Sudbury Social Justice News - September 1, 2013

EVENTS & MEETINGS:

1) Monday, September 2: Labour Day Family Fun Fest at Bell Park
2) Tuesday, September 3: Raise the Rates Organizing Meeting
3) Friday, September 6: Stop the Spraying of Harmful Herbicide in Our Forests
4) Monday, September 9: Meeting of Coalition for a Liveable Sudbury
5) Thursday, September 26: Capitalism Must Die!

NEWS, ANALYSIS, & CALLS TO ACTION:

1) "Rage against Empire: Resentment, Reconciliation and Indigenous Decolonization in Canada" (a video of a talk by Dene scholar Glen Coulthard)
2) "Fate of Canadians Detained in Egypt Remains Unresolved" by Sarah Woolf

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Monday, September 2: Labour Day Family Fun Fest at Bell Park

Time: 10am to 4pm
Location: Bell Park, Sudbury

Celebrate Labour Day with Sudbury's working families, free for you, sponsored and organized by Sudbury labour unions and our generous partners

    FREE BBQ! Hamburgers - Hot Dogs - Drinks
    FUN FOR THE KIDS - Bouncy Castles, Face Painting, Games and more!
    MUSIC IN THE AMPHITHEATRE - From alternative to classic rock, a great variety of FREE live music on the main stage
    GREAT PRIZES – participate in a FREE raffle to win one of dozens of great prizes donated by local businesses
    MUCH MORE – Demos from our local Irish Regiment reserve corps, Police and Fire Services, games for grown-ups, and much more!
    MAIN STAGE LINEUP: To be announced

This event on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/events/366050843515753/

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Tuesday, September 3: Raise the Rates Organizing Meeting

Time: 6:30pm
Location: Sudbury and District Labour Council office (Suite 209 upstairs in 109 Elm Street, which is across the street from the Native Friendship Centre)

Plans are being made in a range of communities to hold local actions during the week of October 14 to challenge plans to merge Ontario Works and ODSP and demand real action on poverty from the Wynne Government. We will be demanding restoration of the Community Start Up and Maintenance Benefit, supporting the right of First Nations Communities to control delivery of social assistance programs, and calling for the raising of the minimum wage in Ontario to $14 an hour and social assistance rates by at least 55%. In place of the endless talk of this Government about 'poverty reduction' we will be taking action.

Sudbury has been asked by the Raise the Rates campaign to host the province-wide action as part of this week. People will be coming from across the province to join us in a large anti-poverty rally and demonstration. This will serve to both highlight and to strengthen our struggles here in Sudbury including our struggles to restore the CSUMB, in the meantime to get at least CSUMB rates and policies for CHPI, and support for the S-CAP 11 whose trial takes place Oct. 28th and Oct. 31. For this to be a success we need for as many people to get involved as possible and as many organizations to support this as possible. We are also hoping to do outreach to other communities in the north-east, including First Nations communities, North Bay, Timmins and the Sault.

All supporters of the Raise the Rates campaign are welcome. Please come if you can. If you want to get involved but cannot make it this Tuesday please contact gkinsman@laurentian.ca.

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Friday, September 6: Stop the Spraying of Harmful Herbicide in Our Forests

Time: 10am to 3pm
Location: Gathering initially at Memorial Park in downtown Sudbury

There was a news report last week(link pinned) about the Ministry of Natural Resources using a herbicide known as Glysophate to promote tree growth in areas where clear cutting has occurred in and around the City of Greater Sudbury. This map will be pinned on the event page.

This practice has been ongoing in the area for a number of years now, however, the awareness among the greater public about the use of Glysophate and its effects was minimal. For those who are aware of the human and environmental concerns surrounding Glysophate - there is no doubt it is harmful.

Over the past few years the public consciousness in the Sudbury area and the broader society has increased significantly about the health of our food systems. A great example of this is the global march against bio-tech giant and unofficial kingpin of the GMO Industry, Monsanto, earlier this year. Sudbury had multiple actions that were well attended and executed.

Another key example of the growing public awareness in the City of Greater Sudbury is the 200% increase in sales that Eat Local Sudbury has experienced in the most recent examination of their sales.

The urgency to protect the environment has never been greater. Just consider the disappearance bees, scarcity of clean drinking water, and the environmental/human damage that comes from the production or use of oil and gas.

Next Friday, September 6th, 2013, everyone is invited to a day of action to bring our concern about the use of glysophate in our city forests directly to those who have a stake or influence in what happens on the lands we share. This includes all three levels of government, the Ministry of Natural Resources, and the Vermillion Forestry Management Company.

As a collective voice we can help put a stop to this damaging practice and help protect our local environment as best we can for the next 7 generations.

The schedule for the event will also be pinned to the event page. The duration is quite lengthy, but, it will allow for people to participate at different points throughout the day. The basics are that the organizers will meet at 10:00 am and actions will start at 11:00 a.m.

Throughout the day we will be visiting each of our selected stakeholders' offices in person as a collective of concerned area citizens. If you can not make it to the event in person, but, want to contribute, there is a petition and a list of the stakeholders referred to earlier. Call, write, or visit them in person over the next 10 days - it will make a difference.

Feel free to use this event page as a forum to help educate each other and build networks around social justice initiatives and see you next Friday!

This event on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/events/709667605725488/

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Monday, September 9: Meeting of Coalition for a Liveable Sudbury

Time: Pre-meeting potluck - 6pm, meeting - 7pm to 9pm
Location: TBA

Join Coalition for a Liveable Sudbury for our fall planning meeting. Pre-meeting potluck starts at 6pm. This will be an exciting year building on past successes, moving ahead on new projects, and looking ahead to a municipal election in the fall of 2014. Join us in making Sudbury more sustainable!

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Thursday, September 26: Capitalism Must Die!

Time: 6pm
Location: The ParkSide Centre, 140 Durham Street, Kinsmen Room A

Cartoonist Stephanie McMillan is coming to Sudbury to promote her upcoming book, Capitalism Must Die!  Stephanie’s presentation will explain how capitalism works, why it has to be stopped and how to stop it. Her presentation will feature cartoons, diagrams and live drawings.

For those of you who know Stephanie’s work, you’ll be familiar with her comic, Minimum Security (which in its current phase is titled Proletarian Theory is a Revolutionary Social Force), as well as her cartoon, Code Green. Stephanie recently wrote The Beginning of the American Fall: A Comics Journalist Inside the Occupy Wall Street Movement, and co-wrote the graphic novel, As The World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial with Derrick Jensen. She has another graphic novel coming out this fall, The Minimum Security Chronicles: Resistance to Ecocide. This is a “story of a group of friends who try different strategies and tactics to stop ecocide. During this process, they hear of a particular geo-engineering project being planned, and focus their efforts on preventing that. It’s not only a thrilling story of trying to save the world, but also a thought experiment gaming out different revolutionary strategies.”

If you’d like to read more about Stephanie, browse through her cartoons, or check out the endorsements of her work (including Vandana Shiva, Howard Zinn and Derrick Jensen); you can do so here: http://stephaniemcmillan.org/sample-page/. You can also check out One Struggle, the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist organization she works with: http://onestruggle.net/.  

This event is free but I would appreciate your help to spread the word. You can share and join this event at: https://www.facebook.com/events/209430909181199/.

For more information, please contact Rachael Charbonneau at rachaelcharbonneau@vianet.ca or 670-1982.

NEWS, ANALYSIS, & CALLS TO ACTION:

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"Rage against Empire: Resentment, Reconciliation and Indigenous Decolonization in Canada" (a video of a talk by Dene scholar Glen Coulthard)

The video can be found here:
http://intercontinentalcry.org/rage-empire-resentment-reconciliation-ind...

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"Fate of Canadians Detained in Egypt Remains Unresolved"
by Sarah Woolf
(originally in The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/article/175987/fate-canadians-detained-egypt-re...)
(Note that the meeting with the prosecutor referenced in the article has occurred since this was published, but the details of how long their detention will last remain unknown.)