That’s the finding of a new report commissioned by Ontario Clean Air Alliance Research from energy consultants Torrie Smith and Associates.Torrie Smith compared Ontario Power Generation’s (OPG’s) plan of leaving the plant untouched for 30 years before starting decommissioning to the internationally preferred approach of immediate decommissioning.
They found that getting to work immediately would create 16,000 person years of employment, save $800 million to $1.2 billion on decommissioning costs, and ensure a smoother transition for workers and the local economy.
In fact, Torrie Smith points out that the only reason to leave Canada’s oldest nuclear plant sitting idle on the Pickering waterfront for the next 30+ years is money. While there is enough money in OPG’s Decommissioning Fund to fully cover the costs of decommissioning Pickering today, OPG would prefer to wait and let investment returns over the next three decades do the heavy financial lifting.
From a safety perspective, a 30-year wait simply means that Pickering’s components and structures will continue to age and deteriorate, actually raising risks while producing more low-level radioactive waste. A 30-year delay will have little impact on levels of radioactivity in the plant or affect how the dismantling work is approached, which is why the International Atomic Energy Agency states that “the preferred decommissioning strategy shall be immediate dismantling.”
The Pickering Nuclear Station is North America’s 4th oldest and one of the largest nuclear stations on the continent. We should not leave this legacy of a bygone era to future generations to deal with. Instead, we should seize the opportunity to develop expertise in a growing new industry – nuclear decommissioning.
Given that Canada’s nuclear industry hasn’t sold a new reactor in 30 years, the future of our nuclear industry clearly lies in providing the expertise to safely decommission old nuclear facilities – including other aging CANDU reactors in Canada and around the world.
Please send Premier Wynne a message asking her to order OPG to develop an immediate decommissioning plan for Pickering and to close this dinosaur by 2018 (when its license expires) at the latest. SOURCE
Angelica Choc, right, sued a Canadian company in the 2009 killing of her husband, a local leader, and Rosa Elbira Coc Ich, left, says she was evicted and gang-raped in 2007. Credit Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
LOTE OCHO, Guatemala — Her husband was away in the fields, she said, when the truckloads of soldiers, police officers and mining security officials arrived. A half-dozen armed men swarmed into her one-room house, blocking her exit and helping themselves to the meal she had made for her children.
For a long time, the woman, Margarita Caal Caal, did not talk about what happened next that afternoon. None of the women in this tiny village high in the hills of eastern Guatemala did, not even to each other. But that day, Mrs. Caal said, the men who had come to evict her from land they said belonged to a Canadian mining company also took turns raping her. After that, they dragged her from her home and set it ablaze.
“The fear is not over,” she said recently, staring down at her hands while her daughter served coffee to visitors. “I still fear, all the time.”
Mrs. Caal has taken her case to the courts, but not inGuatemala, where Mayan villagers like her, illiterate and living in isolated areas, have had little legal success. She has filed in Canada, where her negligence suit, Caal v. Hudbay Mineral Inc., has sent shivers through the vast Canadian mining, oil and gas industry. More than 50 percent of the world’s publicly listed exploration and mining companies had headquarters in Canada in 2013, according to government statistics. Those 1,500 companies had an interest in some 8,000 properties in more than 100 countries around the world.
For decades, overseas subsidiaries have acted as a shield for extractive companies even while human rights advocates say they have chronicled a long history of misbehavior, including environmental damage, the violent submission of protesters and the forced evictions of indigenous people.
Rosa Elbira Coc Ich in Lote Ocho, Guatemala, where she used to live and where, she said, she was among several women gang-raped in 2007.CreditAdriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
But Mrs. Caal’s negligence claim and those of 10 other women from this village who say they were gang-raped that day in 2007, as well as two other negligence claims against Hudbay, have already passed several significant legal hurdles — suggesting that companies based in Canada could face new scrutiny about their overseas operations in the future. In June, a ruling ordered Hudbay to turn over what Mrs. Caal’s lawyers expect will be thousands of pages of internal documents. Hudbay, which was not the owner of the mine at the time of the evictions, denies any wrongdoing.
Canadian law does not provide for huge American-style payoffs, even if the court rules in the plaintiff’s favor. But the Hudbay case is being watched carefully because it appears to offer a new legal pathway for those who say they have suffered at the hands of Canadian subsidiaries. A ruling in this case, experts say, could also help establish powerful guidelines for what constitutes acceptable corporate behavior.
“Up until now, we just have not had judicial decisions that help us consider these sorts of relationships,” said Sara Seck, an expert on corporate social responsibility at the Faculty of Law, Western University, in London, Ontario. “For once, the court is going to look at what really happened here, and that is important.”
The Fenix nickel mine in El Estor, a town near Lote Ocho.CreditAdriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
The behavior of multinational companies working in poor countries has come under increasing fire in recent years. Social expectations have changed, experts say, with many citizens of rich countries demanding that corporations be more responsible in the countries where they operate.
In Canada, efforts to define a code of good behavior for extractive corporations are longstanding, if so far unsuccessful. Many mining companies are based there because Canada offers a concentration of expertise in mining finance and law, and the government offers incentives including tax breaks.
A bill that would have created an ombudsman to investigate complaints and deny access to government loans — and even consular services — to companies accused of behaving poorly failed by a narrow margin in 2010 after facing fierce opposition from the extractive industry. John McKay, a member of Parliament from the Liberal Party who sponsored that bill, said he expected Canada’s new government to try again soon.
“There are companies out there doing things that they would never do in their own countries,” he said.
In a 2014 report, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a policy group in Washington, concluded that Canadian companies, accounting for 50 percent to 70 percent of the mining in Latin America, were often associated with extensive damage to the environment, from erosion and sedimentation to groundwater and river contamination. Of particular note, it said, was that the industry “demonstrated a disregard for registered nature reserves and protected zones.”
At the same time, the report said, local people were being injured, arrested or, in some cases, killed for protesting.
Angelica Choc, at the grave of her husband, Adolfo Ich Chamán, in El Estor. Mr. Ich was killed during a demonstration against mining in 2009.CreditAdriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
Victims, however, have had little success gaining access to Canadian courts. Their lawyers have often tried to get cases heard on the basis of violations of human rights or international criminal law. But most were told that Canada had no jurisdiction, and that their claims would be more appropriately heard in the country where the events took place, even if that country’s courts were notoriously corrupt or otherwise dysfunctional.
The lawyers for the plaintiffs in the Hudbay case, Murray Klippenstein and Cory Wanless, took a novel approach, however, making a simpler claim. They said the Canadian parent company was negligent for failing to put an effective monitoring system in place to understand what its Guatemalan subsidiary was doing. Framing the claim in this way allowed the plaintiffs to draw a clear connection between the negligence and Canada.
In addition to the claims brought by Mrs. Caal and the other women who say they were raped in Lote Ocho, Hudbay, based in Toronto, is facing claims over the death of a prominent local leader, Adolfo Ich Chamán, 50, and the shooting and paralysis of a bystander, German Chub, 28, during demonstrations against mining in the nearby town of El Estor in 2009.
German Chub, 28, was shot during mining protests in 2009, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. CreditAdriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
Hudbay lawyers moved to have the case dismissed both because of jurisdictional grounds and because it was “plain and obvious” that the claims would fail. Before the ruling on jurisdiction, they dropped that claim and went forward with the other one. In July 2013, however, the judge ruled it was not obvious that the claims were without merit.
Turning to the courts has not been easy for the plaintiffs, most of whom speak only Q’eqchi’, a Mayan language, have had little or no schooling, and find the prospect of going to Canada terrifying. In addition, they face animosity from a sizable portion of the local population, particularly in El Estor, where there is a giant nickel processing plant.
Hudbay officials dispute most of the plaintiffs’ claims. They say that no mining security officials were present during the Lote Ocho evictions and that no rapes took place. The company’s website also points out that at the time, Hudbay had nothing to do with the mine. It was owned by Compañía Guatemalteca de Níquel, a subsidiary of another Canadian company, Skye Resources Inc., which Hudbay bought in 2008, assuming its liabilities. Hudbay has since sold the mine.
Children played on a truck in Lote Ocho. The community consists of about a dozen flimsy wooden houses, home to about 100 people, most of them children.CreditAdriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
Hudbay officials also maintain that there was no negligence in 2009 when it did own the mine. Officials say the killing of Mr. Ich, a teacher, and the shooting of Mr. Chub, a farmer, took place as the mine’s security guards were defending themselves from armed protesters.
But some recent events appear to lend credence to the plaintiffs’ claims. The head of the mine’s security during the 2007 evictions and the 2009 shootings, a former army colonel named Mynor Padilla, is now on trial in Guatemala over the shooting of Mr. Ich and Mr. Chub.
Moreover, an army officer and a paramilitary officer were convicted in February of raping and enslaving indigenous women in the 1980s, during Guatemala’s long civil war, suggesting, some advocates say, that such behavior has long been entrenched in this country. During the war between the United States-backed government and leftist rebels, the indigenous population in this region was repeatedly attacked for trying to make land claims.
Even now, the local Q’eqchi’ population believes much of the land in the area belongs to it, and not to the mining company.
At the time of Mrs. Caal’s eviction, there was no mining anywhere near Lote Ocho, but mining officials moved to evict the villagers anyway. The community is made up of about a dozen scattered, flimsy wooden houses, home to about 100 people, most of them children.
There is no electricity here or a school for the children. The village is a bumpy 45-minute ride in a pickup truck uphill from the nearest town. But that costs money, so most of the villagers walk there using a footpath, which takes about two hours.
Mrs. Caal said the armed men who attacked her during the eviction were so brutal with her that she could not get up from the spot where they had left her. But when her husband asked what had happened to her, she told him only that she had fallen, afraid of how he might react.
It is still a subject she turns to reluctantly.
“Remembering is reliving,” Mrs. Caal said. “It hurts. It hurts as a woman.”
This year’s Canadian Open Dialogue Forum preached the gospel of transparency and freely accessible data, but success will depend on the will of political leaders.
If on a future visit to the City of Lights you wind up visiting the restored “Petite Ceinture” railway in the heart of the metropolis (a project vaguely reminiscent of New York’s High Line park), you’ll have average Parisians to thank for the project. Ditto for the conveniently located public water fountains that may be installed in the years to come.
Through the city’s Budget Participatif citizens engage in a public process where they can propose and vote for €100 million in funding for projects that make their city better, and also encourage the participation of youth. In 2015, 66,867 Parisians voted in this open government exercise.
To hear the high-profile figures who spoke at this year’s Canadian Open Dialogue Forum in Ottawa, this kind of citizen-driven process is where policy-making is headed. Voices from organizations such as the OECD, Facebook, Open Text, and a handful of speakers from Europe evangelized about the benefits of not just asking people what they think of a proposal, but getting them to participate in the formulation of it in the first place, and sometimes even involving them in the delivery of solutions.
Part and parcel of this is making sure government data is made available for the public and the private sectors to use freely. Bernard Rudny and James McKinney wrote about this in a Policy Optionsmagazine article last week.
If you had any doubt that there is some momentum behind the open government push, consider that the conference featured Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne and federal Treasury Board President Scott Brison, and it was chaired by Ontario Deputy Premier Deb Matthews and former federal Clerk of the Privy Council Wayne Wouters.
Wynne insisted that open government is the right thing to do – it’s what the public expects. Antipoverty activist Paul Born of Tamarack recounted how a neighbourhood in Northern Ireland flourished with the power of citizen mobilization. Born recounts that a local priest told him, “We listened and we gained a corner on the obvious.”
Canadian Open Dialogue co-chairs Wayne Wouters and Deb Matthews.
But it’s hard not to see two major drivers of the open government movement domestically. One is economic, and the other is political.
OpenText chairman Tom Jenkins, who led a landmark federal study on research and innovation, delivered a compelling presentation on how opening up information and encouraging digitization is key to making Canada more competitive. Rodney MacDonald, a senior executive at Intuit, the firm that brings you the TurboTax software, talked about how their business was built on the fact the Canada Revenue Agency opened up its process data to the private sector. The Trudeau Liberals are also making the argument that more openness and consultation will help ease the way to major natural resource project approvals.
Meanwhile, politics can never be far behind when cabinets decide a particular project is a priority. One only has to look at the mass repudiation of the political class in countries such as Brazil, Guatemala, Spain, and even in the United States (see Donald Trump) to understand that people feel increasingly distant from decision-makers.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was part of that political class, yes, but he seemed to overcome that knock by making transparency, openness and engagement part of his daily mantra.
As for Wynne, not to diminish her commitment to open government, but she’s also still dealing with the aftermath of the Ontario gas plant scandal, in which potentially damaging public documents were destroyed.
Politics will ultimately (and naturally) be the biggest hurdle in the push for open government.
Interestingly, public servants who attended the forum repeatedly expressed doubts that the bureaucracy would be able to embrace the idea – the cover-your-ass culture of the public service didn’t inspire risk-taking or openness.
“How can we be innovative and open when you feel if you’re doing something innovative you’re breaking a rule?” Wouters exclaimed during one panel.
Wouters pointedly noted that nothing much will happen “without political leadership” – the room was too polite to say that 10 years of the Harper Conservatives had also inculcated a generation of public servants in the ways of secrecy. The Government of Canada’s communications policybecame a joke.
There are compelling recent examples of how government institutions close their doors by default – on Friday, the CBC reported that Ottawa’s Police Services Board has been meeting secretly, even to discuss issues such as racial profiling. Correctional investigator Howard Sapers is currently studying why distraught families cannot get information about why their loved ones died in prison.
Federal Treasury Board President Scott Brison at the Canadian Open Dialogue Forum in Ottawa.
The culture problem is real, but it’s politicians and their party apparatuses that will ultimately be the speedbumps in the road to open government. Matthews pointed out that governments work in a “very toxic work environment…open information, open data, gives opposition parties ammunition to ask questions,” and she also mentioned the gotcha tendency among journalists.
The reflex to conceal becomes strong the bigger the political scandal. Parliamentary committees, which are supposed to be an important consultative tool and source of information, close in on themselves the stickier the subject. This is where increasing the powers of information commissioners and supporting quality journalism will be key.
Potentially more difficult, though, will be overcoming the impetus of electoral politics. Political marketing (see Susan Delacourt’s book Shopping for Votes for an excellent overview) favours developing policy that will appeal to the parts of the electorate that will help a party form a minimum winning coalition. Polling, focus groups and other consultative tools can help the parties devise policies and communications plans that will have strategic appeal.
At the same time, lobbyists have identified the benefit of creating “communities of interest” around particular policy issues that are important to their clients. Those communities can be leveraged for the powerful pressure they can put on decision-makers.
Those types of consultations don’t necessarily have the public interest at heart. They don’t necessarily have to include all voices.
That is why it might be easier to engage with citizens on something like laws to protect condo owners, as Ontario did, but harder to open up the floor to citizens and experts on something that was a key platform promise or that is tied up with the party’s fortunes.
In the next few years, if this open dialogue momentum holds, it will be interesting to see which areas of the policy-making process are opened up to the public. It’s impossible not to want to see the promise of more openness and transparency succeed.
The new Canada Child Benefit (CCB) unveiled in the 2016 federal Budget has been widely supported by progressives and anti poverty activists who have long favoured the expansion of income tested child tax credits. By contrast to the so called middle-class tax cut which favours the more affluent, the CCB will have a positive impact upon the lamentably high rate of child poverty in Canada (which stood at 16.5% in 2013), and will promote greater income equality among families with children.
Somewhat ironically, the new program is an unintended consequence of the regressive policies of the Harper government which opened up the needed fiscal room for progressive change.
The CCB is a big program by any measure. Starting in July, non taxable cheques totalling $23 Billion per year will be issued monthly to families with children. The maximum annual tax free benefit is $6400 for children under age six, and $5400 for children age six to seventeen. Families with more than one child get the same benefit for each additional child.
The CCB is also a redistributive program. Benefits phase out slowly as family income rises above $30,000, but remain significant for middle-class, two earner families.
A family with two children with a median or mid point annual income of $85,000 will receive about $6,000 per year. Benefits fall to zero only above a family income of about $200,000.
The CCB is roughly twice as large in terms of spending as the system of child benefits put in place by the Chretien and Martin governments. About one half of the cost of the new program is paid for by folding in the Canada Child Tax Benefit and the National Child Benefit Supplement, which are similarly paid out monthly, and are non taxable benefits based upon family income.
Another part of the cost of the big new CCB was made possible by folding in two large, signature Harper government programs, the Universal Child Care Benefit or UCCB (costing $6.8 Billion per year), and income splitting for families with children (costing $2.0 Billion per year) Getting rid of these programs meant that the net additional cost of the new CCB to the federal government is just $3 Billion per year.
The UCCB was originally introduced in 2006 to partly offset the costs of child care, and to legitimize the Harper government’s decision not to proceed with a cost-shared national child care program. This program paid out as flat amounts of $100 per month for young children, so pre tax payments were not reduced for high income families, or increased for low income families. The benefit was increased and extended to send payments to all families with children below the age of 18 starting in July, 2015, just before the election.
Family income splitting for income tax purposes, introduced as a pre election measure in 2014, was designed to reward traditional families with a stay at home spouse. Studies by the C.D. Howe Institute, the Broadbent Institute, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and others found that most benefits, to a maximum of $2,000 per year, would go to families with a high income single earner in one of the top tax brackets.
The UCCB and family income splitting were widely criticized by progressives as programs that failed to take into account the fact that the great majority of families with children today have both parent working. These programs were also criticized for their failure to counter growing income inequality and poverty, and indeed the Conservatives failed to significantly improve income-tested child benefits during their watch.
The Conservative fiscal legacy to the new government was thus almost $9 Billion in annual spending on child benefits in the form of non redistributive programs which could readily be folded into the new CCB while benefiting the great majority of families with children. Working families with children earning between $30,000 and $100,000 will receive in the range of $1,000 per child per year more than they did in the system in place in 2015.
One can quibble a bit about the equalizing and anti poverty impact of the CCB. Low income families with children will receive a more modest increase than middle income families; the new benefit is not indexed to inflation until 2020; and action will have to be taken to ensure that benefit increases to families on social assistance are not clawed back by the provinces.
But the program is a step forward for progressive change, thanks in part to the Harper government’s decision to spend big on questionable programs for children.
Andrew Jackson is Adjunct Research Professor in the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University, and senior policy adviser to the Broadbent Institute.
From left to right: Alberta Environment Minister Shannon Phillips, Vancouver City Councillor Andrea Reimer and federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna discuss climate change at Progress summit
Tough federal measures to fight climate change such as carbon pricing are coming to Canada, Environment Minister Catherine McKenna said on Friday. But she warned that moving too fast would disrupt the country’s national unity.
McKenna made the comments during an animated panel discussion with Alberta Environment Minister Shannon Phillips and Vancouver city councillor, Andrea Reimer at the Broadbent Institute’s annual Progress Summit.
“We need a transition to a low carbon economy. We absolutely do. But we can’t do it overnight,” McKenna said. “I’m a realist on this. There are a lot of people who have lost jobs in Alberta. I’m not saying that we destroy our planet. But I think we need to be thoughtful of how we move forward.”
The discussion among the three like-minded politicians highlighted some of the different political calculations at play as they seek to reconcile both their environmental and economic concerns.
Collapse of communities
Alberta has already introduced a plan to cap pollution from its oil sands industry — Canada’s fastest growing source of greenhouse gases — but will still allow the sector’s emissions to rise 40 per cent higher than current levels as part of a transition plan to diversify its economy.
The province has also pledged to introduce an economy-wide carbon tax. The details are expected in its upcoming spring budget. But it has said it needs to pursue a “thoughtful” approach to that plan, in the wake of plummeting oil prices that have hammered its oil-based economy, eliminating thousands of high-paying jobs.
“A transition that is not thoughtful and an approach in the Canadian economy (that) is not thoughtful will take the current social dislocation and inequality– people losing their jobs en masse, the collapse of communities…we are seeing (this) in Alberta right now…and make it worse and that is not great,” Phillips said, drawing applause from the crowd.
“It’s really important for Canadians to appreciate what we have in Alberta, which is we have one commodity, one price, one market. That is what has led us to this place where we have now lost $10 billion of our revenue and we are having a hard time ensuring that we don’t have really big social problems as a result of this.”
Losing everyone
McKenna said she feared that many Canadians would turn against action on climate change if government action went too far or too fast.
“Everyone here (at the summit) believes that climate change is a massive problem. We’ve got to do something right now. But there’s a lot of people that aren’t there,” said McKenna. “If what we end up doing has a huge immediate dislocating effect on the economy where tons of people lose jobs, I’m losing everyone. I’m losing them.”
She added that she has also heard from people in northern communities who are concerned about a possible carbon tax since they can’t even afford to pay for food.
“That’s an important message,” McKenna said. “You can’t just go in and do things and assume the federal government knows best. And that has actually been a really good way to split up our country. So, I don’t want this to be a national unity crisis. I get nervous about the way the conversation sometimes goes: that it’s east versus west, it’s different groups. I don’t think that that’s a positive way forward.”
Tough measures
But McKenna also said that these concerns would not stop the Liberal government from making difficult choices.
“That is not an excuse,” she said. “That is not saying that we aren’t going to take tough measures. But this is about doing this in a thoughtful way and working with the different parties involved.”
Reimer, from Vancouver, also drew applause from the crowd for telling the panel moderator, Postmedia journalist David Akin, that there was no way she’d support pipeline expansion that would lead to a massive new oil port in her west coast city.
She said this wasn’t an ideological position, but based instead on two years of research into different impacts of having more oil shipped through the city. Vancouver’s reputation was among the issues at stake, she said.
“Our brand is worth $31.5 billion as a city - the City of Vancouver,” Reimer said. “It’s largely based on (being) clean and green. Just having a major oil port there - we would be one of the largest oil ports on the planet - that damage that it would do to our brand, even without a spill, is immense. A spill would pretty much wipe out the brand of the City of Vancouver. So it’s way too much risk, no benefit, on a planet that is dying because we are burning fossil fuels. So, the answer seems fairly clear.”
Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion
McKenna said she wouldn’t presume the outcome of the federal review of projects such as Kinder Morgan’s proposed expansion plan to triple the capacity of its existing Trans Mountain pipeline that carries heavy oil from Alberta’s oil sands industry. But the federal minister agreed that she didn’t want to see a disaster.
“I totally get you,” McKenna told Reimer. “The idea that there would ever be any kind of spill in the waters outside of Vancouver is petrifying, so that’s why you need to look at it that. And it may be that the outcome (of the project review) is you can’t do it.”
Reimer added that Vancouver is also trying to create space for Indigenous communities to propose their own solutions and energy projects. For example, she said that one local Indigenous community had proposed a plan to clean up the Burrard Inlet in Vancouver so that people could eventually eat shellfish from the water again.
“What an incredible vision to be advancing on all of our behalf, because I would like my child to able to enjoy the health of that inlet at that level as well,” she said.
“It really is about, not just partnership, not (just) inviting (Indigenous communities) to our table, but respecting that they have a table and we have to show up there as well.”
It’s been half a century since Ottawa first acknowledged the crisis of Aboriginal overrepresentation in the prison system, so why have we made so little progress since then?
We have yet to hear anything concrete from Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould about her plans to reduce the overrepresentation of Aboriginal people in the corrections system, writes Jacqueline Briggs. FRED CHARTRAND / THE CANADIAN PRESS
By Jacqueline Briggs, reposted from TheStar, Apr 3, 2016
It’s been nearly 50 years since the federal government first officially acknowledged Aboriginal overrepresentation in the Canadian corrections system. As we approach that anniversary, it’s worth pausing to reflect on why, in the half-century since then, things have mostly gotten worse.
In August 1967 the Canadian Corrections Association presented the Indians and the Law report to the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (as it was then called). The report provided statistical evidence that Indigenous people were grossly overrepresented in provincial and federal facilities — a situation it characterized as “of serious magnitude.”
Sadly the description remains apt.
Overrepresentation refers to the imbalance between the proportion of the Indigenous population in Canada (currently estimated at less than 5 per cent) and their population within the provincial and federal corrections systems. The problem exists across Canada, but has long been particularly pronounced in certain parts of the country. In the prairie provinces, for example, Aboriginal inmates currently account for approximately 50 per cent of the federal corrections population.
The Correctional Investigator’s most recent report identifies that — when expressed as a national average — the total current population of Aboriginal federal inmates has now reached an all-time high of 25 per cent. The situation for Aboriginal females is particularly worrisome, as they comprise 35.5 per cent of the total female federal corrections population. Many of these women have young children; and so the cycle of disadvantage continues.
The Supreme Court of Canada has done its part, admitting in its Gladue decision in 1999 that Aboriginal overrepresentation is a “crisis.” The Court’s ruling in that case gave rise to the so-called “Gladue method” to incorporate restorative justice and rehabilitation principles into the crafting of meaningful sentences for Aboriginal people, with the stated goal of avoiding incarceration. Despite this effort to tackle overrepresentation at the sentencing stage, the numbers and proportions of male and female aboriginal people in federal and provincial corrections facilities keeps rising. Much more needs to be done.
Specifically, Ottawa needs to more aggressively use the policy tools at its disposal to address the roots of the problem, which are by now well known. The final report of the TRC on Residential Schools has laid bare the connections between the colonization and over-incarceration of Indigenous peoples in Canada. The intergenerational impacts of the residential school system and the 60s scoop are now clearly linked to the ongoing institutionalization of Indigenous children in the child welfare system, in youth criminal justice facilities, and as adults in provincial jails and federal prisons. The upcoming inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women will undoubtedly also make these connections, adding more voices to the chorus identifying the “serious magnitude” of the problem.
We have for too long accepted the high costs of inaction. In 1991, the Report of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba quoted lawyer Ovide Mercredi, who would soon become the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations: “If you accept our assertion that much of the root cause of Indian peoples’ disproportionate conflict with the justice system lies in their poverty and marginal position in Canadian society, then what do you think is going to happen in the next 10 or 20 years, if radical changes do not occur?” But radical changes did not occur, and the outcomes were predictable. Will we repeat the same mistakes?
The upcoming 50-year anniversary of the federal government’s knowledge of Aboriginal over-incarceration will be a shameful occasion if it is not accompanied by a meaningful, well-funded plan to reverse the trend. The long-awaited significant investments in First Nations health, education, and infrastructure in the 2016 federal budget are a good start to address some of the root causes which contribute to involvement with the criminal justice system, but we have yet to hear anything concrete from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau or Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould about their plans to reduce the overrepresentation of Aboriginal people in the corrections system. It’s been half a century — we can’t wait any longer. SOURCE
Jacqueline Briggs is a PhD Candidate in the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto.
Please send Premier Wynne a message asking her to order OPG to develop an immediate decommissioning plan for Pickering and to close this dinosaur by 2018 (when its license expires) at the latest. SOURCE
