Paul Manly

On March 26, the Council of Canadians, Vancouver Island Water Water, CUPE Local 410 and the Island Glass Artisans presented to Nanaimo city council the ‘blue community’ resolution recognizing water as a human right; promoting publicly financed, owned and operated water and wastewater services; and banning the sale of bottled water in public facilities and at municipal events. While city council initially adopted this resolution, it later reversed its decision on May 14.

At their annual meeting in the United States last month, the Waterkeeper Alliance adopted a resolution expressing their support for “the principle of water as a public trust resource” and for “a Declaration from the International Joint Commission that the Great Lakes Boundary Waters are a Shared Commons and Public Trust.”

Waterkeeper Alliance Board of Directors member/ Lake Ontario Waterkeeper Mark Mattson - who has been a part of the ‘Great Lakes Need Great Friends’ tour in Toronto, Hamilton and Kingston (tonight) - brought this resolution forward to the organization’s Board, which is chaired by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Mark Mattson

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

This evening there was a fundraiser for the struggle of the Algonquins of Barriere Lake at the Cube Gallery in Ottawa featuring actor August Schellenberg (perhaps best-known for his roles in ‘Black Robe’ and Terrence Malick’s film ‘The New World’, and who is currently in the city playing the lead role in the National Arts Centre production of King Lear), as well as Tantoo Cardinal (who was in ‘Dances With Wolves’, is performing in King Lear, and notably who was arrested in August 2011 at a large protest outside the White House against the Keystone XL pipeline), and other cast members.

Barriere Lake is a community of about 450 people located on 59-acres of unceded territory 300 kilometres north of Ottawa in Quebec.

The Vancouver Sun reports that Denver-based, Toronto-listed Thompson Creek Metals has announced plans to raise up to $430 million to help fund their Mount Milligan copper-gold mine in British Columbia. “The miner plans to start production at project, located some 900 kilometers (560 miles) northwest of Vancouver, in late 2013.”

CBC has reported, “The federal government approved development of the open-pit copper and gold mine in December 2010, despite the objections of the Nak’azdli Indian Band, which vowed to fight the project.”

On last night’s season finale of ‘Saturday Night Live’, Mick Jagger and Arcade Fire performed ‘The Last Time’ to an audience of millions. The Globe and Mail reports, “In New York, members of the Montreal-based rock band Arcade Fire wore the (student) movement’s iconic red squares during an appearance with The Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger on Saturday Night Live. Mr. Jagger wore a red shirt, but no red square.”

Montreal singer-songwriter Mark Berube will perform at the Friday night public forum for ‘Shout Out Against Mining Injustice’ on Friday June 1 in Vancouver.

The Latin American Herald Tribune reports, “Canada’s Barrick Gold expects to finish earthworks construction this year at the Pascua Lama open-pit gold and silver mine project on the Argentine-Chilean border with a view to inaugurating production in 2013, an Argentine government official said. …Pascua Lama, the world’s first bi-national mining project, straddles a border area that encompasses parts of the western Argentine province of San Juan and of Chile’s Atacama region… The project has received strong bi-national government support, although it has been staunchly opposed by environmental groups.”

Shout Out Against Mining Injustice!
The ‘Shout Out Against Mining Injustice’ conference this June 1-2 in Vancouver will feature as a speaker Sergio Campusano Villches, the president of the Comunidad Agrícola Diaguita Los Huascoaltinos/ the Diaguita Huascoaltinos Indigenous and Agricultural Community in Chile.

Re: Water in Canada in long-term decline, Opinion, May 16

Chris Wood writes that a new water security report by the Forum for Leadership on Water “should prompt a rethink of the familiar trope.” And while he lists issues the Council of Canadians has highlighted as concerns — “a changing climate, growing human demands, water-borne complex chemicals” — he bizarrely adds, “The real threats to the safety and sufficiency of our water demand a more sophisticated response than the human rights nostrums advocated by the xenophobic and anti-business Council of Canadians.”

By “human rights nostrums” we presume Wood is referring to our backing of the United Nations General Assembly recognition of the human right to water and sanitation (a human right the Harper government fails to respect and implement). “Xenophobic” is a harder one to figure out, but perhaps the next time our chairperson Maude Barlow chairs a board meeting of the U.S.-based group Food & Water Watch, she can pose that question to them. And Wood’s framing of our work against excessive corporate power undermining democratic institutions as “anti-business” may be more revealing of him than it is of us.

Let’s hope this letter prompts Wood to rethink his familiar trope.

Brent Patterson, Political Director, The Council of Canadians, Ottawa
http://www.thestar.com/opinion/letters/article/1181125–council-of-canadians-responds

G8 leaders in Maryland tuck in (Source: CBC)

Canadian and Quebec civil society groups have sent a letter to new French President François Hollande reminding him of transatlantic opposition to Canada-European Union free trade talks ahead of a G8 meeting in Maryland, U.S. this weekend where he is expected to discuss the proposed agreement with Prime Minister Steven Harper.

“Our organizations say NO to this agreement, which has been negotiated for the sole benefit of transnational corporations at the expense of people’s rights and of the protection of the environment,” says a joint declaration signed in October by over 80 Canadian, Quebec and European organizations, many of them in France. The declaration was forwarded to President Hollande’s office Friday afternoon.

“Neither the European Union nor Canada has ever informed their populations of what is really at stake in these negotiations,” says the declaration, which describes the CETA negotiating process as “a total denial of democracy.”

The joint statement was reissued and sent to the French president by the Trade Justice Network and Réseau québécois sur l’intégration continental (RQIC) before a scheduled meeting Prime Minister Harper during the weekend G8 summit to talk about the CETA negotiations. The groups note in their letter that Mr. Holland ran for office and won the presidency on a promise to reverse a wave of austerity in Europe that includes pressure on EU member states to reduce and privatize public services.

The Canadian and Quebec networks, which comprise labour, environmental, Indigenous, student, farmers and cultural organizations, consider the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) to be an austerity deal that must be fundamentally altered or rejected entirely.

Pigeon, Zanzanaini, and Meera Karunananthan in Brussels, July 2010.

Martin Pigeon, of Corporate Europe Observatory, and Gabriella Zanzanaini, of Food and Water Europe, write in Public Service Europe that, “Public water systems were never designed to generate profits but to deliver clean water to all citizens for public health purposes, making them one of the most essential public services of them all. At the EU level, water services have remained under the control of member states, in accordance with the subsidiarity principle. …The European Commission’s attempts to privatise urban water systems over the last decade have faced strong resistance. But now privatisation has reappeared as one of the bail-out conditions for struggling European Union economies. Will the financial crisis give the commission the opportunity to bypass democratic accountability and create new markets for water companies?”