There's a Mysterious New Sickness in Canada and the Government is Keeping It a Secret
There's a Mysterious New Sickness in Canada and the Government is Keeping It a Secret
Will this be New Brunswick's Flint Michigan water crisis?
Canada is not the kind and friendly place you see depicted in the media.
While undoubtedly more polite (and often more open-minded) than its neighbo(u)r to the south, Canada has a long history of human rights abuses it would rather the world never hear about:
Canada is currently in violation of dozens if not hundreds of treaties with the 634 First Nations within its borders.
Canada has yet to pay reparations for its century-long experiment in kidnapping 150,000 children; abusing, torturing, and murdering thousands during the era of residential schools.
Canada, a 155-year-old English nation, controls a 414-year-old French nation within its borders and has systematically undermined its attempts at regaining sovereignty. (Anglophones needn’t bother email in their complaints.)
Despite all its greenwashing in the press, Canada is currently setting off the biggest carbon bomb in human history with its scorched-earth tar sands project.
The Canadian government is doing nothing to address the long-running Indigenous genocide, with more than 4,000 women and girls missing or found murdered since 1980.
Canada is an international powerhouse at destroying ecosystems and is at the global center of countless mining atrocities, including slavery.
Canada is one of the only nations on earth that refuses to declare clean water a human right.
Canada is, essentially, a nation of real estate-obsessed hyper-individualist consumers whose core identity is smugly: “We’re not Americans.”
And now there’s a new scandal brewing out east.
A quick geography lesson
Canada can essentially be broken down into five regions:
The North
Out west
The prairie bit
Torontoland/Drakesburbs
Out east
“Out east” is everything east of Quebec, including Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, the island where all the potatoes come from, and New Brunswick.
New Brunswick pretends to be a democratic province, but in reality, it’s far from it.
It’s a massive plantation controlled by a single family.
The Irvings
The Irving family monopoly started in the late 1800s, and is a textbook case of why we need aggressive corporate taxes, wealth taxes, and inheritance taxes:
The corporation destroys its competition and controls more than 250 other companies, and like all good monopolies — say it with me, readers — it will not stop until it is stopped.
The Irving family “owns Canada’s largest oil refinery [where the lung cancer rates happen to be 50% higher than neighboring cities], employs 1 in 12 people in New Brunswick, and is one of the wealthiest families in Canada.”
They are one of the five largest landowners in North America, controlling nearly 6 million acres.
With a net worth of around $10 billion thanks to decades of corporate socialism and tax evasion via Bermuda, the secretive company has a stranglehold on New Brunswick media, including all 12 newspapers and 17 radio stations in a province of just 790,000 people.
Poison for profit
It is not a secret that the Irvings kill people for money.
After all, they’re in the oil and gas business.
And the pulp and paper business.
And the deforestation business.
These businesses give people cancer, and then those people die.
Irving-owned facilities are proven to spew all sorts of toxins and carcinogens, including benzene and lead.
They were once fined a measly $3.5 million for dumping 91.56 million liters of lethal poisons per day for two straight years — and clearly, it wasn’t a big enough fine, because it was their fourth time getting caught.
One company town of 70,000 people is even known for permanently reeking of sulfur.
But like every massive corporation, they never pay the full cost of their abuses.
Instead, they intimidate rivals.
And sue detractors.
And fire journalists.
And illegally smother competition.
And oust progressive political opponents from office.
And squeeze more corporate handouts from their (s)elected officials than any other company in Canada.
And use their media monopoly to silence all negative stories.
I wonder what would happen if a mysterious illness suddenly started crippling teenagers in the banana republic of New Brunswick…
Canada’s Flint Water Crisis?
It took a brave whistleblower risking their career to sound the alarm about what’s going on in New Brunswick right now.
Since the leak, the number of official cases has been purposefully frozen by the provincial authorities at 48, but there are at least 150 other people awaiting assessment.
Its official name, for now, is the “New Brunswick neurological syndrome of unknown cause.”
We don’t know much about the illness — and the province is dragging its heels to keep it that way. All we know is that it is a progressive neurological illness, potentially a novel degenerative disease and that healthy teens with zero health triggers are suddenly developing terrifying symptoms:
Hallucinations
Insomnia
Massive weight loss
Rapidly-progressing dementia
Muscle spasms
Balance issues
Difficulty walking
Blurred vision
And it’s not just young people:
“One suspected case involved a man who was developing symptoms of dementia and ataxia. His wife, who was his caregiver, suddenly began losing sleep and experiencing muscle wasting, dementia and hallucinations. Now her condition is worse than his.”
“A woman in her 30s was described as non-verbal, is feeding with a tube and drools excessively. Her caregiver, a nursing student in her 20s, also recently started showing symptoms of neurological decline.”
So far, at least eight people have died, with New Brunswick’s health minister announcing they found “no significant evidence that any known food, behaviour or environmental exposure could be responsible.” Instead, the province is claiming all the deaths are just “misdiagnosis.”
Experts don’t know exactly what’s destroying the lives of healthy people in New Brunswick, but some think β-Methylamino-L-alanine (BMAA) is to blame. BMAA is an algae bloom neurotoxin that can be found in lobster — the question is, what’s causing the BMAA spike?
Canadian federal scientists want to test the brain tissue of the eight good people who’ve died so far, but — surprise surprise — the province won’t let them. Corporate-captured New Brunswick has a long history of withholding information from its citizens, and when the Guardian reached out for comment, the criminal bureaucrats simply ignored the request.
But people aren’t that stupid: There is a family that controls a province. They control that province’s media. They are proven polluters. They have sprayed forests for decades. They have leached millions of pounds of chemicals into the air, ground, and water. And now there is a new illness in their province.
This is the part of the article where I have to reveal what astute readers have probably already seen coming:
New Brunswick’s Premier spent 33 years working as a senior executive at Irving.
The public cost of private profits
How many people need to die before we get serious about corporations destroying the environment?
A million?
A billion?
338 Canadian Members of Parliament, every politician in New Brunswick, and at least half the Irving family?
Come on, humanity.
Will thousands of teenagers have to die of dementia in New Brunswick before democracy smashes the empire that controls their province?
How many more Flint Michigans will we have in the decades ahead as we discover the effects of all the corporate pollution that has poisoned our planet? Just think about the billions of microplastics, chemicals, carcinogens, toxins, and radioactive substances that corporations have dumped into our ecosystem. For what? For a few more zeroes in the digital bank accounts of the richest people in human history.
While children suffer and die, corporations like Irving collude with their corrupt politicians to stall for time while they secretly try to bury the evidence.
Humans are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, but it’s the exact opposite for corporations — they are not humans, and we know they are “born” guilty because we already know their criminal motive: To extract private profits at the public’s expense.
It’s time we give corporations like Irving a new corporate fiduciary responsibility.
To do no harm.
And if a company can’t do that, then it doesn’t deserve to live.
At the very least, corporate profits shouldn’t require human beings to die.
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