All eyes will be on Chicago this weekend, as thousands of protesters from all over North American converge on the the NATO summit. The symbolism could not be more trenchant, as Chicago was the scene of protests and rebellion against an earlier US war, and famously out-of-control police violence.
We, Afghanistan and Iraq veterans, from around the country have united with CANG8 Coalition against NATO/G8 war and poverty agenda to converge in Chicago on May 20th for a unity march to the NATO summit and ceremoniously return our service medals to NATO generals. We were awarded these medals for serving in the Global War on Terror, a war based on lies and failed polices. This endless war has killed hundreds of thousands, stripped the humanity of all involved, and drained our communities of trillions of dollars, diverting funds from schools, clinics, libraries, and other public goods.
Iraq Veterans Against the War calls on fellow service members, veterans, Chicagoans, and everyone who believes in justice, dignity, and respect for all peoples to join us in the streets on May 20th. On this day, we will hold a nonviolent march to the site of the NATO summit where we will ceremoniously return our military service medals. We will demand that NATO immediately end the occupation of Afghanistan and relating economic and social injustices, bring U.S. war dollars home to fund our communities, and acknowledge the rights and humanity of all who are affected by these wars. We wish to begin a process of justice and reconciliation with the people of Afghanistan and other affected nations, fellow service members, veterans, and the American people.
The city of Chicago will host the NATO summit from May 20th-21st. NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is an organization of western military superpowers whose combined military might is the world's largest and most powerful military force. The NATO mission in Afghanistan has dragged on for over a decade, to the detriment of the people of Afghanistan, military service members and their families, and our communities.
The recent news that the G8 summit, originally set to take place in Chicago this May, has been moved to Camp David shows that the world's large economies fear the mass mobilization and collective organizing of the people of Chicago. NATO should also be advised that the world's military superpowers, responsible for unjust wars, occupations, and militarism, are also not welcome in our hometown. We are emboldened by the knowledge that Chicagoans' call for popular mobilizations was enough to move the G8 out of our city. We must now harness this same people power to send the message loud and clear to NATO that they too will be met with resistance. Furthermore, even though the G8 and NATO will now be held apart from each other, we know that these two summits, and the interests they represent, are linked. War, austerity, poverty, and economic exploitation by the 1% go hand in hand.
It is time for us to take a stand and make our voices heard. We stand in international solidarity with the people of Afghanistan and all the people of the world who are demanding their right to self-determination, their human rights, and economic justice.
Afghan peace and justice activist Malalai Joya writes in Rabble about this weekend's demonstrations.
The protesters remind us all that the government of the United States is not representative of the people of the United States. It's encouraging to see so many people willing to take action and stand up against this unjust and disastrous war.
Recently U.S. President Obama travelled to Kabul to meet Afghanistan's so-called President Hamid Karzai. Both leaders used this meeting to pretend that they are ending this war when they are really trying to continue it even longer.
Obama knows that the U.S. people are turning against the war, and both men know that the Afghan people are against this war and reject the foreign occupation of their country. So on one hand they claim the war will end in 2014, while on the other hand they say that U.S. troops will remain in some capacity until 2024.
When 2024 comes closer they will probably say they plan to remain in Afghanistan until 2034. The reality is that the U.S. and their NATO allies plan to dominate Afghanistan and the larger region militarily for the next generation. They need this for geostrategic reasons. They want to control the energy and mineral resources of our countries, and they want to maintain military superiority against China and other competitors.
No one can believe the words of Obama and others who say they are working for peace even while they continue to make war and to kill our people in bombings, night raids and now more and more drone attacks that kill civilians every week and sometimes every day in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries.
This weekend's protests will likely face repression. But it's vital that people take to the streets to raise their voices. Here in Afghanistan, many peace and women's rights activists literally risk their lives to hold protests against the occupation and against the fundamentalist warlords.
I know Chicago is something like President Obama's "hometown," because he lived there many years and it was in the state of Illinois that he was first elected. My hometown is in Afghanistan's remote Farah Province. I was elected in 2005, when I was only 26 years old, to represent Farah in Afghanistan's Parliament. Because I spoke out and denounced the occupation, the warlords and the Taliban, I faced threats, assassination attempts -- and then they even kicked me out of Parliament in 2007. [Read more here.]
15 May 2012
The Honourable Jason Kenney, P.C., M.P.
Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism
Citizenship and Immigration Canada
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 1L1
Re: International Conscientious Objectors Day
Dear Minister Kenney,
Today is International Conscientious Objectors Day. On this occasion and on behalf of
the Commission on Justice and Peace of the Canadian Council of Churches, I am writing
to you to express our support for the American conscientious objectors to the war in
Iraq (commonly called the “war resisters”) who have sought refuge in Canada.
Several member churches of the Canadian Council of Churches have provided care and
support for the war resisters since January 2004 when the first US war resisters came to
Canada.
More than eight years on, our concern deepens as this matter remains unresolved,
leaving the US war resisters and their families, now well-established in Canada and
contributing to their local communities, in limbo.
On July 22, 2010, Citizenship and Immigration Canada sent a directive (Operational
Bulletin 202)1 to all immigration officers in Canada, focusing on the processing of
military deserters who claim refugee status in Canada. The first paragraph of the
directive implies that military deserters from other countries who are seeking refugee
protection in Canada may also be serious criminals and therefore inadmissible to
Canada, as desertion is a serious crime in some countries. When this effort to
discourage military personnel prevents them from exercising conscientious objection
rights guaranteed in the UN Handbook for Refugees then this is not in accord with
respect to Canada’s adherence to the norms of universal human rights.
Conscientious objection to military service, whether by draft resisters or deserters, is a
widely recognized ground for granting refugee protection, both in Canada and
internationally. As churches, rights of conscience and religion hold a particular
significance for us as we seek to encourage people to live faithful lives. We are of the
opinion that when they have followed their conscience in the decision they made to
refuse to serve in war and to come to Canada then their circumstances warrant
humanitarian and compassionate relief. Their beliefs are protected under domestic and
international law, and facilitating their punishment by returning them to the United
States, in our opinion, is regrettable (a backgrounder on theological and legal
arguments in favour of conscientious objection is appended).
We ask the Government of Canada to either allow the US war resisters to stay in Canada
on humanitarian and compassionate grounds or to create a mechanism, perhaps a
revision of Bill C-440 that would enable them to apply for status from within Canada.
We look forward to your response and would welcome an opportunity to meet regarding this concern.
In Christ,
Joy Kennedy
Chair
Commission on Justice and Peace of the Canadian Council of Churches
cc:
Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada
Jinny Sims, Immigration, Citizenship and Multiculturalism Critic (NDP)
Kevin Lamoureux, Immigration, Citizenship and Multiculturalism Critic (Liberal
Party)
André Bellavance, Immigration, Citizenship and Multiculturalism Critic (Bloc
Québécois)
This letter was written by Nicole Marie Burton, the partner of war resister Jules Tindungan. It affected me deeply, and I asked Nicole for permission to share it with you.
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
To the Right Honourable Minister Jason Kenney,
I join many others in writing you today, a day that is known as the International Day of Conscientious Objection.
I write you as a Canadian citizen, a worker and taxpayer, and a voter. I write to you further as the partner of a U.S. Iraq War Resister--an Afghanistan veteran who, upon returning home was offered a simple choice amid difficult circumstances: "volunteer" to go to Iraq--go back to a combat zone within months of a 15-month tour of duty--or be stop-lossed* and sent on the second deployment anyway.
As fortunate citizens of a relatively peaceful society, many of us go through our entire lives without so much as facing a single difficult circumstance as might require an objection on the basis of conscience--saying "No" in a time when everyone around you is saying "Yes".
That is why, when we are presented with such cases--as rarely as they may be presented--we must listen. The reasons these circumstances were difficult are the reasons that they apply to conscientious objection. They pertain to entire policies, practices, and cultures happening now within the U.S. Army that violate sections of the Geneva Convention--policies like "Recon by Fire," where my husband and his fellow unit members were instructed to fire mortars blindly into Afghan moutainside (a herd of sheep or nearby village be damned); practices, no-where dumb enough to be written as policy, like strapping the dead bodies of Afghan combatants on the hood of your humvees and then driving them through the nearest settlements (to show the locals what happens to people who work with the Taliban); and finally, cultures, like the culture of silence and shame surrounding post-traumatic stress... one that sees symptoms (including suicidal tendencies) un-diagnosed or treated with the wrong substances. My husband was personally given medication to help him sleep in Afghanistan that was deliberately left off of his record, setting him up for disaster when he returned stateside and realized that there was no record or prescription--nothing at all--to help him cope, on a very basic level, with the horrible things that he had witnessed.
Having a stressful job is one thing. Having a stressful job because you were instructed to do things that are illegal is another. Fortunately, there are international legal precedents that are in place to support these individuals if and when they have the courage to resist the wrong orders.
This is why we listen. But furthermore, it is why we also must act.
No one wants to believe that they are a part of history--right now. But these are the circumstances when history is tapping our shoulders, reminding us that we've seen things like this before--and learned hard lessons.
History is not on the side of the Harper Government in this matter. And, if it is of any empirical consequence, neither are the Canadian people.
War Resisters have a right to stay in Canada, and Operational Bulletin 202 must be rescinded now. If the Conservative Government wishes to deny what is historically and democratically correct in this matter, it has already relegated itself not to Canada's future, but to its past.
History has a way of revealing everything.
Yours Most Truly,
Nicole Marie Burton,
Toronto
Cc'd to Immigration Critics Jinny Sims (NDP) and Kevin Lamoureux (Liberals);
Cc'd to my Minister of Parliament, Olivia Chow (Trinity-Spadina, NDP)
* Stop-loss is a term primarily used in the United States Military. In the U.S. military, it is the involuntary extension of a service member's active duty service under the enlistment contract in order to retain them beyond their initial end of term of service (ETS) date and up to their contractually agreed end of obligated service (EOS).
If you haven't emailed Jason Kenney yet, asking that OB202 be rescinded, you can do so here. The email will also be sent to your MP and the Opposition Immigration Critics.
Celebrate International Day for Conscientious Objection by calling on the government to rescind Operational Bulletin 202
Today, May 15, is the International Day for Conscientious Objection. Please join us in calling for the elimination of Immigration Minister Kenney's Operational Bulletin 202. OB202 directs immigration officers to refer the cases of all U.S. war resisters to their superior officers, and it has stopped the progress of war resisters' cases, even when the courts have ruled in their favour.
*** Email Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and your own Member of Parliament.Click on this link to do this in one step! Your email will also be sent to the relevant Opposition leaders and critics. You may edit and personalize the letter if you wish.
*** Download the OB202 petition - sign it - and fax it to Minister Kenney's office at 613.957.2688. Download the petition here.
*** Tweet @kenneyjason: repeal #OB202 support #WarResisters on #COday #cdnpoli
*** If you're in the Toronto area, join us tonight, Tuesday, May 15 for an evening of letter-writing at the United Steelworkers Hall, 25 Cecil Street, 7:00 p.m. We will write, email, fax, and tweet Jason Kenney. We'll have a campaign update and light refreshments will be served.
*** Please spread the word to your own networks! Today, May 15: International Day for Conscientious Objection: Rescind OB202!
Conventional wisdom has it that healthy foods cost more than junk food, that buying and preparing nutritious food is more expensive than eating processed food. How many people bemoan the supposed fact that low-income people cannot afford to eat healthfully: "When carrots are less expensive than chips, then everyone will have access to a healthy diet."
There's only one problem with that. It's wrong. Carrots are less expensive than chips. Brown rice and lentils is way cheaper than McDonald's. I'm not talking about the difference between organic and conventionally grown produce, just the difference between processed foods or fast-food and buying basic ingredients and cooking them yourself. It's almost always cheaper to shop, cook, and eat at home than it is to buy processed food.
So why don't more people do it?
In September of last year, Mark Bittman asked, "Is junk food really cheaper?"
This is just plain wrong. In fact it isn’t cheaper to eat highly processed food: a typical order for a family of four — for example, two Big Macs, a cheeseburger, six chicken McNuggets, two medium and two small fries, and two medium and two small sodas — costs, at the McDonald’s a hundred steps from where I write, about $28. (Judicious ordering of “Happy Meals” can reduce that to about $23 — and you get a few apple slices in addition to the fries!)
In general, despite extensive government subsidies, hyperprocessed food remains more expensive than food cooked at home. You can serve a roasted chicken with vegetables along with a simple salad and milk for about $14, and feed four or even six people. If that’s too much money, substitute a meal of rice and canned beans with bacon, green peppers and onions; it’s easily enough for four people and costs about $9. (Omitting the bacon, using dried beans, which are also lower in sodium, or substituting carrots for the peppers reduces the price further, of course.)
Another argument runs that junk food is cheaper when measured by the calorie, and that this makes fast food essential for the poor because they need cheap calories. But given that half of the people in this country (and a higher percentage of poor people) consume too many calories rather than too few, measuring food’s value by the calorie makes as much sense as measuring a drink’s value by its alcohol content. (Why not drink 95 percent neutral grain spirit, the cheapest way to get drunk?)
Besides, that argument, even if we all needed to gain weight, is not always true. A meal of real food cooked at home can easily contain more calories, most of them of the “healthy” variety. (Olive oil accounts for many of the calories in the roast chicken meal, for example.) In comparing prices of real food and junk food, I used supermarket ingredients, not the pricier organic or local food that many people would consider ideal. But food choices are not black and white; the alternative to fast food is not necessarily organic food, any more than the alternative to soda is Bordeaux.
The alternative to soda is water, and the alternative to junk food is not grass-fed beef and greens from a trendy farmers’ market, but anything other than junk food: rice, grains, pasta, beans, fresh vegetables, canned vegetables, frozen vegetables, meat, fish, poultry, dairy products, bread, peanut butter, a thousand other things cooked at home — in almost every case a far superior alternative.
“Anything that you do that’s not fast food is terrific; cooking once a week is far better than not cooking at all,” says Marion Nestle, professor of food studies at New York University and author of “What to Eat” [and author of the excellent Food Politics blog]. “It’s the same argument as exercise: more is better than less and some is a lot better than none.”
The fact is that most people can afford real food.
This an excellent article that I highly recommend saving and reading. Bittman acknowledges and addresses several other factors of why so many people, particularly low-income people, don't eat healthfully. He addresses those factors - but in my opinion, he minimizes or even dismisses the issues that exert great pressures on people's lives. For example:
** Food deserts. Imagine having to take multiple forms of public transit to shop in a supermarket. Such is the insanity of a profit-driven food system, when a community is seen as a marketing opportunity, rather than a collection of people who need access to nutritious food. Living in a food desert is an enormous obstacle to healthy eating, and for some people, an insurmountable one.
** Who's doing the shopping and cooking? Although many couples and working families share domestic work equitably, a shockingly high percentage of women still pull the "second shift," working all day, then coming home to 100% of the home care and child care. A recent CBC story about the inequities women face both in the workplace and in the home cites women spending more than twice the time doing unpaid child care than men, and "even when government supports exist to encourage men to do their share, they don't always do so".
In Canada in 2009, women spent an average of 13.8 hours a week on domestic chores, while their male counterparts spent 8.3 hours. (Soon none of these facts will be available, thanks to Stephen Harper killing the mandatory long-form census. Then we won't have to trouble ourselves with bothersome reality.) Michael Pollan frequently acknowledges that it is unfair to admonish families to cook more if the burden for healthy eating is thrown on one already overburdened person: mom.
** Cultural norms and generational habits. Habits we are born into and raised with can be very difficult to break. We must first recognize these habits as contributing negatively to our lives, and then be powerfully motivated to learn new ones. When I taught inner-city teenagers, the teenage moms gave their kids the same snack: soda and chips. In their world, a snack meant soda and chips. That's what their own young moms gave them when they were hungry, that's what they eat, and that's what their kids eat. Once in a great while I'd meet a young woman who gave her child a snack of raisins or cheese, and I immediately recognized her as a world apart. How do you educate that young mom and break that cycle?
** Exhaustion. I saw this recently in an essay called "Black Women and Fat".
A room full of thin affluent people applauding the idea of forcing fatties, many of whom are dark, poor and exhausted, to exercise appalls me. Government mandated exercise is a vicious concept. But I get where Mr. Lieberman is coming from. The cost of too many people getting too fat is too high.
What jumped out at me was the word "exhausted". Exhaustion from the stress of never having enough, from worrying about how you will stretch your food budget to the end of the month. Exhaustion from working two jobs and having full responsibility for unpaid domestic work. Exhaustion because your health is poor, from (in the US) a lifetime of inadequate or nonexistent health care. Exhaustion because whatever work you can find is hard on the body and numbing to the mind. Exhaustion from doing everything the hard way.
Because if you are low-income, you cannot afford any of life's little conveniences; none of the time-vs-money tradeoffs that many of us make without a second thought are available to you. You do your laundry in a laundromat, rather than dropping it off or doing at home while you accomplish other tasks. You wash clothes by hand rather than have them drycleaned. You use public transportation in areas designed for the car, so you spend a lot of time waiting and riding on buses. In many areas, you live farther from your workplace than middle-class families. And when it comes to cooking and eating, you can't afford shortcuts, such as pre-washed lettuce, ready-to-cook vegetables, or salad bars.
Preparing healthy meals may cost less money, but it might cost more energy than we have in the bank. Perhaps shopping and cooking is just too exhausting to consider. That may seem like a poor excuse... to someone with enough money and energy to make better choices.
Bittman highlights two other factors that make junk food a difficult habit to break: its constant presence in our cultural landscape, and its built-in addictive quality.
The ubiquity, convenience and habit-forming appeal of hyperprocessed foods have largely drowned out the alternatives: there are five fast-food restaurants for every supermarket in the United States; in recent decades the adjusted for inflation price of fresh produce has increased by 40 percent while the price of soda and processed food has decreased by as much as 30 percent; and nearly inconceivable resources go into encouraging consumption in restaurants: fast-food companies spent $4.2 billion on marketing in 2009.
Furthermore, the engineering behind hyperprocessed food makes it virtually addictive. A 2009 study by the Scripps Research Institute indicates that overconsumption of fast food “triggers addiction-like neuroaddictive responses” in the brain, making it harder to trigger the release of dopamine. In other words the more fast food we eat, the more we need to give us pleasure; thus the report suggests that the same mechanisms underlie drug addiction and obesity.
This addiction to processed food is the result of decades of vision and hard work by the industry. For 50 years, says David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and author of “The End of Overeating,” companies strove to create food that was “energy-dense, highly stimulating, and went down easy. They put it on every street corner and made it mobile, and they made it socially acceptable to eat anytime and anyplace. They created a food carnival, and that’s where we live. And if you’re used to self-stimulation every 15 minutes, well, you can’t run into the kitchen to satisfy that urge.”
Real cultural changes are needed to turn this around. Somehow, no-nonsense cooking and eating — roasting a chicken, making a grilled cheese sandwich, scrambling an egg, tossing a salad — must become popular again, and valued not just by hipsters in Brooklyn or locavores in Berkeley. The smart campaign is not to get McDonald’s to serve better food but to get people to see cooking as a joy rather than a burden, or at least as part of a normal life.
As with any addictive behavior, this one is most easily countered by educating children about the better way. Children, after all, are born without bad habits. And yet it’s adults who must begin to tear down the food carnival.
The question is how? Efforts are everywhere.
This article mentions a few, like The People’s Grocery in Oakland, zoning laws in Los Angeles that restrict the number of fast-food restaurants in high-obesity neighborhoods, and FoodCorps, a farm and food education program. They seem like tiny, isolated examples - but how else does a movement start?
On the other side of the spectrum, some people focus on reforming the present system. That may seem like sleeping with the enemy, but reforms can have an immediate and large impact, as when McDonald's was pressured into changing its frying oil, or when Whole Foods stopped selling live lobsters.
Almost one-third of the food sales in the US is controlled by - guess who - Walmart. This excellent article at Grist reports on an event where Michael Pollan interviewed Jack Sinclair, the executive vice president of grocery merchandise for Walmart. Believe it or not, Pollan sees an upside to the Food Inc. found at Walmart.
“I’m actually of two minds on this question,” Pollan said: sure, he’s excited by the tremendous energy behind food alternatives like organic farming, food co-ops, and farmers’ markets — but he also believes we’ll need larger changes to make good, healthy food accessible to everyone.
“The upside — if there is an upside — to having a highly concentrated food economy where a very small number of corporations exert tremendous power is that when they move, everything changes,” he said. He pointed to McDonald’s decision, following years of complaints from customers and animal rights groups, to stop tolerating inhumane livestock slaughter. “The way the whole industry slaughtered animals changed overnight,” he said. “You don’t have to love McDonald’s to see that engaging with them might actually produce some positive results.”
Of course, the downside — and there is a downside — to engaging in conversations with representatives of powerful corporations is that they will spend the bulk of the time telling you what their company is doing right. And later, if they do make changes based on external pressure, they’ll frame it as if they’ve simply discovered a new way to be right.
The key, then (and I’m sure Pollan could teach a course in this, too, by now) is to watch your opponent as you would a dangerous animal in the wild. Let him move around at will. Let him feel proud of those talking points. But keep watch for the smallest fissures in his argument, the cracks that illustrate when he has heard your opposition and might just be forced to agree in retrospect.
This doesn't have to be an either-or proposition. We can - we should, and we must - pressure Walmart and McDonald's to adopt better practices, so that people who depend on their products can poison themselves and the environment less. And we can - we should, and we must - create alternatives to the industrial food chain, so that more people can actively withdraw from it.
Our food system is fundamentally broken. A few companies dominate the market, prioritizing profits over people and our planet. Government policies put the interests of corporate agribusiness over the livelihoods of farm families. Farm workers toil in unsafe conditions for minimal wages. School children lack access to healthy foods--as do millions of Americans living in poverty. From rising childhood and adult obesity to issues of food safety, air and water pollution, worker's rights and global warming, our current food system is leading our nation to an unsustainable future.
Food Democracy Now! members have a different vision. We know we can build a food system that gives our communities equal access to healthy food, and respects the dignity of the farmers who produce it. We believe in recreating regional food systems, supporting the growth of humane, natural and organic farms, and protecting the environment. We value our children's health, worker's rights, conservation, and animal welfare over corporate profits. And we believe that working together, we can make this vision a reality in our lifetimes.
The industrial food chain poisons our water with pesticides and antibiotics, it poisons our bodies with E. coli and carcinogens, it impoverishes farmers, it sickens and kills workers, it causes massive and unnecessary suffering to animals, it keeps us unhealthy and obese but undernourished - and it makes corporations and their shareholders stinking rich. Many of us will never be completely free of it, but any small break is meaningful.
Ultimately, the only way to ensure that all people can afford healthy and nutritious food is to eliminate poverty - which means dismantling capitalism. You didn't think I'd miss an opportunity to say that, did you?
Bravo to the hundreds of Canadian family doctors who protested the dismantling of the refugee health care system! There was a demonstration in Ottawa, occupations of MP's offices in Winnipeg and Toronto, and press conferences in other cities.
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney claims that refugee claimants have better health care than other Canadians - a lie - and that this is a cost-cutting measure - another lie. The Interim Federal Health Program costs a pittance. And we all know that allowing health needs to go untreated does not save money in the long run. The move is part of Jason Kenney's program of tightening the noose around certain prospective immigrants and refugee claimants, to make Canada a harsher, less hospitable, less welcoming place to people without resources, from countries he has targeted.
The Tories justify the cuts by claiming that they will promote fairness, save money and protect public health. But these arguments are bogus. Denying basic and medically necessary health care for people who have been forced to leave their countries to escape war, rape, torture and persecution is not fair, it is inhumane. Furthermore, as the CCR points out “the government’s own figures show that the per capita cost for refugee claimants under the IFHP is only about 10% of the average per capita cost for Canadians.” Refugees are not a drain on the system, and depriving of them of basic health care needs will not save money. Instead, denying people cost-effective preventive care will force them to suffer complications of untreated conditions, which is costly and a threat to public health.
As infectious disease specialist Dr. Mark Tyndall wrote, "There is not a health economist in the world who would tell you that restricting primary and preventive care is a cost saver. In fact, waiting until people require urgent care before intervening is contrary to everything we know about sound health economics. Does Immigration Minister Jason Kenney really believe that we shouldn’t treat someone’s high blood pressure, diabetes, depression or arthritis or offer pre-natal care to expectant mothers?"
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-38. I am very sad, because this bill is the worst of all bills of this House, for two reasons.
First, because the government has chosen to introduce fundamental changes to many laws that affect the environmental, social and economic life of Canada, without consultation and in a way that is illegitimate and scandalous. This process is unacceptable and against true democracy.
Second, beyond the process that is so offensive, this bill that purports to be a budget bill is, in substance, something quite different. The substance of the changes is equally alarming.
Laws this bad take some explanation. As I have sat through the truncated debate on this process at second reading, what we have had are presentations from the government side, the Conservative MPs, basically providing lists of things they like in the legislation, and from the opposition benches, lists of things we do not like in this legislation.
I think that leaves out a big piece of the puzzle. We have also been confusing measures that are actually budget measures that are not in Bill C-38, things like fighting the deficit, and things we do not like, like killing the Centre for Plant Health in my own riding which is necessary to protect the health of the economy, particularly in the grape-growing regions and wineries, and killing jobs in national parks, again in my riding of Saanich—Gulf Islands, the Gulf Islands National Park jobs in ecological work.
However, again, these are not in Bill C-38. The debate has been combatting lists. We like this; we hate this. I want to step back and try to understand what is going on here. Why do we have this enormous package of measures, most of the substantial changes being those that unravel environmental law in this country?
I have been involved in the development of most of the laws that we now see being unravelled, particularly the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, the National Round Table Act, and what I see behind all this is a shift in mindset. [More here.]
If there's anything to take hope from, it's the fact that this woman sits in the House of Commons, elected by Canadians.
I didn't blog about this year's seal slaughter, although I followed news of it through HSI Canada. It isn't going well for sealers, as the market for their antiquated product has all but disappeared.
While the scale of the slaughter so far has been smaller than in previous years, it was devastating to witness the suffering of the very young pups, who were killed just so their skins could be stockpiled. Just as notable was the impact of climate change on these ice dependent harp seals. Instead of solid pack ice, we found tiny, melting ice floes and only a few thousand pups in regions where there should be hundreds of thousands.
Between closing seal product markets and the melting sea ice, there is no future in commercial sealing. Instead of providing pointless subsidies to an industry that cannot be revived, our government should end the slaughter by affording immediate compensation to sealers in exchange for their sealing licenses and investing in economic alternatives.
Senator Mac Harb, who sponsored the bill that may finally bring an end to this pointless ritual, feels that the seal hunt is in its final years.
The Conservative government is ignoring Canadian opposition to the commercial hunt and has turned a deaf ear to the international community and its global boycott of commercial seal hunt products. Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan have joined the European Union, the United States, Mexico and others who have banned trade in seal products. And despite millions in taxpayer dollars spent by the federal government, markets in China have failed to materialize. The global market for these products has been eliminated.
There now appears to be unstoppable momentum towards the end of the commercial seal hunts around the world. Canada stands virtually alone in its defense of this industry.
Workers in East Coast rural communities need to hear the truth from the government. They do not need to be patronized with handouts and hollow promises that the industry might come back, some day, maybe... The Conservative government should stop wasting taxpayers’ dollars, tell the sealers the truth that the market is dead, and transition these hard-working Canadians into sustainable economic development programs.
This is why I am re-introducing legislation to end the commercial sealing industry in Canada. Formally acknowledging the end of this industry will send a clear message to Canadians that we are working towards a viable future for the workers of this region and it will end the costly and economically damaging challenges currently before the WTO.
I encourage you to contact members of the Senate of Canada and call on them to support my bill to end the commercial seal hunt in Canada.
For the latest updates, please follow me on twitter at: @mharb20. Your efforts are making a difference and I thank you for your encouragement and support.
If you live in Canada, go here to support the Harb Seal Bill.
No matter where you live, if you oppose the seal slaughter, go here to take action. There are links for people outside of Canada to send messages to the Canadian Senate, and ideas for other actions.
The IG acted as the public safety minister’s eyes and ears, monitoring whether or not our powerfully intrusive domestic intelligence service was abiding by its policies and, more important, the law as it went about its key counter-espionage and counter-terrorism responsibilities.
I say “stealth-like” because the Conservative government buried its decision to shut down the IG’s office deep inside a budget bill it tabled last week. If not for the industrious work of Canadian Press reporter Bruce Cheadle, Canadians would have been kept in the dark about this astonishingly wrong-headed decision to pull the plug on the only independent agency that provided some measure of oversight over CSIS’s day-to-day operations.
The IG’s office didn’t have much money or staff to do its important job. Indeed, last year it “enjoyed” a paltry budget of $1 million dollars to go about its work. (A spokeswoman for Public Safety Minister Vic Toews heralded the closure of the IG’s office as a cost-saving measure. The million dollar savings will, I’m sure, put a large dent in the federal deficit.)
Historically, despite its laughable lack of resources, the IG’s office has done a more than adequate, if occasionally admirable job, keeping watch over CSIS. The ever-circumspect Eva Plunkett, the last IG, proved to be up to the job, producing incisive annual reports that were sometimes bluntly critical of CSIS.
On Monday, June 4, websites representing thousands of Canadian people and organizations will go dark to protest changes introduced in the Harper Government'sTM budget act (Bill C-38).
To join this online protest, go to Black Out Speak Out - or Silence, on parle! - and sign up. You'll receive tools to turn your blog or website into a message of protest that will be counted by all the major media and political parties.
This government, which represents the interests of industries and profit over the interests of ordinary Canadian people, is putting the future of our land, water and climate at risk. More than a third of the budget is dedicated to weakening Canada's most important environmental laws, including measures to make it more difficult for environmental charities to participate in the public policy process. Typically undemocratic and typically insular, this will further extend the government's orientation of making policy decisions based on profit and ideology, rather than facts.
