Gary Freeman, AKA Joseph Pannell, pictured circa 1976.

He was branded Canada’s very own Black Panther. In 2004, Gary Freeman, born Joseph Pannell, was arrested by Toronto police at gunpoint outside of his workplace, the Toronto Reference Library. It turned out that this friendly library assistant, father, and husband was harbouring a secret past. In Chicago in 1969, he had shot a cop three times, leaving him with a partially paralyzed arm. He then skipped bail and fled to Canada.

Juicy story. But there’s no evidence Freeman was a Black Panther Party (BPP) member. He denies it. Former party members haven’t heard of him. And U.S. authorities didn’t even attempt to link him to the group in their criminal proceedings against him. The case itself was also rife with irregularities. The injured officer’s account of the incident was inconsistent, which mainstream media never reported on, and he was also the case’s investigating officer—a major conflict of interest.

Although Freeman knew a trial would reveal the holes in the evidence and the reality of police brutality against blacks at the time, he accepted a plea bargain in 2008. At that point, he’d spent years in pre-extradition custody and he just wanted it to be over. Freeman served 30 days in the U.S. and paid a fine of $250,000, which went to a charity chosen by the injured officer. But despite this, Freeman is unable to resume his life in Toronto with his family.

Canadian authorities won’t let him back in, claiming he is linked to a “terrorist organization,” the Black Panthers. But the only evidence the government has provided to substantiate its claim is news stories; furthermore, BPP is not even designated a terrorist organization in Canada, and other members, including former Panther Angela Davis, cross the border without incident.

Last fall, Freeman was even denied permission to visit his dying father-in-law, with whom he was extremely close, and was later prevented from attending his funeral.

“It’s so cruel, we really don’t understand,” says Freeman’s wife, Natercia Coelho, who visits her husband at his parents’ house in Washington, D.C. as often as she can. Their four children also visit when able, but the distance weighs on the family. They continue to fight for Freeman’s return by circulating petitions and sending letters asking authorities to allow him in on humanitarian grounds.

Potter’s new book explores how we’ve come to perceive what’s real. Knowing we can only look back for a greater understanding of the present, and maybe the future, Potter starts with Socrates and works up to now. Though it sprawls and meanders sometimes, this book is an effort to explain why we’re looking for what we want.

Potter weaves Descartes and Marx with Paris Hilton and Seinfeld, touching on personal identity, art, environmentalism, and consumer culture. He’s aware of the corruptions and costs of modern life, but rejecting society and all her comforts is not the answer, he concludes. Benedictine monk Dom Deschamps is quoted on his vision of “authentic” commune living without intellectuals: “no books, no writing, no art: all that would be burned.” Potter shoots back with a pop culture riposte: two cavemen in a New Yorker cartoon enjoy clean air, water, exercise, and organic food, “yet nobody lives past thirty.” Authenticity, it turns out, has its discontents.

Illustration by Dushan Milic

On a chilly afternoon in mid-June 2009, bush-pilot-turned-environmental-activist Joel Theriault is once again flying over the deforested landscape near his home. My passenger headset mutes the rush of air and deafening noise of the plane’s engine. Peering out of my side window, I can see the spider-veined pattern of rivers that flow through industrial-stamped forests, around checkerboard farmland, and regroup into lakes. As seen from the air, deforestation carves its brutal honesty into the land, vividly illustrating our self-destructive relationship with the forest. I recall Theriault’s earlier exasperation with the public’s ignorance of what happens to a forest that’s being logged: the tracts of cleared land are easy to see, but there is much more going on. The invisible threat is from the chemical herbicides that forestry companies spray—chemicals that seep unseen into nearby streams, marshes and lakes. “Where does the herbicide run-off go? We’re north of the Arctic watershed, so all our water goes up to the Arctic. But 40 miles south of us they’re doing the same thing and all of that water flows down into the Great Lakes and eventually makes its way into Toronto’s water supply. So, I think if people from Toronto recognize that they are being exposed to non-essential chemicals—which are being banned on their front lawns for health and environmental reasons—they’d be outraged.”

At one time, the name “Joel Theriault,” when spoken in the small northern Ontario town of Foleyet, could elicit threats of violence. For the past six years, Theriault has been involved in what Linda McCaffrey, director of EcoJustice Ottawa, characterizes as a “David and Goliath situation.” It’s resulted in childhood friends turning against him, a lawsuit from one of the world’s largest pulp and paper companies, Theriault’s struggles within a prominent environmental law organization, alienation from other activists, and stonewalling from a government agency. These are the result of Theriault’s mission to stop the use of herbicide spraying in northern Ontario forestry operations. “I’d better change it, or it’s going to drive me nuts,” he says.

Theriault’s battle affects 90 percent of Ontario’s land. Of the 58 million hectares of the province’s forests, 88 percent are owned and managed by the Ontario government (known as Crown forests) and occupy an area larger than many European countries. Although Crown forests are public, roughly a third (about 26 million hectares) are open to commercial logging, a $17-billion industry regulated by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) that needs to be maintained. An essential part of this maintenance is the regeneration of clearcuts—allowing logged areas to grow back in a uniform fashion. For the last 20 years, that has meant the aerial spraying of herbicides to kill off competing vegetation so that the new trees will survive. Industry and government argue that it’s a cheaper, more efficient, and less hazardous way to maintain forests (since workers would otherwise be manually thinning vegetation or conducting controlled forest fires). Critics say that spraying chemicals on land used by local communities to hunt, fish, and camp is destructive and dangerous.

“It’s very challenging to grow conifers without herbicides,” says Susan Pickering, the former divisional forester for boreal Ontario employed by the multinational pulp and paper company, Tembec Enterprises, Inc. The industry’s herbicide of choice is glyphosate, which kills every unwanted plant, blade of grass and piece of vegetation it comes into contact with by destroying an essential protein-processing enzyme. Within six to eight months it chemically binds to the soil, making the ground safe for conifer seedlings to be planted (since the chemical is no longer available for uptake by their roots). The most widely used glyphosate-based herbicide in forestry is Monsanto Canada’s Vision, more commonly known by its agricultural brand name, Roundup. Ninety percent of the forestry market sprays glyphosate-based products, affecting approximately 70,000 hectares of Ontario’s forests annually. Theriault has seen what results from the aerial spraying of glyphosate over the forests near his home. “You can see it from the air, you can also see it from the ground. Everything’s dead except for the pine trees.”

Theriault rejects the notion he’s pitted himself against an immovable opponent. He can hold his own in a fight, although his adolescent appearance would suggest otherwise. He is 28 years old with delicate features and a smooth, rosy complexion—a striking contrast to his unkempt hair and patchy beard, which lends him a wild-wilderness-nut look. In his community, Theriault is well-known for his intensity and uncompromising commitment to his convictions. “He’s got more tenacity than I would have thought,” says his mother, Jeanne. “If he thinks it’s right and the best thing for the environment or the world or mankind, it’s above dispute.” Theriault is determined to win the war that has consumed much of his time, resources, and energy over the last six years. “I think you’ve got to pick an issue that bothers you that is attainable, that is manageable,” he says. To him, trying to transform the forest management practices of a couple of multi-billion dollar corporations in northern Ontario is “the most attainable of the issues out there.”

The forest was a constant feature in Theriault’s childhood. He was raised in an isolated outfitting lodge, the Ivanhoe River Inn. The lodge borders the northern Ontario forests a few minutes’ drive outside Foleyet, a town with a population of 216 in the district of Sudbury. The Ivanhoe River Inn is stationed on the edge of Ivanhoe Lake, a moderately sized body of water among a smattering of snake-like rivers that spread across northern Ontario. For over 10 years, Theriault has spent his summers working for his parents as a pilot at the lodge, flying supplies and clients to one of the family’s 31 isolated cabins on the lakes in northern Ontario. It was during this time that Theriault’s interest in herbicides began to deepen. As a pilot he began to notice changes in the landscape. Once-familiar swaths of greenery, shrubs and dense, dark forests took on a sickly yellowish-brown hue. From the air, vast clearcuts gave fallen trees the appearance of twigs strewn over patches of mud. Forests quickly became barren, marked by the occasional patchwork of brown brush. Theriault was horrified by the transformation and felt a personal responsibility to prevent its further destruction. “If you spend enough time somewhere—as it was for me—I kind of look at it and say, ‘Well, this is kind of a part of me.’ You start to claim some ownership over it,” he says.

In 2004, a hunting trip sparked Theriault’s interest to find out what exactly was being done to the forests around his home. Theriault was hunting in the Pineland forest, a mile away from cut blocks that housed signs stating that the area had undergone a recent herbicide spray. As he waded into a blueberry patch he discovered a black bear and quietly raised his rifle, shooting and killing the animal. Theriault used its meat in a stew for himself and his girlfriend at the time. When she suffered odd symptoms (dry itchy eyes, itchy throat, headache, nausea, heart pains) 20 minutes after the meal, Theriault saw it as nothing more than a bout of hypochondria. “We didn’t think anything of it,” he recalls. “I just thought, ‘Well, it’s not real, this is just something that’s in your mind.’” He admits his own throat felt strangely itchy after the meal, but ignored it. The next day, he cooked more of the bear meat—but this time telling his girlfriend it was deer, only to see her complain of the same reaction. Theriault’s curiosity was piqued. It just didn’t make any sense, he thought. He fed the same meat to some unsuspecting friends. “I had a couple of friends over, they’d eat the meat and I’d ask them, ‘How do you feel?’” It was tasty, but they experienced a dry, itchy sensation, they responded. To Theriault, it was more than coincidence. He knew that he’d been hunting near a former spray site. He had a hunch that what he’d been experiencing was a result of ingesting meat containing high concentrations of herbicides. But he couldn’t get a commercial or government lab to test the meat for herbicide contamination. While it’s true that some health effects associated with glyphosate-based herbicides include eye and skin irritation, headache, nausea, numbness, elevated blood pressure, and heart palpitations—Theriault had no way of linking the herbicide to his girlfriend’s symptoms.

Three years later, in 2007, Theriault experienced another bizarre incident that confirmed his earlier suspicions that herbicides were poisoning the wildlife near his home. He shot another black bear and when he field-dressed and quartered its carcass, he balked at the sight of its lungs. “Instead of nice healthy pink lungs, its lungs were totally bloodshot and full of blood lesions everywhere. They looked like red Jell-O.” White mossy spots covered the bear’s liver. Theriault says that the area that he was hunting in was a few miles from where herbicides had been sprayed.

Theriault’s experiences are not isolated. Similar reports of herbicide sprays killing rabbits and causing moose to develop cysts were noted in 1992. At that time, Ontario’s Environmental Assessment Board conducted one of the longest and most expensive hearings in Canadian history, in which Forests for Tomorrow (a coalition of environmental groups) challenged the forestry practices of the Ministry of Natural Resources and the industry—including the use of herbicides. During the four-and-a-half-year hearing, community members, aboriginal leaders, hunters, anglers and foresters all came forward to testify to the effects they thought Vision was having on the ecosystem. A particularly striking statement came from John Steinke, a guide who relayed what he witnessed while walking in a forest a week after it had been sprayed. “My dog couldn’t have survived if I didn’t carry it around,” he told the judiciary. “Most notable is the total lack of wildlife; there isn’t a bee, there isn’t a bird, there is nothing there.” The hearing ultimately decided that herbicide would continue to be used in forestry, as it was not threatening human health and was essential to the survival of the industry. Rick Lindgren, a lawyer with the Canadian Environmental Law Association and co-counsel representing Forests for Tomorrow recalls the hearing. “On some of the big ticket items like herbicide application and clearcut size we didn’t see much progress at all. In fact, all it really did was entrench the status quo.” Lindgren attributes the hearing’s results to the difficulty of altering long-established federally approved herbicide practices. “It was hard to say, ‘well, maybe you shouldn’t have registered these things for use, or the registration should be reconsidered in light of new or growing scientific evidence which suggests that there may be potential risks to applicators and the ecosystem,’” says Lindgren. The expert he’d arranged to testify on herbicide alternatives in forest regeneration practices was unable to attend at the last minute and the public testimony didn’t constitute hard evidence against the use of herbicides. “It’s one thing to say, ‘well they came in and sprayed and I saw this disappear, I no longer saw this species, I no longer saw that species.’ But try to prove cause and effect, that was difficult,” he says. Ironically, just as Ontario’s Environmental Assessment Board was rendering its decision to uphold the use of herbicides in the forestry industry, Quebec was moving towards enacting a provincial policy that would see all herbicides banned from use in public forests by 2001. But no precedent was set.

It’s difficult to win a battle that hinges on changing government regulations when the government itself resists. Brennain Lloyd, the project coordinator of the northern Ontario environmental group Northwatch, says that the Ontario government advocates for herbicide use in forestry: “The Ministry of Natural Resources’ mandate is to promote and support forest management, and what forest management requires in the present industrial worldview is the use of herbicides, so those things seem to be accepted as givens within the ministry.”

The MNR’s lack of presence on the ground during forestry operations is a result of the 1995 Ontario government reform agenda known as the “common sense revolution,” which slashed the budgets of ministries to reduce government spending and taxation, often through privatization. The MNR lost 50 percent of its forest management staff—including half of its field inspectors—and millions from its budget. In 1998, the MNR formally transferred Crown forest oversight to the forestry industry. “I had concerns that it was letting the fox look after the henhouse,” Lorraine Rekmans, the former executive director of the National Aboriginal Forestry Association, says of the shift in policy.

In fact, even though the MNR requires the forestry industry to adhere to certain standards in its application of herbicides, the industry is left to regulate itself, a policy known as the “forestry self-inspection system.” “The whole thing is constructed on a fundamental conflict of interest,” says Mark Winfield, a professor at York University who conducted a comprehensive review of the system. “Employees are effectively going to have to report non-compliance on the part of their employers,” he says. “That’s obviously problematic. Winfield’s research found that forestry inspections conducted by MNR employees uncovered violations at a much higher rate than those conducted by industry-employed inspectors. Michael Irvine, the MNR vegetation management specialist, acknowledges the criticism of the self-inspection system, but argues that forestry companies are subject to independent audits that examine the degree to which their ground operations comply with the province’s sustainable forest management regulations. But “the quality of the audit reports vary,” says Winfield. The process is poorly documented and varies from auditor to auditor.

Meanwhile, the chemical regulatory branch of Health Canada (the Pest Management Regulatory Agency) responsible for approving glyphosate-based herbicides has been widely criticized for its pro-industry bias. The federal Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development has rebuked the PMRA for its slow and unresponsive regulatory approach and dependence on risk-assessment data from chemical companies that lack quality assurance and independent validation. The PMRA, along with the federal Minister of Health, have also been accused of ignoring scientific evidence of environmental and health risks when approving glyphosatebased products for use in Canada. As of September 25, 2009 a lawsuit has been launched (by a retired B.C. pediatrician, Josette Wier) against the federal Minister of Health on these grounds.

Theriault has tried to use government bureaucracy to his advantage in attempting to halt forestry operations. Over the course of six years he has filed several requests for individual environmental assessments that temporarily froze forestry operations near his home, sent foresters off the job, caused the industry to lose money, and inflamed tempers. “It’s amazing how one individual in Foleyet can shut down industry,” says Susan Pickering, who worked for Tembec when Theriault’s request for an environmental assessment (called an EA by insiders) froze the company’s operations in the spring of 2006.

Theriault recalls a time when his repeated requests for environmental assessments even caused his childhood friends who now work in the forestry industry to turn against him. “My fishing and hunting friends all of a sudden wanted to fight with me. Wanted to actually fist-fight me. They were so pissed because their bosses were telling them I was going to shut down the forestry in the whole province and they were all going to be out of jobs.” Although Theriault was never subject to physical violence, he was careful not to go to the local bar without friends, in case any confrontations arose. “I’d make sure I had backup there in case I had a group of belligerently drunk forestry guys who all wanted to fight me. Which was very well within the realm of possibility. What do you say to a drunken forestry guy who hates your guts because he thinks that you’re going to put him out of work?”

Theriault also noticed that with each environmental assessment request he made, the Ministry of Natural Resources became less receptive to his requests for information on forestry operations. “So I just stopped asking as myself,” he says. “It was unproductive for Joel Theriault to ask for information. It was more productive for aliases to ask for information. because then the guards were down.” In June 2009, foresters working for Tembec were sent off the job as a result of an assessment request filed by Theriault, which temporarily suspended the company’s logging operations. At the time, Tembec’s chief forester in Ontario, Alan Thorne, described the issue as “very sensitive,” explaining that “hundreds of thousands of dollars” could be lost. Of the EA requests filed by Theriault to date, none have resulted in a permanent halt to herbicide spraying.

Despite Theriault’s energy and obvious enthusiasm for his cause, his go-it-alone style has often backfired. Theriault attended law school—“I think that having a law degree is going to give me the tools to incite change that might not otherwise happen,” he says—but things haven’t exactly worked out as he planned. As a student of environmental law, Theriault focused on gathering evidence for his case against industry. To sharpen his arguments, he wrote papers on herbicides, discussed the issue with professors, attended and organized herbicide workshops, wrote petitions against the use of herbicides in forestry, went to forestry planning meetings, wrote letters to the editors of local and national newspapers on the subject of herbicides, and solicited help from other activists. He also started a website, Domtar.org, which he says was set up to showcase harmful practices and embarrass industry. The site, now relocated to Whitemoose.ca, contains aerial photos and videos of deforested land, numerous letters to the editor written by Theriault criticizing the industry’s use of herbicides, as well as his correspondence with scientists, academics, activists, and members of industry or government on the subject of herbicides.

Theriault’s aggressive critiques of the industry and government were often self-defeating, getting him kicked out of community forestry planning meetings and alienating him from other activists. “A lot of people who work in forestry, the pesticide industry or government really disdain me because of my activism,” says Theriault. Susan Pickering, who worked for Tembec until 2008 when she became the program manager for the forest research partnership at the Canadian Ecology Centre, adds, “I know that Joel has had court orders not allowing him to speak to the Ministry of Natural Resources because of his language.” Although the MNR denies filing a restraining order, Theriault says he’s been asked to leave meetings in which the Ministry officials were present.

Other activists have also steered clear of Theriault because of his reputation. Jennifer Simard, the executive director of the Mushkegowuk Environmental Research Centre, and an active member of the First Nations community in northern Ontario, has, like Theriault, witnessed the damaging effects of herbicides used in the forests near her home. Simard met Theriault at a 2006 symposium on forestry herbicides that she helped organize.

She describes Theriault as a “dedicated guy,” but his singleminded pursuit of a pesticide ban has also tended to alienate potential allies. “It’s too bad, and I think that he could be very helpful if he would just be more of a team player.” “Joel is a very intense individual, highly committed,” says Brad Morse, one of Theriault’s law professors. “But Joel has a bit of an aggressive streak. He’s not at all shy to challenge people. Joel doesn’t let anything stand in his way. I’ve suggested to him on some occasions to calm down a bit and to think more strategically.” Linda McCaffrey, Theriault’s former articling principal at EcoJustice in Ottawa, says he “has an unusual amount of confidence in himself and his priorities. I had been told by one of his professors that he was very talented and that he wasn’t easy to keep under control. And he’s not easy to keep under control, he’s absolutely his own person. He knows what he wants and he knows what he thinks.”

Theriault’s efforts culminated in the last year of his law degree when he directed a team of students to gather research for a petition submitted to the Canadian government in 2007. It was a request for an investigation of a violation of the Fisheries Act by Domtar and Tembec, claiming that Ontario lakes and rivers near their forestry operations were being contaminated with herbicides. It cited repeated incidents in which glyphosate contamination of drinking water occurred as a direct result of its use in forestry. In Denmark, glyphosate contamination in ground water resulted in the chemical being banned, and in 2006 glyphosate was detected in the well water of the northern Ontario town of Cochrane, although there was no proof linking the contamination to forestry activities in the area. The petition was ultimately rejected on the grounds that there wasn’t enough evidence to prove waterway contamination. Theriault was ultimately willing to do what the government wasn’t. His petition requested that specific lakes and rivers near forestry spray sites be tested for herbicide contamination, although Theriault was already on a mission to do this himself. After finishing law school, in his first week of articling in Toronto at environmental law advocates EcoJustice, Theriault told his bosses he wanted a week off. “I basically told my bosses in Toronto, ‘look, I want to go north to go water sampling. So we’ve got two options. Either you guys can send me up for a week and we’ll call it work, or if we can’t agree on that, then I’d like a week off. ‘ That’s how I said it.” Theriault acknowledges that his request was unusual, “Who takes a week off without being there for a week? Not many people. But I did.” His bosses granted him a week off to take water samples but Theriault was embarking on a task that would be a challenge for a multidisciplinary team of scientists to complete, let alone an individual. “He was highly committed, highly ambitious, courageous, very determined and not very experienced [in collecting water samples],” says EcoJustice director Linda McCaffrey, who worked with him in Ottawa. “After you’ve got all these samples you have to have them analyzed. And pesticide samples can be hellishly expensive to have analyzed. And you have to know who can analyze them. You can go to a commercial lab and, depending on the lab, they can give you an analysis result and it may not be meaningful at all.” Theriault admits his task was daunting, “It was a bastard trying to get water samples,” he says. For one, he had no idea where and when the spraying was happening. He asked MNR for that information, but the ministry told him it didn’t receive that information until long after spraying occurred, and that he’d have to ask the forestry companies directly (who, understandably, had no interest in sharing the information with him). So Theriault would fly around in his father’s seaplane, listen to his radio, and wait.

Theriault says he never would have known exactly when spraying took place if it wasn’t for the radio in his plane, which allowed him to intercept the communication of industry pilots who sprayed the herbicide. “I’d go up in the airplane and I’d hear: ‘Okay, Charlie Golf Lima X-ray Zulu. Two miles west of Five Mile Lake, aerial allocations ten’… I know exactly where you fuckers are. And that’s how I followed them.” But Theriault then had to spend time on the ground finding bodies of water near the spray sites. He spent hours driving remote rugged logging roads looking for signs announcing a recent spray. “In a week I probably put on 700 kilometers driving forester roads looking at signs,” Theriault says. “And the next part, after you know it’s been sprayed, is to be at the shoreline of the creek when the first rainfall hits.” So Theriault squatted at the shores of lakes, waiting for rain. “Just sitting there, just waiting and saying, ‘Fuck, I hope it rains soon, I’m ready to go home.’ And then trying to get those kind of water samples, which turned out to be just kind of impossible.”

Theriault gathered two water samples that he believed might have been exposed to Vision, but the commercial lab where he had them tested showed that any herbicide in the water was below MNR-regulated levels. Theriault was determined to keep trying, but his bosses at EcoJustice were not pleased. “After that it was like, ‘oh that was a big waste of time, a big disappointment.’ There was a lot of confidence lost after that,” Theriault says. “I think they kind of looked at it and they said, ‘Wow. Nice kind of vacation for you Joel. Now we’re going to do our work.” The crusade was temporarily suspended—but far from over.

A week after theriault’s sampling trip, and two weeks after his petition was filed with the federal government against Domtar and Tembec, Theriault was served with legal papers from Domtar. The company claimed that his website Domtar.org was libelous in its attempts to pose as the organization. Two weeks later, a lawyer from Domtar phoned Theriault’s boss at EcoJustice in Toronto. By Theriault’s account, “Domtar called and said, ‘Look this guy’s driving us nuts. We’re going to bring in legal action against him if you don’t stop him, and we’re going to bring legal actions against you guys personally.’ So that freaked out my bosses.”

He left the Toronto office in what everyone involved politely refers to as a mutually agreed-upon “leave of absence.” Several months later, Theriault moved to EcoJustice’s Ottawa office on the condition that he no longer advocate on the herbicide issue. McCaffrey, at EcoJustice in Ottawa, recalls the ordeal. “A Domtar lawyer phoned one of the lawyers in the Toronto office and accused Joel of unprofessional conduct,” she says. “I don’t know what the specific allegations were, but I guess they boiled down to a general allegation that his conduct was unprofessional in some way, but I don’t know what way that would have been. Anyway, the result was that Joel came to Ottawa to finish his articles. He agreed to give up his campaign and focus just on the work of this office.” (Domtar refused to comment on its interactions with EcoJustice or Theriault.)

In December 2007, Domtar took Theriault to court over his website domain name, resulting in Domtar.org being transferred to the corporation. Theriault was disappointed with his employer’s response to Domtar. “EcoJustice is this environmental activist group, you’d think that they’d see through the bullshit,” he says. Theriault was also discouraged because Domtar had effectively silenced him on the herbicide issue. “I couldn’t say anything about Domtar without fearing that I’d be laid off again and publicly humiliated and have my career destroyed.” Theriault was demoralized and exhausted. Domtar and Tembec continued to spray herbicides in the forests near his home, his petition had failed, and EcoJustice would only rehire him on the condition that he’d stop advocating for the issue that he cared about most.

In September 2008, Theriault finished his articling with EcoJustice in Ottawa, and continued to work with them until November 2009. He’s a certified lawyer, although he has yet to find a full-time job. He half-jokes that he’s temporarily retired, as he still spends summers working for his family’s business. But Theriault is far from giving up on the herbicide issue. In the evenings he can be found nursing a beer, composing editorials to his local newspaper on the subject. But his frustration is mounting; it’s become painfully clear that for years the only tangible progress he’s made is delaying forestry operations near his home and angering industry—and making enemies for himself. “Have I changed things so far? No I haven’t. No, I’m still plowing away at it. It’d be a different story if I was sitting here, complaining and griping about an issue and doing absolutely nothing,” he says, “which is where most of the world fits in.”

Theriault has recently filed a new environmental assessment request. Companies that spray pesticides around domesticated livestock grazing areas are required to abide by strict exposure limits; Theriault is asking that forestry companies be held to the same standard when spraying around animals that are hunted in the wild. He argues that hunters and local communities should be protected from pesticide-laced food just as surely as supermarket shoppers are. So far, the Ontario Ministry of the Environment has been receptive.

But while flying in his seaplane, I feel a blunt isolation from the devastation of the land, although its scars are clearly mapped out before me. I see Theriault reach his arm out of his tiny rain-stained window and snap pictures of the flattened landscape sliding below us. The crackle of my headset breaks the muffled silence as I hear Theriault’s voice. “I would rather just see this all burned and be able to re-grow from there than what’s being done.”

George F. Walker

After decades of populist programming, serialized television has blossomed into an auteur’s medium over the last decade. This new golden age is marked by subtle characterization and complex narrative: American cable networks such as HBO and AMC have pioneered the revolution with series like The Sopranos, Mad Men and The Wire.

Here in Canada, playwright George F. Walker has emerged as a leader of our own televisual renaissance. Ten years ago, Walker took leave of the theatre—“it was time for a change,” he says nonchalantly—and embraced television, where, with his writing partner Dani Romain, he has since created and written three ambitious programs. His first foray into television, the criminal justice–oriented This is Wonderland, aired on CBC for three seasons. That was followed by The Movie Network’s The Line, which explored the blurred moral boundaries on both sides of the law.

Walker and Romain’s latest effort, Living in Your Car, co-created by Joseph Kay, premiered in May on HBO Canada. A single-camera comedy reminiscent of Arrested Development, it follows Steve Unger, a powerful executive who loses his wealth and family after being caught cooking the books, and is forced to live in his 2004 Mercedes S430.

“People used to like their sitcoms 22 minutes long and very loud, and they liked their dramas very quiet and whispered and very serious,” says Walker. “But now I think the world is much too complex to separate those things. There will be elements of everything.”

Eroding divisions between TV genres make the medium an ideal outlet for Walker’s sardonic social commentary. “They’re comedies about serious things,” he explains, adding that by focusing on character, he is able to address political issues without the clunky exposition.

Walker was working as a cab driver in the early 1970s when he submitted his first play, The Prince of Naples, to Toronto’s Factory Theatre. Since then, his storied career has resulted in more than two dozen plays and numerous awards, including three Governor General’s Awards, one for Lifetime Artistic Achievement. His works—prickly satires of corporate greed and urban pretense—often focus on those living on the periphery of mainstream society. Drawing on everything from the Theatre of the Absurd to the deft, character-driven tradition of Anton Chekhov, Walker’s plays grapple with some of modernity’s most pervasive dilemmas.

Although Walker left the stage, the stage didn’t leave him. “Dani and I try to bring theatre to television,” he says. “Basically every scene is a one-act play, and the actors get really good stuff to do, which is really what you’re trying to do in theatre—not waste actors.”

In addition to the new TV show, two new Walker plays will debut in 2010. And So It Goes, the story of a middle-class family’s struggle with financial ruin and a schizophrenic daughter, opened to excellent reviews last February, while King of Thieves premiered at the Stratford Festival in July.

Walker calls King of Thieves “a play with songs” for which he wrote the lyrics and dialogue. The play is loosely based on John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, but transplants the source text to New York City right before the stock market crash of 1929. “It’s about who the real thieves are,” he explains. “Are the police the thieves, are the bankers the thieves, are the thieves the thieves—are they all thieves?”

Of his return to the theatre, Walker says, “It was just there.” He insists that it wasn’t a self-conscious decision to return to his old stomping grounds, but an outlet for reflection. “All this stuff is just sort of what’s on my mind,” he explains. “If I feel it personally, if I have an emotional response to it, I’ll let it come out.”

Dear Progressive Detective: I’ve heard of a new birth control pill, Seasonale, that reduces your period to four times a year instead of 12. I see the appeal, but messing with my cycle just seems like a bad idea. How safe are these kinds of contraceptives?

Extended-use hormonal contraceptives like Seasonale boost estrogen to levels that some experts link to increased risk of cancers, blood clots, and bone density loss. Yet published studies on such long-haul pills are generally not placebo-controlled, says Dr. Jerilynn C. Prior, professor of Endocrinology at the UBC Department of Medicine’s Centre for Menstrual Cycle and Ovulation Research. Prior argues such studies either use women on the standard pill as a control measure, or simply don’t bother with a control at all. Either way, those study results imply a woman on the standard pill is hormonally the same as an untreated woman—something Prior sees as grossly unscientific.

These studies have been published in respected medical journals, while concerns from experts such as Prior aren’t being taken seriously by reviewers, editors or governing bodies. “They scoffed at me when I suggested that placebo-controlled trials were necessary,” says Prior. “They got away with getting Seasonale accepted in Canada without doing placebo-controlled trials.”

What’s worse, Prior says many doctors and gynecologists rely on out-of-date trials. “The placebo-controlled trials of the birth control pill go back to when it was really a different drug. It had about five times higher estrogen doses,” she explains. “And the placebo-controlled trials were not done well by today’s standards.”

It’s not easy for the average citizen or researcher to look into the drug approval process, either. You’d have to submit an Access to Information Request form, which is limited and slow, says Anne Rochon Ford, coordinator of Women and Health Protection at York University. “We had an unbelievably long wait,” she says, “and when we did get it back it was significantly blacked out, like a prisoner’s letter.”

Ford adds post-marketing studies to monitor adverse side-effects for Seasonale aren’t being done effectively. “There’s a conflict of interest now because [Health Canada] requires pharmaceutical companies to pay for their evaluation,” says Prior. “It isn’t funded by parliament as much as it’s funded by the people it’s supposed to be regulating.” With such deeply vested interests— and such complex data—Progressive Detective asks for better research before opting for this kind of pill.

Illustration by Matt Daley.

When Google, citing concerns over security and censorship, pulled their operations out of China in March this year, they were widely praised for taking a stand for democracy. But Google’s move wasn’t the first time a Western entity had taken the moral high road in regard to China.

In fact, almost 200 years ago, the British government also stood up for its beliefs. After they had expended countless resources developing an opium industry, China shut down its borders to the drug, claiming that addiction was taking its toll on Chinese society. The Raj, seeing not only its business threatened, but also its ideals of free trade and capitalism, twice sent its navy to war to force China to open its borders. Britain won, and China had to relent.

Of course, comparing an enforced opium trade with online free speech may slip into exaggeration. But when Google indignantly left China, an important point was lost in the sanctimonious chatter: to many in China, the difference between the Google of today and the Empire of yesterday isn’t as clear as we might like to think. And as the web increasingly becomes a battleground for cultural and political exchange, it’s worth remembering that history is never as far in the past as we might hope.

In the aftermath of Google’s departure, the chorus of satisfied approval was overwhelming. Though Google itself treaded with the kind of care any profit-minded company might, the press was less tactful. When Google launched a chart that tracked which services China had blocked, prominent tech journalist Steven Levy called it an “Evil Meter.” Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff suggested that China was simply a bully, and that Google had “beat an honourable retreat.” Meanwhile, the National Post and the Globe and Mail did their best to cast the decision in moral rather than economic terms. The complexities of geopolitics and culture were reduced to a tired old approach: “Western values good; China bad.”

One might say “fair enough”: we are talking about a totalitarian regime here. But a few hundred years of Western global domination means there’s just no way to get around the optics of a massive American multinational saying its moral views are the right ones. In light of history, that kind of ideological dogmatism comes off as more than a little paternalistic.

But Google is not a parent and places like China, with their own histories, cultures and practices, are not children. To make matters worse, Google’s business model is essentially a paragon of Western democratic capitalism: disseminate information without restriction and then find a way to make money off the ways people access it. This may seem neutral, but it isn’t. It relies on the idea that spreading knowledge and information is an inherent good because an effective social system empowers individuals to find out things for themselves, and change their lives accordingly. For us, the sovereign individual is everything.

By contrast, even in contemporary Chinese thought, what still reigns is the idea that the community gives people their place in life, and the structures of ritual and authority give life order. The individualism that underpins Google’s business model is frequently seen as both arrogance and selfishness because it seems to prioritize the individual over the knowledge of the state and its rulers. The questions Google raised in China weren’t simply a matter of “repression,” but of how people locate themselves in reality. This fact seemed to be lost on most Western journalists. (About the only dissent in the technology press came from Gizmodo’s Brian Lam, himself the son of immigrants from Hong Kong, who wrote a piece titled “Google Would Remind My Grandpa of the Arrogant White Invaders.”)

Is it a noble goal to try to spread values and ideals that seem to have benefited the societies that have adopted them? Sure. But principles like democracy and freedom of speech don’t simply float down from the sky into open arms below. They are borne out of centuries-long processes rooted in social, material, and intellectual change. To assume their universal good—as Google and the Western press seemed to—is to deny their historical and cultural specificity. And at a certain point, it ceases to matter what is “objectively” right when such presumptuousness and arrogance only serve to galvanize people against you.

For all that, it’s worth noting that when Google did leave China, many there weren’t too affected. They had Baidu—a Chinese search engine, albeit heavily censored, that is the sixth most-visited website in the world and is still growing. And this is the thing, really: a Western navy can no longer force “our” way of thinking on the world, because power is no longer centralized in the West.

But history rattles noisily still, and the values of an open, democratic web aren’t universal or even necessarily right. And some, presented with the image of Google getting up on its moral high horse, find it hard to forget an armada of ships, their holds stocked with opium, barging their way into the Canton harbour.

Artist's rendering of a Masdar public square. Click to enlarge.

Looking out over the site of Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, it takes some imagination to consider that this slice of hardscrabble desert will soon contain the world’s first carbon-neutral, zero-waste city. A six-metre sign at Masdar’s entrance is the only confirmation that my cab driver and I have arrived at the right place. Despite its ambitious nature, Masdar—the Arabic word for “source,” a reference to the sun—is not a household name in the region, and for the moment its seven square kilometres, demarcated by a corrugated white plastic fence, is home to little more than shrubs and debris.

It’s early December, and one of the last hot days of the year before the mild winter begins. Even at 30 degrees Celsius, today’s temperature is nothing compared to the heat of summer. Migrant labourers dressed in white lay paving stones over the sand. Some of the men wear turbans while others are in baseball caps.

Workers in boots, alternating with workers in suits, come and go from the development’s temporary headquarters, a series of white, two-level portables shaded by circus-sized canopies the colour of desert. Inside, an image framed on the wall projects the future HQ, a wavy steel and glass structure that produces more energy than it consumes.

Once complete, Masdar is supposed to be home to 50,000 residents and 1,500 companies with 40,000 people commuting daily from Abu Dhabi. At its centre is the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, a sustainable-research hub, which as of today is the only building that has started to sprout. By 2018, Masdar is meant to contain two city squares housing day-to-day activity, outside of which will lie all the infrastructure required to sustain an eco-city in a desert: solar-power plants, a waste-to-power plant, an algae farm for biofuel, a solar desalination facility, a tree nursery, and a water-treatment plant.

The form of the city—itself an experiment in sustainable design—will mirror its function, which is to develop a completely new economic sector. Masdar City is the planned home of the Masdar Initiative, a foreign direct-investment fund for renewable energy technology. The end result, its leaders hope, will be Abu Dhabi’s own version of Silicon Valley.

The irony, of course, is that the United Arab Emirates is both a massive oil exporter and produces more carbon per capita than any other nation on Earth. The Abu Dhabi government’s rhetoric is lofty—Masdar will be a “testing ground for the future of humanity,” its purpose to create “a manifesto for sustainable life”—but it’s not empty: there is money behind it. Lots of money, even with Abu Dhabi now feeling the effect of the recession that has been devastating its neighbour Dubai. Oil brought wealth to the tiny emirate only a generation ago, and leaders know the supply is limited. Masdar is an attempt to ensure future security for a newly rich people.

The timing is canny. As the scientific and political consensus has shifted from if there is a climate crisis to how severe it will be, governments, industries, and citizens are increasingly looking for action to take. While change threatens to disrupt many traditional businesses, others see the transition to a post-fossil-fuel economy as a gold rush in the making. In 2008, for the first time, investments in renewables outpaced those in traditional energy: $140 billion was invested in wind, solar, and others, compared with $110 billion for fossil fuel and nuclear. What was once the marginal turf of environmentalists is now fought over by titans of industry. (The UN predicts renewable energy could create as many as 20 million new jobs over the next decade.)

Despite the economic potential, Canadian government policy—fixated on the tar sands—has not kept pace with science. Short-term thinking, buttressed by entrenched industrial interests, has stunted innovation here. Abu Dhabi, by contrast, has kept a long view, developing a vision for a fossil-fuel-free future, and is working to realize it. The motive is self-interest, but the results have the potential to be world-changing.

Political will, of course, is easy to mobilize in a wealthy monarchy unconstrained by democracy, election cycles, or budgets. But still, in striving to wean its prosperous economy off ever-scarcer fossil fuels, the tiny Muslim territory can be seen as a microcosm for the rest of the world, and one we would do well to take a lesson from. Whether it succeeds or fails—and there are bets placed on both outcomes— the emirate knows something that Canada doesn’t seem to: you can’t build a sustainable future without a blueprint.

Arriving in Abu Dhabi, the 20-kilometre drive from the airport to the city’s centre is quick in time more than distance. People in the UAE drive fast: traffic accidents are the number one cause of death here. Brand new SUVs hurl themselves down a 10-lane desert highway that not too long ago was desert itself. The drive to Dubai takes about an hour, but anyone over 50 will recall when the trip could be made only by camel, taking three or four days.

Abu Dhabi’s history reads like a rags-to-riches screenplay: the largest of the seven independent sheikdoms that comprise the United Arab Emirates, it was a poor pearl-farming outpost for the first 60 years of the 20th century, watching from the sidelines as oil strikes elsewhere in the Persian Gulf made its neighbours rich. When Abu Dhabi’s own huge oil reserves were discovered in 1959, residents expected the new wealth would bring long-awaited modernization, but nothing happened. Crown prince Sheik Shakhbut had grown paranoid from decades of dealing with the British, who maintained a presence in the region, and hoarded the wealth in case he should need it to fight off a military threat. By the mid-1960s, the problem was obvious to all, and Shakhbut was overthrown by his youngest brother, Zayed, kicking off an overnight transformation into a modern petrocracy. The nomadic population traded palm huts for air-conditioned villas, camels were swapped for cars (though there were few roads to drive them on), and high rises sprouted. Each Abu Dhabian received at least two plots of land—one for home, another for business—and a lump-sum cash payment. For most, it was a bewildering windfall: it was not uncommon at the time to see residents unaccustomed to keeping bank accounts leaving banks with cardboard boxes full of cash on their heads.

In 1968, when Britain announced its plan to withdraw from all territories east of the Suez, Zayed—fearing the prospect of being swallowed by a larger neighbour—successfully united the region’s quarreling sheiks under the flag of a federated UAE in 1971. Abu Dhabi is the largest and richest of the emirates, holding 90 percent of the country’s oil, about 10 percent of total global reserves. The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, the notoriously secretive sovereign wealth fund tasked with keeping the country rich, is thought to be worth about US$350 billion.

Headquarters of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Click to enlarge.

ADIA, as the investment authority is commonly called, makes its home in a 36-storey black skyscraper with rounded edges that wouldn’t look out of place in a Star Wars movie—and it dominates the view from where I am staying. My friends’ Abu Dhabi home is a four-bedroom, four-bathroom apartment, palatial, with marble floors and high ceilings. It rents for US$50,000 per year—a bargain by Abu Dhabi standards. With the influx of Western expatriates seeking large, tax-free incomes here, demand for housing outpaces the supply.

Our 14th floor balcony looks directly onto ADIA’s five-storey, airconditioned parking garage, which is topped by a gym featuring a pool that looks like it should be filled with dollar bills—which, in a way, it is. Water in the UAE is desalinated from the Gulf: nine million tonnes of oil are used each year to turn salty water sweet. (Even so, the UAE is number three in water consumption globally— behind the U.S. and Canada.)

I pour a smaller version of the ADIA pool in my en suite bathtub and think about what’s on the other end of the water pipe. In my imagination, it’s sinister machines belching black smoke while men in robes sit around lighting shisha pipes with dollar bills—but at least they are talking about wind farms.

The truth is the sheiks are talking about oil and wind farms—and Formula One racetracks and branches of the Guggenheim designed by Frank Gehry. Along with the new economic sector represented by Masdar, Abu Dhabi is focusing on tourism, aiming to make itself the cultural centre of the Middle East. Call it bet-hedging. The emirate has a lot to lose. If Masdar is successful, it may just happen that Abu Dhabi, a latecomer to the industrial age, will be among the first out the other side.

Nicholas Parker knows something about trying to move past fossil fuel dependence. The Canadian coined the term “cleantech” eight years ago when he founded Cleantech Group, a venture capital company that specializes in technology and knowledge related to the mitigation of ecological crises. Cleantech as an investment category includes everything from energy production to wastewater management to compliance management, and today, it’s the fastest growing sector there is.

Parker sits in the backyard of his home in Toronto’s High Park neighbourhood on a sunny June day. In a sweatshirt, sandals and socks and khaki pants, he looks much more at home than in the suits his business dealings often demand. Parker comes across as generous, gregarious, and as something of a rebel.

To me, he represents the convergence of environmentalism and business that has become our best hope for progress. “I’ve always had a passion for two things: entrepreneurship—I really celebrate that—and sustainable development, social justice, the environment,” he says. “Most of my life I felt schizophrenic; my lefty friends think I’m a right-winger and my right-wing friends think I’m a hardcore revolutionary.”

Parker says he founded Cleantech to “bring the radical disruptive mentality that exists in Silicon Valley and put it at service of the major sustainability challenges of our time.” That, and he claims to be unemployable. It’s true Parker is hard to pin down. He’s a venture capitalist who hasn’t owned a car for 23 years, a lifelong Liberal—but for a dalliance with the Green Party—and a Zen Buddhist.

In his business, the stakes here are high, both financially and environmentally. “If we’re focusing on energy, this is a $6-trillion-a year industry,” says Parker, adding that no other industry gets measured with numbers close to those for power generation. By now, most people know generally what is at stake with global warming. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that Earth’s average temperature will rise somewhere in the range of 1.1 to 6.4 degrees over pre-industrial times by the end of the century. The IPCC’s overall veracity was called into question last year with the exposure of emails suggesting it used questionable sources to advance questionable claims in its groundbreaking 2007 report, but “Emailgate” aside, these warming estimates are widely believed to be conservative, as actual increases have so far outpaced projections.

Beyond two degrees Celsius, the scenarios become apocalyptic: polar ice caps melt, three-quarters of the world’s species face extinction, and rising sea levels threaten coastal settlements. As it is, we’re 0.7 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures and the carbon we’ve emitted so far has us committed to at least another 0.2 degrees. To avoid the worst, environmental scientists believe we must reduce emissions by 80 percent before 2050. The numbers don’t leave a lot of room for optimism.

Parker’s company is at the forefront of innovation in trying to keep us away from the precipice, and he says he spends a lot of time spurring competition in the race toward a greener future. “My job is to run around telling everyone they’re behind everyone else,” he explains with enthusiasm.

When it comes to the environment, Canada has chosen to lag in pretty much every way. Our Kyoto commitment was a six percent reduction below 1990 levels, but we’ve increased emissions by 22 percent since signing on. Environment Canada attributes this trend primarily to increases in fuel production for export (specifically, the Alberta tar sands), as well as new vehicles on the road and our continued reliance on coal-fired power plants. In keeping with its demonstrated priorities, government spending on clean technologies has been almost entirely earmarked for non-renewable nuclear as well as carbon capture and storage, in which emissions are captured at the source and injected into the ground—at best a technological stop-gap. The Tories’ 2010 budget committed Canada to becoming “a leader in green job creation,” but failed to back the pledge with investment in renewable energy technologies.

Canada’s approach to climate change, or lack thereof, became hard to ignore in the weeks leading up to December’s UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, and during the proceedings, where the Canadian government’s disregard for emissions reduction led to loud international scorn. (For the third year running, Canada won the “Fossil of the Year” award, presented by the Climate Change Action Network to the country that has done the most to obstruct progress on climate change.)

This country’s regressive stance means Parker doesn’t do a lot of business close to home. “Canada doesn’t have a top 10 company in any cleantech category,” he says. “That’s why I live here, and I don’t work here.”

Parker is hopeful about the future, but not convinced we will make enough progress to avoid catastrophe. “I think this is an experiment,” he says, “and it’s quite possible we’ll fail. It’s incredible to be smart enough to know we’re fucking it up and stupid enough to still be doing it—it’s an amazing thing to be a human being.”

José Etcheverry is trying to make sure we succeed. A member of the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University and president of the Canadian Renewable Energy Alliance, Etcheverry argues that a future in which all energy is derived from renewable sources is possible, if only government would wield policy to stoke innovation—not to mention the jobs it would create. “What we need to do is implement policies that make it possible for project developers to do what they do best,” says Etcheverry. “Entrepreneurs are by definition very creative and what we are missing is the political will to open market possibilities and create policies that give people the will to invest.”

This is what Abu Dhabi is trying to do, and it’s hardly a new idea. Denmark currently derives 19 percent of its energy from wind, thanks to an aggressive policy of government incentives implemented in the 1970s, spurred by the energy crisis. The windswept nation used to get 90 percent of its energy from petroleum sources, and the transition was pure self-defence. Today, Denmark is an energy exporter, and has reduced its carbon emissions by 13 percent since 1990.

John M. R. Stone is an adjunct research professor at Carleton University and until recently was on the bureau of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Opportunities here are abundant, he says, but Canada has not stepped up. “We’ve got a prime minister who doesn’t want to tackle this issue, who would prefer if it simply went away,” says Stone. “And the main reason is because he doesn’t know how to square it with the development in the tar sands. It’s unimaginative.”

Parker says there’s no shortage of imagination: researchers have shown that, theoretically, the planet’s total energy needs could be met with solar arrays covering around four percent of the world’s desert (if it were one plot of land, it would be about the size of the Gobi). “You can make deserts into valuable land,” says Parker, “leave the lights on all night, and it won’t matter, if we get this right. We’re five years, maybe 10, from solar being cost competitive from baseload fossil fuel power, so why aren’t we pursuing it?”

In a plush-seated auditorium in Abu Dhabi’s Chamber of Commerce, Masdar’s leaders are gathered for a specific, important purpose: to convince local businesspeople to sign up for the ecocity’s vision. They are having trouble sourcing materials and labour locally due to the stringent green standards inherent in the project. For local companies—providers of everything from lighting systems to floor finishings to roofs—to do business with Masdar, they must first green their own supply chains, rising to the same environmental and ethical standard Masdar has set for itself.

Masdar City is planned to be 99 percent carbon-free, with the remaining one percent (of what a comparably sized community would emit) offset or stored. The city is being constructed using the World Wildlife Fund’s One Planet Living principles, which include zero-carbon and zero waste, as well as sustainable transport, sustainable water and local food.

The WWF initiative began as a public relations campaign designed to communicate the ecological consequences of overconsumption. By 2035, the WWF figured, Earth’s residents would require a second planet, having exhausted the resources of the first. Its involvement in Masdar, however, goes beyond cheerleading. One Planet Living also acts as an accreditation system. Each principle of sustainability is a target that a project must meet in order to get WWF’s seal of approval. According to WWF, Masdar City goes beyond their expectations.

But even with all the political will and money in the world, people need to be convinced that the change is worth the risk.

At the chamber of commerce, a row of men in flowing white dishdashas take turns speaking, introducing Masdar and its aims in an effort to win the attendees to their view. There is interest—the 400-seat room is more than half full—but this is not an easy sell. Sultan Ahmed al Jaber, CEO of Masdar, lectures to the crowd, his talking points jargon-filled and clearly well-rehearsed. “We are going to direct you. But you must look for opportunities and solutions around the world. Contribute to the knowledge transfer, the making of a knowledge economy. You as the private sector have a major role to play. Don’t underestimate your contribution; the opportunity here is huge. The project we are working on now is a paradigm shift. You must be aggressive.”

But the people who have gathered here are still a few chapters back, and with good reason. This, after all, is a city that doesn’t even have a recycling program. “Why is Masdar next to the airport?” asks the first person to stand up. (He is reassured the development is not under any flight path.) Other questions range from how multicultural the city will be to how fast carbon neutrality can realistically be achieved. A cynical comment gets al Jaber back on his feet, full of fight. “We need to make a choice,” he says, fiercely. “We can do what we usually do—sit in the passenger seat and have others develop the technology and sell it to us. Or, we can take that pioneering and become owners of intellectual property and shop it around the world. Which one would you choose?”

As far as al Jaber is concerned, the choice is made, and the big-picture elements are well under way. The Masdar Initiative’s $250-million venture capital fund has invested in about a dozen early-stage companies around the world. One is Atlanta-based EnerTech, which does waste-to-energy conversion. Since coming on board with Masdar as a small shop, it’s signed a contract with the city of Los Angeles, and could end up meeting as much as 20 percent of L.A.’s energy needs through the conversion of septic sludge. (The process is called SlurryCarb, and it works by using heat and pressure to mimic the natural processes that turn once-living materials to fossil fuel.) Masdar also has high-profile investments in projects such as London Array, the world’s largest offshore wind farm.

As an idea, Masdar is irresistible. It’s compelling, the thought of a green utopia springing forth from the desert within the world’s biggest polluter, funded by the oil money of far-sighted sheiks trying to diversify away from a diminishing and damaging resource. And it’s still early enough that Masdar is a blank canvas on which everyone involved can project their fondest hopes.

Gerard Evanden sits overlooking the Thames at a small round table in the Foster and Partners London offices. Evenden, a stylish fortysomething with spiky salt-and-pepper hair, is lead architect for Masdar City. The architectural firm founded by celebrated British architect Lord Norman Foster is a pioneer in sustainable design—the firm renovated Germany’s Reichstag, the world’s first energy-positive parliament building—but Masdar is their biggest project yet, a chance to engineer a complete city from scratch.

Evenden shows me slides illustrating Foster’s vision: pedestrian walkways elevated seven metres off the ground, with driverless electric taxis bustling below and monorails gliding overhead. According to the plan, no resident will ever be more than 150 metres from emissions-free public transit.

“It’s not just about providing power for buildings and it’s not just about collecting energy,” Evenden says. “It’s about everything from the research through to the way people live, through to the way people move.” Evenden believes Masdar is the most important project in the world right now, and for this team of architects, it’s a dream come true.

Others, however, think of it more as a pipe dream. Christopher Davidson is a fellow at the Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Durham University in the U.K., who studies the UAE, and has published numerous books on the region. He points out the political dimensions to Abu Dhabi’s motives. As a monarchy, he says, Abu Dhabi continuously needs to prove itself legitimate. “Abu Dhabi in the past couple of years has hit on a fantastic new legitimacy resource, which is championing the environment,” says Davidson. “It’s political and economic. Anyone who claims that Abu Dhabi can diversify away from oil and all related industries is living in a dream cloud. That’s just not accurate.”

But that doesn’t mean its leaders can’t have it both ways. “Despite the titillation we may feel over Abu Dhabi, a massive oil exporter, doing this, once we get over that irony, I think what we can see is a great initiative,” Davidson continues. “They’ve seized on a great opportunity, and in the long term, they might become an international hub for environmental industry.”

When I reach John Stone on the phone, he has just come from a meeting at Parliament in Ottawa—a gathering of a conservation caucus that brings together MPs with scientists and members of NGOs to talk about environmental issues. “They even listened to me,” he jokes.

Stone points out that it’s possible now, with existing technology, to rapidly move to a low-carbon future, and questions why we in Canada are not doing just that. “We should be working as hard as we can toward a new energy system that is carbon free, if possible,” says Stone. “And we have the technologies that we need already: photovoltaics, solar thermal, wind and the like. We basically know what we need to do. We just need to go on and do it.”

Despite the federal government’s foot-dragging, there’s more hope at the regional level. Etcheverry calls Ontario’s energy legislation the most progressive on the continent: the Green Energy Act of May 2009 is the first in North America to mandate feed-in tariffs, compelling electricity utilities to pay renewable energy providers at a premium rate. The law makes it possible for every home, office building, or neighbourhood to produce renewable energy and guarantees a market to sell it. Such a system currently provides 12.5 percent of Germany’s electricity, and adds about $2.20 to the average German home’s monthly energy bill. Solar City, a development in Freiburg, Germany, produces all its own electricity from solar arrays (in one of the cloudiest spots in Europe) and sells the surplus into the grid. A combination energy plant in Kassel, Germany, sells wind and solar power, and switches on biogas combustion to meet peak demand. Based on the Combined Power Plant, German scientists believe that country could be powered entirely with renewables within 40 years.

“It’s very difficult to make a quantum leap if you’re stepping into the unknown,” says Etcheverry about imagining a different future. “For me it’s easy. I have solar power in my own house, and have seen what others have done, and what we could do if we got our collective act together.”

Currently, nearly 60 percent of Canada’s grid is powered by a renewable source: hydro. Other renewables are a tiny 0.5 percent, with the balance coming from coal, natural gas and nuclear. According to world average numbers from the Canadian Renewable Energy Alliance, coal is still the least expensive power source at four to seven cents per kilowatt hour. Wind comes in second at six to nine cents, followed by nuclear at 10 to 13 cents (CanREA factored building-cost overruns into its equation). Expensive carbon capture and storage facilities, which are key to “cleaner coal” schemes, will soon push the price of coal above 12 cents per kWh. The prices for solar and coal are expected to meet within the decade.

Traditional problems with renewables—only being able to produce power when the sun shines or the wind blows—still pose challenges. The most compelling fix is to reconfigure the energy grid as a two-way, distributed system linking together many different types of generation facilities. The same redundancy and flexibility is what makes the internet possible: when one node fails, others pick up the slack. The electricity equivalent, advocates say, would be greener, more efficient, and more resilient.

But business as usual is tempting. It’s easier, for one, and there is still a lot of money to extract from the ground. North America is sitting on a lot of coal—probably enough to last at least 300 years, if we don’t mind tearing mountaintops off to get it. Oil has maybe 100 years; accessible uranium, 40. But climate change is the real catalyst for developing alternatives. From an ecological perspective, diminishing oil stocks are irrelevant. “The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones,” quips Stone, “and the oil age is not going to end because we’ve run out of oil.”

When it comes to energy and climate change, the path forward is as fundamentally uncomplicated as it is urgent. It’s last call for the oil age. The only question now is, how long until we kick the old drunk out of the bar?

Artist's rendering of the completed Masdar City development. Click to enlarge.

A sign at the entrance to the Masdar site dwarfs everything around it. At its top is an aerial illustration of what the city will look like on completion. The rest of it lists the various businesses that are partnering to make it happen.

Masdar’s associates undoubtedly feel good about the project’s noble cause, but the sign would be empty if these companies weren’t making money. The Masdar Initiative is a business: the city is intended to be a magnet for foreign investment, the eventual home of 1,500 companies looking to profit from clean technology. The physical city is one big carbon offset project, generating carbon credits that will be sold on international markets. There is no ambiguity: the motive here is financial; environmental benefits are a bonus. Regardless of the reason for its existence, the Masdar Initiative shows what clearly defined policy and political leadership can do.

Through its two facets, the city and the initiative, Masdar shows that climate change is both an individual problem and a macro one, and that the best tool for change is policy. The city, with its emphasis on living lightly, while retaining a high standard of living, shows what individuals—in intelligently planned surroundings—can do. The initiative is political and economic, creating an environment favourable to the pursuit of alternatives.

There are politicians in Canada who have attempted, in smaller ways, to use policy to fight climate change. Stéphane Dion wanted to put a price on carbon to reduce emissions, but his Green Shift plan—centred on a carbon tax—failed to connect with voters. Similarly, B.C. premier Gordon Campbell did not come away unscathed after implementing a revenue-neutral carbon tax. The public knee jerks at the mention of the word “tax,” but just as there is consensus among scientists that humans are changing the climate, economists are in agreement that carbon pricing is essential if we are serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Before the October 2008 federal election, 230 of Canada’s leading economists from universities across the country signed an open letter to the federal parties urging a coherent economic plan to combat climate change. “In the absence of policy, individuals generally don’t take the environmental consequences of their actions into account, and the result is a ‘market failure’ and excessive levels of pollution,” reads the letter, which goes on to warn: “Even those who are not convinced by today’s scientific evidence need to consider the costs of not acting now. Any action (including inaction) will have substantial economic consequences and, thus, economics lies at the heart of the debate on climate change.”

Industrialization produced the emissions that threaten the climate balance, and moving to a low-carbon society must also largely be driven by economics. Yale University economist William Nordhaus believes that all the conflict and contortions of 2009’s Copenhagen summit, and the next round of wrangling scheduled for November 2010 in Cancún, Mexico, could be avoided if the world could simply agree on a price for carbon. He told a pre-Copenhagen conference that “to bet the world’s climate system on the Kyoto approach is a reckless gamble. Taxation is a proven instrument. Taxes may be unpopular, but they work. The Kyoto model is largely untested and the experience we have tells us it will not meet our objective—to stabilize the world climate system.”

The threat to polar bears may not stir their consciences, but slashand-burn capitalists will respond to threats to their pocketbooks: Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank, projected in 2006 that investing one percent of global GDP in emission-reduction measures would spare the world an economic contraction of as much as 20 percent this century. As an investment, that’s a winner. (Two years later, Stern has revised his figure to two percent because climate change is progressing more rapidly than anticipated.)

The first evacuations directly attributable to man-made climate change occurred in 2009 in the Carteret Islands in the South Pacific without much fanfare. If we were paying more attention to such evidence, we would be sprinting toward a clean energy future. Instead, we have been sauntering. As people have discovered there’s money to be made, it’s picked up to a jog. As Parker says, “We’re learning. But the problem is that the situation is deteriorating faster than we’re learning.” Despite rhetoric to the contrary, the economics favour action. “The longer we delay,” says Stone, “the graver the threat, and the more expensive it will be to address.”

There are lessons to be learned from the desert, and they are familiar ones. We’ve mustered political will for important things before. “Other prime ministers have said we will have railroads that will connect the country from coast to coast,” says Etcheverry. “We will have public health care, we will have a Canadian broadcasting corporation, and so on. The big 21st century Canadian project is making our country a generator of clean power, truly clean power. And it could make us rich in the process.”

Carson couldn’t stand being at parties with Nikki. Nikki flirted. But Carson stuck through it.

When Carson was a kid, his brother and he played Alice in Wonderland. One of them had to wear their sister’s communion dress and tap shoes to play Alice the whole way through. Carson hated being Alice.

Not because of the itchy ruffle dress or the tight patent leather squeaky shoes but because of the time that Carson knew would always come, when his eye would fall onto a cake.

They’d put the Alice record on and it all began. Down the hole Carson went, into the hall of doors, and the very uncomfortable shrinking process started and Carson cried for the forgotten key, and then, keeping true to what the tenor of the English narrator told him to do, Carson’s “eye fell on a little glass box” with a cake inside that begged, “EAT ME.”

That’s when Carson would throw up. Because what Carson pictured was his eye popping right out of his head and landing, slippery in a pool of his own blood, onto cold hard glass.

Metaphor was lost on him. Except for when it came to Nikki.

With his head in the toilet and tears in his eyes while the party went on outside, Carson laughed between dry heaves as if he had got the joke.

Nikki’s eye always fell on a man begging to be eaten, then Carson would excuse himself to the washroom.

Carson thought about tonight’s tempting taste. Salvatore was a fat sweaty man who resembled tiramisu: soft brown and slightly shiny. But as much as Nikki longed for him with her eyes and as much as Salvatore begged to be eaten, Carson was sure Nikki would never take a bite.

Nikki had been anorexic as a teenager. Nikki’s father had left early and Nikki’s mother was hard and cold to her so that, as Nikki’s mother had confessed from her deathbed, Nikki would grow up strong. But instead it made Nikki sick.

At 12, Nikki was tired of being the funny fat girl “just a friend” or “hot girl sidekick” and she desperately wanted someone to see her—to see her for the horny, five-times-a-day masturbating sex machine she was on the inside.

So she starved. And she starved. And she starved. Until she fit the mould of what she wanted to be. Then the hating began.

She hated anyone who wanted her. She thought, “He must be stupid if he can’t see who I really am,” which to her was a lonely little fat girl and not the wraith-like cold and hard model girl popular in the ’90s that she had become.

And so she practiced abstinence, rejection, and cruelty. If a man wanted her, she would flirt with him but only under certain circumstances and those circumstances were hers to set. Did she want a condo overlooking the bay? Yes. And that is what she got from Cain. Did she want to fly to Paris on some weekends and then to Buenos Aires the next? Yes. And Richard gave her that. And all—all—she had to do was ask. That and belittle and ignore them for liking her. They really got off on a thing like that!

When Carson flew to Vancouver for work and met Nikki, things were different. She devoured him.

Carson was staying with friends. Nikki was there. And she stared, hard, at Carson.

Under her glare, Carson’s palms became sweaty. He couldn’t get comfortable on the couch and just when he didn’t think he could take the churning in his stomach anymore and he thought, “Who is this strange elongated girl staring at me on a couch?” Nikki did something she hadn’t done for a very long time: she told a joke. “Which lesson in school is the fruitiest?” Carson was sure it was a dirty joke about queers. “It must be a gym-class joke,” he thought. But in the end, he had to admit, “I don’t know. Which?” and Nikki threw up her hands in excitement and shouted, “History! It’s the one with all the dates.”

Now it was Carson’s turn to stare at Nikki. “That is a really bad joke.” But he still laughed. Nikki looked down and away. “I know. But it’s all I’ve got.”

Carson studied her profile. He examined her small nose and her pale skin. He looked so long and so hard that he swore he knew her from somewhere…sometime. She was so familiar. “In fact, I’m sure that…” And before Carson could finish his thought, Nikki ripped open her top and leapt on Carson to motorboat his face.

After that—the motorboating, the oral, the anal, and the repeated explicit sex on their friends’ couch—nothing was the same for Nikki, or for Carson. They were happy.

They walked hand in hand everywhere they went. Carson loved to look into Nikki’s clear blue eyes. They took walks on the beach and pointed out every interesting thing they saw.

That’s how Carson discovered that Nikki saw a lot of things. A lot of things Carson thought weren’t there before.

When they went to the beach to watch the sunset, Nikki cuddled up to Carson and pointed at the sunset. “If someone were here to take a picture of us, with all the orange and the single point of extreme light reflecting in our glasses, well, it looks like we’re lovingly watching…an ATOMIC BLAST.” Nikki laughed.

Carson didn’t want to picture burning people and screaming children and cancer and indelible death shadows imprinted on the ground—not when he was having a nice time. Nikki nudged him. “Don’t get freaked. I’m just being silly.”

Silly? She had taken an otherwise loving moment and made it creepy. That wasn’t very cool in Carson’s books.

But then, Nikki did great things too, brave things, that Carson could never imagine doing out loud.

On his last night in Vancouver, his last night with Nikki, he asked her to talk dirty to him while he was fucking her from behind and she wrapped her fingers into his and said, “We fit together just like a space Lego man’s feet do the surface to the Lego-ey moon.” And just like that, she had done something to him.

Carson felt like he was worth it. Worth someone—worth someone as good as Nikki.

More than that, Carson, who may have at one time written a poem as allegorically complex as

the water
was like
the water

could now see things he hadn’t before.

When Nikki came to visit Carson, they went for a walk around U of T.

Instead of ivy on the old buildings, Nikki saw barbed-wire made to keep all the ideas penned, and when Carson finally saw what she saw, his hands and face went cold and clammy. Then she imagined that the trees were swollen infected emphysemic lungs. And Carson envisioned the same and started to sweat all over.

But when, on his own, Carson noticed some bike-lock stands that were something other than bike-lock stands, he was overwhelmed. What Carson saw first were stands that looked like upturned coat hangers. And his head swam. But upturned hangers were not all he saw. He saw mechanical keys like you find in the backs of dolls, only “when you turn these keys,” he thought, “the cobblestones come to life. And the cobbles rattle and rumble and wiggle, clicking all about…and they come to you, for you, shaking everything beneath you as they come!” Carson needed to sit down. He put his head between his legs. Nikki sat beside him and held his hand. She whispered something in his ear. Carson smiled. He looked up. Everything was better again. When Nikki left to go home, Carson was lost. He stood staring at the wall in his living room for hours. Sometimes he would leave the kettle on and it would scream at him for minute after minute after minute until its bottom burned. He was busy thinking. He imagined that he stood at a crossroads.

A dirt path led to Vancouver—to Nikki. The other, was the wellgroomed, well-paved Toronto road of his already-life.

Both directions were mad. A new life—starting all over—in Vancouver made no sense and a life without Nikki—4,000 km away from Nikki—was just plain crazy! Nikki sent Carson a text. It was a picture of her smiling face.

Carson sold his bed and his TV and his books on craigslist and stuffed all his hopes and his doubts tightly into one small bag and went the new way, the way of happy—Carson went to Nikki.

Only, when Carson got there, it was like Nikki didn’t like Carson in Vancouver. And Carson didn’t like Carson in Vancouver.

But anytime he asked what had changed, Nikki said, “Nothing.”

In the battle between doubt and hope in Carson’s backpack, doubt had won out—Nikki and Carson, things—they just weren’t that sure anymore.

It was all so confusing for Carson. There were parties that Carson didn’t understand. No one made any sense or was who they said they were or had the jobs they said they had. And they made jokes about Jersey Shore and The View that made Carson want to throw up. But he tried. He kept trying for Nikki.

He made altogether the wrong kinds of jokes. He’d meet someone who was “Just kinda, you know, trying to find my way on this blue planet we call home,” and make a joke like “But that’s like a fish swimming around without any porpoise!” HAHAHAHA…HA…ha. Apparently, punny was not funny with Nikki’s friends.

Carson looked to Nikki to throw him a laugh lifeline (she was the queen of bad jokes!) but she just left him adrift.

Carson felt like his feet were detached from the planet—like the Lego man let go. It didn’t feel very good.

And, also, there was Nikki. She’d mill—mill about nibbling on this or that, never finishing anything she started. She’d talk. Talk to Grant and Chris and Chad. Smiling, staring, giggling, outright laughing at their crap jokes. And touching. A touch on the shoulder here. Another little nibble of a chip there. Here a touch, there a touch…

“Don’t be jealous. I don’t like jealous.”

Carson didn’t think he was being jealous. He thought he was being lonely.

And to his “How come you never hold my hand or touch me?”

She said, “I like to keep private things private.” She shrugged. “It works for me.”

And to his “Can we at least talk about it?”

“You should just know how I feel” came out of her hard beautiful face.

This made Carson very sad.

Nikki wasn’t who she had been and, how did she feel about him if she wouldn’t touch him anymore?

So Carson did what he had learned to do. He thought hard. And eventually imagined an answer.

It wasn’t that Nikki didn’t love him anymore. It was like a test—he just had to love her through this. And she must love him, he thought: “She can’t even eat around those other guys.” She ate around Carson—whole things—like burgers and steaks and waffles and never did around them. And that small difference in Nikki’s behaviour was all he had to hang his hopes on. And, he did.

When Carson finally came out of the washroom and saw Nikki push the last piece of her pastry away while she stared longingly, starvingly at Salvatore, Carson thought everything was okay and he wasn’t queasy anymore. “What a laugh that fat man is,” Carson thought.

But the joke was on him.

Carson was at a meteorology conference in Hull and Nikki called him to chat before bed. “Thank you!” he said. “I was about to die from boredom and it is so cold here, you wouldn’t believe how cold it is. Like minus 20.” She laughed at him, “Oh yeah. Well, it’s really nice here. And I got up early and went for coffee and took a stroll along the seawall.” He loved to hear her happy again. “Not fair, Nikki,” he teased. “I could even garden. And Drea stopped by with some new espresso from Switzerland. After she left, just the usual,” she said.

She said, “We watched the Dexter finale last night.” “We? I thought Drea hated Dexter.” Nikki snorted. “I guess I should tell you. Sal came over.” Carson held his breath—It couldn’t be.

“He fell asleep on my chest.”

Carson faded away. He stared at the wall and pictured the blood from the show spreading out all around her and Sal… Sal? When had Salvatore earned Sal?

“I mean, it was nothing. We just made mini pizzas and…” But her voice was like screaming electric currents over him.

Carson’s legs buckled and he went down against the wall. He desperately wanted to disappear from it all. Shrink away. Change it all. Change him. His insides cringed. His body seized. Carson wished: Anything else but this.

A giant dark vacuum hole opened in the bathroom floor and it sucked Carson down, while everything else around him went flying up. Terracotta hotel bathroom tiles sped upward past him and turned to bits of mini-pizzas in the distance and itty-bitty bites of nacho chips dashed past his head. He saw the underside of the hotel sink fading, far away—a pinprick of white.

Carson’s stomach turned. One thought consumed him: Slimy Salvatore. Slimy Salvatore collapsing as a gelatinous oozing bulb on Nikki’s cold hard chest—them lying in a pool of television blood.

Carson waited for the bottom.

When he landed, the rocks on shore vibrated lightly under Carson’s feet and then gracefully shushed their stone song. He felt the cool breeze on his arms. Everything was very big where Carson had landed. A big clear lake. A big beautiful sky. He heard the rushing waters of a big-big waterfall and he looked at the very big trees. Carson put up his hand to block out the light of the big harsh sun and he saw that he, was very small. Very very small. But instead of being sad, or sick, or hurt, Carson was calm.

He looked out to the lake. To the giant trees and the colossal mountains. He thought of Nikki. He pictured fat little Nikki standing beside little confused Carson, and he held her hand.

Carson took a smooth stone from his pocket and threw it out to the lake. Carson and Nikki whispered as the stone skipped, “One.” “Two.” “Three.”

And everything changed.

The winner of the "Miss Talavera Bruce" women's prison pageant.

Rio de Janeiro has a murder rate as high as a war zone—millions of impoverished people here resort to crime for survival. A kid from the favelas of Rio has limited career options: kidnapper, cocaine trafficker, gang leader, robber, or hit man. For many, prison is safer than the streets, and comes with more reliable food and shelter.

Carnaval is one of the hardest times of year for imprisoned Brazilians, as their fellow free citizens pour into the streets in a sea of colourful celebration. In February 2009, I traveled to the notorious Bangu Prison Complex in Rio to photograph the women who live there. I wanted to see how prisoners celebrate such an important national holiday behind bars.

When I entered the prison for the first time, I was shocked to see bright pink, blue, and yellow paint on the main corridors of the jail. I felt I was shopping for candy, not walking inside a building containing some of the city’s most dangerous criminals. Prisoners walked freely in the courtyard and garden, picking up leaves, changing garbage bags, working. Everyone was smiling. It all felt a little too happy—considering that the women I met were imprisoned for smuggling, armed robbery, even murder.

I made a friend inside, Michelle, from Amsterdam, caught at the Rio airport smuggling cocaine. She had learned Portuguese during her difficult first incarcerated year, and became my translator and guide to the inner workings of Bangu. Outwardly, the women I talked to and photographed were cheerful, smiling, glad to have the small luxuries I snuck in for them—chocolate, phone cards for their illicit cell phones, or the plastic Carnaval crowns that people wear during the five-day holiday. But the stories they told while I took their portraits betrayed their sadness and loneliness inside the massive prison.

The prisoners I met are young women who were never given the chance to grow, or who grew up too old, too quickly. Born into poverty and with few options, they had fallen into desperate circumstances. One inmate, Sylvia, told me she especially misses giving Carnaval party tours to tourists, now that she’s in jail for armed robbery. When she was young, she got a phone call from her father who said he was going to beat up her mother. When she was in her teens, her father tried to kill her mother. From that point on, she decided she would never again rely on a man for support. That is what led her to armed robbery. After spending months in jail she, like many other prisoners, has turned to the comfort of God and religion for guidance and understanding. But, like many others, when she is released, the chances are high that she will be back within a matter of months.

Gallery

Over the years, governments have tinkered with the parliamentary rules set by the Charlottetown conference, pictured here.

The Harper government has placed a bill before Parliament that would alter the formula for how seats are redistributed following the census. It would give Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia more seats in the House of Commons; naturally, Quebec and the Atlantic Canadian provinces are upset with this change as it diminishes their relative influence in Parliament.

Originally, Ontario was upset with the plan because it wanted the Commons to be even closer to representation by population. So vocal was Premier Dalton McGuinty in his opposition that the Harper government was forced to increase its offer to 18 new seats for Ontario after the next census, instead of the four additional seats as planned. Alberta will now get five instead of one, and B.C. seven instead of two. The increase and redistribution of parliamentary seats will provide some necessary repairs—greater representation for large, currently underserved, immigrant populations in the suburbs around Toronto, for instance—but it opens the door to bigger problems in the future.

Federalism is adopted by countries where there are strong regional identities or linguistic differences, in order to protect these minorities from the tyranny of the majority. A bicameral legislature—literally, “two chambers,” the house and the senate—then allows for two different approaches to representation: the lower chamber represents the majority of the population, while the upper chamber provides minority and regional counterbalance.

The Fathers of Confederation adopted this model in 1867, and established a House of Commons that would be largely “rep-by-pop”—on the condition that the French Canadian partners would receive equal representation in the Senate, and the creation of their own province in which French Canadians would be the majority.

Canada’s first Parliament in 1867 had 181 seats in the Commons: 82 for Ontario, 65 for Quebec, 19 for Nova Scotia, and 15 for New Brunswick. The Senate had 75 seats, divided equally between Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes. But it soon became clear that the Senate had no capacity to represent regional, sectional and provincial interests as was intended. This is, in part, because senators are appointed by the prime minister and so are federally oriented; it’s also because over time unelected representatives have lost the credibility they need to participate in the legislative process.

The result is that the Senate has withered in its authority and importance, mostly rubber-stamping the laws that the House of Commons writes. This has forced the distribution of seats in the Commons—and thus the distribution of political power—to move away from representation by population in order to ensure regional and provincial demands can also be met. A 1974 constitutional provision passed by Parliament dictated that a province can never lose seats—which means the only way to balance things out is to add more.

So why tinker with the formula now? The obvious answer is there are votes to be won in these new seats, and these are voters the Conservatives have long been courting: suburban voters around Toronto and in the big western Canadian cities.

The other answer is that the Harper government has a democratic reform agenda. This agenda involves making the Senate elected on eight year terms and holding Commons elections every four years, with ridings distributed equally by population. Part of the Senate would be standing for election with the Commoners every four years. Sound familiar? This model is not from Westminster—it’s from Washington, D.C.

Most observers won’t know that, because each of these changes is contained in a separate piece of legislation. This is so the Supreme Court does not strike it down— which they surely would, given how radically it would alter the contract found in the constitution.

The problem with a piecemeal approach is that not everything will pass, and half-measures could mean trouble. It is quite possible that the only plank of the new system that will get adopted is the transition closer to representation by population for the House of Commons: more seats for B.C., Alberta and Ontario—at the expense of everyone else.

All of the eastern Canadian provinces would be diminished, but the prospects are most serious for Quebec. Without a reformed Senate, the protection Quebec was guaranteed at Confederation will be severely diminished. Undoubtedly there will be separatists in Quebec who will point out their weakened standing in the House of Commons, a trend that will continue to get worse based on current population projections. In such a scenario, separatists could argue the only political body that can be trusted to represent Quebec’s interest is the National Assembly—and it might be best to go it alone.

Eternia. T-shirt reads: "My Favourite Rapper Wears a Skirt"

In this edition of Listen to This, Associate Editor Natalie Samson talks with Eternia, the Canadian rapper whose music and volunteer work aim to challenge gender-based stereotypes and injustices such as sexism in the music industry, violence against women, and rape. Eternia was in Toronto two weeks ago for the People’s Summit, the alternative gathering to the G20 leaders’ conference, where she performed for a rapturous crowd. Be sure to stay for the end of the podcast, where you can hear a song off of Eternia’s 2005 album, It’s Called Life. Be sure to keep an eye out for Eternia’s newest album, At Last. The album is a collaboration with Canadian producer MoSS and it’s set to release on June 29, 2010.

Included in the podcast is this 2005 Eternia track, Love, which was used to promote Amnesty International’s “Stop Violence Against Women” campaign.

Mike Leitold

In this episode of Listen to This, This Magazine editor Graham F. Scott talks with Mike Leitold of the Summit Legal Support Project, part of the Movement Defence Committee of the Law Union of Ontario. Leitold talks about what activists need to know before taking to the streets to protest the G20 summit, as well as some of the other legal issues brought up by the presence of so many law enforcement officials on Canadian streets. Please note that none of this conversation should be construed as “legal advice”; everything we discuss here falls under the category of “legal information,” i.e., you should know it but don’t sue anyone because you listened to the stuff we say here. If you are a protester or other individual in need of the services the Summit Legal Defence Project provides—listen to the interview to determine if that is the case—then you can get in touch with the project at this number: 416-273-6761.

Duff Conacher, coordinator of Democracy Watch.

In this edition of Listen to This, Nick Taylor-Vaisey interviews Duff Conacher, coordinator of Democracy Watch, a non-partisan advocacy group that lobbies for greater government transparency, accountability, and democratic reform. Conacher is one of the best-known media personalities in the field, constantly called on by media outlets to talk about what really goes on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill. With their slogan “the system is the scandal,” Democracy Watch aims to identify, publicize, and pressure for the closure of legislative loopholes that allow waste, corruption, and abuse of power by elected officials and civil servants. He talks about the dynamics of the cozy relationship between lobbyists and politicians, Democracy Watch’s aggressive media strategy, the key role that Ralph Nader played in the founding of the group, and why he’s not a political junkie.

[Note: we're posting this podcast a week earlier than scheduled because the issues that Conacher addresses are so much in the news at the moment, with the Guergis/Jaffer affair making daily headlines. Because of that change, the next podcast will be up in three weeks, not two.]

Nadja Sayej, host of ArtStars.* Photo by Gwen Lim-Brydson.

In the latest edition of Listen to This I interviewed Nadja Sayej and Krzysztof Pospieszynski, the onscreen and offscreen personalities, respectively, behind ArtStars*, an online video magazine that bills itself as “the TMZ of the Toronto art scene.” What that means in practice is that host, interviewer, and provocateur-in-chief Nadja crashes gallery openings, parties, and other gatherings of visual arts professionals and causes a scene of some sort: she shouts; she stomps around asking impertinent questions; she barges into back rooms she’s not supposed to be in. In every case, she delights in ridiculing and badgering the esteemed art-world personalities she meets, deflating what she sees as their pretense, empty rhetoric, and brittle cliqueiness. At that point, the show’s editor, Krzysztof, takes over, distilling the whole thing to a three-minute collage of loudmouthed shenanigans, agressive, stream of consciousness patter, and incongruous sound effects. No description here can really do it justice; all the videos are available through their website, and I’ve embedded a few notable episodes below.

Unsurprisingly, ArtStars* is polarizing: many in the art world find it to be irritating, lowbrow nonsense; others seem thrilled to see the dead-seriousness of the contemporary art world skewered by such a direct and colourful assault. Whatever you think of it, their provocations are increasingly drawing attention—including, most recently, a writeup in the austere pages of the terribly serious Art In America.

Notable episodes:

There are a few videos referenced in the interview, so for easy reference, here they are:

Kriistina Lahde

The Leona Drive Project

Nuit Blanche

Members of the Vibe Collective in the CIUT studios. From Left: Corey Dawkins, Chantelle Jaime, Michael Richard Lewis AKA Reality Architect, Jamaias DaCosta AKA Jams

We’ve done something a little different with Listen to This #008, bringing you a special hour-long conversation between several This Magazine contributors and Toronto’s Vibe Collective, a group of broadcasters who do a weekly mix of talk and music on CIUT 89.5 FM (available anywhere, anytime, at ciut.fm). Interviewers Jamaias DaCosta and Chantelle Jaime welcomed some writers who contributed to our November-December 2009 issue, “Legalize Everything,” on to the show to talk about the different legalization measures they had written about: Katie Addleman on legalizing drugs, Tim Falconer on assisted suicide, and Laura Kusisto on hate speech. This editor Graham F. Scott (uh, that’s me) was also there to chime in on the origins of the special issue and some of the thorny topics it tackled. It’s a lively, challenging conversation about some really fascinating topics. Running to one full hour, it’s longer than one of our usual podcasts, but we thought it was worth running the conversation in its entirety. The talk took place in mid-January 2010. Hope you enjoy it.

Cover of "Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond"

In today’s edition of Listen to This, Marisa Iacobucci talks with Liz Worth, author of Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond. The book chronicles the punk scene throughout the turbulent years from 1977 to 1981, in the words of the bands and tastemakers who made it happen. Through interviews with Teenage Head, The Viletones, The Diodes, The Curse, Forgotten Rebels, B-Girls, The Ugly, and more, the book is kind of like a VH1 Behind the Music special from hell, and a Who’s Who of a musical scene that’s often been overshadowed by its counterparts in bigger American cities. There was clearly an appetite for the stories told here — the book has already entered its second printing and there are plans for a followup volume in the works.

In addition to her music writing, Liz Worth is an experimental poet; her most recent book of poetry is Eleven Eleven, published by Trainwreck press.

In this week’s edition of Tuesday Tracks we take a look at a couple of side projects—two starkly different sounds, both with an inherent Canadiana about them. Both bands evoke the great expanse of the country in different ways, the first conveying that certain sense of isolation it instills, while the second feels like a tribute to the community built out of it, a singalong stuffed with words you can’t hear.

Oh and then there’s the Arcade Fire, because, well, they made one heck of a music video.

First up is Grey Kingdom, the side project of Attack in Black guitar player Spencer Burton. It’s an apt alias, well suited to the wistful, contemplative track-list on his self-titled EP, which is out today. They’re lonely, sad songs that can be hard to listen to if you aren’t ready for them, but if you are, a song like “Paintbrush Soul” feels like it could save your life:

Next is Baby Eagle, another side project, this time from Steven Lambke of the Constantines. Although, with recent news that the Constantines have essentially broken up, Baby Eagle might become his fulltime gig. The new album Dog Weather is certainly reminiscent of Lambke’s days as frontman, but twangier. Listen to “Haybale Song” here:

And finally, yesterday the Internet was all a buzz about Arcade Fire’s new video for “We Used to Wait.” What’s so special about it? It’s a unique little experiment that blends really well with the themes in the band’s latest album The Suburbs. Basically it takes some new features allowed by HTML 5, and combines it with data from Google Maps to create a personalized video that plays on the viewer’s nostalgia quite effectively. Unfortunately, a video like this can’t be embedded, and it only works in the Chrome and Safari browsers. Check it out at The Wilderness Downtown.

Computer model of a Bisphenol-A molecule.

Canadians – a bunch of walking, talking BPA vessels? Apparently so. Statistics Canada recently released results from their first nationwide look into bisphenol A, and the results aren’t pretty.

According to a Globe and Mail report on the stats, 91 per cent of Canadians tested show some sort of BPA exposure, and teenagers carry most of the brunt, with their bodies often containing up to 30 per cent more BPA than the rest of the population.

When the first round of BPA warnings surfaced years ago, it looked like Canada would take a stand that could lead to the ingredient being declared a toxic chemical. And since then, while that declaration has stalled, the levels of BPA found in our bodies continues to rise.

It can seem like fear mongering, but BPA really is in a shocking amount of everyday products. CDs, tin can liners, and plastic water bottles all contain BPA. Most people get a steady BPA diet through food packaging. The big deal is that the chemical mimics estrogen — the average level of BPA in our bodies is actually close to 1,000 times the normal level of naturally occurring estrogen.

Of course, some scientists, and those who are involved in the BPA industry, say that just because something is in our body, doesn’t mean it’s causing harm. And it’s true that while we can speculate on what this added BPA might mean for us, we don’t know for a fact if it causes health problems.

But it’s concerning the ease with which we let synthetic products become a part of our diet with very few restrictions. The argument that it’s probably not causing any harm to our bodies is ridiculous — seeing as how BPA’s not a naturally occurring ingredient in our food system, we shouldn’t be ingesting it.

It’s interesting that the media also recently wondered why puberty continues to hit our adolescents earlier and earlier. If what we’re putting into our bodies as fuel isn’t natural, our bodies won’t act that way either. (Of course it hasn’t been proved if there are any links between chemicals like BPA and early puberty, though the New York Times article linked above does mention it briefly.)

The pessimist in me wonders if it’s too little too late now. We’ve been exposed to products with BPA so long that all the studies are doing is proving that our bodies are at the whim of packaging manufacturers. This is testing that shoud have been done years ago, but it’s only now that we’ll get a peek at what’s happening to us.

Elizabeth Powell, lead singer for Land of Talk

In this week’s edition of Tuesday Tracks we’ll take a look at a group of modern new wavers, one of the country’s best kept secrets and a wild video from a true eccentric. Sometimes sifting through the web for new music can be an arduous task. There’s just so much, but other times the songs really find you. Such is the case this week. Here’s three songs that has been on pretty constant play in my iPod this week.

First up is Bishop Morocco, a neo-new wave group that pays it’s respects to Manchester, but in the most elegant of ways. Their video for “Last Years Disco Guitars” uses the nostalgic quality of the music and pairs it with dreamy scenes of made up memories.

Next is Land of Talk, a band that I think has remained under the radar for a lot of people, but I’m not totally sure why. They’ve released two stellar albums already: Applause, Cheer, Boo, Hiss and Some Are Lakes. They return again with their third album Cloak & Ciper today. “Quarry Hymns” is from that record:

Finally, we have Hawksley Workman. The song “Tokyo Bicycle” is off his latest album Meat and a simple, straight ahead burst of enegry initially, then as the song grows it becomes as eccentric as he is.

Oxfam Polar Bear demonstrates at the 2009 Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Photo courtesy of Oxfam International, Flickcreativecommons.

Negotiators are currently engaged in talks in Germany to discuss the agenda for the year-end environmental summit in Mexico. The Mexico meeting is intended to broker a new international agreement to replace the soon-to-be expired (but long since overshadowed) Kyoto Protocols.

Sounds promising; but before we get too ahead of ourselves, let’s try and understand what exactly is going on here: international decision makers are spending their time in meetings to discuss the agenda for upcoming meetings to replace an agreement that was the celebrated result of past meetings but has largely been ignored since. All the while, citizens of the world wait patiently like the oblivious frog in the slowly blowing pot of water as climate change ravages whole countries.

While UN delegates at the Bonn conference have taken off their jackets and ties in a fatuous stance against the abstract concept of heat, much of the rest of the world is being forced into the realization that climate change is not about weather getting warmer—it’s about the volatility and unpredictability of weather, and the storms, floods, droughts, and other natural disasters that come with that.

Leaving world leaders to their meetings, lets check in with the real world: Russia is literally burning as wildfires have sprung up across the tinder-dry land already ravaged by a record-setting heatwave and smog choking the capital. China and India-controlled Kashmir are still dealing with the aftermath of massive floods and mudslides following heavy rains that overflowed the Bailong River, leaving hundreds dead and chasing thousands from their homes. The Pakistani floods have affected more individuals than the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, 2005 Kashmiri earthquake and the recent earthquake in Haiti combined—the UN estimates that nearly 14 million people will be affected by the country’s worst flooding in 80 years. Seven million people in Niger face starvation as droughts have ravaged crops in the Sahel region of Africa, leaving an estimated 10 million people across the region with no food. A sheet of ice 260 square kilometers—more than four times the size of Manhattan—broke off the Petermann Glacier recently, making it the largest Arctic iceberg to split since 1962.

And yet while all of this is going on, Globe and Mail’s Neil Reynolds has the audacity to answer the cries for a solution to climate change with a single word, emblematic of the hubris that led us blindly into this crisis in the first place: “adapt.” Sure! Humans undoubtedly can adapt to a 0.6 degree increase in our average temperature (especially those of us in the West, sitting comfortably in front of our air conditioners). But what of the environmental systems directly affected by our actions (the crisis in Russia, if nothing else, shows us exactly how sensitive the global food system can be to an increase of even a few degrees as drought, heat waves, and wildfires have created a perfect storm that’s decimated Russia’s wheat crops). Oceans, glaciers, forest and agricultural cycles are all intricately affected by the most minute changes in weather patterns, and while we may easily be able to adapt to the changing weather our pollution has created, the basic systems that sustain our life may not.

To recap, then: climate change talks in Bonn, aimed at establishing a working platform for the upcoming summit in Cancun, have back-slid as some leaders are walking away from even the most modest commitments they made in Copenhagen. China and the U.S. have clashed in the meetings, and rich countries have lined up against developing nations in a refusal to compromise on emission-reduction targets. This tit-for-tat maneuvering is endemic at the senior negotiating level, and threatens to derail the entire endeavour. All the while, the world burns.

The pot of water has been gradually getting hotter around us for some time. While Reynolds and his kind turn up their air-conditioning and UN delegates loosen their ties and talk in circles, we’re begining to feel the heat.

Paul Murphy of Postdata

This week in Tuesday Tracks we’re going to slow it down a notch with three great songs sporting three great videos—perfect for listening to in the sweltering days of August.

I went through a long period of time where I avoided these kinds of songs—slow, sad, strums of an acoustic guitar paired with whispered poetry. I had spent most of my life withdrawn and introspective and didn’t need the help of the Nick Drakes of the world to help get me to that place. In fact, turning to music was the best antidote to a bout of crippling shyness. It is in part the swaggering arrogance of rock n’ roll that makes it so appealing: the bombast of frontmen like Mick Jagger or Freddie Mercury, the genre-bending posturing of Prince and Michael Jackson. Living legends with god complexes, true rockstars who aspired to be larger than life and perpetuated that image.

Of course, none of today’s selections approach their music with those aspirations—and that’s Ok. Not everyone can be, nor should be, Axl Rose. Sometimes a whisper is more effective than a scream.

In the bio to Postdata’s self titled release, Paul Murphy talks about his grandparents’ death. He explains in their passing he was left with sad dreams that haunted him afterwards, dreams that later turned into songs with his brother and even later became this album.

It’s an album of hurt and acceptance, understated instrumentation and above all, spectacular beauty.

This is “Tobias Grey”:

The next band, Entire Cities, don’t spend all their time writing sparse piano music about regret, but when they do, it’s something special. “The Woods” is actually a pretty unconventional song for the band. Being seven members strong, along with a smattering of “long distance” and “occasional” contributors, Entire Cities doesn’t really do “sparse” very often. The only hint in the song is all the voices, all members who would normally be playing instruments.

Julie Fader is one of those musicians who made a name for herself in the music community well before the general public ever caught wind. She’s played on albums for Great Lake Swimmers, Chad VanGaalen, Blue Rodeo, and Sarah Harmer, among others. But it wasn’t until this past year that she released an album with her own name on it. Outside In is that album, and this is “Flights”:

James Cagney, Greenpeace, Syncrude, and other menaces to society.

Conservative provocateur Ezra Levant suggested in a Calgary Sun column last week that, according to Section 467.1 of the Criminal Code, Greenpeace should be prosecuted as a criminal organization.

That section of the Code defines a “criminal organization” as a group numbering more than three people in or outside Canada that “has as one of its main purposes or main activities the facilitation or commission of one or more serious offences that, if committed, would likely result in the direct or indirect receipt of a material benefit, including a financial benefit, by the group or by any of the persons who constitute the group.”

For the record, a serious offence is defined as that which carries a maximum punishment of imprisonment for five years or more.

Levant argues that Greenpeace, which is clearly composed of more than three people both in and outside Canada, financially benefits from repeated illegal activity—Greenpeace’s protests sometimes employ direct action and civil disobedience—through donations after the fact. And because break and enter—a common charge for protesters—is considered a “serious offence,” Greenpeace ought to be categorized as a criminal organization for encouraging it. Levant’s suggestion? Prosecute the bosses.

Now, let’s play along with him and accept for the sake of argument that Greenpeace leaders ought to be tossed behind bars. But as long as we’re cracking down, let’s take a look around for other nefarious criminal organizations hiding in plain sight. Who else was breaking the law in northern Alberta?

Oh, right. There was that consortium of oil giants, Syncrude, which was guilty of breaking two laws—the Alberta Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act, and the federal Migratory Birds Convention Act.

Now, we’re not sure yet what kinds of penalties Syncrude will face, as those won’t be handed down by the court until later this month. But more importantly, we do know what penalties Syncrude could have faced.

According to the Migratory Birds Convention Act, anyone who is convicted of an offence under that Act can be imprisoned “for a term not more than three years”. And if they are convicted a second time, that penalty can double to six years.

Let’s recall the definition of a serious offence: “an indictable offence under [the Criminal Code] or any other Act of Parliament for which the maximum punishment is imprisonment for five years or more.”

If my math is correct, a six-year prison term is longer than five years. So if Syncrude screws up again and a few thousand ducks pay the price, we might have a new criminal organization among our ranks.

Since the federal government is all about getting tough on organized crime these days, we thought they might like to know.

Child miners are forced to work the mines by the warring groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Photo courtesy: ENOUGH Project, Flickr Creative Commons.

As I type this, I am complicit in the funding of rape and war. You probably are too–sitting on your laptop, listening to your mp3 player, texting on your smartphone–even if you don’t know it.

But that could all change with the passing of Barack Obama’s sweeping financial reform legislation by Congress in July. While the story made headlines across the United States and pundits and politicians debated its potential ability to clean up Wall Street, largely lost in the 2,300 page document was a landmark piece of U.S. legislation that is geared towards transforming a place as far removed from Wall Street as possible—the Democratic Republic of Congo, the rape capital of the world.

Tucked into the “Miscellaneous Provisions” section of the bill, the new U.S. law will require all publicly-traded and electronics companies to disclose the source of the minerals contained in their products and the steps they are taking to ensure that they are “conflict free.”

The DRC is a resource-rich nation with large deposits of tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold, all of which can be found in every cell phone, laptop, iPod, digital camera and most other pieces of modern technology in the world. If it stores a charge, vibrates, or has gold-coated wiring, chances are it’s got these four minerals in it. The provision, then, will affect thousands of U.S. companies, including technology giants Apple, Hewlett Packard and Dell.

Activists, U.N. experts and non-governmental organizations have become increasingly vocal about concern that armed Congolese groups—including the Congolese army, rebel militias, and groups from Uganda and Rwanda—are financing themselves with minerals from eastern Congo. In what’s been called Africa’s World War, the DRC has been mired in violence for more then a decade. The war began following the 1994 genocide in neighbouring Rwanda and has claimed the lives of roughly 5 million Congolese, displacing another 2 million from their homes. Hundreds of thousands of women and young girls have been raped, as soldiers on all sides of the conflict have utilized systematic sexual violence as a weapon.

As with conflict diamonds, the legislation recognizes the direct correlation between our consumer appetites and the violence plaguing the Congo. While it stops short of placing an embargo on the purchase and use of the minerals, American manufacturers must now be forthright if they do so, essentially saying: “this cell phone helped fund rape and war.”

One U.K.-based advocacy group is taking the initiative to distance our consumer goods from conflict minerals one step further. Global Witness filed suit against the British government last week for failing to recommend that U.K. companies face United Nations sanctions for purchasing conflict minerals from the DRC. UN Security Council Resolution 1857, passed in 2008, calls for a travel ban and asset freeze on all individuals and entities supporting illegal armed groups in the DRC through illicit trade in natural resources. Resolution 1896 strengthened this by calling on UN member states to bring individuals and corporations forward for sanctions.

While the British government has refused to recommend the companies accused by advocacy groups for sanctions and has disputed the evidence brought against them, it has affirmed their countries commitment to the UN resolutions and to ethical mining.

The U.S. and U.K.’s support for due diligence and ethical mining relations with the DRC—lip-service though it may turn out to be—is more then we can say for our country. Canada has not only opposed valuable mining reform but has worked to undermine the DRC itself.

Canada delayed the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s proposed $12.3 billion debt relief for the DRC, intended to mark the country’s jubilee anniversary of its independence. The decision was delayed following a request from Canada due to a legal dispute between Kinshasa and Vancouver-based mining company First Quantum Minerals Ltd. over mining rights. The proposed debt relief eventually went through, despite Canada’s tacit opposition as the lone abstaining vote.

While Harper claims that the DRC’s transfer of operating licenses violated international law and he used the podium of the G20 to frame the blocking of debt forgiveness as his stand for good governance, the actions of Canadian mining companies in the DRC has largely gone unquestioned by our government. A UN Security Council report on the illegal exploitation of natural resources of the DRC found that First Quantum, along with several other Canadian corporations, were in violation of OECD guidelines of ethics and that their actions had led to an “economy of war”. That the Canadian government would stand alone on the world stage and hold Congo’s debt relief in limbo in defence of the mining rights of a company found to be acting illegally to pillage the natural wealth of the DRC makes it clear that our government is closer aligned with the mining sector then the international community.

Our government’s opposition to accountability within the mining sector is not without its own calculus—we are, more so then most other nations, particularly invested in global mining projects. The world’s largest source of equity capital for mining companies undertaking exploration and development can be found in the financial markets in Toronto and Vancouver; in 2008, exploration and mining companies based in Canada accounted for 43 percent of global exploration expenditures and 75 percent of the world’s mining companies were headquartered in Canada.

Canadian policy therefore has a vested interest in the mining sector, since Canadian companies play a major role in it globally.

But that doesn’t mean that Canada can’t follow the suit of our neighbours to the south and legislate for more ethical mining practices. When our MPs return to the House of Commons for the fall session, among the first bills on the agenda will be Private Member’s Bill C-300, the “Responsible Mining Bill.” Introduced by Liberal MP John McKay in 2009, the bill seeks to implement stricter guidelines for corporate social responsibility, to ensure that mining companies receiving funding from the federal government comply with internationally agreed-upon standards of human rights and environmental protection.

It comes down to responsibility: holding companies responsible for the goods they produce and the way they produce them. Of course, this is simply one small step to end the violence in the DRC—the war did not begin over minerals and this will not bring about its end. Every dollar in our society is a vote, though, and the the idea behind initiatives like Bill C-300 and the legislation in the U.S. is that civilian purchasing power, combined with government pressure, can enforce corporate accountability to stop funding the militarization of the region. This action is merely one in the arsenal that is required to stabilize the DRC. But it is an important one.

A little while ago K-OS and Sebastien Grainger took a camera crew down to the Gulf Coast to shoot a documentary showcasing the devastation caused by the BP oil spill. The two were moved enough to write the song “BlackWater” about the experience. It will also be on K-OS’s mixtape, out Aug. 6.

It’s been three years since Chromeo impressed the musical masses with their sophomore release Fancy Footwork. The slick production and tongue-in-cheek delivery hit all the right notes, now they’re back with “Don’t turn the lights on” off their upcoming album Business Casual.

It’s finally arrived, Arcade Fire’s fiercely anticipated followup to Neon Bible came out in stores yesterday. The band first gave fans a taste a couple of months ago with a pair of mp3s, then they played a host of secret shows, but as of yesterday the secret it out. Here’s “We used to wait” off The Suburbs.

Millions around the world live without access to clean drinking water that plays a role in a host of easily preventable diseases. Photo courtesy: from a second story)Mike Bailey-Gates, FlickCreativeCommons.

UPDATE: Wednesday, July 28, 12:14 — The Council of Canadians reports that the United Nations general assembly has voted in favour of the resolution to recognize water and sanitation as basic human rights. The still-unofficial vote count was 124 votes in favour, zero votes against, and 42 abstentions. We’ll update with the official vote when it’s known. It is our presumption, and not reported fact, that Canada abstained, given its obstructionism on this issue to this point; but we’re willing (and hoping!) to be surprised. We will update with further details when we know officially.

UPDATE: 12:32 — Council of Canadians updated their report (viewable here) confirming that Canada did abstain on the vote.

Human rights: what are they? It should be a relatively straightforward question, but posed to any group of people, it’s bound to elicit a huge range of responses. To date the most successful attempt to articulate a workable standard is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on December 10, 1948, by the United Nations and its constituent countries.

The document consists of 30 articles outlining our most basic and universal human rights, from all individuals’ inherent equality before the law (article 1) to the right to education (article 26) to the right to seek asylum from persecution (article 14). Despite having the distinction of being the most widely translated document in the world—available in over 375 languages and dialects—it is only part of an ongoing struggle to entrench dignity as the cornerstone for all human interactions. Even a casual perusal of the days headlines reveals that this struggle is far from realized.

Today, the United Nations General Assembly will consider adding a 31st article to the Declaration: the human right to “available, safe, acceptable, accessible, and affordable water and sanitation.” The political and environmental landscape of our day is far different then the postwar horror that birthed the original human rights declaration in 1948. Few then predicted a future when water would become a contested issue. But access to water now presents us with the most pressing human rights concern.

Article 25 of the Declaration reads:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

All human rights are interrelated, interdependent and indivisible; in this regard, guaranteeing a standard of living and health based on the availability of food, clothing, housing and medical care while making no provision for water calls into question the entire project. What level of well-being can possibly be achieved when 884 million people in the world do not have access to safe water; what standard of living is provided for when 2.6 billion people in the world do not have access to basic sanitation; and what principle are we using to measure health when 1.4 million children die every year from preventable diarrhea caused by contaminated water and poor sanitation.

When we consider the tragic realities of those 3 billion people who do not have access to running water within a kilometre of their homes, the obvious oversight of water rights becomes startlingly clear; its absence is glaring.

Today’s UN vote is the culmination of several years of lobbying by international and community groups advocating for water justice. These groups demand that the right to water, like the right to food and shelter, be protected by a binding UN convention guaranteeing that no individual can be denied water because of an inability to pay.

And yet, despite the obvious gravity of the situation, a small bloc of nations—with Canada (surprise, surprise) at the helm—have worked to curb even the most modest recognition of the right to water while they have worked behind the scene to quash any UN proposal. At the World Water Forum at the Hague in 2000, in Kyoto in 2003 and in Mexico City in 2006, Canada refused to recognize water as a human right. Canada was the only country to vote against a 2002 UN resolution on the human right to water (baldly stating: “Canada does not accept that there is a right to drinking water and sanitation.”) and again in 2008, Canada played a pivotal role blocking the motion by Spain and Germany to officially recognize water as a human right at the UN Human Rights Council.

Our government (under both Liberal and Conservative leaderships) has offered little in the way of explanation for their stance on water rights. Those opposing the concept would have us believe that, if passed, it would see Canadian lakes drained and Canadian water shipped off to hotel fountains and golf courses in water-parched Las Vegas and other U.S. states.

This is simply not the case, and our government—and anyone familiar with UN rights conventions—knows it. Rights conventions oblige each country to uphold and enshrine the right within their borders and for their population and to report these steps to the UN (Canada, for example, despite having signed the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is under no obligation to provide Americans with the right to own property or the right to peacefully assemble. We would likewise be under no obligation to provide Americans with the right to water).

The reality is that NAFTA and the proposed EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement threaten Canadian water far more then the recognition (I’d say elevation but let’s be honest: for the majority of the world, the right to water is a no-brainer; it’s just us in Canada that are the holdouts) of water as an inalienable right. While NAFTA and the EU-Canada CETA provide windows for far greater privatization of our water, enshrining water as a human right would serve to temper corporate hegemonic control of our most basic necessity. And it would transform water from a resource to be exploited for profit, to a human right to be safeguarded for the public good. It would also provide legal recourse against those who would pollute our waters—tar sands, I’m looking at you. You can’t, after all, turn massive amounts of a human right into toxic tailing ponds that pollute groundwater and the Athabasca River.

Canada’s backward stance on water rights around the globe should, unfortunately, surprise no one; we have only to look in our own backyard and the availability of clean water in many indigenous communities across the country to see how little our government—the current Conservatives as well as the Liberals before them—values water access. The Ontario community of Kaschechewan gained national attention in 2005 when 1,000 of its residents were forced to evacuate because of poor water quality and unsanitary conditions. Kaschechewan, while an extreme example, is the rule and not the exception: over 80 First Nations communities are currently under “boil water advisories” (meaning they can’t drink their tap water), and 21 communities are deemed to be at high risk for contamination.

The UN vote has the potential to be at once both historic and self-congratulatory: if it passes today, it will see water enshrined alongside food, shelter and safety as an undeniable basic human right. But, as we have seen with other human rights, there is a huge gap between the words written in the convention and the actions of our government. At the risk of repeating myself from earlier posts: we are no longer “Canada the good.” We do, however, have the opportunity to lead this time—by ensuring that the resolution will pass, and by acting quickly to realize its goals, both at home and abroad.

Rich Aucoin

Summer festivals were once kingpins of the concert season, but in recent years their popularity has waned significantly. The recession has been blamed, and it certainly has had an effect, but the more likely cause for a drop in popularity has to do not with personal economics, but greed by the promoters. A great summer festival is about creating atmosphere: a parallel utopia that is built and demolished over the course of a few days. The problem with festivals lately is that feeling has mostly been abandoned in favour of commerce.

It’s not that people can’t afford to go to big behemoth events, it’s that they don’t want to afford it. Who wants to spend $200 to enter a fenced-in field where you’ll be searched as if you were crossing a border checkpoint, to ensure you’re not carrying contraband like bottled water or a picnic—forcing you to pay the inflated prices for Dasani and Pizza Pizza.

But let us not paint all festivals with one brush! Last weekend, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, hosted the Evolve festival. The three-day event promotes better living by example and tries to educate visitors about social issues. So, this week on Tuesday Tracks, we salute the Evolve festival for being just a little bit better than all the rest. Coming up: three performers from this year’s event.

First is experimental songsmith Rich Aucoin. Aucoin’s track “Push” is a laser-fulled, Daft Punk dance number that goes from robotic dissonance to a very human, inclusive anthem about accomplishment.

Finally we have Hey Rosetta, a band who has been steadily gaining steam since they formed in 2005. These Newfoundlanders make the kind of music you hear and wonder why they aren’t on the radio. Their songs are accessible, but at the same time, unique and intriguing. Here’s “Red Heart”: