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Ted Smith organizes local protests against Harper’s war on drugs
By Hempology | January 7, 2008
Monday Magazine, BC
12 Dec 2007
Ida Chong, Liberal MLA for Oak Bay-Gordon Head and minister of community
DRUG LAWS DRACONIAN
Protesters are set to gather Monday, December 17, at MP offices in Victoria and across Canada to speak out against proposed drug laws they say are draconian and ineffective. The Conservatives’ Bill C-26 would entrench the criminalization of cannabis and require minimum mandatory prison terms for people caught with pot.
Protest organizer Ted Smith of Victoria’s Cannabis Buyer’s Club says the laws would needlessly clog up already over-burdened courts and jails, and that organized crime would only profit from prohibition. The Conservatives are driven by an ideological agenda that is disconnected from most Canadians, he says.
“The moral minority, that’s what we’re up against here,” says Smith. “It’s pretty self-righteous of these people to be condemning the cannabis culture, one of the most peaceful subcultures in society.” Smith says he is organizing two local protests this week-one outside Saanich-Gulf Islands Conservative MP Gary Lunn’s Sidney constituency office, the other NDP MP Denise Savoie’s Victoria office-both of which are set for noon on the 17th. Savoie, who shares Smith’s concerns, will be addressing the gathering outside her office.
“Clearly we all want the bad guys-the organized criminals, the violent criminals-put away, so that’s not in question. What I’m questioning is this American-style war on drugs that has shown itself to be a failure,” Savoie says.
Liberal MP for Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca Keith Martin is also very much against Harper’s stance on drugs. In fact, it is one of the issues that made him leave the Conservatives for the Liberals in the first place, he says. “This is a very destructive piece of legislation, it’s going to criminalize ordinary folk and ruin lives at the expense of the taxpayer,” Martin says. The government should focus on education, prevention and targeting organized crime, not on criminalization, he added.
While he is fairly confident Bill C-26 won’t get passed this time around, Martin says he is afraid Harper will be able to ram it through if he gets re-elected with a majority. Lunn’s spokesman, Logan Wenham, says Lunn was unavailable for comment and that he is not even sure if Lunn will be in Victoria on December 17.
Sewage pipe dreams?
Now that sewage treatment has been mandated by the provincial government, one question that remains is whether or not this project-pegged at $1.2 billion, one-third of which the CRD would be responsible for-should proceed by way of a public-private partnership.
“The province has been pushing for public-private partnership for some time now,” says Saanich councillor and CRD Core Area Liquid Waste Management Committee member Vic Derman. “When you’re talking about a situation that could involve huge amounts of public money, then the public has a right to participate. With public-private partnerships, the one thing that concerns me more than anything is the fact that very often, for reasons given of confidentiality and proprietary information, the public isn’t made aware of the nature of the contract that is signed.”
Provincial legislation used to require electoral approval before a municipality could borrow over $5 million, or enter into a debt contract that would extend over five years, to finance wastewater treatment systems. But an April 19, 2007, Order in Council changed all that. The order, signed by Ida Chong, Liberal MLA for Oak Bay-Gordon Head and minister of community services, removed liquid waste management plans from requiring electoral approval before they can proceed. One might speculate whether the order is related to the June 2006 rejection by Whistler residents of a private-public partnership to rebuild their aging wastewater treatment system.
But CRD chair Denise Blackwell says she thinks the order was intended to prevent residents from rejecting sewage treatment altogether. “I think any time you ask the electorate to spend $1.2 billion, they are going to reject it,” she says. “I don’t think it matters whether it’s a public-private partnership or whether it’s a straight expenditure.”
At this point, the decision about whether or not the CRD should pursue a public-private partnership has not been made-at least to his knowledge, says Derman. “It better not have been made. And we better make darn sure when you’ve got that kind of public expenditure, and environmental consequences, that you’ve got the best options sorted out.”
“Big pipe” outdated
Emerging technologies that can generate electricity from what is tactfully termed biosolids should be seriously considered for the design of CRD’s sewer project, says two Core Area Liquid Waste Management Committee members. But the push thus far has been to build upon outdated and ancient “big pipe” technology, they say.
“Up to this point, the minister has dictated, ‘Go do this,’ but that should not be an excuse to do the thing that makes most sense,” says committee member and View Royal mayor Graham Hill. The tight deadline imposed by the province, which required the CRD put forward a sewage treatment plan by June 2007, prevented engineers from exploring all available design options, he says. That CRD plan, although it calls for five decentralized plants, still involves collecting sludge from the proposed Clover Point outfall and trucking it elsewhere. But emerging technologies would treat that sludge upstream in a “resource recovery” mode similar to that of the Dockside Green development.
“My concern is we haven’t done the investigation yet into that broader resource-based system,” says fellow committee member Vic Derman. “We’re too tied to where we have been. There’s technology that’s coming out now that takes all the biosolids and essentially turns them all to a biogas and energy, and gets about a three or four to one return. So for the amount of energy you use for the process, you get three to four times as much back out,” says Derman, adding this is something that climate change forces us to consider very carefully.
Victoria, because it hasn’t yet instituted any secondary sewer treatment, has a unique opportunity to implement cutting edge water and energy recovery systems, but there’s a risk we might lose this chance if we don’t carefully consider our options, says Derman.
“If we go in the direction we indicated in June, and if we do it in a fairly short time-line, then we might lose out on that opportunity to put in what essentially is a 21st century system, rather than older technology and older approaches.”
Sure fur no slur
Animal rights organization PETA teamed up with a local group to distribute 53 fur coats to the homeless just as Monday was going to press on December 11, which cynics could see as a heartless ploy to downscale the image of fur. But sheathing Victoria’s “street entrenched” population in chic stoles is not a guerrilla tactic intended to besmear the exclusive air some people still attach to fur coats, say the individuals organizing the effort.
“When people who have fur coats find out how horrific the fur industry is, they no longer want these things hanging in their closet. But they want to do good things with them, so they donate them to PETA,” says Joanne Chang, an animal rights activist in Vancouver. “We do want to do something to contribute to humanity as well, and this is the best thing we could think of.”
Kelly Heggart, program coordinator for SOLID, the Society Of Living Intravenous Drug Users, says that when she found out about the “fur kitchens” run by PETA, she jumped on the chance to host an event in Victoria, which was only the second in Canada.
SOLID members come into contact with many of Victoria’s homeless individuals while volunteering to clean up the streets of used needles. All of the people who received coats were extraordinarily pleased with them, she says.
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