Bone Heads
Post
08/06/07, Rick Salutin, Take it or they will come, Source.
18/06/07, Editorial, Imagine! Children playing in the trees, Source.
20/06/07, Joe Friesen, Free speech goes up in smoke at school, Source.
20/06/07, Martin Mittelstaedt, Scientist's endorsement of bisphenol A under review, Source.
19/06/07, Mark Hume, B.C. natives mourn missing eulachon, Source.
20/06/07, Editorial, The trouble with Canada's no-fly list, Source.
08/06/07, Rick Salutin, Take it or they will come, (Back).
On Monday, the city council of Sarnia, an Ontario border city of 80,000 with some oil refineries, voted 6-3 not to take $120,000 from the Harper government to fund a counterterrorism plan for their buses. Mayor Mike Bradley came out against the idea last Friday, calling it ludicrous. Sarnia's bridges and refineries are secured; this was just for the buses. Still, it was "tricky," he says, since no one wants to look unvigilant on terror. It was a one-day story with a bounce, maybe another half a day. But like everything, it connects to everything.
For me, it resonated because I recalled that a Sarnia native, 37-year-old Corporal Brent Poland, died in Afghanistan in April, and a Sarnia councillor had said, "I guess we've really learned the price of freedom." I wondered then what he could mean, or have thought he meant.
On Tuesday, CBC Radio's Carol Off, on As It Happens, asked the mayor if he'd have taken the money if it weren't for $40,000 that Sarnia would have had to kick in. He said no, because there was no way to "justify" it. Was that just fast footwork on his part? I don't think so. "Have you seen Bowling for Columbine?" he asked on the phone yesterday. It turns out he's the Canadian mayor in Michael Moore's film about how U.S. gun violence is rooted in a culture of fear. "Those things were linked even in 2002," when the film was made, he says. "It's the same climate of fear."
The way you fight fear, he thinks, is by striking at its real sources in people's lives, such as deprivation and inequality. You do that through social policies. Then he cites Bruce Springsteen - "no one wins unless everyone wins," as he had in the film. Springsteen is huge for him. He has served 19 years as mayor, he says, with Springsteen as "the soundtrack." When he met Toronto Mayor David Miller, he said it was like meeting a rock star. Mayor Miller asked which one, and he charitably answered, The Boss.
It's about taxes, too, he says, and using them intelligently. Last week, Quebec Premier Jean Charest voiced shock that Quebeckers massively oppose his plan to take almost $1-billion in federal money and give it back to them in tax breaks. They want it used for education and health care, instead. Only in Quebec, he moaned, as if his people are uniquely stunted. Yet, clearly for them, taxes aren't something you just want back; they're a resource to use for things you can't acquire individually - like Quebec's public, affordable child-care program, which is a role model for how to spend public money smartly. Anti-terror planning for small-town bus routes is not.
(Lethbridge Mayor Bob Tarleck, on the other hand, took the Harper bus money and told the CBC that any city that didn't do so has issued an "open invitation" to terrorists. Take It Or They Will Come. "If any terrorist is listening," he said, "I'd discourage them from coming to Lethbridge.")
But is there also a link between the death of Cpl. Poland (and of another local soldier last year in Afghanistan) and rejecting the bus money? Mayor Bradley says not. And the Poland family explicitly said they don't want his death to undermine the Canadian military mission there. So I'm the one making this link, which is, as the mayor might say, tricky.
Yet, I can't help wondering if people in Sarnia and elsewhere might start to ask whether they and their children are really paying the price of freedom, or rather of a whipped-up and ludicrous hysteria that contributes to and even creates what it fears most. We send our troops there, who mean well but seem to inevitably kill civilians and innocents, creating rage and rancour that lead to more Canadian deaths there and possibly here, too, as some think: Those Westerners will only leave us in peace if the terror reaches them at home. Was voting down the bus money an indirect (or unconscious) way to raise that delicate issue and avoid further Canadian deaths?
18/06/07, Editorial, Imagine! Children playing in the trees, (Back).
Bravely, if naively, an influential British accident-prevention group has urged people to tolerate more risk in children's play. It's brave because the prevailing wisdom is that risk needs to be stamped out at all costs for children. It's naive because the group's recommendation - that wild areas be built within parks so children can, say, climb trees, under supervision - could never happen under liability law. Not unless the trees were five feet tall and there was pea gravel or wood chips underneath.
But there is something wonderful in the idealism of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. Despite its name, the society does not wish to prevent every single accident. "We need to ask ourselves whether it is better for a child to break a wrist falling out of a tree or to get a repetitive strain wrist injury at a young age from using a computer or video games console." That is not just a figure of speech. British statistics show that nearly 600 children went to hospital in 2005 for repetitive strain injury, usually an affliction of office workers who spend their days at keyboards. Meanwhile, there has been a sharp drop in tree-climbing and bike-riding accidents over the past several years. Isn't safety wonderful?
The problem caused by risk aversion is in a sense invisible. Parks, schoolyards and ravines once filled with children now have a few scattered souls (except during organized activities), largely because children are not allowed out on their own because of the fear of pedophiles. A British study found that 43 per cent of parents do not believe children under 14 should be set loose out of doors unsupervised. The Royal Society reminds us of what our children have lost: the opportunity for unstructured play, especially in nature.
Children need to take reasonable risks to learn and grow. But there is a tyranny afoot, a tyranny of liability lawyers and timid decision-makers and overanxious parents - a tyranny exemplified by the Toronto District School Board's panicky decision to spend $6.3-million in 2000 to scrap the allegedly dangerous playgrounds in 170 schools and replace them with dull, metal contraptions. In the madness, even the simple tire swing was ruled a life-disabling risk.
The notion that play in the wild is essential to children is so simple, yet so forgotten, that the opening words of a study on play in nature by Norwegian education expert Ingunn Fjortoft feel like a revelation. "Modern societies seem to have neglected the value of such environments for the development of children and adolescents. A generation ago, children had access to wild lands and used them for exploring, challenging and exercising the skills needed to master a challenging landscape and unforeseen situations." Today's children may have electronic devices unknown to previous generations, but they have been deprived of something beautiful and valuable.
How valuable? The Norwegian study was set at a school beside a forest. Children 5 to 7 were split into two groups: one group played in the forest, the other on a traditional playground. In the forest, the children hid among the spruce trees, climbed the deciduous trees, chased each other in the open areas, built dens and played hide and seek among the shrubs. They climbed and leapt off a steep rocky wall and in winter slid on the hills. A big rock was "the Space Ship"; a place of pine cones was "the Cone War." (They threw the cones at one another.) A prickly juniper bush became a favourite home; the whole group of 12 children would be embraced within its "rooms." The study found that the natural playscape is important to the development of children's motor skills - co-ordination, speed, agility, power and balance. A traditional playground, not so much.
Bringing the wild into the mainstream is a lovely idea, even if doomed; the wild areas would soon be as sterile as the manmade ones. But the larger message should not be lost. In trying to protect children from reasonable risk, we do them no favours.
20/06/07, Joe Friesen, Free speech goes up in smoke at school, (Back).
Saskatchewan student's marijuana research spurs lockdown and suspension
WINNIPEG — It started months ago when Kieran King's high-school class heard a presentation about the dangers of drug use.
Kieran, a 15-year-old Grade 10 student in tiny Wawota, Sask., population 600, thought the presentation lacked credibility, so he did some research on the relative health risks of alcohol, tobacco and cannabis.
When he told some of his fellow students that cannabis seemed the least hazardous of the three, he set in motion a series of events that led to a school lockdown, a threat assessment involving the RCMP, a suspension and failing grades on his exams.
"It's all a bit overwhelming," his mother, Jo Anne Euler, said. "It's just totally bizarre."
She explained that her son is a compulsive researcher who tends to go on at length about what he reads on the Internet.
One student at Wawota Parkland School didn't want to hear Kieran's thoughts about marijuana, and complained to principal Susan Wilson.
The principal then called Kieran's mother because she was concerned he was advocating drug use, Ms. Euler said.
Ms. Euler told the principal her son is an A student who doesn't go out, doesn't smoke or drink, and isn't pushing drugs on other kids.
"She said 'Well, if he talks about it again, I will be calling the police,' " Ms. Euler said. "I told Kieran that and he said 'Mom, all I'm doing is sharing the facts.' "
Kieran felt his right to free speech was being trampled, so he enlisted the help of the Saskatchewan Marijuana Party.
Together they planned a school walkout for free speech, scheduled for 11 a.m. last Tuesday, where free chocolate chip hemp seed cookies would be handed out.
But just before 11 that day, the principal announced that the school was a closed campus and that no one was allowed outside.
When several students tried to leave anyway, teachers barred the doors and ordered them back to class, Ms. Euler said. Kieran and his younger brother Lucas defied and joined a ragtag group of five protesters standing across from the school holding placards.
The principal then ordered a lockdown to ensure the safety of students. The RCMP raced to the scene, only to find a small, peaceful protest.
Kieran's mother was again called to the school and told that both her sons had been suspended for three days. Later that day, the school conducted a threat assessment on Kieran with the help of the RCMP and school division counsellors, Ms. Euler said.
"In the letter I got about the threat assessment [the principal] had documented five or six times in the last year that Kieran had talked to some kid about marijuana - not one of those times was Kieran ever talked to or was I ever talked to. Were they documented before or was it a witch hunt after the fact where they said 'Let's try to remember all the times Kieran talked about marijuana?' "
Don Rempel, director of education in the South East Cornerstone School Division, said the principal acted appropriately.
"The school had received complaints that the student was promoting the use of marijuana as an alternative to alcohol or sharing information around marijuana use," Mr. Rempel said, adding that Kieran overreacted to the principal's simple request.
Kieran is now in Shanghai where he will spend the summer learning Mandarin and working as an English tutor. He had scheduled his exams early in order to accommodate his trip, but the suspension meant he couldn't attend school to write the exams. As a result, he got a mark of zero on each paper. His marks were high enough to pass, but instead of getting 85 or 90, he'll get 55 or 60, his mother said, which could hurt his chances of a university scholarship.
She is appealing to the school board to allow Kieran to write his exams in September.
20/06/07, Martin Mittelstaedt, Scientist's endorsement of bisphenol A under review, (Back).
No more health risk than tofu, doctor says
The head of the Health Canada scientific team studying the safety of bisphenol A has been abruptly reassigned, while the department investigates claims he is too biased in favour of the chemical to objectively analyze it.
Speaking at a medical conference in the U.S. in March, Mark Richardson, manager of Health Canada's contaminated-sites division, endorsed the use of bisphenol A after he had been selected to undertake a review of the health impacts of the chemical.
He indicated at the conference that he personally didn't think bisphenol A presented a danger, extolled the virtues of its use in dentistry and dismissed possible health threats posed by exposures to the substance, comparing it to eating tofu.
The Globe and Mail raised questions about Dr. Richardson's objectivity yesterday morning with Health Canada. Shortly afterward, Health Minister Tony Clement's office asked for an investigation into Dr. Richardson's remarks and suitability to work on the review. The investigation will be conducted by the department's chief scientist, Wendy Sexsmith.
"We are aware of the concern that has been communicated to the department," Paul Glover, director-general of the department's consumer safety branch, said in explaining the action.
Bisphenol A is one of the most controversial chemicals in widespread use because it has been found to mimic the female hormone estrogen. Almost all Canadians have involuntary exposure to it because it is used in such items as hard plastic baby bottles, resins lining food cans and dental composite materials used in white-coloured fillings.
Traces of bisphenol A leach from consumer products into people. There is a growing body of scientific research using animal experiments that link exposures to health problems, such as abnormal breast tissue growth and enlarged prostates.
At the conference, Dr. Richardson dismissed these concerns, saying "yes, bisphenol A is estrogenic, it interacts with estrogen receptors, but a myriad of other things do as well, including proteins in tofu," which he said is recommended by some as a treatment for menopause. He also said bisphenol A exposures are "so low as to be totally inconsequential, in my view."
However, there have been more than a dozen studies in laboratory animals since 1999 finding adverse effects from bisphenol A at levels below Canada's current standard. One study, done in 2005, found the chemical able to change breast tissue in ways that predispose it to cancer - at a dose 1,000 times lower than Canada's limit.
Tofu, and many products from plants, contain estrogen-like chemicals and there is scientific uncertainty about their possible health effects.
The federal government is reviewing the safety of 200 potentially dangerous synthetic chemicals - including bisphenol A - that were used in the 1980s but were grandfathered from detailed safety assessments when Canada adopted its first comprehensive pollution legislation.
Bisphenol A is one of the largest volume chemicals made in the world, and any decision by Ottawa to restrict it would have major economic impacts if other countries follow. Last month, four major bisphenol A manufacturers, Dow Chemical Co., GE Plastics, Bayer MaterialScience, and Sunoco Chemicals, hired Tactix Government Consulting, a well-placed Ottawa-based lobbying firm, to help them respond to the review.
The industry disputes assertions that bisphenol A is dangerous.
Dr. Richardson is an expert on the dangers of amalgam fillings, or those containing mercury. He was a guest speaker at the conference, held in Tucson and organized by the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology, a Florida-based medical group concerned about dental material safety.
In his talk, Dr. Richardson conveyed the thinking within Health Canada on the grandfathered chemicals, saying they weren't acutely toxic because "we've been using them for a few decades and we don't seem to have a trail of dead bodies around."
However, he added that the chemicals weren't studied in depth. "I hate to say it but we're a big pool of guinea pigs with a lot of these things."
Dr. Richardson said he is convinced that dental composites using bisphenol A are safer than amalgam. He personally felt so strongly about this that he had his 15 amalgam fillings replaced with composites.
19/06/07, Mark Hume, B.C. natives mourn missing eulachon, (Back).
BELLA COOLA, B.C. — When the Nuxalk band gathers on the banks of the Bella Coola River, it is usually to celebrate the blessings of nature. But this spring, instead of singing to welcome back the salmon or casting eagle feathers on the water in thanks, tribes from the central coast of British Columbia gathered to hold a Feast of Shame and discuss a growing crisis.
At the gathering, elders from 10 B.C. bands, including the Nuxalk (pronounced new-hawk), Kitasoo, Oweekeno and Haisla, spoke with anger and sadness about the loss of a small, herring-like fish, known as eulachon, that until recently returned in such numbers they turned the river black.
In 1995, when the last big run came in, there were millions of eulachon, so many they spilled out onto the gravel bars in writhing waves. Since then, the river has been nearly empty of fish.
“Every year we wait. Every year the seals, the sea gulls, the ducks, the swans, the geese, they sit along the river waiting,” said Oweekeno Chief Frank Johnson.
There has been a coastwide collapse of eulachon over the past decade, but in few places has it been as dramatic as in the Bella Coola Valley, where the run disappeared almost overnight.
Rudolph Ryser, chair of the Center For World Indigenous Studies, a U.S.-based, non-profit research and education organization, said the loss of eulachon is culturally devastating for tribes throughout the Pacific Northwest. “It is essential to the people of this part of the world … the eulachon is essential to life.”
At the “crisis gathering,” as it was called in posters tacked up on telephone poles in Bella Coola, 400 kilometres north of Vancouver, elders told stories about the days of plenty and issued a plea for help to government. They want scientists to find out why the eulachon have gone from B.C.'s coast – and they want a fisheries restoration project to bring back the runs of small, silver fish prized for their rich oil.
Native leaders are discussing sending delegations to Victoria, Ottawa and the United Nations to draw attention to their plight. Without eulachon, they feel a culture that has survived 12,000 years is crumbling.
“It is very painful when you lose something that has been the backbone of your people,” said Percy Starr, hereditary chief of the Kitasoo band. “… It's about more than the loss of a resource. It's about the loss of a culture. The loss of eulachon is spiritual … this is the foundation of a people.”
Looking back
Spencer Siwallace is 28, a newly elected Nuxalk chief who recently returned to Bella Coola with a university degree in forestry and a fierce desire to change things. He opened the gathering, telling of sitting by the river recently and dreaming of a boy running to the water to get a bucket of eulachon for dinner.
“The river wasn't clear … it was black with eulachon. Dozens of families were scooping eulachon with their bare hands … they looked so happy, so healthy, so content.
“I opened my eyes and looked out at the barren river. There were no children catching eulachon with their bare hands, no families working together … there were no eulachon. The camps were all deserted. The stink houses and cooking boxes were collapsed and overgrown. As I sat there I realized I had been looking into the past.
“I was the boy sent down with the bucket to catch dinner,” he said, before lowering his head to sob as about 100 elders and chiefs looked on silent and grim-faced.
They took turns then, passing a microphone around the gymnasium in the community centre, trying to describe the magnitude of the damage. Gwen Pollard said she was raised on eulachon oil, which was used in bread-making and eaten daily as a dipping sauce, but now there is so little found in the village people guard it like gold.
“I have three little kids who have never seen an eulachon,” she said, questioning whether the lack of fish oil in their diet is making people sick. “If we get it back here maybe our communities, our nations will be healthy.”
“It is a real big disaster,” said Glenn Clellaman, who had just come in from fishing the Bella Coola River for spring salmon. But because of high water, and declining stocks, there were so few caught the Nuxalk could not serve salmon, the traditional main course at feasts.
Mr. Clellaman said the riverbanks had once been “filled with small, little houses. We called them stink boxes and that's where we fermented the eulachons. You look there now and … it's bare, eh. But you still see a little bit of the remains of the boxes left and now it's overgrown and dying.”
“We can no longer tolerate what we have been through,” said Ross Neasloss, Chief of Kitasoo from Klemtu, a small village on Swindle Island, north of Bella Coola. He, like many others, blamed commercial fishing for reducing not only the stocks of eulachon, but also salmon, herring, abalone and halibut.
“Our pantries are empty,” he said.
Keystone species
Anthropologists and native-rights lawyers describe eulachon as a “cultural keystone species” vital to the identity of native people.
When Alexander Mackenzie became the first European explorer to cross North America over land to the Pacific in 1793, he followed the grease trail, a native trade route used to get oil from the coast to east of the Rocky Mountains.
Early missionaries gave eulachon religious currency by noting it returned at Easter, and some native bands referred to it as “the saviour fish,” because it ended months of winter hunger.
“It is like a spring awakening,” Derek Snow, a speaker at the Feast of Shame, said of the eulachon's arrival. “Like we are sleeping all winter and we wake up … and the first thing we look at is the river.”
At the feast or gathering – so named to reflect shame on the government – one speaker recalled how everyone once ran from church to fish in their Sunday best when the eulachon arrived.
Eulachon thrived until relatively recently and then, about a decade ago, began to decline from California to Alaska.
Few rivers have had as stunning a drop as the Bella Coola, where a run of several million fish fell to an estimated 1,200. Researchers netted only 50 this year.
Megan Moody, a young Nuxalk woman working on her masters in the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia, said the Bella Coola run collapsed in 1996, the same year the federal government opened a shrimp trawl fishery in Queen Charlotte Sound.
Bella Coola is on the mainland at the head of a deep fjord that leads to Queen Charlotte Sound. The shrimp trawl nets took an estimated 90 tonnes of eulachon on the central coast that year. While the shrimp fishery was later closed in Queen Charlotte Sound, it has continued in Bella Coola and Rivers Inlets.
Ms. Moody said the impact of the trawl fishery, climate change, increased predation and alterations to river hydrology, caused by logging, are all suspects in stock declines.
She said shrimp trawlers off the west coast of Vancouver Island are netting eulachon as bycatch, leading to estimates there are thousands of tonnes of juvenile fish at sea. But that doesn't square with the empty rivers. “Why are they not coming back? What's going on here? Are these estimates incorrect?” she asked.
“It's an enigma,” said Doug Hay, a retired Fisheries and Oceans Canada scientist.
The impact of the shrimp fishery isn't understood because eulachon, which have no commercial value, haven't been studied enough, said Mr. Hay, who was “shocked” to hear trawling is still allowed in inlets around Bella Coola.
Mr. Hay said his best advice for restoring eulachon runs is simple: “Make sure they have good spawning habitat … make sure they have good marine habitat and … stop killing them at sea.”
Asked what an eulachon recovery program might cost, Mr. Hay gave a rough estimate of $650,000 annually to work on B.C.'s 13 eulachon rivers.
Krista Robertson, a Victoria-based lawyer who specializes in native-rights cases, said tribes could have grounds for suing the federal government or seeking a judicial review of the shrimp trawl fishery.
“Legal action is not the answer necessarily … but being ready to litigate can get you action,” she said. “I don't think it would be hard to prove a profound native dependence on eulachon.”
Indeed, the courts may soon hear that argument. Kevin Doyle, a Victoria lawyer, said in a recent e-mail that he has been instructed by the Komoyue band on northern Vancouver Island to pursue legal action against the federal and provincial governments for the loss of eulachon from traditional diets.
Human error
During a break in the gathering, Lance Nelson and his brother, Chris, who both teach Nuxalk language and culture at the local school, walked to the banks of the Bella Coola River to beat drums and sing.
Below where they chanted, the Nelson family stink house was slowly being consumed by vegetation after nearly a decade of disuse. Inside the stooped building were old, broken nets and unused storage jars.
“The reason we don't have eulachon in our river is clearly human error,” Lance Nelson said. “The river is our mother. She feeds us … Through prayer we may get these gifts back.”
Below him the empty Bella Coola River flowed past. “We used to fish for eulachon right there,” he said. “No more.”
20/06/07, Editorial, The trouble with Canada's no-fly list, (Back).
Ottawa says there are no liberty concerns and therefore no constitutional concerns in its spanking new no-fly list of 500 to 2,000 names, which went into effect Monday.
No liberty concerns? As soon as any one of those 500 to 2,000 people shows up at an airport and tries to pick up a boarding pass, alarms will go off (in a metaphorical sense) and the RCMP and local police will rush in (in an actual sense). Of course there are liberty concerns. In the United States, people on the no-fly list who try to fly may be detained for hours. A man named Robert Johnson (one of the 12 hapless Robert Johnsons assembled by a CBS News team because a Robert Johnson is on the no-fly list) was strip-searched. Of course there are constitutional concerns.
At its most basic, the constitutional concern is this: The government of Canada is now keeping a list that it provides to private companies (the airlines) and other countries of people deemed too dangerous to fly. The people have no right to challenge their inclusion before their names are put on the list. They are not even entitled to be notified that their names are on this list. Through no fault of their own, in some cases, they may face a public humiliation at the airport. Who knows what they may face in other countries?
At first glance, the reason these individuals aren't told their names are on the list seems obvious and sensible. If they were told, they would know that the RCMP and CSIS were on to them. If they knew, they might take extra steps to evade detection.
But wait. Those deemed dangerous (are there 2,000 suspected terrorists in Canada?) can easily find out whether they're on the list. All they have to do is try to board an airplane. The no-fly list may in fact serve to alert the bad guys that they're being watched.
The answer to that problem is to keep the most dangerous people off the no-fly list. There is evidence this has happened in the United States. The 11 British suspects now facing charges in a plot to blow up U.S. airliners were not on the U.S. list, according to CBS News, though they had apparently been under surveillance for a year. The reason: The FBI and the CIA didn't want their names circulating among airport workers in other countries, in case word leaked back to the suspects. Brilliant. Except, what good is a no-fly list if the truly dangerous aren't on it?
The United States will no doubt be pleased that Canada has a no-fly list. The question is whether pleasing the U.S. is worth the price. While Ottawa hasn't revealed the exact cost, it allocated $404-million over two years in the 2006 budget to pay for "programs to enhance border security, national emergency response, a no-fly list and arming border guards." Any money put into a no-fly list is money that isn't going into RCMP and CSIS boots on the ground to track the terrorists. "Presently we are very short of personnel," a senior Mountie in charge of a national security team told a Senate committee this week. It's doubtful anyone will be accountable for the money spent on the no-fly list. It will be difficult to know whether the money is being spent to any effect at all.
Are there less intrusive, more effective means to ensure airplane safety? Police can arrest the most dangerous people on the list if they have broken or plotted to break any laws. They can track suspects and tap their phones.
In the end, people are happy if airplanes don't explode, and most would say they would pay a heavy price in dollars and in loss of liberty (especially someone else's) to keep flying safe. With the no-fly list, however, people will pay dearly for uncertain benefits.
(Back)
18/06/07, Editorial, Imagine! Children playing in the trees, Source.
20/06/07, Joe Friesen, Free speech goes up in smoke at school, Source.
20/06/07, Martin Mittelstaedt, Scientist's endorsement of bisphenol A under review, Source.
19/06/07, Mark Hume, B.C. natives mourn missing eulachon, Source.
20/06/07, Editorial, The trouble with Canada's no-fly list, Source.
08/06/07, Rick Salutin, Take it or they will come, (Back).
On Monday, the city council of Sarnia, an Ontario border city of 80,000 with some oil refineries, voted 6-3 not to take $120,000 from the Harper government to fund a counterterrorism plan for their buses. Mayor Mike Bradley came out against the idea last Friday, calling it ludicrous. Sarnia's bridges and refineries are secured; this was just for the buses. Still, it was "tricky," he says, since no one wants to look unvigilant on terror. It was a one-day story with a bounce, maybe another half a day. But like everything, it connects to everything.
For me, it resonated because I recalled that a Sarnia native, 37-year-old Corporal Brent Poland, died in Afghanistan in April, and a Sarnia councillor had said, "I guess we've really learned the price of freedom." I wondered then what he could mean, or have thought he meant.
On Tuesday, CBC Radio's Carol Off, on As It Happens, asked the mayor if he'd have taken the money if it weren't for $40,000 that Sarnia would have had to kick in. He said no, because there was no way to "justify" it. Was that just fast footwork on his part? I don't think so. "Have you seen Bowling for Columbine?" he asked on the phone yesterday. It turns out he's the Canadian mayor in Michael Moore's film about how U.S. gun violence is rooted in a culture of fear. "Those things were linked even in 2002," when the film was made, he says. "It's the same climate of fear."
The way you fight fear, he thinks, is by striking at its real sources in people's lives, such as deprivation and inequality. You do that through social policies. Then he cites Bruce Springsteen - "no one wins unless everyone wins," as he had in the film. Springsteen is huge for him. He has served 19 years as mayor, he says, with Springsteen as "the soundtrack." When he met Toronto Mayor David Miller, he said it was like meeting a rock star. Mayor Miller asked which one, and he charitably answered, The Boss.
It's about taxes, too, he says, and using them intelligently. Last week, Quebec Premier Jean Charest voiced shock that Quebeckers massively oppose his plan to take almost $1-billion in federal money and give it back to them in tax breaks. They want it used for education and health care, instead. Only in Quebec, he moaned, as if his people are uniquely stunted. Yet, clearly for them, taxes aren't something you just want back; they're a resource to use for things you can't acquire individually - like Quebec's public, affordable child-care program, which is a role model for how to spend public money smartly. Anti-terror planning for small-town bus routes is not.
(Lethbridge Mayor Bob Tarleck, on the other hand, took the Harper bus money and told the CBC that any city that didn't do so has issued an "open invitation" to terrorists. Take It Or They Will Come. "If any terrorist is listening," he said, "I'd discourage them from coming to Lethbridge.")
But is there also a link between the death of Cpl. Poland (and of another local soldier last year in Afghanistan) and rejecting the bus money? Mayor Bradley says not. And the Poland family explicitly said they don't want his death to undermine the Canadian military mission there. So I'm the one making this link, which is, as the mayor might say, tricky.
Yet, I can't help wondering if people in Sarnia and elsewhere might start to ask whether they and their children are really paying the price of freedom, or rather of a whipped-up and ludicrous hysteria that contributes to and even creates what it fears most. We send our troops there, who mean well but seem to inevitably kill civilians and innocents, creating rage and rancour that lead to more Canadian deaths there and possibly here, too, as some think: Those Westerners will only leave us in peace if the terror reaches them at home. Was voting down the bus money an indirect (or unconscious) way to raise that delicate issue and avoid further Canadian deaths?
18/06/07, Editorial, Imagine! Children playing in the trees, (Back).
Bravely, if naively, an influential British accident-prevention group has urged people to tolerate more risk in children's play. It's brave because the prevailing wisdom is that risk needs to be stamped out at all costs for children. It's naive because the group's recommendation - that wild areas be built within parks so children can, say, climb trees, under supervision - could never happen under liability law. Not unless the trees were five feet tall and there was pea gravel or wood chips underneath.
But there is something wonderful in the idealism of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. Despite its name, the society does not wish to prevent every single accident. "We need to ask ourselves whether it is better for a child to break a wrist falling out of a tree or to get a repetitive strain wrist injury at a young age from using a computer or video games console." That is not just a figure of speech. British statistics show that nearly 600 children went to hospital in 2005 for repetitive strain injury, usually an affliction of office workers who spend their days at keyboards. Meanwhile, there has been a sharp drop in tree-climbing and bike-riding accidents over the past several years. Isn't safety wonderful?
The problem caused by risk aversion is in a sense invisible. Parks, schoolyards and ravines once filled with children now have a few scattered souls (except during organized activities), largely because children are not allowed out on their own because of the fear of pedophiles. A British study found that 43 per cent of parents do not believe children under 14 should be set loose out of doors unsupervised. The Royal Society reminds us of what our children have lost: the opportunity for unstructured play, especially in nature.
Children need to take reasonable risks to learn and grow. But there is a tyranny afoot, a tyranny of liability lawyers and timid decision-makers and overanxious parents - a tyranny exemplified by the Toronto District School Board's panicky decision to spend $6.3-million in 2000 to scrap the allegedly dangerous playgrounds in 170 schools and replace them with dull, metal contraptions. In the madness, even the simple tire swing was ruled a life-disabling risk.
The notion that play in the wild is essential to children is so simple, yet so forgotten, that the opening words of a study on play in nature by Norwegian education expert Ingunn Fjortoft feel like a revelation. "Modern societies seem to have neglected the value of such environments for the development of children and adolescents. A generation ago, children had access to wild lands and used them for exploring, challenging and exercising the skills needed to master a challenging landscape and unforeseen situations." Today's children may have electronic devices unknown to previous generations, but they have been deprived of something beautiful and valuable.
How valuable? The Norwegian study was set at a school beside a forest. Children 5 to 7 were split into two groups: one group played in the forest, the other on a traditional playground. In the forest, the children hid among the spruce trees, climbed the deciduous trees, chased each other in the open areas, built dens and played hide and seek among the shrubs. They climbed and leapt off a steep rocky wall and in winter slid on the hills. A big rock was "the Space Ship"; a place of pine cones was "the Cone War." (They threw the cones at one another.) A prickly juniper bush became a favourite home; the whole group of 12 children would be embraced within its "rooms." The study found that the natural playscape is important to the development of children's motor skills - co-ordination, speed, agility, power and balance. A traditional playground, not so much.
Bringing the wild into the mainstream is a lovely idea, even if doomed; the wild areas would soon be as sterile as the manmade ones. But the larger message should not be lost. In trying to protect children from reasonable risk, we do them no favours.
20/06/07, Joe Friesen, Free speech goes up in smoke at school, (Back).
Saskatchewan student's marijuana research spurs lockdown and suspension
WINNIPEG — It started months ago when Kieran King's high-school class heard a presentation about the dangers of drug use.
Kieran, a 15-year-old Grade 10 student in tiny Wawota, Sask., population 600, thought the presentation lacked credibility, so he did some research on the relative health risks of alcohol, tobacco and cannabis.
When he told some of his fellow students that cannabis seemed the least hazardous of the three, he set in motion a series of events that led to a school lockdown, a threat assessment involving the RCMP, a suspension and failing grades on his exams.
"It's all a bit overwhelming," his mother, Jo Anne Euler, said. "It's just totally bizarre."
She explained that her son is a compulsive researcher who tends to go on at length about what he reads on the Internet.
One student at Wawota Parkland School didn't want to hear Kieran's thoughts about marijuana, and complained to principal Susan Wilson.
The principal then called Kieran's mother because she was concerned he was advocating drug use, Ms. Euler said.
Ms. Euler told the principal her son is an A student who doesn't go out, doesn't smoke or drink, and isn't pushing drugs on other kids.
"She said 'Well, if he talks about it again, I will be calling the police,' " Ms. Euler said. "I told Kieran that and he said 'Mom, all I'm doing is sharing the facts.' "
Kieran felt his right to free speech was being trampled, so he enlisted the help of the Saskatchewan Marijuana Party.
Together they planned a school walkout for free speech, scheduled for 11 a.m. last Tuesday, where free chocolate chip hemp seed cookies would be handed out.
But just before 11 that day, the principal announced that the school was a closed campus and that no one was allowed outside.
When several students tried to leave anyway, teachers barred the doors and ordered them back to class, Ms. Euler said. Kieran and his younger brother Lucas defied and joined a ragtag group of five protesters standing across from the school holding placards.
The principal then ordered a lockdown to ensure the safety of students. The RCMP raced to the scene, only to find a small, peaceful protest.
Kieran's mother was again called to the school and told that both her sons had been suspended for three days. Later that day, the school conducted a threat assessment on Kieran with the help of the RCMP and school division counsellors, Ms. Euler said.
"In the letter I got about the threat assessment [the principal] had documented five or six times in the last year that Kieran had talked to some kid about marijuana - not one of those times was Kieran ever talked to or was I ever talked to. Were they documented before or was it a witch hunt after the fact where they said 'Let's try to remember all the times Kieran talked about marijuana?' "
Don Rempel, director of education in the South East Cornerstone School Division, said the principal acted appropriately.
"The school had received complaints that the student was promoting the use of marijuana as an alternative to alcohol or sharing information around marijuana use," Mr. Rempel said, adding that Kieran overreacted to the principal's simple request.
Kieran is now in Shanghai where he will spend the summer learning Mandarin and working as an English tutor. He had scheduled his exams early in order to accommodate his trip, but the suspension meant he couldn't attend school to write the exams. As a result, he got a mark of zero on each paper. His marks were high enough to pass, but instead of getting 85 or 90, he'll get 55 or 60, his mother said, which could hurt his chances of a university scholarship.
She is appealing to the school board to allow Kieran to write his exams in September.
20/06/07, Martin Mittelstaedt, Scientist's endorsement of bisphenol A under review, (Back).
No more health risk than tofu, doctor says
The head of the Health Canada scientific team studying the safety of bisphenol A has been abruptly reassigned, while the department investigates claims he is too biased in favour of the chemical to objectively analyze it.
Speaking at a medical conference in the U.S. in March, Mark Richardson, manager of Health Canada's contaminated-sites division, endorsed the use of bisphenol A after he had been selected to undertake a review of the health impacts of the chemical.
He indicated at the conference that he personally didn't think bisphenol A presented a danger, extolled the virtues of its use in dentistry and dismissed possible health threats posed by exposures to the substance, comparing it to eating tofu.
The Globe and Mail raised questions about Dr. Richardson's objectivity yesterday morning with Health Canada. Shortly afterward, Health Minister Tony Clement's office asked for an investigation into Dr. Richardson's remarks and suitability to work on the review. The investigation will be conducted by the department's chief scientist, Wendy Sexsmith.
"We are aware of the concern that has been communicated to the department," Paul Glover, director-general of the department's consumer safety branch, said in explaining the action.
Bisphenol A is one of the most controversial chemicals in widespread use because it has been found to mimic the female hormone estrogen. Almost all Canadians have involuntary exposure to it because it is used in such items as hard plastic baby bottles, resins lining food cans and dental composite materials used in white-coloured fillings.
Traces of bisphenol A leach from consumer products into people. There is a growing body of scientific research using animal experiments that link exposures to health problems, such as abnormal breast tissue growth and enlarged prostates.
At the conference, Dr. Richardson dismissed these concerns, saying "yes, bisphenol A is estrogenic, it interacts with estrogen receptors, but a myriad of other things do as well, including proteins in tofu," which he said is recommended by some as a treatment for menopause. He also said bisphenol A exposures are "so low as to be totally inconsequential, in my view."
However, there have been more than a dozen studies in laboratory animals since 1999 finding adverse effects from bisphenol A at levels below Canada's current standard. One study, done in 2005, found the chemical able to change breast tissue in ways that predispose it to cancer - at a dose 1,000 times lower than Canada's limit.
Tofu, and many products from plants, contain estrogen-like chemicals and there is scientific uncertainty about their possible health effects.
The federal government is reviewing the safety of 200 potentially dangerous synthetic chemicals - including bisphenol A - that were used in the 1980s but were grandfathered from detailed safety assessments when Canada adopted its first comprehensive pollution legislation.
Bisphenol A is one of the largest volume chemicals made in the world, and any decision by Ottawa to restrict it would have major economic impacts if other countries follow. Last month, four major bisphenol A manufacturers, Dow Chemical Co., GE Plastics, Bayer MaterialScience, and Sunoco Chemicals, hired Tactix Government Consulting, a well-placed Ottawa-based lobbying firm, to help them respond to the review.
The industry disputes assertions that bisphenol A is dangerous.
Dr. Richardson is an expert on the dangers of amalgam fillings, or those containing mercury. He was a guest speaker at the conference, held in Tucson and organized by the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology, a Florida-based medical group concerned about dental material safety.
In his talk, Dr. Richardson conveyed the thinking within Health Canada on the grandfathered chemicals, saying they weren't acutely toxic because "we've been using them for a few decades and we don't seem to have a trail of dead bodies around."
However, he added that the chemicals weren't studied in depth. "I hate to say it but we're a big pool of guinea pigs with a lot of these things."
Dr. Richardson said he is convinced that dental composites using bisphenol A are safer than amalgam. He personally felt so strongly about this that he had his 15 amalgam fillings replaced with composites.
19/06/07, Mark Hume, B.C. natives mourn missing eulachon, (Back).
BELLA COOLA, B.C. — When the Nuxalk band gathers on the banks of the Bella Coola River, it is usually to celebrate the blessings of nature. But this spring, instead of singing to welcome back the salmon or casting eagle feathers on the water in thanks, tribes from the central coast of British Columbia gathered to hold a Feast of Shame and discuss a growing crisis.
At the gathering, elders from 10 B.C. bands, including the Nuxalk (pronounced new-hawk), Kitasoo, Oweekeno and Haisla, spoke with anger and sadness about the loss of a small, herring-like fish, known as eulachon, that until recently returned in such numbers they turned the river black.
In 1995, when the last big run came in, there were millions of eulachon, so many they spilled out onto the gravel bars in writhing waves. Since then, the river has been nearly empty of fish.
“Every year we wait. Every year the seals, the sea gulls, the ducks, the swans, the geese, they sit along the river waiting,” said Oweekeno Chief Frank Johnson.
There has been a coastwide collapse of eulachon over the past decade, but in few places has it been as dramatic as in the Bella Coola Valley, where the run disappeared almost overnight.
Rudolph Ryser, chair of the Center For World Indigenous Studies, a U.S.-based, non-profit research and education organization, said the loss of eulachon is culturally devastating for tribes throughout the Pacific Northwest. “It is essential to the people of this part of the world … the eulachon is essential to life.”
At the “crisis gathering,” as it was called in posters tacked up on telephone poles in Bella Coola, 400 kilometres north of Vancouver, elders told stories about the days of plenty and issued a plea for help to government. They want scientists to find out why the eulachon have gone from B.C.'s coast – and they want a fisheries restoration project to bring back the runs of small, silver fish prized for their rich oil.
Native leaders are discussing sending delegations to Victoria, Ottawa and the United Nations to draw attention to their plight. Without eulachon, they feel a culture that has survived 12,000 years is crumbling.
“It is very painful when you lose something that has been the backbone of your people,” said Percy Starr, hereditary chief of the Kitasoo band. “… It's about more than the loss of a resource. It's about the loss of a culture. The loss of eulachon is spiritual … this is the foundation of a people.”
Looking back
Spencer Siwallace is 28, a newly elected Nuxalk chief who recently returned to Bella Coola with a university degree in forestry and a fierce desire to change things. He opened the gathering, telling of sitting by the river recently and dreaming of a boy running to the water to get a bucket of eulachon for dinner.
“The river wasn't clear … it was black with eulachon. Dozens of families were scooping eulachon with their bare hands … they looked so happy, so healthy, so content.
“I opened my eyes and looked out at the barren river. There were no children catching eulachon with their bare hands, no families working together … there were no eulachon. The camps were all deserted. The stink houses and cooking boxes were collapsed and overgrown. As I sat there I realized I had been looking into the past.
“I was the boy sent down with the bucket to catch dinner,” he said, before lowering his head to sob as about 100 elders and chiefs looked on silent and grim-faced.
They took turns then, passing a microphone around the gymnasium in the community centre, trying to describe the magnitude of the damage. Gwen Pollard said she was raised on eulachon oil, which was used in bread-making and eaten daily as a dipping sauce, but now there is so little found in the village people guard it like gold.
“I have three little kids who have never seen an eulachon,” she said, questioning whether the lack of fish oil in their diet is making people sick. “If we get it back here maybe our communities, our nations will be healthy.”
“It is a real big disaster,” said Glenn Clellaman, who had just come in from fishing the Bella Coola River for spring salmon. But because of high water, and declining stocks, there were so few caught the Nuxalk could not serve salmon, the traditional main course at feasts.
Mr. Clellaman said the riverbanks had once been “filled with small, little houses. We called them stink boxes and that's where we fermented the eulachons. You look there now and … it's bare, eh. But you still see a little bit of the remains of the boxes left and now it's overgrown and dying.”
“We can no longer tolerate what we have been through,” said Ross Neasloss, Chief of Kitasoo from Klemtu, a small village on Swindle Island, north of Bella Coola. He, like many others, blamed commercial fishing for reducing not only the stocks of eulachon, but also salmon, herring, abalone and halibut.
“Our pantries are empty,” he said.
Keystone species
Anthropologists and native-rights lawyers describe eulachon as a “cultural keystone species” vital to the identity of native people.
When Alexander Mackenzie became the first European explorer to cross North America over land to the Pacific in 1793, he followed the grease trail, a native trade route used to get oil from the coast to east of the Rocky Mountains.
Early missionaries gave eulachon religious currency by noting it returned at Easter, and some native bands referred to it as “the saviour fish,” because it ended months of winter hunger.
“It is like a spring awakening,” Derek Snow, a speaker at the Feast of Shame, said of the eulachon's arrival. “Like we are sleeping all winter and we wake up … and the first thing we look at is the river.”
At the feast or gathering – so named to reflect shame on the government – one speaker recalled how everyone once ran from church to fish in their Sunday best when the eulachon arrived.
Eulachon thrived until relatively recently and then, about a decade ago, began to decline from California to Alaska.
Few rivers have had as stunning a drop as the Bella Coola, where a run of several million fish fell to an estimated 1,200. Researchers netted only 50 this year.
Megan Moody, a young Nuxalk woman working on her masters in the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia, said the Bella Coola run collapsed in 1996, the same year the federal government opened a shrimp trawl fishery in Queen Charlotte Sound.
Bella Coola is on the mainland at the head of a deep fjord that leads to Queen Charlotte Sound. The shrimp trawl nets took an estimated 90 tonnes of eulachon on the central coast that year. While the shrimp fishery was later closed in Queen Charlotte Sound, it has continued in Bella Coola and Rivers Inlets.
Ms. Moody said the impact of the trawl fishery, climate change, increased predation and alterations to river hydrology, caused by logging, are all suspects in stock declines.
She said shrimp trawlers off the west coast of Vancouver Island are netting eulachon as bycatch, leading to estimates there are thousands of tonnes of juvenile fish at sea. But that doesn't square with the empty rivers. “Why are they not coming back? What's going on here? Are these estimates incorrect?” she asked.
“It's an enigma,” said Doug Hay, a retired Fisheries and Oceans Canada scientist.
The impact of the shrimp fishery isn't understood because eulachon, which have no commercial value, haven't been studied enough, said Mr. Hay, who was “shocked” to hear trawling is still allowed in inlets around Bella Coola.
Mr. Hay said his best advice for restoring eulachon runs is simple: “Make sure they have good spawning habitat … make sure they have good marine habitat and … stop killing them at sea.”
Asked what an eulachon recovery program might cost, Mr. Hay gave a rough estimate of $650,000 annually to work on B.C.'s 13 eulachon rivers.
Krista Robertson, a Victoria-based lawyer who specializes in native-rights cases, said tribes could have grounds for suing the federal government or seeking a judicial review of the shrimp trawl fishery.
“Legal action is not the answer necessarily … but being ready to litigate can get you action,” she said. “I don't think it would be hard to prove a profound native dependence on eulachon.”
Indeed, the courts may soon hear that argument. Kevin Doyle, a Victoria lawyer, said in a recent e-mail that he has been instructed by the Komoyue band on northern Vancouver Island to pursue legal action against the federal and provincial governments for the loss of eulachon from traditional diets.
Human error
During a break in the gathering, Lance Nelson and his brother, Chris, who both teach Nuxalk language and culture at the local school, walked to the banks of the Bella Coola River to beat drums and sing.
Below where they chanted, the Nelson family stink house was slowly being consumed by vegetation after nearly a decade of disuse. Inside the stooped building were old, broken nets and unused storage jars.
“The reason we don't have eulachon in our river is clearly human error,” Lance Nelson said. “The river is our mother. She feeds us … Through prayer we may get these gifts back.”
Below him the empty Bella Coola River flowed past. “We used to fish for eulachon right there,” he said. “No more.”
20/06/07, Editorial, The trouble with Canada's no-fly list, (Back).
Ottawa says there are no liberty concerns and therefore no constitutional concerns in its spanking new no-fly list of 500 to 2,000 names, which went into effect Monday.
No liberty concerns? As soon as any one of those 500 to 2,000 people shows up at an airport and tries to pick up a boarding pass, alarms will go off (in a metaphorical sense) and the RCMP and local police will rush in (in an actual sense). Of course there are liberty concerns. In the United States, people on the no-fly list who try to fly may be detained for hours. A man named Robert Johnson (one of the 12 hapless Robert Johnsons assembled by a CBS News team because a Robert Johnson is on the no-fly list) was strip-searched. Of course there are constitutional concerns.
At its most basic, the constitutional concern is this: The government of Canada is now keeping a list that it provides to private companies (the airlines) and other countries of people deemed too dangerous to fly. The people have no right to challenge their inclusion before their names are put on the list. They are not even entitled to be notified that their names are on this list. Through no fault of their own, in some cases, they may face a public humiliation at the airport. Who knows what they may face in other countries?
At first glance, the reason these individuals aren't told their names are on the list seems obvious and sensible. If they were told, they would know that the RCMP and CSIS were on to them. If they knew, they might take extra steps to evade detection.
But wait. Those deemed dangerous (are there 2,000 suspected terrorists in Canada?) can easily find out whether they're on the list. All they have to do is try to board an airplane. The no-fly list may in fact serve to alert the bad guys that they're being watched.
The answer to that problem is to keep the most dangerous people off the no-fly list. There is evidence this has happened in the United States. The 11 British suspects now facing charges in a plot to blow up U.S. airliners were not on the U.S. list, according to CBS News, though they had apparently been under surveillance for a year. The reason: The FBI and the CIA didn't want their names circulating among airport workers in other countries, in case word leaked back to the suspects. Brilliant. Except, what good is a no-fly list if the truly dangerous aren't on it?
The United States will no doubt be pleased that Canada has a no-fly list. The question is whether pleasing the U.S. is worth the price. While Ottawa hasn't revealed the exact cost, it allocated $404-million over two years in the 2006 budget to pay for "programs to enhance border security, national emergency response, a no-fly list and arming border guards." Any money put into a no-fly list is money that isn't going into RCMP and CSIS boots on the ground to track the terrorists. "Presently we are very short of personnel," a senior Mountie in charge of a national security team told a Senate committee this week. It's doubtful anyone will be accountable for the money spent on the no-fly list. It will be difficult to know whether the money is being spent to any effect at all.
Are there less intrusive, more effective means to ensure airplane safety? Police can arrest the most dangerous people on the list if they have broken or plotted to break any laws. They can track suspects and tap their phones.
In the end, people are happy if airplanes don't explode, and most would say they would pay a heavy price in dollars and in loss of liberty (especially someone else's) to keep flying safe. With the no-fly list, however, people will pay dearly for uncertain benefits.
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