Controversy

 Here's a message from Rafe Mair, former BC cabinet minister and radio talk show host. Post it widely. And my congratulations to Occupy Halifax for making the decision to vacate the Grand Parade for Remembrance Day, and return later. You're acting like the grass. The tree may be blown down, but the grass bends and pops back up. Bravo! 

RAFE HERE … as a supporter of the OCCUPY movement I’m constantly told that this is just the usual bunch of whiners and pot heads.

I give no answer myself but let Nanaimo do so.  

JOURNAL ENTRY FROM OCCUPY NANAIMO ~ Saturday, October 29th, 2011

We are Occupy Nanaimo.

Here in Diana Krall Plaza Nanaimo, we stand in solidarity with 2,217 cities across the globe asking for change.

A lot of people do not understand why we are here. Why we occupy. Why we protest. We are here to try and make the voice of the people heard. If you are in debt, you have reason to be here. If raising a family is becoming too difficult with the low number of jobs available and low wages, you have reason to be here. If you have ever called the streets your home because in the end of the day there was just nowhere else to go, you have reason to be here. If you have a grievance with the current world-wide system, you have reason to be here.

Peter Waite, of Dalhousie University, was the best history teacher I ever had. He was sharply critical of politicians, and one day a student asked him to describe his own political philosophy. Waite pursed his lips and looked out the window for a moment. Then he turned back to the class.

“Throw the rascals out,” he said.

That's the way my column for Sunday, May1, was supposed to begin  -- but that was before the Halifax Herald's antediluvian management philosophy led the paper to demand that all freelance contributors sign a horrible, exploitative contract. The freelancers tried to bargain, but the Herald wouldn't alter the crucial clause in the contract. If you want the gory details, check out my blog at www.thegreeninterview.com/blog, and also the freelancers' site, www.HoweNow.ca.

Anyway, back to Peter Waite, throwing the rascals out. A lot of Canadians share that philosophy – but you can only throw the rascals out by throwing some other set of rascals in. And therein lies the problem.
 

In 1998, when the Halifax Chronicle-Herald invited me to contribute a weekly column to their new Sunday edition, I wrote a simple one-page contract that said, essentially, that the Sunday Herald would publish my columns before anyone else, and that I would retain all other rights to the works. And thus began a happy association between me and the paper – and its readers – that lasted 13 years.

The secret of freelance survival is to make many different uses of the same research, so I wove the column in and out among my other assignments. Some columns were built on my work for foundations and other associations. Sometimes I sketched out ideas in the column and developed them elsewhere. When McClelland and Stewart commissioned a book about sailing from Nova Scotia to the Bahamas, I sent columns to the Herald from ports all down the coast – and then stitched the material into my book Sailing Away from Winter.  The Herald never paid a nickel of travel costs or expenses, but it received columns from every province of Canada, from England and India, from the Bahamas and Bhutan.

And then in mid-February, management wrote to all freelancers directing them to sign a new contract, ASAP.
 

In this Canadian federal election, the major parties have connived with the national broadcasters to prevent the inclusion of Green Party leader Elizabeth May in the televised “debates” that have become such an important feature of modern elections. The official fiction is that because the Greens have no seats in Parliament, they are not a national party – though they are running candidates in every riding, and won 7% of the vote -- nearly a million votes -- in the last election.

To counter that fiction, Elizabeth has been holding rallies from coast to coast – and on Saturday I spoke at the one in Halifax. I'm not a Green – Elizabeth would say, with a smile, “not yet” -- but a member of the New Democratic Party, Canada's social democratic party, which forms the provincial government here in Nova Scotia. If you'd like to see my five-minute speech, click here:  http://www.silverdonaldcameron.ca/silver-donald-cameron-speaks-elizabeth-may-rally-democracy

By sheer coincidence, my eldest son, Dr. Maxwell Cameron, also spoke to the same point -- but in a very different context.  He is a political scientist at UBC. Here's his video clip: http://www.fairchildtv.com/news_headlines_ad.php?headlines_iid=3158

I've just posted my lecture, Energy, Environment and the Left, in the Green Pieces section of this website. This lecture is  my most extensive and detailed examination of the ideas and issues we're now pursuing through The Green Interview. It was delivered at the University of British Columbia on March 25, 2000. Although it's ten years old, most of what it says is still valid and important.

The audio file is also available to download.

At its best, British humour -- the Monty Python dead parrot sketch, for instance -- is almost unbearably funny. At its worst, British humour is flat, vulgar, and nasty. An example of that? The video recently released by 10:10.org, under the title “No Pressure” or “There Will Be Blood.”