Photo from ‘1974 Anicinabe Park Occupation 40 Yr Anniversary’ Facebook page.

Robert Jago, a member of the Kwantlen First Nation and Nooksack Indian Tribe, has asserted: “The modern fight to reclaim land began with the 1974 Ojibway occupation of Anicinabe Park near Kenora, Ontario.”

On the 40^th anniversary of the occupation, Lorraine Major, one of the people who occupied the park, commented: “In the [Treaty 3] area, there are not very many people who even know about the occupation. It’s not something that’s talked about. It’s not in our history. There’s very little knowledge about what happened.”

What happened that summer?

It has been noted that occupation “began in mid-July and lasted until late August.” Another article specifies that it lasted 39 days. Linda Finlayson, who visited the park during the occupation, has written: “The police in Kenora gave the Native Youth in Anicinabe Park a deadline to evacuate the park. Several youth left before this deadline. These youth went to court August 17.”

On August 19, 1974, the New York Times reported: “For a month, armed Ojibway militants have occupied a 14‐acre park in the resort town of Kenora in northwestern Ontario to call attention to long‐standing grievances against the white authorities.”

“The embattled Ojibway in Kenora Park, led by 24‐year‐old Louis Cameron, the head of the militant Ojibway Warriors Society, marked the new phase of their campaign yesterday by destroying a collection of firebombs in a clearing. They then placed eight rifles and handguns on a blanket and turned them over to Mayor James Davidson of Kenora at the barricaded entrance to the park. In return, the 80 young Indians were given a city permit to spend 10 days more in the park, which they had occupied since [July 22].”

That article adds: “The Ojibway say the park was Indian land sold illegally to the city of Kenora by the Department of Indian Affairs in 1959. The militants also demand social reforms for some 7,000 Indians, most of them impoverished, in Kenora and nearby reserves.”

Years later, Jago interviewed seven members of the Warrior Society who took part in the occupation of the park. He spoke Lorraine Major (noted above), Tommy Keesick, Harry Greene, Rosabelle Major, Richard Greene, Lynn Skeen and Nancy Morrison.

Morrison said: “I went to residential school – the horror stories everybody knows. I was 17 years old, and I went back to my reserve. And when I came back, there was absolutely nothing [because everyone had been forcibly relocated]. No tents or anything left.”

Greene stated that the revelation in 1970 that the Reed Paper had been dumping mercury in the waters near the Ojibway community of Grassy Narrows 70 kilometres north of Kenora “really inspired us … to do more serious things to make our grievances known.”

And Major has highlighted the issues that drove the occupation included: “Lack of employment, poor housing, education, the high rates of Native peoples in the jails.”

Following the end of the occupation of the park, a demonstration took place on Parliament Hill on September 30, 1974.

In an interview from late 1974, Louis Cameron (noted in the New York Times article above) commented: “I think the way we planned it while we were in Anicinabe Park was to have a demonstration on Parliament Hill to illustrate the oppression and dictatorship against native people to the rest of the world. …I think our objective was to illustrate [that Canada] commits death on the native people.”

Cameron adds: “We did get approximately 800 to 900 native people on Parliament Hill that day. As we were going up Parliament Hill, we saw trucks passing by, big army trucks loaded with soldiers.” He describes pushing through a first line of RCMP police and then advancing against a second barricade of about 250 police by the steps He then notes: “And, while we were defeating two lines of those RCMP, the national guard with their bayonets started coming forward. There was about fifty or seventy-five of them.”

Cameron further noted: “They lowered their guns with the bayonets pointing towards us and started marching towards us. That was [when] the riot police advanced from the right of the demonstration and started hitting people with the clubs and their guns. They had tear-gas guns and they were hitting the people with that.”

Forty-seven years after the occupation of Anicinabe Park and the protest on Parliament Hill, the Land Back struggle continues.

Photo from ‘1974 Anicinabe Park Occupation 40 Yr Anniversary’ Facebook page.

On August 7, Secwepemc land defender Kanahus Manuel tweeted: “#blockades are necessary to confront the illegal settler colonial invasion happening right now with canadian owned tarsands pipeline and #transmountain man camp.”

Human rights norms support her assertion.

Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination

First, there is the context of free, prior and informed consent.

In December 2019, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination issued this decision that called on Canada “to immediately cease construction of the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion project and cancel all permits, until free, prior and informed consent is obtained from all the Secwepemc people, following the full and adequate discharge of the duty to consult.”

The Committee monitors the implementation by states of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination that Canada ratified in 1970.

Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) on blockades in Colombia

In June of this year, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) conducted a visit to Colombia to report on possible human rights violations in relation to the ongoing national strike. It issued this report the following month.

Their report cautions that: “The Commission considers that the absolute prohibition of any blockade … could constitute a restriction disproportionate to freedom of expression, demonstration and assembly.”

“The IACHR considers that in the current context Colombian inter-American standards on the right to protest and freedom of expression can contribute to a better understanding of the scope of these rights and its possible restrictions.”

And the report further highlighted: “In the current Colombian context, it is noted that the generic official rating of the blockages as illegal behaviors can lose sight of the specificities of each particular roadblock, as well as affecting the possibility of reaching solutions negotiated through dialogue and mediation.”

The IACHR is an autonomous organ of the Organization of American States (OAS), which Canada joined in 1990.

IACHR on violence against Indigenous women in Canada

In June 2019, the IACHR called on Canada to “protect and guarantee the human rights of Indigenous women and girls, given the findings of the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada.”

That final report concluded that “work camps, or man camps, associated with the resource extraction industry are implicated in higher rates of violence against Indigenous women at the camps and in the neighbouring communities.”

The IACHR further urged “Canada to act with due diligence in the prevention, sanction and reparation of all acts of gender-based violence against Indigenous women and girls, and to take concrete actions, with the participation of Indigenous women, to implement the recommendations issued on the matter.”

UK Supreme Court

And in June 2021, The Guardian reported: “Four demonstrators who formed a blockade outside a London arms fair have had their convictions quashed by the supreme court, in what has been hailed as an affirmation of the right to protest.”

Two members of the court stated: “There should be a certain degree of tolerance to disruption to ordinary life, including disruption of traffic, caused by the exercise of the right to freedom of expression or freedom of peaceful assembly.”

PBI-Canada continues to follow the situation on Secwepemc territories.

Economic justice, including a living wage, is fundamental to all human rights. This principle has informed the campaigns seeking a $15 per hour minimum wage.

Earlier this year, the Center for Defense Information highlighted: “It costs approximately $44,000 per hour to fly the F-35. Extrapolated out over the expected 8,000-hour lifespan of each F-35, the [US armed] services will spend $352 million to operate a single jet.”

Their article further notes that the lifespan of an F-35 could be as low as 2,100 flight hours, dramatically increasing its cost per hour.

Significantly, Canada could sign a $19 billion contract next year to purchase 88 of these warplanes. It has been estimated that the costs to operate and sustain these aircraft could total close to another $60 billion.

Economic choices

The Center has also reported: “Sold in 2001 as a cheap multi-role fighter at a promised $38 million per plane, the troubled F-35, now at an average $158.4 million per copy, continues to dramatically underperform in crucial areas including availability and reliability, cyber-vulnerability testing, and life-expectancy testing.”

Research by the Costs of War Project based at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs found that while $1 million spent on “defence” creates 6.9 direct and indirect jobs, the same amount invested in solar power creates 9.5 jobs, in health care 14.3 jobs, and in elementary and secondary education 19.2 jobs.

A quick calculation suggests that the money needed to purchase one F-35 could generate 1,090 defence sector jobs, but if spent on education would create 3,033 jobs.

Since 1997, the Government has invested CAD $770 million in the development of the F-35. It argues that Canadian companies have secured more than US $2 billion in production and maintenance contracts related to this warplane. It does not offer comparative calculations if that money were spent on peaceful production.

$347 million war on Libya

The issue of cost and flying hours have been previously raised with respect to the bombing missions conducted by Canadian CF-18 fighter jets over Libya.

The Canadian Press has reported: “In terms of a jet’s airframe life, every hour spent on combat sorties equals three of regular mission use at home. The Libya campaign had the potential to add 9,000 flying hours to jets that were already well into middle age.”

The monetary cost of Canada’s intervention in Libya, including jet fuel and the salaries of pilots and support personnel, totalled $347 million.

Ten years later, Libya has gone from having one of the highest standards of living in Africa to having more than 200,000 people who are internally displaced and 1.3 million people in need of humanitarian assistance.

By the hour

Tamara Lorincz has pointed out: “The average hourly cost to operate an F-35 is sky-high at about $40,000, which is close to the yearly salary of an essential worker such as a paramedic, nurse and long-term care worker.”

An F-35 carrying 18,500 pounds of fuel can burn all of that in under an hour at full speed. By comparison, for a worker struggling to pay for a 40 litre tank of gas for their car, an F-35 can burn more than 10,000 litres of fuel in an hour.

The Government of Canada plans to spend an estimated $76.8 billion on a fleet of fighter jets. While weapons sales are profitable for the corporations that sell them, they represent a massive diversion of public dollars from the needs of people.

Image by Thoughtco.

Seventy-six years ago, the United States Army Air Force dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima (on August 6) and Nagasaki (on August 9). By the end of 1945, those bombings had killed more than 210,000 people.

Setsuko Thurlow, who survived the bombing of Hiroshima when she was 13-years-old, reminds us: “Each person had a name. Each person was loved by someone. Let us ensure that their deaths were not in vain.”

Canada’s role in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Matt Korda, a research associate for the Nuclear Information Project, has noted: “Canada played a critical role in the development of these horrific weapons: scientists at the Montréal Laboratory were an essential part of the Manhattan Project, and the first atomic bombs were made with uranium shipped from the Northwest Territories.”

And Gordon Edwards, who co-founded the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, has further explained that the uranium for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was refined in Port Hope, Ontario.

There were alternatives

Professor Benoît Pelopidas has written: “According to the US Air Force’s own review, finalized not long after the end of the war, Japan would likely have surrendered that same autumn even in the absence of atomic bombings or an invasion.”

Canada supplies uranium for nuclear weapons

Edwards has also highlighted: “For twenty years after World War II, Canada sold plutonium (from Chalk River) and uranium (from Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and the Mackenzie District) for use in the American and British nuclear weapons programs.”

Professor Jim Harding, the founder of the Regina Group for a Non-Nuclear Society, has further explained: “We now know that uranium out of Saskatchewan has been diverted through the depleted uranium (DU) system and has been fuelling the weapons stream.”

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has additionally noted: “Canada has long been the main source of uranium for the U.S. nuclear arsenal, globally the largest and deadliest at 10,000 warheads and bombs.”

A massive diversion into nuclear militarism

It has been estimated that the United States, between 1940 and 2005, spent more than $7.5 trillion on nuclear weapons.

The International Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has stated: “In 2020, the report estimates that nine countries spent $72.6 billion on nuclear weapons, $27.7 billion of which went to a dozen defence contractors to build nuclear weapons.”

It further highlights: “Those contractors then spent $117 million lobbying policy makers and up to $10 million funding think tanks writing about nuclear weapons to ensure they can continue to line their pockets with nuclear weapon contracts for years to come.”

This represents a massive diversion of spending away from the public good and speaks to the need to defund nuclear war and divert that spending to alternatives.

Canada’s role today

Significantly, Canada has not signed the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the first legally binding international agreement to comprehensively prohibit nuclear weapons with the goal of leading towards their total elimination.

In December 2019, the Canadian Press reported: “[The treaty] has no support among the countries that possess nuclear weapons — including the United States and its allies, including Canada. Canada doesn’t have nuclear weapons but its membership in NATO means it adheres to the 29-country military alliance’s nuclear-deterrent policy.”

And Korda has noted Canada “participates in NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group” and allows “American and British nuclear-capable vessels to visit our ports.”

As we commemorate the 76^th anniversary of the death of more than 210,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, let us recommit ourselves to stopping this country’s role in supplying, facilitating, participating in and providing cover for nuclear militarism.