First Nations

Why rural Canadians need public transit just as urgently as suburbanites

Retrieved on: 
Tuesday, May 9, 2023

BBC’s Race Across the World shows contestants trying to make their way around British Columbia without access to rental cars or planes.

Key Points: 
  • BBC’s Race Across the World shows contestants trying to make their way around British Columbia without access to rental cars or planes.
  • BC Transit works with local governments and First Nations to deliver transit services.
  • That’s unique in Canada and partly accounts for the relatively large number of rural public transit systems in B.C.

Rural transit needs

    • In short, the benefits of accessible, affordable public transit in rural communities are economic, social and environmental.
    • In a recent study, my fellow researchers and I identified seven types of rural transit barriers.
    • Rural communities need a high level of both human and financial capacity to start and maintain a transit system.
    • Low (if any) potential profit means rural transit is often run by local governments or not-for-profit organizations, which require a high level of both human and financial capacity to start and maintain a transit system.

Gaps in our knowledge


    There is another issue: gaps within our knowledge base. In a synthesis of rural transit literature in Canada, my fellow researchers and I found three substantial gaps:
    Overall, our understanding is narrow and incomplete. So it’s no wonder that we see gaps in the policies and programs created based on this limited understanding.

Government initiatives fall short

    • In early 2023, the federal government announced Canada’s Rural Transit Solutions Fund would be accepting applications for capital projects.
    • It is flexible in terms of what can be funded by government, and it’s open to innovative ideas.
    • The Rural Transit Solutions Fund is just one example of efforts to bolster rural transit that fall short.

Missing the mark

    • But there is a continuing misunderstanding of rural realities, particularly relating to available human and financial capacity.
    • And if we want the broad benefits of accessible transportation, we need to fund both the buses and the drivers.

Prime Minister celebrates the Coronation of His Majesty King Charles III

Retrieved on: 
Saturday, May 6, 2023

The Crown was created by the Canadian Heraldic Authority as a symbol of the Canadian monarchy and was approved by His Majesty the King.

Key Points: 
  • The Crown was created by the Canadian Heraldic Authority as a symbol of the Canadian monarchy and was approved by His Majesty the King.
  • The new flag of the Sovereign was also recently approved by King Charles III.
  • "Today, we ring in the reign of His Majesty King Charles III and reaffirm Canada's enduring commitment to the Commonwealth.
  • His Majesty King Charles III acceded to the Throne on September 8, 2022, following the passing of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

New funds will tackle Indigenous smoking. But here's what else we know works for quit campaigns

Retrieved on: 
Friday, May 5, 2023

A key priority of the strategy is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander smoking and Closing the Gap.

Key Points: 
  • A key priority of the strategy is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander smoking and Closing the Gap.
  • Here’s why that’s urgently needed and what needs to happen next to reduce smoking rates among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Tobacco is still a killer

    • For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, more than a third of all deaths are caused by tobacco.
    • Over the past decade we have lost more than 10,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lives due to smoking.
    • Multiple policy failures beyond health – from poverty, education, employment, housing, family removals, dislocation and the systematic embedding of tobacco as rations in lieu of wages – mean Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are disproportionately impacted by the harms of Big Tobacco.

We know what works

    • This makes the case for targeted approaches, including local level campaigns, reinforced by general, national activity.
    • Audiences engage with the message when they can see themselves and their community members (sometimes actually) in the advertising.
    • This was created by Indigenous agency Carbon Media, starring musician Fred Leone alongside real stories from community members.
    • When Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people lead and promote smoke-free behaviours, communities are more interested in quitting.

What works? Product, price, place and promotion

    • Social marketing campaigns, like the ones we’ve mentioned, really work well when they take on the Four Ps of product, price, place and promotion.
    • This is where the rest of the National Tobacco Strategy comes in.
    • Place We have known about the harms of commercial tobacco since at least 1950.
    • Promotion The commitment to close any last promotional loopholes for tobacco and e-cigarettes, particularly online is also important, along with local and national anti-smoking campaigns.

What we also need

    • Targeted approaches are critical and can be effective, but they need to be supported by bigger, whole of population structural changes.
    • Lisa J Whop receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Australian Research Council.
    • Michelle Kennedy receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, Medical Research Future Fund and the National Heart Foundation.

Australia finally has a Net Zero Authority - here's what should top its agenda

Retrieved on: 
Friday, May 5, 2023

The Albanese government has announced a Net Zero Authority to reduce national emissions and help industry, communities and workers manage the shift to a low-carbon economy.

Key Points: 
  • The Albanese government has announced a Net Zero Authority to reduce national emissions and help industry, communities and workers manage the shift to a low-carbon economy.
  • So let’s take a look at how the Net Zero Authority can help Australia make the most of this once-in-a-generation economic transformation.

What will the Net Zero Authority do?

    • Reaching the target requires a transformation of Australia’s economy away from emissions-intensive activities such as burning fossil fuels.
    • But without an organisation such as the Net Zero Authority, reaching this target was not assured, and workers and communities may have suffered along the way.
    • The authority will work with federal agencies and state, territory and local governments, existing regional bodies, unions, industry, investors, First Nations groups and others.
    • Our findings suggest the Net Zero Authority is on the right track, and offers specific ways forward on policy.
    • Read more:
      We need a National Energy Transition Authority to help fossil fuel workers adjust

Co-ordination is key

    • Between them, they extract or make products such as iron ore, steel, aluminium, chemicals and liquified natural gas.
    • These regions are significant in terms of emissions and energy use, but also make a big contribution to the economy.
    • We found more work was required to coordinate the transition and help all stakeholders collaborate and attract investment.

Let’s get together

    • Our research suggests one approach: creating clusters of industrial businesses in one place, powered by 100% renewable energy.
    • We identified 11 priority areas across Australia with the potential to host these precincts.
    • It would allow businesses to share resources and knowledge, reduce costs and capitalise on Australia’s abundant renewable energy resources.

Paying for the transition

    • Co-investment partnerships between federal agencies and state governments could offer even greater benefits.
    • Co-investment is a way for governments to combine multiple, smaller funding sources to achieve scale and efficiency.
    • Attracting private capital is important for reaching the scale of finance needed to fully decarbonise industry in key regional locations.

Seize the moment

    • Australia’s energy transition represents a moment of great opportunity.
    • But it means focusing on the needs of our workforce and industries and ensuring no-one gets left behind.
    • It will help ensure Australia’s industries, regions and communities are positioned to prosper in a decarbonising global economy.

What does it mean to play sport on First Nations land? Ellen van Neerven explores sovereignty and survival on the sporting field

Retrieved on: 
Friday, May 5, 2023

This is an ugly book that was born of the ugly language I grew up hearing in this country.

Key Points: 
  • This is an ugly book that was born of the ugly language I grew up hearing in this country.
  • This book is me scratching my way out of the scrap of the schoolyard, just trying to stay alive.
  • Review: Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity – Ellen van Neerven (UQP) Weaving together race, Indigeneity, sports, sexuality, gender, class and Country, they offer something no sport historian has.

Prominent and personal Black sporting moments

    • The sporting field as a site has offered many iconic moments for mob, both in victory and as victims of racial violence visited upon us – from spectators, selectors, and sporting clubs and associations.
    • And with Aboriginal men’s innumerable, yet memorable, defiant stances against racism in both rugby league and Aussie rules.
    • Van Neerven doesn’t visit those familiar iconic moments.
    • Instead, they take us into the private moments they’ve experienced as a soccer player and as a queer non-binary Blackfulla growing up in Brisbane.

Strategising survival on the sporting field

    • In reading their story, I felt perhaps I had missed something in not loving the game like they do.
    • Van Neerven most powerfully demonstrates their skills – as a writer and soccer player – in the chapter titled “Skills”.
    • And van Neerven honours Black theorising throughout the text, as they make sense of survival, sovereignty and sporting fields.
    • With Perfect Score, van Neerven reminds us that sport, for Blackfullas – pre- and post-1788 – has never been just for recreation.

After decades of trying, how can we deliver more effective alcohol regulation in the NT?

Retrieved on: 
Friday, May 5, 2023

The Northern Territory continues to report the highest levels of alcohol consumption and harm in Australia, despite decades of reform.

Key Points: 
  • The Northern Territory continues to report the highest levels of alcohol consumption and harm in Australia, despite decades of reform.
  • As we’ve seen over the years, there’s been a concerning link between alcohol consumption and domestic violence, crime and antisocial behaviour.

1) Controlling supply and distribution

    • The simplest way governments can reduce alcohol-related harm is to decrease supply and access to alcohol.
    • The public anger over the planned opening of a Dan Murphy’s near three dry communities in 2021 indicates that Territorians understand the link between supply and harm.
    • These measures are combined with targeted and adequately resourced alcohol-related public health campaigns, such as a recent one aimed at reducing the supply of alcohol to minors.

2) Changing purchasing and consuming behaviour

    • This has proven effective in reducing alcohol consumption – especially for wine products.
    • As a result, consumers may be motivated by the cheaper cost and reduced scrutiny when buying alcohol from a bottle shop.
    • Another way of changing behaviour is through health messaging.
    • Read more:
      Alcohol bans and law and order responses to crime in Alice Springs haven't worked in the past, and won't work now

3) Empowering community-led approaches

    • Another way governments and communities can manage alcohol-related harm is to promote drink-free activities and one-month alcohol abstinence campaigns, such as “dry July”.
    • These types of campaigns have lasting positive effects on health, wellbeing and maintaining control over drinking.
    • Some Darwin locals have also formed a social sober club, where socialisation without alcohol is emphasised.

A way forward

    • Ultimately, effective reform will require deep reflection on what alcohol means to us as individuals, and as a society.
    • By learning from the successes and failures elsewhere, we can deliver a tailored approach for the NT that will have a better chance of success in the long term.

Remarkable new tech has revealed the ancient landscape of Arnhem Land that greeted Australia’s First Peoples

Retrieved on: 
Thursday, May 4, 2023

Many visitors to Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory are struck by the magnificent cliffs, stunning bird life and extraordinary rock art.

Key Points: 
  • Many visitors to Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory are struck by the magnificent cliffs, stunning bird life and extraordinary rock art.
  • Some may know this landscape includes the earliest evidence of human occupation in what is now Australia, at Madjedbebe, where signs of habitation have been dated to 65,000 years ago.

Red Lily Lagoon

    • This landscape has been transformed by a sea-level rise of more than 120 metres, which brought the coastline from more than 200 kilometres away to lap directly on the cliffs in the Red Lily Lagoon area in Western Arnhem Land.
    • The buried landscape we have mapped contains a sandstone escarpment, now buried underground, which has great potential to contain archaeological sites.
    • This overlooked a deep valley that contained a river system, which is now buried by more than 15 metres of sediment.

Modern maps of an ancient landscape

    • Previous work in Arnhem Land using drilling has provided some information about the history of the landscape, but our research achieves much greater detail.
    • We combined this data with aerial mapping of the modern landscape undertaken with a drone and an airborne laser.
    • While geophysics techniques like these are often used to find and map archaeological sites, we instead focused on reconstructing the ancient landscape itself.

What lies beneath?

    • The past 8,000 years have seen dramatic changes, from a dry river valley to a mangrove forest to today’s seasonally inundated flood plains.
    • These changes would have had important implications for people, including in terms of what they could eat and drink, and where they could live.
    • Some archaeologists have questioned the accuracy of the dates of occupation determined from the Madjebebe site.

‘We want people to see’

    • Better models of how the environment has changed let us ask new questions about how people lived.
    • We need to know, us Bininj, and everyone in the world with this new technology, bringing that up to our country.
    • We want people to see and want people to know what’s been happening many thousand years ago in the past.
    • We need to know, us Bininj, and everyone in the world with this new technology, bringing that up to our country.

Western Announces First Quarter 2023 Results

Retrieved on: 
Wednesday, May 3, 2023

Results in the first quarter of 2023 reflect more challenging macroeconomic conditions, resulting in lower lumber prices and reduced demand compared to the same period last year.

Key Points: 
  • Results in the first quarter of 2023 reflect more challenging macroeconomic conditions, resulting in lower lumber prices and reduced demand compared to the same period last year.
  • Lumber revenue was $211.0 million in the first quarter of 2023 as compared to $313.9 million in the same period last year.
  • Average stumpage per cubic metre in the first quarter of 2023 was 39% lower compared to the fourth quarter of 2022.
  • Western has recognized $5.0 million in restructuring costs in first quarter of 2023 related to APD.

The Sacred Balance: blending Western science with Indigenous knowledges, David Suzuki's influential book has been updated for this moment

Retrieved on: 
Wednesday, May 3, 2023

Canadian scientist, author, and environmental activist David Suzuki knows firsthand the power of books.

Key Points: 
  • Canadian scientist, author, and environmental activist David Suzuki knows firsthand the power of books.
  • Suzuki, now 87, may be one among millions active in today’s environmental movement, but he is one in a million.
  • This is the sacred balance: that people might achieve “rich, rewarding lives without undermining the very elements that ensure them”.
  • Read more:
    David Suzuki: Australian scientists should be up on the ramparts

Soil and life

    • Consider the opening few pages of the chapter on soil, or the element “earth”.
    • the fundamental connection of soil and life is expressed in different ways; in some, the first human is fashioned from material produced by earth - carved from wood, moulded out of cornmeal, shaped from seeds, pollen and sap.

‘You are what you do’

    • On the 25th anniversary of its release, a new edition has been published.
    • They bring renewed urgency to his message that “we have to see ourselves in a different relationship with the rest of nature”.
    • The major crises we face – “pandemics, climate disruption and biodiversity loss” – “all have roots in our lack of recognition of our place in nature”.
    • One of these is Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, emblematic of a “new generation of young people” fighting for climate action.
    • I don’t want your hope […] I want you to act as you would in a crisis.

Indigenous worldviews

    • Of course, those familiar with Indigenous knowledges and worldviews will recognise Suzuki’s view of human-nature connection is not at all new.
    • As he acknowledges, it has been at the heart of Indigenous worldviews for millennia.
    • Indigenous ways of teaching could be beneficial for all children

      Indigenous perspectives are central to the discussions in The Sacred Balance, although the sense in which non-Indigenous sciences are presented as a “corroboration” of ancient, continuing Indigenous wisdom and knowledges feels outdated amid contemporary postcolonial and decolonising critical discourses.

    • We already live in the presence of the model and the guidance of Indigenous worldviews, which marry science with spirit, gift and responsibility.
    • at a time when 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity is safeguarded by Indigenous Peoples, yet they legally own only 10% of the land mass, this book recognises the imperative for Western science to learn from Indigenous knowledge.

Wins and losses

    • But he notes that,
      no matter how many wins we celebrated, new threats arose: protected land nibbled away, mining and logging allowed in parks, halted projects renewed and environmental legislation overturned.
    • no matter how many wins we celebrated, new threats arose: protected land nibbled away, mining and logging allowed in parks, halted projects renewed and environmental legislation overturned.
    • What matters now is that “we shift from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism” and “reformulate” our legal, economic and political systems.

A form of devotional reading?

    • Perhaps a book we read for information in 1997, is now read more for love; the need to be informed has transformed into the need to be encouraged.
    • Amongst these is the practice of devotional reading, or partaking in a “calibrated daily dose of ideas”.
    • Wall Kimmerer suggests The Sacred Balance “sows a vision of the future we want to live in, with guidance to get there”.

Alberta election: Is the province's energy regulator acting in the public interest?

Retrieved on: 
Wednesday, May 3, 2023

As a political scientist with a public finance background, I have been studying the impact that environmental contamination can have on government finances.

Key Points: 
  • As a political scientist with a public finance background, I have been studying the impact that environmental contamination can have on government finances.
  • Environmental liabilities are the future costs assumed by licensed oil and gas companies to remediate the extraction site to its previous state.

Reclamation

    • What’s known as the “polluter pay” principle in Alberta law requires all licensed and operational oil and gas companies to adhere to the remediation and reclamation practices of the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER).
    • Since 2015, financial hardship has resulted in a number of court decisions with significant ramifications for those who could ultimately be stuck with the reclamation bill — taxpayers rather than company shareholders.
    • Financial security is defined as cash or letters of credit that ensure funds are available to the regulator for reclamation costs if companies go bankrupt and fail to meet their obligations.

Two key court cases

    • The first court case on this issue began in May 2015 after ATB Financial, an arm of the Alberta government, pushed Redwater Resources into bankruptcy.
    • Taking such action is always a last resort for a creditor, especially for a public institution like ATB.
    • When the case made it to the Supreme Court of Canada, the polluter pay principal was upheld.

Unpaid municipal taxes

    • Rural Municipalities of Alberta (RMA) says that as of December 2021, $253 million in unpaid taxes had accrued.
    • The RMA is particularly galled that the provincial government allowed companies to avoid municipal taxes on new wells drilled until 2025.
    • Furthermore, it would only apply to 41 per cent of unpaid taxes owed by companies that are currently operating.

Smith’s royalty lobbying

    • Smith’s support of the oil industry’s efforts to receive royalty payment breaks, meanwhile, is an embarrassment to the sector.
    • The premier’s proposed royalty deferral program, RStar, was previously rejected by then Energy Minister Sonya Savage, who was soon moved to the Environment and Parks department.

Kearl Lake spill


    Recently a toxic spill at Imperial Oil’s Kearl Lake oilsands mine has led to a House of Commons environment committee inquiry. The AER and Imperial Oil failed to notify affected First Nations or the federal government. Heartbreaking testimony from First Nations and evasive testimony from chief executives of both Imperial Oil and the AER reveal continuing indifference to the environment.

A tool of the industry

    • All of these developments suggest the Alberta Energy Regulator is controlled by the industry and has lost the public’s trust, particularly First Nations.
    • A powerful book, Hidden Scourge by ecologist Kevin Timoney calls for a dismantling of the regulator, given it apparently acts on behalf of the industry and not the public.