It is now legal to drill oil and build pipelines in B.C.'s provincial parks

A little-known bill, the Park Amendment Act, that will drastically alter the management of B.C. parks became law Monday, creating controversy among the province's most prominent environmental and conservation organizations. The passage of Bill 4 will make way for industrial incursions into provincial parklands including energy extraction, construction of pipelines and industry-led research.

The bill, quietly introduced in mid-February, has already met significant resistance in B.C. where the Minister of Environment received "thousands of letters" of opposition, according to Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society's Peter Wood. "There has been absolutely zero public consultation, and the pace at which this was pushed through suggests this was never a consideration," he said in a press release.

A normal government wouldn’t ram through this elections bill

In normal times, under a normal government, the Fair Elections Act would have been withdrawn by now, or at least be in serious trouble. The past few weeks have seen the bill denounced as a threat to democracy by the chief electoral officer, the former chief electoral officer, several provincial elections officials, academic experts domestic and foreign, and newspaper editorials across the country.

Thursday they were joined by Harry Neufeld, the former chief electoral officer of British Columbia and the author of an inquiry into irregularities in the 2011 election. Neufeld’s report has been much quoted by the minister responsible, Pierre Poilievre, in particular to support his contention that the bill’s ban on “vouching” — allowing one voter to affirm another’s eligibility to vote in a riding, in cases where the usual documentation is lacking — was needed to prevent voter fraud.

Federal budget bill targets right to strike, public service union charges

OTTAWA — Canada’s largest federal public sector union says changes included in the government’s new sweeping budget bill would erode workers’ right to strike by effectively ripping up agreements over what is considered an essential service.

The changes in the budget implementation bill go to the heart of a court challenge filed this week by the Public Service Alliance of Canada over the government’s move to block strikes by federal workers deemed to be offering “essential” services. The union says in its court challenge that major reforms to the Public Service Labour Relations Act that were introduced in last fall’s budget legislation (Bill C-4) violate federal workers’ freedom to strike and freedom of association as guaranteed in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Conservative Budget Bill Full Of Unrelated Measures, Say Critics

OTTAWA - The latest Conservative omnibus bill weighs in at 359 pages and alters everything from the food and rail safety regimes to the Judges Act, the National Defence Act and the handling of temporary foreign workers.

In all, almost 40 different pieces of legislation are being altered by the single bill tabled Friday.

The government says it is designed to enact measures in last month's federal budget, and has christened the effort the "Harper Government Creating Jobs & Growth While Returning to Balanced Budgets With Economic Action Plan 2014 Act, No. 1."

GOP Steps Up Attack on Early Voting in Key Swing States

On Election Night 2012, referring to the long lines in states like Florida and Ohio, Barack Obama declared, “We have to fix that.”

The waits in Florida and Ohio were no accident, but rather the direct consequence of GOP efforts to curtail the number of days and hours that people had to vote. On January 22, 2014, the president’s bipartisan election commission released a comprehensive report detailing how voting could be smoother, faster and more convenient. It urged states to reduce long lines by adopting “measures to improve access to the polls through expansion of the period for voting before the traditional Election Day.”

Why ‘Harris v. Quinn’ Has Labor Very, Very Nervous

Sometime soon, certainly by the late-June conclusion of its present term, the Supreme Court will tell us its decision in Harris v. Quinn, arguably the most important labor law case the Court has considered in decades. Harris has already generated a great deal of attention and worry in labor circles, and nearly as much enthusiasm and celebration in pro-business ones—reflected in the extraordinary number of friend-of-the-court briefs filed by advocates on both sides. The case threatens the existence of the “agency shop,” a bedrock institution in American labor relations—one relied on in the most successful recent union organizing, and that is decisive to the health of public sector unions. Here’s what Harris is about.

The School-to-Prison Pipeline Starts in Preschool

The school-to-prison pipeline, to my mind, is the most insidious arm of this country's prison-industrial complex. Under the guise of protecting our children, we push many of them out of school and into prisons, limit their opportunities, fail to and/or undereducate them, all while feeding our addiction to mass incarceration and retribution that is not justice at all. That the students who find themselves funneled into the school-to-prison pipeline are predominantly black is further proof that the United States system of racist oppression chugs along through the rhetoric of colorblindness.

Koch-Funded Network Jumps To Defend Billionaire Brothers Against Democratic Attacks

WASHINGTON -- A nonprofit group funded by Charles and David Koch to promote the reduction of national debt and government spending has been pressed into service as a defender of the billionaire brothers, who have come under attack by Democrats for plowing millions into conservative causes.

Public Notice, a Koch-connected, Washington-based nonprofit organized as a limited liability corporation with 501(c)(4) tax status, sent opposition research on Senate Majority PAC, a super PAC supporting Democratic candidates, and the candidates the group supports to reporters on Friday. The research said Senate Majority PAC's attack on the Koch brothers as out-of-state billionaires was hypocritical, since Senate Majority PAC is funded by billionaires from California and New York.

Robert Kaplan: The End Of A Stable Pacific

Robert Kaplan is the author of “Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific”

Kaplan spoke with The WorldPost editor Nathan Gardels on March 25, 2014.

Russia Threatened Countries Ahead Of UN Vote On Ukraine, Diplomats Say

UNITED NATIONS, March 28 (Reuters) - Russia threatened several Eastern European and Central Asian states with retaliation if they voted in favor of a United Nations General Assembly resolution this week declaring invalid Crimea's referendum on seceding from Ukraine, U.N. diplomats said.

The disclosures about Russian threats came after Moscow accused Western countries of using "shameless pressure, up to the point of political blackmail and economic threats," in an attempt to coerce the United Nations' 193 member states to join it in supporting the non-binding resolution on the Ukraine crisis.

A Debate on Torture: Legal Architect of CIA Secret Prisons, Rendition vs. Human Rights Attorney

As the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence feuds with the CIA over the declassification of its 6,000-page report on the agency’s secret detention and interrogation programs, we host a debate between former CIA acting general counsel John Rizzo and human rights attorney Scott Horton. This comes as the United Nations Human Rights Committee has criticized the Obama administration for closing its investigations into the CIA’s actions after Sept. 11. A U.N. report issued Thursday stated, "The Committee notes with concern that all reported investigations into enforced disappearances, torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment that had been committed in the context of the CIA secret rendition, interrogation and detention programmes were closed in 2012 leading only to a meager number of criminal charges brought against low-level operatives." Rizzo served as acting general counsel during much of the George W. Bush administration and was a key legal architect of the U.S. interrogation and detention program after the Sept. 11 attacks. He recently published a book titled "Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA." Attorney Scott Horton is contributing editor at Harper’s magazine and author of the forthcoming book, "Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Foreign Policy."

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Rwanda Genocide Anniversary: 20 Years Later, Flame Stirs Memories

NYARUBUYE, Rwanda (AP) — Rows of human skulls sit in glass cases near the red brick Catholic church here. Some are cracked in half; holes are punched in others. Hundreds of arm and leg bones lie nearby. To the left is a table of tools: rusty shovels, hoes, pipes, and a machete — the weapons of genocide.

Down the hill 10 miles (15 kilometers), thousands of Rwandans gathered under spittles of rain to watch the arrival of a small flame, symbolic fire traveling the country as Rwanda prepares to mark 20 years since ethnic Hutu extremists killed neighbors, friends and family during a three-month rampage of violence aimed at ethnic Tutsis and some moderate Hutus.

Harper wants to make it harder for you to vote in 2015

Yesterday, MPs began debate on electoral bill C-23 tabled Tuesday in the House of Commons. The sweeping 247-page “Fair Elections Act” is a calculated overhaul of Canada’s voting laws and would, among other things, increase donation limits to political parties, exempt some fundraising from campaign spending, and establish a robocall registry. Canada’s chief electoral officer Marc Maynard was not consulted on the bill that would restructure his office, and his request that elections officials be able to compel testimony during investigation is absent from the new bill.