TheTyee.ca – Page 5

Kristian Lindhardt says Canada’s laws stifle press freedom afforded ‘during every crisis.’

Danish documentary-maker Kristian Lindhardt works with his country’s version of the CBC and has visited BC many times working on his documentary about the the Tsleil Waututh First Nation’s opposition to the TMX pipeline expansion. Photo: Supplied

When Danish journalist Kristian Lindhardt arrived at the Vancouver airport on Friday, he knew he would face additional levels of border scrutiny because of the coronavirus. Lindhardt wasn’t too concerned, though, because he has international press credentials from Denmark’s version of CBC and a statement from Chief Reuben George of the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation explaining that Lindhardt is here to report on the Trans Mountain pipeline. Lindhardt had also made all the necessary arrangements for a 14-day quarantine in Vancouver.

But just as Lindhardt was about to get through customs a border guard pulled him aside. The guard questioned him for hours and made him sign a document promising to fly back to Denmark today. “I asked what happens if I don’t sign them,” Lindhardt told The Tyee over the phone Saturday morning, just hours before his flight back to Europe was set to depart. “And he said he would detain me in a jail cell.”

The B.C. government currently deems “newspapers, television, radio, call centres, online news outlets and other media services” as essential work. But there is no direction from the federal government saying journalists must be let into the country, according to Green Party MP and former leader of the party Elizabeth May, who has looked into the issue. At the end of the day, it’s up to individual border guards to decide who can enter and who can’t.

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End the Navy War Games in the Pacific Ocean

August 14, 2020

End the Navy War Games in the Pacific Ocean

They dirty our waters, threaten health and have harmed women and girls. Cancel RIMPAC.

The *HMCS Winnipeg* is one of two Canadian warships that recently departed BC to participate in the 2020 RIMPAC war games. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Two Canadian warships, the HMCS Regina and the HMCS Winnipeg, recently left to participate in the Exercise Rim of the Pacific. It’s the largest naval war game in the world and takes place across the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.

In September, people all over BC are meeting to talk about what’s on their minds. You should join them.

RIMPAC is a biennial military exercise led by the United States navy to enhance war readiness and interoperability among allied countries. The navies of 25 nations participate and deploy surface ships, aircraft, submarines and personnel. Canada has participated since RIMPAC’s inception in 1971.

This year, the Royal Canadian Navy has sent two missile-laden frigates with 500 sailors and torpedo-carrying Cyclone helicopters from its Esquimalt base in B.C. to Hawaii.

During RIMPAC, the navies jointly conduct live-fire testing, ship-sinking, submarine warfare and amphibious assault. They also engage in air force training, precision bombing and urban warfare practice. The exercise is a massive show of force by western navies in the Pacific region and provocative to China, which has been prohibited from participating.

The multinational exercise is typically held for six weeks from June to August. However, the pandemic means this year’s RIMPAC was scaled down to a two-week period from Aug. 17 to 31 and will be modified to mostly at-sea training.

But with our oceans in grave peril and the pandemic still raging, RIMPAC should be permanently cancelled. For over five decades, Hawaiians have protested this large-scale naval exercise citing the adverse environmental and social impacts. Canadians must join their protest and pressure our government to not participate.

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Thousands of Quakes, Tied to Fracking, Keep Shaking the Site C Dam Region

August 14, 2020

Thousands of Quakes, Tied to Fracking, Keep Shaking the Site C Dam Region

Several recent reports on the tremors add to concerns about the mega-project’s stability.

An artist’s rendering of the Site C Dam upon completion, a vision of the future rattled by thousands of tremors in the region triggered by fracking. Image via BC Hydro.

Building the Site C dam in northeastern British Columbia is proving more difficult than officials predicted due to unstable ground on the northern bank. Adding to concerns: myriad earthquakes.

For nearly a decade, The Tyee has reported on a rising number of earthquakes caused by the hydraulic fracturing of shale formations in the region. Now, new studies put the number of such tremors in recent years in the many thousands, raising more worries about the future of the mega-project.

Researchers warn the shaking could become strong enough to crumble critical infrastructure such as roads, high-rise buildings — and dams.

B.C.’s regulatory practices try to limit fracking after small earthquakes have been triggered. But that’s “not sufficient to protect critical or vulnerable infrastructure that have unacceptable failure consequences,” noted seismic hazard expert Gail Atkinson in the May 7 issue of Nature Reviews.

No one can yet predict frack-triggered quakes before they happen, and “hazard forecasting” remains a “critical area of research.”

Another study, released this week by researcher Ben Parfitt at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, took data from federal earthquake catalogues to show how many tremors the fracking industry is producing near the Site C dam.

The numbers are staggering. Between 2017 and 2018 alone, the industry triggered 6,551 earthquakes greater than 0.8 magnitude in the region near the troubled mega-project with a price estimate of $12 billion and rising.

Drilling by Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., for example, triggered a magnitude 4.6 earthquake in November 2018 that forced the evacuation of the Site C Dam site. It was followed by magnitude 3.5 and 4 events after the fracking ceased.

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Alberta’s Environment Minister Cheered on Coal Mining in New Areas before Restrictions Were Dropped

August 13, 2020

Alberta’s Environment Minister Cheered on Coal Mining in New Areas before Restrictions Were Dropped

Months before ending the Coal Policy, the Kenney government issued letters of support for open-pit projects.

Coal mining along Alberta’s Rockies. Months before a large zone along the eastern slopes was opened to coal strip mining, two Alberta ministers endorsed an Australian firm’s plans for the protected lands. Photo via Shutterstock.

Half a year before the Alberta government abruptly rescinded a 44-year-old policy protecting its Rocky Mountain flanks from coal open-pit mining, its ministers were already sending “letters of support” to a new Australian coal mining corporation trying to raise capital on the open market.

Valory Resources Inc. is just one of several Australian firms planning to excavate open-pit coal mines along the Rockies’ eastern slopes, a key source of fresh water previously off limits to surface mining until last June.

That’s when the Kenney government cancelled the protective Coal Policy established in 1976. Under the cover of the pandemic, it did so with no public consultation.

The letters of support — one from Alberta’s minister of tourism and the other from the minister of environment — indicate Valory’s plans were already understood and favoured by the Kenney government well before it changed regulations to make them possible.

Valory, a private company now trying to raise capital for the project, displays the letters in its promotional materials (see page 24 in this pdf).

In a presentation to the town of Rocky Mountain House in central Alberta last month, Valory Resources boasted that it had “recently met with key members of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta and received strong statements of support… which indicates that the Alberta provincial government are ‘pro-development and open for business.’”

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Job Loss Disaster Slams Low-Wage, Young Workers

May 12, 2020

Job Loss Disaster Slams Low-Wage, Young Workers

April numbers show three million lost jobs, while another 2.5 million people had their hours cut in half.

‘Half of all those earning $14 an hour or less have been laid off or have lost all their hours.’ Photo by Joshua Berson.

We thought the March jobless numbers were bad, but it is almost a good news story compared to what we saw Friday in the April figures.

The unprecedented closure of major sections of Canada’s economy in mid-March is finally being reflected in the jobless numbers. Of course, without those closures we would be in a historic health crisis with emergency rooms overflowing and our health system shutting down, as we saw elsewhere.

In that sense, this shutdown was exactly the right thing to do. I look at these unprecedented joblessness numbers and think: this is how we protected many workers from contracting the virus — though they sacrificed their income.

The official unemployment rate for April is 13 per cent. This is a historic high. There was a single month, December 1982, when unemployment was slightly higher at 13.1 per cent. But after that one month you’d have to go back to May 1936 at the end of the Great Depression to see anything similar. Put another way all jobs created since October 2005, 15 years ago, have been lost by April 2020. While the March data was collected as the shutdown was in progress during the third week of March, the April figures show the full impact of a month’s worth of pandemic lockdown.

There have been few precedents for April’s dramatic jump in the unemployment rate. Source: Statistics Canada.

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Global Boom, Pandemic, Crash: Is History Just Repeating Itself?

May 7, 2020

Global Boom, Pandemic, Crash: Is History Just Repeating Itself?

If Peter Turchin is right, we face the end of a 300-year cycle, as did previous far-flung empires.

The intensification of globalized networks creates more instability, insecurity and unpredictability. Epidemics can hasten the ends of ‘secular cycles’ for highly-interconnected civilizations. Image: Shutterstock.

The coronavirus pandemic is, among other things, a tribute to human ingenuity and our relentless pursuit of globalization, an impulse thousands of years old. Previous civilizations, from the Romans to the Mongols, traded aggressively and invaded new ecosystems. They, too, connected far-flung geographies in innovative ways. None of it, however, ended particularly well.

By trading in all manner of peoples, plants, germs and animals, these empires diligently tested the limits of globalization and its growing complexity by seeding their own disintegration.

The corona pandemic, a pretty mild affair in the scheme of things, is telling us that we are now in the middle of a historic cycle where hyper-connectivity combined with hyper-complexity could rapidly lead to decline, if not collapse.

In fact, pandemics are not black swans, but predictable and natural events that often appear like clockwork in the evolution of human empires. They trigger other crises or partner up with them.

These mass reversals often appear after periods of intense population growth and changes in population density just as an imperial adventure unknowingly begins its descent.

In the process of pruning human numbers, pandemics invariably play a significant role in the disintegration of civilizations. They reveal wealth inequalities and technical fragilities. In this regard pandemics announce both the ending and beginning of things. They can have both negative and positive effects.

Peter Turchin, a Russian historian, has long argued that civilizations expand and contract in distinct waves or what he calls “secular cycles” that last about 300 years.

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Alberta’s Meat Plant Workers Share Their Fears and Anger

May 3, 2020

Alberta’s Meat Plant Workers Share Their Fears and Anger

As Cargill prepares to reopen, voices from the frontlines of Canada’s largest COVID-19 outbreak.

Cargill Plant — Processing beef at the Cargill plant in High River, Alberta. Photo source: Cargill.

They fear the virus. They are concerned about the futures. They worry for their communities.

And they say neither the government nor two foreign-owned companies, which account for 70 per cent of the nation’s beef slaughtering capacity, are doing enough to ensure their safety.

They say the companies didn’t provide adequate protective gear for the people who butcher Canada’s beef until it was too late.

The Tyee interviewed five Alberta employees of two meat plants, parts of different international conglomerates. The people interviewed are members of a largely immigrant work force that speaks dozens of languages and now finds itself at the centre of the largest COVID-19 outbreak in Canada.

Those who work at the JBS meat-processing plant in Brooks wondered why it has never shut down in order to do a thorough disinfection and increase its safety measures.

Those who work at the Cargill meat-packing plant in High River said the company has lied about the protections provided, as well as compensation paid.

As one shared, “Why did this virus spread? It came from the fabrication floor where there is no airflow, and we are working elbow to elbow and there is no distancing. Where are the safety precautions? They said they did the safety precautions. No they didn’t.”

Now that worker and others fear returning to work when the Cargill plant reopens Monday. Among that plant’s employees, 921 out of 2,000 are now infected. At least seven workers are in hospital and five are in intensive care. One Cargill worker and a close contact have died.

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Traditional News Media Were Already Ill. COVID-19 Is Killing Some

May 1, 2020

Traditional News Media Were Already Ill. COVID-19 Is Killing Some

Report finds 48 community newspapers have closed and 100 have made cuts as pandemic hits ad revenue.

COVER.Trad-Media-Closure-Cuts.jpg — Pandemic has led to closures, layoffs and pay cuts at news media across Canada.

Local reporting is being kneecapped by pandemic-driven cuts to media outlets across B.C. at a time when community-specific, trustworthy reporting is vital to public health.

A project to map the impacts of COVID-19 on Canadian media paints a bleak picture of communities in Canada hurtling towards news poverty in the midst of a pandemic.

The project, which involves J-Source, the Local News Research Project at Ryerson University and the Canadian Association of Journalists, found 2,053 editorial and non-editorial staff have been laid off by media across Canada in the last six weeks. More than 100 outlets have been affected, with 48 community newspapers closing.

And experts say it is difficult to see how the already struggling industry could fully recover from such a blow.

In B.C., at least four media outlets have closed temporarily or permanently, and nine have cancelled some or all print editions or cut back on broadcasts.

Journalists at 16 publications in the province have been laid off and 14 outlets have cut or reduced hours for their reporters.

These include Glacier Media-owned community newspapers in the northern hubs of Dawson Creek, Prince George and Fort St. John, and Black Press Media-owned community papers across the Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley.

The pandemic-related cuts are only the latest blow, April Lindgren of the Local News Research Project told J-Source.

“To put the damage to the community newspaper sector in perspective, we know from the Local News Map that 215 community papers have been shut down in the last 12 years,” she said.

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Ignoring US Alarms, Alberta Meat Packers Spawned Canada’s Biggest Outbreak

April 25, 2020

Ignoring US Alarms, Alberta Meat Packers Spawned Canada’s Biggest Outbreak

As the virus gripped US plants, the union pleaded for a shutdown. They were rebuffed.

Cargill’s High River, Alta. meat-packing plant, shut down due to a deadly outbreak weeks after its union pleaded for a temporary closure and safer working conditions.

Canada’s largest outbreak of COVID-19 swept through two meat-packing plants in southern Alberta two weeks after the provincial government ignored union requests to temporarily close both of the plants.

And it mirrored a series of recent, well-documented hot-zone eruptions in meat plants in the United States.

More than 600 immigrant workers and community members have been infected while the disease has killed at least three people at Cargill’s High River plant and the JBS food plant in Brooks, Alta.

“The real issue here is a moral issue,” charged Thomas Hesse, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 401, which represents workers at the plants. “How do we as a society want to bring food to our tables?”

Rachel Notley, the former premier of Alberta, has called for a full public inquiry.The Tyee is supported by readers like you Join us and grow independent media in Canada

“It is unconscionable that we now have a situation where hundreds of people have contracted a deadly virus,” said Notley, who leads the NDP Official Opposition. “What kind of concerns put the lives of workers so low?” she asked on CBC Radio yesterday.

Alberta’s growing outbreaks follow in the wake of deadly events in the U.S. where meat-packing plants have become COVID-19 incubators.

The U.S. recorded its largest single cluster of cases at a pork-processing facility in Sioux Falls, South Dakota in early April. By the time the Chinese-owned facility closed for two weeks there were nearly 900 cases.

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For Oil and Its Dependents, It’s Code Blue

April 19, 2020

For Oil and Its Dependents, It’s Code Blue

The great price collapse of 2020 will topple companies and transform states.

Oil drop — Failing vital signs: Economists predict a depression after the pandemic. That will mean less energy spending, which translates into ongoing low energy prices that already no longer cover the cost of extraction in many places. Illustration for The Tyee by Christopher Cheung. Oil rig image: Creative Commons.

If oil has been laid low by the coronavirus, then the nations whose economies most depend on it might soon be on ventilators. By any prognosis the great oil price collapse of 2020 has pushed the world’s most volatile commodity into Code Blue.

No one expects oil, its peddlers or consumers to emerge wealthier or wiser from this crisis. Oil company bankruptcies, already happening before the pandemic, will escalate. And more petro states will begin to stumble, like Venezuela, down the rabbit hole of collapse.

The pandemic, combined with suicidal overproduction and a brief price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia, has reduced oil consumption and revenues on a scale that is mindboggling.

Prior to the pandemic, the world gulped about 100 million barrels a day, filling the atmosphere with destabilizing carbon. Today it sips somewhere between 65 million and 80 million barrels.

At least 20 to 30 per cent of global demand has vanished and nearly two dozen petro-producing countries including Canada have agreed to withhold nearly 10 million barrels from the market. Few expect this agreement will stop the price bleeding.

In fact, the price of Western Canadian Select or diluted bitumen remains below five dollars a barrel — cheaper than hand sanitizer. That’s a drop of more than 80 per cent compared to the month before.

Because the spending of oil fertilizes economic growth and expands national GDPs, most of the world’s economists now predict a long depression after the pandemic.

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FOI Documents Confirm RCMP Falsely Denied Using Facial Recognition Software

April 16, 2020

FOI Documents Confirm RCMP Falsely Denied Using Facial Recognition Software

Its contract with Clearview AI started in October, but the force was still denying using the controversial technology three months later.

RCMP denied using facial recognition to track Canadians. That wasn’t true. Illustration from Pixabay.

The RCMP denied using facial recognition software on Canadians three months after it had entered into a contract with controversial U.S. company Clearview AI, The Tyee has learned.

Documents obtained under a Freedom of Information request show an RCMP employee signed a “Requisition for goods, services and construction” form to fund a one-year contract with Clearview AI that began Oct. 29.

The RCMP refused to say whether it used Clearview AI when asked by The Tyee in January 2020.

And the force went further in an emailed statement in response to questions from the CBC, denying in an emailed statement that it used any facial recognition software.

“The RCMP does not currently use facial recognition software,” it said on Jan. 17. “However, we are aware that some municipal police services in Canada are using it.”The Tyee is supported by readers like you Join us and grow independent media in Canada

In fact, the RCMP’s $5,000 contract with Clearview had begun almost three months earlier.

The FOI documents show the RCMP justified the request based on the software’s successful use by U.S. police agencies.

“Clearview is a facial recognition tool that is currently being used by the child exploitation units at the FBI and Department of Homeland Security because of it’s [sic] advanced abilities,” the employee wrote.

If the request was not approved, the form stated, “Children will continue to be abused and exploited online.”

image atom

Despite Denials, RCMP Used Facial Recognition Program for 18 Years

“There will be no one to rescue them because the tool that could have been deployed to save them was not deemed important enough.”

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Despite Denials, RCMP Used Facial Recognition Program for 18 Years

March 10, 2020

Despite Denials, RCMP Used Facial Recognition Program for 18 Years

NDP critic calls on government to explain why RCMP falsely denied using Clearview AI technology.

Charlie-Angus — On Monday, NDP MP Charlie Angus called on the federal government to explain why the RCMP had denied using Clearview AI’s technology when several departments within the force were using it. Photo by Adrian Wyld, the Canadian Press.

Despite denials, the RCMP has been routinely using facial recognition technology since 2002, The Tyee has learned.

And the software continues to be used in British Columbia, the RCMP confirmed Monday.

Attention has been focused on the RCMP’s use of Clearview AI’scontroversial facial recognition software, which uses a database of billions of images scraped from social media. The technology allows police forces — and individuals and companies — to upload a photo and see any matching images on the web, along with links to where they appeared.

But The Tyee has learned the RCMP has been using facial recognition software for 18 years.

“The Computerized Arrest and Booking System (CABS) has been in use at the RCMP for many years,” spokesperson Catherine Fortin said in a written response to emailed questions. “Currently, it is only being used by the RCMP in B.C.”

The technology is used to store and compare faces of “charged persons” and to create photo lineups, said Fortin.

When the RCMP bought the system, the supplier said it provided “increased efficiency of surveillance and investigation activities” and “the ability to identify an individual within very large databases of images in seconds.”

The RCMP did not respond to a question about how the use of the software could be reconciled with its previous claims it was not using facial recognition technology.

In July 2019, the RCMP told The Tyee it was not using such software.

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Diana Beresford-Kroeger on the Flawed Thinking that Got Us to Climate Crisis

February 25, 2020

Diana Beresford-Kroeger on the Flawed Thinking that Got Us to Climate Crisis

Our conversation with the renowned botanist turns to fire, money and manual work.

In early November, a California radio station in Marin County invited the world-renowned botanist to participate in a podcast about her new book To Speak for the Trees.

The book, already in its fourth printing, has much to say about climate change and the healing role of forests.

But the climate crisis rudely intervened as wildfires once again scorched their way across the populous state.

Just before the scheduled interview, she got an emergency call from the station, recalls Beresford-Kroeger.

“They said, ‘Sorry we can’t do the interview today because the studio is on fire. We’re getting out of here fast.’”

At first she thought it was a joke. “They were telling me as matter of fact as though their studio goes on fire everyday. But this is the new reality.”

So she wished them well. “You know that that the crisis is happening to them and you realize yours might be the next shot.”

And there’s the problem. Climate change has now appeared at everyone’s doorstop in different guises; rising seas, longer king tides, melting ice caps, brutal fires, dying trees, failed crops, migrating peoples, rising food prices, monstrous storms, drying aquifers and absent politicians.

Beresford-Kroeger has been thinking about climate change for a long time.

She first thought about the issue in the 1960s while chatting with her bookish Uncle Pat about her fear of going hungry.

The two didn’t have much money, and Beresford-Kroeger already knew what it meant to go to bed with an empty stomach.

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Amidst National Crisis, Province Gives Unist’ot’en an Ultimatum

February 24, 2020

Amidst National Crisis, Province Gives Unist’ot’en an Ultimatum

Meet with pipeline company within 30 days or decision will be made without you, Environmental Assessment Office says.

Brenda arrest — Unist’ot’en member Brenda Michell, whose chief name is Geltiy, was arrested on Feb. 10. Photo by Amanda Follett Hosgood.

The office found Coastal GasLink had not provided the information needed to allow the office to assess the project’s impact.

But it said that was because the company had been prevented from accessing the area to gather the information by Wet’suwet’en opposed to the project.

Discussions between the Wet’suwet’en and Coastal GasLink are unlikely to be easy to arrange, if they happen at all.

Opposition to Coastal GasLink’s LNG pipeline by Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs and their supporters have thrown the country into a national crisis. Blockades have closed major highways and railways over the past two weeks.

On Friday, Trudeau said the barricades erected across the country should now be removed.

The nationwide protests were initiated when the RCMP enforced an injunction by removing barricades and arresting 28 people along the Morice West Forest Service Road over five days earlier this month.

Seven of those were arrested at the Unist’ot’en Healing Centre, including Karla Tait, volunteer director of clinical programming.

In a news release, Tait questioned the timing of the province’s directive.

“It is very distressing, after we’ve faced assault rifles and endured arrests at the beckoning of CGL, to now be advised by EAO to work collaboratively with them to address these gaps. We urge the province to take this opportunity to respect the rule of law and follow the processes laid out to protect both our rights and the environment,” Tait’s statement said.

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New Study Finds Far Greater Methane Threat from Fossil Fuel Industry

February 21, 2020

New Study Finds Far Greater Methane Threat from Fossil Fuel Industry

The gas plays a powerful role in driving up global temperatures.

COVER.Methane-Fossil-Fuel-Industry.jpg — A new study found that methane emissions from human activities — mainly fossil fuels — are probably 25 to 40 per cent higher than previously estimated. Photo via Shutterstock.

A new study published in Nature may have ended a long scientific debate about the key source of rising methane levels in the atmosphere.

It found that methane emissions from human activities — mainly fossil fuels — are probably 25 to 40 per cent higher than previously estimated, while natural sources of methane emissions are up to 90 per cent lower than previously estimated.

In plain English, that means the fossil fuel industry is having a much greater impact on climate destabilization than previously thought.

Methane, the main chemical constituent of natural gas, is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide in the short term. Although methane dissipates faster than carbon dioxide, it has 80 times the climate warming impact over a 20-year timespan.

Every day, the oil and gas industry burns or releases methane by design, often as an unwanted byproduct of oil production, or leaks it accidently through faulty or aging equipment — a form of chronic spillage known as “fugitive emissions.” The Tyee is supported by readers like you Join us and grow independent media in Canada

Methane also escapes while industry strips a number of impurities and contaminants from natural gas gathered in gas fields, including hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide.

For years the fossil fuel industry has claimed that natural gas is a clean fuel that will serve as bridge to a renewable future, but recent studiesshow leakage rates are highly underestimated, thereby challenging that claim.

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