Canada22: Who Will We Be Over the Next 7 Generations?

There are cracks in Canada’s maple leaf. If you look closely you can see that it is a vibrant symbol, but it is drying and decaying under assaults on its cohesion.

And today, Canada Day 2008, on our nation’s 141st birthday, we should take stock. A barrel of oil broke $140 today and gasoline in British Columbia passed $1.50/litre. The International Energy Agency stated today that we are now in the world’s 3rd oil shock, worse than both in the 1970s.

These are harbingers of what?

We are besieged by neoliberalism as free market ideologues engage in rampant privatization of our infrastructure and health care system, gratuitous corporate welfare schemes at the expense of human welfare and human security, neglect of our first nations peoples to a criminal degree (a great Canada Day for them!), tax cuts to lure the economically desperate middle income and working poor to the right despite the resulting crippling of our social safety net, keeping women’s wages at 71% of men’s wages (down from several years ago when it was 72%), a new norm of double income households that have less purchasing power than 35 years ago, the revolving door between government and business being replaced by an archway that allows a general milling about on both sides, and generally the rich getting richer as the poor are getting poorer, all while the World Economic Forum defines and coordinates the New World Order.

But while the leaders of the 1,000 richest corporations and the most powerful governments meet every January at the WEF in Davos, Switzerland to issue their fiats around the world, the World Social Forum meets to plan alternatives that put people before profits. This is particularly critical in these days of looming peak oil and water, ecological crisis and the unlikeliness that the industrialized world (made up of us billion or so out of the 6.7 billion people on earth) can reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 90% in the next generation to stop the climate mayhem.

Indeed, BusinessGreen.com reviewed George Monbiot’s Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning and concluded that his recommendations to save us: “are so far from the political and business mainstream it is hard to imagine them being adopted in 50 years, let alone 20, but, as Monbiot constantly reminds us, the threats posed by climate change are so serious the alternatives could prove even more unthinkable.”

But where do we go from here?

I think back 20 years to the original free trade agreement with the United States. A fascinating national coalition emerged called the Pro-Canada Network, where people rightly recognized the neoliberal free trade movement as a mortal threat to social cohesion. Whether democratic socialist or social democrat or some version of groups interested in social and economic justice, Canadians gathered together to fight for things like Medicare, then barely 20 years old.

That was the last time such a massive neoliberal agenda was put forward with any sense of democracy as the federal election swung on it. Chretien signed NAFTA despite campaigning against the Tory free trade regime. The MAI, FTAA, and SPP are now all pursued anti-democratically and under the radar as much as possible.

Today we need a new kind of Pro-Canada Network. We need to ask ourselves what should our Canada look like. We need to figure out what values the social, political and economic face of our land should orbit. And we need to figure out how to get there from here.

So when Canada22 formed at a workshop in Vancouver on very sunny Earth Day 2006, we embarked on that.

Canada22 is all about envisioning how we will guide our national life over the next 7 generations into the 22nd century. We are an umbrella organization that links people and groups together to fight for social economic justice, locally, nationally and ultimately globally. We link groups with the same social economic goals so we can work together more effectively and combine resources, insight and ideas.

With members in 12 Canadian cities, we are now ramping up our chapter organization to be pro-active in fighting for the Canada we want…and it will be a fight, as anyone working in social and economic justice circles well knows.

And while the neoliberal free marketeers seek to destroy any communitarian efforts that reduce private profitability, we need to take advantage of this time of flux to re-assert what community is all about. And while the World Social Forum and related meetings are critical for creating synergy and vision, we need to take those ideas and implement them in our local, provincial and national social, economic and political arenas if we are to re-frame what our communities and nation will look like as the looming peak oil and water and climate crisis stop looming and start affecting the breadth of our lives. And we need to force political parties to enact our vision.

Feeling the pulse of change is a difficult thing sometimes. Being the pulse of change is harder still. But on days like today when Canadians celebrate ourselves, we truly need to ask ourselves what kind of change we must embrace in our next generation. When my children become adults our world will be far more symbiotically healthy, or it will be a victim of decay from our selfishness (except for the hyper-rich who will be immune from the climate havoc to come).

How high does a barrel of oil have to get before we embrace the reality of our future and do something before our apathy victimizes us all?

Being the pulse of change is Canada22. Get involved at http://Canada22.org!

Gordon’s New Hoax: Informed Climate Change Policy

Hot on the heals of Steve in Ottawa, Gordon in Victoria is trying to look like he knows what he is talking about with the climate change thing.

Embracing the Gateway Project goals that link in with the North American SuperCorridor, worshiping the car and pretending to care about transit while removing democracy from the TransLink board are pretty cynical.

But worse is Gordon’s idiocy when he was being interviewed by Vaughn Palmer on theVoice of BC TV program last fall almost bragging about how he just made up a target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions without any real scientific backing. He should have at least read George Monbiot’s Heat. Here is how Palmer described it in his column on January 16, 2008:

It has been almost a year since the throne speech announced the premier’s goal of reducing greenhouse gases by one-third.

Where did he get the target? I asked him a while back.

“I don’t want to pretend that I went out and asked a scientific panel about how to get there,” Campbell replied. “I didn’t.”

Rather he picked the target out of the air, then set his officials the task of determining the means and cost of hitting it.

It’s clear that window dressing is important as Gordon traipses around the left half of the continent signing non-binding memoranda of understanding with various other jurisdictions on fixing the climate change problem…while twinning our bridges and building more roads.

But today, when my email Inbox received Steve’s crazy treaty ratification nonsense, I received Gordon’s announcement [and below] that he’s going to actually try to come up with some science from a new wonderful scientific panel to back up his desire to be the green premier with the brand new Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions.

Not trusting the fellow at all, I watched his government flip from promoting racist policy towards First Nations with a treaty referendum which facilitated open discrimination, to one that uses treaties to skim land from the Agricultural Land Reserve. Now our leader is trying to come up with some semblance of expert backing for his whimsical climate change solutions.

Despite not trusting the premier, I expect that there is a chance that this Institute can actually come up with some real contributions to the issue. I worry, though, that its creation–being significantly political and optical–may confine its work to solutions that will allow the climate change deniers and avoiders, as well as the rich and SUV-lovers to keep driving on our smoothly paved, privatized toll roads and bridges.

And in the end, the first sentence of the announcement just made my stomach spin. The province will seek legislative approval for the Institute. It’s almost as if folks in Victoria and Ottawa co-ordinated their press releases to capitalize on the idea that legislative oversight actually matters. BC signed a new corporate bill of rights combined with a de facto economic union with Alberta in TILMA after secret negotiations and won’t allow the agreement to be ratified in the ledge. BC has removed democratic accountability from TransLink, but they are promoting how important it is to get legislative approval for building this Institute.

It’s just too much to bear in one day.

And to rub in the gall is the constant reference to the role of the private sector in the Institute. P3s are so sexy these days for neoliberals. Governments, academics and the private sector: nice. What of labour, NGOs, environmental groups, the rest of civil society? No need. In the privatized commons view of Gordon’s neoliberalism, the business sector is sufficient.

And quite frankly, I don’t want the private sector to have anything to do with the kind of socio-behavioural change required in our society to avert climate change disaster.

Premier’s Office PREM:EX wrote:

January 25, 2008
B.C. to Fund World-Leading Climate Research

Vancouver – The Province will seek legislative approval for $94.5 million to create the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, which will bring together top scientists, researchers, governments and the private sector to develop innovative climate change adaptation and mitigation solutions, Premier Gordon Campbell announced today.

“British Columbia universities have some of the top climate scientists and researchers in the world,” said Campbell. “This institute will bring together those academics, along with others from around the world, with business and the private sector to develop new policy alternatives, to find ways to educate and encourage greener lifestyles, and to develop new, green technologies into products that can be used by consumers around the globe.”

The Institute will be a unique joint collaboration between the province’s four research-intensive universities – the University of Victoria, University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University and University of Northern British Columbia – the private sector and government. It will bring provincial, national and international climate researchers together to work with governments and the private sector to develop ideas that can be applied and transferred to government, industry and the public.

Besides providing research support and developing innovative alternatives such as new energy systems, new forms of transportation, alternative technologies, and socio-behavioral change, the Institute will also provide the public with information and ideas on how to reduce individual greenhouse gas emissions through public forums, publications and online information. It will provide education, training and outreach to business leaders, government staff and non-government organizations via workshops, short courses and publications.

The Institute will be founded on four pillars: Research on climate change impacts; assessment of mitigation and adaptation options, including technology development; education and capacity building; and outreach through knowledge management and technology transfer.

The Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions will be hosted and the collaboration led by the University of Victoria, utilizing existing space. The proposed funding will be used to support research projects, staff salaries, graduate fellowships and internships. The endowment will ensure the Institute will operate in perpetuity.

“Linking British Columbia’s climate researchers together and with other national and international researchers will help us develop and apply knowledge to British Columbia situations,” said University of Victoria president David Turpin. “It will also ensure that research is meaningfully transferred to government, industry and the public and secure B.C.’s leadership in this important area.”

“Developing technologies to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions represents not only a challenge, but an economic opportunity,” said Environment Minister Barry Penner. “We have at least 18,000 people working on leading-edge technological solutions in B.C., which we can market to the world.”

Advanced Education Minister Murray Coell said the Institute will build on existing climate research initiatives currently operating in B.C., such as the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium.

“This will serve as a linchpin for a Pacific regional network that includes key scholars from B.C.’s four research-intensive universities, major Alberta universities, and universities from Washington, California and others,” said Coell. “The Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions will be a valuable resource to government and the private sector by providing access to the considerable climate change expertise found in British Columbia’s universities.”

The Institute will be governed by a consortium of British Columbia’s four research universities and will receive advice and guidance from an advisory board made up of public and private sector stakeholders.

The Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions’ mission will be: ‘To partner with governments, the private sector, other researchers and civil society, in order to undertake research on, monitor, and assess the potential impacts of climate change and to assess, develop and promote viable mitigation and adaptation options to better inform climate change policies and actions.’

The Institute will stimulate and promote the development and commercialization of world-leading climate change solutions and assist government and the private sector in selecting the best possible solutions to be applied to mitigation and adaptation. It will support and promote societal change and use the synergies of a broad collaboration to leverage funding coming into the province. The Institute will also be a key partner in providing education and training opportunities for graduate students, both in British Columbia and globally.

British Columbia is legally mandated to reduce B.C. greenhouse gases by 33 per cent below 2007 levels by 2020; reduce emissions by at least 80 per cent below 2007 levels by 2050; and make all provincial government operations carbon-neutral by 2010.

Link to More Information:

Backgrounder — B.C. Founds Cutting-Edge Climate Solutions Institute

Related Video:

$14-Billion Transit Plan for British Columbia

Premier Announces Climate Action Team

Sassy Indian Squaw: Imagine, Create, Transform?

“This sexy indian costume comes with suede corsetted dress with leather fringe and matching anklet.”

It’s the “Sassy Indian Squaw” Halloween costume and shock of shocks, it is going around the internet as a symbol of offense to all sorts of people. A few ironies lurk in the background, particularly in BC.

1. Halloween Mart’s website boasts Imagine, Create and Transform as their motto. It’s hard to see how this costume accomplishes any of that.

2. For the second time this year, a local First Nation has voted to ratify a treaty with the Crown. Regardless of where you stand on the content/process of these treaties this year, the Maa-Nulth have voted to imagine, create and transform.

At least some are able to move past the past. Too bad we all can’t.

You can contact Halloween Mart here to let them know what you think of their sexy Indian squaw and her matching anklet.

Racist Survey Questions on a Survey about Multi-Culturalism

OK. Click on this image. I dare you. I’ll go into how offended I am by it below. If you find the questions fine, you can stop reading now and go here.

I’m starting to become far more than mildly concerned about Innovative Research Group. I’ve already written about the creative nature of interpreting reality that goes on at Robbins SCE Research. Now I can’t help but wonder about the validity of IRG’s polling.

Among whatever else they do, they conduct monthly polls in an online format. They ask about political support and current events.

Their online polling methodology is questionable. To sign up for their Canada 20/20 polls, you must provide an incredibly personal dossier on yourself, which they can use to pre-determine who gets to answer each month’s poll. Maybe they request participation randomly. If so, why bother with all the up-front data-mining? I suppose we should just trust them on this. Here are your views and information they ask about [a poll in itself] before you can participate in their polls:

1. federal party support
2. our presence in Afghanistan
3. Medicare and prescription drugs
4. gender
5. birthdate
6. postal code
7. citizenship
8. residency
9. whether you work in media or polling
10. whether and who you voted for in the last federal election
11. whether Quebec is a distinct society
12. federal party affiliation
13. your registered and non-registered investments
14. your personal financial asset wealth
15. your charitable giving habits
16. the role of newspapers, tv and the internet in your news gathering, and which media outlets
17. whether you rent or own your home
18. employment status, sector, job category and authority position
19. formal education
20. union membership
21. religion!
22. language at home
23. and of course the money shot, household income [which you can decline to answer, as with some but not all other questions]
24. the country where you and your parents were born
25. whether you wish to be in a focus group

Aside from the poll not being a random sample of British Columbians [the homeless and others on the wrong side of the digital divide don't always check their email promptly enough], their August poll asked “473 British Columbians” from around the province to comment on Vancouver’s strike. Asking people far from Vancouver what they think of Vancouver’s strike is questionable. This might explain how on page 10 of their August poll report, we find that 62% of those polled found the strike to not have affected them at all while 18% were affected “not much.” Perhaps they don’t live in Vancouver? Their heading on page 10 is “Most feel no impact from strike.” Really.

They do break down the 17% of 473 people [or 80] who reported being affected and 96% of them [77 people] ]live in Vancouver or the lower mainland. I am not thrilled by that sample size. Good thing the Vancouver Sun reported on the poll that includes merely 77 of the over 2 million living in the lower mainland [that's .00386% of the population].

In all, they conclude that poll participants think the union had been more unreasonable than the city. Presumably this includes people from the rest of BC who may have virtually no knowledge of the machinations of the strike itself. In the end it doesn’t matter because the percentages blaming each side were within the margin of error. So no one really loses. They interpret this to mean a pox on both your houses. Perhaps the conclusion is lack of information due to living in Fort St. John or Cranbrook.

So I’ve been wary of IRG’s methodology for some time now. But this evening I participated in one of their polls. Why not? I have a chance to win $500.

After many reasonable questions in the monthly online survey, many having to do with general views of federal and provincial politics and multi-cultural acceptance [perhaps having to do with Bruce Allen and his idiocy], I encountered a series of questions asking how I felt about living in a society with so many cultures.

I was even asked to reflect on the idea that after all, our nation is a land of immigrants. [I agreed.]

Then I clicked on the next page button and saw this piece of garbage above.

I thought I had learned to stuff down the bile in my throat after Gordon Campbell’s BC neoLiberal party has gone all in favour of treaty negotiations after their racist First Nations treaty referendum, but now we have a “major” polling group asking these ridiculous questions.

Below is the letter I sent to their support@canada2020.com. Feel free to share with them how you feel about asking these ridiculous questions. And pop back here to see any updates. I expect a response from them. If I don’t get one, I’ll comment on that as well.

Attached is a screenshot of a question in your current web survey [the same image as above].

It is irresponsible, inflammatory and impossible to answer by anyone but the ignorant or at best highly uninformed.

It can provide no meaningful information.

You should be ashamed of yourselves.

While most of the other questions were highly or mostly answerable without having to over-simplify thought, this entire page is an affront. I await your apology and a public apology to all who have answered this survey.

I will be tracking how you disseminate the results of this survey. If you demonstrate that you have included information from this question, I will publicly be demanding a public apology.

Stephen Elliott-Buckley

Moving Past Complacency in Protest

Activists need some inspiration. Salutin’s piece in the Globe today [see below] is key to reminding us of the necessity of a fight, not just a polite march through some streets to a park for a peaceful rally. That’s important. However, the injustices seeping into the fabric of our rapidly decaying democracy need to be challenged radically, in part to wake up a complacent public distracted by Canadian Idol, iPhones and the fall TV line up.

Neglect of social, political and economic for First Nations, the creeping SPP and our recent success in outing the agent provocateurs at Montebello [though we still need an inquiry and a government to topple because of it] all should remind us of what is at stake.

Indeed, the success with the rock-carrying masked cops in Quebec should let us know that the anti-democratic elites running our country are desperate to undermine dissent.

Their desperation is our vindication of the importance of what they are doing and what we need to do to stop them.

Mild social change can be polite. But when elites are transforming our democracies into soft fascism, the stakes are incredibly higher. Perhaps the biggest indication of this is in the USA where habeas corpus has now been declared optional and the population is largely unaware of it and certainly too complacent to do anything about it.

George w.Caesar is not Jack Bauer. In the backs of too many people’s minds, I think he is seen that way. This kind of complacency will be our undoing.

Salutin’s piece is a welcome tonic.

A Canadian labour moment: Don’t apologize, never placate
The Globe And Mail
Friday, August 31, 2007
Rick Salutin

Labour Day weekend, 2007.

Canadian labour had a good moment two weeks ago at the Montebello protest. Union leader Dave Coles denounced three undercover cops posing as anarchists and cradling rocks to give the protest a bad name. They retreated behind police lines, not a normal anarchist tactic. But he went a step too far for my taste, in shouting, “This is a peaceful demonstration.” He sounded perhaps overeager to placate TV viewers or police or maybe the people who write editorials in places such as The Globe and Mail. To be sure, it was a peaceful protest, but radical movements such as labour have been most effective when they had a touch of menace.

Uh-oh, I’m having a Dave Coles moment. I don’t mean they should be violent or threaten violence. But they need a sense of implacable determination that takes them beyond any desire to seem respectable. The best example is the movement for Indian independence led by Gandhi. He more or less invented non- violence as a political tactic. Yet, he didn’t shun violence when it arose and, in cases, courted it. He wouldn’t instigate or retaliate, but lots of bloodshed was involved. Here’s 90-year-old Baji Mohammed, “one of India’s last living freedom fighters,” interviewed recently: “On August 25, 1942, we were all arrested and held. Nineteen people died on the spot in police firing … Many died thereafter … Over 300 were injured. More than a thousand were jailed … Several were shot or executed. There were over a hundred shaheed (martyrs) … ” Others, such as Nelson Mandela, went to jail for causes that did involve armed resistance. But I’m saying the key is not violence, it’s relentless determination.

A sense of commitment at any cost draws the attention of others, and sometimes their respect, especially if every normal recourse has failed, sometimes for centuries. I’m thinking of the case of Shawn Brant, the Mohawk leader who spoke eloquently for native protests that recently closed Highway 401 and the CN rail line. He was jailed and has twice been denied bail. In an eloquent plea of her own, his wife, Sue Collis, compared his situation to labour protests against Mike Harris in Ontario 11 years ago. Then, she says, “economic repercussions … far surpassed” those of the recent one, “yet no labour leader was ever jailed, let alone charged.” So why is Shawn Brant in jail? I’d say there was an implacability in his expression; he cut his opponents no moral slack. He didn’t threaten, but he didn’t try to mollify, either.

In its heyday, the labour movement had this kind of single-minded, almost stoic conviction. Its main weapon, the strike, was non-violent but aroused feelings comparable to those during war, toward scabs or bosses. In that frame of mind, there is no need felt to placate the other side and none at all for respectability. What would you want it for?

I think a society benefits from this kind of challenge. It clarifies choices and discourages endless avoidance. Sue Collis writes that, after the Mohawk blockades in June, polls showed “71 per cent of Canadians wanting actions on land claims and 41 per cent of Ontarians prepared to acknowledge rail blockades as justified.” There’s also a social loss when fierceness and passion vanish almost entirely from movements such as labour or the environment. I sympathize with the dismay of green veterans at the rise as a green icon of Al Gore – who couldn’t even beat George Bush in his home state in 2000 or fight the battle of the Florida recount with bloody-mindedness, despite its dire implications.

Sue Collis writes that, after the second bail hearing, she found herself “contemplating the best way to tell my children that they would have to wait an unknown period of time before seeing their dad, and wondering how to explain … why.” From a very minimally comparable experience, I’d recommend playing them a Peter, Paul and Mary song: “Have you been to jail for justice? I want to shake your hand …”