apatheticman posted:

https://twitter.com/CBCMeg/status/1409991814216617984?s=20

I should just really stop reading the news.

Arcsquad12 posted:

One month for murder these days.

flakeloaf posted:

The easier fruit to pick is the court's conclusion that the cop who wore a blackface costume wasn't a racist, while he was bouncing a Black woman's face off the floor

infernal machines posted:

If the Prime Minister does it, who are we to throw stones?

Starks posted:

I get what you’re saying but there is a very recent and obvious example of people giving a poo poo about excess deaths. When the average CTV watcher hears “heatwave deaths”, they’re not usually thinking of the homeless, they’re thinking of their grandparents, just like they did with COVID.

The timing of Horgan’s comments as we come out of a 15-month period of checking daily death counts makes them all the more psycho. And on top of that, I don’t think many people see this as just a blip, but just the beginning.

flakeloaf posted:

the cop who wore a blackface costume wasn't a racist

quote:

Kafi was Black, and while there was no evidence presented at trial that the assault was motivated by racism

PittTheElder posted:

how is our judicial system this useless and ineffectual?

Starks posted:

I get what you’re saying but there is a very recent and obvious example of people giving a poo poo about excess deaths. When the average CTV watcher hears “heatwave deaths”, they’re not usually thinking of the homeless, they’re thinking of their grandparents, just like they did with COVID.

The timing of Horgan’s comments as we come out of a 15-month period of checking daily death counts makes them all the more psycho. And on top of that, I don’t think many people see this as just a blip, but just the beginning.

PittTheElder posted:

lol holy gently caress. hopefully the crown is going to ap

how is our judicial system this useless and ineffectual?

Arcsquad12 posted:

One month for murder these days.

flakeloaf posted:

Aggravating factors: Defendant is a police officer, was executing his duties in the moments leading up to the assault, had clear UOF guidelines, abused his authority, subject was defenseless and in handcuffs, bodily harm was to the face and caused/exacerbated MH symptoms

Mitigating factors: ?

Sentencing is a dark mystery I wouldn't understand if I spend the next 40 years reading PSRs with the actual sentences stapled to the cover pages, but I don't understand why any leniency here was necessary

infernal machines posted:

My general impression from cases like Forcillo's was a general unwillingness to punish police for using their "professional judgement" in the line of duty, even when that judgement was absolutely terrible and the sole cause of the offense.

That may be absolute bullshit, it's just the impression I got from the reporting on his trial.

apatheticman posted:

https://twitter.com/CBCMeg/status/1409991814216617984?s=20

Drunk Canuck posted:

On the back of that news from last night, is when some ol' Albertan premier hopeful sent out a perfectly clear message of police support.
https://twitter.com/RachelNotley/status/1410058015189966853?s=19


Just beautiful.

You loving disaster of a provincial NDP party.

infernal machines posted:

All this hullabaloo about defunding the police and the UCP just goes and does it.

Incredible.

quote:

A Mining Startup’s Rush for Underwater Metals Comes With Deep Risks
DeepGreen built a nearly $3 billion valuation on the dream of gently excavating the ocean floor. Now environmentalists want to block its plans to go public.

By Todd Woody
June 23, 2021, 10:33 PM CDT Updated on June 24, 2021, 2:35 PM CDT

A seabed mining startup, DeepGreen Metals Inc., has successfully sold itself to investors as a game-changing source of minerals to make electric car batteries that can be obtained in abundance—and at great profit—while minimizing the environmental destruction of mining on land.

But there’s strong scientific evidence that the seabed targeted for mining is in fact one of the most biodiverse places on the planet—and increasing reason to worry about DeepGreen’s tantalizing promises. Bloomberg Green’s examination of corporate and legal filings, regulatory records and other documents raises questions about DeepGreen’s business plans. Previously undisclosed agreements with developing island states in the South Pacific show the company’s political and financial leverage over its partners, who are dependent on its expertise to exploit their seabed resources and obligated to ensure DeepGreen’s compliance with international environmental regulations.

For years, the Canadian-registered startup has been pitching a solution to climate change that can be found 13,000 feet below the sea. That’s where potato-sized polymetallic nodules rich in cobalt, nickel and copper cover the ocean floor by the billions. DeepGreen Chief Executive Officer Gerard Barron calls these nodules “a battery in a rock.”

The deep ocean holds the world’s largest estimated reserves of minerals, potentially worth trillions of dollars. While seabed mining remains technologically and commercially unproven, rising demand and prices for metals crucial to decarbonization are already unleashing a gold rush to the bottom of the sea. The minerals can be gently extracted, at least according to DeepGreen’s public relations campaign, thus avoiding the toll of terrestrial mining and powering the transition to a clean-energy future.

In a statement, DeepGreen said it doesn’t view mining on land or underwater as sustainable. “The only path to sustainable metals is to build up enough metal stock to shift away from mined to recycled metals,” says Dan Porras, the company’s head of communications and brand. He added: “Our stated objective is to inject enough primary metal stock into the system to enable this shift… and exit primary extraction as soon as possible.”

Scientists say DeepGreen officials have mischaracterized the ocean floor as less vulnerable to harm from mining. It’s “a very deep, dark, very monotonous kind of place,” the company’s chief ocean scientist, Greg Stone, said in a 2019 podcast interview. “We're not talking about vibrant coral reefs, we're not talking about herds of tuna or whales,” he said. The impact from nodule mining? “The longer-term disruption, if you can even call it that, would settle down certainly within months.”

The podcast host was skeptical of this light-touch mining. “It sounds like I'm helping you guys brainwash,” he said. “All we got to do is go pick them up? It can’t be like that.”

It isn’t. Scientists have discovered in recent years that deep-sea life where DeepGreen would mine persists on timescales that dwarf human existence. Nodules form over tens of millions of years, accumulating metallic elements that precipitate from seawater. They are worlds onto themselves: a single nodule can be habitat for scores of species, including millennia-old corals, tubeworms and sponges that incubate the eggs of ghost octopuses.

“Nodules are absolutely central to the functionality of this ecosystem,” says Diva Amon, a deep-sea biologist and scientific associate at the Natural History Museum in London. There’s growing evidence that beaked whales dive 2.5 miles to this region of the abyss to forage for prey, holding their breath all the while. Half the larger species there depend on nodules, researchers say, and only a fraction of those animals, have so far been discovered.

But DeepGreen executives in public statements tend to focus on the hazards of mining on land while minimizing the harm underwater, as Barron did in April appearance on Bloomberg TV. “Most of statements by DeepGreen are on biomass, not biodiversity,” says Porras, the spokesman, referring to the cumulative weight of living organisms in a given area. “This is why DeepGreen executives describe the abyssal plain as ‘one of the least inhabited places on Earth’ or ‘the equivalent of marine desert.’ ”

In March, DeepGreen announced plans to go public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. These lightly regulated companies carry risks for investors. But the risks here are planetary in scope, with scientists warning of the potential destruction of ocean ecosystems that play a little-understood role in the global carbon cycle and climate change.

So far DeepGreen’s success with investors, who have valued its SPAC merger at nearly $3 billion, is a sign of strength for the nascent deep-sea mining industry’s case for nodules. DeepGreen’s SPAC, Dallas-based Sustainable Opportunities Acquisition Corp., raised $300 million last year and institutional and strategic investors have committed $330 million more to the new deal. The combined business, which will be renamed The Metals Company, will be headquartered in Canada.

But environmentalists are moving to challenge the merger. In a June 1 letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, an environmental group called Deep Sea Mining Campaign asked for an investigation into what it says is a failure to properly disclose potentially catastrophic environmental risks of seabed mining in the SPAC’s S-4 registration statement.

DeepGreen’s drive to brand itself as a company that would mine with what it calls “the lightest planetary touch” is a test case for disputes between investors, regulators and scientists over how to navigate the potential for untested climate solutions. The company seems to know the allure of guilt-free mining. As Barron put it to an interviewer in 2019, “Whether you invest in a company like DeepGreen or not, everyone's a sucker for the story.”

DeepGreen is one of just 22 entities with permission to prospect for minerals in the deep ocean. It’s the only one soon headed to public stock markets. Licenses are issued by the International Seabed Authority, an autonomous and obscure United Nations organization headquartered in Kingston, Jamaica. The agency is charged with regulating deep-sea mining while, contradictorily, ensuring protection of the marine environment. The ISA is now finalizing regulations that would permit DeepGreen and other companies to apply for licenses to begin mining the seabed.

Through a partnership with three small and impoverished South Pacific island states—Nauru, Tonga and Kiribati—DeepGreen holds prospecting rights over nearly 90,000 square miles in a vast stretch of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Mexico called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone.

In an extraordinary display of DeepGreen’s influence, Nauru broke UN protocol by ceding its seat to Barron at a February 2019 meeting of the ISA Council in Jamaica, allowing an executive to address the organization’s policymaking body. “Personally, I get very uncomfortable when people describe us as deep-sea miners,” Barron told the delegates, who appeared dumbfounded by the breach of procedure. “We are in the transition business. We want to help the world transition away from fossil fuels with the smallest possible climate change and environmental impact.”

It’s a message Barron uses frequently as he travels the world to promote “metals for the future.” One day recycling will dramatically reduce demand for mining new minerals, but not until “we build up a stock of billion new batteries,” as he told the ISA delegates.

Part of DeepGreen’s objective is just getting this message out. “While we’ve got a great team of mining people and oil and gas people, this is a communication challenge,” Barron told me at that ISA meeting. “That’s why we hired a head of brand.”

Scientists, environmentalists, the European Parliament, and some national governments are calling for a moratorium on deep-sea mining until its ecological consequences can be better understood. In March, BMW AG, Google, Samsung Electronics Co. and Volvo Cars endorsed the moratorium and pledged not to use deep-sea minerals. Demonstrations against ocean mining are also heating up. A Greenpeace vessel in April intercepted a DeepGreen ship conducting mining research in the middle of the Pacific. At the June G-7 meeting in Cornwall, England, hundreds of surfers paddled out to demand a ban on seabed mining.

On Thursday, in the hours after this story was published, more than 300 ocean scientists and marine experts from 44 countries released a statement calling for a “pause” in seabed mining “until sufficient and robust scientific information has been obtained” on the environmental impacts. An even stronger call for a mining moratorium came from the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, an alliance of 80 environmental groups, which credited Bloomberg Green’s investigation for “underlining the risks posed by the emerging deep-sea mining industry.”

Opponents, however, face the dilemma of confronting a company that says it cares about sustainability. “We are with @Greenpeace—we must protect the oceans,” DeepGreen wrote on Twitter in 2019. “If the data shows polymetallic nodules are not a safer solution for the planet and humans, @Greenpeace can count on us to stand with you to stop #DeepSeaMining.”

Arlo Hemphill, a senior oceans campaigner with Greenpeace, calls this “next-level gaslighting.” Greenpeace also says it has concerns about DeepGreen’s business. “They’ve thrown on a green cape and say all the right words but their sole intention is to make money,” says Hemphill.

Before deleting his Linkedin profile, former DeepGreen environmental scientist Jason Michel Smith wrote a post in late 2020 warning people not to trust the company. He said he was fired after conflicts with executives and “combating an anti-science private agenda on the daily.” Recent attempts to reach him were unsuccessful.

“The company has minimal respect for science, marine conservation, or society in general,” Smith wrote. “Don’t let them fool you. Money is the game. It’s business in their eyes, not people or the planet.”

Porras of DeepGreen says the company retained a third party to independently investigate Smith’s allegations, an inquiry in which he says Smith declined to participate. “While the report is privileged and cannot be publicly shared, the statements have been independently confirmed to be without merit.”

At 54, Barron sports the look of an aging rock star—long hair, graying beard, and a unvarying uniform of jeans, boots, T-shirt and leather jacket worn whether addressing the ISA Council or taking an Instagram selfie with surfing champion Kelly Slater holding pair of polymetallic nodules.

The SPAC registration statement describes Barron as a “seasoned entrepreneur with a track record of building global companies in battery technology, media and future-oriented resource development.” His mining career started with a lucky investment.

In 2001, Barron founded Adstream, an Australian ad tech company that would grow to $100 million in annual revenues, according to the registration statement. That same year he invested in Nautilus Minerals, an early deep-sea mining company headed by fellow Australian David Heydon. “I originally invested in Nautilus not because I knew mining but because I just sort of thought it sounded cool, and I sold out at the right time,” Barron told me in Kingston.

In 2017, the trade publication Mining.com reported that Barron walked away with $31 million on his $226,000 stake after the Canadian-registered company went public in a reverse merger in 2006. Heydon departed in 2008, and then three years later founded DeepGreen in Canada.

Other Nautilus investors didn’t fare as well. The company filed for bankruptcy in February 2019 after burning through $686 million without mining an ounce of metal. That left the poverty-stricken South Pacific island nation of Papua New Guinea out the $120 million it had invested in a joint venture with the company to excavate hydrothermal vent fields for copper, gold and silver.

Barron’s background with DeepGreen also includes murky fundraising relationships.

Between 2015 and 2020, for example, DeepGreen raised at least $75 million by selling securities directly to private investors, Canadian and U.S. securities filings show. In a December 2017 offering, DeepGreen sold $17.6 million worth of securities and paid a sales commission of $252,288 to a company called Victorem Ventures Limited. The same company also earned a $102,500 finder’s fee on a securities DeepGreen offered in the U.S. in late 2017, according to an SEC filing.

The Canadian securities filing, which was signed by Barron as DeepGreen’s CEO, declared that Victorem had no relationship to any DeepGreen insider. But corporate records in the U.K. show that Barron incorporated a company called Victorem Ventures Limited in 2015 and served as the sole director and shareholder until it was dissolved in October 2018. The Canadian securities filing listed Victorem’s address as a villa in Dubai, but did not provide a phone number or email address. DeepGreen subsequently submitted an amended filing that used Barron’s DeepGreen email address and his U.K. phone number as contacts for Victorem.

DeepGreen’s Porras says that while Barron was CEO of the startup when the securities were sold, he didn’t hold that position when Victorem performed the services that earned it the commission and finder’s fees. The registration statement says Barron served as a strategic advisor to DeepGreen from 2013 to 2017.

As DeepGreen tries to go public, it has mounted a vigorous campaign to raise funds. In the SPAC registration statement, DeepGreen pegged total capital costs for a single deep-sea mining operation and an onshore metals processing plant at $10.6 billion with annual operating costs of $1.8 billion after 2030. Barron, who earns a $565,000 salary running DeepGreen, which has 24 employees and contractors, would own up to 6.9% of the merged company’s shares.

Matthew Gianni, a founder of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, fears the SPAC could unleash a wave of capital investment in deep-sea mining. He notes that an independent unit of shipping giant A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S holds a significant stake in DeepGreen. The company did not respond to a request for comment. “Barron is a wildcatter who may provide the political and financial impetus for the big players to jump into deep-sea mining,” says Gianni, a longtime observer of the ISA.

When the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea established the ISA in 1994, it declared the seabed to be “the common heritage of mankind,” with rich and poor nations to share equally in any spoils of seabed mining. Previously confidential agreements between DeepGreen and Nauru and Tonga show the company’s influence over the countries.

Mining contractors must secure sponsorship from an ISA member state that is required to exert “effective control” over the contractor and is responsible, along with the ISA, for its compliance with environmental regulations. Sponsoring states in turn can collect royalties and fees.

Most sponsoring states work with government-run mining contractors or companies headquartered in their countries and controlled by their citizens. Western startups like DeepGreen, however, have also sought sponsorship from tiny countries that have access to mining concessions the ISA reserves for developing nations. Over the past decade, mining concessions from South Pacific microstates have traded hands among a small coterie of Barron associates, corporate filings and ISA records show.

One of DeepGreen’s mining contracts is sponsored by Tonga, which has a population of 106,000. Tonga’s sponsorship agreement with DeepGreen’s wholly owned subsidiary, TOML, was previously held by Nautilus and before that by a company controlled by Heydon, the former Nautilus CEO. The sponsorship agreement, which was disclosed in the SPAC registration statement, allows DeepGreen to unilaterally assign the mining contract to another party and declares the agreement is governed by Canadian law. Any disputes must be arbitrated in British Columbia, 5,700 miles from Tonga.

The nation of Nauru is involved in a similar arrangement with DeepGreen. The license was originally acquired by a Nauruan-registered company called NORI, founded in 2008 by Heydon before subsequently being bought by Nautilus. The cost of securing the mining concession in 2011 was a $250,000 fee paid to the ISA. DeepGreen became the owner of NORI the same year.

DeepGreen now estimates it will earn $95 billion from one area of the Nauru concession over 23 years of production, according to the registration statement. The startup expects to pay 7.6% of those revenues in royalties to Nauru and the ISA.

Just as was the case in Tonga, the sponsorship agreement between DeepGreen and Nauru shows the government exercises little control. It permits DeepGreen to transfer the mining contract to another entity “without reason and without prior consultation.” The sponsorship agreement also bars Nauru from nationalizing NORI or expropriating its assets and requires the government to guarantee the transfer overseas of NORI’s earnings.

“DeepGreen’s subsidiaries’ local operations are regulated by our sovereign partners under their national laws,” Porras says. “Our subsidiary companies have negotiated and agreed with our relevant partners to a neutral jurisdiction to govern certain relationships for the benefit of both parties.”

Nauru is an 8-square-mile island with a population of 11,000 people that had been ravaged from decades of phosphate mining overseen by the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. Long plagued by corruption, Nauru’s revenues chiefly come from hosting an Australian refugee detention center, though that income has fallen dramatically recently. DeepGreen’s last round of funding exceeded Nauru’s GDP. The government of Nauru did not respond to a request for comment.

“How could a small country like that have effective control over a multinational company?” asks Pradeep Singh, who studies the ISA as a research associate at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany.

He notes that Nauru and Tonga could be potentially liable if a seabed mining disaster happens on their watch. “What wasn’t really anticipated by the Law of the Sea was that multinational companies would go out on their own and partner with the developing countries.”

That’s where DeepGreen’s promotion of its robotic nodule collector might offer reassurance. A new rendering shows a sleek design created by a Danish architecture firm. The curvy DeepGreen collector resembles a cross between an Apple computer mouse and a Roomba, in stark contrast to mining machines from rival contractors that roll across the seabed on tank-like treads. Porras says the collector is under construction and testing is expected to begin later this year or early 2022.

“Directing a jet of seawater across the tops of the nodules, the collector gently frees them from sediment and lifts them on compressed air bubbles to a production vessel at the surface,” DeepGreen says on its website.

The reality would likely be far harsher. All marine life on nodules would be killed, says Amon, the biologist. Microbial life in the sediment would also be in peril. “The bacteria are probably one of the most important components of this ecosystem,” she says. “Even if they were able to delicately remove the sediment, that is still where the majority of the animals live and constitute a massive part of the seabed’s biodiversity, including many rare species.”

“This is completely unproven technology,” Amon says. “It seems like science fiction.”

infernal machines posted:

My general impression from cases like Forcillo's was a general unwillingness to punish police for using their "professional judgement" in the line of duty, even when that judgement was absolutely terrible and the sole cause of the offense.

That may be absolute bullshit, it's just the impression I got from the reporting on his trial.

Drunk Canuck posted:

On the back of that news from last night, is when some ol' Albertan premier hopeful sent out a perfectly clear message of police support.
https://twitter.com/RachelNotley/status/1410058015189966853?s=19


Just beautiful.

You loving disaster of a provincial NDP party.

quote:

Invoking residential schools, B.C. senator says Canada should be careful about criticizing China

In a provocative speech in the upper house on Monday, Independent Senators Group (ISG) Leader Sen. Yuen Pau Woo said Canada should avoid criticizing China for its human rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims because our country has mistreated Indigenous peoples.

Echoing an argument made by Chinese officials at the UN last week, Woo said China's policy toward the Muslim minority in Xinjiang province is similar to the colonialism directed at Indigenous peoples in this country, and that condemning the Asian country in harsh terms would be "gratuitous" and "simply an exercise in labelling."

Citing allegations of China's mass arrest of Uyghurs on "terrorism" charges, the forced sterilization of Muslim women and the relocation of their villages, Woo said Canada "did all of those things, and we did them throughout our short history as a country, most appallingly to Indigenous peoples, but also to recent immigrants and minority groups who were deemed undesirable, untrustworthy or just un-Canadian."

Woo, who was appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2016, urged senators to reject a Conservative-led motion in the upper house that would denounce China's genocide against the Turkic minorities, arguing such a statement would be a "distraction" that would further damage already strained Canada-China relations.

Senate motion no. 79, which was introduced by Conservative Sen. Leo Housakos and seconded by Independent Sen. Marilou McPhedran, calls on the Senate to "recognize that a genocide is currently being carried out by the People's Republic of China against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims."

It also proposes calling on the International Olympic Committee to deny Beijing the 2022 Winter Olympics by relocating the Games to another country "if the Chinese government continues this genocide."

Woo said that while there may be legitimate concerns about the conditions the Uyghurs face, parliamentarians should avoid passing motions on sensitive issues like this because it would needlessly embarrass China or suggest Canada believes it is morally superior.

Canadians may be concerned about the Uyghurs, but our criticism should be made in the spirit of friendship and "out of a desire for China to succeed as a nation of many ethnicities," he said.

"The fact that China does not share our view of individual freedoms or, indeed, our interpretation of freedoms based on the Charter is not a basis on which to lecture the Chinese on how they should govern themselves," Woo said. He added that the Chinese would be appalled by some Canadian policies — such as medical assistance in dying.

Woo said that, in a recent conversation with an unnamed Chinese "interlocutor," he said that some Canadians understand that China's Uyghur policies are "motivated by the fight against terrorism," a "desire to provide employable skills for minorities" and the "need to modernize infrastructure and upgrade living standards" — but are troubled by the reported repression of religious and cultural rights.

"Canadians are saying to Chinese friends that we don't want them to make the same mistakes," Woo said.

He also said the Chinese are happy with their form of "democracy," pointing to a recent poll by an organization called Alliance of Democracies, a pro-democracy group led by former NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The poll suggested that a majority of respondents from China are generally content with their system of government. In fact, Woo said, most Chinese poll respondents were happier with their political system than Canadians are with theirs.

Most experts agree that China, an authoritarian country run by the Chinese Communist Party's politburo, is not a democracy.

Woo — who leads the ISG, a group primarily composed of Trudeau appointees to the upper house — said Western-style democracy doesn't always produce positive outcomes and there is something to be said for the Chinese system, which he maintains can produce results for its people.

"We are learning the hard way that democratic elections and changes in government over decades have not consistently produced better outcomes for citizens in many industrialized economies," he said.

"I much prefer the vagaries of democratic choice to the certainty of authoritarian rule, but we cannot be smug. We also cannot deny that the Chinese state has its own claim to a kind of legitimacy, even if we don't like it."

Trudeau himself has rejected the comparison between the way Canada and China have handled official injustices. While Canada has recognized its past wrongs, the Chinese regime contends there is no evidence of mistreatment of Uyghurs — despite abuses reported by a number of sources, including a report from the House of Commons subcommittee on international human rights.

The subcommittee's report, tabled last fall, says that China's persecution of this Muslim minority — through mass detentions in concentration camps, forced labour, state surveillance and population control measures — is a clear violation of human rights and is meant to "eradicate Uyghur culture and religion."

"The journey of reconciliation is a long one, but it is a journey we are on. China is not even recognizing that there is a problem. That is a pretty fundamental difference," Trudeau said last week when asked about China's statement at the UN that it was "deeply concerned about the serious human rights violations against the Indigenous people in Canada."

"In Canada, we had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission," Trudeau continued. "Where is China's truth and reconciliation commission? Where is their truth? Where is the openness that Canada has always shown and the responsibility that Canada has taken for the terrible mistakes of the past, and indeed, many of which continue into the present?"

Trudeau said it's important for Canadians and the world to pay attention to the "systemic abuse and human rights violations against the Uyghurs."

In a tweet Tuesday, Housakos, the senator behind the motion, said he was "beyond disbelief" as he sat listening to Woo's comments about the matter.

"Indigenous people in Canada are not pawns to be used to silence criticism of other human rights abuses. They AND China's Muslims deserve better," the senator tweeted.

Housakos said there is no justification for the "atrocities" committed by the Chinese state against this Muslim minority, adding that the "undeniable" systemic repression of the Uyghurs has been well-documented by respected groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

He said Canadian attempts to justify China's actions or to act as "apologists" for the communist regime sends the wrong message at a time when Uyghurs need Western countries to stand in solidarity against their plight.

Another Trudeau appointee, Ontario Sen. Peter Boehm — a former senior official at Global Affairs Canada and Canada's former sherpa to G7 meetings — also talked down the value of a motion condemning Chinese genocide.

Boehm said a similar motion passed by the House of Commons in February resulted in "a lot of media and social media pizzazz afterwards, but it had no discernible impact ... other than to spark an angry reaction from the Chinese government."

He said foreign policy pronouncements should be left to the prime minister and cabinet, not the appointed upper house.

"The very public denunciations that we make will only reinforce an internal Chinese view of us as adversarial. If that's what we want to do, fine. But in the event, it is the people of China who will change that country's behaviour, and if we wish to influence them, I would suggest this is not the way," Boehm said.

"Poking China again is unlikely to change things."

Tippecanoe posted:

How are we going to triple cancel canada day????

Femtosecond posted:

It seems remarkable that Woo's comments here, which seem wildly out of alignment with public opinion, and seemingly the position of the PM, are not being much picked up on by the media and do not seem to be causing any questions for Trudeau.

I suppose this means that Trudeau's attempt to reform the Senate as "independent" and having nothing to do with his party in the House of Commons has succeeded, since despite Woo being appointed by Trudeau and being the leader of the "Independent group" which is ostensibly Liberal aligned it doesn't seem like the media thinks that there's any connection worth following up here.

forest spirit posted:

Poking someone is very annoying, and we don't want to annoy China, and also we're not angels, so don't rock the boat and let the Chinese continue their forced sterilizations

Mr Luxury Yacht posted:

Sorry I've just come up with a radical new thought pattern called "Multiple things can be bad and criticized at the same time".

Willatron posted:

China will continue the forced sterilizations regardless. As will certain Canadian social work agencies and hospitals.

I actually don't see the value in condemning China's human rights abuses, which are real and heinous, while Canada continues to enact policies of genocide and digs up the remains to the surprise of nobody indigenous or who's been paying even a bit of attention to this country for the past 150 years. Unless Canada is both planning to actually take up the recommendations put forth by the TRC and abide by UNDRIP, they can shut the gently caress up about it as far as my Metis rear end is concerned.

forest spirit posted:

Well I mean China is pedal-to-the-metal genociding while we're easing off of the gas. I think it's fair to criticize a global superpower while dealing with our own insane issues. As far as my Inuit rear end is concerned

Beelzebufo posted: