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Information removed from the audit into Ohio’s HB6 law by a protective order granted by the Ohio Public Utilities Commission (PUCO) is still unavailable although some of the details were ostensibly unredacted during a Nov. 2 hearing on the case.

Those details include the identity of the company that has been overcharging for coal supplied to one of the coal plants at the heart of HB6 – Resource Fuels of Columbus – and the net income for the Ohio Valley Electric Corp. (OVEC), the company bailed out by HB6.

Matt Schilling, the PUCO spokesman, said those redactions on that information were declared invalid during the Nov. 2 hearing, but the audit still remains on the PUCO website with that data blacked out to the public.

Nov. 2 PUCO hearing transcript in which the name of coal supplier Resource Fuels is determined to be available to the public.

Only a close examination of the Nov. 2 hearing transcript on the PUCO website would provide the name of Resource Fuels, which identified in the LEI audit as overcharging for the coal it supplied OVEC’s Clifty Creek power plant in 2020. But its name was redacted from the audit, because of the protective order granted on July 7.

C&BP has reported that testimony submitted in October to PUCO indicated that Resource Fuels was paid $12.6 million more for the coal it supplied Clifty Creek in 2020 than another company, Alliance Coal, that was supplying Clifty Creek from the same coal mine. Details of the two companies’ coal contracts are available in data reported by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

C&BP also reported that the PUCO staff agreed to the protective orders requested by three of the utilities that are part owners of OVEC, even though the information that was declared secret was already available to the public either through the Energy Information Administration or OVEC’s own website.

PUCO denied C&BP request for staffers’ identities

C&BP requested PUCO supply the identities of the staff members who recommended granting the protective order and accepted the rationale that the details of the audit that were already available to the public were somehow “trade secrets.”

The publicly available audit into HB6 still contains the redactions of the name of coal supplier Resource Fuels.

Schilling said the request for the staffers’ names was a “request for information,” not a public records request and there were no public records that included the information sought by C&BP. “Therefore, your request is denied.”

The history of the audit into the surcharges required by HB6 is marked by delays and attempts by utility representatives to limit the disclosure of information.

As Kathiann Kowalski of the Energy News Network reported in June: “London Economics International completed its audit reports on the 2020 costs in late 2021. More than a year passed before the commission set a schedule for accepting comments in the case.”

No set date for when public audits will be unredacted

When asked by C&BP when the public audit would reflect the unredactions apparently agreed to during the Nov. 2 hearing, Schilling replied with a copy of a transcript from Nov. 6 in which Attorney Examiner Megan Addison said parties in the audit case could discuss “possibly reducing the confidential treatment of certain exhibits as referenced throughout this transcript in order to limit the number — the amounts of redacted information contained in the public domain.”

Addison set Jan. 8, 2024, as the date by which the parties must briefs about the details from the audit and Jan. 29, 2024, as the date when reply briefs are due.

Schilling said Wednesday morning that “briefs and reply briefs are due on those dates in January. Otherwise the parties indicated at hearing they will be making future filings to unredact certain information.”

Ray Locker is the executive director for Checks & Balances Project, an investigative watchdog blog holding government officials, lobbyists, and corporate management accountable to the public. Funding for C&BP is provided by Renew American Prosperity and individual donors.

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Checks & Balances Project is requesting the identities of the Ohio Public Utilities Commission staff members who recommended issuing the protective order that declared publicly available information to be trade secrets in the audit conducted into the details of Ohio’s HB6 law.

The order, granted July 7 by Attorney Examiner Megan Addison, forced the redaction of the identity of the company that auditors said was “overcharging” for the coal it was supplying to the Ohio Valley Electric Corp.’s Clifty Creek power plant, the cost of that coal and OVEC’s net income.

Those details are publicly available in filings to the U.S. Energy Information Administration and on OVEC’s own website.

The motion for the protective order filed by the PUCO staff said “financial information contained in the Audit Reports that is highly sensitive in nature.”

Concealing the name of the company supplying expensive coal to Clifty Creek — Resource Fuels of Columbus— made it difficult for members of the public and interested parties to discover the profit motives behind the company’s financial support of former Ohio House speaker Larry Householder, who rammed HB6 through the Ohio legislature in 2019.

At the time HB6 became law, Clifty Creek was Resource Fuels’ only contract to supply coal. Testimony provided to PUCO in October showed Resource Fuels made $12.6 million more for the coal it supplied OVEC in 2020 than Alliance Fuels, which provided more coal from the same mine.

Former Ohio House speaker Larry Householder is serving a 20-year prison sentence.

Resource Fuels’ owner an early Generation Now backer

HB6 supporters led by FirstEnergy of Akron donated $61 million to a fund called Generation Now that was used to bribe Householder, who was convicted in March of participating in a racketeering conspiracy. Wayne Boich, the owner of Resource Fuels, was one of the first donors to Generation Now in February 2017.

Boich and his wife Cynthia each gave $25,000 to Generation Now, while Resource Fuels gave $250,000 in April 2018, one month before the May primary election in which Householder allies were nominated for seats in the Ohio House.

Householder, a Republican, ran for the speakership after the 2018 general election and won with the support of those House candidates who were backed by Generation Now.

Financial motives for supporting HB6

The financial motives for the support of FirstEnergy and its nuclear power-generating affiliate, FirstEnergy Solutions, were well known when federal prosecutors announced the indictments of Householder, former Ohio Republican Party chairman Matt Borges, and others in July 2020.

FirstEnergy Solutions, which had filed for bankruptcy in March 2018, wanted a bailout of its money-losing nuclear plants to emerge from bankruptcy with a healthy balance sheet. FirstEnergy wanted a similar bailout for the two coal-fired plants owned by OVEC of which FirstEnergy is a part owner.

But Resource Fuels, which federal records show continued overcharging for coal in 2021 and 2022, went unidentified through much of the HB6 investigation, even though it gained close to $38 million in excess coal payments over three years.

Federal prosecutors noted the Resource Fuels donation to Generation Now during Householder’s trial last March. Householder said under oath that he didn’t recognize the name of the company whose owners have been some of his biggest supporters.

Members of the Boich family gave Householder’s campaign accounts $73,168.70 between 2018 and July 2, 2020, records filed with the Ohio secretary of state’s office show.

 

Ray Locker is the executive director for Checks & Balances Project, an investigative watchdog blog holding government officials, lobbyists, and corporate management accountable to the public. Funding for C&BP is provided by Renew American Prosperity and individual donors.

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A protective order issued by the Ohio Public Utilities Commission (PUCO) in its audit of the scandal-plagued HB6 law redacts publicly available information that can be found on federal websites and the annual reports of the utility bailed out by HB6.

The order issued July 7, 2023, said information contained in the audit conducted by London Economics International deserved to be kept from the public because “it derives independent economic value, actual or potential, from not being generally known to, and not being readily ascertainable by proper means by, other person who can obtain economic value from its disclosure or use, (2), It is the subject of efforts that are reasonable under the circumstances to maintain its secrecy.”

Details covered by the order were the seller of coal to the two power plants owned by the Ohio Valley Electric Corp. (OVEC), the prices OVEC paid for the coal and the amount of OVEC’s net income for 2020.

Section of LEI audit that redacts the identity of a coal supplier to OVEC’s Clifty Creek plant. That information is contained in publicly available documents.

Checks & Balances Project reported Nov. 13 that HB6 enabled coal supplier Resource Fuels to continue to overcharge OVEC for the coal it provided during 2020. The name of Resource Fuels was redacted from the audit because of the protective order, but the company was identified in expert testimony to PUCO submitted in October and in annual reports filed by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Campaign finance records and court documents show that Resource Fuels’ owner, Wayne Boich, and his wife Cynthia were among the first donors to Generation Now after its creation in February 2017. They gave $25,000 on Feb. 13, 2017. The Generation Now bank records were obtained by federal prosecutors for their successful trial of Householder and former Ohio Republican Party chairman Matt Borges earlier this year.

Resource Fuels then donated $250,000 to Generation Now on April 5, 2018, one month before the Ohio primary election. Householder used the money in the Generation Now account to back candidates in Republican state House primaries who would later support his campaign to become House speaker after the 2018 general election. Householder, however, spent more than $500,000 of the money to pay off credit card balances, repair his Florida home and settle a business lawsuit.

Audit linked to OVEC annual report

Records show that in 2020, Resource Fuels was paid $12.6 million more for the coal it supplied OVEC than another coal supplier, Alliance Coal, was paid. The overpayments are 50.4 times more than its $250,000 donation to Generation Now, the fund used to bribe former Ohio House speaker Larry Householder, who pushed HB6 through the Ohio legislature in 2019.

The section of the LEI audit that describes Component D. It redacts OVEC’s 2020 net income, which is publicly available.

The amount of OVEC’s net income for 2020 — $2.8 million — was also redacted from the LEI audit, but that information is available online from the OVEC website.

LEI auditors identified a payment called “Component D” or a “payment per common share (similar to a dividend),” which is not allowed to be reimbursed by ratepayers. “Component D,” the audit said, amounted to nearly all OVEC’s [redacted] million of net income in 2020.”

The audit included a footnote to the OVEC annual report as the source of the information about Component D. The annual report contained the unredacted amount of OVEC’s net income for 2020.

PUCO staff requested protective order

The request for the protective order was filed Dec. 17, 2021, by the PUCO staff on behalf of three utility companies connected to OVEC – Dayton Power and Light (AES Ohio), Ohio Power (AEP Ohio), and Duke Energy Ohio.

OVEC’s 2020 net income as it is listed in its annual report. The PUCO protective order required it to be redacted from the audit.

“There is financial information contained in the Audit Reports that is highly sensitive in nature,” the PUCO motion said. “Keeping this material confidential is consistent with the Commission’s actions in prior auction matters as disclosure of this information to the public could be prejudicial.”

Ray Locker is the executive director for Checks & Balances Project, an investigative watchdog blog holding government officials, lobbyists, and corporate management accountable to the public. Funding for C&BP is provided by Renew American Prosperity and individual donors.

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Resource Fuels, the coal supplier to power plants at the heart of Ohio’s HB6 corruption scandal, has consistently been overpaid for coal during the first three the law has been in effect, according to an analysis of federal energy data conducted by Checks & Balances Project.

On Nov. 13, Checks & Balances Project reported that independent analysts determined that Resource Fuels was overpaid $12.6 million for coal it supplied to Ohio Valley Electric Co.’s Clifty Creek power plant.

But coal contract details reported by the U.S. Energy Information Administration show that Resource Fuels was also overpaid for the coal it supplied Clifty Creek in 2021 and 2022.

In 2021, Resource Fuels charged between $2.64 and $2.70 per mm/BTU for the coal it supplied OVEC from the River View mine in Waverly, Ky., while Alliance Coal charged between $1.98 and $2.23 per mm/BTU for coal from the same mine, EIA data show.

In 2022, Resource Fuels charged $2.71 per mm/BTU for coal supplied by the River View mine, while Alliance Coal charged $2.22 per mm/BTU for coal from the same time, EIA data show.

Accessing the coal price information from the EIA is difficult. The information is contained in forms EAI-923 and EIA-860 and on the fifth page of a spreadsheet with upwards of 20,000 entries. For most years, the name of Resource Fuels is misspelled in the spreadsheet as “Resource Fules.”

PUCO audit

The terms of HB6 required that Ohio’s Public Utilities Commission (PUCO) conduct an audit of the law. So far, only one audit has been conducted, and it analyzed only 2020.

That audit found that Resource Fuels charged far more for its coal than Alliance Coal, another company supplying coal to the Clifty Creek plant.

The PUCO audit of HB6 riders conducted by London Economics International of Boston noted that OVEC was paying too much for the coal, but the specific details were redacted from the audit released to the public. The actual cost of the coal, the identity of the seller of the coal to OVEC and the percentage of coal OVEC received from the seller were not available to any member of the public interested in learning the details of the OVEC energy riders included in HB6.

“LEI found that for the Clifty Creek plant, the coal purchase prices in 2020 were significantly higher [redacted] than the spot prices from SNL” (an energy price monitoring group), the audit said. “The high average price is mainly attributable to the expensive coal purchases from [redacted] through a contract entered into in 2012, which accounted for more than [redacted] of the total supply in 2020.”

Even though the coal price data for Resource Fuels is available from the U.S. Energy Department, it is redacted because of a protective order the Ohio PUCO granted in July, said Matt Schilling, the PUCO communications director.

“The audit reports are filed under seal pursuant to state law regarding trade secrets,” Schilling told C&BP.

Kentucky reported overcharges

Records filed with the Kentucky Public Service Commission show the 2020 coal sales to OVEC were not the first time Resource Fuels has charged higher prices to OVEC for lower-quality coal. 

Between Nov. 1, 2014, and April 30, 2015, Resource Fuels’ coal prices were 41% and 42% higher than those charged by American Energy and an unknown company, the filing with the Kentucky PSC shows. The Resource Fuels coal also had 4.5 percent fewer BTUs per pound than that provided by the other companies. 

Ray Locker is the executive director for Checks & Balances Project, an investigative watchdog blog holding government officials, lobbyists, and corporate management accountable to the public. Funding for C&BP is provided by Renew American Prosperity and individual donors.

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A coal company that donated to the fund used to bribe former Ohio House speaker Larry Householder was overpaid for coal because of the law the now-imprisoned Householder rammed through the Ohio Legislature in 2019, according to an audit of the law, federal records and testimony by utility analysts.

That law, HB6, includes riders that require Ohio ratepayers to subsidize the operations of two coal-fired power plants — Clifty Creek and Kyger Creek — run by the Ohio Valley Electric Company (OVEC). HB6 also gutted Ohio’s renewable fuels standards.

According to Ohio and federal records, Resource Fuels LLC of Columbus was one of two main suppliers of coal to the Clifty Creek plant in 2020. An audit conducted for the Ohio Public Utilities Commission found that OVEC was overpaying for coal used to power both plants, which are also allowed to run at will and send power to the electrical grid.

Records show that in 2020, Resource Fuels was paid $12.6 million more for the coal it supplied OVEC than another coal supplier, Alliance Coal, was paid. The overpayments are 50.4 times more than its $250,000 donation to Generation Now, the fund used to bribe Householder.

Campaign finance records and court documents show that Resource Fuels’ owner, Wayne Boich, and his wife Cynthia were among the first donors to Generation Now after its creation in February 2017. They gave $25,000 on Feb. 13, 2017. The Generation Now bank records were obtained by federal prosecutors for their successful trial of Householder and former Ohio Republican Party chairman Matt Borges earlier this year.

Resource Fuels then donated $250,000 to Generation Now on April 5, 2018, one month before the Ohio primary election. Householder used the money in the Generation Now account to back candidates in Republican state House primaries who would later support his campaign to become House speaker after the 2018 general election. Householder, however, spent more than $500,000 of the money to pay off credit card balances, repair his Florida home and settle a business lawsuit.

Resource Fuels’ deal with OVEC

Records from the U.S. Energy Information Administration show that in 2017 Resource Fuels only supplied coal to the two OVEC plants — Kyger Creek for one month and Clifty Creek for the rest of the year. 

In 2018 and 2019, federal records show, Clifty Creek was the only plant for which Resource Fuels supplied coal. Without OVEC, Resource Fuels supplied no coal to any other power plant, according to federal records. 

“OVEC purchased coal sourced from River View Mine in Kentucky for the Clifty Creek unit through two separate suppliers: Resource Fuels and Alliance Coal,” said utility expert Elizabeth Stanton in testimony submitted to PUCO in October. 

“The coal purchased through Resource Fuels was at a higher price than the coal purchased through Alliance Coal, despite having the same average heat content,” Stanton said. “Specifically, Resource Fuels supplied 1,016,071 short tons of coal to the Clifty Creek Unit for $60.1 million ($2.57 per MMBtu) and, in contrast, Alliance Fuels supplied 1,249,160 short tons of coal for $59 million ($2.03 per MMBtu). On a per MMBtu basis, OVEC paid $0.54 more MMBtu for coal purchased from Resource Fuels than coal from the same mine with the same heat content purchased from Alliance Coal.

2019 EIA.gov coal sales report showing Resource Fuels as Clifty Creek coal supplier.

2019 EIA.gov coal report “If OVEC had paid the same per MMBtu price for coal from Resource Fuels as they had for Alliance Coal in 2020, the total cost for coal supplied from Resource Fuels would have been $47.5 million compared to $60.1 million (a difference of $12.6 million),” Stanton said.

John Seryak, a utility analyst with the firm RunnerStone, submitted testimony to the PUCO in October that Resource Fuels had overcharged OVEC for coal for years, citing cost details collected by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Audit details redacted

The PUCO audit of HB6 riders conducted by London Economics International of Boston noted that OVEC was paying too much for the coal, but the specific details were redacted from the audit released to the public. The actual cost of the coal, the identity of the seller of the coal to OVEC and the percentage of coal OVEC received from the seller were not available to any member of the public interested in learning the details of the OVEC energy riders included in HB6.

“LEI found that for the Clifty Creek plant, the coal purchase prices in 2020 were significantly higher [redacted] than the spot prices from SNL” (an energy price monitoring group), the audit said. “The high average price is mainly attributable to the expensive coal purchases from [redacted] through a contract entered into in 2012, which accounted for more than [redacted] of the total supply in 2020.”

Several utilities with a stake in the audit have fought to keep these cost details secret, including filing a Nov. 3 motion with the PUCO to prevent consumer advocates from seeking more price data, claiming that “such an investigation is beyond the scope of this proceeding and the assessment contemplated.”

Ray Locker is the executive director for Checks & Balances Project, an investigative watchdog blog holding government officials, lobbyists, and corporate management accountable to the public. Funding for C&BP is provided by Renew American Prosperity and individual donors.

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Climate change shouldn’t be political. The evidence is there for all to see, and people everywhere are feeling the effects. Government leaders from every nation and ideology have signed agreements to address the crisis, and reputable organizations from the International Energy Agency to the World Bank have analyzed the necessity and benefits of acting quickly.

Why, then, do so many politicians and governments act as if they represent the coal, oil and gas industries rather than the people who elected them?

Are they in denial? Are they simply ignorant? Do they care more about short-term profits and political prospects than human health, wellbeing and survival? Some actually cite biblical prophecy about the “end times” as an excuse to ignore the emergency.

It’s no wonder so many young people are anxious, scared and uncertain about their futures. Most can see where we’re headed if we don’t pick up the pace of real climate action. And political leaders are failing them — failing us all.

We see it here in Canada, where some provincial leaders reject every climate solution — from carbon pricing to wind energy — and continue to promote polluting, climate-altering fuels that everyone who has studied the issue says must be left in the ground. They put the brakes on the rapidly growing, profitable, job-creating renewable energy industry. They parrot the fossil fuel industry in promoting “natural” (fossil) gas and expensive, largely unproven technologies such as carbon capture and storage (which is little more than a lifeline for a dying industry) as climate solutions.

Astoundingly, some political figures outright deny that we have a problem. Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott recently called climate science “ahistorical and utterly implausible,” repeating easily debunked disinformation.

In the US and elsewhere, you can often gauge a politician’s stance on climate science by how much money they get from fossil fuel interests, with some even owning stakes in companies.

That anyone could witness or directly experience the increasingly frequent and intense heat domes, droughts, floods and record high temperatures and claim we don’t have a problem is insanity! Most have no knowledge or background in science and couldn’t tell you the difference between a scientific fact, hypothesis, theory and law even if those were clearly explained.

These people are delaying critical climate action and jeopardizing all life. Even politicians who understand and care about the climate emergency often compromise and water down policies to appease voters and ensure their success in the next election.

But every molecule of carbon dioxide we emit into the atmosphere remains for hundreds of years, which means even if we immediately stopped burning all gas, coal and oil, and destroying carbon sinks like forests and wetlands, global average temperature would continue to rise.

As George Monbiot recently wrote, “What we are living through today, unless sudden and drastic action is taken by us and our governments, is the sixth great Earth systems collapse.” Although these catastrophic events are usually referred to as “mass extinctions,” Monbiot argues extinction is a symptom of systems collapse.

We’re now reaching tipping points, at which vanishing Arctic sea ice, caused by global heating, will trigger even greater heating as reflective ice is overtaken by darker, sunlight-absorbing water and land — as well as more extreme weather events as the northern atmospheric jet stream weakens.

Rapidly melting Antarctic sea ice “could lead to the cascading collapse of the freshwater ice shelves perched above the sea ice, with catastrophic results for rises in global sea levels.” Deforestation in critical areas like the Amazon could seriously affect precipitation patterns, flipping it from rainforest to savannah.

We’re also seeing massive declines in plant and animal species, with more facing extinction every day.

As the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2023 illustrates, we’re making progress, but we’re quickly running out of time. We all need to do everything we can to make sure those with decision-making power — from politicians to industry leaders — understand this crisis and take it seriously.

We need to speak up, write letters, sign petitions, march in the streets and vote only for those who recognize the need to shift to a world with cleaner air, water and soil, better jobs and economic opportunities and a stable climate.

Let’s not waste precious time on denial.

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with David Suzuki Foundation Senior Writer and Editor Ian Hanington.

Learn more at davidsuzuki.org.

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Health care in Alberta is moving confidently into the 1990s!

The United Conservative Party (UCP) government led by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is about to bring the province’s health care system back to the future with a massive infusion of new red tape, just like the old red tape. 

It’ll be so much like the Nineties you’ll be ready to celebrate New Year’s 1994 on January 1!

Instead of Alberta Health Services (AHS), the largest provincial health care agency in Canada created in 2009, there will be new health care boards, new bureaucrats to staff them, and loads and loads of chaos to bring the bring the entire system closer to collapse! 

And the expense – it’ll be fabulous! Literally billions of dollars, most likely. Some consultants are going to get very, very rich. Some of them are doubtless already getting rich as we prepare to completely restructure a system that we’ve just spend a decade and a half and another billion or so completely restructuring. 

Well, one thing will be different: all those streams of red tape will lead directly back to the premier’s and health minister’s offices, which will now make all the province’s health care decisions. That should work out well. 

Anyway, Premier Smith and Health Minister Adriana LaGrange, her Mini-Me on the health file, have promised for months to do something to instantly fix the intractable problems facing health care in Canada, so something dramatic had to be done. 

Never mind that what they’re proposing won’t help with the fundamental problem facing health care – the worldwide shortage of health care professionals, especially physicians and nurses. In fact, it’s almost certain to make it worse in Alberta.

And the elephant in the Operating Room, of course, is that this is also about wreaking revenge on AHS in particular for its enforcement the public health measures during the pandemic that so annoyed the UCP’s QAnon-influenced base, especially the Take Back Alberta faction that now dominates the party. 

Why, you may wonder, do we know this already if the government isn’t going to announce it until later today?

Well, because the NDP published one of the foundational documents of the government’s big plan for health care yesterday – a slide show prepared for the provincial cabinet that was leaked by an unknown whistleblower to the Opposition. The Canadian Press confirmed later that the slides are the real thing, 

The release of the slide deck, the NDP’s news release, and the questions asked by Opposition MLAs in the Legislature yesterday certainly rained on the parade of puffery the government planned for its announcement today that it’s about break up AHS into easy-to-privatize chunks. 

As the slides explain, heavy spin and paid advertising will be required to persuade the public this won’t be another expensive disaster with “potential to fragment care delivery” and “risk of service disruption/failure,” to quote one slide.

In Question Period, beyond the premier’s assertion she is “100 per cent committed” to the plan as shown in the slides, LaGrange told MLAs (and by extension the rest of us) to wait for today’s announcement. 

So we have no choice, I’m sure readers will agree, but to toss aside the hallowed journalistic commitment to balance and go with the NDP press release for the time being.

“Smith’s long-promised breakup of Alberta Health Services is mostly a transfer of AHS functions into the Government of Alberta under the direct supervision of the health minister and premier,” the NDP news release summarizes. “There is no plan to move decision-making outside of the two major cities. Instead of regional boards, there will be four new government bureaucracies for continuing care, acute care, primary care, and mental health and addiction.” (Emphasis added.) 

So, the release quotes Opposition Leader Rachel Notley, “any UCP members who cheered for more rural or local decision-making in health care at their AGM this weekend are about to find out they’ve been brutally double-crossed by Danielle Smith.”

In addition to the massive new bureaucracy described in the files, the UCP plan will add seven new agencies with impenetrably bureaucratic new names like “Integration Council,” “Centre of Recovery Excellence,” and “Procurement and Systems Optimization Secretariat.”

What’s missing, as Notley pointed out, is that “there are no new doctors, no new nurses, no new paramedics, no new nurse practitioners and no new LPNs in this plan.”

“There will be entire new office floors filled with people at computers trying to figure out what the heck the UCP wants from them,” she said. “I strongly suspect many of those folks will skip this altogether and simply pursue their health care careers in other provinces.”

“We are heading down a very dangerous path when we allow politicians to decide on medical treatment methods,” Notley added. “We have massive, radically disruptive change, putting Albertans’ lives at risk. … Patients are forced to navigate 13 new agencies where there used to be one. Rural communities get absolutely no new decision-making powers and no new doctors, either.”

“Health care workers just desperately want some help and some more people working beside them. Instead, they are facing yet another onslaught of chaos from the UCP,” said Notley, who also asked, who benefits? “The only person who benefits from this is Danielle Smith, who gives herself sweeping powers to reach into any part of our health care and override medical professionals.”

Well, we’ll see this morning how the government tries to spin this. 

The UCP has scheduled an “embargoed news conference,” an oxymoronic concept, at 7:30AM There will be another public newser at 9AM, after the participants have had a chance to practice their answers, at 9AM The NDP will hold its own news conference at 11. 

UCP to dump ethics commissioner, chief electoral officer

Never mind health care, the UCP also plans to get rid of its ethics commissioner, who recently authored a critical report about Premier Smith’s interference in the justice system on behalf of a political ally, as well as the province’s chief electoral officer. 

Marguerite Trussler and Glen Resler will be gone when their terms expire on May 24, the Globe and Mail reported yesterday. Both were appointed by previous Progressive Conservative governments, which from the perspective of the Take Back Alberta cabal that now controls the UCP, may make them worse than New Democrats. They will certainly be replaced by individuals more simpatico with the TBA worldview. 

Danielle Smith will share stage with Tucker Carlson, no matter what

Questioned in the Legislature yesterday about her plan to appear on stage with far-right American bloviator Tucker Carlson, known for advocating the violent overthrow of the Canadian federal government, Premier Smith made it clear she won’t be missing the opportunity to hob-nob with the MAGA celebrity just because of his loudly expressed racist, Islamophobic, white supremacist, homophobic, anti-vaccine, and anti-Canadian views. 

This seems on brand, actually, as Ms. Smith appears to share many of Mr. Carlson’s opinions, in addition to her past career as a right-wing talk radio bloviator. 

Certainly, Ms. Smith has advanced a separatist “sovereignty” agenda. And Mr. Carlson has described Canada as a dictatorship and opined that “I’m completely in favor of a Bay of Pigs operation to liberate that country.” (Alert readers will recall that the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 did not result in a change of government in Cuba, but whatever.) 

Mr. Carlson also complained vociferously when Mars Inc.’s M&M’s marketing spokescandies were redrawn to eliminate characters wearing spike heels and hooker boots. “The company added obese and distinctly frumpy lesbian M&M’s,” he complained. “M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous, until the moment you wouldn’t want to have a drink with any one of them.” I suppose it didn’t occur to him that the original cartoon characters might have been … in drag! 

Nice to know our government is working with serious people to, well, to do whatever serious things they’re doing.

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In 2017, journalist Samantha Cole discovered someone on Reddit who was using open-source artificial intelligence (AI) technology to create homemade, non-consensual pornography and sexual images using the faces of celebrities. This person called themselves, “deepfake.”

Early deepfakes were easy to spot because they were glitchy and looked unrealistic. However, this technology has become so sophisticated that anyone with a half decent understanding of computers and AI and with access to a decent computer can now easily make, distribute and sell a decent deepfake. 

All a deepfaker needs to do is find photographs of the person they want to target on a public source like Instagram to create very realistic sexualized images or pornography. 

“There are real sexual autonomy questions and harms that come with just the creation,” Suzie Dunn, assistant professor at Dalhousie’s Schulich School of Law, told rabble.ca during an interview.

Dunn went on to say, “Now, you can have people who can really sexually violate people in pretty serious ways without actually even having to have contact with them.”

A new form of gender based violence

The creation of a sexualized deepfake, in and of itself, is a violation of sexual autonomy – the right of an individual to make decisions about their own body and sexuality without interference. 

Publishing deepfakes online while claiming they are real sexual content is tantamount to non-consensual distribution of intimate images. That’s because the resulting public harm is the same.

The Sensity AI report, The State of Deepfakes 2019 Landscape, Threats, and Impact, found 96 per cent of deepfakes are used to create non-consensual sexual content. Of those deepfakes, 99 per cent were images of women.

This is the newest form of gender-based violence.

“In Canada, and globally, the harms of sexual deepfakes are being recognized. When these deepfakes started coming out of that Reddit site, a lot of people were posting them on Pornhub and different places. Quite immediately, most social media companies, including Pornhub, created policy that said that type of content is not allowed and we include it under the same category as other non-consensual image rules that you can’t post non-consensual content on our websites,” Dunn said.

Australian Noel Martin was targeted by someone who found her on the internet. They began making fake photoshop porn and eventually deepfakes of Martin. 

Martin advocated for legal changes that included adding the term “altered images” to Australia’s non-consensual image laws. Including altered images means that anyone sharing a sexual image – either a true likeness or a deepfake – without consent is subject to the law. 

Canada’s criminal law does not include that provision. So, if a sexual image is released without your consent, then it actually has to be your naked body in order to press charges. 

Civil statutes in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador do include altered images providing an option to sue for damages and harms. 

In provinces and territories without this option, someone could still file a civil lawsuit, but it would be a novel legal argument meaning the first of its kind – in other words, a precedent-setting case. 

Particular groups of women are more prone to being turned into deepfakes including journalists, gamers and those who use the video live streaming service Twitch.

Deepfakes represent real consequences for victims

“Once a deepfake is associated with your name and is Googleable, even if people do know it’s fake, it impacts the way people perceive you,” Dunn explained.

Deepfakes can have significant economic impacts especially when labour laws are weak and fail to protect those targeted through this content.

The repercussions may cause women to self-isolate or suffer mental health issues. Women may remove their images from online outlets. However, increasingly, women’s careers dictate that they be online and have a public presence so choosing to take those images down may impact their income and career advancement.

“There’s a real loss of sexual autonomy that happens for women. And, when we lose our sexual autonomy, people will have a variety of reactions. Some people might find it a mere annoyance, but for other people it can be devastating, life ruining,” stated Dunn. 

However, Dunn says the laws are progressing and most of the legal responses are addressing the distribution of porn without consent.

Some porn sites have content moderation rules around who can post and what can be posted. Yet, on Meta, Instagram and TikTok, even though there are clear content moderation rules they are not always enforced. 

“When I talk about pornography, what I’m talking about is content that was specifically made for public viewing. When I’m talking about sexual abuse materials or image-based abuse, this is content that is put onto pornography sites, but I don’t think we should categorize it as pornography. It’s abuse material,” explained Dunn.

When image-based sexual abuse content is uploaded onto porn sites, there’s usually a number of boxes that need to be checked including age and consent verification. Once all the boxes are checked, the content is made public. 

However, Dunn points out that it’s impossible to look at a video and know whether it was consensual or not.

That remains one of the big challenges that demands ongoing conversations around the obligations of pornography sites and how they plan to ensure everyone involved has consented to the material being uploaded.

According to Dunn, unless strong ethical practices are built into their systems, websites can very easily upload image-based sexual assault content.

Legal system must evolve with technology

Dunn also points out that, as facilitated violence evolves, society and the legal system needs to create a language for technology-facilitated abuse. It must be named before it can be categorized and the harms it inflicts identified and addressed.

Currently, the Criminal Code of Canada does not include altered images. However, Dunn says including them opens up a large conversation around where’s the boundary between what is criminal and what breaches criminality? Do the images have to be extraordinarily realistic? Should this definition be extended to include sexualized stories and cartoons of individuals? 

These complex questions can only be addressed through growth within both the criminal and civil systems that focuses on technology-driven gender violence like deepfakes. 

For changes to be meaningful they need to be reinforced with improved regulations for social media companies and porn sites to ensure rules are in place barring sexualized images or pornographic content. There also needs to be rules around how to handle situations when this content does get posted to ensure that it is taken down in a timely manner.

Dunn cautions that there needs to be a differentiation between consensual sexual expression on the internet and sexual abuse. This is important because sometimes when people are making an effort to try to get rid of abusive sexual content, they want to sweep all sexual content. 

“There’s a really important role that sexually expressive content plays in our society. So, when we’re thinking about improving the way that sexual content is available on the internet, I think we have to be careful about not throwing the baby out with the bath water. We want positive healthy sexual expression in our physical selves and that’s different than sexual assault. In the same way that we can have positive, healthy sexual expression in digital spaces like kid’s sites about sexual health information that could be caught up in the sweep,” Dunn said. 

Deepa Mattoo, lawyer and executive director of the Toronto-based Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic, told rabble.ca, “we haven’t seen a case come forward yet, but when a case does come forward, it is going to be a challenge. Online violence in general, is on the rise and AI definitely has played a big role.”

Mattoo does not think there should be a different standard of legal test for abusive online content. If it is AI generated and done with the same intention of sexually or mentally harassing this person; attacking their reputation; or blackmailing them, then it is a crime and should be seen as sexual violence. 

“It is part of a pattern of coercion and control that should be taken even more seriously because the intention of the act shows that you planned it and you applied yourself to the extent of using the technology. So, from that perspective, it should be taken even more seriously than other crimes,” Mattoo stated. 

Mattoo believes there should be no excuse of any kind when someone deliberately procures images and then sexualizes them with the intent of trying to harm the victim.

Mattoo points out that science has established that trauma resulting from sexual violence can impact the victim for the rest of their life.

Mattoo would like to see the jail system become an education system because as she sees it, keeping someone inside a small space and curbing their capacity isn’t enough to actually change them. 

“This is about something happening without your consent, your agency was taken away. So, the psychological harm is much deeper. What is really needed is a change in society so that these crimes stop happening,” Mattoo said.

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Sometimes the old time-worn cliché’s convey hard truths. For example, the view that reality under advanced capitalism has outpaced  both irony and satire is sometimes conveyed in the phrases “no future for satire” and “You can’t make this stuff up. “  This view was famously adopted by the brilliant song writer and mathematician Tom Lehrer on the day the iconic war criminal and imperial consigliere Henry Kissinger was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The songwriter announced his immediate retirement, the story goes, lamenting that nothing he could imagine would be as glow in the dark weird as a Peace Prize for Nixon’s  toadlike master of war.

Living in Vancouver under the current right wing ABC party’s hegemony in city government, I often think of Lehrer’s contention. Mayor Ken Sim and his minions regularly go beyond satire as they exert their best efforts to bring the city I love back to an imagined past in which the policeman is our friend and the big planning decisions belong properly in the hands of real estate developers. 

Recently, Vancouver government news broke that belongs squarely in the “you can’t make this up,” category. A decision made in a closed door in camera meeting of the council in January of this year, very soon after Sim’s Alphabet Gang took power, reverses a policy position adopted by the City of Vancouver in 2017 that required the city to pay all its direct employees and subcontracted workers at least the Family Living Wage as defined by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives  and the Living Wage for Families project currently operated by the VanCity Foundation. Annually, the Living Wage for Families project calculates a living wage for families figure, which represents the hourly wage needed for a two income couple with two kids to meet basic expenses such as food, clothing, rent, child care, transportation and minimal saving to cover illness or emergencies. Nearly 400 businesses, NGOs and governments across BC have made the living wage pledge.  

The City of Vancouver decision to back out of the city’s previous commitment will hit low wage employees of firms that provide food, cleaning etc. services to the city as contractors, but it will also have an impact on directly employed staff as well. In its febrile attempts to look like tough money managers, the ABC council majority began their cuts at the bottom of the city’s pay scale, hurting a group of workers that is primarily female and brown. When this secretive decision was finally brought to the attention of the public by researchers like the Service Employees International Union researcher Alicia Massie, the Vancouver Sun’s Dan Fumano and the Tyee labour reporter Zak Vescera, it was greeted with outrage by many observers. The outrage level went up as the public learned that city council had OK’d a 7.3 per cent wage increase for themselves at the same time they moved to cut wages at the bottom of the city’s pay scale. 

Former city councillor and lifelong anti-poverty activist Jean Swanson told the Vancouver Sun’s Dan Fumano in May that the decision was “disgusting.” While granting that the pay raise for her former colleagues was mandated by an external process, she argued that councillors could have and should have refused the increase.

“They could have voted to reduce it, which we voted to do during COVID,” told the Sun. (Swanson herself gave away a large slice of her city pay during her time on council.)

Alicia Massie, the union researcher whose freedom of information request first surfaced the January decision to cut the wages of Living Wage protected low-income employees and contractors, told me in early November that city bureaucrats refused to tell her how many workers would be left scraping by on lower wages after the city’s new policy was in place. I have to wonder what the bureaucrats don’t want us to know. Perhaps the highly paid top bureaucrats are emulating their political masters in their commitment to secrecy. The mayor launched a code of conduct complaint against One City councillor Christine Boyle for revealing her own vote in an in-camera meeting of council to the press. It cost Boyle $7,000 in legal fees to successfully defend herself against the complaint. 

Jean Swanson is right. This latest austerity move by Vancouver’s ABC  majority is disgusting. It also underscores how important it is that workers and their unions remain active in city politics to fight for worker interests. Without a vigorous labour response, the new wave of right-wing governance and service eroding austerity can overwhelm many of the gains we have made in the past centuries.

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Over 420,000 Quebec public sector workers engaged in strike action on Monday, November 6 in one of the largest since the general strike of 1972.

Like that strike more than 50 years ago, the unions representing these workers have joined together as a Front Commun (Common Front in English).

The Front Commun is made up of the following unions: The Centrale des syndicats du Québec (CSQ), the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN), the Alliance du personnel professionnel et technique de la santé et des services sociaux (APTS) and the Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec (FTQ). Together they represent teachers, nurses, social service workers and many other provincial government employees.

The unions are looking for better wages and conditions across the public service sector and most recently rejected a government offer made on October 28.

That offer, which included a pay increase of 10.3 per cent over five years, was met with outrage by the Front Commun, who point out that the Quebec National Assembly gave its elected members a pay increase of $30,000 a year earlier this year and the provincial police, the Sûreté du Québec a 21 per cent increase.

According to the union, this rate of pay increase would mean an effective pay cut, due to inflation. According to the Front Commun’s projections, inflation would be more than seven per cent higher than the wage increase offered by the government.

READ MORE: Quebec public sector workers face cuts as negotiations press on

More strikes coming

On Monday, the Front Commun stated that unless a deal can be reached, three more strike dates are planned from Tuesday, November 21 to Thursday, November 23.

“For a period of 72 consecutive hours, everything in Quebec will be closed for three days,” said CSN vice-president François Enault at a press conference on Monday.

Beyond the issues around pay, the Front Commun is also seeking additional assurances from the government on issues of pensions and parental leave.
“Right now, we’ve trimmed our demands at all the sectoral tables. But one thing is certain: workers’ expectations are high,” reads a statement from the Front Commun.

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In the summer of 2022, Edmonton video game workers made history by becoming the first Canadian video game workers to unionize. Represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) these workers have fought for a fair first contract until September 2023, when they were laid off. 

The laid-off UFCW members were employed by Keywords Studios which provides services and labour to larger game companies. Unionized Keywords workers were working on quality assurance and testing for BioWare which is owned by Electronic Arts (EA), one of the largest video game publishers in the world. BioWare ended their contract with Keywords Edmonton in a move that the union called “shocking.” 

Video game workers have long faced challenges of low wages, long hours and a lack of work life balance in Canada. Marie-Josée Legault from Téluq-Université du Québec and Johanna Weststar from the University of Western Ontario wrote in a research paper that video game workers deal with unpredictable hours and have little real control over when they must work. According to a study by the Informations and Communications Technology Council, Ontario employers in the creative technology industry are struggling to retain workers because they cannot pay the salary workers expect. 

While Bioware’s decision to end their contract with Keywords has definitely put unionized workers in a difficult position, UFCW has also expressed frustration with Keywords for their handling of the situation. 

“Instead of trying to pivot the team to other projects and continue to bargain for a fair first agreement, the company laid off the recently unionized staff,” UFCW wrote on their website. 

The video game workers’ struggle against both BioWare and Keywords highlights the difficult bargaining situation that many workers in the video game sector face. 

According to a paper written by Legault and Weststar, collective action for video game workers can be more complicated due to the amount of contract based and agency work. 

In their paper, “Organising challenges in the era of financialisation” Legault and Weststar highlight how large contractors enter agreements with smaller studios, creating distance between employers and workers. Large contractors often set the working conditions and terms for a project. The funders for a project would usually be considered the employer, but may now remotely set the stage, without having to face as many consequences for their labour practices. 

The diminished role of local managers has harmed the willingness to unionize in the video game sector, Legault and Weststar wrote. Their paper highlighted that many video game workers are privy to the strict agreements that managers are bound to and feel as though the real actor behind their working conditions is inaccessible. 

The increasing separation between the funders of a project and the studios who create the work is referred to as “financialisation” by Legault and Weststar. 

“Financialisation breaks the legal employment chain between funders of the process and the subcontractor who has to provide the product according to the contractor’s strictly defined performance standards,” Legault and Weststar wrote.

Difficulties within a subcontractor organization have placed many of the managers on the same footing as other workers. Legault and Weststar shared the results of a survey that showed the desire to unionize was similar between managers and developers.  

Legault and Weststar highlighted that going forward, contractors must be made part of bargaining that unionized game workers engage in. 

As the first union to represent video game workers in Canada, the UFCW could be setting the stage for how workers address these issues. At the time of writing, the union has been calling out both BioWare and Keywords Studios. In their ongoing email campaign, supporters can send a message to CEOs of Keywords Studios, BioWare and EA calling for fairness for their unionized staff.

If UFCW is able to effectively engage both BioWare and Keywords, it could bolster unionization sentiments in a sector that has struggled due to the actor behind labour conditions separating themselves from workers.

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Massive fires, floods, and heat waves are making the climate and biodiversity crises ever more evident, and the need for economic transition ever more urgent.

Andrew Nikiforuk, in I Warned Against the Green Energy ‘Boom.’ It Sparked Debate, argues for degrowth.  Despite huge resistance among policy makers, degrowth in the transportation sector is essential and could be readily achieved with tax measures.

Policy makers should also integrate green energy in a circular economy while addressing social equity. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation popularized the circular economy concept. MacArthur was the fastest solo sailor to circumnavigate the world – in only 71 days: “After circling the globe – carrying everything she needed with her – she returned with new insights into the way the world works, as a place of interlocking cycles and finite resources.”

MacArthur concluded that our economic system is fundamentally flawed. Her foundation promotes three principles: eliminate waste and pollution, keep products and materials in use (e.g., “right to repair”), and regenerate natural systems.

A circular economy contrasts with a one-way, linear economy that depletes natural resources, transforms them into waste, and pollutes residual natural capital through resource extraction, production, and waste disposal practices.

Kenneth Boulding’s 1966 paper, The economics of the coming spaceship earth, is often cited as the origin of the circular economy concept. Boulding, a pioneering ecological economist, drew on his knowledge of natural systems and the 1960s fascination with space travel to consider Earth as a finite, closed system – a spaceship.

Boulding predicted that “the time is not very far distant, historically speaking, when man will once more have to retreat to his current energy input from the sun, even though this could be used much more effectively than in the past,” adding that “tomorrow is not only very close, but in many respects it is already here,” and “it seems to be in pollution rather than in exhaustion that the problem is first becoming salient.”

Boulding characterized attitudes as: why worry “when the spaceman economy is still a good way off (at least beyond the lifetimes of any now living), so let us eat, drink, spend, extract and pollute, and be as merry as we can, and let posterity worry about the spaceship earth.” He wrote, “I am tempted to call the open economy the “cowboy economy,” the cowboy being symbolic of the illimitable plains and also associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behavior.”

Canada has done little to implement a circular economy, whereas the People’s Republic of China incorporates it in economic planning. Some scholars trace the concept back to China and Japan of the 1600s.

At the start of the Edo Period (1603-1868), Japan faced severe environmental degradation, exhausted farmland, depleted forests, and famine. Azby Brown’s Just Enough: Lessons from Japan for Sustainable Living, Architecture and Design explains how Japan reversed deforestation, increased agricultural yields, and grew its population while keeping people fed, housed, clothed, educated, and healthier than before.

A Japan Times review laments that “people who would benefit most from this book — those with the requisite power and influence in policymaking — are unlikely to encounter it.”

Fast forward to 2023, and an article entitled Circular economy strategies for combating climate change and other environmental issues. Its authors urge “life cycle assessment” of the industry, waste, energy, buildings, and transportation sectors. They note that the construction industry produces 40 per cent of the world’s total waste through its “obtain, manufacture, and dispose” linear model, and that half of that waste occurs at the “end-of-life” stage when building materials are discarded directly. They point to the major opportunity to recycle construction waste and apply it to new construction sites.

A circular economy differs from a “bio-based economy” that emphasizes use of biotechnology and biomass to produce goods and services. Biological materials are a major component of a circular economy – we must eat, and our waste must return to the ecosystem. But the 2023 article cautions that overreliance on bio-based materials would present “a challenge in terms of land use and land cover,” and that technologies such as carbon capture and storage are “prohibitively expensive.”

David Suzuki, in “Circular economy is too important to be co-opted by industry,” warns that Canadian corporations are “greenwashing” using circular economy jargon. But let’s not dismiss the concept – the Union of Concerned Scientists points out that Wind turbine blades don’t have to end up in landfills.  

Degrowth can go hand-in-hand with social equity measures and integrating renewable energy within a circular economy. In the transition to circularity, Indigenous wisdom that values respect and reciprocity between people and Nature will be invaluable.

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Well, it looks as if the United Conservative Party’s (UCP) extremist Take Back Alberta (TBA) faction now controls all the seats on the party’s board.

Some guy named Rob Smith who you’ve likely never heard of if you don’t happen to live in Olds or Didsbury is now the party president.

Rick Orman, who was rumoured to be Premier Danielle Smith’s choice for the job and who had a long history in Alberta Conservative politics, is not.

Last night, David Parker, TBA’s founder, chief ideologist and chief executive, tweeted from the party’s AGM in Calgary, “Veni, vedi, vici.”

That takes a lot of Gaul, if readers will forgive me. 

Actually, when Julius Caesar famously made that observation, he was talking about some place in Turkey. But seriously, who cares? If he did say it as he claimed, in 67 BCE,* it would have sounded like this: “Weenie, Weedy, Weakie.” 

Somehow, this seems appropriate. 

It suggests that what isn’t really a very significant victory has gone to Parker’s head. 

Well, it’s a long time till the Ides of March, but at least Parker has moved on from his Napoleon complex. I wonder if he whistles Hail to the Chief whenever he walks into a room?

I’m here to tell you this isn’t as big an accomplishment as I am sure Parker would like us to think.

Not because the party board doesn’t really control the UCP caucus in the Legislature, although that’s true too. If the TBA cadres who now run the board try to push elected MLAs around, there is sure to be friction, and some of it may set off some entertaining sparks. 

“This weekend begins a new age in Alberta,” Parker blustered on social media Thursday. “After this AGM, the grassroots of the UCP will be in charge. Those who do not listen to the grassroots or attempt to thwart their involvement in the decision making process, will be removed from power.”

I frankly doubt there’s anyone in the UCP caucus who has the intestinal fortitude to stand up against such thuggery. So some really nightmarish policies may indeed become law, hurting many Albertans as intended, but also weakening the political strength of the UCP-TBA.

Still, sitting MLAs may prove harder for Parker to purge than some of his former friends and allies in TBA. 

UCP MLAs are sure to be saying the same thing I am – the caucus knows its own hive-mind, party policy resolutions are just suggestions, yadda-yadda. Just like they told voters in Calgary, when it looked like the NDP’s attacks on Ms. Smith’s screwball pronouncements had given the Opposition party a fighting chance to win last May’s election, not to worry, that as soon as the election was over Ms. Smith would be gone.

No, I mean that it’s not much of an accomplishment because the UCP is already so debased from the days of the Progressive Conservative Party in Alberta that it wasn’t a very steep hill for the conservative movement’s MAGA fringe to climb. 

Parker had made it clear his choice for party president was Smith, although TBA cautiously didn’t officially endorse any candidates – just in case, I guess. 

But face it, while it may be taking a while to sink in with rural voters, the UCP had already gone pretty well full MAGA by the time Jason Kenney was done with it. 

Kenney couldn’t control the demons he let out of the bottle and they devoured him as well. (There’s plenty of historical precedent for that phenomenon, isn’t there? I give you Maximilien Robespierre! Thump.) 

But by the time Parker and his big ego came along and Smith was chosen to replace Kenney, the UCP had already gone down the rabbit hole. Old style conservatives had mostly been run out of the party. The few that remained were having their doubts. 

So election of nine party executive officers was low-hanging fruit for a group like TBA. 

Poor Orman – well, he’s anything but poor, but you know what I mean – called his slate the “Unite the Right Movement.” 

What he forgot was that Parker and his ilk don’t want to unite the right, they want to purge it – of people like him. Too PC, as it were. 

There were a couple of other candidates for the presidency, as well, but they’re already forgotten too. 

A full list of the board’s members is found here. Trust me, you’ll never hear from most of them again. 

Naturally, we look forward to Parker’s reply churlish, in which he will explain why thes TBA victory, and he, are very significant indeed. *Someone’s bound to say BCE is the woke version of BC. Maybe so, but that’s just tough, innit? Learn to live with it. Also, if you’ve ever read Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars, you’ll know that the man was a self-publicist on a scale that makes Donald Trump look like a piker. And with no social media! Say what you will, though, bone spurs wouldn’t have kept him out of the army.

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Opaque deals and policy loopholes are facilitating weapons sales to Israel. While government dodges accountability, the people must demand action says Anna Stavrianakis

The post How the UK arms the occupation and genocidal war in Gaza appeared first on Red Pepper.

Israel’s weeks-long bombardment of Gaza and recently-launched ground invasion has killed over 9,000 Palestinians, among them 3,700 children, with full U.S. government support. Global demands for a ceasefire go unheeded. This week, one senior United Nations human rights official had enough.

“I write at a moment of great anguish for the world, including for many of our colleagues,” wrote longtime human rights attorney Craig Mokhiber, opening his letter of resignation as director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. “Once again, we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes, and the Organization that we serve appears powerless to stop it.”

Mokhiber’s resignation serves as a powerful, personal critique of the UN. The 193-member General Assembly passed a Gaza ceasefire resolution by a vote of 120-14 with 45 abstentions, but Security Council motions for a ceasefire are consistently vetoed by the U.S.

Mokhiber’s resignation letter noted a protest last Friday night when more than a thousand Jews and their allies descended on New York City’s Grand Central Station for a mass rally demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Protesters scaled the station’s historic train departure boards and hung banners with messages like, “Never Again for Anyone,” “Mourn the dead and fight like hell for the living” and “Palestinians Should Be Free.” About 400 protesters were arrested.

“We are here to protest the genocide that is happening in our name. It has to stop,” Hunter College Distinguished Professor Emerita Rosalind Petchesky told the Democracy Now! news hour. “Palestinians have been the victims of oppression for 75 years, and it has to stop.”

Jane Hirschmann was there with 13 members of her family – her husband, her children and grandchildren. Moments before her arrest, she explained:

“My parents were Holocaust survivors. There’s one thing I learned: Never again means never again for anyone. We don’t condone this, and Netanyahu better stop the bombing of Gaza…Jews, American Jews, have to step up and say, ‘Not in our name. Not with our tax money.’”

Dr. Steve Auerbach stood in the middle of the protest in a white medical coat holding a hand-made sign reading, “Jewish Pediatricians Say Stop Killing Kids and Families.”

“I’ve never been prouder to be a pediatrician than when, on Friday, October 13th, a thoroughly mainstream organization, the New York state chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics said that ‘We stand with the children of Israel and the children of Gaza. We love all children, all families equally,’ and calling for an immediate ceasefire,” Auerbach said. “Unfortunately, children and their families continue to be killed…It is not a Jewish value to be dropping bombs on children, killing children and their families.”

Speaking on Democracy Now! Craig Mokhiber said the Grand Central protesters were “stripping away the Israeli propaganda point that they are somehow acting in the defence of Jews. Israel pushes an old antisemitic trope that it somehow represents Jewish people around the world. Not only is that not factual, but it’s very dangerous. Everyone needs to know that Israel is a state that’s responsible for its own crimes, and that responsibility does not extend to our Jewish brothers and sisters, many of whom are standing up alongside Muslim and Christian and others in demonstrations across this country and across Europe, saying that this must end.”

At a fundraising event in Minneapolis on Wednesday night, President Biden was interrupted by Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, who shouted, “Mr. President, if you care about Jewish people, as a rabbi, I need you to call for a ceasefire right now.” Later, Biden said, for the one of the first times publicly, he supported a pause in hostilities in Gaza. The Rabbi asked, “What is a pause,” to which Biden replied, “A pause means it gives time to get the prisoners out.”

So far, the Israeli leadership seems unmoved by Biden’s quiet suggestions. He has publicly repeated that he has not encouraged Israel to exercise restraint, following the surprise October 7 attack in which Hamas killed up to 1,400 people in Israel and took over 200 hostages.

On Thursday, Israel bombed a UN school building in Gaza, killing at least 27 people. This comes after multiple strikes on the densely-populated refugee camp of Jabalia in northern Gaza, with a death toll of over one hundred civilians – ostensibly to kill a Hamas commander. The UN has said the bombing may be a war crime. At least 18 Israeli soldiers have been killed to date in the ground invasion. It’s not clear how many Israeli hostages have been killed since Israel began its attack on Gaza.

Saving Palestinian lives will save Israeli lives.

This column originally appeared in Democracy Now!

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The way Michael Kalmanovitch sees it, he had no choice but to raise a ruckus inside the Chamber of the Alberta Legislature moments after Monday’s Throne Speech.

The world is afire with climate change, he said, and governments are doing nothing – or, even worse, like Alberta’s, actually working hard to make things worse in the name of profit. 

So, he asked me, what else can a good citizen do but cry out in protest?

Kalmanovitch, well known in Edmonton as the founder and owner for 31 years of Earth’s General Store on Whyte Ave. until his retirement last year, said he regrets embarrassing Marlin Schmidt, his NDP MLA, who invited him to sit with other guests inside the Legislative Chamber Monday afternoon.

But he has no regrets about disrupting the ceremonial occasion. Such tactics are peaceful, and they work, he argued. 

“Yeah, it’s disruptive. People get very, very angry,” he said during a conversation about his role in the excitement at the Legislature.

But, he continued, “if I wasn’t doing this action, we wouldn’t be talking, right? So it’s effective that way. I am a promoter of disruption!”

“We can do a lot more marches. We can do a lot more rallies. We can do a lot more. But we need disruptions. We need disruptions to say, ‘Hey, something’s not right! Something’s wrong!’ Right,” he added.

He described participating in slow marches with Just Stop Oil during a recent stay in the United Kingdom. “We got climate change on the map. Big time!”

“If we stand on the outside of the halls of power … and ask them, even demand, that they do something good. You know what? They do not listen. We need to occupy those halls, instead of demanding from the outside,” Kalmanovitch said.

When Kalmanovitch took his own advice and cried out in the Legislature, the reaction to his one-man protest was swift. The Legislature’s Sergeant-at-Arms dragged him off the chair he’d stood upon, and hauled him out of the Chamber. Kalmanovitch could be heard shouting as he was escorted from the room. 

Whether the tactic worked as well as he’d hoped is another matter. Most Alberta media ignored the disruption. Maybe it wasn’t dramatic enough for their taste? Perhaps they require a massive illegal highway blockade costing Alberta $44 million a day like the one those UCP MLAs took part in last year. Maybe news judgment just isn’t a thing anymore? Who knows?

For the sake of history, here’s a short transcription of how Kalmanovitch’s lone protest unfolded, based on Alberta Hansard, the official transcript of the Legislature, and my own notes:

The Sergeant-at-Arms: Order!

[Preceded by the Sergeant-at-Arms, Their Honours, their party, and the Premier left the Chamber as a fanfare of trumpets sounded]

[The Mace was uncovered]

[Disturbance in the gallery]

Alas, at this point, the official record of the Legislature ceases for a few moments. 

So here is your blogger’s unofficial transcription* of what could be heard during the seconds summarized by Hansard only as “[Disturbance in the gallery]”:

Michael Kalmanovitch: I’m terrified! I’m terrified because we’re in a climate emergency and this government is …

The Sergeant at Arms: “ORDER!!”

Michael Kalmanovitch: … This is important …

The Sergeant-at-Arms: “GET DOWN!”

[Thumping noises]

The Speaker: Please be seated.

Michael Kalmanovitch: …you address the climate emergency … 

[Thumping noises; muffled cries; excited chatter]

Michael Kalmanovitch: We need to stop drilling for new oil! We need to stop new gas! We need to stop new coal!

At this point, the Hansard transcription resumes:

The Sergeant-at-Arms: Order!

No need to go on. That’s the interesting part. The rest is just a Throne Speech.  

The photo in the Edmonton Journal shows what appears to be an actual oil billionaire, W. Brett Wilson, standing by nearby as the Sergeant-at-Arms attempts to drag Kalmanovitch from the chair he’d clambered onto. (Kalmanovitch said he hadn’t recognized the billionaire, whose extreme views about environmentalists are notorious. It’s almost a pity no one thought to introduce them.)

There has been fallout. 

Kalmanovitch said he has been banned from entering the grounds of the Legislature for a year.

In addition, I understand that the NDP Caucus has been browbeaten into apologizing for the hullabaloo and that Speaker Nathan Cooper has decreed guests will never again be seated inside the legislative chamber. 

I’ll give the last word to the protagonist of Monday’s brouhaha, who describes himself as a “full time professional citizen” now.

“Citizens have rights and responsibilities. But we always just focus on the rights – my rights, Trump’s rights, everybody else’s rights.

“I’m about responsibility. So I try to highlight the responsibilities,” he said.

*Disclaimer: I cannot guarantee my transcript is as accurate as that of the government’s professional transcriptionists.

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