Green Party deputy leader and Fairy Creek land defender appealing to the Supreme Court of Canada
The guardian of B.C.’s old growth trees is now on bail pending appeal.
By: Brandi Morin
In a case that highlights the complex intersection of Indigenous rights, environmental activism, and the Canadian legal system, land defender and Green Party deputy leader Angela Davidson, continues her legal battle after being sentenced to jail for her role in the Fairy Creek forest protests.
Davidson, also known as Rainbow Eyes, a member of the Da’naxda’xw First Nation from northern Vancouver Island, and is the current Green Party’s candidate for the Northwest Territories, was sentenced to 51 days in jail by the B.C. Court of Appeal last week. However, she was released just 24 hours after being taken into custody on April 10th as her legal team filed an application to appeal the case to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The sentence stems from Davidson’s participation in the Fairy Creek protests between 2021 and 2022, where more than 1100 people were arrested for defying court orders that were aimed at protecting logging operations. Davidson was convicted of seven separate offences between May 2021 and January 2022, where she violated various court and bail orders as part of her commitment to protecting the ancient forest.
Her lawyer, Benjamin Isitt, who has represented Davidson for the past two and a half years, explained the recent developments in the case. “She was sentenced by Chief Justice Hinkson of the B.C. Supreme Court. Yesterday, that sentence was thrown out,” Isitt said.
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Are Danielle Smith and Postmedia on Team Trump?
As U.S. tariffs come into effect, Canadians should remain vigilant against foreign interference, from inside and outside our own house.
By: Brad Fraser
There is treason afoot, as well as a colossal waste of Canadian tax dollars. With increasingly serious threats to Canadian sovereignty from the United States, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and the U.S.- hedge-fund-owned Postmedia empire, are looking guilty.
Smith started her current term as Premier by taking part in a stunningly exploitive greenwashing campaign at the climate conference in Dubai a year ago, which cost taxpayers nearly $200,000, and included stays at luxury hotels.
Now, most shockingly of all, in an interview with American far-right Breitbart News, Smith appeared to be in support of Trump. While discussing Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, she said “the perspective that Pierre would bring would be very much in sync with, I think… the new direction in America.” This came after a whirlwind tour of conservative cocktail parties, visits to Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and hobnobbing with the oily Kevin O’Leary, and that academic for morons, Jordan Peterson, who was recently published on the front page of the National Post urging Canadians to take Trump up on his offer.
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We are Canadian youth and we demand an end to fracking on Indigenous land
This federal election, all of our collective futures are at stake.
By: Aishwarya Puttur
Young Canadians have a message for the next government. There will be no “drill, baby drill” on Indigenous land in Canada.
While the infamous words from U.S. president Donald Trump are being echoed by Canadian politicians like Alberta premier Danielle Smith and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, young people will not sit back and watch as our hard-earned money is used to finance the destruction of our futures.
Right now, there are three new fossil-fuel projects that are about to be approved and financed very soon.
Canada’s big banks have pooled out $1.2 trillion in the past nine years into climate-disastrous fossil fuel projects — at the same time, all six big banks have now exited the global banking climate coalition, a betrayal of their 2021 promise to help limit the impacts of the climate crisis.
Young people are tired of waiting.
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While Canadian workers fight Trump, Carney and Poilievre still fail to defend workers
Expanding Canada’s social programs would be a way to punch back at MAGA, but our broken electoral system holds us back.
By: Christo Aivalis
Canadian workers are fighting efforts by billionaires on both sides of the border who are trying to destroy their livelihoods through U.S. president Donald Trump’s tariff war.
Last week in Windsor, Members of UNIFOR launched a factory blockade because the company was trying to ship machines into the United States to evade tariffs.
The workers scored an immediate — if still tentative — victory. Because of their wildcat protest, “the company agreed to unload the tools and dies off the truck… They’ve put the dies back on the shop floor. The union and employer will sit down and discuss multiple solutions.”
We should be clear: Poilievre agrees in large part with the politics of Trumpism, and is making a pivot now as it has hurt him in the polls to be associated with a “maple MAGA” brand.
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‘It’s classist. It’s racist’: Ontario’s overdose death capital braces for more loss
In Thunder Bay, the Ford government’s plan to close harm reduction programs is hitting the community hard.
By: Jon Thompson
Juanita Lawson fidgeted with two scraps of paper as she wound down a meeting with Thunder Bay media on Monday. The interviews marked the official end of her consumption and treatment program, as well as the closure of the only safe supply site in northern Ontario.
The NorWest Community Health Centres CEO didn’t refer to her notes, which consisted only of two anonymous client testimonies. One read, “Safe supply + Path 525 have harmoniously saved my life in so many ways. When they inevitably will no longer be available to us, it’s going to be a very short matter of time until the clients (past clients at that point) will start dying. I will quite likely be one of them.”
Thunder Bay had the highest death rate from opioid overdose in Ontario last year at 69.5 per 100,000 people, four times higher than the provincial rate of 17.5. That rate has increased 663 per cent since record-keeping began in 2016. The local health unit consistently issues warnings over the toxic drug supply and the city has been under an active HIV outbreak since 2019 that disproportionately impacts unhoused people.
Frontline workers are now bracing for what they say will likely be a tide of overdose deaths.
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‘We’re not garbage’: How Buffalo Woman was identified as Ashlee Shingoose
The Anishininew mother has been missing since 2022 — now, her family is one step closer to bringing her home as the Province of Manitoba vows to search for her.
By: Crystal Greene
This is co-published with IndigiNews as part of an ongoing partnership supporting emerging Indigenous investigative journalism.
The Province of Manitoba is committing to search for the remains of Ashlee Shingoose — who was previously unidentified and named Maskode Bizhiki’ikwe (Buffalo Woman) — in hopes that her family can finally bring her home.
After the woman’s identity was revealed at a press conference last week, the room erupted in cheers when the premier vowed to enact a probe of the Brady Road landfill where the body of Tanya Nepinak is also believed to be located.
It’s the second “Winnipeg” landfill that Indigenous families have demanded be searched for their missing and murdered loved ones as they seek closure and justice.
Shingoose’s family spent three years wondering where their loved one was after the Anishininiw (Oji-Cree) mother of three went missing in 2022. During a press conference held by the Winnipeg Police Service on Wednesday, the Chief of their community read out text messages from Shingoose’s parents.
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Dirty, dangerous, crowded, and cruel: judges blast Ontario’s neglect of its detention centres with prisoners sleeping on the floor
Province says there’s room for prisoners in jails, despite overcrowding
By: Stephen Spencer Davis
It was just before 3:15 p.m., and there were no corrections officers in sight when Trevell Greene and another inmate attacked Dashawn Sinclair at the Toronto East Detention Centre on July 23, 2022.
Greene and the other assailant punched, kicked, and stomped on Sinclair for more than five minutes as security cameras rolled. Staff did not intervene, apparently unaware of the prolonged assault in progress, in which Greene used an apple concealed in a sock to beat Sinclair. Security footage shows a group of officers in a nearby corridor as the beating dragged on before passing beneath a camera.
Staff arrived at 3:21, according to time-stamped security footage. By then, Greene and the other assailant, who is not identified in court records reviewed by Ricochet, had broken Sinclair’s jaw. His face was streaked with blood as officers escorted him out of the room.
When Superior Court Justice P. Andras Schreck sentenced Greene for the assault and another crime last September, he highlighted the harsh conditions Greene had endured inside the Toronto East facility, citing several recent decisions in which judges described the sorry state of the institution.
“The government’s response to these criticisms has been to do nothing,” Schreck said in his September 2024 sentencing reasons.
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We want to take a moment to congratulate our team and partners for being selected as finalists for their work in this year’s CAJ Awards.
Huge congratulations to:
Brandi Morin and Geordie Day, nominated for their groundbreaking mini-documentary, The Apache Stronghold standing in the way of a massive coppermine.
Photojournalist Amy Romer, and our valued partner Indiginews, nominated for Romer’s exceptional photojournalism alongside Brandi Morin.
And finally, Crystal Greene, for her portfolio being nominated for the JHR / CAJ Emerging Indigenous Journalist Award.
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