BITCHIN’ IWD
International Women’s Day Toronto 2015 in not so many words. Yes, women still have to protest this shit. See photo gallery.
VERBATIM
“I spent a lot of my life locking up bad guys, [but] I think our criminal justice system reflects Canadian values, and I would hope that we would cling to those values as opposed to whatever the political calculation of the day.”
Toronto police Chief Bill Blair offers more evidence that he may be running for the Liberals in the upcoming federal election, criticizing a Conservative government proposal to block parole for certain types of murders last week. The chief has also supported legalization of marijuana.
CITYSCAPE
For sale: Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel’s former Carlton Street bunker. The three-storey Victorian built in 1890 was sold by Zundel in 2001 when he vamoosed to the U.S. after being denied citizenship here. Today’s asking price: $1.688 million. Features: 15 rooms, five baths, scars from 1995 pipe bomb mailed to the address. Interesting conspiracy theory about that: Canada’s spy agency ordered postal workers to allow the incendiary package through.
TAKE FIVE: Edward Snowden
Five take-aways from the National Security Agency whistle-blower’s Canadian Journalists for Free Expression video address at Ryerson on March 4.
1. More people are killed by lightning strikes every year than by domestic terrorism.
2. “Canadian intelligence agencies have some of the weakest oversight in the first world, and Bill C-51 [the Harper government’s anti-terror legislation] would only serve to shroud more of these operations in secrecy.”
3. More data, more problems. “When you collect everything about everybody, you don’t really understand any of it.”
4. Governments actually keep a closer eye on those who use encryption and other measures to secure the privacy of their communications.
5. More powerful security legislation, such as Bill C-51, creates the illusion that mass surveillance is required for our safety.
FEDS’ NORTH KOREA NUMBERS GAME
1 Number of North Koreans requesting refugee status who were granted asylum in Canada in 2014, according to the Immigration and Refugee Board
21 Number granted asylum in 2013
222 Number granted asylum in 2012
Since the tightening of Canadian regulations, North Koreans who lived in South Korea before seeking refugee status in Canada are returning there under threat of deportation. In 2014, 68 North Koreans were deported to South Korea by the Canada Border Services Agency. So far this year, 14 have been sent back. J, a former high-ranking North Korean government official currently residing in Canada (pictured above), says he will take his own life if ordered deported to South Korea. Read about him and two others facing deportation at nowtoronto.com.
BILLIONAIRE KOCH BROTHERS CUT HUGE SWATH THROUGH TAR SANDS
The extent of their holdings in the Alberta tar sands has long been rumoured, but now we have a map to prove just how much sway the U.S. billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, hold over deposits in Stephen Harper’s Alberta backyard. A map released by the San Francisco-based International Forum on Globalization (IFG) last week offers up the dirty details: leases on more of the Alberta tar sands, some 890,000 hectares (2 million acres), than oil and gas giants Exxon, Chevron and Conoco combined. What role the Koch’s enormous stake in the tar sands is playing in U.S. approval of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, not to mention Ottawa’s oil sands fever, is the big question.
TRUDEAU’S TAKEN TO TASK
Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s takedown of the Harper government’s anti-terror rhetoric in a speech to the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada in Toronto Monday, March 9 – he charged it is fomenting hatred against Muslims – was met with the predictable backlash from HarperCons. Trudeau invoked the “none is too many” line, used as the title of Irving Abella and Harold Troper’s book on Canada’s stance on Jewish refugees in the 1930s and 40s, to describe the current government’s policy toward Muslims. Now B’nai Brith has weighed in, calling Trudeau’s remarks “wholly inappropriate” and “divisive.” Federal Safety Minister Steven Blaney, meanwhile, countered growing criticism of the “promotion of terrorism” section of the feds’ anti-terror Bill C-51 by saying, “The Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers it began with words.”
