Posted by admin on Aug 10th, 2009
The Globe and Mail, Susan Krashinsky, August 10, 2009
When the world descends on Vancouver in six months for the 2010 Winter Olympics, another kind of convergence will quietly be taking place. A cross-Canada security force will gather to keep those crowds under control, and disaster at bay. “It’s the largest security operation, ever, in Canadian history,” said Staff Sergeant Mike Côté of the RCMP unit in charge of security for the Games. The co-ordination of a $900-million security plan is a gigantic nationwide human-resources effort, pulling personnel from coast to coast to keep things safe.
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Posted by admin on Aug 10th, 2009
By Miro Cernetig, Vancouver Sun columnist. August 10, 2009
VANCOUVER — Vancouver’s Olympic organizers informed us a few days ago they want the private sector to hand over 1,500 highly skilled workers to help them run the 2010 Winter Games. As you might have guessed, the chances of big business lending the Olympics so many employees, whose salaries would all be paid by their companies, wouldn’t be good in the best of times. In a recession, it’s about as likely to happen as China’s hockey team winning the gold medal in 2010.
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Posted by admin on Aug 9th, 2009
By MARK BONOKOSKI, Toronto Sun, 9th August 2009
LINDSAY — Mohawk activist Shawn Brant, his customary camouflage fatigues replaced by an orange prison jumpsuit, looks weary — and is weary. Weary of it all. “This one, this stint in prison, has been the hardest on me, and the hardest on my family,” he admits, speaking over a telephone intercom, and sitting behind protective glass at the provincial superjail here. Brant has been behind bars since June 10 — ironically the first anniversary of National Day of Reconciliation for Canada’s First Nations, and the federal government’s apology for the Indian residential schools — when approximately 100 OPP and First Nations police stormed in at dawn to end the Mohawk blockage of the Skyway Bridge near Deseronto.
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Posted by admin on Jul 21st, 2009
By Daphne Bramham, Vancouver Sun, July 21, 2009
In the flush of bidding for and winning the right to host the Olympics, nobody talked about how staging them might mean limiting civil liberties. It’s only now, with seven months until the 2010 Winter Games begin, that organizers and compliant politicians are revealing plans to make it more difficult to exercise our fundamental constitutional rights to free speech, peaceful assembly and free expression. For months now, police have been knocking on the doors of known activists and tracking them down in their neighbourhoods to “chat” about their Olympic protest plans. But that’s only part of it.
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Posted by admin on Jul 4th, 2009
By Shiri Pasternak. 06/04/2009. Indypendent Reader
Indigenous peoples in Canada have marked the geographical limits of capitalist expansion through more than five centuries of permanent resistance. Due to the geography of residual Aboriginal lands, they form a final frontier of capitalist penetration for natural resource extraction, agribusiness, and urban/suburban development. While much of the focus of the economic crisis has centred on foreclosures and job losses in the manufacturing and service sectors, a renewed push for resources – e.g. tar sands, timber, fisheries, mining, suburban sprawl – may tread in the old vices of colonialism, but it has also been ushered in by a new political economy of indigenous dispossession, and with it, spurred a new phase of resistance.
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