statism watch

CBC News
June 17, 2008

About one in three people shot with a Taser by the RCMP receive injuries that require medical attention, according to a joint investigation by CBC News/Radio-Canada and the Canadian Press.

The media outlets, which analyzed the Taser-use forms RCMP officers are required to fill out if they draw a stun gun, examined reports from 2002 to 2007. According to the data, 28 per cent, or 910 of the 3,226 people who were shot, had to go to a medical facility.

But a detailed examination of the forms revealed that many more people are injured, yet never see a doctor.

In three years worth of reports obtained under Access to Information legislation, people suffered injuries including burns, puncture wounds from the probes, and head wounds from falling. In many cases, however, the person was not taken for medical treatment.

More recent forms had the sections on injuries blacked out. The investigation suggests some of those incidents resulted in injuries that are not included in the 28 per cent figure.

For example, in one incident report, a person shot with a Taser suffered “burn marks from touch stun mode” but was not examined at a medical facility.

In another example, a person suffered “multiple skin burns where Taser came into contact with subject while fighting with police” but he was not taken to be examined.

RCMP Public Complaints Commissioner Paul Kennedy noted this failure in an interim report last fall on stun gun use by the force.

Dr. Paul Dorian, a cardiologist and a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, said police officers need to assume they may hurt someone when they use a Taser and treat all injuries seriously.

He conducted a study on pigs on the effects on the heart of Taser shocks and found multiple hits with a stun gun can cause heart stress.

“If there is injury and illness, as a physician, I would have to say those people, even if they are accused criminals, should be taken care of,” he said.

Full Story | See Also: RCMP firing Tasers multiple times at subjects, probe reveals | U.S. jury shocks Taser, investors, with rare loss in court | Tasering violated suspect’s rights, judge rules | RCMP willing to change Taser policy, inquiry told | Tasers pose risk to heart, MDs testify | ‘Peel and Stick’ Tasers Electrify Riot Control | Canadian police have been brainwashed, Taser inquiry told | Mounties censor Taser report | Taser group’s chair to defend stun guns at public inquiry | Chicago study calls Taser’s safety claims into question | Officer injured in Taser demonstration

Royson James, Toronto Star
Jun 17, 2008

Road tolls are coming – and it will be good for you.

That may be the easiest of the arguments Metrolinx has to make to GTA residents long starved of top-notch transit.

Metrolinx is the 11-member provincial agency (most members are municipal politicians) charged with the task of developing a 25-year transportation plan for the region. There is no shortage of ideas and projects as each city and town has dusted off favourite projects. What’s been missing is the money – not good when the price tag is in the neighbourhood of $17 billion.

The province will pick up a hefty portion. And we can always pray for a change in Ottawa. But municipalities will have to chip in between $2.8 billion and $6.2 billion a year of their own share. And municipalities mean you.

Metrolinx is to present a draft report on the financing options next month and decide by October. And last Friday board members received an update, a kind of preview of what to expect. That’s where the road toll, or road pricing option, came up.

Once upon a time, promoting that option would have been fatal to anyone’s political fortunes. Now, just about everyone realizes that road tolls are a given as the region attempts to grapple with millions of trips in one of the fastest-growing areas in the nation.

In case you are still skeptical about the need for road tolls, consider the options and alternatives for the GTA and Hamilton, each one netting $1 billion per year:

Add a 20-cent tax to each litre of gas;

Raise transit fares, especially in the 905 region, so that the fare box covers half the operating cost. The TTC is already there;

Add a 1 per cent retail sales tax;

Lobby governments to pay half the capital costs;

Slap a $1 per weekday tax on non-residential parking spaces;

Impose a 10-cent per kilometre toll on the Gardiner, Don Valley Parkway and 400 series highways.

If you managed to get all those through – all six – then you would have netted about $6 billion and have begun to address the GTA region’s transportation needs. That explains why a sure thing like road tolls can’t be omitted as a funding option.

Metrolinx has some advantages over the politicians who proposed road tolls in the past. The mayors and regional chairs that sit on this agency don’t have to seek re-election based on their actions and voting record at Metrolinx.

For example, Mayor David Miller’s re-election platform doesn’t include his imposing road tolls on Toronto residents to maintain or expand the TTC. Rather, Miller pushes the idea at Metrolinx where the politicians are better insulated from public backlash.

Whether or not that flies in the face of responsible governance is a matter for pundits and the guardians of democracy. But it is efficacious. We’ve known that it will cost bundles of money to address our transit deficit across the region. And we know property taxes alone can’t pick up the tab. That part isn’t new. What is new is we have an agency that is positioned and prepared to dispense the medicine so needed to fix the region’s ailing transportation infrastructure.

Which would you rather pay to get the subways and streetcars and high occupancy vehicle lanes and rapid transit and road improvements needed to move this region daily? More gas tax on top of already outrageous gasoline prices? How about a 1 per cent sales tax? None of them is painless. And we need them all.

Just remind us of the benefits.

Source | See Also: World has enough oil reserves, says BP boss |  Is it time for toll roads? | Toronto part of ‘transnational mega-region’ | Vancouver to import road tolls from UK | UK proposes national road tolls to cut congestion | Motorists to pay London toll

Stuart Trew, Council of Canadians
June 17, 2008

Canada’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Wilson, will address the secretive invite-only North American Forum gathering today (June 17, 8:30 a.m.), according to a press release from the World Affairs Council forwarded to Integrate This! by Teresa Healy of the Canadian Labour Congress.

“Over the course of the two-day conference, attendees will engage in off-the-record discussions on a range on critical topics including security, energy resources, climate change, arms and drug trafficking, economic integration and competitiveness,” says the release. “The conference will close with a roundtable discussion led by the three Co-Chairs.”

This is the fourth North American Forum meeting since the first took place, very quietly, in Sonoma, California. The event, which has been described as a “sister organization” to the Security and Prosperity Partnership, is co-chaired by former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Schultz, former Mexican Finance Minister Pedro Aspe, and former Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed. According to the World Affairs Council, “the agenda for each meeting is tri-national in scope and promotes discussion among 75 delegates from Canada, Mexico, and the United States.”

Security, economic competitiveness, energy and the environment will be the primary topics on the agenda, “as leading scholars, business leaders and policy experts are convened… from June 15-17, 2008 in Washington, D.C.” says the press release. “These topics will be considered through the lens of collaboration among Mexico, Canada and the United States, particularly in light of the upcoming U.S. elections.”

The contents of Ambassador Wilson’s speech are predictable. He has been running around like a chicken with its head cut off, dispatching minions to try and convince every major American policymaker that without NAFTA, the North American economy will collapse. The bigger problem is that Wilson will be representing the government of Canada at a private gathering that has to date purposely excluded the media and public from seeing exactly what is being discussed behind closed doors.

Source | See Also:   “North American Parliament” Meets At Integration Forum | South American union is created | Business group sets and gets its agenda | Continental Business Lobby Releases List of Priorities for Government to Address at SPP Talks| CBC-TV’s mini-series Trojan Horse is a very clever warning to Canadians about the North American Union agenda | New Documents Reveal North American Union PR Campaign | Vicente Fox Admits Plan For Single NAFTA Currency | Military To Crackdown On North American Union Protesters | North American Union plan headed to Congress in fall | Fraser Institute: The Case for the Amero

Matthew Weaver, guardian.co.uk
Tuesday June 17 2008

The government today insisted that pilot schemes to test bin taxes using wheelie bins with microchips will go ahead despite a decision to scrap them by the first council to try the scheme.

The microchips enable bins to be weighed by bin lorries so the amount each household recycles and throws away can be assessed.

South Norfolk council became the first in England to pilot the scheme in 2002. But yesterday it announced that the scheme had been a failure and had led to a huge increase in flytipping

The Tory-run authority blamed a combination of electrical, data, mechanical and hydraulic faults.

The council leader, John Fuller, said: “A system that sounded good on paper in London failed to work at 7.30am on a cold and wet Monday in December in South Norfolk. It was time to bin the technology.”

The council paid for the scheme using government grants of more than £1m.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) denied that the council decision would derail the government’s controversial “pay-as-you-throw” bin levy plan.

“If something doesn’t work for a local authority, we think it’s right for them to drop it. Systems don’t work equally everywhere,” a spokeswoman said.

She added: “Pilot schemes to create incentives for recycling will be undertaken by five local authorities next year, when current legislation is updated to make this possible.

“Councils wishing to participate will propose schemes and methods that they have devised, not us. We will evaluate the impact of those pilots before making a final decision on whether other local authorities can introduce similar schemes.”

It cost South Norfolk council £25,000 to install on-board weighing technology to refuse lorries to enable them to read the microchips installed in bins.

David Bills, a Tory councillor with responsibility for recyling, said: “I spent a day on the rounds with a bin crew and experienced the frustrations of chips not being read which required a manual override.

“The whole concept of pay-as-you-throw is fraught with problems.”

Last October the government denied that it had dropped pay-as-you-throw plans after reports that Gordon Brown had intervened to halt a Defra announcement to allow council to levy bin taxes.

Source | See Also: Toronto Residents Furious Over RFID Garbage Bins | The monster (blue bin) that ate downtown | Bin Brother is watching you

Julian Borger and Joe Jackson, The Guardian
Tuesday June 17, 2008

British offenders depressed at the prospect of sweeping out bus stations in a fluorescent jacket identifying them as a criminal, or being shamed in a “conviction poster”, can console themselves with the thought that they could be at the cutting edge of a historic revival.

The reforms, suggested in a report by Louise Casey, former head of the government’s Respect Unit, hark back to the days of Ancient Rome, where prostitutes were forced to wear a man’s toga as a badge of shame, and to China’s Cultural Revolution, when class enemies were paraded around with self-condemnatory slogans on their clothes. Originally used in Medieval Europe as a means for the community to punish petty offences, “degrading treatment” was outlawed in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

According to Amnesty International and Penal Reform International, contemporary examples of “shaming sentences” are rare. If the British measures come into force, we will apparently share honours with China, rural India, Rwanda and a few jurisdictions overseen by particularly imaginative judges in the US.

When police in Shenzhen, southern China, paraded 100 prostitutes and their clients through the streets in yellow tunics in 2006, the practice was the subject of unusual public criticism and was not repeated. Miscreants in some Indian villages have had their heads shaved, and have been made to ride donkeys around the area to the scorn of their neighbours. Meanwhile Rwanda’s community courts order anyone convicted of taking part in the genocide there to perform menial tasks wearing pink shirts.

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Nick Pisa, The Scotsman
June 16, 2008

SOLDIERS are to be deployed in Italian cities as Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister, cracks down on crime as part of his government’s new domestic security package.

The troops – drawn from those who have served abroad – will patrol alongside regular state police and carabinieri paramilitary police.

They will be able to stop, search and identify suspects but will have no powers of arrest. Instead they must call for support or take suspects to the nearest police station.

Defence minister Ignazio La Russa said: “We are talking about a contingent of 2,500 troops who will patrol, alongside ordinary police, in order to safeguard the security of citizens.

“The scheme will be initially for six months and then renewed for another six months as a one-off and that will be it.

“If it was possible to recruit and train 2,500 police officers immediately then I would be delighted not to use troops.”

Opposition MPs and police unions did not share his enthusiasm with Antonio Di Pietro, of the Party of Values, saying: “Troops on the streets are only seen in places like Colombia against terrorists and armed insurrectionists. The idea of militarising cities gives an impression of insecurity and will affect tourism and the economy.”

Mr Berlusconi came back to power two months ago after campaigning on a strong law and order manifesto.

The cities earmarked for troop patrols are Rome, Milan, Naples, Florence, Genoa, Bologna, Turin, Palermo, Bari and Venice.

Source | See Also: Machine Gun-Toting Officers To Patrol NYC Subway | U.S. Northern Command, Canada Command establish new bilateral Civil Assistance Plan | Harper pledges to boost military presence in cities

Paul Joseph Watson, prisonplanet.com
June 16, 2008

Staged incident to justify continued military occupation in Afghanistan

Reports out of the Middle East indicate that U.S. forces gave the green light for the Taliban to attack a government prison in Kandahar this past Friday and stood idly by while Taliban fighters violently freed more than 1000 inmates.

“Experts in regional affairs believe that Taliban militants attacked the Kandahar prison with the green light from US forces,” reports Press TV.

“They say it is questionable – how could the militants dare attack the prison with US-led troops stationed just northeast of the jail?”

“The sources also noted that although clashes between Afghan security forces and the militants lasted for several hours, US-led troops did not intervene.”

“Ordinary people share the idea, asking how is it possible that hundreds of militants could attack a government prison, detonating more than 800 kilograms of explosives and foreign forces show no reaction.”

Why would U.S. forces stand idly by while 600 hundred Taliban fighters were freed?

The report notes that “Afghans are tired of war and that only a few illiterate people, called Taliban, are fighting foreign forces.”

Without an enemy to fight, there would be no justification for a continued U.S. and NATO presence in Afghanistan. There would be no more weapons sales contracts and no more rebuilding contracts for Halliburton.

Remember, this miraculous prison break occurred just days before Gordon Brown agreed to send hundreds more British troops into Afghanistan to put the British presence there at an all time high.

The necessity for continued violence in Afghanistan exists just like it does in Iraq, for the pretext of justifying an endless military occupation and the opportunity to build military bases that will be used as launch pads for future wars, as is now being discussed for Iraq.

As we have highlighted in the past, links between Taliban leadership and the U.S. military-industrial complex are documented.

As Seymour Hersh reported in January 2002, at the height of the war in Afghanistan, hundreds of Taliban fighters “accidentally” ended up on U.S. organized special safety corridor airlifts right before the fall of Kunduz.

The Taliban itself was a creation of the CIA having been set up and bankrolled by the U.S. in tandem with Pakistan’s ISI.

“In the 1980s, the CIA provided some $5 billion in military aid for Islamic fundamentalist rebels fighting the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, but scaled down operations after Moscow pulled out in 1989. However, Selig Harrison of the DC-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars recently told a conference in London that the CIA created the Taliban “monster” by providing some $3 billion for the ultra-fundamentalist militia in their 1994-6 drive to power,” reported the Times of India.

Source | See Also: Taliban fighters take villages near Kandahar after jailbreak | Afghan prison break | British Special Forces Caught Carrying Out Staged Terror In Iraq? | US Allowed Taliban, Al-Qaeda Airlift Evacuation

Terry Milewski, CBC News
June 16, 2008

Lakes are in B.C., Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, Northwest Territories and Nunavut

CBC News has learned that 16 Canadian lakes are slated to be officially but quietly “reclassified” as toxic dump sites for mines. The lakes include prime wilderness fishing lakes from B.C. to Newfoundland.

Environmentalists say the process amounts to a “hidden subsidy” to mining companies, allowing them to get around laws against the destruction of fish habitat.

Under the Fisheries Act, it’s illegal to put harmful substances into fish-bearing waters. But, under a little-known subsection known as Schedule Two of the mining effluent regulations, federal bureaucrats can redefine lakes as “tailings impoundment areas.”

That means mining companies don’t need to build containment ponds for toxic mine tailings.

CBC News visited two examples of Schedule Two lakes. In Newfoundland and Labrador, the Vale Inco company wants to use a prime destination for fishermen known as Sandy Pond to hold tailings from a nickel processing plant.

In northern B.C., Imperial Metals plans to enclose a remote watershed valley to hold tailings from a gold and copper mine. The valley lies in what the native Tahltan people call the “Sacred Headwaters” of three major salmon rivers. It also serves as spawning grounds for the rainbow trout of Kluela Lake, which is downstream from the dump site.

Lakes ’safest option’: mining association

Vale Inco’s proposal was the subject of a public meeting on June 10 in Long Harbour, N.L. Billed as a “public consultation” on the proposal, the meeting was attended by government officials, mining executives, environmentalists and fishermen.

Lakes are often the best way for mine tailings to be contained, said Elizabeth Gardiner, vice-president for technical affairs for the Mining Association of Canada.

“In some cases, particularly in Canada, with this kind of topography and this number of natural lakes and depressions and ponds … in the end it’s really the safest option for human health and for the environment,” she said.

But Catherine Coumans, spokeswoman for the environmental group Mining Watch, said the federal government is making it too easy. She said federal officials are increasingly using the obscure Schedule Two regulations to quietly reclassify lakes and other waters as tailings dumps.

“Something that used to be a lake — or a river, in fact, they can use rivers — by being put on this section two of this regulation is no longer a river or a lake,” she said. “It’s a tailings impoundment area. It’s a waste disposal site. It’s an industrial waste dump.”

Coumans said the procedure amounts to a subsidy to the industry and enables mines to get around the Fisheries Act.…

Jim Bourquin of the Cassiar Watch Society, a conservation group, said Kluela Lake, immediately downstream from the site, is “one of the best trout fishing lakes in northern B.C.”

“This is a precedent-setting decision by the federal government to start using fish-bearing habitat as a waste management area,” Bourquin said. “It’s totally bizarre for the federal government to come here and say that this Y-shaped valley up here is no longer a fish habitat, it’s no longer sacred headwaters, it’s just a waste dump site.”

But Steve Robertson, exploration manager for Imperial Metals, told CBC News the dump site will be sealed and that the economic benefits of the planned Red Chris mine will be enormous.

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