Fredericton Peace Coalition

“As a press release from Foreign Affairs states, “Once implemented, the agreement will lock in market access for Canadian investors and provide them with greater stability, transparency and protection for their investments.”

Since NAFTA, Canadian-negotiated free trade deals have included chapters that provide extremely strong corporate investment rights (the infamous chapter 11 in NAFTA). That’s the “stability, transparency and protection” Foreign Affairs is talking about. Canadian multinationals will now be given privileged access to the Colombian market and its resources, backed up by the right to sue Colombian governments if they feel their rights under the trade agreement haven’t been fulfilled – as might be the case, for instance, if local community opposition halts a mining project. Canadian companies have in fact been actively litigious under the other trade agreements; they are more likely to sue foreign governments than their foreign counterparts are to sue Canadian governments.

Add to the new FTA the aggressive neoliberal restructuring Colombia has already undergone in the last several years, including the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)-funded rewriting of its mining code (which allows corporations access to indigenous land) and the ridiculously low royalty rate imposed on foreign investors (as low as 5% in the oil sector and 0.4% in mining), and Canadian corporations could have a field day. Colombia is rich in petroleum, natural gas, coal, iron ore, nickel, gold, copper, emeralds, and hydropower – and Canada has the largest mining industry in the world, and not insignificant oil and hydropower sectors.”

Salem’s power plant, like many others, shifted to Colombian coal because it was cheaper and cleaner than coal mined in the U.S. The coal may be cheaper and cleaner when it is burned here, but it is dirtier and more expensive where it is mined. We must also count the cost in murdered workers and the devastated environment in the coal-mining regions.

When I met Harry Wilson on the bus yesterday he was barely conscious, inebriated and heading in the wrong direction. He could barely open his eyes when I sat next to him. It had been a month or so since our last encounter, but in that time Harry had suffered a heart attack and been evicted from his tiny bug-filled hovel in the Brandiz Hotel on Vancouver’s skid row. Now, he’s yet another of the homeless army who wander, and wander. Harry is fifty four years old and a “survivor” of the United Church’s Alberni Indian Residential School.

“Amnesty International is of the view that the right to refuse to perform military service for reasons of conscience is inherent in the notion of freedom of thought, conscience and religion as recognised in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).”

Former Democratic presidential contender, Dennis Kucinich, has called for the impeachment of George W Bush claiming that the president set out to deceive the nation, and violated his oath of office with the Iraq war.

The Canadian Parliament passed an historic motion on June 3, 2008, that calls on the Canadian government to make a program to
allow US war resisters to apply for permanent resident status in Canada and to cease all deportation and removal proceedings against US war resisters.

The next step is to write to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, Diane Finley, and prime minister Stephen Harper to
ensure that they that the will of Parliament is implemented.

Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Diane Finley
phone 613.996.4974
fax 613.996.9749
email finley.d@parl.gc.ca and finled1@parl.gc.ca

Prime Minister Stephen Harper
phone 613.992.4211
fax 613.941.6900
email pm@pm.gc.ca

Richard Sanders: The goal of Freedom Network (Réseau Liberté, RL), says Paul Breton, the director of its international programs, is to assist the media in “countries in transition to democracy.” RL’s founder and CEO, Réal Barnabé, also stresses their noble sounding ambition to “promote press freedom in countries in transition, and in emerging countries,” such as “Iraq, Haiti, Kosovo [and] Bosnia.” Left unmentioned is that these places have all been ravaged by wars, invasions and/or regime changes in which Canada and its allies have actively participated. And neither do Barnabé or Breton question whether these military interventions have actually created real “transitions to democracy.” That is accepted as a matter of faith.

An award winning documentary film produced for German television by Freider Wagner and Valentin Thurn. The film exposes the use and impact of radioactive weapons during the current war against Iraq. The story is told by citizens of many nations. It opens with comments by two British veterans, Kenny Duncan and Jenny Moore, describing their exposure to radioactive, so-called depleted uranium (DU), weapons and the congenital abnormalities of their children. Dr. Siegwart-Horst Gunther, a former colleague of Albert Schweitzer, and Tedd Weyman of the Uranium Medical Research Center (UMRC) traveled to Iraq, from Germany and Canada respectively, to assess uranium contamination in Iraq.

International donors, and increasingly Canada, are undermining the Afghan government’s efforts to build its legitimacy with citizens by funnelling assistance through the foreign “aid industry” instead of through the Karzai regime’s own programs, a former head of Canada’s aid program there says.

Reasons for the West’s stalemate in Afghanistan sought neither in lack of troops and imperial treasure, nor in Pakistani obstruction, but in the very nature of the occupation regime. Tariq Ali on the actual results of ‘state-building’ in the Hindu Kush, as a broken country is subjected to the combined predations of NGOs and NATO.