AUDIO RECORDED ON LOCATION BY SACHA OUELLET AND ERICA HIROKO ISOMURA AT THE WEDZIN KWA, KWECWECNEWTXW (COAST SALISH WATCH HOUSE), HOLMES CREEK, BRUNETTE RIVER, BURNABY LAKE, AND SKᵂƛƏMA:ɬ STÁL̓ƏW̓(COQUITLAM RIVER) · Photo by Sacha Ouellet

Art and activism are necessary to sustain hope, especially in hard times like the present. In June and July 2021, poets Rita Wong, Emily Riddle, and Sacha Ouellet joined me to record the audio project “From the Prairies to the Pacific Rim,” a poetry exchange and conversation about waterways and the Trans Mountain (TMX) pipeline project, which connects us spatially across western Canada. This audio segment launched as a podcast and was featured at Vancouver’s Powell Street Festival last year. It weaves together a rich conversation featuring poetry and discussions on identity, culture, politics, and climate issues. Amidst varied relationships to land and migration, the four of us exist in a hybrid space as poets, organizers, and community members, the intersections of which shape the project.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about climate grief, and just like grief, as all these residential school sites are investigated further … I don’t think people understand that those things are so intimately connected,” Riddle says, from the eastern side of the pipeline in amiskwaciwâskahikan, or “beaver hills house,” also known as Edmonton. Whether it be fossil fuels or beaver pelts, the removal of Indigenous people is intrinsic to resource extraction and commodification in Canada. “I don’t think most people would connect those two things at all—children were removed in order to have these developments [on the land].”

Wong, who is also an educator, believes “it is not too late … to repair relationships that should have been better in the first place” and that “part of the work is to educate ourselves on what we should have learned all those years ago.” Wong’s recent work in community has included supporting 1308 Trees, an art project raising awareness about the trees being cut down by TMX in Burnaby’s Brunette River watershed, and writing about on-the-ground land defence at Ada’itsx (Fairy Creek). “My family comes from the Pearl River Delta in Southern China and wherever we happen to live, I think it is important to understand or try to learn about the waterway that we are part of.”

While sharing poetry, Ouellet reads a poem that honours her relationship to fireweed, a companion found growing both where she lives in Vancouver, and more rurally up north, where she has spent time at the Unist’ot’en camp and in her homelands of Gwaii Haanas. She asserts belief in “the power of love for the land and love for each other, compassion for the land, and also, knowing, while Mother Nature is having reactions, the end of the world isn’t here.” This segment also includes Wong’s poetry from undercurrent (Nightwood Editions, 2015) and new work from Riddle’s forthcoming chapbook with Glass House Press. Each respective poem offers a witnessing of the self and others in relation to care for these occupied lands and waters.

One of the most notable layers to this project is the sound of waterways. The audio features soundscapes from salmon-bearing rivers, creeks, and lakes from the Wedzin Kwah, Holmes Creek, Brunette River, Burnaby Lake, skʷƛ̓əma:ɬ stál̕əw̓ (Coquitlam River), and Kwekwecnewtxw (also known as the Coast Salish Watch House—next to Silver Creek), each of which are currently being affected by major development, resource extraction, and transportation projects, including TMX, Coastal GasLink, and CN Rail.

As someone who grew up alongside the great Stō:lo (Fraser River), I see this work as part of my own relationship-building to the lands I occupy. In the coming months, I intend to keep writing new work in response to the rich and generous conversation exchanged with Wong, Riddle, and Ouellet.

In the meantime, “From the Prairies to the Pacific Rim” has been released for free on SoundCloud. While the news blasts doom and gloom, artists, activists, policy makers, and everyday people continue to make change in little ways each day.

As Ouellet proclaims, “it can feel very hopeless but it is not, I promise you.”

The full audio of “From the Prairies to the Pacific Rim” with Rita Wong, Emily Riddle, and Sacha Ouellet can be streamed at soundcloud.com/ehiroko.

Four First Nations communities overlap Vancouver Olympic Sites from Vancouver to Whistler.

British Columbia’s First Nations are divided in their support for the Olympics. On one side, the chiefs and band councils of four indigenous communities—the Lil’wat, Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh—have endorsed the Games and set up the Four Host First Nations Society, an offi cial Olympic partner and organizer. On the other side, some of the most vociferous and vocal anti-Olympics activists come from within these same groups. Many in leadership positions view the Olympics as an opportunity to share First Nations culture with the world and a source of revenue that will aid their people; others see the Games as a threat to Indigenous culture, including their traditional lands and livelihoods.

With a few small exceptions, British Columbia is legally Indigenous territory. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 states that the Crown must sign treaties with the Indigenous people before land can be ceded to the colony. While many such treaties took place, the Government of the Colony of British Columbia failed to negotiate treaties, which is why B.C. is the only province not covered by them. Therefore, B.C., for the most part, is unceded—stolen—Indigenous territory.

According to Gord Hill, from the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation and editor of No2010.com, the division in Indigenous communities around the Olympics stems from the band council structure itself: “The Indian Act is divisive and was always meant to install a pro-government council that would implement government policies over Native peoples. In the Vancouver area there are over 60,000 Natives, yet the FHFN represent only 6,000 or so members,” he says.

To date, treaty processes are taking place but little progress has been made. The Indigenous people who oppose the Olympics point out that, fi rst and foremost, the Games are taking place on stolen land. Not only that, they are worried that the Olympics will attract even more foreign investment to Vancouver and B.C.—foreign investment that is troublesome because land disputes are still unresolved. Each new dollar that fl ows in from abroad further encourages the government to continue ignoring indigenous land titles, and that investment is also usually detrimental to the natural ecosystem. Many First Nations activists are further concerned about the impact of the Olympics on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where Indigenous people disproportionately live in poverty and have been hit hardest by increasing rent costs and gentrifi cation.

Hill says that he opposes the Olympics “because of the huge social and environmental impacts, including ecological destruction along the Sea-to-Sky Highway, the venues constructed in Whistler, the massive amounts of concrete used in all related construction work, the $6-billion debt, the massive police state being built, the huge increase in homelessness suffered since Vancouver won the bid in 2003, the criminalization of the poor and of anti-Olympic groups, and the erosion of civil liberties. The government also hopes to use the Olympics as a way to increase international investment in mining, oil and gas, and ski resort industries, further threatening indigenous peoples and lands.”

In a recent speech, Tewanee Joseph, executive director and CEO of the Four Host First Nations, painted anti-Olympics protesters as “non-Aboriginal naysayers … [that] want us to remain forever the Dime Store Indian.” “Do these protesters not realize they are forcing, yet again, Aboriginal people into a dreadful mould, a stereotype that takes us back to a shameful chapter in Canadian history? No. No. And no again. We fought to participate in the Games. As full partners. We fought for the jobs. We fought for respect. That is why few Aboriginal people are likely to be swayed by salvoes of warmed-over, anti-corporate rhetoric. That is yesterday’s news for the Aboriginal people of this country.”

But with opposition only likely to grow as the Olympics approaches, those “salvoes of warmed-over, anti-corporate rhetoric” look set to be tomorrow’s news, too.

The problem with the official budget is that it excludes Olympics-related infrastructure costs, like the Sea-to-Sky Highway, despite the fact that the Games are the only reason that money’s being spent.

If we include infrastructure and other Olympics-related costs, the total bill for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics is at least $9.2 billion—although no one will know the final bill, realistically, until the games are long past. VANOC intends to recoup some of their costs selling off the Athlete’s Village after the Games end—but the recession and subsequent tanking of Vancouver’s real estate market makes that plan increasingly dubious.

Here’s our independent tally of the real cost of Vancouver 2010:

Shortly after Vancouver was named the host of the 2010 Olympics, Naomi Klein was seething about injustice again. “The Vancouver-Whistler Olympic bid presented the province of British Columbia as a model of harmonious, sustainable living, a place where everyone gets along,” she wrote in 2003. After 9-11, the city had sold itself to the International Olympic Committee as the “Safety and Security Candidate…a place where nothing ever happens.” It was a false image, and Klein feared that the darker realities of life in B.C. would remain unexposed to the international community. She needn’t have worried. Six years later, just as the world was turning an eye on Vancouver in advance of the coming Olympic carnival, the city was full of guns. The murder rate between January and March was unprecedented: 47 shootings, 19 of them fatal—twice as many as five years previous. The U.K.’s Sunday Times ran an article calling Vancouver “Murder City.” Vancouver police chief Jim Chu summed up the situation for a panicking public: “There is a gang war, and it’s brutal.”

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime released its 2009 World Drug Report in late June, naming the west coast of Canada as a hub of the international drug trade and B.C.’s organized crime groups as largely responsible. By this time, the violence had died down and not much attention was paid to connecting this new information about B.C.’s pivotal role in world drug traffic and the war that Chu had identified three months earlier. The link between gang warfare, the manufacture and export of illicit drugs, and the fact of those drugs’ very illegality was, meanwhile, barely mentioned at all.

After years of attacking the symptoms of the (increasingly ludicrously named) “war on drugs,” it’s time to stop and consider what would actually end the murders, gang wars, smuggling, petty arrests, and drug-related deaths that afflict us. The answer is to attack the root of the problem: prohibition itself.

In October 2007, six men were found dead in an apartment in the Vancouver neighbourhood of Surrey. The 48 investigators charged with solving the crime appealed to the public and the victims’ families, asking for any information that could lead to arrests. It was obvious to everyone that four of these six murders weren’t random. The two remaining victims had been caught in the crossfire and killed accidentally. These were executions. Vancouver had long supported a substantial criminal economy, but the case of the Surrey Six marked the beginning of a precipitous rise in gang-related violence. In the months that followed, the headlines of local papers became increasingly macabre; by the time I arrived in Vancouver at the end of 2008, I felt I’d landed in Gotham City: Three Slayings Within 24 Hours, the papers screamed; Man Gunned Down in East Vancouver; Grieving Mom Begs for Public’s Help; Four Fatal Shootings Lead Cops to Expect More. At the beginning of 2009, one year before the Olympics would make Vancouver the focus of every news outlet in the world, people were being shot on a nearly daily basis.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper responded with the hardline approach typical of conservative politics: more convictions, longer sentences. The proposed legislation called for more of the same, its coup de grâce being a mandate that all gang-related killings be called first-degree murder and carry minimum jail terms of 25 years. Harper announced his proposal in Vancouver at the end of February, affecting a “we’ll take care of it” demeanour that aimed to calm the public and the international media, who were now swarming on the story of Gangland Vancouver. There was nothing to worry about, he said. The escalating violence shouldn’t concern those planning to attend the 2010 Olympic Games. (They’d install 15,000 police officers, working morning to night!) Later that day, Cory Stephen Konkin, 30, was shot in his car in Maple Ridge. He was followed by four more murder victims in the five days that followed.

“They have to appear to be doing something,” says Jerry Paradis of the Harper government’s fledgling recourse. “They can’t just admit they are at a loss on how to deal with the issue.” Paradis, who served as a judge on the Provincial Court of British Columbia between 1975 and 2003, has become an outspoken critic of governments’ law and order policies, and particularly their proven ineffectiveness in preventing gang violence. He points to the various “task forces” that have been created and re-created over the years as examples of this failure—when one proves ineffectual, it is replaced by another that looks remarkably similar: the Integrated Gang Task Force, implemented in 2004, was followed in 2007 by the Violence Suppression Team. The violence not having been suppressed, Premier Gordon Campbell is now allocating funds to identical squads in Kelowna and Prince George, to be developed over the next three years at a cost of $23 million per year.

Paradis points to the failed anti-gang measures of the United States, which bear a strong resemblance to those our own government would adopt. “The federal and many state penal systems that adopted mandatory minimums are withdrawing from that approach,” he says. “In California, devotion to quick-fix measures like three-strikes laws and widespread minimums have nearly bankrupted the government, while having no perceptible effect on crime.”

Why do we continually fall back on tactics that don’t work? Aside from the share of votes garnered through “tough on crime” posturing, gangs are exceedingly problematic to combat. “Their airtight culture, their shifting alliances, and, most important, the fear they spread make gangs exceedingly difficult to successfully investigate and prosecute,” says Paradis. “Surveillance, infiltration, and intelligence seem to be the keys—and those can be extremely delicate and costly.” No government in the world has the resources necessary to quash gang activity through these conventional means. Policy makers need to put on their creative thinking caps, and then ready themselves for a revolution. The solution to the problem— legalization—is nothing if not divisive.

The concentration of violence was unprecedented in Vancouver. But gang violence is nothing new; gangs are volatile entities, their hierarchies often disrupted by death or imprisonment, their members sensitive to power fluctuations occurring in like organizations all over the globe. When a cartel boss flaps his wings in Mexico City, a typhoon of violence can erupt in Surrey, B.C. According to a study on organized crime in British Columbia prepared by the RCMP’s Criminal Analysis Section in 2005, as of that year there were 108 street gangs operating in B.C. Today’s estimates place the number higher, at 160. And it will continue to rise; there’s money enough to support hundreds of these organizations. It’s not hard to turn a dime when you’re invested in the world’s most lucrative market.

Michael C. Chettleburgh, a criminal policy consultant in Ottawa and Canada’s foremost authority on street gangs, posits that gang life offers various attractions—camaraderie, protection, a shared sense of identity, power—but that the opportunity to make vast amounts of money is undoubtedly its primary allure. “The desire for money and the desire to make money quickly, by whatever means possible, are the combined drivers of street-gang activity,” he writes. Street gangs derive their income from myriad illegal activities, but selling drugs is far and away their greatest profit source. (Studies conducted by the RCMP, CSIS, and the Fraser Institute, among others, consistently produce findings to this effect.) Though the worth of any black market is impossible to calculate exactly, the UN puts the yearly value of the worldwide drug trade at somewhere between US$150 and US$400 billion. That’s one-eighth of the world’s international trade, according to UN studies. Only the textile industry yields similar gains.

“This kind of gang violence is always very cyclical,” Const. David Bratzer told me in the measured, helpful tone of a schoolteacher, when I reached him at his home in Victoria and asked for his take on the current crisis. “It’s related to control of the black market for drugs. A lot of times, when you see this kind of violence, it’s because something has been destabilized: a leader’s been arrested or shot, and now his subordinates or other groups are fighting to control that black market and all those tax-free profits.” Whether violence is up or down at a given moment is inconsequential; it will continue to rise and abate in endless waves as long as there are gangs, and there will be gangs as long as organized crime is profitable.

Still, in the early months of 2009, politicians and police were compelled to offer more pointed explanations for the latest explosion. Most spoke broadly of internal power struggles or disruptions to the drug supply, while some, like RCMP Supt. Pat Fogarty, placed the blame squarely on the ongoing Mexican drug war. None of this reasoning is invalid, but it skirts the larger truth: people were dying, and killing, for money. Or, more accurately, enough money to buy a country.

Ounce for ounce, marijuana is worth more than gold, and heroin more than uranium. Yet it’s only as a direct result of international policy that drugs are so valuable; if they weren’t illegal, they’d be worthless. Prohibition floats the drug trade by raising potential profits to astronomical levels, and the drug trade in turn floats the gangs who control it. “Because of … their illegality and associated criminal sanctions,” writes Chettleburgh, “those willing to trade in them—drug cartels, organized crime syndicates, so-called narco-terrorist groups and street gangs—can demand high prices and derive great profits.”

Great profits is an understatement. Everything in the drug trade is profit. Manufacturers, who buy from farmers, incur virtually no overhead. They’re buying plants—weeds, in fact— that will grow nearly anywhere. From the point of production to the point of purchase, the value of their product can increase by as much as 17,000 percent. By contrast, the markup on retail goods is generally closer to 100 percent. This is what Canada, and all other governments who support prohibition policy, fail to grasp: drug dealing is a profession, and its potential earnings guarantee an endless supply of hopeful employees. Harsher criminal penalties haven’t stopped it, and won’t stop it, because the number of dealers will never diminish. Locking up one doesn’t remove one from the street; it creates a job opening that hundreds of people are waiting to fill. In his wildest imaginings, Stephen Harper could not envision an effective deterrent to this fact.

“You’re talking about a profession where people accept a risk of being murdered, execution-style, as an occupational hazard,” said Bratzer. “How is a mandatory minimum sentence going to deter a person who already accepts the risk of being shot and having their body dumped in a car?”

In British Columbia, the marijuana trade alone accounts for five percent of the GDP, placing it alongside forestry and mining in economic significance. It employs 250,000 people and is worth $7 billion annually. Police have busted thousands of grow-ops in eradication campaigns over the past 10 years, finding particular success with the Electric Fire Safety Initiative, a four-year-old project that partners B.C. Hydro with the fire department and the RCMP to track down growops through notable spikes in private electricity usage. Yet the industry continues to thrive. The number of plants in B.C. is actually proliferating; the RCMP estimates there are currently 20,000 province-wide. The webpage of the City of Richmond, B.C., includes helpful hints for landlords wishing to prevent their properties from becoming marijuana farms.

The Criminal Intelligence Service of British Columbia confirms “marijuana cultivation is the most pervasive and lucrative organized crime activity” in the province, but goes on to remind us that local methamphetamine production is nothing to pooh-pooh; it’s making a strong push to the top, “expanding at a rate similar to the early growth of the marijuana industry.” It’s little wonder that the province can support so many gangs.

And while, in Chettleburgh’s words, Canadians demonstrate a “robust interest” in consuming illicit drugs (a 2004 study by the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse leaves little room for interpretation), it must be noted that 90 to 95 percent of the illegal drugs produced in Canada are eventually sold in external markets. This is not unique to Canada, but representative of the trade. The drug market is borderless, and links every crime ring in the world to every other: grow-ops in Canada are guarded by American guns, which are sold to Canadians to finance purchases of cocaine, which is sold to Mexicans by Colombian manufacturers, and then ferried across the border by American importers, who trade it with Canadians for B.C.-grown marijuana, who sell it for guns to protect their growops, ad infinitum. Variations on the model are unlimited; supply lines and products traded change along with profit margins, power structures, and government patrol barriers. What remains constant is a competitive economic system, controlled by people under immense pressure and concerned only with profit potential. Violence is the natural by-product of such a system—in Vancouver, in Phoenix, in Ciudad Juarez. It is a global problem.

Jack Cole is the executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an international organization comprised of police chiefs and officers, former mayors and governors, criminal justice policy experts, MPs, retired senators and judges, and the former attorney general of Colombia, among others. Its mandate is to legitimize a fringe position on drug policy: legalize. Legalize everything.

“I’d say this is about business as usual,” Cole said of the violence raging from Mexico to Canada. We had finally gotten the chance to speak; Cole travels endlessly for LEAP, within the U.S. and internationally, presenting to professional, civic, religious, and governing bodies, including the UN, on the proven dangers of prohibition and the necessity of ending it. He estimates that he has given his speech, “End Prohibition Now,” more than 800 times. The International Harm Reduction Association selected it as one of the world’s finest documents on policing and harm reduction. Our conversation had been preceded by numerous emails. The last one, genial as always, concluded, “Attached are some of the things that would not exist if we had legalized regulation of drugs.” I opened the attachment. It was an article from a recent issue of the London Telegraph. “Henchman of Mexican Drug Lord Dissolved 300 Bodies in Acid,” read the headline. I didn’t read any further. Cole’s position was clear enough.

When we spoke the next day I was surprised by his tone: warm, patient, patently American. It made his pro-legalization talk all the more intriguing. “It was worse than this at given times in the past,” he said. “In Colombia, for instance. Most people weren’t following it, but when you look at the number of people murdered in Colombia back in late ‘80s and early ’90s … I mean, the drug cartels actually attacked the federal courthouse, and for several days held hostages there. They killed a whole bunch of judges.” For all of the apocalyptic talk at the beginning of the year, gang violence was not, internationally, the worst it had been—just the closest to home. “The fact of the matter is, that all this would end, it would all be over within a day, if we legalized and regulated these drugs,” Cole said.

Not everyone agrees. Darryl Plecas, a professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Fraser Valley and the RCMP Research Chair in Crime Reduction, argues widely for continued prohibition and prosecution of producers and traffickers. “Things are changing, thanks very much, without a change in policy on prohibition,” he told me when I reached him on the ferry from Vancouver Island to the mainland. “Cocaine, crystal meth—we wiped that problem off the planet. It’s vanished. There were all kinds of people using meth, then there was an all-out assault [by government and law enforcement agencies]. What it takes is clever education.” The UN World Drug Report naming Canada as one of the largest exporters of crystal meth had not yet been released at the time of our conversation.

Plecas, who has twice participated in the prestigious Oxford Round Table, an annual forum on public policy at Oxford University, also takes a moral stance against legalization, arguing the harmful effects of drugs on users and their communities. “Do we want to facilitate, condone that?” he asks. When I put forward the standard argument that marijuana has proven less harmful than alcohol, he responds that there is “mounting medical evidence of the harms of marijuana use. Nobody’s getting schizophrenia from drinking. You can backtrack from alcoholism. You’re not returning from schizophrenia.”

This, in effect, is the centre of the prohibitionists’ argument. Drugs are not just dangerous, but demonic; if they weren’t, it would be very hard to justify their illegality. “People have, to some extent, been hoodwinked by the misinformation put out there by the prohibitionists,” says Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist who has been studying the unintended consequences of prohibition for 15 years. “This is the claim that drug use is very, very horribly bad for you, the implication that it’s always and necessarily bad for you, as opposed to the more accurate view that, like alcohol, dose makes a difference and lots of people can use in moderation and use responsibly,” he says. “They don’t seem to want to think about the fact that some people misuse alcohol and do stupid things, but millions of people don’t misuse alcohol and use it in moderation. And they assume that somehow drugs would be different, that we would only get the extreme cases. But the evidence doesn’t suggest that. I don’t know why more people don’t recognize that.”

So while Plecas says prohibitionists “should get their moral compass out,” Miron, Cole, and a growing number of politicians, economists, criminologists and police officers (particularly in the wake of President Obama’s election to the White House, as the new administration is seen as more amenable to logic) are putting forward the idea that legalization represents the most ethical solution to the drug problem. It is founded on a singular fact, irrefutable in the face of a century of gathered evidence: prohibition has made everything worse. From crime to corruption to instances of overdose, prohibition has left us less safe, sicker, and poorer than before, and all at tremendous expense. Governments everywhere have essentially spent billions ramping up social ills. It is one of the hideous ironies of our age.

As drugs and their use predate prohibition, the social implications of the policy can be easily traced. The first instance of anti-drug legislation in Canada was the Anti-Opium Act, passed in 1908. British Columbia was then roughly 20 percent Chinese. One year earlier, an anti-Asian riot had torn through Vancouver, and the practice of placing head taxes on Chinese immigrants, first instituted in 1884, was at its peak. The Anti-Opium Act was plainly born of racist sentiment masquerading as a public safety initiative, as drug use in general was hardly stigmatized during this period. Throughout the Victorian era, one could dabble in cocaine, morphine, and heroin, whether instructed to do so by a doctor or no (physicians regularly prescribed all three), without wandering outside the border of mainstream practice.

In his book Chasing Dragons: Security, Identity, and Illicit Drugs in Canada, author Kyle Grayson writes that “public disapproval of opium arose not from the effects of the drug itself, but rather from its association with a group perceived as biologically and culturally inferior.” Opium was identified with Chinese immigrants and labourers, and, worse than that, with the corruption of white women at the hands of Chinese opium merchants. While other drugs were an acceptable good time, opium was foreign, un-Christian, and threatening. “It is important to remember that the publicly stated rationale for the Opium Act, the legislation that made further acts possible, did not have to do with the potentially harmful effects of opium. Rather, it was based on reports of the narcotic’s ‘dire influence’—specifically, on reports that young white women had been found in an opium den.”

By 1911, as Canadians were first starting to carve out a cultural identity, drug use of all kinds had begun to be seen as “improper,” not “Canadian,” and a symptom of moral deterioration. This new conception, spearheaded by culturally conservative journalists and politicians, led to the Opium and Narcotic Drug Act, a broader version of its predecessor, which included a clause permitting for the later addition of other drugs. In 1923, marijuana made the list. No reason was given. The trend continued, and the production, sale, and consumption of opium, cocaine, heroin, and marijuana were all eventually entirely criminalized, with other narcotics similarly banned as they appeared. The result? Just over 100 years after the misinformed creation of Canada’s first drug law, production is up, usage is up, crime is up, prices and ill-gotten profits are up. Prohibition has had none of its intended effects, and has instead served its targets. There is a kind of poetic justice here: we’ve seen that prohibition was based on a bogus theory, and as befits all ill-founded practices, it failed demonstrably.

The solution is to end it. We’ve lost much to fear campaigns (“Drugs kill!”) and plain delusion (“We can achieve a drug-free world!”), but the population can be re-educated. The majority of the Canadian public already supports legalized marijuana, but a 2009 Angus Reid Strategies poll indicates that only eight percent favour legalization of hard drugs. We are uneasy with the idea of the government supplying the public with drugs; there are too many attendant moral questions. But legalization, though not ideal, remains what the Economist calls the “least bad policy.” The trouble will be getting the public to vocally support it, and finding politicians willing to stand for it. “There has to be some fundamental change in people’s attitudes toward drugs,” says Miron. “It’s not obvious where that change will come from, unless a mainstream politician or a mainstream figure, a respected figure, stands up and says, ‘This policy’s idiotic.’”

Nowhere is the sale and production of drugs a legal activity. Prohibition remains a fact of life in every country in the world, but the decriminalization policies of some places— most notably Switzerland, Portugal, and the Netherlands—are so comprehensive as to give us an idea of what life in a drug-law-free zone might look like. The Swiss have been treating heroin as a health problem since 1994. There were 23 clinics in the country where addicts could go up to three times a day to inject government-supplied heroin in 2007. The drug is provided on a sliding monetary scale. If an addict can pay for it, he or she does; if not, it’s free. The crime rate went down by 60 percent. Portugal shocked the international community and its own citizens when it decriminalized the possession of all drugs in 2001, becoming the first country in Europe to do so. A report published earlier this year by the Cato Institute, a U.S.-based think tank, concluded that the policy change had led to lowered instances of drug trafficking, sexually transmitted diseases, and overdose deaths, and an increase in the number of adults registered in addiction treatment programs. In the Netherlands, where soft drugs have been all but legal since 1976, the per capita usage of marijuana and hash is half what it is the U.S. Studies also suggest that the Netherlands per capita usage of hard drugs and homicide rates are one-quarter less than those of the U.S.

While we don’t have examples of successful legalization to look to, most policy makers, researchers, consultants, and activists envision it as combination of governmental drug production and distribution and harm-reduction initiatives. The government would manufacture the products, standardizing them for purity; supply them to the public in government-operated stores like the LCBO or B.C. Liquor. and use the profits from taxation to treat and ease addiction through rehabilitation programs and safe-injection sites. “There are lots of different ways it could be implemented,” says Miron. “It could be implemented by medicalizing it, meaning change the rules so that medical provision was not much supervised, so doctors could prescribe relatively freely, in which case just as many people can go and get Prozac; if they go to a psychiatrist and act as though they need it, people will be able to go to doctors and say, ‘My back hurts,’ or ‘I have anxiety,’ and be able to get prescriptions for morphine or methadone or marijuana or whatever. But it would still be open to the views of the enforcers about whether or not to allow wide-scale medical distribution. I think the better model is alcohol—sold by private companies, advertised, subject to age restrictions and some taxes, but just a legal commodity like anything else. There’s no reason it has to be treated any differently than Starbucks or Budweiser.”

Whatever the model we choose, drugs cannot continue to be treated as they are. We’ve avoided it as long as possible, but it’s time to look the ethical maze in the mouth and navigate our way through it, because to continue to pretend that we can extricate ourselves from this war through the traditional crime-and-punishment avenues of the Canadian justice system is to continue to line the pockets of those who would slay us in Surrey, if only by accident.

Another B.C. election has passed, and the Liberals under Premier Gordon Campbell were able to hold on to power, but it was hard to tell at times which party stood where on the issues and the political spectrum. The environment was a central issue in this election, but it played out in a way that made no sense based on the historic positioning of political parties in Canada.

The Liberal Party of B.C., which since the demise of the Social Credit has been perceived by some to be more right-wing, was the party that defended the merits of a carbon tax. Meanwhile, the voice of the left, the B.C. New Democrats under Carole James, went all-out under the slogan “axe the tax.” They vowed to eliminate the green tax and, instead, embrace a system of cap-and-trade similar to the one now endorsed by the federal Conservatives.

Environment groups and left-of-centre think tanks, such as ForestEthics, the Pembina Institute, and the David Suzuki Foundation, were put in the awkward position of having to enter the campaign to challenge the NDP.

They were concerned that if the NDP was successful using this strategy it would set the environmental movement back decades, as political parties dropped crucial environmental initiatives from their platforms. While B.C. might be unique in how dramatic its provincial politics tends to be, the NDP across Canada appears to have abandoned the environmental file.

In the last federal election, Jack Layton found himself running against a much more environmentally aggressive Stéphane Dion, and even when the possibility of a coalition government emerged, it was the NDP that insisted the “Green Shift” not be government policy.

So what explains this bizarre policy positioning? The answer is the Green Party. In 1929, American economist Harold Hotelling advanced a model for business based on “spatial location.” Let’s say you want to open a convenience store on a street where there is already one on its eastern end; where would the ideal location be to open your store? As close as possible to your competitor, of course, so as to capture every customer on the street to the west. That way, when someone leaves the house to purchase, say, a carton of milk, they will stop at your store because it is closer, even if just by a few feet.

In 1957, Anthony Downs applied this spatial model of competition to politics and suggested that voters will choose political parties that are closest to them in terms of policy. This explains why, in a two-party system like that of the U.S., the policies of the two political parties end up so similar, as each party tries to grab the maximum number of votes on its side of the left/right spectrum.

The Democrats need to be only slightly left of the GOP to get everyone to their left. Where else can the voters go?

In Canadian elections, we have had a number of what we call “third parties,” such as the NDP. The benefit of this sort of competition should be that these parties can adhere to their core ideological values because they have more room to manoeuvre, while still positioning themselves strategically to capture the greatest share of the electorate.

Enter the Green Party. Now with a new viable political player on the field, the other parties have been repositioning. It doesn’t matter that the Greens have yet to score an actual electoral victory; their simple presence in the campaign has altered the other parties’ strategies. The effect has been most substantive for the NDP, which has tried to stake out new ground on the environment, the deficit, and even law and order.

Political parties, of course, are not convenience stores. Economics is modelled using homo economicus, an incredibly selfish man—a man who considers only what will make his own life better, trying to get the most for the least. That is why economists are always surprised when people walk further to get their milk and even pay a little more. The economic model does not allow for considerations economists call “irrational,” like loyalty to a local neighbourhood store and the people who run it.

But this is not the ideal citizen that democracy is predicated upon. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, argued that the very nature of society would force people to rise above their own selfinterest and make decisions for the common good. It was because he believed in a “general will” greater than the individual—that people believe in democracy.

The NDP needs to ask itself what it believes in. Does the party want voters to walk the extra distance for their policies because they’re the right ones—or do they simply want to offer policies that are convenient?

A natural gas site near Dawson Creek, B.C., damaged by a blast on December 3, 2008. Photo credit: RCMP.

The RCMP’s recent decision to raise the temperature in this region by officially describing the gas well blasts as “terrorism” is unlikely to improve the relationship between the investigators and area residents. “This is not the work of eco-terrorists, for God’s sakes,” Andrew Nikiforuk, the author of the 2002 book, “Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig’s War Against Big Oil,” said in a particularly prescient October 2008 interview. “This is the work of a pissed-off landowner who’s probably a property-rights advocate, who doesn’t like the fact that either his health has been damaged, or his property has been devalued by sour-gas developments.” In that same interview, Nikiforuk rejected the idea that the intent of the person(s) behind the bombing was to injure people. “Whoever did this wanted to make the headlines, they didn’t want to kill people. If you want to kill people up there with sour gas, it would be very easy to do. There are thousands and thousands of pipelines, wells, and scores of sour-gas plants up there,” he said. “Whoever did this planned it very well, picked the locations very carefully, and seems to have been either skilfully adept at not rupturing a pipeline, or skilfully inept at not rupturing a pipeline — and I suspect there are signs here of skilful adeptness.”

Letter from the bomber that preceded the first blast at an EnCana facility. Courtesy RCMP.

The original letter, above, that preceded the first bombing some nine months ago identified the unregulated and unrestricted growth of the oil and gas industry and its effects on the health and security of local residents as the source of the author’s anger. Blair Lekstrom, the MLA for Peace River South and the Minister of Energy, Mines, and Petroleum Resources, believes that the government has made progress on that front. “We have acted on a number of things,” Lekstrom said in an interview with the Dawson Creek Daily News recently. “The setbacks and the flaring we’re working on right now as I committed to. There have been numerous issues raised that we have moved on in the last six-months, and I’m quite proud of what we have been able to do.” These issues include introducing a code of conduct for the land agents who interact with local homeowners on behalf of the oil and gas companies, the opening of an Oil and Gas Commission in Dawson Creek and Fort Nelson, and the creation of a farmer’s advocate.

For the bomber, though, that doesn’t appear to be enough, judging by the two most recent bombings. In time, whether because of a misstep on the bomber’s part, a tip from the public, or just good old-fashioned detective work, the RCMP will break the case and make an arrest, but that will only be the end of the beginning of this story. The rest of the story will turn on whether local officials continue to insist that the person responsible for the bombings was an isolated lunatic, a dangerous idiot with an unreasonable vendetta against local industry. If they do, another disgruntled individual willing to take the law into his own hands will materialize in time, just as Wiebo Ludwig did a decade earlier. Violence, after all, is a perfectly logical way of expressing political dissent in a part of the country whose culture is informed in equal parts of anti-government prairie populism and stubborn, gun-at-the-hip, can-do northern individualism, and more effective than any facebook petition, political rally, or other form of civilized political disagreement could ever hope to be.

The bigger challenge facing local officials, from Liberal MLA Blair Lekstrom, who conveniently enough is also the Minister of Energy, Mines, and Petroleum Resources, all the way down to the mayors of towns like Dawson Creek, Fort St. John, Pouce Coupe, and even little Tomslake, where this all began nine months ago, is to recognize that the public’s silence throughout this investigation represents a form of protest of its own. Nobody up here wanted to see anyone hurt or injured while doing their job, but neither do they want to have to see their quality of life sacrificed to the development of the gas industry, or live with the long-term consequences of being so close to such a dangerous substance. It’s time for someone to find a middle ground between these two equally toxic alternatives.

Monday: Why no leads? Yesterday: Everyone’s a suspect. Today: Will the bombings change anything?

Max Fawcett is the editor of the Chetwynd Echo, a weekly newspaper serving the community of Chetwynd, B.C., and a contributing editor at Dooneyscafe.com.

Site of two bombings of EnCana natural gas facilities near Dawson Creek, B.C., one on July 1, 2009, the second on July 4. Police are still seeking a suspect. Photo credit: RCMP.

If the gas that was coming out the ground in Northern B.C.  smelled like rose petals, it might not be such a big deal. The well sites, after all, are relatively small and inconspicuous compared to those required to extract oil from the ground, and it’s not like people up here are short on land. But sour gas doesn’t smell like rose petals, and its effect on the health of those who are unfortunate enough to live near the source of its extraction is no prettier. Sour gas, a form of natural gas that contains significant amounts of hydrogen sulfide, is unpopular among the ranchers, farmers, and other rural residents who are forced to count the well sites as neighbours.

The gas, exposure to which can lead to everything from memory loss, headaches, and dizziness at lower levels to reproductive disorders such as miscarriages, birth defects and even death at higher concentrations, is routinely released into the air by companies that would rather flare it on site—quite literally, burn it off—than transport it to a refinery where the hydrogen sulfide could be removed more safely. While these wells used to be sunk deep into the bush, away from populated areas, the sheer number of them being drilled, combined with the savings associated with using local transport and energy infrastructure, means that the wells are now frequently placed no further than 100 metres away from the property limits of homeowners. Governor General Award winning author Andrew Nikiforuk describes living near a sour gas as being “like having a child molester in your neighbourhood. You never know when it’s going to go off; when there’s going to be a problem. So it introduces to agricultural communities a level of risk and hazard that was never there before.”

Some of these homeowners have fought back, most famously the infamous Wiebo Ludwig, who waged a decade-long war against EnCana that ultimately resulted in convictions on five charges related to bombings, and other forms of vandalism against the company’s installations, that landed him in prison for 28 months. Despite the presence of a local culture that holds personal independence and a facility with firearms in roughly equal esteem, many residents in the Peace are more reticent than Ludwig was to get into a confrontation with the oil and gas companies in the area. In a March 23, 2004 piece published by The Tyee, journalist Shefa Siegel tried, without success, to get residents affected by their proximity to sour gas wells to go on the record. “I don’t know what it’s going to take for people to wake up to what’s happening here,” one local who wished to remain anonymous told him. “We’re even scared to grow a garden because we don’t want to eat food from our land. We don’t have any idea what’s in the soil.” Another, he writes, ”sought me out to discuss burns on their bodies suffered after what they believed was an unpublicized leak at a nearby well. I met a number of other families who claimed their lives are in ruin because of sour wells perched in view of their kitchen windows. I made notes on their health woes, their trouble getting physicians to take them seriously, and their feelings of abandonment. But none of these sources would agree to be identified by name.”

The reason why so many won’t talk is because they know what the penalty associated with doing so looks like. The big companies, Siegel wrote, might offer modest cash settlements in exchange for non-disclosure agreements, but they’re just as likely to engage them in a court battle in which their exceptionally deep pockets give them a nearly insurmountable advantage.

As one frustrated resident told Siegel, “Look, I want to talk to you, but I’ve been shouting about this for five years, and no good has come of it. I can’t afford to pay a lawyer if it comes to that. I just want to sell my land and get my family out of here.”

Local, provincial, and federal politicians aren’t of much help, either, given the fact that the extraction of natural gas is increasingly the only business of consequence in the Peace Region. In 2008-09, the revenues from the sale of oil and gas land rights hit a record $2.4 billion, a figure that was double the previous record of $1.2 set in 2007-08, and four times the $625.7 million the province took in just five years earlier in 2003-04. Despite lagging global commodity markets the natural gas exploration boom doesn’t look like it’s going to stop, with all the big players exploring new plays in the region from Tumbler Ridge in the south up to Fort Nelson. That boom, which has already created 34,000 new jobs since 2001, is welcome in a region that has seen just as many jobs in the forest industry disappear with little hope of them ever returning.

But while the natural gas industry is a big hit in northern communities like Dawson Creek and Fort St. John, at the corporate headquarters in Vancouver, and the government offices in Victoria, the people who have to live in close proximity to the thousands of well sites that pockmark the Peace are less enthusiastic. That disaffection helps to explain why the public in the Peace appears to have elected to sit on their collective hands when it comes to the RCMP’s investigation. In an unintentionally ironic statement, the RCMP announced on January 13th that they were offering a $500,000 for anyone who provided information that led directly to the arrest of those responsible for the bombings, and noted that their investigators “are being thwarted by uncooperative residents in the area who are opposed to sour gas exploration.” Right now, that definition could include just about everybody living within a kilometre of a sour gas well, which is, well, just about everybody.

Yesterday: Why no leads? Today: Everyone’s a suspect. Wednesday: Will the bombings change anything?

Max Fawcett is the editor of the Chetwynd Echo, a weekly newspaper serving the community of Chetwynd, B.C., and a contributing editor at Dooneyscafe.com.

A natural gas well head near Dawson Creek, B.C., site of a deliberate blast that partially destroyed the well's metering shed on January 4, 2009. Photo source: RCMP.

[Editor’s note: this series of blog posts on the bombings of natural gas wells in Northern B.C. will run over three days, starting today. Look for part two on Tuesday morning and the final part on Wednesday.]

When I agreed to take a job as the editor of a small newspaper in Chetwynd, B.C., I didn’t expect to find myself in the middle of an ongoing national story. I learned about the first bombing of an EnCana pipeline as I listened to CBC radio while driving across the country, stuck somewhere between Ignace, Ont., and Theodore, Sask., and I didn’t expect the story to last the two days it would take me to get to Dawson Creek, B.C, the major city closest to where the bombing took place. Yet almost nine months after I arrived in the Peace Region the campaign of bombings continues, while the person(s) responsible for them continue to elude the RCMP. The bomber celebrated Canada Day with a personalized fireworks display, launching another attack on an EnCana installation that was just a few kilometres from Dawson Creek. As RCMP investigators were collecting evidence from that incident, the bomber struck again on the fourth of July.

For those who don’t live up here, this campaign of bombings must be more than a little confusing. How, you must wonder, can the RCMP—with the assistance of INSET, the integrated national security enforcement team—have made so little progress in finding the person or persons responsible for six separate bombings in a pair of communities, Pouce Coupe and Tomslake, that together barely exceed the population of the average Toronto-area high school? Forget looking for a needle in a haystack; for trained law enforcement officers working with $500,000 in reward money, this should be like looking for a needle inside an empty manila envelope.

Yet in more than eight months, during which time the RCMP has moved from chiding the public for their lack of co-operation to virtually begging them for their assistance, they have been unable to produce a suspect. A series of surveillance photographs taken by a security-camera in the Shoppers Drug Mart in Dawson Creek, where the RCMP believes the initial letter threatening EnCana was sent from, yielded nothing. Likewise, the $500,000 reward has failed to lubricate the local tongues that the RCMP believes hold information that’s vital to the case. The locals, it seems, aren’t particularly interested in helping the RCMP catch the person or persons responsible for the bombings.

There’s a good reason for that, and it smells like rotten eggs. While one would be hard pressed to find anybody who would express support for the bomber’s methods on the record, it might be even more difficult to find somebody who doesn’t sympathize with the motives behind his actions. Virtually everyone who owns land in the Peace Region has had to come to terms with a legal technicality that dictates that while they might own the land on which their home, their farm, or their ranch sits, they don’t own the rights to what lies beneath it. In a region rich with oil and gas deposits and an international commodity market increasing desperate for each, that’s a recipe for conflict.

Today: Why no leads? Tomorrow: Everyone’s a suspect. Wednesday: Will the bombings change anything?

Max Fawcett is the editor of the Chetwynd Echo, a weekly newspaper serving the community of Chetwynd, B.C., and a contributing editor at Dooneyscafe.com.

If the Association of Book Publishers of B.C. gets its way, the province’s libraries will be making a major acquisition this summer without gaining any weight. The association’s Best of B.C. Books Online project plans to purchase electronic rights to a collection of some 1,000 non-fiction titles from British Columbia publishers, which will soon be made available for free in schools and public libraries across the province.

1,000 B.C. books in your pocket. Illustration by Dave Donald

As one of the first such projects in Canada, Best of B.C. Books Online has the daunting task of navigating the myriad legal and mercantile ambiguities of e-book distribution and sharing. “This is a pilot project in a bigger sense, that we’re setting some kind of standards with this project in Canada,” says Margaret Reynolds, executive director of the Association of Book Publishers of B.C. There are many details still to be negotiated between the libraries and publishers, such as the cost of electronic rights, whether they will be bought with a one-time purchase or an annual fee, and how much text readers can copy or print from these files.

Further complicating the project is the print publishing establishment’s wariness of e-books. Their concerns hinge on the risk of piracy, those of an unfamiliar marketplace, and the challenges of incorporating new technologies into their practices. E-books have yet to catch on with the public, but the success of the Amazon Kindle ebook reader in the U.S., and internet giant Google’s prospective settlement with the Writers’ Union of Canada over digitization rights to authors’ works shows that changes are afoot. Publishers are looking to futureproof their business, even if a full strategy isn’t yet clear.

Paul Whitney, the city librarian at the Vancouver Public Library, thinks the book industry is now where the music industry was 10 years ago, when fear of piracy made record companies hesitant to adopt new distribution methods. “Now the music industry understands that the notion of restricting content to one platform means it’s not going to succeed in the marketplace.”

At a time of crisis in the publishing industry, the Best of B.C. Books Online, which will go live in the summer of 2009, wants to ensure that Canadian content doesn’t get lost in the scramble to create a new model for the industry. “We want this to be a success story,” says Whitney, “with more Canadian content being available, more revenue for Canadian publishers, and more people accessing these Canadian books.”