Gillis and Mair launch indy multimedia journal

From Rafe Mair and Damien Gillis:

Damien Gillis and Rafe Mair announce new multi-media journal coming March 2010

The Common Sense Canadian combines video, radio, and expert opinion to cover vital issues the corporate media ignores.

"These are the times that try men's souls."

Thomas Paine's eloquent and pithy summation of the tyranny of yesterday applies equally to tyrants of today who would steal our democracy and environment from us. Paine, a leader of both the American and French Revolutions and author of the three best selling books of the 18th Century, including the seminal Common Sense, also said, "We have it in our power to begin the world over again."

With these truths in mind, Damien Gillis and Rafe Mair have joined forces in a bold new media venture, an online journal called The Common Sense Canadian, to be found at TheCanadian.org beginning in March 2010, which will combine cutting edge video, a weekly radio show and podcast, and writing from Mair, Gillis, and a host of formidable contributors to bring you the stories and opinions our establishment media won't publish. The Common Sense Canadian will cover the issues that really matter to Canadians and the world, such as water, energy, food, democracy - not to mention government corruption and corporate greed. The Common Sense Canadian will tackle tough issues with purpose and courage and will offer innovative, workable solutions from the best minds in these critical areas.

Gillis is an award-winning documentary filmmaker; Mair is a former Environment Minister, a Hall of Fame Broadcaster, and writer. Many British Columbians will have seen the pair together, touring the province exposing the theft of BC's precious watersheds for private power. The Common Sense Canadian will rally British Columbians to protect our rivers and public energy system, our sacred farm land, and to save BC's wild salmon from the ravages of fish farms and other threats. It will demand public input into all environmental decisions with a public right to judge them.

The corporate mainstream media that has so failed to serve the public interest is now crumbling before our eyes, and the time is right to launch a new independent media project like The Common Sense Canadian. Thomas Paine himself sidetracked the tightly controlled newspapers of his day with the pamphlet, which became Internet of that era. His blockbuster, Common Sense, with only 2.5 million people living in the 13 colonies, sold more than 125,000 copies in the first three months, and 500,000 during his lifetime! What Paine did in the 17th century, we must now do in the 21st.

TheCanadian.org will be a rallying point for actions and a source for dialogue about real solutions to the challenges we face. You'll hear from our excellent team of contributors - awesome Canadians like Alexandra Morton, Rex Weyler, Harold Steves, Otto Langer, Joe Foy, Dr. John Calvert, and independent MLA Vicky Huntington, to name just a few.

But above all, this is about you. Because we need your help - to comment on stories and send us your letters; to share our stories with your friends, to join our email list for weekly updates... And we also need your financial support. As the old saying goes, "You get what you pay for." So long as a media outlet depends on corporate owners and advertisers, its content will inevitably be censored and slanted toward those interests. If we are to change things, we need a new media that answers only to its public.

This is hardly a new concept - America's best media institutions, PBS and National Public Radio, have successfully used this model for years. Recently, we've seen President Obama's use of the internet to win a historic US presidential election. We note the blossoming of blogs that connect millions around the world; citizen journalists and a burgeoning online independent media supplanting the old corporate establishment. Clearly the public has never had such powerful tools at its disposal.

At TheCanadian.org, you'll be able to see the series we're working on - from documenting the battle to save BC's rivers, to exposing the destruction of our precious farmland and food security, to investigating whether closed containment farms could help save our wild salmon from open net fish farming - and you'll be able to choose the series that really matter to you, and help make them a reality.

This is an idea whose time has come. With the ever-pressing environmental and social challenges we all face, The Common Sense Canadian is poised to fill the vacuum left by the disintegrating corporate media - with something that can truly be called a free press.

So be a part of an exciting new idea - coming to TheCanadian.org early in 2010!

Because deep down, we're all Common Sense Canadians.

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Bute Inlet power project on hold!

Bute Inlet. Photo Wilderness Committee.

Received today from Joe Foy of the the Wilderness Committee:

I have some really good news. Actually I have freaking fantastic news!  General Electric and their partners Plutonic Power have decided to postpone their bid to gain control of 17 rivers in the Bute Inlet area. This puts the Environmental Assessment Process into a holding pattern for at least 12 months. We have a saying here at the Wilderness Committee - "to stop a train you first have to slow it down." Well, this train has been slowed, a lot, thanks in large part to the wave of letters sent in by the folks on this 10,000 Voices e-mail list. You all deserve a great big pat on the back!

This just goes to show you that when enough folks get to know about a threat to our environment and then take action, even a giant company like General Electric can be knocked back on its heels. Today the wild rivers of Bute Inlet teem with fish that support grizzly bears and other wildlife. Let’s keep it that way! Now that the project to dam and divert Bute's rivers is on the ropes - lets get rid of it once and for all. Time to write another letter to the Premier telling him how much you want him to declare the Bute Inlet hydro power scheme dead - so that the wild rivers there can continue to flow free.

Hope you have enjoyed reading the good news - and the sample of your great letters we included. Next time we write we expect to have more good news about the fight to save Glacier and Howser Creeks in the Kootenays. Until then - say hi to the Premier for us. Bye for now.  
  
Joe Foy | National Campaign Director
Wilderness Committee

And from the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency:

To: All Interested Parties
Additional Delay in the Environmental Review Process

In a letter dated December 3, 2009, Bute Hydro Inc. informed the Panel established to review the Bute Inlet Hydroelectric Project that additional field work and analysis on some valued environmental components is required before Bute Hydro Inc. can be in a position to submit its environmental impact statement. The attached letter notes that once the new data --  to be collected in the spring and fall of 2010 -- has been compiled and analyzed, Bute Hydro will be in a position to re-evaluate the timeline for submitting its environmental impact statement.
As a result of this significant delay in the panel review process, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency has decided to postpone its participant funding process for this project (see the attached News Release). The participant funding process will be re-initiated when the proponent is in a position to confirm a timeline for the submission of its environmental impact statement.
Please note that the attached documents are also available on the project's public registry at the following link: http://www.ceaa-acee.gc.ca/050/details-eng.cfm?cear_id=44825

Do not hesitate to contact the Panel Secretariat should you have questions on the panel review process.
Regards!

Marie-France Therrien
Panel Manager | Gestionnaire de commissions
Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency | Agence canadienne d’évaluation environnementale
160 Elgin St. Ottawa ON K1A 0H3 | 160, rue Elgin, Ottawa ON K1A 0H3
marie-france.therrien@ceaa-acee.gc.ca
Telephone | Téléphone : 613-957-0324
Facsimile | Télécopieur: 613-957-0941
Government of Canada | Government of Canada

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In defense of eco-neurosis

Fish Lake in Central British Columbia, one of two lakes to be turned into toxic mine waste cesspools. Photo Georgia Straight.

A friend recently forwarded me two links on the topic of ecological neurosis. The first one describes the case of couples who try to do the right thing for the environment but only succeed in jeopardizing their marriage. The second one reports on a growing number of viewers of the movie Avatar who are so enamored with the natural beauty of the fictitious planet Pandora, that they have trouble reconnecting with the reality of everyday life and develop suicidal tendencies as a result.

I recommend both links.

My friend was implying that there is something seriously wrong with the Western middle class when they allow themselves to binge in the coziness of self-centered eco-depression, in spite of the obscene wealth that they enjoy compared to, say, the people of Haiti. And he certainly has a point.

Nonetheless, I responded back to him expressing my strong disagreement. There is nothing wrong, I said, about people being neurotic in the face of today’s ecological destruction. If anything, feeling neurotic and depressed about the sixth wave of mass extinction, the depletion of our oceans, agribusiness-driven mass deforestation, the torture of animals inside factory farms, and of course the effects of climate change, is a sign of profound sanity.

At just about the same time, another friend forwarded me the following link which reports that BC’s Environmental Assessment Office has performed its duty admirably once again. It has diligently rubber-stamped yet another industrial project which will forever wipe out a unique natural ecosystem. This time, it’s an open-pit copper and gold mining project in central BC which requires the transformation of two pristine trout-bearing lakes into cesspools to store mine tailings, rocks, and toxic chemicals. Ten thousand years from now when the mine has long been abandoned and the memory of the mining company’s very name has been erased from humanity’s records, those two lake ecosystems will still be destroyed. If you don’t feel neurotic after reading such news, there is a chance you are losing touch with reality and you may want to have your head examined.

I myself have been struggling with eco-neurosis for many, many years. Keeping my sanity, let alone my positive thinking ability, in this constant avalanche of catastrophic environmental news, is a daily struggle. And yes, my marriage sometimes feels the strain of my neurosis (I hereby officially apologize to my wonderful wife) and yes, I sometimes ache for the overwhelming digital beauty of planet Pandora (which my neurosis has so far required me to visit twice).

My insanity has been compounded in recent years by the realization that ecological protection and social justice are one and the same struggle against the world’s elite class and its neoliberal iron grip over the planet. Marxist analysis, in particular, has helped me understand how the capitalist mode of production has thrown 4/5 of the world’s population into bondage and misery and has precipitated the world’s ecosystems into rapid collapse. It helped me realize that in this equation, I am personally both a victim of class exploitation, and an accessory to and beneficiary of the West’s imperialist plundering of the world. Realizing that Haiti was a food self-sufficient country 30 years ago, and would still be today had it not been for Bill Clinton and the IMF’s dismantling of its local agriculture to make way for US subsidized grain imports, does nothing to restore my inner psychic balance.

The feeling of powerlessness in the face of such crushing forces and intractable inner contradictions, is overwhelming. If I didn’t feel emotionally compromised and schizophrenic after such a realization, I would have to be either dead or comatose. Thank goodness for my neurosis. It means I’m still alive.

The trick, of course, is to channel my insanity – which I realize is in itself a contradictory project – so it can be transformed into a positive sentiment, such as anger toward the system, and into positive action, such as taking part in the upcoming social revolution, which I sure hope to see before I die. My friend, himself a hardcore Marxist, kindly responded to my dissenting remarks with this comment:

“I think the real problem [of eco-neurosis] emerges when concern over an issue becomes personally self-destructive instead of focusing the energy on the external, broader political-social transformations necessary and even more importantly on the possibilities that are opening up, either latently or actually.  

As you can probably tell, I have dealt with my own serious concerns about ecological problems by externalizing instead of internalizing, and recognizing that they were subordinate to the bigger questions of global equality, of both the real physical social-technical-economic, and even more importantly, of the global political power that will be necessary to fully attain the former.”

Eco-neurotics of the world, you are sane. Unite!

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2010 Winter Olympics will be Vancouver's demise

Vancouver's ill-fated Olympic village condo project. Photo CBC

The following column was published in the Georgia Straight's online edition on December 28:

2010 Winter Olympics will be Vancouver's demise

By Ivan Doumenc

I recently saw a map of Vancouver’s downtown core showing the restricted zones for the period of the 2010 Winter Olympics. It hit me that, for the duration of the Games, I was going to be under siege in my own neighbourhood. About a dozen streets and 20 city blocks will be closed or severely restricted to the public. A long list of venues, restaurants, shops, and public places will also be closed in order to accommodate a variety of corporate-sponsored private events.

For all intents and purposes, the neighbourhood I live in will cease to support me during the Olympics. Like some obscure red- or blue-listed species I am about to lose my habitat, because people richer and more powerful than me are flying into town to enjoy endless parties behind highly guarded security gates. Talk about the enclosure of the commons.

Of course, I could decide to hold my breath for a few weeks and let this idiotic and degenerate storm of a party pass, and simply resume my normal life after that. Problem is, by all measures, there will be no normal life for Vancouverites to return to once the Olympic caravan and its corporate VIP guests have left the city. The Vancouver 2010 legacy will include:

• A $6-billion public debt, mostly owed to transnational corporations, which will cripple our children’s well-being for most of their adult tax-paying lives;
• A staggering $1-billion security budget paid on our own money to ensure that we, the people, are kept under control both during and after the Olympics;
• The enactment of retrograde anti-protest laws, which are in direct violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights;
• The destruction of unique ecosystems which were standing in the way of a highway expansion or Olympic facility;
• The removal of affordable housing from the city’s core to make room for ill-designed, elitist, and downright useless condoland projects such as the Olympic Village fiasco, which was bailed out in secret by city council with hundreds of millions of our public dollars.
  

This massive transfer of public wealth into private hands has an extraordinary cost. In years to come, we will be asked to work harder to pay off an enormous public debt which we have not personally accumulated nor benefited from. As our taxes increase, we will discover that we are no longer working for ourselves, but to finance the extravagant way of life of the world’s hyper-rich.

Olympics watchdog Chris Shaw, who ran for city council with the Work Less Party in the last civic election, figured this out on day one, while the rest of us were still happily waving our Canadian flags and rooting for Vancouver’s 2010 bid. Recently, he has shown us the way by suing the City of Vancouver, forcing it to back away from its particularly repressive anti-protest bylaw.

No doubt the Work Less Party, a fiercely anti-Olympic political movement, is likely to have its “I told you” moment in the next few months and see its popularity boosted as a result. But it will be a bittersweet victory at best, since it will coincide with the demise of a city that we love, which held so much promise and had everything going for it, and will instead enter into old age and decay before its time.

Work defines us as humans, and at the Work Less Party I have met smart people with admirable work ethics. But the value and very purpose of our work has been confiscated from us by people in high places. They have thrown us into the bondage of debt, using schemes such as the Olympics corporate franchise to appropriate both our wealth and our future in the name of sport. It’s time to break free. Yes, I am proud of my work. But business as usual, work as usual is no longer an option. If that’s the deal handed to us by the elite class, then hell yeah, I choose to work less.

Ivan Doumenc is an environmental and social activist. He ran for the Vancouver park board with the Work Less Party in the 2008 civic election. He blogs at Grass!Struggle.

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Gordo save yourself, kill the Bute project

Grizzly cubs at Bute Inlet's Orford river. Photo Isabelle Groc Tidelife Photography

Submitted to Office of the Premier Dec. 09, 2009
cc: Kathy Eichenberger, EAO

Dear Premier Campbell,

You have given us so many different reasons why we should give away Bute Inlet to General Electric and Plutonic Power that it has become difficult to keep track.

First, you told us that BC needed Bute’s power for its own domestic use. But the BC Utilities Commission rejected that explanation in a recent decision, stating that we don’t need this additional power. And indeed the 17 power plants which are part of the Bute project would produce most of their energy in the spring and summer when we need it the least. You, however, decided to override that legally binding decision with an executive order.

Then, in the wake of BCUC’s decision, you explained that the reason we needed Bute’s power was actually to save the planet. By sending energy South to California, you said, we would do our part in the “fight against climate change”. But we are now discovering that much of Bute’s planned energy will not be shipped South but rather North – to large mining projects along the planned $400 million Northwest Transmission Line. Mines consume enormous amounts of energy and as such are among the worst contributors to greenhouse gas emissions on the planet.

Quite a plan to save our climate.

We also discovered that California’s legislature does not want Bute’s energy because it does not consider it to be “green”. The only option that governor Schwarzenegger had left to move ahead was to follow your example – override its legislature with an executive order.

Quite a display of democracy.

Finally, you and your partners from the IPP industry have explained that private power would make BC rich. We would be the “Saudi Arabia of the North”, Plutonic CEO Donald McInnes said. However, thanks to the work of eminent experts such as John Calvert and Marvin Shaeffer, we know that Bute’s private power would cost about twice to produce as its going rate on the energy spot market. Buy high, sell low appears to be the plan.

Quite a business model.

The pieces of the private power puzzle are finally coming together. Take over and ravage BC's watersheds. Produce excess energy which BC does not need. Export some of it to California at a financial loss for the BC taxpayer. Send the rest of it up North to power up some of the most devastating devices to our climate ever built by man – mines.

The people know about the IPP scam, they understand it, they are informed, and they are mad.

Premier Campbell, save yourself. Kill the Bute project.

Yours sincerely,
Ivan Doumenc

Scientists blast DFO over sockeye collapse

Dr. Brian Riddell. Photo Pacific Salmon Foundation

Last night, Simon Fraser University hosted a panel presentation on the Fraser sockeye collapse of 2009.

A group of scientists and field experts had gathered for two days to discuss the causes, impacts, and possible solutions to the salmon crash, and they were now presenting some of their findings to the public.

I was expecting a polite and slightly sedate discussion among members of the scientific and bureaucratic elite, which I somewhat felt are part of the problem rather than the solution in the salmon tragedy.

I changed my mind. To my surprise, I found myself participating in a powerful and genuine moment of reckoning.

A chart of the sockeye collapse (see figure below) was projected on the wall which demonstrated that the salmon’s demise, although particularly devastating in 2009, really started 15 years ago in the early nineties.

One after the other, the panel's scientists and members of the public stood up in front of that chart of almost totemic significance and delivered the same message: how in the world did we let this happen?

Particularly powerful was an exchange between former MP and Minister of Fisheries John Fraser, and former DFO top scientist Brian Riddell who recently resigned from the Department over fundamental policy disagreements.

Fraser, who is retired, was not on the panel but talked instead as a member of the public. All this information about the sockeye, he said, was available to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans since day one. Why did this not set any alarm bells, why did this not trigger more research? It poses the essential question of who is in charge at DFO, Fraser commented. It is incredible that a vast department like this could not explain that something was going wrong. Someone at the Department didn't do anything, he concluded.

Riddell responded for the panel. He said that there was no question DFO knew early on about the collapse. As years went by, he added, I asked myself: can I do more inside or outside of DFO over my career’s remaining 10 years? And so I left. Ottawa was asking me: why should we give you more funding for your salmon research when there is no value in the salmon? (At this point, the room went: gasp.) Ottawa has lost understanding of the value of the salmon, Riddell concluded. The people of BC carry great weight in delivering the message back to Ottawa about the salmon’s value, but you are not there yet, he warned.

Mark Angelo, the chair of the panel, pointed out that DFO was invited to participate in the panel’s work sessions but had declined the invitation, invoking the ongoing judicial review over the sockeye collapse. Angelo commented that DFO’s decision was “unfortunate”. He did not use the word stonewall, but his eyes said precisely that.

A member of the public described DFO as a “moribund” administration.

Many questions of the public were directed at salmon research and why more of it wasn’t being done. Angelo’s response was yet another ballistic missile fired at DFO: it bothers me, he said, that we don't have specific parameters in place right now to monitor the Fraser sockeye populations. Riddell jumped in: if we had the proper funding, we could get started on the research right away. We could take concrete steps such as tagging the fish. We can work with a lot of bright people across various organizations. But we need the cooperation of DFO on this. For example, the data on the salmon is a public resource, yet DFO will not release that data for 2009.

Translation for those not fully versed in bureaucratic lingo: DFO, either help us or step out of the way!

Alexandra Morton, who was not on the panel but participated in the two-day work sessions, best captured the spirit of the evening when the panel invited her to answer a question about the impact of fish farms on the Fraser sockeye collapse. We simply don’t know, she said. Fish farms and sea lice could be part of the Fraser collapse or not, and there could also be many other factors involved such as viral infections. But what matters, she said, is that – finally – we are talking about this in the open and the law of silence has been broken.

I had come to this evening expecting a pasteurized lecture by the scientific and bureaucratic establishment on why it’s okay to continue salmon business as usual. Instead, I found myself in the middle of a scientists’ open revolt against the system. Life is like a box of chocolates, Forrest Gump used to say.

My particular admiration goes to Brian Riddell who could have decided to finish off his baby boomer career on a rather tranquil note, waiting for retirement in a DFO corner office and then taking off on an uninterrupted string of oblivious Alaska cruises or whatever else it is that baby boomers do. Instead, he chose to step down, which in his world is the most defiant form of civil disobedience.

What we need here is more Brian Riddells.



Panel participants:

Dr. Mark Angelo
Pacific Fisheries Resource conservation
Rivers Institute, BC Institute of Technology

Dr. John Reynolds
Simon Fraser University

Dr. Brian Riddell
Pacific Salmon Foundation

Dr. Randall Peterman
Simon Fraser University

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Vote Rafe Mair year's newsmaker

Rafe Mair. Photo: The Tyee

Rick Glumac sent a message to the members of Save our Rivers!

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Subject: Vote for IPPs and Rafe Mair as newsmaker of the year

www.cbc.ca/bc/features/newsmaker2009

All has been relatively quiet on the 'Run-of-River' front lately. But 2009 has been an eventful year. Many of us have been doing all we can to alert the public about what 'Run-of-River' means to our province. Perhaps none as eloquently as Rafe Mair, who toured for months, speaking to residents in all corners of the province. He was trying to do what the media should have being doing more of - reporting on the the sale of our rivers and what it means to residents of BC.

"In a nutshell, Campbell forces BC Hydro to buy all the private power produced on a "take or pay basis" at up to twice its value at a time when its not needed, meaning Hydro must sell it at half price into the export market and buy it back at much, much higher prices if they do need power." -- Rafe Mair

And what this means is that it will cost us a LOT of money. Some are estimating that BC Hydro will be losing $300 million dollars per year or more because BC Hydro will be paying far above market rates for this electricity. As one individual recently put it: "At least, after the fast ferries were done, you could park them."

Please help keep this issue in the spotlight. If Rafe wins this contest, 'Run-of-River' will get some of the media attention that it deserves.

VOTE FOR RAFE MAIR AS BC'S NEWSMAKER OF THE YEAR
www.cbc.ca/bc/features/newsmaker2009/

Please vote by DEC. 11.

Thanks.

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