. . . The bill "isn't really about terrorism," but about preserving economic and power relations in Canada, Palmater said.
Citizens have worked too hard to create treaties, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and international laws that protect basic human rights to toss it all away "because we wanted to protect some corporate economic interests," she added.
Her arguments were echoed by Grand Chief Stewart Phillip of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, who said the bill would dangerously expand powers of Canada's security agencies without making people any safer.
Canada's spy agency helped senior federal officials figure out how to deal with protests expected last summer in response to resource and energy development issues — including a pivotal decision on the Northern Gateway pipeline.
Bill C-51 'Day of Action' protests denounce new policing powers
Anti-terrorism bill opens door to spying on opponents,Mulcair charges
Anti-terrorism bill's powers could ensnare protesters, MP fears
Kinder Morgan says its protocols dictate that it report "suspicious activities" like taking photos near its Burnaby Mountain facility, even though the surrounding area is Crown land on which they have no jurisdiction to prohibit photography.
SFU climate change scientist Tim Takaro says he felt "intimidated" when he got a call from Burnaby RCMP earlier this week asking him about photographs he took with Kinder Morgan infrastructure in the background. They also told him they knew he had been to protest rallies that had taken place there a few months earlier.
A scientist, or any knowledgeable person, will tell you climate change is a serious threat for Canada and the world. But the RCMP has a different take. A secret report by the national police force, obtained by Greenpeace, both minimizes the threat of global warming and conjures a spectre of threats posed by people who rightly call for sanity in dealing with problems caused by burning fossil fuels.
OTTAWA — An internal RCMP report’s portrayal of northern B.C. as one of two Canadian regions most vulnerable to violent, anti-pipeline extremists working with aboriginal radicals to sabotage “critical infrastructure” is “absolutely bizarre,” one of B.C.’s most outspoken First Nations leaders said Wednesday.
Stewart Phillip, head of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, has long espoused civil disobedience to defend First Nations rights and was recently arrested during an anti-pipeline protest on Burnaby Mountain.
Four years ago, if you had asked Stephanie Merrill of the Conservation Council of New Brunswick(CCNB) and Jennifer West of the Ecology Action Centre (EAC) in Nova Scotia the odds of success in their respective efforts to enact fracking bans in their provinces, they would have likely replied: pretty low. After all, they were going up against a powerful industry, lax government oversight, and a largely uninformed public.
Yet last fall, the provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick joined Quebec in halting the practice of hydraulic fracturing for shale gas.
The Union of BC Indian Chiefs (UBCIC) is the latest to speak out against Prime Minister Stephen Harper's proposed Anti-Terrorism Act.
Harper's Bill C-51 is meant to increase the power of RCMP and other bodies to combat terrorism and includes giving more power to security personnel, letting authorities detain possible terrorists for longer periods, and allowing authorities to remove terrorist propaganda from any Canadian-based website. However, critics have said that the bill will restrict Canadians' freedom.
But a newly disclosed intelligence assessment from the RCMP looking at the "anti-Canada petroleum movement" suggests the same might not always be true about their facts.
First reported in La Presse, and again Monday in the Globe and Mail, the RCMP report dated January 2014 warns of "a growing, highly organized and well-financed anti-Canada petroleum movement that consists of peaceful activists, militants and violent extremists who are opposed to society's reliance on fossil fuels."
Lawyers for Harvard University will appear in court on Friday to fight off attempts to force the world’s richest university to dump coal, oil and gas companies from its $36bn (£23bn) endowment.
A lawsuit filed late last year by seven law students and undergraduates argues the university has a duty to fight climate change by pulling out of fossil fuel companies.
The university and the state of Massachusetts, which is also named in the lawsuit, are asking the judge to dismiss the case.
