Monthly Archives: December 2011

How did this Canadians First Nations situation come about?

For some time now I have been amazed at the way the Canadian Government treats our first Nation and aboriginal peoples.

Let’s just go back a short way in history, a couple of hundred years or so would do, and see what we have done.

For thousands of years the peoples of North American survived very nicely in conditions that were really not much of a problem to them. They had their ways of feeding themselves, and surviving the weather and the seasons that were very efficient. To prove that we just have to see that for thousands of years they survived.

Largely their food supplies came to them in the form of roving herds of beasties (or fish and whales on the coasts), and those beasties provided them with their houses, clothes, tools and food. Water was plentiful, clean and full of fish. Certainly some of the watering holes would be a mess after a herd of beasties had passed through, but nature has a way of solving that problem on it’s own very quickly. On the coasts fish and whales were plentiful, trees were used for buildings and clothes and tools and in other words the local and readily available resources were used in traditional ways that worked.

To sum this all up, there really wasn’t a problem with their way of life in that it worked very well for them for as I say thousands of years. Yes there were wars amongst the nations but not fake or mystical religious wars, rather wars of envy of location, housing, animals, crops, women, or power struggles or simply amalgamation, and let’s not criticizes that as it has been historic all over the world. They believed then and still do in the creator who had different names in the different languages but in essence was the same creator, a kind and gentle “being”, for want of a better word, who asked little of his people but that they look after the land for him.

But then along came the settlers from the old countries who knew best how to live, which of course is why they were looking for better lands to plunder having ruined their own lands.

The arrogance of these early arrivers that their way of business, living and religion was best and therefore had to be adopted by the “ignorant savages” still boggles my mind, but it was of course a product of that time.

Or was it?

Have we moved on?

We bought them strange diseases, deceit, destruction of their lands, huge reduction of their beasties, poisoning of their water, removal of trees and worst of all an insistence that our form of housing in a specific static place, thus removing their ability to move when and if they needed to and had done so for centuries.

Is today any different?

We still tell them what to do, when and how, and it is our way as non-aboriginals that we force them to accept, still completely and arrogantly assuming that our way is the best; that the deals we made with them in the form of treaties were made by others and therefore not to be taken seriously; that we have herded them into and onto reservations and taken away their traditional ways of surviving; that we have plundered and continue to plunder their lands, turned their water poisonous; forced them to accept a form of housing that isn’t even sustainable in the cities; having bought them disease we make them sicker with our presumptuous form of medicine which works in a way that is totally foreign to their ways. Treating symptoms with money driven drugs instead of treating the cause of the symptoms which is what they had done for centuries doesn’t serve them anymore than it serves the rest of us. The claim that new diseases need these drugs is of course self-serving as we bought them these diseases and then removed their ability to treat them their way.

I listen to committee meetings in both houses and am amazed that this government is trying to shift the blame for the current state of affairs firmly onto the ‘incapable’ first nations instead of acknowledging that their way of life was damaged so badly and that we are not allowing our historically competent aboriginals to decide for themselves what they want to do. We still insist after a couple of centuries of failure that we know best. A look at our inner cities with their ever growing homeless peoples would show that this claim is false. Slums, overcrowding, disease, poverty, mentally sick, alcoholism, drug use, broken buildings crumbling instead of being refurbished to use by the poor and sick and homeless all show how successful we are.

I believe it is time we woke up to the fact that we do not know best, that we are murdering this land called Canada along with is original peoples and we do not have that right.

It is too late to undo the wrong we have done, fake and insincere apologies will not work, but it is not too late to support and allow the aboriginals of our country to live their own way at their own pace and if we are smart we will learn from them how to treat this land and indeed this planet so our children and grandchildren will have a habitable place on which to live.

“Only after the last tree has been cut down, Only after the last river has been poisoned, Only after the last fish has been caught, Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.” … a Cree Indian prophecy

Jack Etkin on Border Action Plan

Harper’s Border Action Plan: 

‘                                                             ONE BORDER’

TO BE PUT AROUND CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES

and the border between us is being removed …

Last week, in Washington D.C, Stephen Harper and Barack Obama announced the next step in the corporate takeover of North America.  This new agreement aims to put one ‘corporate-planned’ border around both Canada and the United States, while at the same time largely ‘removing’ the border between our two countries,  to create ‘something new’.    Negotiations between our governments, and the world’s biggest corporations, have been going on for the past 18 months or more  –  in complete secrecy.  On December 7th the ‘Joint Action Plan’ was publicly announced, with a massive propaganda barrage aimed at Canadians to convince us that this is a truly wonderful new deal for us all.

But it’s not!

REMEMBER:  THE CORPORATIONS WANT THE DEAL. THE CORPORATIONS  OWN THE MEDIA. THEIR MEDIA TELLS US THE DEAL IS GREAT

One part of this deal is to put one border around both Canada and the United States probably to give the corporations more control than they already have.

Canadian resources will become ‘North American’ resources.

Beginning in the summer of 2012, police forces from both countries will begin to operate on ‘both sides’ of what used to be our border.

As of 2015, Canadian nursing graduates will have to pass an American exam in order to work in what used to be Canada.  At the same time, our governments are being completely removed from the governing ‘process’, because  with two countries inside one border, but with only ‘one set of rules’, who will be making those rules?

Luckily,

a new ‘corporate authority’ The Regulatory Cooperation Council has been set up to do just that…

ANOTHER PART OF THIS PLAN IS TO WEAKEN AND GET RID OF ALL OF THE RULES AND REGULATIONS THAT PROTECT US FROM THE CORPORATIONS AND ALLOW PEOPLE TO HAVE SOME CHOICES.

Pesticide rules in Canada have recently been watered down to the more corporate-friendly US rules; so we Canadians now have more pesticides in our foods.  Similarly, every safety standard and health standard and environmental standard that they can get their hands on is going to be destroyed under this new agreement.

Several Canadian provinces, led by BC and Alberta, are already involved in secret agreements that give businesses the legal right to demand – on a wide variety of issues – that the lowest standard in any participating province will be applied to them, even if the province they are in has higher standards.  The corporations want one low level of standards right across Canada and the United States, and this is happening with the full support of very corrupt politicians and a totally corrupt media.  Neither Canadians nor Americans are even told about all of this, instead we are just betrayed.

To see the Harper Government’s point of view,   www.borderactionplan.gc.ca    Please click on the ‘Regulatory Cooperation Council’.  This is the corporate group that has been set up to bring in lower standards.

For the corporate point of view on all of this, Google:    CCCE The Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) represents 150 of the largest corporations in Canada.  Many people think the CCCE is the real government of Canada, and their website will tell you what a wonderful new border plan this is.  Virtually every tv station, radio station, and newspaper in Canada is owned by a CCCE member, which is exactly how they control everything that we see, hear and read in their media.  The two parts of this new plan are:   The Action Plan on Perimeter Security and Economic Competiveness    and the Action Plan on Regulatory Cooperation Both parts of this plan seem to be evolving without any participation from the citizens of either country, or our governments.  Just Mr. Harper and Mr. Obama.  Our two corporate puppets.

  What can we do?

1.  Support independent media.

The corporate control of the media is one of their most powerful weapons, and a real enemy of our democracy.

2. Support democracy.

Right now the corporations have all the power.  More democracy will give us citizens a voice in what is going on, and that has to be a good thing.

If you want to know more about Jack Etkin, google “Face to Face with Jack Etkin” , and enjoy his work in conjunction with Steve Poole, both of whom are from Victoria BC.

Rememberance Day letter to two of my grandsons

To my grandsons Kieran and Aiden.

This is Remembrance Day, November 11th 2011, and I have been having some thoughts today which I wanted to pass to you. I believe you are old enough to understand and if not, to ask questions.

This is the day when we are to remember those men and women who gave their lives for their countries believing that they and their countries were on the right side. Here in Canada, as in other countries, we tend to remember only our own men and women, but I have over the last few years been thinking not only of my own family but of all families from every country who lost their loved ones in war. I have met a pilot from Germany from WW2 and he was a man the same age as my father, with a wonderful family and they fed me in the south of France when I ran out of money. He was a human being as our First Nations People say.

For me in the 2nd World War, which was my mother’s and father’s generation’s war,  there were 5 men, 2 brothers for my mother and two more brothers for my father.  All those men, my father and 4 uncles, took part in WW2. 3 survived and 2 died.

My father’s brother died in England flying an airplane using a new on board radar system which was being tested. Unfortunately they had it hooked up backwards and instead of flying away from mountain in the dark, he flew into the mountain. I do not understand why they didn’t test it during the day when he could see, but they did not and my uncle Frederick died.  To make it worse my father was one of those scientists who was working on the new radar.  He didn’t say very much about it.

My mother’s brother was sent in a plane to parachute into Holland behind the enemy lines to try and help the Dutch resistance.  Again, unfortunately, the plan was leaked and the Germans were waiting for them and not one man arrived on the ground alive…my uncle Peter was one of them.

Yes it is important to protect all of us against what we think is evil, and in your Kung Fu lessons you are getting a taste of that in what you are taught about bullying and how to protect yourselves and others from it.

One of the things I have learned is that most wars are not brought about by hatred, but rather by a collection of cruel men (and women) who use something called propaganda to create passions of hatred and fear where none existed.  Today, there are advertisements for games of war on TV along with images of people being beaten by police or killed by terrorists, this is what creates the passions of fear and hate and not love for one another.

That is propaganda.

The difference between you and the boys from Japan, China, Germany, Russia and India are only really the colour of your skin and the language you speak. You all want to play and learn, so we should let you instead of creating the desire to kill even if it is only a video game or the fear of being different.

The town in which I was born, Southampton in England, was attacked during the war almost every night.  It was a mere few miles, or kilometers if you wish, from Portsmouth which was and still is a huge Naval Base.  Some lights were left on to fool the enemy into thinking it was Portsmouth and the result is that Southampton was very badly damaged and had to be rebuilt after the war. I showed your sister Shelby where the old High Street used to be inside the old castle walls and now it is new shopping centers, walk ways for people and commercial buildings.  The old walls still remain, but not in the way I remember them as a very small boy. So when in your games you blow up buildings and destroy towns, I think of my town of birth.  Maybe that’s another reason why I don’t like those video games.

Today, I went to Island View Beach and sat on a log and smoked a cigar and thought about not only my uncles but those I went to school with who have been killed in war, and I wept for them.

If you ask why I don’t go to the public ceremonies anymore it’s because they are now, I think, politicized and made into religious events and only serve to create passion for what our armed forces are doing now.

There is no way I can stand in a crowd of people who believe that dropping bombs from modern planes on unarmed and unsuspecting men, women and children, in the name of protecting them is what Canadians or any human beings should be doing. Yes civilians have always suffered in war, usually high numbers of them but wars, particularly today’s wars, are only about money and people are used as the excuse. To hear war and death being glorified and prayers being offered to one god or another for the success of those wars about money is more than I can stand.

So I go alone to the flag pole at Beacon Hill Park, or this year Island View Beach, and if one year you wish to come with me I will be happy to take you.

Your loving granpa.