Eco-Art and Food Festival
What a day at the Farmers’ Market. The rain held off, the corn tasty, the wonderful people-Great community event. Thanks to all who stopped by to give support and to those who participated, fbsc.org extends special thanks to the Oshawa Centre, OPUC Networks and Eric Novak. See the the pictures, video to follow.
Peacekeepers Day
Durham’s finest take their knowledge to troubled lands
Peacekeeper veteran has scars to show for lifetime of work
Peacekeepers paid a stiff price
Peacekeepers’ scars
Captain Allan Williams of Oshawa paid stiff price
Aug 11, 2009 – 01:16 PM
By Tim Kelly
OSHAWA — A blazing sun beat down Sunday as 61-year-old Captain Allan F. Williams (retired) stood ramrod straight, saluting while a small crowd gathered at attention.
A short ceremony was playing out at the Simcoe Street South flagpole area of Branch 43 of the Royal Canadian Legion in Oshawa where a group of civilians, police officers and former peacekeepers, like Capt. Williams, were remembering those who had served in Canada’s 40 missions since 1948.
It was all to mark National Peacekeepers Day, set in motion last year by the federal government and dedicated on Aug. 9. It was on this day in 1974 when nine Canadian peacekeepers were shot down near Damascus, Syria, marking the worst single day loss of life in Canadian peacekeeping history. In all, 125,000 Canadian peacekeepers have served since 1948, and 130 have died while on active duty.
Inside Branch 43, tables were set up to honour peacekeepers and speeches were made to praise their past and ongoing work. Glenn McKnight, of Foundation for Building Sustainable Communities, took the lead in organizing the Oshawa ceremony and said it was all about recognizing the positive contributions peacekeepers have made around the world.
Capt. Williams was used to the heat because he served in some very hot zones, both literally and figuratively. The Toronto native, who retired to Oshawa after serving in the Canadian Forces for nearly 35 years, was on peacekeeping missions in Cyprus, Egypt, Lebanon, Israel and Cambodia.
He joined up as a rawboned 17-year-old in 1965 and served in Europe before heading to Cyprus in 1972 and it was there that he really learned what peacekeeping was all about.
“We were told to guard the perimeter,” he recalls. “But a mother and her three children were killed in their home when some radicals were able to get through our lines.” He looks down and pauses for a moment before continuing. “I took the job a lot more seriously after that,” he says quietly.
A few years later, the young soldier was assigned to Egypt where blistering desert heat made living conditions miserable, but he was able to tough it out.
Then, in 1975, it was on to Lebanon and more Middle East strife.
“It was hell,” he says. “We were in the middle of a civil war with factions fighting each other and you just had to keep them apart. Very tough.” But that was a mere warm-up to the Israel assignment he had in 1982. “Israel decided suddenly on a three-pronged attack and we peacekeepers got caught in the middle. We were living in shelters for six weeks, getting fired on. We got cut off with no electricity or food and water. We had to try to survive however we could. Lots of peacekeepers were killed on that one.”
There was one last peacekeeping mission for the captain and it would crown his career.
It took place in the Khmer Rouge killing fields of Cambodia where the infamous Pol Pot was wiping out his people by the millions. Capt. Williams went there in 1992.
“As soon as the peacekeepers went in, the factions began fighting again and our position became overrun. In February of 1993, I was in a helicopter that was shot down and both my legs were badly injured and I spent a month in a hospital and was in a wheelchair. But I was sent back to the capital, Phnom Penh, and I worked with my platoon from there, using a cane. Once we sent in the Apache gunships, it was over.”
After retiring in 1999, he has had time to think about peacekeeping and his role in it.
“It’s changed from when I started. At first we had to wait until the enemy engaged us, but by the end we didn’t,” he said softly.
Oshawa celebrates Peacekeepers’ Day
Peacekeepers day: Dr. Colin Carrie, M.P. Oshawa
Peacekeepers’ in troubled lands
Durham’s finest take their knowledge to troubled lands
Peacekeeping Day reveals officers’ wishes to give back
Aug 09, 2009 – 03:47 PM
DURHAM — For Detective Constable Martin Franssen, the opportunity to serve in Afghanistan for a year starting this fall is something he relishes, because “we (in Canada) have opportunities beyond what the average person understands.”
The 10-year Durham Regional Police veteran has already served a one-year peacekeeping stint, working to train Iraqi police recruits from July 2006 to August 2007 while in Jordan. The 49-year-old officer found the work to be an “incredible experience.
“It was unsafe to train them in Iraq so we had to train them in Jordan. We were training them to be police officers in a war environment … we had recruits that were as young as 15, some as old as 40, many with war wounds, but they just want to help their country.”
Det. Const. Franssen was on hand at Branch 43 of the Royal Canadian Legion in Oshawa on Sunday afternoon to mark the inaugural celebration of National Peacekeepers Day. The local ceremony brought out a crowd of about 50 including Oshawa MP Colin Carrie, Durham’s Deputy Police Chief Sherry Whiteway and other noteables.
The federal government proclaimed the day in honour of Canada’s peacekeepers to mark Aug. 9, 1974, when nine Canadian peacekeepers were shot down on a flight near Damascus, Syria. It was the single largest loss of life on one day for Canadian peackeepers in over 60 years.
Det. Const. Franssen already has 10 years of military service under his belt, retiring with the rank of captain, so he admits going back into the Canadian Forces won’t be foreign to him. But he says the danger of the mission — 127 Canadian soldiers have died in Afghanistan since 2002 — “goes through the mind.”
Other Durham Regional police officers have served in peacekeeping operations. Deputy Chief Whiteway said 16 have worked as Canadian peacekeepers since 1997. One of those officers was her husband, Sergeant Tom Whiteway, who worked as a peacekeeper in Sarajevo, Bosnia, in 2005.
“It was the highlight of my policing career,” said Sgt. Whiteway, who recently retired and now works with Ontario Power Generation after 30 years with DRPS.
While the war officially ended in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Sgt. Whiteway didn’t arrive until years later to work as a police adviser on a war crimes investigative unit, as well as an anti-human trafficking unit and a witness protection department.
He said it was still very dangerous and that in the Sarajevo suburb where he lived, “the front yard of our house was an active mine field. You never walked where grass wasn’t cut or where it wasn’t hard surface road.”
And he said that without an international presence even years after the war was over, “there would have still been conflict. The country was still quite a mess. Ethnic division was very evident.”
The DRPS currently has three officers serving on active duty in Afghanistan, due to arrive back in Canada in November, with three more deploying to Afghanistan at that time.
Deputy Chief Whiteway paid tribute to her officers saying they are helping to bring freedom to local people and protecting the cause of human rights.
Oshawa announces Peacekeepers’ Day
Peacekeeper Day Sunday
Aug 07, 2009 – 05:32 PM
OSHAWA — Oshawa will mark National Peacekeepers Day with a ceremony Sunday, Aug. 9.
The Foundation for Building Sustainable Communities will host the event, which will include Oshawa MP Colin Carrie and Oshawa Mayor John Gray as guests.
The ceremony runs from 1 to 3 p.m. at Royal Canadian Legion Branch 43, 471 Simcoe St. S.
Parkwood Estate
- Parkwood Estates Community Day, view
Thanks to all the community members who participated in the puppet show. You made it really awesome.
When you see your picture, right click to download. Enjoy!!!
India’s right to food security: an opinion
Right to Food Act: essential but inadequate: Article
Rahul Lahoti and Sanjay G. Reddy
| There is an imbalance between the expansive vision expressed by the draft Act and the narrow means it seeks to achieve it. |
The Union government’s draft Right to Food (Guarantee of Safety and Security) Act insists on “the physical, economic and social right of all citizens to have access to safe and nutritious food, consistent with an adequate diet necessary to lead an active and healthy life with dignity…” The proposed law offers a quantity of cereal at a modest cost each month to a broad range of beneficiaries: in principle, all those living under the poverty line and a range of others.
Imbalance
The recognition of a right to food (and therefore to freedom from undernourishment and hunger) is a landmark measure and deserves great credit. However, there is an imbalance between the expansive vision expressed by the Act in principle and the narrow means it seeks to achieve it in practice; reflected, for instance, in its focus only on calories from foodgrains and on direct distribution rather than on the provision of means for commanding food and on complementary policies. It appears that the Act may not add much to the existing Public Distribution System or State and Central programmes to provide subsidised cereals.
It appears very important to address the poor functioning of the existing system, and to remedy both the apparent discrepancies across States and the general non-transparency in the definition of the beneficiaries (in particular, the ambiguities in the understanding of what is a ‘Below Poverty Line’ household). It is also unclear how the Act will be truly rights-based, in the sense that an individual may make a binding demand for the satisfaction of the right.
A contrast can be drawn between an approach to further economic and social rights which centres on the direct provision of essential goods and one which ensures access to such goods through the creation of an economy and society which produces and distributes these adequately in the normal course. It is possible to fulfill such basic rights even at a relatively low per-capita income by employing public action, but there are advantages to combining both means in order to fulfill them in a sustained way.
An approach focussed on the provision of subsidised resources can play a vital role in protecting the poor and the vulnerable from catastrophic outcomes, and can contribute to the establishment of a more productive and healthy population that is capable of bringing about a higher level of national development. It can serve ends which are both intrinsically and instrumentally important.
However, such an approach is, in isolation, likely to be more costly, less effective and face more political challenges to its maintenance, than one which is supported by a larger programme to generate remunerative livelihoods and inclusive growth. A trajectory of national development which brings about a widening circle of prosperity will both help ensure that the right to food is fulfilled, and make it easier to provide direct support wherever required.
The recent renewal of the government’s focus on investment in agriculture and rural development can be helpful in this regard, though much more is required if there is to be a departure from the overly concentrated pattern of recent economic growth which has centred precipitously on a few islands of relative prosperity. Growth must occur in a variety of sectors of production as well as geographical areas in order to be socially inclusive. Inclusive growth may require broad-based investment in human capabilities, public goods, productive infrastructure and policies to broaden access to productive resources such as land and credit.
A related distinction is between legislation seeking to promote or protect a basic right and the strategy of doing so. The proposed Act will help further the fulfilment of the right but will not by itself achieve it, and it is unlikely that any one piece of legislation would do so. Already, diverse pieces of legislation, including the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), contribute in different and important ways toward that end. It should be ensured that these diverse measures together constitute a layered social security system which protects various groups of vulnerable people, going beyond the able-bodied poor to include the elderly, the handicapped and children. As Amartya Sen has famously underlined, starvation results from insufficient command over food and not usually from inadequate food availability as such. Since command over food is achieved in a diversity of ways, through the market mechanism and otherwise, it can also fail in a variety of ways.
A broader strategy
The generation of adequate purchasing power is, however, a crucial means to ensure food security in a market economy, which India increasingly is. As such, in addition to protective measures such as the NREGA, a broader strategy of inclusive growth — a generalised increase in opportunity across the society — is the essential means to secure the fulfilment of the right to food.
Such a strategy is the product of a range of government actions and cannot be fully enshrined in legislation, however important such legislation may be. The framers of the Indian Constitution recognised this in laying out the Directive Principles, which have an intermediate role in the sense that they recommend a direction to the use of sovereign power while declining to restrict it.
India continues to be a primarily agrarian society. The majority of the people derive their livelihood directly or indirectly from agriculture, even as the share of economic output generated by agriculture has sharply diminished. It is important to observe that agriculture, unique among sectors of production, plays the dual role of providing an enormously important source of livelihood and of producing the means of life. This dual role requires that it receive special consideration.
Keeping pace with demand
India has traditionally espoused this view in global debates on trade policy, and should place a similar perspective at the heart of domestic public policy. Despite the relative stagnation of agricultural productivity in recent years and evidence of continued widespread undernourishment, as Indian society has become more urbanised and more oriented toward non-agricultural activities, Indian agriculture has largely kept pace with the growing domestic market demand for food.
India’s largest contribution to the fulfilment of the right to food outside its borders may be that it has succeeded in doing so and thus avoided competing with food-importing countries. Its largest contribution to the fulfilment of the right to food within its borders will be its embarking on a path of development which reaches the mass of its people, thus making the Right to Food Act an essential means but an ultimate irrelevance.
Rahul Lahoti is an independent scholar (email: rahul.lahoti@gmail.com). Sanjay G. Reddy is Associate Professor, Department of Economics, New School for Social Research, New York (email: reddys1@newschool.edu).
