The Dominion - G8

The Roads We Travelled

Moira Peters — Wed, 18 May 2011 05:39:02 +0000

Building the Toronto People's Assembly

TORONTO—Copenhagen, December 15, 2010. The day before what CNN referred to as “the most hotly anticipated action of the summit,“ nearly 1,000 activists huddled together in a Danish squat that became the focal point of grassroots mobilization against the United Nations annual Coalition of the Parties (COP) Climate Change Conference.

Lisa, an American activist and veteran of 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, delivered a final pitch for the plan of action while maps were distributed, blocs were formed and participants felt the growing anticipation of being part of a plan to change the course of history.

“We will use the combined mass of our bodies to push through the police lines and then break through the fence,” she announced. “Once we are inside the UN grounds we will secure a safe space where delegates coming out from the conference can join us and together we will form a People’s Assembly.”

As much as has been said about the day of December 16—the “Reclaim Power” People’s Assembly in Copenhagen—the prior two weeks of frantic meetings, alliance building and constant striving to create an inclusive and horizontal process were critical in creating a new model for organizing that could be exported around the world. This action in Copenhagen was to inspire the Toronto People’s Assembly, a global gathering held in parallel to the 2010 G8/G20 summits.

Cochabamba, April 2010. Bolivia hosted the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. Toronto activists in Cochabamba observed a conference that, while engaging the grassroots participation of 30,000 activists from across the globe, was largely organized from the top down. The Toronto People’s Assembly drew much inspiration from Cochabamba, which also acted as a guide for the Assembly to be critical of its own process.

The main development to come out of Cochabamba was a collective understanding that the best way to answer the international call for justice is to build your struggle locally. One of the lessons drawn from Bolivia was the need to put in place impactful structures to build and maintain a movement that is substantial, consistent and long-term. The call from Cochabamba was to build a worldwide climate justice movement.

Toronto, May/June 2010. The weeks in May immediately following Cochabamba and in June prior to the G20 were a crucial and transformative period for the social and climate justice communities. Ongoing talks and discussions evaluated which elements could be drawn from Cochabamba.

“The People’s Assembly is an extension of the dialogue, organization, and mobilization that took place in Cochabamba. It’s an instrument through which local activists can create new spaces, and generate new possibilities,” said organizer Raul Burbano, who is also active with Toronto’s Latin America Solidarity Network.

As June 2010 and the G20 grew closer, a call was put out through the Toronto Community Mobilization Network for a day of resistance for climate and environmental justice during the G8/G20. Responding to this call, a circle of unaligned climate justice and environmental organizers started meeting weekly in a park on Church Street. Two plans for action emerged. One was a rally that would become known as the Toxic Tour. The other was the People’s Assembly on Climate Justice (PACJ).

The G20 hit Toronto like a storm, and the collective response was quick and widespread, with a resounding call to establish new relationships that was not only heard, but also understood.

In the aftermath of the G20, the organizing community would suddenly find itself in a new, highly charged environment. After the Toronto People’s Assembly on June 23, 2010, and through July and August, the intensity of organizing would remain high, with action camps across the country and groups in Toronto together emphasizing the immediate need for movement building. There would be no doubt that a second PACJ would take place.

Maxim Winther, a participant in the June 2010 Assembly, said, “I don’t really know what the G20’s like because it’s behind two layers of fence and it’s costing billions of dollars and I’m not seeing any of that. All I see is police roaming the streets.“

Police from across the country turned the downtown Toronto hub into what the Ontario Ombudsman Andre Marin would later call “a time period where martial law set in the city of Toronto, leading to the most massive compromise of civil liberties in Canadian history.”

Despite this atmosphere, the Toronto PACJ was vibrant and successful, and another People’s Assembly was organized on December 4, 2010—the Worldwide Day of Climate Action. While the first PACJ focused on defining the meaning of climate justice, the second focused on the collective work of building a stronger movement for climate justice in Toronto. For both Assemblies, the starting point for participants to generate ideas was a “framing question”—a direct import from the Reclaim Power Assembly in Copenhagen.

The main innovation introduced in Toronto was a round of break-out groups, allowing more space for the Assembly’s horizontal process both to generate ideas and also to orient itself for action by harnessing the intimacy and energy of small group work. Beginning with the December 2010 Assembly, Toronto activists took the working-group model that emerged from Cochabamba and re-framed it as a series of permanent action-oriented bodies known as People’s Councils. People’s Councils included Movement Building, Outreach & Education, Group Coordination, Building Alternatives Spaces, Mass Action & Political Pressure, and Personal Development.

Both assemblies generated more than 200 participants and more than 40 endorsements from community groups in Toronto.

“It was very participatory and very open,” said Alaynah Smith. The new activist who travelled to Toronto from Michigan said the People’s Assembly was “unlike the G8/G20 where we can’t see stuff...and its really kind of almost a mystery. But this was open to the public; anybody could come and we all had a voice equally.”

The Assembly is an open collective dialogue which organizers have termed “radical horizontality.” Within the Assembly, radical horizontality is a two-pronged process which allows participants, through two rounds of break-outs and intermittent plenaries, to first generate ideas, and then to develop and synthesize them with the goal of establishing mandates for the People’s Councils. Radical horizontality extends to everyday life, seeking to establish shared responsibility and accountability in the entire community, making local resistance and organizing sustainable.

From its beginning, the Assembly focused on being a point of convergence inclusive to a wide range of organizations: women’s groups, anti-poverty, food security and environmental and migrant justice organizations, cyclists, co-operatives, collectives, and so on. To transform communities, the Assembly posited closing the gap between activism and everyday life.

Raul Zibechi, a Uruguayan socio-political theorist, explained how “in the new pattern of action...mobilization starts in the spaces of everyday life and survival, putting in [motion] an increasing number of social networks or, that is to say, societies in movement, self-articulated from within.” The People’s Councils were modeled on the hope of establishing this sort of organizing on a permanent basis, to make the leap from activism to organized communities.

The post-G20 realities of community organizing in Canada presented a challenge, and a new dynamic that calls for activists to develop, out of necessity, new methods of organizing. This requires ingenuity, responsibility, and a long-term willingness to sculpt a new grassroots paradigm.

Small beginnings and creative examples were observed in Canada during the months following the G20.

Action camps took place throughout the country during the summer of 2010, themed around climate justice, Indigenous solidarity, non-violent direct action and tar sands/pipeline resistance. Organizers built links between cities and strengthened regional networks. Simultaneous People’s Assemblies were organized in December 2010 across Canada; organizers in Montreal began to develop a climate justice co-op, and the climate justice community in Toronto established a permanent People’s Assembly. Climate justice organizers have used momentum from the G20 to create their own grassroots infrastructure, without waiting for existing infrastructure to get on board, or being dependent on external funding.

The People’s Assembly in Toronto rose on the tide of a paradigm shift towards popular assemblies as an alternative to the failure of international institutions and nation-states to address the urgent global threat presented by the climate crisis.

At the same time, a global climate justice movement has grown organically, shaped by horizontal structures, and differentiating itself from mainstream environmental voices through a deep anti-capitalist analysis.

The year 2010 presented the organizing community in Canada with two major opportunities to mobilize—one in Vancouver to oppose the Olympics and one in Toronto to resist the G20. Toronto organizers took this confluence of factors as an opportunity, and the People’s Assembly was one outcome.

By eschewing traditional hierarchies, the open and inclusive process of the Assembly is an invitation for communities and organizers to come together and build solidarity, share skills and coordinate efforts.

“The aim of the People’s Assembly in Toronto,” an organizer told The Dominion, “is for the climate justice community and its allies to utilize it as a vehicle or a space through which it can operate as a movement, a self-articulated space that will allow it to remain a movement.”

Kimia Ghomeshi, an organizer of the June Toronto People’s Assembly, told a Toronto Media Co-op reporter that the entire process was “highly participatory which we so rarely see in Canada...What will change things is the solutions being home-grown because then they’re relevant to the local context and people feel more ownership in creating that change rather than it being imposed on them.”

This article was produced by the Toronto Media Co-op for A People's Forecast: The Climate Justice Issue, our 2011 special issue. To read more articles as they are published, click here.For more news driven by readers and not advertisers, check out www.toronto.mediacoop.ca

People's Assembly Image

You've Got Bail! (But No Freedom)

Moira Peters — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 13:11:46 +0000

Ryan Rainville, and the letter of G20 law

TORONTO—The men’s shelter doesn’t look like a prison. There are no bars on the windows, no sign announcing the building’s institutional status. The walls are decorated with posters about Indigenous pride and occasionally the air is tinged with the sweet smell of burning sage.

For Ryan Rainville however, it is a prison. He is not allowed to leave the shelter except to see his lawyer and for occasional group activities. There is a long list of people—some of whom he has never met—whom the courts have ordered him not to contact. Because of these conditions he can’t work or go to school.

"I went from being able to actually work and come up with my own money to not being able to work...It's driving me nuts that I can't go out there and look for work because I want to help my mom, and her partner," said Rainville, whose mother was recently diagnosed with cancer. "That poor guy is working double shifts so that he can keep up with the [medical] bills."

Rainville is charged with crimes related to alleged participation in the Black Bloc during the G20 protests. He was arrested August 5, 2010. His original bail was denied and he spent three months in pre-trial detention in prisons in the Toronto area before finally being granted bail on November 9, 2010.

During the G20 protests in Toronto in June 2010, more than 1,100 people were arrested in the largest mass arrest in Canadian history. Many more were detained or trapped in the rainy streets for hours between lines of riot police using a tactic called "kettling."

The now-infamous Public Works Protection Act, a Second World War-era law that was secretly re-enacted by the province—and which the Ontario Ombudsman called "illegal" and "likely unconstitutional" in a report released in December 2010—was used for arrests across a broad swath of downtown Toronto, even though the act was supposed to apply to the area inside the G20 security fence. In a video posted on YouTube, police officers were quoted as saying, "This ain't Canada right now; you're in G20 land." Only one man—environmental justice activist Dave Vasey—was formally charged under the Public Works Protection Act, but when he arrived at his court date, he found the charges had been "lost."

Many who were released from the temporary detention centre on Eastern Avenue allege beatings by police, threats of rape, strip searches of young women by male officers and widespread denial of the right to call a lawyer after arrest. Due cause was thin on the ground, and in many cases, passers-by were arrested. A Toronto Transit Commission worker in full uniform was arrested while walking between job sites. By the time of the first mass court date for G20 defendants in August 2010, only 300 people faced charges, 100 of which were dropped that day at the courthouse for lack of evidence, and 100 more which were dropped October 14, 2010.

Since the G20, police have engaged in what critics are calling a witchhunt against activists, arresting 11 from Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) during a small demonstration outside Liberal Party headquarters in downtown Toronto. Authorities appear to be targeting particular kinds of activists on thin pretenses. Indigenous activist Jaroslava Avila was arrested after speaking at a health-related event on September 29, 2010, at the University of Toronto, only to have charges dropped for lack of evidence on December 20, 2010, after her name was released to the press and she had spent months living with restrictive bail conditions.

Rainville, 23, is active in Indigenous and working-class organizing. Friends describe him as a tireless activist, always ready with a joke or an insightful observation. He is of Cree background, but notes that he appears White, and therefore escapes the worst racial prejudice.

He is fluent in Spanish—his stepfather is from El Salvador and he taught himself the language while spending time in the country. Self-educated, Rainville is reading through a huge stack of books—political literature, texts on Indigenous land claims and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. He was working on his high school diploma through an academic upgrading course at George Brown before he was forced to drop out due to post-G20 legal harassment. Prior to his current bail conditions, he supported himself through work as a factory laborer and as a baker.

Despite having no criminal record, Rainville was initially denied bail, and had to wait in jail for three months until his appeal was heard. Most other G20 defendants in this situation were released within days or weeks. Rainville attributes this disparity in treatment to poverty.

“My father is dirt-poor and works for just above minimum wage as a truck driver, and my mother lives in the US right now, and is also dirt-poor,” he said. “She was working in a factory for $7.25 per hour until she contracted breast cancer, for which she just had surgery today.”

Because of economic insecurity, he explained, his family has been forced to disperse from Toronto. This makes it difficult to get bail, as he would be unable to live with family if released. Neither can his family post up large amounts of money, nor purchase a plane ticket to Toronto to testify in court on his behalf. Each of these elements of a disadvantaged economic situation work against someone going through the court system.

“If you have a lot of money you are going to get more justice in this system,“ said lawyer Davin Charney, who is familiar with Rainville's case and is defending other G20 arrestees. “This doesn’t apply just to Ryan; this applies to people of the working class and impoverished people.” Charney said many people in economic difficulty find it hard to access bail, not only because they have trouble raising the large sums of money required, but also because they have trouble finding someone who will be respected by the court, and who has space to put them up if the court requires a residential surety—someone who can vouch for them. Homeless people, for example, do not have an address—a requirement to be granted bail.

Gary McCullough, who was arrested for driving near the G20 zone with most of his possessions in his car, experienced the judicial disadvantage of poverty that Charney cited. According to the Toronto Star, McCullogh was kept in prison with minimal health care and suffered a jailhouse beating, exacerbating his mental illness. He was initially denied bail because his elderly parents are unable to supervise him. He was only released December 6, 2010.

“People charged with what would be essentially the same crime are being treated very differently [than non-G20 related offenders],” said Charney. “For example, in my practice when people are charged with mischief it’s seen as a less serious offence, but for some reason because of the context of the G20 there is all this hysteria…They are pulling officers who would normally be on the homicide squad, or the sexual assault squad, and putting them to investigate these ‘mischief makers,’ which I find really upsetting. It’s a political decision on the part of the police.”

Byron Sonne, charged with computer crimes, has been incarcerated without bail since his arrest on June 22, 2010, before the G20 even started.

Activist Alex Hundert was preemptively arrested in the early morning on June 26, 2010, released on bail, then re-arrested. Police interpreted his speaking with several professors at an indoor panel at Ryerson University on September 17, 2010, as violating a bail condition about speaking at public demonstrations. He was released after the legality of this was challenged and after being forced under duress on October 13 to sign what he called “draconian” conditions. Ten days later, Hundert was re-arrested under the pretense of another alleged bail violation; he was recently released after taking a plea bargain with the crown.

Rainville was eventually released to a Native bail program at his hearing on November 10, 2010, with his father and two professors as sureties. But, contrary to normal procedure, Ryan’s bail conditions prevent him from leaving the shelter at all, even accompanied by his sureties. He also has a no-alcohol condition which he attributes to anti-Indigenous targeting. “Despite the fact that I’ve grown up with white-skinned privilege—and I do look like a settler—they are targeting me based on my Cree background with this whole alcohol issue.”

“Out” on bail, Rainville is technically free, but his is a pitiful freedom. Time spent confined at the shelter will not count toward Rainville’s time served if he is convicted at his trial, scheduled to take place in April. This situation was made worse by the fact that his mother was diagnosed with cancer, and he could only communicate with her by phone. The day he was interviewed at the shelter, she was having surgery. “They’re telling me that I’m free. But if I were free I’d be holding my mom’s hand next to her hospital bed right now in Louisiana.”

More recent tests found his mother to now be free of cancer.

Rainville can leave the shelter for medical and legal appointments and on group field trips with the shelter staff.

“Aside from that I’m forcibly confined...I basically feel like I’m in jail still, minus the fact my mail is not being torn through and I can read whatever literature I want, and I can have visitors not through a glass window. But aside from that I’m forcibly confined.” The front door of the shelter visibly bothers Ryan; he says he effectively acts as his own jailer.

“I’m doing it to myself, it’s basically out of this want to not end up in jail again,” he said. “I go crazy in this place sometimes. I have to stick to doing jumping jacks and push-ups in my room because I feel like a trapped animal.”

In spite of blatant denial of individuals’ civil rights by the Canadian state, G20 arrestees have been first to encourage Canadians to keep their arrests and detentions in perspective.

“It’s a hugely intrusive imposition,” said Hundert of bail conditions before he was placed on conditions which restricted his ability to talk to media, ”I think it’s supposed to disrupt the communities in which we organize and to be punitive despite the fact that we haven’t been convicted of anything.”

Rainville agrees. “Forget about this,” he said. “Forget about me having a little bit of privilege stripped away from me...This whole thing is a walk in the park compared to what they are doing to people like Omar Khadr.“

Megan Kinch is an activist and journalist in Toronto.

Ryan Rainville

True North

Tim McSorley — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 05:43:19 +0000

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

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

True North, part I

True North, part II

Powers of Eight

dru — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 21:20:04 +0000

powersofeight.png

The G8 accounts for a small portion of the world’s population, but a majority of its power. Through their influence over international financial institutions and their economic and military dominance, the G8 countries shape the world’s economic structures.

Download a pdf version of this infographic.

From Ski Hills to the Summit

dru — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 05:09:22 +0000

Indigenous activists challenge Canada’s claims to traditional lands

VANCOUVER—“Recovery and New Beginnings” is the slogan Canada will be pushing at the G20 summit in Toronto, but for many Indigenous people, what’s going on inside the meeting represents more of the same.

Activists like Arthur Manuel of the Secwepemc Nation think the impacts of a Canada-hosted summit are clear.

“The G8/G20 impacts Indigenous people because Canada, who’s hosting the session, is actually claiming they have 100 per cent exclusive power, jurisdiction, authority over Aboriginal and treaty territories, and that’s totally wrong,” he said.

Manuel and others will be working to ensure that the illegitimacy of the G20, and the Canadian government’s ongoing denial of Indigenous sovereignty, take centre stage during the meetings.

What is Defenders of the Land?

In a declaration entitled, “Tell the world the truth about Canada’s record on Indigenous rights!”, the Defenders of the Land, a network of Indigenous communities and activists, is appealing for a “cross-Canada day of non-violent action” on June 24, timed to coincide with the opening of the G20 summit in Toronto.

According to the declaration, actions could include “blockades, occupations, rallies, or economic disruptions, in addition to spiritual ceremonies and community gatherings, all of which maximize respect for life and our rights as Indigenous Peoples.”

First Nations signed on include the Algonquins of Barriere Lake in Quebec, the Ardoch Algonquin and Big Trout Lake in Ontario, and the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council, which represents eight communities in the central interior of British Columbia.

They aim to draw attention to what they say is the Canadian government’s “continued policy...to terminate Indian Peoples by removing our land and resource base and denying us the right to self-determination.”

Canada, alongside New Zealand, Australia and the United States, were the only countries to vote against the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. Australia reversed its position last year and was recently followed by New Zealand, which declared its support at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York on April 19. The next day, Washington’s UN Ambassador Susan Rice announced the United States would review its opposition.

In his Speech from the Throne in March, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper indicated the Conservative Government might give “qualified recognition” to the UN Declaration, which critics argue would drastically limit its full implementation.

During the national day of action, Defenders of the Land will demand the Canadian government adopt and implement the UN Declaration, recognize Indigenous land rights, stop criminalizing Indigenous human rights activists, and investigate and take action to end the murder and disappearance of hundreds of Indigenous women (582 since 1974, by the latest count of the Native Women’s Association of Canada).

—Martin Lukacs

From climate change to Indigenous rights, the government of Canada lags far behind.

The G8 is a power play by participating countries, said Ben Powless, a Mohawk from Six Nations who works with the Indigenous Environmental Network. “It’s an effort to try and get out of their international obligations in terms of the [United Nations] and in terms of their own actual moral and legal responsibilities to the people most impacted by their decisions.”

Manuel and Powless are part of a push to bring Indigenous resistance to the international, macroeconomic level. Both are involved with Defenders of the Land, a national-level organization that attempts to bring together a national response to Indigenous struggles that are often isolated and fragmented.

“The AFN [Assembly of First Nations] has already tried to deal with all these issues, and so have all the provincial, territorial and tribal organizations,” said Manuel. “They’ve all written their letters, they’ve all had their resolutions, but the government doesn’t respond to it. The Defenders is just another added level of reaction that is coming from a body that isn’t really controlled through any sort of government-type funding,” he said.

The AFN and the territorial and tribal organizations receive yearly core and project funding from the federal government.

“But I don’t think Defenders in itself is adequate. I think the real answer is the local people have to get involved, local people have to take action on the ground and force the federal government and the provincial government to change basic fundamental policy,” said Manuel.

This push for bottom-up action is a concerted, purposeful response to the top-down, undemocratic powers exercised by the G20.

“Right now all of the major economic decisions are top-down; that’s what the G8/G20 is all about,” said Manuel. “All the top dogs get together, and they make decisions in private meetings. And the decisions float down—which is wrong. One of the things about Aboriginal treaty rights is that it’s a very bottom-up kind of approach, especially vis-a-vis the G20.”

Manuel emphasized that non-Native support for Indigenous struggle is not only possible, but also an effective way to push back against corporate power.

“The real thing for Canadian people to realize is that Indigenous people are really the only ones who have a legitimate interest in pushing back government and pushing back industry, and you can tell that just by the court decisions that Indian people have won,” he said. “If Canadians can understand that, that’s how they can counterbalance big companies: by supporting Indigenous people, and the recognition of Aboriginal treaty rights—as opposed to just leaving it up to the government. If you leave it up to the government then you’re endorsing the top-down approach.”

While 2010 is the second time Canada has hosted the Winter Olympics and the G8 in a single year, it is the first time anti-capitalist and anti-colonial movements will converge on both events.

For those who were part of the anti-Olympics convergence in Vancouver, the G8/G20 protests in Ontario mark the next step forward.

“The step forward I want to take from anti-Olympics organizing is from here to Toronto,” said Lyn Highway, a community organizer in Vancouver. “Convergences are places where Indigenous resistance can connect with other anti-capitalist resistance.”

For Highway, being able to work on an autonomous action and also plug into legal and media infrastructure set up as part of the convergence, was one of the key successes of the anti-Olympics convergence.

“The anti-globalization movement never really mobilized Native people in North America, although there were large numbers involved in Mexico and South America,” said Gord Hill, an artist from the Kwakwaka’wakw nation involved in anti-Olympics organizing. But he thinks many Native people were encouraged by the expressions of resistance during the Games in Vancouver.

“No movement has ever succeeded without using a diversity of tactics, which arises from the involvement of diverse social movements, and this is a strength that should be promoted,” said Hill. “Expressions of resistance in non-Native movements shows a fighting spirit, a warrior spirit,” he said.

A day of action on Indigenous rights, called by the Defenders of the Land, will take place June 24 in Toronto.

An Indigenous counter-summit planned for Toronto evolved out of an Indigenous summit in Hokkaido, Japan, which took place during the G8 summit there in 2008.

The decision to focus on the G8 in 2008 was a telling moment in the international Indigenous movement, said Powless, because it brought together those people living in G8 countries who are directly impacted by economic and colonial policies.

The four-day gathering at Toyako, Hokkaido, in Ainu territory, included Ainu performances and cultural events, as well as open- and closed-door meetings, all of which took place alongside public events surrounding the G8 summit. “It did a good job of opening up the spotlight in terms of Indigenous issues there, and gave a fairly prominent voice to a lot of the Indigenous representatives who were able to attend,” said Powless.

In addition to the actions of June 24, Indigenous people will be active around the G20 in labour unions, anarchist collectives, and national and youth organizations.

Dawn Paley is a journalist based in Vancouver. She is a member of the editorial collective of the Vancouver Media Co-op.

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

Grassy Narrows River Run 3

Gaming the Budget

Tim McSorley — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 05:08:41 +0000

Full cost of Olympic security even higher than we thought

TORONTO—The amount the Canadian military spent on its portion of securing the 2010 Vancouver Olympics was more than double the publicly stated cost of $212 million, indicate files obtained by The Dominion.

Initially, the Department of National Defence (DND) only publicly stated the much lower "incremental costs" of its Olympics operation, know as Operation Podium. Incremental costs do not include the salaries and other expenses the military says they would have spent anyways. When taking the “full costs” into account—including salaries for members of the Canadian Armed Forces—the number jumps much higher.

“The number we're going with is $212 million, that's the incremental cost,” said Lieutenant-Colonel John Blakeley. “The incremental costs are the additional costs.” He did not disclose the full cost of Operation Podium during the interview, but according to data on governmental websites, the full costs for Operation Podium reached nearly $470 million.

If the entirety of DND expenses are taken into account, the overall security budget for the Winter Games breaches the $1 billion mark, well above the government's 2002 budget of $175 million. “Incremental costs are basically the costs excluding salaries,” said Steven Staples, a military analyst and president of the Rideau Institute. He explained it is usual for the military to use the incremental cost instead of the full cost when publicly stating budget figures.

“This is an old argument back and forth—should you be using full costs? Should you be using incremental costs? We often use full costs here [at the Rideau Institute] because you can't do missions without people, but the military is trying to diminish the apparent cost. They go with incremental and they say 'well, we would have [to pay] these troops anyway,'” said Staples. “In our work we tend to use both.”

A chart published on the website of the Vice Chief of Defence Staff in March 2010 listed cost estimates for the Canadian Forces operation to secure the Olympics Games. Full DND cost was listed as $471 million in the 2009/10 fiscal year. The chart also listed the publicly stated Incremental DND cost which came to $216 million in the 2009/10 fiscal year.

Blakeley said that if the Canadian Forces were paying soldiers regardless of where they were deployed, their salaries should not be included in the cost of operations.

“I think you do need to look at the full cost,” counters Staples. “Wouldn't it be great if we could buy cars from General Motors and not pay for the labour that was involved in building [them] and only pay for the steel and rubber and plastic? But we don't. We have to pay for the whole cost.”

“Generally if you want to do more military missions, you need to recruit more troops and pay for them. That is a cost associated with doing those missions, and should be included,” said Staples. “Similarly if you weren't doing many missions I don't think you would have these troops hanging around, in fact you would let them go back into the economy just like any major company does.”

The budget for Olympic security released in February 2009 totaled $900 million. This figure only budgeted $212 million for the Department of National Defence. There was no indication that this was only the incremental cost. By including DND full costs the total reaches $1.15 billion.

It has become increasingly difficult for Canadians to keep track of the ever-changing budgets, even four months after the Games.

“I guess I believed that $900 [million] was the full number, but it changed so often I have a hard time being surprised that it's more, which is horrible because we should be outraged and shocked that it went so far over budget and that we can't believe these numbers,” said Myka Tucker-Abramson, a Vancouver resident who opposed the Games.

This revelation comes as questions arise over the cost of securing the three-day G8 and G20 summits in Huntsville and Toronto. The government originally released a $179 million security budget for the two meetings. Known as Operation Cadence, the Canadian Forces operation to secure the summits has an estimated budget of $72 million in incremental costs, as published on the website of the Vice Chief of Defence Staff. In late May the government released a new security figure of $933 million. When the full cost of Operation Cadence is taken into account, as opposed to the incremental costs, this figure is pushed to over a billion dollars.

Following public outcry and pressure from opposition parties over this massive increase, Auditor General Sheila Fraser says she will investigate the G8/G20 budget. No such investigation is being held for the cost of Olympic security.

“It seemed like the budget was limitless, that any Olympic project, be it security or infrastructure, could use as much as it wanted,” remarked Tucker-Abramson. “Given the recent cuts to public education, health centres on the Downtown East Side [of Vancouver] and all the cuts that women's centres and other vital social services have faced due to unavailable funds, the money budgeted for security was shameful.”

Tim Groves is an investigative researcher and journalist based in Toronto.

Olympic budget burning up

Toronto's Communities Prepare for the G8 and G20 Summits

Moira Peters — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 05:19:06 +0000

G20 has no business meeting; local solutions better address global problems

TORONTO—The leaders of the 19 richest economies, as well as their central bank governors, the IMF, the World Bank, and the EU will be in Toronto June 26-27, 2010. That is nearly 20,000 delegates, 15,000 armed police, 2,000 media personnel and over $1.1 billion in security budget all descending to make it a very hot June weekend indeed. Annual Queer Pride festivities that include massive marches and parties have been rescheduled but the tourists will be here, as will thousands of protesters, activists and delegates. The real question, though, is: will Toronto’s residents and long-term social movements join the resistance?

The answer is clear for Sabrina Gopaul, an organizer with LIFEmovement and Jane and Finch Action Against Poverty: “Our people are hungry, they are jobless, we have few schools and lesser social services—all these attacks are a direct result of the G20 policies and we will protest against them. We have real community solutions on how to take care of each other, have good food, create economic opportunities and we will make sure that those are seen, heard and shared.”

****

The first G6 summit took place in 1975. The attendees were France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. This was during the oil crisis when oil-rich states such as Saudi Arabia increased the price of oil in an unsettled global economy, causing tremors in the hallways of power across Europe and North America. Canada joined the G6 in 1976 and Russia joined in 1997.

The G8 leaders have always had at the top of the agenda international trade and managing relations between the once-colonizers and the colonized (the developed and the underdeveloped worlds). In asserting their desire for national security, G8 countries place access to energy and other strategic resources at the forefront of discussions. At G8 summits, ad hoc consensus is reached on myriad issues that never make the public communiques. The decisions that emerge after the G8 meetings—some formally in the Summit Declarations, and many others as a result of side-conversations—impact how the world lives and works.

The first G20 summit, held in 1999, was initially a meeting of the central bank governors and financial ministers of emerging powers and the G8, firmly entrenched within the IMF-World Bank alliance (the so-called Bretton Woods’ sisters). The G20 is comprised of the G8 as well as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Korea, Turkey and the EU. In November 2008, under the weight of another financial crisis, George Bush hosted the first full G20 summit, where leaders of G20 countries joined their finance ministers and central bank governors along with representatives from the IMF and World Bank. The G20’s policy focus is maintaining global financial stability and the ongoing economic, military and financial dominance of the richest states and their corporations.

“The G8 is saving the banks, while ignoring lives,” said David McNally, Professor of Political Science at York University, noting the group’s failure to meet the 2005 Gleneagles G8 summit aid commitments. “Two years after promising $20 billion to deal with the world food crisis—a pittance compared to what they have put into banks—the G8 has delivered only one-tenth of what it pledged."

****

Resistance to the G8/G20 has been manifold and diverse. Organizations such as Make Poverty History and the Ottawa-based “At the Table Campaign” have tried to influence the G8, hoping it could be lobbied to take grassroots concerns into account.

Stephen Lewis, in a recent statement, called on summit leaders to live up to their UN Millennium Goals and the promise to halve poverty by 2015. Lewis said, “this is an historic moment for Canada. We are in a position to lead the world in resolving one of the great moral issues of our time.”

“We’re calling for a breakthrough plan to tackle climate change,” said Zoe Caron, of WWF-Canada in a media release announcing the launch of the “At the Table” campaign. “The choice is clear for the G8 this June: lead us forward in this transformation to a clean green economy.”

Others disagree, insisting that the G20 has no business meeting.

“The G20 and G8 are meetings of the very people promoting war and environmental destruction around the world. They push people out of their homes and off their land, force many to migrate and to work in dangerous, temp jobs,” said Mohan Mishra of No One Is Illegal-Toronto, a group involved in planning demonstrations in June 2010. “These people should not be meeting to make undemocratic decisions about our lives. People in our communities know what we need and are working to make sure that we create the world we wish to live in, the G20 leaders are simply in the way.”

Though much of the debate in the corporate media has focused on security threats, fences, the relocation of weddings, and consistently typecasting the mobilizations as the protesters pitted against the cops, conversations on the ground are markedly different. Lesley Wood is an organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and a sociologist who has studied large mobilizations for over a decade. Wood noted that “since Seattle in 2001 when the anti-globalization movement had its coming-out party, many have questioned the lack of participation of community groups and ongoing campaigns in large mobilizations. People doing anti-police-brutality work, organizing in housing, growing food, fighting for childcare have sometimes struggled to connect their local struggles with one-time circuses that come through their city.” Wood believes that Toronto is seeing a coalescing of social movements and as June 2010 comes closer, participation from community groups in Toronto has greatly increased.

“Having seen the bruised faces of our mothers; the broken legs of our youth; the public humiliation of our neighbours; summer curfews and the militarization of our schools, our communities are constantly reminded that law enforcement does not solve crime; it sustains it—just like military efforts around the world do not create peace; they destroy it,” said Greg Walsh, an anti-police-brutality activist in the Jane and Finch community who sees resistance to the G20 as part of his everyday work.

Considering that the G8/G20 Summits are taking place on traditional Anishinaabe territory and Mississauga lands, and that the G8/G20 leaders assert neo-colonial relations on most of the six billion people of the world, much of the organizing for the convergence is under an anti-colonial umbrella.

Clayton Thomas-Muller of the Indigenous Environmental Network and part of Defenders of the Land, a group organizing a Day of Action for Indigenous Sovereignty, explained: “Here in Canada, Indigenous people have been dealing with the effects of globalization and neo-liberal economic policies for some time, all of which have had a tremendously negative effect on our sovereignty and ecology. This can best be described through the crown jewel of US energy and security policy, the Alberta tar sands. Access to the tar sands is being enabled by massive free-trade-driven development such as the Pacific gateway initiative and the Atlantic gateway initiative, both of which mean the development of super ports, highways, pipelines, railways providing the transportation of resources such as the synthetic crude much easier to be accessed by G8 members, most specifically the United States. The effects of these kinds of development have devastating impacts on Indigenous people across the continent of North America.”

Unlike many of the convergences of the past, this June might just see a real community-based mobilization against the G8/G20 that puts forwards its own campaigns for local lives while pushing for global transformation. A real grounded local/global movement is emerging in Canada.

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Voices from Toronto’s mobilizers

Kole Kilibarda from the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid, which is fighting to build a local and global boycott and divestment campaign against the government of Israel:

“Whether it was the G8’s complacency during Israel’s brutal 33-day war on the people of Lebanon in the summer of 2006, or its enthusiastic support for the more recent slaughter in Gaza in January 2009, the G8 has repeatedly shown its willingness to continue criminalizing any expression of Palestinian self-determination while financing, arming and applauding the apartheid state of Israel.”

Pragash Pio, a Tamil community organizer and Canadian HART activist in Toronto:

“Our local issues are connected to global ones. Many people in our community are sending money home to assist their families, rebuild homes and lives and as a result [are] impoverishing themselves. Things like the War on Terror paradigm which is really a war on racialized and diaspora people is interfering with everyday lives here and elsewhere. People understand that it’s not just local levels of apartheid—the G8/G20 is the coordinating committee of global apartheid, they make us refugees, they attack us, they are the systemic side of injustice and must be resisted.”

Kimia Ghomeshi, National Youth Climate and G20 Organizer at the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition:

“The G8/G20 are indebted to the global south, displaced migrants and Indigenous peoples everywhere for creating and furthering the climate crisis. This is a global catastrophe that will not go away through mere lifestyle changes like riding bikes or changing light bulbs. It requires a complete transformation away from the global capitalist system that justifies the ravaging of our lands and exploitation of our communities.”

Sultana Jahangir, of the South Asian Women’s Rights Organization based in Victoria Park in Scarborough, and who is organizing contingents to join the rallies:

“International capitalism displaces people from all over the world by economical, military and environmental aggression. In Bangladesh three million people [have been] displace[d] and our homeland has become the biggest human exporter in 2009. [The] Canadian government traffic[s] and displace[s] people to exploit them. They bring migrant women and totally marginalize them. They are forced to live in margin[s] of society in either low paid job[s] or as baby machines. We immigrant women demand the rich to stop marginaliz[ing] us, and demand...childcare, health, education, housing and all services.”

Andrew Mindszenthy, a member of DAMN 2025, a radical cross-disability coalition that is mobilizing against the G8/G20:

“Canada segregates disabled people with more than pervasive physical barriers: we are impoverished by Canada’s ‘social assistance'; denied at its international borders; confined in its institutions and prisons; ostracized by social isolation; and largely excluded even from social movements. DAMN 2025 is allying with other oppressed groups to resist the G8/G20's agenda of making the rich richer on the backs of poor people around the world.”

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A People’s Summit is planned from June 18-20, 2010, which will be a social forum-style conference bringing together community groups, NGOs, labour unions, faith groups and others to educate and be agitated.

Following the People’s Summit, actions and demonstrations organized by different networks are taking place across Toronto. These include a demonstration for Indigenous Sovereignty and Self-Determination on June 24, a massive mobilization by community groups on June 25 calling for “Justice For Our Communities.”

A labour march and major anti-colonial, anti-capitalist actions are also planned on June 26 and 27. Details of all events can be found on Toronto Community Mobilization Network’s website which is the body coordinating and supporting many of the actions taking place between June 21-27, 2010.

To learn more about the G8 and G20, visit g20.torontomobilize.org, g8.utoronto.ca and g20.utoronto.ca.

Syed Hussan is a community organizer involved in building a people's convergence during the G8/G20 through the Toronto Community Mobilization Network and the June 25 Justice for Our Communities demonstration.

Growing resistance to G20

justice for our communities

Women and Children First?

Cameron Fenton — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 09:10:06 +0000

Conservative policy contradicts "maternal and child health" plan

TORONTO—This January, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper called on G8 leaders to make women and children a top priority during the June summit. In a Toronto Star opinion piece, Harper cited a “pressing need for global action on maternal and child health,” and expressed concern for what he called the world’s “most vulnerable populations."

Women’s rights advocates say that since taking office Harper has in fact undermined equality policy and existing advocacy programs.

In The Harper Record, a book published by the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, the Ad-Hoc Coalition for Women’s Equality and Human Rights documented how, upon gaining power, the Conservatives made drastic cuts to women’s equality programs. They shut down 12 Status of Women offices and defunded the Women’s Program on equality advocacy as well as the Court Challenges Program, a legal program supporting gender equality, among other things.

“The common consensus in the coalition is that Harper’s policies have been a repressive step backwards for the feminist movement in Canada,” Coalition Coordinator Claire Tremblay explained.

In the January 2009 federal budget the Equitable Compensation Act was passed, preventing women in the Public Service from challenging pay-equity cases at the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

Long-time feminist activist Judy Rebick notes that Harper is “ideologically motivated; he does things by stealth, so most of the things he does are under the wire.”

In 1998, Harper declared that “the federal government should scrap its ridiculous pay equity law,” and in 1999 he called human rights commissions “an attack on our fundamental freedoms.” He announced plans to shut down Women’s Commissions in Vancouver, Toronto and Halifax this March.

In April 2010, the Coalition for Pay Equity in New Brunswick was denied funding despite the fact that, as vice-president Denise Savoie noted, the group had fulfilled all requirements for funding. “Evidently, their decision is based on ideology, not on the value of the project or on the group’s ability to reach the objectives,” she said.

According to the Global Gender Gap Index—produced for the World Economic Forum to measure economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment, health and survival of women—Canada has fallen 11 places since Harper took office.

Harper’s announcement of the “Women and Children Initiative” came on the heels of the Canadian International Development Agency’s (CIDA) funding cuts to KAIROS, an ecumenical non-profit organization that supports overseas partners addressing the root causes of women’s inequality.

The Popular Feminist Organization (OFP), a grassroots women’s organization in Colombia which runs 22 centres providing legal and health services and youth programs, is one example of the groups to be directly affected by the CIDA cut. For women, “the OFP represents an important democratic space,” said KAIROS’s Latin America specialist Rachel Warden. The organization is “an alternative to the violence, poverty, and human rights abuses that surround them.”

The evolution of the Conservatives’ focus on maternal and child health remains unclear. In his Toronto Star opinion piece, Harper only made vague mention of the need for clean water, inoculations, and the “training of health care workers to care for women and deliver babies.”

Action Canada for Population and Development, a human rights advocacy group, explains that maternal and child health requires a comprehensive approach that includes sexual and reproductive health and rights, with access to family planning, including contraception.

But these recommendations appear to be falling on deaf ears. In an interview this February in Embassy magazine, Minister of International Cooperation Bev Oda stated the government’s plan will not “support access to family planning and contraception.”

In March, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon confirmed that this new priority “does not deal in any way, shape or form with family planning. Indeed, the purpose of this is to be able to save lives.”

Two days later Harper flip-flopped, stating, “We are not closing doors against including contraception, but we do not want a debate here or elsewhere on abortion.”

Meanwhile, the International Planned Parenthood Federation is waiting to hear if an annual $6 million CIDA grant supporting crucial reproductive health and family planning programs will be renewed.

The battle lines have been drawn. But what is at stake?

Financially it is unclear. The 2010 Canadian federal budget increases international aid by $364 million before capping it for subsequent years. The budget states, “Canada will use its leadership...to focus the world’s attention on maternal and child health and will work to secure increased global spending on this priority.” Yet there is no specific monetary allocation for the new initiative.

In ideological terms the stakes are well-defined. Harper told the World Economic Forum “it is...time to mobilize...to do something for those who can do little for themselves. To replace grand good intentions with substantive acts of human good will.” There is no attempt to address the root causes of injustice.

“There is a connection between a woman having control over her body and taking a first step towards empowerment and equality,” notes Tremblay of the Ad-Hoc Coalition. “If a women doesn’t have control over her body how successful can those other initiatives be?”

It isn’t clear what Harper’s G8 Initiative on Women and Children will achieve. On the contrary, given the systematic erosion of work supporting women’s equality and equity, there is a pressing concern that women’s rights will be further undermined.

“Stephen Harper has been a disaster for women,” observes Rebick. “He is the most dangerous prime minister we have ever had. Harper is dismantling Canada as we know it.”

Rusa Jeremic is an Educator, Writer & Satirist based in Toronto. She has an M.A. in Political Science from York University.

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

World Social Forum Kenya

From H-Ville to G-Spot

Moira Peters — Fri, 21 May 2010 05:41:58 +0000

G8 host has little control over how Legacy Fund touches Huntsville

HUNTSVILLE—This June, the ritzy, resort-rich Muskokas will see the life, leisure and liberty of its residents change in preparation for the interplay between heads of state and their entourages, private security forces, temporary workers, the global media, protesters and police.

Huntsville, Ontario, and the Deerhurst Resort will take the world stage for a few days to play host to the "informal" and private working meeting of the world’s richest states.

“Prior to the announcement that the G8 was coming to Huntsville, there were no community consultations,” said Dan Powers, assistant to Huntsville Mayor Claude Doughty. “The G8 summit is a federal responsibility,” he said, administered and determined by the prime minister and his office.

“No, we (Huntsville) didn’t have an option,” said Kelly Haywood, General Manager for the Huntsville/Lake of Bays Chamber of Commerce, explaining that despite lack of initial community input regarding the G8 summit, “the idea was primarily embraced as an opportunity to benefit the business community.”

For many in Huntsville, the undemocratic nature of the G8, the lack of safe and clear forums for debate and dissenting voices, and the tremendous police presence and control over the area are still secondary concerns overwhelmed by the economic benefits that will come to the Muskokas through the G8.

The G8 will bring money and interest to the area—an area that Chaffey District Town Councillor John Davis says faces struggles in tough economic times. Huntsville, he said, is a “sort of weird community where there are people who are really rich and people who wait on tables and clean hotels for minimum wage.”

Operating in trying economic times and dealing with problems such as an aging population, youth out-migration and underemployment, Hunstville town council is debating tapping into its rainy-day reserves to finish funding G8-related projects to make up for the projected shortfall.

“There will be a debenture of almost $9 million that the township is going to have to somehow pay,” said Davis, whose constituents are worried about housing, the public library and road maintenance. He said not all the money coming to the area for the G8 is being spent wisely, but that “everything that goes on in a community, if there is money being spent, is beneficial.

“Is it solving poverty? No. Is is solving homelessness? No,” he said. “What does?”

For a town that Davis describes as having “not a lot of money” in the municipal coffers, the G8 summit brings with it a sudden and great opportunity for building local infrastructure and economy. “It is the cheapest, best advertisement we’re probably going to get.”

Jack Tynan, Managing Editor of local newspaper Huntsville Forester holds that “if someone is going to come and fix up your neighbourhood for you, you smile and thank them.”

Parry Sound and the Muskoka region will profit directly from hosting the G8, receiving a $50-million G8 Legacy Infrastructure Fund, to be distributed by Muskoka MP and Minister of Industry Tony Clement and The Federal Economic Development Initiative of Northern Ontario.

Projects benefitting from this money have been pulled directly from Community Municipal Master Plans, according to Haywood—plans she said were developed through community input and, where possible, have been contracted to local businesses. Bracebridge-based Fowler Construction, for instance, has been awarded a $3.9-million security contract.

The Legacy Projects include replacing asphalt sidewalks with concrete sidewalks in the village of Rosseau and new signs for Bracebridge. A Summit Centre, a University of Waterloo research centre and an icepad will be constructed in Huntsville, according to Municipal G8 Information Co-ordinator Lauren Parrot.

Parrot, a Federal Youth Intern, is clear that despite her professional title, she can offer minimal information about the G8 summit. Her job is to deliver inquiries to the Summit Management Office (SMO)* or to the Integrated Security Unit (ISU)**.

“Security is really run by the SMO—they plan and organize everything and we’re really sort of bystanders.” said Councillor Davis. The SMO briefs town council and staff, and conducts community meetings. To stay informed, Davis explained, the ISU (which has been in the community for over a year) has taken to frequenting local coffee shops and listening for rumours they might need to dispel.

The growing police presence in Huntsville will swell to thousands in the days leading to the summit, and will control movement in the city with security perimeters and flight, marine and traffic restrictions.

An ISU information pamphlet explains the G8 is “a private, working meeting between several working leaders” and that “the general public is discouraged from coming to observe the event.” The ISU has set up a toll-free number for townspeople to “report unlawful activity that could be related to the summit.”

The ISU has come under criticism in the recent past for selectively dismissing civil liberties during the Olympics.

Richard Cusson, who works at Deerhurst Resort, said what has recently changed is the notable presence of plain-clothed police integrating into town activities. “It’s not too hard to tell (that they are police officers) when you see two guns sticking out,” he said.

In a town thickening with police, rumour and suspicion, Cusson, for the most part, is choosing to keep his lips sealed. As an employee of the host resort, he is “not supposed to talk about it,” he said. “The least amount of info I get, the better for me.”

The ISU seems to be following the example set during the Olympics. It declared it will honour Charter rights to assembly, free speech, the press and other fundamental freedoms. Special note is made by the ISU G20/G8 website, regarding Breach of Peace, a designation that allows police to arrest people without laying charges, and thereby skipping scrutiny and accountability in the courts.

Police seem to be gathering information and allies in the community. People living within the interdiction zone have all been visited personally at their houses by the ISU, explained Councillor Davis, and people living in the summit area must register with police forces. “They must provide a name, date of birth and, of course, a background check is done,” said Powers.

He said only a small number of people will truly be affected by the police presence and that others, including those in the area who are opposed to the G8, need not worry about police involvement in their lives.

The Huntsville Forester has received and printed relatively few words from those opposed to the G8, said Tynan. Though he knows some locals may oppose the G8, Davis suggested that Huntsville “is a small town and those people still have to live in this town after.”

Local media are most inhabitants’ means of accessing information, and most of the information reported comes directly from the SMO or ISU.

Davis, critical of the Forester for delivering what he calls “cookie-cutter journalism” and acting as “a mouthpiece for the Mayor” said that when a small town of 20,000 receives the majority of its news from one paper that tends to print whatever the reigning political bodies offer, “it becomes an autocratic society; democracy is not served well.”

Rachelle Sauvé is a cook, gardener, educator, agitator and advocate working for over a decade at Food Sovereignty and Anti-Poverty Movements in Ontario.

* A federally administered project of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.
** Overseen by Public Safety Canada and is a combined force of the RCMP, OPP, Canadian Forces and other security agencies.

Welcome to Huntsville 2

Indigenous Peoples' Declaration on G8 Summit

Lia Tarachansky — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 22:18:07 +0000

image 1.jpg

Prior the G8 Summit in Japan this year indigenous peoples from around the world gathered in Ainu Mosir. This is the official declaration they have prepared.

INTRODUCTION