From: Bruce & Nicole Sent: April 15, 2019 Subject: Strathcona Regional District resolution Importance: High
Hi. I thought you might enjoy some good news, since you are fighting the same issues.
For those of you who have been following, you will know that the Strathcona Regional District (SRD) resolution asking the provincial government to stop approving licences for bottling and commercial sale of groundwater was being presented at the Association of Vancouver Island and Coastal Communities (AVICC) convention this weekend.
I am really pleased to report that the resolution was passed unanimously!!! That means that the 53 member communities of the AVICC unanimously support the ask of that resolution, and ultimately the protection of groundwater.
The next step will be for the SRD and the AVICC to submit and present the resolution to the Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM) convention in September, and if it is successful there, it will be presented to the BC Government for action.
This is a huge victory!!! Many thanks to SRD Director Brenda Leigh for championing this resolution. This is very gratifying, after working with Director Leigh since September, and lobbying each and every member community of the AVICC for their support of this resolution.
“It is a fundamental doctrine of the rule of law that our Attorney General should not be subjected to political pressure or interference regarding the exercise of her prosecutorial discretion in criminal cases,” Philpott wrote in a public letter to the prime minister. “Sadly, I have lost confidence in how the government has dealt with this matter and in how it has responded to the issues raised.”
It was yet another sign that Jody Wilson-Raybould, the Liberal MP for Vancouver Granville, remains a powerful force more than three weeks after resigning from cabinet. . . .
A third Liberal MP, Celina Caesar-Chavannes, has announced that she will not be seeking reelection this October in her Whitby, Ontario, riding. In a tart tweet, she declared: “When you add women, please do not expect the status quo. Expect us to make correct decisions, stand for what is right and exit when values are compromised.” . . .
“The history of Crown-Indigenous relations in this country includes a history of the rule of law not being respected,” Wilson-Raybould told MPs on the committee. “Indeed, one of the main reasons for the urgent need for justice and reconciliation today is that in the history of our country we have not always upheld foundational values such as the rule of law in our relations with Indigenous peoples. And I have seen the negative impacts for freedom, equality, and a just society this can have firsthand.”
Trudeau’s political problems are compounded by a decision to send out a bunch of men—such as former principal secretary Gerald Butts, clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick, Finance Minister Bill Morneau, and Fisheries and Oceans Minister Jonathan Wilkinson—to try to put Canadians’ minds at ease.
But to date, these Trudeau defenders have not been nearly as compelling as Wilson-Raybould was when she presented her meticulously documented 30-minute opening statement to the justice committee. And it didn’t help Trudeau when the Liberal MP for Mission-Matsqui–Fraser Canyon, Jati Sidhu, suggested that Wilson-Raybould was put up to this by her father. Sidhu later apologized.
UBC law professor Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond knows what it’s like to be out on her own speaking truth to power. As B.C.’s former advocate for children and youth, she often issued public reports about the mistreatment of young people in the care of the provincial government. At times, the backlash was very intense.
Turpel-Lafond told the Straight by phone that when she watched Wilson-Raybould testifying, she felt that this was a historic moment, paralleling the time when an Indigenous Manitoba MLA, Elijah Harper, held up the approval of the Meech Lake constitutional accord almost 30 years ago.
“I was extremely impressed by her courage and her ability to handle a very intense, pressured situation with…a thoroughness and a very logical, rational, focused approach despite a lot of the political distractions,” Turpel-Lafond said.
Video: Former Manitoba MLA Elijah Harper became a hero to Indigenous people for standing up for reminding Canadians that the Meech Lake constitutional agreement overlooked First Nations rights.
Others in the Indigenous community have also rallied around her, including Manitoba NDP leader Wab Kinew. He has said it’s really about two-tiered justice and people with money trying to receive a better deal from the politicians.
Part of Wilson-Raybould’s public appeal, according to Turpel-Lafond, is that she can demonstrate power without having an influential position in government. Moreover, Turpel-Lafond said, the MP didn’t portray herself as a victim. Instead, the former justice minister focused on how the principle of prosecutorial independence was being undermined when 10 people approached her or her chief of staff over four months to lobby for a deferred prosecution agreement for SNC-Lavalin.
Turpel-Lafond also saw Wilson-Raybould living up to the example set by matriarchs in traditional Indigenous societies.
In fact, Wilson-Raybould referred to herself as coming from a long line of matriarchs, saying she’s a “truth teller in accordance with the laws and traditions of our Big House”.
Turpel-Lafond revealed that in her own Cree culture, the importance of matriarchs is reflected when people say things like “Grandma makes the law; Grandpa enforces it.”
“Nobody crosses Grandma,” she added. “It’s not a harsh justice but it’s a care and concern and orderliness that comes from the important roles that are not really so much gender-defined as they are leadership-based.”
Turpel-Lafond point out that there’s an element of fearlessness in matriarchs, something she credited Wilson-Raybould with demonstrating before the justice committee.
“You have to stand up to people that are bigger than you physically,” Turpel-Lafond noted. “They may have a bigger title than you. You have to find a way to be effective in that role. She has an amazing reputation on that front.”
When Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond was the advocate for children and youth, she often spoke truth to power—and that often generated major backlashed from the government.(PLEASE GO TO THE ARTICLE (internet) IF YOU WISH TO HEAR THE OTHER SIDE, AS OFFERED BY Mark Wexler, a professor of business ethics and management at SFU’s Beedie School of Business. I find it frustrating that the authority appears to be oblivious.)
Years ago, when I wanted some little grasp of living in a world of addiction, one that I couldn’t fathom from reading, I deliberately pursued a two-year relationship with a late-stage alcoholic. Among other lessons was the role of abuse of the child, in its various forms.
Subsequently I came across the book “Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast” (2001) – – personal stories that arose in the mire of abuse in childhood.
In March 2002, I made a submission to the Romanow Healthcare Review that included reference to Belly of the Beast. An excerpt from the submission is in
We know the stories of residential schools, abuse of First Nations children and dysfunction (addictions) in adulthood. We forget that it wasn’t only First Nations children (the documentation was there already in 2001, in Notes from the Belly of the Beast).
Rod MacLeod was sexually abused by a Basilian priest, starting when he was 13 years old. His battle for justice is the subject of a new documentary film, called Prey. (Border City Pictures)
Listen30:21
When priests are found guilty of sexual abuse, the Roman Catholic Church follows a familiar script: offer money to the victim, settle out of court and avoid a public trial.
Usually, it works.
Rod MacLeod refused to settle.
Instead, he hired Rob Talach, a lawyer based in London, Ont. — known as “the priest hunter” — and insisted on his day in court.
This legal case is the subject of a film called Prey, which premieres this month at Hot Docs, Canada’s largest documentary film festival.
Watch the film trailer below.
‘He’d start by tickling you’
MacLeod was a 13-year-old student at St. Charles College, an all-boys school in Sudbury, Ont., when his physical education teacher, a Basilian priest named William Hodgson Marshall, began to sexually assault him. The attacks continued for four years.
The school’s gym was located down the hall from the showers, and students had to pass Father Marshall’s office en route.
“That’s where he would grab you and pull you in,” MacLeod told The Sunday Edition host Michael Enright.
“He would kind of pin you between his desk and his chair. He would put his leg up so that it was like an enclosure … and then he’d start by tickling you and then very quickly it would be down into the shorts, and so on.”
Marshall also regularly pulled students into an empty classroom, locked the door and assaulted them.
Priest showed up at victim’s home
MacLeod said when he learned how to avoid him at school, the priest started to show up at his home, which his staunch Catholic parents considered an honour.
He would take MacLeod for “driving lessons,” then park the car and attack him.
Father William Hodgson Marshall was transferred to different communities, but remained a teacher. (Border City Pictures)
“The pattern that is in play in many of these cases is identical,” Talach told Enright. “I’ve joked before that it must be a night school course at seminary because many of the perpetrator priests employ the same mechanisms to get at their victims.”
Talach added that developing a relationship with the victim’s family offers predators a “firewall,” because parents develop an affinity for the priest that — in addition to their religious loyalty and faith — stops them from reporting the abuse to higher authorities.
“And then, of course, there’s another firewall, that if it does get to the ears of the hierarchy of the church, it’s a pretty safe bet that they’re going to … simply move him,” said Talach, who has dubbed this “the silent shuffle.”
It happened to Marshall, who was transferred to four different communities, but each time remained a teacher with access to potential victims.
Prey features never-before-seen footage of Talach questioning Marshall during his deposition, as the priest calmly confesses to four decades of serial sexual abuse of young boys.
The Sunday Edition
Lawyer Rob Talach questions William Hodgson Marshall on sex abuse
00:0001:34
In audio provided by lawyer Rob Talach’s office, Talach interrogates Father Marshall during his 2012 deposition. Marshall admits to sexually touching boys at most of the schools where he was a teacher, and says he ‘imagines’ he knew it was a criminal offence at the time. 1:34
“It was a very surreal moment to sit across from a perpetrator priest,” said Talach, “and to take the priest’s confession, in a sense.”
Only about one per cent of cases involving sexual abuse by priests goes to trial, and MacLeod said the church could have avoided it in his case.
“I could have been persuaded not to go forward if I’d felt there was a contrite heart, a true sense that they were sorry and something like this would never happen again,” he said.
“But all I got was, here was another corporation that was protecting all of their assets right to the very letter, dragging things out as much as possible, being less than forthcoming, being less than helpful. So the more I experienced that, the more determined I became to see it through.”
‘There is a cathartic effect to litigation’
Talach said the average amount the church pays its victims is $250,000, “so these aren’t lottery wins.”
In MacLeod’s case, the church tried to abort the trial midway through with an offer of $1 million.
He refused.
Talach had warned him the legal proceedings would be long and difficult, but added that “there is a cathartic effect to litigation beyond the money.”
The jury awarded Rod MacLeod almost $2.6 million, including a landmark ruling for punitive damages of $500,000.
“There really hasn’t been a cost to the church other than paying for the spilt milk in these situations,” said Talach.
“In most of these cases, they’re paying cents on the dollar as to what the real life effect was on the victim. The church in Canada has never had to pay a fine or be punished and no one has spent a day behind bars, from the hierarchy.
“So when we talk about punitive damages, that’s where we start to get that punishment piece — or penance, to use their language – which is more than due here.”
It’s in their DNA to do the wrong thing.
– Lawyer Rob Talach
Neither MacLeod nor Talach is surprised the church has appealed this decision.
“I’ve dealt with them now for 17 years, the Catholic church as a whole, and you can count on one hand the number of times they’ve done the right thing,” Talach said. “So, you know, it’s in their DNA to do the wrong thing.”
“You want some outcome that leads to prevention,” Talach said. “The all-male celibate priesthood needs to go. You need to be like any other occupation in this nation: men, women, gay, straight, trans, single, married, blended family. Just open the doors and fix the problem.”
Feel free to copy, paste and edit, for whatever use it might serve.
Subject: April 12, re changes to governance of Dental & Medical professions
Dear (Host of Program),
The interviewee said:
There is a shortage of health care workers across Canada.
The accurate statement is:
There is anover-supply of sick and damaged peopleacross Canada.
Understand it this way:
Bees (insects) and songbirds will have a chance of surviving in Bavaria because, in response to projected extinctions within 20 to 30 years, they recently passed legislation that will phase out chemical farming (coating the land with poisons).
Of course, those same chemicals are playing havoc with the health of the human population, too. Hence the court awards (California) in favor of plaintiffs whose cancers have been caused by Monsanto (now Bayer)’s ag chemicals.
The Court wins offer a glimmer of hope in North America that disease and developmental problems in the human population could eventually start to reverse upward trend lines. In which case we might eventually reach a situation where we care enough about the planet and its inhabitants to stop the rampant poisoning. Canada might save our insects and songbirds, too.
BTW: in my life’s experience, I have yet to know a profession that self-regulates in service to the public interest. There is a conflict-of-interest. Self-regulation always staunchly protects the interests of the profession.
For seven years, from the moment Julian Assange first sought refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, they have been telling us we were wrong, that we were paranoid conspiracy theorists. We were told there was no real threat of Assange’s extradition to the United States, that it was all in our fevered imaginations.
For seven years, we have had to listen to a chorus of journalists, politicians and “experts” telling us that Assange was nothing more than a fugitive from justice, and that the British and Swedish legal systems could be relied on to handle his case in full accordance with the law. Barely a “mainstream” voice was raised in his defence in all that time.
From the moment he sought asylum, Assange was cast as an outlaw. His work as the founder of Wikileaks – a digital platform that for the first time in history gave ordinary people a glimpse into the darkest recesses of the most secure vaults in the deepest of Deep States – was erased from the record.
Assange was reduced from one of the few towering figures of our time – a man who will have a central place in history books, if we as a species live long enough to write those books – to nothing more than a sex pest, and a scruffy bail-skipper.
The political and media class crafted a narrative of half-truthsabout the sex charges Assange was under investigation for in Sweden. They overlooked the fact that Assange had been allowed to leave Sweden by the original investigator, who dropped the inquiry, only for it to be revived by another investigator with a well-documented political agenda.
They failed to mention that Assange was always willing to be questioned by Swedish prosecutors in London, as had occurred in dozens of other cases involving extradition proceedings to Sweden. It was almost as if Swedish officials did not want to test the evidence they claimed to have in their possession.
The media and political courtiers endlessly emphasised Assange’s bail violation in the UK, ignoring the fact that asylum seekers fleeing legal and political persecution don’t usually honour bail conditions imposed by the very state authorites from which they are seeking asylum.
The political and media establishment ignored the mounting evidence of a secret grand jury in Virginia formulating charges against Assange, and ridiculed Wikileaks’ concerns that the Swedish case might be cover for a more sinister attempt by the US to extradite Assange and lock him away in a high-security prison, as had happened to whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
They belittled the 2016 verdict of a panel of United Nations legal scholars that the UK was “arbitrarily detaining” Assange. The media were more interested in the welfare of his cat.
They ignored the fact that after Ecuador changed presidents – with the new one keen to win favour with Washington – Assange was placed under more and more severe forms of solitary confinement. He was denied access to visitors and basic means of communications, violating both his asylum status and his human rights, and threatening his mental and physical wellbeing.
Equally, they ignored the fact that Assange had been given diplomatic status by Ecuador, as well as Ecuadorean citizenship. Britain was obligated to allow him to leave the embassy, using his diplomatic immunity, to travel unhindered to Ecuador. No “mainstream” journalist or politician thought this significant either.
They turned a blind eye to the news that, after refusing to question Assange in the UK, Swedish prosecutors had decided to quietly drop the case against him in 2015. Sweden had kept the decision under wraps for more than two years.
It was a freedom of information request by an ally of Assange, not a media outlet, that unearthed documents showing that Swedish investigators had, in fact, wanted to drop the case against Assange back in 2013. The UK, however, insisted that they carry on with the charade so that Assange could remain locked up. A British official emailed the Swedes: “Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!”
Most of the other documents relating to these conversations were unavailable. They had been destroyed by the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service in violation of protocol. But no one in the political and media establishment cared, of course.
Similarly, they ignored the fact that Assange was forced to hole up for years in the embassy, under the most intense form of house arrest, even though he no longer had a case to answer in Sweden. They told us – apparently in all seriousness – that he had to be arrested for his bail infraction, something that would normally be dealt with by a fine.
And possibly most egregiously of all, most of the media refused to acknowledge that Assange was a journalist and publisher, even though by failing to do so they exposed themselves to the future use of the same draconian sanctions should they or their publications ever need to be silenced. They signed off on the right of the US authorities to seize any foreign journalist, anywhere in the world, and lock him or her out of sight. They opened the door to a new, special form of rendition for journalists.
This was never about Sweden or bail violations, or even about the discredited Russiagate narrative, as anyone who was paying the vaguest attention should have been able to work out. It was about the US Deep State doing everything in its power to crush Wikileaks and make an example of its founder.
It was about making sure there would never again be a leak like that of Collateral Murder, the military video released by Wikileaks in 2007 that showed US soldiers celebrating as they murdered Iraqi civilians. It was about making sure there would never again be a dump of US diplomatic cables, like those released in 2010 that revealed the secret machinations of the US empire to dominate the planet whatever the cost in human rights violations.
Now the pretence is over. The British police invaded the diplomatic territory of Ecuador – invited in by Ecuador after it tore up Assange’s asylum status – to smuggle him off to jail. Two vassal states cooperating to do the bidding of the US empire. The arrest was not to help two women in Sweden or to enforce a minor bail infraction.
No, the British authorities were acting on an extradition warrant from the US. And the charges the US authorities have concocted relate to Wikileaks’ earliest work exposing the US military’s war crimes in Iraq – the stuff that we all once agreed was in the public interest, that British and US media clamoured to publish themselves.
Still the media and political class is turning a blind eye. Where is the outrage at the lies we have been served up for these past seven years? Where is the contrition at having been gulled for so long? Where is the fury at the most basic press freedom – the right to publish – being trashed to silence Assange? Where is the willingness finally to speak up in Assange’s defence?
It’s not there. There will be no indignation at the BBC, or the Guardian, or CNN. Just curious, impassive – even gently mocking – reporting of Assange’s fate.
And that is because these journalists, politicians and experts never really believed anything they said. They knew all along that the US wanted to silence Assange and to crush Wikileaks. They knew that all along and they didn’t care. In fact, they happily conspired in paving the way for today’s kidnapping of Assange.
They did so because they are not there to represent the truth, or to stand up for ordinary people, or to protect a free press, or even to enforce the rule of law. They don’t care about any of that. They are there to protect their careers, and the system that rewards them with money and influence. They don’t want an upstart like Assange kicking over their applecart.
Now they will spin us a whole new set of deceptions and distractions about Assange to keep us anaesthetised, to keep us from being incensed as our rights are whittled away, and to prevent us from realising that Assange’s rights and our own are indivisible. We stand or fall together.
While Julian Assange languishes in south London’s maximum security Belmarsh Prison, a British court is weighing his fate. The 48-year-old Australian founder of Wikileaks is serving time for the minor crime of jumping bail by taking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden. His fear at the time was that the Swedes, with a track record of assisting rendition of suspects sought by the U.S., would send him straight across the Atlantic. Now that he has lost his diplomatic refuge, 70 British members of Parliament have petitioned to dispatch Assange to Sweden if prosecutors there reopen the case they closed in 2017. The greater threat to his liberty is the United States Department of Justice’s extradition demand for him to stand trial in the U.S. for conspiring with Chelsea Manning to hack a government computer.
The U.S. insists Assange will not face the death penalty. If he did, Britain, in common with other European states, would not be able to send him there. The maximum sentence for the hacking offense is five years, but there is no guarantee that, once he arrives in the U.S., he will not face additional charges under the Espionage Act of 1917 that President Barack Obama used against nine individuals for allegedly leaking secret information to the public. The sentence for that offense could be death or life in prison. If Assange ends up in the U.S. federal judicial system, he may never been seen again.
His most likely destination is the “Alcatraz of the Rockies,” otherwise known as the United States Penitentiary Administrative Facility (ADMAX) in Florence, Colorado. Among its 400 inmates are Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Boston Marathon terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, FBI-agent-turned-Russian-spy Robert Hanssen and Oklahoma City co-bomber Terry Nichols. The prison’s regime is as ruthless as its prisoners: 23 hour daily confinement in a concrete box cell with one window four inches wide, six bed checks a day with a seventh at weekends, one hour of exercise in an outdoor cage, showers spraying water in one-minute spurts and “shakedowns” at the discretion of prison staff.
If Trump’s Justice Department ups the ante to charge Assange under the Espionage Act, a journalist-publisher who has not committed homicide may spend the rest of his life at ADMAX among killers, traitors, and drug pushers.
I have visited Assange often over the past eight years, first at the Norfolk farmhouse of Vaughan Smith, a former British Army officer and news cameraman, where he lived under house arrest for a year and a half. The next place I saw him was in the dreary recesses of an embassy that is a little more than a 630-square-foot converted apartment with no outside space. It was not ideal, but better than ADMAX. Lawyers, supporters, and friends dropped in to keep him company. John Pilger, a few other friends, and I took him more than one Christmas dinner. As each month passed, his skin grew paler from lack of sunlight and his health deteriorated. Dr. Sean Love, who is part of a medical team with Dr. Sondra Crosby of the Boston Medical Center and British psychologist Dr. Brock Chisholm that has conducted regular evaluations of Assange since 2017, said, “He had no ability to access medical care.” Dr. Love complained that the physicians were under constant electronic surveillance, a violation of the doctor-patient relationship, and the British government would not allow Assange safe passage to a hospital for urgent dental surgery. While the British tabloid press scorned Assange’s hygiene, it ignored what Dr. Love called “the deleterious effects of seven years of confinement, whose risks include neuro-psychological impairment, weakened bones, compromised immune function, increased risk of cardio-vascular disease and cancer.” Reacting to the stories about Assange not washing, Dr. Love insisted, “This is a complete smear. This is meant to degrade his humanity.” He believes the “cumulative effect of pain and suffering inflicted on him is most definitely in violation of the 1984 Convention on Torture, specifically Articles 1 and 16.”
At my last meeting this year with Assange, the energy that I recall at our first encounter in January 2011 was undiminished. He made coffee, glancing up at surveillance cameras in the tiny kitchen and every other room in the embassy that recorded his every movement. We talked for about an hour, when an embassy official ordered me to leave. In between, we discussed his health, his strategy to stay out of prison, his family, and the Democratic National Committee’s accusation that he colluded with President Donald Trump and Russia to hack its emails and publish them. The DNC was alleging that Assange revealed its “trade secrets,” a reference to the methods the DNC used to deprive Bernie Sanders of the presidential nomination. The DNC is using the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), meant to control organized crime, to pursue a journalist-publisher. If successful, it will set a precedent that should worry media everywhere.
President Trump’s personal lawyers insist that no crime was committed and therefore no criminal conspiracy took place. That won’t stop the DOJ under Trump’s attorney general from pursuing criminal charges against Assange, not only for working with Chelsea Manning to gain access to government secrets, but to examine how Assange obtained confidential Defense and State Department documents as well as the CIA’s hacking program that Wikileaks published in 2017 under the name Vault 7. London’s Guardian newspaper, which had once cooperated with Assange, had accused him of meeting Paul Manafort in the embassy. Assange said, “I have never met or spoken to Paul Manafort.” The embassy’s log book, signed by all visitors, had no record of Manafort.
Assange said that the restrictions and surveillance had become punitive, as there was now nowhere in the flat out of range of cameras and microphones. “It’s the Truman Show,” he joked. We knew the Ecuadorians were watching, but he believed they supplied the recordings to the U.S. Someone monitoring the cameras must have seen me taking notes, because an embassy official came into the room and ordered me to leave. “No journalists,” Assange explained. That was our last conversation. It was Friday evening. When I left, the embassy closed, the staff left, and Assange was wholly alone until Monday morning.
The road to Belmarsh began in 2006, when Wikileaks exposed a Somali rebel leader’s attempt to assassinate government officials. Next came details of the shocking procedures at America’s detention facility at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. That prompted the U.S. to shut down the Wikileaks site, which bounced back. Assange then exposed activities of the Scientology movement and, in 2010, the illegal misbehavior of the U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan and Iraq — through documents in which the parties indicted themselves.
Wikileaks’ collaborators were a consortium of the world’s leading newspapers, the New York Times, London’s Guardian, El Pais of Spain, and Paris’s Le Monde. If Assange violated the law, they were in it with him. While redacting thousands of Wikileaks documents to avoid identifying sensitive intelligence sources, the newspapers presented the Afghan and Iraq wars in ways that deviated from the official line. One of the best remembered disclosures was a military video of an American helicopter crew taking delight in shooting dead two Reuters journalists and ten other civilians on the streets of Iraq. When U.S. investigators discovered that the source of the leaks was an intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning, they arrested him in May 2010. Bradley, a transgender soldier who became Chelsea, received a 35-year sentence for espionage in August 2013. President Barak Obama commuted Manning’s sentence in January 2017, leaving the Assange case open.
Among Assange’s subsequent disclosures were the emails of Syrian President Bashar al Assad, no friend of Washington. Assange was becoming a rock star of free speech. Like a rock star, he attracted groupies. So far, so normal. Then he went to Sweden, where two women denounced him to police for sexual misconduct.
Swedish police dropped the case and allowed him to leave the country, but Swedish prosecutors revisited the case and demanded that Assange return to Sweden for an interview. Sources in Swedish intelligence told me at the time that they believed the U.S. had encouraged Sweden to pursue the case. Assange offered to be interviewed in London, where he felt safer from U.S. extradition than in Sweden. The Swedes, while never officially charging Assange with a crime, demanded extradition. British police arrested him pending a court hearing.
Assange was placed first in jail, then under house arrest at Vaughan Smith’s farm. When the court at last determined to send him to Sweden, he requested and received asylum in Ecuador’s embassy. Conditions were not ideal, but the Ecuadorian president and ambassador gave him full support. Visitors, including myself, came and went. In the meantime, Sweden dropped its investigation into the women’s claims. This left Assange facing only a charge of evading bail in Britain, for which he would receive only a small fine. However, if he left the embassy to report to the court, he feared the U.S. would unseal its indictment against him and demand his extradition.
On May 24, 2017, Lenín Boltaire Moreno Garcés became president of Ecuador and Assange’s life changed. An ally of President Donald Trump in need of IMF loans, Moreno replaced the ambassador with a functionary hostile to Assange’s presence in the embassy. Although the previous regime had granted Assange citizenship, based on five-plus years on what is legally Ecuadorian soil, the new government cut his internet and telephone access and restricted the number of visitors. Embassy staff changed. The new functionaries became less cordial to visitors like myself and were visibly hostile to Assange. Then, last Thursday, Moreno cast aside the principle of political asylum and told the British police to come and get him. The U.S. presented the indictment that Assange had said all along was waiting for him. And so Assange waits to know whether he will ever be free again, while journalists who published his leaked documents continue working without fear of prosecution and, in some cases, brandish their journalism prizes while denouncing the man who made them possible.
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SNC-Lavalin CEO Neil Bruce is photographed in Toronto on March 20, 2019. Only a handful of SNC-Lavalin Group Inc.§s rivals have received deferred prosecution agreements in the past five years, a Canadian Press analysis reveals. The low count appears to contradict remarks by CEO Neil Bruce The Canadian Press last month that about three-quarters of the company’s competitors have received DPAs, giving them a leg up over the beleaguered engineering and construction giant. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
MONTREAL — It was a sunny Wednesday in March, and Neil Bruce was making his case forwhy SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. deserved a negotiated settlement over corruption charges tied to alleged dealings in Libya.
After spending six weeks in the eye of a political storm over the actions of top government officials who had pushed to head off a criminal prosecution in the case, the CEO of Canada’s most renowned engineering and construction firm went on a press offensive.
Flanked by a public relations team in a downtown Toronto boardroom, Bruce shared some internal data on the use of deferred prosecution agreements (DPA) by SNC-Lavalin’s rivals to illustrate the competitive disadvantage his firm faces.
“We’ve calculated that about 75 per cent of these U.S. and European competitors have done DPAs in their own host country and are free to work in Canada,” Bruce told The Canadian Press on March 20.
When pressed for details on this claim — made to at least one other news outlet — SNC-Lavalin told The Canadian Press it does not have a comprehensive list of competitors who have entered into DPAs. The firm did not share how it arrived at the number.
The Canadian Press analyzed figures on corporate settlements from a pair of databases and found that only a handful of SNC-Lavalin Group Inc.’s rivals or their subsidiaries have received deferred prosecution agreements. In the U.S. and United Kingdom, just one of SNC-Lavalin’s 16 main competitors listed in its 2018 annual information form is named as a DPA recipient, according to the databases that go as far back as 1992.
Of 216 DPAs and non-prosecution agreements — which are similar, but more lenient — in the U.S. since 2014, only eight were granted to construction or design firms, and only three of those companies qualified as global players, according to figures in annual reports by law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.
The U.K. has granted only four DPAs since legislation was passed in 2013, records from Fieldfisher law firm show.
“Most of the activity in DPAs is extremely recent,” said Jennifer Quaid, a criminal law professor at the University of Ottawa. “There isn’t necessarily a long tradition of holding companies criminally liable in many European jurisdictions.”
When asked about the discrepancy in the numbers, SNC-Lavalin stood by its figures.
“SNC-Lavalin did internal research on the topic and calculated that about 75 per cent of its rivals have concluded DPAs in their host countries,” spokesman Nicolas Ryan said in an email.
While none of SNC-Lavalin’s 16 competitors appear to have received DPAs in the U.S. or U.K. in the past five years, a few of their subsidiaries have, and several rivals accepted deals prior to 2014.
In 2012, Tokyo-based Marubeni Corp. agreed to pay US$54.6 million in a DPA linked to its participation in a decade-long scheme to bribe Nigerian government officials, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Montreal-based engineering firm WSP Global Inc. bought Louis Berger in 2018 — three years after that company paid US$17.1 million to resolve charges it bribed officials in India, Indonesia, Vietnam and Kuwait.
Tishman Construction Corp. — purchased by Aecom in 2010 — accepted in 2015 a US$20.2-million DPA tied to an overbilling scheme dating back to 1999. And SNC-Lavalin’s own WS Atkins, which it bought in 2017, acquired a subsidiary seven years earlier that reached a US$3.4-million DPA following allegations of bribing Qatari officials in 2009.
In 2008, British construction company Balfour Beatty admitted to “payment irregularities” and paid a 2.25-million-pound penalty following a bribery investigation by the U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office, avoiding charges in the process. Instead it got a plea bargain, which unlike a DPA involves a legal admission of guilt along with the bidding bans and steeper penalties that can come with it.
The goal of a DPA, also known as a remediation agreement, is to encourage voluntary disclosure of criminal misconduct that might otherwise fly under regulators’ radar. By entering into a DPA, a company avoids prosecution while taking responsibility for breaches such as fraud or bribery of foreign officials and agreeing to conditions like overhauling its board and senior management, adopting a compliance program and accepting third-party oversight.
DPAs also aim to slash costs and time for investigators in what can be lengthy, exhaustive criminal probes by cash-strapped government bureaus.
“The big thing that corporations are worried about is stigma. They don’t like the stigma of being considered a corporate criminal, because that affects their sales and their public reputation,” said Russell Mokhiber, a corporate crime journalist and author.
The difference between who gets a negotiated settlement and who doesn’t often comes down to size, says Susan Hawley, policy director at London-based non-profit Corruption Watch.
“Large companies tend to get away with DPAs and the smaller companies get prosecuted criminally,” she said.
She points to Rolls-Royce PLC, with which U.K. prosecutors pursued an agreement “for corrupt conduct spanning three decades,” as the state’s Serious Fraud Office director put it in February. The settlement — which emerged only after Rolls-Royce had been “found out,” Hawley said, not after self-reporting — drew renewed scrutiny of the practice.
“Because the large corporations have the power, they have the power to demand and secure these agreements,” said Mokhiber. “You lose so many jobs in the economy, shareholders get hurt, innocent employees are punished, and so forth.”
Companies in this story: (TSX:SNC, TSX:WSP)
Note to readers: This is a corrected story. An earlier version stated that Tishman Construction Corp. was owned by Aecon.
Judge Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond joins CPAC’s Martin Stringer to discuss the audio recording Jody Wilson-Raybould provided to the justice committee of a conversation she had with Clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick on SNC-Lavalin.
Documents reveal ‘cosy’ relationship between the government, the banking industry and its watchdog
Erica Johnson, Enza Uda · CBC News
Public policy researcher Ken Rubin looks through drafts of the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada’s report on bank sales practices, which he obtained using Access to Information. (Andrew Lee/CBC)
Last year’s report from Canada’s banking regulator about aggressive sales tactics underwent several drafts that eliminated proposed protections for consumers — edits that were made after the regulator sent early versions to the federal Finance Department and the big banks.
Internal documents from the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada (FCAC) — obtained under Access to Information and provided to Go Public — show that some recommendations for action were weakened or removed, including a proposal to require that banks work in the best interest of consumers.
Another key edit was the addition of a line saying the review did not find “widespread mis-selling” by the banks.
It all paints a picture of the “cosy” relationship between the country’s six big banks, the agency that’s supposed to regulate them and the federal government, said Paul Thomas, professor emeritus of political studies at the University of Manitoba.
“[The banks] have disproportionate access and perhaps disproportionate influence.”
Political scientist Paul Thomas says the banks are ‘well-heeled, well-connected and have a traditional working partnership with the government of the day.’ (Jaison Empson/CBC)
The report was prompted in part by months of reporting by Go Public, in which hundreds of current and former bank employees said they were pushed to upsell customers to try to meet sales targets.
Some described feeling pressured to do such things as mislead customers about credit card fees and mortgage rates, forge signatures on credit card and loan insurance products and secretly increase lines of credit.
At the time, the banks told Go Public that they act in the best interests of their clients, and that employees are expected to follow various codes of conduct.
‘More to it than meets the eye’
The documents were obtained through Access to Information by public policy researcher Ken Rubin, who asked for draft copies of FCAC’s report on sales practices at the big banks, and related correspondence.
The regulator’s review focused on BMO, CIBC, RBC, Scotiabank, TD and National Bank.
It found that banks encourage employees to sell products and services and reward them for sales success. But FCAC also said it did not find evidence of widespread harm to consumers.
Although FCAC staff interviewed 600 bank employees, and reviewed more than 100,000 pages of documents and 4,500 customer complaints, the report did not name a single bank or quote from any of the interviews.
“When I saw the March [2018] report, I said, ‘There’s more to it than meets the eye,'” said Rubin, one of Canada’s most prolific practitioners of federal Access to Information requests.
Draft sent to banks
Thomas found it particularly interesting that the regulator sent a draft of its report to the very banks at the centre of its eight-month review.
“[The banks] have greater power, more influence than other actors in the policy field of banking,” he said. “It’s a fact of life.”
Sending the banks a draft copy is a big concern for consumer advocate Duff Conacher.
“You don’t share … the evidence you gathered,” said the co-founder of Democracy Watch and adjunct professor of law at the University of Ottawa. “That evidence is the basis of your conclusions as to whether the law has been violated.”
More than half the pages of a draft of the report obtained via Access to Information had words or entire sections redacted. (Andrew Lee/CBC)
The banking regulator told Go Public it sent the banks a draft report so the financial institutions could “identify factual errors.”
Read the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada’s full response to Go Public
“If the agency wanted to check the facts in the report … they could have just sent them those facts,” Conacher said.
In a subsequent draft, a line was added pointing out that banks are “in the process of enhancing their oversight and management of sales practices risk.” It’s not known who proposed adding that line.
Go Public asked the Canadian Bankers Association (CBA) whether it requested a draft copy of the report.
CBA spokesperson Mathieu Labreche sent an email that did not respond to that question, writing, “The Canadian Bankers Association and its member banks regularly communicate and meet with supervisory bodies, including the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada, as part of the normal course of the oversight process.”
Banks’ responses redacted
The internal documents also include dozens of pages from the big banks, which appear to be responses to the regulator’s draft report.
Go Public is not able to know their contents — including the date they were written, or who wrote them — because entire pages were redacted under an Access to Information exemption that protects commercial interests.
The documents also reveal that the banking regulator supplied a draft to Finance Minister Bill Morneau and his department three months before publicly releasing it last year.
Democracy Watch co-founder Duff Conacher says the finance minister should not be given the opportunity to provide input on the banking regulator’s findings before they are released to the public. (David Richard/CBC)
Conacher says the regulator, purportedly an independent agency, should not have given the minister and his department a chance to vet and comment on its report.
“It’s inappropriate and improper for a minister to be looking at the draft conclusions of a law enforcement agency,” he told Go Public. “That means decisions could be made on the basis of politics, not on the basis of the facts and the law.”
One of the most significant edits to the initial draft that was sent to the finance minister was the addition of a finding on Page 1 that says, “FCAC did not find widespread mis-selling during its review.”
“It’s hard to say … exactly what happened,” said John Lawford, executive director of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, a consumer organization based in Ottawa.
“The language seems to belie the rest of the report, which goes into some detail about how sales practices — which are a little unseemly — can be performed.”
Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s office received a draft of FCAC’s report three months before it was released to the public. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)
Go Public requested an interview with Morneau, but his spokesperson, Pierre-Olivier Herbert, said the minister was unavailable.
In a statement, Herbert did not respond to Conacher’s criticism that it ought to be considered inappropriate for the minister to receive a draft report from the banking regulator.
A Finance Department spokesperson said it is routine for financial sector agencies to share documents for comment and to confirm facts.
Access to Information exemptions
Go Public received various versions of the banking regulator’s report, including several versions of the original draft, a revised copy after it went to the finance minister, and the final report.
Sentences, recommendations or conclusions are redacted in several drafts, based on an exemption in Canada’s Access to Information Act that allows the head of a government institution to refuse to disclose any advice involving the institution or a federal cabinet minister.
The exemption applies to advice or recommendations that occur at a ministerial level, essentially to allow confidentiality in the policy-making process.
Go Public asked the minister about additions made after he had received a copy.
In an email, Morneau’s spokesperson wrote, “the Minister’s office did not provide comments or request any edits to the FCAC’s report. The findings in the FCAC’s report are entirely their own.”
However, the documents indicate that Morneau’s department made at least six comments on the first draft of the report, including about changing parts that say the regulator will introduce certain reforms to the regulator “proposes” them.
Most of the comments from the department are redacted.
“The biggest thing is there were three recommendations saying banks should be ‘required’ to make changes,” Conacher said. “And those were all changed to ‘suggestions’ that the banks should do some things.
“Suggestions are meaningless, if you’re actually trying to solve a problem. The banks don’t have to do anything.”
The whole process is submerged. It’s not transparent
– Paul Thomas, professor emeritus of political studies at the University of Manitoba
The draft sent to the minister’s office included a line saying, “Require banks to work in the best interests of their customers.” The line didn’t make the final version of the report.
Some other language that was critical of the banks — such as a line saying that banks “lean disproportionately in favour of a sales driven culture” — was also dropped before the report was published.
Banks lobbied government 165 times
Go Public checked the lobbyist registry to see how many times the banks or their umbrella group, the CBA, lobbied government officials, senators, MPs — including Morneau — the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions and FCAC during the 12-month period between when the regulator announced it was conducting a bank review and the date it released its report.
Between March 15, 2017, and March 20, 2018, the big banks and the CBA lobbied a total of 165 times.
In the month leading up to the release of FCAC’s report, the CBA met with the regulator’s deputy commissioner, Brigitte Goulard, four times — including the day before the report was published.
Lobbying is legal, but those who do significant amounts of it are required to file a record with the lobbying commissioner, who then makes the information public online.
Ken Whitehurst of the Consumers Council of Canada says cash-strapped consumer groups need more support to participate fully in policy discussions around consumer protection. (Gary Morton/CBC)
“The banks — because they’re an important economic asset to the country — have to be listened to,” said the University of Manitoba’s Paul Thomas. “They have greater power, more influence than other actors in the policy field of banking. It’s a fact of life.”
As a comparison, Go Public asked four consumer advocacy organizations how many times they had the ear of lawmakers and banking watchdogs during the same period.
In total, they had fewer than 10 meetings with policy-makers and FCAC to discuss the sales practices of banks, they said.
“It’s extremely concerning to us, of course, that consumer groups are not more meaningfully supported to participate in these important conversations,” wrote Ken Whitehurst, executive director of the Consumers Council of Canada.
“The council continues to have serious concerns about the resources available to facilitate meaningful consumer representation at not only FCAC but across government concerning consumer protection.”
More transparency needed
Thomas says after combing through the various versions of the bank regulator’s report, the relationship between the banks, the government and the banking regulator can be difficult to figure out.
“The whole process is submerged. It’s not transparent,” he said.
“If it hadn’t been for Access to Information requests, we wouldn’t know the extent to which the banks were given a certain privileged status in this process.”
About the Author
Erica Johnson
Investigative reporter
Erica Johnson is an award-winning investigative journalist. She hosted CBC’s consumer program Marketplace for 15 years, investigating everything from dirty hospitals to fraudulent financial advisors. As co-host of the CBC news segment Go Public, Erica continues to expose wrongdoing and hold corporations and governments to account.
Lengthy with good information, set in the international context of water shortages.
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Just 90 minutes from Toronto, residents of a First Nations community try to improve the water situation as the beverage company extracts from their land
Alexandra Shimo
Iokarenhtha Thomas, a mother of five. ‘That’s just the reality of living on reserve,’ she said of the lack of water. ‘You grow up being treated unfairly.’ Photograph: Jennifer Roberts for the Guardian
The mysterious rash on the arm of six-year-old Theron wouldn’t heal. For almost a year, his mother, Iokarenhtha Thomas, who lives in the Six Nations of the Grand River indigenous reserve in Ontario, went to the local doctor for lotions for the boy. It worked, for a time. But the itchy red rash always returned. Thomas came to suspect the culprit behind the rash: water – or, rather, the lack of it.
Thomas, a university student and mother of five, has lived without running tap water since the age of 16. Her children lack access to things commonplace elsewhere, like toilets, showers and baths. For washing and toilet usage, they use a bucket.
It is a challenging existence, full of frustration, exhaustion and health problems, and reminiscent of life in some developing countries. But this is not the “third world”. It is Canada, which regularly ranks as one of the United Nations’ top places in the world to live. Moreover, this Native community is located in prosperous southern Ontario, 90 minutes from Canada’s largest and richest city, Toronto.
Meanwhile, while Thomas and her family do without water, the beverage company Nestlé extracts millions of litres of water daily from Six Nations treaty land.
Twice a week, Thomas and her husband grab jugs, pails and whatever else they have in the house, and drive 8km to a public tap to fill up. The water isn’t drinkable, however, so once a week they also drive 10km to the nearest town, Caledonia, to buy bottled water to drink.
Ken Greene boils water in his home at the Six Nations reserve in Ontario. Photograph: Jennifer Roberts for the Guardian
“When my husband isn’t here, it makes it difficult to do the dishes or anything because I don’t have the strength to carry all the jugs of water,” Thomas said.
“When I start to compare my life to someone who isn’t living on reserve, I start feeling angry at the government,” she said. “Because our people don’t have running water. But that’s just the reality of living on reserve. You grow up being treated unfairly.”
Each container of the store-bought bottled water weighs more than 40lb, so a little over a year ago, Thomas, a slight, willowy woman, began supplementing them with rainwater collected from her rooftop gutters. She would have continued had it not been for her son’s rashes, later diagnosed as impetigo, which she believes came from bacteria on the roof’s shingles. “It made me feel like a bad mother to know that he had all these skin issues from washing with [rain] water.”
Ninety-one percent of the homes in this community aren’t connected to the water treatment plant, says Michael Montour, director of public works for Six Nations. Some, like the Thomas home, have no water at all. Others have water in their taps, but it is too polluted to drink.
The Six Nations are not the only First Nations community in Canada with a water crisis. There are currently 50 indigenous communities with long-term boil water advisories, which means an estimated 63,000 people haven’t had drinkable water for at least a year – and some for decades. But this may underestimate the size of the problem, since some indigenous communities, such as Six Nations, have a functional water plant but no workable plumbing. The lack of water has been linked to health issues in indigenous communities including hepatitis A, gastroenteritis, giardia lamblia (“beaver fever”), scabies, ringworm and acne.
“Why do white people live with water and we don’t?” said Dawn Martin-Hill, a Six Nations local and professor of indigenous studies at McMaster University. “They don’t have to live like we live. There’s a lot of environmental racism.”
It seems difficult to believe that anyone in Canada, a large, sparsely populated country home to 60% of the world’s lakes and one-fifth of the world’s fresh water, could be without clean water.
Canada’s bounty has made it an attractive destination for beverage brands such as Aquafina and Dasani, which pump and bottle the abundant freshwater. But the distribution is rarely according to need. Nestlé, the world’s biggest bottler, is extracting up to 3.6m litres of water daily from nearby Six Nations treaty land.
“Six Nations did not approve [of Nestlé pumping],” Martin-Hill said. “They told Nestlé that they wanted them to stop. Of course, they are still pumping as we speak.”
Iokarenhtha Thomas holds her daughter Waehsa Thomas and the water she needs to bring into her home. Photograph: Jennifer Roberts for the Guardian
Nestlé pumps springwater from the nearby Erin well, which sits on a tract of land given to the Six Nations under the 1701 Nanfan Treaty and the 1784 Haldimand Tract, said Lonny Bomberry, Six Nations lands and resources director.
The Six Nations – Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca and Tuscarora – sided with the British during the American revolution; as a reward they were given an area of approximately 3,845 sq km around the Grand River. Later, Ontario broke the treaty, reducing it to the current 194 sq km.
The land’s legacy may be 300 years old, but for Six Nations residents, it is alive and present. Many are outraged at Nestlé’s practices, including JD Sault, a self-employed mother of two. Like the Thomases, she lacks drinking water in her home. She paid several thousand dollars for her house to be connected to a nearby well – then found the water too polluted to drink. There is probably sewage contamination from her neighbours’ septic beds, she said. She worries about Ecoli and other bacteria.
“Nestlé are taking out water for free, so why don’t they dispense it to people?” Sault said. “It’s the indigenous resources they are taking. It’s unreal what [Nestlé] are doing. It’s unreal the way they operate.”
No one disputes the existence or legality of the Haldiman or Nanfan treaties. If anything, their legality is finally being taken seriously, thanks to a shift in the national political climate toward greater recognition of indigenous rights, including several wins in the supreme and lower courts.
But the question of who owns Canadian water is as murky as the water on many First Nations lands. In theory, the provinces have owned the water since 1930, when the federal government delegated ownership with the Natural Resources Transfer Act. According to that act, the provinces have the right to sell their water to whomever they want, including companies like Nestlé.
But water is also supposed to be regulated by the federal government, which is responsible for the natural environment and Canada’s waterways. And, according to the Canadian constitution, the federal government has a “duty to accommodate and consult” First Nations and to make sure other parties do the same when extracting any natural resource, including water, from indigenous land.
This legal ambiguity has allowed Nestlé to move in and extract precious water on expired permits for next to nothing. Nestlé pays the province of Ontario $503.71 (US$390.38) per million litres. But they pay the Six Nations nothing.
In response, the Six Nations are suing the province, in a case before the superior court of Ontario.
“We are working hard on developing our relationships with local First Nations communities, and look forward to working together,” Jennifer Kerr, director of corporate affairs for Nestlé Waters Canada, wrote in an email to the Guardian.
“Everything has to do with the water,” explained Ken Greene, 53, who lives with his wife in a one-bedroom trailer without running water. “Because it has to do with the land. Land needs water. We need water. We can’t survive without it.”
The disputed Erin well is located in a drought-stricken area, explained Emma Lui, a water campaigner with the Council of Canadians, a progressive not-for-profit that works on environmental causes. The drought has dried the wetlands surrounding Greene’s 10-acre property. It has also decimated the local populations of salmon, trout, pike and pickerel, Greene said.
Ken Greene gathers water for his home at the Six Nations reserve in Ontario. Photograph: Jennifer Roberts for the Guardian
Martin-Hill told me that indigenous leaders can do little to address the drought because they are caught in a legal trap. Drought and other environmental problems are supposed to be addressed during the granting of new water permits. That’s when scientific and legal experts examine fish populations, vegetation and aquifer levels to decide how much well water can be safely extracted.
It’s not happening. There’s been a moratorium on new permits since 2016 – yet, paradoxically, the Ontario government has also given companies the right to pump water on expired permits until 2019. (The permit for the Erin site expired in 2017.)
Makaśa Looking Horse, 21, a student in indigenous studies at McMaster University, has organized a community-wide march for this fall. She has also organized a boycott of Nestlé’s products. “It’s hard to boycott Nestlé because they own so many companies that sell so many products,” she said. “It’s hard to pick and choose. You don’t always know what’s Nestlé and what’s not because they own so much.”
This is not the first time Nestlé has found itself in such difficulties. In fact, numerous conflicts have surfaced related to their business model, according to Peter Gleick, co-founder and president emeritus of the Pacific Institute, a global water thinktank, and author of Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water.
Many of Nestlé’s competitors, such as Aquafina and Dasani, don’t use spring water, but filter and treat tap water, Gleick said. But Nestlé was founded in the 19th century on the idea that spring water might have incredible health benefits. Nestlé bottles its brands – including Arrowhead, Poland Spring, Deer Park, Ozarka, Zephyrhills, Acqua Panna, San Pellegrino, Perrier, Vittel and Buxton – from deep aquifers and natural springs, which can take decades or longer to replenish.
Ken Greene gathers water for his home. Photograph: Jennifer Roberts for the Guardian
For the past century, demand for freshwater has grown twice as fast as population growth, explained Steven Solomon, author of Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power and Civilization. The United Nations predicts that by 2025, 1.8 billion people will live with dire water shortages, and two-thirds of the world’s population could be living under stressed water conditions. That means a race to find untapped springs.
Anticipating shortages, companies like Nestlé are trying to lock in as much of the world’s water as possible, explained Solomon. Bottled water is the world’s most popular drink, and its sales recently outstripped soft drinks, according to a study by Beverage Marketing Corp. The trend is expected to intensify. The higher temperatures predicted with climate change will lead to less water and more thirst. “Demand is rising,” Solomon said. “The curve is rising a lot. And they are trying to tie up supply.”
“The fact that Nestlé is commercializing these natural resources in a community that doesn’t have access to reliable safe, affordable drinking water is a stunning example of the disparities we see around the world in access to safe water,” Gleick said. “The rich can pay for water and the poor get shortchanged over and over again.”
The former CEO of Nestlé, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, caused an international furor when he praised the commodification of water in a 2005 documentary, saying: “One perspective held by various NGOs – which I would call extreme – is that water should be declared a human right … The other view is that water is a grocery product. And just as every other product, it should have a market value.”
While the lack of water in indigenous communities has been carefully documented, the full impact on the health and mental wellbeing of indigenous residents has not.
Eager for answers, McMaster University professor Martin-Hill is conducting a three-year interdisciplinary study examining the impact of contaminated water and lack of water on humans, as well as fish and wildlife. “We need to know what is going on. Because what is happening with our water is a systemic, institutional assault on indigenous people’s lands and rights over those lands to protect and preserve them.”
Martin-Hill believes that the exorbitant suicide rate among First Nations youth – five to seven times that of other Canadians, according to the federal government – is directly related to the lack of drinkable water. For a Six Nations person, water is sacred and a symbol of life. But the lack also has metaphorical significance, as it becomes representative of the myriad ways that indigenous Canadians are treated as second-class citizens.
Larry Jamieson collects water. Photograph: Jennifer Roberts for the Guardian
“The young people are upset, pissed and demoralized,” Martin-Hill said. “There’s a strong element of depression, sadness and hopelessness because it’s been going on for so long. Young people don’t see a future.”
At Six Nations, the water situation is improving, albeit slowly. In 2013, the community received a $41m grant to build a state-of-the-art water treatment plant. Unfortunately, the grant did not cover the cost of plumbing, so it serves only 9% of homes.
“We had to take out a loan for $12m to come up with the final dollars needed,” Chief Ava Hill said. “In addition, they have not provided sufficient operation and maintenance dollars for us to run the plant. The challenges of gaining money for infrastructure on reserves is that the federal government simply does not provide enough dollars even though they have the fiduciary responsibility to do so.”
With the election of Justin Trudeau, the tide seemed to shift somewhat. The prime minister promised to improve First Nations prosperity and solve the bad water issue on indigenous reserves by March 2021.
While there has been some progress, there aren’t sufficient funds. The Liberal government earmarked $1.8bn over five years to solve the water issue. But the real cost is estimated at $3.2bn, leaving the government more than $1bn short.
For Thomas, the inequality between indigenous people’s access to drinking water and everyone else didn’t start with water, but far earlier, with land displacement and colonialism. For her, it is the latest example of an ongoing cultural genocide. When thinking about how she will survive another day without drinking water, she remembers how her family has survived in the past.
“We are taught to be resilient,” she said. “It’s not right, but it’s just a reality. You have to tell yourself: ‘This is just the way it is.’ Otherwise you become angry and bitter.”
