NDP must withdraw from Canada-Israel Interparliamentary Group

by Yves Engler

September 13, 2022

To condemn Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian’s is one thing, but is must be followed up with concrete action.

A screenshot of Jagmeet Singh addressing the media.

 Credit: CPAC

When challenging power, it’s imperative to celebrate victories. But it’s also important to understand the political dance is often two steps forward, one step back.

In a victory for thousands of party activists, Jagmeet Singh recently released a statement that sharpened the New Democratic Party’s critique of Canada’s contribution to Palestinian dispossession. The NDP leader’s email made 13 demands of the Liberals on Palestine. The first point implies Israel is committing the crime of apartheid while the last two points call on Canada to “suspend the bilateral trade of all arms and related materials with the State of Israel until Palestinian rights are upheld” and “end all trade and economic cooperation with illegal settlements in Israel-Palestine.”

Singh’s statement is important and should be applauded, as I did in “Supporters of Palestinian rights should praise NDP’s dramatic policy shift”. But the NDP has also been tentative with the statement. They didn’t publish it on their web site or post it to social media. It was only sent via email to a list of individuals they’ve (presumably) identified as backers of the Palestinian cause.

Still, Singh’s statement received significant attention. Canada Talks Israel/Palestine, Canadian Dimension, The Maple, The Orchard, Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, Independent Jewish Voices, National Council of Canadian Muslims and many others reported on or publicized the email. After it received significant attention in left circles, including NDP foreign affairs critic Heather McPherson defending it, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) published a press release and action alert criticizing Singh’s statement for “laying all blame at the feet of Israel”.

While the NDP must be defended from CIJA’s attacks, the apartheid lobby group shouldn’t control the agenda for progressives regarding the party’s Palestine policy. We must keep pushing from the left. That is why Just Peace Advocates and the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute released a public letter calling on the NDP to withdraw from the Canada-Israel Interparliamentary Group. Signed by 40 groups and 200 individuals, including Noam Chomsky, Svend Robinson, Linda McQuaig and Roger Waters, the letter reads:

NDP must withdraw from the Canada-Israel Interparliamentary Group

Over the past eighteen months Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’tselem and the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinians have all concluded that Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid.

In recent months NDP foreign affairs critic Heather McPherson has repeatedly asked foreign minister Melanie Joly why the Liberal government rejects the conclusion of Amnesty’s 280-page report titled “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel system of domination and crime against humanity”. A number of NDP MPs recently signed Independent Jewish Voices’ Together Against Apartheid pledge and others have voiced criticism of Israeli apartheid.

In April of last year NDP members overwhelmingly supported a resolution that called for suspending arms sales to Israel and “ending all trade and economic cooperation with illegal settlements in Israel-Palestine.”

While the party sharpens its critique of Israel’s subjugation of Palestinians, NDP MP Randall Garrison remains vice-chair of the Canada-Israel Interparliamentary Group. NDP MPs Lisa Marie Barron, Gord Johns and Bonita Zarrillo are also listed on the website of a group which has a mandate to promote “greater friendship” and “further co-operation” between Canada and Israel.

Four years ago 200 prominent musicians, academics, trade unionists and NDP members released “A Call for the NDP to Withdraw from the Canada-Israel Interparliamentary Group”. Since that time the Israeli military has killed prominent Palestinian journalists, repeatedly bombed Gaza and Syria, assassinated individuals in Iran and expanded illegal settlements in the West Bank.

It is incoherent for the NDP to echo human rights group’’ finding of Israeli apartheid and simultaneously participate in a group promoting “co-operation” with Israel.

It’s time for Jagmeet Singh to formally disassociate the NDP from the Canada-Israel Interparliamentary Group.

Whether Singh disassociates the NDP from the Canada-Israel Interparliamentary Group in two days, two months or two years from now it’s unavoidable. The party can’t suggest a country is committing the crime of apartheid and simultaneously promote greater friendship with it.

Please take a minute to call on the NDP to withdraw from the Canada-Israel Interparliamentary Group

Chile Refuses Israeli Ambassador Over Killing of Palestinian Teen

"The fact that Gabriel Boric's extremely normal and reasonable actions in response to Israeli violence against civilians is seen as 'unprecedented' reflects incredibly poorly on the rest of the international community."


Chilean President Gabriel Boric leaves Congress after his inauguration ceremony in Valparaiso, Chile on March 11, 2022. (Photo: Vanessa Rubilar Quintana/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

BRETT WILKINS

September 16, 2022

Human rights defenders on Friday welcomed a move by Chile's progressive president to put off accepting the new Israeli ambassador's credentials in response to the killing of a Palestinian teenager earlier in the day.

"All states should cut diplomatic relations with Israel for its continuing crimes against humanity. Enough is enough."

A spokesperson for the Chilean Foreign Ministry confirmed to Reuters that the decision to delay a meeting between President Gabriel Boric and Israeli Ambassador Gil Artzyeli was made "because of the death of a minor."

Israeli occupation forces fatally shot 17-year-old Odai Trad Salah in the head during a Thursday morning raid in the village of Kufr Dan outside Jenin in the illegally occupied West Bank of Palestine.

According to The Palestine Chronicle, Artzyeli was inside the Chilean presidential palace awaiting his scheduled meeting with Boric when Foreign Minister Antonia Urrejola informed him that his credentials would not be accepted that day, and that the formal ceremony would be delayed until next month.

Ahmad al-Deek, an adviser to Palestine's foreign ministry, said in a statement that "we welcome the Chilean president's position, which is in line with international law and resolutions, and we appreciate this position aimed at applying pressure on the Israeli government to stop its ongoing daily crimes against our people."

Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded by calling the snub "puzzling and unprecedented behavior" that "seriously harms the relations between the two countries."



Chile is home to the largest Palestinian community outside the Middle East. The advocacy group Comunidad Palestina de Chile published a statement Thursday saying it "highly values" the decision by Boric to postpone Artzyeli's credential ceremony.

"As long as the world continues to treat Israel and its diplomats with normality, while committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, human rights violations systematically, and subjecting the Palestinian population to an apartheid regime, the situation of the Palestinians will not change," the group added.

Michael Bueckert, vice president of the group Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, tweeted that "the fact that Gabriel Boric's extremely normal and reasonable actions in response to Israeli violence against civilians is seen as 'unprecedented' reflects incredibly poorly on the rest of the international community."

The Palestinian BDS National Committee—part of the global boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement—thanked Boric for "courageously postponing the accreditation of apartheid Israel's ambassador."

"Israel is escalating its massacres, ethnic cleansing, siege, land theft, and colonization in broad daylight," the group added. "As with apartheid South Africa, there should be no normal relations with Israel's abnormal, decades-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid."

The Israeli raid that killed Salah targeted the home of cousins Ahmed Ayman Abed and Abdulrahman Hani Abed, who were killed on Wednesday after attacking an Israel Defense Forces checkpoint outside the Jenin refugee camp and killing IDF Maj. Bar Falah.

According to the anti-occupation news site Mondoweiss, six Palestinians, including four from the Jenin area, were killed by Israeli forces over the past week. Among those killed was 16-year-old Haitham Hani Mohammad Mubarak.

The Palestine Chronicle reports at least nine Palestinians—including an 8-year-old child—were injured Friday as Israeli occupation forces attacked demonstrators taking part in a weekly protest against the expansion of an illegal Jewish settler colony in the village of Kafr Qaddum near Qalqiliya. According to witnesses, IDF troops attacked the protesters with rubber-coated steel bullets and tear gas.

Sixteen children were among the 45 people killed last month during IDF attacks on Gaza in response to rockets fired at Israel by Palestinian resistance fighters.

Since the beginning of the century, more than 2,200 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli military, police, and settler attacks, according to the group Defense for Children International Palestine (DCIP).

"Israeli soldiers kill Palestinian children with complete impunity," DCIP accountability program director Ayed Abu Eqtaish said last week. "With each killing, Israeli forces highlight their complete disregard for international norms, brazenly perpetrating war crimes over and over again, as the international community merely expresses concern."
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NOT SO NEW AMERICAN FASCISM

Book-Banning Efforts Rising at Unprecedented Rate, US Libraries Report

"We're truly fearful that at some point we will see a librarian arrested for providing constitutionally protected books on disfavored topics," said one free speech advocate.

Emilie Matthews helps Maddison Morgan, 5, pick out a book at

 Belmar Library on June 6, 2017, in Lakewood, Colorado. 

(Photo: Seth McConnell/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

JULIA CONLEY

September 16, 2022

Right-wing attempts to ban books are showing no sign of slowing down, according to a report released Friday by the American Library Association—and in fact have reached an unprecedented level, with libraries and bookstores increasingly facing legal threats over the materials on their shelves.

The organization, which has been tracking book-banning efforts for more than 20 years, found that so far in 2022, parents and other community members have "challenged" 1,651 different books and have issued 681 complaints across the country.



In 2021, 1,597 individual books were the subject of challenges, which can include written complaints, forms provided by and submitted to a library, or social media posts in which people demand books be removed from a library's collection.

Friday's report showed that right-wing groups like Moms for Liberty have escalated their attacks on library patrons' right to access certain books, with 27 police reports having been filed so far this year over accusations that librarians are providing inappropriate or "pornographic" material to children.

"Efforts to censor entire categories of books reflecting certain voices and views shows that the moral panic isn't about kids: It's about politics."

"We're truly fearful that at some point we will see a librarian arrested for providing constitutionally protected books on disfavored topics," Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the Office of Intellectual Freedom at ALA, told The New York Times.

Book challenges this year have mainly focused on titles that center Black or LGBTQ+ characters, according to the Times.

The graphic novel Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, a memoir about the author's coming of age as a nonbinary person, has been the most frequently targeted book so far this year.

The book was at the center of a vote in Jamestown Township, Michigan last month in which residents rejected essential funding for the town's library, prompting concerns that the library will be forced to close within the next year.

Parents in a town in Washington also filed police reports against the school district for including Gender Queer in a school library's collection, and a Republican lawmaker sued Barnes & Noble to prohibit it from selling the book to minors—a lawsuit that was dismissed last month.

ALA president Lessa Kanani'opua Pelayo-Lozada said the group's report "reflects coordinated, national efforts to silence marginalized or historically underrepresented voices and deprive all of us—young people, in particular—of the chance to explore a world beyond the confines of personal experience."

Banning books that discuss racial inequality or LGBTQ+ issues "denies young people resources that can help them deal with the challenges that confront them," added Pelayo-Lozada. "Efforts to censor entire categories of books reflecting certain voices and views shows that the moral panic isn't about kids: It's about politics."

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It Can't Happen Here - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › It_Can't_Happen_Here

It Can't Happen Here is a 1935 dystopian political novel by American author Sinclair Lewis. ... It describes the rise of a US dictator similar to how Adolf Hitler ...

Author: Sinclair Lewis

Publisher: Doubleday, Doran and Company

Publication date: October 21, 1935

Pages: 458 pp

Reading the Classic Novel That Predicted Trump

https://www.nytimes.com › Books › Book Review

Jan 17, 2017 — The protagonist of Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel “It Can't Happen Here” sees something dark brewing in American politics.

Getting Close to Fascism with Sinclair Lewis's “It Can't Happen ...

https://www.newyorker.com › Culture › 2016 Election

Oct 19, 2016 — “It Can't Happen Here,” which came out in 1935, was a frightening book written for frightening times. Sinclair Lewis published the novel as ...

It Can't Happen Here - Project Gutenberg Australia

http://gutenberg.net.au › ebooks03

Falck will forgive me, is 'the hell it can't!' Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how ...

THIRD WORLD U$A

Railway Workers Fight Shows Need for Paid Sick and Family Leave, Says Economist

"It staggers the imagination that in September 2022 the workers who keep the trains running did not have even one sick day to care for themselves."


Advocates for paid leave and government investments in programs including homecare, childcare, and expanded tax credits protest outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. on October 21, 2021.

 (Photo: Paul Morigi/Getty Images for MomsRising Together)

BRETT WILKINS

September 15, 2022

With paid time off for family and medical leave—and the glaring lack thereof—taking center stage Thursday as the Biden administration announced a tentative agreement to avert a crippling railway strike, a leading progressive economist underscored the need for paid leave in the only country in the developed world that doesn't guarantee it.

"Top brass at the railroads were willing to have a strike and plunge the nation back into supply chain hell."

"It staggers the imagination that in September 2022 the workers who keep the trains running did not have even one sick day to care for themselves," Eileen Appelbaum, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said in a statement.

"Railroad management was intransigent on this point, a key union demand, until President [Joe] Biden got involved in the negotiations," she continued. "Top brass at the railroads were willing to have a strike and plunge the nation back into supply chain hell, rather than grant this reasonable request."

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Wednesday blocked a Republican effort to force 115,000 rail workers to settle for a contract pushed by a nonpartisan presidential panel, an agreement that did not include a single day of paid sick leave.

"The details have not been made public yet," said Appelbaum, "but it appears that railroad workers will get one—let me repeat that—one paid sick day a year."

They had asked for 15. The average among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations is nearly 45 days of paid family leave per year, while paid time off for illness generally runs from five to 15 days, "but can be several weeks or months, as in Austria, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, and even up to two years in the Netherlands," according to the OECD.

Calls for national paid leave grew during the Covid-19 pandemic as workers—especially lower-income ones—faced the stark choice of staying home without pay at the risk of losing their jobs or reporting to work and possibly infecting colleagues and customers.

"Even in the face of this pandemic, Congress is reluctant to permanently mandate a paid sick leave program," said Appelbaum. "According to the most recent data, there are about 540,000 workers still out due to Covid-19."

"It is very disappointing that the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act left the provisions addressing the care economy on the cutting room floor," she added. "The U.S. came very close to joining the rest of the industrialized world by enacting a national paid family and medical leave program."

Unlike the Build Back Better Act from which it was born, the IRA was largely stripped of its progressive social programs and policies in order to win the support of conservative Democrats like Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.).

Paid sick and family leave, universal pre-kindergarten and childcare, free community college—and the tax hike on wealthy individuals that would have paid for it all—were excluded from the package that was passed by Congress and signed by Biden last month.

Appelbaum emphasized "the need for the U.S. to guarantee sick workers some form of paid sick days and paid medical and family leave legislation."

"Not including a robust paid leave program as the nation continues to struggle with public health crises places unreasonable burdens on all workers," she added, "and not just the millions of low-income workers unlikely to have access to benefits through their jobs."

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From Omar Khadr to Shamima Begum: CSIS’s trail of mistakes

by Monia Mazigh

September 14, 2022

Canada claims to stand against the trafficking of women and girls. So why is it when it comes to Shamima Begum’s case, our Prime Minister averts his gaze and praises CSIS’s operation? Didn’t we learn anything from the mistreatment of Omar Khadr’s case?
   

Protest in front of the White House on the 17th anniversayr

of Guantanamo Bay, January 11, 2019. 

Credit: Victoria Pickering / Flickr

When Omar Khadr was held in Guantanamo Bay, the Canadian government sent two CSIS agents to the island prison. Their objective was not to repatriate the teenager but rather to interrogate him.

Years later, in January 2020, the Supreme Court of Canada concluded that Omar Khadr’s constitutional rights were violated and that the agents who led the interrogations “offended the most basic Canadian standards of detained youth suspects.”

In 2012, with Senator Roméo Dallaire’s efforts, thousands of Canadians signed a petition to pressure then Public Safety Minister Vic Toews to repatriate Omar Khadr, who many human rights organizations considered a child soldier.

Toews insisted that Omar Khadr was not a child soldier but a terrorist.
Stigmatizing and scapegoating Khadr

According to international law, Khadr was a child soldier who should have been treated as a victim. He was arrested at the age of 15 after a July 2002 firefight in Afghanistan, in which U.S. special forces stormed the compound where he was living. Without credible evidence, the U.S. government labeled him an ‘enemy combatant,’ kept him in Guantanamo and charged him with ‘war crimes’.

Canada— his birthplace and the only home he knew— watched quietly, occasionally peaking its head from the sand to call him a terrorist.

Whether Khadr was a child soldier isn’t the central issue. When human rights advocates or lawyers highlighted a caveat that would humanize Khadr and described the horrible experiences he had been subjected to, in an attempt to rally some support around his cause, these efforts were squashed and even denied by many politicians.

For years, Canada claimed to be an international leader defending child soldiers, particularly in African countries. When it came to rescue one of its own children caught in a war zone, Canada miserably failed the test. Many politicians distanced themselves from Khadr’s case. Worse, many, including then Prime Minister Harper and his public safety minister, refused to use the term child soldier and kept calling him a terrorist, in an effort to deny him any form of justice and further stigmatize him.

In 2017, after a decades long ordeal, Omar Khadr received a settlement from the Canadian government for all the damages and trauma he was forced to endure.

You’d assume the Canadian government Canada learned from its past mistakes. But that’s clearly not the case.
Brits recruited online by ISIS, trafficked into Syria

Last week, Canadians learned that Shamima Begum, a young British woman, aged 15 in 2015, was smuggled into Syria by a man who worked as a spy for the Canadian Embassy in Jordan. During the height of ISIS recruitment efforts to draw vulnerable Western youth to their ranks, Begum flew to Turkey where she met up with a man who trafficked her into ISIS territory.

This news wasn’t a scoop.

The Canadian involvement in this case was already established by some media reports as early as 2015. However, nobody cared and it went mostly unnoticed. In fact, some media sources discredited Turkish authorities who revealed the connection between the British teenager and Canada.

Former Sunday Times correspondent, Richard Kerbaj, recently published a book and brought this story back to the limelight.

According to Kerbaj’s account and other reports, Mohamed Al Rasheed is a Syrian who asked for asylum status at the Canadian Embassy in Jordan. The Embassy asked him to become an informant and run a ‘counter-intelligence’ operation as part of a mutually beneficial deal. Speaking about the Canadian Embassy in Jordan, Al Rasheed said: “they told me they were going to grant me my Canadian citizenship if I collect information about the activities of ISIS.” From facilitating the travel of young British women, to copying their passports, to driving them around and delivering them to ISIS territory to their prospective ‘husband’s, Al Rasheed did it all.

In 2013, then Prime Minister Stephen Harper appointed his personal bodyguard, Bruno Saccomani, as an ambassador to Jordan, despite facing many criticisms about this unusual choice.It is believed that it was under Saccomani that the counter-intelligence operation was conducted.

Who ordered and authorized this Canadian operation? It is important to determine Canada’s exact involvement and implication.
Call this what it is: a case of human trafficking

This case lies squarely at the intersection of human trafficking and the unethical actions of intelligence agencies.

Years ago, Begum tried to re-enter Britain, but in 2019 she was stripped off her British citizenship.

Today, she is still in a Syrian camp waiting to go back to her home country, where she was born and raised and where she should have been protected from online recruiters, intelligence agencies, human traffickers and spy operations.

Last week, CSIS refused to comment on this case. Prime Minister Trudeau congratulated CSIS for using “creative” and “flexible” tools to manage the case. As if brainwashing young girls and promising them some sort of a paradise as brides in a war zone is creative or flexible.

From some British and Canadian media, we learned that CSIS didn’t even share details of this operation with the London Metropolitan Police until much later, after the matter became known and they feared public scrutiny. In in one exchange with their Turkish counterparts, CSIS sent a high-level official to Ankara “to beg forgiveness for failing to inform Turkish authorities they had been running a counter-intelligence operation in their territory.”

Shamima Begum isn’t Canadian. Her British lawyers describe her case as one of blatant sex trafficking, and they are trying to convince the British authorities to reinstitute her British citizenship so she can go back and live with her family in Britain.
As Canadians, why should we care?

As a country we claim that our values are to stand against the trafficking of women and girls. We have a national plan to combat human trafficking.

So why is it when it comes to Begum, our Prime Minister averts his gaze and praises the operation? Didn’t we learn anything from the mistreatment of Khadr’s case?

It is not the first time that Canadian intelligence services pressured refugees or immigrants, particularly from Muslim countries, to become spies against their own communities.

What CSIS and. by extension the entire Canadian government did, is unethical and dangerous. Some claim that this is what spies are supposed to do.

Perhaps.

But how about transparency? Public accountability?

How can Canadians know that our country didn’t commit crimes by helping Shamima Begum, and others, travel to ISIS territory? Without this spy, it’s possible she wouldn’t have entered Syria.

We need answers.

I don’t think we can plead ignorance and say that we didn’t know about Shamima Begum or the sex trafficking or the complicity of Canadian agencies. We can’t make the same mistakes we did with the Omar Khadr case.
Begum isn’t the first, or the last

Finally, we shouldn’t forget the 43 Canadians who remain in Northern Eastern Syrian camps of Al Hol and Al Roj. Among them, are 23 Canadian children. What do we know about them? How many of them were enabled by Canadian agents? How many of them were trafficked into those dangerous territories?

Canada is still hiding its head under the sand. It is time to repatriate these Canadians and open an investigation into what CSIS has done in the case of Shamima and many others.

PSAC says public-sector investment will fight inflation

by Gabriela Calugay-Casuga

September 13, 2022
RABBLE.CA

A new report shows investing in the public sector puts more money back into the economy than private sector spending and helps fight inflation.

A photo of the PSAC flag Credit: PSAC / Twitter

Inflation pressures have been tough on workers for months, and as the Bank of Canada hikes up interest rates as a response, members of the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) are concerned about a potential looming recession.

According to an August publication by l’Institut de recherche et d’informations socioéconomique (IRIS), higher interest rates are not the solution, investing in the public sector is.

PSAC said the findings of the IRIS’ research reinforces their demands for higher wages for public service workers. The report said that indexing public sector wages will help maintain a strong middle class.

The IRIS report found that money invested in the public sector reaped higher returns for the Canadian economy. For every dollar spent in the public sector, $1.09 to $1.28 is added to the country’s GDP, compared to returns of $0.93 to $1.10 from private sector investments.

Based on these figures, the report reframed public sector investment as income instead of expenses, supporting the case for indexed wages for workers.

Despite calls for indexed wages, which have spread to many workplaces across Canada, the Bank of Canada has said they are concerned about a “wage-price spiral” being set off when wages match inflation.

“This is a situation where companies pay higher wages and pass those costs on through prices,” a Bank of Canada spokesperson has previously explained in an email to rabble.ca. “This raises workers’ cost of living and they seek further wage increases to compensate. If that cycle repeats itself, prices continue to rise and workers constantly strive to keep up.”

The IRIS report outlined that indexed wages are unlikely to exacerbate inflation because wages are only a small part of what determines prices.

“Cost-of-living adjustments to wages have no amplifying effect on inflation, as wages are only one factor in product pricing,” the report reads, “alongside raw materials and components, capital financing, profit margins and productivity.”

Chris Aylward, PSAC’s national president, said that while wages have stagnated, companies are posting record profits. This claim has been backed by another IRIS report. Instead of putting inflation on the backs of workers, the report says it is important to hold corporations accountable as they use high levels of inflation to up prices and bring in profits.

Aylward said that putting this money into compensation for workers will ensure that the money goes back into the economy, instead of into the pockets of a wealthy few.

“What workers are doing is, with every extra dollar they have in their pocket, they’re going out and actually spending that in the community,” Aylward said in an interview with rabble.ca.

PSAC is in the process of mediation with the Treasury Board as they continue to bargain for a fair contract for more than 165,000 federal public service workers. With the next meetings on the horizon, Aylward said the IRIS findings serve as a reminder of why PSAC is fighting for the wage increases they want. He says he hopes that, in light of these findings, future negotiations will not take on the same shape as they did when PSAC declared an impasse.

“The reactions that we’ve seen so far from the Treasury Board have been nothing but disrespectful,” Aylward said. “There’s total disrespect for their employees by saying no to everything that we have on the table.”

Aylward said that to address inflation, the government must tax the rich rather than offer subpar wage increases to workers.

“If workers don’t start standing up and pushing back, we’re just gonna keep falling further and further behind,” Aylward said. “We can’t allow that to happen when corporations, financial institutions and oil and gas industries are making record profits. If the government truly wants to fight inflation, then they need to pay all workers fairly.”

The impacts of colonialism outlive the British Queen

by Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan 

DEMOCRACY NOW!

September 15, 2022

With its history of slavery, concentration camps, executions and torture, what would reparations and accountability look like?

It has long been said that “the sun never sets on the British Empire,” referring to the United Kingdom’s colonies around the globe. Will the death of Queen Elizabeth II trigger further shrinking of the empire, as former colonies now in the British Commonwealth debate whether to permanently sever ties? With its history of slavery, concentration camps, executions and torture, what would reparations and accountability look like?

On her 21st birthday in 1947, Elizabeth, five years before her coronation as queen, said, “I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.”

Elizabeth was in South Africa, a British Commonwealth nation, one year before its white minority imposed the racist policies of apartheid over the majority Black and other non-white populations. Over the next half-century, South Africa’s apartheid regime, shored up by the United Kingdom and the United States, demonstrated that not all in the Queen’s “imperial family” fared well.

“I would like to see the dismantling of this notion of the Commonwealth,” Cornell University Professor Mukoma Wa Ngugi said on the Democracy Now! news hour. Mukoma was born in the U.S. but raised in Kenya, the son of renowned Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

“‘Commonwealth?’ Whose wealth?” Professor Mukoma wa Ngugi asked. “The book I’m working on now on Africans and African Americans took me to Keta in Ghana, where slaves were taken from. It’s very depressed [by] the aftershocks…or the trauma of slavery. Maya Angelou called it melancholic.”

“I left Keta. Then I went to Bristol in England. Bristol was a slave-trading port. It’s thriving…Most people know it now because of the dismantling of the statue of [Edward] Colston [during the George Floyd protests in 2020], who was one of the slave traders. We can see the effects of slavery, of colonialism. We can see how the wealth of England was built.”

In 1952, Elizabeth was in Kenya when she learned of the death of her father, King George VI, and became Queen. Kenya suffered for decades under British colonial rule. An organized armed resistance rose up in the 1950s, called the Mau Mau. Harvard historian Caroline Elkins documented Britain’s violence against Kenyans in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya.”

“Nearly 1.5 million Kikuyu, or Africans, were detained in detention camps, or emergency villages, barbed-wire villages, as a way of suppressing Mau Mau,” Elkins explained on Democracy Now! “This was a story about systematic violence, torture, murder and massive cover-up…serious crimes happened on the queen’s imperial watch. Her picture hung in every detention camp in Kenya as detainees were beaten in order to exact their loyalty to the British crown.”

Many nations still struggle with the impacts of British colonialism. “Formerly enslaved and colonized nations and people, like those of the Caribbean, including Barbados, have been inserted in that international order in a structurally subordinate and exploitative manner,” David Comissiong, Barbados’s ambassador to the Caribbean Community, said on Democracy Now! last December, just after Barbados severed its Commonwealth relationship with the UK, removing Queen Elizabeth II as head of state and declaring itself sovereign. “Barbados was the first society in human history that was built totally on the basis of slavery — its economy, its social system, its ideology. That’s our history. The royal family was deeply involved in the British slave trade and the system of African enslavement,” Comissiong said.

The Prime Minister of the Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda, Gaston Browne, announced this week that the country will hold a referendum within three years to decide on complete separation from the UK.

Dorbrene O’Marde, the chairperson of the Antigua and Barbuda Reparations Commission and an ambassador-at-large of Antigua, said this week on Democracy Now! that Queen Elizabeth II “managed to cloak the historical brutality of empire in this veneer of grandeur and pomp and pageantry and graciousness…We need to examine that history a lot more closely.”

Queen Elizabeth’s eldest son has succeeded her, and is now King Charles III. He will be confronted with rising demands for accountability and reparations for the generations of colonial exploitation that enriched the United Kingdom and the royal family, himself included. The Windsor family’s estimated wealth is in the billions of dollars.

“The CARICOM reparations plan talks of development,” Dorbrene O’Marde said. “where the hurt of enslavement and genocide continues to exist and continues to impact the lives of Caribbean people today…You have committed crimes against humanity and there is a moral and an ethical demand that you acknowledge these crimes.”

King Charles III should heed the call of these former colonial subjects, and answer for the innumerable harms inflicted worldwide in the name of the British monarchy.

This column originally appeared on Democracy Now!

Geoff Dembicki on How He Wrote a Big Oil Blockbuster Geoff Dembicki’s The Petroleum Papers, set for release Sept. 20, is getting raves while inspiring rage. Kirkus Media has listed it among its top anticipated books for the fall season and the Toronto Star placed the work on its own similar list. Dembicki, a widely published climate journalist who’s written for The Tyee for 15 years, pored over a mountain of historical documents and interviewed key players to expose many key moments when the oil industry and its political allies sowed disinformation about the rising threat of climate catastrophe. He names names and connects dots from Fort McMurray to Washington, D.C. The Tyee spoke with Debicki ahead of his book’s launch to learn how we could have averted disaster decades ago. You can read the full conversation and an excerpt from The Petroleum Papers on our website. The Tyee: The title of your book references a huge collection of confidential oil industry archives. What’s contained in these documents and how did you get access to them? Geoff Dembicki: So for the last few decades major oil companies have been secretly researching climate change and then writing up reports about their findings. Pretty much all the major firms with operations in the oilsands — including Suncor, Shell, BP and the Exxon-owned Imperial Oil — learned internally that their products were making climate change worse and potentially leading to catastrophic impacts around the world. They also produced reports about how to communicate this science to the public. By the early 1990s, the strategy most companies decided on was lying about the science, trying to convince the public it isn’t real. Investigative research groups like DeSmog got access to huge amounts of these documents and posted them online in vast databases. So the documents were publicly available, but no journalist had really gone in and written a book telling the explosive story contained in all those documents. Starting a few years ago, that’s what I decided to do. That sounds like a ton of work. Give me a sense of how you went about it, and maybe something you dug up that amazed you. There’s a site called Climate Files run by a group called the Climate Investigations Center that has a master collection of documents sorted by year and going back to 1953. I began the process of reading every single document on the site. Through that process I found stuff that even the disinformation experts didn’t really know about. The document that really blew my mind was a short summary of talking points about climate solutions created by Imperial Oil in 1993. Exxon had been internally studying climate solutions and learned that a national carbon price in the early 1990s could effectively stabilize the crisis without hurting the economy. It would be bad for profits though, so Imperial urged executives to essentially portray the research in the worst possible light to media and policy-makers, saying that fixing climate change was a reckless strategy that would destroy the economy. Imperial could have helped stop this emergency three decades ago, but chose not to. You are an Alberta kid who started as an intern at The Tyee right out of Carleton’s journalism program in 2008. And you’ve been a regular contributor to our pages ever since. But now you live in Brooklyn and also write for Vice and the Guardian. Why are you in New York and what’s that like? As a writer I’ve always been fascinated with New York and after my partner Kara and I got renovicted from our apartment in East Vancouver in 2019, we checked out rents in Brooklyn and they actually weren’t so much crazier than Vancouver rents. I also wanted to be here to cover the dozens of lawsuits against Big Oil moving forward in U.S. courts, as well as the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. The West Coast will always feel like home to me, but New York is fun and exciting. I’ve met a lot of other writers and editors and spent much time exploring the city on my bike. I still regularly read The Tyee and the whole network of awesome climate and environment-focused writers in B.C., including Arno Kopecky, Sean Holman, James MacKinnon, Francesca Fionda, Michelle Gamage — really there’s too many to name.

Jordan Peterson, the Climate Crisis Deniers’ New Mouthpiece

Touting myths to millions is ‘highly irresponsible,’ say experts trying to avert disaster.

Geoff Dembicki 

5 Sep 2022

TheTyee.ca
Geoff Dembicki reports for The Tyee. His work also appears in Vice, Rolling Stone and the New York Times.

Peterson, who’s no climate scientist, questions models used by those 

who are, and muses that global warming is ‘beneficial.’ Photo via Wikimedia.

In mid-August, Jordan Peterson uploaded a video for his more than 5.4 million YouTube subscribers in which he referred to the growing body of science linking extreme weather events to climate change as “dubious.”

Dressed in suit and tie and seated in an austere white room with the feel of a tech startup office, the Canadian celebrity conservative influencer claimed to take aim at the “globalist utopians” forcing us “to fall in line” in order to stabilize global emissions by 2050. That goal is widely regarded by scientists as crucial for avoiding the worst damages of climate change. But Peterson referred to it as “absolutely preposterous.”

The bulk of the video, which has more than 1.2 million views, consisted of Peterson reading verbatim an article he’d recently written for the Telegraph, a major British newspaper, headlined “Peddlers of environmental doom have shown their true totalitarian colours.”

The idea that “storms, wildfires, droughts, downpours and floods around the globe in the last 18 months are unique and unprecedented” is “a dubious claim,” Peterson said. And to the “power-mad utopians” pushing the supposedly false narrative of a climate emergency Peterson had this to say: “We will not allow you to steal and destroy the energy that makes our lives bearable.”


No one is out to make people’s lives unbearable by “stealing” energy from them, of course. The work being done by scientists, technologists and policy-makers to transition the global economy to conserve emissions-producing energy and shift to renewables in order to head off a climate catastrophe does invite a willingness to imaging how life can remain bearable by changing our ways.

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But bald denials of the climate crisis are increasingly rare in many mainstream media outlets. And as Peterson ramps up his naysaying, climate skeptics are delighted with the former University of Toronto psychology professor born in Alberta. A far-right U.K. website called the Conservative Woman deemed the publication of his recent essay “a first for the usually ‘conspiracy’-shy Telegraph,” and explained that Peterson was “expressing views which, to date, have been shared only on alternative social media outlets.”

Peterson in turn used his Telegraph story and the accompanying YouTube video to name and praise climate skeptics such as Matt Ridley, a journalist and conservative politician who earlier this year argued that climate change is “mostly beneficial” and that “this startling fact is kept from the public by a determined effort on the part of alarmists and their media allies who are determined to use the language of crisis and emergency.”

Trackers of climate disinformation said this potentially represents a worrying new phase in the climate crisis denial movement: skeptics who are increasingly struggling to be taken seriously by legacy media are now being exposed to millions of people via social media through their association with a celebrity conservative influencer from Canada.

“Through Peterson, who has a prominent voice, these other fringe voices are being lifted up,” Kert Davies, executive director of a U.S. research and watchdog group called the Climate Investigations Center, told The Tyee.

‘Truly irresponsible’

Actual climate scientists say it’s dangerous for Peterson, who didn’t respond to a list of questions from The Tyee, to be misleading the public at a time when we have less than a decade to halve global emissions or else risk crossing irreversible global tipping points such as the collapse of the Amazon rainforest.

“It is truly irresponsible,” Michael Mann, director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Tyee. “And it betrays the fact that Peterson is nothing more than a right-wing disinformation artist.”

Earlier this year Peterson went on The Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast which has nearly 13 million followers on YouTube, and made rambling remarks about how the models used by climate scientists are flawed and incomplete.

“But your models aren’t based on everything,” Peterson told Joe Rogan. “Your models are based on a set number of variables. So that means you’ve reduced the variables — which are everything — to that set. But how did you decide which set of variables to include in the equation if it’s about everything?”

Climate scientists slammed the segment, with Mann saying at the time that “such seemingly-comic nihilism would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.”

Yet climate crisis deniers were pleased that Peterson was taking their message to a mainstream audience. “Dr. Jordan Peterson has upset climate change alarmists by claiming on The Joe Rogan Experience that long-range climate models aren’t accurate,” recounted a U.S. website called Liberty Nation News, which has referred to the climate crisis as “hysteria.”

That article’s author Caroline Adana acknowledged Peterson was being “somewhat vague” in his criticisms of climate models, but that was likely because he “needed to adapt his language to the level of the average listener. If we compensate for these adaptations, he made valid criticisms that highly schooled and decorated climate skeptics have also raised.”

Indeed, as criticism mounted over Peterson’s comments, the former University of Toronto professor cited on Twitter one source for his views on climate change: a book titled Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate by Fred Singer.

“Fred Singer was the grandfather of climate denial,” Davies told The Tyee.

The now deceased Singer was active for decades in campaigns to sow doubt and uncertainty about the science of climate change, including founding a disinformation hub in 1990 called the Science and Environmental Policy Project, which received funding from oil companies such as Shell and Exxon according to the climate disinformation watchdog group DeSmog.


A Conservative Grassroots Thick with Climate Crisis Deniers

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Singer was among six “specialists” who spoke at a 2002 news conference in Ottawa, sponsored by Imperial Oil, whose stated goal was to debunk “climate change myths.”

These days it would be difficult to find a direct reference to Singer’s work, which has been thoroughly debunked by climate experts, in a mainstream media outlet. But after the Joe Rogan appearance, alarmed observers argued that Peterson was essentially repackaging Singer’s views for a massive digital audience.

Mega-influencer in an echo chamber

“This latest episode reveals a growing trend, whereby ‘non-climate influencers’ are becoming central nodes of mis- and disinformation for a mainstream public and exposing them to views which either deny the reality and impacts of climate change, or explicitly undermine trust in the science and institutions working to marshal a response,” Jennie King, head of civic action and education at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue think tank, told DeSmog.



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This is the dynamic that such observers saw in Peterson’s recent Telegraph essay, which argued that “there are clearly more important priorities than costly and ineffective emergency climate change reductions.”

To bolster that point Peterson referred to the work of Bjorn Lomborg, a political scientist and economist who acknowledges that climate change is real but says it won’t be as bad as many scientists predict, arguing in 2021 that “rapid hyperbole scares us witless.”

Peterson also cited Marian Tupy, editor of the conservative website HumanProgress, which is a project of the Cato Institute, a think tank founded by Charles Koch. Last year Tupy said that climate change “is not an existential crisis.”

When a mega-influencer such as Peterson lends a platform to such fringe views, Mann argues, it has real world impacts on our ability to solve the climate crisis.



Come to Our Launch of Geoff Dembicki’s ‘The Petroleum Papers

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“As a result of the denialist echo chamber, people tend to perceive that a far greater proportion of the public denies climate change than actually does,” he writes in his recent book The New Climate War. “That flawed perception, in turn, inhibits people from engaging their friends, neighbours and acquaintances on climate.... The less we talk about the issue, the less prominent it is in our larger public discourse, and the less pressure that is brought to bear on policy-makers to act.”

Peterson isn’t primarily known for his reactionary views on the climate crisis. But Mann argues it’s about time the public sees him for what he truly is — the latest in a long line of skeptics delaying society’s response to a crisis that is only getting worse and worse.

“He is promoting climate change denial at a time when it is increasingly untenable,” Mann said.