Loyalty and resistance beat strategic voting ( Comment Whitehorse Star October 14, 2015 )
Those families who resisted and hid children from being kidnapped into residential schools across North America have survived better against cultural genocide.
That is one lesson I learned from those who will vote for Melissa Atkinson, the Yukon’s NDP candidate in Monday’s federal election.
Primal things matter, loyalties matter, land and countrymen matter, survival matters.
Wilfrid Laurier, the first francophone PM of Canada, understood that.
Justice for the Métis, Red River land titles and rehabilitation for Louis Riel, he powerfully stated that loyalty goes both ways.
Laurier said government can only ask loyalty in response to the loyalty it is giving to people.
Continuing predecessor Brian Mulroney’s work in the Métis Federation vs. Canada case, prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin got busy undoing Laurier’s legacy.
When attacking Métis land claims in court, they had retained none other as legal history consultant than Tom Flanagan, the poster boy for manifest destiny in Canada.
Flanagan fudges evidence and asks openly to erase aboriginal rights, land titles and for an American style of breaking agreements and treaties.
In his 2008 book First Nations? Second Thoughts, Flanagan’s diatribes remind one of 1830s Georgia, brimming with land-hungry speculators lobbying the Cherokee Removal (Trail of Tears death march) at fever pitch.
He writes: “In much of Canada, their (the First Nations) present place of habitation postdates the arrival of European settlers.”
And Liberal candidate Larry Bagnell said nothing. Since, we get to see Flanagan as a regular guest of the likes of the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge.
How can one claim in court, fronting Flanagan, that indigenous people don’t exist in Canada, then keep a straight face when talking a good First Nations line on the public stage?
From 2003 to 2006, Bagnell was involved as parliamentary secretary to the minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development and Federal Interlocutor for Métis and Non-Status Indians before becoming parliamentary secretary to the minister of natural resources.
During those years, Stephen Harper was also helped by Flanagan but on top of that was assisted by the U.S. Endowment for Democracy, a U.S. government arm’s-length operation that specializes in international political “party renovation” towards the U.S. model of voter suppression, attack ads etc.
The Conservative Party of Canada never declared receiving assistance from a foreign power in taking and consolidating government control.
It became public only in 2014 Wikileaks cables. Veteran diplomat and journalist Peter Dale Scott fished it out from there, and deserves recognition as a Canadian:
“12. In addition to the campaign schools, IRI (International Republican Institute, a subsection of the Endowment for Democracy) will be bringing in consultants (here to Venezuela) who specialize in party renovation to discuss case studies of political parties in Germany, Spain, and Canada, which successfully carried out the process of party renovation.”
It was widely reported in international media, several times in the Huffington Post, and again on its Politics page by Mark Taliano from Niagara on Oct. 8, 2015 (http://goo.gl/OpUe14).
Bad news for Canada including for things like medicare and aboriginal rights, jobs, the environment, wealth, climate justice and international solidarity that are all tied into Canadian sovereignty.
In refreshing contrast, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair appears to be a patriot who worries at least about our jobs but so far makes a big mistake to be quiet on what the TPP is all about, handing undemocratic legislative powers that override Parliament to foreign corporations.
The Canadian government continues to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars under frivolous NAFTA chapter 11, investment arbitration rulings.
The U.S. government has not paid a single penny. The world’s free trade sucker (Canada) is the most sued country and has ponied up more than anyone, not population adjusted, growing debt.
Mr. Mulcair overlooks people who vote for values, not programs, a weakness he compensates into rotten compromises. Corporatism or corporate feudalism-elitism is out of of character and phoney for social democrats.
And as polls unreliably indicate, the NDP would once again be dearly punished in the election when disillusioned NDP voters stay home.
Remember Adrian Dix, the former B.C. NDP leader? He betrayed his support base with green-washing and LNG interest-serving carbon tax talk even before a corrupt carbon pricing ideology led him to become a frack turncoat.
I recommend the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation and B.C. Auditor General reports on carbon taxing and trading, which incentivize greenhouse gas emission increases, subsidize oil and gas fracking, corrupt carbon accounting and push hard to sneakily patronize renewable infrastructure initiative down to the cosmetic levels.
Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, a carbon tax is not a fuel tax that can be put to ecological use. It is by design and name harnessed to hide, prolong and spin annual 5.3 trillion fossil resource subsidies as a false market that supposedly responds to nudging it around a little.
Nowhere and never has it worked for the environment, but always to increase big emitter rights.
If you were in touch with people, you would know about the June 2013 protest letter (energyjustice.net) signed by 86 grassroots groups from 11 countries against the revenue-neutral deception of the carbon tax message by the citizen’s climate lobby.
Mr. Mulcair, emissions can be capped but carbon trading caps emission reductions; you are dead wrong about the acid rain and ozone hole lessons.
As indicated by him since 2009, Mr. Harper is sure to be not far behind on the U.S. carbon price bandwagon, but his timing outfoxes the opposition parties.
Many of the environmental NGOs also hand the advantage to him on a silver platter.
For example, Yukoners Concerned about Oil and Gas Exploration/Development, in a recent group email (https://goo.gl/LiavDq), has moved closer to the oil and gas front group twins Center for Sustainable Shale Development – Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).
Like Pembina, with their shameful presentation backing up the Yukon government and Yukon Energy on fracking/LNG at the Mt. Mcintyre Recreation Centre, July 2013, and Synergy Alberta; they are big on carbon pricing.
False front groups are not straight shooters, and use the cigarette industry’s method as merchants of doubt.
Turning frack harms into “risks” is typical for EDF-sponsored studies.
An EDF-controlled and funded study by Chip Groat that claimed fracking is safe for groundwater was disowned by the University of Texas as corrupt in 2012.
Carbon pricing talk is EDF’s number one recruiting tool to, over time, convert environmental groups into supporters of extreme oil and gas expansion.
(Anatomy of an Industry Front Group by the watchdog group Public-Accountability.org, a non-profit, non-partisan research project mostly used by academics and journalists, provides analysis on how EDF and CSSD work: http://goo.gl/4FOFLl.)
The Yukon Conservation Society (YCS) maintains a carbon trading proposal on its website that has all the markers to incentivize greenhouse gas emission increases that are listed in the Dag Hammarskjold report How carbon trading works and why it fails, and more. The gas frack-subsidizing Pacific Carbon Trust is listed as one desirable design.
It is hard to see this greenwashing document outside the context of a Synergy Alberta-type backroom contract the YCS had signed with Northern Cross Yukon on Oct. 5, 2012: https://goo.gl/9JUmx9 .
I blew the whistle on it soon after. The contract aims at step-by-step frack implementation at Eagle Plains.
It secured privileged access to the Yukon government for the YCS and Northern Cross Yukon that marginalized, not streamlined, community voices.
Back to carbon pricing: Dix outright self-combusted in the 2013 B.C. election with a 20-point lead in the polls.
OK; suddenly becoming a pro-fracking promoter during the leadership race in the summer of 2013 might have accounted for a part of those losses.
Social democrats seeking majorities on the right and losing them on the left is how honest crooks get elected, freely paraphrasing after the American political linguist George Lakoff. Left-right traditionally plays less of a role in Canada.
The TPP is not a trade deal like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade or once the Auto Pact (destroyed by the World Trade Organization with NAFTA chapter 11 as weapon), but an agreement of protectionism for pharma price-gouging, competition law violators and anti-capitalist speculators.
Trade is good, but free trade ruins export profits, increases Canadian debt and trade deficit levels while destroying quality jobs; the economics data are clear.
The so-called investor state dispute settlement (ISDS) corrupts corporations with the power to override Parliament and legislate medicare, aboriginal rights and renewable economic development out of Canada.
Trade lawyer Gus Van Harten, who already blew the whistle on FIPA in 2012, alerted Canadians that TPP ISDS aims squarely at abolishing aboriginal rights.
I might add before we saw Premier Darrell Pasloski and Prime Minister Stephen Harper acting it out for real, then-Yukon premier Tony Penikett had raised the pressure that NAFTA chapter 11 (ISDS) exerts against aboriginal rights with Chretien, previously author of the infamous white paper, his colonizer blueprint.
On March 25, 2015, Wikileaks released the all-important centrepiece of the TPP that Van Harten talks about “Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty: Advanced Investment Chapter working document for all 12 nations (January 20, 2015 draft)”, ISDS.
On page 12, a really striking “Annex on Health” has just four short lines and only excludes Australian health care from privatization and pharma price-gouging attacks. Go to: TPP investor leak, or : https://goo.gl/SW4IXY.
I had a recent conversation on so-called ISDS in the TPP with Tony Negus, Australia’s High Commissioner to Canada.
I came away with the impression that the Aussie government is bought off with its medicare handshake and further exemptions, not to blow the whistle on free trade gangsterism.
The context: Ever since NAFTA chapter 11 hit home, ISDS is a really dirty word in Australia, and its free trade agreements with the U.S., Korea, China and Japan have excluded ISDS.
Not to be overly skeptical, the one moderating aspect I noticed reading the TPP draft, which can be expected almost final, is that Section B of the Investment Chapter exempts Canadian cultural industries from attacks.
Van Harten may have overlooked that one. But then, who can trust such a toxic document on anything?
Thomas Mulcair is more critical than other party leaders on the TPP impact of job losses in Canada while being quiet on the anti-democratic nature of ISDS, which is to be almost complicit in it.
Mulcair correctly puts his finger on the secretive nature but has no excuse for not knowing what is going on. This needs to change.
Along with coming unstuck from election planners and advisors who are a bunch of Big Oil compliant carbon free traders and losers from a two-decades string of continuous Yukon NDP campaign failures, most importantly, Ms. Atkinson is picking up winning momentum, within recently experienced wide margins of polling errors, as the right candidate for the strategic advantage Yukoners and Canadians need in Ottawa.
