As many Canadians celebrated Thanksgiving, Idle No More demonstrators gathered in Yonge-Dundas Square on Monday said they have "little to be thankful for" and urged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to keep his election promises to protect Indigenous rights and the environment.
Becky Big Canoe, co-founder of Water is Life: Coalition for Water Justice, said while Trudeau has vowed to support Indigenous people across the country, he's already reneging on some election promises.
Indigenous leaders and activists who oppose pipelines and other natural resource development projects, such as the proposed Pacific NorthWest LNG project recently approved by the federal government, say they are not being heard by the federal government.
Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, who is president of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, said there is a distinct difference between listening, and hearing, and that the federal government is failing at the latter when it comes to the concerns of indigenous people.
Wed., Oct. 5, 2016 - Justin Trudeau has abandoned the illusion that logic alone will persuade all provinces to get onside with fighting climate change. That’s the upside of his pledge to have Ottawa impose a national carbon price.
The downside is that the price he set is too low to be effective.
In announcing Ottawa’s unilateral decision on Monday, Trudeau signalled that, on the climate change file at least, his quixotic attempts to achieve federal-provincial consensus have come to an end.
It’s easy to make virtuous statements when you’re not even the official opposition.
“The Great Bear Rainforest is no place for a pipeline,” Justin Trudeau tweeted in 2013. Now that the Liberal leader is prime minister, apparently the GBR is just the place to slap down an LNG pipeline.
The fresh new face Canada showed the world at the Paris COP21 climate meetings held out hope for many Canadian climate activists that a national course change was in the works.
In its less than a decade in power, the Harper government extinguished multiple important Canadian environmental laws, muzzled climate scientists, harassed environmental NGOs, created "anti-terrorism" legislation that targets First Nations and other pipeline activists, and generally introduced regressive and reactionary social policy while promoting Canada as the world's new petro-state.
EDMONTON — First Nations and environmental groups want the federal government to revisit its approval of British Columbia’s Site C dam which they worry would threaten a national park that is a World Heritage Site.
Groups including the Mikisew Cree and the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society say the risk to Alberta’s Wood Buffalo National Park from the dam and upstream oilsands development is so dire that they will ask UNESCO investigators to put the area on its list of threatened sites.
Trudeau spent the last campaign talking about righting the environment/energy balance. Based on the LNG decision, equilibrium between Canada's contribution to the mitigation of climate change and its energy ambitions remains as elusive as ever.
PUBLISHED : Monday, Oct. 3, 2016 12:00 AM
MONTREAL—As Liberal leader and subsequently as prime minister, Justin Trudeau has talked in the abstract of the need to secure a social licence prior to undertaking any major energy project. Until this week, no one was sure what he actually meant by that.
