Against the wishes of most western farmers, and in defiance of laws that they are sworn to uphold, Stephen Harper and his Conservatives are poised to destroy the Canadian Wheat Board. In truly Orwellian fashion, the Tories describe this as “democracy,” all the while invoking closure on Parliamentary debate and refusing to hold the farmers’ plebiscite that is required by federal law before any such major change can be made to the status of the CWB.
The CWB has been a bone of contention in farm policy circles for decades. While a loud minority of western grain producers have been clamoring for an end to the CWB monopoly on wheat and barley exports, most farmers continue to support the Board, as evidenced by several CWB Board of Directors election results and a recent CWB-sponsored plebiscite. The reason for the Board’s enduring support is that it works for farmers, as opposed to private grain companies who exist to maximize profits for their shareholders.
Urban Canadians have yet to wake up to this issue, though this is starting to happen. The Council of Canadians is prominent in the coalition of organizations leading the fightback. What we city slickers need to get our heads around is that this is, first and foremost, a battle for democracy. It is a struggle against growing corporate control of our food and the relentless corporatization of agriculture that is destroying rural communities.
One one level, the issues are complex. You can get a crash course by watching the video I produced along with my WCTV colleague Ken Harasym. Follow that up with visits to the web sites listed below and you will be well on your way.
On another level, it is very simple: like us, farmers are part of the 99%. We gotta stick together. Occupy that, Stephen Harper!
Despite its well established habit of electing social democratic governments, Winnipeg has claimed some dubious honors — “Murder Capital of Canada” and “Child Poverty Capital of Canada” to name two of the most disturbing. Even though we have had 11 years of NDP government to undo the damage of Gary Filmon’s Conservatives, both poverty and crime are well entrenched in Manitoba, especially in Winnipeg.
92,650 children in Manitoba live in families under the poverty threshold
29,000 children in Manitoba live in families with annual incomes insufficient for meeting basic needs
29,563 Manitoban children use food banks each month because their families cannot afford to purchase the necessary food they require
59,734 Manitobans accessed Employment and Income Assistance
The richest 20% of Manitoban families have more total income than the poorest 60% of the population
The Council says these statistics have not changed significantly since 1989, the year the House of Commons pledged to end child poverty in Canada by the year 2000.
What is to be done? According to the Manitoba Green Party, 80 per cent of all expenditures on social assistance programs are consumed by government bureaucracy. They proposed, in the last provincial election, to replace welfare benefits with a Universal Basic Income benefit, payable to all Manitobans, that would ensure no one slipped below the poverty line. The idea has merit and I hope the Greens continue to explain and promote it.
Yet another group of Manitobans proposes a package of measures they call a “Justice Charter to End Poverty in Manitoba.” I’ve included it at the end of this piece.
They also hold an annual event called the Four Directions Walk to End Poverty in which four contingents begin their walk on the outskirts of town and converge on the Manitoba Legislature. They held their fourth such walk on Saturday, Oct. 22. Naturally, I brought my video camera.
Justice Charter to End Poverty in Manitoba
We the people of Manitoba, seeing the growing gap between the wealthy and people in need, the working poor, and discriminated groups want to act in a timely manner to reverse the situation, to provide for people with needs and support the right for everyone to contribute to society to the best of their ability. To this end we make these demands and will work to make them a reality:
Housing must be a right and a comfort, not a constant crisis!
End subsidies to private landlords.
Establish stricter rent controls.
Enact a Tenant Bill of Rights.
Build and maintain public housing to the standard building code.
No utility cut-offs; establish a panel with legal power to require landlords to pay.
Universal health care for all, for every need!
Expand medicare into a comprehensive health care system focusing on prevention.
Extend medicare to cover all essential needs such as eye, drug, dental, ambulance and prosthetics.
Reduce pollution from mining and manufacturing, especially next to low income neighborhoods.
Jobs are a human right. Create good-paying jobs for all!
Create jobs through a massive investment in public housing, a public child care program, and conversion to a “green” economy.
Increase the minimum wage to $14 an hour.
Quality job creation by ensuring access to education, ending tuition fees, free student housing, education in Aboriginal and any other language where numbers warrant.
Access to better jobs – reduce the work week with no loss in pay, add paid vacation days and reduce the pension age for women to age 60.
End the Foreign Temporary Worker program, give these workers full labour rights and make them immigrants to Canada, if they so choose.
Provide for those in need!
Introduce a Guaranteed Liveable Income, above the poverty line and indexed to inflation.
Improve special needs benefits and introduce a fast appeals process with free advocacy services.
A public, high quality, free child care program employing well-paid early childhood development professionals.
Establish a hot breakfast program for children in schools.
For injured workers, establish a fast and free appeals process independent of the Workers Compensation Board. Provide free legal services and always respect the right to appeal.
Establish a Manitoba pension credit plan funded by payroll deductions, a surtax on corporate income to top up pensions above the poverty line and an inheritance wealth tax.
Establish a federally-chartered, publicly-owned bank that does not discriminate against people in poverty, is located in low-income areas, and provides free or nonprofit cheque cashing services and international fund transmittals.
Establish a province-wide, free and publicly-owned handi-transit service for people with disabilities.
Establish price controls for essential foods throughout Manitoba.
End racism, sexism and discrimination of all forms!
Support immediate settlement of Aboriginal land claims and emergency action to end housing, health care and education inequality.
Take steps to recognize Aboriginal nations on a new basis in Canada, including full national rights and equal nation to nation relations.
Introduce immediately affirmative action hiring with mandatory quotas for Aboriginal people, people of colour, women and people with disabilities in both the public and private sector.
Job pay equity for all workplaces.
Replace the present legal system of retribution and punishment with principles of restorative justice – restitution and reconciliation; include “ability to pay” as a consideration for sentencing people to jail for nonpayment of fines.
Ban discrimination based on social or mental health conditions in the Human Rights Code.
Introduce a Manitoba Bill of Rights based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), adding protections against all forms of sexism.
Reform the democratic system
Establish proportional representation so that people will vote for what they want and so that every person’s vote will count.
Pay Legislators the average worker’s wage and benefits in Manitoba.
The Justice Charter is for discussion by all Manitobans. The annual Four Directions Walk is Winnipeg’s largest annual anti-poverty activity. It is organized to encourage discussion of the ideas in this Charter. We invite groups representing Aboriginal peoples, women, workers, youth and students, people of colour, people with disabilities, injured workers, the working poor, people living in poverty, people of all faiths and nonbelievers – all supportive groups:
To establish a Four Directions Walk in other Manitoba communities.
To discuss the Charter and send us your ideas.
Contact us if you would like to receive information on the annual Walk, held on a Saturday close to the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty (October 17).
On Thursday, George W. Bush and former U.S. president Bill Clinton (himself an accomplished war criminal) will be attending the Surrey Regional Economic Summit at the Sheraton Vancouver Guildford Hotel. Here’s some information from the Canadian Peace Alliance on what you can do to support Bush’s arrest for war crimes.
» Report George W. Bush as a person likely to try to enter Canada contrary to section 35 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.
The Canadian Border Service Agency runs a Border Watch Toll-free line. Their website advertises:
“If you have information about suspicious cross-border activity, please contact the Canada Border Services Agency Border Watch Toll-free Line at 1-888-502-9060.”
George Walker Bush, born July 6, 1945 is likely to try to cross the border into Canada on or about October 18 to 20th 2011 to attend an event in Surrey British Columbia. Mr. Bush has admitted to authorizing and approving the widespread use of torture by the U.S. Armed Forces and the CIA. There are reasonable grounds to believe that George W. Bush, as the President of the United States of America and Commander in Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces between 2001 and 2009, counselled, aided and abetted the commission of torture and other war crimes and crimes against humanity in Iraq, Afghanistan and other locations. Experts estimate that in Iraq alone, over a million innocent men, women and children have died as a consequence of the illegal U.S.-led war on Iraq authorized and directed by George W. Bush.
For more information about the case to charge Bush as a war criminal please see: Lawyers Against the War
» October 20: Peaceful Rally to Protest George W Bush’s Surrey Visit
Thursday, October 20, 11:00 am
Join at the parking lot outside the Bay, Guildford Mall, SW corner of 152 St. & 104 Ave.
For info on this rally, please email stopwar@resist.ca http://stopwarca.wordpress.com/
» Sign the Online petition to arrest George Bush: www.amnesty.ca
Oct. 15, 2011: Scenes from Occupy Winnipeg – and a reminder that what is now called Canada was occupied long before by the aboriginal peoples of this part of the world. It is time the descendants of the Europeans who took the land from the people who were here first do a much better job of sharing it with today’s First Nations.
Winnipeggers took to the streets October 15, 2011 as part of the international outcry against corporate greed that began with Occupy Wall Street. The Flaming Trolleys provided just the right musical foundation, and, as usual, I took my video camera along.
Sept. 30, 2011 - Award-winning Israeli journalist Amira Hass speaking at the University of Winnipeg on the need to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Photo: Paul S. Graham
“Inhuman, immoral and unsustainable” are the words used by Amira Hass to describe what she terms “the State of Israel and the privileges it endows to Jews only, at the expense of Palestinians.”
Hass was at the University of Winnipeg Sept. 30, to provide a unique perspective on the Palestinian struggle, that of an Israeli Jew, a woman and a journalist for Haaretz, who has lived and worked in either Gaza or the West Bank for the past 17 years.
Hass was forceful in her denunciation of the conditions under which Palestinians live and uncompromising about the need to end the occupation and restore the rights of Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories. What especially caught my attention, however, was her diplomatic yet unmistakable suggestion that activists outside of Israel take stock of their own societies and refrain from applying a double standard toward Israel.
“I’m fully aware that I’m speaking here mostly to the privileged. You are also a settler society that owes a large part of its affluence and comfortable life to the disenfranchisement of native peoples,” Hass said early in her presentation. She continued, “I also know that many who are engaged in the struggle for justice for Palestine are aware of it and probably some of you are part of the struggle to undo some of the damage that your communities, that your society, has inflicted on the First Nations.”
Hass returned briefly to this theme late in her presentation. While she expressed profound regret that she and other Israeli activists had not succeeded in convincing fellow citizens to end the suppression of Palestinians, she advised activists to get a sense of proportion.
“I would call for some sort of proportion. The calls about Israeli illegitimacy – I understand them – but I also want to understand why Israel is more illegitimate as a settler society – why is it more illegitimate than Canada. . . . let’s not treat Israel as the only evil in the world.”
If you look at the map Hass used in her presentation (click for a larger view) it would seem that the Israelis have borrowed the Canadian playbook – force the aboriginal peoples onto isolated parcels of land, compel them to live in poverty and control every aspect of their existence until they lose the will to resist. The main difference in this regard is that we’ve been doing this to “our” native peoples for a much longer time.
My take-away from Amira Hass’s presentation: stand up for Palestinian rights, but remember your responsibility for stand up for aboriginal rights in Canada.
Please share this video widely, especially with those who have imbibed deeply at the well of Israeli propaganda. For them, it could be an eye-opener.
As the world marks ten years of war in Afghanistan, it is instructive to remember, as Michel Chossudovsky has observed, that the war started long before, in 1979, when the United States sponsored an insurgency against the Afghan government. Chossudovsky calls it “genocide”; I think he’s understating the situation.
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter, known these days for good works such as Habitat for Humanity and defending Palestinian rights (oh the irony!!), on the advice of Zbigniew Brezinski, turned the CIA loose upon the Afghans, trained and bankrolled the Mujaheddin and drew the Russians into a bloody quagmire as it sought, unsuccessfully, to defend the progressive, pro-Soviet Afghan government.
The rest, as they say, is history.
As an antidote to main-stream media mythologizing, take 20 minutes to watch this excellent report by James Corbett at Global Research TV. Then curse the war criminals and mourn the lives needlessly sacrificed to satisfy imperial greed. Then organize.
Cholera kills. Since the UN brought the disease to Haiti last year, 6,000 have died. Because this disease thrives in countries that lack potable water and sewage treatment infrastructure, it is unlikely to be eradicated soon in that country.
Cholera treatment facilities are likely to be an ongoing need in Haiti for some time to come. According to researchers at Harvard and University of California (San Francisco), the number of infections could rise to 779,000 this year. Sensibly, the Canadian Red Cross (CRC) did its part last November by setting up an 80-bed cholera treatment camp in Carrefour, and staffing it with 14 Canadian health and technical professionals, as well as local medical personnel.
However, with much fanfare, the Canadian Red Cross announced, in April 2011, that it was turning the operation over to the Haitian Red Cross. According to the CRC, cholera incidences had been reduced significantly. In the breathless, feel-good prose favoured by propagandists everywhere:
“That’s the real strength of the Red Cross,” explains Dave Batement, head of the Canadian Red Cross cholera treatment centre team. “We are training personnel from the Haitian Red Cross and giving them the tools they need to take over when we leave.”
Would that it were so . . .
In June, 2011, the Canada Haiti Action Network dispatched a small team to Haiti to gather information, gauge progress and learn how Canadians might express their solidarity. One of their objectives was to visit the cholera treatment camp in Carrefour.
This is what they went looking for.
This is what they found.
According to CHAN coordinator Roger Annis, the CRC didn’t transfer the centre; it closed it. “We met with Haitians there who told us the story,” says Annis, who added that the story was confirmed by staff at a nearby cholera treatment camp operated by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), who also told him of the increase in cholera cases after the CRC closed its camp.
Upon returning to Canada, Annis contacted the CRC for an explanation. Unwilling to be swayed by a few facts, the CRC spokesperson insisted that the camp was operating. Sigh . . . (insert your favourite expletives here).
Annis, and fellow delegation member Sandra Gessler, of the Winnipeg Haiti Solidarity Group, reported on their trip on September 26, 2011, in Winnipeg. As is my habit, I packed my video camera.
When asked if her party would support a moratorium on transporting radioactive nuclear fuel waste through Manitoba, Progressive Conservative candidate Heather Stephanson equivocated, saying she would not answer a “hypothetical question.”
By contrast, Green Party Leader James Beddome answered with a thunderous denunciation of allowing nuclear waste on Manitoba soil and declared the possibility of a Conservative government being elected Oct. 4 to be “hypothetical.”
Judging from the applause for Beddome and the lack of it for Stephanson, it was clear where the audience stood on this issue.
This is not a hypothetical issue. A movement has sprung up in Saskatchewan to prevent the establishment of a nuclear waste dump. A respected aboriginal elder, Emil Bell, is on a hunger strike against storing nuclear waste in Saskatchewan.
Kudos to Beddome for clearly stating his party’s anti-nuke position.
Against the wishes of most western farmers, and in defiance of laws that they are sworn to uphold, Stephen Harper and his Conservatives are poised to destroy the Canadian Wheat Board. In truly Orwellian fashion, the Tories describe this as “democracy,” all the while invoking closure on Parliamentary debate and refusing to hold the farmers’ plebiscite that is required by federal law before any such major change can be made to the status of the CWB.
