By David McNally
While cursing the inane mainstream commentary on the global economy, I remembered a pivotal scene in the 1976 movie, All the President’s Men. As two young reporters investigate the burglary of Democratic Party offices in the Watergate Hotel, a disgruntled high-ranking FBI agent, code-named Deep Throat advises, “Follow the money. Always follow the money.”
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By Mandy Hiscocks
“Get down on the ground! Hands behind your head!”
And so it began.
The Guns and Gangs Unit of the Toronto Police Service showed up at the house in the early morning of Jun. 26, 2010, the first day of the G20 Leaders Summit. There was a bang on the door, then a crash as they broke through. A man with a gun pointed at the two of us ran into the living room and yelled at us to hit the floor. Others went through the house looking for other people, finding one. Still others were looking around the place, and more were waiting outside with a wagon. It was quite an impressive crew to take down three sleepy organizers – I think the guns and the bullet-proof vests might’ve been a bit of overkill, but hey, there was all that money they had to justify spending so I guess it had to look at least a bit dangerous for them.
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By Alex Hundert
Sept. 12, 2011 was the first day of what is scheduled to be an 11-week preliminary inquiry for what the Ontario Crown Attorney’s office call the “G20 Main Conspiracy Group Prosecution.” This prosecution will require that, myself, along with 16 other community organizers, spend almost three months in court every single weekday. Here, we will watch and listen as the Crown Attorneys from the Provincial “Gangs and Guns Initiative” present evidence, collected by a series of undercover cops who infiltrated community organizations across the country. This permeation took place over a period of nearly two years prior to last year’s G20 (an event which saw the city converted into ‘Fortress Toronto,’ as the heads of state from the world’s 20 richest countries, along with more than 10,000 cops, occupied the city’s downtown).
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By Certain Days Calendar Collective
The Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar is a joint fundraising and educational project between outside organizers in Montreal and Toronto, and three political prisoners being held in maximum-security prisons in New York State: David Gilbert, Robert Seth Hayes and Herman Bell. The initial project was suggested by Herman over ten years ago, and has been shaped throughout the process by all of our ideas, discussions, and analysis. All of the members of the outside collective are involved in day-to-day organizing work other than the calendar, on issues ranging from refugee and immigrant solidarity to community media to prisoner justice. We work from an anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, feminist, queer and trans positive position.
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By Jen Rinaldi
False equivalence, you might say, to compare mental health institutions to prison systems. I am in good company, though.
French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault wrote extensively on asylums and prisons, drawing explicit connections between the two. He spoke of the rise of the Great Confinement, a seventeenth century movement which led to the institutionalization of those deemed unreasonable or mentally ill. Diagnoses were rendered for the purpose of discipline and control.
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By Martin Merener
The University of Buenos Aires (UBA) has an affiliated university centre within the Devoto Prison in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where prisoners can take degree programs from many of the UBA faculties. Since establishing Devoto Prison’s university centre in 1986, 400 UBA professors have worked there and over 2,000 prisoners have taken university courses; at least 67 of these began and completed their degrees while incarcerated, and many more finished after leaving prison.
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By Rebecca Hall
The true North is our destiny – for our explorers, for our entrepreneurs, for our artists. To not embrace the promise of the true North, now, at the dawn of its ascendancy, would be to turn our backs on what it is to be Canadian.
– Stephen Harper 2008, speech in Inuvik NWT
On Feb. 27, 2009, the Native Women’s Association of the Northwest Territories received a call: a woman in Gameti, a small community about 240 km north of Yellowknife, had been murdered. The woman was Alice Black. She was killed by Terry Vital, her estranged husband, who had been charged with assaulting her a year previous, but had eluded arrest in a community without a local police force. The tragedy rocked the community. What was particularly upsetting to so many was the perceived preventability of the death: the murderer was, after all, a wanted man.
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Theresa McGee
The sun sets on a crisp October evening outside the Parliament street Library. Inside, members of the Downtown East Neighbourhood Committee gather in a second floor meeting room. They’re here to organize resistance to the agenda in an upcoming round of budget meetings at City Hall. The committee, like the five other neighbourhood groups that make up the Toronto Stop the Cuts Network, are sending the message that the recent move to delay cuts to social programs and city services is not the same as stopping them.
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Tyler Shipley
In Nov. 2009, I stood among thousands of unarmed Hondurans – teachers, students, civil servants – demanding an end to a military coup that had transformed a relatively peaceful country into a brutal police state. As I leaned toward a line of soldiers to take a photo, I felt the butt of a machine gun against my rib cage and understood, in a visceral and embodied way, just how serious the situation had become.
The soldiers guarded the Brazilian embassy, where democratically elected
President Manuel Zelaya was being held captive by the military regime. At the time, around 40 people had been killed in direct state violence, while hundreds more had been terrorized in their homes or in the streets, attacked with batons and bullets, raped and tortured in prisons. Anyone who tried to speak out against the coup was targeted for violence or intimidated by threats.
The coup regime is still in power today and the repression continues unabated; in fact, just three weeks ago, Amnesty International Canada issued an urgent call for support for some 114 families targeted by intense police violence in northern Honduras.
But on Aug. 12, 2011, Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited Honduras to congratulate its leaders on a successful return to democracy and respect for human rights.
It may seem like a contradiction, but this is the new Canada. Not only has the Harper government been the strongest supporter of the military regime since the Jun. 2009 coup, we have also successfully negotiated new trade agreements with it and recently announced that we would be sending 150 Canadian soldiers to conduct joint military exercises with the same military that carried out the coup and has overseen some 200 politically motivated assassinations in just over two years.
The horrific stories start to blur together. Beloved teacher Jose Manuel Flores, shot to death at the school where he taught with his students – a response to his activism in the National Teachers’ Federation. Carlos H. Reyes, former presidential candidate, bludgeoned in the head by police. Enrique Gudiel, a critical journalist from Danli, discovering his 17-year-old daughter hanged to her death.
Honduran human rights organizations have meticulously documented the crimes of the military regime and time and time again have begged the international community to take heed, isolate the regime, and force them to step down and allow civilian rule once more.
But Canada has taken the lead in willfully ignoring these groups.
In 2009, the leaders of the coup held fraudulent ‘elections’ in an attempt to legitimize their rule. Every reputable international observation group in the world refused to participate in the sham. Nonetheless, independent conservative US and Canadian groups came to Honduras and declared the elections ‘free and fair,’ all the while refusing to speak with delegations from Honduran civil society who wanted to present evidence on the widespread repression. I confronted one such observer, Edward Fox, about his refusal to pay attention to the human rights organizations and he replied, “I’ve spoken to the US ambassador, and he’s here all the time.”
Indeed. The United States has a long history of meddling in this country; it was nicknamed the USS Honduras in the 1980s, and from its bases in Honduras, the United States launched some of its most brutal and violent wars in Central America. As Honduras has slid back into the chaotic violence characteristic of the 1980s, many Hondurans have suggested that Canada is taking on the role the US used to play; as one woman put it, we are “more gringo than the gringos.”
Kidnapping an elected president and putting an entire nation in lockdown fits the definition of ‘coup d’etat’ to a T. But Canada’s statements have carefully softened the severity of the violence, euphemistically calling it a ‘political crisis’ and routinely ‘calling on all sides’ of the dispute to exercise restraint, as if this were a matter of two equally powerful parties struggling for control. We ‘congratulated’ Honduras on its fraudulent elections (of which up to 70% of Hondurans boycotted in defiance) and regularly praised victorious coup president Pepe Lobo on his ‘steps toward reconciliation’ while the violence continued unabated.
Canadian Minister of State Peter Kent held meetings with Lobo and worked tirelessly to bring Honduras back into the international community, even sending a Canadian diplomat to sit on a ‘Truth Commission’ in 2010 which looked, frankly, farcical to Hondurans who continued to be targeted by police and military on a daily basis.
A shameful record, indeed. But if supporting a miserable gang of thugs like the one ruling Honduras seems un-Canadian, it may be time to look a bit closer in the mirror, and re-examine some of our assumptions about Canada’s behaviour in the world.
Our decade-long occupation of Afghanistan has left over 10,000 civilian casualties, utter social and political ruin, widespread allegations of torture, and no improvement in the much-maligned conditions for women whom we claimed to represent.
Our decision to send the Canadian military to overthrow the democratically elected president of Haiti in 2004 ushered in an era of political instability and disarray that drove the country into ever-deeper poverty and dislocation, making it tragically and immeasurably more vulnerable to the devastating earthquake in 2010.
Our quiet participation in the quagmire in Iraq ought to be a skeleton in the closet, but it is ignored perhaps because we are now actively dropping bombs on Libya, though it doesn’t appear to be doing much good for ordinary Libyans.
As Stephen Harper prepares to heap praise on the leader of a brutal and illegal government in Honduras this Friday, we might ask who in Canada is benefiting from our relationship with this regime. Certainly the Canadian mining and garment giants, from Goldcorp to Gildan, which exploit Hondurans’ weakness under such a repressive state apparatus.
But surely not those of us who may have been born in Canada but consider ourselves global citizens. For those of us who believe democracy, security, and human freedom and dignity are more than just euphemisms, it must be time to take responsibility for the Canadian governments’ actions and to insist that they change.
Tyler Shipley is a writer and researcher who teaches at York University in Toronto.
Land and Environment Unit Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug
Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI) voted overwhelmingly in favour of protecting our entire watershed from all industry activity, and approving KI Consultation Protocol that sets out how KI consent will be given prior to any decision being made affecting our KI’s lands and resources.
KI citizens voted in the community custom- based referendum with over 96% of ballots cast in favour of the KI Watershed and the KI Consultation Protocol, according to first count results. The two documents will now be brought into force by KI Chief and Council through a Band Council Resolution along with a spiritual ceremony and blessings of the results. The documents will become part of KI’s Indigenous laws, and KI calls on outside governments and corporations to recognize and respect them. “The KI Watershed Declaration and the KI Consultation Protocol will give us a new mandate to foster dialogue with governments and corporations and as well as open up new opportunities in the areas of economic development, environmental sustainability, and off-reserve issues,” said Chief Donny Morris.
The KI Watershed Declaration applies to a vast 13,025 square kilometer area of lakes, rivers, forest, and wetlands in KI Homeland including 661 square kilometer Big Trout Lake.
It states: “We declare all water that flows into and out of Big Trout Lake, and all lands whose water flow into those lakes, rivers, and wetlands, to be completely protected through our continued care under KI’s authority, laws and protocols…No industrial uses, or other uses which disrupt, poison, or otherwise harm our relationship to these lands and waters will be permitted.”
Activities affecting KI’s lands and resources must only proceed with KI’s free, prior, and informed consent. The Consultation Protocol sets out how KI consent will be given freely, where KI is fully informed of the consequences, prior to any decision-making made, and according to KI’s own laws and decision-making processes.
Six KI leaders including Chief Morris were jailed in 2008 for preventing Platinex from exploring on our Homeland – activities we feared could contaminate the Big Trout Lake. After massive public outcry, an appeals court released the jailed KI leaders, and in 2009 the province bought out Platinex claims and promised never to develop them without our KI support.
Contact:
John Cutfeet, KI Spokesperson (807) 537-
2054 or (807) 738-0935
For more information go to:
http://www.kitchenuhmaykoosib.com/landsandenvironment/