2400 Motel and Jericho Hostel

Joseph Jones — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 23:57:37 +0000

A Case of Vancouver ADD (Avoidance, Desperation, Disappearance)

Hot Potato Homelessness

Have you ever seen a hot potato blow up? Well, the City of Vancouver has a magical hot potato. A potato that goes kablooey over and over and over again.

As 2020 ends, Vancouver stews with twenty-twenty hindsight over when and how to disappear its current manifestation of the hot potato – Strathcona Tent City. New magic is sought after.

During 2020 Vancouver City Council dithered away many fine-weather months, while piling rezoning onto rezoning to try to keep developers happy. Despite the mid-May clearance of a two-year tent city at Oppenheimer Park, that pressing circumstance kept on getting relegated to mañana.

But as frost began to bite the air in mid-October, Council went into "special" mode on 8 October 2020 to devote a whole meeting to Emergency COVID-19 Relief for Unsheltered Vancouver Residents.

A cynic might suspect that certain powers-that-be have been thinking that footdragging might help the covid pandemic bring about a less costly "solution." Despite all their fervid verbal fancy-dancing to tunes of "concern."

Sidewinder Missile

During those tardy proceedings, Jean Swanson launched a sidewinder missile that has to have kept city staff reeling ever since:

Pursue using the City-owned 2400 Motel and the Jericho Hostel for housing unhoused people as soon as possible (page 9)

https://council.vancouver.ca/20201008/documents/spec20201008min.pdf

In very recent reporting, Mike Howell reveals that "the 2400 Motel and Jericho Hostel will likely not be used to house homeless people from Strathcona Park."

Should this staff move surprise a Vancouver City Council that blinked when a dollar-bloated Vancouver Police Department flat-out "just said no" in response to specific earlier orders to plan for redirection of civic finance to more appropriate service providers?

Politics of Tent City

The fundamental politics of "tent city" is to aggravate authority with in-your-face reminder of the neglected problem. The task for activists is to struggle incessantly against the notion that the problem should somehow "just go away" – get disappeared. This, after tent city residents have left behind the vulnerability of being lone individuals who scrabble to survive on a city sidewalk.

Homeless persons as invisible ones, rather than a visible assemblage, is a situation that responsible authorities love being able to pretend not to see. "Anywhere except where you are" becomes the credo of politicians and bureaucrats, as they recurrently have to grapple with an issue that never ever wins votes in the next election.

The present iteration of whack-a-tent-city has fantasized that Strathcona Tent City could disperse into Jericho Hostel and 2400 Motel. Now that 2400 Motel and Jericho Hostel have been put into play, oppositional strategizing calls for some concrete thought experimentation.

Persons who have been exposed to military training will be familiar with key concepts like "containment" and "perimeter." What potential do these particular two sites offer as terrain on which to execute future tent city maneuvers?

Start with Jericho Hostel. If you want to regiment and control a possibly rowdy crew, what better space to invite them into than a purpose-built former military barracks stuck way out at the end of nowhere?

Norquay in East Vancouver

The 2400 Motel site on Kingsway presents far more intriguing possibilities. With 65 units in 23 separate physical structures, primarily distributed as small cottages over an area of 3.5 acres, the site offers startling potential for staging blowback drama. Especially when the extensive difficult-to-police frontages along Kingsway, East 33rd Avenue, and East 30th Avenue are taken into account.

Besides which, reinforcements likely could be mustered easily from an established and growing homeless constituency in the immediately surrounding area.

The 2400 Motel is what it is because the Property Endowment Fund wants to landbank on the backs of East Vancouver residents. And the supersecret PEF rules Vancouver, perpetually double-dealing as a municipal real estate speculator.

For ten years now, the City of Vancouver has stonewalled on its 2010 Norquay Plan commitment to deliver amenity to the heart of what planners proclaimed would be a "Norquay Village Neighbourhood Centre." Amenity was specified to include this:

The Strategy targets achieving 100 units or 20% of the 500 units possible at the 2400 Motel site, addressing between 25% and 35% of the total need for social housing in the neighbourhood. (page 9)

Norquay Village Public Benefits Strategy
https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/norquay-village-public-benefits-strategy.pdf

So now, in late 2020, we come to trying to stuff a few desperate bodies into
an old motel. When City of Vancouver already could have delivered ONE HUNDRED
promised units of social housing.

Tent city activists, please put Norquay on your radar.

In Vancouver, tent city history really has been just one damn thing after another.

Further Reading

Kenneth Chan. Vancouver City Council signals new homeless shelter at
285-bed Jericho Beach hostel. Daily Hive (9 Oct 2020)
https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/vancouver-jericho-beach-hostel-2400-motel-homeless-shelter

Dan Fumano. Park board, city moving to end Strathcona Park tent city. Vancouver Sun (14 Dec 2020)
https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/tentative-dan-fumano-park-board-city-moving-to-end-strathcona-park-tent-city

Mike Howell. Strathcona Park homeless camp will remain in place at Christmas. Business in Vancouver (15 Dec 2020)
https://biv.com/article/2020/12/strathcona-park-homeless-camp-will-remain-place-christmas

Eric Zimmer. Park Board pushes forward with homeless shelter at Jericho Beach hostel. Daily Hive (14 Dec 2020)
https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/vancouver-park-board-homeless-shelter-jericho-beach-hostel

Vancouver releases strategy to move homeless people out of Strathcona Park. CBC News (14 Dec 2020)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-strathcona-park-homeless-camp-strategy-1.5840332

Jen St. Denis. After Deaths and Injuries, Strathcona Park Camp Gets More Services. Tyee (15 Dec 2020)
https://thetyee.ca/News/2020/12/15/Strathcona-Park-Camp-Gets-More-Services/

Recent Timeline

History becomes confusing when remnants of hot potato moulder all over the place. Here is a sampling of the detritus, not even going back as far as Woodsquat (2002) [https://chodarr.org/node/706]

=============

58 West Hasting 2010 Olympics Tent City (Feb 2010)

Carlito Pablo. Downtown Eastside tent city highlights lack of housing in Vancouver. Georgia Straight (17 Feb 2010)
https://www.straight.com/article-290445/vancouver/housing-still-lacking-city

=============

Olympic Village Tent City (26 Feb 2011)

Joseph Jones. Tent City Activists Go Homeless. Vancouver Media Co-op (27 Feb 2011)
http://vancouver.mediacoop.ca/story/tent-city-activists-go-homeless/6455

=============

Oppenheimer Park Tent City (2014) goes down with five arrests on 16 October 2014

Oppenheimer Park: 5 arrested as tent city comes down. CBC (16 Oct 2014)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/oppenheimer-park-5-arrested-as-tent-city-comes-down-1.2800767

=============

Ten Year Tent City (2017)

Joseph Jones. Gimme Shelter ... No! How About an Injunction? Vancouver Media Co-op (16 June 2017)
http://vancouver.mediacoop.ca/story/gimme-shelter-how-about-injunction-instead/36551

=============

Sugar Mountain Tent City (2017)

Alliance Against Displacement. The Winter is an Implacable Foe: Sugar Mountain smashed in order to cover up homeless crisis. (19 Dec 2017)
https://www.stopdisplacement.ca/category/ten-year-tent-city/

=============

Oppenheimer Park Tent City (2018-2020) goes down after two years

Jesse Winter. The Last Days of Oppenheimer Park, Vancouver’s Tent City. Vice (12 May 2020)
https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5ppvq/the-last-days-of-oppenheimer-park-vancouvers-tent-city

Vancouver's Oppenheimer Park empty of people and tents, officials clean site. CBC (10 May 2020)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-s-oppenheimer-park-empty-of-people-and-tents-officials-clean-site-1.5563919

=============

Port Authority Parking Lot Tent City loses out to BC Supreme Court Injunction

Elana Shepert. 'I’d be lost': Homeless people fight port authority for right to remain by Vancouver Park. Vancouver Is Awesome (4 June 2020)
https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/vancouver-news/homeless-people-fight-port-authority-crab-park-2408116

Simon Little. B.C. Supreme Court grants injunction to clear CRAB Park homeless camp. Global News (10 June 2020)
https://globalnews.ca/news/7051524/b-c-supreme-court-grants-injunction-to-clear-crab-park-homeless-camp/

=============

Namegan/CRAB Park Tent City ends with 46 arrests on 16 June 2020

Stephanie Ip / Mike Raptis. 46 people arrested as Vancouver police order tent city out of CRAB Park area. Vancouver Sun (17 June 2020)
https://vancouversun.com/news/vancouver-police-order-tent-city-out-of-crab-park-area-on-tuesday-morning

=============

Strathcona Park Tent City rises up at midsummer 2020

Jon Hernandez. Days after Vancouver's Crab Park tent city dismantled, new camp growing in Strathcona. CBC (21 June 2020)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/days-after-vancouver-s-crab-park-tent-city-dismantled-new-camp-growing-in-strathcona-1.5621686

=============

The Cost of Canada’s Militarist Culture: Perspectives From a Former Cadet

Fernando Arce — Sun, 10 May 2020 06:14:15 +0000

Is war rhetoric desensitizing Canadians to its effects?

On April 23rd, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the government would be deploying the Canadian Armed Forces to fight COVID-19 on what he had earlier described as the “front lines.” An interesting choice of words, I thought, given Canada’s devastating sanctions on North Korea imposed since last year as well as its controversial involvement in Iraq since 2014.

As a former cadet, this has led me to question the role of Canada’s militarist culture, and the effect this type of war rhetoric has on the minds of Canadians.

Growing up as a Canadian cadet, I was taught that the military is the most important aspect of society and that it deserves unquestioned respect. Trips to museums, Remembrance Day parades and even school assignments were all designed to instill in us the idea that soldiers are noble and that wars are fought for democracy and freedom. The very idea of citizenship is linked to military culture, something that became evident when we toured the HMCS Fredericton naval war ship during a so-called “Citizenship Trip.” To this day, I’m not clear what a naval ship has to do with citizenship.

Conversations at any cadet gathering are invariably the same: video games and pre-teen gossip, the Victoria Cross, whose brother or father was in Afghanistan and, of course, the Gurkhas – Nepali soldiers who we were taught had built a society that honoured martial prowess above all else: the ideal society by a cadet’s standards.

Canada’s Cadets program, known as Cadets Canada, has always been about the development of soldiers. The program began in the mid-19th century as "Drill Associations" to instill militarism in children amid an outburst of support for imperialism. The program ran into stiff opposition in the 1930s from parents who were wary of sending their children to the military after the First World War. As a result, the program was scrapped from schools and made voluntary. Today, it is plagued with scandals of veterans and soldiers who have used it to prey upon children sexually.

It was only after moving to South Korea in 2014, that I would come to understand how Canada’s militarism left not democracy but decades of silence, pain and suffering in South Korea following the Korean War in the 1950s.

After the Second World War, Koreans were creating a unified state and undoing the wrongs of Japanese colonialism. Western intervention interrupted that historical process, leaving Korea divided to this day.

***

I arrived in South Korea in 2014 for a job after graduating university and have never left. At first, all I knew about Korea came from a cheap paperback I had read about Canada’s role in the Korean War. Canada had sent 20,000 soldiers to join the United Nations force, I had learned, so I felt obligated to visit battle sites.

That book had painted Canadians as benevolent and well-trained soldiers protecting civilians, while Americans were presented as arrogant and wasteful, namely for their blundering attempt to invade China. It reduced Korean history to a series of battles led by foreign forces and UN decisions, while Koreans themselves were barely mentioned. By its end, I was left believing that the UN saved South Korea in the name of freedom and democracy. (Today, I call this widespread opinion what it really is: Western arrogance.)

The book had left me with the impression that South Korea had somehow disappeared from history only to reappear in the 1990s as a democratic success story. It did so by skipping from the 1950s directly to the ‘90s, leaving me with no information about what had happened outside those years. The brutal dictatorships in between had been conveniently left out as they undermined the narrative that the Korean War of the ‘50s had been waged to protect democracy.

My time in South Korea, however, had started to undermine those ideas and my beliefs about war and the military in general.

In my first year here, I visited the Korean War Memorial and the adjacent museum, next to the American military base. The museum stands as a token of appreciation to veterans, and it serves as a reminder that the Korean War was fought over “liberty” with the help of former American General Douglas MacArthur. Today, elderly Koreans in downtown Seol can still be seen marching, waving American and Israeli flags to publicly thank Western veterans and Donald Trump.

But not everybody feels the same.

In late 2016 and 2017, Seoul’s downtown was flooded with demonstrators against the right-wing president Park Geun-hye, who was accused of corruption.

As I walked through the protests, what I witnessed betrayed the idea that war and battle were the precursors to democracy, as the Cadet program had instilled in me. From what I was seeing, in South Korea, that simply wasn’t the case.

For one, Koreans from all walks of life happily cooperated with each other and milled about as bands played, people sang and entrepreneurs sold foam mats and water. There was no sign of military might being celebrated.

In fact, while the protests had been sparked by corruption allegations against Park Geun-hye, they were also about rejecting militarism.

Park had closely cooperated with the US in military and free-trade agreements and had controversially installed anti-missile defense batteries in South Korea, which critics considered to be aggravating the global nuclear arms race. As a result, large democratic movements had begun incorporating anti-militarism and making it a central part of their mandate.

Unions and radical student groups, I came to learn, also played a major role in the pro-democracy movements that continue to this day in South Korea.

***

Still surviving in the middle of Dongdaemun – one of South Korea’s biggest shopping centres – are long warehouses that snake their way through a shopping district. Today, tourists wander through the long, cramped buildings of the fabric markets looking for deals on fabric and cheap clothes. But Dongdaemun was once also the centre of South Korean fabric manufacturing and the heart of Park Chung-hee’s drive for development.

Park Geun-hye is the daughter of Park Chung-hee, a military dictator who ruled South Korea for decades with an iron fist. After the Korean War, South Korea was a devastated state with no resources and needed to rebuild.

Enter Park Chung-hee’s dictatorship, which used US loans received as payment for deploying South Korean soldiers to the Vietnam War, to develop the nation’s economy through large business conglomerates. South Korean workers, particularly in those notorious fabric markets, were consequently subjected to deplorable working conditions, little pay and no democratic freedoms in order to develop the economy.

In 2018, with the help of members of the International Strategy Centre, a South Korean group covering the 2016 protests in English, I met Shin Soon-aeh, a labour and union activist who had worked in those infamous fabric markets in the 1960s under Chung-hee’s dictatorship.

She recalled how women worked long hours for very little money and were forced to share one bathroom with all workers in the building. The almost entirely female workforce didn’t have menstrual products, she said, and had to walk across the cramped factory floor just to go to the washroom. The hours were long and the pay was miserable.

Similar conditions occurred in the massive industrial factories of Guro before it became the “Guro Digital Industrial Complex.” In the 1980s, workers there had slaved for measly wages in order to develop South Korea’s industrial might under the dictatorships of Park Chung-hee and then Chun Doo-hwan.

According to Soon-aeh, it was in the fabric markets that the modern South Korean left and subsequent pro-democracy movements were born. That moment will perhaps forever be marked by the solemn day when a young man named Jeon Tae-il had self-immolated outside her workplace in protest against the treatment of workers, she recalled.

It was his sacrifice that would impulse future students to risk arrest, torture and sexual assault in order to organize unions in factories in Guro District in the 1980s. As a result, a massive pro-democracy movement built from the might of unions and radical students who worked together to overthrow Chun’s dictatorship was established.

South Korea’s first president from those pro-democracy movements, Kim Dae-jung, would come to be elected in 1997.

Contrary to what I had learned as a Canadian Cadet, it was the sacrifice of people like Jeon Tae-il and the strength of subsequent popular movements by South Koreans that had brought democratic reforms to South Korea. Not war. And certainly not Canada.

***

In Canada, at school, Remembrance Day was a time to celebrate the vileness of war: children participated in essay-writing contests on the theme of Remembrance Day through either written melodramas or recreations of World War II video games.

This is in stark contrast to what I witnessed when I visited the Jeju 4.3 museum, a memorial to the victims of the 1948 Jeju Uprising. That year, Jeju islanders protested the elections that would ratify the division of Korea. The South Korean government would respond by massacring the inhabitants of Jeju in a scorched-earth strategy.

When I visited the museum in 2019, it was eerily quiet, and posters plastered everywhere reminded visitors that the entire building was a memorial to the victims. There were no aggressive declarations such as “We will remember them.”

The museum’s very existence had been hard-won, as the Jeju Uprising, or 4.3 as it’s known in South Korea, was only acknowledged in the ‘90s, and any mention of it before then could be prosecuted under the National Security Law. In 2003, then-president of South Korea, Noh Moo-hyun, gave a formal apology and the museum was opened with funds from a legal settlement with the government.

The Jeju Uprising and the resulting massacre contradicted the idea that Canada and the UN had fought a “police action” to save a fledgling democracy in the Korean War.

As I left the museum, I was overcome by a sobering realization that betrayed all I had learned as a cadet: Canada hadn’t actually defended democracy in the Korean war. On the contrary, it had only created decades of suffering for South Koreans.

***

While declaring a war on COVID-19 might seem innocuous, the celebration of Canada's militarist culture is not. As seen in the case of South Korea, its legacy is one of pain and destruction.

As such, opposing a declaration of war at home is more important than ever as Canada currently enforces sanctions on North Korea, effectively continuing to disrupt the Korean peace process.

The assumption that the military fights for freedom and democracy, which I used to believe in, stands in the way of peace. Declaring war on COVID-19 endangers Canadians and the rest of the world as it normalizes militarism.

Kelly Jarman works in Seoul, where he teaches business English and standardized tests. He works with the International Strategy Center to educate an international audience on Korean labour and social movements. He is originally from Fredericton, New Brunswick, where he took part in the literary community and student politics.

GroundWire August 5 | MMIWG2S Campaigns, Bill 21 Passes in Quebec, & Winnipeg’s Portage Place Sold

GroundWire Production — Tue, 06 Aug 2019 00:22:51 +0000

This episode of GroundWire was produced at CKUT 90.3FM in Montreal on the unceded, traditional Kanien’keha:ka and produced by Gau Mahadevan and voiced by Zo.

Download the episode: http://www.groundwirenews.ca/dAarz

Headlines:
- Fossil-Power Top 50 Corporate Mapping Project Released | Catherine Fisher (CJLY)
- Val-David Company Announced General Contractor for Laval Migrant Prison | Amy Lloyd, Gau Mahadevan (CKUT)
- Continued Dakota Pipeline Land Resistance in Manitoba | Michael Welch (CKUW)

Features:
- MMIWG2S Campaigns Draw to an End | Robin Eriksson, Keira Reid (CJSF); Michael Welch (CKUW)

- Coalition Avenir Québec Successful in Passing Bill 21 | Amy Lloyd, Gau Mahadevan (CKUT)

- Winnipeg's Portage Place Sold to Toronto-Developer | Michael Welch (CKUW)

Community Radio Report:
Community Radio Veterans Question NCRA-CBC Pilot Project | Gau Mahadevan (CKUT)

Music:
LAL - Belong

Groundwire is looking for pitches for its upcoming August 19th episode!

Interested in contributing to an award winning, nationally-syndicated news program? Pitch your idea for a headline, feature, and/or community radio report to Groundwireprod@gmail.com by August 14th.

GroundWire Coordination Team

WEBSITE - www.groundwirenews.ca

PODCAST - groundwire.gwradio.koumbit.org/feed

EMAIL - groundwireprod@gmail.com

FACEBOOK - facebook.com/gwradionews
TWITTER - @GroundWireNews

Over 60 actions organized internationally in response to police raid of Wet'suwet'en

David Gray-Donald — Sat, 12 Jan 2019 20:33:09 +0000

On January 7th, Canada stumbled into the global spotlight following RCMP raids on the Gidumt’en camp in Northern BC.

The RCMP were enforcing an injunction granting Coastal GasLink access to the Gidumt’en camp, one of two camps set up by Wet’suwet’en clans to defend their territory from pipeline construction. The raid resulted in fourteen arrests. In response, thousands of people gathered in over sixty cities around the world—from Toronto to San Fransisco to Stockholm—to support the Wet’suwet’en peoples and their opposition to the pipeline.

Tensions eased on Friday, January 11th, after hereditary chiefs agreed to allow Coastal GasLink to carry out pre-construction work beyond the access point. The Unist'ot'en—the other Wet’suwet’en clan who have established a traditional camp along the proposed pipeline route—released a statement explaining the context of this decision, stating, "We have demonstrated that this fight is about more than a pipeline; it is about the right of Indigenous peoples around the world to exercise Free, Prior, and Informed Consent."

The statement echoes the wording of Article 19 of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples which reads, "States shall consult and cooperate in good faith with the indigenous peoples concerned through their own representative institutions in order to obtain their free, prior and informed consent before adopting and implementing legislative or administrative measures that may affect them."

Coastal GasLink is a subsidiary of TransCanada, now called TC Energy, who argue in favour of the pipeline, which will carry natural gas from near Dawson, BC to ports in Kitimat. They point out that they've received consent from all Indigenous nations along its route. However, some Indigeous leaders argue that this consent is insufficient, since while band council chiefs along the pipeline's route have signed, many hereditary chiefs have refused.

This struggle gets to the heart of deep questions surrounding Indigenous sovereignty in Canada. Wet’suwet’en leaders maintain that since each clan governed its own territory historically, the centralized band councils established by the Canadian government have no right to make territorial decisions on behalf of individual clans. Several sections of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples could be interpreted as asserting Indigenous peoples' right to determine their own leadership stuctures (like Articles 3–5), undermining the band council system, and with it, the justification under international law for many resource extraction projects currently underway.

To support Wet’suwet’en opposition to the pipeline, you can donate to the Unist'ot'en Camp Legal Fund or to the Gidumt’en access point.

Defining Moment for New Vancouver City Council?

Joseph Jones — Sat, 10 Nov 2018 19:11:18 +0000

Vancouver's new City Council seems to have set itself up for a defining moment that may make many councillors squirm in discomfort. How awkward it could be, so early on, to face a vote on substance that would be hard to present as the nicey-nicey unanimity of "working together."

The hot potato item? Number 8 out of 10, put forward by Hardwick: Reconsider RS Zoning Amendments – By-law No. 3575 and Related Strata Title Guidelines. Here is how eight of the eleven jockey for position at the kickoff council meeting by having their names attached to ten Motions on Notice: Boyle (1), Carr (1), De Genova (2), Fry (2), Hardwick (3), Kirby-Yung (1), Stewart (1), Swanson (2). Thus far just observing are Bligh, Dominato, and Wiebe.

On 19 September 2018, the ultra-last lame-duck hobble of now decimated Vision Vancouver was to approve by a vote of 7 to 4 a measure to mass rezone approximately 99% of 68.000 RS zoned lots in Vancouver to accommodate duplex. Seven Vision Vancouver in support, three NPA and one Green opposed.

The new council features 5 NPA and 3 Green, a strong majority that can do pretty well anything it chooses to. On the other hand, the easy and crude and possibly dominant left-right split is seen as 6 (3 Green, 1 COPE, 1 One City, 1 Independent) "progressives" aligned against 5 NPA.

• • • • • •

Recent reporting on this situation shows Green froth and dither over being pig-in-the-middle.

24 October: Last month Carr said her party wouldn’t go so far as to reverse the duplex legalization after its passage.
https://www.sightline.org/2018/10/24/bc-local-elections-housing-policy/

8 November: Carr: "I think Colleen sort of jumped the gun on me." Meanwhile, Carr seeks feedback from city legal and planning departments.
https://www.vancourier.com/opinion/new-vancouver-council-in-for-doozy-of-a-meeting-1.23492261
(Does this sound like Carr in earlier 2018 trying to decide whether or not to take a run at becoming Mayor?)

9 November: Fry says Green will meet on weekend "to discuss what to do about the duplex motion"
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-compromise-seen-as-the-likely-key-to-making-vancouvers-new-council/

• • • • • •

Here are three factors to consider in calculating possible combinations:

• Whatever their labels, Boyle and Kennedy "ran together with" Vision Vancouver. Would they now stand 2 to 9 against rescinding duplex in RS?

• Will Green caucus tight? Or might the three split in their voting?

• Swanson (COPE) disfavors duplex in RS for lack of tenant protection and failure to impinge on landowner profit. Together with NPA, Swanson could carry the vote and make Green irrelevant.

It seems likely that the symbolism of rescinding duplex in RS as a repudiation of ten years of Vision Vancouver will prove irresistable to a majority, if not to a unanimous council.

GROUNDWIRE OCTOBER 8 | MMIW HEARINGS AND VIGILS, MASS DEMONSTRATION AGAINST RACISM, MB CARBON TAX

GroundWire Production — Tue, 16 Oct 2018 06:09:15 +0000

This episode of GroundWire was produced on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the New Credit by the GroundWire National Coordination Team in Toronto.

Headlines:

B.C. Supreme Court Ruling on Jumbo Glacier Resort | Catherine Fisher, CJLY

Withdrawal of Manitoba's Carbon Tax Commitment | Michael Welch, CKUW

Eviction of ‘Namegans Nation’ in B.C. | Chris Cook, CFUV

Features:

MMIW Hearings in Winnipeg | Michael Welch, CKUW

Nation-Wide MMIW Vigils | Michael Welch, CKUW; Lizzie Chatham and CKUT News Collective

Mass Post-Election Demonstration Against Hatred and Coalition Avenir Quebec in Montreal | CKUT News Collective, Rian Adamanian

Community Radio Report:

New Off-Site Studio and Funding Initiative at CJSF | Michael Welch, CKUW

Music:

Ice Walker - Iskwé

Thanks to all our contributors for this week’s episode. We also thank Michael Welch, Chris Cook, Catherine Fisher, Omme-Salma Rahemtullah, and Gau Mahadevan.

Back to its grass roots: can new AFN leadership make change?

Kerry Coast — Fri, 20 Jul 2018 15:58:30 +0000

“Truth before reconciliation.”

AFN election July 25, 2018

This summer the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) has been refreshed by a certain candidate running for National Chief, whose participation lends the organization rare credibility.

Russell Diabo knows he has quite a mountain to climb in order to win. But he is already achieving one objective: to use the candidacy as a platform to alert the Chiefs and the people to a dramatic and impending crisis in Canadian legislation affecting the Indigenous.

“We’re in a situation just as critical as we were in 1969 with the white paper and Indian policy. This ‘recognition and implementation of rights framework,’ that Trudeau is pushing, is to implement rights that they are defining, and they’re going to use their fiscal policies to force us into accepting it. So I want to get that message out to the Chiefs and the people that the Trudeau government is perpetrating a fraud. That’s why I decided to run. ”

Diabo’s message is not simple. His perspective is informed by thirty years in Aboriginal politics. In a nutshell: he is anticipating the legislation of a suite of Aboriginal rights. This suite of rights will reflect Supreme Court of Canada decisions about Aboriginal rights since the 1982 Canadian Constitution. Because the Courts have never recognized the fullness of Aboriginal rights, the coming legislation will consolidate into law a far inferior kind of right than the rights which the original nations actually possess – which are equivalent to the internationally recognized, and protected, rights of peoples.

This downgrading, believes Diabo, will result in the municipalization and incorporation of Indian Bands, or First Nations, and funnel the communities into a process of total assimilation within Canada. It is possibly the fourth phase of the process that was initiated by Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau – flowing from the infamous white paper policy of 1969, where the objective of dismantling the Indian Act and therefore making all the Indians disappear was only barely concealed.

“If I was elected, the first thing I would do is let Trudeau know that we’re putting the brakes on the legislation. And if he didn’t want to put the brakes on it, I would work with the Chiefs that support me, and the community people, and hit the streets, mobilize a caravan to Ottawa; start pumping up the pressure like we have had to do in the past.”

“The other thing I would do is restructure the AFN, hold a special Assembly, and re-write the Charter. We have to restructure it fundamentally. There are Chiefs that are doing great things across the country, despite the Indian Act, and they know we need a national plan and strategy of our own, which supports our own right of self-determination from the ground up. And we need to change that relationship with Ottawa.”

Check this link to hear the full interview.

Reform of the AFN organization

The nations of the broken treaties and the unsurrendered but illegally occupied Indigenous nations have one existing vehicle in which to travel together, politically, towards redemption. And towards reparation, repatriation, compensation, and restitution. That existing vehicle is the Assembly of First Nations.

“I want fundamental reform of the Assembly of First Nations. We have to go beyond just the Chief and Council and Band staff reporting to Ottawa. It’s the whole Indian Act structure that AFN is based on. We’ve got to look at dissolving the whole colonial Indian Act system. I know the AFN is not working, I’ve worked for two past National Chiefs and I know that organization from the inside. It’s a bigger system of change that we need.”

Diabo’s vision for the AFN is revolutionary, beginning with taking an axe to the “Termination Tables,” as he calls them, where First Nations “negotiate” for less rights, less land, and a short term supply of cash, under the Comprehensive Claims Policy. All negotiations with Canada are driven to the extinguishment of Indigenous land rights, and towards “certainty” for the colonial governments. And continuing with throwing a bucket of cold water on Canada’s so-called “10 Principles for reconciliation,” which should wash off the façade and expose the fact that Canadian double-speak in terms of its policies towards Indigenous peoples is an endangered language.

Diabo’s travelling campaign is called “The Bannock and Bologna Tour.” There is no disconnect between him and the people. Presumably that tour will soon become the “Bannock and Bacon and Strawberry Jam Tour,” if elected. But National Chief Diabo will not stop travelling to the communities once elected. The purpose of the AFN is, was once, to unite the colonized peoples against the colonizer. This requires a lot of communication. In person.

Minimum International Peoples’ Rights

What Russell Diabo brings to the electoral race uniquely is his enthusiasm for the self-determination and land rights of Indigenous nations, rather than promising to deliver program funding from Ottawa.

Diabo has been very involved in United Nations forums concerning Indigenous rights for decades, something that puts him completely past the other candidates. He has been involved in UN procedures concerning many forefront issues, including the BC Treaty Commission, and its attempts to coerce land and rights surrenders out of impoverished communities; the Red Response to Bill C-45 in late 2012, also “Idle No More;” the Wet’suwet’en camp at Unistoten, blocking pipelines and reoccupying land; the Barrier Lake Algonquin reoccupation; and more.

During his tour west of the Rockies this week, he brought his media attention to the recent arrest of Kanahus Manuel, Secwepemc, in her own homeland. He issued a press release explaining the event, and stated in it: “As National Chief, I will do everything possible to support those forces, like the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, the Treaty Alliance and above all the Secwepemc grassroots, who are the titleholders, in opposing this pipeline. The fight against Kinder Morgan is a battle that all Indigenous peoples in Canada have a stake in because it is a challenge to our fundamental right to give or withhold our consent over development on our land.”

Diabo went to the Secwepemc reoccupation taking place on the proposed site of a Kinder Morgan worker camp – instead of participating in the AFN leadership debate. “It is Aboriginal title territory, and the people who hold that title are the community people themselves: the families and the communities that make up the nation. This effort by the Tiny House Warriors is a good way to bring attention…to the fact that the Prime Minister is ignoring their Aboriginal title and pushing this project through.” He was quoted in an online article by APTN.

Diabo has already shown himself to be a force in many activist legal and communication campaigns. He runs his own newsletter, the First Nations Strategic Bulletin. The last issue began with an article by himself:

The most important right recognized in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) is the right of Indigenous Peoples to self-determination. This is now enshrined in Article 3 of UNDRIP, which replicates Article 1(1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and makes it clear that this right applies to Indigenous Peoples. The right to self-determination is the overarching umbrella right; much of its essence is then spelled out further in UNDRIP, in regard to land rights, governance and Indigenous free prior informed consent (FPIC).

Arguably, the most important statement in the UNDRIP is that Indigenous Peoples are Peoples, entitled to any and all of the rights recognized of any other Peoples on the planet. According to the first Articles of the International Bill of Rights, that includes:

1. All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.

2. All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources without prejudice to any obligations arising out of international economic co-operation, based upon the principle of mutual benefit, and international law. In no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence.

3. The States Parties to the present Covenant, including those having responsibility for the administration of Non-Self-Governing and Trust Territories, shall promote the realization of the right of self-determination, and shall respect that right, in conformity with the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations.

The Assembly of First Nations was conceived to be the combined voice of these currently unrecognized peoples or nations or states which are occupied by Canada. The National Indian Brotherhood, c. 1969, became the AFN in 1982, when the Constitution Act, 1982, invoked the term “Aboriginal” in place of “Indian” in Canadian law, and “Indian Bands” became “First Nations.”

The National Indian Brotherhood (NIB) had been amalgamated out of solidarity between Indigenous nations and national organizations fighting their common enemy, Canada, over fishing rights; hunting rights; rights of families to keep their children and basically every other right: which are all violated by Canada when it denies the national character and autonomous standing of the nations.

So the position of AFN National Chief holds considerable power. The National Chief holds the power of voice.

The state’s “talk and log” strategy, identified as such by the late, great, Chief Qwatsinas of Nuxalk, relies on the kind of talking that goes on for years and achieves nothing, unless it achieves a doormat endorsement of Canada’s genocidal policies, practices, and propaganda schemes. Elected leaders attend endless meetings while logging companies, development companies, miners and oil drillers and oil pipeline builders and institutional assimilation developers carry on the important work of liquefying the national assets of Indigenous nations, be those assets natural resources, women, or children.

Diabo intends only to talk long enough to make his demands. Then he will wait for an intelligible answer. But he won’t wait very long. If the AFN’s statements and interventions to the several UN treaty bodies had ever been as bold and clear as the ones Diabo and his longtime friend Arthur Manuel have been making over the past decades, it is unlikely that people in Canada would be dithering about the catastrophic condition Indigenous peoples are in. They would be coming into that period which South Africa experienced in the late 1980s, with most of the world refusing to trade with them until apartheid was truly disintegrated.

In an interview with The Georgia Straight, Diabo put the land question in a nutshell. Since the Canadian Constitution of 1982 affirmed the existing rights of Aboriginal peoples, politicians have bought themselves all this time by philosophizing about “whether self-government was an inherent right or a conditional right depending on agreements with Crown governments. The national Aboriginal organizations said, ‘No, it’s an inherent right. It’s already in the Constitution; it’s already an existing Aboriginal right.’ The premiers and the prime minister said, ‘No, no, no, you’ve got to reach agreement with us.’ ” And that is precisely what the fuss is about. Canada uses its power to deny the peoples’ existing rights, in order to access all the natural wealth of this, their half-continent.

The AFN’s tarnished reputation

Unfortunately, since at least 1995 the Assembly of First Nations has scandalized traditional Indigenous peoples by its leadership’s preference for government program dollars over land and freedom.

The AFN is the summit of the Indian Act system – all elected Band Chiefs gather and carry out administrative tasks required by the Canadian government to create the appearance that native people have a role to play in their own affairs. The Canadian government refers to the AFN, when it is peddling its own variety of colonial oppression abroad, as an example of Indigenous power and self-determination. The “democratic” election of a single Chief in each Band was legislated in 1935 as a requirement of the functioning of an Indian Band, in order to receive any kind of cooperation from Ottawa. This imposition on the traditional governance structures was often catastrophic, and was resisted by Indigenous adaptations such as in Líl’wat, where all the duly appointed family head chieftains would meet for a few days and come to consensus as to who their “elected” chief would be, and what was expected of him. And that chief had a lot of resources in the council that put him forward.

The “democratic” election process has been exposed many times for what it really is. In Homalco, for instance, a fellow can get elected to the post of chief very neatly if his campaign literature includes hundred dollar bills, supplied by an Atlantic salmon farming company, against his anti-fish-farm competition for the office.

The excess of cooption and capitulation, apparently for the sake of personal career advancement, saw AFN under National Chief Phil Fontaine become a party to the Indian Residential Schools Survivors’ Settlement Agreement – a lump-sum settlement process that killed a meaningful percentage of the wounded people who promptly drank or overdosed themselves to death with the cash. And the Agreement, with its compensation to child victims of astonishing crimes, paid out something like 10% of what court settlements produced.

Fontaine also remained silent during the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Whistler, BC – or, rather – in the non-treaty and stolen lands of the Líl’wat and Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Former National Chief Fontaine has lucrative arrangements now with the Royal Bank of Canada and several resource extraction companies.

Unless the media has managed to black out everything to the contrary, it appears National Chief Perry Bellegarde has managed to do and say nothing for four years. Canada would be very supportive of this kind of an AFN leader: all Canada wants is time to continue its worst greatest achievement: the total assimilation of some fifty Indigenous nations, brainwashed and disfigured by the relentless “serious bodily or mental harm” inflicted by the Indian Act... and all the individual Canadians, and groups of Canadians, which carry out violent crimes against the dehumanized peoples.

The AFN’s operations are entirely and directly subsidized by Canada. It wasn’t at the beginning, when the National Indian Brotherhood was subsidized by bake sales and bingos. It’s unclear how the state-sponsored arrangements might fluctuate with a firebrand in office.

In 1995, AFN National Chief Ovide Mercredi visited the Ts’peten Defenders at Gustafsen Lake, in Secwepemculucw, even as they were surrounded by 400 RCMP with tanks and weapons that are outlawed under international conventions. His visit was coordinated by the RCMP and resulted in many media events where the AFN leader was verbally despairing of the hardline position of Wolverine’s sovereigntists. In the pictures it looked like someone had his reproductive organs in a vice.

Shawn Atleo astonished the world by ceasing to talk about Black Elk once he was elected from Ahousat to the national office and, instead, allowed his lips to be moved to the tune of the legendary Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s First Nations Education Act. In 1971, Indian Control of Indian Education was a show-stopping platform set forth by the NIB. It was detailed, determined, bound to be successful in reversing the assimilation function that “education” for Indigenous children has performed for almost two centuries. By contrast, the First Nations Education Act was a powerful tool for assimilation. But Chief Atleo compared it to the 1971 proposal.

Former National Chief Noel Starblanket was most candid. Why was he not running again for the national office? He told someone that getting too used to the cafés in Ottawa doesn’t really help the Indigenous cause.

The Assembly of Second Nations

The map of Canada should be redrawn, says Diabo. "They've severed everything north of 60 in this coming legislation. Everyone that signed treaties up there, the Yukon and Nunavut and some of the Dene, they're on their own now. And we now how they're doing - they're broke."

"Canada keeps pushing this map on us, where we become tiny municipalities, with just as little power, and they have these huge provinces and territories. We have to keep holding on to our own map. We need to look at Article 46 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Inidgenous Peoples, which says that no peoples can threaten the territorial integrity of a member state. But state or not, we should redraw the lines for ourselves."

If the original peoples, confined by the invention of “Canada,” are First Nations, Canadians should consider the way their state - an industrial warehouse of epic proportions, populated by an enterprising and rapidly growing colony of refugees from around the globe - is an Assembly of Second Nations. Even the Supreme Court of Canada sits on land that has never been surrendered or sold to Canada by the people with the existing right of Aboriginal title to that property.

"We have to change the way we're thinking," says Diabo, "and right now the AFN is not thinking that way."

APTN News interview with Russell Diabo

First Nations Strategic Bulletin Jan-March 2018

AFN National Chief Candidates' Biographies

From Brotherhood to Nationhood, Peter McFarlane, Between The Lines press, 1993.

The Fourth World: An Indian reality, George Manuel and Michael Posluns, Collier-Macmillan Canada, 1974

Upstream opposition to KM pipeline growing

flux — Tue, 17 Apr 2018 14:51:48 +0000

Kamloops to host Picnics NOT Pipelines on Sunday, April 22

KAMLOOPS (SECWEPEMC TERRITORY) – Indigenous peoples living upstream from Kinder Morgan’s Burnaby pipeline terminal say their very existence is already under threat from the massive expansion project.

Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty spokeswoman Dawn Morrison says proceeding without prior and informed consent is illegal and has increased the risk and uncertainty the bitumen pipeline poses. She says opposition to the pipeline upstream is growing and the Working Group is hosting a family-friendly Picnics Not Pipelines educational event in Kamloops on Sunday, April 22.

The Working Group says that while much of the focus has been on the very real risks to the Salish Sea, Kinder Morgan’s pipeline project has already negatively impacted rivers and salmon habitat upstream, as well as the social and economic well being of Indigenous food economies. Anti-spawning mats placed in streams by Kinder Morgan have been removed by activists concerned about the threat to wild salmon - a cultural and ecological keystone species already seriously endangered.

“We see people rising up in strength and resiliency to stop and prevent any further damage to our rivers, oceans, lands and dignity in the traditional territories where we have been the title holders and stewards for thousands of years,” says Morrison. She adds that financial promises made by Kinder Morgan to some band councils in the region “do not represent the whole Secwepemc Nation or the nations downstream who have always shared and protected the entire Fraser Basin watershed through inter-tribal networks.”

The food sovereignty advocacy group calls the failure to include Indigenous representatives at last Sunday’s meeting between Prime Minister Trudeau and the premiers of Alberta and BC “a continuation of the historical injustice of blocking Indigenous peoples from the very decisions that impact them.” It adds that threats of military or economic oppression of Indigenous peoples will only further inflame racist tension and ignorance.

“The wild salmon provide a powerful metaphor for working in unity to overcome adversity in the struggle to protect and maintain the health and integrity of our lands and waterways,” says Morrison. “Indigenous peoples are reinforcing their vital role in conserving the biodiversity and cultural heritage of humanity - we are connected to a global movement of 200 million small-scale farmers, fishers and Indigenous peoples mobilizing under the banner of food sovereignty.”

-30-

Media Contact: Dawn Morrison 778 879 5106 dmo6842@gmail.com

Event: Picnics NOT Pipelines

Date: Sunday, April 22 11 am – 5 pm

Location: Mission Flats Park, 2710 Mission Flats Rd., Kamloops, BC

#foodnotoil #swimming upstream #clean water

GroundWire | April 9

GroundWire Production — Mon, 09 Apr 2018 22:08:32 +0000

Actions against Deportation, Manitoba Hydro Board Resignations, & Vigil for Palestine

This episode of GroundWire was produced on the unceded territory of the Mohawk and Algonquin peoples in Montreal by Gretchen King.

Download Links

http://groundwirenews.ca/

Headlines

National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Vancouver | Co-op Radio, Gunargie O'Sullivan

Annual 7th Generation Walk for Mother Earth in Winnipeg | Michael Welch, CKUW

Features

Actions against Community Organizer’s Deportation | Sejeong Park, CKUT

Manitoba Hydro Board Resignations | Michael Welch, CKUW

Vigil for Palestine | Gretchen King, CKUT

Community Radio Report

Celebrate Earth Day 2018 with second annual Wetland broadcast | Co-op Radio

We thank all of our contributors, as well as Gau Mahadevan for making this episode possible.

Music this week was by Buffy Sainte-Marie & Tanya Tagaq.

Pitch to the Next Episode

Send your pitches to groundwireprod@gmail.com by Tuesday April 17.

GroundWire Coordination Team

WEBSITE - www.groundwirenews.ca

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GroundWire | March 26

GroundWire Production — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:39:01 +0000

Indigenous Justice, Crystal Meth Crisis, & Inequalities in Healthcare

This episode of GroundWire was produced on the unceded territory of the Mohawk and Algonquin peoples in Montreal by Gretchen King.

Download Links

http://groundwirenews.ca/

Headlines

March 15 demo against police brutality | Julie Bugiel, CKUT

New collective agreement for Safeway workers | Michael Welch, CKUW

Protesting pipelines from Burnaby to Ottawa | GWNC with files from Stand Earth

Features

Walkouts for Indigenous justice | Julie Bugiel, CKUT

Crystal Meth crisis in Winnipeg | Michael Welch, CKUW

Uniting against growing inequalities in Quebec's healthcare | Gretchen King, CKUT

Community Radio Report

Community radio in Swaziland presentation to World Social Forum workshop on Community Radio in Africa | Gretchen King, CKUT

We thank all of our contributors, as well as Gau Mahadevan for making this episode possible.

Music this week was recorded in the streets of Montreal by CKUT.

GroundWire Coordination Team

WEBSITE - www.groundwirenews.ca

PODCAST - groundwire.gwradio.koumbit.org/feed

EMAIL - groundwireprod@gmail.com

FACEBOOK - facebook.com/gwradionews
TWITTER - @GroundWireNews

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