The SlutWalks are challenging that vocabulary of oppression. On April 3, hundreds of women took pride in their pleasure and walked through the streets of Toronto (note that they walked for all kinds of different reasons). Inspired by them, a march followed in Boston on May 7. Now self-proclaimed “sluts” and their allies are taking to the streets all over the world in response to the falsehood that sexual assault is linked with promiscuous attire.

It’s an old idea, and one we should be long rid of. There may be other definitions involving a woman’s barely-there clothing or willingness to cheat, but “slut” in its most powerful and oppressive form is inextricably linked with rape.

Patricia Douglas

Patricia Douglas made headlines after she was raped by an MGM director.

Who exactly is Patricia Douglas?

In 1937, she was a 19-year-old dancer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer – you know, the film company with the iconic roaring lion. On May 5 of that year, she answered a call to a “film set” at an isolated ranch outside of Los Angeles. She and 119 other girls were required to wear cowgirl outfits. Patricia didn’t notice there were no movie cameras at the ranch. Present at what turned out to be an MGM sales convention party were nearly 300 salesmen, directors and producers. Throughout the night a film director pursued her, as they often did, asking her to teach him a popular dance. The director, David Ross, offered her champagne and whiskey, but Patricia had never tasted liquor so she refused. He and another patron forced the alcohol down her throat. When she ran outside to vomit, Ross followed her. He then violently raped her in a field near the barn.

Today we would hope such an act would be condemned and such a man would be brought to justice. But the 1930s were different. The word “rape” was rarely used. Instead the newspapers printed the word “ravished.” Women who were sexually assaulted didn’t often press charges. If they did, it was likely they would be publicly shamed. Only “sluts” had sex before marriage, whether or not they willed it.

As former MGM extra Peggy Montgomery said in a documentary I just watched about Patricia:

“I remember two words that I learned — one was ‘rape,’ which was an extreme disaster, and the other one that usually was in the same conversation was ‘tart’ – ‘well she’s a tart.’ … The whole vocabulary of ‘ bad woman’ – slut, tart, tramp – came up immediately if anybody mentioned, ‘she was raped.’”

It’s still a pervasive idea. If a girl sleeps around, she must have wanted it. If a girl is wearing suggestive clothes or makeup, as a Manitoba judge recently said, she must be asking for it. If on the other hand she doesn’t dress like a slut, as a Toronto police officer recently recommended, then she will prevent rape.

Patricia pressed charges against Ross. It was a brave move. Even today, attacking the credibility of a rape survivor is a valid means of undermining his or her testimony. Patricia was up against a financially powerful spin-machine. If MGM could show she had questionable morals – if she had casual sex, for example – the movie giant stood a better chance of winning the case. The movie studio circulated a form asking about the girl’s morals and whether she had been drinking on the night of the party. It aimed to establish that Patricia was a slut. If she was a slut, she couldn’t have been raped. But Douglas had been a virgin at the time, so MGM used another defense. “Look at her,” the prosecutor commanded: “who would want her?”

Rape was and still is linked with desire according to folk psychology. But this is an oppressive idea. Rape is all about power. Rapists perceive their “victims” as weak, which is why many sexual assault centres have shifted to calling them “survivors.” In a linguistic sense, this new word takes some semantic power away from rapists.

And what would happen if the word “slut” lost its power too? What if it bestowed strength rather than shame upon its subjects? Thanks in part to the SlutWalks and the debate they have launched, we may at last find out.

Illustration by Dave Donald.

Dear Progressive Detective: I’m an HIV-positive Canadian, and I’ve heard troubling stories about people being criminally charged for transmitting the disease. Can that happen here? What are my rights and responsibilities under Canadian law?

Under Canadian law, criminal charges can be laid if an individual does not disclose his or her HIV-positive status prior to engaging in certain activities, including sharing needles. While there are no specific laws regarding HIV transmission, charges of criminal negligence causing bodily harm, aggravated assault, and even murder have been laid. This isn’t happening only in Canada, but many say the number of HIV-related criminal cases here is rising, and has been since 2000.

Of more than 60 cases in the past decade, however, Johnson Aziga’s first-degree murder trial has easily garnered the most attention. Six years after the Ontario man’s 2003 arrest, the jury’s guilty verdict made history as the first murder conviction in a criminal case involving HIV transmission. Aziga had infected seven women with HIV; two died of AIDS-related lymphoma during the trial. Additionally, Aziga was guilty of 10 counts of aggravated assault, prompting Crown prosecutors to proceed with a dangerous-offender application. Defence lawyers are currently appealing the application, and Aziga won’t be sentenced until it’s resolved sometime this spring.

In the meantime, groups such as UNAIDS and the Ontario Working Group on Criminal Law and HIV Exposure are worried. Both are currently assessing whether criminalization, in the long run, will achieve criminal justice and prevent the transmission of HIV—or if it will undermine human rights and public health. If Canada starts using criminal law as a blanket solution to HIVrelated sex offences, it may be a slippery, and troubling, slope, say the groups. For instance, HIV-positive women have a 30 percent chance of transmitting the virus to their child during pregnancy, delivery or breastfeeding. Should they face criminal charges?What about women and girls who do not disclose their status in fear of violence or abandonment?

Because of all these factors, UNAIDS proposes that criminal law only be applied to cases of intentional transmission. They also suggest that, as an alternative to criminal law, governments further expand programs promoting education, counselling, support, and other proven forms of HIV prevention.

The article goes in depth, examining jury absence rates and penalties by province. Only three of the provinces and territories track jury attendance, but those who do have relatively low penalties.

There are many reasons to avoid jury duty: it’s long, often unpleasant, and “sucks so bad.” The internet is abound with suggestions on how to get out of jury duty, with everything from feigning racism to being gay. Even if you do serve on a jury, you could cause a mistrial by being “dumb”.

In Canada, it is a civic duty to respond to a jury summons, either by showing up for the jury selection panel or providing a sufficient reason not to partake as a juror.

While some of the commentators on the Star article gladly participated in a lawyer hate-on, many spoke out about the very real barriers to participating as a juror.

Employers are legally obligated to grant employees leave for jury duty. Although jury duty remuneration vary by country and jurisdiction — in Phoenix you get free wi-fi, in L.A., free art gallery admission — it’s almost universal that employers have no requirement to pay salaries while you do your civic duty.

If approved at a jury panel, jurors in Ontario aren’t compensated until after 10 days of service (day 11 to 49: $40.00 per day, day 50 onwards: $100.00). This scheme is replicated across the country. In our (maybe post-)recession economy, many have less job security. With little to no stipend for lost work days, especially for the rising number of self-employed and those in precarious work, it’s no wonder many opt out.

There’s also the issue of transportation. When called to jury, citizens in most provinces have to get to the trial — or a jury panel, where they might be declined — on their own dime. A daily travel expense is issued to those approved for jury service living outside the city where the courthouse is.

As the Ontario government says, “parking facilities vary from courthouse to courthouse, and public transportation is strongly recommended if available. If you attend the courthouse as a member of the jury panel, you will be responsible for paying your own parking fees.” Nice.

While justice systems make allowances for certain hardships — medical conditions, school, vacations — being among the working poor isn’t one of them. In Ontario, there is no allowance issued for childcare expenses, so if you have to take time off from your minimum-wage hourly-paid job to attend jury duty, you’re left holding the bag for daycare or babysitting costs, without any income to offset it. The increasing number of people in that situation literally cannot afford to serve on a jury.

What results is a socially unrepresentative pool of potential jurors who are likely to be more economically privileged than the defendants they sit in judgment on. Much research has been published on jury biases based on economic background.

It’s reasonable to hypothesize that socio-economic status shapes verdicts. A jury’s perspective is shaped by the jurors themselves. If only those of a certain class or salary are able to afford the luxury of jury duty, they will deliberate on a very specific set of principles—especially in cases where poverty or race is involved.

Justice is costly. Fair trials require time, professionals, and lots of documentation. But just as underpaying prosecutors threatens the pursuit of justice, perpetuating barriers to jury duty compromises the integrity of a fair trial.

On February 8, roughly 1,500 Quebec crown prosecutors and lawyers went on strike in frustration over being the country’s most overworked and underpaid public lawyers.

The strike is believed to be the first in Canada. Prosecutors were given the right to strike in 2003 by the provincial government, who opted for contracts and incremental raises instead of binding arbitration. The aim of the strike was to close a 40 percent income gap separating Quebec from the national average.

An episode of CBC’s The Current examined the pay discrepancy and resulting backlog of cases. Lawyers discussed the low morale that comes with insufficient time to do justice. Decrying an understaffed system, one guest spoke of rape victims only getting 90 seconds to speak with a prosecutor.

A group representing the striking prosecutors says low salaries prevent the province from retaining the most competent lawyers, who must challenge the arguments of well-paid defence lawyers. Lawyers have left the provincial system, lured by competitive salaries in the private sector and other provinces. The result is a high rate of turnaround, with younger, less experienced prosecutors filling spaces left by those seeking greener pastures.

After the two weeks of picket lines, Quebec Premier Jean Charest legislated provincial prosecutors and lawyers back to work. The strike threatened provincial legislation, as state lawyers write the laws passed by the National Assembly.

As part of its back-to-work legislation, the province implemented a pay rise of 6 per cent over five years. It also announced plans to hire 80 new prosecutors and 65 related staff. The group that mobilized the strike estimates that Quebec lacks 200 crown prosecutors — 45 percent of its current workforce.

The resulting outcry is affecting the provincial government on multiple fronts. Not enough prosecutors have stepped forward for an upcoming biker-gang trial implicating 155 Hell’s Angels members. The government created an anti-corruption unit to prosecute those allegedly involved in organized crime in Quebec’s construction industry; crown prosecutors have boycotted the project. Last week, half the province’s top prosecutors asked to be reassigned, citing precarious working conditions.

Quebec’s current predicament is similar to the 2009 Legal Aid Ontario lawyers’ boycott. Legal aid lawyers refused to participate in long-term trials involving violent crime, saying they lacked sufficient pay and resources to provide a fair defence. Yet again, provincial lawyers were underfunded, threatening the pursuit of justice.

With a federal election looming, Stephen Harper is pursuing a tough-on-crime agenda, with stiffer penalties for young offenders, more prisons and fewer programs like prison farms. Toronto mayor Rob Ford wants more cops — something even the police union disagrees with — in an effort to grab the public safety vote.

All these proposals are empty hypocrisy without more crown prosecutors and lawyers, and adequate funding to pay them. They’d have to be well-paid to avoid the precarious conditions now experienced in Quebec. Otherwise, we risk undermining one of society’s most crucial institutions.

Bodies lie in a ditch in rural Mexico, as police look on. Photo by Tomas Bravo/Reuters

The first of Juan Escobedo’s many trials began in 2007 when his common-law wife, Lisbeth, then just 31, was diagnosed with cancer. The couple had four children and little money. At the time, Escobedo (not his real name) drove a bus he rented by the day around the city of Oaxaca and Lisbeth worked as a cleaner at the Mexican Social Security Institute. As a state employee, she qualified for free radiation and chemotherapy treatment at a public hospital, but doctors there held out little hope. It quickly became clear Lisbeth did not have long to live.

Escobedo’s second trial began in July 2008, when a gang of masked, gun-toting men burst into his house in the middle of the night. They blindfolded and tied him up along with Lisbeth and bundled them both into a van. They drove them to the Huayapam reservoir, where Escobedo was held underwater until he almost drowned, then beaten while Lisbeth was forced to look on. Their assailants identified themselves as members of “Los Zetas,” and said they wanted the couple to work for them. “They said, ‘We want a place from which to make sales and you are going to work for us, you understand?’” Escobedo recalls. “My wife was sick, and even so they made her sell drugs from our house.”

In a region known for corruption, electoral fraud and strong-arm politics, the Escobedos were just the kind of people the Zetas knew they could control and extort—average citizens without resources or connections. “They forced me to sell drugs, but others, they were forced to keep an eye on us,” he explains. “So anyone who said anything or made an accusation, for sure they would kill them.” The Zetas made copies of the couple’s identification cards, but that wasn’t the only factor that trapped them. What really stopped the couple from trying to escape, says Escobedo, was the fact that outside Oaxaca, Lisbeth’s cancer treatments would no longer be paid for by the state, and there was no way Juan could afford to pay for them himself.

He describes this period as “very painful. Like something you might see in a movie, but I was living it. I couldn’t do anything, and this put me into a kind of shock. I wanted to die.” By then, his wife was in constant pain and unable to sleep, “crying and moaning all the time,” he recalls. Every day for four months, dealers and addicts would climb onto his bus and purchase small bags of cocaine and crack, which he kept in his change box beside the steering wheel. Passengers and police alike took no notice. At one point, the couple was once again blindfolded and taken to a house where they joined a circle of people similarly bound. Two men brought in a third and beheaded him with a machete in front of the group’s horrified eyes—his punishment, they were told, for trying to escape. This was where Escobedo saw the one person he could identify, a uniformed police commander named Castillo.

In September 2008, Lisbeth died and Escobedo sent his children to stay with relatives. Mourning and hopeless, he also stopped working. Two weeks later, Castillo came to see him. “He said, ‘You’ll keep on working for us because you work for us.’ I really didn’t want to, so he said, ‘Here it’s not whether you want to or not,’ and he pulled out a knife. I didn’t know if he wanted to kill me or what his intentions were, but he stabbed me twice in the leg.”

In desperation, Escobedo’s father called Juan’s older sister, who lives in Canada, to see if she could help. She paid for his passport and a plane ticket, and in April 2009, with $5 to his name, Escobedo landed in Canada and immediately applied for refugee status. With his application to the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board, Escobedo became one of the unprecedented 9,309 Mexican migrants seeking Canadian refugee status last year.

Though Escobedo’s status as a refugee applicant allowed him to go on welfare, he found work in Toronto instead. “I am not here to take anything from this country,” he says. “I am here for the second chance I wouldn’t have otherwise. And because I am more use to my family alive than dead.”

As drug-related violence sweeps across Mexico and the death toll rises, Canada has responded by shutting out more and more Mexican refugees fleeing the mayhem. In 2006, when 4,955 Mexicans applied, the Immigration and Refugee Board accepted 28 percent of those applications. That acceptance rate steadily dwindled to just eight percent, and in July 2009, the immigration ministry placed a visa requirement on all Mexicans travelling to Canada, essentially halting the flow entirely.

Lawyers and others who work with Mexican refugee claimants readily agree that there are opportunists using the violence as a pretext to enter Canada for short-term, higher-paid work than they can get at home. The dilemma they face is not gang-style execution, but a profound lack of economic opportunities.

“You have people in Mexico selling stories,” says Francisco Rico-Martinez, who heads the Faithful Companions of Jesus Refugee Centre and has been helping refugees for more than 20 years. “You come and the only detail is to say that you will be killed in Mexico if you go back. So we have those cases as well—people who are desperate for the lack of future and the poverty in Mexico, and they use any way to get out.”

Rico-Martinez estimates that roughly 60 percent of Mexicans claiming asylum here fit that profile, while 40 percent are at genuine risk of violence or murder. Yet Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney routinely refers to all Mexican asylum claims as “bogus,” fostering a climate of skepticism even toward legitimate claimants who can document the persecution and death threats they have experienced. In these cases, says lawyer Mordechai Wasserman, the IRB “skips any consideration of credibility whatsoever. They jump to state protection. They say that Mexico is a democracy, that there’s a presumption of state protection.”

For the IRB, Mexico is a sunny travel destination, a functioning democracy where citizens have ample recourse within its domestic laws to deal with serious crime. When Wasserman points to the murders of police, soldiers, and members of the judiciary as evidence of the lack of state protection, the IRB says that evidence simply indicates that the police were killed in the line of duty and the government is making an effort to root out corruption. The absurdity of that rosy view drives Wasserman crazy. “I just want to tear my hair out,” he says.

Wasserman isn’t alone in his frustration. Aviva Basman, a lawyer at Toronto’s Refugee Law Office, describes her Mexican clients as “some of my most traumatized and most compelling cases.” Many are battered women, whose husbands have backchannel connections to Mexico’s public security apparatus that allow them to repeatedly track down and attack them. “I feel like I’m banging my head against a wall,” she says, “because you go in and make what you think are very strong legal arguments based on facts as they now are in Mexico, that is so dire, and then you get a kind of boilerplate answer back.”

Among the most prominent cases of those refused is that of Wasserman’s client Gustavo Gutierrez. A detective commander with the Ciudad Juárez police force investigating the murders of more than 200 young women, Gutierrez fled to Canada after 36 of his colleagues were killed and he himself began receiving death threats from traffickers.

Another is Toluca lawyer Alfonso Vega, who was represented by Andrew Brouwer of the Refugee Lawyers Association of Ontario. Thanks to two legal cases Vega was pursuing against their members, he ran afoul of the shadowy yet powerful Atlacomulco Group. Wasserman had a client who was actually told by an employee of the Public Prosecutor’s Office that he would be killed if he did not leave the country. His claim was also denied by the IRB.

However, one of the most gruesome consequences of an IRB decision affected a Mexican woman identified only as Nuemi.

She came to Canada with two daughters in 2004, after she and her family received death threats from the Familia Michoacana cartel. The family’s claim was rejected, but the women stayed in Canada fighting deportation orders until, in August 2008, the elder daughter returned home to visit her dying grandmother.

Detected by La Familia and raped, Nuemi’s daughter flew back to Canada—which promptly deported her back to Mexico in December. Nuemi and her younger daughter were deported the following February, and all three women went into hiding at the home of an elderly friend. Only weeks later, then seven months’ pregnant as a result of the rape, Nuemi’s elder daughter was kidnapped. Police found her body in June; not only had she been beaten and shot in the back of the head, but the baby she had been carrying had been removed by Caesarean section. The elderly man sheltering them was also killed. His family, not surprisingly, told them to leave.

After receiving various desperate email messages from Nuemi, Rico-Martinez and Basman succeeded in bringing her and her surviving daughter back to Canada on temporary residence permits. Adding insult to injury, the condition of Nuemi’s return was that she reimburse Citizenship and Immigration Canada for their original deportation costs— including those of her murdered daughter.

While Nuemi’s assertion that she and her family lived in fear of their lives—and that Mexican authorities were incapable of protecting them—was tragically and graphically proven by her daughter’s grisly death, the IRB continues to rely on the “Internal Flight Alternative.” It suggests that applicants move elsewhere within their own country, such as Mexico City, where, in the words of one ruling, “I am convinced that state protection would be reasonably forthcoming.”

For lawyers defending what they feel are clearly meritorious refugee claims, their clients risk becoming victims of the Mexican government’s stated intention—but demonstrated inability—to protect its own citizens.

“There’s this belief,” says Basman, “that it’s okay as long as the government is trying to protect—even if it can’t.”

It is early summer and Mexico City bathes in the sweltering heat of a dry season stubbornly refusing to give way to the rains. Even as the number of deaths from the government’s struggle against organized crime reaches past 23,000, even as one of the nation’s most powerful men (former presidential candidate Diego Fernández de Cevallos) is himself kidnapped, life goes on in the vast metropolis and in towns and cities across the country. In Oaxaca, an international aid and human rights caravan is attacked and two activists killed, but no police investigation will take place and everyone accepts this. It is as if an alternate reality, a webbing of uncontrollable criminality, lurks below the surface of daily life. It’s a reality to which Mexicans, appalled as they may be, are becoming accustomed.

“It’s not like you’re fearful just walking down the street,” says John Mill Ackerman, professor at the Institute of Legal Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, “but if you’re targeted by a drug cartel, there’s really nothing you can do. And this,” he adds, “is an inheritance of the authoritarian system of government. This has been the big problem of the democratic transition of the last 10 years. We are still working with the same state apparatus, the same institutions. The changing colours of the party has led to different groups or mafias coming in or out of government— but not to a real conquest of formal institutions over informal institutions.”

Mexicans who, like Juan Escobedo, have for one reason or another fallen afoul of what Ackerman calls “powerful informal actors” should be seeking protection from the federal attorney general, or PGR. Its Ministerio Publico, or Public Prosecutors Office, has the job of not only investigating crimes, but deciding which cases will be prosecuted. “The Ministerio Publico is in total control of every part of criminal proceedings,” says Ackerman.

While the 2000 ousting of the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party from government may have cracked open the political system, the judiciary remains mired in a culture of favouritism, secrecy, and corruption.

Judges rarely question or even see defendants during trial. There are no juries, no oral arguments, and no public access to evidence until the trial is over. Evidence gathered under torture is admissible, and most suspects are found guilty without scientific proof like fingerprints or DNA. In this system, prosecutors have unusually broad powers, deciding if a suspect is guilty before their day in court and using their own police force to gather evidence to support those decisions.

For José Rosario of the non-governmental Miguel Agustin Pro Juárez Human Rights Centre, the probability of such a system offering protection is “almost zero. There are many inequalities in Mexican society,” he says, “and those same inequalities reproduce themselves in the justice system.” What’s more, Mexican law severely limits the effectiveness, and so the likelihood, of people from one state accusing anyone of so-called “common” crimes like extortion, threats, kidnapping, or even murder in another. To seek justice, victims must stay within the jurisdiction where the crime has occurred, putting themselves in even greater danger. And, says Ackerman, “that’s not going to happen because the person knows the Ministerio Publico itself is, if not totally corrupt, that at least a criminal gang will have eyes and ears there. They’re going to see who is actually charging them. So there’s a very strong disincentive to even accuse these people.” The entire apparatus allows organized crime to flourish. “Most Mexicans,” says Edgardo Buscaglia, a law professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico and an expert on organized crime, “consider the judicial system corrupt at all levels. By being conceived as corrupt by society, people do not report crimes, do not collaborate with the authorities and therefore any effort of the state is hampered.”

Originally trained by the Mexican army in the 1990s as an elite crime-fighting squad, a Mexican version of the Green Berets, the Zetas were soon co-opted by Osiel Cárdenas, leader of the Gulf Cartel. When Cárdenas was captured, “they slowly became more and more independent in many of their operations,” says Buscaglia, “at first with kidnappings, later extortions. And at some point they acquired so much economic power that they were able to divorce themselves from the Gulf Cartel.”

By now, he says, they are much more than a drug-trafficking gang. “They are a transnational organized crime group involved in 17 types of crimes, and present in 23 countries around the world.” Branching out into weapons and human trafficking, along with contract killings, protection rackets, and the kind of small yet profitable business of forcing non-members to retail drugs, “they have made fortunes out of this huge diversification,” he says.

Their financial clout and violent methods have allowed the Zetas to infiltrate police and judicial systems in several states, including Chiapas and Oaxaca. Infiltrating the federal government has been more of a challenge for them, says Buscaglia, but that’s only because their main rival, the Sinaloa Cartel, “has had a long-term monopoly on the capture of federal authorities at the highest level.”

There are 982 “pockets” in Mexico, where “the authorities and organized crime are one force,” Buscaglia adds, “and that’s the essence of a failed state. Mexico is facing limited symptoms of a failed state—and it’s expanding.”

Although President Felipe Calderón has continually proclaimed his desire to vanquish organized crime, dispatching the army throughout the country to do so, he seems unwilling to overhaul its dysfunctional justice system. “That system,” says Buscaglia, “is quite cosy for the political and business elite.”

Mexico’s congress did pass new acts designed to reform the justice system in 2008. With reform, says Buscaglia, “the capacity of organized crime to capture the judiciary would be limited.” But the president has done nothing to actually implement those changes. For Buscaglia, judicial reform is “a joke—two years have gone by and nothing substantive has been done.”

“The big opportunity of democratic transition,” says Ackerman, “the possibility of reforming our institutions, of bringing democracy into the state itself? Calderón just hasn’t done it.”

The third trial of Juan Escobedo is still under way. The ruling that will, in one way or another, change his life is yet to come. An April 2010 hearing was interrupted, as the IRB grappled with the fact that he took part in criminal activity, even if it was against his will. Another hearing in June was postponed. He remains convinced that if he does return to Mexico, the Zetas will somehow find him and subject him to the same gruesome death they have historically inflicted on so many others. “You don’t ask how they can find you,” he explains. “They have all your documents and that’s why they go and look for you.”

For her part, Basman is convinced that the IRB will carry on making negative rulings against Mexican claimants. “Because of the sheer number of claimants, there’s a fear,” she said, “that if you give positive decisions, you’re just encouraging more to come. If you recognize Mexico as a refugee-producing country, then more are going to come and they’re just going to be overwhelmed at the board.”

Yet in Mexico, said Buscaglia, “this nightmare will never cease until the violence and the suffering of average Mexicans reaches the political and business elite—when their families, their persons, and their net worth is actually hampered by organized crime, and the monster they created starts to eat them.”

Illustration by Dushan Milic

On a chilly afternoon in mid-June 2009, bush-pilot-turned-environmental-activist Joel Theriault is once again flying over the deforested landscape near his home. My passenger headset mutes the rush of air and deafening noise of the plane’s engine. Peering out of my side window, I can see the spider-veined pattern of rivers that flow through industrial-stamped forests, around checkerboard farmland, and regroup into lakes. As seen from the air, deforestation carves its brutal honesty into the land, vividly illustrating our self-destructive relationship with the forest. I recall Theriault’s earlier exasperation with the public’s ignorance of what happens to a forest that’s being logged: the tracts of cleared land are easy to see, but there is much more going on. The invisible threat is from the chemical herbicides that forestry companies spray—chemicals that seep unseen into nearby streams, marshes and lakes. “Where does the herbicide run-off go? We’re north of the Arctic watershed, so all our water goes up to the Arctic. But 40 miles south of us they’re doing the same thing and all of that water flows down into the Great Lakes and eventually makes its way into Toronto’s water supply. So, I think if people from Toronto recognize that they are being exposed to non-essential chemicals—which are being banned on their front lawns for health and environmental reasons—they’d be outraged.”

At one time, the name “Joel Theriault,” when spoken in the small northern Ontario town of Foleyet, could elicit threats of violence. For the past six years, Theriault has been involved in what Linda McCaffrey, director of EcoJustice Ottawa, characterizes as a “David and Goliath situation.” It’s resulted in childhood friends turning against him, a lawsuit from one of the world’s largest pulp and paper companies, Theriault’s struggles within a prominent environmental law organization, alienation from other activists, and stonewalling from a government agency. These are the result of Theriault’s mission to stop the use of herbicide spraying in northern Ontario forestry operations. “I’d better change it, or it’s going to drive me nuts,” he says.

Theriault’s battle affects 90 percent of Ontario’s land. Of the 58 million hectares of the province’s forests, 88 percent are owned and managed by the Ontario government (known as Crown forests) and occupy an area larger than many European countries. Although Crown forests are public, roughly a third (about 26 million hectares) are open to commercial logging, a $17-billion industry regulated by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) that needs to be maintained. An essential part of this maintenance is the regeneration of clearcuts—allowing logged areas to grow back in a uniform fashion. For the last 20 years, that has meant the aerial spraying of herbicides to kill off competing vegetation so that the new trees will survive. Industry and government argue that it’s a cheaper, more efficient, and less hazardous way to maintain forests (since workers would otherwise be manually thinning vegetation or conducting controlled forest fires). Critics say that spraying chemicals on land used by local communities to hunt, fish, and camp is destructive and dangerous.

“It’s very challenging to grow conifers without herbicides,” says Susan Pickering, the former divisional forester for boreal Ontario employed by the multinational pulp and paper company, Tembec Enterprises, Inc. The industry’s herbicide of choice is glyphosate, which kills every unwanted plant, blade of grass and piece of vegetation it comes into contact with by destroying an essential protein-processing enzyme. Within six to eight months it chemically binds to the soil, making the ground safe for conifer seedlings to be planted (since the chemical is no longer available for uptake by their roots). The most widely used glyphosate-based herbicide in forestry is Monsanto Canada’s Vision, more commonly known by its agricultural brand name, Roundup. Ninety percent of the forestry market sprays glyphosate-based products, affecting approximately 70,000 hectares of Ontario’s forests annually. Theriault has seen what results from the aerial spraying of glyphosate over the forests near his home. “You can see it from the air, you can also see it from the ground. Everything’s dead except for the pine trees.”

Theriault rejects the notion he’s pitted himself against an immovable opponent. He can hold his own in a fight, although his adolescent appearance would suggest otherwise. He is 28 years old with delicate features and a smooth, rosy complexion—a striking contrast to his unkempt hair and patchy beard, which lends him a wild-wilderness-nut look. In his community, Theriault is well-known for his intensity and uncompromising commitment to his convictions. “He’s got more tenacity than I would have thought,” says his mother, Jeanne. “If he thinks it’s right and the best thing for the environment or the world or mankind, it’s above dispute.” Theriault is determined to win the war that has consumed much of his time, resources, and energy over the last six years. “I think you’ve got to pick an issue that bothers you that is attainable, that is manageable,” he says. To him, trying to transform the forest management practices of a couple of multi-billion dollar corporations in northern Ontario is “the most attainable of the issues out there.”

The forest was a constant feature in Theriault’s childhood. He was raised in an isolated outfitting lodge, the Ivanhoe River Inn. The lodge borders the northern Ontario forests a few minutes’ drive outside Foleyet, a town with a population of 216 in the district of Sudbury. The Ivanhoe River Inn is stationed on the edge of Ivanhoe Lake, a moderately sized body of water among a smattering of snake-like rivers that spread across northern Ontario. For over 10 years, Theriault has spent his summers working for his parents as a pilot at the lodge, flying supplies and clients to one of the family’s 31 isolated cabins on the lakes in northern Ontario. It was during this time that Theriault’s interest in herbicides began to deepen. As a pilot he began to notice changes in the landscape. Once-familiar swaths of greenery, shrubs and dense, dark forests took on a sickly yellowish-brown hue. From the air, vast clearcuts gave fallen trees the appearance of twigs strewn over patches of mud. Forests quickly became barren, marked by the occasional patchwork of brown brush. Theriault was horrified by the transformation and felt a personal responsibility to prevent its further destruction. “If you spend enough time somewhere—as it was for me—I kind of look at it and say, ‘Well, this is kind of a part of me.’ You start to claim some ownership over it,” he says.

In 2004, a hunting trip sparked Theriault’s interest to find out what exactly was being done to the forests around his home. Theriault was hunting in the Pineland forest, a mile away from cut blocks that housed signs stating that the area had undergone a recent herbicide spray. As he waded into a blueberry patch he discovered a black bear and quietly raised his rifle, shooting and killing the animal. Theriault used its meat in a stew for himself and his girlfriend at the time. When she suffered odd symptoms (dry itchy eyes, itchy throat, headache, nausea, heart pains) 20 minutes after the meal, Theriault saw it as nothing more than a bout of hypochondria. “We didn’t think anything of it,” he recalls. “I just thought, ‘Well, it’s not real, this is just something that’s in your mind.’” He admits his own throat felt strangely itchy after the meal, but ignored it. The next day, he cooked more of the bear meat—but this time telling his girlfriend it was deer, only to see her complain of the same reaction. Theriault’s curiosity was piqued. It just didn’t make any sense, he thought. He fed the same meat to some unsuspecting friends. “I had a couple of friends over, they’d eat the meat and I’d ask them, ‘How do you feel?’” It was tasty, but they experienced a dry, itchy sensation, they responded. To Theriault, it was more than coincidence. He knew that he’d been hunting near a former spray site. He had a hunch that what he’d been experiencing was a result of ingesting meat containing high concentrations of herbicides. But he couldn’t get a commercial or government lab to test the meat for herbicide contamination. While it’s true that some health effects associated with glyphosate-based herbicides include eye and skin irritation, headache, nausea, numbness, elevated blood pressure, and heart palpitations—Theriault had no way of linking the herbicide to his girlfriend’s symptoms.

Three years later, in 2007, Theriault experienced another bizarre incident that confirmed his earlier suspicions that herbicides were poisoning the wildlife near his home. He shot another black bear and when he field-dressed and quartered its carcass, he balked at the sight of its lungs. “Instead of nice healthy pink lungs, its lungs were totally bloodshot and full of blood lesions everywhere. They looked like red Jell-O.” White mossy spots covered the bear’s liver. Theriault says that the area that he was hunting in was a few miles from where herbicides had been sprayed.

Theriault’s experiences are not isolated. Similar reports of herbicide sprays killing rabbits and causing moose to develop cysts were noted in 1992. At that time, Ontario’s Environmental Assessment Board conducted one of the longest and most expensive hearings in Canadian history, in which Forests for Tomorrow (a coalition of environmental groups) challenged the forestry practices of the Ministry of Natural Resources and the industry—including the use of herbicides. During the four-and-a-half-year hearing, community members, aboriginal leaders, hunters, anglers and foresters all came forward to testify to the effects they thought Vision was having on the ecosystem. A particularly striking statement came from John Steinke, a guide who relayed what he witnessed while walking in a forest a week after it had been sprayed. “My dog couldn’t have survived if I didn’t carry it around,” he told the judiciary. “Most notable is the total lack of wildlife; there isn’t a bee, there isn’t a bird, there is nothing there.” The hearing ultimately decided that herbicide would continue to be used in forestry, as it was not threatening human health and was essential to the survival of the industry. Rick Lindgren, a lawyer with the Canadian Environmental Law Association and co-counsel representing Forests for Tomorrow recalls the hearing. “On some of the big ticket items like herbicide application and clearcut size we didn’t see much progress at all. In fact, all it really did was entrench the status quo.” Lindgren attributes the hearing’s results to the difficulty of altering long-established federally approved herbicide practices. “It was hard to say, ‘well, maybe you shouldn’t have registered these things for use, or the registration should be reconsidered in light of new or growing scientific evidence which suggests that there may be potential risks to applicators and the ecosystem,’” says Lindgren. The expert he’d arranged to testify on herbicide alternatives in forest regeneration practices was unable to attend at the last minute and the public testimony didn’t constitute hard evidence against the use of herbicides. “It’s one thing to say, ‘well they came in and sprayed and I saw this disappear, I no longer saw this species, I no longer saw that species.’ But try to prove cause and effect, that was difficult,” he says. Ironically, just as Ontario’s Environmental Assessment Board was rendering its decision to uphold the use of herbicides in the forestry industry, Quebec was moving towards enacting a provincial policy that would see all herbicides banned from use in public forests by 2001. But no precedent was set.

It’s difficult to win a battle that hinges on changing government regulations when the government itself resists. Brennain Lloyd, the project coordinator of the northern Ontario environmental group Northwatch, says that the Ontario government advocates for herbicide use in forestry: “The Ministry of Natural Resources’ mandate is to promote and support forest management, and what forest management requires in the present industrial worldview is the use of herbicides, so those things seem to be accepted as givens within the ministry.”

The MNR’s lack of presence on the ground during forestry operations is a result of the 1995 Ontario government reform agenda known as the “common sense revolution,” which slashed the budgets of ministries to reduce government spending and taxation, often through privatization. The MNR lost 50 percent of its forest management staff—including half of its field inspectors—and millions from its budget. In 1998, the MNR formally transferred Crown forest oversight to the forestry industry. “I had concerns that it was letting the fox look after the henhouse,” Lorraine Rekmans, the former executive director of the National Aboriginal Forestry Association, says of the shift in policy.

In fact, even though the MNR requires the forestry industry to adhere to certain standards in its application of herbicides, the industry is left to regulate itself, a policy known as the “forestry self-inspection system.” “The whole thing is constructed on a fundamental conflict of interest,” says Mark Winfield, a professor at York University who conducted a comprehensive review of the system. “Employees are effectively going to have to report non-compliance on the part of their employers,” he says. “That’s obviously problematic. Winfield’s research found that forestry inspections conducted by MNR employees uncovered violations at a much higher rate than those conducted by industry-employed inspectors. Michael Irvine, the MNR vegetation management specialist, acknowledges the criticism of the self-inspection system, but argues that forestry companies are subject to independent audits that examine the degree to which their ground operations comply with the province’s sustainable forest management regulations. But “the quality of the audit reports vary,” says Winfield. The process is poorly documented and varies from auditor to auditor.

Meanwhile, the chemical regulatory branch of Health Canada (the Pest Management Regulatory Agency) responsible for approving glyphosate-based herbicides has been widely criticized for its pro-industry bias. The federal Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development has rebuked the PMRA for its slow and unresponsive regulatory approach and dependence on risk-assessment data from chemical companies that lack quality assurance and independent validation. The PMRA, along with the federal Minister of Health, have also been accused of ignoring scientific evidence of environmental and health risks when approving glyphosatebased products for use in Canada. As of September 25, 2009 a lawsuit has been launched (by a retired B.C. pediatrician, Josette Wier) against the federal Minister of Health on these grounds.

Theriault has tried to use government bureaucracy to his advantage in attempting to halt forestry operations. Over the course of six years he has filed several requests for individual environmental assessments that temporarily froze forestry operations near his home, sent foresters off the job, caused the industry to lose money, and inflamed tempers. “It’s amazing how one individual in Foleyet can shut down industry,” says Susan Pickering, who worked for Tembec when Theriault’s request for an environmental assessment (called an EA by insiders) froze the company’s operations in the spring of 2006.

Theriault recalls a time when his repeated requests for environmental assessments even caused his childhood friends who now work in the forestry industry to turn against him. “My fishing and hunting friends all of a sudden wanted to fight with me. Wanted to actually fist-fight me. They were so pissed because their bosses were telling them I was going to shut down the forestry in the whole province and they were all going to be out of jobs.” Although Theriault was never subject to physical violence, he was careful not to go to the local bar without friends, in case any confrontations arose. “I’d make sure I had backup there in case I had a group of belligerently drunk forestry guys who all wanted to fight me. Which was very well within the realm of possibility. What do you say to a drunken forestry guy who hates your guts because he thinks that you’re going to put him out of work?”

Theriault also noticed that with each environmental assessment request he made, the Ministry of Natural Resources became less receptive to his requests for information on forestry operations. “So I just stopped asking as myself,” he says. “It was unproductive for Joel Theriault to ask for information. It was more productive for aliases to ask for information. because then the guards were down.” In June 2009, foresters working for Tembec were sent off the job as a result of an assessment request filed by Theriault, which temporarily suspended the company’s logging operations. At the time, Tembec’s chief forester in Ontario, Alan Thorne, described the issue as “very sensitive,” explaining that “hundreds of thousands of dollars” could be lost. Of the EA requests filed by Theriault to date, none have resulted in a permanent halt to herbicide spraying.

Despite Theriault’s energy and obvious enthusiasm for his cause, his go-it-alone style has often backfired. Theriault attended law school—“I think that having a law degree is going to give me the tools to incite change that might not otherwise happen,” he says—but things haven’t exactly worked out as he planned. As a student of environmental law, Theriault focused on gathering evidence for his case against industry. To sharpen his arguments, he wrote papers on herbicides, discussed the issue with professors, attended and organized herbicide workshops, wrote petitions against the use of herbicides in forestry, went to forestry planning meetings, wrote letters to the editors of local and national newspapers on the subject of herbicides, and solicited help from other activists. He also started a website, Domtar.org, which he says was set up to showcase harmful practices and embarrass industry. The site, now relocated to Whitemoose.ca, contains aerial photos and videos of deforested land, numerous letters to the editor written by Theriault criticizing the industry’s use of herbicides, as well as his correspondence with scientists, academics, activists, and members of industry or government on the subject of herbicides.

Theriault’s aggressive critiques of the industry and government were often self-defeating, getting him kicked out of community forestry planning meetings and alienating him from other activists. “A lot of people who work in forestry, the pesticide industry or government really disdain me because of my activism,” says Theriault. Susan Pickering, who worked for Tembec until 2008 when she became the program manager for the forest research partnership at the Canadian Ecology Centre, adds, “I know that Joel has had court orders not allowing him to speak to the Ministry of Natural Resources because of his language.” Although the MNR denies filing a restraining order, Theriault says he’s been asked to leave meetings in which the Ministry officials were present.

Other activists have also steered clear of Theriault because of his reputation. Jennifer Simard, the executive director of the Mushkegowuk Environmental Research Centre, and an active member of the First Nations community in northern Ontario, has, like Theriault, witnessed the damaging effects of herbicides used in the forests near her home. Simard met Theriault at a 2006 symposium on forestry herbicides that she helped organize.

She describes Theriault as a “dedicated guy,” but his singleminded pursuit of a pesticide ban has also tended to alienate potential allies. “It’s too bad, and I think that he could be very helpful if he would just be more of a team player.” “Joel is a very intense individual, highly committed,” says Brad Morse, one of Theriault’s law professors. “But Joel has a bit of an aggressive streak. He’s not at all shy to challenge people. Joel doesn’t let anything stand in his way. I’ve suggested to him on some occasions to calm down a bit and to think more strategically.” Linda McCaffrey, Theriault’s former articling principal at EcoJustice in Ottawa, says he “has an unusual amount of confidence in himself and his priorities. I had been told by one of his professors that he was very talented and that he wasn’t easy to keep under control. And he’s not easy to keep under control, he’s absolutely his own person. He knows what he wants and he knows what he thinks.”

Theriault’s efforts culminated in the last year of his law degree when he directed a team of students to gather research for a petition submitted to the Canadian government in 2007. It was a request for an investigation of a violation of the Fisheries Act by Domtar and Tembec, claiming that Ontario lakes and rivers near their forestry operations were being contaminated with herbicides. It cited repeated incidents in which glyphosate contamination of drinking water occurred as a direct result of its use in forestry. In Denmark, glyphosate contamination in ground water resulted in the chemical being banned, and in 2006 glyphosate was detected in the well water of the northern Ontario town of Cochrane, although there was no proof linking the contamination to forestry activities in the area. The petition was ultimately rejected on the grounds that there wasn’t enough evidence to prove waterway contamination. Theriault was ultimately willing to do what the government wasn’t. His petition requested that specific lakes and rivers near forestry spray sites be tested for herbicide contamination, although Theriault was already on a mission to do this himself. After finishing law school, in his first week of articling in Toronto at environmental law advocates EcoJustice, Theriault told his bosses he wanted a week off. “I basically told my bosses in Toronto, ‘look, I want to go north to go water sampling. So we’ve got two options. Either you guys can send me up for a week and we’ll call it work, or if we can’t agree on that, then I’d like a week off. ‘ That’s how I said it.” Theriault acknowledges that his request was unusual, “Who takes a week off without being there for a week? Not many people. But I did.” His bosses granted him a week off to take water samples but Theriault was embarking on a task that would be a challenge for a multidisciplinary team of scientists to complete, let alone an individual. “He was highly committed, highly ambitious, courageous, very determined and not very experienced [in collecting water samples],” says EcoJustice director Linda McCaffrey, who worked with him in Ottawa. “After you’ve got all these samples you have to have them analyzed. And pesticide samples can be hellishly expensive to have analyzed. And you have to know who can analyze them. You can go to a commercial lab and, depending on the lab, they can give you an analysis result and it may not be meaningful at all.” Theriault admits his task was daunting, “It was a bastard trying to get water samples,” he says. For one, he had no idea where and when the spraying was happening. He asked MNR for that information, but the ministry told him it didn’t receive that information until long after spraying occurred, and that he’d have to ask the forestry companies directly (who, understandably, had no interest in sharing the information with him). So Theriault would fly around in his father’s seaplane, listen to his radio, and wait.

Theriault says he never would have known exactly when spraying took place if it wasn’t for the radio in his plane, which allowed him to intercept the communication of industry pilots who sprayed the herbicide. “I’d go up in the airplane and I’d hear: ‘Okay, Charlie Golf Lima X-ray Zulu. Two miles west of Five Mile Lake, aerial allocations ten’… I know exactly where you fuckers are. And that’s how I followed them.” But Theriault then had to spend time on the ground finding bodies of water near the spray sites. He spent hours driving remote rugged logging roads looking for signs announcing a recent spray. “In a week I probably put on 700 kilometers driving forester roads looking at signs,” Theriault says. “And the next part, after you know it’s been sprayed, is to be at the shoreline of the creek when the first rainfall hits.” So Theriault squatted at the shores of lakes, waiting for rain. “Just sitting there, just waiting and saying, ‘Fuck, I hope it rains soon, I’m ready to go home.’ And then trying to get those kind of water samples, which turned out to be just kind of impossible.”

Theriault gathered two water samples that he believed might have been exposed to Vision, but the commercial lab where he had them tested showed that any herbicide in the water was below MNR-regulated levels. Theriault was determined to keep trying, but his bosses at EcoJustice were not pleased. “After that it was like, ‘oh that was a big waste of time, a big disappointment.’ There was a lot of confidence lost after that,” Theriault says. “I think they kind of looked at it and they said, ‘Wow. Nice kind of vacation for you Joel. Now we’re going to do our work.” The crusade was temporarily suspended—but far from over.

A week after theriault’s sampling trip, and two weeks after his petition was filed with the federal government against Domtar and Tembec, Theriault was served with legal papers from Domtar. The company claimed that his website Domtar.org was libelous in its attempts to pose as the organization. Two weeks later, a lawyer from Domtar phoned Theriault’s boss at EcoJustice in Toronto. By Theriault’s account, “Domtar called and said, ‘Look this guy’s driving us nuts. We’re going to bring in legal action against him if you don’t stop him, and we’re going to bring legal actions against you guys personally.’ So that freaked out my bosses.”

He left the Toronto office in what everyone involved politely refers to as a mutually agreed-upon “leave of absence.” Several months later, Theriault moved to EcoJustice’s Ottawa office on the condition that he no longer advocate on the herbicide issue. McCaffrey, at EcoJustice in Ottawa, recalls the ordeal. “A Domtar lawyer phoned one of the lawyers in the Toronto office and accused Joel of unprofessional conduct,” she says. “I don’t know what the specific allegations were, but I guess they boiled down to a general allegation that his conduct was unprofessional in some way, but I don’t know what way that would have been. Anyway, the result was that Joel came to Ottawa to finish his articles. He agreed to give up his campaign and focus just on the work of this office.” (Domtar refused to comment on its interactions with EcoJustice or Theriault.)

In December 2007, Domtar took Theriault to court over his website domain name, resulting in Domtar.org being transferred to the corporation. Theriault was disappointed with his employer’s response to Domtar. “EcoJustice is this environmental activist group, you’d think that they’d see through the bullshit,” he says. Theriault was also discouraged because Domtar had effectively silenced him on the herbicide issue. “I couldn’t say anything about Domtar without fearing that I’d be laid off again and publicly humiliated and have my career destroyed.” Theriault was demoralized and exhausted. Domtar and Tembec continued to spray herbicides in the forests near his home, his petition had failed, and EcoJustice would only rehire him on the condition that he’d stop advocating for the issue that he cared about most.

In September 2008, Theriault finished his articling with EcoJustice in Ottawa, and continued to work with them until November 2009. He’s a certified lawyer, although he has yet to find a full-time job. He half-jokes that he’s temporarily retired, as he still spends summers working for his family’s business. But Theriault is far from giving up on the herbicide issue. In the evenings he can be found nursing a beer, composing editorials to his local newspaper on the subject. But his frustration is mounting; it’s become painfully clear that for years the only tangible progress he’s made is delaying forestry operations near his home and angering industry—and making enemies for himself. “Have I changed things so far? No I haven’t. No, I’m still plowing away at it. It’d be a different story if I was sitting here, complaining and griping about an issue and doing absolutely nothing,” he says, “which is where most of the world fits in.”

Theriault has recently filed a new environmental assessment request. Companies that spray pesticides around domesticated livestock grazing areas are required to abide by strict exposure limits; Theriault is asking that forestry companies be held to the same standard when spraying around animals that are hunted in the wild. He argues that hunters and local communities should be protected from pesticide-laced food just as surely as supermarket shoppers are. So far, the Ontario Ministry of the Environment has been receptive.

But while flying in his seaplane, I feel a blunt isolation from the devastation of the land, although its scars are clearly mapped out before me. I see Theriault reach his arm out of his tiny rain-stained window and snap pictures of the flattened landscape sliding below us. The crackle of my headset breaks the muffled silence as I hear Theriault’s voice. “I would rather just see this all burned and be able to re-grow from there than what’s being done.”

Rahim Jaffer, Noted Businessman Who Is Smart, says he wouldn’t touch Nazim Gillani with a bargepole:

“We realized very quickly after a few meetings with him that our firms were very divergent, that we had no synergies where we could develop a relationship, so that exploration ended at that stage,” Mr. Jaffer said.

“If you are a businessman who is smart, you don’t jump into bed with anyone immediately. You take the time to learn about them, and if you find there is no synergy, you leave them in good nature and you don’t work with them. That is what happened with Mr. Gillani,” he said.

Ah, but Gillani has a bunch of recent emails and signed contracts that say different, and the contract explicitly touts “connections” with government departments and ministries as being “valuable”:

Nazim Gillani’s business dealings last year with former Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer were more extensive and formal than previously thought, according to documents tabled at a parliamentary committee today. […] Mr. Gillani has revealed details of a written contract with Green Power Generation, the company founded last year by Mr. Jaffer and business partner Patrick Glémaud.

In the contract, signed by Mr. Glémaud, Green Power Generation states that “it is in ongoing dialogue with, and has valuable connections to and with, the government of Canada and various departments, ministries, and wholly or partially owned entities thereof.”

The whole story is worth reading here, along with the Globe‘s live-blog of Gillani’s testimony.

Bonus round: notice the hilariously vague, semi-grammatical corporate slogans on Gillani’s website, including “Assisting companies identify and access various resources which they may be unaware of,” and “A relationship based approach makes it possible to source the level of people required to successfully grow a business.” Businessmen Who Are Smart are always looking to Access Various Resources through a Relationship Based Approach, but perhaps “Being Married To A Sitting Cabinet Minister” isn’t quite what those motivational posters were implying.

Marcia Ramírez is suing the Toronto Stock Exchange over a violent incident with a Canadian mining company's security service. Photo by Malcolm Rogge.

Marcia Ramírez is in for the fight of her life: suing the Toronto Stock Exchange for listing a company that it knew might cause her harm.

In early December 2006, Ramírez was one of some 30-odd residents of the remote Intag valley in northwestern Ecuador who stood in the way of over 50 heavily armed security guards, mostly ex-soldiers, who were hired to set up camp on mineral concessions belonging to Vancouver’s Copper Mesa Mining Corporation. Wanting to protect their rich cloud forest home, the residents urged the guards to leave. The guards responded by spraying tear gas into the protestors’ faces and firing shots that injured one man.

Now Ramírez and two other villagers are suing Copper Mesa (formerly Ascendant Copper Corp.) and the TSX for more than $1.5 billion. The suit, filed in March, claims that the TSX is negligent for listing Copper Mesa when the TSX knew, having been warned in the company’s listing prospectus, that violence could escalate should mineral exploration activities continue. If Ramírez’s lawsuit is successful, it will set a precedent for communities seeking justice for damage done by Canadian companies abroad.

The Intag villagers are also suing members of Copper Mesa’s board of directors for failing “to take any meaningful steps to reduce the risk that threats of physical harm and violent tactics would be used by the corporation’s agents.” The defendants vigorously deny the allegations.

Ramírez argues that if the TSX hadn’t listed Copper Mesa, the company may not have been able to raise capital allegedly used to hire the violent security guards. The TSX is the biggest source of financing for global mining and specializes in services for junior companies like Copper Mesa. But this success story has a dark side—Canadianfinanced mining companies have been accused of destroying lands and causing social upheaval from Mexico to Argentina.

Ramírez hopes her lawsuit will make the TSX think twice about what companies it lists and cause mining companies to realize that local people won’t tolerate abuses.

But first they need to get to court. Murray Klippenstein, the Toronto lawyer representing the Ecuadorians, says they anticipate “a blizzard of procedural motions” that could take years before they get a court date. Currently, Canada has no act that allows foreign citizens to fight Canadian-financed abuses occurring abroad. But Klippenstein believes they have a case. When company directors in Ontario make decisions that lead to harm in Ecuador, he argues, the company is therefore vicariously responsible.

“No matter how you dress up a corporation with all sorts of subsidiaries, chains of financial transactions, and miles of distance,” he says, “the principle that you should not hurt another person should apply.”

“Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation,” or SLAPP suits, happen when a powerful corporate interest, usually a developer, deploys its legal team against indivual citizens to bully them out of the public consultation process or distract them. From Commissioner Gord Miller’s press release:

A variety of legal manoeuvres such as SLAPPs (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) can create a chill on public participation. The Report cites a recent case before the Ontario Municipal Board where citizens faced a claim for costs of $3.2 million – which was fortunately denied by the Board.

Such lawsuits, which the actual report defines as “civil actions with little or no substantial basis or merit advanced with the intent of stifling participation in public policy and decision-making,” scare off ordinary citizens and generally put a chill on public consultations, tilting the process in favour of developers. Both Quebec and B.C. have already instituted anti-SLAPP legislation, and now Miller says it’s time for Ontario to follow suit (other provinces should too). From the report [PDF]:

The public’s right to participate in decision-making over matters of public interest is a cornerstone of our democratic system. Efforts aimed at suppressing this right should be discouraged by the Ontario Legislature and other public agencies. The ECO sees a need for provincial legislation that would put both sides of development disputes on equal footing. Such legislation could serve to halt SLAPP suits in their tracks. It also could provide a means for the public to access financial and other resources in order to exercise their participatory rights in planning approvals and other contexts that have a significant bearing on the environment.

The section on SLAPP suits and other dirty legal tactics is a comparatively small part of the full report, but the fact that the Commissioner is highlighting it is heartening news. You can download the full report here [PDF].