Link – blog on council members
Link – blog on school board
This is a preliminary post, of exchanges between myself and the mayor of Delta, BC, on account of GMO and pesticides. I chose the title because I am afraid the mayor is lost on the issue of GMO and is going about it in a completely wrong way, attempting to get herself and her council even more biased towards the science, the economics and the ethics of GMO cultivation in Canada. It reminds me of a ship floundering in turbulent waters, cast adrift without a helmsman or propulsion.
She also makes a false statement that the city council has no power to control GMO, and that all those that are supporting a GMO free resolution are, in essence, jumping a bandwagon that is going nowhere. What is most galling, is her assumption, or implication, that she considers it her duty to bring ‘credible reports’ on the science of GMO and then to study it, so that she, and her council can then pass their verdict and sermon on the people of Delta on what they should or should not eat. Far as I understand democracy, it should be the people that make the decision and the elected public servant that carry out people’s wishes.
I shall deal with most of these issues fully in due course. But lest I forget or miss anything, I am creating the first blog on it, calling it Mayor of Delta – where are you? I believe she is lost and along with her, the residents of Delta are drifting aimlessly, and facing collective peril with regard to our health, environment, biodiversity, food security, seed freedom and our very existence as a free and independent nation capable to charting our own course without interference and control from outside forces, and corporate greed.
But first, the letters. I had asked all candidates of Delta civil election on their position on GMO and if they would support Delta passing a resolution to be GMO free.
I have created two blogs, one for the council members and one for the school board, already. But the mayor deserves a dedicated blog. And here it is.
Tony Mitra
On Oct 26, 2014, at 6:48 PM, Lois Jackson <jacklo12@dccnet.com> wrote:Mayor Jackson
GREETINGS: WELL, FIRSTLY MY NAME IS LOISŠ
SECONDLY, MAY I SAY THAT WE HAVE NOT BEEN USING PESTICIDES NOR INSECTICIDES IN OUR PARKS FOR SEVERAL YEARS. WE BAN IT FROM BEING SOLD IN DELTA AND ENCOURAGE PEOPLE TO USE łNATURAL˛ METHODS TO KEEP DOWN GARDEN PESTS. AS WITH MANY TOPICS THAT ARE BEING DISCUSSED TODAY IN THE MEDIA AND BY THE PUBLIC, GMO SEEMS TO BE ONE OF THEM. THIS ISSUE HAS NOT BEEN SCIENTIFICALLY PRESENTED TO OUR COUNCIL AND I HAVE ASKED OUR CHIEF ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICER, MR. GEORGE HARVIE TO BRING FORWARD GOOD SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS FOR COUNCILąS PERUSAL.
I MUST ALSO SAY THAT I AM NOT A SCIENTIST NOR A CANADIAN FOOD INSPECTOR NOR CANADIAN LEGISLATOR;THESE ARE VERY COMPLEX ISSUES AND I LOOK FORWARD TO RECEIVING CREDIBLE REPORTS TO OUR COUNCILąS ATTENTION.
AS FAR AS OTHER CITIES AND COMMUNITIES ARE CONCERNED, IT IS SO EASY FOR SOME COUNCILąS TO SIMPLY JUMP AT AN ISSUE, (LOOKING FOR ATTENTION PERHAPS?) AND THEY JUMP ONTO A BANDWAGON WHICH IS EMPTYŠ EMPTY OF INFORMATION, SCIENCE AND UNDERSTANDING. OUR DELTA COUNCIL TAKES PRIDE IN ANALYZING THE ISSUE, SEARCHING OUT THE BEST INFORMATION, REFERRING IT TO EXPERTS, BEFORE WE łJUMP ONTO THE BANDWAGON˛.
AS AN EXAMPLE, I REFER TO THE ISSUE OF SHARK FIN SOUPŠ THIS WAS A FEDERAL IMPORTATION MATTER AND WE HAD NO JURISDICTION TO DISALLOW ITS IMPORTATION NOR SALE IN DELTA. WE DID HOWEVER, MAKE STRONG PRESENTATIONS TO MANY FEDERAL JURISDICTIONS WHO DID HAVE AUTHORITY. MANY COUNCILLORS AND COUNCILS CAME FORWARD CONDEMNING THE PRACTICE, HOWEVER, THE SUBJECT WAS AN EMOTIONAL ONE OVER WHICH LOCAL GOVERNMENT HAD NO JURISDICTION.
ANOTHER ISSUE WAS THE łBANNING OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN VANCOUVER˛ THERE WAS NO EFFECT OF THIS STATEMENT, AND IT WAS SIMPLY A STATEMENT BY A COUNCIL WHO HAD NO JURISDICTION OVER A MATTER.
THEREFORE, TO BE HONEST AND OPEN AND MAKING GOOD LEGISLATION ON AN ISSUE, I WILL AWAIT THE REPORTS FROM OUR STAFF AND CONTACT YOU UPON DELIBERATION OF SAME,
THANK YOU FOR YOUR QUESTION, AS I REMAIN,
LOIS E. JACKSON MAYOR OF DELTA
I have responded to her by a holding email. But I need to single out this email to show how many ways the politicians are being less than fully truthful, and honest in their statements.
- Banning of Lawn pesticides in Delta parks and removing them from stores. This is good work done. The work is not finished since anyone in delta can drive across scrott road and buy all the pesticide they need from stores in Surrey. More importantly, this banning was initiated by the municipality of Hudon, Quebec in 1991 – 23 years ago, starting a precedence for the rest of Canada. It took Delta 20 years to catch up on one issue. We do not have another 20 years for Delta to catch up with rest of BC on GMO and Glyphosate(RoundUp) issue.
- Mayor says she has asked someone to bring good scientific analysis for the council’s perusal. By that statement, the mayor has exposed her lack of grasp of an issue that relates to not just “scientific analysis”, but a) with the denigration of neutral science in North America in the last two decades through industry influence, b) with impossibility of independent science labs to find problems with either GMO or Glyphosate due to “proprietary knowledge” that disallows independent scientists to honestly study their safety, just to name a few. Her statement is so outrageously absurd that I wonder if she is just ignorant, or calculating.
- The mayor claims she is not a scientist nor a food inspector. That is correct. She is a public servant, and her duty is to check what the public wants. If the issue is complex, she should consider arranging experts on both sides of the argument to come to Delta and present their case, not just to the council, but to the residents of Delta, and let the people then decide what they would like their municipality to do. That, my dear mayor, would be your duty. You do not need to be a scientist nor a food inspector. You are hired to work as a public servant. Nothing more.
- She belittles other towns and other politicians as if they are jumping a bandwagon and seeking popularity on fake issues. These other towns and politicians, are fighting for the interest and well being of Canada. The mayor, on the other hand, might be knowing or unknowingly sitting in the band wagon of foreign corporations hell bent on subverting Canadian food security and sovereignty. I consider it my duty to expose arrogant, dismissing replies that politicians use in this way.
- Shark fin soup – I dispute her statement that it was merely federal matter. Hudson, QC defied federal approval and went ahead to ban a product in their town. They faced a barrage of court challenges for ten years and persevered, proving and setting a precedence, that municipalities have the right to ban a product or a practice, if the people there believe this is bad for their health or environment. I would have liked the mayor of Delta to strive to protect Delta people’s wish as well as the sharks future, and not hide behind an excuse.
- Banning Nuclear weapons in Vancouver – I would have liked the mayor to consider pushing back at the federal Govt by having the gall to propose a ban on installations or transportation of any nuclear warhead in the municipality or through the municipal land of air or waterways. I would have loved the mayor to take this issue to the public and ask if they agree and support this, and if “yes”, to threaten to pass this law and be ready to be challenged by higher authorities. That is the right way to stand up to principles and make a difference, instead of finding excuses to shirk responsibility. She took a very bad example as an excuse to explain why she would not fight to declare Delta GMO free and strive to work with other BC municipalities to push back at this dangerous onslaught on our food, health and nature.
- If I appear annoyed and outraged at the mayors response, I feel I am more than justified. At stake is Canada’s future and here is a mayor tap dancing around important and difficult issues.
IT time Canadian politicians, starting from the bottom up, stop using ignorance as an excuse for doing nothing. It is time for them to stop passing the buck by blaming federal politics and claiming Municipalities have no authority. It is time for politicians to stop misguiding the public and obfuscate this issue. It is time for them to get off their high horse and face issues squarely and without hiding behind corporations and lobby groups.
SCIENCE ? WHAT SCIENCE ? The mayor used the term ‘Credible report‘ and the fact that she has asked a city administrator, to bring forward ‘good scientific analysis‘ for the council’s perusal. The mayor also goes on to add that the council takes pride in analyzing issues, searching out the best information and referring it to experts, instead of jumping to bandwagons.
These statements are so hollow that I am going to spend some time on them.
May the mayor and her team first address the issue of how they are going to ascertain that they are getting “credible” unbiased and neutral reports on science ? Are they aware of where scientific neutrality currently lies in Canada or North America ?
Let me refresh the mayor’s memory, that Governments do not fund science research through tax payers money any more, and science is funded by the industry. And the industry has absolutely no interest in funding scientist that may find problems with their product. Not only that, they actually fire any scientist that finds problems with their products, shuts down their labs, gets their papers retracted, forces the universities to discredit them, withdraws their licence if possible, and makes their source of income disappear.
Let me remind the mayor that, due to intellectual property rights clause of patented GMO, no independent science lab is even allowed to study possible ill-effects of GMO and not allowed to publish any finding without permission of the creator of the GMO and no article that is less than flattering ever gets published because of it. Which planet is the mayor living in, when she she thinks she can get “good scientific analysis” on the subject?
So, to start with, i invite the mayor, & her team to first identify a science institute that is doing meaningful work on testing GMO, that is not funded by the industry and where the scientists are not under either industry or political control.
How about reading the book “Poison Spring” by a retired EPA scientist Mr. Vallianatos? He is an ex EPA scientist that describes how corrupt EPA is due to constant interference of the industry on one side and the White House on the other. And it is this EPA that approves “ALL” pesticide that go into agriculture including Canadian Agriculture. In fact the Canadian health ministry gloats over the fact that it works “closely” with EPA and therefore only approves those chemicals that are deemed safe by EPA.
The EPA scientist Mr. Vallianatos meanwhile states that EPA has gotten so corrupt, that any scientist that ever finds even a little bit of problem with any pesticide, is fired, or gagged or transferred and made irrelevant. Could I invite the mayor to listen to Dr. Vallianatos speaking with me on record on this issue ?
So, how about Delta Council inviting Mr. Vallianatos to Delta (he lives in California) for a first hand presentation of how pesticides are approved by EPA ?
Then we can find the next scientist that can explain how things work inside Health Canada, in approval of questionable substances. How about reading the book “Corrupt to the Core – Memoirs of a Health Canada whistleblower” by Dr. Shiv Chopra, who was fired by Health Canada because he refused to accept a questionable growth hormone for cows imported from the US for approval unless sufficient safety tests were done, despite the fact that EPA had approved it. Because he was not accepting the hormone without safety tests, he got fired by Health Canada. Dr. Chopra and his union is taking Health Canada to the supreme court for wrongful dismissal of a conscientious scientist.
How about inviting Dr. Chopra (he lives in Ottawa) to present his case to the Delta Council?
And if you like to speak with a Canadian genetic engineer and soil biologist that has worked for many years with Agriculture Canada on one side, and is also an organic farmer on the other – there is Dr. Thierry Vrain, from our own British Columbia, currently flying to Ottawa to speak with the health minister Ms Rona Ambrose on the topic of, you guessed it, GMO and pesticide and how dangerous these things are and how none of them have ever been independently tested.
So, how about inviting Dr. Vrain to advise you his take on the dangers of the pesticides that are associated with the GMO ?
And ohh, I forgot to mention – EPA does not test the pesticides, just like FDA or other bodies do not test the GMO. All these tests are “supposed to be” done by the same corporation that produces them, i.e. companies such as Monsanto. Is that a conflict of interest or not ?
How about Dr. Don Huber ? He is a professor emeritus from Purdue University, Idaho, a microbiologist and a plant pathologist among many things. He has beens studying toxic chemicals such as Glyphosate for years and is and outright critic of the GMO science that pushes this dangerous chemical on our agricultural fields. As a result, he is now being hounded by the industry, and the University is trying to discredit him, although he is respected enough outside of the industry to be funded by external sources, including being invited by a few countries to teach them and guide them to move away from GMO and chemical farming to healthy localized sustainable farming.
Dr. Huber was a biological warfare expert, employed earlier by the US military. His job was to protect Americans from biological warfare. He has told me in his own words, that, if he was a terrorist and wanted to invent a harmful bio-molecule that would slowly, steadily and greatly harm America, he could not have invented a chemical better than Glyphosate. And how the terrorists don’t have to do that, because Monsanto is selling it to everybody, supported strongly by the US Govt.
How about asking Dr. Huber to come and give you his presentation on the issue ?
How about calling scientist Dr. Nancy Swanson from Seattle, that drew those charts based on US Govt data, showing correlation between release of Glyphosate and rise of diseases such as Crohn’s, Celiac, or autism ? How about calling Dr. Anthony Samself or Dr. Stephanie Seneff of MIT artificial intelligence laboratory, who are compiling paper after paper about the mechanism by which Glyphosate in our food destroys our gut bacteria that is so important for keeping us healthy ? How about calling Anthony Samsel or Stephanie Seneff or Nancy Swanson ? I know all of them personally and can help introduce you.
Canada signed it but did not ratify it. USA & Australia never even signed it. Rest of the world (except Russia which bans GMO altogether) signed and ratified it, protecting their biological diversity from theft by Biotech corporations or accidental destruction or extinction.
How about Studying Cartagena Protocol of the United Nations, which is about protecting your biological diversity against inadvertent damage through introduced GMO. A hundred and sixty countries have signed it, but Canada has not. As a result Canada’s biological heritage is up for grabs and grabbed it has been, by the likes of Monsanto. My question to you is – who in Delta Council is going to spend time studying this protocol and raising awareness so Ottawa is forced to address it? The Protocol Head office is in Montreal, not that far away. How many Canadian politicians even know about this issue ? Canola was a Canadian invention. If we had signed the Cartagena protocol and put up laws to protect our biological inventions and heritage, then Canola would still have remained a Canadian product. Instead, it is now owned by Monsanto. So, would the Mayor and Council still feel qualified to find “credible report” on GMO ?
And even that is not enough. My question to the Delta Council is – who are they to study GMO and make a decision on if the people should eat toxic gene or toxic chemical laden food ? Who gave them the authority ?
Last I checked how democracy is to work, it should be the people that decide if they like pesticide laden food in their meals or not. Last time I checked, the duty of elected officials is to carry out the wishes of the electorate. All that the Municipality and the mayor needs to do, is to check the pulse of the people, and assist them to get both sides of the story without bias and without industry propaganda and without political or corporate interference. Is the Mayor and the Council capable to arranging that ?
Last time I checked, the only leaders that makes decision on what kind of food or anything else is good for the people, are Dictators, and not Elected politicians.
This is one problem that creeps into politics, the moment the public stops watching over politicians – the politicians forget that they are public servants, and starts thinking they might be dictators, or perhaps prophets sent down to this planet by God himself, to make all decisions for us the poor and ignorant people.
The Mayor and the corporation of Delta assumes authority, which they do not have, of deciding what GMO is and if it is good for the people. The elected officials should be joining the people’s wish across the land, to declare themselves to be GMO free and then work with other municipalities and UBCM and FCM to find ways to push back at the current agro-industry contract workers (I find it difficult to call them GMO farmers, since they do not own their seeds and are in effect contract labourers for Monsanto), to take over farming and kill all local farmers.
The farm lands are getting depopulated as the small organic farmers go bankrupt, and move to the cities to become unemployed, while huge swaths of land is coming under control of US biotech industry.
I find myself both annoyed, outraged and exasperated by the Mayors high handed and dismissive note on GMO issues, where she and the other politicians are obviously out of their depth and yet presume to study “credible reports’ without having a clue about how biased the very science has become thanks to the politicians allowing the industry to skewer our science in the first place. How blind can a politician be ?
How about calling Vandana Shiva to Delta? She did her PdD in quantum mechanics in Canada. She is coming to Ontario next month.
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If I feel annoyed and outraged by the mayor’s dismissive and arrogant email, perhaps she and other readers will understand that I have sufficient reason to be so. Ms Mayor – please consider calling both sides of the argument and let the people decide. You do not have the authority to decide for the people.
I have no doubt your team with find a lot of pro-GMO pro-industry propagandists. They are crawling all over the place. But I doubt you or your team is able to gather a credible team of scientists that can tell the people the opposing view, those that are beyond the reach of the industry and the Governments, who are willing and able to tell the people how they are being robbed off their land, their environment and their future, by what amounts to new age cobbler barons. So, please call them and let them speak to the people of Delta.
- EG Vallianatos (ex EPA scientist) – California
- Shiv Chopra – (Ex Health Canada scientist) – Ottawa
- Thierry Vrain (Ex Agriculture Canada scientist) – Comox Valley, BC
- Don Huber (Ex US Army biological warfare expert, scientist) – Idaho
- Anthony Samsel (Ex Arther d’Little, scientist) – Massachusetts
- Stephanie Seneff (MIT artificial Intelligence lab, scientist) – Massachusetts
- Nancy Swanson (Correlation – Glyphosate & disease, scientist) – Seattle
- Vandana Shiva, of Navdanya, India, who will be touring Ontario in winter.
- Read Book – Poison Spring, by Vallianatos
- Read Book – Corrupt to the core – memoirs of a health Canada whistleblower, by Chopra
I shall come back here later, to add more points for the mayor, the council and the people of Delta. And we shall talk about seed freedom, about farm labour, about economic viability, about local produce against food coming from California while local small farmers die off. We have a lot of ground to cover on the GMO / pesticide issue. The biggest and deepest issue is – political corruption in Canada that has brought Canada to this state of affairs, literally handing over our freedom and ability to control our destiny away from the people’s hands into those of foreign corporations.
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Feedback from a North American scientist that is fighting against Industry and Govt repression because he tried to research and speak the truth. He wishes to remain anonymous for the moment, but I expect he will come out in the open soon. Here is what he said. The formatting is mine.
Dear Tony
The big business is very good at destroying the scientists who stand against them.
This afternoon if you can wait I will feed you some more of my ideas. We need to learn how to play the game of pseudo-democracy, which is reality.
- EG Vallianatos, cannot comment much – sounds interesting. I need his curriculum.
- Shiv Chopra, one guy who was properly destroyed by big business. A good value.
- Thierry Vrain, give him a try. Good value if he can speak well.
- Don Huber, my hero; big business is trying hard to destroy his name.
- Anthony Samsel, Stephanie Seneff – very imaginative and with ideas to work on for next 50 years, however, they have been the target of the most vicious attacks.
- and Nancy Swanson. A remarkable person who put together a summary in which I verified a lot of the data.
A scientist is always afraid of misleading correlations. But the search for cause-effect is so often a misleading act in itself.
For example cholesterol plugs arteries but it is a symptom of damage to arteries and not a cause of damage. Mainstream medicine has not caught up yet because the pharmaceuticals have so much control over medical schools.
But various studies showed that lower cholesterol is not a predictor of reduced cardiovascular problems.
I heard a conference at Laval University that went through the whole history of cholesterol research; the very first scientists knew that cholesterol was, overall, a good molecule.
True culprits for cardiovascular problems exist; sugars, excess iron in red meat, trans fats, and probably pollutants of various kinds, which are irritant to blood vessels. But the focus on all fats and on cholesterol was led by a fraudulent scientist named Ancel Keys who published papers ignoring any data that was contrary to his hypothesis. He became so powerful that he crushed all others in his path. And big pharmacy saw a golden opportunity. The result is a 15 billion $ fraud.
Maybe I am out of context, but this is to show how far away from the truth science can go. You see, cholesterol plugs arteries THEREFORE we must lower cholesterol is a cause-effect statement in which the search for the cause was not serious and honest, and thus the true causes were obliterated in USA and in all countries that suffered their influence.
That is the problem we have. Big companies are making money, they want more, and they do not want to know anything that could bother their money-making scams.
Governments have made themselves very dubious entities in our attempts to know the truth. Canadian governments appear to be enemies of true science.
Mayor, consider investigating this, about science in Canada. And I am not joking
In the last months the federal government has emptied all scientific libraries of 99% of books, & 100% of journals. You could not find one scientists who was really consulted. Or perhaps the younger generation does not care about science…
Try to grasp the implication. Many scientific disciplines are getting lost. Of all pathologists that were used to breed disease resistant plants, perhaps only 10% remain, compared to 40 years ago. Once you get rid of those people the only solution becomes CHEMICALS.
This massacre went on everywhere, I understand. Such events of mass desctruction of scientific knowledge have perhaps no equivalent in 2000 years in the history of the world. All the history of the Canadian scientific research in agriculture is gone to the dumpster. All the documents that allow us to see what is changing over time is destroyed.
I was sleepless for days after seeing that. Sometimes, it still gets me awake at night. And if the same is going in in Health Canada, Environment Canada, everywhere… just think about this: moving Canada 40 years behind in a single sweeping move.
One of the main tools of research scientists has been burned to ashes. Books worth a fortune were destroyed; they were not offered for sale, not offered to interested scientists, just destroyed.
What a stupid, dirty, revealing way to deal with public science. And you want to bring “Credible Reports” on GMO?
Then they claim that the science behind the pesticide industry is sound science, and all I have to say, is – you bullshitters, you do not even know what science is about.
If the govt gets itself in a weaker position which I hope will be sooner rather than later – it may then be safer for a scientist or two to emerge from the shadows to talk about these horrors of Canadian science.
Ms Mayor of Delta – you are way out of your depth on the assumption that you and your office, can check best available information and make educated decision on behalf of the people, about the “science” of GMO. Study, if you like, first, on the issue of destruction of past records of Canadian agricultural documents, studies, reports and data, if you dare.
Pardon my French, Ms Mayor – you are either unbelievably naive or extraordinarily out of your depth here, both on your ability to grasp the science and the business model behind GMO and on what authority you may have in making a decision on it.
Its not that the mayor has not received mails and appeals from concerned citizens on this and related issues before. I have personally written to her several months ago, and put that up on my blog goo. The mayor did not see it fit to respond to it. Her actions do not show any evidence that her office had attempted to study up on it.
.. This is a link to my letter to the Mayor in May 2014 which she did not bother to respond to, and displays no evidence that she cares about.
Podcast : Lisa Fraser of Burnaby, BC, tries to get candidates to explain their stand on GMO. She talks to Tony Mitra about it.
Meanwhile, my friend 
As the title says, Evaggelos Vallianatos, along with Mr. M. Jenkins co-authored the book on EPA, and how the organization has been literally captured by the toxic chemical industry, to the disadvantage of the average American, and by extension, of the people the world over.
What I learned in the process is that the dozen or so labs in Canada that have the accreditation for testing for Glyphosate, none seem prepared to test its presence in any sample except water and soil. Urine, blood or milk from nursing mothers or cows cannot be tested. I told him of me being puzzled and wondering if Health Canada at all has imposed any acceptable limit of concentration of Glyphosate in humans, and if they do – what is that limit. More importantly, how do they test it if no lab in Canada can do that? If on the other hand, Health Canada has not set any limit of concentration in humans, and in effect considers any level of accumulation is fine – then why set a limit for potable water in the first place ?
