Pamela Palmater knows how badly First Nations have been treated historically and how small amendments squirrelled away in many huge omnibus bills by PM Stephen Harper have been cynically used by PM Justin Trudeau to divide and conquer – particularly in the current Wet’suwet’en pipeline issue.
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In 2011 the Harper minority government was defeated after they were found to be in contempt of parliament. They denied a contract had been signed (LIE) and kept on lying about the cost. They won a majority with a whopper of a lie. From rabble.ca:
On March 25, 2011 Harper’s government was brought down after a non-confidence vote and a finding that the Conservatives were in contempt of Parliament for refusing to disclose full information about the cost of the fighter jets, as well as the cost of their crime legislation.
Throughout the election campaign, Harper and his campaign insisted on figures between $14-16 billion. But, at the highest levels, they must have known it was false.
So they lied. Harper knew, and Harper lied. Harper lied before, during and after the election campaign that saw him win a majority government.
Harper has and will continue to lie about the virtues of the TPP. Here are key questions we must demand answers for, not from his or any CPC mouth, but from the publication of the actual document signed on October 5 or any other source known to be correct:
BGH: American milk and meats use Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH), suspected of being associated with cancer. Will we be exposed to this?
Food Safety: Will Cdn standards on food safety (already weakened by Harper cuts to Food inspector jobs) be further weakened by TPP?
Labeling: Will Canadian products still be identified in supermarkets?
Public services: Are they threatened? Wikileaks revealed that TPP pushes for the elimination of publicly funded institutions like the CBC, Canada Post. These leaks are notably absent from discussions even on the threatened CBC!
Bank Deregulation: Will banking regulations be weakened?
Privacy: Will Canadian privacy, already blown away by C-51, be further jeopardized by this agreement?
Temporary Foreign Workers: Can foreign corporations that procure TFW’s sue for lost income if Canada cuts numbers of TFW’s? This is already being done in a case about McDonalds. And Canadian Seafarers are threatened and fighting back. TFW’s are themselves abused and are already being inappropriately used to keep Canadians making a just wage from working.
Job Losses: Will Canadian jobs be lost in large numbers to workers from countries with lower wages, labour standards, less unionization?
Investor-State Dispute Settlements: ISDS agreements allow foreign corporations to sue the ass off countries and cities that enact legislation to protect health care, the environment, jobs, wages and democracy.
Other Trade Deals: Trade deals (TPP, TIPP, CETA, TISA), written in secret by Corporation lawyers, all contain similar threats to democracy, environment, health and jobs. For example, this from the Independent (UK) on TTIP: Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.
This is my incomplete list. Please check out these questions and feel free to comment (PLEASE) or to add your own.
We First World Humans here in Sleepy Hollow (aka Canada) never saw this coming and it’s here under our desensitized noses and we still don’t see – or smell – it for what it really IS.
The early victims (Tim Hortons, Royal Bank, and McDonalds workers) are shocked but still unaware of the fact that we are a commodity to the new, few, real commanders of Planet Earth.
Our ancestors stood by as New World Peoples and Africans were commodified to serve the Very Very Few.
Now the VVF ship Filipinos and Chinese around the world like soles and uppers for Nike runners to be used and abused so that shareholder profits can be maximized.
We don’t even know where and when (in which omnibus bill Harper stashed this undebated piece of legal excrement) the expansion of the use of Temporary Foreign Workers happened to us.
And we live in a (here I turn aside to politely spit) “democracy.”
The Wachowski brothers, who wrote and directed The Matrix, saw where our world is headed. We viewers were dutifully amused in 1999, but not awakened.
We still lie here dreaming – attached to the apparatus of the Very Very Few – harvested, like the Yoruba in the 17th and 18th centuries, for a few extra “pennyworths” of profit, profit, profit.
T’was ever thus. When the Olympics end, there’ll be plenty of other circuses. Methinks, however, the bread will diminish…
By the way, feel free to substitute your own national mascot. Joe is mine.
Substitute Corporate Personhood (or the 85 richest men) for Rome.
Will Emperor Harper call an election if Canada continues to do well?? Probably not, he’s made such a dog’s breakfast out of the last couple of years. But I bet his pollsters are busy and his fraudsters are having their hearts shrunk …
Surprise! Sometimes I even have something positive to propose instead of just bashing Stephen Harper.
I am re-proposing my Feb 1st proposal to the Green Party in a more general form. I have resent these messages directly to Elizabeth May and to Stephane Dion, since I respect and trust their greenness and honour. They just might “get it” and start the ball rolling. I am confiding to you readers that this challenging idea may be ignored without a huge show of support from Canadians for the idea. Maybe a Facebook page. I will not do it, since I only now use FB with my tiny iPod after learning that hackers siphoned off some folks’ financial information via that popular social media site.
If you believe, as I and Maude Barlow do, that we do not have two years to wait to derail the Conservative Party’s plan: Let’s Expose Canada to Foreign Corporate Lawsuits Forever By Signing Secret Trade Deals With The Pacific Rim and Europe then…
Here is something that just might work:
Continue reading “At The Risk Of Repeating Myself Precisely Ten Months Later”
Before we can say “Mike Duffy” Harper will have us tied up in so many politically-paralyzing trade deals that we will become a true colony of the worldwide super-wealthy
Stephen Harper has squirrelled away, in several huge omnibus bills, many changes to First Nations’ governance designed to divide and conquer First Nations and thereby enable pipelines to be rammed across their unceded territories. Pamela Palmater in 2013 gave four talks identifying these small, scattered, insidious changes and major problems that existed long before Harper. My summary of her main points follows, along with links to all four talks…
Pamela Palmater, lawyer for 14 years, a professor at Ryerson University, Mi’kmaw citizen and member of Eel River Bar First Nation in northern New Brunswick, speaking on the Harper legislative onslaught upon First Nations. Her talk has been divided into four parts and is posted on YouTube by Idle No More Alberta. Where I am quoting Ms. Palmater directly the text will be in quotation marks.
Part One:
Listening to the CBC radio news today about the crisis in Europe over the Italian election results, the statement was made:
Markets don’t like a coalition.
Hey, that’s one more reason for me to like a coalition. Wish we had one of those instead of a mogul megalomaniac running a one-man show in Ottawa.
By the way, did you notice that markets are now personified. They have “likes” and “dislikes.”
Seeing as corporations have corporate personhood – all the rights, and more, of a human being (plus tons of power – and immortality to boot), I guess it was only a matter of time until the Markets became persons, too.
How does an emperor bury thousands of these full size clay soldiers for two millennia without the huge project being discovered until two farmers dig a well in 1974?
Kill off all the wonderfully skilled workers who ever worked on it so no one can squeal.
It takes a strange, compulsive mindset to be emperor.
Just ask Stephen Harper.
mightyturk 