According to a study by The Guardian, the world’s top 100 oil and gas companies collected more than $30-million every hour in “unearned” profit during the first month of the Iran war, and stand to make “$230-billion by the end of the year if the price of oil continues to average $100.” That’s a pretty big “if”—but it does put an eye-watering number on the potential windfall for companies in 2026 compared to anticipated profits before the war started. And it’s why people began talking about a “windfall tax” on the companies.

“As the owners of the resource, Albertans should get the lion’s share of those profits,” wrote Alberta Federation of Labour president Gil McGowan in the first week of the war. “And the way to do that is to introduce a windfall profits tax on top of the royalties that oil companies pay in exchange for the right to exploit publicly owned assets.”

This wasn’t a sudden revelation but rather part of McGowan’s long-standing argument that Alberta must increase oil and gas royalty rates. And he’s not alone. A long list of prominent economists have been saying the same thing for years—and they doubled down as the Iran war dragged on into April. “Taxing windfall profits won’t worsen inflation; it will recapture unearned gains from corporations and resource owners and can be used to protect vulnerable populations,” declared a group of economists led by Nobel-prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz.

It all sounds straightforward. Indeed, about 25 countries had already introduced a windfall tax well before Donald Trump’s misadventure in Iran. And Alberta does have a sliding scale for oil sands royalty rates, where they increase relative to the price of oil. But this isn’t enough for critics such as McGowan.

Oil companies are suddenly awash in windfall profits—while we’re paying near-record prices for gas.

Oil companies are pushing back, arguing windfall taxes discourage investment. They quote University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe, who in 2022 said in an interview that “having a government just enact an ad hoc tax out of nowhere based on just whatever they think the rate should be—that’s problematic because it creates uncertainty.”

We also bump up against the “symmetry argument,” in which oil companies, facing a windfall tax from governments during boom times, could then demand some sort of “calamity compensation” from governments when oil prices collapse—as they did during the COVID-19 pandemic.

To save ourselves from jumping on the never-ending merry-go-round of arguments for and against a windfall profits tax, let’s just ask one short question: Would a windfall tax ever fly in Alberta The even shorter answer: No.

That’s not just because Alberta is governed by the fossil-fuel champion Danielle Smith. A windfall tax is part of a political suicide trifecta, along with raising royalty rates and introducing a provincial sales tax. The provincial NDP has also shied away from the trifecta. After campaigning in 2015 on implementing “competitive, realistic royalty rates as prices rise,” NDP leader Rachel Notley then performed a whiplash-inducing policy shift upon becoming premier. She went through the motions of a royalty review, then concluded the rates under previous Progressive Conservative governments were suddenly okay.

At the time, an irate McGowan complained that the NDP government was committing a “profound political mistake.” McGowan vowed to continue the battle for higher royalties, a fight that now extends to a windfall tax.

The public appetite for higher royalties comes and goes in direct relation to the world price of oil. When it’s over US$100 a barrel, Albertans practically march on the legislature, demanding a bigger share of energy revenues. When the price drops, so does the appetite. We felt the hunger pangs return last spring, watching our wallets drain as our tanks filled. In that context a tax on skyrocketing oil profits looked pretty good.

But even if there were a windfall profits tax, how would you, as an inflation-pummelled Albertan, benefit Alberta governments in the past have tended to spend windfall revenue to avoid making hard political decisions. The nadir of that unofficial policy came in 2006, with “Ralph Bucks.” Premier Klein, trying to boost his flagging popularity, gave a $400 “prosperity” cheque to pretty much everyone in the province. A lot of Albertans were happy. Like McGowan today, they saw it as a just counterbalance to high oil prices.

But there was no long-term plan, no saving for a rainy day; just a cheap political stunt. You could still argue a windfall tax is a good idea—but you can’t deny that Alberta has a poor track record of dealing with windfall revenues in the past.

Graham Thomson is an Edmonton-based political commentator who has covered Alberta politics since the early Don Getty era.

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by Benjamin Hertwig
FREEHAND BOOKS
2024/$24.95/300 pp.

Juiceboxers is Benjamin Hertwig’s first novel—and you’d never guess. Upon reading, you might think it was his tenth. It’s confident, intelligent and extremely well written—and it’s the first Canadian novel to come out of Canada’s military involvement in Afghanistan.

Following the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City, Canada joined the international military campaign against Afghanistan’s Taliban government, which was believed to be supporting, and possibly harbouring, the terrorist group Al-Qaeda. Canada’s military involvement after 2005 was concentrated in the dangerous Kandahar region of Afghanistan, where 2,300 Canadian soldiers were deployed.

Juiceboxers is the story of four Edmonton teenagers who join the military and go on to serve in Kandahar. They meet as army cadets in Edmonton and do their basic training together in Wainwright. The main character, Plinko, gets his nickname from a video game, but once he’s known as that, the nickname sticks and won’t come off. But what the heck, even a dumb nickname is a sign of being known and perhaps accepted.

While in training, Plinko and his friends Abdi and Walsh are asked by another army trainee, Krug, if they want to rent rooms in Krug’s house. It seems like a good idea, even though they are leery of him. Krug is, to say the least, crude. He’s foul-mouthed, porn-addicted and violent. He’s in their face at all times—the kind of guy who drops and does push-ups just for that bit of tough-guy edge. Krug calls his place “The House of Guns,” and has the hardware to back it up. He seems so theatrically evil that his three roomies assume it can’t be real.

The young men’s reasons for wanting to be soldiers are not deep, nor is it a big topic among them. Krug feels he was born for it. Plinko thinks it would be cool. Abdi, whose parents are from Somalia, is looking for inclusion—and so is Walsh, for reasons the novel will reveal.

Krug calls the other three “queers” because they aren’t tough like him. He makes fun of Abdi’s being brown. Plinko really likes Abdi and Walsh and envies the closeness of their friendship. He also envies them their close and supportive families, who are pleasant with Plinko in ways his own family isn’t.

And then the four are in Kandahar, where the rubber of playing soldiers hits the road of a dangerous war.

Benjamin Hertwig is from Edmonton and he served in the Canadian armed forces in Kandahar. Prior to this novel he wrote a book of poetry titled Slow War, also rooted in his military experience. Slow War was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award and won the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry.

Juiceboxers is not just a great first novel, it’s a great any-time-in-your-career novel. I believe it will be recognized as one of Canada’s best novels of war. It has what Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and Michael Herr’s Vietnam memoir Dispatches had: the boredom and terror of being a soldier in modern, highly mechanized warfare. Both those now-famous books more or less created a style to suit their subject, a way to bring it all uncomfortably close, close enough to feel and smell. Like those works, Hertwig’s novel is skillful, emotional and carries authentic weight. What Juiceboxers brings that goes beyond most other novels or memoirs of war is a heart-rending depiction of PTSD—the afterlife of a soldier. When Plinko gets away from war, his problems don’t go away; they grow.

This is also, importantly, a novel of friendship. Even Krug, who seems mostly brutal and hateful, is revealed as vulnerably human and more tragic than vile in the end. Plinko and the others from the House of Guns don’t see one another much after Kandahar, but, in some other sense, they are stitched together, whether they want to be or not.

Fred Stenson’s many books include the novels Who By Fire, The Trade, Lightning and The Great Karoo.

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It’s impossible to say why the incident ended as it did—why, in the words of Edmonton Police Chief Dale McFee, “We are incredibly lucky that there are no reported injuries and no lives have been lost,” including those of a visiting class of Grade 1 students. It’s impossible to say why, 10 months after the fact, we’re not talking about downtown Edmonton as the site of a mass murder, or about how “Edmonton City Hall” has become synonymous with “Sandy Hook” and “Columbine” and “École Polytechnique,” or living with the knowledge that Edmonton mayor Amarjeet Sohi was the first Canadian politician in over 50 years to be assassinated. City police and the RCMP have released no details about why the incident ended so quickly. Gun users speculated online, based on watching security footage, that the shooter’s rifle jammed. “He’s using a higher capacity magazine, but for some reason… stops shooting at the third or fourth pull,” one man writes. “[This] indicates a malfunction. He fiddles with the handle but then drops the rifle.”

If we hadn’t been “incredibly lucky”—if the gun (perhaps) wasn’t a cheap SKS variant and hadn’t (probably) jammed, or if the shooter had brought a second gun—Alberta today would be different. We might be remembering front-page photos of blood streaked across the marble zigzags of Edmonton City Hall’s foyer, or mourning the murders of a dozen Edmontonians, or sickened at the thought that a class of schoolchildren witnessed everything. And almost immediately after the massacre we’d have become livid at our provincial government.

One of the first things most civilized people do after hearing about a mass shooting in their country is demand a ban on the type of gun used. This is what happened after mass shootings in Port Arthur, Australia (1996: 35 dead), and Dunblane, Scotland (1996: 17 dead, most of them kindergarten students), and Utøya, Norway (2011; 68 dead), and Christchurch, New Zealand (2019: 51 dead). The public in each case was strongly in favour of tougher restrictions, as were police, and support came from across the political spectrum. A wide array of guns—automatic, semi-automatic, “military-grade” and, in the UK, most handguns—were eventually banned. Close to a million guns were surrendered through buybacks. Norway already had some restrictions but added the Ruger Mini-14 model used to slaughter dozens of children at a summer camp to its list of prohibited weapons.

“We are incredibly lucky that there are no reported injuries and no lives have been lost.”

Canada is not so different. After the massacre at Montreal’s École Polytechnique in 1989, when a gunman murdered 14 women, our federal government reacted to the public’s horror by passing legislation that included mandatory registration and licensing for gun owners, a national registry, background checks, and verification processes and controls on ammunition sales. The legislation had support across party lines. It took years to create, however, and didn’t preclude Canadians from owning the semi-automatic rifles still associated today with mass shootings. (Canada in 1977 had banned fully automatic guns: those “with the capability of discharging projectiles in rapid succession during one pressure of the trigger.” Think machine guns or the Rambo movies.)

Canada has now banned “assault weapons” as well—or is trying to. Our federal government, borrowing from the US Department of Justice, defines these as “semi-automatic firearms with a large magazine of ammunition…designed and configured for rapid fire” (i.e., the trigger must be pulled repeatedly, but an experienced shooter can get off at least one shot per second). It announced its ban in the aftermath of our country’s worst mass shooting, April 18–19, 2020, when a 51-year-old man impersonating an RCMP officer and armed with two semi-automatic rifles roamed rural Nova Scotia from Portapique to Shubenacadie and murdered 22 people, including a pregnant healthcare aide and a 23-year-veteran RCMP constable.

For nearly 50 years advocacy groups and police in Canada have been calling for a ban. As far back as 1977 the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police had argued “semi-automatic firearms are basically designed as an instrument of war” and have “no sporting use either in the cultural or the recreational sense.” And the federal Liberals had already promised more gun controls following the 2019 Danforth shooting in Toronto (two dead; 13 injured). Portapique jolted them into action. On April 20, 2020, then-public safety minister Bill Blair declared his government would prohibit “military style assault weapons.” “There have been far too many incidents of gun violence in our country,” he said, promising “measures… that significantly reduce those incidents and keep people safe.”

The public was behind him. According to an Ipsos poll that May, compiled after Portapique, 82 per cent of Canadians supported a ban, including 77 per cent of Albertans. A concurrent Angus Reid poll put support across the country at 78 per cent for “a complete ban on civilian possession of assault weapons.” That survey found 60 per cent of conservative voters supported a ban, as did 70 per cent of former gun owners and even 45 per cent of current gun owners. And Portapique didn’t much change public opinion. A year before that mass shooting, Angus Reid had found 75 per cent support among Canadians for an assault weapons ban.

On May 1, less than two weeks after the rampage in Nova Scotia, Blair announced a ban on “over 1,500 models and variants of assault-style firearms” as well as certain components and magazines. The list included the Ruger Mini-14 used at École Polytechnique, Utøya and Portapique, and the AR-15 used in hundreds of US shootings, including Sandy Hook and Columbine. These can no longer be legally used, imported or sold in Canada.

The restrictions came with a two-year amnesty (until 2022) and a promised buyback to be overseen by the RCMP in which owners would be compensated when surrendering their weapons. Gun control advocates celebrated. It looked like Canada was belatedly following the lead of countries that outlawed weapons used in mass killings. But four years later the ban is in limbo.

On the same day that Canada banned assault weapons, then-premier Jason Kenney issued a statement. “The Government of Alberta is concerned about all crime, including the illegal use of firearms,” he said. “[But] today’s order by Ottawa does little to target criminals. Instead, Ottawa is singling out law-abiding Canadians who purchased their property legally, have owned these items safely for years, and who have committed no crimes.” In the years since then, the UCP government has continued to oppose federal efforts to ban guns—which Kenney has called “legally purchased inanimate objects.”

Advocates on all sides of the debate have long argued about what constitutes an “assault weapon” or “military style.” Owners of these guns dismiss such terms as fear-mongering akin to referring to chef knives as “stabbing tools.” But no one disputes that these “inanimate objects” were first designed for soldiers to use to kill other soldiers (e.g., the AR-15 was mass produced for American troops in Vietnam). And ads in archived newspapers remind us that gun shops in Edmonton and Calgary were advertising the likes of AR-15s as “assault weapons” only a few decades ago. Gun advocates in Canada pivoted to calling them “sporting rifles” after École Polytechnique.

For nearly 50 years advocacy groups and police have called for an assault weapons ban.

The Alberta Chief Firearms Office (ACFO)—created by Kenney in June 2020, and which has taken on much of Alberta’s pro-gun advocacy work—responded to questions about the ban by saying “ ‘assault-style’ is not a type of firearms classification for the purposes of regulation under any federal or provincial legislation that governs firearms such as the Criminal Code or the Firearms Act.” This is true. So, in addition to banning 1,500 specific makes and models, the federal government is trying to restrict “assault-style” guns based on a certain level of muzzle energy (thus encompassing sniper rifles) and bore diameter (the threshold captures the most powerful shotguns).

Unlike Americans, Canadians have no enshrined right to keep and carry guns. This has been so since Canada’s founding, and the distinction has been upheld many times by our courts. In summer 2024 a group of UCP members from Medicine Hat, calling themselves the Black Hat Gang, asked premier Danielle Smith to add the right to keep and bear firearms to Alberta’s Bill of Rights. In October Smith said she’d introduce legislation to do just that. Canada’s Charter, however, is unclear.

Gun proponents’ strongest objection is that some guns Canada would ban are used by hunters, including Indigenous people. Even as the ACFO is advising Albertans about how to comply with a ban, it will “continue to stand up for Alberta’s law-abiding hunters.”

Canada’s list of 1,500 “assault weapons” was made by executive order. Four years later it isn’t finalized. Facing opposition from Alberta and other provinces, hunters, gun makers, gun collectors, property rights advocates, various MPs and the Assembly of First Nations, in March 2022 the federal government extended the amnesty until October 2023. In November 2023 it extended the amnesty again, until October 2025. It has withdrawn amendments to legislation that would have clarified which guns are banned and why. Today our politicians are still arguing over which guns are uniquely well suited to killing moose at a distance and which can too easily slaughter a crowd of civilians up close.

Guns seized by police at the Coutts border blockade in 2022, including a semi-automatic rifle modified to shoot 30 rounds in nine seconds.

The debate doesn’t fall neatly along partisan lines. Some NDP MPs call the list overkill. The federal NDP says Canada can’t impede “those who use long guns for hunting and farming, and can’t hinder the treaty rights of Indigenous peoples.” But former federal Conservative leader Erin O’Toole supported the ban. “I want to make my position on firearms perfectly clear,” he said during the 2021 election. “First, the ban on assault weapons will remain in place. Second, the present ban on a number of other firearms that were reclassified in 2020 will remain in place.” He called for “taking the politics out of” the discussion. The Trudeau government in May 2023 said it would re-establish an independent committee to review gun classification. Then-public safety minister Marco Mendicino said this would “take the misinformation out of these debates.”

The federal Conservatives, now under new leadership, might kill the ban. Pierre Poilievre calls the policy a failure, saying last spring about the prime minister: “He has spent 40 million tax dollars that could have secured our ports and our borders, and he has not taken in a single, solitary gun.” (He didn’t elaborate on who’s responsible for delaying the buyback.) At a rural Ontario rally last June, Poilievre, asked by a gun owner his intentions should he become PM, said “We [will] just reverse everything Trudeau has done.”

Regardless, the UCP government says it will prevent the RCMP in Alberta from taking part in an assault weapons buyback. If need be, it will replace the RCMP with a provincial force, and prevent local police from taking part by stopping them from making funding deals with Ottawa.

In the meantime, gun-control advocates are frustrated. “Instead of working on the law, we find ourselves fighting about details and disinformation and procedures,” said Heidi Rathjen, coordinator of PolySeSouvient, whose organization formed in response to the École Polytechnique massacre. Gun owners are in limbo. And some gun makers are proceeding as though the ban isn’t real. “While sales were no doubt initially dampened by the Liberal government’s [changes], the Black Creek Labs SRV2 Siberian semi-auto rifle is in production,” reported Calibre magazine in 2023. “Now, with the Liberals removing those amendments… presumably more shooters are emboldened to put their money down on one of these made-in-Canada rifles.”

Other complications include that no one can say how many guns might be affected by Canada’s ban. According to a 2018 federal report, “Because ‘assault weapon’ is not a legally defined term, providing a count of how many are held in Canada is not possible. However, there are about 100,000 legally owned non-handgun firearms—usually rifles and shotguns—registered to individuals. Some of these could have features consistent with what is described as an assault weapon.” ‘Features’ is a telling word. Guns can be made more powerful, or modified with aftermarket parts, potentially turning a legal gun into an illegal one. Even gun-control advocates acknowledge that an “assault weapon” is not so much a standalone, standardized item, like a baseball bat, but a collection of integrated parts, not all of which are easily controlled or banned. (Magazines and ammo are regulated separately.) Similarly we don’t know how many “assault weapons” are in Alberta. The ACFO says, “[We have] received estimates from the federal government that approximately 30,000 firearms in Alberta meet this criteria.”

A further twist is that the federal government hasn’t only banned “assault weapons.” On December 15, 2023, Bill C-21 received royal assent. The law toughens penalties for gun smuggling and trafficking, adds new offences for “ghost guns” (which lack serial numbers and are 3D-printed or made from parts) and creates new “red flag” laws and licence revocation provisions to address domestic violence or self-harm. Most notably the bill bans the sale, purchase, import or transfer (but not ownership) of handguns in Canada.

Shotguns and hunting rifles may have “historic and cultural importance.” AR-15s do not.

Even the UCP government can get behind tougher smuggling penalties or a crackdown on ghost guns. But a handgun freeze—whatever its merits or drawbacks—is another kettle of fish. Canadians seem to believe that handguns represent less of a threat to them or their kids than do the weapons used in Canada’s worst mass shootings. The people who responded to pollsters after Portapique declared overwhelming support for ridding the country of AR-15s. They didn’t feel quite the same way about pistols and revolvers. Ipsos and Angus Reid both found at least 10 per cent less support for a handgun ban than for an assault-weapons ban, with support falling to as low as 43 per cent in Alberta.

An ordinary Canadian, following the debate through headlines and soundbites, could easily conflate efforts to ban “assault weapons” with a push to eliminate other guns. Handguns are more commonly used in gang violence, domestic and intimate partner violence, suicides and accidental shootings. Compelling arguments can be made for banning them, but reducing mass shootings isn’t on top of the list. When the UCP says “Trudeau’s policies won’t stop gangs,” they’re talking about handguns.

For that matter, when the UCP evokes the “historic and cultural importance of firearms” to our province, they mean shotguns and bolt-action hunting rifles, not AR-15s or their equivalents. Indeed, while something like a quarter of Canadians own a gun (mostly traditional rifles and handguns), few have owned anything resembling an “assault weapon.” But everyone is a potential target for the man who would use an assault weapon for its original purpose.

The arguments opposing a ban on assault weapons are that the federal government’s “ridiculous firearms agenda”—in the words of Kenney—is an affront to law-abiding property owners, including hunters, and that we’ll waste a huge amount of money buying back 100,000 scary-looking but otherwise harmless inanimate objects. If the ban goes ahead, many hundreds of collectors in Alberta will be made to surrender treasured property, even guns that don’t work or haven’t been removed from a locked cabinet in years. Heirlooms handed down from parents will be caught in a gun-grabbing driftnet. Some collectors will choose to keep contraband, becoming criminals with the stroke of a pen, left to worry about when the RCMP will come to inspect their collection.

Many recreational shooters—those who don’t use handguns or smaller shotguns—will have to change their hobby. Some gun ranges will lose business. At Calgary’s Shooting Edge, for example, four of 16 ranges were dedicated to “centrefire rifles,” which include AR-15s and AK-47s (specifically, a Chinese-made descendant of Russia’s famous Kalashnikov). The Shooting Edge shut down in October, blaming the federal ban.

Many hunters will find that weapons they have used safely for years are now illegal to own. They’ll lose lawfully acquired property. They’ll be forced to surrender trusted tools in exchange for compensation they believe is unfair. Some of their new guns will be different—more expensive, harder to operate, less powerful.

Indigenous groups—who know a bit about government mass confiscations—haven’t been assuaged by promises that the final list of banned guns won’t impact subsistence hunting. Nunavut Tunngavik vice-president Paul Irngaut told Canadian senators in 2023 that Inuit hunters face unique dangers and can’t always access search and rescue services. “Semi-automatic rifles are effective and necessary as a humane method to quickly dispatch animals, and as defence against polar bears, grizzly bears and wolves,” he said. If the federal government gets its way, some Indigenous Canadians will be forced to trade higher-powered guns for traditional rifles and deterrents such as bear spray.

The argument for a ban on assault weapons, however, is more compelling: Canada could prevent a mass shooting.

Surveys show that many gun owners support an assault-weapons ban. Some even argue in online forums that a ban on AR-15s is neither a slight on law-abiding gun owners nor the start of a slippery slope toward outlawing hunting or sport shooting. Canadians—Indigenous and otherwise—will continue to hunt, albeit some with new guns and different precautions. Following their assault weapon bans, people in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Norway continue to hunt, using guns. Shooting ranges will sound a bit different, but many will survive.

When most of Canada’s assault weapons have been carted away and destroyed, Canadians will not only feel safer, they will in fact be safer. The correlation between lower rates of gun ownership and less gun violence is backed by research. A 2000 study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery concluded: “Across [26] developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides.” Other factors such as the effectiveness of mental health supports and gun-owner screening contribute. But the simple fact is that where there are more guns, there are more deaths from guns.

Australians appear to have less to fear from gun violence today following their 1996–1997 buyback, when over 650,000 guns were taken out of circulation (by a conservative government). From a 2006 article in the journal Injury Prevention: “In the 18 years before the gun law reforms there were 13 mass shootings in Australia, and none in the 10.5 years afterwards.”

The rate of gun crime has fallen in the UK since its government banned civilians from owning most guns, and the country’s homicide rate is the lowest in the OECD (and one-sixth of Canada’s rate).

“[One] thing to remember is that the people who are shot, injured or killed have rights too,” said Calgary-based surgeon, hunter, self-identified conservative voter, and assault-weapons-ban proponent John Kortbeek in a 2021 interview with Cold Steel: Canadian Journal of Surgery Podcast. “They didn’t ask to be shot, they didn’t ask to be killed, and they didn’t ask to be disabled. And that’s a pretty stiff price to pay for ready access to handguns and military style assault weapons.”

Shotguns and hunting rifles may have “historic and cultural importance.” AR-15s do not.

last January at Edmonton City Hall, premier Danielle Smith appeared onstage at events in Calgary and Edmonton with former Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson. Carlson owns guns, including an AR-15, and has likened gun control in the US to “class warfare.” As he told the NRA, “The Left hate that guns are tools and that millions of normal people own them. They hate that guns are also a metaphor for true individual freedom.” Neither Smith nor Carlson mentioned the previous day’s incident in Edmonton, nor did Smith’s government issue a statement.

That shooting is largely forgotten. In March the gunman was charged with two terrorism offences and nine other charges. In July he pleaded not guilty. City Hall was closed to the public for two months, then was reopened with metal detectors and other new security measures. Albertans moved on.

Edmonton mayor Amarjeet Sohi is now doubtless safer. But that city also has the Legislature. Alberta has other government buildings, and malls, nightclubs, country music festivals, political conventions, church gatherings. It has schools and daycares and children’s camps. Both my 10-year-old daughter’s public elementary school and my 5-year-old’s preschool in Calgary now do lockdown drills, where they bolt the doors, turn off the lights and take silent cover under desks and tables “in case the bad guys come” (my 5-year-old’s words).

A mass shooting leaves a permanent scar on society. “Certain dates are written into our country’s story as defining days,” Norway’s King Harald said on the 10th anniversary of Utøya. Then-prime minister Jacinda Ardern called the Christchurch massacre one of her country’s “darkest days.” “We are suffering,” said Colchester County, NS, mayor Christine Blair in spring 2024, four years after Portapique. “It’s huge here, and it has affected everyone.”

But the flipside is true too. Gun restrictions reinforce and shape cultural values and norms, in the same way other legislation has long-term effects (e.g., seat belt laws). If mass shootings can traumatize a society, reasonable gun restrictions can inspire a more peaceful one.

The Mass Casualty Commission that was struck following the 2020 massacre in Nova Scotia recom-mended in its exhaustive report a ban in Canada on “all semi-automatic rifles and shotguns that discharge centre-fire ammunition and that are designed to accept detachable magazines with capacities of more than five rounds.” It did so after concluding that mass shootings pose a “significant though rare” threat to Canadians.

But a mass shooting almost did happen in Alberta last January. It may have been prevented only by dumb luck. If a mass shooting does happen here, and three or seven or 22 people are killed, including schoolchildren, a horrified Albertan and Canadian public will immediately demand a ban on the assault weapons used in the massacre. And then we’ll find out that we already did ban these guns—or tried to, before opponents, including Alberta’s government, decided that the chance to prevent a mass shooting wasn’t worth the price.

Evan Osenton is the editor-in-chief of Alberta Views.

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The post We Could Prevent A Mass Shooting appeared first on Alberta Views.

A person reading this story today might think, “How quaint!” But in the light of the UCP government’s approach to school curriculum, I’m not so sure it is merely quaint.

The PCs began the curriculum review, but the quarrel began when the Notley government completed it and let the public see it. By now the opposition was the UCP, with Jason Kenney as leader. He decided to make challenging the curriculum a hefty platform plank, and launched cannonball one in 2018. What would he do with the new curriculum “Put it through the shredder!”

As the election neared, Kenney said he’d stop the “ideological rewrite” of the curriculum. He’d replace it with “essential knowledge and skills, instead of political agendas and failed teaching fads.” The NDP’s response was that the new curriculum was hardly their creation. It was the result of untold hours of committee work, much of it by teachers. They’d also consulted with parents and experts. Pressed for specific criticism, Kenney vowed to end “the disaster of discovery math.”

The teaching of math has traditionally begun with skills: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. Brick by brick, a skills foundation is built. Only then do you present a real-life problem: for example, an apple pie that must be fairly shared by eight people.

In discovery math, you begin with the pie. By grappling with the pie problem, students “discover” the skill needed to solve it.

If you have friends or children in their 30s, you know this debate is not new. The Cold War was new when educators began debating whether rote memorization or experiential learning was superior. Kenney, posing as champion of “back to the basics” and high-stakes testing of 6–8-year-olds, is fighting a fight older than himself. Kenney’s pal Doug Ford is also tortured by discovery math. It’s all very Jonathan Swiftian, isn’t it Eighteenth century Gulliver, lost sailor, finds the tiny people of Lilliput and Blefuscu locked in endless war over which end of a boiled egg (big or little) is the right one to open.

The “back to the basics” math quarrel is not only stale, it is also a big stinking red herring. I don’t believe Kenney lives or dies over whether we start with the pie or the times tables. What irks him most about the new curriculum is its goals for science and wellness. Playing up to parents mad because they can’t help their children with discovery math homework is his sneaky way of kicking open the door.

The new K–4 draft curriculum states in its science overview (Grade 1) that “people are connected to nature” and “can impact nature.” In Grade 3, students would learn about sources of energy but also how their actions can help with conservation. The social studies overview for Grade 3 speaks of “respect for diverse identities” and “relationship to land and place informing decision making.” The word “consent” appears for the first time. That’s right: teachers in 2019 would instruct children from the start of schooling that they have a right to consent or not consent to being hugged or touched.

We can see where that’s headed, can’t we Special clubs for LGBTQ students; denial of parental rights. Why, the NDP were trying to grow a generation of environmentalists! They start by teaching them about energy, and next thing they tell them that combusting oil causes pollution. After that Climate change!

Kenney’s leadership style is to start each argument with Trumpian bombast. When it comes to actually doing something (on equalization, say, or pipelines), his actions speak more softly than his words. It may prove so with curriculum too. He was going to put it all through the shredder. He did, in fact, cancel an agreement with the Alberta Teachers Association by which teachers had been carrying much of the load on curriculum development. Why is he so suspicious of teachers Because they’re organized. He doesn’t trust organized workers.

Kenney created an advisory panel to lead his curriculum review, not one of whose members, as one educator put it on Twitter, “has been an active teacher in a classroom in this millennium.” The new curriculum is now “paused.” It will likely be “walked back.” I’d put money on its eventually saying: “Scientific opinion differs as to whether human actions are responsible for global warming.”        

When it gets to Earth, I hope it doesn’t say: “With respect to the shape and motion of our planet, opinions differ.”

Fred Stenson’s most recent novel is Who By Fire (Doubleday). Other books include The Trade, Lightning and The Great Karoo.

The post Educational Warfare appeared first on Alberta Views.

The rhetoric has only grown more raucous since the federal government decided last May to buy the project from Kinder Morgan, and more still after the Federal Court of Appeal quashed the government’s approval of the pipeline in August. Pipeline proponents’ position has been mostly straightforward. “The Trans Mountain expansion project is of vital interest to Canada and Canadians,” Finance Minister Bill Morneau told the press when the federal purchase plan was announced. “Our government’s position is clear: It must be built and it will be built.” Not a lot of ambiguity there. Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, meanwhile, called the deal “a major step forward.” Then she told Albertans to “pick up those tools,” which was perhaps less clear, in that not all of us necessarily had pipeline construction equipment ready and waiting in our backyard sheds.

In any case, these were nowhere near the first words on TMX and they are far from the last. Conservative opponents of the federal Liberals and Alberta NDP were, in a shocking turn, unimpressed with the decision to buy TMX. But they found themselves in the maddening quandary of having to take a stance against a project they are even more rabidly in favour of. Federal Conservative leader Andrew Scheer called the deal an admission that Trudeau had “failed Canadian energy workers and investors,” while Alberta United Conservative leader Jason Kenney clarified that it was not just your common garden variety of failure but rather a “catastrophic failure” on the part of both Trudeau and Notley. He then outlined a multi-point plan that Trudeau should have enacted, which called for the feds to basically cease being a government in BC, hence presumably to let the coastal bastards freeze in the dark. BC premier John Horgan, meanwhile, said the only thing that mattered was “defending our coast …from a dilbit spill,” which he added would be—wait for it—“catastrophic.”

Ah, but these are just the bland statements of those milquetoasts in elected office. You’ve surely heard many other, much more colourful things about TMX from voices outside the stuffy halls of power. First Nations chiefs Stewart Phillip and Serge Simon, for example, wrote in The Globe and Mail that TMX was a choice between “collective survival or collective suicide.” In reference to the Notley–Trudeau stance that the pipeline approval was a trade-off for more ambitious climate change policies, David Suzuki called it “a crock of shit.” In more measured tones, the Parkland Institute said the project was built on “faulty assumptions,” and Environmental Defence drew up a list of 10 reasons to oppose TMX. Prominent environmentalist Tzeporah Berman, formerly of Notley’s Oil Sands Advisory Group, promised that “all hell is about to break loose in BC.”

So, you know, fair to say you’ve probably heard that opinions differ on TMX.

Opponents say TMX will create an intolerable increase in spill risk. In truth, the science regarding bitumen and spills is far less certain and damning.

As for Canadians in general, we’re actually much less strident in our TMX takes. As of May 2018, national support for the project (per Ipsos) sat around 56 per cent, including 55 per cent in BC; 84 per cent of Albertans say they’re for it. Abacus Data has for years tracked Canadian attitudes on building new pipelines, and opposition has remained virtually unchanged at around 22 per cent; the only significant shift from 2014 to today is that those who feel “positive” about pipelines has shrunk from 58 to 44 per cent, while those who feel “neutral” has grown from 20 to 36 per cent.

In general, then, most Canadians who aren’t totally against TMX might be for it, but they aren’t quite clear enough on the details to maintain a strong position. It’s perhaps understandable, amid all this inflated rhetoric, that so many Canadians are left wondering what the deal truly is with TMX. Is it environmental catastrophe or economic necessity Is it vital infrastructure or looming disaster Argle-bargle or fooferaw So let’s try to sort some truth from the rhetoric.

From what you may have heard from the BC government, oil spills would appear to be the biggest deal about TMX. Virtually every time Premier Horgan addresses the topic, he reiterates some version of a line that appeared in a Maclean’s column he wrote the day after the federal government announced it was buying the project: “My priority is to defend BC’s interests from the economic and environmental costs of a spill.”

Elected in the spring of 2017 on a promise to use “every tool in the toolbox” to stop TMX, Horgan’s government would eventually sign on to a court case mounted by a Vancouver-area First Nation against the federal government for failing to properly consult with them before approving the pipeline. This case led to the Federal Court of Appeal decision in August 2018 that brought the pipeline project to a halt.

Horgan’s worry is shared by dozens of coastal First Nations, many environmental NGOs and a considerable portion of the BC public (about 37 per cent of whom oppose TMX under any and all circumstances). There are grounds for these concerns. Oil tankers have undoubtedly been known to spill, and pipelines surely do spring leaks. On the other hand, TMX represents a “twinning” of an existing pipeline—it follows the same route, and presumably presents no greater risk in and of itself than an existing pipeline more than a half century old.

The specific issue, opponents say, is that TMX will create a singularly intolerable increase in the risk of a much more damaging spill, because dilbit is uniquely difficult to clean up, with as-yet-undetermined properties, especially in salt water. Actually, that understates these concerns. The BC environmental group Dogwood says about dilbit: “It’s toxic, it’s explosive, and if it spills in water, you’re screwed.” Their release was entitled “Climate action won’t make bitumen float”—this because it’s become pretty much established truth in BC environmentalist circles that bitumen will sink too fast to be cleaned up.

In truth, the science regarding bitumen and spills is far less certain and damning. As many TMX critics note, a 2015 Royal Society of Canada survey noted major gaps in the research, in part because the science is in its infancy—dilbit hasn’t sloshed around in pipes and tanker hulls long enough to yield a body of conclusive evidence. Still, the research in the years since the Royal Society survey seems to indicate that dilbit does, in fact, float on salt water. (It also floats on freshwater at anything less than the very warm summer temperatures that caused it to sink during the Kalamazoo River spill in July 2010.) By the estimate of one of the co-authors of a National Academy of Sciences review that is frequently (and erroneously) cited in support of the certainty of dilbit sinking, emergency crews would have up to three weeks to clean up a spill before waves and sediment began to break up the mat-like clumps dilbit forms on salt water. (It’s also worth noting that conventional crude disperses rapidly in a spill, which is why it’s so difficult to clean up.)

So the research doesn’t seem to indicate that dilbit poses a singularly high risk in the event of a spill. But what about the probability of a spill itself?

Going once again by Premier Horgan’s public statements, oil tanker traffic in the Salish Sea would appear to be the next biggest deal after spills. Rare is the Horgan speech on the matter that doesn’t mention how TMX would mean “a seven-fold increase in tanker traffic.” On this point, Horgan is joined by virtually every environmental activist in the Lower Mainland and great hordes of TMX opponents on social media, all of them invoking that “7X increase” so often it’s a wonder it hasn’t become a hashtag of its own. The Federal Court of Appeal’s decision nullifying the pipeline’s approval also explicitly called for greater clarity on the pipeline’s potential risks to marine environments.

But as with so much of the TMX debate, this “seven-fold increase” is both basically true and yet not unequivocally a harbinger of disaster. First, the truth of it: It’s estimated that the 590,000 additional barrels of dilbit brought to Vancouver daily by TMX would boost Aframax-scale oil tanker traffic from the current 120 transits per year (roughly one tanker arriving and departing per week) to 816 per year (roughly one arriving and departing per day). The most basic math indicates this is an increase by a factor of 6.8. And on the face of it, that sounds like a significant, maybe even reckless change in the scale of shipping traffic—and in the risk of an oil spill.

That would only be the whole story, though, if oil tankers were a significant portion of the Port of Vancouver’s commercial shipping traffic (they are not), or if the Salish Sea’s ecological risk from commercial shipping came down exclusively to oil tankers loading in Vancouver (it does not). So here’s the bigger picture: Vancouver is by far Canada’s largest port, the port of call for more than half of the country’s container cargo and a major coal export site. About nine of what the industry calls “large commercial vessels” arrive there each day. So while TMX would mean a seven-fold increase in oil tanker traffic, it would mean only an 11 per cent increase in overall large commercial vessel traffic.

While TMX would mean a seven-fold increase in oil tanker traffic, it would mean only an 11 per cent increase in overall large commercial vessel traffic.

What’s more, Vancouver shares its shipping channels with the Port of Seattle—America’s fifth-largest port, also a major coal exporter and the hub of a region that is home to five oil refineries. All told, the Salish Sea sees approximately 16,000 “large commercial vessel transits” each year—that’s 43 per day—and there is significantly more oil tanker traffic in and out of Seattle than there would be in Vancouver even after TMX’s notorious seven-fold increase.

Again, there’s no denying TMX would significantly increase the volume of oil tanker traffic on the BC coast and, consequently, the risk of an oil spill that would be, as BC’s premier likes to put it, catastrophic. To assuage such concerns, the federal government launched a $1.5-billion enhancement of ocean protection and spill response measures in 2016. This new safety and regulatory regime—combined with a $150-million investment by industry in the Western Canada Marine Response Corporation, including six new spill response bases and 43 new watercraft—is far more robust than the one under whose watch the original Trans Mountain pipeline’s oil tankers navigated the Salish Sea without catastrophic incident for 65 years. And for what it’s worth—quite a lot to TMX boosters, apparently next to nothing to opponents—the risk analysis conducted on behalf of Kinder Morgan by the Norwegian organization Det Norske Veritas (a world leader in maritime safety oversight) concluded that “the region is capable of safely accommodating the additional one laden crude oil tanker per day increase that will result from the Project.”

So that’s the deal with tanker traffic.

It’s a less common topic in the TMX discussion than traffic volumes and spills, but still you might have heard about the southern resident killer whales, a population of orcas that live year-round in the southern end of the Salish Sea. “There are 76 remaining southern resident killer whales who transit the Pacific coast,” Greenpeace Canada’s Mike Hudema wrote on Twitter. “This is no place for an oil tanker super highway.” As I say, Hudema is describing what is already one of the busiest shipping channels on the continent. This is pretty crucial, because too often the situation is portrayed the way Hudema has framed it—as a binary choice between saving an endangered species and permitting more oil tanker traffic.

Now, first, there is no downplaying the fate that has befallen this orca population—it is a tragedy. Their numbers are in decline, and it has been three years since a female in the pod has given birth to a healthy calf. This summer, a calf died just after its birth and its mother spent 17 days carrying her baby balanced on her nose. It’s hard to imagine a more brutal and heartbreaking image of environmental decline.

Still, this is the grim status of the southern resident killer whale population before TMX pipe has transported a single barrel of dilbit. One of the male orcas failed to return to the Salish Sea this year and is presumed dead, and the underfed females seem unable to give birth to healthy calves and nurse them properly. The pod also lost several members to aquatic theme parks a generation ago—just two adult males have fathered more than half the calves born in the last 30 years. Much is unknown about what’s reducing the orcas’ numbers and interfering with reproduction, but a certain and major contributor is the decline in stocks of their most important food—chinook salmon.

Another significant culprit in the pod’s decline is boat noise. Heavy commercial and recreational traffic disrupts the orcas’ communications and pushes them out of some of their favourite feeding grounds—Haro Strait off the southern tip of Vancouver Island, for example. In recent years new regulations have increased the distance whale-watching boats must keep from the orcas in an attempt to reduce stress. And for the past two summers the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority has run a pilot program where commercial vessels slow their engines as they pass through Haro Strait in the summer when the orcas are feeding there.

Beyond all this, pollution of many kinds has both shrunk salmon populations and sent bioaccumulated toxins up the food chain to the orcas. The sources include mines and other industrial sites up the Fraser River, as well as Seattle’s wastewater treatment plant, which overflows and dumps raw sewage into the ecosystem with alarming frequency, and the City of Victoria, which has pumped its raw sewage into the Salish Sea for decades and has only now begun building a modern treatment plant.

Too often the situation is portrayed as a binary choice between saving an endangered species and permitting more oil tanker traffic.

There’s no question human activity is mostly to blame for the decline of the southern resident orcas. Another huge oil tanker traversing the Salish Sea each day will undoubtedly contribute to the noise problem, and a major spill would be disastrous for the entire region. But given that there is not even vague talk of reducing other kinds of shipping traffic in the region—the Port of Vancouver plans to expand from nine large commercial vessels per day to around 12 by 2026—is it fair to say that one daily tanker represents the decisive factor in the survival of the whales in an ecosystem under attack from all sides?

Though sometimes overshadowed by spill concerns in the rhetorical battle, greenhouse gas emissions are ultimately the biggest deal when it comes to TMX and the health of the planet. They are the reason pipeline debates loom so large in the national political discourse, and competing ideas about how to reduce them represent the fundamental division between the pro- and anti-TMX camps. Trudeau’s Liberals and Notley’s NDP see TMX as a necessary trade-off, a way to keep Canada’s oil and gas sector profitable during the long transition from fossil fuels and a means of staving off a political swing to the reactionary right like the one that recently seized Ontario. TMX opponents view the project as a guarantee of further expansion in the oil sands, ensuring spiking emissions and blown targets—what one academic called “a bet against the success of the Paris climate agreement.”

So what’s the deal with TMX and greenhouse gas emissions The most basic numbers, though sometimes disputed, are well established. The ones the National Energy Board used in its approval of the pipeline suggest that without new pipelines for bitumen, Canada could reduce its overall emissions by an additional 10–11 megatonnes (Mt). In 2016 Canada’s emissions were 704 Mt, so stopping TMX could be worth about a 1.5 per cent reduction (though this is being generous, because the NEB calculation included potential emissions from other proposed pipelines such as Enbridge’s Line 3 project and Keystone XL).

The logic of opposition to TMX on climate grounds, then, is simple enough: If the goal is to slash emissions as much as possible, wherever possible, then why not cut an easy 1.5 per cent by simply not building any new oil sands infrastructure—this presumably as a necessary first step toward phasing out oil sands production entirely?

The counter-argument takes issue with the assumption of ease and the necessity of phasing out. In the absence of TMX, for starters, oil sands operators don’t immediately cut capital budgets or reduce production by the number of barrels they’d planned to ship down the pipeline. An estimated 620,000 barrels per day of new oil sands production is scheduled to come online by 2020, and it’s not contingent on TMX being built—it will simply find other routes to market, either by other pipelines or by rail.

And even if stopping TMX were able to cut those 10–11 Mt, would this be a particularly efficient way to reduce emissions Economist Trevor Tombe of the University of Calgary calculated the total cost of reducing oil sands production by 450,000 barrels per day (the amount that would produce an 11 Mt reduction) and found that it would mean $18-billion in losses. This equates to a cost of between $1,500 and $2,000 per tonne of carbon dioxide reduced—more than 60 times the current cost per tonne under Alberta’s carbon tax. This, to use a technical term, is super-duper inefficient.

There’s also a presumption built into opposing TMX on climate grounds, which is that stopping the project is the first of many decisive and increasingly rapid steps toward hitting Paris targets and building a low-carbon economy in Canada and around the world. If any pipeline opponent has drawn up a political map of that strategy, however, they’ve kept it well hidden. The presumption underlying Trudeau’s and Notley’s support for the project is that if TMX isn’t built, it could well lead to conservative governments before long in Edmonton, Ottawa, even Victoria—and that such a swing might well set back any meaningful action at all on climate change by a decade or more. The fragile, imperfect consensus that led to Canada’s Paris targets and coordinated provincial government action on climate change, after all, took more than two decades and the freakish coincidence of centrist or left-leaning governments in every province other than Saskatchewan. Canada may not see such agreement on an issue as complex and contentious as climate change for a very long time. Better, then—the argument goes—to do everything possible to build momentum now, even if it means lending full support to a pipeline and losing friends among the urgent-climate-action-yesterday crowd.

The economics of TMX are a very big deal for Trudeau and Notley. Their support of the project is predicated not just on keeping their climate consensus together but on the belief that long-term climate action needs a profitable oil and gas sector to prop up the Canadian economy—and thus their political fortunes—for the foreseeable future. And the profitability of Canada’s oil sector, so the argument goes, gets a big boost from TMX.

There’s some evidence to back this assertion. As the TMX debate raged last winter, a supply glut caused the price differential between Alberta bitumen and the West Texas Intermediate crude benchmark to soar to as much as $30 per barrel—a substantial loss of both industry revenue and of taxes and royalties. (At $25 per barrel, the differential is estimated to cost the industry $20-million per day; by the fall of 2018, the differential had surged as high as $60.) One of the major selling points for TMX is that it expands opportunities to ship Alberta’s oil to markets where this discount is much less onerous, because it avoids supply bottlenecks and reduces shipping costs overall. As for the general health of the economy, UBC economist Kevin Milligan looked at median earnings across Canada from 2000 to 2015 and concluded that “nothing has contributed more than natural resources to buttressing the Canadian middle class against the rapidly changing global economy of the 21st century”—and no piece of that resource economy is bigger than oil and gas.

So oil production is a major contributor to Canada’s economic health, and industry and government proponents are certain TMX makes a vital industry more profitable. In singing its praises, however, they’re sometimes guilty of some overzealousness. As the Parkland Institute has pointed out, the Alberta government tends to exaggerate the pipeline’s economic benefits—claiming, for example, that it will create 15,000 jobs, when even Kinder Morgan only suggested the construction phase could generate 5,000.

In the wake of the federal government’s decision to purchase the project, skepticism has occasionally ballooned into something verging on conspiracy theory. You may have heard the assertion, for example, that there is “no business case” for TMX—this claim appears to have first been made in the National Observer and was later repeated by federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh. This would come as news to the oil sands operators suffering from recurring pipeline bottlenecks, paying premiums to ship by rail, continuing to expand production, and agreeing to 20-year guaranteed contracts to gain access to TMX’s capacity. Another common argument—a favourite of Premier Horgan’s—that all the profit from TMX went to “Texas boardrooms,” lost its punch once ownership switched from Kinder Morgan to the Canadian taxpayer.

The Indigenous people involved have been treated as less than equal partners for so long that even the appearance of equality now is highly suspect.

You’ve probably heard a lot about Indigenous rights when it comes to TMX. For the most part, First Nations leaders have appeared as part of the strident opposition—for example, Stewart Phillip, grand chief of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, telling reporters he was in full opposition to “this very toxic, dangerous, dirty oil pipeline” as he was arrested at a protest in Burnaby. And there’s no question that Indigenous people down the length of the pipeline and across Canada have been visible and vocal in their dissent. The government’s failure to properly consult with First Nations was one of the two reasons the Federal Court of Appeal quashed the pipeline’s approval.

The full story, though—as with all things TMX—is slightly more complex. All told, TMX passes through or near the traditional territory of more than 130 First Nations and crosses the officially designated reserve lands of 10. Kinder Morgan was obliged to consult with all of those First Nations as part of the pipeline approval process. In all, 43 First Nations—including all 10 whose reserve land is traversed by the pipeline—signed mutual benefit agreements.

Given that the pipeline mostly follows an established right of way, the legal issues are simpler for TMX than for other proposed pipelines, notwithstanding the Federal Court’s August ruling. Still, the laws governing relations between First Nations and the federal government are in flux and hotly contested, and the letter of the law is nowhere near enough as far as many Indigenous people are concerned. Some First Nations—most visibly in the Metro Vancouver area, such as the Squamish and the Tsleil-Waututh—are opposed to the pipeline under any and all circumstances. Others have made pipeline deals despite significant opposition among their membership or because no other option seemed viable. “We just figure we have a better opportunity sitting at the table than protesting,” Wayne Sparrow, chief of the Vancouver-area Musqueam Indian Band, told Maclean’s. Still others, particularly in Alberta, are pipeline boosters—a handful of First Nations in the Fort McMurray area, including the Athabasca Chipewyan, often vocal in its criticism of oil sands development, have expressed interest in buying a direct equity stake in the project.

Like so many issues in pipeline politics, it’s possible to shape this range of opinions to suit almost any agenda and predetermined position. And as with any Indigenous rights issue, it’s a fair assumption that the Indigenous people involved have been treated as less than equal partners for so long that even the appearance of equality now is highly suspect. On the other hand, these are questions ultimately for high courts and intergovernmental deliberations, and it’s inevitably messy trying to litigate them via pipeline approval.

On balance, TMX represents a net negative for the planet’s health. It will amplify spill risks down its length and in the Salish Sea, marginally increase noise pollution in shipping channels, and possibly add a few megatonnes to Canada’s already oversized carbon footprint. It doesn’t create any of these problems on its own, but it exacerbates all of them. To make a case for it, then, you’d need a damn good reason. Notley and Trudeau believe they have one—building a solid long-term policy platform for climate change action. Both the federal and Alberta governments (along with every other province and territory other than Saskatchewan) had the political will in 2015 and 2016 to bring in robust climate plans. But Notley and Trudeau both worked under the understanding that their support couldn’t endure open warfare with the oil and gas industry or the Alberta public in general. So they threw their support unequivocally behind TMX—a reassurance to the oil patch that climate plans didn’t mean an attack on their business.

This is the trade-off that everyone from Alberta Environment Minister Shannon Phillips to the climate policy wonks at Natural Resources Canada and the Prime Minister’s Office believe is the only way forward. But the rancour caused by TMX has already seriously damaged the wobbly consensus needed to advance Notley’s and Trudeau’s respective climate plans. Their bet is that keeping the pipeline on track will save those plans. Their understanding, in any case, is that without the project, the consensus would have unquestionably collapsed entirely, ensuring many more years of inaction on climate change. That TMX wasn’t a great bet, just the least bad one on offer.

Chris Turner’s latest book, The Patch (Simon & Schuster), won the 2018 National Business Book Award. His bestselling books The Geography of Hope and The Great Leap shed light on the global sustainability movement. A prolific speaker and magazine writer, he lives in Calgary.

The post Trans Mountain Pipeline: Cold Pipe, Hot Rhetoric appeared first on Alberta Views.

So now Mahon wrote another letter. “You are hereby immediately suspended without pay from all duties and privileges associated with teaching, research and community service,” he informed Hall. “The suspension is being implemented as a precautionary, not disciplinary, measure, and will remain in effect until the University has concluded its review of this matter.” Mahon signed his name.

The fallout was quick. Hall responded on October 5 with a video recorded in the U of L faculty lounge and uploaded to YouTube that same day. “I have to leave the campus where I’ve been working for 26 years,” he said, at the outset of a nearly six-minute monologue in which he cited his two scholarly books, said the Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith has “essentially taken control of my university’s administration,” and plugged his co-presented online talk show, False Flag Weekly News. “There’s been no due process,” he said. “The institution of tenure… has apparently just disappeared.”

Are there limits to academic freedom Can a university legitimately discipline a professor for social media remarks?

The University of Lethbridge Faculty Association (ULFA) agreed with Hall’s concerns about due process—the right to fair and equal treatment under the law—and tenure. As the Canadian Encyclopedia defines it, tenure is a permanent post-secondary appointment that “enables the holder to exercise free but responsible criticism of his institution and all aspects of society without fear of dismissal.” The ongoing appointment of a professor granted tenure “may be terminated only through resignation, retirement or dismissal for good reasons as established by a proper hearing.”

Writing in defence of Hall, on October 10, ULFA president Andrea Amelinckx sent a statement to CBC, the Calgary Herald and other media. “The president’s action violates provincial law,” she wrote, “and contravenes the university’s contract with its faculty, which provides a process for investigating complaints, such as those alleged against professor Hall, in a fair, speedy and thorough fashion.”

The public criticism, as Mahon acknowledged in an open letter to the university community on October 13, drew “uncomfortable attention to our university.” Built in a coulee above the Oldman River, the publicly funded University of Lethbridge is visually striking and—increasingly—academically respected. Since 2013 Maclean’s has ranked the U of L in the top four best primarily undergraduate universities in Canada. This rise happened under Mahon’s watch. In late 2016 Mahon was a year into his second five-year term as president.

Mahon defended Hall’s suspension, asserting that Alberta’s Post-Secondary Learning Act allowed a university president the “discretion” to suspend academic staff. “The decision to suspend Dr. Hall was not made easily or quickly,” he wrote. “This action is not focused on Dr. Hall’s published scholarship [nor] driven by complaints of students or the demands of external advocacy groups. It is focused on his YouTube-based videos and comments in social media that have been characterized as being anti-Semitic, supportive of Holocaust denial and engagement in conspiracy theories.”

Despite the vigorous rhetoric, the definition of academic freedom in Canada is disputed.

By 2017 the faculty association—noting that Hall remained suspended even though his pay had by now been restored—rejected Mahon’s reasoning. In a letter to its membership on January 20, 2017, the ULFA’s executive committee said that the collective bargaining agreement between the administration and faculty outlined in the University of Lethbridge Faculty Handbook “explicitly names ‘the right to participate in public life’ as protected activity alongside research, teaching and service activity. The notion that Dr. Hall’s work in social media, which he himself consistently characterizes as part of his research and community activities, can be unilaterally determined by president Mahon to be outside of his university duties… is both absurd and a fundamental threat to the institution of tenure.”

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), which represents 70,000 academic professionals at 123 universities and colleges, also weighed in, passing a resolution to “condemn the actions of the University of Lethbridge administration in suspending Professor Tony Hall without due process.”

Eventually Premier Rachel Notley was drawn in to comment. The premier got involved because in May 2017 the NDP government brought in legislation that made university collective bargaining agreements subject to the Labour Relations Code, meaning that when parties can’t agree on an arbitrator the provincial government appoints one. The government intervened in court in support of the faculty association’s interpretation of the new law.

The legal wrangle focused on whether the suspension was disciplinary as opposed to precautionary. If so, then an investigation process, as outlined in the Faculty Handbook, had to be followed and the president had made a mistake in suspending Hall without a hearing. These legal issues, as Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench Justice G.H. Poelman put it in a September 15, 2017, judgment that led to the appointment of an arbitrator between the parties, were “unrelated to the merits of the University’s concerns about Professor Hall’s activities.”

After arbitration, Hall was reinstated as a professor on November 23, 2017, subject to an investigation. President Mahon declined to speak publicly about the issue after Hall’s reinstatement. But others weighed in. After receiving multiple emails protesting the government’s intervention, Notley responded with a mass email. “The views Anthony Hall holds are repulsive, offensive and not reflective of Alberta,” wrote the premier. “While it’s true that the Government of Alberta did intervene in a legal proceeding, our role was only to ensure that the Labour Code and the letter of the law were upheld. This action in no way amounts to a defence of Mr. Hall, nor of his beliefs. We absolutely do not believe he should be teaching students… His future at the university is not guaranteed or protected beyond the due process afforded by his collective agreement.”

Notley’s email roused ULFA president Amelinckx to respond, in another open letter, that the premier—in commenting on an active labour file—had interfered in Hall’s right to due process. “Having the premier draw conclusions about the acceptability of professor Hall’s academic work prior to any decision rendered by an expert panel of qualified academics has the potential to undermine this very process we have fought to achieve,” she wrote, on January 15, 2018. “We believe it is a dangerous precedent… for elected officials to intervene so directly in a complex labour matter such as this one.”

For the investigation of Hall’s “activities,” the ULFA and the U of L board of governors agreed to a committee of three academics from Alberta universities. According to the Faculty Handbook, either the complaints will be thrown out, Hall will be suspended “with or without pay” for up to three months, or he will be “dismissed for cause.” Hall’s case raises concerns far beyond the University of Lethbridge. Are there limits to academic freedom Can a university legitimately discipline a professor for social media remarks?

Academic freedom is at the core of a university’s mission and purpose. As defined in the U of L’s Faculty Handbook: “Academic freedom is generally understood as the right to teach, engage in scholarly activity, and perform service without interference and without jeopardizing employment. This freedom… entails the right to participate in public life, to criticize university or other administrations, to champion unpopular positions, to engage in frank discussion of controversial matters, and to raise questions and challenges which may be viewed as counter to the beliefs of society.”

Canadian university presidents are increasingly called on to defend such freedom. On April 24, 2018, after donors and faculty angrily protested the University of Alberta’s decision to grant David Suzuki an honorary degree, U of A president David Turpin wrote: “The university must give people the space and support they need to think independently without fear of external control or reprisal.”

Similarly, when student protesters tried to shut down a speech by anti gender-neutral pronoun crusader Jordan Peterson at Queen’s University in early 2018, Queen’s principal and vice-chancellor Daniel Woolf wrote: “Hate speech aside, failing to explore or confront ideas with which we disagree through disciplined and respectful dialogue, debate and argument, does society a disservice, weakens our intellectual integrity and threatens the very core of what… any university should be about. What is at issue is nothing less than our commitment to academic freedom.”

But despite the vigorous rhetoric, the definition of academic freedom in Canada is disputed. The disagreement is between faculty and administration. CAUT and Universities Canada (UC), a national organization “providing university presidents with a unified voice,” differ in their official statements. UC largely agrees with the CAUT’s open-ended definition, including “the right, without restriction by prescribed doctrine, to freedom to teach and discuss.” But UC—unlike CAUT—includes a section on the “Responsibilities of Academic Freedom,” which defines academic freedom as “constrained by the professional standards of the relevant discipline and the responsibility of the institution to organize its academic mission.” This focus on “responsibilities,” says Peter MacKinnon, president emeritus of the University of Saskatchewan, is so divergent that the UC and CAUT statements show “little potential for their reconciliation in the interests of a common university voice on a subject as important as academic freedom.”

As a condition of membership, UC members are expected to affirm the UC statement. Paul Axelrod, former dean of education at York University, argues that, in practice, “this means that professors are not free to teach anything they want. Courses must be vetted and approved by departmental committees composed of one’s colleagues, and to get one’s course on the books a professor may have to alter that content. Consider as well that faculty cannot publish anything and everything they research and write. They are subject to peer review, and their voices could well be muted by assessors and journal editors who, theoretically, are the gatekeepers of scholarly standards.”

Unlike citizens “on street corners or blogs,” scholars do not have a licence “to lie, propagandize or speak in habitually ill-informed ways,” writes Axelrod. “Academic freedom and freedom of speech are not the same thing.”

But, as the Anthony Hall case shows—particularly when it comes to “work in social media,” as the ULFA put it—the line can blur. President Michael Mahon is currently chair of the UC board. Intended or not, Mahon’s attempt to suspend Hall for “his YouTube-based videos and comments in social media” illuminates the lack of clarity dividing the parties in the dispute.

“Our university is committed to academic freedom,” Mahon stated in an interview with the Lethbridge Herald in January 2018. “But academic freedom is also not just an uninterpretable concept. It has to be supported within the concept of the broader parameters of society.”

Among those Canadian “broader parameters,” as Axelrod noted in a November 2017 piece in The Conversation, are societal prohibitions on demeaning speech and behaviour, including sexism and racism. Hate speech is another. “Speech that promotes ‘genocide’ and ‘incites hatred against any identifiable group where such incitement is likely to lead to a breach of the peace’ is illegal, on and off university campuses,” he wrote. But, while noting that, as an example, “neo-fascists who speak in code, avoiding overt hate-mongering, could be exposed and denounced by critics,” Axelrod cautioned: “If their words break no law, forcefully silencing them sets a perilous precedent that could be used to curtail vexatious presentations by those with different political views.”

The Hall case lies in this kind of grey zone.

Anthony James Hall, born in 1951 in Toronto, got a Ph.D. in history from the University of Toronto in 1984 and joined the U of L in 1990 as an associate professor of Native American studies. He was granted the protection and job security of tenure at the U of L, he says, “in the early 1990s.” In 2003 he published The American Empire and the Fourth World, a 736-page book that argued “the so-called War on Terror has deep roots in US history” and offered “an array of alternatives” to “the American empire of private property.” Naomi Klein praised it and in 2004 the book won the Wilfred Eggleston Award for best work of non-fiction by an Alberta author. A longer companion volume, Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization and Capitalism, was published in 2010.

Hall was promoted to full professor of globalization studies in 2008. At a senior professor’s pay tier, his annual salary by 2015 had reached over $150,000 plus some $25,000 in other compensation. In YouTube videos, Hall has said that 2008 was also when he “got very interested in studying 9/11 and saw, without a shadow of a doubt, that the facts that were presented us, the so-called facts, are not true. That 9/11 was a concocted event.” After 2008 Hall spoke about 9/11 both off-campus and in his U of L classes. In a public speech in Lethbridge he said the World Trade Centre buildings were destroyed, at least in part, by a “controlled demolition,” and that the “objective”—by US and Israeli neo-conservatives—“was to create a licence, an opening to conduct warfare” in the Middle East. When reached by phone, on May 25, 2018, Hall said: “There is no consensus on who did what on 9/11… I think this is something we need to deal with at the academy, at the university.”

Among his media endeavours, Hall was a regular commentator on Press TV, Iran’s state-owned network. While critics allege the network regularly airs anti-semitic stories and Iranian government propaganda, Hall has said his appearances there “lie well within the mandate of the kind of community service and public education that is, or at least should be, part of the work of a senior professor.”

In 2015 Hall joined False Flag Weekly News, broadcast live on YouTube, as a co-host with Kevin Barrett, a former US professor who labelled 9/11 “an inside job.” Hall also wrote articles defending Arthur Topham—owner of a press that published Hall’s essays in the 1990s—after Topham was convicted of a hate crime in British Columbia in 2015 for “online statements that wilfully promoted hatred against Jewish people.”

When contacted last May, Hall defended his online presence. “The nature of human communications and human interaction has been radically transformed by the internet. This is a new dimension to life in the academy,” he said. “The question is, How are we at the university going to deal with the fact that our students watch social media, that social media has a big impact Do we just simply say ‘No, we’re purer than that, we’re more prestigious than that, we shouldn’t soil ourselves with, essentially, going into the public square’?”

“Of course, if you’re going to do one take and turn the machine on and have a discussion, are you going to say everything as perfectly as you might have?” he said, in reference to live-streamed shows. “Is it going to be the same as writing an article where you can revise and revise and get some feedback and then revise again You know… you say what you say and that’s it.”

Unlike bloggers or people on street corners, scholars don’t have a licence to “lie, propagandize or speak in habitually ill-informed ways.”

On August 26, 2016, a Facebook “friend”—whom Hall knows from Lethbridge—posted an image that denied the Holocaust and said “Kill All Jews Now!” to Hall’s Facebook wall. Hall said he only learned of the image after Facebook took it down. He also claims his acquaintance was hacked, and that the offensive material was falsely communicated to Premier Notley as if Hall had actually said the words. His initial suspension from the university, he said on the phone, is “inexplicable” without this “planted Facebook post.”

Hall called the image “repulsive.” In a timeline of events posted online, Hall wrote, referring to himself in the third person: “The item that does reflect Prof. Hall’s views is the video where he calls for ‘open debate’ on the Holocaust and every other subject, but especially those most vital to the formulation of public policy.”

That video—“Why do you support open debate on the Holocaust?”—is three minutes 30 seconds long and features Hall along with Alfred and Monika Schaefer, siblings who grew up in Alberta. It was posted to YouTube on July 8, 2016, by the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), a group also responsible for putting up posters at the University of Calgary in 2017 asking: “Did the ‘6 million’ really die?”

Before making the video, Monika Schaefer was a three-time candidate for the Green Party of Canada in Jasper. Hall visited her “from time to time.” In 2016 the two were in Germany together and visited Monika’s older brother, Alfred, a videographer who can be heard on numerous US and European anti-Semitic online talk shows discussing topics such as “the ongoing genocide of the white race.” In the CODOH video, filmed by Alfred, Hall argued for “open debate on all subjects” and also said: “We’re living in a time of huge hate speech, hate speech directed towards Germans collectively, generically, with no real ability to consider Germany’s place in the world outside of this particular way that National Socialism has been interpreted.”

In Germany Alfred also filmed Monika for another video—“Sorry, Mom, I Was Wrong About the Holocaust”—in which Monika said the Holocaust is “the most pernicious and persistent lie in all of history” and “there were no gas chambers” in Nazi concentration camps. It was posted to YouTube in June 2016. Monika was arrested a year and a half later in Germany, where Holocaust denial is against the law. She remained in custody until she and Alfred were put on trial together in Munich in July 2018—charged with “incitement to hatred.”

In Canada, well before her arrest, the Green Party terminated Schaefer’s membership. On July 22, 2016, Monika appeared on False Flag Weekly News with Hall and Barrett. Hall was incensed about Monika’s expulsion and said Green Party leader Elizabeth May is the “chief cop for the Zionist police force in Canada.” Hall then said that learning the “reality” behind “the myth of 9/11” can lead one to perceive other conspiracies.

“Alfred and Monika are quite typical, as I am myself,” said Hall, “in a trajectory of looking at, well, if Israel could do 9/11, what about this other big religious fable concerning what is called the Holocaust?” As he spoke in the video, his voice rose. “Sixty million people died in World War Two. That’s a ‘Holocaust,’ ” said Hall. “Some of those people were Jewish. That has to be lamented. All the people who died in World War Two should be acknowledged. And a large number, many millions, were Germans—murdered genocidally after 1945 in the ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe. In the camps… these US camps where people were dying.” He leaned in toward the camera. “Where’s the monuments for these dead Where are the monuments for a Native American Holocaust Where’s the monuments for the Palestinian Holocaust happening right now?”

He was nearly shouting now. “Where are the shrunken heads The lampshades made out of Jewish skin Thank you, Monika Schaefer, for opening up this issue… Thank you for making ‘Sorry, Mom, I Was Wrong About the Holocaust.’”

On October 3, 2016—the same day U of  L president Mahon wrote Hall a letter to request a meeting—the CBC’s David Gray interviewed Hall on the Calgary Eyeopener. Gray asked Hall to confirm statements he had made on False Flag Weekly News. Hall accused Gray of “acting like
an inquisitor.”

“Do you teach your ideas to the students at the University of Lethbridge?” asked Gray.

“Well, what choice would I have, David Should I teach somebody else’s ideas?”

The interview was antagonistic. But Hall got in a last word: “We can’t just allow this to be put in a simple framework of good or bad, right or wrong,” he said. “The issue front and centre here right now is academic freedom at the University of Lethbridge and the institution of tenure.”

Update: Anthony Hall retired in the fall of 2018.

Tadzio Richards is a two-time National Magazine Award winner and an associate editor at Alberta Views.

The post Freedom and Loathing in Lethbridge appeared first on Alberta Views.

In 2016 Americans elected a vulgar POTUS who every day of the long campaign spewed statements that fact-checkers said were doubtful or impossible. Whatever he said spurred that day’s crowd to applaud wildly and bellow “Make America great again!” and “Lock her up!” Facts were now for bending and inventing, for using out of context and for getting rid of the inconvenient. Mr. T could cite something as fact one day and call it bullshit and pseudoscience the next. His followers applauded both.

When T was the president-elect, a woman appeared on American television described as “a Trump surrogate.” This confused me. Did that mean she was “Trump in absence” or that she had borne Trump using donor sperm After some skirmishing with the host over dubious campaign statements, the woman grew irritated and said, “There are no facts.” And this statement took off. It made the papers everywhere, for the surrogate had put her finger on what had changed, what had made the new America possible.

This is not an entirely new thing to say. In the 1880s Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “There are no facts, only interpretations.” But Mr. T’s surrogate meant more; she seemed to be saying there was no longer anything but that which Mr T. said, which his followers accepted as true without reservation and which his adversaries saw as false and despicable. After one of the debates with Hillary Clinton, Mr. T was found to have lied 57 times. But if no one cares, why bother to even count the lies If there are no facts, there can be no lies.

So what happened that made America get rid of facts, after having formerly worshipped them It doesn’t take McLuhanist-level thought to suggest that facts have turned on America. Instead of translating into world-beating assembly lines and first-rate cars, the facts for a long time have been that even Americans prefer Japanese cars; that the American industrial heartland has turned to rust; that well-paid and secure jobs have been shipped overseas or over the border to the maquiladoras of Juarez. Certain billionaires made more billions but that only gets a country so far. The proud American ethic of hard work grew a belly, sat in a bar watching sports and felt sorry for itself.

Everywhere the white American male looked there were more of these threatening facts: Women have equal ability and should receive equal pay; Black people and Hispanic people have equal intelligence and abilities as white people. The fact of American white privilege was teetering on the edge. If those were the facts, then to hell with the facts. Give me a fantasy that says white men will lead America to greatness again.

When America dispensed with facts and proved that they had done so by electing POTUS Trump, one of the first facts to go was climate change. Another discarded fact was that the damage caused by climate change is reaching a point where it might be irreversible. Mr. T’s statements that the climate crisis is pseudo-science and a Chinese-created hoax were seen by many as exaggeration and gamesmanship, but when his appointee for leader of the Environmental Protection Agency was a white man who denies climate change, it was a ploy no longer. Climate change was dispensed with. Over and out. When he chose the Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil, the biggest oil company in the world, to be his secretary of state for foreign affairs, it meant T wanted to return to the let ’er rip era of jacked-up oil production and combustion. That Mr. Tillerson, as CEO of Exxon, accepted that climate change is real and human-caused makes no difference. Exxon, as a corporation, will continue to make as much product and profit as it is allowed to.

Soon, Canada’s Conservative Party will be choosing a new leader, and, wouldn’t you know it, among the candidates are some who are hoping the “no facts” approach will work for them too. Of course, to follow suit requires that you also exhibit misogyny, racism and xenophobia. No problem. Once you get rid of the facts, that part’s easy. #

Fred Stenson’s most recent novel is Who By Fire (Doubleday).Other books include The Trade, Lightning and The Great Karoo.

The post Aping America appeared first on Alberta Views.

I joined the Chaldean Catholic parishioners at St. James Church in Calgary for their Sunday evening service. The ceremony began when Farman appeared at the front of the church and the congregation rose to sing an opening hymn. Though no longer a believer, I was raised Catholic and recognize the structure of the liturgy—Catholicism is a tattoo—but my childhood church did not prepare me for this aural beauty. My Catholicism never sounded like this. The Chaldeans sang together in Aramaic and seemed to draw collective breath from some distant, Eastern elsewhere. The voices chanted minor chords that drew arabesques through the aroma of frankincense and women’s perfume hanging in the nave. At the altar, Farman stood and faced the hanging crucifix, occasionally turning to the congregation and using his hands to encourage them.

Noël Farman told me about his life as we sipped Turkish coffee in his downtown presbytery. He was born in Isnoah in 1952, the same village in northern Iraq where members of the Chaldean faith believe the Ark of Noah eventually landed. His family moved to Mosul when he was two years old. A decade later, Noël enrolled in a seminary school run by French Dominican fathers. There he embraced the French language and culture, and became a man of faith. But Farman did not rush into the priesthood. “I decided I would like to have a Christian mission as a layman,” he said. 

When he finished school, a bishop friend sent him to Italy, where he worked within the Focolare Movement, a lay organization that attempts to create greater unity among Catholics and various other Christian denominations, and seeks connections with followers of other faiths. Later Farman was employed as a translator and, for three years, as a tour guide leading groups of travellers on religious and cultural journeys through 20 countries in Europe and the Middle East.

Farman returned to Iraq and trained as a journalist with the Dominican Fathers. The Dominicans appointed Farman as the assistant editor-in-chief of the Arabic-language magazine Christian Thought, where he worked for 10 years. Farman also freelanced for Alef-Baa, the leading culture and issues magazine in Iraq. He wrote predominantly about religious topics for both magazines, but maintained a wide focus. Farman reported on the election of the first Christian patriarchate in Iraq, for example, and examined monastic life. He wrote about Mother Teresa and reviewed European cinema with religious themes. In 2000 the International Catholic Media Organization elected him its Middle East vice-president. “It was like a new seminary for me,” Farman said. “My pen was baptized for writing.”

But a young man living in Iraq during the 1980s faced other obligations. Even a man of God is pressed, on occasion, to answer the earthly demands of violent men. When Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, Farman was forced to serve in Saddam Hussein’s army. Farman’s skills with language kept him out of combat. Instead he translated for military engineers working on the bases and for six months guarded an Iranian border town called Qasr-e Shirin that the Iraqi army had occupied. He never experienced the trench warfare, the horrors of which echoed the First World War. Farman barely spoke to me of his time as a soldier. I sensed that very little of the man he became was forged during his few months of reluctant service in someone else’s war.

Farman returned to journalism after the war and became a deacon in Baghdad in 2000. The position allowed him to serve communion, to preach and to administer the sacraments to the sick and dying. After four years, however, members of his parish pressured him to become a priest. After serving the Catholic community for years as a layman and as a journalist, Farman was ready to lead a congregation. He returned to his original church in northern Iraq and was ordained by the Chaldean archbishop four days after Christmas in 2004—an auspicious time of year for a man named Noël.

Peace is an elusive and fragile notion for these Iraqi Christians. It is little wonder they grasp it tenderly.

When the opening hymn ended, Farman gestured for the congregation to sit, but he continued to sing. Almost the entire Chaldean ritual is conducted in song; even the Gospel is sung rather than read. The Aramaic end-vowels lend a natural music to the language, and Farman’s skilled voice lends it art. Farman is one of fewer than 10 Chaldean priests qualified by the Order to sing the Aramaic mass. Acolytes to the faith around the world learn the music of the service by listening to recordings of Farman saying mass and singing hymns.

Farman’s parents taught him to sing when he was a boy—both had beautiful voices—but a family tragedy strained his early associations with song. When he was six years old, Farman’s infant brother died. He does not recall how; he remembers only that his brother was “a very beautiful honey baby.” Farman’s parents mourned their son’s death with long, doleful chants, and young Noël learned to associate music with his parents’ pain, particularly his mother’s. For years afterward, Farman fled the room each time she began to sing. He assumed her songs were laments for his brother, and Farman didn’t like to hear them. Only much later did he realize that music could be joyful. “Until I was 12 years old, I was thinking that singing was to cry.”

Mournful singing distinguishes the religions of the Middle East. Chaldeans place great importance on observing the Stations of the Cross, Christ’s long walk to crucifixion, and they lament his ordeal through sorrowful requiem. Shiite Muslims observe the bloody martyrdom of Hussein ibn Ali, Mohammed’s grandson and the third Shia imam, with dirges. And both of these “passions” originate from the ancient Babylonian cult of mourning for the god Tamuz. “As Iraqis, we are altogether influenced by the spirit of mourning,” Farman told me.

Midway through the Chaldean mass, Farman pressed his palms together and offered a sign of peace to his deacons. He approached each of them and gently embraced their clasped hands within his own. The deacons then stepped into the nave, walked to the person at the end of each pew and offered him or her the same brief caress. The parishioners turned and passed the offering, hand to hand, down the row. The Chaldean “peace offering” has a different intimacy than the handshakes of Roman Catholics, but peace is a more elusive and fragile notion for these Iraqi Christians. It is little wonder they grasp it tenderly.

By the time Farman was ordained, the Hussein regime had fallen, the battle against the US-led invasion had degraded into a civil war and the country was on fire. With Saddam’s predominantly secular dictatorship gone, sectarian militias emerged and clawed at each other for power. Farman blames much of this violence on the US policy that supported the formation of sectarian parties that divided Iraqis along religious lines. The strategy of the US, Farman believes, was to avoid terrorism against Americans by giving the jihadist militias local enemies to slaughter. “They encouraged the instinct to kill. The instinct to avenge. The instinct to dominate,” Farman said.

Iraq’s Christians, who had enjoyed relative peace under Saddam and good relations with their Muslim neighbours, were suddenly perceived as infidels. Extremists threatened Christians with kidnappings, robbery and murder. A few months before Farman was ordained, terrorists launched a coordinated bombing attack on five Iraqi churches. Eleven people were killed. That autumn, 30,000 Iraqi Christians fled Iraq, but the pogroms continued. Militias kidnapped and beheaded priests, forced female university students to wear the hijab and declared that Christians must convert to Islam or leave town. Fearing for his family, Farman sought an appointment to a parish outside of Iraq. Church leaders told him about opportunities in Canada. Farman’s family waited for their visa applications to be processed while trying to remain safe and inconspicuous. By the time Farman arrived in Saskatchewan in 2006, more than half of Iraq’s one million Christians had already fled.

A priest of Farman’s credentials turned out to be in high demand on the Canadian prairies. Calgary’s 110 Chaldean families needed a priest, as did the Chaldean community in Saskatoon, and La Paroisse Sainte-Famille, Calgary’s francophone Roman Catholic parish, also required a pastor. Farman decided to serve them all. He and his family moved into the Sainte-Famille presbytery and for eight months Farman celebrated mass in French on Sunday mornings at Sainte-Famille, in Aramaic on Sunday evenings at St. James and flew to Saskatoon every other Sunday to serve the Chaldean congregation there.

“It was a miracle for me,” he said. “I ask myself, ‘How was I able to do all that service at one time?’” Farman arrived late only once—and by less than an hour—when WestJet cancelled his flight and he had to rush to find a seat on Air Canada. The Chaldean archbishop found another priest for Farman’s Saskatoon parish in 2009, thus lightening the clerical load, but Farman continues to celebrate two masses, with different languages and liturgies, every Sunday. The congregation at Saint Famille refer to Farman as Abbé rather than the customary Père lest he be confused with Santa Claus—though Farman does wear his red vestments at Christmas and hands out presents after mass.

Farman and his family became Canadian citizens in 2010. “Canada is the best country for me,” he said. “I notice it frankly, and with proudness as a Canadian, that Canada is the country most open to other cultures.” He admires the Canadian commitment to religious tolerance and cultural pluralism.

He hopes to contribute to this richness through his command of language. As a native speaker of the dialect of Christ, Farman reveals to his congregations the linguistic poetry of their scripture. He teaches his parishioners that the Aramaic word for “Peter” and “rock” are the same, and so when Jesus asked Peter to be the rock upon which to build his church, he was making a pun. Farman teaches that his own name, Noël, is not merely “Christmas” in French, but an abbreviation of the Aramaic word “Emmanuel,” meaning “god with us.” He teaches that “alleluia” was not a word at all—at least not originally—but the sound joyful Arab women make when they ululate. And each year on Holy Thursday, the observance of the first “Last Supper,” Farman sings the words of consecration in ancient Aramaic, “in the very words of Jesus Christ.” The sacred whispers of an ancient Passover meal are the gifts Farman bestows on his congregation.

Farman stepped forward with his CIBORIUM of holy wafers. As the congregation filed forward, I slipped out of the Communion line to watch from the back of the church. For the first time during the mass, no songs were sung. The sanctuary was silent aside from the shuffle of parishioners and the amen—from the Aramaic word for “indeed”—whispered by each as they received the Eucharist.

Months earlier, in Baghdad, gunfire and screams shattered this consecrated silence. Members of an al-Qaeda affiliate stormed Our Lady of Salvation church in October 2010. The terrorists massacred nearly 60 people, most of them Chaldean worshippers, with gunfire, grenades and, ultimately, suicide vests. In the months that followed, the group responsible for the bloodbath declared all Iraqi Christians “legitimate targets,” Kirkuk’s Chaldean archbishop cancelled Christmas celebrations—and in Calgary two Muslim women contacted St. James church to seek an audience with Noël Farman.

The three transplanted Iraqis would finally meet the following spring. The women, a mother and her university-aged daughter, joined Farman one morning at the Sainte-Famille presbytery. “They came to express their condolences regarding the massacre,” Farman told me. Both women were devout Muslims and both wore the veil, but the daughter sang in a Christian church choir because she loved to sing. “They are open,” Farman told me. They sat and talked together for two hours. “There was nothing different between us,” he said. “We spoke about traditions. About food. About having an everyday life in common.”

Farman and the women shared language in common too, and not just the colloquial Arabic they spoke in Iraq. All three spoke the Mesopotamian dialect of sorrow and loss. And they spoke sincerely. This was no act of starched diplomacy. There was no photo op or camera crew or stiff handshakes for the evening news. It was, instead, an intimate passing of peace from hand to hand. A conflict between armies and militias, sects and politics, was distilled at Farman’s dining room table into an expression of the sadness of three people who refuse to grant victory to men with guns. And it occurred quietly on a spring morning while the rest of the city carried on oblivious to the grace blossoming at its centre.

Marcello Di Cintio is the author of three books, including In the Shadow of the Wall (Goose Lane, 2012). He lives in Calgary.

The post A Hymn in Aramaic appeared first on Alberta Views.

His errant gunshot, which struck a two-year-old girl in the chest as she was sitting at her grandparent’s kitchen table, galvanized the Samson Cree First Nation near Hobbema. The child survived, but the shooting was the last straw for members of the community of 12,000 and they came out swinging with plans to eradicate the 13 gangs that terrorized them. The court, keenly aware of the public indignation, sentenced Crane to nine years, reduced on appeal to seven.

But the April 13, 2008, shooting of Asia Saddleback set off alarms around the province and heightened public interest in reining in the gangs that had become more numerous, overt and violent during the Alberta boom. A triple slaying that included an innocent bystander at a southeast Calgary Vietnamese restaurant eight months later served notice that gang violence wasn’t just an Aboriginal community phenomenon. A war between two Calgary gangs, Fresh off the Boat (FOB) and the Fresh off the Boat Killers (FK) had claimed 25 lives since 2002. But the January 1, 2009, slaying of 43-year-old contractor Keni Su’a triggered outrage. It wasn’t just gang members killing gang members anymore. The public wanted something done. Following an investigation involving more than 600 police and civilians, four men were charged with first-degree murder.

“That particular shooting sent shock waves through the community,” says Calgary Police targeted enforcement unit detective Gordon Eiriksson. “When an innocent bystander gets shot and killed, it really galvanizes us as a police service.”

The triple slaying capped off years of killings, shootings, stabbings and beatings by members of a gang that had fallen out of sorts, split into factions and begun trying to eliminate each other. The deaths, deportations, prison sentences and charges against key members on both sides have brought some respite, but Calgary police aren’t counting on lasting peace.

What draws a kid to a gang? Not just the money, but the brotherhood. For many gang members, it’s the first time anyone has cared about them. “With the clients I represent who have gang affiliations, the common thread is a lack of a role model and support at home,” says Edmonton lawyer Harold Brubaker, who represented Crane at his 2010 trial. “The function the gang ends up playing, for better or worse, is to give them a sense of identity and belonging.”

Crane’s own testimony at his sentencing in Wetaskiwin suggested he grew up without a father and was shuffled back and forth between relatives from the age of 3. “I was allowed to do whatever I wanted as a kid,” he testified after pleading guilty to charges of aggravated assault, weapons charges and a home invasion robbery. “It seemed to me like nobody cared.”

By age 11, Crane was smoking marijuana daily. By Grade 7, he’d stopped attending school. A psychologist hired by the defence described him as a severely traumatized, sad and tormented child who became a moody, hot-tempered, bitter and violent teen. He said Crane was sexually abused as a child and suffered from anxiety and depression.

Although the heavily tattooed Crane told the court he wanted to leave gang life to focus on his wife and child, gangster rap lyrics and drawings were found in his remand centre cell. A hand-drawn sign found with his belongings proclaimed: Thug life until the end of time.

Aboriginal gang members are often distinguishable by tattoos and colours and are territorial, frequenting certain areas of specific communities. While they may be among the most visible gangs, they are not the major focus of Alberta police. The province’s law enforcement agencies are more interested in the criminal organizations that control the bulk of the drug trade in the province. They also focus on violent gangs engaged in open warfare on city streets.

What draws kids to gangs A sense of identity. “The common thread is a lack of a role model and support.”

More than 900 gangs operate in Canada, according to police intelligence, and 83 of them operate in Alberta—up from 54 in 2008. (According to the Alberta government, “gangs” include criminal organizations, or “groups of two or more individuals” who conspire within an ongoing network to break the law, and street gangs, defined as “more or less structured groups of adolescents and young adults” who use intimidation and violence to commit criminal acts.) Gang expert Cathy Prowse, a University of Calgary criminologist and former Calgary police officer, says the top criminal organizations have fixed, close-knit memberships, are largely invisible and handle most of the importation and distribution of drugs in Alberta. “The street gangs are one rung below and will always rival one another for affiliation with organized crime,” she explains. “There are only a fixed number of spots. The shooting starts with peripheral associates, each group hoping to destabilize the other. Violence is the way to preferential affiliation.”

Edmonton criminologist Bill Pitt says the Hells Angels still rule the roost in Canadian organized crime while street level gangs fight over the crumbs. For the most part, they fly under local enforcement radar. “There are so many layers of retailers before you get to the Hells Angels and the other biker gangs,” says Pitt, who teaches at Grant MacEwan University.

Many ethnic gangs still exist—Indo-Canadian, Asian, Jamaican, Somalian. Pitt says these are a product of Canadian immigration policy. “Canadians are notorious for marginalizing their immigrants,” he contends. And while Aboriginal gangs are prolific in Western Canada, “they’re at the lower end of the food chain when it comes to sophistication.”

In Edmonton the police gang unit has files on about 50 different groups. “We have 15 to 20 groups we keep track of, who’s associated with them and a bit of their hierarchy, but I’m sure there are a lot we don’t know about,” says Staff Sergeant Darren Derko, who directs the 35-member gang unit out of a small, second-floor office at Edmonton’s downtown police headquarters. In 2007, the unit released the names of 10 street gangs active in the city. The list included, along with the Hells Angels, the Alberta Warriors, the Crazy Dragons, the Crazy Dragon Killers, GTC (Get the Cash), Indian Posse, North End Jamaicans, Redd Alert, Southside Boys, West End Jamaicans and White Boy Posse.

Police in Alberta are reluctant to disclose a list of the gangs in their jurisdiction, and the Calgary Police Service’s Eiriksson won’t even refer to the “criminal organizations” by name, because he doesn’t want to give them credibility in the eyes of Calgary’s youth. “When they’re in our streets killing each other and shooting innocent people, we don’t give them any validation.”

Derko says it’s getting more difficult to tell who’s who because many of the people they arrest don’t identify as belonging to a gang. “They don’t give themselves distinctive names anymore,” says Derko. One explanation may be a federal law that now makes it illegal to belong to a criminal organization. But probably the biggest reason, say police, is that gangs no longer want notoriety. “The groups we deal with are low-key because they don’t want us to know who they are, who they associate with and what activities they’re involved in,” says Eiriksson. “They quite often blend right in and thrive on that anonymity.”

Gang-related homicides are difficult to solve because gang members don’t co-operate with police, and witnesses are often afraid or unwilling to come forward. This came to a head in Edmonton in January when a homicide detective berated the Somali community for not co-operating with police investigating a fatal New Year’s Eve shooting of a Somali youth at a club. The city’s acting police chief apologized to angry community leaders, and vowed to keep detectives working on the unsolved homicides of more than 30 young Somali men in Alberta in the past five years. The low “clearance rate” is not unusual. Out of 77 gang homicides committed in Alberta between 2002 and 2006, more than 60 per cent remain unsolved, according to a 2009 report by the Calgary Police Service. The national clearance rate for gang crimes in 2006 was only 45 per cent, compared to 80 per cent for non-gang killings.

Police say Edmonton and Calgary had the second- and third- highest gang homicide rates in Canada in 2006 and 2007. The cities dropped to seventh and ninth respectively in 2009 when total Alberta gang homicides dropped to 13 (from 35 in 2008), but even then one in five homicides was gang-related.

A government profile of the alleged leader of the Alberta Warriors at the Peace River Correctional Centre. 

While the visible cost of gangs can be tabulated by counting coffins, the economic and social costs are incalculably high. The cost of policing, courts and incarceration is likely trivial compared to the damage done through the sale of illegal drugs—particularly healthcare costs—lost productivity, financial support for abandoned children and dysfunctional families. The U of C’s Prowse says no one has a handle on the cost of mortgage and insurance frauds and credit card scams related to gangs, but the numbers are likely huge. Then there are the psychological costs stemming from intimidation and a culture of fear in communities. “The obvious risk to the public is when these guys decide it’s time to take out a rival,”
Prowse says.

The government says gangs flourish in a community of indifference. “Too many individuals believe gangs are ‘not my problem’ or that gang crime happens ‘somewhere else,’ ” the province announced in a November 2010 report called “Alberta Gang Reduction Strategy.”

Government and police have recently taken initiatives to improve the way they tackle organized crime, including a major restructuring of the law enforcement machinery. The first changes occurred in 1996 when the province formed an independent body called the Criminal Intelligence Service of Alberta (CISA) to collect data on criminal organizations and provide it to municipal police agencies, Canadian Border Services, gaming and liquor officials and federal and provincial corrections agencies. “Before, there wasn’t a clear understanding of what organized crime looked like in the province,” says CISA director David Maze. “There was a need for an agency to look outside its own backyard and get a better understanding of the criminal element across the province.”

In 2006, the province established another independent enforcement initiative, called Alberta Law Enforcement Response Teams (ALERT), complete with its own civilian board of directors, to take action based on intelligence gathered on organized crime groups and other serious criminals such as child abusers, sexual predators and fugitives. With escalating gang violence in Calgary and Edmonton, ALERT was expanded in 2009 to nearly 400 people, most of whom—more than 300—were funded from provincial government initiatives. All members of the unit are seconded from partner agencies for a minimum of two years.

Inspector Jim Kennedy, ALERT’s director of intelligence, says his organization is unique. No other province has a central body for the oversight and governance of integrated provincial policing, although Manitoba is developing a similar agency. Since its inception, ALERT has laid 6,200 drug-related charges against 2,500 people, seized more than $4-million in cash and taken 300 firearms and 700 kg of drugs off the streets. But there have been lots of targets out there.

Maze says gang activity in Alberta spiked in 2006 when the province was rolling in an oil and gas bonanza and the economy was booming. “Basically, criminals outside of Alberta came here for the same reason everybody else did—the ‘Alberta Advantage,’” says Maze. “There was a lot of money to be made and lots of criminal markets.”

Law enforcement officials blame the federal Corrections Service for the spread of gangs across the country in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Maze says CSC officials began to have a problem with large populations of gang members in prisons such as Stony Mountain in Manitoba, and attempted to deal with it by dispersing them to prisons across the country. “What they did was educate other local criminals that were incarcerated… and build new gangs,” he says. Soon police were encountering Alberta Warriors, an offshoot of the Manitoba Warriors.

Maze says some of today’s organized crime groups are sophisticated and others are basically opportunists. But he says there’s been increased involvement in white-collar crimes because the profits are huge and the chances of violence and apprehension are greatly reduced. He says gangs are recruiting tech-savvy teens for identity thefts, credit and debit card scams, and even mortgage and real estate fraud. Sentences for these are not nearly as heavy as for drug crimes.

Poverty is key, but Alberta puts most of its resources into enforcement rather than social programs.

There’s also a boom in counterfeiting—not money, but goods such as appliances. Gangs also enlist people to steal specific items they then sell on the Internet. Other groups operate theft rings that take advance “orders” for specific items—everything from snowmobiles to tractors—and send out operatives to steal them. “The gang members shooting each other and injuring people are just the tip of the iceberg,” says the CISA director.

Police attempt to rein in gangs by monitoring their activities and gathering information to justify charging or, if applicable, deporting members. “We create an environment where these groups don’t feel comfortable and can’t operate,” says Maze. This fall in Calgary, the province will launch TALON, a controversial real-time law enforcement database. Eventually all 12 municipal police services in the province as well as First Nations police will be linked to a database containing records of all public interactions with police. “We’ll make it more difficult for the criminal to move around the province and commit offences, says Maze. “It will be one of the most significant changes in law enforcement in Alberta—a huge benefit to officer safety and public security.”

Ayaaz Janmohamed, executive director of the provincial Solicitor General’s information technology branch, says police currently have to individually contact each municipal police agency in the province to determine if a specific gang member was involved in illegal activities there. TALON enables a police officer stopping a vehicle for a traffic infraction in Edmonton to instantly access information about the driver’s history—everything from traffic tickets to outstanding shoplifting charges. “Information is gold for them,” Janmohamed says. “The concept is to have a single source of the truth.” Unlike the RCMP-operated Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC), however, which contains only verified information such as criminal convictions, TALON captures “speculative” information about suspects, including unproven allegations, investigation theories, details of 9-1-1 calls—virtually any of a citizen’s contacts with police—and this has attracted criticism from defence lawyers and civil liberties advocates.

Police have begun working with special prosecutors to increase the likelihood of convictions. This was prompted by a massive drug case that collapsed under its own weight in Edmonton. Police arrested 60 people in a series of raids in September 1999, in a crackdown on an organization known as the Trang gang. About 24 people were convicted on various charges and four were deported, but after the province spent $2.1-million building a special courtroom, charges against 19 people were stayed after the court ruled police failed to adequately disclose evidence. The case cost taxpayers $36-million in policing and legal expenses. To add insult to injury, Trang gang members successfully sued the province in a nine-year-long civil suit over horrific conditions in the remand centre. A judge found they had been subjected to cruel and unusual treatment and their Constitutional rights had been violated, but no monetary damages were awarded.

Tom Engel, an Edmonton lawyer who represented 26 of the accused, says the massive investigation did little to stop the flow of drugs. Younger and more violent criminals took over the drug trade in the city and violence became even worse. “Out of that came a gang called the Crazy Dragons, and those guys didn’t mind violence at all,” he says. Engel questions the value of enforcement and suggests the decriminalization of illegal drugs would remove gangs’ main incentive. “I don’t think there’s any information that any of these specialized units that cost millions of dollars are effective at all in controlling the use of drugs.”

Police concede they will never totally shut down gangs or the drug trade. “You’ll always have gangs,” Derko says. “We’ve laid some pretty serious charges and put gang leaders in jail, but the group gets a new hierarchy and they keep going.” But he says it is necessary for police to keep the pressure on. “If we didn’t, how rampant would this be?” he says. “We might not be able to stop them, but if we keep them down so they can’t grow, that has an impact. The more money they can generate, the more power they have.”

When police arrest and courts convict gang members, it puts a strain on the prison system. Terry Garnett, director of the Alberta Correctional Service intelligence unit, says the province now posts a security intelligence officer in all corrections facilities to keep tabs on gang members, who make up 7 per cent of the prison population. He says more than 200 inmates in 25–30 gangs are in eight provincial facilities at any one time.

Another 250 are in federal institutions in Alberta, and another 100 are in local communities under federal supervision, says April Morris, a spokesperson for the Correctional Service of Canada. She says about 2,000 gang members or associates are in federal jails and 415 of those are identified as affiliated with Aboriginal gangs. Morris says nearly 25 per cent of all incarcerated gang members are serving sentences for drug-related crimes at a cost to taxpayers of more than $300 a day. The average annual cost per inmate in 2008 was $106,583.

Garnett says that when provincial inmates are admitted they’re asked to reveal, for their own safety, whether they’re affiliated with any gangs. “We know who they get along with and try to make sure they don’t cross paths in the corrections facilities,” he says. But gang members sometimes attack gang members. The family of one is suing the province and Alberta Corrections for nearly $11-million for a vicious May 31, 2006, attack at the Edmonton Remand Centre that left the victim severely disabled.

Garnett says the influence of gangs in prison is directly related to how many members of the same gang are in a jail. “The minute they show that they’re trying to control a unit, we take measures to prevent that.” Correctional officers say the increase in the number of gang members in provincial jails brings with it a heightened risk for prison staff as well. Some are concerned that risk will increase in the new 2,000-inmate Edmonton Remand Centre, currently under construction, because guards will be mingling with prisoners rather than watching them from relative safety behind shatterproof glass windows.

Locking kids up ensures an infinite supply of new gangs. Edmonton counsellor Wallis Kendal: “Talk is cheap. If you want to get a kid off gangs, give him an alternative.” (Darcy Henton)

But Alberta’s strategy against gangs is not limited to locking them up in prisons. Premier Ed Stelmach launched a safe communities initiative following his 2008 election victory, and followed up in December 2010 with a comprehensive anti-gang strategy. The four-pronged plan focuses on awareness, prevention, intervention and enforcement. It says the suppression of gangs must be led at the community level. “Traditional law enforcement has a vital role to play in stamping out criminal activity, but more arrests alone will not solve the gang problem,” says the 50-page document. “Instead we must take a comprehensive, long-term approach—one that systematically reduces the ranks of gangs by stopping the recruitment of new gang members.”

With a multi-ministry approach, the province has invested more than $500-million to fund police, prosecutors and community programs, says former justice minister Alison Redford. “That’s one of the reasons we’ve been successful,” she says. “We didn’t just implement policies. We put in a fair amount of money.”

The province also passed a series of anti-crime bills aimed particularly at gangs—legislation that empowers police to remove gang members from bars, seize body armour and impound armoured vehicles. They also passed a bill to establish a witness protection program for gang members who testify for the Crown, and a bill that makes it mandatory for medical personnel to report stabbing and gunshot wounds to police. But the most controversial legislation so far has been a revised Victims Restitution and Compensation Payment Act that enables police to seize cash, property, vehicles and other assets they believe were used in crimes or are linked to the proceeds of crime.

“Police have told us it’s a very successful tool,” says Redford. By the end of 2010, police in Alberta had seized $20.9-million worth of property or proceeds from crime and put more than $2.5-million back into the community for programs to support immigrants, women and at-risk youth.

But this tool comes with a price, say critics, arguing it gives the province too much power. Janet Keeping, president of the Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership and co-founder of the Calgary Civil Liberties Association, says that there’s little evidence from other jurisdictions that “civil forfeiture” laws reduce crime, and she notes that the law violates the provincial Bill of Rights.

Brian Hurley, president of the Edmonton Criminal Trial Lawyers Association, says the government is focusing its energy in the wrong places. He says poverty and child abandonment are key factors in kids joining gangs, but the government still puts the bulk of its resources into enforcement rather than social programs and support systems for at-risk children.

“Upper class suburban kids don’t join gangs,” he notes. “Gang members come from disadvantaged backgrounds. You rarely have a gang member who has even one parent who gives a crap about him. Kids need to be wanted and need at least one parent to take care of them, but none of that makes a good sound bite.”

Chris Hay, executive director of the John Howard Society of Alberta, warns that youth crime is linked closely to demographics, and the number of at-risk youth is expected to increase over the next decade. He says the birthrate was up 5 per cent in 2004 over 2003 and that means more at-risk teens by 2017. He says a strong correlation between fetal alcohol syndrome and delinquency makes it logical to spend money now on counselling for drug- and alcohol-addicted women to reduce the number of FAS births. “If a young person gets into crime and doesn’t get out of it, we’ll spend millions on that person,” he notes. “There’s all that enforcement and the cost of locking them up in jail. But it’s difficult for governments to step up and invest now so we can have a brighter future 20 years from now.” Hay says other strategies aren’t working. “If we think crime is a law enforcement problem, we’re doomed to failure. Gangs are a community problem.” He says, however, the government is on the right track with its investment in community programs that support youth and their families.

Some critics say policies that aim to keep people locked up just ensure an infinite supply of new gangs. Inmates scheme with other inmates with technical skills and contacts to set up new criminal enterprises when they’re released. “The crews today were made up in jail,” says Edmonton youth outreach worker Wallis Kendal. “They meet in jail.” And once in a gang, he says, it’s extremely difficult to get out. “These kids have no other way to make an income,” he says. “I have a lot of guys and gals who would get out of gangs, but they have no way to live.”

The Native Counselling Service of Alberta (NCSA), which operates the minimum-security federal institution in downtown Edmonton known as the Stan Daniels Healing Centre, has run a Warrior program aimed at curbing violence for nearly a decade. Patti LaBoucane-Benson, NCSA’s research director, says it’s possible to help people get out of gangs, but they must be motivated. “We can’t do it for them,” she says. “We facilitate a process where they do what they need to get out of gangs. We can’t make people heal, but we try to create a safe environment where they can begin to contemplate this stuff.”

Solicitor General’s office spokesperson Christine Nardella says the province doesn’t run any programs aimed at getting gang members out of gangs, but it funds several aimed at steering youth away from gangs. In late 2010, the province allocated $8.2-million to 14 agencies with a track record of supporting vulnerable youth. One youth intervention program that received $1.5-million under the Safe Communities Strategy is Pohna: Keepers of the Fire. Pohna director Karen Erickson says the program was launched in 2006 at the request of Edmonton police to reach out to youth aged 11–17 at risk of being involved or already involved in criminal and gang activity. Some teens were wearing gang colours and modelling themselves after Los Angeles gangs with names such as the Bloodz, the Blood Set Soldiers, King Pin Blood and the Blood Tie Family.

Police say gang activity spiked in 2006, when the province was rolling in oil and gas bonanza.

“We build on the strengths of kids, rather than their problems,” she says. A critical component of the program requires youths to bring key adults in their lives—a parent or guardian or relative or teacher—for support. “We try to ensure they don’t fall between the cracks,” she says. “We develop a relationship in which they feel valued, that someone is there for them, that they have somewhere to turn, that they are not alone.”

She says the support system sticks with the youths even if they falter and end up charged with additional criminal offences. It shows them a better way and helps establish a support network to get there. “They want to stay out of trouble and to stop drinking and doing drugs,” she says. “They want to move away from the group that gets them into trouble, but making all these things happen isn’t easy. A 14-year-old can’t do it alone. Will alone can’t make changes occur.”

Kendal, an outreach worker who’s been stabbed and beaten in his line of work, isn’t optimistic such programs will be successful without housing support and employment opportunities for youth. “Talk is cheap,” he says bluntly. “If you want to get a 16-year-old off gangs, you have to give him an alternative that means something.” He says programs to help prepare youth for employment have inflexible hours and pay only $1,000 a month, which nobody can live on.

Jesse (not his real name) is coming to terms with that. A former gang leader in Edmonton, he lived the life of a high roller, pulling in several thousand dollars a day. He had credibility on the street and he had power. He could give an order and people would be beaten. But a few stints in prison for home invasion and drug charges got him thinking. He was tired of always looking over his shoulder for other gangs or the police. He was tired of hurting people to collect drug debts or just because they were from a rival gang.

In jail, he saw 50-year-old gang members trapped in that lifestyle and decided it wasn’t the life he wanted. “The fact that I didn’t have a Christmas, I didn’t have a birthday, was depressing. I didn’t know every day if I would live or die. I was angry. Days were stressful—always living by the drugs and the money. I always wanted to change, but change is so hard.”

He reached for help through a NCSA program called Quest for Success, a predecessor of Pohna. It took two tries before he finally managed to cut all ties to gangs and drugs. Going back to school and finding a job were nearly impossible. Kendal got him into drug rehab and his counsellors helped him get a job. But it was a long process. Jesse had never lived a “normal” life. His mother and other relatives were drug dealers and users. He’d sold drugs since he was 13. He had to turn away from his gang buddies, from the money and the power.

Jesse, now 25, has been clean and sober for two years. He’s still going to school, has a part-time job and works with other young people trying to wean themselves off gangs. He says he would never have got this far without the programs. “Those supports are needed when someone’s trying to get out of that lifestyle,” he says. “It’s almost like teaching a baby how to walk.”

He’s enthusiastic about a new program called Uncensored, run out of the U of A. “It’s outside the box,” explains Jesse. The program enlists youth to counsel counsellors in techniques to help kids like themselves. Similar to Pohna, it gives youth power to change the way things are.

“This program is a groundbreaker,” Kendal adds. “If there’s going to be a change, it will come because the kids themselves will be the driving force.”

Darcy Henton is a veteran journalist who currently covers politics as an Edmonton-based legislature reporter for the Calgary Herald.

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Promise comes in the form of a middle-aged doctor from Canada. He is on a humanitarian vacation of sorts, returning to his homeland—Iraqi Kurdistan—to see his people and to ease his conscience. He comes with medicine and supplies and, so it is said, will cure the sick. Gratis. Barely 10 years old, the girl knows better than to believe all she hears. Born with a weak heart that keeps getting weaker, she comes prepared. She and her mother are called into a makeshift examination room where the doctor stands waiting. Something about the girl reminds him of his daughter back in Canada and he catches himself calling her gulekem, little flower.

Her heart needs fixing, she says. And, not to worry, she can pay him. With tender confidence, she opens her palm, revealing a creased, worn bill. Two hundred and fifty Iraqi dinars. The equivalent of twenty-five Canadian cents.   

The doctor stumbles through a response. In Canada, her case would be manageable with high-tech diagnostics, surgery and expert monitoring. But in one of the poorest pockets of the Kurdish region of Iraq, her case is impossible. There is neither the medicine, nor the equipment, nor the will to heal her heart.  

The doctor feels the twofold sting of sorrow and shame. How unforgiving this world can be, he thinks; how unfair. Back in Calgary, his child’s ear infections and toothaches are treated with more care than the failing heart of this little Kurdish girl.

He knows that under marginally different circumstances he could have been waiting in such a line pleading with a foreign doctor to cure his sick child. And he would have found it incomprehensible—outrageous, even—for that doctor to say only that he was sorry but nothing could be done. Not here. Not now. So this doctor does the only thing he can—he takes a bar of chocolate from his pocket, places it upon the money nestled in the girl’s palm and gently closes her fingers around it. He allows himself a moment before moving on to the next patient. 

I cried when I heard this story. First I cried for the girl. Then I cried for her mother. Finally I cried for the doctor. Which is to say that I cried for my husband. 

Dr. Saren Azer came to Canada in 1994, a political refugee from Iran. A passionate Kurdish nationalist, he was imprisoned in both Iran and Turkey for publishing in Kurdish, a banned language. He sought political refuge and found it in Canada; I sought personal refuge and found it with him. 

What began as a mutual fascination with “the other”—westerner vs. easterner, Christian vs. Muslim, academic vs. activist—matured into a delightful blend of experiences, values, dreams and desires. In the shadow of his passion for social justice, I became a quick study—thirsty for a vision of the world to replace the consumerist metaphors of my youth. Das Kapital meets No Logo.  

Ten years on, we’re struggling to make room for our principles in an otherwise crowded life. Since August 2004, Saren has earned an MD (he’s now a resident in internal medicine at the University of Calgary), we’ve had three children and we’ve moved to Calgary, to Vancouver and recently back to Calgary. I’m attempting to balance motherhood with an “otherhood” of writing, volunteering and consulting. Our margins are narrow but wide enough to keep a watch on the world.   

Kurds’ capital rose with the toppling of Saddam. Then it was “discovered” that they were floating on a sea of oil.

For Saren it feels like selling out: putting everything personal in front of everything political. I feel complicit, but perhaps I’m getting comfortable with my complicity. Sigh. What to do when my days are filled with decision points like “I have five minutes—do I change this diaper or change the world?”

Throughout 2005 and 2006, Saren remained restless. In the spirit of Norman Bethune and Albert Schweitzer, he wanted to practise medicine in the neediest of places, on the neediest of people. In May 2007, with the ink on his MD barely dry, using the only four weeks of vacation he’d had in years, Saren set off for the Kurdish region of northern Iraq.  

At the invitation of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), he saw patients in the hospitals and clinics in the region’s three largest cities—Suleymaniye, Dohuk and Hewler. He also visited the shantytowns and refugee camps encircling the cities, meeting people displaced by war, chemical attacks and invasions. They couldn’t have received him more warmly; the nation’s son had returned! In their midst, in some of the worst conditions imaginable, he felt alive for the first time in years. 

After decades hovering in geopolitical obscurity, the Kurds’ pivotal role in the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq garnered international acclaim. Their capital rose with the toppling of Saddam Hussein, jumped when he was captured and soared when he was hanged. The new belle of the Middle East had arrived. Branded by Madison Avenue as “the other Iraq,” Kurdistan became an oasis in a hostile land. International carriers began flying in to Hewler, dousing the region with a mix of adventure tourists, venture capitalists, aid workers and diaspora Kurds.

At first, the attention spurred growth, democracy and good government. Emerging from a past scarred by betrayals, bombings, manipulation and mass graves, Iraqi Kurdistan was coming of age. Then it was “discovered” that Kurdistan was floating on a sea of oil. To Kurds there was no discovery required: they’d long been able to start fires by striking a match across the soil. Saddam, with no interest in a petroleum-inspired Kurdish uprising, had decreed that the oil stay underground. Even during the decade-long era of the “no-fly zone,” there was little domestic capacity to kickstart an industry as capital intensive as oil extraction. Yet the irony of living atop one of the world’s largest oilfields while paying bloated prices for an unreliable supply of petrol was not lost on Iraq’s Kurds. 

By mid-2006, the few starred hotels in the big cities were filling with western oilmen representing a range of oil interests—from Fortune 500 blue chips to wildcat penny stocks—whose presence fuelled a dream of drill-based economic development. The KRG relished the opportunity, courting foreign investors with panache while ignoring confrontational calls from Baghdad. A war of words over jurisdiction was small bother compared to the bounty beneath their feet. 

Canadian energy companies beat a path to the KRG’s door. With lapels festooned with newly minted Kurdish/Canadian friendship pins, they tried to learn regional traditions—like triple cheek kissing among the same sex. Still, without a Kurdish version of the Lonely Planet guides, westerners struggled with some of the more intimate details of cross-cultural adventure. 

Dr. Saren Azer speaks with a patient in a rural clinic in Kurdistan. (Photo courtesy of Dr. Azer)

A consultant hired by a Calgary company with a stake in Kurdish oil asked me if I could introduce him to Iraqi Kurds living in Calgary, people who would put a face to the place and help to answer questions about day-to-day living in the region’s business capital, Suleymaniye. Pressing him for an example, I laughed at his reply. “They want to know whether Kurdish grocery stores stock peanut butter.”

When Saren made his initial trip back to Kurdistan—his first in 13 years—it was under the banner of the organization we founded almost a decade ago, the International Society for Peace & Human Rights. He went with fellow member Lynne Foster—and 100 teddy bears, gently worn children’s clothing and boxes of aloe vera cream for victims of Saddam’s chemical warfare. Arriving at the outskirts of some villages, they would be surrounded by hundreds of people who had just learned that a western doctor was coming to take the sick back to Canada in his personal jet, no less. Many came with treatable conditions, such as infections due to improper water and sewage sanitation, and needed a good dose of antibiotics—which they received. Even more were sick due to hunger, and needed a meal—which they received. But most were ill, really ill, and with nothing to give, there was nothing to receive. 

That fall, cholera broke out in Iraqi Kurdistan. An infectious gastroenteritis transmitted through contaminated food and water, cholera is an unforgiving disease—the afflicted can die within hours. An accurate assessment of the spread of the disease was difficult to pin down. The KRG’s account was markedly more conservative than that of the World Health Organization, which within two weeks labelled the situation an epidemic. In private conversations with health officials on the ground, Saren learned that the situation was nearing a crisis—medications imported via Baghdad weren’t reaching the Kurdish region quickly enough. We approached Health Partners International Canada, an organization that coordinates donations from Canada’s pharmaceutical industry for humanitarian efforts. Their rapid response, in combination with a donation from an international transportation company to ship the medication directly to Hewler, resulted in over $100,000 worth of first-class cholera medicine arriving at the crest of the epidemic. 

Our initial endorphin rush from doing something tangible faded to numbing regret at not being able to do more. The needs are infinite, the resources finite—it’s mathematically impossible that the lines will meet. And so we threw ourselves into plans for a May 2008 trip to Kurdistan. The delegation expanded to include Jason, a settlement worker, and Sheila, a retired nurse. I stayed at home with the children. Our delegation was expanding, too—I was pregnant and due in August. 

A Calgary oil company operating in a desperately poor region of Iraqi Kurdistan wanted to support the community. They donated $10,000 for the mission; Saren and Lynn spent five days seeing patients at a clinic in the community. 

During one of those five days, Saren and Lynn met Parveen. She moved gracefully, laughed easily and breathed deeply. But appearances deceived. Parveen’s condition was not only serious but potentially fatal. A blood disorder had enlarged her liver and spleen almost beyond her petite body’s capacity to contain them. Parveen shared her story with Saren, talked about her family and their poverty. And about the fact that they could see oil wells out their back window. “Who are these foreigners taking our oil?” she asked. The question hung in the air. 

There was nothing Saren could do for Parveen. She needed surgery—a specialized procedure not offered in the region. She needed to go to a neighbouring country such as Iran or Turkey, and for that she needed at least $5,000. Money her family didn’t have, money we didn’t have to give her. 

But Parveen made an impression on Saren and Lynn. She asked them for their phone numbers and called daily while they were in Kurdistan and weekly once they returned home. At the end of every call, she said: “Forgive me, but I will die without your help. Please don’t forget me.”

When Saren returned to Canada he was a shadow of the man I had taken to the airport six weeks earlier. Exhausted, gaunt, emotionally spent. Seven months pregnant and raising two young girls while working and preparing to relocate our family to Vancouver, I endured a roller coaster of emotions during his absence. On the way up I was proud, optimistic, resilient. On the way down I was worried, vulnerable, resentful.

And on it goes. It’s becoming a split-screen existence for us—Canada vs. Kurdistan, abundance vs. scarcity. Albeit in different roles, Saren and I have taken a stake in the struggle. It’s the only way we can live with ourselves and with each other. 

Saren was in Kurdistan when I got news that another Canadian oil company had signed an agreement with the KRG: Talisman Energy. One of Canada’s largest independent oil and gas companies, it has struggled to repair the damage done to its reputation during the company’s tenure in war-torn Sudan. In late 1999, allegations surfaced that Talisman’s role in Sudan was fuelling the civil war. The numbers balanced: $1-million a day in oil royalties, $1-million daily in military spending. Talisman eventually withdrew from Sudan under heavy criticism. 

Five years later, Talisman entered Kurdistan with a US$95-million investment in two exploration blocks. I had a dreadful sense of déjà vu. True, Kurdistan is no Khartoum—but it’s no Shangri-la, either. The KRG is increasingly guilty of institutional megalomania, their hold on power reinforced by corruption, nepotism and tribalism. The stealth armour surrounding the KRG leadership is rattling under the tectonic shifts gripping Kurdish society. The gaps between rich and poor, traditional and modern, loyalty and opportunism are widening and the resulting tension undermines the stability of “the other Iraq.”

How would the Talisman of war-torn Sudan differ from the Talisman of war-torn Iraqi Kurdistan?

The dark underbelly of Iraqi Kurdistan’s accelerated coming of age is stained with human rights abuses, limitations on freedom of the press and miscarriages of justice. It has caught the eye of the international human rights community, most notably Human Rights Watch, which in 2007 published a report entitled “Caught in the Whirlwind: Torture and Denial of Due Process by the Kurdistan Security Forces.” Human Rights Watch claims that security forces, known as Asayish and operating outside the control of the Ministry of the Interior, have held hundreds of detainees without due process. Detainees tell of being beaten with cables, hoses and metal rods.

To what lengths did Talisman go to ensure that the KRG’s human rights record did not contravene the company’s business and ethics policies How did Talisman ensure that it would not be charged with “complicity in human rights abuses” like it was in Sudan Did Talisman appropriately consult communities about potential human rights issues affecting its operations In a press release announcing the company’s entry into Iraqi Kurdistan, Talisman CEO John Manzoni said: “We have done extensive due diligence, including careful review of corporate social responsibility [CSR] issues.” In addition to the US$95-million spent on the properties, “as part of the transactions with the KRG and in keeping with Talisman’s corporate responsibility policies and practices, the company will pay US$220-million plus further conditional contributions to the KRG for the sole purpose of providing financial support to infrastructure and capacity-building projects for the benefit of the people in the region and in particular the local communities in the agreement areas.” 

The official ruling body of Iraqi Kurdistan is a national assembly of 111 seats. After years of fighting—with words and weapons—the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan created a coalition in 2004 called the Democratic Patriotic Alliance of Kurdistan. The names are lofty, the reality less so. In the 2005 election, the coalition received 90 per cent of the vote. Overnight, entire tribes of uncles, brothers and nephews of the leaders rose to bureaucratic stardom. The stench of nepotism hangs in the air still.

The relationship between the KRG and the Iraqi government is complicated by a high-stakes competition for the assets of this fledgling federal state. Bubbling to the top are disputed claims over oil revenues. The KRG argues that it has sole authority over the resources. Baghdad begs to differ. Like other investors in the region, Talisman must nervously watch as this petroleum passion play unfolds. Will KRG leadership resort to Klein-esque decrees to “let the southern bastards freeze in the dark?” Is an Iraqi version of the NEP imminent?

I’m more than a little surprised to learn that Talisman would allow the KRG—warts and all—to oversee the disbursement of its CSR investment. Where are the checks and balances to ensure that the funds are spent accountably How much of the money will make it out of the gated communities of top officials and into impoverished communities like Parveen’s And, more troubling, if the disagreement between the KRG and Baghdad over the spoils of oil continues to escalate and civil strife breaks out, how would the Talisman of war-torn Sudan differ from the Talisman of war-torn Iraqi Kurdistan?

It’s Spring 2009. Saren and Lynn are preparing for another trip to Kurdistan. Again they’ll travel with medicines, supplies and a suitcase filled with teddy bears. It’s a shorter trip this time—three weeks is all they could manage—and there’s a lot of ground to cover. They feel a moral imperative to see Parveen. According to her doctor, she’s worse off than she was a year ago. Should they tell her that among the foreigners in her backyard is a new batch of Canadians?

As long as I’ve known him, Saren calculates potential expenditures by comparing them to what the money could do for others. Take our old IKEA coffee table—decorated with stickers and indelible drawings, perfect for his university bachelor pad, impractical for a family of five.  It took more than a year of lobbying to get Saren to part with $100 to buy a modest replacement. Don’t get me wrong—he’s not cheap. He would empty his wallet for anyone in trouble and would never expect to be paid back. But spending impulsively when 30,000 children die every day of hunger To him, it’s no different than stealing. 

Alison Azer is a Calgary researcher and activist. She is a former Public Policy Fellow with the Sheldon Chumir Foundation.

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