see the green state of the show good morning welcome to changes the program on sustainability i'm suzanne gregory the coordinating producer of the show and just before we begin we need to thank those who made financial contributions to the station during our fund drive last week and you could still do that by calling our office line today two five zero seven one six three four one zero or you can go online at c h o y dot ca you'll find the donate link in the menu at the top of the screen or you could come into the station and lois lane which is of course near the bottom of the china steps and say hello to the people who are here i think big g is in the office area out there and we have jennifer on bob and various other people so do come in and say hi if you are in the area we'd like to give special thinks to the port theatre for providing two sets of tech it's that went to our supporters last week and they were very appreciative so hurry for the port theatre somebody definitely very important at our community somebody to for us to support later in the show today we will have another set of tickets to give away to a listener who calls in a pledge to help  stay tuned for that we'll mention that at the bottom of the hour because we do want to get started with our interview and to take care of that we have marjorie stewart once again in the studio good morning mar suzanne tell us about our guest oh i think everybody knows about to pull our guests to a local filmmaker musician representative of the council of canadians general to vist who has most recently been an exciting and interesting assignment in el salvador so without further ado show we ask him how that came about yes the i was i'm working on a film another film about trade in this one i did a film in two thousand and nine about the security and prosperity partnership which was very much focused on that agreement between kind of the united states and mexico and for months after i finished the film the agreement was officially dismantled as the security prosperity partnership but it but the agenda carried on and it was it it unfolded in under a whole bunch of different names and not film has been used now it's been used in the states it was on p b s and i sold a whole bunch of copies in the states it's on free speech t v and people are using it to educate people about the t p p the transpacific partnership all these d copies of it and on online downloads and stuff through the broadcast but just the fact that it's being used as an educational tool is great and so people in the states were contacting me about to me making a film about the team and i thought rather than making a film about another specific acronym why not look at what the overarching agenda is the common thread between all of these agreements the phoebus the cedars the t t p t t i the nafta caf on and on and on there are a whole whack of acronyms so what is the common thread between all of these follow the money follow the money but it's all about corporate control and giving corporations more rights and one of the key aspects of that is the investor state dispute settlements that are built into trade agreements and that's a mechanism that allows corporations to sue governments for laws and policies that they don't like you know environmental regulations labor laws consumer standards health and safety standards anything that gets in the way of corporations impedes their profitability they can turn around and sue governments for the loss of potential profit so would you introduce that acronym again to people poll because they need to gradually get used to it investor state yes yeah i s d s investor state dispute settlements and enough that we have what's called chapter eleven which is the investor state dispute settlement enough and that was the first investor state clause built into a trade agreement and under nafta now we have two no half billion dollars worth of lawsuits against canada suing the canadian government after they wanted to extend a patent by changing the utility of a drug and they went through the court system and here in canada they went through the court the appeal court all the way to the supreme court and they lost it all three levels and so then they turned around and they are suing under nafta under chapter eleven of nafta for five hundred million dollars half a billion dollars they want to the money that they have made a lot of money that they have made well they've already they've already made money off of this drug and and what they're what they were saying is what a lot of drug companies do is they can tinker with a little bit and say well now this drug is good for this or good for that and you often see that with drugs that they start opening for one kind of medical issue and up being used for something else and so on and we have a federal government that has set the precedent for using our tax dollars to pay off corporate employees and with marred barlow who's the chairperson for the cost of canadians in talking about the abitibi bowater case and abitibi both water was a very important case because it was the first time where there was a investor state contract was we're going to put a mill in this community we're going to hire people and as part of that we would like right to water to be able to run the mill you need water to run a pulp mill we want to right to be able to feed the mill and we all their employees and and screwed them over for their pensions on their way out the door and then made the move inland they turned around and said well we want to sell the the water rights and timber rights that we had and move in line government danny williams said no paying way are you going to sell out it doesn't belong to you it belongs to the people who knew finland was part of the social contract for you having the mill here and hiring people and so go pound salt beat it so they took  court under chapter eleven and our last year as prime minister mr harper settled the agreement outside of the tribunals so tribunals can create don't create precedent because they're all  settled separately but because it was settled out of court by the government it actually set a precedent for land rights and water rights which are now showing up in investor state disputes with you know between developed countries and developing countries so there's some of these going on with disputes in in africa and just to clarify that for again for canadian listeners what did the premier harper say to the provincial premiums about whether they would run into similar problems in the future but i'm not exactly sure when i picked that one up when i was doing some reading for this he actually announced that he would go to the provinces for repayment to the federal government of of  especially under the the seat agreement which is the kind of the european comprehensive economic trade agreement which has been signed now but hasn't been ratified people don't believe it's a done deal yet the harper government would like us to believe it's a done deal but the investor state clause in it has caused a lot of concern in europe not because a sida but because the t t ip the teeth tip is the agreement between europe and the united states and it's the same agreement as the the european agreement except that when legislators in europe saw this investor state clause in the agreement with the united states and realized that the american corporations were going to be able to come in and sue you know for for policies that they didn't like you know the the europeans have blocked generic the modified foods they've they want to block dirty fuels they've you know they're good there's a lot of things that that that they don't that they want to be able to control like they don't like bleached the idea of having bleach tricked chicken from the united states or but things like that so they want to be able to control things they don't want to be sued by american corporations but as soon as the started to be aware of the council of canadians to keep the trade justice network started telling the europeans well really it's the same i mean they've been telling them all along during the whole comprehensive economic trade agreement negotiations that these these lawsuits investor state was going to create problems in europe as it's created problems in canada and really because we have nafta caning american corporation to it's the same same thing they go yeah they do what's called trade agreement shopping and it's kind of figuring out where you can sue from so if you have a branch plant in a country with a trade agreement with another country you can use that branch plant t like the ships registered in liberia yeah that's a way of escaping we have regulation yes the trade agreement shopping stuff though is is a impose yes and it 's interesting that we have another green another trade dispute under nafta chapter eleven it's a lone pine resources which is a calgary based company is suing the government of canada because quebec imposed  lawrence basin the st lawrence basin is you know the water supply for millions of people they wanted to ensure that fracking wasn't going to ruin the water supply so the assuming our listeners know what fracking is but maybe you could take a second just to explain in case anybody doesn't look like a gas fracking is the process of drilling down into the earth pumping in some thousand plus chemicals and and creating many earthquakes in shale formations to release that's there and what happens is that a lot of these wells the cement casing on them leaks industry documents show that five percent of their wells leak almost immediately another fifty percent of them will leak over thirty years and they release the those chemicals which include a whole bunch of carcinogenic chemicals like benzene and there's a whole long list of them that we're we're not aware of because they're corporate proprietary information and they're it's created all kinds of problems in some places it's created huge problems it's it's created less problems in other places but where it has created problems it's destroyed aquifer is poison dock with hers and so the  government wanted to be careful about having fracking in the st lawrence basin so long point where pine resources has an office in delaware which is you know like a appeal box kind of office you know there's a door somewhere there and an address and delaware is a favorite spot for corporations because of the low taxes and low regulations on corporations in delaware and they use that office to sue the canadian government so a canadian corporation with a convenience addresses or something yeah you know there's a there's so many trade agreements going on there's something like three thousand different investor state dispute going on on the planet right now and a couple of key examples of investor state shopping are philip morris didn't like the fact that australia wanted to have plain packaging on cigarettes that that was nothing but a plain package with a health warning on it so you couldn't have the logo in the fancy design and everything else and philip morris didn't suing under that and the same thing is was happening with argentina i believe and they are using the singapore agreement to sue argentina for the same thing there is a vote check capitalist who has control of a lot  of argentina's debt bones and he personally behind the suit against the government is trying to bankrupt the government of argentina to increase his own bank account right so crazy stuff going  on with these investor state dispute settlements and so i was at the people social form an auto and i was just doing interviews with different people and the social forum was was awesome there was five thousand people there was i can't remember how many five hundred workshops over three days and so you had to choose and so there was all these different ones on trade that i wanted to go to and some of them were happening at the same time but one of them was pacific rim versus all salvator and it's the it but the investor state dispute between pacific r which is a was a canadian mining company and the country of all salvador so i went to this workshop and they were telling me well there's a delegation international delegation going to solve it are three weeks do you want to go and i was like sure yeah i'll go in the family and you know so then i was busy trying to raise some funds to pay for the trip down there i hired a driver slash production assistant slash translator to help me because with the delegation they were moving pretty quickly through things and i wanted to stop and do extra interviews and get other footage and not be dragging everybody behind all the time and so yeah within three weeks i was down in el salvador on this tour and so symptom or fifteenth the independence day in el salvador almost two hundred years of independence from spain also happened to be the day that the case went to the exit the international center for settlements of investment disputes at the world bank in washington and so the final hearings on this investor state dispute started on independence day the same day as independence day in el salvador so that's partly why they picked that the time for the delegation but also because there was a public consult like a referendum in san jose last forest which is one of the communities that was going to be affected by a bunch of different mining projects so we went on a tour and we looked at we went first to a historic mine which was in i just think and then that was taken over there there's a company called commerce group in the united states and that's the son of the the previous owners and they open an open pit mine and they use the the the gold is found it's all gold mining like on the eastern and northern border of salvador along the honduras and guatemala border and right down through nicaragua there's a whole belt of gold there and it's in volcanic rock and what they have to do is they have to take the rock out crush it up washer with cyanide and other chemicals to get the gold out and so they they have all this leftover crushed rock that is laced with cyanide it's full of arsenic naturally and they just dumped all these tailings on the side of a hill above a river and so all of these tailings are are leeching arsenic cyanide iron a whole list of other heavy metals and there are and it's just going down to the river and all downstream people in these communities that really got nothing from this mining project like they were they were paid a pittance them on the road into the community is trash you know the so the mining executives would come in with their fancy cars and leave them in the next town and then get in the four by fours to drive into the mine because the road was so trashed they they've got no community health center no nothing really to speak of that the the  mine no infrastructure into the community and were you on the ground witnessing this we did a tour through so this is a historic mine and we walked the walk through were all the tailings where we could see where the tailings were reaching through like the orange water that was running down the river and in the river downstream we saw kids swimming in the river people doing laundry animals drinking etc and there's a high rate of kidney failure downstream showed there have been fish there should have been fish so the all the way to where the river flows you know flows into the ocean there's contamination all the way along and so it's created problems all the way along so that was a an example of a mind that we saw  commerce group they tried to re start to mine and they were told by they also had a government that they couldn't they didn't pass the environmental review and the el salvadoran government just now they hold free trade kowtowing to the n yeah and so was the rule of the party that power and now they're here and they were the good guys yeah so it was a raina which is the right wing government had said no to this mining permit and so commerce group launched an investor state dispute and they they took it to the excited and they lost on a technicality and then they couldn't come up with the money to keep the case going and so that whole case is has gone by the wayside and that mine is just sitting there in the meantime what they've done is is signed up community members into a mining cooperative and they've done a really good job of dividing the community so that people think that there is something in it for them a number of jobs was was minimal so the case that we were looking at the one that was launched in the exceed the international center for settlement of investor disputes and in the world bank that was originally started by pacific rim and pacific rim was a company based out of vancouver they wanted to put a mine in the cabanas area and that mine had the potential to contaminate the lemper river and the lumber river is the water supply for sixty percent of the population that supplies domestic water for sixty percent of the population of all salvador and six million  lot of people yeah it's a dense population there's three hundred people per square mile in el salvador and they would have you know contaminating that river which would have created a lot of environmental refugees both internally and externally would have seen a lot of people having to leave the country and pacific so pacific rim was you know working on trying to develop community support and so we went after going to s sebastin we the next day we went to a protest at the world bank headquarters in san salvador so you know me showing up at protests all over the place i got to go and go to one in the hall salvador to an undocumented dot and then the next day we went out to cabanas or that night we went out to companions and we met with people at a d s and talked about how the pacific rim was affecting the community out there and the next day we went to radio victoria which is a community radio station in victoria in the companion is region and they so you need to explain that's not victoria vancouver i don't know this is victoria companions region el salvador and so this is a community radio station not unlike c h r y except that in a much poorer location and with a lot less resources and the pacific rim came to them and said we we want to pay you up to eighteen thousand dollars a month to run our ads and promo and and they went i mean that was a ton of money eighteen thousand dollars a year for their budget would have been awesome they offered to put another story on to their building and to provide them with all kinds of equipment radio victoria has a long and storied history you know through the civil war with in el salvador there was a civil war for ten years and they were a center of your resistance and truth and they were trusted by the community well respected within the community and very involved the community is very involved in a very different way than what you see with c h r y like the the programming and everything that goes on is brought out to the community and people really have a lot of input into what goes on to the station before it goes on and so they were well trusted in the management and in the programmer said no we're not going to run stuff from pacific rim without checking you know first and see what the mining industry would do here and so they dug in to all the research and figured out what was going on in other communities and how mines were contaminating the water  it wasn't good for communities and so they started to tell the truth and then in the meantime pacific rim had all the mainstream media on side the other community stations on side and this was the one media hold out that was you know telling the truth about pacific rim distillery and so yeah it's quite amazing actually so they were there was a lot of stuff going on this is in the two thousand and nine time period five environmental activists were murdered within a short period of time you know one of them is get the names here straight so marcello rivera he was a a well known community activists in santa seadrill and and he disappeared and has been tortured body was found in the well later on doris sort o is eight months pregnant and she was walking with her two year old back from a community while she was shot with a high powered rifle and her and her unborn child were both killed and her two year old was injured and she was in benson right sure and then and then the daughter of another environmental activist was murdered and two other environmental activists i don't know their names were also murdered so at this time the radio station was getting all kinds of pressure from the mining company would as soon as they said no and started telling the truth about how mining would affect the area then they started to receive threats and death threats and their equipment started to be trashed and they were pressuring the police when marcel rivera went missing they were pressuring the police to to look into the case and why you know why was there not the investigation going on and were the police complicit in it and at one point you know members of the radio station had gone to sound salvador to do a big press event international press event and the woman who was working the controls and running the station was there by herself received a phone call that says you know we we know you're in there come out we're going to do these things to you threatening rape and murder and torture and they had been following radio programmers around in the community for a while and what they didn't what the mining company and their supporters didn't realize was that it wasn't just a group of thirty people that managed and programmed the station with the whole community that was behind them that was really involved in the station and so there they they realized that they were fighting the whole community but programmers had to leave the country like for their own safety as refugees and so  quite a harrowing tale to hear that was so we were at radio victoria and got this whole feedback about what was going on then we went to santa seadrill where marcello rivera was from to meet with people who worked with him at the community center very popular guy with kids like did music programs and you know well loved in the community had no enemies no reason for anybody to go after him except that he was very outspoken and very good community organizer lives was due to the presence of pacific rim and that was a real killer and we're going to come back to tribunals and how real they are and what their impact is on our lives but you have some announcements to make suzanne yes thinks marjorie i'm quite flabbergasted by the story of what happened there with the radio station gives us pause here to think about our role in our community i think and partly how lucky we are but perhaps there's a standard there that we could be looking at as well in terms of and i have my close friend who is to me thinking of moving to  that ok good but meanwhile you are listening to see a chill i went to one point seven f m your campus and community station based in downtown and i'm all but of course heard also on the internet at c h ca where we stream live and podcast and i will attempt to have the podcast of today's program uploaded as soon as i can so that if you missed any part of the show which is a gripping show i should say today you will be able to listen to the whole thing at your convenience now just a few events to mention these the first of all we've got some that are a follow up from the show that we did last week these were all mentioned then but just to remind you that this is zero waste challenge week think you can be a zero hero the city of new and i'm a wants to challenge you to see how close you can get to zero waste let's find out what the barriers are to zero waste in our city  be fun we'll learn about zero waste along the way and there will be prizes so if you would like to accept the challenge the city will ask you to monitor your garbage for one week simply subscribe at  there's a link on the home page there and they'll provide instructions and all the materials that are required it's expected to take about an hour of your time and it's completely voluntary of course join in and get to know your garbage as we get closer to zero nine imo recycles recycle today for a better tomorrow so once again and imo dot ca check that out the island roots market co op of course is opening tomorrow at pleasant valley hall sixty one hundred dumont road that's just off metro the hours are three to six pm and that's our winter indoor farmer's market that larry talked about last week sounds like a good lineup of producers they're trying to they'll have some sort of plus to sell and we'll see how long they can go through the winter and just a reminder that it's on a bus route it's not far from w it's on the number three bus route so yeah fairly easy to get to even if you don't have your own wheels also tomorrow progressive non i mo is holding another new candidates forum six thirty pm at bevan park social center i understand that last week's went quite well so this is your chance to have a look at new candidates for then imo city council if you didn't have a chance to go last week there may be some other candidates there as well this time you can stay in touch with progressive and imo by looking at their facebook page and you can always find more there about what's happening with their work towards about plumping votes and that's an important thing yes is no you either you either the short version is you plump to get someone in and you use all your votes if there's someone you want to keep out but remember that the same number of people will get elected yes right but you don't have to vote for all we know if if there's somebody who are little dubious about just don't vote for them because if you do vote for them they might get in ahead of somebody that you really do want to have particularly object to people voting for people they know nothing about because they think they are safe and usually there are people who are keeping a very low profile and hoping that nobody will find out anything about them and that's something to keep in mind then do check out progressive and i am most facebook page now paul there's a council of canadians meeting tonight it pacific gardens three forty seven spring and so world will be looking out at what kind of things we want to do in the future and really putting on those kind of community events or getting involved in activity on a whole range of issues that the council deals with is dependent on the people that show up were a relatively small group of activists who are regularly active with the chopper but there's several thousand members of the right right you also have in the event coming up at via you that perhaps you'd like to talk about yes next wednesday october twenty ninth at seven pm and it's the vancouver island university faculty associations human rights and international solidarity committee they're hosting me for a report back event and that's in building three fifty five room two or three seven o'clock next wednesday and i'm going to show some footage some photos talk about my experience in el salvador and what people can do talk about investor state dispute settlements and and you know what we can do but these agreements that we're going to kind of going crazy on like i heard james moore on on the house a couple of weeks ago he's a minister from the harper conservative government saying they've gone from five trade agreements when they came to power in two thousand and six to forty three fail like the w t o talks of failed because of opposition to them we've seen larger trade agreements like the free trade agreement of the americas the f d a failed because there's been a lot of opposition and and so trying to have a large group of countries in a trade agreement has failed so the developed countries have been running around you know signing signing bilateral agreements and cannabis bilateral agreement is called a fee a foreign investment promotion and protection agreement we've signed a whole bunch of those with countries like algeria and cameroon and colombia costa rica and i work my way through the alphabet there's a bunch of them but the most recent one to be ratified was the one with china and it's actually the worst of national post i've been railing against this agreement and of the first nation had taken a court challenge forward on this agreement and the harper government ratified it september twelfth as i was packing my bags to go to el salvador that agreement was was ratified so it was kind of a horrible sickening feeling to to see that go through because a lot of these agreements have opt out clause is you know now technically we can get out and out there was not six months and up to it not that any government is is going to do that but fifteen years and the thing is that the chinese state owned corporations have invested hugely in in the  they've they own seven percent of the tar sands they own twenty five percent stake and bridge northern gateway seen a sign a pack all these these companies that are actually state owned corporations of  tarion government it's already a communist state anymore because it's an regulated and communism is about regulating themselves yeah and so you know to stop to stop and bridge in the gateway right scary i see suzanne still has some paper in our hands maybe a couple of more down there is one more thing that i would like to mention first of all i should say that the program that you're listening to on c h l i went to one point seven  changes and today if you hadn't figured this out already or hadn't heard the beginning of the show paul manley is our guest talking about these trade agreements investor protection agreements and specifically some issues in el salvador that he observed when he was there recently but we have one more bit of business to accomplish and that is that we do still have to  available for a contributor to c h o y who phones in today with a pledge of thirty dollars or more and these tickets are for the muted note  multi faceted poetry music and dance project coming to the harbor city theater formerly known i will center stage the performance will be this thursday october twenty third at seven thirty p and actually paul is going to be performing which is kind of interesting that's another hat that you wear isn't it you are of musicians as well as a filmmaker and activist life yes yes i was a professional musician for ten years before i got into filmmaking yeah so yes there will be several opening acts including kenny brawl tuesdays well known to r i've got any kind of portuguese pronunciation there paul didn't use for a sort of mixing up of languages but there will be poetry also by adrian how and t but it doesn't mention that you're actually going to be playing bass for some anthers dance piece doesn't match mention that she's dancing with guys equal either ok the last two weeks of pulling it together see more information on this event once again it's thursday october twenty third seven thirty pm at the harbor city theater it's called the muted note a multifaceted poetry music and dance project and you can have two free tickets by calling now to our office line at c h l y two five zero seven one six three four one zero and making a thirty dollar pledge or more to keep a c h l why on the air we made the point last week at the end of our show that most of us are volunteers here you're not contributing to someone's big salary or anything like that this is a this is a station that's run on a shoestring so your contributions are much appreciated actually in order to pick up those tickets you will need to pay that pledge as well just because we do need to have the money  the bank has it worse so once again to five zero seven one six three four one zero and if you happen to be in your vehicle right now and an able to make the call right away you could call today let's say  make that pledge and we will get your name and your phone number and sort of follow up with you from there are so once again seven one six three four one zero so let's go topic we were on which was candidate dealing with china it's my understanding that china has some very high powered lobbyists in canada and some of them are very close to the federal government and paul you were telling us a bit about the most recent agreement by lateral agreement that innocent little canada has made with large and powerful china yes so the people agreement i guess now there's not a lot we can do about it because it's a signed it's signed and done deal it's extraordinary isn't it because we just don't know what's coming down the pike at us and we won't know about lawsuits until they've happened and unless both parties agree to release the information publicly we never know about what we've paid out to chinese state owned corporations for a project we've blown which takes me right to the whole tribunals  because you know efficiency michael who are strolling into our large buildings in influential parts of the world and demanding answers to questions and i don't suppose you have quite his budget to be able to do that kind of thing however maybe you could try and sketch for us what it is and how many people and what kind of people are involved in in settling these disputes well usually it's three people settling these disputes so they'll be one for the defendant one for the complainant and then and in the middle arbitrator their corporate lawyers they there's a bunch of law firms that specialize in this kind of work big money they get paid a thousand bucks an hour so it's kind of the  pinnacle of payments in a law career and they're it's completely secretive so we don't know what goes on in the hearings where they take place i mean there's there's an office for the exit in the world bank but some of these decisions are done in you know hotel they may remember they mate yes the reason i asked that question is because some of our listeners may have a lot of respect for law and order and when they hear that there is going to be a they sort of imagine a democratic judicial process that's not what this is a toll isn't something very different no it completely bided bypasses judicial systems so it's not courts in democratic situations at all and that's the investor state part of this used to be country to country disputes where the countries negotiated with the government to government but what the investor state provisions in trade agreements allowed for corporations to bypass their own court system their own government and sue directly other governments that may take that and run with it for a moment the way i'd like to try to explain it is for investor read corporation yes for state read your government whatever level federal provincial municipal the city of new and imo could be sued but a major corporation with huge money they would be sued the the canadian government as a signatory for the trade agreement so they would be sued but this is the so see the is the the new trade agreement with europe brings minas apologies in for the first time so originally that trade agreements like nafta their government to government federal to federal and the provinces are creatures of the federal government and so they're brought in things that they do concrete been municipalities across canada i think thirty five or forty of them have pos resolutions to oppose sita and to be exempted from including our municipality here and imo city council passed a resolution to be exempted from the studio agreement so it's a very important move to make it's a symbolic move but it's consciousness raising yes and also you know saying we we weren't consulted we shouldn't be dragged into this without proper consultation without informed consent no you know you've got some interesting footage i gather tell us about a little bit about the footage you've gotten and maybe talk about dream of ok what i actually what i'd like to do is go back and finish off a little bit of what's going on in el salvador so we had this case the pacific rim launch a lawsuit with the excited for seventy seven million dollars they did it under kept of the central america free trade agreement but canada's not a signatory for that agreement so they did what the trade shopping shuffle they opened an office in nevada and then they also launched a separate suit in based on a national law that el salvador had to protect investors exit through out the case under caf to because they could see that pacific rim had opened the office in nevada specifically for the lawsuit pacific rim also has an office in the cayman islands which is where their taxes are dealt with that's where all the money flows through there and i just don't know their money they don't have to pay tax they're registered in canada as a mining corporation like that a lot very unflagging of ships situation but now they're suing in exceed the cases going forward under the national law which has been repealed by the al salvador government pacific rim was sold it they have this case for seventy seven million dollars they were sold to oceana gold for ten point two million dollars and in oceana gold picked up the exit lawsuit and up to three hundred one million dollars so the company is valued at ten point two but the lawsuits three hundred and one and that's the case this going forward in september fifteenth so that the good news kind of part of this of what communities are doing well there was a conference september nineteenth we had people from mining activists from guatemala honduras nicaragua the k i john cut feet from the k i bent in ontario which has been fighting mining projects in their first nations territory and kemah the name right offhand i don't have it in front is this about canada and mining well canadian mining companies a lot of mining companies are registered in canada and so we're kind of the bad guys around the world with cleaning mining companies all through central america so there was activists that were part of this speaking to or and what was going on in guatemala was horrific i've posted a video it's in spanish of the speaker but the photos that accompanied his exhibit where they they blocked the mining companies from bring in equipment and so they brought in the military armored vehicles you know time to tear gas but tongs shooting people tons of violence in guatemala like the environmental activists there people were trained as election monitors international observers and they had a referendum consult a popular about whether people want to mining in the community so the day of the referendum which was a plan for twenty first the same day we had people's climate mobilization here in town and that i was helping to organize and then bailed out on i was in watching this referendum and documentary not so i traveled around to all the little communities the satellite communities and went to the different point stations and i went to the main point station and there was national media there you know big media scrum everybody documenting the whole process it was very interesting because you could take a camera into the polling booth and videotape whatever you wanted to and interview people on their way out you couldn't videotape behind the screen at all right so they still had their privacy and there their vote was kept secret yeah but you but the whole process was so wide open to the media to everybody to observe that this was a clean and fair process and the counting of ballots there was media cameras there and everything else and then the final vote count was ninety nine point nine percent against mining in the community so the question was do you want mining exploration and you know mining projects in the community of san so paul i regret to say that where reaching the very end of this program at one point you said things weren't so bad there now so but or maybe you want to march on that or maybe you want to choose what your sort of wrap up statement would think you know there's still a lot of problems with violence in el salvador but i think that in the case of the mining the community and the country has have all come together there's a consensus that they don't want these mines and so that there's a lot of people working together to push back against the corporations and so the good the government the people they're doing these referendums in different places and i think that that it just shows that when people stand together educate each other and work together that you can stop things that you don't want and things that are damaging to your community i mean al salvador is is viewed i think as a zone of sacrifice it's a place where you can go and extract minerals get cheap labor cheap work force destroy the environment and do what you want you know that's the way corporations view areas like this and they view any area potentially like that we know that you know that they put their dirty work in the poorest parts of the area i think our m p at the moment is making a stink about not having marijuana grown and  oh that would be mr lunny i'm sure he's not opposed to all the coal mines that they want to point you know thank you paul there was enough material to go on a lot longer but i think we covered a lot of ground on line just quickly i guess they could get that information at the vi you website on their events over this probably but you've got a web site as well manley media dot com i don't have that event on my  and we do have information on those tickets to the muted notes and on behalf of our production team thanks so much for joining us