Gruending On Mining

The CNCA [Canadian Network on Corporate Accountability]  brief also referred to a systematic pattern of Indigenous and human rights abuses that have accompanied increased Canadian mining activity. It cited a report presented to the IACHR Commission last year by the Working Group on Mining and Human Rights in Latin America. In ten of the 22 Canadian mining projects reviewed by the group, 23 violent deaths and 25 cases of injury were found.

Read the whole thing through the link.  Nice to know KAIROS is still out there, doing good work, despite their past run-ins with the Harper Tories.  Development and Peace, too.

Gruending On CIDA: Canada's New Foreign Policy = Helping Canuck Mining Companies

 Another fine piece from the author of Pulpit and Politics:

CIDA will soon abandon a number of its long-standing development partners among Canadian NGOs, including a number of church-based organizations. Reliable sources say that a number of those groups will see their funding ended or curtailed this year. CIDA is replacing them in its affections with Canadian based multinationals, including Barrick Gold, IAMGOLD, and Rio Tinto Alcan. Oda has been speaking enthusiastically about overseas projects with these three companies and others in the agri-business sector.

Interesting to note to that the funds are being shifted from outfits like KAIROS to CPOC friendly evangelical groups like World Vision.

Go Get 'Em KAIROS

Coal is on today’s Kairos agenda.

Tria Donaldson of the Wilderness Committee arrives to make a presentation about four new coal mine applications from Fanny Bay to Campbell River. She distributes a map, marking the proposals.

“I want to make sure we can focus on some of the awesome opportunities to take action on coal mining, here on Vancouver Island,” she says.

Article also speaks of the kind of things KAIROS can't do anymore, and the things it continues to do, since losing funding.

Gruending On Bev "No" Oda

Probably the fullest account of that mysterious memo and the real story behind KAIROS' defunding, as told by Dennis Gruending. Nice to know that KAIROS is still fighting on after being stiffed by the Tories.

Incidentally, I am sure I've seen a .pdf of the memo floating around the net. I spent last evening searching but have been unable to locate the thing. If anyone can point to it, I'd be interested in having a look.

And Now, In Non-Ann Coulter Related News

Dennis Gruending has a typically well-written piece on the Manning conference and the Tories on-going battles with KAIROS and Rights and Democracy. Apparently, Mennonites are extremists.

KAIROS Struggles On

I don't know why so much of the activity on this issue seems to be coming from the West Coast, but kudos to the Salt Spring United Church for not letting go of the bone:

This coming Sunday, March 7 at Salt Spring United Church, there will be a photo event to appeal for restoration of funding to Kairos from CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency).

[...]

The photo of the banner and supporting group, plus an accompanying article, will probably appear in the following week’s Driftwood. This will be forwarded on to CIDA.

Kairos Controversey Sideswipes B.C. B&B

If you want to see how toxic Jason Kenney's musings re KAIROS and anti-semitism have been, here's the owner Kairos Guest Suite near Comox, who feel's its necessary to tell folks that they are not those people.

Minister Kenney, you must be so proud.

James Lunney: Standing Tall Against The Anglicans, Quakers, And Other Riff Raff

The Tory MP for Nanaimo-Alberni MP explains why he won't meet with local representatives from KAIROS:

Nanaimo-Alberni MP James Lunney says he won't be bullied into meeting a church group upset about federal funding cuts to international aid organization KAIROS.

"The message is, don't try to intimidate your MP," he said.

Context is important: the Parksville-Qualicum chapter (is that the right term?) of KAIROS has asked repeatedly for a meeting with their MP. Their "bullying" has consisted entirely of phoning that MP's office and, perhaps, sending him emails.

Readers can catch up on the whole unfolding of the KAIROS story here.

KAIROS Fumble Lingers For Lunney

Nanaimo-Alberni Tory MP James Lunney takes more heck for refusing to meet with local KAIROS representatives:

There is no hard rule saying MPs must meet with constituents but the parliamentary tradition is to at least give them an audience. Those who don't, walk on thin political ice, says Allan Warnke, a Vancouver Island University political science professor who served as Vancouver-Steveston MLA in the early 1990s.

And that stems from this.

Tory MP James Lunney On KAIROS

Parksville-Qualicum KAIROS requested a meeting with our Member of Parliament, James Lunney, to discuss the [de-funding of KAIROS]. We were not able to secure a meeting, and finally, in a telephone call on Feb. 1, Lunney advised that he would not meet with our group because, he claimed, we disagreed with all of his and his government’s actions.

While it is true that in the past we have disagreed with some of the government’s actions, we have not disagreed with them all. But even if we had, Lunney is our Member of Parliament, and we believe we have a right and he has a duty to meet. Members of Parliament are elected by citizens in order that citizens views are represented to Parliament.

Learn To Google

From The Prince Albert Daily Herald:

Kenney apparently confused KAIROS Canada, a charity with a 35-year history of good deeds to its credit, with a small, unrelated Palestinian group. It's a grievous error roughly equivalent to calling a group of Norwegian photo buffs, the Kristiansund Kamera Klubb or KKK, a white supremacist group. (We note that some among KAIROS Canada have called for an end to bloodshed and violence in the Middle East: hardly an anti-Semitic view.)

The gong-show gongs on.

Tutu On KAIROS

Desmond Tutu on KAIROS:

'The Church in Southern Africa is deeply indebted to the churches in Canada for their prayers, ecumenical actions and solidarity in overcoming the scourge of apartheid. The initiatives of the Canadian churches through KAIROS have inspired continued faithful ecumenical action not only in Africa but around the world to uphold human rights. The world needs more of KAIROS Canada. It would be an unparalleled setback for the poor, vulnerable and disenfranchised if the voice and work of KAIROS in the global South is muted.'

It isn't that I'm obsessed with the KAIROS debacle; its just that there's not much else in the way of news out there as '09 winds down. Furthermore, given the number of churches associated with KAIROS, reactions like this one seem likely to bubble along for awhile. The story may have legs into the new year.


Interesting, incidentally, that the Archbishop's statement was made way back on the 8th, and only made an MSM outlet (the Star) on the 26th.

Gruending On Who Kenney Was Pandering To

When the Harper-led Conservatives became the government, Kenney was given a key responsibility in winning over new Canadians and certain religiously identified groups to support the Conservatives. One imperative has been to woo Jewish voters and their financial support. Kenney and the Conservatives have clearly chosen sides – supporting Israeli no matter what actions it undertakes. This unflinching support also plays to the fringe elements of the Christian right – who believe that Armageddon in the Middle East would fulfill what they believe is a biblical prophecy that End Times and the rapture are drawing near.

Throw in the fact that KAIROS has been critical of the Federal government's approach to the tar sands' development, and you have a veritable triple-play of pandering--the gov. wielding three wedges at one time, as it were.

Selley On KAIROS

Heaven only knows what went on here. Maybe it's just general hamhandedness. Maybe they [Kenney et al] hoped the benefits reaped whilst people assumed they'd taken a stand against anti-Semitism and/or for Israel would outweigh the damage reaped by disavowing the idea on a day when everyone's shopping instead of reading the Star. Maybe Ms. Oda really did make the decision on her own, and Mr. Kenney decided he'd try to score some disingenuous points with it in Israel. Whatever happened, it's a complete insult to Canadians' intelligence — and Israelis', come to think of it. And it's proof positive, as if any was needed, that nobody should put any stock in what any Canadian politician says. Ever. About anything.

Well, not Jason Kenney, anyway.

Jason Kenney: I Didn't Say What I Just Said...

...and anyone who says I did is lying. From today's Star:

I did not accuse KAIROS of being anti-Semitic. What I said was that KAIROS has taken "a leadership role in the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign (against Israel)."

From the origonal speech (which I have not seen reproduced in its entirety anywhere else). the bolding is mine:

Almost at the same time that Prime Minister Harper was visiting Chabad House in Mumbai, anti-Semitic fanatics in his home city, my home city of Calgary, Alberta were spray painting anti-Semitic graffiti on the Jewish Community Centre, Jewish homes, on public transit installations and indeed, spray painting swastikas on our city’s Holocaust memorial. Some of this graffiti called for the end to the Israeli genocide in Gaza -- "Stop the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

What Prime Minister Harper witnessed in Mumbai, what happened at the same time in Calgary, were practical expressions of the new anti-Semitism. Even though Canada is celebrated around the world as being a successful model of mutual coexistence and tolerance, we too have seen a troubling increase in incidents of anti-Semitism. B’Nai Brith Canada publishes the authoritative registry of anti-Semitic incidents in Canada. In 2008, they received reports of 1,135 incidents of anti-Semitic instances, the highest number recorded in 28 years of the study, an increase of 8.9% over 2007.

[...]

So how have we addressed these growing incidents of anti-Semitism? Well first of all, on the domestic level, our government has worked with the Jewish community to begin a program of recognizing our own history of official anti-Semitism.

[...]

We have articulated and implemented a zero tolerance approach to anti-Semitism. What does this mean? It means that we eliminated the government funding relationship with organizations like for example, the Canadian Arab Federation, whose leadership apologized for terrorism or extremism, or who promote hatred, in particular anti-Semitism.

We have ended government contact with like-minded organizations like the Canadian Islamic Congress, whose President notoriously said that all Israelis over the age of 18 are legitimate targets for assassination. We have defunded organizations, most recently like KAIROS, who are taking a leadership role in the boycott. And we’re receiving a lot of criticism for these decisions. I can’t recall how many times I’ve been sued for some of the decisions that we have taken, but we believe that we’ve done these things for the right reasons and we stand by these decisions.

Sounds pretty clear to me.

Incidentally, I don't think any of the Calgary hate messages that Kenney mentions rose to the level of eloquence of "Stop the Israeli genocide in Gaza." Too many words. ARC has a good post on this.

PS. MP Rick Dykstra also has a copy of the entire speech at his website.

Ezra Goes A Smearing

One nice thing about Ezra's attempts at on-line sleuthing: you usually just have to click through a few links to figure out he's bullshitting (which implies, incidentally, that he's counting on his regular readers to be too stupid to click through the links). Anyway, here's Ezra smearing KAIROS:

If KAIROS aren't a bunch of anti-Israel bigots, then why...

are they furiously editing their website to add disclaimers to links, or remove links outright, to virulently anti-Israel and anti-Semitic groups?

[...]

But... there was the small problem of their website, rife with calls for political war against Israel, and links to groups who lacked KAIROS's Canadian sophistication about how to phrase their bigotry in the soothing tones of diplomatic gibberish. About a week ago, one of their more sober friends obviously told them, "maybe you should lose the kauft nicht bei Juden business. Mark Holland isn't the CIDA minister, you know." So down the memory hole went page after page of their propaganda -- and up went new disclaimers that their anti-Semitic allies were just being highlighted for informational purposes. Nothing to see here!

As a bit of an aside, note how The Ez can't seem to decide if being anti-Israel is the same thing as being anti-semitic or not. But in any case, here's the allegedly altered page of Israel-Palestine links:

...and here's the google-cache of that page from 2 Oct 2009 19:59:49 GMT:

The formatting is a bit different, but the disclaimer is still there, and all the links appear and are in the same order as the more recent version of the page.

Something those folks who are getting sued for taking Mr. Levant at his word should take note of.

PS. Looks like Ezra has abandoned the speechy Jihad. I eagerly await his next project--a book on the Tar Sands tentatively entitled "Oiled Up".

Update: Welcome Wells readers.

You'll notice if you click through my first link above, the text has changed. I think Ezra read my origonal post and did a bit of redacting of his own. He now writes:

...are they furiously editing their website to delete pages of links to virulently anti-Israel and anti-Semitic groups?

Now, if you click through this link, you go to a really ugly looking URL that gives you a "404 error"; Ezra claims this page used to be on the KAIROS site, and has been pulled since. True, if you link from one of the pages in the google cache version of the KAIROS site you hit this page. However, if you go to the current site, and click on Human Rights and Trade -> Countries of Concern ->Palestine & Israel, you go here, which is the page Ezra claims is missing. So it looks like he's calling KAIROS anti-Semitic based on his own inability to maneuver around a standard issue website.

Later, Ezra "evidence" mutates further. It appears that he has found the one Palestine-Israel page that previously (in October) lacked a disclaimer as noted above, and uses the fact that one was added later to argue that the site is "rife" with "after the fact editing" and link deletions.

Independent Jewish Voices On KAIROS

OTTAWA, Dec. 21 /CNW Telbec/ - Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) condemns Immigration Minister Kenny's politicized move to defund social-justice church-group Kairos, which received government funding for 35 years. Kenny said this occurred because, in 2007, Kairos offered a grant to Sabeel, a Palestinian NGO that doesn't mirror Conservative policy.

Not a particularly surprising statement, given the IJV's politics. Nevertheless...

Alberta Government On KAIROS

Background on the KARIOS cuts and the Harper government's justification for them can be found here. And below, bumped up from the comments to that earlier post, is David Sands , with the Gov. of Alta's Public Affairs bureau (who I have mentioned on this site before). He's talking about when KAIROS representatives went out to Calgary to investigate the state of the Alberta oil sands (which I am calling "oil" rather than "tar" sands so as to be polite to Mr. Sands):

For what it's worth, when KAIROS came to Alberta on its oil sands inquiry, we asked some of our best (and busiest) people to brief them and take questions on impacts on air, land and water, and on health and social issues. These were people involved directly in monitoring and investigating the impacts, not flacks like myself.

I have been told that most of the delegates were open-minded and interested, had done some prior research and had probing, relevant questions. There were one or two who, we inferred, had already reached their conclusions and were suspicious, even hostile. But overall, not a group of NGO delegates with an entirely closed agenda.

We have no stake in or opinion on whether the group should receive federal funding or not. As with any group that takes the time to travel here to see the impacts of oil sands development first hand, we gave KAIROS the best access to the best people we could offer. And, we'd do it again.

- David Sands, for the Government of Alberta

As a rabidly Toronto-Centric, The West Hating BigCityLiberal, it terrifies me that reps from the Gov. Of Alberta should be making more sense on this issue than the Feds.

Quick Notes On The KAIROS Funding Cuts

The Star article mentions "anti-Semitism"--code here for criticizing Israel--as Minister Kenney's justification for the cuts. Note that the main charge:

"We have de-funded organizations, most recently, like KAIROS who are taking a leadership role in the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign" against Israel, [Kenney] told the Global Forum for combatting anti-Semitism.

...is denied by KAIROS executive director Mary Corkery here:

Corkery, who said she was shocked by Kenney’s comment, said her group has been critical of some of Israel’s actions but has not supported a boycott.

Furthermore, the notion that KAIROS might have had questionable unacceptable political leanings is rather belied by the very good reviews that Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), its funding body, has given it over the years, including February of this year.

The 2nd article above from the T.O. Sun hints at who the Tories might be pandering to with this decision: B'nai Brith and Charles McVety's gang at the Canadian Christian College. Both organizations have targeted KAIROS for years now. Here's a recent clip of McVety denouncing the group as "leftist ideologues".

This, plus KAIROS criticism of Alberta tar sands development, probably left them cruisin for a bruisin.

Gruending On The KAIROS Cuts

KAIROS (the Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives) is a Toronto-based alliance of social justice coalitions. Within the past couple of days, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)--Bev Oda's department-- has cut all funding to KAIROS.

In his latest, Dennis Gruending speculates as to why:

Minister Oda did not communicate with KAIROS about its fate — she rarely communicates publicly with anyone about her portfolio except in the most controlled of circumstances. But the “trouble at the top” may well have had more to do with the work of KAIROS within Canada than with its overseas projects. KAIROS has questioned, on environmental and hence ethical grounds, the rapid development of the tar sands in Western Canada. KAIROS hosted a forum in Calgary in October 2008 and organized a delegation of Canadian church leaders to visit the tar sands in May 2009. The Reform Party and the Canadian Alliance, prior to their takeover of the Progressive Conservative Party, were beneficiaries of generous support from the oil and gas industry. The Harper Conservatives exist on similarly friendly terms with the carbon industry and will not hear of any proposal that would scale back rapid development – despite the environmental problems such development is causing. The implied criticism from KAIROS may have excited the ire of Conservatives at the top, even though most of the KAIROS budget is provided by the organization’s own donors and not by CIDA.

Just by co-incidence, within hours of defunding KAIROS which, among other things, helps women in the Congo who have been brutalized (often raped) by local militias, the Harper government indicated that it wanted an extra 1.7 mill set aside so that the PM can shoot video of him getting on and off military helicopters, and riding on navy vessels, and pass that off as news.