As pandemic restrictions ease, Canada should replace its capitalist system with a Scandinavian-style alternative

Ed Finn

May 11, 2020

ENVIRONMENT

POLITICS IN CANADA

Ed Finn grew up in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, where he worked as a printer's apprentice, reporter, columnist and editor of that city's daily newspaper, the Western Star. His career as a journalist included 14 years as a labour relations columnist for the Toronto Star. He was part of the world of politics between 1959 and 1962, serving as the first provincial leader of the NDP in Newfoundland. He worked closely with Tommy Douglas for some years and helped defend and promote medicare legislation in Saskatchewan. The post originally appeared on Ed's personal blog.

As some Canadian provinces (and American states) prepare to relax their pandemic-driven social and economic constraints, many thousands of hitherto housebound citizens are flocking to stores, playgrounds and beaches.

Governments are urging these suddenly mobile people to maintain their self-distancing and keep wearing masks in crowded assemblies. But the enforcement of such restrictions is clearly impossible. Now, free from weeks of home confinement, many -- perhaps even the majority -- will be inclined to gleefully mingle and frolic.

This reduction in anti-virus safety measures, of course, is much too premature, as is the outburst of glee by the pleasure-seekers. With thousands still dying from the pestilence, and millions more infected, COVID-19 is far from being overcome. The provinces and states that are "opening up" their economies because the virus has so far killed relatively few of their citizens are risking a new and deadlier wave in the future.

Looking at the overall situation from a climatic rather than human standpoint, the likelihood of such an ongoing plague has some redeeming features. As is now evident, the sharp reduction in air, water and soil contamination induced by COVID-19 has cleansed the atmosphere and temporarily reduced global-warming oil and gas development.

Also curtailed has been the dominant global economic system, and with it capitalism's further infliction of poverty, inequality, ill-health, greed, pollution and planet-wrecking climate change. These, too, appear to be the outcome of a return to a pandemic-free capitalist economy.

Contemplating a perilous future

Replacing a virus that kills hundreds of thousands of people with a catastrophic business system that impoverishes and kills millions -- and, left unchecked, will eventually destroy most sentient life on the planet -- surely can't be considered a worthwhile prospect.

The pandemic has bankrupted many thousands of small and medium-sized business firms, but the big banks and other large corporations, although their profits have been trimmed, remain as powerful and influential as ever. They patiently await the waning of the coronavirus so they can resume their voracious consumption of Earth's non-renewable resources.

There may well be further waves of COVID-19 before an effective vaccine is discovered, but the cohorts of capitalism will ride them out, as they have the current outburst.

If we had a sane society, the many economic crises triggered by neoliberal capitalism would by now have exposed its devastation and lunacy, and prompted its abandonment. Instead, as Guardian columnist George Monbiot has pointed out, "The greater the failure, the more extreme the ideology becomes. Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatize remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens."

COVID-19 has temporarily interrupted capitalism's reign of terror, but the reprieve is already being impaired. Probably well before the end of this year, the corporations will again be free to run amok -- to pursue economic growth and profits by any means they choose.

Profits at any price

Anything that can be developed, produced and sold for a profit keeps getting produced and sold, regardless of the ruinous long-term consequences. On the other hand, if something is actually needed to enhance public welfare, but would not be profitable, it doesn't get produced.

In such a ruthless capitalist system:

• Extracting and selling global-warming fossil fuels is profitable.
• Pillaging non-renewable resources is profitable.
• Deforestation is profitable.
• War, and the manufacture of tanks, warships and military hardware is profitable.
• Offshore tax havens are profitable.
• Poverty and inequality are profitable, at least for the millionaires and billionaires.
• Ill-health is profitable for the big pharmaceutical companies.
• Hooking kids on junk food is profitable.
• Low wages and unsafe workplaces are profitable.
• Purchasing politicians is very profitable.

Conversely, anything that would benefit most people, but be unprofitable or less profitable, is seldom undertaken. Reducing the high rates of disease caused by poverty and malnutrition, for example, would lower health-care costs, but would not be nearly as profitable as waiting for people to become ill so they can be treated with expensive and often debilitating drugs.

A grossly inequitable world

This is the pernicious and grossly inequitable world we are now forced to live in. It is a world in which billions of people suffer in abject poverty and squalor. It is a world in which millions are compelled to earn their living as employees of the planet-wrecking business barons. They have no choice if they want to keep feeding their families.

Most of them would much prefer to earn a living that doesn't involve extracting more climate-heating oil, more deforestation, more air and ocean pollution. But a pernicious global economy ruled by autocratic capitalists obsessed with aggrandizing their wealth and power does not offer them such benign and constructive employment.

Workers in the public sector, too, don't like helping their political bosses help the corporate marauders. But all these workers -- and their unions -- are hostages to a destructive international economic system. They see no better alternative than capitalism, and accept its blights of poverty and inequality as unavoidable.

They remain unaware that a much more benign and progressive economic and social form of governance has prevailed in the three Scandinavian countries plus Finland for decades. The citizens of these countries enjoy a fair distribution of income, completely full and free health-care, month-long annual vacations and a substantial guaranteed pension. Their living conditions may not be idyllic, but are far, far superior to those in other countries, including Canada.

Maybe, while waiting for the pandemic to subside, Canadians with an open mind may take a more critical look at the horrific capitalist system that afflicts them in so many ways. They could seriously explore its replacement with the kind of equitable, first-rate economic system that the Norwegians, Swedes, Danes and Finlanders have enjoyed for so long.

Of course, that also entails the replacement of our current decadent capitalist political system with a Scandinavian-style alternative.

Okay, so I'm dreaming in technicolour. But, occasionally, if rarely, some dreams do come true.

Image: La Citta Vita/Flickr​

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COVID-19

CAPITALISM

CLIMATE EMERGENCY

CLIMATE HOPE 2020

Why big tech won't solve our transit woes

Malcolm Araos

May 21, 2020

ARTS & CULTURE

Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? Public Transit in the Age of Google, Uber, and Elon Musk

James Wilt

Between the Lines

2020

27.95

In 2018, Elon Musk logged onto Twitter to share his ambition for the future of L.A. transit: a network of underground tunnels buzzing with electric self-driving Tesla cars. The system would have thousands of "small stations the size of a single parking space that take you very close to your destination and blend seamlessly into the fabric of a city," he tweeted.

Critics inevitable rolled their eyes. "Every two or three weeks," a commentator pointed out, "a tech guy accidentally invents the concept of a city bus."

Yet public bus and train systems across North America are crumbling, while Tesla stocks have risen alongside the popularity of private ride-sharing apps. Between 2014 and 2017, bus ridership in the U.S. plummeted by 14 per cent. In New York alone, subway ridership dropped by almost 30 million rides between 2016 and 2017. In Washington, D.C., subway stations are literally catching on fire, and due to a lack of funding for maintenance, flames lick the tracks unattended until someone tweets about it.

James Wilt's rousing first book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? Public Transit in the Age of Google, Uber, and Elon Musk, maps out how we ended up in this situation and how we can get out of it. How have tech billionaires gotten a stranglehold on North America's transportation options, pushing electric and autonomous ride-sharing as the only desirable future of mobility? And how can our society take the reins over our collective fate and gain public control of transit, with a view to building a renewed democratic, equitable, and low-carbon world?

Wilt's central task is to dismantle what leading tech figures have touted as the inevitable "three revolutions" that will bring a new generation of cars: A proliferation of personal electric vehicles, then ride-hailing services, and eventually autonomous or self-driving vehicles.

These "three revolutions" are currently being sold as the inevitable way of the future and therefore used by austerity-minded politicians as an excuse to not invest in public transportation.  The result, Wilt argues, is a reduced ability to plan transit for the public good. For example, a commissioner for Michigan's Macomb County has argued that Detroit's transit system should be replaced by ride-hailing subsidies for low-income residents. And in South Florida, many decisions not to fund public transit are already being made on the promise that autonomous ridesharing vehicles will soon arrive on the scene.

We know that autonomous vehicles, if they ever arrive, may be decades away. Yet Wilt documents how many elected officials and decision-makers talk about them like they'll be on the roads tomorrow, as if that means we should rip up traditional transit systems.

Wilt argues that the supposed affordances of the "three revolutions" fall apart under scrutiny. Take the case of transit and the climate crisis. Electric vehicles, promoters say, will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and sharing vehicles means fewer cars can transport more people. Autonomous technologies promise to nearly eliminate the need for parking spaces, opening up large portions of cities and towns for densified redevelopment that cuts down on the need for motor vehicle travel.

This is a promising vision, but according to Wilt it is built on fabrications. Given the incredible lobbying powers of private industry and its ability to dissolve regulation, the chances of best-case conditions are slim, and Do Androids Dream documents the historical evidence we have to be suspicious.

Even in its current underfunded state, transit remains far less polluting on a per-passenger basis than personal automobiles. It takes an estimated 100 personal electric vehicles, for example, to achieve the same "environmental relief" that a single sixty-foot electric bus provides. Thus a billion Teslas will not solve climate change, Wilt contends. Each of those cars has an enormous carbon footprint from the components mined from the earth and the energy-intensive processes needed to create it.

Beyond climate, Wilt dissects the empty promises for increased equality, safety, accessibility, privacy,and rural connectivity. He makes a convincing case for how how the "three revolutions" will only bring worsened inequality, more sprawl, dangerous streets, and even less accessibility for seniors, people with disabilities, women, and trans and gender non-conforming people.

In every instance, Wilt provides reams of evidence that public options better serve the most marginalized members of our society at a lower cost. Solutions are no easy task, however, and are contingent on hard-won political commitment and funding, fought for by organized transit workers and riders.

Due to its rich detail and accessible writing, Wilt's book should be of interest not only to transportation activists, but to anyone looking for the information necessary to resist more cars in cities, and to advocate for more free, reliable, accessible, and pleasurable public transportation.

In this world-historical moment, we have the opportunity to organize and radically re-think our cities to be more equitable, accessible, and low-carbon for all. Wilt's book is a shining beacon in this regard, even if it was written before the arrival of COVID-19.

At first glance, it would seem that fewer people would be willing to take public transportation in the wake of this pandemic, as close quarters in packed train cars or buses might raise our chances of catching a virus. However, Wilt's proposals for making public transport effective and democratic -- more frequent, dependable service at low or no cost -- might also lower chances of contagion, as crowds disperse into more and cleaner train cars and buses. Seattle, Los Angeles, and Denver have led the way, making municipal bus travel free to help essential workers and protect bus drivers (since riders can enter through back doors).

We will have to fight for this spirit to continue once the pandemic subsides.

Malcolm Araros is a PhD student in sociology at New York University.

Image: Boden Deplaedt/Unsplash

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Canadians of conscience should not be smeared as 'anti-Semites' for boycotting apartheid Israel

David Kattenburg

May 21, 2020

POLITICAL ACTION

In the fight against anti-Semitism, no one enjoys greater influence than B'nai Brith Canada (BBC) and its League for Human Rights.

Each year, BBC and the league produce an audit of anti-Semitic incidents across Canada and the world. According to BBC, their annual audit gets "cited world-wide by government agencies, social policy planners and law enforcement bodies, and is considered the authoritative study on antisemitism in Canada."

No idle boast. BBC's most recent audit merited mention in one of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's daily news briefings on the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2019 audit reports over 2,000 incidents of anti-Semitism -- over six every day -- including shocking accounts of racist violence, vandalism, desecration and Holocaust denial.

True, anti-Semitism is a scourge that cannot be denied. Unfortunately, though, there's a flaw in BBC's accounting procedure that calls its conclusions into question: It is based on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's "Working Definition of Antisemitism" (IHRA-WDA). Of the 11 "illustrative examples" of anti-Semitism flagged by the IHRA-WDA, six involve criticism of Israel and its founding ideology, Zionism.

How can the IHRA-WDA -- and BB's 2019 audit -- be squared with the consensus about Israel among other, less parochial human rights groups? With its "grave violations" of human rights law (Amnesty International), its "severe and discriminatory" treatment of the Palestinian people (Human Rights Watch), and its "regime of occupation … inextricably bound up in human rights violations" (B'Tselem)?

B'nai Brith Canada doesn't attempt to do so. First and foremost, it is a "staunch defender of the State of Israel." Among the anti-Semitic acts swelling its 2019 audit: calling for the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails ("terrorists"), suggesting that Palestinians have been displaced or killed in the name of Zionism, that "Zionists control American politics" and all forms of "anti-Israel or anti-Zionist activism."

Nothing infuriates BBC more than the "antisemitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement." On page 14 of its 2019 audit, BBC presents the image of a box of Israeli clementines on a Canadian store shelf, upon which a "Boycott Israeli Apartheid" sticker has been applied.

Is it anti-Semitic to say that Israel practises apartheid, or something akin to apartheid, and to call for a consumer boycott? To answer this question, one must define apartheid. The 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid defines apartheid as a system based on "policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination" similar to those practised in southern Africa, "committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them."

Article 7(2) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines apartheid as comprising various "inhumane acts ... committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime."

Further precision is provided in a 2013 article authored by former UN special rapporteur John Dugard (one of the leading South African jurists who opposed apartheid) and Irish academic John Reynolds. Dugard and Reynolds identify three "pillars" of the South African prototype that they say Israel reproduces: 1) "demarcation of distinct racial groups," 2) "territorial fragmentation and racial segregation," and 3) a "matrix of security laws and practices" aimed at suppressing opposition and buttressing "racial domination."

Sounds a lot like Israel today.

But what do we mean by "Israel"? Opponents of the Israeli apartheid idea invariably argue that Israel is fully democratic. What they call "Israel" is Israel "proper" -- its internationally recognized territory. A more accurate definition is what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his constituency and a large swath of Israel's supporters around the world (including BBC) call the "Land of Israel." Namely, all the lands between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, and from the northern tip of the Golan Heights down to the Red Sea. These are the lands Israel and its military exercise complete control over. In addition to Israel "proper," they comprise the West Bank, Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and Gaza.

The "Land of Israel" is home to 14 million people belonging to two racial/ethnic groups -- a distinction codified in Israel's "Basic Laws" and 2018 Nation-State Law. Wherever they live (they do so everywhere except Gaza), Jews enjoy full citizenship and national rights and are governed by Israeli domestic law. Under the Nation-State Law, Jews have an exclusive right to self-determination. Non-Jews have no such right. Jews are free to own land and reside pretty much anywhere they please -- including Jewish settlements in the West Bank -- and to travel freely (except to those enclaves where Palestinians live). Any Jew anywhere in the world has the same right.

Palestinian lives are entirely different. Between 1.5 and two million are Israeli citizens. They carry Israeli passports and can travel as they please, but they have no national rights. If they marry someone who isn't Jewish -- from the West Bank or Gaza or Canada or France, say -- their spouse cannot join them in Israel. A plethora of racially based laws and regulations limit their residency rights and access to public services. They can vote and run for political office, but no member of an "Arab" party will end up in government because "Arabs" are viewed by the political establishment with distrust and contempt.

All things considered, though, Israeli "Arabs" have it good. For the three million Palestinians living in the West Bank, the story is very different. They are stateless, with neither citizenship nor national rights. Most live in populated areas assigned to them under the 1994-95 Oslo Accords. In Oslo areas A and B (40 per cent of the West Bank), their lives are administered by the Palestinian Authority, but Israeli soldiers can seize and imprison them at any time. Their natural resources are controlled by Israel. They are not free to travel.

Another 200,000-300,000 Palestinians live in Oslo Area C, under full military occupation. Their homes can be demolished and their farmlands razed based on arbitrary military orders. They are subject to routine violence at the hands of Jewish colonists living in their midst, aided and abetted by the Israeli military. They can be arrested and forcibly transferred to prisons inside "Israel proper" (in breach of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention).

Yet another 375,000 Palestinians reside in East Jerusalem, with neither citizenship nor national rights, and their residency rights can be revoked at a moment's notice. They are not allowed to build upon their property, as East Jerusalem's Jewish colonists can. If they do, their property can be demolished.

In the twilight zone of Israeli settler-colonialism and apartheid, several thousand Palestinians live in the "seam zone" between Israel's Separation Barrier and the Green Line. Among these, some are fully walled off and can only come and go through a gate controlled by Israeli soldiers.

Worst off are the Palestinians of Gaza, a 365-square kilometre sliver of land variously dubbed an "open air prison," "ghetto" or "concentration camp." Under Israeli siege for 13 years, Gaza's eastern border, coastline and airspace are under the complete control of the Israeli army, navy and air force.

What better term is there to describe the above geographical matrix than apartheid?

Back in 2014, the UN committee that oversees the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights described Israel's "domestic legal framework" as a "three-tiered system of laws affording different civil status, rights and legal protection for Jewish Israeli citizens, Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem."

Sounds like apartheid.

The list of those who've used the A-word is lengthy: former UN special rapporteurs Richard Falk and John Dugard, David Harel (vice president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities), Jewish-Israeli journalists Gideon Levy and Amira Hass, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, veteran CBC correspondent Neil Macdonald, John Kerry, Jimmy Carter, South African anti-apartheid activists Desmond Tutu and Denis Goldberg, Cameroonian academic Achille Mbembe, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) … the list goes on and on.

To call all these people anti-Semites would be preposterous. In the absence of a formal ruling by the International Criminal Court or the International Court of Justice, the Israeli apartheid idea plainly falls within the bounds of reason. It logically follows that consumer boycotts of the sort illustrated in BBC's 2019 anti-Semitism audit are justified as well -- certainly not acts of anti-Semitism.

Arguably, they are a civic duty. Under the 1995 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the "Crime of Apartheid" is considered a "crime against humanity" -- one of 11 such crimes itemized in Article 7 (j) of the Rome Statute, to which Canada is a signatory. Canada has incorporated these into its own Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act (2000). Why shouldn't Canadians of conscience be free to boycott "Israeli" clementines -- or wine, dates and cosmetic creams -- without being smeared as anti-Semites?  

By conflating boycotts and other pro-Palestinian activities with true Jew-hatred, as it does in its 2019 audit of anti-Semitic incidents, B'nai Brith Canada undermines the fight it claims to champion, not to mention the larger struggle for universal human rights and equality.

For B'nai Brith Canada, smearing and silencing Israel's critics seems to come first.

David Kattenburg is a Winnipeg-based science instructor, journalist and activist.

Image: David Kattenburg​

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

APARTHEID

BOYCOTT DIVESTMENT SANCTION

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Alberta government shelves 'fair deal' report

David J. Climenhaga

May 18, 2020

POLITICS IN CANADA

Alberta's so-called "fair deal" panel, which might have seemed like a good idea when Premier Jason Kenney announced it last fall, presents something of a political problem for a government that has let Ottawa do the heavy lifting throughout the coronavirus pandemic.

Premier Kenney pitched the rhetorical roadshow as a way to help ruggedly individualistic Albertans cast off the dead weight of Ottawa's collectivist mentality and, in the words of the notorious Firewall Manifesto, "take greater charge of our own future."

Most of the ideas the nine-member panel was instructed to explore came straight out of the risible independantiste screed penned in 2001 by Stephen Harper, three of his market-fundamentalist college teachers and a couple of hangers on. 

But faced with an actual crisis caused by the coronavirus, Kenney's United Conservative Party government mostly bowed to federal decisions, did its best to upload the costs onto the feds and concentrated on yelling at the likes of Norway and China. The former was attacked for its lack of enthusiasm for getting back to the carbon economy as quickly as possible; the latter, inspired by U.S. President Donald Trump, presumably to deflect the blame for any shortfalls in the province's efforts to limit the spread of COVID-19. 

This makes it pretty obvious to Albertans who are paying attention -- say what they will about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau -- what level of government you need to go to in a real crisis. 

To put this metaphorically, it's all very well to say that an Englishman's home is his castle, but when fire breaks out in the castle kitchen, your imagined Englishman will still likely ring the fire brigade!

Which means that most of the panel's presumably predetermined recommendations -- replacing the RCMP with a provincial force, no longer cooperating with Ottawa to collect taxes, finding ways to wiggle out of the Canada Health Act, appointing provincial chief firearms officer dedicated to not enforcing the gun-control provisions of the federal Criminal Code, and dumping the Canada Pension Plan and replacing it with a provincial version -- either have lost some of the cachet they appeared to have a few months ago or have already proved to be unpopular with voters. 

More provincial autonomy as a general theme has certainly lost lustre now that Albertans have seen how little our provincial government is willing to do about anything, no matter how important, that isn't among the bees in Premier Kenney's bonnet. 

The idea of grabbing CPP funds contributed by Albertans so that the UCP can dip into our retirement security to prop up Kenney's beloved oil industry just about moved participants to tears of fury at some of the panel's 10 small "town halls" across the province. 

Despite the panel's baked-in assumption Alberta gets a raw deal from the rest of Confederation and its apparent effort to lead witnesses to the conclusions the government wanted, plenty of people got up on their hind legs at the town hall I attended January 9 in Fort Saskatchewan to proclaim their love of Canada and advise panel members they thought this province needs to start working with our fellow citizens instead of just yelling at them.

Soon after came the coronavirus, making their case for them. 

Given all this, it should come as no surprise that nothing was said about the panel's report until Saturday, May 16, when the government revealed in a rare long-weekend news release the report was in its hands. 

How long the government has had it remains a mystery. The panel was supposed to report at the end of March and received an extension until mid-April. News reports have indicated it was submitted this month. But on Sunday a member of the panel suggested in a tweeted remark that the government has had a final copy for more than a month. 

Whenever it was received, the report can now sit on the shelf until a more promising moment to implement Harper's bad ideas, which even Ralph Klein had the good sense to spike back in 2001. 

"I look forward to giving this report and its recommendations the proper attention it deserves once we have safely started to implement our relaunch strategy," Kenney said in Saturday's news release. The middle of a long weekend, needless to say, is an appropriate time for publishing information a government would like voters to forget about as quickly as possible. 

If you want to know what the panel recommended, you'll just have to wait till a time of Kenney's choosing. 

"Government will announce a date for the public release of the report once the urgency of the COVID-19 response has subsided," the government's press release explained, a judgment, of course, that is entirely in the government's hands.

The panel, chaired by former senior mandarin Oryssia Lennie, included Preston Manning, the godfather of the Canadian right; Stephen Lougheed, president of Alberta Innovates and son of the late premier Peter Lougheed; Donna Kennedy-Glans, a former Progressive Conservative cabinet minister now a blogger whose blog sometimes advocates some sort of sovereignty-association; law professor Moin Yahya; and backbench UCP MLAs Drew Barnes, Miranda Rosin and Tony Yao. The ninth member of the panel, former Assembly of First Nations regional chief Jason Goodstriker, died suddenly on January 16.

David Climenhaga, author of the Alberta Diary blog, is a journalist, author, journalism teacher, poet and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions at The Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. This post also appears on his blog, AlbertaPolitics.ca.

Image: David J. Climenhaga​

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Pipeline projects, the pandemic and the question journalists fail to ask

Robert Hackett May 19, 2020

Robert Hackett is a professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University, and co-author of Journalism and Climate Crisis: Public Engagement, Media Alternatives. He is also a member of the NDP and of the non-partisan Burnaby Residents Opposing Kinder Morgan Expansion (BROKE). This article originally appeared in the National Observer.


While the pandemic marches on, it's another workday at Burnaby Terminal, the oil storage "tank farm" that is being doubled in density as part of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project (TMX). Large vehicles rumble inside the compound and through the electronically controlled perimeter gate. The clatter of heavy machinery resounds through the nearby forest and neighbourhoods. Large signs warn obstructing access to this facility could result in arrest -- the fate of hundreds of Indigenous-led land, water and climate protectors in 2018. A smaller sign, next to the guardhouse and gate, says, "Social distancing, where possible, while at (company) sites."

"Where possible." That's a big caveat. Maintaining a two-metre distance in construction sites is often not possible.

While thousands of B.C. businesses have closed, schools and libraries gather dust and millions of British Columbians are urged to stay at home -- all for good reason -- fossil fuel-related expansion projects continue as if they are "essential services." Both Trans Mountain and LNG Canada (a consortium of foreign corporations) boast they are meeting significant milestones on their respective projects.

TMX would convey toxic diluted bitumen from the Alberta oilsands to the Westridge harbour terminal in Burnaby. LNG Canada's Coastal GasLink (CGL) would bring liquefied "natural" gas from the fracking fields through (as is now notorious) Wet'suwet'en territory to the northern B.C. town of Kitimat.

Significant health concerns have been raised about both projects, as well as BC Hydro's Site C hydroelectric dam in the province's north. Though publicly touted as "green" energy, it is partly intended to provide subsidized electricity to LNG Canada and carries enormous environmental costs of its own, from methane emissions to flooding of Treaty 8 Indigenous territories and some of Canada's richest farmland.


At the end of March, the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs (UBCIC) publicly called for a halt to all construction at the 1,600-worker Site C dam camp "due to the risk COVID-19 now poses to vulnerable workers and nearby Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities in northeast B.C.," followed by a similar call with respect to CGL pipeline construction. The UBCIC added "corporate exceptionalism" should not be a pandemic-response strategy: "The expansion of economic enterprises cannot be considered essential when it directly endangers the health and well-being of every one of us."

Similar appeals were made by city councillors in Fort St. John, the town nearest the Site C camp, and by Dr. David Bowering, former chief medical health officer for the Northern Health region -- joined as recently as April 29 by the David Suzuki Foundation.

Nevertheless, Premier John Horgan said Site C construction will continue until provincial health officer (PHO) Dr. Bonnie Henry "tells us otherwise."


Henry and other provincial authorities have emphasized the precautions mandated specifically for industrial work sites, such as increased sanitation and physical distancing between employees, and procedures for detecting, isolating and removing workers who do become ill. BC Hydro claims to have reduced its workforce, but hundreds remain and residents and officials in vulnerable communities continue to question the adequacy and enforcement of provincial guidelines. Workers themselves have expressed deep concern for their families' and their own safety.

"The scary thing is that many of the camps are in northern B.C.," says Ben Parfitt, former environmental reporter and now a researcher with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. "There are few critical beds there. Small, isolated First Nation communities where people live in often crowded housing conditions and lack ready access to health care, can ill-afford to have the virus arrive. Both First Nation and non-First Nation leaders have raised concerns about the Site C workers' camp, where several people have come down with COVID-like symptoms."

Validating such concerns, the Interior Health Authority warned of an outbreak at the Kearl Lake oilsands work camp near Fort McMurray, Alberta, on April 18. The outbreak has expanded to northern B.C. via workers travelling between the two provinces.

Following a public-health order on April 23, the province is finally sending inspectors to work camps. But there is a legitimate concern about whether park rangers, mining inspectors or other B.C. public-service employees slated for this role are qualified to assess COVID-19-related health-protection procedures.

The risk from fossil fuel "essential services" is not confined to the northern region. Many residents see my hometown, Burnaby, as a fossil fuel sacrifice zone. The TMX project has long raised the spectre of pipeline ruptures, uncontrollable toxic tank-farm fires, salmon-bearing stream contamination, oil-tanker spills and damage to the livability of surrounding neighbourhoods.

To that brew, add the potential for incubating a coronavirus outbreak at Burnaby's two TMX terminals. As Elan Gibson, a spokeswoman for Burnaby Residents Opposing Kinder Morgan Expansion (BROKE), put it, the virus is often not symptomatic among its carriers, and workers at both the tank farm and the Westridge terminal "are going to and from their homes and into our communities each day."

The Indigenous-led group Mountain Protectors, working out of the Watch House built next to the tank farm in 2018, has collected "ample proof" TMX is not respecting the province's or its own "social distance and safety measures," according to Gibson. Photographs in the local newspaper appear to confirm this claim. Encouraged by BROKE, Burnaby Mayor Mike Hurley transmitted these concerns to Trans Mountain and B.C. government authorities.
Essential services?

Are such megaprojects worth adding public-health risks to their indisputable environmental costs?


The B.C. government apparently thinks so. On March 26, Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth released a list of "essential services," defined as those "essential to preserving life, health, public safety and basic societal functioning … the services British Columbians rely on in their daily lives." While not mentioning specific companies or projects, the list identifies "critical infrastructure service providers," including "oil and natural gas."

The list was developed by Emergency Management BC (EMBC) in consultation with other government ministries and the Provincial Health Officer. In legal and operational terms, the designation apparently doesn't sharply differentiate essential from non-essential businesses, apart from those (like beauty salons and casinos) that have been ordered closed. All are required to adapt to health office guidelines; industrial work camps have a specific set of rules as well as qualified exemptions, for example, from liability for damage due to COVID-19 exposure, and from ceilings on crowd size in one site.

Rather, the list is intended to "encourage" designated businesses to remain open, and to provide a shared framework should further public-health measures be necessary, according to the EMBC's Joint Information Centre.


Nevertheless, the definition of "essential service" is symbolically important, and inherently political. It's an important clue as to the vested interests and policy mindset of political and corporate elites. Treating these three projects as "essential" to B.C.'s future implies a multifold gamble -- that global gas and oil prices and demand will escalate sharply from their current historic lows, that the rest of the world will largely abandon efforts to contain greenhouse gas emissions, that taxpayers are willing to continue subsidizing gas and oil producers and lock Canada into exporting fossil fuels for decades, that we are willing to continue destroying farmland just as food-supply chains are becoming demonstrably more fragile and that Canada will continue to play an outsize role in exacerbating climate catastrophes that could make the coronavirus pandemic seem trivial.

None of the megaproject trio currently delivers services to British Columbians. (Trans Mountain did not respond to requests for comment on whether it is an essential service, and on what grounds.) Nor are their prospects of being a future economic engine particularly promising. In the case of TMX, independent analysts like economist Robyn Allan and veteran earth scientist David Hughes have argued compellingly there is no large Asian demand for Alberta's bitumen, TMX will not hugely increase its per-barrel price, relatively few permanent jobs will be created, competing delivery routes will be online soon and there is sufficient export capacity in Canada's existing pipelines.

Rather than fuelling economic growth, TMX could burden Canadians with $9 billion or more in rising construction and insurance costs -- costs that have recently shifted Canadian public opinion against the project, according to recent polls.

Similar claims could be made about the dubious economic benefits and definite environmental costs of CGL, compounded by tax subsidies to a foreign consortium (LNG Canada) and the blatant violation of Indigenous rights and traditional territories.
Collaborative media?

The stakes are high enough to warrant critical attention from the province's news media -- the institution that should be informing citizens about policies and events that affect them, acting as a watchdog on power and scanning the scene for threats to individual and community well-being. These are aspects of what media scholars Clifford Christians and his colleagues describe as the "monitorial" function of the press.

They identify three other ideal functions of the press in a democracy: facilitating a forum for public conversation, identifying and even advocating for necessary social change and collaborating with government and other institutions to support broadly acceptable social purposes.

Though under-recognized in conventional western journalism theory, that collaborative role is often practised by supporting charity campaigns or governments in times of emergency, like war -- or pandemics. I tracked most daily news briefings with Henry and Health Minister Adrian Dix from March 30 until April 30. Journalists raised numerous pressing questions about the trajectory of the disease, the situation of vulnerable groups like the homeless and elderly, strategies for response and much else. They can take much credit for how well British Columbians generally responded to public-health advice.

But while five out of 224 questions I've recorded concern risks from the industrial work camps, nobody queried Henry's repeated references to construction projects and workers as "essential." Perhaps journalists are reluctant to push their monitorial role in a climate of emergency, and vis-a-vis a personable official whose calm professionalism and empathy has made her a folk hero in B.C. The demands of a fast-moving story and the distance of most work camps from B.C.'s southwestern metropolitan media may be factors.

But there's also evidence corporate news media implicitly accept the ideological premises underlying fossil fuel-oriented energy megaprojects. One recent example: an April 4 column by Vancouver Sun veteran Vaughn Palmer, concerning the pleas from northern B.C. to suspend Site C construction. Palmer devoted just three paragraphs to outlining those calls, and 18 to rebuttals by Premier Horgan, Dr. Henry and BC Hydro. Knowing the additional price tag of "another year's delay" in the massive river diversion associated with Site C, he concluded, would give the public "a more rounded picture of the stakes."

Corporate media pundits less often include the costs of business as usual as part of a "more rounded picture." Jay Ritchlin, a David Suzuki Foundation spokesman, suggests subsidies to the fossil fuel megaprojects could be used instead for transitioning to a new type of economy. The COVID-19 catastrophe requires us to reconsider what really is essential.

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Texas hits worst unemployment rate on record 

— 1 in 8 Texans is out of work

Published May 22, 2020 By Texas Tribune


The state’s April jobless rate was 12.8% — Texas’ worst monthly tally on record.
That number, included in the Labor Department’s monthly report released Friday, is the government’s clearest and most comprehensive look at the economic devastation in Texas since the coronavirus pandemic first swept the state in March.

Previously, the state’s worst-ever monthly unemployment rate was 9.2% in November 1986, as Texas reeled from the last big oil bust. Now, with more than 2 million Texans who have filed for unemployment during the outbreak, the contracting oil industry is only part of the state’s economic problems.

“We are in some sense a state having to deal with two extraordinarily negative circumstances all at once,” Venkatesh Shankar, an economist and director of research at the Center for Retail Studies at Texas A&M University, said in an interview.

And perhaps no economic indicator matters as much as the public health data related to COVID-19. In explaining his rationale for allowing businesses to reopen, Abbott has zeroed in on two figures. One is the ratio of positive cases to tests conducted. The other is the hospitalization rate — the proportion of infected Texans who are requiring hospitalization.



Both those numbers have trended down over several weeks, but Texas is still often seeing 1,000 or more people test positive for the virus each day.

“We never had a steep rise, but we haven’t hit anywhere near a plateau,” Shankar said. “The question is: You have to open the economy to a certain extent. When the economy starts to come back and cases come back again, how will unemployment be affected then?”

Economists have said Texas could struggle to bounce back from the economic calamity caused by COVID-19 even though businesses across a wide swath of industries are allowed to reopen because of the double whammy Shankar described the coronavirus leading to shuttered businesses combined with weak oil prices.
The pandemic’s damage has been swift and spared no sector of the Texas economy, leading to bottlenecks at food banks, renters evicted and scrambling for housing, college graduates without jobs and many jobless Texans not receiving unemployment benefits due to the Texas Workforce Commission’s inability to fully respond to the surge in demand.

The price of oil, which for the first time ever briefly plunged negative in April, is tightly tied to the Texas economy and state budget. On Wednesday, Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dennis Bonnen directed state agencies and colleges to reduce their budgets by 5%.

The result will mean worse services for Texans, who are already feeling the effects of a ravaged economy in the middle of a pandemic. Oil producers have had to make the tough choice to close wells, restaurant workers have had to navigate confusing orders issued by Abbott as dining rooms have started to reopen, and immigrants working in meatpacking plants in West Texas have had to endure large coronavirus outbreaks.



The crisis “has shone a blinding light on our state’s geographic, economic, and social systems, revealing their vulnerabilities so clearly that their existence can no longer be debated or denied,” read a recent report titled “A Playbook for Resiliency: Creating Opportunity for all Texans,” released by the University of Houston and the University of Texas at Austin.

Recent jobs reports have shown that lower-wage workers have been affected disproportionately by the coronavirus, and Shankar agreed, adding that parts of the energy sector might never return as companies have lost such steep amounts of money.

Despite the eye-popping economic numbers, analysts are concerned about incomplete data because “the economic impact of the sudden drop in activity may be much more far-reaching than the already-devastating headline unemployment number,” S. Michael Sury, lecturer of finance at UT-Austin, wrote in an email to The Texas Tribune.

Keith Phillips is a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. He and his and colleagues at the bank, normally focused only on economic data, have also been tracking health numbers. It is the “elephant in the room” that cannot be ignored when rejuvenating the economy.

“The health thing is driving the economics,” Phillips said.

Some other countries, Phillips said, such as South Korea, were able to corral the virus more quickly through testing and contact tracing, “and we were slow.”

“We’re going need to do that in order to keep confidence up so people feel safe going around and doing their business,” Phillips said.

Disclosure: Texas A&M University, the University of Houston and the University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.