Tom Kertes

Image source: ienearth.org

Andrew Nikiforuk will be writing a column, as writer in residence for The Tyee, entitled “Energy and Equity.” If his first piece is a preview of what’s to come, we should be thankful for The Tyee’s approach to supporting independent journalism.  The Tar Sands are threat to Canadian ways of life, threatening more than our democracy but also the place itself.  The world’s largest industrial project to produce the world’s dirtiest oil threatens to displace a more sustainable economy with a roller coaster ride that will crash land from heights we cannot even imagine.  With the oil comes concentrated power from foreign interests, devastation to our land, water and air, cultural and political domination from powerful corporations disinterested in Canadian democracy or the cultures of the people of Canada and its First Nations communities. If there is to be any hope requires the light of day and relentless commitment of Canadian institutions and people to advance a different vision for our communities.

Now, from the column:

Just two weeks ago the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development abruptly cancelled a big report on the tar sands and the project’s extreme water impacts. The parliamentarians even destroyed draft copies of their final report.

After listening to testimony from scores of scientists, bureaucrats, lobbyists, aboriginal chiefs and environmental groups, the committee dropped the whole affair like a bucket of tar. (For the record, the Alberta government, a petro-state with Saudi visions of grandeur, refused to show up and testify.) read more

After framing the column about danger not only to earth, land and water, but also to Canadian democratic institutions at all levels, he continues:

But nobody appears to be standing on guard. Even though Environment Canada has a clear mandate to protect fish from tar sands pollutants, the agency has completed but one fish study on an industrial development with a geographical footprint larger than 40 Calgaries or 17 Berlins. read more

And:

Everyone living downstream from the project (more than 40,000 people) bitterly told the committee that the federal government had repeatedly neglected its duties. Chief Bill Erasmus, regional chief of the Assembly of First Nations for the Northwest Territories, called for an immediate halt to tar sands expansion until the government prepared emergency plans in case of catastrophic breaches in some 20 tailing ponds. (At least one is as large as the Aswan Dam on the Nile River.) He also called for a dry tailing process as well as a 10-year plan to immediately clean up six billion barrels of mining waste in the region. read more

The shredded, and not to be released, report should be the basis for ensuring that our land, water and air is not destroyed by a few private interests, not the basis for covering up this dangerous reality from public site.

When the government fails to advance the public interest, we are in trouble.  The massive scale of the tar sands threatens to overwhelm good governance, and presents a challenge to Canadian democracy itself.  Just as with the G20 meetings, when government failed to conduct its business in an orderly and transparent way, not the government is failing to report on the costs that a few private interests want to pass onto the entire community.  The job of government is to stand up to this kind of threat, to defend the public interest and not to cover up for those who seek only private gain.  And it is our job to demand this of our government, and to make sure that those in government are not opposed to good governance and to other democratic values. The column about the shredded report should concern us all, and serve as yet another warning that not all is well in our democracy.  It’s time for people to do our job, to hold ourselves responsible for holding our government accountable.

Image source: Daily Mail

From the Globe and Mail, via We Move to Canada. The op-ed by Drew Hayden Taylor is in response to the Iroquois lacrosse team being prevented from traveling to the UK for the game’s world championships.  Taylor proposes a theory on why US border guards are such a tough and unwelcoming lot.

What if all these booth people, in charge of keeping the unwanted people of the world from stepping foot on the shores of America, were the reincarnated spirits of all the dead native people that have, over the centuries, been killed off in America by colonial expansion, manifest destiny, epidemics, the Trail of Tears, boarding schools, etc.?Through some sort of eternal search for spiritual justice, they have returned from the beyond to protect their shores from invaders who are intent on hurting the people who already live there. They are trying to pick up the slack from five centuries ago.

I say this because if you look into the faces of these people of the booth, they do have a sort of disconnected, vacant look that is born either of processing several thousand people in an eight-hour shift or of travelling back from the dead. I know most if not all of them appear to be non-native, but if you can come back to the land of the living, you can probably fudge some personal appearance details. read more

For more on the refusal by US and UK officials to recognize the passports of team members, read this update from the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle:

The rights of Native nations to govern themselves independently has long been recognized by federal treaties, but the extent of that recognition beyond U.S. borders is under challenge in a post-Sept. 11 world.

After initially refusing to accept Iroquois Confederacy-issued passports because the documents lack security features, the U.S. State Department gave the team a one-time waiver letting them travel to Great Britain. The Confederacy is a group of six Indian nations overseeing land that stretches from upstate New York into Ontario, Canada.

But leaders of the Iroquois Nationals squad announced Saturday that a last-ditch attempt to persuade British officials to recognize their passports had failed, meaning the team wouldn’t play in its last scheduled game.

“We are not trying to excommunicate ourselves from other nations, but we have been recognized as our own sovereign nation by treaties,” said Craig Marvin, president and owner of the semi-pro Rochester Greywolves Lacrosse Club.

Even though the Greywolves potentially could have been strongly competitive against the world’s top teams, maintaining sovereignty must remain a top propriety, Marvin said.

“Once you lose your language, your culture and your beliefs, then you lose your identity and we can’t do that as a people,” he said. “It’s already a struggle every day to keep traditions alive and they could have easily taken a U.S. passport, but we wanted to represent who we are.” read more

News from Huffington Post:

The approval [of same sex marriage] came despite a concerted campaign by the Roman Catholic Church and evangelical groups, which drew 60,000 people to march on Congress and urged parents in churches and schools to work against passage. Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio led the campaign, saying “children need to have the right to be raised and educated by a father and a mother.”

Opponents of gay marriage proposed a civil-union law instead that would have barred gays from adopting or undergoing in-vitro fertilization to have children, and enabled any civil servant to “conscientiously object” to register gay couples. In the end, parliamentary maneuvers kept the Senate from voting on civil unions as the government bet all or nothing on the more politically difficult option of marriage.

“I’m proud that we never tried for civil unions, always for complete equality,” said Esteban Paulon, the LGBT federation’s general secretary. He credits “an enormous conviction that equality means the same rights with the same names.” read more

One of the reasons that I moved to Canada was because marriage here is recognized between same-sex couples. Because of this fact Ron and I were able to get married at Toronto City Hall on our 10th year anniversary (May 2009).  Living in a place like Canada, that recognizes equal marriage rights, has benefits that extend beyond the those of marriage itself. (Which in Canada aren’t that different from common law partnerships anyway.) It has surprised me how much differently my relationship is treated because people have a word for it (“marriage”), and also that they have a word for my partner (“husband,” “spouse,” and/or “partner”).  People I talk to in a coffee shop, at school or at work seem to have an easier time talking about my relationship, and that makes being included more straightforward than it would be without these familiar words.  It makes it easier for me as well, since I can describe my relationship with one word, fully conveying how I view my relationship in shared cultural terms that most people can easily relate to.

The words are like bridges, that can open up dialogues and help people cross boundaries of exclusion.  Moreover, the fact that I am married makes it easier for me to assert being included, such when deciding whether or not to come out in places that queer people are too often excluded.  Being married does not mean that injustice against queers is over, especially not for the more marginalized – such as people whose gender identities don’t fit into simple binary woman or man categories.  Queer families, trans people, religious queers, women, queers in poverty and queers of colour still face double injustices, that result in exponential barriers and hardships that are inexcusable.  Given that there have been four reported beatings against queer identified people in Vancouver this summer, we surely know that marriage rights are not an end to fights for equal justice and universal dignity around sexual and gender politics.  But, still, my personal experience has been that when governments include same sex couples in marriage, things certainly do change and improve.  That’s one reason why the recent passage of same sex marriage in Argentina is such welcome news!

An op-ed in the Toronto Star by Randy Hillier, a Progressive Conservative MPP candidate:

It has been said that in war, truth is the first casualty. Yet in the wake of the Toronto G20 summit, it is clear that truth is an unwelcome intruder within the realm of politics as well. Call it my inherent cynicism about politics or maybe put it down to my observation and experience, but the discussion and media coverage surrounding the G20 summit has been ignorant at best, or deliberately misleading at worst.

The facts are clear when the political spin is replaced by reasoned evaluation. The truth is that Dalton McGuinty arbitrarily suspended and abrogated our most sacred civil liberties — our freedoms and privacy — without discussion, debate or public awareness. The premier then justified this abuse of power by asserting that we needed law and order instead.

Instead of a choosing a more controlled and less populated location that would not be such a powerful magnet for the few juvenile anarchists, Stephen Harper agreed to host the G20 in a location that he had to have known would draw the greatest opposition and most violent response, therefore justifying an outrageous expenditure of public dollars and creating an army of police equipped with a siege mentality. read more

The 4th ranked team in Lacrosse is being held up because the US says it may not recognize passports from the Iroquois Confederacy, and the UK is not allowing the team entry unless the US okays it. From the NYT:

“Lacrosse is our game — we are the originators, we invented the game, there are 60 countries that play our game,” said Denise Waterman, a member of the team’s board of directors. “And now we can’t go to a tournament that’s honoring our game? It’s almost unbelievable that this is happening.” read more

Paul Jay of the The Real News discusses the G20 security response and raises the question of the who and why of the security response during the G20 summit.  The responsibility for the summit falls on the federal government given that the meeting was an international event hosted by the federal government.

Putting larger questions about the overall strategy reflected in the response to vandalism during the summit aside, it is clearly the job of the government to conduct its business in an orderly and transparent way.  The government failed on both counts, and given the billion dollar price tag for event security there is simply no excuse for this massive failure.  In a democracy it is the job of government to conduct its business in ways that encourage and support public scrutiny and accountability, Otherwise democracy is at risk and government risks losing its legitimacy.

Watch Paul Jay discuss the G20 response and raise tough questions about Harper’s role in the summit’s security response:

Disclosure: I was at paid communications consultant for The Real News.

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From the Toronto Star:

The G20 security strategy has been spectacularly successful at cocooning the world’s leading politicians and staggeringly ineffective at protecting the property and peace of mind of Torontonians. And the one, inevitably, led to the other.

By bringing in thousands of heavily armed strangers and throwing up barricades everywhere to regular traffic, frightening off good and decent citizens, Canadian authorities created a ghost town in the heart of our city.

Perfect for the political leaders. Protesters were kept blocks away from where the deliberations were going on.

And most protesters conducted themselves faultlessly as the global good and great met behind rings of gulag-like fencing and battalions of police beating Plexiglas shields with batons in a primitive show of might.

It was, however, less than perfect for the city, its businesses and its inhabitants. The only force that can prevent vandalism and mayhem in a city is the presence of its population. Surely that was the lesson every urban planner learned from looking south to the hollowed-out urban war zones of the United States in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

No police force, no matter how large, how well armed, how empowered to limit the civil rights of citizens, can stop vandalism in the empty shell of a city. Canadian authorities have proved that two days and nights running.

The strategy that ensured G20 leaders would never have to see a Canadian who wasn’t a politician, a police officer or a waiter lacked even a glimmer of common sense when it came to the security of Toronto and Torontonians.

They took our city to hold a meeting and bullied us out of the core, damaging the commerce of thousands of merchants and inconveniencing the entire population. Then, they failed to protect our property. Along Yonge St., as self-described anarchists were smashing stores unopposed, terrified merchants and their staffs sought shelter behind counters and in basements. If these establishments had been set alight, all of the thousands of fearsomely equipped police would have been able to do little more to save our citizens than they did to save their burning cruisers. read more

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There was a lot more to the G20 summit than the government’s failure to conduct its business in a safe and transparent way that respected democratic values.  The purpose of the summit is to decide how to run the world economy, and Paul Krugman of the NYT writes that the economic news coming from the summit (Harper’s “victory” for Canada) may lead the world toward a third depression. Krugman writes:

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.

In 2008 and 2009, it seemed as if we might have learned from history. Unlike their predecessors, who raised interest rates in the face of financial crisis, the current leaders of the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank slashed rates and moved to support credit markets. Unlike governments of the past, which tried to balance budgets in the face of a plunging economy, today’s governments allowed deficits to rise. And better policies helped the world avoid complete collapse: the recession brought on by the financial crisis arguably ended last summer. read more