Category Archives: Politics

Good bye, New York Times

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Sorry New York Times, I do not buy this latest bout of crocodile tears.

The biggest political story of the US election did reach a dramatic climax but it was unexpected only because media such as yours tried your damnedest to fool the people with corporate and state pushed propaganda to tilt the playing field in favor of Hillary Clinton.

You stopped being neutral, and objective a long time ago. It was not Donald Trumps unconventionality that was the root cause – your corruption and lack of journalistic integrity was.

The election was divisive but the reason was far from what was projected by your media. It was divisive because one side was pushed by the entire corrupt establishment, of which you are a part and and the other side was those that stopped believing in you. Therefore everything you said was suspect. More you trashed Trump, more folks suspected there was something important about Trump that may be good for the people that the establishment does not like. More you ridiculed him, more he appeared a good candidate to those that stopped believing in you.

You should reflect on it all – but you are not going to continue to con past subscribers like me. I would not read you even if someone paid me to do so, forget about buying a subscription ever again.

You say you cannot deliver independent and original journalism without our support. The trouble is, you did not deliver those items even with our support.

Now, you claim you cannot do without us.
I for one, can and will do without you.

Good bye.

Tony Mitra

NATO may be brain dead

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RT Report says NATO is rethinking a scenario where US under Trump might pull out from Europe.

Far as I think, NATO should seriously mull this scenario and Trump should consider de-escalation of warmongering, and also tell Trudeau to stop selling weapons to Saudi Arabia. Everybody should go home and spend that money on local jobs and infrastructure. Russia is not a devil and war mongering should not be the only way to grow an economy and Corporatocracy should not be the only policy for nation states.

Enough already.

The German defence minister says Trump to be firm with Russia as NATO stood by the US after 9/11. Well, with all due respect, I do not know what Germany means by standing by the US after 9/11. US falsely attacked Iraq which had less than zero involvement in 9/11 and ended up killing a million people of Iraq. What is the meaning of Germany standing by the US, please explain – Germany. And Russia is not the bully. You are allowing US missiles to be placed on German soil aimed at Russia – you are the puppet of USA threatening Russia you moron. You deserve to have Russia placing their missiles aimed at you. Are you completely devoid of rational thinking ? Soviet Union had a gripe against you on two counts:
1) It was ideological – communism thought capitalism needed to be defeated, everywhere. But Russia today is not communist.
2) Germany had invaded Russia twice, in WWI and WWII. You were the aggressor each time and cause massive damage and death to Russia. Russia has a historical justification to be suspicious of you. And now you are adding fuel to the fire – you bunch of morons !!

I seriously think NATO and the German political clan under Angela Merkel might be brain dead.

Angela Merkel on Huffpost – A warning, or hypocrisy?

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Along with many other news sources, I have more or less stopped watching Huffington Post too, a part of the media trash. Nonetheless, this one came out of it, covering Angela Merkel’s supposed not-so-subtle warning. The title was carefully designed to get you interested and click to read further. I did not get it directly from Huffpost since I stopped looking at it. It nonetheless came to me through Facebook shares.

The main theme of this article, whether Merkel meant it or not – implies that Merkel is ready to work with the new president elect Trump, when and if both leaders share a common belief of equal rights to people of all colour and faith.

The article implies that Merkel suspects Donald Trump might not not allow equal human rights to people of skin colour other than white, or to people of faith other than Christianity etc etc.

In that, Merkel is conveniently mixing two issues and blurring a very important national concern for anybody. The two issues are : is supporting human rights the same thing as allowing unlimited immigration from anywhere?

This to me is one of the key elements to the problems in the global politics relating to the war torn middle east today. The so called immigrant issue, for Merkel and EU, involves people from the middle east. Why are they moving to Europe ? Not necessarily because they want free state support, easy money or a better lifestyle. They are moving primarily because their homes, cities, villages and mode of living have been bombed to smithereens, thanks to western manufactured bombs used on them either directly, or indirectly by the west.

Another way to look at it is – Merkel and the rest of warmongers, Hillary and Obama included, believe, rightly, that accepting all these homeless refugees is a moral responsibility, if they wish to continue to bomb more and more middle eastern towns, villages and cities. Accepting these immigrants is a price that the European and American societies must pay, so that the military industrial complex can continue to its business business as usual and the entering immigrants can then work at wages lower than the locals would accept, thus making it even cheaper for the corporations to make a buck.

It would have been smarter, to wake up to the fact that there is another way to solve this problem:

  • Stop the war
  • Stop the bombing
  • Spend the money to rebuild the devastated towns and cities
  • Make sure that the local people get the jobs
  • Ensure local firms get the contracts like the post war Marshall plan
  • Do not allow western firms and tycoons to milk the system again.

If you do all that and make the middle east great again, the people will not only stop wanting to move to Europe or North America, but those that already came would largely want to go back.

This is the first item that Merkel is mixed and made fuzzy.

The next item that she may be making fuzzy is questioning Donald Trump’s right to want to protect his own nation from endless ingress of refugees from exactly those war torn areas where most have been harmed by western war crimes and will likely to have many that hold a grudge against the west because of it. Trump may or may not follow up on what he stated during his campaigns, but what he did state is not that he denies human rights to brown skinned people or people of the Islamic faith – but that he opposes the US governments policy of bombing the shit out of everybody – and wishes to work WITH other nations and not FIGHT with them, and that he opposes endless influx of immigrants precisely from those areas where terrorists are mushrooming up.

I do not at all see this reasoning as a sign that Trump is either a racist, or that he despises people of colour or other religion.

The only thing I am uncomfortable with about Trump in this particular field, is his open declaration of supporting Israel in what appears to me to be a biased tilt towards it and calling out Iran as a demon. But I suspect he said it because he had to say it, and that, somehow, no American politician can rise to power without blessing of Israel – a strange and incomprehensible situation where a tiny tiny tribe of people can have such an overwhelming influence on the supposedly most powerful nation on the planet.

But, Angela Merkel too has been in the same rut, and will not say a word against Israel.

Other than that Israel angle, I see no real evidence that Donald Trump has been either a virulent racist or a virulent anti-Muslim or any-any other faith.

So, either Angela Merkel is a fraud, or Huffington Post is a fraud, or both of them are.

IF you want to address issues with human rights, racism or religious intolerance, Angela and Huffington post, start with Israel and Palestine first. Then, I am willing to listen to you and might stop considering you anything better than trash.

The decline and fall of mainstream media

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Ten years ago, I used to subscribe to, or read often, daily and weekly news outlets such as Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, Washington Post, The New Yorker, Time magazine, Newsweek, New York Times etc, as well as many other sources, and web sites, blogs and the social media.

I slowly stopped subscribing and reading the mainstream, as began to realize that these vaunted news sources were not real news, but market manipulations and perceptions of some of the writers, all of whom were stuck to a few universally accepted ideas that I was beginning to doubt – that constant rise of GDP measured in an unsustainable yardstick was the first and only measure of development, that constant upward development was a must, that only news was financial news, war news, sports news, or trivia.

In the last few months, I got thoroughly disappointed by almost all major news sources as I could clearly and plainly see that it was engaging in a concentrated attack on Donal Trump for minor or trivial issues, inflating them and turning him into a demon, while giving the nasty deeds of Obama-Hillary a total pass. I found it increasingly difficult to take any of these news sources seriously.

I came to realize another factor – the Democratic party of Hillary was far to the right of Donald Trump, and in fact, Hillary was likely more a fascist than Trump himself. And yet, even Jill Stein was identifying Trump as the fascist instead of Hillary! The world was gradually turning upside down and black was being painted white and vice versa.

I used to be an instinctive Democratic party supporter, somehow influenced in my school days by the charm of John & Jacqueline Kennedy. But I began to understand, now, that my fixation with the “liberal” wing was kind of wrong because the liberals were pretend liberals, and dishonest to boot.

I came to understand in the last fifteen years, the real dangers of removing the glass-steigel act and implementing NAFTA, the de-linking of currency from gold, and the ability of western economies to create vast amounts of money out of thin air, without any backing, and that all money thus created were in essence counterfeit money, legalized by state governments.

I came to understand the real goals behind the agendas of IMF and the world bank, and the reason WTO failed and the new drive for the west to create regional trade agreement so that difficult components and nations could be bypassed, thus writing down TPP and many other such localized trade deals, all of them designed to make money for multinational corporations and hurt local labour forces and remove the rights of nations to resist these efforts.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

I also came to understand that the war mongering of the US government was more a democratic party gift than a republican one. I remembered that the only ex-president that warned the American people of the threat posed by an all consuming military industrial complex was Dwight Eisenhower, a republican and not a democrat. I also came to understand how the one living Democratic ex-president that to me appeared to be morally straight and willing to call a spade a spade – Jimmy Carter, would denounce Israel’s apartheid policies in his book with regard to the treatment of Palestinians and US governments incestuous relationship with Israel. He identify USA not as a democracy any more, but as an oligarch with unlimited bribery. And now, the democratic party was trying to create as much distance as it could, with Jimmy Carter.

I found it hard to identify reliable news sources anywhere. Aljazeera english remained an interesting alternative, but it was way too far leaned towards Soudi and Qatar Governments and their obnoxious record in human rights and anti-shia blood letting and joining hands with Israel and the US to create a phoney civil war in Syria so the war machine can continue rolling.

I even found google news to be heavily biassed in favour of Hillary and I had to seriously fine tune google news asking it to specifically restrict sources like New York Times, Washington Post and the like.

I now find it amusing that The New York Times is asking me, here, to get back on board and start subscribing again….

Hahhhhh …. not a chance, buddy, you are not a news outlet. You and most others here are all paddlers. What I see is the death of mainstream news, replaced by rubble and a few paddlers, and a promising grassroots movement of a mass of citizen journalists mushrooming up through the social media.
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Thought I’d move all these from ranting on Facebook, into a blog.

Monsanto Tribunal missing the bus?

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There is a Monsanto Tribunal in The Hague in mid October, where world’s notable Monsanto haters are tentatively expected to be present.

 

It looks like a grand event. The concept is novel. A group of international judges will sit and hear presentations from a number of International notables, about the crimes of Monsanto. The judges will then pass judgment, even if it is symbolic. At the end of the two day affair, the international participants are supposed to get a sort of legal expertise and guideline on how Monsanto might be legally challenged in different countries, and prevented from further damaging the planet.

The participants are who is who in the global list of folks that one way or another have resisted either Monsanto directly, or the biotech industry, and are sort of well known in the field. Names such as Seralini or Kruger from Europe, Vandana Shiva from India, Shiv Chopra & Percy Schmeiser from Canada, Steve Marsh from Australia, Don Huber & Stephanie Seneff from the US are in the provisional agenda, and are expected to present their evidence to the judges, on Monsanto’s wrongdoings. Even a few ambassadors are to be in attendance.

While I wish this endeavour all success, I could not help notice that the whole thingamajig  essentially misses the bus.

Monsanto has been used as a convenient punching bag by all sorts of organizations and people, without much success. To me, targeting Monsanto is what the Biotech Industry would like us to do. Why ? Because such an effort will always be little more than symbolic. Further court cases against Monsanto will only enrich a few legal pockets. Why? Because Monsanto does not necessarily break the law, but rather influences Governments to bend the rules to favour the corporation. In fact, the only legal cases that have sort of succeeded, and thus provided some jurisprudence in the GM technology issue have been against Governments and not against Monsanto.

Monsanto is just a corporation and most Corporations will do whatever it can, to make a profit, irrespective of the human or environmental Cost. In that, it is not very different from the Pharma industry that wishes to push unnecessary vaccines down your throat, or corporations like Nestle that might wish to grab pubic water, oil giants wanting to steal someones fossil fuel reserve, or the military industrial complex pushing armaments across the world and promoting continuous warfare.

The real culprit and the root of all these evils, including that of Monsanto, is political corruption in Government. It might start with Obama downwards in the US, Trudeau down in Canada, and so on. It is our Governments that are suspected of working against the interest of the people, and passing laws that allow free reign to corporations including Monsanto.

Therefore, without any mention at all of Government level political corruption, this entire Tribunal, to me, is a waste of time, and an effort to keep the public barking up the wrong tree.

When a the problem is rooted in political corruption and an onset of fascism, it can only be solved by grabbing this rotten political bull by the horn. It is my belief that ecocide will not be stopped by lawyers targeting Monsanto. It will, if at all, be done by the people going after corrupt Governments.

I wish the wise people attending this tribunal will ponder on that, and perhaps let the attendees know that a mock tribunal is, after all, only a mock one. As long as it keeps targeting Monsanto, and keeps focus away from corrupt politicians and irresponsible Governments – nothing will change, and this tribunal itself will be little more than a pompous circus and an attempt to misguide the people. And misguided is exactly what corrupt politicians, Governments, Monsanto and the biotech lobby would like people to be.

9-11 and people’s rights vs politician’s rights

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Here are a few questions that come up in my mind.
The bill is to allow victims of the 9-11 attack to sue Saudi Arabian Government over claims it might have aided or financed the terrorism attacks.

Such a bill, passed through Senate, has been vetoed by President Obama. Now the bill has gone back to the House and the Senate. The Senate has voted to override the President’s objection.
I believe it will also be taken up in the House, for a similar override.

What puzzles me are a few issue:

1) President Obama reportedly vetoed the bill because, it is reported, that he is concerned that allowing such lawsuits would open the door to legal challenges against American officials in other countries. What I don’t get is – if the victims have justifiable claims (to be investigated by an US court) of someone greatly harming US citizens, that effort is being squashed so that foreign courts cannot also pursue possible great harm being done to non-US citizens by US politicians or officials ? Are protecting American politicians from possible collusion in mass murder so important that US citizen’s own protection can be overridden ?

2) The Senate vote was very lopsided and bipartisan, with 97 persons out of 100 voting to override the President. Out of the remaining three, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid cast the only “No” Vote. Two others abstained – Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Bernie Sanders, D-Vt.

Harry Reid

My view on this is, Harry Reid’s vote perhaps shows the position of the Democratic Party, i.e. they will protect US politician’s rights to cause mayhem abroad, over US citizen’s rights to protection of their life in USA.

Tim Kaine

But the two that perhaps cleverly avoided voting and taking sides on the issue, and sat on the fence are very telling. The first is Hillary Clinton’s running mate Tim Kaine. The other is Bernie Sanders, the so called great champion of the downtrodden voters that was beaten, perhaps unfairly and corruptly, by Hillary Clinton, and who is now wholly supportive of Clinton for the current presidential election.

Bernie Sanders

My question to both would be – why did you abstain? Why are you scared to show where you stand? Are you, by simply not voting, not disclosing that you too, are supportive of the the system that puts US politicians above the law, even at the expense of the common man, but would not like people to recognize you as a betrayer of the people?

I hope the Senate and the House will override President Obama as many times as the law calls for, till the people get the right to sue Saudi Arabia. This is not about Saudi Arabia. If they were not guilty then the court will declare them innocent and absolve them from responsibility or penalty.

This is about people’s rights over politician’s rights. This is about questions on if USA has a democracy by the people, or a dictatorship in disguise.

Kickstarting a grassroots movement on testing our food

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This is a movement in need and in waiting.
This was not possible a year or two ago, cause we did not have enough labs, but is possible today.Here is something this movement is NOT about:
Its NOT about debating if glyphosate is safe or unsafe to be in our food.
Its NOT about what the “science” might say about it.
Its NOT about passing new laws by federal or provincial Government about labelling.
Its NOT about if our farmers can or cannot do without Glyphosate.
So, what is it about ?
Its about people’s right to know if Glyphosate in in their food and how much.
Its about recognizing that labelling GMO does to give the full picture since non GMO crops are now desiccated with glyphosate and people can be more poisoned by some of these non-GMO crops than even GMO crops.
Its not about labelling – its about measuring and disclosing the contamination.
In order to kick start the movement, which should have a corresponding petition on change.org, it would be necessary to influence people that this is supposed to be a people’s movement that needs more than arm-chair activists.
Signing petition and sharing them on Facebook is not the goal. The goal is to appeal, for each of us, to our respective municipalities, to set aside a budget and start testing food, both locally grown and/or sold in stores, for glyphosate content, using Canadian labs, and to make the results public.
Irrespective of the debate, the science and the politics around Glyphosate/ RoundUP, the people will decide if they like some of the food brands that have more glyphosate or they like other brands that have less. Its about people’s right to choose without ever having to explain to any politician or scientists why they prefer to have one kind and not the other. That is their right.
Municipalities do not have the authority to get involved in scientific debate. Their job is to fulfil people’s wish. People wish to know which brands of their bread or other food items have how much glyphosate – and the MUnicipality’s job is to provide the answer. Thats it.
In order to kick start this effort, we wish to have a short 10-15 minute video where committed grassroots activists are ready to discuss this under a camera. Once it is done, we shall make more from others around our country that have found novel ways to approach their municipalities. How some of our compatriots manage to get our largely do-nothing municipalities to get off their hind quarter and start testing food.
Anyhow, for the first brainstorming, idea-exchanging video, I am inviting like minded and committed food security activists from nearby to respond, so we can arrange a date, time and venue, to get this off the ground.
Mind – we are not looking for arm-chair activists, but real people committed to approach municipalities and stubborn enough to be at it.
Interested parties please contact. My email – tony.mitra@gmail.com. my phone 604-649 7535.
Thank you

Relevant links:

E-413

The road ahead on glyphosate

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We have so far gone around the country, speaking about the dangers of chemical dependent agriculture, forestry and weed control in public places. We have had meetings with politicians, and joined marches against Monsanto. We have written to ministers and contacted labs about testing of Glyphosate in food.

And yet, Canada, its land, air, water, soil, flora, fauna and people are all getting systematically poisoned through introduction of batches of killer chemicals that are deemed safe by our Government, but whose safety documents are kept hidden from public scrutiny, which essentially makes the approval of these chemicals potentially illegal.

We have a petition asking Ottawa to release all hitherto hidden safety documents on Glyphosate to the people of Canada, with over 22,000 supporters. The details of this petition has been handed over to Minister Carla Qualtrough on April 27, to be hand delivered to the Minister of Health in Ottawa.

Apart from that, we have also asked Minister Qualtrough to try and arrange some public funds to start public testing local food and water in her own constituency, Delta, BC, for Glyphosate.

Jane Philpott

We have so far not achieved any measurable success. There is no response from the minister of health about disclosure of the safety documents. There is a separate access to information act application from me to the Ministry of Health asking for the same safety documents, which too are languishing, as the ministry drags its feet over the issue.

I might send her another letter, but there is no compulsion for the minister to respond to it and from the pace of follow ups, it may well be that Canadians shall not hear any feedback from the ministry, let alone disclosure of the safety documents, or a review of the approval of Glyphosate for Canadian agriculture.

As a result, I have started preparing another petition, this time not on change.org but on the Government web site using Government’s own official template. It is addressed also to the Minister of Health (Health Canada), and asks for public disclosure of safety documents for Glyphosate.

However, there are some steps that need to be taken before such a petition can be submitted. One of them is to have a sponsor, among the current Members of Parliament. I would have asked Mr. Alex Atamanenko to be the sponsor, if he was still an MP. Unfortunately he retired from politics last year. Next, I thought of asking MP Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada. However, I have written to her in the past and never received any reply, and feel unsure of her willingness to help in this cause. I should ask my own MP first, honourable minister Carla Qualtrough, and I have done so in an email. However, I do not wish to feel her pressured in an awkward situation with her colleagues in the Government, so I do not know what her response would be.

As a result, I am kind of in the hunt, for a suitable MP that might take up this cause for Canadian people.

The draft petition

I invite readers to suggest a suitable MP. More importantly, if they personally know a good MP that could be interested to sponsor it, I encourage them to check with the MP first and let me know.

I have not done such an official petition before, so do not know if the system allows more than one sponsor, but believe it might. So, if more than one MP is willing to support this cause, I shall be very keen to contact them. I am thinking of approaching some of the other party members such as NDP and CP. Any help would be appreciated.

There is one more issue at hand – which is to try and push the movement for grassroots activism for people to get their local municipalities to set aside funds and start testing local foods and water for Glyphosate and to make the results public. I shall come to that hopefully in the next blog.

My blog itself had been hacked, taken down, and access denied. But all that has thankfully been solved after many days of off-and-on struggle. Allt things finally became OK yesterday, June 7th, in the evening. Hence today I have my first update again.

Send your suggestions to me.

Thank you.
Tony Mitra

Meeting with a minister

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Meeting the Canadian Federal Minister Carla Qualtrough, regarding Glyphosate
April 27, 2016
1:30 PM

Delegation members were:

1. Tony Mitra (myself) creator of the petition.

2. Dr. Thierry Vrain – genetic engineer & retired Agriculture Canada scientist

3. Kenneth Young, Canadian army veteran

4. Richard Sweeting, retired orthopaedic surgeon

5. Eliza Olson, President, Burns Bog conservation society

6. Liz Walker, President, White Rock & Surrey Naturalist & Director, Citizens for Safe Technology

7. Richard Miller, glyphosate sufferer & promoter of growing clean food at home.

RECAP OF THE MEETING

First speaker
First speaker was Dr. Thierry Vrain, retired genetic engineer, soil biologist and ex-Agriculture Canada scientist. He spoke about the history behind glyphosate, and recent studies that point to possible problems with Glyphosate. He took about 8 minutes and handed over printed documents on many of the studies to you.

Second speaker
Second to speak with Kenneth Young, Canadian army veteran and spokesperson for military use of toxic chemicals and effect of exposure on humans, including agent orange. He spoke of the Stockholm convention on organic pollutants. He took 6 minutes and handed over his talks in writing to you.

Third Speaker 
The third and main speaker was myself, taking 20 minutes to cover the following five items:

i) Handing over of the petition documents in two copies of DVD drives for Health Canada, and one flash drive for the Honourable minister, with about a thousand pages of pdf documentation and 15 videos.

ii) My background, such as

Going around Canada with Dr. Thierry Vrain to speak about problems with Glyphosate based agriculture;

Discovering over two years ago that Canada did not have a lab to test our food or our body fluids for presence of Glyphosate.

Writing to the then Health Canada minister Rona Ambrose to do something about getting a lab for Canadians. Receiving no response;

Alex Atamanenko, MP from NDP taking up my cause, eventually getting Health Canada to respond to me, which I found to be non-committal;

Two years down the line, some labs are now beginning to offer glyphosate testing. I feel satisfied as far as that goes, that I was on the right side of history on that issue;

I am now into the next phase of my effort – to get some layer of our Government to start testing local food, soil and water for the people, since labs are now available, and making that results available on public domain.

iii) It is my belief that keeping biosafety data of glyphosate hidden from the people is illegal, and my reasons for this belief – i.e. my own personal communication with Health Canada through Access To Information Act applications, as well as legal precedence set in the supreme court of India. It is because of this belief that I made the public petition for Canadian Government to disclose all safety records it has in its possession based on which it decided to approve the use of Glyphosate for Canadian agriculture. Should the minister wish to contact the relevant advocates or litigants in India about the precedence setting case, I am ready to help introduce the Minister to the relevant persons.

iv) UN convention on biodiversity and Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. These were created by the world body to help member nations put in place responsible safeguards to prevent damage, destruction, extinction or contamination of local biological diversity from inadvertent or faulty introduction of LMO (living modified organism, which is UN’s way of saying GMO, or genetically modified organism). 170 nations have ratified it. Canada has not. We stand out like a pariah nation in this regard and our biological diversity is being stolen from under our feet as a result.

I presented example of how India put in place specific laws that prevents foreign nations of corporations from studying, tampering with or patenting living organisms from India without specific permission from the Government, and how Monsanto was found to be violating this law, and how a court case in India obliged the Government to sue Monsanto for biopiracy as a result. I also gave example of Canola, a Canadian invention, that was a great product, but today 96% of all Canola grown in Canada are Monsanto’s patented version. In my view this is a good example of how our biological heritage is being stolen from under our feet. I request Honourable minister Carla Qualtrough to speak directly with our PM Honourable Justin Trudeau and request him to drop in at the secretarial office of this convention in Montreal, which is in his own constituency and near his own home, and find out how Canada compares with the rest of the world on Cartagena Protocol. The office is at:

Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity

413, Saint Jacques Street, suite 800 

Montreal QC H2Y 1N9 , Canada

Tel: +1 514 288 2220

Fax: +1 514 288 6588

E-Mail: secretariat@cbd.int

Web: www.cbd.int

v) Last, I made an urgent request for the minister to find ways to allocate some funds for the people of her constituency, the township of Delta, to start testing some of our soil, water and food for presence of Glyphosate and to place such data on public domain. She said she would see how and if public funds can be used for this. I did ask her to make this happen, since public funds should be used to tackle issues of public safety, and help Delta to lead the rest of Canada on this important public interest initiative.

Fourth speaker

Next to speak was Richard Sweeting, retired orthopaedic surgeon and he spoke about manmade chemicals, history of deceit and suppression of evidence on past chemicals by the same company that today sells RoundUp and Glyphosate. He spoke about how long it took for folks to disclose that smoking was bad for health, and how many of these chemicals disrupt our endocrine system and how science and safety data on these chemicals should always be publicly available. He spoke for about 4 minutes or so.

Fifth speaker

Richard Miller spoke briefly, who had personally suffered for over twenty years through exposure to glyphosate and GMO without apparent cure and without any solution from the medical establishment, cured himself eventually in only ten days, going to 100% organic.

There was then a short follow up talk with Mr. Jude Welsh,  the Parliamentary affairs director for Minister Carla Qualtrough, who was listening in from Ottawa, about what they were to do as a follow up of our talk and presentation. I then reminded the Minister that I had asked for three things, which were:

a) That the minister hands over the petition document to Health Canada and ask it to respond, hoping to get the safety data on Glyphosate released.

b) I had asked Honorable Carla Qualtrough to impress upon Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to drop into the Secretarial office of the UN convention on biodiversity and ask about Canada’s position in comparison with the rest of the world on Cartagena Protocol

c) And I asked the Honorable Minister to help Delta lead the rest of Canada by arranging for periodic testing of local food, soil and water for presence of Glyphosate and make the result available to the people.

The Honourable Minster had wondered if the current liberal Government had been approached for the biosafety data on Glyphosate. I responded saying I opened a fresh Access to Information application with Health Canada the day after the Justin Trudeau government came to power , for Health Canada to disclose to me all safety documents it has read before approving glyphosate, and got a few written confirmation from Health Canada, acknowledging that I have the right to such data, and that they have over 130,000 pages of it, but has still been dragging its feet and I have not seen any of it, which is why the petition was created to get the public to ask the Government to release the data.

Attached video is a audiovisual rendition of the same recap, done by Mistry Britskaya. My thanks go to her.

[youtube XHkrWKoRG20]

Updates on Glyphosate Petition

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Hello friends,

It has been an exhilarating time since I opened two separate channels for my Government, in Ottawa, Canada, to address the issue of rising use and presence of the weed killer RoundUp and in particular the chemical Glyphosate in our environment, and the fact that the people do not have either access to information on how much of the toxic chemical is in our food, water and soil, or access to the safety test that is supposed to prove that the chemical and the formulation is actually safe for people or for the environment.

This matter has now reached a turning point since Canada is now having a lot of labs accessible to the public that will test our food for Glyphosate, something that was not the case a few years ago, and something on which I had already butted head with the previous Government under Harper, and where my letter was carried by the then MP Mr. Atamanenko to the then Health Minister Ms Rona Ambrose, to respond to. This is a good sign that labs are now beginning to offer this service.

One of my current multi-channel dialogue with the Government included an application to Health Canada, which is Canada’s way of describing the Ministry of Health, to disclose to me if it actually has seen safety test data on Glyphosate, and if so, to disclose to me all such data and reports. This application was made through the official system known as “Access To Information” act of the Government of Canada. Similar acts are also known as “Freedom of Information” act or “Right to Information” act elsewhere, such as in Canadian provincial Governments or elsewhere in the world.

Another parallel effort was the creation of an online petition for Canadians to support a motion, for our Government to disclose all hitherto hidden safety documents on Glyphosate or RoundUp, to the Canadian people, so that people can independently verify if the product is safe and if the Canadian Government has been diligent in its study and analysis. Further, it is the right of the Canadian people to see such documents and it is in effect be illegal to deny public access to such data.

Why exhilarating? Well, first of all, the correspondence that generated from the “Access to information” act appeal, confirmed a few things,

  • that the Canadian Government has in fact seen a lot of safety test data and documents
  • that they are in possession of over 130,000 pages of such material
  • that I indeed have a right, as a citizen of Canada, to see such data

And in spite of that, the Government has unfortunately been dragging its feet, citing reasons why it needs more time to provide me with the information requested. One of the reason is that they need to cross check with the parties that conducted that safety test, if the details may be divulged to me and under what condition.

The very facts that the Canadian Government acknowledges it has the data, and that I have a right to it, are positive development. That I cannot see it yet unless third parties that provided the data agree to the arrangement – is in my view illegal. If such data cannot be shown to the people, then the product (Glyphosate) cannot be approved for use among the people either. That is how I read the law.

The second part – the petition, has 30 updates so far, has generated almost 23,000 support, over 98% of them being Canadian. This is far and away more support than I had anticipated. For a country with a very small population of 35 million, this is an unprecedented level of support on a subject not so easy to understand and one that has not been covered by the mainstream media at all. The sheer volume of support, I suspect, has influenced my MP Carla Qualtrough, who also happens to be a federal minister, to agree to see me on April 27th for 45 minutes, so I can hand over all the documentation on the petition, which runs to over 1,000 pages, to her in a CD or a flash drive, to be taken to Ottawa and handed over the Health minister.

I asked if I might bring a delegation of six other persons, to which the Minister Qualtrough’s office that I may. The petition itself can be visited by clicking on the image below.

It has many interesting updates. One of which is a comment by India’s noted supreme court advocate Mr. Prashant Bhushan, who is representing petitioner Ms Aruna Rodrigues in her public interest litigation against the Government of India on account of GMO, where legal precedence is already set, that obliges the Government to disclose biosafety data of transgenic products to the people before the product is to be approved for release. In other words, intellectual property rights, or agreement on Confidentiality or or non-disclosure clauses cannot be used to trump public safety. Click below for that video.

My request to the Honourable minister is going to be in three parts, of which one would be to personally carry the petition documents to Ottawa and hand over same to Health Canada and to ask them to respond. The second is to have a personal talk with Prime Minister Trudeau, requesting him to drop in at the secretarial office of the UN Convention on Biodiversity, located in the same home turf of the Prime Minister, in Montreal, and to ask the staff in that office about how Canada is doing in comparison with the rest of the world with regard to Cartagena Protocol. The third is to look into ways to kick start testing of local foods in Delta, her constituency, for presence of Glyphosate.

[youtube d5TQHzroqDs]

 I have added information on a few UN platforms for Canadians in the latest update. These are:

There is also an effort on my part to convert a condensed form of the petition material and references into an interactive e-book on Apples’s iTune store and/or Amazon’s Kindle for around $3 in the next few weeks.

There are perhaps a few more updates that will go into the petition before it is closed. These might include:

  • A talk with the president of the Canadian Farmers Union
  • How to engage citizens into coaxing our Municipalities to start testing local food, water and soil, for presence of Glyphosate and to make the data public.
  • An update on the coming meeting with Minister Carla Qualtrough about this petition.

Stay tunes and feel free to add your comments below.

Thank you.

Tony