Manifestation de Casseroles

Génial! "Manifestation de casseroles sur la rue Fabre, le 19 mai 2012. C'est tous les jours, partout, à 20h." Make a musical clanging sound! Spreading through Montreal neighbourhoods to support the 2012 Quebec student strikes. Zut alors!

Tar Sands Action

The Keystone XL pipeline is a project would pump over one million barrels of “tar sands” oil from the Alberta Tar Sands, Canada, to Texas every day. The oil in the Keystone pipeline could poison drinking water, threaten the communities it runs through, and wreck the climate.

350 Vermont is helping to coordinate a 4-day expedition from August 28th to the 31st to be a part of this historic action. Local coverage in Seven Days,  the Burlington Free Press,  Senator Sanders Youtube video. For those that care, there is a Facebook group.

Surprise!

The New York Times came out today with an editorial against the Keystone XL pipeline.

Bush motivates protests in Montreal yesterday...

Via CTV.ca:

"He has nothing to offer," said Helen Hannah, a colourfully dressed member of the Raging Grannies.

"He stands for modes of torture, modes of warfare and modes of lying that don't represent the way most Americans and most Canadians want to face the world -- we don't believe in those things."

Andre Gravel said Bush was a bad president who was incompetent on many levels, including his handling of the environment, the wars in the Middle East and the economy.

The conflicts Bush waged in Afghanistan and Iraq have destabilized world peace, he added.

"I am in favour of (his) right to speak," Gravel said.

"But we have the right to protest against him.

"Everything he did was negative."

Awaiting a refugee

From The Lead

The Diocese of Montreal in the Anglican Church of Canada has sponsored more than 1,000 refugees in the last 25 years but one Algerian who is still in custody at Guantanamo has an offer from the diocese to sponsor him to come to Canada as a refugee.

The Anglican Journal reports:

Janet Dench, executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, said Canadian officials would have to have access to interview Mr. Djamel Ameziane first. The current hold-up, she said, seems to be that the Americans are waiting until they have reviewed all the prisoners’ cases. “No one has formally and officially said that it is waiting for the U.S. to do their internal review but … all signs seem to point to” that cause for the delay, Ms. Dench said. “Once they’ve done the reviews, then they’ll be starting to think about ‘how do we find solutions for all of the people in Guantánamo and how do we involve these different other countries that might play a role?'”

Bishop Barry Clarke decided to sponsor Mr. Ameziane as a part of an ecumenical partnership with the Presbyterian Church in Montreal. “There’s an injustice here,” he said, noting that one the Five Marks of Mission in the Anglican Communion is changing unjust structures in society.

The Anglican Journal says that Mr. Ameziane has been imprisoned in Guantánamo since 2002, but has never been charged with a crime. According to information from the Center for Constitutional rights in New York where lawyers have taken on his case, he is an ethnic Berber who fled Algeria 17 years ago. He came to Canada but was denied refugee status and then traveled to Afghanistan. “As a foreigner in a land soon torn apart by conflict, he was an easy target for corrupt local police who captured him while he was trying to cross the border into Pakistan. Mr. Ameziane was then sold to U.S. military forces for a bounty,” his lawyers say.

Mr. Ameziane fears his life would be in danger returning Algeria with the stigma of having been accused of terrorist-related activities and would like to come to Canada because he has family in Quebec, said Bishop Clarke.

“People say to me ‘Can you really guarantee that he wasn’t a terrorist?' Well, there’s no guarantees in any thing, but on the other hand I keep telling people ‘We’ve done our homework. It’s not something that is just a nice thing to do,” said Bishop Clarke, commending Presbyterian pastor Glynis Williams for all her work on the matter. He added that the Canadian Council for Refugees and Amnesty International are also working hard to help Mr. Ameziane. “They’re not going to come and present something to me that they haven’t done their homework on.”

CANADA ISSUES RESTRICTIONS ON TASER USE

From WaPo/AP (12 February 2009): TORONTO -- Canada's federal police will no longer use stun guns against suspects who are merely resisting arrest or refusing to cooperate _ saying the guns can cause death.

The Canadian Tainted Blood Scandal

An Ontario court has acquitted those responsible of wrongdoing.

John Plater of the Canadian Hemophilia Society expressed bewilderment at the verdict. "If you, on the one hand, have a study that says there's a problem, and on the other hand have a study that says maybe there isn't a problem, any reasonable person takes the product off the market. They didn't. People were infected, and people died," Plater said. "How that could be considered reasonable behavior is beyond us."