Goodbye Canada

2011-09-06T01:23:00.000-04:00

It's a sad state of affairs, when the majority of people using state of the art communication technology, with the capability of connecting infinite numbers of people from infinite places anywhere on the surface of the earth, simultaneously for the exchange of ideas and information , in real time and on any and all topics, use it for mere entertainment, self aggrandizing, and sexual gratification.

This is just my opinion, but seriously people, this is like the library at Alexandria times a trillion. And its at our fingertips. I wonder, how long this window of direct information and communication sunlight will last before those who disagree with standing in the sunlight come and burn the temple of the information highway?

Cape Split, NS

2011-04-14T22:57:00.003-04:00

Newfoundland 2010

2011-04-14T22:04:00.006-04:00

Cape Breton

2011-04-14T21:39:00.009-04:00

Opposition to Canada-Colombia Free Trade Continues

2009-12-13T18:12:00.002-04:00

Opposition to Canada-Colombia Free Trade Continues
Protest targets Liberal trade critic over his support for accord

by Tracy Glynn

The Dominion - http://www.dominionpaper.ca

WOLFVILLE, NS—As the controversial Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement proceeds into second reading in the House of Commons, pressure is mounting on the Liberal party, and its international trade critic, to drop its support for the proposed accord.

On Friday, December 4, over 80 people rallied in front of the Wolfville, NS, office of Scott Brison, MP for Kings-Hants. Brison, the Liberal International Trade Critic, was targeted because of his support of Bill C-23—an Act to implement the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (CCFTA). The rally also came only days after the Conservative government cut funding to a well-known NGO critical of Canadian foreign policy.

Free trade critics say the CCFTA, like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), serve the interests of capital. They describe free trade agreements (FTAs) as a mechanism that allows soaring profits and reduced labour costs through the super-exploitation of workers in economically and politically oppressed areas. Labour unions, human rights organizations and church groups across Canada have decried the 38 assassinations of trade unionists in Colombia this year as reason enough to oppose the deal.

Brison sits on the House of Commons Standing Committee on International Trade. Earlier this year, Brison and the committee “called for a full independent human rights impact assessment of the proposed FTA with Colombia,” said Kathryn Anderson of the Church in Action Committee of the Maritime Conference of the United Church of Canada.

“Brison no longer supports this and his uncritical support for the CCFTA today is beyond the pale,” she says.

Brison made a brief appearance before the rally began, and attempted to physically grab the microphone from Council of Canadians Atlantic Organizer Angela Giles. Brison told the crowd that he would not be staying for the rally and that they could meet him to have a discussion a half an hour later at Acadia University.

Large puppets of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez and paramilitaries mingled with protesters. Demonstrators held white masks with flowing red streamers to represent the victims of Colombia's state-supported armed violence.

Following songs by the Raging Grannies and speeches from representatives of labour unions and church and social justice groups, the crowd marched to Acadia University. Protesters chanted, “Hey Scott, just say No!” as they entered the building and room where Brison was waiting.

Brison asked the crowd if they supported market-based economies, free trade agreements and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

“I was deeply disturbed by Mr. Brison's comments. Instead of taking the opportunity to listen to those with in-depth historical knowledge, Mr. Brison insisted on sharing with us a shallow and distorted understanding of the history and present reality in Colombia. It was particularly frustrating to have Mr. Brison read selectively from a UN document without stating the concerns and recommendations of the UN Rapporteur,” said Anderson.

One man in the room told Brison that his support for the CCFTA meant he “support[s] murderers.” Another, Tom Walsh, a Wolfville resident, asked Brison how, as a gay man, he could support the Uribe government that tolerates the organized murder of homosexual and vulnerable people in Colombia.

Colombian mining critic denied visa

The day before the rally, over 90 people attended a panel discussion about Colombia and the CCFTA. While the panel featured a broad range of speakers, one person was notably absent: Jairo Epiayu Fuentes, an Indigenous Wayuu man from Tamaquito, Colombia. Epiayu was scheduled to speak about the imminent eviction of his community for the expansion of the Cerrejon coal mine—the mine that supplies New Brunswick's Belledune coal plant and is on the list of approved suppliers for Nova Scotia Power. His two attempts at receiving a Canadian visa were denied.

Initially he was told that his form was not legible. The second rejection letter claimed the government was unconvinced that he would leave Canada at the end of his visit. "Family ties in Canada and country of residence," "purpose of visit," "limited employment in his country of residence" and “personal assets and current financial status" were listed as factors in the decision to deny his visa.

Although he was denied entry to Canada, the community leader was granted a multiple-entry visa into the United States. The two applications were filed within weeks of each other.

Last September, after a three-day visit to Colombia, Brison stated that “paramilitary groups have been disbanded in Colombia,” and that “to say that paramilitary forces are murdering union leaders today is false.” This stance has been highly disputed. Common Frontiers, a coalition critical of free trade, and which is working to propose alternative economic models, called on Brison for a public apology “to the long suffering Colombian people, and...the families and work colleagues of the murdered trade union leaders.”

James Brittain, author of the upcoming book Revolutionary Social Change in Colombia: The Origin and Direction of the FARC-EP, also disagrees with Brison's proclamations that the Colombian state under President Uribe has curbed corruption and violence and enhanced opportunity and security.

"Like Harper, Brison heralds the free trade agreement between Canada and Colombia as the way to improve living conditions in Colombia. Brison says the CCFTA will help reduce poverty, prevent the resurgence of illegal armed groups and help prevent more Colombians from entering the narco-economy.

"Such ideological pronouncements are interesting because they demonstrate a shocking lack of information... concerning Colombia's economic, political and social conditions. Colombia has participated in formal FTAs for over two decades. Each FTA claims to bring prosperity, development, sustainability and an end to the country's half-century of civil war. However, after a thorough investigation one becomes aware that very different outcomes have arisen as a partial result of liberalized economic policies."

According to Brittain, “War and the extraction of natural resources have led to the internal displacement of 4.6 million Colombians. Coca cultivation and the narcotics trade have increased since the 1980s. Thousands of workers and community leaders have been violently assassinated, arbitrarily disappeared, and/or harassed by state forces and state-supported paramilitaries.

“Brison neglects to address the fact that the Uribe administration is mired in scandal and murder. There are documented allegations and confessions that far-right paramilitary groups and over 100 government and military leaders—including dozens of Uribe's closest political partners, confidantes and family members—have worked closely together to eliminate state antagonists and threats to economic growth. The 'False Positive' program implemented by the current administration saw Colombian soldiers rewarded for murdering innocent civilians and subsequently dressing them as guerrillas. Under Uribe's tenure as president over 700 unionists have been murdered,” says Brittain.

Brittain is a supporter of the campaign to free Colombian activist Liliany Obando. Obando, a human rights leader in Colombia's agricultural sector, traveled throughout Canada in 2005 and then again in 2006, highlighting how millions of women and children have been displaced by land seizures and state-based violence in Colombia. In August 2008, she was charged with "rebellion," separated from her two children and jailed. After repeated delays, and evidence of state forces tampering with files related to her case, Obando's trial finally began November 27 and is scheduled to continue on December 14 and 21. Her children and people involved in her support campaign have received threats.

Canada stops funding group critical of free trade

KAIROS, an ecumenical and social justice-based organization, was told November 30 by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) that the agency would no longer fund the organization. Mary Corkery, KAIROS' executive director, was told KAIROS no longer fits CIDA's funding priorities.

“We are disheartened that this longstanding relationship and decades of support by the Canadian government has been ended,” she said in a press release. “KAIROS and the millions of Canadians we represent through our member churches and organizations do not understand why these cuts have been made.”

CIDA funded KAIROS for the past 35 years. As the November 30 deadline for CIDA to approve KAIROS' funding loomed, KAIROS member churches, its partners and other organizations wrote letters of support to Minister of CIDA Bev Oda requesting she approve the organization's contract which had been sitting on her desk since July. One of those letters of support came from Colombia's Popular Women’s Group (OFP).

Yolanda Becerra Vega, OFP's Director General, immediately wrote to Oda when she learned the news about KAIROS' international programs.

She wrote, "As you know, we work in regions in Colombia where armed conflict has resulted in the denial of women’s basic rights. The economic support from KAIROS and CIDA permits us to implement programs which include legal and health services, community kitchens, and other humanitarian assistance that have saved many lives and given possibilities and opportunities to hundreds of women, mothers, wives, daughters, sisters and entire families.”

KAIROS, a vocal critic of FTAs, pointed out in one of their campaign trading cards that 60 per cent of cut flowers in Canada come from Colombia. The roses and carnations are cut by women and children whose bodies are exposed to pesticides long banned in Canada.

CIDA has been criticized in recent years for the kind of financial support it provides to Colombia.

In 2001 and 2002, CIDA’s Colombia branch worked with the University of Calgary-based think tank Canadian Energy Research Institute (CERI) to streamline Colombia's mining and petroleum regulations. CERI is funded by various government departments and the mining industry. Critics of the new mining laws say Colombia's environmental regulations have been relaxed and the lands of Indigenous people have opened to more exploitation.

The length of company concessions was extended and royalty rates paid to the Colombian government were slashed. Prior to August, 2001, foreign companies paid 10 per cent for coal exports above three million tons per year and a minimum of five per cent for exports below three million tons. After August, 2001, private interests with rights to Colombia's sub-soil paid 0.4 per cent in royalties, no matter the amount of material they extracted.

Earlier this fall, Brison asked Mining Watch Canada at a hearing of the House of Commons Standing Committee on International Trade whether they could name mining companies guilty of human rights violations in Colombia. Jamie Kneen, Mining Watch's communications coordinator, told Brison that none of the companies could prove they were not complicit.

“We fear that by granting 'most-favoured nation' status to Canadian mining investments, the CCFTA will restrict the ability of the Colombian government to implement the recommendations of the Ombudsman in Colombia with respect to people who have suffered violence, threats, and forced relocation in the areas the mining companies are operating. As well, without—at minimum—undertaking a human rights impact assessment prior to implementing the Agreement, there is no way of excluding the possibility that these investments could be rewarding people who have undertaken systematic violations, and benefiting from those violations,” stated Kneen.

Tracy Glynn is an organizer with the Atlantic Regional Solidarity Network and a director on the board of the Dominion Newspaper Cooperative.

Undercover cop infiltrated torch protesters' ranks

2009-12-13T16:23:00.001-04:00

Undercover cop infiltrated torch protesters' ranks

By BOB MACKIN, 24 HOURS

An undercover cop watched Lower Mainland anti-Olympic torch relay protesters in the rear-view mirror on Oct. 30, according to Victoria Police chief Jamie Graham.

"You knew that the protesters weren't that organized when on the ferry on the way over they all rented a bus, they all came over on a bus, and there was a cop driving the bus!” Graham told the 12th Vancouver International Security Conference on Monday.

Graham said protesters were “probably going to be violent,” so uniformed police infiltrated the crowd. A group of 300 people, many in Hallowe’en costumes, peacefully blocked traffic, diverted the torch relay and delayed its arrival at the Parliament Buildings.

“The relationships individual field officers have with protesters and so on just kills these kinds of disturbances and it worked extremely well,” he said.

Graham described the $220,000 policing bill as “well beyond our ability to pay,” but worth it.

"Police departments from all over the country have taken our game plan, our operational plan and adopted it as their own,” he said.

The day was not without incident. Graham said two ferry passengers were arrested for dumping water on an undercover security person, while two motorcycle cops wiped out on slippery pavement. “One of them was hurt quite badly, but has since recovered,” he said.

Meanwhile, a secondary security vehicle "got T-boned by an old guy who ran a red light.”

Olympic Spirit and The Coca-Cola Torch Relay

2009-11-22T11:28:00.005-04:00

Olympic Spirit and The Coca-Cola Torch Relay

This past week the so-called Olympic Torch Relay passed through Nova Scotia, and more importantly for me and this article, directly passed my home in Dartmouth, as it did for the 1988 Olympics in Calgary. I remember standing on Waverly Rd for the ’88 relay as a 7 year old boy, so excited to see and maybe even touch the torch on its way to open the games. I didn’t get to touch the torch that year but I ran beside it (within arms reach) for a few minutes, just long enough to see the flame and absorb its radiant energy into my sponge like childhood brain, hoping that someday that energy might carry me to the Olympics. It did not.

As a 7 year old amateur sport enthusiast I watched every moment of the ‘88 games, or as much as physically possible, oozing excitement no matter what event was on the TV. I watched subsequent Olympics with the same enthusiasm and aspired to be an Olympic athlete someday. I guess you could say that, as a child, I was full of the Olympic spirit. Unfortunately, my more recent memories of and thoughts about the Olympics and the Olympic spirit are far less positive.

In 2002, 14 years after my first experience with the Torch Relay, I found myself spending Christmas in Lac Brome, Quebec, a short drive from where the Torch was passing through Vermont on its way to Salt Lake City. Fourteen years is a long time, and like everything else in the world since 1989, the Torch Relay had been drastically altered (at least according to my childhood memories). No longer was the relay about the Olympics, or instilling the Olympic Spirit into children so that they too might be inspired as I once was. No, it was now about the almighty dollar and how best to make as much as possible from the Olympics via advertising. Sponsors were now the main focus. Not the athletes, not the Olympic flame, nor the Olympics themselves, not even the Olympic spirit was as important as ads and money. These were my thoughts as I watched the Olympic flame pass by me in 2002 surrounded by Coca-Cola everything.

I’m not saying that the first corporate sponsored Olympics wasn’t a money making opportunity for someone, it surely was, as they have been ever since. I am merely pointing out the shift that is gradually taking place from celebrating amateur sports to celebrating sponsors and their ‘generosity’. However, this generosity is meant to ingrain, the sponge like minds of our youth with images of Coca-Cola, McDonalds, and Gatorade in the hands of our athletes, instead of medals and the spirit of amateur sports. However, medals are also good; Coke in one hand and a gold medal in the other is good advertising, no doubt.

This brings me to my most recent experience with the Olympics, the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. I was unfortunate enough to see and hear the Torch Relay 4 times this week. I nearly lost my lunch on my shoes when I first saw the massive display that Coke had created for this years torch relay. In fact most people that saw me commented on the fact that I looked visibly upset. I was. I was watching a 106 day Coke Advertisement drive across Canada, twice. Sound wasteful?

Of the 3 trucks taking part in the celebration, none were Olympic trucks. They were all gigantic driving Coke Ads following the Torch holder (the only Olympics related thing in the parade). The Coca-Cola volunteers in and around the trucks were not giving away anything related to the Olympics, just bottles of Coke and non-recyclable plastic flags (what happened to the biodegradable paper ones?) depicting the route the torch was supposed to take on its way to Vancouver. Only they (Coke) forgot to show the Touch route passing through Nova Scotia. It skips us all together. They can't even get that right. Other than the person holding the torch, there was no mention of the Olympics that I saw during the 'Coke Torch Relay'. Only Coke ads. So what kind of a relay is this? What are we supposed to be celebrating? Coca-Cola? RBC? McDonalds?

To say nothing of the 1000’s of homeless or poor people displaced from the streets and there homes in Vancouver to prepare for the games would be a serious injustice. And it is not hard to see why those people in particular are angry and attempting to disrupt the games. A small portion of the money used on the Olympics would have solved Vancouver’s homeless problem and made it a safer place to live. Instead they made it worse. To also ignore the legacy of debt these games will leave on the people of Vancouver would be equally wrong. The tax payers of Vancouver and BC are on the hook for these games and they are expensive, even more so than the ’76 Olympics in Montreal, which just got paid off recently after 30 some odd years.

Lastly, I would just like to comment on the misuse and poor selection of sponsors for the Olympics. In my opinion, if you’re going to sponsor what most people consider the crowning achievement in amateur sports, you should in the very least be a healthy product for the human body to consume. Does it not bother anyone that the main sponsor(s) of this event is are companies and product lines that are completely poisonous to the human body, and not 'used' or even considered by athletes until they require money to achieve there 'dream'. They don't want the products which are useless, they just want the money. I wish someone (government and corporation) would pay for me to accomplish my dreams. Unfortunately my dreams aren't profitable for others, as amateur sport appears to be. Give the money to the kids, let adults pay for there own dreams to come true, instead of our tax dollars.

On a side note, I would just like to thank the no less than 12 motorcycle riding police officers (there were others) it took to block my street and tell me I had to wait 20-30 minutes to get to my parents home just 10 seconds down the road. "You'll have to park somewhere and walk, the torch is on its way."

I would like to suggest that the Olympic Torch Relay be renamed to the Coca Cola Torch Relay.

The Uncivilized Haligonian

Reply to my questions about the Naval Deployment of April 19th, 2008

2008-05-19T10:34:00.001-04:00

Your correspondence concerning the April 2008 deployment of Canadian ships to the Middle East was forwarded to me by the Office of the Prime Minister. Thank you for writing to voice your concerns about this important matter.

On February 29, 2008, I announced that from June until September 2008 Canada will be the next country in the rotation to lead Combined Task Force 150 (CTF 150), a naval coalition task force currently operating in the Middle East.

The naval deployment will include three Canadian ships and more than 850 sailors, soldiers, and airmen and airwomen. They will be assigned to monitor shipping activity and help detect, deter, and protect against unlawful acts in the region.

CTF 150 conducts maritime security operations in the Gulf of Aden, Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Sea, Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean. Maritime security operations help set the conditions for security in the maritime environment, which promotes stability and global prosperity. These operations complement the counter-terrorism and security efforts of regional nations and seek to disrupt violent extremists from using the maritime environment as a venue for attack or to transport personnel, weapons, or other material. The task force was set up under UN Security Council Resolution 1373 in September 2001. CTF 150 is typically composed of ships from such nations as France, Germany, Pakistan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Her Majesty's Canadian Ship (HMCS) IROQUOIS, a destroyer, will act as the command platform for the task force. HMCS CALGARY, a frigate, and HMCS PROTECTEUR, an auxiliary oil replenishment ship, will round out this fourth rotation of Operation Altair, Canada's contribution to the maritime portion of the global war on terrorism. HMCS CHARLOTTETOWN, a frigate, is currently serving on the third rotation of Operation Altair and will be returning to Canada in late spring.

Such deployments in support of international peace and stability do not compromise the Government of Canada's ability to effectively monitor and enforce Canada's sovereignty. This is accomplished through a whole-of-government approach with the use of a combination of sea-based, air-based, and land-based personnel and equipment in keeping with our "Canada First" strategy.

With respect to your comments about a visit to the Czech Republic, Canada's contribution to CTF 150 is not related to US missile defence development in any manner.

As for the training of naval weapons technicians, any missile training conducted by naval personnel is defensive in nature and linked to capabilities inherent to the naval task group to which they are employed.

Thank you once again for writing. I trust the information I have provided is of assistance.

Sincerely,

Peter G. MacKay
Minister of National Defence

c.c. Office of the Prime Minister

The Canadian Nixon

2008-04-30T22:14:00.002-04:00

The Canadian Nixon

Stephen Harper's feud with Elections Canada is just the latest front in his war against government institutions

Dimitry Anastakis and Jeet Heer
April 24, 2008

Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper is in trouble with Elections Canada, the government body that runs the vote in Canada. They've accused him of overspending in the last election and have even gotten the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to raid the Conservative party's headquarters to find incriminating evidence. In response Harper and his followers have lashed out against Elections Canada, accusing it of a partisan witch hunt.

The whole sorry situation shouldn't surprise anyone who has paid attention. Every prime minister has a modus operandi. Harper's is his utter contempt, shown not once but many times, for Canadian institutions. In fact, it is not a stretch to say that Harper simply sees many Canadian institutions - Elections Canada being simply his latest target - as illegitimate, not just in need of reform but worth attacking root-and-branch.

The historian Garry Wills once observed that Richard Nixon wanted to be president not to govern the nation but to undermine the government. The Nixon presidency was one long counterinsurgency campaign against key American institutions like the courts, the FBI, the state department and the CIA. Harper has the same basic approach to politics: attack not just political foes but the very institutions that make governing possible. The state for Nixon and Harper exists not as an instrument of policy making but as an alien force to be subdued.

Canadians have never had a prime minister who has literally made his career attacking and undermining the legitimacy of Canadian institutions.

Until now.

For instance, in his long-running war against the media, Harper has taken every opportunity to de-legitimise their role in holding his government to account. He refuses to take questions. He speaks only to friendly media outlets. He claims that "national outlets" are biased.

Remember, this is a PM who does not let cabinet ministers speak to the media, and even hides the place and times of cabinet meetings in an effort to avoid questions from the fourth estate.

Along with the media, another of Harper's favourite targets is the Canadian court system. Conservatives love to attack what they call "judge-made law", which really means any decisions that conservatives don't like.

Take same-sex marriage, for example. In 2003, Harper condemned the courts for saying that marriage laws were unconstitutional. He even personally attacked Ontario judge Roy McMurtry, and claimed a Liberal conspiracy: "They put the judges in they wanted," to get the result, Harper accused, even though McMurtry was appointed by Conservative Brian Mulroney.

This anti-court animus is rampant within Harper's inner circle. His chief of staff, academic Ian Brodie, wrote that financially strapped and historically underrepresented groups such as women, ethnic and linguistic minorities, and gays, should have their court funding cut.

Presto - one of Harper's first acts in office was to cut funding for those very groups so that they could no longer make their case at the supreme court.

Then there is the Senate. Harper and his allies hate the Senate. A long-held bugaboo of Harper's Reform party roots, our prime minister never misses a chance to attack the Senate. He'd like to see the Senate be equal, making it even more undemocratic than it is now. Should Price Edward Island (population 130,000) have as many Senate votes as Ontario (population 12 million)?

Harper actually made comments in Australia, touring in his official capacity as head of our government, attacking the constitutionally legitimate Senate, to a foreign audience. Is this standing up for Canada?

Now, many Canadians would like to see the Senate reformed. This is a worthwhile goal. But in the meantime, all Canadians understand that the Senate is a part of our Parliament, created by the 1867 British North America Act.

But Harper has attacked the legitimacy of the Commons, even. After the 2005 same-sex-marriage vote passed, Harper claimed, as leader of the Opposition, that the result was not legitimate because it included the votes of the separatist Bloc Quebecois.

Of course, he did not question the legitimacy of those same votes when the Paul Martin government lost the confidence of the Commons. Harper wanted an election. As for the functioning of the Commons itself, the National Post's Don Martin famously uncovered the Conservative's "black book" of procedural dirty tricks, designed to slow parliamentary action to a halt. Another way to de-legitimise another Canadian institution: paralyse committees, have your committee chairs run out and refuse to bring things to a vote - especially when they bring the government into question.

Most disturbing is Harper's continued attacks upon Elections Canada. The recent raid on Conservative party headquarters is more of a reflection of Harper's disdain for Elections Canada than any supposed "vendetta" conspiracy-minded Conservatives might imagine.
Harper's animus toward Elections Canada goes back years, as do his attempts to circumvent electoral law. As head of the right-wing National Citizens Coalition (NCC), Harper fought for years against Elections Canada's laws around "third-party advertising". The NCC, a murky organisation that does not release its membership, brought a court case against Elections Canada, infamously named Harper v Canada. Though Harper lost, during his time at the NCC he took every chance to attack the legitimacy of Elections Canada and the country's electoral law.

As prime minister, Harper's shocking comments about Elections Canada's investigation of the "in and out" scam alleged by the agency are perhaps the most alarming outburst by any sitting prime minister. Desperate to take Canadians' focus off the Conservatives' allegedly illegal overspending during the 2006 campaign, Harper actually publicly criticised the head of Elections Canada for upholding the law over the non-issue of veiled voting (why didn't he attack the 80,000 people who voted via mail?).

This is unprecedented in Canadian political history. Never has a prime minister publicly attacked a non-partisan election official in such a manner, essentially for partisan gain. The same goes for most of his party, which this week accused Elections Canada of a partisan witch-hunt, being in bed with the Liberals and the media and any other number of tin-foil-hat conspiracies. Of course, unsurprisingly, Harper and the Conservatives have blocked every other effort to examine the scheme in Parliament.

But then again, no one should be surprised. If it's not the media, or the courts, or the Senate, or Elections Canada, it's the Wheat Board, the federal government's own spending power, the bureaucracy, the gun registry ... .

Canadians should rightly wonder why their head of government has such a problem with so many Canadian institutions.

Amnesty International slams SPP talks in letter to Bush

2008-04-26T16:57:00.002-04:00

Amnesty Internationals letter can be viewed here.

“The secrecy and lack of accountability that has marked development of the SPP … leave insufficient room for informed involvement of civil society,” Amnesty International leaders wrote in their letter. “The glaring lack of human rights commitments and an effective institutional means to monitor and enforce those commitments is unacceptable,” the directors of Amnesty International of Canada, Mexico and the United States wrote. “We repeat our call to you to take steps to ensure that initiatives being shaped under the framework of the SPP are brought to the Canadian, Mexican and the United States legislatures to facilitate meaningful public debate.”

North American Heads of State Unified in SPP Talks

2008-04-26T16:52:00.003-04:00

Joint Statement by President Bush, President Calderon, Prime Minister Harper

April 22, 2008

As continental neighbors and partners committed to democratic government, the rule of law and respect for individual rights and freedoms, Canada, Mexico and the United States have shared interests in keeping North America secure, prosperous, and competitive in today's global environment. We met in New Orleans to discuss how we might collaborate further to achieve these goals, as well as to discuss our hemispheric and global interests and concerns.

The Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), based on the principle that security and prosperity depend on each other, is a useful mechanism that helps us to identify and pursue practical solutions to shared challenges in North America in a way that respects our individual and sovereign interests. We each remain open and accountable to our own people.

The SPP complements the success of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has helped to triple trade since 1993 among our three countries to a projected $1 trillion in 2008. NAFTA has offered our consumers a greater variety of better and less expensive goods and services, encouraged our businesses to increase investment throughout North America, and helped to create millions of new jobs in all three countries. NAFTA is key to maintaining North America's competitive edge in an increasingly complex, fast-paced and connected global marketplace.

Our Ministers responsible for security and prosperity met in Los Cabos, Mexico on February 27, 2008 to advance the five priority areas we identified last year in Montebello. In New Orleans, we decided that our Ministers should renew and focus their work in the following areas:

* To increase the competitiveness of our businesses and economies, we are working to make our regulations more compatible, which will support integrated supply chains and reduce the cost of goods traded within North America. In the auto industry, for example, we are seeking to implement compatible fuel efficiency regimes and high safety standards to protect human health and the environment, and to reduce the costs of producing cars and trucks for the North American market. We also are strengthening efforts to protect our inventors, authors, performers and other innovators by advancing our Intellectual Property Action Strategy. We have forged stronger relationships to support more effective law enforcement efforts to combat the trade of counterfeit and pirated goods.

* To make our borders smarter and more secure, we are coordinating our long-term infrastructure plans and are taking steps to enhance services, and reduce bottlenecks and congestion at major border crossings. In this regard, we are working to coordinate the efforts of federal agencies to enhance capacity at major border crossing points, such as Detroit-Windsor and San Diego-Tijuana. We are deepening cooperation on the development and application of technology to make our border both smarter and more secure, as well as strengthen trusted traveler and shipper programs. We will seek to allocate resources efficiently so as to avoid unnecessary inspections. We are exploring new customs procedures, such as a more uniform filing procedure, with the aim of reducing transactional costs while enhancing the security of our borders. We are cooperating to install advanced screening equipment at ports of entry to deter and detect the smuggling of nuclear and radiological materials. The United States and Canada are working to finalize a framework agreement to govern cross-border maritime enforcement operations in shared waterways. All of these efforts will help us more effectively facilitate the legal flow of people and goods across our shared borders while addressing threats to our safety.

* To strengthen energy security and protect the environment, we are seeking to develop a framework for harmonization of energy efficiency standards, and sharing technical information to improve the North American energy market. Together we intend to create an outlook for biofuels for the region, work to enhance our electricity networks, and make more efficient use of our energy through increasing fuel efficiency of our vehicles. Building on the gains in technology over the last 5 years, we are exchanging information and exploring opportunities for joint collaboration to further reduce barriers to expanding clean energy technologies, especially carbon dioxide capture and storage to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. We are working to better North America's air quality and working together to improve the safety of chemicals in the marketplace.

* To improve our citizens' access to safe food, and health and consumer products in North America, we are increasing cooperation and information sharing on the safety of food and products. We are working to strengthen our respective regulatory and inspection systems to protect consumers, while maintaining the efficient flow of food and products among our three countries. We are working to make our food and product safety standards more compatible. We are also working to improve continental recall capacities and are engaging the private sector to ensure that our efforts are complementary.

* To improve our response to emergencies, we are updating our bilateral agreements to enable our local, State, Provincial, and Federal authorities to help each other quickly and efficiently during times of crisis and great need, including responding to threats posed by cyber or chemical-biological attacks. We have made significant progress in discussions for new bilateral emergency management agreements to help manage the movement of goods and people across the border during and after an emergency. We will explore ways to expand cooperation in North America to the trilateral level.

Our efforts in these areas have been informed by the insights of interested parties, in particular the North American Competitiveness Council (NACC), representatives from the business community who have helped us identify and develop solutions to the most pressing issues affecting North American competitiveness.

Our citizens represent the true promise and potential of North America. Our governments help best when they act to promote the conditions necessary for the liberty, safety and success of our people. We believe that we should continue and strengthen our regular dialogue and ongoing cooperation. The partnership among Canada, Mexico and the United States is broader than the sum of our many bilateral and trilateral activities. We share the goals of strengthening democratic governance and reducing barriers to trade within our region and beyond. We also share a common purpose to strengthen our hemispheric institutions and consultative processes.

We will continue working to fight transnational threats that pose challenges to our countries and to the well being of our people, such as organized crime; trafficking in arms, people, and drugs; smuggling; terrorism; money laundering; counterfeiting; and border violence. The transnational nature of these threats makes it imperative that our domestic efforts be complemented and strengthened by our cooperation together, and in international fora.

We reiterate our support for the Bali Action Plan and stress the urgency of reaching agreement to ensure the full, effective and sustained implementation of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change now, up to and beyond 2012. We believe that the Major Economies Leaders Meeting should make a contribution to that outcome. All should redouble efforts to address climate change and to establish nationally appropriate programs and goals to be reflected in binding international commitments based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, to contribute to ensuring global greenhouse gas emission reductions, adaptation measures, energy security, and sustainable development. We are determined to work together to further explore regional cooperation in climate change efforts, including, but not limited to, advancing innovative and suitable clean energy technologies, building the capacity to adopt and deploy them and developing appropriate financial and technical instruments . We reaffirm our shared conviction that increased trade in environmental goods, services, and technologies can have a positive impact on global climate change efforts and encourage the removal of barriers to such trade.

We welcome the invitation of President Calderón to host the next meeting of North American leaders in 2009.

Chester wants uranium mining ban made law - Chronicle Herald

2008-04-13T21:00:00.000-04:00

Chronicle Herald
Chester wants uranium mining ban made law
Worried about health hazards, council asks N.S. to enact legislation
By BEVERLEY WARE South Shore Bureau
Fri. Apr 11

CHESTER — Chester municipal councillors want the province to permanently ban uranium mining.

A retired emergency room doctor spoke to council about the health hazards of uranium Thursday morning. After that, the seven-member council voted unanimously to ask the provincial government to enshrine a ban in legislation.

"At this point, to lift the moratorium literally requires nothing more than a stroke of the pen," Dr. David Maxwell said in an interview after his presentation to council. "There is no legislative ban on anything."

Nova Scotia is the only province or territory to have such a moratorium. It has been in effect since 1982. Premier Rodney MacDonald has asked for a review of the ban, given the growing demand for nuclear energy.

Spokeswoman Jennifer Gavin said the Natural Resources Department isn’t directly reviewing the moratorium. A committee of Nova Scotians working under Voluntary Planning will speak with people across the province, then develop a new natural resources strategy governing minerals, forests, parks and biodiversity. Those meetings will begin next month.

Ms. Gavin said it will take three years to put a new mineral policy in place.

The issue is of particular concern in the Chester area because Tripple Uranium Resources Inc. has found uranium in its search for gold and base minerals in Wentworth and in Millet Brook, near New Ross.

The company reported April 1 it found significant concentrations of uranium in five of 11 drill holes. The find was not unexpected — the Mining Association of Nova Scotia has said the province’s geology indicates there are large uranium deposits — but Tripple’s exploration licence does not allow it to search for uranium.

"The province is still enforcing the moratorium," Ms. Gavin said.

Cheryl Scott is the councillor for the New Ross area. She said a number of residents already buy bottled water because there is uranium in the groundwater and their wells. And they’re worried about what will happen to them if the ban is lifted.

Dr. Maxwell said uranium and the mining process are hazardous. "We’re not against mining. Uranium mining is particularly dangerous and different."

"The waste products remain hazardous for tens of thousands of years," he told council. "You cannot get rid of them. . . . Radioactivity damages cells, period. There’s no way around it. There is no safe level."

He said uranium and waste products from its mining damage chromosomes, cause miscarriages, birth defects, cancers and fertility problems and damage kidneys.

Dr. Maxwell said radon gas is also released in the mining process and it breaks down in the lungs into polonium, lead and bismuth, which damage cells.

"It causes lung cancer, very simple."

Uranium mining would create only a few jobs that would last little more than a decade, he said.

"It does not justify poisoning our environment for the next 10,000 years. I mean it’s utterly ridiculous."

Coun. Marshal Hector said while he supports legislating the ban, council should hear from the mining industry. He said council listens to both sides of the argument on other issues and should on this, too.

But Coun. Gail Smith didn’t agree.

"I am adamant in the fact we don’t need to hear at this point from mining people. . . . There is no second side to this story."

A spokesman for Tripple Uranium was unavailable for comment Thursday.

( bware@herald.ca)

Nova Scotia Uranium Mining info

2008-04-12T15:20:00.005-04:00

Just some info on whats going on with the mining company exploring for Uranium in Nova Scotia.

First, a quote from a Capella Resources Ltd news release dated March 25th, 2008.

"Vancouver, B.C., March 25, 2008 - CAPELLA RESOURCES LTD. (TSX-V:CPS) ("Capella" or the "Company") announces that Universal Uranium Ltd. ("UUL") has elected not to commit to certain expenditures (the "Expenditures") required to maintain its interest under an option agreement dated August 1, 2006 between Tripple Uranium Resources Inc. ("TUR"), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Capella, and UUL (the "Option"). Pursuant to the terms of the Option, UUL had the option to earn and acquire a 60% interest in TUR's 2,727 staked mineral claims located in the Central Mineral Belt of Newfoundland and Labrador (the "Claims") provided that among other things, the Expenditures on the Claims were made by UUL. As a result of UUL's election not to pay the Expenditures, TUR and UUL entered into an agreement formally terminating the Option.

And second, Oh my, look they found Uranium. Who would have thought that drilling in a region that runs near the vein of Uranium that nearly parallels highway 101 would result in actually finding Uranium?

VANCOUVER, B.C., April 1, 2008 - CAPELLA RESOURCES LTD. (TSX-V: CPS) ("Capella" or the "Company") announces that the Company has completed an 11 hole diamond drill program at its Titus Project, located in central Nova Scotia (the "Titus Project"). Initial down-the-hole gamma logging of drill holes at the Titus Project yielded uranium values over 100 parts per million (ppm), a uranium threshold that required the Company to notify the Nova Scotia Government pursuant to the Mineral Resources Regulations (Nova Scotia) made under the Mineral Resources Act (Nova Scotia).

Pursuant to such regulation, the Company immediately notified the Registrar of Mineral and Petroleum Titles (the "Registrar") of the uranium identification and the Registrar established a committee to monitor the Titus Project (the "Monitoring Committee"). Capella and the Monitoring Committee are in discussions concerning future drilling on the Titus Project in order to define the extent of the newly discovered uranium mineralization as it relates to the potential associated base and precious metal mineralization.

All drill holes at the Titus Project were logged with a down-the-hole Calibrated BGR-01 4-Channel Gamma/Resistivity Probe (the "Probe") operated by the Company's technicians. The Probe was calibrated in February 2008 at the Government of New Brunswick's calibration site under the supervision of the Probe's manufacturer. Probe results for the Titus Project are set out in the below table using a 0.3 lb/ton eU3O8 cutoff.

Drill Hole Probe Results

Hole ID	From (metres)	To (Metres)	Interval (metres)	eU3O8 (lbs/ton)	eU3O8 (%)
TS-004	93.15	98.18	5.03	4.60	0.230
TS-005	140.73	144.85	4.12	0.71	0.036
TS-007	174.65	180.63	5.98	0.77	0.038
TS-007	187.56	213.21	25.65	0.54	0.027
TS-009	159.59	167.05	10.62	0.63	0.031
TS-010	103.79	106.18	2.39	0.95	0.048

The diamond-drill program at the Titus Project was drilled West of the observed trend, in the region where the anomalous zone slips under sedimentary cover. Unexpectedly, the calibrated down-the-hole gamma/resistivity probe reported significant concentrations of uranium in five of eleven drill holes with a maximum hole separation of more than 1 kilometer, and a peak value of 0.815% eU3O8 intersected in hole TS-004. Core samples from the drilling program have been split and sent to Activation Laboratories of Ancaster, Ontario for analysis of base metals and gold and results are pending.

Description of the Titus Project

The Titus Project is situated west of Windsor Forks, Nova Scotia in a complex zone of sediments, metasediments and exposed granitoid plutonic rocks. The primary target in the claim block is located at the intersection of three major structural features and a late Paleozoic sedimentary outlier (siltstone & sandstone) that overlay Paleiozoic granitic rocks. Uranium mineralization occurs in both the sedimentary and granitic rocks.

The region has been imaged with a wide array of high-resolution geophysical and remotely sensed data to investigate for the occurrence of structural conduits to base-metal mineralization and any zones of hydrothermal alteration on the flanks of intrusives. Many of the observed magnetic lineaments also correspond with topographic lineaments noted in both the high-resolution digital terrain elevation data along with zones of possible hydrothermal alteration in the analyzed radiometric data and satellite imagery. The radiometric ratios indicate high K/Th values associated with observed lineaments indicative of possible potassic alteration along the probable structural conduits.

Targeting the anomalous zones where the high K/Th ratios coincide with a presence of intersecting North and West-North-West lineaments, the Company's field crews have identified several zones of visible surface mineralization. A base-metal occurrence corresponding with an observed geophysical trend, previously reported by the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources, was sampled by the Company's field crews yielding the following concentrations: 22.8% Pb, 8.83% Zn, 0.017% Cu and 1.78 oz/ton Ag (see the Company's News Release dated March 17, 2008). Additionally, the Company recently received chemical assay results from the same area with a higher Silver content of 2.86 oz/ton Ag.

Richard Bachman, Chief Geological Officer and qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 (Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects) has reviewed and approved the content of this news release.

You can be sure this will be coming to Canada in the very near future

2008-04-02T17:46:00.001-04:00

From: http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts01042008.html
"Thinking for Yourself is Now a Crime"

January 4, 2008
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

What was the greatest failure of 2007? President Bush's "surge" in Iraq? The
decline in the value of the US dollar? Subprime mortgages? No. The greatest
failure of 2007 was the newly sworn in Democratic Congress.

The American people's attempt in November 2006 to rein in a rogue government,
which has committed the US to costly military adventures while running
roughshod over the US Constitution, failed. Replacing Republicans with
Democrats in the House and Senate has made no difference.

The assault on the US Constitution by the Democratic Party is as determined
as the assault by the Republicans. On October 23, 2007, the House passed a bill
sponsored by California Democratic congresswoman Jane Harman
[http://www.congress.org/bio/id/52], chairwoman of a Homeland Security
subcommittee, that overturns the constitutionally guaranteed rights to free expression, association, and assembly.

The bill passed the House on a vote of 404-6. In the Senate the bill is
sponsored by Maine Republican Susan Collins
[http://www.congress.org/bio/id/283] and apparently faces no meaningful
opposition. Harman's bill is called the "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown
Terrorism Prevention Act."When HR 1955 [http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?
d110:4:./temp/~bd6uWO::|/bss/d110query.html|] becomes law, it will create a
commission tasked with identifying extremist people, groups, and ideas. The
commission will hold hearings around the country, taking testimony and compiling a list of dangerous people and beliefs. The bill will, in short, create massive terrorism in the United States. But the perpetrators of terrorism will not be Muslim terrorists; they will be government agents and fellow citizens.

We are beginning to see who will be the inmates of the detention centers
being built in the US by Halliburton under government contract.

Who will be on the "extremist beliefs" list? The answer is: civil
libertarians, critics of Israel, 9/11 skeptics, critics of the
administration's wars and foreign policies, critics of the administration's
use of kidnapping, rendition, torture and violation of
the Geneva Conventions, and critics of the administration's spying on
Americans. Anyone in the way of a powerful interest group--such as
environmentalists opposing politically connected developers--is also a
candidate for the list.

The "Extremist Beliefs Commission" is the mechanism for identifying Americans
who pose "a threat to domestic security" and a threat of "homegrown terrorism"
that "cannot be easily prevented through traditional federal intelligence or
law enforcement efforts."

This bill is a boon for nasty people. That SOB who stole your girlfriend,
that hussy who stole your boyfriend, the gun owner next door--just report them
to Homeland Security as holders of extreme beliefs. Homeland Security needs
suspects, so they are not going to check. Under the new regime, accusation is
evidence. Moreover, "our" elected representatives will never admit that they
voted for a bill and created an "Extremist Belief Commission" for which there
is neither need nor constitutional basis.

That boss who harasses you for coming late to work--he's a good candidate to
be reported; so is that minority employee that you can't fire for any normal
reason. So is the husband of that good-looking woman you have been unable to
seduce. Every kind of quarrel and jealousy can now be settled with a phone call
to Homeland Security.

Soon Halliburton will be building more detention centers.

Americans are so far removed from the roots of their liberty that they just
don't get it. Most Americans don't know what habeas corpus is or why it is
important to them. But they know what they want, and Jane Harman has given them
a new way to settle scores and to advance their own interests.

Even educated liberals believe that the US Constitution is a "living
document" that can be changed to mean whatever it needs to mean in order to
accommodate some new important cause, such as abortion and legal privileges for
minorities and the handicapped. Today it is the "war on terror" that the
Constitution must accommodate. Tomorrow it can be the war on whomever or whatever.

Think about it. More than six years ago the World Trade Center and Pentagon
were attacked. The US government blamed it on al Qaeda. The 9/11 Commission
Report has been subjected to criticism by a large number of qualified people--
including the commission's chairman and co-chairman.

Since 9/11 there have been no terrorist attacks in the US. The FBI has tried
to orchestrate a few, but the "terrorist plots" never got beyond talk organized
and led by FBI agents. There are no visible extremist groups other than the
neoconservatives that control the government in Washington. But somehow the
House of Representatives overwhelmingly sees a need to create a commission to
take testimony and search out extremist views (outside of Washington, of
course).

This search for extremist views comes after President Bush and the Justice
(sic) Department declared that the President can ignore habeas corpus, ignore
the Geneva Conventions, seize people without evidence, hold them indefinitely
without presenting charges, torture them until they confess to some made up
crime, and take over the government by declaring an emergency. Of course, none of these "patriotic" views are extremist.

The search for extremist views follows also the granting of contracts to
Halliburton to build detention centers in the US. No member of Congress or the
executive branch ever explained the need for the detention centers or who the
detainees would be. Of course, there is nothing extremist about building
detention centers in the US for undisclosed inmates.

Clearly the detention centers are not meant to just stand there empty. Thanks
to 2007's greatest failure--the Democratic Congress--there is to be
an "Extremist Beliefs Commission" to secure inmates for Bush's detention
centers.

President Bush promises us that the wars he has launched will cause
the "untamed fire of freedom" to "reach the darkest corners of our world."
Meanwhile in America the fire of freedom has not only been tamed but also is
being extinguished.

The light of liberty has gone out in the United States.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan
administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial
page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny
of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Iran in the Crosshairs. - Counterpunch.org

2008-04-01T22:59:00.001-04:00

March 31, 2008

Iran in the Crosshairs

A Third American War in the Making?

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts03312008.html

The US Congress, the US media, the American people, and the United Nations, are looking the other way as Cheney prepares his attack on Iran.

If only America had an independent media and an opposition party. If there were a shred of integrity left in American political life, perhaps a third act of naked aggression--a third war crime under the Nuremberg standard--by the Bush Regime could be prevented.

On March 30, the Russian News & Information Agency, Novosti, cited "a high-ranking security source: "The latest military intelligence data point to heightened US military preparations for both an air and ground operation against Iran."

According to Novosti, Russian Colonel General Leonid Ivashov said "that the Pentagon is planning to deliver a massive air strike on Iran's military infrastructure in the near future."

The chief of Russia's general staff, Yuri Baluyevsky, said last November that Russia was beefing up its military in response to US aggression, but that the Russian military is not "obliged to defend the world from the evil Americans."

On March 29, OpEdNews cited a report by the Saudi Arabian newspaper Okaz, which was picked up by the German news service, DPA. The Saudi newspaper reported on March 22, the day following Cheney's visit with the kingdom's rulers, that the Saudi Shura Council is preparing "national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards that may affect the kingdom following experts' warnings of possible attacks on Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactors."

And Admiral William "there will be no attack on Iran on my watch" Fallon has been removed as US chief of Central Command, thus clearing the way for Cheney's planned attack on Iran.

The Iranians don't seem to believe it, despite the dispatch of US nuclear submarines and another aircraft carrier attack group to the Persian Gulf. To counter any Iranian missiles launched in response to an attack, the US is deploying anti-missile defenses to protect US bases and Saudi oil fields.

Two massive failures by the American media, the Democratic Party, and the American people have paved the way for Cheney's long planned attack on Iran. One failure is the lack of skepticism about the US government's explanation of 9/11. The other failure is the Democrats' refusal to begin impeachment proceedings against President Bush for lying to the Congress, the American people, and the world and launching an invasion of Iraq based on deception and fabricated evidence.

If an American president can start a war exactly as Adolf Hitler did with pure lies and not be held accountable, he can get away with anything. And Bush and his evil regime have.

Hitler launched World War II with his invasion of Poland after staging a "Polish attack" on a German radio station. On the night of August 31, 1939, a group of Nazis disguised in Polish uniforms seized a radio station in Germany. Hitler announced that "last night Polish troops crossed the frontier and attacked Germany," a claim no more true than the Bush Regime's claim that "Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction." Hitler's lie failed, because his invasion of Poland, which began the next day allegedly in reprisal for the Polish attack, had obviously been planned for many months.

Iran is a beautiful and developed country. It is an ancient civilization. It has attacked no one. Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Iran is permitted by the treaty to have a nuclear energy program. The Bush Regime's case against Iran is based on the Bush Regime's desire to deny Iran its rights under the treaty.

The International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors have repeatedly reported that they have found no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Despite all the disinformation from US Gen. Petraeus and other Bush Regime military lackeys, Iran is not arming the Iraqis who are resisting the American occupation.

If Iran were arming insurgents, the insurgents would have two weapons that would neutralize the US advantage in the Iraqi conflict: missiles to knock down US helicopter gunships and rocket-propelled grenades that knock out American tanks. The insurgents do not have these weapons and must construct clumsy anti-tank weapons out of artillery shells. The insurgents are helpless against US air power and cannot mass forces to take on the American troops.

Indiscriminate American violence has reduced Iraq to rubble. The civilian infrastructure is essentially destroyed--electricity, water and sewer systems, medical care and schools. Depleted uranium is everywhere poisoning everyone, including US troops. There is no economy, and half or more of Iraqis are unemployed. Literally no Iraqi family has escaped an injury or a death as a consequence of the US invasion. Millions of Iraqis have become displaced persons. A developed country with a professional middle class has been destroyed because of lies told by the President and Vice President of the US. The Bush Regime's lies are echoed by a neoconservative media, and have gone unchallenged by the opposition party and an indifferent American public.

In Afghanistan, death and destruction rains on even the smallest village from the air. America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are wars against the civilian populations.

Just as the world could not believe Hitler's next horror and thus was always unprepared, the Iranians despite all the evidence cannot believe that even the Great Satan would gratuitously attack Iran based on nothing but lies about non-existent nuclear weapons.

Iran's only chance would be to strike before the US delivers the first blow. Instead of using its missiles to take out the Saudi oil fields and to sink the US aircraft carriers, instead of closing the Strait of Hormuz, instead of arming the Iraqi Shi'ites and moving them to insurgency, Iran is perched like a sitting duck in denial even as the US and its Iraqi puppet Maliki move to eliminate Al Sadr's Iraqi Shi'ite militia in order to avoid supply disruptions and a Shi'ite rebellion in Iraq when the US attack on Iran comes.

It is important to emphasize that Iran is making no moves toward war. Having tamed, blackmailed, and purchased Congress, the US media, and US allies and puppets, Cheney might delight in the arrogance with which he can now attack Iran free of any restraint or fabricated provocation. On the other hand, he might cover himself by orchestrating an "Iranian provocation" to justify his attack as a response. But like Hitler's planned attack against Poland, Cheney's attack on Iran has long been in the works.

On March 29 the Associated Press reported that Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi "poured contempt on fellow Arab leaders" at the Arab summit that day. Gadhafi told the Arab "leaders," many of whom are on the American payroll, that their American masters would turn on them all, just as America turned on Saddam Hussein after using him to fight a proxy war against Iran.

Saddam had once been an ally of Washington, Gadhafi reminded the Arabs, "but they sold him out." Gadhafi told the American puppets, "Your turn is next."

Gadhafi asked, "Where is the Arabs' dignity, their future, their very existence?" If Arabs remain disunited, he predicted, "they will turn themselves into protectorates. They will be marginalized and turn into garbage dumps."

Indeed, it is this disunity that permits the US to bomb and murder at will in the Middle East.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Trigger happy military and the Build up in the Persian Gulf?

2008-03-25T17:25:00.004-04:00

Earlier this week I talked about the Canadian ships heading to the Persian Gulf as part of a commitment the conservative government made to the US lead War on Terror. This week the US military rented the container ship, Global Patriot from a company called Global Container Lines to transport something to the Persian Gulf. I'm curious what this 'something' is, as this is a fairly large container ship.

This ship was passing through the Suez Canal, on route to the Persian Gulf when it was approached by a group of small merchant boats. These boats are common, attempting to sell merchandise and food to passing ships in the canal. The Navy claims they warned the boat to stay away (in a native Arabic language), fired a flare and then warning shots. They claim they killed no one. However, Egyptian officials claim one death in the incident.

Meanwhile, Egyptian officials also claim that a US nuclear submarine and destroyer made there way through the Suez Canal in the direction of the Arabian Sea. A large portion of the US fleet is stationed in and around the Arabian Sea, this just adds to the total.

Some things to consider:

1. Some US media (LA times and Reuters) called this a "US War Ship", disinformation?
2. Does a civilian vessel have the legal right to shoot? And if so, under who's orders or what jurisdiction?
3. What kind of guns were they using? This is a container ship. I know it is under the control of the US Military, but was it a person shooting or was it a gun loaded and installed on the ship?
4. If you were in your home city, doing the job you do every day of the week and a foreign container ship told you to leave the area, would you listen? Probably not.

US War Resisters. Let them stay. Grant them status.

2008-03-23T10:16:00.006-04:00

War Dodgers

Aaron Harris/Associated Press

Jeremy Hinzman, an Army infantryman gone AWOL from the 82nd Airborne Division, arrives at a federal court in Toronto in a bid for refugee status.

By BEN EHRENREICH

Published: In the NY Times March 23, 2008

Next month, the Canadian House of Commons is slated to debate a resolution that would allow conscientious objectors “who have refused or left military service related to a war not sanctioned by the United Nations” to apply for residency in Canada. The phrasing is vague but the intent is not. The war in question is the Iraq war, and the resolution represents the culmination of a four-year debate about what to do with the small but steady stream of American soldiers who have fled across our northern border to avoid fighting in Iraq.

Michael S. Yamashita/Corbis

It all began in Jan. 2004, when a young American with a long, serious face walked into the Toronto law office of Jeffry House to ask for help with what was at the time a highly unusual immigration case. The American turned out to be a soldier named Jeremy Hinzman, an infantryman in the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division. He told House that his petition for conscientious-objector status was denied while he was stationed in Afghanistan. He crossed the border into Canada just days before his unit was to be deployed to Iraq. Of the more than 25,000 American soldiers who, according to the United States Department of Defense, have deserted since 2003, the Toronto-based War Resisters Support Campaign estimates that 225 have fled to Canada. (The D.O.D defines a deserter as anyone who has been AWOL for 30 consecutive days or who seeks asylum in a foreign country; desertion carries a maximum penalty of five years’ imprisonment.)

The majority of the deserters in Canada have chosen not to make the authorities aware of their presence. Like any other illegal immigrants, they have settled for invisibility. A few dozen, though, followed Hinzman’s lead. Most found their way to Jeffry House. One young Army medic named Justin Colby read an AOL news posting about Hinzman’s case while stationed in Iraq. He telephoned House from Ramadi and showed up in his office a few months later.

House would eventually represent between 30 and 35 American deserters. Most of them, like Colby, say they joined the military in part out of patriotism. “I thought Iraq had something to do with 9/11,” Colby says, “that they were the bad guys that attacked our country.” But unlike Hinzman, most did not apply for conscientious-objector status. They tend to say they aren’t opposed to all wars in principle — just to the one they were ordered to fight. It wasn’t until Colby arrived in Iraq that he started to see the conflict as “a war of aggression, totally unprovoked,” he says. “I was, like, ‘This is what my buddies are dying for?’ ” Midway through his tour, he decided: “I’m never going to do this again.” He went AWOL the day before his unit left to train for a second deployment. House says that more than two-thirds of his clients have been deployed to Iraq at least once. “One is resisting a third deployment.”

Tens of thousands of American draft dodgers and deserters took refuge in Canada in the late 1960s and early ’70s. House was one of them. He packed up his car and left his home in Wisconsin 38 years ago to start a new life in Canada. The process was simple. “I came to the border and said: ‘I would like to immigrate to Canada. I’m refusing to serve in Vietnam,’ ” he recalls. Border officials had him type up an application for residency on the spot. “Four weeks later, I got my permanent-resident status.” But times have changed since Pierre Trudeau, then the prime minister, declared Canada “a refuge from militarism.” While Canada is still a relative haven for asylum-seekers, its immigration laws have tightened sharply, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been a faithful ally of the Bush administration. (Harper has kept 2,500 Canadian troops in Afghanistan, whose deployment the House of Commons recently extended until 2011.) As a result, the new generation of war resisters find themselves in an uncomfortable squeeze. In today’s Canada, deserters like Hinzman really have only one legal option: to apply for residency as refugees.

“There’s a very clear Canadian precedent for the idea that no soldier has to participate in an illegal war,” House says. That precedent, interestingly enough, is a case in which an Iraqi Army soldier was granted asylum in Canada after fleeing to avoid taking part in the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. But House’s first task was to prove that the Iraq war is illegal. His argument relied largely on his reading of international law. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees lays out a slender possibility for relief. Mere disagreement with the “political justification for a particular military action” is not sufficient. The action must be “condemned by the international community as contrary to basic rules of human conduct.” Only in that case can punishment for desertion or draft evasion “be regarded as persecution.”

Juridically, at least, House saw the case as straightforward. A British court had awarded asylum to a Russian deserter of the Chechen war on the same basis. (British case law often influences Canadian jurisprudence.) And there was the precedent of the Iraqi deserter. But convincing the Canadian courts to equate George W. Bush’s occupation of Iraq with Saddam Hussein’s attack on Kuwait was a politically daunting task.

In the end, House never got the chance. He showed up at Hinzman’s first hearing armed with evidence arguing for the illegality of the Iraq war: 13 four-inch-thick binders containing everything from former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s memos on the treatment of detainees to Human Rights Watch reports to the British Army’s documentation of civilian deaths at American military checkpoints. In March 2005, the immigration board ruled against Hinzman, insisting that its “authority does not include making judgments about United States foreign policy.”

A Canadian federal court upheld that decision in 2006, interpreting the relevant international law to apply only to high-level policy makers. “The ordinary foot soldier,” the court ruled, “is not expected to make his or her personal assessment as to the legality of a conflict.” All the documents in House’s 13 binders were thus irrelevant. House objected that policy makers are rarely asked to take up arms. But an appeals court ruled against him last April on other grounds.

“The present position is basically Pontius Pilate,” House told me last fall, not long before he hit the end of the legal road. In mid-November, the Supreme Court dismissed his request for an appeal. “It’s a huge loss,” House said at the time. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s the court deciding not to be involved in the controversy.”

The deserters’ fight has since passed out of the courts and into the hazy realm of politics. On Dec. 6, the Parliament’s immigration committee passed the resolution that would give American deserters a chance at residency. The vote broke down along party lines: the four members of the Conservative Party (which is currently in power but lacks a parliamentary majority) voted against it, but they were outnumbered by the seven representatives of the three major opposition parties.

Whether such unity will survive the full House of Commons debate next month remains to be seen. The Iraq war has been immensely unpopular in Canada, and the leaders of the Bloc Quebecois and the left-leaning New Democratic Party have both come out in support of the resolution. But Canadian M.P.’s tend to vote with far more party discipline than their American counterparts, and Stéphane Dion, the head of the Liberal Party, has not yet taken a public stance on the bill. Without his support, its fate is uncertain.

In the meantime, the deserters have little to do but wait. Though the United States Army does issue arrest warrants for deserters, it does not actively track them down; even at home, deserters are most likely to be apprehended if they are picked up for an unrelated offense. According to a State Department spokeswoman, the United States has made no diplomatic efforts to bring deserters home from Canada. And despite the Canadian Supreme Court decision in November, none have yet been deported. But, as House puts it, “the machinery is grinding along.” At least eight deserters, including Hinzman, have received Preremoval Risk Assessment notices, the bureaucratic preludes to actual deportation orders. It’s very unlikely, though, that the government will make any move before the parliamentary vote in April. Even then, the deserters’ supporters say they hope, the government might prefer that this issue disappear. Given the unpopularity of the Iraq war and the Harper administration’s narrow hold on power, “the Conservatives have nothing to gain if this issue becomes very public,” says Michelle Robidoux of the War Resisters Support Campaign.

Undeterred by the Supreme Court ruling, new arrivals are still showing up. Robidoux’s group has added five to its roster in just the last three weeks. For Colby, Hinzman and others, uncertainty in Canada apparently looks better than combat in Iraq. “Every day that I’m here,” Colby says, “I’m glad I’m not in Baghdad.”

Nuclear Power and Uranium Mining - Dispelling the Myths

2008-03-21T10:53:00.013-04:00

Because of the climate crisis, the push to more environmentally friendly sources of energy is coming on strong. However, our government and the power industry seem to have there heads up there asses. Over the past few years we've seen commercials from the Government of Canada pushing the idea that Nuclear power and bio-energy will be the saviors of the planet. This couldn't be further from the truth. For this article I will stick to nuclear power.

The Nuclear power industry is pushing there product on four ideas which if inspected are complete myths and outright lies. Unfortunately our government is complicit in these lies. The four points they are using to sell nuclear power are that:

1. It is safe
2. It is greenhouse gas emissions free
3. It is cheap
4. It is peaceful

Before I talk about these points lets get some facts out of the way. It has long been known that the safest place for Uranium is in the ground, undisturbed. Once it is removed from the ground and exposed to air and water it begins to leach its radioactive particles. Uranium takes over 200 000 years to decay, and releases these deadly particles for that entire length of time, poisoning everything in the area. Radioactive particles from this material can also be transported by moving water and the wind, expanding the area of devastation. These particles are invisible, so you won't know if your being effected until you are already sick and it is too late. They seep into the water table, into plants and animals you eat and into the air you breath.

In Canada, uranium is mined with open pit methods, and of the extracted material, only 15 percent can be used to create nuclear power and of the radiation, only 40% of the potential power can be harvested and used as power. So only 6% of the extracted radioactive potential is used as power. The rest of the material must be disposed of. However, there are no known methods of containing or disposing of this material. Attempts to encase it in concrete were a complete failure and after 30-50 years they leak. Holding ponds are notorious for leaks and over flows, in fact there are no lagoons that have not leaked in one way or another. No technology exists that can contain uranium waste for 200 000 years, it just isn't possible. So what we are doing, as with every other industry we operate, we are giving up the health and lives of our grand children for our gains, all the while killing ourselves in the process.

Since 2004, the global climate crisis hit the mainstream, and the interesting in nuclear power has been renewed. This has caused the price of uranium to grow exponentially, increasing pressure on government to open up markets to exploration. In the last Federal budget of 2008, the Government of Canada announced a subsidy of $300 million to the nuclear industry and $0 to fight climate change, and only a tiny amount to actual renewable and clean energy technologies. All this even though the citizens of Ottawa, the nations capital, are in the midst of fighting the nuclear/uranium industry, who are trying to open a mine in the surrounding area. If its not good for the families of the politicians why is it safe for the rest of us?

Now lets tackle the current myths being pushed by the industry one at a time.

1. Is it safe?

No, nuclear power is one of the most unsafe forms of power production known to man. If we start back in the beginning and follow the history of the radium and uranium industry in Canada, we find a long trail of lies followed by death and destruction of the environment, as well as human and animal life.

The first Canadian mines were opened in Uranium City, Saskatchewan (Sask. is still the Uranium capital of Canada), which today is a barren land with toxic radioactive winds blowing from its mines. However, the first major disaster that can be attributed to this deadly radioactive metal is sourced from Northern Canada in the North West Territories. Uranium extracted from the early mines in the NWT was the source material used in the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Beyond that massive death toll is the fact that the tilings were dumped into the waters, which poisoned the native people, there food and water. Most of the people that mined in those days had extremely short lives due to exposure. The dumping of tilings is a common thread in the history of uranium mining and nuclear power as we saw above, because there is no way to safely dispose of it.

Uranium has poisoned the water and food of every community that has ever allowed the extraction of this deadly substance from there soils. This has been followed by epidemics of cancer and birth defects, which persist for generations after the first exposed people. I again refer you to the length of time it takes uranium to decay, that being over 200 000 years, which translates into thousands of generations of people.

2. It is GHG emissions free? Will it help prevent the global climate crisis?

No, people who tout nuclear power as GHG emissions free are considering only the nuclear plant itself and not the processes that are required to build the plant, extract the material (mining), transport the material and dispose of the material. When all of these are considered the impacts on the global climate are certainly not emissions free, safe or clean. Another point worth considering is that these nuclear plants use huge amounts of water in the cooling process, which is ejected back into the river systems, lakes and oceans. This heating of the worlds oceans will also effect global climate change, aquatic environments and put more strain on the coming water crisis, which has come to light over the past decade. There is also the fact that they are cutting down trees and forests to get at this rock which reduces the ability of the land to be a carbon sink an pull GHG's from the air back to the land to be stored in plant life.

3. Is it cheap?

Certainly not. As I stated above the nuclear industry in Canada and the world is highly subsidized. This money comes straight from the tax base, so even if the cost that show up on your bill from the electric company are low, you've already paid the other costs through the subsidies the government gives away to these companies. And above that your paying for there huge profit margins, and after all they wouldn't be in the business if there weren't huge profits.

Beyond visible initial costs, what is being ignored are the social and environmental costs, and the money needed to clean up after the nuclear industry abandons mines, power plants and processing facilities. The companies, like in every other industry, do not clean up there mess, they leave the land exactly how it is and move on to other more profitable ventures, leaving your government to pay the clean up bills, if clean up is even possible. Also, since like oil, uranium is a finite resource (and expected to run out around the same time), it will eventually run out, and the one industry towns with will pop up around mines (think of Fort McMurry) will be left with no jobs to support there people in the coming years. Again, government will be left to fill the gap and provide for these people until they can be retrained. Unfortunately most of them will be unfit for other jobs due to illness and serious disease. There children will require medical treatment for there entire lives, putting unneeded strains on the already suffering health system.

4. Is it peaceful?

There are no guarantees that uranium mined and processed in Canada will not be obtained and used by terrorist or rogue nation in nuclear weapons. No systems is in place by government or industry that can guaranteed this. And if you think the effects felt from radioation due to mining and processing are any better then a bomb, you've got another thing coming, and its called cancer.

Plus, in todays world, where people use planes as missiles to destroy buildings, who is going to defend these nuclear reactors against terrorist attacks? It only takes one crazy to fly a plane into a plant to cause a melt down. Is that a chance your willing to take? These things are sitting ducks, targets that would cause the most possible damage to human life. Causing massive amounts of suffering for generations to come. We can see the devastation of this possibility in the aftermath of the Chernobyl incident, which was cause by human error.

Depleted uranium is the left overs from the 15% of usable extracted materials. This depleted uranium still contains 60% of the radioactive energy of the original extracted material. In recent years this material (metal) has found a use in the weapons manufacturing industry. Being a product that is impossible to dispose of safely, companies will practically give it away just to whip there hands clean of it. This makes it one of, if not the cheapest metal on the market today. Its low cost has drawn a lot of attention from the weapons manufacturing industry to try to bring down the cost of making weapons and increasing profits.

Depleted uranium from every uranium mining and nuclear power consuming country in the world is being made into the casings for missiles, bombs and bullets and had been dropped in the middle east for the past decade. The effects of which will have disastrous impacts on the people of that region for centuries to come as well as the soldiers who have been stationed there. In the coming decades I believe we will see a scandal erupt similar to the one surrounding agent orange and agent purple in Vietnam and Cambodia, which was also sourced from Canadian resources.

Conclusion:

Nuclear power and the uranium mining that is inevitably attached to it, are not safe, not clean, not cheap and not peaceful, in fact they are the complete opposite. The Government of Canada and the Nuclear Industry have amassed a huge disinformation campaign to fool the Canadian people into believing nuclear power is part of what will save the world. When, if all the facts are looked at together, it is worse then every other known source of power in the world today. Not only that but it poses the most dangerous threat to the safety and continuation of the human race.

Currently our federal government has allowed exploration in almost every province in the country. Newfoundland is very near to mining. British Columbia has lifted its moratorium on uranium exploration and is actively pushing the mining of uranium. New Brunswick, which already has nuclear plants has taken proposals for mining operations in Moncton and a few other areas (luckily the residents are standing there ground, opposing the operation). Saskatchewan has never stopped mining uranium. Ontario has approved exploration.

Nova Scotia is the only province in the country that maintains a moratorium on uranium mining. Unfortunately it is a de-facto moratorium which can be repealed at anytime without consulting the citizenry. At the moment a company called Triple Uranium who is a publicly traded US company that deals only in uranium has been grated rights to explore areas of known uranium deposits for 'other base metals'. In my opinion, the MacDonald Conservative government has already made up its mind, and is planing to repeal the moratorium as soon as this company has a buyer for the land it is actively buying up. This is an attempt to reduce the ability of the citizens and there advocacy groups to oppose this activity by having everything already set up.

I call on all Canadians to oppose uranium mining in Canada, your province, home towns and communities. You are fighting for not only your lives but the lives of thousands of generations of Canadians that will not be given the choice to live without this poison. It will be forced upon them from birth to death by the decisions we make.

Please defend Canada.

Political / Electoral Reform and its opposition

2008-03-16T15:34:00.008-04:00

What this country really needs is SERIOUS dialog on both political and electoral reform. What does that entail you might ask?

First, campaign funding:
Should be from the tax base, and the tax base ONLY. Fair, clean election is of the utmost importance. Currently, corporate funding for political candidates is appalling. If everyone was given the same amount of money for a campaign, we could eliminate some of the corporate influence on the outcome of our elections, taking our politicians out of the pocket of big business. This move is happening right now in the US, where many states are passing similar clean election laws.

Second, Independent Candidates (IC's):
Should be allowed to run for the PMO as they are in the US. Which would mean separate votes for the PMO and local MP's, which makes since because they are completely different issues. This is a serious flaw in our election process. Currently, candidates for the PMO are selected from a pool of candidates in each political party, which means that the average citizen has absolutely no say in who is running the country. These candidates are selected by higher ups in each party, which means the PM is actually selected by roughly 2000 people in each party. So a small fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the population (8000/35000000 = a very small number) are influencing the outcomes of elections, and these people are mostly rich white guys with large stakes in the outcome.

It should be obvious to anyone who knows and follows politics and corporate dealings that these party members will vote for someone who will best represent there needs and wants and not those of the general public. A good example of this is Chretien, in 1974, as Finance Minister he changed the banking rules in Canada and converted the Bank of Canada into a regulatory agency, gaving control of the Canadian dollar to the banking industry, then as you might expect he found his way into the PMO when these men voted for him to be leader of the liberal party for his loyalty. This chance in control of the dollar was the begninning of the Canadian national Debt that has skyrocketed to almost $600 Million, and makes the same Banking Executives billions of dollars a year, stolen from OUR taxes. When you vote, your trusting that the 2000 people that run the party you voted for are trustworthy and are looking out for your best interest, which is a HUGE mistake, because they absolutely do not represent your best interests. They represent there best interests.

Allowing independent candidates with equal tax base funding to run for the PMO would take the power away from the corporate parties and place it back in the hands of the people. Now I know what your thinking, if we let just anyone run for PM we'd have a line up miles long, but there are ways to narrow down candidates with votes starting at the local levels and then provincial levels which I won't get into here, because it is a long discussion. Lets just say, it could be worked out if the political will to discuss it was there. In fact if we actually had a real discussion on this issue we might come to the conclusion that the Office of the PM and the party system as a whole might be ambiguous and unnecessary. Locally funded elections for Independent MP's to the HoC would place the dealing of the House under the control of the people and not the Parties, because the people would have the right to change there mind as to there representatives instead of the party. Something to think about indeed.

Thirdly, Unelected Advisers:
What exactly is the job of unelected adviser to the PMO? We have these men, who are considered the closest part of the PM's inner circle, whispering in his ear, influencing extremely important decisions. Who are these men? Who are they accountable to? Where do they get there information and views from? We need laws to keep these men out, the only people making decision for Canada should be our elected officials. Those are the people the PM should be talking to because they are supposed to be directly representing our concerns (we know isn't the case, but its better then unelected people doing it).

Forth, Lobbyists:
When was it part of the democratic process to allow random people with corporate agendas access to government officials when the citizens of this country can't even get the time of day from our government. We have to go through a maze of secretaries and representatives of our government officials to get even the vaguest of responses from the offices of our elected representatives. Rarely will a citizen get a response from a Minister or from the PMO. Some have a hard time talking to even there local MP's and conveying there opinions and concerns. So to give the heads of corporations and there lobbyist full access to the Ministry and the PMO is really, not just unfair but completely undemocratic. Its certainly part of what is ruining this country.

Opposition to political and electoral reform comes from the party system itself and from those who are comfortable with the current statue quo. It's no surprise that Political Parties don't want Canadians thinking about reform on these issues, they currently have a monopoly on politics. They have successfully kept independents and small party out of the mix and have stolen tax dollars based on the number of votes each party gets in the federal election. For every vote they receive the party gets $1.75. Roughly 60% of the population votes, so thats $1.75 x 36000000 x 0.6 = $37 800 000 straight from the public tax system into the pockets of political parties. Save yourself some money, vote independent.

I would love to hear opinions on this.
please comment.

PMO, MP's vs. Appointed Officials, Politics as Usual

2008-03-16T14:38:00.006-04:00

The fact that the former head of a federal inquiry into the sponsorship scandal has told members of Parliament that there is a dangerous and growing concentration of power in the Prime Minister's Office should come as no surprise. This has been a growing concern of anyone who pays attention to Canadian Politics for some time now. The role of MPs in day-to-day decision-making has been diminished while the size and influence of PMO has grown, retired judge John Gomery said Thursday.

“It should be remembered that the political staff in the Prime Minister's Office are not elected,” he told the government operations committee.

“They are not subject to any rules or laws of which I am aware, and they have the ear of the most important and powerful person in Canadian government.

“I suggest that this trend is a danger to Canadian democracy and leaves the door wide open to the kind of political interference in the day-to-day administration of government programs that led to what is commonly called the sponsorship scandal.”

What we are seeing here is a gradual move towards a dictatorship of sorts. Harper already runs his minority government as a majority with his claim that "we have a mandate to govern" where he makes every possible issue a confidence vote. The point of having an official opposition is to keep the government in check and prevent it from running out of control. We elect representatives to represent us, so that we can have some say in the day to day functioning of OUR government. But what we are seeing is the complete lack of respect for the opinions of our elected representatives and a 100% reliance on the opinions of UNELECTED (aka appointed) aids to the PMO. People who are not responsible to anyone except the party and the corporations that prop them up in positions of power. A serious question every Canadian should be asking is, what are the politics of these people and who's best interests are they representing?

Now, I'm not saying that all the people we have elected are doing a great job either. But we have a level of control over them, albeit not much of one, since they are responsible to the party first and the citizenry second. Political reform is something this country should think about, but I will discuss that in a later article. MP's regardless of party affiliation should have the ear of the PMO, because they are the ones most responsible to the people who this government is supposed to serve. I think most of the time that the Federal and Provincial governments forget that we the tax payers actually employ them and pay those highly inflated salaries.

Politics as usual, whats the current situation?

Well we have a PM that says he and Canada do not want an election, while secretly he is craving an election before the recession that is sweeping the US makes its way north of the border. He wants and needs an election before that happens and hes willing to do anything in his power to make that happen. Hence we have the rhetoric that every vote is a confidence motion, so it looks like the election is the oppositions fault. If the opposition disagrees with the PM then we get a vote. At the moment the Conservatives are confident that they can win an election and possibly secure a majority, which might be the worst possible thing to ever happen in Canadian Political history.

The Liberals on the other hand, are desperately trying to avoid an election, for they know that Harpers CONs have a lot of support and could take a majority if an election is called in the near future. This is why we've seen them either voting for motions they slightly oppose and not voting at all on motions they completely oppose. For in the next election whenever it happens they do not want to be attached in anyway to motions that were detrimental to Canada. Then they can say, "well we didn't support that motion", but the CONs will say "you didn't oppose it either". Its a sticky situation indeed. The problem is that while the Liberals are not voting the Conservatives are pushing through the Bush agenda in Canada. Its madness, and it has to stop.

The NDP and the Block, are standing up for Canadians on the issues. They know they have no chance of winning an election and know that the Liberals will take the fall for anything that goes wrong because they have the majority of votes in the opposition. They feel free to vote there conscience and win over more votes from the Liberals by looking like they are standing up for Canadians. This should sit very well with the conservatives, because its eroding support for the Liberals there biggest contender in the next election, making it even easier for them to steal a majority.

Where does that leave us, the citizens of this confused and intentionally made ignorant country. In the dark unfortunately. With no way to effect change on our countries government, policies, regulations, trade deals, etc, etc, etc, we are left to play the part of slaves. Get a job, work yourself to death for a lifetime and suck it up. Under this kind of government Medicare, education, job security, social service, infrastructure and the like are privileges that can be taken away at the wave of the corporate governments big stick. Instead this money, YOUR MONEY, goes to support increased militarization, unending war, corporate profits and trying to find the easiest, cheapest and fastest way to solve every problem without concern for the health of people, society, culture or the environment.

Such is the government which we have elected and which will continue to be elected until we force reform in this mixed up country.

NAFTA Democrats and the SPP

2008-03-16T14:17:00.004-04:00

Recently, the Canadian Government was the center of a scandal, where a high level government official close to the PMO released sensitive info about both Hilary Clinton and Barak Obama. The information was in relation to claims that both of the candidates for the Democrats Presidential Nomination had stated on the campaign trail that they had serious problems with NAFTA and would either renegotiate or withdraw from NAFTA. The information leaked stated that the campaign offices of both nominees had contacted the PMO and informed them that the Canadian Government should not take such promises seriously, and that things said during campaigns might not carry over to the office to the President.

First, this should raise serious questions for voters in the US. Candidates making promises that they have no intention of keeping. While this is not uncommon in Canada or the US as we've seen, it should still cause a stir in the public of both countries and cause them to reconsider there election processes and party systems. Why would you want to vote for another liar? Look what voting (or not voting) for Bush got you, didn't he run on a platform of 'non-intervention', yep he sure did. Maybe considering a candidate that has a long history of not taking Corporate money, like Cynthia McKinney might be a better option. Unfortunately the Green Party primaries got zero air time on mainstream US news. And I'll bet they don't get much play during the election in November either.

Second, we're listening to candidates promise to back out of NAFTA, which in my opinion is right on track with the Dem. and Rep. agendas. Confused? I'm talking about the Security and prosperity partnership of North America, where the Heads of state of all three North American countries are already renegotiating NAFTA with the help of the North American Competitiveness Council (aka the Largest Corporations in North America) and no input from civil society or our elected representatives. No talk in Congress, No talk in the House of Commons, NO TALK WHAT SO EVER. When citizens advocacy groups have to file Access to Information Act requests to find out what there government is doing at SECRET meetings with other states, you know something shady is going on.

What I'm saying is, we're hearing candidates making promises they intend to keep so that when the time comes they can say "I am keeping campaign promises", and "I promised the US people, and I'm doing it". We've heard this rhetoric before from our own PM when he promised then forced through new election laws to align elections in Canada with elections in the US.

Our governments are already renegotiation NAFTA and the plan is for the US to back out of NAFTA and expand the SPP on the basis of renegotiating trade.

STAND UP FOR CANADA OPPOSE THE SPP AND NAFTA

4-6 Canadian Ships to set sail for the Straits of Hormuz (aka Iran) in mid-April

2008-03-16T13:37:00.014-04:00

Recently it has been brought to my attention (by multiple source in the Canadian Navy) that Canada is about to send a large naval deployment of 4-6 ships from the Port of Halifax to Dubai. This deployment is taking a whirlwind tour of US hot spots on its way to being stationed in the Straits of Hormuz in Dubai off the coast of Iran.

I've suspected this move for some time, because last fall the largest deployment of Canadian ships to ever leave at one time (10), were sent from the Port of Halifax, to Virginia, USA to train with the US navy. On that date I said and I quote, "Those guys are going to Iran next year." And low and behold, these same ships and crew are headed to the Gulf of Oman and the Straits of Hormuz, aka Iran, in mid-April (April 19th to be exact), to join there US counterparts in patrolling those waters. They will be stationed in Dubai.

What might be even more interesting is the trip they will take to get there. Strangely enough, they will be heading to the Costa Rica, Spain, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia, the Czech Republic and a few others before making port in Dubai. The Czech Republic you might ask? That doesn't even have a port. Its true the Czech Republic is land locked, however they are the newest addition to countries hosting US bases, where they have just agreed to be a host site for the US Missile Shield, being touted as a first strike weapon against Iran and serious threat to Russia. Then take into consideration that on board these Canadian vessels are highly trained Weapons Technology Officers, who, after returning from Virginia, were sent on another advanced weapons training course (possibly missile related, as that is within the scope of a weapons tech officer) and who will be allowed to travel inland to the Czech. Rep. Will these officers be involved in the planning, building and testing of these 10 missile sites in the Czech Rep.?

My guess would be yes, but that is yet to be seen or heard because my source also said that the Canadian Government is keeping this deployment hush hush until the day of, just as they did with the Virginia training mission. I'm hoping to have more info in the near future.

I believe that Canadians should be 100% informed on the goings on of all branches of our armed forces seeing as how we are now have one of the fastest growing armed forces in the world and have been moved up in the UN rankings. Not to mention we were just told in the latest budget that thre is no money for frivolous spending. What do you call this?

EDIT:
I found this article on the National Defence and the Canadian Forces website.
http://www.forces.gc.ca/site/community/mapleleaf/article_e.asp?id=4231

Apparently, there are 3 ships going and one is already on its way. It is called Operation ALTAIR, Canada’s contribution to the maritime portion of the global war on terrorism. Some commitment we made to Operation Enduring Freedom.

Civil Disobedience and Cross Border Repression/Depression

2008-03-16T11:47:00.008-04:00

Its been awhile since I've had time to add a post to this blog, and even longer since I've had time to add words of my own. I've received a lot of comments recently for posting, I appreciate your support and solidarity.

I want to make some comments about the recent bilateral Civil Assistance Plan, agreed to by Canada and the United States. I would also like to pose some questions as to the use of such a plan. This plan allows the armed forces of one country to enter the other and aid in the event of a 'civil emergency'.

U.S. Air Force Gen. Gene Renuart, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command said from San Antonio, Texas that "This document is a unique, bilateral military plan to align our respective national military plans to respond quickly to the other nation's requests for military support of civil authorities", and "Unity of effort during bilateral support for civil support operations such as floods, forest fires, hurricanes, earthquakes and effects of a terrorist attack, in order to save lives, prevent human suffering and mitigate damage to property, is of the highest importance, and we need to be able to have forces that are flexible and adaptive to support rapid decision-making in a collaborative environment.”

Canadian Air Force Lt.-Gen. Marc Dumais, commander of Canada Command said “The signing of this plan is an important symbol of the already strong working relationship between Canada Command and U.S. Northern Command,” and “Our commands were created by our respective governments to respond to the defense and security challenges of the twenty-first century, and we both realize that these and other challenges are best met through cooperation between friends.”

First off, I think that we already cooperate quite a bit, I mean, the US Navy patrols Canadian waters, the US Army already has legal authority to enter Canadian soil without our consent and the US Air Force already patrols Canadian skies and has authority to launch missiles that travel through Canadian Air space endangering Canadian civilians. Really what more do they need? Well I'll tell you what they need, they are seeking the right to repress civil disobedience in both countries in the event of a 'terrorist attack' (aka civil unrest), and the right to use Canadian soldiers in replacement of there National Guard which they sent to Iraq.

Lets tackle point number one first. We've already seen the definition the US government has for "terrorism", its completely open ended, and has no real definition under the law, allowing them to make it up as they go. Add to this the fact that 'terrorists' are held without charges, in secret prisons and tortured on a daily basis. They are not granted the right to a lawyer, family members, or even the evidence held against them. Thats pretty scary when you consider the implications of allowing the US some kind of jurisdiction on Canadian soil. Given the vague definition of terrorism, we must ask, under what circumstances will this new plan be used. Does domestic civil disobedience count as terrorism? Does protesting (violent or non-violent) in the face of government repression count as terrorism? Does opposing an illegal war and exercising our right to assemble, protest, and demand government action on issues count as terrorism?

The second point I made, was that the US National Guard is in Iraq, and there ability to quash domestic disturbance is severely weakened. We've seen this in the addition and use of weapons designed for the Afghanistan and Iraq war (such as sound weapons) being used by local police and the increase in the use of tazers to control civil unrest. Given the unstable situation in the Middle East and the commitments made by US presidential hopefuls on all sides, it will not come as a surprise to me when troops do not come home, and are in fact just moved to other parts of the Middle East or replaced by new recruits.

I think its safe to say that the security situation in the US will remain questionable, and there ability to respond to domestic disturbances will also remain questionable. The ratcheting up of domestic spying can attest to this, why would you need to spy on citizens if you weren't worried about there actions at home? The answer is, they are worried, because there ability to handle them is ever fading away, as more and more soldiers are needed in the Middle East and the US economy comes to a grinding halt. In the face of economic ruin, endless war, legalized torture and continental integration its not a surprise that they seek the ability to put down domestic disturbance in both countries with cooperative support, they need it to keep the strangle hold they have on the power structures in North America.

One final thing I'd like to add is that, because Canada is under the umbrella of NORTHCOM, we also come under the jurisdiction of the Federal Emergency Management Authority. In the event of a 'terror attack' or a 'Code Red Alert' in the US, Martial Law can be imposed. Under martial law, many functions of civil society would be transfered to the military, similar to what we've seen recently in Pakistan. Under our new agreements Martial Law could be applied in Canada, and would conform to the US version, exposing Canadians to all that comes along with the US definition of terrorism and procedures to control civil unrest. In fact, such a military training exercise has already taken place (TOPOFF 2), which included Canadian Participants.

Here in Canada, we should be opposing this military Civil Assistance Plan and any and all Military Integration with everything we have. Mark my words, this will become a serious issue in the near future, not if, but WHEN the next 'terror attack' takes place on US soil and/or the US economy hits a recession worse then the Great Depression of the 1930's.

Canada’s secret war in Iraq

2008-02-11T22:12:00.000-04:00

Canada’s secret war in Iraq

Richard Sanders

Posted on Common Ground - Feb. 2008. www.commonground.ca

How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! – Mark Twain

On March 25, 2003, during the “shock and awe” bombardment of Iraq, then US Ambassador Paul Cellucci admitted that “… ironically, Canadian naval vessels, aircraft and personnel... will supply more support to this war in Iraq indirectly... than most of those 46 countries that are fully supporting our efforts there.”
Cellucci merely scratched the surface of Canada’s initial “support” for the Iraq War, but he had let the cat out of the bag. As then Secretary of State Colin Powell had explained a week earlier, “We now have a coalition of the willing… who have publicly said they could be included in such a listing.... And there are 15 other nations, who, for one reason or another, do not wish to be publicly named but will be supporting the coalition.”
Canada was, and still is, the leading member of this secret group, which we could perhaps call CW-HUSH, the “Coalition of the Willing to Help but Unwilling to be Seen Helping.” The plan worked. Most Canadians still proudly believe that their government refused to join the Iraq War. Nothing could be further from the truth. Here are some of the ways in which we joined the fray:
Escorting the US Navy: Thirteen hundred Canadian troops aboard Canada’s multibillion dollar warships escorted the US fleet through the Persian Gulf, putting them safely in place to bomb Iraq.
Leading the coalition Navy: Canadian Rear Admiral Roger Girouard was in charge of the war coalition’s fleet.
Providing war planners: At least two dozen Canadian war planners working at US Central Command in Florida were transferred to the Persian Gulf in early 2003 to help oversee the war’s complicated logistics.
Commanding the war: In 2004, Canadian Brigadier General Walt Natynczyk commanded 10 brigades totalling 35,000 troops. He was Second-in-Command of the entire Iraq War for that year. When Governor General Clarkson gave Natynczyk the Meritorious Service Cross, her office extolled his “pivotal role in the development of numerous plans and operations [which] resulted in a tremendous contribution… to Operation Iraqi Freedom, and… brought great credit to the Canadian Forces and to Canada.”
Helping coordinate the war: Canadian military personnel working aboard American E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System warplanes helped direct the electronic war by providing surveillance, command, control and communications services to US war fighters.
Providing airspace and refuelling: Countless US troop and equipment transport aircraft have flown over Canada, to and from the Iraq War, and many refuelled in Gander, Newfoundland.
Providing air transport: At least three Canadian CC-130 military transport planes were listed by US military to supply coalition forces during the Iraq War.
Freeing up US troops: Canada’s major role in Afghan war has freed up thousands of US troops for deployment to Iraq.
Providing ground troops: At least 35 Canadian soldiers were directly under US command, in an “exchange” capacity on the ground, participating in the invasion of Iraq.
Testing weapons and drones: Two types of cruise missiles (AGM-86 and -129) and the “Global Hawk” (RQ-4A) surveillance drone, used in Iraq, were tested over Canada.
Depleted uranium (DU) weapons: Canada is the world’s top exporter of uranium. Our government pretends that Canada’s uranium is sold for “peaceful” purposes only, but absolutely nothing is done to stop the US from using DU in their weapons. America’s A-10 Wart Hog warplanes have fired DU munitions in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, while each cruise missile contains three kgs of DU ballast. Providing RADARSAT data: Eagle Vision, a US Air Force mobile ground station, which controls Canada’s RADARSAT-1 satellite and downlinks its data, was used from the start of the Iraq War.
Diplomatic support: Former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien supported the “right” of the US to invade Iraq, although Kofi Annan said it was an illegal occupation. Chrétien criticized Canadian citizens who questioned the war, saying they provided comfort to Saddam Hussein.
Training Iraqi police: Canada has spent millions sending RCMP officers to Jordan to train tens of thousands of cadets for Iraq’s paramilitary police force.
Training Iraqi troops: High-level Canadian military personnel joined the “NATO Training Mission in Iraq” to “train the trainers” of Iraqi Security Forces who are on the leading edge of the US occupation. A Canadian colonel, under NATO command, was chief of staff at the Baghdad-based training mission. Canada was the leading donor to this centre, providing an initial $810 thousand.
Funding Iraq’s interior ministry: Canada provides advisors and financial support to this ministry, which has been caught running torture centres. Thousands of its officers have been withdrawn for corruption, and it has been accused of working with death squads that executed a thousand people per month in Baghdad alone in the summer of 2006.
Military exports: At least 100 Canadian companies sold parts and/or services for major weapons systems used in the Iraq War. Quebec’s SNC-TEC sold millions of bullets to the US military forces occupying Iraq. General Dynamics Canada, in London Ontario, sold hundreds of armoured vehicles to the US and Australia. Between October 2003 and November 2005, these troop transport vehicles logged over six million miles in Iraq. Winnipeg’s Bristol Aerospace sells cluster-bomb dispensing warheads used by US aircraft in Iraq.
Canada Pension Plan investments: Canadians are forced to invest their pension money in hundreds of military industries, including most of the world’s top 20 weapons producers, which are the leading prime contractors for virtually all the major weapons systems used in Iraq.
So the next time a proud fellow citizen tells you that Canada didn’t join the Iraq War, remind them of Mark Twain’s famous quip: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

For more information on the myth of Canada’s role as a global peacemaker, read Press for Conversion, http://coat.ncf.ca or write to COAT, 541 McLeod St., Ottawa, ON, K1R 5R2. Richard Sanders is the coordinator for the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade.

No SPP summit in New Orleans, consult Canadians now

2008-02-02T11:56:00.001-04:00

No SPP summit in New Orleans, consult Canadians now

The SPP marches on and once against democracy is left behind. Canadians learned last night from the American president during his final State of the Union address that our prime minister would be meeting with him and the president of Mexico in April for the 'North American Summit' in New Orleans, Louisiana. At the time of the last Security and Prosperity Partnership summit in Montebello the final communiqué from the leaders only noted, “Prime Minister Harper and President Calderón were pleased to accept the proposal of President Bush for the United States to host the next meeting of North American leaders in 2008."

On August 20, 2007, at the last 'Leaders Summit', Prime Minister Stephen Harper refused to accept 10,000 letters collected by the Council of Canadians from concerned citizens across the country who called on him to "cease all talks leading to deeper integration between Canada and the United States" and who expressed their concern that "our government is forging ahead with the deep integration agenda enshrined in the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), without any public input or parliamentary debate."

On August 22, the Canwest News Service reported that, "...Council of Canadians chairwoman Maude Barlow claimed vindication after a corporate advisory panel to the three leaders recommended that legislatures be more involved with the Security and Prosperity Partnership...Barlow said the ‘jaw-dropping’ report is an admission that the SPP won't succeed without more public input. ‘We've been saying that for three years, and for three years they've been having their private meetings with leaders and scoffing at us for criticizing them,’ Barlow said outside a Montebello ice cream stand. ‘For me, what happened was they got caught. All of a sudden they're admitting that this executive level of decision-making isn't going to fly because they forgot about democracy. I see this as a true vindication of our position.’” And yet, to our great disappointment, after the glare of media attention ended, so did their promise of legislative review of the SPP.

That October, Maude Barlow, David Suzuki, Ken Georgetti, Maher Arar and Monia Mazigh sent the prime minister a letter demanding that his Throne Speech include a commitment to submit the Security and Prosperity Partnership to a vote in the next parliamentary session. The prime minister did not do so and by failing to commit in the Throne Speech to a parliamentary debate and vote on the SPP he very clearly broke his April 2006 Throne Speech promise "to submit significant international treaties for votes in Parliament."

As we hear news about the upcoming summit - in April of this year, but still with no specific date mentioned - the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc Quebecois need to mobilize in Parliament and act decisively on the promises they made just prior to the 2007 summit in Montebello:

Liberal Party (August 17): "We will table a resolution calling on the government to inform Canadians of the work and negotiations of the SPP, and to report to the House of Commons to allow for parliamentary scrutiny and a full and informed debate when the Parliament reconvenes."

Le Bloc Quebecois (16 août): "Il est clair que le Canada doit suspendre la mise en application des nouvelles mesures règlementaires découlant des discussions du PSP jusqu’à ce qu’il ait consulté les parlementaires. D’ailleurs, le gouvernement Harper ne dispose d’aucun mandat pour agir dans le secret et procéder à des changements avec ses partenaires de l’ALÉNA." (It's clear that Canada must suspend all current regulatory measures related to the SPP until parliament has been consulted. Without a consultation, Harper cannot claim to have a mandate for proceeding with regulatory changes, in secret, with his NAFTA partners.)

New Democratic Party (August 17): "The NDP will continue to show leadership, working to ensure that any further developments on the SPP are stopped until a full legislative review, public debate and parliamentary vote take place."

THE DEMAND

Activists are encouraged to send their own version of the following message to Prime Minister Stephen Harper (pm@pm.gc.ca), Stephane Dion (Dion.S@parl.gc.ca), Jack Layton (Layton.J@parl.gc.ca) and Gilles Duceppe (Duceppe.G@parl.gc.ca) or send a letter using the form on our website at www.canadians.org/action.

Prime Minister Harper,

As a member of the Council of Canadians, I am calling on you to stop talks on the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, including the upcoming leaders summit this April in New Orleans, and to consult with Canadians on this critical issue.

While Canadians have learned about this upcoming summit from the US president, not from you, we would ask you at this point to be specific about the planned date of the summit in New Orleans.

I am opposed to the SPP, which includes the no-fly list (the SPP states, "Develop comparable standards and procedures…for passenger screening"); pesticide residues (it says, "Work to resolve differences in pesticide maximum residue limits that may be barriers to trade…"); the tar sands (it calls for, "Greater economic production from the oil sands"); and civil rights (it calls for, "sharing of terrorist watch list data and the establishment of appropriate linkages between Canada, the United States and Mexico.")

I also believe that the North American Competitiveness Council should be disbanded. Corporations such as Manulife Financial, Home Depot and Wal-Mart should not be dictating economic policy between Canada and the United States.

I urge you to keep the promise you made in your Throne Speech in 2006 that "significant international treaties will be submitted for votes in Parliament." I believe that the Security and Prosperity Partnership should be subject to public hearings, as well as brought to the House of Commons for a full debate and vote.

I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

For extensive information about the Security and Prosperity Partnership, please go to www.IntegrateThis.ca.

Why is our Health Care in such bad shape?

2008-02-02T09:07:00.000-04:00

Friday, February 01, 2008

Why is our Health Care in such bad shape?

Gordon and Phyllis Maybee separated by a very abusive Nova Scotia “government”, bureaucracy. This is not the first story we have read, where senior citizens are being separated and it will not be the last. More and more of our married aging population will see this happening to them, but why? Isn't this why we pay and paid all of those taxes?? Read Gordon and Phyllis Maybee’s story (HERE)

Gordon and Phyllis were good taxpaying citizens of Nova Scotia for years. They paid into a taxation system which they were led to believe, needed their taxes to maintain and build a public infrastructure... which would support them in their senior years. So why isn’t that system in place? Look at the provincial government, who should be ashamed of themselves.

This is what you get when you put your trust and your vote in the hands of anyone connected with these political parties.

Read this Chronicle Herald article about patient care in one of the biggest hospitals in Nova Scotia. Meet another longtime citizen of paying taxes,and read how she was treated. The last thing this poor woman saw before she died was , flies, feces and stench of urine and a filthy room , all courtesy of ..."Health" Minister Chris d'Entremont . RuthRussell

Public infrastructure by the way is Health care, highways, education, not a seafood processing business or an offshore supply shipping business. While they close the Cobequid Community Health Center to a man having a heart attack, because the "government" claims they have no more money... the same money they extorted from you using their tax laws and the Department of Finance, or should I say, that "government" money laundering agency, controlled by the political parties, who sit in the legislature on Hollis Street.

Now read about the people who get your hard earned tax dollars and look and reflect on how they are treated. They are treated so much better than we little people, who finance this goddamned province.

Fred Smilhers wife Nancy , owns Naturally Nova Scotia Health Products Limited a herbal food business, and by the way the taxpayers are major shareholders in that private enterprise as well, why? People like the Smithers manage to get their hands on “your” taxes because they are what I call the party backroom, and this is how people like them ,use the party system.

Good question, maybe we should ask Fred Smithers , CEO of Sucunda Marine or John Risley , CEO of Clearwater Seafoods , it is because of business people like these, that Gordon and Phyllis Maybee, are being separated. When a business community raids the public purse so they can make their bottom line look good, the public infrastructure suffers.

The more important question is, why were those tax dollars that Gordon and Phyllis Maybee, along with every other taxpayer go to fund private business, why? This is just one example of how we are abused by the very people we elect and how those we employ in “our” government bureaucracy. I have asked the Auditor General and the Finance Minister of Nova Scotia many times, to stop using the taxation system to extort taxes out of the public, to finance the private sector.

Fred Smithers, John Risley are not the only business pigs who raid the public purse, John Bragg , Joe Shannon an the rich Sobey and Jodrey family are but a few more. These so called business men then turn around and win business awards from their business peers, for what being the best pirates. If you look close at the names of the rich and famous here in Nova Scotia, you will find many of these people hold shares in private business which will service you in your senior years. This is by no accident, it is by design.

You see, the name of the game is to collapse the health care system and open up private health care services, thus the very people who raided your public tax funded bank, are more likely the same people who own that private clinic or senior care home, ask Joe Shannon.

This is what Daily News Columnist David Rodenhiser preaches when he is on the 920 CJCH Talk Show, with that other government ass kisser Rick Howe, they are pushing a 3P health care system. David is really big on bringing down the public infrastructure and turning it all over to the business community, he must be realted to Brian Lee Crowley.

These two company sheep, Ricky and Davie, think that this is all a joke, it may be funny to them, but it is not so goddamned funny if your on the receiving end of this shit.

Politics and the party system are a very dirty system and don’t you think it is time to change that? Don’t you think it is time “our” taxes stop going to finance private business, don’t you think it is time “our” taxes were applied to the public infrastructure and not given to Fred and Nancy Smither?

Nova Scotian's just last month gave two mulitmillionaires, who own Eastlink Cable and SeaSide Cable the sum of $34 million dollars, to set up a wireless network. Well, what in the name of god does their private family businesses have to do with servicing OUR public infrastructure? Think about that, we are being taxed in the name of public infrastructure and then those taxes collected are turned over to people like Jon Bragg and Irving Schwartz.

Keep in mind now , that the taxpayers public infrastructuure is slowly being robbed of the very dollars we pay to maintain it. When will the taxpayers of Nova Scotia wake to hell up and finally realize that we are being abused by this goddamned political system here in this province?

It is time this kind of garbage was brought to an end and if there was ever, a time in the history of Nova Scotia to reform politics , it is now.

All three, political parties, are the very reason we are being held up to this kind of political extortion and it is time we stopped supporting this system. If you want to send a message to these crooks and these useless politicians, then do not give these parties your time, your money and most importantly YOUR VOTE.

The real truth is , when we vote , we give our support to continue on with corruption, lies and abuse, so if you are serious and want to end this ... then refuse to VOTE. Think about that , think about the message you will be sending to these parties. And by not voting, we also cuts them off from that $1.65 fee they charge us when we vote.

Next week we are going to address the corrupt media here in Nova Scotia. We are going to look at how many former employees of the Daily News, are now employed with either a party or who are employed as a spin doctor for one of the 'government" departments. Maybe it is time to stop buying those newspapers and save more than a tree.Maybe it is time we looked at the business we are doing business with, are they the same ones who are stealing away our public infrastructure dollars?

posted by Eagleman

Remember this? I wish more people did.

2008-01-28T15:57:00.000-04:00

The Man Behind Stephen Harper

The new Conservative Party has tasted success and wants majority rule. If Tom Flanagan and his Calgary School have their way, they’ll get it without compromising their principles.

by Marci McDonald

Photograph by Eamon Mac Mahon

Published in the October 2004 issue of The Walrus

Consternation rumbled across the country like an approaching thunderhead. For aboriginal leaders, one of their worst nightmares appeared about to come true. Two weeks before last June’s federal election, pollsters were suddenly predicting that Conservative leader Stephen Harper might pull off an upset and form the next government. What worried many in First Nations’ circles was not Harper himself, but the man poised to become the real power behind his prime ministerial throne: his national campaign director Tom Flanagan, a U.S.-born professor of political science at the University of Calgary.

Most voters had never heard of Flanagan, who has managed to elude the media while helping choreograph Harper’s shrewd, three-year consolidation of power. But among aboriginal activists, his name set off alarms. For the past three decades, Flanagan has churned out scholarly studies debunking the heroism of Métis icon Louis Riel, arguing against native land claims, and calling for an end to aboriginal rights. Those stands had already made him a controversial figure, but four years ago, his book, First Nations? Second Thoughts, sent tempers off the charts.

In it, Flanagan dismissed the continent’s First Nations as merely its “first immigrants” who trekked across the Bering Strait from Siberia, preceding the French, British et al. by a few thousand years – a rewrite which neatly eliminates any indigenous entitlement. Then, invoking the spectre of a country decimated by land claims, he argued the only sensible native policy was outright assimilation.

Aboriginal leaders were apoplectic at the thought Flanagan might have a say in their fate. Led by Phil Fontaine, National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, they released an urgent open letter demanding to know if Harper shared Flanagan’s views. Two months later, Harper still had not replied. For Clément Chartier, president of the Métis National Council, his silence speaks cautionary volumes. Martin’s minority government could fall any minute, giving Harper a second chance at the governmental brass ring. “If Flanagan continues to be part of the Conservative machinery and has the ear of a prime minister,” he worries, “it’s our existence as a people that’s at stake.”

That protest provided a wake-up call about Harper’s agenda for others too – not least among them disenchanted Tories who found themselves shut out of the election campaign. At a time when Harper remains vague about his agenda and the Conservatives’ first policy convention has been postponed, some have been stunned to discover that the party’s course may have already been set by Flanagan and a handful of like-minded ideologues from the University of Calgary’s political-science department.

Who are these men – for they are, without exception, men – in Harper’s backroom brain trust, collectively dubbed the “Calgary School”? Flanagan won his conservative spurs targeting the prevailing wisdom on the country’s native people – what he calls the “aboriginal orthodoxy.” Others like Rainer Knopff and Ted Morton – Alberta’s long-stymied senator-elect – have built careers, and a brisk consulting business, taking shots at the Charter of Rights, above all its implications for the pet peeves of social conservatives: feminism, abortion, and same-sex marriage.

But what binds the group is not only friendship, it’s a chippy outsiders’ sense of mission. In a torrent of academic treatises and no-holds -barred commentaries in the media, they have given intellectual heft to a rambunctious, Rocky Mountain brand of libertarianism that has become synonymous with Western alienation.

That neo-conservative agenda may read as if it has been lifted straight from the dusty desk drawers of Ronald Reagan: lower taxes, less federal government, and free markets unfettered by social programs such as Medicare that keep citizens from being forced to pull up their own socks. But their arguments echo the local landscape, where Big Oil sets the tone – usually from a U.S. head office – and Pierre Trudeau’s 1980 National Energy Policy left the conviction that Confederation was rigged against the West.

They also share one beef not confined to Alberta: exasperation at Ottawa’s perennial hand-wringing over Quebec. In a 1990 essay in the now defunct West magazine, Barry Cooper, Flanagan’s closest departmental pal, advised Quebec separatists that if they were heading for the federal exit, they’d better get on with it – or, as he now sums it up, “The sooner those guys are out of here the better.” Cooper and David Bercuson, now director of the university’s Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, promptly followed up with Deconfederation: Canada without Quebec, a polemic that rocketed to the top of best-seller lists and sent shock¬waves across the country.

Cooper’s article was entitled “Thinking the Unthinkable,” a headline that might have been slapped on most of the Calgary School’s work. Revelling in their unrepentant iconoclasm, its members take pride in airing once verboten ideas that they have helped convert to common currency in the national debate. “If we’ve done anything, we’ve provided legitimacy for what was the Western view of the country,” says Cooper, the group’s de facto spokesman. “We’ve given intelligibility and coherence to a way of looking at it that’s outside the St. Lawrence Valley mentality.”

But what has put the Calgary School on mainstream radar is not merely its academic rabble-rousing, it’s the group’s growing influence on Canadian realpolitik – first through Preston Manning, whose Reform Party tugged the ruling Liberals inexorably to the right; now through Stephen Harper, who commands the best parliamentary showing for any combination of conservatives in a decade – and sits only a vote of confidence away from toppling the government. In both cases, the linchpin has been Flanagan, once Manning’s right- hand man, who masterminded Harper’s campaign and remains his closest confidant.

Little is known about the shadowy, sixty-year-old professor who is staying on Harper’s post- election payroll as a senior advisor from Calgary. Flanagan declined to be quoted in this story. In Ottawa, where he has refused interviews for the last three years, some journalists regard him as a modern- day Rasputin manipulating a leader sixteen years his junior. But in Calgary, one of his former students, Ezra Levant, publisher of the eight-month-old Western Standard magazine, cautions against that generational cliché. These days, Levant sees Flanagan and Harper more as “symbiotic partners.” But he does not disagree with a Globe and Mail report that once referred to Flanagan as the original godfather of the city’s conservative intellectual mafia. “I call him Don Tomaso,” Levant says. “He is the master strategist, the godfather – even of Harper.”

The first clue that the University of Calgary political science department is not quite like any other stares out from Room 748 of the Social Sciences tower – the book-crammed cubby-hole that serves as Barry Cooper’s office. Above a visitor’s chair hangs the mounted head of a black-tailed deer, academic conference credentials dangling from its antlers. Cooper didn’t bag the deer himself, but that doesn’t mean he would have had qualms about doing so. One of the ties that binds the members of the Calgary School is their macho derring-do in the wilds.

Cooper’s bulletin board is littered with snapshots chronicling their hunting and fishing trips. Flanagan, who declines to hunt, is an avid hiker and fisherman who for years led Cooper, Bercuson, and assorted others on an annual angling expedition to the Northwest Territories, where they flew in by Twin Otter to a cabin on Hearne Lake. As airfares soared, Flanagan decreed a change of venue. “Tom said, ‘This year we’ve got to go for meat fish,’” Cooper recalls. “Then he cancels out because of the bloody election.”

Harper himself has never been part of the Calgary School’s rollicking outdoorsmanship. But their tales provide grist for an image mill meant to set it apart from the Eastern academic establishment, which Cooper scorns for its timorous “garrison mentality.” As a disgruntled voice of the West in his weekly Calgary Herald columns, Cooper plays his own role to the hilt. He loves to recount how his great-grandmother shot an Indian intruder in her Alberta ranch house and his uncle announced the Calgary Stampede for forty-two years. He is less quick to admit that, growing up as the son of a wealthy doctor in Vancouver, he went to Shawnigan Lake School, one of the country’s more elite private boarding schools, north of Victoria.

In fact, Cooper didn’t come to U of C until 1981 – the last of the group to arrive – after ten years teaching at York University, where Jack Layton was one of his students. His friends from those days can’t recall him showing any interest in politics until he moved west. “Barry’s ideas were shaped by Alberta,” says Edward Andrew, a political-science professor at the University of Toronto, who dismisses his old pal as “a poseur. Partly he just likes to be a bad boy,” Andrew says. “The only influence on Cooper was that he didn’t get a job at U of T, despite my best efforts, so he became a Western chauvinist.”

Andrew is not so indulgent about Flanagan, whose flinty reserve and dry wit often earn him the label “chilly.” Unlike Cooper or Bercuson, Flanagan appears never to have strayed from a conservative path. As he likes to point out to startled Canadians, that path began in Ottawa – Ottawa, Illinois, a blue-collar town 130 kilometres southwest of Chicago. What he seldom mentions is Ottawa’s chief claim to fame: on August 21, 1858, ten thousand people gathered in the town square to hear the state’s young senatorial candidate, Abraham Lincoln, square off against his rival Stephen Douglas in the first of their legendary debates on slavery.

Flanagan shrugs off the Lincoln-Douglas debates as meaningless in shaping his political world view – just a plaque in the park. Shirley Hiland, a fellow student at Marquette High, is not surprised. Hiland recalls that the nuns on the Roman Catholic school’s teaching staff avoided such potentially charged chapters of history. Instead, they focused on the heroic feats of the French missionary who gave the school its name: Father Jacques Marquette who teamed up with the voyageur Louis Jolliet to become the first Europeans to discover and trace the Mississippi. “The emphasis was on Father Marquette,” Hiland says, “and how he brought Catholicism to the Indians.”

In a town where almost everybody worked for Libby Owens Ford, Flanagan’s father had a white- collar job, man¬aging the outlet of an auto-parts chain, that put the family a notch up the local social ladder. The defining influences on the household were the Roman Catholic Church and the Republican Party, two forces that did not always mix. Most U.S. Catholics then voted Democrat, but the only time Flanagan’s father made that radical gesture was in 1960 when a fellow Irish Catholic named John Kennedy ran for president.

Popular and known for taking on any teacher he thought had made a mistake, Flanagan graduated from Marquette in 1961 as class valedictorian, winning a $500 scholarship from the Retail Clerks of America – more than half his college tuition – a reward for his after-school labours at the town A & P. His father wanted him to go to Harvard, but he opted for the Catholic bastion of Indiana’s Notre Dame, where political science meant Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas.

On every side, the social glue of America was coming unstuck: Kennedy was assassinated, Martin Luther King marched on Washington, and protests against the Vietnam War were breaking out like wildfires. But at Notre Dame, Flanagan found a haven of tradition and certainty. There he met his first wife and was captivated by another figure who would shape his career: Eric Voegelin, a German-born philosopher who had fled Hitler and blamed a flawed utopian interpretation of Christianity for spawning totalitarian movements like Nazism and Communism. In Voegelin’s complex Weltanschauung, Flanagan found a philosophical framework that reconciled his Roman Catholic faith with his family’s conservative politics. He confided later that he felt he’d been drifting leftward. Suddenly, Voegelin pulled him back from that perilous course.

Flanagan went on to pursue his PhD at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where John Hallowell, one of Voegelin’s disciples, presided over the political science department. Among his fellow grad students was an ebullient Canadian with whom he found himself sharing real estate at the campus library. “I show up in the carrel I’ve been assigned,” Cooper recalls, “and Flanagan’s in it.”

They worked out shifts – Flanagan, by then married, got the cubicle by day, Cooper at night – laying the foundations for a forty-year friendship. In 1996, at the height of Flanagan’s notoriety for Riel-bashing, Cooper thumbed his nose at his pal’s critics by nominating him to the Royal Society of Canada. “I don’t think I disagree with Tom on anything,” Cooper says. “Political or intellectual.”

In Durham, a North Carolina radio host named Jesse Helms was constantly denouncing desegration on air, cloaking his rage in the mantra of federal decentralization: states rights. But classmates can’t recall Flanagan or his Duke pals ever debating lunch-counter sit-ins or other Sixties’ hot-button issues when they met for barbecue and hush puppies on Friday nights. “I don’t remember any discussion of the civil-rights movement or the draft,” says Elliot Tepper, a Carleton professor who was Cooper’s roommate. “We were not into sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. We were into witty exchanges of bons mots.”

The closest brush Flanagan had with the hurly burly of live politics was the friendship he struck up with one of Cooper’s professors, Allan Kornberg, Duke’s expert on decoding the statistical mysteries behind voting patterns – a science then still in its infancy. A native of Manitoba, Kornberg was celebrated on campus for financing his academic career not only as a lineman for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, but as a professional wrestler, the “Kosher Krusher.” He was a key influence on Duke’s Canadian studies program, and since 1964 has charted the political winds in Canada, including those that swept through the last election. Now, at 73, the self-confessed “registered Republican” applauds Flanagan and Cooper’s increasing clout. “Given the left-of-centre intellectual climate in Canada,” he says, “I’m delighted. It’s good for debate.”

Kornberg has been periodically seconded to ply his expertise on Canada for the U.S. government, probing the risk of a destabilizing crack-up on America’s northern flank. Before the 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty, he was on loan to Washington’s National Science Foundation, constantly measuring Lucien Bouchard’s péquiste troop strength. Later, he took the pulse of Reform Party voters. Beneath the yawn-inducing titles of his studies – A Polity on the Edge: Canada and the Politics of Fragmentation – his work has surveyed the national psyche through every tremor that might send U.S. bureaucrats scrambling for a foreign-policy Plan B. Those governmental gigs are listed on Kornberg’s curriculum vitae, along with consulting stints to the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon. But in a phone interview, he adds one detail: during the Vietnam War he was “a consultant on psychological operations and counter-insurgency” – a rare intelligence assignment for a political numbers cruncher.

In 1967, Flanagan’s burgeoning friendship with Kornberg spawned his first scholarly paper: a joint study of the ultra-conservative voters who backed Barry Goldwater’s abortive 1964 bid for the White House. Even then, Kornberg regarded Flanagan as one of Duke’s most conservative students. “He believes many people want a risk-free society,” Kornberg says. “He is sort of like Goldwater: he believes people have to take care of themselves.”

What brought Flanagan to Alberta where that bootstrap ideology would find such fertile ground? He says only that he needed a job: he and his wife had already started a family (last year his oldest daughter, Melissa, retired from a twelve-year communications career with the U.S. Army). At the time, new Canadian universities were hatching across the country, prompting a hiring spree that outstripped the national crop of PhDs. But Flanagan didn’t apply for the post. In the spring of 1968, when he was offered an assistant professorship – just as Pierre Trudeau came to power – he was researching his thesis on an obscure German novelist in the turbulent com¬pound of the Free University of West Berlin, a U.S.- funded institution briefly shuttered by anti-American protests. When the offer arrived in the mail, Flanagan had to go to the library to look up Calgary on a map.

The invitation came from E. Burke Inlow, another American, and the first head of U of C’s political-science department. An expert on Iran and the Far East who died last year, Inlow himself had been recruited directly from an assignment with the Pentagon. There, according to his son, Brand, a Calgary lawyer, he was engaged in “cultural work – providing intelligence to people we (the U.S. government) were sending to the Middle East.”

For Inlow, Flanagan’s conservative inclinations were no coincidence. He and his successors set out expressly to counter the prevailing leftist currents on the country’s campuses. “Canadian universities were almost the fiefdom of Karl Marx,” says Anthony Parel, a Jesuit-trained expert on Machiavelli, whom Inlow hired from Radio Vatican in Rome. “We wanted balance.” Balance is always in the eye of the beholder. Soon critics charged that the department had leaned too far to starboard. “They said we were all right-wing reactionaries,” Parel winces. “Very offensive epithets were used.” Radha Jhappan, now an associate professor at Carleton, remembers concluding it was pointless to apply for a more senior post in what she now refers to as the “department of redneckology.” At U of C, “I realized they’d rather hire a chimpanzee than me,” she says. “I was perceived as leftist, feminist – everything they can’t abide.”

Still, it wasn’t until the spring of 1996 that Flanagan bounded into the department brandishing a paper from a scholar at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. “He said, ‘Hey guys, guess what? We’re a ‘school!’ ” Cooper recalls. That twenty-page treatise entitled “The Calgary School: The New Motor of Canadian Political Thought” reported that a band of Alberta academics had “given birth to a new form of nationalism, that in turn is changing the terms of debate in English Canada.”

Today, its members can’t seem to decide whether to bask in their ongoing celebrity or shoot down the notion entirely. “It’s an external construct,” scoffs Cooper, rhyming off the group’s internal differences, then diving into his filing cabinet to unearth proof of their shared crusades. But it seems no accident that the group’s first nod of recognition came from an American. Not only are Flanagan and Morton U.S.-born, but Cooper is a member of the Bohemian Club, a fraternity of Republican movers and shakers who fork out a $10,000 initiation fee to gather every year in the redwoods outside San Francisco for a policy version of summer camp. In a crowd that has included Henry Kissinger and Vice-President Dick Cheney, Cooper gives a regular talk on Canadian politics – one reason the Calgary School’s views may hold more sway in Washington than Ottawa.

For the Calgary School, in turn, intellectual inspiration has always run north-south, not east-west. Its papers are studded with admiring references to some of the most controversial figures on the U.S. conservative landscape. In his argument for aboriginal assimilation, Flanagan repeatedly cites Thomas Sowell, a black Republican who became the darling of the Reagan-Bush right for attacking affirmative action. Not surprisingly, most of the group’s policy prescriptions – from an elected senate to parliamentary approval of judges – would have one effect: they would wipe out the quirky bilateral differences that are stumbling blocks to seamless integration with the United States.

But Shadia Drury, a member of the U of C department until last year, accuses her former colleagues of harbouring a more sinister mission. An expert on Leo Strauss, the philosophical father of the neo-conservative movement, Drury paints the Calgary School as a homegrown variation on American Straussians like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who share their teacher’s deep suspicions of liberal democracy. Strauss argued that a ruling elite often had to resort to deception – a noble lie – to protect citizens from themselves. To that end, he recommended harnessing the simplistic platitudes of populism to galvanize mass support for measures that would in fact restrict rights. Drury warned the Globe’s John Ibbitson that the members of the Calgary School “want to replace the rule of law with the populism of the majority,” and labelled Stephen Harper “their product.”

If so, there’s no mystery in the appeal of Strauss’s theories to Flanagan or Cooper, who edited Strauss’s thirty-year correspondence with Voegelin, Faith and Political Philosophy. “Strauss believed that good statesmen have powers of judgment and must rely on an inner circle,” the University of Chicago’s Robert Pippin told Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker last year. “The person who whispers in the ear of the King is more important than the King.”

From his summer home outside Washington, Kornberg scoffs at charges that his protégés are ultra-rightists masquerading as anti-establishment eggheads. “Their extremism has been greatly exaggerated,” he says. “It wouldn’t be surprising if it came from the University of Toronto or McGill. It’s the fact that it’s a provincial university out West that people find outrageous – how dare they?!”

At first, Flanagan had no plans to stay in Calgary. His wife was homesick – she eventually left the country, and the marriage, with their two kids – and he’d never had the slightest interest in Canadian politics. But once he decided to apply for citizenship, he volunteered to teach a summer class in the subject to force himself into a crash course. In the midst of that reading blitz, he stumbled on Louis Riel, the Metis firebrand hanged by Sir John A. Macdonald’s government in 1885 for treason.

What intrigued Flanagan was not Riel’s contentious place in history, but scattered references to his claims of prophecy. For Flanagan those allusions were the equivalent of a scholarly smoking gun. Suddenly, he saw Riel’s Metis rebellions as an attempt to found one of those misguided messianic movements against which Voegelin had warned. In Riel’s diaries and the obscure archives of Roman Catholic orders, he found evidence of his suspicions.

The result was Louis “David” Riel: “Prophet of the New World,” his 1979 profile of a man driven by ecstatic visions to raise a purified North American version of the Catholic Church with its papal seat in St. Boniface outside Winnipeg. According to Flanagan, not only did Riel view himself as its chief prophet – an heir to the Biblical King David – but he went to the gallows convinced that, Christ-like, he would rise again on the third day. “Riel did not see himself as a tribal soothsayer,” Flanagan writes. “He was the voice of God to a sinful world.”

Historians applauded Flanagan’s research, excavating Riel’s unsuspected religiosity, and the University of British Columbia awarded him its biography prize. But Metis and aboriginal scholars were appalled. Flanagan’s Riel wasn’t merely a stressed-out leader who’d had a mental meltdown; he was a delusional religious crackpot. “He turns nearly every interpretation of Riel into megalomania,” says Regina writer Maggie Siggins whose best-selling biography of Riel appeared five years later. “To make him that kind of crazy is to say that aboriginal people who followed him have no claim on land.”

It would take Flanagan another four years to get around to the subject of land claims. Along the way he became a one-man Riel industry, turning out a flood of books and papers, then constantly updating them with new research that spurred him to increasingly damning conclusions. In his 1983 preface to Riel and the Rebellion: 1885 Reconsidered, Flanagan confessed that earlier he’d taken for granted that the Metis had justified gripes. Now he was recanting. “I concluded that . . . the Metis grievances were at least partly of their own making,” he wrote. Flanagan admitted he was rushing his revised opinions into print with a motive: to block lobbying for a posthumous pardon that would exonerate Riel in time for the 1985 centennial of the Northwest Rebellion. A pardon, he declared, “now strikes me as quite wrong.”

By the 2000 edition, he was even more adamant. Rehabilitating Riel’s reputation, he warned, could cost Ca nadian taxpayers billions in Metis land claims. What seems most striking about the revised text is its notched-up adversarial tone. Flanagan’s closing argument reads not like a measured scholarly assessment, but political scare-mongering. In establishing his Metis provisional governments, Riel had twice issued unilateral declarations of independence from the federal government, Flanagan pointed out – exactly what Ottawa feared from Quebec.

What had happened to provoke not only Flanagan’s hardened line, but his rush to man the federal barricades? He has said he simply had a chance for more research – an exercise that turns out to have been financed largely from federal coffers. Between 1972 and 1994, he received nearly $620,000 in research grants on the subject from the Canada Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. That largesse includes a rare scholarly bonanza: $500,000 for a five-year project with four other academics, co-editing the collected writings of Louis Riel.

But Flanagan’s views wouldn’t have raised more than eyebrows if his telephone hadn’t rung on a June afternoon in 1986. The Justice Department offered him a $103,000 contract as its chief historical consultant on one of the biggest land-claims cases before the federal courts: a suit by the Manitoba Métis Federation for 1.4 million acres promised to Riel and his followers in 1870.

Flanagan has gone on to repris that role in a half-dozen other federal aboriginal disputes, including Victor Buffalo, et al. vs. The Queen – a landmark claim for more than $1 billion in damages by the Samson Cree Nation at Hobbema, near Edmonton, over Ottawa’s handling of its oil and gas royalties. The Manitoba and Alberta governments have also hired him for their own battles over treaty rights. “What he’s become is a very convenient tool for the government,” says David Chartrand, president of the Manitoba Métis Federation.

Flanagan’s expert-witness stints have not proved unrewarding, but friends insist he is driven not by money but ideology. “He’s concerned the state should not adopt people as wards,” says Allan Kornberg. “It eventually has a corrosive effect on the entire society.” That libertarian loathing of special rights for any group is the philosophical underpinning of Flanagan’s most provocative work, First Nations? Second Thoughts, which unleashed outrage not only in aboriginal circles, but in the usually restrained corridors of academe. “These aren’t second thoughts,” says Joyce Green, an associate professor at the University of Regina and a Metis herself. “They’re the same old first thoughts that the colonizers came with from Europe. It’s a celebration of the original arguments that supported the subordination of indigenous peoples.”

What ignited the most fury was Flanagan’s contention that aboriginals were simply conquered peoples who’d been bested by Europeans with a higher degree of “civilization,” as he termed it. That argument, peppered with references to “savagery,” hadn’t been heard in polite company for decades. “There’s a fundamental racism that underpins his view,” says Radha Jhappan. “It’s an amazingly selective reading of history and it’s driven by a particular right-wing agenda that wants to undermine the claims of collectivity.”

But Flanagan’s fans cheered the book as a brash intellectual ice breaker on a subject that has bedevilled Ottawa policy-makers for years. “What Tom was trying to do was demythologize a lot of stuff that needed demythologizing,” says David Bercuson. “Political correctness had settled over the issue like a wet blanket.”

When First Nations? Second Thoughts won the $25,000 Donner Prize in 2001, Flanagan’s foes weren’t surprised. The award is funded by the Donner Canadian Foundation, which set out to promote a Reaganite agenda in this country. The foundation, in fact, funded Flanagan’s basic research with a $25,000 grant.

But when the Canadian Political Science Association cpsa awarded Flanagan’s book its prestigious Donald Smiley Prize, all hell broke loose. Gurston Dacks, an expert in aboriginal rights who chaired the three-member jury, quit after finding himself outvoted. In a tense, closed-door session, the cpsa’s board decided to keep Dacks’s walkout under wraps and even today no one will talk about it. But in political-science circles the decision left lasting bruises. “It fractured the community,” says Joyce Green, “because it implicated us all in rewarding something that many of us felt was deeply wrong.”

Today, Flanagan’s work remains an explosive topic, but few of his colleagues are willing to criticize him – at least on the record. After an introductory political-science textbook he co-authored was dropped from Ontario’s approved list of high-school texts because of its “racial, religious, and sex bias” against women and Jews, he became active in the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship, an aggressive lobby of professors fighting political correctness, on whose board he now sits.

Certainly, by last June there was no lack of opinion that Flanagan’s own writings were controversial, if not right off the mainstream map. As the Conservatives’ campaign director, he seemed perfect fodder for the sort of Liberal attack ads already depicting Stephen Harper as a scary extremist with a hidden agenda. The mystery is why Paul Martin’s admen didn’t jump on that tailor-made target.

One reason for their reluctance may well have been case #C181-01-01010. After twenty years, the Manitoba Metis’ land claims are still in federal court and the stakes for Martin’s government are high – vast tracts of prime Manitoba real estate, including slices of Winnipeg, and cash reparations that could run to billions of dollars. In that battle, as in at least two others, the Department of Justice is still pinning much of its defence on Flanagan’s expert testimony.

The Liberals’ silence not only left him untouchable, but it may have allowed Harper to sidestep the question posed by aboriginal leaders: does he share Flanagan’s views? Rick Anderson, who has worked with both Harper and Flanagan in the Reform Party, has no doubts. “I’d be astounded if it were otherwise,” he says. “They’re intellectual soulmates, philosophical soulmates.”

In a cramped, windowless office at Calgary’s Canada West Foundation, Preston Manning tries to keep his eye on the big picture. Down the hall in a glass-walled corner suite, the foundation’s president, Roger Gibbins, had just vented his post-election spleen in a Globe opinion piece, blasting Paul Martin’s campaign rhetoric for stoking Western alienation. That tirade hardly seems unexpected from a think-tank long regarded as an arm of Manning’s defunct Reform Party, but in his own commentaries, Manning, the foundation’s star fellow, strikes a more conciliatory note. He is careful never to betray bitterness toward the two protegés who helped orchestrate his ouster from the movement he founded – Stephen Harper and Tom Flanagan – both once his closest aides. “These politicians who keep score,” Manning says, “it’s just a waste of energy. Now if you talk to my wife you might get a different story.”

For nearly two decades, Manning had dreamed of launching a Western-based populist movement that took up where his father’s Bible-thumping Social Credit Party had left off. In 1987, with Westerners furious at Brian Mulroney’s gst and mollycoddling of Quebec, he sensed the time was ripe. A policy wonk who’d worked on systems theory for a U.S. defence contractor during the Vietnam War, Manning asked Gibbins – then head of U of C’s political science department – to pull together some intellectual wattage to help hammer out a platform.

During those brainstorming sessions in the departmental conference room, Flanagan and his colleagues not only met Manning, but the grave young grad student who was already his policy chief. Harper was just finishing his Master’s degree with Robert Mansell, a neo-conservative economics professor who joined the group, but Gibbins can’t remember Harper uttering a word. “He had a quiet, very serious, imposing presence,” recalls Radha Jhappan. “I got the feeling he was one of the people pulling Manning’s strings – definitely playing an influential role.”

For Manning, the relationship with Harper was “very much an intellectual one. Stephen was one of the few people who could write speeches for me with very few changes,” he says. Not that Harper had any knack for Manning’s trademark folksy phraseology. “Stephen’s preferred method of communication is policy-writer language,” he says. The down-home parables that Manning added came from cocking a careful ear to the small talk after political meetings – part of the process he calls “democratic discourse.” Harper had no time for it, then or later. “Stephen worried about the dark side of populism,” Manning says. “He’d feel I went overboard on all this grassroots stuff.”

In October, 1987, when Manning launched the party in Winnipeg with the rallying cry, “The West Wants In,” its policy manifesto may have been Harper’s handiwork, but the Calgary School could see its own fingerprints on the pages of that Blue Book. Still, once Reform got rolling, Manning’s ideafests at the university petered out. “We’d filled a vacuum,” Gibbins explains.

No one in the department joined the party. By then, Flanagan had plunged into a new intellectual passion, the theories of the once scorned Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, who lauded free markets as the cornerstone of free societies, impervious to intrusive government meddling. In the late 1970s when Flanagan stumbled on his work, Margaret Thatcher had just cut short a Conservative policy confab in Britain by slapping down Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty on a desk. “This,” she said, “is what we believe.”

In the 1988 election on free trade, Flanagan cast his ballot for Mulroney’s Conservatives. He points out that even his second wife, Marianne, a speech therapist he’d met on a winter trek with the Rocky Mountain Ramblers, voted Reform before he did. But by 1990, he was furious at Mulroney’s mushrooming deficits – heresy to fiscal conservatives like himself – and he signed up. Months later, when Manning was looking for a right-hand man, Flanagan leaped at the job.

His university colleagues were stunned he was willing to rub shoulders with the Reform hoi polloi. “He is not a social animal in any way,” Gibbins says. “If people look on Harper as reserved, Tom is a further evolutionary step behind that.” At Duke, however, Allan Kornberg viewed the move as a logical leap for the grad student who’d once pored over Goldwater voting patterns. “Tom’s always been interested in building a conservative movement,” Kornberg says, “and a conservative party.”

Still, it was the theoretical nuts and bolts of politics that fascinated Flanagan – the sort of statistical prowess he’d acquired at Duke that now allows him to parse pollsters’ bafflegab. “He’d equipped himself with all this theory,” recalls Rick Anderson. “But he didn’t have much respect for the practical school of politics. And there’s no book learnin’ for that.”

For Manning, the heart of his populist vision was a constant consultation process with the party’s grassroots. Flanagan didn’t hide his distaste for it. He arrived at constituency meetings armed with studies and stats as if he were back in the classroom. “Tom would get in all these terrible tussles with folks who he thought didn’t know as much as he did,” recalls one former Reform insider. “Finally one night he just had this outburst: why are you people always talking and not listening to me? This guy goes up to the microphone and says, ‘Because we pay your salary.’”

In Manning’s office, Flanagan set out to create a chain of command in which everyone, including Harper, reported to him – a foretaste of the tight Conservative campaign ship he would run last spring. Along the way, he found himself stickhandling reports that security squads at some party rallies were members of the neo-Nazi Heritage Front. That scandal was sparked by the revelation that Heritage Front member Grant Bristow was a Canadian Security Intelligence Services (csis) informer. “Preston used to say, ‘When you turn on a lightbulb, you get a lot of bugs,’” Cooper says. “Well, one of Tom’s jobs was to swat the bugs.”

The party’s unruly rank and file wasn’t Flanagan’s only frustration. Manning was ignoring his flow charts and increasingly giving his counsel the cold shoulder. He felt useless, shut out of the inner circle he had tried to command. “Nobody seemed to want his advice,” Cooper says.

Manning’s closest collaborator had suddenly become Anderson, a veteran Ottawa operative who’d run the Washington office of the lobbying giant, Hill & Knowlton. To Flanagan, Anderson was a hired political gun – a onetime Liberal with no loyalty to Reform policies – who had slyly insinuated himself into the leader’s confidence. Harper too was miffed that Anderson had usurped his wunderkind role. As Manning noted later in his memoir Think Big : “Stephen had difficulty accepting that there might be a few other people (not many, perhaps, but a few) who were as smart as he was with respect to policy and strategy.”

Harper and Flanagan had already hit it off as ardent devotees of Hayek, and tolerated Manning’s populism as a tedious inconvenience. Now they were galvanized by a common foe. Their friendship was cemented in that summer of their mutual discontent. “Tom thinks along the same lines as Stephen,” Manning says. “They reinforce each other. But Tom always saw the gloomy side.”

Months before his contract ran out in the fall of 1992, Flanagan quit, blaming Manning’s decision to name Anderson manager of the next election campaign. Not only did Anderson personally disagree with one of Reform’s key platform planks – opposition to the Charlottetown constitutional accords – he had a conflict of interest: his firm, Hill & Knowlton, was the government’s lobbyist for the referendum on the subject. For Flanagan, Anderson’s views were a fireable offence. “Tom doesn’t like the kind of hypocrisy you need in politics,” says John Herd Thompson, former head of Duke’s Canadian Studies Program. “Something’s right or wrong: he’s pretty unrevised and unrepentant.”

So anguished was Harper over whether to follow suit and abandon the Calgary Reform nomination he’d sewn up that he huddled with Flanagan and his university colleagues over his future. In the end, he went on to ride the wave that catapulted Reform from a single seat to fifty-two overnight, shattering the Conservative party into a two-seat curiosity. But Harper refused to campaign nationally and nearly a year later, when press leaks revealed an internal party probe into Manning’s expense ac¬counts, some Reformers fingered him as the source. He promptly went public – a stab Sandra Manning never forgave. In 1997, Harper decamped to the National Citizens’ Coalition, the country’s oldest libertarian lobby, whose motto is “More freedom through less government.”

For Harper and Flanagan, Manning’s decision to appoint Anderson had symbolized his willingness to betray a fundamental Reform credo – no special rights for any group or province – in his quest for more parliamentary seats. But Manning and Anderson saw it simply as a clash of egos over who had the moxie to make the party a national force. “They tried to turn it into this whole thing about how Preston was watering down the wine,” Anderson says. “I think they were actually trying to assert who was alpha male.”

That metaphor would soon prove apt. As the long unite-the-right minuet kicked off, Flanagan and Harper began jostling for position in a dance that might have been borrowed from a text on Flanagan’s newest enthusiasm: bio-politics – a collection of controversial theories on the biological basis for power that had become the rage of the American right.

“Tom just fell in love with that literature,” Gibbins recalls, “and brought it into the classroom.” Indeed, on Flanagan’s reading list was one book that had sparked a personal epiphany: Frans de Waal’s Chimpanzee Politics, which won raves from Newt Gingrich in The New York Times. A study of the world’s largest captive chimp colony at a Netherlands zoo, it chronicles the scheming, coups, and ultimate murder of the would-be alpha male, Liut. Ezra Levant, then still a student, remembers being riveted by Flanagan’s lectures on the subject. “It was the most radical class I ever took,” he says. “If a series of young males were fighting for power, a thoughtful chimpanzee would make alliances with all the losers and eventually take over the group.”

Flanagan pressed copies of Chimpanzee Politics on Cooper and his Calgary School confreres, who delighted in watching staff meetings for tell-tale signs of simian rituals – their favourite a trademark show of bluster that de Waal dubbed “pant-hoot.” “We’d look at each other: ‘Yeah, there it is – pant-hoot,’ ” Cooper recalls.

Chimp behaviour convinced Flanagan he’d been too rigid in his first foray into the political arena. In de Waal’s Dutch colony, savvy chimps built coalitions and bided their time. Over the next years, Flanagan and Harper might not have been on Reform’s main stage, but they were far from inactive. A new intellectual infrastructure was taking shape on the Canadian right, echoing the web of conservative foundations and think tanks that paved the way for Reagan’s 1980 ascension to the White House. Flanagan became an activist in Civitas, a network of 300 conservative thinkers spawned by the 1996 Winds of Change conference that Levant and fellow National Post columnist David Frum had organized in Calgary. Toronto’s C.D. Howe Institute – whose researcher, Ken Boessenkool, would later become Harper’s policy chief – and Vancouver’s Fraser Institute, which opened a Calgary office under Cooper, were routinely proffering policies once considered too radically right wing for mainstream consumption.

In 1997, Flanagan and Harper made their media debut in the short-lived Next City, arguing coalitions were the only route to conservatives seizing national power. One combo they proposed might make compelling bedtime reading now for Paul Martin: an alliance with the Bloc Québécois, whose core rural Quebec voters “would not be out of place in Red Deer,” they noted. “They are nationalist for much the same reason that Albertans are populist – they care about their local identity . . . and they see the federal government as a threat to their way of life.”

Flanagan and Harper’s writing collaboration would last four years. Flanagan was the chief wordmeister, spinning out a snappy first draft at one sitting, then handing it over to Harper to refine. As Flanagan explained later, his verbal wizardry allowed Harper to get his thoughts into the media more quickly – and with more pizzazz.

Meanwhile – perhaps not coincidentally – the drum rolls of disenchantment with Manning were building. His image might no longer be a problem – Sandra Manning had shelled out for his laser eye surgery and he’d thrown away the glasses and Brylcream – but there were mounting questions about his appeal outside the West. No sooner had Manning tried another kind of makeover, rebranding Reform as the Canadian Alliance, than Flanagan paint him with the same brush that had once tarred Riel. Manning was imbued with a quasi-religious “mission” to unite the right, Flanagan told a Globe reporter, and seemed to be saying, ‘This is the manifestation of God’s will.’”

Two months later, when Manning agreed to what he regarded as a pro forma leadership race for the new party, Flanagan promptly announced he was putting his money on another horse: Alberta Treasurer Stockwell Day, who had introduced a flat tax. Day went on to win, leaving Manning’s national dream in shreds. But Flanagan’s infatuation with the new leader proved short-lived. Within a year, Day had become a national joke, mired in scandal and immortalized in comic monologues as an evangelical airhead in a wetsuit. “You’d have to be a moron,” Flanagan told Ted Byfield’s Alberta Report magazine, “not to see that the chances of the Alliance winning soon are not very great.”

In fact, Flanagan – a man now known for his aversion to the media – proved decidedly verbose on the subject of Day’s shortcomings. So busy did he seem leaking news of the tribal revolts within Alliance ranks that Rick Anderson wondered publicly “what Prof. Flanagan is trying to achieve.” In September, 2001, the answer became clear. As Day was forced to call a leadership review, a website suddenly appeared: www.draftharper.com. Flanagan turned out to be national co-chair of the movement to woo his co-author back into the political limelight.

The first clue to that scheme had surfaced nearly a year earlier. In one of their last joint literary efforts, Flanagan and Harper co-authored a public missive to Alberta premier Ralph Klein – co-signed by Boessenkool and two other members of the Calgary School – calling on him to build a political “firewall” around Alberta. That firewall letter, as it became known, demanded Klein use the muscle of Alberta’s oil wealth to sieze control over health care, opt out of the Canada Pension Plan, and send the rcmp packing in what would amount to quasi-secession from the federal bosom.

At the time, Ted Byfield thought he saw a plot: the group was positioning Harper to take on Klein in the provincial arena. In fact, their aim was more ideologically ambitious. Alberta was to be a test case in their push to untie the Big Government bonds that knit Confederation. It was only when Day’s leadership imploded that Harper and Flanagan shifted their attention back to the national stage and another means to that libertarian end.

In Harper, Flanagan finally had his dream candidate to carry the neo-conservative torch: an alter ego whose benign boyish good looks belied the radical agenda they shared. Says Cooper: “Tom understands that Stephen is a guy who has the capability of changing what the country looks like.”

Flanagan took a leave of absence to join the three-year campaign that began with Harper’s takeover of the Canadian Alliance and ended with his annexation of Peter MacKay’s Tories and his ultimate face-off against Martin last June. Some friends were astonished Flanagan opted for a role as Harper’s chief of staff, not one that would tap the sort of risk-calculating he’d honed in his 1998 text, Game Theory and Canadian Politics. But in fact Flanagan and Harper had already spent years together pondering every possible policy and tactic. “Stephen has an incredible strategic sense,” Cooper says. “It’s like playing chess: he can always see five or six moves ahead.”

On Sunday, December 7, Jean-Pierre Kingsley, Canada’s Chief Electoral Officer, went to the office. He almost never worked weekends, but Harper and Progressive Conservative leader Peter MacKay persuaded Kingsley they couldn’t wait to register their new Conservative Party of Canada, forged from a merger that had been ratified by MacKay’s members in a vote only the night before.

Already, challengers were poised to block their pact. A month earlier, after they had unveiled their deal, David Orchard, the Saskatchewan farmer whose support had clinched the Tory leadership for MacKay – and with whom MacKay had signed a written agreement not to embark on merger talks – had filed a suit to block the union. Former Tory MP Sinclair Stevens had also threatened to contest the new party’s legality – which he later did in a separate lawsuit. By rushing to register their offspring on Sunday, Harper and MacKay hoped to circumvent any process servers who might try to stop the official baptism the next business day.

MacKay makes no apology for their move. “There wasn’t any dark conspiracy,” he says. “We had ratification from our memberships that was over 90 percent.”

Orchard denounced the new party as “conceived in betrayal and born in deception.” He was not alone in his feelings of unease. For many, its furtive beginnings were a bellwether of the secretive climate that promptly descended over the Conservative election campaign. From the first, the merger was billed as a marriage of equals, and in star turns for the camera, MacKay, the deputy leader, was invariably caught in Hallmark moments of unity, applauding wildly just over Harper’s left shoulder. But behind that sunny façade of team spirit, a different reality has been unfolding. According to well-placed sources, MacKay was shut out of the party’s inner circle and given virtually no role in the election campaign.

MacKay himself refuses to confirm those leaks from angry former Tories. But according to associates, he was never included in strategy sessions or dispatched to help out other former Tory candidates, many of whom later lost. More than once when he agreed to answer a call for help, Harper’s headquarters vetoed the trip. When MacKay did come to the rescue of friends in ridings across the country it was at his own initiative. Otherwise, Harper’s official Number Two was left to sit out the race in Nova Scotia. “There were weeks at a time when Peter didn’t talk to Harper,” says an associate, “or hear from anybody in headquarters.”

Nor was MacKay the only former Progressive Conservative who found himself snubbed. Key players in the old Tory election apparatus – including the Ontario team that propelled Mike Harris to power – never received the expected calls for their services.

Some try to explain away those lapses as the pitfalls of a rough-and-tumble national race for which Harper’s team had little time to prepare. But off the record, they pin the rap on Flanagan, the supreme cog in his campaign machine. From a war room that ironically once housed Groupe Action, the ad firm behind the Liberals’ sponsorship scandal, he directed an election effort that stunned even veteran Parliament Hill reporters with its fortress mentality. “Everything was very tightly held,” says one Tory. “It was circle the wagons completely.”

At the centre, the lanky, taciturn wagon master remained a phantom presence, whose aides scrupulously referred to him as “Dr. Flanagan” but whom only a few ever glimpsed. Says a miffed Tory MP: “He was just this overlord nobody ever saw.”

Now, both former Alliance and Tory loyalists blame Flanagan for a parliamentary showing that, however strong, fell far short of the campaign’s overhyped eleventh-hour expectations. “He caused us to lose,” says an irate MacKay loyalist. “I don’t think he really understands this country.” Even some in Harper’s own ranks are equally blunt: “You can’t build an organization by excluding people,” says a former Alliance MP. “There’s a lot of bitterness out there.”

Veterans of the Reform Party see that snub of the Tories as a rerun of Harper’s treatment of party stalwarts, including his former boss Deborah Grey, who bolted the Alliance caucus under Stockwell Day. Even after Harper took over, they found themselves treated as not quite trustworthy and relegated to the back benches. As official co-chair of the Conservative campaign, Grey refuses to badmouth Flanagan – at least not in so many words. “He’s bright and he’s capable – a university guy – and I wish him well with his classes,” she says. “Some guys fit and some guys don’t.”

Critics blamed the Conservatives’ near miss on their mushy platform, but there seems no doubt the party’s policies were left purposely vague. They were released on a Saturday, under the media radar, and couched in language that the University of Lethbridge’s Geoffrey Hale calls “a masterful exercise in ambiguity.”

Now Harper and Flanagan seem in no rush to convert that cotton wool to concrete. They have postponed the party’s policy convention, originally scheduled for October, until at least March – delaying a high-risk day of reckoning that many predict could be bloody. “There will be tremendous pressure to move to the centre,” says David Taras of U of C’s Faculty of Communications and Culture. “When there’s actually a policy convention, you’ll see real struggle. It’ll be a contest for power.”

On one side are MacKay and other former Tories pressing for progressive policies – an adjective that gives neo-conservatives palpitations. “It has to happen,” MacKay insists. “This party has to portray a modern, moderate vision with compassion for people who represent all facets of this country.” For him, it’s not a matter of choice. “We’re right at the precipice of electing a new government if we play our cards right,” he says. “But we have to lead people to a new comfort zone. We don’t want to remain in opposition forever.”

Lined up against him are those true believers who have long made up the Reform and Alliance faithful – not to mention Flanagan himself. He has never blanched at owning up to his most contentious beliefs: scrapping medicare in favour of personal medical savings accounts – a policy adopted by some U.S. corporations – and whittling aboriginal claims on land and self-determination down to individual property rights and municipal self-government. Flanagan may, in fact, not be unlike Louis Riel: a man with a mission, albeit secular. In his last literary outing with Harper, a June, 2001, column in the National Post, they warned fellow conservatives to stick to their policy guns and offer a genuine right-wing alternative – not some pale vote-getting pap. “If all we want is the exercise of power,” they wrote, “we might as well join the Liberals.”

The looming power struggle is not only for the soul of the new party. It is also over Stephen Harper’s political future: how much is he willing to water down the ecumenical wine required to win the pmo? Rick Anderson calls it “the defining question of his leadership – whether he’ll fudge the party’s policies or not.”

But back in Alberta, Ted Byfield, the unabashed voice of the West since the Calgary School’s professors were pups, sees it another way – in terms Leo Strauss might have approved. “All these positions which Harper cherishes are there because of a group of people in Calgary – Flanagan most prominent among them,” Byfield says. “I don’t think he knows how to compromise. It’s not in his genes. The issue now is: how do we fool the world into thinking we’re moving to the left when we’re not?”

To those who are unnerved by that prospect, Byfield offers no cheer. “Those people who said they’re dangerous – they’re right!” he says. “People with ideas are dangerous. If Harper gets elected, he’ll make a helluva change in this country .”

STOP STRIP MINING IN CAPE BRETON

2008-01-25T13:18:00.000-04:00

Survey of elected representatives in Cape Breton

As of January 21, 2008

Do you support the call for
a public independent review
of strip mining coal in Cape Breton?

Results: YES - 35, NO - 2

CBRM Mayor John Morgan	YES
Deputy Mayor Claire Detheridge	YES
Councilor Kevin Saccary	YES
Councilor Jim MacLeod	YES
Councilor Tom Wilson	YES
Councilor Lee McNeil	YES
Councilor Ray Paruch	YES
Councilor Darren Bruckschwaiger	YES
Councilor Wes Stubbert	YES
Councilor Frankie Morrison	YES
Councilor Brain Lahey	YES
Councilor Charlie Long	YES
Councilor Richard Fogarty	YES
Councilor Esmond Marshall	YES
Councilor Gordon MacLeod	YES
Councilor Clarence Prince	YES
Councilor Vince Hall	YES

Victoria County Warden Wayne Budge	YES
Councilor Fraser Patterson	YES
Councilor Dan MacNeil	YES
Councilor Keith MacCuspic	YES
Councilor Lawrence Barron	YES
Councilor Bruce Morrison	YES
Councilor John Graham MacInnes	YES
Councilor Robert MacLellan	YES

Sidney-Victoria MP Mark Eyking (Lib)	YES
Canso MP Mark Cuzner (Lib)	YES

Eskasoni First Nations Elder Albert Marshall	YES

Cape Breton Nova MLA Gordie Gosse (NDP)	YES
Cape Breton Centre MLA Frank Corbett (NDP)	YES
Cape Breton South MLA Manning MacDonald (Lib)	YES
Glace Bay MLA Dave Wilson (Lib)	YES
Richmond MLA Michel Samson (Lib)	YES
Victoria-The Lakes MLA Keith Bain (PC)	YES
Cape Breton West MLA Alfie MacLeod (PC)	YES
Cape Breton North MLA Cecil Clarke, Minister of Justice (PC)	NO
Inverness MLA Rodney MacDonald, Premier (PC)	NO

Do you support the request for
a public independent review
of strip mining coal in Cape Breton,
and a moratorium in the meantime?

Cast your vote

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

Community Matters
Phone-In show on strip mining CBRM

Call 270-3588
(leave your name and number and they'll call you back)

7pm - 8pm

Sydney Eastlink TV Channel 10

Climate Change - Choose Column A

2008-01-24T12:43:00.000-04:00

Lockheed Martin 'investing' in Canada

2008-01-24T01:41:00.001-04:00

This is a CBC article about the Canadian Government selling out its citizens to Corporate America. We bought some planes from the largest weapons manufacturer the world, and also agreed to allow them to set up shop in Canada. To make us part of the supply chain for the war machine. I guess this is what the Harper government mean when it promised to create high paying jobs for Canadians. Sell your soul (they've already taken a few billion of your tax dollars) and help make and design more efficient killing machines. NO thanks, keep your dirty weapons manufacturing jobs, I'll keep my soul and my sanity.

Are they allowing Lockheed Martin to set up weapons manufacturing plants in all provinces of the country? Attaching the economy of every province to the sale of weapons and therefore the proliferation of war? How can an Industry Minister promoting proliferation of war by investing our economy in the development of a more efficient killing machine ever come close to sounding like a sane idea. To me it seems the equivalent of driving full speed into a brick wall, your looking at the wall, you can see it coming, but you just can't seem to get your foot off the peddle. Its because you've given up control of the car along time ago, and the government is the one driving you head long into the wall, and feeling pretty comfortable about screwing you over, for when they are removed from office they will have cushy jobs with impeccable retirement packages waiting for them.

Our government, all branches, needs to be cleaned of any and all traces of the Calgary School.
This is the kind of people our current government does business with, people who pay there bills off of the proliferation death and destruction and the continuation of war.

Boeing and Lockheed Martin to send $341 million Western Canada's way

Last Updated: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 | 2:47 PM ET

CBC News

Government officials and two aerospace industry giants announced $341 million in contracts for Western Canada on Wednesday at Standard Aero in Winnipeg.

Industry Minister Jim Prentice and Vic Toews, regional minister for Manitoba, welcomed investment commitments made by Boeing and Lockheed Martin as part of previous transactions with the Canadian government.

As required by Canada's industrial benefits policy, Boeing and Lockheed Martin are obligated to reinvest 100 per cent of contract values from aircraft purchases made by the federal government back into the Canadian economy.

"These significant investments are a sign of confidence in the talent and abilities of our region's businesses, which have demonstrated that they have what it takes to become part of Boeing's and Lockheed Martin's global supply chains," said Toews.

In February of 2007, the government purchased four C-17 Globemaster III aircraft and services from Boeing, at a cost of $1.5 billion.

"Boeing will match every dollar spent by the Canadian government in acquiring its C-17 fleet by partnering with and issuing contracts to companies in Canada," said Mark Kronenberg of Boeing.

Boeing has already identified $795 million, more than 66 per cent of its quota, in transactions throughout Canada. The company expects to fulfill the rest of the requirements within the next three years.

Boeing said contracts for Western provinces alone would equal more than $157 million.

So far, Boeing has done business with Western Canadian companies including Avcorp, Boeing Winnipeg, CFER Technologies, Hydratech Ltd., SED, Saskatchewan Indian Institute of Technology, University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University.

In another recent deal, Canada purchased 17 C-130J Super Hercules aircraft from Lockheed Martin, which in turn will reinvest $842 million back into the Canadian economy.

In a press release, Lockheed said it has already fulfilled 60 per cent of its quota and is working closely with Industry Canada to invest the remaining 40 per cent.

Ross Reynolds, Lockheed Martin vice-president, said the company worked with 300 Canadian companies in the past two years alone, with transactions totalling $266 million US.

Earlier in the week, Prentice announced that Atlantic Canada's share from the industry benefit policy will amount to $290 million while Quebec's portion will be $660 million.

"The deals represent just the beginning of the significant industrial benefits to be realized in the coming years," said Prentice.

On The Identity Trail

2008-01-18T18:01:00.000-04:00

Everyone should check out this site.

On The Identity Trail
http://www.idtrail.org/

The Canadian Banking System - Completely Fraudulent

2008-01-18T14:00:00.000-04:00

How did Jean Chretien become Prime Minister of Canada?

As Finance Minister in the mid to late 70's ha handed over control of our banking system to private banks. His dishonesty and greed has caused the $500 billion dollar national debt.

Have a look for yourself.
And then contact your local representatives and demand that all Municipal finances and loans go through the Bank of Canada.

USE THE BANK OF CANADA AS IT WAS MEANT TO BE USED NOT AS A REGULATORY BODY

Part 1 The Crime of the Canadian Banking System
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=O8Zl1Wax8MI&feature=related

Part 2 The Great Canadian Experiment
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=9yYEFuN2v08&feature=related

Part 3 Gerald G. McGeer: A True Canadian Hero
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=zB7GbM1OgzA&feature=related

Banking and the Canadian Government
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=WPSoQfumzQ0

Money as Debt
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279

The Shift

2008-01-17T22:29:00.000-04:00

www.theshiftmovie.com

GMO labeling

2008-01-10T23:00:00.000-04:00

Labeling laws in Canada are seriously fucked up.
First off, products labeled made in Canada do not have to be made in Canada. In fact products can be labeled Made In Canada if the last substantial transformation of the goods must have occurred in Canada, and at least 51% of the total direct costs of producing or manufacturing the goods is Canadian.

Secondly, Genetically Modified products require no labeling, in fact some major grocery store chains have banned labels stating there products are GMO free, removing the right to choose from the customers.

Currently GMO labeling is not required in Canada, however, it is required in the UK and the US. Why is the Safety of US and UK customers more important that of Canadians? Why does our government not require GMO labeling?

No studies have been done to PROVE that GMO's are safe.
In fact most studies show that there is serious evidence to support the fact that GMO's are DANGEROUS.

It is estimated that 70% of the food on shelves in Canadian grocery stores contain Genetically Modified products.

BAN GMO's IN CANADA UNTIL FURTHER RESEARCH PROVES WITHOUT A SHADOW OF A DOUBT THAT THEY ARE SAFE. Which in my opinion means a permanent ban, because GMO's are not safe, both for people and the environment.

At the BARE MINIMUM we need GMO labeling in Canada so that Consumers can choose to protect themselves from this deadly experiment forced on us by large corporations, there lobbying groups and our own government. To all 3 groups I say FUCK YOU.

New York Times Editorial December 31st, 2007

2007-12-31T16:33:00.000-04:00

Published In the New York Times: December 31, 2007

There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.

The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.

Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.

In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.

We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.

Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.

The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.

Hundreds of men, swept up on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, were thrown into a prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, so that the White House could claim they were beyond the reach of American laws. Prisoners are held there with no hope of real justice, only the chance to face a kangaroo court where evidence and the names of their accusers are kept secret, and where they are not permitted to talk about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of American jailers.

In other foreign lands, the C.I.A. set up secret jails where “high-value detainees” were subjected to ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped, so that “experts” could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, after consultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know.

The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners — some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports — to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let go without any apology or hope of redress.

These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.

We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.

Comments on Canadian Business Mag's Rich 100 issue

2007-12-30T12:18:00.001-04:00

Today I was reading the winter 07/08 issue of Canadian Business Magazine, which just happened to be the issue detailing the 100 Richest people/families in Canada. Now in looking through this list, you recognize a few names, some as assholes and others as unknowns, some outright criminals, and other low level thieves. Some may be good people, but it would be hard to separate them from the rest of the list.

Each of the 100 got a short description of there business history (very brief) and a kind of financial year in review (ups/downs, sales/purchases, criminal activity, etc). Many of those on the list were currently under investigation or facing law suits. Many shady characters indeed, not all, but most. How many of these, the richest people in the country, actually earned there money? How many made there riches off the back of the tax payers through non-guaranteed loans, political favors, hand outs, freebies or other shady government activities?

I don't claim to know much about these people personally, and many I don't know at all. So I'll stick to what I know, our local man on the inside, John Risley of Bedford, NS, the #78 richest man in the country according to this review. I've been following a lot of Mr. Risleys activities over the years and as far as I can tell he never earned a cent of his estimated $676 million net worth, all his business ventures were funded by the public tax system, most of which was never paid back (non-guarunteed loans, payroll rebates, and th like). To illustrate how some of these people get rich, let me tell you a little about John Risley, dealings with the provincial and federal governments and his abuse of the system that makes the Atlantic Regions Business community the most heavily subsidized in Canada.

First off, Mr. Risley has never been able to stand on his own two feet, he has been at the public tit since he began doing business. His father, a well connected man in the Mulroney government insured his son would never have to pay a single cent of his own money for any business adventure he ever embarked on, by helping Mulroney become the Prime Minister, through his dominance in Nova Scotia. This relationship would eventually yield all sorts of advantages for Risley’s Clearwater Seafoods, including numerous dips into taxpayer dollars through ostensibly legitimate front organizations set up by both federal and provincial government departments as “business development loan agencies ” that, strangely enough, seem to have a preponderance of “party faithful” as the main beneficiaries.

Between 1995 and 2004 government assistance to John Risley and his business totaled over $41 million. In 2007 alone this nearly doubled with a government hand out of 30 Million dollars for a new fish oil processing plant in Dartmouth NS. Ocean Nutrition, makes Omega-3 oils from fish products, and employed 117 people in its Dartmouth plant. Risley laid off all these employees along with many others around the Atlantic provinces in the same quater. He moved processing plants in NS and NB to China and the US. For this he received $15 million, $7.5 million in non-guaranteed loans (ie. free money) and another $7.5 million as a payroll rebate for creating what he claims will be 'new' jobs at the "New" processing plant in Dartmouth. $7.5 million dollars was removed from the already hurting NS tax system and given to the 78th richest person in Canada.

Why does the 78th richest person in Canada with a net worth of over $600 Million dollars need to STEAL money from Nova Scotia Tax payers? He doesn't, hes a greedy piece of shit, and so are his politician friends.

Through the government bodies that have been set up to funnel money to business and friends for kick backs and wonderfully high paying jobs when they leave office, John Risley and other like him have been STEALING money that would otherwise go to ESSENTIAL SOCIAL SERVICES that this region desperately needs. Doctors, Teachers, Nurses, Primary and Secondary roads, etc, etc the list goes on and on and on. The Atlantic Provinces are facing serious hardship and what does our government do? Gives money to the rishest people in the country.

To the Nova Scotia Business Inc (NSBI) and the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS) that give away hundreds of millions of tax dollars to there friends every year I say FUCK YOU.

I hope someday that voters will wake the fuck up and pay attention to what there elected officials are actually doing in this country and hold them accountable. Question the people your voting for, and hold them to there campaign promises. FORCE them to perform the will of the people.

I also hope that someday we can elect an honest government, provincially or federally, both would be an amazing accomplishment.

Manley panel on Afghanistan "a sham," says Michael Byers

2007-12-28T23:16:00.001-04:00

Manley panel on Afghanistan "a sham," says Michael Byers

December 20, 2007

The following op-ed by Michael Byers appeared in the Ottawa Citizen on December 13, 2007.

Why I said no to Manley; I declined to appear before the panel on the Afghanistan mission because I believe it was constructed to come to a pre-determined conclusion
By Michael Byers
The Ottawa Citizen, Thursday Dec 13, 2007

Earlier this month, I received an invitation to appear before the "Independent Panel on Canada's Future Role in Afghanistan," headed by John Manley. My initial reaction was positive. For several years, I've worked hard to sound the alarm about flaws in Canada's counterinsurgency mission and our policies on detainees. Speaking to a panel set up by the government would, I thought, provide a useful opportunity for repeating my concerns.

But then I decided to do some research on the panel.

It quickly became apparent that the word "independent" was a misnomer. It would be difficult to find five people more likely to recommend an extension of the mission than Mr. Manley, Derek Burney, Jake Epp, Paul Tellier and Pamela Wallin.

Canada's mission is as much about Canada-U.S. relations as it is about Afghanistan. So it is probably not a coincidence that all the panel members are avowed supporters of close economic and political ties with the United States.

Mr. Manley, as foreign affairs minister, led the post-9/11 effort to convince Washington that Ottawa was serious about border security. More recently, he co-authored a report that advocates a full customs union between the two countries as well as a common security perimeter -- supported by much tighter integration between the Canadian and U.S. militaries.

Ms. Wallin, who served as consul general in New York, played a central role in persuading American opinion-makers that Canada was fully supportive of the "war on terror." She now works as a senior adviser to the Council of the Americas, a free trade-promoting organization that counts some of the largest U.S. corporations among its members.

All five of the panel members have been captured by Big Business. Between them, they sit on 19 corporate boards including Nortel and CIBC (Mr. Manley), CTVglobemedia (Ms. Wallin), CanWest Global and TransCanada Pipelines (Mr. Burney).

The panellists seem to share the view that a strong relationship with our southern neighbour is the sine qua non of economic prosperity and therefore Canadian foreign policy, whatever the decisions of the U.S. administration of the day.

Two of the five panel members have close ties to the Canadian defence industry. Mr. Burney served as president of CAE Inc., the largest Canadian-owned military contractor. Mr. Tellier headed up Bombardier when it was heavily involved in training pilots for the Canadian Forces and other NATO countries.

Three of the five are linked to the Conservative party. Mr. Epp was a cabinet minister in Brian Mulroney's government. Mr. Tellier served as clerk of the Privy Council in the same government. Mr. Burney led the transition team after Stephen Harper's January 2006 election victory.

Most worrying, some of the panel members have already expressed clear views on the very issues they have been asked to examine. Just two months ago, in the journal Policy Options, Mr. Manley wrote: "We often seek to define Canada's role in the world. Well, for whatever reason, we have one in Afghanistan. Let's not abandon it too easily."

It cannot be denied that a clear-eyed assessment of Canada's future role in Afghanistan is needed. Seventy-three Canadian soldiers have died, hundreds more have been seriously wounded, and many billions of dollars spent.

But if Mr. Harper really wanted objective advice, he'd have modelled the Manley panel on the Iraq Study Group in the United States.

The ISG was created, and its two co-chairs selected, by a bipartisan group of U.S. congressmen. George W. Bush endorsed the group but did not choose its members.

The members of the Manley panel have been hand-picked by the prime minister.

Logistical and research support for the ISG was provided by an independent think tank, the U.S. Institute for Peace.

The Institute for Peace set up four working groups composed of non-governmental experts from across the political spectrum. It established a "military senior adviser panel" composed of retired rather than serving officers.

The Manley panel is inordinately dependent on the government. Its six-person secretariat is made up of some of the same officials who have been overseeing the Afghanistan mission. Prominent among these are David Mulroney, the current director of the government's Afghanistan Task Force, Sanjeev Chowdhury, the former director of the Afghanistan Task Force, and Col. Mike Cessford, the former deputy commander of the Canadian mission.

The ISG was charged with conducting "a forward-looking, independent assessment of the current and prospective situation on the ground in Iraq, its impact on the surrounding region, and consequences for U.S. interests." In other words, its mandate was drawn in such a way as to encompass all issues and options, including diplomatic ones.

The mandate of the Manley panel has been focused on recommending one of four set options, all of them featuring continuing roles for the military.

Alternative policies, such as negotiating with the Taliban, have been effectively excluded from consideration. So too have the opportunities for non-military responses to the crisis levels of opium production and the lawlessness in northern Pakistan. And little room has been allowed for serious consideration of whether NATO troops should be replaced with UN peacekeepers.

The ISG operated on its own timetable, and chose to delay its report until after the 2006 congressional elections.

In contrast, the Manley panel has been given a deadline of Jan. 31, 2008. This ensures the report will be released before the next election, when it can be used by the Conservatives to buttress their position of extending the counterinsurgency mission for another two years.

So why would Mr. Manley -- a Liberal -- play into Mr. Harper's hands?

My guess is that he'd feel duty-bound to answer any prime minister's call. Like the many well-intentioned individuals who have agreed to speak to the panel, or submitted written briefs, Mr. Manley wants to make government work.

I suspect it is this intrinsic loyalty to a democratic ideal that Mr. Harper seeks to exploit. He wants the legitimacy that Mr. Manley and other non-Conservatives can provide.

Well, he's not getting any legitimacy from me. Although it pains me to say it, the Manley panel is a sham.

Michael Byers holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Intent for a Nation: What is Canada For?

Christmas Cheer vs. Climate Change

2007-12-21T12:42:00.000-04:00

Christmas Cheer vs. Climate Change
Are we sending the right message to our children?

For most people in Canada, Christmas isn't a religious time of year (for some it is). Its just a week to enjoy spending time and money with friends and family and of course indulging in some good food and drink. Children of families fortunate enough to have money are showered with gifts while others are forced to dream and crave to have the lives (and presents) of those more fortunate unless of course there parents are kind (silly) enough to take out a loan for such gifts. In order to show neighbors our Christmas spirit: windows, doors, trees (inside and out), roofs, and front lawns are decorated with plastic ornaments and bright colorful lights for all to see 24 hours a day. Many people leave there lights on for weeks, even months. But is this the right message to be teaching our children this Christmas?

Even though we live in a world where climate disasters are a weekly occurrence and everyday we are pounded with news about how our government is failing to meet emissions standards, refusing to sign environmental agreements to reduce emissions, and ways you can help to reduce your personal environmental impact, yet we, at this time of year, ignore all these issues, leaving it to government to handle this pending disaster. But why? What lesson is this teaching our children? How will it effect there judgment on similar issues in the future?

Children learn what they live. If they grow up in a wasteful, thoughtless societal or family environment that has a leave it to government mentality, this will echo in the way they live there lives as young adults and then parents of there own children. By teaching our children that they must take responsibility and sacrifice small things to make the world a better place it will ingrain ideas and beliefs that will help promote environmentally friendly actions and decisions in the future. Instilling them with proper views of the world will help create a more educated population in the future.

A few questions to ask yourself at Christmas time:

Why in an era of climate change do we need:

Billions of non-recyclable plastic ornaments made with cheap labor in developing countries all over our yards and houses (why not natural home made ornaments that involve kids in making things instead of watching Christmas cartoons and eating chocolate all day). Local natural crafts and ornaments are available in farmers markets and craft stores across the country

Hundreds of billions of lights, lining every nook and cranny of our lives 24 hours a day for a whole month? We seemed to have forgotten that every light has a consequence attached to it, depending on where you live and what source of power you use.

If, like my community, your dependent on coal, your complicit in the destructive and should be illegal practice of mountain top removal to get coal. One of the many effects of this process is destruction of the local water supply in rural villages via runoff, forcing thousands of people out of there homes and off there land. Not to mention the poisonings and deaths of children in these areas.

If its nuclear, its the same thing but you get radioactive particles in the rivers and lakes near mines that supply water to many families, normally (in canada) this takes place on native lands, one such proposed mine is in northern Ontario where they have also done weapons testing without the native communities knowledge.

Billions of dollars in expensive presents/toys that come with an unimaginable amount of packaging and waste, while children in developing or poor communities suffer the consequences of our greed.

Dangerous pesticide filled food that has to travel thousands of miles from cheap international sources? We have a struggling family farm industry in Canada, yet we import more then we can consume, forcing family farms out of business. Buy local, buy organic. Invest in both your local economy and in farmers that grow food properly and naturally without the use of pesticides. Also, its helpful to buy fresh foods from local markets instead of buying packaged foods from national and international supermarket chains.

Millions of Christmas trees. Why in the world does every house in Canada and the US require a mature tree to be cut down and placed in there living room? Wouldn't these trees serve a better use elsewhere? Couldn't the land these trees are grown on be used for a much better purpose? Like food for all the people who are starving through this time of year (ever here in the west let alone other parts of the world) or left alone to help remove some CO2 from the air.

Wrapping paper, why is it necessary to repackage something thats already been packaged? If you must, why not us the cartoon section of your newspaper which many people already get, or just put a home made ribbon on the box that the item already comes in. To me this really doesn't make any god damn sense.

Christmas is touted as a time of giving, but as far as I can tell all we do in the west is take. We take from developing countries to provide the christmas cheer we believe we need. We take resources, labor, products, poisonous food, all because its cheaper or more readily available. But what we don't understand is that its not cheaper, someone is paying the costs for all these things, it just isn't you or me. Its the people who are already underprivileged, who make it through this time of year with a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the things we enjoy as conveniences.

We need to start making better choices not just at christmas but all year round. For ourselves, for our children and for the children who have yet to have a christmas or never will. Instead of buying your children hundreds of dollars in gifts and teaching them that christmas is about bright lights, wasting, receiving gifts and eating as much chocolate as you can get your hands on, why not teach them that christmas is about conserving (giving back to the earth), charity (giving to those most in need), healthy living and generally enjoying time spent with friends and family. Buy gifts for them to give to others (like homeless and underprivileged families in the first and third world), take time to make christmas ornaments with your children from home waste, as well as naturally occurring and local products.

This isn't to say that your child doesn't deserve a gift at christmas, far from it, its just that they don't need the cornucopia of toys and gadgets that appear under the tree every christmas season. A single gift should be more then enough for any child, use your remaining budget to show your child that sharing with those less fortunate is more important any gift they could pick out for themselves.

NAFTA Interplanetary Corrador (super highway)

2007-12-21T11:19:00.000-04:00

NAFTA Interplanetary Corrador (super highway) -
Where is the opposition? Where are our elected officials?

To all Canadian Government officials (elected and appointed):

At the bottom of this email there are comments from a writer for the Toronto Star. He was asking Mr. Layton about his support for the Manitoba Throne Speech of Nov 20th, 2007 because it contained the first Government acknowledgment of the NAFTA Super Highway being built from Mexico to Canada (http://www.gov.mb.ca/throne.html). Mr. Layton has been attacking the government for its secrecy on the SPP and North American Union, yet seems to be falling inline with Conservative plans when push comes to shove.

The Harper Government (up until this speech) has been denying that this highway existed. In the final speech at the highly protested Montebello SPP summit of the 3 North American heads of state in August 2007, all 3 leaders mocked the accusations of a North American Union and a superhighway connecting all 3 countries. The leaders were asked 2 questions:

(1) Can you say that the SPP is not a prelude to a North American Union similar to the European Union and
(2) are there plans to build some sort of superhighway connecting the three countries?”

All three leaders outright mocked the questions. Prime Minister Harper was the first to reply. He admitted, with a smirk, that he may have heard some of his opposition leaders speculating on massive water diversion and “some sort of super highway between the countries on the continent - maybe even an interplanetary highway - I’m not sure’ he jokes derisively - and the press gang echoes his laughter.

President Bush follows in his own inimitable nit-wit style: “I’m amused by some of the speculation… I’m amused by the differences between what actually takes place in the meetings and what some are trying to say takes place… it’s quite comical actually.” And with those clever sidetracking spins the two of them never come close to answering the two questions or telling us what they really ‘think’ and believe. Bush finishes with a smile and assures us: “The United States is a force for good.”

Misinformation and deceptions about political and economic affairs impact all of us whether we like it or not and whether we believe it or not.

I have a few questions for our elected representatives of every party affiliation:

1) Where do you stand on this issue? No person or party that supports the SPP, NAFTA highway, smart border plan or any other activity that will undermine Canada's sovereignty and move this country even further to a police state will receive my vote in any election. Even further, anyone I vote for will actively oppose and fight against such activities. And I hope other Canadians will follow this lead.

2) Do you even read the legislation that comes across your desk? Your job is to understand legislation and vote according to what is best for the community that elected you. If you no longer have the time to read and understand complicated, lengthy legislation or do not vote according to the best interests of you electorate, then you do not have the capacity to fulfill your duties. Being unable to educate yourself on issues that are important to Canadians is not an excuse for allowing Government to pass potentially damaging legislation unchallenged. If you do not have time to read a 700 page document (and they make them that log on purpose so you can't read them) before the vote, then it is your duty to bring this to the attention of the house to push back the vote until you and all others can and do understand the implications of passing a bill/legislation/law. In this case it is your duty to 100% oppose the SPP as it is being done outside the Canadian/American/Mexican political systems with no oversight by the people representatives in any country.

3) Why are opposition parties criticizing government for secrecy around the SPP and NAU when they openly support government initiatives to move this illegal project forward? Its time we halted any and all Tax payer funding of the SPP and abandon any and all government involvement in its initiatives until all information surrounding this treacherous agreement are made public and a referendum can be called to finally put this issue to rest.

4) Why is Mr. Harper and other government officials (elected and appointed) not being tried for Treason? The SPP is in the process of undermining the rights of Canadian citizens and giving away our treasured natural resources at the request of big business and corporate interests. Not to mention that until recently all this was taking place behind closed doors in meetings that excluded media and public interest while not only included corporate interests but actually taking its cues from them directly. Talking with CEO's and lobbyists to come up with ways to make them more money and take away rights of the people in a process designed to 'harmonize' the laws in the 3 countries.

5) When will you stand up for Canadians and actually do what is in our best interests?

6) If Mr. Harper lied about the Highway, is he lying about the water diversion? Is he lying about the North American Union? Keep in mind that no one wanted NAFTA, and after promising to not get us involved in NAFTA, Mr. Mulroney signed the agreement anyway. Now, Mr. Mulroney is making more headlines, is it possible this Mulroney/Schreiber scandal is just bullshit and possibly designed to take attention away from the fact that the SPP is moving forward with no governmental oversight. Headlines are stuck on Mulroney/Schreiber and no attention is being given to far more important issues like the SPP. Mulroney is Harpers mentor and adviser, speaking on a weekly maybe even daily basis.

I look forward to hearing from all of you.

Adam Campbell
10 Locks Rd.
Dartmouth, NS
B2X2J4
9024622603

Comments from a writer at the Toronto Star

"I met Jack Layton two Saturdays ago and asked him why the NDP was
supporting the NAFTA highway in the NDP Manitoba Throne Speech.
He said "Manitoba needs the Churchill jobs."
I asked: "Why then, do they have to issue Mexican drivers licenses
for fall of 2008?"

He RAN AWAY!!!!!! "

-- Victor / Toronto Street News

"Yes, I button-holed him at the Bali demonstration at Yonge & Dundas.
His aide took the current issue of the paper calling Harper a traitor
for lying about the NAFTA highway and NAU. But they left me standing
there when I asked the question."

-- Victor

please circulate.

Top Hurricane Expert Says Officials Threatened His Job Over Pre-Katrina Warnings

2007-12-16T21:30:00.000-04:00

Top Hurricane Expert Says Officials Threatened His Job Over Pre-Katrina Warnings

AMY GOODMAN: Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which ravaged the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The storm was the most powerful and expensive natural disaster to hit the U.S., killing more than 1,500 people in New Orleans alone, displacing some 770,000 residents and destroying over 300,000 homes. The federal government’s response to the disaster was widely condemned. Images of the tens of thousands of New Orleans residents piling into the city’s Superdome stadium, pleading for food, water and aid, became symbolic of the government’s inaction.

In the aftermath of the storm, it became increasingly clear that the effects of Hurricane Katrina were made far worse by government incompetence and neglect. Warnings about the severity of the storm were ignored, and the levees, which were supposed to prevent New Orleans from flooding, were grossly inadequate. And, as investigative reporter Greg Palast reveals in this new Democracy Now! report, there were major holes in the city’s evacuation plan

GREG PALAST: Welcome to New Orleans, whose motto is “The City that Care Forgot.” In fact, it’s a city that everyone forgot.

BROD BAGERT: Reckless negligence that killed human beings. Old ladies watched the water come up to their nose over their eyes, and they drowned in houses just like this in this neighborhood, because of reckless negligence that’s unanswered for.

DR. IVOR VAN HEERDEN: By midnight on Monday, the White House knew. But none of us knew.

PATRICIA THOMAS: Katrina didn’t come in my house and put these gates up on my windows and things. Katrina didn’t have me walking out here looking for somewhere to stay. Man did this. This was manmade.

MALIK RAHIM: They wanted them poor niggers out of there, and they ain’t had no intention to allow it to be reopened to no poor niggers, you know? And that’s just the bottom line.

GREG PALAST: Our president says he hasn’t forgotten a promise he made here.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: I want the people down there to understand that it’s going to take a while to recover. This was a huge storm.

GREG PALAST: Well, Mr. President, I think people down here know it was a huge storm. Over half a million of them fled the flood. It’s been a full year, and only 170,000, far less than half, have come back, almost none to their own homes.

STEVEN SMITH: Stayed three nights here and one night on the bridge.

GREG PALAST: You were three nights stuck in the flood?

STEVEN SMITH: Right here. Yep.

GREG PALAST: And they weren’t looking for you?

STEVEN SMITH: We had helicopters, but they—nothing didn’t pass. At least they passed over us. I’m on a roof, holding my shirt out and saying that we had babies back here.

GREG PALAST: This is Steven Smith. Like 127,000 others in this town, he didn’t have a car in which to escape, so he was left in the rising waters. Stranded in the heat on a bridge, he closed the eyes of a man who died of dehydration after giving his grandchildren his last bottle of water.

What kind of evacuation plan would leave 127,000 to sink or swim? It turns out that the Bush administration had contracted out evacuation planning to a corporation, IEM, Innovative Emergency Management. I couldn’t locate their qualifications, but I did locate their list of donations to the Republican Party. We went to Baton Rouge to talk to them.

These are the offices of Innovative Emergency Management. They were the ones that were paid a half-million bucks to come up with an emergency evacuation plan for the city of New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina. One problem is, I can’t find the plan. So I’m coming here to ask them about it.

So when I showed up at their office, they would only talk to me from behind a glass wall. By phone.

Did you in fact come up with a plan, because it says it’s urgent to come up with a plan? Did you come up—can you just tell me if you came up with a plan or not? I’m just happy to talk to you one-on-one. You’re probably about 12 feet away from me. Or somewhere. I don’t know, are you hiding in this office somewhere? I’m happy to speak to you face-to-face.

We can’t find your plan—neither can FEMA—that you were paid a half-million dollars for, that at least claimed to here. We can’t find this plan. And it’s kind of a problem. I guess it’s kind of hard to evacuate a city, if you can’t find the plan itself.

IEM EMPLOYEE: Can we—she’s got a lot of experience in evacuation.

GREG PALAST: Is it more true that maybe it was helpful that she gave a lot of donations to the Republican Party? Maybe that’s the experience?

IEM EMPLOYEE: Terry?

TERRY AT IEM: Yes.

GREG PALAST: So that’s when they called in the guards.

IEM SECURITY GUARD: Security has been called. We ask that you please leave the building now.

GREG PALAST: So, quickly, before security gets here, I just want to tell you that this is Innovative Emergency Management, and it’s very innovative not to have a plan to manage an emergency.

I decided to look for someone with a little more experience in hurricane evacuation. LSU, Louisiana State University, they’re just down the street from IEM. LSU has one hellacious football team. They also have the best team of hurricane experts in the nation. I met with Dr. Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the university’s elaborate Center for the Study of Hurricanes. I asked this renowned specialist about the reputation of IEM, prior to their getting the half-million-dollar evacuation exercise contract.

DR. IVOR VAN HEERDEN: I hadn’t heard of them prior to this exercise, no.

GREG PALAST: The LSU scientist already had an evacuation model, but IEM and FEMA refused to use it.

DR. IVOR VAN HEERDEN: We had the science. We had really studied this thing. We knew what was going to go wrong. We had an enormous amount of information, right down to mapping where the gas tanks were and pipelines. Science was basically ignored all the way through the process.

GREG PALAST: The LSU professors warned, for example, that the IEM plan simply made no provision for people—the old, the sick—who couldn’t escape in a car. I asked him the consequences of this oversight.

DR. IVOR VAN HEERDEN: Well, you know, 1,500 of them drowned. That’s the bottom line.

GREG PALAST: Then the professor surprised me by saying that giving us this information put his job at risk.

DR. IVOR VAN HEERDEN: I wasn’t going to let them—let those sort of threats shut me down or any of the other sorts of nonsense that went on, because it was so important that we get out what had gone wrong and why.

GREG PALAST: Apparently, the heat from the university originated with a state official, who now works for IEM.

DR. IVOR VAN HEERDEN: We got a phone call from somebody in the state government who actually now works for IEM. But, I don’t think that was his plan at the time. And he jumped all over me and said, by criticizing their work, I was putting the whole exercise in jeopardy, and if I did it again, I would be banned.

GREG PALAST: Back in New Orleans, former city councilman, Brod Bagert, a lawyer, standing in the gutted wreckage of his own home, did not think kindly of the concealment of van Heerden’s warnings.

BROD BAGERT: Ongoing protection that should have been occurring was done—it was done negligently. Not only wrong, negligently. And not only negligently, but reckless negligence, the kind of negligence for which an individual would be indicted, prosecuted, tried, convicted, and spend their life in jail. Negligence that killed people, lots of people. Reckless negligence that killed human beings. Old ladies watched the water come up to their nose, over their eyes, and they drowned in houses just like this in this neighborhood, because of reckless negligence that’s unanswered for.

GREG PALAST: So now, we’ve discovered why there was no real plan of escape. But that leaves the question: why did the water flood the city? People drowned. The city drowned.

BROD BAGERT: Destroyed house, destroyed house, destroyed house, destroyed house, destroyed house. Every single house on every single block. Mile after mile after mile of residential urban neighborhoods are completely destroyed and remain destroyed.

GREG PALAST: Bagert took us to a neighbor’s house near the levee.

BROD BAGERT: So, look, they have three feet of mud in here. There’s a basketball. You know, some children’s toys. One day it was somebody’s home. The next day, it’s—looks like a mad monster came through it, a beast.

GREG PALAST: There’s an x on this house. It has a five under it. That means that five corpses were pulled out of here, five people who were killed. And they weren’t killed by Katrina. They were killed by this, a levee, which was supposed to protect them from the waters of the Mississippi, and it failed. And they never told the five in there that they knew it would fail.

DR. IVOR VAN HEERDEN: FEMA knew at 11:00 on Monday that the levees were breached. At 2:00, they flew over the 17th Street canal and took video of the breach. By midnight on Monday, the White House knew. But none of us knew.

GREG PALAST: Back at LSU, van Heerden’s experts warned the Bush administration about levees, long before Katrina hit.

DR. IVOR VAN HEERDEN: I, myself, briefed many, many senior federal officials, including somebody from the White House.

GREG PALAST: Without the warning that the levees had begun to break, evacuations stopped, until it was too late. But those that survived, where were they? This city is still half empty.

AMY GOODMAN: Investigative journalist Greg Palast. This piece was produced by Jacquie Soohen of Big Noise Films. Part two in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Hurricane Katrina flooded 80% of New Orleans, destroying the city’s infrastructure, displacing most of its residents. A year later, only about half of New Orleans population of 450,000 people has returned. Many of those unable to come back are poor and African American. In the ravaged, mostly Black neighborhood of the Lower Ninth Ward, only 1,000 of the 20,000 people who lived there before Katrina have returned. This has drastically altered the demographics of a city that used to be two-thirds Black. Activists and residents have condemned the government’s refusal to reopen the city’s public housing projects and point out that while tourist areas are being developed, affordable housing is not being built. Many are asking, “Who is New Orleans being rebuilt for?” Here again, investigative reporter Greg Palast, from New Orleans.

GREG PALAST: We drove back to New Orleans to find out what happened to those who tried to return.

What’s wrong, now?

DISPLACED NEW ORLEANS RESIDENT: They just messing all over us?

GREG PALAST: What are they doing?

DISPLACED NEW ORLEANS RESIDENT: Putting you out your own house. Now we ain’t got nowhere to go. You called them back, saying we could come back home. Then when we get there, they got the police coming in there putting us out and others. They’re harassing us. Oh no, this is not right. I’m basically between here and Texas, coming in—you know, coming to see if I could get my house back. And I’m—you know, but I’m in Texas, but I’m coming down here to see about my house. But they say they ain’t letting nobody in and all this. But where we going to go at, though? Where’s we going to go at?

GREG PALAST: What happened?

PATRICIA THOMAS: And then they told us to come back.

GREG PALAST: What happens tonight? Where are you going to go tonight?

DISPLACED NEW ORLEANS RESIDENT: That’s what I want to know, mister. I don’t know where I’m going, me and my kids.

GREG PALAST: Her friend, Patricia Thomas, was also locked out of her home in the Lafitte housing project. The next day, we helped her break into her apartment, barred by metal plates.

PATRICIA THOMAS: This is my porch, right here. I think I might take me a little break and sit on it for a minute. Yeah, this is my porch here.

GREG PALAST: The city has sealed up almost all public housing. But these apartments were never touched by water. It was nearly perfect.

And this, it’s been a year.

PATRICIA THOMAS: It’s been a year, and my house looking good like that.

GREG PALAST: I think you and I together, just the two of us, could put your place back together in a week.

PATRICIA THOMAS: You see?

GREG PALAST: No problem.

PATRICIA THOMAS: No problem at all.

GREG PALAST: But they won’t let her in. And this has nothing to do with Katrina.

PATRICIA THOMAS: Katrina didn’t do this. Man did this. Katrina didn’t come in my house and put these gates up on my windows and things. Katrina didn’t have me walking out here looking for somewhere to stay. Man did this. This was manmade.

GREG PALAST: This is not what we think of as public housing in America. These places are gorgeous, two- and three-story townhouses with iron porticos. Why would the city spend thousands of dollars per unit to armor these places, kick out the tenants? Well, the answer may be over here. This is the downtown business district. We are halfway between there and the tony French Quarter. In other words, this is some very expensive real estate. For years, the city and speculators have been trying to get the tenants out of these apartments. Katrina, the perfect storm, was the perfect excuse. So what kind of New Orleans do they want?

WHITE TOURIST: Would you like a beer?

GREG PALAST: This is the new New Orleans, stripped down, downsized, not too Black, just right for tourists. You could call it Six Flags over Louisiana.

They call this drink a “hurricane.”

But across the Mississippi, far from the Quarter, not everyone is thrilled with this brave new New Orleans of tourists and Mardi Gras.

MALIK RAHIM: It’s two cities. You know? There’s the city for the white and the rich. And there’s another city for the poor and Blacks. You know, the city that’s for the white and rich has recovered. They had a Jazz Fest. They had a Mardi Gras. They’re going to have the Saints playing for those who have recovered. But for those who haven’t recovered, there’s nothing.

GREG PALAST: Malik Rahim is a leader of Common Ground, a grassroots recovery organization. He explains why Patricia and others are locked out of their apartments.

MALIK RAHIM: They didn’t want to open it up. They wanted them closed. They wanted them poor niggers out of there, and they ain’t had no intention to allow it to be reopened to no poor niggers, you know? And that’s just the bottom line.

GREG PALAST: Malik’s group isn’t waiting on George Bush to get around to housing the surviving poor.

MALIK RAHIM: This is a unit we are getting together.

GREG PALAST: Common Ground is completing almost as many homes as the Bush administration, but who’s left? And who will stay?

This is the Lower Ninth Ward, or I should say “was” the Lower Ninth Ward, an African American working class neighborhood. There’s no potable water here. There’s no electricity. There’s no nothing. There’s just no way to return, and a lot of residents feel that’s exactly the plan.

This is Mr. Henry Irving, Sr. He has no neighbors, no water, no electricity, but he is not leaving.

HENRY IRVING, SR.: They want you to leave. That’s what they want us to do. They want us to get discouraged and leave. So why leave? Where I’m going, then? I’m going to go to another community? I put all my life in this community. I’m going to stay here, and if God’s willing, I’m going to be here long enough to see it come back.

GREG PALAST: So can it happen again? Another hurricane? Another flood? Don’t worry, because the government has hired a consulting firm to analyze what went wrong with the response to Katrina. It’s a little firm from Baton Rouge called Innovative Emergency Management.

AMY GOODMAN: Investigative reporter Greg Palast in New Orleans with producer Jacquie Soohen of Big Noise Films.

Goodbye Canada

Cape Split, NS

Newfoundland 2010

Cape Breton

Opposition to Canada-Colombia Free Trade Continues

Undercover cop infiltrated torch protesters' ranks

Olympic Spirit and The Coca-Cola Torch Relay

Reply to my questions about the Naval Deployment of April 19th, 2008

The Canadian Nixon

The Canadian Nixon

Amnesty International slams SPP talks in letter to Bush

North American Heads of State Unified in SPP Talks

Chester wants uranium mining ban made law - Chronicle Herald

Nova Scotia Uranium Mining info

You can be sure this will be coming to Canada in the very near future

Iran in the Crosshairs. - Counterpunch.org

Iran in the Crosshairs

A Third American War in the Making?

Trigger happy military and the Build up in the Persian Gulf?

US War Resisters. Let them stay. Grant them status.

War Dodgers

Nuclear Power and Uranium Mining - Dispelling the Myths

Political / Electoral Reform and its opposition

PMO, MP's vs. Appointed Officials, Politics as Usual

NAFTA Democrats and the SPP

4-6 Canadian Ships to set sail for the Straits of Hormuz (aka Iran) in mid-April

Civil Disobedience and Cross Border Repression/Depression

Canada’s secret war in Iraq

No SPP summit in New Orleans, consult Canadians now

Why is our Health Care in such bad shape?

HawkEyeNews.Blogspot.Com

Friday, February 01, 2008

Why is our Health Care in such bad shape?

Remember this? I wish more people did.

The Man Behind Stephen Harper

by Marci McDonald

Photograph by Eamon Mac Mahon

Published in the October 2004 issue of The Walrus

STOP STRIP MINING IN CAPE BRETON

Climate Change - Choose Column A

Lockheed Martin 'investing' in Canada

Boeing and Lockheed Martin to send $341 million Western Canada's way

Last Updated: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 | 2:47 PM ET

CBC News

On The Identity Trail

The Canadian Banking System - Completely Fraudulent

The Shift

GMO labeling

New York Times Editorial December 31st, 2007

Comments on Canadian Business Mag's Rich 100 issue

Manley panel on Afghanistan "a sham," says Michael Byers

Christmas Cheer vs. Climate Change

NAFTA Interplanetary Corrador (super highway)

Top Hurricane Expert Says Officials Threatened His Job Over Pre-Katrina Warnings

Top Hurricane Expert Says Officials Threatened His Job Over Pre-Katrina Warnings