Lost at sea: human rights in the age of COVID
by Tom Sandborn

April 24, 2023

RABBLE.CA

“No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.” 

Samuel Johnson in Boswell: Life of Johnson

A cargo ship transporting goods across the sea.

 Credit: Athanasios Papazacharias / Unsplash

Many observers would say that Dr. Johnson’s sour assessment of the life of a sailor, issued near the end of the 18th century, is still timely today. Despite the existence of some unions for seafarers, and the guidance provided by well-intentioned public documents like the International Labor Organization’s Maritime Labor Convention, working conditions for seafarers are often still almost as vile as they were in Dr. Johnson’s day, especially for those without the protection of a union contract.

The experience of the pandemic years highlighted the human rights crisis at sea, but the abuses that drew public attention during the COVID-19 pandemic- seafarers not being allowed off their ships for many months at a time, poor wages, lack of appropriate help in getting home after an employment stint has ended, management bullying – are logical extensions of the systemic abuses that have characterized both the deep-sea freight sector and the cruise line sector for decades. For many workers at sea, the ocean is still a human-rights-free zone.

According to the International Chamber of Shipping nearly 90 per cent of world trade is carried by deep sea ships.

“There are over 50,000 merchant ships trading internationally, transporting every kind of cargo. The world fleet is registered in over 150 nations and manned by nearly 2 million seafarers,” the Chamber reports in a recent article. Meanwhile, the cruise ship tourist sector, with 430 ships in global waters, says that it supports a million jobs and generated over $18 billion in revenue last year.

Spoiler alert, not much of the revenue from lucrative freight shipping and tourism at sea ends up in seafarers’ pockets, and not nearly enough has been expended by employers to meet basic human needs of the at sea workforce.

At sea as on land, the pandemic heightened existing contradictions and created new ones. Even before COVID-19, seafarers too often found themselves abandoned by their employers in distant ports without any help in getting home. But with COVID panic making many ports deny sailors land access while their ships were loading or unloading, and creating other obstacles to travel, the number of worker abandonments spiked into the hundreds of thousands.

An August 2022 article in Seatrade-Cruise.com, a site friendly to the cruise industry, reported that by then 150,000 cruise ship workers had been repatriated in a joint effort by employers and unions, while in the freight sector nearly 300,000 were still marooned, often stuck on their ships, and unable to return home.

A month before, in July of 2022, two and a half years after the pandemic first struck, 4.2 per cent of seafarers were then on board beyond the expiration of their contracts, with 0.3 per cent on board beyond the 11 month maximum mandated by the Maritime Labour Convention. (Reader, let us pause for a moment to reflect on the fact that the Labour Convention, theoretically meant to protect workers at sea, allows them to be kept away from home and down time for nearly a year. That mandated stay is bad enough, but during the worst of the COVID confusion, some workers were kept from home for up to 20 months!)

“The insidious culture of seafarer abandonment is a direct result of a lack of effective enforcement of human and labour rights protections in the industry. There is still little, to no, deterrent effect or transparency,” said David Hammond, the founder and chief executive of the non-governmental organization Human Rights at Sea.

“Without the hard backstop of union, port and flag state inspections and associated ship arrests disrupting violator’s financial liquidity, the rates of abandonment would keep rising without check,” he said.

Here are a few examples, drawn from the Seatrade-Cruise article cited above.

“Daresh Villarayan of Punnaikayal in Tamil Nadu, India, spent a month on the MT Peterpaul while it was stuck in Sri Lanka. He has also had to quarantine numerous times. He recorded videos of himself and his crewmates talking about their predicament from the ship, which is now back on the move.

“Because of corona (COVID-19), there are lot of problems in the life of a seaman,” he said.

Hermant Solanki, another Indian crew member from Surat, Gujarat, could not find work for eight months. He tried to join a ship in Egypt, but instead had to spend a month in a hotel before finally making his way to the MT Peterpaul.”

The number of seafarers abandoned by their employers continued to grow in 2022, the worst year on record so far. Last year saw 103 vessels and nearly 1,700 seafarers abandoned, according to Sea Trade Marine News. The same article reports that over $40 million in unpaid seafarer wages is currently owed, with some of the debt going back 20 years.

“When abandoned on vessels, seafarers are left alone to fend for themselves while corporations avoid their responsibilities. When those who destroy the lives of seafarers also employ them, it is, in all senses, deeply troubling,” commented Steen Lund of Rightship, an organization that describes its goal as “To be a trusted innovation partner, charting a safe, sustainable and socially conscious future for the maritime industry.”

Clearly, despite the efforts of unions, the ILO, the UN and NGOs, much more work is needed to protect the vital and too often exploited workers on our world’s oceans. Until that unfinished work is completed, Dr. Johnson’s severe comments will continue to be timely. It may remain safer and better to go to jail than to go to sea.

Hey Elon Musk, what about pressures faced by ‘corporate-funded’ media?

by Rick Salutin

April 21, 2023


The pressure faced by CBC due to its source of funding is no worse, and is possibly less, than the pressures on private media outlets.

CBC's Twitter page on April 21, 2023. Credit: CBC / Twitter

It sounds like a stage direction. CBC “paused” its use of Twitter after being labelled “government-funded media” there. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who’d campaigned for the slur, danced a jig in delight.

CBC huffed that it’s “arm’s length” from the government that funds it, has journalistic independence etc. But between us, I think the term’s accurate enough, provided Twitter also labels CTV, Global, The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, as well as the New York Times, “corporate-funded” media, or advertiser-funded, and Twitter itself as funded by a manic, right-wing narcissist.

My argument isn’t that CBC faces no pressure, but that it’s no worse and possibly less, than the pressures on private media outlets. For most of the last century, every Toronto paper rigorously avoided any reporting on unionization drives at Eaton’s.

Why? Because every edition every day contained a full-page Eaton’s ad. What’s surprising about CBC, given the difference in funding sources, is how similar CBC is on basic coverage to the commercial networks.

To test this, I flipped CBC on randomly Wednesday and found an interview by CBC’s David Cochrane with retired general David Leslie. It was a congenial gang-up against Justin Trudeau over a leak in which he told NATO that Canada would never meet NATO’S target of 2 per cent of GDP for defence spending. They were both scandalized — though there’s never been a rationale for the number and only seven of NATO’S 30 members meet it. Personally I think it’s despicable to prioritize that when a generation of Canada’s young have lost hope of ever owning homes.

If CBC was carrying water for anyone here, it wasn’t for the government that funds them, it was for the U.S., which aims to dominate Europe through NATO, or Brussels, where careers are built on NATO’s inevitability.

Democracy under assault

Tennessee’s legislature recently expelled two Black members on frail, spurious legal grounds. That echoed post-Civil War efforts to (successfully) disenfranchise freed slaves. But it’s also part of the current anti-democracy global tool kit.

India’s main opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, lost his seat over a silly defamation charge and got exactly the length of sentence required to bar him from running again. Pakistan’s election commission barred its most popular politician, former PM Imran Khan, from running again as well.

Don’t be smug, we share this tradition. In the 1830s, Toronto’s first mayor, William Lyon Mackenzie, the leading critic of the colonial Tory oligarchy, was thrown out of the assembly — which wielded no real power — five times and returned each time by voters.

In a late echo, the only serious challenger to Pierre Poilievre for the Conservative leadership in 2022, Patrick Brown, was disqualified by a party bureaucrat over claimed violations of the Elections Act, which weren’t revealed for reasons that were also concealed.

What stands out is non-electoral processes for dumping legitimate reps. In other words, take it out of the hands of the citizenry. The New York Times’ scrupulous Thomas Edsall did a piece this week on ways that democracy is “under assault from the ground up.” I would add the discouraging effect of seeing how casting your vote for someone can be so easily turned pointless.

Spies like us

The most recent leaker of U.S. state secrets, Jack Teixeira, was no spy. He was a young guy out to impress his gamer friends. He sloppily jammed the confidential papers into his pants.

It sounds like Canada’s greatest spy caper, the Gouzenko affair. Igor Gouzenko was a Soviet cipher clerk in Ottawa who stuffed papers into his shirt in 1946 and wandered around Ottawa trying to defect, but was rebuffed by everyone at first: police, Mounties, media, the prime minister.

Yet the event turned into the kick-off for 45 years of Cold War. As they say, it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up. And it’s not the shabby players, it’s their chroniclers and glamourizers. John le Carré’s elegant writing style has a lot to answer for.

This column originally appeared in the Toronto Star.

Supporters, NDP call on Trudeau to block extradition of Hassan Diab

by Stephen Wentzell

RABBLE.CA

April 28, 2023


Hassan Diab is facing another extradition to France after a trial based on a case a Canadian judge said lacked evidence.

Hassan Diab with his family at Ottawa airport on his return to Canada after his detention in France. Credit: Hassan Diab Support Committee

Supporters of Hassan Diab are calling on the Canadian government to block any extradition requests from France, one week after the former professor was convicted a second time for his alleged involvement in the 1980 Paris synagogue bombing.

Diab’s legal tribulations began in 2008 when France first requested he be extradited from Canada to stand trial on terrorism charges. The bomb attack at the Rue Copernic synagogue killed four people and injured more than 40 others.

In 2014, Diab was transferred into the custody of French law enforcement where he spent 38 months behind bars awaiting his day in court — much of that time spent in solitary confinement. On top of the human rights violations Diab suffered behind bars, he also missed more than three years with his young children, including the birth of his son.

The terrorism charges were dropped in 2018 due to what judges called “a lack of evidence.”

But Diab’s second chance at freedom would not last.

Now, experts and advocates alike are calling on Canada to block an extradition request from France that would see Diab again incarcerated in a French prison.

During his first extradition, the judge characterized the persecution of Diab as “a weak case” and that “the prospects of conviction in the context of a fair trial, seem unlikely.” Despite the ambiguity, the judge had no legal recourse other than approving the extradition.

Allies of Diab argue that the former professor was not even in Paris during the synagogue bombing. Rather, Diab presented evidence that he was in Beirut at the time, with documents and testimony from students at the Lebanese University confirming his presence.

Concerns about ‘manifestly unfair trial’

In an April 21 statement to the media, Hasan Diab Support Committee member Roger Clark laid out key factors that led to what he called a “manifestly unfair trial.”

Clark noted that while anonymous and unsourced secret intelligence was reintroduced, no new evidence was presented at the trial.

Also concerning to Clark was the admittance of handwriting reports by “experts” hired by the prosecution that were previously rejected and withdrawn due to unreliability. Some of those reports also included “new” conclusions.

READ MORE: Hassan Diab, trial in absentia

Clark added that no official transcript or recording of the proceedings exist, making it virtually impossible for the public to determine whether Diab received a fair trial.

Because Diab was tried “in absentia” — he didn’t attend the trial in France out of fear of not being allowed to return to Canada — there is no possibility to appeal his conviction.

Clark is also concerned about the speed with which a guilty verdict was found — less than 24 hours.

Diab faces life sentence

When Diab was freed and returned to Canada in June 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that “what happened to Hassan Diab never should have happened,” while promising he would “make sure this never happens again.”

Just five years later, Canada’s Extradition Act will be put to the test again.

“The time is now for Canada to make the Prime Minister’s commitment a reality,” Clark concluded. “Canada must make it absolutely clear that no second request for the extradition of Dr. Diab will be accepted.”

Meanwhile, the calls from Diab’s supporters have reached the New Democrats. NDP justice critic Randall Garrison and foreign affairs critic Heather McPherson joined the push to block Diab’s extradition, emphasizing that he’s been denied a fair process and had his human rights violated for more than a decade.

Diab is facing a life sentence in French prison.

While the NDP expressed its condemnation of the attack and offered condolences to the victims and families seeking justice nearly 45 years later, Garrison and McPherson added that “this entire trial has been a sham.”

“Diab has lived through a nightmare for the last decade and unjustly spent three years in a French prison under tortuous conditions,” the pair said in a Friday statement.

Garrison added that “everyone deserves the right to a fair trial,” a right he believes was denied to Diab.

“The horrible conditions Dr. Diab suffered over flimsy and discredited evidence violated his rights and poisoned the process,” he said.

Last month, Amnesty International urged the French public prosecutor for anti-terrorism to drop the “groundless” charges against Diab, while calling the case against him “baseless and flawed.”

The calls to end the persecution of Diab come in tandem with a push to hold individuals responsible for the antisemitic attack to be brought to justice.

“Justice does not, however, come by pursuing a man against whom both the Canadian and French justice systems have already found there to be a lack of credible evidence,” a March press release from Amnesty International reads.

After reviewing judicial decisions, evidence, documents, legal submissions and court rulings, Amnesty has concluded the charges against Diab should be withdrawn.

Now, it’s up to the Canadian government to prevent the relentless persecution of Diab from continuing. It’s a promise the professor hopes Trudeau will keep.

A Marxist reader for disorienting times

by Kate Jacobson 

 Mar 7, 2023 

Briarpatch Magazine

I know that I am not alone in saying that I am the most politically disoriented and unorganized I have been in my life. While I have political tastes and desires, I have no sense of a future, let alone a positive one, and little sense of where the levers of power are. There are many hopeful signs and valiant struggles, but still, the enormity of capitalism’s violence is far outstripping the scale of our efforts to confront it.

The reflexive answers to this situation tend toward either doomerism or boosterism. It is an obvious error to give in to panic and catastrophism, but I believe we are equally in error to engage in boosterism: the practice of claiming every loss and setback as some kind of secret victory. And from Bernie Sanders’ second unsuccessful presidential campaign, to soaring police budgets despite widespread Black Lives Matter protests, to the alienation and illness of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been no shortage of losses and setbacks over the past few years.

Activists often contend that we should speak truth to power; I am currently preoccupied with the task of speaking truth about ourselves, our movements, the conditions we organize in, and what it will truly take to win. So, what is to be done? I don’t know, but I have found the following texts useful in guiding my thinking in the direction of an answer and then, hopefully, toward political orientation, organization, and action.

The majority of these texts are based in the Marxist tradition, which I have found invaluable as a tool in disciplining my mind to face a disorienting and distressing world with unflinching honesty. Capitalism is an incredibly obfuscating and mystifying political system; Marxism is a method for parsing it.


The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

At the risk of sounding obnoxious, I would say that this is my favourite Karl Marx – easy to read, funny, literary, and incisive. The Eighteenth Brumaire is a journalistic account of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s autocoup of 1851, but it has been most useful for me as an example of how Marxists should analyze current events. We are not simply identifying problems in society and complaining about them; we are using the method of historical materialism to understand the concrete formations and contradictions of a specific moment in time. Doing this well requires a certain openness to both the specificity of the historical moment and the possibility of sudden change, and Marx demonstrates this approach with style.

Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974)

Harry Braverman is the first researcher since Marx to take seriously the labour process itself as a site of class conflict. In the postwar period, it was common to understand the control and coordination of work as a technical or bureaucratic exercise; Braverman demonstrated that automation and “scientific management” were instead a way of deskilling workers. Contrary to contemporary leftist memes that there is “no such thing as unskilled labour,” Braverman argues that skilled labour does exist, but that capitalists use technology and management techniques to strip away the “skilled” parts of workers’ jobs, separating the conception and arrangement of work from its execution. For example, instead of an engineer designing a small electric motor, the worker would input desired performance data into a computerized program and inspect the results. Unskilled labour is real, but manufactured deliberately to suppress wages, foster alienation, and make employment more precarious. Crucially, this insight into the way labour processes are reshaped is not restricted to traditional “manual” labour; his analysis includes the proletarianization of professional and white-collar workers, making the text an invaluable foundation for anyone involved in the labour movement.

Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction (2019)

To my shame, I spent most of my twenties dismissing feminist theory out of hand. I was frustrated by liberal feminism’s preoccupation with women’s inclusion in institutions and power structures I believed were immoral, and I painted with a very large brush. Fortunately, owing to the efforts of some very patient comrades and my remarkable feminist shop steward, I was acquainted with Marxist feminism as both an alternative to liberal feminism and as a way of analyzing the production and reproduction of life itself. Martha E. Giménez is a rigorous and unorthodox thinker who is critical of ideas commonly known to contemporary feminists like intersectionality and identity politics, but her criticism is based on a rich and productive engagement with those concepts. I think even readers who end up disagreeing with her critiques will find that the effort has produced new understanding and insight. I admire Giménez for her unwillingness to handwave away thorny particulars, even if I am not always content with the answers.

 
“Capitalism and mental health” & “A theory of mental health and monopoly capitalism” (2019, 2020)

By bringing together two distinct veins of Marxist thought, David Matthews’s articles from the Monthly Review show both how alienation is created by capitalist society and its corresponding psychological toll. One vein the author taps is Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital, which is one of the most influential works of Marxist political economy produced in North America. Published in 1966, it remains deeply prescient on issues of financial speculation, monopoly, inequality, economic stagnation, and imperialism. The other is the work of Erich Fromm, who argued that poor mental health arises from capitalist society, the organization of which hinders the fulfillment of our uniquely human desires. Both articles are excellent on their own, and they are also a great jumping-off point for further reading on Marxist political economy or political psychology.


Space Crone (2023)

I am keenly looking forward to this new collection of Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing on feminism and gender. While Le Guin isn’t a Marxist, she embodies the best aspects of its approach – lucidity, invention, adamance. It has rarely been more necessary that we engage with feminist writing that takes seriously the category of “woman” while emphatically rejecting reactionary bio-essentialism. Le Guin is committed to an ecological and multi-generational feminist consciousness; she is equally committed to rejecting tired gender-essentialist tropes about women’s inherent capacity for wisdom, divinity, and nurturing. The result is a feminist politic that takes women’s intellectual capacity and engagement with other women’s ideas seriously; I can’t wait to do the same with this text.


Fire Alarm (2006)

Michael Löwy’s close reading of Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” is so good that I almost always recommend it as a companion to the original essay. Benjamin makes several key theoretical insights through his critique of progress and understanding of catastrophe as the status quo. Löwy’s reading enriches these insights by forcing you to think about concepts previously taken for granted – time, historical materialism, messianism, progress, history – in a radically different and generative way. I return to this book often, particularly the conclusion. In an enigmatic paragraph, Benjamin reminds us of the dangers of looking into the future: if you think you know precisely what will happen, you are cursed to wait passively for the inevitable. Instead, Benjamin and Löwy both invite us to think of the future as the “small gateway in time” through which deliverance may enter, if we work to bring it about.

It is my belief that honesty – about ourselves, our opponents, our situation – is the necessary precondition for political action, as without it we will become disillusioned and ineffective. In the coming years, I am endeavouring to face the world as it is, without consolation or despair.


Kate Jacobson is a union organiser and the host of the Alberta Advantage podcast.

Four-day work week: Reformist or revolutionary?

Transforming our ecologically unsustainable class society will mean moving away from the capitalist growth imperative

Nick Gottlieb / April 9, 2023 / 

https://canadiandimension.com/

Office workers in the early 1980s. Photo courtesy the Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums/Flickr.


The British Columbia Green Party is the closest thing to a left-wing political party (at least, with any seats) we’ve got in Canada. So I did a double-take when I saw that the World Economic Forum is advocating for the same policy they are: reduced working hours.

It turns out the BC Greens are just the latest to join an odd convergence of interests supporting the four-day work week. Groups ranging from self-proclaimed “business leaders” to mainstream media outlets, climate activists, and radical economists seem to have joined forces in support of this policy.

What exactly is going on? Is it genuinely a win-win-win, a top-to-bottom alignment of class interests with climate benefits to boot, just waiting for someone to flip the switch?

If you think that sounds implausible, it’s because it is: the reality is that the anti-capitalist economists who first studied the four-day work week made a radically different case for it than pro-corporate magazines like Forbes. Whether it’s radical or not depends on the form and context in which it’s implemented.

The World Economic Forum and various other business interests—I’ll call them the “Davos contingent”—advocating for a four-day work week claim that it will help fight gender inequality and climate change (along with a few other trendy issues they can try to co-opt). Simultaneously, and here’s the crux, a compressed work schedule will improve worker productivity to the point that it more than offsets the reduction in working hours.

One article cites a Japanese study that saw worker productivity go up by 40 percent, nearly double the reduction in working hours, and goes so far as to claim that reduced working hours is essential for “preserving economic growth.” Every piece of support from this camp emphasizes that cutting working hours will actually help grow the economy.

There is some evidence that cutting out an entire day of work could reduce carbon emissions even if it stimulated economic growth, although the mechanism behind this raises some questions about who exactly the Davos contingent imagines enjoying the benefits of a four-day work week. Most pilot studies have found climate benefits coming predominantly from a decline in commuting and, in some cases, from reduced energy use at offices.

To capture these climate benefits, new employees can’t fill in for the old ones, which in practice limits the opportunity to businesses where daily presence isn’t required—effectively, to the so-called “knowledge sector.” A grocery store, for example, would not see the same climate benefits from implementing a four-day work week that a public relations firm might because they’re simply going to hire more cashiers to fill in their hours. The same goes for hospitals, schools, and much of the rest of the economy.

So there’s already some question about just who this policy is designed for, and what limitations that might have on its purported benefits. But to top it off, the vast majority of the articles coming out of the Davos contingent justify the potential emissions reductions by mis-applying research by a sociologist named Juliet Schor—research that demonstrated that reducing working hours could reduce environmental footprint precisely by reducing total economic activity.

The Davos contingent is, at least publicly, attempting to have it both ways, arguing that we should reduce working hours as a way to stimulate economic growth while simultaneously claiming the environmental benefits that radical economists have found would come with reducing economic growth.

Schor’s research on working hours is part of a tradition that is now known as degrowth: the idea that to remain within the Earth’s ecological limits, wealthy countries need to shrink their economies. Most degrowth advocates support reducing working hours, but precisely as a way to help reduce total economic activity while mitigating harm to workers. Shorter work weeks and job sharing are ways to ensure people can still earn a living even if total economic activity in wealthier, industrialized countries declines. If, as the Davos contingent proposes, reducing working hours increases total economic activity through improved productivity, then the benefits cited by degrowth economists disappear.

All that leaves us with the question: should we support it, and how? It’s helpful to look at this through the frame created by the socialist philosopher André Gorz. Is this a “non-reformist reform,” or a reformist one? It is clearly a boon for workers—at least, the workers it applies to. But beyond its immediate material benefit, will it further entrench class society or will it contribute to the longer-term project of overcoming it? Will it perpetuate or accelerate the rate of consumption, or will it put wealthy countries like Canada on a path towards shrinking their material footprint? Does it contribute to revolutionary change even though its support base includes those thoroughly in the reformist (and even capitalist) camp?

As Mark and Paul Engler explain, Gorz didn’t give us a clear litmus test for whether something is reformist or non-reformist: context, framing, and the process of fighting for the reform itself are key factors. Just like Rosa Luxemburg argued in her famous essay on the subject, reformists and revolutionaries often pursue the same short-term tactics, but by framing those tactics as the end goal themselves, reformists lose out on the more transformative benefits that stand to be gained.

1933

Companies and governments implementing a four-day work week because of the (claimed) benefits for business, workers, and climate? Reformist. Labour laws won by social movements that implement a four-day work week as a first step towards a bigger project of moving away from economic growth and towards sufficiency in the Global North? Non-reformist.

So where does that leave the BC Green Party’s campaign? Their framing is, at least so far, thoroughly reformist, presumably because they see that approach as a path to actually getting something passed. It’s a classic example of the hazards radical movements face when they obtain electoral power. But to their credit, the legislation they suggest the province adopt appears designed to apply to much more than just the knowledge sector and doesn’t specifically highlight productivity gains as a goal.

Ultimately, what it would take for this to be a radical campaign in BC is a shift in framing: are we simply trying to incrementally improve worker wellbeing and, maybe, cut a few tonnes of carbon emissions? Or are we trying to take a step towards transforming our ecologically unsustainable class society by moving away from the capitalist growth imperative?

Nick Gottlieb is a climate writer based in northern BC and the author of the newsletter Sacred Headwaters. His work focuses on understanding the power dynamics driving today’s interrelated crises and exploring how they can be overcome. Follow him on Twitter @ngottliebphoto.

As Lasso flails, Ottawa pushes for more Canadian mining in Ecuador

The proposed Canada-Ecuador FTA would greatly expand the power of Canadian mining companies in Ecuador

Owen Schalk 

/ March 28, 2023 / 

Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso. 

As embattled Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso faces public disdain, struggles against potential impeachment, and foments regional divides, Ottawa is quietly negotiating a free trade agreement (FTA) with his extremely unpopular government.

The proposed Canada-Ecuador FTA would greatly expand the power of Canadian companies in Ecuador, including through the implementation of a foreign investment protection agreement, or investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism. Such agreements give foreign companies the ability to sue national governments in private tribunals if they feel the state in question is interfering with their capacity to earn profits. Oftentimes, this mechanism is invoked when states try to increase tax and royalty earnings on foreign investments or introduce new regulations to protect the environment and human rights.

In the midst of these negotiations, Toronto hosted the annual Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) conference. The purpose of this event is to put representatives from investment-friendly governments into contact with industry figures, with the goal of promoting the transnational mining industry of which Canada is the world’s most notorious champion, serving as home to 75 percent of registered mining companies.

One of the events at PDAC was titled “Ecuador Day: Next mining destination.” The event noted that Ecuador offers “enormous opportunities” in the mineral sector, and that “the [Lasso] government[’s] support for responsible mining and foreign investment makes us a very attractive country.”

It is no surprise that Canadian mining companies are so interested in Ecuador. Canada is Ecuador’s largest foreign investor, due primarily to mining investments. Canadian direct investment in Ecuador is $3.7 billion, approximately four percent of Ecuador’s entire GDP. Since 2017, the year that wildly unpopular right-winger Lenín Moreno took power, Canadian investment in Ecuador has tripled.

PDAC’s Ecuador event was organized by the Mining Chamber of Ecuador, an industry association whose president came out against local consultations with environmental groups and Indigenous communities during a period of anti-mining resistance in 2021. The Mining Chamber’s president, Nathan Monash, is also the vice president of business sustainability at Lundin Gold, a Canadian mining company headquartered in Vancouver.

Ecuadorian social and environmental groups have expressed concern about the FTA generally and Canada’s push to expand mineral exploitation specifically. A statement signed by sixteen such organizations noted that “Free Trade Agreements [are] instruments of transnational corporate power… that grant excessive legal protections to investors while deepening extractivism, deregulating labour and environmental protections, abandon measures to protect small-scale family agriculture [and] privatize basic services.” The statement expressed concern over Canada’s role in deepening these social, economic, and political crises:
[W]e are also concerned that an FTA with Canada will guarantee greater impunity for Canadian investments in the extractive sector, mainly mining, in Indigenous and peasant territories, water recharge areas, and forests, where mining projects are being opposed due to evidence of water contamination. We are concerned that an FTA will lead to deforestation, the destruction of the páramos, forced displacement, a rupture of the social fabric, as well as violence, criminalization, and prosecution of those who defend human rights and the environment.


Canada’s reasons for rushing to implement an FTA with the Lasso government are obvious. In the context of public disapproval, nationwide resistance movements, and skyrocketing violence (some report that Ecuador is on track for its most violent year on record), the Lasso administration has prioritized foreign mining investment over basic public demands for state support. His administration is reviled by the Ecuadorian public—recent polls put his approval rating between 12 and 14 percent—but that doesn’t seem to matter to the Trudeau government or its friends in the mining industry.

Lasso’s friendliness with foreign mining capital seems to be one reason why the Canadian government has not condemned his government’s cruel policies, which have been rejected by the vast majority of Ecuadorians. In fact, during anti-Lasso resistance last year, the Canadian Embassy in Ecuador mimicked the rhetoric of the discredited Ecuadorian right-wing, labelling the protests “violent riots.”

While Canada is negotiating an FTA with Ecuador, the country’s left-wing, politically persecuted under Lasso and his predecessor, is resurgent. In local elections last month, the Citizen Revolution Movement of former president Rafael Correa won nine of the country’s 23 prefectures and 60 mayorships, including in the two largest cities of Guayaquil and Quito. The results reaffirmed that the Citizen Revolution is still the most powerful political force in Ecuador.

While Ecuador under Correa was never averse to foreign investment, the Canadian government has always looked on him and his political movement with suspicion, much preferring the reliable subservience of the right. One can see why in a recent interview with Correa on Mexican television. When asked if he supported free trade, Correa answered, “With smart trade, yes. With dumb openness, never. And check history, not a single country has developed like that… There is not a single country that has developed without proper protectionism.”

As Lasso flails, bleeding public support and allies in the National Assembly, Trudeau is staying on the right-wing’s side, just as he did when Lasso’s predecessor Moreno became the least popular president in modern Ecuadorian history.

It is clear that most Ecuadorians do not view their future as one of neoliberalism, blind openness to foreign capital, and subservience to Canadian mining companies. However, the opinions of the majority have never altered the character of Canada’s neoliberal, pro-corporate, anti-socialist foreign policy, and they aren’t doing so in the case of Ecuador, where Guillermo Lasso has retained Ottawa’s support.

Owen Schalk is a writer from Manitoba. His book on Canada’s role in the war in Afghanistan will be released by Lorimer later this year. To see more of his work, visit www.owenschalk.com.

SOLIDARITY

Unions Criticize Vancouver’s Continuing Tent Sweeps

CUPE local that represents workers involved condemn the city’s approach.

Zak Vescera 

Yesterday

TheTyee.ca
Zak Vescera is The Tyee’s labour reporter. This reporting beat is made possible by the Local Journalism Initiative.

Several major unions and the BC Federation of Labour have criticized the City of Vancouver’s approach. Photo by Jen St. Denis.

Vancouver’s continuing efforts to remove tents from the Downtown Eastside has drawn criticism from some unions and many of the municipality’s own workers.

Unions representing hospital staff, shelter workers and even employees who began clearing the tents on East Hastings Street on April 5 have condemned the approach of city and police, saying it left displaced residents in an even more desperate situation.

Dozens of frontline workers in the neighbourhood have also signed open letters criticizing city officials, police and Vancouver Coastal Health, which employs and finances many outreach and health services in the neighbourhood.

One signatory, Blake Edwards, said the heavy involvement of police has frayed the already fragile trust between marginalized residents and government service providers, whether or not they were directly involved.

“We attempt engagement in an attempt to build a therapeutic relationship,” said Edwards, an outreach worker in the neighbourhood for roughly a decade. “And this decampment is just an undoing of all this work we’ve put in.”

The Tyee reached out to the Vancouver Police Department and the office of Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim seeking comment for this story and did not hear back by publication time.

The tent city spread along the sidewalk in 2022 shortly after Vancouver police announced they would no longer accompany city staff doing controversial “sweeps,” which advocates say often resulted in staff taking residents’ belongings and shelter. The sweeps were cancelled shortly afterwards.

Fire Chief Karen Fry first ordered the removal of tents in July 2022, saying the camp posed a safety hazard. In a news release, the city also claimed the encampment was linked to an increase in physical violence and sexual assault in the neighbourhood.

The city also said it would help residents find shelter beds.

But Tyson Singh said there was little evidence of any serious plan to house people. On the first day of the sweeps, Singh said, police had barricaded a stretch of the neighbourhood, barring members of the media from entry. Singh was able to get through to assist residents, he said. Within hours, tents had already begun to reappear, he added.

“Tents had already started popping up in the place where I had just helped decamp just a few hours before,” said Singh, an outreach worker in the community. “When you offer people nowhere to go, I don’t know what you expect.”

Several labour organizations have criticized the way the decampment was handled. The BC General Employees’ Union, which represent staff at some shelters in the Downtown Eastside, called the decampment “a violation of human rights.” The Hospital Employees’ Union called it “cruel, unsafe and dehumanizing.” And the BC Federation of Labour, the voice of unionized workers in the province, called the city’s approach “callous and dehumanizing.”

Many city workers who took down tents are represented by CUPE 1004, which represents a range of workers across the public sector. But the union’s provincial office also issued a statement, saying the city’s leadership “does not reflect the values of CUPE BC or CUPE Local 1004.”

“CUPE workers have no capacity to reject this work under current labour laws, and face discipline or termination if they refuse their daily assignment without legal justification,” said a statement from the union. CUPE 1004 acting president Scott McIntosh did not return multiple requests for comment.


A Better Future Is Possible for the Downtown Eastside

READ MORE

Kahlied Salem, a housing co-ordinator with the Kílala Lelum health centre, believes the backlash from labour groups and workers stems largely from the lack of a plan to house residents.

It’s not the first decampment Salem has seen. In 2019, the city began clearing a homeless encampment at Oppenheimer Park. In 2021, workers dismantled a tent city at Strathcona Park. And a smaller tent city still exists in CRAB Park a short walk away. But Salem says this time was different, largely because of the scale of the police presence and the lack of other housing options on offer. On the day of the decampment, he said he saw two dumpster trucks rolling up and down Hastings Street as workers tossed tents inside. Some residents were given bins, he said, to hastily store their belongings.

“With the other decampments, the city kind of said ‘Here’s our plan to go and do this.’ But with this one, it was a like a surprise attack,” Salem said. “It was something you would do if you were in war.”


Kirsten Douglas, a social worker, said the tent city emerged out of a lack of good housing options in the Downtown Eastside, a neighbourhood she said is often misunderstood.

Single-room occupancy units in the neighbourhood, she said, are often infested with pests and are increasingly expensive. Douglas said the tent city’s many problems emerged from that lack of housing, but says the city’s change didn’t offer a solution.


Women Aren’t Safer After Hastings Camp Cleared, Say Advocates

READ MORE

“We saw a lot of peoples’ only shelter being taken down during a downpour,” she said. She said she and many workers in health and social services have a personal connection to the community and have been shaken by the staggering number of toxic drug deaths in recent years.

“It’s becoming impossible not to raise the alarm,” she said.

Many workers in the Downtown Eastside cannot or will not speak on record with media because of policies enforced by their employers, who may be government agencies or indirectly funded by the province or the city.

One worker, who spoke under condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal from their employer, said they worried about the negative health consequences the displacement might have for people who lived in the tents.

“Ultimately, I don’t think you last that long in this kind of work without giving a shit, for real,” the worker said. “It hurts me to see so many people lose everything.”

PSAC  STRIKE

From the Picket Line: What’s at Stake in the Big Strike

Workers discuss public perceptions of ‘cushy government jobs.’ Experts eye a path to a deal.

Zak Vescera 

25 Apr 2023

TheTyee.ca
Zak Vescera is The Tyee’s labour reporter. This reporting beat is made possible by the Local Journalism Initiative.
‘I do worry about being able to just afford my home and whether I’m going to be able to keep making those payments,’ says PSAC member Damir Moric. Photo by Zak Vescera.


Workers on the frontline of Canada’s largest strike in decades say their finances and careers could hinge on the outcome of the escalating labour dispute.

More than 100,000 federal workers went on strike last week after negotiations between the Public Service Alliance of Canada and the government hit an impasse over salaries and whether workers should have the right to remote work enshrined in the collective agreement.

The union has asked for 13.5 per cent over the three-year agreement, which would be retroactive to late 2021 when their last contract expired. The Union of Taxation Employees, which represents more than 35,000 workers at the Canada Revenue Agency, have asked for an increase of 20.5 per cent, on top of a one-time nine-per-cent raise.

The federal Treasury Board’s last public offer to both units was nine per cent.

On a rainy picket line in Vancouver, Matthew di Nicolo said stereotypes about federal public servants mask the realities of the job.

“If they had these cushy government jobs where they pay you to sit around, I’d love one of those,” said di Nicolo, who processes unemployment claims. “If they were offering those, I’d take one in a heartbeat, because that’s not my experience.”

The PSAC’s membership spans 155,000 government workers. They handle tax claims, cook meals for the military and inspect and maintain fisheries on B.C.’s coast, among other things.

The union says just under a quarter of those members earn between $40,000 and $60,000 a year and that almost 60 per cent are earning less than $70,000. PSAC says about 20 per cent are earning more than $80,000 a year.

Damir Moric says the wages used to be enough to get by. But now, he’s facing higher interest payments on his mortgage and rising costs as inflation spiked in 2022.

“I do worry about being able to just afford my home and whether I’m going to be able to keep making those payments,” Moric said. “It was adequate for me starting out. Now I’m not able to really make it.”

Moric and di Nicolo were among dozens of PSAC members at a picket line in downtown Vancouver on Friday. Many huddled under archways for shelter or crowded around a folding table overflowing with Tim Hortons’ doughnuts and lukewarm coffee.

Others paced around in the rain, carrying white placards that said “2% is for milk,” a reference to part of the government proposal.

At another picket line up the street, a group of bemused strikers watched as a dark blue sports car was towed away. Members are receiving $75 a day in strike pay.

The PSAC has picketed more than 250 locations across the country, the union says, and is now also stopping work at some federal ports to ratchet up pressure at the bargaining table.

On Monday PSAC members began picketing the Cascadia Terminal on East Vancouver’s waterfront, halting work at one of the country’s largest export grain terminal.

Milton Dyck, president of PSAC’s agriculture union, said the union plans to picket more locations if a deal isn’t reached, part of a broader plan to ratchet up economic pressure on the government.

“We’re not trying to close the entire port down. But we want to start selectively choosing parts here and there,” Dyck said.

“What we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be hitting different spots and scaling up.”

PSAC president Chris Aylward and the federal government traded accusations this weekend about who was responsible for the pace of talks. Aylward said the union was willing to target “strategic locations,” including ports.

The union can legally picket grain terminals because roughly 290 of its members work at the Canadian Grain Commission and are in a legal strike position, including workers at Cascadia. Dyck said other union workers at that terminal, including the Grain Workers Local 333 and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, respected the picket line.

Dyck said his goal is a fair deal for his members, who he said are often asked to do overtime because of staff shortages across the grain commission. But the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association worries the union’s plan could inflict economic pain on farmers. Association president Gunter Jochum said lengthy delays at grain ports could back up supply chains, increasing costs and potentially hurting Canadian grain prices.

“The companies will just pass that cost up down the line and it ends up at the lowest common dominator, which is the farm,” Jochum said.

The Canadian Grain Commission, which regulates the handling and export of those crops, says exports are still flowing. Spokesman Rémi Gosselin said the commission was allowing grain companies to collect samples on the commission’s behalf. Gosselin said those samples were then being tested and evaluated by commission managers so they can still be exported during the strike.

PSAC represents roughly 65 per cent of the commission’s employees, Gosselin said, something he said has had a “significant” impact on their operations. “We totally respect our employees’ right to strike, but at the same time we have a mandate to fill,” Gosselin said.

Jochum has called for the federal government to allow private inspectors to do the work, something PSAC would likely viscerally oppose, since those workers would need to cross picket lines and would undercut their pickets.

The Cascadia Terminal is jointly owned by agriculture giants Viterra and Richardson International and has more than 280,000 metric tonnes of storage space for canola, barley and other grain. A Viterra spokesperson declined to comment on the picket line when contacted on Monday.

.

Milton Dyck, president of PSAC’s agriculture union, said the union would expand pickets at grain terminals that are critical to exports. Photo by Zak Vescera.


PSAC president Chris Aylward and the federal government traded accusations this weekend about who was responsible for the pace of talks. Aylward said the union was willing to target “strategic locations,” including ports.

University of Saskatchewan political science professor Charles Smith said the PSAC doesn’t have a tradition of labour militancy.

He said the strike is part of a larger period of labour upheaval sparked by high inflation, rising interest rates and low unemployment rates that have made workers seek better working conditions and in a strong position to get them. The COVID-19 pandemic, Smith said, likely amplified that since many public federal workers were asked to continue reporting for work and launch new programs in a period of uncertainty.

“The PSAC were asked to do a hell of a lot of work in a way they were not trained for and get the job done, and they did,” Smith said.

Public opinion on the strike appears to be slightly favourable towards PSAC. An Angus Reid poll conducted last week found 48 per cent of respondents supported the union’s wage requests, compared to 40 per cent who opposed it and 12 per cent who were unsure. The online poll was conducted among a representative randomized sample of 1,276 people and had an estimated margin of error of 3 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

Mark Thompson, a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business, said federal public servants typically are not as sympathetic to the public as their provincial counterparts, who are often more visible and provide more direct services.

“Not very many of us have direct interaction with federal people. And it’s not always something that we relish. If you cross the border and you want to wait in line, you just want to get it over with,” Thompson said.

Matthew di Nicolo says any perceptions of cushy government jobs don’t reflect reality. Photo by Zak Vescera.

But he said the federal government’s wage proposal was likely too low to secure a deal. Most provincial public servants in B.C., for example, secured a wage increase of between 10.74 to 12.74 per cent over three years for most positions, with the final total depending on the rate of inflation in the years of the agreement.


A Freedom Denied Canadian Workers

READ MORE

Thompson said the most interesting part of the dispute is remote work. Many federal servants began working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic and did not return to the office until this year, when the Treasury Board set a requirement for employees to report to work in person at least twice a week. In a statement, the government said it made that decision because working in-person “supports collaboration, team spirit, innovation and a culture of belonging.”

PSAC now wants the right to remote work enshrined in collective agreements, something that has been controversial in other organizations.

In B.C., the government resisted requests from unions to guarantee remote working privileges in collective bargaining last year, leaving it up to managers to decide. But the province has also signalled it wants to be flexible about remote work and that it wants more workers in different regions of the province outside Victoria and Vancouver.


‘These Workers Have Proven Their Worth Time and Again’

READ MORE

Vanessa Radunz, who works in procurement services for the federal government, says being able to work remotely has saved her hours of commuting each day on transit plus associated costs. She says she is able to do her job — which involves helping multiple federal departments buy anything they might need — from home with ease.

“It’s an extra two hours a day. You have to set all your equipment up, troubleshoot any technical things, pack it all up at the end of the day and go home,” said Radunz.

But the biggest sticking point on the picket line is still wages. The federal Treasury Board has said the union’s requested pay increases are unreasonable and that its revised offer of nine per cent reflects the recommendations of a Public Interest Commission Report. The reports are part of the process in federal labour negotiations.

Steve Claxton, a supervisor who has worked for the government for 24 years, says salaries have become less competitive over time compared to the private sector or working for the provincial government. He said many of his colleagues also worked extensive overtime at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said, and were hopeful the next collective agreement would acknowledge that contribution.


Why 2023 Could Be the Year of the Union

READ MORE

“No one knew what the pandemic was going to end up like or how dangerous it was at the time, and they came in every day without a contract,” Claxton said.

Di Nicolo joined the public service in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic began. He met some of his colleagues for the first time in person on the picket line. During the pandemic, he said, he worked overtime hours to stand up the Canada Emergency Response Benefit for the millions of workers who lost their jobs in the first months of the pandemic.

“During the pandemic we got a lot of kinds words. They were saying, ‘You guys are doing a lot of work, you’re essential.’ And then two years later we’re looking for a cost of living adjustment and we’re not getting it,” Di Nicolo said. “The words are great, but I cannot buy groceries with some kind words.”

Big Risks, Long Hours, Low Pay: The Lives of BC Log Truckers

As forests shrink, drivers work 16-hour days to deliver single loads of logs to BC sawmills.

Ben Parfitt 

12 Apr 2023

TheTyee.ca
Ben Parfitt is resource policy analyst for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives BC Office.

Longer and longer days, bigger risks and less pay for logging truckers. 

Photo via Shutterstock.

When Eugene Wilson started driving a logging truck 24 years ago, he worked out of the Bulkley Valley community of Houston three hours west of Prince George.

He recalls the trips as if they were yesterday. He’d begin the morning driving a short distance west out of town. Then he’d turn off the highway onto the first of two industrial roads that he’d follow for about 70 kilometres before arriving at the logging site.

After pulling up at a landing — a flattened, dirt-packed area where stacks of logs awaited loading — he would wait as his truck bed was filled with tens of thousands of kilograms of logs. He’d then secure the load and head back to town to drop the logs off at the sawmill.

Every day he made three round trips before heading home for supper and bed. The days behind the wheel were long. But the pay was steady and he had few complaints.

The longer he drove, though, the more things changed. The sawmills in Smithers, Houston, Burns Lake, Fort St. James, Vanderhoof and Prince George all needed lots of logs, some of them a million or more a year. Feeding them required constant logging.

The Tyee is supported by readers like you Join us and grow independent media in Canada

The more the logging progressed, “the further and further away from the mills the trees were,” Wilson says. Now, instead of delivering three loads of logs a day to the mill, he was down to delivering half as much.

The hauling distances became so great that it took Wilson 10 hours to make one round trip with one load of logs. To keep the logs flowing and the good paycheques coming, he would turn around after those 10 hours and drive five hours back to the logging site.

He’d sleep at a nearby camp overnight, then at first light the next day he’d drive back to the mill with one load and make one more round trip after that. Away from home every other night, Wilson and his wife, who does the family’s household and business accounting, decided they’d had enough.

Before dawn to after dusk

Wilson’s experiences behind the wheel are a brutal reality for many others. As British Columbia’s primary forests (those forests never before subject to industrial logging) shrink further still, the distance from forest to mill increases, necessitating longer and longer log hauls.

Earlier this year, The Tyee published an analysis by the B.C. office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives noting that a crash in forest industry employment is underway in B.C. partly because the best and easiest to access trees are gone.

The article noted that logging truck drivers who started work at daybreak are on the highway past midnight driving through the darkness toward Fort St. James to pick up logs somewhere far beyond town. The article questioned how long such drivers must work each day.

In response, a logging truck driver contacted The Tyee to say he wanted to speak about his experiences. He said many drivers routinely work brutal hours and there is a tacit agreement between drivers and their employers that records must be falsified sometimes so that drivers appear to be at or below the maximum number of hours they are allowed to be behind the wheel.

According to National Safety Code regulations, logging truck drivers are restricted to driving no more than 13 hours each day — a work day 62-per-cent longer than most Canadians work on average.

Other rules specify that drivers’ combined driving and non-driving work hours (non-driving work includes the time waiting for logs to be loaded and offloaded, putting chains on and off trucks, doing brake checks) cannot exceed 15 hours, and that they must have at least nine consecutive hours of non-driving time per day.

To protect his job, the driver requested anonymity. A second driver did the same. Both drivers were unaware the other had spoken. Coincidentally, both drivers worked recently in B.C.’s remote northwest region. Key aspects of their stories aligned and were corroborated by information in online job postings for logging truck drivers.

The first driver, who we will call Shane, is relatively new to the logging industry and describes his brief time on the job as a trial by fire.

When Shane called me one day in early February, he was near the small community of Kitwanga, which is where Highway 37 — also known as the Stewart-Cassiar Highway — begins. The highway is one of two northern transportation corridors connecting B.C. to Yukon and traverses some of the most remote and sparsely populated terrain in the province.

Shane was on the return leg of a trip that saw him begin his day at 2 a.m. when he woke for breakfast at a remote work camp near Dease Lake, a community of a few hundred people about 230 kilometres south of the Yukon border. Twelve hours later he was heading back to that camp having delivered one load of logs to Houston, a journey of 662 kilometres.

“They tell us we should be able to do the return trip in 13.5 hours. It takes closer to 15 or 16 if the weather is crap,” Shane said. But there are opportunities to hide the long hours. “If you have a paper log, you can manipulate that as much as you want.”

Shane added that the log load he dropped off in Houston did not stay there but was destined to be picked up by a second truck that would take the logs another 307 kilometres to a sawmill in Prince George. The total trip for one load of logs from the Dease Lake area to Prince George is nearly 1,000 kilometres.

Unbroken transportation

Prior to the arrival of trucks, conveying large numbers of logs great distances was limited by the energy required to move such heavy objects. Two key ways to save energy were exploiting gravity to move logs downhill or reducing friction.

On steep slopes in winter or during wet weather, logs could literally be slid downhill (at considerable cost in terms of damaged soils) on ground slides or on slides made of wood.

Logs could also be moved very effectively by floating or towing them on water or by damming streams. When the impounded water behind the dams was released by opening a sluice gate, tens of thousands of penned up logs would shoot downstream in the current. When logjams occurred as they often did, dynamite could be used to break up the logjams and get them moving again.

Cables were also used to elevate logs, allowing them to be moved above ground rather than across it to points where they could be put on slides or hauled away by horses or oxen pulling wagons or sledges.

For centuries, the movement of large numbers of logs occurred in three stages involving a short initial “skidding” phase where logs were dragged or wheeled a short distance along the ground, then an intermediate phase where they were slid or towed further, then a final journey by water or, later, by rail.

The arrival of the logging truck effectively reduced the transportation phases to two, with the logs simply having to be moved out of a cut block to the roadside for pickup by a truck, introducing a new “system of unbroken transportation” that remains to this day.

A not-so-novel idea — make the trucks bigger

By the 1940s, logging trucks became the primary way almost all logs were moved in the province. Harnessing the energy of the combustion engine both in the logging operations themselves and in log transportation changed everything. Now, forests that had once seemed impossible to reach were there for the taking.

One way to understand just how deep that reach became is to look at the number of “resource roads” in the province, the off-highway transportation corridors used primarily by the logging industry, but also by the mining and oil and gas industries.

Today, there are roughly 700,000 kilometres of resource roads of varying age and condition in the province. The roads reach into virtually every corner of B.C. and when combined stretch far enough to circle the Earth 17 times.

As B.C.’s forest companies grew and amalgamated, some of the largest sawmills on the planet emerged and the demand for more trees to process into lumber skyrocketed, requiring truck drivers to travel into ever more remote and in some cases extreme territory. The higher up mountainsides or the further north they went, the smaller, on average, the trees were.

This meant more forest had to be cleared to extract the same volume of wood. Data analyzed by the CCPA show that about 10 per cent less “fibre” — the logging industry’s word for trees — came out of the forests per hectare between 2011 and 2019 as came out of the forest between 2001 and 2010.

With more forests being cleared to extract the same amount of logs, the costs inevitably went up, leading transportation engineers working for the not-for-profit research and development organization, FPInnovations, to come up with a not-so-novel idea: make some trucks bigger by adding a ninth axle.

As mills are farther and farther away from logging sites, truckers face new challenges. Photo via Stand.earth.

The new monster trucks feeding the monster mills, which were approved for some routes in B.C. in 2017, were capable of delivering 15 per cent more logs per trip. This resulted in energy savings of about 10 per cent, because less fuel was needed per unit of wood delivered.

But the bigger payloads did nothing in terms of energy saving for the drivers themselves.

A world of extremes

Shane describes the area he drives in and out of each day before reaching the highway as “steep terrain,” before chuckling and correcting himself. “That’s an understatement. You’re driving at maybe 10 kilometres an hour because you’re basically on the edge of a cliff. This is extreme logging. ‘This is where people die.’ That’s what an old-timer told me and I believe him.”

The second driver, who also spoke anonymously and who we will call Phil, confirmed that the driving conditions on some logging roads in the Cassiar Timber Supply Area — the most remote forest administration zone in northwest B.C. and where Dease Lake is located — are, indeed, extremely challenging.

He most recently hauled logs out of Bell II, an unincorporated community south of Dease Lake which gets its name because it marks the second bridge crossing of the Bell-Irving River.

“That Bell II country is for the very experienced,” Phil said. “It’s very adverse there, very adverse. You’re driving on anywhere from a 25- to 30-per-cent grade carrying 140,000 pounds.”

Phil said to make one round trip from the Bell II area to Houston is 14 hours. And that’s for an experienced driver, someone like Phil with 40 years’ driving experience. Even so, Phil said experience only takes you so far.

“Even the experienced guys will have trouble every once in a while and you have to accept that. Weather is a major factor, right. You’ve got snow, freezing rain, every variable Mother Nature will throw at you. If it was easy, everybody’d be doing it.”

Phil said most of the time he was driving out of the Bell II region, he was dropping off logs in Houston where they were stored for subsequent trucking to Prince George. The odd load of logs he took, though, had to go directly to Prince George. In that case, he’d do one day of at least 14 hours, then overnight in Smithers, and make a trip to Prince George the next day. Two days of driving to deliver one load of logs.

Fudging the books

This summer, all commercial truck drivers, including logging truck drivers and their employers, will no longer be able to skirt the rules limiting the hours behind the wheel — at least not as easily. Using paper logs to record hours at the wheel will be eliminated, and all truck drivers will be required to drive in vehicles equipped with electronic logging devices.

Dave Earle is president and CEO of the BC Trucking Association. The association’s members include the owners of 400 trucking fleets in the province and account for more than half of the roughly 45,000 commercial trucks on the road, including some logging trucks.

Earle says the introduction of the electronic monitors is a welcome development.

“The carriers have been calling for this — my members have been calling for this — for years,” Earle says. “The industry has known for a long time that there’s many people in the community that cheat and fudge the books.”

Earle stressed that while certain drivers falsify written travel logs, they are not doing so in a vacuum. Who they pick the goods up from and who they deliver the goods to may place entirely unreasonable expectations on drivers that result in unsafe conditions.

“Exploitation of drivers absolutely happens,” Earle says. “The Motor Vehicle Act says that no person can pressure a driver to work more than the permissible time. But I have never seen where a customer has been written up.”

Two things that are immutable are distance and time, Earle says. You start at point A and end at point B. Electronic logging devices will capture both distance and time. What they won’t capture, but other equipment increasingly installed on many commercial vehicles will, is speed.

Earle admits that with the installation of electronic logging devices the temptation to speed may be there. But his hope is that more companies will adopt technology that’s already in place in some fleets — including fleets owned by companies in his association.

That monitoring equipment “can detect things like speeding in specific speed zones, hard acceleration or braking, or sudden stops. Driver performance is measured not just by getting the job done, but getting it done safely and efficiently,” Earle says.

He added that such technology, if widely deployed, would improve working conditions for drivers themselves and for those who share the road with them.

Stay home or haul?

For years, Eugene Wilson drove trucks owned and maintained by local trucking companies. The expense of buying his own truck and being his own boss was a daunting financial proposition.

But after nearly two decades on the road, he and his wife decided to take the plunge. He put a down payment on a new tandem axle Kenworth that all-in cost $220,000.

And that was just for the truck itself. The trailers that would hold the logs were extra.

“You’re up to $300,000 just to haul logs,” Wilson says, adding that’s all you need to know about why you sometimes see big, shiny new logging trucks parked outside mobile homes. The truck is worth way, way more than the house a driver lives in, the house the person rarely sees because they’re always on the road.

Wilson says he did everything he could to lower the amount of interest the bank got by paying down the principal as fast as he could. For the first year, he paid $5,200 a month on the truck and another $1,200 on the trailers.

“The name of the game is to pay it off as quickly as possible,” Wilson says.

That means working constantly.

“When the mill says they have wood for you to haul, are you going to stay home or are you going to haul? You’re going to haul if you want to continue running your business. There’s no stopping.”

When Vladmir Putin invaded Ukraine and gas prices shot through the roof pushing prices past the $2-a-litre mark, Wilson had enough.

“I was completely burned out. I couldn’t do it anymore,” he says. “We weren’t making any money. We could afford a pickup and a house, but there was no other money.”

An early grave

As he drove back toward Dease Lake, Shane said he was mystified about how what he and others are doing can possibly be sustained.

“How they’re making money out of this I do not know,” Shane said. “They’re using diesel from Alberta to cut down trees in B.C. My fuel consumption is going to be anywhere between 500 and 750 litres of diesel a day.”


How Monster Mills Ate BC’s Timber Jobs

READ MORE

For each day that he’s on the road driving out of B.C.’s remote northwest corner, Shane gets about $700, which is the only reason he’s sticking with it. He says he won’t last long.

The driving conditions are too hair-raising and the constant pressure to exceed maximum hours to ensure that the logs are delivered are too intolerable to continue for much longer, he says.

“I was talking to another driver who said what’s happening in our company shouldn’t be happening,” Shane said. “The squeezing that’s going on, the pressure and the squeezing to make the mill turnaround... I could keep working here all year and not have a day off. But I don’t want to do that. It will send me to an early grave.”

Life after trucking

When Wilson sold his Kenworth, he took a job as a forklift operator at Seaton Forest Products, a small sawmill in Witset, a short drive north of his home in Smithers. He likes the scale of the operation where a relatively modest 80,000 cubic metres of logs is all that is needed each year to keep more than two dozen mill employees working.


Running on Empty: The BC Forestry Crash

READ MORE

In his years hauling logs, pretty much everything Wilson delivered went to West Fraser or Canfor, two companies that dominate the Interior forest industry and whose mills are among the biggest consumers of logs in the province.

But that industry, dominated by big mills with huge appetites for wood, is now in a full-blown “timber supply crisis.” There’s simply not enough wood to go around, forcing mill after mill to close.

Seeing that crisis build over 20-plus years of driving, Wilson decided it was time to change course. He thinks others should too, before it’s too late.

“I’d love to see our province go back to the smaller mom-and-pop mills. My folks homesteaded out of Houston. They had a little sawmill behind our house and everybody had a little piece of the pie. And now two companies own the whole thing — West Fraser and Canfor. Government should take back the rights to the timber and let the people of the province have a share in it.”

These Rare BC Reefs Are No Longer Threatened by Offshore Drilling

ExxonMobil and Chevron gave up exploratory rights after a lawsuit challenged the legality of their permits.

Michelle Gamage 

25 Apr 2023

TheTyee.ca
Michelle Gamage is a Vancouver-based journalist with an environmental focus who regularly reports on climate for The Tyee. You can find her on Twitter @Michelle_Gamage.

Glass sponge reefs create an important habitat for aquatic life. As of Friday these reefs are protected from oil and gas drilling in BC. Image still from Moonless Oasis.

Glass sponge reefs, which are ancient living creatures only found in B.C.’s cold, deep waters are no longer threatened by future oil and gas drilling.

It’s the latest development in a story The Tyee reported earlier this year.

Two multinational oil companies, ExxonMobil and Chevron Canada, have voluntarily given up offshore exploratory oil and gas permits they held in B.C. after the environmental law charity Ecojustice, on behalf of environmental organizations the David Suzuki Foundation and World Wildlife Fund Canada, challenged the legality of the permits.

In July Ecojustice sued both companies and the federal government, claiming the 20 permits held by the companies issued 50 years ago had been given multiple unlawful extensions by the federal government and were no longer valid.

ExxonMobil gave up its permits in March. Chevron gave up the permits named in the lawsuit Friday.

The Tyee is supported by readers like you Join us and grow independent media in Canada

These 20 permits were particularly concerning because they overlapped with areas that are hotbeds of biodiversity and vital ecosystems for a number of different species, according to the lawsuit. Before the lawsuit ExxonMobil held one permit to explore within the Scott Islands marine National Wildlife Area and Chevron held 19 permits to explore the Scott Islands and one permit to explore within the Hecate Strait/Queen Charlotte Sound Glass Sponge Reefs Marine Protected Area.

The Scott Islands are located off the northern tip of Vancouver Island and are a human-free refuge for millions of shorebirds. The HS/QCS MPA protects reefs that are thousands of years old and found nowhere else on the planet. Glass sponge reefs found in the cold waters of the Pacific Northwest suck up and store 227 tonnes of carbon per day as they filter bacteria out of the ocean, marine ecologist Jessica Schultz previously told The Tyee.

In early March ExxonMobil voluntarily gave up all nine permits it held for B.C.’s offshore, including the one that overlapped with the Scott Islands. Chevron gave up the 19 permits named in the lawsuit on Friday.

ExxonMobil was dropped from the lawsuit once it gave up its permits and now that Chevron has also given up its permits the lawsuit has been discontinued entirely, says Ian Miron, a staff lawyer with Ecojustice.

“This results in the outcome we’d asked the court to reach: we had asked the court to say that [Chevron’s remaining] 19 permits were not lawful and to essentially get rid of them,” he told The Tyee.

“We didn’t get the declaration they’re unlawful but we did get rid of them and from an on-the-ground perspective that’s a really big win. It means these two areas are entirely free of oil and gas permits so they can be fully protected from that activity.”

When protection for the Scott Islands and Hecate Strait glass sponge reefs was originally drafted the door was kept open to the possibility of future oil and gas exploratory drilling.

“There was always a chance that the permits could be exercised,” says Hussein Alidina, lead specialist in marine conservation with World Wildlife Fund Canada, which has been working to get rid of offshore oil and gas permits for 20 years.

Friday’s update “removes any risk of that,” Alidina adds.

This is good news for the glass sponge reefs and the five islands that make up the archipelago of the Scott Islands, but it doesn’t get rid of the “lurking threat” of future oil and gas drilling in B.C., Miron says.

There has been a federal moratorium on offshore exploration in B.C. since 1972, but a moratorium is not legally binding and could be lifted in the future.


Oil and gas companies, including Chevron, still hold permits that could one day allow them to do offshore drilling in B.C., Miron says. It’s not entirely clear how many permits still exist but Miron estimates the number is around three dozen.


These Rare and Beautiful BC Reefs Fight Climate Change

READ MORE

There’s also the permits in the arctic to consider, Alidina says.

“We’re seeing relinquishment but even better would be extinguishment,” he says.

Many oil and gas permits lie within the Northern Shelf bioregion, stretching from northern Vancouver Island to the southern tip of Alaska, Alidina says. This is an area where First Nations, B.C. and the federal government are working on creating a network of Marine Protected Areas.

In early February the federal government said Marine Protected Areas established after April 25, 2019 will have minimum protection standards that prohibit “industrial activities, such as oil and gas exploration and exploitation, mining, dumping and bottom trawling.”

It’s not clear if these minimum protection standards would extinguish existing oil and gas permits or grandfather them in.


Hype or Hope? Can the Blue Economy Transform Coastal Communities?

READ MORE

Ending the lawsuit before it went to court means “we don’t get to have a court decide whether or not the permits were legally invalid which could have had broader implications for these other permits in the offshore,” Miron says. “That’s a question that will have to be decided another day.”

Jay Ritchlin, the western Canada director for the David Suzuki Foundation, told The Tyee he is “very pleased” that Chevron gave up its permits but adds “we need to get to a spot in society where we realize we don’t need to go and drill for more oil.”

Offshore oil projects pose an “incredible threat to marine life,” and run contrary to advice from the global authority on oil, the International Energy Agency, which said there should be no new fossil fuel projects as of 2021, he says.

For now it’s a good news update for Hamish Tweed, a highly trained diver and citizen scientist who has been working to research and raise awareness about glass sponge reefs for a decade. He even helped create a documentary about them.


What Are Oil Giants Doing to Stop Climate Change? Media Won’t Ask the Hard Questions READ MORE

Tweed says it feels like a “huge relief” to know the Hecate Strait/Queen Charlotte Sound Glass Sponge Reefs Marine Protected Area is no longer threatened by drilling. “I applaud Chevron for doing it,” he adds. “I’m feeling positive that everyone together is taking steps in the right direction to protect these animals today and into the future.”

The Tyee asked Chevron Canada why it gave up the 19 permits and how many permits the company still holds in B.C.

Spokesperson Jennifer Werbicki did not answer the questions but directed The Tyee to the company’s Friday press release, which says the 19 permits covered 5,700 square kilometres which can now be counted towards Canada’s marine conservation targets.

The company says in the release that it has been talking with Natural Resources Canada about “opportunity to contribute to the Government of Canada’s international marine conservation targets” since 2020.

The press release does not mention the lawsuit.