Bill Tremblay | Trenton | Feb 9

Northumberland news - The military community is in shock following the arrest of 8 Wing Trenton Commander Colonel Russ Williams.

Col. Williams, 46, has been charged with the first-degree murders of Brighton resident Marie Comeau and Belleville resident Jessica Lloyd. He also faces two counts of forcible confinement, two counts of break and enter and two counts of sexual assault in connection with two home invasions in the Tweed area last September.

** 'In the company of the devil': Victim

Greg Quinn and Mark Drajem | February 5

Bloomberg - A yearlong dispute was settled between the U.S. and Canada over “Buy American” rules in the Obama administration’s stimulus package, the countries said.

The deal will allow use of Canadian products in many local U.S. projects funded by the stimulus program, the governments said in a joint statement. Canada agreed to sign up its provinces to the World Trade Organization’s government procurement agreement, which it had refused to do when the WTO was formed in 1995.

Buy American provisions approved in the $787 billion economic stimulus package a year ago mandated that all the steel and manufactured goods purchased with the funds be made in the U.S., or in countries with U.S. agreements on government procurement. Under the deal announced today, those Canadian-made goods would now qualify for purchase in stimulus projects. Products from other nations wouldn’t qualify.

Chris Wood | Vancouver | January 28

Straight - You may be able to see it, but you can’t measure it. No public agency requires the truckers or their employers to keep a tally of the water they extract from the Peace and other streams for delivery to the scores of gas wells being drilled at any one time in the area. Estimates based on Peace drilling activity, however, suggest that the giant sucking sound could reach as high as 135 billion litres a year. That’s enough water to fill a line of tanker trucks parked bumper to bumper around the equator—five abreast.

You’re also not allowed to know what gets mixed in with the river water before it’s injected into the ground under staggering pressure in order to fracture solid rock and release the hydrocarbons trapped there. Drilling contractors insist the mixes they use are trade secrets. The Oil and Gas Commission, British Columbia’s decade-old one-stop shop for gas and oil oversight, isn’t curious. “The question I ask in reverse,” said the OGC’s leader for corporate affairs, Steve Simons, in his Victoria digs—the temple to sustainable building, Dockside Green—“is why? Why is it important to know?”

Ciara Byrne | Toronto | January 24

The Canadian Press - In a display that was anything but apathetic, thousands of Canadians of varying political stripes clogged city streets across Canada demanding Prime Minister Stephen Harper reopen Parliament and get back to work.

Hordes of protesters crammed Toronto’s downtown square, cradling signs denouncing the Prime Minister’s decision to suspend Parliament until early March.

Kim Murphy | Jan 12

LA Times - Vancouver engineers its own urban dream - The city imposes notions of sustainability in its decisions on what, where and how to build. Still, it's not quite the utopia.

The result has come to be known as "Vancouverism," an urban motif of public transit instead of freeways, a low-carbon energy infrastructure and gleaming high-rise condominium towers in sunlit, walkable neighborhoods laced with urban parks.

The 2010 Winter Olympic Games next month provide a showcase for how Vancouver is trying to evolve. A $1-billion development that houses the athletes' village generates up to 70% of its power from converted sewage, and the vaulted ceiling of the Richmond speed-skating venue emphasizes that most renewable of resources, wood.

Over the last 20 years, Vancouver has managed to more than double the number of people living downtown while also reducing its carbon emissions per capita to the lowest levels of any big city in North America. The central city has refused to allow a single freeway and recently began to further tighten the noose around automobiles, closing lanes on crowded streets in favor of buses, bikes and sidewalks.

The city has hit up developers to build parks, recreation centers, libraries, day-care centers, and open, public waterfronts to a degree almost unknown anywhere else.

Sandro Contenta | Toronto | January 8

Global Post - Prime Minister Stephen Harper is determined to send back the some 200 American asylum-seekers who have fled the Iraq war.

Canada has long been a haven for Americans escaping their wars.

During the American Revolutionary War in the late 1700s, an estimated 50,000 colonists who wanted to remain loyal to Britain fled north to what would later become Canada. Thousands more crossed the border during the Civil War, using an underground railroad that led escaped slaves to freedom.

Daniel Leblanc | Ottawa | December 30

The Globe and Mail - Prime Minister Stephen Harper will prorogue Parliament Wednesday for a two-month break.

The House of Commons and the Senate will come back in March, after the Vancouver Olympics, for a Speech from the Throne and a budget. The move will have the effect of stalling all bills currently in Parliament, including crime bills that the government had said were being delayed by the opposition.

Jessica Leeder | Toronto | December 23

Globe & Mail - One of the most unfriendly places for animal farmers in Ontario is the region designed to be one of the best: the 2-million acre swath of protected land that makes up the province's Greenbelt.

Ontario's Greenbelt is the largest protected area of its kind in the world. But animal agriculture is disappearing from the area so rapidly that it is having a negative impact on the local food system, according to University of Guelph researchers who are charting the exodus of livestock farmers from the area.

The culprits, researchers say, are a tag-team duo: encroaching urbanites repulsed by the less romantic aspects of animal farming and environmentalists who are winning a policy battle over whether to “pickle-jar” protected land or farm it.

This is a very insightful article about one aspect of our manufacturing ills. The lede:

One of the themes that came up while I was profiling White House manufacturing czar Ron Bloom earlier this fall was managerial talent. A lot of people talk about reviving the domestic manufacturing sector, which has shed almost one-third of its manpower over the last eight years. But some of the people I spoke to asked a slightly different question: Even if you could reclaim a chunk of those blue-collar jobs, would you have the managers you need to supervise them?

This strikes me as a very important question to ask. It’s one thing to bemoan the evisceration of our manufacturing capacity the last several years. One of the frequent excuses has been, “how can we compete with China’s low wages?” Not to mention the other one, “the same thing has happened to Europe.” But as the article makes pretty clear, although Europe has lost some manufacturing jobs, they’ve retained the well paying value-added jobs, quite well.

More after the jump.

Gloria Galloway | Ottawa | December 14

Globe & Mail - Rumours swirling around Ottawa suggest the Conservative government is thinking of shutting down Parliament until after the Olympics, killing some of its own bills but also ending the discussion of Afghan detainees that is nibbling away at Tory popularity.
Harper, the master manipulator, is at it again.

Halifax, NS | Dec 12

CTV - Genevieve Weir, a research project manager for Immunovaccine, emphasized that the vaccine is unique both in its content and delivery system.

"It contains seven different antigens to target seven different pathways in cancer," she told CTV Atlantic in Halifax. "The vaccine itself will stay in the body for two weeks, but the immune response is long-lasting and will be maintained over several years."

With the administration's approval, Immunovaccine will enter the first phase of human clinical trials. It aims to develop a "therapeutic cancer vaccine" for breast, ovarian and prostate cancers, said Brian Lowe, the company's vice-president.

Steven Edwards | New York | Dec 5

Montreal Gazette - Khadr likely to face July war crimes trial - The military judge in Omar Khadr's war-crimes case told defence and prosecution lawyers Friday he wants to set a firm trial date for the Canadian-born terror suspect — and gave them two weeks to propose schedules.

November 26

CBC - The federal government wants to change the law governing whether an offender serving a criminal sentence abroad can get a transfer back to Canada. Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan said that legislation introduced Thursday would clarify the factors under which the minister would permit a return.

Van Loan said those factors would now include if an offender, upon return to Canada, would endanger public safety, continue to engage in criminal activity or endanger child safety.

Additional factors, unmentioned, include whether the offender is a Canadian child that a foreign state wants to torture over several years; is an independent news reporter in a conflict zone; is somebody whose passport photograph differs slightly from their present appearance; is being held elsewhere without charge or trial - these are just a few of the recent cases where Canada's government has absolutely and totally abandoned her citizens that find themselves in trouble abroad.

Nov 21

The Guardian - Usually it is the children, not the parents, who are loath to spend their evenings practising spelling and learning times tables. But a Canadian couple have just won a legal battle to exempt their offspring from homework after successfully arguing there is no clear evidence it improves academic performance.

Shelli and Tom Milley, two lawyers from Calgary, Alberta, launched their highly unusual case after years of struggling to make their three reluctant children do school work out of the classroom.

After waging a long war with their eldest son, Jay, now 18, over his homework, they decided to do things differently with their youngest two, Spencer, 11, and Brittany, 10. And being lawyers, they decided to make it official.

Julian Borger | Halifax | Nov 20

The Guardian - The Canadian government was fending off calls for a public inquiry on torture today after allegations from one of its senior diplomats that Canada was complicit in the torture of Afghan detainees.

Richard Colvin, who was second in command at Canada's Kabul embassy in 2006 and 2007, said that Afghans swept up in security sweeps by Canadian troops during that time were routinely handed over to the Afghan intelligence services.

"According to our information, the likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured," Colvin told Canada's parliament. "For interrogators in Kandahar, it was standard operating procedure.

"In other words, we detained, and handed over for severe torture, a lot of innocent people."

Colvin said his frequent memos about the abuse were ignored and that senior officials attempted to cover up Canada's complicity until prisoner transfer procedures were changed in 2007, partly as a result of his complaints.

Washington | November 13

CBC - Omar Khadr will be transferred to the United States from Guantanamo Bay to face charges in a military commission, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Friday, on the same day that the Supreme Court of Canada heard a federal government appeal in his case.

It is unclear when or where the 23-year-old inmate will be transferred, but he is one of 10 high-profile detainees to be sent to the U.S. to face justice.

Ottawa | Nov 2

AFP - Canadians are no more loving of the United States under its current leadership than during George W. Bush's presidency, suggested a poll published Monday.

But they do like President Barack Obama a whole lot more than his predecessor, said the Historica Dominion Institute survey of 1,018 Canadians.

Obama was viewed favorably by 86 percent of respondents, compared to only 21 percent for Bush in 2005.

"What's striking about these findings is how Canadians have detached their personal view of Barack Obama, whom they quite like and respect, from the United States, which they still view with skepticism, even distrust," said Andrew Cohen, president of the institute.

Compared to results of a similar poll taken four years ago, Canadians have a marginally improved view of Americans as individual people, with 71 percent expressing a favorable view in 2009 versus 68 percent in 2005.

Canadians were split as to whether the United States is now "a force for good in the world." Forty-four percent agreed while 46 percent disagreed. This question was not asked in 2005.

Ron Nurwisah | October 28

National Post - Paul Pritchard, the Victoria man who shot the footage of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski being Tasered by RCMP at the Vancouver International Airport, has been given the first ever Citizen Journalism Award from the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.

"Without the tape we wouldn't have had the journalistic investigation, the year-long inquiry into the incident, and we wouldn't have seen the safer use of the taser by police departments across the country," said CJFE President Arnold Amber in a press release.

While Canada's designated citizen whipping boy, Omar Khadr, remains incarcerated in the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, it's becoming increasingly apparent that evidence against his elder brother, Abdullah, was also obtained through torture-induced "confessions". These young men are both members of the unit once described by Barbara Frum's evil spawn as "Canada's first family of terrorism." That catchy phrase seems, at this point, to provide the only shield for government prosecutors, given that little or no provable evidence has materialized concerning the two imprisoned Khadr brothers (and notwithstanding a significant rewrite of that pesky "right to face one's accusers" aspect of the court system in this case.) The youngest of the three brother seems to have escaped attention but he is also imprisoned, in this case by his quadriplegia, (thanks to an American shoot-out.) Then again, perhaps prosecutor's aren't interested in that child's recollections because the family patriarch was also killed in that attack. Pops, being stone cold dead, is obviously exempt from prosecution so there'll be no trial where troubling questions about his true culpability could be raised. Nevertheless, it seems to me some actual evidence of the rest of the family's wrongdoing should be examined in a court somewhere that is devoid of procedural improvisation. To put minds at rest on this, neither Canadians nor American's should fear that finding these kids to be innocent of the charges against them would result in their release into society. So far, court orders notwithstanding, we just keep 'em locked up indefinitely anyway. After all, at the end of the day, WE know better than the courts, don't we? David Frum has already told us all we apparently want or need to know about Canada, about Who's Who in the world of terror, and which of his denominated "axis of evil" enemies are readying for military attack.

John Byrne | Oct 22

Raw`Story -

Ex-president gets standing ovation from paid crowd

During a visit to speak in Canada Tuesday, former president George W. Bush was met with signs, songs, screams and a black-clad Grim Reaper. And a little applause.

Protesters outside the speech carried signs emblazoned with such phrases as "Bush is a war criminal," "Bush lied, 1,000s died" and "Canada is not Bush Country," according to a Canadian press report. As a crowd mushroomed, police erected metal barricades.

Bush spoke at the Shaw Conference Centre in Edmonton where he led a talk, "A Conversation with George Bush." Tickets to the event ranged from $30 to $100. All 2,000 tickets sold out, and ticketholders were frisked and made to show their tickets twice upon entrance.

One protester carried a nine-foot tall Grim Reaper tagged with signs that said "GWB I am your biggest fan" and "Thanks for 8 great years."

Former Canadian Chief of the Defense Staff has this to say in his forthcoming book, "A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War:"

Afghanistan has revealed that NATO has reached the stage where it is a corpse decomposing and somebody's going to have to perform a Frankenstein-like life-giving act by breathing some lifesaving air through those rotten lips into those putrescent lungs or the alliance will be done.

Now, I'm not surprised to hear someone say this. I've been saying for years now--at least six--that the defensive alliance part of NATO has long been dead. There are a lot of reasons for this, but it's been clear for quite some time that NATO has become just like the Concert of Europe, by inviting too many members into the club, it was watered down in post-Napoleonic Europe and NATO has duplicated the same process. A new order isn't really in the offing as of yet and the current state of affairs will continue, as the collapse of Concert of Europe did, for a great deal of time. What arises in its aftermath is anyone's guess.

One last note: the idea that the Ukraine or Georgia will ever be a part of an effective defensive alliance with the US is laughable as well.

Steve Connor | Oct 20

The Independent - Study delves back into 200,000 years of history to demonstrate the devastating impact of global warming

A frozen lake on a remote island off Canada's northern coast has yielded remarkable insights into how the Arctic climate has changed dramatically over 50 years.

Muddy sediment from the bottom of the lake, some of it 200,000 years old, shows that Baffin Island, one of the most inhospitable places on Earth, has undergone an unprecedented warming over the past half-century. Scientists believe the temperature rise is probably due to human-induced warming. It has more than offset a natural cooling trend which began 8,000 years ago.

Instead of cooling at a rate of minus 0.C every 1,000 years – a trend that was expected to continue for another 4,000 years because of well-known changes to the Earth's solar orbit – Baffin Island, like the rest of the Arctic, has begun to get warmer, especially since 1950. The Arctic is now about 1.C warmer than it was in 1900, confirming that the region is warming faster than most other parts of the world.

Martin Mittelstaedt | Oct 18

Globe and Mail - Embassy in Washington asks agency to alter plan that would force lake freighters to stop burning dirty bunker fuel

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed tough new measures to reduce the health toll from air pollution around the Great Lakes by forcing lake freighters to stop burning dirty bunker fuel.

But the plan has an unusual opponent: The Canadian embassy in Washington has quietly asked the EPA to weaken the measures, arguing that they could harm trade. It wants ships to be allowed to continue using the high-polluting fuel and to instead install smokestack scrubbers that would clean up their emissions. The Canadian recommendation, if accepted, could delay the clean-air measure for years, because the technology for the scrubbers does not yet exist.

The embassy asked the EPA to make the changes in a letter last month, marking a rare instance in which Canada has lobbied the United States to weaken air-pollution controls designed to reduce health problems linked to breathing dirty air. Because winds carry contaminants back and forth across both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, the EPA proposal would also lead to air-quality improvements in Canada.

The Canadian position is supported by the Great Lakes shipping industry, which is warning that the costs of complying with the proposed environmental regulations are so high that they will force companies to scrap some of the iconic steamers that now ply the lakes carrying everything from salt to iron ore.

From Our Family to Yours.

Canuck, Haydn & Frosty (Eski-Poo0

Steven Chase and Bill Curry | Ottowa | September 19

Globe and Mail - The future of Stephen Harper's minority government now apparently rests in the hands of Jack Layton's New Democrats, who have previously made a virtue of opposing Tory legislation.

As expected, Mr. Harper's Conservatives survived a parliamentary confidence vote on several budget measures Friday after both the Bloc Québécois and NDP voted in their favour – with the Liberals opposing.

But later that day, Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe took to the microphone to make it clear that the Tories should not count on his party's support in future confidence votes. Mr. Duceppe emphasized that while he continues to support a popular home renovation tax credit approved in yesterday's budget vote, he has no interest in propping up the Tories on a regular basis. He suggested the NDP would be the only party keeping Mr. Harper in office. He said the Bloc would vote against the Conservatives in motions that test parliamentary support for Mr. Harper.
 

Interested especially in what Canadian Agonists think of this