He took his school to the Supreme Court in the 1980s for pulling 'objectionable' books. Here's his message to young people

Nicole Chavez - CNN

When school officials in New York removed 11 books they disliked from library shelves, 17-year-old Steven Pico joined a legal fight that would eventually take him and his school to the US Supreme Court.

In 1976, Pico was a high school student at the Island Trees Union Free School District in Levittown, New York when the school board ordered the removal of several books from the junior high and high school libraries, including “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut and “Best Short Stories of Negro Writers” edited by Langston Hughes. The books were part of a list of “objectionable” books that some board members obtained months before when they attended a conference by the conservative group Parents of New York United. When Pico learned about the board’s actions, he and a few other students filed a lawsuit in 1977 with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union to try to get the books back into the libraries.

This month marks 40 years since Pico’s fight in court ended as the Supreme Court recognized the First Amendment rights of students in Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico and ruled that school boards may not remove books because they dislike the ideas contained in those titles.

But for Pico, now 62 years old and who became a painter, editor and advocate for First Amendment rights, the case continues to resonate as America faces a new wave of book challenges.

In the past year, authors of color exploring history, racism or their own experiences in America have been targeted by a record number of challenges. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called on his state’s school boards to remove books he described as “pornography” and school districts across the country have pulled books reported as “inappropriate” from their library shelves.

“I believe that schools have a responsibility to teach all ideas, not just the ideas with which they agree,” Pico said.

Pico spoke with CNN about how the landmark 1982 Supreme Court case impacted his life and whether efforts to ban books in the United States have changed through the decades. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why was book censorship such an important issue for you as a high school student that you decided to challenge your school district in court?

I think the freedom to read a book is the foundation of our democracy. It’s under attack today. Basic freedoms are under attack around the world and inside the United States. It was the same in 1977 and it’s the same right now. When people ban books, the victims here are the books, the ideas, the students, the teachers, the librarian, and our form of democracy. What happened in my school district was political. Schools and school board members have an obligation to teach all ideas in the United States, not just the ideas that align with their politics.

Six years passed before the Supreme Court ruled on the case. You graduated high school and even college but you did not forget about the case. How was your life during that time as the lead plaintiff?

It was busy. I held a press conference in 1977 when I was 17 years old with author Kurt Vonnegut Jr (whose book “Slaughterhouse-Five” had been removed from library shelves) and we announced the lawsuit against the school. I graduated a few months later, went to Haverford College in Pennsylvania and got my degree. I took time throughout college to do interviews, to raise money for the case, do speeches and raise awareness for the case. After I graduated college my first job was at the National Coalition Against Censorship where I worked for three additional years to try to change laws and put policies in place to prevent (book) removals in the future.

Prior to this interview, you had mentioned that many of your classmates were apathetic or had other priorities like getting into college and that for the most part, you didn’t feel supported.

When the lawsuit became public, I didn’t see a lot of support and even my own parents had a lot of doubts. They were not particularly supportive of the lawsuit because they thought it was perceived as troublemaking and that I might not get into college or I might not get certain scholarships that I was eligible for because I was taking a stand that in my community was very unpopular.

I think today students are much more sophisticated. They have more knowledge about their rights as citizens. I actually have much more hope today that these battles are going to be fought and won. I know there are young people out there right now who are forming book clubs, groups where they’re going to actually read banned books and decide for themselves. I know there’s young people standing up, fighting these attempts at book censorship and that’s really encouraging because that did not happen when I was in school.

Most students were just simply unaware of their rights but today, young people are acutely aware of their rights. I’m really proud of them. I know that they’re not going to just sit back and take this.

Students are getting organized and are fighting back against book bans in many ways. For example, there are two students in Missouri who sued their school district earlier this year over the removal of books that are by and about communities of color and LGBTQ people. What is your message to them?

One thing I was told in the 1970s was that “this is going to be the most important thing you do in your entire life.” Whether that’s true or not, I want the young people out there to hear what I heard and know that their advocacy is not just about their rights, but it’s about all students’ rights across the United States.

Conservative views are playing a role in the current efforts to remove certain books from school libraries. Some books are being singled out by politicians for allegedly having “profane, vulgar or indecent” content. Has the debate over books in America changed 40 years after your case reached the Supreme Court?

There is a political agenda behind book censorship. At least one political party in America is trying to scare parents and trying to influence how they vote in the upcoming elections. I think local and state politicians in the Republican Party right now are trying to galvanize their voters by putting fear into parents whose votes they may have lost in the last election. I think this is a scare tactic. Having local politicians decide which books cannot be used in schools was precisely the situation I confronted in 1976. No one in my community in New York, in 1976, objected to any of the 11 books that were removed and banned. No student no teacher, no librarian, no parent, no member of my entire community, which included four high schools ever complained about any of the books that were ultimately banned. My school board went outside the community found a list of so called objectionable books. They did not read the books in their entirety. They used a handful of excerpts, a handful of words, a handful of vulgarities to make these books look bad. You have to judge books in their entirety and that’s not what these politicians and school boards are doing, then and now.

You are saying that throughout the decades, America is still having the same or a very similar debate over books and censorship. How can we move forward? Is there a solution to this long lasting dispute?

I think the solution in America is always to have more ideas and to have more discussion and to have more free speech. It’s not controlling what people read and think, we have to do this the American way. Young people and older people need to go out and buy banned books. They need to make judgments for themselves. They need to read the books in their entirety. They need to adopt a banned book.

To think that children today are naive, is foolish. They go home, they turn on the news, or they read it on their phone… they know what’s going on around the world. They know that the ideas that they hear are serious, complex and need to be understood. I think these controversial personal stories, like drug abuse, racial discrimination, anti-Semitism, violence against youths and adults because of their sexual preferences, these things need to be discussed. Young people need to be prepared to deal with these issues when they turn 18 and when they leave high school. I think the best place to discuss these issues is in the classroom, where they can discuss it with their peers, and there’s a trained professional there to help them understand what they’re reading and why.

Office divergence: Tech workers starting to return while government studies options
James Bagnall - Yesterday 



© Provided by Ottawa CitizenThe empty shells in the capital region's downtown core. Their fate hangs in the return of government employees.

Since the beginning of the pandemic the capital region’s office market has verged on bizarre. Most tenants sent their workers home and continued paying for largely unused real estate.

The result is that office space is still more than 90 per cent leased, one of the best such ratios in the country. Yet, it has the feel of a conjuring trick.

Yes, landlords are getting paid but for how long?

The underlying assumption has long been that employees would eventually return to the office, and that working remotely full-time was an anomaly caused by the unpredictable trajectory of the coronavirus. But now, with so many people socializing in restaurants and bars in their free time despite the prevalence of COVID-19, returning to the office appears less a matter of public safety and more like resistance to resuming pre-pandemic work patterns.

The longer the delay, the more entrenched working from home becomes, with potentially profound knock-on effects throughout the local economy, but especially in the downtown core.

“If you had asked me anytime during the past two years when I thought office work would resume, I’d have got it wrong every time,” said Martin Vandewouw, president of KRP Properties, which services more than three million square feet of office space in Kanata’s tech park.


Martin Vandewouw, president of KRP Properties, says it’s very difficult to predict when workers will return en masse to offices in the National Capital Region. LinkedIn photo

Vandewouw convinced his own complement of nearly 30 inside workers to return to KRP’s office towers last autumn, arguing that since KRP is in the business of providing real estate services to office workers, then “we had better walk the walk,” he said.

The timing of the great return for everyone else — if it happens — has acquired special resonance in the capital region. No other urban area in the country has embraced remote work with as much enthusiasm, leading many to assume to it’s become a permanent feature of our economy.

In the balance is the credibility of the city’s long-term plan to accommodate population growth, which assumes people will want to live in dense corridors along transit lines. The fate of the transit system itself is also at stake, along with hundreds of downtown businesses. Despite a re-opening economy, restaurants and retailers are still bleeding cash, waiting impatiently for businesses and dozens of federal departments and agencies to decide how they will deploy their talent on a permanent basis.

Other cities across the country are grappling with the impact of empty offices as well, but not to the same extent.

Statistics Canada estimated in May that nearly half the region’s workforce continued to work from home — 46 per cent in Ottawa and nearly 40 per cent in Gatineau. The same survey showed that elsewhere in the country, the work-from-home contingent was less than 28 per cent of the workforce.

The popularity of remote work is mirrored in the makeup of each city’s workforce. Urban areas heavily populated with government employees, white-collar professionals and financial specialists tended to have relatively more home offices. In Ottawa and Gatineau alike these three sectors make up nearly 40 per cent of the total workforce — by far the highest such ratio in the country. Only Quebec City, with a ratio of 31 per cent, came close.

And, for the most part, this doesn’t include high-tech, which accounts for more than eight per cent of Ottawa’s workforce, the highest such ratio in the country. (In Gatineau, it’s just two per cent).

Tech workers are returning, albeit methodically. Across Kanata, an estimated 20 to 25 per cent of the parking spaces are occupied on any given day. Though the ratio is rising, tech giants are anxious for faster progress. Ciena — the optical networking specialist that employs more than 1,700 locally — recently hosted a charity barbecue at its Kanata campus, attended by 80 per cent of its workforce. More than half the company’s employees are now commuting to work on a regular basis, on full-time or hybrid schedules.

Likewise, communications equipment leviathan Nokia recently unveiled plans to remake its Kanata campus. The working assumption is that the new buildings will be 80 per cent occupied throughout the week.

Kinaxis, the supply chain software company with 700 local employees, held an open house June 2 to showcase its new global headquarters in the Kanata West Business Park. The company also invited 30 of its nearly 700 globally-based workers. The move follows a two-month ‘soft opening’ during which Ottawa area employees were invited to simply show up and get comfortable with in-office work again.


© Julie Oliver

Kinaxis held a global open house for its new headquarters June 2. More than 70 per cent of the employees have started to work there at least three days a week.

“We’ve tried to make the office a magnet for employees,” said chief human resources office Megan Paterson, pointing to enticements such as spacious, flexible work areas, and fully-staffed gym and kitchen featuring healthy foods prepared by the former chef at Shopify, which closed its downtown offices in 2020.

Employees were recently surveyed about their working preferences. Paterson said 65 per cent chose a flex arrangement involving three days a week in the office. Thirty per cent opted for the full-time work-at-home option and five per cent said they would prefer to work full-time at the new headquarters.

That last number surprised Paterson. “We’ll give it another six or seven months and see how it changes.” Even so, Kinaxis is beginning its back-to-the-office regime with a considerable core connected to the office.

Yet, significant as these developments are, they represent a small fraction of the region’s total office space. The federal government’s dozens of departments and agencies occupy the lion’s share, more than half of it located in the city core.

Unfortunately for many downtown merchants, this part of the market is moving very deliberately towards pre-pandemic patterns.

**

Stéphan Déry, the official in charge of the federal government’s massive property portfolio, started his new assignment just a few months before the pandemic struck. Sometimes it feels as though he’s been at it forever.

The former CEO of the government’s Translation Bureau, Déry has been consulting with his counterparts around the globe, searching for the best way to accommodate nearly 320,000 federal government employees, including 125,000 in the capital region. An estimated 90,000 are office workers.

Since the government has left it up to individual departments and agencies to determine how employees should return to the office, Déry’s role is limited to getting those offices ready for whatever the new normal turns out to be. Nevertheless, the job has given him good insight into how this might play out.

“Post-pandemic our planning assumption is that the attendance rate will be 50 per cent,” he said in a conversation last year with his British counterpart, Steven Boyd. “Pre-pandemic we typically assumed an attendance rate of 66 per cent.”

A follow-up query to Pubic Services and Procurement Canada — Déry’s department — clarified that the actual attendance rate was between 60 per cent and 65 per cent.

This meant that on any given day pre-COVID, fewer than two of every three office employees were physically present in federal buildings. The rest were on training, visiting clients, on holiday or working remotely. While many large private-sector employers also permit white collar workers latitude when it comes to office attendance, the difference in the public sector is that it’s all very codified, courtesy of detailed collective agreements.

The 50 per cent target is based on surveys of government employees who said they expected eventually to work three days a week from home on average. Fully 85 per cent expressed a desire to work remotely at least part of the time. Government unions, who represent the vast majority of the government’s workers, will do their best to make this a reality.

If they succeed, the government will be paying for too much real estate, as Déry acknowledged. “Many of our old offices were scaled on an assumption that 100 per cent of people might be in the office only one day,” he said, “which clearly meant that they’re oversized.”

Any pruning of the government’s office portfolio has potentially serious ramifications for the local economy. The federal government accounts for 39 million square feet of office space in the capital region, about 16 million square feet of it leased. In Ottawa alone, the leased portion accounts for about 30 per cent of the total market, calculates Warren Wilkinson, the managing director of Colliers, a real estate consulting firm.

The impact of a government pullback will depend on multiple factors.

The first is the strength of the shift away from assigning dedicated spaces for each employee: The government for years has been experimenting with setups that require employees to book space before they come into the office, or work in more open areas. If workers do become wedded to a mostly remote way of doing their jobs, they will almost certainly become less attached to their office real estate.

Canada Revenue Agency, which occupies 2.2 million square feet in Ottawa and Gatineau, has adopted a policy of unassigned seating for the vast majority of its 12,500 locally-based employees. The agency, the largest federal employer locally, expects it will no longer need that much space. For the moment, some 400 CRA employees in the capital region are commuting to the office. While the agency expects this number to climb considerably, it will almost certainly not reach pre-pandemic levels. Similarly, just four per cent of employees and Public Services are at present working full-time in the office.

Federal departments are also mulling the idea of shifting Ottawa or Gatineau-based employees into regional ‘hubs’ equipped with remote networking technologies. One reason is to reap savings by relocating to smaller and less expensive cities. Another is to take advantage of talent that exists outside the National Capital Region, which accounts for 42 per cent of federal government employment.

“Maybe post-pandemic people will start thinking ‘Well, why do we need to be in Ottawa to progress to the highest level within government?” Déry asked rhetorically.

CRA acknowledged that a very high percentage of its headquarters or corporate staff is based in the capital region while operations employees — those who process tax returns for instance — are scattered across the country. However, the agency is re-examining how it recruits senior talent. “The move to virtual work has increased the number of headquarters positions available to talent outside the National Capital Region,” said CRA spokesperson Chantal Beaudry, adding “it makes it easier to ensure that CRA has a diverse workforce.”

The Ontario government also examining de-centralizing its workforce. In their most recent budget, the Progressive Conservatives committed to using remote technology to distribute public services jobs across the province. It’s being billed as a way of helping to “reduce transportation congestion, contribute to environmental conservation and reduce future real estate costs.”

The province, like the federal government, is testing the use of regional office hubs in smaller cities.

A related consideration involves policy. While major federal departments and agencies such as Canada Revenue Agency, Employment and the military have long supported operations scattered across the country, the workforces of other organizations are concentrated overwhelmingly in the capital region. The latter include Finance, Innovation, Health, Statistics Canada and Treasury Board — each of which maintains at least 80 per cent of its employees in Ottawa-Gatineau. The obvious danger is that policies are developed in the capital region bubble — when government workers have already been travelling less thanks to the pandemic.

There will of course be pushback at headquarters over the potential loss of senior jobs to outlying areas. Nevertheless, the risk to the region’s economic core of a shrinking federal government presence is real.

One development that could offset the risk is the potential conversion of government offices into apartments or condominiums. Déry’s department has plenty of flexibility. Nearly 40 per cent of the office space it has secured in the capital region is in the form of leases. As these expire, the government could simply walk away, leaving it to private developers to remake parts of the core.

This won’t happen automatically, because conversions such as this are very expensive. Consider that Minto Apartment REIT in the first quarter this year spent roughly $50,000 just to upgrade each of certain apartments. Now look at the work involved in transforming a federal government tower. Depending on the floor layout, a developer would have to redo electrical, plumbing, air conditioning and other major systems. Costs would run easily into hundreds of thousands of dollars per apartment.

Still, it can be done, and profitably, assuming there’s a market for downtown apartments despite fewer government jobs. Certainly the addition of a permanent community of residents would help to enliven the city’s core.

That development would make the City of Ottawa very happy.

**

City councillors last autumn approved its latest long-term development plan, which assumes Ottawa’s population will climb 400,000 to 1.4 million by 2046. The overarching goal is to increase the share of new housing to 60 per cent in areas that are already built up and well-serviced with water, sewer and other amenities. The plan still requires the okay of the Ontario government.

The biggest population growth between 2016 and 2021 occurred in four areas that happen to house large communities of federal government workers — Aylmer, Barrhaven, Kanata and Orléans. While some of the land is classified as ‘built up,” the peripheries of each of these communities have been hives of new home and apartment construction for years.

The city’s plan predicts these areas will essentially be fully built by 2045 and there is resistance within council — including from Somerset Ward councillor and mayoral candidate Catherine McKenney — to the idea of further expanding the city’s perimeter to include more vacant land for expansion.

Regardless of the result of that particular battle, the big question is whether those government workers from suburbia will ever want to resume their commutes to downtown office towers. The answer is unknowable.

Long-term planning must be done, but COVID has taught us humility. So much can change.

The city plan’s assumptions — based on a return to near normal downtown and the popularity of living there — may well prove right in the end. But getting there will depend in a significant way on where government office employees decide to do their work in a post-pandemic economy.

RCMP reform would prevent political interference, criminologists say

© Provided by The Canadian PressRCMP reform would prevent political interference, criminologists say

OTTAWA — An Ottawa criminologist says questions about whether political pressure was placed on the RCMP commissioner in the Nova Scotia shooting investigation illustrate why Brenda Lucki should not report to the public safety minister.

A parliamentary committee has called Lucki, former public safety minister Bill Blair, and several other RCMP witnesses to explain what happened during an April 28, 2020, phone call, during which Lucki allegedly said she had promised federal officials to release information about the type of weapons used in the shooting.

According to handwritten notes from Supt. Darren Campbell, who was in charge of the investigation into the shooting spree that left 22 people dead, Lucki said that was tied to upcoming Liberal gun control legislation.

RCMP, Ottawa deny interfering with N.S. massacre investigation to advance gun laws

Campbell chose not to release anything about the weapons, stating that may jeopardize the ongoing investigation.

To date, no one has been charged with weapons-related offences in the case, and it was revealed early on that the gunman obtained all the weapons illegally, smuggling most from the United States.

Lucki, the Prime Minister's Office and Blair have all denied there was any political interference in the RCMP's investigation.

Criminologist Darryl Davies said if the commissioner reported to Parliament, rather than the public safety minister, this wouldn't be an issue.

“It makes crystal clear that the RCMP are an autonomous, independent organization and that decision-making will be taken without undue influence from politicians,” he said.

The RCMP Act states that the commissioner is appointed by the minister and “under the direction of the minister, has the control and management of the force and all matters connected with the force.”

Another criminologist disagrees that parliamentary accountability is the answer.

Rob Gordon, who teaches at Simon Fraser University, said what the force needs is proper non-political civilian oversight, but for that to be effective, he said a review of its mandate is needed first.

“It's trying to be too many things to too many people,” he said, noting that federal police forces in the United States and United Kingdom, for example, are not also tasked with contract policing in rural and remote areas.

Reports have called for this type of structural reform over the years but no government has acted upon them, Gordon said.

“We have been, unfortunately, cursed with a Canadian icon and nobody wants to break it up,” he said.

Facing repeated opposition questions Thursday about whether he believed Campbell’s version of events in the April 28, 2020, meeting, Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair said, “I have never and will not criticize a serving member of the RCMP.”

Gordon called that statement “irresponsible and disappointing flim-flam" while Davies said it shows that governments continue to defend the RCMP rather than try to fix it.

“It's an institution that has been in crisis and has been dysfunctional for many years,” he said.

Recent evidence at the public inquiry into the killings has focused on how the RCMP withheld information during and after the killings.

While Lucki and national headquarters were prepared to release a list of the victims’ names, the Nova Scotia RCMP didn’t release that information.

In its initial news conference, when reporters asked for the number of victims, Chief Supt. Chris Leather said it was “in excess of 10.” Documents released through the inquiry show that Leather knew there were at least 17 dead.

Hours later, Lucki gave two separate media interviews in which she said the death toll was 13, and then 17.

By 11 p.m. on April 19, 2020, the RCMP had concluded that up to 22 people had been killed, but it didn't reveal the final number until two days later.

Davies said that shows the need for better policies, training and operational procedures, which "either don't exist or fell apart."

“We know that some of the officers on the ground who are responding to both media requests for information, and from families and so on, some of them had absolutely zero training in this area,” he said.

The inquiry will resume hearings Tuesday.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 25, 2022.

Sarah Ritchie, The Canadian Press

THE ANARCHY OF CAPITALI$M

Canola crusher planned for Saskatchewan suspended

Jeremy Simes - Yesterday 

 Leader Post

A file photo of a canola field in Regina. 

GMO RAPESEED

An agriculture company that had planned to build a canola crushing facility in Saskatchewan announced on Friday the project has been paused.

Ceres Global Ag Corp. said in a news release it’s suspending its Northgate, Sask. project for a variety of factors, including inflationary pressures and “shifting macroeconomic conditions.”

“Ceres intends to continue to explore avenues to pursue a canola crush project of some form in the future, but there is no guarantee that such a project will come to fruition or would be similar to the previously announced project,” the company stated.

In May 2021, Ceres announced it was going to build a $350 million crusher in Northgate, located near the U.S. border.

It would have had capacity to crush 1.1 million metric tonnes of canola annually, and refine 500,000 metric tonnes into oil for food and fuel. Ceres estimated it would have created more than 50 full-time jobs in the province.

Ceres had been among a string of companies announcing planned canola crushing facilities in the province.

Viterra and Cargill have both announced plans to build a crusher in the Regina area. Richardson has also planned to double crush capacity at its Yorkton facility.

Federated Co-operatives Ltd. has also announced it wants to build by 2027 a $2 billion agriculture complex that features a biodiesel plant and canola crusher. The company partnered with AGT Foods on the crusher.

Ceres’s announcement could mark a blow to the industry as more crush capacity in the province would help grow the economy.

Ceres said it has terminated an equipment design and supply contract related to the project. As a result, it expects an impairment charge in the range of $25 to $30 million.

jsimes@postmedia.com

Ceres Global Ag Corp. Profile (sedar.com)

Canadian arms sales rose again in 2021

Since Justin Trudeau took office in 2015, Canadian global arms sales have risen every year

Owen Schalk / June 22, 2022 /

A LAV III participates in a NATO training mission. 

Photo courtesy the 32nd Canadian Brigade Group/Flickr.


Recently released data quantifying Canada’s 2021 exports of military goods mark the continuation of a disturbing trend in the Trudeau government: the consistent growth of arms sales, including to some of the most repressive states abroad.

Since Justin Trudeau took office in 2015, Canadian global arms sales have risen every year, with the sole exception of 2020, whose total was still “at least double that of almost all years between 1978 and 2017.” While 2020 was a low for the Trudeau government, it remains Canada’s third-highest year for military exports on record. The only two years in which Canada sold more arms abroad also occurred under the Trudeau government: 2018 (over $2 billion) and 2019 (almost $4 billion).

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Canada is the 17th largest exporter of military goods in the world, with most going to the United States and Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, Canada continues to cling to its false image as a global peacekeeper, even though Canadian peacekeeping contributions to the United Nations are less than one percent of the total—a contribution that is surpassed by both Russia and China, two countries with a threatening and militaristic presence in the mind of most Canadians.



UN statistics from January 2022 show that Canada ranks 70 out of 122 member states that contribute to UN peacekeeping operations. When paired with recent arms export figures, these disclosures show that Canada is in fact a leading global arms dealer whose contributions to UN peacekeeping operations are nominal at best.

In 2021, the largest non-US buyer of Canadian arms continued to be Saudi Arabia, which has used Canadian-made weapons in its brutal offensive against Yemen for years. This means that Saudi Arabia has been the second-largest buyer of Canadian military goods for ten years in a row, with sales spiking under Trudeau.

In 2020, the Trudeau government approved sales to the kingdom totalling $1.3 billion. In 2021, that total jumped to $1.7 billion, meaning that the Trudeau government chose to increase Canada’s arms sales to Saudi Arabia by $400 million while the kingdom continued its horrific bombing campaigns against Yemen, which have killed hundreds of thousands of people since 2014.

Almost all Canadian arms exports to Saudi Arabia were LAVs. Although Canada claims these weapons are not used in Yemen, photographic evidence contradicts this claim, and a pair of UN reports released in 2020 and 2021 directly blame Canada for fueling the war through its arms exports to Saudi Arabia. A 2021 report by Amnesty International and Project Ploughshares specifically notes that there is “persuasive evidence” that Canadian-made LAVs and sniper rifles “have been diverted for use in the war in Yemen.” Regardless of this international pressure, the Trudeau government decided to ramp up arms exports to Saudi Arabia by over 30 percent last year.



In 2020, Canada sold about $25 million in weapons to the United Arab Emirates, another belligerent in the war on Yemen. Those exports fell to $3 million in 2021, but that drop was more than counteracted by the $400 million increase in military sales to the Saudis.

Meanwhile, Canadian arms sales to apartheid Israel are currently at a 30-year high and climbing every year. Like Saudi Arabia, Canada’s military exports to Israel increased by over 30 percent in 2021. The Trudeau government made the decision to approve these sales during the apartheid state’s internationally condemned 11-day bombing campaign against Gaza, which killed hundreds of Palestinians and wounded thousands.

Over $6 million of the weaponry that Canada sold to Israel last year was classified as “explosives or related components.” About $10 million was related to Israel’s space program and “military aircraft,” while almost $7 million went to a category “which may include weapon sights, bombing computers, or target acquisition components.” The fact that Canada exported notable volumes of aircraft technology, bombs, and targeting equipment to Israel during the 11-day bombing campaign against Gaza has caused Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East to note that “Canadian-made weapons or components could have been used in Israel’s military offensives in Gaza, including airstrikes on residential targets which may amount to war crimes.”



Other states which saw significant increases in Canadian arms inflows courtesy of Trudeau include Indonesia ($8 million in 2020 to $10 million), Kazakhstan ($44,000 to $6 million), and Morocco, which is currently occupying Western Sahara, the last formal colony in Africa and a former hub of Canadian potash investment ($750,000 to $22 million). European states also shipped in tens of millions in Canadian weaponry, as did Japan, whose purchases rose from $42 million in value in 2020 to $280 million in 2021.

Not only do these arms sales far overshadow Canadian peacekeeping contributions and foreign development programs—they completely undermine the false image of benevolence that the Canadian government astutely crafted for itself in the Cold War context. Even though Canadian peacekeeping initiatives were always politicized in their goals and implementation, they served as the basis of an international marketing campaign that branded Canada as the peaceful and considerate antithesis to the aggressive and militarist US. Now, with peacekeeping contributions embarrassingly low and arms sales rising every year, even that flimsy justification no longer exists.

Owen Schalk is a writer based in Winnipeg. He is primarily interested in applying theories of imperialism, neocolonialism, and underdevelopment to global capitalism and Canada’s role therein. Visit his website at www.owenschalk.com

SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY 

How I Found Myself Befriending a Wild Fox
A scientist went against the grain on her industry’s rule against anthropomorphising non-human animals—here’s what she discovered.

Catherine Raven
15 Jun 2022

Photo credit: Catherine Raven


Editor’s note: At 15, Catherine Raven left home and headed west to work as a national park ranger. She later earned a PhD in biology and built an off-the-grid house on an isolated plot of land in Montana, making a living by remote teaching and leading field classes in Yellowstone National Park. One day, she noticed that the wild fox who had been showing up on her property was now appearing every day at 4:15 p.m. One day she brought a camping chair outside and sat just feet away from him. And then she began to read to him from The Little Prince. Her memoir about the relationship that developed between them, Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship, is the winner of the 2022 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.

For 12 consecutive days, the fox had appeared at my cottage. At no more than one minute after the sun capped the western hill, he lay down in a spot of dirt among the powdery blue bunchgrasses. Tucking the tip of his tail under his chin and squinting his eyes, he pretended to sleep. I sat on a camp chair with stiff spikes of bunchgrass poking into the canvas. Opening a book, I pretended to read. Nothing but 2 meters and one spindly forget-me-not lay between us. Someone may have been watching us—a dusky shrew, a field mouse, a rubber boa—but it felt like we were alone with the world to ourselves.

On the 13th day, at around 3:30 and no later than 4 p.m., I bundled up in more clothing than necessary to stay comfortably warm and went outside. Pressing my hands together as if praying, I pushed them between my knees while I sat with my feet tapping the ground. I was waiting for the fox and hoping he wouldn’t show.

Two miles up a gravel road in an isolated mountain valley and 60 miles from the nearest city, the cottage was not an appropriate arrangement for a girl on her own. My street was unnamed, so I didn’t have an address. Living in this remote spot left me without access to reasonable employment. I was many miles beyond reach of cell phone towers, and if a rattlesnake bit me, or if I slipped climbing the rocky cliff behind the cottage, no one would hear me cry for help. Of course, this saved me the trouble of crying in the first place.

I had purchased this land three years earlier. Until then I had been living up valley, renting a cabin that the owner had “winterized,” in the sense that if I wore a down parka and mukluks to bed, I wouldn’t succumb to frostbite overnight. That was what I could afford with the money I’d earned guiding backcountry hikers and teaching field classes part-time. When a university offered me a one-year research position, you might think I would have jumped at the chance to leave. Not just because I was dodging icicles when entering the shower, but because riding the postdoc train was the next logical step for a biologist. But I didn’t jump. I made the university wait until after I had bought this land. Then I accepted and rented a speck of a dormitory room at the university, 130 miles away. Every weekend, through snowstorms and over icy roads, I drove back here to camp. Perching on a small boulder, listening to my propane stove hissing and the pinging sound of grasshoppers flying headfirst into my tent’s taut surface, I felt like I was part of my land. I had never felt part of anything before. When the university position ended, I camped full-time while arranging for contractors to develop the land and build the cottage.

Outside the cottage, from where I sat waiting for the fox, the view was beautiful. Few structures marred my valley; full rainbows were common. The ends of the rainbows touched down in the rolling fields below me, no place green enough to hide a leprechaun but a fair swap for living with rattlers. Still, I was torn. Even a full double rainbow couldn’t give me what a city could: a chance to interact with people, immerse myself in culture, and find a real job to keep me so busy doing responsible work that I wouldn’t have time for chasing a fox down a hole. I had sacrificed plenty to earn my PhD in biology: I had slept in abandoned buildings and mopped floors at the university. In exchange for which I had learned that the scientific method is the foundation for knowledge and that wild foxes do not have personalities.

When Fox padded toward me, a flute was playing a faint, hypnotic melody like the Pied Piper’s song in my favorite fairy tale. You remember: a colorfully dressed stranger appears in town, enticing children with his music to a land of alpine lakes and snowy peaks. When the fox curled up beside me and squinted, I opened my book. The music was still playing. No, it wasn’t the Pied Piper at all. It was just a bird—a faraway thrush.

…

The next day, while waiting for Fox’s 4:15 appearance, I thought about our upcoming milestone: 15 consecutive days spent reading together—six months in fox time. Many foxes had visited before him; some had been born a minute’s walk from my back door. All of them remained furtive. Against all odds, and over several months, Fox and I had created a relationship by carefully navigating a series of sundry and haphazard events. We had achieved something worth celebrating. But how to celebrate?

I decided to ditch him.

I poured coffee grounds from a red can into a pot of boiling water, waited to decant cowboy coffee, and thought about how to lose the fox. Maybe he wouldn’t come by anymore. I opened the door of the fridge. “Have I mistaken a coincidence for a commitment?”

The refrigerator had no answer and very little food. But it gave me an idea. I drew up a list of grocery items and enough chores to keep me busy until long after 4:15 p.m. and headed out. The supermarket was in a small town thirty miles down valley, and I had to drive with my blue southern sky behind me. Ahead, black-bottomed clouds with white faces chased each other into the eastern mountains. Below, in the revolving shade, Angus cattle, lambing ewes, and rough horses conspired to render each passing mile indistinguishable from the one before. Usually, I tracked my location counting bends in the snaky river, my time watching the clouds shift, and my fortune spotting golden eagles. (Seven was my record; four earned a journal entry.) Not today.

Now that I was free to be anywhere I wanted at 4:15 p.m., I returned to my mercurial habits and drove too fast to tally eagles. Imagine a straight open road with no potholes and not another rig in sight. Shifting into fifth gear, I straddled the centerline to correct the bevel toward the borrow pit and accelerated into triple digits. Never mind the adjective, I was mercury: quicksilver, Hg, hydrargyrum, ore of cinnabar, resistant to herding, incapable of assuming a fixed form. The steering wheel vibrated in agreement.

The privilege of consorting with a fox cost more than I had already paid. The previous week, while I was in town collecting my groceries, I got a wild hair to stop at the gym. The only person lifting weights was Bill, a scientist whom I had worked with in the park service. I mentioned that a fox “might” be visiting me. “As long as you’re not anthropomorphizing,” he responded. Six words and a wink left me mortified, and I slunk away. Anthropomorphism describes the unacceptable act of humanizing animals, imagining that they have qualities only people should have, and admitting foxes into your social circle. Anyone could get away with humanizing animals they owned—horses, hawks, or even leashed skunks. But for someone like me, teaching natural history, anthropomorphizing wild animals was corny and very uncool.

You don’t need much imagination to see that society has bulldozed a gorge between humans and wild, unboxed animals, and it’s far too wide and deep for anyone who isn’t foolhardy to risk the crossing. As for making yourself unpopular, you might as well show up to a university lecture wearing Christopher Robin shorts and white bobby socks as be accused of anthropomorphism. Only Winnie-the-Pooh would associate with you.

Why suffer such humiliation? Better to stay on your own side of the gorge. As for me, I was bushed from climbing in, crossing over, and climbing out so many times. Sometimes, I wasn’t climbing in and out so much as falling. Was I imagining Fox’s personality? My notion of anthropomorphism kept changing as I spent time with him. At this point, at the beginning of our relationship, I was mostly overcome with curiosity.

Catherine Raven is a former national park ranger at Glacier, Mount Rainier, North Cascades, Voyageurs, and Yellowstone national parks. She earned a PhD in biology from Montana State University, holds degrees in zoology and botany from the University of Montana, and is a member of American Mensa and Sigma Xi. Her natural history essays have appeared in American Scientist, the Mensa Bulletin, and Montana Magazine.

Source: Independent Media Institute

Credit Line: This excerpt is from Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship by Catherine Raven. Copyright © 2021 by the author and reprinted with permission of Spiegel & Grau, LLC. It was adapted for the web by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/07/how-to-tame-foxand-build-dog-amazing.html

Learning to Live Diversity in India

Twenty-two-year-old Wendy Doniger of Great Neck, Long Island, NY arrived in Calcutta in August 1963, on a scholarship to study Sanskrit and Bengali.

Wendy Doniger, Githa Hariharan
26 Jun 2022

Image courtesy: Speaking Tiger

Twenty-two-year-old Wendy Doniger of Great Neck, Long Island, NY arrived in Calcutta in August 1963, on a scholarship to study Sanskrit and Bengali. It was her first visit to the country whose history and culture she was deeply interested in. Over the coming year—a lot of it spent in Tagore’s Shantiniketan—she would fall completely in love with the place she had till then known only through books.

In An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections, 1963-64 (Speaking Tiger, 2022), the country comes alive through her vivid prose, introspective yet playful, and her excitement is on full display whether she is writing of the paradoxes of Indian life, the picturesque countryside, the peculiarities of Indian languages, or simply the mechanics of a temple ritual that she doesn’t understand.

In this conversation with Githa Hariharan, Doniger talks about her letters and recollections as well as her journey, from the young girl who wrote those letters to the woman looking back and how in many ways, that journey has also been the journey of what India was and what it has become.

Wendy Doniger | UChicagoNews

Githa Hariharan (GH): Throughout the collection of letters and recollections in An American Girl in India, I had a sense of a ‘prequel’ – in terms of the work you have done, the first loves that have grown deeper, and the books; but also the kind of person you have become. In what ways did travel, specifically travel to a crazily diverse place like India, train you in crossing cultural borders? In being open-minded to ideas as well as experiences?

Wendy Doniger (WD): That first trip to India was indeed the most important educational experience in my life, so much more important than everything I ever learned in universities. The letters betray the constant tension between my passionate love of so many facets of Indian life – the ancient culture, the people I met, the architecture, the music, the food, even the extremes of the climate – and my disappointment in myself for not being able to love everything about India, the poverty, the begging; I never got used to being begged from, especially by women and children. I learned how to go on loving and appreciating all the facets of India – and by extension, eventually, all sorts of other things on the planet earth, and indeed other peoples – despite being painfully aware of many of their tragic shortcomings. In particular, I learned to appreciate all that I loved about Hinduism – its diversity, its great stories, its passions, its architecture, its music – without losing my awareness of its capacity for violence, in animal sacrifices as well as in human conflicts, perhaps, in some ways, always reflecting the violence of the climate.

Also read | An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections, 1963-64

GH: In the same vein, I think of the trope of travel to other places to understand where you come from, and meeting all kinds of ‘others’ to understand a little more of yourself. This is also underlined by the connections you make, whether it is through films, literature, songs, jokes and proverbs. Did you leave with a different sense of ‘identity’ than you came with? And now, when you read the letters, what are the selves that reveal themselves to you?

WD: I certainly learned, from living in India, how very privileged I had been growing up as I did in America. And I learned, from experiences such as passing out cold when they chopped off the head of the goat in the sacrifice, that any plans I might have had to become an anthropologist had to be abandoned for good. I learned that I really did love the Sanskrit stories best of all, better even than the Bengali stories, and that the reality of India – the fabulous temples and spectacular rivers and mountains, the way people dressed and danced and sang – was even more wonderful than the India that I thought I knew from the texts. When I read the letters now, I am embarrassed by the naivete and arrogance of my young self, particularly about politics, but I am proud of her courage and her determination and the way that she never lost her sense of humour, even in difficult situations.

GH: I was struck by your early discovery that humour is so essential to survive the cross-cultural experience. The element of play makes the weighty – whether matters of myth or language or inscrutable cultural practice – a fairly joyous process of discovery, rather than a series of obstacles to be overcome. The tenor is also brisk, almost racy. Is this optimism, or a case of writing cheerily to one’s parents, or a strategy you learnt early to grapple with ‘big’ ideas and experiences?

WD: I was raised never to lose my sense of humour even (or, in fact, especially) in difficult situations; this was my mother’s way of dealing with life, and it stood me in good stead in India. I still can’t resist the temptation to make a joke, even when I’m writing about fairly serious matters. And so the letters are inevitably light-hearted, as indeed was much of my later serious academic writing. But of course you are right about the need to stay cheerful in reassuring my parents that I was well and happy. And so I did not, for instance, tell them how ill I had become, with both amoebic and bacillary dysentery, or how frightened I was by the angry Hindu mobs attacking Muslims in Calcutta in the first skirmishes of what was to become the war between India and Pakistan in 1965, or, in another sphere, how I had, inadvertently, gotten quite stoned on bhang on the night of Durga Puja in Bengal. Often the best way I found to explain to myself, as much as to my parents, a particularly troubling or puzzling aspect of Indian life, was to find a parallel in a much-retold old family joke.

GH: This has been quite an exercise in looking back, reconstructing, but also judging and forgiving yourself. How self-conscious and deliberate were you in constructing the persona of the past, and the present older persona looking over the girl’s shoulder?

WD: My first reaction to the letters was that I would have to censor a great deal if I was going to publish them. I did, in fact, cut out a lot of boring paragraphs about asking my parents to send me stuff and telling them what I was sending them and so forth. But then I wanted to cut out the stupid things that I had said, the spoilt-brat assumptions as well as blatant errors about Indian history and contemporary Indian politics, and even mistakes in the plots of the myths I recounted. However, my Indian publisher, Ravi Singh, urged me to keep in those uncomfortable, often embarrassing bits, but to write a preface to the book as a whole, and individual prefaces to sections and sometimes to particular letters, noting that I now realize that these were, in fact, mistakes; and, in a way, to forgive my younger self for her ignorance and her naivete, but always to make it clear that I stopped holding those opinions long ago. And I returned again and again, in later years, to many of the myths that had fascinated me even then, now correcting my errors as I read the texts of the stories that I had often just heard people tell when I was in India, and I came to understand more and more of the history that had framed them. So those prefaces did in fact construct what you rightly call an ‘older persona looking over the girl’s shoulder,’ somehow forgiving her for at least being frank about her wrongheaded ideas. In a way, leaving those wrong ideas in the letters and apologizing for them is my answer to the excesses of the cancel culture: yes, we were wrong in the past, and we are not going to go on doing that now, but we need not condemn everything about the way we were then, nor deny it.

GH: You have a deep, almost poetic connection to the landscape – do you continue to have that, and revel in the sensory as you did during your early travels in India?

WD: Never again did I have the chance to immerse myself as deeply in the landscape as I did in those months when I lived in the countryside at Shantiniketan. But on later visits to India, I often spent weeks, if not months, in other parts of India, and always left the cities to travel to the countryside. I particularly recall getting to know the feel of the land when I stayed on the coast of Kerala some years ago, after watching some Koodiyattam performances, and again traveling in the desert outside of Jaipur after speaking at the Jaipur literary festival, and on another occasion traveling in a boat all around Sri Lanka, frequently going ashore for a day or two. And, of course, I never lost my pleasure in immersing myself in Indian music, and Indian art, and Indian stories most of all, even back in America.

Also read | Hindutva, Counter-Culture and Manusmriti

GH: There are so many worlds that co-exist in this slim volume, and you seem to straddle all of them. What is your description of a true cosmopolitan?

WD: I don’t think I was a true cosmopolitan when I arrived in India, though I was certainly open to new ideas and new places right from the start. I remained very much an American in my tastes and many of my habits, but I emerged from that year much more aware of the limits of the American world I had grown up in, and much more appreciative of the sensibilities of people who felt very differently from me about basic aspects of human life. Perhaps that is a working definition of a cosmopolitan.

GH: Inevitably, the India you saw up close then and the India that we are all struggling to understand now: are we in danger of eroding that gloriously multi-stranded, argumentative narrative so characteristic of Indian myth and tale as well as cultural practice?

WD: Certainly the intrusive presence of mass world culture, first in film and then in television and now in the Internet and YouTube and podcasts and all the rest, and particularly as these media are manipulated in the hands of rich, powerful people who know how to use the media to change the opinions and the lives of people at all levels of society – certainly all of this does threaten to erode the India that I saw and loved in the 1960s, a place where geographical variations and caste traditions and village traditions and just the whole polytheistic and polyphilosophical and polyritual nature of Hinduism was still alive and well and living in India, right alongside Islam as well as, to a lesser but still significant extent, Buddhism and Jainism and Christianity and even Judaism. So much of this is under serious attack in India today. But people in India are still telling their stories and publishing their poems and novels and showing their paintings and their sculptures and practicing their family rituals all over the great subcontinent, and that gives me hope.

GH: Finally, a word or two about your first love, Shiva. Did it last? Were there competitors?

WD: Ah, Shiva has always remained the god who seems to me best to express the way the universe really is, as well as being the god who is the subject of the best stories and much of the best sculpture in India. The Shiva of the Puranas, the Shiva of Kailasanatha at Ellora, Shiva with Parvati and Nandi – I still find him fascinating and, though enigmatic, the deity best able to explain to me the nature of reality.

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum

I FIRST CAME ACROSS WD WHEN I READ SOMA, BY WASSON, SHE WAS THE COLLABORATOR AND TRANSLATOR OF RG VEDA THE SANSKRIT REFERENCES TO THE MAGICK MUSHROOM SOMA. WE USED THIS TEXT IN MY SHAMANISM CLASS IN COMPARITIVE RELIGION AT THE UNIV OF ALBERTA

I ALSO READ HER WORK ON SHIVA, AS WELL SHE HAS WRITTEN A REVISIONIST HISTORY OF HINDUISM I CANNOT RECCOMEND ENOUGH

Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality

by R. Gordon Wasson

Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, by R. Gordon Wasson (New York, 1968), in 404 bookmarked and searchable pdf pages, with numerous color plates and illustrations.  A Wikipedia entry discusses the remarkable work of Wasson, and his identification of the Amanita muscaria (or, fly-agaric) mushroom as a psychoactive component in the mysterious Soma beverage mentioned in the Hindu Vedas. Sanskritist Wendy Doniger is the book's coauthor. Scanned by Robert Bedrosian. Internet Archive has a selection of works about ethnobotany.

Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality,: Wasson, Robert …

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• Format: Paperback

• Author: Robert Gordon Wasson

Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, Paperback – April 1 1972 by Robert Gordon Wasson (Author) 11 ratings See all formats and editions Kindle Edition $3.45 Read with Our Free App Hardcover $2,391.99 1 Used from $2,391.99 Paperback $152.65 5 Used from $124.00

https://www.amazon.ca/Soma-Immortality-Robert-Gordon-Wasson/dp/015683…

Revisiting Wasson's Soma: exploring the effects of …

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21305914

In 1968 R. Gordon Wasson first proposed his groundbreaking theory identifying Soma, the hallucinogenic sacrament of the Vedas, as the Amanita muscaria mushroom. While Wasson's theory has garnered acclaim, it is not without its faults. One omission in Wasson's theory is his failure to explain how pre …

• Author: Kevin Feeney

• Publish Year: 2010