organization:harper government

Canada’s Israel Policy on the Day After the Elections
Haaretz Israeli News Source
▻http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.681523

Harper’s bid to make Israel a wedge issue failed. When he suggested in the leaders’ foreign policy debate that his government was the best supporter of Israel, Trudeau shut him down. In media interviews, both Trudeau and NDP leader Tom Mulcair spoke out forcefully against the boycott movement. Trudeau even spoke in language right out of a Jewish Federation-style playbook, calling BDS “demonization, delegitimization and double standards,” adding, “that’s just not what we are as a country.”
Still, there remains the fundamental question of whether Harper’s Israel policies were any different from those of his predecessors. Bernie Farber, former head of Canadian Jewish Congress, pointed out that on Israeli-Palestinian issues, Jerusalem, the settlements and so on, “Harper changed not one comma” on Canada’s official policy.
He’s got a point. Reading through Canada’s official policy one might think one was perhaps reading the Arab Peace Initiative. Canada doesn’t recognize Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem; Canada believes that a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem must take heed of international law, including UN Resolution 194; Canada declares that Israeli settlements are a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Most would agree, though, that there was something different in Harper’s approach to Israel: its tone.
Benjamin Shinewald, former senior policy advisor in the Privy Council Office under both prime ministers Harper and Paul Martin, knows how important tone can be in shaping the conversation on the world stage. Shinewald notes that on an array of indicators — capped by Canada’s loss of its UN Security Council bid, its “international standing in the world and in the Middle East is in a shambles. We don’t have much of a voice with anybody. The first thing a new Liberal government could do is try to get our voice heard again.”
Shinewald believes there’s a host of things Canada could do in the realm of Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding, starting with empowering the many diplomats who are “demoralized.” Under the Harper government, Shinewald says, they simply “weren’t allowed to engage in public diplomacy.” It’s a story I’ve heard time and again from civil servants and foreign service officers who have felt hemmed in by the Harper government.
And then there are the spillover effects to the Jewish community of the Harper legacy. Farber points to mainstream Jewish organizations “tilting very strongly to the right since Harper became prime minister,” adding that “there’s a polarization I’ve never seen before in the Canadian Jewish community.” The mutual name-calling, the narrowing of open discourse, what Jewish tradition calls sinat chinam (baseless hatred) have all been intensifying.
It’s a dynamic that has frequently affected me in my Jewish communal life over the last several years, most recently when I was told in advance of a scheduled community project meeting that a fellow member of the Jewish community refused to have me in his home because of my columns.
Farber looks back fondly on his nearly thirty years at CJC, where vigorous debate and discussion took place around issues of social justice and poverty. By contrast, Farber points to hard-hearted, Harper-led policies like denying health care to refugees. “This was not my Canada,” Farber recalls thinking.

Canada prepares to join in training Ukraine military - CBC News - Latest Canada, World, Entertainment and Business News
▻http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada-prepares-to-join-in-training-ukraine-military-1.3031806

A defence source says the Harper government is expected to announce the deployment of training troops — possibly over 100.

Most of them are expected to be housed at an existing NATO training centre located in Yavoriv, in the western portion of the embattled European country, near the Polish border.

The troops will join American and British soldiers, likely in mid-May.
(…)
The U.S. military has deployed 800 troops to train three — possibly four — battalions in western Ukraine and the British recently sent 75 soldiers to give instruction in command procedures, tactical intelligence and battlefield first aid.

#Harper government silences pain of Gazan children | rabble.ca
▻http://rabble.ca/news/2014/11/harper-government-silences-pain-gazan-children

Writing about a previous generation of Gazan children, Dr. James Graff said that between 1987 and 1993 a third had either been beaten or shot by Israeli soldiers. He mentioned a 1992 survey of Gazan’s aged eight to 15 in which 89 per cent had had their homes raided at night and 45 per cent were there subjected beatings. He described those child beatings where,

“Usually two, four or more soldiers are involved, using their rifles or army issued 60 cm plastic or fibreglass truncheons. They usually repeatedly strike their victims with these weapons all ’over the body,’ often including the genitals, and they frequently kick or beat them with their fists as well. Other ’standard’ beatings involve repeatedly smashing the victim’s head against walls or striking the victim on the forehead in order to cause a hairline fracture at the base of the skull.”

This was decades before #Hamas rule and when the Strip’s population barely exceeded 600,000. Thus the child victims of today are themselves descended from the child victims of yesterday, their homes now invaded by missiles at night rather than marauding soldiers.

#Gaza #Palestine #Israël #Israel

Is #Canada Tarring Itself ? - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/opinion/is-canada-tarring-itself.html?hp&rref=opinion

START with the term “tar sands.” In Canada only fervent opponents of oil development in northern Alberta dare to use those words; the preferred phrase is the more reassuring “oil sands.” Never mind that the “oil” in the world’s third largest petroleum reserve is in fact bitumen, a substance with the consistency of peanut butter, so viscous that another fossil fuel must be used to dilute it enough to make it flow.

Never mind, too, that the process that turns bitumen into consumable oil is very dirty, even by the oil industry’s standards. But say “tar sands” in Canada, and you’ll risk being labeled unpatriotic, radical, subversive.

Performing language makeovers is perhaps the most innocuous indication of the Canadian government’s headlong embrace of the oil industry’s wishes. Soon after becoming prime minister in 2006, Stephen Harper declared Canada “an emerging energy superpower,” and nearly everything he’s done since has buttressed this ambition. Forget the idea of Canada as dull, responsible and environmentally minded: That is so 20th century. Now it’s a desperado, placing all its chips on a world-be-damned, climate-altering tar sands bet.

Documents obtained by research institutions and environmental groups through freedom-of-information requests show a government bent on extracting as much tar sands oil as possible, as quickly as possible. From 2008 to 2012, oil industry representatives registered 2,733 communications with government officials, a number dwarfing those of other industries. The oil industry used these communications to recommend changes in legislation to facilitate tar sands and pipeline development. In the vast majority of instances, the government followed through.

After winning an outright parliamentary majority in 2011, Mr. Harper’s Conservative Party passed an omnibus bill that revoked or weakened 70 environmental laws, including protections for rivers and fisheries. As a result, one proposed pipeline, the Northern Gateway, which crosses a thousand rivers and streams between Alberta and the Pacific, no longer risked violating the law. The changes also eliminated federal environmental review requirements for thousands of proposed development projects.

(...)

Climate change’s impact on Canada is already substantial. Across Canada’s western prairie provinces, an area larger than Alaska, mean temperatures have risen several degrees over the last 40 years, causing releases of greenhouse gases from melting permafrost and drying wetlands. The higher temperatures have led to the spread of the mountain pine beetle, which has consumed millions of trees. The trees, in turn, have become fodder for increasingly extensive forest fires, which release still more greenhouse gases. Given that scientists now think the Northern Hemisphere’s boreal forests retain far more carbon than tropical rain forests like the Amazon, these developments are ominous. At least the Harper government has indirectly acknowledged climate change in one way: It has made a show of defending the Northwest Passage, an increasingly ice-free Arctic Ocean link between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that winds through Canadian territory.

Nevertheless, the Harper government has shown its disdain for scientists and environmental groups dealing with climate change and industrial pollution. The government has either drastically cut or entirely eliminated funding for many facilities conducting research in climate change and air and water pollution. It has placed tight restrictions on when its 23,000 scientists may speak publicly and has given power to some department managers to block publication of peer-reviewed research. It has closed or “consolidated” scientific libraries, sometimes thoughtlessly destroying invaluable collections in the process. And it has slashed funding for basic research, shifting allocations to applied research with potential payoffs for private companies.

With a deft Orwellian touch, Canada’s national health agency even accused a doctor in Alberta, John O’Connor, of professional misconduct — raising “undue alarm” and promoting “a sense of mistrust” in government officials — after he reported in 2006 that an unusually high number of rare, apparently tar-sands-related cancers were showing up among residents of Fort Chipewyan, 150 miles downstream from the tar sands. A government review released in 2009 cautiously supported Dr. O’Connor’s claims, but officials have shown no interest in the residents’ health since then.

Dr. O’Connor’s experience intimidated other doctors, according to Margaret Sears, a toxicologist hired by the quasi-independent Alberta Energy Regulator to study health impacts in another region near the tar sands operation. Dr. Sears reported that some doctors cited Dr. O’Connor’s case as a reason for declining to treat patients who suggested a link between their symptoms and tar sands emissions.

The pressure on environmentalists has been even more intense. Two years ago Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver (who this month became finance minister) declared that some environmentalists “use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest” and “threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.” Canada’s National Energy Board, an ostensibly independent regulatory agency, coordinated with the nation’s intelligence service, police and oil companies to spy on environmentalists. And Canada’s tax-collecting agency recently introduced rigorous audits of at least seven prominent environmental groups, diverting the groups’ already strained resources from anti-tar-sands activities.

#sables_bitumineux #langage #Harper #climat #argent #guerre_contre_la_science #abus_de_pouvoir

Harper government exempts oilsands from reviews despite water concerns | canada.com
▻http://o.canada.com/2013/05/28/harper-government-eliminated-reviews-for-oilsands-projects-following-warni

The federal government removed some oilsands projects from a list of those requiring environmental screenings, after being told in an internal memorandum that this form of industrial development could disturb water sources and harm fish habitat.

The memo to the deputy minister of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, dated May 5, 2011, came a year before Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government introduced hundreds of pages of changes to Canada’s environmental laws, which will allow the government to exclude some oilsands projects from reviews.

In total, the changes eliminated about 3,000 federal environmental assessments, including hundreds of evaluations of projects involving fossil fuels and pipeline development, once the laws were adopted in July 2012. Ministers in Harper’s government said this would reduce unnecessary delays and focus federal resources on investigating projects with the greatest potential impacts on the environment.

#Harper #Canada #sables_bitumineux

Harper government using “humanitarian” aid to boost Canada’s global mining companies - World Socialist Web Site

On en apprend de belles. Les miniers canadiens sont aussi très actifs dans le Caucase, en Arménie et dans les territoires occupés autour du Haut-Karabakh, et enfin en Asie centrale au Tadjikistan si je m souviens bien.

Sinon, on commence à comprendre pourquoi en Afrique, on préfère de loin les Chinois aux occidentaux... Les Chinois ne sont pas tellement philanthropes (Ils sont clairement là pour faire des affaires, et leur attitude commerciale peut-être brutale, mais, entend-on en Afrique, au moins il n’y a pas l’hypocrisie de l’aide.

▻http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/02/11/cida-f11.html

Harper government using “humanitarian” aid to boost Canada’s global mining companies
By Louis Girard
11 February 2013

At the behest of Canada’s Conservative government, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) is working with Canada’s mining companies to silence widespread opposition from people working at, or living near, many of their Latin American and African operations.

The people affected by these projects accuse major Canadian mining corporations of depleting their rivers and contaminating their water; causing health problems (skin disease, cancer, respiratory problems); offering miserable working conditions; and paying miniscule royalty amounts to local governments despite huge profits. This opposition threatens investors’ returns as sometimes it compels Canadian miners to delay or cancel projects. Frequently, it is violently repressed by police or company-hired goons.

#matières-premières #mines #canada #aide-au-développement

Idle No More

Inside Story Americas - Al Jazeera English

▻http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryamericas/2013/01/20131167814118428.html

Idle No More
Can an aboriginal protest movement and the rest of Canada’s indigenous community force the Harper government to change?
16 Jan 2013 11:41

The Idle No More movement in Canada, a nationwide call to action by aboriginals, has gained significant momentum in recent weeks.

“Canada has consistently failed to live up to its obligations .... There is not a lot of good faith all the way around in this relationship.”

– Pamela Palmater, a spokesperson for the Idle No More movement

It all began as opposition to a far-reaching set of laws introduced by Stephen Harper, Canada’s prime minister.

The movement says that among other provisions, Omnibus Bill C-45 threatens aboriginal treaty agreements and sovereignty.

On December 11, Chief Theresa Spence began a hunger strike in protest against the bill. More protests spread across the country and even internationally.

#peuples-autochtones #canada #aborigènes