BC NDP BETRAYALS on Indigenous Rights and Climate Change
Friday, Feb 25. 7:00 pm
John Horgan’s NDP promised to govern for human needs, not profit. In government—supporting corporate profits—they have betrayed pledges on inter-woven policies of indigenous rights and environmental sanity, notably in using militarized police against Wet’suwet’en land defenders. At Fairy Creek they also used police instead of honouring their pledge to protect old-growth forests. At the Site C Dam fiasco and thousands of related, poisonous fracking sites, indigenous rights and eco-sanity have also been trampled. And the “every-tool-in-the-t00lbox” fight against the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion has, instead, become another profit-backing police action to suppress indigenous and environmentalist opposition.
Join us on February 25 to hear speakers and take part in discussion. This event is hosted by the Socialist Unity Assembly, with partners BC Socialist Action and Vancouver Ecosocialists.
SPEAKERS:
Sleydo’ (Molly Wickham) is the spokesperson for the Gidimt’en check-point on Wet’suwet’en territory. She holds the name in Cas Yikh (grizzly house) and has been living on and occupying the territory since 2014 with her husband and children. Gidimt’en check-point has been an Indigenous reoccupation site since 2018 which has been raided three times by militarized RCMP—on January 7, 2019, on February 5, 2020, and again on November 18 and 19, 2021—as a result of grassroots resistance to the Coastal GasLink pipeline project which would bring fracked gas from northeastern B.C to an LNG terminal near Kitimat. In the November police assault, Sleydo’ and several other unarmed resisters were threatened with automatic weapons, arrested, and incarcerated for several days. Sleydo’ has a masters degree in Indigenous Governance from the University of Victoria and is heavily involved in the Wet’suwet’en clan governance system.
Robert Hackett is a Professor Emeritus of Simon Fraser University, and a writer for the Tyee and other independent online news outlets. He is the co-author of Journalism and Climate Crisis and other books on media and politics, and he also wrote Pie in the Sky, a study of the Waffle, a radical wing of the NDP in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He is currently a member of the BC NDP's Left Unity caucus as well as other environmentally-oriented committees in the party and community. He lives in Powell River.
Gary Porter is a leader of Socialist Action, Coordinator of the NDP Socialist Caucus, and an NDP electoral district executive member. He authored Ecosocialism vs. Fossil Capitalism and The Struggle of Indigenous People in Canada Against Canadian Capitalist Oppression And Genocide. Gary is a retired chartered accountant.
