August 2015

Strength of Conviction

by Tom Mulcair

Mulcair's Strength Conviction book cover• Editor’s note:

With a crucial federal election looming, it is important that Canadians find a way to redeem the federal government after Stephen Harper’s nine-year train wreck. Harper’s neo-cons cheated and lied to take over the Progressive Conservatives and devolve it into the Conservative Party of Canada (see Anthony Hall’s article Conservative Party crashers in this edition, and Neconning the Public in our May edition). They went on to cheat in the last three elections – robo calls, campaign over-spending, withholding information on the purchase of F-35 fighter jets, denying climate change, closing down scientific research, dragging Canada into war, and now using our tax dollars to bribe us with child tax credit.

It doesn’t stop there. They gerrymandered electoral boundaries, installed 30 new ridings, and renamed 31 others to further confuse people. With such tactics their intent is obvious: keep power no matter what.

Harper’s dictatorial control is double-speak in the form of the Fair Elections Act. It will be as fair as its big corporate supporters south of the border – who want to keep control of Canada’s resources, export our wealth, while ignoring our civil liberties and environment. We cannot allow this Conservative carnage to continue.

The actions of Brigette DePape, who held up a STOP HARPER sign in he House of Commons, have proven prophetic. Harper’s list of damage is long. We need a new government that will protect Canadian values. We need leaders who have the strength of conviction to save Canada.

So with that in mind we introduce the leader of the Official Opposition, Tom Mulcair. What impresses most is what he has done, not just what he has said – in particular, his commitment to protect the environment when he was the environment minister in Quebec. When he stood up to Premier Charest to protect a park from condo development, it cost him his cabinet privilege. He sat as a back-bencher to fulfill his term, then quit the Quebec Liberals. Later he was invited to join the NDP. But by caring deeply and doing what was fair, legal, and in the best interest of the public he protected the commons from privatization.


This selection, chosen from his new book released August 2015 tells that story, and why he deserves to be the new Prime Minister.


The storm clouds are gathering. Harper has done his darnest to fix the game in his favour. His operatives have attacked Justin Trudeau, Elizabeth May and now they will turn their propaganda machine on Mulcair. It is now up to each of us to see through their fog of election war, to learn from recent history, to be clear about principles, to participate in our own riding campaigns and support candidates who are best able to change the government of Canada for the better.


Our actions and decision today will effect generations to come. Get involved, learn from history, and vote.

—

Strength of Conviction
Book excerpt

Tom Mulcair with wife and family in Paris
A younger Thomas Mulcair with wife Catherine Pinhas (left) and family members in Paris. Photo © the Mulcair family, used with permission.

 

In 2005 we learned of an illegal development in western Laval, where a developer had gone ahead and developed a large tract of land including clearly protected areas. Instead of fining the developer after the fact, as the department had always done and which we knew would have little effect, I decided that it was time to send a strong signal that this was no longer how things would be done. I consulted our legal team. Did we have a more stringent approach available to us? Our lawyers said we did, but it had never been tried before: I could issue an order forcing the developer to restore the wetland to its original pristine state. So that’s what we did. I issued the order in August 2005.

I had just completed a wide-ranging twenty-one-city tour of public con­sultations on my draft Sustainable Development Act, starting in Kuujjuaq on Ungava Bay in February and criss-crossing the province right into April, with Alain Gaul, my chief of staff, occasionally along to provide guidance, and Chantale Turgeon, my press secretary, as my wagon master. To oversee the whole operation, Alain had tapped Isabelle Perras, a very respected, experienced hand, whose wisdom and determination inspired the entire team. Everything was going well, and the legislation was ready to go, when a Cabinet meeting was called in August.

The order to restore the wetlands in Laval had just been issued and had received very favourable front page coverage, with a piece by Louis-Gilles Francoeur, the highly respected environmental reporter for Le Devoir. He has since gone on to sit as vice-president of the Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement (BAPE), the independent public environmental review board charged with assessing development projects in the province.

It was the first time that Premier Charest and I had a disagreement, and it came as quite a surprise. He clearly wasn’t pleased and told me so in no uncertain terms. I remember asking him if he was telling me that I should apply the rules one way in Longueuil and another in Laval. It was a bolt from the blue. After all, hadn’t Charest himself been minister of the environment in the federal government? When I got back to the office I was still winded. I sat down with Alain and went over the day’s events. I was going to stick to my guns.

From then on, in contrast to the first two and half years of my mandate, relations became frosty between the premier and me. There were several more disagreements, one of them over the Coca-Cola corporation. Since the 1980s Québec had had a law on the books on recycling soft drink cans that, to make things simpler, was also applied by the companies to juices. One day Coke decided that it was no longer going to charge the five-cent deposit on the juice cans, which meant that they could no longer be recycled as part of the deposit and return system. When François Cardinal, the environmental reporter for La Presse who has since joined the paper’s editorial board, asked me what I was going to do about it, I said I wasn’t going to allow it. That didn’t sit well with the premier.

Our next serious disagreement came in the fall of 2005, over the Rabaska project — a methane and liquid natural gas plant and meth­ane terminal that was being planned for the port of Lévis, across the St. Lawrence from Québec City, by a private consortium including Enbridge, Gaz Métro, and Gaz de France. Local environmental and citizens’ groups vehemently opposed it.

In early 2006 I decided to go down to Boston and have a look at the Everett deliquification plant situated there. The plant was close to a bridge that was very reminiscent of the Jacques Cartier Bridge in Montréal. As with the proposal for Lévis, the liquid natural gas came into port in massive tankers. I met with U.S. officials, including the senior level of the U.S. Coast Guard, who turned out to be very helpful and truly exceptional people, to ask them how safe those installations were.

“You should see what we have to do every time a ship comes in,” one of them replied. “We have to shut down the whole bridge. The plant is far too close to a civilian population. It’s a huge mistake. We would never allow that gasification plant to be built so close to a large population today.”

I described to them the Rabaska project that was being planned on the St. Lawrence, right across from Québec City, a metropolitan area numbering close to a million people. They warned that it was extremely dangerous and should never be allowed, which only confirmed my own and my depart­ment’s evaluation. I went home to Québec more determined than ever to block the project.

While all this was going on, an even more contentious matter that had been simmering for a more than a year was about to come to a boil. Mont-Orford provincial park, established in 1938, covers nearly sixty square kilometres of lakes, rivers, mountains, and valleys, featuring great downhill and cross-country skiing. As the Mont-Orford ski hill was losing money and there were fears for its financial viability, the premier and several of his ministers had negotiated a deal to sell 649 hectares of parkland surrounding the ski hill to private developers. The provincial government was proposing to sell off a significant swath of public land that had been set aside in perpetuity for future generations. Mont-Orford was in the premier’s electoral backyard. He went on record supporting the deal and made it clear he wanted the project approved as soon as possible. I was also under considerable pressure from colleagues who urged me to deliver for “the team.” At the end of the day, though, I was being asked to sign a document selling off public land in a provincial park to private developers. We had a clear legal opinion that as long as the land could still be used for a park, selling it off was illegal. I simply couldn’t do it. It was a matter of principle. I refused.

In politics we’d better stand for something, because we’re often faced with decisions that force us to weigh private interests against the public interest. You need strong convictions. Conviction is what gives you strength to fight the battles that must be fought, to do the job the voters sent you to do, which is to faithfully convey, protect, and defend their interests. We are elected to represent them, to be their voice in our parliaments, in our governments, in Cabinet, as the case may be, and to influence government decisions on their behalf. They place their trust in us and we must never forget why they elect us.

—

Excerpted from Strength of Conviction by Tom Mulcair. Copyright ©2015, Tom Mulcair. All rights reserved. www.dundurn.com

Going raw

fresh fruits• One question we often get asked is why cooked foods sometimes have a higher level of nutritional content. One of the main reasons for this is that the water content decreases, creating a food that is more concentrated and calorically dense. Consider a large bunch of dark, leafy greens; when raw, they take up a lot of space, but when cooked, that large bunch of greens cooks down to a very small amount of greens. So no, cooked foods are not more nutritionally dense; they just have a lower water content, which reduces the size and volume of the food but keeps the calorie count the same. This means in the raw food lifestyle, you get to eat much more and feel like you are eating much larger volumes of fresh, raw foods.

But what can we do when we can’t or don’t want to eat large volumes of fresh, raw whole foods? Fortunately, we have a number of great alternatives in raw food for those looking for more concentrated nutrition but with all of the nutrition, enzymes, antioxidants and phytonutrients abundant in raw food. Juicing is a fabulous option to get very concentrated nutrition and large amounts of fresh, raw produce daily while being very easy to digest. We also really love dehydrating occasionally for more of a cooked style and concentrated small amounts of food. Just be sure to drink lots of extra water to compensate for the very low moisture content of dehydrated food. The third option we have in raw food is to massage our greens. Massaged greens are greens that have been massaged to break down some of the difficult to digest fibres. Massaging greens also gives them a cooked consistency and volume, giving you the best of both worlds.

Zen Elixer
1 tbs. spirulina1 cup water, almond milk or fresh fruit juice

½ vanilla bean or squeeze of lime juice

1 cup of fresh or frozen berries
Place all ingredients in the blender and blend until silky smooth. Enjoy immediately! One of our favourite combos: almond milk, fresh sun ripened blackberries and vanilla bean.

Ultimate digestibility

Juiced and blended food is so much easier to digest, absorb and assimilate, especially for most of us who have compromised digestion. After a lifetime of eating the Standard American Diet, most people are not digesting their food well – particularly not the cellulose in plants – let alone absorbing the nutrients in their food. By blending and juicing, you are taking a lot of the stress off the digestive tract. Juicing or blending in a high speed blender works to break down – and remove, in the case of juicing – the tough fibres as well as break open tough cell walls, releasing all of the nutrients, phytonutrients and antioxidants inside. Because it is already broken down, the body doesn’t have to work hard to get the nutrients and readily absorbs them into the blood stream.

Concentrated greens and nutrition

Most people would have a tough time in a single sitting eating all of the fresh greens, vegetables and fruits that go into a single glass of fresh, green juice. But by extracting only the juice, it becomes feasible to consume large amounts of fresh fruits and vegetables far beyond what we would be able to physically eat. This provides our bodies with an extremely concentrated source of all of the beautiful goodness of plants: vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and phytonutrients. Because the blending or juicing has improved the digestibility so dramatically, these nutrients are easily absorbed into the body for tissue repair and growth.

How will I get enough protein? 

This is one of the biggest misconceptions about vegetarian, vegan and raw vegan lifestyles. Meat, dairy, eggs and processed soy are not the only sources of protein; all whole foods contain protein. Furthermore, when you cook any food, the protein decreases by half. Did you know that one bunch of raw spinach contains 10g of protein – 20-25% of the daily requirement for the average adult female? A fresh, raw, green juice could easily contain two bunches of spinach and 20g of protein in a much healthier, nutrient dense and alkalizing state.

Will I have enough energy? I don’t want to feel tired all the time. 

One of the main benefits of a raw food diet is faster, more efficient digestion. This means that instead of the body allocating 10-20% of its energy towards digesting heavy, cooked meals and processed protein shakes, that energy can fuel workouts and day-to-day activities instead. As with every other eating style, one does have to ensure they eat enough and that they are eating a well balanced diet. Most people notice an incredible surge of sustainable daily energy eating a low-fat, raw, vegan diet that powers their cardio, strength and yoga training.

—

RAW Foundation Culinary Arts and Nutrition Institute is home of the Raw Food Education Experts! Raw Foundation teaches foodies, health enthusiasts and healthcare practitioners around the world how to get even healthier in just five minutes a day, create delicious food-that just happens to be healthy, transform lives and share their passion with others, growing profitable businesses that make a positive impact. Get their FREE RECIPE e-zine, Get Healthy in 5 Minutes a Day, at www.rawfoundation.ca

photo © Ana Blazic Pavlovic

New cholesterol-lowering drugs coming

Watch for the sleight-of-hand

• DRUG BUST by Alan Cassels

Portrait of columnist Alan Cassels
• If your aim in life is pursuing truth, one of the things you might want to study is why deception is so common in life.

– American magician Eugene Burger

Magicians are experts at directing our attention – basically manipulating and managing our perceptions. Maybe people like magic so much because we like being deceived and fooled. Houdini made an elephant disappear. An elephant! And David Copperfield once made the Statue of Liberty disappear. Incredible.

While I’ve spent a lot of time thinking of the art of misdirection and how it works in selling diseases and the drugs to treat them, it is still a most mysterious and wonderful thing. It seems even when we know we are being deceived, we don’t seem to mind. It’s almost as if we beg to be deceived over and over again.

Let’s wind the clock back a few years to the most successful example of pharmaceutical magic the world has ever seen. The drug atorvastatin (Lipitor) was launched in 1998 and over the next 13 years, before its patent expired, it earned its maker, Pfizer, upwards of $141 billion. It was the biggest commercially successful drug in the history of the world and made a lot of people very wealthy even if it did almost nothing of value to the vast majority of people who swallowed it.

Let me qualify that: if you wanted to lower your LDL (the bad) cholesterol, Lipitor was very good at that. Superb. Part of the reason for its astounding commercial success – other than Pfizer’s weapons-grade marketing power – was that it was able to lower LDL better than other rival statins on the market and Pfizer’s salespeople enticed doctors with graphs filled with curves showing how effective Lipitor was at lowering LDL compared to its rivals. Lipitor also had another marketing advantage; it had a reputation for being more potent. In the late 1990s, the statin makers were funding campaigns to get people to “know your numbers” and were responsible for a new health obsession that made people check, alter and recheck their cholesterol numbers.

I remember watching Lipitor take off in the late 1990s, astonished that the public’s love affair with the drug was completely disconnected from reality. The most amazing thing about Lipitor when it arrived to market was that there were no data showing any effect of the drug on reducing rates of heart attacks and strokes, unlike rivals such as Pravachol and Zocor. In fact, it wasn’t until mid-2004 – after Lipitor had been on the market about seven years and bagged $5.5 billion a year in sales – that the company was able to convince the FDA that clinical trials could show some tiny benefits on cardiovascular disease. This drug became an immense blockbuster well before there was any evidence – zero evidence – it could do anything except lower LDL cholesterol.

This is classic misdirection at work. Most drugs are prescribed to do something that has a positive effect on your health such as reducing your risk of cardiovascular disease and an early death. That’s what we expect. But if it only alters a blood reading? Going to great efforts to alter your LDL might be a waste of time because at the end of the day numbers are just numbers. That numeric fixation is like the sleight-of-hand used by magicians: get the audience to look in one place and they won’t realize the elephant is hiding somewhere else. In characterizing cholesterol as a killer and LDL numbers as the answer, people were manipulated into thinking that focusing on lowering numbers was good for their health.

Over the past 10 years, more recent research has shown that, given one’s age, cholesterol levels and medical history, the majority of people who take statins are in the “low risk of a heart attack” category. Which means their chance of avoiding a heart attack by taking a statin is miniscule. For example, if your risk of a cardiovascular event is 10% over the next five years, the best a statin might lower that by is 1-2% so your risk drops to 8-9%. Another way to say this is that 98-99% of the “low risk of heart attack” people who swallow a daily statin are unlikely to have any benefit related to heart health. However, they will likely have lower LDL cholesterol. Those at ‘higher risk’ – like people who have already survived one heart attack – might see a higher benefit, but even then the absolute benefits seem tiny. What’s clear is the numbers game with statins has resulted in millions of people probably taking them needlessly.

And, of course, they’re not without a range of adverse effects, such as liver damage, muscle weakness, cognitive difficulties, diabetes and other risks. For many people, that’s too high a price to pay for tinkering with some arbitrary numbers. One of the most potent statins available, cerivastatin, only lasted a few years on the market because of its tendency to cause liver failure. But boy, did it ever lower LDL!

Right now, there are two LDL busters that will surely make statins seem so “last millennium.” Amgen’s Repatha (evolocumab) and Praluent (alirocumab) made by Sanofi are known as PCSK9s (proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9). These drugs are being discussed this summer at an FDA expert committee and have been recommended for approval. A decision is likely to be made this month. Positioned to replace statins, industry analysts suggest these drugs will be priced at sticker-shock levels of $5,000-10,000 per patient per year.

Even though many doctors will wonder how the new drugs perform in relation to the statins, I’m worried they’ll still just focus on LDL. Repatha and Praluent, which are injectables, perform well in lowering LDL cholesterol so the question is: who needs them? The initial target market will likely be people with a relatively rare disease called homozygous familial hypercholesterolemia (HoFH), a genetic disorder that may lead to heart attacks in childhood, but you can bet the companies won’t stop there. The market will undoubtedly expand to those who don’t tolerate statins, those who have trouble lowering their LDL or others who want to try it “just in case.” Analysts are saying these two drugs could be worth as much as $2.5 billion a year, launching the two new drugs into the “blockbuster” category.

While all this sounds very exciting, let me pull back the curtain with two impolite questions: 1) Is it true that, like Lipitor, these drugs are coming to the market without any long-term health outcomes data (i.e. proof they prevent heart attacks or strokes) and 2) Could the drugs have nasty adverse effects (i.e. could they accidentally kill or injure people)?

The respective answers are yes and maybe. There are no long-term health outcomes data and no extensive adverse event data. Not yet. But don’t look there; look here: the drugs are ruthless LDL busters so doctors and patients worried about their LDL need to give them a try.

Seems like even the big boys are in love with the magic. The prestigious Harvard Medical School, in an article entitled PCSK9 inhibitors: a major advance in cholesterol-lowering drug therapy, waxed poetic about how the PCSK9 inhibitors are superb cholesterol-lowering agents which can lower LDL levels, compared to placebo by about 60%.

Call me a naysayer but do we really want to replay this massive deception again? Isn’t it somewhat misguided to be rushing towards new drugs that cost 10 grand a year, without a clue as to their long-term effectiveness and safety because they alter a lab value? Maybe we should give doctors the benefit of the doubt and trust they have learned the lesson of Lipitor: that it’s both silly and premature to be spending billions on drugs unless they can show anything more than impressive LDL numbers.

Or maybe, like most of us, they like to be fooled and bamboozled. After all, magic is…well, just magic.

—

Alan Cassels is a drug policy researcher at the University of Victoria. He writes about medical screening and drugs, consults with unions on drug benefits plans and is helping research tools to make deprescribing easier for physicians. You can read more of his writings at www.alancassels.com or follow him on twitter @akecassels

Holistic aromatherapy

by Lynne Edel

pouring aroma oil

• Aromatherapy is more popular than ever, yet there is much confusion and misinformation about essential oil use today, with some companies advocating unsafe practices and synthetic and adulterated essential oils flooding the market.

The British Columbia Alliance Of Aromatherapy (www.bcaoa.org) defines aromatherapy/essential oil therapy as “the controlled use of essential oil(s) to maintain and promote physical, psychological and spiritual well-being.” Essential oils are explained as “plant molecules that are highly volatile, complex chemical structures created in nature… extracted by man through steam distillation, expression, solvent and CO2 extraction.”

Holistic aromatherapy incorporates safe and effective practices to promote health and wellbeing on the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual levels. The individual is seen as a whole and once a lifestyle and health history is gathered from the client, a custom blend – using natural and authentic essential oils – is formulated and a treatment plan created by the essential oil therapist. The treatment plan may include inhalation, compress and topical application. Internal use is never recommended.

As an example, a client comes in who has recently quit smoking, is experiencing digestive upsets and wants to move forward in their life. A blend could be created using essential oils of black pepper, frankincense, ginger, cypress and orange. Clinical research (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8033760) has shown that black pepper curbs nicotine withdrawal, ginger and orange ease abdominal discomfort, cypress is used in times of transition and frankincense helps to cut ties with the past. The client would be encouraged to use this blend in a carrier oil to massage into the abdominal and lower back area or alternately disperse it in hot water and use it as a compress on the abdominal area. In conjunction with the topical application, they would be advised to use the blend in a diffuser or personal inhaler to ease nicotine cravings.

The BCAOA holds the designated and trademarked titles Registered Aromatherapist-RA ™ and Essential Oil Therapist-EOT™ and sets the standard for education within the province of BC. The British Columbia Association of Practicing Aromatherapists (www.bcapa.org) offers educational training twice a year so that members can keep current within the ever-evolving study of aromatherapy. Professional holistic aromatherapists belong to one or both of these associations. Membership assures in-depth educational training through an examination process.

Langara College is the only public college within BC to offer a certificate program in this fascinating field of study, constituting a year-long, part-time, comprehensive, hands-on training that includes clinical practice in a health care setting. Once the training is complete, the holistic aromatherapist may start a business, work within the spa industry or establish a holistic practice in a wellness centre. The next Holistic Aromatherapy Practitioner Certificate Program at Langara College begins September 2015 and runs through to June 2016.

It is advised to contact a Registered Aromatherapist™/Essential Oil Therapist™ to ensure confidence in quality of care, product knowledge and safety when using essential oils for holistic health and well-being.

—

Lynne Edel (RA™, EOT™) is an aromatherapy instructor at Langara College (www.langara.bc.ca) and president of the British Columbia Alliance Of Aromatherapy (BCAOA), www.bcaoa.org

photo © Subbotina

Breastfeeding and herbs

mother and child It is quite possible that herbal remedies help increase milk supply. There are several drugs that obviously do increase milk supply, and, of course, it is reasonable to assume that some plants and herbs might contain similar pharmacological agents.

Almost every culture has some sort of herb or plant or potion to increase milk supply. Some may work as placebos, which is fine; some may not work at all; some may have one or more active ingredients. Some will have active ingredients that will not increase the milk supply but have other effects that are not necessarily desirable. Note that even herbs can have side effects, even serious ones. Natural source drugs are still drugs and there is no such thing as a 100% safe drug. Luckily, as with most drugs, the baby will get only a tiny percentage of the mother’s dose. The baby is thus extremely unlikely to have any side effects at all from the herbs. Two herbal treatments that seem to increase the milk supply are fenugreek and blessed thistle, in the following dosages:

  • Fenugreek: three capsules three times a day
  • Blessed thistle: three capsules three times a day or 20 drops of the tincture three times a day

The tincture container states that blessed thistle should not be taken by nursing mothers, presumably because of the tiny amount of alcohol the mother would get. There are some preparations of both herbs that are labelled “not for use by nursing mothers.” Don’t worry about this; these herbs are safe for the mother to take because so little gets into the milk. Teas also seem to work, but to take enough to make a difference, you will be drinking tea all day and night since the amount of the herbs you get is much less.

  • Fenugreek and blessed thistle seem to work better if you take both, not just one or the other.
  • Fenugreek and blessed thistle work quickly. If they do work, you will usually notice a difference within 12- 24 hours of starting taking them. If not, they probably won’t work.
  • Fenugreek is often sold as a combination with thyme. Do not buy this combination, but try to get the capsules with fenugreek alone.
  • Herbal remedies are not standardized, so though the bottle of fenugreek, for example, may say that it contains 405, 505, 605 or 705 mg/capsule, we do not really know how much of the active ingredient you are taking. Fenugreek has a distinct smell. If you cannot smell it on your skin, you are not taking enough, even if you are taking three capsules three times a day. Ensure that the fenugreek is very fresh and gives off a strong odour when you open the container.
  • Fenugreek and blessed thistle seem also to work better in the first few weeks than later. In fact they tend to work best in the first week.
  • If you are ready to stop fenugreek and blessed thistle, you can probably stop suddenly or wean off over a week or so.
  • Fenugreek does not cause low blood sugar. Where this rumour came from is unknown.

Other herbal treatments that have been used to increase milk supply

Alfalfa, spirulina, goat’s rue, raspberry leaf, fennel, brewer’s yeast, stinging nettle.

Some lactation teas may be effective for some mothers. We do hear from many mothers that [the following] have helped to increase their milk supply: mother’s milk teas, nursing teas, lactation teas.

Foods that may help

Eating oatmeal daily and garlic and ginger in moderation are all thought to help milk supply. Many cultures have their own “remedies” that they have found to be helpful – fish and papaya soup, hot curry dishes, etc.

Homeopathy is another approach that may work and consulting with a good naturopath or homeopath may prove helpful.

None of these herbal or food treatments, including blessed thistle and fenugreek, has been proved effective scientifically. Remember, herbal treatments are only part of the solution to “not enough milk.” See Protocol to Manage Breastmilk Intake at www.canadianbreastfeedingfoundation.org and look for videos on how to latch a baby on, how to know the baby is getting milk… how to use a lactation aid, as well as other information sheets on breastfeeding.

—

Source: www.canadianbreastfeedingfoundation.org

photo © Tatyana Gladskikh

Take a hike

and some food to keep you going

hiker eating"

• For short hikes, food is more of a nice to have rather than a necessity. But on long hikes, an adequate food supply is critical to success and safety. Whether going on a five-mile walk or a 500-mile-long distance trek, you should have some food along. If for no other reason than just-in-case. Having a good idea about how much food will be required to provide the energy to complete the hike is part of good planning. A day hike requires simple, tasty, cold snacks. Pausing for a rest, munching on a handful of fruit or trail mix and then continuing your hike is all it takes. Food that packs well and tastes good is the goal. Multi-day hikes require much more planning and preparation than a simple day hike. Planning food needs and a diverse menu is important to ensure adequate energy is available for your body. Running out of food 30 miles into a 70-mile trek is not a good thing.

Food for treks

Pretty much any snacks work to provide energy for a day hike since you can eat a healthy breakfast before hiking and a nice dinner when you get home. Once your hike becomes multi-day, your nutrition needs change greatly. You now need to ensure your body is receiving more than just calories.

A good distribution of foods from the food pyramid, possibly supplemented by a daily vitamin will keep you hiking strong for days, weeks and even months on end. The calories you consume should be around 15% proteins, 50%-65% carbohydrates and 20%-35% fats.

Carbohydrates provide faster energy, fat more long-burning, and protein replenishes and keeps muscles healthy over time. Reducing protein too much will be devastating on a long-distance hike. Carbohydrates and proteins have 4 cal/gram (113 cal/oz) while fats have 9 cal/gram (255 cal/oz). It is a good goal to find calorie-dense foods so fewer pounds are carried for the same amount of energy. A food pack containing about 4.25 cal/g (120 cal/oz) is fairly dense. Most multi-day hikers carry 1.5 to 2.0 pounds of food per day. That means carrying more than about 10 days of food becomes impossibly heavy. For longer treks, read about supplying food along the way at http://www.hikingdude.com/hiking-food-supply.php

Outfitting your trekking food

  • Estimate how many calories are needed with the Calorie Calculator at the website noted above.
  • Create the meals with the menu planner at www.hikingdude.com/menu/menumain.php
  • Shop for food. Start early and buy when items are on sale since they can be stored.
  • Repackage. Just before the trek, repackage food into meals so all ingredients are easy to find.
  • List required utensils. Choose food to minimize the extra tools needed.

The planning of food, shopping for ingredients and repackaging into meals is an enjoyable part of planning for a long hike. It’s exciting to think I will be preparing this meal while the sun is setting on some far mountain. Figuring out what tastes might work together, making sure I have enough but not too much food, understanding what utensils are needed to make the meal – all parts of the planning that can be a lot of fun. Some people like real food, such as steak, stew, hamburgers or other items that take real cooking and weigh a ton. These people tend to take day hikes from a base camp, exploring an area thoroughly.

To take an extended trek requires changing your expectations of food and the effort involved in carrying it and preparing it. Minimizing the weight to carry and the time, fuel and utensils needed to prepare a meal are the main goals.

Reduce the weight

It makes no sense to carry any more weight than necessary. Since a large portion of total pack weight can be food, that’s a good place to start lightening the load. There are a number of ways to reduce the weight of your hiking food:

Dehydrate: Buy your own food dehydrator and dry fruits, vegetables and meats – the most inexpensive and healthy option, but requires effort at home. A dried apple is still an apple, just without the water.

Buy pre-packaged: Purchasing freeze-dried or dehydrated meals is the easiest. It is also the most expensive and can introduce large amounts of sodium and preservatives.

Calorie density: Read the nutrition labels on foods. Find those that are dense in calories compared to weight. Sunflower kernels are 190 cal/oz while an apple is 15 cal/oz. and a dehydrated apple is 100 cal/oz.

Repackage food: You’ll be surprised how much garbage labelling you’ll throw away. Better to just leave it at home rather than carry it mile after mile just to throw away later.

Other trek food tips

  • Take dehydrated fruits and vegetables to help input vitamins not found in processed foods.
  • Take a daily vitamin each day to help fill any lack of nutrition in your food choices.
  • Pack spices. Take a lightweight container of five or six common spices to add flavour to meals – salt, cayenne pepper, garlic, cinnamon, chili powder, onion, etc.
  • If you expect cold mornings or aren’t eager to start hiking bright and early, have oatmeal and hot chocolate. On long treks, I prefer packing up and moving right away with a break for Pop-tart, granola bar or trail mix after an hour or so. This saves a lot of time heating water and clean up. It also means less fuel to carry.
  • The ultimate lightweight meal packaging is to just take your credit card. When thru-hiking a long trail that goes through towns, it’s a lot lighter to eat at a restaurant or buy fresh food at a grocery store than to carry your meals.

Food weight calculator

Hikers normally consume from 1.5 to 2.5 pounds of food a day plus water. During that day, 10 to 30 miles may be travelled. How many days’ worth of food are you comfortable packing and carrying? To figure out how much food you need, see the calculator at www.hikingdude.com/hiking-food-supply.php

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Source: hikingdude.com

photo © Dragonimages

Sparks of the divine

Quotations

by Sant Rajinder Singh Ji Maharaj

Sant Rajinder Singh Ji Maharaj
Sant Rajinder Singh Ji Maharaj

• Quotes from Spark of the Divine

“Within each of us is a spark of the Divine. Breathtaking regions of beauty, unimaginable vistas of sights and sounds, infinite wisdom, and all-embracing love invite us within. The Light of the Divine glows continually.” by Sant Rajinder Singh Ji Maharaj, from his book Spark of the Divine

“Throughout history, the North Star has guided the footsteps of the wayward traveler; so to does the spark of the Divine lead us to self-knowledge and God-realization.” by Sant Rajinder Singh Ji Maharaj, from his book Spark of the Divine

“The journey begins by looking inside to find that guiding light of the divine spark within us. The practice that leads us to the spark is meditation on the inner light and sound.” by Sant Rajinder Singh Ji Maharaj, from his book Spark of the Divine

“To travel through the outer cosmos, one boards a spaceship. The fiery combustion o thee engines produces lift-off to propel the spacecraft beyond the pull of gravity and into the silent wonders of outer space. To travel into the spiritual realms within, the spark of the Divine is ignited to propel our soul on the inner journey.”

“A spiritual Master ignites that spark at the time of initiation. Instead of gazing through a spaceship’s porthole to see the outer stars and celestial bodies, a spiritual Master taches a meditation that opens for us an inner porthole. With our spark ignited, our soul begins its wondrous journey to the Divine.” by Sant Rajinder Singh Ji Maharaj, from his book Spark of the Divine

Quotes from Meditation as Medication for the Soul

“Masters of Science of Spirituality focus on a meditation on inner Light and Sound that brings peace to the soul. The main purpose of this meditation is to help people find inner spiritual regions. There is a beyond. A direct experience of the beyond can be had by each person. It is open to all. Spiritual Masters have come throughout the ages to help us experience realms beyond this physical one.

When we rise above this world through meditation, we see the light of God in all and love all creation as one family of God. We become an agent of peace and goodwill, an ambassador of love. If each person offered their soothing presence to those with whom he or she came in contact, it would not be long before we would begin to heal the world of the scars of war and hatred. Outer peace would begin to spread worldwide.

The solution for all our pains and the world’s pains is not costly. It is a free solution, available to every human being on this planet. By spending time daily in meditation, we will be in continual contact with a power that can profoundly transform our lives and those around us.”

Sant Rajinder Singh Ji Maharaj

will be in Vancouver on September 6 and 7

The spiritual Master’s program will include two public talks and an initiation: in-depth instructions for meditation on the inner Light and Sound. This event is sponsored by Science of Spirituality Meditation & Ecology Centre.

Science of Spirituality is a worldwide, spiritual organization, dedicated to transforming lives through meditation.

Public talk: Transformation through Meditation

September 6, 6:30 pm

Chan Centre for the Performing Arts

University of British Columbia

6265 Crescent Rd, Vancouver

Public talk: Experience the Spark of the Divine

Followed by Initiation: In-depth instructions for

meditation on the inner Light and Sound.

September 7, 2:30 pm

St. Andrews-Wesley United Church

1012 Nelson Street, Downtown Vancouver

Clean tech’s top 10 trends

by Bruce Mason

electric vehicles plugged into solar panels• It’s virtually impossible to stay on top of the clean tech tidal wave exploding in many places on our endangered planet. It’s particularly difficult in Canada where this worldwide transition is being ignored, temporarily diverted and even foolishly subverted. Despite the counter-productive efforts of suspect politicians, greedy businesses and complicit corporate media, technology is outpacing – and hopefully, outstripping – public policy. It’s our best, although faint, hope for humanity.

Below – in David Letterman style – is a summary highlighting 10 trends that “defined and propelled the global shift to clean energy in 2014,” as noted in Clean Energy Canada’s 2015 flagship annual world report, Tracking the Energy Revolution, prepared in Vancouver by James Glave.

#10 Divestment becomes definitive

At the UN’s climate summit, investors pledged to transfer $100 billion (US) out of filthy fossil fuel into clean, renewable energy. The milestone moment included the Rockefellers and the World Council of Churches (representing 600 million people in 150 countries). Much of the work/success is at universities and growing, from Stanford to Glasgow. Religious leaders are setting the pace and tone – including Desmond Tutu and Pope Francis – calling out climate change as “cataclysmic,” “the human rights challenge of our time.” Thus, a new imperative: divest or perpetuate suffering. Inaction is no longer neutral; it is immoral, an “ecological sin.”

To break our lethargy, activists are embarking on an a clear, moral call to action, transcending politics and status quo imperatives, recalling that apartheid ended when people quit buying South African wine, diamonds and such. Some argue that fossil fuels are so deeply embedded in the very fabric of the global economy and community that investors should transform institutions from within. But divestment pressure is being increasingly applied in boardrooms, campuses, churches, as well as on the streets.

#9 Global clean energy surges while Canada lags behind

Turbines, solar panels, hydroelectric and geothermal plants are iconic, but electricity is just part of the bigger picture. The clean-economy shift includes biofuels, energy efficiency software, green buildings, electric vehicles, smart grids and more. All this is now valued at $790 billion (CAD). However our country’s market share has dipped more than any of the 24 exporting countries. It’s dropped five points to $7 billion – a mere 0.9% of the global market – from 14th to 19th place, behind the Czech Republic, losing out on $8.7 billion annually. This new opportunity is expected to grow to $1.8 trillion by 2022, but Canada – thanks to the likes of PM Harper and Premier Clark – must catch up, fast.

#8 Carbon pricing the “new normal”

Ten additional countries – Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey and Ukraine – implemented or committed to pricing carbon pollution. All told, some 39 countries and 23+ sub-national jurisdictions have signed on. More companies/investors have spoken out on carbon pricing as a must-have. It’s no longer a question of if; instead, it’s which mechanism to choose. More governments are requiring polluters to pay massive, hidden costs, helping clean energy compete fairly. Within a couple of years, at least half of the global economy will have some kind of carbon price.

#7 The developing world plugs into renewable power

Last year, developing nations in Africa, South America and the Caribbean invested an impressive, additional 36% in clean-energy projects: $131 billion (US) – almost as much the rest of the world ($138 billion). Reading the writing on the looming climate change wall, the clear message is renewable energy is a smarter path. For example, India committed to deliver electricity to all its citizens by installing 175 GW of renewable energy by 2022. Predictions are that world coal combustion will continue to climb, but its exponential growth is being short circuited – the path to prosperity, now lined with solar panels and other renewable energy.

#6 Wind power spreads like Canadian wildfires

Globally, governments and developers built 50% more wind capacity in 2014, the greatest number in a single year; a new wind turbine spins in service of the planet every 20 minutes. There’s enough world wind energy to meet the electricity needs of 300 million homes, enough electricity to power Canada’s economy, twice over. China houses one third of this installed capacity – something to celebrate, refuting claims that renewable energy won’t power the world.

#5 Climate diplomacy increases

A new era emerged when the world’s largest climate polluters – China and the US – stopped pointing fingers and started shaking hands at an historic agreement in November. America agreed to slash its carbon emissions below 2005 levels. China will halt its growth of greenhouse gas emissions and double renewable energy grids. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) predicts that by 2030, coal will still provide 30% of America’s power. However, it also acknowledges that it is likely overestimating continued coal use, underestimating growth in renewables and diplomacy.

#4 Total renewable energy increasingly more mainstream

There is growing research that humanity is raising the bar far beyond fossil fuels and studies suggest a 100% benchmark is technically achievable and cost-effective. In 2009, Stanford’s Mark Jacobson showed that the entire world can theoretically power itself without fossil fuels or nuclear plants by 2050. To that end, cities, companies and entire nations – such as Denmark – plan to meet heating, cooling, transportation and electricity requirements entirely from wind, water, sun and other clean sources; 45+ cities are working on total renewable electricity. Germany’s on track for an 80% clean grid. And Norway has a 114% renewable electricity target to export surplus. The private sector’s IKEA, Google, Apple and Unilever are keen on completely renewable energy businesses. Yet while the clock ticks, there is still some ongoing debate in some circles about nuclear power and carbon capture, horrifying climate change and absolutely essential mitigation.

#3 Tesla’s Gigafactory unleashes a game-changing revolution in batteries

Electric vehicle battery prices have plunged in five years and a supply surge will drop them even further. When up and running (2017), Tesla Motors’ five million square-foot Gigafactory plans to supply 35 gigawatt-hours of batteries for a half-million of its vehicles by 2020. That’s double the global quantity of lithium batteries available and 30% cheaper. Perhaps more importantly, energy increased storage, when wind and sun aren’t available, makes renewable power inevitable, ahead of predictions. To encourage competition, in 2014 Tesla released its technology patents. In May, it had received $800 million pre-orders for Powerwall, its home storage system and utility-scale Powerpacks, signalling an earnest, historic shift.

#2 Solar power prices drop making it affordable and doable

The costs of new wind and solar energy are declining to match nuclear and fossil energy. Over the past five years, solar-module costs dropped 73%, driving investment, additional projects and employment; 2.5 million people work in solar, worldwide. In 30 countries, electricity from residential panels is now cheaper than previous dirty options. The International Renewable Energy Agency figures solar and wind will compete directly in the majority of markets within a decade. The industry leads in recycling and disposal, but components include some “conflict materials” from sources with poor health and safety regulations. Production also generates pollution. As yet, we have no clean, reliable, cost-effective, completely pollution-free electricity source, but thankfully, solar leads the way.

#1 Renewables help stall global carbon pollution

Preliminary data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) indicated that global emissions of carbon dioxide from energy stalled in 2014, the first time in 40 years with no economic downturn. The IEA estimated that carbon dioxide stood at 32.3 billion tonnes in 2014, virtually unchanged from the previous year, attributing this to the ramp-up of renewable energy and the payoff of efficiency policies. Still an enormous, unconscionable bill for future generations and expected to continue to rise – but some faint cause for hope, optimism and inspiration for further mitigation of climate change. See http://cleanenergycanada.org/trackingtherevolution-global/2015/#/a-new-hope/

Clean tech readers are aware of Analytica Advisor reports. Toronto-based think tank, The Mowatt Centre for Policy Innovation, confirms Canada is falling dangerously behind. The federal government and some provinces dabble with little consistency, coherence or conviction. The Centre joins a rapidly growing chorus, calling for clean technology as a centrepiece of a new national energy strategy.

—

Bruce Mason is a Vancouver and Gabriola-Island based five-string banjo player, gardener, freelance writer and author of Our Clinic. brucemason@shaw.ca

photo source: Envision Solar

Conservative Party crashers

How Canada got taken

by Anthony Hall

ghost of Nixon visits Harper
US President Nixon visits Stephen Harper.

• The fast approach of the most important federal election in Canadian history highlights the question: “How did Stephen Harper seize control of the Canadian government in the first place?” Were rules broken, laws violated and Canadian institutions subverted?

The guilt of Harper and his minions has already been demonstrated on all counts. We still don’t have the full story, however, on the deep politics underlying Harper’s meteoric rise. In less than a decade, the former Imperial Oil mailroom clerk went from starting a new political party to winning in 2011 a majority government.

Harper’s ascent to the top was energized by foreign-backed regime change. The term “regime change” was popularized in the US in the process of overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi government in 2003.

Iraq’s invasion after 9/11 continued Cold War patterns of US-led overthrows of indigenous governments in, for instance, Latin America, Congo, Indonesia and, as we shall see, Canada. In Killing Hope, William Blum has surveyed over 50 episodes of US-directed regime change since the Second World War.

JFK orders Pearson’s replacement of Diefenbaker as Canada’s PM

In 1963, US President John F. Kennedy provided Liberal Leader Lester Pearson with assistance from CIA-connected pollsters and journalists. Concurrently, JFK ordered that a media smear campaign in Canada be directed against the Progressive Conservative government of John Diefenbaker.

Diefenbaker’s supposed crime was to have rejected American nuclear weapons on Canadian soil. A newcomer to the Ottawa political scene in 1963, Pierre Trudeau responded to this engineered regime change by asking rhetorically, “Why should the US treat Canada differently from Guatemala when reasons of state require it and circumstances permit?”

Trudeau dubbed Pearson “the defrocked priest of peace” while the Nobel Peace Prize winner was on his way to taking over Canada’s top job. Pearson received US assistance in replacing Diefenbaker once the Liberal Party quisling agreed that Canada should accept nuclear-tipped US Bomarc missiles at our military bases.

Disappearing Joe Clark to empower Brian Mulroney

Pierre Trudeau was a chief beneficiary of the US intervention to bring the Liberal Party to power. For most of the period between 1968 and 2003, Trudeau and then Jean Chretien, Trudeau’s former Quebec lieutenant, dominated Canadian political life.

The party of John A. Macdonald and John Diefenbaker exists no more. It was made to disappear in the course of manipulations to install and prop up the Harper government. Canada’s current PM is the embodiment of the replacement of indigenous conservatism in Canada with a neocon extension of the US Republican Party. Election fraud is one of the specialties of both the north and south branches of this continent’s Republican Party.

Brian Mulroney, prime minister from 1984 to 1993, was the transitional figure in the rightward shift of Canadian conservatism from the moderate middle to the police state extremes of Bill C-51. In 1983, Mulroney replaced Joe Clark as Leader of the Progressive Conservative Party. Clark led a minority government for nine months in 1979-80.

Mulroney was finagled into the PC leadership with the help of a powerful clique of neoconservative power brokers revolving around Bavarian premier Franz Josef Strauss. One of Strauss’ foot soldiers in Canada was Karlheinz Schreiber, a convicted criminal whose reputation for skulduggery has become synonymous with Mulroney’s shame in the Airbus scandal. The Strauss-directed Airbus conglomerate sold passenger jets to Air Canada in a deal that included at least three cash payments from Schreiber to Mulroney of $75,000 each.

The Strauss-Mulroney connection is part of the foreign-backed alteration that eliminated Joe Clark from the PC Party leadership and put Mulroney on a rapid trajectory to the PM’s chair in 1984. As Lawrence Martin observed in the Globe and Mail, “What happened in 1983 was an outrage, worse than the money handoffs to Mulroney.” In 1983, Strauss funded an airplane load of planted delegates to attend a Tory convention in Winnipeg with the objective of removing Clark from the PC leadership.

In A Secret Trial, William Kaplan characterized this backstory as follows: Strauss was “… determined to export his particular brand of Conservatism abroad, mostly by providing financial assistance to like-minded politicians. In Canada, Joe Clark, a Red Tory had to go – he did not fill the bill. But Brian Mulroney did.”

The Caracas Cable on party renovation

The invisible hands that replaced Clark with Mulroney were more numerous than those of Strauss, a leading promoter of Airbus and the West German armaments industry. Their activities were part of a broadly organized radicalization of “conservatism’s” meaning and application in many countries.

One of the instruments of this transformation is the International Democratic Union. Currently, the IDU is a central organizing hub for conservative parties in 63 countries, including Canada. A similar hub is the International Republican Institute, a key part of the complex of US government-funded agencies under the umbrella of the National Endowment for Democracy.

The NED, IRI and IDU were created during the presidency of Ronald Reagan as “surrogates” for the CIA after wide public exposure of its illegal activities. According to journalist Mukoma Wa Ngugi in Anti-War.com, the IRI’s role has been “to install US-friendly governments and undermine those that are not by supporting coups and ousters.”

The ouster of John Diefenbaker and Joe Clark presented the International Republican Institute with examples to emulate and build upon. The IRI’s own literature refers to itself as an agency for “consolidating democracy.” In language that well describes Canada’s “unite the right” movement during the prelude to the Harper years, the CIA’s surrogate boasts of its capacity to join “splintered” opposition groups in coordination with church organizations.

Wikileaks published the 2005 Caracas Cable highlighting the activities of the IRI in Venezuela. This document explained the IRI’s effort to create the conditions for unseating the socialist government of then-President Hugo Chavez after the earlier failure of US-backed military coup attempts.

Section 12 of the Caracas Cable reports, “IRI will be bringing in consultants who specialize in party renovation to discuss case studies of political parties in Germany, Spain and Canada, which successfully carried out the process of party renovation.”

Media deception in regime change

Like “regime change” and “collateral damage,” the seemingly innocuous phrase, “party renovation,” disguises deeply invasive processes. The “renovation” of political conservatism is a code that disguises many assaults on the public interest, including Harper’s rapid dismantling of the Canadian state as we have known it.

Our social welfare states began to be demolished in the 1980s just as agencies like the IRI came into being. The aim of those that initiated the Reagan-Thatcher revolution was to crush those progressive forces blamed particularly for the defeat of the military-industrial complex in Vietnam.

Popular sentiment turned against US military aggression in Indochina in spite of the CIA’s hiring of thousands of well-placed journalists in Project Mockingbird to create propaganda and prevent the nationalization of natural resources in Africa, Latin America and Canada.

After becoming PM in 1984, Mulroney provided a very clear illustration of the desired outcome of “party renovation.” On taking power, he did away with Canada’s National Energy Policy. Mulroney also eliminated the Foreign Investment Review Agency.

Canada’s Republican propaganda mill

America’s defeat in Vietnam in the 1970s traumatized the ruling class in the US and its capitalist satellites, including Canada. Many of this class’ most prominent members regrouped to make sure the primary beneficiaries of the permanent war economy would never again face such a setback.

The CIA was downgraded even as other agencies were created to install and prop up compliant governments within the USA itself and around the world. The plutocrats and their corporate managers thereby expanded and privatized many facets of so-called “national security.”

Along with their work inside the Reagan administration, the makers of the neocon revolution created a broad array of new think tanks, media venues, security firms and mercenary armies. This spawning of new agencies helped advance the corporate takeover of many functions formerly performed by government.

In 2004, pundit Lewis Lapham described the communications branch of this operation as “the Republican propaganda mill.” According to Lapham, its core message was “the abiding lesson that money ennobles rich people, making them strong as well as wise, while money corrupts poor people, making them stupid as well as weak.”

The Republican propaganda mill’s primary outpost in Canada has been the National Post founded in 1998 by Conrad Black as a flagship of his worldwide media empire. In the late 1990s, Black’s Hollinger Corporation controlled over 500 news outlets. Its star-studded International Advisory Board featured many neocon luminaries, including Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, William F. Buckley, Richard Perle and George F. Will.

As Lawrence Martin put it, “Black didn’t just want to own newspapers. He wanted to use them to reshape the political culture of his native Canada and to influence the United States, Britain and Israel.” Our current Prime Minister would be the main beneficiary of Black’s neocon obsession with rewards for the rich, austerity for the poor and the middle classes.

Mr. Harper goes to Ottawa

Harper was first sent to Ottawa in 1993 as a Reform Party MP for Calgary West. The PC government’s failure to deliver on its promise to have Quebec recognized in the constitution as a “distinct society” caused the severing of Mulroney’s fragile alliance linking alienated Albertans with so-called “soft” separatists in Quebec. While in 1988 the Mulroney coalition elected 169 MPs, in 1993, the PCs elected only two, the same number of federal seats presently held by the Green Party.

The PC deflation opened the way for an elaborate campaign of “party renovation.” Black would take under his plutocratic wing the ambitious Albertans who claimed as their heritage the Christian evangelical heritage of the Social Credit Party. The Reform Party’s founder, Preston Manning, is the son of the Baptist preacher, Ernest. As Alberta’s Social Credit Premier between 1943 and 1968, Ernest oversaw the initial phase of the transformation of Canada’s oil-rich province into Texas North.

In his Canadian media chain’s daily doses of propaganda, Black guided the “unite the right” renovation. This transformation required the controlled demolition of the PC heritage of nation building in the public interest.

As part of his enterprise, Black hosted his Albertan Trojan Horses, Preston Manning, Stephen Harper and Ralph Klein, at Bilderberg events. At these infamous Bilderberg gatherings, fresh recruits are regularly put under the command of those at the global heights of capitalism’s permanent war economy.

Harper was selected as the anointed one to embody the outcome of the “unite the right” renovation. Black helped shape Harper’s media personae to conform to the prevalent ethos of the 9/11 Wars. The media mogul is reported to have paid Peter MacKay not to run against Harper in 2003 for the leadership of the “renovated” conservative party.

In March of 2003, Harper condemned the Liberal government of Prime Minister Jean Chretien for withholding from the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq the addition of our Armed Forces. “For the first time in history,” explained Harper and his co-author, “the Canadian government has not stood beside its key British and American allies in their time of need.”

In their New York Times op ed, Harper and Stockwell Day described Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein as a “perpetrator of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.” The Leader of the Official Opposition contended that Canada should respond to 9/11, an episode in which the Iraqi government had no role whatsoever, by invading that country to “scorn the forces of evil,” to stand instead “for freedom, for democracy, for civilization itself.”

Renovation or sabotage of Canada?

Harper’s hawkish stance hit home [in terms of] both the outcome and future direction of the “party renovation” that so radically transformed political conservatism in Canada between 1963 and 2003. In 1963, John Diefenbaker was eliminated from office for opposing US nuclear warheads on Canadian soil. In 2003, Harper demonstrated to the patrons of the Republican propaganda mill that he was the ideal person to lead the Canadian government into the seemingly endless 9/11 Wars.

In 2003, the Chretien Liberals commanded a comfortable majority in Parliament with 172 MPs. In the federal vote of 2011, a contest still tainted by unresolved issues of election fraud, the Liberals dropped to 34 seats while the Harper Conservatives emerged with a majority of 166 seats. There is much more to this dramatic renovation of Canada’s political culture than immediately meets the eye.

References

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/the-real-schreiber-outrage-how-foreign-money-toppled-joe-clark/article1090801/

http://www.antiwar.com/frank/?articleid=13076

https://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/04/05CARACAS1049.html

http://harpercrusade.blogspot.ca/2010/05/conrad-blacks-role-media-manipulation.html

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Anthony Hall is professor of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge. He has written for the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, Canadian Dimension and many other periodicals. His most recent books are Earth Into Property: Colonization, Decolonization and Capitalism and The American Empire and the Fourth World. He recently wrote another article, Neconning the Public for our May edition.

Canada’s climate change crossroads

Hope in the summer of fire

by Bruce Mason

• What are we to make of the sickening smoke that still lingers over much of Canada? And the toxic soup of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, nitrogen oxides, suspended ash, water vapour and other particulate matter visible as far south as Tennessee? And the sheer size, intensity and enormity of its cause: the much too-early, too-scary, fire season captured ghost-like on NASA photographs across vast areas of North America and all over the world? It is a teachable moment, a feedback loop, a death spiral of carbon sequesterers becoming carbon emitters contributing to the melting of ice in the Arctic and Greenland.

Terry Fox comes to my mind. Especially after Jonathan Franzen – one of the world’s best writers and most articulate activists – recently argued in New Yorker magazine, “Earth now resembles a patient whose terminal cancer we can choose to treat either with disfiguring aggression or with palliation and sympathy.”

Back in 1980 – when the world started ignoring the early signs and warnings of cancerous climate change – this one-legged kid appeared in the green room of the TV station where I worked. He said he was going to run across the country to raise awareness and collect $1 from each of his 24 million fellow Canadians to fight the disease. We got daily updates from his Marathon of Hope noting the cysts on his stump, shin splints, bone bruises, an inflamed knee, dizzy spells and concern about his enlarged heart that beat through gale force winds, heavy rain, snowstorms and blistering heat, 26 miles (42 km) every day. Oh, and the crowds, of course, growing in size along the long, long Trans-Canada highway.

“Everybody seems to have given up hope of trying. I haven’t. It isn’t easy and it isn’t supposed to be, but I’m accomplishing something,” he told us from the steps of our federal government.

Terry Fox had beaten the 50/50 odds of surviving the osteosarcoma that took one of his legs. A few years earlier, his chances would have been 15%. He also endured 16 months of chemo, watching fellow cancer patients suffer and die. Terry Fox wrote, “There were faces with the brave smiles and the ones who had given up smiling. There were feelings of hopeful denial and the feelings of despair.” Sound familiar? Depression and post-traumatic stress are rampant among climate scientists, environmentalists and laymen alike.

The loneliness of his venture, his audacious vision and his determination to overcome challenges united this nation; his memory still inspires pride and embodies the cherished Canadian values of compassion, commitment and perseverance.

The osteosarcoma cure rate is now almost 80% due, in some measure, to the $650 million raised since Terry Fox started his Marathon of Hope. He was no saint, although he – like those acting on climate change – had a Pope praying for his health and his mission. And he frequently vented his frustration at media and those impeding the “run,” while placing his achievements – which are celebrated worldwide and sustainable across time – within everyone’s reach.

Where is Canada now? What have we become? Having poisoned or squandered the primary elements of life – earth, air and water – our feet are being held to the fourth, fire. Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has categorized us as “free riders… laggards on climate change… withdrawn from the community of nations seeking to tackle dangerous climate change.

“By hedging their bets and waiting for others to move first, some governments are playing poker with the planet and future generations’ lives,” he said recently, pointing out that we have fallen behind impoverished Ethiopia, Kenya and Rwanda in the effort to combat global warming. “This is not a moment for prevarication, short-term self-interest and constrained ambition, but for bold global leadership and decisive action,” he added.

Twenty-seven years ago, Bill McKibben wrote the first book for a general audience about global warming: The End of Nature. He now says, “People in the world are used to thinking of Canada as a force for good in the world. It takes a strange new calibration of peoples’ mental geography to understand for the moment Canada is an obstructive and dangerous force upon the planet.”

McKibben was also a founder of 350.org, the first global grassroots climate change movement. Its name is derived from the upper limit for safe levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — 350 parts per million. We blew past that in 2007 and now sit precariously at over 400. He spearheaded the Keystone pipeline resistance, brought hundreds of thousands together in a climate march in New York in 2014 and launched the fastest growing fossil fuel divestment movement.

“From a distance, watching the trashing of environmental regulations, watching the efforts to intimidate environmental groups, First Nations – watching all that’s been pretty sad,” he told 10,000 people at a rally in Toronto, all but ignored by corporate media.

What are we afraid of? The Pew Research Center asked that question in 40 countries. In Canada, 58% said they were “most concerned” by ISIS – far ahead of climate change, which tops lists globally. Little wonder we’re deluded. Our Prime Minister Stephen Harper met with US VP Joe Biden to “discuss global security issues and ongoing instability in the global economy, including the threat posed by ISIS.” At a FIFA soccer game in Vancouver, under an orange haze rivalling Beijing and prompting air quality alerts, Harper, apparently, couldn’t see past his nose or the sniffer dogs or open his mouth, which must have been full of it.

He arrived from the Stampede on his home turf, now economically scorched by his oil-soaked obsession and nightmarish dreams of becoming a fossil fuel superpower in a post-carbon age; not far from his cherished tar sands (“oil sands”), the single, greatest ecological threat to the planet. He flew over forests denuded by pine beetles, an area now the size of Sweden, still thriving thanks to climate change. He peered out a window at mountains bereft of life-sustaining snow packs – sources of water – quickly becoming more valuable than the fossil fuel which must now be left in the soil, if Earth as we know it is to survive.

Is climate change contributing to wildfires? “I think it’s possible,” Harper said, answering the one question he allowed during a photo op in Kelowna alongside his extreme-energy sidekick Christy Clark; in its “summer of fire” in 2003, a wildfire in Okanagan Mountain Park necessitated one of the largest evacuations in Canadian history.

“It’s possible” – the only response from folks who haven’t a clue about real possibilities and who, on a policy level, are tossing butts around in a drought. “Insanity” is what Vancouver Sun’s Pete McMartin calls Clark’s policy, in the corporate media, which is starting to read the smoke signals and calling out so-called “sceptics” as “deniers.”

What is causing the spike in wildfires? “In a short answer, climate change,” says Toddi Steelman, director of the School of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Saskatchewan, a province at the epicentre of the new now. The scientists – and the foresters – agree. If anything, they have underestimated the impacts. Our only option is action; delay will inevitably lead to exponentially higher costs, more smoke and unimagined suffering.

This is more than a wake-up call. We slept through that. A smoke alarm is sounding; our home is on fire. Where are Stephen and Christy? Who knows? Leave them behind, with their pipe dreams and tainted money stuffed in their oily, gassy mattresses. Find the route out of the fire, even if you’re turned off and ‘not good’ at science. Use your common sense and an awakened vision. If you learned something in the “teachable moment,” look inside for the guts and vision of a Terry Fox, for your own Marathon of Hope. Take back the country and the world, which are still ours if we want them enough.

Get rid of the smokescreens, the smoke and the mirrors.