Horgan's Throne Speech is slated for Feb. 8. Seth Klein's proposed text for it (below) is a fantasy, but it does lay out many of the tasks that need doing in the near future. Only a huge mobilization of BCers can force even some of them to be done.
This is a written version of a speech that COPE councillor Jean Swanson delivered in a January 13 Zoom call to party supporters and various media people:
“I’ve been pondering for a while. Should I retire, or should I keep working for housing, renter protections, ending homelessness, racial and Indigenous justice, climate action, and supporting working and low-income folks in the city?
Pressure continues to mount against the Coastal GasLink pipeline in Interior B.C., as posters appeared in Vancouver on Thursday highlighting the violation of Indigenous rights and the impacts of climate change.
The first poster, put up at the intersection of Main and Union, shows armed RCMP agents with the text: “Reconciliation won’t come at the barrel of a gun. Call off the RCMP.”
A new conservation foundation is working to provide Indigenous and other land-based communities with funds to protect endangered ecosystems and build economic alternatives to the logging of at-risk old-growth forests.
Three years ago RCMP moved onto Wet’suwet’en territory, tearing down a barricade on a forest service road that blocked access to the planned route of the Coastal GasLink pipeline.
The single-day enforcement on Jan. 7, 2019, resulted in the arrest of 14 people, both Wet’suwet’en and their supporters. But it didn’t bring a resolution to the dispute over the pipeline, opposed by Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs.
A major piece of unfinished business left behind at the end of last year looks certain to haunt British Columbia in 2022, as the province’s NDP government faces determined Indigenous opposition to the Coastal GasLink pipeline and the project itself runs into serious financial headwinds.
The federal Crown corporation building the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion has been handed a seven-day deadline to answer tough questions about soil stability, drilling method, and environmental impacts after proposing to redrill and reroute part of a 1.5-kilometre tunnel beneath the Fraser River, an iconic salmon-bearing waterway near the Lower Mainland population centre of Coquitlam.
Growing awareness of contemporary injustices towards First Nations children and a landmark court ruling this fall forced the federal government to reach agreements seeking to settle cases of discrimination in the child welfare system, says the First Nations advocate who led the fight for change.
Cindy Blackstock, the executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, called the agreements words on paper, but said in an interview that she will measure progress at the level of First Nations children.
