Volume XIV, Number 4, April 1996
The Western Separatist Papers are published
monthly by W.S.P. Ltd.
Address all correspondent to WSP, P.O. Box 40143, Victoria, B.C.
Western Canada V8W 3N3.
A one-year subscription is $15.00.
My office has been the repository of a growing mass of papers for the past eight years. Lately my desk has been almost hidden by boxes containing clippings, articles, legal documents, letters, manuscripts, pamphlets, newsletters, photographs, and more clippings. I haven't amassed these by myself, but have been sent copies of things for years from people who are interested in building the case for Western independence, or those who have noticed cases of the infringement of individual rights and freedoms and sent me information about that. Nowadays my children are adding to the piles of paper with their artwork and stories and even Cadeyrn's own dictionary.
These boxes keep reproducing, doubling their numbers, then quadrupling. And meanwhile, I have been a slave to them, shifting them around to make it look like I have more space. I have compressed them, sorted them and resorted them at times, and planned my time around them. I have been tempted, egged on by those insensitive to the riches contained in my 50 or more boxes, to have a big bonfire, weighed down by this mass of paper as I have felt over the years, and unable to put aside other priorities long enough to sort the papers, file them or destroy them. Last year my New Year's resolution was to sort and "deal with" just one box a week. That would have finished the whole lot of them, providing I didn't create new ones in the meantime.
My attitude towards these papers has evolved through the years.
As a child I had a vast correspondence, so that I would get mail. I've always been a packrat. When I first got a computer people naively told me that it would cut down on my use of paper. I was still merrily saving "significant" pieces of paper then. In the late eighties, I began to sense a problem, and bought a book entitled "Information Anxiety" about the difficulties of dealing with the vast amount of information that is daily input into an individuals' brain from a myriad of sources — television, newspapers, magazines on every topic imaginable, cheap books, radio, photocopied things sent in great numbers of copies from many different sources, junk mail, and now the latest insidious paper monster: things gleaned from the Internet and printed off to save or share with others. I am not the only one guilty of this, for I have noticed that we have all become paper-rearrangers and passers around, investing in these scraps significance far greater than they deserve.
I think it relates to a basic insecurity with our own ability to think, and a reliance on the logical fallacy of appealing to another authority, rather than our own capacity to reason.
Lately I have cleaned my office of these boxes, numbering over 50, and the latest motto I have hanging in my newly spacious, clean office is "You are your clutter."
I think that I've spent several decades greedily seeking and hanging onto knowledge in many different forms. Our library is enough to bend the floor joists. My files on "topics of interest" deserve their own building.
I too have seized upon a bit of paper proclaiming it essential to proving a certain point, the key to an argument, necessary to the process of debunking the federalist claim, or substantiating the separatist dream. I have a terrific reference library about Western Canadian history and current freedom of speech issues around the world.
This hoarding of information is not limited to people who are politically aware, but a condition of modern life, the time of material excesses and spiritual poverty. As in many other areas, we attempt to compensate for the latter with the former.
I have now only current things on my desk, and I look critically at each piece of paper that enters my office. I have begun to understand, really understand that old aphorism that "knowing and doing aren't the same thing." The question is what will I do with what I have already amassed in my brain. I am learning the value of the gold amid the dross.
I have learned that those pieces of valuable paper won't convince people who don't want to be convinced. Many times during the free speech trials, people would approach us with a "piece of paper" that they assigned with powers of acquitting the accused. This was never true. Those trials were battles of papers, huge mounds of paper, forests of paper in the case of the Finta trial, but most of it was ignored or misunderstood because of fear or willful blindness.
Doug hauls boxes of papers with him every time he leaves for a case somewhere, books of authorities from both sides that are rarely looked at, except that their size should supposedly measure the worth of one's arguments. And just so have legal decisions become longer and longer as our thinking becomes more buried in the masses of what other people have said or thought before us. In the days before photocopiers, when lawyers brought the actual, heavy, leather-bound books of law reports to court with them, judgments were succinct and more reasonable.
There is no clarity in verbiage. I don't want to add to the masses of garbage.
With the great quantities of advertising and newsletters and paper in general, has come a corresponding diminishment in quality of thought and discourse. Most of the paper that I see has great style but very little content. There are very few writers that are even interesting to read, whose words juxtaposition words to create an unexpected, thought-provoking meaning. I'd read a writer like Doug Collins for example if his column was hand-printed on an old paper bag or laser-printed on the finest bond paper. He really <M>says something. But most other writers read like they've been turned out of the a gigantic factory of grammar and style, toned down to the same bland color of pap.
Office supply stores offer paper in all hues and textures and weights; there are color copies and multiple copies and very quick service available for low prices to duplicate your meanings endlessly. But the content that is presented with such panache or flavor usually has no vital meaning.
In my quest for a standard to measure what I should save and what throw out I have come face to face with what also I should write. I don't want to weighing others down, as I have been, with garbage. (I'm really leaving myself wide open, aren't I?)
The following passage from the last book of Jack Whyte's four volume saga about the Arthurian legends presented itself propinquitiously to me. It is when Merlyn is old, reflecting upon his life and says:
"I find it strange nowadays to think that I may be the only one alive in all this land who knows how to write words down, and because of that may be the only one who knows that words, unwritten, have no value. Set down in writing, words are real; legible, memorable, exact and permitting recollection, imaginings and wonder. Otherwise, sung or spoken, whispered to oneself or shouted to the winds, words are ephemeral, perishing as they are uttered. That, at least, I have learned in my extreme age.
"And so I write my chronicle, and in the writing to if I maintain the life in my old bones, unable to consider death while yet the task remains unfinished. For I believe this story must survive."
So too the story of Western Canada and its struggle, and the stories of battles for basic individual freedoms in Canada. The obstacle to telling these important tales isn't that no one is writing or reading, but that they might be buried in a surfeit of trivia.
I have however, started my journey, cleaned my office, and remembered that words have meaning.
Keltie Zubko
To the Editor:
A martyr is a person who suffers greatly for a cause or belief.
I was surprised to see the article "A Momentous Challenge for Brian Mulroney" by John Schmidt reproduced in the Western Separatist Papers of January 1996.
Once upon a time, the function of martyrs was that of setting examples of moral and ethical conduct so that others could emulate it, so that others would revolt and change wrong to right, evil to good, injustice to justice.
Today a martyr is a lunatic in search of courage in other people and in his quest, he realizes that he is a lonely lunatic. I wonder if John Schmidt would find courage in Cascadia. Would Cascadia be free of multinational corporations such as the $12.4 billion Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) of Decatur Illinois mentioned in his article.
I wonder if in Cascadia the 300 grain elevators would belong to 300 different companies or to the farmers in their communities. Or if the 200 plants to process corn, soybeans, wheat, cottonseed, canola, rice, barley etc. would belong to 200 different companies.
Or if the 2000 barges (and tugs) would belong to 2000 different companies.
Or if the railways would belong to the State of Cascadia (the people) or to private billionaires. Will taxes be fair in Cascadia? Then there will be tax credits, tax rebates, tax exemptions, tax auditors, tax lawyers, tax courts, tax judges ... which would have to be paid with more taxes and in no time at all there would be multinational corporations also in Cascadia which would require an FBI and a secret police, all paid with more taxes, to catch tax evaders and price fixers.
I fail to understand why the people of Cascadia would be more honest and would uphold tax laws when taxation is in itself immoral? How can a person be honest when the law is dishonest?
From what I know about the life of John Schmidt, he has been assailed many times by the Canadian Establishment; he is one of the last, true investigative journalists. Like most of us he resents the injustice behind political schemes such as the $300,000,000 tax credit given to ADM. He knows that we, the taxpayers, will have to make up the $300 million with more sweat, and he would like to see these billionaires pay their share of the tax burden. This is the TRAP that has worked so well for the last 5,000 years, and it will keep on working for the next 5,000.
Aided by lack of knowledge and myth, this trick has caused all the wars in History.
This trick made Rome grow from a republic to an empire and the emperors were worshipped as gods; today there are men on this earth who yield more wealth and power than roman emperors, and nobody knows that, given time, even one cent of tax will create an imbalance of power.
Would Cascadia, or any other new country be immune from the arithmetic fact?
If so, we don't know how to count.
The extent of the corruption of power is well-documented in a book by Alexander Del Mar "The Worship of Augustus Caesar" (1899, last sold by CBC, Box 638, Hawthorne, California, 90250).
For those who do not know me, like John Schmidt, I am another lonely lunatic who is waiting for people to wake up. There are thousands of us who are enduring the schemes of the Elite who uses Revenue Canada Taxation (the real Mafia, the real criminals, the real terrorists) as a tool of persecution.
Please sign my name if you publish this letter, because I no longer fear mentally sick people who write sick laws, political laws, usury laws.
Tony Palma
Calgary, AB
To the Editor:
Your Feb.-Mar issue of WSP is a prize among the excellent, no one mincing around embarrassed to count out and name our continuing opposition to the continuing injustices inflicted on the West and English Canada such as — fettered speech, jobs excluding whites, hate laws (so-called), multiculturalism, bilingualism, metric, special Indian rights and concessions, opulent social programs. powerful centralization vs. confederation, too powerful and big federal government, the NEP (to be repeated), transfer payments that Ottawa manipulates, equalization even to "have" provinces (especially Quebec), startling national debt, excessive taxation, laws favoring Eastern Canada, French immersion in our schools (excluding essential basics including English competence in grammar, spelling, composition, etc., which difficulties partly cause the dropping-out of students then committing crimes), ever more concessions to Quebec (which will never secede except from Canada laws and responsibilities, while it rules and overrules Canada from both Quebec City and Ottawa-Hull especially inflicted on the West).
N.R. Horne
Edmonton, AB
To the Editor:
Following is a quote from the Financial Post of November 18, 1995 (Copy Attached):
"Ottawa had an operating surplus of $8.8 billion in the first half of the current fiscal year, up from $4.3 billion last year.
"But that doesn't count interest payments, and compound interest is putting the deficit on a rising trend, as the chart above shows.
"A straight line projection of current rates of change in revenue, spending and interest costs reveals that interest charges will equal total government revenue in 11 years time. By 2020 interest charges will top $1 Trillion.
"Martin has too little time to turn the trend."
Doug, it is time for you, the captain to call "All Aboard!"
Stockwell Day
Hinton, AB
The Western Separatist Papers welcomes your letters to the editor. They should pertain to Western Canadian issues, and be short, due to our space limitations. Please send them to the Editor, WSP, P.O. Box 40153, Victoria, B.C. V8W 3N3, or by e-mail to wcc@ftcnet.com .
In those days, and later as a young man, I used to try to picture in my imagination the feelings and ambitions of a white boy with absolutely no limit placed upon his aspirations and activities. I used to envy the white boy who had no obstacles placed in the way of his becoming a congressman, governor, bishop, or president by reason of the accident of his birth or race. I used to picture the way that I would act under such circumstances; how I would begin at the bottom and keep rising until I reached the highest round of Success.
In later years, I confess that I do not envy the white boy as I once did. I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed. Looked at form this standpoint, I almost reach the conclusion that often the Negro boy's birth and connection with an unpopular race is an advantage, so far as real life is concerned. With few exceptions, the Negro youth must work harder and must perform his task even better than a white youth in order to secure recognition. But out of the hard and unusual struggle through which he is compelled to pass, he gets a strength, a confidence, that one misses whose pathway is comparatively smooth by reason of birth and race.
Booker T. Washington
The older I grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women.
Booker T. Washington
In our industrial teaching we keep three things in mind: first, that the student shall be so educated that he shall be enabled to meeting conditions as they exist now, in the part of the South where he lives — in a word, to be able to do the things which the world wants done; second, that every student who graduates from the school shall have enough skill, coupled with t intelligence and moral character, to enable him to make a living for himself and others; third, to send every graduate out feeling and knowing that labor is dignified and beautiful — to make each one love labor instead of trying to escape it.
Booker T. Washington
If my life in the past has meant anything in the lifting up of my people and the bringing about of better relations between your race and mine, a assure you that this day it will mean doubly more. In the economy of God there is but one standard by which an individual can succeed — there is but one for a race. This country demands that every race shall measure itself by the American standard. By it a race must rise or fall, succeed or fail, and in the last analysis mere sentiment counts for little. During the next half-century and more, my race must continue passing through the severe American crucible. We are to be tested in our patience, our forbearance, our perseverance, our power to endure wrong, to withstand temptations, to economize, to acquire and use skills' in our ability to compete, to succeed in commerce, to disregard the superficial for the real, the appearance for the substance, and to be great and yet small, learned and yet simple, high and yet the servant of all.
Booker T. Washington
This article appeared in the Washington Post of January 14, 1996 and is by Charles Trueheart
British Columbia, Confident of Province's Prosperity, Doesn't Fear a Federation Breakup
Which Canadian province long ago proclaimed itself a distinct society and struggles still to free itself from the yoke of the Canadian federation and take charge of its historic domain?
The obvious answer is Quebec. but there is another, equally correct answer: British Columbia.
Quebec's drive toward sovereignty, for all the anger and anguish it stirs across the rest of Canada, has brought to the surface a latent and potentially compatible independent streak among Canada's Pacific Coast citizens.
"If you scratch the surface of public opinion in British Columbia," said David Mitchell, the only independent member of the province's legislature, you'll be surprised to find a lively secessionist spirit here." In a recent poll, he noted, a remarkable 12 percent of British Columbians said the province could go it alone if it had to — that is, if Quebec were to rend the federation.
Those sentiments, according to University of Victoria political scientist Norman Ruff, "Speak to a certain amount of self-confidence that if the country was to break up, it wouldn't mean the end for British Columbia. It could be a viable entity on its own."
British Columbians have reason to feel bold about their future. The province is Canada's third largest, its fastest growing and its most robust economically. British Columbia exports less to the rest of Canada and the United States than any other province. More and more of its markets are offshore, and its burgeoning Asian immigrant population has brought in capital and labor and solidified Vancouver's traditional links to the Pacific Rim.
Two and a half months after the traumatizing Quebec referendum last October, in which sovereignty for the largely French-speaking province was defeated by a single percentage point, British Columbia is coming into its own as a powerful player in the next round of the now permanent Canadian unity debate.
The fractious province will wield unprecedented influence as Canada enters what Mitchell, a historian and political biographer before he entered politics, called "a period analogous to the American Civil War — without, God forbid, the bloodshed — that will define us and decide whether we can survive as a transcontinental nation."
To that convulsive process, British Columbia is likely to bring an agenda of increased autonomy within the Canadian federation and further devolution of powers to the provinces — potential solutions to British Columbia's grievances that serendipitously could lend themselves to Quebec's.
Like other analysts of the Canadian political situation, Ruff sees a "paradoxical correspondence" between the aims of westerners who want the federal government in Ottawa to "download" powers to the already powerful Canadian provinces and Quebecers who want to wrest more if not all power from Ottawa. Authority over labor training and immigration policy are at the top of the list in both Quebec and British Columbia.
Mitchell said he thinks British Columbia is undergoing its own "Quiet Revolution" akin to the one the convulsed Quebec society in the 1960s and set that province on its tortuous road to possible independence. "We want to be masters in our house too," said Mitchell, echoing the slogan of the late Quebec separatist leader Rene Levesque, "Maitres chez nous."
"In a perverse kind of way, the dream of Rene Levesque for `sovereignty-association' with Canada may end up being what this country becomes," said Angus Reid, a former sociologist who heads national poling firm here. A looser confederation of more muscular regions, he noted, would be in keeping with a vision of the future favored by some Canadians, in which smaller units, such as Quebec or British Columbia, operate effectively in the global marketplace.
The possible dovetailing of interests from these two dissimilar provinces is hastened by a third force.
As the once lavish Canadian federal social service system undergoes drastic retrenchment under the pressure of crippling government debt, Canada, like the United States, is finding devolution of powers — and thus financial burdens — a convenient instrument of budget balancing.
The possibility that Canada might withdraw from its role as one of the world's best-known welfare states worries even those Canadians who argue that decentralization makes sense.
Poll after poll has shown that Canadians say the defining attributes of their national identity are their social service institutions, such as health care and unemployment insurance. Without those unifying institutions, many wonder, would Canada have a reason to exist? "Is running foreign policy and the post office enough?" asked Mitchell. "No — the post office would be privatized," said Ruff.
David Anderson, who represents Victoria, the provincial capital, in the federal Parliament and sits in Prime Minister Jean Chretien's cabinet, said in an interview that such go-it-alone thinking obscures the clout that the federal government brings to ensure British Columbia's prosperity: using its continental standing to settle the latest lumber dispute with the United Sates, for example.
He also noted the advantages British Columbia, and the port of Vancouver especially, enjoy as Canada's gateway to Asia and the Pacific Rim. "We find that B.C. is very, very closely emotionally involved with Canada," Anderson added.
If so, that would run counter to prevailing and historic wisdom. British Columbia, with a population of 3.8 million, always has been aloof and distinct and, unlike much of the rest of Canada, blessed by geography and climate — "the spoiled child of confederation," as a timeworn Canadian description has it.
British Columbia joined the federation in 1871, four years later than the founding provinces, and until just a few decades ago represented only a tiny fraction of the Canadian population — and, in its West Coast ways, is a cantankerous exception to most Canadian norms.
"We're the Californians of Canada," Mitchell said, "and so we're not taken very seriously. We live in splendid isolation on the other side of the mountains. We're un-Canadian in so many ways — more outward looking."
But British Columbia is now being taken more seriously, and the stirrings of fundamental change there and elsewhere in the west reflect what some analysts see as the end of the modern Canadian era.
"The pillars of the fundamental order are falling, and the equilibrium of the past 25 years is clearly unraveling," said Reid. "We've seen the end of the Ottawa mandarinate. The mixed economy is fading. The federal bureaucracy has been neutered. And Quebec could be the final pillar. That speaks to a much different political order in the future."
Columnist Sandy MacDougall wrote something in the Burnaby/New Westminster News of Dec. 10, 1995 that would be big news, if it was strictly speaking true.
Chretien is helping BC NDP
It's a topsy-turvy political world out there, folks.
We have the absolutely stunning political spectacle of the free enterprise Chretien Liberal jumping on BC's head over the peculiarly nonsocialistic welfare politics of socialistic NDP government. Go figure.
We also have BC MPs David Anderson and Hedi Fry stepping in front of television cameras to demonstrate just who they are really representing in Ottawa and why BC must be spanked to the tune of $47 million .British Columbians are a surly lot when it comes to politics in general but we're at our meanest when it comes to Ottawa telling us we have to shoulder an even greater and more unfair share of the national welfare dream.
If Mike Harcourt and Elizabeth Cull can be believed, (at least on this one subject) we have been diddled by the feds to the tune of almost $2 billion in cuts to shared welfare costs in the past five years.
I don't think most British Colombians are separatist at heart but Chretien and company are doing their level best to turn us all into devotees of western separatist leader Preston Manning.
And the Liberals have done it at a time when the provincial Liberals are struggling to maintain their lead over the NDP as our next provincial election approaches.
In BC, fed-bashing during a provincial election campaign is as certain as death and income taxes. In most cases, the arguments are thin and poorly documented.
This time it's different. I think Chretien and company have provided post-Harcourt NDP with a perfect election issue for whoever ends up leading them.
A powerless Gordon Campbell can only stand by and watch the results.
by Douglas Christie
There are more than economic reasons for the West to separate.
For about the last 18 years I have been advocating that the West leave Canada for largely economic reasons. We produce for Ottawa substantially more than we consume in taxes and federal spending every year to subsidize Quebec and the Maritimes. This is still true. Even as the federal system withdraws its services to people they do not reduce their taxes. The interest on the debt in 11 years will exceed the present gross tax revenues for the year but who cares. The U.I.C., C.P.P. and O.A.P. and pension cheques are still being cashed. The beer still flows and the TV still works so why worry. The economic argument doesn't matter much when you have a job and there is really no apparent suffering even if nobody can afford a house or a family. Mostly they don't care.
However the economic argument is only one reason. The destruction of freedom is spiritually more devastating than economic difficulties. The recent cases of Malcolm Ross and James Keegstra in the Supreme Court have demonstrated that truth and religious freedom have no place in the nation of Canada. The court which put its stamp of approval on Henry Morgentaler and Chantal Daigle has shown its expediency once again to serve the powerful and the worldly. Principles of free speech are rendered obsolete as we move into the New World Order of ethical relativism and situation ethics. Everything depends on who you are and what the Canadian Jewish Congress says about you. That determines whether you are free to speak, write or have a job. This is the nation of Canada where fundamental freedoms are subject to such reasonable limits as appear appropriate to the absolute discretion of politically appointed and politically sensitive judges.
The people may not at the moment realize what has been done to them by the super elite in Ottawa but they will and when they do the elite has another surprise in store for them. We have a thoroughly corrupt secret police force. They pay agents to incite crime, to lie about the people they spy upon and to set up political foes of the elite for embarrassment and political annihilation. We saw just the tip of this iceberg in the thoroughly phony Grant Bristow affair. They have a group of political appointed supervisors to vet and approve these actions too. It is called SIRC. (Security Intelligence Review Committee.)
That body thoroughly approved of Bristow and held him up to congratulation in its report called appropriately the "Heritage Front Affair." They knew or were at least told Bristow lied and supplied names of persons to harass. He incited violence in order to assure some criminal conduct to justify expenditure on him as a spy. There is a huge multi-million dollar building in Ottawa for CSIS which houses hundreds of bureaucrats and spies. This building is CSIS headquarters, and cost about $1-billion and occupies a large city block. This police force is designed to control and manipulate political activity. Since the end of the cold war it has had to create a new raison d'être. It has chosen the right wing. The police state has already arrived for any one who knows what this body does on a daily basis. The "supervisory" body SIRC does no more than public relations for CSIS and tries to exonerate anything it gets caught doing. This is the real Canada.
Not that the Reform Party constitutes any danger of real change in Canada, but because it wasn't the old boys network, CSIS and Bristow exposed the connection between Heritage Front and Reform just before the election...coincidence?
After teachers are controlled, the next area of thought police is the media. Already massively controlled, a few exceptions exist. Doug Collins in the North Shore News (a columnist) and Charles Maclean, a talk show host on Vancouver Radio Station AM 1040, are two such exceptions.
Mr. Collins is the target of a Human Rights complaint about his columns. Human Rights Tribunals after the case of Malcolm Ross have a license to destroy more than teachers in spite of the precious scruples of Justice La Forest seeking to limit the application of his ruling to just Malcolm Ross. Mr. Collins is accused of discriminating in his columns. His employer North Shore News has spent thousands to a Vancouver lawyer to defend the newspaper. How long they can hold out remains to be seen.
Charles Maclean has dared to give the censored a platform on radio. Among hundreds of other shows, Mr. Maclean allowed David Irving on one show to explain how he has been censored (not to express his views but just to speak about censorship). Now the same forces the Canadian Jewish Congress, who claimed credit for deporting Irving in the first place (in an off the record speech to York University by Bernie Farber) seeks to silence Maclean in a complaint to the CRTC. This can only be opposed by letters to that federally appointed bastion of left wing ideology , presided over by ardent trough-feeder Keith Spicer, opponent of Christian broadcasting.
The average Western will more and more face tyranny in Canada. Are you and your friends not in favour of freedom, if not for yourselves, at least for your children? To save the equivalent rights of Americans for ourselves we will have to escape the left-wing dictatorship of the Canadian elite. The pot-smoking left-wing revolutionaries have become the intolerant advocates of tolerance who use their authority with a ruthlessness they would have descried in their 60's days. Separation is the only road back to basic principles of freedom and justice.
Meanwhile, write to the CRTC on behalf of AM 1040 to: Alan J. Darling, Secretary General, CRTC, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0N2. Send copies of your letters to: AM 1040, Ste. #100, 856 Homer St., Vancouver, B.C. V6P 2W5.
Last month's WSP advertised the Second Canadian Free Speech Conference. The notice read: "A second conference devoted to the discussion of free speech issues in Canada and featuring various advocates of free speech, will be held in Vancouver on Saturday, March 23rd, 1996, from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the Surrey Inn, 9850 King George Highway, in the East Fraser Room.
"Among the confirmed speakers are Pat Burns, Doug Christie, Doug Collins, Jud Cyllorn, Steve Dumas, Paul Fromm and Eileen Pressler. Topics to be discussed include customs censorship, censorship in the media, Bill 33, thought crimes trials, censorship and politics, as well as a look at what can be done to secure freedom of expression in Canada."
After news of this meeting became public knowledge, so much pressure was exerted on the Surrey Inn by unions and special interest groups that the management cancelled the booking and the conference was forced at the last minute to find a new place to meet. Many people who had been planning to attend the meeting heard only about the cancellation and therefore did not attend.
The meeting did however go ahead and considering the difficulties, was well-attended. The forces of censorship were - temporarily - foiled again.