Cheney heads to Vancouver amid NDP call he be barred from Canada

Globe and Mail
Kevin Drews

A member of Parliament from British Columbia is challenging the federal immigration minister to a debate on torture, war crimes and whether former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney should be barred from entering Canada.

Don Davies, the NDP immigration critic, said Mr. Cheney should not be allowed into Canada to promote his book “In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir” during an exclusive $500-a-ticket dinner in Vancouver Monday night.

Mr. Davies said Mr. Cheney has admitted publicly to authorizing and endorsing the use of water boarding and sleep deprivation while serving as vice-president in the Bush administration. Mr. Davies contends those interrogation techniques break Canadian and international law.

“Sections 35 and 36 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act have a number of provisions that directly state that anybody who has engaged in those practices is inadmissible to Canada,” said Mr. Davies. “So I'm just calling on the immigration minister to enforce the law.”

Mr. Davies said the federal government has been silent on the issue and he's ready to debate Immigration Minister Jason Kenney “on any point” raised.

Mr. Kenney hasn't commented on the issue, but a spokesperson said that highly trained public servants who follow Canada's immigration laws make decisions on admissibility on a case-by-case basis.

Mr. Cheney's spokesmen could not be reached to comment on the controversy his visit has generated. However the former vice-president has vigorously and vocally defended interrogation techniques used on detainees during the Bush years, saying they saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Monday night's exclusive event at the Vancouver Club has already sold out, said Leah Costello, founder of the Bon Mot Book Club.

She said club organizers wanted to stimulate debate and decided to invite Mr. Cheney because of the anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attacks and the release of the former vice-president's memoirs.
“How I feel, you know, it definitely comes down to the freedom of speech issue, and what I love about Canada is that we are all free to speak and to debate and to pursue ideas and positions that we believe in.”

Ms. Costello said the club has a security plan in place and has contacted police.
A number of Vancouver peace activists and organizations are calling for protests.
The website stopwar.ca is calling Mr. Cheney an “unrepentant torture and war advocate” and is asking supporters to give him the “welcome he deserves.”

Japan’s Fukushima catastrophe brings big radiation spikes to B.C.

Straight
Alex Roslin

After Japan’s Fukushima catastrophe, Canadian government officials reassured jittery Canadians that the radioactive plume billowing from the destroyed nuclear reactors posed zero health risks in this country.

In fact, there was reason to worry. Health Canada detected massive amounts of radioactive material from Fukushima in Canadian air in March and April at monitoring stations across the country.

The level of radioactive iodine spiked above the federal maximum allowed limit in the air at four of the five sites where Health Canada monitors levels of specific radioisotopes.

On March 18, seven days after an earthquake and tsunami triggered eventual nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, the first radioactive material wafted over the Victoria suburb of Sidney on Vancouver Island.

For 22 days, a Health Canada monitoring station in Sidney detected iodine-131 levels in the air that were 61 percent above the government’s allowable limit. In Resolute Bay, Nunavut, the levels were 3.5 times the limit.

Meanwhile, government officials claimed there was nothing to worry about. “The quantities of radioactive materials reaching Canada as a result of the Japanese nuclear incident are very small and do not pose any health risk to Canadians,” Health Canada says on its website. “The very slight increases in radiation across the country have been smaller than the normal day-to-day fluctuations from background radiation.”

In fact, Health Canada’s own data shows this isn’t true. The iodine-131 level in the air in Sidney peaked at 3.6 millibecquerels per cubic metre on March 20. That’s more than 300 times higher than the background level, which is 0.01 or fewer millibecquerels per cubic metre.

“There have been massive radiation spikes in Canada because of Fukushima,” said Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility.

“The authorities don’t want people to have an understanding of this. The government of Canada tends to pooh-pooh the dangers of nuclear power because it is a promoter of nuclear energy and uranium sales.”

Edwards has advised the federal auditor-general’s office and the Ontario government on nuclear-power issues and is a math professor at Montreal’s Vanier College.

In a phone interview from his Montreal home, he said radiation from Fukushima will lead to higher rates of cancer and other diseases among Canadians. But don’t panic. Edwards cautioned that the risk is very small for any particular individual.

“It’s not the risk to an individual that’s the problem but how much society is at risk. When you are exposing millions of people to an insult, even if the average dose is quite small, we are going to see fatal health effects,” he said.

Some impacts may have already occurred in North America. Infant mortality in eight cities in the U.S. Northwest jumped 35 percent after Fukushima, according to an article by internist and toxicologist Janette Sherman and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano on the Counterpunch website in June. The number of infant deaths rose from 9.25 per week in the four weeks prior to March 19 to 12.5 per week in the following 10 weeks, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control data.

“There has been a dismissiveness about the long-term hazards of nuclear power,” said Dr. Curren Warf, adolescent-medicine division head at B.C. Children’s Hospital.