12 Reasons Why I Did Not Celebrate Canada Day
by Don Weitz
1. The federal-Harper government’s refusal to honor the ‘Kelowna Accord’ that would provide over $5 billion in affordable housing, urgently-needed health care and other essential services to many thousands of Aboriginal People, including children, on First Nations reserves; the ‘Accord’ was signed over 1 year ago by the previous Liberal government, all provincial premiers, and many Chiefs of the Assembly of First Nations.
2. The federal-Harper government’s refusal to provide and guarantee clean and safe drinking water, flush toilets, other sanitation facilities, and essential health care services on all reserves across Canada have \resulted in numerous public health hazards, chronic and debilitating diseases (e.g.,diabetes, tuberculosis, HIV-AIDS), suicides of young children, and preventable deaths.
3. The federal-Harper government’s refusal to provide decent, liveable, and affordable housing on all First Nations reserves.
4. The federal-Harper government’s continuing refusal to establish a national affordable housing policy.
5. The federal-Harper government’s refusal to establish a national, publicly funded childcare program that would create many thousands of urgently needed publicly-subsidized day care spaces for low-income and poor families.
6.The federal-Harper government’s refusal, including the negligence of federal Health Minister Tony Clement, to fully protect Canada’s publicly-funded healthcare system, Medicare, by refusing to enforce the Canada Health Act, such as refusing to outlaw and penalize private clinics and other private health facilities that violate basic principles of the Canada Health Act. As a result, Canada is increasingly becoming a 2-tier healthcare system - one for the rich, one for the poor.
7. The federal-Harper government’s offensive military policies and actions in Afghanistan are a failure and have caused many unnecessary deaths of Canadian soldiers, the bombing-deaths of thousands of of Afghan civilians including hundreds of innocent children (‘collateral damage’), and its complicity in the torture of many Afghan prisoners.
8. The federal-Harper government’s failure to provide national public debate on its militaristic plans and combat role in Afghanistan before ordering thousands of soldiers to that country approximately three years ago - a blatant violation of the democratic process. The government’s anti-democratic militaristic policy has led to the violent deaths of approximately 60 Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, the numbers increase almost every week.
9. The federal-Harper government’s refusal to order pharmaceutical companies to send affordable, urgently needed AIDS drugs to many African countries where HIV AIDS has become a devastating continent-wide epidemic that has already killed millions of people. Despite the government’s ‘commitment to Africa’ several years ago and again publicly announced by Health Minister Tony Clement during the International AIDS Conference in Toronto in August 2006, not one AIDS drug has been shipped from Canada to Africa!
10.The federal-Harper government’s refusal to honor the international ‘Kyoto Agreement’ that requires nations to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions causing catastrophic climate change by specific dates.11.The federal-Harper government, like previous liberal government, has seriously violated and continues to violate the civil and Charter rights of many citizens-such as enforcing its anti-terrorist laws that have unjustly deprived many citizens of their legal and Charter rights , and that have resulted in wrongful convictions, secret trials, trials without jury, denial of the legal right of the accused and their lawyers to know the case or access evidence against them, indefinite imprisonment, deportation, and unlawful imprisonment and torture of many innocent people the Canadian government has labeled ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorist suspect’.
12. The federal government’s support of Canada’s repressive and discriminatory provincial ‘mental health’ laws that authorize preventive and indefinite detention (‘involuntary committal’, ‘warrant of the lieutenant governor’, ‘community treatment order’), and coercive, health-threatening psychiatric procedures such as forced drugging (‘medication’ without informed consent), electroshock (‘ECT’), physical restraints, solitary confinement (‘seclusion’). All of these psychiatric procedures are blatant and persistent violations of international law and human rights—including the United Nations’ Covenant on Political and Civil Rights , the Convention Against Torture, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Don Weitz is a social justice and antipsychiatry activist and producer-host of ‘Antipsychiatry Radio’ un CKLN, and recipient of an Award in Advocacy presented by the Mental Health Legal Committee in Toronto.
