Perhaps it’s the charming student activist, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, who donated his $25,000 Governor General’s Literary Award to the pipeline fight, or perhaps it was the scandalous documents leaked last week that showed pipeline company TransCanada has teamed up with one of the world’s most powerful PR firms, Edelman, to manipulate public opinion surrounding the Energy East pipeline.
Is there a place for acts of conscience in our society?
Protesters on Burnaby Mountain have proven they feel strongly enough about stopping a proposed Kinder Morgan oil pipeline that they are willing to be arrested.
No doubt there are many who will dismiss their protests as foolish and misguided. Others will not envy the hassles that inevitably attend being arrested and charged.
The B.C. Supreme Court smeared its robes with political tar sand by issuing the injunction in the Burnaby Mountain pipeline dispute.
In a bit of legal sleight-of-hand, Associate Chief Justice Austin Cullen robbed protesters of their right to civil disobedience, fettered their defences and sullied the court.
He ought to have known better: Members of his own bench have railed for years against this use of injunctions as a substitute for police doing their job.
MONTRÉAL — Two years ago student leader Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois rose to fame by becoming the face of Quebec’s so-called Maple Spring. He turned the episode that spelled the beginning of the end of premier Jean Charest’s tenure into a book titledTenir tête.
Last week, the book won the Governor General’s 2014 French-language non-fiction prize. On Sunday, Nadeau-Dubois revealed that he was giving his $25,000 prize to a citizens’ coalition devoted to blocking TransCanada’s Energy East pipeline.
RCMP arrested 14 protesters on Burnaby Mountain this morning and are enforcing Kinder Morgan's injunction against pipeline opponents (according to activists, the number of protesters arrested is closer to 20). Kinder Morgan crews are now reportedly back at work on the mountain.
"I'm really sad. I've been fighting tears all morning," said Lynne Quarmby, an SFU scientist who is one of six citizens that Kinder Morgan has filed a multi-million dollar civil suit against.
cientist Lynne Quarmby -- the chair of SFU's molecular biology and biochemistry department, and a face of public opposition against pipeline giant Kinder Morgan -- has just been arrested at Burnaby Mountain.
There's nothing more unambiguous in the battle against global ecocide than placing one's body between the fertile earth and a giant fossil fuel company. This is why when one spends a few minutes with the caretakers of Burnaby Mountain, one develops a genuinely abiding allegiance to their cause. This is direct witness to the existential immediacy of the climate crisis that threatens the future of our planet. This is appropriate response to the danger climate change entails.
Recent revelations that the RCMP spied on Indigenous environmental rights activist Clayton Thomas-Muller should not be dismissed as routine monitoring. They reveal a long-term, national energy strategy that is coming increasingly into conflict with Indigenous rights and assertions of Indigenous jurisdiction over lands and resources.
LISLE-SUR-TARN, France — The protests began a year ago in this quiet corner of southwestern France, as a small and peaceful gathering of hippies, environmental activists and utopians of all types set up tents to oppose the construction of a nearby dam.
In August, after local authorities sent diggers and then crushing machines to level the soil and destroy trees, clashes erupted between protesters and the police, turning this vast stretch of woodland into what many here called a war zone.
