Presentation of coast-to-coast-to-coast trip disappointed, 2018 Jan.

Presentation of coast-to-coast-to-coast trip disappointed  (16 Jan. 2018 Whitehorse Star Coloumn)

The legacy of Canada 150 was given stale, narrow reference while ignoring and outright rejecting the foundational and non-European meanings of continuous adaptations in Canadian constitutional laws, that are still to shape inclusivity, reciprocity and stability.

Crucial meanings consolidated out of Louis Hippolyte Lafontaine’s premiership as Canada’s first prime minister of a responsible government following March 11, 1848. 

Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin had launched comprehensive human rights, democratic, electoral, education and governance reforms unknown to other Western powers.

On Jan. 7, an almost house-filling crowd at the Yukon Beringia Interpretative Centre witnessed a reminiscing evening from a 2017 Canada 150-inspired icebreaker voyage from Toronto to Victoria with seven Yukoners on board for increments of it. 

This, along with observing images and stories, recalling opportunities along the journey for exchange and experiential inter-cultural learning, that were no doubt stimulating. 

But unfortunately, a limiting vision of Canada seemed to hamper the striving. 

On questioning by the author, this was explicitly asserted by one of the program leaders, who
dismissed and trivialized our constitution as “legalistic”.

The evening parroted the silly idea that Canada’s constitutional roots are of European characteristic, when really they were derived of Indigenous deep laws all along.

In fact, they grew out of this land, through 40 000 years, through 400 years and through 40 years, an arc that kindled a re-birth of a nation-to-nation space.

Multiple-personality-order is an ancient Indigenous achievement and, not surprisingly, First Nations are still, or are again, leading and defining discourse of substance in Canada.

Cutting off memory is undemocratic because it is cutting off accountability, which is at the heart of the neo-colonizing nonsense an all party political leadership in Ottawa, or in Whitehorse, has adopted. 

Succinctly summarized by Mi’kmaq lawyer Pamela Palmater as “Trudeau’s Forked Tongue ...” (Canadian Dimension 8 Dec. goo.gl/pSXbZg ).

More than uninspired, people don’t care for neoliberal elites who don’t speak the language of our country. 

It is precisely the phoney weasel words of a globalizer provincialism that puts reactionary armies into the field, and supercharges racism. 

Just wait for a few elections to come in Canada.

To a large part, such dysfunctionality is where blockage comes from; that fails a vibrant Canadian future which is already inseparably dependent on releasing constructive energies inherent to reconciliation and colonialism reparation. 

We are talking about a serious inability to co-shape a future in the land and partnering with First
Nations, not above nature, and not talking down to people more or less in the style of self referential European aristocrats and technocrats.

I can only speak from the vantage point of a citizen who is also a settler immigrant.

And it seems to me that guiding youth in the C3 program towards diminished meanings and ignored memory is an expensive disservice to our country. 

Such fostering of a spiritual and political lightweightness of non-Aboriginal Canadians is out of touch with the confidence of mothers and fathers of our Constitution.

A lack of confidence is harmful also because it freezes change and neuters courage necessary to become allies of First Nations, and be more than talk.

Being better than hollow words could mean listening. 

It could mean returning some Crown land, tripling Aboriginal language and double education investment, strengthening labour and medicare rights, quitting nickle-and-diming, and stopping the technocratic standard for the frivolously litigious denial of many First Nations’ existence, even.

Warnings abounded under dark clouds over the C3 evening, from New Age identity politics and consumer feminism to ecocide-complicit carbon-pricing ( report released at  COP23, goo.gl/KRUFEH ).

The reconciliation resolutions of some are un-grounding into another eternal pop culture notion without resolve or urgency.

Peter Becker CV

Peter Becker CV, Renewable Energy Consulting in Yukon and Beyond

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Premier Notley's s lost opportunity for reconciliation, Whitehorse Star July 18, 2017

Premier Notley's s lost opportunity for reconciliation

Not always is the difference between lip service and meaningful action as visible as with the continued exclusion of First Nations from the Council of the Federation meetings, this time under Premier Notley's auspices in Edmonton.

A profound lack of generosity in Premier Notley's stance against a very feasible evolution of the council, well within its mandate, is striking. 

The word profound is meant to indicate she might have an above premiers' average capacity to comprehend what is right.

This can't be about charity. Profound generosity is the kind with gumption that finds the courage to do better than what one is used to. 

Think of doing away with the old Indian Act in 1951, which was partly driven by the desire not to once again humiliate returning indigenous war veterans by removing their freedoms with extreme racial segregation.

This step in the right direction happened in an era not without problems, but of vibrant democratic trends, and before arrival of the kind of neoliberal/neocolonial foulness we witness in Edmonton.

Or in lose human rights analogy consider perhaps allowing LGBT marriage rights that partly materialized in balance to a history of barbaric state brutality against all who insisted on expressing sexual liberties.

Human freedoms that perhaps are indirectly triggered by indigenous wisdom traditions that citizens recently aspired to, even if on a personal level some have family ideals leaning towards a more Victorian model.

On the other hand consider as another negative example former Quebec premier Pauline Marois's disaster at introducing an islamophobic religious charter, which she deceptively had called a secular charter. 

Naturally Quebecers threw Marois out of office, right along with her christian theocratic proposals.

Rachel Notley already had delivered a twisted neoliberal sense of political compromise, aiming to satisfy elites, instead of ordinary people.

On that track, left of a neoconservative right wing, political status quo technocrats like her stand at attention for every shift of goal posts by reactionaries, so they can head towards them, aim for them or even overshoot them.

Notley's climate plan put forward carbon price stimulated subsidies and expansion plans of tar and frack extraction beyond anything Alberta PC or Wildrose parties thought they could get away with.

And all to prove Goody Two-Shoes Social democrats like her are holier-than-thou fossilized. Leadership in unfolding crises times means compromise with the community of peoples, not derailed elites unknown to display gratitude for useful idiots.

Leadership would have meant to lead collaboratively, to get out in front of overdue and mounting reconciliation challenges. 

Marilyn Poitras, technocratically sabotaged (by feds) and resigning Commissioner for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, only indicating one more of recent examples.

As Canadians everywhere, Albertans face the kind of Brexiteer/Trumpismo voter demobilization the Alberta remake of Unite-The-Wrong is dreaming about. 

And Rachel Notley is obligingly inserting the coffin nails into her reelection campaign.

Seemingly in a broader decolonization context Author Lee Maracle has a question Ms. Notley obviously has not heard: "Where do you begin telling someone their world is not the only one?"

The Liberals and NDP failed on the Khadr file (Whitehorse Star July 10, 2017)

The Liberals and NDP failed on the Khadr file (Whitehorse Star July 10, 2017)

The Liberals' and NDP's withholding of exonerating, conclusive and sworn legal testimony (US Military Commissions Report OC-1 CITF) from the public feeds ammunition to the Conservatives.

The treatment of Khadr was a war crime under the Geneva and Child Soldier Conventions, and under Canadian law which adheres to international law, rendering Guantanamo rulings invalid. 

However, acts of resistance are first rate relevant in the story, such as by the courageous American military lawyer Bill C. Kuebler who had forced into the process the sworn legal eyewitness statement by US military personnel: Khadr did not kill Christopher Speer.

A crucial failure to get out in front of reintegrating the innocent Omar Khadr is bound to cost Liberals and NDP dearly in the 2019 federal election. 

These spineless Neo-liberals want to have it both ways with a belated settlement and weasel absolution from their collectively acquired legal responsibilities.

All the while they are still trying to get in on the islamophobic smearing of Khadr and Canada through assigning consistent and fact defying blame regarding US army medic Christopher Speer's death.

Author Thomas King with his observed "first rule of racism" perhaps best echoes the political correctness of united dog whistlers on the Hill: "Think it, but do not speak it out loud."

Quote from my coloumn in the Whitehorse Star Dec. 2, 2015:

-- Unfortunately, there is no indication yet from the Trudeau government that Canada will return to the world community of nations that follows the UN Child Soldier Conventions signed by Canada in 1949, 1977 and 2000.

Under the law, prosecution and punishment of child soldiers or combatants under 18, including the cover-up, facilitation or aiding thereof, is a war crime (no ifs and buts).

Justice and compensation for Omar Khadr, who was also psychologically tortured with attention to sadistic detail by Canada’s CSIS in Guantanamo (CBC video: https://goo.gl/8cTgn4 ), is overdue, and has to be the measure of that.

Aggravating injustice occurred on Feb. 4, 2008, when the U.S. Military Commissions, in Guantanamo, accidentally released and later suppressed eyewitness report OC-1 CITF of March 17, 2004.

It contains sworn, legal testimony by the U.S. army personnel who captured Khadr in Afghanistan on July 27, 2002, that Khadr, then 15, did not kill U.S. army medic Christopher Speer.

Some decent women and men stood up for the law and Khadr’s rights.

Among them were UN officials, RCMP Chief Supt. Mike Cabana, who resigned in protest from the RCMP anti-terrorism unit Project O Canada, the former senator and general Romeo Dallaire, Michelle Shepard from the Toronto Star, American military lawyer Bill C. Kuebler and Dennis Edney from Edmonton.

It is widely agreed that the Guantanamo concentration camp continues to be a first-rate recruiting tool transforming young Muslim women and men toward the extreme.

One way to put a little more distance between Canada and Guantanamo would be to avoid the usual decades-long foot-dragging for victim rehabilitation in the justice system and clear the air quickly for all Canadians and now upstanding, loyal citizen Khadr. -- End of quote.

Break Climate Denial of Carbon Pricer – Flat Earther Symbiosis

Ideas competition in Sweden: Climate Survival - Political Reform

An intriguing project, if not compelling, my attention was roused after a friend had alerted me to it last fall. There are around 12 000 registrations so far aiming for the September deadline that the Global Challenges Foundation has set, aside to 5 million $ US prize money.

Perhaps more Yukoners will participate, or just continue in informal ways of a forum, be it groups or individuals? There already is a lot of interest, to build on, in the theme of the competition's core challenge, climate crisis, really a crises cataclysm that is coming on. 

At any rate, here are my two cents at this point working towards a 1000 word summary component for a submission document:

Break Climate Denial of Carbon Pricer – Flat Earther Symbiosis

(Whitehorse Star Coloumn 29 June 2017)

Imagine Winston Churchill levying on NAZI trade a 25% sales tax during the Battle of Britain. The self-directing market, right? Wrong, pending (or creeping) doom demanded active choices. Survival needed narrative change with new words, he created them.

Contemporary contrast to Ida Tarbell's and Teddy Roosevelt's dissolving of Standard Oil's criminal cartel:

Self-referential technocratic mandarins in neoliberal political, critically environmental NGO, areas respond to crises with a dulłed and dogma drilled oiligarchic chant mass: put a price on carbon.

In solidarity with climate scientists, activists from the Global South like Vandana Shiva, Arundhati Roy describes the scene as "NGO-ization", which resurrects/reenforces a racialized system, spearheaded by predatory carbon pricing design.

In its study's preface, Carbon Trading – How it Works and Why it Fails, the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation speaks for all scientists and economists who have actually examined climate - energy policies, including carbon pricing:

“At a time when carbon trading is still being promoted as the central solution to climate change, we continue that it is, instead, part of the problem.”

Under the headline Taxation:

“As a means for altering behaviour, carbon taxes [initiating, leveraging, legitimizing, capitalizing organized crime carbon offset derivative fraud schemes, as Interpol warned already in 2013] have many of the same problems as carbon (off-set) trading.

Matt McGrath, BBC News Science & Environment page, reported on the COP 20 Lima, Dec. 13, 2014:

"A large group of developing nations known as the G77 objected [as they did in Copenhagen, Paris, Marrakesh]. "[Antonio Marcondes, Brazil’s representative at the talks:] ... We stand behind the differentiation, we stand behind common but differentiated responsibilities, these are issues we hold very strong and these are definite red lines."

In Marrakesh Nnimmo Bassey (Friends of the Earth International, Environmental Rights Action) addressed Western NGOs, referencing the Paris agreement as vehicle for carbon price profiteering, it never mentioned fossil fuels (hard to believe, I fact checked). He reiterated the G77's charismatic speaker from Copenhagen, Lumumba Di-Aping:

"... and I will say this to our colleagues from Western civil society  –  you have definitely sided with a small group of industrialists and their representatives and your representative branches. Nothing more than that. You have become an instrument of your governments."

Mainstream portrays as climate villain a true global leader actually achieving GHG emission reductions, and not by eco-waffling Big Oil/Davos talking points.

Nicaragua is poised for 90 percent renewables in power generation by 2020, while adding much needed Socratic sting to the neocolonial Paris flirt with disaster.

Likewise in Denmark, China and Germany carbon pricing is intentionally, explicitly or de facto, in a non relevant role. Emission reductions follow renewable energy source legislation which recognizes that renewable cost parities are in the past, not the future as carbon pricing stipulates, as to never find it.

Unist'ot'en First Nation banner against new pipelines and against the carbon pricing that brings them: goo.gl/dcWLao . 

Global South and Indigenous spheres overwhelmingly aim for the Kyoto principle of climate justice based leap frogging towards renewable energy critical mass thresholds, noted by few western observers.

John Ralston Saul at the 2010 Melbourne Writer's Festival marked an exception: "And unfortunately most of the environmentalist language is in fact not terribly different from its enemy, it's very much like a shadow of the enemy, ... Maybe we should actually do something as opposed to negotiate about doing something."

Gordon Laxer, veteran energy analyst, University of Alberta Parkland Institute, finished his Dec. 3, 2015 piece in the Edmonton Journal, “Opinion: Alberta’s climate plan stands in the way of Canada’s”, observing:

“Getting the NDP’s backing on expanding the oil sands lends more credibility than Big Oil could have got from a Conservative Alberta government. No wonder Big Oil is smiling" [Premier Notley repeatedly in plain text: Without carbon pricing there would be no pipeline expansion].

Justifiably subterfuge, aside to impoverishment, diminishing returns associated with unconventional extraction, angers people and many are herded to false populist demagogues because they are being lied to, even if some are confused as to the exact details of deception.

Carbon pricers efficiently facilitate full spectrum destruction, expanding unconventional fossil extraction faster than their climate denial brethren in more crudely styled conservative governments.

British Columbia Auditor General 2013 special report: carbon tax refunds specifically subsidize frackgas outfits, and emission increases.

More fossil subsidies inherent to the design of carbon pricing false language:

- No unified carbon product, intentionally hollow abstraction attracts toxic content.

- Distraction from outlawing criminal behaviours such as oil and gas fracking and from infrastructure initiative responsibilities/accountabilities, blaming folks by instead "putting the price on carbon".  

- Falsely posing as fuel tax, energy pricing, risk addressing, pollution penalty instrument.

- Oil is politically/militarily influential, clean electron is market competitive, inexpensive, Carbon Pricers bury those facts (Peter Droege, Eurosolar).

- Slights of hand: swapping luxuries with basic needs, bastardizing "price elasticity for demand" market economics.

- Carbon pricing policy choice sold as part of climate science, weakening science impact. 

- Carbon pricing inflates financialization towards 2008 levels, driving investment away from renewable industries (Chester & Rosewarne, University of Sydney).

- Capping emissions is OK, Whereas Offsetting caps reductions, including mathematically, and nullifies GHG accounting while expanding polluter rights.

From Johan Rockström, Bill McKibben, David Suzuki to Nicholas Stern, who promotes expanding the most climate destructive fossil extraction, gas fracking, by buying into an increase of natural gas power plants, carbon pricers back up their attack on climate justice with an attack on science.

Carbon pricing exclusively validates/navigates current emissions, whereas climate science is unequivocal: accumulated emissions cause the crisis, not levels at any given moment.

In wooden oblivion to non western voices, such as by stonewalling cross culturally vibrant G77 countries' global governance reform initiatives, western leaders in the climate forum have become corrupt intellectually, and isolated.

Elites that are reminiscent of a complicit pre 1914 intelligentsia, epitomized by Norman Angell with his 1910 bestseller "The Great Illusion", arguing the deception that war and destruction supposedly had become impossible through globalized free trade.

Reentering reform dialogue requires listening and delinking from World Bank/Exxon Mobile sponsored colonial structural adjustments, such as Carbon Pricing-Taxing-Trading, that pollute and exploit especially poor regions while frying the planet. 

                    [decarbolonize -- notcarbonprice -- greenenergize]