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Sunday, February 11, 2024

Anarchy, Freedom, Native People & The Environment

GEORGE WOODCOCK

Interview by Alvin Finkel

Article originally published Fall 1990

George Woodcock is a Canadian treasure. Author of innumerable books and articles on subjects ranging from Canadian literature to Gandhi to the native peoples of British Columbia, Woodcock is always lucid and generally controversial. An opponent of systems of external authority both capitalist and communist, Woodcock's many works champion human desires for autonomy and for community. In this interview, he shares his insights on the possibilities of creating genuine freedom in complex modern societies. Mr. Woodcock, 78, has just finished writing a book on the history of British Columbia, and now is “between things”—doing a little poetry, a little translation. Winner of the Governor General's Award, he lives in Vancouver where he is contemplating his next book.


Aurora: You've published a great deal on anarchist theory and traditions. Are there lessons in this body of work for industrial societies, or have we passed the state where there are opportunities for organizing society without the overwhelming influence of state and corporate bureaucracies?

Woodcock: I think anarchism and its teachings of decentralization, of the co-ordination of rural and industrial societies, and of mutual aid as the foundation of any viable societies, have lessons that in the present are especially applicable to industrial societies.

The anarchists, unlike William Morris and John Ruskin, have never stood in opposition to industrialization. Indeed, as many modern sociologists recognize, the best-known anarchist theoretician, Peter Kropotkin, particularly in Mutual Aid and Fields, Factories and Workshops, was a pioneer in sketching out ways in which an industrial society could be humanized through the efficient use of new techniques.

Surely recent events have demonstrated very clearly the failure of state and corporate bureaucracies in organizing modern societies. State bureaucracies throughout the Communist world have shown the total inadequacy of centralized governmental production and distribution to provide for the needs of populations. In all these countries the recent relaxation of centralized state bureaucracies has demonstrated the extraordinary resilience of individual and co-operative as opposed to state-regulated enterprise.

I was in China three years ago to see the extraordinary revitalization of the economy as the peasants once again took control of the products of their fields and as small co-operatives began to operate local industries and even coal mines. Almost overnight, stubborn problems of consumption were solved by the willing and spontaneous activities of farmers and artisans. In the streets of Chinese cities one saw great markets springing up, controlled by voluntary agreement between the peasants and merchants who went there to sell. These markets had no queues like those which formed in Moscow at the same period; sufficiency of consumer goods had been achieved in a very short time once the state and its centralizing agencies did not interfere.

Since then, everywhere in the Communist world except for Albania, the dismantling of centralized state bureaucracies has begun, because everywhere these bureaucracies have shown their total incapacity to manage either national or local economies productively. Once the control of production was put back into the hands of the producers, the natural inclination of all societies towards mutual aid and co-operation went into action again and saved the situation.

The same criticisms apply to corporate bureaucracies. It is, to begin with, disputable how much benefit such bureaucracies have ever been to society as a whole. In the interests of profit, on the one hand they increase the cost and on the other they diminish the variety of consumer goods, even on the agricultural level with such products as apples and potatoes. At the same time, they work in collaboration with labour union bureaucracies to dehumanize the conditions of work through mass production techniques; most of the improvements union bosses claim to have gained are cosmetic ones.

These two tendencies combine to reduce the quality of life for individuals, a tendency that is increased by the fact that corporate bureaucracies also pollute and destroy the environment. This is dramatically revealed these days on an international scale by sensational oil spills and by the continued devastation of the Amazon basin.

On a more local scale we see this in the series of disputes between logging companies on the one hand and environmentalists and native peoples on the other regarding the practice of “clear cutting.” In all these situations, corporate bureaucracies show themselves to be irresponsible, antisocial and, because of their size, inefficient.

In consequence, many industries are now finding a decentralized form of production more efficient than Henry Ford-style centralized mass production; this is particularly the case in the automotive industry Ford helped to create.

At the same time, experiments in centralized agricultural planning in Soviet Russia, Communist China, and smaller countries ruled on so-called “Marxist” principles have universally failed on the most important level, that of the efficient production of consumer goods. Where they have been replaced by individual peasant holdings or by small locally controlled co-operatives, the increase in productivity has been strikingly large and almost immediate.

I think that experience has shown by now that bureaucracies—whether political, corporate, or labour—are efficient in inverse proportion to the area they control; and the lesson of this experience is that if we are to better our lives and save our environments, we must move away from centralized national or corporate structures and in the direction of decentralized confederal structures allowing much greater participation of the citizen as producer, consumer, and community member.

Aurora: Many of Canada's native peoples, about whom you've written extensively, can look to a past in which complex state organizations were unnecessary. Is there much in this past that can aid them in searching for a better future?

Woodcock: I doubt if any of the Canadian native peoples can look back on a complex state organization as we envisage such organizations in the modern world, whether totalitarian or soi-disant democratic.

What we mean by the state is a rigid authoritarian hierarchy of power in which the government always has the last say in determining not only matters of collective interest but also the lives of individuals. Though structures roughly approximating this definition may have evolved in a few places in the pre-Columbian Americas (Inca Peru and less certainly Aztec Mexico) there was no time in Canada when complex state organizations existed or were considered necessary.

The Inuit and the forest Indians of northern British Columbia had virtually no political organization beyond the wandering extended family. The Coast Indians of British Columbia, who had the most complex culture north of the valley of Mexico, possessed elaborate social ranking systems but virtually no political organization.

The man whom traders or explorers saw as the chief of a village was in fact no more than primus inter pares, the head of the most prosperous lineage in the village. He had no more than a moral influence over the rival house chiefs, based not on any political system but on his ability to gather the consumer goods necessary for the celebration of prestigious potlatches or giving feasts.

The only groups among whom some kind of political organization state existed were the Plains Indians of what we generally call the Blackfoot Confederacy, and the confederation of Iroquois tribes—the Six Nations of history—who appeared first in Canada as dreaded invaders and did not settle in what is now Canadian territory until late in the eighteenth century, after the war of American Independence. In neither case did anything remotely resembling a political state emerge. In both instances there existed a loose confederacy of tribes with common interests though not always with a shared language.

In both confederacies the tribes were autonomous groupings of lineages holding certain rights and organized under a concept of chiefly authority that Europeans always found puzzling since the chief had no more than his personal prestige to sustain his dignity, and he enjoyed no form of absolute power. He really projected the authority generated by councils of elders, warrior societies, and women's societies among the Iroquois in what were essentially systems of participatory democracy, not state hierarchies.

The tribes of the Blackfoot Confederacy would usually meet each summer in a common camp on the western plains, and there, matters of common interest—usually mutual defence and shared raiding enterprises— would be discussed without obligation on any side; there was never, so far as I have been able to ascertain, any permanent council of the Blackfoot Confederacy.

The Iroquois tribes during their pre-Canadian period did have a common council of sachems, in whose selection the women, whose influence derived from their control of agriculture, played a great role; but this council did not interfere in the internal affairs of the tribes, so that it remained the co-ordinating body of a true confederation rather than the government of the state.

It seems to me that this history of anarchic and federalist organization, based on the negation of centralized political authority, gives the Indians a position of special advantage in the modern world—once they can gain the economic basis of a fair land settlement. Then they will be in a marvellous position to reculer pour mieux sauter, to draw on the lessons of their own past to help them rebuild their societies.

We, the others, might learn a great deal about ways to solve our own problems by watching them. They have developed more political sophistication, and groups like the Inuit and the Dene, so disunited before, now consider themselves “nations,” though by this they do not mean “nation-states” but groups of people with their own languages, land, and traditions.

There is no Indian “nation” because the variety of native traditions leaves no room for one, and no thought of an “Indian” state exists. The aims of native people today lean rather towards establishing a number of small self-governing sovereignties with federal links with the rest of Canada. And why not, since Canada's destiny is surely a confederal one in need of experimental social and political forms?

Aurora: You've written recently rather positively about the evolution of the Canadian nation-state in the nineteenth century as a contribution to the development of a national identity. Do you believe generally that nationalism can be a positive force, and if so, how do you distinguish healthy and unhealthy nationalism?

Woodcock: Alas, how easily even a writer whose reputation rests so largely on his clear prose can be misunderstood!

I have never written, as you suggest, on the Canadian nation-state or on any other nation-state in a positive way, since my view of such political structures and their effects is entirely negative. They have been and still are responsible for most of the major disasters of the modern world, including of course two major wars and the outbreak of such totalitarian maladies as National Socialism in Germany and nationalistic Communism in Stalin's Russia. Modern communications have rendered them wholly obsolete, yet the survival of these outdated dinosaurs prevents us from creating effective international organizations; they have turned the United Nations into a mockery of what we need, and within countries they have prevented the development of effective systems based on the contemporary demand for participatory democracy and libertarian decentralism.

I may, as a historian, have at times objectively traced the development of a nationalist tendency in Canadian politics; who could fail to do so? But always, whether dealing with Sir John A. MacDonald and his National Policy (which was unashamedly structured to favour Central Canada and ruin the Maritime provinces) or Pierre Trudeau (with his undated Jacobinical centralism whose consequences may yet tear Canada apart), I have condemned any attempt to create a nation-state here. To do so would be out of keeping with the country's history and geography, its vast cultural variety, and its long-term inclinations towards regional autonomy and towards recreating in terms suitable for the twentieth century the sovereignties of the native peoples.

We have in this country a unique opportunity to take up the lead which the Swiss offered at the end of the Middle Ages and to present a true con-federal society to the world, a grand experiment that would help spell the end of the nation-state everywhere.

Like George Orwell, I believe patriotism (a love of one's land or community and not of its political system) to be a positive force. Patriotism at its best is cohesive. It leads us to respect others as we are able to respect ourselves; it is not divisive, as is nationalism, which is built on fear and resentment.

Aurora: Your work on Gandhi makes clear your admiration of pacifist principles. Do you think such principles have a greater degree of support now than early this century, or does the cooling of superpower tension, for example, simply reflect a lull in the world's continuous history of war-making?

Woodcock: I am sure that active pacifism has increased and that resistance to participation in warfare, i.e. conscientious objection, would be higher than ever before in the event of large scale wartime call-ups in the western countries. In themselves, such individual gestures are probably of little importance, but they do reflect a general dread of war and a general, though somewhat vague and diffused, resolution that major conflicts must not occur again. I think the awareness of this barely articulated feeling does weigh on the minds of politicians, but they are much more influenced by the sheer destructiveness of any foreseeable major war.

At the end of 1979 I was asked on a CBC panel show whether I foresaw a major war as a likely prospect in the 1980s. Not a major war, I answered, but a lot of nasty little wars. That of course is what happened, and some of the nasty little wars are continuing, in places like Angola, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Afghanistan, without much benefit to anyone and with a great deal of harm to millions. During this period even the major powers became involved only in “nasty little wars”—the Russians in Afghanistan, the British in the Falklands, the Americans in Grenada.

I think there will never again be a World War like those of the past. And only some horrifying miscalculation is likely to set off an atomic war. But there are powerful interests, both industrial and political, that are likely to encourage small wars in the hinterlands of the world, where ever-more-sophisticated conventional weapons can be tried out and consumed. There is still not a strong enough world opinion to prevent it. Even a country like Sweden, neutral by law and largely pacifist in sentiment, profits from selling the Bofors gun to potential belligerents.

What is needed is a grand gesture from a country of standing which would declare neutrality and transform its armed forces into a redemption corps dedicated to rehabilitating polluted and devastated areas of the country, tree planting, etc. Canada would be ideal for this role.

Aurora: The destruction of the environment is an issue that has recently assumed political importance. Is it possible to change the lifestyles that contribute to environmental degradation without extensive state regulations? In general, how easily can one reconcile notions of civil liberties and individual choice with reasonable limitations placed on our endeavours by the needs of the environment?

Woodcock: In principle I am opposed to attempts to save the environment by compulsion and by the kind of regulations that would reach into every home. Unless a great majority of the people is already convinced, such attempts to change behaviour by wholesale compulsion usually fail, and very often they have socially disastrous side-effects.

Think of prohibition in the United States, the popular resistance to which produced an era of organized and profitable crime. Think also of the pathetically unsuccessful attempts in recent years to suppress drug consumption, which again have heightened the profits of crime and encouraged its spread, accompanied by widespread corruption among politicians and public servants.

The approach to environmental issues—the most effective and least disruptive one—I suggest should be a double one. Most pollution still comes from the major industries (pulp mills, oil refineries, logging operations, chemical factories), and strict codes should be laid down for them, with heavy fines and eventually dispossession as the penalities for noncompliance. (Imprisonment should not be a penalty; that makes martyrs and is counter-productive.)

The general public, seeing the major polluters brought in line, would be encouraged to play their major part in recycling, and in avoiding petty pollutions, particularly if the municipalities were also penalized for non-treatment of sewage, perhaps by the withdrawal of federal and provincial grants.

Municipalities should also be held responsible for recycling depots and ensuring transport to them for the recyclable garbage people are persuaded to put out in their “blue boxes.” Certain products, like white toilet paper, should obviously be phased out, but that should not be difficult once the major polluters are dealt with and the public encouraged to make a habit of environmental carefulness.

Aurora: Do you think that increased trade has limited the ability of national governments to set their own economic agenda, as economists keep telling us? If so, is that likely to contribute to greater international harmony or to detract from it?

Woodcock: Economists are usually wrong. The point here surely lies in the question: “Why should governments set any economic agenda?” Surely that is ideally for the producers to decide, and in a true confederal society it would be easy, with each industry self-managed.

Self-managed industries are always more flexible in dealing with competition and with international trade situations than state-managed ones, because they are more flexible (as the economic crisis of Communist countries have shown). By self-managed, of course, I mean industries in which the workers have a fair share in ownership and management, which eliminates owner-worker dissent and leaves individual enterprises and whole industries more room to manoeuvre.

There is no real reason why industries in one country should not make their own terms with similar industries in others, without governments interfering. Indeed, they sometimes do that already. The great danger is not competition between parallel industries in various countries, but the elimination of competition by the growing power of the multinational corporations. It is that respectable but ruthless financial mafia that must be controlled and in the end destroyed.

Aurora: What issues generally will become the key ones for civil libertarians in the years to come?

Woodcock: 

The abortion issue will remain with us for a long time, though in terms of civil liberties it is a straightforward one, with women having a complete right to control their own bodies. I think in the decades ahead we have to make decisions on the vital issue of libertarian versus paternalistic government. Too often nowadays people are being controlled “for their own good,” instead of being allowed to go to Hell, if they wish, in their own particular handbaskets. This explains the current mania for stamping out smoking, with all its exasperating restrictions, and also, as I have already pointed out, our foolish policies on drugs. If freedom means anything, it means the freedom of people to harm themselves if that is their choice.

On more specific civil libertarian issues, I think we have to be alert to attacks on freedom of the press, which are now being made covertly, through the taxing procedures. The proposed extension of the Goods and Services Act to books is an obvious instance, especially since books have long been exempt from Customs duties in Canada.

So is the similar tax on periodicals, which will most affect the more outspoken and experimental papers, also hit by the Goods and Services Tax. This is a none-too-subtle form of censorship by elimination directed at the very publications and publishers most likely to bring out writing critical of the regime. To tax books is only a degree less atrocious than to ban or burn them.

Sometimes I am asked whether I foresee the danger of a totalitarian government in Canada. The danger does not have to be foreseen; it is here. Let us do our best to prevent this being realized.

Books by George Woodcock

Beyond the Blue Mountain. Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1987.

Introducing the Stone Angel. ECW Press, 1987.

Northern Spring: The Flowering of Canadian Literature. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1987.

Strange Bedfellows: The State and the Arts in Canada. Douglas & McIntyre, 1985.

A Place to Stand On: Essays by and about Margaret Laurence. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1983.

Letter to the Past: An Autobiography. Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1982.

The Canadians. Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1979.

Gabriel Dumont: The Metis Chief and His Lost World. Edmonton: Hurtig, 1975.

Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. Harmondsworth, England: Markham, 1962.

Article originally published Fall 1990


An Aurora Update

George Woodcock died in 1995 at age 82. Prior to his death he was awarded the Freedom of City award on February 22, 1994 (Freedom of the City is the highest award given by the City of Vancouver. Reserved for individuals of exceedingly high merit, it is given only in exceptional cases, usually to someone who has gained national and international acclaim in the arts, business or philanthropy, and who has brought recognition to Vancouver through his or her achievements).

Further information on George Woodcock can be found at:

UBC: Canadian Litertaure

Updated July 2001


Citation Format

Finkel, Alvin (1990). Anarchy, Freedom, Native People & the Environment: George Woodcock. Aurora Online

Sunday, July 17, 2022

ABOLISH MONARCHY
Damaged Queen Victoria statue is beyond repair, Manitoba government says


WINNIPEG — A statue of Queen Victoria that was toppled and beheaded by protesters last year outside the Manitoba legislature is beyond repair and will not be restored.


© Provided by The Canadian PressDamaged Queen Victoria statue is beyond repair, Manitoba government says

"It's gone through a lengthy assessment process and is not repairable," Justice Minister Kelvin Goertzen said in an interview.

Trying to replicate it is also out of the question, Goertzen said, because it would cost at least $500,000.

"I know it will be disappointing to many people — it won't be recast — but that's the decision."

The statue, a prominent monument on the front lawn of the legislature, was tied with ropes and hauled to the ground on Canada Day last year during a demonstration over the deaths of Indigenous children at residential schools. It was covered with red paint. The head of the large statue was removed and found the next day in the nearby Assiniboine River.

While the statue was toppled in an area covered by many security cameras, no one was charged with causing the damage.

A smaller statue of the Queen, on a side lawn next to the lieutenant-governor's house, was also toppled but suffered less damage. That one of Queen Elizabeth II is being repaired and will be put back in place, Goertzen said.


Discussions with Indigenous groups are ongoing about what might replace the Queen Victoria statue, he added.  
TRIPTICH OF LOUIS RIEL, GABRIEL DUMONT 
AND POUNDMAKER

There is no word yet on what is to become of the broken Queen Victoria statue. In online discussion forums, some people have suggested the statue be installed in a museum as-is to commemorate last year's protest.

The decision to not restore or replicate the statue comes amid a public debate over how to mark Canada Day this year, at a time when the country is still coming to grips with the legacy of residential schools. Winnipeg is home to the highest concentration of Indigenous people among major cities in Canada.

Organizers of the city's big annual Canada Day celebrations at the Forks — the downtown junction of the Red and Assiniboine rivers — have renamed the event this year "A New Day," cancelled fireworks and promised events that will be reflective as well as celebratory.

That has led to accusations that organizers have cancelled Canada Day, which they deny. Jenny Motkaluk, a candidate for the city's mayoral election in October who finished second in the last race in 2018, blasted the decision and said she would go elsewhere because she loves the country unconditionally.

Other mayoral candidates are supporting the renamed event and have said acknowledging the country's history, including its flaws, is important.

Wab Kinew, Manitoba's Opposition NDP leader, said there are ways to mark the holiday while acknowledging the wrongs.

"I think it could mean things like marking Canada Day, attending a Canada Day celebration, but wearing an orange shirt in honour of the (residential school) survivors," Kinew said.

"I am a patriot, but I'm a patriot who is also the son of a residential school survivor, and my dad shared a bunk with a child who never came home from that residential school."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 22, 2022.

Steve Lambert, The Canadian Press

Sunday, June 05, 2022

Fate of Métis scrip lawsuit in doubt after 17 Alberta plaintiffs ask to withdraw


The future of a lawsuit seeking to hold Canada accountable for the loss of Métis lands is in doubt after about a third of the plaintiffs asked to withdraw from the action when their legitimacy was questioned.



© Provided by The Canadian Press
METIS FLAG, LOUIS RIEL (L) GABRIEL DUMONT(RIGHT) 

The Métis Nation of Alberta says the move proves that it speaks for Alberta's Métis and that the provincial government's dealings with breakaway groups should stop.

"These are the same groups that the current provincial government props up and consults with to the exclusion of the vast majority of Métis in Alberta," vice-president Dan Cardinal said in a release.

The so-called Durocher case, filed in 2019, was brought by 17 Métis groups and individuals in Alberta and another 39 similar plaintiffs from Saskatchewan on behalf of all Métis in the area. It sought compensation for the loss of a vast amount of land in the northern reaches of the two provinces through the issuance of scrip certificates to Métis around the turn of the last century.

The scrip was supposed to be redeemable for land.

The available land, however, was far from the Métis homelands. Much scrip was bought by speculators for pennies on the dollar from people who didn't understand the deal they were making.

The lawsuit sought damages, a declaration that Métis still hold title to the land and negotiations toward a land claim.

But that lawsuit is now on hold. The Alberta plaintiffs have asked to be removed from it after the Métis Nation of Alberta and the federal government challenged the legitimacy of their claim to represent all Métis.

In addition to 10 individuals, the groups withdrawing from the legal action are the Métis associations in Athabasca Landing, Fort McKay, Lakeland, Willow Lake, Owl River and Conklin. The 17th plaintiff, Chard Métis Dene Inc., has been dissolved.

"When the light of scrutiny is on them, it's telling that they say we'll just withdraw," said Jason Madden, lawyer for the Métis Nation.


Métis Nation president Audrey Poitras said in a news release that any scrip settlement must be negotiated with representatives of all Métis.

"Justice requires that any benefits that come from litigation or a negotiated settlement will be for the benefit of all of the descendants of Métis scrip, not just a few self-appointed individuals and private corporations they control."

The groups that brought the claim are only a few years old, said Madden. The Métis Nation of Alberta was founded in 1928.

The fate of the case is now uncertain, Madden said.

"All the parties have agreed to a three-month adjournment to give the Saskatchewan parties a chance to decide what they're going to do next."

Madden said the withdrawal of the 17 plaintiffs now makes it clear that the Métis Nation of Alberta has the right to speak for Métis in the province. He pointed out the United Conservative Party government has been eager to consult and work with the breakaway groups who have now backed off from Durocher.

That relationship should end, said Cardinal.

"We hope that the same judicial scrutiny will be applied to the backroom deals between the Kenney government and these self-appointed individuals and groups to ensure that all negotiations represent the interests of all Métis citizens."

Neither the lawyer for the breakaway groups nor their representatives could be immediately reached for comment.

In the release, Poitras acknowledges the issue of compensation for loss of land through the scrip program needs more urgency. She said her group signed a deal with Ottawa in 2019 that included negotiations over scrip, but little has happened since then.

"Little progress has been made with Canada," she said. "We will be consulting with our citizens as well as our democratic governance structures at the local and regional levels on what we should do next.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 4, 2022.

-- Follow Bob Weber on Twitter at @row1960

Bob Weber, The Canadian Press

Wednesday, December 01, 2021

Feds shortchanging First Nations on operating cash for water systems, PBO says

OTTAWA — The parliamentary budget officer has put a price tag on providing clean drinking water in First Nations, saying in a new report that the federal government still has a shortfall to make up

.
© Provided by The Canadian Press

Yves Giroux’s report on Wednesday said the government has set aside more than enough money to meet the expected capital costs to build water and wastewater systems over the next five years.

Where the government falls short is on financial help to First Nations to operate the systems, which Giroux's office estimates would need $138 million more annually in federal funding.

Indigenous Services Minister Patty Hajdu said the government intends to close that gap and is working with First Nations to understand what is standing in the way after the Liberals promised to fund all operating costs.

The budget officer's report warns that not spending enough, and not spending it on time, could increase the bill to provide water and wastewater services on reserves comparable to non-First Nations communities of the same size.

The report said "a low investment rate or a significant delay in the investment completion" could mean systems deteriorate faster than expected, "costing more money and risking service disruption."

The Liberals had promised in their successful 2015 election campaign to end all boil-water advisories in First Nations within five years of taking office, a timeline that was supposed to be met this year.

But the government last year said the target wouldn't be met, pointing to the pandemic among a variety of other factors in its way.

Hajdu didn't set a new deadline when asked on Wednesday.

"We'll be working with First Nations communities to understand how we can make sure that we expedite the work and give them the tools that they need to move forward in this planning," she said outside the House of Commons.

"This isn't something the government unilaterally can impose on a community. This is something that we do together with communities."

The latest federal figures show that 119 long-term drinking water advisories have been lifted since November 2015, with 43 remaining in 31 communities with federally supported systems.

The government says many of those remaining should be lifted over the next 12 months based on plans in place for each community. Hajdu's office said some project scopes have changed or construction schedules have been complicated by pandemic measures that shifted timelines.

"We have to be truthful with our timelines to Canadians who are looking for answers," said Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller. "But behind all that is the resolve of this government to continue investing in essential water and essential assets in communities."

He also said homegrown solutions to train local Indigenous people to run water plants and working with First Nations on plans are as important as funding.

The PBO report also noted that the share of water systems deemed to be "high" or "medium" risk — meaning they are unlikely to manage through any problems — has remained virtually the same since 2015 despite annual federal spending more than doubling during that time.

The government says it takes time to improve systems, years in some cases to plan, design and build them, so changes to levels of risk may be more gradual than dramatic.

Jamie Schmale, the Conservative critic on the file, said the government should look at all solutions and alternative ideas to end long-term drinking water advisories, although his statement didn't provide any specifics.

"Success isn't measured by funding announcements and election promises, it's measured by outcomes," Schmale said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 1, 2021.

— With files from Erika Ibrahim

Jordan Press and Stephanie Taylor, The Canadian Press


Program aims to train First Nations water treatment operators

When Jerome McDonald flew south to help provide safe drinking water for his community, he left his newborn behind.

This year, McDonald left his life and family in Fond du Lac to join the kanātan nipīy (the water is clean/clean water) program at Saskatchewan Polytechnic in Saskatoon.

"Being away from them was hard. It was our first time," he said.

He's one of the First Nations students who joined the program’s inaugural run to ensure clean waters in their home communities.

That's not taken for granted. Last year, Fond du Lac was stuck dealing with a malfunctioning water treatment plant while grappling with new COVID-19 cases.

The kanātan nipīy program is a joint effort between the City of Saskatoon, Gabriel Dumont Institute, Radius Community Centre, Saskatchewan Polytechnic and Saskatoon Tribal Council.

It aims to train people to operate and maintain water and waste systems to provide clean drinking water needed in Saskatoon and First Nations across Saskatchewan, a news release said.

“As First Nations people, we are all protectors of water, and this training program provides the opportunity for our people to carry out this important work," STC Chief Marc Arcand said in a news release.

The program has already been renewed for another year, said Gerry Youzwa, academic chair for the Saskatchewan Polytechnic's School of Continuing Education.

The first year hosted 16 students; 12 are enrolled for the upcoming year.

Federal and provincial grants mean incoming students' tuition will be free, she noted, adding that graduates have an 80 per cent employment rate so far.

Youzwa said a placement at the City of Saskatoon's water treatment facilities contributes to those employment rates.

"There's not a lot of employment in (the field), and so it's fairly specialized," said Brendan Lemke, director of water and waste for the City of Saskatoon.

"This gives people a chance to be part of that."

Indigenous students can leverage their experience for work anywhere in the province.

McDonald hopes to put that into practice in his home community.

He started work at Orano around the same time the program began, so he spent his spare time during two weeks of full-time work studying for the program's exams.

That effort took a toll on him, but completing the program was rewarding, he said.

Now back in Fond du Lac, he hopes he can put his water treatment skills to work for his community.

His cousin works at the treatment plant at Fond du Lac; McDonald plans to join him one day.

"It opened quite a few doors for me," he said. "Getting noticed — it feels pretty good, actually."

Nick Pearce, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The StarPhoenix

Thursday, May 23, 2019


Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has been criticized by some indigenous communities, on Thursday apologized and posthumously exonerated a Cree chief unjustly imprisoned for treason more than 130 years ago.

The Liberal prime minister received widespread support from Canada's First Nations when he ran for office four years ago promising to reconcile Canada with the native peoples wronged during the country's colonial past.


Chief #Poundmaker, or #Pihtokahanapiwiyin, was a #Cree leader during #Canada's #NorthWestRebellion*** of 1885. Historians have said he helped prevent a massacre of federal soldiers during a battle with the primarily French speaking rebels, who were descendants of First Nation and European settlers, was a Cree leader during Canada's North-West Rebellion of 1885.

Historians have said he helped prevent a massacre of federal soldiers during a battle with the primarily French speaking rebels, who were descendants of First Nation and European settlers
THE FRENCH SPEAKING REBELS HAVE A NAME THEY ARE THE #METIS PEOPLE, MANY ALSO SPOKE ENGLISH THEY HAVE RIGHTS IN CANADA AS FIRST PEOPLES AS WELL AS FIRST NATIONS 

THEY WERE REBELLING FOR PROVINCIAL RIGHTS SEPARATE FROM OTTAWA AND IN RECOGNITION OF AUTONOMOUS PARLIAMENTARY STRUCTURE AKA #RIELREBELLION ***, FOR WHICH RIEL WAS HANGED IN REGINA SASK, AT NWMP/RCMP HQ

WE HAVE NO FEDERAL TROOPS, THAT IS MEXICO
WE HAD THE #NWMP THE PREDECESSOR TO THE #RCMP

FOR MORE SEE MY REBEL YELL 
http://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2005/07/rebel-yell.html
AND THE GREAT CANADIAN METIS LEADER 
GABRIEL DUMONT WHOM GEORGE WOODCOCK CALLED A PRAIRIE ANARCHIST https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=GABRIEL+DUMONT 



Monday, February 21, 2011

Louis Riel Day



While in most of Canada February 21st is a holiday called Family Day and in the U.S. it is President's Day in the province of Manitoba it is Louis Riel Day. Louis Riel negotiated the Manitoba Act that brought Manitoba into Confederation on the 12th of May 1870. The holiday celebrating Riel is celebrated on the third Monday of February.


Actually it should be celebrated across Western Canada because Manitoba was the official capital for Alberta, Saskatchewan and the NWT until 1905.

And just to piss off my Tory MP Peter Goldring who denounced Riel as an Anarchist and murderer. Must have confused him with Gabriel Dumont, whom George Woodcock, the Canadian Anarchist author, wrote a biography of.

Ironically my neigbourhood which Goldring represents has a large Metis community....hope they remember his stupid racist colonialist comments come election time.


In the late 1870s, Gabriel realized that with the dwindling numbers of
bison,
the Métis would need government assistance for their survival. He
chaired meetings, in 1877-78, to draw-up petitions asking for representation
on the North-West Territories Council, to confirm Métis ownership of alreadyoccupied
lands and to ask for farming assistance, schools and new land
grants. In 1880, he led a successful protest against paying a fee on wood cut
on crown land. The following year, he petitioned for land grants and Scrip.
However, the Métis’ grievances were being ignored in Ottawa.
In 1884, frustrated with the federal government’s inaction, Gabriel
called a meeting to suggest bringing Louis Riel to Batoche from the Montana
Territory to help the Métis with their grievances against the federal
government. The other Métis leaders agreed: therefore, on May 19, Gabriel,
Michel Dumas, Moise Ouellette and James Isbister left for St. Peter’s Mission,
Montana Territory in order to bring Riel to Canada. By July 5, they were
back on Gabriel’s farm along with Louis Riel and his family.
During the early winter of 1885, Gabriel and Louis Riel concluded that
negotiations with the government had failed. Therefore in a secret meeting
on March 5, it was decided that Métis would resort to taking up arms, if
necessary. At this meeting, Gabriel was appointed the “Adjutant-General of
the Métis Nation”. He soon organized, along the lines of the bison hunt,
approximately 300 men for potential military action.
On April 24, the next Métis battle during the 1885 Resistance occurred
at Fish Creek, or as the Métis knew it “coulée des Tourond”. The Canadian
militia, commanded by General Middleton, outnumbered the Métis by a ratio
of five-to-one. However, under Gabriel’s leadership the Métis still managed
to drive-off the inexperienced Canadian soldiers. However, the victory was
costly for the Métis: they lost many horses and used much of their
ammunition. Once the battle was over, the Métis headed back to Batoche to
set up a defensive position.
The Battle of Batoche (May 9-12, 1885) followed two weeks later.
After four days of fighting, the Métis, who ran out of ammunition, could no
longer fend off the much larger and better-equipped Canadian militia. A few
days after the battle, Louis Riel surrendered. At this point, Gabriel and
Michel Dumas went into political exile in the United States – arriving across
the border on May 27. The American authorities arrested them
immediately; however, they were released two days later on orders from
Washington. Gabriel had relatives in the Montana Territory with whom he
stayed until he decided upon his future. Madeleine arrived that fall at Fort
Benton, Montana Territory. Unfortunately, she died in the spring of 1886
from tuberculosis – a disease that killed many Aboriginal people.
In June 1886, Gabriel joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show as a trickshot
artist with Annie Oakley and others. After that, he discovered a large
community of French Canadians living in New York and in New England and
spoke to them of the Resistance, which led to contacts with French-Canadian
nationalists in Québec. He was asked to begin a lecture tour by Laurent
Olivier David, president of the Société Saint-Jean Baptiste de Montréal. The
first speech went badly because Gabriel was highly critical of the clergy’s lack
of support for the Métis during the Resistance. The rest of the tour was
cancelled because Gabriel’s anticlerical outbursts upset French Canadians
who at the time were strongly Roman Catholic.
In 1893, after he was granted an amnesty for his role in the 1885
Resistance, Gabriel returned to his homestead at Batoche. He let his
relatives farm his land and moved into a small cabin on his nephew, Alexis
Dumont’s farm. It was here, on May 19, 1906, that Gabriel Dumont died
suddenly while visiting Alexis.
See my posts on Riel:

Why Isn't Today A Holiday?

Remember Riel

Rebel Yell

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Sunday, December 18, 2005

Ed Sez: Gun Ban Useless

NDP Candidate and former GG, Ed Schreyer laughed out loud over the suggestion that the Liberals ban on handguns will solve crime in Canada. "They have been banned since 1934, its not a solution to a complex problem like crime." He told Craig Oliver on CTV's Question Period.

Nice to know that another Western Canadian NDP candidate running in a rural riding recognizes how out of touch the gun control lobby and the Toronto Liberals are. He actually said the Liberals had blown it over the Firearms registry and gun control. "I have represented Selkirk before you know, and I know what I am talking about."

I was waiting for him to pull a Charlton Heston though. Would love to see that. Ed Schreyer brandishing a long rifle belonging to Gabriel Dumont from the Riel Rebellion quoting him; "
That we have a fair and full representation in the Canadian Parliament". See the Dippers support legal responsible gun ownership, now back off Blogging Torys.


Saturday, October 01, 2005

Return of the City State

Cities crucial to Canada's success with emerging Indian, Chinese markets: PM

Ottawa's so-called new deal for cities recognizes the growing clout of large urban centres in a globalized economy, Martin said. "Statistically economic performance when you read about it is compared by country to country," he said. "But the fact is more and more competition is being waged by major metropolitan centres, our cities. "It is Vancouver against San Francisco; it is Montreal and Toronto against Shanghai and Bangalore." British Columbia has a natural advantage because its ports are the closest in North America to Asian markets. Martin's Liberal government has touted its new deal for cities policy as a recognition cities are Canada's economic centres of gravity. He's promised a reliable stream of money for them, as well as smaller communities, to rebuild crumbling roads, bridges, sewer and water systems, as well as bolster public transit.

A city-state is a region controlled exclusively by a city, and usually having sovereignty.

Colonies competing with the mother-land in its production of manufactured goods, such is the factor which will regulate economy in the twentieth centuryAnd why should India not manufacture ? What should be the hindrance ? Capital?--But capital goes wherever there are men, poor enough to be exploited. Knowledge?--But knowledge recognizes no national barriers. Technical skill of the worker?--No. The tendency of trade, as for all else, is toward decentralization.

Peter Kropotkin The Conquest of Bread 1906
CHAPTER XVI The Decentralization of Industry


Paul Martin has put the cart before the horse. In reality Cities in Canada and around the world pre-date the State. The brutal capitalist competition he forecasts between metropols, is the result of the expansion of state captialism world wide, where the hinterlands are being dispossesed of population forcibly emigrated to cities to become proletarians.

This is another aspect of capitalist globalization, the creation of super cities, which began 160 years ago as originally described by Engels in his, The Condition of the Working Class in England. The Metropols are reflections of the State and its Monopoly Capitalist mode of reproduction, they are not the City States of old, which had sovereignty and autonomy. They are the branch plants of the Nation State era of Monopoly Capitalism, transmission belts of power over the citizens, not power of the citizens. This then is the end of the era of colonialism, as national Capitols become Capital, as the City of London and New York once did with their stock exchanges and banking houses (hence the capitalist trade centre in London is known as 'the City' and in NY its 'Wall Street').

Martin is merely revealing the shift in global capitalism from the era of the nation state to the era of the metropolis. As capital has moved Westward through the eras of Imperial colonialism, nation state ( Hobsbawm), and the American Century it now ends up ironically in the Asian Pacific. What was begun 500 years ago with Columbus ends up with Capital now being situated in the newly industrializing nations of the Asian Pacific. Capital will now situate itself as National Capitol with competiton as Martin points out between the old world centres of London, New York, Toronto, against the new world captial(s) Peking, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore. What had been the nature of the city in the 19th Century is now writ large across the face of the world. The urban landscape of the working class in London in Engels time is now the urban landscape of Jakarta.

Condition of the Working Class in England, by Engels, 1845

The Great Towns

A town, such as London, where a man may wander for hours together without reaching the beginning of the end, without meeting the slightest hint which could lead to the inference that there is open country within reach, is a strange thing. This colossal centralisation, this heaping together of two and a half millions of human beings at one point, has multiplied the power of this two and a half millions a hundredfold; has raised London to the commercial capital of the world, created the giant docks and assembled the thousand vessels that continually cover the Thames. I know nothing more imposing than the view which the Thames offers during the ascent from the sea to London Bridge. The masses of buildings, the wharves on both sides, especially from Woolwich upwards, the countless ships along both shores, crowding ever closer and closer together, until, at last, only a narrow passage remains in the middle of the river, a passage through which hundreds of steamers shoot by one another; all this is so vast, so impressive, that a man cannot collect himself, but is lost in the marvel of England's greatness before he sets foot upon English soil.

But the sacrifices which all this has cost become apparent later. After roaming the streets of the capital a day or two, making headway with difficulty through the human turmoil and the endless lines of vehicles, after visiting the slums of the metropolis, one realises for the first time that these Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature, to bring to pass all the marvels of civilisation which crowd their city; that a hundred powers which slumbered within them have remained inactive, have been suppressed in order that a few might be developed more fully and multiply through union with those of others. The very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels. The hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other, are they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? And have they not, in the end, to seek happiness in the same way, by the same means? And still they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest, becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited space. And, however much one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seeking, is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city. The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme.

Hence it comes, too, that the social war, the war of each against all, is here openly declared. Just as in Stirner's recent book, people regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all is that the stronger treads the weaker under foot; and that the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains.

What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, is true of all great towns. Everywhere barbarous indifference, hard egotism on one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare, every man's house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the protection of the law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the consequences of our social state as they manifest themselves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together.

Since capital, the direct or indirect control of the means of subsistence and production, is the weapon with which this social warfare is carried on, it is clear that all the disadvantages of such a state must fall upon the poor. For him no man has the slightest concern. Cast into the whirlpool, he must struggle through as well as he can. If he is so happy as to find work, i.e., if the bourgeoisie does him the favour to enrich itself by means of him, wages await him which scarcely suffice to keep body and soul together; if he can get no work he may steal, if he is not afraid of the police, or starve, in which case the police will take care that he does so in a quiet and inoffensive manner. During my residence in England, at least twenty or thirty persons have died of simple starvation under the most revolting circumstances, and a jury has rarely been found possessed of the courage to speak the plain truth in the matter. Let the testimony of the witnesses be never so clear and unequivocal, the bourgeoisie, from which the jury is selected, always finds some backdoor through which to escape the frightful verdict, death from starvation. The bourgeoisie dare not speak the truth in these cases, for it would speak its own condemnation. But indirectly, far more than directly, many have died of starvation, where long-continued want of proper nourishment has called forth fatal illness, when it has produced such debility that causes which might otherwise have remained inoperative brought on severe illness and death. The English working-men call this "social murder", and accuse our whole society of perpetrating this crime perpetually. Are they wrong?

True, it is only individuals who starve, but what security has the working-man that it may not be his turn tomorrow? Who assures him employment, who vouches for it that, if for any reason or no reason his lord and master discharges him tomorrow, he can struggle along with those dependent upon him, until he may find some one else "to give him bread"? Who guarantees that willingness to work shall suffice to obtain work, that uprightness, industry, thrift, and the rest of the virtues recommended by the bourgeoisie, are really his road to happiness? No one. He knows that he has something today and that it does not depend upon himself whether he shall have something tomorrow. He knows that every breeze that blows, every whim of his employer, every bad turn of trade may hurl him back into the fierce whirlpool from which he has temporarily saved himself, and in which it is hard and often impossible to keep his head above water. He knows that, though he may have the means of living today, it is very uncertain whether he shall tomorrow.

Meanwhile, let us proceed to a more detailed investigation of the position in which the social war has placed the non-possessing class. Let us see what pay for his work society does give the working-man in the form of dwelling, clothing, food, what sort of subsistence it grants those who contribute most to the maintenance of society; and, first, let us consider the dwellings.

Every great city has one or more slums, where the working-class is crowded together. True, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to the palaces of the rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it, where, removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may struggle along as it can. These slums are pretty equally arranged in all the great towns of England, the worst houses in the worst quarters of the towns; usually one- or two-storied cottages in long rows, perhaps with cellars used as dwellings, almost always irregularly built. These houses of three or four rooms and a kitchens form, throughout England, some parts of London excepted, the general dwellings of the working-class. The streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead. Moreover, ventilation is impeded by the bad, confused method of building of the whole quarter, and since many human beings here live crowded into a small space, the atmosphere that prevails in these working-men's quarters may readily be imagined. Further, the streets serve as drying grounds in fine weather; lines are stretched across from house to house, and hung with wet clothing.


PLANET OF SLUMS

MIKE DAVIS

Future history of the Third World’s post-industrial megacities. A billion-strong global proletariat ejected from the formal economy, with Islam and Pentecostalism as songs of the dispossessed.

Sometime in the next year, a woman will give birth in the Lagos slum of Ajegunle, a young man will flee his village in west Java for the bright lights of Jakarta, or a farmer will move his impoverished family into one of Lima’s innumerable pueblos jovenes. The exact event is unimportant and it will pass entirely unnoticed. Nonetheless it will constitute a watershed in human history. For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural. Indeed, given the imprecisions of Third World censuses, this epochal transition may already have occurred.

The earth has urbanized even faster than originally predicted by the Club of Rome in its notoriously Malthusian 1972 report, Limits of Growth. In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with a population over one million; today there are 400, and by 2015, there will be at least 550. Cities, indeed, have absorbed nearly two-thirds of the global population explosion since 1950 and are currently growing by a million babies and migrants each week. The present urban population (3.2 billion) is larger than the total population of the world in 1960. The global countryside, meanwhile, has reached its maximum population (3.2 billion) and will begin to shrink after 2020. As a result, cities will account for all future world population growth, which is expected to peak at about 10 billion in 2050.


Sinister Paradise

Does the Road to the Future End at Dubai?
By Mike Davis

Welcome to paradise. But where are you? Is this a new science-fiction novel from Margaret Atwood, the sequel to Blade Runner, or Donald Trump tripping on acid?

No, it is the Persian Gulf city-state of Dubai in 2010.

After Shanghai (current population: 15 million), Dubai (current population: 1.5 million) is the world's biggest building site: an emerging dreamworld of conspicuous consumption and what locals dub "supreme lifestyles."

Dozens of outlandish mega-projects -- including "The World" (an artificial archipelago), Burj Dubai (the Earth's tallest building), the Hydropolis (that underwater luxury hotel, the Restless Planet theme park, a domed ski resort perpetually maintained in 40C heat, and The Mall of Arabia, a hyper-mall -- are actually under construction or will soon leave the drawing boards.

Under the enlightened despotism of its Crown Prince and CEO, 56-year-old Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the Rhode-Island-sized Emirate of Dubai has become the new global icon of imagineered urbanism. Although often compared to Las Vegas, Orlando, Hong Kong or Singapore, the sheikhdom is more like their collective summation: a pastiche of the big, the bad, and the ugly. It is not just a hybrid but a chimera: the offspring of the lascivious coupling of the cyclopean fantasies of Barnum, Eiffel, Disney, Spielberg, Jerde, Wynn, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

Canadian Cities: Self Government or a Third Level of the State?


Cities should be given wider tax powers, more autonomy:Canada West report

EDMONTON (CP) - With Western Canada's resource-rich economy firing on all cylinders, a report released Thursday suggests large cities should be given wider powers to tax residents and a louder voice at the table on provincial issues.

The Alberta-based Canada West Foundation suggests the West's six largest cities - Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Regina and Winnipeg - have become engines of economic growth and should therefore be given more autonomy and wider taxing powers to help fix crumbling infrastructure and provide a better standard of living to residents.

The foundation says property taxes are no longer enough to fund pot-hole filled roads and creaky old sewer systems, noting that, in 2003, all six cities were forced to postpone $500 million in infrastructure improvements due to a lack of cash.

"Evidence is mounting that our big cities are slowly starving for want of adequate revenues," the report states.

"To compete internationally, Canada needs a high quality of life in its biggest cities to both attract and retain those who work in . . . industries that can locate virtually anywhere in the world to do almost anything," it says.

Calgary Mayor David Bronconnier and Edmonton Mayor Stephen Mandel agreed it is unfair that other levels of government are rolling in multibillion-dollar surpluses, yet municipalities have to raise taxes to fix roads and pay for transit.

"You have two other orders of government that are sitting there with major, multibillion-dollar surpluses, (and) you have two local governments that are starved for cash," said Bronconnier of the situation in Alberta's two largest cities.

Bronconnier has called on the province to cap the education portion of property taxes. Mandel said that would inject another $260 million into his city's coffers and $470 million into Calgary's.

But Bronconnier said he doesn't think that Calgary can wait for Premier Ralph to retire to have its problems fixed.

Klein has been critical of the cities' repeated calls for more cash.

"We're not here to take advantage of the province and say to them, 'look, we want all your money,' " said Mandel. "We're willing to take responsibility for it, but we have to have the opportunity to fix the problems. We have affordable housing problems in Edmonton, we have homeless problems in Edmonton. We understand them. We can fix them much quicker. We can get to the root of it much faster."

The foundation also urged provincial governments to consult more with large urban centres when drafting provincial policy and calls for a new fiscal framework that would give cities more power to deal with local concerns.

The report details that while many provincial governments in Western Canada have taken steps to improve revenue sharing, only Manitoba municipalities are allowed to impose their own taxes on lodging, restaurant meals, liquor and a land transfer tax.

Cities in Sweden and Germany are allowed to levy local income or corporate taxes, while U.S. cities tend to rely more heavily on sales taxes to generate revenues, the report points out.

"A new fiscal framework would help big cities build greater self-reliance, increase electoral accountability and allow more community control," it says.

The think tank's latest report argues the federal government, "realizing that national political borders are becoming less and less relevant," is already "courting" large urban centres with federal dollars and the provinces should do the same.

It warns provinces could be seen as out of touch if they don't build new partnerships with urban centres, adding provincial governments should lead or "get out of the way" on the issue.

© The Canadian Press, 2005

The State in Canada, both Federal and Provincial are tyrannys of power over cities that they have emasculated since the founding of the great Con of Federation in 1867. To now bequeath some small tax break or funding grant back to the cities is to maintain the economic and political servitude of the cities.

Cities were constituted in Canada before the Federal state was. Based on the British law of municipal independence, a hold over from the ancient Guild days, the incorporation of the city pre dates the State.

It is changed by the English state under Elizabeth as she reigns over the independent Aldermen and Mayors elected by the Guilds, and imposes taxation and wage laws as well as reducing the municipal autonomy as zones of free trade.



Kropotkin The State It's Historic Role

With these elements - liberty, organization from the simple to the complex, production and exchange by the Trades (guilds), foreign trade handled by the whole city and not by individuals, and the purchase of provisions by the city for resale to the citizens at cost price - with such elements, the towns of the Middle Ages for the first two centuries of their free existences became centers of well-being for all the inhabitants, centers of wealth and culture, such as we have not seen since. One has but to consult the documents which made it possible to compare the rates at which work was remunerated and the cost of provisions - Rogers has done this for England and a great number of German writers for Germany - to learn that the labour of an artisan and even of a simple day-laborer was paid at a rate not attained in our time, not even by the elite among workers. The account books of colleges of the University of Oxford (which cover seven centuries beginning at the twelfth) and of some English landed estates, as well as those of a large number of German and Swiss towns, are there to bear witness. In those cities, sheltered by their conquered liberties, inspired by the spirit of free agreement and of free initiative, a whole new civilization grew up and flourished in a way unparalleled to this day. All modern industry comes to us from these cities.

In three centuries, industries and the arts attained such perfection that our century has only been able to surpass them in speed of production, but rarely in quality, and very rarely in the intrinsic beauty of the product. All the arts we seek in vain to revive now - the beauty of a Raphael, the strength and boldness of a Michelangelo, the art and science of a Leonardo da Vinci, the poetry and language of a Dante, and not least, the architecture to which we owe the cathedrals of Laon, Rheims, Cologne, Pisa, Florence - as Victor Hugo so well put it “le peuple en fut le maçon” (they were built by the people) - the treasures of sheer beauty of Florence and Venice, the town halls of Bremen and Prague, the towers of Nuremberg and Pisa, and so on ad infinitum, all was the product of that age.


The role of the nascent State in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in relation to the urban centers was to destroy the independence of the cities; to pillage the rich guilds of merchants and artisans; to concentrate in its hands the external commerce of the cities and ruin it; to lay hands on the internal administration of the guilds and subject internal commerce as well as all manufactures, in every detail to the control of a host of officials - and in this way to kill industry and the arts; by taking over the local militias and the whole municipal administration, crushing the weak in the interest of the strong by taxation, and ruining the countries by wars.


In Canada the municipal corporation, the City, pre-dates provincial governments and even the Federal State. However their corporate power (sovereignty) is reduced after confederation. The Candian State imposes provincial governments on city corporations, without any recognition of their role in Confederation. Confederation is a con imposed on the corporate city's without their input.
Thus the Federalist system in Canada is a parlimentary system from England imposed on us, and in no way is a true confederation of peoples. What had been a form of independent self government, cities in Canada are now merely a 'third level of government' the beggar at the bottom of the tax hierarchy of the Canadian Federal/Provincial State.


The Anarchist Sociology of Federalism

In the great tide of nationalism in the nineteenth century, there was a handful of prophetic and dissenting voices, urging a different style of federalism. It is interesting, at the least, that the ones whose names survive were the three best known anarchist thinkers of that century: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. Proudhon, who devoted two of his voluminous works to the idea of federation in opposition to that of the nation state. They were La Federation et l'Unite en Italie of 1862, and in the following year, his book Du Principe Federatif. And beyond this, he profoundly mistrusted the liberal anti-clericalism of Mazzini, not through any love of the Papacy but because he recognised that Mazzini's slogan, 'Dio e popolo', could be exploited by any demagogue who could seize the machinery of a centralised state. He claimed that the existence of this administrative machinery was an absolute threat to personal and local liberty. Proudhon was almost alone among nineteenth century political theorists to perceive this:

"Liberal today under a liberal govermnent, it will tomorrow become the formidable engine of a usurping despoL It is a perpetual temptation to the executive power, a perpetual threat to the people's liberties. No rights, individual or collective, can be sure of a future. Centralisation might, then, be called the disarming of a nation for the profit of its governrnent ..."

Everything we now know about the twentieth century history of Europe, Asia, Latin America or Africa supports this perception. Nor does the North American style of federalism, so lovingly conceived by Thomas Jefferson, guarantee the removal of this threat. One of Proudhon's English biographers, Edward Hyams, comments that: "It has become apparent since the Second World War that United States Presidents can and do make use of the Federal administrative machine in a way which makes a mockery of democracy". And his Canadian translator paraphrases Proudhon's conclusion thus:

"Solicit men's view in the mass, and they will return stupid, fickle and violent answers; solicit their views as members of definite groups with real solidarity and a distinctive character, and their answers will be responsible and wise. Expose them to the political 'language' of mass democracy, which represents 'the people' as unitary and undivided and minorities as traitors, and they will give birth to tyranny; expose them to the political language of federalism, in which the people figures as a diversified aggregate of real associations, and they will resist tyranny to the end."


An excellent work on the City as autonomous corporate political entity and its devloution into municipal corporatist arm of the Federal/Provincial State in Canada is Cities Without Citizens. The Modernity of the City as a Corporation, Engin F. Isin.

An example of this is Edmonton. Edmonton as a corporate entity existed prior to even the creation of the North West Territories, by the CPR and the Mercantilist State in Ottawa. Edmonton was a corporate entity created as a fur trading post for both the Crown Monopoly Hudson Bay Company and the free trade share capitalist Northwest Company. (
See Appendix on Edmonton, all references below are to data in the appendix )

Edmonton predates the historical State in Canada. Founded by the Crown monopoly HBC it becomes a free market Fort. Pitched canon battles occured across the North Saskatchewan river between the rival fur trading companies, with the NW Company unable to defeat the mercantilist HBC.

Instead they come to a common agreement to share Fort Edmonton and its economic base, with the free market capitalist NW Company becoming the dominant company .

As the history of the Indian territories shows the expansion westward created a new culture in Western Canada, the Metis, as the fur traders brought with them other non-indigenous native trappers, and married into local and regional native families. It is this culture of independence, autonomy, and adaptation that would prevail through out the West, and clash with the Imperial Mercantilist culture of Toronto and Ottawa. It is in this new culture that the origins of the Metis rebellion of Gabriel Dumont and Louis Riel would lay. The Fur Trade in Western Canada created a unique culture of integration of Western Europeans with Indians, a culture that was NOT white.


Like the later CPR the Hudsons Bay Co. would be the very model (as Gilbert and Sullivan would say) of a Crown Mercantile Monopoly. The NW Company as a share capitalist enerprize would be forced to merge with HBC due to the State refusing to recognize their land claims, in favour of its own Monopoly of course.

This is the history of Edmonton, Alberta and the Western Expansion of the British Colonial State and its monopoly corporation the HBC. It is the model that would influence future of the Canadian Mercantilist State and its Crown Corporations, especially the railways.

While the HBC had a monopoly on lands in the Edmonton area they sold it to the Federal Government who in turn sold these lands to the CPR. The government offered the land to immigrants in order to facilitate the expansion of the railroad westward. This was essential to the development of the West as a source of 'hewers of wood and drawers of water' for the Mercantilist Canadian state. The CPR would continue to dominate the West with its monopoly on land granted by the Canadian State. It would be the railroad, not the Candian State, that opened the west to further Central and Eastern European immigrants at the turn of last century.

A free market share capital Capitalist political economy was stillborn in Canada. Instead Canada was the model of State Monopoly Capitalism from its birth.

Economics, Politics and The Age of Inflation. Paul Mattick 1977

Chapter 4
On the Concept of State-Monopoly Capitalism

In the first instance the term monopoly capitalism is no more than a correct description of existing society. Capitalism is pleaded by monopolies and in large part determined by them. The state, whose function is to protect the social structure, is thus tile state of monopoly capital. This is by no means a new phenomenon in capitalist society: it has always been a feature of capitalism, if not as pronounced in the past. According to Marx, who has given us the best analysis of capitalism, capitalist competition presumes monopoly, i.e., capitalist monopoly over the forces of production. The antagonistic class relations that result from this require control of the state, which at the same time represents the national interests of capital at the level of international competition.

A capitalism of pure competition exists only in the imagination and in the models of bourgeois economics. But even bourgeois economists speak of natural monopolies and monopolistic prices. Although, granted, monopolies are not subject to the laws of the market, they are still held to be unable to shake these laws to any notable extent. Only in recent times, with whole branches of industry monopolized, has bourgeois economics been forced to deal with imperfect or monopolistic competition in its theories and to go into the changes monopoly has wrought in the market. What for bourgeois economics marked a theoretical turn had in Marx’s analysis of capital always been seen as an inherent tendency in capitalist accumulation. Capitalist competition leads to capital concentration and centralization. Monopoly was born of competition, and out of it grew monopolistic competition. Marxist theory has also always ascribed a more important role to the state than the bourgeois world was willing to acknowledge, not only as an instrument of repression but also as the organized powered mainstay of capitalist expansion.

If a form of monopoly capitalism was always present within the Canadian State as Mattick points out, then the modern form of State Monopoly Capitalism of the 2oth Century was already embryonic in the Canadian Federal Mercantilist State since the advent of the HBC and the later CPR.

In preverse tribute to Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent we can say that the 20th Century was Canada's Century, in that the rest of the post depression world adopted the poltical economic model that Canada had practices since confederation.

A Neo-Conservative State is Still the State


In Alberta school boards as an arm of the municipal corporation existed prior to the founding of the Province a hundred years ago. During the 1995 Ralph Revolution in Alberta, the state under a neo-liberal right wing government consolidated it's control over these independent democratically elected bodies by taking away their independent ability to tax. An ability that was theirs since their founding by the citizens of Edmonton and Strathcona in 1881.

The changes in education that were introduced by the State in Alberta, a neo con state were all based on the latest attempts to marketize public education, vouchers, school based management, increased funding to private schools, charter schools. Along with these mandated changes, funding control was stripped from the school boards and placed in the hands of the State. The state also eliminated school boards in a centralizing attempt at consolidation.


This was challenged in the courts by the Public School Board Association of Alberta. The court in Alberta upheld the Provinces right to overturn the rights of school boards. The PSBAA and other school boards appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada claiming that this was one of the most 'It will come to be known as one of the three or four most important constitutional cases since 1867'. The court ruled in 2000 against them in favour of the State. No surprize there, as the court is the judicial arm of the State. It is worth quoting their decision and reasons for it at length:

The School Amendment Act, 1994 and the Government Organization Act, together with the Framework for Funding School Boards in the 1995-96 School Year, introduced a new school funding scheme. The Alberta Government chose to pool all revenues in a central fund and to distribute funding to school boards in a provincially stipulated per-student amount multiplied by the number of students enrolled within each board's jurisdiction. With one exception, public school boards may no longer retain money raised through direct taxation. As a result of their constitutional status, separate school boards could and did opt out of the fund and continue to requisition taxes directly from ratepayers. Separate school boards, however, may not retain an amount less than or greater than the allotment they would have received from the fund. In the event of a deficiency, an opted-out board receives a payment from the fund and, in the event of a surplus, opted-out boards must remit to the fund any amount in excess of the allotment they would have received had they participated in the fund. All boards also receive provincial grants determined by the Framework based upon three blocks: instruction, support and capital. Each school receives the same allotment per student for basic instruction. Additional funding is provided to equalize the effect of school-specific factors. Several school board associations and others challenged the constitutionality of the scheme arguing that school boards had a constitutional right to reasonable autonomy, that the new scheme discriminated against public school boards, and that it violated a constitutional principle of mirror equality that guarantees equivalent rights to public and separate school boards. The trial judge rejected the reasonable autonomy and discrimination arguments but accepted the mirror equality argument, finding the scheme invalid to the extent that it does not allow public school boards to opt out of the funding scheme. The Court of Appeal upheld the trial judge's decision on the reasonable autonomy and discrimination issues but held that s. 17(1) did not import a principle of mirror equality and found the new scheme constitutional.

Held: The appeal should be dismissed. The new school funding scheme is constitutional.

School boards do not enjoy reasonable autonomy from provincial control. School boards are a form of municipal institution and are delegates of provincial jurisdiction under s. 92(8) of the Constitution Act, 1867. Municipal institutions do not have an independent constitutional status. School boards are subject to legislative reform even though they are unique vehicles through which denominational rights are realized. Under s. 93 of the Constitution Act, 1867, the provinces have a plenary jurisdiction over education. A claim to an institutional sphere of reasonable autonomy is inconsistent with, and would impair, this plenary power. Section 17 of the Alberta Act does not alter this position. Alberta may alter educational institutions within its borders, subject only to those rights afforded through the combined effect of s. 93 and s. 17. Moreover, no constitutional convention demonstrates reasonable autonomy. The historical evidence indicates that significant centralized control existed when Alberta joined Confederation and the grant to the provinces of plenary jurisdiction over education suggests that the framers of the Constitution did not feel bound by convention to restrict the provinces to historic structures or models. Legislative reform since Alberta joined Confederation denies the existence of a belief in binding models of education. The new scheme therefore does not violate a constitutional principle or convention of reasonable autonomy.

This is significant in that it shows that the State in Canada views itself not as a constiuent assembly of the people or even a confederation of the people, but as a power over and above the people on its own behalf, as if it had always existed in perpetuity. When Alberta 'joined' confederation, it was granted provincial status as was Saskatchewan a hundred years ago, with the break up of the North West Territories as a territorial government ruled by Manitoba. The provincial status was granted by the Mercentalist State in Ottawa. A state which Quebecois Premier Papineau denounced at the time of its founding as being a 'con' federation, a state created in the backrooms of Ottawa by the then ruling class of the day without the consultation of the people. And the con contiues.

The neo con state of Ralph Klein and his Tories went further in 1995 in consolidating their state power over municipalities, by eliminating elected health boards and creating large centralized boards with appointed hacks to run them.

This consolidation movement by the right in Canada, also occured in Ontario under Mike Harris. Who moved to create supercities, in this case the super city of Toronto. The same movement would occur in Quebec under the then PQ government of Lucien Bouchard, an former cabinet minister in the Tory Federal Government of Brian Mulroney.

The move to consolidate municipalities, health and school boards, ran contrary to the psued0-libertarian ideology espoused by the neo-cons like Klein and Harris.

It was social engineering from the Right, since resistance at the local level to state attempts to privatize public services, was popular and growing the way to defeat it was to eliminate local control and autonomy. In order to introduce a radical economic reform such as the neo-con agenda the State removed any forms of popular representation that could become a popular opposition to its plans.

'The birth of bio-politics':
Michel Foucault's lecture at the Collège de France on neo-liberal governmentality

Thomas Lemke, Economy and Society, Volume 30, Number 2, 1 May 2001, pp. 190-207(18)
This paper focuses on Foucault's analysis of two forms of neo-liberalism in his lecture of 1979 at the Collège de France: German post-War liberalism and the liberalism of the Chicago School.

The neo-con corporatist state in Alberta and Ontario forced muncipalities and public sector services to contract out and privatize by centralizing economic and political power in their hands and downloading their economic shortfalls to these levels of governance. In Alberta that led to a $7 billion dollar shortfall in infrasturcture funding which was used to pay off the provincial debt, while the provincial government insisted the way to make up for it was that the public sector should begin using Public Private Partnerships (P3's).

The most authoritarian methods of State power were used to implement a 'market' model of public service. The privatization of the the public sector could only be done top down, with a ruthless crushing of resistance by the use of state power by those who espoused minimalist government.
The contradiction of the neo con agenda is plain to see. The state acts in a ruthless authoritarian fashion to restructure civil society into a market place for its corporate partners. The politcal manifestation is one of corporatist state capitalism-fascism not libertarianism.

The Real Threat of Fascism
by Paul Bigioni

It is always dangerous to forget the lessons of history. It is particularly perilous to forget about the economic origins of fascism in our modern era of deregulation. Most Western liberal democracies are currently held in the thrall of what some call market fundamentalism. Few nowadays question the flawed assumption that state intervention in the marketplace is inherently bad. As in Italy and Germany in the 20’s and 30’s, business associations clamor for more deregulation and deeper tax cuts. The gradual erosion of antitrust legislation, especially in the United States, has encouraged consolidation in many sectors of the economy by way of mergers and acquisitions. The North American economy has become more monopolistic than at any time in the post-WWII period. Fewer, larger competitors dominate all economic activity, and their political will is expressed with the millions of dollars they spend lobbying politicians and funding policy formulation in the many right-wing institutes which now limit public discourse to the question of how best to serve the interests of business. The consolidation of the economy, and the resulting perversion of public policy are themselves fascistic. I am quite certain, however, that President Clinton was not worrying about fascism when he repealed federal antitrust laws that had been enacted in the 1930’s. The Canadian Council of Chief Executives is similarly unworried about fascism when it lobbies the Canadian government to water down our Federal Competition Act. (The Competition Act regulates monopolies, among other things, and itself represents a watering down of Canada’s previous antitrust laws. It was essentially written by industry and handed to the Mulroney Government to be enacted.)

At present, monopolies are regulated on purely economic grounds to ensure the efficient allocation of goods. If we are to protect ourselves from the growing political influence of big business, then our antitrust laws must be reconceived in a way which recognizes the political danger of monopolistic conditions. Antitrust laws do not just protect the marketplace, they protect democracy.

Our collective forgetfulness about the economic nature of fascism is also dangerous at a more philosophical level. As contradictory as it may seem, fascist dictatorship was made possible because of the flawed notion of freedom which held sway during the era of laissez-faire capitalism in the early twentieth century. It was the liberals of that era that clamored for unfettered personal and economic freedom, no matter what the cost to society. Such untrammeled freedom is not suitable to civilized humans. It is the freedom of the jungle. In other words, the strong have more of it than the weak. It is a notion of freedom which is inherently violent, because it is enjoyed at the expense of others. Such a notion of freedom legitimizes each and every increase in the wealth and power of those who are already powerful, regardless of the misery that will be suffered by others as a result. The use of the state to limit such “freedom” was denounced by the laissez-faire liberals of the early twentieth century. The use of the state to protect such “freedom” was fascism. Just as monopoly is the ruin of the free market, fascism is the ultimate degradation of liberal capitalism.

In the postwar period, this flawed notion of freedom has been perpetuated by the neo-liberal school of thought. The neo-liberals denounce any regulation of the marketplace. In so doing, they mimic the posture of big business in the pre-fascist period. Under the sway of neo-liberalism, Thatcher, Reagan, Mulroney and George W. Bush have decimated labor and exalted capital. (At present, only 7.8 per cent of workers in the U.S. private sector are unionized – about the same percentage as in the early 1900’s.) Neo-liberals call relentlessly for tax cuts which, in a previously progressive system, disproportionately favor the wealthy. Regarding the distribution of wealth, the neo-liberals have nothing to say. In the result, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. As in Weimar Germany, the function of the state is being reduced to that of a steward for the interests of the moneyed elite. All that would be required now for a more rapid descent into fascism are a few reasons for the average person to forget that he is being ripped off. The racist hatred of Arabs, fundamentalist Christianity or an illusory sense of perpetual war may well be taking the place of Hitler’s hatred for communists and Jews.


ANARCHY -THE PEOPLE ARE SOVEREIGN
IN THE LIBERTARIAN CITY STATE


The city is where we live, we do not occupy the country be it Canada, or Quebec. We do not occupy our Provinces, or states. These are merely geographic designations as Proudhon points out.

We live in communities. It is here where self government originated and was destroyed by the State. The State as a historical entity has always opposed self governance in favour of rule over, domiance of, the people with the motto "Law, Order and Good Government" or other such tripe. As soon as Law and Order are introduced we know that we are subjects of a
Burkean state. Self government is liberty and order; the best government. " Liberty is the Mother not the daughter of Order" Proudhon.

The Liberalism/Conservatism Of Edmund Burke and F. A. Hayek:A Critical Comparison
Edmund Burke, the passionate defender of the "ancient principles" of his forebears, might be surprised to discover that he originated a new school of political thought. By all accounts, however, he is the "modern founder of political conservatism," and generations of ‘conservative’ thinkers have found his life and work a rich source of philosophical and practical wisdom. Burke, of course, was a statesman and not a political philosopher, and he never produced anything that may be regarded as a systematic political treatise. Nevertheless, he embraced a consistent political creed that governed his actions throughout his life. The thesis of this essay is that Burke’s implicit political creed is, in all essential respects, the doctrine articulated by the twentieth-century social philosopher F. A. Hayek. Hayek’s aim, he said, was to "restate" or systematize those basic principles whose observance generated and sustain Western constitutional government and the free society. The "classical liberal" principles articulated by Hayek were also those that inspired and guided Burke. Burke and Hayek, in short, represent the same political tradition. Not only do they subscribe to the same substantive political philosophy, but they hold similar views regarding the nature of society, the role of reason in human affairs, the proper tasks of government, and, to a certain extent, the nature of moral and legal rules. Although there are differences between their views as well, differences that stem from Burke’s orthodox Christianity on the one hand and Hayek’s religious agnosticism on the other, the area of substantive agreement between their respective views is far greater than that of their disagreement. The heart of the matter is that both Burke and Hayek remained, as Hayek put it, "unrepentant Old Whig[s]" to the end.

When the politicians speak of Law and Order and Good Government they are speaking of the power of the ruling classes and their state over the people. It neccistates the creation of laws of privatization, destruction of common ownership, creation of police and judiciary to protect private property, against the commonwealth of the people.

Capitalism originated in the agricultural revolution in England that neccitated the privatization of the commons by encroachment laws. Todays neo-cons use the full force of the state to impose privatization on civil society, they do so with the ruthless cooperation of their business allies and ideological stooges. Regardless of their sops to the idea of a free market their actions reveal them to be good old coroprate statists, fascists by any other name. Whether they run to take over school boards, or provincial governments, once in power they use it to restrict any possible form of self governance or autonomy of civil society in favour of state imposed privatization.

Their greatest fear is real libertarian self governance, anarchy. For real authentic self government is the basis of community and commonwealth, authentic libertarianism. While the neo-con so called market economy is the basis of private cops, private services, privatization of everything for the benefit of the few.

When we have self governing communities and industries organized within a municipal federation is when we will have the basis for a new and authentic Federalism. And then we shall have authentic anarchy. It is no contradiction then to say that 'self government=anarchy'.

Libertarian Municipalism: The New Municipal Agenda by Murray Bookchin

MUNICIPALIZATION by Murray Bookchin

WHAT IS ANARCHISM?

(excerpted from Peter Kropotkin's entry on anarchism in the Encyclopaedia Britannica's 11th edition [1910-11])

As to their economical conceptions, the Anarchists, in common with all Socialists, of whom they constitute the left wing, maintain that the now prevailing system of private ownership in land, and our capitalist production for the sake of profits, represent a monopoly which runs against both the principles of justice and the dictates of utility. They are the main obstacle which prevents the successes of modern technics from being brought into the service of all, so as to produce general well-being. The Anarchists consider the wage-system and capitalist production altogether as an obstacle to progress. But they point out also that the state was, and continues to be, the chief instrument for permitting the few to monopolize the land, and the capitalists to appropriate for themselves a quite disproportionate share of the yearly accumulated surplus of production. Consequently, while combating the present monopolization of land, and capitalism altogether, the Anarchists combat with the same energy the state, as the main support of that system. Not this or that special form, but the state altogether, whether it be a monarchy or even a republic governed by means of the referendum.

The state organization, having always been, both in ancient and modern history...the instrument for establishing monopolies in favour of the ruling minorities, cannot be made to work for the destruction of these monopolies. The Anarchists consider, therefore, that to hand over to the state all the main sources of economic life--the land, the mines, the railways, banking, insurance, and so on--as also the management of all the main branches of industry, in addition to all the functions already accumulated in its hands (education, state-supported religions, defence of the territory, &c.), would mean to create a new instrument of tyranny. State capitalism would only increase the powers of bureaucracy and capitalism. True progress lies in the direction of decentralization, both territorial and functional, in the development of the spirit of local and personal intitiative, and of free federation from the simple to the compound, in lieu of the present hierarchy from the centre to the periphery.