#ohnocanada

Cabinet OKs Midnight Raises

In Italy, an asbestos industrialist has recently been sentenced to 18 years in prison for causing a public health catastrophe of asbestos deaths. Yet the Harper government promotes the deadly deception that asbestos can be “safely used.”

Justice J. V. Clyne neatly summarized the general racialized language of black primitivism in his comments on Matthews' general character. 'He is obviously an emotional, undisciplined youth of twenty years of age,' Clyne wrote, 'and in my opinion is not very far removed from the jungle . . . I think that he is a primitive who became so furious by being deprived of what he wanted that he committed a very brutal murder and was careless of the consequences.' These sentiments reflected not only one judge's candour, but also the general tone of expert opinion.

Perhaps the alarm raised over Aboriginal carriers of venereal disease draws both on this theme of disappearance and on more obvious fears of miscegenation and racial slippage. For if venereal disease can remain hidden, undetected, undiagnosed, and unreported among the First Nations, then it can act as a hidden enemy within a cross-cultural community where the sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women was not uncommon. The covert enemy of disease, concealed within Aboriginal women, had particular resonances during war time. This fear, unjustified even by the statistics of medical surveillance, led to the harassment of Aboriginal women in Prince Rupert during the Second World War, when those believed to be infected with venereal disease were routinely hunted down and forcibly confined so that they would not spread the disease to locally stationed troops.

While they did not quite become wild animal tamers, the wardens at Banff did install slat licks along the Banff-Windermere road in 1922 so that game would be drawn there in full view of the motoring public. The possibility that they might be luring the animals to their deaths was not, it seems, discussed.

To facilitate the company's planning, [BC minister of lands and forests] Kenney pledged to place reserves on the possible sites of interest to Alcan in order to exclude the intervention of competitors. He also offered the lowest possible water rental fees allowed under the law and concluded with this remarkable concession: 'If after such surveys and investigations have been made, and your engineering studies demonstrate that our existing laws would not economically permit further development, I shall be very glad to discuss ways and means with my colleagues, having in mind the amendment of such laws whereby such a project might be economically pursued to the mutual advantage of both our Government and your Company.' Alcan would later call for changes to provincial law and taxation policies in order to facilitate its building program and settlement scheme at minimal cost.

It was not until well into the 1960s that the province's labour unions abandoned their rhetoric of the 'natural order' that relegated women to the home, and it was not until 1964 that married women achieved the right to act in a legal capacity independently of their husbands. For all its revolutionary rhetoric, Parti Pris formed a part of this gendered world.