The Legislature Raids

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Today French citizens are crowding the streets of Paris, enraged by their government giving massive "bail-out" funds to the banks, but nothing for citizens. Government corruption in Zimbabwe has destroyed their currency so that only foreign money is of value to them. In Britain, construction workers are marching in protest because some financial genius brought in foreign labour to do their jobs -- even bringing in floating accommodation for the foreign workers. The best item on tonight's BBC News was the new monument in Baghdad called "Spirit of Iraq" -- a replica of the shoes hurled at the man who started this world-wide melt-down.

And then I was told about this speech given in our own Legislature at 2:00 AM on January 17, 2009. It may rip your heart out, but it will leave you smiling. Here is Corky Evans, M.L.A. for Nelson-Creston, speaking on Bill 47, the legislation authorizing City of Vancouver to borrow millions for completion of the Olympic Athletes' Village, and asking "Why?":



C. Evans: I rise to speak precisely to the narrowly focused issue of Bill 47 ...

We are here talking about Bill 47. Bill 47 was requested by a mayor who I like and respect and was brought into the House by a minister who I'd like to congratulate for having his job. I like and respect that gentleman too. The mayor of Vancouver is the only politician I know where I ever walked into a farmer's barn and in the loft was an "Elect this man" sign for the mayor of Vancouver. I don't know farmers that put up election posters for politicians, and I think it's because the mayor of Vancouver was once himself a vegetable grower in the Fraser Valley.

He's asked us to come here and to pass this bill, Bill 47. The minister who brought the bill into the House is a gentleman I respect because he got to be a minister by sitting down there and actually saying what he thought instead of what he was told to say — a rare commodity in this House.

Bill 47 is about funding for an event, the Olympics, which I think we all love — especially the Winter Olympics. I remember sitting with my family and watching Elizabeth Manley make Canada proud. So we have a bill brought in by a guy I like, asked for by a mayor I respect, about an event that I think everybody here loves, and the total event sucks.

The debate debases what we are and what we do here. The fact that we have to have the debate at…. It is now ten minutes to two o'clock in the morning. It's an appalling insult to the people who will pay the bill. Good people asked for and bring in a piece of legislation to allow, to accommodate, to create an event — the Olympics — that we all believe in, and it is an embarrassment to be an elected politician and participate in this. How can this be? That's a massive contradiction.

I'd like to try to explain that contradiction. In fact, I think explaining that contradiction to the people at home, who I'm sure don't understand Bill 47…. I hope it is the purpose of this speech. How on earth did we get here, with the good intentions of putting on an event, to host the world, which we believe in? How did we get to this moment at ten minutes to two o'clock in the morning, trying to borrow a half a billion dollars to backstop a bunch of people who have walked from the project 90 days from its supposed conclusion?

I'm pretty old, so this event sort of has antecedents in my political memory. We, one time, hosted the world before — eh? Remember Expo 86? British Columbia — in fact, the same town, the town of Vancouver — said to the world: "Come on here." How did we organize that? We went and got a guy, Jimmy Pattison, and we paid him $1 to manage the event, to put it on, to host the world, to make us proud in the city of Vancouver. I don't think they had to come….

Interjections.

C. Evans: It's okay. Let them rage. The people can see who they are.

I don't think they had to meet at two o'clock in the morning in 1986 in order to attempt to backstop what Mr. Pattison was doing. I think maybe this time, when we're hosting the Olympics, we did it a little different.

Instead of getting a British Columbian to work for $1, we decided to give this project to something called a hedge fund. We decided to turn the athletes village, the part of False Creek that we're going to put 850 people from the world in, into the hands of something called a hedge fund from New York. Not a British Columbian working for a dollar, answering to a Premier, coming in here and being proud of it, but to a hedge….

I kind of think the people at home at ten minutes to two in the morning might want to know why. How come? If it used to be that we could do it with a citizen of our own province working for a nominal sum just because he's proud to be a British Columbian, how come we turned it over to something they don't understand, called a hedge fund, in New York?

That is the function of this debate on Bill 47. It's why, not what. How on earth did we get here? The answer to that question is that the present government, the Liberal government, aren't Social Crediters or New Democrats. They are a brand-new kind of administration in British Columbia that we've never seen before.

The people who used to govern and sit in that chair governed for us, governed this land, and believed they were responsible to the citizens at home watching, the citizens who own this land.

We've got a government who has decided that its function is to sell this land, a government who has lost its sense of pride at being British Columbian and has said to the world: "We're pretty sure that if you're from New York or Bonn, Germany or Tokyo, you can do it better than we can. We can't build our own ships. We can't run our own railroad. We can't run our own electric company." We will sell the creeks and the rivers, we'll lease the railroad for 999 years, and we'll get our ships from Germany, because we no longer believe in British Columbia.

So if we can host the Olympics, let's get something called a hedge fund, from New York, to do what Jim Pattison used to do for $1. It is an ideological mindset that none of the folks at home have ever seen before. What are we doing here at ten minutes to two in the morning attempting to backstop strangers we will never meet, who have decided to abandon us in the building of the Olympics to host the world?

Hon. Speaker, I would like to help the folks at home. I walked in here, and I've got to admit — I'm an MLA; I'm 61 years old — that I had no idea what a hedge fund is. I would bet that the majority of the members on the opposite side who signed the contract to do the deal don't know what a hedge fund is. I'm betting that of three million people in British Columbia, 99.9 percent of you could never afford to meet these people, never mind do a deal with them.

So I looked it up: what is a hedge fund? Remember, a lot of intelligent people say that when something's going on that you don't understand, the way to figure it out is to follow the money. So who did we decide to do our contract with? We decided to do it with something called a hedge fund. That's not a bank or a credit union. That's not borrowing from your neighbour. It's some kind of an institution which is defined in the encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

It says that a hedge fund is "a private investment fund open to a limited range of investors that is permitted by regulators to undertake a wider range of activities and other investment funds. It also pays a performance fee to the investment manager. As the name implies, hedge funds often seek to offset potential losses in the principal markets they invest in by hedging their investments using a variety of methods, most notably short-selling" and to participate in "funds using short-selling and other 'hedging' methods…." This is the important part: "…other 'hedging' methods to increase rather than reduce risk, with the expectation of increasing return."

I wonder if the folks out there in British Columbia understood that instead of hiring a British Columbian to do this project, we went to New York and got a firm that is in the business of increasing risk rather than reducing it, in order to increase income.

Now, hedge funds are typically only open to a limited range of professional or wealthy investors. This provides them with an exemption, in many jurisdictions, from regulations governing short-selling, derivative contracts, leverage, fee structures and the liquidity of interest in the fund.

In other words, we are here debating Bill 47, which is going to backstop a bunch of people who increased risk in order to get a better return on investment. Why? Because of the ideological mindset of the folks who have been governing British Columbia for seven years, who think that dealing with the robber barons of the world is better business than trusting our own people. That's what we're doing here at two o'clock in the morning. We're trying to figure out how to deal with the facts that we did a deal with the robber barons and they have backed out.

Now, follow the money. Bill 47 — we're here to debate Bill 47. Follow the money. What kind of a hedge fund? Which hedge fund that increases risk…? Somebody with a…. It's a great, beautiful name — Fortress Investment Group. Now, there's a George Bush title if I ever heard….The Fortress Investment Group. We gave a contract to the Fortress Investment Group to build the athletes village.

Did you debate it in here, hon. Speaker? I know I'm not supposed to ask you rhetorical questions. Did any of you members ever come in here and say: "Should we or should we not give a contract to somebody called the Fortress Investment Group in New York to build the athletes village for this event that we're all…"? I don't remember that debate. I remember secrecy. I remember people on the other side saying P3s are good because they reduce government risk.

At one minute to two we are here taking to the people of British Columbia all the risk that Fortress Investment Group was allowed to avoid by the contract that they signed in secrecy, without public exposure, with the government of British Columbia.

Who is Fortress Investment Group? It's "a New York–based asset management firm which manages private equity hedge funds and real estate and railroad-related investments, with announced plans to move into casinos and horse racing." Oh, those are good guys for the athletes village — the real estate and railroad company with announced intentions to move into casinos. There are some folks who will take our risk off our hands, eh?

I don't think, had we debated that in the House before we signed the contract, there'd be a single person from either side who would have said: "Oh yeah, that's better than a British Columbia bank or a Canadian credit union or the B.C. people. Let's get a horse-racing company and see if they'll build our athletes village." And now we're debating Bill 47.

Let's follow the money to see how we got here. What could possibly be the connection of Fortress Investment Group to the people of British Columbia, to the people we represent? Well, I guess there is a connection. If you follow the money, you find a connection. The connection would be that in 2006 Fortress Investment Group bought a company called Intrawest.

Now, who's Intrawest? Let's follow the money. In 1986 Intrawest acquired Blackcomb Mountain. Ten years later Intrawest acquired Whistler Mountain to form Whistler-Blackcomb, which is the venue of the 2010 Olympics. Follow the money. We did a deal with a hedge fund, who I submit on the record are the robber barons who are essentially responsible for the speculation in the world economy that has created the crash we're experiencing right now.

We did the deal with Fortress, which it turns out owns Whistler-Blackcomb. Then, in a development that defies understanding, Fortress decides that it's too broke to continue to advance the money to build the athletes village, but it's still rich enough to own Whistler-Blackcomb.

Now, at two minutes after two, we are here debating Bill 47. What does it say? I submit that what it says is that the people of Vancouver are going to backstop the company that is hosting the Olympics. I submit on the record here, at two minutes after two, that there is not even a contract with these robber barons that guarantees that we'll hold the Olympics at Whistler-Blackcomb.

We are being asked, in the narrow confines of Bill 47, to assist the good mayor, written by the good minister, to give the right to borrow to the people of Vancouver to backstop a New York company that owns Whistler-Blackcomb and hasn't agreed yet to let us hold the Olympics there.

When I was a little boy, one day at church the minister was at the front giving a sermon about usury. I was a little boy. I didn't have the slightest idea. I went home and said to my mom: "Mom, what's usury?" She said: "It's a sin." I said: "Yeah, but what's it mean?" And she said: "Well, that's kind of like when you loan some money to your friend and charge him more than 10 percent."

I was a little boy. I believed my mom. I've thought ever since that usurers were those crooks you see on late-night movies or the bad guys you read about in the Bible. It turns out that the usurers are the Fortress Investment Co. The city of Vancouver is paying them 11 percent on the money that Fortress refuses to advance to finish the contract on the village they agreed to build.

At five minutes now after two we're all coming here to vote on the narrowly written nature of Bill 47 to give the city of Vancouver the right to borrow the money to backstop the robber barons…. Every time we come in here, we, from our perspective — and the folks that govern from theirs — debate this idea of the public ownership and public initiatives and projects against the private.

I've been doing this ever since they sold B.C. Rail and sold off land in the tree farms and tore apart B.C. Hydro and ordered ships from Germany. It goes on and on and on — over in Maple Ridge, trying to stop them from bisecting the farm with the German P3 road. But every time I raise it, what do the ministers get up and say?

Come on. Shout it out. You say: "You stupid socialist. We have to do this to reduce the people's risk." Every single time we raise the issue, members in the government say: "P3s are the way to reduce risk."

It is now five minutes after two, and we are here taking on half a billion, maybe $800 million worth of debt for the city of Vancouver to backstop private industries' risk. It is dishonest to say that the P3, the private process that led us to Fortress, protects the people against risk. We are here. This entire debate is the Legislature of British Columbia embracing to our bosom the risk that private industry has reneged on, paying usurious interest rates to them every day until we take it back.

From this day on there should never be another minister or Premier with the gall to stand up and say that the P3 process, the private industry process, absolves the people of risk, because the government — that government — has brought us here today to take the risk back to the people because the New York hedge firm no longer sees a profit.

Hon. Speaker, I think that it's unparliamentary to say "lie," so I'm going to say that for seven years the people who governed this province have been mistaken. And now, tonight, they will understand, because they are the people who are bringing in the bill, asking the people to take back risk.

You will understand the mistake that you were led to, and in future you will understand that the people of British Columbia can manage their own affairs, run their own railroad, build their own ships, run their own power company and create electricity from their own creeks and rivers. It is wrong to say to the people of B.C. that by privatizing contracts, we off-load risk, because we are here at your request, taking it back and giving it to the city of Vancouver.

How much? What's it going to cost them? Bill 47 — let's speak to the bill. How much is it going to cost them? Is it going to cost them $250 million — the people of Vancouver? Is it going to cost them $300 million? What is the function of Bill 47 here? Is it $500 million? Is it wrong for an MLA to stand here and say: "We're debating the thing. What's it worth?"

Hon. Speaker, let them heckle. Let them shout. Let them write it down. What's it worth? How much risk are we taking back tonight and giving to the people of Vancouver? Is it a buck and a half?

Let the record show that nobody is shouting out an answer. Let the record show that they don't know. They don't know, hon. Speaker. We off-loaded the risk, and it turned out they can't make a profit, so we're taking it back.

Interjection.

C. Evans: Ah, let him go. It's two o'clock in the morning. It makes no sense. I can talk over him.

Interjection.

Deputy Speaker: Member. Member.

C. Evans: We took a beautiful project that I want to build. You want to build it? I think everybody here wants to build it. I want to see the Canadians in the Olympics, and I want to see our neighbours and friends around the world come here and say: "This is a beautiful place. This is a beautiful society. Look what they did."

But in secret, without coming in here and talking about it, somehow or other we decided to give a $500 million, $800 million, a billion-dollar deal to some people in New York that you never met, the ministers who are over there never met, I never met and the people of Vancouver never met. And then we said to them: "Oh, it's okay, you guys. If the rules change, we'll pay you 11 percent on your money."

I read the records. In the last five years they were making, at times, 30 percent on their investment because, of course, they're those professional and rich people that play with hedge funds. You know, if they were our class of people, we'd call them gamblers. But of course, they're professional people, so they're investors.

Then all of a sudden around the world those gamblers screw up the world economy with their speculative mortgages and their speculative stock values and by essentially gambling with money they don't have. And crash; it comes down. And all of a sudden the hedge fund doesn't have the money to keep its word.
Now, hon. Speaker, if this was happening in your life, if this was your landlord, your landlord couldn't say to you: "Oh, I can't pay the mortgage anymore, but you still have to pay me rent."

In this Legislature on this morning we are agreeing to Bill 47, which says that we will allow the city of Vancouver to backstop the debt, to borrow a sum of money which no one knows — more than a buck and a half and maybe as much as $800 million — to backstop a company that, it turns out, owns the venue on which we hope to host the world, and those people don't have to return that venue to the people of British Columbia. If this was your landlord, they'd lose the property. They could not renege on the loans without losing the property.

In this case Bill 47 says that we're going to backstop them, and they still get to own Blackcomb Whistler — that chunk of British Columbia. I submit, hon. Speaker, that every single person on that side and the Premier and all the people that work for him should understand that to ask the robber barons of the world to relieve us of risk is folly ...

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I thought that none of the Big Media had reported on Corky's speech. But this email came in today. I sent thanks, and got Vaughn Palmer's OK to post it here. He said:


i wrote about corky's speech, calling it an early morning wakeup for government and opposition, in the column that was published on the front page monday Jan. 19.

--vaughn


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BC Mary comments: It's Friday afternoon of a politically-charged week in British Columbia. Watch the vigilant editor of Salt Spring News for events which appear to be the first signs of a collapsing Campbell Cabinet ... watch especially Jim's comments ... more will likely be added soon ... 

Regional News
Force 7 from Peace River South: First crack in the Campbell coalition fortress appears

Posted Friday, June 11, 2010 by: Jim Scott
Read lots more HERE.


MLA Blair Lekstrom resigns from Liberal Caucus

Kimberley Molina
Fort St. John News/Energycity.ca
British Columbia Canada
June 11, 2010

MLA Blair Lekstrom has given his resignation to Premier Gordon Campbell and has left the BC Liberal Caucus.

However, he says he will continue to represent the Peace River South riding as an independent. He says his decision was made because of his constituents’ opposition to the Harmonized Sales Tax.

He says that although he had first supported the introduction of the HST, he now says he will attempt to stop the HST from coming into effect. “This is a major tax policy shift and it is time to engage British Columbians with a series of discussions about our province’s future.”

In the 2009 election, 4,801 people voted in Lekstrom as the MLA for Peace River South, but figures released this week show 4,985 people in the riding signed the “Fight HST Campaign”.

Lekstrom will be holding a press conference this afternoon. ... The full statement of his resignation can be viewed below. ...
http://www.saltspringnews.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=20533

Related: Energy Minister Blair Lekstrom acknowledges peak oil and downplays offshore drilling

Charlie Smith
Georgia Straight
British Columbia Canada - May 21, 2010

Energy Minister Blair Lekstrom says there are no staff in his ministry working on offshore drilling at this time. Lekstrom made the revelation late Wednesday (May 19) afternoon during the estimates debate for his ministry. "I think it is fair to say that what we're seeing with the environmental disaster taking place in the Gulf [of Mexico] today brings into question whether that can be done," Lekstrom said, according to Hansard. "So we will not pursue the extraction of any resource in this province unless it can be done in a manner as I stated, and we stand by that."

During the same debate, NDP energy critic John Horgan asked Lekstrom if the Oil and Gas Commission had done any work in connection with peak oil. Peak oil is the point when global oil production will start going down because of diminishing supplies. Lekstrom replied that staff are following the peak oil debate. "There are people that think we have plateaued or peaked, and there are others that don't," he said, according to Hansard. "So it's an ongoing debate, and our staff do follow that."

It's the first time the B.C. government has publicly acknowledged the possibility of global oil production peaking. Horgan then asked Lekstrom if he's prepared to table any documents or briefing materials produced by his ministry on peak oil for the public to review. "I will point out that we do have a PowerPoint that we will ensure that we get to the member," Lekstrom said. "As well, I would offer, if the member would want, a briefing to the member on the issue of peak oil, through our ministry."

Jim comment: Mmmmmmm!!!! Nervous about offshore drilling. Acknowledges peak oil. Constituents concerned about Site C and the resulting transmission lines for resource extraction (read open pit mining) in Northerm BC. Also, Lekstrom's riding is one that was adamantly opposed to the sale of BC Rail. (And Lekstrom's name is likely to come up during the BC Rail political corruption trial with regard to the lobbying firm, Pilothouse. See Gary Mason, September 23, 2009.) Wonder if the coalition will try to do to Lekstrom what they did to Paul Nettleton?


Staying on as MLA, eh? What IS going on behind the scenes? Lekstrom is now in a position that I always felt most represented him and his riding best. He should have run as an independent. He would have won. Guess he naively thought he could work for change from the inside. So now we have, Vicki Huntington (independent) and Blair Lekstrom (independent) sitting in the house. Both of them are natural Progressive Conservatives, Vicki on the left of the party and Lekstrom on the right (Red Tory; Blue Tory). Interesting times ahead I think. And it looks now, like this is the beginning of the end for Campbell's coalition. Shades of the Social Credit party's rapid, out-of-control implosion.

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BC Mary comment: The name "Quisling" was made infamous during WWII - a Norwegian name symbollizing treason. But I had never come across an explanation for it like this one, making it clear that Norway had managed to function, on their own terms, under Nazi occupation. I hadn't realized that Anders Behring Breivik is almost a home-grown product -- gone wrong -- but extremely relevant today -- not just in Norway. 
 
It looks to me as if the world will be a long time dealing with the fall-out from last week's tragedy in Oslo and Utøya Island. I thought you might be interested in seeing this ... from Salt Spring News:


Palestine's Norwegians
 
By VIJAY PRASHAD
Counterpunch - July 25, 2011

Sitting on an Amtrak train from New Haven to Washington, DC on Friday, I was enjoying my thriller, Kjell Ola Dahl's The Man in the Window. Dahl's police procedural novels are set in Oslo, Norway, where the remarkable detectives Frank Frølich and Gunnarstranda confront the heart of modern evil: Property is often the hub of the conflict, but so too is the ineluctable history of Nazism and the Second World War. Abrave history of pacifism, partly contained in the Norwegian Labour Party, kept the country out of World War I. Its ports and a direct route to Swedish iron ore made it irresistible to the Nazis, whose forces invaded a largely unprotected Norway in 1940.

To run the country, the Nazis turned to the leader of the Norwegian Nasjonal Samling, the local Nazi Party, Vidkun Quisling (from whom we get the noun for traitor). It was the Quisling era (replete with concentration camps) that planted the tree of Nazism in Norwegian soil. The remnants of Scandinavian Nazis regrouped after World War II, but they remained small and obscure.

Scandinavian social democracy stumbled by the 1980s as the economic benefits of its welfare state were reduced. Anti-immigrant and anti-left sentiment grew amongst sections of the dispossessed working-class and middle-class, whose more militant element formed the Skinheads. They were the rump of the revival of neo-Nazism in the 1990s. It was as a consequence of this emergence that in 1995 the Swedish left created Expo, the anti-racist magazine edited by Stieg Larsson. It is also the reason why Scandinavian police procedural novels and thrillers are so very good (from Henning Mankell to Larsson to Jo Nesbø): they produce superb artfrom the hypocritical bourgeois denial of the existence of Nazism, and how it is the soft-Right of the "moderates" that tolerates and encourages the far-Right.

In Norway, the Skinheads morphed into groups such as the Boot Boys, who spent their time trolling the streets seeking out those who appear to be migrants. In 2002, three of the Boot Boys killed a fifteen year old, Benjamin Hermansen. When this incident occurred, the newspaper Dagsavisen wrote, "This must open the eyes of the authorities and all those who don't want to acknowledge the existence of Nazism and racism in Norway." On February 1, 2002, 40,000 of the 4.4 million Norwegians gathered in Oslo to demonstrate against this murder. The crowds included Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and Crown Prince Haakon. The Centre Against Racism in Oslo notes that since the late 1980s, there have been almost two thousand incidents of racism in the country, some of it enhanced by the rhetoric of the so-called Progress Party and of course the Nazi sects.

My I-Phone pinged, and news came of the bombing in Oslo and the massacre on Utøya Island. The dead at the latter were from the Workers' Youth League (AUF), linked to the Norwegian Labour Party, but with roots in the Communist and Socialist movements of the 1920s. The current Prime Minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg, was once leader of the AUF. The initial reaction in the West was that the attacks had been conducted by Muslim jihadis. This has become a habit – after the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, CBS's Jim Stewart said, "The betting here is on Middle East terrorists." Of course this was more Mid-West than Mid-East, but there was no apology from the media to the Muslims in America.

The first reports from the New York Times suggested that the Oslo bomber was a jihadi (Professor Will McCants tweeted that the perp was Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami, something repeated by the Times, who later said that "the group was previously unknown and might not even exist"). When the fog of Islamaphobia partly cleared, and the Norwegian police was allowed its moment, they revealed that the actual killer was a Nazi, Anders Behring Breivik, who could very well have been a character from a Dahl novel.

A few hours later, Breivik's manifesto began to appear on various websites. [My emphasis. - M.]  Here Breivik fulminated against "Marxist-Multiculturalists." This has become a familiar refrain among the defenders of Fortress Europe: they want to secure their continent from the re-conquest of the Moors. The tendency is hateful toward immigrants and Islam. But these are not marginal socio-paths. Their views flow down the center of the stream of European conservatism. InOctober of last year, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that multiculturalism "has utterly failed." Immigrants needed to be force-marched into German culture, and if this is not possible, they should not be allowed to enter the country.

In February of this year, Britain's Cameron and France's Sarkozy followed Merkel's lead. Cameron blamed the "doctrine of state multiculturalism" for encouraging migrants to "live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream." France's Sarkozy gave a bitter speech against multiculturalism and then told the MPs of his "Union for a Popular Movement" party that he wanted laws to rein in Islam. Electorally, Sarkozy wanted to outflank the increased popularity of Martine Le Pen's National Front. "We had a debate on the burqa," he said, "now we should have a debate on street preachers." This is less a debate and more a vitriolic campaign against Islam and those who look like Muslims.

European Conservatism takes a harsh position vis-à-vis its African and Asian migrants. There is not much that separates these sophisticated leaders from their antecedents (namely, Enoch Powell and his 1968 "rivers of blood" speech) and the neo-Nazis (namely, Breivik). This strand of Conservatism hates difference and diversity, and promotes mono-cultures in social life. It cannot fathom that human beings are able to live convivial lives with those who are different. It would like to blame society's problems on difference. The last thing imaginable is to put the onus on the hierarchies of property, power and propriety, all of whom are generally alien to the commonplace conviviality of everyday people.

When Breivik writes that "indigenous Europeans" are committing "cultural suicide" by accommodating these migrants, he displays the typical ignorance of Nazism – they have no sense of the long centuries of interaction across the continents, of the mechanisms of colonial ideology that continued those interactions amidst the growth of a toxic racism, and of the recent histories of polycultural social life that has become so important to the lives of people in his own Europe. Watching television footage from Utøya, one could see that the Labour youth had among them children of migrants from Sri Lanka and North Africa. Their Norway was not Breivik's Norway.

BDS.

On July 20, days before the shooting, the leader of the AUF Eskil Pederson gave an interview to the tabloid Dagbladet. The AUF had held a rally for the boycott of Israel at Utøya Island, and it had strengthened its position vis-à-vis the BDS campaign (Boycott-Divest-Sanctions). Pederson told the tabloid that he believed that"the time has come for more drastic measures against Israel." He wanted the Norwegian Foreign Ministry to impose an economic boycott against Israel. "We in the Labour Youth will have a unilateral economic embargo of Israel from theNorwegian side."

Norway has a very advanced position on the international campaign against the Occupation of the Palestinian people. The Norwegian trade union federation (LO), which includes a fifth of the country's population, divested from a series of Israeli firms, such as Africa Israel Investments,Danya Cebus, and Elbit Systems. This is one of the largest sovereign funds in the world, and its move puts pressure on other funds. Norway also has an arms ban on Israel. Norwegian civil society has been very active in pushing for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel (support comes from 42% of the population, including the Norwegian soccer coach Egil 'Drillo' Olsen, who is a member of the Norwegian Worker Communist Party). Last year, the Norwegian Foreign Ministry refused to allow the Germans to test submarines that are slated for sale to Israel in Norwegian waters. A few days before the shooting, Norway's Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre visited the AUF youth, who told him that they wanted the boycott strengthened. A picture of Støre at the AUF camp walking past a sign that said "Boikott Israel" ran in the tabloids.

Støre's visit to the AUF camp came just after he met with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmud Abbas to reaffirm Norway's support of the Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations later this year. It is significant that Oslo was the home to the Israel-Palestinian peace accords in 1993. Israel's obduracy since then has changed the equation. "I don't think that any Palestinians or anybody around the world are in doubt that Norway supports Palestinians' right to statehood," Støre said. Støre is also a great supporter of diversity in Norway; he often uses the expression "the New We" to refer to Norwegian society. His "we" includes the asylum seekers and migrants, the Muslims and the Jews.

Above my desk I have a poster from a demonstration led the Anti-Fascistik Aktion in Copenhagen in June 1995. "No Fucking Fascists," it says. That is the sentiment of the more than ninety young people of the AUF killed last week. Breivik was certainly a right-wing militant, and without a doubt inspired by the Euro-fascism of Merkel-Sarkozy-Cameron. The press might be obsessed by their "lone gun-man" theory. They see things in the police's terms, which is to say, in terms of who actually acted, and who provided material support for the action. The action in Utøya was not the act of a madman, and it was not a human tragedy. It was an act of political murder against people who had committed themselves to a convivial world not only for their beloved Norway, but also for those who live under Occupation elsewhere.


Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His most recent book, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, won the Muzaffar Ahmad Book Prize for 2009.


He can be reached at: vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu

See also Conspiratorialists with an appetite for political destruction ... &   Stephen Harper on 'the anti-Israeli mob'. 





Quote:

In Norway, the Progress Party; in Canada, the Conservative Party of Canada. Anders Behring Breivik grew up in the youth wing of the Progress Party and for much of his adult life was a card-carrying member of the party. Stephen Harper worked for almost two decades to create the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC). First, the formation of the Reform Party; second, morphing Reform into the Canadian Alliance; third, the betrayal and destruction of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada; fourth, the forging of the revolutionary coalition that is the CPC.


End of quote.

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Lawyers for Dave Basi, Bob Virk, Aneal Basi (BVB) will again go before B.C. Supreme Court Justice Elizabeth Bennett next week in another pre-trial hearing.

BC Rail figures largely in this affair. Some background data is given below, excerpted from a Canadian Transportation Act (CTA) Review Panel's report dated 23 February 2001. That date is important. The NDP government of Ujjal Dosanjh was still in power. The Gordon Campbell government was installed 3 months later after the election of May 17, 2001.

The CTA Review Panel had been asked (by whom, it doesn't say) to assess rail competition in Canada, especially the running rights and "other forms of access remedies."

The report says that these rights are significant for British Columbia because the Province owned the largest regional railway in Canada, BCRail. As such, BCRail was a strategic resource for the province.

BC Rail was Canada's 3rd largest railroad by revenues, operating 2,315 kilometers of mainline track and 740 kilometers of industrial and yard track throughout B.C. In addition, BCR had a 37 kilometer line connecting CN, CP, Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) to the West Coast's largest coal terminal and Deltaport container terminal at Roberts Bank.

BC Rail was provincially regulated and competed fully within the private sector in a market environment without government subsidy.

Freight traffic involved 200,000 revenue carloads annually from over 200 customer facilities. In 1999, forestry, mining, energy, and agricultural products made up 80% of the $329 Million annual revenue.

The overwhelming percentage of BCRail tonnage was transported beyond BC's borders. 40% of BC Rail shipments were forwarded to other North American railroads. By contrast, loaded rail cars forwarded to BCR by other railroads accounted for only 2% -- an imbalance which results in an inordinate number of train miles without revenue loads.

BCR's only direct rail link was with CN at Prince George and Vancouver. CP and BNSF were accessed through CN in North Vancouver. Big railroads threaten regional ones.

Recommendations of the C.T.A.:

1) Negotiate Competitive Access over major rail lines, e.g., Prince George to Edmonton, using haulage rights, not running rights.

2) Provide access to final arbitration on disputes such as tariffs.

3) Regulatory oversight for major mergers, i.e., must prove it's in the public interest. [This must be where the Competition Bureau Report, mentioned in Hansard re the BCRail sale, comes into the picture.]

Nowhere did it suggest selling BC Rail.


[There is much more interesting information in this report, which can be readily googled at the identifier below. The report is easy to read, and well worth anyone's time. - BC Mary.]


From: Canadian Transportation Act Review Panel "On Competitive Rail Access", BC Rail -- 6 October 2000.
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BREAKING NEWS:

Almost immediately after CN won the bidding on BCRail, CN & BCR issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) to third party tour trains over the BCR network from North Vancouver to Prince George, and on CN line from Prince Rupert to Prince George, and Jasper. Of 3 final submissions, decision was held back by delayed report from Competition bureau. Great Canadian Rail Tour Co. Ltd. abd Whistler Rail Tours Ltd. were final submissions, with one submission rejected. 16 June 2004. both officials of both proponents as well as BCRail & CN, are on a train to Whistler. 26 August 2004 the 3-member evaluation committee decides that Great Canadian Rail Tour Co. is the successful bidder. 2 Sept. 2004, CN & GCR execute agreement.

Now read on, from Vancouver Sun, 14 December 2006.

Rocky Mountaineer head has a continental 'dream'
By Malcolm Parry

PETER ARMSTRONG's Armstrong Hospitality Group Ltd. [formerly known as Great Canadian Rail Tours] should end the year with about $180 million in revenues. Most of that will come from the 140,000 passengers -- "guests," Armstrong calls them -- who'll have paid an average of $1,000 each to ride aboard the deluxe trains his Rocky Mountaineer Vacations firm runs to Whistler and beyond [i.e., Prince George], and along the Yellowhead and Kicking Horse route to Banff and Jasper ....

With former Conservative MP Jim Gouk's urging, he's planning a 2008-2009 route south from Calgary via the Crow's Nest Pass to Nelson. Entry costs for that would be $35 million to $40 million for 10 new cars, and $2 million for a pair of refurbished locomotives.

Beyond that, Armstrong's "dream for some years" has been "some kind of transcontinental service." Unlike the other Rocky Mountaineer itineraries, which put travellers into hotels overnight, this one "could be sleeping-car service; I have to be somewhat vague."...

There was no such vagueness in late-1992, when Armstrong's three-season outfit -- then called Great Canadian Railtour -- had lost $6.3 million, owed $800,000 (much of it to hoteliers in overnight-stop Kamloops), and basically had nothing for a week-away payroll. Further, GRC was about as popular as a burning trestle with Via, from which Armstrong had pried the all-daylight train service in an early example of federal-government privatization policy.

The story of that brinkmanship period is recounted in author Paul Grescoe's 344-page Trip of a Lifetime: The Making of the Rocky Mountaineer. Rare for an authorized book, it includes then Via executive-VP Jim Roche's assessment of Armstrong as "smarmy and unctuous."

In the relevant chapter, Grescoe reports how a tough deal saw Calgarians Sandy Slaytor and Mike Phillips add $1.1 million to their $2.5-million investment, thereby saving the fledgling company. Then-Deputy Prime Minister Don Mazankowski's executive assistant, Dave Allin, also recalls Via boss Ron Lawless or another official saying of GCR: "They are not going to make it. You cannot run a profitable private-sector rail line in Canada -- you cannot do it." ....

While awaiting the election of a majority federal government that could level the playing field between Via and private operators, Armstrong is stoked to see equity money pouring into "huge growth opportunities" in "quality tourism products." He means deals like the Fortress Investment Group's $2.8-billion acquisition of Intrawest Corp. stock at $35 a share; Bill Gates's Cascade investment firm and Saudi Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal's Kingdom Hotels International offering $3.7 billion for the 71-hotel Four Seasons group; and Prince Al-Waleed paying $3.9 billion earlier for the Fairmont Hotels & Resorts chain.

Full Story at Vancouver Sun, 14 December 2006.
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