The WAR on Science: Thursday, November 21, 2013, 7:00 pm Room 1900, SFU Harbour Ctr

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http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/11/10/3590757/canadian-union-abandons-neutrality/

Stephen Harper’s Anti-Labor, Anti-Science Agenda Pushes Union To Speak Out For The First Time
BY KATIE VALENTINE POSTED ON NOVEMBER 10, 2014 AT 1:00 PM

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivers his speech in Guangzhou, China Friday, Feb. 10, 2012.
CREDIT: AP PHOTO/KIN CHEUNG

A major public service union in Canada is wading into the country’s 2015 Prime Minister race, an unprecedented step for a group that’s historically stayed out of political matters.

The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), which includes climate and environmental scientists as well as other public sector employees, voted Friday to begin planning an advertising campaign that will highlight the anti-labor policies of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s administration. The union has traditionally stayed out of elections, preferring to keep a politically neutral stance, but multiple decisions made by the Harper government have prompted it to abandon that neutrality.

“Extraordinary times call for extraordinary actions,” PIPSC President Debi Daviau said in a statement. “[The Harper government] has launched an unprecedented assault on unions, and other democratically elected organizations in this country. It has cut thousands of federal public service jobs, programs and services. This government has forced non-partisan organizations such as ours to make a very difficult choice: to remain silent or to speak out. We have chosen to speak out.”

The union won’t be endorsing any specific candidates in the race, which is likely to pit Harper against New Democratic Party leader Thomas Mulcair and Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau, but it will be educating the public about how Harper’s policies have affected the public sector.

Those policies have been particularly hard on Canadian scientists. The Harper government forbids federally-employed meteorologists from talking about climate change, on the grounds that the meteorologists are only allowed to speak publicly about their area of expertise, which includes weather but excludes climate.

According to a survey done by PIPSC, 90 percent of government scientists feel like they aren’t “allowed to speak freely to the media about the work they do.” In addition, 24 percent of the federal scientists who responded to the survey had been asked to “exclude or alter” information in government documents for non-scientific reasons.

These claims have led to critics accusing the Harper government of “muzzling” its scientists in an attempt to keep the scientific message on climate change and environmental issues in line with the government’s messaging, which supports tar sands development and the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and has favored business interests and economic growth over action on climate change.
“The Prime Minister is keen to keep control of the message, I think to ensure that the government won’t be embarrassed by scientific findings of its scientists that run counter to sound environmental stewardship,” Thomas Pedersen, a senior scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, told the BBC in 2012. “I suspect the federal government would prefer that its scientists don’t discuss research that points out just how serious the climate change challenge is.”

Canada’s federal government has drastically scaled back its environmental funding and policies since Harper took office in 2006. The government cut about about 500 jobs from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in 2013, eliminating positions that had helped patrol for illegal fishing and conduct conservation and water pollution research. Canada also withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol in 2011, and Harper didn’t attend the UN’s climate summit in New York this September.

Harper’s challengers in next year’s election have differing views on climate and environmental issues, but both have stopped short of expressing opposition to Canada’s tar sands industry. Liberal Party leader Trudeau has said that Keystone XL is in Canada’s “national interest” and has voiced his support for the tar sands industry, though he’s also called for emissions limits on tar sands operations.
NDP leader Tom Mulcair has called for a Canadian cap-and-trade system that puts a price on carbon, and has also said the tar sands industry needs more environmental oversight.
 
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http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/11/07/canada-scientists-harper_n_6124598.html

Canadian Federal Scientists, Professionals Union Launches Anti-Harper Campaign
CP | By The Canadian Press
Posted: 11/07/2014 7:06 pm EST Updated: 11/07/2014 10:59 pm EST CANADIAN SCIENTISTS

OTTAWA - The union representing scientists and other professionals in the federal public service is abandoning its tradition of neutrality in elections to actively campaign against Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC) says delegates to its annual general meeting have agreed the union should be more politically active heading into next year's federal election.

In particular, delegates have agreed that the union should energetically expose the damage they believe the Harper government has done to federal public services.


Members of the union have complained bitterly about what they claim is the muzzling of federal scientists and political interference with their work.

The union, which represents some 55,000 professionals in the public service, has traditionally chosen to stay at arm's length from elections.

But union president Debi Daviau says the government's war on labour unions and its cuts to public service jobs have forced a change in strategy.

"Extraordinary times call for extraordinary actions," Daviau said in a written statement Friday.

"This government has forced non-partisan organizations such as ours to make a very difficult choice: to remain silent or to speak out. We have chosen to speak out."

Daviau cited several controversial bills as proof that the government has targeted "the very existence of unions and collective bargaining."

A survey commissioned by the union last year found hundreds of scientists who claimed they had been asked to exclude or alter information in government documents for non-scientific reasons. And thousands more said they'd been prevented from talking freely about their work with the media or the public.

"Canadians deserve to know the damage this government is inflicting —unnecessarily and often underhandedly — to their services, their programs and even to their democracy," Daviau said.
 
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http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/m...ay-be-damaging-to-government-itself-1.2831576

Muzzling federal scientists may be damaging to government itself
Experimental Lakes Area researcher Michael Rennie speaks to CBC's As It Happens
CBC News Posted: Nov 11, 2014 3:25 PM ET Last Updated: Nov 11, 2014 4:20 PM ET

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Hear the full interview with Michael Rennie on As It Happens
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Muzzling of federal scientists widespread, survey suggests
External Links

Experimental Lakes Area
(Note: CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external links.)
Michael Rennie
Michael Rennie, biologist at the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) research station, said that when he was a federal scientist, he never spoke to a journalist on the record in response to any media requests he received. (International Institute for Sustainable Development)

The federal government is hurting itself by not letting its scientists speak, says a researcher at the Experimental Lakes Area research station in Northern Ontario.

Up until recently, the research station was run by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and Michael Rennie was a government employee. That meant he couldn't speak very freely to the media.

"For all the interview requests I got, I never actually spoke to a journalist on the record to provide information," he told CBC's As It Happens this week. The fact that he had received media training didn't seem to matter, he said.

Hear the full interview with As It Happens http://www.cbc.ca/asithappens/features/2014/11/10/ela-scientist/
Rennie is now able to give interviews because the research station was turned over to a non-profit organization, the International Institute of Sustainable Development, earlier this year. The group helped save the research facility from being shut down altogether, as the federal government had planned.

Experimental Lakes Area research station officially saved http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/e...a-research-station-officially-saved-1.2594161
Rennie called the feeling of being allowed to speak freely "refreshing."

He suggested that the federal government's restrictions on scientists' ability to speak aren't just bad for the public, who are deprived of their expertise — but are also bad for the government itself.

When the federal scientists who do the research can't talk about the results, he said, "they're left to whatever commentators of the day to interpret results for the public — and I think in many ways, that can be more damaging than letting these authors comment for themselves."

Federal scientists muzzled by media policies, report suggests http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/f...d-by-media-policies-report-suggests-1.2791650
Muzzling of federal scientists widespread, survey suggests http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/m...ientists-widespread-survey-suggests-1.2128859
When asked by As It Happens host Carol Off about the perception that certain topics such as climate change are especially sensitive, Rennie said, "It's possible."

He added, "The fact that it leaves this open to speculation doesn't serve the department very well. It certainly doesn't serve the science that they're producing very well, either."
 
http://www.ipolitics.ca/2014/11/09/harpers-dishonestly-on-display-in-latest-pentagon-papers-on-f-35/

Harper’s dishonesty on display in latest Pentagon papers on F-35
By Michael Harris | Nov 9, 2014 9:00 pm

The serial dishonesty of the Harper government was back on display last week in pink neon for all to see: the F-35 has surreptitiously re-appeared on the government’s agenda and once again the loser is Parliament.

According to a Canadian Press story by Murray Brewster based on a Pentagon leak, the Harper government plans to buy four F-35s and slip the acquisition into the current fiscal year. In order to get the controversial jet by 2016 or 2017, Canada has to provide the F-35 Project Office with a letter of intent by mid-November. All this is documented in a U.S. Department of Defense slide show. Not a peep in Ottawa.

Sooner or later, it is going to sink in that it doesn’t matter what this prime minister says. All that counts is what he wants. Harper’s dictatorship of marketing is picking up speed as we get closer to a federal election and our central institution, Parliament, is playing a profoundly minor role in the affairs of the nation.
Conservative MPs seemed in the dark about the back-door procurement, while the Opposition was blindsided.

No one should be surprised. Stephen Harper has taken to announcing things like a U.S. president rather than introducing legislation in the House of Commons or holding debates — whether the issue is war or warplanes. Tokenism at the eleventh hour is the rule of the day.

Remember, this is the prime minister announced the changes to the Old Age Supplement while he was hobnobbing with the world’s richest and most powerful in Davos, Switzerland. He first talked about deeper engagement in the third Iraq War while speaking to a business audience in New York. Most recently, he mused aloud about significant tax changes very publicly, but the measure has yet to be brought to Parliament for a debate on its merits.

With the credibility of his government in tatters over the F-35, Stephen Harper simply threw the Batmobile into reverse. A new story appeared.”

To Harper, as his former privacy commissioner Robert Marleau put it, Parliament is a minor obstacle to his executive modus operandi. This prime minister has it constitutionally backwards. He thinks Canadians elect governments when, actually, they elect parliaments.

Not for nothing has his record for submitting unconstitutional legislation to the Supreme Court been without precedent in Canadian history.

Not for nothing does he have the worst-ever record for resorting to time allocation to minimize any meaningful debate in the Commons.

And not for nothing does a legendary former House Speaker insist Harper is still in contempt of parliament because he never did release those 40,000 Afghan detainee documents to a parliamentary committee as he was ordered to do – only 4,000 of them.

So why is he still in contempt? The direction to release the documents was done by an Order of the House, and survived the dissolution of parliament for the 2011 election, or at least it did in the learned opinion of Peter Milliken, the dean of Speakers in western parliamentary democracies, and the longest serving Speaker in Canadian history.

It is widely acknowledged — but sadly accepted by many as the new normal — that Stephen Harper has put us firmly into the post-democratic age.
One of the ways is to force phone-book-size omnibus bills through parliament, making it impossible to properly scrutinize new legislation — resulting in what former CPC MP Brent Rathgeber calls “irresponsible government”.

Who ever heard of budgets without planning and priority reports? If the political opposition doesn’t have the information to rationally critique the budget, they simply can’t fulfill their primary duty as watchdogs of public spending. The entire Canadian public suffers when the Opposition can’t hold the government’s feet to the fire.
Another method is to withhold or distort information, which leaves critics in the dark. That’s why the Harper government dumped the long-form census, shutting off an important source of independent information vital to making informed policy decisions. That’s why it muzzles scientists, who are now drawing up in battle order against Harper for the next election, despite a history and tradition of political neutrality. And quite often, the Harper government simply lies, which brings us back to the F-35.

There was a time when Stephen Harper himself talked on the record of having a “contract” to buy 65 F-35 fighters, a mantra that was repeated by then-Defence Minister Peter MacKay and the calamitous Julian Fantino.

That was before they got caught with pants aflame and Canadians were mooned with the ugly truth. Auditor General Michael Ferguson found that the government’s costing for the F-35 — supposedly a mere $15 billion — was astronomically and deliberately out of whack. The true cost of this expensive and troubled experimental jet was $25 billion, 40 per cent higher than Harper was willing to admit publicly.

National Defence HQ knew the real price in 2010 when it decided to purchase the Lockheed Martin “stealth” jet and the cabinet knew that too when it announced its intention to buy the F-35 on July 16th, 2010.

The only people who didn’t know, including during the writ period in the 2011 election, were the Canadian people. It was yet another example of voter fraud, deliberately programming voters with false information. And of course, that was the election where Harper achieved his majority government.

As former Auditor General Sheila Fraser put it, the F-35 debacle was akin to the Ad Sponsorship scandal. It was not that the process was murky. Rather, there were clear rules that were solidly in place and known by everyone. They had simply been ignored at every level, including the federal cabinet.

Making the whole thing much worse, the F-35 was being purchased without a competitive bidding process as a sole-source acquisition. That is the fastest way to add 20 per cent to the price of anything in a major procurement.

No one has yet explained why DND disobeyed a direct order of an officer of parliament, Kevin Page, who demanded that the department release the true cost of the F-35. That request came in 2011, nearly a year after DND knew that the full cost of the jet fleet would be at least $25 billion. Yet NDHQ kept the true number a secret, and misled Page with a price-tag of just $14.7 billion.

Both the parliamentary budget officer and the auditor general put a quick end to the government’s charade by the numbers.

With the credibility of his government in tatters over the F-35, Stephen Harper simply threw the Batmobile into reverse. A new story appeared. Now there was no “contract” and no decision. People would just have to get over the fact that their prime minister had once insisted the exact opposite.

Instead, the Harper government hit the “reset” button. Now there was a miraculous seven-point plan to select a new fighter jet for Canada and the Harper government promised more “supervision” of those sneaky bureaucrats over at DND, who the butt-coverers from PMO say were responsible for the whole mess. Some in the media even talked about the program being cancelled. Perhaps we would choose a different jet after all if a real competition were held. Bless them in their innocence.

It was of course just public relations nonsense and marketing, like so much that comes out of this government. Stephen Harper never cancels anything he wants, he merely re-groups and waits for a subsequent sneak attack.

He has done it on internet snooping legislation, which he can’t seem to decide exactly what it is designed to protect us from — child-pornographers or terrorists.
He did it on the laughably described “private member’s” initiative, Bill 377, which is being sent back to the Senate without earlier amendments, the better to continue his war against unions.

And now he has done it again on the F-35.

Nothing has been broached in parliament about this potentially imminent order of a jet that is grossly over-budget, grossly delayed in production, and mired in operational problems. If the story is accurate, there never was a meaningful review of the F-35 decision of 2010 — another lie.

After CP broke the story, defence minister Rob Nicholson was not in Question Period last Friday. But the government once again played silly bugger on the F-35 file when Bernard Trottier, the minister’s parliamentary secretary, rose to answer in his place.

Refusing to address the information in the Pentagon leak, he simply parroted the speaking points that no decision had been made to replace Canada’s fleet of CF-18s. Does anyone believe that if the Harper government wants to buy four of these jets that the F-35 will not be the choice to replace the CF-18? This is simply vintage Harper — getting what he wants by other means.

It is interesting to note that four Lockheed Martin F-35Bs were set to debut in the United Kingdom at the Farnborough air show this summer. They were within days of heading across the Atlantic when the engine of an F-35A caught fire preparing for takeoff on June 23, 2014 and the pilot had to “egress” from the aircraft.
Operational commanders then scrubbed the trans-Atlantic flight for the four F-35Bs, which are not even expected to debut at the Paris air show next year. The Pentagon banned reporters from asking questions about the decision to bail out of Farnborough and the mishap involving the $98-million-per-unit fighter jet.
No wonder Harper is so impressed with these guys.
 

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Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His eight books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. His new book on the Harper majority government, Party of One, recently hit number one on Maclean’s magazine’s top ten list for Canadian non fiction.

Readers can reach the author at michaelharris@ipolitics.ca. Click here to view other columns by Michael Harris.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.
 
http://www.ipolitics.ca/2014/11/16/harper-has-been-losing-friends-even-from-his-base/

Harper has been losing friends for a decade — now he’s losing his base
By Michael Harris | Nov 16, 2014 9:00 pm | 33 comments | Tweet about this on Twitter113Share on Facebook318Share on LinkedIn3Google+0Email to someone
Parliament Returns
More from Michael Harris available here.
Conrad Black says Stephen Harper has “run out of steam.”
Among moguls, that’s code for a guy who doesn’t know what to do anymore — but likes the job a lot. And yes, this is the same Conrad Black who founded the National Post to advance the fortunes of the Conservative party.
John Ralston Saul thinks Mussolini would have admired the way Stephen Harper does business. Ralston Saul is one of the country’s great public intellectuals, a man at the very centre of the cultural establishment.
Preston Manning recently urged the prime minister to extend rather than limit democracy in Canada, both in Parliament and in elections legislation.
Even the National Post speculated this week that the Energizer Bunny of Conservative politics, the indefatigable Jason Kenney, might be prime minister of Canada before the polar vortex gives way to spring flowers.
The Post’s Stephen Maher, who makes about as many predictions as he does mistakes (next to none), thinks Harper could resign early in the New Year and that the top job is there for the taking if the “formidable” Kenney wants it.
And, of course, it was someone from within in the Conservative caucus — Harper’s own political family — who leaked the fact that the prime minister went to ground during the recent shooting incident inside Parliament following the tragic murder of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo at the National War Memorial.
Telling Vladimir Putin to get out of Ukraine at the G20 seems something less than macho now when placed against the image of the PM hiding in a closet — while his colleagues fashioned impromptu weapons to defend themselves against whatever came through the caucus door. Although the PM apologized to his stunned caucus for going missing in action during those 15 minutes that mattered, it probably did little to restore his image as the warrior prime minister.
There was a time when it could count on the PM to denounce the repression of human rights and religious freedoms in that country (China) and not sacrifice Canadian values for the almighty yuan. Those were the bankrupt ways of the Liberals and their ‘moral relativism.’
It is one thing when the political opposition goes after you. But when the winds of change begin to blow through your own camp, it’s time for a reality check.
The fact is, almost everybody seems to be getting tired of Stephen Harper — of his fear-mongering, his deceitful nature, his megalomaniac urge to control everything. For the first time, that might include his base. There is much to justify their sense of grievance.
Harper came to power promising to do things differently than the Liberals of the Ad Sponsorship era. The base expected a new integrity reflecting the best conservative values — integrity, frugality and respect for Canadians. Instead, Canadians have been fed a steady dose of behaviour out of the prime minister’s own office that redefines unethical — and, in some cases, verges on the criminal.
Harper’s former parliamentary secretary, Dean Del Mastro, has been convicted of election fraud — exceeding spending limits, failing to report a personal contribution of $21,000 and knowingly submitting a falsified document. This came on the heels of an earlier election-related sleight of hand — the in/out scandal — that saw the party plead guilty to election fraud.
Then there’s Arthur Porter, the man Harper appointed to oversee Canada’s spy agency, who is in jail in Panama fighting extradition to this country, where he faces a bevy of criminal charges. One of Harper’s closest former aides, Bruce Carson, is facing influence peddling charges. Carson was hired by Harper despite the PM knowing of his previous criminal record for fraud.
And lest we forget, there’s the whole Wright/Duffy mess and the murky robocalls business and the self-serving legal rejigging of Elections Canada’s abilities to promote voter engagement and prosecute wrongdoing.
Hardly what conservatives respect — and not what Conservatives said they would bring to Ottawa.
For social conservatives, Harper hasn’t even delivered the promised national conversation on issues important to them. There was a time when the PM could reasonably argue that issues like abortion could not be raised when the Conservatives had only a minority government. But even in a majority situation, Harper has done nothing to win back the support of Conservative MPs who thought their day had come after the May 2011 win. Many of them, like Maurice Vellacott, are not running this time around. He was the co-chair of the Parliamentary Pro-Life Caucus and has been the MP from Saskatoon-Wanuskewin since 1997.
The base has to be confused by the PM’s bizarre policy on China. There was a time when it could count on the PM to denounce the repression of human rights and religious freedoms in that country, to not sacrifice Canadian values for the almighty yuan. Those were the bankrupt ways of the Liberals, with their “moral relativism”.
But now Harper touts his trade deals with China as major accomplishments, including the sale of a Canadian resource company to a state-owned entity in China. We can’t have a Petro Canada, but we can sell to the Chinese equivalent.
And while he’s doing that, he wants Conservatives to donate to his crusade against the victims of communism. So what is he when it comes to Beijing: ally, trading partner or moral opponent of a country that has hacked Canadian government computers and is called by some the largest criminal enterprise on earth?
Conservatives expected a clear, consistent approach to the military that would make up for the Liberals’ era of neglect. Yet there are no new fighter aircraft because of bureaucratic bungling, no new ships despite dozens of giant novelty cheques and ribbon cuttings, and some of the navy’s existing frigates have been tied up in harbour because the country doesn’t have the trained personnel to crew them.
And who in the Conservative base could have foreseen the abusive cuts made to the budget of Veterans Affairs, stinting injured and traumatized soldiers returned from a decade of war in Afghanistan?
One of the legends of the old Reform Party was the way Stephen Harper passed the Kentucky Fried Chicken barrel in basements in Calgary to raise money for the party. Conservatives admired the grassroots effort and frugality and expected it to continue once in Ottawa.
It has not. This prime minister blew close to a billion dollars on the G8 and G20 meetings in Toronto and Muskoka. He blamed the debacle on “thugs.” He wasted $28 million on commemorating the War of 1812 when he was closing veterans centres to save a paltry $3.8 million. And he has doubled the cost of the PM’s personal security to a whopping $20 million and climbing.
The once ostensibly cost-conscious politician now thinks nothing of spending a cool million to fly his own limousine to India for a state visit, or burning $45,000 of taxpayers’ money to attend a Yankees game. You would need a lot of Kentucky Fried Chicken barrels to hold the cash he has wasted on an increasingly imperial style.
Ultimately, one-man rule is only good for one man. By George, Conrad Black may be on to something.
Readers can reach the author at michaelharris@ipolitics.ca. Click here to view other columns by Michael Harris.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.
 
http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/indigenous-lawsuits-could-paralyze-the-tar-sands

Indigenous Lawsuits Could Paralyze the Tar Sands
May 5, 2014
by Michael Toledano
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Reject and project protest, via Flickr
Whether it calls the program “responsible resource development” or strives to become an “energy superpower,” Canada is digging up vast swathes of the earth and selling them as quickly as possible at the expense of the environment and aboriginal rights. In many of the treaty territories and unsurrendered First Nations across Canada, the constitutionally protected rights of indigenous people—including the right to hunt, fish, trap, and be consulted with and accommodated when new development is planned—are being increasingly overstepped by rapid industrial growth. After a frenzy of environmental de-regulation, undertaken by the fraudulently elected Harper Government at the request of oil lobbyists, indigenous rights remain as a last line of legal defence for the environment in Canada.

“This is not an Indian problem anymore. If you breathe air and drink water, it’s about you,” said Crystal Lameman, a member of the Beaver Lake Cree. Her band is suing for an injunction in their traditional territories, which, if granted, could prohibit a third of planned oil sands development from moving forward without their consent. Theirs is one of the largest lawsuits of what the Canadian Press calls 2014’s “aboriginal legal onslaught” against the tar sands.

This wave of litigation responds to Canada’s new regulatory climate, in which many major energy projects no longer require environmental assessments, millions of waterways are now unprotected, and those looking to participate in public hearings on energy projects need to endure a prohibitive and time-consuming application process to (maybe) be heard. Most recently, oversight of Alberta’s oil industry was handed over to an industry-funded corporation, and habitat protection requirements for the humpback whale were loosened, likely to permit the construction of the Enbridge Northern Gateway.

To justify this stream-lined regulatory regime, Stephen Harper said in 2012 that: “We cannot allow valid concerns about environmental protection to be used as an excuse to trap worthwhile projects in reviews-without-end.” Instead, the government and industry now face lawsuits without end.

“As we’ve seen with bills C-38 and C-45, the problem with environmental assessment tools is that they can essentially be legislated out of existence,” said Robert Janes, a lawyer representing a number of First Nations. “They are created by the legislature or parliament and they can be abolished or limited by the legislature or parliament.” In contrast, Janes said, “what treaty and aboriginal rights have is constitutional protection. So the government can’t wish them away.”

Accordingly, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, with support from Neil Young, has filed four lawsuits that challenge specific Shell projects and allege that entire land use policies were developed without proper consultation. The Mikisew Cree and Frog Lake First Nation are suing the government over massive changes to the country’s environmental assessment and water protection laws. The Lubicon Cree, a non-treaty nation lacking a reserve and basic amenities like running water, allege that billions of dollars in minerals, oil, and gas have been removed from their territories without consent. They are suing the government to nullify thousands of current oil and gas extraction permits and pay $700 million in compensation, while also seeking an injunction against a fracking company called Penn West. In B.C., Tsleil-Waututh Nationhas just launched a lawsuit against the government over the immense Kinder-Morgan export pipeline, while in Ontario the Chippewa of the Thames First Nation is suing the government over inadequate consultation regarding Enbridge Line 9.

Outside of the courts, indigenous activists are pledging to keep blockading unwanted fracking projects in New Brunswick, to physically obstruct construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, and to blockade major gas and tar sands pipelines through British Columbia. Each of these lawsuits and actions reinforces the others, threatening the fuel supply, extraction sites, and distribution network of the tar sands and amounting to many billions of dollars of risk.

Government officials know about this risk and how their economic policies trample indigenous rights. Leaked reports from the Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs, obtained by Martin Lukacs and the Guardian, warn government insiders that the assertion of indigenous rights and new legal precedents set by successful indigenous lawsuits pose “significant risks” to the federal government’s policy agenda and may result in “economic development projects [being] delayed.” One of the documents quoted in Lukacs’ report suggests that “there is a tension between the rights-based agenda of Aboriginal groups and the non-rights based policy approaches” of the federal government.

In pursuing “non-rights based policy,” the government is betting that it can violate its own constitution—so long as it can crush blockades, outspend First Nations in the courts, and authorize projects faster than First Nations can sue. It’s a calculated gamble launched from shaky legal ground, sustained by the ignorance of investors, enforced by the RCMP, aided by the poverty of First Nations, and bankrolled by the infinite wallet of the Canadian taxpayer. In 2013 alone, the government spent $106 million defending itself from aboriginal litigation, while the province of New Brunswick spent $9.5 million policing the Elsipogtog blockade.



Crystal Lameman and Neil Young, photo via Jamie Henn

...continued...
 
Anatomy of a Tar Sands Trial: The Beaver Lake Cree Nation

A look at the Beaver Lake Cree’s litigation, one of the many active aboriginal tar sands lawsuits, reveals the enormity of the government’s policy bluff. With a population of about 900, this First Nation is moving forward with a lawsuit that draws a third of planned tar sands extraction into question. Like BLCN’s traditional territories, an area approximately the size of Switzerland, this legal action is gargantuan—or “so large as to be unmanageable” to use the words of Canada’s lawyers.

The defendants, Canada and Alberta, are accused of authorizing over 20,000 permits that collectively threaten the Beaver Lake Cree’s treaty rights. BLCN charges that the governments have failed to adequately monitor the cumulative effects of development, failed to consult with them in good faith, and failed to take measures to protect the abundance, diversity, and habitat of wildlife.

“When industry and development is destroying our right to hunt, trap, and fish, that’s in direct violation of Canadian law. So we have grounds to challenge,” said Crystal Lameman, a member of the band who fundraises for their litigation.

At the centre of the trial is Treaty 6, an 1876 agreement between the Crown and the Beaver Lake Cree. It outlines the territories relinquished by the Cree, but ensures that “the said Indians shall have right to pursue their avocations of hunting and fishing throughout the tract surrendered,” except in “such tracts as may from time to time be required or taken up for settlement, mining, and other purposes.”

“That language allows for development. It anticipates development, it anticipates that there’ll be settlement. But, at the same time, it can be read in the context of a promise that in the treaty negotiations, a way of life would be protected,” the BLCN’s lawyer Robert Janes said. Accordingly, “there is some limit to the ‘taking-up’ process that means it is not just an open-ended process of extinguishing the rights by slices. What the courts have said is that at some point you cross a line where there’s a danger that there’ll be no meaningful right to hunt, and at that point there’s a limit to the Crown’s conduct.”

“A right to hunt or a right to fish or a right to carry out a cultural activity is absolutely meaningless without a proper habitat in which there are animals, fish, and land. So what the courts have recognized is that what comes with those rights is some kind of protection for habitat,” Janes clarified.

“My hope is that this litigation will set precedent on the protection of our ecosystem, our water systems, our air, our land—everything. The ecosystem, in its entirety,” said Crystal Lameman. “We have to leave something for our children. It doesn’t matter what colour they are—all of our children, the world’s children. And right now, the way this industry is moving about, we’re leaving nothing for our kids but oil they’re going to drink and money they’re going to eat.”



Protesters hold up a map of Treaty 1876 at Reject and Protect in Washington, D.C. via Beaver Lake Cree Facebook
Lameman also hopes that BLCN’s lawsuit will rebalance the relationship between her nation and the Crown, resulting in “true and honest consultation—not before the pen is going to the paper, but consultation from the get-go—defined by us, the citizen members.” When I asked what kinds of efforts industry has made to consult with the Beaver Lake Cree, Lameman clarified that “consultation for me is not a company coming into my community for half an hour, setting up a fancy table, raffling off an iPad, and saying ‘OK, consultation, check.’ That’s their idea of consultation. That’s really what happens.”

The BLCN’s traditional territories already host about 35,000 oil and natural gas wells, a Canadian Forces base, and thousands of kilometres of pipelines, access roads, and seismic lines. These territories are 38,927km2 and cover large parts of the two largest oil sands deposits. While the Beaver Lake Cree say the ecosystem is rapidly declining, the government has plans to triple bitumen extraction in these territories to 1.64 million barrels per day.

“I want it to be stated clearly that I’m not against development. I’m not against this industry,” Crystal Lameman said. “What we are asking for is to show us there’s such a thing as sustainable development, show us that our treaty rights are not being infringed upon, and show us that you are abiding by your obligation to consult.” Lameman believes that if the Crown was confident that they could win this case, “we would be in court already.”

“A lot of the old people, they talk about how the fish don’t taste good anymore—they taste different,” Lameman said. “Hunters have been seeing deer with green meat,” and “there’s been evidence of moose with puss bubbles under their skin.” She noted that ducks are increasingly scarce, “we don’t have very many frogs anymore,” blueberries are “becoming harder and harder to find” and “in about two, three weeks, the Saskatoons are dry. It wasn’t like that when I was a kid.”

Most significantly, caribou herds in the Beaver Lake Cree territories are disappearing fast. “This is an animal that we used to subsist on—thousands and thousands of caribou. As of 2011, we had between 175 and 275 caribou,” said Lameman.

A report by the Cooperative Bank of Manchester, who provided BLCN with funds to launch their case, concluded that “oil and gas exploration and development” and associated roads, pipelines, and seismic lines have resulted in “physical loss of habitat, avoidance of areas by caribou, and increased caribou mortality.” Avoided caribou habitat now covers “51% of the Cold Lake herd range” and “66% of the East Side Athabasca herd range,” with roads acting as “semi-permeable barriers” to caribou and above-ground pipelines “completely impassible.” Saving local caribou herds, the report argues, means issuing “a moratorium on all new industrial developments.”

Instead of a moratorium, Canada and Alberta have developed widely-criticized plans to save the region’s caribou. A federal caribou recovery strategy mandated that 65% of threatened caribou habitat must be left undisturbed, though this threshold has already been exceeded and the government keeps handing out industrial permits. Meanwhile, Alberta is considering building gigantic, outdoor caribou pens, and has been poisoning thousands wolves with strychnine and gunning them down from helicopters to stop them from preying on caribou. A series of reports by Carol Linnitt of DeSmog Blog explores these policies in detail, driving Linnitt to conclude that “according to this strategy, caribou and wolf alike fall prey to another kind of predator: multinational corporations.”

The BLCN’s traditional territories have also been impacted by several oil spills that nobody knows how to stop, with heavy oil and tainted water are oozing up from fissures deep in the earth. This includes the infamous Cold Lake spill which is ongoing after eleven months with no end in sight. “In the south-west portion of the lake we have ancestors buried,” Lameman said, noting that this burial site is a part of her nation’s litigation. Friends of Lameman’s who were employed to clean-up this spill told her they saw deer and moose drinking from the polluted lake, and dead ducks and frogs littering the scene.

“We’ll be pulling together evidence to show just how the land has been disturbed, what land is no longer available for harvesting, how certain kinds of physical disturbances affect wildlife patterns, how certain kinds of physical activities limit hunting,” said lawyer Robert Janes, noting that the case will argue that the indigenous “right to hunt carries with it a substantial cultural component.”

“A lot of these things are personal accounts,” Lameman said. “These systems we have placed upon us, they don’t recognize oral history. But that’s our history. We don’t write our history down in books, so that makes it less valuable to this system.”




Caribou herds in Beaver Lake Cree territories are disappearing fast. Photo via Flickr user Rich Durant
With this in mind, the BLCN’s legal team is unearthing evidence that will verify, through a court-approved European optic, the oral history of development as told by the Beaver Lake Cree. This amounts to a herculean research project that their lawyer estimates could involve upwards of 250,000 documents—a collection of satellite images and old aerial photographs, ecological and anthropological studies, testimonies from elders, and “getting the government to choke up the information out of individual sources.”

Robert Janes explained that “every farm has a land title deed and has a history, every project has authorizations, every road has a history. And those documents exist inside the government, it’s just that the government never actually tries to establish how those come together.”

“The really hard part is actually establishing the baseline picture of what the environment was like before the disturbances, and that is a very challenging process,” Janes said. “But there is data out there and we do know that at some point in time the land was in fact undeveloped.”
...continued...
 
Beaver oil sands lease, via Raven Trust
Time, money, and the burden of history

While the law moves at a snail’s pace, industrial development is ceaseless and rapid. While the government’s coffers are unlimited, indigenous communities face endemic poverty. While First Nations’ rights are now the strongest environmental protections in Canada, the weight of history obstructs aboriginals from easily having these rights recognized in the courts.

Up until 1951, aboriginals in Canada were not permitted to hire lawyers. As a result, while other areas of law have had more time to develop, many basic concepts in aboriginal litigation are not yet clearly defined. First Nations across the country charge that the government or industry have failed to consult with and accommodate them, but the law has only begun to define consultation in the last decade and “the courts have barely started to scratch the surface” of what accommodation means, Robert Janes said.

As a result, Janes said, “it is not uncommon for the Crown to raise very difficult legal issues at very early stages of the process.” Complex preliminary issues “can consume the First Nations’ ability to litigate and can introduce so much delay that often there’s nothing left to fight over.”

“Aboriginal litigation raises some of the most important and complex and difficult and therefore expensive issues to resolve. But at the same time the people who raise these issues are in fact some of the most impoverished people in Canada, in many cases because of the very issues they’re trying to raise,” Janes summarized.

Yet, under the growing weight of aboriginal litigation, procedural roadblocks for indigenous plaintiffs are beginning to unravel. As an example, the BLCN’s lawsuit overcame a major legal obstruction faced by indigenous communities impacted by large industries. Theirs is the first case to look at the impacts of development as a whole on their treaty rights, rather than the impact of one particular project.

“When we filed the litigation in May of 2008, we claimed over 17,000 treaty right infringements and violations. [Canada] wanted us to go to court 17,000 times,” Crystal Lameman said, laughing. Instead, the courts ruled that the Beaver Lake Cree “are entitled to access to justice uncircumscribed by limits imposed by the scope of Canada’s alleged misconduct,” and struck down Canada’s appeals.

“This has very significant implications for other First Nations,” said Robert Janes. In many First Nations “it’s not that just one project looked at in isolation is bad, it’s that their lands have been affected by hundreds, in many cases thousands of impacts. It’s the totality of those impacts, which are supposed to be regulated by the government, which has really changed their life and has interfered with their aboriginal rights, their aboriginal title.”

This precedent was hard won. It took almost four years for the Beaver Lake Cree to be granted a trial and now, almost six years since the case was first filed, BLCN is still a few years away from a court date. As the case has grown to include thousands of new permits, Janes explained, it reflects the reality that “the world doesn’t stop while the case goes on.”

While in court, Janes said, “the practical reality is that Beaver Lake has to continue to fight on other fronts as a part of trying to avoid excessive development.” He offered the example of “an oil sands project that is in progress right now, where Beaver Lake is trying to participate in the regulatory process to have the regulator limit or delay or ultimately not approve the project.” Development might be slowed, too, by the investor uncertainty created by a lack of customers for, and endless litigation against, Canada’s tar sands infrastructure.

Robert Janes noted that another of his clients, Grassy Narrows, has successfully deterred development while fighting their legal battle “for 12, 13 years.” They have done this by being “very involved in the regulatory process, they have had blockades, they have also had a very effective grassroots boycott campaign that a number of organizations have helped them with. When you look around at successful cases, aboriginal people have to fight these cases on a number of fronts—political, legal, regulatory, and it’s a bit of a hearts and minds campaign as well.”

Winning hearts and minds, the BLCN lawsuit has drawn support from lawyers and donors from around the world, as well as charitable organizations, and the Cooperative Bank of Manchester. They’ve also crowd-sourced donations online, gathering more funds than they asked for.

Susan Smitten, the executive director of a charitable organization called RAVEN Trust that fundraises for BLCN, said several lawyers and law-firms have worked on the case at half of their normal rate or “put in hundreds of thousands of dollars pro-bono.” A prominent UK lawyer, Michael Mansfield, wanted to represent the Beaver Lake Cree for free, but was not permitted to do so by the Alberta courts—instead he sent lawyers from his firm to work behind the scenes. “Lots of people have put in time in lieu of money,” Smitten summarized.

Smitten noted that in addition to RAVEN’s fundraising, “people in Beaver Lake Cree community are digging as deep as they can. Their resources are so limited, and they have other issues as well, but they all believe in this strongly.” Overall, she said, “the band is putting in hundreds of thousands of dollars themselves… at a recent open band meeting they raised about $4,000 just from the people in the room.”

And still, Smitten told me, as legal challenges like the BLCN’s are increasingly seen as one of the most tangible ways to challenge unchecked tar sands growth, more and more donors seem to be reaching out to help.

“People are starting to really awaken, in the sense of a global awareness, to how indigenous led strategies based on their treaty rights are really forming one of the key ways that tar sands expansion can be at least limited,” said Susan Smitten. “In everything I read these days, everyone is tuning into the fact that this rate of expansion is unviable. It’s untenable because within less than a decade they want to double the current production.”

“All the voices seem to be saying ‘don’t we need to freeze this for a minute? Do we even need this and if we do isn’t there a better way? And shouldn’t we be consulting with First Nations and making sure their rights aren’t completely trampled in the process?’” Smitten said. “As more and more people tune into that and become aware, there are more and more voices saying ‘how can we help?’ and there’s more and more people reaching out to us.”


@M_Tol
 
http://www.iflscience.com/environment/epa-barred-getting-advice-scientists

EPA Barred From Getting Advice From Scientists

November 22, 2014 | by Stephen Luntz

photo credit: Gavin Schaefer via wikimedia commons. Under a bill that has passed the US House, the people best qualified to say whether a chemical is dangerous will not be allowed to do so
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A bill passed through the US House of Representatives is designed to prevent qualified, independent scientists from advising the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). They will be replaced with industry affiliated choices, who may or may not have relevant scientific expertise, but whose paychecks benefit from telling the EPA what their employers want to hear.

The EPA's Science Advisory Board (SAB) was established in 1978 to ensure the EPA uses the most up to date and relevant scientific research for its decision making and that the EPA's programs reflect this advice. It has served in this role, most often uncontroversially, through 36 years and six presidents. If the new bill passes the Senate and wins presidential approval, however, that is about to change.

It's hard to be against “balance”, which no doubt helped Rep Chris Stewart (R-Utah) gather 229-191 support for his bill H.R. 1422 to overhaul the way appointments to the SAB are made. Of the 51 members of the SAB, three come from the industries the EPA is regulating. Stewart wants more, saying, "All we're asking is that there be some balance to those experts…We're losing valuable insight and valuable guidance because we don't include them in the process."

However, deeper investigation suggests the agenda involves more than getting input from a wider range of backgrounds. For one thing, the vote was largely on party lines with four Democrats supporting and one brave Republican opposed. Moreover, Stewart doesn't have much of a record for listening to genuine scientific expertise, considering 98% of qualified scientists' assessments irrelevant.

Moreover, Stewart has made clear he doesn't believe the EPA should exist at all, calling for its scrapping because it “thwarts energy development”. Axing a body that ensures water is drinkable and air doesn't kill you is politically hard, but nobbling is easier.

The legislation has been under consideration since 2013. At an early hearing on the bill Dr Francesca Grifo, previously director of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History testified, “Conflicts of interest threaten the integrity of science. Specifically, the objectivity of the members of an advisory committee and the public's trust in the advice rendered by that committee are damaged when a member of an advisory committee has a secondary interest that creates a risk of undue influence on decisions or actions affecting the matters in front of the committee.”

The bill would prevent scientists from voting on the release into the environment of a chemical by their employers. Nevertheless, they would be allowed to vote to release a nearly identical chemical, Grifo notes, including some that would set a precedent that would be very useful to the company in future decisions.

More insidiously, research scientists are barred under the act from advising on any topic that might “directly or indirectly involve review and evaluation of their own work”. In other words, the only people barred from advising the EPA on a particular chemical are those who have actually studied its toxicity or effect on the environment.
 
http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2014/11/2...ce=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=241114


What We Forgot on Remembrance Day
Where is the democracy our brave soldiers fought and died for?
By Rafe Mair, Today, TheTyee.ca
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LestWeForget_300px.jpg
Cartoon by Greg Perry.

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Read more: Rights + Justice,
At our Remembrance Day ceremony in Lions Bay, we heard a great deal about sacrifices made in two world wars for democracy and freedom -- a pretty constant theme, I dare say, right across the country.

This troubles me greatly. Those who died for Canadian democracy -- indeed all those who served -- must be bitterly disappointed at the legacy they see.

What triggered this thought was when Finance Minister Joe Oliver didn't give his pre-budget speech to the House of Commons but to a group of political supporters in a private lunch and then on New York television. The Commons, with the basic obligation to approve the budget or not, was ignored as if it was irrelevant to the process -- which, as I will show, it is.

Then, my mind went back to Prime Minister Stephen Harper proroguing Parliament to avoid a non-confidence motion.

I started to think about the prime minister having been found in contempt of Parliament.

My thoughts moved to just how the House of Commons, the repository of our democracy, actually works.



I thought of the committees of the House of Commons, which descended from a similar process at Westminster, designed to hold the government accountable. They are intended to hold hearings to test ministers' policies and be critical of legislation that troubles the members. Instead, they are appointed by the prime minister and anytime he gets a sniff of criticism coming from a committee, he changes the chairperson or members of that committee accordingly.

Then I went back to a favourite theme of mine -- a favourite because it is so vital. Members of Parliament have absolutely no power whatsoever.

In theory, of course, MPs can topple the prime minister and his cabinet. This has happened once, when there was a majority government, back in 1873 during the Pacific Scandal when Parliament voted no confidence in Sir John A. Macdonald. This, it must be noted, was before there was the ironclad party discipline that prevails today.

Without members of Parliament having a real and constant power, how can there be democracy?

If there is no one to hold the prime minister to account, how is there democracy?

While MPs do have theoretical power, in reality the prime minister personally is in charge of everything including the appointment of cabinet, all junior positions, even deciding which MP sits on which parliamentary committee and which good little boys and girls go to that useless conference on a tropic isle during the Ottawa winter. He takes his advice, if he takes any at all, not from elected members of Parliament, but from unelected party hacks.

Where, then, is that democracy that our brave soldiers fought and died for?

Absolute power

It's not hard to see how we got into our present difficulties. Because, in theory, the government (being the prime minister and cabinet which he hires and fires) depends upon the consent of the Commons to rule, it became obligatory for survival that the PM control it. Why take chances? (He could, of course, rule by consultation and consensus but prime ministers, with majorities, see no need to go to all that bother.)

Absolute power is achieved by a PM by a combination of the carrot and the stick.

One carrot is the power to promote.

As Napoleon once said, "every foot soldier has a Marshall's baton in his knapsack." So it is with government backbenchers for whom the all-consuming thought is that they, like that foot soldier, could replace any of the cabinet and probably, for that matter, the prime minister.

If backbenchers behave properly, perhaps they'll get on a committee that travels to neat places; perhaps they'll be chair or vice chair of a committee and make more money for doing what they're told; maybe it'll be a parliamentary secretaryship, with increased money and prestige; or maybe a deputy whip or even the whip himself -- again more money; perhaps, just perhaps, they'll make the next cabinet shuffle, with big bucks, car and driver, first class travel and all the trimmings. Maybe, if they behave themselves, and are loyal foot soldiers, good things will happen. What's certain is that if they're not, they won't.

The PM's stick is a lethal weapon. He can turf an MP out of caucus, meaning he'll be expelled from the party and lose its support in the next election. They all know how difficult it is to be elected as an Independent. Moreover, the PM has the statutory power to refuse any nominee the right to run for the party, even though his constituency organization is 100 per cent behind him.

This combination of the stick and the carrot renders the prime minister all powerful and the MPs into eunuchs.

Essential reading

I recommend a book Irresponsible Government by Brent Rathgeber, MP, Edmonton-St. Albert, elected as a Tory in 2008 and re-elected in 2011, who left the Conservatives to sit as an Independent. It's a horror story if you think government backbenchers have a soupçon of power. Rathgeber relates how they all have their Commons speeches written for them by the Prime Minister's office as well as powder puff questions to put to ministers in question period, both of which they are expected to give verbatim -- no personal thoughts, now!

The PMO always prepares comfy (for the PM) agendas for committees and even obligatory speeches and press releases for MPs to use in their constituencies.

Rathgeber emphasizes the point that Tory MPs consider themselves as part of the government (which they are not), and that being a government cheerleader transcends any obligation to constituency or constituents.

It's a hell of a read and will lay to rest all notions you were taught, and badly want to believe, about "responsible government."

(I wait with patience but I fear in vain for a point-by-point response from my Tory MP or any other for that matter.)

Land of make believe

Sadly, MPs, in order to justify their well-paid, phony existence, pretend they really do have influence and truly are an essential part of running the nation.

My MP, Tory John Weston, peddles this rubbish while his record shows a 100 per cent pandering to every government decision no matter what it is. In reality, he's reduced to handing out cheques to municipalities and organizations that would get them anyway, and making PMO approved speeches to chambers of commerce.

For example, in my constituency, a major issue is a proposed LNG plant in Squamish. Weston supports this plant unconditionally even though the majority oppose it. Obviously on instructions from above, he arm wrestled the West Vancouver Council into changing their opposition to this facility. There was a hell of a public reaction, and with a municipal election imminent, Council promptly reversed itself and is once more opposing the plant!

Weston's plight is repeated right across the country with government backbenchers who all understand the advice of the late U.S. House Speaker Sam Rayburn that "to get along, one must go along."

Stephen Harper has become dictatorial in the extreme because he can be. He has contempt for the House of Commons because he doesn't have to have respect for it. He runs parliament just as a tinpot dictator runs his legislature.

The entire system has become a land of "make believe."

We should be able to look up to and respect our members of Parliament as people with power and dignity who represent our interests at the seat of power. Of course they don't and haven't the guts and sense of honour to do a damned thing about it. What, lose that MP designation, all that money, and possible promotion to cabinet?

You must be mad!

How can we be true to all those valiant men and women who put themselves in harm's way and too often died for us, if we permit this façade of the democracy they held so high to continue?

We mouth the right words on Remembrance Day, but in truth, we repay sacrifice, sometimes the supreme sacrifice, with hypocrisy.

We, who owe so much to these brave people we rightly honour every November 11, ought to be ashamed of ourselves.

On another note

Forgive me for making a short reference to my last column on the fall of communism and the severe limits to the apparent victor capitalism. A flurry of comments held that I should've done something about this when I was in political office.

Of course I should have, and I fully intended to.

Unfortunately, I ran into some bad luck.

You see, the Berlin Wall didn't fall until nine years after I left politics, the Soviet Union collapsed two years later.

Drat! Just bad timing kept me from political immortality
 
http://www.pressprogress.ca/en/post...-made-pipelines-most-toxic-issue-canada-today

NOV 26, 2014 by PressProgress
5 ways Stephen Harper made pipelines the most toxic issue in Canada today
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Are Stephen Harper's pipeline policies beginning to boomerang back at him?

On the West Coast, 78 people have been arrested (so far) over the past week on Burnaby Mountain, protesting Kinder Morgan's proposal to triple its pipeline capacity to transport Alberta oil to British Columbia.

From an 84 year-old retired librarian to 11 year-old girls, people are being hauled away and charged with "civil contempt" for obstructing surveyors for the Kinder Morgan pipeline.

In Central Canada, opposition to the proposed Energy East pipeline project is gaining steam with a crowdfunding initiative that continues to grow.

Meanwhile, cheerleaders for the oil and gas sector are really annoyed, advising people who are raising questions about the approvals process and concerns about climate change that if they don't like pipelines, they can "freeze in the dark" this winter.

Of course, they don't mention that in 2012, the Harper government changed NEB's mandate to limit public participation in pipeline hearings, placing strict rules on who could speak at hearings and what topics could be discussed. Apart from excluding the public from the hearings, it also barred environmental scientists from participating.

Reflecting on what's going on in BC, Desmog Canada's Carol Linnitt explains that "the mishandling of the National Energy Board review of Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain oil pipeline and tanker proposal has created the conditions for the situation now unfolding on the mountainside."

In other words, the civil disobedience at Burnaby Mountain is exactly what you get when your government fails to provide a lawful, democratic process for making decisions that affect the health, safety and sustainability of communities.

Here are 5 ways Stephen Harper created the toxic pipeline debate in Canada today:

1. The National Energy Board is "engaged in public deception."

The National Energy Board – that's the arms-length regulator of Canada's energy sector – was recently described as a "farce," "clearly biased," "not objective" and "Kafkaesque." And that's from a guy who's in the know.

Marc Eliesen, the former CEO of BC Hydro and former board member at Suncor, withdrew earlier this month as an intervenor in the federal government's review of Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain Expansion Project. The board is "engaged in a public deception," avoiding "digging too deeply for fear the economic case may crumble," says Eliesen.

The "fraudulent process" excludes important issues from the scope of the hearings, he says. This means the board is "reviewing only untested evidence" and blocking key stakeholders – including the Province of British Columbia, municipal governments, First Nations and environmental groups – from accessing information about the project.

"Given the Board’s lack of objectivity it is not surprising that out of the approximately 2000 questions not answered by Trans Mountain that Intervenors called on the Board to compel answers, only 5 per cent were allowed by the Board and 95 per cent were rejected," writes Eliesen.

The Province of BC has said that because the pipeline company failed to answer their request for information, the province is unable "to fully understand the risk posed by the Project, how Trans Mountain proposes to mitigate such risk and Trans Mountain's ability to effectively respond to a spill related to the Project."

2. The Prime Minister really doesn't seem to care about climate change.

How else to explain the long delay of regulations for the oil and gas sector to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Or that Harper appears to be looking forward to the day the Northwest Passage opens up to shipping traffic.

Or that Canada fails to meet greenhouse gas reduction targets to which the Harper government agreed in 2009 (or even acknowledge Environment Canada's own carbon emission report.

Or that Canada is dead last in a climate change performance ranking in the industrialized world.

Or that a Conservative running in the 2015 election thinks renewable energy exists only in a "dream world."

3. "Science?"

Here's a sampling of Harper being called out by scientists on pipeline process problems in recent year.

300 scientists wrote Harper in June criticizing the "flawed" science of the Northern Gateway pipeline. Ignored.
Hundreds of scientists in 17 cities protested the Harper government's cuts and muzzling of scientists in 2013, particularly in areas relating to the environment and climate.
800 international scientists signed an open letter last month from the Union of Concerned Scientists protesting Harper's muzzling of scientists, particularly research relating to air pollution and climate science.
Six associations representing science writers and communicators called on Harper in 2012 to stop muzzling scientists, particularly relating to climate science
The New York Times took the spectacular step in 2013 of singling out Harper for "restrict[ing] the flow of scientific information, especially concerning research into climate change, fisheries and anything to do with the Alberta tar sands -- source of the diluted bitumen that would flow through the controversial Keystone XL pipeline."

4. It's almost like Harper's got something to hide...

Since securing a majority in the 2011 election, the Harper government has been burying anti-green legislation in omnibus bills.

For example, the 2012's massive 450-page omnibus budget bill included watered down important environmental laws, including the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act, the Navigable Waters Act, the Fisheries Act, the Species at Risk Act, and the Canadian Oil and Gas Operations Act.

This bill also tweaked the National Energy Board Act to speed up the pipeline approval process.

5. Oh, and that thing where the Harper Conservatives use the nation's spies and cops against law-abiding Canadians...

In late 2013, documents obtained by the Vancouver Observer showed that the NEB, along with the RCMP and CSIS, Canada's spy agency, were monitoring several advocacy groups critical of the Northern Gateway and Kinder Morgan pipelines in BC.

In the documents, the Council of Canadians, Sierra Club, Dogwood Initiative, LeadNow, Idle No More, and ForestEthics were labelled as "security concerns."

Photo: sbeebe, Moosealope and PMO. Used under a Creative Commons BY-2.0 licence.
 
Rick Mercer: Tories Are Cheating With Economic Action Plan Ads<iframe width="570" height="321" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/lfpSajAHTTk?list=UUt3Ag7rdgR6mtzOMEhd_v6g" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
 
http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2014/12/0...eadlines&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=011214

Why Canada's Job Future Is Sinking like a Stone
Our business elites got all they wanted. Still they fail to invest, innovate and compete.
By Murray Dobbin, Today, TheTyee.ca
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Cartoon by Greg Perry.

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Canada's economy is increasingly at the mercy of a risk-averse, inept corporate elite addicted to government tax breaks. They are enabled by an ideologically addled government that is incompetent.

It is a deadly combination -- a dumb and dumber team dragging us backwards at a time when the world is hoping there won't be another economic collapse.

Recent media reports reinforce what we have known for decades about the Canadian corporate elite. One highlighted Canada's dismal performance when it comes to research and development, the other our pathetic efforts at broadening our markets for exports. More and more evidence piles up that we are de-industrializing -- reminding me of the Star Trek episode where the whole crew starts devolving. Captain Picard is destined to become a pygmy marmoset. I wonder what the end point for Canada might be?

Passed by Taiwan, Brazil, India

An OECD study reported in the Globe shows that Canada has dropped out of the top ten in research and development spending and now ranks 12th. While we de-industrialize and fall back on raw resource exports, previously underdeveloped countries -- Taiwan, India and Brazil -- are now outspending us as they industrialize.

We continue to decline in the World Economic Forum's World Competitiveness Index as well. For 2014-2015 we rank 15th.



Even worse, in the category of "innovation and sophistication factors" we rank 25th.

In 1998 our overall rank was sixth. Some of the countries that now beat us: the United Arab Emirates, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Canada's dramatic decline in research and development has a continuing negative impact on labour productivity as well. According to OECD figures for the year 2012, we stood at 73 per cent of the U.S. benchmark of 100. This failure to increase labour productivity through investment in new machinery and innovation has had a huge impact on our standard of living and the domestic economy: as wages stagnate and personal debt increases, domestic consumption starts to flatline -- and that further suppresses investment.

The other media report that reveals the pathetic level of government and corporate leadership on the economy focused on our complete failure to look to India as a potent export market. It is the fastest growing economy on the planet yet Canadian corporations and their government partners seem asleep at the switch. Kevin Carmichael in the Globe and Mail quotes the president of Canada-India Business Council: "We've got to get in here fast or we're going to miss the boat. You've seen a rush to the gates [from other nations]. We seem to be taking a slow walk." Currently exports to India account for a minuscule 0.63 per cent of Canadian exports -- and just under half of that is raw materials.*

Canada scarcely does better in other emerging nations. Our top three destinations for goods are: the U.S. at 74.5 per cent, China at 4.3 per cent and the U.K. at 4.1 per cent. Australia, a Pacific nation we compete with, is far more diversified: China 29.5 per cent, Japan 19.3 per cent, South Korea 8 per cent, India 4.9 per cent.

For decades, alarms about lagging productivity

Where I live, in Powell River, B.C., the evidence of our race to the bottom is stark. An endless stream of huge log booms go by my window, most headed to China, which not too many years ago bought one of the local mill's paper machines, packed it up and sent it home -- to process our trees.

The more things change the more they stay the same -- especially when it comes to corporate leadership. Two studies on Canadian competitiveness by Harvard Business School's Michael Porter, one in 1991 and one in 2001, concluded: "The absence of intense local rivalry combined with customers who were not demanding produced weak pressures for firm productivity and upgrading.... Research uncovered key weaknesses in the sophistication of company operations and strategy."

Canadian firms that did "compete" internationally took the easy way out -- exporting almost exclusively to the U.S. and relying on "natural resource advantages or lower labour costs than other G7 competitors instead of sophisticated products and processes."

Is it even possible to change corporate culture or at least engage in a little behaviour modification? Do we -- that is the government -- have to treat our (ridiculously over-compensated) CEOs as adolescents to get them to deliver?

After all we have given them literally everything they have asked for starting with the original free trade deal with the U.S., deliberately suppressed wages, a shredded safety net, and the gutting of regulations.

None of it has had any impact. Their performance has been getting worse for almost two decades.

What's Harper got against manufacturers?

So what does Stephen Harper do? He rewards corporate ineptness and irresponsibility by providing one of the lowest corporate tax rates in the 34-nation OECD. It doesn't matter that all this free money just goes into the cash reserves of the country's largest companies (now totalling over $600 billion). Why doesn't it matter? Because Stephen Harper doesn't actually care if they invest in anything. The point of his tax cuts was never to stimulate investment -- it was to jettison government revenue in aid of dismantling the activist state and making it impossible for future governments to act.

The only sector Harper even thinks about is oil and gas. If that seems a bit over the top have a look at the Carol Goar's Toronto Star story on the phantom $200-million fund to stimulate Ontario manufacturing. The money, formally announced a year ago, was slated for something called the Advanced Manufacturing Fund and it was first mentioned in February last year. The goals were laudable, including: "To support transformative technologies and foster collaboration between universities and the private sector."

The problem, says Goar (using information dug up by the NDP's Peggy Nash) is that "To date, not a single project has been approved. Not one dollar has been released. Not one job has been created."

Two-hundred million might sound like a lot of money to promote manufacturing in one province, but the fact is that given Canadian corporations' appalling record of investment in innovation and "sophistication of company operations and strategy," government engagement is absolutely critical. The manufacturing and high tech sectors are in desperate need of the kind of guidance that can only come from a smart industrial strategy. Otherwise Canada faces a continued decline in its value-added sectors and export markets. Ontario has lost 300,000 manufacturing jobs in the last ten years -- that's more than one in four.

If the goal is to create "transformative technologies" (the word green comes to mind) then $200 million is just lunch money. But the Harper government is so opposed to government intervention it can't even bring itself to spend the money it actually allocated.

Everything oil wants

Imagine if even 10 per cent of the largesse and free passes showered on the oil and gas sector was used to create what the Advanced Manufacturing Fund was established to do. According to the IMF, Canadian subsidies to the oil sector, in real dollars and avoided externality costs, amount to $34 billion a year.

If you have been taken in by the spin that this sector creates thousands of jobs in other provinces, then think again. The entire resource sector accounts for only 7 per cent of the economy and is one of the worst job creators we have. Two reports, one by the IMF and another by the Canadian Energy Research Institute in 2011 revealed just how little the oil and gas sector contributes to jobs and GDP growth.

Commenting on the reports, Frances Russell highlighted the fact that "Canada's energy sector created only 1.7 per cent of all new jobs in Canada from 2007 to 2012." That was just 13,000 jobs. Compare that to the 22,000 jobs created in a single month, December 2013, in health care and social assistance. "The energy sector accounts for only 0.1 percentage point of the average 2.25 per cent annual GDP growth over the last decade," according to the IMF. As for the alleged benefits accruing to other provinces, a dollar invested in the tarsands boosts manufacturing in the rest of Canada by three cents and GDP in Ontario by four cents. And if none of the pipelines from the tarsands were built? The economy would grow 0.5 per cent less by 2020.

The potential for Canada to be leading in many new areas of innovative green growth has been squandered for years and continues to be ignored.

Instead Canadian governments shower the oil and gas sector with obscenely large subsidies and allow risk-averse and timid added-value sectors to languish in the ferocious competition for global markets.

To add insult to injury we hand over billions in tax cuts that could be used to become genuinely competitive. Dumb and Dumber was a bad movie. But this one's worse.

*Percentage error corrected Dec. 1 at 8:40 a.m.
 
http://thetyee.ca/Culture/2014/11/2...eadlines&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=011214

The Power of Conscience in 'Citizenfour'
Edward Snowden doc reveals struggle in acting alone.
By Dorothy Woodend, 29 Nov 2014, TheTyee.ca

Citizen
A prodding, insistent conscience set Edward Snowden in motion. The same goes for protesters opposing Kinder Morgan's pipeline expansion.

I have been waiting a long time to see Citizenfour. It was worth the wait.

Director Laura Poitras's film about Edward Snowden had its premiere at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 10, 2014. It entered theatres not long after. I went to see it on the same day as a fundraiser for the Burnaby Mountain protesters opposing Kinder Morgan's expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline. It turned out the two things had something in common.

Action undertaken in secret by government is the motivating factor that drives Edward Snowden to sacrifice his life as an ordinary person. It was an issue that came up again and again at the Burnaby Mountain event, as speaker after speaker talked about secret meetings, nondisclosure agreements and backroom deals between the Canadian government and large multinational corporations. Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan called it ''the invisible hand of the marketplace.'' That secret hand has become a little easier to spot, thanks in large part to the courage and defiance of ordinary people who feel it at the back of their shirt collars, frog-marching them to jail, or giving them a hard shove away from some invisible line in the dirt.

In the staid confines of the Law Courts Building in Vancouver, a crowd of all ages sang, spoke and read poems in support of the protest. It is easy to be brave when you are all together; it's much harder when you're alone. This became readily apparent as SFU professor Stephen Collis recalled keeping watch on Burnaby Mountain in the dark and the rain -- not knowing whether Kinder Morgan would show up, or what to do if they did. The pipeline protests have become much more lively since then. But change still requires those first steps: people acting almost entirely alone, with only the insistent prodding of their conscience.

The profoundly personal cost of taking action is rendered explicit in the story of Edward Snowden. Snowden's actions set into motion one of the biggest stories in recent history, but it started with one person, deciding to do the right thing, all by himself.
..continued...
 
Meet America's most wanted

In many respects, Citizenfour is a simple film -- a three-act story that unfolds in what occasionally feels like real time. Director Poitras places it within the context of a trilogy of films about post-911 America. If you have not seen her earlier works, My Country, My Country and The Oath, I would urge you to seek them out. My Country, My Country is about the United States' role in the Iraqi elections, which secured Ms. Poitras a position on the highest threat rating of the Department of Homeland Securities' watch list. Her subsequent work, The Oath, centered around Abu Jandal, a taxi driver who worked as a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden.

Citizenfour takes place a little closer to home.

Poitras had already begun work on a film about surveillance when she was contacted by email by someone calling him or herself Citizenfour. Poitras narrates this initial experience in her own voice, plainspoken and clear, detailing the journey that led to a hotel room in Hong Kong, where she met Edward Snowden. Over the course of eight days, as Poitras filmed the proceedings, journalist Glenn Greenwald and investigative reporter Ewen MacAskill interviewed Snowden about secret documents that detailed the extent of NSA surveillance of the American people. These scenes are the centrepiece of an extraordinary work that has the curious effect of making one almost complicit in the action. As Poitras wields her camera and sets up shots (you catch occasional glimpses of her in a hotel mirror), the film forces you to register the smallest of details, whether that's a tiny pimple on Snowden's face, or his cowlick of hair that refuses to lie flat.

Originally, the scope of Poitras's film had been much wider, involving WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in much more expansive fashion, as well as a number of other key players. The film's genesis is detailed in a recent New Yorker essay. When Poitras initially asked Snowden why he chose to contact her, he responded: ''You asked why I chose you. I didn't. You chose yourself.'' He goes on to state: ''My personal desire is that you paint the target directly on my back. No one, not even my most trusted confidante, is aware of my intentions, and it would not be fair for them to fall under suspicion for my actions. You may be the only one who can prevent that, and that is by immediately nailing me to the cross rather than trying to protect me as a source.''

In these first emails, Snowden may sound like an overly earnest graduate student. (At the time of the film's making, he was 29 years old.) Some of the callowness of youth is still there, in his demeanor and his obsession with getting his hair just right. But there is something else that is deeply familiar, even old fashioned about him -- like a character Jimmy Stewart might have played in an earlier age. Maybe it's the openness of his face, or the calm and detailed manner in which he tells his story, or even the somewhat goofy way he goes about maintaining a level of security (a pillow case dubbed ''the mantle of power'' is pulled over his head and laptop when an especially sensitive bit of information is imparted). Whatever it is, there is never a moment when you doubt his veracity, even as the wilder aspects of the story are detailed in what he describes as ''the biggest weapon for oppression in the history of mankind.''

Alone, together

The human element remains the central quality of the film. This is due to the efforts of the three principles at its centre, Snowden, Greenwald and Poitras, as they navigate the complexities of how best to break the revelations that the American government has been spying, not only on its own people, but just about everyone else in the world as well. (Later scenes in the film that reveal the NSA accessed private cell phone conversations of German Chancellor Angela Merkel are handled with a particularly dark humour.)

Initially, the complicity between Snowden, Greenwald and Poitras swirled around the technical aspects of the leaked documents. But that was before the discussion was concerned with not making Snowden the focal point of the story (which turned out to be somewhat moot). These conversations and all their digressions are captured by the clear eye of Poitras's camera, but something else also begins to occur. You, the audience member, begin your own careful surveillance of the action, noting the placement of moles on Snowden's neck, or the pattern of thinning hair on the top of Greenwald's head. One begins to feel almost like one of the surveillance drones that Snowden describes, patiently observing people and feeding that information back to some unnamed and anonymous collector.

Watching the film in the relative safety of a Vancouver movie theatre, I felt my hands grow cold with dread. Anxiety suffuses the entire film but nowhere is it quite as palpable as these long scenes in a bland hotel suite. While Snowden waits for the inevitable, for the large, shadowy presence that hovers at the edge of the proceedings to take notice and then to take action, you wait with him, sick to your stomach. A ringing telephone or a sudden fire alarm, even a pen snapping in two, are telegraphs some weird infectious form of paranoia.

I was tempted to yell at the screen, ''Get out of there, they're coming to get you!''

And then, almost before you know it, this brief stay of events is over. As images of Snowden the whistleblower were disseminated around the globe, things moved quickly. He is hustled away, by lawyers seeking support from the UN to allow him to stay in Hong Kong. At that point, the film goes dark, quite literally, as the only contact between the filmmaker and her subject takes places on a black computer screen.

Poitras maintained intermittent communication with Snowden as he spent weeks in a Russian airport after the US Government cancelled his passport. When Poitras, Greenwald and Snowden are finally reunited in another hotel room, this time in Moscow, the subsequent revelations are larger and more profound. The existence of another, even higher-placed whistleblower is written down on scraps of paper. Snowden goggles at the information as Greenwald tears the paper to shreds and piles it all on a coffee table. The only word that is clearly visible is POTUS.

Secrets everywhere

I left the theatre, jumpy and paranoid, looking at my cell phone with sudden and deep distrust. But the feeling that remained strongest after seeing the film was the need to tell the truth. It was a need that other people seemed to be feeling with the same sense of urgency. Big or small, secrets have a way of squirming to the surface, however hard governments or corporations are trying to bury them.

At a fundraiser for Burnaby Mountain, Burnaby mayor Derek Corrigan spoke about the review of Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain project, terming it a sham from the beginning. Even though the ''result was predetermined,'' he said, the process was undertaken with due diligence. The city of Burnaby asked 1,700 questions of Kinder Morgan and the National Energy Board, and stated that the city would abide by the process -- even as the courts saw fit to overturn the city's ability to enforce its own municipal bylaws.

Corrigan is a careful speaker and, as an ex-lawyer, he has deep knowledge of the judicial system. There was no denying the surprise in his voice as he described conversations that took place with the NEB that detailed no public interest, no public policy, nor any discussion about climate change or the best use of Canada's limited oil resources. In no uncertain terms Mayor Corrigan made it clear who stood to benefit and who stood to lose: ''The invisible hand of the marketplace, multinational corporations, will decide public policy for the Canadian people based on their economic interests. We cannot tolerate that reality.''

Union of BC Indian Chiefs President and Grand Chief Stewart Phillip also raised concern about policy changes taking place without any kind of public process. In his speech at the fundraiser, he made reference to the BC Liberals' efforts to change the Land Act, asking the BC First Nations Leadership Council to participate in closed-door consultations. The talks would require the Council to undertake a confidentiality agreement that would not allow for any discussion with their own constituents. Chief Phillip told the Liberals to take a flying leap.

When people no longer believe or trust in their own democratically elected government, you know something radical must take place. This could mean civil disobedience on a small scale, like getting arrested in a public park, or it could mean much riskier action -- like outing the secrets of a huge organization like the U.S. National Security Agency.

As Glenn Greenwald stated at the New York premiere of Citizenfour, even the biggest of stories often comes down to the conscience of one person. Said Mr. Greenwald: ''I always thought that the most powerful part of the story was not going to be the documents or the revelations, as important as those are. It was going to be the power of his story, the acts of this very ordinary young man who decided very consciously to sacrifice his whole life for a political principle.''

Sometimes you just have to tell the truth, no matter what the price
 
Unique national science facility may close due to federal cuts


National Ultrahigh-Field NMR Facility for Solids shows struggle to maintain science facilities

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/u...ility-may-close-due-to-federal-cuts-1.2856469

gang-wu-with-900-nmr.png


A unique national science facility that houses the most advanced scientific instrument of its kind in Canada may be forced to shut down after losing its federal funding.
Prior to a temporary reprieve announced this weekend following media coverage of its plight, the Canadian National Ultrahigh-Field NMR Facility for Solids in Ottawa was slated to be closed and decommissioned on Dec. 15.
In an announcement posted on the facility's website, David Bryce, a University of Ottawa chemistry professor who chairs the facility's steering committee, cited a lack of funds for the machine's operation and maintenance. He said the closure would be "a big blow not only to the Canadian research community but will be felt all over the world.”
Now, thanks to a new agreement with the National Research Council, which owns the building that houses the two-storey-tall instrument, it should stay open until at least March 2015, said Sylvain Charbonneau, associate vice-president of research for the University of Ottawa, which helps manage the facility.

But researchers are still short about $200,000 in funds needed to keep the facility running and stop its ultimate closure.
NMR spectrometers apply a strong magnetic field to gather information about the structure of molecules and the interactions of atoms.
The Ottawa facility houses a magnet with a field strength 21.1 Tesla – the most powerful in Canada. It's known affectionately as "the 900" for the frequency (in megahertz) at which hydrogen atoms vibrate in a field that strong.
That makes it the most advanced NMR spectrometer in the country and one of the top in the world, said Gang Wu, a chemistry professor at Queen’s University in Kingston who relies on the instrument for his research and who sits on the steering committee for the instrument.
Since it opened in 2005, the machine has been used by hundreds of researchers across Canada. It has provided data for studies to understand biological processes such as vision, new materials with the potential to store large amounts of carbon dioxide and roughly 120 other projects.
The high magnetic field makes the machine sensitive enough to probe atoms of other elements that can't be studied with any other NMR, including zirconium, barium, indium, gallium, germanium, lanthium and magnesium, said Yining Huang, a chemistry professor at Western University in London, Ont.
"This facility is so unique," he said.
Wu is using the machine to develop a new NMR technique using oxygen as a probe to study the structure of proteins. If the facility shuts down, he said, "basically, I have to abandon my research program. It's really a disaster or a crisis right now."
No grants available

Unfortunately, the facility, which costs about $200,000 a year to run, not including leasing costs, faced the loss of its main source of funding.
The federal government cancelled the Major Resource Support program, which provided close to $100,000 a year in operating funds through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.
There were no other federal grants that the facility qualified for, said Michèle Auger, a chemistry professor at the University of Laval, who sits on the steering committee.

Initially, the facility faced another problem – its annual leasing costs had jumped from zero to close to $100,000 a year. That's because space for the facility was originally leased for free from the National Research Council in exchange for the use of the instrument by NRC researchers, members of the steering committee said. But after the Conservative government “refocused” the federal agency to serve business in 2012, the researchers who used the instrument were laid off and the NRC withdrew from participation in the facility.
The NRC has now agreed to temporarily waive leasing costs, Bryce announced Saturday.The NRC confirmed in an email Monday that under an agreement with the University of Ottawa, it will help sustain the facility for the next 12 to 18 months. Charbonneau said that is in exchange for collaboration with users of the machine.
He added that he has now contacted the eight universities across Canada who partnered on the project to come up with additional funds.
Built with $11.8M in public funds

Wu said the steering committee previously approached individual universities across Canada to ask for annual membership fees of around $20,000, but found it wasn't practical. He said Monday that the steering committee is also trying to negotiate with federal government granting agencies for operating funds.
The 900 was built with $11.8 million in public funds, supported by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI). The federal government program covers up to 40 per cent of the cost of building new scientific infrastructure, but only covers the operating costs for five years.
Auger said if the 900 closes, "it's $11 million of public funds that's basically being wasted."
In a statement, Industry Canada, which oversees CFI, said the foundation works with institutions to ensure they have a plan in place for the operation and maintenance of the infrastructure over its useful life.
"It is the responsibility of the institution to operate, maintain and sustain the infrastructure they are applying for," it added in an email.
But Charbonneau said planning 10 years ahead is not easy.
The situation points to a broader problem faced by Canadian science facilities built with millions in taxpayer funds – after they're built, scientists often struggle to find the funds to keep them running.
Between 1999 and 2014, the CFI invested $5 billion in more than 8,000 infrastructure projects. But 35 per cent of projects funded by the program reported in 2013 that their biggest challenge was finding funding to cover operating costs.
"I think if Canada wants to make sure our country is the leading player in science, we should invest in the facility," said Huang. "There's a lot of investment in this very expensive equipment. If it ends up no one wants to look after it … it's really sad."

Now for some "Making stuff up"

When asked the PMO's office commented "when were heard the co2 thing we thought the money would be better spent advertizing on the weekend football TV broadcast to let Canadians know that we have an Action Plan." When asked what that action plan was there was suddenly no one available for comment.
Sun News also reported on this story on how government waste on such projects "to create pixie dust" and it should be canceled before they come up with a Tax on air. Your intrepid reporter tried to get a comment from Ezra Lavant but he was busy meeting with tarsands companies hoping for support to pay off his court fines. I next went to the minister of the environment for her comments but she had left town for the winter and her office only had a caretaker cleaning up all the empty offices after all the layoffs.
There was however a spokesman from minister of propaganda that told us that projects like this confirm our best in the world class science and our commitment to pure research. He seemed confused as I don't think he read the article.
 
http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2014/1...ce=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=021214

What Canada's 'Open Government' Hides
A truly open plan would release all the info to which the public is entitled, not only what the feds want us to see.
By Michael Geist, Today, TheTyee.ca
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Treasury Board president Tony Clement
In short, our 'open government' will never be truly open so long as access to information remains broken. Photo: Government of Canada.

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Read more: Politics
Treasury Board president Tony Clement unveiled the latest version of his "Open Government Action Plan" earlier this month, continuing a process that has seen some important initiatives to make government data such as statistical information and mapping data publicly available in open formats free from restrictive licenses.

Given the promise of "greater transparency and accountability, increased citizen engagement, and driving innovation and economic opportunity," few would criticize the aspirational goals of Canada’s open government efforts, which have centred on three pillars: open data, open information, and open dialogue. Yet scratch the below the surface of new open data sets and public consultations, and it becomes apparent that there is much that open government hides.

True, federal efforts around open data have seen progress in recent years. What started as a few pilot projects with relatively obscure data has grown dramatically, with over 200,000 government data sets now openly available for use without the need for payment or permission. Moreover, the government has addressed concerns with its open government licence, removing some of the initial restrictions that unnecessarily hamstrung early efforts.

However, the enthusiasm for open data has not been matched with reforms to the access to information system. Despite government claims of openness and transparency, all government data is not equal. There is a significant difference between posting mapping data and making available internal information on policy decisions that should be released under access to information rules.

Indeed, while the government has invested in making open data sets available, it has failed to provide the necessary resources to the access to information system. The Information Commissioner of Canada has warned that inadequate financing has made it virtually impossible to meet demand and respond to complaints. Regular users of the access to information system invariably encounter long delays, aggressive use of exceptions to redact important information, significant costs, and inconsistent implementation of technology to provide more efficient and cost-effective service.

In short, the access to information system is broken. An open government plan that only addresses the information that government wants to make available, rather than all of the information to which the public is entitled, is not an open plan.



'Consultation theatre'

The efforts on open dialogue and open government suffer from similar shortcomings. The government and its agencies have embarked on public consultations on many issues in recent years: the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission asked Canadians for their views on broadcast regulation, the Competition Bureau consulted on advocacy priorities, and House and Senate committees regularly hold hearings on new legislative proposals.

Yet open dialogues and consultations mean little if the outcomes are pre-determined and the public input is largely ignored. This form of consultation is properly characterized as "consultation theatre," where government seeks to claim consultation with no discernible impact on the resulting law or policy.

For example, this week the Senate Committee on Justice and Human Rights wrapped up its hearing on Bill C-13, passing the lawful access/cyberbullying bill with no comments or changes. The hearing included many voices (I appeared in a personal capacity), but Carol Todd, the mother of cyberbullying victim Amanda Todd, was excluded after she expressed concern with the privacy implications of the bill. Similarly, Daniel Therrien, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada appointed earlier this year by the government, advocated changes during his appearance that were ultimately ignored.

Open dialogue and public consultations do not mean that the government simply follows whatever advice is offered up through the process. However, if the consultations or hearings are little more than theatre, claims of open government or open dialogue mean very little.

Open government -- whether open data or dialogue -- offers great promise to provide a more transparent, inclusive and efficient government. Unfortunately, ignoring issues such as access to information and genuine efforts to incorporate public input into policies means that for now open government is most notable for what it hides.
 
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