It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, May 16, 2021
Jason Kenney kicks out two rebellious MLAs following UCP caucus dissent
Can Alberta Premier Jason Kenney remain in officer longer than Alison Redford was premier?
Until yesterday, I would have answered that despite his current unpopularity, Premier Kenney's rule would obviously last longer than Redford's short, unhappy tenure.
Now I am not so sure.
Kenney has not emerged looking stronger after it took him most of the afternoon and well into the evening to drag his United Conservative Party caucus kicking and screaming behind him to dump two dissident MLAs who had openly challenged his leadership.
And while Cypress-Medicine Hat MLA Drew Barnes and Central Peace-Notley MLA Todd Loewen have now been turfed from the UCP caucus, at least 16 MLAs from the dissident group known as the COVID 18 remain in the party. Redford, who was in effect fired by her own Progressive Conservative party caucus at the end of March 2014, lasted 898 days as premier of Alberta after she perpetrated a series of scandals and missteps that PC MLAs feared threatened the continued rule of the party. Their fear turned out to be warranted in May 2015 when Albertans elected an NDP majority government led by Rachel Notley.
As of today, Kenney has held the job for only 746 days.
No one's fired him yet, although Barnes has been needling him for weeks and Loewen took a decent stab at trying to unseat him yesterday with his letter saying the UCP "did not unite around blind loyalty to one man" and telling the premier to resign.
When he came to power in the 2019 provincial election after playing a significant role uniting the far-right Wildrose and centre-right Progressive Conservative parties, Kenney looked like a colossus astride Alberta, his grip on power historic and unshakable.
But he did it on a promise that he could not deliver -- even without a global pandemic to make everything worse. It was delusional to think anyone could restore the boom times to Alberta with a snap of the fingers and the restoration of Conservative government. That is now obvious to many.
Kenney's tone deafness, arrogance, miscalculations, constant flip-flopping on COVID-19, and dismissal of the new UCP's old Wildrose base recounted in Loewen's bitter epistle did not help. His personal popularity, which has always lagged his party's, is now in the toilet. And as my blogging colleague Dave Cournoyer pithily observed yesterday, the UCP "is an institutional mix of former Progressive Conservatives, who do not tolerate leaders who look like they are going to lose, and Wildrosers, who just don't want to be led."
Right now, the UCP trails the Opposition NDP -- whose four years in power were made possible in part by Redford's foibles.
In the fall of 2018, when the NDP kicked out rebellious MLA Robyn Luff -- who seemed in a tweet last night to be comparing her fate to Loewen's -- the party caucus was solid, committed to the same vision and united behind Rachel Notley's leadership. After the Calgary MLA had announced she wouldn't sit in the legislature any more, alleging bullying by NDP brass, the vote to remove her actually brought the NDP caucus together, insiders now say.
Kenney's position today is quite different. The COVID 18 is still the COVID 16. Kenney's grip on power looks far from sure. The Western Standard, the far-right online news outfit founded by former UCP finance critic Derek Fildebrandt, who was kicked out of the party on Kenney's command in 2018, was practically live-tweeting the supposedly closed-door caucus meeting yesterday. That sure doesn't make Kenney look like a strong leader in command of his troops.
But at least the premier managed to skid Loewen and Barnes at the end of the day, otherwise his grip would have been shakier still.
There was no vote to remove Dave Hanson, the UCP MLA for Bonnyville-Cold Lake-St. Paul, who praised Loewen on his own Facebook page and shared his letter. This suggests what the current limits to Kenney's power are.
If the UCP caucus had told Kenney to forget about dumping the dissident pair, he wouldn't have had much choice but to resign himself. He would then have had to find something to do to keep body and soul together until his generous parliamentary pension kicks in in May 2024.
The Wildrose Independent Party's leadership nominations close at 5 p.m. today, so it's not too late for Barnes, who has definite separatist leanings, to throw his hat in that ring. David Climenhaga, author of the Alberta Diary blog, is a journalist, author, journalism teacher, poet and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions at The Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald.
The COVID-19 devil runs free, yet again, in Alberta and the premier has no excuse. Andrew Nikiforuk 3 May 2021 | TheTyee.ca Tyee contributing editor Andrew Nikiforuk is an award-winning journalist whose books and articles focus on epidemics, the energy industry, nature and more.
Cartoon by Greg Perry.
Alberta has now recorded more daily confirmed COVID-19 cases on a per capita basis than any other Canadian province or U.S. state.
That’s more than 2,400 cases a day in a province of four million people. Nearly 30 per cent of the infected are children.
With a rising infection rate of 12 per cent, one in eight Albertans test positive for the virus, likely in the form of its many variants, breaking all previous provincial records.*
These numbers reflect, first and foremost, Premier Jason Kenney’s callous and persistent disregard for scientific findings and mathematical reality. He apparently does not understand or deliberately ignores the inconvenient truth that the virus spreads exponentially and therefore, left to its own devices, explosively. And that the faster and wider it spreads, the more it strengthens through mutation.
Because premiers have at their disposal any expert advice they choose to summon, and also the use of Google, all of this was knowable to Kenney a year ago. Yet even during the second wave last fall, he did not impose restrictions until COVID-19 threatened to totally overwhelm the province’s ICU capacity.
And now he’s daring fate again, behaving in the same reckless fashion.
As a consequence, Alberta now has 508.2 cases per 100,000 citizens. That’s double the rate in hard-hit Ontario and more than triple the rate in British Columbia.
As Lethbridge Mayor Chris Spearman lamented to the CBC last weekend: “We have done the least of the provinces. We’ve tolerated protests against masks and at the hospital and rapid vaccination clinic.”
Once you let the devil in the door, he often runs the house. Kenney again has waved him right in.
Failing to outrun the variants
A man with high opinions of himself, Kenney thought he could outrun the variants with vaccines. He lost that gamble totally, and now young citizens are struggling for air in hospitals with tubes in their tracheas. One 17-year-old woman in Magrath tragically died within five days of exposure. When governments give a dangerous virus free rein, bad things happen.
What explains Kenny’s dithering and wholesale aversion to leading in the public’s interest? The brash libertarian, probably the most unpopular premier in Alberta’s history, set the tone in his politicking by signalling he really doesn’t believe the government should restrict anything — including the movement of viruses.
Then when Kenney began to fiddle with closing, opening and closing again in response to lurching COVID-19 rates, 17 members of his own caucus flung his own don’t-tread-on-me notions back in his face, protesting such measures. Last month they openly chastised their premier and called for a regional approach that would allow areas with low infection rates to avoid restrictions.
The only problem with this idea is that the scientific evidence shows this kind of inequality doesn’t work in a pandemic for a logical reason. People travel from zones of high transmission to zones of low infection to avoid restrictions. In the process, they faithfully spread the virus.
Meanwhile, however, calls for Kenney to resign are reportedly growing among United Conservative Party influentials.
So, to appease his rebellious MLAs, Kenney has now done the unthinkable. He created, last week, a two-tiered pandemic system for Alberta based on half measures or no measures of consequence.
Cities like Calgary, Edmonton, Red Deer and Fort McMurray got one set of rules, including the closure of high schools and gyms along with the threat of curfew.
Meanwhile rural Alberta, where the virus is also running amuck, got another set of rules: the equivalent of don’t worry, you can ignore the science.
Stoking division
To compound the confusion, the previous day Kenney proclaimed, “There’s a false idea that lockdowns stop viral spread, that they can be effective in every instance.”
That’s not what the science says at all. In fact, England only stopped its variants with a harsh three-month lockdown.
Kenney has stoked potentially deadly division and disinformation about the virus in other ways. For example, he has welcomed increasingly ugly anti-mask protests as legitimate forms of democratic debate. A notorious Edmonton church openly violated COVID-19 distance and masking rules for four months before the province took any action. What kind of message does that send to Albertans?
In a province where the premier doesn’t apparently give a damn, the enforcement of COVID-19 rules has become a joke throughout the province.
This willful dereliction of duty in the face of a public emergency prompted this sharp tweet from Shannon Phillips, NDP MLA for Lethbridge West:
“Conservatives used to be a party where self-discipline, rule of law, and understanding rights come w/ responsibilities was the narrative. Now it’s do what you want, disregard others, break the law, reject responsibility, just yell, blame, lie with no intellectual anchor.” Discriminatory messages
Let’s not forget that Kenney didn’t see anything wrong when the cabinet minister in charge of vaccine distribution and other politicos took off for trips aboard last Christmas, until Albertans pointed out injustice and the double standard. Everyone knows that Kenney is a do-as-I-say guy, not a do-as-I-do leader.
Kenney’s messaging malpractice has at times been racist. He repeatedly has been tone deaf to how and why COVID-19 disproportionately attacks people of colour and essential workers. They are often one and the same population.
When last year the virus ravaged the largely immigrant workforce of the U.S.-owned meat packer Cargill — then one of the largest outbreaks in North America — Kenney refused to shut down the contaminated workplace. Several workers died, and the outbreak spread throughout the community of High River.
And when COVID-19 ran rampant last fall through Calgary’s northeast, a thriving immigrant community of 120,000, Kenney’s response was equally racist. Flaunting his ignorance of the science, he intimated that the whole problem had nothing to do with essential workers toiling in badly ventilated buildings or having to deal face to face with the public.
Kenney falsely argued that infection rates in Calgary’s northeast were due to “big family gatherings at home.” In Kenney’s world, no infection ever happens in the workplace.
Tellingly, government pandemic support for Calgary’s northeast did not arrive until last December. That response came in the form of free self-isolation hotels and information packages in foreign languages in the midst of a punishing second wave. Don’t even ask about sick benefits.
Kenney is now so fearful of making any decision that might antagonize his ideological base that he did nothing when COVID-19 cases surged through the school system last month.
Instead, he left it up to the Calgary Board of Education and Calgary Catholic School District to make the independent decision to shut down or not. That way, the premier of Alberta didn’t have to speak truth to science-blind constituents in order to protect young Albertans.
Kenney now hopes that he will be able to avoid any more restrictions by using the province’s exhausted health-care system as a sort of shock absorber.
Right now, 150 beds are full. There’s the capacity to expand to 425 — except there aren’t enough qualified personnel to staff them. The calculated political decision to fill hospitals with sick citizens in order to avoid proper public health restrictions in the community is nothing short of cowardly, incompetent and abusive. The price of failed leadership
In January, experts warned that the variants represented a new pandemic. They advised prudent and conservative leaders to stamp out the new threat or face an ongoing catastrophe.
The experts advised these things for a reason. Because they are more contagious, the variants are much harder to bring under control. The English proved this reality with a lengthy and severe lockdown the hard way. So, too, did Portugal, Ireland and Denmark.
Last week, the Lancet published another study showing that jurisdictions that choose the approach called elimination — making a cluster of hard decisions to eliminate the virus within their borders — have achieved better outcomes socially, politically, economically and health wise.
Kenney has repeatedly disavowed elimination in favor of the failed strategy of mitigation, which typically translates into a circus of openings and closings that fail to solve the problem, instead eroding public trust.
In contrast, elimination uses a lockdown, followed by rigorous testing, tracing and quarantining, to achieve a health goal that frees the population from future restrictions.
OECD countries that opted for elimination (Australia, Iceland, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea) have recorded about 25 times lower deaths per million people than other OECD countries that championed mitigation. Unlike Alberta, their economies thrived.
The evidence also shows that jurisdictions that opted for elimination strongly minimized restrictions on civil liberties while the mitigators like Kenney’s Alberta locked their populations in COVID hell.
Eliminating the virus also gives people more freedom and choice. New Zealand, for example, is not panicking about vaccinating its people, because they are free of the virus.
Meanwhile, Alberta has belatedly realized that its linear vaccination program cannot outpace an exponential virus. Moreover, history shows repeatedly that no vaccination program can work without strong public health measures. Canada’s Crazy Pandemic Response
The Lancet study also highlights another truth made evident by Kenney’s failing COVID gamble. Relying solely on vaccines to control the pandemic is very risky for several reasons. The rollouts and uptakes for vaccinations are uneven; immunity is limited to perhaps 200 days, and new COVID variants keep emerging.
One workforce enjoys Kenney’s protection. He has closed Alberta’s legislature for two weeks out of viral precaution. For everyone else in Alberta, no such luck.
Kenny could have chosen a different path for Alberta. But that would have required leadership. Instead, a conceited political gambler has defended a failing strategy, squandered the province’s resources, ignored the best science, pandered to pandemic deniers and betrayed its citizens.
It’s time to pray for Alberta.
*Story updated on May 3 at 9:30 p.m. to reflect tests do not indicate one in eight Albertans carry the virus.
DOXA Opener Takes the Gig Economy to Task
The gap between the potential and the reality of ‘platform’ work is disturbingly wide, argues filmmaker Shannon Walsh.
Frederick Blichert 3 May 2021 | TheTyee.ca Frederick Blichert is a freelance journalist and film critic. His writing appears in Vice, Paste Magazine, Xtra, Motherboard and elsewhere. You can reach him here.
The gig economy. The ghost economy. The platform economy. Task-based work.
Call it what you will, but there’s no denying that labour has been dramatically transformed by digital platforms divvying up tasks among armies of so-called independent contractors.
You’ve likely participated in this, maybe unwittingly. Even if you avoid Uber Eats and Amazon, the artificial intelligence behind your standard Google search is supplemented by humans, invisibly filling in data gaps for literal pennies.
In her new doc The Gig Is Up, which will open the upcoming DOXA Documentary Film Festival, Vancouver filmmaker Shannon Walsh talks to experts as well as workers who have no real protections and are severely exploited.
It’s mostly an exposé of what’s wrong with gig work, and why the promise of more freedom for workers has largely been broken, replaced by a dehumanizing reality in which workers are given ratings, like consumer products, and subject to the whims of unaccountable corporations — or worse, algorithms.
The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated this dehumanizing process. I remember my first contactless meal delivery in early 2020. Instead of the customary handoff, I received a notification on my phone that my meal had been delivered and was waiting at the door
.
My Uber Eats courier had even provided a photo of the brown paper bag sitting sadly on the tacky carpeting in the hall outside my apartment door. As I collected my dinner, I shouted a thank you towards the elevators, unsure if anyone was even there. “Thank you. Have a good night,” a disembodied voice shouted back.
I spoke with Shannon Walsh about The Gig Is Up ahead of its virtual premiere at DOXA. This interview has been condensed and lightly edited.
The Tyee: The gig economy is such a huge phenomenon, and I think it can be hard to grasp the link between something like an Uber driver in Vancouver and somebody analyzing images for Amazon’s AI in Nigeria. How do you go about making connections between these?
Shannon Walsh: I think that’s what is really different right now, and that sometimes gets skipped over. Like, “musicians are in the gig economy, it’s just the same.” But this idea that your work is being mediated by an algorithm, and that your manager is a rating system you have no control over in all of these areas is really the huge transformation that we’ve seen, and that we don’t yet understand how to deal with. [American anthropologist and author] Mary Gray calls it task-based work, which I think is a nice way to put it, because it just lets us understand the fact that it’s on-demand. People making themselves available for tasks is as valuable as the task-doing itself.
I think the tech industry has done a really good job of either telling us that this is a liberating form of work, or that there aren’t humans there at all. And neither of those things are true.
How important was it to you that this be a global project?
The thing that struck me so much as someone who’s been working on issues of globalization over the years is how flattened the platform economy has made the space for workers. So, someone in Florida is doing literally the same job for the same pay as someone in Nigeria or someone in India, and that was really striking to me, that you can see the globalization of inequality, really distinctly. It’s definitely different than anything I’d seen before.
A lot of gig workers speak very openly in the film. Were there fears of repercussions because of that abusive work model?
I was thinking a lot about that. I didn’t want to make a film that ended up putting people’s work in jeopardy, or their livelihoods in jeopardy, so I networked with folks that were already organizing… people who had already decided to become visible to some degree. Al, in the film, from San Francisco, talks about the fact that he’s got a legion of workers from the Yemeni community who won’t even speak out loud. They send Facebook messages to him to even ask questions.
You leave room for a certain sense of hope and opportunity. Do you feel like there’s room for a functional gig economy in the world?
I hope so, honestly. I am an artist myself. I get why people want flexibility and to be able to do creative work and not make their lives revolve around a 9 to 5. I think people are getting used to living with that kind of convenience, but it does have a cost.
I do think that there’s space to make change. We’ve done it before as a society. We don’t have child workers anymore. We got a weekend. It’s not impossible, right? There is a degree to which the vampire of capitalism is just getting worse and worse. But people are getting so damn tired of the whole thing that there’s a rise of co-operatives and collective ideas and a localism.
The film ends on something of an activist note, encouraging viewers to get involved by going to your website. Can you tell me a bit about how you’re trying to engage people outside the film?
I’ve started working with organizers in different local contexts to connect people with what’s happening where they live. Often, we watch social impact or political docs like this and think, “Oh gosh, how awful. Tell me to delete the app or something, and I’ll feel better.” But I don’t think it’s as easy as that. I think that’s really the answer to this big, globalized situation is to remember these are people in our communities, in our neighbourhoods, and a lot of them are organizing already.
I think the gig economy has started to feel a lot more real to a lot of us during this pandemic. You shot a lot of this before the pandemic and got to check in again with a lot of these people mid-pandemic. How did that affect your relationship to this material?
I think it did what you’re saying, and completely brought it to a much larger part of the population’s everyday lives. So, I hope that the public is more open to talking about it and thinking about it. The idea of these workers as “essential” never would have struck me, but that’s the role that they’ve ended up playing. I hope that the takeaway is some respect and giving some dignity to the people who are doing this work, and at the very least, recognizing that an algorithm’s rating is not a way to treat a human’s livelihood. We’re not on a reality TV show.
‘The Gig Is Up’ is available to stream through DOXA from anywhere in Canada, May 6 to 17. A Q&A with Walsh will be livestreamed on May 7. Learn more on the DOXA website.
Poly Styrene Doc Pays Tribute to the Person Behind the Persona
The punk rocker’s story feels eerily familiar in a modern era of celebrity culture backlash. Showing at DOXA. Frederick Blichert 4 May 2021 | TheTyee.ca Frederick Blichert is a freelance journalist and film critic. His writing appears in Vice, Paste Magazine, Xtra, Motherboard and elsewhere. Reach him here.
Watch the trailer for ‘Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché’ above.
The ’70s U.K. punk scene isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the hot button topics of today. But a film screening at this month’s DOXA Documentary Film Festival makes the story of punk icon Poly Styrene feel urgently relevant.
Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché presents the life and career of Marianne Joan Elliott-Said, who crafted the stage persona Poly Styrene in the 1970s. She is now recognized as the first woman of colour to front a successful rock band in the U.K. — X-Ray Spex.
Known for staging killer shows at the legendary London Roxy punk club and its debut influential single “Oh Bondage Up Yours!,” X-Ray Spex was a huge part of the scene.
The band was overtly political, taking part in the Rock Against Racism movement that saw U.K. punk bands pushing back against the far-right National Front party and a rise in racist violence across the nation.
In 1978, Rock Against Racism aligned itself with the Anti-Nazi League for a carnival and concert in Victoria Park. First up was Poly Styrene with X-Ray Spex, sharing the bill with the Clash and the Buzzcocks. Later concerts would include Stiff Little Fingers, Aswad and Elvis Costello, all part of a growing chorus against hate.
Narrated by Oscar-nominee Ruth Negga reading the words of Poly Styrene, I Am a Cliché explores how the musician rose to fame and faced immense pressures from the press and music industry as an outspoken and in-your-face icon.
This intimate and personal portrait is told not only from the perspective of Poly Styrene’s daughter, co-director Celeste Bell, but also with input from a huge stable of people who knew her both on and off the stage — including her sister Margaret, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, Bikini Kill and Le Tigre’s Kathleen Hanna, fellow X-Ray Spex members Paul Dean and Lara Logic, and plenty more.
This access breaks down the image of Poly Styrene to give the audience a more grounded view of a young woman finding her voice.
“I just consider myself as a person first, and anything else or anybody else might call you, well, they’re just names, really, aren’t they? Just given to trends and people and things like that,” says Poly Styrene in a recorded interview.
The erasure of a young woman’s personhood is all too familiar and suddenly urgently relevant as we look back at the life and career of Poly Styrene. The treatment of celebrities has become a hot topic in recent years. Framing Britney Spears — a New York Times doc about the pop music superstar and 2000s tabloid culture — is a recent flashpoint in the ongoing backlash.
It’s hard to avoid comparisons to Spears while watching I Am a Cliché. Seeing Poly Styrene’s image altered by record label execs, her figure slimmed down for an album cover, and hearing how she struggled with misdiagnosed mental illness all hit close to home.
The parallels reach their peak in scenes when old friends and bandmates describe Poly shaving her head, a now-familiar act of reclamation. After all, if the industry and press want to control your body, what better way to deny them that than to remove one of the symbols of femininity altogether? It’s not much of a stretch to believe a #FreePoly movement might have materialized if this were all happening just a few decades later.
We’re starting, as a society, to come to grips with how we’ve treated pop stars and other female celebrities of the not-so-distant past. But I Am a Cliché lays the truth (and scale) of the problem bare.
We can wring our hands about our complicity in a corporate machine that willfully sacrificed Spears — along with Meghan Markle, Whitney Houston, Megan Fox and so many more — but even the counterculture of punk, so self-satisfied with its emphasis on throwing off the shackles of mainstream tastes and morals, was no different. It casually allowed Poly Styrene to be subjected to the same leering tabloid culture. Her weight, her braces, her race... none of it was off-limits.
As the doc points out, she amassed a high level of fame without the matching fortune to shield herself from the abuses that came with it. Keenly aware of society’s ugliest corners, Poly Styrene fought on the right side of history and made a name for herself, only to be pushed to the margins.
This is the brilliance of hearing Poly Styrene’s story told by her daughter, someone who knew Marianne Joan Elliott-Said before knowing anything about Poly Styrene. Her famous mom was, like all of us, “a person first,” with admirable qualities, serious flaws and everything in between.
I Am a Cliché pays her the respect of recognizing that personhood in all its complexity and beauty.
‘Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché’ is available to stream thro Poly Styrene Doc Pays Tribute to the Person Behind the Persona
The punk rocker’s story feels eerily familiar in a modern era of celebrity culture backlash. Showing at DOXA.
A TRIBUTE
Tom Berger’s Cases Revealed His Moral Character
Revisiting ‘One Man’s Justice,’ the memoir of fighting for the vulnerable written by the renowned BC jurist two decades before his passing.
Ian Gill 5 May 2021 | TheTyee.ca Ian Gill is co-owner of Vancouver bookstore Upstart & Crow, a co-creator of Salmon Nation and a contributing editor of The Tyee.
Justice Thomas Berger listens as John Amagoalik, director of land claims for the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, speaks to the Berger Commission in Ottawa on June 3, 1976. Photo by Fred Chartrand, the Canadian Press picture archive.
Al ot has been written in a very short time recently about the long and storied life of Thomas Rodney Berger, who died last week aged 88. The obituaries of one of the finest jurists this country has ever produced have chronicled a lot of important commissions and headline grabbing cases he led, and rightly so. But they have almost universally failed to reference his personal traits.
I didn’t know Berger the Younger. He was called to the British Columbia bar in 1957, when I was barely out of nappies, as we called them in my native Australia. But I did get to know him a little starting in the ’90s. I was lucky enough to recruit him for a time to the board of Ecotrust Canada, and otherwise to see him occasionally over the years at various events, and the occasional lunch.
He was, in a word, avuncular. He had a polished, barrister’s baritone, an easy but authoritative way of speaking, ear cocked out of genuine curiosity, a smile never far away. For a big man with a sharp mind, there was a languidness about him that seemed to verge at times on diffidence. In fact, he was a master of soft power.
In his brilliant but incomplete memoir, One Man’s Justice: A Life in the Law, Berger writes that in high school he decided he wanted to be a teacher, a lawyer or a journalist. “All of those professions have one thing in common — they involve using language; they involve communicating ideas, speaking and writing. I’ve tried other things, but I’ve always returned to law.”
And thank goodness for that. The country, the world, is a better place because Tom Berger took an interest in justice and, in a statement last week from B.C. Premier John Horgan, “that meant he needed to address injustice.”
It was journeyman stuff to start out — small claims, administrative tribunals, criminal courts, “defending drug addicts, traffickers, thieves, burglars and prostitutes.” When he opened his own practice in 1963, his first client was a man charged with impaired driving. There was only one chair in his office. “Where was the client to sit? Where was I to sit? I couldn’t ask him to stand while I remained seated. On the other hand, it would seem peculiar if I remained on my feet throughout. I decided to move the chair to the other side of the desk, then I invited my client to sit down while I sat companionably on the corner of the desk, my hands folded in my lap, in an attitude of confidentiality. Perhaps he didn’t notice the absence of furniture.”
That was Berger to a T — the kind consideration of the other, the putting at ease of people at their uneasiest — i.e. people, often from the wrong side of the tracks, who found themselves on the wrong side of a system that seemed purpose-built to intimidate. All the more serendipitous that Berger in the 1960s started arguing Aboriginal rights cases. Thus, from a “a pocket-sized office,” he wrote, “the land claims industry developed.” The defining Aboriginal rights case not just for Berger, but for Canada, was of course Calder vs. British Columbia, which took Berger and the Nisg̱a’a Nation to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1971, which upheld the place of Aboriginal rights in Canadian law.
“Tom filed the writ in the B.C. Supreme Court in 1969,” lawyer Don Rosenbloom told the Vancouver Sun last week. “It alleged that Aboriginal title had never been extinguished, and the First Nations maintained their ownership of the land. “Lawyers in this city were just laughing, it was just, ‘Give me a break.’ They couldn’t believe a case was being taken that made such a suggestion. But it turned out not to be a joke. And look where we are today.”
Berger: “It helped that I was young and tireless and not fully aware of the obstacles that had to be surmounted.”
WATCH: Tom Berger discusses the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry he led. It proved a milestone for the assertion of Indigenous rights in Canada.
In 1971, at the age of 38, Berger was appointed to the B.C. Supreme Court, serving 12 years as a trial judge and three-time royal commissioner, one commission being the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry that “made me famous in Canada for a time.” So too his public dissent in 1983 against Canada’s adoption of a Constitution and Charter of Rights that abandoned provisions that recognized the rights of Indigenous, Inuit and Métis people. He left the bench and returned to practising law. You could say he never looked back.
But, thankfully, he did look back — in One Man’s Justice: A Life in the Law, written at the urging of Scott McIntyre and published by Douglas & McIntyre in 2002. (McIntyre also served on the Ecotrust Canada board. They were good times.)
It is out of print now (my partner and I are working on sourcing a few copies for the curious; see below), but One Man’s Justice remains one of my all-time favourite books. It is notable not just for its clear writing (Tom would have made a great journalist, although what a waste!), but for its description of cases — not all of them judicial triumphs — and characters who seemed unfavoured by society and thus the law. People like Penny McNeil, the first woman in Canada to be prosecuted as a habitual criminal, a case “as sad as any I’ve ever done.” Declaring someone a habitual criminal meant they could be locked up for good, but in McNeil’s lifetime of prostitution and drug use she had never endangered another’s life, or property. “Her crimes were truly crimes against herself.” Berger offers an empathetic description of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside — not just the blight, but the camaraderie and sense of community — that is as true now as it was then. McNeil and two other women Berger defended would be declared habitual criminals because the evidence showed they were, but in each instance they escaped preventive detention because their lawyer persuaded a judge that “the idea of imprisonment as a deterrent had virtually no effect on their conduct.” Legislation allowing people to be declared habitual criminals was repealed in 1977.
Dr. Jerilynn Prior was born in Alaska but moved to Canada in 1976 because she was opposed to American war-mongering in Vietnam and admired Canada’s universal health-care system. She was a Quaker who opposed the use of force and thus, by definition, the spending of her taxes by her government on military purposes. “How important is a conscience in a citizen’s life?” Berger asked. “Dr. Prior wished to apply the idea of conscientious objection to her taxes.”
Prior’s objections to her tax assessments had been heard and rejected in several Federal Court rulings and an appeal hung on whether there was a sufficient nexus between taxes and actual military expenditures to have violated Prior’s freedom of conscience. Berger failed to convince the Federal Court of Appeal to even hear Prior’s evidence and the Supreme Court of Canada turned down leave to appeal. “We were thrown off the bus at the first turn.” But Berger’s wide-ranging chapter on citizen conscience still stands up, especially these days when taxpayers should have every right to challenge our government’s war on nature, and its use of our money to subsidize the fossil fuel industry, for one; and fish farms, for another; and war machines, still.
MKULTRA, CIA AND DR. EWEN CAMERON
Linda Macdonald had been a victim of brainwashing experiments by Dr. Ewen Cameron at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute, funded by the American Central Intelligence Agency and later by the Canadian government. By the time Macdonald sought out Berger in 1988 the horror stories of wiping peoples’ memories through methods of gross medical malpractice had been widely told. Macdonald had been admitted to the AMI in 1963 for postpartum depression, then “treated” for schizophrenia, despite there being no evidence she suffered from it. After four months of more than 100 electroconvulsive shocks, untested combinations of barbiturates, anti-psychotic drugs and an 86-day drug induced sleep, she was discharged. “She had regressed to a child-like state. She had to be toilet trained. She could no longer read or write. She did not know her husband or children.”
At 26-years-old, Macdonald had been “depatterned” and then abandoned. Her legal issue was that Canada refused any culpability for what happened to her. In the end, it was her character and tenacity, rather than the courts, that determined the outcome: compensation for her, and other victims, although no admission of liability. Just a government crawling down in the face of a media storm that Berger realized was more powerful, and more speedily rendered, that any court decision could have been.
Thomas Berger receiving an honorary doctorate of laws from Vancouver Island University in 2013, one of 20 honorary degrees conferred upon him during his lifetime.
I mentioned that Berger’s memoir is incomplete and that’s true. It was published almost two decades before his death, and even into his eighth and ninth decades, an older and vastly wiser Tom Berger was still exhibiting his legendary stamina when tasked with making a good argument on a matter of principle.
He fought and won a battle to stop the Yukon government from undoing protections for the Peel Watershed, a vast expanse of sub-Arctic wilderness, after previously agreeing not to develop 80 per cent of it with the agreement of First Nations. He fought and won the Manitoba Métis Federation’s case that the government had defrauded Métis children out of 1.4 million acres of land. He fought and won a huge judgement against Imperial Tobacco on behalf of the B.C. government. All chapters that would have made it into a second edition, if only there’d been time. (Two excellent sources on his life are here and here.)
In December last year, in failing health, he argued before the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal that the Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation is owed a “fair share” of compensation for lands flooded by SaskPower, an act that the Cree claim is a trespass on their reserve. “Berger expects to hear the top court’s decision sometime in 2021,” the Saskatoon StarPhoenix reported at the time.
Berger would love to have won that one (he might yet do so), because as warm and good-natured as he often appeared, he did like to win. “We are all of us animated by a mixture of motives,” he wrote in One Man’s Justice. “I acknowledge that ambition has played a part in my career.” That, and faith. “I’ve never become jaded — weary, dispirited, furious, frustrated perhaps, but I’ve never lost my faith in the law.”
Vale Thomas Rodney Berger. Teacher. Lawyer. Author (not journalist). 1933-2021.
‘One Man’s Justice’ is out of print but Upstart & Crow is sourcing a small number of copies. Please email them if you would like to order a copy.
WATER IS LIFE, CLEAN WATER IS A HUMAN RIGHT
My Community’s Boil Water Advisory Is Almost as Old as Me
This human rights violation against First Nations has affected an entire generation. And I’ll never take water for granted again. Valerie Ooshag 6 May 2021 | TheTyee.ca Valerie Ooshag is an Anishinaabekwe from Eabametoong First Nation. She lives in Ottawa and will start the journalism program at Algonquin College in the fall. She is an intern at The Tyee through the JHR Indigenous Reporters Program.
A new water plant built in 2019 was intended to end the boil water advisories in Eabametoong First Nation. But the community says the design is inadequate and relies on reverse osmosis systems. Photo by Michele Hakimian, resident of Eabametoong First Nation.
When you grow up in an urban setting, you never have to worry about water. I never did until I turned 18. It always poured abundantly from the faucet — for washing dishes, for making juice, for cooking. The water was always there.
I grew up off-reserve in Thunder Bay and was never taught that I couldn’t drink the water. I never had to worry about whether it would give me skin problems or make me sick.
I’d visited my remote fly-in community of Eabametoong First Nation many times. But I was young and never thought too deeply about why I couldn’t drink from the tap like I did at my mother’s house in the city.
Eabametoong, located 360 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay, has two locally-owned stores where the community shops for food or other necessities. It is surrounded by many bodies of water where people go out to fish or travel to their families’ traplines.
When I moved back there at 18, officially an adult, the harsh reality hit me. The water was still not safe to drink. Eabametoong First Nation has been on a boil water advisory since August 2001 — it came into effect when I was just four years old.
Lately, my home community has been on my mind as I recently read reports that the Canadian government had missed its own deadline to end all boil-water advisories on First Nations reserves. I imagined the extra pandemic risks that came with a lack of clean, safe water.
Flying into Eabametoong First Nation, which has had a boil water advisory since 2001. Photo by Valerie Ooshag.
I wanted to find out if there was anything being done about this clear violation of basic human rights.
So I called Andy Yesno, current senior advisor for Eabametoong, who I met during my work with the Reversing River Youth Council. The council was founded by me and other youth in Eabametoong and has been officially recognized by the community as a voice for its young people.
Yesno has worked for Eabametoong for 45 years, serving as the Chief and on council. He is one of the most knowledgeable people around — he was once an electrician and knows so much about the treaties, government and, of course, the water issue in our community.
Water problems have plagued Eabametoong for years. The water would get shut off from time to time because of problems with the treatment plant. When water use rose, the inadequate sewer system would overflow, creating a health risk. In 2019, the nation declared a state of emergency over the water supply problems.
“It complicates things,” Yesno said, because when there is no running water, you can’t do everyday chores or maintain a normal life.
A new $12-million water plant, supposedly completed in 2019, was intended to end the boil water advisories. But the plant has many deficiencies because the community says its design is still inadequate.
The community now relies on reverse osmosis systems to provide filtered drinking and cooking water for the approximately 1,300 residents. Yesno says there are three reverse osmosis units, and people have to take water jugs to refill every time their household runs out
.
Fetching water from the reverse osmosis system in Eabametoong. Photo by Valerie Ooshag.
Tap water needs to be boiled for more than five minutes so it can be used for everyday purposes. “Some community members trust the lake water more than the water that comes from the tap,” says Yesno. And the lake water still needs to be boiled.
Community members buy bottled water as well, but it is expensive, as it has to be flown in and is resold at a very high price. From my own experience, cases of bottled water can cost $25 or more at the local stores.
Water should not be this expensive. It is a basic human necessity. The lack of readily available, safe water creates health risks and adds costs and work to daily life — especially for families with babies or for Elders. There are times when bottled water has been shipped into the community from organizations like Matawa First Nations Management, a non-profit tribal council that serves nine communities from Treaty 9 and the Robinson-Superior Treaty.
There have been times when the water plant would have to shut down for a few hours, occasionally for days at a time, leaving everyone without running water. People would fetch lake water to flush toilets or for daily chores.
Every time it’s announced on the local radio station that the water will be shut off, households fill up their bathtub with water for everyday use.
“The infrastructure here is getting old,” Yesno tells me. The water and sewer system can back up fairly easily, so it has to be flushed out and cleaned out properly.
Before the new treatment plant can begin fully operating, the water will have to be tested to meet the standards set by Ontario water regulations. Yesno says the design of the plant is still not right and needs improvement.
“We will not allow the boil water advisory to be lifted until the new water treatment plant is fixed and is ready to be used,” he says.
“Nothing has changed in the past 20 years,” he added. “We would like to have clean water for the health and safety of our community.”
I first learned how common boil water advisories are when I worked as youth representative for different Indigenous organizations, and even more so when I was attending Aboriginal studies at my college.
In school, I explored more about the issues surrounding water in Indigenous communities. It frustrated me to learn that there were 52 long-term advisories in effect as of last month. Many of those advisories have been in effect for years, including for my community.
Canada is a first world country, with Indigenous populations and communities having to live under boil water advisories, with some children and youth never having had access to clean drinking water in their entire lives.
In the 2015 election campaign, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau vowed to lift all boil-water advisories by 2020. It is now 2021, and yet there are still these 52 advisories affecting 33 communities that don’t have access to clean drinking water.
There is no new target date for the government to keep its six-year-old promise. Communities need the proper infrastructure and funding now to be able to have clean water for the current members and future generations as well.
A class action litigation has been announced on behalf of the Tataskweyak Cree Nation, Curve Lake First Nation and Neskantaga First Nation against the attorney general of Canada for failing to address drinking water advisories on First Nation reserves across the country. WTF Bad Water Sickens First Nations. But Government Doesn’t Track the Toll
This could push the government to act faster on its obligation to ensure clean drinking water is available for Indigenous communities. But the fact that communities are still suffering and having to fight for their rights is unnecessary. It should’ve ever have happened.
Being able to live in my community for a time was a true eyeopener. I realized that growing up I took water for granted by not appreciating it as much as I should. Many communities, like mine, have been living in those conditions for years, and a generation has grown up without ever having access to clean water.
When I moved to Ottawa for school, I cherished the fact that I was able to drink from the tap, because after living in my community and educating myself about the issues, I had a better understanding of what water means to me.
Water is taken for granted by those who don’t know about this human rights violation that Indigenous people from communities affected live with every day. It is time to do better, Canada.
Making the Case for Universal Basic Income Jamie Swift and Elaine Power’s book offers a compelling argument that it’s time to give Canadians more freedom and security.
Paloma Pacheco is a Vancouver-based freelance writer and a graduate student at UBC’s School of Journalism, Writing and Media.
No stone is left unturned in this ‘thorough and convincing argument in favour of a basic income.’
The Case for Basic Income By Jamie Swift and Elaine Power Between the Lines (2021)
“The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”
When American activist and social worker Jane Addams wrote these words in 1893, the world was in the heyday of its first run with free-market capitalism and liberalism. Ideas about the “common good” were not popular in the mainstream. The Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries had paved the way for a cultural shift away from local economies and communal dependence. In Europe and North America, society’s focus was on mechanization, large-scale growth and a bootstraps-and-grit ethic that dictated an “every person for themselves” approach to life and work.
It was an ideology that would become deeply entrenched in western culture, and that we are still immersed in today, argue journalist Jamie Swift and academic Elaine Power.
In their new book, The Case for Basic Income, the duo presents an alternative vision for post-pandemic existence after a year that has exposed the fallacies of neoliberalism and the reality of our interconnectedness and interdependence. It’s a proposal that once seemed radical but is gaining increasingly widespread traction and appeal: a universal basic income. The Tyee is supported by readers like you Join us and grow independent media in Canada
The concept of basic income (colloquially known as “BI” or “UBI”) is not new. In fact, it’s much older, and more tried and tested, than its critics give it credit. This is a pillar of Swift and Power’s exploration of the policy. No stone is left unturned in their thorough and convincing argument in favour of a basic income.
Though the book focuses primarily on Canada’s history with basic income, the authors acknowledge its antecedents, both literal and imagined, all the way back to the publication, in 1516, of Thomas More’s Utopia. The idea of providing a fixed income for all members of society to meet their basic needs and, in doing so, escape cycles of poverty, instability and ill health, is not simply a utopian ideal, they conclude. It’s a well-studied and financially viable option that would benefit Canada’s economy and social fabric immensely.
The Case for Basic Income opens with a short foreword by an Ontario-based family physician who writes of her concern for her patients at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. While she worried about an 86-year-old man who lived on his own and a young woman pregnant with her first child, she was most preoccupied with the well-being of a small dance studio owner who went out of business within the first few weeks of the pandemic. She knew how much the financial loss would affect her and, as a health equity advocate, she also knew that financial insecurity often leads to poor health outcomes.
Luckily for this doctor’s patient, and for many thousands of Canadians, this woman was offered a life raft: the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, which provided $2,000 per month in guaranteed income. Along with the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy, which subsidized employee wages for eligible businesses, the CERB provided temporary security and relief from the stress of losing work, something a large portion of the country’s population (some 5.5 million people) experienced when COVID hit.
The fact that the government was able to provide this emergency support so quickly, and with few bureaucratic hurdles for applicants, write Swift and Power, proves that what is often deemed impossible is actually not: expanding the social security net to include more people and to offer genuine support instead of crumbs.
While CERB was the closest Canada has come to a federal basic income program, it still left many out, and was dependent on meeting a previous employment threshold. People who had earned under $5,000 in 2019 were ineligible, along with those who had been unemployed previous to the pandemic or were coming off of EI or parental leave.
This is where basic income differs. Basic income programs are not tied to employment, and, unlike welfare and disability assistance, they do not require constant monitoring to determine eligibility and deservedness.
Swift and Power are unequivocal in their assessment of these systems: they are closer to policing than to a social service. Besides the difficulty of meeting eligibility criteria, once accepted for these programs recipients are punished for earning above a certain annual income on top of their assistance payments and must constantly prove their merit to government workers.
If a true basic income were to be implemented in Canada, it would mean moving beyond the limitations of our current thinking around social security, say Swift and Power. And, perhaps even more importantly, it would mean a transformational reimagining of work, labour, time and freedom.
For many Canadians, any mention of basic income is linked to Manitoba’s “Mincome” pilot program, launched in Winnipeg and the small town of Dauphin in 1975. Albeit short-lived (the program was cancelled by provincial and federal Conservative governments four years later), the resulting data is telling.
Health economist Evelyn Forget, spurred by her own experience with childhood poverty, decided to dig into it in 2008, later publishing her research in an article for Canadian Public Policy. What emerged was a resounding advertisement for the program’s benefits. During the period that residents received a guaranteed income of $16,000 (nearly $80,000 in today’s dollars), hospital visits dropped by nearly 10 per cent and both fertility rates and high school dropout rates also declined.
Swift and Power do not spend much time on the Mincome experiment — a topic that could have used more expansion, given its fascinating findings, as well as its place in the national imagination — instead zipping along to dive into two more recent basic income pilot programs, both in Ontario. Under the leadership of former Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne, the towns of Hamilton and Lindsay were both selected as trial sites for the Ontario Basic Income Pilot in 2017.
This program saw 4,000 low-income earners receive $17,000 if they were single and $24,000 if coupled, and included a $6,000 top-up for disabled people. For those working low-wage jobs while participating, their basic income was reduced by 50 cents for every dollar they earned, until they hit a ceiling of $34,000 for singles and about $48,000 for couples.
Again cut short by Conservatives — this time only several months in — the pilot program offered similarly striking results. And this is where Swift and Power’s book gains real momentum, as they zero in on the individuals positively impacted by the Ontario pilot program.
Drawing on examples from a range of backgrounds and circumstances — a single mother with a disabled daughter and three other children to care for; a disabled man struggling with precarious employment, mental health issues and food insecurity; a young millennial working a minimum-wage job and looking for more meaningful work — they show how even the relatively small annual amount each of these people received made an overwhelming difference in their lives. Families were able to pay off long-standing debt and stop using the food bank; individuals were able to pursue higher education or start small businesses.
The Case for Basic Income’s primary strength lies in its ability to connect these stories with the greater picture surrounding basic income. Like all good journalism, it uses the personal to shed light on the political and public, and in doing so, the book builds a solid and demonstrable defence for the approach. These real-world examples lend credibility to what basic income’s proponents often hold up as its main benefit: the freedom to choose a life of purpose and to live without the anxiety and fear that precarity and poverty entail, the reduced toll on the health-care system and the increased food security.
Swift and Power have studied basic income for years, so they know that it has met with resistance from both the political right and left, and that spotlighting its wins is not always enough. They devote equal attention to criticism against it, gently but firmly showing how it is often misguided.
For those on the right who believe giving a “handout” to everyone would simply discourage people from working, they argue that the poorest people in society are those that currently work the hardest: the (often racialized) workers the pandemic has deemed “essential” but not worth protecting with policies like paid sick leave. Basic income would offer some the opportunity to leave dangerous or exploitative working conditions, but it would also acknowledge undervalued forms of labour, such as (often gendered) care work.
For those on the left, who might fear that basic income would erode labour protections and government-worker unions, as well as endanger important public supports like medicare and non-market housing, the authors propose that liberating people from social assistance would free up public-sector workers to provide more preventative health services. Unions would remain critical to the labour movement, and access to subsidized health care, pharmacare, child care and housing options would be a key factor in the policy’s implementation, funded by a progressive taxation system.
For Many on Assistance, COVID Benefit Boost Means ‘I Don’t Have to Eat Just Brown Rice and Beans’READ MORE
Swift and Power don’t delve into the nitty-gritty of how basic income might be implemented at the national level in Canada, citing the “tricky policy knots” of our country’s provincial-federal jurisdictional issues. While it’s certainly a question that begs answering, the reality is that the details could likely make up their own book. And this one is about winning hearts and minds, not convincing skeptical economists.
Ultimately, they argue, basic income is about freedom. Not the freedom of unregulated capitalism — the current system we live in, that prioritizes corporations above people — but a more expansive, human one. In a world increasingly dominated by precarious labour and the gig economy, as well as by growing automatization of jobs, skyrocketing economic inequality and a global climate crisis, it would mean an intentional value shift. Away from the worship of growth and towards a whole-hearted, intentional sustainability.
It’s a powerful idea. And after the past year, and all the inequity, injustice and moral failings the pandemic has exposed, perhaps it’s one whose time has come.
CELTIC ASTROLOGY -A MODERN HOAX by Michel-Gérald Boutet (iconographer)
with comments by Joseph Monard (linguist)
ABSTRACT The following is a description and critical comment on the various models given or proposed by the various interpreters and Reconstructionists for a working zodiac labelled as 'Celtic astrology'. Many attempts have been made at restoring or reconstructing ancient Celtic Astrology, these models are for the most part, fabricated, when not, completely re-invented. Not surprisingly, these tree zodiacs bear very little resemblance to both Western and Eastern Astrology. This being that most of the Reconstructionists have worked from false indications given by Robert Graves who seems to have confused Almanac with Zodiac.
This Historical Overview on the Origins of Antique Druidical Astrology has been written with the special collaboration of Joseph Monard and David Frawley.
On the Origins of 12 sign Astrology
Twelve sign astrology, traditionally attributed to the Chaldeans, finds its origins in the shamanistic lithic cultures of Eurasia. It then reached a higher level of sophistication with the early Vedic science of the early Indo-Europeans. It was already very ancient when Hipparchus of Nicaea had catalogued the positions of some 1022 stars and 49 constellations. By this time, the ancients were already inpossession of a sky chart. They knew that their ancestral homeland was situated in the stars of the northern skies. This is why the study of stars was very important to them. The ancient seers saw themselves as star children. Zodiacal constellations were a thing long familiar to the seers of Antiquity. In 174 BCE Hipparchus identified a new star in the constellation of Scorpio. He was very eager to chart allthe visible stars, for he correctly suspected that the skies were not eternal. He made himself famous by discovering the Earth's precession caused by the oscillation of the rotational axis every 25 600 years. This oscillation affects the position of the celestial poles by causing a slow shift of the equinoxes. Around 280BCE, another Greek, Aratus of Soles, gave in Phenomenons and Prognostics, a very precise description of the skies for the practical use of navigators and farmers. Aratus, who was born in Cilicia, Asia Minor, and sometime around 320 BCE was drawing information from the work of Eudoxus (c. 370 BCE). This study was the first true scientific work on astronomy. The old constellations identified by the ancients are generally those that run along the ecliptic, those referred to as the Zodiac and which serve to mark the passing of seasonal time. They also identified the circumpolar stars, Ursa Major, then called the Great Wain with alpha Draconis as the Pole Star before 2500 BCE. From the names hinted at in the zodiac, i.e. Orion and his dog (Sirius), we can guess the general pastoral theme. Some authors believe that the oldest proofs for the antiquity of Western Astrology are to be found in the Denderah planisphere artefact dated before 1800 BCE and kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de Paris.
However, it now certain that the time of creation of the relief is no earlier than 50 BCE during the time of the Greco-Roman period. because of the astronomical positions of stars and planets. It was also observed that the uncharted skies without zodiacal representations run along the 36 degreeslatitude. The centre of the band coincides with the position of the southern pole in2500 BCE. This indicates that the Egyptian astronomers were drawing on a more northern tradition than their own. Bronze Age Greeceof the Minoans and Mycenaeans (ca. 2500 -1100 BCE) and Old Hittite Kingdom (ca. 1600 -1400BCE) were just above the 36th latitude. This Greek and Anatolian position rightfuly hints at a Northeastern Mediterranean origin for the zodiac
Michel Gérald Boutet Michel-Gérald Boutet is a retired Art teacher and is an independant researcher in the fields of French Canadian, Algonquian and Celtic studies with interests in Rock Art, iconological and epigraphic studies. Studies : University of Ottawa, B.A.
A ‘determined peace-builder’? Analysing Canada’s role in the Israel-Palestine conflict
2017 marked 50 years since the beginning of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. Technically, under various statutes of international law (Article 42 of the 1907 Hague Regulations and Article 2, of the four Geneva Conventions, 1949) temporary military occupation of foreign territory is permissible for self-defence purposes. However, the way Israel has prosecuted its control over Palestinian lands and Palestinian lives is in blatant violation of numerous international norms. While most countries around the world challenge the legality of particular aspects of Israel’s occupation – though not always in its totality – a de facto consensus that accepts the status quo persists. Virtually all major actors in international relations – Canada included – prioritize Israeli claims regarding its security over Palestinian aspirations for independence or self-determination. Yet during the last days of 2016 the conflict appeared to be entering a period of potentially significant turbulence. As a signature to seven major international human rights conventions, Canada’s long-standing perceived international influence related to values of human rights dates back to their role in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of human rights in 1947-1948. However, as this paper demonstrates, official statements by the Canadian government, combined with Canada’s voting at the UN on resolutions pertaining to Palestine paint a very different story than that of a ‘determined peacebuilder’ and an even handed advocate for human rights. This paper assesses Canada’s relationship to the conflict and examines whether Canada’s reputation as a peacemaker and human rights advocate are reflected by its record on Israel-Palestine. Ultimately arguing that, in this case, there is little evidence to suggest that this reputation is warranted. In order to dodge the proverbial trap of the hypercritic, this paper concludes with forward-looking analysis and suggesting ways in which Canada may better live up to these models in the future.
Countless Canadians have for decades been trying to provide support to Palestinians living under military occupation in the occupied Palestinian territories. However, they have often faced strong resistance from pro-Israel advocates and elites in Canada, including their own government. This paper looks at the government suppression of Canadian development sector organisations running Palestinian aid projects 2001 to 2012, including from the perspective of the people running them. Based on document analysis, policy analysis and original semi-structured interviews with coordinators running aid projects, it describes how their work was almost universally undermined by the Canadian government. Tactics uncovered include appointing ardent pro-Israel advocates to an organisation's management, defunding specific projects, defunding entire organisations, launching questionable audits, spurious allegations of terrorism and the forced closure of organisations. This oppression was particularly overt under the Harper Conservative government, but had a basis in earlier Liberal governments. This interference provides an understanding for the fear that exists surrounding Palestinian aid work in Canada and the process by which Canadian aid to Palestinians is rendered ineffective. The paper further argues that while these tactics were likely first honed against Palestinian solidarity work, they were then used against other progressive groups, undermining Canadian civil society and democracy.
Cartoon by Greg Perry.
