Publications
Few European citizens are aware that their governments are in the midst of negotiating an ambitious trade deal that could boost Europe’s involvement in the world’s most destructive project – the Canadian tar sands.
The Canadian and BC governments are currently exploring the development of Foreign Trade Zones (FTZ) around the province with a specific proposal for a zone at Deltaport, which is located south of Delta near the community of Ladner, BC. There has been very little public information provided about this proposed zone, or debate about its potential social, environmental and economic impacts.
Northern Alberta’s tar sands are home to 175 billion barrels of recoverable bitumen, a tar-like substance that requires intensive processing to become liquid fuel. Approximately 1.4 million barrels of bitumen are produced daily with plans to increase to 2.2 million barrels by 2015. But The impacts of this massive project stretch much further than just Alberta.
There are two competing narratives about the earth’s freshwater resources being played out in the 21st century.
Instead of renewing its support for public health care, the federal Conservative government is letting the forces of privatization dismantle our most treasured social program. Unless ordinary Canadians from every part of the country rise up to defend it, our public health care system will not survive this onslaught from the for-profit sector.
Far away, on the southern cone of South America in Chilean Patagonia, exists one of the most beautiful, still-virgin territories on Earth. There, an intense struggle is taking place that most Canadians have never heard of, but that intimately involves the Canadian mining industry, the Canadian government, and millions of Canadian pensioners and investors.
Texas-based Kinder Morgan was founded by Richard Kinder and Bill Morgan, both former Enron executives and billionaires. Now they want to make more profits by expanding a current pipeline to export tar sands oil to new markets.
Close consideration of the probable costs and benefits of the CETA for Nova Scotia reveals that the agreement’s benefits are being oversold, while its costs and consequences are minimized or even ignored.
Passed into law in 1984, the Canada Health Act is the overarching legislation covering Canada’s national medicare program. The act sets the criteria and conditions for insured health care services, and the national standards that provinces and territories must meet in order to get federal funding from the Canada Health and Social Transfer (CHST).