Shucking Oysters: Strong and Not Free
Are we having fun yet? Isn’t 2025 turning into a great year? Everyday, yet another preposterous, scary curve ball. Everyday, we are confronted with the unimaginable. Everyday, we are exposed to the worst examples of humanity (if such a word exists). We are coming for you Canada. Watch out Greenland. Bend over Panama. And Gaza, the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Leaving all of us to wonder whether Lord Rump is truly out of his mind and not just thinking outside his Pandora’s box. Judging from his bulldozing persona, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
This is an existential version of the Cold War. Geopolitical tensions. An atmosphere of uncertainty and fear. Dystopian literature, like Brave New World and Fahrenheit 45, which embodied the anxieties about totalitarianism and nuclear war, was the norm. It was a time of social movements and calls for civil rights and freedoms. Sound familiar?
If you read any newspaper (yes, they still exist), every opinion piece can’t avoid acknowledging the elephant in the room. With a slight reprieve we welcome, as a Globe and Mail editorial noted, “the breather we needed from the trauma of enduring an American leader who seems to wake up every morning and ask himself, How will I make good people sick to their stomachs today.”
Fear seems to be Trump’s favourite diplomatic tool. For the first time in Canadian modern history, a US President is threatening to annex Canada by economic force. Canada is simply a piece of real estate with valuable rare earth minerals and crude oil to be raped and pillaged. The Trumpet’s plan is unclear, yet he seems to want to hurt Canada so hard through tariffs and economic turmoil that we will beg to join the United States. I beg to differ.
The Demander-in-Chief keeps pointing ominously to a 1908 treaty with Great Britain, that established the 49th parallel as the boundary between the US and the then-Dominion of Canada, blatantly suggesting it could be erased. It is a little more complicated than that, the Canadian Constitution replaced the Treaty making it clear that we have sovereignty over our own territory, twit-face.
How do Americans and Canadians feel about it all? Bloomberg revealed that only 26% of Americans want Canada to become the 51st state. Most Americans do not support Trump’s “muscular foreign policy of bullying everyone around.” The Toronto Star revealed that 71% of Canadians are against Canada joining the United States. Clearly, there is no political room for Trump to merge Canada and the US, but as we have witnessed, it’s not about politics, it’s about the almighty American dollar with a shit load of narcissism.
The White House claims that the reason for the tariffs is to stop the illegal smuggling of fentanyl into the US. Like the accuser, there is no rationality to the accusations. A mere 0.08% of all fentanyl seized in the US was from our border. 0.08%. Economist Paul Krugman explained that the use of fentanyl to justify Trump’s trade war is no different than claiming the existence of “weapons of mass destruction” to invade Iraq. “It’s just a plausible-sounding reason for a president to do what he wanted to do for other reasons – George W. Bush wanted a splendid little war, Donald Trump just wants to impose tariffs and assert dominance.”
This is not the first time that the US has considered taking over Canada. The War Plan Red of 1930 was drummed up by the US Department of War on how to invade Canada if ever needed. It involved kicking the attack off the east coast with poison gas in Halifax, and working their way inward. On our coast, military strategists planned a naval attack on Victoria, launched from Port Angeles, as well as a combined assault on Vancouver and Vancouver Island. I’ll spare you the details of the war on other provinces, but you get the idea.
Although the Plan was declassified in 1974, the New York Times reported that the United States Congress had assigned $57 million in 1935 (nearly $1 billion today) to build three air bases near the US/Canadian border in line with the Plan’s recommendations. The air bases were supposed to be disguised as civilian airports, but it was accidentally revealed that they were actually military air bases. Take note.
Americans have a history of underestimating us Canadians. And never more so, than now. Canadians are suddenly booing the US anthem at sporting events and even boycotting American goods. We are feeling threatened and protective, two highly charged emotions leading to a decidedly unCanadian sentiment: Patriotism. My name is Alex, and I am a hyphenated Canadian. “I believe in peace keeping, not policing. Diversity not assimilation. And, the beaver is a truly noble animal!”
Home Sweet Home (Part 2)
Home Sweet Home (Part 2)
Hornby Housing is in the midst of a strategic planning process and they will have more clarity about their needs and goals following their meeting this coming weekend.
In the meantime, what are some of the things we know about home?
When I was a young adult living in Montreal, with my father newly remarried in Vancouver and my mother having moved to California to embark upon a disastrous remarriage herself, I remember going through a time of feeling I had no home. Our family home had been sold with the divorce; neither of my parents’ new partners seemed inclined to invite a grown “step- daughter” to come and live with them. I was about to graduate from university, but had no employment prospects or even a sense of what I really wanted in terms of a career. I loved Montreal, but it was far too harsh a climate for me to consider living there permanently. I was floundering. One day an older woman gave me a temporary answer: “Home is where the heart is”. For me at the time, that seemed to mean: home is where my love interest is, so that took me to Philadelphia for 7 years, in a classic 60’s case of “If you don’t know what to do next, why not get married?” Bad idea. Ah well, as my grandmother wisely told me, we each have to learn our life lessons in our own way!
When I think of Trump’s odious assertion that he’s going to give the Palestinians a “better life” by “owning” their land and resettling them who knows where, it hearkens me back to the title of Mahmoud Darwish’s selected poems, “Unfortunately, It was Paradise”. For Palestinians, their hearts will always be in Palestine, whether that be Gaza, the West Bank, or their Palestine before the ruthless Israeli land grab of 1948. That is where their home is – the land, their culture, language and history. And as one Palestinian woman said recently: “They could give me a whole city and I would choose instead the rubble of my home”. Home is the land, the light, the olive trees, the soil. It is their house, and it is more than their house.
For many here on Hornby and Denman, home is sunset at Phipps Point, sunrise at Morning Beach, coffee at Abraxis, walking Helliwell. Home is the Recycling Depot, a hot lunch at Joe King Ball Park, Readers & Writers Festival, Herring Fest. Home is swimming at Chickadee Lake or having a surf off Little Trib. Home is getting the wood in and poring over seed catalogues for the next spring. It is gathering seaweed, harvesting blackberries, opening the library, and cleaning the Hall. Home is the whole island they live in and on. Home, be it a dwelling, a landscape, or a sense of community, is where we find sanctuary. May we all find and cherish our home.
And at the same time, let’s be mindful of the reality that people do need dwellings! Next week: More on Housing.
Green Wizardries: Spring Cleaning with Non-Toxic Cleaners
It is too cold out to do any gardening, even pruning in this sub zero weather is unpleasant. So, the efficient housewife and house-husband’s thoughts turn to spring cleaning. This is the only time of the year I would rather be inside so I plan to make the most of it.
The first step in the cleaning process is to declutter. I have been making strides in this area since I found a teacher on YouTube who was just as bad at cleaning as I am. Her YouTube channel is titled,”A Slob Comes Clean.” I tend to get overwhelmed by clutter and I don’t know where it is supposed to go. I have always envied tidy people and wondered how they do it.
Years ago when we still had a railway, I took a train trip up Vancouver Island. All the way along the route, I found myself looking into backyards and marvelling at the junk and chaos. I asked myself why anyone would have an ancient, decaying motorboat with holes in the hull decorating their yard? I should have been asking myself why my office looked like these decrepit backyards.
The reason my house is so untidy is that I never learned how to house keep. My new Guru, Dana K. White, learned as an adult and she has also struggled with clutter. The worst thing about clutter, is that you can’t really clean a cluttered house.
Dana started to see her house as a container. She would keep only the things that fit in the container. Some strategies suggest you should go through your stuff and keep only that which gives you joy. Clutter people love their stuff and that is why it is heaped on their other stuff.
So, I take a bag for garbage and a box for donations and mercilessly go through a space until I am left with just what fits in the space or even to the point where I have room on bookshelves! I have trouble parting with books but really, if I have not read them in years, no matter how much I love them, it is time to let go.
Once the decluttering has been done, I start from the top down. I use a freshly-washed broom to sweep the ceiling and walls. Spiders love my house. Next I sweep the floors and finally go over the space with a mop. Windows get washed and we are done. A nearly bare space is so easy to clean.
For windows, Herman de Vries, may he rest in peace, taught me to use a bucket of hot water, a spash of white vinegar and a few drops of liquid dish detergent. No one cleaned windows better than Herman. If a house on Denman would not sell, realtors would get Herman to go in and clean the windows. His shiny windows made every house look worth $500,000 more. Then, the house would sell easily. Get a proper window-cleaning squeegee. They are worth the expense and you will never go back to trying to wipe windows.
For washing floors, I use a bucket of hot water with a 1/4 cup of borax and a little soap. Ivory soap grated and soaked in a jar of hot water is excellent for this. For cleaning tubs and sinks, I mix up baking soda with dish detergent and use that. It works great and will not set in your drains like the powdered cleaners that set in the pipes like concrete.
To wash clothes, I use a bar of Ivory soap on grease spots or heavily soiled areas and let the clothes sit overnight. The next morning, I add a couple of tablespoons of borax to the washing machine and a very little liquid laundry detergent. My machine is very old and I can turn it off after it has filled and agitated a bit. I soak the clothes in the hot water for an hour which lets the borax and detergent work on the dirt. Then, I turn the machine back on and end up with lovely clean clothes.
To unblock the drains in the kitchen sink, I pour a cup of baking soda in the drain and follow that with a cup of white vinegar. A bit later, I chase it all down with a kettle of boiling water and this method has never failed me.
All that is needed for cleaning supplies are white vinegar, real soap such as Ivory soap, borax which is just a simple salt, liquid dish detergent is convenient too. Any commercially-manufactured cleaner may contain dangerous, unhealthy chemicals such as scents which dis-regulate the human endocrine system and pollute the environment when you pour them down the drain.
The Plan To Ethnically Cleanse Gaza Didn’t Start With Trump
Feb.10th
| I still can’t get over how absurd it is how everyone’s acting like the plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza is some new idea that Donald Trump just came up with. “Wait, so you’re saying we make the Palestinians go away and replace them with Jews?? What bold, innovative thinking! By golly, that’s just crazy enough to work!” |
This notion that removing all Palestinians from Gaza is a fresh new idea that was conceived of by Trump is one of the most ridiculous narratives we’re seeing pushed by the mainstream political/media class today. Israeli think tanks and intelligence services were pushing the plan to move Gaza’s inhabitants to Egypt within days of the October 7 attack. The Biden administration tried unsuccessfully to get Cairo to facilitate this agenda.
Kicking the Palestinians out of Gaza to neighboring Arab states has always been the plan; it didn’t just emerge out of nowhere when Trump became president. And yet you’ll see everyone on both sides of the mainstream partisan divide furiously pushing this narrative that this is all Trump’s idea, whether they support or oppose the ethnic cleansing agenda. If they support it they talk it up as some brilliant outside-the-box innovation nobody’s ever thought of before, and if they oppose it they completely erase from history the fact that it was being advanced under the Biden administration in the early days of the onslaught.
I just saw Alan Dershowitz babbling about how we should all “thank Donald Trump for coming up with the first new idea in many, many years about how to solve this problem.” But it isn’t a new idea, and Trump didn’t come up with it. Driving Palestinians out of their historic homeland has been the Zionist vision for the region since before Israel was even established as a state, and all of its actions from 1948 on have born that out. This has always been about ending the existence of Palestinians in Palestine.
And that’s all it has ever been about. Not October 7. Not hostages. Not fighting terrorism. Not self-defense. This is about driving Palestinians out of their homeland so that their territory can eventually be fully and officially absorbed by Israel.
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Israeli sources are telling Haaretz that Benjamin Netanyahu is planning to sabotage the ceasefire in Gaza to keep it from progressing to its second phase after the 42 days of its first phase are up. It’s entirely possible we’ll see things slide right back into the same nightmare we were looking at during the Biden administration in a few weeks.
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A member of the Zionist ultranationalist group Betar recorded himself handing pro-Palestinian academic Norman Finkelstein a pager the other day, a menacing reference to Israel’s terrorist attack in Lebanon in which beepers loaded with explosives were detonated simultaneously around the nation.
Israel supporters can’t get enough of this pager schtick. They think it’s the most clever thing in the world. See the joke is that maybe the pager is explosive and you’ll be murdered for disagreeing with their political beliefs. Very subtle stuff. Really makes you think.
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Democrats are as happy as a pig in shit right now. Suddenly they get to pretend all the unfathomable evils their president inflicted upon our world never happened, just because there’s a different president doing bad things who people are feeling big feels about.
They wanted to lose. They’re overjoyed that they don’t have to be the face on the US empire’s depravity anymore, and that it’s no longer their job to make excuses for it. They’re getting everything they want out of the present arrangement, because liberals don’t actually care about fixing problems and making the world a better place, they only care about feeling good about themselves. Their politics is never actually about anything other than their feelings, and Biden was making their feelings feel bad. Trump lets them feel smug and vindicated and correct. He also lets them feel outraged and indignant, and they enjoy that too.
But it’s all bullshit. No matter what Trump says or does or how he and his goons make people’s feelings feel, it will still be a historical fact that Biden and his handlers spent 15 months facilitating a campaign of extermination and demolition in Gaza which could not have happened without US backing. It will still be a historical fact that Biden and his handlers pushed Ukraine into an unwinnable war that the US and its allies knowingly provoked in order to advance geostrategic grand chessboard agendas, sabotaging potential peace negotiations and threatening the world with nuclear annihilation along the way. It will still be a historical fact that Biden kept in place many of the ugly policies put in place during the first Trump administration and actively expanded and added to them.
It’s important to point this out because Democrats are posturing as opponents of tyranny and abuse right now, and they aren’t. They are allies of tyranny and abuse, who LARP as righteous defenders of truth and justice whenever the other tyrannical and abusive party happens to be in power. Their behavior during the Trump administration shows you how they wish to be perceived, but their behavior during the Biden administration showed you who they really are.
The Sla-dai-aich Rest and Repair Network
We are writing to you to seek support for our community initiative called The Rest and Repair Network. Please read on to learn more about what we do. Right now we are especially seeking donations of accommodation.
About the Network
The Rest and Repair Network supports Indigenous land and water defenders engaged in building Indigenous sovereignty by providing them with retreats to Sla-Dai-Aich (the Pentlatch word for what settlers know as Denman Island). Our intention is to provide respite, nourishment, and access to the healers of our community to people working for the sovereignty of their lands and waters. Our program is supported by a broad network of community members, settlers and anarchists most of whom live on Denman Island who we thank deeply for their continued support and collaboration.
The Rest & Repair Network has been successfully operating on the basis of word of mouth and mutual aid since early 2023 and has hosted 18 land defenders and children for 3 – 7 day retreats up to this time. We support Indigenous sovereigntists and their families and loved ones through mutual aid by supporting the people who are doing the work of protecting the land and water for all of us, including the future generations from the devastating effects on the climate and ecology due to resource extraction and profit driven mentality.
Up to this point we have connected land defenders with accommodation, acupuncture, counselling, herbal medicine, massage, reiki, counselling and other treatments. We also provide land defenders with delivered dinners, the opportunity to use a vehicle or be guided on the island and the opportunity to connect with supportive community members.
As a community we can leverage the network of skills and resources we have to offer. We are motivated to provide services which are meaningful and helpful to our various guests and incorporate them in shaping what their retreat looks like within the possibilities we have available.
In keeping with the grassroots and community focus of this project we are asking the broader community to help support this initiative. If you would like to get involved please email us at philippajoly@gmail.com
Ways to help are:
-Offer your cooking skills and be on our list of people who would like to donate a cooked meal when we are hosting guests.
-If you have private accommodation that you would be willing to share either free or at a reduced rate for our guests (3-5 days usually), please let us know. This is one of the most important parts of what we offer and one of the biggest costs. We would add you to our list of supporters who can offer accommodation, so there would be no pressure to offer it at all the time.
-If you are a health practitioner of some kind and would like to offer your skills either free or by donation
-If you or your group would like to do some fundraising
-And please consider signing up for an ongoing monthly donation by clicking here:
https://chuffed.org/project/respite-for-indigenous-land-defenders
Keep you eyes out for some fun fundraising events coming this spring!
Thank you for all the great work you do in this community.
Sincerely,
The Sla-dai-aich Rest and Repair Network
History
The “Laurentian Elites” have always been in control.
They set up Canada to enrich themselves.
The Western provinces are merely their
designated resource colonies.
They are desperately clinging to 150 years of
political and economic dominance.
The last ten years has seen their dying gasp.
Their oppressive parliamentary system
has been exposed and is thoroughly compromised.
They have methodically weakened
Canada beyond recognition.
Is there any crime they won’t stoop to?
The inevitable crisis is here and an
implosion is looming.
Quebec hangs in for the bribes
but otherwise left long ago.
Will Alberta grow tired of Laurentian abuse?
History is being made before our very eyes.
Will we shape it ourselves or will we
maintain polite blindness
as the most shameless government in Canadian history
clutches it’s pearls and goes for broke;
unconcerned as the country unravels around them.
Team Canada at its finest.
Letter to the Editor – Ken Fisher
Maxine’s otherwise reasonable comments on local down home production and its values to the community , suddenly became an anti-government diatribe with exaggerations , and frankly untruths . To claim : The Canadian Government set out to destroy family farms because so many people living on them were able to provide for most of their needs by producing goods , services and trade …….. that escaped in house taxes that the government wants us all tightly captured in ! and : Denman used to be covered with little farms before 1945 that were intentionally destroyed by government regulation ! …….are distortions .
When domestic food production goes public ….. the government , rightly , gets involved to assure that buyers will be purchasing safe Botulism-free products .. i.e. regulations . Yes, sales of all products and labour ( farm and other ) are subject to taxes ….. These , our means to build and maintain the roads , laws , and working systems we all use and need .
Denman and Hornby farms suffered after 1945 with the introduction of cold-storage and freezer-capable trucks . The orchard and farm produce that traditionally came in early and could be sold in urban settings , was quickly replaced by even earlier maturing , and cheaper large scale California shipped produce .( utilizing cheap foreign labourers )
Our small family mixed farm on the prairies , died because it was too small to compete . While I was starting my last rounds with our 12 foot discer the Big acres across the road would seed his whole field pulling 48 feet ! One hour of his labour was worth four of mine …soon …… Small machinery became a memory and the ol’ farm , now a Mega company ……..
Support our locals …….. and our government . Ken Fisher