Attendance was impressive as more than 70 people attended from very different backgrounds and vocations: including well-known Iranian writers and journalists, youth leaders from the Pakistani community, local youth from the Esplanade neighbourhood who hosted the event and, students from the University of Toronto. The fact that we had been able to secure such a strong and diverse attendance came because of our partnering with different campus and community groups, without whom this event would never had happen.”

It continues:
“The true measure of the level of civilization in society is how we take care of the old and the young. By this measure, we do not qualify as a civilized society, but rather a society that is teetering on the edge of barbarism. Even in the period of boom there were already symptoms of barbarism in society, with a wave of crime and violence, and the spread of anti-social and nihilistic moods among a layer of young people. But these moods are a faithful reflection of the morality of capitalism… which treats people as mere “factors of production” and subjects everything to the profit motive. Our answer is for the youth to organize and join the working class in the struggle against capitalism and for socialism!”

Mike Barber and Miranda McQuade, both of Toronto, are acting as representative plaintiffs for the approximately 1,150 people who were detained, arrested and incarcerated at a temporary detention centre in Toronto’s east end after police clamped down on demonstrators during the summit.

The suit was filed Thursday at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Toronto and also includes business owners whose property was vandalized.

The plaintiffs said in a statement of claim that they launched the suit to have the court declare that their constitutional and civil rights were violated, and denounce the conduct of the authorities during the G20 summit.”

Mercury, thallium and other pollutants accumulated in higher concentrations in snowpacks and waterways near and downstream from oilsands development than in more remote areas, said a study to be published Monday afternoon in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences…

The study led by Erin Kelly and David Schindler of the University of Alberta also found that levels of the pollutants cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, silver and zinc exceeded federal and provincial guidelines for the protection of aquatic life in melted snow or water collected near or downstream from oilsands mining.”
- “Action to protect the environment: Only public ownership of the land, major industries, oil, mining and logging companies, energy and transport, can form the basis of a genuine socialist approach to the environment. Environmental plans would be measured in generations, not fiscal quarters.” –From the Fightback Programme

We organized two workshops. The first one, which happened on Saturday morning, was titled “What is Socialism?” Julian Benson, Co-Chair of TYND and ONDY executive member, presented the workshop. Julian started by talking about the miserable conditions that capitalism has enforced on billions of people around the world and went on to talk about the crisis of the system and the socialist alternative we could present to it. There followed a lively discussion where we talked about, among other things, revolutionary, as opposed to reformist, concepts of change and the socialist roots of our party, the NDP, as demonstrated in the Regina Manifesto of 1933, which advocates a socialist transformation of society and “eradication of capitalism”. The need for the party to once more adopt socialist policies and come to power to start abolishing capitalism was also discussed.

Later in the afternoon, we had the pleasure to hear our guest speaker, Alex Grant, unionist and NDPer from Toronto who edits a Marxist journal called Fightback. Alex’s chosen topic was “The history of the Canadian working class.” He started with the oft-forgotten fact that 500 years ago, the dominant mode of production in Canada was… communism! (Referring to the primitive communism of the First Nations before the arrival of European settlers). He then went on to tell us about the glorious history of the working class in Canada, which is nothing like the “calm” picture some try to paint. It was hard, at least for the author of these lines, not to go into tears when hearing about the glorious struggles of our class, from the Winnipeg general strike of 1919 to the Auto Wars of the mid 20th century, to the Common Front revolutionary general strike in the 1970s. It was especially worthwhile to remind ourselves that capitalists and bosses, and their bourgeois state, have never ever given anything to us for free and every aspect of “civilization” that we enjoy, from weekends to Medicare, are in fact gains won by the blood that workers have shed.”

-What a terrific and inspiring event. This is certainly the type of work we need to build a solid working class movement to finally abolish this senile system.

The weather averaged 20 degrees colder. The sunless winter and perpetual daylight of summer were new. Game was hard to find, especially with no local knowledge. And promised assistance from the federal government didn’t materialize.”