Pictured: Mike Farnworth, NDP MLA and Minister of Public Safety. Also features the logo of the National Democratic Institute and an image of ex-USA president George W. Bush speaking to troops who were in the process of invading Iraq in 2003.

B.C. Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth has a penchant for assisting invasions and occupations of sovereign territory.

Written by: Jeremy Appel

Mike Farnworth, public safety minister of British Columbia (a Canadian province), who approved RCMP raids on sovereign Wet’suwet’en territory against land defenders protesting the Coastal Gas Link pipeline, previously spent time working for U.S. government-funded National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) during the occupation of Iraq.

Farnworth, who served as acting premier while Premier John Horgan underwent cancer treatments in late-2021, was first elected as an NDP MLA in 1991 for the riding of Port Coquitlam-Burke Mountain. After losing his seat in 2001, Farnworth worked for the NDI in Bulgaria, the Balkans and then Iraq, on “democratic governance programs to help build multiparty democracies in former one-party states” before returning to politics in 2005.

We know Farnworth gave a keynote address to an assembly of newly-elected Macedonian MPs in December 2002. Farnworth provided an orientation in April 2003 for newly-elected MPs in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where he was listed as the NDI’s former Bulgaria program director, as part of an effort to “facilitate the long-term development of democratic institutions.” But his time in Iraq is murky.

Unfortunately, Farnworth’s office didn’t acknowledge a request for comment on his activities in Iraq.

What does the NDI do?

The NDI is funded by grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was founded during Ronald Reagan’s presidency and is in turn funded by the U.S. Congress, despite being a non-governmental organization (NGO) on paper.

Former spy Phillip Agee says the “fiction” of the NED being a genuine NGO, rather than an arm of the U.S. government, serves a valuable purpose, “because so many countries, including both the US and Cuba, have laws relating to their citizens being paid to carry out activities for foreign governments."

The NED and its affiliates work to influence political processes abroad by means of “influencing civil society, media, fostering business groups, lending support to preferred politicians/political parties, election monitoring, and fostering human rights groups,” according to the Center for Media and Democracy’s Sourcewatch.org website. “A lot of what we do was done 25 years ago covertly by the CIA,” NED co-founder Alan Weinstein said in 1991.

The Canada Files has previously reported on NED-funded organizations’ successful efforts to push the Canadian government to support regime change efforts against China and the DPRK (known to many as North Korea).

The NDI in Iraq

According to its website, the NDI “began working with reform-minded Iraqi politicians in 1999,” the year after President Bill Clinton passed the Iraq Liberation Act, “and formally established its in-country presence in 2003,” the year the U.S. invaded. This means Farnworth must have been in Iraq anywhere from mid-2003 to 2004.

In a March 2002 submission to its backers in U.S. Congress, the NDI depicted its “democracy assistance programs” as being central to the War on Terror, approvingly quoting President George W. Bush’s infamous remarks — “Every nation in every region has a decision to make. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.”

“His warning registered everywhere, precisely because it was universally understood that terrorism is a threat to civilization and those who sustain the threat will suffer the consequences,” the submission said.

The NDI also noted that unlike governments, NGOs aren’t “constrained by the stringent rules of formal diplomacy.”

After the invasion, the NDI sent delegates on an assessment mission to Baghdad from June 23 to July 26, 2003. While there’s no indication Farnworth was there, another NDP affiliate was.

Leslie Campbell, former chief of staff to NDP leader Audrey McLaughlin and assistant to Manitoba NDP leader Gary Doer, was on the trip as director of the NDI’s programs in the Middle East and North Africa.

In a dispatch after spending three days on the ground in Baghdad, Campbell wrote “it is already clear the NDI will find fertile ground for democracy promotion initiatives on a scale not seen since the heady days of the fall of the Berlin wall.” The report says the “overwhelming finding” across the country “is a grateful welcoming of the demise of Saddam’s regime and a sense that this is a pivotal moment in Iraq’s history.”

“Anxiety, not opposition to the coalition’s aims and mandate, drives the apparent souring of Iraqi opinion to the presence of an occupying force.”

He blames this on Iraqis’ “fantastically unrealistic expectations of the United States as liberator and saviour.”

The Bush administration and its media allies aggressively pushed a white saviour narrative. "My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators,” Vice President Dick Cheney said in the leadup to the invasion in March 2003. Canadian National Post columnist Colby Cosh also took this view, writing, “most everyone understands that a majority of Iraqis welcome this war, and that they’ll be better off for it on the whole.” When this clearly didn’t occur after a couple of weeks, Iraqis were depicted as uncivilized.

A couple months later, in May 2003, Iraq was taken over by an American, Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority, who signed the infamous Order 39, which privatized 200 Iraqi state companies, opening the country up to foreign investors, who were then permitted to fully take over Iraqi banks, mines and factories, revealing the true aims of the war.

In Iraq, the NDI worked closely with the CPA, the U.S. military and United Nations, serving as a liaison between the CPA and select civil society organizations by establishing an NGO League. The NDI also founded the Front for Peace and Democracy to provide training and networking opportunities “for new and smaller parties geared towards ultimately building an identifiable, stable and effective political coalition.”

While some of the NDI’s work was innocuous, such as promoting the role of women in the political sphere and working with human rights groups, it played a significant role in facilitating regime change in Iraq after the U.S. invasion by legitimizing Bremer’s occupation government. While neither the NDI or Farnworth have explained in any detail what his role was in Iraq, Farnworth was most definitely involved in legitimizing the U.S. occupation government in Iraq.

Invading sovereign territory at home

Farnworth worked in some capacity with the occupation government in Iraq. His role in suppressing protests against the Coastal Gas Link pipeline on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory near Houston, British Columbia, from 2019 - 2021, was much more direct.

In January 2020, Farnworth authorized the RCMP to conduct a raid against Coastal GasLink protestors “to the extent necessary to maintain law and order, and to ensure the safety of persons, properties, and communities in the area".

In March 2020, NDP MLA Nathan Cullen, whom Premier Horgan appointed the provincial liaison between the province and Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, falsely denied the government has the ability to call off the RCMP.

“I ask that you please continue to inform the ministry of planned actions and any further developments through established channels between executive Policing and Security Branch and RCMP staff," Farnworth wrote to RCMP Deputy Commissioner Jennifer Strachan on Jan. 27 — the same day Cullen was appointed liaison.

After Farnworth approved their action, the RCMP arrested 28 people over a span of five days in February, blocking journalists from covering their raids.

Documents obtained by the Guardian show that in January 2019, the RCMP prepared to shoot people participating in a Wet'suwet'en blockade camp if they didn’t comply with their orders. Ultimately, 14 people were arrested in what the Mounties described as “sterilizing [the] site.”

Most recently, the RCMP arrested another 14 people in November 2021, infamously using a chainsaw to break down the door of a cabin protestors were staying in.

The company behind Coastal Gas Link — Calgary-based TC Energy — boasts the support of the elected Wet’suwet’en band council, but its hereditary chiefs oppose it and according to Supreme Court of Canada precedent, that’s all that matters.

A 1997 ruling dubbed Delgamuukw v. British Columbia held that the First Nation — like others located in British Columbia, had never surrendered rights or title to their lands, meaning their territory is unceded and that jurisdiction belongs to the hereditary chiefs, not the elected council imposed on them by the Indian Act.

“They never surrendered or ceded their territory, so what they’re dealing with is this incursion by pipeline companies and police who are basically invading,” Clifford Atleo (Tsimshian, Nuu-chah-nulth), an assistant professor of resource and environmental management at Simon Fraser University whose work focuses on Indigenous governance, told The Grist.

“What the Wet’suwet’en are doing is protecting their lands.”

While the suppression of protest in Wet’suwet’en cannot be compared to the sheer destruction and destabilization the U.S. has wrought on Iraq, both invasions are the product of the colonial arrogance embodied by Farnworth.

We also must keep in mind that the RCMP invasion of sovereign Indigenous territory is not a one-off event. It’s deeply rooted in the foundations of the Canadian state, which was founded via an ongoing genocide against Indigenous peoples.

With Premier Horgan announcing his impending retirement, and Farnworth’s previous runs for the party leadership in 2011 and 2014, British Columbia could wind up with a Premier Farnworth, who would undoubtedly continue his pattern of aiding colonialism at home, and imperialism abroad.

Jeremy Appel is a Calgary-based independent journalist and author of the Orchard newsletter on Substack.

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