By Keith Jones, 18 July 2008.

Canada’s Border Services Agency turned Iraq war resister Robin Long over to US authorities Tuesday morning. Long, who fled the US Army in 2005 after learning he was to be deployed to Iraq, was immediately sent to a Bellingham, Washington county jail. He has since been transferred to the US Army base in Fort Carson, Colorado where he will be subject to military discipline for “desertion”—an offense for which US military personnel can be court-martialed, jailed and, in time of war, executed.

A US military spokesman told Canwest News Service that “the unit commander will look at the facts” and make a recommendation “about what disciplinary actions will ensue.”

The 25-year old Long had been in the custody of Canada’s border and immigration police, the CBSA, since last October. He had sought political refugee status in Canada, arguing that the 2003 US invasion of Iraq was illegal, that were he deployed to Iraq he would be complicit in war crimes, and that he would suffer irreparable harm if deported to the US.

By Macdonald Stainsby, July 14, 2008

For much of the last year, many of the anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian forces across Canada have started to work towards converging many of the bigger issues to take place in 2010 into a larger whole.

Some of the issues included are: The 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver, the next round of Security and Prosperity Partnership [SPP] negotiations to be held within Canada-- and the G8 Summit to be held in Ontario all during that same year. On many different levels these issues interlink and have an inherent connection with one another. Some of them, more than others. Here I wish to make the case that what belongs as a major thread through all of these discussions is often absent among those of us trying to make these larger connections coherent in our organizing.

Here I will specifically focus on making a connection for the 2010 Games resistance, the SPP and the Albertan Tar Sands as another central organizing point.

Harper's Free Trade Mantra: Hush, Rush, and Sign
Written by Dawn Paley
Tuesday, 01 July 2008
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1356/1/
This January, after little more than 6 months of negotiations, the
Canadian Government announced the completion of negotiations of the
Canada-Peru Free Trade Agreement at the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland.

Six months later, on June 7, 2008, Canada announced that negotiations
for a controversial Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Colombia were
finalized.

The negotiations with Colombia were controversial from the get go: the
country has the worst human rights record in the hemisphere, and the
government of Alvaro Uribe is riddled by ongoing scandals that have
revealed proven links between Uribe's allies in Congress and
paramilitary death squads.

In a corruption scandal that would most certainly bring down a
Canadian Prime Minister, Uribe himself is the subject of a recent
Sentence by the Colombian Supreme Court. The justices condemned him
for buying the key vote of Congresswoman Yidis Medina in exchange for
political favours, a crime necessary for the constitutional changes
that opened the door to Uribe's re-election in 2006.

On June 26th, Medina was sentenced to 3 ½ years of house arrest for
accepting bribes from the president. The president promptly responded

Barriere Lake Algonquins Occupy MP Office!
by Lia Tarachansky, Dominion Weblogs, June 26, 2008.

GATINEAU- On Thursday, June 26th, Algonquin representatives from Barriere Lake and allies assembled outside the Indian Affairs government building across the river from Ottawa. Their demonstration was a diversion, intended for a peaceful occupation in Birmingham, QC of Lawrence Cannon's office, the MP for the Barriere Lake region. The Algonquins demand a meeting with the MP to discuss the recent government ousting of the Customary Chief and Council as well as a re-election monitored by outside observers.

The Barriere Lake Solidarity Collective, based in Montreal, as well as Algonquin representatives from Barriere Lake itself have vowed they will not leave the office until their demands are met. They have been threatened with arrest, and are welcoming support from anyone who is willing or able to assemble in Buckingham, QC.

On a quest for secular piety: Reviewing Tarek Fatah's Chasing a Mirage
by Justin Podur, ZNet, June 22, 2008.

Tarek personally asked me to review his book, Chasing a Mirage: the tragic illusion of an Islamic State (CM). With a book being favorably reviewed in the Canadian (and US and UK) media, including the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Huffington Post, the UK Guardian, and the Asper-family owned newspapers (Ottawa Citizen and National Post, which also published long excerpts of CM and frequently runs op-eds by Tarek), CM hardly needed a review from me to get attention. I therefore took the request as a signal of a serious desire to engage with people who might disagree about the ideas of the book.

CM's basic thesis is that religion and politics should be separated in Islam. Although it has major flaws, it also has many attributes of interest and will be thought-provoking on the relationship between religion and politics, and between Islam and the West.

A flawed book with some thought-provoking ideas

Mohawk Grandmothers Attacked by Canadian Border Services Agency Guards
No-One Is Illegal-Montreal, June 17, 2008.

This past Saturday, June 14, 2008, around 2:30pm, a vehicle with two outspoken Kanion’ke:haka (Mohawk) activists, writers and grandmothers was stopped at Akwesasne while crossing into "Canada" from the "USA". Akwesasne is a Kanion’ke:haka Indigenous community that includes parts of so-called Ontario, Quebec and New York, and community members routinely cross between "states" and "provinces”.

Katenies lives in Akwesasne, with her mother and near her daughter and three grandchildren, who reside on both sides of the "border". Kahentinehta, also a grandmother, is from Kahnawake. Katenies and Kahentinehta publish Mohawk Nation News and were delegates to the Indigenous Peoples Border Summit in San Xavier, Tohono O'odham Nation (Arizona) in November 2007.

Lakes across Canada face being turned into mine dump sites: Lakes are in B.C., Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, Northwest Territories and Nunavut

by Terry Milewski, CBC News

CBC News has learned that 16 Canadian lakes are slated to be officially but quietly "reclassified" as toxic dump sites for mines. The lakes include prime wilderness fishing lakes from B.C. to Newfoundland.

Environmentalists say the process amounts to a "hidden subsidy" to mining companies, allowing them to get around laws against the destruction of fish habitat.

Under the Fisheries Act, it's illegal to put harmful substances into fish-bearing waters. But, under a little-known subsection known as Schedule Two of the mining effluent regulations, federal bureaucrats can redefine lakes as "tailings impoundment areas."

That means mining companies don't need to build containment ponds for toxic mine tailings.

CBC News visited two examples of Schedule Two lakes. In Newfoundland and Labrador, the Vale Inco company wants to use a prime destination for fishermen known as Sandy Pond to hold tailings from a nickel processing plant.

Racism in the Tar Sands: exploiting foreign workers and poisoning indigenous people

By Macdonald Stainsby, June 12, 2008, reposted from Oil Sands Truth

The giant corporations that are determined to exploit the Alberta tar sands face a major problem — a serious shortage of local labour to do the actual work. So the Canadian and Albertan governments have a plan, ideal in their eyes, to solve the crunch.

Currently, employers desperate to find needed hands, backs and minds for the vast production targets of the “Gigaproject” are flying workers from the Maritimes from their homes for shift stretches and then back again, but that effort faces limits in terms of workers available. Nary a day goes without a business page article somewhere in Alberta bemoaning the lack of workers. Many of the Newfoundlanders who would have come out this way in the past will now work in Newfoundland premier Dany Williams’ new off shore oil and gas ventures, using skills learned in Fort McMurray, Alberta.