#ontario health coalition

[sambargestuff]

Doug Ford's Ontario:

Doug Ford, Ontario Premier, is riding a wave of good will because he just spent hundreds of millions of dollars to put beer in corner stores.

Of course, he's bankrupting the province and privatizing our healthcare but how about the beer?

This fucker formed a majority gov't with less than 25% of the available vote because NO ONE VOTED in 2022.

Now, the rumour is that Ford will call an election early, this fall, to secure another majority before next year's Federal election. So, if you didn't vote in 2022 and if you prefer public healthcare to beer in corner stores, fucking vote in the next provincial election. Vote NDP. Especially if you live in the 905. It's your Conservative neighbours that keep putting this fucker in office.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Mark Friday, May 26 and Saturday, May 27 on your calendars. Then, circle these dates, highlight them and put a star next to them. May 26 and 27, Ontario Health Coalition (OHC) will be holding a citizens’ referendum with more than a thousand voting stations across Ontario. Online voting with be available starting May 2 – and I encourage everyone reading this to vote online as soon as the site is activated.

The referendum is in response to the Ford government’s announcement that it’s moving ahead with Bill 60, Your Health Care Act,  which is expected to pass this week.

The legislation significantly expands privatization of surgeries and diagnostics as well as private for-profit hospitals and clinics – something the Ford government said they would never do during the lead-up to the election.

Once this legislation is passed the government will move with lightening speed to dismantle universal health care.

Full article

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[godbirdart]

june 21 is national indigenous peoples day up here in canada; a day focused on celebrating the arts and cultures of our indigenous neighbours and communities.

if you’re looking for ways to support, or generally further your education on indigenous history, here are a bunch of links to help you get started! please go further and look up events hosted by your local community specifically, as some may not be listed on the sites below.

remember that if you cannot attend events or monetarily support businesses - you can always boost indigenous artists and voices online too.

indigenous tourism; lists businesses, events, and other indigenous-owned / led programs for the respective province or territory

indigenous tourism canada [generalized resources, event listings etc]

yukon

northwest territories

nunavut

british columbia

alberta

saskatchewan

manitoba

ontario

quebec

newfoundland and labrador

new brunswick

nova scotia

prince edward island

art

bill reid gallery of the northwest coast

lattimer art gallery

native northwest [while NNW itself is not indigenous-owned, it is a good way to discover artists and purchase their work. some artists sell on other sites too, so look around]

strong nations [sells books by indigenous authors]

education and resources

two-spirited people of manitoba

alberta indigenous history timeline [pdf]

alberta indigenous history resources

british columba history timeline

list of first nations peoples [wikipedia; could be incomplete / inaccurate]

cbc indigenous [indigenous-focused news]

missing and murdered indigenous women and girls

national centre for truth and reconciliation

native land interactive map

orange shirt day

qikiqtani truth commission

lil’ red dress project

whose land interactive map

charities / support / donations

clan mothers healing billage & knowledge centre

first nations health authority

indian residential schools survivor society

indigenous peoples resilience fund

qajuqturvik food bank

niqinik nuatsivik nunavut food bank

nunavut food security coalition

reconciliation canada

urban native youth association

additional links are always appreciated

[canadianabroadvery]

“...n 2020, the Ford PC government passed the Connecting People to Home and Community Care Act. It facilitates hospital privatization in two ways. First, it allows the expansion of the small number of for-profit hospitals in Ontario. Private, for-profit hospitals have been frozen for years—but this bill modifies the Private Hospital Act to allow them to expand “home and community care” beds. Apparently, “home and community care” can happen in for-profit institutional facilities nowadays.Similarly, the Act also adds unlicensed “residential congregate care settings” as a location for “home and community care services”—with no restrictions on for-profit operators. Instead of public hospitals, these unlicensed congregate care homes would provide rehabilitative, transitional, or other care.Under the previous Mike Harris PC government, home care was largely privatized. The result was chaotic service and very low wages. OCHU/CUPE had to have a pitched battle with University Health Network (UHN) when they contracted out reactivation services to a home care organization at their Hillcrest site. The PSWs operating the beds were paid $16.50 an hour. While OCHU/CUPE was ultimately able to force UHN to take the work back in-house, many more such projects are underway. Like so much of what Ford is up to, a key goal is to reduce the wages for the female hospital workforce....”

[snehalblog]

Global Mpox Treatment Market: Insights into Diagnostic and Therapeutic Developments - UnivDatos

According to a new report by UnivDatos Market Insights, The Mpox Treatment Market was valued at approximately USD 1,025.46 million in 2023 and is expected to grow at a substantial CAGR of around 10.86% during the forecast period (2024-2032). This is mainly due to several key factors that contribute to its rapid growth. The growing number of zoonotic infections is one of them because the increased contact with animals poses higher threats of diseases such as mpox to affect humans. This has brought awareness and the need for treatment and the prevention of such diseases into the limelight. Another factor is the governmental programs and grants as the promotion of high-risk vaccines and other antiviral therapeutics, including Tecovirimat which has already received the approval of regulatory authorities in some countries. Mpox is identified to be an internationally infectious zoonotic viral disease that has been both transported globally and travelled to different countries as the world continues to globalize and as people travel. Further, the rising patient awareness to advance mpox treatment through public-private partnerships for better research and development of mpox drugs and vaccines is also driving the growth of mpox treatment market.

Request To Download Sample of This Strategic Report - https://univdatos.com/get-a-free-sample-form-php/?product_id=68167&utm_source=LinkSJ&utm_medium=Snehal&utm_campaign=Snehal&utm_id=snehal

For instance, in September 2023, BioNTech SE and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) announced a strategic partnership to advance mRNA-based vaccine candidates with the development of BNT166 for the prevention of mpox. Through this partnership, CEPI will provide funding of up to $90 million to support the development of mRNA-based vaccine candidates.

There has been a recent upsurge in the mpox outbreak in the several areas located in North America and more so in the US which has been receiving the highest ripple effect from the mpox breakout. Upto March 16, 2024 this year, United States has reported 511 cases which is two folds as of United States reported in this similar time span in the year 2023 and had less than 300 cases. There exists greater growth potential in this region following subsequent funding for the development of new antiviral drugs and vaccines. Thus, actions that the authorities have taken with an eye to the extension of the demand for genetic engineering to produce vaccines for mpox can also embrace a positive function in the enhancement of the chance to treat mpox. Moreover, availability of therapeutics in the region also results into growth for this market.

For instance, in April 2024, Bavarian Nordic A/S announced that JYNNEOS®, the only FDA-approved mpox vaccine, is now commercially available in the U.S., marking a significant expansion for access to JYNNEOS® by establishing additional pathways for vaccine procurement, distribution, and reimbursement by both public and private payers.

Increasing Prevalence of mpox is driving high demand in Canada

The current high rate of mpox infection in Canada is very influential in determining the need for treatment and prevention measures. Since outbreak in May 2022, Canada has recorded 1,541 mpox cases as of August 17, 2024, and most of them in Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia. Additionally, governmental support such as increased support and surveillance is further assisting in mpox treatment market growth. For instance, with growing cases of mpox, Canada’s government states and health agencies of Canada are monitoring the global mpox situation closely and working with domestic and international partners to determine opportunities for support. The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) has recently ensured the administration of Imvamune vaccine which is decisive for the prevention of mpox among the targeted groups. It makes vaccination campaigns a critical requirement, apart from disease outbreaks, due to their importance in reducing the number of severe cases that utilize the health facilities.

Ask for Report Customization - https://univdatos.com/get-a-free-sample-form-php/?product_id=68167&utm_source=LinkSJ&utm_medium=Snehal&utm_campaign=Snehal&utm_id=snehal

Conclusion

Thus, the market in North America has great growth potential, because the region has a high prevalence of mpox. With the availability of advanced technologies including the use of AI for rapid drug discovery and presence of key market players within this region, the mpox treatment market is increasing significantly in the continent. The commitment that North America has made to bring innovation in this market further escalates North America’s position as the leading region for mpox treatment market growth. According to the Univdatos Market Insights analysis, the rise of prevalence of mpox, increasing mpox vaccination, government support, and increasing focus towards preventive measures drive the mpox treatment market. As per their “Mpox Treatment Market” report, the global market was valued at USD 1,025.46 million in 2023, growing at a CAGR of about 10.86% during the forecast period from 2024 - 2032.

[aceduchessdragoness]

Originally uploaded on Instagram by dimitrilascaris on November, 7, 2024.

Today in Ottawa, we announced the filing of a lawsuit against the government of Canada for violating its duty to prevent genocide.

Our clients, two Palestinian Canadians whose families in Gaza have been devastated by Israel's genocidal rampage, allege that Canada has violated their constitutional rights.

It is time for @JustinTrudeau and @MelanieJoly to answer for their support for Israel's genocidal regime.

Our full press conference can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CL_pGWJMguw

#gaza#genocide#cdnpoli#palestine

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[id: video captions --grammar by me

Good morning. My name is Dimitri Lascaris, I'm one of seven lawyers in the Coalition for Canadian Accountability in Gaza. We represent two Palestinian Canadians, Hany El-Batnigi and Tamer Jarada – Mr. Batnigi is here to my right today.

On March 13th 2024, our clients, who have lost dozens of family members to Israel's attacks on Gaza, announced their intention to pursue claims against Canada's government. Since then, the Canadian government has done nothing to address their pleas. Yesterday, we filed a civil claim on their behalf, seeking declarations from the Ontario Superior Court of Justice that Canada has failed to fulfill its duty to take all reasonable measures within its power to prevent genocide, and has violated the charter rights of our clients.

For more than one year, the world has watched in horror as Israel has perpetrated a genocide in Gaza. Israeli munitions have burned Palestinian refugees alive. Israeli snipers have shot Palestinian children in the head while they were playing in, or near, their homes. Doctors have been forced to perform amputations on Palestinian children without anesthetic. Palestinian children have been crushed and trapped in collapsed buildings targeted by Israel's western supplied bombs; sometimes no one was able to come to their rescue before they died an agonizing and lonely death. The official death toll for Palestinian children in Gaza now exceeds 16,000; the true number is certainly far higher. The number of Palestinian children who have been disabled, wounded, traumatized, or orphaned is far higher still. For more than one year, Israel has pursued a deliberate policy of depriving Palestinian children of food and water. Doctors in Gaza have revealed to the world images of emaciated babies on the verge of death.

The casualty figures I've cited thus far do not come close to telling the full story. In July of this year the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, issued a report in which it estimated the true death toll in Gaza. As The Lancet explained, armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence. Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in coming months and years. In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. The Lancet applied a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death, to the 37,396 official deaths reported at that time, and thereby opined that 186,000 deaths could very well be attributable to Israel's war on Gaza.

In a report issued on October 10th, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry, on the occupied Palestinian territory in Israel, documented that Israel had perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza's health care system as part of a broader assault on Gaza. The commission also investigated the treatment of Palestinian detainees in Israel and of Israeli victims since October 7th, and concluded that Israel is responsible for torture, and sexual, and gender-based violence. There's more; Israel has repeatedly bombed UNWRA operated schools, where the displaced were sheltering. Israel has destroyed the universities of Gaza.

Throughout this parade of horrors, Canada's support for Israel has not wavered; although Justin Trudeau and Mélanie Joly periodically expressed their grave concern for the plight of Palestinians, not once have they backed up their purported concern with real action. Canada has imposed no meaningful sanctions on Israeli political or military leaders, it continues to allow Canadian citizens to serve in Israel's military, it continues to permit Canadian-made military equipment to be delivered to Israel, and even purchases deadly weapons from Israel. Canada also continues to accord trade benefits to Israeli businesses, including those situated in illegal, West Bank settlements. Canada continues to accord charitable status to Canadian entities that funnel money to Israel, or that are devoted to whitewashing Israel's crimes.

On January 26th of this year, the International Court of Justice ruled that it was plausible that Israel is committing genocide within the meaning of the Genocide Convention. On that very day Canada suspended funding for UNWRA, the main humanitarian agency operating in Gaza. It did so based on allegations by Israel, the perpetrator of this genocide, that a tiny number of lower level, under employees, had participated in the October 7th attacks. Months later, belatedly, Canada restored its funding for UNWRA, but only after the international media revealed that Israel's allegations were not supported by even a shred of credible evidence.

Canada has done nothing, emboldening Israel to be more brazen. Israel, in fact, has now designated every major human rights organization in Palestine as a terrorist entity. Today, the world sees clearly that when it comes to the suffering of Palestinians, our brothers and sisters in Palestine, Canada has no red line. There's no atrocity Israel can commit that would end Canada's support for Israel. Our clients and all Palestinian Canadians are in effect, victims of Canada's anti-Palestinian racism. Confronted by so much pain and so much government indifference to their agony, our clients have decided to seek justice.

As stated by former US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Aided by a team of lawyers who are pursuing this litigation on a pro bono basis, Hany and Tamer, our clients, will shine a cleansing light on Canada's indefensible support for Israel's genocidal regime. Moreover, neither they, nor their lawyers, will cease until Canada has been held accountable. Even if Israel stopped its genocide tomorrow, this litigation will continue. We will not relent; we will not give Canada's government a free pass.

I now invite my co-counsel, Shane Martínez, to address the legal nature of our client's claims. Shane is a lawyer with the Canadian branch of the International Center of Justice for Palestinians, whose practice is focused on criminal and human rights law. And, after my colleague has spoken, Hany will make a brief statement, and we will then take questions from the media /id]

[motherearthday]

Multi-stakeholder Dialogue ''Towards a strong global treaty."

In preparation for the upcoming fourth round of negotiations of the Global Plastics Treaty in Ottawa, Ontario (INC-4), please join us for a multistakeholder dialogue at House of Sweden in Washington, DC. The goal of the event is to raise awareness about the environmental, climate and health impacts of plastics and plastic pollution and discuss the best practices and policy options for addressing these challenges.

TOWARDS A STRONG GLOBAL PLASTICS TREATY: A Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue April 8 @ 9:30 am – 12:00 pm. House of Sweden 2900 K street, NW Washington, DC 20007.

AGENDA 9:30 am Networking Coffee and Registration

10:00 am Welcome and Introduction · Urban Ahlin, Ambassador of Sweden to the United States · Jovita Neliupšienė, Ambassador of the European Union to the United States

10:15 am Perspectives from the Public Sector/Governments

· Kathleen Rogers, President, EARTHDAY.ORG (Moderator) · Manuel Carmona Yebra, Deputy Head of Section for Global Issues and Innovation, European Union Delegation to the United States · Oladipo Okusaga, Head of Energy, Climate & Programme Management, British Embassy · Rob Wing, Deputy Director, Office of Environmental Quality, U.S. Department of State · Global South Speaker (TBD)

Q&A

11:15 am Perspectives from Civil Society

· Aidan Charron, Director, End Plastic Initiatives, EARTHDAY.ORG (Moderator) · Julia Cohen, Managing Director, Plastic Pollution Coalition · Jo Banner, Co-Founder & Co-Director, The Descendants Project · Felipe Victoria, Senior Manager for International Plastics Policy, Ocean Conservancy · Rachel Radvany, Environmental Health Campaigner, CIEL

Q&A

House of Sweden

[plethoraworldatlas]

...

In recent decades the Inland Empire — comprised of San Bernardino and Riverside counties — has been the primary victim of America’s warehouse boom. As demand for online shopping has surged — e-commerce sales grew 50% to $870 billion during the pandemic alone — this region has served as a billionaire’s dumping ground. Those are the words of Tom Dolan, executive director of Inland Congregations United for Change. “Now it’s no longer just Warren Buffet, it’s Jeff Bezos and Amazon,” Dolan told The Guardian in 2021. “And we’re paying the cost of doing their business.”

That business is only made possible by taking out a nonconsensual loan from the residents of surrounding communities. It’s a coercive trade: the health and safety of citizens for the profits they’ll never share. And no worthwhile efforts have been made to pay off that debt.

In order to fulfill the glamorous promises of expedited, overnight and same-day deliveries, diesel trucks conduct over 600,000 daily trips through the Inland Empire alone, carrying roughly 40% of the nation’s goods. These vehicles emit 1,000 pounds of diesel particulate matter every day (alongside 100,000 pounds of nitric oxide and 50,000,000 pounds of carbon dioxide).

The International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified diesel particulate matter as a Group 1 carcinogen — the most severe category — due to sufficient evidence linking diesel exposure to lung cancer. (Other studies have suggested a relationship to cancers of the bladder, larynx, esophagus, stomach, pancreas and blood, alongside asthma, other respiratory disease, heart attacks and premature mortality.) The region bordering the warehouse hub in one Inland Empire city, Ontario, ranks in the 95th percentile of cancer. A 2015 study estimated that 70% of the total cancer risk from air pollution in California is caused by diesel exhaust alone.

An Undue Burden

The people who suffer the consequences of our online shopping are not typically over-consumers themselves. The South Coast Air Quality Management District found that the 2.4 million people living within half a mile of a warehouse are also disproportionately Black and Latino communities below the poverty line. In 2012 San Bernardino ranked as the second poorest city in America with over 34.6% of people living in poverty. And of all the residents living within a mile of the average Amazon warehouse, 80% are people of color.

In January a coalition of over 60 environmental groups (including the Center for Biological Diversity, publisher of The Revelator) wrote to Gov. Gavin Newsom and asked him to declare a public health state of emergency in the Inland Empire. The request included testimony from residents on their firsthand experiences dealing with the everyday reality of increased asthma attacks, nose bleeds, hospitalizations, and coronary episodes. Given “nowhere else to turn,” they’re demanding government intervention, alongside a moratorium on new warehouse construction until the health consequences can be better understood.

[4stary]

For any and all Ontarians!

[college-girl199328]

Fullerton, who shuffled through three cabinet posts and was in charge when thousands died of COVID-19 in Ontario nursing homes, said Friday that she was stepping down immediately. She did not detail why she was leaving.

The family physician left medicine for politics in the lead-up to the 2018 election when she won her Ottawa-area riding of Kanata-Carleton. She won that seat again, handily, in 2022. "A strong sense of duty brought me to politics after decades as a family physician serving my community, to continue my work toward solutions that would address the shortcomings of our healthcare system and improve health services for individuals," she wrote in her resignation letter to Ford.

"To serve has been a profound honor." Fullerton's first role in the cabinet was as minister of colleges, training, and universities, a post she held for one year.

In June 2019, she was named minister of long-term care, a file she held through the early days of the pandemic.

She was heavily criticized for the havoc COVID-19 wrought on long-term care – 3,794 nursing home residents had died from the virus by the time she was shuffled out of the role in June 2021, and thousands more were infected. Five nursing homes were hit so bad that the province called the army to help.

A scathing report later found the neglected long-term care sector was unprepared for a pandemic. In the 2021 cabinet shuffle, Fullerton was named minister of children, community, and social services, autism services for children, and the Ontario Disability Support Program.

Fullerton drew the ire of families of children with autism as the rollout of a new program that began under the previous minister was slow and opaque. Ontario to 8,000 families by the end of fall 2022, though it wouldn't say by how much.

Since then, the government removed updates from its website on the number of children registered in the Ontario Autism Program and how many had received interim funding and refused to publicly divulge the number of children receiving government-funded therapy in response to media requests. Meanwhile, the Ontario Autism Coalition complained that Fullerton had not meaningfully met with them since taking over the ministry and did not hold a press conference to publicly discuss or update the program.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

What do you think about bill 7? I've only just become familiar with it and it worries me

I just heard about it too:

[atlanticcanada]

Calls grow for Ottawa to set conditions against funding private health care in negotiations with provinces, territories

As momentum and negotiations build toward a long awaited deal on federal health care funding, calls are also growing for specific conditions on how any transfer money should be spent.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has scheduled a Feb. 7 meeting with Canada’s premiers to reach a new funding agreement.

Bernadette Landry, co-chair of the New Brunswick Health Coalition, said federal funding parameters should be imperative to any pending agreement.

“You don’t give millions and millions of dollars without making sure those dollars aren’t spent appropriately,” said Landry. “It’s just common sense."

Landry said the federal government should ban any transfer funds from being spent on private clinics delivering public health care.

"Those private clinics (are) stealing nurses and other health care professionals from the public system; people we need so badly in the public health care system," said Landry.

On Friday, federal Green Party leader Elizabeth May and New Brunswick Green Party leader David Coon said federal funding should come with a clause of it not being spent on private delivery model of care.

Private surgical centres are already operating with public money in the Atlantic region.

Ontario recently announced a plan to increase use of private surgical and diagnostic centres around the province.

This past summer, the three Maritime Progressive Conservative premiers met with Ontario PC Premier Doug Ford to discuss health care. The meeting happened shortly after Ford announced initial plans to increase the use of private clinics for public health care.

None of the Maritime premier would reject the possibility of additional privatization in their own jurisdiction, at joint news conference.

“Yes things are going to change, and yes that could be in a different form and I don’t know what that’s going to look like,” said New Brunswick Premier Higgs, on Aug. 22, 2022.

On the Jan. 21 edition of CTV’s Question Period, Higgs said the premiers and prime minister were close to reaching a long-term funding deal, with conditions tied to health care outcomes. Higgs said the metrics for success could vary by area.

Higgs also said he didn’t have the sense the federal government would increase funds from 22 per cent to 35 per cent of health-care costs (about an additional $28 billion a year) as requested by the premiers.

“But between where we are and where we've asked, there's a number in there somewhere,” said Higgs.

On Sunday’s edition of CTV’s Question Period, federal Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos said the federal government would avoid “micromanaging” how provinces and territories delivered health care.

“We are also going to work flexibly with provinces and territories because they are not at the same place,” said Duclos. “There are some provinces in Canada, where access to a family health team is almost 90 per cent, other provinces is below 80 per cent, and that's something we should recognize and should work with provinces and territories to address.”

Duclos said certain conditions and metrics would be attached to any transfer funding, including reductions in surgery and diagnostic backlogs, retention and recruitment of health care professionals, along with set mental health benchmarks.

Lori Turnbull, a political scientist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, said the federal government’s tone on the private delivery of public health care had softened as of late.

“They have called what Doug Ford is going to do in Ontario as being innovative,” said Turnbull, in an interview with CTV News Channel.

“That’s a significant departure. We can think back over the past number of years, when people talked of increased privatization in health care, (there was) a lot of resistance to that from the public. But now we’re seeing a different thing, where there’s been a bit more acceptance, I think, because people know that the system is on the brink of collapse in a way it hasn’t been before. There’s a different conversation around what’s possible.”

With files from Hina Alam of the Canadian Press, Akshay Tandon of CTV News Channel, and CTV’s Question Period with Vassy Kapelos.

from CTV News - Atlantic https://ift.tt/wWcRGET

[trans-axolotl]

Do you have any ideas for someone in Canada

who is looking for alternatives to mental health hospitals?

So I’m currently institutionalized right now and can’t do a lot of research, but I’m going to link some orgs and also ask any Canadian followers to please add on if you know of any resources. I also can’t vouch for any of these orgs because I don’t organize with anyone from any of these orgs, and don’t know firsthand how good they are.

Coalition against Psychiatric Assault

Ontario Peer Development Institute

Madness Canada

Mad Society of Canada

Psychiatric Survivors of Ottawa.

Here’s a few places that look like they might be sort of similar to peer respite, but I can’t vouch for them and would recommend doing more research:

Crisis stabilization Space

Crisis Stabilization Unit

It looks like CMHA has a lot of things like mobile crisis response teams as alternatives to police, maybe some housing options, and other community based care.

Seespring is trying to get funding for a peer respite house but I’m not sure if it’s operational yet.

Here’s another possible peer respite.

Anyway, Canadian followers please add on!

[fatehbaz]

“They never told us these things.”

[O]n 6 August 1998, 10 members of the small Sahtugot’ine Dene community of Deline (Fort Franklin) in the ‘Northwest Territories’ apologized in Hiroshima for the atomic destruction of that city – and the death of over 200,000 civilians – exactly 53 years earlier by a bomb made in part from uranium from their land.

The Dene didn’t even mine the stuff, a role reserved for the all-white below-ground workforce of Eldorado Gold Mines Ltd., placed under state control during World War Two. They were allowed only to help it on its long and winding way, 3,000 miles by river, lake, road and air, from Port Radium on Great Bear Lake to Port Hope on Lake Ontario, where, from 1942-45, the suddenly precious ore – the ‘new gold’ of the atomic age – was, together with ‘Belgian’ uranium from the Congo, refined and dispatched to Los Alamos, the desert lab in New Mexico secretly building the new, city-smashing Superweapon.

The existence of this epic road to hell was unsuspected by the Dene until long after Eldorado stopped mining for radium and uranium in 1960. Beginning in the 1970s, and spiking sharply in the 1980s, many of the men who had handled and carried the ore – and the men who had mined it – began to die from cancer, raising obvious questions about health and safety which soon led in shocking directions. In the 1990s, Gordon Edwards, co-founder of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility (CCNR), told a group of Deline Dene there was compelling evidence that the ore that had made so many of them sick had been used to kill vast numbers of innocent people. By the end of decade, Deline was better known as The Village of Widows [...].

The “Dene,” the CBC ‘revealed,’ “were never told of the health hazards they faced, even though the government knew … as early as 1932 that precautions should be taken in handling radioactive materials”. Instead of which, for example:

“Paul Baton, now aged 83, used to lift sacks of uranium ore onto boats. He said workers dressed in casual clothes and uranium dust ” — gold dust yellow — “covered the men like flour.” [...] ‘Paul’ Baton was actually Peter Baton, interviewed by scholar [...] Julie Salverson [...]. Peter’s wife, Theresa, told her: …that when they lived in Port Radium, the women would make tents for their families to sleep in from the sacks that carried the uranium.

The image harrowingly evokes the poverty of the workers, as detailed in a December 1998 article, ‘Deline Dene Mining Tragedy,’ in First Nations Drum:

During the beginning of the war efforts, the mine was kept running at a very high pace, utilizing non-Native miners brought in from all over the country. The Dene were employed as ‘coolies’ packing 45-kilogram sacks of radioactive ore for three dollars a day, working 12 hours a day, six days a week.

This at a time when the ore was worth over $70,000 a gram.

Cindy Kenney-Gilday, a member of the delegation to Hiroshima and Chair of the Déline Dene Band Uranium Committee, told First Nations Drum journalist Ronald B. Barbour that the toll taken on “my own home” is “the most vicious example of cultural genocide [...].” “Kenney-Gilday,” Barbour wrote, “who has suffered the loss of her father to colon cancer and brother to stomach cancer, stressed that” [...] because the grandfathers [...] transmit teachings and worldways to younger men and boys, “the loss of these men in the community” has left “too many men” without guides.

The guide to all Dene, of course, is the land itself, and the legacy of the Eldorado era has been to create “a radioactive heartland.” Wrote Barbour:

Over 1.7 million tons of radioactive waste and tailings was callously dumped into and around the lake, drastically contaminating food sources.

In 1998, the Déline Dene Band Uranium Committee released a 160-page, 14-recommendation report, “They Never Told Us These Things.”

In a 2011 article in Maisonneuve, Salverson recounts a community meeting in Deline to discuss the report, “where [non-Dene] lawyers delivered a year’s worth of uranium-impact research from the archives in Ottawa,” revealing that in “the mountain of papers we dug up … there is not one mention of the Dene, your people.”

“The hall,” Kenney-Gilday remembers, “went completely silent. The elders had incredulous looks on their faces, a combination of sadness and anger.”

Nor were they once mentioned in Eldorado: Canada’s National Uranium Company, the official company history commissioned [...] in the early 1980s as controversy grew over the criminal negligence of Eldorado as both as a private and Crown corporation. [...]

In 1999, the Ministry of Indian Affairs and Northern Development appointed a Canada-Deline Uranium Table (CDUT) to investigate ‘health and environmental issues relating to the Port Radium mine.’ In 2005, its final report, while acknowledging “the perceptual link between exposure to mining activities and illness and death,” found no evidence of abnormal cancer rates in the area; it also concluded that the numerous environmental “impacts” and examples of contamination it considered were “not a cause of concern from an ecological perspective.” [...] Most controversially, the “only statistics considered relevant in the determination of cancer were body counts,” with other easily-obtainable, highly-pertinent evidence (e.g. blood and urine samples) excluded [...]. As van Wyck notes, in a 2006 documentary on Deline – David Hennington’s Somba Ke: The Money Place – scientist [...] Dr. Rosalie Bertell argued that relying “on death records alone” effectively killed off the study:

“Yet again,” he writes, “the testimony of their dead has proven insufficient. Once again, the living are passed over in silence.”

-----

Photos, captions, and text published by: Sean Howard. “Canada’s Uranium Highway: Victims and Perpetrators.” Cape Breton Spectator. 7 August 2019.

[creepingsharia]

Canada: Syrian immigrant teen admits allegiance to ISIS, plotting bomb attacks to kill Christians

He needed an Arabic interpreter so we have to presume he is a Syrian refugee or immigrant.

A teenager admitted in Ontario court on Tuesday he had pledged allegiance to the so-called Islamic State and worked with an attack planner based in Syria to plot bombings.

From his home in Kingston, the Syrian-Canadian youth collaborated through social media with a figure known as "Abu Umar Ibrahim," who encouraged him and guided his bomb-making.

Nightclubs, churches and sporting venues were discussed as possible targets. While he was preoccupied with bombs, police also found materials referring to poisons, vehicular attacks and burning people inside their homes.

“All those ways are good to kill Christians,” according to an audio file uncovered by police.

The youth, who was 16 at the time and cannot be named because he is a minor, pleaded guilty to four terrorism offences and breaching his release conditions by removing his ankle monitor.

The Crown is seeking an adult sentence.

The RCMP said almost nothing after the high-profile Kingston terrorism arrest in January 2019, refusing to respond to questions about the suspect’s motive and never acknowledging it was an ISIS plot.

But the guilty plea provided the first public look at the troubling details of the case, one of a growing number involving Canadian ISIS supporters.

The plot has the hallmarks of a “remote-controlled” attack — one conducted by an operative living inside a Western country, but with encouragement and guidance from ISIS figures in Syria.

An agreed statement of facts was read into the court record, with an Arabic interpreter providing translation for the accused, who is originally from Syria.

Asked by the judge if he admitted to the facts detailed by the Crown over several hours, the youth simply replied, “Yes.”

"In an Agreed Statement of Facts filed with the court, the young person admitted to manufacturing an explosive substance, Triacetone Triperoxide (TATP), with the objective of manufacturing an explosive device to place either in a public place or to place under a police or military vehicle with the intent of killing innocent people," the Public Prosecution Service of Canada said in a statement.

"The objective was to commit terrorist activities for the benefit of a listed terrorist entity (that called itself the 'Islamic State'). A search of his residence resulted in the seizure of all the necessary materials to build an explosive device."

"He also admitted to creating a PowerPoint presentation detailing the instructions on building a successful pressure cooker bomb, and disseminating it through various communications application," the PPSC said.

"After providing the instructions, he counseled an individual to build the device and place it in a bar, a public place, in order to kill innocent people."

The events took place in late 2018 and early 2019, as ISIS was collapsing in Syria. Despite his age, the Kingston youth repeatedly expressed his support for ISIS, and his determination to kill for the terror group.

Building bombs was his main focus. Using social media channels, he communicated time and again with Ibrahim about bomb-making, and indicated he was in Canada.

After he asked Ibrahim if he knew any "brothers" in the U.S., the Syrian-based jihadist connected him with a U.S. contact he thought was a "lone wolf."

The youth then began communicating with the U.S. contact about targets and sent him detailed bomb instructions, but the American turned out to be an undercover informant working for the FBI, which tipped off the RCMP.

When police searched his bedroom following his arrest, they found an assortment of chemicals and tools used to manufacture explosive devices.

His online search history and electronic devices also revealed his involvement in terrorism.

He is now 17.

ISIS has repeatedly tried to incite and direct attacks in Western countries, including Canada, which was singled out because it is part of the anti-ISIS military coalition.

The Kingston case is similar to that of Abdulrahman El-Bahnasawy, a Mississauga youth who connected online with ISIS to plan a bombing in New York, unaware the FBI had infiltrated the plot.

An 18-year-old with mental health challenges at the time, El-Bahnasawy was arrested during a family trip to New Jersey in 2016. He pleaded guilty and is now serving a 40-year sentence.

[walls-to-the-ball]

Muscle Panic

By Robin Alex McDonald

    Queer theorist Jennifer Doyle suggests that “thinking about sports is like thinking about a novel that has five dimensions. It can be hard to pin down your object. The sport text has watery boundaries: Is it the event? The competition? The broadcast? The arena, fan culture? Training? The match report?”[1] Similarly, thinking about Hazel Meyer’s Muscle Panic is like trying to pin down an immeasurable imagining, one that shape-shifts from idea to archive, from archive to installation, from installation to performance, from performance to print. Each adaptation of Muscle Panic offers new constellations of sport history ephemera, locker room curiosa, and affective objects that reveal the oft-repressed queer and feminist sensibilities of sport cultures: “Sport Dyke” locker labels, a multi-gallon thermos of Lez Hulk Sweat, net-less and bare basketball rims, photographs of women athletes whose tenacity is palpable even on cardstock, a shiny silver whistle around which countless lips have closed. Doyle claims that the athlete’s sense of self is “fluid, changeable, contingent,” but Muscle Panic expands on this to show that the material cultures that constitute the athlete’s world are fluid, too.[2] Their archives take on new shapes and new forms, depending on where and how they are being housed (a gym locker, a storage room, a hall of fame, a gallery) and what their caretaker deems meaningful.

    Past iterations of Muscle Panic crescendoed in multi-participant performances that relished the rigor of athletic rituals and the sweet idiosyncrasies of women and queer people occupying space together. In them, Meyer and her team of performers donned handmade jerseys, stretched one another’s bodies, passed basketballs back and forth (and back and forth, and back and forth) between them, inhaled the odour of their own and each others’ armpits, tied their long hair back into sport-ready ponytails, double-knotted each other’s shoelaces. Within the homosocial world of sport, in which teams are segregated by sex and the existence of queer touches, looks, and desires are actively denied, these types of interactions are mostly dismissed as teammate comradery or game-time rituals. In the constructed world of Muscle Panic’s performance, however, these interactions both educe and exceed the intimacies of sex – sweaty touches, heavy breathing, furtive eye contact, giggly asides – and thus speak aloud what Heidi Eng has called the “silences underlying and permeating discourses of normality” within the world of sport.[3]

    Named after the sociological concept of moral panic, a fear of something dangerous and threatening to “discourses of normality” as well as the status quo of the social order, Muscle Panic uses touch and sweat to terrorize the gender binary and its attendant presumption of heterosexuality on which most sports rely. Now, in a world where touching, sweating, and breathing together have become dangerous in altogether new ways, Meyer has been tasked with translating the collaborative and spontaneous spirit of performance into another, safer format. For the 2020 version of Muscle Panic, Meyer has solicited five women and/or non-binary athletes to create a collaborative print project that draws from the codes and aesthetics of instructional exercise posters. Such a poster project recalls elementary school gymnasium décor, but it also recalls the safer sex cartoons and information pamphlets created during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s by organizations like the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the National Coalition of Gay Sexually Transmitted Disease Services, wherein communities disproportionately affected by the epidemic sought to communicate information and care using their own languages and signs.  Renowned art historian and political activist Douglas Crimp discussed these instructional comics in his 1987 essay, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” where he referred to community-created materials as “precisely the sort of safe sex education material that has proven to work.”[4] While there are obvious differences between teaching someone how to properly put on a condom and instructing them how to perform the perfect jump shot, there are similarities as well: a flicking motion of the wrist, the need to be gentle yet shrewd, the importance of practice and the risks that sloppiness carries. Both tasks demand focused attention on the body and are usually done in the presence of another body. And if the instructional posters of the 1980s helped gay men to have promiscuity in an epidemic, perhaps this instructional poster can teach its audiences how to create new intimacies in a pandemic by reminding us that the queer desires that exist in sport – the desire to touch, to be playful, to work together in new ways – have not gone away.

    Meyer has stated that Muscle Panic is about the need for women’s bodies, queer bodies, and sick bodies to “take up space” on the field, on the court, in the locker rooms, and in the gallery.[5] Now, in the absence of these bodies, we instead have Muscle Panic’s stuff: scaffolding that stands strong like skeletons, pompoms that caress like fingers, the pebbled texture of basketballs like our craggy skin. If, as queer affect scholar Ann Cvetkovich suggests, “objects are meaningful as expressions of desire,”[6] we might think of the objects that make up Muscle Panic as “testimon[ies] to social relations” between an imagined team of women, femmes, queers, crips, and others whose bodies and identities have been, and continue to be, marginalized within sport cultures.[7] Like that stink of sweat that cannot be evicted from a gametime jersey, these relations endure – their affects linger, their politics persist.

Robin Alex McDonald (they/them) is an independent curator, writer, and academic currently living and working as an uninvited guest on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory, the traditional territory of the Anishnaabeg people and specifically, the Nipissing First Nation. Robin works as a part-time faculty member in the Fine and Visual Arts department at Nipissing University in North Bay, an instructor in the Visual and Critical Studies program at OCAD University in Tkaronto/Toronto, and a PhD Candidate in the Cultural Studies Program at Queen’s University in Katarokwi/Kingston, Ontario. Their academic and arts writing has been published in such journals and magazines as Literature and Medicine, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, n.paradoxa, Syphon, nomorepotlucks, Spiffy Moves, and Guts Canadian Feminist Magazine (with Elly Clarke, Amanda Turner-Pohan, and Michelle Ty). To view more of their work, please visit www.robinalexmcdonald.com

[1] Jennifer Doyle, “Introduction: Dirt Off Her Shoulders,” GLQ  19, no. 4 (2013): 423.

[2] Ibid., 426.

[3] Michel Foucault as cited in Heidi Eng, “Queer Athletes and Queering in Sport,” in ed. Jayne Caudwell, Sport, Sexualities and Queer/Theory (Taylor and Francis Group, 2006),

[4] Douglas Crimp, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” October 43 (Winter 1987): 264.

[5] Hazel Meyer, interview for the MacLaren Art Centre, August 2015.

[6] Ann Cvetkovich, “Photographing Objects as Queer Archival Practice,” in eds. Elspeth Brown and Thy Phu, Feeling Photography (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 275.

[7] Ann Cvetkovich, “Personal Effects: The Material Archive of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s Domestic Life,” NoMorePotlucks 25 (Winter 2013), no page numbers.