All photos courtesy Provincial Archives of Alberta

The first image: a small child in striped pyjamas, three years old, peering through the bars of a crib, directly into the lens of the camera. There’s intelligence in her eyes, but no indication of pleasure or recognition. Just a quiet, cautious curiosity. She’s holding a naked, hairless, rubber doll. Behind her, off-kilter on the wall, are two framed drawings, one of a kitten, the other of a girl hugging a rabbit. The scene is a ward in Edmonton’s Charles Camsell Indian Hospital. The year is 1960. The child is Linda McDonald, from the Liard First Nation in the Yukon, recently diagnosed with tuberculosis. The solitude and vulnerability emanating from the photograph are not surprising, given her age and the abruptness of her departure. “My earliest memory is of mom walking with me to the little lake we lived beside,” she tells me, more than five decades later. “She carried me in her arms and she was crying. That is all I remember of mom saying good-bye. I then recall being on a plane with someone.”

Arrival at Camsell was no less traumatic: “The bathroom seemed very large. A nurse all in white was taking my clothes off and making me stand in a shower. I think this was my first shower experience. I was crying and she said, ‘shut-up’ and banged my head against the wall of the shower. I remember the smell of the bathroom, the large bars of Ivory soap.” Another of McDonald’s memories of Camsell involves being awakened in the middle of the night by a siren, by shouting and people running, and not knowing what was happening. A head-count on the lawn revealed someone was missing. McDonald recalls a nurse using the scissors to cut the cloth bonds that tied her to the crib and carrying her out where the rest were gathered.

I first heard from her in response to a brochure I distributed at the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Vancouver in September 2013. On the cover was an image of four small girls in dressing-gowns overlaid with the caption: “What Was Going on in Canada’s Indian Hospitals?” Inside, along with a photograph of Camsell, was a description of the link between the racially segregated hospitals for aboriginals and residential schools: the latter serving as farm-teams or recruiting grounds for the former, providing a constant clientele of guinea pigs for forced sterilization, gratuitous drug and surgical experiments, and electric shock treatment—a sure way to destroy the short-term memory of sexual abuse. “I went into the hospital
an Indian girl,” McDonald confides, “and came out a white girl.”

I met her a few months later in Whitehorse. At the time, she was just finishing a six month medical leave from teaching. The person I met was out-going, middle-aged, and very bright. We had a wonderful lunch together and she arranged for me to meet several of her friends who had also been patients at the Camsell. Without those emails and beautifully written memoirs, I would not have guessed there was anything troubling this charming and vivacious person, whose life had been so profoundly affected by her two solitary years peering through crib bars, wearing pyjamas that resembled striped prison garb, and who had returned home “spoiled and thinking our little cabin was dirty and smelled funny.”

Yet, her experience was not unique. Camsell was one of 22 segregated hospitals in Canada, created not so much to help the Indigenous population, as to keep them separate from the white community. Established on racist assumptions, it’s not surprising that these hospitals were poorly staffed and underfunded. While residential schools— with their death-rate of 40-60 percent—are now widely acknowledged as a horrible stage in a slow-motion genocide, the story of the socalled “Indian hospitals” has been largely ignored. And yet, their legacy continues in today’s health care system. Were it not for this ongoing racism and colonial legacy, for instance, Brian Sinclair, a 45-yearold Indigenous man and double-amputee, would not have died in his wheelchair in a Winnipeg emergency room in September 2008 after being left unattended for 34 hours with a kidney infection that could have been treated.

Speaking of the Camsell era, medical researcher and author of Healing Histories, Laurie Meijer Drees offers the understatement of the year when she informs us it’s clear that, in Canada, aboriginals “mattered less.”

Provincial Archives of Alberta

Systemic racism is no stranger to Canada. British Columbia, my home, not only spearheaded the evacuation of thousands of Japanese-Canadians during World War II, but also gave enthusiastic support to the Chinese Head-Tax and the refusal to allow the Komogatu Maru to dock in 1913 in Vancouver harbour, sending it back to Hong Kong with its cargo of Sikhs and their shattered dreams of immigration. B.C. was also quick to follow suit when its neighbour across the Rockies passed the Alberta Sterilization Act in 1929, both provinces paying doctors to perform involuntary surgical procedures, a disproportionate number of them done on Indigenous men, women and girls. The provinces were in tune with the federal government, which turned away the St. Louis and its shipload of Jews fleeing the Holocaust, because someone in the Ottawa bureaucracy thought one Jew too many.

Treaty 7, signed between the Crown and First Nations in Southern Alberta in 1877, came with no promise of medical assistance—not even the standard clause of a medicine chest, which had been included in earlier treaties. Neither did Treaty 8, which covered Northern Alberta, B.C. and part of the NWT. A secondary report by Indian Commissioner David Laird promised that “supplies of medicine would be put in the charge of persons selected by the Government at different points, and would be distributed free to those of the Indians who might require them.” Laird and his contemporaries assured aboriginal signatories that “the government would always be ready to avail itself of any opportunity of affording medical service,” although these promises were not written into the treaty itself. The federal government would pay little attention to the health of aboriginals for decades, eventually downloading the responsibility to the provinces.

Another former Camsell patient, Marilyn Murray-Allison, a Gwich’in woman from the NWT, contacted me to say that both she and her mother had been patients in the early 1950s. Age five-and-a-half, and in constant pain, she could neither sit nor stand. Together with her parents and her sister, she was flown to the hospital, where staff found tuberculosis in her lymph glands; her mother had it in her lung. “It was a very tragic time,” she says. “In a matter of a few hours, our family was separated.”

The separation anxiety, rather than the tuberculosis, almost killed her. Although in the same hospital, mutual contact between family members was disallowed on the assumption that it would be upsetting to both parent and child who were supposed to be immobile and resting. But separation in a strange place, where no one spoke her language, made it worse. “All I remember of those days,” says Murray-Allison, “was the hurt and sadness and crying for my mother and my family. I was dying of heartbreak, not being able to eat and biting my fingernails until they were bleeding.”
Eventually, staff realized she wasn’t improving and put her in a room next to her mother’s. Able to see her mother through a window in the wall that still separated them, she began to heal slowly. More than once, a kind nurse would wrap her frail body in a blanket and sneak her in to cuddle with her mother. Bedridden for so long, she forgot how to walk and had to learn all over again.

Such procedures do not speak well of either the medical knowledge or the psychological insight of doctors and nurses, whom we might expect to know something about the role of emotions in the healing process. In The Camsell Mosaic, a book put together by the hospital’s history committee, Dr. William Barclay acknowledges the severe limitations under which staff worked and the primitive measures taken to treat patients. He describes how, initially, no drugs were available for the treatment of tuberculosis, so total bed rest was prescribed, sometimes including surgical collapse of the lung and plaster casts to fixate the joints, most of these procedures applied in “blind faith.”

Among the many Camsell photos in Meijer Drees’ Healing Histories and in the federal government’s archives, there is one that touches me deeply. It shows 11 children, aged two or three, in white gowns arranged on benches by a nurse wearing a facemask. The two in the front row wear moccasins, another child is missing a shoe and a third is sucking her fingers. Collectively the photograph does not depict a single mood, such as fear or anguish or pleasure—though the children are anything but animated. Yet, knowing how children need the love and affection of parents—and how their health and immune systems can plummet without this special care—the photo sends a shiver down my spine. Many of those toddlers—if they even made it through their hospital ordeal— were not sent home, but shipped off immediately to residential schools, where their chances of survival were sometimes as low as 60 percent.

Relevant to the story of these segregated hospitals is Canada’s long-standing policy not only of ignoring aboriginal wellbeing, but also of deliberately starving Indigenous peoples to force them into white subservience. Many of the great chiefs, including Poundmaker and Big Bear, were brought to their knees as beggars, asking for handouts to save their people. The violence that prompted killings at Frog Lake in 1885 and helped spark the Riel rebellion in the prairies was precipitated by Canada’s high-handedness and failure to fulfil treaty promises, particularly the failure to provide food and medicine after the extermination of the buffalo. As Maureen Lux explains in Medicine That Walks: Disease, Medicine and Canadian Plains Native People, 1880-1940, the starvation of the tribes at Fort Walsh, “was a cynical and deliberate plan to press the government’s advantage and force the Cree from the area and allow the government a free hand in developing the prairie.”

It has taken more than 100 years to dismantle some of the myths about Canada’s Indigenous peoples, including the notion that they are more susceptible to disease than other races. Appalling conditions, rather, were to blame for the high rate of morbidity: hunger, malnutrition, being crammed into tiny reserves, and held captive in residential schools that were often a haven for diseases, sadists, and pedophiles. Continual neglect and abuse resulted in fatalities that, in earlier times, might have been avoided, or at least less widespread, when food, confidence, and solidarity were not in short supply. These exacting measures were approved at the highest level of government. Prime Minister John A. Macdonald made this clear in 1882 when he assured the House, “we cannot allow them to die for want of food,” then added that Commissioner Edgar Dewdney and the Indian agents, as they wer called at the time, “are doing all they can, by refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of starvation, to reduce the expense.”

When Dr. Peter Bryce, chief medical officer of the Department of Immigration, was sent out to study the conditions in prairie residential schools in 1907, he wrote a scathing report about what he witnessed, including overcrowding, malnutrition, and an appallingly high death rate. His report was shelved and his position eliminated. Fifteen years later he would publish the report himself under the title A National Crime. Duncan Campbell Scott, deputy superintendent of what was then called Indian Affairs, dismissed Bryce’s claims, saying in April 1910: “It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habitating so closely in these schools, and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this department, which is geared towards the final solution of our Indian Problem.” On another occasion he added: “It is only necessary to carry out some common sense reforms to remove the imputation that the department is careless of the interests of the children.”

Those promised reforms, of course, did not come. Lux tells us that Chief Long Lodge, whose people had been forcibly removed from Fort Walsh in the Cypress Hills of southern Saskatchewan and were sick from starvation, put the matter bluntly: “I want no government medicine. What I want is medicine that walks. Send three oxen to be killed and give fresh meat to my people and they will get better.” When the aboriginal population—albeit one that was devastated and drastically reduced in numbers—refused to disappear, residential schools and segregated hospitals were the next phase of the “final solution” that Indian Affairs (now Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada) set in motion.

Forced sterilizations and drug and surgical experiments happened in many segregated hospitals during the two decades following World War II. Teeth were often removed without freezing and experimental drugs were administered that caused serious harm, or proved fatal. The causes of death were often falsely reported to authorities and loved-ones were not contacted. Sexual abuse was not uncommon, as many testimonies at the hearings of the TRC confirm. One friend told me an orderly raped her at the Nanaimo Indian Hospital while her upper body was encased in an iron lung. Much of the fear that Indigenous people have of doctors and hospitals today derives from the horrendous experiences and racist attitudes encountered in these institutions.

Provincial Archives of Alberta

As I was putting these thoughts together in January 2014, Melinda Bullshields phoned me from her small flat on East 2nd Avenue in Vancouver’s East End to say she’d seen one of my brochures at the TRC. One of 11 siblings from the Blood Reserve in Alberta, about 30 kilometres from the U.S.-Canada border, she’d been a patient at the Camsell from age four to eight. Simply put, it ruined her life. Her voice was strong, urgent, articulate, informing me that being bedridden for so long made her knees small for her size, but she’d still managed to become an athlete. She saw many things at Camsell—every kind of abuse, “I remember the casts, little kids with hips and both legs in a body cast, just a small hole where they could pee,” she says. “At night, the orderlies would be doing things in those holes.”

Four years of hospitalization, followed by residential school, alienated her from family, some of whom she no longer recognized when she returned to the reserve. “They groomed me for solitude,” she says. “I coped with the abuse by dissociation, closing off the emotions, being elsewhere when nasty things happened to me.” This dismal situation continued even back home, where her sisters tormented her for being too English and where the worst abuses learned in residential school and the segregated hospital had become an epidemic.

When we met at a coffee shop on Commercial Drive in Vancouver, Bullshields brought her copy of The Camsell Mosiac to show me her photo on page 211, front row, third from the left—one of 10 tiny, costumed girls, part of the Counterpane Players, wearing a frilly, conical cap, her only photo of herself from that period, a light moment in an otherwise dark period. “I hate both sides,” she says, “so where does that leave me?”

Indeed, where does this leave all of us? As individuals and as a nation, we have a responsibility to rewrite the national narrative, acknowledging our failure to honour the promises and partnership
implied in the treaties and to build a better, stronger, healthier future. We can start by making the records of all 22 segregated hospitals available. Canadians need to know what really happened in these hospitals—the sterilizations and the nutritional, drug, and surgical experiments. We also need to find out what was going on in that special day school on the Goodfish Lake reserve in Alberta where, from 1959–1963, 38 Cree children were isolated, taught nothing, allowed to watch TV all day, and subjected to excessive doses of polio vaccines, known even then to be contaminated with a carcinogen called SV40—a virus originating in the kidneys of the rhesus monkey used as a culture for growing the vaccines.

Camsell would be a good, symbolic place to jump-start the reconciliation and healing process. After serving as a general hospital for the entire population from 1967–1996, it was abandoned because of asbestos contamination. It remained empty for decades, grew increasingly decrepit, and only made the news periodically, when vandals started fires or the building figured in the internet’s latest ghost watch.There was enlightened talk of renovating and turning it into housing for Edmonton’s homeless and low-income population, a large number of whom are First Nations individuals, but the locals objected. Instead, the city sold the building to a developer, who promised to turn it into condos for seniors and yuppies. Now that the asbestos has been removed, the city council could intervene to realize that earlier dream.

Harold Cardinal wrote many years ago in The Unjust Society that equality of health or education services is not enough: “We aren’t starting on equal grounds. Equality of services doesn’t mean a thing to people who are so far behind they can’t even see the starting line. It just means we would remain that far behind. That’s not good enough. We want to catch up. Then we can talk equality.” Cardinal, who was born in High Prairie, Alta. and grew up on the Sucker Creek Cree Reserve, wrote those words in 1969. Some 46 years later, we have still not taken them to heart.

Between 1946-1966, nearly 97 Indigenous patients who did not survive Camsell, including 13 infants, were buried in the cemetery on the grounds of the former Edmonton Indian Residential School, located in nearby St. Albert. Their names are inscribed on marble slabs on four sides of a monument made of round stones set in concrete. On the top of the six-foot-high structure, between the stones, mourners have deposited tiny plastic toys and a small skipping rope. When I visit the site in late April 2015, a cold wind has blown a tiny, black, plastic car onto the paved surface. I pick it up and place it back on top of the monument, wondering about those who left it here.

Before departing, I drive a few hundred metres to the new Poundmaker drug and alcohol addiction centre that now occupies the grounds of the former residential school. A stand of poplars in the distance is festooned with long, brightly coloured cloths. I ask a woman outside having a smoke what they signify.

“They’re prayer flags,” she tells me. “When the wind blows, they flutter and the pain is carried off by the breeze.

I’m here—I hope—to meet Anawa, a Cameroonian mother in indefinite detention, and her son, who was born in the facility. Alpha must stay with his mother at all times, even when she’s in the shower. While she carries his weight, she must also live knowing that her daughter, Tracy, not yet 10, is growing up without her in Nigeria. Anawa is imprisoned for a simple, all-too-common reason: coming here, to Canada. She hasn’t been charged with a crime and has not had a trial. She’s held because Cameroon won’t issue travel documents for deportation and Canada will not set her free for apparent fear she’ll disappear.

Anawa’s story is as much a national tragedy as it is the result of a decade of degradation in the manner in which Canada treats those people who flee oppressive circumstance in hope of refuge. A system that—over the past nine years under the federal Conservative government—has gone from bad to worse. It’s the result of policy that continually seeks to remove basic rights to those our federal government considers outsiders. It’s thanks to a persistent messaging campaign to brand people as undesirable—or worse, criminal. Today, the walls of detention centres like the one in Rexdale act to hide the mistreatment of the disenfranchised and promote a culture of fear. A culture that often prevents the mistreated from speaking about their experiences with the media, or anyone.

So I wait.

IT’S A STICKY DAY in early May, and I’m sitting in a slowlyfilling courtroom at the Ontario Court of Appeals. I’m here to watch as the End Immigration Detention Network (EIDN) and a team of lawyers appeal a ruling denying habeas corpus to immigrants in detention. Basically, they want the court to prove that indefinite detention is justified. Even for the experts, the legal framework proves difficult to navigate. “I don’t know every section [of immigration code] anymore,” one of Anawa’s lawyers tells the court. “I used to know it all, but it’s been amended so much I just can’t keep up.”

IF THERE’S BEEN one constant since Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party came to power, it’s change. Policy has changed rapidly and seemingly at random, with the consistent misdirection acting as an obstacle for immigration lawyers and experts. “Every month is a change,” says Loly Rico, the president of the Canadian Council for Refugees, “and every month is a cut.”

In nearly a decade of conservative power, Canada has gained an abysmal record in caring for those seeking asylum—the most egregious of which is arguably our country’s new and unusual habit of indefinitely detaining refugee and immigration claimants without providing any documentation as to why. In fact, in July the United Nations Human Rights Commission Report chastised Canada for this very practice.

Take Anawa’s case. Facing female genital mutilation, she fled Cameroon to Finland, then to the U.K. and, eventually, to Canada. By that time, she was pregnant with Alpha. Lacking official documentation and identification, upon arrival she was put in the detention centre where she and Alpha now live. She has no release date.

Laced through the policy upheaval is also a shift in the tone in which Canada speaks about refugees. This government is openly hostile, introducing terms like “bogus claimants” and “abusing our generosity” to the public lexicon. Rico, once a refugee herself, says “[Refugees] are not coming because of what we have. They’re coming because they need protection.” Syed Hussan of the EIDN echoes that statement: “The idea that Canada, or any international agency, gets to decide who is and who is not worthy of safety is absurd.”

Stripping a claimant’s humanity with such language allows abuses of power to slip by—and become a norm. Anawa’s lawyer, Swathi Sekhari, worries whenever a client speaks to the media. “The [Canadian Border Services Agency] can be quite subversive with their actions,” she says, “I would say even violent.” Guards can punish detainees for speaking out—either in the yard with verbal abuse or, at times, in detention reviews. “All of a sudden you can be declared as being uncooperative,” she adds.

MANY TYPES OF IMMIGRATION have felt the effects of structural decay—including migrant workers and caregivers. Hussan, who’s also with the organization No One Is Illegal, says that to focus on one stream or another is to confuse the problem. “People are just people trying to move,” he says. When people are fleeing oppression their only concern is getting out, and they will choose the path they think is most likely to help. Each stream has its own pitfalls. Migrant workers, for example, don’t have their housing covered under workplace safety laws even though they’re forced to live where they work.

I’M STARTING TO REALIZE I won’t get to speak to Anawa. It’s my third time visiting the detention centre—a place that, in anything but name, is a prison. While I sit on this side of the glass, she’s being herded back from lunch where Alpha may have been playing with a new friend. He has to make new friends a lot. Most of them move out eventually, into a world he doesn’t understand. Each time I’ve gone I’ve seen her warm, welcoming face and his unbridled pent-up energy as he bounds around the visitation area. She corrals him as she tells me she can’t talk. Not today. I’ve been waiting a while, but at least I get to drive home after. For the time being, she’s already there.

Later, in 2010, Harper’s position softened, but only slightly. Amidst public pressure, particularly from aboriginal leaders, Canada signed a letter of support for the declaration— even though the government remained wary of its contents. This fact was reiterated in 2014 when Canada was the only country to raise objections over the declaration’s outcome document, meant to provide a framework for countries to follow and set minimum rights standards. The feds said they worried the document could provide “veto” power to aboriginal groups, despite the fact that the word veto isn’t even used in the document. Equally disappointing, it also called the agreement an “aspirational” document, suggesting it wasn’t achievable—or, at least, that the government had no concrete plans to do so.

Perhaps such sentiments shouldn’t come as a surprise. Under Harper, the federal government has also consistently chosen industry over aboriginal interest (see: the much-protested Northern Gateway Pipeline, for example); eliminated First Nation Band and Tribal Council funding for advisory services, limiting the ability of councils to assess and analyze government legislation; drastically cut funding for First Nation political organizations; completely ignored pressing aboriginal issues such as the emergency state of Canada’s murdered and missing women; and missed meaningful opportunities for change, such as it did with its bungled communications (or rather lack thereof) with members of Idle No More, one of the most significant protest movements in Canada’s history.

No wonder, then, that in 2013 when James Anaya, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Aboriginal Peoples, visited Canada, he declared that we are facing a “crisis” when it comes to aboriginal rights. “Amidst this wealth and prosperity,” he said, “Aboriginal people live in conditions akin to those in countries that rank much lower and in which poverty abounds.” Not much has changed since—but, by now, such a change is long overdue.

When the Conservative government rushed to pass the bill into law last year, Justice Minister Peter MacKay repeatedly told media outlets that the government considers sex workers as victims in need of saving. Workers are not breaking any laws by selling sex, however it is illegal for someone to purchase it. Prohibitions are also against activities involved in the sex trade, like a client communicating with the intention of buying sex or advertising the sale of someone else’s sex trade services.

It is also illegal for establishments like massage parlours or escort services to sell sex. It is legal to be a sex worker, thought it is near impossible to legally work. The government believes it’s simply trying to deter people from entering sex work. But Johns scared of legal punishment are more likely to be anxious and, as a result, aggressive. This means sex workers have less time to clearly communicate terms; there is not enough time to adequately screen. It doesn’t help that it’s also illegal for sex workers to work together—further lessening safety. A year old in November, the new legislation has already done a lot of damage, particularly amongst those it is supposedly trying to save.

After raiding 20 Ottawa massage and body rub parlours late last April, police detained 11 women. These women will be deported, and this trend is likely to continue. If our federal government is so interested in saving sex workers, why would they put them through the trauma of Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) inspections, before sending them back to possibly more abusive situations? “Migrant sex workers are often the target of robbery and assault. They are afraid to report to police or seek help because they do not want to be deported,” Elene Lam of Butterfly—Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network told media in May. “Investigations under the guise of trafficking and police raids make the situation even worse. It makes people hide further underground, and makes them more vulnerable to violence and endangers their safety.”

Not that things are much safer in Stephen Harper’s Canada. Indigenous women in sex work operate in a nation where Indigenous people are over-represented in
prisons, and colonialism has normalized violence against Indigenous women. This oppression is only amplified when these women are in sex work, as is shown with the abductions and murders of Indigenous women, mostly sex workers, in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side. This violence is so frequent British Columbia’s Highway 16 is called the Highway of Tears. “Native women are not afforded the same level of agency as everyone else,” Indigenous feminists and activists Naomi Sayers and Sarah Hunt wrote last January for The Globe and Mail. “They are merely passive bodies waiting to be violated.” Sayers and Hunt continue to say they have no faith that the Canadian justice system will protect them, when it is clear that they have a better chance of being arrested.

Take the recent case of Cindy Gladue, which has set a dismal, unfortunate precedent for dehumanizing court evidence. An Indigenous woman and a sex worker, she was killed four years ago in an Edmonton motel room. When her body was found, authorities discovered an 11 cm wound in the 36-year-old mother’s vagina. It appears to be caused by a sharp object, but Bradley Barton, Gladue’s alleged murderer, told the courts that his fingers caused the wounds during rough consensual sex. The victim’s actual vagina was brought to court as evidence. It was a move many see as a complete disregard for her life, as well as the female body.

This was also done before a jury that had only two women on it and did not include a single Indigenous person. Barton was initially found not guilty. Thankfully, protests arose across the country. It was announced during these rallies on April 2 that Barton’s acquittal was appealed. Good news, but the message had already been sent: In Canada, Indigenous women, especially those working as sex workers, are not seen as human. As Harper told Peter Mansbridge during a December 2014 interview on CBC, these women are not high on the Conservative radar.

The government is pushing their morals onto others, to the extent of endangering lives. Maybe, they should have attended the solidarity rally in June where the voices of sex workers could be heard loudly, demanding rights, not rescue. Certainly, I would have shared my markers.

What we have, largely, is a budget based in politics, not policy—more a campaign advertisement than an economic document. Thanks to a consistent and persistent PR campaign over the past decade, the government needed an operating surplus to uphold its claim of competent fiscal management—a necessity it deliberately created. Harper works tirelessly to convince Canadians the economy is simple. That spending is bad, taxes are bad, a balanced budget is good, and that no party understands that but his. If there’s any indication of Harper’s widereaching political success, it’s that today every party agrees a balanced budget is necessary; they only disagree on when they’ll get there.

Unfortunately, when a budget becomes a political answer, rather than an economic one, many Canadians lose. Let’s look at the document itself. It was never really balanced. With slumping oil prices and slow growth, a surplus wouldn’t come without consequences. The feds delayed the release of the budget by weeks so they could sell off $2.1 billion of its General Motors shares—a move Stanford, known for his past work with the Canadian Auto Worker’s Union, says will hurt future investment from GM. Then, it dipped into the Employment Insurance operating surplus for a cool $3.4 billion. (Meanwhile nearly 60 percent of unemployed Canadians are ineligible for EI.) Finally, the feds took $2 billion from the emergency contingency fund. And yet, we get headlines that boldly declare “balanced.”

In reality, the budget “bakes in growing income inequality” warns Armine Yalnizyan, a leading economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. It’s low on meaningful investment. It barely nods to public transportation or infrastructure spending. There is nothing for Canada’s youth. What it does promise is a familiar pattern: tax breaks that disproportionately favour the wealthy, and new ways to reduce the abilities of government. And so we get a government that consistently seeks ways to reduce revenue streams, increasing dependence on a select few, such as Canada’s oil economy. “[The Conservatives] have no plan other than $100 a barrel oil,” says Yalnizyan. “That’s their economic action plan.”

In a way, it’s nothing new. Under Harper’s leadership, the Conservatives have been remarkably consistent in their messaging since the party’s victorious 2006 campaign. That platform declared “Canadians deserve to keep more of their own money,” which acted as a (often mis-) guiding principle for the government. Under Harper, the government slashed corporate tax rates, rolled back the (since renamed) goods and services tax, and introduced other boutique tax cuts. In doing so, the government deprived the treasury of over $300 billion, limiting the country’s resources during a tough economic recession.

An economy, however, needs an engine, argues Stanford—when the public isn’t spending money, it falls to the government to open its wallet. Instead, it cut off its source of revenue. When asked for the government’s guiding economic principle then and now, Yalnizyan answers quickly: “To write themselves out of a job description.”

Which brings us to today. In place of a truly thriving economy, we get policy made for politics. Canada’s economy is fragile. The oil slump is real, and the country’s dependence on the energy sector has been exposed. People aren’t spending money. Economists say the economy shrunk in the first quarter of 2015, and that will likely continue. We have a budget that isn’t made to govern and an economy that isn’t made for the majority of Canadians. For Stanford, an evaluation of this government is easy. “The economy,” he says, “has performed worse under the Harper Conservatives than any other government in Canada’s post-war history.” Well, in every way but politics, that is.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer, meanwhile, announced that the government’s operative budget will— based on overly-optimistic projections—actually sit in deficit at the end of this year. But that never really mattered to the Conservatives. It was the headlines they were after.

Yet, at the same time, rights on paper don’t always translate into lived rights. And, despite our reputation as a supposed LGBTQ leader, Canada itself is still missing important on-paper rights. Over the past nine years, our federal government’s actions when it comes to LBGTQ rights have been inconsistent—even confounding.

Here in Canada, for instance, queer youth are grossly misrepresented amongst the homeless population, accounting for 25–40 percent. Members of the federal Conservative Party have also actively blocked the advancement of trans rights at home with endless delays of Bill C-279, which seeks to give transgender people basic Charter protections. The back-and-forth doesn’t stop there: The feds cut funding to gay organizations, such as the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network in 2012 and Pride Toronto in 2010—yet a 600-person gay Conservative party called Fabulous Blue Tent was thrown in 2011 to bring gay Conservatives together during the Party’s convention. That same weekend, the Tories passed a resolution supporting religious organizations’ refusal to perform same-sex marriages. Previously, in 2005, Harper had campaigned on the promise to repeal same-sex marriage.

And, it doesn’t stop there. Here, we examine the Conservatives sad, confusing track record:

TRANS RIGHTS
Within the Conservative Party, there are LGBTQsupportive caucus members, but they are in the minority, despite the now-biennial Fabulous Blue Tent party. When Bill C-279—to grant transgender Canadians equal protection under the law—passed through the House of Commons, only 18 of 155 Tory MPs voted in favour. Conservative MP Rob Anders called it a “bathroom bill,” insisting its goal was to give creepy men access to women’s washrooms. All other party MPs who voted were unanimously in support of C-279.

The bill is currently sitting in the Conservative-dominated Senate, and will almost surely be killed at election time—having to retrace its process through the House again. Now more than 10 years in the making, this would be the second time the bill was forced back to square one. Yet, if passed, it will give trans people legal recourse against things such as being fired and being denied housing, and will also make sky-high rates of violence punishable as hate crimes.

HARPER TRIES TO MOVE BACKWARDS
Opposing queer rights is nothing new for Harper. Early on in 1994, he fought plans to introduce same-sex spousal benefits in Canada. In 2005, after same-sex marriage was legalized, he promised to bring legislation defining marriage as “the union of one man and one woman.” When this plan was defeated shortly after his election, he decided to leave the issue alone, saying, “I don’t see reopening this question [of marriage] in the future.”

FUNDING CUTS
After more than 20 years of federal funding, the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network faced cuts in 2012 because it “may have used the funds for advocacy.” After receiving a “significant portion of its funding from Ottawa” over its entire existence, the organization sought renewal of the same funding but the Public Health Agency of Canada rejected 16 of its 20 proposals.

In 2006, shortly after taking power, the Conservative Party also cut the entire budget of a program called Court Challenges, which had made public funds available for individuals launching human rights challenges in court. Used by those making challenges on the basis of sexual orientation and more, the fund had helped homosexual couples secure spousal benefits and achieve equality protection. Harper’s chief of staff from 2005-2008, Ian Brodie, used his PhD to argue the program unfairly empowered homosexuals and other minority groups. The Conservatives had killed the program in 1992 originally, only to have it revived by the Liberals. Now the Cons have resuscitated it, but with a narrowed focus on only linguistic minorities.

PROGRESS, PR, OR SOMETHING ELSE?
Canada’s immigration office under Harper worked with Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees to fast-track 100 gay Iranians into Canada, saving them from possible execution. Harper also personally lobbied Uganda’s president in 2009 over a law that would imprison gay people for life. Canada even gave $200,000 to Ugandan groups to fight the law. Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird has made repeated international public statements condemning countries that criminalize homosexuality, and during the 2014 Olympics Baird and Harper spoke out against the Russian “gay propaganda” law that makes it illegal for anyone to distribute gay rights materials.

Yet, speaking against the criminalization of LGBTQ people is not the same as active support. In regards to Russia in particular, Ontario Conservative MP Scott Reid, who chairs the Commons’ subcommittee on international human rights, said it’s an issue of freedom of speech. Saskatchewan Conservative backbencher Maurice Vellacott said he believes LGBTQ folks should have basic protections, but that he wouldn’t want his kids exposed to “homosexual propaganda.” These attitudes offer insight into the mixed messages of the Conservative Party when it comes to queer rights. Whatever its motives are for this dissonance, the fact remains there’s a lot of work to be done in this country before queer liberation becomes a reality.

Also problematic: In 2010, when the Conservatives cut the long-form census, they also nixed the Participation and Activity Limitation Survey, better known by its acronym, PALS—those who received the survey were the same people who, on their census form, said they had a disability. PALS was used to track the needs of Canadians with disabilities, and looked at everything from rates of poverty, violence and abuse, to quality of housing, education and employment, and participation in community and civic activities. From there, government, but also more importantly advocacy groups, could use the data to better determine needed supports. The government has since introduced the Canadian Survey on Disability, but acknowledges that its data sets can’t be compared to PALS because of different questions and, notably, a different definition of the actual term “disability”—stunting a body of research. The new survey also received fewer responses, which advocates feared.

Perhaps that data could have been used to help the government figure out how to spend the near $40-million budget for the Opportunities Fund, a fund designed to help those prepare for, maintain or find employment. Unfortunately, in 2013-2014, the government failed to allocate one-quarter of its funding—undermining yet another promising initiative for those with disabilities.

Since that first speech, Canada’s international environmental reputation has shifted quickly under the Harper Conservatives. We were once considered an influential environmental leader, but now are what famed environmentalist Bill McKibben calls, “an obstacle to international climate concerns.” That’s thanks to several major changes, the breadth of which we’ll review here.

INTERNATIONAL EMBARRASSMENT
After signing the Kyoto Protocol on carbon pollution in 1997, Canada withdrew 14 years later in late 2011. It’s the only country to have done so. Then in 2013, the government pulled out of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification—and again has done so solo. Established in 1994, the convention is a key legally-binding international agreement addressing environment, development, and sustainability. Listen: you can hear Canada’s diplomatic credibility crumbling.

DEMOLISHING LAWS
In 1992, the Government of Canada enacted the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, created to evaluate and mitigate negative environmental effects possibly caused by industrial projects. In 2012 the entire act was repealed and replaced with “CEAA 2012.” The new version applies to a much smaller scope of projects, expands ministerial discretion, and narrows the scope of assessments. The Canadian Environmental Law Association called this “an unjustified and ill-conceived rollback of federal environmental law.”

After the change, nearly 3,000 environmental project assessments were cancelled. As a result, environmentally- harmful projects will face less red tape in gaining approval. “It’s streamlining the review process for our pipelines,” quips Peter Louwe, communications officer for Greenpeace Vancouver.

RUINING PROTECTIONS
Besides weakening The Fisheries Act to the point where it doesn’t protect most fish, the Cons have also rewritten The Navigable Waters Protection Act so that it no longer protects most lakes and rivers. “There is no environmental protection for our waters unless there’s a commercial aspect to it,” says Louwe. Since Canada contains 20 percent of the world’s fresh water as well as the world’s longest coastline, changes to these acts are of worldwide concern.

SILENCING SCIENCE
After Environment Canada senior research scientist David Tarasick published on one of the biggest ozone holes ever found over the Arctic in 2011, he was forbidden to speak with media for nearly three weeks. Once given permission, his calls were supervised by Environment Canada officials. In speaking of the incident, he wrote to a reporter, “My apologies for the strange behaviour of EC [Environment Canada],” adding if it were up to him, he’d grant the interview.

All federal scientists now face regulations from Ottawa deciding if they can talk, how, and when. Approved interviews are taped, and often approval is not forthcoming until after deadlines have passed. When this happens, journalists receive government-approved written answers. Between 2008-2014, the federal government cut the jobs of more than 2,000 scientists. In 2014, it announced plans to close seven of its 11 Fisheries and Oceans Canada libraries.

HIT ’EM WHERE IT HURTS
Environment Canada, the government department charged with protecting the environment, is quickly having its capacity drained. Between 2010- 2012, the federal government cut 20 percent of its budget (made official right after the Cons became a majority), and from 2014– 2017 another 28 percent will be cut. This translates to hundreds of job losses and lost programs.

Environment Canada’s ozone-monitoring program, host to the world’s archive of ozone data and relied upon by scientists worldwide, several monitoring stations closed due to lack of funding, and the lone person running the archives was laid off.

The list goes on: the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, which has provided research on sustainable development since 1988, and was established by a previous Conservative government, is no more. Also included in the cuts: Monitoring for heavy metals and toxic contaminants, the Climate Action Network, Sierra Club of B.C., The Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, and many other organizations.

AUDITS
Meanwhile the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) is auditing charities. In 2012 the government tightened rules and created a special budget so the CRA could check on charities’ political activities. EthicalOil.org, founded by Harper’s aide Alykhan Velshi, made a series of complaints to the CRA about environmental groups. The David Suzuki Foundation, Tides Canada, Equiterre, and Environmental Defence, three of those EthicalOil.org targeted in its complaints, were audited—though the government denies any link with CRA’s activities.

THE KICKER
“I think C-51 should just be repealed because of the way it targets First Nations and environmentalists,” says U of T’s Stewart. This piece of legislation, adopted in June, adds power to security agencies collecting information on anything that “undermines the security of Canada,” including interfering with economic stability or “critical infrastructure.” It also gives the Canadian Security Intelligence Service power to react to these perceived threats. Many environmentalists and activists believe this means them. An RCMP document obtained by Greenpeace labels the “anti-petroleum movement” as a growing and violent threat.“There’s not much more damage that one person would be able to do to the environment of a country,” says Vancouver’s Louwe, referring to Harper.

And yet, the Harper government hasn’t managed to build any pipelines. In the face of such blatant injustice, Canadian people have risen up, building a stronger environmental movement that is not only more resolved, but broader, including people from a wider range of backgrounds and interests than before. And Stewart points out that although this government has done a lot for industry, the more obvious it becomes to the public that its government is acting as a cheerleader for big oil, the less social licence industry has in people’s minds. And this means that whatever the legacy of the Harper government leaves us, it also leaves a more politicized, involved, and activated country of people who will do what it takes to protect what matters.

After nine years of Stephen Harper’s federal Conservative government, Canadians know less than ever about how their government is governing. We have now seen an onslaught of legislation, media protocols, and funding cuts designed to keep information hidden and people silent. Scientists, academics and librarians are all subject to The Media Relations Protocol, an Orwellian piece of legislation implemented in 2007, that was once meant for climate change researchers, but has now bled into all areas. It states that government employees should have one unified voice and stipulates that if government scientists and academics are approached by media or concerned citizens, that they respond to inquiries with “approved lines.”

But of the various changes we have seen throughout the nearly, decade-long leadership of Mr. Harper, Bill C-51 offers perhaps the most nefarious implications to democracy in Canada. Under Bill C-51 confidential information can be disclosed “to any person, for any purpose.” Canadians’ tax information, health and passport applications are just some of the information now freely shared between government departments. Private conversations can be interpreted as terrorism and result in the detention of Canadians for up to five years. Online posts will be censored under C-51 and internet service providers and telecom providers can be directed to remove any content deemed as terrorist propaganda. If a you teach political science, and want your students to see a video from a group like ISIS or Boko Haram, as well as material condemning them, the material could be forcibly taken down from your web and social media sites. C-51 would also allow for you to be identified and located for posting such materials, says Turk.

Any group activities that are considered to challenge the security of Canada, including those that affect the economic stability of Canada, such as a strike of auto workers or oil workers, are offences under Bill C-51. Protests and strikes that lack the proper permits will also become causalities of this new legislation—something that could, for instance, negatively affect protests to defend aboriginal land claims or to oppose pipelines. A protest can be deemed “unlawful,” adds Turk, for reasons as trivial as violating a noise by-law by using a megaphone.

To add to the list of various civil rights violations, Canadians’ ability to move freely across borders may be limited under C-51. The bill extends the Passenger Protect Program so the government has the ability to add anyone to the no-fly list. People on the list could be denied boarding passes. No transparency will be offered—a person can be denied a boarding pass without being given a reason. Bill C-51 will also empower Canadian customs officers with the increased ability to search through people’s possessions and confiscate anything they consider to be terrorist propaganda, including “writings, signs, visible representations or audio recordings.” This newfound authority could include computer and phone searches, and would give border officials full discretion to choose which materials to seize. “The bigger threat than terrorists is a government that tries to take away our democracy,” says Turk, “in order to try and fight to save democracy.”

A recent analysis conducted by the Toronto Star, spanning from June 2013–July 2014, reveals the disturbing lack of transparency offered by the Canadian Government when it comes to the public’s right to know. Of the 28,000 requests made for government records, for instance, a mere 21 percent were returned redaction-free. The report also found the government was unable to find records 18 percent of the time. Only 26 percent of information requests directed to Environment Canada were left uncensored.

Such trends have deeply disturbed Mark Bourrie, Carleton University professor, political activist, and author. His latest book, Kill the Messengers, is a 400-page investigation into the Harper government’s unofficial mandate of muzzling. Bourrie describes the Harper-imposed media protocol documents as a “willful blindness.” If the federal government convinces itself that it does not see issues such as climate change, for instance, he says, it can believe they don’t exist. In that case, the media relations protocol controls information so that a specific narrative on history, science, and public policy can be set, he adds. “It’s like going into a card game with a deck of cards up your sleeve,” says Bourrie. “Because you can’t argue science with people if you don’t know the science.”

In Kill The Messengers, Bourrie reveals that between 2007–2012, media coverage on climate change issues fell by 80 percent. In his research, Bourrie found that the Harper government held meetings on ways to cut Environment Canada’s budget by $60 million in the 2012 federal budget and made sure that media and communications specialists were present in the room to weave a Harper-friendly narrative. These trends have put many people in the academic community on alert. Organizations such as Scientists For The Right to Know have formed with a mission to educate Canadians on the dismantling of freedom of speech and to advocate for more transparency surrounding government research. “Canadians are paying for this research,” says Chloe Shantz-Hilkes, executive director of Scientists for the Right to Know. “These are tax-funded studies that we don’t get to hear about because of the communication protocols. That is an absolute violation of our right to know about ourselves, the world around us, our environment, and how it’s changing.”

Not only is the Canadian government keeping publicly-funded research under wraps, it also eliminated the long-form census in 2010—a chief method of collecting data needed to research issues such as poverty, income inequality, and transportation. And it has done so in spite of the protests of its citizens. Killing the long-form census, says Turk, stripped Canadians of the ability to bring evidence to bear on these issues. To illustrate the overwhelming opposition to the government’s decision Turk lists a lengthy catalogue of organizations of Canadians who fought to keep the census, including such disparate groups as the Vancouver Board of Trades, the Canadian Jewish Congress, and the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. “The government could find no organization that supported its position,” says Turk, who testified at several parliamentary hearings on the subject. “Labour unions, chambers of commerce—everybody was saying, ‘You can’t do this.’ But they did it anyway.”

Through media protocols, legislation and funding cuts a government has become all-powerful and all-seeing—yet it’s left a society that is conversely uninformed and because of this, ultimately, powerless. “The government has an ideological agenda and is absolutely single minded about imposing it,” says Turk. “And that’s what is really frightening.”

It’s not a cheap project to run—because of permafrost, growing soil has to be flown to the community. But Vuntut Gwitchin staff say the garden is important for the community, to provide both a place for people to come together and fresh, locally-grown food. Old Crow isn’t accessible by road, so groceries arrive on a plane and they’re expensive. “Because we’re so far north, there’s a sense of pride in what can be grown,” says Lindsay Johnston, the First Nation’s recreation coordinator. “Here’s this good local food. You know where it came from.” The garden is a grassroots effort to increase Old Crow’s food security and affordability.

Johnston says produce availability and prices have improved since a new co-op grocery store opened in town, but she admits costs are still much higher than in southern Canada. A pineapple, for example, costs $9. A two-litre carton of milk costs about $7.99. A bag of cherries costs $12 per pound.

Food’s hefty price tag is a problem in northern communities across the country, from the Yukon to Nunavut to Labrador. As an attempted remedy, the federal government introduced the Nutrition North program in 2011, offering retailers subsidies on staple perishable items such as eggs, milk, meat, and frozen fruits and vegetables. Retailers are then responsible for selling these goods at a discounted price.

But an audit completed by the Attorney General of Canada in the fall of 2014 found that Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada (AANDC) hadn’t properly verified whether retailers were doing this. It’s not the only Northern issue that critics argue the government has bungled. They point to a overall flawed approach to dealing with Canada’s massive North.

Take, for instance, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s six-day sojourn across the region, which last year cost taxpayers more than $786,000—at the same time many Northerners struggle daily to pay for food and housing. Harper’s annual tour of the North has been described by some as nothing more than a photo op, a hurried trip of funding announcements, staged photos with beautiful backdrops, and little else. Yet Harper claims to love the North; he’s said before his tour is the highlight of his summer. (This year, he didn’t embark on the journey; instead he’ll be focusing on the October election, according to reports.)

On these tours in the past, Harper has posed for photos wearing a parka, firing a gun, and eating seal meat. He’s called the expansive area “a great treasure house” due to its plentiful minerals and resources. But does his emphasis on resource development and Arctic sovereignty come at the expense of giving proper attention to the North’s social issues, such as health and lack of affordable housing? Reporters have questioned him about this, and about whether he’s left social problems up to the territorial governments—but have received few satisfactory answers. Mental health services remain a grave concern for northern residents, particularly in Nunavut, where the suicide rate is the highest in Canada. The territory of 36,000 experienced 45 suicides in 2013, a record number, and 27 in 2014, including that of an 11-year-old boy. Yet, on his Northern tour last summer, Harper made no mention of mental health, even though he stopped in the suicide capital.

“Our government understands that Canadians who live, work and raise families in this part of the country face unique challenges,” the prime minister said at the tour’s kick-off in Whitehorse. “Let’s call them Canadian challenges because after all Canada is the North and the North is Canada.” The key to transforming these challenges into opportunities, Harper said, is—apparently—scientific knowledge
and discovery, going on to announce a new $17-million Arctic program through the National Research Council.

The cries for an inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women are also heightened in the North. Rates of violence against women are significantly higher in the territories than in the rest of Canada: four times, nine times and 13 times the national average in the Yukon, NWT, and Nunavut, respectively. Despite this, Harper has rejected calls for such an inquiry. While in Whitehorse last summer, he said the country’s 1,000-plus cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls aren’t a “sociological phenomenon,” but a crime. Opposition leaders and aboriginal organizations quickly, and harshly, criticized Harper for his remarks. Marian Horne, president of the Yukon Aboriginal Women’s Council, told the Whitehorse Star his comments showed the prime minister’s “flagrant disregard” for First Nations people and their well-being.

Yukon First Nations chiefs were also angered over the federal government’s Bill S-6. Approved in the House of Commons in June, it contains amendments to the Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Act. The chiefs have vowed to fight the bill in court, arguing they had no input on four amendments they say violate their land claim agreements and threaten the independence of the assessment board. And in Nunavut, trouble is brewing between the territory’s planning commission and the Harper government. Last year, the commission sued, accusing Ottawa of trying to interfere in a land-use plan for future development in the territory. Created out of the 1993 Nunavut Land Claim Agreement, the commission alleges AANDC refused to provide $1.7 million needed to conduct a final public hearing on the plan, required before it can become law. Then head of the commission, Percy Kabloona, told the Canadian Press at the time that the federal government has shown little support for Inuit management of their own lands.

Meanwhile, back in Old Crow, residents continue to tend to and take pride in their garden. Caitlin Cottrell-Lingenfelter, the Vuntut Gwitchin’s director of health and social programs, says she understands the premise behind Nutrition North, but it just hasn’t worked for people in the country’s remote communities. Bluntly put, she says, it’s failed. The same could be said for much of Harper’s actions, and inactions, in the North.