Wet’suwet’en: Rule of Law?

Wet’suwet’en hereditary Chief Na’moks stands beside Paul Manly at the Office of the Wet’suwet’en (Submitted photo)

Paul Manly MP, Green Party

On Saturday Feb. 8th I was invited to speak at a local rally in support of the Wet’suwet’en people. I was grateful for the opportunity because the situation in Wet’suwet’en territory is a complex one. Too often important parts of the story get lost in the public debate. I did my best to to highlight some important points that are not well understood, particularly by those who are citing the “rule of law”as justification for the injunction enforcement that has taken place, and the arrests and removals that were a part of that.

Wet’suwet’en: An Open Letter to Justin Trudeau and John Horgan (02/01/20)

Wet’suwet’en: Pipelines, Politics and UNDRIP (01/26/20)

Transcript:

Three weeks ago I went to Wet’suwet’en territory, and I traveled with Chief Na’Moks for two days. I listened to him for two days about the situation, what was happening in the Wet’suwet’en territory. I also met with the Smithers detachment commander of the RCMP, and the liaison officers there. They weren’t involved in this injunction enforcement. They’re connected to the community. They’re not necessarily happy about this political failure that the RCMP is having to deal with. I also met with the detachment commander at the Community Industry Safety Office, which is a police station in the middle of nowhere. Thirty kilometres off the highway, a series of Atco trailers and storage facilities. The police in there, the detachment commander there, is rotated in every week, and the RCMP are rotated in every week. And they have no connection to Wet’suwet’en territory. They have no connection to the people there. They’re also not happy with having to deal with the political failure of our prime minister and our premier.

This is a political failure. When I met with Chief Na’Moks one of the things that he told me was that they had proposed an alternate route for Coastal GasLink and when you read the injunction it recognizes that the Wet’suwet’en people had asked Coastal GasLink to take another route, and they proposed another route, and Coastal GasLink said no it’s too expensive we’re not going to go that way we’re going to go the way we want to go. And so they drove their pipeline through pristine territory, running right through the historic Kweese trail. This trail is thousands of years old, this trail has burial grounds on it, this trail has archaeological sites on it, this is where they do their cultural training for their young people, this is where they do their hunting and their trapping and their berry picking. This is where they built a healing centre, the Uni’stot’en healing centre, which is being attacked today. This is their territory, and these blockades that they have set up, they are asserting their sovereignty over their territory.

I want to talk a minute about the rule of law because we’ve heard this from the premier, about the rule of law and court injunction from the you know the colonial court system. The Wet’suwet’en have their law, they have the hereditary law. And in 1997 in the Delgamuukw decision the Supreme Court of Canada recognized the hereditary system and their laws. In that Supreme Court case it was the hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en and the Gitxsan that took this case forward. There was not one elected band council member or chief from the colonial imposed Indian Act system. This court decision, the plaintiff in this Court decision, were the hereditary chiefs, that was who was represented and who was recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada. This was affirmed in the Tsilhqot’in decision. That it is the people who bring the case forward, it’s the hereditary system, that determines the land and title rights of First Nations. This land was never signed over. It was never surrendered. This is Wet’suwet’en territory and they are asserting rights to their sovereignty here.

I want to tell you that we cannot blame anybody who signed onto these these agreements with these gas companies, because in all of these First Nations, in these reservation systems, the band councils that are part of the Indian Act system, they are dealing with poverty. They’ve been struggling with poverty since colonization. And they’re given a choice, this pipeline’s going through anyway, do you want the money or not? And we’ve heard with the Teck Resources mine, this huge oil sands project, the largest oil sands project that’s being proposed in Alberta right now, that First Nations have signed onto that. I heard a chief on CBC say they’re going to do it anyway, the regulator has never turned down one of these projects. So this isn’t consent, they are conceding, they are conceding this is not consent. When you have communities in poverty and, you know, take the money or don’t take the money. I can’t blame the Haisla either, the Kitamaat people, they’re the ones with the LNG facility going onto their territory. their land has been poisoned by Alcan. The Kitimat River was poisoned by the smelter there, their ooligan run is destroyed. Their salmon run is destroyed. The harbour, the Douglas channel, the end of the Douglas channel is poisoned. People have cancer in that community they need economic prosperity and they see that LNG is coming and it’s going to be there or it’s going be somewhere else if do you want the money or not? That’s their choice because they’re ramming this stuff through.

I want to talk for a second about the economics of this situation because we’re sold a bill of goods on this. We’re told that this is good for the economy, we’re told that this is good for the environment. I meet with people in the House of Commons, I’ll meet with any lobbyists, I won’t go to their receptions and drink their wine, but I met with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers this week and had a nice little debate with them in my office. Talked about the economics of this situation, they’re talking about about LNG replacing coal, and that it’s gonna be a transition fuel, and by the end of my argument with them they conceded that LNG has as much of a greenhouse gas footprint as coal does. When you take it from the fracking, and the leaking of fracking, all the way to when you turn on your stove and you release a little methane before it lights up. That is damaging our climate as much as coal burning coal for electricity is. Methane is 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas in the first 15 years it’s released and in 100 years is 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gases CO2. It is a climate killer, it is not a solution. And in my little debate with the Canadian Association for Petroleum Producers they admitted that. I wish I had it on video.

I delivered letters to Justin Trudeau, and I sent a letter to John Horgan. I told them that the RCMP should stand down, that we shouldn’t be pushing this project through. And Justin Trudeau said this is a provincial matter It’s not our problem. I said you’re responsible for the relationship with indigenous people, it’s a nation to nation negotiation. British Columbia is not a nation. Canada is a nation and they need to be talking to the Wet’suwet’en people.

I want to mention a couple of other things about this LNG nonsense. They say that it’s going to pay for hospitals and schools and whatnot. You know ten years ago we got 1.2 billion dollars in revenue from natural gas in this province. You know much we got last year? 108 million. And that is in spite the fact that production ramped up by 70 percent, so almost double the production, but we’re getting ten percent of the royalties. Why that is? Because they’re giving royalty breaks to the gas frackers because they’re horizontal drilling. All the fracking is horizontal drilling! They’re giving the resource away. The LNG plant, which is five foreign multinationals, have 5.4 billion dollars in tax breaks, including not paying the carbon tax, not paying PST, they’re getting power from the Site C damn, which is another incident where First Nations, some of them signed on to an agreement because they conceded. Fourteen of them opposed the project, twelve of them ended up signing on because that was their only choice, was to get money. Two of those nations are still fighting in court, the West Moberly and the Prophet River. That dam is being built to provide hydropower to the fracking fields and to the LNG plant. The federal government has put $250 million dollars into LNG Canada, five foreign multinationals, three of them are state-owned corporations from China, Korea, Malaysia, giving our resources away, giving them huge tax breaks, building a damaging dam and making ratepayers like you and me pay for it so that these folks can get to our resources for nothing.

We are being ripped off, the First Nations people are having their rights trampled over this. We’re talking about the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, what does that mean? What does it mean? Where is the respectful relationship here? This is… there are so many layers to this, that need to be undone. I got into a 10 minute debate on this because in December, I brought up a question of what was the government’s response to the UN Human Rights office about the Site C damn. The UN has asked that the Site C damn be stopped. Stop construction until you have informed consent from the First Nations involved and they have not stopped. Since then the UN has written again and asked that the Coastal GasLink project be stopped until there’s informed consent. And that the Trans Mountain be stopped until there’s informed consent.

I got my ten minutes of debate in Parliament when I first got back after being up in Wet’suwet’en territory. I also asked the question on Thursday, where is this government on the nation to nation negotiation? Why don’t they respect the rule of law? Why not?

This whole situation is disgusting. We stand in solidarity and support the Wet’suwet’en people, and all of those communities that are being destroyed in the fracking fields in northeastern British Columbia and those communities that are standing against the Trans Mountain expansion pipeline. We’ve got to keep on fighting folks. They are on the front line of this climate battle. They are on the front line of the defending the rights of Indigenous people. They are on the front line of the future of our children and grandchildren, and the future of their children and grandchildren. Thank you.  SOURCE

Putting the ‘public’ back into public services

Amsterdam is one city among many where economic democracy on a municipal level is taking off.

Image: Jeanne Menjoulet, CC by 2.0

n the face of climate catastrophe, mounting inequalities and growing democratic unrest, public services are more important than ever. Across the world, people are building better, more democratic and inclusive public services because privatisations are failing.

Amsterdam is confronted with challenges comparable to those facing other cities across the world, while also facing extreme pressure on affordable housing. According to a recent report, 11 percent of Amsterdam’s inhabitants are particularly vulnerable across a variety of indicators such as health, income, and education. Poorer people, relatively many of color, are pushed outside boundaries of the inner city. And while the city has ambitious environmental goals, it remains the second-largest coal port in Europe. At the same time, lower income residents are significantly more affected by environmental collapse and climate change than their wealthier counterparts. Citizens of Amsterdam are concerned about the housing market, the steep increase in tourism in the last decade, gentrification, exclusion, poverty, accessible care, climate change and energy.

Amsterdam’s municipality intends to face these challenges head-on. It has founded The99ofAmsterdam, a do- and think tank under the municipality’s Fearless program. It consists of a small team funded by the municipality. The 99 was established to connect initiatives in Amsterdam that make the city fairer, more equitable and more sustainable and inclusive. It aims to link to, and align with, international municipalist movements for inspiration. The name refers to two types of 99: the 99 neighborhoods of Amsterdam where children play on the street, and where citizens live, connect, and shop; and the 99 percent of the world, who are the vast majority of people excluded from power and who do not belong to the excessively rich 1 percent. The name thus evokes a fair Amsterdam that reflects the dreams of the 99 percent in the 99 neighborhoods of Amsterdam.

On December 4 and 5, The 99 and the Transnational Institue (TNI) are organizing the international conference The Future is Public: Democratic Ownership of the Economy. The conference location in the K-neighborhood in Amsterdam Southeast was deliberately chosen, as it is a diverse neighbourhood inhabited by around 50,000 people of more than 150 nationalities. This will be followed by a more Amsterdam-oriented conference, the City of Tomorrow, taking place at the same venue on the 6 and 7 December, which is about granting more power to all inhabitants of Amsterdam, whether marginalised or not. It is about creating neighbourhood economies that are based on solidarity and work to benefit the people, not big corporations. It is an opportunity to get together and share inspiration, with examples from other cities and by influential thinkers such as David Harvey and Ted Howard, the founder of the Cleveland model. The conference will facilitate the exchange of ideas and generate concrete plans on how Amsterdam can become a city of change.

Amsterdam will draw inspiration from the international municipalist movement as progressive cities take the initiative to counterbalance these acute social and environmental problems in the absence of adequate action by – and often in opposition to – the policies of their central states and international institutions. In their own city, neighborhood and living environment, citizens contribute by initiating ideas, working together, uniting people and their goals for radical change. In cities like Barcelona, Naples, Paris, Berlin, Paris, New York, Montreal, Lisbon, Recoleta and others, movements have arisen that call themselves ‘municipalist’, with names such as Fearless Cities, Rebel Cities, and Transformative Cities. They share the values of democracy and solidarity, and aim to achieve fairer neighborhoods, economies based on alternative principles, better social services, and clean energy for those with lower incomes.

There is solid evidence that privatisation costs more and undermines human rights. The resistance to privatisation has turned into a powerful force for a positive cause, that of (re)municipalisation, which refers to reclaiming and creating new public services on a municipal level. The Transnational Institute and partner organisations have in their most recent research identified more than 1,400 cases of (re)municipalisation, involving over 2,400 cities in 58 countries. But ‘The Future is Public’ report is about more than just numbers. A growing international movement is on the ground, building democratic public services that are fit for the social, ecological and economic challenges of our time. (Re)municipalisation is redefining public ownership in the 21st century, offering a new route towards community-led, climate conscious and gender-sensitive public services.

Some of the most progressive municipalities – such as the Philippine cities Binalonan, Caloocan and Lanuza – are recentering their public services to prioritise the needs of the most marginalised people in society, including women, people with disabilities and low-income families, among others. While others – such as Paris, Terrassa and Wolfhagen – dare to share decision-making powers and open up ownership models to representatives of users, workers, civil society and research institutions. Together, they are shaping a template for how to expand democratic public ownership to all levels of society. The data and stories also illustrate the diversity of remunicipalisation efforts, taking us to new countries and new sectors that present their own specific challenges, such as waste management in some countries in Africa, the many new public pharmacies in Chile, and the call of the UK Labour Party to provide public internet access as a human right.

Civil society organisations, trade unions and local authorities can push in concert for democratic public ownership on all levels and call for universal public services so that all residents can lead dignified and prosperous lives. This way, we put the “public” back into public services, while actually changing the design of how our economies are run.

That said, this wave of (re)municipalisations is taking place at a critical moment. As racism, fascism and xenophobia are on the rise, we must offer solidarity and concrete solutions–decent jobs, public services for all, and resilient local economies. Our public future lies in the hands of communities – not corporations.

 

Forged in Fire: California’s Lessons for a Green New Deal

Flames climb trees as the Camp Fire tears through Paradise, Calif., on Nov. 8, 2018. Photo: Noah Berger/AP

WE WERE JUST TAKING PICTURES. Of the ash, stray bricks, and weeds. Of twisted metal and charred patio furniture. Of the pine trees still standing on the edge of the lots, their towering trunks now charcoal black. Of the lonely white brick fireplace in the middle of it all, the only surviving structure, metal pokers hanging expectantly by the grate.

“Get the hell off my property!”

The words came bellowing from a burly man who had just pulled up to the pile of ash that once was his home in Paradise, California. As he shouted a litany of complaints, it became clear that his rage wasn’t only reserved for us trespassers — and there have been plenty who have gone to Paradise to gaze at the eerie emptiness where a thriving community once stood, before it was decimated by California’s deadliest fire one year ago.

The target was myriad forces that had conspired to twist the knife, again and again, on his already wrenching property loss — from the insurance company that wouldn’t pay up, to the county that wouldn’t let him clean up, to the state that wanted his (now contaminated) well to be sealed up. His rage was also directed at the absence of decent temporary housing for fire victims like him, not to mention the electric utility that had started the blaze and was still evading responsibility.

When the complaints petered out, I approached the man to introduce myself and apologize for our intrusion. But as I got closer, I felt his volatility: I have been in many disaster-struck communities and know how quickly the gale-force of emotion these events churn up can direct itself at the closest available target. We wished him luck and left.

The encounter was a reminder of the kind of stress that is in the air in the parts of California recently scorched by fire, as well as in the communities that have welcomed thousands of newly homeless neighbors to towns now bursting at the seams. The intersecting hardships experienced by so many in the region also explain why, days before the one-year anniversary of the deadly Camp Fire that burned down Paradise and killed 86 people, local politicians in neighboring Chico unveiled a plan calling for the small city to adopt its own Green New Deal.

Like its national inspiration, the Chico Green New Deal framework marries rapid decarbonization targets with calls for more affordable housing; a safe and sustainable food system; investments in “clean, 21st century” public transit; green jobs creation, including projects earmarked for the poorest residents; and much more.

Chico shows that there is no way to cope with climate breakdown without a simultaneous shift to a very different kind of economy.

“Your city council has heard the call of its community that has resounded locally and across the nation,” said Chico Vice Mayor Alex Brown when the plan was announced. “We are choosing to walk the walk of this movement and to take the leadership being demanded of us.” In an interview, Brown told me that the Camp Fire’s impact on both Paradise and Chico was a glimpse of the future unless action is taken to both radically lower emissions and build “communities that are more resilient to these shifts.” Brown is well aware that a small city like hers isn’t going to make much of a dent in global emissions. But, she said, “We can demonstrate what a Green New Deal looks like at the local level.”

The Chico plan is one of many similar local initiatives that have sprung up in the year since the Sunrise Movement occupied the office of then-prospective House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with young demonstrators demanding that the Democratic Party embrace a sweeping Green New Deal to meet the twin crises of climate disruption and deepening inequality. Since then, as the Green New Deal proposal has picked up momentum in the Democratic primaries, several states and big cities have unveiled their own frameworks, including Maine and Seattle, where city council recently passed a resolution that included the city’s most ambitious climate justice targets to date. It also pledged to create an oversight board to hold the city to its commitments, a body that will be made up of representatives from communities directly impacted by racial, economic, and environmental injustice, as well as climate experts and representatives from trade unions and green groups.

And yet the contribution now coming from humble Chico — a scrappy northern California college town with a population of approximately 100,000 — may be the most politically significant. Because the Chico Green New Deal is based directly on this region’s hard-won experience of living through the 2018 inferno; it was forged, quite literally, in fire.

Ever since the Green New Deal landed on the political map, liberals have attacked it for its supposedly impractical scope and ambition. Fighting poverty, racism, and homelessness are worthy goals, we have been told — but what do they have to do with lowering greenhouse gas emissions? Surely a carbon-centric approach — like a simple tax or cap-and-trade and some narrow regulations on polluters — would be more likely to succeed. And besides, connecting greenhouse-gas reductions with building a fairer society just confirms Republican beliefs that climate change is a vast left-wing plot: Better to focus exclusively on pollution and worry about the rest down the road. Conservative Chico city council members have gone on the offensive against the Green New Deal with precisely this kind of attack.

An aerial view of a destroyed neighborhood in Paradise, Calif., on Oct. 21, 2019, one year after the Camp Fire. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Yet Chico’s lived experience over the past year is a devastating rebuke to this line of criticism. As the community that housed the vast majority of people displaced by the Camp Fire, Chico shows that there is no way to cope with climate breakdown without a simultaneous shift to a very different kind of economy, one that is willing to make major nonmarket investments in housing, transit, health (including mental health), water, electricity, and more. MORE

He’s Urged a Guaranteed Income for Years. Are We Ready Yet?

Hugh Segal on his new book ‘Bootstraps Need Boots: One Tory’s Lonely Fight to End Poverty.’

Former Tory senator Hugh Segal: ‘A completely affordable and sustainable proposition.’ Photo via the Basic Income Canada Network.

Hugh Segal sees no contradiction in being a conservative who’s long advocated a way to deal with poverty that some call a radical form of wealth distribution.

And as tech disrupts and the gig economy makes jobs more precarious, his idea has been talked up by noted people of many ideological stripes. Barack Obama, Milton Friedman, Elon Musk, cabinet secretaries for Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton, take your pick. All have endorsed, to some degree, a guaranteed basic income.

Segal can take satisfaction in not only advocating the policy early, but helping to craft a real-life pilot project in Ontario (shut down by the incoming Doug Ford government).

Now, after an election that signalled growing division in Canada, Segal suggests a guaranteed income could help build bridges.

“There are disagreements and there are strong differences in points of view, but the way you build national unity is by having national projects with which everybody can identify,” he told The Tyee. “Let’s be clear: 75 per cent of Canadians think a basic income would be a good step forward. And, there is an expert committee looking at a basic income in British Columbia.”

John Diefenbaker ignited Hugh Segal’s interest in politics, which led to him joining and eventually running for the legendary prime minister’s Progressive Conservative Party. But it was Joan Baez who inspired Segal — a Paul Martin-appointed Conservative senator from 2005 to 2014 — to consider the far-reaching implications of poverty.

As he recounts in his recently released book, Bootstraps Need Boots: One Tory’s Lonely Fight to End Poverty, published by UBC Press, Segal and a fellow high-school classmate landed an exclusive interview for their student magazine with the American folk-music icon in Montreal during her anti-Vietnam War concert tour in the early 1960s.

“The battle for civil rights and the battle against the war are really the same battle,” Baez told the teens in her suite at the Windsor Hotel. The draft caught up poor, mainly African-American and Hispanic young men denied the advantages their Caucasian counterparts had through university deferments or “parents well-connected enough to work the system,” Segal writes.

Baez’s linkage of war and human rights to poverty resonated with Segal, who grew up in a poor Eastern-European Jewish immigrant family in Montreal’s working-class west end. He never forgot where he came from as he rose up the ranks of Canada’s political establishment to serve as Brian Mulroney’s chief of staff and eventually as a parliamentarian, and advanced the need for a guaranteed annual income as the most effective way to alleviate poverty.

Now 69 and serving as both the Matthews Fellow in Global Public Policy at Queen’s University in his hometown of Kingston, Ont., and a senior advisor at Toronto law firm, Aird & Berlis LLP, Segal recently spoke to The Tyee about his book and the challenge of getting poverty on the agendas of parties and on the minds of parliamentarians.

Here is what he had to say…

On how a basic annual income would work:

“It would work the way the Guaranteed Income Supplement works for seniors. Everybody has to file their taxes. If you fall beneath a certain level, you’d be automatically topped up.

“The proposal that I made to the Province of Ontario was that rather than the present level of welfare, which is fairly rule-laden, massively over-administered, and forces the people who work in those departments to be auditors and police officers about how people are living as opposed to helping people out of poverty.

“Those welfare programs across Canada generally do not pay more than 50 per cent of what it takes to be at the poverty line or a little bit above.

“Moreover, all those programs have restrictions as to whether or not you’re allowed to work. If you did work while you’re on welfare, and depending on the province, money earned would be clawed back, becoming a huge disincentive to try to find a spot in the workforce.

“The recommendation I made was to take people from 45 per cent to 70 per cent of the poverty line, and increase the monthly benefit from $640 per individual to $1,300. Plus if they did find work, which they’d be encouraged to do, they would pay 50 per cent tax on half of what they earned but keep the rest. When they reached the same amount as the basic grant, they’d pay the same level of taxation as everybody else in the economy.”

On whether it would reward the lazy:

“Seventy-per-cent of Canadians who are beneath the poverty line have jobs. Some, in our big cities, have more than one, but can’t get above the poverty line because of the costs in their jurisdictions.

“So the notion that this is about people who sit on their couch, eat bonbons and watch soap operas is an ancient right-wing trope for which there is simply no justification.”

On why it’s not bizarre to imagine left and right working together on solving poverty:

“All the major social and economic improvements that have made a difference in people’s lives have really come from a multi-party source.

“[Co-operative Commonwealth Federation premier] Tommy Douglas in Saskatchewan started universal health insurance in the early 1960s. Mr. Diefenbaker, when he was prime minister, asked Mr. Justice Emmett Hall of the Supreme Court [of Canada] to study that for the country as a whole. When Justice Hall submitted his report, Mr. Diefenbaker had been defeated by Mr. [Lester] Pearson, a Liberal in a minority government, who worked with the provinces to bring in a system whereby we had universal health insurance across Canada.

“The first guaranteed annual income supplement started from the Progressive Conservatives in a minority government in Ontario in 1975. It started because in a standing committee on social affairs, the New Democrats and the Liberals made a motion to reduce the minister of Community and Social Services’ salary to one dollar because of the lack of engagement on seniors’ poverty. We had just been through an election campaign, and I was the legislative assistant to the premier [Bill Davis]. Rent control had come up in the campaign, but seniors’ poverty had not.

“I asked: why can’t we figure out what the issue is? When we did, the numbers were so clear; 35 per cent of seniors in Ontario who were mostly women were living below the poverty line. The province brought in the guaranteed annual income supplement and it had support across the legislature. It spread to a few other provinces, and then the federal government introduced the Guaranteed Income Supplement for seniors, which means that no Canadian resident, who is 65 and older, would live on less than $1,200 a month.

“These things become part of the universal consensus of what is fair and just in a mixed-market economy, and I think that’s the best way this poverty issue is going to be addressed.”

On whether he is a member of any political party:

“No, I’m not.”

On the chance afforded by Canada’s new minority Parliament:

“I am quite optimistic. I would say that probably the coalition most supportive of moving ahead on this file to begin with would be the Liberals, New Democrats and Greens. It’s been part of the Green platform for over 10 years.

“The Liberals also deserve credit for the child benefit which has lifted some 800,000 kids out of poverty across the country, and I can understand why having done that three or four years ago that they weren’t prepared to go the next step to a basic income for working-age people. But this is a new Parliament, and there’s a new mandate, so I think it’s a time of some opportunity.

“And who knows, the way in which it’s put forward, there may be some thoughtful Conservatives who are more than prepared to push within their party for a more rational and open-minded approach. But I don’t expect the leadership to be there on this as an issue.”

On why Prince Edward Island could offer the next test case:

“There is now a Red Tory Progressive Conservative government in minority elected in Prince Edward Island with the Greens as the official Opposition. There is a resolution that was passed by the legislature and articulated in the throne speech that there should be a basic income. A Special Committee on Poverty is meeting now on how to put that together, and I appeared before the committee to discuss what I had the privilege of doing in 2016 for [former Ontario Liberal] premier [Kathleen] Wynne in terms of the plan for a basic-income pilot, which was launched in 2017.

“I’m hoping that the new mix in Parliament will allow people who care about poverty in different parties to work together and try to establish a national basic-income pilot, which could be run in P.E.I., where about 22,000 residents out of about 157,000 people live beneath the poverty line.”

On who is ‘deadly opposed’:

“Here are the people who are deadly opposed to it: all the civil servants in every finance department across Canada. Why? Because when you have a program that says as the Guaranteed Income Supplement does for seniors that if you reach a certain age you have a statutory right. That means that money will be spent whether civil servants think it’s a good idea or not, every year. That reduces their control; that reduces their influence; and that reduces their ability to maintain the spending discretion of their minister.

“The other group opposed quite often is the far left: union organizers and others who are normally well-intentioned and whom I broadly tend to support. But on this issue, they’re afraid it will do away with public-service jobs in welfare departments across Canada, and it is their duty to protect the jobs of their members.

“They often talk about the need for programs that will deal with the implications of poverty, but they don’t like the idea of a direct-cash transfer.

“Of course the other group opposed is the far right that says if you pay people to do nothing they will do nothing, and argue that we can’t afford it, when in fact there’s no evidence to back that up.”

On whether it would be too expensive:

“[Ottawa member of Parliament] Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative finance critic, asked the Parliamentary Budget Officer what it would cost to take my proposal for the Ontario basic-income pilot and make it a national program. The answer was that initially it could cost about $76 billion, but before we would reduce the federal programs that it would replace. That would take it down to about $44 billion.

“But remember Ontario alone spends $10 billion on welfare and disability support. So if the basic-income program replaced that, there would be a further saving and you’d have savings of similar proportionality in every province.

“The notion that we would spend about $20 billion to reduce poverty and all the negative pathologies of it strikes me as a completely affordable and sustainable proposition.”

Ontario Progressive Conservative Premier Doug Ford: Shortly after taking office he scuttled a basic-income pilot project not one year old.‘He purports to be for the people,’ says Segal, ‘and I guess that doesn’t include low-income people.’

On poverty absent from debates in the recent federal election:

“We had three TV debates and it did not come up.

“The same thing happened in 2011 and I called Steve Paikin, who was the moderator of the English debate, and I said, ‘How come poverty didn’t come up?’ He said, ‘We did polling and people didn’t raise it as an issue,’ and I said, ‘Steve, the people who are living beneath the poverty line are in such a desperate, daily scramble to make sure there’s lunch for the kids, to make sure there’s money to pay for the heat or that they’re not behind in their rent that they don’t have time to do long polling surveys on the phone.’

“So the notion that they would leave that out was quite surprising.”

On whether he and Bernie Sanders, who calls for a ‘living wage,’ are on the same page:

“A living wage is really about, through contract-compliance, government saying to suppliers that they have to pay better than the minimum wage to their employees. I don’t disagree with that as an interesting way forward. But it is different from a statutory guarantee that no resident of Canada will fall beneath a certain basic amount that they need to live with some modest measure of dignity and self-respect.

“It’s not the same as the living wage. It’s complementary to it. But I think it’s a different approach in terms of the fundamental socioeconomic responsibility we have to our fellow citizens. I say this as someone who’s been a Progressive Conservative all my life.

“My brand of conservatism has always been about equality of opportunity. It’s been about inclusion and stability in the context of our parliamentary traditions. It’s not about necessarily having the state over-legislate; it’s not about neo-conservative selfishness with respect to constantly lowering taxes so the state loses the capacity to do what it should be doing, which has become part of the brand of the federal Conservative party — and conservatives in other parts of the world, to be fair.”

On Doug Ford, who killed the basic-income pilot program in Ontario just after taking office:

“He purports to be for the people, and I guess that doesn’t include low-income people. That’s not good enough. That’s not the kind of inclusive progressive conservatism that has always been, by and large, the brand in places like Ontario.”

On how a basic annual income helps the whole economy:

“It’s about providing liquidity for an economy overall.

“When I was in the Senate and part of the government caucus at the time, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. bought $362 billion worth of performing mortgages from the banks to keep them liquid during the collapse of the U.S. credit system in ′06, ′07 and ′08. That was the right thing for Mr. Harper to do.

“But if CMHC, which is owned by the Canadian taxpayer, has that capacity, how come we don’t have the ability to provide liquidity for individuals who fall beneath the poverty line — in many cases, for no fault of their own. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

On how a guaranteed income relates to climate change:

“What we know about climate change, natural disasters and serious and frightening weather [is that] low-income people pay the biggest price. They have the least level of resilience to fight back, to deal with what happens to their property or their part of the world. Therefore, the notion that we would tackle climate change, which we need to do as an absolute top priority without addressing poverty, makes no sense at all.

“All the pathologies that cost our society so much — early sickness and hospitalization; bad educational outcomes for kids; family violence; not doing well with the law, running into substance-abuse issues — are all driven by poverty.”

On why he wrote the book:

“The editor said, ‘We simply want the answer to one question: Why are you the most prominent conservative on the side of a basic income guarantee? How did that happen? What happened in your life?’ And I said, ‘Why would anyone care?’

“They made the case that if people understand how someone who identifies as a conservative who believes in things like a productive economic system and fair profits, but also believes in a basic income, and read how you came to that conclusion, that may broaden the base of people who are prepared to give some consideration to this means of reforming our welfare system.

“On that basis, I concluded that maybe I owed it to the thousands of people involved in the basic-income movement and people who are doing advocacy for low-income people across Canada, and that’s why I wrote the book.”

On whether he expects to ever see an end to poverty in Canada:

“If you’re a Red Tory, you are by definition optimistic. Some would say naive and delusional but I prefer to view it as optimistic.”  SOURCE

How Swedes and Norwegians broke the power of the ‘1 percent’

A march in Ådalen, Sweden, in 1931.

While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.

Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living.”

Neither country is a utopia, as readers of the crime novels by Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbø will know. Critical left-wing authors such as these try to push Sweden and Norway to continue on the path toward more fully just societies. However, as an American activist who first encountered Norway as a student in 1959 and learned some of its language and culture, the achievements I found amazed me. I remember, for example, bicycling for hours through a small industrial city, looking in vain for substandard housing. Sometimes resisting the evidence of my eyes, I made up stories that “accounted for” the differences I saw: “small country,” “homogeneous,” “a value consensus.” I finally gave up imposing my frameworks on these countries and learned the real reason: their own histories.

Then I began to learn that the Swedes and Norwegians paid a price for their standards of living through nonviolent struggle. There was a time when Scandinavian workers didn’t expect that the electoral arena could deliver the change they believed in. They realized that, with the 1 percent in charge, electoral “democracy” was stacked against them, so nonviolent direct action was needed to exert the power for change. MORE

Instead of squabbling over scarce jobs and incomes, we should jointly strive for a fair economic system

There’s an African proverb that is becoming uncomfortably apt to apply to many workers and citizens: “As the waterhole becomes smaller, the animals get meaner.”

In other words, as basic needs dwindle, so does the willingness to share what’s left. The merits of community and co-operation are superseded by a selfish survival-of-the-fittest mentality.

A big difference, however, exists between what happens at a shrinking waterhole in Africa and what happens in Canada when good-paying jobs are reduced, incomes fall or stagnate, and government services are cut back. The African waterhole gets smaller because of a drought. It’s a natural and unavoidable phenomenon. In Canadian society, however, the necessities of life for the most vulnerable among us are being deliberately restricted.

Our welfare “waterhole” is being siphoned away, its contents inequitably transferred from the pockets of the poor into the bulging bank accounts and stock portfolios of the rich and powerful.

There is no shortage of money in Canada. Our per-capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — the country’s entire financial output — has more than doubled over the past 50 years. But its dispersal has been ruthlessly skewed to favour the most opulent among us. Corporate executives, bankers, major investors and financiers wallow in wealth, much of it derived from taxpayer-funded billion-dollar bailouts of big corporations.

Maldistribution of income

That a barbaric maldistribution of income leaves millions of citizens, including hundreds of thousands of children, destitute and undernourished doesn’t bother the elite in the least. Their cherished capitalist system inevitably creates many more losers than winners, and always will. That’s its chief purpose. So the diversion of income from the needy to the wealthy is welcomed, and the wealthy can count on their right-wing political minions to block or minimize significant poverty reductions.

As long as progressive activists continue to accept the calamities of runaway capitalism as unpreventable, then their many protests, though admirable on their own, will be ineffectual.

MORE

Indigenous Women Survivors in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside

Indigenous women march in Vancouver, Downtown Eastside Photo Rebecca Blissett

“We need to keep families together. Colonization and missing and murdered Indigenous women has broken families. The children left behind by missing and murdered Indigenous women are mostly in foster care and then when they age out they end up on the street. The violence against missing and murdered Indigenous women continues with their children who are also violated and made vulnerable.”

On April 3, 2019, The Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre (DEWC) released Red Women Rising: Indigenous Women Survivors in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside based on the lived experience, leadership, and expertise of Indigenous survivors. This comprehensive report is the culmination of a participatory process with 113 Indigenous women and 15 non-Indigenous women regarding the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

Violence against Indigenous women, girls, trans and two-spirit people is one of the most pressing human rights issue in Canada today. We know that the over-representation in statistics on homicides, poverty, homelessness, child apprehensions, police street checks, incarceration, and overdose fatalities is not a coincidence; it is part of an infrastructure of gendered colonial violence. Colonial state practices target women for removal from Indigenous lands, tear children from their families, enforce impoverishment, and manufacture the conditions for dehumanization.

Red Women Rising: Indigenous Women Survivors in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is an extraordinary report with Indigenous women survivors at the center; rather than as a secondary reference. Indigenous women in the Downtown Eastside (DTES)—a neighbourhood known as ground zero for violence against Indigenous women—are not silent victims, statistics, or stereotypes. This unprecedented work shares their powerful first-hand realities of violence, residential schools, colonization, land, resource extraction, family trauma, poverty, labour, housing, child welfare, being two-spirit, police, prisons, legal system, opioid crisis, healthcare, and more.

View report online

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Emissions inequality: there is a gulf between global rich and poor

jag_cz / shutterstock

American congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently shook up environmental politics by releasing a broad outline of a Green New Deal– a plan to make the US a carbon-neutral economy in the next ten years, while reducing both poverty and inequality. Lauded by many as a radical and necessary step, president Trump responded in typical style:

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

I think it is very important for the Democrats to press forward with their Green New Deal. It would be great for the so-called “Carbon Footprint” to permanently eliminate all Planes, Cars, Cows, Oil, Gas & the Military – even if no other country would do the same. Brilliant!

176K

The Green New Deal doesn’t directly call for people to consume less meat. But the argument that solving climate change means changing our diets is widespread, and Ocasio-Cortez herself has made the link.

From personal carbon footprint calculators to articles outlining how many Earths we need to sustain the consumption of the average citizen of the UK, Europe or the US, consumption is identified as the problem. Reduce consumption, runs the argument, and you solve climate change. But is “our” consumption really the problem? Who is “we” anyway?

Globally uneven consumption

This point has been made before, but bears repeating. Most of the world’s population produces very little in the way of either carbon emissions or broader environmental impacts. We can go further here by also looking at imported carbon emissions – that is, the emissions that come from the production of goods and services in countries such as China that are then consumed in the wealthy countries of the global north. If we include imported emissions, the UK’s overall emissions have only marginally decreased since 1990. MORE

Justice system an ‘industry’ profiting off Indigenous offenders and victims

InFocus
Less than five per cent of the population in Canada is Indigenous, yet Indigenous men make up 28 per cent of those behind bar, Indigenous women 43 per cent and Indigenous youth 46 per cent.

And while incarceration rates are on the decline for the general population, they’re trending upwards for Indigenous people.

Poverty and family and community breakdown are contributing factors to being both a perpetrator and a victim of crime.

But Treaty 3 Grand Chief Francis Kavanaugh says there are plenty of people profiting off this – jobs rely on it.

“We’re becoming commoditized,” Kavanaugh told InFocus Host Melissa Ridgen. “We’re providing job opportunities for others. That’s one of the problems. MORE

What is the Green New Deal and how would it benefit society?

This story was originally published by The Guardian and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey, along with dozens of co-sponsors, have introduced a vision for the Green New Deal. One Republican called it a “socialist manifesto”. Many environmental advocacy groups have hailed it, but some say it doesn’t go far enough. Others warn that its broad scope and the long list of progressive social programs it endorses could hinder its climate efforts.

So what is the Green New Deal?

The proposal outlines the broad principles of a plan simultaneously to fight inequity and tackle climate change. It does not contain policy details or advocate for specific ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But with a broad brush it aims to make the US carbon-neutral – net zero carbon emissions – in 10 years.

The Green New Deal recognizes that transition would require massive change. It endorses ways of ensuring that vulnerable populations – including the poor, people of color, indigenous populations and communities already facing environmental degradation – take part in the planning process and benefit from the green economy.

Would it end the use of coal, oil and natural gas?

No. But it would aim to offset any remaining greenhouse gas pollution with forests that absorb carbon dioxide, for example. It does not specifically address what role nuclear power or fossil fuels with carbon capture technologies would play. Nuclear power represents half of the carbon-free energy in the US, but it runs on mined uranium. Fossil fuels with carbon capture would still require drilling and cause pollution.

How ambitious is the Green New Deal?

Incredibly ambitious, both on climate change and with its reimagining of society.

Fossil fuels are deeply embedded in the US economy. Of the total greenhouse gas emissions in the US in 2016, 28% were from electricity, 28% were from transportation, 22% were from industry, 11% were commercial and residential and 9% were from agriculture. MORE