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Wet’suwet’en Block Effort To Tunnel Under Morice River

At the turnoff, four workers with Coastal GasLink security gather in orange and yellow vests, their voices edged with frustration as they talk above four idling pickup trucks that release a haze of exhaust into the early morning light. Another pickup faces off against the group, blocking access to the rough and muddy spur road that leads to the pipeline worksite. It’s a scene that has played out every day for the past week and a half on Wet’suwet’en territory, as land defenders block pipeline workers from accessing a site where Coastal GasLink is preparing to drill under the Morice River and install the pipeline. On Sept. 24, protesters used Coastal GasLink’s own machinery to dig up the rough resource road that connects this junction to a worksite two kilometres beyond.

Horgan’s Fairy Creek Excuses Betray Citizens

The NDP government can’t keep dodging responsibility for the debacle at Fairy Creek — or the much bigger questions about the RCMP’s role in the province. Especially as increasing RCMP resources — with provincial government approval — are devoted to shutting down protests, frequently by Indigenous people. Last week, the BC Supreme Court refused to extend an injunction against protesters blocking logging, citing RCMP civil rights’ abuses — facilitated by the provincial government — in enforcing the court order. The dispute is about old-growth forests on southern Vancouver Island. Protesters blocked licence-holder Teal-Jones from logging in late 2020. On April 1, BC Supreme Justice Frits Verhoeven granted the company an injunction preventing the protesters from blocking roads or interfering with company operations.

Orange Shirt Day Is A Reminder Of A Genocide

Some Canadians bristle at the suggestion that Canada has committed genocide. But the discovery of over 6,000 unmarked graves at residential schools has shocked Canadians into realizing that such atrocities occurred in their country. This is what we had to reflect upon during the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation on Sept. 30. According to the United Nations, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Tsleil-Waututh Nation Lead Powerful Pilgrimage Walk In North Vancouver

A sea of orange flowed down Dollarton Highway on Sept. 30 as members of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation community, and family members from Musqueam and Squamish nations, took part in a pilgrimage walk to commemorate the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. The rain did not dampen the spirits of community members who gathered at the Tsleil-Waututh Reserve administration building at 9 a.m. on Thursday, to walk 8.5 kilometres to the site of the former St. Paul’s Residential School, now home to St. Thomas Aquinas Regional Secondary School. The morning began with drumming and song and an uplifting, positive feeling grew amongst the crowd as more than 100 members began the journey. It was also a sombre time for many members, as they retraced the steps their relatives took every day to “school.”

Judge Refuses To Extend Court Injunction At Fairy Creek

A B.C. Supreme Court judge has refused to extend an injunction that was granted to prevent protesters from impeding logging operations at Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island. Justice Douglas Thompson ruled the reputation of the court outweighed the economic interests of the logging company, Teal Jones. Thompson pointed to the RCMP’s enforcement of the court injunction as the main reason for the court’s tarnished reputation. “The methods of enforcement of the court’s order have led to serious and substantial infringement of civil liberties, including impairment of the freedom of the press to a marked degree,” wrote the judge. One of the lawyers who argued against extending the injunction, Patrick Canning, said the ruling puts pressure on the province to resolve the ongoing dispute at Fairy Creek.

Residents Speak Out Against Prince George Petrochemical Project

Opposition to a proposed petrochemical complex near Prince George, British Columbia, continues to build, with locals fearing environmental harms and environmental experts asking how such a project could proceed with the global climate on red alert. A council meeting in B.C.’s largest northern city grew heated last week as residents expressed “fierce criticism” about the C$5.6-billion petrochemical complex that Calgary-based West Coast Olefins (WCO) hopes to build outside of town, reports CBC News. Among attendees were members of a grassroots organization called Grasslands Not Gas Lands, which has collected 1,500 signatures to date on its petition calling for a “holistic review” of the project that would include public hearings.

China’s ‘Hostage Diplomacy’ Wins

Big crowds greeted Huawei senior executive Meng Wanzhou’s arrival back in China, which believes its show of strength against America forced Washington to back down in this three-year standoff. The biggest story of the weekend saw Meng released from house detention in Canada and returned to China, while Beijing subsequently released two Canadian prisoners it had accused of spying. The development brought an end to a horrific three-year saga for all involved. On arrival in Shenzhen, Meng, the company’s chief financial officer, was greeted with a hero's welcome, including thousands who gathered at the airport to meet her, while millions watched it online amid a chorus of euphoria from Chinese media. The West quickly spun this euphoric reception as a state propaganda effort, but this completely misses the point and deliberately takes it out of context.

Gidimt’en Land Defenders Mobilize To Protect Archeological Site

Gidimt’en land defenders are presently mobilizing on their unceded territory within the province of British Columbia in Canada to protect an archaeological site from the Coastal GasLink fracked gas pipeline. Earlier this month, The Tyee reported that the area at risk is a ridge near Lamprey Creek. Downstream the creek flows into the Morice River (Wedzin Kwa to the Wet’suwet’en) at a traditional village site called Ts’elkay Kwe Ceek. And upstream are sites at McBride and Collins lakes that contain house pits, also evidence of past occupation. The article highlights: “To the Wet’suwet’en, this site holds clues, pieces of their history on the landscape that dates back millennia. To the B.C. government’s archaeology branch, it is known simply as GbSs-8.” Past excavations by archaeologists have revealed evidence of use that pre-dates the arrival of Europeans, including lithics, materials related to stone tools.

Canadian Amazon Warehouse Could Be First To Unionize In North America

The struggle to unionize Amazon is shifting to Canada, where workers in Alberta could soon be the first to unionize an Amazon warehouse in North America. Workers at the “YEG1” facility in Nisku, Alberta, just outside Edmonton, filed for a union election on Monday, September 13. The election could be held in mere weeks, once the Alberta Labour Relations Board approves the application. Workers at the relatively new facility in Nisku, which employs between 600 to 800 Amazon “associates,” have described rampant favoritism and discrimination against marginalized workers of color and immigrants. Job security, the pace of work and wages are also among Nisku workers’ top concerns, according to Christopher Monette, director of public affairs at Teamsters Canada.

Trans Mountain Loses 16th Insurer

The world’s biggest publicly-traded provider of property and casualty insurance, Chubb, has become the 16th insurer to declare that it won’t back the controversial Trans Mountain pipeline, a coalition of climate and Indigenous campaigners announced yesterday. The flurry of social media activity was triggered by a single tweet from Financial Times insurance correspondent Ian Smith, with no elaborating news story as The Energy Mix went to virtual press Tuesday evening. “Chubb does not provide insurance coverage for any tar sands projects,” a spokesperson told Smith, following a protest at the U.S. Open tennis tournament earlier this month. Chubb became the official insurance sponsor for the annual tournament last year.

Report: Trans Mountain – Delays Into 2023 Will Add Millions To Public Cost

With construction underway on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion (TMX), many Canadians are seeking greater transparency about the delays and rising costs associated with this publicly-funded pipeline and tanker project. West Coast Environmental Law analyzed hundreds of regulatory documents and construction reports and projected that the Trans Mountain pipeline is delayed into 2023, adding millions to the cost. This report compiles and analyzes various Trans Mountain documents, including regulatory filings, sworn affidavits and Trans Mountain’s own website to estimate and project the current state of delays to construction and their potential cost implications. Our analysis found evidence of delays in each of the seven segments (or spreads) of the project, ranging from two to 23 months.

Groups Call On Trudeau And RCMP To Protect Secwepemc Activists

Blue River, BC — Over 40 human rights lawyers, organizations, authors and First Nations representatives penned a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau calling on him to abide by demands made from the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) calling on Canada to immediately halt construction of the Trans Mountain Pipeline. The letter follows a summer of escalating confrontations, including assaults, surveillance, and harassment targeting Secwepemc land defenders by pipeline workers and security. The letter urging Prime Minister Trudeau to stop the construction of the pipeline was also sent to Jennifer Strachan, Deputy Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and details the precarity of the hostilities between workers from the mobile Trans Mountain Pipeline worker camp and the surrounding Secwepemc community.

Fairy Creek Protesters Rally Outside Justin Trudeau’s Hotel

When Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau touched down in the Vancouver area on Tuesday as part of his election campaign, a group of protesters against old-growth logging in the Fairy Creek watershed were waiting to greet him at his downtown hotel. A mix of Liberal supporters and protesters, numbering about 150 people in total, stood outside the Marriott Pinnacle Hotel where the leader was expected to spend the night. Many of the protesters carried drums and chanted "Justin Trudeau commits genocide; the Liberal Party commits genocide," as Vancouver Centre Liberal incumbent Dr. Hedy Fry watched in silence. The Liberal Party later told reporters that Trudeau had gone out for dinner rather than heading straight to the hotel as planned because of security concerns from the RCMP.

On 1000th Day Of Incarceration, Canadians Demand Wanzhou’s Freedom

Canada - Thursday, August 26, 2021, marks the 1000th day of unjust incarceration by the Trudeau government of Meng Wanzhou. That’s 1000 days during which Mme. Meng has been denied her freedom, has not been able to be with members of her family, has not been able to carry on the duties of her very responsible position as Chief Financial Officer of Huawei Technologies, one of the world’s leading tech companies, with 1300 employees in Canada. Meng’s ordeal began on December 1, 2018, the date on which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau kowtowed to the request of former USA President Donald Trump’s to extradite Meng. This was a colossal blunder on Trudeau part’s because it torpedoed fifty years of good relations between Canada and China, resulted in China curtailing major economic purchases in Canada...

A Report From The Fairy Creek Blockade

The cops are the army, are the industry, are the government, are the predator, are the enemy, and this is nothing if not a war for our very survival… BC’s perennial “war in the woods” is not just a catchy, metaphorical brand. We hold the enemy accountable by defending ourselves, and fighting back. We are accountable to ourselves when we realize that there is no such thing as justice, only liberation, and do whatever is necessary to make it happen.

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Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

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