TS and the Vast Socialist Conspiracy

Designated Speech Zones

2010-05-14T02:22:00.002-03:00

One of the gravest assaults on civil liberties by George Bush II was the idea of "free speech zones" in which protest would be allowed - in blatant violation of the right to free speech contained in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. And now these abominations on freedom have come to Canada.

For the G20 summit taking place in Toronto in late June, the Integrated Security Unit (a concretion of the Toronto Police Service, the Ontario Provincial Police and the RCMP have declared a "designated speech zone" for protests. This is obscene. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms declares that all of Canada is, subject to reasonable limits, a designated speech zone. The notion that only in certain areas are the people to be free to exercise their constitutional rights is antithetical to free expression. Protesters are supposed to be mollified by the fact that there will be a "live feed" to the convention centre where the high priests of capital will be meeting so that the protests will be "visible." A few monitors showing protesters does not recompense us for our lost liberty.

I was prepared to accept the idea that there might be an area in which protests would be prohibited. I wasn't happy about the idea, but I was prepared to go along with it. But the notion that the entire city, with the exception of Queen's Park, is going to be an area in which free expression is to be suppressed is intolerable. The G20 has the right to meet, but they don't have the right to meet out of sight and out of mind of the people objecting to them. Shame on the police for going out of their way to curb our liberty. What a great commitment to constitutional governance they have.

The IMF, Structural Adjustment and Greece

2010-05-06T13:15:00.002-03:00

The IMF and its boosters like to bill it as having 'seen the light.' Nowadays, we hear all about the IMF that has learned its lesson and is warm and cuddly. We are told that the IMF understands the importance of maintaining governance and government capacity. Why, we are even told they have a focus on poverty reduction. For a sterling example of this, you can see a discussion at enmasse.ca between me and several other posters going under the handles thwap, Rufus Polson, elmateo, Senor Magoo and A_J about the IMF, structural adjustment and whether or not Haiti should accept the loans offered by the IMF after the earthquake. You can read it here.

The notion that the IMF is not a heartless profit machine is, frankly, absurd. The conditions being imposed on Greece now prove this and put the lie to the notion that the IMF has changed from the cruel master of the 1980s and 1990s. All you have to do is look at the package of "austerity" measures that the Greek government (a quisling "Socialist Party" government at that) is trying to put through the parliament. The BBC has the details (see here and here), and the thing that is immediately noticeable is that the vast majority of the pain from these reforms is going to be felt by disadvantaged groups: the poor and the elderly.

In a crisis, the government needs to look to both its income and cost situation. Clearly, the IMF and the European Union are demanding action on the cost side of the ledger. But the government is doing almost all of its actions on this side, trying to cut expenditure without substantially increasing long term revenue. These measures don't even include a hike in income taxes, the most progressive way a government has of raising revenue. The government ought to be hiking taxes on its top income brackets to ease its balance of payments crisis, not cutting services and raising taxes that have disproportionate impacts on the poorest people in society. The government should also be raising taxes on banks and other corporations - the ones who actually caused the crisis. Instead, all there is is a one-off tax on profits and hikes in VAT (the Greek sales tax) and increased taxes on fuel, alcohol and tobacco. For the elderly, these cuts will be a double-whammy as they will see their pensions cut, and their costs rise.

The BBC also mentions privatization. Privatization is stupid at the best of economic times, killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. In times like these it would be a fire sale, giving away valuable state enterprises for pennies on the Euro. Privatization represents just another way of transferring capital accrued by the people in common to the owning class. Transferring control away from democratically accountable institutions like Parliament to the kleptomanic classes that caused this problem. But this is another hallmark of the reckless profit-lust of the IMF. It seems that in their view and Naomi Klein's words, the state should be nothing more than a conveyor belt moving public money to private interests.

The IMF remains the same villain it has been for decades. What is happening now shows no indication that the IMF cares a whit about reducing poverty, in fact these actions will without a shadow of a doubt increase poverty in Greece. The IMF cannot viably claim to be new, warm and fuzzy when it is pursuing policy options that could well have been tailored to cause more poverty and misery. The IMF should just admit that it is what it is, a shill for the global capitalist class, seeking to open countries to exploitation by capital.

The Oil Industry is Psychopathic

2010-05-05T00:28:00.005-03:00

In the days following the revelation of just how monumentally disastrous the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is going to be, it has emerged that the oil industry is asking the government of Canada to loosen restrictions and regulations for safety on drilling in Canada's arctic waters. Are they insane? If nothing else, did their entire PR departments take an unscheduled mass vacation? To suggest that measures to protect the environment should be loosened now, when it is becoming clear to even the most thickheaded and troglodytic supporter of offshore drilling that it represents a colossal threat to the environment, is moronic. To make the suggestion at all is verging on psychopathic.

This isn't something that I am suggesting lightly. The people in charge of the oil industry are exhibiting the classic lack of empathy and emotion that characterizes psychopaths. They are actively endangering the health and wellbeing of millions, if not billions, of people for their own gratification. When confronted, they cry crocodile tears, as the CEO of BP did after his company's heinously negligent behaviour placed one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world in peril. They don't care about other people, though as explained in the film The Corporation this is an inherent defect of the corporate form and a not so inherent defect of the system of legislative regulation of corporations in North America and western Europe. Their only motivation is profit, the basic gratification of the capitalist.

The disaster in the Gulf is as bad as it is because the gusher can't be capped. It can't be capped because the pressure is far to high. The pressure can't be reduced until a relief well is completed. And it is going to take ninety days, NINETY DAYS, to drill the relief well. So oil is going to keep pouring into the Gulf of Mexico for ninety days!! That is fundamentally unacceptable, yet there is nothing that can be done about it. Canadian regulations require that in Arctic Ocean waters, relief wells must be drilled within the same season as the main well. This sensible precaution means that if a Deepwater Horizon-type incident were to have occurred in Canada's arctic waters (touch wood that it doesn't) it would have been much more easily sealed off, because a relief well would already have been drilled and could be put into use immediately to allow the capping of the main well. If there absolutely must be drilling in arctic waters, this is at least the most sensible way of doing it.

The same-season relief well requirement is expensive though. It means the oil companies have to put in a lot of money to make sure that the relief well is finished before the end of the season. Accordingly, they don't like it. And now they want the government of Canada to scrap it. I say fuck that and fuck them. Fuck them and the horse they rode in on.

Even now, when the oil industry has been caught with its lies on safety exposed in a spill so massive it is visible from space, they are playing a game of musical chairs over who is responsible. BP is trying to foist as much blame as it can off on other players. It remains to be seen how much of the financial burden of trying to clean up this gigantic mess is going to be foisted onto American tax payers, many of whom have had their livelihoods stripped away as a result of BPs uncaring and callous negligence, but you can bet it will be a lot. If there was any justice in this world, a fine would be levied against BP big enough to put them and their affiliates out of business forever.

The oil industry's behaviour, seeking to avoid all but the most basic repercussions of their actions, and to seek to eliminate measures that might prevent it from happening again, demonstrate the basic principle of capitalism: do whatever you have to do, no matter how down and dirty, sleazy, underhanded and hurt whoever or whatever you have to hurt to make as much money as you can. That's why I fundamentally reject capitalism. As a system of social organization, it is the embodiment of psychopathy. Greed is good. Harm is good. Responsibility and ethics are bad. Even after the Exxon Valdez catastrophe, the oil industry had to be dragged kicking and screaming into mandatory double-hulling on oil tankers. I am willing to bet that even now, after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the oil industry and their bought-and-paid-for slugs in the US Congress are going to fight tighter regulation on offshore drilling every miserable step of the way. Because heaven forfend that anything should get in the way of the almighty dollar, be it plants, animals or people. Because other things just don't count. That's the psychopathy of capitalism.

Surprise! The Liberals are also Complicit in Detainee Torture

2010-03-10T11:53:00.002-04:00

Up until today, the public evidence indicated only that Conservative ministers had known, and done nothing about, the fact that detainees were being tortured by the Afghan authorities. Well not any more.

CBC is reporting that a Canadian diplomat, Eileen Olexiuk, raised concerns that detainees were being tortured in 2005, while Mr. Dithers himself (Paul Martin) was still in office. And apparently her concerns were ignored. As Ms. Olexiuk put it, based on the response she got from the government, she didn't think that anyone cared.

Shame on the Liberals. There are MPs in the Liberal caucus now who were ministers in 2005. Why haven't they sounded the alarm? Oh right, because that would make their party look bad. I shouldn't have expected anything different out of the Liberals. Two leaders later and its still the same thing. I guess with the Liberals the old aphorism holds true: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

A Timeline of Revelations on Torture in Afghanistan

2010-03-09T02:43:00.005-04:00

I put together this timeline of revelations on the issue of Afghan detainees for the enMasse discussion board. I thought I might as well post it here too. There is a continuing thread on detainee abuse at enMasse, and it and Google News were invaluable in putting this together. Just a warning, it is long, depressing and probably partially incomplete. If you have more events to add, please by all means do so in the comments and I will add them into the main entry.

December 2005 – Amnesty International and the BC Civil Liberties Association file an application in the Federal Court seeking to stop the practice of transferring detainees from Canadian custody to Afghan authorities

Feb. 6, 2007 – Military officials begin investigation of three complaints by Afghan prisoners that they were abused while in the custody of the Canadian forces.

Feb. 21, 2007 – Amnesty and the BCCLA again seek to stop the transfer of detainees

March 2, 2007 – Three detainees at the centre of a probe into abuse of detainees by the Canadian forces disappear. They are never found.

March 9, ~~2001~~ 2007 – Amir Attaran reveals a covert agreement signed in 2005 to transfer detainees to Afghan secret police

April 23, 2007 – Globe and Mail reveals thirty allegations of abuse by Afghan authorities of prisoners transferred by the Canadian Forces, contradicting earlier claims by the government that no complaints had been made

April 25, 2007 – Then Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor says that Canada will monitor detainees for signs of abuse. The same day, the Globe and Mail reveals that a report on the treatment of Afghan detainees was circulated to Cabinet Ministers in 2006 which was censored to remove information damaging to the government. The government had previously denied the existence of this report.

April 26, 2007 – The Globe and Mail reports that Michael Byers and William Schabas sent a letter to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court requesting an investigation into Gordon O'Connor and then Chief of the Defence Staff Rick Hillier on the grounds of possible crimes committed against Afghan detainees.

April 27, 2007 – Stockwell Day insists Canada has had access to detainees since the beginning of the mission, and that all allegations of mistreatment by Afghan authorities are false. He also insists that the existing agreement provides sufficient protection for Afghan detainees.

April 30, 2007 – The government denies that there have ever been any specific allegations of prisoner abuse. Later the same day, Stockwell Day says that Canada has received at least two specific allegations of torture.

May 2, 2007 – A source inside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs revealed that the original prisoner transfer agreement was drafted primarily by the Canadian Forces, and that Foreign Affairs was largely frozen out, suggesting that Hillier acted without government authority. Later the same day, the National Post reports that negotiations for a prisoner transfer agreement were initiated approved Paul Martin and Bill Graham in May of 2005 showing that the government was directing policy on detainee transfers.

May 3, 2007 – Canadian government signs new detainee transfer agreement with Afghanistan. The agreement includes substantially increased protections for detainees, at least on paper.

May 18, 2007 – Amir Attaran testifies before a committee of the House of Commons and reveals a cover-up of reports indicating that detainees transferred by Canada were tortured by Afghan authorities. Lieutenant-General Walter Natynczyk, then Chief of the Land Staff, now Chief of the Defence Staff, says that there is no proof any detainees transferred by Canada have been tortured.

June 6, 2007 – Stockwell Day tells the parliamentary committee that they shouldn't care about abuse allegations because the people making the allegations are “terrorists.”

June 9, 2007 – CBC reports that the Department of Foreign Affairs now acknowledges six specific claims of torture or abuse

June 25, 2007 – The Globe and Mail reports that one of the investigations into the fate of Afghan detainees transferred by Canada won't be allowed to look into whether or not they were tortured or abused

July 9, 2007 – The Globe and Mail reports that the Department of National Defence has been systematically and illegally refusing access to information requests on the topic of the treatment of transferred detainees on the grounds of national security, including information as innocuous as the number of detainees transferred

Sept. 22, 2007 – The Globe and Mail reports that fully one quarter of the detainees transferred to Afghan authorities by the Canadian Forces have disappeared and cannot be found

Oct. 29, 2007 – La Presse reports that prisoners at Afghan jails in Kandahar province continue to be tortured. The government dismisses the report as Taliban propaganda.

Nov. 6, 2007 – The Federal Court dismisses the government's motion to strike the application by Amnesty and the BCCLA for documents relating to prisoner transfers

Nov. 15, 2007 – The Toronto Star reports that the government admits that one of the allegations of torture is “credible.”

Nov. 22, 2007 – Peter MacKay asserts that suggesting that the Canadian Forces are involved in war crimes is “un-Canadian”.

Jan. 24, 2008 – The Globe and Mail reports that the government stopped transferring detainees to Afghan authorities on November 5, 2007, but didn't tell anyone.

Jan. 25, 2008 – A government spokeswoman says that the government was not told that the Canadian Forces were suspending prisoner transfers. Later the same day, she says she mispoke on that point. Stephane Dion reveals that he and Michael Ignatieff were informed the prior week but were sworn to secrecy.

Feb. 1, 2008 – The Globe and Mail reports that the government was aware in the spring of 2007 that the governor of Kandahar was personally involved in torturing prisoners. The allegations against the governor were reported to the International Red Cross by Canadian diplomats, but not to the House of Commons.

December 10, 2008 – Amnesty once against files suit in the Federal Court claiming that the new detainee transfer agreement has not stopped torture.

Oct. 7, 2009 – Richard Colvin files documents with the Military Police Complaints Commission which is holding hearings on the question, in an attempt to get around the government's attempts to stop him from testifying to the Commission. Colvin claims that the Canadian government was aware of torture as early as 2006.

Oct. 14, 2009 – The Toronto Star reports that Colvin warned the government in writing in May 2006 about the risk of torture with transfers to Afghan detainees.

Nov. 18, 2009 – Colvin testifies to the parliamentary committee that the government knew it was likely that all detainees transferred by the Canadian forces were tortured.

Nov. 19, 2009 – Peter MacKay denies that there has been a single proven allegation of torture, and that Colvin got his information directly from the Taliban.

Nov. 22, 2009 – Yahoo News reports that the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission has documented at least 400 cases of torture across Afghanistan. The vast majority of these claims were made in 2006 and 2007, when Colvin was in Afghanistan. The same day, Peter MacKay repeats his assertion that there is no proof that any detainees have been tortured.

Nov. 25, 2009 – The government bars Colvin from handing over documents supporting his claims to the parliamentary committee investigating detainee abuse on the grounds of national security. On the same day, the Toronto Star reports that e-mails sent to the office of Peter MacKay as early as 2006 expressed alarm about the treatment of Afghan detainees. This is contrary to MacKay's claim that he never heard anything about it until May of 2007.

Nov. 26, 2009 – Former Afghan MP Malali Joya backs up Colvin's claims. Later the same day, Luis Moreno Ocampo, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, begins an investigation into the complicity of NATO troops in the abuse of Afghan detainees. The news makes almost no splash in the Canadian media.

Nov. 27, 2009 – Three top generals claim that they were not worried because the Colvin memos never used the word torture, despite the fact that they have been shown to contain descriptions of treatment that amount to torture. Later the same day, in a humiliating new low for Canada, China lectures the government of Canada for its participation in torture.

Dec. 2, 2009 – The Canadian Press reports that in June of 2006 the Red Cross warned Canadian diplomats in Kandahar that detainees were being abused by Afghan authorities

Dec. 7, 2009 – The Globe and Mail reports that documentary evidence and the sworn testimony of Canadian officers proves at least one instance in 2006 in which Afghan authorities so badly beat a detainee that the Canadian Forces took him back into their custody. This evidence makes a liar of both Peter MacKay and Walter Natynczyk.

Dec. 11, 2009 – The House of Commons votes to require the government to turn over all relevant documents in an unedited form to the parliamentary committee. The government flatly refuses on the grounds of national security.

Dec. 14, 2009 – Lawrence Cannon admits that some of the detainees transferred by Canada have gone missing and cannot be accounted for because the Afghan authorities refuse to account for them to Canadian officials in defiance of the 2007 agreement.

Dec. 18, 2009 – CBC reports that documents prepared for Peter MacKay in 2008 indicate that the military police launched six separate investigations into allegations of abuse involving members of the Canadian Forces.

Dec. 30, 2009 – Stephen Harper prorogues Parliament, dissolving the parliamentary committee investigating the abuse of detainees.

Jan. 25, 2010 – The Toronto Star reports that the government is refusing to pay Colvin's legal fees after they were the ones to summon him to testify.

Jan. 28, 2010 – The government agrees to pay Colvin's legal fees.

Mar. 6, 2010 – Amir Attaran reveals that the documents that the government is resisting releasing will reveal that the Canadian government made a policy decision to transfer detainees to Afghan authorities for the purpose of the detainees being tortured.

Mar. 9, 2010 – CBC reports that Canadian officials began preparing a public relations strategy as early as March 2007, several months before the first documentation of widespread abuse in the Globe and Mail.

John Edwards Admits to Fathering Baby

2010-01-22T03:54:00.001-04:00

Mr. Edwards needs to learn how to use a condom. That is all.

Prorogation, Again

2010-01-06T23:25:00.002-04:00

So, prorogation, and my working myself into a stew over it, is what has dragged me back to blogging. I never intend to take breaks from it, but then the force of inertia keeps me quiet. Anyhow.

Harper has, as I'm sure everyone knows, prorogued the House and Senate again. After just a year. But I suppose this is longer than the 13 sitting days before the 2008 prorogation. Thank goodness for small blessings?

The decision to prorogue is crass, cynical political manipulation. Much of the speculation about the reason for the prorogation is that it allows the government to avoid the hideously embarrassing revelations that were coming daily from the Special Committee on Afghanistan. I have no doubt that this was a significant part of the decision, but I don't think it was the primary motivation. Those revelations, as terrible as they were (especially considering that they were leading down the road to a Somalia-like situation where Canadian troops will, one day, be shown to have been involved in the torture of Afghans) were not sticking the government. Frankly, and disgustingly, most Canadians do not care. We have become so insular and inward looking that we simply don't care that this government has been committing blatant violations of Canada's obligations at international law under the Geneva Conventions.

No, I believe that the primary reason Harper got our incompetent nitwit of a Governor-General to prorogue the Parliament was because Parliamentary committees are reconstituted after a prorogation. This is important because shortly Harper will be appointing five new Senators (all doubtless Conservative flacks and lackies) and will have achieved a working plurality in the Senate. This will be reflected in the composition of the new Senate committees, allowing the government to force items through the Senate and eliminate the ability for the Liberals to two-facedly support legislation in the Commons and delay it to death in the Senate. Because the Commons liberals are spineless little twits, and refuse to oppose Harper's legislative agenda on anything this now means that Harper's reactionary legislation will go through unobstructed.

As an aside, how did it only take four years of appointments for Harper to undo the effects of 13 years of Liberal appointments to the Senate? Were the Liberals appointing doddering old folks for most of that time?

Regardless of the motives, this prorogation is a baldly undemocratic move. Whether or not doing so was the primary intention behind obtaining prorogation, it did in fact wipe out the Special Committee on Afghanistan and its inconvenient daily revelations. But that is not out of the ordinary for this government. Whether it is muzzling public servants who are inconveniently serving the public rather than the Party (see, for example, Kevin Page the Parliamentary Budget Officer, or the entire Military Police Complaints Commission or the head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission), stopping Olympic critics at the borders, proroguing Parliament, circulating a dirty tricks handbook to stymie the works of Parliamentary committees or bringing the House to a shamefully low level of decorum, this government has taken a dump on democracy at every turn. I don't know how long the Canadian people will stand for it. I can only hope that at some point they will say "enough!" Then again, socialists like me have been waiting for that kind of moment for a long time.

Iran Protests are Increasingly Revolutionary

2009-06-21T22:05:00.001-03:00

I'm taking a break from a weekend full of articling applications (ugh) to note a new development in Iran. There seems to have been a sea-change in the protests there. They have gone from being about an election result to about bringing down the government. This is a good thing. Iran's system of theocracy is deeply corrupt and needs to change. A revolution is the only true way to do that.

Persiankiwi (http://twitter.com/persiankiwi) has some very interesting tips on how to disable the Iranian government, which indicate this trend.

I promise I will try to get to something on domestic politics, but that might be a few days off. Suffice to say, Iggy = Stephane II.

Developments in Iran

2009-06-15T21:18:00.002-03:00

The situation in Iran seems to continue to degenerate. I am getting worried for the tweeter at Change_for_Iran since he last tweeted that he was going to the Mousavi rally and hasn't tweeted since. I hope he is alright. Another excellent twitter is persiankiwi. He has been reporting increasing violence by both state police and civilian militias. It sounds like the opposition is not backing down. New marches are planned for tomorrow. This is beginning to resemble a revolutionary moment. This may be the chance that Iran needs to throw off the shackles of their reactionary theocracy.

My hope now is for a relatively peaceful revolution, but that is looking increasingly unlikely, as the state appears to be using steadily increasing violence as it attempts to maintain control. This uprising is driven by new media, and increasingly resembles the lead up to the massacre in Iiananmen Square in 1989. That uprising was driven by cellphones and faxes. This one appears to be driven by Twitter, as students share information and knowledge. I haven't heard anything more about the members of Ansar-e Hezbollah captured at Tehran University.

I'm doing my best to keep abreast of the situation.

Later tonight I will try to put together something on today's developments in federal politics.

I'm Back

2009-06-14T21:30:00.004-03:00

It's been far to long, but I'm back.

I stopped blogging for a while because of school and then got caught in the intertia. I've been dragged back in by the events in Iran.

I've been monitoring a twitter feed by a student in Tehran. It is something that could turn out to be to the stolen election what Riverbend's blog was to the occupation of Iraq. You can find it at twitter.com/change_for_iran

The latest tweets from him suggest that he is being attacked by pro-government militias:

bastards just attacked us for no reason, I lost count of how much tear gas they launched at us!

my friend saying more than 100 students arrested, I can't confirm this but the numbers are high

to other sources: this isn't the police! police is still outside! we're under attack by Ansar-Hezbolah

unfortunately the entrance door is completely destroyed and there is no way of barricading it

typing as fastest as I can in both English & Farsi, Still we need outside help, I really don't want to be captured by Ansar

For some unknown reason there is still power in here and DSL line is working. but there is no dial tone

Stop burning tires & trash cans! come to our aid it's getting worse than 18tir already!

We're trying to stop Masood from going outside! there is no way they will listen to us right now.

the other buildings are now chanting "Ey Iran" song

This sounds like an increasingly brutal crackdown in progress.

As I've said elsewhere, I could see Ahmedinejad winning, but not with a ridiculous margin like that claimed. To suggest that he got 63% of the vote is absurd and smacks of vote rigging.

I'm going to keep following this. In the coming days I'll also blog about my response to the Nova Scotia election.

Update: Iranian Student is now reporting that two paramilitaries from Ansar-e Hezbollah (the group leading the siege of Tehran University) have been captured by students. Not sure what this will mean, but it's a big event.

I Deeply and Sincerely Hate My Computer

2009-02-25T20:37:00.003-04:00

Sorry in advance, but this is going to be a rant.

I hate my fucking computer. About five days ago, it started acting weirdly, refusing to access certain sites, sites that have nothing to do to each other, as different as www.tsn.ca and www.halifax.ca. Now at first, it seemed like Flash might be a common denominator. But no. I can open some pages that have Flash elements, like www.addictinggames.com. So then I think it might be a virus of some kind. Run a full system scan with McAfee (or try to, that software takes forever), give up on that, get new anti-virus software which is much faster, and there is no virus. So then I figure something deeper must have changed. So I use the Windows Vista (how I hate Vista) restore tool. I go back 48 hours before I started having problems. But no good. I just can't figure out what is going on.

Then I hit on the idea that it might be a problem with my internet connection, so I plug my laptop into the connection (same ethernet cable, same modem, same everything) and it works just fine. Fuck. That means something is wrong with my computer itself.

So then, I physically open up the tower, and reseat the network card, something I have never done before, but I pulled it off, giving the interior a good cleaning with the blow-function of the vacuum cleaner while I'm at it to get rid of the dust. Turn the computer back on, and still nothing happening. GAH!

At that point, I give up for a few days out of frustration. After all, only some websites aren't working, the Internet is still usable.

Today I come back to it, and get on the phone to my ISP to see if they have any idea what might be wrong. They run me through a batter of tests that solve nothing. Then they suggest that I can almost definitely fix the problem by reinstalling Windows Vista. Well doesn't that just sound like a fun proposition. But if it's what I have to do, it's what I have to do. Now, my computer didn't come with a rescue disk, but it did come with a restore utility that says it will reset everything to factory settings. Surely this should fix the problem.

So I go through the entire rigmarole of backing up my files on an external hard drive, and reinstalling Vista on my computer. All the while, I'm thinking great, when all this hassle will be done, everything will be fine. After about an hour, it's all done. I open up Internet Explorer (since reinstalling got rid of Firefox), and check one of the sites that wasn't working for me. Son of a bitch! It still doesn't work! All that work, all those programmes that have to be reinstalled, and it still doesn't fucking well work.

I am now utterly and completely at wits end. I'm approaching the point of giving up and dragging the demonic machine down to the store where I bought it and getting them to fix it. The problem with this is that whenever I take a computer with a problem to be fixed, they can never replicate the problem, so it doesn't get fixed (and reappears when I get it home) and they charge me anyhow. It's extremely annoying.

The urge to throw this machine off my balcony is steadily rising, but I am restraining myself because I can't afford to replace it.

If anyone reading this thinks they might know what is wrong, and what I can do to fix it, please leave a comment or e-mail me at ts-blog@live.ca.

Update on Feb. 26: I officially give up trying to understand computers. Over night, without me doing anything, the problem resolved itself. I don't understand, but I'm not going to question it. If only it had corrected itself before I reset my computer to factory.

Tell Me Again how the Occupation is Going Well

2009-02-18T02:38:00.006-04:00

The New York Times is reporting that in 2008 civilian deaths in Afghanistan rose by forty percent. 40%!

This should put the lie to the bullshit spun by imperialists and colonialists who support the occupation of Afghanistan. When we look at these numbers, we also need to bear in mind that the occupying powers routinely deflate the number of civilian dead by citing many of those killed by the occupation powers as suspected enemy combatants. Killed a child? He was holding a grenade. Blew up a wedding? It was actually a terrorist cover. Shot up a car full of kids? They refused to stop when you screamed at them in English which they don't understand.

The occupation is a colossal scam job. It is a neo-colonialist adventure inscribed on the bodies of the Afghans, whether it is those killed by high altitude bombs, or those tortured into psychosis at Bagram Airbase or Guantanamo Bay. Installing ~~a former Unocal executive~~ a man with highly limited experience (his highest post in any government before 9/11 being deputy foreign minister) as President, and then keeping him in place through elections organized and run by occupying powers is a sham. You can't have free and fair elections under occupation.

But of course, the interest in free and fair elections is part of the myth. If they tried to sell the occupation as securing a pipeline route for oil from the Caspian Sea or as a device to hand over colossal amounts of money to private contractors running a private war, the public would have none of it. Only by running a campaign of lies has public consent for the occupation been mobilized.

Bring the occupation army home now. No more death, no more lies for capitalism.

Thanks to anonymous for the comment below, and I've edited this piece to incorporate that, as well as for a few little spelling errors.

Chavez Wins Venezuela Referendum

2009-02-16T01:06:00.002-04:00

Just a quick note to say that Hugo Chavez has won the referendum in Venezuela. This is great news, and an excellent step toward making the revolution in Venezuela permanent. Now the people will be free to re-elect Chavez if they wish.

Congratulations, Venezuela.

The American Stimulus Package

2009-02-15T01:12:00.003-04:00

Otto von Bismark said "laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made." That maxim definitely applies to the excruciating process of watching the American stimulus package wind its way through the Congress. If anyone still wonders why the Democrats need that 60 vote majority in the Senate that they came ever so close to, this was why.

The Republicans took a good run at destroying everything good in Obama's proposed package. They reduced the overall value by $80 billion. They stripped out the limits on pay for employees of companies receiving a government bailouts. They turned something like $100 billion of the spending proposals into tax cut proposals instead. They stripped out the heart of the "buy American" clause (more on this in a bit). And the Democrats capitulated. But I'll give them credit for at least proposing some decent measures.

The Republicans seem set to filibuster everything with which they disagree in the Senate. And the bad news - the Senate Repugs are far more ideological on average than the House Republicans. Essentially, everything comes down to the two Maine Senators, both Republican and both relative moderates. Right now, and until Al Franken gets seated as the Senator for Minnnesota, the Democrats need two votes to break a fillibuster. This means that the two Republicans must be appeased. Even once Franken is seated, and it really is a matter of when not if, they will still need one Republican.

One of the biggest losses was the meat of the "buy American" clauses. It cracked me up to hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth coming out of Europe particularly, but also the Canadian centre and right about this. I wanted to smack some of them upside the head. Seriously. The point of a stimulus package in the US isn't to send money to European and Canadian business who employ European and Canadian workers, it is to send money to American workers, put Americans to work and support demand for American products. The people wailing about it are stupid idiots. Now, I know that stupid =/= conservative necessarily, but conservative = stupid a surprising percentage of the time. Why, for gawd's sake, would the American government be sending borrowed money overseas to support foreign economies when the US economy going into the shitter is what caused the current recession, and the US economy getting out of the shitter is the only thing that will make it better? Honestly these people are morons. It shouldn't be a surprise really, that the same people who gave us $100 = daycare think that stimulus money should be flowing out of the country. Stupid, stupid, stupid. And now, just for a change, I won't hold back and I'll tell you how I really feel. Oh. Wait.

To go back to Bismark's bon mot at the beginning, watching laws get made really is like watching sausages gets made (I am making an assumption about the making of sausages, since I have never seen it done). Both will make you nauseated, and eliminate your desire to have anything to do with the end product.

One post I am planning to write in coming days is about the inquiry into the extra-judicial execution of Robert Dziekanski by the RCMP, and how it is exposing a major web of lies. One outrage at a time though.

Ignatieff Disgraces the Liberal Party, Harper Helps

2009-02-04T00:29:00.005-04:00

I know it takes some doing, but Iggy has disgraced the Liberal Party of Canada once again. By voting in favour of the budget, he and his party voted in favour of the roll back of pay equity for women. The Liberals are now against equal pay for work of equal value. It's a sad day.

Pay equity is not some frill that can be cut in hard economic times. It is the absolute right of all women. The Harper-Ignatieff proposal cuts off women's access to the courts. Their alternative? The collective bargaining table. Bzzzt, sorry, try again. This proposal leaves behind all the women who work in non-union workplaces, a staggering 41% of all women who work outside the home.

Obviously, it would be nice if all women worked in unionized work places, but even if they did, denying access to the courts is not an acceptable approach to pay equity.

The Conservative-Liberal attack on pay equity also plays the ostrich when looking at the history of pay equity at the bargaining table. Federal civil servants negotiated pay equity almost twenty years ago, but since then have had to fight tooth and nail in the courts to force successive Liberal and Conservative governments to honour that pledge. Why would anyone be taken in and believe that now will be different. The corporate world is no more friendly to pay equity than our corporate government. They will fight as hard as can be to avoid pay equity obligations.

When pay equity is something to be gained at the negotiating table, it becomes something that can be negotiated away. That is an unacceptable possibility. Further, when pay equity is the subject of negotiation, it loses its rights-based aspect. It occurs to me that this is precisely what the Conservatives and their Liberal lackeys want. They want to move the discussion of equal pay for work of equal value away from a rights discourse. Because they don't seem to favour women's rights at all. Oh, the Liberals mouth the words when the camera is on, but their actions belie them. If they had any positive principles at all, they would have refused to vote for a budget containing the attack on pay equity, especially when they could have had it excised in exchange for their support.

The Liberals are lying, hypocritical assholes, at least their party brass is. We should be ashamed that our country has vacillated between dumb and dumber for better part of 150 years.

The Coalition is Dead

2009-01-28T13:49:00.003-04:00

Ignatieff has, today, killed the chance to remove the Conservatives from power. He has killed the coalition by supporting the Conservative budget, and that means that the NDP will no longer enter coalition with the Liberals. With the coalition option off the table, then the only choice when Harper falls is an election, which the Liberals are unprepared to fight and have no money to fight it with. This means we are set for a re-run of Milquetoast Dion propping up the Conservatives while they run roughshod over Canadian values.

Iggy has failed the test of leadership, and has ended that moment of hope that there was in late 2008.

The Budget is a Bust

2009-01-27T20:30:00.003-04:00

As I feared, there are major tax cuts in this budget. The Conservatives are cutting taxes by $1.9 billion this year, and $2 billion on a continuing basis by moving the tax brackets upward. I will admit, that these are not the worst tax cuts there could have been, there could have been ~~corporate income tax cuts, or~~ cuts for the top tax bracket. The cuts that are in this budget do help to fight bracket creep, and that is generally speaking a good thing. These cuts are not, however, targeted to help the poorest of the poor, and those earning the least, those for whom tax cuts flow directly back into the economy in the form of spending on staples like food and clothing.

Also bad, is $4 billion over two years in tax credits for home renovations. This is a stupid way of doing things. Firstly, the credit isn't tied to any environmental objective. Someone expanding their monster home to build a heated swimming pool would get this credit the same as someone who is renovating their home to put in solar panels, geothermal heat sinks and improved insulation. Secondly, this programme requires individuals to outlay, and then claim back on their tax returns. This is stupid and produces unnecessary paper shuffling. The better way is simply for the government to directly reimburse for costs of pro-environmental renovations.

A good thing is to see extended EI benefits, to fifty weeks. But very bad is that there is no expanded eligibility. Part of the problem with the EI programme now is that only a tiny percentage of people who pay into it will ever be able to collect. The government should have expanded eligibility rules to ensure that more laid-off workers have access to the plan.

The budget includes $4 billion over two years for new infrastructure projects. This is paltry compared to the demand that is out there, and the massive infrastructure debt that this country faces. Public transit projects alone could gobble up all of this money.

Where is the money for social housing? Where is the money for retraining programmes for laid-off workers?

The deficit for this year is expected to be $33.7 billion, for 2010-2011 $29.8 billion, for 2011-2012 $13 billion and for 2012-2013 $7.3 billion. That means that the government expects to lose $83.8 billion over the next four years. That undoes almost a decade of debt repayment that was bought with the suffering of Canadians from slashed healthcare transfers, cuts to education, the outright theft of the EI surplus and a myriad of other cuts.

This budget is a bust, and if the Liberals support it, as far as I am concerned the coalition is dead.

Update: On further review, this budget is even more garbage than I thought it was. It places a huge load on the provinces and the municipalities to provide matching funds for infrastructure projects, which is insane since cities can't run deficits. The feds can borrow at a much lower interest rate than provinces. Those jurisdictions that cannot come up with the matching funds will be unable to access the federal money. This budget is a sham. Further, it is based on the 2008 fiscal statement (you know, the one that produced the first major constitutional crisis in a decade), and therefore includes by reference the elimination of pay equity, the attack on workers' rights and the ending of public campaign financing.

With regard to EI, I should add that the lack of increased eligibility is a disgrace, since the government blatantly stole $50 billion from the EI surplus during the 1990s and 2000s to pay for corporate tax cuts.

For an excellent explanation of why this budget will not stimulate the economy, see The Progressive Economics Forum.

The Budget, and the Coalition's Last Chance

2009-01-27T00:15:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow, Finance Minister and Flim-Flam-Artist-in-Chief Jim Flaherty will deliver the federal budget for the 2009-2010 fiscal year. Much of the budget has already been leaked, in defiance of long-standing trends of budget confidentiality. The Conservatives appear to be set to spend like drunken sailors on a variety of areas. The spending seems, for the most part, to be focussed on good things (though as the NDP has been pointing out all day, the Conservatives can't really be trusted to deliver on this stuff, since they keep re-announcing the same money over and over). Concerningly, however, is that it has been indicated that the budget will contain broad-based tax cuts.

As I wrote a while ago, tax cuts are not stimulus, no matter how much the government would like us to believe the Chicago School, neo-liberal orthodoxy that if you free the market, greater prosperity will follow. That has been proven time and again, from the Southern Cone of Latin America to the post-Communist economies of the former Soviet Block, to the former Asian Tigers. Neo-liberal orthodoxy produces fantastic riches for an elite few, but produces planned misery for the vast bulk of the population. Neo-liberalism produces a massive wealth transfer from the poor to the rich, and produces the most astonishingly unequal societies on the face of the earth.

If this budget includes broad-based tax cuts, those will not be stimulus, those will drag the federal curent accounts budget into a structural deficit. Reducing revenue is the most astonishingly inappropriate thing for the government to do when major fiscal stimulus is needed.

The Liberals have this one opportunity to prove that they have grown a spine. If they vote for this budget, and for the con artists who have put it together, they will have proven themselves cowards, shrinking in the face of Conservative lies and bullying. However if they vote against, they will have proven a willingness to find an alternative within our constitutional structures, and without forcing the expense of another election on the people of Canada. Of course, all of that depends on the Governor General not disgracing herself again when Harper asks her for dissolution and a new election.

If the Liberals knuckle under, that will be it for the coalition. There is no point in any kind of cooperation with a Liberal Party that is staggering drunkenly to the right under Michael Ignatieff who is quickly proving once again that the Liberals will say anything and stand for nothing.

Tomorrow will be interesting.

Obama Going in the Right Direction

2009-01-23T19:34:00.003-04:00

I must say, I've been pleasantly surprised by President Obama's first days in office. He has issued an executive order to close down the torture camp at Guantanamo Bay within a year (good, but not perfect - it should close now), he has frozen all of Bush's "midnight regulations" ordered between Nov. 4 and Jan. 20. which would have done enormous damage, and today the FDA cleared the way for the first study on embryonic human stem cell therapy, and more importantly Obama lifted the global gag rule that stops US government funding from going to groups that discuss abortion abroad.

Ending the global gag rule is particularly important, because it denied so many women around the world access to the full array of family planning options. According to International Planned Parenthood, they've lost more than $100 million because of this rule.

This is a very encouraging sign that Obama will take a stand to protect the rights of women from the encroachments of conservatives, and I applaud him for that. Well done!

Na Na Na Na, Na Na Na Na, Hey Hey Hey, Goodbye

2009-01-20T09:08:00.002-04:00

This is going to be my last post before George W. Bush leaves office, and with it I will retire my personal countdown that I've been running at the end of each post since before I was blogging at Blogger.

George W. Bush has been the most disastrous President in American history, leading an unprecedented assault on the American Constitution, on regulation of the economy, and on progressive taxation. He has ripped to shreds whatever remnants of credibility the United States had on the world stage, and has turned the entire Muslim world vehemently against citizens of Western nations. He has turned a projected 10 year surplus of $5.6 trillion into a projected 10 year deficit of $10 trillion, a $15.6 trillion swing in eight years. His reckless lack of regulation has killed Americans through tainted food (and through regulatory harmonization efforts has dragged down similar standards in Canada and Mexico), led to a collapse of capitalism parallelled only by the Great Depression, and privatized enormous swathes of formerly public services.

George W. Bush also invaded and occupied two countries, supported brutal dictators in a dozen others and dramatically worsened the AIDS crisis through mandating abstinence only education to get access to US money.

While Obama will not fix all of these problems, he seems to intend to take a swing at most of them. And that will be a refreshing change.

Goodbye, Mr. Bush. It's been depressing.

The Last Day

2009-01-19T17:29:00.003-04:00

I'm taking a moment to revel in the fact that this is the last full day of George Bush's presidency. The sunset I just watched was the last one of his presidency. Never again will the sun set on a world where George Bush is President. The worst president in American history is just about done.

Good bye George, and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

'Cause Obama doesn't want ass-prints on his new door.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 1

Montreal to Ban Masks at Protests

2009-01-19T02:20:00.002-04:00

Of all the foolish stupidness in the world, this may not rate that high, but it is pretty damn foolish and stupid. The Montreal Gazette is reporting that the City of Montreal plans to ban the wearing of masks or face coverings at public demonstrations (as a side note, why this is in the "Business" section of the Gazette is beyond me).

This bylaw is quite possibly unconstitutional on two grounds. First, and more questionably, this bylaw is potentially in violation of the constitutional division of powers. This law bans a behaviour and attaches a penalty, with no connection to any provincial head of power that I can think of under the Constitution. This risks a finding that the law is, in pith and substance, criminal law and therefore ultra vires the province (and therefore the city, which derives all of its powers from the province). This is more shaky, because a good constitutional lawyer can make arguments for connection to a provincial head of power surprisingly easily. Second, this bylaw clearly runs afoul of the guarantee of freedom of expression in s. 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Many people wear masks to protests to parody a politician or world figure with whom they disagree. That is clearly conveying meaning, and therefore it fits within the rubric of s. 2. There may also be an issue of denial of liberty without the principles of fundamental justice since a law like this is dramatically over-broad, and would catch far more people the occasional yahoo that starts trouble a rally. The real question is whether it would survive the s. 1 test of being demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

I don't see any real or pressing need for this ban. Sure, at some protests a few masked idiots decide to start violence, but many people who wear masks or face coverings do so only to convey a political meaning, without any sinister intent. This is a massive and unnecessary intrusion into the civil liberties of protesters in Montreal.

A tightly focused law is the only way this would be acceptable, and to write such a law would be almost impossible. Any such law gives enormous discretion in enforcement to police officers. Frankly given the behaviour of police officers in Quebec, most damningly the agents provocateur placed by the Surete du Quebec at the Security and Prosperity Partnership summit in Montebello a while ago, I don't see any reason to trust Quebec police with such discretion.

A law like this is also unnecessary. If the masked individuals are causing property damage or assaulting people, then arrest them and charge them with that. Arrest for wearing a mask is simply a form of guilt by association and preventative arrest. Our legal mechanisms have always been sufficient to deal with idiot anarcho-vandalists in the past, and they remain so now. This law is offensive, excessive and redundant, serving only to provide prosecutors with a means of loading the bill against defendants. The City of Montreal should see sense, and drop this law.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 1 (oh dear gawd, I can't wait for it to be over)

Israel Declares Unilateral Ceasefire (Sort Of)

2009-01-18T01:40:00.003-04:00

Today the Israelis finally called a halt to their offensive against the Palestinians in Gaza. The Israelis have said that they are ending offensive operations so long as their soldiers in Gaza don't come under attack. On the face of it, that sounds reasonable. But you have to dig a bit deeper to find the major problem with what is going on here.

Functionally, the Israelis have re-occupied Gaza. Their troops have taken up positions across the strip, and it has been declared that they are not leaving any time soon. The Israelis have regressed the situation to what it was prior to the evacuation of Gaza by Ariel Sharon, and that is not an acceptable state of affairs.

Hamas has vowed to keep fighting until Israeli soldiers leave, and the siege of the Gaza strip is lifted. They are entirely within their rights to resist an illegal occupation.

Israel has essentially made a play for the moral high ground through this action. Unfortunately, the brutality of the Israeli state has foreclosed on any such possibility. By killing 1200+ Palestinians in three weeks, the Israelis have forfeited any claim to moral superiority, especially when many of those killed, if not most were non-combatants/civilians and children. Neither side is morally perfect in this war, but at least the Palestinians are fighting for national liberation (the vast majority are not fighting to drive the Israelis into the sea). The Israelis are fighting for the right to subjugate millions of people for territorial aggrandizement and settlement lands, as well as for domestic political consumption for the coming elections. One is a rather more ethical struggle than the other.

We shall see if Israel successfully maintains this sham end to the war. Hamas may not let them.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 2

[Update] Well, it looks like I spoke a little precipitously. Hamas has now declared a week long ceasefire and says that Israel should use the time to withdraw its soldiers and lift the siege.

We Get it CBC, There's a Deficit Coming

2009-01-17T03:18:00.002-04:00

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm getting really tired of CBC's constant stories about how the upcoming budget is going to run a deficit. My reaction is generally something along the lines of "no shit, Sherlock." Everyone and her dog knew that a deficit was coming, except for the Conservatives well before the failed fiscal update that triggered a constitutional crisis. CBC seems determined to try to scare people with horrible economy stories. It's very reminiscent of Fox News and it's fear factory approach to reporting.

My message to CBC: give it a rest. We know the economy is bad, and we know a deficit is coming. You need to stop telling us to be afraid, to be very afraid, and start treating the Canadian public like a group of rational adults (no matter that we may not behave like it sometimes).

On a positive note, the window for George Bush to pre-emptively pardon his torture-cronies is closing quickly. He's only got eighty-two hours left as Preident.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 3

A Momentous Time

2009-01-15T00:25:00.003-04:00

As we approach the end of the reign of George Bush II, it becomes evident, to all but the most-close-eyed conservatives the hell to which we've been carried in Bush's hand-basket.

Human disasters are unfolding across the world. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the imperial west is brutally occupying, whether to extract oil or to protect pipeline routes. In Gaza the Palestinians are being slaughtered for political gain, in an appallingly crass, hubristic and hypocritical display. The genocide in Darfur continues to unfold, and American ally states from Lebanon to Pakistan to Georgia have been declaring states of emergency and clamping down on democratic opposition.

The great glory of modern capitalism, our globalized economy, is coming apart at the seams as economies across the world melt down, throwing workers out on the street, and bringing new protestations of Keynesian faith, despite the fact that the supposedly socialistic policy of bailouts simply enriches those already bloated with ill-gotten wealth. Bush and his wild-eyed acolytes of laissez-faire and the unfettered free market have proven to be unspeakable failures at managing the economy, as the ideological bankruptcy of their economic ideologies is proven to be matched only by its moral bankruptcy as in engages in one last orgy of upward redistribution of wealth. Executives get golden parachutes and workers get the soup kitchen line.

As laid out by the late, great, and incomparable Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose in their book Bill of Wrongs, the Bush regime has encouraged an all out assault on the principles of constitutional government in the United States, and this has had knock-on effects across the world. Canada puts in place Gitmo North and imprisons four men for eight years without charge, the opportunity to face their accusers or to know the evidence against them. Great Britain collapses into an agonized security state in which the average citizen of London is recorded on camera three hundred times every day, which would make Big Brother jealous. States in eastern Europe hold and torture men who have been kidnapped by the American government, in a practice called, with a chilling sterility, extraordinary rendition. American puppet regimes in the Middle East torture others, including Maher Arar who was confirmed to have committed no crime.

Bush and his flunkies have radically undermined the emergence of an international legal order, attempting to scuttle the International Criminal Court after securing major concessions. They have sabotaged attempts to save our climate from radical and disastrous change by recanting America's signature on the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. They have undermined the Geneva Conventions on the Law of War by creating the status of illegal enemy combatant that has no basis in law and is simply an excuse to hold the racialized other forever in a legal black hole.

This is but a brief and incomplete catalogue of the worst excesses, and high crimes, of George Bush, called Dubya. But not all is dark.

In the election on Nov. 4, 2008 Americans spoke resoundingly of a desire for change. While they likely will get only cosmetic change out of Barack Obama, Americans were mobilized and involved in politics in a way not seen since the election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Americans have been jolted out of political apathy, and it is to be hoped that their awakening will be transmitted to the slumbering populations of the rest of the industrialized world.

In Latin America a radical transformation of both economics and politics is gaining steam. A truly democratic and socialist movement has arisen, and is demanding justice and equality for their people, and an end to the domination of their states by their wealthy paleo-colonialist elites and foreign corporations. The people of Venezuela resisted an American-sponsored coup in 2002 that was eerily reminiscent of the coups in the southern cone during the 1970s. The workers and the indigenous populations have reclaimed control of their countries in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. Centre-leftists have been elected by wide margins in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay. South America faces a revolutionary moment, and it provides a template that can be followed across the South.

As the economy melts down, that defining revolutionary moment spreads into the industrialized economies. It is a self-evident failure of capitalism. Socialists must be ready with alternatives to present, or we will lose this moment, as we lost the moment of the Great Depression.

The last days of George W. Bush are a time for celebration, as the global tyrant leaves the scene. But we can't stop at celebration. We must push for a true revolutionary moment, to bring democratic socialism to all the people of the world.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 6

Israeli War Crimes Confirmed in Gaza

2009-01-12T02:05:00.003-04:00

Wide confirmation (see e.g. here) is beginning to come in that Israel has used, and is continuing to use white phosphorous (WP) against the civilian population of Gaza. Human Rights Watch observers in southern Israel (they are barred by Israeli forces from entering Gaza), saw shells fired over a Gazan refugee camp that left trails characteristic of WP shells, and exploded in a manner consistent with WP, which produces unique looking explosions.

WP is a weapon banned from use in civilian areas by the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, Protocol III. Wikipedia lists the following as effects on humans of exposure to WP:

Effects of Exposure to WP Weapons

Incandescent particles of WP cast off by a WP weapon's initial explosion can produce extensive, deep (second and third degree) burns. Phosphorus burns carry a greater risk of mortality than other forms of burns due to the absorption of phosphorus into the body through the burned area, resulting in liver, heart and kidney damage, and in some cases multi-organ failure. These weapons are particularly dangerous to exposed people because white phosphorus continues to burn unless deprived of oxygen or until completely consumed. In some cases burns are limited to exposed areas of skin because the smaller WP particles do not burn completely through personal clothing before being consumed...

Exposure and Inhalation of Smoke

Burning WP produces a hot, dense white smoke. Most forms of smoke are not hazardous in the kinds of concentrations produced by a battlefield smoke shell. Exposure to heavy smoke concentrations of any kind for an extended period (particularly if near the source of emission) does have the potential to cause illness and even death.

WP smoke irritates the eyes and nose in moderate concentrations. With intense exposures, a very explosive cough may occur. However, no recorded casualties from the effects of WP smoke alone have occurred in combat operations, and to date there are no confirmed deaths resulting from exposure to phosphorus smoke...

As you can see, this is a worse weapon than napalm in terms of damage to the human body. Once you are hit with it, you can't get it off. It literally burns its way into the skin. The fact that it reacts with oxygen means that it cannot be put out with water, and trying to do so only makes the problem worse.

WP was used against the people of Fallujah by American occupation forces in Iraq during the 2004 massacre. That is one of the best documented uses of WP against a densely concentrated area of civilians. The USA violated the laws of war in Fallujah, and Israel is doing so now, using WP in a banned capacity. This is at least as terrorist as anything Hamas has done, including suicide bombings. This is a weapon used without fear of consequences designed to kill civilians and terrorize them into behaving in the desired manner. This is terrorism.

Israel claims to want peace, but with every action it takes, it undermines the chance for that peace, driving home the message to the Palestinians that they are not to be allowed to live in peace themselves. Israel's version of peace requires that the Palestinians be subjucated, racialized and imprisoned in an enormous open-air concentration camp called Gaza, in which they will be left to starve in the dark. If Israel is unwilling to live in true peace, how can it expects the colonized and brutalized people of the occupied territories to be willing to do the same?

There can be no peace without justice. Justice for Palestine!

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 8

[Update] White phosphorus shelling has been confirmed in the Israeli destruction of a United Nations compound in Gaza.

Israel, Gaza, Hamas and a Look at Causes

2009-01-08T15:45:00.007-04:00

I think it's time I wrote something a bit more fleshed out about the situation of the Palestinians in Gaza. At the beginning, I should make my view of the entire Israeli-Palestinian history clear. I view it as an essentially colonialist enterprise after the point at which Zionist philosophy enters the picture. I don't pretend to a balanced point of view, or to neutrality. I am anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist, and this means that I am pro-Palestinian. I should also state that I think Israel is here to stay, and the people of Israel should have a state within their pre-1967 borders. There won't be any functional reversal of the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, and Israel isn't going anywhere. I don't go to the extremes of some who believe that there is an organized campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians, but I do believe that Israel's policies toward the Palestinians are not functionally different than those of the white government of Apartheid South Africa. I also don't believe that all Israeli citizens, or all of Israel's Jewish population, support the actions of their government with regard to the Palestinians. There is a peace movement within Israel with both Jewish and Arab members, and I wish them the very best with their work.

To find the beginning of the current fighting in Gaza is an exercise in nearly infinite chicken-and-egg reasoning. Causes and effects can be traced back before the founding of Israel, and I don't have the time or the inclination to go into that. To find the immediate cause, I look to the ceasefire deal negotiated indirectly about seven months ago between Israel and Hamas, the legally elected governing party of the Palestinians. In this deal, there were a couple of essential points for each side. Essentially, Israel wanted an end to rockets into the south of Israel. Essentially Hamas wanted an end to bombings/missile strikes, and the opening of the borders of the Gaza Strip. Neither side seemed to have been making unrealistic demands.

Beginning in early November of 2008, Israel killed eleven Hamas personnel (militants or security personnel depending on who you ask) over eleven days, leading Hamas to fire rockets into Israel once again. This is an undisputed fact, as reported by the International Herald Tribune. The Israeli response to these rockets was to tighten the economic blockade of Gaza, which had never really been lifted, despite the deal, essentially placing Gaza under siege and cutting supplies of food and fuel. These events set off a spiral of violence that, over about two months, developed into the brutalization now taking place in Gaza.

In the light of those facts, it is clear that the cease-fire was never properly implemented, as Israel did not fulfil it's side of the bargain. This means that it is Israeli bad-faith negotiation that is the intermediate cause of the current violence, and Israeli breaches of other terms of the cease fire that is the immediate cause. Increased rocketing by Hamas was certainly unhelpful, and likely provoked a more extreme Israeli response, but it is clear that Israel expected complete compliance with the terms of the cease fire deal from Hamas without delivering the same itself.

That is an unfortunate pattern in Israeli dealings with the Palestinians, that has been repeated time and again. As an example, the Oslo Accords agreed to a right of passage between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, but this was repeatedly infringed upon by Israel. The history of bad faith negotiation on the part of the Israelis makes it hard to believe that they will keep any new agreement that is reached to end this current attack on Gaza.

Israel's approach to Gaza in particular has been highly unethical and immoral. Beyond the bad faith negotiations, Israel has inflicted collective punishment on the people of Gaza both in the form of the blockade and in the form of bombing civilians. It has violated principles of international law protecting civilians. A civilian population does not lose its protected status at international law because an army's enemies are hiding amongst them, despite the claims of Israel, and of every other modern occupier from the United States in Iraq, Canada in Afghanistan, Russia in Chechnya and so forth. This is exemplified by the bombing yesterday of a United Nations school that was clearly marked as such, killing at least 39 people. Israel claimed that mortar shells were fired from that location, as if that excused knowingly killing civilians.

As Devin Johnston says, the only way to peace is for one side to let bumps in the road to peace pass, and not use them as an excuse for renewing or escalating the cycle of violence. As I see it, it must be Israel that does this. Israel is the occupier, and it faces no existential threat from the Palestinians. Israel has the capacity to destroy all society in the occupied territories. The Palestinians have no such capacity with regard to Israel. Despite the number of rockets fired into Israel in December (approximately 3,000) only five Israelis were killed. Contrast that with the first week of the Israeli bombing of Gaza in which 400+ people died, and that fact comes into focus. However, this is only one necessary condition. Israel must tear down the Apartheid walls it has built, and withdraw settlements from the West Bank. Israel is going to have to return East Jerusalem. Without these things, it is difficult to see how the Palestinians can consent to an agreement.

As an aside before I wrap up, Israel demands as a precondition of peace that Hamas recognize the right of Israel to exist. No state has the right to exist at international law. Israel is demanding something that no other state has, or can have at international law. What Israel can legitimately demand is that Hamas recognize the right of the people of Israel to live in peace - but Israel must recognize the same for the people of Palestine.

Ultimately, you cannot fight for peace. Peace must come through dialogue, and negotiation. Peace will not come from the barrel of a tank cannon or the explosion of a Quassam rocket. Peace will come when both sides are willing to make concessions, and to realize that each will have to give up some of what it wants in order to have peace. I believe it is possible and necessary. As John Lennon put it:

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 12

EI and Stimulus

2009-01-08T00:53:00.002-04:00

On Wednesday, the Liberals decided to announce that they want the Harper government to improve EI as part of the budget in order to obtain their support. That's all well and good, but coming from the Liberals, it seems like a rather last minute trip along the road to Damascus. Liberals are the same party that effectively gutted EI in the 1990s to finance their deficit reduction. They stole billions from Canadian workers, and used it to pay down the debt and deficit. I'm glad they've finally seen the light, but it seems rather late.

Improving EI is an excellent way to stimulate the economy, because it keeps families who have lost jobs able to buy their essentials, and pay their bills, which flows money back into the economy. It's also the right thing to do, because these workers have been paying EI premiums for years, and deserve the security it brings, so that losing one's job does not mean an instantaneous disaster. Workers have given their sweat, tears and (far too often) their blood, for this county. It's time for the country to give back to them.

In their Alterative Budget, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives called for the injection of $3.4 billion into the EI programme, to increase benefits to 60% of insurable income, and coverage to fifty weeks. EI is the very definition of counter-cyclical spending, since it spends money when the economy is bad, and saves money when the economy is doing well (at least it saves when the feds don't steal its surplus).

Canadian workers deserve the support of their government, and enriching EI is a good way to give that support. If the Liberals want to get on the pro-worker train, the more the merrier. But they're going to have to prove that they have earned their seats.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 12

Tax Cuts Aren't Stimulus

2009-01-06T18:36:00.005-04:00

The Finance Minister is an idiot. I'm going to put that out there now. He's also a liar and a crook, but that's a different story. This one is about how Jim Flaherty thinks that tax cuts are a form of counter-cyclical stimulus. He is talking about including tax cuts in the federal budget due at the end of January.

I'm sorry, this is a moronic move. The kind of tax cuts that Conservatives like are narrowly focused on the capitalist class, and emphasize trickle-down voodoo economics. Supply-side tax cuts are unequivocally not what we need in this economic climate. I don't think we generally ever need them, but that is, again, something for another entry, but we especially don't need them when our economy is staring massive over-production in the face. Providing tax cuts intended to increase capital investment is an inappropriate move in the current economic environment. If the Conservatives are bound and determined to have tax cuts in the budget, then cut marginal taxes for the lowest tax bracket, and maybe raise the basic personal exemption. This is the kind of tax measure that might be helpful. Those who would benefit from the measure are the people who live from paycheque to paycheque, and spend every cent they get. This money goes right back into the economy, and stimulates demand, easing the crisis of overproduction, without sacrificing jobs.

But I don't think tax cuts are the way to go right now. Tax cuts aren't a good method of counter-cyclical stimulation of the economy. Counter-cyclical stimulation, in the typical Keynesian mode, requires that the stimulation be capable of easing off when the economy no longer requires stimulation. Tax cuts cause a major problem in this regard, because in the current political climate it is very difficult to raise taxes, when the economy no longer needs the stimulation. We have seen a practical example of this in Canada. In the last election, Stephane Dion mused about the possibility of raising the GST back to 7%, and the howling across the country was deafening.

The best way to stimulate the economy is infrastructure spending. Infrastructure spending has five aspects that make it good for counter-cyclical stimulation:

It is capable of getting to work quickly, since most cities and counties have some kind of infrastructure project just waiting for funding to go into effect. An example is the Transit City proposal in the City of Toronto, envisioning many more streetcar lines to greatly increase the available transportation in the city.
It puts people to work, both in the immediate construction industry and in the feed-in system, creating a ripple effect across the economy. By putting people to work, more money is earned, and that helps to ease the overproduction crisis.
It stimulates demand for products manufactured in Canada, helping to keep well-paid manufacturing jobs in Canada.
Building infrastructure leaves something that will be useful for decades. A new subway line can be used for a hundred years or more (see London and New York), a new streetcar line for decades. Building infrastructure is a part of long-term economic planning.
It can be easily eased off when the economy recovers.

Obviously, infrastructure spending can't be the whole deal, but it is a far better way than idiotic Conservative tax cuts that will be secreted in bank accounts, and not put to work on products made in Canada. We need real stimulus in this budget.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 14

Back to Blogging

2009-01-04T01:54:00.002-04:00

Hi everyone. This is just a quick note to apologize for the long absence from the blog. When I was home over the holidays I didn't blog due to a combination of only sporadic Internet access and not having the inclination. But I'll be getting back to it now.

I also want to take a moment to unequivocally condemn the bombardment and now invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israel. Israel is exacting vastly disproportionate revenge through collective punishment. It claims that this most recent brutalization of the Palestinians is a necessary response to the rockets launched from Gaza over the last eight years, some thousands of them. Sure, when you give the number of rockets, it sounds bad, but then think about the number of deaths. From eight years from 2000 to 2008, rockets fired from Gaza killed 21 Israelis. In the eight days this offensive has lasted, more than 440 Palestinians have been killed. In the month of December, rockets killed four Israelis. This means that in December, Israel killed 110 Palestinians (including at least 100 people with no connection to Hamas) for every Israeli killed. How that is defensible to anyone is beyond my understanding. Israel is engaging in an Orwellian effort to brutalize the people of Palestine into turning against Hamas. They tried that in Lebanon in 2006 vis-a-vis Hezbollah. Anyone want to remind me how that turned out? If Israel wants peace, they must also create the conditions for Palestinians to live in peace, and this includes withdrawing from occupied territories, tearing down the apartheid wall and lifting the seige of Gaza.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 16

Iggy to be Liberal Leader

2008-12-10T17:16:00.002-04:00

Democracy in the Liberal Party is dead today. Bob Rae has dropped out, and Iggy will be crowned interim leader, to become permanent leader in May. He has not had to face a single vote from the membership of the Liberal Party of Canada.

Iggy is a right-winger, who believes that the invasion of Iraq was a good idea, and that torture can be justified. I have great qualms about the coalition going forward with him as leader. He is a clone of King Stephen on a lot of things, even down to the condescending attitude. The Liberals will be led by the Man Who Would Be Philosopher King. The man who sees the coalition not as a way to represent the will of 62% of Canadians but rather as a tool to extract concessions from the Conservatives.

I don't know if the coalition can go with Iggy the Hawk in charge of the Liberals.

Of course, Iggy leading the Liberal Party is in the partisan best interests of the NDP. He will draw CPC-LPC swing voters, and drive LPC-NDP swing voters to the NDP. This may help the NDP gain seats in Atlantic Canada and in Ontario. At the same time, the LPC can gain seats from the CPC in Ontario and maybe from the BQ in Quebec. It may be enough to knock King Stephen off his throne in the Dictatorial Republic of Canada.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 41

National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women

2008-12-05T15:10:00.004-04:00

On December 6, 1989 Marc Lepine entered L'Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal and killed Genevieve Bergeron, Helen Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Maryse Laganiere, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michele Richard, Annie St-Arneault, Annie Turcotte and Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz. This event has become known as the Montreal Massacre.

Since 1991 we have marked the anniversary of this tragedy with the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. On this above all days we remember all women who have been killed and harmed by men. The fourteen killed at L'Ecole Polytechnique were killed because they were women, and because Lepine had a violent hatred of feminists.

We must stand against all violence against women, and take every possible action to ensure that no woman is killed by her partner or because she is a woman. We must also act to ensure that women are equal in all ways to men.

May the fourteen and all other women killed by men rest in peace.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 46

Pro-Coalition Rally in Halifax

2008-12-04T23:32:00.004-04:00

There was a great pro-coalition rally in Halifax today at Maritime Hall.

Here are some of the pictures:

My sign for the rally:

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 47

The Governor General Has Sabotaged Parliamentary Democracy

2008-12-04T12:40:00.006-04:00

The Governor General has allowed the Prime Minister to prorogue Parliament just a few weeks after the session began, without anything passing the House and simply to allow the government to escape the loss of the confidence. The Governor General has fundamentally sabotaged the nature of parliamentary democracy by allowing Harper to govern without Parliament. This is contrary to the basic nature of representative parliamentary democracy.

The government must be responsible to the Parliament, and must be able to sustain the confidence of Parliament. The Governor General by granting prorogation has allowed Harper to abrogate this principle, and ought to be ashamed of herself. She has allowed a lying, mendacious, cowardly and bullying Prime Minister to display contempt for Parliament and for the institution of the Constitution of Canada. She ought to be ashamed of herself.

This is absolutely unprecedented in Canada. The Governor General has effectively allowed Harper to do what he wants because he doesn't like what Parliament is up to. The institution of the Governor General has betrayed Canada. The Governor General has endorse a campaign of lies by the Prime Minister that is unprecedented in Canada. She has impeached the honour of her office by endorsing it. That she would allow Harper to display such craven cowardice as to suspend Parliament to avoid the loss of confidence is absolutely shameful.

No government without Parliament! Constitution now!

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 47

Tenterhooks

2008-12-04T11:27:00.001-04:00

I can hardly take it. Harper's been in with the Governor-General for an hour now, and still nothing.

Harper has stirred up the greatest political and economic crisis in decades, and is deliberately fanning the flames of a national unity debate to save his own job. He has done this with LIES.

I'll have more once we find out if Harper got an answer from the G-G.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 47

Prop 8, The Musical

2008-12-03T13:49:00.002-04:00

This, this is brilliant.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 48

Will He or Won't He

2008-12-03T01:12:00.002-04:00

The question now is whether Harper will prorogue Parliament to avoid an official loss of the confidence of the House. I really hope he doesn't, both because I want to see the coalition come to pass and because if he does it will be a huge blow to parliamentary democracy.

The fundamental principle of parliamentary democracy is that the government remains in office so long as it enjoys the confidence of the Parliament, and in Canada that means the House of Commons. The corollary of this principle is that the executive branch governs with the Parliament, so that if the confidence is lost, the Parliament may signal that that is so, and the government leaves office. If the Governor-General grants Harper a prorogation, the executive will functionally be governing without Parliament, in violation of the basic principles of Parliamentary democracy.

Prorogation, for those that don't know, ends the session of the Parliament, until it is recalled for a new session with a new Speech from the Throne. This kills all bills on the order paper and sends MPs back to their constituencies. Essentially, the legislative branch of government is dismissed, while the executive continues to govern. There is no precedent in Canada for a prorogation so early in a first session of a Parliament, and no precedent for a prorogation before anything other than the motion approving the Speech from the Throne has passed the House.

If Harper obtains a prorogation from the Governor General, it will be a blatant admission that the government no longer enjoys the confidence of the House, and will represent a brazen abuse of the Prime Minister's power to advise the Governor-General on the convention and dismissal of Parliament. If there is a prorogation, it will be a clear statement that Harper's government is illegitimate, and governing in an anti-democratic and anti-constitutional manner.

So the question now is, as I posed above, will he or won't he. In the House today, Harper said that his government would take all legal means to avoid defeat (and some of his supporters in Alberta are committing sedition by saying they will take up arms if he falls). I take this to mean that he is threatening the coalition with a prorogation. I still don't know if he would do it though, given how massively illegitimate it would render his government.

I want to hear from everyone who reads this, do you think he will or won't? I'm interested in what you think regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum.

By the way, there are going to be rallies across the country on Thursday in support of the coalition for change. I'll be out in Halifax. You can find information on the rallies, including whether there is one in your neck of the woods at http://www.makeparliamentwork.com/.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 48

Coalition Bloggers

2008-12-02T03:19:00.003-04:00

There is a growing network of bloggers out there who are supporting the Liberal-NDP coalition. I'm happy to be one of them.

Ordinarily, I have my qualms about working with the Liberals. They tend to govern as technocratic, corporatist and coldly capitalistic. Their history in government is distressingly similar on fiscal issues to that of the Conservative Party. The difference comes on social issues. While the Liberals may have to be dragged kicking and screaming to modern positions on issues like equal marriage and a woman's right to choose, at least once they get put in the right place on those issues they have a tendency to stay there. Whether this is reflective of the Liberal Party's congenital institutional inertia or not is hard to say, but at least it happens. The Conservatives may be temporarily dragged to a semi-modern position (i.e. equal marriage is a closed issue), but they have a tendency to back-track when we aren't looking, for example bill C-484, the attempt to bestow rights on the collection of cells known as as a foetus.

I find myself in a mirror image position to that of Jason Cherniak. He is a fiscal conservative, and self-identified blue Liberal. Yet he endorses the coalition because the alternative is Stephen Harper. I find myself thinking the same way. I am a socialist, and on the left of the NDP. But I support this coalition, because a) it gets us the most left-wing government we've had in a very long time, and b) because it isn't Stephen Harper.

Harper has done incalculable damage to the institutions of Canadian government, from turning standing committees of the House of Commons into three-ring circuses, to abusing the requirement of confidence to instituting sweeping policy changes without debate in the House through orders in council and the discretion of ministers of the Crown. If nothing else, the Liberals have a respect for the institutions of this country that the Conservatives lack. The NDP does as well. We (and I) may want to see the Senate abolished, as an example, but we believe that while it is in existence it has important work to do. We believe that the courts of this country should not be packed with partisan judges picked for their ideology. We believe that government can be a force for good.

If people from blue Liberals to socialists can support this deal, I believe that this is an indication that it will have wide support in Canada, Conservative hysterics and freeping of call-in shows and Internet forums notwithstanding. To show my support, I've added the badge that now appears at the top of the right hand column of my blog. Eventually, there will also be a website (coalitionbloggers.ca). If you want to contribute to the discussion about what that site should do or be, feel free to post comments either here, or on Dipper Chick. If you are a blogger supportive of the coalition, I urge you to add the badge to your blog as well. The code can be found at the link above.

We have to remember that what the coalition is doing is legal and constitutional, but more over it is both ethical and moral. We are faced by a regressive Conservative government instituting policy direct from the Reform Party platform of the mid-1990s, none of which was mentioned in the election campaign. The CPC may have withdrawn their attempts to eliminate public electoral funding and the right to strike of public sector workers, but they are still trying to legislate away the gains of a decade and a half for women employed in the public service, and if we let them off the hook this time, you can bet that those other measures will be back.

Now is not the time for half-measures. We must be resolute, and we must be strong. Now is manifestly the time for actions, and a better way forward is in our grasp. If we don't take it now, it will recede out of reach for years. Write to your MP and the Governor General (info@gg.ca). Let them know that you support the coalition. Remember the immortal words of Tommy Douglas: "courage, my friends. 'Tis not too late to make a better world." And never let anyone tell you it can't be done.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 49

Coalition Deal Completed

2008-11-30T23:15:00.002-04:00

The NDP and Liberals have reached a deal to form a coalition government, according to the CBC. According to this deal, the NDP will get 25% of the Cabinet seats, and will not get to name either the Deputy Prime Minister or the Finance Minister.

This is a good thing. I was hoping for a few more Cabinet seats (more like 33%), but this is good. This gives the chance to put in place a government working in the interests of Canadians unlike the hopelessly partisan and bully-boy Conservatives. Given the opportunity, this new government will bring in fiscal stimulus, and avoid the harms of a couple more years of Harper.

I'm not going to be focusing on the blatant illegalities of the taping of the NDP caucus meeting by the Conservatives. It is a sideshow they are setting up to try to distract from their completely flop of a fiscal update. I won't be distracted, and I urge the entire progressive community online not to get caught up in it either.

I'll have more information on the coalition deal as it emerges.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 51

Canada Has Our Very Own Watergate

2008-11-30T18:59:00.003-04:00

Buried in a CBC News story about how the Conservatives are moving up the date of the budget, we find this:

The Conservatives, meanwhile, have released details of an NDP caucus meeting they say was held in the form of a conference call on Saturday.

The Tories say they released a portion of the transcript on Sunday because it shows the NDP was working very closely with the Bloc long before last Thursday's economic update to replace the government.

"Let's just say we have strategies," NDP Leader Jack Layton said during the call. "This whole thing would not have happened if the moves hadn't been made with the Bloc to lock them in early because you couldn't put three people together in … three hours. The first part was done a long time ago. I won't go into details."

NDP deputy leader Thomas Mulcair said at a news conference that nothing in the NDP-BQ talks is any different than the contingency planning Stephen Harper himself engaged in with the two parties during the last Liberal minority in 2004.

He said the meeting, whose co-ordinates were inadvertently given to a Tory, were illegally recorded and broadcast and that the party has consulted two experts including a legal specialist for an opinion on whether the Criminal Code was violated.

The Conservatives intercepting a telephone call is caught neatly under s. 184(1) of the Criminal Code of Canada which reads:

184. (1) Every one who, by means of any electro-magnetic, acoustic, mechanical or other device, wilfully intercepts a private communication is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years.

This is the Harper Conservatives bugging their political opponents. And who knows how long they have been doing this for. This is criminal. This is Watergate-type. Clearly the high-level Conservatives knew about this, and authorized both the bugging and the release of the information. They knew about it, and by authorizing the release of the recording, they abetted the offence after the fact. If Harper knew about and authorized it, he is equally guilty and should go on trial.

Even if criminal proceedings are not commenced against the dirty-tricks types in the Conservative Party, the Speaker should find the whole load of them to be in contempt of Parliament. Bugging the meetings of members is pretty much the definition of breaching the Parliamentary privileges of MPs.

The Harper government is inept, dishonest, desperate, and now criminal. When the Conservatives admit to a crime to cling to power, it is over. THROW THE BUMS OUT! COALITION NOW!

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 51

Harper Lies About the Constitution

2008-11-29T15:52:00.003-04:00

Shame on Mr. Harper. Last night, at his specially constructed and pseudo-Presidential podium in the foyer of the House of Commons (does he really think he is too good to go to the Press Gallery as every PM before him has done?), Steveo lied to the people of Canada.

He got up on his hind legs and started spewing nonsense about how the opposition could not form a coalition and govern without an election. This is bullshit, and what is worse I'm sure he knows it.

The King-Byng affair, as well as numerous precedents in both the provincial legislatures and the British Parliament, affirms that the Queen or her representative has every right in a situation where the government loses the confidence of the House during the first sitting of the Parliament to ask an opposition party leader to try to assemble a government that can gain the confidence of the House. This is the whole point of our parliamentary system, and it is why the opposition is known as both "Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition" and the "government-in-waiting."

Steveo has unleashed his con-bots across the Internet, all screeching the same lines about a coalition government being anti-democratic and even anti-constitutional. This is part of a coordinated attempt to politically undermine the coming coalition government, but it is being done by lying to the people of Canada.

Part of the reason for the ferocity, and mendacity, of this response to the looming collapse of the government is surely fear. The Conservatives very likely cooked the books in the financial statement if not before, and they are deadly afraid of the opposition getting into the Ministry of Finance and finding the documents to prove it. The Conservatives have, in their three years in control of the government, surely lied and covered up multitudinous sins. Once the opposition gets in there, they are all coming out, and the Conservatives know that it will be doled out piecemeal, and they will be completely sunk in the next election. And so they are afraid.

And the result of that fear is the lies being spouted to the Canadian public by Conservatives from Steveo on down. This government lies to the public, and if for no other reason it thereby renders itself unfit to govern.

Update: The Con-bots now have their talking points for call-in shows. The CPC has a whole site set up for their partisans who are apparently either too stupid to think what to say for themselves or too untrustworthy to be allowed to come up with their own lines. You can find the CPC talking-points site here. I got their talking-points for the coalition negotiations (yes I was bad and put in a fake postal code), and here they are:

Opposition lacks mandate to take power

Is anyone else outraged by what the Opposition Parties are doing in Ottawa?
We’re not even two months removed from the last election, and a group of backroom politicians are going to pick who the Prime Minister is. Canadians didn’t vote for this person. We don’t even know who this person will be.
Not a single voter voted for a Liberal-NDP coalition. Certainly not a single voter voted for the Liberals to form a coalition with the separatists in the Bloc.
Add – what’s worse the Liberals even promised that there wouldn’t be a coalition with the NDP – this is all about power, all about money and they don’t even want to face the voters
This is what bothers me the most. The Conservatives won the election. The Opposition keeps saying that the Conservatives have to respect the will of the voters that this is a minority and so on. …how about Liberals, NDP and Bloc respecting the will of the voters when they said “YOU LOSE”.
And what’s this going to do to the economy. I’m sorry, I don’t care how desperate the Liberals are – giving socialists (Jack Layton) and separatists (Gilles Duceppe) a veto over every decision in government – that is a recipe for total economic disaster.
Here is what is bothering me about all of this backroom opposition coalition talk.
Sure it bothers me that parties Canadian rejected are trying to seize power through the back door.
But how more phony could these guys be? I mean, I follow the news, virtually every single day you have Harper or Flaherty out there telegraphing exactly what they plan to do with the economy. And not once did you hear the Liberals, NDP or separatists talking about toppling the government in response.
No – do you know what set this off. When Flaherty said he was going to take taxpayer-funded subsidies away from the opposition. Now there is a reason to try and overturn an election– because the Conservatives the audacity to say “Hey, it’s a recession, maybe you should take your nose out of the trough.”
And I wish the media would be more clear on this point – the opposition aren’t being singled out by this fact the Conservatives stand to lose the most money of all. The only difference is that Canadians are voluntarily giving money the Conservatives, so they don’t need taxpayer handouts. The only reason the opposition would be hurt more is because nobody wants to donate to them. They should be putting their efforts towards fixing that problem.
I don’t want another election. But what I want even less is a surprise backroom Prime Minister whom I never even had the opportunity to vote for or against. What an insult to democracy.

Not only is it stupid and inane, it is full of lies.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 52

Harper Scampers to Save His Government

2008-11-28T20:26:00.003-04:00

Craven Stephen Harper, the true small-man of Confederation has pushed back the opposition day scheduled for Monday by a week in a desperate attempt to save his government that is suddenly on the rocks. Flim-Flam Flaherty's economic update included more poison pills than the opposition could ever have been rationally expected to swallow, including not only the elimination of public campaign financing, but also a frontal attack on collective bargaining rights and the equal rights of women.

Flaherty took union busting to the next level, declaring that the government would use the power of the Crown to roll back collective bargaining and arbitral gains on wage increases, and eliminate the right to strike over wages until 2010-11. Not only is this piece of legislation mean spirited in the extreme, it is quite possibly illegal in light of the Supreme Court decision made last year that overturned BC's Bill 29 which tried to do much the same thing. Workers have a right to the gains they have made, and they have the right to withhold labour over whatever they please.

The government has also made a frontal assault on the pay equity of women, by stating in the economic update that pay equity would not be retroactive, and the right to recourse to the Canadian Human Rights Commission would be removed. This is insane. In the years since the courts forced the government into pay equity, this is the biggest attempt to go back on what was ordered. I don't know where the government gets off trying to eliminate the rights of women retroactively.

This stuff is red meat right out of the reform party platforms of the mid-1990s. This is our "moderate" Prime Minister. The opposition parties were never going to accept this, and it was a red flag. This is our government's way of kicking their opponents when they are down, like a bully on the school yard. We are being governed by people who behave like maladjusted eight year olds.

Dipper Chick summed up my feelings about the coalition quite nicely:

A month or so ago, I never thought that there would be a set of circumstances that would make me supportive of the NDP forming a coalition with the Liberals. But here we are.

...

I am not feeling the slightest bit complacent about any of this. The Conservatives need to be stopped. I still don't trust the Liberals, and I still believe that an NDP government is what Canadians really need. But right here and now, with things being as they are, a Liberal-NDP coalition is the best option.

My apprehension comes from wondering if the Liberals can be fair while negotiating the terms of the coalition. I have a hard time believing that they can put their sense of entitlement aside and offer the NDP a significant enough role to form a true coalition. But if they can come to an agreement that is fair, I say take Harper down.

This coalition is necessary, but Stephen Harper will do everything he can to avoid it. He's going to take the week of grace he fabricated for himself and try to turn the Canadian people against his bully-boy government. I have faith that the Canadian people will see through the thing tissue of rationalizations, excuses and lies that Harper is putting forth.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 53

Coalition Government Looks Increasingly Likely

2008-11-28T12:44:00.002-04:00

The news is breaking today that Jean Chretien and Ed Broadbent have been brokering the coalition talks between the Liberals and NDP. These two elder statesmen are working together to produce a workable coalition government that will be supported by the BQ.

Various opposition MPs have been sounding increasingly sure that the government will fall next week, including a statement by NDP Deputy Leader and Finance Critic Thomas Mulcair during question period today. If the Conservatives don't blink, they will get voted out of power by the House.

Even if the Conservatives do blink on the campaign financing, they may get voted out anyway, due to the failure to provide fiscal stimulus in the economic update. At this point, a coalition is entirely preferable to any Conservative government at all.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 53

Coalition Talk Intensifies in Ottawa

2008-11-28T01:51:00.003-04:00

The talk of a coalition government between the Liberals and NDP supported by the BQ is intensifying in Ottawa, with reports now surfacing of second-stage talks taking place, including between the opposition leaders personally. There looks to be one big bump on the road to a centre-left coalition government: the Dion factor. The NDP and BQ have signalled that they will not support a government that installs Dion as leader. This has led to an effort within the LPC to remove Dion as a leader early, and install an interim leader to see the LPC through until the May election. The problem is whether the country is prepared to accept an interim Prime Minister.

I see one way to resolve this problem, though it is admittedly massively unlikely to happen: have Jack Layton lead the government and become Prime Minister. He is a leader solidly in control of his party, and he isn't going anywhere. He has high positive ratings with the Canadian public, and is generally well respected. This is, of course, unlikely to happen because the Liberals know that letting Layton be Prime Minister is almost as deadly to their long-term interests as allowing the end of the per-vote subsidy. It would bestow huge legitimacy on the NDP federally, and cut further into the remaining base of left-liberals in the Liberal Party of Canada.

At the very least, the NDP needs to get Cabinet positions out of this deal, and Jack Layton needs to become Deputy Prime Minister and hold an important Cabinet portfolio (Finance would be good but is unlikely, Industry might be more reasonable). This is an opportunity to give a voice to the 62% of voters who did not choose the Conservative Party of Canada to govern this country. This is also a chance to prove that Parliamentary but not electoral coalitions can work as well, which is a key part of a proportional representation system.

As Dr. Dawg put it on his blog, "Form a coalition. That is all." As cliche as it is to say, the Chinese character for "crisis" incorporates both "danger" and "opportunity." And opportunity is knocking.

Update: CBC is running a poll on the cuts to democracy, which you can find here. It's currently being freeped (800+ anti-democracy votes in the past two hours, when it was running even just before then). I encourage everyone who reads this and cares about the issues to counter-freep it.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 53

Conservatives Pushing Forward With Cuts to Democracy

2008-11-27T13:26:00.004-04:00

According to Norman Spector, the Conservative attempt to repeal democracy (and thanks to Devin Johnston for that wonderful phrase) will be put to a vote before the scheduled rising of the House of Commons on Dec. 12. The Conservatives are trying to take advantage of the short time frame since the last election to push through this assault on democracy.

Is this supposed to be yet another example of Stephen Harper's ability as a brilliant political tactician? He has forced the opposition parties into a corner, from which there is no escaping. This policy would cripple the NDP and finish the Liberals and BQ. No matter that it is confidence, they cannot vote for this, they cannot let it pass.

Harper is taking an awful risk with this proposal. He is gambling that:

The opposition parties don't have the guts to bring his government down over this; and
The Governor General wont risk a repeat of the King-Byng Affair by refusing him dissolution and giving the Liberals a chance to govern with the support of the NDP and BQ.

This is a bad gamble. This is an existential threat for the opposition parties. They would rather fight another election on this issue than face the political extinction that would come from allowing this measure to go through. Further, the fact that it will have been two months since last election (at the most) will disincline the Governor General to dissolve Parliament yet again. The Conservatives could face the prospect of a Liberal-led coalition government ruling with the support of the BQ.

If the opposition parties find some steel in their spines and fight this, they may force the government to back down and remove it from the economic update. That is the best possible result at this point, because we don't need a constitutional crisis at the same time as an economic crisis.

I encourage everyone who reads this to get in touch with their MP as I have done to let MPs know that this is not on, and that Canadians support public election financing, and that we support democracy.

Update: Talk of a coalition government is swirling around Parliament Hill in the wake of this plan. I will be very interested to see what comes out of this, since the government could fall on an unrelated Ways and Means motion as early as tomorrow.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 55

Crass Conservative Games

2008-11-26T23:26:00.004-04:00

Did anyone out there fall for the line from the Conservatives that they were looking for a new spirit of cooperation? Don't worry if you did, so did the whole media. Now, however, only twelve days into the new Parliament comes word that Harper is going to try to end the $1.95/vote/year subsidy to political parties that was intended to replace corporate and union donations, as well as to compensate for the cap on personal donations.

This is an astonishingly crass move from the Conservatives, since they stand to lose the least from this. Losing the subsidy would lose the Conservatives 37% of their income for the year, whereas losing it would cost the NDP 57% of their income, cost the Block a whopping 86% of their income, and (this is the critical one) the Liberals 63%. The Conservatives are trying to exploit the fact that they have a massive fundraising edge on the other parties to cripple them, in the name of austerity. This is, quite frankly, an attempt to apply the coup de grace to the Liberal Party of Canada by extra-electoral means. It is distinctly undemocratic, and in fact anti-democratic.

This is stupid. The subsidy supports a system that reduces donor influence in the political process, and only costs $30 million. This is another one of those mean spirited Conservative cuts, but this one is profoundly anti-democratic as well. The electoral financing system is not a tool to be used for partisan political advantage.

This is likely to be the beginning of a long list of cuts to progressive programmes that the Conservatives will propose in the name of austerity. They will use this as an excuse to cut programmes they don't like, while still handing over $50 billion in tax cuts to corporations. No economist in their right mind would suggest cutting corporate taxes in the middle of a recession like this. The correct response is spending, and deficit spending if necessary, to directly stimulate the economy, and create jobs for the unemployed. This puts money directly into the hands of the worst affected, as opposed to corporate tax cuts, which gives money to the most well off while cutting what goes to the poor.

Back to the main point however, this economic meltdown is being exploited for partisan and ideological gains by the Conservatives, and they should be ashamed.

Update: As Devin Johnston mentioned in the comment, he has started a Facebook group, which you can find here. As of the time of writing this, it has 45 members. I encourage everyone who reads this and cares about the issue, or about democracy in general, to sign up.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 55

Shenanigans

2008-11-24T00:45:00.004-04:00

I call shenanigans on the banks of Canada. You may recall that not that long ago, the government of Canada made $50 billion available to banks in case they were hit hard by the financial crisis in the United States. And yet today we get a statement from the CEO of TD Bank that it is highly unlikely that the bank will be cutting dividends.

This drives me nuts. For those of you that don't know, dividends are how corporations return profits to shareholders. The board of directors decides how much to return, and generally this is only supposed to be done when the company is profitable. These bastards are using public money to pay dividends to shareholders when the money was intended to help them survive a big hit from the financial crisis. These capitalists are robbing Canadians blind, and this crap flies under the radar, being mentioned only in coverage like the Report on Business.

Canadians should be up in arms that we are being fleeced, yet again, by the big banks. They must honestly think we're all stupid to pull this crap. Let's show them that we're not. Let's show them that they can't steal from the Canadian people. This is garbage.

How many people voted Conservative and not NDP in the naive belief that Conservatives would be better managers of the economy and the public purse? The NDP even ran ads telling people that exactly this would happen, including pictures of money being divvied up on boardroom tables. And that is exactly what we got. What is it going to take for people to realize that Conservatives are frauds?

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 57

Harper, the Coming Deficit and Conservative Class Warfare

2008-11-23T12:34:00.004-04:00

Stephen Harper continues to move away from his declarations during the election campaign that if we were going to have a recession here in Canada we would already have had one, and that the fundamentals of the economy are strong. Today at the APEC summit, he was, to use the Toronto Star's language, "[drawing] on memories of the Great Depression." Is it not strange, that he can change his tune so radically over the course of a month and a half, from excoriating Stephane Dion for refusing to absolutely rule out running a deficit, to making the arguments for why we should be deficit spending.

There are two explanations for this incongruity, when you take into consideration that many economists saw this recession coming down the pipes at least a year in advance, and some saw it coming longer away than that (Marx saw it coming 130 years ago). The first possible explanation is that Harper is fundamentally incompetent at the role of managing the economy. If he, with an MA in economics, was unable to see this coming 45 days ago, when the majority of the western world could, then he is entirely incompetent to be making the big decisions. Of we adopt this explanation, he was too focused on blind partisanship to actually see that the train was about to go off the rails. The second possible explanation is that Harper deliberately deceived the Canadian people, that he lied to us. This explanation is supported by the rapid about-face he performed when it became undeniably clear that the economy of the western world was headed into the shitter.

Harper has already committed the country to a $50 billion bank bailout, which when you consider the proportional sizes of the Canadian and American economies is actually a bigger bailout than the $700 billion Wall Street bailout. He wants to send the country further into debt to bail out the auto industry by handing them a no-strings-attached cheque. And mark my words, this deficit that he created to bail out failing capitalists is going to be used as an excuse to cut services for the working class. This is the Conservative modus operandi. Transfer wealth to capitalists. Use resulting deficit to justify programme cuts. Rinse. Repeat.

Now, I think that so long as we are operating under a market-capitalist system, Keynesian spending is a good way to stimulate the economy, but it has to be targeted correctly. Shovelling money into the gaping maw of transnational capital is not correct targeting. The best way to stimulate the economy is through direct transfers to the most impoverished. These are the people living pay cheque to pay cheque, and spending every cent that comes in on necessities of life like food, clothing and rent. These people will not take the transfers and squirrel them away. They will put every last cent back into circulation, thus getting maximum value for the government's stimulus dollar. Whereas transfers that benefit the rich wind up being saved, taken out of circulation and ultimately sent overseas to nontaxable Swiss bank accounts. Supposed stimulus measures targeted at the rich are a deception. They will not stimulate the economy because the money won't go into circulation, it will go into bank accounts to be inactive and gather interest.

I understand that many people are worried about the looming failure of the big three American automakers. So am I, since there are plenty of jobs that will be lost, with the resulting knock-on effects through the economy. That is why I support finding a way to save them, but not in their present form. The only way I would ever support a bailout is if it resulted in the public acquiring, on a permanent basis, majority equity and voting control over the companies. That way, the government can insure that the bailout money goes to the right places, not into paying dividends and obscene executive pay packages. The government can make sure that the companies are serving the public interest by building fuel-economical (not the same as fuel-efficient, though generally fuel economy requires fuel efficiency) vehicles for sale to the public, as well as retooling some plants to produce public transit vehicles like buses, street-cars, light-rail vehicles and trains to meet the longer-term requirement for effective, efficient and widespread public mass transit.

Nationalization is ultimately the best bet precisely because the nationalized companies can be made to serve the needs of the people, rather than the people serving the needs of the companies and their controlling capitalists. Government ought to be for the people, not for capital, but I can't call to mind a time when Canada truly had government for the people. In fact, the only government I can think of that was ever really for the people in Canadian history was the CCF government of Tommy Douglas in Saskatchewan that introduced many great programmes, built many strong Crown corporations, substantially increased the standard of living across Saskatchewan, and managed to do all of this while running 17 straight balanced budgets, making that government the most effective manager of public funds in Canadian history.

Conservatives like to wrap themselves in the mantle of sound fiscal management, but their version of sound management is transferring wealth to the wealthy, and making up for it by cutting services to the working class. That isn't sound fiscal management, that is the class warfare for which they so readily decry socialists. The only difference is that conservatives around the world wage class warfare on the working class. Since the capitalists and their political puppets on the right are waging class warfare on the workers already, it is time that the working class said "enough already" and started to wage class warfare back. Enough sitting around and passively taking it. It's time to organize and fight back.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 58

Canada Signs Free-Trade Agreement with Colombia

2008-11-22T00:24:00.004-04:00

Well, this isn't good news. It seems that Stephen Harper craftily, and without any fanfare, signed a free-trade agreement with Colombia today. That's right, the same Colombia that allows right-wing paramilitaries to kidnap and execute union leaders (see, for example, here, here or here) and journalists (see here, here or here). The same Colombia that tramples on the rights of women (e.g. this), the indigenous people (e.g. this) and LGBT folks (see here). This is not a government with which Canada should be consorting.

Free trade is also a deeply problematic notion for the working class on both sides of the equation. In Canada, we lose yet more manufacturing jobs to places where the companies can pay peanuts, and in Colombia they get goods dumped on their markets at very low prices, essentially forcing local competitors out of business. This is especially a problem in the market for food. History shows that free trade in food leads to market gluts and greatly depressed prices. This means that small farmers can no longer make the income they need to stay in business. They are forced off the land and wind up in the barrios of the big cities, living in the attendant squalor, because there are some meagre jobs to be had. This is a recurring problem all over the world, wherever the west gets to dump its surplus grains.

The only people that free trade works for are the capitalists. The Canadian capitalists get to slough of the expense of paying decent union wages in Canada in exchange for the pathetic wages that workers will accept in Colombia, and their profits go up. The Colombian capitalists get to find an increased market for the goods that they make in Colombia now that all the factories are moving down there, plus they get to force more and more small farmers off their land, clearing the way for large plantations growing cash crops for export. For them, it's a win-win.

The deal supposedly has a clause requiring respect for human rights, but the only penalty imposed for breaking the clause is payment into a fund for strengthening human rights. Ooh boy, what a penalty, a fine into a fund that they can probably tap themselves. That's a deterrent. And our hopeless leader, Stevie Harper, seems to think that such a pathetic clause "answers" all the criticisms. Well guess what Stevie. Not even close.

Oh wait, I get it. The Conservatives don't much care for women, aboriginal people or gays and lesbians. That would be why they don't care that Colombia stomps on the rights of all three groups. It's so obvious now.

Stevie, your little deal goes against Canadian values of tolerance and social justice. Shame on you.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 59

The Liberal Leadership Race

2008-11-20T01:21:00.002-04:00

Things seem to be firming up in the race to take over the most haplessly managed party in Canada, this side of the Greens. It's been a long time since we've seen a new entrant to the race since Iggy formally announced (and no-one was surprised). Indeed, there's been a veritable parade of notable, and not so notable, Liberals to declare that they will not be seeking the leadership.

The highest profile person to declare a non-interest in leading the Liberal Party of Canada is Gerrard Kennedy (sorry for the National Post link, but it was the first one that came to hand and I can't be fussed to look elsewhere). To that, I say "good", and wipe my brow, because if he had been Liberal leader there would be no chance to knock him off next election. Now there is. Also, he remains an empty suit with a good haircut, and unqualified to lead the Liberals.

It is increasingly looking like a three-man race, starring Dominic LeBlanc, Bob Rae and Iggy in what is already turning into an entertaining gong show, what with the debate fiasco last week. We know where Iggy and Rae stand, generally speaking (though with Rae you never can be sure), but LeBlanc is more of an unknown quantity, lacking much profile beyond his home province of New Brunswick. This is something like Alex Atamenenko (good guy though he is) theoretically running for the leadership of the NDP. He is a second generation politician, as his father was also a Liberal MP, and LeBlanc's highest position was parliamentary secretary to various ministers. There is not much information available that I could find with regard to his political leanings, but I have heard some mutterings (mostly from the bobbleheads on the CBC's At Issue panel) that he is trying to wrap himself up in the generational change flag hoisted by the victory of Barack Obama in the States.

Unless someone new and high profile joins the race, and aside from Dalton McGuinty I can't think of who that would be, this contest will come down to Rae and Iggy, with LeBlanc shouting from the sidelines. Both of these two major candidates have significant baggage though, and both of them will face attacks from both the right and the left should they get elected leader.

Something about Iggy, besides the right-wing policies really grates on me, and from what I can tell most of my political junky law school friends (who I should say are mostly Conservatives): his condescension. He spends most of his career in the States, and then deigns to come back and grace us with his presence and wisdom. I think he may well see himself in the mould of a Platonic philosopher-king, to some extent like Pierre Trudeau. Sorry Iggy, but that isn't what Canada wants or needs right now. And you've made quite clear where your ideas would lead us: American imperialistic aggression as tag alongs. So no, thanks, Iggy. If you get defeated one more time, why not go back to your position at Harvard. I'm sure they're still holding it open for you.

As for Rae, I just plain don't like him. He sold out the NDP when in government, betraying the principles of the party and our supporters in the labour movement. He governed ineptly, allowed a free vote on equal spousal benefits for same-sex couples (the measure failed), and blackened the name of the Ontario and federal NDP for the better part of a generation. He is a pro-Israeli hawk and shows a marked void of any sort of principles whatsoever. But then again, he is a high-profile Liberal. That comes with the territory.

In summary, and I'm sure surprising no-one, I don't like any of the contenders for the Liberal leadership. However, in my mind Iggy represents the best bet to kick Harper out of office while still allowing for further NDP growth, so I hope he wins. He won't get a majority, but if he gets a minority the NDP can wield some influence, and we can get better governance out of it. Yes, I know that's selfish and partisan. So sue me.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 61

Rallies Against Hate Across the World

2008-11-16T02:03:00.003-04:00

Across the United States, and around the world, rallies were held to protest the passage of Proposition Eight in California on Nov. 4. There are some phenomenal pictures out there, from protests all over the United States, as well as some that I could track down from the protest in Toronto. The site with the most pictures is Towleroad, and the pictures from Toronto can be found at This. That. No Other.

The numbers for turnout are absolutely remarkable. The Los Angeles crowd was reported at 30-40,000, and the San Diego crowd was reported at 25,000. This moment may mark a new revitalization in the campaign for equal rights for LBGT folks in the United States, and may mark the point at which the momentum moved from the bigots and haters to the supporters of equality.

In Canada, it is easy to be complacent, to think that because the battle for marriage equality was won here those who support equality here can rest. But it's not true. On the day that the Conservative Party held the plenary session of their policy convention, we have to remember that there are still those in Canada that would roll back equal rights, and that they form the government.

The object lesson of Proposition Eight is that while rights can be won, the bigots will not rest until they find a way to take them away. That means that those of us who support equality can't become complacent. We have to remain on watch until the bigots either see the error of their ways, or die off.

Being angry is good, being angry is healthy. But being angry alone is not enough. In the words of Solidarity Forever, and as equality supporters in the United States are showing, what is necessary is to organize and fight.

Good on everyone who came out to protest, and hopefully this is the beginning of a new, strong, movement for full and equal citizenship for all.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 65

Eva Ariak Becomes First Female Premier of Nunavut

2008-11-15T16:22:00.002-04:00

Eva Ariak, the only woman in the Nunavut legislature, was elected by the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut yesterday to be the new premier, defeating incumbent premier Paul Okalik. She becomes the second premier of Nunavut, and the first female Premier of the territory.

I confess to not knowing much about Ariak's policies, but it is always good to see more members of historically disadvantaged groups, such as women, attaining high office. I do wonder to what extent Nunavut's consensus-style government eases the way for this to happen. After all, Ms. Ariak did not did not have gain the leadership of a political party as would be the case in any of the provinces or in the Yukon. Party structures have traditionally militated against female party leaders, particularly at the federal level but at the provincial level as well.

I wish Ms. Ariak well, and I hope that her election will lead to more women running for and winning seats in legislature both in Nunavut and the across the country. Good luck Ms. Ariak!

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 66

Unite the "Left"? I Think Not

2008-11-14T19:11:00.003-04:00

In the month since the general election of October 14, there have been an increasing number of calls to “unite the left.” Generally when this is proposed, the writer or speaker means that the Liberals, New Democrats and Greens (and sometimes the Blocists) should unite to form a single party, as the Reform/Alliance and Progressive Conservatives did in the early years of the decade to produce today's governing Conservative Party of Canada. Protagonists of this view believe that this is the only way in which the opposition to the current government can gain power.

Even those on the right who don't want to see this but think it would be a good idea for the opposition parties (I was talking with one of them about this yesterday), suggest that it would be successful, and would allow the NDP to gain a greater ability to push through policy proposals, as opposed to the “freak of mathematics” (as my friend put it), that results in the NDP every so often holding the balance of power for a Liberal minority government.

As you may have gathered from my previous mentions of this proposal, I think the whole idea is a crock, designed to subsume more principled opposition into the Liberal Party, and effectively render it impotent. If the NDP were to go along with this, the Party would simply become the left wing of the Liberal Party of Canada, which is really not acceptable, considering the substantial differences on policy between the parties. Liberal brass loves this idea, because it allows them to no longer have to worry about electoral opposition on their left flank, and thus to concentrate on matching the Conservatives tax cut for tax cut. The only pain the Liberals would suffer from this agreement is having a very vocal, but ultimately powerless, left-wing faction within their party.

The subsuming of the NDP (and to a lesser extent the Greens) into the Liberals would also be profoundly anti-democratic. The people are far better served by a system with more than two political parties. For an example of what happens when there are only two national parties with any real representation, look no further than the United States. There, the red and blue wings of the Property Party trade power back and forth, stultifying in a stagnant swamp of political theories long gone sour. The democratic processes are far better served when there are third and fourth parties able to compete for seats and a share of power. Even the old Westminster-style Parliamentaries democracies have multi-party systems now: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, India and the mother of them all, the United Kingdom. The US is one of the few industrialized democracies in the world clinging to a two-party system, where the space between the parties on most issues is so small as to be negligible. A two-party system reduces voter choice to a minimum, and that is anti-democratic. I don't want to see that for Canada, and that is another reason I oppose the idea of uniting the “left.”

But the most important reason that I oppose this idea is that it pre-supposes that the Liberal and Green parties are in fact parties of the left, or even the centre-left. As my Conservative friend pointed out to me, the Liberals have the capacity to occasionally elect a centre-left leader. However, this has not happened since the days of Pierre Elliot Trudeau. Some, perhaps many, would disagree with me and point at the hapless Stephane Dion. However, Mr. Dion was not left or even centre-left. His public face is a mix of dated and stale Liberal centre-left proposals that we have heard every election since 1993, such as universal childcare that was never delivered, and a wink-wink, nudge-nudge to his party's friends on Bay Street, promising more and deeper corporate tax cuts for the Conservatives, and a policy to fight greenhouse gas emissions that would have directly placed the burden for changing consumption practices on the poorest members of Canadian society. The Liberal Party is expert at putting on a veneer of the centre-left come election time, but the Liberals have not governed from the centre-left in a long time, indeed governing from the centre-right during the long Chretien/Martin years. No, the Liberals are not a party of the centre-left, and to unite with them is to lose one's soul in pursuit of power.

Similarly, political pundits seem to revel in identifying the Green Party as a party of the left. Sorry, no. Green Party policies focus on market based solutions, and reverse-wealth transfer schemes, such as a carbon tax. They are led by a woman who said that women do not have "the frivolous right to choose" to have an abortion, and who worked for Brian Mulroney, identifying him as the "greenest" Prime Minister in history. The leadership of the Green Party, and increasingly it's electoral base, is drawn from former Progressive Conservatives. Not exactly the left. Caring about the environment is not a left-right issue. How you approach environmental protection is, and that is where the Greens show themselves not to be a party of the left, as the media and many pundits would have us believe.

As for the BQ, merging with a party seeking the dissolution of Canada is incompatible with the mission of a federal political party representing the entire country. They have some good, left, views and policies, such as opposition to the use of replacement workers during strikes, but their policies of radical decentralization are a right-wing position to take.

The reality is, despite the mass of pundits who would like to see a subsuming of the NDP and Greens into the Liberals, there is no collection of left-wing parties to unite. Canada has a party of the far right, two parties of the centre right, a party of the left-centre-left, and a party devoted to Quebec independence. The left is already as united as it can get without pawning its soul to buy power. And if you don't have any principles, then all you have is power, and all you are is a Liberal.

If the NDP were to merge with the Liberals, I would rip up my membership there and then. For this socialist, the NDP has drifted too far right as it is. Drift much further, and there is no more value in the party for me.

I'll have an entry updating the Liberal leadership race within the next couple of days.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 67

Once Again, It's All About eMay

2008-11-12T20:29:00.002-04:00

Elizabeth May (eMay), has written six page memo for the Green Party summarizing what went well and what went badly for the Greens in the recent election. I'll save you the trouble of hunting it down and reading it (it's remarkably hard to find the original version, rather than the edited version that eMay released on her blog, which if you want you can find here) and summarize it for you. What went well: Elizabeth May. What went badly: everything and everyone else.

Some fantastic (and wince-worthy) quotes:

Sadly the media was stuck in their old story line. Despite polls to the contrary, the media story was that Peter MacKay was unbeatable. This certainly hurt our last stretch messaging.

Uh huh. I couldn't have anything to do with the fact that you were actually running several thousand votes behind?

We accomplished a great deal. In late August, we made history when Blair Wilson became the first Green MP in Canadian history. The announcement of that coup was flawlessly executed and positioned us well for the campaign.

Oh yes, a great coup alright, bringing in a disgraced Liberal to force your way into the leaders' debates and then proceeding to lose his seat in the general election.

In relative terms, we did better than any other party.

HAH! Two other parties gained seats, four other parties elected their respective leaders, every other party finished in first place in at least one province or territory in terms of popular vote.

There are many lessons to learn, but top of my list was that our vision and aspirations were not matched by a machine on the ground to deliver the vote.

So, its the fault of your volunteers? Classy eMay.

... the media in Canada was not ready for a message for change. Our national media was working from an old script. Ironically, the media agenda and partisan bias was more fixed in Canada than in the U.S..

Media bias was clearly a major factor in this election. By this, I mean more than the usual media bias against the Green Party. There is no question that our policies were either ignored or misrepresented. Our policy announcements were often completely ignored. If not for a telegenic whistle stop tour, I do not think we would have had any major coverage once the "debate over the debates" was resolved. The times we did the more traditional major photo op media event with a big policy announcement attached, we received nearly zero coverage.

Bwa-hah-hah!! Oh, eMay, you slay me. The media was biased in their favour. Aside from the strategic voting nonsense, I can't recall a single negative story about the Greens from the last campaign. eMay got far more face time than her party's standing warrants.

What did get coverage was repeated efforts to throw us off-stride, generally originating in the blogosphere, then in major papers and to scrums and media questions. For the most part, the communications team did a great job shutting these down.

Yes, the threat to sue Buckdog for posting the clip in which she called Canadians stupid was a great piece of work. Fantastic.

I believe the Conservative Party let their favourite media mouthpieces know that they wanted the Greens marginalized by treating me as a "bizarre" or "off the wall" (both Mike Duffy and the Macleans piece last year have tried this spin). It is clear to me that CTV orchestrated the situation so that I would be informed on Mike Duffy Live that the consortium had decided to keep me out of the debates. It was a deliberate ploy to spring the news on me in hopes of having a television clip of me over-reacting, being angry or tearful. They could have used such a clip to confirm my unsuitability to participate in the debates - thus letting Harper and Layton off the hook.

Oh, that's a good one. Paranoid much?

No campaign planning document was ever prepared that I saw. No campaign discussions and strategies calls took place during the campaign. My feeling throughout the campaign was that I was flying by the seat of my pants.

So, a) it's all someone else's fault, and b) she was doing all the work. Well, doesn't it seem to anybody that, perhaps, a leader's job is to coordinate this kind of stuff? Perhaps if there were no campaign planning documents, eMay should have initiated the process to write a few. As for the phone calls, I'm pretty sure eMay's phone can make calls as well as receive them. She could have initiated campaign discussions and strategy calls herself.

The biggest problem area to sort out by the next campaign is how I can win in my riding (any riding) when I am out of the riding more than half the time. The push and pull is tough. Can we have any kind of decision that the Leader winning in her seat is a top priority? (*the* Top Priority?) If I had been in Central Nova the whole time (except for national debates), I would have won.

It's all about MEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!

I pledged constantly, from my opening press conference seeking GPC leadership, to never say something I believed to be untrue.

Oh stop, stop, you're killing me! Explain how you could say "There’s something wrong with Jack Layton if he’d rather open up discussions with the Taliban than the Green party" if you are such a relentless truth-teller (note: a link is to a Green Party blog because it was the only source I could still find for the quote, since the original Chronicle-Herald story has disappeared behind a subscription wall. If anyone wants to help me out with a link to the original story, I'd appreciate it).

As long as I am leader, I will ensure the Green Party of Canada is a beacon of truth in a sea of spin. I will not allow partisanship to betray our children's future.

I can't say anything about this that I haven't said before, but my gawd, the hubris.

I'll just leave you with those quotes and my commentary. I think that's about all that needed saying from me on that topic.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 69

Keith Olbermann and Proposition Eight

2008-11-11T16:15:00.000-04:00

Keith Olbermann is incredible.

I just stumbled across his Special Comment on Proposition Eight, and thought it was something that merits sharing. Good on ya Keith.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 70

Ignatieff Poised to Enter Liberal Race

2008-11-11T01:24:00.003-04:00

I'm working on my entry on the "unite the left" nonsense, but that will take a while if it's to be anything other than a ranting screed. Meanwhile, life carries on, and I'll be commenting on the Liberal leadership race primarily.

It looks like Michael Ignatieff will declare his candidacy for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada in the coming days. Obviously, this is long expected, since along with Bob Rae he is considered one of the front-runners for the leadership.

Mr. Ignatieff is, despite appearances to the contrary, a very polished and skilled politician. I saw him speak at Dalhousie Law School and he spoke quiet eloquently, though in a rather stilted manner, on the duty to protect under international law. This "duty" is a hallmark of the position of 'liberal hawks' such as Iggy. Clearly he firmly believes in the duty to protect. A Liberal who firmly believes in something is a refreshing change. Mr. Ignatieff is also consummately skilled at dodging questions, another important skill for a potential leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. He was asked a number of tough questions about how his support for Iraq and the duty to protect could be reconciled with the dominance of the concept of sovereignty in international law (including by yours truly). He didn't give a straight answer to any of those questions. Iggy has the smooth interpersonal manner that one expects from Liberal politicians, with the effortless assertion of an unquestioning moral superiority. He very adroitly handled a couple of protesters that had attended his address to the Law School, with the typical Liberal mix of crocodile tears and imperious condescension. This is the man that would be philosopher-king.

However, Iggy's position as a liberal hawk will stand him in bad stead with the majority of the country. Canadians have turned against the occupation of Afghanistan, and it's exaltation of the parasitical and corrupt quisling Karzai. Iggy's vocal support of the invasion of Iraq will not go over well with Canadians who are tired of fighting as American proxies. He will be made to wear that support for George Bush's war by the left if he becomes the leader of the Liberals.

Where Iggy would be politically good for the Liberals would be on fiscal policy. He is a classical economic liberal, seeing a smaller role for the state in the economy, and favouring reduced taxes on the rich and scaled-back social programmes. He has the capacity to entice lapsed Liberal voters who moved to the Conservatives back into the fold, bringing many seats into play.

What is sad is that a candidate so damaged should be considered one of the best bets to lead the Liberals through the wilderness. There was a long time when the Liberal Party attracted titans to fight for it's leadership, people like Sir Wilfrid Laurier, William Lyon Mackenzie King, Lester B. Pearson, Pierre Elliot Trudeau and even Jean Chretien. Neither Iggy or Rae are in the same league. We are watching the decline and final stages of the decline and fall of the most successful political party in the western electoral democracies. The Martin years were the last fluorescence of Liberal decadence before the fall.

The question that remains to be seen is how softly the Liberal Party will go into that sweet night. Will it struggle one more time for life, or will it end not with a bang but with a whimper?

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 70

Liberal Leadership

2008-11-09T19:50:00.005-04:00

It's looking increasingly like it will be a small field for the Liberal leadership this time around, rather than the 12-person gong show it was last time. New rules put in place by the Liberal executive place stringent financial requirements on would-be entrants, that will screen out many lesser lights at the entry stage. Also, the party is forcing candidates to hand over 10% of all donations to their campaigns to the central party. That's how close to broke the formerly-dominant Liberal Party of Canada is.

Interestingly, a number of pro-Iggy MPs have been trying to hustle the party toward an undemocratic decision, with Judy Sgro going as far as to suggest that the Liberal Party should "flip a coin" to determine who takes it. And these people wonder why they are seen as out of touch.

I still believe that the best thing for the Liberal Party in terms of electoral success would be to elect someone from the right wing of their party, but they are rapidly running out of such people willing to run. Of the three high-profile figures than answered that description, both John Manley and Frank McKenna have indicated they don't want the job. Of the immediately apparent contestants, that leaves only Iggy and maybe Scott Brison. Electing Mr. Brison would probably help the Liberals regain ground in the Atlantic provinces, and he would likely appeal to the red Tory-blue liberal swing votes in southern Ontario as he is fiscally conservative but socially liberal.

Something that has been very annoying lately is the inane blather coming from certain corners about "uniting the left," by which the people writing seem to mean the Liberals, NDP and Greens, and sometimes the BQ. This very much annoys me, since the Liberals are not, by any stretch of the imagination, social democratic or left-wing, and neither are the Greens. I think I will probably write a longer piece on this topic at a later point. However, this meme will likely gain some traction in the Liberal Party, since they are always looking for a way to co-opt the voters of other parties.

If the "unite the left" blather picks up steam, the Liberals may elect someone from the left of their party in an attempt to de facto unite the left, and if this is so they will likely pick Bob Rae or Gerrard Kennedy. Rae is an untrustworthy turncoat, sharing some views with the far right wing (most evidently on Israel), but because he was at one point a wolf-in-sheep's-clothing New Democrat, he will be seen as left-leaning. Gerrard Kennedy is simply an empty suit and a good haircut. He did squat as education minister in Ontario and is only in the running because he is charismatic on TV. In person he is slime incarnate. I say that having met him on a couple of occasions.

What ever way the Liberals go at their convention in Vancouver next May, they have a long roe to hoe to get back into a government situation.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 72

Homophobia Lives in the United States

2008-11-05T10:07:00.002-04:00

I am bitterly disappointed with voters in California, Arizona, Florida and Arkansas today. In all of those states, voters opted to pass ballot initiatives, some of them constitutional amendments, to eliminate certain rights for gay, lesbian and bisexual Americans. In an election in which racism was shown to be on the decline, voters still proved themselves to be bigots. I am especially disappointed in California. They had marriage equality, and they have opted to tell everyone that their state constitution is a vessel for bigotry, by voting in favour of proposition 8. The most flabbergasting part of these results is how strongly black voters supported prop 8. It is incomprehensible to me that members of a group that 45 years ago was suffering the brutality of segregation could turn around today and tell another group of people that separate-but-equal is good enough (especially since "civil unions" are not as good as marriages, for all the reasons put forward in the now-annulled California Supreme Court decision).

Some day, Americans will look back on the plethora of homophobic ballot initiatives over the last eight years as a dark period in American history. Someday the veil of hateful superstition will lift, and the people of America will realize that holding someone to be less of a person and less entitled to equal benefit of law because of some factor about themselves that they have no control over is a fundamentally wrong thing to do. Someday Americans will look back on this period of ignorance and hatred, and be astonished that the people of California thought that this was an acceptable way to behave.

But until that day comes, LGBT Americans will continue to live in a country where denying their basic rights is common practice, and where embedding hatred and bigotry in a constitution is deemed an acceptable practice. The pall of racism has begun to lift, but the dusk of homophobia is settling further across the United States. For shame.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 75

A Seminal Moment

2008-11-05T02:18:00.002-04:00

Tonight, an African American was elected President for the first time in American history. This is a pivotal moment in the history of the United States. This is an opportunity to turn from the old prejudices and hatreds, and to look to a brighter, more equal tomorrow. Congratulations to you, President-Elect Obama, and congratulations to America for having the courage to elect him.

Unfortunately, this wind of change, hope, acceptance and tolerance does not seem to reach to all. Voters in several states have voted to restrict the rights of gay and lesbian people, whether it be a ban on adoption by same-sex couples, or bans on equal marriage in Florida, Arizona and California, they have all succeeded or are leading at the moment. It is a sad statement that America and Americans are willing to try to move past racism, but are unwilling to move past homophobia.

The Democrats have strengthened their hold on both the Senate and the House of Representatives, but will fall short of the sixty-seat super-majority needed in the Senate to block Republican obstructionism, and as a result will face more filibusters and delaying tactics on the part of an embittered and hateful opposition.

There are many races not yet done, and I hope especially to see Al Franken win in Minnesota and to see Prop 8 fail in California. We shall see.

I will try to post a more fulsome analysis later, when I'm not sleepy.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency (Day Until Obama Presidency): 75

Long Lines in Many States and Continuing Irregularities

2008-11-04T15:54:00.002-04:00

Another quick update. Long lines are being reported in many states, with continuing strong turnout, including an estimated 80% turnout in Ohio.

In some eastern states, wet weather is causing problems with voters dripping water on optical scan ballots, while there were problems with registration books in a county in Missouri, and voting machines are rejecting some ballots in Florida where voters abstained on certain questions. All of these have been addressed so far with what appear to be satisfactory solutions.

More concerning is text messages reported by voters in Texas, Missouri, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas telling Democrats to vote on Wednesday. Apparently, someone has also paid for robocalls in Missouri telling voters the same thing, and an e-mail saying the same has been circulating in Arkansas. This is clearly a fairly well financed attempt to distort and alter the vote in these states. The police should be looking into who is responsible, particularly for the Robocalls in Missouri.

I'll try to keep abreast of what is going on and update again before polls close. Though being in class all day is making that tough.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 76

Substantial Voting Problems Reported in Florida, Ohio

2008-11-04T11:19:00.003-04:00

CNN is reporting that significant problems with voting machines are occurring in Florida and Ohio, with sporadic reports of problems elsewhere in the US. So far today, 11,000 calls have been made to CNN's hot line reporting problems, and of those 1,500 are in Florida and 450 are in Ohio. Both of these are states that McCain must win if he is to have any chance of winning the Presidency. These must be closely watched.

I do wonder how long the Americans will continue to accept Diebold voting machines in their elections. The rest of the world seems to manage just fine with paper ballots, and yet American governments seem to have a fascination with electronic voting machines. Hopefully the Americans will force their government to return to paper ballots.

I will try to keep updating during the day, but since I'm in class for most of the day, that may be a bit difficult. Also, I won't be live blogging the election tonight, since I'll be watching the returns at a bar with friends. I will write something later tonight once the outcome is clear.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 76

Twenty-four Hours

2008-11-03T19:58:00.006-04:00

That's how long we have before the first polls start reporting in the Presidential election. In twenty four hours we'll start seeing exit poll results from Vermont, Virginia, Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and Georgia, with real poll results soon afterward. If Obama takes Virginia, Indiana and Georgia, it will be lights out for John McCain and an early call to this presidential election. An important thing to remember is that Democrats voted strongly in early polls where they were availalble. This may well act to skew the results of exit polling in favour of Republicans, so take exit poll numbers with some additional grains of salt. If McCain holds both Indiana and Georgia, then we'll have to wait for the 7:30 EST closing states to assess the election. Those are Ohio, West Virginia and North Carolina. If Obama has taken Virginia and proceeds to take either Ohio or North Carolina, once again it's lights out for McCain. McCain's path to victory is extremely narrow, and I don't see any realistic way that he wins this election.

The important question to be asked now is just how much change a President Obama will bring. On too much, he is simply a reiteration of the status quo ante in American politics: unqualified support for Israel, opposition to marriage equality, bellicose attitudes toward Cuba and Venezuela and the orthodoxy of capitalism. Not that I expected anything different from him. Let's face facts. Even a left-wing Democrat would be, at best, a centrist Liberal in Canada. Horatio Alger-ism and class misidentification have produced a phenomenally distorted public perception of class in American society. American society is deeply inculcated with a Pavlovian hostility to socialism, despite the fact that socialism would produce better lives and more true freedom for a great majority of the population. The American political spectrum is so skewed to the right that a depressing number of Americans actually believe that Obama is a socialist. To their credit, many do not, but in a country where "liberal" is a slur (despite the country being deeply liberal in the classical sense), it is hardly surprising that so many react with snarling hostility to the cry of "socialism."

All of that aside, Obama is still a better choice for President. While he will not likely move significantly to the left on either foreign or domestic policy (if he does I will happily eat crow), John McCain would continue the move to the radical right, appointing judges to strike down a woman's right to choose, continuing the abusive excesses of executive power perpetrated by the Bush government, further reducing tax rates on those with the most, cutting services for those with the least, bloating the military further, running up ever more ruinous debt loads, pursuing ever more violent foreign policies and seeking to destroy the United Nations to replace it with some NATO-type proxy.

No, Obama is not what I would want, or even want to settle for, but he is still better than McCain, who is, quite simply, scary. I hope that Americans vote for Senator Obama tomorrow, and I hope that he proves me wrong and becomes the transformational, progressive, President that there is an opening for him to be.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 77

Coming Down to the Wire

2008-11-02T19:43:00.003-04:00

The American presidential election is finally drawing to a close. At the moment, it is looking like the earth would have to move in order for Barack Obama to lose this election. There are only two states where his lead over John McCain is very thin: North Carolina and Florida. Obama can win without either of those state. John McCain cannot win if he does not get both. But even getting both of those would not be enough to put John McCain in the White House. He would need to take more states away from Obama, states where Obama has a much more solid lead - states like Pennsylvania and Virginia. I think this is unlikely, especially given the number of early voters.

More interesting, at this point, is the race for control of Congress. The Democrats will control both houses when the show is over, but the question is whether they will have a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. At this point, it's looking unlikely, though Minnesota is a true toss-up, and both Georgia and Texas (astonishingly) are in play as potential Democrat gains. Watch those three states on election night. If the Dems take North Carolina, those three states will tell the tale, since if all three go Democrat, they can have their filibuster proof majority without counting on Joe "Turncoat" Lieberman or moderate Republicans like Olympia Snowe of Maine. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem likely, since Georgia has been trending GOP over the last couple days.

It should be interesting, and I may live blog it happens, depending on if I'm watching at home.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 78

The Pyhrric Victory of the New Democratic Party

2008-10-27T19:26:00.005-03:00

So, this is my long promised analysis of the NDP coming out of the October 14th election. This will probably conclude my series on issues arising from the election. After this, I will probably turn my attention to Liberal leadership politics and the American election.

To begin with, the NDP accomplishments out of this election should be stated. A net gain of seven seats over the standings at dissolution, and a gain of 0.65% of the vote on top of the 2006 election. The gain of seats is nothing to sneeze at, particularly as they largely represent a new power base for the NDP in Northern Ontario, as the NDP won seven of the ten seats that make up the region, failing to gain only Kenora, Nippising-Timiskaming, and Parry Sound-Muskoka. Of those three, Kenora is within reach for the next election. Also important, is that for the first time ever, the NDP won a seat in Quebec in a general election, and for only the second time ever, the NDP took seats in Alberta and Newfoundland and Labrador. There were also a number of seats where the NDP came very close to making gains: St. John's South - Mt. Pearl, South Shore-St. Margaret's, Gatineau, Oshawa, Beaches-East York, Palliser, Regina-Qu'Appelle and Nunavut. There are also a number seats that the NDP lost control of by a narrow margin that join the forgoing as the low-hanging fruit: Parkdale-High Park (more on this one later), Surrey-North and Vancouver Island North. That makes twelve seats that could reasonably be called low-hanging fruit for the NDP, and if we can take them all and hold what we have in the next election, that would take the NDP to 49 seats, which would be the party's highest ever number of seats.

Another important thing for the NDP is that the party's vote is becoming much more effective. Over the last many elections, the NDP vote has been consistently under-represented in the number of seats won. In the 2004 election, the NDP took 15.68% of the vote, but only got a paltry 6.17% of the seats. It took 111 968 NDP votes to win one seat. In 2006, the NDP took 17.48% of the vote, and garnered 9.41% of the seats. This means 89 296 votes for the NDP to win a single seat. In the 2008 election, the NDP got 18.13% of the vote while taking 12.01% of the seats in the House. This meant it took 67 814 votes for the NDP to win one seat for the party. Between 2004 and 2008, the NDP nearly doubled its vote effectiveness, representing both an increase in the total NDP vote and an increasing concentration of that vote in certain ridings.

This is an important trend for the NDP. In the 2004 election, the winning party took 43.83% of the seats with 36.73% of the vote. It took them 36 579 votes to win one seat. In 2006, the numbers for the winning party were 40.26% of the seats with 36.27% of the vote, and 42 992 votes per seat. In 2008, the numbers were 46.43% of the seats with 37.63% of the vote, and 36 416 votes per seat. The NDP is moving steadily toward a level of vote effectiveness similar to the winning parties in the last three elections. There is an important caveat to this, however. The last three elections have elected minority governments, and minority governments are generally less vote effective than majorities. To take the high water mark of vote effectiveness for a winning party in recent times, in the 1984 election the Progressive Conservatives needed only 29 757 votes to win a seat, and won a massive majority. The low water mark of recent majority governments was the 1997 election, in which it took the Liberals 32 221 votes to win a seat. Clearly, the NDP has a long way to go even to reach that low water mark.

There we have the NDP gains out of the recent election: substantial gains in Northern Ontario; landmark victories in ridings in Quebec, Newfoundland & Labrador and Alberta; substantial low-hanging fruit for the next election; and steadily increasing vote effectiveness. However, there is a reason I have labelled these accomplishments a "Pyrrhic victory". For those unfamiliar with the term, it means a victory that costs is very costly, sometimes to the point of costing you more than you have won. The main reason for my applying this label is that this election seems to have exposed a fairly hard popular vote ceiling for the NDP.

Over the last two elections, the NDP share of the popular vote has grown only marginally, increasing by only 2.45 percentage points over that time. In the election just passed, the NDP share of the popular vote grew by only 0.65 percentage points. A negligible gain. This despite what should have been perfect conditions for the party. A woefully incompetent Liberal leader, at the helm of a disastrously bad campaign. A Conservative Party making gaffe upon gaffe, including Gerry "Death by 1000 Cold Cuts" Ritz, and a strong Anyone But Conservative campaign, led by that masterful politician Danny Williams. The party also spent up to the Elections Canada limit (going deeply into debt to do so), and ran a huge ad campaign in Quebec. I saw more NDP ads on TV than I did Liberals ads. And for all that, the party gained a minuscule percentage of the vote, and due to the low turnout, actually took in a reduced absolute number of votes (as, in fairness, did every one of the parties represented in Parliament - sorry Greenies).

For all of the effort and treasure expended, the NDP gained a net of seven seats, and lost the best rookie MP in Parliament Peggy Nash (defeated by the execrable Gerrard Kennedy), and lost seats that should have been winnable. The high-water mark of votes received in Atlantic Canada (including coming first in the popular vote in Nova Scotia), may not be replicated next election, since the NDP can't expect to see another ABC campaign by Williams, indeed he seems to have given up on that already. Further, the next Liberal leader will not be such a milquetoast as Dion was, and in fact is likely to be either Iggy or Rae, both of whom are political street-fighters.

This was the NDP's golden moment to make the break from fourth-party status. A collection of factors that may never appear together again united to pave the way for the NDP to make a major move, perhaps even to official opposition status, though likely for this to happen the Conservatives would have had to win a majority government and decimate the Liberals completely. That doesn't bear thinking about. None the less, this was the perfect storm for the NDP, and the opportunity was missed, though not for a lack of effort on the part of the party. These results simply suggest that in Canada's four-party reality, the 18-20% range may be a cap on NDP support.

Much of the future prospects for the NDP depend on what happens with the Liberal leadership campaign. If they pick a leader on the right of their party (Iggy, Manley or McKenna), then there may be an opening for the NDP to scoop up left-Liberals, and claim seats in Atlantic Canada, urban Ontario and Vancouver. The NDP could still make a move, and perhaps surpass the BQ, moving into third place. If the Liberals select a leader from the relative-left of their party (Rae, Kennedy), as suggested by Devin Johnston in an excellent discussion of the Liberals after the last election, then the NDP may be in serious trouble. Those leaders would be able to take back recently gained NDP seats in the same areas I've identified above.

Frankly, I have no idea how the NDP should go about breaking this vote ceiling. The NDP has tried just about everything, and nothing has worked. The party polled as high as 22% during the election campaign, but fell back on election night. If I did have the answer to this, I would phone up the NDP and be hired on to win the next election. But such is life. One thing that I can promise you is not the solution is moving the party to the economic right. The party has drifted too much for my socialist comfort as it is, and I don't know how long I could go on supporting an NDP that had become a clone of the Liberals. If the NDP makes itself indistinguishable from the Liberals, leftist New Democrats will leave the party for a new left alternative, and centrist Dippers will return to the Liberals. The party will also shed voters to the Green Party. Only by presenting a distinct policy alternative, and an economic critique, can the NDP hope to succeed, but this is simply a pre-condition of success, not a plan for reaching it.

Whatever happens, the NDP needs to do some soul searching as to while this golden moment yielded minimal gains. And it needs to happen soon.

This wraps up my planned entries on issues I see resulting from the October 14th election. As before, if there is something I haven't addressed that you'd like me too, feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me at ts-blog@live.ca, and I'll look into it.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 84

Failed Halifax Politician to Run for Liberal Leadership

2008-10-27T17:06:00.002-03:00

From the "Holy crap that's funny" files, a losing candidate for mayor of Halifax, David Boyd, has declared that he is planning to seek the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada. This is screamingly funny because Boyd has never in his life won an election, and he has tried at both the municipal and provincial levels. This will be his first stab at federal office. I think it's safe to say that he won't win it. However it is a sign of the sad state of the Liberal Party that this joker is even considering running.

I know I promised an entry on the NDP coming out of the October 14th elections, and it is coming. Soon.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 84

The Decline of the Liberal Party of Canada

2008-10-21T22:47:00.004-03:00

This is the fourth post in my continuing series about issues pointed out by the election held on October 14. In this entry, I will deal with the decline of the Liberal Party of Canada, and where it goes from here.

"Whither the Liberals" is a common question these days, being asked by everyone from the columnists of the Globe and Mail, though notably not the Liberal mouthpieces at the Toronto Star, to average Canadian political junkies. And this question is asked with good reason. What was once the Big Red Machine, that won three Consecutive majority governments for Jean Chretien, a feat equalled only by William Lyon Mackenzie King, Sir Wilfred Laurier and Sir John A. Macdonald. From this height of political dominance, the Liberals have fallen to their worst ever percentage of the vote, and their second worst number of seats ever (exceeded only by the meltdown of the Liberal Party under John Turner in 1984).

The Liberals as recently as the 2000 elections ran the table in Ontario, won most of Atlantic Canada, and won sizable percentages of the seats in Quebec and British Columbia. Now, by contrast, the Liberals are reduced to a rump in Western and Northern Canada, having only one seat in Manitoba, one seat in Saskatchewan, the Yukon and five seats in B.C. In central Canada, the Liberals have been reduced to an urban rump, taking only one non-urban seat in Central Canada (Nipising-Timiskaming) and otherwise being confined to Greater Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa-Gatineau, Kingston, Guelph and London. Only in Atlantic Canada did the Liberals do decently, netting a loss of only two seats.

The question that seems to be all around these days is whether the Liberals can come back from this. There seems to have been a marked shift in Canada. In the Liberals former power-base of Ontario, which is still the source of their single largest chunk of seats, the province is now divided into the three - the north where the NDP is strong, rural and some urban parts of eastern, central and south-western Ontario where the Conservatives are strong, and urban Ontario, where the Liberals have their remaining base, but are also challenged by the NDP. In Quebec, with the exception of Hull-Aylmer, the Liberals are confined to Montreal. In BC, the Liberal vote is concentrated in the west side of Vancouver, winning three seats there and two seats outside of the actual city of Vancouver, while the NDP and Conservatives challenge them within Vancouver, while the NDP and Conservatives take the seats across the lower mainland, and the Conservatives, with two notable exceptions, dominate the north and the interior. The prairies are largely a write off for the Liberals.

It is difficult to see how the Liberals rebound from this defeat and reverse these trends. For the last three elections, Liberal support has been trending down and has become increasingly concentrated into the areas I have catalogued. This pattern was, of course, exacerbated by Adscam, and by Dion's hideously bad leadership. The next leader of the Liberals will have to do something, and something drastic, to turn this around.

The Liberal Party of Canada will have two options. 1) Elect a leader from the left wing of their party and try to go after the NDP's votes. 2) Elect a leader from the right wing of the party and try to go after Conservative votes.

The first option is a route that will likely yield short-term gains, as the Liberals may be able to claim back seats lost to the NDP, such as Welland, Ottawa Centre, Trinity-Spadina, Hamilton East-Stoney Creek, Hamilton-Mountain and the seats in Northern Ontario. However, in the long term this is a losing strategy for the Liberals. There are simply not enough NDP seats they could win and votes to pull to take them back into minority government territory, never mind opposition.

The second option features primarily Ignatieff, Manley or Mackenna. A right-leaning leader would be able to draw back Liberal-Conservative swing voters, and this puts many more seats into play. Probably 30 seats in Ontario would come into play, as would seats in and around Winnipeg, and seats on the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. This is the strategy that will possibly yield a renewed and governing Liberal Party. As a corollory to this, the Liberals need to once again focus on winning the votes of immigrant populations. These groups are important in the 905 and in the Lower Mainland. Essentially, what the Liberals need to do is rebuild their centre-centre-right governing coalition, that fell apart over the last eight years.

However, the Liberal Party of Canada has devoted itself almost pathalogically to trying to take down the NDP. The Liberals seem to regard the NDP as being a theif of votes that "rightfully" belong to the Liberals. If this obsession continues to possess the Liberals, they will pick a left-leaning leader and go after the NDP. Given that there are a number of seats where the NDP competes with the Conservatives in the west and wins by relatively narrow margins, an attack on the NDP as the plan for a Liberal recovery would have some major unintended consequences. If the Liberals suck away NDP votes in the west, that will tip seats to the Conservatives, and make it harder for the Liberals to overtake the CPC. Picking a right-leaning leader however, could tip a number of BC races that are between the CPC and NDP to the NDP, and thus reduce the number of seats that the Liberals must gain in order to overtake the Conservatives for government.

The Liberals must pick carefully when they choose a new leader in May. Going for the easy, short-term gains will be attractive, but ultimately counter-productive. The only road back to power for the Liberals runs through the newly gained Conservative seats in Ontario, British Columbia, Manitoba and New Brunswick. Taking the wrong road could ultimately plough the Liberals into the ground permanently.

I will continue this series by discussing the NDP's outcome from the election in my next entry.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 90

Women and the New Parliament

2008-10-19T22:48:00.003-03:00

This entry is the third in my continuing series on issues that have been pointed out by the most recent elections. This discussion will focus on the pathetic level of representation that Canada has of women in the House of Commons.

In the election of 2006 , of 308 MPs elected, 66 of them were women, or 21%. This put Canada in the lower tier of long-standing democracies for representation of women in the legislative branch of government. In the election just concluded, the number of women elected has increased slightly t0 68, or 22%. Embarrassingly, this is a historic high for Canada in the representation of women. The greatest absolute number of female MPs elected in the Conservatives with twenty-three, but this is simply a function of the fact that they have a caucus twice as large as the Liberals, three times as large as the BQ and three-and-a-half times as large as that of the NDP. The NDP has the greatest percentage of female members in the caucus, at approximately 36% (twelve members out of thirty-seven).

This situation is, frankly, pathetic. Canada is a country that has equality for women enshrined in the Constitution, and yet we can't seem to manage the election of women to the House of Commons in anything like their proportion to the population. Many other countries do much better, and some (like Rwanda) have even managed to achieve greater than 50% representation of women, giving women representation proportional to their share of the population.

Now, I'm not going to suggest that this problem in Canada is due to misogyny, but there are two important factors. The first is latent sexism in our society that fosters impressions of women as less capable or less devoted. I don't think, in most people, that this is a conscious prejudice, but rather an unconscious impression fostered by societal conditioning. The second factor is the first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system. 'What?' I hear you ask. It works like this: a system of FPTP elections creates a situation in which the candidates nominated in the individual ridings must be those deemed to be most electable. Because of the first factor above, parties tend to believe that women are less electable than men, and in consequence, fewer women are nominated and of necessity fewer women are elected.

This problem is not one that is easily fixable, and both of the solutions require a ton of work, but I think both of them need to be done, and both are doable. First off, we need to work on wiping out the latest sexism in society. This means stamping on sexism wherever it occurs, whether it be in exploitative advertising or the "pink-collar ghetto." When we do this, it will help increase the representation of women within the FPTP system. Secondly, we need to change that FPTP system. In a PR system, the parties could much more easily achieve proportional representation of women through electoral lists. When the two means were combined, it would be a set of potent steps to address the problem of the under-representation of women.

In an ideal world, and I do believe that we should work toward an ideal world even if we don't get there (because you can't get there if you don't try), women would be represented exactly in proportion to their population, and this would be accomplished voluntarily by the political parties, both through their electoral lists and through their nomination processes. However until we get there, we first need to work on squashing sexism, and changing our political system. If we can bring an end to sexism, then any number of things in society will improve, from violence against women to the prosperity of society (since more women with low incomes will earn more money, injecting it back into the economy rather than concentrating it in the hands of old, rich white men who will put it in Swiss accounts and dodge taxes).

We can all do our bit, and hopefully when the next election rolls around, we will see a significant increase in the number of women elected. And hopefully a couple elections from now there will be some real momentum toward electoral reform.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 92

Disproportion and the Failures of First-Past-the-Post

2008-10-17T19:20:00.006-03:00

It seems that Ed Broadbent beat me to the punch on this one with his column in today's Globe and Mail (here). The election held on Tuesday has resulted in a hugely disproportionate result, though in that it isn't all that different from any other election in recent Canadian history.

Tuesday nights results, when you incorporate percentage of the vote and percentage of the seats look like this (vote %/seats/seat %):
CPC - 37.6/143/46.4
LPC - 26.2/76/24.6
NDP - 18.2/37/12.0
BQ - 10.0/50/16.2
GPC - 6.8/0/0.0

As can be seen, only the Liberals share of the seats even remotely reflected their share of the vote. The Conservatives are over-represented by 28 seats (or 19.5% of their seats), the Liberals are under-represented by 4 seats (or 5.2% of their seats) , the NDP is under-represented by 19 seats (51.3% of their seats), the BQ is over-represented by 19 seats (or 38.0% of their seats), and the Green result was distorted most of all, being under-represented by 21 seats when they won none at all.

As Mr. Broadbent points out, and I highly recommend that people read his article, if Canadian's votes had been accurately reflected in the seat distributions in the House of Commons we would be looking at a solid and stable centre-left coalition government between the Liberals, NDP and Green Party, with 157 seats. There would be a strong right-wing opposition from the Conservatives with 115 seats, and a significant presence for a regional party in the Bloc Quebecois with 31 seats. Canadians would get government by a set of parties that, in certain areas, have substantial policy agreement. Canadians would get action on climate change, we would get universal early childhood education, we would get coverage for at least catastrophic drug costs. And we would be spared government by a party that more than 60% of Canadians who voted rejected.

Our system of elections is, frankly, outmoded and archaic. Every modern multiparty democracy (except the United Kingdom) has adopted a system of proportional representation, and with a couple of high profile exceptions that everyone knows about (Italy and Israel), these systems of proportional representation result in stable governing coalitions with elections no more often than in Canada, and substantially higher levels of voter participation at election time. Our electoral system was designed for a time in which there were only two parties attracting any significant number of votes and is inappropriate for a context in which five parties draw more than 5% of the vote. Almost every other system also has a much higher level of representation of women and visible minorities. Many other multiparty democracies have even manged to elect women as head of government (Golda Meir, Angela Merkel, Benezir Bhutto, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Corazon Aquino, Eugenia Charles, Indira Gandhi, Zinaida Greceanîi, Sheikh Hassina Wazed, Anneli Tuulikki Jäätteenmäki, Janet Jagan and many others).

Our electoral system also exaggerates the strength of parties that have managed to pull together concentrated bases of support. The BQ got just over half of the votes the NDP did and yet will seat thirteen more members when the new Parliament is convened. Meanwhile the Green Party, with support dispersed across the country, but only about 3 percentage points less than the BQ, will seat no members at all despite receiving the support of close to 1 million Canadians. Just because a party's support is scattered across the country does not mean that those who vote for that party should be functionally disenfranchized.

This election points up the need for us to switch to a system of proportional representation along the lines of Germany or New Zealand. Their systems give the benefits of proportionality while still maintaining local representation. That would be fully in accord with the Canadian tradition. Hell, at this point I would take any system that would give us proportionality. I very much hope that BC voters will approve electoral reform when they get the chance to vote on it in 2009. If they don't a double defeat in BC and a rather resounding defeat in Ontario will likely scotch the idea for a generation.

Canadians need to wake up and realize that there won't be a change unless and until the people force their democratic representatives to do something about it. The Conservatives won't change it, as they currently benefit from it. The Liberals won't change it because generally speaking they benefit from it. The BQ won't change it, because they would fade dramatically in prominence under a proportional system. The NDP doesn't have the strength to force the change, and the Green Party has no votes in the House to contribute to the cause. Not until one of the two biggest parties can be forced into adopting PR as a policy plank can there be a change. To force that change there must be concerted citizen action. I urge everyone who reads this and agrees to get in touch with Fair Vote Canada, and see how you can help in your community. That goes double for anyone who lives in BC. Don't let anyone tell you it can't be done, just get out there an do it.

I'm looking to continue this series on issues highlighted by the recent election, and my next entry will probably be related to this one and focus on the under-representation of women in the new Parliament.

Oh, and just as an aside, this is my 100th entry. Go me.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 94

The Low Turnout and Systematic Denial of the Right to Vote

2008-10-16T00:14:00.006-03:00

I was moved to write this particular piece after reading Devin Johnston's latest blog entry, which you can find here.

Across Canada, there was an unacceptably low turnout yesterday. Only about 59% of Canadians eligible to cast ballots did so. Some of this is directly attributable to the fact that this election seemed to be (and was sold by the media as) a forgone conclusion from the beginning. Some people decided that if the results were going to be about the same as last time (and functionally, they are), then what was the point of taking the time to get informed, and to get to the polling station and vote. There was some of that.

What was the bigger problem is the systematic denial of accurate information, the inconsistent application of new rules on identification and the inherent biases against highly-transient populations, particularly university students and the homeless. The new voting rules required every person to present either a piece of photo ID with name and address in the riding in which you intend to vote, or a piece of government issued ID with a photo, and some other document with your address, for example a piece of official mail. For most people, this is no problem. Most people have lived where they are for a couple years. Not so much for students and the homeless.

The homeless, by definition, lack a fixed address, and their only route to vote was an attestation of residence from an emergency shelter. That works to an extent, but only when the homeless person actually goes to a shelter. There are many that do not, for a variety of reasons. If you don't go to the shelter, you don't get the attestation. If you don't get the attestation, you don't vote. It's not really that hard to grasp.

A similar situation applies to students, especially those in their first year of university (or a professional/post-graduate programme) in a place other than their home towns. Students also have a tendency to change their housing arrangements repeatedly. When I was doing my undergrad degree, I knew a person who moved four times in four years. She remained within the same riding, but would have been in different electoral divisions within that riding for each year. She would have had a very difficult time getting enumerated, on the list, and having sufficient ID to vote. If you don't get on the list, and can't prove your address (some students pay rent under the table, some get their "official" mail sent to their permanent address to be forwarded by family, some have never filed an income tax return.

These problems have been compounded by a severe lack of information. Student unions do what they can to get information out about where to vote, but anyone who has been a student during the information age knows just how deluged with e-mails students get. Most of us just delete whatever we get from our student unions. More importantly, this should not be a student union's job. Elections Canada has done a woeful, pathetic, job of this, and as a result tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of students eligible to vote have, through systematic failings or procedural bars, been denied the ability to exercise their franchise.

Lack of information is complemented by moving goal posts in terms of what is acceptable in order to vote. In some polling stations, deputy returning officers were accepting different things as proof of address, and some were refusing to allow electors to vouch for another, as is clearly permitted by law. Students often have to argue their case to try to present what little proof of address they may have to the DRO.

Taking these two problems together, and adding in the apathy I discussed above, we have the recipe for the historically low turnout. If you put these kinds of hurdles in the way of someone who wants to vote, but doesn't feel really strongly about it, then they will simply forget about it, turn around and go home.

In his blog entry (linked above), Mr. Johnston concludes that these bars and hurdles have not been put in place deliberately. I can't be so charitable. These new rules resulted from a bill pushed through Parliament by the Conservatives and Liberals working together. The Conservatives and Liberals are also the two parties least likely to benefit from student votes. Most students that vote will vote NDP or Green. Many homeless people will vote NDP. Applying the logic of cui bono ("who benefits?") we see some reason to believe that the Liberals and Conservatives colluded to put these traps before the feet of highly transient populations.

Many of these new rules need to be reversed. The ID bar is set absurdly high, and the rules governing it are unnecessarily complex. Where I certainly agree with Mr. Johnston is that the government must invest much more funding in voter education efforts. I got one mailing from Elections Canada about the ID requirements, but nowhere on there was information for a student about what that person needed to do to establish residency and get on the voters' list. The government must also ensure that there is a consistent application of the rules. Unequal rules around voting imperil democracy by seeking to disenfranchize a group. Finally, I also agree with Mr. Johnston when he says that the government ought to focus on policies of inclusiveness, rather than exclusivity. Government is (supposed to be) of the people, by the people for the people. Modern governments seem to be forgetting the "by the people" and (most importantly) "for the people" parts.

This may wind up being part of a series on problems I have seen highlighted by the recent election. The next one will probably be on the disproportionate representation arising from the vote. If there is something you'd like to see covered, leave a comment and I'll look into it.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 95

The Election Results

2008-10-15T18:34:00.003-03:00

So, Canada has held it's 40th general election. The results are in, and the Conservatives have won another minority government, going from 124 in 2006 to 143. The NDP was the only other party to gain seats, going from 29 in 2006 to 37. The Liberals shed seats, going from 103 in 2006 to 77 and the BQ lost one seat, going from 51 in 2006 to 50.

This election was a Pyrrhic victory for Harper and his paleo-cons, and frankly it was for the NDP too (though less so). Harper was handed his golden moment to win a majority by the Liberals electing someone as feckless as Stephane Dion as leader, and by Dion's catastrophic campaign. Despite being handed a majority on a silver platter, Harper bungled and was force to accept another, though stronger, minority. Harper doesn't want a minority, even if for a year or so he will be able to govern as if he had a majority, thanks to the fratricidal mania that is already possessing the Liberal Party of Canada. I predict now that Harper will be gone within three years. And then the tables will be turned, with the Conservatives desperate to avoid an election, and the Liberals champing at the bit.

As I said, for the NDP this result is also something of a Pyrrhic victory. The NDP broke the bank, and and went flat out, and only managed to gain 0.8% of the vote and eight seats. There were some important accomplishments, such as for the first time ever winning a seat in Quebec in a general election, and for only the second time ever winning a seat in Newfoundland and Labrador and in Alberta. The NDP lost one particularly strong incumbant last night when Peggy Nash was defeated in Parkdale-High Park by skeezball Gerrard Kennedy. He is, as I have memorably heard it put, a hair cut and an empty suit, and he defeated one of the hardest working and best New Democrat incumbents. Peggy will be missed, and I look forward to the day when Kennedy gets the royal heave from the people of Parkdale-High Park. But the amount of money spent by the NDP put the party into debt, and that is a hole it will take a while to climb out of, especially since in absolute terms the NDP got fewer votes than last time out. That means less money from Elections Canada, and a deeper debt hole. Hopefully the NDP can stay positive and look forward.

Dion, however, is the big loser out of last night. His party had it's worst ever showing in terms of percentage of the popular vote, falling to 26%, 2% below the previous low water mark set by the Turner Liberals in 1984. He lost twenty-six seats in the House, and is finished as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. Dion is only the second leader of the Liberals never to sit as Prime Minister (Edward Blake was the leader of the Liberals from 1880-1887). Dion will either resign within weeks, or be forced out in a previously scheduled leadership review in early 2009. If he goes the first way, the Liberal Party can be healed of this trauma, and get on with getting back to power. If Dion goes the second way, it may finish the Liberals for good and all. The Liberals are completely out of money, their donor base is depleted and exhausted, their base is evaporating, and has essentially retreated to western Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Atlantic Canada. The extra expense of a convention simply to get rid of Dion, followed by another convention to elect his successor could break the Liberals.

Oh, and the Greens. Oh the Greens. It warmed my heart to see Elizabeth May (eMay) go down hard. That bloviating hypocritical liar got thumped by Peter Mackay, and watched her one MP (and her party's claim to legitimacy) get flushed down the toilet in West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country. Hilariously (in a dark way), it seems like eMay's antics were what took down the Liberals. Essentially all of the Greens' gain in the polls from 4.5% to 6.8% came from the Liberal vote. Hopefully we won't need to hear whining about eMay being in the leader's debate next time. They don't any longer meet the bar of one MP (even if obtained by nefarious means) and weren't truely close to winning anywhere. Even in Central Nova eMay fell thousands of votes short. Also hilarious, she has vowed to run in Central Nova again. She won't get another assist from the Liberals like she got this time. The next leader of the LPC won't be so enamoured of her, after her party stripped 2% of the vote off them.

Overall, I'm not happy with the result, but I'm not despondent either. The fact that the NDP came close to running the table in Northern Ontario, falling short in Kenora by about 2000 votes, and being out of contention in Nipising-Timiskaming, is good. The taking of Edmonton-Strathcona is fantastic, and watching Jack Harris absolutely crush his opponents in St. John's East was gratifying. But we have another Conservative government. We are going to likely be treated to more of the bully-boy tactics that characterized the last Parliament. We are going to have to take a couple more years of nasty, mean-spirited and ideological cuts. We'll probably have to organize to defeat another attempt to introduce draconian copyright legislation, attempts to eliminate a woman's right to choose, another attempt to roll back same-sex marriage and goodness knows what else. We will probably also see pandering to Quebec, such as Stephen Harper ending the federal spending power in Quebec. Once again, we will have to count on the unappointed, elitist, Senate to put the kibosh on the excesses of the government (that one really irks me).

Much remains to be seen. I hope that Harper summons Parliament as soon as possible, but somehow I don't see it happening. Harper doesn't want to face criticism, and the question period is just to hard for his government. They still don't understand how to behave like a government, rather than a group of hooligans who managed to take over the premises.

It's going to be an interesting couple of years.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 96

Harper Wins Minority, NDP gains 7

2008-10-15T10:27:00.002-03:00

Just a quick note to say that I will have a full post on the election results when I get myself together.

The good: thank gawd for the Bloc Quebecois. Without them, Harper would have a majority today, and that doesn't bear thinking about. Also good, for the first time ever the NDP has won a seat in Quebec in a general election, Jack Harris wins St. John's East by a crushing margin and Linda Duncan breaks into Fortress Alberta, taking Edmonton-Strathcona for the NDP. The NDP wins big in Northern Ontario, taking seven of nine seats in the region (all except Kenora, Nipising-Timiskaming and Parry Sound-Muskoka).

The bad: NDP only gains seven. Boo. Peggy Nash gets defeated in Parkdale-High Park. Double boo. The NDP doesn't make any breakthrough in BC, instead netting a loss of one seat. NDP manages to place first in popular vote in Nova Scotia, but still only gets two seats.

More to come in another post.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 96

NDP Ad Shows Harper's Fiscal/Economic Policy as a Jenga Game

2008-10-14T00:09:00.003-03:00

I discovered this fantastic new internet ad by the NDP today. A little late to post it now, on the night before election day, but hopefully some people who are up will watch it before deciding who to vote for. It's 1:26, and worth every second. It very artfully explains what is wrong with Harper's economic policies through the metaphor of a Jenga game, and uses the same visual metaphor to explain what the NDP would do differently. Extremely effective, and I wish they had come up with it a week earlier, to potentially give it time to go viral.

Anyway, here it is:

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency:97

Elizabeth May (eMay) Sells Out Her Party and Reveals Some Bitter Partisanship

2008-10-13T17:30:00.006-03:00

In the closing days of the election campaign, Elizabeth May (from here on in: eMay) has sold out her supporters, and Green candidates across the country, by saying that where it close between a Liberal and a Harpocon, or a New Democrat and a Harpocon, Greens should vote for one of the other two parties. You might think, yes, that is rational strategic voting to try to avoid another Conservative government. You'd be wrong.

At the same time as making her call for strategic voting, eMay made it abundantly clear that she doesn't want Greens to vote for NDPers. In the Toronto Star, as well as other papers across Canada, we find this snippet:

"I think she's muddying the waters," [Green candidate in the Ontario riding of Simcoe-North] Valerie Powell said. "I think she's the best prime minister, and we have to keep working hard as Greens to make sure we have as many MPs as possible."

Asked if she is muddying the waters, May responded, "It's true I am."

"I love Valerie and I read her full quotes and they weren't harsh or unfair. She's right, life would be simpler if I acted like (NDP Leader) Jack Layton and didn't care if Stephen Harper formed government again.

"Life would be simpler if I were a complete hypocrite like Jack Layton and pretended I cared about the climate when all of his strategy makes his own personal success more important than survival of the climate and decent climate policy.

"I'm just not that person."

Lovely. That's really doing politics differently. Not only is that nasty and negative, it is completely false. Jack Layton has been a campaigner on environmental issues for decades. He bikes to work on Parliament Hill. He led the process which completely re-wrote Bill C-30, Harper's regressive environmental legislation to make it a strong, progressive, law to control and reduce carbon emissions (this is a bill, the rewriting process of which eMay called a "pointless exercise", and for which she absurdly claimed credit not two weeks later [source]). NDP policies on the environment under Layton received high marks from the Sierra Club until eMay left that organization to lead the Green Party, at which time the NDP (shockingly) dropped in the ratings, while the Green Party soared.

Elizabeth May has a long-standing history of making ridiculous, and bitterly partisan, attacks on Jack Layton and the NDP. Lets cast our thoughts back to 2007, when eMay struck her deal with Stephane Dion to endorse him for the PM's chair in return for the Libs pulling out of Central Nova (where they had finished third in 2006, with the Greens barely a blip). She then promptly turned around and demanded the same thing from the NDP. Unsurprisingly, the NDP, which finished a close second in Central Nova in 2006, told eMay to take a hike, in about so many words. eMay decided then to unleash a screed against Layton, charging that “there’s something wrong with Jack Layton if he’d rather open up discussions with the Taliban than the Green Party...” Not only is this a blatantly, bitterly, partisan thing to say (never mind being inaccurate), it is also a complete renunciation of the Green Party policy on Afghanistan, which favours a negotiated settlement.

Now, Elizabeth May is lying again. She has now "updated" her position, and claims that she doesn't endorse strategic voting. Get your story straight. I don't understand how anyone can support the Green Party when it is led by Elizabeth May. She is a proven liar and hypocrite, never mind advancing regressive opinions on abortion or comparing lack of action on climate change to Nevile Chamberlain appeasing the Nazis at Munich. She is trying to pull on the Green Party what Hazen Argue pulled on the NDP. And one day she will be as reviled in Green Party circles as Hazen Argue is in NDP circles.

As the last day before the election winds down, I want to remind everyone to vote. Vote for who you want, just get out there and do it. Democracy only functions if the people exercise their franchise and get involved in it.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 98

Harper Has Been Hiding a Deficit

2008-10-08T17:27:00.003-03:00

So it turns out that all of Stephen Harper's assurances that the country is not in a deficit were false. Based on Ministry of Finance figures, blogger Michael Watkins has discovered that over the first six months of the fiscal year, Harper's government ran a deficit of $23 billion. This is far more that the deficit over this same time period from any other government this decade, and it is unusual for the government to see first half losses, indeed, there is usually a spike in the surplus in the first three months.

All of the documentation for this situation can be found at mikewatkins.ca. He's done a great job laying out the proof of Conservative perfidy and fiscal failure. I highly recommend reading it for yourself.

This is proof that not only can the Conservative Party of Canada not be trusted as fiscal manager (uh, no shit! Look at Ontario under this same Minister of Finance or Canada under Brian Mulroney), it proves that they are willing to lie about it, and hide the truth from Canadians (again, no shit. Flahrety lied about the shape of Ontario's finances, and a claimed small surplus turned out to be a $6 billion deficit).

The CPC is corrupt, and full of lying bastards who will do whatever it takes to hold on to power. What do you know, that is almost an exact description of the Liberal Party of Canada too. We as Canadians need to throw these bums out, and stop electing black cats, white cats, or spotted cats. Mouseland needs to elect mice to run the show. For those of you who don't get the reference, google "Tommy Douglas" and "Mouseland".

Six days left until the election folks.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 103

The Home Stretch

2008-10-06T23:04:00.003-03:00

The election has entered it's final stretch, with seven days of campaigning left. The game has started to change. With the economy melting down around the ears of Canadians (witness the TSX being down as much as 1100 points this morning, and closing down 570-odd), Steve Harper finally blinked and admitted something was wrong. But he didn't take the opportunity to unveil his magical vanishing platform, instead he tried to turn a mea culpa moment into another opportunity to rail against the Liberal carbon tax plan. Too late, Steveo. Canadians are (finally!) tuning in to this election, and they don't like what they see.

Much as I have ranted against a focus on polls in this election, this is a moment in which I think looking to them is justified. Every poll reporting over the last two days (generally three day rolling polls) is showing the CPC below the level of support achieved in 2006, with Harris/Decima showing them as low as 32%. Nanos shows the CPC at 34%, the LPC at 29%, the NDP at 20%, the BQ at 11% and the Greens at 6%. The Conservative message is obviously falling flat on its face. Canadians are not an inherently conservative group of people. We support government intervention in the economy and, to blatantly steal Stephane Dion's good line, Harper's laissez-faire, I don't care attitude isn't going to cut it (of course the Liberal economic plan is pretty laissez-faire too. Dion's economic plan seems to involve meeting with bankers and capitalists so they can tell him what to do. You know, SOP for the Liberal Party of Canada). You can smell the stink of desperation coming of the planned release of the CPC platform tomorrow. They never intended to release it until they got hammered over their lack of a platform in both debates.

Harper will still, probably win this campaign, but any chance for a majority has gone right out the window. Given the poll numbers in Ontario and especially Quebec, the CPC will be lucky to net a gain of ten seats overall this election. After this, the knives may come out for our Robot Emperor.

Oh, and in my neck of the woods, Jack Layton was in town for a rally. Fantastic energy, and probably about 500 people out. Yelling, screaming, all revved up. Jack gave a great speech, and showed why he is the best one to lead this country. As the signs they were handing out said, "United with Layton" "We Will Beat Harper".

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 105

$700 Billion Bailout Fails to Pass Congress

2008-09-29T19:19:00.005-03:00

What do you know. The unprecedented, mind-bogglingly big, handout to the corrupt financial sector in the United States has failed to pass through the House of Representatives. It failed by a margin of about 20 votes. This has caused a major drop on American stock markets, but remarkably an even larger drop in Canada. While the Dow Jones Industrial Average of the New York Stock Exchange fell 6.98%, the S&P/TSX Composite Index fell 7.9%.

As we see stocks in Canada being more adversely affected by this crisis than American stocks, and the trading partner on whom the Canadian economy is dependant circling the drain, we have the out of touch ramblings of our Prime Minister for cold comfort. Two weeks ago, Stephen Harper said “My own belief is that if we were going to have some kind of big crash or recession, we probably would have had it by now.” Yeah, right Steve. Tell that to all of the people who have seen their retirement savings wiped out over the last three weeks as the TSX has been tanking.

Steve would very much like for us not to connect the currently unfolding crisis in the States with the kind of massive, neo-liberal, deregulation that he wants to foist on us up here. Deregulation is responsible for this crisis, because when greed (i.e. capitalism) is allowed to run rampant and unchecked, it results in shady dealings and outrageous short-term planning. It leads to the kind of exploitation that sees the CEO of Lehman Brothers take home a pay package of US$37 million this year, the same year he steered that bank into the ground. Capitalism, but especially deregulated capitalism, is what allows the kind of insane, idiotic lending that led to this whole crisis in the first place. Neo-liberal deregulation of the economy is what led to Washington Mutual having on a tiny percentage of its debts in available cash, and being by far and away the biggest bank failure in the history of the world. Out of control capitalism is what led to the Great Depression, and it is what will lead to the depression that is coming. And the level of integration in the modern economy could lead to this depression spreading world-wide and making the Great Depression look like nothing.

Now is the time for the people to reassert democratic control over the economy. Now is the time to take control of the financial system away from greedy, exploitative and uncaring capitalists in their bank towers, and restore it to the people who actually make the economy go, the working class. Building institutions to allow for horizontal, popular, control over the economy will make sure that wealth is shared, and that no small cabal of piggish capitalists can drive the economy into the ground for their own personal gain.

It is exactly this connection that Steve and his pack of lying, bigoted and reactionary Conservatives would like for us all not to notice. Steve doesn't want us to realize that he is leading us down the garden path to financial ruin. He can spout all of the "strong on the economy" bullshit that he wants, but his policies essentially represent a massive wealth transfer from the labouring class to the capitalist class. The class that has stolen untold billions that they did not toil to earn. He wants to bleed Canadians dry to fatten the capitalist class. Canadians have to show him that we know what he is up to, and that he doesn't fool us.

But don't take this information and go vote Liberal. The Liberals have endorsed Harper's fiscal policies. They are simply a nice, smiley face to go with the same hyper-capitalist fiscal policies, and in fact they want to deepen the corporate tax giveaways and enrich corporate welfare while at the same time stripping resources from the poorest of the poor through a regressive carbon tax.

The NDP, while not perfect, is a party that can be counted on to stop this outrageous rush to the bottom of regulation, to put a stop to the insane transfers of wealth to the already obscenely wealthy, and to put money back into the social safety net. That's why I'm voting NDP. I hope you'll consider it too.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 112

The Disappearance of Protest Songs, and the Left's Loss of Its Roots

2008-09-22T22:28:00.007-03:00

I have been thinking lately about how the left has become largely disconnected from it's ideological roots. The left arose in the context of union activism, of workers pushing for a fair distribution of the wealth of society, based on the work one does, rather than on the family into which one was born. This was represented by the great struggles of the 19th and 20th century for workers rights, such as the right to strike, the right to withhold labour, the right to keep scabs out of the workplace and job security.

The modern left seems to have largely abandoned this fight. Sure, leading lights in the NDP will occasionally show up at a major workers rights protest, such as the shut-down of GM Canada's headquarters by the CAW. This loss of interest in the plight of the working class has been parallelled by the loss of traditional protest songs, expressing both outrage and hope. Songs like "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize", "We Shall Overcome" (a socialist song before it was a civil rights anthem), "Solidarity Forever" and "Union Maid". These songs relate powerfully to the efforts of capital to stomp out any vestige of a movement for workers' rights.

Capital, and its cronies in government, at first sought to suppress the working class by sending in soldiers and police to kill strikers, like any number of coal miners' strikes in Cape Breton or West Virginia, or manufacturing workers strikes in Montreal, Toronto, New York, Chicago or Pittsburgh. That didn't work. The workers were willing to risk the rifles and bayonets of the soldiers to defend their rights. Then, there was the phase of McCarthyism, and the attempt to smear all labour rights activists as Bolsheviks and anti-democrats. And sadly, this largely worked. North Americans became convinced that unions were synonymous with big-C Communism, and in the face of the hysteria worked up by capital about the Cold War, turned away from fighting for their rights. Unions never stood for any such thing, rather standing for democratic socialism and for horizontal, democratic, control of the economy to produce just outcomes for all.

The loss of the old protest songs is a sad reflection of the modern tendency in labour relations, and in the wider battle against global capital. This tendency toward giving up, and back-peddling on, the rights of workers continues up to this day. Under the leadership of quislings like Buzz Hargrove (who sold his soul to the Liberal Party, icons of capitalism, for a prospective seat in the Canadian Senate), unions have frittered away the rights of workers. For example, the CAW signed a collective agreement with Magna stipulating that the workers did not have a right to strike. That is heinous. If the workers have no right to strike, no right to withhold labour, there is no way to get concessions from management for better pay, benefits and job security.

Perhaps if we heard the old protest songs again, some of the moribund sections of the union movement might finally wake up. After all, as "Solidarity Forever" proclaims:

When the Union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun.
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?
But the Union makes us strong.

Capitalists would have the people believe that pushing for labour rights will simply see more jobs flee to China. That's bullshit. Jobs are fleeing to China anyway, and if the workers aren't organized, there's nothing they can do about it. But if they do organize, workers can fight back. With the flight of good jobs to China, and the proliferation of crappy, un-unionized, McJobs, workers are returning to the situation of the working class in the late 1900s. As Marx wrote at the end of the Communist Manifesto, "the proletarians of the world have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite!"

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 119

Fed Up With Election Coverage

2008-09-21T22:23:00.003-03:00

Holy sweet zombie jeebus am I sick of polls being the focus of election coverage. I know, I know, Kim Campbell was right when she famously declared that an election is no time to discuss policy, but seriously, can our leading news organizations do nothing but cover polls? If they were all showing the same thing, that might be meaningful, but they all show different things, and not even the same trends. And yet every single one gets reported as if it were an earth shattering event. Polls are not supposed to be the story in an election.

News organizations have gotten unbelievably sloppy and lazy. They save a tonne of money by having one hack sitting in an office writing horserace stories about polls, when what they should be doing is sending out reporters to cover and critique the policy of the various parties. There is no critical commentary in the media, simply a mindless and endless nattering about polls and how the change in one poll, within the margin of error, means that the world has come to an end for one party or another. If the CPC is up two points, then they are 'approaching majority territory'. If the Liberals are down two points, then they are 'spiralling into oblivion'. If the NDP is up two they are 'closing in on the official opposition' and if they are down two the next day they are 'falling into oblivion'. If the GPC is up two, they are 'about to make a breakthrough' and if they are down two they are 'failing to connect with voters.' This is all complete horseshit.

Our media needs to get it together, and cover the election, not the damn polls.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 120

US Debt to Increase by almost 10% to Bail Out Bankrupt Capitalists

2008-09-20T17:06:00.005-03:00

Over the last couple days, as the drama on North American financial markets has unfolded, the US government decided that it needed to do something. And now that something has emerged as a US$700 billion plan to buy bad debt from banks and investment houses.

Brilliant. This plan will take the US debt from US$9.668 trillion (I can't even properly conceptualize that much money) to about US$10.3 billion. This plan will increase the US national debt by 150% the amount of the entire Canadian national debt (currently about C$500 billion or about US$477 billion). And for all this debt, Americans don't even have a national healthcare system. Lets, just for the shock value, look at these values expressed as numbers.

US National Debt: US$10 368 000 000 000
CAN National Debt: US$500 000 000 000

That's obscene. What is even more obscene is that this bail out won't do a single thing to help the ordinary people of the United States. The working class won't see a penny of this money. Bush is going to transfer $350 billion per year to the capitalist class. These are the same people who scream about welfare recipients getting a grand or two a month, so that they can buy food and pay rent (and often can't afford even that). And yet some on the right are screaming about this being "socialism." Trust me when I say, as a socialist, that this is not socialism. This is kleptocracy. The capitalists made ridiculously bad business decisions, endangered the fundamentals of the American economy, got filthy rich in the process, and now their mistakes are being covered by the taxes paid by working class Americans. It's obscene.

Americans are going to be stuck paying for this bailout for decades to come, if not centuries. The stupid, greedy piggish capitalists have gotten bailed out of their stupidity, and once again it comes on the backs of the people most oppressed by the capitalist system. But so long as the American media gushes about this bailout, most people won't ever know the difference. And of course, the supposed "left wing alternative" in the US, the Democratic Party, is cheer-leading this bullshit and will uncritically pass it through Congress.

This is bullshit. Americans need to be up in arms about this. Their future is being mortgaged (pun not intended, but now I like it) to bail out irresponsible pig-dog capitalists. But there is no outrage. It is beyond frustrating.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 121

I'm Back

2008-09-17T21:55:00.005-03:00

I've let this lapse for far too long, but now I will try to get myself back on track. That may be tough, since I have a busy couple of days coming up, and there's been a lot going on, but I'm going to try.

The Canadian federal election is clearly going to be the top story. The media has itself worked up into a lather about how the Conservatives are knocking on the door of majority government, the Liberals are in meltdown, the NDP is pushing for official opposition and the Greens are the best thing since sliced bread and a going to make a serious breakthrough. Unsurprisingly, given the history of media lather, none of that is true.

To start off with, lets look at the polling numbers. Routinely, for the last couple federal elections, Nanos polling (formerly known as SES) has been the most accurate polling company, coming very close to the final result. So I am going to use their numbers as the guide for my commentary on polls through the election. Unless, of course, I see a blatantly ridiculous poll like the one from Segma Research last week that showed the CPC at 43%. That was a howler.

Nanos currently has the following numbers:
CPC: 38%
LPC: 31%
NDP: 17%
BQ: 7%
GPC: 7%
Margin of error: +/- 3.2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Looking at those numbers, it means that all of the change since the last election (CPC +2%, LPC +1%, NDP -1%, BQ -3%, GPC +2%, after rounding) is within the margin of error. We could very well come back with the exact same result as the last election. All of the people running around screaming about any number of disasters or miracles need to have their heads checked. Much as I would like to believe the NDP is about to have it's breakthrough to be the official opposition, it isn't looking like it is going to happen this time. The same way, the CPC will not form a majority government. 38% is only in the most positive of eventualities enough for a bare majority. Chretien squeaked one out with 38% in 1997, but there was no opposition party polling anywhere near 30% at the time and Liberal support wasn't concentrated in a relatively small province the same way CPC support is concentrated in Alberta. Stephen Harper can only win every seat in Alberta once. The Greens will also not elect a single MP. Potato Head Pete will beat eMay in Central Nova, and Blair Wilson will suffer an embarassing beat-down in West Vancouver - Sunshine Coast - Sea-to-Sky Country.

If the Conservatives come back with an increased minority (I repeat, it won't be a majority), it will likely be because of seat gains in rural Quebec, and possibly in BC. They will lose seats in Atlantic Canada, possibly being wiped out in NL and down to one seat in NS (Pete, beating eMay). The CPC may also lose Tobique-Mactaquac, putting them down five seats. It think, however, that the most likely outcome is probably the CPC coming out of this election up by 2-5 seats, with the NDP gaining 3-6, and the losses coming from the LPC, BQ and Greens (their one pathetic floor crossing seat).

The Cons have not been running the same kind of gaffe-free campaign they did last time, that much is already clear. From the puffin fiasco to the ill-advised swipe at the father of a dead soldier, however, the gaffes have come from the back room, not candidates. That all changed today. Today the Globe and Mail is reporting that Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz was making fun of the deaths from Listeriosis poisoning (referring to "death by 1000 cold cuts") and, when he heard that one of the fatalities was from Prince Edward Island, he said that he hoped it was Wayne Easter, the Liberal Agriculture critic. Oops.

That kind of gaffe is exactly what can sink the not-so-good ship Conservative. Last time around, a significant contribution to the fall of the Liberals was Scott Reid's "beer and popcorn" quip. This comment has the capacity to do the same thing. Conservatives are shown to be making light of the deaths of Canadians on their watch, from a product that is supposed to be regulated by the government they were running. This shows an appalling coldness of heart, as well as a sadistic streak, wishing death on Mr. Easter and hideous sorrow on his family.

This comment also shows that the CPC has not changed since it was the reform party. It continues to be crass, classless and cruel. Mean spirited cuts to the arts, ideologically motivated cuts to funding for Status of Women Canada (not to mention removing the word "equality" from their mandate), introducing copyright legislation more draconian that the US's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, electoral fraud through the in-and-out scheme, attempting to roll back the sexual morality clock to the 1950s by raising the age of consent (and shame on the other parties for going along with it) and by trying to repeal the Civil Marriage Act that allowed same-sex marriage. And let's not even get into their colossal failure on the climate chaos file.

Now, the Liberals are not a lot better, since they stood aside and let these paleo-con measures pass unimpeded, ranting and raving about how they opposed the bill, but generating all light and no heat, since when the time came only a rump of Liberals showed up to cast votes against the bills. The Liberals are also trying to out tax cut the Conservatives, pledging more and deeper tax cuts for corporations than even the Conservatives. That is NUTS. Canada already has a lower corporate tax rate that the United States, and corporate income tax rates are substantially lower than personal income tax rates. Never mind the Green Shift that works nicely for the upper crust puppet masters of the Liberal party, while laying the burden of the post-carbon transition on the backs of the poorest in society. But enough about the Liberals for now, they are mostly doing enought to embarass themselves that I don't need to help them along.

The NDP is not perfect. It is too pragmatic in its pursuit of power, and it has drifted too far from its principles and its base. But I do like a lot of the policy that the party has proposed this time around. It is good, on point, and addresses many important issues, including childcare, reform of the banking sector and climate chaos. I was ashamed to be a member of the party when all but Bill Siksay voted in favour of the omnibus crime bill that not only overrode just about every social worker and sociologist in the country on the age of consent, but also neglected yet another opportunity to end the bigoted differential age of consent for anal and vaginal intercourse. But I am still a supporter of this party. I can't say I will be forever, but for now I am. My vote will be going to Meagan Leslie, the NDP candidate here in Halifax, and I think she makes a good candidate.

The Greens are an interesting case. I think the most interesting role they have left to play in this campaign will be whether or not eMay endorses Dion and the Liberals at the end. She may well, since he has endorsed a number of Liberals, even those running against Greens. I will go on the record saying that eMay should not have been included in the debates. Her party has only got one floor crossing seat in Parliament. Every previous party has had to have at least one MP elected under their banner (and don't mention Gilles Duceppe, everyone knew he was running for the BQ but they just weren't a formal party at the time he was elected) to get into the debate. Yet eMay managed to shame the country into giving her a voice despite her deal with Dion which effectively makes her a second Liberal in the debate. We should all watch closely to see if they are signalling each other.

Any how, that is enough for now. As I said, I will try to keep this blog updated, but we shall see.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 124

Taliban "threats"

2008-08-17T19:04:00.003-03:00

A spokesman for the Taliban in Kandahar has said that if the occupation of Afghanistan does not end, Canada can expect to see more dead soldiers coming back. Predictably, the pro-war media (i.e. all of the MSM in Canada) has worked itself into a massive lather about this, displacing even the bread and circuses spectacle of the Olympic Games. There is ranting hither and yon about the Taliban "threatening" Canada. That is just arrant stupidity. It doesn't matter whether you are for the occupation or against the occupation, it is simply a fact that so long as the people of Afghanistan continue to resist the occupation of their country by uninvited foreign powers (and no, the invitation by a US installed Unocal consultant doesn't fly), and so long as Canadian troops continue to take part in the occupation, Canadian troops will continue to die. It isn't a threat, it is a statement of reality.

Now I disagree with the Taliban on just about everything, from the rights of women to the right to a democratic government, but they have this one right. So long as the occupation continues, the Afghans will resist it. They have done it before, countless times since the invasion of Alexander the Great to the Soviet occupation of the 1980s. For the West to imagine it will be any different this time is the hight of hubris and arrogance. The people of Afghanistan have the right to determine their own future, not to have it determined by the imperial thug who sits in Washington, or his minions and lackeys in Ottawa, London, Amsterdam or Kabul. I profoundly hope that the people of Afghanistan choose a future free of the Taliban, but that is a choice they must make for themselves, and not have it imposed upon them by the American Empire.

If Canadians are wise, we will force our government to withdraw from Afghanistan, and serve two purposes at once: the end of the occupation allowing Afghans to determine their own future, and the end of Canadian soldiers dying for nothing more important than an oil pipeline route.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 155

More Gouging by our Friendly Neigbourhood Telecom Oligopoly

2008-07-08T23:46:00.005-03:00

I really, really, hate the telecoms. I'm just going to put that out there from the get go. Let's toss the CRTC in there too. I really hate the CRTC.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, on to why I am particularly peeved today. Bell and Telus have announced that in August, customers who do not have a text messaging package on their contracts will have to pay $0.15 per incoming SMS. That is bullshit.

It costs the telecoms absolutely nothing to deliver an SMS to a mobile phone, since the sending person has already paid. The telecoms are simply trying to force people into buying SMS packages on their phone systems. I for one don't use text messages all that much, so when I got my current contract, I didn't bother getting a text messaging package. This means that were I a Bell or Telus customer (which I am not), I would be forced into paying for something I don't want and don't need.

This is especially bull because there is no capacity to block unwanted text messages. A person is not given the opportunity to refuse an SMS when it comes it. This is like forcing a person to accept a collect call. If the company is going to make me pay for incoming text messages, they had damn well better let me choose which ones I do and don't want to accept. People who get SMS spam shouldn't be stuck having to pay for it.

This is gouging of the worst kind, and clear evidence of the existence of a predatory oligopoly. On the one hand, we have Bell and Telus, who want to impose bullshit charges on incoming texts. On the other, we have Rogers, which refuses to institute an unlimited data plan for it's smart phones. Between the three of them, Canadians pay vastly more for cell phone service than citizens of pretty much any other country in the world. And this is where we come to why I hate the CRTC.

The CRTC (Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission) has been given the task of regulating the telecom industry. At this job, it has failed grievously. The CRTC has allowed unprecedented concentration in the telecom industry, allowing only three companies (and don't think I've forgotten Fido, but they are owned by Rogers now) to control the entire market. If the CRTC was doing it's job, it would never have allowed Rogers to buy Fido, and it would pursue much more stringent competition policies. Instead, it has been asleep at the switch, and what is more sleeping in the same bed as the telecoms.

We need to give the CRTC a massive kick in the pants to wake it up. The CRTC is an organ of the state, and the state is (at least theoretically) controlled by the citizens. What we also need to do is put in place a state-owned telecom, to enter the market and provide for-cost mobile phone, internet and television service. Force the telecoms to either give up their predatory practices or fade away. The people should control the economy. The economy should be democratic. But under capitalism, it is no such thing. The economy under capitalism responds to those with money, and through the economy, they control the state. A nationalized telecom wouldn't break the hold of the capitalists and the bourgeoisie, but it would start the ball rolling, proving to people that a democratic economy is possible, and indeed desirable.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 195

First Pride Parades Held in India

2008-06-30T00:13:00.005-03:00

In defiance of homophobic legislation in India that provides a punishment of up to ten years in jail for being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered, hundreds of gay rights activists have held the first widespread pride parades in India's history (there had been a couple small events in Calcutta in the last couple years). Good on them. What is sad is that many of those brave individuals who turned out felt the need to wear masks to hide their identity.

India's laws prohibiting homosexuality are a disgusting throwback to the era in which Imperial Britain imposed appalling Victorian moralizing on it's empire. The British Empire has many things to answer for, and the horrifying attitude toward GLBT folks is yet another one of them. I salute those with the courage to show up and show their pride. Straight society around the world needs to come to terms with the reality that gays, lesbians, bisexuals and trans folk exist, and are entitled to the exact same rights as every other person.

In many parts of the west, we like to congratulate ourselves on having a progressive attitude towards LGBT folks. The sad fact is that while in some countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Canada, South Africa and Norway) there is full formal equality for LGBT folks, even in those countries, deep undercurrents of homophobic hatred persist. When school children feel it is alright to use "you're so gay" as a put-down to mean stupid or worthless, something is deeply wrong. When people rely on ridiculous injunctions from a book more than 2000 years old (that also, by the way, condemns as abomination wearing clothes made of two kinds of fibre among other idiocies) to decide that being gay is abomination, something is wrong. When a person is allowed to declaim violent hatred under the thin guise of religion, something is wrong. Ultimately, formal legal equality is meaningless unless there is substantive society equality to go along with it. Until the day that no child grows up learning to hate someone on the basis of a biologically determined reality, until the day that there is no danger of another murder like that of Brandon Teena or Matthew Sheppard, the work isn't finished.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 205

A Travesty of Democracy in Zimbabwe

2008-06-28T23:49:00.003-03:00

Robert Mugabe was once a man to be respected and admired. He was a revolutionary who led the people of Zimbabwe to overthrow white minority rule, and opposed transnational capitalism. Unfortunately, Mugabe has degenerated into yet another violent tyrant, confirmed by the process leading up to the presidential runoff election held yesterday. Mugabe's thugs attempted to terrorize the population into turning out to vote, and to vote for Mugabe. In an incredible act of courage, the people have defied Mugabe, and stayed home in droves. The outcome of the election is not in doubt, and has not been since the unconscionable delay in releasing the results of the first round of the presidential elections in May, that opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai should have won outright, and yet still the ZEC (the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission) can't manage to release the results of this staged farce within one day. They need more time to falsify the results.

The people of Zimbabwe are entitled to much better than this. They have the right to a vote and a result that expresses their collective will, not some ridiculous vaudeville act masquerading as an election. The people of Zimbabwe, as do all citizens of the world, have a right to government of the people by the people for the people, and that is not what they are getting. I will not call for an armed intervention in Zimbabwe. War doesn't fix anything, and only leads to more suffering. However, the United Nations must impose carefully targeted sanctions, such as travel restrictions and bank account seizures, aimed only at Mugabe and his chief thugs in what is mockingly called a cabinet. The UN must also be sure that the sanctions imposed do not hurt the people of Zimbabwe. This is not their fault, and they should not have to suffer any further for Mugabe's despotic brutality.

Thabo Mbeki, president of South Africa, ought to be ashamed of himself for the stance he has taken during this crisis. He has refused to criticize Mugabe, and has tacitly lent him support. That is unbelievable in the leader of a democratic state, as South Africa is. Letting Mugabe escape without criticism is unbelievable. Frankly, this type of "quiet diplomacy" is a crock.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 206

Dion Defends Carbon Tax

2008-06-19T13:28:00.003-03:00

So yesterday the Liberals finally released some of the details of their carbon tax plan. The key to it is offsetting income and corporate tax cuts of $15 billion. Stephane Dion claims that the Liberal plan will be "good for the environment and good for the economy — good for the planet, good for the wallet." He also pledges that under his plan the Auditor General will examine the numbers every year to ensure that the tax remains revenue neutral.

This is ridiculous. A carbon tax must, in order to be effective, have an impact on the bottom line. By making the tax revenue neutral, that impact on the bottom line is eliminated for all but the poorest of the poor. The middle class will see something approaching neutrality, and the upper classes will actually get extra money from the tax cuts. The addition of corporate tax cuts to the package simply reinforces the fact that Dion's plan will accomplish nothing but a wealth transfer from the poorest of the poor to the richest of the rich. Dion's plan is much more along the lines of from each according to his inability and to each according to his excess wealth. Dion is camouflaging a massive give away to the capitalist class as a measure to protect the environment.

Dion claims that his plan will price carbon in the first year at $10 per tonne, and rise to $40 per tonne by the fourth year. This is not nearly fast enough. The NDP's cap-and-trade plan will auction carbon quotas, with a floor price of $35/tonne in the first year. Dion further claims that the cost to the "average" home (without specifying what makes an average home) will be about $225-250 per year. That is a lot of money for some families, particularly those in the lowest tax brackets, even if that number accurately reflects the cost. There will also be many poor families living in rural areas who have to pay much higher added costs, for example struggling farm families who need to fuel their tractors.

The specific breakdown in the income tax cuts is as follows:

Tax Bracket 1 (first $37 885 of taxable income) - 1.5% cut
Tax Bracket 2 ($37 885 - 75 769) - 1% cut
Tax Bracket 3 ($75 769 - $123 184) - 1% cut

It is totally counter to the spirit of a progressive taxation system to see tax bracket 3 get the same percentage cut as tax bracket 2. This is yet another step towards flattening the tax system.

The Liberal plan also does nothing to help Canadians make the switch to zero-carbon or low-carbon lifestyles. Because of "revenue neutrality" there are no additional funds to pay for beefed-up public transit, subsidies for the purchase of ultra-low emission vehicles, the development of green renewable energy generation or the retraining of workers in fields that will be adversely affected by any shift in consumer behaviour. Though I suppose that isn't really an issue, since this plan won't produce a shift in behaviour, since it won't negatively impact the bottom line for anyone but the poorest of the poor. And I'm pretty sure the Liberals don't want it to have much of an effect either. After all, they were in power for years after signing the Kyoto Protocol, and sat on their hands while emissions went up and up. Liberal green-washing is just as pathetically transparent as the green-washing the the oil companies are trying to do. I hope that Canadians have the sense to see through it. No, the Conservatives aren't any better, but they really aren't much worse at this point.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 215

Carbon tax vs. Cap-and-Trade vs. Do Nothing

2008-06-17T22:16:00.005-03:00

As we move into the summer BBQ circuit/silly season in the world of Canadian politics, I thought I ought to take a gander at the proposals the main parties are making to control global climate change resulting from greenhouse gas emissions, and particularly carbon dioxide. I say control because there is a snowball's chance in Hell that we can stop it now. All we can hope to do is limit it to non-disastrous levels, say making sure that the oceans don't rise enough to submerge every island state in the world.

Since in this country it takes a proposal from the Liberals to get the media interested in anything, I will start with the Liberal position on the issue. They have decided that their approach to the problem is going to be a carbon tax, a la British Columbia or some of Europe's right-wing governments. This is a tax that the Conservatives have unhelpfully dubbed a "tax on everything." Typically inaccurate, but punchy. This tax is essentially targeted at the demand end of supply-demand teeter-totter, aiming to disincent carbon-intensive activities. This tax will increase the costs of goods ranging from home heating oil to motor vehicles to plastic wrap, in essence anything produced through CO2 intensive means, or putting out a substantial amount of carbon dioxide when used. The Liberals further say that their plan will be revenue neutral, that is the government will reduce other taxes, principally the income tax, to make up for the hit from the carbon tax. My experience growing up during the Mike Harris years in Ontario makes me automatically suspicious any time I hear the wwords "revenue neutral". After all, the amalgamation of Toronto was supposed to be revenue neutral, but the city is still trying to climb out of the massive hole created by amalgamation and downloading of social services.

The Liberal plan will jack up the price of many essentials for working class families, such as transportation and food (since food will cost more to transport). These same families will get very little back from an income tax cut, because they pay relatively little income tax to begin with. The supposed relief from the income tax cut will not even reach the poorest people, who don't earn sufficient money to pay income tax in the first place, but will take a ding in their already meager budgets from the costs added by the carbon tax. I can't support this plan because it is regressive, and will hurt the poorest and most vulnerable members of society, while passing on yet more money to the bourgeoisie.

Next, there is the NDP plan. The NDP calls for the creation of a cap-and-trade system, in which hard targets will be imposed, and companies doing better than their carbon quota will be able to sell their excess to companies exceeding their quota. This is the plan used by the European Union as a whole, as well as a number of other states party to the Kyoto Protocol. The levels of CO2 allowed would be reduced year by year, bringing emissions down. This plan is focused on the supply end of the supply-demand teeter-totter, aiming to disincent the production of carbon intensive products by companies and the development of new green technology. Further, the plan sells a company their quota of carbon dioxide for the year, bringing in about $2.5 billion per year according to NDP estimates. This money would then be put into a fund to develop green energy sources, worker retraining (to adjust to changes in the economy in the transition to post-carbon) and public transit.

This plan strikes me as much better, because it puts the burden on industry and business first, rather than setting the whole weight of the burden on the consumer. It also acknowledges that government action beyond fiscal policy levers is going to be needed in order to cope with the problem. I am not crazy about emissions trading, but to simply go straight to cap and no-trade would simply never get enacted. There will still be an increased burden on the poor, but there won't be a transfer of wealth to the capitalist class, and there will be measures to help ameliorate that burden, like expanding public transit to provide an alternative to private vehicles. This plan also wouldn't impose an extra cost on home heating, which is important in a cold country like Canada.

And then we have the Conservative plan, which calls for intensity targets and that's it. Blech. There is nothing good to say about this way of addressing the problem. An intensity target of a 25% cut means nothing if activity increases by that same 25%, and it means worse than nothing if activity grows more than that. For example, the government might tell the oil patch that it has to reduce carbon-per-barrel of oil by 25%, but production is expanding by well more than 25%, which means that not only will emissions not decrease, they will actually increase. The Conservative do-nothing plan has been rightly denounced as a fraud by every environmentalist from Al Gore and David Suzuki on down. This plan is merely a smokescreen to make a government that doesn't believe the science of global climate change look like it is doing something.

Hopefully Canada can have a meaningful discussion on this subject, but the Conservatives seem dead set on doing everything they can to prevent that, starting with their idiotic attack ads on the Liberal's "tax on everything." The CPC can't have much respect for Canadians, and they have proven that they have no interest in governing in the public interest, simply in their own interest. Here's hoping Canadians see sense, the Liberals grow a spine, and we have an election when the House comes back in the fall.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 217

Murder of de Menezes Back in the Headlines

2008-06-16T01:59:00.005-03:00

The murder of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian electrician, by member's of London's Metropolitan Police in July 2005 in a Tube station, is back in the headlines as the inquest into the event is finally getting under way. That's right, the inquest is getting started three years after Mr. de Menezes was killed.

The police story at the time was that Mr. de Menezes resembled one of the fugitive terrorists from the then-recent July 11 bombings on the London transit system, was wearing bulky clothing and had jumped a turnstile, leading them to believe that he was about to detonate a suicide bomb. The bulky clothing story and the turnstile jumping have since been thoroughly debunked. Once again, the police lied about the circumstances of killing. As for resembling the missing bomber, de Menezes was Brazilian. About the only thing he had in common with the bomber was that he was brown-skinned. And that tells us a lot. Either members of some of the most elite squads of the Metropolitan Police are unable to tell brown-skinned people apart, or they were just out to shoot a brown man that day. While the first is disturbing, the second is absolutely appalling.

The Metropolitan Police as a corporate body has been convicted at trial of endangering the health and safety of Mr. de Menezes. What the inquest will determine is whether or not Mr. de Menezes was unlawfully killed. I don't see how the coroner's jury could possibly conclude otherwise. Mr. de Menezes was killed because he was brown, no other reason. What other possible reason could the police advance, given that their previous story has been completely debunked? Even if Mr. de Menezes did resemble a missing suspect, that is simply not grounds to shoot him. It might, if you stretch things, be reasonable and probable grounds for a short-term detention (i.e. an hour or two) to determine his identity, but these officers decided to shoot first and then try to avoid questions. If the jury comes back with the right verdict, these officers must face trial for second-degree murder.

Sadly, this case is just another demonstration of the need for fundamental reform in the way that society polices itself. The institutions of the police are too hopelessly racist, sexist and homophobic to deserve the trust of any marginalized groups in society, and are especially dangerous to any person that fits more than one of those bills. Civilians must have full and complete control of the police. The public must remember that the police serve us, not the other way around. We live in nominal democracies, and democracy gives us the tools to make a change, if enough people band together to demand that change. As Margaret Mead wrote, we must never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, people can change the world. And if even a small group can change the world given time, imagine how fast the people, united, could change it.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 218

Sanity Makes a Comeback in the American Legal System

2008-06-13T01:42:00.003-03:00

Carl Schurz had the idea right when he said "If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other." Today the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) recognized that and restored habeas corpus to the American legal system, by ruling that the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have the right to challenge their imprisonment through the federal courts. After seven years, it is about damn time.

The right to challenge one's detention is a fundamental right in any society that is functionally democratic. Habeas corpus is the fundamental building block of a system of due process. No government has the right to hold anyone, without charge and without a chance to confront the evidence against them. The United States is on shaky enough ground about being considered a democracy, what with the rampant militarism, the outrageous xenophobia and so on, not to mention the two stolen elections and the limitation of electoral choice to effectively the blue and red wings of the Party of the Wealthy.

While this ruling by the SCOTUS is important, a note of concern should be that the ruling was a 5-4 split decision. I would expect two votes in favour of stripping away a person's legal rights, from Antonin Scalia and his hand-puppet Clarence Thomas, but also joining in the dissent were Chief Justice of the United States Roberts, and Samuel Alito. The fact that all four of them thought that the rule of law was not worth protecting shows clearly that there is every danger of this decision being reversed after the next election, especially if McCain wins and gets to fill the next opening.

As a bit of a tangent, why is it that in the United States the right can get away with appointing dionsaurs to the bench, but the left is too lily-livered to appoint anyone who isn't a moderate to the Court? This is how the US wound up with a court that makes some outrageously bad decisions, and has a four-strong dissent in cases like this. At least in Canada the Liberals have sometimes appointed decent judges to the bench. Heck, Pierre Trudeau even appointed a few New Democrats (though not to the Supreme Court). When are the Democrats going to grow some spine, and appoint someone who might be on the left-wing of their party (which would still make them a centrist Liberal in Canada)? My guess is never.

Anyway, back to the main point, this is still good news. For seven years, the rule of law has been functionally suspended in the United States. This ruling doesn't bring it all back, but it is a good step in that direction. The next step is to get rid of the PATRIOT Act, that founding document of the security state.

The United Kingdom, by the way, continues to traipse merrily down the path to dictatorship by lengthening the period for which people can be held without charge to 42 days. That is absolutely unacceptable. That is six-weeks. A month and a half. And the police claim that they need this time to put together cases. Well guess what, shoddy investigation technique is no excuse for denying people basic civil liberties. Britain seriously needs a new Magna Carta, this time to set out the rights of the people as against their government. If this law is allowed to stand, the British courts are not doing their job. They have a responsibility as the third branch of government to check the excesses of the other two branches, and if they let this government, a mockery of the name Labour, go forward with this, they have abdicated their claim to their positions.

Canada can't yet crow on this front either. We have legislation allowing for people to be tried in star chambers without the right to instruct their lawyer, know the evidence against them or confront their accusers. Our government holds a number of people indefinitely without giving them a trial. As of now that power can't be used against citizens of Canada, but if the government gets used to exercising this power against non-citizens for long enough, it will decide that it also wants to use it against citizens. And then we will be at the end of democracy.

Governments serve their people, not the other way around. Governments across the west have begun to forget that. Let's remind them.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 221

Industry Canada Busted Trying to Censor Wikipedia

2008-06-05T01:56:00.003-03:00

Michael Geist, a specialist in Internet law at the University of Ottawa Law School, brought to public attention on June 4th an effort by Industry Canada to buff up the Wikipedia entry on Industry Minister Jim Prentice. Their edits included ridiculous praise of Prentice and speculation that he is in good position to be the next leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. More important and insidious, they attempted to get rid of references to Conservative efforts to introduce a clone of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act from the United States. Fortunately, Mr. Geist tracked the IPs of the edits, and the Wikipedia community has restored the information that was deleted. This seems like a classic example of the Streisand Effect.

Do the Conservatives (and I say Conservatives because the only people with the motivation to do this are members of Prentice's political staff at Industry Canada) really think no one will notice when they pull this kind of stunt? There are tools on Wikipedia specifically to track who makes edits to avoid exactly this kind of situation. Did they not know this because Conservatives are Luddites (of the Marjorie "I Don't Use Facebook But I Think It's Dangerous" LeBreton variety)? Or did they think they could get away with it because they think we're all stupid? Either way, it isn't a good thing. Just another indication that this government has no respect for transparency or accountability, and that it lacks simple common sense (seriously, if you are going to do this, take your laptop to Starbucks which has a different IP address).

This government is undemocratic, anti-constitutional (since they plan to ignore the private member's bill on climate change passed on June 4), warmongering and tyrannical. And yet they continue to poll 30%+ support. What needs to happen for Canadians to wake up and smell the coffee? If Americans are waking up, and about ready to give their most egregious liberals the boot, why can we not do the same?

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 229

Obama Secures Democratic Party Nomination

2008-06-03T23:52:00.003-03:00

Today Barack Obama secured the nomination of the Democratic Party for the Presidency of the United States. This is a historic moment, with the first black person to secure the nomination of one of the two major parties in the United States of America. Obama has broken barriers and brought hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of new voters into the process.

Obama also gave a phenomenal speech tonight. There is only one orator like him in any given generation, and he may be able to mobilize the country, if the Republicans aren't able to drag him down into the mud. His call to seize the moment was hair-raising, and driving.

Hilary Clinton was deeply ungracious tonight. The race is over. She needs to admit that, endorse Barack Obama, and work on unifying the Democratic Party. What is most important at this stage is that John McCain not be the next President of the United States. The world cannot stand another American President who will recklessly spread war around the world. The world cannot stand a trigger happy President who wants to bomb Iran. Obama doesn't have the best policy in the world, but at least Obama believes in diplomacy, and the world needs diplomacy.

Now, the run-up to November begins.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 231

International Treaty to Ban Cluster Bombs Agreed

2008-05-29T00:45:00.004-03:00

Diplomats representing one hundred nations, meeting in Dublin, Ireland have agreed to a treaty that would ban the stockpiling or use of cluster bombs. These bombs maim and kill many innocent civilians, and scatter unexploded bomblets across war zones, that may detonate and destroy a life years after the bombs were dropped. Most recently, these bombs were deployed during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and see continuing use in the occupation of Afghanistan. These bombs are weapons of terror, just as much as land mines are. I congratulate these one hundred nations on making this agreement, a worth heir to the anti-land mine treaty of the 1990s. Hopefully, this treaty will reduce the number of civilians who are killed in wars. Of course what would be better is to prevent wars in the first place, but until that happens we have to settle for banning the most hideous weapons of war.

But not all countries that produce, stockpile and in some cases have used these weapons are onside. The most notable holdouts are China, Russia, Pakistan, India, Israel and (surprise!) the United States. Shame on them. They persist in creating a legacy of fear and death for the people of the countries they attack, or for the victims of the countries to whom they sell cluster bombs.

I sincerely hope that the Canadian government has signed onto this treaty, but knowing Harper's craven boot-licking attitude to the Bush administration, Canada probably opposed the deal, simply because the Americans said so. We need an election.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 238

Equal Marriage in California

2008-05-15T23:35:00.003-03:00

California has, today, become the second American state to allow equal marriage for all people, regardless of sexual orientation. In a 4-3 ruling, the California Supreme Court overturned the statute defining marriage as between a man and a woman. The reasons of the Majority, written by Chief Justice George, contain several clear explanations of why LGBT folks are entitled to equal rights, and why "separate but equal" civil unions/domestic partnerships just don't cut it. First the Chief Justice had this to say:

Furthermore, in contrast to earlier times, our state now recognizes that an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual’s sexual orientation, and, more generally, that an individual’s sexual orientation — like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights. We therefore conclude that in view of the substance and significance of the fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship, the California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples.

He added this:

Second, retaining the traditional definition of marriage and affording same-sex couples only a separate and differently named family relationship will, as a realistic matter, impose appreciable harm on same-sex couples and their children, because denying such couples access to the familiar and highly favored designation of marriage is likely to cast doubt on whether the official family relationship of same-sex couples enjoys dignity equal to that of opposite-sex couples. Third, because of the widespread disparagement that gay individuals historically have faced, it is all the more probable that excluding same-sex couples from the legal institution of marriage is likely to be viewed as reflecting an official view that their committed relationships are of lesser stature than the comparable relationships of opposite-sex couples. Finally, retaining the designation of marriage exclusively for opposite sex couples and providing only a separate and distinct designation for same-sex couples may well have the effect of perpetuating a more general premise — now emphatically rejected by this state — that gay individuals and same-sex couples are in some respects “second-class citizens” who may, under the law, be treated differently from, and less favorably than, heterosexual individuals or opposite-sex couples.

Those two excerpts from the decision eloquently make the case for equal marriage.

The forces of acceptance have won the battle, but the forces of bigotry and hatred haven't yet given up the war. They have one last play: an attempt to change the constitution of California to return to unequal marriage. This attempt will likely be on the ballot in California in November. If that battle is won, then it will truly be a time to celebrate.

That is not, of course, to play down the incredible victory that today's ruling represents. Thousands, if not millions, of Californians will be able to marry the person they love now, and that is certainly a cause for joy.

I salute the judges of the California Supreme Court for coming to the right decision, and I hope that the people of California will see fit to reject the ballot initiative to entrench bigotry in California's constitution. For anyone interested in reading the decision, the following link will take you to the PDF version of the ruling.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 251

Police Tase Eldery Kamloops Man Three Times

2008-05-09T22:24:00.004-03:00

This one just has me boiling. On Saturday Frank Lasser, an eighty-two year old man who was lying in a bed in the Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops with an oxygen/breathing apparatus, was tased by the RCMP because he was supposedly delirious and wielding a "three inch pocket knife." This on it's own is bad, but is unfortunately rather usual given the culture of systematic police brutality. Today, more details emerged. It turns out that police tased this elderly man three times. According to Lasser's account to the CBC, as soon as the three RCMP officers arrived, he was immediately tased because the police had "more important work to do on the street" that night.

This is absolutely outrageous. First off, this guy was 82 and in the hospital after having had a heart bypass. And yet the RCMP is asserting that he posed a deadly threat to the lives of the officers, no different than a 20 year old man. Somehow, I think an 82 year-old in a hospital for heart surgery is going to lack the strength to overcome three RCMP officers and then do any kind of damage with a blade of what sounds like a Swiss Army knife. What is the RCMP teaching its officers these days? Are they not teaching them how to use intermediate levels of force or non-violent conflict resolution? Lasser is a former prison guard and has asserted that three officers could easily overcome a person of his age and in his condition. I'm inclined to agree, and it seems only logical to believe. That they didn't speaks to a culture of violence in the RCMP.

Not only was he tased, but he was tased three times. Imagine the damage that three shocks of 50 000 volts can do to a person. Even if one shock was possibly called for, there is absolutely no way that three shocks would be justified. What if Lasser hadn't had his heart bypass yet? He would probably have entered cardiac arrest and possibly died. The police have become lethal weapons in their own right.

Once again, I call for proper civilian oversight of the police. Oversight that isn't afraid to call a spade a spade or to come down on officers who betray the trust placed in them by society. Lets bring democracy to the police. It can be done if the will of the people is strong enough and clear enough. Don't let the naysayers and the authoritarians tell you no, that the police are just fine as they are. Don't let them tell you it's too hard, or not worth the fight. Don't let them tell you it can't be done.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 257

Tragedy in Burma

2008-05-08T22:24:00.003-03:00

The tragedy continuing to unfold in Burma in the wake of Cyclone Nargis is absolutely heartrending. It seems that as of today, the estimated death toll is 100 000, with the capacity to go much higher. That 100 000 is 80% of the number that died in the Boxing Day tsunami disaster that struck the entire coast of the Indian Ocean. It is equivalent to killing one in three people living in Halifax. Put another way, this is roughly 33 Hurricane Katrinas rolled into one. And those are just the people killed from the immediate effects of the storm. Given the horrendous delays that the Burmese junta is creating by denying visas to aid workers from the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross/Red Crescent, tens of thousands more people are going to die from starvation and disease, since there is no food, no drinking water and no shelter. To get an idea of how bad the devastation is, take a look at the following satellite pictures from NASA.

The first picture shows the Irrawaddy delta area of Burma (where the cyclone came ashore) on April 15, prior to the storm. The second shows the same area on May 5, three days after the cyclone struck. As I'm sure you can see, a huge area of the delta, including much of the land around the capital city of Yangon is under water. Reports suggest that 95% of buildings in the affected areas have been knocked down by the storm surge. The rivers in the area that provided drinking water are full of mud and human waste, becoming unsuitable for drinking. Food supplies and crops have been swept away, so there is nothing to eat. As the bodies of the dead rot, the water will be tainted by disease, spreading to the survivors.

This is a disaster on a scale not seen possibly since the Bhola Cyclone in 1973 that killed between 300 000 and 1 000 000 people in what is now Bangladesh. The government of Burma (a tyrannical military dictatorship) is making the situation worse by misappropriating and misdirecting the aid, getting it only to their political supporters. The only possible good thing that might come of this storm is if the regime is so debilitated, and the people so outraged by the government handling of the storm, that the military regime is brought to an end.

My thoughts are with the people of Burma as they face this horrible time.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 258

Nelson Mandela on American Terrorist Watch List

2008-05-01T01:47:00.003-03:00

So it seems that the US has the first black president of South Africa on its terrorist watch list. That was brought up today in hearings before the US Senate, in which Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice confirmed that since the apartheid government of South Africa designated the African National Congress as a terrorist group in the 1970s, Mr. Mandela has required a special waiver to come to the United States. Let's not forget who this man is. He was a leader of the ANC for many years in the struggle to free black South Africans from the oppressive rule of the white minority. This man was jailed for 27 years for his role in the ANC, after being released from prison he went on to become the first black president of South Africa, and to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. The fucking Nobel Peace Prize, and the US says he's a terrorist. Just bloody brilliant.

This story illustrates the idiocy that is terrorist watch lists. You know the ones, where people who have never been convicted of anything, or even told they are under investigation, turn out to be on lists that keep them from flying, or visiting certain countries and so on. In this age of paranoia about terrorism, when the government would like us to believe that terrorists lurk under every rock and behind every tree, we need stories like this to remind us that these lists make no sense. People wind up on these lists because they are political opponents of their governments. Hell, if he was alive today, Ghandi would probably be on an American terrorist watch list. The American founding fathers would be on the watch list too, since they used guerrilla tactics to win their war of independence.

Terrorist watch lists are simply another means of controlling the population. There is no independent control of these lists. There is no one making sure that a person is not listed simply because they are political opponents of their government. As Michael Moore pointed out, the resources of the American state were used to infiltrate and spy on a peace group called Peace Fresno. No one can have reasonably thought that a group of peace activists in Fresno were a threat to the national security of the United States.

We must be vigilant. We must guard our rights, both political and human, from theft by the security state. Cases like that of Nelson Mandela help to remind us of the danger that the state, uncontrolled by citizens, poses to liberty. In memorable words published (though not written) by Benjamin Franklin, "he who gives up a little liberty, to gain a little security, will deserve neither and lose both." Words to remember.

Days remaining in Bush presidency: 262

Transit Workers Strike in Toronto

2008-04-27T01:00:00.004-03:00

On Friday evening, workers at the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) walked off the job in a legal strike. Earlier in the day, the workers had, by a 65% to 35% margin, rejected the tentative contract reached at the end of last week. There are many who are angry and frustrated that the workers walked out, but those same people who are angry don't seem to appreciate that TTC workers are also angry and frustrated. They are frustrated that the TTC has done nothing to act on the complaints of the workers about personal safety when doing their job, and that the TTC seems unwilling to give the workers job security, so that they know their jobs will not be contracted out.

Contrary to the usual "greedy workers" meme that comes out of the usual capitalist sources, this strike isn't about money. It is about security, both personal and professional. These workers haven't walked off the job to try to get more money out of the city (and thus by proxy out of the populace). They have walked out to make sure that the city doesn't outsource their jobs, replacing stable and well paying jobs, allowing the workers to contribute to the economy, with unstable, poorly paid contract jobs.

And now the Ontario government proposes to legislate the workers back to work (and to my shame the Ontario NDP has gone along with this), by slapping a fine of $2000/day on any worker who stays off the job. The government implies by taking this action, that the TTC workers are providing an essential public service. Fine, I can go along with that. The hitch is that they want to do that without actually declaring them and essential service. If they were to do that, in exchange for stripping away the right to strike, they would have to replace it with a right to binding arbitration, and they are afraid of where that might lead. This way of handling the issue is conniving and deceitful. If they are an essential service, declare them so and give the right to binding arbitration. If they aren't an essential service, let the negotiation and strike process run its course, and don't legislate and end to the strike.

The members of the Ontario provincial parliament seem intent on squelching the concerns of the workers. They are probably worried that if to many other people realise what the TTC workers are striking about, they might demand job security in their own jobs, throwing the outsourcing craze off the rails. And goodness knows that global capitalism can't have that. Capitalism is, at its very core, exploitation. Capitalists take from the workers what the capitalists have not laboured to earn. And if too many people fought for their job security, that ability to exploit workers, and to pit one against another, would be compromised. That is why this strike is being stomped upon, not any faux concern about the people beyond the possibility that they might not get to work, putting a damper on capitalism for a little while.

I stand with these workers. They have democratically decided to go on strike, and everyone who claims to respect the rights of workers must do the same, and if you live in Ontario, let your MPP know that you don't support this effort to stomp on the rights of workers, and you want them to vote against this bill. Together, the people are strong. Let's make sure that the elected representatives of the people know that.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 266

Conservatives continue efforts to roll back women's rights

2008-04-22T23:48:00.003-03:00

Another private members bill that would set the stage to radically roll back a woman's right to choose and to control her own body has been proposed by a Conservative member of parliament, Maurice Vellacott, MP for Saskatoon-Wanuskewin. Bill C-537 would allow health care practitioners to refuse to participate in a medical procedure that "offends a tenet of their religion."

If a person's religious beliefs prohibit them from offering a certain service, then that person should not get into a profession where they might be required to provide that service. If a person feels that their religion prevents them from giving out the 'morning after' pill, then they shouldn't be a pharmacist. If they can't perform an abortion, or prescribe emergency contraception, then the person shouldn't be a physician. If they can't perform a blood transfusion, they shouldn't practice emergency medicine. This really isn't that complex.

This bill is framed in the context of protecting religious rights, but it should tell you something that Vellacott is the chair of the "Parliamentary Pro-Life Caucus" which includes both Conservative and Liberal MPs (but thankfully no New Democrats). This nonsense would allow doctors, who are being paid by the state, to refuse to provide abortions, in effect banning a practice that the Supreme Court of Canada (in R. v. Morgentaler, 1988) said the government could not use the law to ban, because doing that violated the right of women to "security of the person" under section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

This is the same philosophy that has seen women left without pharmacists willing to dispense emergency contraceptives in various parts of the United States. It is the philosophy that says that a doctor's dogmatic beliefs are more important that a woman's right to control her body. That is utter garbage and nonsense.

Furthermore, this bill follows hard on the heels of Bill C-484, which would impose extra penalties for killing a pregnant woman since the assault also terminates the fetus. That bill deems the fetus to be a person, since only a person is legally capable of being murdered, setting us back on the road to banning abortion as murder.

The Conservatives are being cagey on how they push this radical patriarchal and misogynist agenda. It is being done through private members bills, not government bills, so in the next election campaign Harper can claim his government had nothing to do with it. This is very important, because the majority of Canadians think this issue is settled, and that a woman has a right to choose. The Cons want to roll back a woman's rights, and want to take our society back to some twisted 1950s ideal, where everyone is white, everyone is straight, everyone is Christian, people don't have sex until they are thirty and a woman stays in the home, with a martini for her husband at the end of the day. That's not my Canada, and I sure as hell know it isn't any Canada I want to see. We have to remember that women's rights are human rights. If the Cons take rights away from one group, it is only a matter of time until they are taking them away from everyone else.

To everyone reading this in Canada, I encourage you to get in touch with your MP and let them know that you oppose this bill and bill C-484, and that you want them to vote against both bills. Tell your friends, make noise, be heard. Don't let the Conservatives take rights away in the dark and in silence.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 271

Justice Michel Bastarache to Retire

2008-04-09T22:30:00.003-03:00

The Supreme Court of Canada has announced that Mr. Justice Michel Bastarache, a puisne justice of the Court, will retire at the end of the spring session. Bastarache J has sat on the court since 1997, and is (aside from Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin) the most senior judge of the Supreme Court. Bastarache J was the judge from the Atlantic provinces, and as such his successor will have to be drawn from the Atlantic provinces. I hope that Harper does not follow the model of the American right and appoint a partisan to the Supreme Court as he has done with some of the Provincial Courts of Appeal.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 285

Former Vancouver Police Complaints Commissioner Was Reluctant to Investigate

2008-04-05T23:44:00.005-03:00

The Vancouver Sun is reporting that the former Commissioner of the Vancouver Police Complaints Commission Don Morrison didn't launch investigations unless there was a media outcry. You can find the Sun story here. This story is based on testimony of Matt Adie, the former Deputy Commissioner.

This kind of thing illustrates the central problem with watchdogs that are also lapdogs. The RCMP Complaints Commission is no different. I can't remember the last time it came back with a ruling that there had been wrongdoing on the part of the police.

"It is my perception that it would be extremely unlikely that Commissioner Morrison would order a public hearing against the Vancouver police unless the matter was in the media and there was very little other option," said former OPCC deputy commissioner Matt Adie.
This was Adie's explanation for why Morrison refused to order an public hearing into the death of Frank Paul, a homeless, alcoholic, aboriginal man who died in December 1998 after being dumped while stupefied with alcohol in a cold, wet downtown alley by Vancouver police.

This is horrifying. If a situation like that one doesn't qualify for an investigation, what does? I would absolutely love to see a citizen of Vancouver slap a misfeasance of public duty suit on Morrison for this.

We need a proper, civilian run, independent oversight process for police from the smallest municipal police force to the RCMP. For too long the police have been functionally above the law, whether it be the summary execution by Taser of Robert Dziekanski, or the murder of Neil Stonechild by the Saskatoon police, nothing is ever done, or if it is done it's far too late. Frankly, I have come to the opinion that the police as an institution are so hopelessly corrupt and morally rotten that the whole lot should be scrapped and we should start from scratch. I know this isn't practical, but it needs to be done somehow.

We also need to make sure that the police are not able hold their inquiries in secret. A democracy thrives on the availability of information to citizens The police must be made to let in the light, and to allow the people to scrutinize their behaviour. If they have done nothing wrong, as they claim, they have nothing to hide. No structure that fears the light of day has any business surviving in a democracy.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 289

Lukiwski Drama Continues

2008-04-04T18:30:00.003-03:00

The controversy continues to swirl around Tom Lukiwski, homophobe par excellence. He continues to assert that the vile insults heaped on the LGBT community no longer represent his views. Bull. I'd be more convinced if he actually, say, repudiated his votes on same-sex marriage, and the motion to reopen SSM. In the era of polite homophobia, bigots for the most part close their mouths and work quietly to undermine the rights of those they hate. Lukiwski expressed his hatred for gays and lesbians when he voted against equal rights on the Civil Marriage Act and on the motion to reopen it. Shame on him. Unless you support equal rights for all people regardless of sexual orientation, religion, race, sex, gender identity, ethnic origin, creed and so forth, guess what, you're a bigot. You may not think so, but if you think it's okay for the government to racially profile Muslims and Arabs, then guess what, you're a bigot. If you think it is okay to deny equal access to the institution of civil marriage to LGBT folks and fob that group of society off with "separate but equal" civil unions, you're a bigot. If you think the native people should shut up and stop whining, guess what, you're a bigot. If you think women don't deserve to control their own bodies in all respects, you're a bigot. And hey, surprise, all of these things can be found in the two parties with a realistic chance of forming a government in Canada. The Conservatives (until they got elected) would take these positions openly. The Liberals would take them behind the collective back of the people. Some of these positions have even turned up in the NDP to a distressing extent. It's not as bad in the NDP, but it sure as hell is more disappointing.

Tom Lukiwski is the poster boy for the new age of polite bigotry. His voting record shows that he still hates gays and lesbians, but he knows now that he can't say what he really feels. Some on the right call this the political correctness police and call those who stand up to bigoted statements "humourless". That's ridiculous precisely because these same people will turn around and scream bloody murder if any ridicule or hatred is turned back around on them, on their institutions. They demand that others be tolerant of their intolerance. I say fuck that.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 290