“I don’t think [Teck will] build it,” said Brian Madden, senior vice president and portfolio manager at Goodreid Investment Counsel, on BNN Bloomberg Friday. “It’s not economic and I don’t think shareholders or the market will sanction them to splash out $10 billion, or whatever it’s going to cost to build this mine in the current oil price environment.”
The impairment tied to Fort Hills dragged Teck into the red for the quarter ending Dec. 31, with a loss of $891 million, compared to a profit of $433 million a year earlier. On an adjusted basis, Teck earned $0.22 per share, down from $0.86 in the fourth quarter of 2018. Analysts, on average, were expecting profit per share of $0.39.
“Ongoing global economic uncertainty negatively impacted commodity prices in the fourth quarter and that has continued into 2020, exacerbated by the effect on markets from the coronavirus and the impact of severe weather conditions in British Columbia, followed by blockades on rail lines,” said Teck CEO Don Lindsay in a release.Sorry but this doesn't add up. Teck which has a total market cap of $10 billion writes off nearly a billion of that value on a Tar Sands mine due to chronically low (inadequate) world oil prices but will take a further $1.13 billion hit if Trudeau doesn't approve a mine that's not economically viable for a company that's getting cold feet about the project anyway.
A major difference is the presence of a hump. Bison have one at the shoulders while buffalo don’t. The hump allows the bison’s head to function as a plow, sweeping away drifts of snow in the winter. The next telltale sign concerns the horns. Buffalo tend to have large horns—some have reached more than 6 feet (1.8 meters)—with very pronounced arcs. The horns of bison, however, are much shorter and sharper. And, if you want to throw a B into the mix, you can check for a beard. Bison are the hipsters of the two animals, sporting thick beards. Buffalo are beardless.I thought you might want to keep the distinction in mind if you're thinking about giving any credence to Ms. Rempel's "Buffalo Declaration."
Projects that enable fossil-fuel growth at this moment in time are an affront to our state of climate emergency, and the mere fact that they warrant debate in Canada should be seen as a disgrace. They are wholly incompatible with your government’s recent commitment to net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050. And with clear infringements on First Nations rights, such projects fly in the face of rhetoric and purported efforts towards reconciliation.
The response to the climate crisis will define and destroy legacies in the coming years, and the qualifications for being on the right side of history are clear: an immediate end to fossil-fuel financing and expansion along with an ambitious and just transition away from oil and gas production towards zero carbon well before mid-century.
The JP Morgan report on the economic risks of human-caused global heating said climate policy had to change or else the world faced irreversible consequences.
The study implicitly condemns the US bank’s own investment strategy and highlights growing concerns among major Wall Street institutions about the financial and reputational risks of continued funding of carbon-intensive industries, such as oil and gas.
JP Morgan has provided $75bn (£61bn) in financial services to the companies most aggressively expanding in sectors such as fracking and Arctic oil and gas exploration since the Paris agreement, according to analysis compiled for the Guardian last year.
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The authors say policymakers need to change direction because a business-as-usual climate policy “would likely push the earth to a place that we haven’t seen for many millions of years”, with outcomes that might be impossible to reverse.
“Although precise predictions are not possible, it is clear that the Earth is on an unsustainable trajectory. Something will have to change at some point if the human race is going to survive.”
The investment bank says climate change “reflects a global market failure in the sense that producers and consumers of CO2 emissions do not pay for the climate damage that results.” To reverse this, it highlights the need for a global carbon tax but cautions that it is “not going to happen anytime soon” because of concerns about jobs and competitiveness.
The authors say it is “likely the [climate] situation will continue to deteriorate, possibly more so than in any of the IPCC’s scenarios”.
Beyond the usual economic and policy risks that most financial analysts worry about, a number of potentially seismic white swans are visible on the horizon this year. Any of them could trigger severe economic, financial, political and geopolitical disturbances unlike anything since the 2008 crisis.
For starters, the US is locked in an escalating strategic rivalry with at least four implicitly aligned revisionist powers: China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. These countries all have an interest in challenging the US-led global order and 2020 could be a critical year for them, owing to the US presidential election and the potential change in US global policies that could follow.
Under Donald Trump, the US is trying to contain or even trigger regime change in these four countries through economic sanctions and other means. Similarly, the four revisionists want to undercut American hard and soft power abroad by destabilising the US from within through asymmetric warfare. If the US election descends into partisan rancour, chaos, disputed vote tallies and accusations of “rigged” elections, so much the better for rivals of the US. A breakdown of the US political system would weaken American power abroad.
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Although the Sino-American cold war is by definition a low-intensity conflict, a sharp escalation is likely this year. To some Chinese leaders, it cannot be a coincidence that their country is simultaneously experiencing a massive swine flu outbreak, severe bird flu, a coronavirus outbreak, political unrest in Hong Kong, the re-election of Taiwan’s pro-independence president, and stepped-up US naval operations in the East and South China Seas. Regardless of whether China has only itself to blame for some of these crises, the view in Beijing is veering toward the conspiratorial.
But open aggression is not really an option at this point, given the asymmetry of conventional power. China’s immediate response to US containment efforts will likely take the form of cyberwarfare. There are several obvious targets. Chinese hackers (and their Russian, North Korean, and Iranian counterparts) could interfere in the US election by flooding Americans with misinformation and deep fakes. With the US electorate already so polarised, it is not difficult to imagine armed partisans taking to the streets to challenge the results, leading to serious violence and chaos.
...By next year, the US-China conflict could have escalated from a cold war to a near hot one. A Chinese regime and economy severely damaged by the Covid-19 crisis and facing restless masses will need an external scapegoat, and will likely set its sights on Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam and US naval positions in the East and South China Seas; confrontation could creep into escalating military accidents. It could also pursue the financial “nuclear option” of dumping its holdings of US Treasury bonds if escalation does take place.
...The US, of course, will not sit idly by while coming under asymmetric attack. It has already been increasing the pressure on these countries with sanctions and other forms of trade and financial warfare, not to mention its own world-beating cyberwarfare capabilities. US cyber-attacks against the four rivals will continue to intensify this year, raising the risk of the first-ever cyber world war and massive economic, financial and political disorder.Roubini's point is that there are so many potentially seismic forces coming into play that stability, certainly across the West, is not to be taken for granted.
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Looking beyond the risk of severe geopolitical escalations in 2020, there are additional medium-term risks associated with climate change, which could trigger costly environmental disasters. Climate change is not just a lumbering giant that will cause economic and financial havoc decades from now. It is a threat in the here and now, as demonstrated by the growing frequency and severity of extreme weather events.
U.S. law enforcement officials and researchers at various levels have issued warnings about the growing threat posed by domestic extremists motivated by fringe ideologies and conspiracy theories. Joel Finkelstein, NCRI's director and a research scholar at the James Madison Program at Princeton University, said the report had been sent to members of Congress and the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Justice, among others.
Paul Goldenberg, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, said the report was "a wake-up call."
"When you have people talking about and planning sedition, and violence against minorities, police, and public officials, we need to take their words seriously," said Goldenberg, who is also CEO of the security consulting company Cardinal Point Strategies.
Goldenberg said the report had "gone viral" within law enforcement and intelligence communities since its limited release last week. People are reading it and distributing it "far and wide," he said.The movement, such as it is, has shown an uptick in activity in recent months.
In the last three months, boogaloo-related conversation has grown rapidly, according to the researchers, who found that use of the term has increased nearly 50 percent on platforms like Reddit and Twitter over the last few months. Increased exposure, the researchers warn, carries the danger of indoctrination.
Boogaloo extremists have used social media to "strategize, share instructions for explosives and 3-D printed firearms, distribute illegal firearm modifications, and siphon users into encrypted messaging boards en mass," according to the NCRI report. The report also notes how the boogaloo concept has been monetized, through merchandise advertised through Facebook and Instagram ads, and marketed to current and former members of the military.
On Facebook and Instagram, the researchers pointed to several boogaloo-themed public groups and accounts with tens of thousands of members and followers.Facebook, predictably, claims it polices users and has a zero tolerance for hate groups. Reality suggests otherwise.
Since NCRI generated the report last week, membership in several boogaloo groups on Facebook has nearly doubled, according to an NBC News analysis. During the same period, two of Facebook's most popular boogaloo groups that boasted nearly 20,000 followers are no longer available this week. Facebook did not return request for comment.
Much like the OK hand symbol coopted by white nationalists who later denied the association, the ambiguity of the term boogaloo works to cloak extremist organizing in the open.
"Like a virus hiding from the immune system, the use of comical-meme language permits the network to organize violence secretly behind a mirage of inside jokes and plausible deniability," the report states.
The term "boogaloo" has also been seen in real-world activism. At the Virginia Citizens Defense League's annual Lobby Day in Richmond in January, one group of protestors who go by Patriot Wave, wore Pepe the Frog patches emblazoned with "Boogaloo Boys." One man carried a sign that read, "I have a dream of a Boogaloo." The rally was held on Martin Luther King Day.
President Trump offered to pardon Julian Assange if he agreed to cover up the involvement of Russia in hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee, which were later published by WikiLeaks, a London court was told on Wednesday.
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Edward Fitzgerald, Assange’s lawyer, said on Wednesday that a message had been passed on to Assange by former Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher.
Fitzgerald said a statement produced by Assange’s lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, showed “Mr Rohrabacher going to see Mr Assange and saying, on instructions from the president, he was offering a pardon or some other way out, if Mr Assange... said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks.”
Mr. Naziel, who goes by the hereditary name Smogelgem, is head chief of Sun House, which is one of 13 Wet’suwet’en house groups. His uncle, Mr. Gagnon, goes by the hereditary name Kloum Khun under Owl House.
Both house groups fall under the Laksamshu clan, which is one of five Wet’suwet’en clans.Mr. Naziel and Mr. Gagnon are the plaintiffs named on behalf of their house groups.
“The defendant has deprived the plaintiffs of their right to equal protection and equal benefit of the law based on the age of the plaintiffs’ younger members and future generations by making laws that allow high GHG-emitting projects to operate now and into the future in breach of Canada’s fair contribution to keep global warming to non-catastrophic levels,” their court action said.I have trouble thinking these chiefs will prevail. They may succeed, however, in shining a very unwelcome light on some important issues that this government would rather not discuss. That, in its own right, would be a victory.
The oil and gas industry has had a far worse impact on the climate than previously believed, according to a study indicating that human emissions of fossil methane have been underestimated by up to 40%.
Methane has a greenhouse effect that is about 80% more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period and is responsible for at least 25% of global heating, according to the UN Environment Programme.
...The findings, published in Nature, suggest the share of naturally released fossil methane has been overestimated by “an order of magnitude”, which means that human activities are 25-40% more responsible for fossil methane in the atmosphere than thought.
This strengthens suspicions that fossil fuel companies are not fully accounting for their impact on the climate, particularly with regard to methane – a colourless, odourless gas that many plants routinely vent into the atmosphere.
An earlier study revealed methane emissions from US oil and gas plants were 60% higher than reported to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Accidents are also underreported. A single blowout at a natural gas well in Ohio in 2018 discharged more methane over three weeks than the oil and gas industries of France, Norway and the Netherlands released in an entire year. At the time, the company said it was unsure of the size of the leak. The immense scale was only revealed a year later when scientists analysed satellite data provided by the European Space Agency.
Fracking also appears to have worsened the problem. Atmospheric methane had started to flatten off at the turn of the century, but rose again after a surge in fracking activity in the US and elsewhere. The industry, however, continues to claim that the energy source can be used as a “bridge fuel” because it has lower carbon emissions than oil or coal, but this fails to account for leaks and flares of methane and other gases during extraction.So, a little bit here, a little bit there. Sure it adds up but does it really matter?
Dave Reay, the executive director of the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation, said one of the key messages from the study was that the old bottom-up method of measuring methane emissions was “woefully inadequate”.
“We knew fossil fuel extraction – including fracking – was a major part of global methane emissions, but this impressive study suggests it is a far bigger culprit in human-induced climate change than we had ever thought,” he said.
“If correct, gas, coal and oil extraction and distribution around the world are responsible for almost half of all human-induced methane emissions. Add to that all the carbon dioxide that is then emitted when the fossil fuels are burned, and you need look no further for the seat of the climate emergency fire.”To see what "invisible" fugitive gas emissions look like, the New York Times last year published an item that showed gas sites as we see them then again as seen through an infrared lens. It's an eye-opener, one that you should check out.
Every country in the world is failing to shield children’s health and their futures from intensifying ecological degradation, climate change and exploitative marketing practices, says a new report.
The report says that despite dramatic improvements in survival, nutrition, and education over the past 20 years, “today’s children face an uncertain future”, with every child facing “existential threats”.
“In 2015, the world’s countries agreed on the sustainable development goals (SDGs), yet nearly five years later, few countries have recorded much progress towards achieving them,” says the report by a commission of 40 child and adolescent health experts from around the world.
“Climate change, ecological degradation, migrating populations, conflict, pervasive inequalities, and predatory commercial practices threaten the health and future of children in every country,” it says.
The commission, convened by the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations children’s agency, Unicef, and medical journal the Lancet, calls for radical changes to protect children’s health and futures from the intensifying climate emergency.A recent article in The Guardian focused on the mental health problems spreading through children who know, all too well, that they're in our crosshairs. They've got a damned good idea of what's coming their way after we're gone. There are many scholarly reports online about research into climate change and juvenile mental health even at this early stage.
It also highlights the threat of predatory commercial practices, linking children’s exposure to marketing of fast food and sugary drinks to an 11-fold increase in childhood obesity, from 11 million in 1975 to 124 million in 2016.
Humanity’s ongoing destruction of nature threatens the survival of our species, a group of former foreign ministers has warned, calling on leaders to step back from “the precipice” of irreversible ecological ruin and protect the planet.
The planet’s rapidly warming oceans must be the focus of increased conservation efforts due to their importance in producing oxygen and food for billions of people, the former ministers added, as governments prepare to begin negotiations for a Paris-style UN agreement on nature next week.
...“The loss and degradation of nature jeopardises human health, livelihoods, safety and prosperity. It disproportionately harms our poorest communities while undermining our ability to meet a broad range of targets set by the United Nations’ sustainable development goals. We must rise above politics and ideology to unite the global community around the urgent cause of protecting our planet and way of life,” reads the statement, which was released through non-profit thinktank Aspen Institute.
The former ministers highlighted the climate crisis, the “excessive exploitation” of natural resources, and ecosystem degradation as grave threats to international security, warning they “imperil the future for our grandchildren”.
“Humanity sits on the precipice of irreversible loss of biodiversity and a climate crisis that imperils the future for our grandchildren and generations to come. The world must act boldly, and it must act now,” the statement continues.I don't know about you but it completely boggles my mind that we should have reached a point in human civilization where a group of former senior diplomats should feel the need to write, begging current world leaders not to destroy our biosphere. "Please don't kill everything." That's what they're trying to convey. Ask yourself how in hell did we come to this point? What have we become?
Treaty negotiations did not take place in vast tracts of British Columbia – a direct affront to the rule of law. “Under international and British law at the time of colonization, unless Indigenous people were conquered or treaties were made with them, the Indigenous interest in their land was to be respected by the law of the European colonizing nation,” historian and lawyer Bruce McIvor explained last week.
Politicians and pundits have been calling for the rule of law to be respected, given the ongoing protests in BC and in southern Ontario in support of the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs opposing the Coastal GasLink project. The protests have stopped CN and Via Rail trains from running in parts of Canada. But let’s set aside for a moment the question of the legitimacy or illegality of those protests. Where have all these influential voices been on the much larger rule of law question, the one that set the stage for these conflicts in the first place?
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We also ignore that the courts have acknowledged repeatedly that Indigenous laws and rights are part of the rule of law in Canada. “Indigenous legal traditions are among Canada’s legal traditions. They form part of the law of the land,” Federal Court Justice Sébastien Grammond wrote in a 2018 decision.
National newspaper columnists have called the Wet’suwet’en system of governance an “oligarchy” and based on a “feudal genealogy,” but the Courts (which help shape the rule of law) haven’t shown that disdain. The Supreme Court has acknowledged the limits of the Indian Act-prescribed structures when considering the holders of Aboriginal title – and dealt specifically with the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs’ authority in the 1997 Delgamuukw decision. In the Supreme Court of British Columbia Tsilhqot’in decision, Justice David Vickers put it succinctly: “While band level organization may have meaning to a Canadian federal bureaucracy, it is without any meaning in the resolution of Aboriginal title and rights for Tsilhqot’in people.”
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Canadian law when it comes to Indigenous communities has been a slippery, oppressive thing throughout the country’s history. Treaties are the law, but they are routinely violated. Laws were invented to erase Indigenous culture. It took until last year for the federal government to finally remove the legislated gender discrimination from the Indian Act.
In British Columbia, the type of land title negotiations that created the Douglas treaties on Vancouver Island (themselves the subject of contention) were abandoned and unilateral settlement occurred on vast tracts of Indigenous land elsewhere in the province. The rule of law and the “honour of the Crown” were disregarded. In 1997, the Supreme Court of Canada advised the Crown that it had a “moral, if not a legal, duty,” to settle the question of title in order to facilitate “the reconciliation of the pre-existence of aboriginal societies with the sovereignty of the Crown.” But today, delving into those fundamental issues around land title and Canada’s fundamental violations of the rule of law seems to exhaust the stamina of many Canadian political and thought leaders.Don't blame the Wet'suwet'en or other First Nations protestors who have come out in solidarity. The path they are on is one of our choosing. It is a path of our making. The "rule of law" is meaningless when the rules are applied selectively, to only one side, at the choosing of the other. That, is our game.
The response from Canadian officials has been predictable: RCMP officers have threatened journalists trying to cover the raids. Horgan, who also spoke to the Assembly of First Nations two months ago and claimed to understand that “reconciliation is not just words,” has decried protest efforts. Talking about a blockade of a government building, Horgan said that that “people were denied access to their workplace, not because of their political views but because they were seen as symbols of government—that’s unacceptable.”
Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer called upon those enforcing the blockade to “check their privilege,” an attempt to reframe the issue by appealing to those affected by the rail closures. Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, after squeezing past protestors to enter the Halifax City Hall, said that “it is very important for all people in Canada, including government officials, to be able to go about their rightful and legitimate business.” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, currently on a trip in Africa, told reporters in Senegal that while it’s crucial to “respect the right to freely demonstrate peacefully,” Canada is a “country with a rule of law and we need to make sure those laws are respected.”
They are setting a trap, trying to pit Indigenous land defenders against the non-Indigenous population and claiming themselves as allies to the “working man” or whatever false story they want to tell. But the story is slipping away from them, if slowly.
“[The media is] starting to talk about our territories as unceded sovereign territories and land defenders and Wet’suwet’en people and governance, and not talking about us as if we’re just protestors off the street, which I think was one of the biggest problems with how mainstream media has been covering this story,” Wicksham said of how coverage of the anti-pipeline movements has recently shifted. She added that she felt as though the media reports in the past have too often focused on the divisions within the Wet’suwet’en community over whether to allow the CGL pipeline, instead of centering the fact that their traditional governance structure is being ignored by Canadian politicians.Defenders of the Land
The Wet’suwet’en, along with other Indigenous land defenders across North America, have posed a question to their non-Indigenous neighbors: Who is being more unreasonable, the Indigenous people enforcing their sovereignty and history on the land, or the government and extractive companies literally cooking the planet?
...with today’s the climate crisis, debates around degrowth have been reinvigorated, and many major figures such as Noam Chomsky, Yanis Varoufakis and Anthony Giddens have, to varying degrees, expressed support for the idea.
For others though — especially business leaders — degrowth is completely unthinkable, not least because of the anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist roots of the term. The prevailing view is that growth is an economic necessity, and any threat to that not only undermines business, but basic societal functioning. For instance, the CEO of H&M Karl-Johann Persson recently warned about the dire social consequences of what he perceives to be a movement of “consumer shaming.” Framed in these terms, the resistance of multinational CEOs and entrepreneurs alike is predictable, as is the reluctance of politicians to promote degrowth policies that would potentially prove unpopular with key constituents. The economist Tim Jackson provides a concise assessment: “Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries.”Strike Three for perpetual exponential growth.
First, given the finite nature of our planet, infinite economic growth — even of a different variety — is a logical impossibility. Secondly, innovation and improvements produce, in many cases, unintended consequences. One of which is the Jevons paradox, where individuals compensate for efficiency through increased consumption. For instance, more energy-efficient refrigerators lead to more refrigerators in a home.
The third and most fundamental issue is that the degrowth movement has already begun: at a grassroots level, consumer demand is actively being transformed, despite political and corporate reticence. A recent YouGov poll in France highlights that 27% of respondents are seeking to consume less — double the percentage from two years prior. The number of people eating less meat or giving it up altogether has been rising exponentially in recent years, too. Similarly, the movement of Flygskam (literally “flight shaming” in Swedish) has had early successes in reducing pollution: 10 Swedish airports have reported considerable declines in passenger traffic over the past year, which they attribute directly to Flygskam.As one door closes, another opens.
Flygskam has been a boon for train travel, bolstered by a social media movement called Tågskryt (“train brag”). Meanwhile reduced meat consumption has been accompanied by an explosion in meat substitutes that produce one-tenth of the greenhouse gases compared to the real thing. Accordingly, degrowth reshuffles competitive dynamics within and across industries and, despite what many corporate leaders assume, offers new bases for competitive advantage.The authors identify three strategies for business to adapt.
First, firms can pursue degrowth-adapted product design, involving the creation of products that have longer lifespans, are modular, or are locally produced. Fairphone, a social enterprise, eschews the built-in obsolescence of larger mobile device manufacturers and produces repairable phones that dramatically extend their longevity. Similarly, the start-up The 30 Year Sweatshirt sells high-quality, durable products that run counter to fast fashion principles.
Second, firms can engage in value-chain repositioning, where they exit from certain stages of the value chain and delegate some tasks to stakeholders. (I really don't understand this one)Until now, consumerism has been driven by the markets. It may be time for consumers to take the whip hand, transforming the markets to conform to a fast changing world. The sooner the better.
Third, firms can lead through degrowth-oriented standard setting. This entails creation of a standard for the rest of the industry to follow. The apparel company Patagonia — that explicitly follows an “antigrowth” strategy — is the poster child for this philosophy, offering a worn-wear store and providing free repairs for not only their own products, but also for those of other garment manufacturers. Walmart and Nike have solicited advice from Patagonia on such practices, and more recently H&M imitated the service with a pilot in-store repair facility. In a similar vein, the automobile company Tesla released all its patents in 2014, seeking to catalyze the diffusion of electric vehicles. Such initiatives were not merely marketing ploys, but also strategies to standardize a practice or technological platform throughout an industry — one in which companies like Patagonia or Tesla would have existing expertise.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police launched one of the largest police operations in Canadian history, including the deployment of four hundred tactical assault team members, five helicopters, two surveillance planes and nine Armoured Personnel Carriers. (the vehicle shown is not an APC but an AFV, an Armoured Fighting Vehicle of the sort we used in Afghanistan) The RCMP kept journalists well away from the site and some reporters became uneasy that the only side of the story being told was that preferred by the police.
On September 11, RCMP detonated an explosive device buried in an access road to the camp, heavily damaging a supply truck being driven by occupiers. The incident resulted in a firefight that made use of the military-loaned Armoured Personnel Carriers (APCs). Non-indigenous occupier Suniva Bronson was shot in the arm during the shootout and would be the only injury in the extensive exchange of bullets. On the following day, an unarmed man crossing a field designated as a no-shoot zone was shot at by police sharp shooters. Police later admitted to this mistake. The standoff ended peacefully on September 17 when the few remaining occupiers left the site under the guidance of medicine man, John Stevens.
By the end of the 31-day standoff, police had fired up to 77,000 rounds of ammunition, and killed a dog. One of the indigenous leaders claimed that at least one of the shooting incidents blamed on them in fact occurred when two APCs fired on one another when their view was obscured. The operation was the largest paramilitary operation in British Columbia history and cost $5.5 million.Then, as now, more blame was attached to the federal government than was their due. Then, as now, the provincial government was NDP.
More than 1,100 former federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials called on Attorney General William P. Barr on Sunday to step down after he intervened last week to lower the Justice Department’s sentencing recommendation for President Trump’s longtime friend Roger J. Stone Jr.
They also urged current government employees to report any signs of unethical behavior at the Justice Department to the agency’s inspector general and to Congress.
“Each of us strongly condemns President Trump’s and Attorney General Barr’s interference in the fair administration of justice,” the former Justice Department lawyers, who came from across the political spectrum, wrote in an open letter on Sunday. Those actions, they said, “require Mr. Barr to resign.”
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Even as the lawyers condemned Mr. Barr on Sunday, they said they welcomed his rebuke of Mr. Trump and his assertions that law enforcement must be independent of politics.
But Mr. Barr’s “actions in doing the president’s personal bidding unfortunately speak louder than his words,” they said.
On Thursday, the RCMP and the Canadian state came to a moral crossroads on a snowy country road and looked briefly down a pathway to reconciliation. Then it said, “Fuck it.”Not surprisingly, Ottawa and Victoria are also trying to throw shade on the hereditary chiefs of the Wet'suwet'en people. They are, after all, not the "elected" chiefs who've thrown in with Coastal Gaslink. These hereditary chiefs are just a troublesome anachronism, a throwback to an earlier time - you know, before those indians became civilized. Those hereditary chiefs don't speak for the Wet'suwet'en people, just a small faction of cranks. How dare they set up protest camps?
As reliable agents of the Canadian state and defenders of resource extraction, the RCMP let it be known that the Trudeau government puts highly subsidized methane projects ahead of reconciliation and UN declarations.
The opposing positions of the two sets of chiefs has been represented by B.C. Premier John Horgan and in the media, as a fight within the nation between the equal actors of hereditary chiefs, who defend the land, and the band chiefs, who seek escape from poverty. Premier Horgan told the CBC he doesn’t think “a handful of people can stop progress and success for people who have been waiting for a break like this for many, many years.”
But this simplification obscures the fact that both sets of chiefs are on the side of their people, working against a colonial system that seeks economic certainty and the surrender of Indigenous land.
The Wet’suwet’en are not a nation divided, they are a nation with differing opinions on the best route to a better future after history of oppression. The band councils have sought opportunity, and funding, where they can find it. But based on Wet’suwet’en and Canadian law, it’s ultimately the hereditary chiefs who have jurisdiction to the territory, and they have been clear about their aim—to assert self-governance over their land and demand a nation-to-nation relationship with Canada. It’s a move that would benefit all Wet’suwet’en.
Each set of leaders has unique jurisdiction, in the same way that municipal and provincial governments do. The band chiefs, who were imposed by the Indian Act, govern their reserves, while hereditary chiefs predate Canada, and govern the entire Wet’suwet’en territory. It’s worth noting that they are not anti-industry and have long held logging agreements.
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A key point that project proponents emphasize, is that 20 elected band councils signed benefits agreements, a phrasing that relies on Canadians’ social conditioning—one that assumes democratic systems are fundamentally more fair.
While talking about benefits agreements, duress is inherent in the process—First Nations can’t actually say no to any project in Canada. In addition, most councils are cash-strapped, and some reported that they were told the project would go ahead with or without their consent—they might as well get on board for a payout. Leaked examples of Coastal GasLink agreements show evidence of large provincial subsidies to get First Nations on board, attempts to muzzle pipeline dissent, and to limit Aboriginal rights.It's an important article and I urge you to read it in its entirety. It puts paid to the bona fides of our governments and the pipeline police force. All this talk about "reconciliation" is just that - talk.
