Sunday, July 01, 2007

I Am Canadien


On this Canada Day I say "Le mon Canada est le Québec" in fact I proudly proclaim " Je suis Canadien". Not Canadian but Canadien.

This is my response to the Conservative Federal Government embracing the narrow nationalism of the Quebecois Pure Laine reactionaries with Harpers too clever by half; "Quebec is a Nation,......within a united Canada".

Last weekend Harper sucked up to the Quebec separatists at their Fete Nationale, in a purely political move to appeal to the reactionary rural unilingual nationalists, a constituency he is familiar with its mirror image is his Alberta base.

In that great dance of the dialectic that is Canadian politics Trudeau was right and he was wrong. He was right that Papineau and the Canadien's established liberalism in Canada and saw Quebec as Canada, not as a separate nation. He was right in seeing the repatriation of the Constitution as a great victory for Canadien's. As I document below, the irony being this is from a Quebec Separatist website, the Papineau family would agree. He was wrong as to the real nature of Papineau and the Canadian rebels view of what a Canadian state should be.

Those who struggled as the majority in Canada, the peoples of Lower Canada, even the English assigned name is a pejorative, a symbol of the lesser importance of the French founding peoples, to create a modern nation state faced opposition by a minority who ruled by royal edict with mercantile and statist power. The real majority the constituent assembly of the Canadian nation was the colonial subject of Mercantile English Imperialism.

The mistake made by those who have linked to Papineau and his fellow Canadien liberals, those who would promote the idea of Quebec as a Nation, is their interpretation of 'Province ' as Nation. In this case mistaking what the Canadien Patroites meant by these terms. Or the fact that Papineau and other Canadien's saw Quebec not as a separate nation, but THE NATION.

Papineau and his comrades regarded Canada as the Province of colonial England, having no rights except those granted by the Crown after 1793 and the Treaty of Paris.
That did not mean the respected or accepted this political designation.

With this agreement Canada was abandoned to British control. Quebec was divided up into two provinces; Lower and Upper Canada, no more topsy turvey Victorian designation could have ever been made. For Lower Canada is geographically above Upper Canada, in fact it was Canada. Lower Canada is Quebece, Upper Canada is Northern Ontario cleaved from Quebec for British colonial expansion.

For the Maritime provinces were colonies in and of themselves battled over by the French and English, which only became part of Canada after the treaty of 1793.

The majority of Canadiens were Quebecois, now ruled over by a minority.
The British were not an enlightened regime. They were an incestuous colonial power, content at keeping the colonists they inherited as serfs .

The myth is that New France, Quebec and Canada were underdeveloped until the English gained power. That a Catholic old world aristocracy kept Canada enthralled and backwards. The reality is that Quebec was Canada, sans the Maritimes, and they were developing a strong capitalist economy. Unlike the British colonies which were underpopulated, ruled from abroad, and subject to Crown Corporations and heavy taxation.

Excerpt of The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty by Jane Jacobs, 1980

we must be aware of Canada's customary view of economic life and its traditional approach to economic development. Canada exploits and exports resources, to the neglect of developing industries and services based on manufacturing or inventions requiring manufacturing. This is a profoundly colonial approach to economic life, but in Canada's case economic colonialism is not something forced upon the country. Canada prefers colonialism.



In order to develop the first Canadian public works project; the Canals, the British needed capital from Quebec, just as it needed slave labour from Ireland; the navvies.

Which is why Canadien's supported Irish Nationhood and Indpendence because they wanted the same for Canada. Both shared a common oppressor.


Throughout Christendom, from religious Rome to philosophical Paris, autocratic Russia to the democratic United States, rises a universal cry of love and pity for Ireland, wrapped in its shroud of plague and famine, woven and sewn around it by aristocratic hands. Montreal alone, [astounded] by I do not know what juggler, will not be able, in the middle of the sheds devoted to the death which England pours from its European Ireland onto its American Ireland, to find a word of sympathy for pains and sufferings such as lamentations of Jeremiah alone can let us foresee the horror! Shame on the men who can be demoralizing enough to want for Montreal to be as lethargic as they are apathetic!

Invite them to take part to a demonstration for the purpose of giving a free expression to the feelings which inflate their generous chests, the hatred of oppression, the pity for the national sufferings of Ireland, as for its individual sufferings, as proves the adoption, by Canadian families, of such a great number of the orphans from Ireland, orphan made so by the cowardice of the whig ministries meanly controlled by mercantile interests and, in consequence of this servility, letting the owners of English vessels operate the trade of the Irish with an even more sordid greed of lucre, a more brutal inhumanity, a more murderous improvidence than the privateer of Cuba and Brazil did in the trade of the blacks.

The interest of the slave trader is to have a short passage and to sell a complete and healthy cargo. The interest of the Stanley, Palmerston, Blake and others of their caste and their temperament, is to drive out of their vast Irish fields those whom they made poor and which can no longer pay them. The more the vessel which carries them is encumbered, the more the field and the heart of the mauvais riche is alleviated, and the more the income is increased. They cannot enforce, do they inform us officially, their law which would tend to prevent the congestion. They "do not want" to have it enforced. They obtain profit and pleasure from it being eluded.


Unlike British Canada which was underdeveloped, Quebec was economically self sufficient and had a growing capitalist economy. Papineau and the liberal reformists in Quebec, as well as their counterparts in Hogtown, were inspired by the American and French Revolutions.

Thomas Paine shone clearly through their thoughts and political demands. They promoted Free Trade and Free Land in opposition to England's Militarist Mercantile power which divided up Canada like so many spoils for the aristocratic members of the English House of Commons and the Crown. They had their own House of Commons for Canada, elected as from a popular assembly. In representative democracy they needed no lessons from Lord Durham and those who inherited their places in the British House of Commons by right of title.

The Durham myth that the English brought representative democracy to Canada is so much malarkey. There was a representative democracy in Canada, a liberal one that wanted even more freedom for Canada as a nation, not just for Quebec as a province.

It was Canada which was the province, including the British territories in the Maritimes and Ontario, which the reformers in Quebec addressed their demands on behalf of.

Lord Durham knew full well the Rebellion of 1837 was no such insurrectionist movement except for the ill fated call to arms in Hogtown. In Quebec their fear was that it had an independent militia, that a call to arms to would resound and lead to yet another American Revolution.

That this did not happen, was the strength and weakness of Papineau and his Patriotes. For it led to a further extension of martial law in Canada and the imposition of a British hereditary parliament. One which was ruled over by veto from its counterpart in England.

Durham lives in infamy for his designation of the rebellion as not being political but racial. He denies that it is part of the liberal revolutions occurring in this period of the 19th Century as the age of Empire declines and the age of the Nation State and liberal political economy and representative democracy ascends.

He further focuses solely on Quebec, and makes no mention of the Rebellion in Upper Canada, in particular in Hogtown. He can't if he is to make his racist designation that it is the backwards Roman Catholics in Quebec who are fomenting dissent wanting their own state.

Unofficial translation of the Discours de l'Hon. Louis Joseph Papineau devant l'Institut canadien à l'occasion du 23ème anniversaire de fondation de cette société, le 17 décembre 1867.

No, it is not true that the political discussions, which were as sharp in both Canadas, were a fight between races. They were as rough in Upper Canada, where there was only one nationality, as they were here, where there were two. The majorities of both of them were uninterested friends of the rights, freedoms, and privileges due to all the English subjects. They were voluntarily exposing themselves to lieful slandering, to dangerous anger, to sanguinary revenge sometimes, from egoistic minorities, by themselves weak, but supported by the strength of the bayonnettes paid with the gold of the people, but everywhere directed against the people.

By the number, we were ten against one in the two provinces. By morality, by disinterestedness, by our justly acquired influence, we were ten times more powerful than by the number. The English and Irish people, by those who were their true and worthy representatives approved us; the American governors and citizens approved us; the enlightened men of the European continent approved us; but especially our compatriots, for whom we suffered and who suffered with us, approved us; better than that even, our conscience approved us.



It is not with Papineau and the liberal reformers in Quebec that the myth of Quebec as a Nation, as a Province of an Empire is created, rather in one of those deliciously ironic twists of history it arises from Lord Durhams Report.

Papineau until the end of his life was a proud Canadien. Not a Quebecer, not a Quebecois, but a Canadien, he saw Quebec as the core of an independent Canada.

Mister President, Ladies and Gentlemen,

You will believe me, I hope, if I tell you: I love my country.

I loved it wisely; did I love it madly? ... From the outside, the opinions may vary. Nevertheless, my heart and then my head conscientiously consulted, I believe I can say that I loved it as it should be loved... This feeling, I sucked it from my nurse's milk, my holy mother. The brief expression by which it is best stated: MY COUNTRY ABOVE ALL, I undoubtedly stammered it on the knees of my father. As soon as he heard me say a word, he saw that his son would not be mute, and that it was necessary to put his education in the right direction. This direction, at a time when the country was more moral than speculative, was known in our good old families, and instilled in us the love of the country and respect for all that could be a source of well-being and greatness for it. I therefore like the Institut canadien, one of our national glories; the institute which served our homeland with such perseverance, with such complete devotion, with such generous ardour, with truly great and useful successes. I could not be in a more pleasant and interesting company than in that of the members of this institute and their many friends, rightly appreciative of the services it provided to the country, and grateful admirers of the judicious program which it adopted to preserve the bits of political freedom that we conquered during a glorious past, in long, difficult and often perilous parliamentary battles. These bribes had been torn off, with one hand from the ill will of the aristocratic government of England, always hostile to popular rights; and, with the other hand, from an oligarchy, weak in number, null in merit, landed just yesterday from overseas, and that the metropolis, by an arbitrary partiality, had constituted local dominant power.

I feel happy, I feel good, among such a patriotic reunion, so liberal, so progressive, so proudly independent as the institute is. I hope it will continue to be so, by remaining faithful to the rules it gave itself, and to its valuable antecedents.

Two words suffice to explain its symbol, its political motto. It says: "Justice for us, justice for all; reason and liberty for us, reason and liberty for all." It is cosmopolitan.

Canada had embraced the enlightenment, the revolutionary values of a secular popular democracy, of free land and the liberal free trade economics of the Americans. It was further imbued with the democratic ideals of revolutionary France, instituting its own popular assemblies by popular election. This government of Canada demanded its rights from the British Parliament.

The World was changing revolution was in the air, tyrants were falling and popular democracy was breaking out in the colonies as well as Imperial Europe and England.

Canada was part of that rebellion, that spirit of social change for the better. The response of Britain was to crush that spirit by instituting yet further extensions of martial law, arbitrary detention, arbitrary executions, arbitrary censorship and closure of the press.

Durham instituted yet another chapter in the long history of British aristocratic military political rule in Canada as Papineau so eloquently outlines in his;
Political Testament of Louis-Joseph Papineau,

Trudeau repatriated the Canadian Constitution which the Quebec Nationalists refused to sign. Despite the fact that in doing so Trudeau was fulfilling Papineau and les Canadien Patriotes dream.

While Papineau was no Separatist he also was not a Federalist like Trudeau. His was not a scheme of a centralizing federalist state, rather his was the ideal of representation by popular assembly with proportional representation. He never accepted the Federal Canadian State of 1867 since it failed to adhere to the principles of the our rights to chose our representatives through a mass based Constituent Assembly.



Letter to the Inhabitants of the Province of Quebec, by the first Continental Congress, Philadelphia, Oct. 1774

These are the rights you are entitled to and ought at this moment in perfection, to exercise. And what is offered to you by the late Act of Parliament in their place? Liberty of conscience in your religion? No. God gave it to you; and the temporal powers with which you have been and are connected, firmly stipulated for your enjoyment of it. If laws, divine and human, could secure it against the despotic caprices of wicked men, it was secured before. Are the French laws in civil cases restored? It seems so. But observe the cautious kindness of the Ministers, who pretend to be your benefactors. The words of the statute are--that those "laws shall be the rule, until they shall be varied or altered by any ordinances of the Governor and Council." Is the "certainty and lenity of the criminal law of England, and its benefits and advantages," commended in the said statute, and said to "have been sensibly felt by you," secured to you and your descendants? No. They too are subjected to arbitrary "alterations" by the Governor and Council; and a power is expressly reserved of appointing "such courts of criminal, civil, and ecclesiastical jurisdiction, as shall be thought proper." Such is the precarious tenure of mere will, by which you hold your lives and religion. The Crown and its Ministers are impowered, as far as they could be by Parliament, to establish even the Inquisition itself among you. Have you an Assembly composed of worthy men, elected by yourselves, and in whom you can confide, to make laws for you, to watch over your welfare, and to direct in what quantity, and in what manner, your money shall be taken from you? No. The power of making laws for you is lodged in the governor and council, all of them dependent upon, and removeable at, the pleasure of a Minister. Besides, another late statute, made without your consent, has subjected you to the impositions of Excise, the horror of all free states; thus wresting your property from you by the most odious of taxes, and laying open to insolent tax-gatherers, houses, the scenes of domestic peace and comfort, and called the castles of English subjects in the books of their law. And in the very act for altering your government, and intended to flatter you, you are not authorized to "assess, levy, or apply any rates and taxes, but for the inferior purposes of making roads, and erecting and repairing public buildings, or for other local conveniences, within your respective towns and districts." Why this degrading distinction? Ought not the property, honestly acquired by Canadians, to be held as sacred as that of Englishmen? Have not Canadians sense enough to attend to any other public affairs, than gathering stones from one place, and piling them up in another? Unhappy people! who are not only injured, but insulted. Nay more!--With such a superlative contempt of your understanding and spirit, has an insolent Ministry presumed to think of you, our respectable fellow-subjects, according to the information we have received, as firmly to perswade themselves that your gratitude, for the injuries and insults they have recently offered to you, will engage you to take up arms, and render yourselves the ridicule and detestation of the world, by becoming tools, in their hands, to assist them in taking that freedom from us, which they have treacherously denied to you; the unavoidable consequence of which attempt, if successful, would be the extinction of all hopes of you or your posterity being ever restored to freedom: For idiocy itself cannot believe, that, when their drudgery is performed, they will treat you with less cruelty than they have us, who are of the same blood with themselves.

Observation on the current state of Canada and the political dispositions of its inhabitants, by Henry-Antoine Mézière, June 12, 1793

One could object the ignorance of the Canadiens as an obstacle to becoming free, their priests, their prejudices. To this I answer that one has a very imperfect idea of the inhabitants. Those of the cities are in possession of all the philosophical works; they read them with passion, as well as the French gazettes, the Declaration of the rights of man and the patriotic songs. They learn how those by heart to sing them at the opening of a Club de patriotes where last year one counted more than 200 citizens. This club even defied the government by publicly discussing the affairs of France, something which, the day before, had been prohibited by a proclamation. The priests in the cities are considered as they should be, I mean to say, as infamous impostors who make use of lies for their own interests; and one looks this race passing by with as little respect as a herd of pigs. I will not speak of this other caste of despicable and scorned men who style themselves nobles; the poor wretches do not exceed ten in number and their ignorance and their gueusery are pitiful. Lastly, I dare statem that the French revolution has electrified the Canadiens and in one year enlightened them on their natural rights more so than one century of reading could not have accomplished. Even since the declaration of the war of France against England, such is progress that the Canadiens made in reason, that they do not fear to publicly wish that the French win. Each day, they assemble in the cities in small groups, tell each other the news, are delighted when they are favorable to the French and are afflicted (but do not despair) when they are bad for them.

The Free French to their Canadien Brothers, by Edmond-Charles Genêt, Ambassador of the first French Republic in the United States, 1794

Summary of the advantages which the Canadiens can gain by freeing themselves from English domination.

  1. Canada will be a free and independent State.
  2. It will be able to form alliances with France and the United States.
  3. The Canadiens will choice their government, they will appoint the members of the legislative and executive powers.
  4. The veto will be abolished.
  5. All people whole will have obtained the right of citizen of Canada will be eligible to all public functions.
  6. Corvées will be abolished.
  7. Trade will enjoy the widest liberty.
  8. The will no longer be privileged companies for fur trade; the new government will encourage it.
  9. Seigniorial duties will be abolished, the lot resale tax, mill duties, tolls, wood reserves, work for the landlord, etc., etc., will also be abolished.
  10. Will also be abolished hereditary titles, there will no longer neither lords nor seigneurs nor nobles.
  11. All religious cults will be free. Catholic priests will be appointed by the people as in the time of the primitive Church and will enjoy a treatment adequate to their utility.
  12. The tithe will be abolished.
  13. Schools will be established in parishes and cities: there will be print shops, institutions of high science, medicine, mathematics; Will be trained interpreters whom having been recognized to have good morals will be encouraged to civilize the wild nations and by this means extend trade with them.

Edmond-Charles Genêt,
Ambassador of the French Republic in the United States


The notes taken by Alexis de Tocqueville while visiting Lower Canada, Aug.-Sept. 1831

The basis of the population and the immense majority is everywhere France. But it is easy to see that the French are a conquered people. The rich classes mostly belong to the English race. Although French is the language most universally spoken, the newspapers, the notices and even the shop-signs of French tradesmen are in English. Commercial undertakings are almost all in their hands. They are really the ruling class in Canada.

The notable British Whig politician John George Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham, was sent to the Canadas in 1838 to investigate and report on the causes of the rebellions of 1837-38. Durham arrived in Quebec City on May 27. He had just been appointed Governor General and given special powers as high commissioner of British North America.

Durham had spoken to merchants in Britain who wanted greater British control over the Canadas, as they felt the French Canadians' presence in Lower Canada undermined their economic interests.

In Canada, he formed numerous committees consisting of essentially all the opponents of the Patriotes and made many personal observations of life in the colonies. He also visited the United States. Durham wrote that he had assumed he would find that the rebellions were based on liberalism and economics, but he eventually concluded that the real problem was the ethnic conflict between French and English. According to Durham, the French culture in Canada had changed little in 200 years, and showed no sign of progress like British culture had. His report contains the famous assessment that Canada consisted of "two nations warring within the bosom of a single state." (1838)

Durham recommended that Upper and Lower Canada be united into one province, which would give British Canadians a slight advantage in population. He also encouraged immigration to Canada from Britain, to further marginalize the supposedly backwards French Canadians and hopefully assimilate them into British culture. The freedoms granted to the French Canadians under the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the Quebec Act of 1774 should also be rescinded; according to Lord Durham this would eliminate the possibility of future rebellions. The French Canadians did not necessarily have to give up their religion and language entirely, but it could not be protected at the expense of what Durham considered a more progressive British culture. The proposed merger would also benefit Upper Canada as the construction of canals led to a considerable debt load; while access to the former Lower Canada fiscal surplus would allow that debt to be to erased.

In exile in France, Louis-Joseph Papineau published the Histoire de l'insurrection du Canada (History of the insurrection in Canada) in the magazine Progrès in May. In June, it appeared in Canada in Ludger Duvernay's La Revue canadienne as Histoire de l'insurrection du Canada en réfutation du Rapport de Lord Durham (History of the insurrection of Canada in refutation of the Report of Lord Durham).

The assertion that the so-called "French" Canadians had no history and no culture and that the conflict was primarily that of two ethnic groups evidently outraged Papineau. It was pointed out that many of the Patriote leaders were of British or British Canadian origin, including among others Wolfred Nelson, hero of the Battle of Saint-Denis; Robert Nelson, author of the Declaration of Independence of Lower Canada, who would have become President of Lower Canada had the second insurrection succeeded; journalist Edmund Bailey O'Callaghan; and Thomas Storrow Brown, general during the Battle of St-Charles. It was also pointed out that an uprising had occurred in Upper Canada where there was only one "race". According to Papineau and other Patriotes, the analysis of the economic situation of French Canadians was biased. Indeed, from 1791 to the rebellions, the elected representatives of Lower Canada had been demanding the control over the budget of the colony.

The Parti canadien (also Parti patriote) was a political party in what is now Quebec, that was founded by members of the liberal elite of Lower Canada at the beginning of the 19th century. Its members included François Blanchet, Pierre-Stanislas Bédard, John Neilson, Jean-Thomas Taschereau, James Stuart, Louis Bourdages, Denis-Benjamin Viger, Daniel Tracey, Edmund Bailey O'Callaghan, Andrew Stuart, and Louis-Joseph Papineau.

The Patriote movement ( was a political movement that existed in Lower Canada; Quebec) from the turning of the 19th century to the Patriote Rebellion of 1837 and 1838 and the subsequent Act of Union of 1840. It was politically embodied by the Parti patrioteLegislative Assembly of Lower Canada. It was inspired by the American Revolution, the decolonization of the Americas, as well as the political philosophy of classical liberalism. Among its leading figures were François Blanchet, Pierre-Stanislas Bédard, John Neilson, Jean-Thomas Taschereau, James Stuart, Louis Bourdages, Denis-Benjamin Viger, Daniel Tracey, Edmund Bailey O'Callaghan, Andrew Stuart, Wolfred Nelson, Robert Nelson, Edmund Bailey O'Callaghan, Thomas Storrow Brown, François Jalbert and Louis-Joseph Papineau. Its ideals were conveyed through the newspapers the Montreal Vindicator, Le Canadien, and La Minerve.
The Ninety-Two Resolutions
were drafted by Louis-Joseph Papineau and other members of the Parti patriote of Lower Canada in 1834. The resolutions were a long series of demands for political reforms in the British-governed colony.
The Lower Canada Rebellion
is the name given to the armed conflict between the rebels of Lower Canada (now Quebec) and the British colonial power of that province. Together with the simultaneous Upper Canada Rebellion in the neighbouring colony of Upper Canada (now Ontario), it formed the Rebellions of 1837. The Address of the Fils de la liberté of Montreal to the young people of the colonies of North America, Oct. 1837

We consider that, based upon the privilege of each individual to act on his own behalf, by the very basis of society, the privilege to join all of one's energy to that of one's co-citizens, in all projects aiming for defence or mutual interest, and consequently the right of association, is a right as sacred and as unalienable as that of individual liberty itself. We sustain that governments are created for the common good and can only rightfully exist with the consent of the governed, and that whatever artificial change may occur in the affairs of society, a chosen government is nevertheless an inherent right of the people. Since it cannot be alienated, one should not need to ask before putting it in practise.

All governments being instituted for the good of the whole people, by no means for the honour or the profit of only one individual, any claim to rule according to a divine or absolute authority, claimed by or for any man or class of men, is blasphemous and absurd, just like it is monstrous to inculcate it and degrading to admit it. The authority of a motherland over a colony can only exist for as a long as the colonists who live in it find this relation to their advantage; because it has been established and populated by these colonists, this country belongs to them by right, and consequently can be separated from any foreign connection whenever the disadvantages, resulting from an executive power located abroad and which ceases to be in harmony with a local legislature, make such a step necessary to its inhabitants, in order to protect their lives and their freedom or to acquire prosperity. By taking the name of Fils de la liberté (Sons of Liberty), the association of the young people of Montreal by no means intends to make it a private cabal, a secret junta, but rather a democratic body full of strength, which will be composed of all the youths that the love of the fatherland renders sensitive to the interests of their country, whatever their belief, their origin or that of their ancestors may be.

History of the Insurrection in Canada in refutation of the report of Lord Durham

This is an unofficial translation of the Histoire de l'insurrection en Canada en réfutation du rapport de Lord Durham written by Louis-Joseph Papineau in 1839.

Close friend of a great number of my colleagues in the representation, honoured with the regard and the confidence of all, since, for the past twenty years, they elected me, often unanimously, always with a great majority, Speaker of the House of Assembly, I am perfectly aware of everything that occurred in Canada up until the moment when the disorders started. I know the acts and statements of twenty-five of my colleagues and of many outstanding citizens, some who suffered death, others who, like me, saw, so to speak, their head put at a price, and were, like me, dragged in exile without trial, often without charge, always without confrontation, then released without trial, despite their asking for a ruling by verbal or written requests, addressed either to the bloodied dictator Colborne, or to the other dictator, falser but no less vindicatory, Durham. Because weren't we all liable of the same punishments? They were all guilty of the same crime! Their virtues were dear to their compatriots, odious to their foreign oppressors! Well then! I challenge the English government to contradict me, when I affirm that none us had prepared, wanted or even envisaged, armed resistance. But the English government had resolved to rob the Province of its income, of its representative system; it had resolved to send us, some to death, others to exile; and it is to this end that it had proposed to proclaim the martial law, and to have the citizens judged by martial courts for acts which, a few weeks before, it had admitted could not lead to any charge, founding the necessity of creating military courts on the impossibility of obtaining death sentences from the civil ones. Yes, once again, the executive power has put in the works, against innocent men, for what is wrongfully taken for the metropolitan interest, inhuman plans that it had admitted not having the right to allow itself: it is from the government that came the provocation.

Thereof, among the actors of this bloody drama, is there no one who repents to have attempted resistance; and among their fellow-citizens, there is not one in a thousand to reproach them to have done so. Only, there is in the hearts of all a deep sorrow that this resistance was unhappy, but at the same time a great hope that it will be re-taken and this time prevail.

It is not that the insurrection was illegitimate, but we had resolved not to resort to it yet. It is what our seized papers taught to a government that became a slanderer to justify its persecution.

And when I make this statement, it is only to restore the historical truth and not to repudiate the moral responsibility of the resistance to a power risen against the holy rights of humanity, risen against "the inalienable birth rights of British subjects", as the legal advisers of Great Britain say, a mocking expression with regard to the colonies and imagined to provide the English aristocracy with Spartan pleasures, such as, for example, the pleasure to hunt down the Helots of Ireland, the Helots of the Canadas, the Helots of Jamaica, the Helots of all its remote possessions, each time the serfs who inhabit them wish to stop being corvéable, taillable and mortaillable and mercy and mercy.

Wanting to prove that his favourite race, the Saxon race, is the only one worthy of command, Lord Durham untruthfully painted it beautiful while he obscured with the darkest colours the faux portrait which he drew of the French Canadians. But in spite of this degrading partiality, I direct with confidence all the honest readers to this strange report, as I am well convinced that they will draw this conclusion from it, that the Canadians have no justice to expect from England; that for them, submission would be blamable and a death sentence, while independence, on the contrary, would be a principle of resurrection and life. It would be even more, it would be the rehabilitation of the French name terribly compromised in America by the shame of the Treaty of Paris of 1763, by the mass proscription of more than twenty thousand Acadians driven out their homes, finally, by the sound of six hundred thousand Canadians ruled since eighty years with a ceaseless injustice, now decimated, tomorrow condemned to political inferiority, by hatred of their French origin.

I will show in a forthcoming article how unjust the complaints of Lord Durham against Canada really are.

It is nevertheless from these so-called complaints that arise the great and only measure of legislative reform which Lord Durham recommends: the absorption of the French population by the English population by means of the union of two Canadas. It is this measure which had been adopted in 1808 by the fur trade monopolists at a time when they lost the majority which they had enjoyed hitherto.

Second Manifesto

This is an unofficial translation of Louis-Joseph Papineau's Deuxième manifeste, as published in L'Avenir on May 15, 1848.

Do not speak much, do not say anything on the merit or the demerit of the Union; representation proportional to the population; the extension of the right to vote to all; of the usefulness that at least a part of the representation be selected among the resident voters; that eligibility should depend only on public confidence, not on the badly or justly acquired property of the candidate.





SEE:

Edward Gibbon Wakefield

Happy Canada Day/Jour heureux du Canada

Origins of the Capitalist State In Canada

Rebel Yell

A History of Canadian Wealth, 1914.



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Saturday, June 30, 2007

CIA Spies In Canada


The Central Intelligence Agency spied on Canadians critical of the Vietnam War during the late 1960s and '70s in an operation code-named "MH Chaos," CBC News has learned. The declassified CIA documents did not show whether the Canadian government was aware the CIA was spying on Canadian campuses.

Well duh. Of course they were. As it was reported in the Ubyssey in 1967;

The Canadian Union of Students is among 25 organizations
identified as receiving contributions from foundations connected
with the U .S . Central Intelligence Agency.


Since the RCMP, and now CSIS ,to this day have a joint information sharing agreement with U.S. intelligence and police forces.. And the RCMP was doing the same thing.
Spying 101: The RCMP’s Secret Activities at Canadian Universities, 1917-1997. By Steve Hewitt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. 295 pages.

If you were expecting a book about a course in basic espionage, look elsewhere. Spying 101 is predominantly a study of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s involvement on Canadian university campuses for eight decades monitoring radicals and subversive activities inspired by communists and Quebec separatists. Historian Steve Hewitt sees this period less as one of “monitoring,” than as one of infiltration, subversion, and spying. But, however one characterizes it, when the radical targets and their supporters found out that the government was watching and listening, they were furious and still are. Hewitt admits there was indeed plotting against the State, but suggests that it was, for the most part, nothing serious. He contends that the RCMP, with the concurrence of its political masters, intentionally exaggerated the threats to secure an inflated budget and arouse public antipathy.
The relationship between the CIA and the RCMP began back in WWII with its forerunner the SOE.

In the 1960's as the cold war raged, the CIA began to interfere in Canada's internal politics. Rumour has it that the CIA was only too happy to help defeat the Diefenbaker government.

CIA Fingerprints in Canada

In 1962, the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, Livingston Merchant, and his Second
Secretary Charles Kisselyak, fuelled a plot among the Canadian Air Forces,
Canadian journalists and others to dispose of Prime Minister Diefenbaker.
Kennedy hated Dief largely for his anti-nuclear stance. Merchant and
other U.S. embassy officers with espionage backgrounds, met at
Kisselyak's home in Ottawa to feed journalists with spaghetti, beer and
anti-Diefenbaker/pronuclear propaganda.

Among the many participants in these off-the-record briefings was Charles Lynch
of Southam News. Diefenbaker later denounced these reporters as "traitors" and
"foreign agents." He lashed out against Lynch on a TV program saying,
"You were given briefings as to how the Canadian government could be
attacked on the subject of nuclear weapons and the failure of the
Canadian government to do that which the U.S. dictated."

The Liberals used information provided by the RCMP to bring down the Diefenbaker government.

The Munsinger Affair was Canada's first national political sex scandal. It focused on Gerda Munsinger, an East German prostitute and Soviet spy living in Ottawa who had slept with a number of cabinet ministers in John Diefenbaker's government.

Most noted amongst these was the Associate Minister of National Defence, Pierre Sévigny, who had seen her since 1958 and had even signed Munsinger's application for Canadian citizenship. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) discovered her background, however, and informed Justice Minister E. Davie Fulton of her activities. She was deported to East Germany in 1961. The matter was dealt with behind closed doors and Sévigny resigned in 1963.

Traditionally in Canada, the personal lives of politicians are not discussed in parliament or in the media, but in 1966 the Liberal government was under attack for an unrelated security breach. On March 4, an angry Justice Minister Lucien Cardin rebutted the Tories by bringing up the Munsinger Affair in the House of Commons. The story dominated the media for weeks and was followed with rapt attention across the country. It became a massive distraction and all but shut down all other parliamentary activity for some weeks.

And thus the long political relationship with the RCMP as 'their' secret police began.

Conventional wisdom holds that police forces in democratic societies face a dilemma whenever the use of unlawful methods appears warranted to enforce the law. This dilemma is of greatest concern in consensus theories. In conflict theories, an "ideological dilemma" emerges: police must maintain legitimacy by appearing to uphold the law equally for all, while acting preferentially to serve the powerful. A small sample of secret RCMP Security Service communications is examined as: (a) an indication of awareness of the ideological dilemma; (b) evidence of "editing processes" to produce "bureaucratic propaganda"; (c) examples of "official deviance." The ability of the RCMP to resist labelling for official deviance, and maintain legitimacy, is considered in terms of organizational advantages not common in similar security services.
But when one deals with an autonomous paramilitary organization like the RCMP one has to be careful as they have their own political agenda, which may not be the same as their Masters.

Plummer a secret Agent man


Set almost entirely in an interrogation suite in a Montreal hotel in 1964, Agent of Influence stars Plummer, 72, as John Watkins, the former Canadian ambassador to Moscow who died in 1964 in RCMP custody.

A close friend of former prime minister Lester B. Pearson, Watkins was suspected of being a communist spy by the CIA.

Days after the interrogation, he was found dead.

"The reality of the story is, did Watkins die in police custody? Yes. Did the RCMP cover it up? Yes," says Ian Adams, who authored the novel upon which the movie is based and co-wrote the screenplay.

"Has there been any evidence produced of Watkins' guilt? No."

'BLOODLESS COUP'

Instead, what Adams uncovered was evidence of an attempted "bloodless coup" by the CIA to depose Pearson in part by accusing the former ambassador of spying.

The Americans theorized the KGB had blackmailed Watkins over his homosexuality.

But Adams believes it was the RCMP buckling under the pressure of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA head of counter espionage, that doomed Watkins, along with his homosexuality -- which was illegal in Canada until 1968.
Two decades after Watkins' death, and only after an inquest and autopsy, did the RCMP admit the diplomat had never succumbed to Soviet blackmail, says Adams.

"There is not one shred of evidence he was guilty."

The author sees Agent of Influence as a cautionary tale following the events of Sept. 11.

"(Intelligence agencies) are now operating with enormous freedom which they have historically abused."



The CIA also attempted to destabilize the NDP Government in B.C. under David Barrett after its success in doing the same in Chile.

At the same time the CIA was using Cuban Mafia connections in Canada to attack the Cuban Embassy in Ottawa, a series of bombings. Which conveniently never resulted in any arrests by the RCMP. In a bombing in Cuba a Canadian was killed. The bombing was orchestrated by Luis Posada Carriles, who is wanted by Venezuela as a terrorist and is being protected by the U.S. government.

As we mentioned earlier, Canada was not spared from the decades-long campaign of violence against Fidel Castro's Cuba.

In the 1960s and 70s anti-Castro groups targeted the Cuban Embassy in Ottawa and the Cuban Trade Commission office in Montreal. Sergio Perez Castillo, a Cuban security guard was killed in the second attack.

And years later -- on September 4th, 1997 -- Fabio Di Celmo, a Montreal resident vacationing in Cuba, died in a bombing at the Copacabana Hotel in Havana. Luis Posada Carriles confessed to that attack, but later recanted.


And of course there was the Canadian governments complicity with CIA brainwashing experiments in Canada known as MKULTRA.

Early in 1957, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, Director of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, formally applied for funding from the "Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology," a CIA front at Corn-ell University Medical School, New York City.

In the 1980s, the CIA and State Department launched a public counterattack on the Canadian government for questioning the propriety of CIA activities. The CIA effectively converted the Canadian government into an active and hostile opponent.

In press briefings, interviews and Court pleadings, the CIA hammered away at one theme - Canada funded Cameron too. Legally, this was irrelevant, but politically, it was devastating. As one U.S. Attorney said, "We're going to wrap the Canadian Government financing of Cameron right around their necks."

CIA brainwashing victims seek Canada court action


In a case that sounds like science fiction, a Montreal court is deciding whether a class action lawsuit can be brought against the Canadian government on behalf of more than 250 psychiatric patients who were unwittingly subjected to radical experiments in the 1950s.

The so-called MK-ULTRA tests were part of a secret mind-control programme funded by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Canadian government in the 1950s.

The Cold-War-era experiments, carried out by a Scottish doctor in Montreal, included forced isolation, induced-comas, electro-shock therapy and the use of hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD and paralysis-inducing narcotics.

Lawyers for Janine Huard, a 78-year-old great-grandmother, told a Montreal court last week that their client suffered for years as a result of Dr. Ewan Cameron's experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital based at Montreal's McGill University.

As to all those Fox News claims that Canada is harboring 'terrorists', they happen to be CIA trained, FBI informants and protected by the U.S. while using Canada as a safe haven.

In the al-Qaida camps, he was known as Abu Mohamed al Amriki -- "Father Mohamed the American." And, until he was finally arrested and convicted in 2000 -- after two decades of high profile terrorism, including helping to plan attacks on American troops in Somalia and U.S. embassies in Africa -- Ali Mohamed roamed free and even protected.

He was so untouchable, he was taken from quick-thinking Canadian officials, who suspected he may have been a threat.

Mohamed was a U.S. Army sergeant, FBI operative and possible CIA asset, who, on the side, was a friend to Osama bin Laden, trained the leader's bodyguards, was instrumental in killing Americans and was the middle-man in an historic and vile union between bin Laden's forces and the Lebanese Hezbollah. His fingerprints can be traced to those who assassinated Jewish militant Meir Kahane and blew up the first truck bomb to hit the World Trade Centre.

Mohamed himself had come to the FBI's attention in 1989, when the agency's Special Operations Group photographed a cell of his trainees firing AK-47s at a Long Island shooting range. The bureau would drop that investigation -- as it would in many other cases involving the terror spy.

It would also keep him safe. Even in Canada. Lance connects all the dots, including how Mohamed came, in 1993, to be questioned by suspicious RCMP officers in Vancouver. Lance says he was set free after handing the RCMP a phone number that connected them with his FBI handler.

"The Canadians placed the call," Lance writes. "Whatever (the special FBI agent) said, caused the Mounties to let Mohamed go... . Al-Qaida's master spy was free."


Canada has been used by the CIA to dump off its undercover operatives, to keep them out of harms way.
Age of Secrets - The Conspiracy that Toppled Richard Nixon and the Hidden Death of Howard Hughes by Gerald Bellett

John Herbert Meier

  • was responsible for Richard Nixon's downfall, which is always missing from books on the subject.
  • was Howard Hughes' most trusted courtier from 1966 to 1970.
  • was forced to flee the U.S.
  • His many businesses & companies were stripped from him.
  • Since 1972 was chased out of England, Japan, Australia, and Tonga by the CIA. Was helped by the British and Cuban intelligence sevices.
  • has been falsely charged with tax evasion, fraud, obstruction of justice, forgery and murder. Life threatened, and family stalked for kidnapping.

Meier was still under CIA surveillance. The RCMP Security Service gave Meier a cover: they pretended Meier was working with CLEU (British Columbia's Coordinated Law Enforcement Unit).

From a CIA contact, Meier obtained documents that he gave to Canada's Security and Intelligence Branch, and later to Canada's Liberal politicians. Contained info on:

  • Canadian politicians, including Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and members of his cabinet.
  • the Canadian military, and defense systems and defense industries.
  • leading CIA agents in Canada, Cleveland Cram and Stacey Husle
Of course once exposed for using Canada as a fly over/stop over location for its illegal rendition operations, the CIA gets an endorsement from our own PM.

"Twenty different planes for the CIA have arrived in Canada over the last four years," said Serge Ménard, a member of Parliament from Quebec. "Italy is prosecuting people from the CIA" allegedly involved in renditions. "Why doesn't the prime minister do likewise?"

Prime Minister Stephen Harper responded in the House of Commons on Wednesday, saying that an investigation into the CIA plane landings revealed "no indication there were any illegal activities."

Good old Stevie boy, he took the word of the CIA that they were not doing anything illegal. LOL.

In the panic after 9/11, Canada enacted anti-terrorism legislation that curtailed civil liberties in favour of national security. Faced with American pressure, is the Harper government poised to go even further?

h/t to buckdog.


See

CIA

Torture

RCMP

CSIS



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Lefty Blog Awards

Engaged Spectator has launched the First Annual Canadian Lefty Awards.

The Lefty's

The Lefty’s 2007

Nominations in progress.Go to sidebar click on “Nominations 2007″ then submit your nominations.

Accepting nominations ;June 11 - July 14

All participating _Cnd Blogger’s_ in the first annual Canadian Lefty Blog Awards get a chance at a draw for $100.


Whether the $100 bucks will be in Canadian Tire money has yet to be revealed.


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Friday, June 29, 2007

Fraser Institute Racists

Whats the difference between the Fraser Institutes anti immigration conference and these guys?

One is overtly racist, while the other hides their racism behind 'national security'.

The other irony is that mainstream media commentators like right whingnut Michael Coren defend restricting access to Canada to White Christian Europeans, which is what media pirriah like right whingnut Paul Fromm also says. But unlike Fromm, Coren is an immigrant.

And being from Britain Coren has dual citizenship, another bugaboo of the right.

While right whingnuts like Coren can freely move here, or like their Canadian counterparts like Mark Steyn or David Frum who freely move to England and the U.S. to work, they would deny these rights to others.


SEE:

Procreation To Save The White Race

Conservatives Orwellian Language Politics

White Multiculturalism

Because They Ain't White

Racist ADQ

The Language Of Racism



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CIA Conspiracies Are Real


After decades of denial the CIA finally is forced to out itself. Of course we knew of many of these things thanks to the work of those who were often labeled 'conspiracy theorists' like Jack Anderson and later Mae Brussel.As this editorial points out there is no difference between the CIA of the past transgressions and the CIA of today.

Editorial: CIA abuses aren't history

The CIA calls them "the family jewels," which make the documents sound like something precious. On the contrary, they are a shameful record of decades of embarrassing missteps and outrageous abuses of power by America's spies.

The documents, released this week, provide new details on CIA activities in the 1960s and 1970s, many of them previously uncovered. They tell of assassination plots, both successful and not, of domestic wiretapping operations, the infiltration of antiwar groups and mind control experiments.

From this distance documents can seem comical, but nonetheless disturbing. The CIA partnered with the mafia in repeated attempts to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro, and the mafia expected favors in return. Thus, we had CIA agents bugging the hotel room of comedian Dan Rowan to determine if the "Laugh-in" star was sleeping with a mob boss's girlfriend. As John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy - who approved the attempts on Castro's life - and the nation soon learned, assassination is no laughing matter.

The CIA released the documents - which remain heavily censored, indicating there are still some sins officials don't want to confess - in an attempt to score points for candor. "I firmly believe that the improved system of intelligence oversight that came out of the 1970s gives the CIA a far stronger place in our democratic system," CIA director Michael Hayden said in releasing the documents.

He should tell that to a judge in Italy, where 25 CIA agents are being tried in absentia, charged with kidnapping an Egyptian cleric. The trial, now recessed until October pending the appeal of a ruling, is a test of the agency's "extraordinary rendition program." He should ask the more than 100 terror suspects held since 2002 in the CIA's secret prisons overseas, subjected to interrogation techniques often described as torture.

- Romanian lawmakers have pulled out of the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) to protest against a Swiss investigator's report that said Bucharest hosted CIA secret prisons.

CIA Remains Secretive About Current Acts


While the CIA is lauded for releasing 700 pages documenting some of its most egregious 1950-1970 abuses, critics say the US spy agency remains secretive about its current controversial activities. "We don't know everything that's going on today. But it seems to me there's already enough evidence to conclude that things are not so different today," said David Barrett, political scientist at Villanova University, author of a 2005 book on the CIA and Congress in the 1940s and 1950s, speaking to the New York Times. -Capital Hill Blue

Documents show 30-year-old skeletons in CIA closet

Little-known documents made public Thursday detail illegal and scandalous activities by the CIA more than 30 years ago - wiretappings of journalists, kidnappings, warrantless searches and more.

Much of the decades-old activities have been known for years. But Tom Blanton, head of the National Security Archive, said the 1975 summary memo prepared by Justice Department lawyers had never been publicly released. It sheds light on meetings in the top echelon of government that were little known by the public, he said.

Blanton pointed to more recent concerns, such as post-Sept. 11, 2001 programs that included warrantless wiretapping.

"The resonance with today's controversies is just uncanny," he said.


On the Net:

The documents can be found at: http://www.nsarchive.org


CIA Document Dump Just Confirms Kissinger's Dark Rep

The recent release by the CIA of documents concerning the agency's illegal surveillance of Americans and involvement in the assassinations of Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Salvador Allende of Chile, and Patrice Lumumba of Congo, as well as assassinations plots against Fidel Castro, prove what authors and scholars have already concluded about the agency. Most noteworthy is the involvement of Henry Kissinger in giving the green light to Turkey's invasion of Cyprus.

The links between Kissinger and Turkey formed a long lasting relationship between Kissinger and the Israeli Lobby in the United States, particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Turks, particularly the links between AIPAC and the American Turkish Council and individuals like Richard Perle, Marc Grossman, and Douglas Feith. That relationship was exposed with revelations stemming from information divulged as a result of the FBI's firing of Turkish translator Sibel Edmonds and the concentration of the Brewster Jennings & Associates CIA front company on weapons of mass destruction and the Turkish nexus to nuclear materials trafficking from the former Soviet Central Asian states.

ACLU Sues for Patriot Act Documents from CIA and Pentagon


Of course the CIA has still not revealed what it knows about the JFK Assassination.

More than 40 years after he was fatally shot in Dallas, researchers have added fresh fuel to the speculation over who was involved in the assassination of President John F Kennedy by claiming the original bullet analysis was flawed and cannot rule out that a second gunman was involved.

Using new scientific techniques not available to previous researchers and analysing bullets from the same batch purportedly used by Lee Harvey Oswald, the team has argued that it cannot be assumed that Oswald was the only assassin involved. While they do not claim evidence to prove a second gunman participated, they say the original fragments of the bullets recovered from the scene of the shooting should be re-examined.


And they also didn't reveal what they know about UFO's.

Because that would lead to disturbing questions about the Weaponization of Space.


SEE:

The Misuse of Acid

Psychedelic Saskatchewan

Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out

Irans Nuclear Program Is A CIA Oops

CIA Secret Flights in Canada



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Procreation To Save The White Race

Behind the attacks on immigration, abortion and birth control, from the Christian right lays the underlying belief that this is the result of the permissive sixties, which introduced no fault divorce, the birth control pill, common law relationships, and a materialist culture that through public education, in particular educational access by women, decreased the birth rate.

Now right wing pundits are claiming that the declining birth rate which results from capitalist production and social liberalism is not just a threat to Western Civilization but to White Civilization.


Fight illegal immigration with procreation

If politicians won't find a way to deport illegals, then it is time for Americans who care to take matters into their own hands. By having lots of babies.

America will have to shoulder the responsibility of being the only Western democracy left; at least the only one big enough to give the remaining "whites" a geographical location to call "home," and – here is the important part – a place relatively free from hostile cultures.

While this is addressed to an American audience in an American publication its author is an influential Canadian Evangelical; Tristan Emmanuel.

Behind the attacks by the Christian right on womens rights, reproduction freedom; which attacks birth control as well as a womans right to abortion and promotes abstinence instead of sex education, their attacks on gay marriage, which is simply an extension of their attacks on our right to no fault divorce, common law relationships, open marriage and free love.

Its all about a return to the not so distant past when America was white, middle class and happy. The mythical 1950's.

As a local Christian (Baptist) church pamphlet I came across says;

A Christian Home. So many precious children are growing up in a home filled with hatred, strife, poverty, and neglect. It is no accident that the devil fights hardest in his attack on the home, using tools such as homosexuality, abortion and divorce. The nuclear family of the 1950's with its working dad, stay at home mom, and 2.3 kids is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. A Christian home, with a loving atmosphere, a happy marriage, a providing father, a teaching mother, and obedient children is even more rare.


2.3 children? The teaching mother exists, women are cast into the pink ghetto of working as an extension of their housework; nursing, teaching, day care, elder care, etc.

The reality is that this idyllic family is as much a the myth as the rest of the Christian belief system.

The Christian right wing wants to social engineer society backwards. As such they deny the liberal progressive nature of the very capitalist system that they defend.


Demand for children is affected by four principal classes of factors: "direct economic costs and benefits of children" [(1) P: 766] costs with regard to time, income and wealth, preferences and norms. Modernization has implications for all the factors mentioned above. With modernization, the costs (economic and time) of children increase, the benefits decrease and preferences and norms change. Money tends to be used for the purchase of consumer goods rather than for having and raising more children.

Other important factors that determine fertility are the material and non-material costs of regulation. Monetary costs, according to the researchers cited above, do not appear to be a significant barrier to contraceptive use, rather, access to information about contraception and the psychological costs associated with access are more important. Moreover, there is also the fear of incurring health costs (especially in case of abortion).

Besides these, Bulatao and Lee [(1) P: 775] mention the importance of communication between husband and wife regarding contraception. They see this as a determinant of fertility and view it as a psychological cost.
Among the various sociocultural factors that affect demand, supply and costs of regulation are the nature of marriage and more generally the "patterns of sexual unions . . . their stability; their composition, including whether they are polygynous or monogamous and whether families are extended or nuclear; and their formation and dissolution" [(1) P: 777].

Education (in particular that of women) and residence (rural or urban) are two additional socioeconomic factors that affect fertility. However, these two factors operate through several channels, making the exact determination of their influence very difficult and allowing many possible explanations.
In addition, the mode of production (familial or industrial) is critical in determining the value of children's labour, which in turn affects the demand for children. Moreover, government policies and efforts made by governments to mobilize the mass media, to make access to information regarding contraception easier, to make contraceptive measures available, and to reduce the costs of regulation are also important [(1) P: 784].

Simmons [(2) P: 96] summarizes the effects of the individual variables considered in various research studies. He has found a strong relationship between women's education and fertility. Women's labour-force participation, sex preference, availability of family-planning services, general environment and population programmes and policies were found to have a medium effect on fertility, while infant mortality, per capita income, income distribution and preferred number of children had only a weak effect on fertility.
See:

A Tale Of Two Canada's

Abortion, Adoption, or Abandonment

Thank God for SSM

Back Door Abortion Ban

December 6 Will Live In Infamy

Marx on Bigamy

Secular Democracy


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Thursday, June 28, 2007

R. Cobb

R.Cobb was a cartoonist for the LA Free Press in the sixties and seventies. He went on to do the design work on Alien. I always liked this cartoon. Ironic that it is as relevant today as it was back during the Viet Nam war era.

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/images/2004/05/292199.jpg

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Carnival of Anarchy Extended

The Carnival of Anarchy has been extended until July 1. We are blogging on the topic of ecology and environmentalism and the responses keep coming in.

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Gambling On Your Future


Here is another reason we need to democratize defined benefit pension plans, whether run by the government or through our employers. While these institutional funds talk about the need for shareholder democracy; they deny the same to us.

They are using their vast reserves of captial now to play the market place investing in risky enterprises like hedge funds and private equity funds.

Canada's three-largest pension fund managers, unable to meet the long-term needs of retirees with returns from stocks and bonds, plan to increase private-equity investments after spending about C$50 billion ($47 billion) buying companies, toll roads and gas pipelines.

The pension funds added C$31.7 billion to private equity holdings in their most recent fiscal year, almost double the amount of the previous 12 months. The retirement plans are buying riskier assets because they don't expect publicly traded securities to provide high enough returns to pay the more than C$1.56 trillion of benefits owed to retirees over the next 50 years, according to annual reports from the pension funds.
The ability of workers to control, or even to influence, the investment of their deferred wages in pension funds — which are now by far the nation’s largest source of capital — is an old but recurring debate. Unions played a leading role in the creation and expansion of private pension trusts, particularly the traditional defined-benefit plans that are funded almost entirely by employer contributions.4 Yet because control over how pension assets would be invested was
never made a bargaining priority, today at least 90 percent of private sector pension fund assets are controlled exclusively by management.

Since the Second World War a number of factors have led to increased investment by institutional investors in public corporations. There has been the use of superannuation and pension schemes. There has been an increase in insurance linked investment products and other forms of indirect investment. Trustee investment rules have been relaxed, enabling trustees to invest in equities

The result is that in Australia, New Zealand, the USA and the UK more than 50% of all equities are held by institutional investors and the tendency is to increase. Add to this the traditional domination by institutions of the bond market and we have the beginning of the growth of a significant counterveiling power if the economic strength is harnessed to a common cause. Listed corporations are becoming the servants of global financial activity rather than its masters.

Peter Drucker argued that this led to a quiet revolution – ‘The Unseen Revolution...The US is the first truly Socialist country."This was simply reflecting what Berle in his later workings had identified and his research student Paul Harbrecht had called ‘The Paraproprietal Society’ – the evolution of a new form of property.

Until the late 1980s the tendency of the institutions was to be a sleeping giant. There were instances of discrete intervention but by and large the institutions voted with their feet and followed the Wall Street Walk – if in doubt, sell.

Institutions themselves came under attack and we see two developments. First, the involvement by them in promotion of improved corporate governance and secondly the use of specialist funds managers. The latter makes it more unlikely for institutions to become activists in particular companies although there have been exceptional cases where a group of funds managers have taken action.

Institutions are primarily focussed on profit and liquidity and have been attacked for short termism in their approach to companies. There is also a problem of lack of coincidence between the interests of institutions and other smaller shareholders in takeover situations. Often institutions collectively have strategically significant holdings.

Institutions sometimes encounter legal problems in increased shareholder activism.

It is sometimes argued that public sector pension funds are more likely to take a long term strategic view and certainly the US and the UK public sector funds have had a tendency at least to mouth the appropriate rhetoric.




See:

Public Pensions Fund Private Partnerships

AIM High

Golden Parachutes

Your Pension Dollars At Work

P3= Public Pension Partnerships



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Prehistoric Happy Feet

What do you call a five foot penguin?
Whatever it wants to be called.


Peruvian prehistoric penguins were taller than Danny DeVito

Danny DeVito is 4'11" tall. These penguins topped out at 5 feet, and lived during a particularly sweltering time in Earth's history. 36 million years ago Icadyptes salasi plied the waters off the southern coast of Peru.

A prehistoric penguin has been uncovered that - at more than 5ft tall and with a spear-like 7in beak - is the mother of all penguins.


A giant I salasi skull compared: How the prehistoric penguins marched on Peru
A giant I salasi skull compared to Peru’s modern Humboldt penguin

The giant birds lived around the equator tens of millions of years earlier than expected and during a period when the earth was much warmer than it is now.

Researchers discovered their fossilised remains in Peru.

Evidence that the giant penguins once marched to South America was found by Dr Julia Clarke of North Carolina State University.

"We tend to think of penguins as being cold-adapted species, but the new fossils date back to one of the warmest periods in the last 65 million years," Dr Clarke said. "The evidence indicates that penguins reached low-latitude regions more than 30 million years prior to our previous estimates."



See:


March Of The Penquins to Extinction

it's natures way

Not So Cute Seals

Penquin Empiricism

Morality not from animals

Ted Morton To Outlaw Homosexuality

Brecht Meets Oscar

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