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Speaking tour of Mi’kmaq activists appeals for solidarity with New Brunswick anti-fracking struggle

Suzanne Patles and Coady Stevens in Vancouver Jan 24, 2014

It was standing room only in downtown Vancouver on January 24 as 250 people crowded into a meeting room at Simon Fraser University to hear two Mi’kmaq activists describe the ongoing fight in against gas fracking in the eastern Canadian province of New Brunswick.

Suzanne Patles and Coady Stevens are two veterans of the battle that has fought the frackers to a standstill and inspired continent-wide solidarity actions. The Jan. 24 event was the beginning of a lengthy speaking tour that has them speaking across British Columbia and then moving on to Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario in the coming weeks.

In BC, they will speak in six cities and First Nations territories. In addition to Vancouver, they will speak in Squamish (Vancouver region), Victoria, Nanaimo, Kamloops (Neskonlith First Nation), and Moricetown (Wet'suwet'en First Nation, in north central BC).

On February 1, they joined the anti-fracking, Unist'ot'en Camp in Wet'suwet'en territory for three days. The camp was established last year to act as a spiritual and physical barrier to the proposed Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline and multiple, proposed gas fracking pipelines that would converge on the northern coast of BC

The speaking tour is organized by a broad range of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal groups, including No One Is Illegal and the Native Youth Movement.

The struggle in New Brunswick

Patles and Stevens were among the many people across New Brunswick and the Maritime provinces who joined the Mi’kmaq of Elsipogtog and other residents of Kent County in southeast New Brunswick to take a stand against exploratory seismic testing by the Texas firm SWN Resources during the spring and summer of 2013. The company had moved into the region with exploratory work for the first time.

Several years earlier, the anti-fracking movement arose after SWN and other fracking companies began to obtain rights to conduct seismic testing and drill on 1.4 million hectares of land in the province. That’s one seventh the territory of New Brunswick, with about one third of the population (map here). Other companies conducting exploration are Corridor Resources, Contact Exploration, Windsor Energy and Geokinetics Exploration. SWN’s rights cover 1.1 million hectares.

SWN says it will begin production by 2016 if it finds enough gas. But its first year of exploration in 2011was delayed then halted by protest actions. The following year, changes to regulations by the government, again responding to protests, left the company too late in the testing season to submit its permit applications.

In 2013, protests beginning in June saw the RCMP (contracted in New Brunswick to act as the provincial police) mobilize to protect the company’s activities. Police arrested several dozen people at that time (see video of one day of arrests, here). But protest actions continued to slow down or even halt work, including closing off access to equipment.

On October 17, the RCMP staged a major assault on the protest camp against SWN near the town of Rexton, Kent County. Armed with a court injunction, dozens of officers, including tactical squads armed with automatic weapons, staged a violent raid, assaulting many people and arresting 40.

Coady Stevens was one of those arrested. His talk in Vancouver on Jan. 24 described the harsh prison conditions to which he and others were subjected, including being placed in solidarity confinement for three weeks. During that time, he was refused the right to communicate with family and was subjected to strip searching every few days.

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