GREEN CAPITALI$M

IMF struggling over long-awaited 'green debt swap' push as COP26 nears

 

© Reuters/Yuri Gripas FILE PHOTO: International Monetary Fund logo is seen inside the headquarters at the end of the IMF/World Bank annual meetings

ROME (Reuters) - The IMF is narrowing its push for debt-for-climate swaps to focus on countries without major debt issues and has dropped plans to release a joint proposal with the World Bank before next week's UN climate conference, according to sources familiar with the matter.

In April, International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Kristalina Georgieva said green debt swaps could spur accelerated action on climate change in developing countries, and pledged to work with the World Bank to "advance that option" in time for the United Nations Climate Change Conference 26 in Glasgow.

Her comments drew strong support from civil society groups pushing for solutions addressing both climate change and rising debt burdens facing many low-income countries, which saw debt levels soar to a record $860 billion in 2020.

But the endeavor has run into concerns about the potential impact and utility of such swaps given the small scale of previous swaps, limited interest by creditors, and the slow progress seen on a broader, more straightforward debt restructuring program launched by the Group of 20 last year.

Georgieva hosted a meeting on the swaps issue with officials from the United Nations, World Bank and outside experts in July, but there has been little progress on specific proposals, multiple sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Asked whether the IMF would unveil any concrete plans next week, a spokesperson said the global lender was continuing to "explore ideas" and expected discussions to extend for some time.

"Debt-climate swaps could be a useful complement to existing climate finance instruments, particularly in countries with sustainable debts but limited fiscal space," the spokesperson said. "We are supportive of creating an environment that allows these swaps to flourish and achieve greater scale."

World Bank officials have been skeptical, preferring to focus on changing climate-related policies rather than requiring additional spending from already heavily indebted countries, said sources familiar with the discussions.

IMF officials also raised questions internally about the impact of such targeted instruments, noting some donor countries may prefer grants due to greater simplicity, sources said.

Kevin Gallagher, who leads the Global Development Policy Center at Boston University, said the lack of progress on Georgieva's plans was disappointing.

Gallagher's think tank and two others in June called on G20 economies to launch a new global facility to guarantee new bonds that could be swapped by private creditors for old debt with a haircut, a plan modelled on the so-called Brady bonds issued by Latin American countries in the late 1980s.

"The IMF needs to increase its sense of urgency," Gallagher told Reuters, underscoring the confluence of problems facing countries that were heavily indebted and at risk of climate change-related weather events.

John Morton, the U.S. Treasury Department's top adviser on climate issues, said it was smart to maximize climate benefits in any debt-forgiveness programs, but it was largely a moot point for the United States, which does not hold a lot of sovereign debt of developing countries.

"In order for these debt-for-nature swaps to be meaningful, they need to be done at significant scale, and it's hard to see an easy pathway to that," Morton told Reuters in an interview.

One of the sources familiar with the discussions said debt-for-nature swaps totaled just $1 billion since the 1980s and arrangements were complicated to execute.

"This type of thing does not work on a systemic basis," the source said, noting the slow progress Chad, Zambia and Ethiopia had made under the G20 Common Framework for Debt Treatments.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal in Rome; Editing by Karin Strohecker and Matthew Lewis)

SOCIAL DEMOCRACY (JUST ADD BQ)

Liberal and NDP officials mull over a potential deal

Senior Liberals and New Democrats are kicking around the idea of reaching a deal that would allow the government to go three years without falling on a confidence vote.

© Used with permission of / © St. Joseph Communications. Singh meets with Trudeau on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Nov. 14, 2019 (Sean Kilpatrick/CP)

Stephen Maher

Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh met secretly to discuss the parliamentary session ahead. Officials would not say that they discussed a deal that would see the NDP agree ahead of time to support the government through three budgets, but sources say the idea is being discussed at senior levels inside both parties, although there have been no negotiations.

The idea is not to establish a coalition—with NDP ministers in cabinet—but a deal like the one reached in Ontario in 1985, when then-NDP-leader Bob Rae agreed to vote with Liberals under David Peterson while they worked on an agreed-on agenda for two years. Some people in both parties say such a deal—this one for three years—could remove the regular pressure of confidence votes and allow the parties to work on shared priorities.

There is likely, though, to be pressure within both parties to reject such an arrangement, which would pose political risks for both sides. One complicating issue is the Liberals’ decision, which they announced late Friday, that they intend to appeal a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal order to compensate Indigenous children who were mistreated by the child welfare system, but also to suspend litigation and try to negotiate a resolution.

The political fallout from that announcement, which is happening as I write, could have an impact on the possibility of a supply deal between the two parties.

A senior NDP source, speaking before that decision was released, said the NDP was pushing for the Liberals to let the decision stand. A senior Liberal source confirmed that Singh and Trudeau discussed it at their meeting, and that Singh was pressing for a resolution.

The NDP official, who spoke on condition that they not be identified, said Trudeau and Singh did not actually discuss a potential agreement, but said New Democrats are discussing the possibility internally.

A Liberal source, speaking under the same terms, said the Liberals are also pondering the possibility.

A government official, speaking on condition that their name not be used, said there is no deal, but the Prime Minister is seeking ways to make Parliament work.“There’s no agreement of that nature to do anything like that beyond the PM generally wanting to make Parliament a productive place and wanting to find, early on, to identify areas of common ground, and of course the NDP because there’s a lot that we agree on.”

One downside for Singh would be that he would not necessarily be able to attack Trudeau as often as he did during the September election campaign in the next campaign if the Liberals have been relying for his party for votes for three years. NDPers can point to the bitter recent experience of the British Liberal Democrats, who suffered at the ballot box after forming a coalition government with the Conservatives.

But NDP supporters of an agreement could point to the successful experience of Rae’s New Democrats in Ontario, which ended with Rae becoming premier in a later election.

MPs in all parties would be relieved, though, to be able to focus on parliamentary work without the regular possibility of confidence votes bringing about a snap election, what Rae referred to as the “day-to-day blackmail bulls–t.”

MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, an outspoken, left-leaning Toronto Liberal, said in an interview Friday that he has been pressing for a deal with the NDP. “When I speak to people who are more influential than me, I say we should kind of work on a deal with the NDP,” he said. “It’s no-brainer stuff.” Erskine-Smith believes that the two parties agree on so much that it would be smart to work together.

“There are so many shared priorities, from climate action, to advancing reconciliation, to addressing affordable housing, to addressing the opioid crisis, to PharmaCare, to long-term care, to child care and on and on, that we should establish a working agreement for stability in parliament, and to ensure that we deliver on our shared priorities over the next, hopefully as many as three years.”

Already, though, some business-oriented Liberals are complaining about the leftward tilt of the cabinet announced this week.

An agreement between the parties would not be unprecedented. In 2008 there were behind-the-scenes negotiations that led to the coalition agreement between Liberals, New Democrats and the Bloc Quebecois. The three party leaders announced a deal to work together to bring down Stephen Harper and make Stephane Dion prime minister, but Harper prorogued Parliament and the coalition fell apart before he had to meet the House.

If the NDP, with 25 MPs, agrees to support the government, the Liberals, who have 159 MPs, they would together have 184 MPs, more than enough to avoid defeat in the Commons

Such an agreement would not necessarily be terrible for the Conservatives, who might be glad to know they won’t have to go through another election anytime soon, but could be deflating for the Bloc Quebecois, since the Liberals would not need to negotiate with them to get legislation passed.

CHILD SLAVE LABOR USA
FLDS church, its bishop and a contractor ordered to pay nearly $1 million for making children work without pay for years

AND THEY ENSLAVED THEIR SOULS TO SERVE THEM WHEN THEY RULE THEIR OWN PLANET IN THE AFTERLIFE

A federal judge in Utah ordered the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) and two of its affiliates to pay nearly $1 million for allegedly violating child labor laws when they employed minors on a ranch without paying them for years.

BREAK AWAY CULT  OF POLYGAMIST MORMONS CONNECTED TO BOUNTIFUL COLONY IN BC

© Rick Bowmer/AP Lyle Jeffs leaves the federal courthouse in Salt Lake City on January 21, 2015, after he was sentenced for his role in carrying out an elaborate food stamp fraud scheme and for escaping home confinement while awaiting trial.

By Amy Simonson, CNN 

The decision comes after a 2012 video showed women and children working to harvest pecans at a farm in southern Utah. The US Department of Labor had filed a complaint, accusing bishop Lyle Jeffs and his business contractor, Brian Jessop, of illegally hiring the children.

U.S. District Court Judge Jill Parrish on Wednesday ordered Jeffs to pay $312,079.30 in back wages and $312,079.30 in damages, according to court documents. Another $281,336.32 in back wages were also ordered for Jeffs, Jessop and the church.

The U.S. Department of Labor alleged Paragon Contractors -- the company Jessop ran at the time -- used children from FLDS to work on the pecan farm without pay from 2008 to 2013, court documents from 2019 show.

Jeffs and Jessop allegedly failed to document records of the hours worked on the ranch, refused to provide names of employees and didn't respond to subpoenas, the documents show.

"Consequently, there are no precise records reflecting the specific number of uncompensated hours worked by children for Defendants in violation of the child labor provisions of the (Fair Labor Standards Act)," the court documents say. "The children were part of the elusive, tight-knit, and very controlled FLDS polygamist enclave closely linked to Paragon."

CNN has tried to contact Lyle Jeffs, FLDS, Paragon Contractors, and Jessop for comment, but was unable to reach them.

Lyle Jeffs is brother to Warren Jeffs, who was convicted in a 2011 sexual assault and aggravated assault case of two girls ages 12 and 15. Warren Jeffs was sentenced to life in prison plus 20 years and is reported to lead the church from there.

In 2017, Lyle Jeffs was sentenced to 57 months in federal prison for his role in food stamp fraud and for escaping house arrest while awaiting trial.

FLDS is a religious sect that broke away from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon Church, over the practice of polygamy.

The sect as an estimated 10,000 members -- most of whom live in Colorado City, Arizona and Hildale, Utah. The group also has followers near Eldorado, Texas, and in South Dakota, Colorado, Nevada, British Columbia and Mexico.

Steven Guilbeault's long climb from tree hugger to Liberal environment minister

Anja Karadeglija

© Provided by National Post Steven Guilbeault is taken into custody by Toronto Police after environmentalists scaled the CN Tower on July 16, 2001

Steven Guilbeault’s first environmental protest took place when he was around five years old, in his hometown of La Tuque, Que.

He lived in a house that backed onto a forest where he used to play, and one day he saw developers removing trees. Panicked, he ran inside to his mother and asked what he should do; she responded that if he climbed a tree, they couldn’t cut it down.

“I climbed it and stayed there for hours and hours, and that day, they didn’t cut down that tree,” Guilbeault recounted in a 2017 Radio-Canada interview. “That was the beginning.”

Now 45 years later, following decades of environmental activism and several arrests, Guilbeault is Canada’s new environment minister.

It is an appointment that has startled, and even frightened, some who fear that the “Green Jesus of Montreal” — as he was dubbed by Quebec media — is going to clamp down hard on the country’s oil, gas and energy sector.

Calgary Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner was the latest to attack him when she said on Friday that the country needed policies that help spur economic growth and lower greenhouse gas emissions in a way that “leaves no one behind.”

“Justin Trudeau could have appointed an environment minister that understands this point. Instead, Justin Trudeau appointed an ideological anti-energy activist,” she said in a statement, claiming that Guilbeault had fought “to shut down entire industries.”

Guilbeault grew up in Quebec under what he described as “modest” circumstances. His father was a butcher and Guilbeault learned English from his mother, who was of Irish origin. He got involved in student politics in high school, helping to organize a student strike to push school administration to resolve a school transport strike.

He was inspired by his uncle, a missionary in Haiti, and whose suggestion led Guilbeault’s parents to adopt one of his sisters from that country. Guilbeault went on to study political science and theology at the Université de Montréal.

He’s pointed to the link between environmentalism and religion in interviews, talking about how prophets thousands of years ago called for humanity to protect the environment around them. Later, he became a prominent figure and voice for the environment in the province.

In 1994, the Montreal Gazette published a story on a youth leaders’ conference in which moderators behaved in bizarre and authoritarian ways to see how the students reacted. “Some of the participants, like (Steven Guilbeault), a political science and theology student at the Universite de Montreal, questioned the moderators’ tactics,” the article reads.

“They charged that the approach was not constructive; they tried to foment revolution. They failed.”

A year earlier, Guilbeault had co-founded the environmental organization Équiterre. Elizabeth Hunter, his co-founder, said its origin was both in youth work during the Earth Summit in Brazil, and in public interest research groups that were founded by Ralph Nader, which both Guilbeault and Hunter were involved in.

“We were on the first board of directors and it was a very scrappy little organization that had no money and that sort of slowly cobbled together bits of funding,” and then over the years has “grown and strengthened and rooted itself in Quebec society and issues,” Hunter said in an interview.

One of her earliest memories of Guilbeault was at a retreat when Équiterre was being set up. “And I remember distinctly him explaining climate change to me, and this would have been in around 1993, and it was just not on most people’s radar at all,” she remembered. “At the time it was new to me… he really was on the early edge of understanding climate change and what it was going to mean for us.”

© Reuters Greenpeace activists Chris Holden, top, and Steven Guilbeault hang from cables near the the top of Toronto’s CN Tower in 2001 after displaying a banner protesting the lack of action by Canada and the U.S. on environmental issues.

He joined Greenpeace in 1997, a move that meant over the next decade he would be regularly mentioned in the news media — as a spokesperson on environmental policy, but sometimes also as the newsmaker. He was arrested four times as a result of various protests meant to draw attention to environmental issues.

That same year, he and four other activists blocked the opening of a storage container at an electrical generating station to try to stop a ship from unloading coal. “Steven Guilbeault of Montreal brought food and water with him and was prepared to stay suspended from the huge receptacle, called a hopper, for as long as it takes for the environmental group to make its point,” the Canadian Press reported.

In 2000, Guilbeault and several other activists fastened themselves to a piece of Suncor equipment to stop the 440-ton coker from going to Fort McMurray, Alta. The RCMP brought in two rented cherry pickers from Edmonton “and plucked Steven Guilbeault … from atop of the coker,” the Canadian Press reported.

In a later interview, he had nothing but praise for the RCMP. “They were extremely nice to us. They offered us food and gave us coffee and tried really hard to make everything as pleasant as possible,” the Edmonton Sun quoted him as saying.

In 2002, Guilbeault was one of the organizers of a stunt in which activists climbed then-Alberta Premier Ralph Klein’s house to place solar panels on top.

But Guilbeault’s most famous protest came in 2001, when he and British activist Chris Holden climbed the CN Tower in Toronto to protest a lack of action on climate change, after the U.S. and Canada failed to ratify the 1997 Kyoto agreement to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. They hung a banner that said “Canada and Bush — Climate Killers.”

When he first ran for office in 2019, Guilbeault hung a big photo of the CN Tower stunt in his campaign office. He told the National Post at the time that “in many ways… I’m still this guy who climbed the CN Tower.”

Guilbeault added that for him, “civil disobedience was never a goal in and of itself. It was just a tool. And now I’m using different tools.”

He left Greenpeace in 2007. By then he was well-known in Quebec; the Gazette wrote at the time that he “has such a high profile in Quebec politics and the Canadian environmental movement that some argue he long ago became ‘bigger than Greenpeace’ in terms of his impact and credibility.”

Though Guilbeault was approached by multiple political parties to get involved in politics, he declined because his children were still young at the time. Instead, he moved back to Équiterre, where he stayed until 2018. He told Radio-Canada he had wanted to work on something more local and more solution-oriented. That also meant working with governments on environmental issues, work that wasn’t a natural fit for the activism-oriented Greenpeace.

Guilbeault’s contemporaries in the environment movement describe him as a good communicator and a pragmatist. Patrick Bonin, a Greenpeace Canada spokesman who has collaborated with Guilbeault on various initiatives over the years, said in an interview there is no doubt about Guilbeault’s conviction and commitment to fighting climate change.

“He knows what’s at stake with the issues. He knows he can work with businesses, with unions, with environmental groups, with politicians, so in that way he’s always been the one trying to build bridges,” Bonin said

.

© Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press Prime Minister Justin Trudeau raises the hand of Steven Guilbeault during an event to launch Guilbeault’s candidacy for the Liberal party of Canada, in Montreal on July 10, 2019.

Guilbeault is someone who can bring people together, Bonin said. “He has the capacity to make allies out of what could be seen as opponents at first glance.”

Hunter said Guilbeault has always been “quite determined but in a quiet way.” When Guilbeault was at Greenpeace, attention-grabbing stunts like climbing the CN Tower were important because climate change wasn’t on people’s radar, she noted. Hunter, who also briefly worked with Guilbeault at Greenpeace, said his approach has always been multi-faceted, in which he focuses on a having a deep knowledge about the issues.

“I can just picture him as we’re talking, looking things up on databases, and making sure that he had the right information. I think he had that sort of nerdy interest in having the right information, but also admirable ability to speak to a really wide range of issues in the environment.”

Équiterre co-founder Laure Waridel said Guilbeault is someone who is oriented toward finding solutions.

“Actually, it’s really funny for us here in Quebec to hear that the premier of Alberta is presenting Steven as a radical because here, among environmentalists, many people present him as not radical enough,” and too quick to compromise, she said.

In 2019, Guilbeault finally made the jump to politics, running as the Liberal candidate in the Montreal riding of Laurier-Sainte-Marie. Following the election, Guilbeault had to switch gears from environmental issues, given his new appointment as Heritage minister.

He had plans for three separate pieces of legislation meant to impose unprecedented regulations on the likes of Google and Facebook. But his approach drew controversy when an amendment to Bill C-10 to modernize the Broadcasting Act led critics to charge it would violate freedom of expression. Despite months of outrage that led the opposition to stall the bill in Parliament, Guilbeault refused to overturn the amendment and exempt user content from CRTC regulation.

That criticism didn’t seem to put him off from moving forward with a bill to tackle online harms that he told an industry conference would be even more controversial than C-10. Critics have since sounded the alarm about the government’s plans for that bill, outlining a number of ways the proposed scheme to regulate illegal social media content would violate Canadians’ constitutional and privacy rights.

As of Oct. 26, those bills are no longer Guilbeault’s babies. As the new environment minister, he’s back on familiar ground, though his arrival at COP26 will be a little different than when he attended the inaugural conference in Berlin in 1995, when he could only afford to stay in a gymnasium in East Berlin.

Bonin, who has been at previous COP meetings with Guilbeault, said “those are the moments where Steven has been at his best, I would say, working on complex issues with many countries and positions and high stakes.”

At U.N.'s COP26 climate summit, Indigenous voices are calling for more than lip service

Erik Ortiz
Sat, October 30, 2021

Ron Turney, a water protector of the White Earth Nation tribe, has been diligently photographing what he says shows the effects of drilling fluid spills and an aquifer breach in northern Minnesota, where a Canadian energy company finished replacement of a crude oil pipeline in September.

The Line 3 replacement project, first announced by Enbridge in 2014, had been fiercely opposed by Native American tribes, environmental activists and celebrities — who more recently urged President Joe Biden to yank its permits — arguing the pipeline would only aggravate climate change and threaten waters where the Ojibwe people harvest wild rice. Already, he said, he's seen chemicals and muck foul what should be pristine wetlands and water.

"It's really frustrating watching a river die out here in front of your eyes," said Turney, who is a member of the Indigenous Environmental Network, a coalition of grassroots groups and environmental justice activists.

Release of drilling fluid chemicals has been ongoing near the Mississippi River in northern Minnesota. (Ron Turney)


He plans to bring his concerns to an international stage at a panel during the two-week United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26, which starts Sunday in Glasgow, Scotland. After last year's annual conference was scrapped because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2021 event is drawing heads of state and world leaders, such as Biden and members of his administration, including John Kerry, the nation's first climate envoy, and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American in that position.

At stake will be whether the nearly 200 nations can agree on cutting greenhouse gas emissions that are contributing to a rapidly warming planet and catastrophic climate-related disasters, with the goal of reaching "net zero" emissions by midcentury. But while the issues that diplomats debate will have consequences for the entire planet, the lesser-heard voices of the Indigenous people, who have historically been excluded from conversations about managing their ancestral lands, plan to make their presence known through groups like the Indigenous Peoples Caucus and Cultural Survival, an Indigenous-led nongovernmental organization, and panels like the one in which Turney is participating.

Some groups had expressed difficulty this year traveling to Scotland amid Covid travel restrictions. One-third of small island states and territories in the Pacific region, where rising sea levels imperil their very existence, are reportedly planning to not send any government leaders, The Guardian reported last week.

"It's frustrating jumping through hoops, and they give us the lip service and some acknowledgment," Turney said of the conference, "but we want real policy change that truly acknowledges and respects our beliefs."

Tom Goldtooth, the executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, said in an email from Glasgow ahead of COP26 that Indigenous groups will be making a point to say the emission-cutting targets that have been touted by governments are meaningless if dependence on coal and other fossil fuels is not abandoned.

Tom Goldtooth speaks in front of the White House

"We will be demanding the rights of Indigenous peoples to be fully recognized," Goldtooth, who is of Diné and Dakota ancestry, said.

The struggle of Indigenous peoples, who are often on the front lines of the climate crisis, exemplified by the deforestation in the Amazon rainforest and wildfires ravaging tribal lands in the western United States, will be emphasized at COP26. Indigenous leaders and "traditional knowledge-holders" whose practices can be useful in mitigating and adapting to the effects of a changing climate will be featured at some events and at panels that are typically attended by climate activists, academic researchers and celebrities.

The Indigenous perspective can't be diminished, the groups say, with the U.N. highlighting that while some 370 million people define themselves as Indigenous, or nearly 5 percent of the global population, they occupy and oversee a substantial portion of land, about 20 percent.

In 2007, the U.N. adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a nonbinding resolution, that recognizes their human rights and fundamental freedoms. But advocates and academics warn that these groups throughout the world who are finding their own solutions in the climate crisis can't do it in a silo, especially when many of them don't have the power or financial influence to advocate for themselves.

"There are opportunities for Indigenous peoples to be recognized at COP26 — if only states and stakeholders are willing to listen and take action accordingly," said Kristen Carpenter, a professor and director of the American Indian Law Program at the University of Colorado.

Native American activists and environmental organizations say they are counting on the U.S. delegation to ensure Indigenous communities are at the forefront.

This month, when Kerry addressed a conference of the National Congress of American Indians, the nation's oldest and largest tribal organization, he painted a dire picture for Indigenous communities: The effects of climate change are threatening lands and livelihoods.

"Indigenous ways of life that have been sustained across the globe for thousands of years are also on the front lines," he said.

"Your resilience is critical for the world," Kerry said, adding the Earth's survival is "inextricably tied to having the leadership of Indigenous peoples in our voice."

That recognition, while important, needs to be backed up by action, said Kyle Whyte, a University of Michigan professor focusing on the environment and sustainability and a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. He co-authored a report published Thursday in the journal Science that found centuries of forced migration of Native people by European and American settlers has left them on marginal lands more exposed to hazards posed by climate change.

He said tribal nations and Indigenous organizations' hands are tied from taking drastic measures or opposing projects on their territories, often getting pushback from government agencies and energy companies.

After the Line 3 replacement project was completed, snaking more than 300 miles in Minnesota and cutting across tribal reservations and treaty lands, Native American activists and supporters marched in Washington this month to demand Biden take a more aggressive stance against fossil fuel projects.

As the protests grew tense and led to dozens of arrests and an attempt to occupy the Bureau of Indian Affairs, calls escalated from demonstrators to amplify Indigenous leaders' voices.

It's an example of Native people being fed up — and a warning to the "current generation of privileged people who haven't learned their lessons," said Whyte, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

"If countries don't get on board with us, leaving out the people who steward a lot of the lands, it's not just a moral issue anymore," he added. "It will have a devastating effect on the speed at which the rest of the world will get to sustainability."

FBI using Navajo language in campaign targeting hate crimes


Fri, October 29, 2021, 

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — The FBI has begun a campaign to use the Navajo language on social media to combat hate crimes.

The federal enforcement agency said Friday that it has an ad in the Navajo language on Facebook that encourages victims and witnesses to contact the FBI, which also has posted messages in the Navajo language against hate crime on Twitter.

“Our message is clear and simple: Hate has no place on the Navajo Nation or anywhere else,” said Special Agent in Charge Raul Bujanda of the Albuquerque FBI Division. “For those more comfortable communicating in Navajo, we hope this outreach encourages them to call us or go online if they are aware of a hate crime.”

The FBI said it also has translated into Navajo numerous posters seeking information abou unsolved homicides and missing person cases.

'No idea my life would be threatened,' says Calgary professor after thousands of hate messages

Terri Trembath

© Terri Trembath/CBC

 linda manyguns, associate vice-president of indigenization and decolonization at Mount Royal University, shows some of her personal ceremonial and smudging items.

There is no name on the frosted window of her office, no signage pointing to the office's location on the Mount Royal University campus. Panic buttons have been installed, and security guards do daily area checks.

This is work life for linda manyguns since her office opened at the end of August.

manyguns is the associate vice-president of indigenization and decolonization at the university in southwest Calgary. manyguns is a Blackfoot woman, born on the Tsuut'ina Nation and registered at Siksika Nation.

In July, manyguns publicly announced she would be using only lower case letters for her name, in addition to not using capital letters except to acknowledge the Indigenous struggle for recognition.

"I had anticipated having to argue my position. I was ready to do that. I had no idea that my life would be threatened," manyguns said.

"To show solidarity with others who are facing the same issues as Aboriginal people, I wanted to purposely and publicly join that initiative," manyguns said.

It is something other academics and writers have done over the years, including author and activist bell hooks and poet e.e. cummings.

When manyguns did it, interview requests came in from various media outlets, both local and international, she said.

Then the responses came.

There were emails, she said, filled with vile and horrid words, calling her every derogatory name in the book. There were over 3,000 messages.

"I had no idea of the vulgar, vulgar nature of these. The people that feel that they have the right to carry on this way, they're cowards."

Michael Quinn, vice-provost and associate vice-president, academic, at MRU, said he cried when he saw the messages.

"The level of personal attack is beyond anything reasonable. We expect and want to have dialogue. We don't expect everyone to agree on ideas, but they need to happen in a civil dialogue. They need to happen with respect," Quinn said.

manyguns is now working on a poster campaign dealing directly with colonization.

"Things that say, 'if you think Aboriginal people get everything for free, you have a colonized mind,'" manyguns said.

manyguns said other post-secondary institutions in the province are adopting the campaign as well.

She said she expects more pushback, or what she referred to as "response," and called it a measure of success.

"You know, you have to expect it. Not by the institution itself, but the very job you're taking on requires that you put yourself into that position, or you're not doing the job right."

Calgary police say they are investigating the messages sent to manyguns through its hate crimes unit.

Mohawks raise the Canadian flag again: ‘You can’t lower a flag on Nov. 11 unless you raise it’
Joe O'Connor 

© Provided by National Post “We didn’t want to have the flags lowered forever.” Ray Deer at the cenotaph of the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 219, in Kahnawake, Quebec, on October 28, 2021.

Ray Deer answered the phone on a late October day and heard the news that Bo Curotte, a Vietnam War veteran, had succumbed to cancer. Deer is president of the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 219 in Kahnawake Mohawk territory, and such phone calls are an ever more regular occurrence.

Deer doesn’t dread the calls, mind you. He understands they are a part of life. The 100 or so Mohawk veterans still left in the First Nation community on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River are all getting on in years. Some were in the Korean War or Vietnam, while others were in the Gulf War and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“Compared to other places in Quebec, you don’t see as many veterans as we have here in our territory,” he said.

Family members of the deceased often relay the message of a former soldier’s passing to the United States Army veteran, who, in turn, calls the branch at 219 River Road, as he did upon getting word about Curotte, and instructs the building’s caretaker to lower the flag in front of the legion to half-mast.

The next death is just as sure as the sunrise, and understanding that a tribute needs to be paid to each departed veteran is one of the reasons Deer and the Kahnawake elders resolved that after keeping the flags at half-mast for a 30-day mourning period in the wake of the discovery of 215 unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, it was time to raise them back up again.

“We didn’t want to have the flags lowered forever,” Deer said. “Quebec and Canada have never told us, as Mohawks, what to do, and so we put the flag back up when we felt it was the right time.”
Colby Cosh: Who will decide when Canada can raise its flag again?
Most Canadians say it was right to lower flags — but now raise them

Meanwhile, the flags on all federal government buildings across the river in Montreal and almost everywhere else in Canada remain at half-mast, as they have since May 30, and they will “until further notice,” according to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Canadian Heritage.

But Trudeau’s symbolic gesture without an end date is about to collide with a fixed date, Nov. 11 — better known as Remembrance Day — and the rituals associated with it. Together with poppies, two minutes of silence, the laying of wreaths and the playing of the Last Post, lowering the national flag to half-mast at sunrise and keeping it there until sunset is an integral part of remembering.

“The rituals are crucial,” retired Gen. Rick Hillier said. “They are part of how we learn, and how we remember.”

But if the flag’s already at half-mast, the ritual can’t be performed, which would be unforgivable, Hillier said. Such was the former chief of the defence staff and Afghanistan veteran’s dismay that he pulled his car over to the side of the road while en route from the capital region to Montebello, Que., to say his soldier’s piece about what is shaping up to be a Remembrance Day fight over the flag.

“You can’t lower the flag on Nov. 11 unless you raise it,” he said. “We are past our best-sell-by date on this, and it is time to put the flags back to full-mast.”

Hillier supported Trudeau’s decision to lower the flags, but to paraphrase his present take: enough is enough. This isn’t just some old, lone wolf veteran popping off, either. A large majority of Canadians polled in mid-September said that lowering the flags was an appropriate response to the discovery of the graves in Kamloops, but a somewhat smaller majority also said it was time to raise them again.

And here we are, six weeks later, at half-mast, caught between recognizing a national tragedy and paying tribute to those who, in some cases, sacrificed their lives in defence of their country.

© Peter J. Thompson/National Post The Canadian flag continues to fly at half mast, like this monument at the Hamilton Warplane Museum, out of respect for children who died and suffered in the Canadian Residential School system, October 28, 2021.

Remembrance Day was originally called Armistice Day. It was first observed in 1919 after King George V called for all countries of the British Empire to observe two minutes of silence on Nov. 11 at 11 a.m.

“At a given signal, which can be easily arranged to suit the circumstances of each locality, I believe that we shall all gladly interrupt our business and pleasure whatever it may be and unite in this simple service of silence and remembrance,” the King wrote in a letter that was received by governments and carried in newspapers across the empire.

Canada lost 66,000 men in the First World War, and another 170,000 returned home wounded, out of a population of eight million. Every town, village, family, indeed, every Canadian was, in some way, touched by the war, and at 11 a.m. on Nov. 11, the country stood still. People in the streets, their homes or cars, and workers at factories, offices and farms all stood silent for two minutes.

“It was a deafening silence,” said Tim Cook, resident historian at the Canadian War Museum and author of 12 books. “If you think about the sounds of the guns of the Western Front — a sonic assault — and then if you think that there were over 500,000 Canadian veterans, and what they would have thought of the silence, it was a hugely important moment.”

There were loud injustices amid the quiet, of course, indicative of an age when the residential school system had already been in operation for decades. Even highly decorated First Nation veterans, such as famed Ojibwa sniper Francis (Peggy) Pegahmagabow, came back to a country where he couldn’t vote, was not considered a citizen and couldn’t access his military pension.

“When he was in uniform, he was considered an equal,” Adrian Hayes, author of a book on Pegahmagabow, once told CBC News. But not so much when he came home.

In the years that followed 1919, the two minutes of silence would be joined by other rituals of remembrance, including the lowering of flags to half-mast, but each aspect of what became the Remembrance Day ceremony that Canadians are familiar with today grew integral to the whole.

Lose any one of them, and there is a risk that what gets lost is the meaning of each, whether that is pinning a poppy to one’s lapel or understanding that a lowered flag is a gesture that reaches across the generations.

“We could probably never do enough for our veterans, based on what they have done for us,” Hillier said.

The dead can’t talk. But the living can at least remember them.

© Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press/File Retired Gen. Rick Hillier supported Justin Trudeau’s decision to lower the Canadian flags, but believes it is time they go back up.

Hillier said he “loves” Remembrance Day, because it reminds him of why he wanted to become a soldier: to be a part of something bigger than himself.

“I try to live out Nov. 11 as it was intended: to remember, to pay tribute and to learn,” he said.

Back in Kahnawake, Ray Deer talks about his life’s trajectory. Before he joined the army, his view of anyone who wasn’t First Nation was that they were out to steal his land or cause him some other harm.

“I thought every non-native person was ready to discriminate against First Nation people,” he said.

The army opened his eyes to other cultures. He found that some people were bad, but many more were good, and many simply had no real clue about the past, or of the inequities many First Nation people face in the present.

There had yet to be a punch-to-the-heart national moment of mourning of the kind that followed the discovery of the unmarked graves, first in B.C., and, a month later, near the former Marieval Indian Residential School east of Regina.

Deer has had conversations since then with his non-native friends.

“I have told them, ‘It is not your fault, in this time, what happened in the past, and if you acknowledge that something was done wrong — that’s what you need to do,’” he said.

Deer’s older brother, Ricky, was sent to a Jesuit-run residential school in Spanish, Ont. He came home, but not everyone did.

“They are going to find more graves,” Deer said. “But I think, with the flag, Canada has to answer the question, how much is enough?”

History moves forward, and so have the Kahnawake Mohawk. The legion is planning a Thanksgiving-style feast for the Saturday before Remembrance Day, and community veterans on Nov. 11 will take part in a ceremony at the local school.

Stories will get told, lessons taught and the flags will be lowered to half-mast, where they belong on Nov. 11, and where they will remain until sunset.

• Email: joconnor@postmedia.com | Twitter: oconnorwrites

 

Aaron Neville ribs Kyrsten Sinema's denim-vest-at-work look

PETER WEBER THE WEEK

OCTOBER 27, 2021

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) caused quite a stir on Tuesday, and not only for forcing her party to abandon higher tax rates on wealthy Americans and corporations. This time it was Sinema's less-than-business-casual sartorial choices as she presided over the Senate.

The criticism of Sinema's cutoff denim jacket ran the gamut, from people who found it unprofessional or unfashionable to those who saw it as another opportunity to criticize Sinema's infuriating policy preferences or enigmatic political persona. After all, "this is the most visible member of the Senate who is currently involved in highest-stakes negotiations on legislation that could shape the future of the country showing up dressed for some kind of Scottsdale version of a biker rally," Bill Goodykoontz writes at The Arizona Republic.

But sometimes a vest is just a vest, which is why singer Aaron Neville's response on Wednesday afternoon gets a special mention.

"Do her clothes matter? Not a bit," Goodykoontz writes near the end of his long column on Sinema's denim vest. "Does whatever message she's sending matter? Yeah, it does." He notes it is generally "gross" for people, especially men, to comment on what a woman wears, and concedes that "as someone who has basically worn a T-shirt and jeans to work for years, I have no standing to critique anyone else's fashion sense." But while "it would be better for everyone if people were talking about, and media were covering, what Sinema is really up to, not what she's wearing," Goodykoontz concludes, "here we are, sleeveless and speculating."

Climate protesters flood Rome amid G-20 summit


Summer Meza, News editor
Sat, October 30, 2021,

Protesters in Rome ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP via Getty Images

Combating climate change is a major focus at this weekend's G-20 summit in Rome — not only among the world leaders gathered, but for the scores of protesters who have flooded the streets to call for stronger action.

Global leaders meeting for the first time in two years have an ambitious agenda for the weekend, and started by all endorsing a global minimum corporate tax. The focus then turned to climate change, a welcome subject for the estimated thousands of protesters in Italy who are pushing for even stronger government commitments to climate justice, reports CNN. Italian authorities bolstered security measures to account for the weekend's protesters, blocking traffic around the G-20 venue and deploying 5,000 police officers to the area. Climate change activists blocking a main road near the G20 venue were forcibly removed by police on Saturday morning, police told CNN. In addition to climate protesters, demonstrators also include vaccine equity advocates, and workers who lost their jobs to globalization.

Several public figures have chimed in on climate measures related to the weekend's summits: UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said G-20 is a chance to "put things on track" in avoiding "climate catastrophe," while U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson asserted there is "no chance" leaders will so quickly land on an agreement to limit climate change to 1.5 degrees Celsius.


After the G-20 events, President Biden will head to COP26, a United Nations climate summit, where he will give a major address on climate issues. Read more at CNN.