Category Archives: Western Canada

Rafe Mair & Bill Vander Zalm on Campaign to Stop HST!

Canada, Politics, Western Canada, ,
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“I can’t believe this bunch. They’re not in touch with the public at all!” -Bill Vander Zalm

Rafe Mair interviews former Socred cabinet colleague and BC Premier Bill Vander Zalm for TheCanadian.org on the campaign to stop the HST. Watch this fascinating 10 min discussion including:

  • Why the HST is bad for British Columbians
  • The ins and outs of this historic push for a referendum to stop the HST…and what happens if Campbell ignores a successful initiative
  • BC conservatism run amok with Campbell Liberals…and why there will be a third party

As of May 12, just five weeks into the initiative’s 3 month window, the campaign of seven directors and 6,700 volunteers has collected over 400,000 signatures from around the province.

In sheer numbers this is already well past the minimum threshold to force a referendum, and just shy of the campaign’s own conservative goal of 450,000. But the signatures must be dispersed around the province’s electoral districts – with a minimum 10% of all registered voters in each of BC’s 85 provincial ridings. So far, the rural campaign has gone exceptionally well, while the key challenge remains urban centres. The deadline for signatures is July 5.

“This is an exercise in democracy that we can’t allow to fail.” – Bill Vander Zalm

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oil painting by Auguste Millière

Canadian Civil Liberties: What Would Thomas Paine Think?

Canada, Politics, Western Canada,
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by Dr. Chris Shaw

It seems fitting with the launch of The Common Sense Canadian that we ponder Tom Paine and the Current State of Canadian Civil Liberties. What he man who used the term “Common Sense” as the title of his revolutionary pamphlet on freedom and revolution might make out of the current state of Canadian “civil rights”.

As problematic as it can be to reach back 200 years to interrogate the long departed, Paine’s writings offer some clues how he would answer. Paine would be utterly disgusted at the travesty of faux civil liberties we so blithely assume shield us all and would be shocked at how casually our elected officials to withhold information and misuse our legislative institutions. Sadly, he’d hardly be surprised by either.
Paine was not a fan of governments in general and bitterly opposed in particular to monarchy. In Paine’s view, governments were innately prone to abuse power.

“Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.” [italics his]

Paine’s later The Rights of Man was written in defense of the French Revolution. Like Thomas Jefferson in the American Declaration of Independence, Paine would lay stress on natural rights as “inalienable”, essentially a gift from a higher power to all humans derived solely from the very fact of humanness. Following on the Enlightenment concept of “natural law”, natural rights did not depend on the validation of any government or social structure, they simply existed. Governments could – and often would – try to suppress natural rights, but could neither create nor extinguish them.

In contrast, civil and political rights were those bestowed by the state and designed to protect the individual from excesses of power and to enable people to exercise some level of political control. Civil rights are those that guarantee the safety of the individual and protect against discrimination. Political rights the freedoms we often take for granted: assembly, speech, religion, the press, suffrage, due process in law, etc.

Civil and political rights –lumped together as “legal rights”- are rarely given voluntarily by the state, but usually have to be fought. The fight always comes with a significant price tag, since freedom is rarely free. The fight for legal rights can be extremely violent as the American and other revolutions show. In less extreme cases, legal rights can arise relatively peaceful: women’s suffrage, for example.

Paine, viewing 2010 Canada through the prism of history would see what? He would have no doubts that Canadians were functionally bereft of civil liberties in all but name – mirage like, but insubstantial. At the federal level, Paine would note the arbitrary nature of a minority ruling party more than willing to dismiss Parliament at whim. He would find in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms the gaping libertarian hole of Section 33, the so-called “Notwithstanding” Clause. Essentially a political compromise to of the most callous order, the clause allows the federal and provincial governments to opt out of pretty much any of the civil rights provisions of the Charter that they don’t like. Paine would wonder at the ingenuity of politicians who could so casually create a Charter of Rights and include within the same document the means to deny its very provisions.

Paine would watch with dismay the lack of transparency by the government. The clear parallels to his own day would be starkly revealed in the way it deliberately ignores the will of Parliament by denying basic information on the handling of Afghan prisoners.

Paine would have watched agents of the federal government in the guise of the 2010 Integrated Security Unit (ISU) conduct round the clock surveillance of Olympic political dissidents who had committed no crime apart from holding contrary views and harassing and intimidating individuals while tracking down their friends, families and neighbors to probe for incriminating information in the absence of the slightest evidence that such information even existed. Paine would have appreciated the irony of three levels of government applauding ISU for providing a “safe and secure Olympic Games” by trampling the Charter thoroughly underfoot.

Here, to British Columbia, the self-touted “best place on Earth”, Paine could hardly have failed to see the same arrogant misuse of power: Legislation passed at provincial and municipal levels that sought to curtail freedom of speech and assembly on behalf commercial agreements with a private entity called the International Olympic Committee. The City of Vancouver’s and BC’s signage laws made fundamental compromises to civil liberties while trying to pretend that it was all fine since it was only “temporary”. The Assistance to Shelter Act would have caught Paine’s notice with its egregious provisions that made individuals doing no harm to themselves or anyone else subject to removal on the whim of police officers.

Paine would have watched the cavalier destruction of the wild salmon fishery and the expansion of private power projects by a government with no respect whatsoever for the concerns of the citizenry. Paine surely would have wondered how an apparently simple conflict of interest case such as the Railgate scandal could still be shrouded in secrecy even years after the initial disclosure.

In Common Sense, Paine enumerated many of the abuses that had led Americans to rebel: arbitrary misuse of power, abrogation of “English” common law civil rights of the day, violence and harassment directed against its own citizens, and, in the end, the lack of any functional means for redress leaving only surrender. This constellation of abuses left no recourse besides rebellion.

For Paine, an illusion of rights in the absence of their reality was more obscene than an honest denial of the same could ever be. In our own day, despotic regimes around the world, unlike Canada, make no pretense to honouring human rights. Despicable, perhaps, but at least not bearing the sin of hypocrisy.

Paine’s conclusions for Canadians might have come to him in a burst of déjà vu: Your governments have actually become your enemies and serve interests not your own. You would be better off without them. Common sense dictates that you take action to reform or remove such governments; how you do so is up to you.

What Paine would not know how to address would be the question about how we create necessary reforms and generate truly representative government when so much of the public is totally apathetic and/or has been brainwashed by the mainstream media and governments themselves on the mantra of “peace, order and good government”?

This last remains the challenge for our own day.

Dr. Christopher A. Shaw was one of the most outspoken opponents of Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympics and wrote a book chronicling Vancouver’s Games, Five Ring Circus.

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Islands and farms in the Peace River valley

Site C, HST and truth in B.C. politics

Canada, Hydropower, Politics, WATER, Western Canada, , ,
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Special for the Common Sense Canadian

The Campbell Liberals’ decision to proceed with Site C is almost as bad as their Harmonized Sales Tax scam because it’s obvious from the content of the Site C announcement that it’s premature – before the proper studies have been done – and so is mainly a PR ploy to try to distract public attention away from the popular revolt against the HST.

Furthermore, the way Premier Gordon Campbell was obviously trying to use the Site C issue to position himself into a province-building legacy akin to W.A.C. Bennett’s is further offensive, especially since he has been deconstructing so much of the legacies like B.C. Hydro and BCRail left by previous governments but also because his spending and taxing choices in general have been so regressive.

Those Vancouver school kids demonstrating against underfunding of education were right on: the Campbell crowd can find hundreds of millions of dollars to retrofit a roof for a soccer stadium (and many other dubious spending choices like that) but they won’t find money for school districts to properly fund education, for health boards to properly fund hospitals or for other pressing needs such as welfare and Medicare as well as useful programs such as arts and culture grants.

More recently we have seen a wave of layoffs in the provincial government and it’s no surprise that some of the steepest cuts have come in Ministries such as Environment and Forests that are charged with protecting the public interests while political agencies such as Public Affairs Bureau have generally been spared from such cuts.

It’s clear that the main reason Campbell is doing what he’s doing – bringing in the HST in order to get the $1.6-billion bribe from Ottawa – is to try to minimize his embarrassment over the huge deficit, and especially to try to hide the fact that he lied about the size of that deficit in the previous election campaign, which is unconscionable.

The Site C issue itself is a prime example of Campbell’s deceits: the Campbell Liberals have knowingly misrepresented the state of the province’s energy supplies, claiming we are net importers when really we have an abundance of reliable supplies which we choose to enhance by being clever traders – we import power from Alberta when it’s cheap and we export power to the U.S. when it’s highly profitable.

I am not opposed to economic growth and expansion of power supplies, and I’d even support Site C provided it can be fairly proven to be safe from the engineering perspective and viable from environmental and community perspectives, but I am very opposed to Campbell pushing it ahead prematurely for primarily partisan reasons.

So what we have is Campbell trashing the public interest in many ways and many areas in order to vainly try to rescue his own political reputation. It is disgusting. He must go.

If you haven’t signed the HST petition yet you should ensure you do so well before the July 5 deadline regardless of how you feel about the petition proponent Bill Vander Zalm, whose own record is checkered. That’s because the issues are bigger than the personalities involved, and a vote against the Campbell Liberals’ mismanagement of the HST can also be – and should be – a vote against his mismanagement of many other issues too.

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Carpe Diem, BC!

Canada, Hydropower, Politics, Western Canada,
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Never
a Better Time to Fight Back

Well,
this is it.

This,
as they say, is the moment we’ve all been waiting for. As
biologist Alexandra Morton embarks this week on a historic walk for
wild salmon down Vancouver Island, her journey serves as a symbol to
the people of this province that the game is truly afoot. Now is the
time to reclaim this place we call British Columbia from those who
have stolen it from us.

Following
years of frustration for a small group committed British Columbians –
toiling in obscurity to rouse their fellow citizens and governments
to action on numerous vital issues…After myriad red flags unheeded,
wanton environmental disregard, excessive and oppressive corporate
control over our public policy – after all this, a window. A door
– open if just a crack. And the people who led us here need all of
our help to kick it down. For the first time in years, that seems
surprisingly possible.

You
see, by taking from the vast majority of the public to give to the
tiny minority of the wealthy and powerful, our government leaders run
the risk of eventually pissing off everyone.

And
that is precisely what has happened.

Take
your pick – just about every Canadian now has an axe to grind with
Gordon Campbell and Stephen Harper. Let me list just a few: cuts to
arts, youth sports, education, health care; tax cuts for the rich,
while levying new burdens on us regular folks; the perpetual
disregard for our less fortunate souls; privatizing or breaking up
virtually every public resource and asset of value – from BC Rail
to BC Hydro; the total neglect of our wild salmon and the impacts of
Norwegian fish farms on our environment; the giving away and
destroying of our most precious natural resources – from private
river power, to Site “C” Dam, to turning lakes into toxic mining
dumps; refusing to get serious about climate change by paving
blacktop over farmland while public transit funding languishes…See
anything you recognize? Of course you do. Unless you happen to be a
billionaire or close friend of Gordon Campbell, in which case, you’d
probably prefer things to remain as they are.

4
big opportunities to fight back:
#1 Pipeline, Tankers

Rather
than a single watershed moment over the past several years where the
momentum has suddenly shifted in the public’s favour, there have
been a series of milestones, one after another, each building toward
the opportunity now before us.

That
said, if I had to point to a single moment where the ground really
shifted, it was at a recent press conference in Vancouver, organized
by the Coastal First Nations and their many supporters. The 150
groups and individuals represented – First Nations from Northern
Alberta to Kitimat, conservation groups, and prominent Canadians –
joined together to tell the world they will not stand for the
proposed Enbridge Tar Sands Pipeline and supertankers on our precious
coast.

It
wasn’t so much what they said, but the way they said it that
struck a chord with everyone in the room. It was the deep,
palpable resolve that underlined every word. They were not demanding
to be consulted and accommodated – they were marching right past the
usual window dressing and simply saying: “No. This pipeline will
not be built. Those ships will not set sail. Period.” And they had
the full force of the coastal business community, leading Canadians,
local and international environmental groups behind them. To Big Oil
and their sycophantic servants in government, this must have been a
scary moment. And as the national media coverage rightly observed,
the stage is now set for the biggest environmental battle in the
province’s history – and this time, for once, the people hold the
cards.

#2
Private Power, Site “C”

In one
fell swoop, earlier this week, Gordon Campbell managed to undermine
his whole private power program and tick off one of his most
historically safe constituencies. By committing to build the final
mega-dam on the Peace River, Campbell removed all doubt that BC
simply doesn’t need the costly private river diversion projects he
has been pushing on the public, handing our watersheds over to the
likes of General Electric. Unlike these seasonal projects that only
produce power when we don’t need it, Site “C” would add a huge
block of year-round firm energy to BC’s public power system.

Only,
we don’t even need that. You see, contrary to the fibs Campbell
has been telling the public, BC is already self-sufficient in
electricity – especially if we get serious about conservation. But
if Site “C” is an unnecessary environmental blight, then private
river power projects are an outright scam. And that message is
getting through to more British Columbians every day. Witness the
record turnouts to public meetings on proposed projects – from
Kaslo to Pitt Meadows to Powell River. The public has shown it is
squarely against private power projects and ready to stand up for
their public power and watersheds.

Now, a
word about Site “C”. People in the Peace region have a
persistent feeling of being ignored by us city folk and our political
and corporate nabobs in Victoria and Vancouver. And they’re right.
From the stress on their communities from aggressive natural gas
exploitation in recent years, to the enormous price they have paid to
build giant dams that service the rest of the province – they have
been used and abused for far too long.

My
family, for instance, lost our ranch on the Peace River – the Gold
Bar Ranch – to build the first of these behemoths, WAC Bennett Dam.
So I know a little about how folks feel about Site “C”. But my
family continued to vote Socred decades after the dam, and for
whatever party of the Right federally and provincially thereafter.
This is because: 1. These governments at least largely did what they
did with the overall public interest in mind; and 2. In Peace Country
you just don’t vote NDP. Which is why in this past election, the
independent candidate in the Peace River North riding captured
32% of the vote – an astonishing and unprecedented result that
showed just how disenchanted folks are up there with their provincial
government. When the conservative party of record is in real danger
of losing the Peace, there’s something blowing in the wind.

These
folks have battled and stopped Site “C” twice before; I wouldn’t
put it past them to do it again…This time they could use a little
help from all of us.

#3
Vander Zalm and the HST

The HST
has produced a crack in the political dam. Over the next several
months it will come to be understood not only as referendum on an
unfair tax to which well over 80% of the province is outright opposed
– but as a referendum on Gordon Campbell’s leadership. The rift
over the HST is particularly perilous to Campbell because of the
people on the other side – beginning with former Socred Premier
Bill Vander Zalm. What it highlights is the division growing within
the Right, separating veteran fiscal conservatives from their
neo-liberal Fraser Institute heirs, who have spent the past decade
undoing generations of Socred initiatives – privatizing BC Rail,
breaking up WAC Bennett’s crowning legacy, BC Hydro, and handing
the party of the Right over to global corporations, to the detriment
of the BC public and environment.

Rarely
do you get a “do-over” in the midst of an election term – the
chance to recognize a mistake and rectify it. But the HST presents
just such an opportunity. For make no mistake – at a historic low
in popularity, both for his party and as a leader – Gordon Campbell
is vulnerable. And his political career does not survive a
successful referendum and defeat of the HST. Either he steps
down or he goes the way of Caesar on the Senate floor. Either result
would call for champagne – not sparkling wine, but the real stuff.
And if you want to experience that sweet, effervescent taste like I
do, you’ll get behind the movement to scrap the HST.

#4 Salmon
Farms – Alex Leads the Way

Much
more will be written and videographed in these pages about Alexandra
Morton’s historic walk for wild salmon, so I won’t go into detail
here…Except to say that after more than a decade of tireless work,
victory is in sight for Alex and her supporters. And victory means
getting open net salmon farms out of our coastal waters – to protect
our embattled wild salmon.

The
momentum swelling on this issue is enormous: from the increasing
vulnerability of the global salmon farming industry from
environmental disasters in Chile, Norway, Scotland, and Canada; to
the global media attention now on the subject; to the dumping of
farmed salmon by some of its biggest retailers; to seminal legal
victories in Canadian courts: Alex and company are kicking butt these
days.

The
same resolve that emanated from First Nations leaders in opposition
to the proposed pipeline and tankers was evident last week in Chief
Bob Chamberlin’s statement to the media as the certification
hearing began for his historic class action lawsuit, suing
governments over the impacts of fish farms on his people’s
traditional territory: “We will not stop. We will protect the
wild salmon and we will protect the environment of our people.”

So
Alex’s march takes place against the backdrop of all these
developments – and just as an unprecedented federal judicial
inquiry gets underway to investigate the causes of the collapse of
our Fraser River sockeye. What a way for the public to demand the
Cohen Inquiry thoroughly examine the impacts of salmon farms – by
joining in Alex’s march and final chorus in Victoria on May 8.

So from
the Kootenays to Campbell River; from the Peace Valley to Haida Gwaii
– let our free and democratic voices ring out and shake the very
foundations of our Legislature and Parliament. Let them hear from
us, the people. Join Alex Morton on her historic march. Rally
behind First Nations and their bold stances on fish farms, pollution
from mines, pipelines and tankers. Sign Bill Vander Zalm’s
petition – heck, call the local campaign office and see how you can
help. Tell your political representatives what you expect from them.
Write letters to your paper, call your favorite radio show, go to a
rally or townhall meeting. Pick up a placard and hit the
streets…Whatever you do, get involved. Because now is your
moment to truly make a difference.

The
stakes have never been higher. Let us not waste this historic
opportunity.

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Bogus flood reduction claims for Fraser gravel mining

Canada, Mining, Politics, Western Canada, , , ,
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BCIT Instructor and former provincial biologist Dr. Marvin Rosenau uses government documents and statements from respected hydrologists to poke holes in the Campbell Government’s Fraser River gravel mining program. 5 min of watching this video will leave you with little doubt as to what’s really going on. Highlights from 2009 Chilliwack event hosted by the Fraser River Gravel Stewardship Committee.

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1,100 protesters showed up in Kaslo, BC - a town of 1,000 - to say no to a proposed private river power project - June 2009

Damn Protesters

Canada, Politics, WATER, Western Canada,
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Long before the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and Whistler. Before that nail-biter of a hockey game. Before any of that was even thought about, I must say that I have thanked my lucky stars each and every night for the good luck of being born Canadian.

I love the way I can drink water straight from the tap. I love that I can live in a big city yet get myself to the wilderness on a Saturday morning for a sunrise hike.

I love the way when, my Dad had heart problems while on vacation on the Sunshine Coast – he was helicoptered to Saint Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, operated on, and returned to us in better shape than ever – all free of charge.

So what I do for a living may come as a bit of a surprise. I am a professional protester.

I work for an environmental organization, the Wilderness Committee, as its National Campaign Director. We conduct grass-roots education campaigns that advocate for more nature protection, more park lands and better laws to protect fish and wildlife.

In my day to day work I photograph endangered wilderness areas, write educational brochures, do media interviews and of course – protest. I protest a lot.

It may seem weird that one so happy as I – would be protesting in many cases, governments representing the very nation that I profess to love.

Name a thing you really love about Canada, and I’ll bet dollars to Tim Horton’s donuts that protest signs, banners and rallies had something to do with it. If you want good stuff done, you need a citizenry ready willing and able to get off it’s collective butt and do a little protesting from time to time.

Most Canadians have heard of Tommy Douglas, that skinny guy with the gift of the gab from Saskatchewan. Fifty years ago he turned the protests of a nation sick with the high cost of being sick into the beginnings of the Canadian public health care system that we are so proud of today. But Tommy couldn’t have done any of it without thousands of people willing to speak up in protest of the pay as you go system that was killing off those who couldn’t afford to pay.

Next time you pour yourself a glass of water anywhere in Metro Vancouver – take a close look.

Back in the 1920s locals were protesting the logging that was ripping apart the forested valleys that produced the water. One Ernest Cleveland, riding the political wave caused by the protesters, rose to the challenge, and was given control of the watersheds by the government of the day. Ernest shut down the logging and then proclaimed “they will log those watersheds over my dead body”. Ernest kept his promise until his death in the mid 1950s.

By the 1960s the logging companies had wormed their way back into Vancouver’s watersheds and the big trees were coming down again. So were the mountain sides as the denuded slopes melted into muddy torrents every November. Vancouverites looked at their murky water glasses and fumed. But by the late 1980s a new generation of protesters had risen again! The beginning of 1990s saw the end of logging in the watersheds – and a clearer future in our drinking glasses.

In fact, all across BC the so-called tree wars of the 1980s and 90s resulted in some mighty fine areas being protected. The protesters of that era made it possible for people today to enjoy such amazing wild places as Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, Meares Island Tribal Park, Valhalla Provincial Park, Stein Valley Heritage Park, Skagit Provincial Park, Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park and the Elaho Conservancy to name a few.

So what’s scrawled on my protest signs these days? Save BC’s wild rivers! All in all hundreds of rivers have been claimed by a myriad of private interests, with many plans in the works to dam and divert them. Publicly owned BC Hydro used to pour millions of dollars into the public coffers, which would then go to things like running the public health care system. Now the money flows to the private power companies.

I believe that this nightmare power play for our rivers can be stopped by the power of – you guessed it – protest! In 2008 over 1,000 people came out to protest a plan to dam and divert all eight tributaries of the Upper Pitt River, a major Lower Mainland salmon river. The BC government killed the project the following day. Similar huge crowds in the Kootenays appear to have stopped the proposed Glacier Howser private river diversion project. And the monstrous project being proposed by General Electric and Plutonic Power in the Bute Inlet area to dam and divert up to 17 rivers has been stalled for at least a year, due to strong public opposition.

Dam protesters? It’s the Canadian way … eh!

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