Twenty-three Canadian cities participated in a national day of action calling for an immediate removal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan, with the biggest demonstrations taking place in Montreal and Vancouver. Malalai Joya, the embattled former Afghan parliamentarian and women’s rights advocate, began a brief Canadian tour with a speech at the Vancouver rally. Joya was kicked out of Afghanistan’s Loya Jirga in May after giving a television interview in which she compared the parliament to a stable or zoo, and accused other parliamentarians of being warlords. She faces daily death threats in Afghanistan, travels everywhere within the country in the presence of armed bodyguards, and changes houses each night. Joya’s Canadian visit, which will also include visits to Toronto and Halifax, comes shortly after the Harper government’s throne speech announcement of its plans to extend the Canadian mission in Afghanistan to 2011, despite overwhelming opposition from the Canadian public. Demonstrations were also held in 11 cities across the US demanding an end to the war in Iraq.
The Harper government has introduced a plan to drastically cut corporate taxes by $14.3 billion over the next six years. The announcement, which would make Canada’s corporate taxes the lowest in the G-7, even took the business community by surprise. “This is a surprisingly aggressive and definitely welcome set of tax cuts,” said Douglas Porter, deputy chief economist at BMO Nesbitt Burns. In response to the plan, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives said that the tax cuts would only benefit a small elite, while doing nothing to address the priorities that have been identified by the Canadian public, such as lower tuition fees, reduced greenhouse gases, or shorter wait times within the healthcare system.
In Alberta, following a month-long media campaign undertaken by multinational oil companies, the Stelmach government announced plans to increase the share of oil royalties the province receives by $1.4 billion starting in 2009. The decision follows a ruling by a government-appointed review panel which had called for the royalties to be increased by 20 per cent, or $2 billion. The current royalties regime in Alberta was introduced in the 1990’s in order to offer bargain basement tax rates for investment in tar sands development. It has remained unchanged in the years since, despite the massive profits reaped by the oil industry from the tar sands after oil prices increased.
New studies have found that Boreal forests are losing the ability to absorb man-made carbon dioxide emissions due to climate changes. The studies, conducted by professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research, found that temperate woodlands in the Northern hemisphere, extending from Alaska and Canada to China and northern Asia, may soon reach a point where they will be releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than they will be absorbing. The recent increases in large-scale forest fires, much like those that have overtaken California in recent weeks, has accelerated the release of CO2 by these boreal forests, according to the studies.
In Haiti, former government minister Maryse Narcisse became the second high-profile activist affiliated with the Lavalas party of ousted Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to be kidnapped in the past three months. Narcisse, along with her friend Delano Morel, was released after a ransom was reportedly paid to the kidnappers. The whereabouts of another grassroots Lavalas activist and human rights advocate, Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, who was kidnapped in Port-au-Prince in August, remain unknown. Both Pierre-Antoine and Narcisse spent two years in exile following the February 2004 coup of Haiti's elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide by US, Canadian, and French military forces. Their kidnappings have raised fears that high-profile Lavalas activists have been deliberately targeted. Although human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were quick to denounce the kidnapping of Narcisse, neither have issued any statement in three months about the kidnapping of Pierre-Antoine.
Canadian Auto Workers union President Buzz Hargrove has signed an agreement with auto parts giant Magna International which will allow the union to organize within the company’s Canadian plants in return for a guarantee that no worker strikes will take place for an indefinite period of time. The agreement has encountered heavy opposition within the Canadian Labour movement, as well as within the CAW itself. Chris Buckley, president of the CAW’s biggest local in Oshawa, argued in a letter to Hargrove that the no-strike clause compromises the fundamental right of union workers to strike. The CAW leadership’s position is that the Canadian manufacturing sector has faced large-scale job loses in recent years, and that compromises are necessary if Magna’s 18,000 Canadian workers are to have any hope of unionized representation. The agreement will be put to a vote at a CAW conference in December.
Following a 2-year campaign by a coalition of 12 indigenous organizations, an internal investigative panel slammed the World Bank’s conduct in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. The investigation revealed that the Bank encouraged foreign logging companies to destructively log rainforests, misled Congo’s government about the value of the forests, broke their own rules and regulations, and even threatened the lives of millions of Indigenous People and subsistence farmers who depend on the forests for survival. Congo’s rainforests are the second largest in the world.
The IMF/World Bank meetings in Washington DC were once again met with protests by global justice campaigners in late October. Demonstrators decried the IMF and the World Bank for their attempts to strong-arm developing countries into adopting deeply unpopular free market reforms. Although such protests have been held for years in front of the traditional headquarters of the Washington-based financial institutions, a disruptive and destructive march of 200-300, organized under the banner of a direct action coalition calling itself the October Rebellion, wound its way through the posh Georgetown shopping district, where many of the delegates were staying. Two demonstrators were arrested.
In India, 25,000 poor, landless and Dalit protestors marched 200 miles from Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh to the capital of Delhi over the course of October. The march was organized to demand the redistribution of land to the poor and landless. Protesters began marching on October 2nd, the birthday of independence leader Mahatma Gandhi. 40 per cent of Indians are now landless and 23 per cent live in abject poverty. Many of the marchers were farmers who have been forced from their land to make way for government-backed economic projects. In response to the march the Indian government has stated that it would establish a new panel to create policies, guide states and monitor the progress of land distribution.