She thought somebody was playing a trick on her. When Connie Fournier tore open the letter from the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) on the afternoon of July 18–a Wednesday–she read that a complaint had been filed against her and the website she runs with her husband Mark, Free Dominion (www.freedominion.ca). The letter was dated July 16, two days before, and postmarked the 17th. It said she had until the 18th, that very day, to reply. “At first we thought it was some kind of joke because it didn’t seem right that we would be asked to respond in that kind of time frame,” Fournier says. As it turned out, it wasn’t a joke. But it still had a punch line–the letter didn’t say what the complaint was about which made it impossible to respond to, even if she had time.

Sensing that perhaps it wasn’t a joke, the next day the 41-year-old mother of four who makes her home in Kingston, Ont., called the CHRC. “It was like pulling teeth trying to get a real person on the phone,” Fournier says. When she finally did and read the complaint number to the woman on the other end, she was told it couldn’t be right because it was supposed to have one more digit in it. So maybe it was a joke? No; using the last name of the complainant in the letter, they finally determined it was in fact real. Several hours later, Fournier was able to contact someone at the CHRC who knew what was going on; he had the complaint in front of him on his computer screen, he told Fournier. But he wouldn’t tell her what it was about. He said he would have to mail it. They settled on having the CHRC fax it to Fournier’s lawyer the next day, Friday–two days past the official deadline.

When Fournier finally got to see the complaint she discovered it had been filed back in June. Marie-Line Gentes, a college teacher in Quebec, was charging that Free Dominion, a conservative discussion forum, was fostering hatred towards Muslims. Why this was of concern to Gentes was not explained because Gentes stated in the complaint that she herself was not a Muslim. On top of that, it didn’t assert that Fournier had written anything untoward. The target was something someone else had written on the site.

The complaint cited comments written on Free Dominion by Saskatchewan activist Bill Whatcott. For instance, in one, Whatcott wrote, “I can’t figure out why the homosexuals I ran into are on the side of the Muslims. After all, Muslims who practice Sharia law tend to advocate beheading homosexuals.” Whatcott also posted links to another website hosting a digital version of a pamphlet he distributed in Edmonton last year that called the Muslim prophet Mohammad a “man of violence.”

Whatcott has been the target of human rights complaints before. He is appealing two Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal judgments against him for anti-homosexual literature he produced in 2001 and 2002.

In Free Dominion’s case, things didn’t get that far. Fournier went public immediately, using her website and contacting the media. “We wanted everybody to know because these things, in our opinion, work best if it’s all done in the dark. That way if anything funny went on, then everybody would know about it. And funny things were going on right from the word go,” Fournier says. The tactic seemed to be successful. First bloggers, then newspapers, jumped on the story, reproducing Whatcott’s somewhat innocuous comments across the country. On August 3, Fournier received a letter informing her that the complaint had been withdrawn, no explanation.

If all this seems a bit unreasonable–the lack of time to respond, the bureaucratic obfuscation, the flimsy premise for the complaint–that’s probably because it is. But then, when it comes to the matter of free speech in Canada, human rights commissions and their quasi-judicial tribunals are not exactly known for using reason. Though most human rights codes stress the primacy of fundamental rights to free expression, freedom of the press and freedom of religion, they nevertheless include prohibitions against publications and broadcasts believed to foster hatred. Since every type of communication except direct conversation involves some kind of publication or broadcast, the supposed support of these other rights appears almost meaningless–and those looking to silence Canadians are taking full advantage.

Over the last few years, in a series of cases, human rights commissions have stretched the meaning of their codes to invariably rule against the right to free expression and in favour of those who claim their feelings have been hurt. Slowly, precedents have built up that are intimidating people into keeping silent. Now, media organizations routinely censor themselves for fear of being dragged in front of a tribunal, even going so far as to get people to sign forms where they promise not to offend anyone.

Attacks on free speech continue across the country, even in supposedly freedom-loving Alberta. In a tribunal hearing which began on July 16, a former pastor, Stephen Boissoin, has been charged with inciting hatred towards homosexuals. Like in the Free Dominion case, an academic–in this instance University of Calgary assistant professor David Lund–claims that Boissoin violated the province’s human rights code in a 2002 letter-to-the-editor Boissoin wrote to the Red Deer Advocate under the title “Homosexual Agenda Wicked.” Similar to the Free Dominion complaint where Gentes said she is not a Muslim, Lund says he is not gay.

The Boissoin case has been notable so far for a pre-hearing ruling that represents a small reversal of the trend to limit speech. Back in 2005 after Lund made his complaint, Boissoin decided to go public by publishing the human rights complaint material on the website of the Concerned Christian Coalition to support fundraising for his defence. Lund tried to shut him down, claiming the material was confidential and so requested a publication ban. The panel ruled against Lund on May 4, 2006.

That ruling came right on the heels of larger reversal of the trend against speech in Saskatchewan. On April 13, 2006, the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal overturned a 2002 Court of Queen’s Bench ruling that supported a 2001 decision of the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission against Hugh Owens. In 1997, Owens published an ad in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix that referred to Biblical passages which condemned homosexuality. Accompanying the citations was an illustration of two male stick figures holding hands inside a circle with a bar through it. The SHRC had fined both Owens and the newspaper $1,500 for violating s. 14(1)(b) of The Saskatchewan Human Rights Code. It was only a partial victory for freedom because the Appeal court didn’t rule that the section of the code was in violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights. The judges simply stated that the SHRC had been too lenient in its interpretation of the Code. Whether that ruling will have any impact remains to be seen. Tom Ross, a labour employment lawyer with McLennan Ross in Calgary, thinks other HRCs were paying attention. “This case certainly helps to rebalance the jurisprudence in Saskatchewan and I think it will have some impact elsewhere,” he says.

Human rights commissions were never meant to control the press or be arbitrators of expressions of opinion. They were set up to combat discriminatory acts in areas like employment and housing. Alan Borovoy was a young lawyer in the 1950s and one of those who lobbied the Ontario government to establish the first human rights commission in Canada in 1961. He has been general counsel to the Canadian Civil Liberties Union since 1968, but Borovoy wrote a letter to the editor of the Calgary Herald, published on March 16, 2006 in which he bemoaned the way the human rights bodies were being abused. “During the years when my colleagues and I were labouring to create such commissions, we never imagined that they might ultimately be used against freedom of speech,” Borovoy wrote.

In interview, Borovoy says that early human rights legislation did address communication. “But those communications essentially were really ways to shore up the discriminatory acts that the legislation was primarily designed to deal with. So if they said, “No blacks allowed,” or “No Jews allowed,” that would be the kind of speech that was always seen as subject to this kind of legislation,” Borovoy says. Discriminatory advertisements and discriminatory application forms were not permissible.

Borovoy says he first started noticing the attack on free speech back in the 1990s. In particular, he recalls referring to two cases that caused him concern. The first was in Ontario. In 1993, feminists attempted to bring a human rights complaint against a convenience store owner for selling pornographic magazines, claiming the publications constituted discrimination against women. “They tried to squeeze it within the framework of that legislation, talking about discrimination. I remember arguing that if this were to hold, they could go into libraries and police them for what they’ve got on the shelves, Oliver Twist and The Merchant of Venice,” Borovoy says. That complaint was eventually dismissed. The second was the Doug Collins case.

In 1999, a BC human rights tribunal found North Shore News columnist Collins guilty of “likely” exposing Jews to “hatred and ridicule” for four columns he wrote in 1994. It was actually the second attempt at trying to nail Collins. In 1996, Victoria B’nai Brith member Harry Abrams had lodged a complaint against Collins for one column he had written titled “Swindler’s List” an attack on the Steven Spielberg movie Schindler’s List. A 1997 tribunal ruled in Collins favour. Abrams then lodged another complaint, this time citing four columns, including the one he originally complained about, claiming that together the columns exposed Jews to hatred. This time the commission ruled in Abrams favour. Though the BCHRC fined Collins and his paper $1,500, it also ordered them never to print similar material again. With that ruling, the BCHRC effectively claimed control over the press. Collins appealed to a real court, asserting that human rights legislation was unconstitutional because it infringed on freedom of the press. The BC Court of Appeal ruled against Collins and the case never did reach the Supreme Court after Collins died in 2001.

Murray Mollard, executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, is one who would like to see the Collins ruling–that human rights legislation has the ability to control the press–tested at the Supreme Court level, though he is concerned that there it could get upheld. “Given jurisprudence in Canada on hate speech provisions in the Criminal Code, for example, there’s a bit of an uphill legal battle to strike down that legislation as unconstitutional,” Mollard says. There are good arguments for it being struck down, Mollard believes, but the trend has been in the Supreme Court of Canada regarding the hate speech provisions to uphold the constitutionality of those.

You can’t prohibit ideas, he believes, whether offensive to some or to everyone. “So it’s the responsibility of democratic people to take the arguments, have access to those arguments, and be able to express those sentiments. That’s really the function and responsibility we have as sovereign citizens.” Mollard says. Therefore, if we allow government to censor that, we have diminished our ability to govern ourselves. “Our organization would say that just because we don’t censor those ideas, that doesn’t mean we don’t have a responsibility to act or respond to abhorrent ideas. We do. But we do that with more speech. So if there are particularly odious and reprehensible ideas that denigrate some on the basis of race, religion, sexualization, etc . . . we as a society have a responsibility to fight back with words, using words to condemn those ideas that we don’t believe are valid to the rules and policies that we govern ourselves by,” he says.

Given that they are prone to rule against fundamental freedoms and thus are grading towards a soft form of socially destructive tyranny, not to mention bogging down the courts with taxpayer-funded nuisance suits, should the human right commissions be destroyed? Borovoy doesn’t think so. “I think human rights commissions have an important role to play. There is still much discrimination in our society and this is a big help in counteracting it. The fact that some of them have gone off the rails, doesn’t mean that they can’t perform very important functions,” says Borovoy. He believes there is enough discrimination in our society to warrant this kind of response. “I’ve never changed my mind about that. I haven’t changed my mind at all. I never favoured using this against speech,” he says.

So perhaps the solution is to merely curtail them and lobby governments to get rid of the provisions in human rights legislation that suppress free speech, freedom of religion and freedom of the press. It would have to be done soon, however, as the case of Free Dominion demonstrated; the commissions are now attempting to stick their fingers of censorship into that great bastion of free expression, the Internet.

On August 16, the online publication WorldNetDaily quoted CHRC investigator Dean Steacy, whose actions dictate whether a complaint goes to a tribunal, stating how the CHRC approaches the liberty to speak freely. “Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don’t give it any value,” he quipped to a lawyer representing a website. Apparently, Steacy has never heard of John Milton or Martin Luther, and with that kind of ignorance at the CHRC, it should be obvious the commissions can’t be reined in soon enough.

[This article appeared in the September 17, 2007 issue of the Western Standard.]

Sean Fitzpatrick is very worried. He sees, just over the proverbial horizon, a big “brain drain” coming to Canada. The last time the brain drain captured the Canadian public’s attention was just before the turn of the millennium, at the height of the Internet investment bubble. Canadians, caught up in the explosion of tech stocks, were treated daily to media discussions of how we were losing skilled workers to the United States. When the tech bubble burst in 2000, most of the brain drain discussion disappeared along with it. But with the U.S. playing by new rules, the drain Fitzpatrick foresees now is a little more real.

Fitzpatrick, president and founder of Talentmap, an Ottawa-based employee research and survey company, knows the Americans are on the verge of changing their immigration system from family-based to merit-based, and that the effect on Canada could be profound. Specifically, they are debating whether they should adopt the points system, where a prospective immigrant is awarded points for education and experience and qualified on that basis. Not only would the change make it easier for Canada’s best and brightest to live and work in the gigantic American marketplace, it would make it easier for anyone in the world to work there. And the change will make it that much harder for Canada to attract talented immigrants to solve its own labour shortages. “I say this is a really big concern, one that we are underestimating,” Fitzpatrick says.

Canada has always had to compete hard for talent with the U.S., and has always lost a certain amount to its southern neighbour. However, even during the last big brain drain debate, much of what Canada lost to the U.S. was regained through immigration because of the points system that Canada already utilized. “All of a sudden, people who don’t have family links but who have very strong technical skills or very high-demand skills in the global economy will have a very strong advantage in that they can go to the U.S. and get in. For anyone who’s mobile and interested in developing their career, the U.S. offers so many attractive advantages–the size of the organizations, the money that’s available there for development if you’re into technology–whereas in Canada, we’re just not on the same playing field,” says Fitzpatrick.

The irony here is that Canada stands to become a victim of its own success. The points system was developed here and implemented in 1967. Prior to that, prospective immigrants were chosen more on the basis of country of origin; people from England, Australia and even the U.S. were all given priority. At the time it was thought the system carried a whiff of racism, and was too arbitrary. Valerie Knowles, a Toronto-based writer and author of Strangers at Our Gates: Canadian Immigration and Immigration Policy, 1540-2006, says for at least the first 20 years of the points-based system, it was very highly thought of and there was a great deal of confidence in it on the part of the administrators. “It did allow for some individual judgment, but it did do away with a lot of capriciousness and a certain degree of prejudice. That’s why other countries have wanted to emulate it,” says Knowles. However, it certainly isn’t perfect. Knowles says in the last 20 years, the Canadian system has become somewhat complicated. Overall, though, Canada’s immigration process is recognized internationally as a success. In 1989, Australia implemented a points system, and two years later New Zealand followed suit. Six years ago the United Kingdom did the same. Now many European countries are considering following Canada’s lead.

The result, however, is that the Canadian advantage–through the innovation of its immigration system–has been slowly dwindling. Finn Poschmann, senior policy analyst for the C.D. Howe Institute in Toronto, calls the threat very real. “Canada has been a beneficiary–for decades now–of brain-dead U.S. immigration policy; their mechanism was tilted towards bringing [in] low-wage, low-skilled workers, and making it more difficult for economic migrants with skills to enter the U.S.,” Poschmann says. Switching to the points system, he adds, is a big leap forward for them.

Canada, Poschmann points out, is short of workers as it is, and that situation is only going to become more acute over the next few decades. At the beginning of June, Statistics Canada issued its “Labour Force Projections for Canada, 2006-2031″ study, predicting in its best-case scenario that the “overall participation rate [in the workforce] inevitably declines” due primarily to the aging population and low birth rate, a trend mirrored in other First World countries such as the U.S. and Germany. This means competition for skilled labour will be even tougher if global economic prosperity is maintained.

So, is there anything Canada can do to compete? According to Poschmann, we cannot open the floodgates to new immigrants to offset demographic change, because that would give us more newcomers than we could possibly deal with. “So it’s very important to be as good as we can putting a good package in front of immigrants, and not put [up] barriers,” he says.

One solution for Canada is to adjust the points system to make sure it has its priorities straight, ensuring the skills needed here are given top spot. Talentmap’s Fitzpatrick sees a real opportunity for innovation in this country, if our system can adjust faster than in the U.S. “Because we’re a smaller market, and because we’re not as a diverse an economy, we could link immigration not just to education, but to labour demands,” Fitzpatrick says. “In the U.S., it would take them a lot longer to adjust because they are just dealing on a bigger scale.” This would require a nimble bureaucracy, he adds, which might be a bit of an oxymoron.

There are also improvements that could be made in the recognition of professional credentials. There’s been some progress at the federal and provincial levels–particularly in Ontario and B.C.–but there is still a long way to go before all the doctors and engineers driving taxi cabs find suitable employment.

But it was taxation that was actually at the centre of the last brain drain debate, and critics say there hasn’t been a great deal of progress on that front. “Canada has done a reasonably good job of attracting high-end wage earners, but if we have to compete with the U.S., our high tax rate will definitely be another barrier,” says Adam Taylor, national research director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. There’s not only the U.S., however, to worry about. “Across the Globe we see countries flattening their tax or simplifying their tax systems in the name of competitiveness,” says Taylor.

While the brain drain debate is nothing new, the difference is that the Americans weren’t trying that hard to lure highly skilled workers in the past. Now as they get set to try, Canada better get serious about competing, or watch their best and brightest flow south of the border.

[This article appeared in the July 30, 2007 issue of the Western Standard.]

At the end of the 1973 sci-fi film classic Soylent Green, the detective played by Charlton Heston discovers the food supply has been deliberately contaminated with human bodies. His cry of revulsion, “It’s people!” quickly entered the popular culture and has been there ever since. Now that the world is coming to understand that many food products coming out of China are contaminated–often deliberately–with things like industrial chemicals and raw sewage, it’s doubtful a Heston-like character will be running through the streets screaming, “It’s people!” But the situation appears to be getting so bad, it probably wouldn’t surprise anyone if he did.

How bad is it? Almost daily there are news reports of the latest scare coming out of China; products, not just food, found to be substandard or contaminated–toys covered in lead paint, wheat gluten laced with melamine, fake veterinary drugs, poisonous toothpaste, deadly puffer fish labelled as edible monkfish, other fish products contaminated with raw sewage, tainted dietary supplements, toxic cosmetics–the list goes on. All the recalls and warnings and bad publicity are plunging China into crisis as it struggles to regain world confidence.

“It’s across the board: it’s in vitamins, toothpaste; it’s in our food products and pet foods as well. It puts a threat label on anything that is perishable that comes out of a particular country. For China this has very serious implications; even though a lot of what they are selling right now is not perishable, it’s mostly manufactured commodities,” says longtime China observer Al Santoli, director of the Asia-Pacific Initiative, based out of Washington, D.C.

The current trouble started in March over, of all things, pet food. It was just the sort of quirky, unforeseeable thing–like striking Polish dock workers starting a chain of events that eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet Union–that leads to a full-blown crisis. It was discovered that cat and dog food produced by Canada-based Menu Foods contained wheat gluten that had been spiked with melamine. The melamine had been deliberately added–it was later discovered–at a plant in China to falsely boost the protein content of the gluten. Melamine, though it does contain protein, is a hard plastic with no food value, and pets started dying across the continent, primarily of kidney failure.

The contamination led to the largest pet food recall in American history. At first, as the scare spread, the Chinese fell back on their old ways, trying to deny there was a problem, almost as if they were oblivious to the severe loss of international credibility on health matters they’d suffered in 2002 during the SARS crisis. At that time they’d attempted, and failed, to cover up the inadequacies of their health system. Now their spin on the current crisis has fallen on deaf ears.

The story widened when it was discovered that wheat gluten entered the human food chain through hog farms, where some of the pet food was fed to the animals–not that it mattered how it landed on folks’ dinner plates, since the gluten had been certified as fit for human consumption. Adding new angles to the story, the press started reporting on other Chinese food rejections and recalls, citing U.S. Federal Drug Administration statistics. It turned out that 69 per cent of all seafood rejected by the FDA this year was from China, and that the FDA had rejected, in the first four months, as many seafood shipments as it had for the entire year previous, primarily because of veterinary drug contamination. In fact, 104 of the 152 product recalls since the beginning of the year were for Chinese products. Then Europe got in on the act, banning the use of dog and cat fur in clothing items. The Chinese have been making stuffed animals, toys, hats, gloves, shoes, blankets and even complete fur coats out of dogs and cats, falsely labelling them as exotic fur from Corsac fox, Asian jackal, loup d’Asie (Asian wolf), mountain cat and rabbit.

The situation has the Chinese in damage control mode. For instance, on June 21 China finally promised to overhaul its food safety rules; Liu Pingjun, chief of the National Standardization Management Commission, will rework his country’s 1,965 national food safety standards. “The top priority for building a food safety standards system is to revise as soon as possible the rules for farm produce and processed food,” Liu said. Not that anyone expects it to do much good, since they have quite a few rules that have been in place for 12 years and nobody seems to have bothered following them.

For the most part the focus has been on the products. But there is a bigger picture. “More than just the issue of the products themselves, it comes down to the system of government that has these kinds of lax controls. The kind of corruption that’s involved, whether it’s in the way production is done, in the way labour is conducted, or the banking system or their stock market–which a lot of people have invested in–it sets a very serious warning trend that when you are dealing with China, you don’t know what to expect. There’s no consistency, no guarantee of quality, honesty or of being treated fairly. You work with them at your own risk,” Santoli says.

That’s a risk Canada is apparently more than willing to take. Last year, this country imported $777 million worth of food products alone from China. How much of that is inspected? No one really knows. When the statistics on rejected Chinese goods and food products began coming out of the U.S., Canadian media started checking around here. They were startled to discover bureaucrats at places like the Canadian Food Inspection Agency kept no figures on rejections or recalls by country.

This is upsetting for people like Randy Hillier. He is now a candidate for the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, preparing to run in the upcoming provincial election. But he’s also past-president of the Lanark and Ontario Landowners Association, a group that supports local farmers, and has been following the Chinese import issue for awhile– long before the current crisis hit the headlines. It burns Hillier that agencies like the CFIA make a big show of nailing local farmers and businesses hard, but really don’t do much to protect Canadians from bad exports. “You wouldn’t believe how many regulations there are that prevent local food from getting to the table. And the amount of local enforcement that anybody in local food production has to deal with, to overcome just to survive! We see groups like the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and local health units attacking local food producers while turning a blind eye to the loads of sh–t coming into this country,” Hillier fumes.

As an example of aggressive local enforcement, Hillier points to the CFIA’s over-the-top attack on local bakeries in the Ottawa area last December. One mom-and-pop bakery, in Renfrew, Ont., was nailed by the CFIA and asked to submit each of their 300 recipes for testing to a laboratory, at a cost of approximately $1000 per recipe. The community rallied, and with the help of the Landowners Association, forced the CFIA to back off.

Hillier attempted to get some figures out of the CFIA through a request to the Library of Parliament, such as how many shipments were rejected from China, and how many food inspectors were actually at Canadian ports. But the CFIA couldn’t answer.

The CFIA is apparently feeling the heat, and in interview with the Western Standard managed to offer one statistic. According to Paul Mayers, acting director of the Bureau of Microbial Hazards at CFIA, 12 per cent of fish products coming from China are regularly rejected due to contamination. But CFIA doesn’t target country of origin when determining what to inspect. “We take a risk-based approach based on the commodity first,” Mayers explains, “and then within that commodity we recognize a problem. And if that problem is associated with a specific source country, we’ll zero in on that source country for more intense scrutiny in order to address that particular problem.” The CFIA maintains that although Canada doesn’t have the data the U.S. has, our food inspection is equal to theirs. And just how much imported food is inspected in the U.S.? About three per cent. The FDA only has about 1,700 inspectors at the docks for the whole of the U.S. Canada, presumably, has much fewer.

If consumers think they can protect themselves at the supermarket from contaminated goods by keeping an eye out for products marked “Made in China,” they should think again. It is deceptively simple to import a food item from anywhere in the world and legally relabel it as “Product of Canada.” Just two things have to happen: the product has to be “substantially transformed” (to use the phrase of the Competition Bureau, which sets the guidelines) in appearance, and 51 per cent of the retail price has to be established in Canada.

Take apple juice, for instance. Canada imports a lot of apple juice concentrate from China. Add water, put it in a bottle, put on a label and ship to the store; the appearance has been significantly altered, and over half the retail price can be justified by processing and transportation. Now it can be labelled a “Product of Canada,” even though it contains no juice from apples grown in Canada under Canadian food standards.

This is done regularly with products from all over the world, but more and more it’s done with food coming from China. Extrapolate the concept to fish, mushrooms, mandarins, clementines, pears, fresh and frozen mixed vegetables, sausage casings, tea, pepper, sugar, chocolate–to name but a few of the food items imported from China–and the scale of this entirely legal-in-Canada deception starts to become apparent.

The whole situation is really starting to get to Canadian food producers. Merle Bowes is an organic vegetable farmer in the Ottawa area. “These things affect me financially, but my greater concern is as a consumer. These food safety programs that we hear about are not effective, they’re not working. Go to the CFIA website and look at the list of recalled items. Many of them are for imported items or foods that contain imported ingredients. The word ‘recall’ is critical, because that means they’re already in the system. The name ‘guinea pig’ comes to mind,” Bowes says.

While the problem may originate overseas, Canada’s inspection practices, which rigorously pursue local producers but ignore foreign products, are importing the danger here.

[This article appeared in the July 30, 2007 issue of the Western Standard.]

Listen to Terry Nelson, chief of Manitoba’s Anishinabe First Nation, and it’s easy to see just how disruptive Canadian Indians’ national day of protest, planned for June 29, might be. “There’s 30,000 miles of railway lines in this country and more than 50,000 miles of [oil and gas] pipelines,” Nelson told a reporter in early June. “The reality is that there’s no army that can actually protect all that. Not the United States army, not the Canadian army, not any.” This is the same Terry Nelson who had earlier stated, “There are only two ways of dealing with the white man. One, either you pick up a gun, or you stand between the white man and his money.” Listen to Phil Fontaine, grand chief of the Assembly of First Nations, and it’s immediately clear just how widespread the aboriginal commitment to illegal action is. “Many people ask why our people are so angry,” Fontaine told the Canadian Club of Ottawa in mid-May. “At this point you must realize we have a right to be frustrated, concerned, angry–anger that’s building and building.” Fontaine is also on record saying he is powerless to stop any blockades.

But listen to elected officials, especially at Queen’s Park in Toronto, and it’s hard to see any sign of scrupulous commitment to upholding the laws of the land in the face of native illegality. Rather, as viewed in the light of inaction surrounding the ongoing Caledonia dispute and, more significantly, of recent de facto official approval of native lawbreaking at Ipperwash, governments are essentially signalling that native lawbreakers will be rewarded, not punished for their actions.

That seems to be how Fontaine interpreted the findings, made public May 31, of Ontario Justice Sidney Linden’s special investigation into the Ipperwash affair, in which native demonstrator Dudley George was shot and killed by a police officer after weeks of escalating native protests. “Clearly, the inquiry has found that nothing is to be gained by applying force to situations where people legitimately feel their rights are at issue,” Fontaine asserted. What Fontaine appears to be saying, then, is that as long as Indians feel they have the moral high ground, the government has no authority to apply the law against them.

The lack of focus by Linden on any native culpability at Ipperwash led influential National Post columnist Andrew Coyne to conclude that the report effectively legitimized illegal protest. “What we have here is nothing less than the normalization of lawlessness, the legitimization of violence as a means of political protest,” Coyne wrote June 2. “And by a judge! Native radicals elsewhere can only take the appropriate clues and be emboldened.”

If Coyne is correct, then Linden’s Ipperwash report represents a milestone in Canadian legal and political history and, as such, bears close scrutiny, not only for what it examined and concluded, but also for what it ignored and the biases it betrayed.

I lived exactly 400 feet away from where it happened, where Dudley was shot and died,” says Mary-Lou LaPratte. The 62-year-old x-ray/ultrasound technician now lives in Sarnia, Ont. But for 18 years she lived with her husband in Ipperwash, from 1989 until March of this year. The “Dudley” she refers to is, of course, Dudley George, the native protester shot and killed by Ontario Provincial Police in Ipperwash Provincial Park on Sept. 6, 1995. That shooting was the subject of a $25.7 million, four-year inquiry headed by retired judge Linden. Linden heard from 140 witnesses over 25 months.

But he didn’t hear from LaPratte, even though she lived so close to the event. He didn’t want to hear from her even though she was one of 103 cottagers originally sued by the band in 1992–they wanted title to her home and $250,000 for trespassing on beachfront property the band had surrendered in the 1920s. The inquiry didn’t call her to testify even though her house had been broken into by protesters.

Actually, none of the residents who lived in the area were called to testify at the Ipperwash Inquiry. All they were allowed was a 90-minute town hall meeting with the commissioner and the inquiry’s lead counsel. And nothing of substance that was said at that meeting ended up in Linden’s report.

LaPratte believes the story of what happened to the residents of Ipperwash didn’t fit with the desired narrative, so they were cast aside. Ontario Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty set up the Ipperwash Inquiry mere weeks after he was elected in 2003, a move LaPratte believes was based on McGuinty’s desire to smear his predecessor, Conservative premier Mike Harris, who was at the helm when George was killed. If true, then Linden, who was appointed to the bench in 1990 by Liberal attorney general Ian Scott, delivered on part of it. The retired judge found fault with the police and with the provincial and federal governments. But he never did find evidence that Harris had interfered. On the other hand, Linden consistently characterized the protest and occupation as justified and peaceful.

As the report does make clear, there have actually been several parcels of land under contention at Ipperwash over the past 80 years. First, there were land surrenders of beachfront property in 1927 and 1928. The Kettle and Stoney Point Indians sold this land through the Department of Indian Affairs and received payment for it. Then in 1936, the Ontario government bought some of this beachfront from developers and established the provincial park. And finally there was the military base. This large tract of land was appropriated in 1942 by the Department of Defence to set up a training facility for troops during the Second World War. It was taken after a payment of $50,000 was made to the band; the government also promised to sell the land back to the band once it was no longer needed.

In 1980, with the military still occupying the reserve lands, the federal government offered $2.5 million in compensation and interest, along with a promise to give, not sell as was the original deal, the land back to the band when it became available. Essentially, it was this last alleged injustice related to the military lands that Linden used in his report to justify the native occupation of the provincial park. There’s a reason he had to stretch the logic: three years after the death of George, the natives had lost a Supreme Court case in which they had tried to reclaim the park and beachfront lands.

According to LaPratte, the trouble started in 1992. That’s when the Kettle and Stoney Point First Nations launched lawsuits against the cottagers on the beachfront, seeking title to the land and $250,000 apiece from the homeowners for trespassing. The band also sued the banks that held the mortgages. This made it difficult for the homeowners to raise money for their defence, or to get credit of any sort.

That’s also when the intimidation started. “They would come onto the property holding a board and say, ‘If you don’t leave the front of your property, I will be back with 50 warriors and we will get you out.’ That kind of thing,” LaPratte recalls. “It doesn’t sound like much now, but at the time it was extremely scary because when we called the police, they told us the Crown attorneys had tied their hands and that they couldn’t do a thing; because the natives sincerely thought they owned our property and our homes–under ‘colour of right’–we could not charge them with anything.” In a more serious incident, one resident was beaten over the head with a lead pipe and suffered neurological damage.

“By the spring of 1993, we knew we were in trouble. We knew the police were not going to help us,” says LaPratte. (This was well before Mike Harris became premier. The NDP, led by Bob Rae, was the party in power from Oct. 1, 1990 to June 26, 1995. Harris was in office for just over two months when George was killed.) At that point, a split in the band occurred and protesters from the Stoney band, led by Chief Carl George, occupied the military base, upset that the land had actually been promised to the Kettle band. “We all knew Carl George, and it was a peaceful protest,” LaPratte says. “But then, pretty soon the natives were fighting themselves at the base. By ‘95 there were other people in charge and a lot of natives there that didn’t even belong to the area and really had no interest in the land. The situation had started to change and, by ‘95, that’s when things became super violent.”

The twist to all this is that the lawyer for the cottagers, Derry Millar, who won the case in 1998 at the Supreme Court level, ended up as the lead counsel for the Ipperwash Inquiry. Linden did not seem bothered by this apparent conflict of interest. Millar himself disagrees with the contention that the residents of the area were ignored. “What the public hearings attempted to do was to look at what happened at the army camp and at the provincial park,” he says. “Certainly the commissioner was aware of the concerns of some cottagers.”

Mark Vandermaas runs a website called The Ipperwash Papers that is seeking to publicize the events surrounding the George killing that the inquiry ignored. “To suggest that Mary-Lou LaPratte wasn’t called as a witness because she didn’t live close enough to the shooting is disingenuous, considering she lived 400 feet away,” Vandermass says. “It seems to me that Derry Millar is trying to put forth the argument that the Ipperwash Inquiry was all about the five or six hours surrounding Dudley George’s death. I thought the inquiry was about trying to find out how he died and why he died.” Certainly that might include some of the violence witnessed by some of the residents.

That violence was considerable. As Coyne pointed out, “. . . in almost every case where police and natives clashed, the violence was initiated by the natives. . . . So the police badly mishandled the occupation, yes. But had this particular group of natives not taken it into their heads to break the law, defy their band council and seized the provincial park, they would never have come into conflict with the police. Yet throughout his report, Judge Linden takes the existence of this and other such native occupations as a given.”

Whitney Lackenbauer is a professor of history at the University of Waterloo. His 2006 book, Battle Grounds: The Canadian Military and Aboriginal Lands, takes a detailed look at Ipperwash. “If I had any major concern about what they presented, it was, despite all the length, a real lack of appreciation of the [divisions within the] native community itself,” Lackenbauer says of Linden’s 78-page executive summary.

Lackenbauer also disagrees with the report’s suggestion that the military had other suitable land available in the area. Lackenbauer says his examination of archival records shows the military had been trying unsuccessfully for years to find an alternative parcel. “So it’s a report that, while it certainly sets up a case of tremendous hardship that the appropriation had on the community, it does so in a way that in some respects plays quite loose with the historical record,” Lackenbauer says.

One conclusion, then, is that Linden was selective with the historical record and ignored potentially important testimony, thereby exonerating the protesters. But then McGuinty’s government stands accused of creating pretty much the same conditions in ongoing problem areas such as Caledonia, where Indian protesters have occupied a subdivision since April of 2006. The police have ignored a judge’s order to have the protesters removed, and many have accused the McGuinty government of being weak-kneed. Since the occupation began, bridges have been burned down, police cars destroyed and residents assaulted, all with no charges being laid against protesters.This is not to say all native grievances lack merit. But, as the country prepares for the June 29 day of action, it does raise questions about the response of successive Canadian governments to those grievances. Some of those questions were answered June 12 when Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced a plan to settle natives’ specific claims in a timely fashion. Specific claims deal with alleged failures of the federal government with respect to treaty obligations; these differ from comprehensive claims that are based on unextinguished aboriginal rights such as hunting and fishing. At the end of 2006, there was a backlog of 861 specific claims. With Fontaine at his side, Harper said the government would work with the AFN to draft a bill to create a new independent land claims commission staffed by impartial judges. The government would give the commission $250 million a year for 10 years to settle claims.

Tom Flanagan, a political science professor at the University of Calgary and former Conservative government insider, correctly predicted in early June that the Tories would establish an independent tribunal to expedite the specific claims, a tribunal he fears will not demand a high standard of evidence, similar to what Ottawa did in response to aboriginal claims of abuse in residential schools. When thousands of natives signed up to sue, the federal government realized trials would be too costly to litigate, so the government paid out $2 billion to claimants–claimants who did not have to prove any abuse.

“The typical specific claim involves a set of facts that took place 100 year ago or more, in some cases 200 years ago,” Flanagan says. If it involves land surrenders, often the claim will be that the Indian agent didn’t properly notify the adult male members of the band to approve it, or he didn’t explain the deal clearly, or that the band didn’t get their money in a timely fashion. What would often happen is that the land would be surrendered to the Crown and the Crown would resell it and the proceeds would go to the band. Sometimes the resales fell through. Then there are complaints about the size of reserves: whether everybody got counted when the reserve was assigned.

“How do you prove some of these things?” Flanagan asks. “Trying to prove more than 100 years ago that the Indian agent did or did not notify everybody to come to a meeting on Sept. 19, 1904, is often beyond human power.”

Significantly, the Chrétien government passed legislation in 2003 to set up such a tribunal, but the Assembly of First Nations rejected the idea because it put limits on individual payouts and tied the number of payouts to an annual budget. The native leaders wanted no limits. Paul Martin came to power and never had the legislation proclaimed.

Flanagan says that, in one way, it’s good the bill was never proclaimed, because it lacked a deadline for filing–an omission that would have virtually guaranteed the process would have gone on forever. “Give me a team of historians and lawyers,” Flanagan says, “and I could generate 10,000 claims.”

It was not known at press time whether the proposed legislation would include a filing deadline. Also unknown was whether the announcement would avert the aboriginals’ June 29 day of action, although the AFN’s website was still promoting the national protest after Harper’s announcement. Perhaps appeasement will buy short-term peace. The long-term implications are anyone’s guess.

[This article appeared in the July 2, 2007 issue of the Western Standard.]

A fine, white dust hangs in the air over the Kandahar airbase in southern Afghanistan, so fine it is barely visible. It obscures the view only at a distance, but you can feel it sticking to your sweat, or as a bit of grit on your teeth. That dust may well have been kicked up by the constant parade of military vehicles grinding their way along the base’s main roads at all hours, but in Afghanistan it’s hard to tell–the dust is simply everywhere.

It was 8:15 a.m. on May 23 and the temperature was already well on its way to 30°C when Prime Minister Stephen Harper stepped out from beside a Tim Hortons trailer onto a boardwalk and into that dusty Kandahar base. Flanked by military brass and Gordon O’Connor, his minister of defence, Harper walked to a podium set up in the centre of an outdoor hockey rink just in front of the iconic coffee shop.

About 300 troops had waited patiently on that concrete rink for over an hour to hear Harper speak, the sun bearing down on their desert hats. Directly in front of the podium, 12 hatless soldiers wearing hockey jerseys–six abreast, facing each other–stood at military ease, their hands clasped behind their backs. The prime minister, Tim Hortons, hockey: a slice of Canada in a dusty land, a long way from home.

“I’m proud of you,” Harper told his appreciative audience. “Canadians are proud of you. And I’m here to tell you that we are behind you. Your government will continue steadfastly supporting the men and women of the Canadian Forces as the most professional, disciplined and effective soldiers in the entire world. We will let no one diminish all that you have achieved for Canada here. Because, friends, we know where we stand.”

If the brain trust in the PMO were looking to showcase Harper as a strong leader, a man of conviction and a man of principle, they would have been hard pressed to conjure up a more impressive setting. But how the message Harper had come to deliver to the troops would sound back home, through the dust and the distance, was hard to say. Nevertheless, it was a message that the soldiers, putting their lives on the line 13,000 kilometres from their kith and kin, certainly embraced. As events would soon suggest, that may have been good enough.

Harper’s surprise visit to Afghanistan had begun with an 8 a.m. landing in a Hercules aircraft at the Kabul airport the day before. There, surrounded by brown hills reminiscent of the region around Kamloops, B.C., staff and reporters were loaded into unmarked armoured vans, provided by the Americans and piloted by local, experienced motorcade drivers who whipped through the bumpy streets of the capital while traffic police held up long lines of cars. Signs of widespread devastation and haphazard reconstruction were everywhere. Reporters peering out through the inch-thick bulletproof glass could see old men on bicycles, children walking to school and a few locals driving donkey carts. But that was as close as anyone on the trip would get to everyday Afghan life.

The prime minister’s first stop was the most pleasant: the Aschiana School for Street Children, where grade school boys and girls sang and played instruments and demonstrated their painting skills. Canada had contributed $50,000 to the school last year. As the PM moved through the rundown buildings of the school in the centre of Kabul, armed paratroopers shadowed him at a discreet distance.

From there, Harper and the motorcade travelled to the Canadian Embassy for a briefing with Ambassador Arif Lalani and officials from the Canadian International Development Agency, and after that to the King’s palace where he met privately with Afghan president Hamid Karzai. It was at their joint press conference following those meetings that Harper faced the media for the only time on the trip. The first question was about the purpose of the trip; specifically, whether he was trying to bolster his party’s popularity. “Our allies, the entire international community, want us here,” Harper answered. “The people and the government of Afghanistan want us here. And the Canadian men and women in uniform or who work for various government agencies believe in their mission. So I’m not here because of the polls; I’m here because it’s the right thing to do.”

Harper’s delivery of a similar positive and principled message the next morning at the base clearly went over well on the ground. Warrant Officer Boyd Carter, a Newfoundlander in his 27th year of service with the Canadian Forces, spoke for many when he said, “It’s always good to hear a voice from back home. And this is particularly good for the young guys, especially those who haven’t seen it before because it lets them know how people in Canada feel about what they’re doing and how they are appreciated.”

But it’s not exactly clear what the “people in Canada” actually feel about the deployment. Canada’s military, some 2,500 strong in Kandahar and part of a larger NATO contingent, certainly knows where it stands on its mission to bring peace and security to a country troubled by 30 years of war and strife. And so does the Conservative government; it backs the mission even as public support for it has dropped, to the peril of the Tories’ own standing in the polls. An SES Research poll, made public before Harper’s trip, showed the Conservatives had dropped four percentage points in public popularity in April, to just 32 per cent–one point behind the Liberals.

Part of the decline is no doubt due to the Canadian public’s indecision about the mission. An April 24 Ipsos Reid poll found that 52 per cent of Canadians supported the role of the country’s troops in Afghanistan. But barely two weeks later, a May 6 SES/Sun Media poll found that 54.6 per cent of Canadians wanted the troops out of Afghanistan if casualties continue, which, since casualties are inevitable in the ongoing conflict, is tantamount to saying they want them out now.

That inevitability became apparent only three days after Harper’s visit. On May 25, Cpl. Matthew McCully became the 55th Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan since the 2002 deployment. The 25-year-old native of Orangeville, Ont., known as Matty to his friends, was killed by an improvised explosive device while on foot patrol 35 kilometres west of Kandahar.

McCully died on the first day of Operation Hoover, a joint operation that involved Afghan, British, Portuguese and Canadian troops trying to drive approximately 300 Taliban fighters out of an area known as Nalgham in the Zhari district. Only in retrospect would it become clear that Harper’s visit, derided in some quarters as a mere photo op, had actually come on the eve of this major offensive.

The launch of Operation Hoover also puts into clearer perspective a remarkable journey that Harper made in the hours following his speech. In the late morning of that day, Harper flew in a U.S. Black Hawk helicopter (Canada has no helicopters of its own at Kandahar) to Ma’Sum Ghar, a settlement on the boundary of Panjwaii and Zhari districts where the Canadian Forces have a forward base. This was the base from which Operation Hoover was launched just days later.

In the press briefing held at the base while Harper was in the air, Col. Mike Cessford, deputy commander of the Canadian contingent in Afghanistan, told reporters, “I think I can make a flat statement that no serving prime minister has ever been closer to combat operations than the prime minister today. That’s a statement of fact. Last week we lost an Afghan interpreter in an attack on this camp.” Later in the briefing, Cessford sought to add credibility to his statement by pointing out that he had a doctorate in history from Carleton University.

The full import of Harper’s actions was not readily apparent, but most reporters recognized what Harper had done, even though they had no idea that Operation Hoover was to follow: the prime minister had demonstrated physical courage and leadership by putting himself in harm’s way, where Canada’s sons and daughters were being asked to go at their peril. Nevertheless, some reporters–those who don’t look favourably on the Conservatives–tried to minimize the historic foray. Some contended that prime minister W.L. Mackenzie King’s crossing of the Atlantic Ocean during the Second World War had been more perilous, while others sniped that Harper looked “dumpy” in his flak jacket. Journalists back in Canada were not immune to the negativity: one column in the St. John’s Telegram, headlined “What the Heck was He Thinking?” compared Harper to Star Trek’s Captain Kirk.

In many ways, Harper’s trip to Afghanistan, which followed his first visit 14 months ago, highlighted the chilly relationship between the Prime Minister’s Office and the news media. Not once on the journey there or back did Harper step to the back of the plane to speak with reporters to give his impressions of the trip or provide context. It’s doubtful that he’s losing any sleep over it; on the other hand, he’s very likely gaining support from soldiers who all too often find themselves misrepresented in the mainstream media. (In this light, it was not surprising that, in his address to the soldiers, Harper managed to get a spontaneous round of applause when he said, “We kicked a few reporters off the plane and brought over some new hockey sticks, which I’m sure you will appreciate.”)

It’s also clear that the value of Harper’s visit to Ma’Sum Ghar wasn’t lost on the military. On May 24, Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Rick Hillier told the Canadian Press’s annual dinner attendees that Harper’s visit had been a major boost to the troops. “He is the actual, visible representation that this country is appreciative of what these young men and women are doing, and that they are remembered,” Hillier said. “And maybe, just maybe,” he continued, “that convinces them that the next day they can get up and do their business and accept that risk because we ask them to do it.”

Considering Hillier’s words came just as Operation Hoover was being launched (though it was still unknown to Canadians because of operational secrecy), his words, “the next day,” seem particularly profound, even heart-wrenching, when thinking of Cpl. Matthew McCully.

PRIDE IN A JOB WELL DONE

As he sits outside his tent in the waning light of a Kandahar evening, a young Canadian soldier confides that morale at the base is pretty high. He has just come back from brushing his teeth some 200 metres away. In the distance, cheering and whistling sweeps across the base from a stadium where entertainers from Canada’s East Coast are treating the troops to Cape Breton Celtic music.

Yes, the troops are in fine spirits. Then again, morale in his unit is already really high. “That’s because we’re going home in a week and a half,” he explains brightly.

But there’s another reason for their good mood: the satisfaction earned in a job well done. “I think everyone here understands it takes some time to build a country,” the 21-year-old corporal says. “We’re pretty proud of what we did out of Camp Julien up in Kabul. That place was a mess when we first got there in 2003–in complete darkness, no power. In two years it started looking like a city again.”

SIX MONTHS IS LONG ENOUGH

“WE really envy those guys,” says the American soldier patrolling the boardwalk at Kandahar airbase, overlooking the Canadian troops gathered in a hockey rink waiting to hear Prime Minister Stephen Harper speak. “They’re on a six-month rotation. We’re here on 15.”

By “we” he means himself and his wife–both of whom are stationed at the base, and both of whom would rather head home after only half a year abroad, like the Canadians do, rather than spend more than a year at a time away.

One of the problems with a 15-month rotation, he explains, is the couple had to find someone to look after their new house in Florida. “Not only does someone have to look after the yard,” he says, “they have to go into the house at least once a month to open all the appliances, fridge, dryer, dishwasher. The rubber on these things will harden and seal shut if you don’t.”

But most of all, he and his wife are worried about their five children, aged 7 to 19. They were distributed among relatives and friends. “The older ones act like they don’t need you around, but they do,” he says. “Man, what I wouldn’t give for six months.”

[This article appeared in the June 18, 2007 issue of the Western Standard.]

If anyone has doubts that environmentalism has become a religion, then Al Gore, the failed U.S. presidential candidate who has been born again as a global warming guru, will put those doubts to rest. At the national convention of the American Institute of Architects in San Antonio on May 5, Gore continually spoke of how global warming had prompted “a new way of thinking” to save the planet. “It’s in part a spiritual crisis,” Gore preached. “It’s a crisis of our own self-definition–who we are. Are we creatures destined to destroy our own species? Clearly not.” Gore’s ideas don’t just have religious overtones, they are religious: spirituality, apocalypse, destiny, conversion, salvation.

That Gore would be talking “spiritual” about the environment, even to a crowd of yawning architects in Texas, is not surprising. His Oscar-winning documentary about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, is itself something of a leap of faith, so poorly does it represent the science on climate. Flawed though the film was, it proved popular enough to catapult Gore onto the speaking circuit, where he now commands $125,000 an appearance to sermonize about the “spiritual crisis.” He is environmentalism’s most popular itinerant preacher.

Gore might blanch at the idea of being called a prophet because of the religious connotations, but, more and more, environmentalism has taken on the characteristics of a religion. In Canada, Green party Leader Elizabeth May has been merging environmentalism and religion. On April 29, she delivered a guest sermon on climate change at the Wesley Knox United Church in London, Ont. Introduced to the congregation by a Liberal MP as a “prophet,” May’s over-the-top sermon made instant headlines. She took aim at fundamentalist Christians in the U.S.: “They are waiting for the end time in glee, and they unfortunately include President Bush.” She said that the Harper government’s approach to climate change “represents a grievance worse than Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of the Nazis.” Her message couldn’t have been clearer: they are evil; hers is the only road to salvation.

In the 1960s, a few environmentalists actually believed their cause could not succeed unless it became a religion first. How close they’ve come to attaining that goal in a generation is perhaps best gauged by the growing body of chroniclers and critics of the new religion.

In 2003, author Michael Crichton kick-started the criticism with a widely circulated speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Crichton, who has written such bestselling novels as State of Fear and Jurassic Park, pinpointed the main practitioners. “Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists,” Crichton said, right after ranking it as “one of the most powerful religions in the western world.” Crichton maintains the position that while an environmental movement is necessary, the conversion of the movement to religion is dangerous. His goal is to get the movement out of the “clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline.”

Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., doesn’t know if that’s possible. “It’s almost trite to say it because it’s quoted so much, but G.K. Chesterton said, ‘When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing–they believe in anything.’ The loss of connection to the practice of Christianity, and in some cases Judaism, has left a lot of people with utterly meaningless lives,” Ebell says. As they discover that, they want to find something. Environmentalism–saving the planet–fills the void.

Modern society is seeing an invasion of environmental morality. The green cause now influences what kinds of cars we drive, or even whether we should drive, what kinds of houses we buy, what we wear, what we eat, what we do each day with our garbage, and even, for some, how many children they will have. A May 7 news story in the London Sunday Times paraphrased a new report from a green think-tank, Optimum Population Trust: “Having large families should be frowned upon as an environmental misdemeanor in the same way as frequent long-haul flights, driving a big car and failing to reuse plastic bags.” Why? Because it turns out couples who had two children instead of three “could cut their family’s carbon dioxide output by the equivalent of 620 return flights a year between London and New York.”

If equating your children to the exhaust of a transatlantic jetliner doesn’t strike you as particularly religious, you might not be seeing the bigger picture. In a Jan. 9 column in the Financial Times, British economist John Kay noted that environmentalism now provided “a simple, all-encompassing narrative,” with two key myths that anthropologists point out are common to many cultures, though they appear to have developed independently: the myth of the Fall (or the Lost Eden), and an apocalypse myth.

The Fall in environmental theology is the idea that our modern, material lives have put us out of harmony with nature and that humanity needs to return to a “natural” state in order to achieve balance. It is a myth because mankind never lived in a static natural state, but has been constantly evolving and learning to use nature throughout time. Some environmentalists push this idea to the extreme and contend that the natural state of the world is one without mankind altogether.

The apocalypse myth is the one that Al Gore has been preaching: global warming doom. Kay observes that for years, the environmental movement didn’t have a successful apocalypse myth because in most cases, the environment has been getting healthier, due to greater public awareness and better technology. “The discovery of global warming filled a gap in the canon. That is why environmentalists attach so much importance to the assertion not just that the world is warming up, which is plainly true, but that this warming is our fault, which is less plainly true,” Kay writes.

It is in the global warming apocalyptic myth that many environmentalists take their leap of faith. This makes sense because prophecy has typically been the preserve of religion since the days of the Delphic Oracle and before. David Orrell, a computational scientist and author of Apollo’s Arrow: The Science of Prediction and the Future of Everything, says the science of climate change has definitely taken on some religious aspects. In particular, he sees what he calls a “priestly class” developing, a “class of people who are interested in protecting their own version of the world. That’s the sense I get with some of these scientific models of the atmosphere,” Orrell says. Most of the predictions from these models are so vague they are in fact quite useless, he contends, but nobody appears to be questioning them. “Scientists are famous for their skepticism, but when it comes to predictions, their skepticism seems to be put on hold.”

Not all who label environmentalism a religion view it harshly. Thomas Dunlap, a professor of history at Texas A&M University, in his book Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest, treats it with a great deal of respect. Dunlap, a devout Catholic, writes, “Environmentalists do not, generally, believe the movement constitutes a religion (and in conventional terms it does not) and they are uncomfortable with religious terms, but they ask religious questions: what purpose do humans have in the universe, and what must they do to fulfil it?” Dunlap sees environmentalism as a nascent religion, one that has not fully worked out its moral imperatives but is worthy of the same kind of respect that other great religious impulses deserve.

William Cronon, professor of history and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin, wrote the foreword to Dunlap’s book and also defends the notion of environmentalism as religion. “If you take it as your premise that faith or belief in things in the world that cannot be proven is by definition proof of unreliability, then there are as many reasons to be doubtful of environmentalism as there are reasons to be doubtful of Christianity or Judaism or Islam or any other great religious tradition,” Cronon says. There are many things in the world that matter enormously that we can never prove with one hundred per cent certainty. Human beings always act on partial knowledge, which means we always act in part on faith. “Science believes, and I agree with this, that we should test our assumptions about the world and subject them to criticism. My own belief is that any religious practice should also subject itself to that kind of scrutiny. I would say the great religious traditions do that,” says Cronon.

How environmentalism as religion would fare when subjected to postmodern western political traditions is another thing altogether. Today, the separation of church and state is guarded jealously by secularists such as the American Civil Liberties Union. How such groups–and religions with differing views on the morality of having children–might respond to environmentalism as a new state religion is not yet known. It’s an unpredictable world. As environmentalists might say: have faith.

[This article appeared in the June 4, 2007 issue of the Western Standard.]

He calls it a “basket charge.” That’s the term Hamilton-area lawyer Chris MacLeod uses when describing “split-ism,” or seeking “to divide the motherland.” This is the charge his client Huseyin Celil has been convicted of in Communist China. On April 19, Celil–a Canadian citizen and ethnic Uyghur by birth–was sentenced to life in prison. “It’s a basket charge for anyone who is either a Tibetan or a Uyghur,” MacLeod says. In other words, if they want to throw someone in prison, all they have to do is allege split-ism, and since the Communist Chinese are pretty much detested in both regions and just about everybody wants them out, they don’t have to do much to make it stick.

Since 1949, China has occupied both Tibet and East Turkistan, the homeland of the Uyghurs, which the Chinese call Xinjiang province. A vague, broad catch-all charge like “split-ism” might explain why the Chinese felt there was no need to show evidence at Celil’s trial. He was also convicted of “organizing, leading and participating in terrorist groups.” For that he received 10 years. Again, no evidence was presented.

But the Chinese Communist party doesn’t do this type of thing without its reasons. So, in the absence of evidence, perhaps there might be an explanation that fits the facts.

MacLeod is willing to offer one. “I think [Celil’s conviction is] for activities he’s done in Canada. This is the Chinese government sending a message to the Uyghur diaspora that if you speak up and speak out in a foreign country for the Uyghur population, that is a crime punishable by life imprisonment or even death,” MacLeod says. And he says it’s now a matter of “message sent, message received”; Uyghurs abroad are fearful of speaking out.

The problem with this theory is that Celil wasn’t known for being a particularly vocal member of the Uyghur community in Canada, which only numbers in the low hundreds. Mehmet Tohti, president of the Toronto-based Uyghur Association of Canada, says Celil simply wasn’t that visible. “He is not an extraordinary man in our community. He’s a real family man, an ordinary man. We arrange protest rallies sometimes in front of the Chinese Consulate. Sometimes he comes, sometimes not, because he has three kids and his oldest son is handicapped,” Tohti says. However, Tohti does agree with MacLeod that the “Chinese government is simply trying to send a message to all Uyghurs outside of China: ‘Just watch your step.’”

Tohti believes the Chinese kidnapped Celil simply because they could. In March 2006, Celil traveled to Uzbekistan with his family to visit his wife’s relatives. Uzbekistan, friendly with the Beijing government because of business ties and Chinese aid, detained Celil when he tried to renew his visitor visa. They concocted a story that he was in fact a wanted terrorist named Guler Dilaver on Interpol’s watch list. Eventually, the Uzbeks spirited him to China without informing his family or Canadian authorities. He continued to be held incommunicado until February this year, when he made a one-day court appearance in the city of Urumchi.

The Chinese initially maintained that because Celil was on an international terrorist watch list, consular agreements didn’t apply–and so China didn’t have to deal with Canadian diplomats regarding his arrest. When it became apparent that this was too weak a pretext to maintain, the Chinese then said they didn’t recognize Celil’s Canadian citizenship, and on that basis have consistently denied him Canadian consular services. But even this latest explanation shows how rickety the rule of law is in China. Tohti is emphatic on this point: “Chinese nationality law is very clear and cut, without giving any room for other interpretations. Chinese nationality law, Article 3, says China does not accept dual citizenship. And Article 9 says if anyone becomes a foreign national, becomes a citizen of any other country except China, he or she will lose Chinese citizenship automatically,” he says. In other words, Celil cannot legally be a Chinese subject.

According to Tohti, when Celil became a Canadian citizen in 2005, he contacted the Chinese consul general’s office in Toronto to find out if there were any formalities he had to undertake to cut all ties with China. The officials there apparently informed him of Chinese law negating his Chinese citizenship. Tohti thinks this was a mistake on Celil’s part because that may have been the moment he appeared on the Communist party’s radar.

China’s human rights abuses against the Turkistan have been widely publicized and internationally condemned, but the plight of the Uyghurs in East Turkistan has largely gone unnoticed. The Uyghurs are not ethnically Chinese. They are a Muslim, mainly Sufi, Turkic-language minority of about 10 million. For years, the Communists treated them as subhuman, denying them basic human rights and treating the region as a buffer-zone wasteland between China and the Soviet Union, a place where they would conduct multiple above-ground nuclear tests without any regard for the population.

Then, as China began to develop and became more energy dependent, it turned out that East Turkistan was oil rich. It also borders with Kazakhstan, which has large oil deposits as well. (Any pipeline from Kazakhstan to China–and the Chinese have been inking oil deals with Kazakhstan–will traverse East Turkistan.) To say that this occupied territory is strategically important to China is an understatement; it is rapidly becoming the heart for the lifeblood of China’s rapidly expanding economy. But Beijing has a problem with this heartland: namely, their long and ongoing conflict with the people who live there.

Throughout their occupation, ethnic Chinese, particularly Han Chinese, have been sent to live in the region to replace and rule over the Uyghurs. In 1997, riots started breaking out in response. These were ruthlessly suppressed by the ruling Communists and were quickly followed by mass executions and a clampdown on religious practice. By 1998, the Chinese began what they called “patriotic education” of the Uyghurs.

Enter, or rather exit, Huseyin Celil. He escaped East Turkistan in 1999. (Canadian newspapers keep repeating that he escaped from prison, but Kamila Telendibayeva, Celil’s wife, says this simply isn’t true; he escaped from East Turkistan without a passport, not from prison.) He managed to get to Turkey, and in May 1999 applied at a United Nations office for refugee status. After two years, in October 2001, he was accepted into Canada as a refugee and eventually settled in Burlington, Ont.

The timeline belies the transparent nonsense of China’s case against Celil. For the first six months of his detention, Beijing said Celil was being detained in relation to two terrorist events: a kidnapping in March 2000, and an assassination of a Chinese diplomat in 2002, both in Kyrgyzstan. But it is well documented that he was living under the protection of the UN in Turkey in 2000, and then in Canada in 2002. Neither event was mentioned at Celil’s trial. Still, he was convicted of a terror charge and sentenced.

Anwar Yusuf Turani is the prime minister of the East Turkistan government-in-exile based in Washington, D.C. He says he isn’t surprised by what China has done. “They’ve been doing it for a long time, arresting people in East Turkistan, labelling them separatists or religious extremists or terrorists. China is very good at labelling people without any proof,” Turani says.

Celil’s plight illustrates how Beijing has used the war on terror to justify continued oppression of the Uyghurs. As lawyer Chris MacLeod points out, the Chinese alleged that Celil gave money to Hizb’allah while he was in East Turkistan. “They didn’t say where he got this money or who he gave it to, but Hizb’allah is a name recognized in the West,” MacLeod says, implying the Chinese are just throwing around disinformation to justify what they’ve done. In 2002, the U.S. government put an organization known as the East Turkistan Islamic Movement on its Treasury Department terrorism watch list, as did the UN, despite the fact that not much is really known about the group. It was largely viewed as a concession to China for their support in the international war on terror. This allows them to pretend to be on the right side. At an April 26 press briefing, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said, “We believe the case is China’s internal affair and in essence relates to anti-terrorism. It has no connection with Canada. We hope the Canadian side will not interfere with China’s internal affairs under this pretext.”

Turani believes the Chinese are playing a game with the international community, and Canada in particular, by kidnapping Celil and then imprisoning him for life. “Eventually they are going to exchange Celil for something they want from Canada,” Turani says. China did a similar thing, he says, when in 1999 they imprisoned Rabiya Kadir, a once successful Uyghur businesswoman, after she refused to speak out against her scholar husband, then living in the U.S., who had been critical of China. After six years in jail, she was freed in March 2005 and allowed to go to the U.S., after the American government exerted pressure on Beijing. Many China watchers interpreted her release as a public relations manoeuvre rather than a change of heart by the CCP. “They wanted to show the world, ‘See how generous we are: we treat the people humanely, we don’t have absolute dictatorship,’” Turani says.

If this is what China intends to do with Celil, then the CCP has done it at the expense of exposing yet again their bogus legal system. Also, it’s a safe bet that, before the Celil case, only foreign policy wonks and human rights activists knew anything about the Uyghurs. Celil’s trumped-up conviction has put a spotlight on that obscure ethnic minority, and has created a permanent irritant in Canada-Chinese relations. Just ahead of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, that can’t be good for a CCP desperately trying to whitewash its image.

THE MEDDLERS:

Throughout Huseyin Celil’s ordeal, numerous Chinese officials have repeated the claim that the matter is entirely a domestic affair and Canada shouldn’t be meddling. Anyone who knows anything about Communist China would find this hypocrisy laughable. China is always meddling in the domestic affairs of other nations.

A good example was put before the Canadian public at the beginning of April, when it was revealed that Zhang Jiyan, the wife of a diplomat at the Chinese embassy in Ottawa, had defected to Canada in early March. She brought with her a document that showed how the embassy had tried to subvert the CRTC application of a New York-based Chinese-language television station, New Tang Dynasty Television, to broadcast in Canada. NTDTV is linked with the Falun Gong and is known to be critical of the Chinese Communist party.

There are numerous other examples. Two years ago, Chen Yonglin, a defector in Australia, identified a network of more than a thousand Chinese operatives in Canada, mostly keeping tabs on ethnic Chinese here. Then there are the connections with Canada’s Power Corp., which has a stake in CITIC, one of the largest Chinese conglomerates, while Power Corp. has had direct links to past Canadian prime ministers going back to Trudeau. And who can forget the infamous Johnny Chung case in the U.S., where China funnelled money to the Democratic party in order to influence the 1996 election?

[This article appeared in the May 21, 2007 issue of the Western Standard.]

Imagine you are given a new job and a new office. When you move in, you discover a briefcase full of confidential files. Is it yours? Actually, no. “Even if we come upon something otherwise lawfully, for example, if we take over someone else’s office lawfully, once we become aware of another person’s property and we keep it, even temporarily, it is called ‘theft by conversion,’” says Shawn Beaver, a prominent criminal lawyer with Taylor Beaver LLP in Edmonton. “The law does expect you not to detain, not to keep it, even temporarily. If you form the intent to return it to the authorities for turning it over to the rightful owner right away and you do so, then you haven’t committed an offence. But detaining it for any time is called ‘theft by conversion’–converting something to yours at least temporarily belonging to somebody else to your knowledge,” he says.

Unfortunately, that’s what the Liberal Party of Canada did as one of its first acts as Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, when it decided to keep Conservative files that were supposed to be transferred by parliamentary movers as the parties changed offices last year. The Liberals had lost the January 2006 federal election in large part because the Canadian public viewed them as ethically challenged, so if the party was looking to rebuild, this probably wasn’t the best way to start.

However, nobody outside the Liberal Office of the Leader of the Opposition (OLO) knew they had the files. For 14 months they held onto them–30 boxes full of personnel evaluations, private correspondence, newspaper clippings and who knows what else, some of it dating back to the Canadian Alliance and even the Reform party years in the 1990s–and kept quiet about it while the Liberal Research Bureau in the OLO rifled through them looking for dirt.

The fact that the Liberals would stoop to such depths, resorting to an almost Watergate-style skullduggery by snooping through private files they only had access to because of their theft, indicates they see themselves as being in big trouble. Indeed, their new leader, Stéphane Dion, doesn’t seem to be inspiring much confidence. In an SES poll conducted for the Sun Media chain between March 31 and April 5, only 16.7 per cent of Canadians thought Dion would make the best prime minister, compared to 42.2 per cent for Stephen Harper.

There are other signs of desperation. On April 3, Liberal blogger Jason Cherniak, an official with Dion’s leadership campaign, produced an Internet TV ad taking a quote from Stephen Harper out of context in an attempt to portray the prime minister as if he enjoyed the deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan. (It was too much even for Liberal supporters and he took it down.) Then there’s legal bullying; on March 23, failed Liberal leadership candidate Gerard Kennedy and MPs Navdeep Bains and Omar Alghabra served the National Post and columnist Jonathan Kay with a libel suit for a critical column published a month before. But rifling through stolen documents?

Tim Powers, a Conservative strategist, says it’s pretty bad when people are going through the garbage or appropriating items that aren’t theirs. “This speaks to the difficulty the Liberals are having themselves, developing an identity under Dion and com[ing] forward with meaningful stuff,” Powers says.

It fell to 32-year-old Liberal MP Mark Holland to introduce to Parliament what the Liberal snoops had found. On March 22, Holland stood up in the House of Commons and said he had turned over to the RCMP private correspondence that showed that in 2000, then Okanagan-Coquihalla MP Jim Hart had asked for and received an inducement to step aside so the newly elected leader of the Canadian Alliance, Stockwell Day, could run in his seat. The Liberal press release of that day said, the “documents . . . came anonymously into [Holland’s] possession.” On the same day, however, the online magazine PoliticsWatch.com published a story with this revealing sentence: “An official in Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion’s office told PoliticsWatch that the Conservatives left approximately 30 boxes of documents in the Opposition leader’s office last February after they moved into the PMO.” In the House, the Conservatives pointed out that the RCMP had looked into the matter seven years ago. And so the story started to turn to the source of Holland’s information.

As the story turned, it started changing. The next day, the Liberal-friendly Toronto Star published a report wherein the 30 boxes suddenly turned into “thousands and thousands of pieces of paper” with “Liberal staffers idly combing through” them, just happening upon what Holland said was the “smoking gun” in the Hart/Day business. It wasn’t an “anonymous” source that gave Holland the Hart memos, after all. It was other Liberal staffers who found them amongst the stolen Conservative papers.

Obviously thinking the public wanted to hear more about their treasure trove of information, on March 26 Holland and Liberal justice critic Marlene Jennings called a press conference. Here they displayed 10 boxes of the documents to the media and started pulling out files. These were personnel evaluations and the like, very private stuff. The two Liberals said it was all found in drawers and in filing cabinets. They said this showed “gross negligence” on the part of the Tories–after all, someone unethical could have found them and rifled through them.

But the Liberals’ announcements were just beginning. The Ottawa Citizen’s Juliet O’Neill quoted Holland and Jennings as saying, “They held back another dozen boxes of papers in case they find some ‘of public interest.’” The two then led a procession through the rain with a trolley bearing the boxes and, surrounded by the national media, delivered them to the doorstep of the Prime Minister’s Office. They were so pleased with themselves, they shot their own video of the event and posted it on the Liberal website.

But as they walked through the rain, prominently visible on one box was a yellow sticker. After the Conservatives got their material back, they realized this was a shipping label showing the boxes were to be moved from the Conservatives’ old Opposition office on the ground floor of Parliament’s Wellington building, to their new location on the third floor. Conservative spokesman Ryan Sparrow says the boxes were quite clearly labelled in January 2006. “There were office managers who were there. They did box things up. Obviously, it’s just like moving house. You box things up and you label them. In the House of Commons there are particular people who move them upstairs,” Sparrow says. He says he’s not about to throw around accusations, but there are two possible conclusions that can be drawn from this. “Either the House of Commons didn’t move them–and the Liberals should have alerted them–or the boxes were not there when the House of Commons movers came to move them. That’s something they are going to have to answer because, quite honestly, we weren’t there at the time,” Sparrow says.

A close-up of the shipping label appeared in a video that was posted at the online video site YouTube by a Conservative supporter, claiming the Liberals stole the documents, but the video was quickly yanked by YouTube when Liberal staff tried claiming copyright because a portion of the Conservative supporter’s video included a snippet from the video on the Liberal website. This detail–the after-the-fact censorship of the video–marked the first recognition by the Liberals that the story had shifted from old Conservative documents to Liberal ethics. And it marked a change in tactics: the beginning of the attempt by the Liberals to smother the story, using all means available–even legal bullying.

On March 29, Conservative MP Scott Reid stood in the House of Commons on a point of privilege and alleged the Liberals were in contempt of Parliament for holding onto the documents for so long. Reid’s personnel file was one of the ones displayed to the media by Holland and Jennings–he had been a staffer with Reform and then the Canadian Alliance party during the period covered by the records, and his file was one of those highlighted in the Liberal video boasting of their “discovery.” Holland countered that the Liberals were under “absolutely” no obligation to return the documents.

After the story turned from Conservative files to Liberal ethics, Jennings and Holland went to ground. The two MPs who had held a press conference, issued press releases, and even produced a video of their activities, refused an interview request for this story. Holland, through his executive assistant Richard McGuire, claimed he was instructed not to conduct an interview on advice of his lawyer. (Holland has issued a press release stating his intention to sue the Toronto Sun, the Calgary Sun and Western Standard publisher Ezra Levant for the latter’s column on Holland’s handling of the documents.)

Despite the lawyer’s gag order, McGuire did attempt to explain to this magazine, via e-mail, Holland’s role in the whole affair, effectively placing the blame for the theft squarely on the shoulders of Liberal researchers working for the OLO–now Stéphane Dion’s men. “Neither Holland nor Jennings EVER had any of the personnel documents in their possession except at the press conference, from which they were delivered to the PMO in the Langevin building, and neither MP ‘held back’ any documents,” wrote McGuire. “In fact, neither Mr. Holland nor I even KNEW about any of these documents at all until we learned of the Jim Hart payoff documents on March 21, and at that time neither of us knew anything about the other documents.”

On April 17, the issue came up again in the House, with Holland rising to address Reid’s point of privilege. He now informed everyone, “all remaining documents have been returned to the sergeant-at-arms on April 10. Second, I can also confirm that these documents were returned and that they were not copied or tampered with in any way.” He added that only one researcher had “looked through the files in question and that this one staffer is prepared to state under oath that he did not copy or mishandle the said documents in any way.” Holland by his own admission had received only photocopies of the Hart/Day documents, so it is known that some were indeed copied. As for the return of the documents on April 10, that could not be confirmed by the Western Standard by press time. As of April 17, Conservative spokesman Sparrow says they’ve only received the original 10 boxes from the Liberals that were shown in their March 26 video, and nothing further.

Conservative MP Reid stood up right after Holland and gave the Liberals a blast, saying he did not trust those responsible to tell the truth about the matter unless they were under oath before a parliamentary committee. He pointed out there were four different alibis from the Liberals on how they came to possess the files: first, the files came from Holland’s anonymous source; then they were found in the 30 boxes left behind; then some of the files came from the boxes and others from filing cabinets and drawers; finally, there were no boxes at all, just files left behind. Reid acknowledged that Holland was probably not “the primary culprit here,” then later laid the blame on the OLO. It was more than blame, however. He accused them of misdirecting and intercepting mail. “That means the law has been broken by the Office of the Leader of the Opposition, which has been in possession of stolen property,” Reid said. As for the Liberals’ March 26 boast that they were retaining files to examine them in the public interest, Reid asserted, “Unless I am mistaken about how these boxes fell into the Liberals’ hands, this, too, represents possession of stolen property.”

In an interview, Reid says this situation has gone a long way to harming the working relationship on Parliament Hill among MPs. “I think there is a common degree of trust one expects, and this is really an egregious shift,” he says, adding that it will make it more difficult to function as an MP. “You have to spend all your time making sure everything you have is moved or shredded or destroyed for fear it would be used in such a manner.”

Speaker of the House Peter Milliken had not ruled on the matter by press time, but after hearing Reid’s complaint said, “legal breaches of the law do not constitute breaches of privilege of the House”–a warning that Reid and other Conservatives who had their files rifled would have to take their more serious complaints, such as theft, directly to the RCMP. Other breaches of the law, including violations of the Privacy Act or the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, two other Canadian laws that govern how personal information must be protected, would be under the jurisdiction of the federal privacy commissioner. And Reid and the other Conservative staffers would also be able to file a civil suit against Holland and the Liberal research office for breach of privacy.

So there’s a poisoned working atmosphere, not to mention possession of stolen property, privacy law violations, and potential civil lawsuits afoot, and it all goes back to the OLO, now occupied by an ever-weakening Dion. Holland’s alibi of being a mere puppet of Dion’s staff is plausible, but hardly an acceptable excuse from anyone who calls himself an “honourable member” of the House. It might get Holland off the hook from Reid’s point of privilege, but only by shifting the blame onto Dion himself. Maybe Dion can shift the blame, too, back to the moment the Liberals took over the OLO and seized the documents, long before Dion became leader. But that doesn’t explain why the documents were still kept after Dion became leader, why Holland was still recruited to be the front man for the announcement of the theft, and why the videotape confessing the theft remains on the Liberal website to this day. The Liberal party has had four different explanations so far. Maybe another one is on the way.

[This article appeared in the May 7, 2007 issue of the Western Standard.]

When Mira Kamdar woke up early in the morning on March 30, the first thing she did was go to the window. From her luxury suite in the Amarvilas Hotel in Agra, India, she had a postcard-perfect view of the Taj Mahal rising out of the mist off the Yamuna River in the sunrise. But the foreground was a little less spectacular. In between the sumptuous gardens of the hotel–with its fountains and marble arches–and the near mythic beauty of the Taj, was a modest residential neighbourhood, and in front of that a large barren stretch of ground. “There were a lot of neighbourhood boys and men coming out to relieve themselves there,” Kamdar says with a laugh; not a pretty sight. However, the reason for using this giant outdoor toilet was pretty easy to guess: the neighbourhood simply lacked an adequate sewage system.

The day before, in another city, Gurgaon, where she was visiting relatives, Kamdar noticed a similar lack of basic infrastructure. Gurgaon, she says, typifies the exploding India. “It was mall mania. Within three kilometres of where we were staying, there were at least six malls in various stages of construction,” she says. Between the malls, with cows and feral dogs wandering the streets, amid bleak poverty, there were no sidewalks; there were sidewalks directly in front of the malls but they ended abruptly on either side. She found this strange in a country where most people get around by foot, bicycle or cycle rickshaw.

Kamdar is no casual observer. The Seattle-born writer of Indian descent is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and an associate fellow of the Asia Society based in New York, where she now lives. She has just published Planet India: How the Fastest Growing Democracy Is Transforming America and the World, a book about the impact of India’s rocketing economy.

The lack of basic infrastructure is evident everywhere, Kamdar says, and it’s not just sewage and sidewalks. “The Achilles heel in the India story is the infrastructure lag. It simply has not built up its infrastructure at any kind of a rate to keep up with the explosion in the economy. There are a number of industries that are just going to run into a brick wall if they can’t ramp up their electrical supply, ramp up roads, ports and airports, because they simply won’t be able to manufacture or move the goods that are fuelling the growth,” Kamdar says.

The Indian economy grew more than nine per cent last year, putting it on pace with rapidly expanding China, and economists predict it will continue to grow by at least eight per cent per year for the foreseeable future. Anywhere you get that kind of growth, there are problems. In India, where the citizens number 1.1 billion, those problems are compounded almost beyond comprehension. Factor in that about two-thirds of Indians live on less than two dollars a day but have rapidly rising expectations, and you’ve got a potentially explosive situation.

But Kamdar is optimistic. India, she believes, can handle its problems. “The mood in the country is by and large very bullish, and that filters down even to the poor who believe life is going to get better,” she says. It is an ancient civilization, but it is a member of the Commonwealth, and as a modern nation it is founded on enlightenment values and institutions, particularly British values, including parliamentary democracy. So it can absorb shocks without stepping backward. “If people grow dissatisfied with the government, they can just throw them out, and they do regularly,” Kamdar says.

That’s actually where India has the advantage over its regional competitor, China, in its ability to absorb the shock of the transition from a relatively backward economy to a modern economic powerhouse.

It’s why James Bennett gives the edge to India. The Colorado-based technological entrepreneur and author of The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-first Century believes, politically, India is about a half a century ahead of China. “India has made the transition to rule of law a long time ago, and they did it under very difficult circumstances,” says Bennett. Just before India’s 1947 independence, in the partition of that year, they had pretty close to an all-out civil war. Over the years, they had three major wars with Pakistan, several quasi wars with China, domestic insurrectionism and the period of emergency under Indira Gandhi. Indian democracy and rule of law have survived all these. Most Third World nations have not managed to maintain rule of law or democracy through far less disruption.

China, in order to continue to grow, will have to make the transition to the rule of law and transparent government, Bennett believes. “Everything we’ve learned from watching development, where it does happen and where it doesn’t, tells us you have to make those transitions at some point or you become just a big racketeer-controlled labour camp,” Bennett says. Right now, the only true regulation in China is the will of the Communist party–if Communists want something to happen, it happens. And in the court system, the person with the best connections to the party wins.

For adjudication to be successful in a region where a business is to be located, it has to be even-handed, predictable to the user, and it has to give reasonably quick decisions. China is terrible on the first two, but it’s not too bad on the third. A one-party state can make things happen. India is quite good on the first two. “But it kind of sucks on the third,” Bennett says. Indian bureaucracy is notoriously slow.

But according to Bennett, it is far easier to take a fair process and make it faster than it is to take a quick but capricious, secretive system and make it predictable and transparent.

China has shown some understanding that it will have to make the transition to the rule of law and democracy. But those changes will come with a loss of privileges to those in power, so they will be resisted. That resistance will no doubt be challenged by those clamouring for change, but in a one-party state they have far fewer options than those who live in a democratic country. Disruptions could be dramatic.

So India’s problems are easier to fix than China’s, Bennett believes. “In the long term, we can say they are all going to go through transitions and then they are going to amaze us even more than they have amazed us in the past 10 or 20 years,” he says. “But the question is, can they get through those transitions without major disruptions, major problems, or even falling back? . . . [A]sk which of the two is more likely to get through its transitions without the soap opera, and it’s probably India.”

India has problems, but its path out is more visible, with fewer huge question marks. India’s problems are more visible than China’s, particularly because it has a free press and an open government. “It’s in our interests, as Americans and Canadians and as members of the developed world, to develop strong trade links with each of these countries. But I think the nature and the depth of the trade links we can create with India are deeper and more significant than the trade links we can create with China, at least for quite some time to come,” Bennett says.

The Canadian government is going to some length to strengthen those links. At the beginning of March, Ted Menzies, parliamentary secretary to Minister of International Trade David Emerson, led a trade mission of about 30 companies through India. They were looking at proposed construction projects like international airports, bridges, new road interchanges and a new deep-water port in Calcutta. “[The Indian government] is looking for the expertise Canadian companies have, and so we were quite wide-eyed looking at all these opportunities,” Menzies says. According to Menzies, Canada and India are very close to signing a foreign investment protection and promotion agreement, which everyone hopes will be inked before the end of this year. The long-term goal, as Minister Emerson has stated, is a free-trade agreement.

Canada, particularly under the previous Liberal administration, expended a lot of effort forging ties with China. This was due in part to high-level members of the party, such as former prime ministers Paul Martin and Jean Chrétien, having personal economic interests in that country. The Harper Conservatives have been criticized for their cooler attitude toward China, putting more emphasis on human rights and linking it with trade.

David Harris, senior fellow for national security at the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, says it makes more sense for Canadian interests to look to India for trade than it is to look to China. “For political reasons, we have a definite interest as a democratic pluralist nation in dealing with a country that has a similarly inclined jurisdiction,” he says.

In that respect, India shows up some of the profound deficiencies in China. “In China, we are, of course, dealing with what might be politely described as a police state, a jurisdiction distinguished by the size of its gulag and slave labour. There are implications as well for economic reliance on slave labour in undermining our own labour rates,” Harris says. Also, any money that China makes in dealing with Canada will, one way or another, be invested in these totalitarian tendencies and in military capacity that directly threatens Canada and its allies, not the least in relation to the freedom of the seas where China is developing a major blue-water naval capacity.

“We’ve seen tremendous adverse use, from the perspective of Canadian interests, of Chinese technology,” Harris says. “As we saw with the Chinese space program, showing its capacity to launch satellite-killing rockets, with the obvious problems this would present to the western world in the event of any sort of hostility with what would amount to a relatively aggressive regime.”

He also believes India is kind of an investment in counter-terrorism. “The same global radical Islamist enemy that is infiltrating and encompassing us and our future has been at war with the liberal democratic state of India for many years,” Harris notes. “Putting these together,” he continues, “I suggest that Canada has a shared political, economic, military and human interest in seeing the success of India’s burgeoning economy.”

[This article appeared in the April 23, 2007 issue of the Western Standard.]

He posts his messages everywhere under several different names on Internet blogs and discussion groups. He writes letters to the editor anywhere and sends e-mails to anyone–anyone who might take seriously shocking evidence that the Chinese government “harvests” and sells live organs from political prisoners. His main message is that the Falun Gong–the group which first brought evidence of live organ harvesting to light–and the Epoch Times newspaper that broke that story are spreading propaganda against China’s Communist government. And he’s not even Chinese. He is Charles Liu, a 40-year-old Taiwanese-born technology consultant who lives in Issaquah, Wash., and does business in China.

Liu has been so active and so pro-Beijing in his writings that some Falun Gong supporters–in particular Epoch Times reporter Jana Shearer–have accused him of being an agent for the Chinese government, waging a disinformation campaign against them, trying to confuse people, and deliberately wasting everyone’s time.

It’s a charge that upsets Liu, who dismisses it as “a bunch of kooky friends making unfounded accusations. It’s just a bunch of blog BS.” As for why he devotes so much energy to attacking the Falun Gong and the organ harvesting allegations, he says, “My position is that I simply don’t agree with their brand of politics, because I observed their politics turning from anti-Communist party, to anti-China, . . . and recently it’s morphed into this anti-Chinese hysteria and that’s going to be hurting people,” he says. As an Asian-American, he says he decided to speak up.

He doesn’t really explain, when asked, why he started a blog last year called “The Myth of Tiananmen Square Massacre” under the name of Bobby Fletcher (one of his online aliases, which he also uses to comment on the Western Standard’s online blog). On that blog, he pushes the minimal 250 casualty figure that the Chinese government has always maintained died that night in 1989 (more reliable estimates put the figure at at least ten times that).

Liu’s actions mirror disinformation campaigns waged by the Chinese government in the past. Typically, these include the deliberate spreading of false or misleading facts to sow confusion or doubt among the conflicting accounts. The classic example is the Tiananmen Square massacre; the Chinese government has maintained that no one died in the square itself, that there was only pushing and shoving on the streets around the square, resulting in a few military casualties. Overseas, the CCP relies on its United Front Work department, part of the Chinese intelligence service, to propagate its message. During the Cold War, the Soviets employed many overseas flunkies through their Disinformation Department.

Former Canadian MP David Kilgour, who co-authored a report on China’s macabre organ harvesting industry, has received many propaganda e-mails from Liu. For instance, Liu has written repeatedly that a U.S. congressional committee looked into the organ harvesting allegations and found nothing. “[David] Matas and I gave evidence to that subcommittee and got support from both the Republican chairman and the Democratic vice-chair,” says Kilgour. “I just came to the conclusion he was trying to waste my time, and I have other things to do.”

Winnipeg-based human rights lawyer, and Kilgour’s co-author, David Matas, really doesn’t know what to make of Liu. “I don’t know who he is, but what he does is spend a lot of time replicating nonsense to defend the Chinese government,” Matas says.

The only concern Matas has is that Liu seems to know who he and Kilgour met with in the United States to discuss their report. Matas discovered Liu had sent e-mails to politicians–and their staff–prior to the meetings. “The only people who would have that information would potentially be the Chinese government. I can’t imagine how Liu would know we were meeting with those people,” Matas says. “We’re not super-secretive, but you can’t find information on the Internet or in any public place about who we’re meeting with, where and when.” He himself has received at least 10 e-mails from Liu, all of which he’s ignored. Maybe Matas is onto something with that approach.

[This article appeared in the April 9, 2007 issue of the Western Standard.]