Okay short post

These are my two favourite political parties in Canada:

http://www.onlineparty.ca/

http://www.quebecsolidaire.net/

Some good Canadian movies, you can watch them fully on the national film board website.

21-87 http://www.nfb.ca/explore-by/director/Arthur-Lipsett/

Kanehsatake 270 Years of Resistance http://www.nfb.ca/explore-by/director/Alanis-Obomsawin/

Residual posting

I was going to write a post but instead I got distracted and wrote a comment on another blog: http://crookedtimber.org/2011/02/12/can-we-feed-the-world-will-we/

When reading this article I thought that it missed part of the point. Although it touched on it in couple times but I don’t believe it was properly articulated.

As a younger person concerned about the food that I eat and food security it seems to me that a large part of the problem would be reforming land use in the developed world. And this has been brought up here, e.g. meat consumption per capita is enormously energy intensive, management intensive systems are more productive than energy intensive systems, using human waste as a direct input for urban agriculture (why not the vast amounts of table scraps too).

There seems to be problems with our agricultural practice at every turn, and yet I can’t help but feel like this article supports the over arching structure of it. Maybe my opinion is somewhat naive, seeing as how I didn’t grow up through the green revolution, but I can’t help but feel like trying to apply western practices else where in the world could produce anything but failure. We can’t even set up democracies there!

The amount of pollution it produces is unmitigated. Have you seen pictures of algae blooms? Fish kills in the united states due to raw animal sewage being dumped rivers.http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/02/100305-baltic-sea-algae-dead-zones-water/

“Unsustainable fishing can be replaced, to a substantial extent by aquaculture, as discussed in this Scientific American article.”
Sea lice linked to aquaculture are decimating wild fish stocks. This is not sustainable.http://www.goodfoodworld.com/2010/12/farmed-salmon-and-sea-lice-whats-killing-wild-pink-salmon/

The colorado river already doesn’t reach the sea.http://www.counterpunch.org/colorado.html

Why would we ever want to reproduce this elsewhere? I guess the answer is to stop millions of people to starving to death. However I agree with some of the other readers we must use increased labour to increase yields. Maybe western governments should implement 2 years of mandatory woofing. Woofing = volunteering as agricultural labour on organic farms (cheap way to travel!). My personal response to this quandary is to dumpster dive.

l'Association pour la Revendication des Droits Démocratiques

The ARDD is contesting the constitutionality of Quebec’s FPTP voting system before Quebec’s appeals court. This hearing will begin February 8^th. This is the best thing I have heard in a while. While I was living in Vancouver the provincial elections featured a referendum to accept a single transferable voting system in 2009 in BC. The campaign was known as BC-STV and was defeated with only 38.82% in favor of implementation.  

Our current system obviously does not properly represent the desires of the population. In the 2006 election the Green Party received 4.5% of popular vote, 0% of seats in parliament; the NDP received 17.5% of the vote and 9.5% of seats in parliament; the Bloc Quebecois received 10.5% of the vote and 17% of seats in parliament; the Liberals received 30% of the vote and 33% of the seats; and the Conservatives received 36% of the vote and 40% of seats as well as the position of Prime Minister. This does not represent a healthy electoral system.

Electoral reform to me is very important for several reasons.

(1) the engagement of citizens relies on their perceived ability to affect the outcome of political discourse in favor of some beliefs they may have. In Calgary recently the voter turnout jumped from 30% in the 2007 municipal elections to 50% in 2010 (in 2004 it had been only 18%). I do not think it is trite or to say that this voter turnout was due to viable candidates representing both reform and the status quo. Naheed Nenshi won, seemingly a very progressive choice for Calgary.

(2) I feel like at this particular time it is imperative to challenge the status quo and the invested interests that manipulate our democracy. Obviously we do not live in the United States, and I think it is fairly obvious that the levels of influence special lobbies play in their government do not exist within our political culture. However I think that for this to remain true we need pursue policies that allow more direct participation of the voters in Canada.

It is impossible to disown regressive policies simply due to some innate aspect of their nature, this would necessitate a belief in the objective truth of the progressive agenda. No such truth exists. My desire to live in a socialist country stems on a belief that more egalitarian societies are better places to live in. So I do not want insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, the industrial military complex, oil companies, tobacco companies, the industrial food complex or corrections companies to control my government (or the Koch brothers).  This requires participation of the citizenry, which needs to be facilitated by the government.

-Adrian

First Canadians

I'm not sure whether the title is in irony or not, and I am even less sure if it is in bad taste. I have been interested for a while in participating in some volunteering with community organizations (e.g. http://qpirgmcgill.org/working-groups/). In particular I would like to do some work with Native American communities. However there is a certain amount of reticence on my part; I feel justifiable complicit as some sort of neo-imperialist, not to mention condescending and arrogant to think that I am somehow different that all those other bleeding hearts who wish to help but more so as a facet of their vanity. I mean my Grandmother was a nurse in a residential school. You can’t inherit more guilt than that; of course you could…

So instead I have begun to research which Native American groups in particular whose lands I have lived on. My intention being to provide some sort of absolution or catharsis. This is as far as I got:

In Calgary I most definitely lived on land belonging to the Tsu T’ina (Sarcee) first nations, one of the tribes making up the Blackfoot Confederacy. In fact my house was about a km from one of the poorest parts of the reserve.

At my cabin north of Calgary I most likely lived on lands belonging to plains cree peoples. The closest reserve is the Sunchild Reserve and the O’Chiese Reserve. The O’Chiese first nations are a Nakawe (Saulteaux) people.

Near Abraham lake, where I have done most of my backpacking, the lands belong to the Nakoda (Stoney) people. The closest reserve is the Big Horn reserve, which includes Bearspaw, Chiniki, Stoney and Wesley first nations.

In Vancouver I lived on land belonging to either the Sḵwxwú7mesh (Squamish) first nations, Musqueam first nations or the Tsleil-Waututh (Burrard) first nations; all members of the larger Coast Salish ethnographic designation.

In Montreal am living on land belonging to St. Lawrence Iroquoians, who were displaced by the time Samuel De Champlain arrived in 1608. First contact was made by Cartier 75 years earlier.

The process of this research was not as simple as I had expected, which in fact motivated this essay. The lack of information available on Wikipedia, or some searchable databases mapping locality to first nations group galled me. It seemed that Canadians have de-emphasize the importance of our colonial past. I think every Wikipedia page for each Canadian city needs a section giving historical accounts of the first nations that lived on the land before the area was settled by Europeans. I guess this is my new Wikipedia project.

This is an issue for myself simply because I believe a society or individuals seeking further equality for everyone is always best to look towards the most ill fortuned. I know this there is some quotable axiom about this, but I couldn’t put my finger on its exact provenance, so it will have to remain poorly stated. As well I have seen the prominent role aboriginals have played in South American politics (is this true? I don’t want to be creating too much of my own truth), and the positive (egalitarian) outcomes that have been produced there.

I understand the concept of solidarity not pity, but I can’t figure out how to reconcile this with 1) my distaste for the marginalized nature of first nations in Canada, and 2) my belief that more empowered first nation communities would have a positive effect on the totality of Canadian politics and society. I feel like no thought I can have regarding first nations in Canada can come without condescension and that nothing I write can come out without terribly patronizing connotations.

But as well it is not like first nations haven't tried to gain more autonomy in Canada (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oka_Crisis, http://www.barrierelakesolidarity.org/) but as often is the case no one listens.

-Adrian

Aside (a Wikaside?); http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Lawrence_Iroquoians:

Although historians and other scholars have been studying the St. Lawrence Iroquoians for some time, such knowledge has been slower to be part of common historical understanding. The hypothesis about the St. Lawrence Iroquoians helps explain apparent contradictions in the historical record about French encounters with natives in this area.

The origins of the word canada, from which the nation derived its name, offers an example of the changes in historical understanding required by new evidence. By canada, the St. Lawrence Iroquoians of Stadacona meant "village" in their language. Cartier wrote, "[I]lz (sic) appellent une ville Canada (they call a village 'Canada')". Cartier applied the word to both the region near Stadacona and the St. Lawrence River that flows nearby.[citation needed]

Both the Canadian Encylcopedia (1985) and various publications of the Government of Canada, such as "The Origin of the Name Canada" published by the Department of Canadian Heritage, suggest instead the former theory that the word "Canada" stems from a Huron-Iroquois word, kanata. It also meant "village" or settlement.

Historians now know that Cartier could not have encountered either the Iroquois or Huron, as neither group lived in the St. Lawrence valley in the 16th century. The account of Canada's name origin reflects theories first advanced in the 18th and 19th centuries. General texts have not kept up with the discrediting of such earlier theories by the linguistic comparative studies of the later 20th century. For instance, the "Huron-Iroquois theory" of word origin appeared in the article on “Canada” in the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1996.