By Jo Wilding
May 29th

“Welcome to Canada,” said the sign at the border. “Not quite as bad as the USA.”

OK, it didn’t but the Canadians who looked after us in Vancouver said it ought to, given how much of their country’s economy and foreign policy had become bound up with theirs next door. Though Canada has troops in Afghanistan, it declined to send any to Iraq but the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) is pressing the federal government for closer economic integration with the US.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect in 1994 between Canada, Mexico and the US, forcing among other things large scale restructuring of Canada’s social programmes, not unlike the “structural adjustment policies” foisted on indebted countries by the IMF and World Bank. It gave corporations the right to sue governments for anything which interfered with their profits, even for legislation to protect citizens from harmful chemicals or for public opposition to the building of a factory in a given area.

Negotiations continue over the controversial Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) to tighten economic ties but there are also plans in process to co-operate with the US on the National Missile Defence system, to develop a North American identity document giving business people greater mobility, unite the two customs systems, increase US access to Canadian energy and water resources and align Canada more closely with the US on refugee and immigration rules, ‘homeland security’ and regulatory standards, for example on drugs and agricultural chemicals and hormones.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that a coalition of groups fighting for indigenous and refugee rights has organised Land, Freedom and Decolonisation Day, to coincide with the July 1st Canada Day celebrations. The oldest and the newest residents of the territory are resisting war, poverty, environmental degradation, exclusion of refugees, defending their lands.

It is a basic right, Harsha said, for refugees to stay in a safe country, not a matter of debate for the people of the receiving country over whether there is enough room, especially when that country’s government and foreign policy make such sizeable contributions to the poverty, warfare, dictatorships and devastation which spawn the refugees in the first place.

She’s been working for some time with the Native Youth Movement. In the interior of British Columbia there’s been an ongoing blockade for the last two years, about thirty people defending their land. It’s not just the big summit protests and the forest defence camps that are going on, Harsha said: native people have taken up arms several times in recent history to hang onto their land.

The event in Vancouver was a benefit both for Land, Freedom and Decolonisation Day and for Spartacus Books, an independent radical bookshop which provided sofas and space to read the books that were on sale so that lack of money wouldn’t limit people’s access to information. Unfortunately it burnt down a while ago and because they always existed on a shoe string there was no insurance.

We had less trouble getting into Canada than the first time when the immigration officer decided we had to pull over, explain how we all knew each other and have the car searched. Having emptied the contents of all our bags out into the boot of the car the items they picked out were Jen’s notebook and a leaflet about the protests in Cancun in September 2003 against the World Trade Organisation.

“Whose is this?” the officer asked, wielding the offending book like a smoking gun. As soon as Jen claimed it he removed the elastic band and flicked through. “Would you care to explain some of this information?” He pointed to the word ‘Falluja’, reading it aloud like it was the verbal equivalent of dirty underwear. David, Andy and I looked at the ceiling, the floor, our fingernails, hummed nonchalantly.

“I’ve never been to Iraq,” Jen said, perfectly truthfully, the only one of us who hadn’t. Apparently the visas and stamps in all our passports had escaped either their attention or their concern.

“I don’t doubt that,” the officer said. “And what is PDX?”

“The code for Portland airport,” Jen said.

“Are you aware that it’s also an explosive?”

“What?” Our collective disbelief evidently convinced him that we weren’t entering Canada to blow anything up, Falluja and PDX notwithstanding, and finally we were let in. This time we didn’t wait to be asked, babbled excitedly about our Memorial Day weekend shopping trip and they waved us straight through, which was just as well because we were late leaving Olympia and barely had time for Vancouver’s rush hour traffic.

The Leaky Heaven Circus performed earlier in the day, a mixture of performers and street-involved youth, meeting at a pre-advertised location to move to the secret street performance venue. It helps boost the kids’ self esteem, gives them a focus other than drugs and alcohol and inspires some of them to move on. Sara said it went really well but there was a worry over one of the girls who had been drinking before the show.

“She was meant to be the base for some of the balances so I wanted to check with her that she thought she’d be OK and remind her if she didn’t feel safe she could just say ‘Down’ and have them get off her. She said she’d be fine and she seemed OK and she was fine in the balances, but there was this bit where she was supposed to recite these beautiful lines from Kahlil Gibran and she forgot them so instead she said ‘Ooh, harder. I’m going to bite your ass.’ It was all over before everyone could even work out if it was really happening and they were onto the next scene.”

A young Ethiopian woman called Beth played records, singing into the microphone along with Erykah Badu in the Afro-Canadian caf� while Dave told us about his trip to Nicaragua in 1988 with his church youth group, the US’s conflict zone of a couple of decades ago. If you got caught up in any conflict or if you were a native and a dissident, it was dangerous, he said, if you happened to live where the contras were, but they were marginalised and kept to rural areas so the youth group was fairly safe in the capital Managua.

We stayed with Fabienne a Belgian music student and juggler extraordinaire with a marimba, a kind of huge xylophone, in her hallway. She and Rick and some other people bought land, a while back, on an island off Vancouver and grow more food than they’ve got people to feed. She speaks Chinese and used to spend a lot of time in a small town on a plateau where the population of about 3000 were brutalised by the Chinese government. A minority, they were not allowed a school which taught in their own language and the kids were compelled to learn Chinese.

UNESCO stepped in to protect them and built an airport on the plateau, which draws three million people a year through the town. All its water sources are now polluted as an after effect of the tourism. She last went in 1999, despairing in the end that anything was ever going to improve.

“I wonder sometimes why I’m here studying music, practising scales when there’s so much that needs doing in the world,” she said, but there’s always plenty that needs doing where you are.