so a bit of context on the “protecting 25% of our land” tweet: it was referring not just to national and provincial parks, but to migratory bird sanctuaries and national wildlife areas, under the umbrella of protected areas. currently, 12% of canadian land falls under that category. this is land owned by the crown and managed by agencies such as parks canada. the liberal party is promising to accelerate the currently planned increase of protected areas from 17% by 2025 to 25% (from a expansion rate of 40% over 5 years to doubling its scope). on the other hand, only 1,3% of canada’s marine environments are protected, so an eighteenfold increase over a period of five years is another question altogether.
what the map doesn’t show you is property relations. even if trudeau repeats and keeps his nail-in-the-coffin last minute promise this time around (we all remember the declaration that the 2015 election would be the last using FPP), this is only a fraction of the land owned by the crown, which owns 89% of canada’s territory. while this figure includes first nations reserves (3%), the organizational body that manages property relations on these treaty-defined lands is indigenous & northern affairs, another crown agency. parks canada manages another 3% as national and provincial parks. so 25% is really low-balling it if this means over half of canada’s landmass will still be rentable to crown and private corporations for capital development.
something that isn’t mentioned often is treaty hunting and gathering rights, that while constitutionally protected since 1982, are still under threat by the arm of law enforcement and conservation officers alike. parks canada interprets section 35 of the constitution as only applying to protected areas designated after 1982, and while today this makes up for about half of the land under parks canada’s jurisdiction, and would only go up as the amount of protected areas increase, this doesn’t answer to the treaty terms on which the crown makes their claims to the land. this only applies to national and provincial parks, as
migratory bird sanctuaries and national wildlife areas seem to observe these rights as far as i can tell, but fall outside of parks canada’s jurisdiction.
so to get back to what started this, the suggestion that canada could, or should expand its protected areas by a factor of 100% over a period of five years misses the point of who is doing the encroaching and who is affected the most by it. while popular demand for environmental considerations is a good thing, any reorganization of crown lands in the interest of conversation should at least be met with a proportional reorganization in the interest of decolonization. while both parks canada and the department of indigenous and northern affairs are both crown agencies fundamentally at odds with the material interest of canada’s indigenous peoples, they both manage a measly 3% of canada’s land, and the crown has the power to expand one department as much as the other. we need better 5 year plans than socialist pipe dreams under liberal administrations of a capitalist mode of production.
“Given current technology, there is no possibility to continue using more energy per person, more land per person, more more per person. This need not mean a gray world of grim austerity, though that’s what’s coming if inequality and dispossession continue. An emancipated society, in which no one can force another into work for reasons of property, could offer joy, meaning, freedom, satisfaction, and even a sort of abundance. We can easily have enough of what matters—conserving energy and other resources for food, shelter, and medicine. As is obvious to anyone who spends a good thirty seconds really looking, half of what surrounds us in capitalism is needless waste. Beyond our foundational needs, the most important abundance is an abundance of time, and time is, thankfully, carbon-zero, and even perhaps carbon-negative. If revolutionaries in societies that used one-fourth as much energy as we do thought communism right around the corner, then there’s no need to shackle ourselves to the gruesome imperatives of growth. A society in which everyone is free to pursue learning, play, sport, amusement, companionship, and travel, in this we see the abundance that matters.”
The company committed a series of violations of the National Labor Relations Act in 2017 and 2018, Amita Baman Tracy, a California administrative law judge ruled in a court filing.
Among the violations of the law cited in the filing was a tweet sent by Musk in May 2018.
“Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing? Our safety record is 2X better than when plant was UAW & everybody already gets healthcare”, Musk wrote in the tweet bit.ly/2nR14f9 from last year.
The tweet amounted to “threatening employees” with loss of stock options if they vote in favor of the union, the judge said in her ruling on Friday.
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