Angry Canadians

Gloria Galloway reports in the Globe and Mail that hope is fading  for those who believed Friday's meeting between native leaders and Stephen Harper would put an end to the Idle No More protests:

Idle No More organizers will hold their own Friday meeting for chiefs that were not invited to the talks on that day with Mr. Harper.

And Governor-General David Johnston announced on Tuesday that he would not be at Mr. Harper’s working meeting with key Assembly of First Nations leaders. As a result, Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence, who called for the meeting in first place, said she might not go either.

Although some chiefs say the leaders of the country’s more than 630 first nations are united in their determination to exert their treaty rights, it is clear that there are divides about how that should be achieved.

There is division among native communities. But that is not surprisisng. People on the ground feel that their official representatives are no longer trustworthy  They are taking matters into their own hands -- and they have good reason to do so. As Jeff Denis wrote just before Christmas:

Since 2008, the Harper government has cut aboriginal health funding, gutted environmental review processes, ignored the more than 600 missing and murdered Indigenous women across Canada, withheld residential school documents from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, abandoned land claim negotiations, and tried to defend its underfunding of First Nations schools and child welfare agencies.

When some dared call attention to poverty, “corrupt” chiefs were blamed. Although the minister of Aboriginal Affairs, John Duncan, claims to have visited 50 First Nations communities and conducted 5,000 consultations, he and his staff clearly have not gained the First Nations’ consent on the seven currently tabled bills that Idle No More activists oppose.

Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples are the fastest growing population in Canada. They are young, ambitious and well aware of historical and contemporary injustices. Like others abroad, they are revitalizing their languages and cultures, rebuilding their nations, and supported in these initiatives by international law, including the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which Canada reluctantly endorsed in 2010. 

Things are not over. They've only just begun. Stephen Harper's take no prisoners style of government has come back to bite him. He is about to become a hostage to events he cannot control.

Shifting The Focus

Deloitte-Touche did as requested, and the reaction was predictable. Tasha Kheiriddin writes:

The audit is out, the verdict is damning. As reported by CBC News, an independent assessment of six years of transactions on the troubled Attawapiskat First Nation reserve reveal “no evidence of due diligence.”

Auditors Deloitte and Touche concluded that out of 505 transactions, “an average of 81 per cent of files did not have adequate supporting documents and over 60 per cent had no documentation of the reason for payment.”

The argument is, "those who can't control their finances deserve no sympathy."  Let's recall that, when the crisis erupted at Attawapiskat last year, Stephen Harper's solution was to send in an accountant. Let's also recall that, eighteen months ago, the Harper government was found in contempt of Parliament for not revealing the cost of jet fighters and prisons. Now they refuse to let Kevin Page see the budget cuts they are making.

Worse still, the Harperites claim that  natives peoples' inability to account for their spending makes them the source of their misery. Rather than seeing the audit as a symptom, the government claims it is a cause. Ultimately, the Conservatives say, Canada's native peoples seek to hide and avoid the truth.

But, writes Michael Harris, we are approaching a moment of truth:

Does anyone really believe the PM has had a conversion on the road to Attawapiskat? How long will he contribute to the working session? Does anyone think Chief Spence’s call for action will be answered by anything other than the bureaucratic sludge in which these events are normally embalmed?

What Idle No More is asking for is changes in Bill C-45, the omnibus budget bill which has gutted Canada's environmental legislation:

The Harper government has unilaterally changed the Indian Act. It has unilaterally changed environmental legislation that weakens protection of fresh water and endangered fish species. It has made it easier for major developments to take place with less study of the environmental impact and no equal say for aboriginals. And in 2012, the very year Stephen Harper pledged to renew the search for justice for all native peoples, his “little minister” — as Chief Spence described John Duncan — announced sweeping cuts for core aboriginal organizations across Canada.

No one in Canada knows better than its aboriginals that a moment of truth has arrived for both them and the land. For good or ill, an explosion of development quivers over the West and the Arctic. Huge fortunes will be made by a few, great change will be ushered in, and the environment will be altered forever. Either the aboriginals make their stand now, or they will be eternally bypassed. As Grand Chief Stewart Phillip put it, “We’re the last line of defence between the country’s resources and a federal government that wants to open it up and devastate it.”

This is, indeed, a last stand. We used to believe that the land will endure. But, if Stephen Harper gets his way, the land will be despoiled for profits -- and those profits will not be shared with the people of the land. To do that, Harper must shift the focus. That is what he and his acolytes are now trying to do.

Politicians As CEO's

When Brian Mulroney first ran for prime minister, his sales pitch was that he would run government like a business. Mike Harris liked to refer to himself as Ontario's CEO. George W. Bush's calling card was that he possessed a Harvard MBA. All three were successful politicians but lousy mangers.

Donald Savoie writes that the notion  that government should be run like a business is wrongheaded:

The notion that public administration could be made to look like private-sector management has been ill-conceived, misguided and costly to taxpayers. Management in the private sector has everything to do with the bottom line and market share. Administration in the public sector is a matter of opinion, debate and blame avoidance in a politically charged environment. It doesn’t much matter in the private sector if you get it wrong 40 per cent of the time so long as you turn a handsome profit and increase market share. It doesn’t much matter in the public sector if you get it right 99 per cent of the time if the 1 per cent you get wrong becomes a heated issue in Question Period and the media.

Most strikingly, the business model has not relied on evidence to produce policy. The second president Bush touted the fact that he relied on his gut to make decisions.  Even though public servants now produce "all manner of reports  . . . they remain unread unless one of them has information to embarrass the government."

The old notion of public service -- despite its shortcomings -- worked. Our politician CEO's have gone to war against government bureaucracy and produced more bureaucracy:

Traditional public administration values have been tossed out the window, including the commitment to a parsimonious culture. Public servants have lost their way, uncertain how they should assess management performance, how they should generate policy advice, and how they should speak truth to political power and even to their own institution. If anything, recent management reforms in government have made public servants feel worse about their institution than they need to.

The result is that the public service has been knocked off its traditional moorings. Simply saying that government managers should operate like their private-sector counterparts without changing how political and administrative institutions function remains a sure recipe for failure. It entails a steep rise in the overhead cost of government that can’t be attributed to programs and services to the public.

The idea that government can be run according to the principles of McKinsey and Company is a lie. Those who peddle that idea are selling snake oil.

The Investor Is King

If you wondered why the Harper government has gutted Canada's environmental legislation, Frances Russell  provides the answer:

The North American Free Trade Agreement was the first of a New World Order of trade agreements designed, to borrow the words of the Trilateral Commission in 1975, to repeal “an excess of democracy in the western world.” It set a precedent never before dreamed of, let alone achieved, in international trade: the right of private investors to sue nations. And not just for millions, but billions, robbing national treasuries of the means to address the social and economic needs of their citizens and, in many cases, pushing them back into extreme poverty.

The Harperites mission is to make the world safe for investors. What that means in practice is that they seek out and sign "trade agreements" which entrench investor rights through a system of investor dispute mechanisms. And a remarkably small number of people have been laughing all the way to the bank:

NAFTA and its growing ranks of copycats like the Canada-Europe Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership are about nothing less than entrenching de facto government by transnational corporations. So far, the corporations are winning. In the process, they’re not just enriching themselves but also a global network of fabulously wealthy lawyers and accountants busy impoverishing governments and their citizens to achieve maximum profits for the multinationals they represent.

The rapacious success — and excess — of these latter-day robber barons can be traced through statistics. The number of investor-state lawsuits has soared from 38 cases in 1996 to 450 in 2011. The amount of money involved has soared, too.

A report titled Profiting From Injustice has documented the extent of the corporate coup:

"(I)t has become clear that the arbitration industry has a vested interest in perpetuating a regime that prioritizes the rights of investors at the expense of democratically elected national governments and sovereign states,” the report’s authors state. “They have built a multimillion-dollar self-serving industry, dominated by a narrow exclusive elite of law firms and lawyers whose interconnectedness and multiple financial interests raise serious doubts about their commitment to deliver fair and independent judgments.”

Investment arbitrators have an inbred bias favouring corporations over states, encourage lawsuits against governments in crisis, promote investment arbitration as a necessary condition for attracting foreign investment and encourage governments to sign investment treaties that use language maximizing possibilities for litigation.

The Harperites are the courtiers of this investor-lawyer elite. And, when they leave government, they will be rewarded -- many times over. Unfortunately, we the plebeians will be left with the bill.

This entry is cross posted at Eradicating Ecocide.

Haiti In Fantino's Crosshairs

Julian Fantino -- who proclaimed before Christmas that Canada's foreign aid would be linked to Canadian corporate opportunities  -- announced this week that Canada was suspending aid to Haiti, that God-forsaken half of the island of Hispaniola:

“If I can put it to you bluntly, we will not be signing any more blank cheques,” Fantino said. “There will be expectations and accountability associated with future aid.”

The former head of the Ontario Provincial Police likes to be blunt. The problem is that, as he showed on the national defense file, he's clueless. If you want to know what's going on in Haiti, ask former Governor General -- and Haitian native -- Michaelle Jean, now the United Nations special envoy to the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere:

Jean defended the slow pace of recovery in Haiti, noting that problems like corruption can be found everywhere, including in Canada. She also said that international donors could do a better job supporting the Haitian government’s own plans to build an economy fuelled by more than global charity.

Still trying to recover from the earthquake, Haiti was ravaged by a hurricane. The nation has endured the modern equivalent of the trials of Job. And before the earthquake and the hurricane, the island was despoiled as a French colony and by American companies paying starvation wages for the manufacture of plush animals which sold for premium prices elsewhere.

Thirty-five years ago, my wife and I visited a clinic, situated on the hills of Porte-au-Prince. It was surrounded by hovels, all of which lacked indoor plumbing. A toilet was a bucket. The contents were dumped on the path leading down to the street. While we were visiting, there was a sudden cloudburst. The refuse slopped down to the gutter, where a woman was bathing in a slough, formed in the aftermath of the storm.

And Mr. Fantino talks about accountability? He needs to take a Haitian bath.

The Meaning Of Silence

As Theresa Spence's hunger strike continues, Stephen Harper remains silent. But his acolytes have had plenty to say. Christie Blatchford and John Ivison have brushed aside Spence's demand for a meeting with the prime minister.

Still, Stephen Harper has remained tight lipped -- except for one throw away line in his New Year's Message about how his government "continued to strengthen First Nation relationships in 2012."  Michael Harris writes:

In Robert Bolt’s great play A Man for all Seasons, the prosecutor asks the jury a question about Thomas More’s unspoken opinion of the king’s marriage: “What does it betoken, this silence?” Well, what does Stephen Harper’s silence betoken? At one level it is obviously a contest of wills, precisely the kind of brick-wall standoff the PM so enjoys. He likes his political opposition in powder form. But there is another, much darker aspect to a leader’s silence when powerful emotions are running through the land.

Harper is playing to all the negative stereotypes about native people:

Elsewhere, all of the ugly stereotypes have been on display: Indians as lazy, Indians “freeloading” (that quote belongs to former Manitoba Tory youth leader Braydon Mazurkiewich), drinking all day, fighting all night and living lives that are just one long flight from responsible living. As for their leaders, we’re told they steal from their own people, are profligate with public money and try to hide from public accountability.

It's classic Harper strategy -- create a straw man and burn it down. The problem this time is that Theresa Spence is no straw woman -- and Stephen Harper is no Thomas More.

Canadian Class Warfare

 

Michael Valpy -- whose new address seems to be the Toronto Star -- writes that Canadians are becoming markedly intolerant of one another -- and Stephen Harper is reaping the political benefits:

What we have are profound, systemic demographic divisions of age and education that aren’t going to go away for years, if ever — divisions which Harper, like Shakespeare’s Brutus, has recognized as a tide in the affairs of men that, taken at the flood, can lead to victory.

He’s deftly caught the baby-boom on the boomerang — the young and rebellious of the 1960s and ’70s who grew into the old and cantankerously conservative of today.

He’s made hay out of the discontent of the non-university-educated who have been persuaded that the country’s so-called elites have made a hash of things. 

As in the United States, Canadians have stopped listening to those with whom they disagree. The consequence of that deafness has led a large number of Canadians to conclude that the ballot box offers no solutions:

What has happened, first, is that the overwhelming majority of Canadians under age 45 have stopped voting — not out of apathy as far as anyone can tell, but because they simply don’t see their political agendas mirrored in the agendas of Parliament and the provincial and territorial legislatures. How democratic is a country where most citizens below the median age don’t vote? Canada has become a country governed by a gerontocratic minority.

And, like their Republican brethren, the Harperites have fueled the resentment of Canadians who did not attend university:

Second, in a society where the well-educated are seen as possessing an unequal hold on power and an unequal share of the country’s socio-economic fruits, Harper and his Conservatives have been successful at presenting themselves as the voice of Canadians who incongruously have the short end of the inequality stick that government policies have allowed to grow.

 It all adds up to a formula for class warfare -- a war which Stephen Harper plans to win.

Doing The Corporate Dance

The Liberal Party's traditional strategy of campaigning from the left and governing from the right led the late Rene Levesque to conclude that the party was "the biggest whorehouse in the world." Now, Paul Adams writes, the party seems to be campaigning from the right:

Martha Hall Findlay calls for an end to supply management.

Marc Garneau wants to open up telecommunications to foreign investment.

And most important — because he appears to be an almost prohibitive front-runner — Justin Trudeau has tried to outflank the Harper Conservatives in welcoming offshore money to the oilpatch. His website has many repetitions of his “pro-growth” mantra, but almost no mention of climate change. He has even gone to Calgary to trash his father’s National Energy Program.

The Liberals have always had close ties to Bay Street. But Adams correctly notes that, until recently, they effectively bridged the gulf between right and left:

The Liberals built their 20th century dynasty by bridging the divide between left and right. The party’s left-leaning social policies took the party where the votes were, but its right wing was also key. No other party in the world was as successful at the straddle — and there were many others that tried.

Now their strategy seems to be to sell themselves as "new and improved" versions of Stephen Harper. In fact, that was Michael Ignatieff's sales pitch -- and it landed the  party in third place. You'd think that performance would have caused some real soul searching among Liberals.That exercise has yet to take place.

And there is already one party that does the corporate dance better than they do.

A Bad Year For The Environment

Canada's native peoples understand how toxic the Harper government is for the environment. So does the Toronto Star:

Bill C-38 included more than $160 million in cuts to environmental spending, significantly impairing our ability to measure or mitigate our impact on Canada’s wilderness and wildlife. Yet it was never put before the Commons environment committee, nor does the bill ever mention climate change. 

The Harperites know exactly what they are doing. That is why they do it secretly.

Apparently the Department of Fisheries and Oceans can’t find the $2 million per year required to run the facility, though it will have to scare up the $50 million needed to remediate the lakes in the area upon the centre’s closing. It’s a bewildering decision that calls into question whether the government’s motivations are, as it claims, fiscal, or whether the Conservatives are instead trying to silence a source of inconvenient data.

Meanwhile, we needn’t wonder about the motivations behind the government’s scrapping of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, a federally funded environmental watchdog created by the Mulroney government in 1988. When asked in Parliament how the government justified its decision to cut funding for the organization, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird implied it was because the Conservatives objected to the Round Table’s repeated endorsements of a carbon tax.

The environment gets in the way of profits -- and profits are the be all and end all in Harperland -- even if they result in long term disaster. As the Star says, we need to debate the wisdom of government policy. But this government is not for turning. And it's certainly not for debating.

2012 was a bad year for the environment. One hopes that 2013 will be the year that Canadians turn against the Harper government.


This entry is cross posted at Eradicating Ecocide.

Out of Touch

There is no love lost between Stephen Harper and Joe Clark. When Clark's official portrait was hung in the Centre Block four years ago, Stephane Dion and Paul Martin attended the ceremony. But, breaking with tradition, Harper managed to be away in Europe.

So, when Clark came out in support of Theresa Spence last week, it's a sure bet that Mr. Harper was not pleased. Michael Harris writes:

But for a former prime minister, and a Conservative one at that, to pay his respects to Chief Spence presents a challenge to the sitting PM. After all, Harper has shown himself to be the Tin Man of Canadian politics, a calculator on two legs who lacks a heart. You get the feeling he would rather have a root canal than a discussion with someone who had a beef with him.

Instead, Harper enlisted Senator Patrick Rousseau to carry his water. Rousseau told Spence she should call things off. But he's in the Prime Minister's pocket. And his relationship with First Nations organizations these days are rocky:

This is the guy who effectively called a CP reporter a bitch, who dubbed the former native organization he headed up a “Mickey Mouse” operation, and who is now suing that same organization — which he says should cooperate with him as a Canadian senator. Brazeau claims that Theresa Spence isn’t a good role model for native kids. Maybe Justin Trudeau punched him a little harder than anyone knows.

Mr. Harper won't come to a premiers' conference. Why should he meet with Chief Spence?

And so Stephen Harper has placed his bet. It is clear from his strategy that he believes he will be going neither to a meeting nor a funeral and that sufficient pressure can be brought to bear on Chief Spence that she will voluntarily discontinue her hunger strike. That is why he has placed the prestige of Leona Aglukkaq and Patrick Brazeau squarely on the barrelhead by having both of them support the government’s position.

If Harper is right, his victory will be, at best, a partial and temporary one. Yes, there will be people who will praise his steadfastness on matters of protocol as a sign of leadership. But those will mostly be white people who are simply tired of wrestling with the profound issues raised by Chief Spence.

Harper is betting that Theresa Spence -- and the problems she personifies -- will go away. He doesn't understand the desperation of Canada's native peoples. The man at the top is truly out of touch.

Private Wealth and Public Squalor

Today's Toronto Star  reports that things have been as they are in Attawapiskat for decades -- and there's not a lot of hope that they will change:

The community was founded in 1893 by Catholic missionaries. The steepled church, an aging grey structure next to the Attawapiskat River, remains the most striking structure.

In 1901, the Hudson’s Bay Co. built a store here. Most natives lived in the bush at the time, hunting, trapping and fishing, and it was only in the 1930s that the settlement began to grow. Housing came in the 1970s, running water and sewage treatment arrived in the 1990s.

It’s been unravelling since it all began.

The local priest says that the main problem is that there's nothing to do  -- unemployment is at 70%. Therefore, kids there see they have no future, and they simply don't attend school:

The children feel no obligation to attend because they wake up in households where they have never seen their parents go to work. “What is the point, they think,” says Vezina.

No education, no employment. It’s that simple, he sighs. 

Homes and  a new school need to be built. But that work has been stalled. Attawpaiskat is a microcosm of what's happening nationally. While governments tell us we have a debt crisis, Paul Krugman has been writing for years that we have a jobs crisis.

It's not that there are no things which need doing. In Toronto, the Gardiner Expressway is crumbling. In Montreal, pieces of the Ville Marie Expressway fall on cars; and the Champlain Bridge is on the verge of falling into the St. Lawrence. But the chorus from all government benches is the same: "We can't afford it." The books must be balanced.

The American economist Dean Baker wrote recently that, "Of course, the point of economic policy is to produce an economy that improves the lives of the people in a sustainable way." By that measure, what is happening at Attawapkiskat -- and in Canada in general -- is an abject failure.

 In the words of another economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, our economic policy has generated "private wealth and public squalor."

How Not To Buy An Airplane

David Olive writes that the F-35 fiasco is a case study in how to bungle a military purchase:

If anything’s to be gained from the monumental botch that is the costliest and most multi-functional military aircraft project ever attempted, the Joint Strike Fighter program from which the F-35 is derived should be taught at the Royal Military College and its peers worldwide. It is an epic case history of supplier over-reach on the part of defence contractors, and deficient decision-making by public policy makers.

From the beginning, the F-35 was too much airplane -- and it promised the impossible:

 The folly of the F-35 – an exercise in hubris for which Napoleon’s Russian excursions are roughly analogous – is that it was to be the first fighter plane that would accommodate the varied needs of all four branches of the U.S. Armed Forces. And to make affordable an aircraft program of unprecedented cost, Lockheed would have to peddle as many F-35s to as many countries as possible. 

The government did not exercise the skepticism that anyone buying a used car would apply to such a purchase. To begin with, the manufacturer did not have a good track record:

The checkered history of F-35 sponsor Lockheed Martin should have given pause to Canada’s Department of National Defence (DND). Soon after the Bethesda, Md. company was created in a controversial 1999 merger, the world’s largest defence contractor was mired in managerial chaos and culture clashes. New-product delays and cost overruns became routine with flagship projects including Lockheed’s F-22 Raptor, C-130J cargo plane, and its latest-generation satellites. In 2006, the year Ottawa formally committed to the F-35 purchase, the U.S. Army killed Lockheed’s troubled Aerial Common Sensors spy plane. And the repeated delivery delays with the F-35 have prompted the Pentagon’s chief procurement officer this year to label the F-35 “acquisition malpractice.”

And, having refused to let Parliament see the books, the Harper government simply lied about the costs:

From the time that Ottawa settled on the F-35 in July 2010, it misinformed Canadians through last year’s general election that the purchase price was $9-billion. Today the estimate, properly including decades of maintenance costs, is about $44 billion. Other likely national F-35 buyers have publicly disclosed the plane’s spiralling costs. “What distinguishes Canada has been the denials of the government,” Stephen Saideman of McGill University’s political science department wrote earlier this year. 

The lesson is pretty clear. Don't believe a government which loudly insists that it is competent. It's a variation on Nixon's line, "I am not a crook!"

Holding Their Breath

It's truly remarkable. The Republican Party will not move away from its one big idea: No new taxes. Ever.

After losing in November, Republicans appear to have chosen David Farragut as their source of inspiration. "Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead," they shout. Then, like children, they hold their breath until they turn blue -- or red.

Public opinion isn't on their side. Robert Reich writes:

Public opinion is already running strongly in favor of President Obama and the Democrats, and against the GOP. In the latest CNN/ORC poll, 48 percent say they’ll blame Republicans if no deal is reached while 37 percent blame Obama. Confidence in congressional Republicans is hovering at about 30 percent; Obama is enjoying the confidence of 46 percent. And over half of all Americans think the GOP is too extreme.

Yet Republicans haven’t budged. The fact is, they may not care a hoot about the opinions of most Americans.

If you are wondering why they are unmoved by anyone or anything, consider Reich's explanation for what is happening:

The national party is in disarray. Boehner isn’t worried about a challenge to his leadership; no challenger has emerged. The real issue is neither he nor anyone else is in charge of the GOP. Romney’s loss, along with the erosion of their majority in the House and Democratic gains in the Senate, has left a vacuum at the top.

House Republicans don’t run nationally. They run only in their own districts — which, because of gerrymandering, are growing even more purely Republican. Their major concern is being reelected in 2014, and their biggest potential obstacle in their way is a primary challenge from the right.

What Americans are witnessing is the triumph of Tip O'Neill's dictum: All politics is local. The parochial  trumps the national. They are no longer all in this together.

 Rest assured. There will be a reckoning.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

Doomed To Repeat Themselves

Today, Postmedia's Michael den Tandt asks a question of national import: Can the Conservatives learn from their mistakes? For, indeed, they have made many. But they all add up to one major mistake:

The hardest knock of all against the Tories, however, and the one that cuts deepest, is simply that they’ve forgotten how to listen. Their opponents will say they never knew how to begin with. That is untrue. If the Conservatives had a single secret weapon over the past seven years, beyond their extraordinary fundraising network, it was their ear.  They had an unerring sense of what, when all is said and done, Canadians want.

In the past year, however, and especially since the spring, the Tories have stumbled from one deadfall trap to the next – with they themselves doing the digging. They consider their two omnibus bills in 2012 to be triumphs of efficient government: Doing the job Canadians elected them to do. From a Conservative standpoint, that is to re-structure every aspect of the economy, and the government’s relationship with it, in light of what is most efficient. Only this approach, the thinking goes, can prepare Canada for the challenges of the 21^st Century.

In the end, rule by fiat will catch up with the Harperites. The evidence of rebellion is everywhere -- in Quebec, in B.C. and in the Idle No More protests of Canada's First Nations. Den Tandt suggests a couple of things which Harper could do to improve his and his party's standing -- like holding press conferences and dumping cabinet ministers like Vic Toews, Peter Mackay and Gerry Ritz.

However, don't count on Stephen Harper taking den Tandt's suggestions, because the prime minister suffers from the same disease that infects all of modern conservatism -- terminal certitude. These jugheads are dedicated to repeating their own failures.

Democracy Or Oligarchy

The American editor and essayist Lewis Lapham has delineated the three hallmarks of democracy. Michael Harris refers to them in a piece he wrote for ipolitics:

Lewis Lapham, author and twice editor of Harper’s Magazine in the United States, made the same point. Democracy, he wrote, announces itself in three fundamental ways: an honest public discussion about issues; accountability of the governors to the governed; and equal protection under the law.

By Lapham's yardstick, Canada is not a democracy -- "let alone a parliamentary democracy. It is an oligarchy with a few well chosen friends and millions upon millions of people to ignore, vilify or bamboozle."

Consider the matter of whether or not there is public discussion of government policy:

For several years, the Conservative government lied its brains out about the F-35 program. They lied about whether there had been a competition, about whether there was a contract, and most spectacularly, about how much these jet fighters would cost the poor saps who have to pay for them.

But contrition is for little people. Oligarchs never say they’re sorry. After being outed by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, by the auditor general and then by independent accounting firm KPMG, the prime minister told a national TV audience that the accounting firm’s report “validated” the government figures for the F-35, and that an “assumption was just made” that Canada would buy these aircraft. This, of course, is the stuff that makes the grass turn green.

And then there is the issue of accountability to the governed:

Jim Flaherty’s last budget, the Agatha Christie budget, brought down billions in cuts. But the mystery of what was cut — where, and by how much — endures. The lion’s share of federal departments haven’t responded to requests by Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page for the precise nature of the Harper government’s slashing.

If opposition MPs and parliamentary officers don’t know the details, it is impossible to debate the cuts — which is, of course, pretty much the idea.

Finally, there is the question of equal justice before the law:

This is a very important question because as the Harper oligarchy suppresses the rights of the political opposition, unions, officers of parliament, environmentalists, scientists and aboriginals, it finds itself more and more before judges.

The PM’s view is that you win some, you lose some. Actually, he’s lost quite a few and will probably lose more in 2013 because of the alleged unconstitutionality of much of his justice legislation as contained in poorly-debated omnibus bills. And that is a universe the prime minister is comfortable in — the winner-take-all world of expensive court rulings and a grinding process — life as an elitist joust where he with the longest lance usually prevails.

Theresa Spence's hunger strike is an attempt to do what Canada's opposition parties have been unable to do -- replace oligarchy with democracy.

A Reader's Response

Two days ago, I published a post on Stephen Harper and guns. Yesterday, I received an email from a reader. That term, while accurate, is a bit misleading. Like me, the reader is a retired teacher. But, unlike me, he has been an officer in the Canadian Forces. And, during summers, he used to shoot competitively at paper targets. He has been a friend for twenty-seven years. This is his response:

Owen,

Until I read your blog yesterday, I had never heard of the National Rifle Association of Canada, despite its existence since 1978. I was, however a member of two other shooting groups, the Dominion of Canada Rifle Association and another Canadian federation from which Canada's Olympic shooters are drawn. I've forgotten its name. Where these two federations differ from the NRA of Canada is that neither attempts to justify firearms as a means of protection. Their purpose is to promote sports shooting through competitions, training, and weapons safety.

The older of the two federations, the DCRA, had a more serious role early in its history. Like Fort Henry and RMC, It was founded in the mid to late 1800's as Britain was scaling back its military support for Canada, and it was intended as a means of creating a body of shooters who could be assimilated into a colonial militia in an "emergency" (like an American invasion) with less training time. Numerous military ranges were built close to towns across the Country - one, I've been told, was just outside Picton. The rifles used by the DCRA were military issue, while the government supplied ammunition. Until the 1970's, DCRA members competed with customized military rifles, using issue ammunition supplied by DND.

At no time have I heard either federation argue that owning firearms was valuable for self-defence. It's a shame such a "nut" organization as the NRA of Canada has seen the light of day in our country. A Wikipedia search revealed it's headquartered in Edmonton. Doesn't anything worthwhile come out of that province?

This morning on CNN, Fareed Zakaria made an interesting point about gun control in the States. As you know, President Obama responded to the Newtown shootings by stating something had to change, that solving gun violence would be a complex process because the reasons for the violence are complex. Not only is there a need for gun control, but a need to examine how mental illness is handled, as well as to examine how gun violence is promoted by movies and video games. The NRA, of course, lept on the last two solutions, in addition to arming even more Americans. Zakaria maintained solving gun violence is not a complex affair: the solution is as plain as the nose on

He pointed out that while the USA has a mere 5% of the world's population, Americans own 50 % of the world's firearms, and in general are by far the most heavily armed citizenry in the world, well ahead of Ethiopians. US Gun killings are twelve times greater than in any other developed country. Is mental illness an important cause? Zakaria claimed the USA has one of the best mental health systems in the world. How about movies and video games? Europeans see the same violent movies and play the same video games as Americans. But in Europe killings by firearms are a twelfth of the USA's. In Japan, where violent movies and video games are always on the cutting edge, the murder rate by firearms is 0%! Strict gun controls are a fact of life in all those countries.

I can't believe Obama is ignorant of this kind of information, Owen. Once again, he's showing himself "full of it", playing on the hearts of Americans who desperately want change, all the while signalling the NRA and its supporters that they have nothing to fear from him.

Americans may have concluded some time ago that the 2nd Amendment gives them to right to own and bear arms - any arms of their choice, it seems. But knowing how the American constitution was drafted by some very bright men, I doubt this was the intention of the amendment. It would have been a counterproductive way of creating a nation where its citizens felt secure. I think modern Americans have bastardized the intent of the 2nd, which was to provide a military balance between the rulers and the ruled by enabling citizens to arm themselves in militias to discourage executive attempts to overturn the constitution by force of arms. There would have been nothing startling about this approach to those who drafted the amendment.

A little more than 100 years earlier, when Charles II was restored to the English throne, a very similar arrangement was agreed. To protect the monarch from the citizenry, a small standing army was formed comprised of the "Guards" regiments (the Coldstreams, Grenadiers, etc.). To protect citizens from the Monarch, a much larger body of part-time, armed militias were formed throughout the country. It provided an effective stand-off until commoners had control of government, and there was no further need for such armed guarantees. 

There's a huge difference between a citizenry being armed this way, and the way in which today's Americans are arming themselves.

Perhaps you've studied this matter before. If so, I hope I haven't bored you with the detail.

I wrote back to say that, indeed, I was not bored; and I asked permission to publish his response.

I only have one thing to add. In the 1960's, my friend was stationed in Cyprus, as a member of the peacekeeping force which was sent there by the United Nations. More than most, he understands how difficult it is to actualize a policy of Peace On Earth Good Will To Men. But we live in hope. Happy Holidays.

Behind The Numbers

When Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page released a report  two weeks ago, which documented the average annual salary of a federal employee as $114,100, there were howls from the usual critics. Andrew Jackson writes:

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation was quick to jump on the report of the Parliamentary Budget Office on federal government pay and compensation, saying that it provided “shocking numbers on the overly generous compensation of federal government employees.” Echoing similarly-exaggerated claims by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business and other employer groups at its recent pre-budget hearings, the House of Commons Finance Committee has just called for a review of public sector compensation and benefits.

But, if you dig down in the numbers, things become a little clearer:

Three of Canada’s leading academic economists — Morley Gunderson, Douglas Hyatt and Craig Riddell — conducted a study for the Canadian Policy Research Networks in 2000. The foreword summarizes their views on public/private pay:
“
(T)he answer to the question of whether there is a ‘pay premium’ associated with employment in government is far from a simple one. On the one hand, some groups, such as senior managers and specialized occupational groups, such as information technology workers, are paid less than their private sector counterparts. On the other hand, women in government, especially those employed in service jobs, such as food services, tend to be more highly paid than women in the private sector. It is clear that employment and pay equity policies, coupled with decades of collective bargaining, have narrowed the pay differentials between men and women and between the highest and lowest paid workers.”

A 2006 report by the Treasury Board Secretariat comparing federal sector and private sector compensation similarly found that the average federal government pay premium was “small” and existed mainly for lower-paid workers. Managers and professionals in the federal government, particularly senior managers, lag behind the private sector. Only a handful of senior deputy ministers earn the $220,000 per year needed to break into Canada’s top one per cent of taxpayers.

The Harper government and its allies have been conducting  a war on wages for over a decade.The problem is that their targets are lower paid workers -- not those who earn high salaries -- particularly in the private sector.

And you wondered why those F-35s cost $45 billion?

Harper And Guns

On the day the NRA advocated having an armed guard in every American school, Thomas Walkom wrote that the gun issue could come back to haunt Stephen Harper. For all of his bloviating about the long gun registry, Walkom reminds his readers that Harper originally voted for it:

Certainly, Harper was careful. Then a Reform MP, he broke ranks with his party to vote with the Liberals for the gun registry.

He claimed at the time that he was following the wishes of his Calgary West constituents. But, as he would explain later and in a different context, he was also uncomfortable with emotional, populist issues.

A party that wanted to govern, he liked to say, couldn’t waste its time on marginal groups.

But for Harper, policy is all about votes. His uncritical support of Israel is about votes in Canada. His rejection of the BHP bid for Potash Corporation was all about votes in Saskatchewan. His recognition of Quebec as a "nation within a nation" was about votes in that province  -- even though Quebecers soon figured out that his declaration -- like his apology to Canada's native peoples -- was just hot air.

Now the National Firearms Assocication has Mr. Harper in its sights:

 "The price of our freedom is unceasing vigilance,” declared one recent editorial in the NFA’s official magazine. It warned that “fifth-columnists” inside the federal bureaucracy — in alliance with the United Nations — were plotting to keep alive the Liberals’ insidious “social engineering experiment.”

These days, the people he courted as allies are turning against Mr. Harper.

She Has His Number

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The War On Wages Continues

On the subject of rotating teacher strikes in Ontario, Tom Walkom offers a little historical perspective:
 

When Bob Rae’s New Democratic Party government overrode collective agreements in 1993, many private sector unions — including the Steelworkers and my union, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers — broke with their public sector counterparts to support the NDP regime.

The essence of their argument would be familiar today: private sector workers had already suffered from what was, at the time, the biggest recession since the 1930s; therefore, public sector workers had to sacrifice as well.

It was an argument that resonated with their rank and file. But it ignored the real story, which was that government was changing the rules of the entire collective bargaining game.

We know that, two summers ago, Jim Flaherty met with Canada's movers and shakers, and one of the items on their agenda was lowering the cost of Canadian labour. That wish became reality when Bill C-377 passed the House. Last week, Tim Hudak -- whose bulb has never burned very brightly -- announced that, when he becomes premier of Ontario, he will table Right to Work Legislation. And, yesterday, General Motors announced that it will move production of its Camero from Oshawa to Michigan -- even though Canadian and Ontario taxpayers helped keep the company alive during its darkest hours.

Walkom writes that the teachers strike is a moment of truth for Canadian labour:

So think of this latest foray against teachers as part of a package. In Ottawa, the federal government brings temporary workers into Canada to staff doughnut shops. They do so not because the ability to pour coffee is an unusual skill, but because doughnut-shop owners don’t want to pay the wages expected by Canadian workers.

In Ottawa and at Queen’s Park, governments respond to deficits by cutting away at social spending. The reason here is that programs like employment insurance keep workers from becoming so desperate that they will take any job at any wage.

Like Canada's native peoples, it's time for labour to be Idle No More.