March 15th, 2001By Naomi Klein Anyone still unclear about why the police are constructing a modern-day Bastille around Quebec City in preparation for a forthcoming summit and the unveiling of the Free Trade Area of the Americas should take a look at a case being heard by a Canadian provincial supreme court. In 1991 a United States waste management company, Metalclad, bought a closed-down toxic treatment facility in Guadalcazar, Mexico. The company wanted to build a huge, hazardous waste dump, and promised to clean up the mess left behind by the previous owners. In the years that followed it expanded operations without seeking local approval, earning little goodwill in Guadalcazar. Residents lost trust that Metalclad was serious about cleaning up, feared continued groundwater contamination, and eventually decided that the foreign company was not welcome. In 1995, when the landfill was ready to open, the town and state intervened with what legislative powers they had available: the city denied Metalclad a building permit, and the state declared that the area around the site was part of an ecological reserve. By this point the North American Free Trade Agreement, Nafta, was in full effect, including its controversial chapter 11 clause that allows...

15 March, 2001

March 3rd, 2001By Naomi Klein I've never been to Chiapas. I've never made the pilgrimage to the Lacandon jungle. I've never sat in the mud and the mist in La Realidad. I've never begged, pleaded or posed to get an audience with Subcomandante Marcos, the masked man, the faceless face of Mexico's Zapatista National Liberation Army. I know people who have. Lots of them. In 1994, the summer after the Zapatista rebellion, caravans to Chiapas were all the rage in north American activist circles: friends got together and raised money for secondhand vans, filled them with supplies, then drove south to San Cristobal de las Casas and left the vans behind. I didn't pay much attention at the time. Back then, Zapatista-mania looked suspiciously like just another cause for guilty lefties with a Latin American fetish: another Marxist rebel army, another macho leader, another chance to go south and buy colourful textiles. Hadn't we heard this story before? Hadn't it ended badly? Last week, there was another caravan in Chiapas. But this was different. First, it didn't end in San Cristobal de las Casas; it started there, and is now criss-crossing the Mexican countryside before the planned grand entrance into...

03 March, 2001

December 27th, 2000By Naomi Klein Ever since I wrote a book about nasty multinationals and the activists who bash them, I started getting the question: "So Miss No Logo, where do you shop?" Those are the aggressive people. The nice ones ask, "Where should I shop?" Sometimes, they send e-mails requesting annotated lists of "good corporations." Last week, an Irish radio interviewer asked me, on air, for suggestions of ethical gifts his listeners could give their children. I don't know how I became a professional ethical shopper, and I'm not very good at it. But I can sympathize with the dilemma. The newspapers are scattered with stories about factory fires in Bangladesh and sweatshop-stained children's toys imported from China. Last week, a coalition of labour and human-rights groups announced that, despite encouragement from the Department of Foreign Affairs to restrict trade with the brutal dictatorship in Myanmar, Canadian retailers have actually increased their imports from that country -- by 170 per cent since last year. But it's tough to turn this information into shopping advice. The more you know about how consumer goods are produced, the harder it becomes to offer practical dos and don'ts. I usually give long-winded...

27 December, 2000

December 20th, 2000By Naomi Klein Where do we go from here? There's a big space in the political landscape for a new party, one that looks at the calls for localization and doesn't see a dire threat to national unity. There is a very simple reason to have a left-wing alternative to the Liberal Party: People are suffering. Despite all the wealth created by deregulated markets, many Canadians are seeing no part of it. In fishing communities from coast to coast, on family farms, on the streets of large cities, Liberal Canada's recipe for economic growth has meant people being thrown into the global market without a net. In response, we have seen a wave of political organizing and militant protests. Students blockade trade meetings where politicians are bargaining their futures away in exchange for foreign investment. In First Nations communities, from Vancouver Island to Burnt Church, there is growing support for seizing back control of the forests and fisheries—people are tired of waiting for Ottawa to grant permission that the courts have already affirmed. In Toronto, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty is occupying buildings and demanding the shelter that is the right of all Canadians. There is no shortage...

20 December, 2000

December 13th, 2000By Naomi Klein When Canadian Auto Workers president Buzz Hargrove called for an emergency task force on the future of the NDP, he got blasted. Mr. Hargrove was "posturing," an NDP insider said. "The press isn't the place to do this," Nancy Riche of the Canadian Labour Congress said— in the press. And NDP Leader Alexa McDonough claimed the process Mr. Hargrove demanded was happening already. It is time to "let a thousand flowers bloom," Ms. McDonough said with a cheerfulness that has become increasingly manic, recalling a post-Regis Kathie Lee Gifford. Elsewhere, Ms. McDonough insisted that "there are no questions that are not fair game to put on the table." The real question is: Why on earth would anyone on the left entrust this process to the NDP? The defensive responses to Mr. Hargrove's call for a task force (not the dissolution of the party, remember) say a lot about why the NDP must be demoted to guest, not host, of any gathering where the topic is the reinvention of the left. Too many times, attempts to reach out to "social movements" have been slapped back by party insiders so busy protecting their piece of power that...

13 December, 2000

December 6th, 2000By Naomi Klein On the weekend, the man in the mask came down from the jungle and held a press conference. In the new year, he will travel to Mexico City and address Congress on the need for an Indian bill of rights. Subcomandante Marcos, voice of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, has been keeping a low profile lately. But he's back, in trademark ski mask, rifle over his shoulder, and pipe hanging from his mouth. Rumour has it he is a university professor who fled to the hills to lead an indigenous uprising in Chiapas, but Marcos has no comment. Showing his face, he jokes, would disappoint his female fans. It's a mark of the Zapatistas' influence that the very first act by Mexico's new president was to order a partial withdrawal of troops from Chiapas. Vicente Fox also invited the Zapatistas to resume negotiations that broke down under his predecessor. Marcos told reporters he's ready to talk, but not until Mr. Fox completes the troop withdrawal and releases all political prisoners. It's clear that Mr. Fox sees settling the Zapatista standoff as key to Mexico's stability. Less understood is how powerful the Zapatistas are outside of...

06 December, 2000

November 29th, 2000By Naomi Klein Last week, two Canadians made international headlines by burning their passports. They were protesting Canada's leading role in making sure that the climate summit in The Hague was a complete disaster. The catalyst? A coalition of 287 environmental groups handed daily "fossil" awards to countries that were especially obstructionist in the negotiations. Canada ended the conference with more awards than any other country, including the United States. For most people, the passport bonfire was a bit extreme—"shrill" to quote The New York Times. When Tooker Gomberg, one of the passport pyros, called from The Hague on Sunday, I told him he may have done the cause of climate change a disservice. "If a single journalist had asked me why I burned my passport," he replied angrily, "I would have been happy to tell them." He has a point. Mr. Gomberg's stunt was the only event at the summit that managed to pry the attention of Canadians away from our election and the Florida recount—if only for 30 seconds. And the scandalous events in The Hague deserve much more scrutiny than that. In Kyoto three years ago, Canada, along with the other signatories, committed to reducing...

29 November, 2000

November 22nd, 2000By Naomi Klein When Alliance candidate Betty Granger used the phrase "Asian invasion," it was a flashback to Second World War "yellow peril" rhetoric and she was forced to resign. But there was another pearl of wisdom the ex-candidate shared with students at the University of Winnipeg, one that went largely unnoticed. Referring to the boats of Chinese immigrants seized off the B.C. coast, she said, "There was a realization that what was coming off these boats was not the best clientele you would want for this country." Clientele. It doesn't have the same xenophobic ring as "Asian invasion"; in fact, it sounds positively clinical. But it may be more dangerous, especially because it is an idea that is not relegated to the fringe of the Alliance but lies at the very centre of the national immigration debate. We often talk about migrant labourers as "clients," while our country, with its public health care and reasonably healthy job market, is the product these clients would like to purchase. Since there are millions of migrants shopping around, we can carefully assess, as Ms. Granger did, whether they are "the best" clients available. "Betty Granger just expressed out there in...

22 November, 2000

November 15th, 2000By Naomi Klein On Oct 20, University of Toronto student Derek Laventure attended a protest outside the Ontario Tory convention. He saw a police officer drag away a fellow activist and he was heard to say, "That's not right." Next, witnesses say, he was brutally assaulted by several police officers, thrown against a barricade headfirst (his eye was so bruised, it swelled shut), and arrested. His crime? Allegedly carrying a weapon and using it to assault a police officer. The "weapon" was a black flag. On the night Mr. Laventure was arrested, Elan Ohayon, a U of T PhD student, was sleeping in Toronto's Allan Gardens. He had camped there every Friday for more than a year as part of a protest against inadequate public housing and police harassment of homeless people. The next morning, Mr. Ohayon woke up surrounded by police officers. They arrested him and, he alleges, assaulted him. Like Mr. Laventure, Mr. Ohayon was charged with assaulting police. He was told to sign bail conditions that barred him from returning to Allan Gardens. He refused. That meant abandoning the vigil to which he had committed himself as an activist. Last week, after spending 20 nights...

15 November, 2000

November 8th, 2000By Naomi Klein When the top two executives at BMG Entertainment resigned on the weekend, it revealed a deep schism in the way multinational companies see the Internet's culture of sharing. Despite all the attempts to turn the Net into a giant shopping mall, the default ethos still seems to be anti-shopping: On the Internet, we may purchase things here and there, but we share ceaselessly—ideas, humour, information and, yes, music files. So here's the real debate as it goes down in the boardroom: Is this culture of on-line swapping and trading a threat to the heart of the profit motive, or is it an unprecedented profit-making opportunity, a chance to turn sharing itself into an enormously profitable sales tool? When the five major record labels, under the umbrella of the Recording Industry Association of America, launched a lawsuit against Napster, they threw their lot decidedly into the first camp: file-sharing is theft of copyright, pure and simple, and it must be stopped. But last week, something strange happened: Bertelsmann, owner of BMG Entertainment (one of the five companies behind the RIAA lawsuit), struck a deal with Napster (hence the BMG resignations). The two companies are going to...

08 November, 2000