Brandi Morin in Ecuador: A rebel priest, a crusading lawyer, and a Canadian mining company
The company sees golden dollar signs, while the community fears their water sources will become ‘territories of death’
By: Brandi Morin
Over the past six months, Indigenous journalist Brandi Morin has travelled repeatedly to Ecuador, reporting on the impact of Canadian mining projects on the Indigenous Peoples who live there. In her latest investigation, she reports from the rolling hills outside the city of Cuenca, Ecuador, where Dundee Precious Metals, a Canadian company, plans to develop the underground gold mine.
This investigation is part of our series Canadian Mining in Ecuador.“
Multinationals, particularly Canadian ones, have come here as the Europeans arrived in 1492, without asking for permission, without authorization,” Yaku Pérez, a lawyer and lifelong environmental defender, explains, his voice measured, but firm. “And with approval of the governments, they have appropriated our territories.”
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Community in crisis: The closure of Neskantaga First Nation’s health centre compounding state of emergency — that’s about to get worse
Ontario’s Bill 5 threatens to trample Indigenous rights to clear the path for development on their land
By: Jon Thompson
Five weeks after Neskantaga’s chief and council declared a state of emergency and evacuation, they shuttered the community’s nursing station permanently after soil tests revealed fuel in the groundwater under the building.
Chief Gary Quisess said results show either a spill or a leakage has occurred and that they confirm the site has no long-term viability as a health centre. An evacuation order was issued on April 14.
Now Ontario Premier Doug Ford has proposed Bill 5, the Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act.
The Act would also allow for fast-tracked permit granting and development on their land for “special economic zones.” Ford has said the first such designated zone would be in the proposed Ring of Fire, a 5,000-square-kilometre mineral deposit downriver from Neskantaga.
Quisess said between the school, the health centre, a 30-year boil-water advisory — the longest in the entire country — an opioid crisis, and poor roads, the link between the Crown failing to honour basic needs in local infrastructure and constitutional partnerships over major resource projects is clear to the community.
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RBC is dropping its sustainable finance goals. How will Mark Carney respond?
Canada’s new prime minister has spent years trying get banks to take the climate crisis seriously — now is the moment when it counts
By: Richard Brooks
As millions of us awaited the results of who would be Canada’s next Prime Minister, the country’s largest bank tried to bury a climate bombshell.
As first reported by Reuters, the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) attempted to use the cover of the federal election to release its Sustainability Report, including an announcement shaking corporate boardrooms, finance conferences, and communities alike: RBC is abandoning its sustainable finance targets and walking back other climate commitments.
There have always been issues with RBC’s sustainable finance target, which increased in 2021 to reach $500 billion of financing by the end of 2025. For example, RBC counted some loans to fossil fuel companies towards this target. That’s why a complaint was filed with Canada’s Competition Bureau in 2022.
The Competition Bureau opened an investigation into the bank’s misleading claims that it is a climate leader despite its continued financing of fossil fuel projects
This presents a fork in the road to Prime Minister Carney, with his newly launched catchphrase of “Build, Baby, Build.” Trump’s hostile tariffs, while attempting to hold our economy hostage, are also giving companies an excuse for backsliding cloaked in more protectionist, “Elbows Up” propaganda.
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This week on the podcast, we discuss the housing crisis with Leilani Farha, who spends much of her time thinking about ways to make housing more accessible and affordable for people everywhere.
The Canadian lawyer, human rights advocate, and former United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing sits down in studio with host Adrian Harewood for a wide-reaching conversation. Leilani connects the dots between the financialization of housing, the eroding global human rights project, and how Palestinians in particular were never meant to be included in that. Leilani Farha is currently the Global Director of the Shift, a human rights organization focusing on housing, finance and climate.
Listen to In Bed with the Elephant wherever you get podcasts.
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Treaty rights at risk: How Alberta premier Danielle Smith is threatening Canada’s Indigenous foundation
As separatists prepare to trigger a referendum, First Nation leaders prepare for a fight
By: Brandi Morin
In a direct challenge to Canada’s constitutional framework, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s controversial Bill 54 has ignited fierce opposition from First Nations leaders across the province. Behind the scenes of this escalating political crisis stands Cara Currie-Hall, a seasoned political strategist from Montana First Nation in Maskwacis, who is coordinating an emergency response from Treaty Chiefs that could reshape Alberta’s political landscape.
Bill 54 would lower the threshold for citizen-led referendums in the province, paving the way for a vote on separatism.
At the heart of the controversy is Bill 54, legislation that critics say makes it dangerously easy for Alberta to separate from Canada. According to Brooks Arcand-Paul, NDP MLA for Edmonton-West Henday and a member of Alexander First Nation, the bill’s implications are profoundly troubling.
Arcand-Paul, a lawyer specializing in Indigenous law and litigation, who proudly identifies as a “treaty lawyer,” has been tracking the legislation closely. He notes that under the proposed amendments to the Citizen Initiative Act, the threshold for triggering a referendum has been drastically lowered to just 10 per cent of those who voted in the last general election.
“That’s 177,000 people that get to determine the fate of the province,” Arcand-Paul explained. “How are they turning this into separation without having a conversation with our Nation? Because this is all treaty land. They can’t just do that.”
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Our children see themselves in the images of Gaza
What do I tell my daughter when she asks about the unimaginable horrors she sees on screens everyday?
By: Shenaz Kermalli
In Gaza, a child is being killed every 45 minutes. At this moment, two million people are teetering on the edge of starvation.
United Nations workers, journalists, mothers, fathers, the elderly — all are targets in the crosshairs of Israeli tanks.
And nine — yes – just nine — aid trucks were allowed into Gaza on Monday after a three-month blockade.
Are we witnessing anything less than the collapse of humanity?
Next month my 11-year-old will be visiting the Toronto Holocaust Museum after spending the last few months learning about the horrors of the Second World War. She’s looking forward to the field trip. But she has some questions.
“Why did they say ‘Never Again’ after the Holocaust if they’re doing this to Palestinians now?” she asks after stopping at an image on my Instagram feed of an eight-year-old child with grey hair and white patches on her skin. Lana Al-Sharif was diagnosed with vitiligo after suffering a severe panic attack following an Israeli air strike on her neighbourhood last year.
“Did they mean that it should never happen to Jews again, or to anyone?”
What do I say?
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We can’t talk about anti-Asian racism without talking about anti-Palestinian racism
On the 77th anniversary of the Nakba, Asians in Canada must reaffirm solidarity with Palestinian brethren
By: Vincent Wong
Vincent Wong is an Assistant Professor at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law where he teaches courses in Access to Justice and Asian Canadians and the Law. He writes:
This Asian Heritage Month, we must urgently remind ourselves that — in the words of novelist and scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen — Palestine is in Asia.
As Asians in the settler-colonial nation of Canada, this simple fact has profound implications for our reflections, histories, and collective obligations in this moment. We cannot in good faith discuss anti-Asian racism without reckoning with the ongoing 19-month-long Western-backed Israeli genocide of Palestinians — a West Asian people so dehumanized and discriminated against that those supporting their collective rights in Canada have faced unprecedented criminalization, surveillance, expulsion, administrative reprisal, and workplace repercussions. To excise Palestinians from Asian diasporic demands for justice is to betray the principles and struggles that necessitated organizing around the Asian Canadian identity in the first place. This is because, at least in part, anti-Palestinian racism is anti-Asian racism.
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