October 1, 2008

September In Review - Part II

373% rise in homelessness in Vancouver, 100 police armed with semi-automatics in Calgary, single mothers working 19 more hours per week in Nova Scotia

by Dominion Staff

The Dominion - http://www.dominionpaper.ca

Protesters from the Olympics Resistance Network disrupted the send-off of the 2010 Olympics' Canadian Pacific 'Spirit Train' from the Vancouver suburb of Port Moody. Photo: Dawn Paley

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Aboriginal justice workers said Stephen Harper's proposal to remove conditional sentencing for more than 30 crimes would mean more aboriginal people end up in jail. When pressed, Harper admitted that his proposal would result in more aboriginal people being incarcerated. According to Statistics Canada, Aboriginals make up three per cent of Canada's population but account for 20 per cent of the prison population.

Pollsters found that "half of those surveyed agreed with the notion that giving Mr. Harper a majority would be like electing Mr. Bush as prime minister." Seventeen political parties registered for the elections.

A hacker was able to send two emails from Prime Minister Harper's account. One email, sent to media outlets across the country, included the statement, "We are a tar sands level party, not a grass roots party," and announced the plan to "make sure that American and Canadian jelly beans have the same standards."

Nunavut Premier Paul Okalik dissolved the legislative assembly in a session that included the passage of 11 new bills, including the Inuit Language Protection Act, which "guarantees that services in both the public and private sectors are provided in an Inuit language." Territorial elections will take place in Nunavut on October 27.

The United Nations received $16 billion in pledges to meet its Millennium Development Goals on poverty, which include halving global poverty by 2015 by collecting 0.7 per cent of UN-member countries' gross national income. The "Group of 8" industrialized countries were found to be among the flakiest, including Canada, which has consistently contributed less than half its annual pledge.

Calgary police announced that 100 officers are being armed with semi-automatic weapons, which can shoot at targets up to 135m away.

Greenpeace accused Syncrude Canada of trying to 'cripple' the organization through a lawsuit. The oil giant is seeking $120,000 in damages relating to a protest carried out at their Alberta tar sands operations in July.

Walk4justice, an 87-day walk from Vancouver, arrived in Ottawa. The walkers aimed to raise awareness about the more than 3000 missing or murdered women – the vast majority of them of Indigenous background – reported in two decades. Their demand for a formal inquiry into the many uninvestigated deaths was presented along with the list of the missing and murdered. Speakers told of extreme difficulty in getting police and government officials to take the issue seriously. Upon their arrival, the walkers learned that three Indigenous women had recently disappeared from communities near Maniwaki, a few hours from Ottawa.

The Nuclear Waste Management Organization launched a search for a site to store nuclear waste in Canada. The site selection focus will be in Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick– all provinces that use nuclear energy. "I don't have a clue where they would put something so eternally toxic,” said Christian Theriault, founder of Citizens against Uranium Mining, to the possibility of a nuclear waste facility in his province of New Brunswick.

[cc 2.0] A theatre poster from 1895 rings true today. Photo: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Collections

On average, Nova Scotians are working one month more per year than they did ten years ago, according to a study by GPI Atlantic. The study found that the average single mother is working 19 more hours per week than she did a decade ago.

Fourteen migrant workers were sent back to Mexico from British Columbia after they submitted papers to unionise. According to union organisers, 29 vegetable growers with Floralia Plant Growers in Abbotsford, BC, submitted their papers to unionise. The next day 14 were told by their employer that they would be returning by plane to Mexico the following afternoon. The union vote was to take place two days later. The BC Labour Relations Board is investigating the matter.

The Tsartlip First Nation filed a lawsuit against the province of BC, claiming ownership over the 78 hectare 'Woodwynd' farm on the Saanich peninsula of Vancouver Island.

Cirque du Soleil announced that it would not participate in the opening or closing ceremonies of the 2010 Olympics. A source close to Cirque said that the decision had to do with "tight control exerted over the creative process by VANOC and the IOC."

Protesters from the Olympics Resistance Network disrupted the send-off of the 2010 Olympics' Canadian Pacific 'Spirit Train' from the Vancouver suburb of Port Moody. Police arrested two people who were later released without charges.

A report carried out by Metropolitan Vancouver found that street homelessness in Greater Vancouver has increased 373 per cent since 2002. The number of people living on the street in the city is close to 3000.

Secure Canada 2008, a military trade fair due to take place in Ottawa, was cancelled because of protests.

Residents of Stratford, PEI were given boil water orders due to fears about E. Coli contamination.

Vancouver police tasered a sixteen year old mother in order to take away her baby. In Brooklyn, NY, a mentally handicapped man fell ten feet to his death after being tasered by New York City police.

The Supreme Court of Canada declined to consider whether it is legal for the Canadian government to deport an individual even if there is the risk of torture. The ruling came a year after the lawyer for Adil Charkaoui asked the top court to rule on the issue. In 2003, an Immigration Canada Pre-removal Risk Assessment concluded that Charkaoui, arrested that same year under a security certificate, faced the possibility of torture should he be deported to Morocco. The government maintains they can deport someone who may face torture if it is balanced out by a threat to national security.

The Fort Qu'Appelle Tribal Council shortened the Treaty 4 Gathering, one of Saskatchewan's biggest powwows, to one day from a planned several days following threats of an undisclosed nature.

Oil closed below US$100 per barrel, to its lowest price since February. (In July crude prices peaked at US$145 per barrel.)

Nevertheless, gas prices spiked as Hurricane Ike hit the heart of the US oil and petro-chemical industry, destroying at least ten oil production platforms and damaging pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico, filling floodwaters with oil and chemicals. The storm also killed at least 40 people and left 30,000 in public shelters and a million without power.

Ike left over 100 dead and tens of thousands homeless in Gonaives, Haiti, where skyrocketing food prices have already led to rampant hunger. In an interview with Democracy Now, Partners in Health co-founder Paul Farmer said that the Haitian government had been "hollowed out over the last several years... We have to stop destabilizing democracy, and any other country that's doing that also needs to stop."

The US government sought approval for a $700 billion bailout of the banking sector. Democracy Now host Amy Goodman noted "The banking, investment, finance and insurance industries, long the foes of taxation, now need money from working-class taxpayers to stay alive." Arun Gupta, an editor of alternative New York newspaper The Indypendent, said of the bailout, "They said providing healthcare for nine million children, perhaps costing six billion dollars a year, was too expensive, but there's evidently no sum of money large enough that will sate the Wall Street pigs." House and Senate negotiators from the Democratic and Republican parties reached a general agreement on the Wall Street bailout after overnight drafting efforts, however, on September 29 the US House of representatives voted 228-205 against the bailout.

New tent cities appeared in Chattanooga, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Fresno Columbus, Reno, Portland and Seattle. Many of the people seeking shelter in the tent cities lost their homes in the foreclosures ensuing from the US mortgage crisis that began in 2007.

A study by Dalhousie University found that Canada's war effort in Afghanistan has cost $22 billion so far, and predicts that there will be 41,000 Canadian veterans of the war in Afghanistan by 2010.

The World Bank cancelled funding to Chad for oil pipelines, stating, "It became evident that the arrangements that had underpinned the bank's involvement in the Chad-Cameroon pipeline project were not working."

In Nigeria, three attacks against Royal Dutch Shell's operations over a 48 hour period included blasts at a flow station.

Maple Leaf meats reopened their Toronto plant, the source of a listeriosis outbreak that killed 18 people across Canada. Tory agriculture minister Gerry Ritz came under fire for making inappropriate comments about the outbreak, allegedly saying that "this is like a death by a thousand cuts. Or should I say cold cuts."

Richmond, BC,-based MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates launched a constellation of five RapidEye mapping satellites from Kazakhstan. According to a company spokesperson, "It covers four million square kilometres a day and can revisit any spot on the earth each day. "

A Statscan survey found a 4.9 per cent rise in public transit use in Canada since last year.

A suicide truck bomber killed at least 43 and wounded nearly 250 in a Marriott Hotel in Pakistan. Just hours earlier, only a few hundred metres from the hotel, new President Asif Ali Zardari, widower of assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, addressed parliament for the first time, calling for terrorism to be rooted out of the country.

Violence increased in Iraq; ten people were killed and 30 wounded in a single week in Baghdad. Thirty-four people were killed in a suicide bombing in Diyala, and 31 people died in a similar incident in Dujail.

Bomb blasts at the US embassy in Yemen killed 16 people. Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Salih is a close ally to George Bush in the "war on terror."

Eight US Air Force and Army generals were punished after they mistakenly shipped components of nuclear bombs to Taiwan.

A Ukrainian ship carrying 33 tanks and other weapons was seized by pirates off the coast of Somalia.

Thabo Mbeki stepped down as President of South Africa, following calls for his resignation after a judge’s ruling that he was connected to corruption charges pressed against his rival for African National Congress leadership, Jacob Zuma.

The Latin American Water Tribunal found Goldcorp Inc "guilty of causing harm to the environment and to the people of San Miguel Ixtahuacán and Sipacapa, San Marcos," in Guatemala. The verdict was rejected by the National Mining Association of Guatemala.

Fifty years ago this month, Cameroonian leader Ruben Um Nyobè was killed by the French colonial army.

Author David Foster Wallace, best known for his mammoth novel "Infinite Jest," committed suicide at the age of 46. Before his death, Wallace was asked during an interview what he found magical about fiction. "I feel unalone – intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness."

Scientists from Memorial University studied a crater in Labrador as a potential lunar training ground. Paul Sylvester, head of the study, told the CBC, "Ultimately I see that Kamestastin Lake could be a place where astronauts might come and train to better acclimate themselves for what they're facing when they go to the moon."

A Canada Post mail truck caught fire in the driveway to a Saint John home in New Brunswick due to electrical problems. The mail deliverer managed to save all of the mail from the truck before it was destroyed.

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