Montreal, Canada – A Canadian federal court has quashed government permits to expand the Trans Mountain pipeline, a decision that has been welcomed by Indigenous leaders and puts the future of the contentious $5bn project in limbo.

In a ruling issued on Thursday morning, the Federal Court of Appeal said the National Energy Board of Canada (NEB) made a “critical error” in issuing a report the federal government relied on to give the project the green light in 2016.

The court said the NEB – an independent regulatory body that oversees permits for oil and gas projects – did not take into account an increase in tanker traffic off the coast of British Columbia as a result of the pipeline’s expansion.

Its report to the government failed to give Ottawa the information “it needed in order to properly assess the public interest, including the project’s environmental effects – matters it was legally obligated to assess,” the ruling states.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau approved the project in November 2016, saying that it would bolster the Canadian economy and create jobs, and that it is in Canada’s national interest to get it built.

The Trans Mountain project involves twinning an existing 1,150km pipeline to ship up to 890,000 barrels of oil every day from the Alberta tar sands to Canada‘s west coast, for export overseas.

In its decision, the court also said the federal government failed to meet the minimum standard required in its consultations with Indigenous people.

Under the Constitution, Canada has a “duty to consult” and accommodate Indigenous people when a project may impact their Aboriginal or treaty rights.

The Duty to Consult has been a constitutional obligation for the Crown for over a decade and is still routinely neglected, fumbled and outsourced to Crown-like agencies for rubber-stamp approval. As was the case in Tsleil-Waututh Nation et al. v. Attorney General of Canada.

— Yellowhead Institute (@Yellowhead_) August 30, 2018

The government did not engage in “responsive, considered and meaningful dialogue” with the Indigenous applicants in the case, which included the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, the Squamish Nation, and the Coldwater Indian Band, among others.

“The law requires Canada to do more than receive and record concerns and complaints,” the court said.

‘It’s a great day’

Indigenous leaders across Canada welcomed the court’s decision.

For several years, they have been leading a growing protest movement against the pipeline, which they say threatens the water and land their communities depend on. 

They have long argued they weren’t adequately consulted, and never gave their consent on the pipeline as well.

“It’s a great day today. We won!” said Chief Lee Spahan, of the Coldwater Indian Band, at a press conference in Vancouver.

“Right from the beginning, we always said water is life. Water is sacred. They can say they consulted, but they never, ever, ever got our consent,” he added.

Chief Bob Chamberlin, vice-president of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs (UBCIC), said the ruling is “a major win with impacts that will be felt across the country”.

“The project should never have been approved, and we are greatly encouraged that the Federal Court of Appeal has recognised the need for Canada to uphold Indigenous Title and Rights on projects on their territories, and fulfil their commitments to true reconciliation,” Chamberlin said in a statement.

Bill Morneau, Canada’s finance minister, said the government is reviewing the court’s decision carefully, but it has not yet decided what its exact response will be.

“We’re going to review today’s decision to ensure that we’re meeting high standards when it comes to both protecting the environment and meeting our obligations to consult with Indigenous peoples,” Morneau said during a news conference.

“As a government, we take our responsibilities seriously. While we want to make sure that the project proceeds, we also want to make sure it moves ahead in the right way.”

Kinder Morgan approves pipeline’s sale to Ottawa

Also on Thursday, the shareholders of Kinder Morgan, the company responsible for Trans Mountain, voted overwhelming in favour of selling the pipeline to the Canadian government. 

In late May, Canada announced it would spend $3.5bn to buy the pipeline from Kinder Morgan, in essence nationalising the project.

Morneau said the government expects to close on the acquisition of the project as early as Friday.

In its ruling, the court instructed Ottawa to remedy the two problems its decision was based on – including restarting the consultation process with Indigenous people – and come to a “fresh decision”.

Morneau said the government remains committed to the project.

“This is a project that’s in Canada’s national interest, a project that means thousands of good, well-paying jobs for the middle-class, that will help us to get a fair price for Canadian resources,” he said.

But the government still faces an uphill battle, as Indigenous leaders, environmental groups, and several municipalities in BC have vowed they won’t allow the project to be built.

Mike Hudema, a spokesperson for Greenpeace Canada, said Justin Trudeau should “read the writing on the wall”.

“Dump this pipeline and shift the billions of public dollars slated for this problem-plagued project into Canada’s renewable energy economy,” Hudema said in a statement.

“While we will all celebrate this massive win tonight we will be ready to continue the fight should this project ever try to endanger these lands, waters or our collective climate again.”

Johannesburg, South Africa – Last week, US President Donald Trump ignited a firestorm when he decided to wade into the sensitive land debate in South Africa.

Trump wrote in a tweet that he had asked Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, to look into “land and farm seizures” and “large scale killings of white farmers”.

Trump’s comment came after he watched a six-minute segment on the issue on Fox News, a conservative US broadcaster. The president was immediately condemned by the South African government and his comments raised the ire of many South Africans, a majority of whom, 24 years after the end of apartheid, are still waiting for land reform to take place.

The question of land remains among the most sensitive and divisive questions in the country.

Apartheid was, at its core, a system of separate and discriminatory development, with black South Africans either dispossessed or denied access to land, infrastructure and resources, while their white counterparts were given preferential treatment and access to the economy.

The legacies of apartheid persist to this day, with social and economic inequality preserved and perpetuated due to the lack of economic transformation.

Al Jazeera answers the key questions about the fraught and complicated land debate in the country.

Who owns land in South Africa?

Following the end of apartheid in 1994, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) said it would redistribute 30 percent of white-owned commercial farmland to black farmers.

“Our estimate is that [today] 9.7 percent of white commercial farmland has been transferred to black people since 1994,” Ruth Hall, from the Institute of Poverty, Land and Agarian Studies (Plaas), based in Cape Town, says.

It is estimated that white South Africans, who make up around nine percent of the population, own around 73 percent of commercial agricultural land.

As it stands, black people own more than 50 percent of agricultural land in just two of the country’s nine provinces.

Are white farmers being targeted and murdered?

Claims that white farmers are being disproportionately targeted and killed, or that a “white genocide” is taking place in South Africa have been repeatedly refuted.

Agri SA, an agricultural industry association based in Pretoria, reported in June that 47 farmers were killed between 2017 and 2018 – the lowest in 20 years. Omri van Zyl, Agri SA’s executive director, told Al Jazeera that despite the numbers, the organisation still feels that there are a “disproportionate number of farm murders”.

Between 2016 and 2017, there were 19,016 murders in South Africa.

This translates into a murder rate of 34.1 people per 100,000 people of the population. Police statistics indicate that during the same period, there were 74 farm murders.

These include farmers and workers of all race groups.

Afriforum, a right-wing lobby group that has both welcomed and taken credit for informing Trump’s tweet, claims that the murders of farmers translates into a murder rate of 156 per 100,000 people, or 4.5 times higher chance of getting murdered than the average South African.

Fact-checking website Africheck has repeatedly refuted Afriforum’s statistics, arguing that given that it is not clear how many people live and work on farms, the group’s numbers are fundamentally flawed.

There remains no evidence to suggest that farmers as a group suffer more attacks than any other demographic in the country.

Why has land reform been so slow?

Since 1994, the government has followed a “willing-seller, willing buyer” model in which it has bought white-owned farms for redistribution. But this process has been slow, with the ANC accusing landowners of inflating farm prices and therefore hindering redistribution.

Experts, meanwhile, say the primary reason land reform has been slow is due to a lack of political will.

“Land reform has never accounted for more than one percent of the national budget. And this means the programme has been constrained by a limited budget.” Hall, from Plaas, says.

“The second reason is that the department of rural development is extremely weak. We don’t have a lot of state capacity to implement their policies … We estimate that six percent of all commercial farms are bought and sold each year, so we could be going a lot faster [if there was more money].”

Likewise, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, author of The land is ours: Black Lawyers and the Birth of Constitutionalism in South Africa, says that the law was designed to help government redistribute land but “no explanation has been given as to why this has not happened”.

In other words, “the ANC tolerated a slow and failing land programme for more than two decades”, Hall adds.

Is the constitution to blame?

The ANC has been consistently reprimanded for its slow land reform policy. Pressure has been building on the ruling party, especially from the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), the third largest party in the country, who have turned the land issue into a key election campaign topic.

With national elections due to take place in 2019, the ANC are at pains to illustrate that they are taking the concerns of the large black majority – who remain poor, landless and on the fringes of the economy – on board.

“This has become a party political issue for the first time, and people are aligning themselves with parties based on their position on land,” Hall says.

At its national conference in December 2017, the ANC resolved to expropriate land without compensation as a means to speed up land reform. This then ushered in talk of amending Section 25 of the constitution in order to allow expropriation without compensation to take place.

“It has become pertinently clear that our people want the constitution to be more explicit about expropriation of land without compensation as demonstrated in the public hearings,” party leader and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said.

But legal experts say the constitution is not the problem.

“My own sense is that they are scapegoating the constitution for their failures… I don’t think the problem is legal, it is political,” Ngcukaitobi, the author, says.

“If, after 24 years of an enabling framework, you’ve done nothing to enforce it, it is very difficult to explain to the public why you have done nothing to enforce it … it easier to say the constitution constrains the government.”

Do black South Africans want white-owned farms?

The ANC’s call for amending the constitution has also ushered in hysteria, rampant misinformation and fake news, culminating in Trump’s tweet last week.

Experts say that while the narrative has centred around the fate of white farmers and the seizure of commercial farms, mostly due to the lobbying of Afriforum, the reality is that most black South Africans are not interested in rural land.

“Unfortunately, the conversation is being framed around white farmers … but white farmers will be largely unaffected, because the demand for land is in the urban areas,” Ngcukaitobi says.

Van Zyl, from Agri SA, confirmed that the demand for urban land was on the rise. He added that while farms were not being seized as reported, land occupations closer to urban areas were taking place.

More than 60 percent of South Africans now live in urban areas and the struggle over land is no longer a question of resolving historical dispossession but a matter of inclusion in the country’s economy.

“The political heart of the matter is located in the urban areas … in particular the big metros,” Hall says.

“Remember, apartheid kept black people out of the cities.”

With urban housing either too expensive or low-cost housing too far and inaccessible from the city, millions of black South Africans since the end of apartheid have resorted to occupying vacant plots of land, often belonging to the city or local government.

“People don’t look at land as purely a hard asset. People look at land as a mechanism to be closer to where they work,” Ngcukaitobi says.

“This is where the future of contestation over land is headed,” Ngcukaitobi adds.

At least 11 percent of all households in the country’s urban areas are located in informal settlements. In Gauteng province, considered South Africa’s economic hub, 19 percent of households are in informal settlements – often without proper water, sanitation or legal electricity connections. It is this demographic who consistently face eviction and displacement.

“Our cities are poverty traps 24 years after apartheid,” says Steven Friedman, director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Johannesburg.

Friedman says that if one looks at other places around the world where progress has been made in the fight against poverty, one of the common dominators is the proximity of poor people to economic hubs. “Until we change that [here], the poor will simply continue selling things to other poor people,” Friedman adds.

Hall says that ordinary black people want action over land because they are well aware that it is they who are most likely to suffer displacement or dispossession.

“We see it in the urban areas: people from informal settlements are evicted by the state. On commercial farms, large numbers of black people are evicted by white farmers,” Hall says.

She cites cases where commercial farmers evict black workers and their families who have lived on these farms for generations due to financial pressure amid worsening economic conditions, as well as political reasons due to the perceived fear of robberies and violence.

“The rate at which black people are kicked out of commercial farms is faster than that rate at which they accessing land,” says Hall.

“Then in the communal areas, the traditional authorities are evicting people after they get into deals with mining companies … across these three spaces, the cities, the farms, communal areas, we see a process of black people being pushed off land and left in much more vulnerable and insecure positions.”

Ngcukaitobi warns that indiscriminate use of expropriation without compensation would hurt poor black families more than it would white families.

He cites the experience of the country’s preparation for the World Cup in 2010, where black families were forced to move to make way for a rail network, and the urban poor were pushed out of the cities in a bid to beautify the metros ahead of the football tournament.

In Durban, some families who were moved to make way for the stadiums are still living in transit camps.

“The likely targets of expropriation without compensation will be the poor and vulnerable and not white people in the suburbs, and we have to put in measures to ensure this does not happen,” Ngcukaitobi says.

Will South Africa become the ‘next Zimbabwe’?

Many commentators continue to point at the experiences of neighbouring Zimbabwe when the question of land reform is debated in South Africa. Former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe embarked on a series of land grabs in the early 2000s that led to the collapse of the country’s economy.

Even though there are concerns that land could be transferred to the politically connected, like in Zimbabwe, experts are clear that the situation in South Africa is very different, pointing out to the country’s vigorous civil society and independent judiciary as bulwarks of democracy.

“White people like the idea that they are being targeted,” Ngcukaitobi says, “but the reality is that this is not the case and that black people’s needs have moved from the countryside to the urban areas”.

Last week, David Mabuza, the country’s deputy president, looked to allay fears when he addressed the Land Summit in the northern Limpopo province. He said that no farms would be invaded or grabbed and that farmers did not have to fear for their well-being.

“As the leadership of the ANC and government, we are clear that the implementation of land reform measures must not result in social fractures and racial polarisation,” Mabuza said.

Responding to the address, van Zyl, the Agri SA executive director, said he believed Mabuza’s commitment was “authentic”.

“The problem is that in the rural areas, they [government] are not there. And that means its a practical issue,” van Zyl said.

“Farmers understand that transformation has to happen, and a lot of farmers are doing it already. But we need incentives and mechanisms … it has to be done in a commercially sound way, otherwise everything will implode.”

But it is not clear how government will decide who will get these newly released plots and for experts observing the process, this is what will matter most.

“There has been an astonishing lack of transparency about who the beneficiaries will be,” Ngcukaitobi says. “It has to be transparent.” 

Friedman, meanwhile, says that “Afriforum, like Trump, are only interested in protecting whiteness”.

The rage over land reform among ordinary South Africans is also a manifestation of a larger concern. In 2017, 30 percent of the black South Africans were unemployed compared to 6.7 percent of whites.

“What black South Africans are actually talking about [when they refer to land] is their sense that this is a minority-controlled economy,” Friedman says.

“This is what lies at the heart of a debate that is still not very coherent or straightforward.”

“In light of our nation’s fiscal situation, federal employee pay must be performance-based …” the president wrote in a Thursday letter to congressional leaders.

President Donald Trump is canceling across-the-board pay raises for civilian workers across the federal government, citing the “nation’s fiscal situation.”

“We must maintain efforts to put our nation on a fiscally sustainable course, and federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases,” the president wrote in a letter Thursday to congressional leaders.

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Under Trump’s policy, roughly 1.8 million people won’t get an automatic pay boost next year, including Border Patrol and ICE agents.

Most civilian workers were slated to receive 2.1 percent increase under a years-old government formula. But the president argues that pay raises should be tied to “performance,” rather than “across-the-board” increases.

The administration’s stance sets up a funding fight with the Senate, which has already backed a 1.9 percent pay raise for civilian federal employees this year.

Last year, Trump approved an average pay raise of 1.4 percent for federal civilian workers and 2.1 percent for uniformed service members. This year, members of the military are slated for a 2.6 percent raise — the largest in a decade.

Under the Obama administration, civilian workers were subjected to multiple years of pay freezes as the federal government weathered the recession.

Image: Shutterstock / pathdoc

Tehran, Iran – A large sign looms over the entrance to Dr Sapir Hospital, Iran’s only Jewish medical facility located on a busy street in downtown Tehran.

“Love your neighbour as yourself,” it reads in Persian, echoing a command found in the Jewish religious text, Torah.

“From the beginning, there was a very important regulation in this hospital: We cannot ask about the religion of the patient. Here, we only ask about the pain of the patient,” Dr Siamak Morsadegh, the hospital director, explained. 

“We want to do our best for all the Iranian people,” added the middle-aged surgeon.

For 76 years, the Dr Sapir Hospital has been a fixture in Tehran’s Oudlajan neighbourhood, once a Jewish quarter just blocks from the capital’s centuries-old Grand Bazaar and Iran’s parliament.

Most of the Jewish residents in the area have since left, but the hospital has remained open, sustained by funds from the Tehran Jewish Committee. It continues to operate as a charity hospital serving mostly low-income patients from the predominantly Muslim neighbourhood.

Currently, 98 percent of the patients and 95 percent of the staff at Dr Sapir Hospital are non-Jewish.

Over the years, the hospital has weathered some of the most turbulent episodes of Iran’s history, such as the 1979 revolution, during which its medical staff treated protesters and hid them from the Shah’s feared secret police, the Savak.

But now, with the return of the US sanctions in the wake of Washington’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, Morsadegh and his hospital staff are facing the dilemma of how to take care of their most vulnerable patients.

Just like other hospitals across Iran, Dr Sapir Hospital’s access to imported medications for life-threatening conditions has turned precarious.

Although medicines from abroad are not covered in the first round of US sanctions that was announced earlier in August, the impact is the same as bank payments from Iran for these drugs are now blocked. As a result, disruption could have life-and-death consequences on ailing Iranians.

At the same time, the value of the currency, rial, has also plummeted against the US dollar, due to the economic uncertainty brought about by sanctions. That has driven inflation higher, forcing Iranians to spend more to afford treatment.

A second round of punitive measures against Iran’s energy sector are expected in November.

The US said those steps are necessary to stop Iran’s nuclear ambition, and to curb its influence in the Middle East. It has vowed to continue the pressure, until Iran decides to give in to its US demands – a prospect that Tehran has so far  rejected.

‘Punishing ordinary Iranians’

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif had referred to the US moves as part of a “psychological war against Iran”.

According to a Tehran Times report, 40 percent of Iran’s pharmaceutical raw materials and five percent of its medicines are imported.

An article in the Independent recently reported about the shortage of chemotherapy drugs for cancer patients, following the reimposition of sanctions.

For Morsadegh, there is no doubt that the sanctions imposed by US President Donald Trump, a property tycoon and former reality TV star, are meant to punish ordinary Iranians.

“I am sure that Trump does not know what shame is, because he is doing his best to deprive the sick children in Iran from the treatment of their malignancy,” he said.

“A man, whose best activity is owning a casino, cannot understand the condition of a family with a sick child,” he added, surrounded by an Iranian flag and a portrait of Moses and Aaron – prophets in Abrahamic religions – inside his office at Dr Sapir Hospital.

Aside from his hospital duties, Morsadegh – who could be mistaken for the iconic American television character Tony Soprano, with his large build and baritone voice – is also a member of the Iranian parliament, the only Jewish among the 290 legislators.

Since 2008, he has represented the more than 25,000 Iranian Jews before the national assembly, also known as the Majlis.

Balancing both roles has a number of challenges, Morsadegh acknowledged.

“But we have a saying, ‘God loves the foolish and the surgeon’. And course God loves a foolish surgeon such as me. So he makes it work for me,” he said, clutching his prayer beads with his left hand.

Turning more sombre on the issue of US sanctions, and the animosity between Tehran and Washington, the doctor said Iranian Jews stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Islamic Republic’s policy.

“We are not a different group from other Iranian people. We are part of the Iranian nation,” he said, adding that there is no contradiction between being an Iranian and Jewish. 

“Any decision that is made by the Iranian nation, about its national interest, about its border and about its relationship with other people is accepted by Iranian Jews,” Morsadegh added.

Iran’s deep-rooted Jewish ties

Younes Hamami Lalehzar, a senior rabbi at Abrishami Synagogue, one of the more than 50 Jewish house of worships in Tehran, said it might come as a surprise to many but Jewish ties to Iran go back as far as 2,700 years ago.

It is believed that the Jewish heroine, Esther, and her uncle Mordechai are buried in the western Iranian city of Hamedan. According to Jewish biblical text, Esther was married to the Persian king, Xerxes.

In more contemporary history, Iran also welcomed Jews, who were fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. And during Germany Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s rampage of Europe, Polish Jews sough refuge in Iran.

But there have also been periods of unrest, such as the forced conversion of Jews to Islam during the Safavid and Qajar era, and the migration of thousands of Iranian Jews to the US following the 1979 Islamic Revolution.  

“Jewish lives in Iran are connected to other Iranian lives, they are not separated,” said Lalehzar, who is also an internal medicine specialist at Dr Sapir Hospital.

Lalehzar said Iranian Jews “share the sorrow” and experience of the whole country with the return of US sanctions.

‘We are united’

Khodad Asna Ashahri, a Muslim man who as the manager at Dr Sapir Hospital is Morsadegh’s most trusted deputy, said that throughout his five-decade-long career at the facility, Jewish and non-Jewish staff have worked side-by-side to serve patients “regardless of their religion, colour or origin”. 

During the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the hospital allotted at least 30 percent of its capacity to treat wounded soldiers, he said. At that time, many Iranian Jews fought and died in the war.   

Amid the reinstatement of sanctions against Iran and its consequence on the country’s healthcare, Ashahri said Iran “won’t submit to humiliation” by the US. 

“Muslims and Jews, we are all united. Even if our situation gets worse and worse, we won’t surrender to Trump’s demands,” said Ashahri, calling on the Us president to “stop these warmongering measures”.

Since his decision in May to withdraw the US from the landmark nuclear deal, Trump has said he is willing to speak to Iran’s leadership without preconditions – even though, his comments were instantly walked back by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who listed several steep demands for such a summit to take place.

Meanwhile Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say in the country’s most important political decisions, has ruled out negotiations with the Trump administration – a stance that Morsadegh backed.

“I must be crazy to again have a dialogue with a man, when he does not want to keep his promise,” he said. “We cannot tolerate this, and we cannot accept this.” 

No matter what Iran’s political and economic prospect would be, Morsadegh vowed to continue doing his “first passion” as a doctor “to decrease the suffering of the people” in Iran.

“Going to the parliament for me is a duty for my country and for the Iranian Jews. My work in this hospital is my duty as a human being.”

Image: Corbis via Getty Images