The New Corporate SLAPP to Canadians

Bill C51, the new expansion of "anti-terror" legislation in Canada, isn't really about the one-in-twenty-million chance of an act of terror having any effect on a Canadian. Rather, it is clearly about expanding the remit of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) to allow the the infiltration and disruption of environmental groups (and, by extension, other politically progressive groups), and to allow the prosecution (and persecution) of Canadian activists under "anti-terror" legislation.
The idea is clearly to scare the shit out of Canadians who question the neo-fascist politics of the Stephen Harper government. In this way it follows in the footsteps of the use of SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) to chill public reaction to corporate domination of the public sphere in Canada.
The RCMP has already begun branding environmental action groups and individuals with the "terrorist" label:

Sgt. Cox would not comment on the tone of the January, 2014, assessment that suggests opposition to resource development runs counter to Canada’s national interest and links groups such as Greenpeace, Tides Canada and the Sierra Club to growing militancy in the “anti-petroleum movement.” via: Globe and Mail

It's all just part of the naked displays of corporate power rising around the world (particularly the developed world). Meaningful action on global warming is stymied because the massive oil corporations would see their value collapse if it was clear to the investment community that the on-book reserves would never be able to be tapped. This is the point being made by the divestment movement: we cannot burn any more fossil fuel if we hope to live on the planet. Therefore, what's in the ground must stay in the ground. And that makes those reserves worthless--a fact not reflected in share prices.
So corporations have enlisted (or compelled) the help of national governments to ensure that they are still able to realize profits--regardless of any threat to (or from) those same national governments, or to the global ecosystem. The global  one percent figure they and their descendents should make out all right without regard to what happens to the rest of us. And they may be right.

Copenhagen, Canada, and the End of the World

The Globe and Mail is reporting on an interview with Environment Minister Jim Prentice, saying that the chance of an agreement on climate change in Copenhagen is pretty much non-existent.
The world wants a climate change agreement in Copenhagen. The US is even onside, with President Obama actually understanding both the science and political realities of global warming. The EU wants an agreement, with Germany busy poaching Canadian alternative energy companies and the Brits launching the 10-10 campaign. China is even pursuing lower carbon emissions. So what's the problem?
The problem is the Canadian government. Canada has become the biggest roadblock to an international agreement to lower carbon emissions. According the the G&M article (23 October 2009, p A1 Ottawa dashes hope for treaty in Copenhagen) Canada is continuing to "insist that it should have a less aggressive target for emission reductions[...] because of its faster-growing population and energy-intensive industrial structure". The Harper government is also going to insist that any cap on industrial emissions will not be applied uniformly across the country, but will allow the Alberta oil sands to continue expanding. To quote the Environment Minister; "The Canadian approach has to reflect the diversity of the country and the sheer size of the country, and the very different economic characteristics and industrial structure across the country." The Harper government has also demanded that emerging economies (like China and India) agree to binding caps on carbon emissions, and has refused to release its own plan for carbon reduction until there is clarity on what the Americans are planning to do.
The New Democratic Party has a bill currently in committee that would commit Canada to an emission reduction of 25% from 1990 levels by 2020--a target that would meet our commitment under Kyoto and would be consistent with the EU's approach in the next round of negotiations. Ottawa has proposed a reduction of 20% from 2006 levels of emissions by 2020--our obligation under Kyoto was a cut of 6% from 1990 levels by 2012. The plan proposed by the Harper government would result in a 3% reduction from 1990 levels by 2020. Chief climate negotiator Michael Martin said to the committee considering the NDP bill that the Harper government's targets are "comparable" because they will be just as costly to achieve as the more aggressive NDP targets.
What becomes clear, as we follow the progress towards significant carbon emission reductions, is that the Harper government has no intention of ever reducing carbon emissions. Harper simply does not consider carbon emissions to be a problem (how can I say that? By simply looking at his record).
And our Prime Minister is dragging a lot of sceptics along with him. World-wide, temperatures maxed out in 1998, leading deniers to claim that temperatures have levelled off or are even declining. But new research to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, was carried out by Judith Lean, of the US Naval Research Laboratory, and David Rind, of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The research, "is the first to assess the combined impact on global temperature of four factors: human influences such as CO₂ and aerosol emissions; heating from the sun; volcanic activity and the El Niño southern oscillation, the phenomenon by which the Pacific Ocean flips between warmer and cooler states every few years.

The analysis shows the relative stability in global temperatures in the last seven years is explained primarily by the decline in incoming sunlight associated with the downward phase of the 11-year solar cycle, together with a lack of strong El Niño events. These trends have masked the warming caused by CO₂ and other greenhouse gases.

As solar activity picks up again in the coming years, the research suggests, temperatures will shoot up at 150% of the rate predicted by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Lean and Rind's research also sheds light on the extreme average temperature in 1998. The paper confirms that the temperature spike that year was caused primarily by a very strong El Niño episode. A future episode could be expected to create a spike of equivalent magnitude on top of an even higher baseline, thus shattering the 1998 record.

The study comes within days of announcements from climatologists that the world is entering a new El Niño warm spell. This suggests that temperature rises in the next year could be even more marked than Lean and Rind's paper suggests." (The Guardian Online).

The British Meteorological Office released a new map of the world (below) showing the current thinking on what the world will look like with a 4°C rise in the average global temperature. The 4°C rise mostly happens at the equator--the further you move away from the equator, the greater the changes. Here on Vancouver Island, we may only see an average 5°C rise, but up in Hudson's Bay, its looking more like 16°C. What this doesn't indicate is just how this will affect global weather patterns. If it was just going to get warmer, that wouldn't be the end of the world.But all that extra energy is going to change things in ways we can't imagine yet, much less model.

The Met Office says that climate researchers have discovered that:

• levels of CO2 have risen 40% since the Industrial Revolution
• Global sea levels have risen 10cm in the last 50 years [and that's a hell of a lot of water]
• temperatures in the Arctic have risen at twice the global average [which suits our Prime Minister just fine]
• snow cover in the northern hemisphere has dropped 5% in the last 2 decades

And researchers figure that extreme temperatures will affect eastern North America, with Toronto and Ottawa seeing the temperatures of their hottest days jumping by up to 10°C to 12°C. Anyone having suffered through a GTA summer will be white with fear about now....

Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction

Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction
Charles Townshend
2002, Oxford University Press
GVPL call number: 303.625 TOW

Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction by Charles Townshend, is a dispassionate overview of a political process that generates some of the deepest fears and excesses of emotion. And this from a series of actions that “...can in principle be minimal. Even in Israel, it has been pointed out, the fatalities and injuries to Israeli citizens from terrorist attacks since the 1967 war would barely deserve a separate line in the national mortality and morbidity statistics if their significance were purely quantitative.”¹

The question of just what is terrorism is one that seems to defy actual definition. As Townshend points out, “efforts to get to grips with terrorism have repeatedly been hung up on the issue of definition, of distinguishing terrorism from criminal violence or military action.” This problem with definitions is summed up by Edward Peck, former U.S. Chief of Mission in Iraq (under Jimmy Carter) and ambassador to Mauritania:

In 1985, when I was the Deputy Director of the Reagan White House Task Force on Terrorism, they asked us — this is a Cabinet Task Force on Terrorism; I was the Deputy Director of the working group — they asked us to come up with a definition of terrorism that could be used throughout the government. We produced about six, and each and every case, they were rejected, because careful reading would indicate that our own country had been involved in some of those activities. […] After the task force concluded its work, Congress got into it, and you can google into U.S. Code Title 18, Section 2331, and read the U.S. definition of terrorism. And one of them in here says — one of the terms, “international terrorism,” means “activities that,” I quote, “appear to be intended to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.” […] Yes, well, certainly, you can think of a number of countries that have been involved in such activities. Ours is one of them. Israel is another. And so, the terrorist, of course, is in the eye of the beholder.²

---

Townshend points out that while “state definitions simply assume that the use of violence by 'subnational groups' (as the US Department of State's definition has it) is automatically illegal. In the state's view, only the state has the right to use force—it has, as academics tend to say, a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.” ³ But the most prolific use of terror is by the state against its own people. Where terrorist acts by non-state actors would, with the exception of the attack of the World Trade Centers in 2001, “ barely deserve a separate line in the national mortality and morbidity statistics,” terror practised by the Peron regime in the 1970s (sponsored and supported by the US), killed between 10,000 and 30,000 of its own citizens. “This regime involved a definite shift form the traditional terrorism of the shock groups—primarily assassination—to a large scale campaign to root out 'subversion'. Its breadth stemmed from the characteristically broad notion of subversion held by military officers: general Videla defined as a terrorist 'not just someone with a gun or a bomb, but also someone who spreads ideas that are contrary to Western and Christian civilization'.”4 This is an example of what is referred to as “white terror” — reactionary or right-wing terror that is characteristically pro-state.

While Townshend provides an overview of the political goals of terrorism (he defines the elements of the terror process as 1. Seizing attention: shock, horror, fear or revulsion 2. Getting the message: what do terrorists want? And 3. Fight or flight? — the response), he makes note of the fact that terror is really a spent force politically. Terror generally fails to have any effect on politics—unless it is state-sponsored terror (as in the example of Argentina, above, where it has a chilling effect on society and the body politic). Recent terror organizations in the West, such as Weather Underground, Red Army Faction, or even the IRA, have failed in any of their attendant goals, with the exception of the “sacralization of violence”, the “purity” of action over talk. Terror must be a component part of a larger political and transformational movement, it cannot and does not succeed on its own.

Even religious terrorist groups—almost unknown before 1980, but comprising nearly a third of terrorist organizations by 1994—have a difficult time communicating their aims to those they wish to terrorize. The attacks on the World Trade Centers have been explained as having been “intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat”(President G.W. Bush) or “they hate us because we elect our leaders” (special counsellor to the President Karen Hughes). As Townshend says;

“Retreat from what, or where? American commentators, both official and unofficial, showed a marked reluctance to accept the fairly well-established view that Osama bin Laden's primary casus belli against the USA was the defilement of Saudi Arabia by the presence of US troops....Even if bin Laden or the shadowy al-Qaida had issued a statement of specific demands, in such a climate of interpretation it would quite likely not have been believed. ”5

Townshend also looks at the responses of the State to violence by non-state actors, and concludes that in fact terrorists are quite correct on one point: often terrorist acts emphasize and increase fascist or anti-democratic actions n the part of the government. He specifically cites both American and British actions since the attacks on the World Trade Centers in 2001 as examples, and discusses what this means for democracies and their responses to violence.

At the end of the day, this proves to be—as so many of the Very Short Introductions have proven to be—an essential read before one can reasonably discuss a given topic. I found the book to be quite free of cant or axe-grinding (although I trust many state actors in both the Bush and Blair administrations would disagree, as Townshend sees no basis in fact or evidence in reality for many of their claims), and at 139 pages of text (less endnotes, further reading, and index), proves to be very information dense for a book so reasonable in length.

1: Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction, Charles Townshend, 2002, Oxford University Press p. 15

2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_terrorism retrieved 03 June 2008

3: Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction, Charles Townshend, 2002, Oxford University Press pp. 3-5

4: Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction, Charles Townshend, 2002, Oxford University Press p. 47

5: Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction, Charles Townshend, 2002, Oxford University Press p. 9

Powered by ScribeFire.