Sandra Finley

2018-05-31 Did Canada buy an oil pipeline in fear of being sued by China? Bruce Livesay, The Guardian

 Climate, Trade Deals, PPPs, Integration Canada-U.S.  3 Responses »
Jun 012018
 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/31/justin-trudeau-kinder-morgan-pipeline-china-did-he-fear-being-sued

Did Canada buy an oil pipeline in fear of being sued by China?
The logic to Trudeau’s action may lie in an obscure and overlooked 2014 agreement to ensure China got a pipeline built

Bruce Livesey

Last modified on Thu 31 May 2018 19.02 BST

Justin Trudeau in Toronto, Canada on Tuesday.

Justin Trudeau in Toronto, Canada on Tuesday. Photograph: Canadian Press/Rex/Shutterstock

 

Why is Justin Trudeau buying a pipeline?

Canada’s government announced yesterday it was planning to purchase the Trans Mountain pipeline for $4.5bn. This pipeline – which transports oil from Alberta’s tar sands to the western coast of British Columbia – is at the centre of a bitter political war that shows no signs of abating.

Standing in opposition are the government of British Columbia, the environmental movement, coastal communities and many indigenous groups. Collectively, they’re alarmed about the possibilities of oil spills and exacerbating climate change.

Pressing for the pipeline is the oil industry and the governments of Canada and Alberta – whose premier, Rachel Notley, crowed after the decision: “Pick up those tools, folks, we have a pipeline to build.”

By buying the pipeline from its current owner, Kinder Morgan, Trudeau’s government could face a price tag much larger than $4.5bn if the government wants it actually built. The Financial Post has suggested that finishing the new expansion would cost an additional $6.9bn.

Trudeau’s ferocious desire to build the pipeline at any cost seems bizarre on the face of it. Ostensibly, his government claims the pipeline is good for the Canadian economy. But the pipeline will be shipping unrefined oil – known as bitumen – to be refined in the US and Asia. This will cost oil refinery jobs in Canada, which is where most employment in the oil industry exists. Canada has been closing refineries for years now. The pipeline will only accelerate this trend.

Moreover, developing the oil sands ensures Canada will never come close to meeting its commitments to the Paris climate accord. In 2015, Trudeau promised to cut emissions dramatically: 30% from 2005 levels by 2030. But most of the oil in Alberta’s tar sands will have to stay in the ground to prevent a global warming catastrophe.

So what’s going on?

The logic to Trudeau’s action may lie in an obscure and often overlooked agreement called the Canada-China Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement (Fipa).

This agreement, ratified in 2014, was negotiated by the previous Harper government. It was passed without a vote in Parliament. Fipa, which remains in place until 2045, was signed to ensure that China got a pipeline built from Alberta to BC, among other benefits.

By then, China was already investing heavily in the oil sands. In 2009, PetroChina bought a 60% interest in two undeveloped oil sands projects, containing an estimated 5bn barrels of oil. And in 2013, the Chinese state-owned CNOOC purchased the third-largest Canadian oil and gas company, Nexen, for $15.1bn. China needs the oil to help fuel its industrial growth.

Yet this Fipa is the sort of agreement that undermines the sovereignty of nations to the benefit of private interests. Fipas are Canada’s name for bilateral investment treaties, which are frequently used by corporations around the world to challenge public policies or community decisions that interfere with their ability to make money. Canada’s first FIPA took the form of a single chapter in the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta). Since then, Canada has paid out $160m to US corporations who challenged public decisions, including environmental policy. Canadian mining companies are using Fipas with developing countries to claim damages from community opposition to unwanted mega-projects.

In the case of the Fipa with China, it notably allows Chinese energy companies to challenge local, provincial and federal policies or laws that interfere with their “right” to make a profit from energy projects. So any environmental regulations, or halted pipelines, or First Nations land claims, could be subject to lawsuits brought by Chinese corporate interests. (Conversely, Canadian companies operating in China have the same rights to do the same thing over there.) A clause in the Fipa, called Investor State Arbitration, gives them this capacity.

“More troubling, there is no requirement in the treaty for the federal government to make public the fact of a Chinese investor’s lawsuit against Canada until an award has been issued by a tribunal,” Osgoode Hall international investment law professor Gus Van Harten has noted.

“This means that the federal government could settle the lawsuit by paying out public money before an award is issued, and we would never know.”

This is no small threat: a few years ago, a Chinese insurance company launched a $2bn arbitration claim against Belgium under a foreign investment protection treaty.

And in 2016, the energy giant TransCanada sued the US government for cancelling the Keystone XL oil pipeline. TransCanada was seeking $15bn.

Trudeau is desperate to keep China happy. In 2016, his government began negotiating a free trade agreement with China. At the time, the Globe and Mail reported, “a senior Chinese official said this will require Canadian concessions on investment restrictions and a commitment to build an energy pipeline to the coast”.

Less than a year later, Trudeau approved the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline. Talks for the free trade agreement are ongoing.

Now he has bought that pipeline, and will have to live with the political fallout, which will likely include protesters, court cases and other acts of civil disobedience. In what might be a strategy to avoid lawsuits from Chinese companies that may result in massive secret payouts, Trudeau’s government may find itself arresting Canadians.

 

2018-05-31 Daniel Ellsberg, ‘the most dangerous man in America,’ comes to Sonoma

 Daniel Ellsberg  No Responses »
Jun 012018
 
CHRISTIAN KALLEN

INDEX-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

Before Julian Assange, before Edward Snowden, before Chelsea Manning, there was Daniel Ellsberg.

It’s a name many of us have heard all our lives, first as a shadowy defense department consultant who spilled the beans on the U.S. government’s decades of lying about Vietnam, then as poster boy in a landmark Supreme Court case on freedom of the press, and more recently as a critic of the very nuclear policy he helped craft, over 50 years ago.

But most of all, he’s the man who brought down Richard Nixon – albeit not directly. Instead his release of the top-secret “Pentagon Papers” led to a federal indictment on espionage, which in turn led to Nixon’s hand-picked crew of dirty tricks operatives known as the Plumbers breaking into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in search of incriminating evidence.

They didn’t find much of use, but the Plumbers continued their illicit investigations at the Watergate Hotel a few months later, where they were interrupted in mid-theft and arrested. One thing led to another, and despite his comfortable re-election in 1972, Nixon resigned from office in August, 1974, thereby avoiding pending impeachment.

It was Henry Kissinger’s fear of what else Ellsberg may have had in hand that led him to call him “the most dangerous man in America,” a phrase that became the title of a 2009 documentary on Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.

All of which gives Ellsberg the catbird seat on some of the most important political events of the 20th century, and with it a rare perspective on the current state of political crisis. He’ll be speaking in Sonoma next Monday, June 4, the latest of the Sonoma Speakers Series parade of guest lecturers.

“Ellsberg has a lot to talk about, and we are honored to have him take our stage and share his knowledge, experiences and his very interesting life with our Sonoma audience,” said Kathy Witkowicki of the Sonoma Speakers Series. “The fact that the event is sold out is proof that the general public wants to hear what this man has to say.”

With a new book out, and the recent chronicle of the Pentagon Papers in the Oscar-nominated “The Post,” the 87-year-old former defense department strategist, think-tank consultant, and constant gadfly to the secretive and powerful finds himself once again with a lot to say, and an audience eager to hear it.

In “The Post,” Matthew Rhys (of “The Americans” TV series) portrays a nervous, driven Ellsberg, trying to get the top-secret government studies of the war in Vietnam before anyone who will publish them. In that movie it was Ellsberg’s colleague in domestic espionage, Andrew Russo, who clips the top and bottom “top secret” notations off the papers before they are photocopied.

In reality, Ellsberg revealed, it was his 10-year-old daughter Mary who did the scissors-work. And his 13-year old son, Robert, ran the photocopier.

The story is found in “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers,” which Ellsberg published in 2002. Just last year Ellsberg released “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner,” and the dangers of nuclear war continue to concern him.

“I tried to publish this book in 1975, as soon as the war was over,” Ellsberg told the Index-Tribune by phone from his Berkeley hills home he shares with his second wife, Patricia. “But it was turned down, they said they couldn’t sell more than 1,400 copies. We’ve done more than that now.”

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The nuclear strategy thinking and documents he shares in “The Doomsday Machine” is based largely on his own work in the field starting in 1958 at the RAND Corporation, a think tank and frequent defense department resource. “From 1958 until 1964, I was an employee of the RAND Corporation, largely consulting for the defense department and the White House on nuclear command and control and strategy.” He would have been just 27 when he started down this path.

We asked him about the Pentagon Papers, today’s whistle-blowers and what it’s like being “the most dangerous man in America.”

Has nuclear strategy changed in the last 60 years since you worked with RAND?

Unfortunately, very little. I tried to help Secretary (Robert) McNamara change it, but we failed, essentially, it didn’t change it much. And that was true for the people who came after me, too. For generations, people tried to change Air Force targeting and scheduling and whatnot with very little effect.

There’s a part in the book when you say that, during your Pentagon Papers trial (1973), you hid copies of sensitive U.S. nuclear planning materials that you intended to leak to the public shortly after the Pentagon Papers was published. What were those materials, and what happened to them?

It was notes of my own work, even one important one from the Nixon Administration on nuclear analysis. But largely on command and control, the nature of the war plans, notes and estimates – things that I had acquired in my years of work on the subject. (My brother) put them in a cardboard box inside a green garbage bag that was buried in a landfill. They were lost.

Well if you hide something in a green garbage bag in a dump, I think it would be hard to find.

It wasn’t that, it was that Tropical Storm Doria scattered the landmarks all around, and the dump itself. So a year and a half worth of searching was just unable to turn it up.

There was a documentary about you and the Pentagon Papers called “The Most Dangerous Man in America.” Who said that about you?

That was Henry Kissinger, and he was referring not to the Pentagon Papers, but to his fear – which was quite reasonable really but was in fact not the case – that I had documents on Nixon’s nuclear threats against North Vietnam. And he felt that I “had to be stopped at any cost,” that’s the rest of the quote, to keep me from putting out these other documents.

Did you say it was reasonable to assume you had them?

Yes, I knew the people who had access to them, and had helped generate them. Those people had resigned over Cambodia some months earlier. I wish they had given those documents to me, and they could have, but they didn’t.

I’ve always been under the impression that your release of the Pentagon Papers, and those recently published about the nuclear threat, was due to your allegiance to a higher loyalty, and not realpolitik. Would that be a fair way to put it?

It was allegiance to my oath, to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. You can call it a higher loyalty, but that is the oath that we take, everybody in the armed services and the government, and not to any lesser loyalty, that’s the only oath we take.

Seems like we still can use more of that loyalty.

Yes, absolutely. I’d been violating it for a long time, as had the presidents I served and everybody I worked with. We’d all been violating that oath by keeping silent when we knew the president was lying us into war, and continuing the war.

Was there a moment when you said you have to do this, get the truth out about it all?

The revelation was that this was a reasonable and right thing to do. And I got that directly from the example of young Americans who were going to prison as an act of non-violent protest against the war, ready to pay with their own freedom to make that message, that the war was wrong. That put it my head that it was something I could do, and should do. Without their example, I wouldn’t have thought of doing what I did do.

You’ve expressed admiration for Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning. Would any leaker earn your respect, or is it someone whose release of information advances the cause of peace?

I don’t know of any leaker who has leaked information that they knew to be untrue, in other words they just lied. That’s for presidents to do. However, leakers do put out information without authorization for a great variety of reasons, not always admirable or even credible.

But when you say “whistle-blower,” that’s a special form of leaker, a relatively rare kind, where somebody’s putting out information … about wrong-doing, or reckless or dangerous or criminal behavior, by their own team or their own party or their agency, information that risks their own membership in that organization, or their own career. And possibly risks prison.

So it’s “whistle blowing” that earns your respect.

That motive is something I respect, I do respect, even when I might not agree with the views of the particular person. But I could respect their willingness to risk their career to get this information to the public.

But not all leaks are equal.

I’m not saying there should be no secrets – I don’t believe that. Therefore I’m not saying that every revelation of a secret is admirable, good and effective. No, I definitely think there have been bad leaks. But if you were to look at that smaller set of whistle-blowers, people who have leaked to prevent wrong doing, there haven’t been too many bad ones, but in principle there could be.

Are you working on anything else now?

As a matter of fact, I just minutes ago answered an email from my editor. I’m doing an “afterword” for my book when it comes out in paperback in December this year; the afterword has to be in by mid-July. My editor said, “I’m curious to know what you’ll be saying in the afterward, given this rollercoaster we’re on.”

And I wrote her back saying I’m curious to know what stage of the rollercoaster we’ll be on – whether the Korea summit will be on in June, and whether or not it’s on, will there or will there not be imminent prospects of nuclear war.

I think I’ll know better on that by late June. And then it’s vacation time.

2018-06-01 Democracy in Europe Movement 2025

 Baltasar Garzon  No Responses »
Jun 012018
 

I want to take a closer look at this Democracy in Europe Movement.   I see where the Spanish Judge, Baltasar Garzon is part of it.

Click on the small text under the Title of this posting, the category “Baltasar Garzon”,  to generate a list of postings related to him. The first is

2009-03-31 Will a Spanish Judge Bring Bush-Era Figures to Justice?    (torture at Guantanamo Bay)

He has pushed for prosecution of transnational corporations.

Earlier, Garzon played a significant role in tackling the brutal military dictator of Chile,  Augusto Pinochet.  Not all accounts tell of Garzon’s role.

Pinochet’s regime was responsible for various human rights abuses during its reign, including murder and torture of political opponents. According to a government commission report that included testimony from more than 30,000 people, Pinochet’s government killed at least 3,197 people and tortured about 29,000. Two-thirds of the cases listed in the report happened in 1973.[151]   (Wikipedia)

I will spare you the details of the sadism and the horror.

Maybe – – I don’t know – – the difficulty in stopping Pinochet, and bringing him to trial ?:  it was a CIA-backed coup that put Pinochet in power, in the first place, in 1973. 

At any rate,  if Baltasar Garzon is involved,  I am interested.  He seems to me to be a man of integrity and courage.

DiEM25 salutes the Spanish parliament’s decision to move past Rajoy to a new era of change

2018-05-30 Opinion Say hello to Justin Trudeau, the world’s newest oil executive, The Guardian, Bill McKibbon

 Climate  No Responses »
May 302018
 

The Canadian prime minister presents himself as a climate hero. By promising to nationalise the Kinder Morgan pipeline, he reveals his true self

justin trudeau
‘Trudeau is banking on the fact that his liberal charm will soothe things over.’ Photograph: Chris Wattie/Reuters

 

 

In case anyone wondered, this is how the world ends: with the cutest, progressivest, boybandiest leader in the world going fully in the tank for the oil industry.

 

Justin Trudeau’s government announced on Tuesday that it would nationalize the Kinder Morgan pipeline running from the tar sands of Alberta to the tidewater of British Columbia. It will fork over at least $4.5bn in Canadian taxpayers’ money for the right to own a 60-year-old pipe that springs leaks regularly, and for the right to push through a second pipeline on the same route – a proposal that has provoked strong opposition.

 

That opposition has come from three main sources. First are many of Canada’s First Nations groups, who don’t want their land used for this purpose without their permission, and who fear the effects of oil spills on the oceans and forests they depend on. Second are the residents of Canada’s west coast, who don’t want hundreds of additional tankers plying the narrow inlets around Vancouver on the theory that eventually there’s going to be an oil spill. And third are climate scientists, who point out that even if Trudeau’s pipeline doesn’t spill oil into the ocean, it will spill carbon into the atmosphere.

 

Lots of carbon: Trudeau told oil executives last year that “no country would find 173bn barrels of oil in the ground and just leave it there”. That’s apparently how much he plans to dig up and burn – and if he’s successful, the one half of 1% of the planet that is Canadian will have awarded to itself almost one-third of the remaining carbon budget between us and the 1.5 degree rise in temperature the planet drew as a red line in Paris. There’s no way of spinning the math that makes that okay – Canadians already emit more carbon per capita than Americans. Hell, than Saudi Arabians.

 

Is this a clever financial decision that will somehow make Canada rich? Certainly not in the long run. Cleaning up the tar sands complex in Alberta – the biggest, ugliest scar on the surface of the earth – is already estimated to cost more than the total revenues generated by all the oil that’s come out of the ground. Meanwhile, when something goes wrong, Canada is now on the hook: when BP tarred the Gulf of Mexico, the US was at least able to exact billions of dollars in fines to help with the cleanup. Canada will get to sue itself.

 

No, this is simply a scared prime minister playing politics. He’s worried about the reaction in Alberta if the pipe is not built, and so he has mortgaged his credibility. His predecessor, Stephen Harper, probably would not have dared try – the outcry from environmentalists and First Nations would have been too overwhelming. But Trudeau is banking on the fact that his liberal charm will soothe things over. Since he’s got Trump to point to – a true climate denier – maybe he’ll get away with it.

 

But it seems like a bad bet to me. Faced with the same situation – a revolt over the Keystone XL pipeline – Barack Obama delayed for several years to avoid antagonizing either side. He ultimately decided he couldn’t defend the climate cost of building it, and so became the first world leader to explicitly reject a big piece of infrastructure on global warming grounds. Trudeau has made the exact opposite call, and now we’ll see if pipeline opponents cave.

 

I was in Vancouver two weeks ago to help activists raise money for lawyers, and I would guess that the civil disobedience will continue – so far, two members of parliament have been arrested, an escalation we’ve never seen even in the States. Coast Salish elders have built a “watch house” along the pipeline route and, as at Standing Rock, other native activists have been pouring in – I’m guessing that making this petro-colonialism officially state sponsored will only harden people’s resolution. The showdown will be powerfully symbolic: kayaktivists, for instance, have paddled peacefully around the pipeline’s terminal, at least until Kinder Morgan put up an ugly razor wire barrier in the middle of the harbor.

 

Now it’s Trudeau who owns the razor wire, Trudeau who has to battle his own people. All in the name of pouring more carbon into the air, so he can make the oil companies back at the Alberta end of his pipe a little more money. We know now how history will remember Justin Trudeau: not as a dreamy progressive, but as one more pathetic employee of the richest, most reckless industry in the planet’s history.

“Les Miz”, a powerful call. “Do you hear the people sing?”

 Climate, Corruption, Empowerment, Non-Violent Resistance, Occupy Movement, Solidarity with the Warriors, Sustainability  No Responses »
May 282018
 
“Do You Hear the People Sing?”

– – – – – – – – – – – – –

You might take a few minutes for  2011-05-11   Revolution, song and youtube by Coco Love Alcorn (young Canadian), closely related.

– – – – – – – – – – – – –

BELOW:

  • the lyrics
  • the oil sands and this Kindermorgan is a reminder of the French Revolution
  • “20 different languages”
  •  flash mobs everywhere, “Do you hear the people sing?”
  • Rousing video , 17 Jean Valjeans from just some of the worldwide productions assembled on one stage.  Large choir and more cast near the end.  Canada represented by Michael Burgess

– – – – – – – – – – – – –

LYRICS, LES MISERABLES

“Do You Hear The People Sing?”

[Enjolras:]
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!

[Combeferre:]
Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?

[Courfeyrac:]
Then join in the fight
That will give you the right to be free!

[All:]
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!

[Feuilly:]
Will you give all you can give
So that our banner may advance?
Some will fall and some will live
Will you stand up and take your chance?
The blood of the martyrs
Will water the meadows of France!

[All:]
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes

– – – – – – – – – –

the oil sands and this Kindermorgan is a reminder of the French Revolution

My friend who has learning disabilities  likes “Les Miserables”,  the musical.  She has seen it, and played it many times over.  Auditory memory serves her quite well.  Internet searches are aided by spell check.  Today, she left a phone message:

Just to let you know that the oil sands and this Kindermorgan is a reminder of the French Revolution.  When angry men or people start together, remember that scene where they all come in with one voice to be heard  I don’t know  In Canada it is to say no more destruction   It is Les Miz, it’s the 2nd half,  it’s do you hear the yells of angry men,  it’s the 2nd song.    So I think it may be a good idea to listen to that and take the French Revolution that’s right now in 20 different languages.  I think now it’s time that we say enough to Trudeau.   Bye.

 

I googled “Les Miz yells of angry men“.

Up came the powerful youtube video, excerpted directly from the film Les Miserables,  “Do You Hear the People Sing?”

The 2nd line of the song is    “Singing a song of angry men“.     See the video above.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

“20 different languages”

Until I spoke with my friend, I didn’t understand that she had found a DIFFERENT youtube of the song – – her reference to “20 different languages”.

Back to google, and up comes the same song, sung by multiple Jean Valjeans, from different countries, in different languages.

My friend understands that Climate Change is a huge challenge.  She understands that it’s a stupid society that allows the bees to be killed (she works on a farm that grows herbs, vegetables, hay for the sheep, cattle.  They plant, weed, grow and harvest.   She sees another pollinator, humming birds, almost every day in the summertime.  During the previous two summers,  one was a regular visitor to her window.  She knows that the “neonic” chemicals kill song birds, as well as bees.  They kill hummingbirds, too?

She connected “the angry men” in Les Miz to the anger over Government failure to do what it’s supposed to do:   Just to let you know that the oil sands and this Kindermorgan is a reminder of the French Revolution.

“Do You Hear the People Sing” is being heard by people all over the world, in many different languages.   In our phone conversation, she told me that we are on the brink of a Revolution, just like in Les Miz.   I don’t think she knows what followed the French Revolution – – the Reign of Terror.

This time around, people who have been working for decades to establish new and better pathways, in combination with today’s connectedness, will do a better job of making the transition to something better.

For the sake of the new life being born by young mothers today,  I hope I’m right!

– – – – – – – – – –

 Flash mobs everywhere, “Do you hear the people sing”

LATER:   I stumbled on a flash mob video of “Do you hear the people sing?”.  Didn’t have time to add it here.   Today, June 14, I went back to find it.  I googled “youtube flash mob do you hear the people sing?”.   The list of flash mobs is long.  The song has been sung and marched in many different places.  I had no idea.

So I think it may be a good idea to listen . . . .  yes!

– – – – – – – – – –

Rousing video , 17 Jean Valjeans from just some of the worldwide productions assembled on one stage.

Large choir and more cast near the end.  Canada represented by Michael Burgess

17 Jean Valjeans “Les Miserables”

 

2018-05-16 Water: Bowser residents protest marine sewage outfall plan, Parksville Qualicum Beach News, Michael Briones

 Water Bowser BC Sewage Treatment Plant  No Responses »
May 242018
 

This is a local issue, but one that affects everyone.

Please see the  “Comments” (from the newspaper)  at the bottom of this posting.

Water and/or Oceans people:  please weigh in at

URL:      https://www.pqbnews.com/news/bowser-residents-protest-marine-sewage-outfall-plan/

with information.

I, too, will add an on-line Comment,  but don’t have time at the moment.

Thanks!   Sandra

 

Michael Briones photo Angry residents at the public information meeting at the Lighthouse Community Centre May 16 express their disappointment to the Regional District of Nanaimo board chair Bill Veenhof and staff on the marine outfall option of the Bowser Sewage Project.

 

More than 100 people showed up at the public information meeting on the proposed rezoning of two properties in Electoral Area H to permit construction of a wastewater treatment facility.

The Regional District of Nanaimo hosted the meeting at the Lighthouse Community Centre May 16 to collect input and feedback from residents about rezoning properties on Pitt Road and Shaughnessy Drive to allow a wastewater treatment plant, one of the three components of the $10.7-million Bowser Sewage Project. The other two are a sewer collection system and marine outfall for treated effluent.

However, a majority of the residents whose properties are not going to be hooking up to the Bowser sanitary sewer area used the occasion to protest the RDN’s plan to discharge treated wastewater into the Strait of Georgia. Some armed with signs and placards, they overwhelmingly told RDN chair and Area H director Bill Veenhof, “we don’t want you dumping sewage into the bay.”

Veenhof and staff faced a barrage of difficult questions and harsh criticisms during the question-and-answer period. One by one, residents conveyed disappointment and anger over the marine outfall option that they said would impact those who are not going to be involve in the sewage service. Only 107 parcels from the Bowser village centre will benefit from it. The property owners in the service area were the only ones consulted and took part in the petition process. Of those, 67 per cent voted in favour of the project.

The irate residents demanded the RDN explore a land disposal solution. Only one person that spoke at the meeting favoured the marine outfall and would not support effluent to be discharged on land as it would threaten the aquifer and region’s drinking water. Veenhof said there just not any suitable land available for ground disposal.

The wastewater treatment plant will be designed to eliminate the hazards to human health and the environment. It will be a secondary treatment facility with ultraviolet disinfection. Veenhof said the treatment plant effluent will be cleaner than provincial and federal regulatory standards. The pipe length of the outfall was also extended and will be 400 metres longer than the orginal length of 2,700 metres.

Area H Residents Association executive director Bryan Holyk told Veenhof he represents hundreds of his constituents “that you are not listening to.” Holyk called the RDN’s idea of a consultation process a “sham.”

“They know it. They designed it that way,” said Holyk. “They showed us a type of arrogance that shows they’ve lost sight of one important fact. We are the constituents and they work for us. I, for one, am tired of being ignored by the people we elected to work for us. What we’re seeing here tonight is a collective outrage of a community that realizes it has been misled, manipulated and duped by an out-of-touch local government which its intent to fast-track a sewage infrastructure project that will make Bowser yet another RDN sewage hub. It has serious, long-term consequences to ocean ecology and our reputation here as responsible citizens.”

Holyk said he and hundreds of his members are against the rezoning.

Joyce McLelland said she is not opposed to the project but is against the marine outfall. She asked who gets to vote on the rezoning. Veenhof replied the RDN board does.

“So the answer is we don’t get to vote on the rezoning,” McLelland asked. “So being here is just for show.”

Veenhof said that he understands that they don’t agree with the marine outfall but stated there are those who are in favour of it. Residents asked where they were and why they were not in the meeting.

The project was awarded $7.6 million from the Clean Water and Wastewater fund in March, 2017, with the condition that the sewer system be in place by March 31, 2019.

The balance of the cost will be paid for by four developers through advance development cost charges totalling $2.6 million for future projects. The rest would be shouldered by residents in the service area through taxation.

Veenhof said all the input and feedback they’ve received will be presented to the RDN board, which will then vote on the rezoning. He indicated that the chosen properties were the only ones they found suitable on which to build a wastewater treatment plant.

Send story tips to: michael.briones@pqbnews.com

Michael Briones photo Residents carried posters and signs at the public information meeting at the Lighthouse Community Centre May 16 protesting the Regional District of Nanaimo’s marine outfall option of the Bowser Sewage Project.

Horsetale Farmer ·

Administração at Canadá
I was there; more like 350 people opposed. No one seemed opposed to the idea of a sewage plant-everyone agrees that dumping the effluent into the ocean, even with “secondary treatment” is archaic. The RDN is not listening.
Bill is incorrect, in that the RDN doesn’t get to “vote” on it, at least without a proper Public Hearing. The meeting of last Wednesday was an information meeting, whose basic purpose is dampen public energy, making people think that it’s “hopeless”. The RDN needs to have a Public Hearing, where opinions are recorded, before the third reading. Strategically, the RDN will try to do this certainly before the next election, and indeed, probably during the summer when they think people’s attention will not be focused, or will in fact be away from home. Renewing the petition that had 600 names is a good place to start, as that can be added as evidence to how the RDN board is ignoring the wishes and values of the majority of people in this area. The residents of Area H deserve much more than the narrow minded, mendacious group called the RDN board, are delivering. I would invite the RDN board and developers to enjoy the first cup of effluent to gush from the pipe to demonstrate how clean it is. Remember, “Flush twice, its a long way to Nanaimo”
Like · Reply · 2d

Tom Gates ·

Works at SELF
Young-Sun, this is democracy in action as shown by the massive anti-effluent turn-out at the May 16 meeting. This archaic RDN practice will be in all our backyards, and will be exported outside Bowser over two sensitive coho streams, over high slope banks, and across the pink salmon public bathing beach, with an outfall adjacent a scallop farm. A DFO shellfish closure will ensue and there are serious public health consequences. Cumulative effects in enclosed waters that flush only one time per year are likely to accrue as population and effluent volumes are routinely increased. Secondary treatment with UV will not meet the reductions of pathogenic organisms required to ‘ensure’ environmental health, and cannot remove a toxic cocktail of ecosystem altering chemicals. Modern on-land disposal which is indeed feasible as per the Chatwin and Kala Geocsciences 2011 reports, does filter and remove toxigenic and ecosystem altering components. Regrowth of bacteria (E.Coli) has been confirmed in UV systems at Carleton University (2017) and a long list of pathogenic organisms remain viable after secondary treatment and UV ‘disinfection’. “Ocean Sewage in 2018, What are you thinking?”
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Young-Sun Yoo

An example of why democracy fails – the lowest common denominator protesting things they can barely grasp. A skull & crossbones poster board protesting wastewater that has undergone primary and secondary treatment, and been heavily diluted into ocean water? Seriously? NIMBYism at it’s worst, and it will drag Vancouver Island into the stone age.
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Tom Murphy

I for one dont agree with your comment .
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Carrie Powell

How dare you call this ‘NIMBYism at its worst!’ Do you not know how much of Canada’s seafood is produced in these waters and do you not know that strong currents will move that so-called ‘treated wastewater’ all along our coast? How is it NIMBYism to want to protect something that affects us all? Shame on you!
Like · Reply · 2d

Young-Sun Yoo

Carrie Powell Your manufactured outrage at my comment is amusing at best, and irresponsible at worst. I’ve worked in fisheries/aquaculture off the coast of Fanny Bay for over 5 years, so I suspect I know the marine environment a lot better than you think. I also believe you vastly overestimate both the damage caused by secondary treated wastewater, and your understanding of it. Shame on me for having a background in marine biology & biochemistry, and for putting pseudo-intellectual nimbys in their place.
Like · Reply · 1 · 1d

Chris Mclean ·

Qualicum Beach Senior Secondary (QBSS)
RDN will do what they want same as the building inspection we voted against it they still forced it on us .ime to pull out of RDN our directors are ust pupits its all about tax monies .
Like · Reply · 2d

Dave Searle ·

Works at Retired
What developers and what is being constructed?
Like · Reply · 3d

2010-05-05 The Pachamama Alliance, “A New Dream” Youtube, 7 minutes

 Change, Sustainability  No Responses »
May 232018
 

 

John Perkins is a co-founder of the Pachamama Alliance (https://www.pachamama.org/john-perkins).   I am a fan of Perkins, his work and his book “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man“.

A 6 minute Youtube by Paul Hawken, plays automatically after the above.  Paul Hawken is the author of “Natural Capital” and “Blessed Unrest“.

There are a number of Youtubes about the Pachamama Alliance.

 

2018-05-21 Global biomass, The Guardian

 Climate, Sustainability  No Responses »
May 232018
 

Thanks to Hart for Global biomass.

This web page (profile, Environment Editor, The Guardian)  has thumbnails for May postings.   There are some very important articles.

https://www.theguardian.com/profile/damiancarrington

 

Humans just 0.01% of all life but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals – study

Groundbreaking assessment of all life on Earth reveals humanity’s surprisingly tiny part in it as well as our disproportionate impact

Damian Carrington Environment editor

@dpcarrington

Mon 21 May 2018 20.00 BST Last modified on Tue 22 May 2018 15.10 BST

Humankind is revealed as simultaneously insignificant and utterly dominant in the grand scheme of life on Earth by a groundbreaking new assessment of all life on the planet.

The world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things, according to the study. Yet since the dawn of civilisation, humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of plants, while livestock kept by humans abounds.

The new work is the first comprehensive estimate of the weight of every class of living creature and overturns some long-held assumptions. Bacteria are indeed a major life form – 13% of everything – but plants overshadow everything, representing 82% of all living matter. All other creatures, from insects to fungi, to fish and animals, make up just 5% of the world’s biomass.

Another surprise is that the teeming life revealed in the oceans by the recent BBC television series Blue Planet II turns out to represent just 1% of all biomass. The vast majority of life is land-based and a large chunk – an eighth – is bacteria buried deep below the surface.

“I was shocked to find there wasn’t already a comprehensive, holistic estimate of all the different components of biomass,” said Prof Ron Milo, at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, who led the work, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“I would hope this gives people a perspective on the very dominant role that humanity now plays on Earth,” he said, adding that he now chooses to eat less meat due to the huge environmental impact of livestock.

The transformation of the planet by human activity has led scientists to the brink of declaring a new geological era – the Anthropocene. One suggested marker for this change are the bones of the domestic chicken, now ubiquitous across the globe.

The new work reveals that farmed poultry today makes up 70% of all birds on the planet, with just 30% being wild. The picture is even more stark for mammals – 60% of all mammals on Earth are livestock, mostly cattle and pigs, 36% are human and just 4% are wild animals.

“It is pretty staggering,” said Milo. “In wildlife films, we see flocks of birds, of every kind, in vast amounts, and then when we did the analysis we found there are [far] more domesticated birds.”

The destruction of wild habitat for farming, logging and development has resulted in the start of what many scientists consider the sixth mass extinction of life to occur in the Earth’s four billion year history. About half the Earth’s animals are thought to have been lost in the last 50 years.

But comparison of the new estimates with those for the time before humans became farmers and the industrial revolution began reveal the full extent of the huge decline. Just one-sixth of wild mammals, from mice to elephants, remain, surprising even the scientists. In the oceans, three centuries of whaling has left just a fifth of marine mammals in the oceans.

“It is definitely striking, our disproportionate place on Earth,” said Milo. “When I do a puzzle with my daughters, there is usually an elephant next to a giraffe next to a rhino. But if I was trying to give them a more realistic sense of the world, it would be a cow next to a cow next to a cow and then a chicken.”

Despite humanity’s supremacy, in weight terms Homo sapiens is puny. Viruses alone have a combined weight three times that of humans, as do worms. Fish are 12 times greater than people and fungi 200 times as large.

But our impact on the natural world remains immense, said Milo, particularly in what we choose to eat: “Our dietary choices have a vast effect on the habitats of animals, plants and other organisms.”

“I would hope people would take this [work] as part of their world view of how they consume,” he said. ”I have not become vegetarian, but I do take the environmental impact into my decision making, so it helps me think, do I want to choose beef or poultry or use tofu instead?”

The researchers calculated the biomass estimates using data from hundreds of studies, which often used modern techniques, such as satellite remote sensing that can scan great areas, and gene sequencing that can unravel the myriad organisms in the microscopic world.

They started by assessing the biomass of a class of organisms and then they determined which environments such life could live in across the world to create a global total. They used carbon as the key measure and found all life contains 550bn tonnes of the element. The researchers acknowledge that substantial uncertainties remain in particular estimates, especially for bacteria deep underground, but say the work presents a useful overview.

Paul Falkowski, at Rutgers University in the US and not part of the research team, said: “The study is, to my knowledge, the first comprehensive analysis of the biomass distribution of all organisms – including viruses – on Earth.”

“There are two major takeaways from this paper,” he said. “First, humans are extremely efficient in exploiting natural resources. Humans have culled, and in some cases eradicated, wild mammals for food or pleasure in virtually all continents. Second, the biomass of terrestrial plants overwhelmingly dominates on a global scale – and most of that biomass is in the form of wood.”

2018-05-20 For your selection

 For your selection (summary list recent postings)  No Responses »
May 202018
 

2018-05-19    Summary, NO, Health Canada DID NOT decide to de-register one of the chemicals linked to death of bees and song birds (the neonic “imidacloprid”)

The PMRA (Health Canada) received 46,000 communications about the need to stop the use of the “neonics”.  Through the petitioning, I emailed my MP on April 30, 2018 re the neonic.   He replied with information.   I responded with a 2nd email to him:

  • The PMRA quote provided in your reply is from March 7, 2017.
  • Your email to me is dated May 16, 2018, more than a year later.

My response documents what happened AFTER the March 7, 2017  statement by the PMRA (Health Canada) that a decision HAD been made to withdraw imidacloprid.  (You can imagine what happened!)

There will be no bees to sting you, if we can’t quickly get letters, phone calls, emails, LOTS of them,  to MP’s!

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2018-03   Federal Government, Report, “What we heard – Transforming Canada’s criminal justice system”

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2018-02-27   Canada’s largest integrated energy company has filed an application for a massive new oilsands project defying expectations of slowing growth in the oilsands, Financial Post     (In the context of the KinderMorgan Pipeline)

NOTE:   I “post”.  The number of hits is “0”.   Within minutes there are 2 hits.  Always.  Then there are 6 or 12.   . . .  25  . . .  I send notice of the posting to you – – that’s when the  number of hits starts rolling.

For this posting,  the number of hits is at 516 and I haven’t yet sent notice of it to you.    ? ?

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2018-05-01   David Orchard. The Kinger Morgan kowtow. Vancouver Sun.

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2018-04-30   Mueller Has Dozens of Inquiries for Trump in Broad Quest on Russia Ties and Obstruction, New York Times

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2018-04-30   Weedkiller found in granola and crackers, internal FDA emails show, The Guardian, by Carey Gillam

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018-04-29   Re pipeline, the Spill Regulations, my input to public consultations

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2018-04-27   Maybe this can be of assistance re the pipeline?

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2018-04-27   For your selection
I am very sorry.  I did not get these circulated to you earlier:
  1.    2018-04-23  Nuclear: In support of Grand Chief Patrick Madahbee, email to CBC, The Current.   Base for Letter to Government officials.

I hope that the posting makes clear the enormity of the COSTS that Canadians will be required to cover, if we don’t get the information spread far and wide.   We will be further hosed by the uranium/nuclear industry.   It’s not too hard to figure out,  if you have the information.

Our network has information that was missing from the interview.  Chief Madahbee did a great job.  The additional documentation should be helpful to him,  and to the CBC.   And to whoever else you can add, including your MP.

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2.   2018-04-21   Poisons in Water, cholera, norovirus: Out In The Open, CBC Radio, Letter to host Piya Chattopadhyay.

In 2005 when I received a phone call requesting me to report to TB Control (after being very sick),  I almost said,  “The test results must have been mixed up.   I’m white, middle-class”.   I also thought that TB had been eradicated from Canada, by aggressive programs in the 1950’s.   I remember the TB van that came to every small town;  it was foreign and a bit scary when I was young.

I learned in 2005 that there is TB in Canada,  we just don’t hear about it – – it’s encountered in drug treatment programmes, in First Nations communities, and in many of the places that provide over-night shelter for those who don’t have homes.   Some choose not to use the shelters for that reason.

Conclude:  it doesn’t make sense NOT to look after the people in our communities, if only for one reason – –  you are dreaming if you think dis-ease can be confined, any more than   . . .  the example in this posting,  WATER can be confined.   I, white, middle class, healthy, don’t do risky behaviours (as long as the propagandists – and some politicians – are unsuccessful in their efforts to make “activists” into “terrorists” or, heaven forbid, “environmentalists”!  (reminds me of the Nazi success in making “Polish” synonymous with “vermin” and the long-lasting effects of that).

Dawn Martin-Hill, a First Nations professor, was interviewed about the water situation on the Six Nations Reserve not far from Hamilton.   How long do you think we can hear about water issues in First Nations communities before we start hearing about serious water issues in “our” water?

I think it’s damn serious when there’s cholera in Canadian waters and norovirus – – a stones’ throw from me, white, middle-class to boot.   There are not only the effects on people who eat food grown in that water:  lots of people swim in the same water.   I can’t swim without getting water in my eyes, ears, and mouth.   The “most plausible” cause of the cholera and the norovirus offshore Vancouver Island, BC, is “human sewage in the marine environment”.   . . .   see  Poisons in Water, cholera, norovirus:  Out In The Open, CBC Radio, Letter to host Piya Chattopadhyay.

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3.   New book, “Moving Beyond: Neo-liberalism in Saskatchewan”, by Jim Harding. 58 pages, available as a free download.

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4.   2018-04-14  What’s really criminal in Canada’s Kinder Morgan pipeline debacle, by Martyn Brown, in the “straight”

(Brown was former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell’s long-serving chief of staff, the top strategic adviser to three provincial party leaders, and a former deputy minister of tourism, trade, and investment. He also served as the B.C. Liberals’ public campaign director in 2001, 2005, and 2009, and in addition to his other extensive campaign experience, he was the principal author of four election platforms.)

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 5.   2018-04-09   Killer robots: pressure builds for ban as governments meet, the Guardian

2018-04-12 (updated 04-16) Lawsuit blaming pesticides for bee deaths will go ahead, CP (neonics, imidacloprid, PMRA)

 Corruption, Sustainability, Take back the University, Water  No Responses »
May 192018
 

RELATED:    2018-05-19   Summary, NO, Health Canada DID NOT de-register the neonic imidacloprid

Lawsuit blaming pesticides for bee deaths will go ahead
Environmental groups say lawsuit will proceed to full hearing after appeal failed
The Canadian Press

A lawsuit that blames pesticides for the collapse of bee populations will go ahead following a Federal Court ruling Thursday. (University of Guelph Honey Bee Research Centre)

Environmental groups say a Federal Court ruling will allow a lawsuit aimed at pesticides blamed for damaging bee populations to go to a full hearing.

They say the decision, released this morning, dismissed an appeal by the federal government and chemical companies to block the case against the commonly used pesticides.

Many studies have found the pesticides, commonly called neonics, are toxic to bees that pollinate many of Canada’s most important food crops.

 

The environmental groups say Health Canada has repeatedly licenced the chemicals despite never getting complete safety information on them from the manufacturers and they want the permits for the chemicals to be revoked.

Bee populations have been in serious decline since about 2006.

Neonics use is severely restricted in Europe and Health Canada has also recently proposed new restrictions.

(INSERT:  update – – see  Summary, NO, Health Canada DID NOT de-register the neonic imidacloprid)

 

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