I come to bury Chavez, not to praise him. Barak Obama says he was authoritarian. And the President is an honourable man. John Graham, former ambassador to Venezuela says he couldn’t manage his own economy. And he is an honourable man. Stephen Harper says he was undemocratic. And he is a Right Honourable man. So are they all, all honourable men. And yet … Hugo Chavez gave people free education while others indenture their citizens. He put in place the most robust electoral system in the south. He narrowed the gap between rich and poor even while the gap grows wider in the north. Poverty, infant mortality, public debt—all cut by half. His will, shall I read you his will? It is simple. To the people of Venezuela he gives them their own country’s resources, and the money earned from their extraction. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar had Marc Antony to rehabilitate his reputation. His Richard III had no one. Shakespeare says the King was a murderer, a usurper, and a twisted tyrant. And Shakespeare was honourable man. But Tudor generals dumped Richard under a Leicester parking lot and Tudor historians heaped upon the ...

 The Ring of Fire. It sounds like something out of a Tolkien novel. Welcome to Mordor Ontario, an area of 5,120 square kilometres in the James Bay watershed chock full of nickel, copper, zinc, gold, palladium and chromium—especially chromium (the element at the centre of Erin Brockovich’s crusade).* The Lords of the Ring are some 30 exploration companies, such as KWG and Noront, who have staked over 31,000 claims. Cliffs Natural Resources from Ohio is the principle mining company. They’re after chromium, a vital ingredient in stainless steel. But others are coming in, including the Chinese state-owned Sinocan Resources Corp. The Crown, in this realm, has two heads—Stephen Harper and Kathleen Wynne. Ottawa has responsibility for some environmental oversight through the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, and Ontario collects royalties, or will, after the 10-year tax holiday it gives remote mines. In fact, Ontario’s mining tax regime is so generous, compared to other provinces, it amounts to a subsidy. (Throw in the oil sands and the Crown gives more money to mining companies than it spends on First Nations’ health, education and housing.) The federal government’s recent omnibus bills have so severely crippled the Crown’s environmental regulatory muscle that you might as well hang a sign on the north that says “(Ring ...

 It is telling that the Idle No More movement started with four First Nations women—Nina Wilson, Sylvia McAdam, Jessica Gordon and Sheelah McLean who gave the first “Idle No More” teach-in. Sylvia McAdam is a lawyer, as is Tanya Kappo, who first tweeted #idlenomore. Perhaps they are of the “New People” of the Anishinaabek Seventh Fire prophecy. Perhaps they are of those who refuse to see themselves as victims, but rather as human beings with rights that are being eroded and responsibilities that need taking up, Time will tell, as it has told of past abuses and as it is telling of present wrongs.In 2007, Mr Harper gave the Kashechewan First Nation a choice. Either stay where they were put in 1957, or move to Timmins—stay in a place where you might get sick again from E-coli or lose your land and move to town. To become what? Beggars? Assimilated? The people suggested a third way and asked Mr Harper to move them upstream, to their original home. He refused. During the pomp and ceremony of Mr Harper’s apology to Aboriginal Canada for the Indian Residential School System, a First Nation’s commentator on the CBC radio said “at least it was well written.” (I think it was Mary Simon, but I can’t find the clip on the CBC website and queries have gone unanswered). It was her way of wondering if the apology was sincere and would ever lead to reconciliation. Perhaps she had seen this sort of thing before. Such apologies are cheaply made and dearly bought. They give only the appearance of reconciliation, because only equals can be reconciled. An apology is insincere if made to people abused, for ...

 It is telling that the Idle No More movement started with four First Nations women—Nina Wilson, Sylvia McAdam, Jessica Gordon and Sheelah McLean who gave the first “Idle No More” teach-in. Sylvia McAdam is a lawyer, as is Tanya Kappo, who first tweeted #idlenomore. Perhaps they are of the “New People” of the Anishinaabek Seventh Fire prophecy. Perhaps they are of those who refuse to see themselves as victims, but rather as human beings with rights that are being eroded and responsibilities that need taking up, Time will tell, as it has told of past abuses and as it is telling of present wrongs.In 2007, Mr Harper gave the Kashechewan First Nation a choice. Either stay where they were put in 1957, or move to Timmins—stay in a place where you might get sick again from E-coli or lose your land and move to town. To become what? Beggars? Assimilated? The people suggested a third way and asked Mr Harper to move them upstream, to their original home. He refused. During the pomp and ceremony of Mr Harper’s apology to Aboriginal Canada for the Indian Residential School System, a First Nation’s commentator on the CBC radio said “at least it was well written.” (I think it was Mary Simon, but I can’t find the clip on the CBC website and queries have gone unanswered). It was her way of wondering if the apology was sincere and would ever lead to reconciliation. Perhaps she had seen this sort of thing before. Such apologies are cheaply made and dearly bought. They give only the appearance of reconciliation, because only equals can be reconciled. An apology is insincere if made to people abused, for ...

 About a month ago, the Harper government dropped the first shoe of its new foreign policy—economic agreements with the 3rd world and China. The latter will be at our expense but it looks as though our agreements with developing countries will be at theirs. Canadian mining companies are implicated in dozens of cases of human rights and environmental abuses: Dorato Resources in Peru, Barrick Gold in Tanzania and New Guinea; Centerra in Kyrgyzstan; Excellon in Mexico; Hudbay Minerals in Guatemala. There are others. If the Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement we signed with China is any measure, the agreements we are signing in Africa and South America will allow Canadian mining companies to run roughshod over other peoples’ rights and their ...

So the 2012 US election is over at last. Democrats won the White House and the Senate and the popular vote for both. They even won the popular vote for the House of Representatives—by half a million votes. But the GOP won the House because Republican governments at the state level spent the last two years re-drawing congressional district boundaries to favour Republican candidates. It seems Americans are in for more of the same legislative gridlock as before the election. How Congress deals with the looming fiscal cliff will be telling. If you look at the exit polls, the vote split along America’s fault lines: income gap, religion, and race. Mitt Romney won amongst white males (especially Protestants), but Obama won women voters, blacks and Hispanics. Race still matters in America. It matters so much that Republican governments in several states tried to suppress the black and Hispanic vote by purging voter lists and by passing laws reducing early voting hours or requiring voter ID. And now, to their credit, some Republicans are admitting the intention of those ...

 My Dear Lord Raglan,I am but a few leagues from you and your great house at Usk and travelling westward. However, I regret to say that I am storm-stayed in a small village on the border of Gloucestershire and here I must rest, for the coachman refuses to challenge the hurricane that howls about the public house in which we sought refuge late last night. I am entrusting this letter to one who must ride to Usk today in order that you might be apprised of my delay and to tell you of a most extraordinary encounter.As I wrote to you last month from my office at the Times of London, I have with me a phonograph cylinder of Lord Tennyson reading his famous Charge of the Light Brigade, made just this year, and another, blank cylinder, on which I propose to record your thoughts concerning that engagement and indeed, the whole of the Battle of Balaclava—that most dreadful encounter with the army of Tsar Nicholas. My editors could not think of a more appropriate way to mark the 40th anniversary of that fight than to interview the grandson of the commander of the British forces in the Crimea.But to my extraordinary encounter. Last evening, by the glow of the publican’s fire, I was browsing through a yellowing copy of the Illustrated London News from 1855. It was a fortuitous discovery because the issue contained Roger Fenton’s famous photographs of the Crimean War. Although not of the editorial quality of The Times, I spent a most pleasant hour browsing through the pictures in that publication. Embraced by the warmth of the hearth and the whisky I had been served, my chin fell upon my chest and the paper slipped from my hands.“Do thee want truth of that photograph there, guv’nor?”

 I am a veteran of the free trade battles of the 1980s and I’ve got the political scars to prove it. NAFTA’s been in effect for some 18 years now, but I still don’t know whether it’s a good deal. I do know that of the 16 trade disputes we launched under NAFTA, we’ve lost every one. US companies, however, have won most of theirs and they’ve taken home $170 million of our money in compensation. So when I look at the deal our PM signed with China in September, I worry. And you should too. If China doesn’t like something we do to protect our environment or our health, it will sue us … not in open court, but in secret arbitration. An example is needed. Let’s say a Chinese company wants to set up a huge windfarm in Grey and Bruce Counties and they meet all our governments’ existing criteria. You and your municipality don’t like where the windmills are going, or their numbers, or how the company does business. (China, by the way, is a major manufacturer of wind turbines now, and under this agreement, it has no obligation to use turbines we build, or to hire locally.) So your municipality passes a bylaw that blocks construction. The Chinese consider that to be an action disallowed by the Agreement. The company sues Canada under the Agreement’s dispute arbitration provisions. You lose. Canada and maybe even your municipality are on the hook for millions of dollars in compensation and the company gets to go ahead and put up its turbines anyway. It’s called the Canada-China Foreign Investment ...

 They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob,When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job.They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead,Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?—“Brother, can you spare a dime?” E. Y. Harburg and Jay Gorney, 1931 In the summer of 1933, General Smedley Butler (ret) sat in the otherwise empty dining room of the Bellevue-Stratford in Philly and tried not to let his jaw drop on the tablecloth. Gerald MacGuire sat across from him and spoke quietly about what it was that JP Morgan and Irénée DuPont wanted the General to do. They wanted him to lead an army of veterans against the government of the United States. They wanted FDR and his New Deals gone and they had the money and the influence to do it. They would force the President to appoint Butler Secretary of General Affairs and “persuade” Roosevelt to take a back seat to their agenda. “You’ll see,” said MacGuire. “They’re organizing things right now.” And lo and behold, a few weeks later, the press announced the creation of an influential but secretive group called the American Liberty League. Most of the money came from Irénée DuPont. Most of the influence came from JP Morgan, J Howard Pew, President of the Sun Oil Company, and Alfred P Sloan, head of General Motors. General Butler was no great fan of government either. But he was a patriot. And when the Congressional Committee on Nazi Propaganda and Un-American Activities ...

The gun is now a part of Canadian politics. Richard Henry Bain killed one person and injured another at the PQ rally last Wed night. He was ill, it seems, and a recluse, like many of those who suddenly, unexpectedly, tragically erupt into violence. It’s tempting to leave it there, at the feet of a mad man. But, like so many other, similar mad men, Mr Bain has tapped into something deeper and darker in our national psyche. Some old business we’ve left unfinished. He’s English, and when he yelled “the English are waking up” he tainted the next four years of politics in Québec. We must be careful that the blood he spilled does not stain us in ‘the rest of Canada’. I remember, now, my last visit to Québec. I chatted with two students from the Université de Québec about the federal election. The conversation was polite—not the sycophantic politeness that makes you cringe. It was a respectful courtesy—discourse without rancour or rhetoric. It was pure Canadian curtesie, to use the old English word, politesse to use the French … tough stands argued bravely, with honour and a smile.  Their wit and their charm were disarming, and typically Canadian. Is it still true? It’s only been a year. Have the hate-filled politics of our neighbour to the south finally infected us? Among us there are some, both mad and bad, who pick up the threads of political discord and act in ways that unravel the social fabric and test our national character. But whenever ...

In John Milloy’s A National Tragedy, there are before and after photographs of an Aboriginal boy. In the before photo, his hair is long. He is dressed in buckskins and beads and posed against a buffalo robe. He is as he was when as he came to the Regina Indian Industrial School. In the after photo, he is beside a potted plant looking as though he could have stepped into Eton with his short hair and neat uniform. Even his name has changed—to Thomas Moore, after a particularly rakish Irish poet popular in regency England, perhaps. But his eyes tell a different story. They have not changed and they say more of what has been guarded than what has been lost. The after photo does not have the effect the administrators of the Indian Residential School System had hoped for. It is not a picture of transformation from savage to civilized. It is a parody of the whole colonial project. Parody is what comes of applying our very Western European ideas to peoples with cultures very different from ours, as the culture of Turtle Island most certainly is. Residential schools with hunters planted in rows like radishes. Houses with tissue paper walls—suburbs on muskeg. Prisons bursting with Aboriginal people being ‘rehabilitated’—sweat lodges behind bars. “Sell a country? Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth?” said Tecumseh to William Harrison. “Didn't the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?” “We have a different understanding,” said Red Jacket to a young missionary come to civilize the Seneca. “To you the Creator has given the book; to us He has given the land.” Or, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu (who knows better than most that belief is the bayonet point of the colonial project) says, “When they arrived, we ...

 Living on a First Nation and looking across the boundary line is a little like looking through the wrong end of a telescope—your field of view is wider, the picture is clearer, and Canada looks a lot further away than it really is. People who have lived on a reserve will know what I mean. For those who haven’t, well Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore; although which side of the boundary is Oz depends a great deal on which side of the line you’re standing. It’s a perspective you can’t get anywhere else in the country, and it’s wonderfully useful for examining the workings of Canada and the US. Take the IJC for example. The International Joint Commission is charged by both US and Canadian governments with managing water diversions in and out of ten lake and river systems that dare to cross the border without a visa or VISA. The IJC was formed because, in 1900, the Army Corps of Engineers built the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to link Lake Michigan with the Mississippi River System. The level of the Upper Great Lakes dropped precipitously and someone said, “Oops, perhaps we should have talked to Canada first.” And the IJC was born. The IJC still carries the Corps’ can-do attitude. It can suggest ways of managing the Great Lakes, but now all the parties have to agree before they do it. However, it’s still not very good at dealing with the consequences. For example, it obtained agreement that the St Clair River should be dredged to make room for ocean going “salties.” The big ships brought all kinds of invasive species that are rapidly changing the food cycle in the water column and wreaking havoc with the fisheries. To examine dropping water levels in Lakes Huron and Michigan, the IJC formed the Upper Great Lakes Study Group. The scientists who undertook the ...

What is it that’s making governments in the West so afraid of information? Britain has platoons of police surrounding Ecuador’s embassy in London lest Julian Assange tries to make a break for it. The PM is threatening to storm the place—an act of war by the way. Not that Ecuador would win, but still. It’s positively Kafkaesque. This small, one story embassy on the ground floor of an apartment building is besieged because some guy leaked a lot of embarrassing information. He hasn’t even been charged with anything. There are no reports of harm to secret agents; no military objectives compromised. But a lot of thuggish back-room chicanery (not to mention war crimes by our side) has come to light. Maybe that’s why the US has a secret indictment signed, sealed and waiting for his delivery. Our own government is not nearly so dramatic. But it is just as paranoid. Mr Harper has cut the long-form census. He’s axed the world-class Experimental Lakes Area. He’s muzzled our scientists. He sees no data, hears no data and speaks no data on everything from crime to climate change to the cost of jet planes. The demos in democracy is you and I. If our governments can’t be transparent, if they are so afraid of scrutiny that they suppress or process or dismiss what we, the people, should know then it falls to you and I with help from whistleblowers like Julian Assange. 

 At the beginning of everything, the Navajo were shown two yellow powders. One they could use—it was maize pollen. The other they were told to leave in the ground. That was oxidized uranium.No one talks of “clean” nuclear energy anymore, not when you consider the whole fuel cycle.Early mining in the NWT rendered Deline a “village of widows” because of the high mortality rate of Dene men who worked, unwarned and unprotected in the uranium mines.The same thing happened to Navajo in the southwest US. Their ancient lands have been devastated by uranium mines, turning their creation story into apocalyptic prophecy.Contamination during the operation of a nuclear plant is a constant concern. And the spent fuel from the core of a nuclear reactor is high level nuclear waste. It takes a million years (give or take a few millennia) before it’s safe to stand beside.So why do four municipalities in southwestern Ontario want to be the nuclear waste capital of Canada?Fourteen other communities—11 in northern Ontario and 3 in Saskatchewan are also in the running. But Brockton (Walkerton), Saugeen Shores, Huron-Kinloss and Central Huron are all inside a 4-hour drive from London, Kitchener-Waterloo, Hamilton, Toronto and the US border. One community in the same area, Kincardine, has already agreed to take

Once upon a time in a distant land, a miller boasted to his king that his daughter could spin straw into gold. Intrigued, the king locked her up in a roomful of straw and told her, “If you can spin this straw into gold by morning, you shall be my queen. If not, you shall die.”The poor girl was at her wit’s end. She could barely spin wool, let alone straw, let alone into gold. Around midnight, a little man snuck into her room and asked, “What will you give me if I spin this straw into gold?” She gave him her necklace. By morning, when the king came to check on things, he found a room full of finely spun gold.But, he didn’t get to be king by playing fair, so he locked the poor girl up a second night. Again the little man came and this time she gave him her ring. And again the little man spun a room-full of gold. And again, the greedy king locked her up for a third night.This time, when the little man came around, the poor girl had nothing to give him. The little man said he would still help her—on the condition she swore to give him her first born child as a death pledge or, in the language of the land, a ‘mort-gage.’She agreed and again the little man spun all the straw in the room into gold thread. The king took the gold as his dowry and made the girl his queen and they lived happily ever after—until the day of the birth of her first child.The little man came back for the mort-gage. The queen wept and ...

“Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” With those words Republican Senator Joe McCarthy set off a 10-year witch hunt in the US for just about anyone whose political colour was a redder shade of pink. He was finally censured by the Senate but not before he ruined a lot of lives and dealt a body blow to democracy in the USofA. Whenever I came across the old news reels of that time, I thanked God I didn’t live in a country that would permit that sort of bigoted, callow, scape-goating attack on its own citizens. I can’t say that anymore. In the House Finance committee, a week or so ago, MPs were hearing expert testimony on the impact of Bill C-38, the Budget Implementation Bill. Randy Hoback is a member. He’s the Conservative  MP from Prince Albert Saskatchewan, which is not far from Tommy Douglas’s old riding. Hoback attacked the credibility of United Steel Workers economist Erin Weir by demanding, “Have you or have you ever been a member of the NDP party, or are you presently a member of the NDP party?” Clearly Hoback is not as eloquent as Joe McCarthy was, and so he blunted his own attack. But his demand resounds like a siren. Was it a question of his own making? Or was it one that the Prime Minister’s Office put in his mouth? Not that it really matters ... for it begs another, more important question. What are we becoming that a democratically elected Canadian can even ask such a thing, and in such a manner, in the heart of our Parliament. 

What are we to make of 100 days of mayhem in Montreal? Étudiants en grève—students on strike. Coddled kids with a mistaken sense of entitlement? Yes there’s some of that. But if it were just that, the strike would have fizzled out long before now. The idea of a free education which has deep philosophical and political roots in France and Québec? OK … but does it run deep enough to pull thousands of young Québecois into the streets week after week? Ah-ha! The unions have hijacked the demonstrations. The Québec unions are there alright, and they’re a lot bolder than their English cousins. But the people on the streets were … and are … students. Dial down the diatribes for a bit and what do the streets of Montreal look like? They look like Toronto or Seattle during a G20 meeting. They look like Occupy Wall Street. We say we want the young engaged in the political process. But they’re young. Why are we surprised they engage in a way we don’t approve of? Listen. Our sons and daughters, in Québec this time, are trying to tell us something. Their leaders are articulating it even if we, in English Canada, can’t hear them. No jobs in the future. No money in the money bank. No food in the food bank. Dishonest business leaders. Dishonourable political leaders. The house is burning down and the pumps don’t work ‘cause the vandals took the handles … to quote an old Bob Dylan tune from the sixties … except the real vandals are not the black-masked kids we see on TV. Mais c’est la vie, hein? (shrug) That’s way it is, eh? What can you do? But then, maybe that’s the problem.