Nora Loreto is a Canadian freelance writer and author of “From Demonized to Organized: Building the New Union Movement.”

On the night of Feb. 4, 2016, Peter Khill woke up to sounds coming from his driveway. He went to the window and saw someone in his pickup truck, a 2001 GMC.

He walked outside, toward the truck, and fatally shot the man inside from behind and at close range. Khill said he thought Jon Styres had a gun. He didn’t. On June 27, a jury acquitted Khill of second-degree murder, deciding he had acted in self-defense.

The story sounds like it could come from an American town where so-called “stand your ground” laws give landowners the right to protect private property, even if someone dies as a result of an altercation.

But it wasn’t in the United States. It was in a suburban driveway in Hamilton, Ontario. Hamilton, a city with more than 550,000 people, is about 30 miles southwest of Toronto.

Wait, why am I getting news about Canada? I’m from America. ������

Pro-tip: The USA is not the only country in the world.

Canadians do have issues of our own, and we are allowed to talk about them.

And guess what Canada has done in the past month? Put retaliatory tariffs on a wide variety of goods because of the actions of your president. You should care. Almost all of the Northern States in the USA have strong economic ties to Canada. People are going to lose their jobs in Canada and the USA because of this ridiculous trade war.

But yeah running this blog can be really frustrating.

I have posted stories that are identical to issues going on in the USA (which will get tens of thousands of notes and shares), but rarely do posts on this blog get more than a few hundred notes.

For a long time my dashboard was filled with nothing but posts on the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Native Americans who were fighting it. I post the exact same situation going on in Canada (Kinder Morgan’s Oil Pipeline which is going through many unceded First Nations territories and their water sources); crickets.

[ image description is two photos side by side. the left one is a snow fence to and the one on the right is a woman being arrested by a cop in a yellow vest at a protest. the text on the left photo says, “920$ fine, 11 months later. 

Doug Ford continues his disdain for Indigenous Peoples in Ontario.

On Friday his government cancelled Truth and Reconciliation (related to Canada’s history of Residential Schools) writing sessions which relate to Ontario’s Education System.

The message above reads:

Dear TRC Summer Writing Team,

The Ministry of Education is cancelling the summer 2018 curriculum writing sessions, including the TRC summer writing sessions on July 9-12 and July 17-20.

If you have booked travel to attend this writing session, please cancel your travel and hotel arrangements immediately (including flights, rail, vehicle rentals, etc). Reimbursements will be provided for any expenses that are non-refundable. Please submit them using the attached form and provide original receipts.

Please email me to confirm that you have read this email.

Text from tweets above:

Jesse Wente: 

If this upsets you, contact the minister of education for Ontario, Lisa Thompson. Here’s all of her contact information: 

http://lisathompsonmpp.ca/contact/

–

Julie Boulton‏:

@BobRae48 @JAWalker @FacingCanada @CBCIndigenous @CBCNews - this needs to be shared widely and publicly. Cancelling the #TRC on a Friday afternoon was done purposefully so that it would be ignored and avoid public scrutiny. Please help to challenge this.

–

Julie Boulton:

Ontario Teacher Friends -get loud! Get the word out. Use #TeachersforTRC - let @fordnation @MacLeodLisa know this is unacceptable and teachers will fight to support the important work that #Indigenous educators, Elders and knowledge keepers are sharing with us. Get loud!

–

Julie S. Lalonde‏:

They are literally going to LOSE MONEY on cancelling people’s travel and accommodations and argue that they are the “tightening the public purse” party. 

When you’re so racist, you’d rather lose money than listen to experts for a few days. 

 Fucking unbelievable.

–

Aylan Couchie:

I understand that you all have your personal issues with Canadian and Mexican leadership and I respect that, but Trump is tearing apart families, sending refugees back to their deaths, undermining civil rights, encouraging Nazis, appeasing our enemies, destroying our trade relationships and antagonizing our allies. Also, he’s a criminal who got Putin to steal him the election. It’s like comparing apples and arsenic.

Do you know what I don’t need, and Canadians at large do not need?

Americans telling us how satisfied we are allowed to be about our political leadership.

We all understand that Donald Trump is terrible.

We cannot allow Donald Trump to be ‘the bar’ to pass to equal good leadership. Because under that definition many awful people end up looking acceptable.

Just because Donald Trump is awful does not make Justin Trudeau good. Justin Trudeau is a status quo centrist politician who has broken a LOT of his progressive promises. He continues to not care about the well being of Indigenous people in Canada, and in fact is directly imposing colonial projects like Kinder Morgan’s Oil Pipeline on unceded Indigenous Nations a la Standing Rock (and using public funds to buy the pipeline). His policies are failing to meet our pathetically low climate change targets. He is maintaining Conservative cuts to healthcare. He is maintaining cruel mandatory minimum crime sentences imposed by our last Conservative government. He refuses to do anything to help refugees who are at risk of family separation or deportation in Trump’s America. He sold billions of dollars worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia as one of his first actions in being elected. He is waffling on important issues like Pharmacare and pardons for marijuana possession. His foreign policy on issues like Israel and Palestine is no different than that of his predecessor, Conservative PM, Stephen Harper.

Canada has serious problems, and by and large Trudeau is not stepping up and solving them, and I believe there is a better alternative. In many cases Trudeau is making these issues worse, or maintaining the unacceptable status quo.

It is really hard for Canadians to hold our government to account when Americans put it up on a pedestal and make it out like Trudeau is some sort of infallible being.

On a recent afternoon in Attawapiskat, on a street near the sewage lift station that’s said to be at its breaking point, a small boy spoke about a skeleton-like wraith that scoops up children caught walking alone after dark.

“There’s a thing that kills you,” said the boy. “It flies and it’s big.”

Then he was off, a shaggy mutt nipping at his heels.

That is one story. But there is another kind of wraith in Attawapiskat, born not of shadow but boredom, that seems to scoop up the young and plunge them into darkness.

“Every time I am on Facebook, I always see these depressed statuses,” said Tyler Hookimaw, 18. “There is nothing really in this town, nothing fun for the kids.”

replied to your photo

“Another protest against Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain Pipeline…”

Question for you: Preface: Pipelines are the safest way to transport oil compared to the only two other options comparable by volume: ship and rail. Feel free to dispute preface instead of answering question. Question: Is there any proposed pipeline project you support? Why / Why not?

Ok rant time because I’m tired of people like @sinesofinsanity​ using conjecture rather than fact on this topic.

Pipelines are the safest way to transport oil compared to the only two other options comparable by volume: ship and rail

Shipping oil by pipeline in general is safe for transportation but not when it comes to oil from the oil sands, as that oil is primarily shipped in a thick viscous fluid matrix called Bitumen:

Georgia Straight: Is it safer to ship bitumen by train?

Elizabeth May: The safest way to ship bitumen is by rail. Now, there are other things that you get doing it that way. There’s probably more greenhouse gases in shipping it by rail. I think certainly there are. On the safety issue, on which they implicitly connect in our brains the notion of Lac Magentic and a fireball killing people in a small community, that accident, that tragedy, did not involve bitumen. We were talking not just crude, but Bakken shale. Bakken shale is bad stuff and enormously inflammable.

Bitumen, on the other hand, solid bitumen, you can try with a blowtorch to try to get it catch fire and you’ll have no luck. And if you had [transport] bitumen [by rail, here’s] how they do it: you have to heat up the bitumen because it’s a solid. You can’t pour it into the train. It’s a solid thing. You heat it up enough to put it in a railcar. And then it cools down in that railcar. It’s not going anywhere until it gets to its final destination when you have to heat it up again to get it out of the railcar.

So you don’t mix it with diluent. You just heat it up. Put it in the railcar. And it goes solid again.

If that railcar were to catapult off a high place and crash into a brook below, it would make a mess of splintered and fractured railcar parts as it broke apart but the bitumen wouldn’t be going anywhere. It would be sitting there as a lump. It wouldn’t catch fire and it wouldn’t blow up.

I don’t think this is a smart thing to do. Why do we want to ship out raw product as fast as possible without getting any value added? But if you were going to do that for some reason, the safest way to do it is by rail.

Also when it comes to Kinder Morgan, the oil would be shipped by pipeline AND then by ship, so you’ve introduced 2 dangerous forms of transport to one of the most pristine environments in Canada. Not a smart move.

Question: Is there any proposed pipeline project you support? Why / Why not?

None of the current pipeline proposals I support for several important reasons:

1. Indigenous Rights. Canada claims to support the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous peoples which states:

This is from article 32, 2. of the UNDRIP:

States shall consult and cooperate in good faith with the indig-enous peoples concerned through their own representative institu-tions in order to obtain their free and informed consent prior to the approval of any project affecting their lands or territories and other resources, particularly in connection with the development, utiliza-tion or exploitation of mineral, water or other resources.

To compound this, most First Nations in BC are not on treaty land. The BC and Federal Governments have no basis of claim to the land. The land is completely unceded. It was never given away.

So if you cannot get consent from First Nations and municipalities, a pipeline cannot be built, period. Pipeline companies should redirect the route onto land that is in agreement with the project.

2. Climate impacts:

The science actually says that if the world is to meet its climate change commitments to prevent catastrophic climate change, most of Alberta’s oil must remain in the ground:

85% of tar sands must stay in the ground to limit climate change to 2 degrees Celsius

Oil sands must remain largely unexploited to meet climate target, study finds

Most of Canada’s oilsands must stay in ground if world to limit global warming: report

This is inconsistent with the idea of large pipelines which are expected to be used for decades, and which will grow the oil industry in Canada.

Also I’ve seen no sign from oil companies on off setting climate emissions by carbon capture or investment in renewables to counteract the increased emissions from a growing oil sands industry.

3. Economics.

Oil pipelines are a huge waste of money when it comes to Job creation. They produce few direct, full time, permanent jobs.

Kinder Morgan’s pipeline will only create ~50 permanent jobs in British Columbia.

This pipelines costs are already estimated at over 7 billion dollars. Are we really convinced that we want to spend that amount of money for 50+ permanent jobs? All those other thousands of jobs that are bragged about are temporary construction based. After about a year, once the pipeline is built those jobs are gone.

Also all of these oil pipelines are export pipelines. They’re not going to create value added (refinery based jobs) in Canada. They’re just shipping raw product to other countries, who will then create more jobs refining the raw products.

I’d be more open to oil pipelines in Canada, if they actually created more permanent jobs here in Canada.

4. Oil Spill Risk

I’m opposed to oil pipelines like Kinder Morgan because the risk of a large oil spill is far too great, especially on the BC coast.

Bitumen oil spills cannot be effectively cleaned up and the main area this pipeline would end is Vancouver’s world renowned harbour.

Here are the risks from that:

5 Years Since Massive Tar Sands Oil Spill, Kalamazoo River Still Not Clean

The Cost of an Oil Spill in Burrard Inlet: $40 Billion…For Starters

Spill from Hell: Diluted Bitumen

Unique Hazards of Tar Sands Oil Spills Confirmed by National Academies of Sciences

Oil spill could cost Vancouver $1.2 billion: report

Study shows oil spill near Fraser River estuary could kill over 100,000 birds

New report adds billions to cost of oil spill off B.C.’s south coast

Pipeline called threat to B.C.’s tourism industry

And lets not forget that Kinder Morgan’s existing pipeline has already spilled several times. This company does not have a good track record:

WHAT IS KINDER MORGAN’S RECORD OF SPILLS?

Kai Nagata: CBC pretends Trans Mountain’s 69 oil spills never happened

Good to see NIki Ashton fighting for Chelsea Manning’s right to enter Canada.

Here’s Harsha Walla one of the co-founders of No One is Illegal:

Here’s a strongly worded response from Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE):

This is sadly, not satire.

As NDP leader, Jagmeet Singh would call for decriminalizing possession of all drugs for personal use, he said during a leadership debate Sunday.

The NDP candidates were asked how they would respond to the opioid crisis that has killed countless Canadians.

Last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau poured cold water over the possibility of legalizing or decriminalizing drugs such as heroin and cocaine, which many advocates believe would help prevent further overdose deaths from the powerful opioid fentanyl.

Singh noted that as a lawyer who had worked in the criminal justice system, “I can tell you that people who are charged with personal possession offences are often those who are poor, often those who have mental health issues and often those who are addicted.

"This does not sound to me like a criminal justice problem, that sounds to me like a social justice problem and a health-care problem,” he said at one of the last debates before party members choose a successor to Thomas Mulcair.

“I would call for the decriminalization of all personal possession offences when it comes to drugs. Period.”

Of all the candidates I like Singh’s policies the most after Niki Ashton. He does have decent policies when it comes to racial justice, people with disabilities, LGBTQ rights, climate change and he opposes oil pipelines. He’s also been more supportive of things like tuition free policies than Angus has been. I believe that many of Singh’s policies don’t go far enough compared to Niki Ashton’s, but I don’t really see how they’re alike to neoliberalism. Today he said he’d consider decriminalizing posession of all drugs. That’s pretty significant, left policy. Care to explain?

Five intelligence officers and analysts with Canada’s spy service have launched a $35-million lawsuit against their employer, claiming the Canadian Security Intelligence Service is a toxic workplace with managers who openly espouse Islamophobic, racist and homophobic views and discriminate against Muslim, Black and gay employees.

The allegations contained in a 54-page statement of claim — filed in Federal Court and obtained by the Toronto Star — provide detailed accusations from inside one of the country’s most secretive organizations.

One of the complainants, a Toronto intelligence officer with more than a decade of service and identified in the claim by the pseudonym “Alex,” is gay and has a Muslim partner.

According to the statement of claim, an October 2015 email sent to him by his manager “Simon” stated: “Careful your Muslim in-laws don’t behead you in your sleep for being homo.” Another boss, given the pseudonym “Joe,” allegedly wrote: “You’re just a fag hiding in your little corner sobbing.”

DFO DISMISSED FROM NEGOTIATIONS BY HEREDITARY CHIEFS; PRIME MINISTER NO LONGER WELCOME IN TFN TERRITORY

Canadian government under fire over $12bn arms sale to Saudi Arabia

Canada admits that the weapons it sells to Saudi Arabia could be used in Yemen’s civil war.

And a few general sources of Trudeau’s failure on indigenous issues:

Trudeau Accused of Betraying First Nations After Permits Granted for Controversial Site C Dam

Trudeau Just Broke His Promise to Canada’s First Nations

‘Betrayal’: Trudeau Approves Kinder Morgan Pipeline Expansion

Indigenous leaders give Trudeau government failing grade on delivering promises

Trudeau Liberals take Human Rights Tribunal to court over First Nation children ruling

Trudeau Budget Continues Illegal Discrimination Against Indigenous Children: Cindy Blackstock

First Nations Groups Launching Massive Lawsuit After Trudeau’s LNG Decision

British Columbia grand chief calls Trudeau a ‘serial liar’ over broken promises

With the Liberal government under pressure to increase funding for children in indigenous communities, the prime minister says his government has the money and is ready to act – it’s the communities that need to articulate their needs and establish their ability to deliver the required services.

“A lot of indigenous communities haven’t had the opportunity yet to take that responsibility, to actually think about how they can and must deliver,” Justin Trudeau said Tuesday while speaking with journalists in Ottawa.