Rabble

Today marks the one-month anniversary of the student encampment movement, which started at Columbia University in New York City on April 17.

Since then, protests have spread to hundreds of campuses across North America and around the world, as students call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and to end their institutions’ complicity in Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land.

None of this should surprise us. Students have been at the forefront of every major progressive movement for change, from May 1968 in France, to the protests against the US war in Vietnam, to the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, and much more.

In Canada, students have set up encampments at 15 universities, with more likely in the works.

The protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful–and diverse. On almost every campus, Palestinian, Arab, and Jewish students, among many others, have been organizing alongside one another to raise united demands.

During Passover, many encampments held the Seder, attracting participation from students of all backgrounds and faiths.

Like the students who came before them, they have faced repression and condemnation from administrators, politicians, the media, and the police.

And like their forebears, they’re on the right side of history.

That’s why the rest of us, including workers, should support the students.

Despite the shameful attempts to criminalize them, they’re doing exactly what we claim we want them to do: think critically, speak truth to power, and take collective action for the common good.

Students are raising legitimate questions about how their institutions invest their endowments and whether they’re complicit in genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other acts of war.

And why wouldn’t they? Our elected leaders pay lip service to human rights all the time. When students ask them to act on those words, they feel discomfort because it exposes their hypocrisy. And so the powers-that-be try to shut the students down.

But the repression is only building their movement, like it did for previous generations.

During the French May in 1968, widespread police violence drew workers to the campuses, in defence of the students. Before long, workers started raising their own demands. In just a matter of weeks, ten million people were on strike. The impact of that movement continues to be felt in France, decades later.

Today’s movement is still a long way from that scale of protest, but a similar dynamic is underway, as parents, professors, and campus workers show up to support the students–many of them facing arrest, too. Labour leaders are also speaking out, defending freedom of speech and assembly and other civil liberties.

Not surprisingly, the so-called “free speech warriors” who, in recent years, have been fuelling far right encroachments of campus, have said nothing to defend the students. In fact, many are demanding a clampdown.

More worrying is the response of administrators who are relying on the police to end the protests by force. Like we saw last week at the University of Calgary and the University of Alberta, and at numerous institutions across the US, some university presidents have allowed baton-wielding riot police to violently target their own students and faculty.

The labour movement must not stand by and let these outrageous acts take place. We need to show up, speak out, and back the students. The forces attacking their rights are the same ones attacking ours.

In recent months, trade unions across Canada have experienced rising police repression on picket lines–a direct attack on workers’ Charter rights to free and fair collective bargaining, including the right to strike.

Workers have also experienced reprisals by employers–discipline, suspension, and even termination–merely for expressing their identity as Palestinians or their support for Palestinian human rights.

Alarmingly, Ontario Premier Doug Ford continues to tolerate the Legislature’s racist ban on the keffiyeh, a deeply significant cultural symbol for Palestinians and Arabs.

Labour must oppose and condemn all these acts of repression. It’s not just the right thing to do, it’s in our own interest to ensure a robust defence of everyone’s collective rights.

Years from now, when the students have won their demands and society’s attitudes have shifted, the same institutions that are currently repressing the encampments will be celebrating their resistance–as if they supported it all along.

The University of Toronto, one of the last in Canada to divest from South African Apartheid, now offers scholarships in Nelson Mandela’s name to students whose community involvement demonstrates “a commitment to promoting peace, justice, citizenship and human rights.”

Sound familiar?

After just one month, students are making history again–and they’re just getting started. Workers have an interest in joining them. The better world that students are fighting for, from Gaza to Turtle Island, is one that would benefit working people everywhere.

The more that workers are a part of that struggle, the sooner it will win its demands.

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May 17 is the International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia, and in the lead up to that day, leaders across the country took a pledge to support Rainbow Equality.

For the first time, the Society for Queer Momentum and their partners organized a national Rainbow Week. The week saw events take place across Canada to push back against rising hate of 2SLGBTQIA+ groups, culminating in the International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia.

As a part of the campaign, the Society for Queer Momentum challenged public leaders to take the pledge to support Rainbow Equality. By pledging to support Rainbow Equality, those that make the pledge are committing themselves to supporting and protecting the rights of 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals.

Many leaders have already taken the pledge, including NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, federal minister for women, gender equality and youth Marci Ien, Green Party leader Elizabeth May, Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Ontario president Fred Hahn and many others.

As allies and members of 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, we're pleased to support the Rainbow Week of Action. CUPE members across Ontario have attended rallies and actions, because it's more important than ever that we fight for a better future for all. pic.twitter.com/Z9E5gU4LNN

— CUPE Ontario (@CUPEOntario) May 15, 2024

Unions speak out on International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia

In addition to several labour leaders taking the Rainbow Equality pledge, many unions issued official statements of support on the International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia.

The statement from CUPE Ontario reads in part:

“It is vital that we show our support for the protection of rights for members of 2SLGBTQIA+ communities. Support for the Rainbow Week of Action and the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia have a special importance this year, as a coalition of partners sign on to the week. Labour unions and organizations, including CUPE’s National Pink Triangle Committee and the Ontario Federation of Labour, have pledged their support and CUPE Ontario’s Pink Triangle Committee also has put forward a resolution to join as a partner.”

Canada’s largest private sector union, Unifor, was another major union pledging their support on May 17. In a statement, they underscored the importance of supporting the 2SLGBTQIA+ community as they face rising levels of hate.

The Unifor states that:

“2SLGBTQIA+ individuals are currently being targeted by hate-promoting movements in Canada. We see this in aggressive, divisive United States-style policy changes impacting schools across the country. We see this in how trans and gender-diverse people’s access to necessary care is being blocked. We see this in the way discussions on identify and sexual diversity in schools is being restricted, further stigmatizing those struggling to find community, representation, and to better understand gender, identity, and expression.”

Rising levels of hate

The 2SLGBTQIA+ community has seen rising levels of hate and oppression over the past few years in North America.

Last year the so-called 1 Million March 4 Children saw far-right extremists form rallies across Canada calling for the oppression of 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals based on baseless propaganda and stereotypes.

There has been growing levels of discrimination against the 2SLGBTQIA+ community at the institutional level as well.

Three provinces in Canada passed laws that attempted to take away rights from 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals, particularly trans individuals.

New Brunswick, Saskatchewan and Alberta all passed laws requiring students under the age of 17 to receive parental permission before being allowed to use their correct pronouns in school. Alberta also went as far as to block access to lifesaving gender-affirming care for trans youths.

In a visit this week to New Brunswick, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau blasted Premier Blaine Higgs for his anti-trans policies.

“I trust parents, I trust schools,” Trudeau said according to a report by the CBC. “And I don’t think we should be trying to score political points off of kids who are incredibly vulnerable, who shouldn’t be targeted by political parties wanting to get elected or to get re-elected.”

Fae Johnstone, executive director of the Society for Queer Momentum said that the 2SLGBTQIA+ community will not be made to live in fear.

“We refuse to live in fear. We refuse to cower because we know that that’s what the homophobes & transphobes want. They want us scared. But we are defiant,” Johnstone wrote on X. “We are speaking up. We are building community, spreading love and taking action for #RainbowEquality.”

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The global union IndustriALL has been helping workers at the Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz plants in the traditionally anti-union south of the United States. The workers at Volkswagen won their union with the UAW. The Mercedes-Benz workers are voting. Right-to-work laws have been introduced in Alberta. In Canada IndustriALL represents unions such as Unifor and the Teamsters.

RadioLabour is the international labour movement’s radio service. It reports on labour union events around the world with a focus on unions in the developing world. It partners with rabble to provide coverage of news of interest to Canadian workers.

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This week on rabble radio, we feature a segment from our most recent Off the Hill political panel. This month, our theme was ‘Off the Hill: The myths and realities of Canada’s labour shortage’

Our panel featured MP Matthew Green, economist Jim Stanford, president of the Ontario Federation of Labour Laura Walton and researcher and policy analyst at the CCPA, Véronique Sioufi.

About our guests

MP Matthew Green was first elected Member of Parliament for Hamilton Centre in 2019 and re-elected in 2021. Previously, he served for the 2014-2018 term as the Ward 3 Councillor, and first person of colour to be elected to Hamilton City Council. Green is NDP Critic for  Employment and Workforce Development; Labour; Ethics; and Deputy Critic for Public Services and Procurement.

Laura Walton is the President of the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL), Canada’s largest provincial labour federation. The OFL represents 54 unions and one million workers in Ontario. Laura previously served as the President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees’ Ontario School Board Council of Unions (OSBCU), which represents over 55,000 education workers across the province. In 2022, Laura led an historic strike that won unprecedented gains for OSCBU members and that led to the defeat of Bill 28, the provincial government’s landmark anti-labour legislation.

Jim Stanford is an economist and the director of the Centre for Future Work, a labour economics research institute with operations in Canada and Australia.

Véronique Sioufi is the racial and socio-economic equity researcher and policy analyst at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives BC.

Check out the entire panel on rabbleTV or rabble’s YouTube channel!

If you like the show please consider subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. And please, rate, review, share rabble radio with your friends — it takes two seconds to support independent media like rabble. Follow us on social media across channels @rabbleca. 

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Earlier this year Oshawa, ON, Del Monte shuttered the doors to the local factory. Seventy-one workers at the Oshawa Del Monte factory were terminated without notice or severance pay

Prior to the closure, these workers were on the picket line fighting for a livable wage above poverty line and other basic compensations. Three weeks into the strike, Del Monte announced the factory was shutting down and stated it was due to the economic impact of the strike.

But since Del Monte used a third-party temporary staffing agency, Premier, to hire these 71 workers, the company was able to subvert Ontario employment laws by simply cancelling their temp agency contract.

“That’s a massive loophole that was exploited in this situation which made it so that Premier didn’t have to give any kind of termination or severance pay to these workers and especially to workers who had been there for five years and who are entitled to severance pay,” said Navjeet Sidhu, international director at Unifor.

“In this situation, it was really gaps in the Employment Standards Act. Whenever an employer terminates a contract, it really gives zero protection for the workers because they have very little recourse in that situation. It’s a constant issue for workers,” Sidhu added.

In the event that a worker is terminated because of economic loss or discontinuation of business because of a strike, they are not entitled to notice of termination or severance pay according to Ontario’s Employment Standards Act (ESA).

“Essentially again, they’re blaming the workers who were not asking for $40 an hour increases. You know, they were asking for a very modest increase from $16 to $20, and they even brought that demand down to $18. And still, Premier just came back with a very insulting five cent increase offer to their wages,” said Sidhu.

Exploitative nature of temporary staffing agencies and multinational companies

When the Oshawa Del monte workers took to the picket line when Premier presented them with an insulting offer on wage increases.

“For the first year we were offered 5 cents … and then 50 cents for the second year, and then adding $1 for the last year,” said Wilma Delo, organizer and chairperson of Migrante Barrie. 

If the offer was accepted, workers would get a total of $1.55 over three years. In addition to fair wages, workers were fighting for other basic compensations such as paid sick days, bereavement leave and basic benefits.

Despite being a multinational company, Del Monte refused to provide Premier with resources to provide better working conditions.

According to a letter from Unifor national president, Lana Payne to Premier Doug Ford, the company makes over $4 billion USD in revenue each year. For 2023, they are expected to see post profits of $400 million.

“Employers who use temporary agencies and then they just cancel contracts. They call [it] flip contracts so they can have this revolving door of vulnerable exploitable workers that they don’t have to provide benefits, pensions, vacations, sick pay and that kind of thing,” said Sidhu.

“It gets them off the hook of all these basic benefits and compensation that employers should be giving workers,” Sidhu added.

Legislation gap in protecting workers hired by temp agencies

The situation in Oshawa Del Monte revealed a gap in regulating temporary staffing agencies. The complex relationship between temp agencies, multinational corporations, unions and workers ultimately disrupts fair collective bargaining and tips the scale in favour of employers. 

The use of temp agencies also allowed Del Monte to bypass employment laws and exploit workers, many of which were from low-income and racialized communities.

Earlier this year, two letters from Unifor were sent to the Ontario government to call attention to this legislative loophole—one directly from Unifor national president Lana Payne and a joint letter from Unifor and Migrante.

Currently, mediation is underway to get workers severance pay from Del Monte and Premier. Both Unifor and Migrante are working together to find ways to help these workers.

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Gratuitous police violence on campus in the wee hours last Saturday has obviously exacerbated the foolish blunder made by University of Alberta President Bill Flanagan when he called in the riot squad to clear out a small encampment of students protesting the ongoing destruction of Gaza.

Whether the university president came up with the brainstorm himself or was pushed into calling the cops by others, the pot is now boiling over and Flanagan’s departure is clearly on the growing protest movement’s list of objectives.

About 400 University of Alberta students, professors, staff, and even some of those dreaded “outsiders” gathered outside the campus administration building at earlier this week and loudly demanded his resignation for siccing billy-club wielding Edmonton Police Service cops in miliary-style fatigues in on the peaceful Palestine solidarity encampment.

There were enthusiastic chants of “Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Flanagan has got to go!”

But the demonstration organized by Faculty for Palestine Alberta was only a part of the growing political problem faced by President Flanagan, who appears to have made things worse for himself with widely mocked claims in two statements published on the university’s website that the encampment “put the university community’s safety at risk.”

The faculty group published an open letter “against the brutalization of students at the hands of administrators at the U of A” that as of yesterday had been signed by 255 faculty members and 807 staff, students, parents, alumni and community members.

In addition to disclosure and divestment of university investments in Israel, the letter demands amnesty for all protesters caught up in the police raid, an apology and complete retraction of threats of discipline by campus security employees against protesters, and Flangan’s resignation. 

Also, the University of Calgary’s respected law blog, ABlawg.ca, published “An Open Letter Regarding the Response to Recent Protests at the Universities of Alberta and Calgary” signed by 19 members of the U of C and U of A law faculties.

The letter expresses the signatories’ “deep concern about the violent infringement of students’ right to protest by the Calgary Police Service, Edmonton Police Service, University of Calgary, and University of Alberta on May 9 and 11, 2024.”

Among other things, that letter calls on the Alberta Crown Prosecution Services to withdraw all charges stemming from the breakup of encampments on both campuses, the referral of both clearances to the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team for investigation, and revocation of trespass notices and removal of restrictions on students, staff, faculty, or alumni to be on campus stemming from the police actions. 

This has obviously worried the Premier’s Office – which is widely suspected of having played some role in the two university administrations’ decisions to call in the cops. At any rate, Premier Danielle Smith told reporters she would ask ASIRT to investigate, although no one should expect that to result in meaningful criticism of the two police services’ actions. 

On Monday, the U of A’s academic, non-academic and student unions jointly signed a letter to President Flanagan expressing “deep concern and disappointment” with the clearances. 

“The visual evidence of the forceful removal of protestors has sent a chilling message to students, faculty, and staff, suggesting that dissent will be met with aggression rather than dialogue,” the union letter said. “This approach not only undermines the core value of freedom of expression but also poses significant risk to the reputation and perceived safety of our university, which should be a place of learning, not fear and intimidation.”

Yesterday’s protest was addressed by former U of A Associate Dean of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Natalie Loveless, who resigned Monday in response to the police violence and Flanagan’s statements, which she said in her resignation letter advanced “a description of events at odds with what I personally witnessed.”

In a list of requests to university leadership, Dr. Loveless urged the university to “immediately stop making unsubstantiated or spurious claims that the encampment was a danger and protesters were potentially violent.”

“The encampment was peaceful and modeled solidarity between Palestinian, Jewish, and Indigenous communities and allies,” she wrote. “None of the supposed threats to safety outlined in President Flanagan’s letters corresponds to my personal observations or the testimonies of many others who visited the camps.”

Whether President Flanagan can hunker down and ride his bad reviews out now depends on how his actions are seen throughout the broader university community.

University presidents are not elected, but there can come a point when even a conservative board of governors can no longer tolerate a president who has lost the respect of too many students and faculty. This is just practical politics. 

Former NDP leader weighs in on the dangers of venturing into ‘Liberal-land’

In a rare post on his Grumpy Old Socialist blog, former Alberta NDP leader Brian Mason has weighed in on Alberta Federation of Labour President Gil McGowan’s departure from the NDP leadership race and the NDP’s troubles winning back working class voters. 

“Why are working people abandoning the NDP?” asked Mason. “In part, it’s because the NDP has abandoned them.”

“This phenomenon can be observed world-wide, as social democratic parties move to the right in an attempt to reach their elusive pot of gold,” Mason wrote. “Workers feel abandoned and become prey for conservative and far-right parties.”

Mason pointed to how several union members in the NDP’s 2015 caucus lost their nominations or decided not to seek reelection. “One reason was a desire by the party leadership to attract more professionals and business people, including those with connections to the energy industry. Some long term NDP activists were also passed over in pursuit of these goals.

“We are seeing the results of this policy today, as a huge liberal wave threatens to drown the social democratic elements of the party,” he said.

“If the Alberta NDP is to avoid permanently veering off into Liberal-land, it needs the labour movement more than ever,” Mason concluded.

It’s worth a read. 

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Hemp has been promoted as a solution to a wide range of environmental issues — as an alternative to petroleum-based plastics, resource-depleting cotton, polluting fossil fuels, energy-intensive building materials, forest-destroying paper products and more. It’s even considered a healthy food source for people and animals and can be used to make cosmetics.

Should the hemp hype give us hope?

Hemp has been used for fibre, food and medicine for tens of thousands of years and is thought to be one of the earliest cultivated plants. Today, “hemp” usually refers to cannabis plants that are low in the psychoactive ingredients tetrahydrocannabinol and cannabidiol (THC and CBD), but any cannabis plant can be used for its fibre.

Much of the hype is true — although whether cannabis is a medicinal cure-all is a topic we don’t have space to cover here.

Hemp cultivation and use were hampered in the early 20th century in North America and elsewhere. Largely because of racist drug laws, growing it was criminalized in the United States in 1937 under the Marihuana Tax Act, and in Canada in 1938 under the Opium and Narcotic Drug Act. Industrial hemp cultivation and production were legalized in Canada in 1998 and in the U.S. in 2018, leading many to reconsider its benefits.

Hemp fibre has numerous advantages over other materials, including cotton. It can also be used to make packaging and building materials that are more environmentally friendly than petroleum-based plastics and other materials, and it can be converted to fuel.

Many of hemp’s advantages are in how it grows — a reason it’s often called “weed.” It’s fast-growing and doesn’t require a lot of water or space, and has properties that can reduce the need for chemical herbicides and pesticides. Its deep root systems store carbon from the atmosphere, prevent erosion and replenish soil nutrients after harvesting. It can also be used for cover crop as it can remediate contaminated soils and prevent weeds, nematodes and harmful fungi.

Cotton uses about 50 per cent more water than hemp to grow, and about four times as much when processing is included. Hemp can also produce about twice as much fibre per hectare as cotton. According to a study by researchers in Bangladesh, “Hemp fiber cultivation requires about 77.63 percent less cost in fertilization, seeds, field operation, and irrigation costs than cotton, the most recognized natural fiber.”

Cotton has a few advantages over hemp, but they’re not major. Cotton is softer and easier to process, although that means hemp is more durable. Hemp fabrics are also less colour-fast, wrinkle more easily and are more difficult to recycle. Hemp is also more expensive and requires a bit more energy to process, but its costs could come down as more enters the market.

Cost is also the main disadvantage to hemp bioplastic, but that’s partly because plastic made from fossil fuels is priced artificially low because the damage the industry causes isn’t factored in. Bioplastic made from hemp is biodegradable and much stronger and lighter than oil-based plastic, which doesn’t break down completely and is fouling our lands, waters and even our bodies. Hemp bioplastic has already been used for everything from packaging to car parts.

As for biofuels made from hemp, again, they’re far more environmentally friendly than fossil fuels — but also more expensive, for some of the same reasons. Hemp biofuels are mainly derived from oils in the seeds but can also be made from other plant parts and biochar. Hemp fuel is renewable, unlike fossil fuels, and is carbon-neutral because the emissions it creates are offset by the carbon it sequesters when it’s growing.

An added bonus: increasing decriminalization and legalization of psychoactive cannabis for recreational and medicinal purposes means a lot more cannabis hemp is being grown. Because the psychoactive cannabis industry mainly uses the buds, flowers and leaves, the fibre-containing stems and stalks can be used for other purposes, reducing waste. A win-win!

Overall, whether it’s used for fabrics, bioplastics, fuels, paper products or building materials, hemp has many advantages and few disadvantages. The biggest drawback, cost, will surely be reduced as more hemp is grown and more facilities are built to process it. It’s also far better for the environment than cotton, fossil fuels and tree-based paper products.

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with David Suzuki Foundation Senior Writer and Editor Ian Hanington. Learn more at davidsuzuki.org.

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Every 48 hours, a woman or girl is killed in Canada. This chilling statistic, from the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability, underscores the urgent need for movements like the Moose Hide Campaign.

The impactful Moose Hide Campaign is ramping up for its annual National Day of Action, happening next week. This powerful grassroots movement, started by Paul Lacerte and Raven Lacerte, calls on all Canadians to wear a moose hide pin as a visible pledge to end violence against women and children.

The campaign began in 2011, driven by Lacerte’s desire to address the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG). Since then, it has transcended its origins, uniting Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities across the country in a shared commitment to creating safer spaces for everyone. Raven Lacerte, the founder of the Moose Hide Campaign, shared her personal dedication to the cause. 

“There’s violence happening that continues every single day in this country. Women and children are unsafe, and we can’t take our foot off the gas pedal. We have to keep going and inviting Canadians into this space. My dad wanted to do this work for my sisters and me, and now that I’m a mom myself, I understand that on such a deep level. I’m willing to do anything for my girls to live a life free of violence,” Lacerte said.

A growing movement: Moose Hide campaign distributed their six millionth pin!

The iconic moose hide pin has become a symbol of solidarity and action. With over six million pins distributed, the campaign has sparked countless conversations about gender-based violence. According to Statistics Canada, a large majority (79 per cent) of those reporting intimate partner violence to police are women. Sixty-seven per cent of people who experience family violence are women and girls.

This year’s National Day of Action promises to be a significant one. Organizers are expecting widespread participation, with events planned in communities large and small. Schools, workplaces, and government institutions are all encouraged to wear moose hide pins and hold awareness-raising activities. 

Voices from the community

Ben Castro, a substance use counsellor at Watari Counselling & Support Services, Vancouver, emphasizes the urgency of the issue and the support he has received from his workplace. 

“There weren’t many other events popping up locally when I started planning this (local event). Given how big of an issue this is, I decided not to wait and that it’s my time to step up. I’ve known about the issue of gender-based violence from a young age and continued to learn about it in many ways over the years. For me, it’s about time all that theory and lived experience gets translated into action,” said Castro. 

Tragically, at least 850 women and girls in Canada were violently killed between 2018 and 2022, according to the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability’s annual report.

The National Union of Employees (NEU) in Iqaluit is actively participating, recognizing the issue’s importance for its members. 

“Our union is working hard to get Family Abuse Leave in all our Collective Agreements,” said NEU president Jason Rochon. 

The union is setting up information tables and encouraging its members to wear moose hide pins on the National Day of Action. 

“We want to see awareness, and that men and everyone recommit to living healthy lives and treating women with respect, kindness, and fairness. We must set a high standard and remember that children are watching us,” he added.

What should men care?

“Men are statistically more likely to do violence to an intimate partner or domestic or gender-based kind of violence,” explained David, CEO of the Moose Hide Campaign. 

The proportion of women killed by a spouse or intimate partner is over eight times greater than the proportion of men.

“It’s crucial for men to understand the roots of violence and take accountability. We need to create a culture where men hold each other accountable and foster environments of respect and safety,” said David.

What can men do?

Men play a crucial role in the Moose Hide Campaign. They are encouraged to take a stand against violence by wearing the moose hide pin, participating in workshops and events, and speaking out against violence in their communities.

Indigenous wisdom leading the way

Selby Harris, a Kizhaay Anishinaabe Niin worker at the Hamilton Regional Indian Centre, sees the campaign as a “warrior for love.” He said “(his) role as the Kizhaay Anishinaabe Niin Worker (I Am a Kind Man in Ojibway) is to role model the Seven Grandfather teachings and to show that violence is and never will be accepted.” 

Raven Lacerte, co-founder of the Moose Hide Campaign, emphasizes that the work is far from over. 

“We can’t stop until the violence stops,” she said. 

Her vision for the future includes reaching 10 million pins distributed and mobilizing a million Canadians for a national day of action.

What you can do

The Moose Hide Campaign offers numerous ways to get involved:

• Wear a moose hide pin: Order one for free from the campaign website.
• Participate in Moose Hide Campaign Day: Attend an event, fast for the day, or participate in online workshops.
• Talk to the men and boys in your life: Start conversations about healthy masculinity and ending violence.
• Educate yourself: Take the campaign’s online learning course, “We Are Medicine.”
• Support organizations working to end gender-based violence: Donate or volunteer your time.

For more information and resources, visit the Moose Hide Campaign website: https://moosehidecampaign.ca/

A message for all people

Violence against women and children is a pervasive issue that affects all communities. By participating in the Moose Hide Campaign, you are contributing to a positive change, promoting awareness and education, and standing in solidarity with survivors and advocates. The campaign isn’t about shame or blame, Castro emphasizes, but about responsibility. 

“Those are all traditionally masculine qualities that I enjoy embracing and see in men all the time. The work is then to do that for the goal of all-gendered liberation.”

While the statistics on gender-based violence are alarming, it’s crucial to remember that domestic violence is 100 per cent preventable. The Moose Hide Campaign‘s National Day of Action May 16, is more than a single day event; it’s a movement calling on everyone to actively participate in creating a society where all genders are safe and respected. 

Join the movement and wear your moose hide pin with pride and start a courageous conversation about gender-based violence at your dinner table today.

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Rex Murphy died last week, and all the usual suspects are sad. The print, online and broadcast media have been awash with over-the-top encomia, (a pretentious word Murphy would have used)  many from the fever swamps of the Canadian right and a few from more middle of the road observers. All portray him as Canada’s favorite Newfie, a bold commentator on politics and culture, a fearless opponent of everything “woke” and a loveably colourful character.

I beg to differ. But first, a few selections from the tsunami of treacle that has swept across the nation marking the death.

Many who came to praise Murphy echoed variations on fellow Maritimer and comic Mark Critch’s comment. Critch told the CBC “You might not agree with what Rex had to say, but oh, boy, could he ever say it.”

Right wing podcaster and celebrity Jordan Peterson told the National Post that “He was the kind of man who saw exactly what was plain for all to see, and was unforgiving in his proclivity to point all that obviousness out to the men and women who refuse to acknowledge the blinding beams obscuring their own vision.”

“Alberta’s government and her people send our condolences and love to the family, friends, and colleagues of Rex Murphy. Canada will never have a voice like his again- as a proud Newfoundlander he championed what he believed to be right for our country and was always a good and true friend to Alberta. Rest in peace, dearest Rex,” wrote Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.

And former Prime Minister Stephen Harper weighed in,  as well,  saying “Rex Murphy was one of the most intelligent and fiercely free-thinking journalists this country has ever known.”

We are often counseled to speak no  ill of the dead, advice that has never really made sense to me. What better time than the death of a public figure to assess their impact on public life?  That said, I should say that my negative assessment of Murphy is not based on any personal animus. The one time he interviewed me on CBC’s Cross Country Check-Up, he was perfectly amiable and civil. Nevertheless, I cannot bring myself to join in the chorus of praise that has followed his death.

Murphy built much of his public persona on a kind of Maritime minstrel show performance, a guy with a Newfoundland accent who knew big words! It would take all day to unpack just how meretricious and insulting that act was, and how steeped its success was in anti-Newfie stereotypes. Suffice it to say that the schtick was mildly entertaining on first encounter but got old and boring very soon.

And can we stop pretending there is anything brave about using a perch at the centre of Canadian media  to decry social justice and the environmental movement, and to uncritically endorse the world destroying fossil fuel industries that are blackening the world’s skies and disrupting global climate?  Murphy served the petroleum industry well and was well paid by Big Petro for his services, payment that came primarily in the form of fat speaking fees. This cozy relationship and the conflict of interest it represented should, at the very least, have been acknowledged in every pro-pollution column he published and every time he hosted a CBC show that discussed petroleum industry and climate change concerns.

The embarrassingly effusive response to Murphy’s death will subside soon enough, but this does need saying. Rex Murphy was a well-paid propagandist for one of the most harmful industries in Canada, and a defender of all the prejudices and harms that the “woke” movements he so despised try to remedy. Perhaps his headstone should read “Rex Murphy, Rest in Profit.”

The post Swimming upstream against a torrent of treacle: Rex Murphy considered appeared first on rabble.ca.

Joe Biden is a dangerous man. He currently is conducting two major American-led proxy wars: one in the Middle East, the other in the Ukraine. These wars have led to a significant loss of life, destruction of the environment and unprecedented expenditures and use of armaments. But that is not the man who Biden believes himself to be. His self-delusion hides his murderer’s face. Rather, when he sees himself, he is simply an amiable guy doing what he believes is best for his country. But what he believes is best for his country is informed in large part by his deeply held imperialist beliefs and ambitions that he has sought to realize over the years through NATO.

NATO has grown from 12 countries at its inception in 1949 to the current number of 32 and Biden has been one of its foremost architects. 

For example, NATO has expanded eastward, with the placement of weapons, into the former Warsaw Pact nations including Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria, and as well as into former parts of the former Soviet Union such as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. 

In a 1997 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Biden forcefully laid out the case for the United States to uphold a robust NATO alliance over the long term. “The United States is a European power,” he said. “We have a strong interest.”

In 1998 Biden was quoted as characterizing the additions of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia to NATO as “righting an historical injustice forced upon them by Joseph Stalin. This, in fact, is the beginning of another 50 years of peace” he crowed, quite unaware of what would become of his actions.

As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2008, Biden called for expanding NATO membership to countries in the Balkans including Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia. He boasted, “Here in the Senate, I helped lead the effort to enlarge NATO.” 

In 2009, Biden expressed support for Ukrainian membership in NATO saying, “We do not recognize anyone else’s right to dictate to any other country what alliance it should seek to belong to, or what relationships, bilateral relationships, you have.”  

Putin, for many years, had been especially concerned about NATO’s courting of Ukraine to join its alliance. Geographically, Ukraine shares an extensive border with Russia, making Russia exceedingly vulnerable to a military attack by a hostile heavily armed future NATO neighbor. Biden’s statement is designed to purposely obfuscate Putin’s understandable concern and rather instead assert unfettered access and control of Ukraine for NATO.

With these remarks, Biden was already setting the stage for what would become, 13 years later, a fateful confrontation with the Russian leader.

During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden made the following bellicose statement “I want to make it clear, absolutely clear to all the people of the Baltic States, we have pledged our sacred honor, the United States of America, our sacred honor to the NATO Treaty and the right to defend under Article 5.” A declaration of war for Putin’s ears.

Later, now as the U.S. President, Biden pledged to the Bucharest Nine, the group of Eastern European countries added to the NATO alliance during the Clinton and Bush administrations, to “defend literally every inch of NATO against Russia.” These words could have only further antagonized Putin.

In March and April 2021, the Russians began amassing thousands of personnel and military equipment near their border with Ukraine and Crimea. A second build-up began in October 2021, this time with more soldiers and with deployments on new fronts. By December over 100,000 Russian troops were amassed around Ukraine on three sides, including Belarus from the north and Crimea from the south. 

In December 2021, Russia advanced two draft treaties that contained requests for what it referred to as “security guarantees”, including a legally binding promise that Ukraine would not join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and a reduction in NATO troops stationed in Eastern Europe and threatened an unspecified military response if those demands were not met in full.

At that moment in time, Biden had an opportunity in which he could have undone the crisis that was now unfolding around him and to which he had personally contributed. There existed the possibility that he could have brought the world back from the brink of a catastrophic war through his own singular efforts. 

On February 12, 2022, Biden spoke directly alone with Vladimir Putin for two hours by telephone, ten days before what would be Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine. Earlier in the day on February 12, the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken talked to his counterpart Sergei Lavrov. Lavrov raised with Blinken that the U.S. was continuing to ignore its security proposals, which include a guarantee that Ukraine would not join NATO and a withdrawal of NATO forces from eastern Europe. These concerns were not new to Blinken as they had been reiterated on many occasions by Russian leaders in the past. No doubt Biden was briefed about Blinken’s phone call before he took his own personal phone call with Putin. So, when Biden took the call, he was well aware of what Putin’s concerns were. 

In this two-hour phone call, according to U. S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Biden made no commitments or concessions on NATO regarding a reduced U.S. military presence in Eastern Europe nor Ukraine’s potential membership in NATO. Biden refused to take any responsibility or acknowledgement in the phone call of the provocative military threat he had created towards Russia through his promotion of NATO expansion and his advocating for Ukrainian membership.

This fleeting opportunity for peace was lost through Biden’s failure to transcend his own imperial worldview. In his view, NATO’s concerns and interests are non-negotiable. NATO exists to be constantly growing; to be adding more and more countries; more and more armaments; more and more power. NATO’s actions he understood were beyond reproach because they were, after all, done in the service of security. NATO had right on its side and therefore had nothing to answer for.

For Biden in that phone call there were no doubts. No deals to be made with the undeserving. And if Putin wanted war, let that be on his head. Not ours.

Ten days later Russia invaded the Ukraine and began the proxy war that has now raged for over two years.

The Ukrainian war has been a very generous gift for NATO. New members are clamoring to join. The profits of the armament sales of NATO’s suppliers have reached astronomical levels and its goal of militarizing the economies of Canada and Europe is advancing with promise. Further, NATO is expanding into the Asia-Pacific region and other areas as well. Its power has never been greater.

In turn, Biden is playing his part by pushing through the U.S. Congress a steady stream of massive appropriation bills of increasingly lethal weapons destined for Ukraine and urging his fellow NATO members “not to waiver” in their gifts to Ukraine’s President Zelensky. He repeatedly pledges to the world that he will “do whatever it takes for as long as it takes” to defend Ukraine against the Russians. Actions and words that have, to date, ensured the continuation, not the ending of the war.

We see in the relationship between Joe Biden and NATO an unwavering blind arrogance, which has now led the world into war. They are both driven to compete and win at all costs. To see their ambitions as a sacred trust that should go forever unquestioned.

Mark Leith is a retired psychiatrist, a past board member of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and a member of Seniors for Climate Action Now.

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For our fourth episode, Scholasticide and solidarity: The mind and memory of Gaza, we welcome University of Toronto professor, researcher and host of the Liberation Pedagogy Podcast, Dr. Chandni Desai and Mount Royal University professor, author and policy analyst with Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, Dr. Muhannad Ayyash.

Discussing the months-long Israeli military onslaught waged on Palestinians, we focus on the destruction of Gaza’s educational systems, educators and students, the role of scholasticide within genocide and the global solidarity mobilizing across university and college campuses to counter it.

Reflecting on scholasticide and the meaning of education for the Palestinian people Desai says:

“Scholasticide is the systemic destruction of the Palestinian education system, which has been ongoing since the 1948 Nakba…But in this genocide ..we are seeing a complete annihilation of the education system in Gaza…When a people have lost everything, including the land …education has become a really important pillar, not just in terms of preserving a national identity across fragmented borders and fragmented geographies, but also as a central pillar of knowledge that gets passed on in various ways that contribute to the cause for liberation. ”

Speaking on the rise of global pro-Palestinian solidarity, including on university campuses, Ayyash says:

“One of the reasons that the Palestinian struggle speaks to so many people around the world, why we see so many people going on their streets in all corners of the globe, speaking up for Palestine .. [i]t’s precisely because the Palestinian struggle makes clear… a yearning for a liberation from the age of colonial modernity that has brought far too much death and destruction for too many around the world …In this moment, the Palestinian struggle is becoming a political consciousness. .. a way for people to make sense of their own systems of oppression.. that oppress and repress their own aspirations for freedom in their own context..”

About the guests:

Dr. Muhannad Ayyash was born and raised in Silwan, Al-Quds, before immigrating to Canada where he is professor of Sociology at Mount Royal University. He is also a policy analyst at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. He is the author of A Hermeneutics of Violence, has co-edited two books, and is the author of multiple journal articles, book chapters, and opinion pieces.

Dr. Chandni Desai is an assistant professor in the Critical Studies of Equity and Solidarity at the University of Toronto. Her areas of research, teaching and supervision include: comparative settler colonialisms, Palestine studies, the politics of the Middle East, state violence (carceral politics, militarism and war), cultures of resistance and revolution, political economy, third world internationalism, solidarity, memory, oral history, anti-racism and feminism. She is working on her first book Revolutionary Circuits of Liberation: The Radical Tradition of Palestinian Resistance Culture and Internationalism. Desai also hosts the Liberation Pedagogy Podcast.

Check out Scholars Against the War on Palestine and SAWP’s International Actions Against Scholasticide Toolkit.

Transcript of this episode can be accessed at georgebrown.ca/TommyDouglasInstitute or here.

Image: Chandni Desai, Muhannad Ayyash  / Used with permission.

Music: Ang Kahora. Lynne, Bjorn. Rights Purchased.

Intro Voices: Ashley Booth (Podcast Announcer); Bob Luker (Tommy); Grace Taruc-Almeda, Karin Maier and Jim Cheung (Street Voices)

Courage My Friends Podcast Organizing Committee: Chandra Budhu, Ashley Booth, Resh Budhu.

Produced by: Resh Budhu, Tommy Douglas Institute and Breanne Doyle, rabble.ca. 

Host: Resh Budhu.

The post Scholasticide and solidarity: The mind and memory of Gaza appeared first on rabble.ca.

May 13, 2024: Gaza and the West Bank continue to drown in blood today, with the death toll in Gaza now over 35,000 plus over 78,000 wounded.

Seven hundred and ninety-four brutal attacks by settlers and Israeli Defense Force (IDF) troops  have killed nearly 500 Palestinians in the West Bank and burned down their villages since October 7, according to the Washington Post.

As I write this column on May 13, IDF bombs are falling on Gaza and  land assaults on both south and north Gaza seem to be ramping up. All the usual horrors of civilian casualties, many of them women and children, continue. So too does the crushing of the human-built environment in Gaza’s cities. Palestinians, seeing Gaza rapidly leveled and casualties mounting, understandably see this war as a genocidal exercise in ethnic cleansing, yet another extension of the Nakba.

Meanwhile,  mainstream media attention in the West has been distracted to handwringing about whether student anti-war demonstrators have been rude  and punditry about how the horrors in Palestine will affect the American elections in the fall. The lives and deaths of the dark skinned colonized can only hold Western attention just so long before our gnat-like attention span moves onto the next viral event online, it would seem.

But whether or not we pay attention, the genocidal war against the Palestinians continues. And it continues with political support and military aid from many Western nations, most prominently the US, but with significant Canadian involvement too.  Both US and Canadian tax dollars and public statements have helped underwrite the genocide, and we all are complicit unless we speak up and act to end it. It is high time for all of us to listen more carefully to Palestinians as we try to understand what led up to this catastrophe.

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017,  a comprehensive account of Palestine’s long agony by Rashid Khalidi might be a good place to start. The author, who holds the Edward Said chair in Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, comes from a family that has lived in Palestine for centuries. He provides a detailed history of the Nakba,  the ethnic cleansing and state terrorism that attended the creation of Israel in 1948, and a detailed, if sometimes admittedly partisan, account of the complex and often fractious politics within Palestinian communities both before and after that watershed disaster, beginning with the notorious Balfour Declaration of 1917 in which the British cabinet promised a Jewish homeland on Palestinian territories and failed to give any serious attention to Palestinian claims to the land on which they had lived for millennia. The Nakba left over 700,000 of the 1.3 million Palestinians as refugees, and the current war against Palestine is creating more refugees, more casualties, and more displaced people. The Nakba continues.

In a recent interview with Jacobin Magazine, Khalidi observed:

“Changing the demographic balance in Palestine in favor of settlers, at the expense of Palestinians, has always been the intention of the Zionist project — from Herzl, through [Chaim] Weizmann, up to Ben-Gvir — not to create a bi-national state. The conviction of those early Zionists was that Europe would not let them live in safety. Their vision of a Judenstaat required a demographic transformation. A process of ethnic cleansing, of squeezing the indigenous population into smaller and smaller areas, similar to what happened in Ireland under Oliver Cromwell or with the Indian reservations in North America. That’s what’s attempted here.”

A powerful international protest movement is calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the West Bank, and for an end to the ongoing genocide. It is vitally important that this global solidarity movement be informed, and that means that those of us outside Palestine who want to offer support need as much input from Palestinians as we can get. Khalidi’s book is one useful source, and Counterfire.org’s recently released compendium of interviews with Palestinians is another. Biselem, an Israeli human rights organization also features interviews with Palestinians on its website. Raed Issa, an artist in Gaza, provides a powerful testimony here. And Mehdi Hassan, a Palestinian American journalist, continues to centre the voices of Palestinians under the bombs of the IDF in videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJGumuVW2iA

In the wake of genocides past, many who could have intervened but did not could plead ignorance. We cannot. The war on Palestinians is being waged in plain sight, and we in the West have a moral responsibility to inform ourselves and to act to help end the carnage.

The post Listening to Palestine appeared first on rabble.ca.

It was obvious the writing was on the wall when Gil McGowan summed up his pitch at Saturday’s NDP leadership forum: “If I don’t raise another $50,000 soon,” he told the audience, “I’m toast.”

So it was not much of a surprise yesterday morning when McGowan connected the dots and announced in a letter to supporters that “Sadly, I’m writing today to let you know that I’ve made the hard decision to suspend my leadership campaign. Paying the final instalment of the $60,000 entry fee — which was due last night at midnight — has proven too much for me.”

McGowan’s campaign was always a bit of a long shot.

The commentariat pretty much wrote off his candidacy from the start, presumably for being out of tune with the new New Democrat coalition – whatever it turns out to be – cobbled together by Rachel Notley through her near decade at the party’s helm. 

And as a person who spoke his mind quickly and often undiplomatically when nettled, McGowan became a frequent target for the United Conservative Party (UCP)’s online army of trolls and bots – not that he ever seemed to mind very much. Well, as Oscar Wilde famously said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, and people certainly have been talking about McGowan. 

The president of the Alberta Federation of Labour for nearly 20 years, McGowan pitched a strategy of winning back working class voters who have moved to the UCP and other conservative parties in recent years and re-establishing the NDP as the party of workers.

He was the only candidate who seriously raised the issue of the Alberta NDP’s faltering relationship with its traditional labour constituency – and what to do about the drift away from the party, as he put it in yesterday’s letter, of “working Albertans with high school, college and trades educations (both inside and outside the two big cities) who, polls show, are supporting the UCP over the NDP.”

“Under Rachel Notley the NDP built a powerful coalition that almost won the last election, but that coalition has a hole in it,” McGowan said the day he launched his bid to lead the party. “There was a missing piece, and that missing piece is workers.”

“In other words,” he said, “the traditional workers’ party needs to find a way to shore up its support among workers. As I’ve been saying over and over, they are the missing piece in the coalition we need to build in order to defeat the UCP.”

That is bound to be dismissed as nostalgia by some, passed off with an embarrassed shrug by others, and it may even result in some serious commentary from veteran New Democrats from the party’s traditional labour wing, but McGowan is right that the NDP needs to find a way to bring those voters back into its big tent or fail again. 

The only other candidate to offer a concrete proposal on the form the NDP coalition should take after Notley departs was Rakhi Pancholi – who dropped out of the leadership race on March 27, the day McGowan dropped in. 

Her answer was for the party to sever all its ties with the federal NDP as a way to get the UCP to quit trying to tie the provincial party to federal policies unpopular in Alberta, or at least unpopular with the UCP base. Media loved the idea. Traditional New Democrats were more wary. 

Pancholi threw her support behind front-runner Naheed Nenshi, the former Calgary mayor, who has been cautious about promoting that idea too vigorously. He’ll consider it, he’s said, and ask members what they think.

Having run a creditable campaign that spoke to the values of a significant segment of the Alberta NDP’s most loyal supporters, the remaining four candidates may well now vie for McGowan’s benediction. 

It remains to be seen if he’ll wear his heart on his sleeve or be tactical and cautious about whom he endorses, if anyone. As of last night, McGowan said he hadn’t endorsed any other candidate. 

Jodi Calahoo Stonehouse was quick to publish a statement thanking McGowan for running and reaching out directly to his labour constituency. 

“The opportunity for a strong labour-NDP coalition in Alberta has never been greater,” she said. “Improving wages, strengthening working conditions, and expanding union rights requires labour and the Alberta NDP to be organized and vocal together – at the bargaining table and politically at the doors.”

The post Gil McGowan bows out of Alberta NDP leadership race appeared first on rabble.ca.

While most Canadians become ever more disconnected from the natural world, Indigenous peoples are making significant efforts to restore their languages, cultures, and nature-based practices.

This is no small task.

According to David Stannard, author of American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, up to one hundred million aboriginal people lived in the Western Hemisphere before the arrival of Europeans. Indigenous peoples coexisted in relative harmony with nature, supported by a wide diversity of native plants and animals.

Then 95 per cent of them perished.

Stannard writes, “From almost the instant of first human contact between Europe and the Americas, firestorms of microbial pestilence and purposeful genocide began laying waste the American natives… disease and genocide were interdependent forces… whipsawing their victims between plague and violence, each one driving countless numbers of entire ancient societies to the brink – and often over the brink – of total extermination.”

European colonists brought their own plants and animals and farming practices. They cleared forests, drained wetlands, and plowed prairies. They decimated populations of once-dominant wildlife species like the American Bison.

We all “benefit” from ongoing ecosystem destruction. Industrial agriculture is highly unsustainable but means abundant cheap food in supermarkets.

I feel some responsibility, and I accept the “settler” label as including all non-Indigenous North Americans, although I’m not a descendent of the early colonizers. My German and Scandinavian ancestors emigrated in the 1880s, well after North America was thoroughly colonized. But my father helped fell the giant trees of the Pacific northwest rain forest in his younger days, a practice that shamefully continues to this day. The BC government says 20 per cent of the forest there is old growth, but this figure includes stunted, high elevation forests not worth harvesting. A 2020 study found that only three per cent of the province can grow very large trees, and old growth remains on only 2.7 per cent of that area. Rachel Holt, a study author, says “We’ve basically logged it all.”

Western science remedies such as “forest management plans” and “impact assessments” purport to deal with this destruction but are virtually meaningless. Impact Assessment Act regulations exempt all but the very largest projects. Even projects on federal lands receive only cursory scrutiny.

Another questionable western concept is a strictly protected area, or “wilderness”, where all human activities are excluded. But evidence suggests that humans co-evolved with other species on this continent for 35,000 years or more. Indigenous-led conservation projects that allow traditional-knowledge-based activities to continue in a territory, while excluding unsustainable extractive practices, represent a better way forward. In fact, in February, the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, announced $66 million in funding to support 42 Indigenous-led conservation projects across the country.

In announcing the funding, Minister Guilbeault said, “Indigenous peoples have long taken care of the land we all share, and these Indigenous-led projects are a testament to their unique perspectives, knowledge, rights, and cultural responsibilities to teach, inspire, and help improve natural balance. It is only by working in partnership with Indigenous peoples and recognizing their traditional roles, knowledge, and science that we can slow biodiversity loss and achieve Canada’s conservation goals.”

Hear, hear!

In the Ottawa River Watershed where I live, Algonquin Anishinaabe people have resided in harmony with the environment for millennia, or as they like to say, “since time immemorial.” According to the Anishinaabe worldview, Algonquin people have inherent responsibility as treaty caretakers of the Earth. They aim to ensure that all forms of life can live free from threats of potential harm across generations, in a healthy and safe environment. For more on this, check out the Algonquin Aki Sibi project.

Given the success of Indigenous-led conservation, why not also fund Indigenous-led environmental assessments for projects in Indigenous homelands, including decision-making powers pursuant to Article 18 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples? Consequences of decisions made by First Nations leaders would be felt by people living in their territories, and they’d learn from them.

For example, although they were only brought into the environmental assessment process as a seeming afterthought, the Kebaowek First Nation, in partnership with other Algonquin First Nations, undertook an  environmental assessment of the Ottawa River nuclear waste megadump that put the proponent and regulator’s efforts to shame. An inspiring and impressive story board details the findings of this Indigenous-led assessment.

Algonquin people deem water sacred: It circulates through all living beings and ensures all life on Earth. This fundamental belief underpins their strong opposition to the megadump.

Putting environmental assessment in the hands of our Indigenous brothers and sisters who have lived in harmony with supporting ecosystems and watersheds for millennia makes eminent sense. Dedicated, ongoing funding for this type of assessment would be a boon for Canada and Canadians.

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Were the presidents of Alberta’s two largest universities pushed to use cops dressed up as stormtroopers to violently clear campus encampments used by students for a few hours to peacefully protest the continuing deadly assault on Gaza?

Or did they jump of their own accord when they asked police to clear the campus demonstrations Thursday night in Calgary and early Saturday morning in Edmonton? 

If they jumped they should be held responsible, for it was a foolish decision that runs counter to the traditions of the academy and will likely make the protests bigger, more aggressive, and potentially much more dangerous – especially if police continue to overreact and the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians continues into the fall when students return to campus in large numbers.

Most university degrees nowadays don’t require proof of competence in second language, so perhaps modern administrators like University of Alberta President Bill Flanagan and University of Calgary President Edward McCauley don’t understand that the phrase in loco parentis is Latin, not Spanish. 

It doesn’t mean university leaders should act like deranged parents who attack their own children, or encourage others to do so. 

Yes, most university students are legally adults, but university teachers and administrative leaders nevertheless have a parent-like moral responsibility to defend their young charges, not facilitate assaults upon them, and to promote the tradition of free expression associated with scholarly pursuits, not undermine it. 

Certainly many parents of university students who have paid their tuition will be just as unhappy with these administrators as growing numbers of faculty members appear to be. 

Some of them will be lawyers or can afford to hire members of that profession. This too is a reason the decision was not a wise one, no matter whose idea it was. After all, if the universities had just left things alone, chances are a good many campers would have dispersed with the end of term, at least for the time being. 

Flanagan’s claim the encampment “put the university community’s safety at risk,” doesn’t wash and doesn’t change a thing.

As for his assertion “the University of Alberta has been clear that violation of the law or policies of the university goes beyond the parameters of freedom of expression,” that is in fact not clear at all. As the Calgary Herald reported, at least some legal scholars say otherwise. 

The Herald quoted Osgoode Hall Law School constitutional law professor Bruce Ryder observing that “it looks to me like they’ve engaged in kind of a mass violation of protesters’ constitutional rights.”

Who knows? Flanagan and Dr. McCauley may find that the courts agree. Then what? 

Naturally, we are going to hear a lot of claims like Flanagan’s in the next few days that many of the occupants of the tents on the two Alberta campuses were not students. Inevitably, they will be called squatters. 

Don’t believe it. The encampment strategy to defend Gaza’s civil population is a student movement in North America, although there are certainly non-students horrified by ethnic cleansing and genocidal behaviour who have joined them. 

Indeed, if one were looking for a way to encourage larger crowds to come to campus with more people who are not students, then setting cops with flash-bang grenades and rubber bullets on a few dozen students in tents would certainly be an excellent way to go about it. 

If the presidents were pushed, though, we need to know by whom.

While there is no proof, yet, it is natural to assume the United Conservative Party (UCP) of Premier Danielle Smith had a hand in demanding the foolish hard-line response to the campus protests in Calgary and Edmonton. 

After all, there can be no question that contempt for academic inquiry, free speech, and the rule of law are all on brand for the UCP government and the political staff in the Premier’s Office. 

There is no question Premier Smith herself was delighted by the violent police response in Calgary. She said so Friday. 

“I’m glad that the University of Calgary made the decision that they did,” the premier said at an unrelated news conference that day. “I think what they found in Calgary is that a large number who were trespassing were not students, and we have to be mindful of that.” (Note the similarity of Smith’s talking point to Flanagan’s.)

She added: “I’ll watch and see what the University of Alberta learns from what they observed in Calgary.” One wonders if she already knew something. 

It is ironic, of course, that the same UCP government does nothing about squatters building semi-permanent structures from which to obstruct public highways as long as they are flying F-Trudeau flags and waving Axe-the-Tax placards. Apparently, they even get friendly visits from UCP MLAs.

Similarly, there is some irony in the fact the same government bullied Alberta universities into adopting the Chicago Statement on Free Expression, which demands “free, robust, and uninhibited debate and deliberation,” including the right of students to publicly confront people with whom they disagree on campus.

Except, I guess, when the potential for free, robust, and uninhibited confrontations venture into arguments the UCP doesn’t like. Then someone dials 9-1-1. 

Edmonton-Strathcona Member of Parliament Heather McPherson, a New Democrat, said on social media she was “appalled by the actions of the University of Alberta and the Edmonton Police Service.”

“Using militarized police to violently attack and break up a peaceful protest goes against everything the University is supposed to stand for,” she tweeted. “The protesters were not a threat to anyone and they were not preventing any university activities. … The U of A betrayed its students, faculty, and its mission.”

This statement is difficult to dispute. 

A joint statement by Opposition Leader Rachel Notley, NDP Justice Critic Irfan Sabir, and Advanced Education Critic Rhiannon Hoyle called the police response “completely disproportionate” and noted “it would be remiss to not contrast the police response in the last two days to the response to other current protests, on Alberta public property, that have not resulted in evictions, arrests or injuries.”

By noon Saturday, there had been another demonstration on the Quad at the U of A. I doubt it will be the last.

I expect many faculty members at the two universities opposed to the roust and suppression of the protest are mulling their next moves. 

In an apparent effort to do some damage control, Flanagan published another statement, repeating his talking points, adding a new one about “potential weapons,” and claiming a “fundamental commitment to freedom of expression.”

The post Were Alberta’s university presidents pressured to call police on protesters? appeared first on rabble.ca.

The United Conservative Party (UCP) announced it would use the potential for spring forest fires three years from now as an excuse to extend its term in office by four and a half months.

The government’s introduction of Bill 21, the Emergency Statutes Amendment Act, 2024, based on a forecast we’ll have a bad fire season in the spring of 2027, suggests that in Alberta it’s never too early for a Conservative government to worry about its ability to get re-elected! 

Among the measures in the bill, which Opposition Justice, Public Safety and Emergency Services Critic Irfan Sabir assailed as legislation “to control everything, everywhere, all at once,” is the bright idea of moving Alberta’s fixed election date four and a half months from May 31, 2027, to October 18, 2027.

That way, Premier Danielle Smith said in the government’s news release, “no matter which region of the province is affected by an emergency, we are able to have an all-hands-on-deck approach.”

Plus, no one should have to campaign on a do-nothing-about-climate-change platform when the skies are NDP orange and whatever is left of Alberta Health Services (AHS) in 2027 is issuing daily warnings not to let your kids play in the unbreathable fug outside!

“With natural disasters like wildfires, drought, and floods more likely to occur in the spring and summer months, moving Alberta’s election date from May to October just makes sense,” said Justice Minister Mickey Amery, who was also trotted out at the news conference along with the Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz, Forestry Minister Todd Loewen, and Emergency Services Minister Mike Ellis. 

“The change would also bring Alberta in line with other jurisdictions that already hold provincial elections in the fall,” Amery added, irrelevantly. 

Well, as Opposition Leader Rachel Notley observed, this would all be more believable if the government had moved the date to the fall of 2026, or the early spring of 2027. Giving themselves the extra time “seems very self-serving and opportunistic from a government that has a strong record of being very self-serving and opportunistic,” she said.

“The UCP is overriding its own fixed election law and unilaterally extending their mandate,” Sabir said in a statement emailed to media, noting that there has been “zero consultation with key stakeholders.”

“This is a government that has an incredibly exaggerated sense of their own value and their own power. Danielle Smith said during the election that Albertans were her bosses, but it is clear now that she intends to be the boss of everyone,” Sabir added.

Readers may wonder, How can they be sure it’ll be smoky at the end of May 2027? The answer, I suppose, is that the party of habitual climate change denial can read the smouldering auguries as well as the rest of us. 

Ellis told The Globe and Mail he thought it would be “almost negligent” to hold another spring election. Alas, there’s no guarantee the worst fires will only burn when it’s convenient to the UCP. Skies throughout Alberta have been clotted with smoke in in the fall as well as the springtime. 

Does that mean the UCP might decide a fall election would be negligent as well? What happens then? 

After all, it seems possible the UCP will not be the only government resistant to measures to mitigate climate change before it is too late that will use the predictable impacts of climate heating to implement increasingly arbitrary emergency measures. 

Notwithstanding Alberta’s constitutionally dubious fixed-election date law, which can be amended or repealed by a vote of the Legislature, Canada’s constitution requires an election to be held five years following the return of the writs of election from the previous election. So, constitutionally speaking, the UCP could stall the next election until May 2028. 

On the other hand, if the government wished to dissolve the Legislature sooner and ask the lieutenant-governor to call an election, that could be done at almost any time without constitutional complications.

What is it with government adjacent Alberta logos, anyway? 

Does anyone remember that time Jason Kenney’s fatuous Energy War Room had to change its logo when it was discovered its chosen corporate symbol belonged to a U.S. software company? 

Or how, after that embarrassment, the logo it chose to replace the first one also turned out to be embarrassingly similar to that of another U.S. based technology company? 

So, is it just me, or does the new logo for the UCP’s Recovery Alberta spin-off from Alberta Health Services look an awful lot like the logo for a group that calls itself Recovery Coaches Alberta, right down to the colourful little empty chair at the bottom of the semi-circle? 

This is Recovery Alberta’s:

And this is Recovery Coaches Alberta’s:

 Is this another design blunder, or is there some kind of relationship between Recovery Alberta and Alberta’s recovery coaches that makes this OK?

The post United Conservatives seek to delay next provincial election in Alberta appeared first on rabble.ca.

Amidst sustained opposition to the holocaust in Gaza, Israel’s supporters are acting more and more like fascists. They have been pushing to restrict civil liberties, dismantle democratic organizations and expand policing for months, but now want to deport protesters, buy arms and ban protests.

Straight out of Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts playbook, a Jewish Khananist mob attacked a peaceful student encampment at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) on Wednesday. The middle of the night assault with sticks, fireworks and chemical irritants left dozens injured. As was sometimes the case with the Blackshirts, the assault legitimated the deployment of state forces the next night to dismantle the camp.

While the incident at UCLA is the most egregious example of Zionist fascism in North America, I wrote about the phenomenon in January and February. Since then, Canadian Zionists have turned more fascistic.

Recently film producer Jonathan Pottins told the Toronto Police Service Board that his anti-Palestinian milieu is buying arms. “Everyone I know is getting armed and that should scare everyone,” Pottins told the public meeting.  The former head of the violent and racist Jewish Defence League Meir Weinstein has been organizing day-long firearms courses in Toronto under the slogan “Every Jew a .22”.

Alongside seeking arms, Israel supporters regularly respond to videos of large numbers protesting Canadian complicity in the genocide by calling for protesters to be deported. The racist and dehumanizing rhetoric is increasingly being taken up by mainstream voices. Recently Warren Kinsella, a self-proclaimed anti-racist, brought this thinking into the mainstream with a Toronto Sun column blaming the anti-genocide protests on the failure of multiculturalism. Taking this outlook a step further, the mayor of the Montreal municipality of Hampstead Jeremy Levi recently posted: “Given the recent behavior of the pro-Palestinian group, Canada should reconsider its immigration plan for Gazans. Their values seem incompatible with ours, and I have no desire to welcome more hatred into our country.”

The bid to ban protests has also taken a more formal turn. A self-described Zionist “wolf”, Neil Oberman won an injunction banning protests at a Jewish community building and synagogue, which faced protests in March during an event with three Israeli soldiers and an Israel real estate fair. Oberman then used the initial (default) decision to expand it to two dozen institutions for six months.

In response to the student encampment at McGill against genocide, Oberman immediately sought an injunction to ban protests within 100 metres of 154 university buildings. The failed injunction would have effectively banned demonstrations in large swaths of downtown Montreal, which was no doubt among his aims. The instigator of a slew of anti-democratic legal maneuvers, Oberman recently said that “since October 8 it’s crazy” in Montréal.

Prominent Zionists, including Liberal MP Anthony Housefather, have called for the violent suppression of the McGill students. After praising US “SWAT teams… deployed to dismantle and arrest pro-Hamas demonstrators on university campuses”, mayor Levi demanded that “Montreal tactical teams should swiftly intervene at McGill, even if it requires force.”

In other words, supporters of Israel are calling on Canada to treat those demonstrating in favour of Palestinian rights the way Israel treats Palestinians, with force and disregard of human rights. Of course, Zionists have long sought to demonize support for Palestinians. What is new is their aggressive and open promotion of police repression and other forms of intimidation historically associated with fascism to prevent protest against the slaughter in Gaza.

Is this irony or tragedy? Perhaps both.

The post Israel’s ‘friends’ mimic Mussolini’s Blackshirts appeared first on rabble.ca.

On Tuesday, May 7, Arnold Viersen, Conservative MP for Peace River-Westlock, AB, introduced a petition into the House of Commons calling for greater protection for the “preborn.”

Such protections would create barriers for women and gender-diverse people seeking to receive abortions, a procedure that is protected under the Canada Health Act.

The introduction of this petition reignited the debate about whether the Conservative Party of Canada can be trusted not to interfere with the right to access abortion procedures.

NDP MP Leah Gazan said that Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre could not be trusted to protect reproductive rights.

“He pretends that he is pro-choice and he vows he would never pass legislation that would restrict abortions, but I have some truths to tell you today,” said Gazan in a social media post this week. “A number of his caucus members are openly anti-choice, and one of them re-introduced a bill that would re-open the debate on whether abortions should be legal.”

The bill Gazan referred to in her statement was put forward in January of 2023 by Conservative MP Cathay Wagantall which would have provided for stiffer penalties for those who harm pregnant individuals and their fetuses.

READ MORE: Private members’ bill could re-open abortion debate

Wagantall has introduced three bills since 2016 that have attempted to put some level of restriction on access to abortion, but so far, none have passed the House of Commons.

Poilievre’s actions speak louder than words on abortion

While Poilievre has pledged not to introduce anti-choice legislation, he has not prevented members of his party, like Wagantall from doing so and has allowed his members to “vote their conscience,” on these bills.

Poilievre was also noticeably silent last summer when the US Supreme Court overturned their landmark Roe v. Wade decision, which had protected access to abortion in that country for 50 years. That move sparked outrage across North America, both in Canada and the US.

READ MORE: The inconvenient anti-choice record of ‘pro-choice’ Pierre Poilievre

Joyce Arthur, executive director and founder of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada (ARCC) said that this latest petition shows how a Conservative government would pose a threat to human rights like the right to abortion.

“It reveals the ever-present danger that any Conservative government poses to the human rights of women and gender-expansive people who can get pregnant. While MPs have wide latitude in the types of petitions they can sponsor, it is only Conservative MPs that continually abuse the e-petition process by sponsoring petitions that seek to remove fundamental human rights from Canadians,” Arthur said to rabble.ca.

Arthur explained that while she did not believe that Poilievre, if he became prime minister, would directly legislate against access to abortion, that he may instead introduce other restrictions on access to reproductive health.

“If party leader Pierre Poilievre wins election, I don’t think he would attempt to legislate on abortion but other things he would likely do include: cancel all sexual and reproductive health and rights funding both domestic and foreign, allow private member bills against abortion with a free vote, restore Canada Summer Jobs funding to anti-choice groups, protect the charitable tax status of anti-choice charities, and erode abortion access by refusing to enforce the Canada Health Act,” Arthur explained.

Abortion rights must be continually defended

Arthur said that the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the US was disturbing and the anti-choice movement in Canada took encouragement from it.

“Canada’s anti-choice movement definitely looks to their US counterparts for inspiration, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade has encouraged right-wing actors around the globe. Sexual and reproductive rights are prime targets, and that includes gender identity and 2SLBGTQIA+ rights,” Arthur said.

Over the past year, conservative premiers in New Brunswick, Saskatchewan and Alberta have introduced restrictions aimed at the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, specifically, transgender youth.

READ MORE: Rainbow Week of Action to push back on rising 2SLGBTQIA+ hate

While there are some variations between these restrictions, they all require trangender youth to receive parental or guardian permission before being allowed to use their correct pronouns in schools.

Conservative groups like the anti-choice Campaign Life Coalition celebrated these new restrictions, and saw them as an opportunity to not just oppress 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals, but also to advance their anti-choice agenda.

In a post on their website from this past February, the Campaign Life Coalition called on Alberta premier Danielle Smith to extend the requirement that minors get permission to have their correct pronouns be used, to also require them to get parental consent to have an abortion.

“Our political system here is quite different than the US, but what’s happening south of the border reminds us that our rights are never safe and must be constantly defended,” said Arthur. 

Arthur said that ARCC is continuing its work to pressure the federal government to protect access to abortion and to withdraw support from non-profit groups that seek to undermine this fundamental right.

“We also are trying to restrict inaccurate anti-choice advertising and graphic images of alleged aborted fetuses, which should not be tolerated in public because they cause harm to communities, and represent attacks on our Charter rights and a misogynist targeting of women and their humanity,” said Arthur.

The post Conservatives amplify anti-choice rhetoric in the House of Commons appeared first on rabble.ca.

It’s Asian Heritage Month in Canada – and this month, we’re very excited to bring you a two-part discussion on the history of Asian labour in Canada.

This week’s episode is a continuation from last week’s conversation in which rabble labour reporter Kiah Lucero, and Patricia Chong and Karine Ng from the Ontario and BC branches of the Asian Canadian Labour Alliance discussed the history of the Alliance; key moments of Asian labour in Canada; and how racism, systemic discrimination, and “othering” still shows up in Canada today. So if you didn’t catch last week’s episode, do so now!

Today, we continue that discussion and dig into the concept of a “model minority,” what it means to be an immigrant on stolen land, and how all racial justice fights are intertwined.

About our guests

The Asian Canadian Labour Alliance (ACLA) is a national organization that represents the voice of Asian Canadian trade union members, Asian Canadian workers and the Asian community at large. Through educational events, organizing and strike support, the ACLA hopes to establish a wide network of labour and community activists in Canada.

Patricia Chong holds a MA in Labour Studies from McMaster University and a Masters in Labour Policies and Globalisation from the Global Labour University (Germany). She is a short documentary film maker and a member of the Asian Canadian Labour Alliance Ontario Chapter. She has worked as an organizer for both public and private sector unions. Chong has successfully unionized workers in Ontario, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and the Yukon.

吳珏穎 Karine Ng (she/her) is an immigrant-settler on Turtle Island, a spore blown across the Pacific from then British colonized Hong Kong, with ancestral roots in what is known today as China. Her work is anchored in education, spanning across diverse ages and socio-cultural settings in the ancestral lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and the Tseil-Waututh people and elsewhere.

For additional information on the organizations mentioned please visit:

• ACLA Ontario

• Canadian Sikh Heritage

• Challenging Racist “British Columbia”: 150 Years and Counting

• Chinese Canadian Historical Society of BC

• Chinese Canadian Museum

• Coalition of Black Trade Unionists 

For reading and watching materials:

• Addressing Anti-Asian Racism: A Resource for Educators A Resource for Educators

• White Riot: The 1907 Anti-Asian Riots in Vancouver

• Toronto Solidarity Rally Against Anti-Asian Racism (2021)

More about Emmie Tsumura, the artist who worked on the Asian Canadian Labour History banners:

• Asian Heritage Month designs

• Follow her on Instagram here

If you like the show please consider subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. And please, rate, review, share rabble radio with your friends — it takes two seconds to support independent media like rabble. Follow us on social media across channels @rabbleca.

The post Examining Asian labour history and challenging white supremacy (Part 2) appeared first on rabble.ca.

With four billion people going to the polls this year the international labour movement has started a global campaign to support democracy against authoritarianism and fascism.  A special focus on the elections for the European Parliament and in the United States.

RadioLabour is the international labour movement’s radio service. It reports on labour union events around the world with a focus on unions in the developing world. It partners with rabble to provide coverage of news of interest to Canadian workers.

The post Labour’s global fight against fascism appeared first on rabble.ca.