“I’m going to fucking kill you!”
Here is #OfficerGoFuckYourself
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Last Week Tonight with John Oliver : Ferguson, MO and Police Militarization
In the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, John Oliver brilliantly explores the racial inequality in treatment by police as well as the increasing militarization of America’s local police forces.
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What Have We Accomplished in Iraq?
Ron Paul: August 18, 2014
We have been at war with Iraq for 24 years, starting with Operations Desert Shield and Storm in 1990. Shortly after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait that year, the propaganda machine began agitating for a US attack on Iraq. We all remember the appearance before Congress of a young Kuwaiti woman claiming that the Iraqis were ripping Kuwaiti babies from incubators. The woman turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US and the story was false, but it was enough to turn US opposition in favor of an attack.
This month, yet another US president – the fifth in a row – began bombing Iraq. He is also placing in US troops on the ground despite promising not to do so.
The second Iraq war in 2003 cost the US some two trillion dollars. According to estimates, more than one million deaths have occurred as a result of that war. Millions of tons of US bombs have fallen in Iraq almost steadily since 1991.
What have we accomplished? Where are we now, 24 years later? We are back where we started, at war in Iraq!
The US overthrew Saddam Hussein in the second Iraq war and put into place a puppet, Nouri al-Maliki. But after eight years, last week the US engineered a coup against Maliki to put in place yet another puppet. The US accused Maliki of misrule and divisiveness, but what really irritated the US government was his 2011 refusal to grant immunity to the thousands of US troops that Obama wanted to keep in the country.
Early this year, a radical Islamist group, ISIS, began taking over territory in Iraq, starting with Fallujah. The organization had been operating in Syria, strengthened by US support for the overthrow of the Syrian government. ISIS obtained a broad array of sophisticated US weapons in Syria, very often capturing them from other US-approved opposition groups. Some claim that lax screening criteria allowed some ISIS fighters to even participate in secret CIA training camps in Jordan and Turkey.
This month, ISIS became the target of a new US bombing campaign in Iraq. The pretext for the latest US attack was the plight of a religious minority in the Kurdish region currently under ISIS attack. The US government and media warned that up to 100,000 from this group, including some 40,000 stranded on a mountain, could be slaughtered if the US did not intervene at once. Americans unfortunately once again fell for this propaganda and US bombs began to fall. Last week, however, it was determined that only about 2,000 were on the mountain and many of them had been living there for years! They didn’t want to be rescued!
This is not to say that the plight of many of these people is not tragic, but why is it that the US government did not say a word when three out of four Christians were forced out of Iraq during the ten year US occupation? Why has the US said nothing about the Christians slaughtered by its allies in Syria? What about all the Palestinians killed in Gaza or the ethnic Russians killed in east Ukraine?
The humanitarian situation was cynically manipulated by the Obama administration — and echoed by the US media — to provide a reason for the president to attack Iraq again. This time it was about yet another regime change, breaking Kurdistan away from Iraq and protection of the rich oil reserves there, and acceptance of a new US military presence on the ground in the country.
President Obama has started another war in Iraq and Congress is completely silent. No declaration, no authorization, not even a debate. After 24 years we are back where we started. Isn’t it about time to re-think this failed interventionist policy? Isn’t it time to stop trusting the government and its war propaganda? Isn’t it time to leave Iraq alone?
Conservatives Could Still Face Repercussions For Election Fraud
Why voter suppression case isn’t all wrapped up with a nice little bow for the Conservatives
PressProgress: August 14, 2014
So is the voter suppression case dating back to the 2011 federal election all wrapped up with a nice little bow for the Conservative Party of Canada?
On Thursday, former junior party staffer Michael Sona, 25, was convicted of one charge of electoral fraud under the Elections Canada for his part in placing misleading robocalls in Guelph riding — directing non-Conservative supporters to bogus polling stations.
But let’s review some things that makes the “Pierre Poutine” case a tad more complicated for the Conservatives.
- In explaining his ruling, Judge Gary Hearn said evidence indicates one or more person was involved beyond Sona.
- According to Elections Canada, whoever orchestrated the illegal calls relied on information from the Conservative Party’s voter-tracking database, known as the Constituent Information Management System. CIMS is “tightly held by the party, with access password protected,” a National Post columnist has explained.
- A source close to the robocalls investigation previously told Postmedia News and the Ottawa Citizen, which led the coverage on the file, said it was unlikely a junior Conservative staffer could have pulled off the scheme on his own. It involved recording a bilingual, professional-sounding message and covering all electronic tracks.
- During the trial, crown witness Andrew Prescott, who served as deputy manager of the Conservative campaign in Guelph (and who was provided immunity in exchange for his evidence), acknowledged he had logged into an account with the company used to send out the calls. “Prescott told the court he was instructed to do so by Ken Morgan, the campaign manager, who supplied him with the password,” explains the Ottawa Citizen in its recap of the case.
- Morgan refused to speak to investigators. Then he moved to Kuwait. “The evidence certainly strongly suggests that Mr. Morgan was involved,” Crown prosecutor Croft Michaelson told the court in closing arguments.” Judge Gary Hearn acknowledged this point on Thursday before rendering his verdict.
- The “sole issue” before the court, though, was whether “Sona is one of the individuals involved, not about any political campaign or party.”
- Jenni Byrne, the party’s 2011 national campaign manager and now deputy chief of staff in the Prime Minister’s Office, instructed a potential key witness in the investigation (Prescott) to push off an interview with an Elections Canada investigator so Byrne could confer with lawyers.
- Elections Canada wasn’t been able to speak to everyone it wanted to as part of its investigation, despite requests for interviews; Elections Act does not grant the agency the power to compel testimony, so it’s hard when people (or a political party) are uncooperative.
- The Conservative government had promised to give this power to Elections Canada before the next election, but failed to do so when it amended the act earlier this year.
- Elections Canada had recommended that the government update this section of the act, but the Conservative government rejected the recommendation, despite this warning from Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand back in March: “The response of Canadians in the face of the robocall affair has been overwhelming. Canadians rightfully expect that such conduct, which threatens the very legitimacy of our democratic institution, be dealt with swiftly and effectively. Without the power to compel testimony, as exists in many provincial regimes, the commissioner’s ability to carry out this investigation will remain limited. All in all, when looking at the proposed changes in relation to enforcement, the bill does not address the most pressing expectations of Canadians for timely and effective investigations.”
- If the Conservative Party conducted an internal investigation to get to the bottom of the robocalls scheme, it has not shared the results with the public.
- In separate civil proceedings in Federal Court backed by the Council of Canadians, a judge upheld the results in six federal ridings in the 2011 election, but did conclude that fraud had occurred in the election beyond Guelph. Here are a few excerpts from the 2013 judgement: “there was an orchestrated effort to suppress votes during the 2011 election campaign by a person with access to the [Conservative Party of Canada] CIMS database”; “I am satisfied that it has been established that misleading calls about the locations of polling stations were made to electors in ridings across the country, including the subject ridings, and that the purpose of those calls was to suppress the votes of electors who had indicated their voting preference in response to earlier voter identification calls”; “I am satisfied … that the most likely source of the information used to make the misleading calls was the CIMS database maintained and controlled by the CPC, accessed for that purpose by a person or persons currently unknown to this Court. … The evidence points to elaborate efforts to conceal the identity of those accessing the database and arranging for the calls to be made”; “I find that the threshold to establish that fraud occurred has been met by the applicants.”
Source : Press Progress Used under a Creative Commons BY 2.0 licence.
Canada Sacrifices Citizens For Corporations ; “Highly Problematic” Trade Deal Leaked
Canada-EU Trade Deal Text Leaked By German TV
Daniel Tencer
The Huffington Post: August 13, 2014
A German news show has published what it says is the text of the Canada-EU free trade deal.
More than 520 pages of the 1,500-page document were posted to the website of German TV network ARD’s news show Tagesschau on Wednesday.
According to some experts now poring through the document, it appears Canada caved on the issue of patent protection for drugs.
The EU had been pushing Canada to lengthen patent protections for drugs, a move that was estimated to cost Canadians $900 million to $1.65 billion annually. The Conservative government in Ottawa has promised to compensate provinces for added drug costs, but no word yet on whether individuals will be compensated as well.
Council for Canadians political director Brent Patterson called the document “highly problematic,” adding the language specifically in the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) chapter is “undemocratic.”
“It’s the same provision that we’ve seen in NAFTA that has been so disastrous,” Patterson told HuffPost Canada.
“In terms of procurement, there is nothing that we can see about cities being excepted as so many had asked to have done.”
Patterson said several municipal governments including Toronto, Victoria, Hamilton and Red Deer asked to be exempted from CETA rules that banned “buy local” policies and other tools to support local jobs and development through public spending.
The Federation of Canadian Municipalities declined to discuss the text.
“Municipal interests in CETA and in all future trade agreements must be protected. FCM will not comment at this time on the leaked document,” said FCM President Brad Woodside.
Though Patterson thinks the documents should have been released earlier, he said the leak would allow groups like his own to start talking to Canadians and build opposition momentum – with possible support from the Liberals party and NDP.
“If the Germans are not satisfied with this, we can see a rocky road ahead,” Patterson said.
Several industry groups contacted by HuffPost Canada said they were not commenting on the leaked text. The Canadian Construction Association, the Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Association and the Fédération des producteurs de lait du Québec all declined to discuss the document.
Scott Sinclair with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives called the procurement provisions in the document “the most extensive set of commitments that Canada has ever made” – reaching down to the municipal level.
“It will interfere with, and potentially end, the use of procurement as an economic development policy tool and interfere with municipal governments, universities or hospitals who, for example, want to implement buy-local food purchasing policies,” he told HuffPost Canada.
It’s “overkill,” he added.
According to University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist, the leaked text addresses concerns many activists have about ISDS.
Critics argued that the trade deal would create an international body through which corporations would be able to sue governments if those companies felt a country’s laws violated its rights under the trade deal. They say these sorts of dispute mechanisms essentially usurp a country’s sovereignty.
The leaked deal includes a clause that allows Canada to review the dispute mechanism after three years. Geist described the clause as “weak.”
Weak side declaration at p.185 offers Canada a review of IP and investment chapter after 3 years http://t.co/e70QEaIrAw 2/2
— Michael Geist (@mgeist) August 13, 2014
Leaked #CETA confirms Canada caved on pharma patent dispute resolution issue as EU language adopted http://t.co/e70QEaIrAw 1/2
— Michael Geist (@mgeist) August 13, 2014
A spokesman for International Trade Minister Ed Fast refused to confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents, but insisted that negotiators have already gone to great lengths to reassure the public that the deal is good for both sides.
(read the full article at The Huffington Post)
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Blowback in Iraq: How U.S. Proxy Wars Led to the Rise of ISIS
Joshua Cook
Ben Swann : August 13, 2014
The U.S. and its regional allies armed and trained “moderate” Sunni rebels to oust President Bashar al-Assad of Syria in order to weaken the Iranian/Russian influence in the Middle East. Then those “moderate” Sunni rebels became more radical and joined the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) which has emerged as the largest, wealthiest and most-radical terrorist organization in the region.
The strategy of arming radical Sunni Muslims has been an abysmal failure, yet Hillary Clinton and neoconservatives like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham continue to push their Brzezinski-inspired foreign policy. In a swipe at the Obama administration, Clinton said, “Failure to help Syrian rebels led to the rise of ISIS.”
Last Sunday, both McCain and Graham appeared on the Sunday talk shows to warn about the “direct threat” of ISIS.
Graham told Fox News, “The Islamic State is ‘an existential threat’’ to our homeland.” Graham asked, “Do we really want to let America be attacked?”
What the mainstream media fails to ask war hawks like Graham is what made ISIS a threat in the first place?
What the mainstream media is not telling you is that both Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham played roles in strengthening ISIS and other Islamic insurgents in Syria.
ISIS success is due to the support they received from the CIA and key U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf — Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Both countries remain to be a critical financial support for al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Recently, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki accused Saudi Arabia and Qatar of openly funding the Sunni Muslim insurgents.
McCain still praises the Saudis, despite the known fact of its state-sponsored terror network and funding sources.
At the Munich Security Conference, McCain said, “Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar and for our Qatari friends.”
According to Steve Clemons writing for The Atlantic, “ISIS, in fact, may have been a major part of Bandar’s covert-ops strategy in Syria.” Clemons notes that according to one senior Qatari official, “ISIS has been a Saudi project.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that the Saudi ambassador, Adel al-Jubeir, recruited both McCain and Graham to “put pressure on the administration to get more involved in Syria.”
So why are U.S. Senators working with the same actors who are behind ISIS instead of working to cut off the Islamic funding mechanisms?
Not only has the U.S. created an unholy alliance with states who sponsor terrorism, it has strengthened ISIS by training and arming radical Sunni insurgents who join ISIS, that share similar goals of creating an Islamic caliphate.
The CIA trains and arms Islamic rebels making matters worse.
There is no real distinction between moderate rebels and ISIS. In fact, there are an endless parade of reports that the U.S.-supported “moderate rebels” in the Free Syrian Army (FSA) have joined ISIS. See here, here and here.
The FSA, al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front and other Syrian rebels are joining forces with a unifying goal of creating an Islamic state.
Despite the reality on the ground in Syria and Iraq, politicians continue to advance their failed policies and the mainstream media never challenges them. They refuse to accept that arming Sunni rebels prolongs the conflict and makes matters worse.
The foreign policy strategy of arming radical Islamist to fight in American proxy wars postulated by Clinton, McCain and Graham is not based on any winning strategy but is based on political distraction by averting attention away from their failures.
The blame game is alive in Washington, D.C.. But their ideas are dangerous for the American people who face a challenging world.
Foreign Policy’s Marc Lynch, said that the scheme of arming rebels is “just wrong” and it’s a strategy that won’t work. He noted that an “external support for insurgents typically makes conflicts longer and bloodier.”
“It’s difficult to produce a single example in modern history of a strategy of arming rebels actually succeeding,” said Lynch.
(read the full article at Ben Swann)
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Snowden Reveals MonsterMind : the ultimate threat to privacy
James Bamford’s profile of Edward Snowden in Wired magazine reveals MonsterMind
MonsterMind requires analyzing all traffic flows, that means we have to be intercepting all traffic flows. That means violating the Fourth Amendment, seizing private communications without a warrant, without probable cause or even a suspicion of wrongdoing. For everyone, all the time.
The massive surveillance effort was bad enough, but Snowden was even more disturbed to discover a new, Strangelovian cyberwarfare program in the works, codenamed MonsterMind. The program, disclosed here for the first time, would automate the process of hunting for the beginnings of a foreign cyberattack. Software would constantly be on the lookout for traffic patterns indicating known or suspected attacks. When it detected an attack, MonsterMind would automatically block it from entering the country—a “kill” in cyber terminology.
Programs like this had existed for decades, but MonsterMind software would add a unique new capability: Instead of simply detecting and killing the malware at the point of entry, MonsterMind would automatically fire back, with no human involvement. That’s a problem, Snowden says, because the initial attacks are often routed through computers in innocent third countries. “These attacks can be spoofed,” he says. “You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?”
In addition to the possibility of accidentally starting a war, Snowden views MonsterMind as the ultimate threat to privacy because, in order for the system to work, the NSA first would have to secretly get access to virtually all private communications coming in from overseas to people in the US. “The argument is that the only way we can identify these malicious traffic flows and respond to them is if we’re analyzing all traffic flows,” he says. “And if we’re analyzing all traffic flows, that means we have to be intercepting all traffic flows. That means violating the Fourth Amendment, seizing private communications without a warrant, without probable cause or even a suspicion of wrongdoing. For everyone, all the time.”
(Read the full profile at Wired)
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Unprecidented Experiment On Humans With Untested Ebola Vaccine
Canada will donate up to 1,000 experimental Ebola vaccine doses to WHO
RT: August 12, 2014
Canada has offered to donate its experimental Ebola virus vaccine to West African States after the WHO said it would be ethical to use untested vaccines to try and contain the outbreak that has already claimed the lives of more than 1,000 people.
According to the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHA) the country sees the vaccine as a global resource and is in talks with the US and the World Health Organization to coordinate the best application of a limited number of doses in its possession.
The deputy head of PHA Dr. Gregory Taylor estimates that Canada has about 1,500 doses of the vaccine, which has not yet been tested on people, saying that 1,000 doses of vaccine could be sent abroad for use, Canadian Press reports.
Taylor also warned that since the drug is yet to be tested on humans, it’s not clear what dosage is needed to protect a person, so those numbers could change.
Earlier on Tuesday, the WHO announced that experimental drugs can be used to treat patients but the scarcity of supplies raises questions who gets saved first.
“There was unanimous agreement among the experts that in the special circumstances of this Ebola outbreak it is ethical to offer unregistered interventions as potential treatments or prevention,” the WHO’s assistant director general Marie-Paule Kieny said after an ethics panel published its guidance.
(read the full article at RT)
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Herr Harper’s Canada
“You won’t recognize Canada when I’m through with it” -Stephen Harper
Here are just 4 of the many ways Stephen Harper is drastically changing Canada in 2014:
1. Corporate for-profit health care
The barely hidden agenda is to unravel Canada’s signature public health care model in favour of an aggregate of more expensive, more fragmented, and less universal corporate models.
Just as the Harper government corrupted the environmental file (in the name of “streamlining”), by drastically removing federal oversight and involvement (vacating jurisdiction), so too is it “vacating jurisdiction” of health care.
The agenda is being achieved by starving the provinces of required funding. Once the 2014 Health Accord is expired, the Harper government will reduce its Canada Health Transfers (CHT’s), — monies transferred from the federal government to the provinces – by$36 billion, up to the end of 2024.
The void of insufficient funding will be filled by corporate health care.
Once this is achieved, Canadians’ access to health care will be restricted, user fees will increase, insurance coverage will cost more, and patient fatalities will rise in number.
Here are some numbers.
According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, public health care costs less than $180 per month per Canadian, while a private insurer in the U.S. charges three times that amount for comparable service.
Even worse, according to a study by Dr. P.J. Devereaux, and published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, if we switch to for-profit hospitals, over 2,000 more Canadians will die needlessly each year.
What are the drivers behind this agenda which is contrary to the wishes of about 86 per cent of Canadians?
According to the Council Of Canadians (who must surely be on Harper’s “enemy list”) there are three drivers:
– Private investors, many based in the U.S, who want to cash in on Canadian health care (NAFTA guarantees equal treatment to U.S companies competing against our public system.)
– Canadian for-profit providers and insurers.
– Cash-starved provincial governments.
That is the long term plan, but there is unfortunately also a shortcut:
We’re at risk of losing our public health care system in 2014.
Right now, there’s a legal challenge in motion that could erase Canadian Medicare as we know it – resulting in a two-tier, US-style health care system.
Dr. Brian Day, owner of Vancouver’s for-profit Cambie Surgery Centre and the leading proponent of privatized health care, launched a constitutional challenge in 2008 that is going to court in September of 2014. This challenge aims to break Medicare in Canada by striking down provincial health legislation that limits the for-profit delivery of medically necessary services, claiming that these rules violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Parties in the case, including the BC government, are calling this the most significant constitutional challenge in Canadian history. Although this case is being heard in British Columbia, experts agree that the case will be appealed and end up in the Supreme Court of Canada – that’s why it’s important to everyone in Canada.
If Dr. Day wins, he’ll open the floodgates to a US-style system that relies on private insurance, and allows providers to set any price on care that the market will allow.
2. Festivals Without Freedom
RCMP are out in force and more than 500 security guards are on hand checking every bag for drugs and alcohol as the Squamish Music Festival gets underway today.
Police enforcement at festivals has been increasing steadily since 2009, shortly after Harper took power:
There was a much stronger uniform presence this year, after the event was identified as requiring higher-than-normal levels of policing, with members being drawn from across the region from the Drug Canine Units, the Integrated Road Safety Unit, the Kootenay Boundary Regional RCMP detachment, and more.
3. Strictly Controlled Internet
Bill C-13 offers service providers immunity for disclosing sensitive information to police and other authorities without a warrant. This isn’t just hypothetical, either—Canadian authorities have been making millions of these requests each year for quite some time.
[…]
With Parliament off for its summer vacation, Bill C-13 is sitting in a strange limbo. Thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision, it’s likely that at least parts of C-13 are unconstitutional. This includes the provisions giving legal immunity to service providers who disclose customer information to authorities without a warrant and without the customer’s knowledge.Despite the court case, the Harper government has shown no intention of going back to the drawing board, or even at least splitting Bill C-13 in two to allow for more debate and input from privacy advocates. This is troubling, since the government is refusing to listen to the privacy expert they just appointed by not even splitting the bill.
What does the future hold, then, for C-13? If Minister MacKay presses forward as he’s indicated when Parliament resumes, it’s likely that the government could find itself in yet another high-level court case about privacy. With lawsuits from civil liberties watchdog groups already on the books over unaccountable spying at CSEC, we could see a legal action from players in the tech-activist privacy coalition against C-13.
As the government keeps silent about making any changes to Bill C-13, it’s stubbornly signaling that it doesn’t care much about Canadians’ privacy. Given its track record, we shouldn’t count ourselves as surprised. But we do know that the Harper government does care about its perception as pro-business. As mainstream outcry grows against this “cyberbullying” bill and businesses line up on the side of reasonable privacy protection, the government may finally change its tune.
Bill C-13 isn’t the only threat to internet privacy. The Trans-Pacific Partnership will end the open Internet as we know it by criminalizing our online activity, invading our privacy, and making our ability to access the Internet far more expensive.
Internet providers will be forced to block content for subscribers who are alleged to have engaged in small-scale downloading or sharing of copyrighted material. It could also kick individuals and even entire families off the Internet for allegations of copyright infringement alone.
Internet providers would be forced to act as ‘Internet cops’, actively monitoring websites for banned links and for any alleged copyright infringement. As costs would be passed on to customers, this would make your Internet more expensive and would result in a stifling Internet censorship regime.
A complete overhaul of Canadian copyright law and potential changes to privacy law that would undermine our digital rights.
4. Dirty Water, Very Dirty Water
The recent disaster at the Mount Polley mine serves as just 1 recent example of water in Canada after a few years with Harper’s fraudulent majority.
A complete water ban affecting about 300 local residents is in effect after five million cubic metres of tailings pond wastewater from the Mount Polley copper and gold mine was released early Monday into Hazeltine Creek.
That’s an amount of water equivalent to about 2,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Local residents are calling it an environmental disaster.
The waterways affected by the ban, which earlier included Quesnel Lake, Polley Lake, Hazeltine Creek and Cariboo Creek, now also include the entire Quesnel and Cariboo river systems right up to the salmon-bearing Fraser River.
Reports of sickly salmon with skin that’s peeling off have prompted a First Nations fishing shutdown in British Columbia’s Cariboo region, which was hit by a mining waste spill this week.
“We are closing all fishing activities down the river immediately, fish are being found very sickly as we speak,” read a notice issued Thursday by the chiefs of the Xaxli’p, Sek’wel’was and Tsk’way’laxw First Nations near Lillooet.
The Secwepemc Fisheries Commission issued a similar advisory telling its members to “exercise caution and stop fishing until further notice.”
The Harper government is waging war on Canada’s freshwater.
We didn’t start with a strong record. Our national water laws are out-dated, we don’t properly enforce the ones we have and we chronically underfund source water and watershed protection. And consecutive governments refuse to consider the effect on freshwater when creating economic, industrial, energy or trade policies.
Yet the Harper government appears intent on systematically dismantling the few protections that have been put in place at the federal level to protect our freshwater heritage.
In its 2011 budget, the Harper government announced a reduction of over $222 million from the budget of Environment Canada and the elimination of over 1,200 jobs in the department. Programs to protect water, such as the Action Plan on Clean Water, which funds water remediation in Lakes Winnipeg and Simcoe among others, were particularly hard hit. Others targeted for deep cuts include the Chemicals Management Plan and the Contaminated Sites Action Plan, both of which are crucial to source water protection.
These cuts followed the cancellation of a major B.C. coastal conservation project after lobbying by the energy industry and the weakening of key elements of the Navigable Waters Protection Act, which eliminated mandatory environmental assessments for major developments such as bridges and dams on Canadian rivers.
But the big guns have come out in the current Budget Implementation Bill. Parks Canada and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans will lose over $100 million in funding and many hundreds of employees between them, which will have devastating impacts on water conservation and watershed protection. Fully cut are the urban wastewater research program and integrated monitoring of water and air quality.
The Fisheries Act, which made it a criminal offence to pollute or destroy fish and fish habitat in Canada and the only federal water protection law with teeth, is being gutted. Already, the Harper government allows the mining industry to apply to have healthy fish-bearing bodies of water to be renamed “tailings impoundment areas” and thus no longer subject to protection of the Act.
But the new rules remove legal protection of fish habitat, allowing harm to fish and habitat based on the “on-going productivity” of commercial fisheries. In essence, the new rules legalize activity that destroys wetlands, lakes and rivers unless these habitats can be proven to have a defined economic value.
Industry will now have unprecedented influence over water protection policy and the Harper cabinet will make decisions about which watersheds deserve protection based on political, not scientific, grounds.
The 2012 federal budget also repeals the Canadian Environment Assessment Act and replaces it with a new law that limits the length of time the assessment process can take, sets strict limits on who can appear before a panel and allows Cabinet to opt out of projects it does not want assessed.
With the plethora of pipelines planned to carry Alberta tar sands bitumen — the dirtiest oil on earth — over fragile watersheds all across Canada, the politicization of the environmental assessment process poses an irreversible threat to our freshwater systems. The Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline to the B.C coast alone would pass over at least 1,000 waterways.
In a mean spirited move, the Harper government is killing the Global Environmental Monitoring System, an inexpensive project that monitors over 3,000 freshwater sites around the world for a U.N. database that Canada has proudly hosted for decades.
Cut too is the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy, which recently published an important paper calling for an end to free or cheap water to resource extractive industries. Perhaps this report was unpopular with the energy and mining companies soon to benefit from the new environmental regime.
This, just months after the Harper government cut funding for the Canadian Environmental Network, a 34-year-old network that acted as a link between 640 small environmental groups and the federal government and which has been a fierce defender of local watersheds.
This list is far from complete, in fact, it just scratches the surface.
Compiled by Alternative Free Press
Herr Harper’s Canada by AlternativeFreePress.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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Feds Transparency Website Can’t Account for $619 Billion
Rachel Blevins
Ben Swann : August 7, 2014
In the midst of the Obama administration’s attempt to implement the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, a recent government audit shows that $619 billion is missing from 302 federal programs.
The Transparency Act was passed by Congress last year to “expand the amount of federal spending data available to the public.”
USASpending.gov was originally created as a way to make government spending more transparent. However, a report from the Government Accountability Office revealed that only 2% to 7% of the recorded spending data in 2012 is “fully consistent with agencies’ records.”
The report stated that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) should implement more oversight of the spending data from federal agencies, and that until it does, “any effort to use the data will be hampered by uncertainties about accuracy.”
[…]
According to USA Today, The Department of Health and Human Services was one of the 302 federal agencies, which failed to report money it had spent. This agency “failed to report nearly $544 billion, mostly in direct assistance programs like Medicare.”
The Department of the Interior neglected to report $5.3 billion it had spent, due to the fact that it claimed its accounting systems “were not compatible with the data formats required by USASpending.gov.”
USA Today also reported that for more than 22% of federal awards, “the spending website literally doesn’t know where the money went.”
(read the full article at Ben Swann)
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