Canadian Bar Association

A few weeks ago we did a lobbyist simulation where people were assigned to act as lobbyists in order to effect change while the government is creating a budget.

Me and Laura chose to act as the Canadian Bar Association. The Canadian Bar Association is a group that represents over 37 000 people who work as lawyers, etc. They work towards procuring funds to ensure justice is fair and achievable for all who have to go through the court systems.

The thing that I spoke about was getting more funding so that legal aide is more accessible everywhere in Canada for everything. Laura spoke about a plan to get divorces and child custody battles to happen more rapidly and without jamming up the supreme courts. 

Canadian Reactions to the Federal Budget Cuts for Environmental Causes

https://350orbust.wordpress.com/

On this blog, 350 or bust, the first post was about how Harper is protecting oil companies while doing nothing for the environment. The post talked about how Canadian crime rates are actually dropping and our money is getting spent on new prisons while closing down rehabilitative farms.

http://www.policyalternatives.ca/newsroom/updates/canadas-military-spending-higher-now-any-time-wwii

On this website of Canadian policy alternatives, I discovered that Canadian military funding is now the highest it's been since the second world war. What is the Harper government doing and why is so much money being put into our military since it's not needed?

http://canadians.org/action/2011/env-can-cutbacks.html

This is an article from the Council of Canadians. It talks about how they cut funding from Environment Canada by 1/5 and moved the money into the military. The Council of Canadians feels that this is out of step with what most Canadians want and show how Harper is not on the same page as the general public.

http://www.ourclimate.ca/wordpress/

This is a website published by the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition. Although I couldn't find anything specifically pertaining to the federal budget 2011, I found a lot on oil subsidies and how they need to be cut.

Class Reflection

The mock question period was just awesome. I think it's been the most enjoyable thing that we've done all semester in this class.

On Tuesday Ali taught the class and gave a small presentation on political parties then we split into our seminar groups and each were assigned a political party of Canada to be. We looked up policies on environment and health and prepared questions and information to ask the other groups.



My group was assigned the Liberal Party of Canada. The Liberal Party is considered to be the natural reigning party of Canada, having produced great Prime Ministers such as Lyon MacKenzie-King and Lester B. Person. What we discovered about their health and environment policies is that they were actually really interesting, especially their health care idea.

On their health care policy ideas, they had one that was an idea on having a plan so that people with a gravely ill family member can take 6 months paid work to take care of them if the need is there. I thought that was a really interesting idea, and could think of people I know that could have helped in the past.

For their environmental policy ideas, they claimed to want to re-establish Canada as an environmental leader in the world. They wanted to put a cap and trade carbon policy in place, and quadruple Canada's renewable energy sources. They also wanted to preserve 50% of all boreal forests in Canada.

During the mock event, there was a lot of laughter and it was just really funny. It was interesting to see what people thought of things or how they tried to play the roles, such as the Bloc Quebecois. I really really enjoyed the activity.

You Should Have Stayed at Home

For our first blog entry after reading week, we were given a research quest to do. We were told to watch an episode of The Fifth Estate called "You Should Have Stayed at Home".  I had never even heard of The Fifth Estate before (I'm extremely T.V. illiterate), so I had no idea what this video could have been about. What I ended up watching was a 45 minute long thing about the G20 in Toronto over the summer. 


I thought that the episode was really interesting. I work at a summer day camp during the summer and babysit so I usually don't sit down and watch T.V. at all so this is something I knew a bit about but not a whole lot. I found it really resembled the Oka Crisis, but lacked the attention and the care that the Oka Crisis received. What I mean by this is that Canadians aren't standing up afterwards and really questioning why G20 protesters were handled as they were. Maybe because we're all so ethnically different we don't have the bonding and background that aboriginals have? It's interesting to see how passive a country can become over something so violent that happened when it was not okay and stirred a commotion 20 years ago during Oka. 


I was really appalled at the violence that took place, but I must say that I'm not really surprised. I've seen violence from police happen at my school. Clearly not on the same scale, but enough that this didn't really surprise me because I've had negative interaction with the police in high school for doing nothing. 


The temporary jail thing that they had set up was really disgusting, made it seem to me like they were planning to just arrest people and throw them into jail before it even happened. The treatment of people who were arrested was appalling, no dignity at all. There's definitely a difference between being a murderer and being a peaceful protester, but I still think they both deserve to be treated decently and like people. The fact that people were throwing up peace signs and screaming peaceful protest and still got arrested and were subject to police brutality is just awful. 

Reading What My Classmates Have Posted:

For our research discovery quest this week we were asked to look at classmate's blogs and to leave comments. I found it actually really fun to see what other people have been looking at and read stuff on over half of them. Here is what I left as comments:


Peter LaMarre:


  Hey Peter, After reading this I clicked on the links up at the top of the post and read the articles for myself that you had sourced. I thought this was really interesting because I'd never really thought or wondered about civilian casualties in Iraq before. It brought up some good questions in my mind about the actual amount of casualties and what that might mean to what effect our occupation has had in Iraq.




Brad Tierney:  


The day before they had announced a tuition cap at 3%, this amounts to a max 185$ increase per year and they decided to keep the bursaries that are given each year to students in Nova Scotia. This is a huge difference from the predicted 86%. Do you think that influenced the decision of students to go moreso than weather or laziness?




Aminta Richard: 


 Hey, I actually did a huge paper on this last semester. Did you know that by the time your average woman is done getting ready in the morning she has applied an average of 126 toxic chemicals to her body? Absolutely insane. There are lots of cosmetic companies though along with others that are slowly getting away from it. Things containing phthalates, parabens, triclosan and fragrance (parfum) are all things that should be avoided to limit toxcity exposure from cosmetics. I agree that more should be done to educate people so that wiser consumer choices are made. There are some really good books out there though on the topic. Slow Death by Rubber Duck is probably my favourite.




Daniel Toney:


  I agree with you that this is a ridiculous anti terrorist tactic. Looking at how things like education are getting budget cuts and stuff, spending money on something like this seems rather useless. I would assume that most terrorists don't figure out their attack tactics and plans of terror and scare over social networking sites such as Facebook  


Katrina Katrina: (no last name specified that I could find?)


  There seems to be a lot in the news lately about the treatment of mentally ill people. I can't ever imagine having to keep a child tethered on a line. It really goes to show how mentally ill people are extremely misunderstood and that not enough is done to understand and to try to help them.

Al Jazeera

I actually had never heard of Al Jazeera before, so it was really interesting for me to look up what it is. Firstly I found the actual Al Jazeera website and read some of the articles on it and compared it to what I was reading in some other newspapers. I found it to be pretty in sync with what I was reading elsewhere, especially about what's happening in Egypt. 


I did some more reading on other websites about Al Jazeera and found out that it's considered to be pretty controversial because it lacks a lot of the reporting restrictions that a lot of other newscasting groups have, especially in the Middle East. I thought that this was really interesting because I don't think that I believe in censorship, at least to a certain degree.  I thought it was interesting that other media outlets like CNN and BBC have re-shown interviews and footage that was originally from Al Jazeera. This would led me to believe that it is a solid media outlet, since BBC is one of the finest in our time. This is confirmed again to me by the fact that BBC has signed an agreement with Al Jazeera for sharing information and resources. 

My Political Ideology

These are the results from the three political ideology quizzes that were emailed out to us today. I felt that the last two are a bit more accurate than the first one. I don't feel that I'm an anarchist in any way, I just gained some riot experience having graduated from Cole Harbour High. 

I felt that the social democrat and political compass results were fairly accurate with my beliefs though. They were both a fair representation. 

The SHAC 7

The Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty U.S.A (SHAC U.S.A) originally comprised of seven animal rights activists that were working to close down a product-testing lab in Huntingdon. Under an act that exists in the U.S.A called the “Federal Animal Enterprise Protection Act” they were charged for their work on this goal with a charge of terrorism. No one has ever been charged under this act before, and the SHAC 7 were charged for their verbal expression of their views on this lab, what would seem to be a violation of the idea of free speech.

I was an employee at the local S.P.C.A in Dartmouth for almost two years. Surprisingly, the fact that something like this would happen doesn't surprise me one bit. I found that traditionally, working at the S.P.C.A, that the government generally supports things like these labs or stores like Pets Unlimited because they generate income and help build the economy. There is such a process in Nova Scotia to be able to take people's animals away or to shut down businesses or breeders without getting in trouble with the law that it makes it rather difficult to do. 

Viola Desmond: Canada's Rosa Parks?

Only 65 years ago, a woman named Viola Desmond was kicked out of a movie theatre in New Glasgow for sitting in the main floor section, an area reserved for white people. She was offered the chance to go sit on the balcony, the area for black people, but refused and instead was kicked out and given a fine.

When she was kicked out of the theatre, her hip was injured. While discussing what happened with the doctor who looked at her injured hip, she decided to take the issue to court, feeling there was a racist seating policy in place at the theatre. The actions that she took helped spread the fact that Canada still was segregated and changed public opinion on segregated seating. By 1954, eight years after this incident and she won the court case on a technicality, all segregated seating laws were gone.

Viola Desmond is compared to Rosa Parks because of her action of sitting in an area where only white people were allowed to sit down. Although just sitting in an area seems like a small action, each one inspired law changes in Canada and in the U.S.A. 

George Elliot Clarke

1933

Steps shear from beefy, rancid houses, T-bone into sidewalks.

Or: ramshackle stairs screw into air, then accordion into heaps

of brick-broken bottles, trash, jalopy remains. Rubble

architects the North End, some left over dying

from '17's Explosion, when seamstresses got mashed

by heavy machines crashing through floor after floor,

and schoolkids' eyes shot out, gaudy with glass.

A Canaan of syphilis: Halifax.

On Gottingen St. - sty of sailors' uncivic vices- 

Indigo Sampson, pop-eyed drunkard,

violet scar raping his Billy-Eckstine-but-darker face,

remembers wharf rats to be so very bad: Like

white gentry promenading in elongated mansions

while black folk pray in taut shacks. This day's not the one- 

he's toxic, shabby, cross-eyed, and tizicky - 

for two white small boys to accost him, zestfully,

as "n-i-g-g-e-r": He's staggering from killing rats.

His ex-boxer fists- used to hauling junk - elevate an axe.

"Let this blade spit! Let your bloods stink!"

Those two boy disintegrated under his blows,

slicking them with red awfulness. Sampson holds

two blond heads aloft like hauled up weeds.

He flings two fair splintered bodies into the gutter.

His eyes have fallen; nobody looks at him:

Doors have always been flung in his face in his face. 

His crimson terrors could have garnished the Somme.

Guts dangled crazily from fence posts.

A child's heart was hashed up by rats' pitiless teeth. 

They put Sampson in what he called the penatenrinary- 

the petty tryanny. 

Gallant, pallid guards played at shooting him.

One morning he was sitting with the Bible

and his head popped open;

his black scalp puffed up fatally scarlet. 

This is a poem from Execution Poems by George Elliot Clarke. This volume of poetry is about his two late cousins George and Rue who were hung for the murder of a taxi driver. The entire volume of poetry is very dark and rather complex but as well as being about his cousins, provides a lot of historical information on Nova Scotia and on Halifax at the time.

Born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, George Elliot Clarke is an established writer and anthologist who has published a variety of works. George Elliot Clarke coined the term "Africadian", a term for the descendants of black loyalists who immigrated to the maritimes. He currently teaches at the University of Toronto and has taught there since 1999. 

George Elliot Clarke is a huge supporter of the study of black Canadian literature and this is a huge focal point in his writing. he has been awarded many awards and honours for his work in this area. Examples are the Governor Generals Literary Award, the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award and his appointment to the Order of Nova Scotia.


Sources: 
- http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=A1ARTA0010840
- http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/325698.Execution_Poems
- Execution Poems (2001) , George Elliot Clarke