On March 23, UN Secretary-General António Guterres appealed to G20 leaders: "I am encouraging the waiving of (economic) sanctions imposed on countries to ensure access to food, essential health supplies, and COVID-19 medical support. This is the time for solidarity not exclusion ... Let us remember that we are only as strong as the weakest health system in our interconnected world." At the same time, AP News reported, ambassadors of eight countries currently affected by economic sanctions -- namely, Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Nicaragua, China, Russia and North Korea -- petitioned the secretary-general for "the immediate and complete lifting of those measures to enable nations to respond to the coronavirus pandemic." 

Regrettably, so far the wealthy and powerful countries of the world haven't heeded the secretary-general's call to loosen the screws on the weaker and poorer ones. They also ignored a similar appeal by Pope Francis in his Easter address. On the contrary, President Trump actually weaponized the pandemic by instituting further sanctions on both Iran and Venezuela, countries already targeted for regime change. 

In Canada, however, two peace groups, the Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War and le Mouvement Québécois pour la paix, sent an open letter signed by 100 prominent Canadians to Trudeau asking him to lift all of Canada's economic sanctions now. 

Unknown to most Canadians, Trudeau's government maintains economic sanctions regimes against 20 countries of the world, including nine African countries. In fact, under the Harper government in Ottawa in June 2013, Canada co-ordinated economic sanctions for the U.S.-led coalition of countries participating in the regime change operation against Syria. Similarly, under the Trudeau government, Canada helped lead the Lima Group in organizing multilateral sanctions against Venezuela. 

Canada typically applies five types of sanctions: arms embargoes, asset freezes, import-export restrictions, financial prohibitions and technical assistance prohibitions. Not all sanctioned countries feel the full weight of all five. However, some countries do: Iran, Syria, North Korea and Libya. 

The effect on the targeted country is crippling. The first result is usually a drastic decline in its currency's value, which translates into ordinary people being unable to put food on the table for their children. Then follow other crises for working people: unemployment due to closing markets for the country's exports and the inability to get spare parts; inability to receive payments from relatives abroad because the international banking system excludes the targeted country; the closing down of whole industries, such as tourism, because access to credit cards or even air access to national airports, as in the case of Syria, is turned off by the sanctioners.

Supporters will point out that sanction regimes generally exclude food and medical supplies. However, international trade requires financing through banks which are subject to penalties in the U.S., for example for trading with Iran, even though the participating bank may be domiciled in a country that has lifted its sanctions on Iran. This practice by the U.S. is called extraterritoriality.

Some have likened economic sanctions to acts of war and compared them to sieges of medieval towns in which the besiegers hope to make life so difficult for the besieged that they rise up against their feudal lords and open the gates. The comparison isn't far off since the brunt of sanctions aren't felt so much by the targeted countries' ruling elites but rather their civilian populations. A monstrous example was the decade of UN sanctions against Iraq between the First and Second Gulf Wars. Between 1992 and 2000, 500,000 Iraqi children perished from lack of food and medicines. But Madeleine Albright, former U.S. secretary of state in the Clinton administration, famously quipped that it was "worth it."  It was worth it to Albright because sanctions were part of U.S. foreign policy to soften up Iraq in preparation for the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of 2003 which continues today.

Notably, coercive economic measures are not levelled against U.S. client states, no matter the enormity of their crimes. Israel, which turned Gaza into the world’s largest open air prison and is annexing the West Bank, and Saudi Arabia, which wages a bloody war on Yemen and murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, don't worry about sanctions.

Under international law, economic sanctions are acts of war. That's why the UN charter restricts the power to level sanctions exclusively to the UN Security Council. That also explains why Canada's unilateral sanctions against 19 countries are illegal. Only in the case of North Korea are Canada's regime of a full spectrum of coercive measures explicable under international law.

While Trudeau tries to play the competent caring leader in his daily COVID-19 press conferences, he cannot ignore the damage he is doing to the efforts to fight the novel coronavirus in 20 of the world's poorest countries, and indeed to the global effort.

Ken Stone is a longtime peace, social justice, labour, anti-racist and environmental activist-resident in Hamilton, Ontario. He is treasurer of the Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War and executive member of the Syria Solidarity Movement.

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Now that Premier Jason Kenney has declared it "un-Canadian" to say oil is dead, I wonder if it's OK to admit Alberta's fossil fuel industry is on the ropes?

Probably. Kenney said as much himself in a remarkable rant yesterday directed at the parliamentary leader of the Bloc Québécois and the former leader of the Green Party of Canada.

But if you don't want to be accused of un-Canadian activities, you'd better make it clear none of these troubles are the fault of anything that's ever been done by any Alberta government, except perhaps the NDP's, and especially not by the United Conservative Party Kenney leads.

There is acceptable speech in Alberta, you see, and it doesn't include saying that oil is done like dinner, which is probably not true just yet, but is nevertheless a position that can be argued in respectable company almost anywhere else in the world, including a number of countries known for producing what Kenney rather sophomorically calls "dictator oil."

As has become his practice lately, Kenney took over Chief Medical Officer of Health Deena Hinshaw's daily COVID-19 briefing in Edmonton yesterday afternoon for the sustained blast of gaslighting he directed at Yves-François Blanchet and Elizabeth May.

Blanchet had dared to suggest at a news conference Wednesday that oil "is never coming back" (uttered en francais, bien sûr) and that Ottawa's bailout package should really be directed at "something which is more green." May, for her part, opined at the same event that "oil is dead."

Specifically, the MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands told the media: "My heart bleeds for people who believe the sector is going to come back. It's not. Oil is dead and for people in the sector, it's very important there be just transition funds." This may be wrong, but outside Alberta I doubt it sounds like a stab in the back or a curb-stomping.

Nevertheless, that is what sent Kenney over the edge, in a calculated sort of way, responding to a set-up question provided by Calgary Sun political columnist Rick Bell, who can be counted on to get the first question at one of Hinshaw's frequently hijacked news conferences.

"I just think it's deeply regrettable that we would see national political leaders piling on Albertans and energy workers at a time of great trial for us," Kenney said piously, opening what appeared to be a carefully rehearsed answer. "This is the opposite of leadership. Leaders should be seeking to bring us together, not to divide us."

This is a bit of an irony, of course, coming from a premier who has been ginning up an Alberta separatist threat for months while denying the oil industry had anywhere to go but up, but let's just take it as a lesson in gaslighting 101.

In his remarks, Kenney trotted out benefits he said have been conferred on Quebec by Alberta's oil industry, noted the province's equalization complaints, blamed "predatory actions" by OPEC countries that "want to dominate the world with dictator oil," reminded Quebeckers they like to drive cars and go on airplane trips, and totted up the medical equipment recently sent by Alberta to other provinces.

Having said it in English, he said it over again in French.

Tsk-tsking and shaking his head, Kenney declared, "I would say to Mr. Blanchet and Madam May: Please stop kickin' us while we're down!"

"These attacks on our natural resource industries are unwarranted, they are divisive, they're, I believe, in a way, un-Canadian at a time like this. It's like blaming the victim!" (Italics added for emphasis. And, yes, Kenney really said that.)

Premier Kenney also took particular umbrage at Blanchet's remark that Quebec receives a string of insults from Alberta -- although anyone who has paid attention to political discourse in this province for the last half century would have trouble refuting the claim.

After the news conference, backup was provided in columns filed by Bell and his Postmedia colleague Don Braid.

Bell pronounced Blanchet and May to be "the Bobbsey Twins of B.S." and the "deluded duo," and accused them of choosing "to kick Alberta when we're down" and indulging "in a little curb-stomping."

Braid, the Dinger's bookend of acceptable oilpatch opinion, charged them with "the foulest kind of cheap shot," to wit, saying "Alberta's oil and gas industry should be left prostrate in the dust with no help from the federal government."

Well, there you have it: the debased state of political discourse in Alberta in the plague year 2020. It's not reassuring.

David Climenhaga, author of the Alberta Diary blog, is a journalist, author, journalism teacher, poet and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions at The Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. This post also appears on his blog, AlbertaPolitics.ca.

Image: Screenshot of Government of Alberta video/YouTube

Mother's Day is this Sunday, May 10.

What is sometimes forgotten at this time of the year is that Mother's Day has its roots in the feminist struggle against militarism and war.

Slate reports, "The women who originally celebrated Mother's Day conceived of it as an occasion to use their status as mothers to protest injustice and war ... In 1870, after witnessing the bloody Civil War, Julia Ward Howe -- a Boston pacifist, poet, and suffragist who wrote the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" -- proclaimed a special day for mothers to oppose war."

Her original proclamation for the day states, "From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, 'Disarm, disarm! The sword is not the balance of justice.' Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession."

National Geographic adds, Howe "promoted a Mothers' Peace Day beginning in 1872. For Howe and other antiwar activists ... Mother's Day was a way to promote global unity after the horrors of the American Civil War and Europe's Franco-Prussian War."

And Jacobin magazine's Branko Marcetic notes, "At its 1874 anniversary, participants sang songs and read papers, including one calling for the abolition of standing armies and war armaments and the creation of a system for universal peace arbitration."

While Mother's Day was recognized officially in the United States in 1914, the message behind the day appears to have been largely lost by 1917.

Time reports, "When the United States joined World War I in 1917, and the war propaganda machine revved up, the burst of patriotism came with a renewed appreciation for mothers. Women were hailed both for raising the soldiers who were on the front lines and for the work they were doing on the home front, such as running fundraisers for the Red Cross. Mother's Day was a way to thank these women for their service."

Over the past 100 years, the day has become increasingly commercialized and sentimentalized. It has been estimated that Canadians spend about $492 million on flowers, cards and gifts for Mother's Day each year. Imagine if even a fraction of that was spent on challenging patriarchy, militarism, weapons and war.

This Mother's Day, let us work to reclaim the radical origins of the day, challenge war and militarism, and strive to deepen our understanding of the intersectionality between feminism, social justice, care for Mother Earth and peace.

Brent Patterson is the Executive Director of Peace Brigades International-Canada. This article originally appeared on the PBI-Canada website. Follow @PBIcanada @CBrentPatterson on Twitter.

Image: bravenewfoundation/Video Screenshot/YouTube

These days, any national leader not actively urging their citizens to drink disinfectant is managing to look (relatively) good on the world stage.

Certainly, compared to the neurotic leadership south of the border, Justin Trudeau has emerged as a steady hand on the tiller, quickly providing Canadians with a wide economic safety net and behaving like an adult in the crisis.

So it's all the more disappointing that, out of the limelight, he's doing a great deal to make the situation worse during this pandemic for some of the most vulnerable people on the planet.

I'm referring to the prime minister's decision to ignore a plea last month from United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres -- and the Pope -- for nations to lift sanctions against other nations in order to help some of the weakest and poorest countries cope with the coronavirus crisis.

That sounds like a reasonable request, under the circumstances.

Indeed, even if we don't care about the world's vulnerable people, helping them deal with the crisis is in our interests too. As the UN leader noted: "Let us remember that we are only as strong as the weakest health system in our interconnected world."

Yet Canada, ignoring the plea from the UN's highest official, continues in the midst of the pandemic to impose sanctions on 20 nations, including Lebanon, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Nicaragua and Yemen.

While Canada's sanctions are typically aimed at punishing the regimes running these countries, the impact of the sanctions falls primarily on ordinary citizens, according to Atif Kubursi, professor emeritus of economics at McMaster University.

Kubursi, who also served as a UN under-secretary-general and has extensive UN experience in the Middle East and Asia, says the impact of Canada's sanctions on the people in these countries is devastating.

While the sanctions often appear to be directed exclusively at military items, they frequently end up being applied to virtually all goods -- including spare parts needed to operate machinery in hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, notes Kubursi, who signed a letter from prominent Canadians to Trudeau requesting the lifting of sanctions.

For instance, if a Syrian businessman wants to buy Canadian products, he has to open an account for the transaction. But Kubursi says the Canadian government instructs Canadian banks not to allow such accounts for the purposes of trade with Syria -- no matter how benign the Canadian product may be, or how urgently it might be needed in Syria.

For that matter, Ottawa's sanctions prevent Canadians from using our banks or financial services to transfer money to Syria -- for instance, to family members living in Syria.

The impact of sanctions, while always painful, is particularly deadly during the pandemic, when even advanced nations have struggled to obtain life-saving equipment.

While Canada's sanctions mostly date back to the Harper era or earlier, the Trudeau government has generally maintained them and even added new ones against Venezuela.

Ottawa's sanctions appear primarily aimed at appeasing the U.S., which ruthlessly enforces sanctions against regimes it wishes to destabilize or overthrow. Washington also punishes countries and companies that don't co-operate with its sanctions.

Ottawa's willingness to fall in line behind Washington is reflected in the fact it doesn't impose sanctions against U.S allies Saudi Arabia or Israel, despite Saudi Arabia's brutal murder of dissident Jamal Khashoggi and Israel's illegal occupation of the West Bank. Even Israel's announcement that it plans to annex the West Bank in July has produced no sanctions or criticism from Canada.

Trudeau's decision to continue sanctioning 20 nations seems quite out of sync with the spirit of the times, when it's hard to find a TV commercial that doesn't proclaim the sentiment that "we're all in this together."

That spirit of international togetherness has been amply demonstrated by Cuba, which sent Cuban doctors to Italy to help its overwhelmed health care system and has offered similar medical help to First Nations in Canada.

When 36 Cuban doctors arrived in Milan last month, a grateful Italy thanked them and Italians at the airport cheered.

Meanwhile, Canada, in the spirit of the international togetherness, rebuffs Cuban doctors, ignores the UN and imposes sanctions on some of the world's poorest nations.

Linda McQuaig is an author and journalist. This column, which appeared in The Toronto Star, is based on research from her new book The Sport & Prey of Capitalists.

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