Against Forgetting: A Perspective from Derrick Jensen

What Life Was Like--For Some

What Life Was Like–For Some

 

The latest issue of Orion landed in my mailbox last week, the first paper issue I’ve seen in a couple of years, having switched to a digital subscription, and I was reminded of the pleasure of sitting down with a physical magazine, especially something as sumptuous as Orion, a visual feast as well as a wealth of content.  First up for me was a piece by Derrick Jensen called Against Forgetting: It’s hard to fight for what you don’t know you’ve lost.

His premise is that there has been a steady erosion of nature and the commons over the last several decades, to the point where there those of us who have become accustomed to the new reality and where there is at one generation and possibly two or three, who have known a whole different picture of society and its relation to the biosphere that what was extant in the middle of the last century.

Jensen writes of…

“,,,declining baselines. The phrase describes the process of becom­ing accustomed to, and accepting as nor­mal, worsening conditions. Along with normalization can come a forgetting that things were not always this way.”

As well, he cites Milan Kundera: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Much of Jensen’s discussion speaks to the disappearance of flora and fauna, to the loss of habitat and to the different nature of our interaction with the living world, though it could apply equally to the changed nature of relations within society. I would cite the state of health care as a prime example, on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, with health care having become a profit center in the United States, subject to management by large healthcare corporations who insert a huge burden of bureaucracy and profit, as well as largesse to the management class, and stifling premiums for citizens, often with major exclusions from coverage and what seem to be denials of procedure on a whim. A look at an afternoon’s programming on an American television station will say much about the for-profit system: what advertising isn’t for cars, beer or casinos is likely to be for some health care organization. The same is true for the pharmaceutical arm of the health care equation, with a portion of the advertising being aimed at justifying the often outrageous cost of many medications because, we are told, these are R&D pharmaceutical companies. It seems, though, that advertising budgets are substantially larger than the budgets for actual research and development. North of the 49th parallel, we fare only somewhat better with the vestiges of what was once a reasonably competent nationwide health care system that delivered a wide variety of procedures in a timely fashion with relatively low overhead. Once Paul Martin took on the deficit pretty much on the backs of working Canadians by cutting services and transfer payments, the provinces were forced to cut back on what was on offer for patients, and, in many cases, did so with relish and glee, as governments turned a blind eye to the establishment of private, for-profit clinics and dismantled structures like the Theraputics Initiative, aimed at independent evaluation of pharmaceutical products and costs. When our current Prime Minister promised us that we wouldn’t recognize Canada when he got through, he wasn’t exaggerating or engaging in an idle boast, and our destination looks very much like the unregulated quagmire of our American friends and neighbours.

It is hard for us to maintain perspective and to measure change without a firm grasp of what used to be, particularly when, as individuals, we have access only to our personal and anecdotal information, and perceptions of how well the system functioned can vary considerably from place to place and with the influence of different circumstances, both personal and systemic. Sadly, it is hard for us to rely on statistics, given that there has been a campaign by several levels of government to ensure that the information that gets out reflect well on the issuing government, and on any interested parties with whom the government has chosen to work. Statistics Canada used to have a worldwide reputation as a quality provider of data and analysis based on thorough and meaningful methodology. My sense is that this is no longer the case, so we have to rely on our intuitive and personal understanding of whatever changes we perceive.

Changes of the same nature have been wrought in many other domains, from education to the world of work, from protection of water resources to urban sprawl, from foreign policy to basic research. The world I now inhabit is a very different world than that in which I grew up, and there is much that has been done that, for the sake of broader humanity and all the life that shares space with us, it would be better were it undone.

Jensen’s conclusion is an exhortation to gather baseline data now, a baseline against which to measure further erosion, or perhaps, rebuilding of the natural and societal realms, and he cites what might be some indicators to include in the baseline:

“But here is what I want you to do: I want you to go outside. I want you to lis­ ten to the (disappearing) frogs, to watch the (disappearing) fireflies. Even if you’re in a city—especially if you’re in a city—I want you to picture the land as it was be­ fore the land was built over. I want you to research who lived there. I want you to feel how it was then, feel how it wants to be. I want you to begin keeping a calendar of who you see and when: the first day each year you see buttercups, the first day frogs start singing, the last day you see robins in the fall, the first day for grasshoppers. In short, I want you to pay attention.

If you do this, your baseline will stop declining, because you’ll have a record of what’s being lost.

Do not go numb in the face of this data. Do not turn away. I want you to feel the pain. Keep it like a coal inside your coat, a coal that burns and burns. I want all of us to do this, because we should all want the pain of injustice to stop. We should want this pain to stop not because we get used to it and it just doesn’t bother us anymore, but because we stop the in­justices and destruction that are causing the pain in the first place. I want us to feel how awful the destruction is, and then act from this feeling.

And I promise you two things. One: feeling this pain won’t kill you. And two: not feeling this pain, continuing to go numb and avoid it, will. ”

All of this is too true, but not so self-evident that it has spurred legions of concerned citizens to action: the struggle of memory against forgetting can only be won when the dynamic tension between what is and what should gives rise to action.

However, there is another side to this.

No More
No More

Back in the early Sixties, we had one of these, though it was a convertible and a kind of a muddy gold colour. It was tricked out with an automatic transmission and power just about everything and was, in some circles, pretty typical of what was on the road at the time. The same with the house we haunted at the time, as seen in the header photo. It was easy to believe at the time that all was reasonably well with the World, and that whatever wasn’t right was going to be made right by our prodigious intelligence and will to make it right. It took decades to recover from the attitudinal fog that allowed us to continue unbridled consumption of goods and services as a way of life, but bits of it started to trickle through in the middle of the Sixties, and by the time Reagan was installed in the White House to begin his program of radical restructuring, there were glimmerings of awareness that we weren’t going to be able to carry on with “Fun, fun, fun ’til her daddy took the T-Bird away.” Somewhere it was written that living like there’s no tomorrow has turned from a lighthearted metaphor into a chilling impending reality, so the V-8 Ford is gone, in the sense that there are groups of people who have chosen to get off the bandwagon of He Who Dies With The Most Toys Wins, and to look for process to rebuild community, a rational economy and resilience, and to try to spread that message as a counterweight to the tsunami of consumerist messaging that permeates all levels of society. I would posit that we should also keep track of the seemingly meagre progress that we’ve made in eliminating the superfluous and harmful so that there is something to celebrate, but also as a way to measure what actions have been effective in preventing the further erosion of nature and society and contributing to reconstruction of a more just and sustainable model.

So Rare, The Truth, The Whole Truth, Nothing But The Truth

What We Don't See (Ane Need To Look For!)

What We Don’t See (Ane Need To Look For!)

 

Recent discussions of the road vs. rail in the face of the possible construction of a gateway facility on the Alberni Canal are all valid, but they miss a couple of points, or fail to give them the focus needed. What has come to light is that there has been a lot of discussion of public business without the public being invited to the discussion, and it’s particularly disturbing that it took months for the information to come out via a Freedom of Information request, stalled on several occasions, delayed from August, 2012 until June, 2013. If we subscribe to the idea that justice delayed is justice denied, we are surely, as members of the public, being shortchanged on the flow of information on which to base decisions. Disturbing is, indeed, a term we might apply to much of what is being done in our names. In a business-to-business negotiation, it may be appropriate to withhold information from the seat opposite, but as soon as the public good is engaged in the discussion, there is a need for those little words that get bandied about so frequently without really meaning anything: open, transparent and accountable. It isn’t only a question of who pays (taxpayers), but also of who benefits and whether taxpayers get good value for money spent, of whether projects are worthy to begin with, and of the general direction of policy.  The obfuscation, delay and misdirection seems to happen at all levels of government, and the links between local, regional, provincial and federal governments seem to become increasingly tangled and the smokescreen increasingly universal. Taxes are good when they serve the community, but toxic when misdirected, and the only way to know the difference is through access to quality information, all of it, and in a timely fashion.

The Latest Shot: The War Of/On Words

A poster supporting Snowden is displayed in Hong Kong

 

The following head appeared in the Toronto Star’s home page:

Ex-U.S. spy arrives in Moscow, seeks Ecuador asylum

A click through to the article does add the word whistleblower, but that aspect of Snowden’s actions seems easy to lose in the flurry of accusations about spying. It’s just the latest attempt to criminalize everything that doesn’t lie down and accept that the powers in Washington, London, Paris, Moscow, Beijing and, of course, Ottawa, get to do whatever they want in their quest to suppress their current bugaboo, terrorism, no matter how many times, how far and how fast they move the goalposts, and no matter that their actions might be creating the terrorists they seek to eliminate. It’s a great gig, like advertising the latest innovation in toothpaste to sell a ton more of the stuff, or creating a new restless leg syndrome to open up a new marketing niche. The adman parallel is appropriate because our politicians have, in effect, become shills for the same mercantile caste that has helped us build a society of overconsumption, waste, pollution, penury, austerity, faux democracy and illusion. So we have the Patriot Act and the Clear Skies Act, Families First, The Government of Canada Action Plan and a long and dreary trail of other misnomers for actions aimed at gutting the real economy and ensuring that power continues to reside with the puppet masters pulling with Wall Street, Bay Street and City strings. Snowden hasn’t referred to himself as a spy, and neither has he been convicted of such an offense, so perhaps it would be prudent to stick an “alleged” in there somewhere. Prudence in the press? only when it comes to turning over the real rocks to see what lies beneath.

Expectations

Powell

 

This young lady caused quite a stir last weekend when she made a bit of a hash of an answer to a question about the gap in remuneration between men and women. Sorry to say, why would we expect cogent and reflective answers to questions asked on the fly of a person whose intellect is clearly of secondary concern? Would we expect that she deliver a scholarly treatise on the development of the gender gap and a set of tangible and feasible steps to resolve a disparity that flies in the face of everything that we claim to support in our egalitarian and democratic society? Likely not, and perhaps we might have a quiet snicker into our popcorn bowl as we watch our beauty pageant, and perhaps we ought to muse on the way a life gets directed into public spectacle based on some idea of the perfection of the human body (and along the way, a thought about why we would be watching this stuff in the first place: no one watches, no sponsors, no pageants!). If the young lady in question mashes up a poor selection of pre-selected platitudes in a form that makes little sense, there’s likely a lack of general preparation in play, starting when she was a foetus and continuing through early childhood and school years, where it seems likely that athletics, cheerleading, modelling and film would have become increasingly important as it became apparent that she was not an ordinary physical specimen of a developing child/woman. Since we all are bathed in the same soup of sales and sex that produced this intellectual prodigy, we ought perhaps not be overly smug. After all, she could yet go into….

 

Clark

 

…politics.

 

Our Mutual Obessession

WebLoon

 

There was considerable splash in the regional media about the Congress being held at the University of Victoria with large numbers of delegates flooding the campus and the city as they attended sessions and debated questions in the Humanities and Social Sciences, those forgotten areas of study that have taken such a back seat to the core sciences, both theoretical and, ultimately, practical, engineering, math and business. First, we seem to have forgotten that all knowledge is connected, and that social, spiritual and ethical considerations are attached to all the results of all the research that fills institutions of higher learning, as well as government and commercial labs: we seems generally to have forgotten the lessons of the fable of Pandora’s Box, be it in relation to nuclear energy, the general use of fossil fuels, the implementation of genetic modifications, nanotechnology, as well as all the panoply of new communication devices. In all the reporting, there was little or nothing about the content of the Congress, about questions debated or about what resolutions might have united groups of delegates in the quest to further our understanding  of human and social phenomena. Instead, we have been told repeatedly how good this gathering is for the local economy, wherein the delegates bring money and spend it on lodging and meals, double-decker bus tours, kitschy souvenirs or weighty tomes from Munro’s, whale watching excursions, copious quantities of single malt whiskey, or newspapers that lack any substantive content. Pride of place amongst those interviewed is given to the chamber of commerce types, the hôteliers and restaurateurs, the boutiquiers and tour operators who will funnel this manna back into the pockets of Victorians in general. Hardly a word that there might be some benefit beyond the simple pecuniary, sad to say, and the question of our infatuation with monetary considerations needs to be one of the questions put front and centre.

Of course the same reporting applies to almost any community event worthy of mention, from social justice film festivals to minor hockey tournaments. Granted, some of these events are only spectacle and entertainment whose legacy will be a note in the statistical compilation of sports and entertainment superlatives as well as the money left behind by those who managed to be on the screen rather than camped in front of it. Does it not, however, seem that the benefits of community interaction might be worthy of a mention? What about the opportunity for our local Pee Wees to measure their mettle against that of their counterparts from over the hill and far away? The reports seem to be generally lacking any of these considerations as though no one among the reader-/listener-/viewership had any interest beyond personal gain. Sadly, that may be the case, given that we’ve been so thoroughly trained to focus on the material economy.

A piece on Northern Reflections by host Owen Gary lays out the ugly truth of the results of humanity serving the economy rather than the economy serving humanity (perhaps the rest of the biosphere is just collateral damage):

http://nor-re.blogspot.ca/2013/06/democracy-and-efficiency.html

Not only is Gray’s piece a telling slice of prose, some of the comments are revealing, as are Gray’s  replies. It’s a tonic for the tripe that passes for information in the press in our time.

Sidestepping Through Questions

confusion_3

 

Here’s a question for all us’ns:

What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?

I saw this gem as a minor headline on the Globe and Mail site yesterday, from whence it then disappeared, though a quick search turned up the article. It burned me up some, as these idiocies will, but I had other things to attend to and Geoff Dembicki over at the Tyee beat me to the acid comment fest (as probably did legions of others).

http://thetyee.ca/Blogs/TheHook/2013/05/30/exxon-mobil-resolution-climate-tillerson/

So what remains to be said is that we are getting as bad at paying attention to questions as we are at seeking answers and solutions, often the latter being something of a result of the former.

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers.

You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.

—Naguib Mahfouz

We ask questions all the time that are perhaps not the optimal questions to deal with situations that confront us. How, for instance, did pacifists deal with the prospect of World War II., supposedly a war to eliminate fascism and the threat of Nazi domination of the planet. Tough to do, largely because folks had already painted themselves into a corner with regard to the aggressive acts of the Axis powers, and, really, part of the problem is that the essential questions were no longer applicable because no one knew what to ask back around the Congress of Vienna in 1814-1815 (and better results might have stemmed from an even earlier questioning of direction and process). So here is Rex Tillerman asking us if we want to stall development in the poorer sections of the world so that we can reduce carbon and forestall the damaging effects of climate change: what he’s really saying is that those poor little brown people are really in the stew anyway, so why can’t we just party on. Climate refugees are already a reality, and even the operators of ski hills are beginning to see that they are seriously impaired in their ability to do business if the snow and ice is all gone on the mountains that they presently occupy.

Dr. Henry Morganthaler died yesterday. He probably thought he had the abortion question whipped several decades ago, but there are still many who don’t think it’s really a good move to be removing nascent life from a woman’s womb before it has a chance to defend itself, and others who will vigorously defend a woman’s right to choose what she does with her body. Heck, in my feeble mind, they’re both right, but, again, the timing of the question is wrong: ideally, the question of the survival of the child needs to be answered before conception, and to facilitate this decision, there needs to be easy availability of family planning, contraception (other than the Bush-era counselling to crossed knees) and counselling. I have no answer for the poor fetus resulting from forced sexual intercourse and better minds will see that there is an answer stemming from a better question, something on the order of looking at how we prevent rape in the first place, something on the order of a fundamental shift in attitudes toward relations of sex and power.

The same quandary applies to the debate about gun control. I’ve never owned a firearm and don’t intend to start any time soon, but I know lots of people who do own firearms, and most of them treat them with a sense of respectful caution and would never think of leaving them lying about in a way that might promote an accidental shooting, let alone have a thought of using a firearm to enforce their will or take revenge. However, we keep hearing of accidents where youngsters harm each other, either with their own firearms, or with carelessly stored firearms belonging to a responsible adult, and every once in awhile, someone loses it and goes on a rampage, shooting mostly random victims. Likely we need to be asking ourselves questions about people’s expectations, people’s perceptions of society, how we define success and how we participate in a live lived in a community, and particularly how we resolve conflicts.

The sad part of the topic is that Tillerman gets away with framing an argument in these terms, when really, it isn’t just the developing world that will suffer, but all of us. There was a line from a song by Luc de la Rochellière a couple of decades back called “Six Pieds Sur Terre” in which he expresses his fervent desire that Hell exist (Mon Dieu, promets-moi que l’enfer existe!) as a remedy for people who perpetrate the unspeakable crimes of warmongering and economic plunder, something that would certainly seem to apply to Tillerman and people of his ilk who are quite keen to add insult to the injury they have  done by sequestering the wealth of the world for their own benefit all out of proportion to any sane standard.

 

It’s Only Words, And Words Are All I Have…

Open Up The Gnarly Gates

Open Up The Gnarly Gates

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers is featuring a series of pretty upbeat ads showing how good the tat sands business is for the whole country, that, dadgummit, they fuel all our activities, and besides, they ensure that people all over the country benefit from jobs in manufacturing and transportation, not to mention spin-off jobs and what a wonderful world it is. You can see this all for yourself at

http://www.capp.ca/Pages/default.aspx

On the other hand, there is the statement issued, today, I think, by some egghead scientists, any one of whom has more credibility in the cuticle of the nail of his left pinky than the whole phalanx of oil patch shills. You can see it here:

http://mahb.stanford.edu/consensus-statement-from-global-scientists/

I can give you the short version, but I recommend you check out the statement and peruse the rather lengthy list of those who’ve signed on in support of the document: it basically tells us what some of the more forward-thinking writers have said for decades, that there are too many of us, that our patterns of consumption are unsupportable, that our living space is already seriously toxic, that we’ve managed to wipe out a huge swath of species, and that we’re staring down our own demise due to accelerated climate change. Of course, a lot of us are staring at our own demise with a blindfold securely covering whatever we normally use to see, and it comes as no surprise that a big part of the blindness is brought on by the smokescreen of don’t-worry-be-happy advertising thrown up by the same people who benefit short term from the destruction they intend to continue wreaking. the same people who have bought, on the cheap, governments who participate fully in the fraud that will kill us all. All parties on that side of the “equation” (a formula which, in this case, represents no equilibrium at all), when caught in a situation where the facts belie what they say, make up their own facts as though they alone can defy the laws of physics, and when they are caught in an outright fiction, their strategy is most often, to lie some more. It’s sad in a way that those who vote for Harper, Wall, Redford, Clark, et al, have so little idea of their share of responsibility for recreating a new version of the middle ages, but at least it will be short-lived as the rulers die in the same cataclysm that will envelope us all.

On Ralph’s Passing

image

 

From the moment life left the body of former Alberta Premier Ralph Klein, there arose such a clatter that, hummmm, no one seemed to know what was the matter. Here was a politician who ensured that everyone possible in Alberta bought the cowboy myth, adopted “Don’t Tread On Me” as a personal motto and “I’m all right, Jack” as a personal ethos, all the while shovelling boatloads of cash to oil interests both in and out of Alberta (and Canada). “He” paid off Alberta’s debt: that is to say, he was hailed as having engineered that feat of financial prestidigitation, but did it with Alberta tax dollars and very much at the expense of social programs. He also did it with cash out of the pockets of every Canadian driver, so, while we ought to give King Ralph credit for having the cojones to pull the con game on a grand scale, there is perhaps a little room in the outpouring of sentiment for some skepticism in regard to the monetary genius or the societal innovator as which he’s been hailed over the last few days. My reading (I get to do that here) is that he was not a particularly nice man, either, given to blustery pronouncements on those less fortunate or who would dare dissent and descending into outright loutishness at times. I get the feeling when I hear that a figure of this nature has moved on that I will have to avoid all media for a week or so until the balm of saccharin has run its course in the hope that another event of like nature and stature will not follow up too closely.

Lot’s Wife Syndrome

Don't Look Back?

Don’t Look Back?

We are witnesses to, as well as participants in an extraordinary set of circumstances as the much-touted end times fantasy becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy under the mandate of the greedy and ignorant (or wilfully malicious) managers of the world’s resources. This mythomania, based on what might likely have been men of ancient times with an agenda (more likely a set of agendas) so powerful that it persists to this day and continues to cloud minds all over the planet. Hence, we’re seeing a degradation of our living space that has already become fatal to thousands of species, and which threatens the existence of the rest of life on Earth. Certainly, there is much evidence of bad behaviour in many iterations of our current societies around the world, but nowhere is there more rampant corruption, greed and destructiveness than in the managerial levels, amongst those who would pass themselves off as the governors, including the puppet masters we rarely glimpse. It is a temptation to contemplate at great length the breadth and depth of the destruction being wrought on both our physical and social living spaces and, like Lot’s wife, to be come transfixed to the point of paralysis. There is a balance between being aware and being self-preserving, and a big part of bringing that balance into something constructive is to find what looks like a path forward, a manner of addressing crisis in a way that might produce results that help to redress some of the wrong being done.

 

Myths can be wondrous if we remember that they are metaphoric and can see current parallels. For instance, the Tower of Babel has some interesting current applications in the different levels of jargon that haunt the professional and political spheres, as well as the consistent failure of groups in conflict to analyze the roots of their conflict with an eye to stepping back from the brink of destruction. Of course, the destruction serves the interests of some, so the likelihood of finding clarity is considerably reduced and the probability of mayhem is greatly enhanced.

 

The story of Pandora’s Box is another tale that has serious implications for humanity in an age where we continue to unleash all manner of technology on ourselves without proper consideration of possible downstream toxicity. GMO tech is one of my favourite targets as everything that could go wrong with them appears to be doing so in a Murphian dystopian unravelling. We are also suffering from addiction to the same fossil fuels that seemed to make us so comfortable for the last dozen decades. Much of this is a result of doing what we can do instead of what we ought to do because it’s easier and more profitable (we can make it so) than working on the pressing problems of over-population, starvation, disease, degradation of the environment and whole societies based on inequity.

Kerryman Jokes

WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 08:  U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry (R) shakes hands with Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird (L) during a press conference after a bilateral meeting at the State Department February 8, 2013 in Washington, DC. Kerry said that the U.S. government continues to evaluate options to solve problematic relations with both the Syrian and Iranian governments.  (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

 

My mother’s family were all Keenans and O’Connells, Irish as Irish could be and generally proud enough of it to make it known to whoever would listen. We made a couple of trips to Ireland, in 1985 and 1993, including a visit to Daniel O’Connell’s grave. This was particularly interesting for a couple of reasons.

 

The first is that, like many venerated figures from history (we’re discussing the Irish Liberator here), the story behind the man is terribly interesting and not as unambiguous as what was presented to me in my youth. Mr. O’Connell really did oppose the union of Great Britain and Ireland and worked for the rights of Catholics to sit in Parliament, but it seems he was also a bit of a high lifer and not uninterested in forwarding the cause of Daniel O’Connell along with that of the downtrodden Irish. The Wikipedia article on him is enough to whet my appetite (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_O%27Connell).

 

The second part of this, the part that leads to an observation or two about John Kerry, and possibly about his Canadian counterpart, John Baird, is that our friends in County Sligo, including Bert, who hailed from Galway, were given to telling us myriad Kerryman jokes. The Irish are constantly the butt of jokes in England relating to mental feebleness, laziness, maladresse and a panoply of sins. Of course the Irish have to have someone as the butt of their jokes: rather than going abroad, they chose the men of Kerry in the far southwest corner of the Isle to stand as the object of their humour. So it turns out that the Liberator/Emancipator was from Carhirsiveen, a burg on the way out to the tip of the Ring of Kerry at Derry Nane. He was, therefore, a Kerryman through and through.

 

So…I caught a bit of a presser featuring Kerry and Baird and was horrified to hear Kerry mispronounce Kazakhstan and refer to the Prime Minister of Mexico in doing something of an imitation of the man to whom he lost the 2004 election (not lost if you follow the writings of the ever-incendiary Greg Palast). It isn’t that I miss Hilary (I winced at her platitudes and lies), but to come out of the gate so weakly hardly inspires confidence that the world is heading into calmer waters with Kerry at the helm. The fact that he chose to meet with Baird before getting to some of the other bagatelles that confront American “diplomacy” speaks more to the fossil fuel lobby than to any sentiment that Canada is really such a good pal. I have to say, too, that I tend to see in Mr. Baird an air of someone just arrived from a frat party. He has a ready tongue and an aggressive and overbearing demeanour that admits no debate. Should we be surprised when an appointee of this nature, one Patrick Brazeau, steps over the line? Was his role to be the First Nations representation in a party that militates to erase any distinction for First Nations and to remove all political and environmental barriers to unbridled exploitation of Canada’s resources? Whatever it was, and whatever Baird, Van Loan, Toews, Flaherty, Ambrose, MacKay, Kent and the like may say, the joke is mostly on us, the citizens of Canada from all ethnic backgrounds. Is what the current bunch in Ottawa doing to First Nations so different from what the English did in Ireland? Always worth a thought in passing.