Desiré Munyaneza

Quebec Superior Court judge André Denis made history on May 22, 2009, when he convicted Desiré Munyaneza of seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Munyaneza, he said, had “intentionally killed dozens” during the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and “raped several women and pillaged homes and businesses.” For the first time ever, a Canadian court tried and found guilty a citizen of another country for crimes committed outside of Canada. It was an important test of Canada’s Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act of 2000, which grants Canadian courts greater authority to try and punish war criminals residing in Canada, regardless of their nationality. The law itself and Justice Denis’s judgment sends a powerful message: if you commit monstrous crimes anywhere in the world, you will not be able to evade justice in the nooks and crannies of technicality and jurisdiction. Canadian justice is coming for you.

Just a day earlier, another Canadian court sent out a much different message. On May 21, 2009, the Supreme Court of Canada declined to consider whether or not suspected Taliban fighters in the custody of the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan are entitled to the rights and protections of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Amnesty International and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association had asked the Supreme Court to judge whether the Canadian military had the right to hand Afghan terror suspects over to the indigenous government, where reliable reports were saying they were suffering torture and abuse. Amnesty and the BCCLA posed two questions to the court: “Does the charter apply … to the detention of non-Canadians by the Canadian forces…?” and, if not, would it apply if “the transfer of the detainees in question would expose them to a substantial risk of torture?” To which the Supremes said, merely: “Questions answered in the negative.”

So: which is it?

Is Canadian law so universal—so undeniably and cosmically just—that it applies to everyone, no matter their location or nationality, as in Munyaneza’s case? Or do our laws stop sharply at our borders, with no obligation to extend our protections to non-citizens in the custody of our government, as in the case of the Afghan prisoners? It’s one or the other—it can’t be both.

Canada’s lawmakers apparently want to keep the credit and deflect the blame. Canada is trying to make up for lost time on the war-crimes front—having earned a deserved reputation as a safe haven for Nazi war criminals in the late 20th century—and wants to strut its new tough-on-crime credentials to the international community. This is why Munyaneza was not deported back to Rwanda or the International Criminal Court, both of which have their own systems for prosecuting exactly these cases. We’re quite happy to take the convenient and comfortable position of condemning a well-known genocidaire and throwing him in our prison, a trophy we’ve awarded ourselves. But when it comes to the politically awkward prospect of extending our justice to alleged terrorists and insurgents in Afghanistan, well, suddenly it’s complicated. Not good enough. Human rights are human rights—no exceptions. If our prosecutions are global, then so are our protections, and the Afghan detainees must receive those benefits. Will Canadian justice come for them, too?

Guests at Ottawa’s Heaven dance club expect to have a good time and dance the night away. What the mostly heterosexual crowd was not expecting this spring Saturday night was for the club to be overrun by the Gay Guerrilla Takeover.

The Gay Guerrilla Takeover is an organization that does what its name says: once a month, a group of gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, queer, and queer-friendly people venture into a hot mainstream— i.e., heterosexual—bar or club and take it over without warning. Tim Campbell, a 28-year-old fundraising coordinator, started the group after Ottawa’s Gay Pride week. Campbell and his friends had gone to a local bar where they were mistreated by the staff, who told them, “We don’t serve those kinds of drinks. This isn’t a gay bar.” That’s when he thought, “Well, what if it was a gay bar?”

He had heard about takeovers happening in Los Angeles after people who lived in the gay village decided to turn heterosexual bars into safe places for them. “There are certain bars in Ottawa where I wouldn’t feel comfortable going with a guy and making out,” says Campbell, “so when I heard about this concept I thought to myself, ‘Yes!’”

Lily Flowers, a takeover regular, says when she goes somewhere “straight” people stare at her. “They seem to wonder: It’s a girl but she’s dressed like a boy. During a takeover, you don’t have to be someone else because it is a safe space,” she says.

Campbell says his organization experiences very little hostility from regular patrons, who party and have fun with an average of 200 to 400 guerrillas.

Members are informed about takeovers via a Facebook group called Guerrilla Gay Bar, but they are only told the location a day or two before to keep the element of surprise. So far the Facebook group has some 1,500 members.

On this particular night, guerrillas were asked to dress in white, and a sea of white-wearing dancers hints at a successful takeover.

While some heterosexual patrons do leave the club when they realize what’s happening, others stay, though a few feel the need to assert their heterosexuality, such as the young man who repeatedly stated “I am not gay” when asking girls to dance.

More takeovers are scheduled for the future, so if you’re in a “straight” Ottawa bar, don’t be surprised if it becomes the Gay Guerrillas’ next target.

Below: A video from our friends at Xtra.ca on the Ottawa Gay Guerrilla Takeover:

Leonardo DiCaprio enjoyng an e-cigarette in March 2009. The electronic cigarettes are touted as a quitting aid.

E-cigarettes are battery-powered devices that detect the user’s pull and vaporize a nicotine solution that recreates the smoking experience without carcinogens, odour, ashes, stubs, or even litter. Without the 4,000 chemicals added to a traditional burning cigarette, pure nicotine is a relatively harmless drug that’s often compared to caffeine.

Developed several years ago in China, the product didn’t sell much in Asia (a real pack of Chinese smokes costs a mere 40 cents) and was largely ignored in North America. But that all changed in March, when the luscious pout of Leonardo DiCaprio was photographed taking a drag off an e-cigarette. This was great news for Bill Marangos, president of SmokeStik International and maker of the actor’s e-smoke of choice. Before that moment, he says, “98 percent of people didn’t know about this product.”

But with this publicity, however, came some unwanted attention. Pressured by special interest groups, Health Canada—previously wary to even classify the product— cracked the whip in March with an advisory. Since they contain nicotine, SmokeStiks and all other e-cigarettes now require approval under the Food and Drugs Act, and so these products are currently off the market while they undergo Health Canada’s nearly year-long new drug review.

Without their fix, e-smokers are again jonesing for a working quit-aid. Marangos—a former three-pack-a-day smoker—claims SmokeStik’s success rate to be 10 times the measly 5 percent norm, though without any peer review studies available, it’s possible Marangos is just blowing smoke.

So e-cigarettes’ effectiveness as a quitting tool is currently debatable, says Jeff Daiter, chief medical director at Ontario Addiction Treatment Centres. But, he explains, “maybe it’s better than the patch or gum because you get the sensation.” He’s excited to incorporate a nicotine-free version of the device into his addiction research. “The deck is stacked against smokers,” he adds. “Anything we can do would be great.”

In the meantime, e-smokers will have to quit—or keep smoking—the old-fashioned way.

I met you in a hostel in Rennes. The weather was humid and this made the door stick: I threw my weight against it and fell into the room. Your pink sandals and your pack were lying in a corner and you were there, too: asleep. Eyes turned toward the window. I had to walk around in my socks so as not to wake you, run the tap on low when I washed my face. I had come into town earlier in the evening and dropped my bag on an empty bed. There were two keys to the room and I knew that one of them was already taken. Out walking, I measured my steps along a set of canals. It was already dark. I didn’t have a map.

I sat in a bar on the main street and wrote letters. A dark green awning stretched over the sidewalk but inside it felt more like a club than a brasserie. Dark wood floor, small tables, no booths. I had left behind both a boyfriend and another man, more than twice my age. I’d left them behind and flown to France, for months, but I couldn’t stop writing to them. A couple in their 40s sat at the next table beneath a print of one of Dufy’s bullfights and watched me write. He was drinking cognac. She had that French hair: black, cut straight. The scrape of her chair along the floor as she tucked a piece of my own hair behind my ear. This seemed entirely natural. Where are you from, the man wanted to know. Where are you staying. Is there anyplace we can drive you. When I left the bar I kept checking over my shoulder. It was after midnight and I walked in the middle of the road, beside the parked cars. Someone had left their bicycle chained to a fence and it was missing both its wheels. There was more than one set of canals.

When I stopped at a gas station to ask directions, the attendant couldn’t let me in. The door was set on automatic lock. He slid open a small window and pushed a hand-drawn map at me. A taxi will take too long to get here, he said. You need to get home quickly.

At the hostel I rang the bell and waited for a boy with a red mohawk and a dog to let me in.

In the morning you painted your toes with clear polish: a few bristles fell off the brush and stuck to your toenails. You already had a plan with a boy named Nigel: he was driving a car he’d bought from relatives in Holland. You said, He can go places the trains won’t take us.

You invited me along to see Merlin’s tomb, Morgaine’s lake, and Nigel pretended to be glad. In the room both of us tried to take a shower: there was a drain, but the floor didn’t even slant. The water spread out like fingers. We stood on the beds and screamed, and hauled our things, bags and shoes, up onto the bedspread. We had to jump for the door when we wanted to leave.

The car had only four gears: we drove 80 kilometres an hour all through Bretagne and everybody on the road hated us. You were from England and he was from Australia. We were like a reunion of colonies in a slow, slow car. I told you how my godmother had warned me against coming to Rennes. She said it was ugly, but I told you it reminded me of home. It was the first French place I’d ever been where I could see a connection.

The three of us stayed in a hostel built from an old farmhouse; the rooms were like dormitories. The women’s room had rows of beds on two sides, set under the dormers. It made me think of an old musical my mother liked to watch, about seven girls trapped in a house with seven brothers. When we lay in those beds, we were like those girls. We bought bread and some cheese in the village. Nigel had food we hadn’t seen in France: peanut butter, vegemite. We were starved for peanut butter. There was no kitchen and we ate off plastic bags on a picnic table in the yard, cutting everything with the same knife.

We rented bicycles. The ferns came to our shoulders and we biked down between the trees on small roads. I was out in front, used to hills, you and Nigel behind me. I had to stop pedalling and coast so as not to lose you. Nigel was surprised that my legs were so strong. It embarrassed him.

Once a week I called my boyfriend in Canada and cried into the phone. I missed him in a practiced way, full of guilt and habit. We’d been living together a year. But I knew if I went home I would only betray him again. The other man was a 50-minute streetcar ride from my apartment. In the beginning I didn’t even know why I was making the trip: I would just dance up and down on one side of his kitchen counter and drink a lot of coffee. One day I sat on the arm of his couch, telling him things, and he stood behind me and slid his hands down into the neckline of my shirt. The tips of his fingers against my nipples. This is something I allowed. He had been married to a poet; I brought over a book of poetry I loved and he said, She used to live here for a while.

Someone I met on a job interview. I was about to graduate and thinking very keenly about what I might do with my life: on the way home from the interview I did what Mary Tyler Moore used to do in the opening credits, where she threw her hat up in the air and spun around. It was April, but still quite cold.

We went to see a documentary about a woman who ran a brothel. I called my boyfriend and said I was staying downtown with this other man. It wasn’t a secret; everyone knew we were friends. My boyfriend said nothing to me about this friendship. We never fought about it. We were both pretending I was someone I’m not. I don’t know how to explain this. It was like walking a worn path: you just can’t see anything else, or any other way. Other people were more suspicious. They asked, What does a 45-year-old man want with a 22-year-old girl.

You can say this the other way around: What does a 22-year-old girl want with a 45-year-old man. One day we were in bed and I looked down and saw a bra lying on the floor. Lace. C cup. He told me there was a woman living in his house. She’d been living there for a year; they were trying to have a baby. The woman had once had a baby with someone else, but that baby died.

You told me you were sleeping with your professor. He had invited you to live in his house in Manchester, with him and his wife. One night he came upstairs. You said, I’m in my nightgown and he sits down on the edge of my bed and I started to cry.

You had a boyfriend, too, with whom you were trying to work things out. We looked upon this coincidence like a lost ring in the pocket of a coat you haven’t worn for a year.

Everything was a mess, and we walked enormous distances together. We walked instead of hitchhiking. I wanted to see the house of Mme de Sévigné. You said, There is no hostel in Vitré. We found a room in the tiny Hôtel de la Gare across from the station and couldn’t believe the luxury. You flung yourself onto your bed and said, Brilliant. Feathers. In the mornings you ordered the breakfast with tea while I took coffee, so that we could both have tea and then coffee. I still do that. I did it today.

It was a long walk to Les Rochers, where Sévigné lived. She was a widow at 26 and never remarried. She knew her letters were being circulated immediately and managed to write for both a private and a public eye. She got away with quite a lot, and I wanted to know how she had done it.

In the mornings I crouched over the toilet and vomited. The smell of tobacco: men smoking on the sidewalk before work. You guessed before I told you, smoothed the hair from my face. I ate very little and my belly stayed flat. I taught you all the words to the best Janis Joplin songs as we walked. When it poured we tied kerchiefs on our heads. The sun shone through the rain. I said, When that happens, it means the devil is beating his wife.

A month later, I stopped throwing up. Holed up in my godmother’s studio, Avenue Kléber. Three days of cramps, the soft lining of the body tearing itself apart, then finally a bony clot, purple in the bowl of the toilet. When it was done I planned a hiking trip: Tuscany, or Ireland, places I’d meant to go. Villages spaced a day’s walk apart.

What I did instead was get in bed. I slept, or lay with my eyes closed, on three pillows, the covers drawn up over my hair. I was cold all the time. I couldn’t get warm. I had dreams that I was awake but couldn’t move. In the dreams I saw my own legs and feet stretched out near the end of the bed, my arms loose across my stomach. I tried to lift the arms, to slap myself awake, or throw my legs off the side onto the floor. Just as I sat up, the tape looped and I had to start over again. All of this long after you left me.

I have photographs of us: the ones you sent, after we’d both gone home. They arrived in their blue envelope from Boots Drugstore, and were so large and glossy compared to my pictures. I wondered if this was your choice, or if that’s how photographs look in England. You sitting on a wall by the Lady’s lake. Me in a monk’s garden, squinting into the sun and wearing a pair of shorts, cut off high. The tidy rows of vegetables on either side. Sitting out at night in Rennes, a fountain streaming by us, the lights blurring past as if we were spinning. As if we were moving so fast the camera couldn’t catch us.

Drunk on cider. Teenaged boys walking by us in packs, yelling out to one another. Sitting underneath the striped houses. I’m learning to mimic the way you talk, using old words in new ways. Knickers. Brilliant. Nice, meaning good-looking. Rhyming things up, linen draper for newspaper. China plate for best mate. At home in Canada, my next boyfriend will ask me to say the word can’t over and over again. Can’t, can’t. I can’t.

It takes a long time to pull you from my mouth.

That was some nice guy, at the end there.

I’m twisting an earring, round and round. It’s a new one, and still stings a little when I move it. Tossing about my new vocabulary. I don’t know. I was looking at you.

There is a long moment as we consider this. We are sitting cross-legged on our feathery beds, facing each other. Like girls at camp. Sleeping in our T-shirts.

You wanted to walk with your eyes closed and asked me to lead you. We were somewhere between Vitré and Fougères. Hiking through fields. It was just beginning to rain: the drops were undefined; somehow our faces were getting wet. Your mouth slightly open as you walked. Delighted. Fingers twisted against mine.

I thought you would sink your foot into a hole and collapse. I didn’t want to be responsible for this. Some of the fields were flooded: the ground was sponge beneath our shoes. There were accidental ponds with animals in them, ducks. One white farm duck, getting beaten. A big mallard pushing its head under water. I’d never seen anything like it and couldn’t move. It scared you; you grabbed at my wrists, my elbows. You had to pull me by the hand and drag me away.

We were apart for a few days. I had promised to meet a friend of a friend, a master’s student in philosophy, at Mont St Michel. When I got there the hostel provided only plastic-covered mattresses. I lied and said I’d brought my own bedsheets, and I slept in all my clothes, layers of shirts and pants. By 11 in the morning the tourists were so bad you couldn’t breathe.

The master’s student only wanted to get drunk. He asked me if I’d ever cheated on my boyfriend.

I wrote to you once, months later. Do you remember that? I wanted to let you know how everything turned out. In the letter I told you how I’d almost reached out to you that night. How close that was for me, the closest I’ve ever been. In a way, I’m still regretful: although I suppose we go ahead and do all the things we really want to do. When you wrote back you were ecstatic. You had moved in with your boyfriend; he liked to bring you croissants at work, at 11 o’clock. He made you tea, then coffee in the mornings. You left some code for me at the end of the letter: p.s., you wrote. About what you said. I know what you mean.

We took the train down into Grenoble: this meant the night before, we had to sleep on the station floor in Lyon. It was a morning train; we’d been half the evening dancing and didn’t want to spend the money on a room in a hostel. There was no one else waiting. There are no night trains in Lyon.

Two conductors on their way home scuffed their shoes against the floor nearby. Where are you going, one of them asked. They were still wearing their SNCF caps and the little pins they have on their jackets, the French flag. You said, Grenoble. Before I could stop you. He pointed to the next platform: That’s the train right there. Why don’t you get on and sleep there instead. The floor’s too dirty. You imagined this to be a gesture of kindness or generosity and I followed you even though I knew better. It wasn’t my first trip to France.

When they climbed aboard behind us you were shocked. I said, Grab your bag. I had to say it three times. I knew it was possible for them to lock the doors and it was a long walk down to the end of the car. We left the station and drank café au lait in an all-night bar-tabac. We sat at a table on the sidewalk. Did you know, you asked me. Did you know that would happen.

I said, I thought you understood what you were getting into.

The last time I saw you, just north of Avignon. Your family had a connection there; he was a fat man who lived in a town carved out of a cliff. You wanted me there so you would be safe in his house. He was going to dinner with friends and asked us to come. We took his key instead, walked through a church garden, drank cocktails outdoors at the very highest point in the town. We wore shoes we liked and hurt our feet walking up the hill to get there, and drank French cocktails: Campari-orange. Pernod. At night we slipped into the house. Inside, there were two sets of stairs and we climbed up to our room and slept in the same bed, our legs touching.

"Sitting Bed" (2006) by Life of a Craphead. Photo courtesy the artists.

Amy Lam, left, and Jon McCurley, the "conceptual comedy" duo known as Life of a Craphead.

For Toronto’s “Making Room” art show in 2006, Amy Lam and Jon McCurley—the duo who call themselves Life of a Craphead— erected a bed sitting on a couch. The couch was large and blue and the bed sat as a human would, folded at the waist, with two wooden legs on the ground. It looked comfortable. On a sign nearby, hand-written, as if the bed itself got down on bedposts and springboard to scrawl the words, was the caption “SOMETIMES EVEN I HAVE TO SIT DOWN.”

“It’s supposed to be funny,” Lam says of their work. McCurley nods. “But the first couple of shows, people just didn’t laugh.”

Today, Lam and McCurley are one of Toronto’s most sought-after installation-, performance-, and conceptual-art teams. They have appeared everywhere from rock clubs to abandoned factories, hoity-toity galleries to Hollywood’s Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. In Toronto’s Chinatown, Life of a Craphead offered a “Free Lunch,” giving away everything on the menu; in Montreal they sat in a church basement, selling $40 “laughter-treated” wood.

Life of a Craphead call themselves a “conceptual comedy duo,” but their work by any other name would be as funny. “Someone from a gallery will ask us to perform at it as performance artists or as installation artists,” McCurley explains, “but someone from the comedy world will ask us to perform [as comedians], or someone from the theatre world will ask us to do a play.”

They met at Canzine in 2004, each there with their own projects. The following year, the duo performed their first comedy set together for the Drake Hotel’s Joke Club night. As they chow down on eggplant curry, their chemistry is palpable: conversing in gentle punchlines, a string of sympathetic giggles, and each peeping through enormous granny glasses.

Whereas Lam has lived in Hong Kong, Calgary, Waterloo, and Montreal, McCurley has known only Ontario, growing up in Mississauga before spending a “year of hell” at Queen’s and then OCAD. Life of a Craphead’s first joke involved boxes of books taken from the house of McCurley’s parents, who had recently moved. “We pulled [them] out on stage and then we went offstage and played Beethoven,” McCurley says. “And nobody laughed. After that we brought out a dog on a cinderblock and we let him loose, with Beethoven. And nobody laughed.”

“And that was the first joke ever,” Lam sadly intones. In their earliest routines, they avoided addressing the audience directly—trying “not to do the things that stand-up comedians usually do.” But as they began to do more “fine” art events, the context changed. “The popular notion of performance art is ‘It could be anything! There are no limits,’” Lam says.

“Comedy’s expectations are different and much more clear,” McCurley continues. “You’re going to go in and you’re going to laugh at these jokes.”

"Laughter Treated Wood" (dates vary) from New Thing Travelling Show by Life of a Craphead. Photo courtesy the artists.

Life of a Craphead’s work began to test the relationship between performance art and comedy, artworks and jokes, often while occupying or reshaping public spaces. In 2007, the pair illegally sawed “musical lines” into Yonge Street—trenches that would play “music,” or rather a brief coughing sound, when cars drove over. More recently, they crashed their own gallery show— engineering a fake wedding party that seemed to sabotage a play at its climax. “Wise art people, who have a handle on things, were tricked,” McCurley gloats. “They asked, ‘How did they do that? Why did they do that?’”

But it’s the arbitrary, self-organized events that most tickle Life of a Craphead: their show at an abandoned truck factory; their proposed “stress ramp” for frustrated Torontonians to jump into Lake Ontario; taking a saw to the road outside Future Shop. “It’s more important to do something with people here than to impress people who don’t exist over there,” McCurley says. “If it gets busted by the police, then no one cares. ‘Oh well! Everyone goes home!’ But if it works, it’s like—‘I can’t believe it’s happening! This is amazing!’ Then it’s like heaven. Nothing else matters. This here is the best place to be.”

Juan Pablo Ochoa, left, addresses a crowd of cane cutters in Bua, Colombia after a court hearing related to their strike. "What is going on is a frame-up." Photo credit: Dawn Paley.

“You know that here in Colombia, there are many human-rights violations,” says José Oney Valencia Llanos, who earns his living cutting sugar cane in Colombia’s fertile Cauca Valley. “Business people, through multinational and transnational corporations, have violated human rights and attacked workers, directly and indirectly.”

Oney told me this on a humid afternoon in El Placer, a small town in the heart of Colombia’s sugar-cane growing region. Among many of the cutters gathered nearby, there was a tangible sense of nervous apprehension. They had every reason to be nervous: about a month previously, the approximately 12,000 sugar-cane cutters in the Cauca Valley had gone back to work after a historic two-month labour strike. Their working situation, from wages to working conditions, was still tenuous. Oney had been a prominent spokesperson for the workers during the strike, a dangerous role to play in Colombia.

“We don’t have the right to free association, or political rights, or the right to unionize,” Oney says. “The government sees that we want to get together so that we can demand our rights, and they call us terrorists. Those of us that have had charges pressed against us, we’re accused of having links with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, even though we have never had links with—and at no time did we have meetings with—illegal armed groups.” Oney told me he hoped to come to Canada as a refugee because he is still being persecuted by the state for his high-profile role during the strike.

Nearby, members of sugar-cane co-operatives were using flip chart paper to plot out their victories and setbacks over the previous year and to plan for the coming months. Heavy rain was intermittent, and while Oney and I talked, an urgent phone call came in: three cane cutters had just been killed when they were struck by lightning while seeking shelter from the rains in the field. The grim news passed from person to person among the gathered cane cutters. Some knew the deceased. And they all knew that lightning is just one of the terrible ways to die in this part of the world. Natural disasters aside, systemic attacks against workers represent an important facet of the generalized violence exercised on the Colombian people.

“It’s important to understand that there is a complete disregard for labour law in Colombia, and the vast majority of workers—around 80 percent—work on informal contracts and have no right to unionize,” says Gustavo Triana, vice-president of the Central Union of Workers. The experience of Colombia’s sugar-cane cutters, the vast majority of whom are not unionized, helps to create a more vivid picture of the repression that Colombia’s large poor population faces on a day-to-day basis.

Sugar-cane cutters cut raw or burned sugar cane with machetes and hand stack it, working as many as seven days a week in conditions that seem like relics of the distant past.

“Today the conditions of sugar-cane workers could even be worse than in the times of slavery, because one has to remember that the large landowners gave to their slaves a roof over their heads and something to eat. Today, even that isn’t the case,” says Mario Valencia, an assistant to a newly formed organization of cane cutters.

“These are people that have absolutely nothing; often the only possession they have is their machete, which they use to cut the cane, and the clothes they’re wearing,” he says. “These are people that lack social security, that receive no benefits from the state, that live in reproachable housing and sanitary conditions.”

Many of the workers and their families live in substandard housing in areas without basic services. Few have job security and most come from historically disadvantaged social groups still battling with the ongoing legacies of slavery and colonization.

Here in Canada, news from Colombia is generally limited to the business section of major papers, with the odd exception when a high-profile delegation touches down on Canadian soil, or when we hear about the country’s powerful drug cartels.

More recently, the proposed Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement has been making the news. Free trade negotiations between Canada and Colombia were announced by David Emerson, former minister of international trade, on June 7, 2007. Negotiations with Peru began on the same day. The move to negotiate with Peru and Colombia signalled the Canadian government’s renewed focus on bilateral trade deals in the Americas. Prior to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s push for new bilateral trade agreements, Canada’s free trade partners were limited to the United States and Mexico through the North America Free Trade Agreement, as well as Chile, Costa Rica, and Israel.

One year to the day after negotiations were opened, Emerson announced that the talks with Colombia had been completed. “These negotiations were extremely rapid, and unlike those with the United States, which lasted 16 rounds, were finalized in the fifth of six rounds initially planned at the outset of negotiations in July of 2007,” reads a press release written by the Colombian Action Network in Response to Free Trade.

The negotiations were completed even before the parliamentary standing committee on international trade released the report they were working on, which was intended to guide the negotiations. The standing committee’s report actually recommended that the government of Canada not sign a free trade agreement with Colombia until an independent human-rights impact assessment was carried out.

Nonetheless, the Conservatives pushed the agreement forward: the texts of the deal were lawyered, translated, and signed on Nov. 21, 2008 by Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon, International Trade Minister Stockwell Day, and their Colombian counterparts, Foreign Affairs Minister Jaime Bermudez and Minister of Trade, Tourism and Industry Luis Guillermo Plata.

Shockingly, it was only after the FTA was signed that the text of the agreement was released. Two side agreements, one on labour and a second on the environment, were also signed at the ceremony in Lima. “By expanding our trading relationship with Colombia, we are not only opening up new opportunities for Canadian businesses in a foreign market, we are also helping one of South America’s most historic democracies improve the human rights and security situation in their country,” said Harper, who was at the signing ceremony.

That rhetoric rings hollow for many people in Colombia. “Free trade agreements are never for the benefit of the people,” says Rafael Coicué, a Nasa indigenous leader from Cauca, in the country’s southwest. “These agreements are shaped by economic interests at the expense of life and sovereignty.”

Canadians’ experiences with NAFTA has also shown that free trade deals do not necessarily improve economic conditions for the majority.

“We have seen the results with NAFTA and the Canada-U.S. trade agreement (CUFTA). Since their implementation in 1988, these agreements and their accompanying economic policies have led to lower incomes for most Canadian families,” writes Peter Julian, the New Democratic Party’s international trade critic.

The Canada-Colombia deal was tabled in Parliament on March 26, as part of Bill C-23, and had its second reading in late May. The Conservatives are firmly behind the deal, but during the second reading, the Liberals bowed to public pressure and insisted that a human rights study be carried out before the FTA is ratified. The NDP and the Bloc Québécois have opposed ratifying the deal. Because of its poor reception during its second reading, the bill was removed from the order paper and will likely return to Parliament in the fall.

Given the financial crisis that continues to shake the globalized economy, the economic merit of the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement is the newest spin in the attempt to sell the deal to Canadians.

“Jobs will be threatened, and especially at a time when we need to open doors, not close them, this would put Canadian producers and Canadian service providers and Canadian workers at a severe disadvantage,” Day told the Canadian Press one day before the deal was tabled in parliament.

The main types of businesses that stand to benefit from a trade agreement between Canada and Colombia are in the mining, oil and gas, telecommunications, and financial sectors. Egregious rights violations aside, there has been no substantial independent economic analysis done to prove that either Canadians or Colombians will see more jobs because of the deal.

“The only rights this agreement guarantees are the rights of investors,” says Scott Sinclair, a senior research fellow in trade and investment at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. “The labour and environmental side agreements are ineffectual by comparison.”

If Canadians are aware of the problems in Colombia, it’s often related to the drug trade. Colombia is the world’s largest exporter of cocaine, and the hemisphere’s number one recipient of “assistance” from the United States, most of which is directed toward the “war on drugs” through a program called Plan Colombia. A protracted internal conflict also sows chaos there, and the political environment is dangerous—often deadly.

Critics say that ratifying an FTA would mean that Canada tacitly accepts Colombia’s horrific human rights record. Colombia is widely considered the most dangerous place on earth to be a trade unionist: the Canadian Labour Congress and the International Trade Union Confederation cite thousands of killings, tortures, and disappearances of union members.

“By endorsing this trade deal, Canadian leaders are turning their backs on the thousands of murdered trade unionists, human rights activists, journalists, indigenous people, and others who have been killed with impunity by the state and paramilitaries in the country,” says UNI Global Union General Secretary Philip Jennings. UNI represents 20 million workers in 900 different unions.

Since 1990, successive Colombian governments have actively dismantled legislation protecting the rights of workers and the environment.

“Almost 20 years of ‘free trade’ in Colombia show that such policies cause major damage to the urban and rural economies of our country, place the state in the service of powerful monopolies and transnationals, further concentrate wealth, and increase unemployment and poverty,” reads a recent letter from Colombian senators and members of the chamber of representatives. The letter was sent to Canadian Parliament on March 31 in response to the tabling of the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

Cruz María Montaña takes a swipe at the base of standing cane. Cane cutters in the Cauca Valley often work seven days a week. Photo credit: Dawn Paley.

Colombia’s other famous white powder—sugar—is an example of a product that is at the heart of the economy, the labour struggle, and the power structure in Colombia. Sugar cane was introduced into Colombia by Spanish invaders during the conquest. The first steam-powered sugar mill in Colombia was built in 1901 by Santiago Eder, then the U.S. consul in Colombia.

During the period known in Colombia as La Violencia, which began following the assassination of presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948 and lasted approximately 10 years, over half a million people were displaced from the fertile lands flanking the Cauca River. These displacements resulted in 98,400 small farms being abandoned and allowed local oligarchs to consolidate their landholdings. Today, of the 400,000 hectares of arable land along the Cauca River, close to 240,000 hectares are planted with sugar cane. A complex and water-intensive irrigation network laid throughout the Cauca Valley allows cane to be grown and harvested year-round, unlike in most other countries, where the cane harvest is seasonal. The owners of the nine sugar mills in the Cauca Valley are among the richest and most powerful men in Colombia.

Among their ranks is Ardila Lülle, who owns three sugar mills that account for 33 percent of Colombia’s sugar production. He controls Colombia’s national soft-drink business, bottle-making factories, and a host of textile manufacturing industries. Lülle also owns RCN, Colombia’s largest private media conglomerate.

RCN “has dedicated itself over the last few years to making apologies for paramilitary groups, which have assassinated almost 4,000 unionists and maintain under their politico-military dominion large expanses of the country, impeding the growth of protests,” writes Colombian economist Héctor Mondragón.

Though it barely made a blip on RCN’s TV news, everything came to a head last September when more than 12,000 of Colombia’s sugar cutters staged a 58-day strike demanding better labour conditions.

Organizers, including Oney, called the strike after repeated failed attempts to negotiate with the owners of the sugar mills. The strike started at what the workers call “hour zero,” in the early morning of September 15, 2008.

“A few days before the work stoppage, when the rumours were going around that there would be a strike, the mills were completely militarized through a presidential decree,” explains Adriana Ferrer, a lawyer with the Bogotá-based human-rights organization Maestra Vida. “The public forces in the Cauca Valley and Cauca were exclusively dedicated to looking after the private capital of the sugar mills.” On the first day of the strike, the ESMAD (Colombia’s version of a SWAT team) attacked the workers while they blockaded the region’s refineries. Several workers were injured that day, but they managed to fend off the initial attack and maintain the strike for another 57 days. The central demand of the cutters was to have the right to enter into direct contracts with the sugar companies, instead of continuing to be sub-contracted as co-operatives with fewer labour rights. Workers also petitioned for better wages, more tools, and access to adequate housing.

The strike came to an end after the sugar mills sat at the table with workers, who represented their co-operatives. The outcomes of the negotiations include a wage increase of 30 cents per tonne, pay cheques weekly instead of twice monthly, and a better supply of sharpeners and machetes; but the workers still didn’t get job security or achieve status as direct employees of the sugar mills.

The situation remains as tenuous as ever for organizers like Oney. I saw him again about a week after our first meeting at a hearing in Buga, a larger city in the Cauca Valley. The courtroom was standingroom only, with cane cutters, their customary red towels laid flat over their shoulders, spilling out onto the sidewalk and into Buga’s central park. The hearing related to the investigation into Oney, three other workers, and two people who assisted the workers in their strike.

The district attorney presiding over the hearing decided that formal charges on counts of conspiracy, assault, and sabotage would be pressed against the six accused. The evidence in the hands of the state consisted of the testimony of a worker and several plant owners.

After the court hearing, the cane cutters who were inside flooded out of the courtroom and crowded into the streets in front of the central park. They formed a circle around Ferrer and Juan Pablo Ochoa, one of the accused and an assistant to an opposition senator who supported the cane cutters during the strike.

“We are confident that they will not be found guilty,” stated Ferrer, acting as the accused men’s lawyer. “We are sure the charges will be dropped, because we know that what is going on is a frame-up. Nobody here was committing crimes. The only thing that any of us were doing was struggling in a just way for the rights of workers.” Before the cane cutters piled back into the buses that belong to their co-operatives, Ochoa issued a chilling warning about their safety. That same morning, just a short drive away from Buga, a man named Edwin Lagarda was killed by the Colombian Armed Forces.

Lagarda was driving a vehicle belonging to the Indigenous Regional Council of Cauca, the largest indigenous organization in Cauca. The army initially accused Lagarda of running a roadblock, even though Lagarda’s truck had at least 15 bullet holes in it from a variety of different angles. Commentators speculated that the army may have been attempting to kill Lagarda’s partner, Ayda Quilcué, a high-profile indigenous leader.

“We are also at risk,” said Ochoa. “It’s important that we are aware that this process isn’t against one worker or one assistant. It’s against all the workers of Cauca Valley and Cauca who are demanding respect for their rights.”

This is the regime that Canada stands to legitimize through opening up trade relations with a free trade agreement: a regime of intimidation, violence, and murder. And all for a deeply flawed trade deal that may actually hurt thousands of Canada’s own workers. While Colombia’s sugar barons and Canada’s transnational oil and mining industries stand to gain from the trade deal, sectors like the Canadian sugar industry, which directly employs more than 1,200 people in four provinces, stand to lose.

Bilateral agreements like the Canada-Colombia deal are “eating away at the market, and companies in Canada can’t make money on that market; they can’t make money, and they’ll have to close,” says Sandra Marsden, president of the Canadian Sugar Institute. The economic effects aside, there is no indication that the deal will help to improve human rights in Colombia.

“There is nothing in the agreement which provides for any sort of leverage to actually … halt the continued massacre of Colombians who simply are on a quest for a better life for themselves and for their co-workers,” writes the NDP’s Julian.

For workers like Oney and his team of cane cutters, the daily struggle to demand basic rights and dignity will continue to be a dangerous one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A woman of letters herself, Brossard’s Québécoise protagonist, Anne, labours to write a novel in a “foreign language.” Far from the familiar cadence of her mother tongue, Anne is exposed to the violent emotions that lie hidden beneath everyday language. In a glorious outpouring of hot, confusing words, Brossard, a two-time Governor General’s Award winner for poetry, writes of the profound anxieties and desires that Anne discovers in her linguistically alien world, a “realm … that is no longer euphoria but an endless dawn with its own heat.”

Anne’s futile attempts to write that world eventually shock her into silence: “I don’t dare write: I am frozen, fossilized in combat position.” She is paralyzed by a puzzle: how can fiction attempt to do what we, its creators and consumers, cannot—make sense of war, intimacy, the calamity of being born? Brossard leaves the question unanswered, though the answer not unhoped for.

How to get local produce in the city? Look up. Illustration by Peter Mitchell.

Canadian architecture student Gordon Graff attracted worldwide interest when he designed SkyFarm, a 59-storey farm for downtown Toronto.

What inspired you to design a vertical farm?

Sometime in 2006, when I was first working on my masters at the University of Waterloo, I knew I wanted to focus on how to turn a city like Toronto into a truly ecologically sustainable city. What frustrated me was that food was rarely in the discussion. It was all about reducing energy use and other fantastic things, but a big issue like the security of the food source of a city and the negative ecological impact of agriculture on the earth never came into the discussion. So I just sort of drifted toward the notion that it would be great if somehow we could actually produce food within cities.

What happened next?

In 2006 I was researching hydroponic configurations, and I came across a website for Dr. Dickson Despommier [a professor of environmental health science at Columbia University] called verticalfarm.com. Here was a professor not connected to architecture who was pushing for skyscraper farms. It was another actual voice out there, giving an academic basis to what I was doing. Around the same time I saw there was a competition to design skyscrapers, and everything just clicked.

You called your design SkyFarm.

I did it rather hastily, and it didn’t win. But Dickson put my drawing on his website and there was an incredible viral spreading of the design. BCME, an Australian publication, put it in their magazine. Global TV interviewed me. When the architecture magazine Azure said it wanted to do a story featuring the design, I figured I should put something better forward, and that led to the current iteration of the design.

This is the 60-storey building you proposed for downtown Toronto.

Yeah. It would have 2.7 million square feet of floor area and 9.5 million square feet of growing area and could feed about 40,000 people a year.

What are the main features of the building?

It’s really just a high-density hydroponic farm that has food growing on different floors. The building’s structure would be similar to that of a commercial or residential high-rise except for some small details. It would be a lot like a conventional greenhouse except the lighting would be artificial instead of sunlight.

What kind of lighting would you use?

LCD grow lights. Some would be on 24 hours a day, so the building would glow at night.

So it would use an awful lot of energy—

—and a lot of water.

How would you compensate for those requirements?

The building would have two key components: a small biogas plant and a “living machine.” The biogas plant would collect methane (natural gas) from the farm’s abundant plant waste, the grass “silage” growing on the south-facing wall, as well as the city’s sewers. The methane would be used to power a generator to deliver electricity to the building. The living machine would filter the farm’s water, recycling it back into the farm rather than into the city’s waste water system. With these two components in place, the SkyFarm would be extremely resource efficient.

What could be grown?

Technically any crop, but a few like rice, which requires a lot of water, are probably too costly to grow.

Is there any reason a vertical farm wouldn’t work?

There are definitely hurdles to overcome, but technologically and economically, vertical farms are viable. They just need the first investments by investors and/or governments to become a reality.

What’s the next step for you with this project?

After my master’s thesis is finished later this summer I plan to formalize a business plan for my design of a vertical farm embedded within a condo—an “agro-arcology.” I’ve been approached by a few developers about the concept, so the logical next step is to create a proper cost analysis.

Pelley is just one of many journalists who have run up against the federal department’s new communications policy, which restricts how government researchers may interact with reporters. At the very least, the new policy is causing frustrating delays. At its worst, according to both reporters and ministry staff, the new policy is causing a chill among researchers and is keeping the public from hearing about Canadian environmental research.

This year-old policy requires reporters to request interviews through a central office in Ottawa, “to ensure that requests for information by the media are responded to quickly, accurately and in a consistent manner across Canada,” explains an email from the department’s communications office.

Previously, researchers were free to discuss their research and reporters normally went directly to these experts for information. Both the Environment Canada head of communications and its minister, Jim Prentice, refused interview requests for this story.

The situation is painful enough that some reporters have started turning to researchers from other countries, rather than face delays from Environment Canada. In April, the 1,500-member Society of Environmental Journalists wrote to the minister to express their frustration that the department had not responded to their concerns and to ask the department to change its policy. “The new policy shows a lack of commitment to government transparency and obstructs the public’s access to information,” said the letter, which was co-signed by a number of organizations including the Canadian Association of Journalists, the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, and the U.S. National Association of Science Writers.

Opposition environment critics David McGuinty and Linda Duncan both say this is just one part of a government-wide campaign by the Conservatives to block access to information, adding that they’re facing similar problems at the Parliamentary committee level.

“They ran on openness and transparency,” says an exasperated McGuinty. “There’s no reason in the world why officials shouldn’t be able to speak.”