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We are a group of Ontario-based Humanists with a passion for social justice, civil and human rights, and environmental action, who have established a provincially-based organization to complement the work of Humanist Canada and local Humanist groups.
If you are concerned with Human and Civil Rights issues in secular society, such as Pro-choice, One School System, Equal Marriage, Gender issues, Dying with Dignity, Environmental justice, Science education, Intellectual Freedom and other progressive issues, we may be able to connect you with other volunteers, speakers and organizations. See our WELCOME page for more information. Here is our OHS Mission Statement.
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NEWS: Barlow says dropping water levels in the Great Lakes a threat to the right to water.
The Georgina Advocate reports, “With the Canadian government having received the long-awaited advice from the International Joint Commission on how to address low water levels in the Great Lakes, all eyes are now on Ottawa and Queen’s Park. The commission advised that Canada and the United States look at structural options to increase water levels in Lakes Michigan and Huron by 13 to 25 centimetres. The Canadian government is expected to respond to the report.”
“Council of Canadians national chairperson Maude Barlow is currently on a seven-stop speaking tour calling for the Great Lakes to be recognized as a common good to be shared, protected and enjoyed by all who live around them.
Falling water levels is among the acknowledged threats to water as a human right, she said. Ms Barlow and her group want governments to recognize the ecological rights of the watershed, to agree that private interests are subordinate to community rights, and to acknowledge that governments have an obligation to manage and protect the Great Lakes in consultation with First Nations. ‘The Great Lakes of North America are in serious trouble’, Ms Barlow said. ‘Industrial pollution, climate change, over-extraction, invasive species and wetland loss are all taking their toll on the watershed that provides life and livelihood to more than 40 million people and thousands of species that live around it.”
Barlow will be raising these concerns in the Ontario communities of Port Elgin on August 1 and Bayfield on September 28.
The newspaper also notes that, “(24 Georgian Bay municipalities reported that) water levels are affecting 68 marinas and 76 other businesses, as well as 31 government facilities, including municipal water systems, coast guard stations and the MS Chi-Cheemaun ferry. It is estimated cottagers will spend $500 million to extend and repair docks and water systems and the negative impact on local economies is pegged between $50 million to $100 million. …There was a nod to low water levels in the proposed 2013 federal budget, but there was no dollar value attached. …The mayors’ group is planning a public information session at the Bayshore Community Centre in Owen Sound June 13 to provide information on their work and to gather more data to support (the business case) for immediate aid from the federal and provincial governments.”
UPDATE: Ethics of PMO meeting with Barrick Gold left unanswered.
By Brent Patterson, Thursday, May 23rd, 2013
The Council of Canadians is demanding that the Harper government come clean and address questions left unanswered by the parliamentary ethics commissioner.
Last August, the ethics commissioner launched an investigation into a May 23, 2012 meeting that included a representative of Barrick Gold, then chief of staff Nigel Wright, and Stephen Harper’s new chief of staff Ray Novak. The meeting was reportedly called because Barrick was concerned that comments made by Harper against Argentina’s claim on the Falkland Islands could negatively impact on the mining company receiving the permits they needed from the Argentine government for the controversial Pascua Lama mine.
One year later, the details of that meeting are still not known and the ethics commissioner has failed to release a public report on her investigation of the matter.
“If the prime minister wants transparency and accountability in Ottawa, then fuller disclosure about this meeting between Barrick Gold and his new chief of staff is needed,” says Maude Barlow, chairperson of the Council of Canadians. Blue Planet Project campaigner Meera Karunananthan adds, “Beyond this controversy, it’s scandalous how the Harper government has given its unconditional support to the Canadian mining industry, which is notorious for human rights and environmental abuses around the world.”
The Council of Canadians is calling on Mr. Novak to clarify the nature of the meeting that took place one year ago today. It is also calling on ethics commissioner Mary Dawson to complete her investigation of the meeting and for her report to be made public.
Daniel Dennett: ‘You can make Aristotle look like a flaming idiot’ | Science | The Guardian.
Interesting article on Daniel Dennett’s new book – read the rest online…
Big thinkers make for big targets and they don’t come much bigger, ….as a leading cheerleader for Darwin and atheism, he is as much a bete noire for their opponents as a hero for their advocates.
Dennett is in London from his native Massachusetts talking to me about his latest book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. It’s a kind of greatest hits collection, pieced together from mainly previously published work to present both a summation of his central ideas about meaning, consciousness, evolution and free will, and to share some of the philosophical tools he has used to craft them. “After half a century in the field I’ve got some tricks of the trade which I’d like to talk about,” he says.
His critics agree, to the extent that they see him as a clever philosophical trickster. Yet time and again it seems the best way to understand Dennett is to understand why so many criticisms miss their targets.
Most assaults are variations on the theme that Dennett takes a too narrowly scientific worldview. The late Stephen Jay Gould, for instance, coined the “shocking” terms “ultra-Darwinist” and “Darwinian fundamentalist” to hurl at him. Yet Dennett has consistently resisted the crude extension of scientific thinking into areas where it does not belong. Nowhere is this more evident than in the issue of free will, which he describes in the book as “the most difficult and the most important philosophical problem confronting us today”.
“It’s important because of the longstanding tradition that free will is a prerequisite for moral responsibility,” he says. “Our system of law and order, of punishment, and praise and blame, promise keeping, promise making, the law of contracts, criminal law – all of this depends on one notion or another of free will. And then you have neuroscientists, physicists and philosophers saying that ‘science has shown us that free will is an illusion’ and then not shrinking from the implication that our systems of law are built on foundations of sand.”
Dennett argues: “There is nothing we have learned from neuroscience that undercuts the foundation for both the law of contract and criminal law.” It is true that we do not have “ultimate responsibility” because our choices are always in some ways the result of things we didn’t choose, such as our core personalities and the values we have absorbed from our society and families. But we have enough self-control to make sense of the difference between the psychopath and the criminal murder, the person who murders unwittingly in a sleepwalk and the cold-blooded killer.
That is the kind of free will we need and is worth wanting. Dennett worries that there is good evidence that promulgating the idea that free will is an illusion undermines just that sense of responsibility many scientists and philosophers are worried about losing. Critics maintain that Dennett’s kind of free will, with its modest idea of “enough” responsibility, autonomy and control, is not really enough after all.
There’s a pattern here, “the story of my life”, as Dennett puts it. People assume unrealistic ideals of what free will, selfhood or rationality are and then get upset when Dennett says: “It’s not the overwhelming supercalifragilisticexpialidocious phenomenon that you thought it was.” But it’s still real enough. The problem is simply: “Both free will and consciousness have been, by my lights, inflated in the popular imagination and in the philosophical imagination,” and so “anybody who has a view of either one that is chopped down to size” is accused of “a wretched subterfuge”, as Kant memorably put it….
NEWS: Harper wants to keep human rights out of CETA.
Embassy magazine reports, “A proposed text linking human rights to trade in a discussed Canada-European Union political agreement could lead to an eventual suspension of the much-awaited (Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) – making federal government officials uneasy, Embassy has learned. …Canadian and European officials started negotiating the so-called Strategic Partnership Agreement in 2011 at the EU’s request. The SPA is legally different than CETA, but talks run in parallel.”
“Its purpose is to establish an all-encompassing framework that would bring all existing sectoral agreements and areas of co-operation the two parties currently share under one roof. It is also meant to update the Canada-EU relationship to reflect the political changes that took place over the last decades, including the EU’s new institutional structures and its expansion to 27 member states.”
But Liberal Senator Joan Fraser, an opponent of the clause, says, “The problem is that in the European formula they want to include a clause that would make it possible for the trade agreement to be suspended if the Europeans judge that Canada had engaged in a serious violation of human rights.”
The article continues, “Canada wants to keep trade and human rights separate…” That is quite true for the Harper government. In November 2012, CBC reported, “A confidential (Harper) government document (that was) prepared by Foreign Affairs and dated Sept. 6 (outlining the) new ‘Canadian foreign policy plan’ the Conservative government has been preparing for more than a year (says that), ‘To succeed we will need to pursue political relationships in tandem with economic interests even where political interests or values may not align’.”
The right to food and water may also be potential issues of concern for the Europeans. This past March the Canadian Press reported, “The United Nations right-to-food envoy (Olivier De Schutter) says the Canadian government’s controversial decision to … negotiate a free trade deal with Europe will make it more difficult to fight poverty in Canada.” And while the European Union has recognized human rights obligations related to water, and Belgium, Hungary, Italy and Spain voted in favour of the right to water at the United Nations in July 2010, the Harper government only grudgingly accepts the right and has not taken steps to implement it, prompting Germany, Spain and Norway to ask Canada to recognize the right to water at the recent Universal Periodic Review of Canada’s human rights record at the UN.
Notably, Senator Fraser mentions in the Embassy article that, “The European Parliament (strongly feels) that we should accept this linkage between trade and human rights.” In order for CETA to be ratified, it must be voted on by Members of the European Parliament. But already, more than 100 MEPs have signed a statement that says there will be no movement forward on CETA unless Canada withdraws its WTO challenge against the EU’s ban on Canadian seal products, a step the Harper government refuses to take.
Humanist Association of Toronto (HAT).
HAT MONTHLY MEETING
SAT JUNE 15, 2013, 1:30-3p,
OISE, 252 Bloor Street West
TOPIC: “The Mysterious Death of Poet Pablo Neruda: Politics and Culture in Chile.”
SPEAKER: Dr. Luis Fornazzari
Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, has been called “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.” When communism was outlawed in Chile in 1948, an arrest warrant was issued for Neruda, a communist, sending him into hiding and eventually into exile. He returned many years later and became a close advisor to socialist President Salvador Allende. At the time of the coup against Allende led by General Augusto Pinochet, Neruda was hospitalized with cancer and died three days later. There are suspicions that the junta had a hand in his death.
In June 2011 a Chilean judge ordered that an investigation be launched following suggestions that Neruda had been murdered by the Pinochet regime for his pro-Allende stance and political views. Enough evidence was uncovered to order an exhumation of Neruda’s body in April 2013 to determine if he had been poisoned.
Enter Dr. Luis Fornazzari, a behavioural neurologist and assistant professor in medicine at the University of Toronto. He is a Chilean-Canadian medical authority who has followed the case closely. Dr. Fornazzari was born and raised in Chile and has lived in Canada since 1974, after fleeing his native country following the coup that brought Pinochet to power. Dr. Fornazzari will discuss his role in this attempt to solve the mysterious death of Pablo Neruda and his personal experience of the political turmoil that brought him to Canada in 1974. This will be a fascinating afternoon, mixing forensics, intrigue and poetry. We may even read a few poems!
House of Commons Gives Final Approval To Same-Sex Marriage Bill | Pam’s House Blend.
Today the British House of Commons gave for a second time its overwhelming approval to the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill, voting 366 to 161 at the bill’s third reading. In February, the same body overwhelmingly approved the bill by a vote of 400 to 175 at its second reading.
The bill, which would legalize marriage for same-sex couples in England and Wales, now moves to the House of Lords.
MPs debated several amendments both yesterday and today prior to the third reading vote. The amendment receiving perhaps the most extensive debate today would have allowed Humanist groups to perform same-sex marriages (New Clause 15). The amendment was withdrawn after the Secretary of State voiced technical concerns. Amendment sponsors appeared committed to reintroducing into the House of Lords an updated version of the amendment which would address the concerns raised today.
Letter to stop seed regulation changes / Alfalfa / GE Crops and Foods (Not on the Market) / Topics / Resources / Take Action – Canadian Biotechnology Action Network – CBAN.
Action alert from the NFU, and other agencies.
Re: Regulations Amending the Seeds Regulations, Canada Gazette Part 1 VOL. 147, NO. 10 — MARCH 9, 2013
Deadline for submissions — May 23, 2013
The National Farmers Union asks you to submit your letter of concern about the significant regulatory changes to Seed Variety Registration. You can just fill out the form below to send this letter instantly to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA).
The changes will allow greater corporate control over seeds in Canada and reduce choice for Canadian farmers. Read the letter below to understand the concerns, or read the Action Alert from the National Farmers Union.
Compassion & Choices.
At a Monday afternoon ceremony, Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin (D) will sign a bill making the state the third in the nation to permit euthanasia, putting his autograph on the Patient Choice and Control at End of Life Act, the first so-called “Death with Dignity” bill to be passed by state lawmakers instead of the voters themselves.
“This is a major breakthrough for the Death with Dignity movement,” Barbara Coombs Lee, president of the advocacy group Compassion & Choices, told Raw Story. “It is the first time that legislators have passed a law like this.”
Under Vermont’s new law, people judged to be mentally competent who suffer from a terminal illness and have less than six months to live will be able to request that a doctor prescribe a lethal narcotic dose. Doctors who comply with those requests will be required to follow a procedure outlined by the state, which includes a patient certification that acknowledges their consent to death.
Patients will be required to self-administer the drugs, which will only be dispensed after the patient confirms his or her request three times 15 days apart. The law then permits doctors to issue a prescription after a 48 hour waiting period.
“This is intended for people who are at the end of their lives, not for people who are suicidal,” Lee said. “This does not apply to them at all. This is about people who do not have a choice on living or drying. They are dying. Death is imminent. To them, the choice really is what that feels like for them and what it looks like for their loved ones who will hopefully be with them.”
Similar laws are on the books in Washington and Oregon, but it took voters to push those measures through. Death with Dignity rules in Montana were also implemented after a state Supreme Court ruling in 2009. In Vermont, it took a vote by Lt. Gov. Phil Scott (D) to break a 15-15 tie in the state’e senate, sending the bill to Shumlin for final approval. It cleared the Vermont House earlier in the month by a vote of 75 to 65, with mostly Republicans in opposition.
The law expires in 2016, assuming doctors in Vermont have adopted their own formal set of rules governing euthanasia.
An Experiment That’s Never Been Tried: Morality Without Religion | Big Think TV | Big Think. (from Kevin S)
A long tradition of thinking tells us that due to man’s animal nature we need to have order imposed from above, in the form of religion. Without religion, we could not live together, and that is why all human societies believe in the supernatural and have developed one religion or another.
This view, which the biologist and primatologist Frans de Waal calls Veneer Theory, is an essentially pessimistic view “that morality is a thin veneer over a nasty human nature.”
In his new book, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates, de Waal challenges this theory, arguing that human morality is older than religion, and indeed an innate quality. In other words, religion did not give us morality. Religion built onto a pre-existing moral system that governed how our species behaved.
de Waal’s argument, which he has been making for years, is strengthened by the fact that recent research is starting to paint a better picture of the kind of cognitive processing that empathy requires. It turns out that empathy is not as complex as we had imagined, and that is why other animals are capable of it as well as humans.
So if being moral is so easy, can we dispatch with religion altogether?
That is an experiment that no one has tried, and which de Waal finds intriguing. The problem, as de Waal points out in the video below, is that we need someone to be keeping watch in large-scale societies in which “we cannot all keep an eye on each other.”…(watch the video from the link above)….
The Racial Politics of Atheism | RD10Q | Religion Dispatches.
{interview with the author, Sikivu Hutchinson, Senior Fellow with Institute for Humanist Studies, and writer for Atheist Magazine}
“After writing Moral Combat in 2011 I became increasingly outraged by the extreme rightward turn of public policy and national discourse. I felt that there needed to be a strong atheist/humanist rebuke and critique of the strident xenophobic nationalism and racist propaganda that erupted with greater vengeance during the 2012 presidential campaign.
I wanted to make a statement against this climate and outline a radical humanist alternative. In addition, there has been much fanfare about the rise of the so-called “Nones” (or those who have rejected organized religion). However there is no evidence that people of color—especially women of color—are rejecting organized religion, much less God, in any significant numbers. I wanted to explore the reason for this, while at the same time providing a radical voice for the growing numbers of openly identified non-believers of color…
n the early-to-mid 20th century, many non-believers and freethinkers of color, as well as radical whites, were deeply invested in the struggle for civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, the labor movement and anti-imperialist resistance. They were not primarily academic or intellectual elites (á la atheist superstars like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens) and came from all walks of life. Moreover, they understood that reaching across the ideological aisle to organize with progressive believers was a necessity if they were going to gain any traction in their local communities (the examples of A. Philip Randolph, James Forman and the Black Panthers are illustrative in this regard).
So while there are numerous grassroots atheist groups spearheading their own projects, the movement as a whole continues to be publicly defined by a handful of superstars and their limited vision. The absence of historical and sociological context for atheist politics, and its disconnection from social justice activism, will keep it in the lily-white one-percent column.
I have no patience for single-issue white male atheists who inveigh against the backwardness of organized religion as the fount of all evil and then have the luxury to retreat into their segregated ivory towers, insulated conferences, and highly-paid seminar bubbles. In Godless Americana I address the lived experiences of some of the most religious communities on the planet in one of the richest nations on the planet. I probe the sociological context for faith traditions and hyper-religiosity in American communities of color.
One bedrock issue is the way students of color are disproportionately denied access to college prep courses, suspended, placed in special education and pipelined into prisons instead of being given a decent shot at a science and humanities-based education…..
What’s the most important take-home message for readers?
That humanism can be culturally relevant to communities of color. Traditional mainstream white-dominated freethought/atheist/humanist models don’t offer an adequate basis for social justice. They don’t address the intersection of women’s rights, civil rights, anti-racism, heterosexism, the racial wealth gap, and educational apartheid.
In the book I push back against the myth of the accessible American dream and look at the devastating impact that the recession has had on communities of color. I ask how one creates a just society based on the principles of anti-racist godlessness; rejecting supernatural, faith-based explanations for the universe, morality, ethics and human accountability. I emphasize the need to build on the historic connection between non-belief and movements for human rights liberation…
(see rest of article at link above)
Government pleads with Labour to save gay marriage bill | Society | The Guardian.
(sound familiar? back bench action…)
Downing Street issued a stark warning that the bill to legalise gay marriage will run into grave trouble – and cost the taxpayer an extra £4bn – if the Labour party joins forces with Tory opponents to vote in favour of granting civil partnerships to heterosexual couples.
As David Cameron was accused by the Conservative Grassroots group of showing “utter contempt” for party activists by pressing ahead with plans to equalise marriage, Labour sources voiced fears that No 10 appeared to be trying to find ways of killing the bill.
The row erupted as No 10 braced itself for a loss of face as up to 150 Tory MPs prepare to show their opposition to the prime minister during a series of votes when the marriage (same sex couples) bill reaches its report stage in the Commons today.
At least two cabinet ministers – the environment secretary Owen Paterson and the Wales secretary David Jones – are prepared to vote for a series of amendments that would grant exemptions to teachers and registrars. Chris Grayling, the justice secretary, and John Hayes, the prime minister’s unofficial envoy to the Tory right, may also side with opponents of the bill during a series of votes, which are “free” – allowing MPs to vote with their consciences….
Government sources made clear that the warnings were aimed at Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, whose support for the amendment will be decisive. One government source said: “Ed Miliband clearly wants to make political capital here. Perhaps he should think of the consequences.” But Labour rejected what it described as the “farcical” warnings, as sources noted that the supposed size of the “price tag” had grown from £3bn to £4bn in five days. One source said: “They are wrecking this bill themselves and trying to blame others.”
Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary and shadow equalities minister, who has been negotiating with the equalities minister Maria Miller, told Sky News: “I think it’s a real problem if this gets lost in the vortex of the Tory infighting that we had over the last couple of weeks when actually it’s a really positive bill that we should all want to celebrate.”
Leading climate scientist: Canada’s tar sands makes climate change ‘unsolvable’ | The Raw Story.
Major international oil companies are buying off governments, according to the world’s most prominent climate scientist, Prof James Hansen. During a visit to London, he accused the Canadian government of acting as the industry’s tar sands salesman and “holding a club” over the UK and European nations to accept its “dirty” oil.
“Oil from tar sands makes sense only for a small number of people who are making a lot of money from that product,” he said in an interview with the Guardian. “It doesn’t make sense for the rest of the people on the planet. We are getting close to the dangerous level of carbon in the atmosphere and if we add on to that unconventional fossil fuels, which have a tremendous amount of carbon, then the climate problem becomes unsolvable.”
Hansen met ministers in the UK government, which the Guardian previously revealed has secretly supported Canada’s position at the highest level.
Canada‘s natural resources minister, Joe Oliver, has also visited London to campaign against EU proposals to penalise oil from Alberta’s tar sands as highly polluting. “Canada can offer energy security and economic stability to the world,” he said. Oliver also publicly threatened a trade war via the World Trade Organisation if the EU action went ahead: “Canada will not hesitate to defend its interests.”
The lobbying for and against tar sands has intensified on both sides of the Atlantic as the EU moves forward on its proposals, which Canada fears could set a global precedent, and President Barack Obama considers approving the Keystone XL pipeline to transport tar sands oilfrom Canada to the US gulf coast refineries and ports. Canada’s president, Stephen Harper, was met by protesters when he visited New York last week to tell audiences that KXL “absolutely needs to go ahead”.
Canada’s tar sands are the third biggest oil reserve in the world, but separating the oil from the rock is energy intensive and causes three to four times more carbon emissions per barrel than conventional oil. Hansen argues that it would be “game over” for the climate if tar sands were fully exploited, given that existing conventional oil and gas is certain to be burned.
“To leave our children with a manageable situation, we need to leave the unconventional fuel in the ground,” he said. Canada’s ministers were “acting as salesmen for those people who will gain from the profits of that industry,” he said. “But I don’t think they are looking after the rights and wellbeing of the population as a whole.
“The thing we are facing overall is that the fossil fuel industry has so much money that they are buying off governments,” Hansen said. “Our democracies are seriously handicapped by the money that is driving decisions in Washington and other capitals.”
The EU aims to penalise oil sources with higher carbon footprints, as part of a drive to reduce the carbon emissions from transport called the fuel quality directive (FDQ). But Canada, supported by the UK, is fiercely opposed: “We are not saying they should not move to reduce emissions,” said Oliver. “But the proposed implementation of the FQD is discriminatory to oil sands and not based on scientific facts.” However,Europe‘s commissioner for climate action, Connie Hedegaard, said the FQD was “nothing more, nothing less” than accurate labelling and putting a fair price on pollution.
Hansen, who informed the US Congress of the danger of global warming in 1988, has caused controversy before by saying the “CEOs of fossil fuel companies should be tried for high crimes against humanity” and calling coal-fired power plants “factories of death“. In April, he stepped down from his Nasa position after 46 years, in order to spend more time communicating the risks of climate change and to work on legal challenges to governments.
Hansen has started a science programme at Columbia University, the first task of which is to produce a report to support suits filed again the US federal government and several state governments. It is being pursued by the Our Children’s Trust charity and is based on a trust principle recognised in US law.
“We maintain that the atmosphere and climate are held in trust by the present generations for the future generations and we do not have the right to destroy that asset,” Hansen said. “Therefore the courts should require the government to give a plan as to how they are going to ensure that we still have that asset to pass on to the next generation.”
French same-sex marriage law signed by François Hollande | World news | guardian.co.uk.
The French president, François Hollande, has signed a law authorising same-sex couples to marry and adopt children, after months of street protests, political slanging matches and a rise in homophobic attacks.
The move makes France the ninth country in Europe and the 14th globally to legalise same-sex marriage.
France’s official journal announced on Saturday that the bill had become law after the Constitutional Council rejected a challenge by the rightwing opposition on Friday.
The first same-sex marriage is due to be held in Montpellier in the south of France on 29 May, Reuters reported.
Hollande and his ruling Socialist party have made the legislation their flagship social change, but the right to marriage and adoption for everyone regardless of sexual orientation has triggered the biggest conservative and rightwing street protests in 30 years, with more than 200 arrests. Opponents have called for another protest on 26 May.
While French opinion polls have long shown that a majority of the public support same-sex marriage, the issue of adoption is more controversial.
The law also leaves key issues on family rights unanswered. It will not grant automatic co-parenting rights for same-sex couples in civil partnerships, nor allow access to medically assisted procreation or IVF to lesbian couples. Rights campaigners want these issues to be addressed in a family law this year.
The government has referred the issue of medically assisted procreation to France’s national ethics council, which will rule in the autumn. But the issue of parenting and procreation rights remains deeply divisive in opinion polls and among politicians.
The other 13 countries to legalise same-sex marriage include Canada, Denmark, Sweden and most recently Uruguay and New Zealand. In the US, Washington DC and 12 states have legalised same-sex marriage.
Law Protecting Afghanistan Women Blocked By Conservatives.
Even small gains are being lost….
KABUL, Afghanistan — Conservative religious lawmakers in Afghanistan blocked legislation on Saturday aimed at strengthening provisions for women’s freedoms, arguing that parts of it violate Islamic principles and encourage disobedience.
The fierce opposition highlights how tenuous women’s rights remain a dozen years after the ouster of the hard-line Taliban regime, whose strict interpretation of Islam once kept Afghan women virtual prisoners in their homes…
The Law on Elimination of Violence Against Women has been in effect since 2009, but only by presidential decree. It is being brought before parliament now because lawmaker Fawzia Kofi, a women’s rights activist, wants to cement it with a parliamentary vote to prevent its potential reversal by any future president who might be tempted to repeal it to satisfy hard-line religious parties.
The law criminalizes, among other things, child marriage and forced marriage, and bans “baad,” the traditional practice of selling and buying women to settle disputes. It also makes domestic violence a crime punishable by up to three years in prison and specifies that rape victims should not face criminal charges for fornication or adultery…
There has been spotty enforcement of the law as it stands. A United Nations analysis in late 2011 found only a small percentage of reported crimes against women were pursued by the Afghan government. Between March 2010 and March 2011 – the first full Afghan year the decree was in effect – prosecutors filed criminal charges in only 155 cases, or 7 percent of the total number of crimes reported.
The child marriage ban and the idea of protecting female rape victims from prosecution were particularly heated subjects in Saturday’s parliamentary debate, said Nasirullah Sadiqizada Neli, a conservative lawmaker from Daykundi province.
Neli suggested that removing the custom – common in Afghanistan – of prosecuting raped women for adultery would lead to social chaos, with women freely engaging in extramarital sex safe in the knowledge they could claim rape if caught.
Lawmaker Shaheedzada also claimed that the law might encourage disobedience among girls and women, saying it reflected Western values not applicable in Afghanistan.
“Even now in Afghanistan, women are running from their husbands. Girls are running from home,” Shaheedzada said. “Such laws give them these ideas.”….
IPS – Women’s Rights Still Denied in Latin America | Inter Press Service.
Inequality and injustice underlie day-to-day violence,” Gabriela Delgado, of the human rights programme at the state National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), told IPS. “The bottleneck for women’s struggles is the justice system. This means that structural changes are needed.”
Among the states’ pending debts in this area are legislative reforms to establish formal equality under the law, and the enforcement of policies to achieve the goals of access to economic resources, violence-free lives, sexual and reproductive rights and non-sexist education to combat discrimination.
Activists have identified laws that tolerate marital rape and other kinds of rape, endorse different minimum ages at which men and women can marry, or grant greater rights to men on marriage, in countries like Argentina, Bolivia, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua and Panama.
Between 17 and 53 percent of women in the region are victims of violence, and this scenario is exacerbated because 92 percent of reported crimes go unpunished. And abortion largely remains illegal in Latin America.
In the view of Rosa Cobo, an academic at Spain’s public University of A Coruña, a mixture of age-old forms of violence are reemerging, together with new phenomena linked to the illegal economy and organised crime.
“We are living in a world characterised by geopolitical, economic, political and patriarchal disorder, which produces excessive violence that always affects the most disadvantaged and the weakest sectors,” Cobo told IPS.
She cited as examples the femicides (gender-based murders of women) in Guatemala and Ciudad Juárez, on the border between Mexico and the United States; gender violence in armed conflicts; the trafficking of women for sexual exploitation; and the sale of women into marriage in Asia.
The activists called for guarantees from states for equality between men and women and girls and boys, through the elimination of discriminatory rules and practices, and the promotion of equality and shared responsibilities for domestic chores, in order to eradicate poverty and usher in a life free from violence for women and girls.
They also called for sexual and reproductive autonomy for women, access to reproductive health resources and services, and secular, intercultural, non-sexist and anti-discriminatory education.
“There is a worrying debt to women that is going to take years to overcome,” Oviedo said.
CLADEM, which is based in Lima, launched a campaign in 2009 for non-sexist and anti-discriminatory education to promote education based on respect, equality and cooperation between the sexes.
“Isn’t it likely that there is a relationship between this extreme violence against women and the progress made in winning women’s rights in recent years?” Cobo asked.
This kind of violence “shows a compulsion to control, in response to the social reality that criticises the status of women. Violence has been displaced from known spaces to the unknown, so that men are now killing women whom they do not know,” she said.
Artist finds inspiration in Canadian government’s attempt to silence her | Environment | guardian.co.uk.
“It is almost like it’s a corporation exercising extreme message control,” she said in a phone interview. “It’s as if Stephen Harper were the CEO of Canada the corporation and we were his employees and we were not allowed to step out of line or say what we believe is right or true because that would upset the company’s brand.
“This fanatical obsession with message control to me is very much what you have in a company but in a democracy that shouldn’t be the case.”
Canada, under the government of Stephen Harper, has exhibited little patience for dissent. The government has muzzled government scientists, insulted Nasa climate experts, and dismissed environmental protesters as dangerous radicals.
But there is apparently one woman whom the government can’t shut up: the Toronto environmental writer, illustrator and activist Franke James, who turned the efforts to silence her into material for a new book.
Banned on the Hill: A True Story about Dirty Oil and Government Censorship, released this week, shows how Canadian bureaucrats tried to silence James because her views on climate change clashed with the Harper government’s push to develop Alberta’s tar sands.
The story is told through visual essays as well as official emails obtained by James, in which government bureaucrats discuss the troublesome artist and her work. It also relies heavily on humour – some of it provided inadvertently by the government bureaucrats discussing what to do about James. The artist said she received some 2,172 pages of official memos in which her name appeared.
The events go back to the summer of 2011 when Canadian officials intervened to try to shut down a show of James’s work in Croatia hosted by a local environmental group.
James is not a household name in Canada, but she had apparently turned up on the government’s radar for a series of visuals poking fun at Harper and demanding that polluters be held accountable for the tar sands.
For James, the decision to target her encapsulated the extreme measures taken by the Harper government to counter its critics, especially those who oppose the expansion of the tar sands, because of the heavy environmental consequences.
Two Toronto Catholic school trustees move to get rid of gay-straight alliances – The Globe and Mail.
Two Toronto Catholic District School Board trustees are looking to eliminate Gay Straight Alliances from the city’s Catholic Schools.
Trustee Garry Tanuan, who represents Ward 8 Scarborough, will introduce a motion at a May 23 board meeting that states that “Toronto Catholic District School Board schools shall have no Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) clubs or similar.” The motion was seconded by Trustee John Del Grande, who represents Ward 7 Scarborough/NorthYork.
What Mr. Tanuan is proposing would go against Ontario law. Last June, the provincial government passed the Accepting Schools Act, which stated that students could not be prevented from setting up a GSA in any Ontario school.
In a statement Thursday, Ontario Education Minister Liz Sandals said that no school board is exempt from the Act. “It is my expectation that all school boards comply with the Accepting Schools Act,” said Ms. Sandals in the statement.
“It is our responsibility to ensure all students feel safe and welcomed at school. That’s why the Act states that neither the board nor the principal can refuse to allow students to have a gay-straight alliance or a similarly named club. Catholic school boards and stakeholders have demonstrated leadership and support in providing safe, positive and inclusive environments for all students. I know that Catholic values of tolerance and love make them natural allies in the fight against bullying. I hope the Board will continue to foster an accepting environment for all students.”
The Accepting Schools Act officially came into effect in September. However, later that month it was revealed that a provision in Canada’s constitution could be used to circumvent the Act.
According to Eugene Meehan, a constitutional scholar who was hired by a conservative-minded think-tank Cardus, Section 93 of the Constitution Act of 1867 protects the rights of Catholics to run their own schools in ways consistent with their religious doctrines. This would allow for an appeal to the federal cabinet, which has the power to impose legislation to amend provincial law…..
The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO) issued a statement Thursday condemning Mr. Tanuan’s motion, saying it “puts gay students at high risk.”
“This motion goes farther than banning GSAs. It would shut down all student discussion on issues of sexual orientation or gender identity in school-based clubs,” said ETFO President Sam Hammond in the statement. “How does that make a young student who is lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) feel welcome or safe in a school environment? How does that educate students to be respectful of differences?”
Take Action – Write Today | Oxfam.ca.
Keep aid focused on poverty and rights
Big changes are underway in Canada’s aid program. As part of budget Bill C-60, the federal government plans to merge the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT).
Let’s make sure that ending poverty and promoting human rights remain at the heart of Canada’s international development efforts, Please reach out to your Member of Parliament.
Big changes are underway in the Canadian international development landscape.In March, the federal government announced it would merge the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT). Two weeks ago, omnibus budget legislation (Bill C-60) was introduced, setting out the framework for the merger.
Before the House of Commons votes on Bill C-60 in June, we urgently need you to reach out to your Member of Parliament. We need to ensure that ending poverty and promoting human rights are at the heart of our international development efforts.
Canada has been a leader in promoting women’s rights and gender equality, food security and the eradication of polio. Canadians can be proud of the results of this good work. But there is still a lot to accomplish on the road to a more equitable world and the CIDA-DFAIT merger raises several key questions:
- How will it impact development priorities?
- Will Canada’s foreign aid maintain a focus on reducing poverty and promoting rights?
- How much of Canada’s aid budget will be devoted to reducing poverty vs other foreign policy and trade interests?
- Where do NGOs, with decades of experience in working with the poor, fit in?
Act right now. The House of Commons is due to vote on Bill C-60 very soon
Fracking is not a right: Tell Lone Pine to drop its NAFTA lawsuit against Quebec’s moratorium on fracking!.
From the COC:
“When the people of Quebec spoke out against fracking, the provincial government listened. Quebec put a moratorium on the controversial and dangerous method for extracting hard-to-reach natural gas until the environmental impacts could be studied.
Fracking uses enormous amounts of water and sand, mixed with toxic chemicals, which are forced into the ground at high pressure to fracture shale rock or coal beds to release natural gas or oil. The process is linked to earthquakes and water pollution, which is why communities around the world are trying to stop it.
You would think the Quebec government has an obligation to protect its people and their environment. But a U.S. fracking company called Lone Pine Resources thinks otherwise.
Lone Pine, which wanted to frack for gas under the St. Lawrence River, has threatened to sue Canada under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The company is demanding $250 million in compensation for Quebec’s moratorium, which it says violates Lone Pine’s “right” to frack!
We shouldn’t have to pay to protect ourselves and our environment. Communities, not private firms, should have the final say on fracking and other projects that threaten water sources, the environment and public health – and there should be no penalty for saying “NO”.
[13-May-13] Enbridge asks NEB to keep pipeline safety issues secret.
“…Eighteen months after being ordered to correct important safety issues with its oil and gas pipelines, Enbridge has finally filed a plan with the National Energy Board (NEB) as to how and when it will come into compliance with the NEB’s regulations. The company doesn’t want its plan made public, however, and has asked the NEB to keep its filing confidential. A ruling is expected later this week.
“Enbridge is desperately trying to convince Canadians that its pipelines are safe, but doesn’t want any public scrutiny of its safety plans,” said Maryam Adrangi, energy campaigner for the Council of Canadians. “After the catastrophic pipeline rupture in Kalamazoo, public oversight is more important than ever.”
Over two years after the Kalamazoo spill, there is still notable contamination. Many Canadians are raising concerns that a similarly devastating spill could happen along Line 9, which is part of the same Enbridge pipeline network as Kalamazoo.
“How can we even consider letting Enbridge pump heavy crude through the heart of the Great Lakes watershed in a forty-year-old pipeline that doesn’t meet today’s safety standards?” asked Emma Lui, water campaigner for the Council of Canadians. “Enbridge has shown itself to be incompetent and irresponsible in the past, and now it wants to keep critical safety information secret from the public. That’s not how you win the trust of Canadians.”
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