Protesters denounce patriarchy in Hamilton courtroom - August 26, 2010

Hamilton, Ont. - On Thursday August 26, The Sexual Assault Centre of Hamilton and Area (SACHA) organized a protest outside the Hamilton Court House after a rape trial was stopped and the accused was set free. A lively crowd of around 40 people, including local unions CUPE 3906 and USW 1005, members of the Immigrant Women’s Centre and of the Hamilton Coalition Against the G20, denounced the actions of Justice Kim Carpenter-Gunn and defense attorney, Peter Boushy and demanded that the legal system stop blaming survivors of sexual assault.

According to the Hamilton Spectator article that broke the story, the trial was stayed after the defense attorney questioned the credibility of the alleged victim because she had made new allegations against another man. According to Boushy, this “raised the spectre of fabrication.”

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Cecilia Begg is the Head Councillor of Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI) First Nation. She is the lone female community leader in what has come to be known as the KI6, a group serving six months for contempt after blockading a mining company from its licensed operations on disputed land near their community. In her first interview since her incarceration, she spoke with The Enterprise’s Jon Thompson at the Kenora jail about the road that has led her to this point, the reasons she is fighting the development, and the path that she hopes will emerge from her imprisonment.

The land entitlement claim that KI filed back in 2000 had been licensed to junior mining company, Platinex. Did that claim have anything to do with the fact that the government licensed a mining operation on the traditional territory of your people?

Jamila Ghaddar is a member of
MacMaster Universities Student's for Palestinian Human Rights. She recently talked to Linchpin about the banning of the term Israeli apartheid on campus by the administration and student union.

Linchpin: O.K. Can you start by telling me what Israeli apartheid is?

Jamila Ghaddar: Well Israeli apartheid is a term that was coined by Israeli senior officials then used by Israeli academics and then taken up by the Palestinian movement both in Palestine and the international solidarity movement. It’s based on the international apartheid convention which outlines the kind of apartheid as a system that systematically has separate and distinct types of treatments for different racial or other types of groups under its jurisdiction.

Linchpin: What is happening at McMaster right now? The term Israeli apartheid has been banned?

FEBRUARY , 2008- Robert Lovelace, former chief of the Ardoch Lake Algonquin First Nation, has begun a six month jail sentence for his role in peacefully resisting uranium exploration near Sharbot Lake this passed fall. He and his community will also have to pay $35,000 in fines. Frontenac Ventures, A uranium exploration company has claimed 30,000 acres of land in eastern Ontario around the headwaters of the Mississippi system, which feeds the Ottawa River.

For over four months now Albert Douglas has been locked up in the Barton Street jail in Hamilton, Ontario. He faces a number of charges including assault and attempted murder. The serious charges stem from an alleged confrontation between Douglas and American government agents at the Douglas Creek reclamation site in Caledonia.

On June 9th 2006 an undercover American ATF vehicle was spotted driving past the reclamation site, the occupants taking photographs of those involved. According to the police Albert Douglas hijacked the vehicle and assaulted those inside, one officer subsequently decided to jump from the vehicle and was injured. After this incident a country wide arrest warrant was issued and Douglas was arrested during a routine traffic stop on Highway 401 on September 27th 2007.

Racism is not just an individual problem of attitude toward a particular group: it is also systemic and structural, inherent in institutions such as the education, health, and justice systems. The Colour of Poverty Campaign (www.colourofpoverty.ca) raises awareness of these inequalities and suggests ways to work toward equality and inclusion in Ontario, explains Kathryn Hunt

The campaign argues that racism and poverty are inextricably linked, feeding into each other and into racialized disparity and inequality more generally, and need to be considered in relation to each other.

An increasing proportion of the population of Ontario come from what the Colour of Poverty Campaign calls ‘racialized groups’ – those of non-European background or heritage. Currently, 13% of Canadians are non-European, and projections suggest that ten years from now, people of colour will make up a fifth of Canadians and well over half of Toronto’s population.