Killing Canadians For Private Corporate Profit , Third Part

For those who think “poor David Emerson” has been maligned in the last few months, let them read the interview with him in B.C. Business, March 2005. Already a cabinet minister (Liberal), Emerson was asked what his goal is in life. You can guess what he said, can’t you? “My goal is to serve Canada and my constituents to the best of my ability.” Or maybe “I want to make the best industrial policy for Canada and Canadians that they’ve ever seen.” No. Here’s what David Emerson replied. “Ultimately my objective – and I’ve done it financially – [is] to get to the point in life where I can tell anybody to stuff it.” [David Emerson quoted in B.C. Business, March 2005, p. 86.] Could that be the unguarded statement of a psychopath? It might be so, especially since the softwood lumber agreement he just brokered destroys any meaning (and there was not much left) to NAFTA except as a statement of Canada’s overt colonial abasement before the U.S.A. But it makes David Emerson look BIG. This column also examines the ridiculous, stupid, insulting pretence made by the Gordon Campbell government to “respond” to criticisms of the intolerable accident count in the forests. Campbell’s pretence will do little or nothing to reduce forest deaths, as he knows. For those Canadians who want to believe well of others (a fine Canadian characteristic), and for those who can’t believe a government like Campbell’s would, knowingly, perpetrate policies that eventuate in unnecessary deaths (to say nothing of deprivation and misery unrecorded), they need only look at the Province of B.C. now. For the unnecessary death of seniors in care read “Tragic death…” in The Democrat, April 6, 06, 1, 5. For the unnecessary deaths caused by purposeful attack on the health care system by the Campbell government read “Overcrowded ER, killing patients…” in the Vancouver Sun, April 25, 06, A1,A2. Doctors at the Royal Columbia Hospital have exploded publicly. They echo a “majority of VGH’s (Vancouver General Hospital’s) 24 emergency doctors earlier this month [who] released an open letter to the public stating, ‘We…feel obligated to publicly declare our non-confidence in the ability of the …department to provide safe, timely, and appropriate emergency medical care’.” A doctor at Royal Columbia Hospital is quoted as saying: “People have been dying waiting on ambulance stretchers in our emergency room….” Gordon Campbell and his highest officials are well-informed about all those matters, as they are about the scandalous deaths connected to the ministry of children and families. As I have said before and repeat (because Canadians should know it) the Coastal Health Authority and other parallel “Authorities” are not there to insure quality of service, but to support and to mask the Campbell government’s attacks on all health and health-related services. Notice that it was not the Coastal Health Authority that went public on the shameful state of Emergency Room services. It was doctors, finally at the end of their tether. Barbara Yaffe (in her Vancouver Sun, Op-Ed column for May 2 06 A11) writes, surprisingly, a sharply critical column. And she lists highly placed medical people who have been shoved out, bought out, “terminated” in the system because they tried to perform decent service. One such is Dr. Victor Dirnfeld, past president of the B.C. Medical Association, dumped by the Gordon Campbell servants. Not only has he “lost count” of colleagues who have been axed. He remarks: “Dismissal is a crude instrument to stifle dissent, but an effective one.” Marcy Saxe-Braithwaite, formerly chief nursing officer at the health authority, was “severed” in 2003. She said she would like to “spill (her) guts.” But she can’t because what she describes as a “huge” severance agreement forbids her to tell the truth about her experience in B.C. Do we Canadians need to see the Gordon Campbell government opening Euthanasia Factories and Death Camps before we will wake up to the fact that it is willingly subjecting British Columbians to unnecessary misery, deprivation, coercion, and death as part of a policy of shifting money from the needy to the wealthy and powerful? The governments of British Columbia, Alberta, and the government of Stephen Harper federally, for instance, intend to destroy the sane, reasonable, responsible social insurance programs for Canadians. Those governments intend to give to Private Corporations all human activities in Canada from which profit can be made (whatever the pain and death suffered by Canadians as a result). Those three governments, for instance, know that giving all possibly profitable human activities to Private Corporations will mean deaths of the defenceless. That result is already visible in British Columbia in the children and families scandal, the shipwreck of the Queen of the North, the unnecessary deaths of seniors in care, the unnecessary deaths in emergency rooms and elsewhere in hospitals. But it also means the deaths of the able, for a part of the Private Corporate strategy of those governments is to remove all legal protections from working people and all effective safety codes. We see the results already in the staggering loss of life in the forest industry where effective safety codes have been eliminated. The strategy of those governments goes farther – we must notice - and may be high-lighted by events in British Columbia. The Campbell government sold B.C. Rail in a scandal-ridden deal. B.C. Rail had wonderful potential to be increasingly useful to British Columbians and to contribute incrementally to General Revenues of the Province. The Campbell government slipped Terasen Gas out of its life as a B.C. Corporation, and then permitted its sale to Texas buyers. Terasen had been publicly recorded as an enterprise almost guaranteed to provide huge stimulus to the B.C. economy (and to General Revenues of the Province). The Campbell cabinet is working to destroy B.C. Ferries (owned, in fact, by the B.C. people) and to place it in rapacious private hands. All of those moves – stinking with collusion and/or backroom deals – are intended to strip the B.C. people of the power to generate the money needed to support decent public services and protections. The final goal is to throw a large portion of the population into poverty, misery, homelessness, and undefended harm so that the people the Gordon Campbell group is serving can become grossly rich and powerful. Human life means nothing to rapacious, predator Private Corporations. Human life means nothing to the Gordon Campbell B.C. government. That is the truth British Columbians and other Canadians must wake up to. The conflict we are in is not new. It is, in fact, tiresomely old. Democracy, after all, sprang from various kinds of despotism in which the lives of ordinary people were considered worthless. Did workers in the nineteenth century really have to work 12 and 14 hours a day, sometimes as mere children? Death rates were staggering, sickness and misery abounded. Reasonable profits could have been made at the same time as the larger population was kept healthy and happy. The condition of unrelieved misery and oppression was driven by predator Private Corporations backed by governments. Only fools believe the despotism of predator Private Corporations is somehow nicer than the despotism of military regimes, religiously fanatical governments, aristocracies, or despotisms of any other kind. Only fools believe the members of the Gordon Campbell government are nice people, trying hard to make the Province a just, fair, happy, and healthy place for all. Only fools believe that. And they will pay for their folly if they don’t act against the Campbell regime. As a part of the policy of killing Canadians for Private Corporate Profit, “planned forestry deaths” in B.C. rose from 13 or 14 in 2004 to 43 in 2005. At the same time profits of the B.C. forest private corporate giant Canadian Forest Products (Canfor) soared to the best financial results in the Corporation’s history. There are – for those who want to itemize the secondary causes of disaster – many changes in forestry practices that have contributed to the alarming deaths and other harmful results. But the primary cause is the deliberate and calculated withdrawal of supervision and oversight by the B.C. government (as sketched out by David Emerson at the behest of Gordon Campbell) from forestry operations in the Province. And so it is not an exaggeration to allege that Gordon Campbell, David Emerson, labour minister Mike de Jong, and forestry minister Rich Coleman – by stripping forestry safeguards and/or failing to restore them adequately – are personally implicated as Ministers of the Crown in the accidents and deaths of working people in the forests. Those who use “street language” and say those cabinet ministers are “murderers” are using dramatic vernacular to state a point that must be made. Murray Dobbin focussed on evidence in the Georgia Straight in March. (March 2 06 17) “As Canfor CEO, Emerson was largely responsible for engineering the transfer of control over forestry policy from the government of B.C. to the large forest companies…. [O]ver a nine-year period Canfor was the third-largest corporate contributor to the B.C. Liberal party.” “He [Emerson] ended up co-chairing a secretive parallel process involving just industry executives and government officials…. And the new Forest Revitalization Act became law with no consultation whatever.” Because of the staggering rise in forestry deaths since that time the Campbell government’s hand has been forced – to undertake band-aid solutions in order to shut up critics and to mask a policy it will not substantially change. That is the policy of sacrificing the lives of ordinary people to increase the profit of Predator Private Corporations. Perhaps the most ridiculous step taken has been to appoint a Forest Industry Ombudsman. The idea, at its best, is nonsense. Its meaning is simple. The government refuses to re-enact legislation to protect forest workers before accidents occur. That is key. To mask that refusal, they have created an ombudsman – a man, that is, who picks up (for instance) the dead faller at the bottom of the cliff and writes a report saying he shouldn’t have died and couldn’t something be done for his widow and orphans. The ombudsman has been set up as an individualist complainer to disguise the fact that substantial, fundamental change to forestry practice is not going to be permitted by the Campbell cabinet, even in the face of calculated deaths, which will continue to happen. At the very best, the “independent” ombudsman for the forests is a huge sham, parallel with the CEO in the nineteenth century who pressed a fifty cent piece into the hand of the widow standing, hungry, at the factory door where her husband had just been killed. The cynicism of the Campbell cabinet in the matter of the “independent” ombudsman, moreover, goes much farther. It goes to an obscene extent. For the “independent” ombudsman appointed, Roger Harris, is a former Campbell cabinet minister, defeated in the last election, and – obviously – totally safe and guaranteed to make no trouble for the Campbell cabinet. What is more, Harris declared upon his appointment that forestry deaths are the result of a Macho attitude in the woods. He said absolutely nothing about the root causes of forestry deaths, revealing to many that he is incompetent to do even the job he has been appointed to do. His appointment is an obscene piece of political nepotism, providing him with a plump salary, from his friends, to do their bidding. Roger Harris may make recommendations to the B.C. Forest Council which - like the Health Authorities around the Province, the “independent” Commissioner of Ferries, and countless other councils, boards, and commissions – is a toothless organization, paid to (in effect) obstruct serious, firm action to protect the people of British Columbia – regardless of how many dedicated and how many caring members it has. Many such bodies have mandates which are so restrictive they cannot do really effective work. Roger Harris will do nothing with tireless energy, and he will be well paid for his work. Forest murder will continue and he will be one of those directly responsible. The second cynically ugly move the Campbell cabinet made was to appoint a forestry coroner. Tom Pawlowski (not apparently, this time, related to Gordon Campbell) will do nothing to end the forest murders. Pawlowski will go from forestry murder to forestry murder and see if there are ways to compare them. “That’s a major advantage,” Tanner Elton, a member of the probably useless B.C. Forest Safety Council said. (Vancouver Sun, Mar 25 06 H1 H3) No one from the Safety Council I have seen has demanded a fundamental revision of forest policy. Pawlowski’s appointment is a sham. His work will make no meaningful difference to the Campbell policy of killing Canadians for Private Corporate Profit. In fact, it will very likely have a negative effect, as the Campbell cabinet has intended. When deaths continue at a high rate, the cabinet will have constructed an alibi – “We have appointed both an ombudsman and a forestry coroner,” the cabinet will say. “They are hard at work. We have to wait to give their work time to have an effect.” What, then, is to be done? British Columbians must get into constituency organizations of political parties and demand bold political action. We must demand more opposition from the Opposition party. We must take legal cases against B.C. cabinet ministers wherever we can find grounds for action. We must organize action groups to confront, peacefully, all levels of government and private corporate corruption. We must organize, and we must peaceably stop work at all the “head offices” of Health Authorities in British Columbia, demanding a complete restructuring of Emergency Room services in the Province and of hospital management through Health Authorities, in order to assist the doctors, nurses, and patients of British Columbia. I have already suggested that action groups should peaceably close down Canfor operations to force new, meaningful, and immediately effective safety legislation. We should peacefully occupy David Emerson’s constituency office to focus on his role in the forestry deaths. By peaceful action we should force attention to the uselessness of Roger Harris and Tom Pawlowski, making them an embarrassment to themselves and to the Campbell cabinet. We should reject all the band-aid moves in Timber sale operation, stumpage auditing, and other recent, phony moves by the Campbell cabinet and demand a complete, really independent investigation of Campbell government and Private Corporate collusion in forestry policy and forestry deaths, fixing responsibility for forestry deaths, and shaping a completely new Forest Policy Act which places the lives and well-being of Canadian workers before the profit, power, and increasing wealth of people like David Emerson and other Gordon Campbell friends. Gordon Campbell’s Liberal government and predator Private Corporations will continue to work together to erase the democratic power of B.C. people and to kill them off as profit-fodder until we make clear the Campbell cabinet and its predator Corporate friends cannot win doing it. [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on May 5, 2006]