Tea & Two Slices is a long-running news round-up by NEEDS frontman and veteran restaurant dishwasher Sean Orr, who lives and works in Gastown. He is very aware of his privilege, so there’s really no need to remind him of it.

Sing it with me: The RCMP has no jurisdiction in unceded territories, wheya heya heyo: Calm before the storm as Wet’suwet’en Nation members await RCMP. Horgan and Trudeau both agreed to uphold UNDRIP, but hey, maybe the NDP can make it a perfect 2-0 when going to war against First Nations. Only this time the world is watching.

Well, ok… the world is trying to watch but the RCMP is setting up something called media exclusion zones. Here is Stuart Parker:

David Eby, you are letting us down. It is absolutely within your power to direct the RCMP to respect the civil liberties you came up through PIVOT and BCCLA fighting for.

“Media exclusion zones” are a monstrous Orwellian assault on our freedom, in addition to the brazen assault on the rights of First Nations.

Of course, as is always the case with sudden attention thrusted upon water protectors, we must remind ourselves that this is not some sort of unCanadian behaviour. Rather, it’s fully in line with the settler colonial resource theft our country was founded upon. Here are nine more things you should know about the Unist’ot’en Blockade.

Instead of sending the RCMP to dismantle checkpoints maybe we should send them to the mountains to protect our glaciers: 80% of mountain glaciers in Alberta, B.C. and Yukon will disappear within 50 years.

Rex Murphy: Time is wrong. Today’s journalists are not ‘guardians of the truth’. Indeed, they are more likely to be guardians of the prevailing neoliberal ideology. Which is exactly what Rex Murphy is doing here. I guess the guy who gets paid $30,000 to speak for oil sands companies would know.

Place the adjective environmental to govern the noun journalism and the former swallows up, nullifies, extinguishes quite the latter. What we may call real journalists on the global warming file are, to use a familiar category, on the very sharp end of the endangered species list. The majority of environmental journalists are a choir in perfect harmony on a one-note score, the settled-science symphony of the IPCC and Al Gore.

Huh? So if a group of journalists started writing that the number 15 is bigger than 5, would that be bad journalism?

False equivalence “both side-ism” of the day: Trump’s new ambassador to Canada: I believe both sides of climate change are accurate. There aren’t “two sides”. One is backed by 99% of scientists, the other, well: “One small fact to keep in mind: Craft is the wife of billionaire coal magnate Joe Craft”.

Dan Fumano: ‘Megacity Vancouver’: Arguments for and against amalgamation. This article should have started and ended with two words: Rob Ford.

Vancouver and West Vancouver to close clothing donation bins following recent deaths. Sorry to keep elevating inanimate objects as metaphors for Vancouver society, but this is just too perfect to not hold up as a shining emblem of inequality under late capitalism.

Is a tent a home? B.C. judge rules OK to search homeless person’s tent without warrant. Well, I mean…according to the City of Vancouver’s definition, this is actually social housing.

Bonus: Do Pacific Northwesterners Have An Accent?