Alberta: Get Rich or Die Trying

Tuesday morning reading

A couple of stories have caught my eye over the last couple days, so I thought I'd share them with you.

1. Alberta's unofficial opposition

What is quickly on the path to becoming my favorite Albertan alt-weekly - Fast Forward Magazine - has an excellent article profiling the efforts of Alberta's public interest groups to fill the void left by the decimation of our parliamentary opposition in the last election.

2. Edmonton has a serial rapist

A fourth woman survived an attack this weekend by a person who police have acknowledged is the same suspect who attacked three woman earlier this year, yet have avoided calling a serial rapist. While the first three assaults were in the Garneau area, the latest was farther south in the neighborhood of Aspen Gardens.  For an example of what can be done as a community to fight the climate of fear often created by these types of assaults and the police warnings that accompany them, check out this article by the Garneau Sisterhood.

3. Ron Liepert is offically a bully

Which is great because Calgary's health system appears to be in shambles and unreasonably long waits persist in Edmonton (at least for patients in emergency situations).

4. The body of another Aboriginal woman discovered by Saskatoon Police

In more violence-against-women related news, police in Saskatoon have located a body and charged a suspect in relation to the death of Daleen Bosse, a wife and mother who went missing over four years ago. Bosse's murder forms the latest development in an epidemic of violence that has targeted over 500 Aboriginal women in Western Canada for the past 20 years. Bosse's disappearance and subsequent murder have garnered more attention than usual due to the courageous efforts of her mother to draw attention to the plight of Aboriginal women. Bosse and her family were also featured in a documentary, Stolen Sisters, created last year to raise awareness about the crisis.

For more AGRDT thoughts on this topic, check out these earlier posts.

5. Calgarians rally to confront racism

Although I've seen a few stories discussing the activity of the Aryan Guard in Calgary over the past couple months, I generally don't like posting on them because I don't want to give these horrible people the attention they crave. That said, I think this particular article (also from Fast Forward) does a great job of highlighting the positive community-led efforts that have been made to stop the hate-propagators and in turn, combat the reluctance of Calgary's Police to do much (if anything) to address this problem.

6. Bill C-61: Comic book-style!

Last but not least, the folks over at Appropriation Art have created an excellent comic book illustration of the recent saga that is Canadian copyright reform. Here's Canadian web-law superstar Michael Geist's endorsement:

Gordon Duggan of Appropriation Art has created a remarkable comic book chronicling the recent battle over Canadian copyright reform. The book includes over 100 links to websites, articles, and other resources as every quote or reference is hyperlinked. It concludes with references to groups actively involved in copyright issues and suggestions for how to get active. This left me absolutely speechless.

I'd like to give a huge hat-tip to reader bd for the link. It's actually pretty impressive, so you should go check it out. For more AGRDT thoughts on Bill C-61, check out these earlier posts by mj.

And we're back...

Lots has been going on in Albertan and Canadian politics over the past week, so here's a recap and some random thoughts on a few issues that caught my eye:

1. OECD to Alberta: Smarten Up!

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has released a new report urging Alberta (and Canada) to stop hemorrhaging every penny of our windfall resource revenues, and instead start building a savings fund that could be used for foreign direct investment. The OECD notes that the symptoms of Dutch Disease are appearing in Canada, and that by forcing the Canadian dollar to artificially high levels, Alberta's boom (contrary to our Premier's assertions) is actually hurting the rest of Canada's economy. The OECD strongly suggests that Canada (and Alberta) should look to Norway as a shining example of how to manage oil wealth. In contrast to Alberta's limping $16 million Heritage Fund, Norway's petroleum fund is worth almost $400 billion dollars and is expected to double over the next ten years. For a quick read on Norway's successful approach to natural resource management, check out this Slate article. For a quick read on how to piss away another boom, check out (former Conservative MLA and cabinet minister) Allan Warrack's history of Alberta's Heritage Fund.

2.  The body of another murdered woman discovered outside Edmonton

An autoposy on the human remains discovered earlier this week has determined that the body of yet another murdered woman (likely Aboriginal) was dumped in Strathcona County at some over the past two years.  Project Kare is investigating. For more on Edmonton's missing and murdered women and the epidemic of violence in our city, check out these earlier AGRDT posts.

3. Canada apologizes for part of its racist legacy

As a non-Aboriginal Canadian, I don't feel qualified to assess the importance or even the quality of Canada's apology to residential school survivors and their families. What I will say though is that is move is LONG overdue and I sincerely hope this symbolic gesture is the first step in a radical shift in our government's treatment of indigenous people in this country. Somehow, I'm not optimistic.

4. Alberta Venture launches interesting new project

Think: A New Idea of Alberta

http://www.thinkalberta.ca/

In AV's own words:

Think: A New Idea of Alberta, is an initiative of Alberta Venture magazine to get Albertans thinking and talking about how to turn our currently prosperous province into a great place for all time. We are soliciting ideas and discussion on ways to make Alberta a leader in areas such as visual and performing arts, architecture and urban design, literature, pure science and scholarship. This is Alberta’s golden age; let’s leave a legacy. (emphasis added)

At AGRDT, we are always bitching about the lack of forward-thinking ideas and basic planning-for-the-future in Alberta, so you know we will be posting on this little initiative in the near future.

5. Stelmach on Colbert

In case you've been living under a rock today, here's the video of Stelmach's brief appearance on Colbert last night.

Gotta love how Stelmach was visibly outraged at the CBC's blunder over hockey music, yet couldn't force even subtle dismay over the whole Syncrude duck episode. I guess that speaks to our priorities.

(h/t CalgaryGrit)

How much longer will we look the other way?

A march was held in Edmonton on Saturday to remember and raise awareness about the hundreds of Aboriginal women who have gone missing in Western Canada over the past two decades. This year's march marked the 2nd Annual Stolen Sisters Awareness Walk and was led by the mothers of Nina Courtepatte and Rachel Quinney, two slain Aboriginal teenagers from the Edmonton area.

Aboriginal women in Canada are five times more likely to be murdered than women of any other ethnicity. Over the past 20 years, more than 500 Aboriginal women in Western Canada have gone missing or been murdered. Although statistics like this are sobering, it seems to me that as a society we don't truly understand the implications of these numbers. If we did, we would be doing a lot more to prevent them from happening.

It is all too easy for each of us to see a headline or hear a news report that another young Aboriginal woman's life has been cut short, and with all but the slightest pause for sadness or regret, continue on with our daily routines. This process is particularly easy when victims are identified as having led a 'high-risk lifestyle.' It's as if while we may be shocked or even somewhat horrified to hear about the disappearance of another young woman or the discovery of another brutalized body in our city's suburban backyard, the revelation that the victim was believed to be a sex worker, drug user, or even simply Aboriginal, is enough to lull us back into our collective indifference and dispel any sense of outrage, safe with the assurance this couldn't happen to women we love.

There are several problems with this 'high-risk' designation, which I think are important and need to be unpacked if we are to truly understand the need for action on our part.

1. Often and particularly, in conversations around initiatives like Project KARE, the Highway of Tears task force, and even when thinking about the Stolen Sisters report, the identies of 'high-risk' and Aboriginal are conflated to mean the same thing. This ignores the fact that many of the missing Aboriginal women, were not in fact leading 'high-risk lifestyles'; however the indifference we feel toward these cases is nonetheless the same.
2. As eh has previously posted on, labeling the victims of violence as 'high-risk' implicitly places blame squarely on the shoulders of the murdered or missing young women and removes the focus from the men trolling our streets looking for the next victim.
3. Designating women as having been involved in 'high-risk' lifestyles obscures the fact that these women are mothers, daughters, sisters, cousins, and nieces and have relationships with other human beings who will be adversely impacted by their disappearance. Many of the people involved in Saturday's march were there in remembrance of a friend of family member they lost and these people deserve the same level of societal concern as the families of any other missing person.
4. Relatedly, labeling missing and murdered women as 'high-risk' removes the context from their lives.  It absolves the media from asking important questions about how a person got to the point where they have become 'high-risk', it conceals the cycles of abuse and violence that have impacted the lives of many of these women and most tragically, it completely dehumanizes these women to the point of being just another statistic or blip on the radar.

Seeing the epidemic of violence affecting Aboriginal women from a new (non-mainstream media) perspective is crucial to our finding the anger necessary to break with our collective indifference, to demand that our lawmakers do more to end the violence, and ensure that Aboriginal woman enjoy the same rights and privileges as every other citizen of this country. If you would like to learn more about this issue, take a look at the Amnesty International 'Stolen Sisters' report (or even just check out the site) that finally forced us to acknowledge there was a problem. There is also a sobering documentary by the same name that appeared on Global in October -- any of them will make you angry.