Canada’s “Common Causes” NGO activist network failing to live up to its potential

Journalist and activist Nick Fillmore takes a swipe at new progressive voice

No 732 Posted by fw, April 30, 2013

“In September, 2012, Common Causes, a loosely-knit network of more than 50 groups from the non-governmental sector (NGO), labour and the Native community, was born. The idea was to have dozens of groups come together under one communications umbrella where they could work together on common-interest projects to oppose the Harper regime…. But now, even though the movement is officially only a few months old, organizers have made it clear that the full force of the movement will not be brought together in big campaigns.” —Nick Fillmore

In this post, Canadian journalist and activist Nick Fillmore explains why he is disappointed in Common Causes’ performance. Click on the linked title below to read Nick’s original critique, or read the following reprint with my added subheadings.

But first, to put the piece in context, here’s how Common Causes represents itself in its mission description:

Our Mission: To unite people and communities to work in solidarity for change. Common Causes is an assembly of social movements dedicated to defending democracy, the environment, and human rights. In keeping with the values of the significant majority of Canadians, Quebecers, and Indigenous peoples, we provide alternatives to the current Conservative government’s agenda. We believe that coordinated action is needed to take a strong stand against this agenda that is changing society in critical areas such as the economy, the environment, labour rights, health care, food safety, education, social programs, culture, civil liberties, peace, and poverty.

And now, Nick’s critique…

Network formed to take on Harper not living up to its potential, by Nick Fillmore, A Different Point of View, April 30, 2013

“The creation of Common Causes gave me hope”

Ever since Stephen Harper took over in Ottawa seven years ago, Canada has needed a strong and powerful social/political movement to stop, or at least slow down, the many destructive measures being carried out by the Conservatives.

Finally, in September, 2012, Common Causes, a loosely-knit network of more than 50 groups from the non-governmental sector (NGO), labour and the Native community, was born.

The idea was to have dozens of groups come together under one communications umbrella where they could work together on common-interest projects to oppose the Harper regime.

The creation of Common Causes gave me hope. I have long felt that we desperately need a hard-nosed civil society movement that will challenge the Conservatives with massive campaigns drawing on the resources of hundreds of groups.

Nick represented his own campaign group at Common Causes’ founding meeting

A strong citizens’ movement that will stand up against the tyrannical Harper is important to all Canadians. Earlier last year I was involved in setting up a campaigning group, the Campaign to Build ‘One Big Campaign‘, which had similar goals, and our organization took part in the Common Causes founding meeting in Ottawa.

Maude Barlow launched the network with these words —

Common Causes was developed under the leadership of the Council of Canadians (CoC). When officially launched in January, it sounded like what we needed. CoC National Chairperson Maude Barlow wrote:

“Common Causes will work cross-sectorally . . . to create an extended network for solidarity, resistance, action and change. Through this coordination, we will shape priorities for common action and maximum impact.”

Network should have developed strong campaigns but instead it’s taking a low-key, long-term approach

I had hoped last fall that the network would quickly pick an area where Harper is vulnerable and develop a major campaign involving hundreds of groups and thousands of people.

But now, even though the movement is officially only a few months old, organizers have made it clear that the full force of the movement will not be brought together in big campaigns.

The movement is taking a low key, long-term approach to its work. Staff said priority attention is being given to discussions about how to organize more strategically in areas such as democracy building, environmental protection, and the defence of human rights. Hopefully, it will be pro-active in some of its work so we’re not always reacting to Harper.

A sure bad sign – Common Causes has failed to capture media attention

Common Causes’ may be able to build an effective forum and voice for Canada’s liberal-minded, progressive community but, as we have been in Quebec, this can take years. So far, because the network is taking such a low-key approach with its activities, it has barely been mentioned in the national media and remains unknown by the public.

Turnout at anti-Harper events has been paltry

Last week Common Causes rolled out a series of actions across the country and, unfortunately, all but one turned out to be very low key. Protests led by one partner group, the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) were held at the offices of a handful of Conservative MPs in English Canada over the Harper government’s disastrous cutbacks to Employment Insurance (EI).

The turnout in communities such as Weyburn, Sask and Simcoe, Ont., were very small – with from 10 to 40 people taking part. In most places, hardly anyone noticed what was going on. There was some local media coverage.

Only in Montreal, was there a huge parade and protest – one source said tens-of-thousands people took part. However, this event was organized by Quebec’s coalition against employment insurance reform. The protest received some local and national media coverage.

Small protests are good news for Harper

I don`t see how protests of 30 or 40 people are of any help to those who have lost their Employment Insurance. Small turnouts surely reassure Harper that the country is not on the brink of revolution. The only thing accomplished is that a few protesters feel good about taking part in an event.

No immediate plans for “full-force” anti-Harper campaigns.

Common Causes says it will not bring together the full force of the movement in anti-Harper campaigns, but, hopefully, those in charge will eventually change their minds.

Movement has “awesome” but, as yet, “unrealized” potential

It was a great accomplishment when the network brought together non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and Canada’s most progressive unions under one campaigning mechanism.

By combining the forces of the NGOs and unions, the movement has awesome, unrealized power. The hundreds – potentially thousands – of NGOs could provide access to millions of members who can take part in campaigning.

The unions could loan staff to the network in the same way they loan workers to the NDP during elections and, more importantly, if they wanted to, they could provide Common Causes with as much as $1-million a year.

Are we serious about challenging Harper?

However, I think organizers need to decide if they are really serious about taking on Harper. In the NGO sector, many groups are more concerned about protecting their own vested interests rather than taking real action that might benefit the general public. And in the labour movement, too often union protests are for show only – to give the impression that the leadership is doing its job.

Routine actions like demonstrations, marches, and petitions just don’t cut it anymore

To have some impact on the Harper regime, the movement would need to be creative and “think outside the box”, instead of carrying out time-worn, routine activities such as holding demonstrations, marches and sending petitions to Ottawa.

So, when it gets right down to it, are the people who head our NGOs and unions too timid?

Nick suggests a change in tactics, including…

In my opinion, we must not be afraid to use the strongest possible tactics as long as they are legal. For instance, we should campaign on key issues such as income inequality and austerity by disrupting some government activities, holding flash mobs, carrying out sit-ins, and disrupting government communications systems, etc. until the Conservatives respond.

After all, we are being destroyed by a fascist-like government, the likes of which we have never before seen in Canada.

MY TAKE

I would add this to Nick’s list of Common Causes’ shortcomings – First, I don’t believe its leadership has the requisite knowledge and skills to front an effective mass movement. Second, inadequate funding will hamstring the organization. Third, Canada simply doesn’t have enough committed progressives to support the cause.

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog, Citizen Action Monitor, may contain copyrighted material that may not have been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I claim no ownership of such materials. Such material, published without profit, is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues. It is published in accordance with the provisions of the 2004 Supreme Court of Canada ruling and its six principle criteria for evaluating fair dealing.

Powerful global movement is quickly emerging, battling climate change on a thousand fronts

“We know what the future holds unless we resist. And so resist we will.”

No 718 Posted by fw, April 14, 2013

“We’ve watched great cultural shifts and organizing successes in recent years, like the marriage-equality and immigration-reform movements. But breaking the power of oil companies may be even harder because the sums of the money on the other side are so fantastic – there are trillions of dollars worth of oil in Canada’s tar sands and the North Dakota shale. The men who own the coal mines and the gas wells will spend what they need to assure their victories. Last month, Rex Tillerson, Exxon’s $100,000-a-day CEO, said that environmentalists were “obtuse” for opposing new pipelines…. essentially declaring that the war to save the climate was over before it started. He added, “My philosophy is to make money…. That same day, scientists announced that Earth was now warming 50 times faster than it ever has in human civilization, and that carbon-dioxide levels had set a perilous new record…. Right now, we’re losing. But as the planet runs its spiking fever, the antibodies are starting to kick in. We know what the future holds unless we resist. And so resist we will.” —Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben on “the fossil fuel resistance”, Waging Nonviolence, April 12, 2013

It got so hot in Australia in January that the weather service had to add two new colors to its charts. A few weeks later, at the other end of the planet, new data from the CryoSat-2 satellite showed 80 percent of Arctic sea ice has disappeared. We’re not breaking records anymore; we’re breaking the planet. In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They’ll just ask, “So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?”

Here’s the good news: We’ll at least be able to say we fought.

After decades of scant organized response to climate change, a powerful movement is quickly emerging around the country and around the world, building on the work of scattered front-line organizers who’ve been fighting the fossil-fuel industry for decades. It has no great charismatic leader and no central organization; it battles on a thousand fronts. But taken together, it’s now big enough to matter, and it’s growing fast.

The Fossil Fuel Resistance: Meet the New Green Heroes

Americans got to see some of this movement spread out across the Mall in Washington, D.C., on a bitter-cold day in February. Press accounts put the crowd upward of 40,000 – by far the largest climate rally in the country’s history. They were there to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline, which would run down from Canada’s tar sands, south to the Gulf of Mexico, a fight that Time magazine recently referred to as the Selma and the Stonewall of the environmental movement. But there were thousands in the crowd also working to block fracking wells across the Appalachians and proposed Pacific coast deep-water ports that would send coal to China. Students from most of the 323 campuses where the fight for fossil-fuel divestment is under way mingled with veterans of the battles to shut down mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia and Kentucky, and with earnest members of the Citizens Climate Lobby there to demand that Congress enact a serious price on carbon. A few days earlier, 48 leaders had been arrested outside the White House – they included ranchers from Nebraska who didn’t want a giant pipeline across their land and leaders from Texas refinery towns who didn’t want more crude spilling into their communities. Legendary investor Jeremy Grantham was on hand, urging scientists to accompany their research with civil disobedience, as were solar entrepreneurs quickly figuring out how to deploy panels on rooftops across the country. The original Americans were well-represented; indigenous groups are core leaders of the fight, since their communities have been devastated by mines and cheated by oil companies. The Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr. of the Hip Hop Caucus was handcuffed next to Julian Bond, former head of the NAACP, who recounted stories of being arrested for integrating Atlanta lunch counters in the Sixties.

It’s a sprawling, diverse and remarkably united movement, marked by its active opposition to the richest and most powerful industry on Earth. The Fossil Fuel Resistance has already won some serious victories, blocking dozens of new coal plants and closing down existing ones – ask the folks at Little Village Environmental Justice Organization who helped shutter a pair of coal plants in Chicago, or the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, which fought to stop Chevron from expanding its refinery in Richmond, California. “Up to this point, grassroots organizing has kept more industrial carbon out of the atmosphere than state or federal policy,” says Gopal Dayaneni of the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project. It’s an economic resistance movement, too, one that’s well aware renewable energy creates three times as many jobs as coal and gas and oil. Good jobs that can’t be outsourced because the sun and the wind are close to home. It creates a future, in other words.

These are serious people: You’re not a member of the Resistance just because you drive a Prius. You don’t need to go to jail, but you do need to do more than change your light bulbs. You need to try to change the system that is raising the temperature, the sea level, the extinction rate – even raising the question of how well civilization will survive this century.

Soon after the big D.C. rally, the state department issued a report downplaying Keystone XL’s environmental impact, thus advancing the pipeline proposal another step. Since then, at the urging of the remarkable cellphone-company-cum-activist-group Credo, nearly 60,000 people have signed a pledge promising to resist, peacefully but firmly, if the pipeline is ever approved. By early March, even establishment commentators like Thomas Friedman had noticed – he used his New York Times column to ask activists to “go crazy” with civil disobedience; 48 hours later, 25 students and clergy were locked down inside a pipeline-company office outside Boston. It’s not a one-sided fight anymore.

No movement this diverse is going to agree on a manifesto, but any reckoning begins with the idea that fossil fuel is dirty at every stage, and we need to put it behind us as fast as we can. For those of us in affluent countries, small shifts in lifestyle won’t be enough; we’ll also need to alter the policies that keep this industry fat and happy. For the poor world, the much harder goal is to leapfrog the fossil-fuel age and go straight to renewables – a task that those of us who prospered by filling the atmosphere with carbon must help with, for reasons both moral and practical. And for all of us, it means standing with communities from the coal fields of Appalachia to the oil-soaked Niger Delta as they fight for their homes. They’ve fought longest and hardest and too often by themselves. Now that global warming is starting to pour seawater into subways, the front lines are expanding and the reinforcements are finally beginning to arrive.

Climate Change and the End of Australia

Right now, the fossil-fuel industry is mostly winning. In the past few years, they’ve proved “peak-oil” theorists wrong – as the price rose for hydrocarbons, companies found lots of new sources, though mostly by scraping the bottom of the barrel, spending even more money to get even-cruddier energy. They’ve learned to frack (in essence, explode a pipe bomb a few thousand feet beneath the surface, fracturing the surrounding rock). They’ve figured out how to take the sludgy tar sands and heat them with natural gas till the oil flows. They’ve managed to drill miles beneath the ocean’s surface. And the hyperbolic enthusiasm has gushed even higher than the oil. The Wall Street Journal has declared North Dakota a new Saudi Arabia. The New York Times described a new shale-oil find in California as more than four times as large as North Dakota’s. “We could make OPEC ‘NOPEC’ if we really put our minds to it,” said Charles Drevna of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers. “We’re talking decades, if not into the hundreds of years, of supply in North America.”

But all that fossil fuel will only get pumped and mined and burned if we decide to ignore the climate issue; were we to ever take it seriously, the math would quickly change. As I pointed out in these pages last summer, the world’s fossil-fuel companies, even before these new finds, had five times more carbon in their reserves than we could burn if we hope to stay below a two-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures. That’s the red line almost every government in the world has agreed on, but the coal, oil and natural-gas companies, propelled by record profits, just keep looking for more – and ignore reality. A new report shows that an anonymous group of industry billionaires has secretly poured more than $100 million into anti-environmental front groups. Weeks before Election Day, Chevron gave the largest corporate Super PAC contribution of the post-Citizens United era, making sure that Congress stayed in the hands of climate deniers.

But every flood erodes their position, and every heat wave fuels the Resistance. When the Keystone pipeline first became controversial, in 2011, a poll of D.C. “energy insiders” showed that more than 70 percent of them thought they’d have permits to build it by the end of the year. Big Oil, of course, may end up getting its way, but so far its money hasn’t overwhelmed the passion, spirit and creativity its foes have brought to the battle. And we’re not just playing defense anymore: The rapidly spreading divestment movement may be the single biggest face of the Resistance. It’s no longer confined to campuses; city governments and religious denominations have begun to unload their stakes in oil companies, and the movement is even spreading to self-interested investors now that HSBC has calculated that taking climate change seriously could cut share prices of oil companies by up to 60 percent.

With each passing month, something else weakens the industry’s hand: the steady rise of renewable energy, a technology that’s gone from pie-in-the-sky to panel-on-the-roof in remarkably short order. In the few countries where governments have really gotten behind renewables, the results are staggering: There were days last spring when Germany (pale, northern Germany) managed to generate half its power from solar panels. Even in this country, much of the generating capacity added last year came from renewables. A December study from the University of Delaware showed that by 2030 we could affordably power the nation 99.9 percent of the time on renewable energy. In other words, logic, physics and technology work against the fossil-fuel industry. For the moment, it has the political power it needs – but political power shifts perhaps more easily than physics.

Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math

Which is where the resistance comes in. Forty-three years ago, the first anarchic Earth Day drew 20 million Americans into the streets. That surge helped push through all kinds of legislation – the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act – and spurred the growth of organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund. As these “green groups” became the face of the environmental movement, they grew adept at playing an inside-the-Beltway lobbying game. But that strategy got harder as the power of the right wing grew; for 25 years, they’ve been unable to win significant progress on climate change.

Now, energized by the Keystone protests, some strides have been made. The NRDC has done yeoman’s work against the pipeline. The Sierra Club, which just a few years ago was taking millions from the fracking industry to shill for natural gas, has been reinvented. In January, the club dropped a 120-year ban on civil disobedience. The following month, its executive director, Michael Brune, was led away from the White House in handcuffs.

But the center of gravity has also shifted from big, established groups to local, distributed efforts. In the Internet age, you don’t need direct mail and big headquarters; you need Twitter. In Texas and Oklahoma, hundreds have joined actions led by the Tar Sands Blockade, which has used daredevil tactics and lots of courage to get between the industry and the pipeline it needs to move oil overseas. In Montana, author Rick Bass and others sat-in to stop the export of millions of tons of coal from ports on the West Coast. And all across the Marcellus and Utica shale formations in the Northeast, people have been standing up for their communities, often by sitting down in front of the fracking industry. The Fossil Fuel Resistance looks more and more like Occupy – in fact, they’ve overlapped from the beginning, since oil companies are the one percent of the one percent. The movements share a political analysis, too: A grid with a million solar rooftops feels more like the Internet than ConEd; it’s a farmers market in electrons, with the local control that it implies.

Like Occupy, this new Resistance is not obsessed with winning over Democratic Party leaders. The Keystone arrests in 2011 marked the most militant protests outside the White House during Obama’s first term; now Van Jones, who once worked for the president, has taken to calling Keystone the “Obama pipeline.” Used to dealing with the established green groups, the administration thinks in terms of deals – “We’ll approve the pipeline but give you something else you want” – the kind of logic that gains the approval of op-ed columnists and talking heads. But given that the Arctic has already melted, we don’t have room for easy compromises. The president’s insistence that he favors an “all of the above” energy system, where oil and gas are as welcome as solar and wind, seems increasingly like a classic political hedge. In fact, if the GOP wasn’t in the tank for the oil industry, you couldn’t do much worse than Obama’s campaigntrail rhetoric. Last year, the president went to Oklahoma, posed in front of a stack of oil pipe and bragged of adding enough new pipelines to encircle Earth. Since the election, the president has started talking green, promising that now climate change would be a priority – but this growing Resistance is, I think, unconvinced. As climate leader Naomi Klein said, “This time, no honeymoon and no hero worship.”

Only grit and hard work. We’ve watched great cultural shifts and organizing successes in recent years, like the marriage-equality and immigration-reform movements. But breaking the power of oil companies may be even harder because the sums of the money on the other side are so fantastic – there are trillions of dollars worth of oil in Canada’s tar sands and the North Dakota shale. The men who own the coal mines and the gas wells will spend what they need to assure their victories. Last month, Rex Tillerson, Exxon’s $100,000-a-day CEO, said that environmentalists were “obtuse” for opposing new pipelines. He announced the company planned to more than double the acreage on which it was exploring for new hydrocarbons and said he expected that renewables would account for just one percent of our energy in 2040, essentially declaring that the war to save the climate was over before it started. He added, “My philosophy is to make money.”

That same day, scientists announced that Earth was now warming 50 times faster than it ever has in human civilization, and that carbon-dioxide levels had set a perilous new record at Mauna Loa’s measuring station. Right now, we’re losing. But as the planet runs its spiking fever, the antibodies are starting to kick in. We know what the future holds unless we resist. And so resist we will.

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org. His most recent book is Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

SOURCE: This story original appeared in the April 25th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-fossil-fuel-resistance-20130411

SEE ALSO

• McKibben giving up on Obama and the Democrats for “fiddling while the planet burns” posted on April 9, 2013. Bill McKibben has more or less given up waiting for Obama and the Democrats to pitch in and help lead the transition in public opinion and public policy on climate change issues. Reflecting on two other revolutionary American movements, the Stonewall gay liberation movement and Selma Voting Rights Movement, McKibben concludes that building a mass movement is our last best hope.

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog, Citizen Action Monitor, may contain copyrighted material that may not have been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I claim no ownership of such materials. Such material, published without profit, is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues. It is published in accordance with the provisions of the 2004 Supreme Court of Canada ruling and its six principle criteria for evaluating fair dealing.

2.3 million petition kicks off nationwide campaign protesting Obama’s planned cuts to Social Security

Any lessons for Canadian activists in this coalition-led mass mobilization of Americans?

No 716 Posted by fw, April 11, 2013

“Today’s White House protest marks the beginning of a mobilization of Americans nationwide. Tomorrow, Americans will follow up today’s petition delivery with a Congressional Call-In day telling members to oppose the chained CPI. Citizens will call the National Committee’s toll-free legislative hotline to connect to their representatives on Capitol Hill in one easy call.” 

Kudos to organizers of this nationwide campaign for recognizing that a petition alone – no matter how big – is not likely to cause Obama to rethink his proposal. The question is, will anything?

Moreover, can Canadian progressives learn anything from this coalition-led mass mobilization of Americans that can be used here against the Harper regime?

Seniors Tell President Obama Chained CPI is a Benefit Cut Americans Don’t Support published by the National Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare (NCPSSM), April 9, 2013

2.3 million Petitions Delivered to the White House today

With more than 2 million petition signatures in hand, Social Security advocates joined members of Congress at the White House today to protest President Obama’s plan to cut benefits for seniors, retired veterans and people with disabilities.  National Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare (NCPSSM) President/CEO, Max Richtman, told the crowd middle-class and poor families should not bear the burden of reducing the deficit:

“Contrary to the political spin, America’s seniors know this chained CPI proposal isn’t a ‘tweak’ or an  ‘adjustment.’  It’s not more accurate for seniors but it is designed to cut benefits and raise taxes, largely on the poor and middle class. Any politician in Washington who thinks they can slip these benefit cuts by millions of seniors, veterans, people with disabilities and their families unnoticed is in for the shock of their careers.”… Max Richtman, NCPSSM President/CEO

National Committee volunteer Antoinette Bobo, a 74-year-old retiree from Washington, D.C., also spoke out against the proposed cut at today’s event:

“President Obama needs to rethink his Chained CPI proposal because most seniors have no other way to survive except for Social Security and Medicare. And it’s not just about us, it’s about our children and grandchildren who are going to need the same protections that we have. We earned these benefits and we’re counting on them for the future.”

A group of Democratic members of Congress committed to protecting Social Security, including Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), told today’s White House protestors that President Obama is simply wrong to propose cutting already modest benefits to seniors, retired veterans and people with disabilities:

“We are not going to balance the budget on the backs of the elderly, disabled vets, the sick, women or children. When one out of four major profitable corporations pay nothing in federal income taxes we know how we can deal with deficit reduction in a way that is fair. The White House tells us they want to defend the middle class. Well if you really want to defend the middle class you don’t cut Social Security, and you don’t cut Medicare and you don’t cut benefits.”…  Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT)

Participants in today’s event included: The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, Social Security Works, AFL-CIO,  National Organization for Women, Campaign for America’s Future, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Democracy for America, MoveOn and former Obama for America supporters and seniors who rely on Social Security.

Today’s White House protest marks the beginning of a mobilization of Americans nationwide. Tomorrow, Americans will follow up today’s petition delivery with a Congressional Call-In day telling members to oppose the chained CPI. Citizens will call the National Committee’s toll-free legislative hotline to connect to their representatives on Capitol Hill in one easy call.  That number is:  (800) 998-0180.

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog, Citizen Action Monitor, may contain copyrighted material that may not have been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I claim no ownership of such materials. Such material, published without profit, is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues. It is published in accordance with the provisions of the 2004 Supreme Court of Canada ruling and its six principle criteria for evaluating fair dealing.