The Daily GRRR! - Nov. 18 2014 - “Too Bad It’s Only Tuesday” Edition

Welcome back to SoundFM! You are now listening to The Daily GRRR! live on the airwaves at 100.3fm, CKMS in Waterloo, Ontario, and SoundFM.ca on the web. This is Kathryn and I’ll be your host on this Tuesday morning show for November 18, 2014.

As always, we are broadcasting from the heart of the Haldimand Tract, the occupied Grand River Territory of the Six Nations, which we continue to recognize as Haudenosaunee land.

The Daily GRRR! is a project of the Grand River Media Collective and is supported by the Community Radio Fund of Canada and CKMS.

We will begin today with headlines:
The Daily GRRR!
HEADLINES for Nov. 18, 2014 
1. Indigenous mom brutally beaten by cop in her own home on Halloween
2. Brazil’s Guarani people despair after brutal murder of female leader
3. Fight against fracking continues in Alberta amid earthquake aftershocks
4. Over 625,000L of oil and wastewater spill...and mainstream media ignore it
5. Northern Gateway project moves closer to the grave as vice president resigns
6. Canadian consulate is in the ranks of ‘win ugly’ fossil fuel lobby groups
7. Sioux tribe deems U.S. vote in favour of Keystone XL Pipeline an “act of war”

1. Indigenous mom brutally beaten by cop in her own home on Halloween

As reported by Rawstory.com, a Winnipeg woman said this week that she has filed a complaint after an officer beat her at home, in front of her 8-year-old son. Indigenous artist and designer Lana Sinclair told CBC that Winnipeg police officers showed up on Halloween night to investigate reports of “yelling,” which she explained were the sounds of she and her son getting ready for an evening of spooky fun and trick-or-treating. One officer spoke to her son, while another officer talked to her, but the situation quickly escalated.

“He came up to me and poked me,” Sinclair recalled. “I was sitting on a chair in the kitchen and I jumped up and said you don’t need to touch me.” The officer pulled out a baton and beat her with it, before smashing her face into a work table. She said the officer then handcuffed her, stood her up, and then kicked her feet out from under her where she hit the floor face first. But despite being horrifically bruised for many days afterward, she said her biggest concern is that her 8-year-old son saw the entire incident.

“We were both traumatized,” Sinclair noted. “I just hug him and kiss him and tell him it’s okay. All I was thinking of was his safety, and how he was going to be traumatized and how he is going to see the police now.” To stop the same thing from happening to someone else, Sinclair has filed a report with Canada’s Law Enforcement Review Agency. But the Agency’s Commissioner Max Churley told CTV that only six of the hundreds of cases filed last year qualified for a hearing, with many of the cases allegedly found to lack sufficient evidence, so unfortunately it doesn’t look good for Lana Sinclair and her son to see justice through the official channels. However, their story has since been reported on internationally, so there is potential for public outcry to hold the Winnipeg police accountable for this brutal attack.

2. Brazil’s Guarani people despair after brutal murder of female leader

As reported by Survival International, indigenous leader Marinalva Manoel has been killed in central-western Brazil, after campaigning for her tribe’s ancestral land to be returned. The 27-year-old Guarani Indian was allegedly raped and stabbed to death and her body was found on the side of a highway on November 1st. Last month Marinalva traveled over 1,000 km to the nation’s capital, Brasília, with a delegation of Guarani leaders, to insist that the authorities fulfil their legal duty to return the land to the Guarani before more of their people are killed.

Guarani leaders are frequently attacked and killed by gunmen employed by the ranchers who are occupying indigenous land and earning huge profits from sugar cane, soy crops, and cattle ranching, whilst the Guarani are squeezed into reserves and roadside camps. Suffering alarming rates of malnutrition, violence, and suicide, the Guarani sometimes decide to reoccupy small patches of their ancestral land stolen from them decades ago, without which they cannot survive. Seven communities which recently carried out land reoccupations, including Marinalva’s community, now face eviction orders which could force them off their land yet again.

Another Guarani leader, Eliseu Lopes, has explained the genocidal situation they face: “We are fighting for our land, and we are being killed, one by one. They want to get rid of us altogether… We are in a state of despair, but we will not give up.” In the wake of Marinalva’s death, the Guarani Council, which voices the Indians’ demands, has released a letter calling on the authorities to investigate the murder and proclaiming, “No more Guarani deaths!”

3. Fight against fracking continues in Alberta amid earthquake aftershocks

As stated in a court ruling handed down in Alberta last week, the province cannot claim immunity against a lawsuit by a landowner who claims an energy company’s operations contaminated her drinking water supply. The new ruling allows Rosebud-area resident and oilpatch consultant Jessica Ernst to move forward with her multimillion-dollar actions against Encana’s hydraulic fracturing and Alberta Environment’s oversight. According to her lawyer, this decision could also clear the way for similar claims by other landowners. To make matters even better, for a change, the judge who refused Alberta’s bid to dismiss the Ernst lawsuit also ordered the province to pay triple her legal costs, after the province made multiple attempts to quash her claims in court. According to Ernst’s lawyer, it’s the judge’s “sign of displeasure that they kept trying to knock her out with legal objections.”

Ernst initially sued Encana, the provincial government and its energy regulator in 2007, claiming the Calgary-based company’s coal bed methane fracking near her property contaminated her well and the Rosebud aquifer with methane and other harmful chemicals. As many of us know, the hydraulic fracturing process involves breaking up underground rock -- a.k.a., the earth’s crust -- using a mixture of water and toxic chemicals injected at extremely high pressures, in order to extract natural gas deposits buried deep underground. This controversial method of fossil fuel drilling has also been causally linked to earthquakes, which is exactly what some other Alberta residents in the Peace River area experienced on the evening of November 1st. As one family recalled, “The house shook! It was like a big vibration; we felt it right in our chairs! We all just looked at each other in awe and thought, ‘What the heck was that?’ One man living in another area had a slightly different experience, saying, “I heard a loud bang. My house gave a cracking sound.” He noted that, while those in other areas “felt some vibrations... I didn’t feel the aftershock. At my place it sounded more like an explosion. I heard the noise first, and the crack.”

Honn Kao, a research scientist with National Resources Canada and the Geological Survey of Canada, also linked the phenomenon to fracking: “In the last few years, with the development of the hydraulic fracturing technology (fracking) in the oil and gas (industries)... there is increasing evidence that fracking can cause earthquakes. ...Oil and gas is stored in shale. (People) can extract oil and gas by creating artificial channels inside shale to allow the flow of gas and oil. So, the nature of fracking is to create fractures – that is exactly what the earthquake is all about; it’s movement along faults.” And the fault for these negative impacts on residents lies with the irresponsibly profit-focused energy companies that continue to negate the damage they are doing to our shared environments.

4. Over 625,000L of oil and wastewater spill...and mainstream media ignore it

Over the past year, West Coast Native News has reported on many oil industry spills all over Alberta, from crude oil pipeline leaks to flows of toxic “produced” water, full of chemicals, that is another dangerous byproduct of fossil fuel extraction. In fact, West Coast Native News has reported over 625,000 Litres of these dangerous, toxic liquids that have been spilled over the course of last month alone, and yet not one mainstream media outlet has picked up the incidents. So we’re going to recap all the crap that got spilled in Alberta -- just in Alberta -- in the month of October, so you can see what the mainstream is failing to tell you.

Oct 3, 2014 – Canadian Natural Resources Limited – 11Km East of Delia – 10,000 litres of Crude oil
Oct 5, 2014 – Nexen Energy ULC – 2.5Km SouthWest of Kinosis – 5,800 litres of Toxic water
Oct 5, 2014 – Cenovus Energy Inc – 56Km East of Brooks – 9,800 litres of Toxic water
Oct 5, 2014 – Nexen Energy ULC – 41Km SouthEast of Ft. McMurray – 13,000 litres of Condensate
Oct 10, 2014 – Husky Oil – 30Km SouthEast of Vermilion – 50,000 litres of Crude oil and 25,000 litres of toxic water
Oct 11, 2014 – TAQA North Ltd – 44Km SouthWest of Spirit River – 24,000 litres of Crude oil
Oct 13, 2014 – Arc Resources – 5Km North of Redwater – 150,000 litres of Toxic water
Oct 14, 2014 – Zargon Oil & Gas Ltd – 26Km NorthWest of Vauxhall – 8,000 litres of Toxic water
Oct 14, 2014 – Whitecap Resources Inc – 37Km NorthWest of Sexsmith – 10,000 litres of Toxic water
Oct 15, 2014 – Penn West Petroleum Ltd -14Km SouthEast of Slave Lake – 52,000 litres Crude oil
Oct 17, 2014 – TAQA North Ltd – 32Km NorthWest of Rocky Mountain House – 18,000 litres of Toxic water
Oct 21, 2014 – Harvest Operations Corp – 20Km East of Galahad – 200,000 litres of Toxic water
Oct 26, 2014 – Apache Canada Ltd -9Km East of Zama City – 50,000 litres of Toxic water
Total = Over 625,000 Litres of toxic substances spilled in Alberta within the month of October alone, without being reported by mainstream media outlets.

Moreover, this trend looks to continue into November and beyond with another serious incident reported by West Coast Native News this past Friday: “On Nov 12, 2014 Spyglass Resources Corp reported to the AER that a pipeline incident occurred 12Km West of Vauxhall Alberta spilling over 500,000 litres of toxic produced water.” The company in question, Spyglass Resources, has a history of such incidents -- as do most, if not all, fossil fuel corporations, which gives a clear indication of their inherent danger to the environment. On April 30th of this year, Spyglass had a leak of 1,000 Litres of crude oil and 9,000 Litres of toxic produced water that went into a creek that it connected to Alberta’s Peace River. And then on May 1st, the very next day, another spill occurred at a mere 2km away, with a staggering 50,000 Litres of crude oil and toxic produced water going into another creek. Clearly, Alberta’s Peace River is under attack from these fossil fuel corporations, and unfortunately this war is raging on throughout the country as pipelines and refineries from coast to coast continue to leach their toxic substances into our natural world.

5. Northern Gateway project moves closer to the grave as vice president resigns

As reported by The Vancouver Observer, amid growing speculation that Enbridge's beleaguered Northern Gateway project is dead, the pipeline's executive vice president said she will resign, effective December 31st. She was the front-and-centre face of the project in all the pipeline's TV ads and promotions, so this heralds a definite downshift for the project. According to the former vice president’s statement, “I have decided now is a good time to take a step back and focus on my family and my personal health. I look forward to spending more time with my husband at our family home in Prince George."

Officially, the company is still moving forward with trying to meet the 209 conditions set out by the National Energy Board and approved by the Harper cabinet in June. However, all has been quiet on the western front of that pipeline for a while - particularly among coastal first nations, said First Nations leader Art Sterritt. "I don't blame her for resigning. Obviously the project can't go ahead," he said. Sterritt has long said the controversial project was a "case study" in how not to do aboriginal negotiations. Moreover, the company has not announced any recent public statements that it has made much progress but has admitted that one of its biggest obstacles remains getting First Nations' approval. And with all of the inspiring and dedicated resistance that indigenous communities have kept up for years in direct opposition to this project, we may be cautiously optimistic that the Northern Gateway pipeline will be abandoned by its proponents before ever transporting a drop of oil.

6. Canadian consulate is in the ranks of ‘win ugly’ fossil fuel lobby groups

The Canadian Consulate is a member of the Western Energy Alliance, which sponsored a now-infamous talk by energy consultant Richard Berman telling the group's members, mostly oil and gas companies, they had to prepared to "win ugly" in an "endless war" against environmentalists. As we reported in a previous episode of The Daily GRRR!, the talk was taped and leaked by a disgruntled member of the group to The New York Times. Although the Canadian Consulate apparently was not present at Berman's talk at Colorado Springs, it appears to be the only government member of the 480-member group that organized it. It is unclear which Canadian Consulate is a member of the Alliance, though they are managed by the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development. But honestly, is anyone really surprised by this collusion with such industry crooks, given the pro-tarsands government currently running the country?

7. Sioux tribe deems U.S. vote in favour of Keystone XL Pipeline an “act of war”

As reported by The Lakota Voice, in response to Friday’s vote in the U.S. House of Representatives to authorize the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, the President of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe (Sicangu Lakota Oyate) announced that they recognize the authorization of this pipeline as an act of war. In February of this year, the
Rosebud Sioux Tribe and other members of the Great Sioux Nation adopted Tribal resolutions opposing the Keystone XL project. The proposed route of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline crosses directly through Great Sioux Nation (Oceti Sakowin) Treaty lands as defined by both the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie Treaties and within the current exterior boundaries of the Rosebud Sioux Reservation and Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation.

The Tribe has done its part to remain peaceful in its dealings with the United States in this matter, in spite of the fact that the Rosebud Sioux Tribe has yet to be properly consulted on the project, which would cross through Tribal land, and the concerns brought to the Department of Interior and to the Department of State have yet to be addressed. In the poignant words of President Scott of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, “The House has now signed our death warrants and the death warrants of our children and grandchildren. The Rosebud Sioux Tribe will not allow this pipeline through our lands… We are outraged at the lack of intergovernmental cooperation. We are a sovereign nation and we are not being treated as such. We will close our reservation borders to Keystone XL. Authorizing Keystone XL is an act of war against our people.”

Midway Music: Warpath by Drezus

Feature: “Peru Now Has A ‘Licence To Kill’ Environmental Protesters” by David Hill for The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/environment/andes-to-the-amazon/2014/jun/29/p...

Closing Song: Pain of a Warrior by Young Jibwe