Dialogue Magazine, Vol.32-3-Digital, Spring 2019

www.dialogue.ca

VOL. 32, NO. 3, SPRING 2019

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Jodi Wilson Raybould PHOTOS

Kevin Annett

Robin Mathews

Bruce Clark

BACK INSIDE COVER: The Power of a Woman’s Words…

“Fortunately Vice-Admiral Norman didn’t fire the females he hired.” Vice-Admiral Mark Norman's lawyer Marie Henein at a press conference in Ottawa on May 8, 2019.

If you missed the press conference, you can watch it on CPAC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= FJ6Q337NUWg

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Anthony James Hall

Corrupt to the Core author, Dr. Shiv Chopra

www.dialogue.ca

A word from the publisher and editor…

Dear Reader, Well, we have wended our way to the letter “W” – and an edition that may become known as the Whistleblower issue…

The numerous essays ‘speaking truth to power’ include our resident whistleblower Robin Mathews, covering both the SNC-Lavalin scandal (and related topics) [p.9] and the Ongoing Genocide and Judicial Suppression of Aboriginal Rights (and Bruce Clark’s book). [p.13].

Anthony James Hall shares his essay on the Wet’suwet’en Land Defenders (and politics, pipelines, police) [p.20]. Sarah Webster’s story about Rev. Kevin Annett is called Erasing the Erasure of Canada’s Biggest Cover-Up. [p.24] And there are many other ‘uncomfortable’ truths exposed by courageous writers in this issue.

A special thank you to artists Susanne Hare Lawson (Water & Wind on the front cover) and Tony Palmer (Primaeval Egg, story on p.59).

Due to Maurice’s ‘wellness’ setbacks in March/April – and a weird technical glitch, the content in this issue is different than it might have been if it had been compiled “on time!” [One of the major file folders holding articles submitted by readers (on Janet’s computer) mysteriously disappeared when the issue was half-completed, so some anticipated articles may be missing from this issue.] Nevertheless, we hope you find this unique collection of essays, poetry and art worthy of your attention ~ and worth the wait!

We feel honoured to be part of this venture with the dedicated writers, artists and readers who are pursuing your dreams of a better world. Without You there would be no Dialogue. And we are profoundly grateful for subscribers and for the small number of readers whose timely donations enable Dialogue to continue.

There are only three more issues – X-Y-Z – until we complete our Alphabet Challenge, started in 2013!

We wish you and your family a Happy & Healthy Spring!

Maurice

volunteer publisher

Janet

volunteer editor

…& Penny & Lucky!

IMPORTANT: If you wish to continue receiving the magazine, please ensure your subscription is up-to-date! PLEASE LOOK AT YOUR ADDRESS LABEL ON THE BACK COVER of this issue to find your RENEWAL DATE. If your subscription is due, you will find a renewal slip enclosed at p.58 of the print magazine. THANK YOU! P.P.S. And Thank You to Thrifty Foods and to Dialogue readers who are

making use of the Thrifty Foods Smile Card Fundraising Program (renewed for 2019-Thank you!) – which enables friends of Dialogue (in BC-AB-SK) to have their grocery purchases at any Thrifty Foods store to support the magazine. The program donates five percent of purchases to Dialogue, at no cost to the shopper. [If you would like to receive a designated “Smile Card,” please let us know (250-758-9877).] ♣ www.dialogue.ca

dialogue is... …an independent, Canadian volunteer-produced, not-for-profit quarterly, written and supported by its readers – empowering their voices and the sharing of ideas.

Now in its 32nd year, dialogue provides a forum for the exchange of ideas and an antidote to political correctness.

We encourage readers to share with others the ideas and insights gleaned from these pages.

If this is your first issue, please let us know what you think of it.

If you would like to share your ideas and become a writer/artist in our magazine, please consider this your personal invitation to participate!

We also need your support as a subscriber, to help us continue (See P. 58 for details) We receive NO government funding and no advertising revenue.

We rely totally on the generous support of our readers & subscribers.

dialogue

was founded in 1987 and is now published quarterly.

Maurice J. King, Volunteer Publisher Janet K. Hicks, Volunteer Editor

Date of Issue: May 10, 2019 Annual subscription: $20.00 [including GST, # 89355-1739] Canada Post Agreement No. 40069647 Registration No. 08915 ISSN: 1184-7042 Legal Deposit: National Library of Canada (409731)

The views expressed in this publication are those of their individual authors.

Reprints of published articles are included for their educational value.

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VOL. 32, NO. 3, SPRING 2019

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Words of Farewell Below is a wonderful goodbye from Paul Dewar who passed away on February 7, 2019, at the age of 56.

Words to remember for sure! - Yours, June, June Ross jross12@telus.net

FROM PAUL DEWAR Dear Friends, The time has come for me to say goodbye. While I have left this place physically, I have some final words I’d like to share.

I want to say thank you. My whole life was filled with the kindness of the people of Ottawa, but never did I feel the true depth and generosity of your love more than this past year. You were a constant source of comfort and solidarity for me and my family. I am so grateful for all that you have done.

I told you that I thought my illness was a gift and I genuinely meant that. In this time in between, I got to see the wonder of the world around us. This reinforced my belief that inherent in our community is a desire to embrace each other with kindness and compassion.

In my time on this earth, I was passionate about the power of citizens working together and making a difference.

I wanted a Canada where we treat our fellow citizens with the dignity, love and respect that every one of us deserves.

I wanted a world where we reduced suffering and increased happiness. A world where we took better care of each other.

I had the privilege to travel and see that despite our many unique differences, we are all ultimately driven by the same desires for community, belonging and fairness.

It is easy sometimes to feel overwhelmed by the gravity of the challenges we face. Issues like climate change, forced migration and the threat posed by nuclear weapons. It’s hard to know how to make a difference.

The secret is not to focus on how to solve the problem, but concentrate on what you can contribute – to your country, your community and neighbours.

Start from a place of compassion and be grateful for all that Canada has to offer – especially the natural 4 dialogue

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beauty that surrounds us, and the music that brings us so much joy.

True change can only come when power is transferred to young people unburdened by cynicism. That’s why I used what energy I had left this year to create Youth Action Now. Hopefully, it will help unleash the power of the young people in our community to make a real difference. I hope you will be inspired to be a part of that project and continue my work.

Ottawa, don’t stop now. Let’s show our strength together. Let’s embrace the vision of Algonquin elder William Commanda for an authentic and organic future, rooted in the wisdom of the Indigenous people upon whose land we reside.

Let’s exemplify how to save our biosphere, right here, with the protection of our beloved Ottawa River and Gatineau Park.

Let’s make more art. Let’s play more. Let’s embrace each other in these days of cynicism and doubt.

Let’s welcome those who need a safe home. Let’s empower those who have been left behind.

Let’s nurture and grow with peace, love and unity.

Let’s join hands and hearts to see the beauty in ourselves through the soul of our city.

In the stoic stillness of my journey, I have found my way to peace.

May you keep building a more peaceful and better world for all.

Let this sacred ground be a place for all.

Let the building of a better world begin with our neighbours.

May we dream together.

May we gather our courage and stand together in moments of despair, and may we be bound together by joyous celebration of life.

We are best when we love and when we are loved.

Shine on like diamonds in the magic of this place.

SMILE AND PLAY… LAUGH AND DANCE… GIVE AND SHARE… My love to you always, Paul ♣ www.dialogue.ca

The Alberta Election…

Alberta’s nostalgic pipedream…

David Bond, Kelowna BC Column April 22, 2019

It appears that the citizens of Alberta voted for a nostalgic dream of renewed oil prosperity and reduced taxes. This pipedream ensured the victory of the United Conservative Party led by Jason Kenney.

Just look at the major promises he made during the campaign, He promised to introduce private delivery options into the healthcare system while at the same cutting $200 million in health administration costs. He will remove the cap on charter school funding while ensuring parental consent for any sex education classes. He also promised to double the number of schools offering vocational training.

Other promised measures include fighting the stress tests applied by Central Mortgage and Housing on mortgage borrowing and cutting unnecessary “deadweight” regulations. Kenney will also try to cancel the NDP’s $3.7 billion deal to transport oil to tidewater in tanker cars, and cut the corporate tax rate by a third to 8%. He will raise the provincial debt to $86 billion but at the same time balance the budget by 2023.

To put Ottawa in its place, Kenney pledged to launch a constitutional challenge against Bill 69 (which changes the process of regulatory review of pipelines) if it becomes law and to hold a referendum on the federal equalization program if there is no major progress on opening new pipelines. (Any such referendum would have zero impact on the program.) He will scrap the Alberta carbon tax - but that will simply switch the collection to a federal levy. He will launch a court challenge to the federal carbon tax before April 30.

To punish BC’s NDP government for its anti-pipeline stance, Kenney promised to turn off oil flowing west through existing pipelines. This despite the potential negative impact on Alberta’s oil producers.

To ensure caucus discipline, he will pass a law to require any member of the legislature who crosses the aisle to resign and stand for re-election before so doing.

Now all of these initiatives make for a busy first year in office. Unfortunately, the UCP’s agenda does little to address the real challenges facing the province. www.dialogue.ca

While Kenney plans to cut corporate taxes and freeze personal taxes, he has never mentioned the province’s excessive reliance on highly variable oil royalties. Unless something is done very quickly, Alberta will find itself in a virtually unstoppable spiral of increasing debt.

Similarly unmentioned has been the major effort needed to diversify the Alberta economy. Completing the Trans Mountain Pipeline will not restore the prosperity that oil brought to the province prior to the financial crisis of 2008. Those days are not returning amid the worldwide struggle against climate change and decline in demand for fossil fuels.

For too long Alberta has had the lowest percentage of high school graduates going to university in Canada. As a consequence, its supply of skilled workers is woefully inadequate. In the past it relied on attracting high-skilled workers from elsewhere but the competition has intensified. The province will need about 40,000 additional well-trained workers by 2030 and has nowhere near sufficient postsecondary places to meet that need. The bill for attracting teachers and building physical plant will run into hundreds of millions.

The way Alberta generates electricity (presently by burning coal) will have to change rapidly to meet pollution targets, putting additional strain on the fiscal capacity of the province. Having long spent oil and gas royalties rather than saving them, and having refused to raise taxes, the government now has very limited capital to fund the necessary transformation of its electrical power grid.

Finally, the province has often failed to enforce cleanup requirements to reclaim the land surrounding abandoned oil wells; a contingent claim of up to $70 billion looms like a black cloud over Alberta. To collect that sum from the oil industry is just not feasible for the foreseeable future even if the pipelines are built overnight.

I have often thought of Newfoundland and Labrador as the basket case of Confederation - but no longer.

It’s likely to be Alberta for at least the coming decade. bond.david9@gmail.com ♣

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U.S. claims Northwest Passage does not belong to Canada

BY PETER EWART Special to the Prince George Daily News, on May 7, 2019 https://pgdailynews.ca/index.php/2019/05/07/u-s-claimsnorthwest-passage-does-not-belong-to-canada/

In a major speech on May 6, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, declared that Canada’s longstanding territorial claim to the waters of the Northwest Passage in the Arctic is “illegitimate” and that these waters are an “international strait,” i.e. Canada does not have jurisdiction. This comes at a time when, as a result of climate change, Arctic ice is melting and new shipping routes between Europe, Asia and North America, as well as resource extraction operations, are expected to significantly open up in coming years.

Pompeo’s statements represent a direct threat to Canadian sovereignty and could represent an overturning of the arrangement made by previous U.S. and Canadian governments in 1985 “to agree to disagree” over the Northwest Passage. This arrangement was that “the U.S. would always ask permission before sending icebreakers through the Northwest Passage. And the Canadians would always give it.” (1) The arrangement was put in place by the U.S. and Canadian governments after the Polar Sea incident in 1985 in which, defying Canada, the U.S. Coast Guard vessel Polar Sea sailed through the Northwest Passage waters without asking permission. This arrogant act enraged many people across Canada and prompted protests whereby Inuit activists and Canadian students dropped a Canadian flag from an aircraft onto the deck of the vessel and demanded that it leave Canadian territory.

In response that year, then Progressive Conservative Secretary of State for External Affairs Joe Clark 6 dialogue

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articulated Canada’s stand on the Northwest Passage.

He stated: “Canada’s sovereignty in the Arctic is indivisible. It embraces land, sea and ice. It extends without interruption to the seaward-facing coasts of the Arctic islands. These islands are joined, and not divided, by the waters between them. They are bridged for most of the year by ice. From time immemorial Canada’s Inuit people have used and occupied the ice as they have used and occupied the land. The policy of the Government is to maintain the natural unity of the Canadian Arctic archipelago and to preserve Canada’s sovereignty over land, sea and ice undiminished and undivided” (2).

Fast forward to today. In recent months, the Trump administration, consistent with its scorn for international law and agreements, has been sending out signals that it plans to directly challenge Canada over the Northwest Passage, as well as Russia over its claim over the Northeast Passage (which stretches along Russia’s northern borders). For example, the U.S. Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer recently stated that “the United States will have to be more engaged in the [Arctic] region” by carrying out freedom-ofnavigation operations “in the northwest – in the northern passage” (3).

One of the means to weaken the Canadian position on Northwest Passage sovereignty (and strengthen the case of the U.S. and various European countries who covet access) will be to allow NATO to conduct operations in the Canadian Arctic. Canada has traditionally opposed such operations for precisely that reason. For example, in confidential U.S. cables released in 2011

by Wikileaks, NATO Secretary-General Fogh Raswww.dialogue.ca

mussen stated that then Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper opposed “a NATO role in the Arctic” and that Canada had “a good working relationship with Russia with respect to the Arctic, and a NATO presence could backfire by exacerbating tensions” (4) Yet the current Trudeau government, as well as the Canadian Parliament as a whole, appear to be throwing that “NATO in the Arctic” prohibition overboard.

For example, the House of Commons Committee on National Defence, chaired by Liberal MP Stephen Fuhr, has recommended that Canada conduct “joint training and military exercises for NATO members in the Canadian Arctic” (5). If this happens, the federal government risks losing sovereignty over the Northwest Passage waters to the U.S. and other European countries, as well as further ramping up tensions with Russia.

What will happen to the Canadian Arctic if an Andrew Scheer Conservative government comes to power in the next election? The signs don’t look any better. On May 7, Scheer made a war-mongering, Cold War-style speech on foreign policy in which he repeatedly attacked Russia and China over their involvement in the Arctic. Yet, even though U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made his arrogant statement about Canada’s so-called “illegitimate” claim to the Northwest Passage just the day before, Scheer, in lapdog style, said only that his government would defend Canada’s sovereignty over the Passage but failed to mention the U.S. by name or the Secretary of State’s veiled threat.

Indeed, in regards to his ranting against Russia, China, and Iran, much of Scheer’s speech appears to have been an echo of Pompeo’s. Sheer even promised to bring Canada further under the thumb of the U.S. militarily by signing onto the controversial U.S.-controlled Ballistic Missile Defence System which promises to further aggravate tensions in the Arctic region and elsewhere.

The irony in all this is that the biggest threat to Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic is the U.S. itself. Besides the issue of the Northwest Passage, the U.S. is also claiming a large section of Canadian territory (21,000 square km) in the Beaufort Sea which is rich in oil, gas and fishery resources.

Canada needs a nation-building project for the Arctic and the entire country. But one thing is clear – it won’t come from lapdog governments or parliaments whatever their political stripe.

Peter Ewart, peter.ewart@shaw.ca Peter Ewart is a columnist and writer based in Prince George, BC. 1. Beeler, Carolyn. “Who controls the Northwest Passage? It’s up for debate.” PRI’s The World. September 4, 2017.

2. Killas, Mark. “The legality of Canada’s claims to the waters of tis Arctic archipelago.” Ontario Law Review, Vol. 19:1.

3. Lajeunesse, Adam. “Is the next big fight over the Northwest Passage coming?” Policy Options, February 14, 2019.

4. “Canada PM and NATO S-G discuss Afghanistan, the Strategic Concept, and the Arctic.” Wikileaks, January 20, 2010 5. “Canada and NATO: An alliance forged in strength and reliability.” Report of the Standing Committee on National Defence.

House of Commons. Canada. June 2018. ♣

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The Assange Arrest Is A Warning From History - by John Pilger, APRIL 13 2019, InformationClearingHouse.info Rec’d from S. McDowall, smcdow@telus.net [EXTRACT/LINK]:

"The shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar Wilde wrote, "sew the seeds of discontent [without which] there would be no advance towards civilisation." The warning is explicit towards journalists. What happened to the founder and editor of WikiLeaks can happen to you on a newspaper, you in a TV studio, you on radio, you running a podcast.

Assange's principal media tormentor, the Guardian, a collaborator with the secret state, displayed its nervousness this week with an editorial that scaled new weasel heights. The Guardian has exploited the www.dialogue.ca

work of Assange and WikiLeaks in what its previous editor called "the greatest scoop of the last 30 years."

The paper creamed off WikiLeaks' revelations and claimed the accolades and riches that came with them.

With not a penny going to Julian Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book's authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, turned on their source, abused him and disclosed the secret password Assange had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing leaked US embassy cables. […] READ JOHN PILGER ARTICLE IN FULL: www.informationclearinghouse.info/51418.htm ♣ VOL. 32, NO. 3, SPRING 2019

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Worthy of Our Better Selves Mike Nickerson, Lanark ON

Deep in debt, caught in jobs we don’t like, many find it hard to imagine finding the time and freedom to create a different society.

A precedent, however, comes from ancient Greece. In the 6th century BC, Greek society was on the verge of disintegration. Solon, an appointed official, decreed that all debts were to be cancelled.* The result was that, instead of people working in bondage to creditors, they explored the possibilities of architecture, astronomy, mathematics, literature, philosophy, art and other frontiers of human potential. Some recognize this liberated creativity as the foundation of the Western World.

It can happen again!

Civilizations rise and fall. They rise on unifying visions, sometimes inspired and sometimes imposed.

What is consistent is that the population works on various parts of a process that provides food, shelter, artifacts and an organizational structure to make sure that those things continue to be available. Civilizations fall as local resources are exhausted and/or the population grows resentful at growing inequality.

Our civilization emerged from the Middle Ages as tradesmen and artisans engaged in local trade. It has grown for centuries to where vast, powerful global corporations dominate the Earth. With the communication revolution, the winners of the Global Monopoly Game have access to the cheapest labour and lowest environmental standards. Local enterprise is hard pressed to compete. Enormous volumes of goods, including single use and short lived products, require billions of tons of minerals and living things to be taken from the Earth, processed, sold and thrown away.

This established order is losing its appeal. Resentment is growing about the rapid rise of the wealth of ‘the 1%’ while the 99% experience dwindling fortunes, and an exponentially expanding system that endangers planetary health. Donald Trump, Doug Ford, Brexit, the Yellow Vests and more, signal a longing for change. What do we need to become?

We humans are truly remarkable. We are capable of 8 dialogue

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creating a civilization that serves everyone while preserving the health of our only planet. We have thumbs, memory and compassion; we learn, remember, invent, create and build – individually and in groups. With our knowledge, we can make products to be durable rather than to go obsolete. Our communications technology could encourage people to appreciate familiar and durable goods, rather than to throw things away and buy new. Most promising, our capacities for learning, love and laughter, for friendship, art, music, dance, sport, service and appreciation enable us to provide ourselves with lifetimes of inspiration and true satisfaction, while minimizing resource exploitation and waste.

Life – our physical bodies and the consciousness that we carry – is composed mostly from gases that float freely in the atmosphere, almost everywhere on Earth.

The denser materials needed to thrive can be cycled endlessly in local soils, as they have throughout the ages. ** We can build buildings that need almost no energy to heat or cool. Education consists of knowledge and good will, both of which are available in any quantity we wish. Health care, on the preventative level, is also primarily knowledge and good will. We could have a well-fed, comfortably housed, educated, healthy population on a small portion of the natural resources and waste of the present system.

We built the world we have. We can recreate it. Imagine a civilization truly worthy of our better human nature, a world that is fair enough that people will cooperate and enlightened enough to maintain the health of the planet we depend on. As this awareness spreads, we are ready. Each one of us can spend time learning more about the challenge – and acting. Find a group already engaged, or start something yourself.

Help put pieces of the new order in place. This is how civilizations rise.

Mike Nickerson co-founded the Institute for the Study of Cultural Evolution in 1972. He can be reached at (email): sustain5@web.ca He is the author of Life, Money & Illusion This article draws on: * http://www.unz.com/author/michael-hudson/ ** Videos # 4 & 5 at: http://www.sustainwellbeing.net/video_index.html http://www.sustainwellbeing.net/3potentsteps.html http://www.sustainwellbeing.net/global_monopoly.html ♣ www.dialogue.ca

Whistleblowers of the Western World

Canadians Meet ‘The Deep State’… (PART ONE)

SNC-Lavalin: The Tip of An Enormous “Deep State” Iceberg.

By Robin Mathews, Vancouver, March 2019 SNC-Lavalin, the large Canadian engineering firm at

the centre of the Liberal government crisis engendered by the treatment of former Attorney General/Minister of Justice and Minister of Veterans Affairs, Jody Wilson-Raybould, is merely the tip of an enormous iceberg.

The gyrations of SNC-Lavalin to have a law passed (obscurely in a Liberal “Omnibus” Bill in 2018) that permits it (and giant firms like it) to write “deferred prosecution agreements” (in what is called a “remediation regime”) may be seen as nothing more than another private/corporate attack on the Rule of Law … supported by the present Canadian (Liberal) government in power.

That government, I suggest, is acknowledging the growing reality of A Regime For The Very Rich Outside The Law … and a law for us, the unimportant others. The move should be seen, I suggest, as a fullscale attack on The Rule of Law in Canada.

In briefest words: the kinds of agreement (already at work in some other Western nations) permit wrongdoers to escape criminal conviction by paying large sums of money and “repenting” their sins ! ! !

(Remember that Fraud Charges may normally occur in such matters, pointing to fairly long jail sentences for individuals, real people involved in the criminal charges normally set in motion.) The Remediation Regime works to erase that possibility completely … so that individuals are never guilty of criminal acts!

Might the process be seen as the bribery of governments by ‘wink-wink-nudge-nudge’ ‘friends’ who – anyway (as with SNC-Lavalin) give large sums to the Party that has become the government in power?

Might the process be seen as the actual codification of the separation of powerful (Deep State) organizations from the Rule of Law in national jurisdictions? The answer is, probably, “YES”.

Canadians should observe the huge consideration that was given to SNC-Lavalin through the whole process.

The Corporation sought and received dozens and dozens of meetings [“more than 50 times”, Globe and Mail, A-11, Mar.1, 2019] with MP’s, cabinet ministers … www.dialogue.ca

over months and months to – in effect – move huge Private Corporations outside The Rule of Law while claiming they are merely assisting in a change in the application of The Rule of Law. And then … And then … SNC-Lavalin appears to have used more lobbyist meetings in order to have Liberal ‘sympathizers’ (including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau) pressure the Attorney General of Canada to impose a deferred prosecution agreement against the decision of the Prosecutor’s Office.

In that regard, the highest Civil Servant in Canada – supposedly clean of political colouring – Michael Wernick, the Clerk of the Privy Council, entered the fray on behalf of SNC-Lavalin in attempts to force the hand of Jody Wilson-Raybould. As an important member of a council much misunderstood – the Canadian Privy Council to the Queen of Canada (not to the Queen of the United Kingdom) – and as the Head of the Public Service (the actively non-political arm of government servants, known as Civil Service until 1967) Michael Wernick, like some grubby hacklobbyist, debased the position of Clerk of the Privy Council and of all Canadian Public Servants. [Mr. Warnick eventually resigned, effective Apr 18, 2019, without admitting to any ‘inappropriate behaviour.’*]

If huge bribes are necessary to get contracts in some foreign countries which act outside The Rule of Law, then, SNC-Lavalin and the Liberal Party of Canada seem to be saying, ‘don’t work to bring those countries under The Rule of Law; instead, degrade Canada to their level of criminal behaviour as the normal state of ‘doing business’’.

That is a fact of present government (and Deep State criminal influence) in the Western World that must be stopped in its tracks. That is the nine-tenths of the SNC-Lavalin Iceberg out-of-sight. There is, quite simply, a smoke-and-mirrors effort to con Canadians into thinking the removal of large corporations in Canada from the Rule of Law is, in fact, bringing them through special recognition into full relation to the Rule of Law! The tendency across the Western World (notably in Europe) is towards the creation of ‘apparently VOL. 32, NO. 3, SPRING 2019

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democratic,’ neo-liberal governments – which, not long ago in history, were called “proto-fascist” governments. Whatever their apparent focus – national or international – their basic loyalty was and is to Big Capital; their basic intention is to release great wealth from the restriction of the Rule of Law, their basic goal is to create a New World Order characterized by domination of a Deep State over all of the rest of life: human, ecological, spatial.

Canadians are indebted to Jody Wilson-Raybould and her integrity for bringing to the attention of the population, not only the shabby values of the PM and PMO and of the Clerk of the Privy Council, Michael Wernick, but also the destructive and possibly highly criminal actions of large corporations in league with a Canadian government to pervert and/or by-pass The Rule of Law in Canada.

The “deferred prosecution” legislation for large corporations must be erased from Canadian legislation.

Which Party will promise that in the coming election?

Robin Mathews, rmathews@telus.net ♣

Editor’s footnotes: Thirty Liberal MPs registered their opinions of the treatment of Jody Wilson-Raybould in the March 2 Globe and Mail.

None saw her as being unfairly pressured by the PM or PMO or others to impose a deferred prosecution regime upon the Prosecutions Office. None mentioned that she was dumped from the position of Justice Minister and Attorney General when she refused to buckle to the pressure which, they are all confident, was never applied.

* On March 29, Wilson-Raybould released a recording of a 17-minute call with Michael Wernick, during which he told her Trudeau was "quite determined" to prevent SNCLavalin's criminal trial from leading to job losses… Wernick — who was not aware he was being recorded in the Dec. 19 call — told the minister there was "rising anxiety" over the fate of a major employer… "He's quite determined, quite firm," Wernick said of the prime minister's position on getting a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) for SNCLavalin. "But he wants to know why the DPA route, which Parliament provided for, isn't being used. And I think he's going to find a way to get it done, one way or another." – from CBC news report by Kathleen Harris, Apr 18, 2019 ♣

SEE PARTS TWO & THREE in this series, ONLINE AT: www.dialogue2.ca/columnist-robin-mathews-uncut.html **************************************************************

RE: Which Party will promise to erase ‘deferred prosecution’ legislation?

From Bob Hansen, Ladysmith BC

Right on, Robin. Your question is haunting, who will remove this fascist law from our books in the next election? Likely none in this corporate-structured de facto regime. So, what then? Do we gnash our teeth and pull our hair? This SNC affair could not have come at a better time. I have an inner peace with the timing of it all, and with the exposure of Liberal Scott Brison’s resignation after tampering with the massive contract for the Canadian navy, attempting to reverse it and give it to the Irvings. Nice. Yes, Jody WilsonRaybould has done us all a huge service. She should be stepping out of the Liberal party and running as an independent and calling other disaffected politicians and Canadians to join her. This is truly a national timely moment, if it can be taken as such and acted on even more boldly by shunning this present scam of Canadian politics and resetting integrity and compassion and truth in these territories.

Bob Hansen hansen.bob5@gmail.com ♣

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Rec’d from Chris Bowers, June Ross:

Jody Wilson-Raybould’s opening statement at justice committee [Full transcript] The former justice minister delivered an extended opening statement to the House of Commons justice committee. Read it here [at Maclean's Magazine]: https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/jody-wilsonrayboulds-opening-statement-at-justice-committee/ [Feb 27, 2019] ♣ **************************************************************

Re Canadian foreign policy (and the demise of CIDA) Gerry Masuda, Duncan BC I was surprised when I read this article (link below) by Yves Engler (2013). I was surprised at how ignorant I was of the real Canadian foreign policy. I appreciate how corporate interests influence governments but did not appreciate how it controlled our foreign aid to favor the capitalist system.

LINK: https://tinyurl.com/crg-yv-cdn-aid Gerry M., gerry.masuda@gmail.com ♣ www.dialogue.ca

Women’s History S. B. Julian, Victoria BC Women’s History has recently become popular with academics. Like forgotten treasures in an ancestral home, female figures of the past are being re-discovered in the nooks and crannies of long-un-visited rooms, taken out and dusted off.

We can only hope this will correct an assumption among some that all women in the past were victims of marginalization by males, and were consequently silent, invisible and barred from civic life. In fact, looking at the past we see influential female scholars, discoverers, reformers and artists who possessed skills and erudition rare among graduates today. These high achievers let no one thrust them to any margins. The interesting question is why so many of them, highly respected in their own times, be that Renaissance Italy, Reformation Holland, Enlightenment France or Victorian England, have been slighted in our own.

There were indeed laws and attitudes that discriminated against women in the past, but to teach girls of today that their fore-mothers were nothing but victims inspires them less than does knowledge of the accomplishments these fore-mothers achieved, barriers or no barriers.

Who, we might ask students of today, launched the three movements that most shape the world in which they have grown up: the civil rights, environmental and “women’s lib” movements? Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat in a bus, sparked the boycott that ended segregation on American buses in 1956 and recharged the modern civil rights movement. Rachel Carson, with her bestseller Silent Spring, woke up the world to the ravages of pesticides, which led to the establishment of Earth Day and the U.S.’s Environmental Protection Agency. Betty Friedan launched the modern feminist movement (and the still-powerful American National Organization of Women) with another bestseller, The Feminine Mystique.

Who founded Planned Parenthood of America, an organization which arguably has changed socio-economic life more than any other? Margaret Sanger.

Who partnered her in bringing birth control to poor women in Britain? Marie Stopes. Who co-founded Britain’s National Trust, and invented the profession of Social Work as part of her tenant-supported housing scheme for London’s poor? Octavia Hill. Who www.dialogue.ca

launched the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (lab animal testing) in 1898, which still survives as Cruelty Free International? Frances Power Cobbe.

Who invented nursing education and modern hospital administration? Florence Nightingale, who had a much longer career after nursing in the Crimean War than during it. She lived to be 90 and never stopped reforming. Who introduced the concept of prisoners’ rights to the Parliament of Britain in 1819, founding the still-active Elizabeth Fry Society? Not being able to vote for politicians did not stop these women shaping the politicians’ policies.

The results these women achieved – civil rights, animal rights, prisoners’ rights, birth control, ecology, education, health care -- are today taken for granted.

The women responsible co-created the modern world with men, so why have we buried their names under a blanket of historical amnesia? Why do some people seem to prefer the female victim story to the instigator story? Why do more people not know that artists like Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana of Bologna, and Artisima Gentileschi took their place among the great Renaissance artists, and that portrait and still-life painters such as Maria Sybilla Merien, Rachel Ruysch and Louise Moillon flourished in the Baroque era?

Fontana was the official painter at the papal court of Clement VIII. Merien was sent by the government of Amsterdam as a botanical artist (no photography back then) to catalogue the species in their colony in Suriname.

Marie-Louise-Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun was an official portraitist in the Court of Louis 16th and Marie Antoinette, whose friendship meant she had to flee for her life during the Revolution. Twelve years later she returned as one of the salon hostesses who nurtured the French Enlightenment.

Who was “the mother of the atom bomb,” so-named because she co-discovered nuclear fission (although she eschewed any but peaceful uses for it)? That was the Austrian Lise Meitner, one-time Director of Radiation Physics at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute – until Hitler dismissed all the Jewish professors. It was Canadian engineer Elsie MacGill who oversaw production of and test-flew Canada’s contribution to the air war against the Nazis, the Hawker Hurricane.

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Who founded the Christian Science Church? What 19th century Japanese woman founded the Omoto Sect? Which African woman launched the Green Belt reforestation movement in Kenya, and won a Nobel Prize for her efforts? Which woman was it who persuaded Alfred Nobel to establish a Prize for Peace?

Google and you can find the answers, but the question is, why are theirs not household names?

Women invented what we might call Anima-philia – the love of animals which informs a modern branch of Biology: Gynae-zoology. Individuals from PETA’s Ingrid Newkirk to the Three Ape Women (Goodall, Fossey and Galdikas) have not only studied but protected species from apes to bears (Jill Robinson) to elephants (Daphne Sheldrick).

Many of history’s lost women edged human civilization in the empathetic direction. In the case of Maria Montessori and Alice Miller, they altered our treatment of children, our methods of parenting and teaching. They exercised power by creating the trends that steer culture. Power is simply the capacity to cause change. Electric power, muscular power, force of personality, force of persuasion … all are forms of power in that they cause changes in states or circumstances, often outside the sanctioned channels of politics.

Sometimes power has been exercised by women boldly, sometimes subtly and anonymously. Subtle anonymity is no less a force in history than are noisy disputes among politicians and armies.

Social class of course often controlled how much opportunity and influence a woman had, as it did with men. Yet remarkable people broke out of that rigidity: Kew Garden was created by a queen (Augusta, mother of King George III), while Britain’s only plesiosaur skeleton was discovered by a 19th century peasant girl (Mary Anning). Interestingly, many worldchanging women were the only-children of supportive fathers, for example the concert pianist and composer Clara Schumann, and Queen Christina of Sweden who in the 17th century renounced the throne of Sweden, moved to Italy and created the Arcadia Academy for Philosophy and Literature. Another whose father opened to her both his library and his intellectual milieu, was Emilie du Chatelet who read five languages, wrote Philosophy and translated the works of Isaac Newton for the French intelligentsia. She lived with another philosopher, Voltaire, whose name is wellknown, while hers is not. No wonder girls today still 12 dialogue

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get the impression that only men can be philosophers.

Abraham Lincoln said that it was a novel, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that led to the start of the American Civil War. Women since Enheduanna, the Sumerian priestess who was wrote the first human writing that still survives, have used the pen to create change. Many writers revered in their own time have been forgotten in our own a-literate, digitalized time. Do you know the plays of the renowned and prolific 18-19th century playwright Joanna Baillie, for instance, or the name of the woman who wrote the poem on the Statue of Liberty?

Do you know who was first given the professional label “scientist”? Researchers were classified separately as natural philosophers, chemists, physicians and so on, until a 19th century book reviewer used the comprehensive term “scientist” for Margaret Somerville when reviewing her bestsellers on Geography, Physical Sciences and Astronomy. A great systematizer of knowledge, this learned Scotswoman was given a Patron Medal by Britain’s Royal Geographical Society, and in 1835 was voted into the Royal Astronomical Society. From the Government she received a pension of 300 pounds, a solid sum at the time, and Oxford University named a college after her.

Why should there be a separate category called “women’s history” we might ask? Surely there is only “history”? The category exists to describe the gaps in history as we tell it. Much of Women’s History has slipped behind a veil.

The above-mentioned are only a few historic female world-changers. Countless others as scientists, discoverers, theologians, investigative journalists and novelists also changed the thinking of their contemporaries. They occupied central positions; it is only in our time that they are marginalized – by our ignorance. We live in a-historical times when many people are more interested in “going forward” than in understanding how we got where we are. Women’s history has been especially occluded. That’s why it is an inviting field of study: it is so intriguingly veiled.

S. B. Julian Sandra B. Julian is the author of Women Who Made the World (Ninshu Press, 2018), in which bio-sketches of many more high-achieving women of history are presented for the general reader.

LINK: www.overleafbooks.blogspot.ca ♣ www.dialogue.ca

“Ongoing Genocide…” and Its Shadow World…. (PART ONE) Ongoing Genocide caused by Judicial Suppression of the “Existing” Aboriginal Rights: BOOK BY BRUCE CLARK

by Robin Mathews, March 2019

Electromagnetic Press has produced a new book by Bruce Clark, scholarly expert and ‘hands-on’ activist in the matter of North American indigenous peoples’ history, philosophy, and – especially – the reality of their present legal being, their rights, and their status in the activity of the higher courts.

Central to his argument, Bruce Clark makes clear that the constitutional and (therefore) luminously obvious thread of law (and precedent) leading from the eighteenth century (especially from the Royal Proclamation of 1763) defines the independent and autonomous legal being of today’s indigenous people living on “unceded” land – land not having been subjected to voluntary sale or other voluntary alienation.

In the very simplest terms, it may be said, Clark observes, that all the courts of Canada [the USA presents another jurisdiction – equally malevolent] – all the legal and judicial Establishments of Canada magisterially choose to violate the Constitutionally constructed law and the precedents developing from it … and so violate the rights and persons of indigenous peoples in Canada.

Apart from the Constitution and precedents growing from the eighteenth century, the government of John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, created the Indian Act and the Residential Schools structure – seen by many as (whatever may have been intended) genocidal actions continuing into the present. And the Province of B.C. passed (ultra vires) a law alienating indigenous land from indigenous control. Thus-- we have the title of Bruce Clark’s most recent book: Ongoing Genocide caused by Judicial Suppression of the “Existing” Aboriginal Rights.

(LINK: www.electromagneticprint.com)

That primary fact is worth repeating: Bruce Clark alleges the Courts, the Legal, and the Judicial Establishments in Canada act, concerning the indigenous people, in open contempt of the Constitutionally constructed Rule of Law in the country we designate by the name Canada – of which those Establishments are a part. Bruce Clark’s book is made up largely of essays published in Dissident Voices over the past ten years or so. As a result, certain key arguments and www.dialogue.ca

presentations of historical and “legal” fact are repeated in a way that gives them exceptional force.

The historical structure of both the undeniable independence of North America’s indigenous population and the unbroken violation of that status by the “settler populations” is presented in a way that throws light upon the real functioning of the whole Canadian society. Bruce Clark tends to see indigenous legal fact and history as unique, and – in important ways – it is.

But it may be wrong to suggest that the ‘habit of mind’ employed to produce a complete reshaping of law and the ‘judge-making’ of a false reality into which all indigenous matters are placed is unique to what would have been called a few decades ago “Indian Affairs.”

One is sorely tempted to make comparisons – which are visibly there – between the treatment of Canada’s indigenous people under a ‘mangled Rule of Law’ and the attempts (which have already been successful in other “democracies”) to vacate gigantic corporations (SNC-Lavalin, and its kind) from criminal prosecution and deliver them to a gray area of what Roman Catholics might call “Penance and Absolution.” Indigenous people are mangled in a Corporate-inspired expression of greed and larceny, Clark suggests, transmuted into judge-and-Legal-Establishment-made law.

Corporations like SNC-Lavalin have ‘special’ legislation created for them alone, so that no individual in their ranks will face adjudication under a common Rule of Law … ever ... because “deferred prosecution” agreements will remove them from any universal Rule of Law… and its meaningful punishments.

What the Justin Trudeau Liberals passed (semi-secretively) in a budget package of legislation (one of the famous “Omnibus” bills: 2018) is, I suggest, an attempt to legitimize a special “approach”, a special jurisdictional and juridical handling of alleged violations of the Rule of Law in Canada which will place large private corporations in a special category subjected to special treatment. That – according to Bruce Clark – is what has been done, negatively, (without any visible legislation) to the indigenous people of Canada by judge and court-made illegitimate precedent. And instead of lightening the load pressing upon the indigenous people, the “dimension” of the law which they VOL. 32, NO. 3, SPRING 2019

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are forced to inhabit assures that, for instance, a fake (powerless) “right of consultation” usurps their right of full, independent being. When they appear in a Canadian court, they are subjected to a regime that is unique … and nowhere ratified Constitutionally.

Bruce Clark reports his own dramatic confrontation with Established Power (as distinct from ‘legitimate power’) during which time he was declared in criminal contempt, was jailed for a time, and was disbarred permanently from the elegant and prestigious practice of law in Canada.

His book confronts us with reality. Canadian judicial and legal structures deliver injustice frequently and institutionally often enough to cause major concern to Canadians because of persistent and determined [improper] legal and judicial action undertaken to disallow the clear, independent status and power of the indigenous people and to saddle them with a “right of [dependent] consultation”. As a result no action taken by indigenous people can (in the Canadian courts) be adjudicated with respect to their real, historically founded status, Clark argues. And so they are cheated of justice in every case.

Moving from indigenous reality … to provide a comparison … in the Nuttall/Korody case (concerning an RCMP faked Islamic Terrorist Event at the B.C. Legislature grounds on July 1, 2013) years of injustice were forced upon the two falsely accused innocents, but both Defence lawyers and B.C. Supreme Court judge, Justice Catherine Bruce, extracted the two from the false accusations by a highly organized RCMP Force. Justice Bruce wrote a superb judgement exposing the RCMP’s alleged criminal behaviour. Her judgement was upheld by three B.C. Appellate Division justices in late 2018.

And then: nothing. Nothing. The Crown, the federal Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, the Minister of Justice, the Attorney General of British Columbia, members of the British Columbia legislature in all Parties, members of the Mainstream Press and Media have maintained stoney silence, failing to demand that criminal charges be laid against every RCMP officer and any other Canadian involved in the entrapment, the preparation of a false criminal case, the incarceration, and the trial of the innocent two … and demanding full and complete restitution and compensation to the two victims for what is almost certainly a criminal conspiracy by RCMP 14 dialogue

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officers and unnamed others….

What is plain in the matter is that the extraordinary work of Defence Counsel and Justice Catherine Bruce – to prevent the success of major, highly organized criminal activity by the RCMP – is something that Mainstream Power in Canada wishes to mask, to ignore. I would suggest that – parallel to the false judicial and legal actions in Canada that create a completely contained corrupt world of “law” for indigenous people that Bruce Clark argues exists – there also exists, in matters involving what may be called the instruments (and the people) possessing real power in Canada (outside of indigenous issues), a consistently corrupt legal/judicial administration is at work to prevent action taken to assure that The Rule of Law in Canada prevails. The falsely staged Islamic Terrorist Event at B.C.’s Legislature grounds which viciously victimized two innocent Canadians – and which ALL of the responsible authorities in Canada are trying to ignore … is only one lamentable example.

Though many, many instances might be brought forward to underscore that truth, no case can be more instructive, perhaps, than the huge, multi-million dollar, nearly ten-year history involving the corrupt transfer of BC Rail to the CNR and a more than three year trial (2007-2010) of what I choose to call victims chosen to mask the major wrong-doing and the major actors undertaking the wrong-doing who should have been the accused in the case.

The imperfect Wikipedia entry (avoiding the major archived independent website on the issue) about the BC Rail Scandal, employing only ‘acceptable’ Mainstream Press and Media sources, fails to report the absolutely primary fact. Much, much about the scandal can be argued about … but not the finding late in the trial – when Madam Justice Elizabeth Bennett had been promoted off the trial to Appeals Court; and the choice was made by Associate Chief Justice Patrick Dohm (he announced that he had made his choice in my presence) of Justice Anne MacKenzie to complete the Supreme Court trial.

In late 2009 it was revealed that the Special Crown Prosecutor – appointed in 2003 and (therefore, normally) associated with RCMP investigations, with the preparation of charges against Dave Basi, Bobby Virk, and Aneal Basi, and then with fulfilling the role as primary Crown actor in the trial of the three accused – that he was named Special Crown Prosecutor www.dialogue.ca

in clear violation of the legislation creating and declaring the terms of such an appointment.

Stated simply … such an appointed person must be free of any possible bias – and the legislation says in addition … must be free of the possibility of even the perception of bias. The Special Crown Prosecutor in the case against Dave Basi, Bobby Virk, and Aneal Basi was for eleven years partner and colleague of the Deputy Attorney General and for seven years partner and colleague of the Attorney General from whose office his appointment was made as Special Crown Prosecutor under the premiership of Liberal Gordon Campbell, at whose feet was laid the whole impetus for the so-called “sale” of BC Rail to the CNR: and, therefore, also, at whose feet were laid many of the allegations of impropriety in the case. (The Attorney General was, of course, a member of the B.C. Cabinet headed by the premier, Gordon Campbell.)

The revealed fact of the illegitimate appointment of the Special Crown Prosecutor in the Basi, Virk, and Basi case rendered, in my judgement, everything about the case null and void, without legitimacy – erasing every action in the process. I wrote to the Chief Justice of the British Columbia Supreme Court and the Associate Chief Justice as responsibles in the matter. In two correspondence attempts to have them assume their responsibilities in the matter – they refused. I wrote to the judge on the case … and she refused to act in any fashion in relation to the improper appointment and the improper presence in her courtroom of an illegitimately-appointed Special Crown Prosecutor. I wrote to the Canadian Judicial Council – the top appeal body concerning the behaviour of the judiciary in Canada. (The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada is ‘nominal’ head of the CJC.) I asked them to name the judge on the case as acting improperly in the matter of an illegitimate Special Crown Prosecutor acting in her Court. The Canadian Judicial Council refused to acknowledge any improper behaviour on the part of the judge on the case. The picture that appears of the legal and (especially) the judicial Establishments in that short accounting leaves little more to be said.

The brutal findings by Bruce Clark – and, indeed, the brutal treatment he, himself, has been subjected to – point to a Rule of Law relating to the Indigenous Peoples that needs complete overhaul: in fact – www.dialogue.ca

complete restructuring. But, alas, in its shadow world – the world in which the Legal and Judicial Establishments act in areas other than those concerning indigenous persons and the rights of their communities – the actions of what must be called the Legal Establishment and the Judicial Establishment – mirror, I suggest, with depressing regularity, the same dismissal of Constitutional reality. And they replace it, I believe, with ‘assumptions of purity’ that are used to protect the political and corporate powers enriching themselves and increasing their power at the cost of fundamental justice.

The Rule of Law, and the will of the people are blindsided by the unanimity of evil-doers and their supporters in the Mainstream Press and Media. That fact suggests the so-called “Criminal Justice System” – meaning the operation of the Legal and the Judicial Establishments in Canada (including the treatment of indigenous people) must be swept aside. The structure must be trashed. The whole fabric of law and justice – especially as it is practised within ‘the system’ in Canada – must be completely reconstructed.

Robin Mathews, rmathews@telus.net See PART TWO online at: www.dialogue2.ca/columnist-robin-mathews-uncut.html ♣ *********************************

Kudos from Bob Hansen, Ladysmith BC

This latest is one of your very best, Robin. Connecting the mess in Canada to corrupt policing and courts is the best outcome of SNC and the present issue of First Nations property rights in these territories called 'British Columbia'. As I heard a First Nations person say, during the Harper fiasco years, 'Everyone is a First Nations person now.'

Bob, hansen.bob5@gmail.com

♣

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Read Ongoing Genocide

Patricia White, Feb 10, 2019, pwhite.red@gmail.com

If any of you have not yet read Bruce Clark’s book, Ongoing Genocide, it makes what is going on very clear... and in my eyes makes this lawyer devoted to Justice a hero. … Nothing could be further from the truth than #babytrudeau’s statement that ‘Canada follows the rule of Law’. Utter BS. – Patricia White READ: Ongoing Genocide caused by Judicial Suppression of the "Existing" Aboriginal Rights – Aug 24 2018

by Bruce Clark (Author), 298 pages, ISBN-10: 1717110916 ♣

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More on The Western World…

The sordid fiscal history of most Western nations – and the inspiring example of the Bank of North Dakota Russ Vinden, Errington BC

I enclose my latest outburst on our un-necessary debts, and hope it may find its way into the Spring issue. I find it hopeless to write to local or national newspapers with these concerns, as any proposal for a different approach to our induced and ever-growing debt absurdity is simply ignored; I'm sure that the pernicious private donation system for Political Parties is the reason for this silence, but short of real revolution which may appear in the streets or – less likely – by elected MPs and MLAs totally choked with the compulsion to toe the Party line, I can only watch with dismay as the madness continues. Meanwhile, Chinese power grows and grows, Britain and the EU tie themselves in knots over Brexit, the US is split and charges madly off in all directions, and our politicians talk about everything except the essentials. G-R-R-R.!

Our world appears to be undergoing an everincreasing rate of change in its vital aspects.

Internet usage, racial disharmony, population growth, consumption of irreplaceable oils and minerals and global warming all spring to mind immediately; they are in every news bulletin and newspaper. The hidden, or perhaps least-discussed one, is the astonishing rise of debts, deficits, and inflation in the 'Western' half of the world. I make this distinction because in the Far East it doesn't seem to be happening, or at least not on the scale or with the devastating effect seen all across the West. It is indisputable that with very few exceptions, all western nations now have debts they simply cannot extinguish. These have been shown (Auditor General's 'Report to Parliament on Interest and the Debt', November 1993, still available on-line from that Office) to consist massively, not of the popular myth ‘rash investments and waste,’ but of cumulative interest charges (at yet more interest) on the already interest-induced deficits, which had to be borrowed to avoid default. Such borrowing is essentially new money which, since it produces no new asset, simply creates endemic inflation – and more taxes. In a nutshell, this is the sordid fiscal history of most Western nations.

So it is startling to realise that just over the Canada/US border lies a State which, uniquely in the whole N. 16 dialogue

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and S. American continent, has funded itself for 99 years from its own State Bank at nil interest. This has enabled it to not run a deficit in 55 years, with no State debt or inflation due to that funding process; a small sanity in a mad system. It is perhaps the bestkept secret in the whole of politics, but readily seen by Googling "Bank of North Dakota", and is now being actively explored by at least five other US States, all in borderline bankruptcy after decades of debt-at-interest funding from an unelected, internationally unified private banking consortium-the only legal source of money creation apart from governments.

China too has risen in 70 years from devastation and recurrent starvation to the #2 economy in the world by exactly the same debt -and-interest-free funding system. So it is even more startling to realise that while we in Canada look aghast at the multiplying tent cities of thousands of people who have no hope of ever getting their own home; yet in China, funding itself debt and interest-free, there are 20 brand-new millionpopulation-capacity cities – entirely empty so far, but there as the need arises. This would be black farce if it were not so dismayingly true; it also throws doubt on any Trade Deals concluded under such disparate conditions.

I believe that any sovereign nation has an absolute right to create and issue its own national monetary needs through its own national Bank, up to a necessarily nebulous limit of international confidence (note Hjalmar Schacht, the Nazi's finance wizard, who by use of a sort of Doomsday Book assessment of everything in Germany, created a new valid Deutchmark from nothing when the old Reischmark collapsed in the late 1920's). The proper role of private-for-profit banks must be to buy nationally-created money at very low interest from the State Bank, and loan it to private individuals and businesses at acceptable rates.

But it is precisely that national right of creation which over centuries has been so very carefully drained and persuaded away from elected governments to reside almost totally now in the un-elected, internationally unified private banking system. The crux of this argument is that the basic purpose of any national www.dialogue.ca

currency is to facilitate the exchange of goods and services to the primary benefit of the nation, not the private for-profit banks.

But creation of money has been so diverted from elected governments to the now internationally unified private banking system, and national debts as a result have become so enormous, that short of outright cancellation, they cannot be extinguished by conventional means. Such vast sums must be constantly transferred to private lenders for interest-on-borrowed-interest (budgets commonly carry 8-10% interest charges despite a whole decade of base rates at an unprecedented 0.0 % to 2.7%); and programs have been so curtailed by misguided dependence on austerity; that budgets can rarely balance without further borrowing. I remember our Prime Minister and Finance Minister appearing on TV in early 2007 to announce with broad smiles that they had just repaid $14 billion off the debt, the largest ever since Confederation they said. I reckoned this was about 2.3% of the federal debt, and that it would take another 43 years of similar record re-payments to extinguish it -- if no additional debt was incurred. I wondered why they were smiling.

I do believe that this crisis is being constantly dodged and downplayed by donation-influenced Parties. For instance, the 1975 abandonment of government funding from our own Bank of Canada at nil interest (which had operated for 40 successful years) had scant publicity and was never put to Parliament for discussion: while Paul Hellyer, an ex-cabinet minister no less, has testified that in a three day search he could find no paper-trail of this fundamental change in the National Archives. Do these examples demonstrate keen examination and agreement by our elected representatives? No, I thought not. Then, 25 years ago the above-mentioned Auditor General's 'Report to Parliament on Interest and the Debt" examined the cumulative Canadian national debt from 1867 to 1993. It concluded that an incredible 92½ percent of it consisted of interest-on-the-interest, as each deficit was borrowed. Each such loan contained new interest, and debts grew remorselessly, but the Finance Minister simply pigeonholed the Report and never presented it to Parliament for review. It only surfaced in the kerfuffle when COMER* took the whole rotten debt business to Court. This eventually wound up in the

Supreme Court, which declined to make judgement, stating that it was a political matter over which it had no jurisdiction.(1) Then the International Court at The Hague stated the terminal truth that any sovereign government can do whatever it likes as long as it breaks no law – and since no law existed, nothing could be done. The whole process of government funding has over centuries had been quietly extracted from government control and lodged almost entirely with private for-profit banks as an assumed right. But it is not their right; national funding should be the prerogative of elected national governments acting for national benefit. Tellingly, it is only the creation of cash currency by national Banks which has been retained by governments – about 3% of total money creation, and dwindling fast under credit card usage – possibly because it is in constant public awareness unlike account books and annual budgets.

Truly, I wonder sometimes why we bother to elect governments at all, when years ago Mel Hurtig, Edmonton publisher and political activist, proposed that an almost laughable $5 fee on every Income Tax Return would generate sufficient money to adequately fund all political Parties, and leave enough to kickstart new ones. This would surely have extinguished the private purchase of influence which so corrupts our politics, distorts all government finances, and ensures that vital national and provincial needs remain unfulfilled.

Russ Vinden, Errington BC * COMER: Committee On Monetary and Economic Reform;

P.S. Maurice & Janet, Greetings to you both for the

Christmas season and best wishes for the New Year – and many thanks for your sustained efforts in producing such a wide-ranging magazine. I regret I have let time slip by this Fall – fall being the appropriate word, as I took a purler at the end of October which makes me hobble around with a wheelchair and has stalled my other great interest (apart from castigating our monetary system) – messing about in boats. At 92, I launched my latest effort in July, which now forlornly rests the winter out under a tarpaulin in the yard while I count the weeks (hopefully) before I can modify/ rerig/ re-arrange or generally mess about with it again.

_____________________________________________________________________________

(1.) Supreme Court of Canada Dismisses Constitutional Bank of Canada Case, Claiming It Is a Political Matter LINK: http://www.comer.org/content/SupremeCourtDecision_4May17.htm ♣ www.dialogue.ca

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Alfred de Zayas: Weaponization of Human Rights by the U.S. & EU in Venezuela and Catalonia Geopolitics & Empire VIDEO INTERVIEW, 75 min., Podcast published Feb 14, 2019; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xv3V-zo9YU Former UN Special Rapporteur Dr. Alfred de Zayas explains the coup in Venezuela, how the U.S. is responsible for the humanitarian crisis, how civil war and U.S. intervention are possible, and more. He describes how human rights are weaponized by Washington (in the case of Caracas) and by Spain and the EU (in the case of Catalonia).

Dr. de Zayas also comments on media propaganda, fake news, and the censorship he has personally experienced.

Show Notes Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order on his mission to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and Ecuador LINK: https://tinyurl.com/UN-G1823931 [EXTRACT, unofficial transcript] “The same strategy has been used against Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, the same strategy that was used against Salvatore Allende in Chile – is to make the economy scream, Nixon said when he called Kissinger in 1970 after the election of Salvatore Allende, he told Kissinger: We are not allowing an alternative socio-economic model to take hold in Latin America. […] [Aside: Maurice says it was more likely Kissinger telling Nixon!] The sanctions and the financial blockade and the general situation of sabotage that obtains in Venezuela is what has caused the crisis that the Venezuelan people are living through. … What you have in Venezuela is a deliberate attempt to strangle the country. To strangle the country by not allowing banks to transfer payments…

It has happened and it is documented in my report

to the Human Rights Council … that Citibank, Commerce Bank, Wells Fargo have simply refused to make transferences for the purchases, for instance, of dialysis supplies, for the purchase of insulin, for the purchase of anti-malaria medicine. So here you have pre-meditated, deliberate homicide. Those countries that have applied sanctions that have connived or been complicit in the financial blockade of the country are the countries that are responsible for deaths as a result of malnutrition, deaths as a result of lack of medicines, etc. I have already written in my report that to the extent that maternal mortality [and infant mortality] had dropped so much has now increased… The deaths – in the 100s or 1000s – are deliberate; that entails not only civil liability, but also personal criminal liability and this is a matter for the International Court of Justice, actually a matter for the International Criminal Court… Sanctions that have such horrendous impacts in the enjoyment of human rights by populations, sanctions that are indiscriminate sanctions that essentially paralyse a country’s economy are contrary to international law; of course they are contrary to articles 1 and 2 of the U.N. Charter; of course they are contrary to the OAS Charter, in particular Article 4, Chapter 19. […]”

Websites: https://twitter.com/alfreddezayas https://dezayasalfred.wordpress.com http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IntOrd... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred-... http://alfreddezayas.com ♣

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A Film About the 5G Apocalypse Article by Dr. Joseph Mercola [EXTRACT/LINK] LINK: https://tinyurl.com/Mercola-85533

• Persistent exposures to microwave frequencies like those from cellphones can cause mitochondrial dysfunction and nuclear DNA damage from free radicals produced from peroxynitrite.

• Excessive exposures to cellphones and Wi-Fi networks have been linked to chronic dis-eases such as cardiac arrhythmias, anxiety, depression, autism, Alzheimer’s and infertility.

• EMF exposure has increased about 1 quintillion times over the past 100 years. Most people experience biological impacts but have no appreciation of the damage it’s causing until it's too late. Even then, it’s extremely difficult to link the exposure to the symptoms or the disease 18 dialogue

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• 5G relies primarily on the bandwidth of the millimeter wave, known to cause a painful burning sensation.

It’s also been linked to eye and heart problems, suppressed immune function, genetic damage and fertility problems • EMFs have clear neuropsychiatric effects, triggering everything from foggy thinking and headaches to learning disabilities and dementia ♣ UN Staffer Warns that 5G is a ‘War on Humanity’ From John Shadbolt, shadbolt617@gmail.com SEE article by Claire Edwards, Stop 5G Space Appeal, Waking Times, at LINK: https://tinyurl.com/WT-13441 ♣ www.dialogue.ca

Ella Built A Nest ~ by Sherry Leigh Williams Ella built a nest She feathered it With love Hope was A bird With a broken wing Yet she sings In her beak A branch, a petalled Offering Once I built a nest Filled it with Children, paper hearts Glue and string Summertime bumble bees Kids by The River

I gathered My chicks Around Me

but The wolf Drank the Snake Straight from the Bottle

Shields made From Feathered chubby hands And wide innocent eyes

Though I tried God knows, I never could quite swallow poison

Black clouds overhead Earth crackling Beneath Our feet

Instead I washed That floor with My Tears

Running Hearts bursting like the Thunderbird We’ll rise again.

My heart Filleted On The Ground

Sherry Leigh Williams, Sydney BC ♣

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Visions ~ by Susan Keyes Woodsworth Come, raven!

Come, raven of my soul!

I spoke to you through the spirit and you showed me the wolf and the way home — a home beyond the stars where there is no harm but the lives of those who have gone before, where souls meet and sound out poems, thoughts so deep that one cannot repeat but utter sounds travelling through the pain of centuries yet unborn.

The wolf howls — a long, distinct cry. All must listen, or the universe will collapse and die.

O Light of a thousand suns, we rise to thee, the angels sing a song. Here the raven soars on wings of morning, shows us once again the wolf, loping along the earth's terrain.

Here is a home where all souls become one in a radiance of a spiritual presence.

All the power of this life is a symphony of love. www.dialogue.ca

Poem by Susan Keyes Woodsworth, Ottawa, 7 January 2004

Note from John Woodsworth:: On Tuesday, 14 July 2002 (the date is in my diary) we were travelling as a family through Yellowstone Park in America. My wife Susan was hoping to catch sight of a wolf up-close, but after traversing most of the park, she still had not seen one. Later that afternoon, while we were taking a brief reststop beside a lake, she spied a raven in a nearby tree. She told the raven how much she desired a wolf-sighting, and was sure she received a positive ‘message’ from the raven in return. Very soon after that Susan’s hope was fulfilled.

A grey wolf ran across the road right in front of our car, and paused long enough for us to get a good look at it. It really made her day!

The above picture (taken by our son Paul Woodsworth) is of the actual raven that ‘spoke’ to Susan that day. ♣ VOL. 32, NO. 3, SPRING 2019

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The Case of the Wet'suwet'en Land Defenders The Politics of Pipelines, Police, the Courts, and First Nations in British Columbia Here is my essay on Wet'suwet'en Land Defenders. I give permission to Dialogue to publish whatever portions you might find suitable.

- Anthony James Hall, Lethbridge [EXTRACT] READ IN FULL AT: https://ahtribune.com/world/americas/canada/2855wetsuweten-land-defenders.html

Anthony James Hall, antoniusjameshall@gmail.com

In recent weeks and days I have been reflecting on the deep historical, political and legal implications of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's raid of Jan. 7, 2019. This RCMP raid was directed at the people and physical obstructions blocking the construction of a pipeline project traversing across some of the most majestic and relatively unspoiled natural geography remaining on this planet.

The envisaged Coastal GasLink pipeline is meant to transport natural gas from the Dawson Creek area in northeastern British Columbia to Kitimat on the Pacific coast. The plan is to export natural gas derived from controversial procedures of fracking, a notorious environmental bane that has been banned in a number of countries, US states, as well as in the Canadian province of Quebec.

The raid on Jan. 7 of a heavily armed and militarized unit of the RCMP resulted in fourteen arrests of Land Defenders with many more individuals being roughly manhandled by the special forces unit. The action saw police go over the Aboriginal barricades to which many Land Defenders had attached themselves with a variety of locked mechanisms. Subsequently, registered traplines in the area were vandalized on behalf of so-called private sector interests as well as their government clients and patrons. The inclination on the part of those pushing the agenda of the fast construction of pipelines is to disregard existing rules in order to realize industrial imperatives.

The heart of the GasLink controversy at present is the Aboriginal territory of the Wet'suwet'en people. The Wet'suwet'en language is part of the Athabaskan or Dene linguistic family. To understand the larger context of the present controversy, it is important to note 20 dialogue

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that the envisaged natural gas pipeline crosses the ancestral territory of several First Nations. Those First Nations in northeastern British Columbia, where fracking is taking place, are within Treaty 8. Alternatively, the ancestral lands of the majority of Aboriginal groups affected by the project have never been subject to completed Crown-Aboriginal agreements concerning land title and jurisdiction.

In 1984 the Wet'suwet'en people in partnership with the Gitxsan people injected their convictions and beliefs into Canadian history in ways that were concurrently new yet also very very old. The Gitxsan and Wet'suwet'en asserted in court the sovereignty of their traditional governments as the primary authorities with sole jurisdiction over the full extent of their ancestral lands. These assertions extend far beyond the concept of "Aboriginal title" as currently conceptualized and litigated in the mainstream of the Canadian legal establishment.

The litigious assertions of the Gitxsan and Wet'suwet'en drew some of their interpretive force from the distinctive history of British Columbia, a polity created within the British Empire to prevent a flood of Americans from annexing the territory as they rushed after gold. A separate colony of the British Empire before it entered the Dominion of Canada in 1871, BC was not founded on principles that recognized the prior existence of a shared proprietary interest of Indigenous peoples in their ancestral lands. The result is that, to this day, most BC First Nations do not have treaties with the Crown.

On the other hand, most First Nations throughout Ontario and the West up to the height of land along the Rocky Mountain are parties to Crown-Aboriginal treaties. These treaties are rooted in the constitutional history of British North America, but especially in the Royal Proclamation of 1763. There has been a long and arduous struggle to gain legal recognition of the applicability of the Indian provisions in the Royal Proclamation to British Columbia. The public education aspect of that struggle continues yet.

By putting forward such a clear and sweeping position in court in 1984-85, the original legal stance of the www.dialogue.ca

Gitxsan and Wet'suwet'en helped establish some basic frames of reference that have become more relevant than ever in the current clashes over the law and politics of pipeline construction. The Gitxsan and Wet'suwet'en introduced many Canadians to an array of old and contemporary realities that must now be squarely faced to avoid compounding existing fiascos.

Only now are the full implications of these sometimes inconvenient realities starting to come to the surface, as the Tar Sands politics of bitumen production in Alberta meet the politics of uncertainty over the nature of Aboriginal/Crown title throughout much of B.C. The effect of this clash was rendered graphic by the exercise of coercive force by the RCMP when its officers pushed down an Aboriginal barricade and very publicly arrested Land Defenders. The aim of this display was quite literally to push aside, punish and discredit that Aboriginal constituency and their allies who are still not onside with the push to purchase Aboriginal acquiescence to BC pipeline construction.

The response to the police actions quickly ricocheted across the country. One manifestation took the form of demonstrations in several Canadian cities where much support was shown for the stance of the Wet'suwet'en Land Defenders as well as the hereditary leadership. At the densely-populated Six Nations Iroquois Territory near Brantford Ontario, there was an especially strong display of identification with the position of the traditional Wet'suwet'en people.

In 1924 the RCMP mounted a display of coercive force at the Six Nations reserve. The RCMP was ordered by the new Liberal government of Prime Minister Mackenzie King to resort to armed intervention to replace the traditional governing system, one that had played a central role in the history of both New France and British North America. This much-admired and studied governing system was based on the Great Law of Peace at the foundations of the League of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Longhouse League). The federal structure of the traditional Longhouse Confederacy, one of the examples drawn upon in constructing US and Canadian federalism, include a strong hereditary element.

The federal police force installed a branch of the Parliament-imposed Indian Act system in the place of the Longhouse government. The League of the Haudenosaunee did not die but went underground after 1924. In the eyes of many Six Nations Iroquois people the Longhouse religion with the Great Law of Peace at its www.dialogue.ca

base continued to form the basis of their legitimate government. On the other hand the local branch of the Indian Act system is sometimes viewed as an alien imposition of foreign jurisdiction.

This tension was a significant factor in the outbreak of armed confrontation between the Canadian Armed Forces and the Mohawk Warriors at Oka & Kanewake in the Montreal area in 1990. The sometimes difficult interactions between the traditional and imposed system affect many First Nations including the Wet'suwet'en and Shuswap people in British Columbia.

The police powers of the RCMP have been asserted again and again to colonize and subordinate First Nations. One aspect of this history of subordinating first peoples is the RCMP's role in imposing a now-notorious system of federally-funded, religiously-run Indian residential schools. The purpose of the residential aspect of this imposed system of mandatory Indian education was to cut Aboriginal youths off from the cultural transfers that would have taken place had the young Native people grown up with their own families and home communities.

When has the RCMP ever made arrests to enforce the constitutional law in Canada that proclaims the existence of Aboriginal and treaty rights? The other side of the bias is reflected in the disproportionately large number of Native people in Canadian prisons. The constitution is very explicit that the rights of First Nations peoples are to be "recognized and affirmed," not denied and negated. What use is Canada's "supreme law" of Aboriginal and treaty rights if those who violate this provision never face consequences? When will the RCMP begin enforcing the laws of Aboriginal and treaty rights?

The image of the Aboriginal Land Defenders being manhandled and arrested by the police arm of the Canadian government presented the domestic population and the world with yet more evidence that, when it comes to First Nations, Canada is a human rights violator. The constitutional responsibility of the federal government to protect Aboriginal people and their collectively-held lands and resources is regularly subordinated to the political quest for power and wealth.

As was demonstrated by the shutting down of the Occupy Movement in 2011 based largely on the police enforcement of mere municipal bylaws, bold constitutional pronouncements affirming liberty and rights and equality and such are regularly violated. ‌/ VOL. 32, NO. 3, SPRING 2019

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A. J. Hall, Wet'suwet'en Land Defenders, contd.

Especially after 9/11, the rule of law has pretty much been subordinated to the rule of political expediency as manifest in the extreme politicization of law enforcement agencies throughout the Western world including in Canada.

A good point of comparison is offered by the present situation in France, where police violence and tactics of internal infiltration are being deployed with the goal of taking the steam out of the popular rise of the Yellow Jacket movement. When law enforcement agencies become agencies available for agendas of political spin doctoring for powerful interests, we no longer are governed by democracy and the rule of law.

In conducting arrests in the way it did, the RCMP acted to pre-empt Canada's "supreme law." The police force acted in this coercive manner with nothing more to justify their actions than the flimsy legitimacy of a temporary injunction obtained easily by a government-favoured pipeline company. In spite of the Canadian government's coercive method of opening up industrial access to the contested territory, the lawyer representing the hereditary chiefs negotiated some sort of truce with the Red Coated Mounties.

Was this concession on the part of the hereditary chiefs consistent with understandings that persuaded the Land Defenders to put themselves in harm's way on the front lines of opposition to pipeline construction through Wet'suwet'en Territory? How often does the political leverage developed by activists who put themselves on the line to emphasize points of

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principle get appropriated by those advancing more self-serving interests?

What is the agenda after the lawyers' made their bargain with the RCMP? Does the imperative continue to be to stop the industrial project or is the goal now to increase the financial and other remuneration to be derived from building this and other pipelines?

Should arms-bearing RCMP officers be entrusted to act as the federal government's prime agents when it comes to Crown-First Nations negotiations on the most sensitive issues of pipeline construction in BC? The Royal Canadian Mounted Police may call itself "royal" but that designation is dubious. The designation is questionable given the longstanding failure of the BC branch of the RCMP to protect Indian people and their collectively-held lands as called for by the Royal Proclamation of 1763.

From the Royal Proclamation of 1763 to the Nisga's Treaty of 2000 to the Contested Wet'suweten Territory in 2019 The Royal Proclamation has played an important role in the complex of constitutional provisions, legislative enactments and policies that touch on the politics of pipeline construction through the Indian Country of BC. The Royal Proclamation established the foundational layer of British imperial law after the British defeat of French imperial forces in the colony of New France. The most famous episode in that military clash between France and Britain in Canada took place on the Plains of Abraham in 1759.

New France was sometimes referred to as Canada even as some of the French-speaking Roman Catholic colonists began to describe themselves as canadiens and canadiennes. Some of the canadiens developed elaborate commercial and familial relations with the Indigenous peoples throughout much of North America through the medium of the fur trade.

The fur trade history of the British Columbia area was conducted through the medium of the Hudson's Bay Company as well as through the Northwest Company based in Montreal. In the era of the www.dialogue.ca

A. J. Hall, Wet'suwet'en Land Defenders, contd.

fur trade, the BC area was often described as New Caledonia. The basis of British claims throughout most of northern North America, including BC, go back to the successful British takeover of the canadiens-Aboriginal fur trade that was the economic lifeblood of New France.

The Indian provisions of the Royal Proclamation were an acknowledgement on the part of the British government that its defeat of the French Army in Canada did not extend to the conquest the First Nations. The Royal Proclamation stipulated that Indigenous peoples would retain possession of their own ancestral lands now placed within an enormously expanded British North America that included the former New France.

Henceforth much of the newly annexed lands, including the eastern watershed of the Mississippi Valley, would be treated as "lands reserved for the Indians as their hunting grounds." The Indians on this territory were not to be "molested or disturbed" in their possession and enjoyment of the reserved lands.

The principle was introduced that, before any nonAboriginal settlement or resource extraction industry was introduced in the protected lands of Canada, some sort of Aboriginal consent would have to be obtained by representatives of the British imperial monarch.

This provision of the Royal Proclamation set in motion a series of Crown-Aboriginal negotiations leading to early treaties in Upper Canada, the jurisdictional seed from which the present-day province of Ontario emerged.

The principles of the Royal Proclamation were exported westward along with the westward expansion of Canada. These principles were expressed in the negotiation of the Robinson treaties in 1850, the numbered treaties between 1871 and 1929, the treaty with the James Bay Cree in 1975 and then a broad array of negotiations sometimes referred to as "comprehensive land claims."

The first of the modern-day treaties in BC was with the Nisga'a of the Nass River Valley. The Nisga's Treaty came into force in 2000. Much of the early work leading to the Nisga's Treaty was lawyered by Thomas Berger. In the early days of his involvement in the Nisga's case, Thomas Berger was sponsored by the Church of England. Church of England missionaries in BC tended to take the Indian provisions of the Royal Proclamation very seriously because the www.dialogue.ca

British monarch is also the head of the Anglican denomination.

The rules are not stipulated for determining how the Aboriginal consent called for by the Royal Proclamation is to be obtained. Thus the nature of "Indian consent" when it comes to relations with "the Crown" is a work-in-progress. This unresolved issue resides near the core of the present uncertainties about how to proceed with negotiations in Wet'suwet'en Territory, and by implications, in the negotiation of other CanadaFirst Nations treaties in BC and elsewhere in Canada.

Should the elected officials engaged in the Indian Act system be the sole deciders when it comes to delivering Aboriginal consent in modern-day treaty negotiations? Or must there be some Crown accommodation of traditional systems of Aboriginal governance that have somehow survived the era when these decisionmaking entities were essentially criminalized by the Canadian state?

This federal criminalization of Aboriginal traditions took place through amendments to the Indian Act. The legal prohibitions extended, for instance, to potlaching, Indian dancing and the organizing of Indian political lobbies across multiple Aboriginal communities. Memories are still present in the Indian Country of BC of the days when some First Nations people were sent to jail for Indian dancing.

The career of the Squamish jurist, Andy Paull, forms another marker of the extent to which the Canadian Indian Department would go to maintain its control.

In the early decades of the twentieth century Andy Paull became legendary for using as a cover his role as coach of the North Sore Indians, a lacrosse team that included many players from Iroquis Country in eastern North America. His job as a lacrosse coach in the Lower Mainland enabled Andy Paull to engage in politically organizing Indian groups across Canada during an era when raising money to advance an Indian claim was outlawed by the Indian Act. One of Paull's partners in his political work was the Huron leader Jules Sioui, the Quebec-based founder of the League of Indian Nations of North America.

This League was founded in 1944 at the same time as the organization that would become the National Indian Brotherhood and then the Assembly of First Nations. While the AFN strand of political organization is rooted in the Indian Act system, the League of Indian Nations was very deliberately developed outside ‌/ VOL. 32, NO. 3, SPRING 2019

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the Indian Act in ways that escaped the control mechanisms of government funding. […]

CONTINUE READING – More on Aboriginal Consent:

LINK: https://ahtribune.com/world/americas/canada/2855wetsuweten-land-defenders.html Anthony James Hall, antoniusjameshall@gmail.com ♣

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The Story of Whistleblower Kevin Annett

Erasing the Erasure: On the Trail of Canada’s Biggest Cover Up

by Sarah J. Webster, sarahjwebster101@gmail.com (Originally published at Salem-News.com, March 30, 2019) LINK: https://tinyurl.com/Salem-news-sw

Preamble: A Personal Note from the Author In writing this piece I’ve done something quite unusual for me by adopting a pseudonym. I’ve only ever done that once before, in a situation of abnormal danger. That was in Africa in the midst of a civil war.

My efforts to construct the story of Canada’s Indian residential school cover up and the professional destruction of Kevin Annett have been no less perilous. I have been met with an unexplained eyebrow-arched discouragement from colleagues and suffered the loss of friends and family and at least one job opportunity. After beginning my research I have also experienced more overt intimidation, gang stalking, late night death threats and at least one “unofficial visit” by the RCMP. Obviously, some powerful people don’t want this story told, which makes it even more necessary to tell it.

I want to point out that the details of certain personal aspects of this story have been deliberately made more vague than I would have preferred, at the insistence of my editors. One example of this is the issue of why the wife of Kevin Annett chose to turn on and betray him at the prompting of his adversary, the United Church of Canada.

The reason behind this betrayal involves the personal history and psychological condition of Kevin’s wife and the unethical sharing of the details of her condition by her therapist with the church officials who approached her in her weakness and exploited her vulnerability. The sordidness of their actions is but one symptom of the criminality that characterizes this church in practice: a malfeasance that the protagonist of this story has so unflaggingly documented at the cost of everything in his life.

With time enough and more people like him, the truth of these crimes will be known, even in as closed a society as Canada. My effort is but another step in that long journey.

Introduction

Whoever looks beneath the surface of things does so at his own risk. – Oscar Wilde 24 dialogue

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I didn’t know what to expect when I first arrived on Vancouver Island in the fall of 2018 to commence my investigation of this story. Frankly, I’d been warned off even attempting it, which made me want to write it all the more. For not only is the issue enormous in scope, but so is the amount of fog, misinformation and outright hysteria KEVIN ANNETT generated around it.

I am speaking of course of Canada’s home grown genocide and how its awful truth was surfaced and then buried again.

Over thirty years of political journalism on four continents has taught me that every story is at its heart a simple one that is made complicated by those who have something to lose by its coming to light. How the mainline churches of Canada went about wiping out huge numbers of brown skinned children in their “Indian residential schools”, aided by the government and its courts, is a basic matter of money and land. How the same killers have got away with their abominations is a sordid and labyrinthine tale of ongoing murder, duplicity, corruption and concealment that many Canadians may have difficulty believing.

Or maybe not.

My efforts at unlocking this story have been aided from the start by another simple aspect of the tale: the fact that it really begins and remains focused on one man - a disarmingly unpretentious former clergyman named Kevin Annett.

If you have a memory preceding July 8, 2008 you’ll probably recall Kevin, since until then he was routinely quoted and featured in Canada’s mainstream media. After that date – when the government of Stephen Harper “apologized” for the Indian residential schools and set the official spin in operation – Kevin’s name simply vanished from the press. How effectively his public erasure was accomplished – along with what he had uncovered over fifteen years – is truly breathtaking, especially considering the passions still www.dialogue.ca

aroused by the mere mention of his name.

But to say that is to get ahead of our story, and of what I gradually learned in the face of an industry of slander, distortion and panic generated from the summit of Canadian church and state. All, it seems, because of this one man.

A Place called Port Alberni I began this tale at the scene of the crime, the exact midpoint of Vancouver Island: a dying lumber mill town called Port Alberni, British Columbia. It served as the launching pad for Christian Canada’s destruction of most of the west coast aboriginal tribes in the last half of the nineteenth century. There are still Indians in the area, but like any of us they know little about their origins or of what makes them unique. Survivors of a slaughter never do.

Port Alberni doesn’t mix its races. I haven’t seen whites and Indians sitting together in its restaurants or alongside each other in its churches. The browns are cloistered on the two local Indian reservations or in the mid-town slum area everybody calls The Ghetto, which is sprawled next door to the barely operating pulp mill. It was the same way when Kevin Annett arrived in town over a quarter century ago, to take up his post as the new minister at St. Andrew’s United Church, which closed down the year after Kevin was fired.

Despite the calumny and fog placed around his name, people here still openly recall the young minister: especially the Indians. More of them seemed willing to talk about him than did the whites.

“He was different” remembers George Tatoosh, a stooped Tseshaht aboriginal man who’s in his sixties.

“You can always tell the fakers from the real deal, and he was real. When nobody else gave a shit, there was Kevin.

He kept visiting us when his church told him to stop. I wasn’t surprised when they booted him out.”

“He fed me and my family every month outta his food bank” says Karen Connerley, a local Ahousaht Indian who attended Kevin’s church until he was fired.

“Those stuck up snots in his church didn’t like us bein’ there, no way. One of ‘em told me to take my brats and get the f(…) out.”

Local white people tend to have a different take on the same man. None of them deny that the pews of Kevin’s church were filled until the day he was fired without cause. And yet according to a retired city official who attended the other United Church in town and who prefers anonymity, “Annett was his only worst enemy, you know, bringing a www.dialogue.ca

lot of it down on himself. He liked to provoke and divide people. He wasn’t a good pastor, not by a long shot. He alienated his own congregation, especially with all his social justice talk. He never tolerated a different opinion, which is why he had to be removed.”

Like the proverbial blind people describing different parts of an elephant, and mirroring the nation, there seems to be no consensus among Port Alberni residents about Kevin Annett, save one: that he let loose a political firestorm about stolen land and missing and murdered aboriginal children.

Who’s Who I tried to speak to the men among whom Kevin first unleashed that storm: a handful of United Church clergymen, some of who still pastor churches on Vancouver Island. None of them returned my phone calls or emails.

Nor did the national office of the United Church of Canada respond when I asked for an interview with anyone who could speak knowledgeably about their firing and public defrocking of Kevin between 1995 and 1997. Like the mass graves of the residential school children that he first pointed out, an official Night and Fog still surrounds Kevin Annett.

Two of these local clergymen are Foster Freed and Phil Spencer: United Church ministers in Nanaimo and Qualicum Beach, respectively. In November of 2018, they hired a lawyer named Lewis Spencer from Derpak White and Spencer law firm in Vancouver to issue a “Cease and Desist” letter against Kevin at his former home in Nanaimo. Without citing any proof, the letter accused Kevin of circulating “defamatory and false” accusations against Freed and Spencer in the form of a leaflet, and declared that the RCMP have “opened a file” on Kevin.

Apparently Freed and Spencer didn’t tell their lawyer that with their encouragement, the Mounties had already opened a file on Kevin Annett in the spring of 1993, well before his firing from the church two years later.

But why is their “cease and desist” action happening now, more than two decades later? Significantly, no-one has ever sued Kevin Annett for any of his claims. And isn’t the United Church always the first one to say (at least, in relation to their own malfeasance) that what’s past is past and should be “healed and reconciled”?

Apparently not, when it comes to Kevin Annett. For even though Freed and Spencer were the main actors in the secret and unauthorized destruction of Kevin Annett’s job, livelihood, good name and even family, they take offense whenever anyone mentions it: as did a group of local young activists who were the ones who actually circulated the “defamatory” …/ VOL. 32, NO. 3, SPRING 2019

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Sarah J. Webster, Erasing the Erasure, contd.

leaflet that their lawyer attributes to Kevin.

People tend to be defensive and over-reactive when they’re feeling guilty or vulnerable. Or as my air force father used to say, “You know you are over the target when the flak starts.” So I followed the flak and did my own digging into what had first caused Freed and Spencer, and eventually the wider United Church officialdom, to tear apart Kevin Annett’s life.

My search quickly led to a letter that Kevin had written on October 17, 1994, three months before his firing without cause or notice by the men to whom it was written.

Kevin’s letter to the head officials of the United Church’s Comox-Nanaimo Presbytery concerned a piece of aboriginal land seized by the United Church and then resold to the corporate benefactors of the church. Such a theft was hardly an unusual event, but in this case it was one fraught with major fall out once it was made known. For Kevin’s discovery of the theft of Lot 363 on the Ahousaht reservation near Tofino opened the lid on a hidden deal between his church, the B.C. government and the largest logging company in the world known as Weyerhauser that stood to profit all involved by over two billion dollars.

In hindsight, Kevin’s letter was amazingly naive. It asked that, in accordance with United Church policy on aboriginal issues, the land be returned at no charge to its rightful owners, the Ahousaht tribe. But that would have “upset the whole apple cart”, in the words of provincial Aboriginal Affairs minister John Cashore - another United Church clergyman - whose government was a major shareholder in MacMillan - Bloedel, the company eventually gobbled up by Weyerhauser. And so the word went out from more than one boardroom for someone to deal with this meddlesome priest.

Foster Freed and Phil Spencer volunteered. The two of them were the covert point men in the destruction of Kevin Annett. They had gone to seminary with the man and they had his trust.

By their own admission, Spencer and Freed were both chomping at the bit to prove they had the right stuff to climb higher in the church hierarchy; they were indeed subsequently rewarded with higher positions in the United Church for their ruination of Kevin Annett, Freed as British Columbia Conference President and Spencer, ironically, as its head of Pastoral Relations. They had also proven themselves to the civil authorities, by flagging Kevin Annett to the RCMP when he’d told them accounts of children being killed in their church’s Alberni Indian residential school.

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Encouraged by the national church office, its lawyer Jon Jessiman and B.C. government minister John Cashore, Foster Freed and Phil Spencer formed a secret Presbytery “oversight committee” to arrange not only Kevin’s firing and defrocking but the blackening of his name and employability in church circles and beyond. Neither Kevin nor his congregation nor even other United Church officials knew of this shadowy committee or its game plan.

Here’s where it gets even sleazier and more revealing.

Apparently with the go-ahead from church lawyer Jon Jessiman, Phil Spencer approached Kevin’s wife, Anne McNamee, months before they actually fired him. Spencer offered to arrange church funding for Anne’s divorce if she agreed to leave Kevin after the boot came down on him, and if she helped spy on him and purloin his personal files. Spencer also assured her that the church could “arrange” for her to get full legal custody of their two daughters in Family Court, as long as she played ball.

Anne McNamee accepted the deal, and eventually she did indeed win custody over their children after she’d disappeared with them following Kevin’s firing. The United Church paid Anne’s lawyer Ron Huinink at least $28,000 during the McNamee-Annett divorce and custody trial in Vancouver early in 1996.

This was not simply another sordid, in-house slam - dunking of an inconvenient church dissident. Phil Spencer, who was a minor clergyman and a relative nobody, acted with total impunity and without apparent fear of consequence, knowing that the court system would be on his side. No-one in his position acts that way unless they know their back is being seriously covered by bigger forces.

Who and what those forces were became starkly obvious as the tragedy played itself out. As Kevin Annett was first fired without cause, and then stripped of his children and publicly defrocked without a semblance of due process, and finally blacklisted, pauperized, made unemployable and publicly branded as a social pariah across Canada, ever-higher levels of church, state and big money stepped in to lead the attack on this lone clergyman. That in itself began to awaken a lot of people to not only Kevin Annett but more importantly, to the crimes he was unearthing.

As a colleague of mine at the Globe and Mail newspaper wondered aloud in 1998, “Why did these jokers spend over $300,000 to get rid of just one of their ministers? And why was it all done so publicly? Who ever wants to wash their dirty laundry in public unless it’s to make an example of someone?” www.dialogue.ca

Fortunately for posterity and a lot of native people, no-one expected Kevin Annett to be so resilient and tough.

Stripped of everything, he just wouldn’t give up documenting stories and holding public protests about the residential school crimes, and of what he’d learned through bitter personal loss and experience. And the longer Kevin persisted over the years, the more an even uglier truth began to emerge.

Sixty Thousand Children Can’t be Wrong The Canadian public has been so carefully inoculated to the little matter of Genocide in their own backyard that the truth so briefly surfaced has once again been placed beyond reach and understanding. Torn and violated little bodies thrown into a mass grave have been sanitized into stale words of “apology” and compensation. We can thank the media and academia for that subterfuge, as well as the church-state spin doctors. But we also have ourselves to blame. For who of us wants to take responsibility for our own Group Crime, especially since there’s nothing forcing us to?

Nevertheless, in the matter at hand, the very degree of the official cover-up of that Genocide is as revealing and as damning as the original crime itself. The bigger the crime, the greater the concealment.

Early in his campaign, Kevin Annett published a front page article from the Ottawa Citizen newspaper dated November 15, 1907 entitled “Schools Aid White Plague”.

The article described the report of a Dr. Peter Bryce of the federal Indian Affairs department, who reported that since 1891, as many as 69% of Indian residential school children were dying every year “after being deliberately exposed to communicable disease”. This official proof of intentional mass murder went down the proverbial Memory Hole and remained there until Kevin published it in the spring of 1998.

Kevin likes to cite the February, 1940 report of a west coast Indian Agent, one P.D. Ashbridge, concerning a fire that was deliberately lit by Indians that destroyed the United Church’s Ahousaht residential school. In response, Ashbridge wrote to the head of Indian Affairs in Ottawa, “As this was the property of the church, care was taken to avoid too close an inquiry.” (www.murderbydecree.com) The same care to avoid looking too deeply into church malfeasance has been a constant feature of Canadian governments and their courts. The most spectacular example of this in recent times was the so-called “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (TRC). This misnamed body was launched by the guilty parties in the summer of 2008 soon after Kevin and his movement forced a belated www.dialogue.ca

“apology” from the feds over the residential schools. As Kevin puts it so succinctly, “The TRC was like the serial killer appointing his own judge and jury.”

At the time and during the stillborn existence of the TRC, I wondered as a journalist why no-one in the public media was questioning the legitimacy or legality of an alleged Commission that was set up by the very parties responsible for the crime being “investigated”. Or why, under the terms of the TRC mandate, its three Commissioners (who were appointed directly by the churches and the Privy Council office in Ottawa) were not allowed to issue subpoenas, freely access church records or take down as evidence any testimony that named the names of perpetrators or of capital crimes, including the death of children.

Even more outrageously, the written statements of the residential school survivors were vetted and censored by the Commissioners before being presented publicly; and their contents were then legally the property of the TRC and could never be used in litigation! And yet the TRC was continually presented in the government - parroting Canadian media as a fair and legitimate investigation into Indian residential schools.

Delmar Johnny, a Cowichan tribal elder on Vancouver Island, remarked in the fall of 2008, “It’s the same old game. Their TRC and the apology bullshit is like a man stealing your car and then knocking on your door and saying he’s sorry for doing it, and then getting in the car and driving away. After all the fine talk, nothing ever changes for us.”

Hypocrisy aside, the TRC represented a clear and undeniable miscarriage of the law and an obstruction of justice.

Perhaps that’s why the original TRC Chairman, federal Judge Harry Laforme, publicly resigned from the Commission soon after his appointment with the remark that because of the TRC’s terms of operation, his participation in it would be “highly inappropriate and irregular.”

Of course, none of that matters when the serial killer is still in charge. But these incidents are also symptomatic of the Canadian nation at large, and our deep reflex not to believe that our churches have the blood of over 60,000 children on their hands. It’s precisely that denial that Kevin ran headlong into after his immolation by his own church and his casting out among the survivors of their genocide. But ironically that positioned him to start surfacing even more proof of the Canadian Group Crime. […]

The balance of this article can be read online at: LINK : https://tinyurl.com/Salem-news-sw See also: http://murderbydecree.com/ ♣ VOL. 32, NO. 3, SPRING 2019

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“Behind The Curtain” Insights from Ed Curtin

The Fascinating Spell Cast by Weasels Edward Curtin, Massachusetts,

March 3, 2019 column “Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style.” – Albert Camus, The Fall To be fascinated by another person who holds or symbolizes power is very common. It is often accompanied by a frisson of sexual excitement, whether repressed or acknowledged, explicitly or implicitly projected. Masters need slaves and slaves need their masters. The chief, the big man, the fascinating woman, the glamorous celebrity, the rich mogul, the powerful politician, while all standard vintage people without their accoutrements of prestigious (magical) power, magnetically attract many people wishing to surrender passively to the perceived superior power of what Carl Jung called the “mana-personality.” However, such supernatural power or aura is in the eyes of the beholder, who wishes to be hypnotized and to fulfill his secret wish to be will-less. As Dostoevsky has written, “Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.” A smile, a song, or the projection of unconflicted authority – often that is all it takes for the spell to be cast.

Think of weasels. They are very vicious and can be found all around the world. Their cute faces belie their treacherous nature. They have the ability to fascinate their victims – fascinate means to cast a spell upon or hypnotize (from the Latin, fascinare, to bewitch). They do this by a stupefying song and dance, a facility that paralyzes those they prey upon before they pounce upon them.

Most people have never seen weasels in the wild, for they are secretive creatures who go about their killing clandestinely. Whether they kill softly, I can’t say.

I’ve never heard their song, or the screaming of their victims.

Nevertheless, many people have been seduced by human weasels, who also court with a song and dance.

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These weasels come in all shapes and sizes. Their faces are almost never as cute as their small fury cousins’ are, but their facial masks conceal similar tendencies and abilities: the talent to immobilize their victims through powerful seductive techniques.

It’s nothing new, of course. It’s still the same old story, a gory story of the fight to dominate and control that is coterminous with human history or longer. It is an ancient myth that we still live by. As in days of old, the siren song is often sexual in nature, not sexual in the passionately loving sense, not an encounter between two unknowns seeking to discover each other, but an instrumental sexual enticement wrapped in power, prestige, money, false charm and fake bravado whose purpose is domination.

There is a reason why the news is constantly filled with stories of a sexual nature: R. Kelly, Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, Robert Kraft, the “me too movement,” Catholic priests, and so many others without end. Obviously, sex sells, and the corporate mass media are in the business of selling sexual titillation and political propaganda – two products that are not unconnected.

But there are many real victims here, people who have been used and abused by predators who traffic in human degradation for their sick pleasures. Some of their victims have been fascinated, while others have been physically or mentally coerced. Power corrupts, yes, but it also thrives on humiliating and using others, shaming them and destroying their innocence.

Living in a society of screens and spectacles, many people have lost a physical connection to other people.

This is the paradox of a sexually saturated, sadomasochistic mass media society. Our bodies have become instruments in a spectral show of instrumental rationality and our relationships metamorphosed into shadows on the walls of our electronic devices. Social life has become mass hallucination. Everything and everyone has become a means to be used. It is a society of mutual masturbators afraid to meet the unknown other in sexual intimacy. Kate Julian chronicles aspects of this sexual recession in The Atlantic magazine, “Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex.”* …/ www.dialogue.ca

And it is not just young people.

While the United States has long been a hotbed for sexual scandals and media, FBI, and CIA exposure of the sexual lives of those they wish to destroy, today, when sex is a staple of the media where it is presented and discussed openly as if one were discussing another consumer product, the use of sexual blackmail and sexual muddling as a political tool of the “deep-state” propaganda apparatus is unmentionable, even as its significance is enhanced by electronic spying and the loss of privacy. Jonathan Marshall puts it this way in Sex Scandals and Sexual Blackmail in America’s Deep Politics: “One outstanding consequence has been to elevate the importance of sexual blackmail and public exposure as tactics of covert political intrigues, just as they have been in espionage. If information is power, the information about adultery, homosexuality, and other private sexual indiscretions by officials is power of a high order indeed. Individuals and organizations that are adept at collecting and controlling such information – such as law enforcement, spies, private eyes, journalists and lawyers – thus play a key role in the hidden campaigns of the deep state. One perverse measure of the importance of sex in America’s ‘deep politics’ is the paucity of systematic attention paid to it by political scientists.”

Yet sexual blackmail is central to “deep-state” operations and political espionage, even as sexual trafficking and scandals mix with the omnipresent sexual intoxication of popular culture. Like the term “deepstate” that is now a staple of the corporate mass media as the secret governing forces go deeper while

seemingly becoming more exposed and shallow, the use of sex and sexual identity to confuse and confabulate is presented by the media as transparency. It’s an old trick in new clothes.

Think of Julian Assange, an innocent man in a living hell in Room 101 of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for seven years. Think sexual blackmail for telling the truth. Read John Pilger.** There are all kinds of weasels, and the spells they cast appeal to the very human desire to be fascinated. Yet it’s a fool’s game. Our society of the electronic spectacle of disembodied images and speculative “news” is meant to immobilize those who remain spectators.

It is black magic of the highest order.

So feel your pulse and take a walk in the woods. If you encounter a weasel there, at least you’ll know it’s doing what comes naturally. It’s the human weasels, those D. H. Lawrence called the “living dead,” who are out to get us.

As Lawrence warned, “Don’t let the living dead eat you up.”

Edward Curtin, This article first appeared at Global Research.

The author’ website: http://edwardcurtin.com/ ******* Footnotes: LINK: http://edwardcurtin.com/the-fascinating-spell-cast-byweasels/ * LINK: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sexrecession/573949/ ** LINK: www.greanvillepost.com/2019/03/03/john-pilgerthe-prisoner-says-no-to-big-brother/ ♣

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Federal Court orders Lobbying Commissioner to re-examine Aga Khan's Bahamas trip gift to Trudeau Democracy Watch, Ottawa, April 16, 2019:.

OTTAWA – Democracy Watch released the ruling it

has received from the Federal Court in its case filed in January 2018. The case challenged the ruling in September 2017 by former Commissioner of Lobbying Karen Shepherd that the Aga Khan’s Bahamas trip gift to Prime Minister Trudeau was legal. The ruling was issued on March 29, 2019. Democracy Watch was represented by Ottawa-based lawyer Sebastian Spano. The Federal Court ruled that the Lobbying Commissioner was wrong to let Aga Khan off the hook for the Bahamas trip gift to PM Trudeau. The www.dialogue.ca

Court ordered the Commissioner re-examine Aga Khan Foundation’s CEO for failing to stop the gift, and Aga Khan for not registering as a lobbyist. […]

Given Lobbying Commissioner Karen Shepherd’s overall weak record of enforcement, Democracy Watch has also requested that the Auditor General conduct a performance audit of her time in office..

LINK: https://tinyurl.com/Dwatch-aga-khan FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:

Duff Conacher, Co-founder of Democracy Watch Tel: (613) 241-5179 Cell: 416-546-3443 Email: nfo@democracywatch.ca ♣ VOL. 32, NO. 3, SPRING 2019

dialogue 29

The Western World… and “Why Do They Hate Us?” America’s Century of Regime Change: 14 countries in 110 years For the answer to “Why do they hate us?” of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 and continuing through the Spanish-American War and the Cold War this book should be required reading…

LINK FROM Adrian Swanston, Vancouver [ alipatricesankara@gmail.com ]

Re: Watch Stephen Kinzer: Overthrow America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq - on YouTube LINK : https://youtu.be/h1fSq_aPGHU (38 min. )

[Downloadable Audiobook - 2006 Instantly available on hoopla] A fast-paced narrative history of the coups,

revolutions, and invasions by which the United States has toppled fourteen foreign governments-not always to its own benefit. "Regime change" did not begin with the administration of George W. Bush, but has been an integral part of U.S. foreign policy for more than one hundred years. Starting with the overthrow

and into our own time, the United States has not hesitated to overthrow governments that stood in the way of its political and economic goals. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 is the latest, though perhaps not the last, example of the dangers inherent in these operations. In Overthrow, Stephen Kinzer tells the stories of the audacious politicians, spies, military commanders, and business executives who took it upon themselves to depose monarchs, presidents, and prime ministers. He also shows that the U.S. government has often pursued these operations without understanding the countries involved; as a result, many of them have had disastrous long-term consequences. ♣

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Economic/Monetary Lessons from Our History Larry Kazdan, Vancouver BC

Footnotes:

Full employment would reduce poverty, enhance labour bargaining power, decrease high levels of household debt, and generally stimulate the economy so that all including businesses would benefit.

According to Modern Monetary Theory,(1) true full employment can be realized because currency-issuing countries like Canada are constrained not by financial limits but by the availability of real resources. A Job Guarantee program would hire the unused labour that the private sector does not need, and anchor inflation by creating an employment buffer stock, rather than keeping people idle as is currently the case.

1. What is Modern Monetary Theory, or “MMT”?

LINK: http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/03/whatis-modern-monetary-theory-or-mmt.html The essential insight of Modern Monetary Theory (or “MMT”) is that sovereign, currency-issuing countries are only constrained by real limits. They are not constrained, and cannot be constrained, by purely financial limits because, as issuers of their respective fiat-currencies, they can never “run out of money.” This doesn’t mean that governments can spend without limit, or overspend without causing inflation, or that government should spend any sum unwisely. What it emphatically does mean is that no such sovereign government can be forced to tolerate mass unemployment because of the state of its finances – no matter what that state happens to be.

Virtually all economic commentary and punditry today, whether in America, Europe or most other places, is based on ideas about the monetary system which are not merely confused – they are starkly and comprehensively counterfactual.

2. Tony Benn interview: LINK: http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=34021 3. 1939--1945: World War II Transformed the Canadian Economy - LINK: https://tinyurl.com/web-econ-ww2 The government budget deficit also increased rapidly: in 1939, the budget deficit was less than 12% of GNP; in 1945, that rate rose above 42%. Nevertheless, by 1944, the Great Depression had faded into memory, and the unemployment rate was less than 1%.

By the end of the war, the economy had a more highly skilled labour force, as well as institutions that were more conducive to sustained economic growth. ♣

Full employment occurred during WWII. As the British statesman Tony Benn noted, "When I was 17, I had a letter from the government saying, “Dear Mr. Benn, will you turn up when you’re 17½? We’ll give you free food, free clothes, free training, free accommodation, and two shillings, ten pence a day to just kill Germans. People said, well, if you can have full employment to kill people, why in God’s name couldn’t you have full employment and good schools, good hospitals, good houses?”

If we can put everyone to work during war-time, we can just as certainly organize full employment during times of peace so that all willing Canadians can earn an income and contribute to society.

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www.dialogue.ca

“Prévoyance”

Are you looking for an election issue?

Erik Andersen, Gabriola Island, BC

An election issue for both the Federal and Provincial elections should be "Unfair Contracts Relief" as proposed by the British Columbia Law Institute.

The Institute identified the unfairness of contracting in BC early in the present century. Their first report was delivered as a draft in 2005 and their final report in 2011. "This report recommends reforms to the leading concepts used by contract law to tackle the problem of unfairness.

These concepts are unconscionability, duress, undue influence, good faith, and misrepresentation." To illustrate the intellectual status of this report there were 10 prominent organisations and many individuals who financially sponsored this work, including the Department of Justice Canada.

So after nearly two decades of identifying shortcomings in Canadian/BC contract law we (still) have no legislative improvements as proposed by the Institute.

The obvious take away here is that those in favour of contracts that employ duress. undue influence, bad faith and deception have convinced the serving politicians to do nothing to make our province and country a place of fairness.

For those interested in the numbers of dollars contracted for on behalf of every person here in BC, for the year 2016; the total was $100,000,000,000

(i.e. $100 billion) of contractual obligations (Auditor General's Report Feb 2017). This amount is on top of "debt" as reported by the BC Comptroller General.

Using StatsCan statistics, that amounts to $21,515 of contractual obligations for every man, women and child living in BC. The next highest amount in Canada is Quebec at $10,656 per capita. None of this includes what obligations the Federal Government has tied to us all.

In that $100 billion total, $60 billion plus Site C, etc. was in the form of contracts with Independent Power Producers. When a contract average term of 30 years is used, that means an annual payment of $2 billion every year for 30 more years. Since BC Hydro does not show any accumulating assets from these payments, this $2 billion is not an investment but rather a rental amount all BC Hydro customers must pay.

Again, using the 2016 statistics, that equals the huge sucking sound of money leaving the pockets of every soul in BC at a rate of about $430 per year.

These numbers should help your readers understand why the Institute saw a problem in contract law but it should also illustrate that those with the job and capacity to use legislation for social justice purposes have been looking the other way for nearly two decades.

Now how is that for an election issue?

– Erik, twolabradors@shaw.ca ♣

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Links from Herb Spencer, Surrey BC Most important advance in medical knowledge I am forwarding this important article (LINK) because this is the most important advance in medical knowledge in many years. Learn about our unique biomes; the second brain. http://www.thehealingmiracle.com/food-and-your-mood-howyour-diet-controls-your-brain/ ♣

The Real History Lesson of WWI Here’s a story few know about, how Fake News (c.1900) triggered the major disasters of the 20th Century. Read how a few powerful Englishmen plotted for the continuation of their glorious Empire. LINK: https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-the-world-war-i-conspiracy/5659905 ♣ www.dialogue.ca

The Pro-Israel lobby Who’s Telling the Truth About the Israel Lobby and Anti-Semitism?

Here are two experts who have studied this group of Super-Lobbyists. https://whowhatwhy.org/2019/02/15/whostelling-the-truth-about-the-israel-lobby-andanti-semitism/ From Herb Spencer spsi99@telus.net ♣ VOL. 32, NO. 3, SPRING 2019

dialogue 31

Soft & Hard Edges

Observing ourselves observing ourselves

By Jim Taylor, Okanagan Centre BC

Despite his scornful dismissal of his companion’s intellect -- “Elementary, my dear Watson!” -- Sherlock Holmes was not a brilliant thinker. Rather, he was an astute observer. He noticed things that others overlooked, little things insignificant in themselves but which, when put together, led to a startling conclusion.

Observing is a key function of survival. It doesn’t refer only to eyes. Dogs observe with their noses.

They detect hundreds of scents that we humans miss, scents that feed information about their environment, their safety, their food. Especially their food.

Birds and butterflies sense the lines of the earth’s magnetic field to guide them on their migrations.

Salmon taste their way through a massive confusion of waters, back to their original spawning grounds.

We humans rely most heavily on our eyes and ears, to observe the world around us. We listen to conversations, to news broadcasts, to public address systems. We watch people’s clothing, their body movements, their interactions, for clues to what they’re thinking or feeling.

In the days when I taught writing courses, I sometimes sent my students out to spend 15 minutes in silence, just observing. Almost always, they noticed five times as many things with their eyes as with their ears – and rarely noticed anything with their noses or tongues.

Watching our minds at work Beyond that, we are -- as far as we know -- the only creatures who observe ourselves.

Some of us do, anyway.

We observe our own reactions. We recognize that we’re taking a casual comment personally. That we’re getting angry. Or looking for an excuse to dislike someone. That we’re falling in love. Or making fools of ourselves.

It’s how we learn. We recognize our mistakes. Even more important, we recognize our successes, and what led up to them.

Being able to observe ourselves gets us through some tough times. We manage to see this person -me -- staggering through a devastating grief or loss.

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Rendered helpless by pain or stress. And in observing ourselves, we can detach ourselves and recover some calm, some peace.

We can say to ourselves, “Yes, that’s me.” And at the same time, “No, that’s not me -- that’s a person suffering deep wounds. I can see it happening, but it doesn’t have to destroy the real me.”

True friends, and true life partners, can do that observing for us, on our behalf, when we can’t do it alone. They help us find ourselves in a maelstrom of meaninglessness.

Don’t leave it to academics And sometimes, sometimes, we manage to observe ourselves observing ourselves. What kinds of things do we notice? How do we organize our observations?

How do we infer meaning from otherwise random happenstances?

Once upon a time, theologians and philosophers took on the task of interpreting how we observe ourselves.

But today, the firehose of information that sloshes over us through our screens and earbuds sweeps philosophers and theologians to the distant margins of our awareness. Does anyone still read Aquinas or Nietzsche -- and not just references to them? Does anyone struggle through the convoluted reasoning of Karl Barth or John Stuart Mill?

In businesses, devolution (supposedly) moved authority from the executive suite to the shop floor.

In life, devolution moves the need for observing ourselves from the ivory tower to the coffee shop and sidewalk. **********

Copyright © 2019 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups, and links from other blogs, welcomed; all other rights reserved. To comment on this column, write jimt@quixotic.ca (and send a copy to dialogue@dialogue.ca too, please!) ♣

Wicked Wacky Wisdom from Susanne Lawson on Wickkaninnish Island, BC, councilfire@hotmail.com 1. Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else.

2. Never test the depth of the water with both feet.

3. A closed mouth gathers no foot.

4. Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side and dark side, and it holds the universe together. [More on p.53]♣ www.dialogue.ca

Of Dogs and Gods

“The Fifth Columnist”

Michael Neilly, Dunrobin ON

The dogs bark. The caravan moves on.

I take this to mean that while people may complain, time marches on. Barking dogs are ultimately irrelevant. It’s like this for us and our gods.

Civilizations through time have had their own gods. Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Roman, Greek, Indian, and many, many others. Civilizations are born and die, and with them their gods.

The Vikings had Odin and Thor, for instance. But the Vikings are gone, and so, too, are Odin and Thor.

Ancient Mesopotamia has long since gone. Likewise their gods, Enki and Enlil say, are recalled only in ancient clay tablets.

Probably the most famous ancient civilization of all is the Egyptian one. And rendered in its temples and tombs we have Osiris, Anubis, Horus, and others. In the modern day, they are gone.

Today, we have religions and their gods based on books. Each book lays down the law. But basically it’s one supreme being and our relation to Him/Her. Frankly I think God is a woman, because she gave birth to the stars. And arranged them so nicely.

I have come to the conclusion, though, that if you have a supreme being, you may well have superior beings. And the UFOs that have been reported, like the European ships of the Old World, are probably a mix of explorers, conquerors and exploiters.

Recently, I watched Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, twice. The premise of this movie is ridiculous. From comic book mythology, you know that Superman could vaporize Batman from space.

Rock beats scissors. The second time, viewing Superman as a god figure, this caught my attention.

Some of the vested interests, the ones who like things just as they are, try to kill him (and succeed). The storyline doesn’t bode well for any www.dialogue.ca

Saviour, because we will test this super being sorely.

Our story goes like this. God creates heaven and earth and deposits Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. But what is a garden but a creation, totally artificial, totally conceived and built to a plan. The garden is order imposed on chaos. The gardener plants his desired species and labours to defend it against all invaders. Eventually though, the gardener lacks the will to garden, due to other priorities, mobility, sickness, or death. The garden is taken over by another, who, for another generation, fights the good fight, replanting, sowing, tilling, and another order, a new garden is imposed. It’s like this for our God or gods. They move on, or we move on.

Me, I’ve come to believe again in Adam and Eve, but multiples, seeded across the planet at different times, possibly by different “gardeners”, call them gods if you will. Many of us believe in a supreme being, but balk, even laugh, at the idea of aliens, superior beings if you like. I think that there’s some conceit at work to think that all that exists is either sacred or profane, a duality of one creator God and us, the chosen people, created in His image.

In the second coming, substituting the loving Jesus for Superman, some will doubt him. Later though, if people begin to stop consuming things for the sake of consumption and take a vow of poverty, if entire governments begin to collapse, and new order sweeps the planet, then these governments and the obscenely wealthy will do everything they can to kill him. So along this line, if Jesus does come, I hope he comes as a superman, completely invulnerable. Because the ungrateful lot that we are, craving salvation but not wanting to accept the consequences, we will try to take him out.

My guess is that some 500 to 2,000 years into the future, our descendants will both praise and rail against a new pantheon of gods. The dogs bark…

Michael Neilly, michael.neilly@bell.net ♣

VOL. 32, NO. 3, SPRING 2019

dialogue 33

Tall Tales

Ideas from David Foster

David Muir Foster, Port Perry ON

In 1974 when the Net had not yet been invented to catch the unwary young, the tallest man-made structure in the world was the CN Tower, built on Toronto’s former railway yards near its lake. 1,815 feet. Continuous-pour concrete, steel bar reinforcing inside. The top was a steel mast placed carefully by a giant helicopter that had flown up from Texas. A crazy man I know leaped off it legally and lived.

Well, maybe not so crazy. Michael Robertson at age 30, is now age 76 and still leaping off tall structures. If you have access to e-mail, ask for the City of Toronto Archives, Series 1465, File 732, Item #9, stunning photos. Michael was close friends with one of the Architects who had taken Michael’s course on ‘’how to fly Hang Gliders with no power assist’, safely. The Architects helped with the stunt. The Pepsi Cola Corporation (that rivals Coca Cola in the southern hemisphere), wanted a worthwhile publicity-grabber. Perhaps a hang glider with the words on its transparent wing ‘Pepsi Cola’ that the young would take notice of.

And it did. The film went ‘viral’.

It took a lot of background work to get all the permissions. The team planned it a year in advance, waiting for the right opportunity that might never come. And then put it away on a shelf ‘just in case’. Over a year later, in some absolutely spooky coincidence of timing and cooperation, it became active. How do you come up with $30 million public liability insurance within 24 hours?

Part of the preparation ground crew was Michael’s neighbour and friend William Lishman (later world famous as the man who flew small airplanes, low, at the speed of a flying goose, and showed migratory big birds how to find southern winter homes that were safe, and then come Spring, find northern homes to breed in safely. Lishman died late December 2017. A fast cancer. Only now is his home township wrestling with what a suitable ‘Memorial’ in 3 dimensions should be.

I’m the nosey man looking into many of the outer connections, even as far back as 1500 AD. The 34 dialogue

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Crimean War of 1856-58 was relevant. And various wars since. And high mountains. Both Lishman and Robertson were committed pacifists and environmental balance advocates. Robertson still is. The art of ‘Skysailing’ (with no engines at all) has come a long way since 1976: on rare occasions mere mortals soaring to 12,000 feet above Sea level.

A problem is that those born after 1984, entered adulthood just as the Internet took hold. Grasping various expensive versions of ‘smart phones’, they had no grounding in what went before. The Net had no sense of history to offer them and they had no note-taking skills to keep diaries. So what went before, even now, is treated as ancient folklore (perhaps like the Bible).

‘Talking with God’ now is to refer to i-phones nearly always in their hands. God is Google you talk to by tapping a glass screen.

The CN Tower must have been a myth like the Tower of Babel back when Canada had actually owned a National Railway company. It in turn owned a National Airline called ‘Trans Canada Airlines’ for faster cross-nation business when the trains were too slow to serve some purposes well. Postage stamps then for an ordinary letter were 10 cents. Now our sense of nation has been frittered and inflated away into International Corporate takeovers.

Someone far far away buys and sells shares on whatever the Bloomberg rumours report of Stock Market ups and downs today. That is more than enough to fill most people’s plates. Add the scary New World of ‘always ready for war’ China, Korea, Kashmir, Trump and Trudeau with their blind allegiances and incompetence. Now a great gloom settles on the Country. It turns out that all forms of electricity cause slow growing cancers and nerve damage.

That was reported in an earlier ‘Dialogue’ article about ‘Hidden Dangers’ (a book by Victoria retiree Jerry Flynn who worked a military career with this stuff. And now Washington State University’s investigative team headed by Prof Martin L Pall convincingly shows the damage all electrical fields do to every living thing. Those in power can’t believe it; their base awareness is so low. So neglected.

So viciously, blindly selfish.

I asked the Net for some poetry on Butterflies because www.dialogue.ca

I associate the Monarch Butterfly with both Robertson and Lishman, Nature and Prince Charles... it failed miserably. Maybe one of these might please a reader for a little while... I looked no further. What the hell, I can write better myself.

• Love is like a butterfly: It goes where it pleases and it pleases wherever it goes.

– Author Unknown.

• An Irish Blessing: May the wings of the butterfly

kiss the sun. ...

• One Day Butterfly: Aren't we all one-day

butterflies, ... (No, not the amazing Monarch).

• A Chrysalis: My little Mädchen found one day...

• Ode to a butterfly: Make up your own.

As an amateur historian, I look for those little brightly burning embers that we, as a proud, once-cohesive people, contributed to the world 60 years ago. Greenpeace among them. Ours is geographically the largest kingdom in the world that others lust after, trying to possess small key pieces. And our Prince about to take over as Monarch in 2022, when the dear old lady finally retires. Yes, she is my Queen, and I as boy of 17 had a few encounters with her family. But then my daddy was a soldier because he loved horses, sworn to serve the Monarch. So I too must be merely a myth from before the Internet.

David Foster, david.foster2@powergate.ca ♣

The Day When I was Born David Foster In Calgary was a regiment called the Lord Strathcona’s Horse, And many years ago they practiced cavalry charges of course.

My father served as a soldier there, and he told of an early morn, Of a day in May long years ago, the day when I was born.

It seems about the time I was due, a message was sent to my Dad, To come and visit the wife he knew and look at the son she’d had.

His troop was off on a five-hour run through the land near the River Bow, And they galloped their horses with eager delight through the hills they had come to know.

But there’d been an accident of sorts and he couldn’t come just then, So my mother lay and worried about her soldier husband again.

Now one of the rules in a cavalry charge is to hold your sword in your hand, And keep the strap that is tied to the hilt from circling your wrist like a band, So that if you should fall from your charging mount, you can toss your sword aside (For there’s many a man who fell with his sword and impaled himself and died).

Well, one of the troop had been unhorsed when they came to a fence and a hedge, And he couldn’t get rid of his sabre, so he fell and was cut by the edge.

It neatly cut off the end of his nose, so they helped him back to the base, www.dialogue.ca

And brought the man to the doctor there, to stanch the blood on his face.

The doctor left my mother’s side and told the man to sit, Then cleaned him up and asked the troop, ‘Where was the severed bit?’

Well, no one had thought to bring it in, so the doctor sent them out To search the hedges along the Bow for the piece of the missing snout.

So the patient stayed in a clinic bed near my mother’s and my own, And he held a cloth to his gory face, and now and then he’d moan.

The rest of the troop went on its way to a hopeless task you’d suppose, To search the scene of the fateful fall for the severed end of the nose.

My father spoke of his lathered horse and the search with a sense of pride, For he found the nose in the trampled dirt and rushed to the patient’s side.

The doctor cleaned it as best he could, and stitched it back to the stub, And after a while it grew again (a little misshapen and snub).

So whenever I see a very old man with a nose that is tattered and torn, I ask if he rode with Strathcona’s Horse on the day when I was born…

David Muir Foster (Dec 6, 2018), 83 in 2018, agnostic Gaian, Educational Class Level-2, Social Class level-3 and falling, david.foster2@powergate.ca - 19 August, 2018 ♣ VOL. 32, NO. 3, SPRING 2019

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My M.P. asked his constituents for “new ideas”…

JIM BJORK’S ANSWER TO HIS MP CONTINUED FROM THE LAST ISSUE:

From Jim Bjork, Huntsville ON, bjork@cogeco.ca [A letter in response to a promotional flyer sent by Tony Clement, MuskokaParry Sound MP. It asked for NEW IDEAS… TC may be gone, but Ideas live on…)

…The politicians will tell you that that’s why you vote in the first place: to place decisions in the hands of people who are looking out Jim Bjork for our best interests. Does anyone still believe this? Do we really think these people are any smarter than you? Is there any proof that this electoral process still functions for the people?

YOU KNOW THE ANSWER. But we’re all afraid to say it in public, for fear of triggering a CRA audit.

[THIRD INSTALLMENT, to be concluded in Summer issue]

The biggest threat the entire planet faces is that of fractional reserve banking, and all of it’s corollaries.

This industry has stolen the future from the planet.

Why was this information never discussed in grade school? Why are kids not shown how to balance a cheque book? Why is the nature of mortgages and loans not discussed in grade school? Where DOES money come from? Where do your taxes go- (the taxes you are told your entire life you have to pay because they go to pay for roads, schools, hospitals, various other “public” services. What! You want accountability for the blood, sweat and tears money you generate from that third job in order to get the money to pay in taxes? Why was the 407 sold? Who paid for it? Why is it in private hands now? Why does every hospital have pathetic donation campaigns? Do your taxes maybe, in reality, not cover the expenses? And who encourages those expenses to be so high? And where is it going to end? Canada is now over one TRILLION dollars in debt. Debt to whom? Did this money make it to the planet from an alien visitation?

We’re all human; how did it happen that a minuscule percentage of our population managed to get control of our monetary system worldwide. At the same time convincing the entire population that they are too stupid to manage their own affairs. And here is the worst of it: if you ask ANY current politician, whether in power or in opposition, about the issue of parliament controlling the issuance of currency, you’re told that 36 dialogue

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to allow that would be inflationary (like I was told by Tony Clement). Our shares in the Bank of Canada are held in trust for all Canadians by the Minister of Finance. What do you call the erosion of our dollar’s purchasing value by ninety-five percent since 1913?

Prudent monetary policy and fiscal responsibility?

Particularly telling is the erosion of your purchasing power in CANADA since 1974, when Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Gerald Bouey decided to roll the taxpayers over to the private international banks and discontinue the use of the Bank of Canada. Here’s the storyyou graduate from some sort of school, you get a job, (a large portion of your income goes to the government) and you get a mortgage from a bank who creates the money out of thin air, and you pay two to three times the value of your house in the next twentyfive years. If you are unfortunate enough to lose your job, you also lose your home. The bank repossesses your home and sells it and makes another mortgage to some poor sap and the cycle continues. And you pay your mortgage out of after-tax dollars. If banks can print money out of thin air, why can’t you? Why can’t all of us? Oh, I forgot, that’s why we vote in the first place, to get responsible people guiding our country in our best interests. Except no government has EVER guided the country in the best interests of the people. Have the banks been given special privileges?

Ya think? Where does the money come from to pay the interest? Is it a Ponzi scheme? Does a bear defecate in the woods? Quoting George Carlin: increasingly shittier jobs, reduced hours, the loss of overtime, jobs wiped out by globalization. You train your replacement who comes from Asia and will work for half the wage you are getting; who will work longer hours under poorer conditions with much poorer retirement benefits (if any at all). Watch COMER vs Bank of Canada on Youtube in the bibliography.

Ontario Finance Minister Vic Fedeli warned Ontarians that “we’ll have to make sacrifices because of the province’s $15 billion deficit”. (Where’s the money come from? Where did it go?) But as OPSEU President Warren (smokey) Thomas says, we could avoid those sacrifices and just stop using costly public-private partnerships also known as “P3’s”. “If Premier Ford wants to stop waste, he should end costly publicprivate partnerships” said Thomas. The Auditor-General has agreed they cost $8 billion more than they www.dialogue.ca

should have. (This issue is covered in Corporatizing Canada: Making Business out of Public Service, 2018

by Jaimie Brownlee, Chris Hurl)

IS THIS THE BEST WE CAN DO?

Austerity means to have a much reduced quality of life, a much reduced access to previously public resources; and to pay for it all to private international banks who create currency out of thin air and charge their customers interest, these customers being governments all over the world. Countries whose highest sovereign duty is to create the currency for the nation from their own central bank at little or no interest and spend this money into the economy for every type of infrastructure project. Except they don’t do it. They allow the private banks to do it. And sign the entire country into endless, oppressive debt. Less than one in a hundred people understand this. Why was this not taught in school? Our politicians repeatedly say that for the government to create its own money would be hugely inflationary.

What do you call our dollar having lost 90% of its purchasing power since 1920? This “inflationary” ruse has been perpetuated by the very people who own these banks. We never hear about it because they own the media also. Canada is the only country of the “G8” that has a central bank, but we stopped using it in 1974 when Pierre Elliot Trudeau allowed these private banks to create our currency.

Our current total debt is well over one trillion dollars currently (debt to whom?), we send 60 billion dollars out of the country every year to pay interest on this debt that is unnecessary and should have been avoided by allowing the use of the Bank of Canada. Let that sink in: you are subject to onerous taxation which goes out of the country, producing nothing of any value for the taxpayers. Do you remember when they started greasing us up for the GST? Very soon thereafter to be “harmonized” with the HST? And we all became further accountants and taxpayers for the government. At threat of huge fines if you didn’t go along with it. They put another whopper of a tax on us, by telling us we must do like the countries in Europe; they have a GST, what’s wrong with Canada having one? I was so happy when I realized what the GST etc represented.

We had a CRA accountant in our office for 3 days shortly after the GST; making sure we were accounting for every nickel. And that; when my industry is GST exempt! Can you believe it? North Dakota has its own bank; the state has no debt. (Please see Bill AbramThe Crime of the Canadian Banking System on www.dialogue.ca

youtube) (and Ellen Brown on North Dakota).

Canada could, and should, be in the same situation.

Why are we not?

Austerity has bludgeoned country after country.

Greece is a basket case, like the other PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain). Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, the entire African continent, all of South America, Australia, New Zealand; all have been subjected to Globalization.

Which is the quiet invasion and subjugation by the International Banks. Who utilize the war machines of various countries (US, Canada, Great Britain) to enforce their slave fiat currency on destitute millions.

Scandinavia is a socialist paradise. Except eventually the socialists run out of other people’s money. And then the privatization begins in earnest. Do you think it can’t happen here? Temporary foreign workers, union destruction, rampant inflation. Venezuela was once one of the richest nations; now the zoo animals have become last night’s dinner. Same for Argentina (just applied for a 50 billion “loan” from the World Bank – why can’t they create their own currency?) and Chile.

Railroads, bridges, roads, hospitals, schools, ports, public water systems (see Bolivia) everything has a price and is sold to the highest bidder (or to their cronies) and the tolls begin. Who owns the Bond-Rating organizations? The same people who have engineered the destruction of economy after economy, and how then downgrade the credit of the country so they have to pay higher fees in order to get loans from the private international banks. The daisy-chain of corruption goes on and on. And it’s never on the six-o’clock news. And the public remains in a media-supported stupor. If you want to see how the world has been prevented in the last 50 or so years, read Naomi Klein -The Shock Doctrine. How about them Blue-Jays?

In the afore-mentioned COMER Journal May-June 2018 Ed Finn reviews Joyce Nelson’s books. A quick summary: Norway’s central bank, which runs it’s 1 trillion sovereign wealth fund, has recommended they fully divest from oil and gas companies and sell off 35 billion in shares of that sector (where’s our 1 trillion sovereign wealth fund?). Trudeau is firmly behind maintaining the ISDS, showing he is defending these rights and privileges of Canadian multi-nationals that could benefit from the system. In the Panama papers in 2017, the NGO Canadians for Tax Fairness estimated between 10 and 15 billion in taxes were not collected annually from the massive amounts being stashed in VOL. 32, NO. 3, SPRING 2019

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tax havens. The Conference Board of Canada’s estimate was even higher: 47 billion. The Bank of Canada Act gives our publicly-owned central bank the power to make near-zero interest loans to our federal, provincial, and municipal governments for infrastructure and health care spending. In 1974, the Bank for International Settlements, the World Bank, and the IMF persuaded most countries, including Canada, to stop their central banks from making interest-free loans, and have their governments do most of the borrowing from the private banks instead. Since then, Canada’s federal debt has skyrocketed and we have paid about 1.5 TRILLION in interest to the private banks, most of which could have been saved if our Federal Government had continued to use the Bank of Canada (got any potholes on your street?). Stop for a minute and give this some thought… (from Ed Finn, COMER journal, May-June 2018) From William Lyon Mackenzie King: “Once a nation parts with the control of its currency and credit, it matters not who makes the nation’s laws. Usury, once in control, will wreck any nation. Until the control of the issuance of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of parliament and of democracy is idle and futile.”

And we; the thinking, conscious (and unconscious) taxpayers; are forced to suffer the incessant denigration provided by our politicians (like my current MP).

Don’t step out of line; be a good serf, don’t question the fundamental right of asking for value for your dollar. Subject yourself, without question, to the intrusion and extortion of the Canada Revenue Agency.

Who decided we would have a “work-week”? The people who benefit from it the most from behind the scenes; force (and pay off) the elected “officials” who enslave the population. Anybody in small business (which is the remaining backbone of our economy) must keep their tax records for seven years, just in case the CRA decides they want to give you an audit.

Small business is constantly being burdened with various government pogroms. You’re an unpaid accountant and a tax collector for the government. And if you don’t do it, you’ll suffer various onerous attacks by the government (CRA). Did anyone ever agree to this when they built the dream of having their own business? And for the employee, isn’t it nice to get Statutory holidays? A little relief (once a month) from the 38 dialogue

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yoke of the ploughshare? Don’t ever complain; because you won’t ever get any other lemming to stick their necks out to offer kinship. Just like Nazi Germany, they can take your neighbour as long as they don’t take you. Just doing what I’m told. Is this the best humanity can do? Keep your nose to the grindstone for 40 years and then ”retire” on a dwindling, under-funded pension while “they” up the price on everything to the point where your grandparents have to sell the family home in order to pay the taxes (and/or keep the heat on). Once you turn sixty-five, the government wants you dead. As soon as possible. They’ve fed you crap your whole life, they’ve poisoned you with drugs.

They’ve taken nearly every cent out of your pockets in one form or another. But shut your mouth or they might come for you. If you’re in business, expect increasing taxes and regulations to the point where you might not be able to stay afloat. You’ll be forced to close because you can’t find anyone to fill the jobs you are able to provide. But don’t mention this to the average working stiff who has received a paycheque. He does not understand the extent of the extortion we have all been subjected to. He pats himself on the back when he gets to sixty-five, decides to keep his mouth shut, and tries to figure out how he’s going to live on half the income he had when he was working. Is this the best we can do? Is anybody upset at this? Why do we not have a referendum on the use of the bank of Canada to provide near-interest-free loans to our various levels of government? I’m initiating a new political term: OBJECTIVE ANARCHY. Will you join the Objective Anarchy Party?

I’ll probably get a lot of grief for writing this, some of my best friends haven’t voluntarily spoken with me for several years now. They don’t want to hear; primarily, they don’t want to acknowledge being aware of this information which should spur them, requires them, to DO SOMETHING. Get off the couch: they’d actually have to do some reading; they’d actually have to grow a backbone and get in the faces of the politicians, and of each other. It’s much easier and more acceptable with their circle of friends to denigrate anyone who provides this information. They’ve worked hard to get where they are, let the rest of the people starve if that’s what they’ve got coming to them. Much more acceptable to shoot the messenger. DON’T SHOOT ME, I’M JUST THE PIANO PLAYER! […]

Jim Bjork, Huntsville ON, bjork@cogeco.ca

[To be concluded in the next issue + bibliography.] ♣ www.dialogue.ca

Word to the Wise: Beware the Agenda 21 “Green New Deal!”

From RK Moore, Wexford rkm@cyberjournal.org LINK: https://dissidentvoice.org/2019/04/word-to-the-wisebeware-the-green-new-deal/

by Geraldine Perry / April 4th, 2019

Seemingly overnight, the Green New Deal has arrived.

Given the sorry state of our environment, what possible objections could there be?

In this case, plenty – and they all trace back to the Green New Deal’s deeply complex and surreptitious ties to UN Agenda 21. Those who claim that Agenda 21 amounts to little more than a right-wing rant or is somehow anti-Semitic are at best seriously misinformed. Those who buy into the carefully crafted jargon of Sustainable Development, Smart Growth, Redevelopment and the Green New Deal are similarly misinformed and need to know that the environmental movement has in fact been highjacked by the Agenda 21 plan. […]

The Green New Deal is in fact a part of a global sustainable development program that was officially rolled out at the “Earth Summit” held in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil in 1992. Out of that summit came Agenda 21 Earth Summit: The United Nations Program of Action from Rio, a 354-page document that can be purchased at online book retailers or downloaded in pdf format from the UN website.

[LINK: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/outcomedocuments/agenda21 ]

Agenda 21 has been updated to include Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development and its offshoot the Global Green New Deal which is a program that was commissioned by the United Nations Environment Program or UNEP for short, mentioned above. A map and outline of “partners” reveals just how deeply embedded in global thinking this program has become.

Effectively, Agenda 21 provides the template while Agenda 2030 gives the goals for achieving “sustainable development”.

Inasmuch as Sustainable Goal 13 is about Climate Action, it is worth noting that in 2009 the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) set up an unelected international climate regime with authority to dictate land use, relocate “human settlements” and directly intervene in the financial, economic, health care, education, tax and environmental affairs of all nations signing the treaty. One must wonder why upwards of $100 billion www.dialogue.ca

has been spent on promotion of the current global warming model yet next to no discussion is devoted to natural forcing agents such as solar and cosmic radiation, volcanoes, clouds, water vapor, and grand solar minimums – even though these have been well documented in the scientific literature to have significant impact on climate. Nor have funds been committed to disseminating information about military weather warfare or other long standing geoengineering projects and their effect on climate. Yet at least five geoengineering Solar Radiation advocates co-authored the section covering contrails in the 2007 IPCC report.

As uncovered by prominent activist Rosa Koire, ‘Sustainable Development’ was originally created and defined by the United Nations in 1987. President George Herbert Walker Bush, along with leaders from 178 other nations, signed the “Action Plan” unveiled at Rio in 1992. This plan is anchored by the political philosophy of Communitarianism which effectively establishes a new legal system used by regional and local governments affiliated with the emerging global government, circumventing national law via a program of “balancing.” Implemented by a relatively small self-appointed group of decision-makers and influencers who achieve “consensus” among themselves rather than through the public voting process, this philosophy holds that the individual’s rights are a threat to the global community. In practice, the consistent rallying cry “for the greater good” is defined any way that suits those in power. […]

Here’s a quick look at a few of the 21 agenda actions called for [at the municipal level]. Under the topic of energy, action item number one calls for mayors to implement a policy to increase the use of “renewable” energy by 10% within seven years. Renewable energy includes solar and wind power.

Not stated in the UN documents is the fact that in order to meet the goal, a community would have to reserve thousands of acres of land to set up expensive solar panels or even more land for wind mills. Consider that it takes a current 50-megawatt gas-fired generating plant about 2-5 acres of land to produce its power. Yet to create that same amount of power through the use of solar panels would require at least 1,000 acres. Using wind mills to generate 50 megawatts would require over 4,000 acres of land, while chopping up birds and creating a deafening roar. …/ VOL. 32, NO. 3, SPRING 2019

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Geraldine Perry, Beware Agenda 21/Green New Deal, contd.

The cost of such “alternative” energy to the community would be vastly prohibitive. Yet, such unworkable ideas are the environmentally-correct orders of the day that the mayors are being urged to follow.”

Agenda 21/Sustainable Development is about Inventory and Control!

Rosa Koire, mentioned earlier, sums up the end game on her website Democrats Against Agenda 21: “The problem that almost no one sees is that UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development is the action

plan to inventory and control all land, all water, all minerals, all plants, all animals, all construction, all means of production, all information, all energy, and all human beings in the world.”

‘Agenda 21/ Sustainable Development’ is about Inventory and Control! Beware Agenda 21 and its Green New Deal!

About the Author: Geraldine Perry is the co-author of The Two Faces of Money and author of Climate Change, Land Use and Monetary Policy: The New Trifecta. Read other articles by Geraldine, or visit Geraldine's website. ♣

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ABOUT THE BOOK, Climate Change, Land Use and Monetary Policy: The New Trifecta (2013)

By Author Geraldine Perry [FROM THE BOOK PUBLISHER] Drawing on the work of

independent thinkers, economists, scientists and historical evidence going back thousands of years, this book challenges conventional thinking about global warming, clean energy, environmental pollution, greenhouse gases and zero carbon, overpopulation, economic and social injustice - and how best to heal our ailing world.

The book argues that the most important element in helping us understand just where it is that we have gone wrong, and how best to go about fixing it, is to first examine the oft-forgotten connection between land use and monetary policy. Examples of how the current economic system serves to undermine all efforts to right the planet are sprinkled throughout the book and contrast sharply with the types of environmental, monetary, legal and economic reforms that many of the world's leading independent thinkers agree are necessary if we are to avoid environmental and social catastrophe.

The first portion of the book focuses on the relationship between climate change and land use, particularly in the agriculture and energy arenas. Here the reader is introduced to a unique form of agriculture through

which it is possible to dramatically reduce CO2 and associated soil and water pollution while at the same time help to rebuild our dangerously depleted agricultural soils. Surprisingly, this form of agriculture can also dramatically reduce the amount of land devoted to food production and at the same time provide us with the astonishing ability to feed the world's billions 20 or 30 times over with high quality, nutrient dense foods. In this first portion of the book, the reader also learns about "land friendly" energy alternatives that bear little resemblance to today's land-hungry "clean" or "green" energy alternatives.

The last portion of the book explores the relationship between land use and monetary policy which the modern world inherited from ancient Mesopotamia. It is the extractive nature of this monetary system which encourages the high-risk gambling characteristic of trifecta bets that destroys the land and deprives the people of the fruits of their labor. Land use is – and long has been – the problem; "land friendly" monetary reform is the only real solution.

Paperback 2013, Wasteland Press, ISBN-10: 1600479278 ♣

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Site C will have more significant adverse environmental effects than any project ever examined in the history of Canada’s Environmental Assessment Act - Sarah Cox, May 6, 2019, in The Hill Times Trust of Canada's 2018 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize Breaching the Peace: The Cite C Dam and Valley’s for Political Writing, the best non-fiction political Stand against Big Hydro by Sarah Cox, has been book of the year. The winner is to be announced in Otshortlisted along with four other books for the Writers' tawa on May 15 at the Politics and The Pen event. …/ 40 dialogue

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www.dialogue.ca

Among other impacts, the Site C dam will destroy habitat for more than 100 species already vulnerable to extinction, including bird, plant, butterfly, bee and mammal species – this at a time when scientists warn we are facing a biodiversity crisis, writes

author Sarah Cox. LINK received from Watershed Watch: https://tinyurl.com/ht-sc-site-c (access by Hill Times subscription only) ♣

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“Have Computer Will Write” ~ Jeremy Arney

“Canada is Back?” Unist’ot’en, Cat Lake and Venezuela Jeremy Arney, Sydney BC granpaiswatching@gmail.com Date: Feb 3, 2019, To: Justin Trudeau justin.trudeau@parl.gc.ca, Ralph Goodale, ralph.goodale@parl.gc.ca, Jody Wilson-Raybould, jody.wilsonraybould@parl.gc.ca, et al.

I am very upset and frustrated at the actions taken by the RCMP on behalf of a corporation which has not and obviously does not feel the need to get agreement from all levels of aboriginal leadership before it destroys the livelihood and, eventually I am sure, the homes of those Canadians – the people of Unist’ot’en. What is happening in northern BC is indeed an insult to not only the people who live there, but also to all Canadians.

Even Lord Dufferin stated back in the 1800s that there was “an initial error” in the way BC dealt with the "Indian title" issue. In the talk he went on and said that in Canada, “Before we touch a single acre, we make a treaty with the chief representing the bands we are dealing with, and having agreed up and paid the stipulated price….we enter into possession, but not until then do we consider that we are entitled to deal with a single acre”.

We do understand that in swearing allegiance to the Crown (sic. corporate power and profit) and not to the Canadian people you have in fact abandoned all the Canadian people to please that Crown. Now you are going to ask us to vote you back in again so that you can swear allegiance to a foreign entity again and ignore us until 2023. No wonder you didn’t want anything but FPTP voting.

I cannot understand how thick skinned you must be to state over and over again that your priority is to establish a good relationship with our First Nations, Inuit and Metis, and yet here you are using a national renta-cop paramilitary force to stop them from accessing their homes and trap lines. At the same time, that force is protecting and even promoting the illegal www.dialogue.ca

actions of Coastal GasLink and their contractors.

Clearly, you have no shame, no humility, no understanding of anything but bowing down to the corporate profit which guides what you do.

What is truly sickening is that any alternative government will do exactly the same as both those other parties are as controlled by the Crown and corporate wellbeing as are you. Even a minority government will no longer be a viable alternative, as all members will swear allegiance not to the Canadian people who vote for you and pay for you but to the Crown.

How many times do you have to be reminded that each time you refer to Canada as a democracy in our House of Commons you are showing us your ignorance at what a democracy is or should be, and you are at the same time misleading the House which is supposed to be against the House rules. Canada has never been a democracy and never will be under the present governmental stewardship. We have a parliamentary system that is indifferent to the people which is the exact opposite of a democracy.

Combined that with your acceptance of an upstart as the new president of Venezuela you have demonstrated again to the Canadian people that you are out of touch with us, that you are out of touch with what Canada should and could be, or is this what you really meant by: “Canada is back”..

No State or group of States has the right to intervene or interfere in any form or for any reason whatsoever in the internal and external affairs of other States. ... The right and duties set out in this Declaration are interrelated and are in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations. Dec 9, 1981 What right, I ask you, do you have to complain about another country’s government and its perceived bad treatment of its people when here at home in Canada we have deliberately kept our First Nations, Inuit and VOL. 32, NO. 3, SPRING 2019

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Métis people in poverty and squalor on reservations not of their choosing, living without drinkable water and in moldy houses as now is shown to be the case in yet another reservation – Cat Lake. Instead, you selfrighteously take your orders from foreigners and their corporations before you deal with the problems we have right here in Canada.

Did you not learn anything by our actions in that disastrous and horrendous war on the people of Libya on behalf of the IMF? American military intervention means bombing what they consider to be an offending country into rubble and oblivion without regard for the civilians killed as happened in Libya. Do you want to take us there again?

All your grand words and talk of perceived atrocities in another country means nothing when you treat our original inhabitants of this fantastic land like vermin, to be pushed aside and extinguished all for the sake of a few worthless pieces of paper.

Yes, I am angry and absolutely disgusted.

I am too old to assist physically but I have and will again donate to and support the Unist’ot’en cause and their right to live unmolested on their un-ceded

traditional territories which, up until the European settlers came, with lust for gold and power in their hearts, have supported their way of life for millennia.

Jeremy Arney Sydney BC granpaiswatching@gmail.com ♣

“What is physically possible, desirable and morally right, we can make it financially possible through the Bank of Canada.” ♣

Feedback from Derek Skinner, Victoria Sent to Jeremy (Feb. 4 2019)

Good letter Jeremy. We have to make sure Trudeau and his Party are decimated at the next General Election. We need a slogan like “Fire Trudeau” but much better than that. A relatively small budget from an internet “Fund...” would buy a lot of buttons. Do you remember the “Stop Harper” buttons? I think they helped get rid of Harper.

The Green Party is the least objectionable alternative unless something better arises. No time for a new Party and Independents are too costly to fund in any numbers.

Any other ideas, Anyone?

Derek Skinner, djlives@shaw.ca

♣

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Thoughts on Canada’s 21 Century Political Options st

Maurice King, Nanaimo BC

It has been a few years since I wrote a comment for Dialogue. As its publisher, I felt that we should leave the space for writers with their interesting comments and stories. I appreciate this opportunity to write and publish my thoughts on Canadian politics today. I have reached the end of my 92nd trip around the sun.

My life has had its share of controversy and that is not something I fear.

Let me begin by saying that it seems to me that many Canadians are still entrenched in the political and economic systems of the 19th and 20th Centuries. I have spent a great deal of my life working in one or other of the thee old political parties, trying to find one that would give Canadians an honest and fair Commonwealth: in which they could live in peace, have their fundamental rights protected, and share fairly in the benefits of our national economy and protect our environment.

Like so many others, I have been disappointed with Capitalism and the greed and corruption it breeds – with its compulsion for ever-expanding profits through 42 dialogue

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its macro-economic schemes – at the cost of endangering our water, air and land to the extent of destroying the environment we require for life. The political twins that Capitalism has created are the Conservative and Liberal parties of Canada. They provide the laws that encourage corporate greed and corruption.

They also permit the rape of our natural resources and the destruction of our natural environment. The other economic system of the past two centuries is Socialism; like Capitalism, it is locked into a system that creates its own one percent, those that control the political power with their need for conformity of the individual to meet their party’s biases.

I am left with the Canadian Green Party, which I believe is committed to protecting the environment and providing all Canadians with a fair share of the new economic base that will be developed by using sustainable resources in harmony with nature and not destroying our environment. The Green Party – in contrast to the three older parties – also offers democratic control to all of its members with the participation of its member as individuals in its conventions www.dialogue.ca

and the development of its policies and the elections of those who will act as the public face of the Party.

I feel that the Green Party of Canada is a political party for the 21st century, one that has moved away from the failed “isms” of the past two centuries – and one that cries out to us, not to forget the past, but to remember its political failures and environmental disasters. It calls on all Canadians to cast aside the fog of lies and pretenses that daily surround us through the corporate control of the media.

Don’t forget Harper and the failures of the Conservative Party nor Trudeau and the failures of the Liberal Party. Although we have not experienced an NDP government at the federal level, that movement has proven provincially to also be aligning with the commitment to

macro-economic projects at the cost of the environment and it is also driven by its outdated doctrines.

I hope I may have a few more trips around the sun and will see Canadians accept a 21st century party with its new concepts for sustainable economic policies that provide jobs and people-oriented democracy that will bring about a new Canada with a healthy environment and a sharing of its economy fairly with all Canadians: a political party not controlled by large corporations that are destroying our environment with their greed and corruption, under the pretense that it is the only way to provide jobs.

Maurice King, maurice.king@shaw.ca p.s. Very happy to have supported Paul Manly (successful Green Party candidate) in the recent Nanaimo-Ladysmith federal by-election. A “Green” vote is not a wasted vote!”♣

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Remembering Another Heroic Whistleblower in Canada

CORRUPT TO THE CORE: Memoirs of a Health Canada Whistleblower 2009 BOOK BY DR. SHIV CHOPRA Dr. Shiv Chopra’s name has become synonymous with food safety. With full support of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada – a 50,000 member union of scientific and professional public service employees, Dr. Chopra and his colleagues refused to approve various harmful drugs such as Bovine Growth Hormone, Baytril, and Revalor-H, for use in meat and milk production. They opposed a series of prime ministers and health ministers who had little or no regard for public safety. They defied gag orders, spoke publicly to the media, and testified at many Senate and parliamentary committees. The courts supported Dr. Chopra and his fellow scientists.

Today, the dangers of these drugs are internationally recognized. Chopra’s fight against the totally avoidable sources of Mad Cow Disease, calling the bluff on the Anthrax scare, and warning about the myth of safe and effective vaccines are equally inspiring stories.

Here is the full account of how government corruption endangers the public food supply. This book contains a blueprint for the establishment of food safety and security: Dr. Chopra’s “Five Pillars of Food Safety,” which was presented in April 2008 to the Canadian Parliament by MP (NDP) Paul Dewar.

[Text from the back cover]

Corrupt to the Core, Memoirs of a Health Canada Whistleblower With Prefaces by Maude Barlow, Paul Dewar, Vandana Shiva, David Yazbeck Copyright 2009 by Shiv Chopra, ISBN: 978-0-9731945-7-9 Published and distributed by KOS Publishing Inc, Caledon ON (519-927-1049) ♣

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Ineffective and Dangerous Vaccines From www.Collective-Evolution.com Immunologist Tetyana Obukhanych wrote an open letter to legislators who may be thinking about removing vaccine exemptions, and argued that unvaccinated children pose no greater health risk than vaccinated children. www.dialogue.ca

To Reflect On: Can we use our discernment to distinguish between those who are seeking the truth and those who are trying to hide it when it comes to vaccine safety and effectiveness? See the report to legislators from an immunologist, at the following LINK: https://tinyurl.com/coll-ev-2019-03-06 VOL. 32, NO. 3, SPRING 2019

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…/

“…Tetyana Obukhanych, who earned her Ph.D. in Immunology at the Rockefeller University in New York and did post-graduate work at Harvard. In a presentation she delivered in British Columbia (full video here: https://tinyurl.com/yt-Tetyana-Obukhanych ),

she was discussing scientific evidence from a publication dealing with a measles outbreak in Quebec in 2011. The evidence showed that 48% of those who had contracted measles were fully vaccinated for measles [...] ♣

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“Your Health Matters”

Wernicke Encephalopathy (WE)

Dr. Derrick Lonsdale, Strongsville OH

I decided to discuss this for two reasons: first, the name Wernicke begins with a W and secondly, this diagnosis is easily missed.

So, who was Wernicke and what is an encephalopathy? Karl Wernicke (1848-1905) was a German physician, anatomist, psychiatrist and neuropathologist. His name is known for his influential research into the pathological effects of specific forms of brain disease (encephalopathy). The disease named after him is characterized by the presence of a triad of symptoms, namely disturbances of eye-movement (ophthalmoplegia), changes in mental state (confusion) and an unsteady stance and gait (ataxia). The importance of recognizing it is because this is a brain disease that is so readily treatable by the administration of vitamin B1 (thiamine).

With the overriding concern with Alzheimer’s disease, it would not be too surprising if an emergency room physician or a family doctor were to label a patient wrongly, concluding that it was untreatable or required some form of medication to treat the symptoms. The multiplicity of additional symptoms is sometimes seen mistakenly as psychosomatic, or just the inevitable effects of aging. They range from confusion, apathy, inability to concentrate and a decrease in awareness of the immediate situation that the patient is in. If left untreated and the deficiency persists, it can lead eventually to coma or death without a thought that the earlier symptoms were the beginning. In about 29% of patients the ocular disturbances are recognized because of paralysis of eye-movement or the flickering eye movement known as nystagmus. A small percentage of affected patients experience a decrease in reaction time of the pupils to light stimulus. If the physician decides to look in the eye with an ophthalmoscope, he might 44 dialogue

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see swelling of the optic disc and there may be some retinal hemorrhage, both being potentially misleading. Would the physician even consider WE as the cause? The symptoms involving stance and gait occur in only about 23% of patients. Important clues may be a low blood pressure, increased heart rate and a progressive loss of hearing, seldom regarded as the effects of deficient energy synthesis. I had to turn to the medical literature in order to emphasize and review the importance of thiamine deficiency in the modern world. I have mentioned in these pages repeatedly that this kind of deficiency is considered to be either rare or completely nonexistent in America. The diversity of clinical expression is due to the central place of thiamin in metabolism as perhaps the foremost item in the process of energy production.

WE has long been thought to be due only to the effects of alcoholism but as we shall see, thiamine deficiency in the brain is far more common than most people realize. Presence of thiamine in the body, particularly in brain, is often marginal and may be asymptomatic or causing common symptoms that are treated by medication because of failure to recognize the underlying cause. For example and unlikely as it may sound, a physician or a patient might conclude that a thiamine deficiency persistent cough or nasal congestion is “an allergy”, a concept to be addressed later in this article. A person in this totally unrecognized state can be vulnerable, sometimes succumbing to an expression of full blown thiamine deficiency if there is some form of incidental stress.

I must point out that symptoms arising from a head injury, after surgery or following an infection, are most likely to be attributed solely to the stressor.

For example, it has been reported in association with Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory disease of the bowel (1). Perhaps not too surprisingly, www.dialogue.ca

it has been reported to occur in a woman who followed a 40 day water-only fasting diet (2). In severe vomiting of pregnancy (hyperemesis gravidarum), WE is an important complication (3) and certainly insufficiently recognized. Although the global prevalence rates of hunger, poverty and nutrient deprivation have said to be decreased in the 21st century, malignancy, critical illness, surgical procedures, magnesium deficiency and genetic abnormalities in thiamine metabolism are predisposing factors in children and adolescents (4). Having witnessed the enormity of diet in American children, I suspect that in many cases this is a predisposing factor. WE in patients with cancer is understudied. In 90 articles on 129 patients, 38 exhibited the classical features of WE. In 22 patients the diagnosis was missed altogether (5), presumably recognized at autopsy. This is particularly true in cases of brain cancer where the symptoms may be attributed to the tumor rather than WE as a complication of treatment. Many chronically ill patients who are unable to take food are treated by intravenous injection known as parenteral feeding.

This contains calories and an adequate concentration of thiamine is an essential addition. WE is not an unusual complication because of an inadequate concentration of the vitamin in the infusions (6).

WE and Stress Several years ago I received an email from the mother of an 18-year-old girl who had received the Gardasil vaccine (the vaccine against HPV virus that causes cancer of the cervix) four years previously. She was more or less crippled with a disease of the autonomic nervous system known as “Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, [POTS] “. The mother had done her own research and had come to the conclusion that her daughter had the vitamin B1 deficiency disease known as beriberi. She wished to see if she could confirm this by testing. At that time, the laboratory used by our practice, now closed, was able to do that test and it was strongly positive for thiamine deficiency.

The obvious question is this: could the vaccination have any relationship with the disease known to be due to vitamin deficiency? The traditional answer is that it would have to be coincidental. This mother knew of several similar cases that were affected by the same condition and three girls and a boy, all of whom had succumbed to POTS immediately after receiving the HPV vaccine, were shown by the blood test to be vitamin B1 deficient. Another girl, also www.dialogue.ca

known to this mother, had POTS but had not received the vaccine. POTS and WE are variations of the clinical effects of thiamine deficiency.

A rational explanation By this time it is predictable that a reader of this article might have some difficulty in understanding or accepting the association of a vitamin deficiency with a vaccination or indeed any other form of stress. It is particularly confusing to read that a single vitamin deficiency is responsible for so many disease variants because it trashes our present concept of disease etiology. There was another factor that had puzzled all the patients with post-Gardasil POTS. Each of these adolescents had been an excellent student and athlete prior to receiving the vaccination. The onset of the symptoms was directly related to receiving the inoculation. The conclusion can only be understood by a switch of mental gymnastics. First of all, thiamine deficiency has long been known to cause dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system in its early stages. This nervous system is responsible for conveying brain instructions to body organs. Why did these adolescents not come down with WE? The fact is that both WE and POTS are really variations on a common theme and both conditions have been published as an effect of thiamine deficiency (7). Another point to bear in mind is that excellent students and athletes have excellent brains and excellent brains require energy to run them.

I therefore concluded that each of these adolescents was in a state of marginal asymptomatic thiamine deficiency prior to inoculation. The “stress” caused by vaccination had precipitated a full blown deficiency.

Note that one adolescent girl had thiamin deficiency POTS but had not received the vaccination, suggesting a nutritional or genetic basis as a sole cause.

Allergy Allergy is, of course, a complex issue but it might come as a bit of a surprise to know that persistent nasal congestion with or without a cough, amongst many other symptoms, can come as a result of brain sensitivity produced by chronic energy deficiency.

Food introduced into the stomach automatically sends a notification signal to the brain. If the sensory area in the brain is hypersensitive from mild oxygen deprivation, it might over-react and cause symptoms that are then called “food allergy”. For the same reason, thiamine deficiency may activate the fight-orflight reflex, initiating “Panic Disorder”. It is just VOL. 32, NO. 3, SPRING 2019

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one of the many aspects of the human body that should interest the alert physician when he observes a change in health. If and when the standard laboratory results do not provide clues, the symptoms are sometimes “written off” as psychosomatic. It should be abundantly clear that thiamine deficiency in the brain can produce many different symptoms. In most cases it is a gradual onset starting with a mild degree of deficiency that gradually becomes worse if the underlying cause is neglected. Not only that, it depends on the distribution of the deficiency as it impacts different parts of the brain. Because these symptoms have been collected into a number of different constellations without understanding the underlying cause, each constellation has been represented as a disease, usually denominated by the first person to recognize a given constellation. Hence, we are saddled with Wernicke disease, Parkinson’s disease, and Alzheimer’s disease as examples of specific diseases, each with a separate etiology. The idea of energy deficiency is spreading: Dr Antonio Constantini, an Italian physician, has successfully treated 250 patients with Parkinson’s disease since 2011, using megadoses of thiamine. Reports of his work can be read by clicking his name on line.

References 1. Welsh A, Rogers P Clift F. Nonalcoholic Wernicke’s encephalopathy. CJEM 2016; 18 open parenthesis 4): 309-12 2. Hutcheon DA. Malnutrition-induced Wernicke’encephalopathy following a water-only fasting diet. Nutr Clin Pract 2015; 30 (1): 92-9.

3. Ashraf W, PrijeshJ, Praveenkumar, R, et al.

Wernicke’s encephalopathy due to hyperemesis gravidarum: clinical and magnetic resonance imaging characteristics. J Postgrad Med 2016; 62 (4): 260-63.

4. Lallas M,DesaiJ. Wernicke encephalopathy in children and adolescents. World Pediatr 2014; 10 (4) 293-8.

5. Isenberg-Grzeda E,Rahane S, DeRosa AP, et al.

Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome in patients with cancer. A systematic review. Lancet Oncol 2016; 17 (4): e142-8.

6. Francini-Pesenti F, Brocadello F, Manara R, et al.

Wernicke’s syndrome during parenteral feeding: not an unusual complication. Nutrition 2009; 25 (2): 142-6.

7. Blitshtteyn S. Vitamin B1 deficiency in patients with postural tachycardia syndrome (PO TS).

Neurol Res 2017; 39 (8): 685-88.

– Derrick Lonsdale, M.D. “Everything is connected to everything else.”

Dr. Lonsdale retired in 2012 at the age of 88 years; he is a retired Fellow of the American College of Nutrition and a Certified Nutrition Specialist.

Website: www.prevmed.com/ Blog: http://o2thesparkoflife.blogspot.com/

Dr. Lonsdale is author of: A Nutritional Approach to a Revised Model for Medicine – Is Modern Medicine Helping You? and also Why I Left Orthodox Medicine.

His 2017 book: Thiamine Deficiency Disease, Dysautonomia, and High Calorie Malnutrition, explores thiamine and how its deficiency affects the functions of the brainstem and autonomic nervous system by way of metabolic changes at the level of the mitochondria… This book represents the life work of the senior author, Dr. Derrick Lonsdale, and a recent collaboration with his co-author Dr. Chandler Marrs. ISBN: 0128103876 / ♣

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A Warning from CAPE (Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment) Quebec Chapter: HYDRAULIC FRACTURING, FOSSIL FUELS AND HEALTH RISKS POSITION OF THE CDN. ASSOC. OF PHYSIconsciousness regarding the whole concept of CIANS FOR THE ENVIRONMENT (QC Chapter) ‘resources’. This is a dominator mentality spreading Received from Eva Lyman/Patricia White the lie that Earth is just a ‘thing’ which is here for us.

This might be a good one to include in the Dialogue.

Not our ‘Life Source’ but a ‘resource’. I don’t know The pipeline that is now the latest in contention would how to express the 180 degree difference in this way carry/does carry the product of fracking. I cannot see how of ‘thinking’ and ‘being’ in the world in a way which this method won’t contaminate large areas of ground will touch the Hearts of people who are so colonized water! Dr. Warren Bell was the founder of this group in and brainwashed that Truth and Beauty are irrelevant.

BC. He lives in Salmon Arm. - Eva, evalyman@gmail.com ONLINE: https://cape.ca/campaigns/healthy-sustain- Martin Poirier (facebook.com/martin.poirier3) able-energy/oil-gas-climate-health/oil-gas-extraction/ To: NON à une marée noire dans le St-Laurent From: patricia white <pwhite.red@gmail.com> [NO to an oil spill in the St. Lawrence] To: Warren Bell <cppbell@web.ca> Comment from Martin Poirier: Great to see this information being shared… At some point, there needs to be a complete shift in 46 dialogue

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STATEMENT FROM CAPE, on the following page…

[References included at the document LINK at the end.] …/ www.dialogue.ca

HYDRAULIC FRACTURING, FOSSIL FUELS & HEALTH RISKS Dr. Éric Notebaert, MD MSc, Quebec The risk of accidents is also significantly higher than in several other industrial activities.

THE POSITION OF CAPE-Quebec Chapter [DECEMBER 2018] The hydraulic fracturing industry It should also be noted that the impact of the arrival of for fossil fuel exploration and exploitation has been this industry in a community is significant both psychodeveloping for several decades around the world, and logically and socially. Several communities complain has experienced a major boom in America over the about the intense stress induced by the presence of conpast decade or so. Unfortunately, before this industry tinuous industrial activity, the divisions that appear was established, no study of the health status of popu- within the population, and the sense of insecurity that is lations living near drilling sites was carried out. As a associated with it. Environmental destruction also has a result, it is now very difficult to measure the precise major impact on several groups: agricultural land subimpact on the overall health of riverside populations. ject to water and air pollution, destruction of places sigHowever, over the past half-dozen years, several manificant to communities. And this can be particularly jor public health studies have been conducted. These harmful for some communities whose social fabric is show a clear deleterious impact on the health of popu- already weakened. This is the case for First Nations. lations at several levels, the extent of which remains to Finally, we must highlight the major negative impact be determined in ongoing studies. Of the thousand on the climate: Methane emissions are such that they fracture chemicals used, 90% are toxic to humans. totally cancel out the benefit so much touted by this There are several worrying associations: a significant industry. Several groups believe that the deleterious increase in the rate of low birth weight babies has effect on climate is worse with hydraulic fracturing, been reported in several studies, an increased risk of because of the methane and ethane that are released premature births, and a higher risk of heart and neuro- into the environment, continuously or during major logical malformations in babies whose pregnant moth- leaks. Do we need to remember that global warming is ers lived several kilometres from the drilling sites. An humanity's most important public health problem? association has also been demonstrated between this In conclusion, the health risks are of several kinds, bioindustry and an increased incidence of one type of leulogical as well as psychological & social, and they seem kemia in young people (acute lymphoblastic leuketo us to be major. Several American medical companies mia). Finally, several otorhinolaryngological, respirareiterated their great concern about this industry a few tory, cardiological, neurological and dermatological years ago. Among the most important are: the American problems have been reported in populations exposed Academy of Pediatrics, the American Lung Association to drilling. There is, moreover, a clear association and the New York State Medical Society. between the hospitalization rate for many of these As a result, the Canadian Association of Physicians health problems and well density. for the Environment has made the following recomThe environmental problems associated with the inmendations: dustry are of great concern: In addition to air and wa1. The Canadian Association of Physicians for the ter pollution, several cases of groundwater contaminaEnvironment is calling for a complete ban on all tion have been described, sometimes in major ways. new hydraulic fracturing projects.

Publications also report a significant increase in acci2. In addition, the Quebec Chapter of the Canadents associated with intensive trucking around wells. dian Association of Physicians for the EnvironIn addition, in regions where drilling activity is high, ment is calling for a halt to all fossil energy explothe risk of earthquakes is significantly increased. This ration and extraction projects in Quebec. has been confirmed by geologists' associations on Dr. Éric Notebaert, MD MSc both the American and Canadian sides. The health Vice President, Canadian Association of status of workers exposed to this industry is a major Physicians for the Environment (CAPE) concern. They are exposed to often high levels of Coordinator, Quebec Chapter, ACME benzene, hydrogen sulphide, silica, fine particles and [See References in the document online, LINK : several other pollutants. Unfortunately, this remains https://cape.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/HydraulicFracturing.pdf ♣ poorly documented and monitored by the industry. www.dialogue.ca

VOL. 32, NO. 3, SPRING 2019

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Art, Action – Transformation Series by Penn Kemp & Susan McCaslin which began with a dialogue in the last issue and continues in the Spring and Summer issues, with reflections by the individual authors…

Penn and Susan: Corresponding by email, we asked one another what our respective poetic practices for activism entailed. We began with a dialogue discussing lines from W.H. Auden, “Poetry Makes Nothing Happen.” They continue with their own reflections on activism through poetry; Susan McCaslin in this issue, Penn Kemp in the Summer issue...

[The segment in this issue features Susan McCaslin’s reflections on the union of art and activism in The Han Shan Poetry Initiative in Langley BC in 2012-13. The websites of the two writers are: https://susanmccaslin.weebly.com/ and https://pennkemp.wordpress.com/

The Han Shan Poetry Initiative

By Susan McCaslin, Fort Langley BC

I’d like to share the story of how I came to experience a powerful union of art and activism in my own local community outside Fort Langley, BC through a merging of art and grassroots ecological concern.

On Thanksgiving 2012 my husband and I visited a 25acre mature rainforest just a few kilometres from our home outside of Fort Langley, BC. We had heard the Township of Langley was planning to sell it off to raise capital funds to build a recreation centre in a neighbouring community. As we strolled under the canopy of Douglas fir, western red cedar, and hemlock, the light filtered down on us through the branches. We stepped over maidenhair, sword, and liquorice ferns, then paused at the base of a giant black cottonwood, a tree said to be hundreds of years old.

I knew that this was it. I’d fallen in love with a forest and become an activist. I would drop everything and do whatever it might take to help save this particular forest.

We soon discovered that this land had been public land for many decades. The westernmost parcel had been taken off the market because of a public outcry led by a local group of residents calling themselves WOLF (Watchers of Langley Forests). However, the easternmost forest where we were walking was slated to be sold immediately. These same conservationists appealed once again to the Township, and the mayor and councillors gave WOLF a two-month window in which to raise three million dollars to purchase the second parcel of land. Time would run out on December 17.

It takes a village to save a rainforest. But what might an artist do? I decided my contribution would be to organize “An Afternoon of Art and Activism” in the forest.

This event drew together local visual artists, poets, 48 dialogue

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musicians, ecologists, photographers, a dancer, university students, high school students, and the general public of all ages. We set up tents under the widely-spaced trees and provided refreshments and information about the history and ecological value of the land. Poets read their tree poems, student played violins and guitars and sang, the dancer danced, and people paused to absorb the beauty of the forest. A local environmentalist from the Western Canada Wilderness Committee gave an inspiring speech and later made a short documentary of the day. Local newspaper reporters arrived and the event was covered in the local press.

Next, I recalled how as an undergraduate I had taken a course in ancient Chinese literature and studied the zesty poems of an old hermit monk named Han Shan, who is said to have lived on Cold Mountain during the Tang Dynasty around the 9th century. Legend has it that he scribbled poems on rocks and suspended them from trees. It seemed appropriate to me that a Chinese poet might inspire a new poetry initiative on the west coast of Canada because Gary Snyder, an American poet popular in the late 1960s, saw Han Shan as a Pacific Rim figure. Poetry is timeless, and Han Shan was to become my forest mentor and muse.

I put out a call for tree poems on the websites of the various writers’ organizations to which I belong.

Soon my calls were appearing on people’s blogs and websites all over the world. Over 150 poems poured www.dialogue.ca

in within a week and a half, and within two weeks the number surpassed 200. My husband and I, with the help of WOLF, sealed the poems in plastic paper protectors which we later cleaned and kept for future use, threaded them with colourful ribbon, and spent an afternoon festooning them on trees without harming a single branch. Poems continued pouring in from across British Columbia and other provinces in Canada, as well as from New Mexico, California, Florida, the UK, Australia, and Turkey.

The forest wanted to be democratic, embracing all types of artistry, accomplishments, and styles. Fluttering against the emerald drapery, poems pirouetted like white angels. Rain and frost seemed to us the forest’s way of reclaiming our human offerings. Or were the poems protecting the trees? We advertised the event in the local papers as the forest’s anthology, the forest’s art installation, where poets set their small gestures of creative expression beside the older and more primal creativity of nature. It seemed to me paradoxical that an apparently “soft” form like poetry could hold such fiercely tender power.

People came from all over to walk through the woods, pausing to read poems against a background of the sounds of the Northwestern Crow, Varied Thrush, and Downy Woodpecker. Soon articles on this project appeared in newspapers, magazines, and media outlets across Canada.

As a result of new scientific reports and unrelenting media attention, the mayor and council met in camera after the public meeting and announced a few days later that the forest had been given another reprieve until January 21. In late December, The Langley Advance declared what was then called the McLellan Forest issue the “story of the year.” The Han Shan Poetry Initiative continued to garner press and visitors though the holiday season, but on January 22, 2013 we decided it was time for the poems to come down. So the forest again spoke for itself without human signage.

On January 28, after another closed meeting, the mayor and council sent out a press release stating they had determined to take the parcels in the western part of the forest off the market while authorizing the sale of three lots to the east. We were relieved that this union of art and activism had resulted in rescuing 60% of the forest. But our elation was mixed with disappointment, since the portion of land the www.dialogue.ca

politicians wished to sell contained some of the most sensitive habitat for species-at-risk. What they presented as a rational compromise seemed to us a dividing of the baby.

The story was not over. As a result of all the media attention, a local farmer’s widow, Mrs. Ann Blaauw, stepped forward to purchase the land in its entirety as a legacy in honour of her late husband Thomas Blaauw. She and Tom had been farmers who loved the forest, and in their younger years used to picnic there. With the support of her family, Mrs. Blaauw purchased the entirety of the forest for over $2.5 million, then donated it to a nearby university to be maintained as a research forest and ecological preserve.

For me, the saving of this microcosm of a forest demonstrates the arts have an untapped potential for bringing about positive change. Perhaps this is because art can lead us to pause before beauty and alters how we perceive. It has the capacity to lift us past our short-term, self-serving ends. It appeals to a common recognition of beauty in biodiversity, transcending ideologies and polemic. Both authentic art and nature draw us into a realm of exchange not based merely on capital or profit, but on gift-gifting and receiving in another kind of economy, that of membership in a common household, that of the earth itself.

When I leapt into the fray of months of lobbying, writing, speaking at Township meetings, and arranging media contacts, there were times when I had to face what seemed the certainty that we would lose this forest. Without attachment to outcomes, an activist acts in the paradox of unknowing. Poetry, this collective “mouth,” this “way of happening,” this “larger conversation,” has the hidden capacity to change consciousness, and a change in consciousness can change the world, just as old Han Shan himself could have told us.

Though I was called dramatically from my quiet life as a writer to become an activist for a time, and may be called again, my primary vocation since early childhood has been to be a writer–a poet. Poems for me are forms of both contemplation and action. I don’t know where they come from and where they go, but I am simultaneously exhilarated and at peace when engaged in their making. In the act of receiving a poem, I am both contemplative and active. …/ VOL. 32, NO. 3, SPRING 2019

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The Han Shan Poetry Initiative, contd.

Yet returning to the silences, the quiet ground in nature is essential for me, since otherwise I burn out and the wellsprings of my participation in the larger whole can shut down. What I would call my faith is experiential. Somehow, miraculously, the poems keep coming. The process is never at my command, but it is my responsibility and my joy to remain open to it.

I’d like to end with a tree poem that wrote me during the period when I was most busy working on the Han Shan Initiative. I felt as if the trees were giving me poems just as they had called out to me to put my energies into organizing a campaign.

Susan McCaslin

O Lovers’ Tree I fell in love with a forest

bride-ing the soar of day

and became an activist

palm to palm like holy palmers’ kiss*

but first there was you

blessed jointure each to each

one, no, two, two cedars twinned

pressed each into the other’s ahhhh

around the heartwood of a tree husk

So, silenced at your mossed knees

a realm—two torsos attuned

I surrender all

stretched limb to limb

to the forest which makes

two root systems’ wet entangling

and remakes your lust and breath

two of you ascending

your aching stately pavane

splitting, reuniting Susan McCaslin

like Plato’s round being

smccaslin@shaw.ca

against the gods of progress (*holy palmers’ kiss: Juliet to Romeo in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: "For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, / And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss." Palmers are pilgrims who go to a sacred site.)

against those who would chainsaw your wide-open hearts And, yes, you pant toward union under the sky canopy

*************

[Sections of this essay appeared in Susan McCaslin and J.S. Porter’s Superabundantly Alive: Thomas Merton’s Dance with the Feminine (Wood Lake,

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2018).]

Penn Kemp’s piece on the relationship of art and action in her own life will appear in summer issue. ♣

www.dialogue.ca

UP FROM THE ASHES

Ramblings

Randy Vancourt, Toronto ON

Something strange happened recently. On the same day, three different friends commented separately to me that they were surprised to see people with ashes on their forehead. This wasn’t just any day; it was Ash Wednesday, and these friends all seemed absolutely baffled by this sudden realization. They all made comments like, “Since when did people start putting ashes on their forehead for Ash Wednesday?”

I’m sure they weren’t impressed when I responded, “Since about the 10th Century,” but seriously, is this news to people? To be fair, one of my jobs is Music Director for a mid-sized Toronto church, so perhaps my awareness of these things is slightly higher but really, how could so many people have never noticed this before, and why did they all suddenly become aware of it this year?

I’ve always thought it rather nice to maintain these ancient customs, but I must admit I have noticed Ash Wednesday can bring out the strange in some people.

About ten years back I was writing music for a Canadian children’s television program. Now in my experience most kids’ performers really are very warm and friendly. I have had the great pleasure of working with Jim Henson and his Muppets, and Mr. Dressup could not have been a nicer guy. Of course I also once had my hand smacked by Sharon (of Sharon, Lois and Bram), but that was because I made a mistake while playing the piano for “Skinnamarink.”

The star of this show however, was a different story – he was difficult, loud and abrasive. Whenever the young children on the series finished shooting a scene, he would walk around with a container of hand sanitizer to cleanse anyone who had touched them.

It was Ash Wednesday and I arrived at the Toronto studio at 9 a.m. to find the place in an uproar; the star was nowhere to be found. Phone calls were www.dialogue.ca

made, shooting was delayed; everyone wondered what had become of him. An entire studio full of actors, crew and staff was left waiting for the star to finally appear.

Eventually he arrived, over three hours late. His explanation was simple: it was Ash Wednesday and he had gone to morning Mass. The ashes on his forehead clearly indicated that this was the case. Or maybe he had fallen asleep with his face in an ashtray – it was hard to tell with him. I suppose no one could fault him for attending church on this special day, but some advance notice of his plans would have been nice so that everyone else didn’t shown up for work hours earlier.

Into his dressing room went our star, where he informed the makeup artist that he would not, under any circumstances, allow the ashes to either be removed or covered by makeup. Now this was a problem. Shooting an entire episode of our show with the star’s forehead blackened by ash might cause our pre-school audience to wonder if something was wrong. Perhaps his house was on fire?

Children love their TV friends and don’t want to see them engulfed in flames, although by this point I’m not sure if everyone else on our show felt the same way. Still, no amount of insistence, cajoling or logical argument was going to change his mind.

I will be forever grateful that I happened to wander past his dressing room at the precise moment that the producer was again trying, in vain, to make the star understand the cost of continuing this delay.

To my surprise I suddenly heard, “I’m a **** Catholic and no ***** producer is going to make me remove these ***** ashes!”

It was the most profanity-laced defence of religion I had ever experienced… and some of my university professors were Jesuits.

Thankfully this year my Ash Wednesday had a slightly calmer tone. I had taken my 4-year-old son to church with me; he stood there fascinated as each person, one at a time, received the ashes.

When his turn finally came the minister leaned over and kindly asked, “Would you like some ashes on your forehead?”

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My son, who clearly thought we were at a face painting event, replied, “No, I’d rather have a cat face.”

Without missing a beat, the minister leaned down and decorated my son’s face with whiskers and a little black nose. Not exactly the customary practice, but a lovely way to be adaptable. After service I suggested that next year we should print up a little

booklet with various design choices for one’s ashes.

We could add butterflies, tigers, rainbows, Spiderman...

And maybe next year I’ll even invite those other friends along to see what they have been missing for the past eleven centuries.

Website: www.randyvancourt.com ♣

**************************************************************

Tales from Fruitvale…

Walking with Malachi Paul Bowles, Granddad

“Hey Malachi,’ I said, “Look outside, it’s blue sky and sun, let’s walk to the park.” “OK,” he replied. ‘Snow pants, hat and gloves,” said his mum, “It’s not that warm.” And so we set off down the road, granddad and grandson testing our balance on the patches of ice.

I had preconceptions of silence while walking; to further free Malachi from the fetters of technology. He has video games such as The Incredible Hulk, vanquishing foes popping up behind every bush while lightning strafes the screen and dire music plays amidst the groaning. A current favourite of his on the computer is Carmen Sandiego, a cartooned story that at least has intrigue, where a stealth posturing femme fatale outwits unwary guardians of worldly treasures.

The plot is seemingly balanced in parts with informative knowledge of art, but eight-year-old Malachi, reaching saturation point, fast forwards to the action happening on the roof of the train or the launching pad of the space rocket.

My reflections of Malachi’s virtual world were soon expelled by the cool air and the slick road.

After a short period of silence he moved into vocal gear and out of the blue said something about Heaven and asked, “What is it?”

Immediately I moved into a cloud of uncertainty and wondered how Mr. Rogers would deal with this. He was the consummate artist in childhood dialogue, listening, teasing out the freedom to talk about feelings and liberating the child from any adult intimidation.

I said, “It’s a special place, we don’t know much about it but everyone has their own ideas. I was 52 dialogue

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literally afraid to say anything else.

Malachi said, “Where is it?”

“Oh dear,” was my first thought, feeling time slipping through my grasp as we strolled through the housing estate and entered the ‘Last Mountain Park,’ a gem of a place at the end of Malachi’s block, with trees, paths and a trail down to the creek in the canyon below.

I said, “Well Malachi, I don’t know where Heaven is but the stories say that we go there when we are finished with our life on Earth. Like going home after school, or having a place to rest or play when our work is done.”

“Can we go down to the creek,” he asked. I looked at the trail of snow and ice and said, “No, too dangerous, we might slide off into the canyon, maybe die and go to Heaven; lets loop around and head back home.”

Malachi said, “How do we get to Heaven if we are dead?” I replied, well, maybe we wake up like in a dream and we are there in Heaven already.”

He turned around to face me and said, “But what would we look like?”

I said, “I really don’t know.”

To which he replied, “Maybe like a fairy?”

I said, “Could be.”

Paul Bowles, Fruitvale BC [See also P.59] scribepoet@hotmail.com ♣

Word Puns for Fun, from Herb Spencer 1. I'm reading a book about anti-gravity. I can't put it down.

2. So what if I don't know the meaning of the word 'apocalypse'? It's not the end of the world.

3. Police were called to the daycare center.

A 3-year-old was resisting a rest.

4. I used to have a fear of hurdles, but I got over it.

5. What is a thesaurus's favorite dessert? Synonym buns. ♣ www.dialogue.ca

My Father’s Journey Continues…

Dear Dialogue Magazine, The joy you gave me by publishing my first three poems was life changing. Now I am sending you poem, My Father, Number 4, but the title is My Father’s Journey Onward.

– Teresa Rowe, Owen Sound

My Father’s Journey Onward My Father is past the angry, angry stage.

What's next? Sleep, more sleep.

Half an hour is long enough to visit, at Dad's request.

When we arrive I say, "Dad, I will walk with you to the Dining Room for your supper."

“Sometimes No,” “sometimes Yes!” I get his shoes on; comb his hair - if it needs it.

I look for a warm sweater perhaps.

Dad with his walker, standing as tall as possible.

I walk on the left side, as I steady his arm.

Mom completes the family circle walking on her husband's right.

Teresa Rowe, January 28, 2019♣

ALSO FROM TERESA…

A Mother’s Day in Owen Sound Since this is Mother's Day today I wanted to do something with my Mom. On such a glorious day with sunny skies we drove down to Harrison Park to walk!

It brought back so many memories from my childhood of swimming and baseball in summer and the ever-popular ice skating and tobogganing in winter. The time always went way too fast.

Today we walked from the Harrison Park Inn up past the swimming pools and around the Mile Drive, seeing the empty campgrounds waiting patiently to be filled with trailers, tents, children at play and parents relaxing from stressful days at work and hectic schedules at home. The sounds of the water gurgling refreshed our spirits. I imagined the wonderful smells of the blazing campfires. It is amazing to me to be inside the city and yet feel the sight and sound of the woods. The sights of the massive trees covered in the brilliant living green moss and fresh white trilliums growing up the hillsides. More untold surprises… as we saw a small florescent-blue butterfly or moth on the walking path, gently flapping his wings. A Mama swan sitting on her nest, carefully moving the sticks one by one and the top of her eggs were barely visible. Papa swan as he patrolled continuously in front of her until Mama decided it was time for a break for a drink of water and a snack from the river bottom Papa swan was at once on www.dialogue.ca

guard to watch the family. Turtles are predators to signets. Mama, after fifteen minutes, returns to the nest to straighten her nest like mothers do. How breathtaking it was to see these interactions of the swan family so near.

We went to see the varieties of birds in the outdoor cages. The male Peacocks that I had seen a few times were out in all their majestic plumage, and it was fitting that Mom did see it for the first time on Mother's Day! I remember that this is why the colour ‘peacock blue’ is so named.

The other birds in their bright reds, golden yellows, and brilliant greens pleased our eyes with rich colours and textures. My favourite indeed, the black and white ones (strictly black/white colouring) with each part of their bodies another intricate pattern.

How truly special to spend the afternoon walking and talking with Mom and watching all the birds, it is a memory I will forever remember.

Teresa Rowe May 10, 2011♣ Wicked Wacky Wisdom from Susanne Lawson on Wickkaninnish Island, BC, councilfire@hotmail.com 5. Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.

6. Never miss a good chance to shut up.

7. The most wasted day is one in which we have not laughed. [contd. From p.32] ♣ VOL. 32, NO. 2, SPRING 2019

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“The Vagabond Writer” THE GOOD WEEDS Wayne Allen Russell Clearwater BC I hope readers enjoy these stories, they will bring laughter and a few tears to you. Taken from truth, but the “Family Weed” is fictitious.

The family: Archibald Tyrus Weed (Pop)……January 10, 1901 Mary Elizabeth/Loretta (Cook) Weed (Mom) Dec. 19, 1905 Married: August 17, 1923 Children: Juniper Shirley / June (Grouch), May 19, 1925 Patty, Patricia Ann (‘Sweet Pea’) Dec, 21st.,1927 George (‘Donkey’), August 17, 1930 Ben (‘Shooter’), April 2, 1932 Bob (‘Stretch’), October 10, 1934 Adam (‘Flyer’), July 30, 1936 Tom (‘Weasel’), June 4, 1939 Cousins: Marian (cousin), August 21, 1925 Sam (‘Punch’ - cousin), December 26, 1931 Bobby (cousin), May 3, 1935 Ray (my buddy) Joe (Ray’s brother)

THE HERO I was a small boy, very well muscled like the others. I was ready with a smile, my teeth were my pride. I liked to smile just to show them off. I was very conscientious but with a low attention span, I therefore was slow in school. I was well liked wherever I went.

One of the times when it was my turn to visit at Aunt Annie’s, my cousin Jennie had just received a brand-new tricycle for her birthday. Of course I tried to get a turn riding it. Jen wouldn’t let me ride it but thought it was just great when I put one foot on the back axle pad and pumped with the other foot. We could really get up a lot of speed and when I would put both feet up; we would coast along for a way.

We noticed some boys on a hill about a city block long pulling their wagons to the top and coming down to beat the devil.

The hill was too steep to ride up so I pushed Jen to the 54 dialogue

SPRING 2019, VOL. 32, NO. 3

top. With me standing on the back, leaning over Jen’s shoulders and steering the trike, we came down the steep paved road to beat the band. The other boys were mad at us because that new bike beat all the wagons, both with speed and distance. They told us that maybe we were faster but the trike couldn’t turn the corner like their wagons when we reached the bottom of the hill. I talked to Jen and as she had faith in me, we decided to tackle that turn and show these smart-Alec a thing or two.

I pushed Jen to the top again and they said to go after them as we were so much faster. We did just that and by the time they reached the turn at the bottom we were right behind. We found out right quick that a three-wheel trike couldn’t turn a corner at that speed.

We hit the curb so hard that I flew right over Jen’s head, did a couple of somersaults, tore holes in my pants and cut my hands and knees on the sidewalk.

Jen was crying since she also did a somersault over the trike’s handlebars, hurt her stomach and got some bruises. When we got our senses back, all those big boys were laughing at us. They knew what would happen. They had set us up for this one.

The worse part, however, was the trike. The front wheel was twisted beyond repair. Boy! Had I ruined her birthday? I jumped at those big city boys with fists flying, both feet ago’n. Even though I was outnumbered and smaller, I lived with a family of boys and real tough sisters and had to know how to defend myself. I eventually lost the fight by sheer number and size. But I bet those boys thought twice before they did anything like this to little guys again.

Even though I ruined her bike, Jen said I was her hero; I always was and forever would be.

By the way, I was five years old and Jen was three.

Wayne Russell, The Vagabond Writer slyolfart@gmail.com ♣

www.dialogue.ca

“Observations from Lithuania”

Ken Slade, Vilnius

Changing for Ageing: [… Ken’s Tips on Cleanliness & Hygiene] Part 2, continued: ‘Some of the Micro Considerations’

by KR Slade CONTINUED FROM THE LAST ISSUE

[Editor's note: Part 1 -- ''Changing for Ageing, ‘Into the Third-Age’" (about the author's feelings of reaching seventy years-of-age), was published in the Autumn 2018 issue. Part 2 -- ‘Some of the Micro Considerations’-- began in the Winter 2018-2019 issue, and is continued here.]

Recap: This section concerns some of the ‘micro’ (i.e., meaning small, relative to a larger grouping) considerations, using some examples (i.e., ‘some details’). By providing some details, there can be some illustration of the possibility to consider some small changes for better-living in advanced age. Of course, everyone is unique, so everyone needs to consider their own - personalized - changes...

▪ I should buy a stepladder (metal; only 1 meter / 40 inches high); I need to stop standing on a chair (especially a folding chair!).

▪ Stop squeezing emptied food-cans, so that they require less room in the trash. The little space-saved is not worth the risk of cutting yourself -- on the jaggedrim of the can, or the lid. Cost: ~1 euro per year -- for additional trash bags.

▪ Cans with a pull-top-tab are supposed to be easier to open; actually, the force required to open is greater than the force required with a good mechanical can-opener; with the tab method, the force required is difficult to control, resulting in loss of control with both hands.

The lids that detach from cans are extremely sharp. A good solution is buying and electric can-opener. Cost: ~20 euro.

▪ Walking steadily: no hands in pockets; natural swinging of arms provides better balance; an open umbrella causes imbalance; better to carry items in a backpack rather than by hand(s). If carrying items by hand, better to have one bag (of equal bulk / weight) in each hand -- to balance the weight.

▪ Use less-amount, and fewer, cleaning-chemicals -- if not for the environment, then for your own health (especially for those who have sinus / allergy problems, sensitive / dry skin). I avoid fragrances / perfumes, in any product; this means no air-fresheners (I substitute an open container of baking soda). I use only low-suds body-cleaning chemicals (i.e., usually not labelled as ‘soap’); the problem with any soap/detergent/cleaner is removing the chemical after using; see (LINK:) www.dialogue.ca

www.eucerin.com . I use less than the recommended amount of laundry-detergent -- less than 25% of the suggested amount -- this means not a cap-full, but even 1/8th (or less) of a cap-full. I try to clean household surfaces with baking soda, or sometimes use a small amount of white vinegar. Cost: a savings of perhaps ~100 euros per year. *** This separate section contains some details of micro changes regarding contagion --contamination or ‘contamination(s)’ -- concerning health, by way of avoiding the spread of disease: not only for the ‘Influenza Season’, but also as a routine way-of-life.

▪ Wash hands: multiple times per day, beginning after getting out of bed, before and after handling food (including eating), after household cleaning, after using the toilet, before and after changing nappies / diapers, upon returning home, etc. ‘Washing’ means: 1) scrubbing (not mere rinsing under running water); 2) using a brush (especially cuticle and under fingernails); and 3) using ‘soap’ (ideally anti-bacterial; without fragrance).

To scrub fingernails, a (dedicated exclusively) toothbrush works well.

▪ Wash feet -- more than once a day. Feet are the filthiest part of the body (as evidenced Biblically, describing an act of charity and penance being to wash the feet of other people, especially the poor/sick). No one needs a cheese-factory or a fungus-farm between their toes and/or on their soles. Use a facecloth (i.e., for abrasive action to loosen / remove dead-skin), dedicated exclusively for feet (i.e., to avoid spreading lifeforms). Always wear rubber sandals in the shower (at home, and in the locker-room), around hot-tubs and swimming pools. Do not allow anyone to walk barefooted in your house, or put bare-feet on shared objects such as seating, tables, etc. A foot fungus infection, which is highly contagious, will require 6 months of medications, and cost 100 euros.

▪ Never-ever share a towel. In the home washroom: provide disposable paper-towels for guests to wipe their hands -- your own personal-environment is primary over the secondary earth-environment of a piece of paper.

▪ A soap-dispenser may be a better option than a bar of VOL. 32, NO. 3, SPRING 2019

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soap; bacteria, viruses, mould / mildew / fungi, parasites, insects, chemicals, etc. can remain on soap, and move from person to person, as well as from one part of an individual to another part of the same individual.

▪ Moisture allows organisms (e.g., bacteria, mould / mildew / fungus; insects; rodents) to thrive.

▪ The filthiest place in a house is in and around the kitchen sink. The filthiest place in a bathroom is the shower-floor / bathtub, and the door-handle in/out of the room. The filthiest place in a bedroom is the bed.

▪ The term "germ" is used to mean microbes, including: bacteria, viruses, fungi, mould, and parasites.

Germs are most commonly spread by the respiratory droplets emitted from sneezing and coughing. When germs land on your hands, the germs are transmitted to objects such as doorknobs, elevator buttons, handrails, and any other surfaces that people around you also touch. If someone sneezes into their hands, that creates an opportunity for those germs to be passed on to other people, or contaminate other objects that people touch. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/27/health/how-tosneeze.html?emc=edit_nn_20180402&nl=morning-briefing&nlid=4918616120180402&te=1

The term “cough etiquette”, which originated in only 2000, means: to cough or sneeze into the bend of your arm, or use a tissue. Moreover, of course, frequently wash your hands -- which have touched what other people have touched. Hand-washing is one of the most important things people can do to keep healthy.

▪ Be aware: disease-causing micro-organisms are found in: decayed-meat, faeces and urine, vomit, blood, saliva, and sexual secretions.

▪ In our sleep, we perspire, which creates moisture.

This moisture seeps into our mattresses, and over time, can nurture the growth of bacteria, and can provide an ideal environment for skin-irritants -- such as dust mites (which are not visible to the naked eye).

▪ High humidity (interior) encourages dust mites (and other insect infestations), which cause health problems (notably: skin toxicity of spider webs; and breathing problems, i.e. asthma, and allergies to mould / mildew) … the lack of use of vacuum cleaners exacerbates the situation … The best solutions are: ventilation, and removal of mould/mildew accumulation (which first requires searching for growths).

▪ The locations of mould / mildew / fungus are: on (and behind, and under) hard surfaces; and on fabrics, especially: wallpaper, rugs / carpets, upholstery, 56 dialogue

SPRING 2019, VOL. 32, NO. 3

pillows, curtains, etc.

▪ One of the most-common causes of food poisoning is cross-contamination, which occurs when bacteria or other contaminants are spread between food, preparation-surfaces, and equipment / implements. Assume that all food -- whether home-grown, self-harvested, or commercially purchased -- has surface contamination; moreover, for chopped / minced meat (i.e., hamburg/er) the surfaces are huge. Food may contain interior contaminants, which can be killed only by high-heat; say goodbye to: steak tartare, raw fish (e.g., sushi, caviar), raw vegetables / salads, improperly smoked meat (e.g., especially home-made). Cut onions, if not refrigerated: begin to rot within a couple of hours; if refrigerated: begin to rot after several hours; wrapping, or storing in a sealed container, does not stop their decomposition. I learned that raw potatoes and onions do not make good storage neighbours; in proximity, both will rot; I also learned to store raw potatoes and onions in closed paper bags, to reduce rotting.

▪ Shaking-hands spreads whatever is on the hands.

Likewise, door-handles, stair-rails, public-transportation seats and grab-bars: all spread whatever is contacted. Kissing spreads bodily fluids. In January 2019, the US Center for Disease Control warned that people should not kiss their pet hedgehog (!), due to spreading of contagions. The example of hedgehogs should certainly be true also for any animal. Sleeping with an animal, or even allowing an animal on a bed / chair / sofa, will spread contagion.

▪ Food from street-vendors, especially non-prepackaged food items, can spread contaminants from whatever money from other customers has contacted.

Food-vendors who have no access to hot water, and no facilities to wash their hands, have unclean hands, utensils, and premises. Most street-vendors are not subject to any health standards and/or inspections.[…]

TO BE CONTINUED IN THE NEXT ISSUE

*** All Rights Reserved: 2018 kenmunications@gmail.com [Editor’s note: Our Summer 2019 issue will contain the final section (#4) of this series, “Changing for Ageing (Part 3: ‘Some of the Macro Considerations’)”] All Rights Reserved: 2018 kenmunications@gmail.com Ken Russell Slade, B.S., M.Ed., M.R.E., J.D. Kęstutis Sladkevičius / english.lithuania@gmail.com mob. tel. (+370-6) 035-9513 Writer & English Language Consultant, Text Editor, & Instructor / Rašytojas, privatus anglų kalbos konsultantas, redaktorius ir mokytojas / Accredited media reporter, by Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs / Reporteris, akreditavamo Kortelė Nr. 17338 (Lietuvos Respublika, URM) ♣ www.dialogue.ca

Who Are You? Bonna Rouse, Owen Sound ON

When one of our girls was very small, a distant relative visited and rather facetiously asked: “And who are you?” Our daughter promptly and emphatically replied: “I’m ME!” That’s quite true. We are ourselves, but how did we get that way? Think back – I’m sure we all have memories of relatives – parents, grandparents, greatgrandparents and perhaps even back further in our family history.

Whether we like to think about it or not, much of who we are can be traced back to them and perhaps beyond. Sometimes it takes generations for a certain trait, characteristic or resemblance to appear, but the genes are there, and they are not going to go away!

I had an example of this when I was cleaning out my mother’s house. Four generations of lares and penates had to be sorted through. I found a large studio portrait of a young man I knew to be a grandfather.

When I showed it to my brother, he looked quite surprised and said “I look at that face across the table every day!” It took three generations for a family resemblance to appear in his son!

Perhaps we attribute our talents as being strictly our very own, but somewhere back there somebody had that particular ability. Case in point – my father had a beautiful singing voice, my mother played the piano

by ear, BUT somebody’s genes came down to me along with a ‘tin ear.’

Investigation of family history can be interesting, rewarding and scary! Be prepared for what you find, it can be surprising – we didn’t know we had a Scottish clergyman way back there who preached in Gaelic in a church in Priceville.

Stories get handed down, very true, and with them we get a sense of continuity. Not all of them may be complimentary, but they make good telling and should not be forgotten. For instance – one of our great-uncles was well-known for his furious temper – thank goodness I didn’t acquire that gene, nor did I end up with the fiery Scottish red hair. I like red hair but not of that carroty shade!

Our talents may be our own, but the ability to develop them may have begun a long, long time ago.

Don’t neglect your history – if you do it may well be lost to the generations to come and they have the right to know who and what they are.

Bonna Rouse, Grey-Bruce Writer’s Club, Owen Sound, Ont. ♣ EDITOR’S FOOTNOTE: “lares and penates” – personal and household possessions. Word origin: Lares and Penates were Roman gods once worshipped as guardians of the household.

**************************************************************

Different Ways to re-fill our Energy-Bucket' to regain inner Balance From: Anna Christine Doehring, Nanaimo BC The need to find inner balance, joy, and inner peace is large. As long as we experience anxiety, anger, fear, sleep problems, no energy, addictions, brain fog, PTSD, panic attacks, poor memory, suffer from trauma and have stressful relationships at home and at work. We need help! The decline of our emotional, mental & physical balance is happening slowly. This is the reason many do not realise the danger and relate it to all kinds of things – even to getting older. Wireless frequencies stress our body constantly and deplete our energy more and more.

Our 'energy-bucket' (body) is not as full as it once was. It needs to be re-filled with energy. We all know that Nature, Yoga, QiGong. Tai Chi, Earthing, and meditation are helpful but there is more to know.

Therefore I will offer at my office a workshop with the title: Different Ways to re-fill our 'Energy-Bucket' and regain inner Balance. I know you will be surprised. www.dialogue.ca

Tuesday, May 28th, from 7-9 pm, at my office (below).

Please call before because the space is limited.

For those who are more spiritual and scientifically oriented, I will give an information speech about 'The Book of Knowledge - The Keys of Enoch' from Dr. J. J. Hurtak: at Unity Nanaimo, Thursday, June 6th., from 7-9 pm, 2325 East Wellington, Nanaimo. Title: Preparing Mankind for the Quantum Changes Affecting every level of Intelligence on this Planet. To a certain degree this talk relates to the necessity of inner balance and wholeness.

Details about both events are on my website: https://energy-all-around.com/workshops-radio-healthfairs Anna Christine Doehring, RHFP, RCP Energy All Around Therapies Tel. (land-line): 250-756-2235 Address: 6280 Olympia Way, Nanaimo, BC, https://ReconnectionToTheCosmos.com / https://energy-all-around.com Email: energyallaround@gmail.com ♣ VOL. 32, NO. 3, SPRING 2019

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Contributors in Andersen, Erik, BC…........31,59 Annett, Kevin, BC (about)…...24 Arney, Jeremy, BC …………..41 Bjork, Jim, ON………………..36 Bond, David, BC………….….05 Bowles, Paul, BC………...52,59 C.A.P.E.-QC…………...…46-47 Chopra, Shiv (about)…………43 Clark, Bruce (book)……….13-15 C.O.M.E.R., ON (about)…..17,37 Cox, Sarah, BC (link)................40 Curtin, Edward, US……….......28 Democracy Watch, ON………29 Dewar, Paul (Farewell)…….…04 De Zayas, Alfred (Extract/link) 19 Doehring, A.C., BC…………..57 Ewart, Peter, BC……………..06

dialogue, Vol. 32 No. 3

Foster, David Muir, ON 34,35,59 Geopolitics & Empire (from)...18 Global Research, QC (link)….31 GreenMedInfo (extract/link)….59 Hall, Anthony James, AB.……20 Hansen, Bob, BC…………10,15 Henein, Marie (QUOTE)……..59 Julian, S.B., BC…………….11 Kazdan, Larry, BC…………...30 King, Maurice, BC……………42 Kinzer, Stephen (video)…......30 Lawson, Susanne, BC 1,32,53, Lonsdale, Derrick, M.D.,US…44 Lyman, Eva (from)…………...46 Masuda, Gerry, BC………….10 Mathews, Robin, BC.……..9, 13 McCaslin, Susan, BC…...48-50

McDowall, S., BC (from)……07 Mercola, Dr. J, US (Link)…...18 Moore, R.K. Wexford (from)...39 Neilly, Michael, ON…………33 Nickerson, Mike, ON………..08 Notebaert, Dr. Eric, QC……..47 Obukhanych, Tetyana (about)43 Perry, Geraldine (author) 39-40 Pilger, John (LINK)……….…07 Poirier, Martin, QC………….46 Ross, June, BC (from)…....4,10 Rouse, Bonna, ON……..….57 Rowe, Teresa, ON……..….53 Russell, Wayne, BC…...…...54 Shadbolt, John, ON….……..18 Skinner, Derek, BC...………42 Slade, Ken, Lithuania…..55-56

Wishing you a Happy, Healthy Spring!

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P.59 PAUL BOWLES RE TONY PALMER ART

By Paul Bowles ‘A breath of beyond’ is how I would characterise this highly gifted artist because of his unique depictions of life’s bountiful and mystical creation.

From Persephone in her Earth garden, rising from the underworld to welcome spring, Tony Palmers love of nature is quite evident. A series of nature subjects drawn in a meadow presents the female form as embodying the beauty and fertility of the Earth.

The range of Palmer’s artistic expression was continually inspired from his travels around the world. He was born in England, from where he obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree with honours in fine art painting at Sunderland University and Guildford School of Art. His experience covers: drawing, portraits, painting, sculpture, fine print making, photography, art history and philosophy. Tony exhibited his works, taught his craft, lived and worked in England, Spain, Quebec Canada, and France.

Our paths crossed about forty years ago in England through a musical acquaintance. One of Tony’s paintings was an imaginative and elaborate poster dedicated to a folk rock band in which I was playing at the time. When I left for Canada we corresponded for many years, Tony shared his art and I shared my calligraphy.

After his journeying to India, I recall his ‘Indian Dawn,’ a verdant landscape within which Krishna playing his flute, encounters unsuspecting persons along his peace inducing way. Particularly memorable for me is ‘The Endless Flow,’ a diversity of images representing the creative explosion of life projected from the Eye of God, like a vision of manifestation.

Another representation of ‘origin’ concept is, of the human foetus breaking from its egg into the cosmos of forms released into being. Entitled ‘The Primeval Egg,’ this represents The Golden Egg of Brahma in which Vishnu sleeps between the re-creations of the Universe. His dreams float out to realms of reality where they evolve into matter, or in other more modern terms, ‘The Big Bang.’

Tony Palmer works with pen and ink, oil and acrylic paint. He likes to express “the mysterious qualities of the natural world, that feeling of being watched in a forest, with magical changes

of light and colour in a landscape.” His work covers the Suffering of the Oceans, Bankers Apocalypse, The Stone Folk, (from natural found forms,) Gaia, the source of plenty, Stonehenge, The Path to Folkestone Warren, The Grotto at Goldney College, Across the Valley from Dover Castle and many more.

The extent of art works can best be seen on his web site www.tonyplamerart for portraits, fantasy landscapes, illustration and murals.

Currently Tony Palmer lives in France where appreciation of art is embedded in the French psyche.

Tylenol's Empathy-Killing Properties Confirmed in 2nd Study Posted on: April 21st 2019: Two highly concerning clinical studies in four years reveal that Tylenol not only kills pain but human empathy as well, adding soul-deadening properties to its well-known list of serious side effects.

FROM THE REPORT SUMMARY: “Overall, the present research

shows that acetaminophen reduces empathy for the pleasurable experiences of other people. These findings not only constitute an important step forward in our understanding of the affective mechanisms underlying the experience of positive empathy but also raise concern about the societal impact of excessive acetaminophen consumption."

Written By: Sayer Ji, Founder, GreenMedInfo [EXTRACT & LINK] Could Tylenol be contributing to anti-social behavior in exposed populations? I believe research like this indicates that this is absolutely a factor in society at large. Like psychiatric medications, with their well-known association with violence against self and other, drugs designed to blunt pain, on a merely symptomatic physical or psychological level instead of addressing the root causes of the suffering, can lead to behaviors that demonstrate a lack of compassion and consideration for others.

When will we learn? Synthetic, patented chemicals have profound unintended, adverse health effects which take decades to be recognize, long after exposed populations have suffered profoundly.[…]

Over-the-counter painkillers have become classical examples of this, with so-called "low-dose" aspirin no longer considered safe enough to use for the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease and stroke, ibuprofen causing tens of thousands of deaths each year due to its recently discovered cardiotoxicity, and Tylenol’s adverse effects on the psychospiritual constitution of humanity only just beginning to surface on top of its already well-established extreme toxicity to the liver.

LINK: https://tinyurl.com/gmi-c2fe73

This article is copyrighted by GreenMedInfo LLC, 2019

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