Monday, November 26, 2018

'There has to be accountability': victims of sterilization demand action

'There has to be accountability': victims of sterilization demand action



Morningstar Mercredi, pictured on Friday November 16, 2018. Morningstar Mercredi says she woke up from a surgery at 14 and immediately broke down when she discovered the baby she once felt inside of her was gone. What remained was an incision from her panty line to her belly button, cut without her permission.JASON FRANSON / THE CANADIAN PRESS


OTTAWA — Morningstar Mercredi says she woke up from surgery at 14 and immediately broke down when she discovered the baby she had felt inside her was gone.
What remained was an incision from her panty line to her belly button, cut without her permission.
She would eventually learn her left ovary and a Fallopian tube had been removed, too — an experience that “irrevocably” changed her life.
“How in God’s name could that be when I was just a child?” the Indigenous author said in an interview.
Mercredi is among a growing number of Indigenous women insisting on action to address the ongoing practice of coerced sterilization — the subject of discussions in Geneva this week at the UN Committee Against Torture.
Representatives from Canada were asked on Wednesday what the government is doing about it. The delegation is to respond Thursday.
The prevalence of the practice today has not been documented but Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde, Sen. Yvonne Boyer and the federal NDP are calling for investigations of recent reports from Indigenous women in Canada.
“We need to raise our voices,” Mercredi said. “We need to do whatever we have to do to hold those people that are responsible accountable if we want this to stop.”
In the mid-1970s, Mercredi said, she endured a rape in Fort McMurray, south of her community of Fort Chipewyan, Alta., and was pregnant.
Resisting pressure in Fort Chipewyan to have an abortion, armed with a bus ticket and a few dollars, she headed to Saskatoon for refuge.
“I wanted to be somewhere else in order to have this baby,” she said.
Wearing worn-out old running shoes one day, she slipped on ice and started spotting, so she went to an emergency room.
Mercredi said she asked what was happening prior to surgery, only to be dismissed.
“I wanted to know how my baby was and what was going on with me,” she said. “The doctor performed surgery on me and when I awoke, I had no baby and what the doctor told me — I don’t know why but I will never forget this — he said, ‘Your chances of getting pregnant will be less than that of the average woman.’ ”
What happened to her, without an explanation or consent from her or her parents, had devastating consequences. Mercredi tried to take her own life six months after the procedure in Saskatoon and struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction for about five years as a young woman.
She’s been sober now for 32 years.
“Absolutely the substance abuse was linked to my suicidal depression and the trauma of that event,” she said. “I went on from — my life from that point on making choices that were shame-based.”
Mercredi said she can’t imagine how many other Indigenous women have gone through similar experiences.
Some did not survive them. Pam, who does not want to use her last name for fear of further harming her family, said her daughter did not. She died by suicide 10 months after a tubal ligation at a Winnipeg hospital in 2009.
Pam said her daughter believed having the procedure would result in getting her other children back, out of foster care.
“I guess I can say she was bullied to death,” Pam said. She’s obtained medical records to learn more about the circumstances surrounding the procedure and the involvement of child-welfare workers.
There could have been a different outcome for Pam’s daughter, said Cora Morgan, a family advocate with the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs.
People who’ve allowed these procedures, or carried them out, must be held accountable, and future instances prevented, she said.
Morgan said she’s heard several stories from Indigenous women who also say they were encouraged to abort pregnancies because they had other children in foster care.
“Their social worker is giving them instructions to abort their baby in exchange for being able to get their children back or get more access to their children,” Morgan said. “They’re basically blackmailing women into having abortions.”
Morgan believes more Indigenous women would come forward to share their stories if they had a formal outlet, a place to tell them.
For her part, Mercredi said she repressed her own story for four decades until she heard a radio broadcast featuring women from the Saskatoon Health Region who said they had been coerced into sterilizations.
About 60 women have now joined a proposed class action lawsuit led by Maurice Law, an Indigenous-owned national law firm, that lists the government of Saskatchewan, the Saskatoon Health Authority, the federal government and medical professionals as defendants in its statement of claim.
Alisa Lombard, an associate with the firm, said that since The Canadian Press published a story about the issue last week, her practice has heard from more than 32 women who also say they were sterilized without their consent.
“I think that it is troubling that everyone would not be as concerned as some of us are and committed to making sure that vulnerable women, at their most vulnerable, wouldn’t have the very basic, standard protection that most people take for granted,” Lombard said Wednesday.
At 55, Mercredi said, she’s now strong enough to fight for her 14-year-old self who had no one.
She also hopes Indigenous women who have endured the trauma of sterilization will not isolate themselves in anguish.
“Put your tobacco down,” she said. “The ancestors are with us. Grandmothers are with us and it is time for us now.”
–Follow @kkirkup on Twitter

Friday, November 23, 2018

LILLEY: Trudeau repeats tragic liberal mistake by bailing out mainstream media


LILLEY: Trudeau repeats tragic liberal mistake by bailing out mainstream media

The government created this problem and now they will just make it worse. 

https://www.thepostmillennial.com/lilley-trudeau-repeats-tragic-liberal-mistake-by-bailing-out-mainstream-media/



Justin Trudeau may not be aware but his plan to help out Canada’s struggling mainstream media follows the path laid out by a conservative icon to a T.

Ronald Reagan famously said that liberals followed this pattern, “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

Well after taxing Canadian media in ways their foreign digital counterparts have never been taxed, after regulating them in ways their foreign competition has not faced, the Trudeau Liberals are looking to subsidize the media.

In the fall economic statement, Bill Morneau announced $595 million over five years to “help” media organizations.

“A strong and independent news media is crucial to a well-functioning democracy,” Morneau proclaimed.

True, but is subsidizing the media a good way to ensure they are “independent?”
I don’t think so.

Now full disclosure, as a freelance journalist, columnist and commentator, I frequently work for mainstream media outlets – well kind of.

I host a nightly radio show on Newstalk 580 CFRA in Ottawa and write regular columns for the Toronto Sun. Both of these outlets could end up benefiting from the government’s latest moves.
The government’s plans include allowing media outlets to set up as charities and accept donations and issue receipts. This is something already done in other countries and is actually a laudable move.
The Guardian in the U.K. and The Daily Caller in the U.S. operate under similar models and remain successful.

The government will also allow a tax credit for subscriptions to digital news media, something that previously was not allowed. This will make Canadian digital news media subscriptions more affordable and while perhaps costing the government somewhat as they forgo theoretical revenue, actually doesn’t cost taxpayers directly.

The third policy is the one that has the potential for huge problems.
The government will establish a refundable tax credit for qualifying media outlets to hire journalists producing original content.

Can independent panels really be independent?

“An independent panel will be established from the news and journalism community to define eligibility for this tax credit, as well as provide advice on other measures,” the fiscal update reads.
Considering the hundreds of millions that the Trudeau Liberals have thrown at CBC and the state broadcaster’s kid-glove approach to covering the government, I’m worried about outlets pulling punches.

As a friend said of CBC’s coverage a while back, “I can’t think of them breaking any really big stories that would embarrass the government.”

Will that become the norm across much of the media?

That is the worry of some, including Conservative MP Peter Kent who said in the House of Commons that any bailout of the media in an election year could be seen as buying them off.


Kent knows a thing or two about media interference


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and Kent apologized  
I was wrong – they are actually giving them a $595 million bailout package.

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The former broadcaster quit his post as anchor of CBC’s The National in 1978 to protest political interference by the government of Pierre Trudeau. Trudeau’s office had tried to exert influence over how and when the state broadcaster would cover the new separatist government in Quebec.
Now Kent worries that money may come with strings.
He isn’t wrong to worry.

Yet for all their fretting over the state and health of the media, the Trudeau Liberals have been voting in a different way with their money.

The government shamelessly chooses the duopoly

For the past several years the Trudeau government has been increasing advertising on digital platforms like Facebook and Google, platforms that don’t charge tax on their advertising the way newspapers and broadcasters must.

According to government documents tabled in Parliament earlier this year, the Liberals spent $24.4 million on Facebook and Instagram ads and videos alone between January 2016 and March 2018.
Digital now accounts for more than half the government’s ad buy while spending on traditional media drops. It isn’t as if people aren’t reading papers or listening and watching traditional broadcasters.
The audience is still there but the government that wants to subsidize the media, won’t advertise with the outlets they now want to give money to.

It is a situation that has frustrated many media executives who have simply asked for a level playing field.
Instead, the government kept the field tilted long enough that they now need to subsidize.
On what planet does that make sense?

Trudeau’s moves on paying off media outlets will not stop the bleeding but it may keep some of them going long enough to provide glowing coverage of him and his government through the 2019 election.
What will he promise those outlets if he wins again?

That will be the story to watch over the coming year.
What do you think about the almost $600 million program? Should the government be involved?
Join the conversation by commenting below.

READ MORE: Failing media giants should not be subsidized with more taxpayer debt