On Friday July 29th, marijuana activist Marc Emery — the 47-year-old leader of the British Columbia Marijuana Party — was arrested in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on a U.S. indictment charging him with selling millions of dollars worth of marijuana seeds to customers throughout the United States.
Jennifer Garner, in an article titled Canada Now Officially 51st State, suggests that “the highest levels of the Canadian provincial and federal governments were involved in setting up the (US-authored Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters treaty between the US and Canada) investigation and raid, in the process raising obvious issues of Canadian sovereignty and revealing to Canadians in a very stark way that Canadian law enforcement can sometimes be a tool of US drug agents.”
Vancouver Police spokesperson Howard Chow admitted that Emery’s selling of marijuana seeds “is not enough” for him to have been arrested by Canadian authorities acting on their own, and confirmed that the arrests came solely as a consequence of DEA motivation and information.
Libby Davies, Vancouver East NDP Member of Parliament, stated that the arrests go against the views of most Canadians, who support decriminalization of marijuana and who had not demanded that Emery’s marijuana businesses be shut down.

“I think it’s very disturbing that the Vancouver police department is raiding a local business and arresting people for the U.S. war on drugs,” Davies told The Vancouver Sun. “It feels to me like the long arm of U.S. enforcement reaching into Canada.”

Here’s the video of the US DEA press conference. In this video, Halifax Police provide information on their role in the arrest. At BlogsCanada, Canadians have begun to express their alarm at Emery’s arrest, detention and possible extradition, taking the federal government to task — most pointedly federal two others are wanted in the United States to face charges of conspiracy to manufacture marijuana, conspiracy to distribute seeds and conspiracy to engage in money laundering. Mr. Emery was in Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia, where he was scheduled to speak at a music festival that raises funds for the organization, Maritimers Unite for Medical Marijuana.
Mr. Emery spent Friday night in a Halifax holding cell, and was remanded to another correctional facility by midday Saturday, where he’ll remain pending arrangements to transfer him to British Columbia early this coming week.

Save St. Paul’s Hospital Coalition co-chair Aaron Jasper will appear live on Rafe Mair’s morning talk radio show on CKBD 600 AM this morning (July 27) from 8:40 – 9:00 a.m. The show is available live, and archived, on the web at 600am.com.
Providence Health Care, a faith-based health care provider, operates five hospitals across Vancouver, the largest of which is St. Paul’s, located in downtown Vancouver. Providence Health Care proposes to close the current West End site and move the hospital three kilometres east, to False Creek Flats, just southeast of the Prior Street exit of the Georgia Viaduct. A thriving community resource widely acknowledged as one of the finest acute care teaching and research hospitals on the continent, St. Paul’s Hospital serves the largest downtown urban core population anywhere on this continent, outside of New York City.
Rick Barnes, at Politics in BC, and Steve Wansleeben at Panorama, provide further insight into St. Paul’s Providence Legacy Project.
The home of the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, and the designated heart centre for the province, St. Paul’s Hospital treats more than 116,000 patients every year, many of whom are members of the majority elderly and gay and lesbian population of the West End / Coal Harbour / Yaletown downtown core.

“What people need is access to the site,” Vancouver Burrard MLA Lorne Mayencourt recently told the Vancouver Courier. “There are seniors in the West End that need to be close to where they get services. There’s a gay population that accesses the hospital’s Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. The plan leaves me with a great deal of concern for health care in my community.”

The West Ender recently also ran a story on the possible move of the 111-year-old hospital, although the West Ender failed to adequately report on the utter lack of community consultation — by Providence Health Care, the City and the province — involved in the proposal to move the hospital. The lack of consultation is particularly egregious given that more than 90,000 residents live within a 10-block radius of St. Paul’s, and another 50,000 work in the downtown core each week day — significantly more than the 20,000 people who live within 10 blocks of the False Creek Flats site.
By moving St. Paul’s Hospital away from the population it serves — should the move come to pass — there is little doubt lives will be lost and health care jeopardized, not least because of the distance of the proposed site from the West End and the relative inaccessability of False Creek Flats.

In one of the most stunning political comebacks of this new millennium the British Columbia NDP gained 31 seats in the legislature, emerging once again as the conscience of British Columbia and government in waiting.
The people of British Columbia sent the Gordon Campbell Liberals a message: we’re not gonna put up with your mean-spirited policies which target the poor and the vulnerable, children and the disabled, the rural areas of our province, and seniors and women across the province.
Today is a day for celebration, a day to acknowledge that British Columbians are a fair-minded people, dedicated to fairness and social justice for all. The people have spoken. Democracy reigns.

In the latest Mustel Group poll, although the Liberals are ahead of the NDP by five points — down from an eight-point lead in April — pollster Evi Mustel told the Victoria Times-Colonist that “the five-point gap makes the election too close to call” when considering the ±4.0% statistical probablilty factor.
Meanwhile, Strategic Thoughts columnist David Schreck says it’s ‘payback time’ for the BC voters …

In an ideal world voters would evaluate each of the candidates, read the platforms of all of the parties, and carefully consider informed debates during the course of the campaign. In the real world people have busy lives with much more to do than follow every nuance in politics.
Traditionally voters are said to have very short memories, but the 2005 election may be very different. Most policy issues do not personally affect very many voters, hence it is easy to put them out of mind. The same isn’t true when you get laid off, have your pay cut, or have your tuition doubled. There are dozens of decisions taken by the Campbell government that inflicted significant harm on tens of thousands of voters. Chiropractors, podiatrists and physiotherapists lost patients because MSP delisted their services; on the patients’ side, they either paid more or did without. Some people skipped their regular eye exams because they no longer had coverage. Some seniors walked away from the prescription counter after learning how much more they had to pay for their drugs. The use of provincial parks declined when families got hit with $1 an hour or $5 a day parking fees. It is not just about the gut wrenching stories of seniors being separated from their spouses after 50 years of marriage as a result of the Liberal’s community care policies, or about the tragedies created when people were turned away from emergency rooms. The election is about thousands and thousands of stories big and small where people know that they were hurt as a result of a mean spirited, uncaring government. May 17th is the time when those who were hurt can inflict some pain on Gordon Campbell. For some voters, it is payback time.

Over at The Tyee, Tyee election prognosticator Will McMartin is now calling for the NDP to win 25 seats, with another 8 seats up for grabs. But when you consider that, according to the Mustel Group poll, that a full 11% of BC voters have not decided on how they’re going to cast their ballot, and news reports have Green Party support soft with the potential of half their supporters voting strategically to defeat Gordon Campbell’s government, the potential for a squeaker must be looming heavy in the Liberal camp.
And factor in, too, the record number of voters eligible to vote this time around — 700,000 more than last year and more than ever in the province’s history — attributable to a decision by Elections BC to make British Columbia the first jurisdiction in North America to allow voters to register, update and confirm registration online. Who’s most comfortable with online registration? That’s right, younger voters. And will the vote of young people go to the Liberals, considering a doubling of tuition fees at post-secondary institutions across the province over the course of the past four years; not to mention, cuts to bursaries and scholarships?
The denouement to Campaign 2005 is shaping up to be interesting, indeed, no matter how quiet the parties have been on the hustings. Campaign 2005, in the end, has become our opportunity to tell the Liberals just how unhappy we are with a government that dramatically reduced funding to legal aid; cut funding to 37 women’s centres; got rid of the Ministry of the Environment and cut staff whose job it was to protect our eco heritage.
Slashed funding for childcare; slashed funding for programmes that would have brought street kids off the streets and into safe conditions; closed 1/3 of the court houses across the province; closed major departments in 69 hospitals in BC while closing three hospitals altogether; closed 1,464 long-term care beds, 2,529 residential care beds and 1,200 hospital beds.
Raised fees in provincial parks and put parking meters in place; sold off BC Rail; gutted labour legislation to the point where it’s now almost impossible to certify a bargaining unit in British Columbia; privatized hospital services with the attendant loss of 7000 frontline health care worker jobs, leading to a radical decline in the quality of food and support services, and dietary and hygiene standards; raised MSP premiums by 50%; doubled or tripled fees for most government services, ranging from renewing your driver’s license to applying for a birth certificate; fired 3000 teachers, raised class sizes, and closed 100 schools; the list could go on and on and on.
Enough is enough. Vote for change May 17th. Kick da bums out of office.