February 2007

“Having caused wholesale changes in the agricultural systems of many poor countries by focusing on free trade and comparative advantage, rich countries are now ready to abandon the poor whose own agriculture no longer functions to feed them.”

Paul Beingessner
Column #604
January 29, 2007

A few years ago we spent a week or so in Mexico. Our fellow tourists at the hotel were far less interesting than the Mexican people who worked in the hotels, restaurants and shops, so I spent as much time as I could trying to learn their stories. Like Canada, Mexico is a land of contrasts in wealth. The upper and middle class people live a life not much different from ours, but half the population lives on less than four dollars a day. Their diet is largely tortillas and beans.

The corn flour tortilla is a staple food in Mexico, like rice in Japan or Big Macs in Regina. Historically, tortillas were made in small shops by family-based businesses. A taxi driver I talked with told me his dilemma with tortillas. While he likely made more than four dollars a day, he found his food budget stretched thin by month-end. He confessed that he had taken to buying his tortillas at the large Sam’s Club on the outskirts of his city. (Sam’s Club is a big box chain owned by the Walmart oligarchy.)

He didn’t feel very good about this, because he would rather have bought from the small shops, but a few pesos meant a lot to his family. He also told me that the tortillas at Sam’s were imported from the U.S.

It was quite an irony, because one of his brothers was working illegally in the U.S. as there were few decent jobs in Mexico. It seemed like quite a vicious circle. Read the rest of this entry »

Your monthly media supplement of seven recommended readings from beyond the Briarpatch. Sign up to receive the B-List via email by using the form on our homepage.

1. The Ecology of Destruction
by John Bellamy Foster
Monthly Review
February 2007

“It is a characteristic of our age that global ecological devastation seems to overwhelm all other problems, threatening the survivability of life on earth as we know it. How this is related to social causes and what social solutions might be offered in response have thus become the most pressing questions facing humanity.”

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0207jbf.htm

2. How the Left Should Frame Issues
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An Open Letter

Dear Friends,

I am writing to you to ask for your support in mobilizing communities, groups and individuals against the unprecedented attack on women’s rights in Canada.

Since their election over a year ago the Harper government has pursued a policy to effectively eliminate policy and programs that would ensure the economic and social equality of women in Canada.

The following (from research compiled by Action Canada for Population and Development - ACPD) illustrates their deep ideological resentment to those actions that were bettering the lives of women and children.

• Refused to adopt proactive pay equity policy, and redirected funding from the Canada-wide childcare program to the Universal Child Care Benefit. A major set back to public ally funded quality child care centers.
• Eliminated support for equality rights test cases – the Court Challenges Program.
• Closed 12 of 16 Status of Women (SWC) regional offices, and cut nearly half the staff responsible for Women’s Rights work. Removed the word equality from the SWC list of objectives, and imposed a ban on all federally funded advocacy regarding women’s equality. Cut 43 per cent of the SWC budget despite the fact that the Standing Committee on the Status of Women said (2005) that women’s groups play an important part in Canadian democracy and recommended a 25 per cent increase in Women’s Program funding.
• On June 22nd, 2006 during the First Session of the new UN Human Rights Council the Canadian government refused to recognize the rights of indigenous people. The Conservative government has refused to honour the Kelowna Accord which would have given much needed social and economic development support to women and families in Aboriginal communities.
• Shelved the position taken by the former Liberal government International Policy Statement that specifically called for “strengthening of sexual and reproductive health, especially for women”.
• While the current government has not changed any government health policy on the right to choose, it has not followed in the footsteps of its predecessor by not defending its position vis-à-vis New Brunswick’s restrictive abortion policy. New Brunswick’ s abortion policy which states that, ” an abortion will only be covered by medicare if it is performed by a gynecologist in a hospital, is certified medically necessary by two physicians and carried out no later than in the 14th week of pregnancy ” is a clear violation of the Canada Health Act. By not defending its position, the current government can be deemed to be supportive of the idea of abortion not being a medically necessary procedure and as such allowing provincial governments to opt out of funding abortion services in hospitals as well as clinics. Individual members of the Conservative government have brought bills to the House of Commons that would regulate abortion.
• Embarked on a process to politicize the nomination of judges by appointing conservative partisans to judicial advisory committees. 16 of the 33 nominees in January 2007 are conservative partisans. Gilles Duceppe pointed out this is what President George Bush did in the USA – “he selected judges who would be against abortion, against women’s equality”.

These attacks when added up portray a government that is fearful of the power that women represent for a better, more progressive Canada.

We have to speak out, to organize against this assault on women’s equality. As a grandfather, father, husband I feel that men should join with women who are fighting back. Over the years men have been part of supporting women’s rights, and we should continue to do so.

Please write the Prime Minister, contact your local MP – write letters to newspapers – have the groups and organizations you belong to take a strong stand for women’s equality in Canada. Prime Minister Harper can be contacted at pm@pm.gc.ca.

We should declare as men that we are opposed to this dismantling of the gains made over many years, and that women’s rights and equality mean a betterment of our whole society.

Sincerely – please circulate

Don Kossick
www.makingthelinksradio.ca
kossickd@gmail.com

TILMA trade agreement would penalize his plans

By Murray Dobbin
TheTyee.ca
February 21, 2007

Good grief, as Charlie Brown would say. B.C. and Alberta signed the Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement (TILMA) last April and it comes into force this coming April Fool’s Day. Yet the ministers responsible for TILMA in B.C. and Alberta don’t seem to have a clue what they have got their governments into.

Alternatively, they do know the serious impacts TILMA will have and are just not willing to come clean with the public.

How else to make sense of the bizarre pronouncements about TILMA B.C. and Alberta officials are making?

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Spokesman Ismayil Radwan said in a public speech that it was Washington’s intention to “fuel a civil war in the Palestinian arena.”

By Jon Elmer and Nora Barrows-Friedman
Inter-Press Service
February 2, 2007

GAZA CITY, Feb 2 (IPS) - Explosions, fierce gunfights and ambulance sirens ripped through the Gaza strip again Thursday, only two days after a ceasefire ended a bloody week of factional fighting that left more than 30 Palestinians dead.

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What the Foreign Minister did not see or discuss during his visit

Jon Elmer
The Dominion
January 25, 2007

GAZA CITY, GAZA — Despite the impression cast by corporate news coverage, there is never anything like “calm” here in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The casualty count for 2006 released by Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reports that Israeli forces killed 660 Palestinians, while 17 Israeli civilians were killed, 13 of them in the West Bank [pdf]. The violence is often spectacular, as during the summer and fall siege operations in Gaza that killed more than 450 Palestinians under withering aerial bombardment, artillery barrages and two major ground invasions. But, as an unusually frank headline in the current edition of the Economist rightly stated, “It’s the little things that make an occupation.”

When Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay visited Israel this week, it was these “little things” that he missed–like the more than 530 fixed checkpoints and roadblocks identified in a joint UN-IDF count in the occupied West Bank. These obstacles make simple travel between neighbouring Palestinian villages often impossible, particularly when added to the more than 7,000 “flying checkpoints” that spring up at the whim of the Israeli army, anywhere and at anytime. As the Economist pointed out, “arbitrariness is one of the most crippling features of these rules.”

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by Chris Arsenault
ZNet
January 29, 2007

Gagetown, New Brunswick- When some 2,500 people braved snow and ice to form a massive Canadian flag at Canadian Forces Base Gagetown as a part of an emotional farewell to soldiers departing for Afghanistan, it seemed like patriotism at its best.

There was only one problem: many attendees were forced to participate in the rally.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Lorne Brown
Briarpatch Magazine
February 2007

Selective co-operation among parties in several dozen constituencies could deny Stephen Harper control of the country in the next election.

Much of what I am about to say would be unnecessary if Canada had a system of proportional representation like most countries claiming to be democracies. A proportional representation system would ensure that the percentage of seats allocated to each party in Parliament actually reflects the percentage of Canadians who voted for that party. Canada, however, like the United States and Great Britain, still uses the old “winner take all” system, in which only voters who support the most popular candidate in their riding are represented in Ottawa. Given Canada’s geographical and cultural peculiarities, this virtually guarantees that even most so-called “majority” governments are elected by a minority of the population.

Read the rest of this entry »

Postal Worker Faces Disciplinary Action
by Gwalgen Geordie Dent
Homophobic pamphlet sparks workplace rights row

Ralph’s Last Laugh
by Ellen Gould
Inter-provincial trade deal cops to business pressure and ties the hands of local and provincial governments

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By Dave Oswald Mitchell
Briarpatch Magazine
February 2007

“When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.”
Rudolf Bahro

I’VE BEEN TRYING LATELY TO FIND A HEALTHY balance between optimism and pessimism, hope and despair. Surveying the accumulating evidence of out-of-control climate change, pending oil and gas production peaks, collapsing ecosystems, and the growing strains on our industrial food system, it would seem that even hope has become a scarce resource.

Read the rest of this entry »