Daishowa wants permanent stop to boycott

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Each side accused the other of using threats and intimidation when lawyers for Japanese multi-national corporation Daishowa, Inc. and members of the activist group Friends of the Lubicon tangled in an Ontario courtroom late last month.

Daishowa initiated the court action. The company is seeking to have an existing temporary injunction which prohibits the promotion of a consumer boycott of its paper products extended to a permanent ban. The corporation is also asking the court to award it over $11 million in damages.

Friends of the Lubicon, a small group of volunteers based in Toronto, initiated a campaign against Daishowa, Inc. in 1991 as a gesture of support for the Lubicon Crees of northern Alberta.

The Lubicon Lake Nation is embroiled in a long-standing land dispute with the federal and provincial governments. Promised a reserve in 1939, the Lubicon claim 10,000 sq. km of resource-rich land in northwestern Alberta. No treaty exists for the area and the Lubicon maintain they have never ceded the land in question. Since 1939, the governments and the Lubicon have been unable to finalize a mutually satisfying land agreement.

In 1988, Daishowa purchased a license from the province of Alberta that gave the company the right to harvest trees on 29,000 sq. km in the region, including the land claimed by the Lubicon. The Lubicon and their supporters, already involved in a bitter fight with the federal and provincial governments over the extensive damage done to their traditional territory and their traditional way of life by provincially-licensed oil and gas exploration, upped the stakes when it appeared another valuable resource would be stripped off of the land they claimed before they could profit from it.

As Friends of the Lubicon watched the impoverished community of about 500 people vainly struggle against governments and big business interests, the activist group hatched a plan that did $11 million dollars worth of damage to the multi-national between 1991 and 1996 and brought the plight of the Lubicon back into the national spotlight.

Three members of Friends of the Lubicon - Kevin Thomas, 30, Ed Bianchi, 37, and Stephen Kenda, 40, all of Toronto - began an information campaign aimed at hitting the multi-national pulp and paper company where it hurt the most.

First they targeted the retail stores that were regular Daishowa customers, urging them to buy their paper bags from a different supplier if the company refused to back away from logging on the traditional Lubicon lands. They told the retailers they would picket their stores if they dealt with the Tokyo-based company. Stores that continued to buy from Daishowa were, in fact, picketed and suffered from being associated with a situation that was widely portrayed as the rape of an impoverished Aboriginal community by a heartless multi-national and two governments.

During the civil trial in September, both sides agreed that the boycott was effective. Daishowa said 47 companies, representing over 4,300 retail outlets, opted to use another supplier rather than become involved in the dispute.

In his opening statement on Sept. 2, Daishowa lawyer Peter Jervis told the court that the Friends of the Lubicon had intimidated and threatened the companies.

Thomas, a 30-year-old legal researcher, finds it amusing that he and his co-defendants have been accused of intimidation. He suggested that court injunctions, expensive legal maneuvering and the threat of an $11 million lawsuit are much more intimidating and threatening than any flyer or picket line. He added that he and the other defendants have been forced to spend most of their time raising money to pay the $30 thousand in expenses their lawyers have incurred while working on the case.

"The whole issue of this case is not about boycotting," Thomas said. "It's about corporations controlling what anybody says about them. It's a silencing action."

Daishowa spokesperson Laurie Grant said the activists have spred misinformation about the company and have wrongly targeted Daishowa, Inc. In a press release issued by Daishowa-Marubeni International, Ltd. (DMI), an Alberta-based forestry subsidiary of Daishowa, Inc. which operates a sawmill near the Lubicon Lake territory, it is claimed that the parent company which has been the target of the boycott does not even use products from Alberta in its paper bags.

The statement from DMI creates the impression that Friends of the Lubicon boycotted the wrong company, that there is no connection between Daishowa, Inc. and DMI, Ltd.

Thomas believes that is a public relations move designed to erode the credibility of Friends of the Lubicon. He points out that DMI has held off on logging on land claimed by the Lubicon. He believes that the boycott convinced Daishowa to instruct DMI to not exercise its logging license.

The story at the heart of the civil action, defendant Thomas believes, is that high-ranking government officials and politicians and wealthy corporate executives have been caught trying to reap a profit from unceded Indian land and now that they've been exposed they're trying to bully their way out of an awkward situation with expensive legal action. He sees it as a modern-day land grab that mirrors the theft of the continent by colonizers in the 18th and 19th centuries. Since the government is an accomplice in this process, Friends of the Lubicon had no choice but to go right to the people, he said.

"It's happening now!" Thomas said. "We've been showing that what's happened over the last 20 years is exactly what happened 100 years ago. I've heard people say that what happened 100 years ago was a shame, that it was wrong and we let it happen. Well, I don't want people 100 years from now saying the same thing about this."

Thomas believes that the public has a right to know if the money they spend is being used for questionable purposes. In the free market, a consumer should have access to information that will allow him r her to make an informed decision about which company he or she will deal with, he said. He believes the court case will boil down to a judge deciding if corporations have the right to function in a society without being accountable to their customers. It's a chance for a judge to decide if there is true democracy in Canada or if the country will be run by the wealthy elite.

"This is a public issue that they're turning into a private issue. It might be the last gasp of real grassroots democracy," he said.

Justice James Marshall of the Ontario Court of Justice (general division) could take several weeks to render his decision.