former Afghan parliamentarian and women’s rights advocate, began a brief Canadian tour with a speech at the Vancouver rally. Joya was kicked out of Afghanistan’s Loya Jirga in May after giving a television interview in which she compared the parliament to a stable or zoo, and accused other parliamentarians of being warlords. She faces daily death threats in Afghanistan, travels everywhere within the country in the presence of armed bodyguards, and changes houses each night. Joya’s Canadian visit, which will also include visits to Toronto and Halifax, comes shortly after the Harper government’s throne speech announcement of its plans to extend the Canadian mission in Afghanistan to 2011, despite overwhelming opposition from the Canadian public. Demonstrations were also held in 11 cities across the US demanding an end to the war in Iraq.

The Harper government has introduced a plan to drastically cut corporate taxes by $14.3 billion over the next six years. The announcement, which would make Canada’s corporate taxes the lowest in the G-7, even took the business community by surprise. “This is a surprisingly aggressive and definitely welcome set of tax cuts,” said Douglas Porter, deputy chief economist at BMO Nesbitt Burns. In response to the plan, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives said that the tax cuts would only benefit a small elite, while doing nothing to address the priorities that have been identified by the Canadian public, such as lower tuition fees, reduced greenhouse gases, or shorter wait times within the healthcare system.

In Alberta, following a month-long media campaign undertaken by multinational oil companies, the Stelmach government announced plans to increase the share of oil royalties the province receives by $1.4 billion starting in 2009. The decision follows a ruling by a government-appointed review panel which had called for the royalties to be increased by 20 per cent, or $2 billion. The current royalties regime in Alberta was introduced in the 1990’s in order to offer bargain basement tax rates for investment in tar sands development. It has remained unchanged in the years since, despite the massive profits reaped by the oil industry from the tar sands after oil prices increased.

New studies have found that Boreal forests are losing the ability to absorb man-made carbon dioxide emissions due to climate changes. The studies, conducted by professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research, found that temperate woodlands in the Northern hemisphere, extending from Alaska and Canada to China and northern Asia, may soon reach a point where they will be releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than they will be absorbing. The recent increases in large-scale forest fires, much like those that have overtaken California in recent weeks, has accelerated the release of CO2 by these boreal forests, according to the studies.

In Haiti, former government minister Maryse Narcisse became the second high-profile activist affiliated with the Lavalas party of ousted Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to be kidnapped in the past three months. Narcisse, along with her friend Delano Morel, was released after a ransom was reportedly paid to the kidnappers. The whereabouts of another grassroots Lavalas activist and human rights advocate, Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, who was kidnapped in Port-au-Prince in August, remain unknown. Both Pierre-Antoine and Narcisse spent two years in exile following the February 2004 coup of Haiti's elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide by US, Canadian, and French military forces. Their kidnappings have raised fears that high-profile Lavalas activists have been deliberately targeted. Although human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were quick to denounce the kidnapping of Narcisse, neither have issued any statement in three months about the kidnapping of Pierre-Antoine.

Canadian Auto Workers union President Buzz Hargrove has signed an agreement with auto parts giant Magna International which will allow the union to organize within the company’s Canadian plants in return for a guarantee that no worker strikes will take place for an indefinite period of time. The agreement has encountered heavy opposition within the Canadian Labour movement, as well as within the CAW itself. Chris Buckley, president of the CAW’s biggest local in Oshawa, argued in a letter to Hargrove that the no-strike clause compromises the fundamental right of union workers to strike. The CAW leadership’s position is that the Canadian manufacturing sector has faced large-scale job loses in recent years, and that compromises are necessary if Magna’s 18,000 Canadian workers are to have any hope of unionized representation. The agreement will be put to a vote at a CAW conference in December.

Following a 2-year campaign by a coalition of 12 indigenous organizations, an internal investigative panel slammed the World Bank’s conduct in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. The investigation revealed that the Bank encouraged foreign logging companies to destructively log rainforests, misled Congo’s government about the value of the forests, broke their own rules and regulations, and even threatened the lives of millions of Indigenous People and subsistence farmers who depend on the forests for survival. Congo’s rainforests are the second largest in the world.

The IMF/World Bank meetings in Washington DC were once again met with protests by global justice campaigners in late October. Demonstrators decried the IMF and the World Bank for their attempts to strong-arm developing countries into adopting deeply unpopular free market reforms. Although such protests have been held for years in front of the traditional headquarters of the Washington-based financial institutions, a disruptive and destructive march of 200-300, organized under the banner of a direct action coalition calling itself the October Rebellion, wound its way through the posh Georgetown shopping district, where many of the delegates were staying. Two demonstrators were arrested.

In India, 25,000 poor, landless and Dalit protestors marched 200 miles from Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh to the capital of Delhi over the course of October. The march was organized to demand the redistribution of land to the poor and landless. Protesters began marching on October 2nd, the birthday of independence leader Mahatma Gandhi. 40 per cent of Indians are now landless and 23 per cent live in abject poverty. Many of the marchers were farmers who have been forced from their land to make way for government-backed economic projects. In response to the march the Indian government has stated that it would establish a new panel to create policies, guide states and monitor the progress of land distribution.

M777

October Rebellion

Dominion Radio #4

Stuart Neatby — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 05:27:42 +0000

Subhead:

Resource Wars in Bolivia, Anti-Poverty Resistance, and Media Democracy

Cover Image:

radio_logo1_2.jpg

MP3:

http://www.dominionpaper.ca/files/dominion/audio/DominionRadio-4.mp3

Body:

Dominion Radio broadcasts grassroots news from across the country, focusing on stories and voices silenced by the mainstream media.

Episode #4:
Aired May 4th, 2007

An interview with Benjamin Dangl, author of The Price of Fire in Bolivia and commentator with Upside Down World. about resource wars in Bolivia.
A conversation with Chris Probert, of Adbusters Magazine about the media carta legal battle.
Finally, in light of recent police attacks against anti-poverty demonstrators outside of a Tory Party fundraiser in downtown Halifax we air a discussion with Keli Belair and Aaron Webber of the Halifax Coalition Against Poverty and Mike DesRoches of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty about anti-poverty resistance in Canada today.

Dominion Radio #3

Stuart Neatby — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 05:00:55 +0000

Subhead:

Vancouver's 'Stolen Land' Olympics and Broken Promises in Afghanistan

Cover Image:

radio_logo1.jpg

MP3:

http://www.dominionpaper.ca/files/dominion/audio/DominionRadio-3.mp3

Body:

Dominion Radio broadcasts grassroots news from across the country, focusing on stories and voices silenced by the mainstream media.

Episode #3:
Aired April 27th, 2007

An interview with Kanahus Pellkey, a member of the Native Youth Movement, a group that is calling for a boycott and cancellation of the 2010 Winter Olympics primarily because the games will take place on unceded Native land. (28:10)
A conversation with Chris Sands the Dominion's special correspondent in Afghanistan on what he describes as NATO’s “broken promises” in the Southern region.(25:18)