Hamilton 350

The Hamilton 350 steering committee is in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en land defenders who are on the front
lines of climate and biodiversity action. They are in court after defending their own lands against Coastal Gas
Links (CGL) and the “Community Industry Response Group” of the RCMP.

We understand that CGL rammed its pipeline through Wet’suwet’en traditional territories that are under the
authority of the traditional Confederacy Chiefs. The only permission gained by CGL for putting this pipeline
through this territory has been granted by Wet’suwet’en band councils. Band councils were imposed on first
nations by the Federal Government in 1886 under the “Indian Act”.

The Chiefs and band council members operate under a colonial governance system and are only responsible for
reservation lands, having no authority over the rest of the traditional territory. Without the permission of the
traditional Confederacy Chiefs, GCL and the RCMP are trespassing.

The land defenders’ actions illustrate the important distinction between traditional Indigenous practice,
protecting and sustaining biodiversity, versus the profit motivated activities of colonizers and their
corporations.

The crimes committed during the strife between CGL and the Wet’suwet’enland defenders are attributable to CGL
and the RCMP. As we continue down the spiral of human-caused climate change, we need to learn lessons from our
Indigenous sisters and brothers. Rather than squeezing every bit of profit out of our lands as we degrade the
land water and atmosphere, we need to learn to think 7 generations into the future.

If you would like to help, please consider the following options:

  1. Amplify their message and testimony!

    Reshare and boost posts by @yintah_access on Instagram and Gidimt’en Checkpoint (X and Facebook). Make
    posts using the hashtags: #WetsuwetenLandWetsuwetenLaw #DroptheCharges #AllOutForWedzinKwah

    Throughout this week you can also follow and retweet live-tweets from @AbolishCirg! This will include
    testimony from Shaylynn Sampson and Sleydo’ so make sure to keep an eye out.

  2. Publish an organizational letter of support.

    If you are part of a group or organization, consider writing a public letter of support for the land
    defenders testifying next week and circulate widely on your social media and networks. Let your
    followers and supporters know that you stand with the land defenders.

  3. Donate to the Wet’suwet’en Legal Defence Fund

    Legal defence for trials like these is expensive and time consuming, so donating is one way you can make
    sure that the land defenders can continue their struggle for their land, and for our collective future.
    Every dollar counts, and if you can’t donate yourself, think about sharing this request with someone who
    can.

  4. Provide in-person support!

    If you live near Smithers, BC, you can attend the trial in-person or join a support rally outside the
    courthouse. Gidimt’en Checkpoint is inviting supporters to attend the trial in-person at the Smithers
    Courthouse (9-4 pm each day). On June 21, celebrated in so-called Canada as National Indigenous Day, we
    will celebrate the end of one more week of survival at the Main Street stage at 5pm with food and music!

Hamilton 350 is a not-for-profit climate defence organization with several subcommittees, including the
Climate Justice action group. This letter was initiated by that action group and has the support of the H350
Steering Committee.

To mark Earth Day weekend, 22 April 2024, a number of supporters gathered outside the offices of MPPs Neil Lumsden and Donna Skelley.

Four members of Hamilton 350’s Elders 4 Climate Sanity (E4CS) were arrested inside the RBC branch in Dundas at the Stop Destroying Earth rally on 22 March. They are due to appear in court in April.

It took six police officers in five patrol cars to accomplish the arrest.

For more details and interviews with the fab four, see the Hamilton Spectator article, No one is too young or too old to be a climate activist, by Susan Clairmont, 2 April 2024.

You can also check out more images from the rally and the arrest.

Hamilton City Council today unanimously endorsed a motion supporting the OEB’s rejection of Enbridge’s proposed gas pipeline subsidy.

Enbridge’s proposal would shift the cost of building of new gas pipelines onto its customers. Doug Ford has threatened to overrule the OEB’s rejection.

See the motion and a supporting email from Environmental Defence. In addition, Hamilton 350 and Environment Hamilton sent this letter to City Council.

Hailing Biden’s decision to halt LNG export licences, McKibben explains the sleight of hand used in arguments by the fossil fuel industry that “natural” gas is an appropriate bridge from coal to renewables.

Read the story in The Guardian

The NDP’s natural resources critic Charlie Angus tabled a private members bill (C-372) in the House of Commons this week. The bill would ban what the party describes as misleading fossil fuel advertising, similar to the way cigarette ads were restricted in the 1990s.

Read the article on the CBC website

Over 50 Canadian advertisers and PR agencies have joined a 900-strong global group that has pledged not to work for the fossil fuel industry.

Founded in the U.S., the Clean Creatives group aims to shine a light on the key and often overlooked role advertisers play in generating and spreading disinformation about fossil fuels and the climate crisis. Some companies have also joined the group, pledging not to hire ad companies collaborating with fossil fuel promotion.

Read more in the National Observer.

Enbridge and TC Energy are among the top 10 companies that lobbied most for anti-protest bills since 2017, along with ExxonMobil, Koch Industries and Marathon Petroleum.

According to a report by Greenpeace USA, Dollars vs. Democracy 2023: Inside the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Playbook to Suppress Protest and Dissent in the United States, nine of the top 10 companies that lobbied most for anti-protest bills since 2017 are fossil fuel companies, including US companies ExxonMobil, Koch Industries and Marathon Petroleum, as well as Canadian companies Enbridge and TC Energy (Trans Canada).

In addition, 25 fossil fuel and energy companies have contributed more than $5m to state anti-protest bill sponsors in this timeframe, data from political finance trackers Open Secrets and Follow the Money shows.

According to the report, a playbook of tactics has been deployed by corporations, law enforcement agencies and fossil fuel-friendly lawmakers in the US since the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protests at Standing Rock in 2016. This includes mass arrests, spurious litigation, intelligence sharing, harsh policing tactics such as water cannons and sophisticated public relations efforts to depict activists as troublemakers and extremists, the report says.

It’s part of a global strategy reported by the Guardian to silence, discredit and criminalize environmental activists and Indigenous rights defenders opposed to polluting energy, mining and other extractive projects that are incompatible with meaningful climate action.

Read more about this story in The Guardian

Science, one of the most authoritative journals in the world, published an article in January 2023 providing solid evidence that Exxon Mobile and other fossil fuel corporations had clear knowledge of the harm they were causing. Their modelling was excellent. They knew all along that they were largely responsible for global warming yet they buried the results and carried on with their business plan to profit from ruining the climate.

From the introduction to the article:

“For decades, some members of the fossil fuel industry tried to convince the public that a causative link between fossil fuel use and climate warming could not be made because the models used to project warming were too uncertain. Supran et al. show that one of those fossil fuel companies, ExxonMobil, had their own internal models that projected warming trajectories consistent with those forecast by the independent academic and government models. What they understood about climate models thus contradicted what they led the public to believe.”

 —H. Jesse Smith for Science Magazine

Read the full article here

Doug Ford has finally decided that the heat’s too much and has backtracked over the Greenbelt debacle. For the latest information, see the CBC, the Globe and Mail, and the Hamilton Spectator. And for a more insightful analysis, see The Conversation, which points out that the Greenbelt giveaway had nothing to do with creating affordable housing and suggests more sensible and realistic solutions.

What does this mean for Hamilton?

In Hamilton, about 2000 acres of foodlands, forests, and wetlands should be safe from destruction. But it leaves another 5400 acres still exposed because of the Ford government’s forced expansion of Hamilton’s urban area despite overwhelming opposition from City Council and the public. A City-run survey in 2020 completed by more than 18,000 people chose “no boundary expansion” by over 90 percent.

So the effort to protect our irreplaceable foodlands, forests, and wetlands has only been partly achieved. And we are still facing massive sprawl development that will greatly increase climate-wrecking greenhouse gas emissions while eliminating the very areas that can cushion us from climatic consequences.

The boundary expansion benefits the same development sector—and in many cases the exact same developers—as were poised to reap billions in the cutting up of the Greenbelt. The motivation of this government will always be profit over people, but now they’ve been shown to be vulnerable. So let’s build on this and fight the next battle in the knowledge that yes, we can win!