Bayer appeal to dismiss Roundup weedkiller lawsuits rejected by U.S. Supreme Court

Bayer said it plans to replace glyphosate-based weed-killing ingredients in products for non-professionals in the U.S. with alternative active ingredients in order to “manage litigation risk in the U.S.,” but not due to concerns about safety.

By

 Cristen Hemingway Jaynes

 -

June 24, 2022

SOURCEEcoWatch

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by German company Bayer AG to dismiss legal claims by customers who assert one of its products — glyphosate-based Roundup weedkiller — causes cancer. The multinational chemical and pharmaceutical company could potentially owe billions of dollars in damages, reported Reuters.

The decision by the Supreme Court meant a verdict by a lower court that had upheld $25 million awarded to Edwin Hardeman — a California resident and Roundup consumer who blamed Bayer’s weedkiller for his cancer after using it at his home for 26 years — was left intact.

In 2015, Hardeman was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and contended that Bayer hadn’t given a warning as to the cancer risks of glyphosate, The Washington Post reported.

“[N]ow thousands of other cancer victims can continue to hold Monsanto accountable for its decades of corporate malfeasance,” lawyers representing Hardeman, Jennifer Moore and Aimee Wagstaff said in a statement, as reported by The Washington Post.

Bayer acquired Monsanto, the original maker of Roundup, in 2018.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified the herbicide glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015.

The weedkiller is still approved for use in the U.S., Europe and other places, reported BBC News. Parts of the European Union have banned the herbicide, according to Deutsche Welle.

A 2019 analysis showed that glyphosate was the most used pesticide in the U.S., the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting said.

Bayer is currently in the midst of thousands of lawsuits, with another Bayer appeal on the horizon for the Supreme Court in the weeks to come, Reuters reported. The Court’s rejection of the current appeal by Bayer led to a 2.9 percent dip in the company’s shares.

Last week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was ordered by a federal appeals court to reexamine if glyphosate presents risks that are unreasonable to people and the environment. 

In a decision favorable to farm worker, environmental and food safety advocates, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the EPA hadn’t sufficiently considered if glyphosate poses a threat to endangered species and causes cancer.

In its annual report released in March, Bayer said that about 107,000 of its approximately 138,000 cases had been resolved. The cases against the company argue that customers should have been warned of the alleged risk of cancer.

Bayer has asserted that the claims that glyphosate and Roundup cause cancer are contrary to science and the approval of the EPA, which has supported assertions that glyphosate is non-carcinogenic and, when used as the label advises, not a public health risk.

Bayer has asked for a review of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Hardeman case. The company argued that it should not be punished when the EPA wouldn’t allow a cancer warning to be put on its product and had determined it to be safe.

Bayer said it plans to replace glyphosate-based weed-killing ingredients in products for non-professionals in the U.S. with alternative active ingredients in order to “manage litigation risk in the U.S.,” but not due to concerns about safety, reported The Washington Post.

US Court of Appeals overturns EPA’s

decision that glyphosate is safe for

humans and wildlife

Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto-Bayer’s pesticide, is the most widely used pesticide in the world.

By

 Ashley Curtin

 -

June 24, 2022

SOURCENationofChange

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled against the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision that the pesticide, glyphosate, was safe for humans and wildlife. A coalition led by the Center for Food Safety brought the case against the EPA and several ag organizations.

The Court ruled that the EPA’s “inconsistent reasoning” made its decision on cancer “arbitrary,” and therefore ruled against the Agency and sided with the Center for Food Safety.

While research and epidemiological studies  have proved glyphosate to cause Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, new evidence shows a correlation between glyphosate exposure and infertility and endocrine disruption to name a few health risks, according to Dr. Zach Bush.

The Court also ruled that the EPA’s decision violated the Endangered Species Act since the Agency admitted prior that “glyphosate ‘may affect’ all listed species experiencing glyphosate exposure—that is 1,795 endangered or threatened species,” but ignored the ESA in its decision.

Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto-Bayer’s pesticide, is the most widely used pesticide in the world.

ALTERNATIVE FACTS

Denunciation of Vladimir Putin’s 2021 essay on the history of Russia and Ukraine is unwarranted

By Roger Annis, A Socialist In Canada, June 21, 2022 (This essay was originally published by Covert Action Magazine, June 20, 2022. Read that version to see extensive, accompanying photos.)

Far from condemning the national aspirations of Ukrainians, the Russian president defends them

In July 2021, Vladimir Putin published a historical essay on Russia and Ukraine on the website of the President of Russia. The essay is a very informative read, written by someone with a deep knowledge of the subject. It is titled ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’ and was published in Russian, English and Ukrainian.

Vladimir Putin, historian, pictured in March 2022

The essay’s appearance occasioned a round of gratuitous condemnations by Western media and pro-Western academics. The pro-NATO think tank Atlantic Council, for example, published a series of short comments on the essay that carefully avoided any substantive reporting of the essay content.

A member of the Ukrainian Rada (legislature) is quoted: “Ukraine holds the key to Putin’s dreams of restoring Russia’s great power status. He is painfully aware that without Ukraine, this will be impossible.” He continues, “[The current conflict] is a war for the whole of Ukraine. Putin makes it perfectly clear that his goal is to keep Ukraine firmly within the Russian sphere of influence and to prevent Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic integration.”

There is nothing new or informative here. Russia IS a great power. The Russian government warned NATO and the world back in December 2021 that a “Euro-Atlantic integration” of Ukraine and the accompanying political and military measures constitute a further escalation of threats against the Russian people and their sovereignty that would not go unanswered. That month, the government published the text of a proposed treaty with the U.S. aimed at resolving the conflict over Ukraine’s future. So, again, the MP is telling us nothing new.

A member of the ‘Kyiv Security Forum’ is also cited by the Atlantic Council survey. He states: “Putin understands that Ukrainian statehood and the Ukrainian national idea pose a threat to Russian imperialism.”

Here we have an example of the gratuitous term ‘Russian imperialism’ used as an epithet in place of political analysis. The term is more commonly seen or heard from the Western ‘leftists’ suffering self-inflicted amnesia over NATO’s decades-long, expansionist aggression against Russia. They are calling for a Russian “withdrawal” from Ukraine, which amounts to a call to bow to Ukrainian and NATO aggression.

Another accusatory voice of ‘Russian colonialism’ and ‘Russian imperialism’ is the pro-Western Yale University professor Timothy Snyder in an essay published in The New Yorker in April 2022. Snyder’s novel contribution to 20th century history is his 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, along with various accompanying essays, arguing that the Soviet Union before and during World War Two was a greater evil than Hitler’s Nazi Germany. (A withering rebuttal of Snyder’s extreme-right thesis is contained in a book review by Daniel Lazare published in July 2014 and titled ‘Timothy Snyder’s lies’.)

So what does President Putin actually say in his 14-page essay? The remainder of this present essay is a summary, concluding with brief comment by this writer on several points of Russian and Soviet history in the 20th century which President Putin’s essay arguably overlooked.

The early history of the future Ukraine

Putin begins his essay with the following:

First of all, I would like to emphasize that the wall that has emerged in recent years between Russia and Ukraine, between the parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space, to my mind is our great common misfortune and tragedy. These are, first and foremost, the consequences of our own mistakes made at different periods of time. But these are also the result of deliberate efforts by those forces that have always sought to undermine our unity. The formula they apply has been known from time immemorial—divide and rule…

This is hardly the stuff of denigration of Ukraine. Putin continues with a review of the invasion and occupation of ‘Kievan Rus’ by Mongol forces beginning in the 13th century and lasting nearly two centuries in Russia. (Wikipedia). He describes ‘The Great Northern War’ (1700–1721) by Russia against the Swedish monarchy that established much of Russia’s modern Western borders. He then writes that modern Russia (during the autocratic monarchy of the Russian Tsars) was “a multilingual and multinational entity.”

Of the emergence of the Ukrainian language, Putin writes:

Many centuries of fragmentation and living within different states naturally brought about regional language peculiarities, resulting in the emergence of dialects. The vernacular enriched the literary language. Ivan Kotlyarevsky, Grigory Skovoroda, and Taras Shevchenko played a huge role here. Their works are our common literary and cultural heritage… How can this heritage be divided between Russia and Ukraine? And why do it?

He writes further:

The south-western lands of the Russian Empire–Malorussia [present-day Ukraine] and Novorossiya, and Crimea–developed as ethnically and religiously diverse entities. Crimean Tatars, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Karaites, Krymchaks, Bulgarians, Poles, Serbs, Germans, and other peoples lived here. They all preserved their faith, traditions, and customs.

I am not going to idealize anything. We do know there were the Valuev Circular of 1863 and then the Ems Ukaz of 1876, which restricted the publication and importation of religious and socio-political literature in the Ukrainian language. But it is important to be mindful of the historical context…

Speaking of historical context, the years that Putin describes here were the years (and several centuries) during which the future NATO powers were waging wars of colonial conquest all around the globe. The U.S. and Canada, in particular, were waging wars of internal conquest against their Spanish and French-language speakers and wars of genocide or policies of cultural genocide (eg. residential schools) against their Indigenous populations. But that is another story for another time.

Putin traces the early development of Ukraine national sentiments during the 19th century:

The idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians started to form and gain ground among the Polish elite and a part of the Malorussian intelligentsia.

Then:

Further developments had to do with the collapse of European empires, the fierce civil war that broke out across the vast territory of the former Russian Empire [following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution] and foreign intervention [ditto].

This pre-1917 history of the future Russia, Ukraine and Belarus occupies about one-third of Putin’s text. Then we move into the most complex and controversial part of Russian and Ukrainian history, that which was opened by the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and its aftermath


Strike by mostly female textile workers in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in late-February 1917 spark revolution that overthrew Tsarist monarchy

Putin traces the efforts of bourgeois forces in Ukraine following the 1917 Revolution in the Tsarist empire to create an independent and pro-Western Ukraine. He describes the role of Symon Petliura and the “Ukrainian People’s Republic” of 1918-20 which Petliura helped to found. That project foundered due to the decisions of Petliura et al. to ally with German imperialism against the lofty goals of the 1917 Revolution.

THE REVOLUTION IN THE UKRAINE INCLUDED THE ANARCHIST ARMY OF NESTOR MAKHNO AND THE INDEPENDENT BOLSHEVIK PARTY OF UKRAINE (BOROBITZ)

PETLURA'S RADA WAS IN KIEV AND THAT REGION, PETLURA ALONG WITH THE BANDIT SKOROSPASKY WERE ANTI SEMITES WHO PROMOTED POGROMS WHICH MAKNHNO OPPOSED, HE ELIMINATED THE BANDIT LEADER AND AFTER THE REVOLUTION A JEWISH MEMBER OF MAKHNO'S ARMY ASSISSANATED PETLURA, IN PARIS 1923.

The most interesting and relevant section of Putin’s 14-page document is his tracing on pages six and seven of the foundation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922, by which time a Soviet Ukraine had emerged and stabilized. The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was one of the founding republics of the USSR.

1989 map showing territories of the former Soviet Union now independent republics (Wikipedia)

Putin is highly critical of the self-determination policies of the early, revolutionary government of the USSR and its predecessors as led by Lenin and his Bolshevik Party. He writes:

The right for the republics to freely secede from the Union was included in the text of the Declaration on the Creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and, subsequently, in the 1924 USSR Constitution. By doing so, the authors planted in the foundation of our statehood the most dangerous time bomb, which exploded [in 1990-91] the moment the safety mechanism provided by the leading role of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was gone, the party itself collapsing from within. A ‘parade of sovereignties’ followed.

In tracing this aspect of the history of the USSR, Putin notes:

In 1954, the Crimean region of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was given to the Ukrainian SSR, in gross violation of legal norms that were in force at the time.

His overall judgment of Bolshevik national rights policies is harsh. He writes:

The Bolsheviks treated the Russian people as inexhaustible material for their social experiments. They dreamed of a world revolution that would wipe out national states. That is why they were so generous in drawing borders and bestowing territorial gifts. It is no longer important what exactly the idea of the Bolshevik leaders who were chopping the country into pieces was. We can disagree about minor details, background and logic behind certain decisions. One fact is crystal clear: Russia was robbed, indeed.

Putin speaks very positively of the economic and social development of Ukraine leading up to the dissolution of the USSR. “Ukraine and Russia have developed as a single economic system over decades and centuries. The profound cooperation we had 30 years ago is an example for the European Union to look up to. We are natural complementary economic partners. Such a close relationship can strengthen competitive advantages, increasing the potential of both countries.”

He then details the long and sharp economic decline of Ukraine since its post-Soviet independence and asks:

Who is to blame for this? Is it the people of Ukraine’s fault? Certainly not. It was the Ukrainian authorities who wasted and frittered away the achievements of many generations.

He writes further:

Even after the events in Kyiv in 2014 [the anti-Russia coup in February of that year], I charged the Russian government to elaborate options for preserving and maintaining our economic ties within relevant ministries and agencies. However, there was and is still no mutual will to do the same. Nevertheless, Russia is still one of Ukraine’s top three trading partners, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are coming to us to work. They find a welcome reception and support.

These are historical descriptions worthy of study and debate. They hardly constitute the ideology of an “aggressor Russian state” against Ukraine.

Putin details in several pages the economic, political and cultural decline in Ukraine since 2014. He goes on to summarize:

The coup d’état [of February 2014 in Kiev] and the subsequent actions of the Kiev authorities inevitably provoked confrontation and civil war.

Far from condemning the national aspirations of Ukrainians, Putin voices respect and tolerance for them. He writes near the end of his essay:

In the anti-Russia project, there is no place either for a sovereign Ukraine or for the political forces that are trying to defend its real independence. Those who talk about reconciliation in Ukrainian society, about dialogue, about finding a way out of the current impasse are labelled as ‘pro-Russian’ agents. But for many people in Ukraine, the anti-Russia project is simply unacceptable. There are millions of such people, but they are not allowed to raise their heads.

He underlines further his respect for Ukrainian nationhood in the closing section of his essay:

The entire Ukrainian statehood, as we understand it, is proposed to be further built exclusively on this [anti-Russia] idea. Hate and anger, as world history has repeatedly proven, are a very shaky foundation for sovereignty, fraught with many serious risks and dire consequences.

And further:

Russia is open to dialogue with Ukraine and ready to discuss the most complex issues. But it is important for us to understand that our Ukrainian partner defend its national interests not by serving someone else’s, that it not be a tool in someone else’s hands to fight against us.

Putin closes his essay with these three paragraphs:

We respect the Ukrainian language and traditions. We respect Ukrainians’ desire to see their country free, safe and prosperous.

I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia. Our spiritual, human and civilizational ties formed for centuries and have their origins in the same sources, they have been hardened by common trials, achievements and victories. Our kinship has been transmitted from generation to generation. It is in the hearts and the memory of people living in modern Russia and Ukraine, in the blood ties that unite millions of our families. Together we have always been and will be many times stronger and more successful. For we are one people.

Today, these words may be perceived by some people with hostility. They can be interpreted in many possible ways. Yet, many people will hear me. And I will say one thing – Russia has never been and will never be ‘anti-Ukraine.’

It is impossible to read Vladimir Putin’s words as those of a ‘Great Russian chauvinist’, as pro-NATO apologists, including self-declared socialists, are doing (see here and here). Meanwhile, the real great power chauvinists and their ideologues—in the NATO countries—have little to say in answer to Putin’s carefully presented history. They resort to superficial name-calling and epithets.

Rethinking the national self-determination policies of Lenin and his Bolshevik Party

President Putin’s essay should serve to stimulate more historical study and debate of Russia, Ukraine and the historical relations between the two.


132-page booklet, first published in 1914

STALIN PROMOTED THE RIGHTS OF NATIONS TO BE INDEPENDENT IN THE USSR

The self-determination policies of the 1917 Revolution should be front and center in that. Sadly, the prevailing anti-Russian propaganda in the West gets in the way of this, including among historians and left-wing thinkers. Instead, all we get are blind condemnations.

Two vital areas of study of the self-determination policy are largely missing from the president’s essay.

One is the portrait of the world and the far-reaching aspirations for national self-determination or independence at the outset of World War One.

The self-determination policies of Lenin and the Bolsheviks were crafted precisely in response to the clamor for national freedom by the subjects of the large empires of the day—Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Britain, France, the USA and others. Self-determination for the oppressed peoples of the Russian Tsarist Empire, in particular, was a key driving force of the 1917 Revolution which began, let us recall, with the toppling of the Tsarist monarchy in February of that year.

Two is the calamitous, four-year military intervention against the early Soviet Union by the world’s imperialist powers, aimed at overthrowing the Bolshevik-led government and the 1917 Revolution itself.

That intervention ultimately failed, but it was accompanied by an economic blockade that lasted for decades longer (interrupted by the Western powers for a few years only for the sake of the exigencies of their wars against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan). The extreme economic hardship caused by the blockade contributed greatly to the factional breakdown of the Soviet government and leadership following the death of Lenin in 1924.

Overall, imperialist intervention and blockades contributed greatly to the rise of authoritarian socialism in the early Soviet Union and to its eventual demise decades later.

Looking back, one can fairly judge and criticize the self-determination policies of the Bolshevik Revolution. But the fact that the most idealistic and far-reaching of these policies did not succeed or were seriously compromised is not an argument per se against them. Rather, it is an argument for more study and learning of the exact reasons why some of the policies (not the entirety) failed or were compromised during the 1930s and in later decades.

The self-determination policies of the early Russian Revolution were astonishing and world-shaking in their scope. They helped to transform the Russian empire into the modern state of the Soviet Union. They inspired peoples around the world to take up struggle against imperialism and for national independence, including another world-shaking event, the Chinese Revolution of 1949.

What’s more, the echoes of the Bolshevik-led self-determination policy can easily be seen in the present-day structure and constitution of the Russian Federation.

It is a truly federated and multilingual country. Examples of this were seen recently in the referendum vote in Crimea in 2014 to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation, and in the rebellion of the people of Donbas against the extreme-right coup in Ukraine in 2014.

Vladimir Putin voiced this at a meeting of Russia’s National Security Council on March 3, 2022 which honored the soldiers of the Russian army fighting in Ukraine. He told the meeting:

I am a Russian. As they say, all my relatives are Ivans and Marias. But when I see heroes like this young man, Nurmagomed Gadzhimagomedov, a resident of Dagestan and an ethnic Lak, and our other soldiers, I can hardly stop myself from saying: I am a Lak, a Dagestani, a Chechen, an Ingush, a Russian, a Tatar, a Jew, a Mordovian, an Ossetian… It is impossible to name all of the more than 300 nationalities and ethnic groups that live in Russia. I think you can understand me. I am proud to be part of this world, part of our powerful and strong multinational people of Russia.

These and many other such examples which could be cited are compelling evidence that the embers of the self-determination policies of the Bolshevik Revolution remain alive in the Russian Federation and the former Soviet sphere. Even more, these policies remain extremely relevant in an imperialist-dominated world that routinely seeks to crush self-determination and national independence aspirations of oppressed peoples.

The principles of peace, social justice and national determination are often voiced but always trampled into the dirt by the imperialist powers that dominate todays’ planet and human society. But that doesn’t mean the policies should be discarded. Rather, it means we must redouble efforts to realize them.

Background and additional reading:

Causes of the 2014 crisis in Ukraine and the history of Russia-Ukraine relations, talk by the late U.S. historian Stephen Cohen, broadcast on YouTube (24 minutes, date is October 2015. Stephen Cohen was one of the world’s leading scholars on the history of Russia and the Soviet Union. He passed away in 2020 at the age of 81. He is the author of Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 , first published in 1971. It is, arguably, the most important book in English for understanding the first 20 years of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union.]

The causes and consequences of the Ukraine war, lecture by John J. Mearsheimer, October 2022 (60 minutes. This lecture was delivered by John Mearsheimer to the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute. He addresses the July 21 historical essay by Vladimir Putin at the 26-minute mark of the lecture. [John Mearsheimer is a professor at the University of Chicago and a proponent of the ‘foreign policy realism’ school within U.S. academia. He advocates that U.S. imperialism and its allies should target China, not Russia, for ‘containment’. See this recent interview with him (18’30” mark).]

75th anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War: Shared responsibility to history and our future, essay by Vladimir Putin, published on the website of the President of Russia, June 20, 2020 …The events of the Great Patriotic War have long become a distant memory, so why does Russia celebrate May 9 as its biggest holiday? Why does life almost come to a halt on June 22? And why does one feel a lump rise in their throat? They usually say that the war has left a deep imprint on every family’s history. Behind these words, there are fates of millions of people, their sufferings and the pain of loss. Behind these words, there is also the pride, the truth and the memory. For my parents, the war meant the terrible ordeals of the Siege of Leningrad where my two-year old brother Vitya died. It was the place where my mother miraculously managed to survive. My father, despite being exempt from active duty, volunteered to defend his hometown…

[The above essay is an overview of events leading up to the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany in June 1941. The Russian president writes: “…I believe that it is academics with a wide representation of respected scholars from different countries of the world who should search for a balanced assessment of what happened. We all need the truth and objectivity. On my part, I have always encouraged my colleagues to build a calm, open and trust-based dialogue, to look at the common past in a self-critical and unbiased manner. Such an approach will make it possible not to repeat the mistakes committed back then and to ensure peaceful and successful development for years to come…”]

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Important new book: ‘The catastrophe of Ukrainian capitalism’

Book review by Jim McIlroy, 

A Socialist In Canada, June 26, 2022

 (originally published in Green Left (Australia), June 17, 2022.)

Reviewing: The Catastrophe of Ukrainian Capitalism: How privatisation dispossessed and impoverished the Ukrainian people, by Renfrey Clarke, published by Resistance Books, 2022, 176 pages $AUS 25

From the book publisher’s description: In the years before its independence in 1991, Ukraine had been among the most industrialised, technologically advanced regions of the Soviet Union. Thirty years later, it was being rated by the IMF as the poorest country in Europe. Why did Ukraine’s transition to capitalism result in such disaster? Was this purely the outcome of an ill-conceived model of ‘reform’? Or was capitalism itself the wrong choice? Has ‘association’ with the European Union provided any answers?

Note by A Socialist In Canada: Below the book review text, will find links to published articles and reports on the privatization of Ukraine’s agricultural industry and agricultural lands, two distinct but parallel privatization drives. In 2020, the Ukrainian legislature (Rada) approved an historic law allowing for private sale or purchase of agricultural land by Ukrainian citizens. The new law entered into force in July 2021.

Full book review text here:

The promotional note on the back of Renfrey Clarke’s important new book on Ukraine asks: “In the years before its independence in 1991, Ukraine had been among the most industrialised, technologically advanced regions of the Soviet Union. Thirty years later, it was being rated by the [International Monetary Fund] as the poorest country in Europe — its people poorer, on average, than those in many countries of the developing world. Why did Ukraine’s transition to capitalism result in such a disaster?”

The Catastrophe of Ukrainian Capitalism was written in early 2020, well before Russia’s invasion in February. Thus it does not deal with the current conflict or its immediate genesis. However, unlike the torrent of lies and distortions that pass for mainstream media coverage of the Ukraine war, Clarke’s book tackles the reality of modern Ukraine, providing essential background to the political and economic state of the country in the lead up to Russia’s invasion.

Clarke’s preface notes: “The focus [of the book] is on the economy and general social system of Ukraine in the decades since independence, and in a more limited way, on the country’s labour movement. The specific aim is to throw light on the reasons why, following independence and despite Western tutelage, the attempt to install capitalism in Ukraine has fared so badly.

“The causes relate in the immediate sense to the economic structures inherited from the [Soviet Union], to the mechanisms of managerial control and to the closely associated political culture that became fixed in the country as it emerged from central planning.

“But Ukraine also shares in a wider fate: it has been turned into a broadly typical part of capitalism’s world ‘periphery’, ruled by a weak, often dysfunctional state apparatus and possessing an economy fitted to the needs of the ‘core’ of the global system for a low-wage, semi-developed hinterland.”

Clarke stresses that the central theme of his book is “the inability of world capitalism to solve the economic and social problems of a country now very much part of the world’s ‘periphery’.” He explains that Ukraine, as a key victim of this process, suffered from low investment and reduced productivity, because the logic of accumulation within global capitalism today means that the most profitable functions are increasingly centred in the developed ‘core’.

The patterns of trade and investment, within which post-Soviet Ukraine has been trapped, systematically stripped the country of capital and assigned it the role of cheap producer of low-value commodities, including primary products. After the ‘Euromaidan Revolution’ of 2014, previously strong economic ties to Russia began to be downgraded.

The pro-Europe, post-Maidan government led the country into a classic “development trap”, Clarke explains. The years following the “turn to Europe” were a period of crushing depression, from which Ukraine has barely recovered.

Ukraine joined most of the post-Soviet Union countries, notably Russia itself, in being transformed into the social and economic order now described as “oligarchic capitalism”. In essence, a process of “exchanging power for property” was implemented. This involved senior Communist Party state officials and industrial managers turning the authority of their posts, via various corrupt means, into the solid legal entitlements of asset ownership, Clarke explains. Applied throughout a large part of the former Eastern bloc, this created possibly the greatest “kleptocracy” in modern history. “The ‘turn to Europe’ of the years since Euromaidan has not addressed the causes of Ukraine’s decline. To the contrary, it is seeing the country driven further into a trap of Western-enforced marginalisation, dependency and de-development,” Clarke explains.

Privatisation of large and small industry, as well as agriculture, was rampant from the early 1990s. This process led to a significant rise in inequality, with one study noting that during the pre-Euromaidan period, 100 plutocrats owned 80–85% of the country’s wealth.

As of 2016, official statistics reveal that the bulk of Ukrainian workers received incomes below the “ethical poverty line” — calculated as the necessary amount to allow a chance of normal life expectancy — of US$7.40 a day. Workers in Ukraine at that time received wages around one-tenth of those in Western Europe.

The post-Euromaidan government signed an Association Agreement (AA) with the European Union (EU) in March 2014. The AA was not strictly economic: it required Ukraine to make a definite political and military commitment to the West. The logic of the AA was for a steady growth of military cooperation between Ukraine’s armed forces and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), with the goal of eventual NATO membership. “Signing the [AA] … thus guaranteed a dramatic heightening of tensions with Russia,” Clarke stresses.

While the growth of far-right organisations received limited popular support, reflected in low votes in national elections, their increased organisational strength after Euromaidan led to burgeoning attacks on the left and labour movements, including the surviving Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU). Ultra-right groups also played an increasing role in combating pro-Russian forces that emerged after Euromaidan, demanding autonomy for the majority Russian-speaking Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.

While attempts were made by reform-minded forces to reduce the levels of nepotism and corruption during the post-Euromaidan period, little progress was made. At the same time, the left and labour movement has struggled to make significant impact on the growing crisis, Clarke writes.

“The oligarchic system, in sum, was not being challenged at any fundamental level. It retained substantial control of the state apparatus, and this power encompassed not just administrators, but also the mechanisms of state coercion.

“The reform effort had never made much impact on the prosecution system, and despite the setting up of the new patrol police, the country’s criminal investigation police continued robbing and brutalising ordinary citizens while protecting well-heeled malefactors.

“Additionally, the deeply corrupted security service, the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine], remained an organ of extralegal harassment — and in some cases, violence — employed by powerful figures against opposing business interests and reform activists,” Clarke notes.

The sudden rise of actor turned “anti-politician” Volodymyr Zelensky to the presidency of Ukraine [in 2019] was a sign of the alienation of the mass of people from the established political system. But Zelensky, despite his popularity, was hiding his own private wealth and links to one particular faction of the oligarchy.

Despite the weakness of the left and labour movement in Ukraine, Clarke expresses hope that developing forces of the working class and the progressive movement will grow from the current crisis. The Russian war against Ukraine has caused huge destruction of the country. Whatever the final outcome of the conflict, popular pressure for progressive change in Ukraine away from its system of “oligarchic capitalism” will undoubtedly strengthen in the coming period.

Amid the “fog of war” we face in the West over the realities of Putin’s unjust invasion [sic] of Ukraine, Clarke’s detailed and fascinating account of the harsh truth about Ukraine’s recent history is an essential backgrounder to the current crisis.

Background:

* The moratorium on the sale of agricultural land is lifted in Ukraine, report published by the Center for Eastern Studies (OSW, Warsaw), April 1, 2020

* Ukraine unblocks the sale of farm land, report by Xinhua, July 2, 2021

* New report and fact sheet published by Oakland Institute details western agribusiness interests in Ukraine, press release by the Oakland Institute, Dec 10, 2014 [This late-2014 report by the Oakland Institute examined a poorly-reported side of the capitalist transformation of agriculture in Ukraine beginning in 2014, namely, how the agricultural conglomerates of the Western imperialist countries have successfully swooped in to privatize much of Ukraine’s agricultural industry. This is distinct from the slower and more complicated and controversial drive to privatize land ownership.]

New study solves long-standing mystery of what may have triggered ice age

by Daniel Stolte, University of Arizona

At the beginning of the last ice, local mountain glaciers grew and formed large ice sheets, like the one seen here in Greenland, that covered much of today's Canada, Siberia, and Northern Europe. Credit: Annie Spratt/Unsplash

A new study led by University of Arizona researchers may have solved two mysteries that have long puzzled paleo-climate experts: Where did the ice sheets that rang in the last ice age more than 100,000 years ago come from, and how could they grow so quickly?

Understanding what drives Earth's glacial–interglacial cycles—the periodic advance and retreat of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere—is no easy feat, and researchers have devoted substantial effort to explaining the expansion and shrinking of large ice masses over thousands of years. The new study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, proposes an explanation for the rapid expansion of the ice sheets that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere during the most recent ice age, and the findings could also apply to other glacial periods throughout Earth's history.

About 100,000 years ago, when mammoths roamed the Earth, the Northern Hemisphere climate plummeted into a deep freeze that allowed massive ice sheets to form. Over a period of about 10,000 years, local mountain glaciers grew and formed large ice sheets covering much of today's Canada, Siberia and northern Europe.

While it has been widely accepted that periodic "wobbling" in the Earth's orbit around the sun triggered cooling in the Northern Hemisphere summer that caused the onset of widespread glaciation, scientists have struggled to explain the extensive ice sheets covering much of Scandinavia and northern Europe, where temperatures are much more mild.

Unlike the cold Canadian Arctic Archipelago where ice readily forms, Scandinavia should have remained largely ice-free due to the North Atlantic Current, which brings warm water to the coasts of northwestern Europe. Although the two regions are located along similar latitudes, the Scandinavian summer temperatures are well above freezing, while the temperatures in large parts of the Canadian Arctic remain below freezing through the summer, according to the researchers. Because of this discrepancy, climate models have struggled to account for the extensive glaciers that advanced in northern Europe and marked the beginning of the last ice age, said the study's lead author, Marcus Lofverstrom.

"The problem is we don't know where those ice sheets (in Scandinavia) came from and what caused them to expand in such a short amount of time," said Lofverstrom, an assistant professor of geosciences and head of the UArizona Earth System Dynamics Lab.

To find answers, Lofverstrom helped develop an extremely complex Earth-system model, known as the Community Earth System Model, which allowed his team to realistically recreate the conditions that existed at the beginning of the most recent glacial period. Notably, he expanded the ice-sheet model domain from Greenland to encompass most of the Northern Hemisphere at high spatial detail. Using this updated model configuration, the researchers identified the ocean gateways in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago as a critical linchpin controlling the North Atlantic climate and ultimately determining whether or not ice sheets could grow in Scandinavia.

The simulations revealed that as long as the ocean gateways in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago remain open, Earth's orbital configuration cooled the Northern Hemisphere sufficiently to allow ice sheets to build up in Northern Canada and Siberia, but not in Scandinavia.

In a second experiment, the researchers simulated a previously unexplored scenario in which marine ice sheets obstructed the waterways in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. In that experiment, the comparatively fresh Arctic and North Pacific water—typically routed through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago—was diverted east of Greenland, where deep water masses typically form. This diversion led to a freshening and weakening of the North Atlantic deep circulation, sea ice expansion, and cooler conditions in Scandinavia.

"Using both climate model simulations and marine sediment analysis, we show that ice forming in northern Canada can obstruct ocean gateways and divert water transport from the Arctic into the North Atlantic," Lofverstrom said, "and that in turn leads to a weakened ocean circulation and cold conditions off the coast of Scandinavia, which is sufficient to start growing ice in that region."

"These findings are supported by marine sediment records from the North Atlantic, which show evidence of glaciers in northern Canada several thousand years before the European side," said Diane Thompson, assistant professor in the UArizona Department of Geosciences. "The sediment records also show compelling evidence of a weakened deep ocean circulation before the glaciers form in Scandinavia, similar to our modeling results."

Together, the experiments suggest that the formation of marine ice in northern Canada may be a necessary precursor to glaciation in Scandinavia, the authors write.

Pushing climate models beyond their traditional application of predicting future climates provides an opportunity to identify previously unknown interactions in the Earth system, such as the complex and sometimes counterintuitive interplay between ice sheets and climate, Lofverstrom said.

"It is possible that the mechanisms we identified here apply to every glacial period, not just the most recent one," he said. "It may even help explain more short-lived cold periods such as the Younger Dryas cold reversal (12,900 to 11,700 years ago) that punctuated the general warming at the end of the last ice age."Scientists shine new light on role of Earth's orbit in the fate of ancient ice sheets

More information: Marcus Lofverstrom, The importance of Canadian Arctic Archipelago gateways for glacial expansion in Scandinavia, Nature Geoscience (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41561-022-00956-9. www.nature.com/articles/s41561-022-00956-

Journal information: Nature Geoscience 

Provided by University of Arizona 

Naira Ashraf's murder must be the last: Egyptian women's rights activists

For several prominent feminists, the grotesque murder of an Egyptian university student in daylight by her suitor after she had repeatedly rejected his marriage proposal must be the last straw in a society that lacks laws to protect women.

Thaer Mansour
Egypt - Cairo
23 June, 2022

Feminists believe there are no deterring laws protecting women against violence in Egypt. [Getty]


The gruesome murder of an Egyptian university student in daylight must be the last straw in a toxic male-dominated society where violence against women is not fully criminalised, a number of high-profile women's rights advocates in Egypt have said.

Earlier this week, a university student stabbed his classmate, Naira Ashraf, to death and then slit her throat in broad daylight outside Mansoura University, located northwest of the Egyptian capital of Cairo. The victim was in her early twenties.

The perpetrator confessed to the murder to authorities and said the reason was that Ashraf had repeatedly turned down his marriage proposal.

"It may seem a crime of passion on the surface. But it, actually, revealed societal endemic ills," prominent political sociologist Said Sadek told The New Arab.

"The incident spotlighted the violence and injustice women are subjected to in the absence of deterring laws or religious and social awareness that could confront regressive thoughts," said Sadek, who is also a feminist.

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Seham Ali, lawyer and board member of the Center for Egyptian Women's Legal Assistance, agrees with Sadek.

"We witnessed some reactions to the murder that nobody could've ever imagined. This crime is the law straw, a warning that there must be a decisive action to protect women in the society," Ali told The New Arab.

"It is time for a law to be enacted to confront violence against women, socially and family-wise. There is no definite law on this purpose, only some articles within some laws," she added.

In the few days following the incident, a further debate erupted on social media regarding the victim not abiding by the Islamic hijab, whether she does not deserve God's mercy and whether those unveiled could meet the same fate for wearing ordinary or revealing outfits.

Mabrouk Attia, a preacher and professor of Islamic Sharia at Al-Azhar University, said in a video released on social media demanding women "to fully cover up" or else "meet the same fate" as the Mansoura University victim.

"The horrific incident highlighted the dreadfulness of the religious discourse of extremists and the masculine obsession of covering women up. So it's not OK to seek mercy for an unveiled woman, while at the same time, advocating for the culture of suppressing women in the name of religion," Sadek remarked about the preacher's comments.

A number of women's rights supporters as well as the National Council for Women were quick to condemn Attia's statements and filed official complaints before the prosecutor general, accusing him of several legal offences, among them were "inciting hate speech and violence against women."

"There is a citizen named Mabrouk Attia, who claims to be a sheikh, asking girls to wear 'tents' in order to preserve themselves. He justifies the murder of the Mansoura University girl that this is the nature of the Egyptian society," renowned lawyer Nehad Aboul-Komsan said in a video shared online addressing the prosecutor general and her followers.

"If women are required to protect themselves [as he said in the video], then there are no laws or a constitution," she said.

"We won't wear 'tents' or live in ones…I speak as a mother of two daughters and in my capacity as the head of the Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights," she added.

After being faced with widespread criticism, Attia, a common face on TV, appeared in another video and declared he will take an indefinite time off and may not even appear publicly ever again.

Azhar institution released a fatwa (religious edict) on Facebook in what seems to be a response to the ongoing debate in which it denounced any justification for killing women.

In the written fatwa, Azhar noted that "it is religiously prohibited to underestimate a woman, whether veiled or unveiled, and taking that as an excuse to assault her is a heinous crime."

"After this wake-up call, now what? Will laws be amended? Will those in charge consider threats ahead of women and work on the ailing male-dominated culture? Will TV channels quit hosting extremist Islamic preachers who talk about women for some time until fatwas against women are purged?" Sadek wondered.

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

Nicole Chavez - CNN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

Yes, landlords are getting paid but for how long?

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


© Julie Oliver

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That development would make the City of Ottawa very happy.

**

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

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

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

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

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

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