Ella Does Squamish

Karen Messing, CINBIOSE, Université du Québec, Montréal, Canda and Piroska Östlin, Karolinska Intitute, Stockholm, Sweden
WHO Gender, Women and Health Department, 2006

Available online as PDF file [57p.] at: http://www.who.int/gender/documents/Genderworkhealth.pdf

"…This volume summarizes the evidence about the relationship between gender inequality and health and safety problems related to work. It reviews gender issues in research, policies and programmes on occupational health and safety, and highlights some specific issues for women. It also considers biological differences between women and men in relation to the hazards they face in the workplace. Implications of the findings and recommendations for occupational health research, policy, legislation and training are discussed…".

Dr. Piroska Östlin, Senior Researcher
Women & Gender Equity Knowledge Network Hub: WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health
Karolinska Institute, Department of Public Health Sciences, Division of  International Health (IHCAR)
Nobels väg 9., SE-171 77 Stockholm, Sweden
Tel.: +46 8 524 83373 Fax.:+46 8 31 15 90 E-mail: piroska.ostlin@ki.se
 
*      *      *     *  
This message from the Pan American Health Organization, PAHO/WHO, is part of an effort to disseminate
information Related to: Equity; Health inequality; Socioeconomic inequality in health; Socioeconomic
health differentials; Gender; Violence; Poverty; Health Economics; Health Legislation; Ethnicity; Ethics;

Thanks TPL!

http://www.spaceandculture.org/2006/11/tat-durgence-montral.php

État d’Urgence - Montréal

Oi, Mother Nature has been hard on parts of Sea to Sky Country and the Sunshine Coast in the last two weeks.  As far as I know there is still a boil water advisory on for Vancouver and much of Horseshoe Bay, Lion’s Bay are still without hydro.  Squamish has had two or three power outages in the last two weeks - not for that long but one does not know how long a power outage will last so one must be prepared (that old Brownie mantra!) 

The first day of the deep freeze here I marched across the street to the local newspaper office and asked to see a reporter.  Someone was sent out to talk to me (almost immediately!) and I expressed my concern about the lack of emergency planning vis a vis the homeless people in the Squamish community and the extreme cold (I have been wearing all my Ottawa winter outfits for the last couple of days and I am still cold, even in the office!)  People, especially in Squamish, are not used to this type of cold and there are no community plans in place to gather up homeless people and offer them a warm spot (there is a 9 am to 5 pm drop-in underway and set to open in three weeks time) but this does not address where people who are homeless are supposed to sleep in this type of weather or where they can go in the meantime to keep warm.

So, big-mouth here, makes it an issue for the municipality to address.  Thankfully, the ‘reporter’ that was sent out to speak with me was the big cheese at The Chief - the editor.  She just moved here in the last six months from Winnipeg so she knows about cold.  She thanked me for raising this issue, as did the reporter who called me today, and I just said that as an addictions worker I had seen lots of folks drink and drug more to try and stay warm (very erroneous concept but …) and worked with people in Ontario who had lost fingers and toes due to frost-bite.  There is a big risk of hypothermia, not to mention death, if people who are homeless do not have shelter in such weather conditions and that many communities have emergency plans in place in these conditions to provide shelter to people who are homeless.

In my earnest passion, I did not clear this expression of my opinion with any of the higher ups at work and I may end up in doo-doo when I am quoted in the local paper on Friday.  I did tell my boss, after the fact, that I had done this and thankfully I will be away from the office attending conferences in Vancouver from Dec. 1 and back in the office Dec. 13th.  I hate the muzzling that goes on … if I had raised the issue in the workplace I would have been sent here and there by phone and nothing would be done.  A waste of my time and energy. 

Update:  I was told today (Wednesday, November 29th) that over-night shelter will be provided for homeless people at the local United Church (they do so much good work!)  The current concern is finding people to do the night shift at the church hall.   This is a community generated response as the municipality doesn’t consider this issue to be part of their ‘emergency response’ planning, etc.  I also read in the paper that the BC govt. sets aside money to provide for shelter in these situations but there has to be a proposal done to access these funds (which hasn’t been done yet in Squamish).  At least people will have somewhere to keep warm as not only is it supposed to go to -16 tonight, it is also starting to snow heavily! 

http://www.rabble.ca/columnists_full.shtml?x=54853

George Bush’s defeat is a global one

by Jim Stanford November 20, 2006

It is often suggested that one of George W. Bush’s motives for invading Iraq was to win a war his father muffed the first time around. Now, after his thumping in the U.S. midterm elections and Iraq’s continuing descent into hell, it is clear that George Jr. couldn’t win, either. The made-for-TV execution of Saddam Hussein (if it happens) won’t change that bitter reality.

A second, less obvious father-and-son irony was unfolding the very same day the Democrats won back both houses of Congress. Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s former revolutionary leader, was declared winner of the presidential election in that impoverished nation, on the first ballot.

In this case, George Sr. thought he’d won the first war: Mr. Ortega’s Sandinista movement was voted from office in 1990 (leaving peacefully, despite their caricature as dictators). This followed a multi-year program of destabilization and military intervention initiated by Ronald Reagan (through the infamous Iran-contra connection) and continued by Mr. Bush.

After 15 years of broken promises and economic decline, however, the Reagan-Bush regime change has come undone. Now the Sandinistas are back in: more cautious, and with a stronger democracy to carry on the good things they did in the 1980s (like boosting literacy to 90 per cent from 40 per cent).

In fact, it’s not just Nicaragua that slipped away under George W.’s watch, it’s most of the hemisphere. A left-wing tide has swept Latin America since 2002, when Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva first came to power. (Lula, unlike the Republicans, was just re-elected with a powerful majority.)

Only a few countries in the hemisphere still orbit closely within America’s influence: militarized Colombia, turbulent Mexico (where the rightist party clung to power by a controversial whisker), and (I almost forgot) Canada. James Monroe must be weeping in his grave.

These tectonic shifts are as much economic, as political or strategic. Indeed, it was the profound failure of the “Washington consensus” — a once-dominant doctrine emphasizing free trade, austerity, and financial liberalization — that sparked Latin America’s overwhelming swing back to the left.

Economics explains why other continents, too, have also drifted away from American leadership. For example, as U.S. voters went to the polls, virtually every African head of state was in China for a gigantic summit meeting on Sino-African co-operation. At the summit, China announced $5-billion in new development aid for Africa, a new $5-billion development fund, and several other initiatives. (Despite Africa’s catastrophic economic and health crises, the U.S. — with six times China’s GDP — sends all of $2-billion per year.) China has its own political motives, of course, but the African leaders — thrilled that someone powerful is finally paying attention — were grateful.

Within China and other successfully developing Asian economies (such as India), the influence of the U.S. model is also surprisingly weak. Yes, these countries rely on U.S. markets and investments from U.S. corporations. But in no sense do they follow U.S. policy leadership. Almost all of them do important things that American economists regularly tell them not to do. And due largely to their consequent success, Washington (shouldering its own $3-trillion foreign debt) can’t call the shots any more at the World Trade Organization and other international forums.

As for the Europeans, they couldn’t contain their glee at the U.S. results. Only Britain’s Tony Blair remains loyal — to share Mr. Bush’s lame-duck status, and commiserate on the difficulties of removing troops from places they should never have been.

My point here is not to kick a man when he’s down (although in George W. Bush’s case, this is awfully tempting), nor to suggest that the world will suddenly change with Democrats running things inside the Beltway instead of Republicans. It’s to suggest that something bigger is happening: something more global, and more hopeful, than the extended departure of one failed leader.

When George Bush Sr. was president, the Berlin Wall came down, the U.S. was the only superpower, and history was supposed to be over.

Today, as George Bush Jr. exits stage right, U.S. clout has rarely been weaker. The younger Bush’s destructive irresponsibility is one reason. But a deeper one is the utter failure of the whole model he advocates to improve the lives of masses of people — at home or around the world.

Jim Stanford is an economist with the Canadian Auto Workers union, currently on a year’s leave in Melbourne.

Americans are shopping while Iraq burns.

The competing television news images on the morning after Thanksgiving were of the unspeakable carnage in Sadr City — where more than 200 Iraqi civilians were killed by a series of coordinated car bombs — and the long lines of cars filled with holiday shopping zealots that jammed the highway approaches to American malls that had opened for business at midnight.

A Wal-Mart in Union, N.J., was besieged by customers even before it opened its doors at 5 a.m. on Friday. “All I can tell you,” said a Wal-Mart employee, “is that they were fired up and ready to spend money.”

There is something terribly wrong with this juxtaposition of gleeful Americans with fistfuls of dollars storming the department store barricades and the slaughter by the thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, including old people, children and babies. The war was started by the U.S., but most Americans feel absolutely no sense of personal responsibility for it.

Representative Charles Rangel recently proposed that the draft be reinstated, suggesting that politicians would be more reluctant to take the country to war if they understood that their constituents might be called up to fight. What struck me was not the uniform opposition to the congressman’s proposal — it has long been clear that there is zero sentiment in favor of a draft in the U.S. — but the fact that it never provoked even the briefest discussion of the responsibilities and obligations of ordinary Americans in a time of war.

With no obvious personal stake in the war in Iraq, most Americans are indifferent to its consequences. In an interview last week, Alex Racheotes, a 19-year-old history major at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, said: “I definitely don’t know anyone who would want to fight in Iraq. But beyond that, I get the feeling that most people at school don’t even think about the war. They’re more concerned with what grade they got on yesterday’s test.”

His thoughts were echoed by other students, including John Cafarelli, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of New Hampshire, who was asked if he had any friends who would be willing to join the Army. “No, definitely not,” he said. “None of my friends even really care about what’s going on in Iraq.”

This indifference is widespread. It enables most Americans to go about their daily lives completely unconcerned about the atrocities resulting from a war being waged in their name. While shoppers here are scrambling to put the perfect touch to their holidays with the purchase of a giant flat-screen TV or a PlayStation 3, the news out of Baghdad is of a society in the midst of a meltdown.

According to the United Nations, more than 7,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in September and October. Nearly 5,000 of those killings occurred in Baghdad, a staggering figure.

In a demoralizing reprise of life in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, the U.N. reported that in Iraq: “The situation of women has continued to deteriorate. Increasing numbers of women were recorded to be either victims of religious extremists or ‘honor killings.’ Some non-Muslim women are forced to wear a headscarf and to be accompanied by spouses or male relatives.”

Journalists in Iraq are being “assassinated with utmost impunity,” the U.N. report said, with 18 murdered in the last two months.

Iraq burns. We shop. The Americans dying in Iraq are barely mentioned in the press anymore. They warrant maybe one sentence in a long roundup article out of Baghdad, or a passing reference — no longer than a few seconds — in a television news account of the latest political ditherings.

Since the vast majority of Americans do not want anything to do with the military or the war, the burden of fighting has fallen on a small cadre of volunteers who are being sent into the war zone again and again. Nearly 3,000 have been killed, and many thousands more have been maimed.

The war has now lasted as long as the American involvement in World War II. But there is no sense of collective sacrifice in this war, no shared burden of responsibility. The soldiers in Iraq are fighting, suffering and dying in a war in which there are no clear objectives and no end in sight, and which a majority of Americans do not support.

They are dying anonymously and pointlessly, while the rest of us are free to buckle ourselves into the family vehicle and head off to the malls and shop.