Trans Mountain pipeline begins construction of tunnel in Burnaby, B.C.


BURNABY, B.C. — Construction has begun on the 2.6-kilometre tunnel in Burnaby, B.C., for the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project.

 Provided by The Canadian Press

The company says in a news release the work on the tunnel connecting the Westridge Marine and Burnaby terminals began Wednesday.

It says the start of construction of the tunnel represents one of the major components of the expansion project in the Lower Mainland and is expected to take a little over half a year to complete.

The tunnel construction began after a year of preparation and more than six years of planning, design and regulatory processes.

Trans Mountain says the tunnel will be more than four metres in diameter and have three delivery pipelines to load vessels at the Westridge Marine terminal.

The company has said the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project is on budget and on schedule for completion by the end of 2022.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 27, 2021.

The Canadian Press

NDP team up with Liberals, promising to get its net-zero climate bill into the Senate

OTTAWA — Federal New Democrats are ensuring the survival of a key piece of Liberal legislation aimed at keeping Canada accountable to its target of achieving net-zero carbon-related emissions by mid-century.

 

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Parliamentarians are currently discussing Bill C-12 at a committee voting on a series of changes to the proposed climate law tabled late last year.

If passed, it would see Canada set rolling five-year targets to slash emissions of heat-trapping, climate-change-causing greenhouse gases, stopping in 2050.

That's when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has pledged that any pollution the country does emit can be offset by initiatives like tree-planting or captured before being released into the atmosphere.

New Democrats have criticized the legislation as lacking short-term accountability from now until 2030.

By working with the opposition party, Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said the government will accept changes to the bill, which the NDP says includes climate progress reports in 2023 and 2025, as well as an "interim emissions objective" for 2026.

"This is too important to let this legislation have no accountability whatsoever, which is what we were faced with," said NDP environment and climate change critic Laurel Collins.

"Either an empty bill, which what was initially put forward, or voting against it and having to wait for the next government to put forward something that would actually provide accountability."

"We were able to use our leverage and use the pressure that we were able to put, to ensure that we actually get a measure of climate accountability."

Among the agreed-upon changes is a 2025 review of Canada's 2030 emissions-reductions goal. Trudeau has pledged to have cut the country's carbon-related emissions by 40 to 45 per cent below 2005 levels, up from the 36 per cent track the government says the country can do under existing efforts.

"If we find that the world moves more quickly than, I think, all countries right now anticipate with respect to reducing emissions, and we find that by 2025, it looks like we can actually go farther than we have presently committed to, of course we will reflect on that," said Wilkinson.

"The reality is we've just gone through a target-setting exercise. We believe the target that we've established is a very ambitious target for Canada and our focus is going to be on achieving that target."

By accepting its proposals, the NDP has pledged to work with the Liberals to get it through the House of Commons, and into the Senate before the session concludes.

Conservative environment critic Dan Albas said in a statement that the Liberals are "rushing" the bill through its committee stage.

So far, the party voted against the bill, saying a government-created advisory body on the net-zero goal doesn't include representation from the oil and gas industry, which could be hurt by the influence of so-called "climate activists."

At least two of the advisory panellists have a background in oil and gas.

“We entered the committee process in good faith with amendments suggested by witnesses that would make the bill better," Albas said.

"Unfortunately the Liberal government and their NDP allies made a deal and are refusing to even debate or engage with any ideas from other opposition parties."

Wilkinson dismissed the Tories' critique and said its net-zero panel includes a diverse range of perspectives, including industry.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 27, 2021

Stephanie Taylor, The Canadian Press

UCP WAR ON DRUG ADDICTS 
'It is going to kill people': UCP to close Calgary's only supervised consumption site

Alanna Smith 

The Alberta government says it will shutter Calgary’s central supervised drug-consumption site as part of a broader plan to overhaul existing harm-reduction services across the province.

© Provided by Calgary Herald The Safeworks supervised consumption site at the Sheldon M. Chumir Health Centre is shown on Feb. 15, 2019.

A plan to close the Safeworks site, inside the Sheldon M. Chumir Health Centre, and replace it with two others in the city was approved at a cabinet meeting Wednesday.

Justin Marshall, press secretary to Alberta’s associate minister of mental health and addictions, confirmed the government is “relocating” the existing site and its services.

“We will be relocating the existing supervised consumption site, which has been highly disruptive to the neighbourhood, and instead add SCS (supervised consumption services) capabilities within two existing partner organizations’ facilities situated in more appropriate locations,” Marshall in a statement Thursday.

He declined to offer specifics, including the identity of the community partners or when Safeworks will be closed.

The Beltline site has more visits than any other in Alberta, not including ARCHES in Lethbridge, which closed after the UCP pulled its funding last July following allegations of financial misconduct. Last year, 53,725 people used the Safeworks site, where clients can use substances under supervision of staff who are trained to reverse overdoses.

The pending closure comes amid an escalating overdose crisis in the province.

Alberta marked its deadliest year on record in 2020 with 1,144 opioid-related deaths — an 83 per cent increase from the year before. Numbers continue to trend upwards, with 228 substance use deaths in the first two months of 2021 alone, 70 of which were in Calgary.

The broader government plan, outlined in documents obtained by Postmedia, also includes changes for existing sites in Edmonton, Grande Prairie and Red Deer.

An AHS employee with experience working at the Safeworks site in Calgary said its closure will further harm vulnerable people, who are already at the whim of “failed” government policy to prevent overdose deaths.

“It is going to kill people. It’s going to result in parking garages, alleys and bathroom overdose deaths,” said the man, whom Postmedia agreed not to identify.

© Darren Makowichuk/Postmedia The Safeworks supervised consumption site at the Sheldon M. Chumir Health Centre is shown in Calgary on Thursday, May 27, 2021.

He said many clients won’t transition to services elsewhere because the connections and trust they formed at the former site will be lost.

“People who live in the world of addictions with mental-health concerns and experiencing homelessness, the first thing you have to do is build trust. If you’re shutting that (site) down, you’re cutting that ribbon of trust,” he said.

“How many times has that ribbon of trust been broken with our clients? And how many more times do you expect them to show up at the trough thinking ‘oh, this time I know you’re not going to?’ ”

In Edmonton, the government plans to “decentralize” sites, according to the documents. Only two of the original three sites remain after downtown Boyle Street Community Services announced it would discontinue operations at the end of April . Three men were found dead of suspected overdoses in a central park , which harm reduction advocates have linked to the closure.

There are no set plans for the overdose prevention site in Red Deer. The document said the province will “re-evaluate need for services once (a) recovery community is established.” The UCP has committed $5 million to build a 75-bed addictions treatment centre in the city.

In Grande Prairie, the government will transition the drug-use site into the Rotary House homeless shelter. The municipality is facing the highest overdose fatality rate in Alberta at 55.1 per 100,000 people, compared with the provincial average of 31.6 based on the latest provincial data.

UCP TREATS JUNKIES AS CRIMINALS 

NOT AS ADDICTS NEEDING MEDICAL ATTENTION

“Our principled approach will continue to provide services while protecting community safety,” said Marshall. 

“Our government is committed to a high quality and easily accessible system of care for both mental health and addictions that includes a full continuum of supports, including services to reduce harm.”

The latest provincial budget outlined $15.7 million to fund five supervised drug-use and three overdose-prevention sites in Alberta. Marshall said there will be “increases” in funding to support the changes but did not offer specifics.

Related
Canada’s hidden crisis: How COVID-19 overshadowed the worst year on record for overdose deaths
No update to province's plan for supervised consumption sites one year after damning report released
Less crime around Sheldon Chumir, but consumption site's fate still uncertain

Elaine Hyshka, an assistant professor at the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health, said uprooting existing supervised consumption sites in the province “defies logic” as Alberta battles one of the highest overdose death rates in the country.

“Alberta really is bucking a national trend here where we see SCS (supervised consumption services) rolling out across the country,” she said. “If anything, we need to be keeping all the SCS we have and making new ones to support other parts of our cities and our the province that could benefit from having these life-saving interventions.”

Hyshka said the province’s safe drug-use sites were implemented after a careful review and consultation process under the former NDP government. The study included analysis on the location of overdose deaths, discarded drug paraphernalia and EMS calls for service, with input from service providers and stakeholders.

“A wholesale discarding of that work is really unfortunate, because planning health systems requires evidence and thoughtful, engaged process,” said Hyshka.

The UCP released a damning report — with disputed findings — on the socio-economic effect of supervised consumption services in March last year. It has been widely criticized by academics, scientists and health-care experts.

The document’s intent was to guide decision-making on the future of existing and future supervised drug-use sites in Alberta, though it is unclear what role it played in the government’s new strategy.

In March, a spokesperson for the associate minister of mental health and addictions said there were “no updates” on the province’s plans when asked about the report.

© Darren Makowichuk/Postmedia The Safeworks supervised consumption site at the Sheldon M. Chumir Health Centre is shown in Calgary on Thursday, May 27, 2021.

Lori Sigurdson, NDP critic for mental health and addictions, said the government’s response to the devastating overdose crisis is a “tragic failure.”

“The UCP really just has their hands over their eyes. They are being blind in their decision-making,” said Sigurdson. “We know that four people a day are dying from overdose and we know that these supervised consumption sites save lives, so the government is making a huge mistake.”

After the three recent deaths in Edmonton and growing overdose rate in Lethbridge after the closure of its supervised consumption site, which was the busiest in North America, Sigurdson said she’s “absolutely” certain this move will result in additional deaths.

“The move to treatment beds and this ‘recovery model,’ as they call it, is just one component,” she said.

“But the harm reduction model, which includes the safe consumption sites, is so important. We need to support people where they are at and that’s what safe consumption sites do.”

alsmith@postmedia.com

Twitter: @alanna_smithh

Ottawa dollars can save B.C.'s old-growth forests

A coalition of conservationists is urging the B.C. government to use federal funds to end the province’s new war in the woods on Vancouver Island, protect old-growth forest and establish targets for endangered ecosystems.

Ken Wu, executive director of the Endangered Ecosystems Alliance, said Premier John Horgan should capitalize on federal funding and align with national and international initiatives to set targets to protect vital land and marine areas.

“It’s a game-changing plan,” Wu told the National Observer.

“Because the province can employ federal money to save these areas if Horgan chooses to do it.”


The B.C. government should adopt Canada’s protected areas targets, and preserve at least 25 per cent of its vital land and marine ecosystems by 2025, and 30 per cent by 2030, said Wu.

Currently, 15 per cent of B.C.’s land area is falls into legislated protected areas, compared to 13 per cent nationally, the alliance said.

The rest of the world is working aggressively to expand protected at-risk ecosystems, and B.C. should follow suit and protect its most valuable ancient forests at the same time, Wu said, particularly as the province boasts the greatest ecological diversity in the country.

B.C.’s participation is critical for Canada to meet its own national and international protected areas commitments, he added.

“Will B.C. join the North American leadership movement to solve the intertwined climate and biodiversity crisis or get left behind as an anti-environmental conservation laggard?” Wu asked.

A total of $3.3 billion to protect land and seas has been set aside by Ottawa in the latest budget, Wu said, adding $2.3 billion is dedicated to terrestrial areas.

B.C.’s part of the funding pie would likely range between $200 and $300 million, which would go a long way to protecting the province’s most valuable ancient forests.

The federal funding comes at a critical time for B.C., conservationist Vicky Husband, renowned B.C. conservationist awarded both the Order of Canada and the Order of B.C. for her work to protect old-growth over 40 years.

“Right now the B.C. government is being pressured by deeply concerned citizens across (the province) and beyond for an immediate moratorium on old growth logging of the last remaining most bio-diverse forests,” Husband said in a press statement.

“This pressure for change also includes support for First Nations who want to protect critical old growth forests in their territory.”

It’s vital B.C. dedicate a significant chunk of the funding to Indigenous Protected Areas, First Nations land use plans, and the acquisition of private lands for protection, the Alliance said.

Also, the province should support B.C. communities dependent on forestry revenue by providing financing for First Nations sustainable economic development linked to newly protected areas, incentives and regulations to grow a value-added, second-growth forest industry, and provide a just transition for B.C. old-growth forestry workers.

While federal funding won’t save all of B.C.’s old-growth, it could protect areas of concern and help end blockades and protests such as those currently underway on southern Vancouver Island and the Fairy Creek watershed, said TJ Watt, a campaigner with the Ancient Forest Alliance.

“The B.C. NDP government has just been handed the keys to ensure much of the grandest, most endangered old-growth forests in B.C. get protected,” said Watt in a press statement.

“Will they keep the door shut or let the solution in?”

Rochelle Baker / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada’s National Observer

Rochelle Baker, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, National Observer

Against Technology - 

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 The Boom, The Bust, and Neo-Luddites in the 1990s 19

Chapter 2 The Mythic History of the Original Luddites 45

Chapter 3 Romanticizing the Luddites 77

Chapter 4 Frankenstein and the Monster of Technology 105

Chapter 5 Novelizing the Luddites 137

Chapter 6 Counterculture and Countercomputer in the 1960s 173

Chapter 7 Ned Ludd in the Age of Terror 211

Notes 235

Selected Bibliography 257

Index 267

https://law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/3397664/Jones-2006-Against-Technology.pdf

 Into the Mainstream and Oblivion”: Julian Mayfield's Black Radical Tradition, 1948-1984 

by David Tyroler Romine

Abstract

“Into the Mainstream and Oblivion” is a study of the intellectual and political biography

of the African American writer and political activist Julian Hudson Mayfield. As a member

of the black Left, Mayfield’s life of activism and art bring the complex network of artists,

activists, and political theorists who influenced the construction, tactics, and strategies of

social movements during the latter half of the twentieth century into sharper focus revealing

the ways in which black, modernist writing served as a critical site of political, social, and

cultural ferment during the Cold War. Using art to communicate ideas and arguments about

the relationship between race, gender, and political economy, Mayfield and his

contemporaries illuminate the broader influence of black writers on American culture and

politics. In addition, the state’s response to Mayfield’s life of literary activism sheds light on

the ways in which anti-communism worked to disrupt, marginalize, and dampen the effect

of challenges to white supremacy.

The project makes extensive use of archives at the Schomburg Center for Research

in Black Life in Harlem, which houses the archives of Julian Mayfield and many of his

contemporaries. In addition to these primary source documents, this project examines

government documents produced by the extensive surveillance of African American writers

by various government agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department

of State, and United States Information Agency. Finally, the dissertation has benefitted from

a close working relationship with the family of Julian Mayfield and oral histories from

contemporaries which sheds light on the complex interplay of gender and class among black

social movements during the latter half of the twentieth century.

https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/17520/Romine_duke_0066D_14836.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

THE REVOLUTION WILL BE VIDEOTAPED:

MAKING A TECHNOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE LONG 1960s

Peter Sachs Collopy

A DISSERTATION

in

History and Sociology of Science

Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania

Abstract

In the late 1960s, video recorders became portable, leaving the television studio for the art gallery, the psychiatric hospital, and the streets. The technology of recording moving images on magnetic tape, previously of use only to broadcasters, became a tool for artistic expression, psychological experimentation, and political revolution. Video became portable not only materially but also culturally; it could be carried by an individual, but it could also be carried into institutions from the RAND Corporation to the Black Panther Party, from psychiatrists’ offices to art galleries, and from prisons to state-funded media access centers. Between 1967 and1973, American videographers across many of these institutional contexts participated in a common discourse, sharing not only practical knowledge about the uses and maintenance of video equipment, but visions of its social significance, psychological effects, and utopian future. For many, video was a technology which would bring about a new kind of awareness, the communal consiousness that—influenced by theevolutionary philosophy of Henri Bergson—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin referred to as the noosphere and Marshall McLuhan as the global village. Experimental videographers across several fields were also influenced by the psychedelic research of the 1950s and early 1960s, by the development of cybernetics as a science of both social systems and interactions between humans and machines, by anthropology and humanistic psychology, and by revolutionary political movements in the United States and around the world

https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3451&context=edissertations

I WAS PART OF THE VIDEO TAPE REVOLUTION WITH OUR YIPPIE GROUP IN EDMONTON WHO USED PORTABLE VIDEO CAMERA'S TO FILM MEDIA CONFRENCES ON THE FUTURE OF TV IN THE NEW ERA OF CABLE, DEMANDING FREE PUBLIC ACCESS TO CABLE FOR DIY PRODUCTIONS. WHAT CANADIANS GOT WAS A SHORT DUREE OF DIY ON CHANNEL 10 WHICH ONLY EXISTS AS A DEVOLED CABLE PR CHANNEL

PAUL MASON POSTCAPITALISM - A GUIDE TO OUR FUTURE PDF

http://pinguet.free.fr/mason2015.pdf

 

Nostalgia for Infinity: New Space Opera and Neoliberal Globalism

by Jerome Dale Winter

Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English

University of California, Riverside, June 2015

 Dr. Sherryl Vint, Chairperson

This doctoral dissertation argues that contemporary postcolonial literature from

and about the Caribbean, Scotland, and India responds to American and British popular

genre fiction, specifically the subgenre known as New Space Opera, in allegorizing the

neoliberal processes, conditions, and experiences of globalization in the world-system.

My project discusses works by postcolonial authors who have yet to receive theoretical

investigation from this perspective, including Iain M. Banks, Karen Lord, and Nalo

Hopkinson, as well as important transatlantic SF authors whose work has yet to be

discussed in terms of globalism including Samuel R. Delany, M. John Harrison, Gwyneth

Jones, Bruce Sterling, and C.J. Cherryh. I argue that these often critically neglected

space-opera novels reconfigure for our times the conventional trappings of traditional

space opera — such as such as faster-than-light starships, galactic empires, doomsday

weapons, and dramatic encounters with exotic aliens — to reflect and refract the global

dimensions of our neoliberal and postcolonial world-system transfigured by

contemporary technoculture. Consequently, I argue that New Space Opera novels address

and intervene in sociopolitical and historical developments specific to the cultures in

which they are written. New Space Opera written from Scottish, Indian, and Caribbean

perspectives interrogates the interweaving of nation-states and transnational culture,

especially in connection with the rapidly accelerating technological, social, and economic

changes facing our planet today

https://escholarship.org/content/qt2n63z8dv/qt2n63z8dv_noSplash_c7c552d04b9e38b239ea82f5e15fa9b1.pdf

 

The Radical Subject: An Intellectual Biography of Raoul Vaneigem (1934 - Present)

Alastair Hemmens

306 Pages

1 File ▾

 

https://www.academia.edu/8096511/The_Radical_Subject_An_Intellectual_Biography_of_Raoul_Vaneigem_1934_Present

This thesis proposes an intellectual biography of Raoul Vaneigem (1934-Present). Vaneigem was a member of the Situationist International (SI) between 1961 and 1970. Today the SI is widely recognised as one of the significant avant-garde groups to have contributed to the historical events that shook France in May 1968. Most people will have come to Vaneigem through his Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations (1967), which he wrote as a member of the SI and was published just months before the largest wildcat strike in French history. Vaneigem is therefore of interest from a cultural history or history of ideas perspective because his work embodies both a political moment and because it emerged out of debates that are still informing contemporary theory. Moreover, Vaneigem is something of an anomaly in that he has always worked outside and against intellectual and political institutions, he comes from a working-class background and he has lived the great majority of his life in the province of Hainaut, the old industrial heartland of Belgium, where he was born. This makes Vaneigem an outsider in a world that has ostensibly been dominated by the Parisian intellectual elite. More often than not Vaneigem has been dismissed, even vilified, by academics interested in the Situationist International. This is all the more surprising given that his Situationist comrade Guy Debord (1931-1994) has become a cause célèbre among the intellectual left since his death, igniting a veritable publishing industry in France and the English-speaking world. The intention of this thesis is not an attempt to earn Vaneigem the dubious acclaim that has feted Guy Debord these past decades. Rather, it endeavours to contextualise, clarify and bring out the complexity of the life and work of Raoul Vaneigem, making him the focus of a critical commentary that will reassess his place in the field.

File:Vaneigem Raoul The Revolution of Everyday Life.pdf ...

https://monoskop.org › File:Vaneigem_Raoul_The_Rev...

Aug. 11, 2012 — File:Vaneigem Raoul The Revolution of Everyday Life.pdf. From Monoskop. Jump to navigation Jump to search. File; File history; File usage.

Articles by or about Raoul Vaneigem, a Belgian Marxist and one of the key theoreticians of the Situationist International.

https://libcom.org/tags/raoul-vaneigem

Key articles:

The Book Of Pleasures

Basic Banalities (Parts I & II) - Raoul Vaneigem

BUREAU OF PUBLIC SECRETS KEN KNABB SITUATIONIST ARCHIVES

http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/revolution/situationists.htm